Mac OS X 10.2.2 Update Available

Fork420 writes "Apple has released the 10.2.2 update. According to Apple: The 10.2.2 Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for the following applications and technologies: Address Book, iChat, IP Firewall, Mail, Print Center, Rendezvous, Sherlock and Windows file service discovery. The update also includes the updated services previously delivered in Security Update 2002-09-20. For detailed information on this Update, please visit http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n107140 (when this story was posted, this link was not yet working) Enjoy..."

Comments

Journaling File System

[RobRancho]

is included too! :)

Re:Journaling File System

[xenocyst]

But, "Provides a foundation for the journalling filesystem (JFS), which may currently be enabled via Disk Utility on Mac OS X Server systems." doesn't exactly seem like support for JFS, more of an experimental thing? It does specfically say "OS X Server", and "foundation" after all. =p

Reverse /. Effect?

[RAMMS EIN]

``when this story was posted, this link was not yet working''
So...10.2.2 features a reverse slashdot effect - the site only gets working when a certain threshold of connections per second is surpassed?

Re:Reverse /. Effect?

[dan the person]

Is it just me, or does everyone here suspect apple is paying OSDN to run OSX stories?

Improved Find function?

[ku hand luke]

"- Improves the Find function of the Finder by no longer finding items in invisible folders." I hope this doesn't break the runaround I use on my brother's iPod: In Jag, I open his iPod on the desktop and do a search in that finder window for any .mp3 and voila!, all files available for drag and drop. We'll see soon enough...

Re:Improved Find function?

[JHromadka]

"- Improves the Find function of the Finder by no longer finding items in invisible folders."

Whew! Now it is easier to to hide pr0n. :)

Re:Improved Find function?

[Dynedain]

crap....this is a bad thing

For some reason the symlink to the OS9 desktop from the OSX desktop keeps randomly disapearing from my test machine here in the office (granted its an old POS to begin with....but we won't go into that)

The only way I've been able to relocate it is through Sherlock which finds the original in a hidden folder. And I need it there because for some stupid reason OSX (or 9.2 for that matter) won't recognize the generic replacement IDE CDROM....and the manufacturer of my external SCSI CDRW has said they aren't going to release the OSX drivers.

AARHRHRHHAAAGHGHHGH!!!!

Re:Improved Find function?

[dhovis]

Easy work around...

• CMD-F in the finder to bring up the new find dialog box.
• Select "Add Criteria -> visiblity"
• Set visibility to "All"

Voila, you can search invisible files. All this update does is set the default search to visible files only, as it should be.

Re:Improved Find function?

[GnrcMan]

You can use Tinker Tool (http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool2.html) to allow the finder to show all hidden files.

Re:Improved Find function?

[pi radians]

you can still find invisible files, but now you just have to tell the find app thats what you want to do.

(just like find from os 8 and 9)

Re:Improved Find function?

[ZigMonty]

Encrypted disk images are your friend.

Hopefully they fix...

[sporty]

Hopefully they fixed the mail.app program. If you have only 1 account, and it's imap, you won't see folders on the account. You have to add another account, even a dummy one that has no mail, to see folders of the first imap account. Stupid mail.app proggie.. had me using that stupid enterage program.

Re:Hopefully they fix...

[sporty]

I can't speak for .mac. For my local imap account, it gets confused.

Re:Hopefully they fix...

[sporty]

Here's your knowledge base link.


http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=1 07 069

Re:Hopefully they fix...

[sporty]

Well, now I wonder why setting a second mailbox, that isn't imap, fixes it? the dummy account i created doesn't even contact my courier-imap server. Hrmm...

Re:Hopefully they fix...

[Drakino]

Nope, one IMAP account in Mail still results in the subfolders being inaccessable.

Re:ip firewall

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. I like my system insecure by default, too.

That's amazing

[Palshife]

when this story was posted, this link was not yet working

Did the submitter just guess the url of the article? Damn, you gotta teach me how to do that.

Re:That's amazing

[LX.onesizebigger]

Did the submitter just guess the url of the article? Damn, you gotta teach me how to do that.

That can get you into trouble.

10.2.2 Changes

[PatJensen]

Here are the changes in 10.2.2. Enjoy! -Pat

Digital Hub and Peripheral Device Enhancements

• Improves playback of large media files and peripheral device file copying.
• Resolves a rare situation in which an inadvertently-ejected CD cannot be remounted and applications accessing the disc cannot be quit.
• Addresses an issue in which an enhanced CD's data and audio sessions do not appear as expected on the desktop when using iTunes and inserting the disc more than once.
• Addresses a formatting issue that could occur when printing or previewing some TIFF documents.
• Addresses an issue in which ColorSync settings for some third-party displays are not retained after restarting or logging out.
• Addresses an issue when printing more than one copy of a file to a postscript printer from Adobe PhotoShop 7.0.
• Improves compatibility with HP 4MV printers when printing over an Ethernet network.
• Adds support for additional third-party disc burners, including: LaCie d2 48x24x48x, Sony CRX-820E, Toshiba SD-R2212 and SD-R1202, Pioneer DVR-105, and Yamaha CDW-F1 44x24x44x models.

Networking and Modem Enhancements

• SMB shared volumes may now be browsed by their user-assigned name.
• Resolves an issue in which an incorrect "Change Password Failed" message may appear when when changing a Mac OS X 10.2 Server client's password via AFP.
• Addresses an issue in which some internal Apple modems may fail to respond, displaying a "Could not open the communication device" message.
• Addresses an issue in which no sound is produced by some internal Apple modems until several seconds after making a connection.
• Resolves an issue in which some internal Apple modems fail to respond when connecting to the Internet.
• Error and warning dialogs boxes are no longer displayed if you cancel the mounting of an iDisk from the authentication dialog box.
• Addresses a startup issue that could occur if an LDAP server designated in Directory Access is not available.
• Addresses a data loss issue which could occur when copying a file whose filename ends with "#02," or other hexadecimal number, via AFP.
• Available disk space on an iDisk is updated more quickly after deleting files.
• Addresses an issue in which an iDisk would appear with an inaccurate 1GB capacity and 1023 MB available.
• Addresses some issues that could cause a "error -36" alert message when copying files to an iDisk.

Address Book and Mail Enhancements

• Resolves an issue in which Address Book could become unresponsive when using the Large Type menu and switching between applications.
• Address Book can now better import groups from prior versions of Address Book.
• Resolves a potential issue when transferring vcards from Address Book to a cellular phone via Bluetooth.
• Improves Address Book compatibility with users that are already on an AIM Buddy List.
• Allows address information to be imported when dragging vCards to Address Book which were created with Address Book from any version of Mac OS X 10.1.
• Corrects Address Book address format for Australian entries.
• Improves responsiveness when switching in and out of edit mode in the Address Book.
• Address Book entries without a name included now appear in the All group list with the email address as the name, instead of "No Name".
• Addresses the rare issue in which Mail may unexpectedly quit when replying to a message.
• Improves the responsiveness of the Mail application's date column and thread highlighting feature.
• Improves the reliability of transitioning a Mac OS X 10.1.5 Address Book.addressbook to an Address Book for Mac OS X 10.2 format.

Application Enhancements

• Improves compatibility for Microsoft PowerPoint presentations that use animations.
• Addresses a potential Disk Copy volume imaging permissions issue that could affect non-Admin users.
• Improves updating of applications installed with Mac OS X, updating them only if they have not been relocated or deleted.
• Addresses a display issue that may occur when Command-clicking a URL in some third-party applications, including BBEdit and Mailsmith.
• Addresses a situation in which the menu bar and Dock are not shown, after quitting a third-party game application, until the desktop is clicked.
• Addresses an issue in which some PDF files created within Mac OS X do not open as expected with Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.
• Reduces occurrences of "missing text" when browsing some web pages.
• Improves compatibility for FAXstf when a fax is being sent while the computer is restarted, shut down, or entering sleep mode.

Other Enhancements

• Provides a foundation for the journalling filesystem (JFS), which may currently be enabled via Disk Utility on Mac OS X Server systems.
• Improves security when using a read-write disk image volume in which "Ignore ownership on this volume" has been deselected.
• Addresses an issue in which automatic Software Update notifications are turned off when upgrading from Mac OS X 10.1 to Mac OS X 10.2.
• Addresses an issue in which, after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.2, an unexpected value in a user's com.apple.LaunchServices.plist file could prevent proper startup.
• Addresses a potential kernel panic situation when using three video cards and more than 512 MB of RAM.
• Addresses a potential issue in which an unauthorized user could log in as a deleted user.
• Improves the Find function of the Finder by no longer finding items in invisible folders.
• Reduces the time required for switching between Sherlock channels when using a low-bandwidth connection
• Sherlock channels may now be saved as a file.
• Allows automatic login to work as expected following an Archive and Install.
• Improves time needed to wake some portable computers.
• Addresses a potential loss of video when waking some PowerBooks from sleep after using DVD Player.
• Addresses a potential issue in which the computer does not respond when quitting DVD Player on some portable computers.
• Includes Apache version 1.3.27.
• Addresses a potential security issue in which access to system daemons could be blocked when RFC-based services are enabled.

Re:10.2.2 Changes

[aardvarkjoe]

Addresses a potential kernel panic situation when using three video cards and more than 512 MB of RAM.

Gee ... I sure wish I was in a situation to run into that particular bug...

Re:10.2.2 Changes

[taniwha]

Adds support for additional third-party disc burners, including: LaCie d2 48x24x48x, Sony CRX-820E, Toshiba SD-R2212 and SD-R1202, Pioneer DVR-105, and Yamaha CDW-F1 44x24x44x models.

Geee when are they going to get around to ours .... it seems that the USB based burners have all been orphaned pre 10.0 which is a real pain for my kids that have older iMacs without firewire ports

Re:10.2.2 Changes

[thinmac]

Provides a foundation for the journalling filesystem (JFS), which may currently be enabled via Disk Utility on Mac OS X Server systems.

Does this mean that I won't be able to use the journalling on my non OS X Server systems? Frankly, I'll have more use for it on my iBook, which runs standard OS X but also all sorts of beta and development software.

Re:10.2.2 Changes

[tupps]

Supposedly accessible via the command line. See this post: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44754&th reshold=0&commentsort=3&tid=179&mode=thread&cid=46 42715

Re:10.2.2 Changes

[Have Blue]

Hey, I'm thanking my lucky stars I have only 512MB of RAM :P

(One side effect of Macs making less progress than PCs is that it's feasible to collect and continue using every video card you've bought over the last 4 years...)

Re:10.2.2 Changes

[singularity]

Here I am with only *two* installed video cards and 1.25 gigs of RAM. I have another video card not in a machine, but all of my PCI slots are currently filled (second ethernet card, four port USB card, and SCSI card).

So I suppose I cannot test this out to make sure it works.

