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Aren't you missing something there? Pardon? M. I think I may have already used the simple interrogative 'pardon'. But I repeat. Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis? Masochism. That's what you're missing. You're really losing me now. Are you a care-in-the-community type? If so, I can call the police. No, look up there. 'ATRQ BSD'. It's spelled wrong, and it's missing the M for Masochism. You mean you think... ...that this column is about the delights of consensual power-play, oft abbreviated to BDSM, which in itself is short for 'Bondage, Domination, Sadism and Masochism'. Were I not a string of characters I would be looking at you funny now. As it is, I shall have to render it thus: come again? Well, is it or isn't it? About dirty sexual things, I mean? No. It's about Berkeley Systems Distribution. The bit that lives underneath the new shiny Mac OS X and makes it robust as hell. Oh. That's rather disappointing. No, not at all. You get decent memory management, pre-emptive multitasking, and the ability to switch between your old Mac environment and a more Unixy one at will. You even get a pretty desktop. Your what? Your 'Mac'? Yeah, it's a computer. Oh yeah, I remember, sorry. I just wandered in from the leather fair next door. Will it run on my PC? Yes. I mean, no. Well. Bits of it. Bits? Well, yes. The BSD bit of Mac OS X will run on a PC. The Mac bits won't. Ah... So I need two computers? No. Apple decided to utilise the goodwill of the open source community to make the BSD layer of Mac OS X. The first thing it did was port it to a PC. Obviously we can't do anything as dumb as let the whole Mac OS run on a PC... Erm... Don't even ask. We just can't. Alright? But it also runs on a Mac which is where it should be. Oh. Right. Can I browse the kind of Web site I like? Yes. We built a really nifty browser for beta users while we wait for... Wait for...? Um, wait for Microsoft for finish IE 5 for Mac OS X. Funny how these things work out. Anyway, it did one for Solaris machines in a funny five minutes so perhaps the notion of IE 5 running on a kind of Unix isn't that odd. Oh, yes, you said it was Unix. I did a bit at college. Must have changed a lot. No, not really, it's still the same old Unix. Look, watch me type: tail -f /System/logs | grep "^...." | perl -e "while (<>) {pack(HHHH); print; | gzip > output.gz Ah. You're smiling. Yes, I knew you hadn't forgotten it. Forgotten what? Masochism, of course! That must be the most unpleasant way to do anything with a computer. Um, I suppose it is... Look, do you want to come next door? The slave auction's about to start! Yeah! Cool! | ||||||
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