Currently there is no IP-over-USB driver in existance for OS X, which prevents the use of Sharp's Zaurus PDAs. If that hurdle could be overcome, data exchange would probably be pretty easy. I'm really not sure about other Linux PDAs like the Yopy or the AgendaVR.
Links: Here is a guy who is working on it Current status - it seems he's got some example USB driver source, but it doesn't work yet. Of course, Sharp has claimed on a number of occasions to be working on OS X support along with Apple, but so far nothing appears to have come out of it.
There is a very good reason for not supporting sloppy focus in OS X. Think about it for a moment... How in the world would you get to the menu bar for an application without that app losing focus? It wouldn't be possible - whatever app you mouse across on the way to the menubar would gain focus, and you'd get the menubar for a different app. The only way to have sloppy focus be even remotely usable would be to add yet another interface hack to allow you to get at the menubar, such as a hotkey which locked the focus to your current window. Sounds kinda yucky to me, frankly...
I'm well aware of that. Read the parent post again, especially the part I quoted; I was just responding to his statemtent that Apple is the first to use graphics hardware like they do.
I believe Apple is the "first" to start making use of the video card's GPU for day-to-day stuff.
*ahem* SGI's IRIX has been doing this for more than a decade. Their systems have always amazed me - just today, in fact, I managed to get an old Onyx system working. It's got a pair of 75mhz r8k cpus and a RealityEngine2. That's not a typo - 2x75mhz. Even with such slow CPUs, the user interface is lightning quick because of how well the OS makes use of the video hardware. Granted, the r8000 was a very unusual CPU in how effecient it was per clock, but still...
So basically, all you have to do to avoid the vulnerability is just not run kadmind4, correct? I certainly can't speak for other KDC admins, but I haven't had much of a use for krb4 compatibility for a long time now - I disabled it at LEAST a year ago. Are there still many systems and/or applications that don't support Kerberos5? In any event, yay for me, my KDCs are unaffected!
I don't think MacOS X is the best OS for the task.
WHAT TASK? OS X most certainly has a target market, and it's exactly what the parent poster was describing - people who want to use something other than windows, but who aren't patient or knowledgeable enough to get going with Linux.
Well, what about those of us who bought Stuffit Deluxe 6.5? What if I bought FIFTY COPIES OF IT (for a lab), and I don't feel like paying for an upgrade to 7.0 yet? Looks like I'm screwed. This is not acceptible behaviour! Even Microsoft doesn't (always) act like this when security holes crop up in the previous version of their product. If Aladdin doesn't offer a patch for 6.5, I will be quite annoyed.
Imagine what would happen if MS stopped fixing security holes in Windows 2000 all of a sudden when Windows XP came out? They would be shot in the street!
Sorry for the sweeping generalization, but this *really* does not please me.
Aqua starts when WindowServer is started by coreservicesd from/System/Library/CoreServices/WindowServer (it's a symlink to somewhere else, can't remember where offhand). Anyway, then loginwindow.app is launched on the console (see/etc/ttys for the line that does it). loginwindow.app handles the rest. Sorry this is vague, but I think you'll be able to find what you want with what I wrote down. I might be wrong about what launches windowserver too, I didn't actually check to make sure. Hope this helps.
No. The fkey-virtual-terminals thing is fairly unique to x86 PC clones, as it is a result of the way text mode works on the video cards (e.g. text being passed to the video board instead of a frame buffer arrangement like most other systems). It would certainly be possible to implement similar functionality on other systems, but it wouldn't be nearly so straightforward as on PCs. Linux, in fact, has already done this - the fbcon text consoles do provide exactly this functionality using a frame buffer, so it works on sparc, ppc, etc. Sadly, OS X doesn't. Then again, I wonder how useful it would even be...
Having read the article and also noticed this myself, I'm now wondering if the paper trading cards don't hold the game at all. Perhaps they are all pre-loaded on the e-Reader doohickey, and swiping the card just allows you to play it.
That would be excessively lame, imho, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
Older VAIO 505's are worth next-to-nothing these days... the 200 and 233mhz 505 and 505f tend to go for less than $300, and they had nice bright 10" SVGA TFT displays. I'm actually considering doing this to an old vaio that's no longer road-worthy...
The whole thing adds up to an incredibly flexible system. You can configure the graphics pipe as a relatively small raster of 2,048-bit-deep pixels, or an 8-million-pixel raster of 256-bit-deep pixels, or almost anything in between. You can render a truly giant image-- about 3K by 2K pixels, progressive scan, or even more than that if you're willing to live with interlacing-- with full antialiasing, multi-buffered. It's pretty.