There was a problem with the 10.2.1 upgrade with multiple video cards of different make (nVidia and ATI, for example) and more than one gig of RAM. Sounds similar, but it sounds like the one that Apple fixed is somewhat different. Both of my cards are Radeons (7500 and 7000), so it never bothered me.

As another poster said, one of the nice things about MacOS is the ease of using old video cards to drive second displays. I have had multiple combinations of cards and monitors and have never had a problem running them at the same time.

Re:10.2.2 Changes

[ScottForbes]

• Improves updating of applications installed with Mac OS X, updating them only if they have not been relocated or deleted.

Aaaaaarrrrrggghh! Apple replaces one Wrong Thing with another. Before 10.2.2, Apple's installer would blindly write files into /Applications/Mail.app/contents/resources without first checking to see whether Mail.app was still in the /Applications folder.

Now Apple's installer looks for /Applications/Mail.app, and aborts the install if it isn't there. For the love of Tog, how hard is it to actually find Mail.app, considering that the OS already has this ability built in??

MacOS X can find where Microsoft Excel is hiding on my hard drive every time I double-click on a spreadsheet - how hard can it be to find /Applications/Apple/Mail.app? Why should I be forced to organize my /Applications folder in a particular way (or, more accurately, why should I be prevented from organizing the folder) just to satisfy Apple's brain-dead installer scripts?

Now I have to re-construct the /Applications folder to look exactly the way it did after a clean install, or I can't get application updates. MacOS 9 didn't require this. I could understand Apple's installer getting uppity if I turned /bin or /usr into my personal carnival of idiosyncracies, but I can't understand why Apple's new and improved OS is hard-wired to implode when I move an application from one folder to another.

Re:10.2.2 Changes

[Twirlip of the Mists]

all of my PCI slots are currently filled (second ethernet card, four port USB card, and SCSI card).

You know, there are these neat things now called USB hubs. You don't need to add PCI cards to add USB devices any more. Just thought you'd wanna know.

Re:10.2.2 Changes

[benh57]

You know, there are these neat things now called USB hubs. You don't need to add PCI cards to add USB devices any more. Just thought you'd wanna know.

Many, Many USB devices say not to use them with a hub. Says right on the box to plug it directly into the computer. Particularly USB audio devices. If you have even more than one of these devices, you need a card, because the other jack will be for the extension to your hub.. Macs only have 2 usb jacks on the back.

Re:10.2.2 Changes

[jweatherley]

Aaaaaarrrrrggghh! Apple replaces one Wrong Thing with another. Before 10.2.2, Apple's installer would blindly write files into /Applications/Mail.app/contents/resources without first checking to see whether Mail.app was still in the /Applications folder.

It's worse than that. I have '/Applications' as a symlink to '/Volumes/BigPartition/Applications' and the installer scripts were too brain dead to follow it. Instead they blasted the symlink and created a new '/Applictions' folder! I wait with interest to see what the new updater will do. If it would just follow the damn symlink all would be fine. Like the parent I can't understand why Apple can't find the Apps regardless of where they are on the drive - I'm even giving them a glaringly obvious hint!

Re:10.2.2 Changes

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Just for the record, all USB devices I've ever encountered work equally well (or equally poorly, depending) connected directly to the computer or through a hub. The only exception arises when a USB device requires lots of power; if you chain too many power-hungry devices on the same bus, you can end up underpowering one or more of them. It's not a tragedy, it just means the device stops working until you give it more juice.

There are ways around this, too: powered USB hubs.

One Problem:

[Anonymous Coward]

Journalling will be great. especially on the disk servers with 480GB worth of storage. But what the Xserves are missing is raid 5. I was pretty upset when I discovered that they only came with raid1 and raid0.

the missing raid mode is worse than it seems. The mac xserves come with 4 big IDE disks. If you want to you want the Xserve to play nice in a unix environment then its a good idea to format the disks UFS. (you dont have to, NFS works fine with HFS+, but you risk screwing yourself with the file name case insensitivity of the mac. A rare event since most people dont have important files that differ in name only in their case but it's lurking.

But wait! you cant format the whole thing UFS becausesome of the mac apps break unless they are on HFS+. So this means you need to format atleast one of the disks HFS for the OS and apps. that leaves three disks. But in RAID 1, you cant use an odd number of disks. So that leaves two disks for raid 1 UFS.

Thus the best you can do is 120GB HFS+ Raid 1 and 120GB UFS Raid 1. So out of four disks the most you can get is 120GB UFS redundant storage. Ah you say, why not just make a small HFS+ partition and let the rest be UFS. Well apple does not yet support partitioning a disk with different File systems. Thus you cant split the disk into UFS and HFS+ partitions.

Two companies are promised a partionalble raid 5 system (Xraid and NXraid) but both suddenly announced delayed shippments. My guess is they are trying to incoporate this new journaling system.

I spoke to apple about this several times. It was hinted to me to keep watching because big things were coming. I suspect these are the Journalling FS and and an outboard mass storage disk sytem. but that's a conjecture.

That's the bad news. The good news is that these Xserves are otherwise a very good deal. The throughput is better than comparably priced linux systems. Also they occupy only 1U but hold 480GB of hot swapable storage. Yes there are some NAS systems that are 1U but they are about 10 X slower in throughput, not to mention that they dont support as many services as the macs (LDAP, NFS, SAMBA, SSH, SCP, FTP, MAIL server, RSYNC,NET info, Net boot ...). The macs have dual Gig-E too. ANd in a very nice move Apple will sell you a spare parts kit with everyhing you are likely to need to fix a deadXSERVE in the field. Plus 24hour tech support.

the other nice thing about the Xserve is the construction. In addition to tool-free hot swap drives, the entire chasis slides out to the front revealing everything with no screws to undo or panels to remove. It's a clever design lacking the usual add-on slider rails of your gneric linux boxes. There's even a firewire port on the front for quick access. Another nice feature is that you dont need a terminal to set them up, they will auotmatically find the administration computer on any DNS system. And if you need to have a terminal attached, you can buy a UPS based KVM switch rather then the usual clumsy Video/mouse/keyboard KVMs.

Anyhow the bottom line is this as soon as a partionalble journaled raid 5 system is avaliable the Xserves will be one of the least expensivie full featured HIGH QUALITY 1U half terrabyte disk servers you can own. (note I said High quality). I just wish they would hurry up since I have two of these cooling their heels waiting for raid 5.

Re:One Problem:

[Cutriss]

you dont have to, NFS works fine with HFS+, but you risk screwing yourself with the file name case insensitivity of the mac. A rare event since most people dont have important files that differ in name only in their case but it's lurking.

It's possible that perhaps the UNIX community needs to move past case-sensitivity in filenames and foldernames. Just because UNIX has been doing it that way for 30 years doesn't mean that it needs to be done that way, and apparently both Windows and MacOS have a hard time cooperating with it.

Example - I'm doing development on a local machine with Visual Studio 6. I try to move my project to a Samba share so that I can work with it in a different lab...but suddenly my project won't build. It turns out that Visual Studio makes assumptions about lowercase letters in the pathing for the various files it creates during compilation. UNIX obviously doesn't abide by this, and so returns "file not found".

Sloppy? You bet. Important? Outside of anal-retentiveness, I can't think of a single reason that you'd *WANT* to be able to support filenames that differ only by case. It's an HCI issue for one thing, and the system incompatibility issues that are now surfacing are making the issue more visible.

I'd welcome some examples of places/functionality where case is of critical importance.

Re:One Problem:

[ivan256]

I was pretty upset when I discovered that they only came with raid1 and raid0.

Standard practice nowadays is to use RAID 0 and RAID 1 together instead of using RAID 5. The data protection is better, and the performance is too. You should make mirror sets, and then stripe them rather than the other way around. That way your system can keep running at full speed if any single disk breaks. The other thing you may consider (I don't know if this is possible under OSX, but it should be) Is to RAID your partitions instead of partitioning your RAID. This should overcome your filesystem issue.

With the low cost of storage these days, RAID 5 is basically obsolete. Spend the extra few gigabytes, and use RAID 0+1

Re:One Problem:

[Twirlip of the Mists]

With the low cost of storage these days, RAID 5 is basically obsolete. Spend the extra few gigabytes, and use RAID 0+1

That's an overstatement. ATA/IDE/whatever storage is pretty cheap, but SCSI and Fibre Channel disks are still pricey. In order to protect a 1 TB filesystem with RAID 0+1, you'd have to have 2 TB worth of (let's say) Fibre Channel drives. That extra terabyte would cost you many thousands of dollars. But to protect the same filesystem with RAID 3 or RAID 5, you only have to have (at least) one spare drive. That's a lot cheaper than the 6 or 8 or 16 or whatever drives you'd have to buy to mirror the whole filesystem.

I'd say that for filesystems in the range of 0-500 GB using inexpensive disks, RAID 3 and RAID 5 are probably unnecessary. But outside that set of conditions, RAID 0+1 just isn't practical.

Re:One Problem:

[sesquiped]

I often name files starting with uppercase letters so they don't conflict with others for tab-completion, but that's not the important issue. The important issue is unicode. In general, it's much more difficult to do things case-insensitively when dealing with unicode, because case isn't a very well-defined concept. Sure, for English text using the Latin alphabet, it's pretty straightforward, but for other languages and other alphabets, it can get much messier, and you have situations like several consecutive characters being shortened to a single one, as part of case normalizing, or a character turning into multiple ones. So strings can even change size as part of case normalization, making the implementation of an accurate case-insensitive unicode string comparison quite a difficult and complex piece of code, and in particular, one that you don't want anywhere near your filesystem code.

Re:One Problem:

[jaywee]

Samba can be configured that filenames are insensitive (which is default since samba 2.2)

Re:One Problem:

[Bronster]

Do they do _all_ possible cases? I seem to remember there are heaps of asian character sets that get rather huge - do you also do equivalence mapping between them? What about the different forms of period in each one - are they all valid for .ext extentions?

What it falls down to is that you don't want similar LOOKING characters to have different values - and you've forgotten all the accented characters, umlauts, etc - do you fold them as well?

The reason non-Unix systems that support Unicode don't chug along is that (a) they support all of Unicode and (b) they don't fold all possible cases, just the few you've mentioned above.

Re:One Problem:

[zzen]

Ah you say, why not just make a small HFS+ partition and let the rest be UFS. Well apple does not yet support partitioning a disk with different File systems. Thus you cant split the disk into UFS and HFS+ partitions.

Well I don't know of which support exactly you are speaking of, but I've been running 2 HFS+ partitions and 1 UFS partition on my iMac (with a single 40GB disk) since 10.0.3 (client) and continue to do so until now (10.2.2).

And in case you forgot to setup the FS types correctly when partitioning, here's the hint how to do it afterwards. You cannot normaly just select "Erase disk" and put a different FS type on it. It will offer only the same type as the partition already has. BUT if you reboot with an OS X install CD and launch Disk Utility, you will be able to change the format of the partition without touching the rest of the disk.

