Buying Mac Mini just for Logic...

[mauseoleum]

now seriously - the other day I was thinking how convenient it would be to have something small - like a laptop without lcd/keybd for testing. i had to harass a person with imac for this.

[hdouble]

Even if you ignore the geek differences, Linux belongs to the UNIX family. That is to say, UNIX is not an operating system, but a family of operating systems.

There are two different ways to define Unix here.

In one sense "Unix" is a collection of program code originally developed in the early 1970s at Bell labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, and a trademark (UNIX) which has variously belonged to AT&T, Novell, and (most recently) the Open Group. This branch of Unix is generally known as "System V" and has been licensed as part of various commerical implementatons like AIX, HP/UX, and Solaris/SunOS.

In another sense, "Unix" is a general set of operating system (library, API, filesystem, etc.) design specifications. The BSD operating systems were originally a rewrite of Bell Labs UNIX based on the "Lions book", a textbook of kernel documentation which leaked out to the hacker community. The BSD (as opposed to System V) operating system has evolved into FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc. as well as Apple's NextStep OS which (along with the Mach kernel) are the direct predecessors of OSX. Linux is yet another kernel written from scratch, fifteen years after BSD appeared, which uses GNU tools and libraries and whose system design is somewhat of a combination of System V and BSD.

There are cases where the specific details of the UNIX trademark or a specific code stream are important, but these days anymore it's not usually a problem (unless you're dealing with programmers or trademark lawyers) if you use "Unix" as a blanket term for all of the above.

[WoJ]

Arg, the term your looking for people is "cracker" not "hacker". Wikipedia...

Hacker is a term used to describe different types of computer experts. It is also sometimes extended to mean any kind of expert, especially with the connotation of having particularly detailed knowledge or of cleverly circumventing limits.

Crackers are the people who break software protection and break into computers!!!

(any1 read the book "The Hacker Crackdown?" by Bruce Sterling? A very informative read, its more about history than anthing else, starts off with AT&T and history of the phone network.)

Ok so the book may be a little geeky! But hey i found it interesting!

Edit: Although that book should realy be called The cracker crackdown...ah watever. The mac mini looks smooth i'll give it that.

WoJ