Could you possibly explain just what it means to have 2048-bit-deep or 256-bit-deep pixels? I've often wondered about this - I assume it is not exactly analagous to saying "24 bits per pixel" or "32 bits per pixel" as we commonly do when referring to more common PC graphics hardware. Perhaps I'm missing something simple, but this is one particular statistic that has confused me for far too long.
I believe that the reason for a 2.2 kernel by default comes mostly from the extremely large number of architectures supported in this release. On some of the eleven architectures, 2.4.x is not as stable as it should be (or so I hear), so they went with a 2.2 by default. Please note that there is *nothing* keeping you from installing 2.4.18 or whatever other kernel you want on Woody - in fact there are prebuilt binaries if you wish to use them.
There is no KDE3 in Unstable yet because everyone has been waiting patiently for Woody to be released. Just wait a little bit, and it will start to appear. Along with Gnome 2, I expect.
Well... the website part of it really hasn't changed since last march. I'll attempt to get some pictures up there. That machine is taunting me right now - there's some sort of flakiness on one of the parallel port interfaces to the buttons and LEDs.
You may laugh at the idea, but that is exactly what we did here - and the old 60's era soda machine now runs a web server - and it's got a window, a biohazard logo, and while it's missing the neon lights, those might be added later. I must say, that was one hell of a project. The biggest problem with it so far? It is damn near impossible to get the key to the machine duplicated.
If it seems down, it's probably not its fault - there have been connectivity problems in the office where it lives this morning, I am heading in to work on it right now.
Does anyone know, if you plug a Sun/Playstation keyboard into a macintosh, does the diamond key act as a command key?
Yes, it will. I can't specifically speak for the Sun/Playstation->Mac arrangement, but if you plug a Mac keyboard into a PC (or a Sparc), the command key acts as a Meta/Windows key. Isn't USB great?
Re:Meg Murry from "A Wrinkle in Time"
on
Geeky Child Names?
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· Score: 1
Oh yeah? One of my computers is named after their dog! (Fortinbras, of course) That was a fun set of books, worth reading again once you're out of grade school. I lost interest about halfway through Many Waters, but I guess that's just not my sort of story.
Just out of curiosity, do you know if there is any prospect of running MacOS X with MOL? I understand it's currently not possible, but I am not familiar with the reasons why. It is also not explained (that I can find) on the MOL website. Perhaps you know more about it than I.
I duno. I'm in much the same situation as the guy in the story, and I seem to be keeping from getting too much flak from the SO with a couple of little mindgames. First, what seems to be oddly important is only having one monitor on my desk. I went for a thoroughly geeky multimonitor setup, and it drove her nuts. Mind you, I do have a fairly large tower system, an Indy, a Sparc 20, and a beige g3 next to the desk (a KVM switch is a miracle) - which brings up another point: one tower system. She got irritated when I had a tower on both sides of the desk for some reason. Whatever, now I only have one. If I really really need two monitors on my desk, out comes my laptop. Next rule: no wires running everywhere. Really. They are hidden behind my desk, and I'm not going to wire the bathroom, for chrissakes. There's an 802.11b access point hidden behind the desk, in case I feel that it's *really that important* to post on slashdot while I'm crapping. Which, by the way, it isn't.
Let's see, what else... oh, the second laptop attached to the stereo and TV bugged her, but only until she noticed how slick it is to queue up some stuff from her computer and have it play in the living room. Oh, of course I have to have my ridiculous amounts of random crap - but the magic part here is if it's out of view, it doesn't exist. I've got a nice big box filled with cables, ethernet cards, sound cards, video cards, etc etc etc etc etc, but 99% of it is not sitting around on the desk/floor/bed/every other horizontal surface. That seems important.
Naturally the whole spending-time-doing-other-things-than-computing thing is a factor, but he seems to have figured that one out. There's also certain activities I just don't avoid when she wants to... aside from the obvious one, which doesn't bear mentioning *g*, those include: Cooking. If she wants help with something she is making, she gets it, and *now*. That way when I fuck up whatever it is I'm trying to make in the kitchen, I get some sympathy.:-)
I suppose I could go on and on and on... but you get the idea. Figure out what things (objects, activities, etc) are trigger items. Change accordingly - it makes a big difference. YMMV, obviously.
I've worked with Karlnet's stuff. It does work as advertised, but in my opinion it is not at all worth the cost (something like $500 per base station *for the software* and $25 per client). In addition, I have never ever seen their Linux driver work. They supposedly came out with a new one recently, but I haven't heard good reports about it either.