Re:One Problem:

[ivan256]

That's an overstatement. ATA/IDE/whatever storage is pretty cheap, but SCSI and Fibre Channel disks are still pricey. In order to protect a 1 TB filesystem with RAID 0+1, you'd have to have 2 TB worth of (let's say) Fibre Channel drives. That extra terabyte would cost you many thousands of dollars. But to protect the same filesystem with RAID 3 or RAID 5, you only have to have (at least) one spare drive. That's a lot cheaper than the 6 or 8 or 16 or whatever drives you'd have to buy to mirror the whole filesystem.

Basically, you've got to spend 33% more on your storage to use 0+1 instead of RAID 5. For smaller arrays, that's not a lot of actual dollars. The only real place I see for RAID 5 anymore is for low-end, medium-reliability configurations with more than 500Gb of storage. If you're a low end user with a 1TB array, then you'll go for the 33% savings. If you're not backing up your array, you'll probably not be spending the extra 33% (even though you probably should!). If you're backing up your terabyte array, and you are in an enterprise environment, the cost of your backup solution and your dedicated redundant caching controllers dwarfs the 33% increase in cost to go from raid 5 to raid 0+1. Also, the cost increase is typically justified by the increased performance of the 0+1 solution.

You're right, RIAD 5 isn't dead, but it's niche is shrinking.

Re:One Problem:

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I don't buy it.

Tab completion in shells is not an issue. It works fine on HFS+, and is just as case-sensitive as always or not, depending on your shell settings.

So your beef with case-sensitivity comes down to: Unicode is hard, and because it's hard, you don't want to do it. But you don't have to do it. Apple does it for you. Apple has been doing it for a long time for you. Apple even made it work very quickly for the common case, because Apple is just hoopy.

Re:One Problem:

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Basically, you've got to spend 33% more on your storage to use 0+1 instead of RAID 5.

No, you've got it backwards. To use RAID 5, you'll have to spend up to 33% more on disks than you would if you used no RAID protection at all. If you bought two 100 GB drives (to keep the numbers round) you'd spend $200 (again to keep the numbers round). To RAID-protect those two 100 GB drives with RAID-3 or RAID-5, you'd have to buy one more 100 GB drive, meaning you spend $300 to buy 200 GB of storage. You spent 33% more.

To create a RAID-0+1 set out of those two drives, you'd have two choices. You could just mirror the drives by themselves, and have 100 GB of storage space for $200-- 100% more money than you would have spent if you'd just bought one 100 GB disk. Or, if you have to have 200 GB of usable space, you could buy two more 100 GB drives and create a RAID-0+1 set out of them, giving you 200 GB of space for $400-- again, 100% more than you would have spent for just the two disks alone.

So the difference in cost between RAID-3/5 and RAID-0+1 starts at 66% above the cost of the data disks themselves. But you can create a RAID-3 or a RAID-5 set out of any number of drives. You could have bought ten 100 GB drives, build a RAID-3 or a RAID-5 set out of them, had 900 GB of usable space, and only spent 10% more on storage than you would have spent without RAID protection. (The other way of looking at it is that you sacrifice a fraction of your usable storage up to 33% when using RAID-3 or RAID-5. Either way, the fraction never exceeds 33% unless you start counting hot spares, mirrored parity drives [for RAID-3], and things of that nature.)

On the other hand, to use RAID 0+1, you have to have one mirror disk for every data disk, meaning you have no choice at all but to spend 100% more on storage than you otherwise would have. The difference in cost between RAID-3/5 and RAID-0+1 starts at 66% of the value of your usable storage and goes up from there.

RAID-3/5 actually makes more sense in all applications that aren't seriously affected by storage performance. RAID-3/5 are inherently slower than RAID 1 because they involve the generation of parity data, and that takes some measurable amount of time during writes. Depending on your RAID software, you may do a parity check on reads as well as a preventative measure, and in that case your reads slow down as well. But RAID-3/5 will always be less expensive than RAID-1 for four drives or more. (You can't do RAID-3/5 with two drives, and you can't do RAID-1 with three drives, so one has to start comparing them at four.)

Now, in some specific cases, RAID-0+1 gives you a level of functionality you can't get with RAID-3/5, and it makes sense to use it for that reason. For example, in an enterprise environment with (say) 20 TB of data in a big array, I would consider setting up a three-way stripe/mirror set. That way, you can detach one of the mirrors and do an offline back-up to tape or whatever, while the production filesystem continues to run with its other mirror protecting it. When the backup or whatever is complete, simply reattach the offline mirror and re-synchronize it. Storage arrays like the HDS 9900 series use this sort of trick all the time, and in that environment it makes a lot of sense.

But absent of outside factors, just considering pure cost of investment alone, RAID-3/5 will always be cheaper than RAID-0+1 for four drives or more.

Re:One Problem:

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't even have to go to non-Latin alphabets. If you're writing Turkish, "I" is *not* the capital of "i". So is "Ii" the same filename as "II"? Is it different if I had my system set to the Turkish locale when I created it? When I list it?

I general I think case-insensitive filenames are better, but Unicode does present some pretty ... interesting ... situations.

Re:One Problem:

[goombah99]

Hi this is Goobah99. No I did not repeat my own post. someone copied it verbatim ans reposted it as an AC. Weird.

Re:One Problem:

[BlueGecko]

But wait! you cant format the whole thing UFS becausesome of the mac apps break unless they are on HFS+. So this means you need to format atleast one of the disks HFS for the OS and apps. that leaves three disks. But in RAID 1, you cant use an odd number of disks. So that leaves two disks for raid 1 UFS.

What kinds of apps are you planning on running on an Xserve, dare I ask? None of the apps that ship with OS X have this problem--in fact, those that do are pretty much only a handful of Classic apps. Further, if your complaint is that you would run the Classic apps over a network from being hosted on the Xserve: that would be done via AFS, which, like HFS+, preserves case, but is not case-sensitive. So I assume that this problem would be masked. (That said, I don't get, honestly, why it matters.)

Re:One Problem:

[captaineo]

Internationalization IS the big problem. If you want open() to be "case-insensitive," the kernel must include not only the simple mapping from English uppercase letters to English lowercase letters, but also the mappings from Traditional to Simplified Chinese characters, Japanese Hiragana to Katakana, etc. (you're talking megabytes of kernel memory here).. Now you can and SHOULD do this kind of thing in user-space GUI libraries (e.g. File Open dialog boxes), but underneath the kernel should not do anything more than strict byte-matching.

In other words, blame Visual Studio for handling cases wrong...

Re:One Problem:

[Raffaello]

RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

(and no, I don't buy the post hoc redefinition of the acronym as "Independent.")

So, if the disks are not inexpensive, by definition, it isnt RAID. Using expensive disks to do RAID largely defeats the purpose of RAID.

Note also, that so called RAID level 0 isn't really RAID either, since there is no redundancy.

Re:One Problem:

[Twirlip of the Mists]

no, I don't buy the post hoc redefinition of the acronym

Not to be rude, but so what? I don't recall anybody asking you if you agreed with the current common usage of the term "RAID." It means what it means: a number of hard drives concatenated, striped, or otherwise combined to behave as a single logical device. Whether the combination of drives is redundant or not, or whether the individual drives is inexpensive or not, isn't important these days. The various implementations of RAID have been well defined, and are understood by everybody in the field. Quibbling over definitions that have long since been rendered moot is a waste of time.

Re:One Problem:

[Hrothgar The Great]

The way I see it, upper case letters and lower case letters are different. Simple as that. They have different numerical values, for example. Why should we want to create arbitrary rules dictating that two fundamentally different filenames should in fact be the same just because it seems to make sense linguistically? I think such rules create unnecessary complications.

Re:One Problem:

[babbage]

Wow, congratulations Goombah, you've got an identity thief. It's like you're living in a techno cyber ninja thriller. I'm so jealous :)

Re:One Problem:

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I'm not a native speaker of Japanese or Chinese, but I'm a little educated in both. Hiragana and katakana are different alphabets with different purposes. The katakana character for the syllable "ka" is not equivalent to the hiragana character for the syllable "ka." There's no circumstance under which you'd want corresponding hiragana and katakana characters to be considered equal.

As far as Chinese goes, traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan, while simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China. Again, they're not equivalent. So you wouldn't need or want to map between them.

The uppercase-lowercase thing is pretty much unique to Latin and Latin-derived alphabets. Some languages have contextual forms-- for example, an initial character in Arabic looks different from the same character in medial or final position in the word-- but that's a rendering issue, not an encoding issue.

I actually think it would be quite straightforward to design a Unicode-based system that's case-insensitive with respect to alphabets that have distinct cases. More work than doing so for ASCII, of course, but not insurmountably more.

Re:One Problem:

[Twirlip of the Mists]

If you're writing Turkish, you're going to be using the ISO-8859-9 character mapping. The capital letter corresponding to the lowercase "i" (U+0069) is U+0130 ("LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE"), while the capital letter corresponding to lowercase U+0131, "LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I," is I (U+0049).

Because your system will chose a character mapping for displaying and sorting strings based on your locale setting, if your locale is set incorrectly, string comparisons for case and sorting won't be done properly.

Re:One Problem:

[bursch-X]

There's no circumstance under which you'd want corresponding hiragana and katakana characters to be considered equal.

Huh? What about displaying Japanese file names in Dictionary order (aiueo), then of course you don't care whether it's Katakana or Hiragana, but you care whether any "nigori" are used etc. and you definitely want to to intermix the two systems. (and the same goes for the readings of the Kanji, you don't care for the Kanji used, but the Hiragana readings of them).

Re:One Problem:

[twoshortplanks]

Can you explain to me what the difference between file IDs and a path name is please? They're both unique ids that point to a resource.

Remember that under unix you can have a symlink (like a shortcut but supported by the very OS rather than just by the file manager.) This can be used to point from your "file ID" (your unique path) to whereever you actually want the file.

This seems to me to be a much more user friendly way of doing things. Of course, you're more than welcome to disagree over that - it's one of those cultral things (you tend to like what you're used to) so of course people are going to say one system is better than the other and vice versa.

Re:One Problem:

[twoshortplanks]

On my linux box I have two commands

• head - get the first 'n' lines of a file
• HEAD - send a http head request to a website and print the result

I have heard my Mac friends complain about the inability to use both commands on the same system, and the problems this has caused.

This is a thing about power. Traditionally Linux users think the power to do whatever they want is the most important thing. The Mac thinks that it's the power to get things done in the easiest way possible (even if you have to make a few edge cases harder - or impossible to do.) You'd be a fool to say either way was better than the other, as it really just reflects on your personal opinion which power is more important.

Re:One Problem:

[twoshortplanks]

Actually, you're the fool to think this has anything to do with power

Hey, I never denied I was a fool ;-)

What is it with the ability to have the files Grok, grOk, GRok, and grOK in the same directory that gives you a sense of power?

