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OS X Hacks
The book is split into 9 chapters; 'Files', 'Startup", 'Multimedia and the iApps', 'The User Interface', 'Unix and the Terminal', 'Networking', 'Email', 'The Web' and 'Databases'.
For my money the last chapter is a complete waste of space since it only covers installing MySQL and PostgresSQL, and if you can't figure out how to install them from the documentation then you aren't smart enough to use them. A number of the other tips would come close to that level, I feel their only use may be to encourage people who would otherwise stay away to make some use of the terminal and similar tools.
Over a dozen people have contributed 'hacks' to the book, among them some major geeks such as James Duncan Davidson (Tomcat author) and Jon Udell (well respected O'Reilly blogger.) This accounts for the wide number of areas covered by the hacks.
When I first started reviewing the book I would have complained about a large number of the tips being too application specific, too general or too low in skill level. Since then I've had a friend who wanted to edit a movie and we both found the chapter on iApps useful, one with a brand new Bluetooth phone who liked the couple of tips on Bluetooth and another who found the cross platform Windows-Mac stuff useful. so I have to say that while some of the tips might seem useless now you may come to appreciate them later.
Overall the book is well written, well laid out and well cross-referenced and covers a wide range of information. My one major beef is still that there are too many 'tips' that are well covered by other material. Since you shouldn't really get this book until you are at least Mac proficient and probably own a basic Mac book or two then perhaps a tenth of the hundred tips will be covered in most Mac books and perhaps another five to ten you will have discovered on your own.
While O'Reilly doesn't offer a sample chapter of this book online they do have a page at Hacks that lists all the hacks and allows you to read eight of them. There is also a page in the catalog with the Table of Contents, Index and Errata.
Reading over my notes I feel split between raving about how good the book is - well written with a bunch of useful tips and tricks for any Mac user - and complaining about the useless nature of some of the tips. After taking another look at 'Google Hacks' and my review I realised where the conflict lies -- in my level of experience on the Mac. If you already feel comfortable with getting your hands dirty on your Mac then this book may well not satisfy you. If, on the other hand, you still have some trepidation about hacking at your OS X Macintosh then you'll probably love this book.
You can purchase OS X Hacks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The reviewer writes "if you can't figure out how to install them from the documentation then you aren't smart enough to use them."
And people wonder why geeks don't have more non-geek friends.
--
http://www.macosxhints.com/ rocks for searching, and if you're unclear on the concept, you can post a query and get an answer from someone in the know. Ad free, and on a decently fast server too. Highly recommended if you want to save a tree.
Considering OSX is one of the unices, it is quite befitting that it is posted on slashdot.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Yes, just open Terminal.app and type sudo justbuyadamnusbtwobuttonmouse -dumbass.
This book looks nice, but it seems like there are just a load of references to third party apps and what they do rather than actual 'hacks'.
Seems like "Intro to OS X and Assorted Utilities" might be a more accurate name for it.
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
I've seen this book a couple of times, but I have not bought it because Web sites like Mac OS X Hints seem to cover much of the same material.
The book looks pretty good for people beginning to explore what they can do with their Mac beyond iTunes, iPhoto, Mail and Safari. However, "experts" will probably be more satisfied with on-line sites like Mac OS X Hints, which have other benefits over the book as well: they have search engines, offer discussion forums, and are lighter to carry in your knapsack than a book -- even a paperback.
-Mark
Agreed. The media has run wild with the term and PR departments are putting the final nail in the coffin. "Hacker" is also now a term of endearment for computer users. "Power users" are those who use windows explorer and know what a boot disk is. "Hackers"--the true experts of computing--are now people that use such non-standard programs as regedit and emacs. I'm thinking of writing a book called eXtreme Hacking. I don't know what I'll put in it yet, maybe windows keyboard shortcuts and a guide for configuring IE. I'm sure it will sell to the l33t wannabe crowd.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Hell, I still run into this constantly today.
;-)
My favorite is the idiot yelling about how much he hates newbies and corporate support in Linux, on a mailing list operated by Intel for Intel supplied Linux software. The "smart" people are such morons, sometimes.
I realize you're probably trolling, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt just in case. If we were talking about older MacOS, you'd be right - it was about as interesting to your average geek as Windows 3.
But the latest version, Mac OS X, isn't your grandfather's Mac. It still runs all the old Mac apps, but under the hood it's UNIX. The fact that it's the only UNIX in town that can run Photoshop, MS Office, etc. is driving "real" technical people towards it - in droves.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
Despite the posts rudely screaming to "get a two button mouse" I have to agree that I would love this hack.
I've been pondering getting one of the Apple laptops, but that one button touchpad drives me nuts [when using my friend's laptop].
Now it's all well and good to buy a 2+ button mouse for your desktop, but when I've the the laptop sitting on my LAP, it's difficult to use a separate mouse and just adds one more thing to have to pack up and lose between uses.
