If you're going to let people continue to keep data on their workstations, you'll want a system for backing them up. Several people have mentioned other programs, I'm using Dantz Retrospect at home. It has a client/server mode where the backup server calls up client programs to dump the local machine.
It does an excellent job of handling media rotation and redundant backups, and is fairly easy to use. It started on the Macintosh (and to be fair, I've only used the standalone mode on Macintosh--never the Windows version.) It'll work with tape, filesystems, removable disk, FTP servers, MO, and packet-linked CD-R[W].
...some CDRs created with a Mac contain the desktopDB file which has human readable strings in it...
It's documented in Toast; I don't know if burning from the Finder does anything similar.
Basically some CD burning programs cheat, and copy the whole desktop DB from your system volume rather than make a new one. Your other choice is to leave it out, and then the OS will make a new one when the CD is mounted and save it in the Preferences folder.
If you've got useful data in your desktop DB, \\:tbxi help you if you ever need to rebuild it.
If I burn a CDR on a drive that I didn't know was wonky, then pop it into an Apple-supplied machine for testing and it, through some magic combination of bits, toasts the drive's firmware, this isn't Apple's fault why?
I think there's confusion over crashing vs. damaging the drive's firmware. If the drive has crashed, you cannot send an eject command to it--even via the front-panel button. The firmware isn't necessarily damanged, but until you get it to reset, you can't do anything with it.
The solutions all involve rebooting and using something stronger--open firmware (via mouse button or keyboard commands) or OS X. OS 9 is a good thing to avoid.
Really, in my experience I only see problems if I try to tape off the DVD.
It depens on how the monitor circuit is done in the VCR. If the video out is fed a split copy of the input, you're OK. But that's a really useless sort of monitor. More commonly, IME, is the monitor out is done after the AGC, and its the automatic gain control that is affected by Macrovision. (I've never seen a [consumer] VTR that had enough heads to monitor the just-recorded signal like a 3-head audio cassette deck.)
MacroVision consists in spikes in the signal that occur outside of our ability to see.
Well, during the horizontal or vertical retrace interval, yes. All it does is confuse the AGC; and it does affect some monitors, like an Amiga 1080.
And if you're going USB, why not look into a universal USB HID driver for your Mac so that it doesn't matter what the thing says on the box, as long as it says "USB".
However, I'll take Logitech over Microsoft any day. I still haven't forgiven them for AmigaBASIC. And Kensington still uses mechanical pickups.
Re:Even 333hr per month is pushing it
on
IBM 120GXP Revisited
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That happened to me. They replaced it with another 75GXP. The label indicates a new drive, but I don't WANT another failure-prone drive!
This sort of thing has happened to IBM's hard drive lines in the past. Some of you may recall the 5.25" 857mb SCSI HDDs from the early 90s. It was well over a year from the time these drives started failing unusually rapidly (and loudly--the problem was in the bearings) to when they came up with a replacement from a different line. (A 3.5" 1gb with modified firmware so it only had 857mb available and a mounting bracket that was almost as heavy as the old drive.)
IBM then issued an "Engineering Change" for the original drive: you no longer had to have a failed drive to get one replaced. It didn't even have to be noisy; if you had an 857, you were eligible for a new drive--while you could still get the data off the old one with "migratepv".
The CSRs guys had been campaigning hard to get this engineering change--they really had better things to do than to replace drives they knew would fail with the same type of drive.... Especially since most people didn't have proper backups, so the CSRs had to do all the stuff to try and get the old drive up long enough to get the data off it.
It got to the point where there were bulk cases of the 1gb-as-857mb drives at my site, so the CSR could just walk in, grab a bunch of replacements, and swap 'em out without having to wait for the warehouse to ship parts down. We did about 20 one afternoon.
You would think they would learn from history. Or at least the warranty costs.
And really, the only reason I could suggest for doing away with them are the limitations on the three letter extension.
I don't care much for extensions, but you haven't been limited to 3 letters for a while. Certainly NTFS doesn't care; I've used 4- and 5-letter assoc (or is it ftype?) entries.
Still, I prefer the type of the file to be separate from the name, and the application used to open a file to be independent of the type. Use the extension as a fallback if the information isn't there some other way. (This is what the Mac OS X Finder seems to do now, but not all applications are happy with extension-only metadata.)