Nothing. But I wasn't talking about having lots of files named /Grok/i, I was talking about a more general situation.

My point was (and still is) that in a Linux sense having case sensitivity is thought of as more powerful system as there isn't a arbitary restriction placed on you by the operating system. (you can always do the case munging in user space if you really want.) The counter argument from HFS+ fans is that the filesystem is better as it's more powerful - look, it has these power features like ignoring cases on reads.

Until Linux users can recognise the design decisions were made for valid reasons for the Mac (and vice versa) we'll never get anywhere. Yes, you might not agree with them...but that's okay. You just have to accept that they have their reasons.

The same filename with different casing is still the same filename.

This is all dependant on your point of view. You're looking at the issue as someone who's used primarly to dealing with letters as words. Other people who are used to thinking of letters as codes for numbers may not agree with you. Neither of you is right - or maybe both of you are - it's just a different model of looking at it. It's a cultral thing.

Filenames ultimately are a small piece of metadata attached to a file for the sake of humans. If filenames were meant for computers the files would have names like 1, 2, 3, 4, ..., 54654654, ...

That's like saying domain names are just for humans to use and computers should just use IP addresses. This is clearly not true as if a computer needs to change IP and if there was no lookup system via the DNS then none of the other computers would be able to find it and it's resources again. Likewise if a computer needs to find a file resource then it looks it up by it's filename, not by an inode, as who knows what that inode might be on any particular system. Filenames, like domain names, are both human readable but are important for computers to find things too.

Re:One Problem:

[Hrothgar The Great]

That's just it, it's not irrelevant, and your filesystem should not place limits on the amount of unique file names to suit your linguistic preferences. And it is an arbitrary rule, because it is soon to be followed by lots of other brilliant ideas you'll probably come up with, like automatic spell checking on file names, or file types based on the meaning of the name, or some such garbage.

Filesystems designed with simplicity, which allow the USER to decide how to organize their own files, will always be a better choice. Overcomplicating the filesystem because some people can't manage to keep track of their stuff just makes the system bigger and slower. No thanks.

Re:One Problem:

[Melantha_Bacchae]

An AC wrote:

> Those Asian character sets that you speak of
> don't have the concept of uppercase and lowercase.
> (Seriously, what would a lowercase kanji look
> like?)

The Japanese don't have lowercase, but their "alphabets" aren't going to easily map to the English one any time soon. For one thing, they have three "alphabets": two that represent sylables (hiragana - for japanese words, and katakana - for foreign borrow words and names like "Gojira"), and one that represents ideograms (kanji) that has as many as 45,000 characters. It is rare (vowels and 'n' in the hiragana and katakana, and a few kanji) that a Japanese character will exactly map to an English one. Even then, you are going to have multiple characters mapping to an English one. The kanji up the anti, as they have two to ten readings per kanji, and tens of thousands of kanji.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, Jaguar handles all that just fine. I ripped my "Gojira, Mosura, Kingu Ghidora: Daikaiju Soukogeki" soundtrack in iTunes, and got its titles, in kanji, off the web database. The mp3s and the folder they are in are all named in kanji, just as nice as you please. What's more, they appear on my iPod's playlist in kanji.

"Compassionate Sun, Sun Goddess, Great Mothra! Great Mothra! Mothra!"
Japanese language "Mothra's Song", "Ebirah, Horror of the Deep"

Re:One Problem:

[vague]

> It's a cultral thing.

Actually, it's not. I talk about the one and only use letters were designed for, to be read and written by humans. This is how they are designed. Fact remains, filenames are metadata designed to be read by humans primarily. The fact that such a system also is useful for the computer and that it's convinient for them to use the same system as humans in many situation doesn't change this. To limit the usefulness of metadata for humans just because the computer also likes to use it is ass backwards. If that's the problem the right thing is instead to invent a parallell system for the computer to use where the problems doesn exist for the computer. I repeat, if filenames were primarily designed for computers to read, they would be file numbers.

That you like to think of words on the computer as different than words anywhere else doesn't change the fact that this is a lousy interface decision for humans, because words are words even in a filename.

> That's like saying domain names are just for humans to use and computers should just use IP addresses.

Exactly.

> This is clearly not true as if a computer needs to change IP and if there was no lookup system via the DNS then none of the other computers would be able to find it and it's resources again.

Problem found, analysis deficient. URLs are designed for one purpose, to make addresses human readable (one can argue whether they succeded or not but...). The fact that it can _also_ fill a function for computers is superflous. Sure it can, but it wasn't designed primarily for this, and every time this secondary use hampers the primary use you're doing things the wrong way.

Re:One Problem:

[twoshortplanks]

I'm impressed a lot by your argument here, and I'm willing to say that you're right...maybe filenames should be case insensative. However, sadly in this world we're all not going to agree on things, and how much I might like to agree with you about the merits of HFS+, some people are still going to want case insensative systems.

I still argue it's a cultral thing. Many unix users would never sacrifice the ability to have case sensitive file systems as they'd die before taking functionality away from their system. You say "That you like to think of words on the computer as different than words anywhere else doesn't change the fact that this is a lousy interface decision for humans, because words are words even in a filename". However consider that to a Unix person having case insensitve files breaks their interface considerably. It's just inconsistant with every else that treats all things as strings. The -h option is not the same as the -H option. And yes, maybe this is wrong, but it's their culture that has set them up to do it.

What I'm trying to say here is that no matter what you might think of the idea being wrong, the people that use it arn't wrong themselves. They're just following a different set of guidelines. (Note, I don't mean to imply that you think they are or that you made this point...it's just a point that's worth making)

This reminds me of a debate I had about spaces in a file name. Now, I personally have no very stong feelings on the matter, but I can remember a Mac user complaining a lot about bad handling of spaces in a filename in Unix. Now, to be fair they're completely right in their opinion - unix does break horribly. What they're wrong in doing is considering that this is due to stupidity...it's not, it's a cultral thing. To the command line people a space isn't part of a file name unless it's properly escaped....it's a meta charecter that delimits the edge of commands and file names. It's a hang over from using the CLI too much...

And yes, you could consider this bad and wrong (especially in the day of the GUI,) but it's a convention that's sprung up over time...like double clicking, or anything else that you can't really draw a comparision to the real world.

Oh, and on a personal note, thanks for the debate...it's not often you get sensible replies on slashdot ;-)

Re:One Problem:

[Twirlip of the Mists]

D'oh! Of course, you're right. I was talking about case-mapping, but I spoke so generally that my comment applied equally well to sorting, and that's wrong. Of course you want to be able to sort Japanese characters in dictionary order, and you (may or may not) want words starting with hiragana "ka" to appear next to words starting with katakana "ka." For that purpose, you have to be able to sort the two character sets together. But strictly speaking, a name spelled in katakana characters is different from a name spelled in hiragana characters, even if it's made up of the same syllables. So you wouldn't want to "case-fold" hiragana into katakana or vice versa.

Re:One Problem:

[lamz]

Hey! This is the second time that I've seen someone complaining about a post being plagiarized. Has someone plagiarized your complaint? What's the world coming to?!?!

Re:One Problem:

[hondo77]

I can't think of a single reason that you'd *WANT* to be able to support filenames that differ only by case.

Just because you have a limited imagination, that is no reason to shackle the rest of us. I've had case-sensitivity for over 20 years. I'm the customer. I want it. "System compatibility issues" is a red herring. At some point you have to move off the punch cards and join the 1970's. If that means being incompatible with punch cards, so be it.

Re:One Problem:

[vague]

> They're just following a different set of guidelines.

So, in a sense, the filesystem might be better of if it could accomodate both types of needs with different tools. The average users need to treat filenames as sensible labels by which they recognise and organize their data. This is the HCI view. The system administrator o.t.o.h. needs to treat filenames as one needs to treat strings in programming language, often with great precision and exact matching, no guesses on what the computer might consider equal. I'm not entierly certain that it's not the culture that should change (in the long run), but at any rate one needs to be practical and plotical right here and right now. So is there any way one could accomodate both sides equally without creating a quagmire of redundancy? I have this sinking feeling there might not...

> Oh, and on a personal note, thanks for the debate...it's not often you get sensible replies on slashdot ;-)

The feeling is 100% mutual I assure you =)

Re:One Problem:

[anarkhos]

HFS+ is case-preserving so tab completion works.

HFS+ supports unicode.

How the hell did the previous post get modded up?!

Re:One Problem:

[captaineo]

As bursch-X pointed out, you do need the Simplified-Traditional mapping in strcmp() or whatever comparison function you use for sorting. (however you are right in the sense that most kernel-level filesystems don't need to sort filenames, only compare equal-or-not-equal).

As a student of Chinese I have many Simplified and Traditional files on my system. You are right that Taiwanese users might not care too much about support for Simplified characters, but the reverse mapping is important since Traditional characters are making a comeback in mainland China... And unlike Hiragana and Katakana, the two character forms are completely interchangeable; someone who is literate in both will often not even be aware of which form he is reading.

I have not studied too much Japanese, but I know there is also the issue of certain words that can appear as either kanji or Hiragana...

I think there is an argument for providing these Unicode character mappings at the libc level, however I'd prefer to see them in a higher-level library that could be shared between GUI applications. (like the international text layout functions in libpango, which theoretically could serve all GNOME, KDE, and Xlib apps)

Re:One Problem:

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Traditional characters are making a comeback in mainland China

Okay, I stand corrected on that one. Am I correct in assuming that there's a one-to-one mapping between simplified and traditional characters? For every character, that is, there's zero or one simplified forms and one traditional form?

I know there is also the issue of certain words that can appear as either kanji or Hiragana...

Yeah, but that's different. That's mapping a set of characters to one character. Way beyond simple case matching there. Hell, that borders on "do what I mean" technology. But then again, input systems like Kotoeri can map hiragana input to kanji (in a one-to-many way with lots of user input), so maybe it's possible.

Re:One Problem:

[captaineo]

Am I correct in assuming that there's a one-to-one mapping between simplified and traditional characters? For every character, that is, there's zero or one simplified forms and one traditional form?

Yes. There are a handful of oddball characters that have more than one traditional form or more than one simplified form, but your assumption is true for the vast majority of Chinese characters.

An oddball example is the character for "enough" (pronounced "gou4" in Mandarin) - it is sometimes written with the left and right-hand sides reversed. Each variant is a different Unicode codepoint (U+5920 and U+591F); and you'd definitely want to include these in a string-comparison function. :)

Re:One Problem:

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Okay, you've convinced me. I give up. From now on, I'm sticking strictly with ASCII. And none of this mixed-case business, either. I'm going back to the old days to keep things simple.

THANKS FOR YOUR INPUT. SEE YOU AROUND.
:wq

Re:ip firewall

[wirelessbuzzers]

Read more carefully next time:

The 10.2.2 Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for the following applications and technologies: Address Book, iChat, IP Firewall...