Aside from all of that, Turbocell does do some neat stuff: bandwidth throttling on the client end, key-based authentication, and it supports hidden nodes on wireless networks. It seems more suited for "wireless ISP" type of arrangements than smaller rigs as described in the article.
To Karlnet's credit, they also now have a $75 version of their firmware that goes on an RG-1000 and allows for one or two wired ethernet devices. Still more than I prefer to pay for such things. And of course, your milage may vary.
Re:And I thought I liked the Fujitsui Lifebook
on
Sony PCG-U1
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· Score: 1
Whoops, my mistake. I did read over the specs on Dynamism's website, and I must have missed that. Sorry!
Re:And I thought I liked the Fujitsui Lifebook
on
Sony PCG-U1
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· Score: 3, Interesting
all the other junk you need to bring along: power supplies, extra battery, mouse, network cord, phone cord, teething ring...
I feel the same way about laptops in general - there are some out there that solve almost all of this, however. Personally I carry the following:
white ibook
thin little ethernet cable
power brick (into which apple conveniently put cable management)
And that's it. Nothing else. Occasionally I bring a mouse, but not often.
I suppose that leads me to a point about this Sony laptop we're supposed to be discussing: no builtin ethernet, no builtin wavelan, no builtin modem. Hmm. That would drive me insane, as I would end up carrying two or three pcmcia cards and their dongles around with me, and that's when things get broken in my backpack. I'd forgive it if it had builtin wavelan. In fact, that would be marvelous. It doesn't, however. And, I might add, I actually had a Sony SR7k (followed by an SR27k) for a year and a half, and I sold it in favor of an iBook for this exact reason. Oh well.
Moral of the story: I'm keeping my iBook.:) You can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Eh, it's not *that* bad. Especially when you consider that the video formats are trivially handled (just get a monitor that can take sync-on-green, composite sync, and separate sync at whatever your max resolution is). All modern workstation hardware seems to either take USB or PS/2 keyboards/mice natively: SGI does since the Indy, HP stuff newer than '94 does, IBM stuff does, Sun stuff takes USB and you can get converters to PS/2. Any Mac you'd likely feel like bothering with takes USB.
Where this sounds like it gets tricky is in the TV out/in part. At that point you have to build yourself a serious scan converter, and doing multi-in/multi-out matrix switching requires a lot of work.
Slashdot Mirror
Links:
Here is a guy who is working on it
Current status - it seems he's got some example USB driver source, but it doesn't work yet.
Of course, Sharp has claimed on a number of occasions to be working on OS X support along with Apple, but so far nothing appears to have come out of it.
There is a very good reason for not supporting sloppy focus in OS X. Think about it for a moment... How in the world would you get to the menu bar for an application without that app losing focus? It wouldn't be possible - whatever app you mouse across on the way to the menubar would gain focus, and you'd get the menubar for a different app. The only way to have sloppy focus be even remotely usable would be to add yet another interface hack to allow you to get at the menubar, such as a hotkey which locked the focus to your current window. Sounds kinda yucky to me, frankly...
I'm well aware of that. Read the parent post again, especially the part I quoted; I was just responding to his statemtent that Apple is the first to use graphics hardware like they do.
I believe Apple is the "first" to start making use of the video card's GPU for day-to-day stuff.
*ahem* SGI's IRIX has been doing this for more than a decade. Their systems have always amazed me - just today, in fact, I managed to get an old Onyx system working. It's got a pair of 75mhz r8k cpus and a RealityEngine2. That's not a typo - 2x75mhz. Even with such slow CPUs, the user interface is lightning quick because of how well the OS makes use of the video hardware. Granted, the r8000 was a very unusual CPU in how effecient it was per clock, but still...
So basically, all you have to do to avoid the vulnerability is just not run kadmind4, correct? I certainly can't speak for other KDC admins, but I haven't had much of a use for krb4 compatibility for a long time now - I disabled it at LEAST a year ago. Are there still many systems and/or applications that don't support Kerberos5? In any event, yay for me, my KDCs are unaffected!
I don't think MacOS X is the best OS for the task.
WHAT TASK? OS X most certainly has a target market, and it's exactly what the parent poster was describing - people who want to use something other than windows, but who aren't patient or knowledgeable enough to get going with Linux.