I use maybe 20 CD-Rs in a year, and I'd wager that I'm way above the average.
Yeesh, I can use 20 CD-Rs in a partial system backup! I'd use CD-RW, but then it would take more than twice as long with my burner. Three times as long during media re-use; and I've had trouble with CD-RW reliability--CD-Rs are less frustrating. (I haven't tried newer CD-RW media; it's definately time to try again.)
Good thing I got those second-hand DDS-2 DAT drives. The data grade tapes aren't taxed and they re-use well.
Calling free() on a NULL pointer is a no-op. No check or assertion is needed.
The assertion lets you catch the logic error that led to the second free during debugging. Presumably, your code path wasn't expecting the pointer to already be free at that point; otherwise, you would have designed it to handle that case already.
Then, in production code, if you do take that path, you'll get the harmless no-op free(0). (You do build production with -DNDEBUG, right?)
Some of the older machines have firmware problems trying to boot any partition that starts past 8GB. I'm pretty sure this applies to everything, not just Linux. I've got my '99 iMac DV booting quite happily from partitions in the middle and end of a 30 GB drive.
However, this seems to be resolved, nothing seems to tell you to be careful of this anymore.
It blocks drag-n-drop copying in the Finder; the Finder will make sure it can read all the files before it starts the copy. Just like it checks the destination for available space before starting (and name collisions and all that stuff.)
So, yes, you could tar or cp or rsync or whatever from a terminal window and they'll do what you're used to under *BSD. Except they won't copy Finder metadata... but then, MS Office should be OK with just file extensions.
OS X, for instance, gets rid of the dotfile dependency [...] with NetInfo, a database for handling this stuff.
NetInfo sits in places of the same sort of things that NIS, NIS+ and DCE registries can replace: passwd, aliases, exports, fstab, hosts, group, printcap, and stuff like that.
Configuration files are stored in ~/Libraries/Preferences. Apple recommends the use of XML, but there are many preferences files that are in more traditional MacOS resource format. And then there's Mozilla....
So, yes, technically your preferences don't go in dotfiles. And it is nice that they're all in one directory which has an obvious purpose. But each application can still choose its own file format.
How about grabbind the disc from the centre hole instead of from the edges? Or you could have an actuator under the tray which would push the disc up so the edge-grabber could get a hold of it. You'd have to make sure you retract it before giving TRAY CLOSE, though.
It's funny, I just did a 10-DAT backup of my iMac (I've only got DDS2) and was wondering if LEGO could be used to build a simple tape librarian.... Toys'R'Us, here I come!
And what about all the non-Linux products from RedHat? Some of us are still upset about RedHat purchasing Cygnus Solutions... this won't make things any better for us.
I beleive the hard drive and optical drives are integrated in all computers; I've not yet seen one where the primary drives are all external.
I've been meaning to pull all the IDE drives out of my iMac and run everything from external disks, just for the sheer irony of it. It'll boot from FireWire, after all....
And if you've never seen a machine with all external disk, try one of those diskless Suns from years ago. Or diskless RS/6000 or HP boxes. Or the CEMCORP Icon, another diskless machine from even longer ago. Or... well, you get the idea.
And I don't miss any of those machines!
And just to stay on-topic, I have no idea how to decide if I should get the 14" iBook or the new iMac with the SuperDrive....
Then I went over to take the "written" computer "test" (in quotes because I just laughed about it more or less - come on - what shape has a stop sign got).
The scary part of those tests isn't how simple they are... it's that people still fail them.
The last time I took one of those (for a motorcycle permit), the only other person doing a test failed very badly. And the poor clerk could not convince her that: (a) no, you may not drive until you pass (b) no, you may not take the test again today (c) no, you do not get your money back for the test and (d) yes, you will have to pay again the next time.
There's a back command in Classic. The keyboard navigation is fully documented in the on-line help, under "Shortcuts". It contains:
Cursor arrows -- move currently selected icons
Begin typing -- select the icon which starts with... (Note, this means "can" selects "canada", as opposed to "ccc" when "canada" is the 3rd item starting with "c". I don't know how people can stand that style, what you have to type to select something _changes_ as items are added/removed from the list!)
Command-Down -- Open selected icon
Command-Up -- Open parent folder
Command-Left -- Open twist-arrow
Command-Right -- Close twist-arrow
Command-DEL -- Move item to trash
RETURN -- toggle rename mode
Hold Option while opening to close previous window; works with mouse and keyboard. Opt-Cmd-Up closes window and opens parent.