Out of curiousity, anyone use the 1 button thing with Linux on the Apple laptops? How do you emulate 3 buttons with 1 button device???
Ender
Nothing to see here
yes, there is a ~$200 price difference for a similar dell. but the differences from quality hardware to softeare is more than worth it. everything really just works. i have an ibook, and wouldn't trade it for anything. i plug in my dv camera, zip drive, anything. plus, i can keep it on my lap for hours and not have roasted chestnuts.
it's not like you can hose the hard drive of a dell and install os x like you can with linux. macs cost more, but it's not apples to apples. if price is that big a deal, get a dell, hose the drive and take one for the team, courtesy of billy g.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
"Out of curiousity, anyone use the 1 button thing with Linux on the Apple laptops? How do you emulate 3 buttons with 1 button device???"
With key modifiers, silly. alt-click, ctrl-click
You must to purchase the G4. The G4 is your zen friend. Darwin came to me in a dream and he said "Pools of Aqua and wide Open Source await you. Run with the Jaguar."
...only lacks the GUI) if you want to poke around in the underpinnings of OS X before you buy. As a media junkie (video artist) and hacker (the benevolent type) I'm pretty happy with my OS X.
It all depends on what you want out of your *nix. OS X is a stable, secure, highly usable port of Free BSD. Great for novices and hackers alike. If you want an OS that has all of the GNU you may be used to if you run Linux and the like, then steer clear because the mamoth porting job is not complete (for instance, there are some CPAN modules that I wanted to use the other day but aren't ported.) Download Darwin(x86 port
"if you can't figure out how to install [MySQL/PostgresSQL] then you aren't smart enough to use them"
On the contrary, many web developers and web application programmers that are not familiar with installation of DB systems (on UNIX-ish systems or otherwise) are probably "smart enough" to use them. What makes them so incompetent in the first place? Cause they're Mac users? Thinly veiled elitism is so easy to identify.
while some of the tips might seem useless now you may come to appreciate them later."
Uhm, no shit? I need only to look at my personal library of O'Reilly books and/or API manuals to know that 99% of the information contained therein is absolutely fucking useless to me *right now*, but I'm certainly going to need them. That's why I bought the books, instead of going to the library to take notes.
"My one major beef is still that there are too many 'tips' that are well covered by other material."
Why should the author of the book expect the purchasers of his work to own the complete works of his (many) competitors? Can't the book stand on its own merit? Where is your analysis of this possibility?
The gripes presented have absolutely no credibility, and this whole "review" seems to be based on the premise of stating the painfully obvious.
Note: I'm an OS X user.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
That's what hack _always_ meant. A hacker has always been another word for coder. The media started using "hacker" where they should have been using "cracker" or "computer vandal" or similar (mostly because, I'm guessing, in the beginning you had to be a hacker to break into a system) and now the negative version of the term has stuck.
;-)
I'm a hacker, proud of it, and may you people who keep thinking that means I break into computers all get beaten with wet noodles.
I'm still waiting for the OS X Hack that will allow me to read and write to a UDF-formatted CD-R. You know, the kind that Direct CD and Windows XP create that allows you to treat a CD-R/CD-RW as a big floppy disc.
Despite OS X having a mount_udf command, it seems that it doesn't support these types of discs yet.
I posted a review of this book today as well, available here . I came to similar conclusions - a lot of it is great, although some of it will be old news to experienced users.
How do you emulate 3 buttons with 1 button device
Indirectly answering the question:
Whether or not you consider the choice by Apple to continue using single-button mice is reasonable, for those who consider it wrong, note that "too few buttons on the mouse" is not a complaint that can only be aimed at the MacOS.
From the perspective of a traditional UNIX workstation user, Windows has too few buttons - they (e.g. Sun Microsystems Sparc-based machines) ship with 3-button mice. It is true you can get 3- (or however-many) button mice for x86 machines, but then (a) that's a "nonstandard" variation already since the "standard"/baseline for Windows is 2, and (b) you can do so for the Mac too.
This is why if you look at (and those who program GUI apps should know this already) the mouse event/action classes in Java, there are more than 2 defined mouse "button-actions", that if the physical hardware does not exist (i.e. only two-button mice are on the machine) the same effect is achieved with modifier keys (Opt/Alt-click, Ctrl-click, or whatnot).
MS Office
Given that MS Office and Internet Explorer obviously run in UNIX, now, why doesn't Microsoft widen their potential customer base by porting to Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.? Oh, their Mac support is just a token to keep the DOJ off of their backs? So, that lock-in revenue from the Windows OS really is the motivating factor? Oh, I see.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Netscape? Who seriously uses that crap!? Netscape and Internet Explorer are the definition of slow. Safari and Camino for all their beta glory are mean, lean, surfing machines. Safari loads complex pages in a snap, so I don't know why you're bagging on it. Perhaps its your connection that's slow. At least you admit you're a troll.
