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Hacking Mac OS X
Bill Hamm writes "DB is carrying a deep interview with Jonathan Rentzsch, who created an open source technology to allow other developers to inject their code into any running process to alter its functions and written papers for IBM to program the PowerPC correctly. The interview is huge and technical, and all over the place in terms of content. Some of the things discussed are the reasons for corporate America's resistance to buying from Apple, software optimization, the importance and history of 10.4's Core Data, why WebObjects is no longer relevant, the status of PowerPC compilers, and why Mac OS X's Finder should be killed off."
Finder is multi-threaded (at least as of 10.2 I believe). Just fire up Activity Viewer and see that Finder's #processes is > 1.
But it blocks for network responses. This is really, really annoying. I wouldn't call it the shittiest thing, but it definitely needs some rejigging. If you've been using OS X since 10.0.3 then you'll remember that the Finder has indeed come quite a long way since then.
My hopes are high for what 10.4 will bring. The problem as I see it is that earlier versions of OS X have had quite a bit of the underpinnings in a certain amount of flux. The Finder (or indeed any 'file manager') is an important element of how the user interacts with the OS. Which means that things like CoreData, Spotlight and other enhancements give an opportunity for a proper overhaul of Finder which makes the most of these technologies. Time will tell I suppose.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
That's not what Automator does. It's understandable why you'd get this wrong, but please check out "Working with Automator."
Short version: Automator lets you chain together very small bits of code called Actions to create Workflows.
Think of Actions as being like UNIX tools, and Workflows as being like command pipelines, and you'll have the idea.
Automator is not a general-purpose AppleScript tool. You can write Actions in AppleScript if you want -- though Objective-C is better, in my opinion -- but you can't use Automator to just talk to any application with an AppleScript dictionary. That's not its job.
They don't, for the most part, stock replacement parts. They don't do anything but the most basic repairs.
I have to chime in here. I have a refurbished dual G5 in which one of the processors stopped showing up. The guy at the Genius bar told me it could be anything from an improperly seated processor to a bad CPU or logic board -- both of which were parts that they had in stock and could fix within a day or two. Luckily, it the processor wasn't firmly "in place" and it just took a bit of reassembly.
They had it diagnosed and back to me in less than 24 hours, no charge. And I don't have Applecare on the machine. My opinion is that Apple hardware is great, but regardless, I've had few occasions to have to get repairs over the years. And when I have, it's been a relatively painless experience. I never had to ship anything in or wait for some obscure supply-chain hopscotch to get a part.
A number of other comments in this post give me pause, but I'm not qualified to respond so I'll just say "hmmm...OK, whatever" to the rest, and admit people's experiences vary.