There's lots more, but that's just off the top of my head--because that's the stuff I use the most.
All of that is retained in OS X, plus the "go back" button in the Finder window toolbar. The major difference is Command-N opens a new window now (like a web browser), and you need Command-Shift-N for new folder.
Not only has this been done before, it has been done by Apple before, in 1997.
So, with the price of LCD panels dropping, it's the obvious next step... but it just isn't a breakthrough (except getting it done at a price suitable for iMac).
So maybe the fix should be in making it harder to share things on the Web, rather than trying to have search bots guess whether someone really meant to post the file?
Web servers could ship configured to not AutoIndex, only allow specific file types (.jpeg,.html,.png,.txt), and disable all those things that I disabled in Apache without losing anything I needed for my site, and so on. Then, the burden is placed on the person who started sharing these other filetypes that have sensitive data on the public internet.
Of course, putting something in public that you don't want someone to see is just plain stupid, but apparently we need to make stupid people feel like they're allowed on the 'net.
One nit:
.../share/... - files that are architecture independent.
That is, the sharing is across architectures, not users. All of those directories are shared across users (read-only except for/tmp, of course.)
I have share/bin, share/man, share/lib, share/include; Korn and Perl scripts go in bin, Perl libraries and modules in lib, and so on. (I'm not talking about/share, I've never seen that on systems I work with.)
The idea was, in a dataless or diskless environment, you'd have one / per client, one/usr per architecture, and one/usr/share overall. Of course, the UNIX vendors never agree on anything, so/usr/share was either empty or misused.
I've had "make install" put shared objects and binaries in the "architecture independent prefix" directory; it is clear this concept really hasn't sunk in. But it is very useful when running a big server with lots and lots of tools and apps on it.
And before anyone picks on UNIX's path, could someone examine their %Path% on a reasonably well-populated Windows NT install and tell me what you see?
Why not drag the icon of the file you wish to open and drop it on the app icon? Works on the Mac, Amiga, Windows, and even OS/2. (I've never used BeOS.)
On the Mac, the app icon won't highlight unless the file is of a type supported by that app. So you know right away dropping an MP3 on your paint program isn't going to work.
With tabbed folders, this is really convenient; drag an icon over the tab, the window pops open, and onto the app you want.
Sometimes ya just gotta hold the button _down_, clicking isn't good enough.
And I still haven't heard a good reason for putting something as critical as "filetype" into the (user-modifiable, user-visible) _name_ of the file.
Actually, you don't need to activate the root account to do root things. Apple ships a pre-configured "sudo" that will let you do everything you want without ever needing to "login" as root. (Since they allow starting shells, it's as good as a real root account, with the benefits of sudo.)
As other people point out elsewhere, any SUID program can be abused once you've got a program running.
Slashdot Mirror
It does an excellent job of handling media rotation and redundant backups, and is fairly easy to use. It started on the Macintosh (and to be fair, I've only used the standalone mode on Macintosh--never the Windows version.) It'll work with tape, filesystems, removable disk, FTP servers, MO, and packet-linked CD-R[W].
I just wish they had UNIX and Linux clients....
It's documented in Toast; I don't know if burning from the Finder does anything similar.
Basically some CD burning programs cheat, and copy the whole desktop DB from your system volume rather than make a new one. Your other choice is to leave it out, and then the OS will make a new one when the CD is mounted and save it in the Preferences folder.
If you've got useful data in your desktop DB, \\:tbxi help you if you ever need to rebuild it.
I think there's confusion over crashing vs. damaging the drive's firmware. If the drive has crashed, you cannot send an eject command to it--even via the front-panel button. The firmware isn't necessarily damanged, but until you get it to reset, you can't do anything with it.
The solutions all involve rebooting and using something stronger--open firmware (via mouse button or keyboard commands) or OS X. OS 9 is a good thing to avoid.
It depens on how the monitor circuit is done in the VCR. If the video out is fed a split copy of the input, you're OK. But that's a really useless sort of monitor. More commonly, IME, is the monitor out is done after the AGC, and its the automatic gain control that is affected by Macrovision. (I've never seen a [consumer] VTR that had enough heads to monitor the just-recorded signal like a 3-head audio cassette deck.)
