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The point is that the World isn't going to jump aboard this Rhapsody [i.e. Mac OS X] ship any time soon. Elitism, attitude and bragadaccio [sic] about Rhapsody's 10 year heritage aside, there first needs to be a warm, fuzzy community. -- The BOZO Bit

Well, now it's got a warm, fuzzy community.

And, look, Mac OS just went down the drain... there's no new Macs that'll boot OS 9 now, and after 2007 there won't be any new Macs that'll even run OS 9 apps.

It's all NeXTSTeP... I mean Rhapsody... I mean OS X from now on. Mac OS is dead, long live Mac OS X.

Learn more about queueing at the pf FAQ.

See my previous post here for a pf.conf recipe to implement traffic shaping based on packet type. You could also prioritize via IP, require a ssh session to gain higher priorities for a specific IP (authpf), based on time of day, or any other number of factors.

THE guide to pf (packet filter) can be found here. pf will run on FreeBSD as well as, I believe, a few other open OSs. I think it's really the best. Almost any reader here could surely benefit from at least a partial working knowledge of packet filters ("firewalls") in general.

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EXTRA CREDIT
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Got a few connections you'd like to tie together into one? Read more about Address Pools and Load Balancing with pf.

Another Bandwidth management HOWTO for Linux systems (last revised in '03 - may be better for concepts than router config recipes)

bittorrent traffic shaping

A nice K5 article about packet filtering with OpenBSD firewalls

Prioritizing empty TCP ACKs with pf and ALTQ

Making the most out of a busy connection

Turn that old P5 and two network cards into an OpenBSD firewall and learn to setup your own router. You will learn a TON about TCP/IP, how to protect your internal network, and BSDs in general (they're pretty neat in the way that they don't have as much "cruft" as usually found in your typical - yeah, that works :) - Linux distro. The simplicity, if you've never experienced it before, can feel both constraining and liberating at the same time. Give it a try if you've got a spare box. It's hard to experiment without learning SOMETHING - and if you're here I'm sure you're into learning, right? So give it a whirl. If you're not sure what BSD to try, give this a read. If you just want to buy a router, learn from the recent Ask Slashdot - Home Routers w/ Decent QoS Performance?. Best of luck!

If you're going to use OpenBSD (which I'd recommend for a firewall/NAT box), be sure to support the OS which strives for portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography by ordering a CD, T-shirt, book, or hacker bunker enhancing poster. OpenBSD supports binary emulation of most programs from SVR4 (Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, BSD/OS, SunOS and HP-UX. Development is active and it won't let you down as a gatekeeper or internal server.

Puffy says "Stay off my computer!" and means it. I sleep well at night knowing "puffy" (the name of my box) is standing guard just behind my cable modem and in front of the 5+ computers my roommates and I are running inside. Has never let me down and doesn't get in my way. Keeps Freenet and torrents from introducing lag into my ssh sessions as well..... Good luck finding a solution to keeping your pipes clean :)

The Synergy developer's plight was moving when I read it: pirates have reverse engineered the license manager he is using and can generate things like 100 seat licenses at will. As a result the developer has abandoned the product.

But when I clicked through to see what Synergy actually was my sympathy evaporated. The damned thing is a single panel with three buttons on it, which can play/pause/rewind iTunes. The license enforcement code alone has to be more complex than the rest of it put together. And for this Saturday afternoon's worth of work the developer wants 5 Euros per copy.

You haven't seen Synergy yet, have you?

Well, I just d/led this and I can't say I'll too impressed. It's cpu-usage is just a little under iTunes (avg. 6% to iTunes avg. 9% on my MDD 867). The rendezvous thing I'm sure is cool, but I have no way of testing it out. It plays the same files iTunes does. And skinning is pointless because I prefer to use synergy for iTunes.

No offence to the author of this app, but I don't see why anyone is trying to charge people money for such an application ($12.50 USD in this case) for a replacement of an excellent tool Apple gives away for free.

This is pretty much fan-boy speculation, but speaks to your idea anyway: since Mac OS X is Unix based, it is really desgined to project desktops remotely over pretty thin connections. Add in an Airport card, already enabled in X, and you have much of what you're looking for--a thin client that is simply displaying your session, while the heavy lifter within range of your Airport enabled handheld, or even remotely over the Internet as long as there is a local Ariport Hub, is processing. You could have a handheld with virtually only a tiny screen, an Airport card, and just enough a proc to run the card.

After all, would the company that freely distributes the means (and a great one at that) to play and burn MP3s really be bowing to industry pressure?

From the looks of it, iTunes will be avalible when mac OS X v1.0 comes out, no prob.

All right on wincent.org they show the vertical dock, from the build at macworld. Apparently, it's now a defaults option. That is, orientation right, and pinned.

Pretty darn cool. Remind's me of the old next bar. I'll probably choose this option over the centered dock, and Desktop icons.

What's more, these UI changes are discussed in much greater detail at Wincent.org

This is a hands-on review of the build which was demonstrated at MacWorld. Some of the key points are:

• Multiple monitor support in place
• Instant wake-up from sleep
• Hierarchical browsing from the Dock (but only 5 levels deep)
• Mouse sroll wheels supported only in Cocoa apps (e.g. not the Finder)
• Network utility provides GUI for netstat, ping, traceroute etc. (and port scanning!)
• Quicktime movies play while in the dock
• Many new languages supported - ability to switch between languages seamlessly
• Text-to-speech, speech recognition
• SSH support by default

Plus lots of other stuff.