IIRC, weren't all these systems the ones which had the 8gb boot partition limitation? Is Apple just forcing people to upgrade/workaround (XPostFacto), or is there some change to the boot system?
I had wondered why Apple dropped the Beige G3's, but not any of the iMacs in 10.3. With a USB card they had the same basic specs (and with a G4 upgrade card and XPostFacto, my G3 runs 10.3 well)
There are a significant number of Macs capable of running X that did not ship with DVD drives. My 2002 powerbook has a combo drive. Towers purchased only a few months before have CD burners only (except for the one with a Superdrive).
It would have been nice if Tiger simply used a number of CD sized disk images. From the DVD it mounts them and works without swapping. Or, you can burn each image out to a CD.
Of course, DVD burners are around $50 or less. Combo drives are less.
The thing to remember about Microsoft, though, is that the marketing department, not the actual engineers, seems to run the company.
I refer to Microsoft not as a computer company, but as a marketing company in the computer business.
During the talk of the Microsoft breakup, I was thinking that instead of the proposed plan, MS should have been split into Marketing and everything else. Let's see them get out of that one:)
It's simple. Ignore the leading 10. As an Apple employee once told me, it's "Mac OS 10", version 1.0/2.0/etc.
Or, for the people who still claim that 10.4 is a "service pack": Microsoft uses the exact same versioning scheme! Windows XP is version 5.1. SP1 and SP2 are version 5.1.something. Those were free. The upgrade from windows 5.0 (ie: Win 2K > WinXP) was not.
No kidding. I have almost a gig on my powerbook, but with many apps wanting 70-100 mb each, it doesn't go far. (150mb for a web browser? 80 mb for mail?)
A building I once worked in was renovated to save energy. The original building used soft indirect lighting, with warm white lamps, parallel to the hallway. Combined with some painting (to remove the last little but of color left), the hallway went from a warm environment to a very cold, uncomfortable one.
The new lights used a brighter cold white tube. They were re-oriented so they no longer lit the sides if the hallway (making it appear dark). Instead, they were almost right in your face. I can remember getting a severe headache the first time I walked in the hallway.
My point was more that for a hardware company, Apple tends to push a lot of software upgrades. You would expect that Apple would be pushing hardware instead. My G3 (over 6 years old) was only dropped last year. It was upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1 to 8.5 to 8.6 to 9.0 to 9.1 to 9.2 to 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2 and now 10.3 (unofficially). 10.3 runs better on that machine than any of the X releases before it. If Apple wants me to give up that machine and sell me an upgrade, they need to try harder (although my primary machine is now a Tibook). I can't think of anyone using an out of date OS on a mac.
In many cases, people won't upgrade a Windows box. Either it sticks with what OS it came with (many of my clients won't move off Win98) or they will replace the whole box to get the OS upgrade. I just haven't come across upgraded machines.
In a stock configuration the X won't be great. You'll want to bump the ram at minimum as X is very ram hungry.
My machine is a Beige G3 with a G4 upgrade card and a lot of ram (the parts were cheap, so why not?). Thanks to XPostFacto it's running 10.3 even though it's not supported. The machine handles its regular load well - in fact better than my powerbook which outspecs it, but carries a much heavier load (ram doesn't go far when each app tries to claim 100 mb). When my powerbook is down the difference is noticeable though.
However, my mom uses a second generation iMac (266 Mhz G3). All I've done is bump the ram. It runs 10.3 just fine and handles email and web. There's no point in upgrading as it won't run any of her tasks faster.
Apple - Apple is a hardware company so they want to sell boxes, not software, yet each release of OS X is faster than the previous one. Tiger is expected to continue this trend.
Microsoft is a software company so they want to sell software, not boxes, yet each release of Windows is far slower than the last one.
There's a reason why I can still use a 6 year old mac with the current OS.
MS is throwing more and more UI concepts out the window. It's one thing to make a thumbnail of a graphic, but of a word document that nobody will be able to read? I can tell the difference between an icon with a big W and other types. But a bunch of white documents with various black lines? Give me better metadata anyday.
Not to mention the performance hit that's going to take to render each word document.
I have a G4/800 and it runs warm when CPU load gets high. I'd expect a G5 to be a fire hazard or at least contribute to global warming, based on the desktop's cooling design.
The G4 powerbooks took forever, and the G5 is even more of a challenge.