The firewall was in there before. There's just bugfixes for it now.

I pray Panther will fix pam..

[Raleel]

Once they fix pam, I won't have many bitches with OSX. As it is, you cannot kerberos login and exect a screensaver to work wihout a local password.

Re:I pray Panther will fix pam..

[netsrek]

What's that one? You can't unlock the screensaver without a local password if you've logged in via Kerb ? It bugs me even more that loginwindow itself doesn't talk to PAM, it just talks to the SecurityServer directly. Makes PAM almost useless imho... I'd love to be able to do native radius auth at the desktop....

Big fan of OSX, but...

[underwhelm]

I'm still waiting for VCD support. >:(

Re:Big fan of OSX, but...

[joel8x]

VideoLAN Client works fine for me.

Re:Big fan of OSX, but...

[underwhelm]

I guess I'm looking for support from Apple on this (read: free). I understand if Apple doesn't see this as critical system software, like they do the DVD player... Like I said, it's not a big deal because I use my PC for all my DVD viewing anyway, I'll just continue to use it for VCDs too.

The Encore DXR-2 pumps all MPEG video out to my TV anyway.

Re:Sleep Issues

[RAMMS EIN]

``Hopefully it fixes sleep issues on certain Mac Hardware.''
Yes, those TiBooks make really hard pillows! I like the built-in heater, though. It's just the right temperature, not like those Intel | AMD based notebooks...

Parent is troll...

[wirelessbuzzers]

... but I'll bite anyway.

I work for Apple's East division, there is no such thing as 10.2.2.

That's funny... I just installed it...

When did we release 10.2.1 ?

09/18/02, according to Apple.

Well, I hope...

[andfarm]

...that they've fixed the NSPDFRep bug that made LaTeX documents print out incorrectly.

If you've got LaTeX installed, you can test this with
\documentclass{article}\usepackage{amsmath} \begin{document}$$\left(\dfrac{\sqrt{2}}{2}\right) $$\end{document}
and see the broken parentheses under high magnifications.

Should be good.

[dsanfte]

Many of us have been waiting awhile for this release. Certainly I have. Perhaps this new software will solve the stability issues many users were having with the older version.

My favorites

[andyring]

# Addresses a potential kernel panic situation when using three video cards and more than 512 MB of RAM.

If only I had to worry about this situation!

# Addresses a potential issue in which an unauthorized user could log in as a deleted user.

Glad to see Apple still on the top with security.

# Improves Address Book compatibility with users that are already on an AIM Buddy List.

Good, this was an issue I submitted through Developer bug reporting, glad to see it fixed!

From the list of enhancements

[underwhelm]

"Improves time needed to wake some portable computers."

Uh oh. If my TiBook wakes up any faster than it already does, it'll resume before I even open the lid. Brings a whole new meaning to the term 'race condition.'

Re:From the list of enhancements

[ealar dlanvuli]

Hypothesis: Apple laptops premptively wake from sleep mode.

Test: Think about opening your TiBook by at the last moment divert your attention (tell your wife to yell at you sometime tomorow when your about to lift the lid or something).

Possible results:
1: it wakes;
hyphothesis upheld.
2: it doesn't wake
Apple has surely outdone all previous innovation with this notebook that actually predicts the future.

Re:What happened to the old Slashdot?

[Wyatt Earp]

Yep.

Back in the day, the only time you'd see an Apple on the front of /. is when they came out with hardware or sued someone.

Now I'm getting my update news here. Scary.

*NEW* Apple Information Service

[EverDense]

Apple announces purchase of the slashdot domain for announcement of OS-X update information.

To make everything UFS and keep things nice:

[SHEENmaster]

just use Disk Copy to make a .dmg image. Mount it and install your 'HFS+ only' software to it.

Before I erased OS X, I did this sucessfully with Bryce(now running under MoL) and Flash MX (now running under MoL).

If I do go rackmount, it will be with Xserves, provided I can return OS X and go Linux.

Multiple partitions

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally have formatted a Mac with a small (20mb) HFS partition for the MacOS, and the rest for UFS for linux.

I used Apple's own HD partitioning util, too. Its just an older version. (3.5 or something like that)

It can still be found on the web, and will still work.

Re:Sleep Issues

[geek]

The original dual processor power macs wont wake from sleep, and if they do they kernel panic immediately. It's been an issue for two years with no solution. MacOS 9 even does it on the systems so I'm guessing it's hardware related and not software which is why there is no "patch".

Re:Cupertino, we have a problem!

[binaryDigit]

They'll pull a Sun and change the name of the OS and version numbers. So Sun went from just SunOS to SunOS 5.x/Solaris 2.x/Solaris X. It's just a matter of time before Apple goes changes MacOS to iOS and starts the version numbers back at 1 (or in a Micro$oft like move, start them at 3). So MacOS 11 will become iOS/1.

Of course they could always do another M$ move and just rename it to MacOS'03.

How to enable journaling (simple howto)

[geek]

enter the terminal.app and type:

diskutil

You'll get a list of diskutil options, two of them are "enableJounal" and "disableJournal".

Happy hunting

-todd

Re:How to enable journaling (simple howto)

[Hadlock]

/dev/disk0
#: type name size identifier
0: Apple_partition_scheme *18.6 GB disk0
1: Apple_partition_map 31.5 KB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh 18.6 GB disk0s2

/dev/disk1
#: type name size identifier
0: Apple_partition_scheme *93.2 GB disk1
1: Apple_partition_map 31.5 KB disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS Hadlock 92.5 GB disk1s2
3: Apple_HFS Documents 644.9 MB disk1s3

so what is the proper "Usage: diskutil [enableJournal|disableJournal] [Mount Point|Disk Identifier|Device Node]" command line to enable journaling on "Hadlock"? i already got "Macintosh" working, but journaling is much more useful on a firewire drive (Hadlock/Documents) prone to accidental unplugging...

Re:How to enable journaling (simple howto)

[geek]

sudo diskutil enableJournal / &

Thank you.

[underwhelm]

Last time I checked on the status of that project it wasn't ready. Thanks for bringing it to my attention again.

VideoLAN.

Re:Cupertino, we have a problem!

[ivan256]

MacOS X version 2
MacOS X version 3
.
.
.
MacOS X version 8

And so on. Wasn't so hard, now was it? It won't annoy me as much as advertising that uses three single word "sentences" that are also supposed to go together, either. Man, those piss me off.

Re:Mac OSX

[ivan256]

It took me a minute to find the button that was going to give me a context menu. Sigh. I always thought that it was just an old joke/troll but seriously, why?

Because the right-click context menu is a windows-ism, and as such, people who have never used windows don't care. In fact, if you gave them another button they wouldn't use it, much like how windows users don't care they are missing the ever-so-useful middle button.

People who do care plug any old multi-button USB mouse into their mac and forget about it.

Re:Cupertino, we have a problem!

[Twirlip of the Mists]

This is such a dead horse. The name of the operating system is "Mac OS X." That's the brand name. The version number is currently 10.2.2. When enough time has passed, the version number will be 11.something. At that time, the full name and version of the OS will be "Mac OS X 11.something."

It's really not that hard to wrap your head around this idea, y'all. It's not necessary to make a lot of noise about it every single time OS X comes up on Slashdot.

Re:ip firewall

[Call Me Black Cloud]

I have the tool for you! It's called a "faq"...

Perhaps if you were doing your job instead of reading /. your students would have one.

But you're right, it is far better to blame the OS then your failure to educate the students.

Re:Cupertino, we have a problem!

[porkchop_d_clown]

So, Intel is the rest of the world, then?

I'm sure Sun and MIPS will be surprised.

Re:Cupertino, we have a problem!

[Darren_Duncan]

Now, a simple guestion: how is Apple going to handle the immense problem with increasing version numbers....11 is not very far anymore :)

I think they are already taking care of the problem by using 10.X increments rather than X.0 increments. For example, they used 10.2 Jaguar rather than 11.0 Jaguar. People complain about having to pay for a point release, while Jaguar is a major upgrade. The only real reason that Apple has called it 10.2 is for branding; they want to keep using "X" as long as possible.

Re:Mac OSX

[phillymjs]

browsing with one mouse button in IE was driving me fucking nuts

Okay, Mr. Power-User, then cough up $20 or whatever for a mouse with the number of buttons you need. For the millionth fucking time.

I always thought that it was just an old joke/troll but seriously, why?

The one-button mouse is designed to have a very clear function, so when Grandma tries to use her new iMac, she doesn't get confused. Apple performed usability testing when they were developing the Mac, to find the optimal number of buttons for the uninitiated user. The results of their testing: one. Any more than that confused people.

You might say, "Well, that was twenty years ago, surely people are more clued in now!"

Wrong. If I had a buck for every exchange like this I've been a part of in even the last two years, I could retire to my own private island:

Me: "Sure, I can help you with that. I need you to right-click on [icon] and select 'Properties.'"
Client: "I clicked on it, but it just went dark. Where is this 'properties' thing?"
Me: "Did you right-click on it, or just click on it?"
Client: "What do you mean, 'right-click?'"
Me: "Right-click, as in, click the right mouse button."
Client (incredulously): "You mean, it does something different???"

My point: Some people STILL find multiple mouse buttons confusing. Since Apple is marketing in large part to people who are confused/frustrated/confounded by Windows, it makes sense to include an unambiguous mouse.

Most people who want a mouse with more functionality either right from the start or after they get up to speed with the Mac will purchse one, and put the Apple one in a drawer somewhere. Those who don't post on /., bitching about how a multi-button mouse still isn't included with Macs.

~Philly

W00t!

[Squidgee]

Haha, I'm so excited. I can get a real JFS (No, Suzy, Window's JFS isn't a -true- JFS; it doesn't let you repair any changes).

Now to wait until all 24.4megs download on my horrid connection (24.0kbps right now!). Wow, I think the download status bar just twitched!

I hope they fixed WINS

[dirkdidit]

Apple claims CIFS compatibility, but they horribly broke WINS in their Samba implementation. If you add a WINS server you can't browse across subnets. All you can see is the WINS server itself. If you remove WINS you can browse your local subnet normally.

For some reason, I seem to be the only person who cares about this. I have never seen it mentioned and nobody responds when I post about it. My local Apple Tech rep didn't even know aout it. I did find it documented in this technote.

Right-Clicking

[Slur]

Control-click does the right mouse button thing on Mac OS X. Of course if you have your own 2-button USB mouse you can hook it up to any USB Mac and use it with Mac OS X. Wheels work too.

Of course Apple only includes a 1-button mouse with their systems, but 2-button optical mice are so cheap that it's just not worth complaining about.

Odd that Apple doesn't sell their own 2-button mouse, though. It's almost as if Apple is trying to help hardware manufacturers get business from Mac users. What could be the advantage of that?