Well, during the horizontal or vertical retrace interval, yes. All it does is confuse the AGC; and it does affect some monitors, like an Amiga 1080.
However, I'll take Logitech over Microsoft any day. I still haven't forgiven them for AmigaBASIC. And Kensington still uses mechanical pickups.
IBM then issued an "Engineering Change" for the original drive: you no longer had to have a failed drive to get one replaced. It didn't even have to be noisy; if you had an 857, you were eligible for a new drive--while you could still get the data off the old one with "migratepv".
The CSRs guys had been campaigning hard to get this engineering change--they really had better things to do than to replace drives they knew would fail with the same type of drive.... Especially since most people didn't have proper backups, so the CSRs had to do all the stuff to try and get the old drive up long enough to get the data off it.
It got to the point where there were bulk cases of the 1gb-as-857mb drives at my site, so the CSR could just walk in, grab a bunch of replacements, and swap 'em out without having to wait for the warehouse to ship parts down. We did about 20 one afternoon.
You would think they would learn from history. Or at least the warranty costs.
I don't care much for extensions, but you haven't been limited to 3 letters for a while. Certainly NTFS doesn't care; I've used 4- and 5-letter assoc (or is it ftype?) entries.
Still, I prefer the type of the file to be separate from the name, and the application used to open a file to be independent of the type. Use the extension as a fallback if the information isn't there some other way. (This is what the Mac OS X Finder seems to do now, but not all applications are happy with extension-only metadata.)
Yeesh, I can use 20 CD-Rs in a partial system backup! I'd use CD-RW, but then it would take more than twice as long with my burner. Three times as long during media re-use; and I've had trouble with CD-RW reliability--CD-Rs are less frustrating. (I haven't tried newer CD-RW media; it's definately time to try again.)
Good thing I got those second-hand DDS-2 DAT drives. The data grade tapes aren't taxed and they re-use well.
The assertion lets you catch the logic error that led to the second free during debugging. Presumably, your code path wasn't expecting the pointer to already be free at that point; otherwise, you would have designed it to handle that case already.
Then, in production code, if you do take that path, you'll get the harmless no-op free(0). (You do build production with -DNDEBUG, right?)
In that case, there's nothing to restart. inetd will simply invoke the new binary once it's in place.
The key to getting this to work is to KEEP the old SSH session open until you KNOW the new binary works. Otherwise you can't get back in.
If you're as paranoid as I am, you'll open a couple of extra sessions before you replace the binary... just in case....
Some of the older machines have firmware problems trying to boot any partition that starts past 8GB. I'm pretty sure this applies to everything, not just Linux. I've got my '99 iMac DV booting quite happily from partitions in the middle and end of a 30 GB drive.
However, this seems to be resolved, nothing seems to tell you to be careful of this anymore.
It blocks drag-n-drop copying in the Finder; the Finder will make sure it can read all the files before it starts the copy. Just like it checks the destination for available space before starting (and name collisions and all that stuff.)
So, yes, you could tar or cp or rsync or whatever from a terminal window and they'll do what you're used to under *BSD. Except they won't copy Finder metadata... but then, MS Office should be OK with just file extensions.
NetInfo sits in places of the same sort of things that NIS, NIS+ and DCE registries can replace: passwd, aliases, exports, fstab, hosts, group, printcap, and stuff like that.
Configuration files are stored in ~/Libraries/Preferences. Apple recommends the use of XML, but there are many preferences files that are in more traditional MacOS resource format. And then there's Mozilla....
So, yes, technically your preferences don't go in dotfiles. And it is nice that they're all in one directory which has an obvious purpose. But each application can still choose its own file format.
You left out the root hostname.
http://./
But it's already slashdotted.
How about grabbind the disc from the centre hole instead of from the edges? Or you could have an actuator under the tray which would push the disc up so the edge-grabber could get a hold of it. You'd have to make sure you retract it before giving TRAY CLOSE, though.
It's funny, I just did a 10-DAT backup of my iMac (I've only got DDS2) and was wondering if LEGO could be used to build a simple tape librarian.... Toys'R'Us, here I come!
And what about all the non-Linux products from RedHat? Some of us are still upset about RedHat purchasing Cygnus Solutions... this won't make things any better for us.
Naw, we're still waiting for a port of cdparanoia. The kernel transport layers all Think Different.