Well, what about those of us who bought Stuffit Deluxe 6.5? What if I bought FIFTY COPIES OF IT (for a lab), and I don't feel like paying for an upgrade to 7.0 yet? Looks like I'm screwed. This is not acceptible behaviour! Even Microsoft doesn't (always) act like this when security holes crop up in the previous version of their product. If Aladdin doesn't offer a patch for 6.5, I will be quite annoyed.
Imagine what would happen if MS stopped fixing security holes in Windows 2000 all of a sudden when Windows XP came out? They would be shot in the street!
Sorry for the sweeping generalization, but this *really* does not please me.
Aqua starts when WindowServer is started by coreservicesd from /System/Library/CoreServices/WindowServer (it's a symlink to somewhere else, can't remember where offhand). Anyway, then loginwindow.app is launched on the console (see /etc/ttys for the line that does it). loginwindow.app handles the rest. Sorry this is vague, but I think you'll be able to find what you want with what I wrote down. I might be wrong about what launches windowserver too, I didn't actually check to make sure. Hope this helps.
No. The fkey-virtual-terminals thing is fairly unique to x86 PC clones, as it is a result of the way text mode works on the video cards (e.g. text being passed to the video board instead of a frame buffer arrangement like most other systems). It would certainly be possible to implement similar functionality on other systems, but it wouldn't be nearly so straightforward as on PCs. Linux, in fact, has already done this - the fbcon text consoles do provide exactly this functionality using a frame buffer, so it works on sparc, ppc, etc. Sadly, OS X doesn't. Then again, I wonder how useful it would even be...
Having read the article and also noticed this myself, I'm now wondering if the paper trading cards don't hold the game at all. Perhaps they are all pre-loaded on the e-Reader doohickey, and swiping the card just allows you to play it.
That would be excessively lame, imho, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
Older VAIO 505's are worth next-to-nothing these days... the 200 and 233mhz 505 and 505f tend to go for less than $300, and they had nice bright 10" SVGA TFT displays. I'm actually considering doing this to an old vaio that's no longer road-worthy...
The whole thing adds up to an incredibly flexible system. You can configure the graphics pipe as a relatively small raster of 2,048-bit-deep pixels, or an 8-million-pixel raster of 256-bit-deep pixels, or almost anything in between. You can render a truly giant image-- about 3K by 2K pixels, progressive scan, or even more than that if you're willing to live with interlacing-- with full antialiasing, multi-buffered. It's pretty.
Could you possibly explain just what it means to have 2048-bit-deep or 256-bit-deep pixels? I've often wondered about this - I assume it is not exactly analagous to saying "24 bits per pixel" or "32 bits per pixel" as we commonly do when referring to more common PC graphics hardware. Perhaps I'm missing something simple, but this is one particular statistic that has confused me for far too long.
Oh, and thanks in advance for enlightening me.
I believe that the reason for a 2.2 kernel by default comes mostly from the extremely large number of architectures supported in this release. On some of the eleven architectures, 2.4.x is not as stable as it should be (or so I hear), so they went with a 2.2 by default. Please note that there is *nothing* keeping you from installing 2.4.18 or whatever other kernel you want on Woody - in fact there are prebuilt binaries if you wish to use them.
There is no KDE3 in Unstable yet because everyone has been waiting patiently for Woody to be released. Just wait a little bit, and it will start to appear. Along with Gnome 2, I expect.
Well... the website part of it really hasn't changed since last march. I'll attempt to get some pictures up there. That machine is taunting me right now - there's some sort of flakiness on one of the parallel port interfaces to the buttons and LEDs.
You may laugh at the idea, but that is exactly what we did here - and the old 60's era soda machine now runs a web server - and it's got a window, a biohazard logo, and while it's missing the neon lights, those might be added later. I must say, that was one hell of a project. The biggest problem with it so far? It is damn near impossible to get the key to the machine duplicated.
If it seems down, it's probably not its fault - there have been connectivity problems in the office where it lives this morning, I am heading in to work on it right now.
Does anyone know, if you plug a Sun/Playstation keyboard into a macintosh, does the diamond key act as a command key?
Yes, it will. I can't specifically speak for the Sun/Playstation->Mac arrangement, but if you plug a Mac keyboard into a PC (or a Sparc), the command key acts as a Meta/Windows key. Isn't USB great?
Oh yeah? One of my computers is named after their dog! (Fortinbras, of course)
That was a fun set of books, worth reading again once you're out of grade school. I lost interest about halfway through Many Waters, but I guess that's just not my sort of story.
Just out of curiosity, do you know if there is any prospect of running MacOS X with MOL? I understand it's currently not possible, but I am not familiar with the reasons why. It is also not explained (that I can find) on the MOL website. Perhaps you know more about it than I.