Re:That is correct

[bnenning]

That little song and dance about their derivative license? Yeah, leech off free software.

Bull. Apple has released far more of their code than they had to (zero). And it's not all modifications to existing software either, quite a bit was written from scratch.

OSX gives some of what Linux's had all along.

More accurately, OS X gives what Linux has been trying to achieve for years: a desktop OS usable by non-geeks.

here.

[netsrek]

After signing up for a free ADC account at the ADC site, submit them here.

Re:here.

[commodoresloat]

Ummmm, did you even read the parent post? Particularly the part about registering for free?

Re:What happened to the old Slashdot?

[skinfitz]

At least it's moderately more important the Quicktime getting a point release. Oh wait - that made the front page too.

Re:Mac OSX

[dhovis]

Im too poor to be a macphile but seriously, browsing with one mouse button in IE was driving me fucking nuts. It took me a minute to find the button that was going to give me a context menu. Sigh. I always thought that it was just an old joke/troll but seriously, why?

Very simple... To prevent poor programming. Contextual menus should speed access to features, but is should not be the only way to access a feature. If you force developers to consider single button mice, then they must provide all options in the regular menus, as well as contextual menus.

There are plenty of people in this world that I would not want to have to explain the difference between a right/middle/left click.

Microsoft Powerpoint X makes this mistake on MacOS X. If you want to group objects together, the only way to do it (unless you customize your menus) is to use context menus.

performance

[linuxpng]

I know apple clearly states that you are going to take a 10 to 15 percent disk performance hit when enabling the journal. I'm not sure about everyone else, but with the update and the journal everything seems even faster than 10.2.1. Anyone have similar experiences? I'm launching apps and just generally messing around. I've noticed that photoshop 7 loads in about 7 seconds as opposed to the 13 that it used to as well. Could be imagining it...

Re:performance

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I think it slower write speed. Not slower over all.

Re:performance

[geek]

My system seems a tad faster but i'm sure that has more to do with the prebinding the update did than anything else. I also always make sure to repair the disk permissions after I install something major, you can do that in the disk utility.

My system doesn't boot faster or anything. Overall it's probably about the same. It is afterall just a point release.

Re:Cupertino, we have a problem!

[benedict]

I think IOS is taken.

RAID

[MrChuck]

Hmmm, software raid ain't cutting it and ain't available for RAID 5 (and dearies, RAID 5 is out there, big time - a big win for my friend putting up about a terrabyte/week for their web server farm).

What to do, what to do? /me strokes beard. Hey! How about using "A HARDWARE RAID!"

Why waste your CPU cycles calculating stuff when you can have a dedicated processor taking care of your storage issues?

Call your nearby raid vendor and get a box in. It speaks SCSI, it gives you lots of bonuses. Me? For high performance RAID at a decent price (too much for hobbyists and home users, don't waste your time), try these guys. Just a personal favorite, I'm not part of their company, just a customer.

Why hardware RAID? When your MoBo/CPU/Disk dies and you can't get that software RAID reconfigured, you unplug the hardware RAID, plug it into a new machine and just go.

When you want real speed, those baydel guys have a screaming, mirrored RAM cache so you get to write at 160MB/s.

Jeez, you put all that money into your server and network connections and want to cheap out by using slow IDE disks and your CPU to do all the work?

HFS+? Yeah, I still have it for my Mac Classic II on an 80MB drive.
THanks, I'll use FFS with softupdates or ReiserFS (or XFS mmmmmm) on my real volumes.

For those of you that can't wait to install...

[rworne]

ssh (or telnet if you are daring) into your box:

%su
password:<enter password>
%softwareupdate 3404

(software update progress occurs)

%reboot

You are now updated to 10.2.2

Re:For those of you that can't wait to install...

[rworne]

Wrong link above, sorry, the real link is here

Re:Cupertino, we have a problem!

[LordNimon]

Just let the kid watch This Is Spinal Tap and then tell him that his OS goes to 11.

Re:ip firewall

[commodoresloat]

My thoughts exactly. But I think ipfw is turned off by default, however no network services are turned on by default so it's not that insecure. You can enable/disable all this stuff including the firewall from the System Preferences under sharing. And if you want to watch your system log (tail -f var/log/system.log) in the terminal you watch ipfw deny connections in the log (at least that's what I assume those entries mean). It's kind of frightening how many attempts there are to access a networked computer on any given day....

Journaling?

[Mister Black]

What does journaling do for me? For average usage (email, web, etc) do I need it? Should I use it on my internal drives? FireWire drives?

Re:Journaling?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Check out the journaling filesystems entry at the Wikipedia.

In short, if you've ever experienced data loss from filesystem corruption due to a system crash (software, hardware, power), or think you might in the future, a journaling filesystem will probably save your bacon.

If the disk fails, you're still SOL, so you should use RAID 1 too, for best results.

10.2.2 - man page killer?

[DiscoOnTheSide]

I don't know if anyone else had this problem, but this update seems to have killed the man command in the terminal. no matter what you type now man says "invalid option -- C" did this happen to anyone else, and can anyone else give me any tips on fixing it? How shall acheive my UNIX-Guru status without my precious man pages!? I mean, I just started growing this beard and not showering :-P

Re:10.2.2 - man page killer?

[geek]

Go to disk utility and repair disk permissions. I notice everytime I run this the man pages permissions are screwed from various application installs. I dunno if that's the prob you are having but it's worth a try.

Re:10.2.2 - man page killer?

[mithras the prophet]

That's probably been broken for awhile but you didn't notice it. It's a common symptom if you haven't updated Fink for Jaguar. Go follow the update instructions.

Re:10.2.2 - man page killer?

[lemkebeth]

It works fine on my system so, I think your system is a bit messed up.

Does fsck find anything in single user mode?

If not, check your paths.

Another poster mentioned a problem with Fink. I personally, don't use Fink, I prefer to get separate packages or archives. Still, it is worth a look.

Re:10.2.2 - man page killer?

[benh57]

You need to perform the fink 10.2 update. Apple removed the -C option in jaguar which broke fink's man wrapper. (which is no longer needed in 10.2 anyway) http://fink.sourceforge.net/news/jaguar.php

not giving anything back?

[Bogatyr]

Umm, Rendezvous?
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/02/09 /25/1754218.s html?tid=177

Re:This post is plagarized!

[MoneyT]

But you can't claim ownership to an idea. Information wants to be free!

[Note to the dense: I'm not serious, but I don't care about a plagurized post either]

Apple does not support mixed raid partitions

[goombah99]

Raid sets cannot be mixed file system partions. your comment only applies to single disk partions which can be mixed. Raid sets cannot

am I the only one for whom mail sucks?

[commodoresloat]

I tried using Mail a few times and though I love its spam filtering capabilities, everything else is working wrong. It won't save copies of outgoing messages. It doesn't warn me if a message couldn't send. I switched to Eudora, which I used to use on OS 8, and it is great. In the free version you get all the features plus a relatively unobtrusive ad box.

Re:Mac OSX

[MoneyT]

On the laptops it's even easier to use the keyboard to access alternate mouse functions because your hands are right there anyways. It's really not a big issue. Try it for a littel while.

Opposite

[_damnit_]

I find things to be the exact opposite. For low end configs, RAID 5 is best usually because of cost considerations. At the high end, RAID 1 or 0+1 is found most often because of the performance, redundancy of controllers/paths and tolerance of multiple failures. Your experience may vary though as this whitepaper explains.

Re:Opposite

[1010011010]

RAID 5 performance, of course, sucks. Spend the dough for extra disks.

Journalling is good for everyone..

[goombah99]

Journaling is great and you should use it. It's good for both AOL grandmas and for big disk servers. For the average user it means if the worst happens, say you power down in the middle of a file table update, you disk does not get corrupted. this is good for every user.

for the huge disk servers it means when you power up after a crash you dont have to do a full file system check which could take hours on say a 400GB disk.

what is the cost? a very small amount of disk space (about 8 Megs) and about a 15% reduction in write-to-disk performance. There is no penalty for read performance.

Re:Mac OSX

[Tokerat]

A little known feature of Mac OS X is the Full Keyboard Access function - it's in the System Preferences, Keyboard pane, under the "Full Keyboard Access" tab.

Asside from the Ctrl-Click contexual menus, you can completely control Mac OS X from the keyboard. the default behavior is for the F-Keys (F1, F2, etc) to highlight keyboard focus on various on screen elements, including any properly API-created Aqua control.

Basically, you can run the computer almost completely without a mouse. Or CLI. With your own custom key layout if you desire. Awsome.

Oh, and my $20 Logitech Optical mouse works great with my G4. Right-click functions as-Windows-expected. Users of OS X and above also enjoy the scroll-wheel goodness, and 10.2 even introduces the "Copy & Paste Files" concept to the Mac for the first time, availible contexualy got all those adjusting Windows users.

Even better is my sister's Logitech Wireless Optical mouse, connected to her TiBook. $40 too expensive? Get the cord version. TiBooks have USB ports, you know.

I'll say one thing for Apple...

[psyconaut]

...they seem to have some pretty robust update servers.....I also grab every update pretty much immediately and never have trouble getting them.

Funny how Apple can have software update facilities that must be handing out several hundred thousand 25Mbyte updates a day.....and many websites can't even cope with the traffic Slashdot sends their way ;-)

-psy

Re:I'll say one thing for Apple...

[geek]

They run it all over Akamais network, like their quicktime site.

Re:This is great and all, but...

[Drizzt Do'Urden]

It as been stated that Quartz Extreme will never run on anything else than Radeon/GeForce or better.

As for older hardwdare support, I'm running it on a iBook SE rev1 (366Mhz with Rage Pro) and a Beige G3 (266 oc'ed to 300, Rage Pro video card added-in). Speed is "normal", everything is usable.. just a little slower than OS 9. Quicktime is fast, games (that run, no Open GL :( ) are faster than under OS 9.

Only thing missing.. Open GL, only chipset caught by that, Rage Pro.. it's not like it was THAT bad...

Case matters

[goombah99]

Apple tech support warns against installing the OS onto UFS. they told me specifically that some of their own utilites will not run on UFS. this has been documented on Macosxhints as well. Thus just to install the OS, you need to have an HFS partition. Other peoples apps also sometimes rely on case sensitivity as well, as do most of my perl scripts.

it wil be interesting to see what happens when apple broaches the unicode file name issue. Will they drop case sensitivity, or retain it for just english users.

Re:Case matters

[BlueGecko]

Apple preserves case insensitivity in Russian. That's about all I know enough to test in.

10.2.2 breaks your emacs install.

[mellon]

This is not a showstopper, but just a word of warning - don't do what I did and upgrade in the middle of your work day when you don't have time to fix it. :'}

Re:10.2.2 breaks your emacs install.

[mellon]

Yeah, I should have said, I'm talking about the version of Emacs from FSF that runs on MacOS X, not the version that Apple ships.