...you're too dumb to eat at McDonald's.
Makes as much sense as this review.
Along those lines, why do so many book reviews here read like a vegetarian reviewing a a steak house?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I know musicians who can compose film scores on the computer but don't know a thing about setting up a midi/sequencer system themselves.
I know accountants who are stone cold Excel experts but barely know how to turn on their computer.
This is elitism pure and simple.
Jon Udell is lead analyst of the InfoWorld Test Center. He is a blogger, and he is the reason I used to subscribe to Byte Magazine. He does write articles for O'Reilly from time to time, but he works for InfoWorld now. His weblog is here at InfoWorld.
BSD for dummies ;)
-Rob
Did anyone read the remote screenshot hack (scroll to bottom)?
If you allow say a friend to log in remotely, they could technically snap a shot of your screen while you were on your machine.
At the least only those who can log in can do this but still, ouch!
Of course it may not work at all, I've tried it on my machine, and it produced a blank white tile.
Anyone else got this to work?
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Uh. I don't know what your problem is, exactly...
Well, I saw an opportunitity to troll and took the low road. Regardless, the fact that Office can be ported to a vastly different operating system shows that it, internally, has a layered architecture. Alternatively, Microsoft uses its vast resources to recreate much of Office for the sake of Mac OS X.
Why would the Department of Justice care whether Microsoft sells applications for OS X or any other OS? If Microsoft wanted to drop OS X support tomorrow and sell Office only for Windows, that would absolutely be their right.
Microsoft was shown to have used their monopoly position on the desktop to nearly destroy Netscape with Internet Explorer, while further reinforcing their hold on the desktop market. A similar effect has happend with Word versus other word processors, again reinforcing Microsoft's hold on the desktop. By dropping support for Mac OS X, Microsoft would essentially be telling the world (who is already addicted to MS Office) that their only choice is to buy Windows. Apple would quickly go bankrupt or nearly so. I think the DOJ would probably be very interested in a Windows-only stance regarding Office.
By making Office for a wider variety of operating systems, Microsoft can demonstrate good will, where they are interested in profiting off of Office indpendently of Windows. This would show they are moving beyond their clear position of conflict of interest regarding Windows, which is very significant in reducing their status as an illegal monopoly.
In what other industry would any company be allowed to continue with greater than 90% market share in multiple markets, anyway? Operating systems, office suites, and web browsers are distinct markets within the overal market for software.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
For my money the last chapter is a complete waste of space since it only covers installing MySQL and PostgresSQL, and if you can't figure out how to install them from the documentation then you aren't smart enough to use them.
This is a little off-topic, but I raise this issue because I spent a week troubleshooting a MySQL install thanks to some cryptic error messages that were not reported anywhere in the MySQL documentation (which in itself is fairly light on the peculiarities of an OS X install). Nor could I find anything online by searching on the error phrase; the closest I got was some bizarre "SQL gazette" where someone mentioned a similar problem but they didn't even answer his question. Now, I don't consider myself "dumb", but does the fact that an esoteric error message halted my self-made progress make me "not smart enough to use" MySQL? Frankly, it's a lot easier USING SQL than it is installing it; so much so that any HTML or javascript monkey can do it.
There's this almost fanatical belief among a lot of slashdotters that follows this basic logic: "if you can't make it work with the documentation provided, well, you're dumb. Now begone from my sight! I have Matrix trailers to download and mp3's to convert to ogg."
And then they wonder why average computer users aren't interested in learning more about linux or running it in their businesses.
THE DOCUMENTATION ISN'T SCRIPTURE. Sometimes it's incomplete. Sometimes it's bad. And sometimes it's thorough and clearspoken, but things happen that the manual just doesn't cover. Saying people are dumb because they run into problems in HOWTO-reading is like saying people with learning disabilities are too stupid make decisions for themselves. It's elitist to suggest that anyone who can't follow any set of instructions ever written is a moron. end rant.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
what does "faster chip architecture" mean ? did you know you can't compare MHz between different CPUs as any reasonable measure of speed?
the computer you are using was introduced in 1997. that system isn't even a G3.... i can't say how that compares to a 486/66, but i can say that the other day i copied about 20 gigs from one drive to another across IDE busses and it was done in 15 minutes. that's fast enough for me. sounds like you're running OS 8, too.
I've seen questions (e.g. on http://forums.macosxhints.com) many times from people who are installing mySQL merely because it is used by some other software that they want to use. They have no intention of defining their own tables, composing their own SQL queries, etc. They just need mySQL to be there for the other software to use.
There is an analogous situation with the C compiler. On Mac OS X, the C compiler is installed as part of the Developer Tools and that is easy enough- but suppose it was harder to do. Then you might be thinking that anyone who has trouble with installation isn't likely to need a C compiler. But again, I see lots of people asking questions about compiling this or that package who haven't the first clue what a C compiler is - they just want to get the FooSnarz program (available as source) running on OS X.