Oh, and one last thing. FOR CHRISSAKES, DONT WIRE THE BATHROOM. I just read that again, and couldn't stop giggling for about 5 minutes.
I duno. I'm in much the same situation as the guy in the story, and I seem to be keeping from getting too much flak from the SO with a couple of little mindgames. First, what seems to be oddly important is only having one monitor on my desk. I went for a thoroughly geeky multimonitor setup, and it drove her nuts. Mind you, I do have a fairly large tower system, an Indy, a Sparc 20, and a beige g3 next to the desk (a KVM switch is a miracle) - which brings up another point: one tower system. She got irritated when I had a tower on both sides of the desk for some reason. Whatever, now I only have one. If I really really need two monitors on my desk, out comes my laptop. Next rule: no wires running everywhere. Really. They are hidden behind my desk, and I'm not going to wire the bathroom, for chrissakes. There's an 802.11b access point hidden behind the desk, in case I feel that it's *really that important* to post on slashdot while I'm crapping. Which, by the way, it isn't.
Let's see, what else... oh, the second laptop attached to the stereo and TV bugged her, but only until she noticed how slick it is to queue up some stuff from her computer and have it play in the living room. Oh, of course I have to have my ridiculous amounts of random crap - but the magic part here is if it's out of view, it doesn't exist. I've got a nice big box filled with cables, ethernet cards, sound cards, video cards, etc etc etc etc etc, but 99% of it is not sitting around on the desk/floor/bed/every other horizontal surface. That seems important.
Naturally the whole spending-time-doing-other-things-than-computing thing is a factor, but he seems to have figured that one out. There's also certain activities I just don't avoid when she wants to... aside from the obvious one, which doesn't bear mentioning *g*, those include: Cooking. If she wants help with something she is making, she gets it, and *now*. That way when I fuck up whatever it is I'm trying to make in the kitchen, I get some sympathy. :-)
I suppose I could go on and on and on... but you get the idea. Figure out what things (objects, activities, etc) are trigger items. Change accordingly - it makes a big difference. YMMV, obviously.
I've worked with Karlnet's stuff. It does work as advertised, but in my opinion it is not at all worth the cost (something like $500 per base station *for the software* and $25 per client). In addition, I have never ever seen their Linux driver work. They supposedly came out with a new one recently, but I haven't heard good reports about it either.
Aside from all of that, Turbocell does do some neat stuff: bandwidth throttling on the client end, key-based authentication, and it supports hidden nodes on wireless networks. It seems more suited for "wireless ISP" type of arrangements than smaller rigs as described in the article.
To Karlnet's credit, they also now have a $75 version of their firmware that goes on an RG-1000 and allows for one or two wired ethernet devices. Still more than I prefer to pay for such things. And of course, your milage may vary.
Whoops, my mistake. I did read over the specs on Dynamism's website, and I must have missed that. Sorry!
all the other junk you need to bring along: power supplies, extra battery, mouse, network cord, phone cord, teething ring...
I feel the same way about laptops in general - there are some out there that solve almost all of this, however. Personally I carry the following:
- white ibook
- thin little ethernet cable
- power brick (into which apple conveniently put cable management)
And that's it. Nothing else. Occasionally I bring a mouse, but not often.I suppose that leads me to a point about this Sony laptop we're supposed to be discussing: no builtin ethernet, no builtin wavelan, no builtin modem. Hmm. That would drive me insane, as I would end up carrying two or three pcmcia cards and their dongles around with me, and that's when things get broken in my backpack. I'd forgive it if it had builtin wavelan. In fact, that would be marvelous. It doesn't, however. And, I might add, I actually had a Sony SR7k (followed by an SR27k) for a year and a half, and I sold it in favor of an iBook for this exact reason. Oh well.
Moral of the story: I'm keeping my iBook. :) You can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Eh, it's not *that* bad. Especially when you consider that the video formats are trivially handled (just get a monitor that can take sync-on-green, composite sync, and separate sync at whatever your max resolution is). All modern workstation hardware seems to either take USB or PS/2 keyboards/mice natively: SGI does since the Indy, HP stuff newer than '94 does, IBM stuff does, Sun stuff takes USB and you can get converters to PS/2. Any Mac you'd likely feel like bothering with takes USB.
Where this sounds like it gets tricky is in the TV out/in part. At that point you have to build yourself a serious scan converter, and doing multi-in/multi-out matrix switching requires a lot of work.