Before you update

[wickline]

10.2.2 kills the moviephone search channel in sherlock.

Before you update, control-click on the sherlock application, view package contents, look in Resources, copy the Channels directory and then paste it somewhere in your home directory before Apple stomps on it.

Hopefully you can find a way to get the channel back in sherlock after the upgrade.

It's too late on my machine, so I'm hoping the wife hasn't updated hers yet (I don't feel like re-installing Jaguar just get a search channel back.)

-matt

NO!

[spitzak]

"Case insensitivity" is a user interface issue that should not be in the innards of the operating system. If a file system can treat a filename as a sequence of bytes that have no other meaning, then it can be written to be far more reliable, secure, and dependable, and easier to prove that there are no bugs.

For the "average user" case means nothing. Grandma picks files by clicking on the little pictures and would never notice if many files had the same name. The *ONLY* use for "case insensitive" is for CLI interfaces, and it is amazing that the same people who say "Unix sucks because of case sensitive filenames" are the same ones that say "it sucks because you have to use the CLI". Hey, if you don't need a CLI, you have eliminated the only reason for case insensitive filenames! Not only that, case insensitivity actually interferes with user-friendliness in a CLI as it makes it more difficult to do really advanced things in the user program, such as spelling correction of filenames.

Re:NO!

[overunderunderdone]

For the "average user" case means nothing. Grandma picks files by clicking on the little pictures and would never notice if many files had the same name.

Lets test your theory using the common scenario of doing tech support for Grandma over the phone:
Me: "OK, Grandma open now click on the picture of a paper that says 'read me'"
Grandma clicks on 'Read Me' - after long conversation I finally realise she opened the wrong file
Me: "No, the OTHER file that says 'read me'"
Grandma clicks on 'READ ME' - another long period of miscommunication follows
Me: "OK, Grandma open the file that says 'read me' but ignore the files 'READ ME', 'Read Me', 'READ me' and 'read ME'.
Grandma does an Ellen Feiss "hugnh???"

The obvious advantage of case insensitivity is that it is easier for humans to talk & think about what is on a computer without confusion. Even the tech savvy may have the occasional problem with distinguishing between 'Read Me' and 'Read me'.

case insensitivity actually interferes with user-friendliness in a CLI as it makes it more difficult to do really advanced things in the user program, such as spelling correction of filenames.

I don't follow you, how does it make this more difficult?

Re:NO!

[spitzak]

1. Well I challenge you to tell grandma to differentiate "readme", "read me", "readme" or "read me " (note extra spaces), or to differentiate "one" and "1", or any of a million other things that Windows/Mac file systems will happily store as different files. This is not an argument whatsoever and anybody who thinks this is an argument for case-insensitivity is an idiot.

It makes spelling correction more difficult mostly by discouraging it's use and making it impossible to write powerful algorithims that can weigh case-sensitivity against other possible corrections. Try it some day if you don't believe me.

Re:NO!

[overunderunderdone]

Well I challenge you to tell grandma to differentiate "readme", "read me", "readme" or "read me " (note extra spaces), or to differentiate "one" and "1", or any of a million other things that Windows/Mac file systems will happily store as different files.

Granted you can still screw things up - though you are a little less likely to do so inadvertantly. I still don't see any advantage to doing so or adding the ability to do so in another way.

It makes spelling correction more difficult mostly by discouraging it's use...

I'm sorry if I'm being dense, perhaps I am missunderstanding you - But I don't see how case insensitivity discourages spelling correction. 'Rede Me" and "REDE ME" are both still misspelled (unless you are asking a medieval Englishman for advice).

...and making it impossible to write powerful algorithims that can weigh case-sensitivity against other possible corrections.

There is no reason your spell checker has to be case insensitive just because the file system is. We are talking about the MacOS here which is case insensitive but also case *preserving*. You can still write your powerful algorithms weighing case sensitivity against other possible corrections. If you want to spell-check "Rede Me" but ignore "REDE ME" you can and those two files will always keep their capitisation they way you created them - you just can't put them both in the same directory.

Re:NO!

[spitzak]

I can see lots of reasons for there to be a spelling corrector in user level programs, but I still fail to see any logical argument for putting a small subset of it into the kernel, especially when it complicates or makes impossible many hashing algorithims that a filesystem would like to use, and can allow more security bugs.

A filesystem should assign no more meaning to the bytes used to name a file than it should assign to the bytes stored in the file. Therefore case-insensitivity, or encoding matches, or anything other than strict equality of the bits for identifying a file is wrong.

CT has a Ti

[djupedal]

OS X literally runs in the background these days around here. Didn't you see the posts about CT moving onto a Ti?

Giddy like a schoolgirl when updates come out :)

What gets me is I now find myself foregoing other mac related sites for such tips... ./ seems to have the info first, so it seems natural to look here first. If CT ever abandons the Ti, we're all in for a shock when these items become 2nd page fodder.

Re:This is great and all, but...

[Drishmung]

Quartz Extreme requires support for non-power-of-two textures, which is something that the older, non-Radeon, ATI GPUs do not have. AFAIK, enabling that is much more than new drivers.

Obviously, I don't know how much QE depends on this feature, but I suspect it is fairly fundamental.

And, as the owner of an unsupported ATI GPU, I would be extremely pleased to be proved wrong.

Inconsistent Behavior in Apple Apps

[calstraycat]

Overall I really like OS X, but the behavior of the bundled Apple applications is very inconsistent. Some applications, like iCal and Address Book, quit when you close the window while others like Mail, iTunes and Sherlock, continue to run when you close the window.

Also, if an application window is minimized to the dock, clicking the application icon in the dock may expand the window (Mail, Address Book, Sherlock and others) or it may not (iChat, Preview). The hallmark of the MacOS before OS X was consistent behavior. Now it seems each application operates by a different set of rules. Bummer.

One other pet peeve: none of the Apple applications include the keyboard shortcut for Hide Others (shift-cmd-H). Many of the third-party applications include this shortcut.

Re:Inconsistent Behavior in Apple Apps

[foniksonik]

Try out this little freeware script... adds just the right stuff to enable hide app and hide others to the docks .plist file.

HideFromDock

Of course you could just do it yourself by going into the dock.app and finding the menu .plist and editing.

Humans are case insensitive

[goombah99]

Do you label your file names in english or with binary numbers. Do you sort them alphabetically or by INODE number? I'm betting you use english. If so then there are hierarchies of linguistic preferences that do apply. Humans read english with case insensitivity, its reasonable to expect a file system to keep its files organized according to human expectations, such as alphabetical listing and case insensitivity.

Re:Humans are case insensitive

[Hrothgar The Great]

What difference does it make how *I* label my files? What if someone else wants to do it differently? Why should *I* be so selfish as to dictate to everyone else that not only is my way the ONLY WAY to label files?

And what if you could allow for every user to make their own choice, WITHOUT EVEN WRITING A SINGLE LINE OF CODE? Impossible, you say? No, it's how shit works already. I, and many others, find case sensitive systems EASIER to use than case insensitive systems. And, it allows for more uniqueness in naming files. Furthermore, it requires less code and complication in the filesystem. You're not going to convince me that this should change in UNIX simply because you can't manage your files.

number games

[MacAndrew]

If they go to "Mac OS X 11.12" or whatever, will they finally abandon this stupidity that "X" is supposed to be pronounced "ten"? Think about it -- "Oh, I'm running OS ten eleven twelve." You really WILL sound like a 5 y.o.!

Re:Mac OSX

[Tokerat]

Ahhh, yes under XDarwin or Linux is a different story...I was under the impresion that you meant you'd rather use your Linux machine (well actually, you would ;-) )...In an emergency though, this would be nice to have. I do remember under LinuxPPC I had XFree86 configured so that F1 and F2 where middle- and right-click respectively, but that acted as the buttons themselves, i.e. I didn't have to click the mouse button as well, the FKey acted as a click on it's own, which is a Big GUI No-No. Then again, at least the functionality was there, and Linux and X-Windows aren't exactly taylored for newbies (or at least, was to a much lesser extent in 2000).

I'd imagine chording could be implemented under XDarwin for the Mac, but it would be up to the XFree86 developers, not Apple. Toss them a line about it, maybe they'll throw it into the next release (and I'd actually start using it again ;-) )

For the really bold, how about modding an iBook/TiBook to have three buttons? Lots of close-call mobo soddering, and a bit of Dremel work I'd imagine. THAT would be impressive.

Re:Mac OSX

[lemkebeth]

You wrote:

EVERY Mac user I know does the same thing upon un-boxing their new Macs: They throw out the POS Apple mouse and plug in a REAL mouse with 2+ buttons and a scroll wheel.

Says you. I'm a Mac user myself and know many others and that is not he case except for the Power User crowd.

Re:Mac OSX

[lemkebeth]

I have used XFee86 on Darwin (not rootless) and there is a simulated keybinding for the other mouse button that you can turn on.

I'm not at that machine right now so, I don't remember what the command line arguments were that turned it on.

Re:Mac OSX

[lemkebeth]

You wrote:

Maybe instead of targeting Grandmas, Apple should aim to please the majority of Mac users by bundling a two-button scroll wheel mouse with Macs.

I'm afraid to tell you this but, the majority of Mac users use single button mice. It is the power user that uses two button mice.

Re:Humans are case insensitive ... huh???

[darien]

It may be surprising to you, but there are actually languages where the same word starting with a capital letter means something different than without.

I was once fired from an Eastern European cleaning product company for accidentally overwriting all our Polish sales data with polish sales data.

For those that don't know what Akamai is

[Sycraft-fu]

They are a company that delivers content for you. You pay them to hold your stuff. However they don't just put it in a fast datacentre, they actually have little cache engines that they give to large networks (like universities). This means that if you happen to be on one of those networks, your downloads are incredably fast.

They just did this at U of A, where I work. They shipped us 3 servers and a switch (for free) and then are helping us get them set up. The effect, when they are running, will be that any traffic bound for Akamai's network will instead get serverd from those local computers. So instead of loading down their and our internet links, they will come form a LAN connection.

Really it's a win for all involved. We are happy because it reduces our traffic at no cost to us. They are happy because it reduces the traffic on their network. Their customers are happy because it means fast data delivery to lots of people.

NO!? er NO!!

[Senjaz]

You say the only use for case insensitivity is for CLI.

Wrong.

The whole idea is to remove any possiblity for confusion.

If I have a picture of my pet then what's the difference in meaning between Dog and dog? They are the same I don't want the complexity of the possibility of those two files being able to exist in the same place at the same time.

This is another reason why file extensions being part of file names is evil. Dog.jpg, dog.gif or dog.png? Surely they're all just the same picture of my dog?

Coding case-insensitivity into a file system is a lot harder to implement than doing without it. The Macintosh filesystem and other subsequent systems have gone to lengths to include the feature for very good reasons. It reduces complexity and eliminates an area of confusion.