That would be something to do in my copious free time.... Hmmmm.
I've been meaning to pull all the IDE drives out of my iMac and run everything from external disks, just for the sheer irony of it. It'll boot from FireWire, after all....
And if you've never seen a machine with all external disk, try one of those diskless Suns from years ago. Or diskless RS/6000 or HP boxes. Or the CEMCORP Icon, another diskless machine from even longer ago. Or... well, you get the idea.
And I don't miss any of those machines!
And just to stay on-topic, I have no idea how to decide if I should get the 14" iBook or the new iMac with the SuperDrive....
The scary part of those tests isn't how simple they are... it's that people still fail them.
The last time I took one of those (for a motorcycle permit), the only other person doing a test failed very badly. And the poor clerk could not convince her that: (a) no, you may not drive until you pass (b) no, you may not take the test again today (c) no, you do not get your money back for the test and (d) yes, you will have to pay again the next time.
There's a back command in Classic. The keyboard navigation is fully documented in the on-line help, under "Shortcuts". It contains:
Cursor arrows -- move currently selected icons
Begin typing -- select the icon which starts with... (Note, this means "can" selects "canada", as opposed to "ccc" when "canada" is the 3rd item starting with "c". I don't know how people can stand that style, what you have to type to select something _changes_ as items are added/removed from the list!)
Command-Down -- Open selected icon
Command-Up -- Open parent folder
Command-Left -- Open twist-arrow
Command-Right -- Close twist-arrow
Command-DEL -- Move item to trash
RETURN -- toggle rename mode
Hold Option while opening to close previous window; works with mouse and keyboard. Opt-Cmd-Up closes window and opens parent.
There's lots more, but that's just off the top of my head--because that's the stuff I use the most.
All of that is retained in OS X, plus the "go back" button in the Finder window toolbar. The major difference is Command-N opens a new window now (like a web browser), and you need Command-Shift-N for new folder.
So, with the price of LCD panels dropping, it's the obvious next step... but it just isn't a breakthrough (except getting it done at a price suitable for iMac).
So maybe the fix should be in making it harder to share things on the Web, rather than trying to have search bots guess whether someone really meant to post the file?
.html, .png, .txt), and disable all those things that I disabled in Apache without losing anything I needed for my site, and so on. Then, the burden is placed on the person who started sharing these other filetypes that have sensitive data on the public internet.
Web servers could ship configured to not AutoIndex, only allow specific file types (.jpeg,
Of course, putting something in public that you don't want someone to see is just plain stupid, but apparently we need to make stupid people feel like they're allowed on the 'net.
.../share/... - files that are architecture independent.
That is, the sharing is across architectures, not users. All of those directories are shared across users (read-only except for
I have share/bin, share/man, share/lib, share/include; Korn and Perl scripts go in bin, Perl libraries and modules in lib, and so on. (I'm not talking about /share, I've never seen that on systems I work with.)
The idea was, in a dataless or diskless environment, you'd have one / per client, one /usr per architecture, and one /usr/share overall. Of course, the UNIX vendors never agree on anything, so /usr/share was either empty or misused.
I've had "make install" put shared objects and binaries in the "architecture independent prefix" directory; it is clear this concept really hasn't sunk in. But it is very useful when running a big server with lots and lots of tools and apps on it.
And before anyone picks on UNIX's path, could someone examine their %Path% on a reasonably well-populated Windows NT install and tell me what you see?
Why not drag the icon of the file you wish to open and drop it on the app icon? Works on the Mac, Amiga, Windows, and even OS/2. (I've never used BeOS.)
On the Mac, the app icon won't highlight unless the file is of a type supported by that app. So you know right away dropping an MP3 on your paint program isn't going to work.
With tabbed folders, this is really convenient; drag an icon over the tab, the window pops open, and onto the app you want.
Sometimes ya just gotta hold the button _down_, clicking isn't good enough.
And I still haven't heard a good reason for putting something as critical as "filetype" into the (user-modifiable, user-visible) _name_ of the file.
Actually, you don't need to activate the root account to do root things. Apple ships a pre-configured "sudo" that will let you do everything you want without ever needing to "login" as root. (Since they allow starting shells, it's as good as a real root account, with the benefits of sudo.)
As other people point out elsewhere, any SUID program can be abused once you've got a program running.