...and I hope I'm not the only one. I actually use Yahoo Shopping on a regular basis, but if Yahoo were acquired by Microsoft I'd stop immediately, and find an alternate vendor-aggregator. Just a matter of principle (and maybe as much aesthetic as anything), but Microsoft just icks me out.
Kinda funny because it troubles me little to support an empire which would probably be just as evil if it had the same amount of power, Apple's. But Apple has an aesthetic sense, and has thus slipped perhaps-irrationally behind my defenses.
This whole Yahoo mess is also a fine example of the downside of going public -- you have amoral raiders screaming the battlecry "shareholder value" and using that to bludgeon anyone in a company who makes a principled decision which might not maximize stock prices in the short term.
I've been using one of these http://www.raindesigninc.com/ilap.html (actually two in succession, in different sizes) for several years now, and still find the design practical and comfy. They're obviously designed to be a good visual match for the aluminum Mac laptops, but, yes, I have tried the experiment of perching a Dell atop one, and it wasn't immediately flung off into the air by some sort of eject mechanism.
The only slight nit I can pick is that with time the Velcro strip holding the removable near cushion can get oddly aligned, and expose the strip's edge, resulting in slightly less comfort (if you have princess-and-the-pea sensitivities). Not enough of an issue to keep me from continuing to use mine, or from buying the second one.
Years ago, I worked with a guy whose last name was Meth. When his wife became pregnant with a girl, I tried my best to convince him that their daughter should be named Crystal, but it didn't take. I don't think he ever got the joke, though.
What is the secret? How can I get my machine to have a kernel panic without abusing it????
Oh, without abusing it...
I can only try to reconstruct what I was up to when it tended to fall over.
The 10.1.x releases would panic, it seemed, once or twice a week. Often there wasn't a consistent set of circumstances I could identify across fallings-over, but one thing which seemed to do it pretty reliably was scrubbing back and forth during attempts at video editing (both with iMovie and with Final Cut). I have this suspicion that there was something in the OS (perhaps in the neighborhood of the disk drivers, but I have absolutely no concrete knowledge about this) which didn't respond well to wacky I/O patterns on a dual-CPU box. Indeed, I was able to get Final Cut to be more reliable by tweaking the Open Firmware bootup string
setenv boot-args cpus=1 boot
to force single-CPU operation.
By contrast, while I haven't had as much time to wring out 10.2, I'm pleased to report that it's only had one panic. (I think it was a panic -- while the 10.1s displayed text including the actual word panic and a register dump or backtrace or suchlike, the time Jagwire fell over, the screen was darkened and a little windowlet popped up informing me that I should now either hit the reset button or hold down the power button. Every other time 10.2 has locked up, it was something in the user interface which had wedged, and I could ssh in from another box and do a clean reboot.
For comparison, my Linux boxes (at home and work) have panicked on average well less than once every two years... but, I've used them differently: I've kept to the hardware-support sweet spot, only using, say, SCSI controllers well-supported by mature drivers. The Mac has had all sorts of bleeding-edge crap plugged into it (partly bacause I bought it in hopes I could get away with that sort of thing). So the comparison isn't, um, apples and apples.
I installed that puppy right away, instead of after the usual cautious waiting period, because I've been having such troubling difficulties with 10.2 (far fewer panics than 10.1.x, but a tendency for USB-connected outboard-DAC audio from iTunes to lose sync and get into a chronic stuttering mode, and uselessness of 39160-connected SCSI drives).
I haven't had a chance yet to test for the previous difficulties, but a brand-new booboo emerged when I rebooted after the upgrade: a volume I have on an ACARD 6880M (a two-disk hardware mirror) is being mounted twice. It looks (on very preliminary investigation) as if maybe one volume being seen is the mirror, and the other is one of the underlying disks of the mirror; but maybe I'm seeing both underlying disks and not the mirror. Either way, it kind of bites, and I think I'm going to have to run explicitly on a single disk until this is resolved.
Maybe it's my fault -- somewhere in there I loaded up the version 1.3 kext from ACARD in place of the (dated earlier, but numbered later) 1.4 version which came with Jagwire. Or maybe nobody ever tests mirroring, because all the kids want to do is stripe. Sigh.
I was deeply saddened when Nokia (now Eizo) dropped their 6600 model: a gorgeous 21-inch greyscale monitor -- with more persistent phosphors than usual, even! Now that'd be easy on the eyeballs. I was just about to buy one, too, really...
Yep, as stated above, redirecting the hostnames of known ad-servers is a fine thing, to screw up their tracking and, most importantly to me, to speed page load and cut down on the number of animated GIFs blinking at me.
There's a further refinement you can do, though, and it's similarly quick and dirty. Aren't most of us running an Apache server or three somewhere? Well, if those missing-image icons look like crap to you, to, just stuff something like the following in your httpd.conf (I'll just treat the doubleclick case for simplicity):
This way, you see, you not only get a filler image of your choice (which could be just a patch of solid color to scale), you get to track them in your logfiles...
Notes:
The earlier post suggested putting
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
in/etc/hosts; this is assumed here. But you don't have to use localhost; you can set up a non-ad server as a service for people on your LAN...
If this looks like crap or some less-than or greater-than signs have gone missing again it's because I finally admitted defeat at the hands of Slashdot's overly-vigorous HTML stomper.