It is the UNIX world that should change for the better. Do you not want Linux to succeed on the desktop? Features such as this subtly improve the user experience.

One reason why Mac OS has been considered easier to use than Windows for years. Fundamentally they are the same, it's the many small considerations that make all the difference.

I've seen some people in the Linux crowd really getting a handle on this which is great and I really respect what's the Red Hat team are trying to do. The Nautilus project was also a big move in the right direction.

I also don't see how case insensitivity makes it more difficult to spell check filenames. If you'd like to explain the problem then maybe I'll be able to understand your point of view better.

Re:NO!? er NO!!

[Creepy]

I actually don't have any problem with case sensitive - I think there's a point where you're being too anal, and as long as opening and saving is done in the GUI without requiring typing, there shouldn't be any issues. If I save the file as Readme, I double-click it to open it and it stays Readme. Having 2 Readme files in the same place should never happen unless you accidentally save as README, but I think most people could figure that one out.

Then again, I also have problems with people scattering README files all over the file system, with no association whatsoever (README should go in a SEPARATE folder with the app if included with the app (although a README technically shouldn't be included with the App at all), not in the Applications folder or the Desktop, unless the README is about Applications or the Desktop.

Most installers have this right, now, but some early 10.0 installers... well, ew.

As for extensions to filenames, they've been a part of every Apple, although hidden in a resource, and a necessity for identifying the file to the OS. For the most part, they still remain hidden. For your above example, you should see three icons for dog with different pictures to identify the image format, not a file called dog.xxx (I know it doesn't always work this way, but that's the way it should work). While this may mean little to a user (it's dog), it means something if you're sending the picture via e-mail (send me the jpg image or I can't see it on my Amiga). The user should be able to identify the different format by the icon, not the extension.

Coding case insensitivity isn't hard, you insensitive clod (sorry, just read the polls :)
- it just requires a bit more overhead because the core of the OS was designed for case sensitivity. It does require some careful coding for multibyte locales (you don't want to change the case for them).

The only thing I can think of for spell checking is that capitalization checks might get confused or possibly file is stored as a different name than what you see (ala Win95/98 with the Windows~1 names)

Re:NO!? er NO!!

[spitzak]

I do not consider "avoiding confusion" a legitimate argument. If "avoiding confusion" was a requirement for file systems then they would not allow files with different numbers of spaces in them, or substitue '1' for 'l' or 'O' for '0', or spell words incorrectly. In fact the filesystem would have to have a full AI to weigh new filenames against existing ones and decide if they are sufficiently close, and also decide whether the old or new name is correct. Now this may be a good idea, but anybody who proposes that that be in the disk driver rather than a user-level library would be laughed out of geek school. For that reason I also think that case-insensitivity is much better as a user-level library.

If Linux is to succeed on the desktop, they have to show some initiative and design some NEW things, not copy stupid cheap "solutions" that Windows or Mac have done. How about a "save as" dialog box that includes the nice error-correction and matching that the newer shells have? That would completely eliminate any need for "case insensitive" and be much more useful for avoiding confusing filenames.

I agree that filename extensions are evil. They are a kludgey version of a "type attribute" that is designed to be stored on systems without such attributes, but I also think an attribute like that is evil as well, unless it is just a cached result. The real solution is to use things like the Unix "file" command to find out what the data is (you then cache this in a file attribute if the command is too slow). This is the only solution that is really user friendly, the result survives any transmission of the data through the net or email or any other system, and allows the user to rename the files.

Re:Mac OSX

[IamTheRealMike]

Because the right-click context menu is a windows-ism, and as such, people who have never used windows don't care. In fact, if you gave them another button they wouldn't use it, much like how windows users don't care they are missing the ever-so-useful middle button.

How many people have used a computer but never, ever used Windows (or Linux, or RISC OS, or ....) ?

And if it's a Windowsism, why do Mac apps have context menus at all?

Re:Mac OSX

[rosewood]

Aparently we can not discuss this on the apple slashdot realm with out being told we are trolling

What bullshit.

Re:What happened to the old Slashdot?

[kalidasa]

Yes, back in the days before Apple discovered UNIX.

Re:Cupertino, we have a problem!

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

Well, according to Apple, the name of the OS is "Mac OS Ten". As in one more than OS 9. I think a lot of people feel the "ten" part is redundant. That is, saying "Mac OS Ten ten-dot-two-two" is kind of lame.

Most folks I know either say "Mac OS ex ten-dot-two-two" or "Mac OS ten-dot-two-two".

The first is, according to Apple, incorrect. The latter is more natural. The recommendation by Apple is the last choice anyone wants to make. I don't think people care that much about it, but it is unnecessarily obtuse. It might have been more clever to brand the release "Mac OS X R2.2", or something.

Brands and labels are important. If people don't find the official way to refer to something easy, they will create their own, possibly varied, names.

As pointed out in this thread, there is no way anyone is going to say "Mac OS Ten Eleven Twelve" or "Mac OS Ten Eleven One Two" for OS X 11.1.2. Not without deep irony, anyway.

Then again, Apple may just be carrying on the tradition of naming UNIX releases with an unwieldy string of digits that get ignore ;)

Re:Mac OSX

[ivan256]

EVERY Mac user I know does the same thing upon un-boxing their new Macs

All you've demonstarated is that you know a very small portion of the mac user community. Most mac users use the included mouse. It's no harder to hold down the option key then it is to right click, and there's no memorization invloved. Did you have to memorize the right mouse button?

OS X is even written with a two button scrollwheel mouse in mind!

Really? I don't see how you mean. I have a mac with a three button scrollwheel mouse (I *HATE* scrollwheels, though), and the only time I use a button other then the left one is in Microsoft software.

Re:Cupertino, we have a problem!

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Yes, that's just what I said. Should I have made it explicitly clear that the "X" in "Mac OS X" is a Roman numeral? When you say it out loud, it's pronounced "Mac oh-ess ten." I just sort of assumed that everybody on Slashdot was familiar with the concept of Roman numerals. Maybe that was going too far, based on some of the replies I've gotten.

Re:Cupertino, we have a problem!

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Well, according to Apple, the name of the OS is "Mac OS Ten". As in one more than OS 9.

Wrong. The name of the OS is "Mac OS X," which is pronounced "Mac OS Ten" because "X" is a Roman numeral. This is absolutely not "one more than OS 9." Why is this important?

Years ago, it was decided that Intel couldn't have a trademark on the expansion "80x86" or any integer x. They had "80286," "80386," and "80486," but they couldn't trademark those names, because they're just a sequential numbering. So Intel came up with an actual name-- as opposed to a number-- for their next major CPU release: Pentium. Ever since, we've had names-- trademarked names, protected by law-- for Intel's CPUs.

So the actual trademarked brand name of the operating system is "Mac OS X," with "X" being the Roman numeral for 10. That's not "as in one more than OS 9," because that would make it a serial number sequence and invalidate Apple's trademark claim.

The name of the operating system is separate and distinct from its version number. The name of the "classic" Mac operating system was simply "Mac OS." It had a version number, so the whole name would be "Mac OS 9.2.2," or simply "Mac OS 9" for short. Or even "OS 9" for shorter, but that was only acceptable in informal situations where everybody understood what you meant.

The name of this operating system is "Mac OS X," and its version number is (currently) 10.2.2. So if you want to say it all out loud and not be wrong, you say, "Mac OS X 10.2.2." And yeah, smart ass, the "X" is a numeral, so it's pronounced "ten."

If this is too complicated for you to understand, or if it just offends your sensibilities in some undefinable way, just keep calling it "Jaguar." That's a perfectly good name for it too. Either way, shut up about it, okay? If you continue to protest that you're unable to grasp this simple idea, you're going to start looking like an idiot. Just some friendly advice.

Re:Sleep Issues

[sebi]

I used to have the same problem on a single proc G4. The culprit was a dodgy memory stick. Once I removed that sleeping and waking worked like a charm. Just go through your memory sticks one at a time and you should be happy in no time. Good luck.

HELP! All my entourage mail is *gone*

[valmont]

My entourage email DB file was about 400+MB ... I have a back-up of a few months ago somewhere. It still sucks. It was that big because i had imported a couple of years' worth of e-mail. anyway.

Last nite I ran the 10.2.2 update.

Rebooted.

Did a 'df' in a terminal and noticed I had a lot more hard drive space. Gone down from 83%+ full to 77% full. It was late. Didn't think much of it.

This morning I start entourage and all my account settings, email, folders, filters, addresses are *gone*. The DB in microsoft user data was brand new from scratch. It even popped the set-up assistant.

What did stick around was my signature and rules. Weird.

I called apple they're supposed to get back to me today.

Can anyone think of any issue with the new journaling file system and a big file?

Uuuugh :( note to self. Always back-up before update.

Re:HELP! All my entourage mail is *gone*

[valmont]

err whoaaa so u think the fsck process when i rebooted nuked that big-ass 400+MB file? can u give me some background?

Re:Cupertino, we have a problem!

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

"The Twirlip of the Mists doth protest too much, methinks."

Look, all you have to do is state your case. You don't have to get your knickers all in a twist. I, in fact, have never really given this all that much thought and don't really give a shit. You'll notice I haven't, in fact, been "protesting" about this at all. I posted exactly one reply to a single thread. Perhaps you have me confused with someone else.

And how have I been a smart-ass? Show me anywhere in my single reply where I was difficult or name calling or otherwise disrespectful? Now check your post. I'd be tempted to say that someone around here is acting the ass, and it sure isn't me.

Since you didn't state your sources, we only have your word to go on about the Intel issue. Assuming you are correct, you have made a compelling case (however, I'm not convinced that "Mac OS" itself could not have been enough of a trademark without having to rebrand). However, It's pretty clear that regardless of what Apple intended, there is enough semantic confusion to warrant criticism. Which was, in fact, the crux of my posting.

If you can't stand someone having an opinion about something, however misinformed that opinion may be, you are in the wrong place. If the slightest disagreement sends you off into vitriol and name-calling, perhaps you should reconsider how you spend your time here.

Install a sense of humour, willya. You are taking all this much too seriously.

Re:Mac OSX

[Tokerat]

That's fine. I do that too.

But if a Mac (or any computer system) doesn't strive to be versitile, what good is it?

The great thing about the Mac is the same thing that makes Perl hated by many: TMTOWTDI: There's More Than One Way To Do It.

Re:Mac OSX

[Tokerat]

I've never tried another office suite on the Mac, but I warn you: if you decide to go directly with Microsoft Office, it carries a hefty pricetag, and sometimes files that move from Mac to Windows Office and back have problems (especially with graphics on Word documents, it's what's kept me from handing in any lab reports in my Digital Circuits class so far this semester, between a non-working printer here and Windows machines at school).

Ahhh Microsoft Office: A format so odd, even Microsoft THEMSELVES can't read it.