Something I've thought about though (but IANA thermal engineer)... What if the heat was dumped behind LCD making it a giant heatsink/radiator? Rather than dumping heat out the bottom (the current model), and now attempting to draw air across the board (there's only so much air can do in a given space). The hot air should rise to the top of the unit, and if you still need cooling incorporate some sort of fan.
I've always wondered why PC's still don't seem to include firewire. Apple vs Intel? Even finding firewire devices can be hard. I can find many flash card readers for USB 2. I've found only one for firewire (my notebook has USB1) and it's 3-5 times the price.
The advantage to PCI is that it's internal and harder for users to mess up. How many times do people drop, trip, unplug or otherwise destroy external devices? One of my clients has a large stack of devices carefully balanced on the tower, and a basically empty case.
Maybe what we need is a standard for stacking firewire devices.
WIth PCIe and it's various types of slots, my question is how this will actually work? Before AGP, if you wanted to you could run as many video cards as you had slots. How do you avoid having open slots of the wrong type?
Not to reply to my own post (/., give us an edit button for 10 min or so!)...
It's just like the 100 Base-T USB 1 adapters (ie: 12 Mbps). There's no way the thing can do more than 10 base-T, but since it will physically plug in to a 100 base port the marketing people called it 100 Base.
I blame all the companies who mis-labeled their USB 1 devices USB 2 so that they wouldn't lose sales of people who didn't understand the concept of backwards compatibility.
Firewire 800 having a different connector is an inconvenience, but at least it prevents the "Firewire 800 low-speed" marketing. Of course, if they continue this pattern than firewire will be the new SCSI.
Still, we don't have this problem with things like IDE or memory. Maybe because you shouldn't touch them if you don't know what you're doing?
IIRC, people were confused between USB 1 and 2 (which were USB low speed and high speed). People would see a USB 2 low speed device, not realize that it would work just fine on USB 1 and panic?
To end the confusion, Intel decided to rename USB 1 as USB 2 full speed, giving us the non-confusing USB 2 and USB 2.
It doesn't. Apple's trying to force you to upgrade. There's nothing in the OS itself preventing it from working.
FWIW, my beige G3 (and many older machines) is happily running 10.3 thanks to XPostFacto. I expect something similar for 10.4. (Why 10.3? My 10.2 discs wouldn't read)
It's no longer my main machine, but my G3 still proves to be useful as a backup/alternate/iTunes machine.
If a company doesn't want its secrets published it shouldn't allow the leaks.
Other than an NDA (a legal contract), what's your big idea? Duct tape? If you don't understand it, too bad. Most contacts have something along the lines of "I understand what I'm signing. I've had the opportunity to consult an independant lawyer before signing."
Apple had a legal contract which said "don't talk". Someone broke it. Apple's trying to find out who broke the contract. If they get a name, they'll move on.
I can understand if Apple was doing something illegal. Trade secrets aren't the last time I checked, and are an important part of operating a business. I have some unique business plans which depend on my competition not finding out about them. I can't impliment them myself. What do you think I should do? I make a deal with you not to tell anyone. If you tell someone and I lose money as a result, what do you think my next action will be?
The only reason this person is refusing is because he knows that he'll never get information again. If your business model depends on doing things which are legally questionable, what kind of business are you running?
I wonder how the newspapers would feel if, say, a blogger approached an advertising company (who had an NDA with the publisher), discovered details about an upcoming product launch, blogged about it, and a competitor used that information to quickly push out their product?
Maybe someone should start a rumor site for various newspapers. They would need contacts within the company to feed the information to the site. Wonder how long any of it would last.
It also reminds me of a technique Apple used in the past. Different rumors (all false) were circulated, just to see where the leaks were.
Tight isn't required, but I'd love to see Apple release a more powerful version of Mail/iCal/AddressBook (maybe as part of iWork?). I hate Entourage, but the interface concept makes sense after a while if you use your calendar for everything. Contact management takes this to an even further level and it's used all the time in business (ie: when was the last time I called/emailed Bob? Do I need to followup?)
First, I always leave mail running. iCal sometimes runs (reminders tell me what to do), AB doesn't unless I need to change something. Which means I need to launch the appropriate app first. Second, I can't transfer information that easily. I want to take an incoming email request and turn it into a To-Do item easily. I can applescript, but again, that requires launching iCal.
Apple's design is to not integrate things (back in OS 8.x/9, the web was just another application), but it can make sense sometimes. As long as it's an option, I don't see much of a problem. I'd love to see Apple's interface on a contact manager type app.