My pet Mozilla feature wish: the selectable "never-display-animated-images" option.
That silly poo-head got a bunch just plain wrong! Sh-bang my big fat butt -- that's `pound-bang' where I come from, Hoss. And SVR4? How about `ess vee are four', the way the folk who developed it say it?
Slashdot Mirror
...and I hope I'm not the only one. I actually use Yahoo Shopping on a regular basis, but if Yahoo were acquired by Microsoft I'd stop immediately, and find an alternate vendor-aggregator. Just a matter of principle (and maybe as much aesthetic as anything), but Microsoft just icks me out.
Kinda funny because it troubles me little to support an empire which would probably be just as evil if it had the same amount of power, Apple's. But Apple has an aesthetic sense, and has thus slipped perhaps-irrationally behind my defenses.
This whole Yahoo mess is also a fine example of the downside of going public -- you have amoral raiders screaming the battlecry "shareholder value" and using that to bludgeon anyone in a company who makes a principled decision which might not maximize stock prices in the short term.
(Mod me +2/-1 incoherent?)
I've been using one of these http://www.raindesigninc.com/ilap.html (actually two in succession, in different sizes) for several years now, and still find the design practical and comfy. They're obviously designed to be a good visual match for the aluminum Mac laptops, but, yes, I have tried the experiment of perching a Dell atop one, and it wasn't immediately flung off into the air by some sort of eject mechanism.
The only slight nit I can pick is that with time the Velcro strip holding the removable near cushion can get oddly aligned, and expose the strip's edge, resulting in slightly less comfort (if you have princess-and-the-pea sensitivities). Not enough of an issue to keep me from continuing to use mine, or from buying the second one.
Years ago, I worked with a guy whose last name was Meth. When his wife became pregnant with a girl, I tried my best to convince him that their daughter should be named Crystal, but it didn't take. I don't think he ever got the joke, though.
You can also do this simply with the cpus= boot argument; here's a reference.
I can only try to reconstruct what I was up to when it tended to fall over.
The 10.1.x releases would panic, it seemed, once or twice a week. Often there wasn't a consistent set of circumstances I could identify across fallings-over, but one thing which seemed to do it pretty reliably was scrubbing back and forth during attempts at video editing (both with iMovie and with Final Cut). I have this suspicion that there was something in the OS (perhaps in the neighborhood of the disk drivers, but I have absolutely no concrete knowledge about this) which didn't respond well to wacky I/O patterns on a dual-CPU box. Indeed, I was able to get Final Cut to be more reliable by tweaking the Open Firmware bootup string
to force single-CPU operation.By contrast, while I haven't had as much time to wring out 10.2, I'm pleased to report that it's only had one panic. (I think it was a panic -- while the 10.1s displayed text including the actual word panic and a register dump or backtrace or suchlike, the time Jagwire fell over, the screen was darkened and a little windowlet popped up informing me that I should now either hit the reset button or hold down the power button. Every other time 10.2 has locked up, it was something in the user interface which had wedged, and I could ssh in from another box and do a clean reboot.
For comparison, my Linux boxes (at home and work) have panicked on average well less than once every two years... but, I've used them differently: I've kept to the hardware-support sweet spot, only using, say, SCSI controllers well-supported by mature drivers. The Mac has had all sorts of bleeding-edge crap plugged into it (partly bacause I bought it in hopes I could get away with that sort of thing). So the comparison isn't, um, apples and apples.
I installed that puppy right away, instead of after the usual cautious waiting period, because I've been having such troubling difficulties with 10.2 (far fewer panics than 10.1.x, but a tendency for USB-connected outboard-DAC audio from iTunes to lose sync and get into a chronic stuttering mode, and uselessness of 39160-connected SCSI drives).
I haven't had a chance yet to test for the previous difficulties, but a brand-new booboo emerged when I rebooted after the upgrade: a volume I have on an ACARD 6880M (a two-disk hardware mirror) is being mounted twice. It looks (on very preliminary investigation) as if maybe one volume being seen is the mirror, and the other is one of the underlying disks of the mirror; but maybe I'm seeing both underlying disks and not the mirror. Either way, it kind of bites, and I think I'm going to have to run explicitly on a single disk until this is resolved.
Maybe it's my fault -- somewhere in there I loaded up the version 1.3 kext from ACARD in place of the (dated earlier, but numbered later) 1.4 version which came with Jagwire. Or maybe nobody ever tests mirroring, because all the kids want to do is stripe. Sigh.
Not E450s -- they `only' cost in the $US(5-digits) range shiny and new.
I was deeply saddened when Nokia (now Eizo) dropped their 6600 model: a gorgeous 21-inch greyscale monitor -- with more persistent phosphors than usual, even! Now that'd be easy on the eyeballs. I was just about to buy one, too, really...
There's a further refinement you can do, though, and it's similarly quick and dirty. Aren't most of us running an Apache server or three somewhere? Well, if those missing-image icons look like crap to you, to, just stuff something like the following in your httpd.conf (I'll just treat the doubleclick case for simplicity):
This way, you see, you not only get a filler image of your choice (which could be just a patch of solid color to scale), you get to track them in your logfiles...
Notes:
That silly poo-head got a bunch just plain wrong! Sh-bang my big fat butt -- that's `pound-bang' where I come from, Hoss. And SVR4? How about `ess vee are four', the way the folk who developed it say it?