It's my understanding that proper security requires a layered approach. A firewall should only be a firewall and run no other services. Obviously IDS needs to run on the external interface, but proxy servers shouldn't (they're basically a yes/no application, not something that needs direct external connectivity), and things like VPN need to live on the internal side. A network diagram would look like:
Internet
| Firewall/IDS ------- Incoming only log box with console access only
| DMZ (web, incoming smtp, pop/imap if you want it outside, wireless)
| Second firewall / proxy
| Internal network (workstations, servers, VPN, etc)
(and if you really want...
|
Firewall 3
|
Jail for virused/compromized/etc machines)
Part of the reason for the layers is that you want to limit the damage a hole can cause. What if the app you're running on your firewall has a remote root exploit?
So, how do these securiity companies get away with providing a single box to do all this? I can't say I'd trust all those services running on a single machine.
My BSD firewall has 4 network interfaces (external, internal, dmz, jail), connecting to two other servers (one for external services, one for internal services). That's all it does - all the other services run on one of the two other machines.
However, putting all the proxies in the right place is why I haven't used that setup fully (ie: I can stick my web server on the DMZ, but then it would be blocked from nfs mounting my raid on the internal side unless I allow the traffic or tunnel it, defeating the purpose. Without the mount, I have no backup and it becomes harder to publish content. Or, my VPN server needs to live on the internal side, but I don't want my primary LDAP/NFS server accepting incoming traffic from the outside.). I don't have the budget (or demand) to install a rack of servers to properly segment services.
Once I know where everything belongs I'll be able to put together packages (or even a big meta-package) with the various config files required to quickly duplicate the setup. I don't think we need a separate distro (and they are out there), but just a better collection of packages. I should be able to pkg_add meta-security-package which will configure the firewall, add squid, ask me to connect to the ldap/active directory/nis/etc. The only advantage the commercial vendors have is that they are providing meta-security-package.
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Did you get a free upgrade for the last Microsoft "point release" (Windows 5.0 to 5.1 or in marketing speak 2K to XP). You didn't?
IIRC, weren't all these systems the ones which had the 8gb boot partition limitation? Is Apple just forcing people to upgrade/workaround (XPostFacto), or is there some change to the boot system?
I had wondered why Apple dropped the Beige G3's, but not any of the iMacs in 10.3. With a USB card they had the same basic specs (and with a G4 upgrade card and XPostFacto, my G3 runs 10.3 well)
The only workaround I've found so far is to run a cron script every few minutes along the lines of:
/Users/Shared/* /Users/Shared/*
chgrp -R group_containing_all_users
chmod -R 775
(or you could also chmod 777)
There are a significant number of Macs capable of running X that did not ship with DVD drives. My 2002 powerbook has a combo drive. Towers purchased only a few months before have CD burners only (except for the one with a Superdrive).
It would have been nice if Tiger simply used a number of CD sized disk images. From the DVD it mounts them and works without swapping. Or, you can burn each image out to a CD.
Of course, DVD burners are around $50 or less. Combo drives are less.
The thing to remember about Microsoft, though, is that the marketing department, not the actual engineers, seems to run the company.
:)
I refer to Microsoft not as a computer company, but as a marketing company in the computer business.
During the talk of the Microsoft breakup, I was thinking that instead of the proposed plan, MS should have been split into Marketing and everything else. Let's see them get out of that one
It's simple. Ignore the leading 10.
As an Apple employee once told me, it's "Mac OS 10", version 1.0/2.0/etc.
Or, for the people who still claim that 10.4 is a "service pack": Microsoft uses the exact same versioning scheme! Windows XP is version 5.1. SP1 and SP2 are version 5.1.something. Those were free. The upgrade from windows 5.0 (ie: Win 2K > WinXP) was not.
No kidding. I have almost a gig on my powerbook, but with many apps wanting 70-100 mb each, it doesn't go far. (150mb for a web browser? 80 mb for mail?)
From what I've heard, it's cheaper to buy faster machines than pay someone to optimize code.
To take it farther...
A building I once worked in was renovated to save energy. The original building used soft indirect lighting, with warm white lamps, parallel to the hallway. Combined with some painting (to remove the last little but of color left), the hallway went from a warm environment to a very cold, uncomfortable one.
The new lights used a brighter cold white tube. They were re-oriented so they no longer lit the sides if the hallway (making it appear dark). Instead, they were almost right in your face. I can remember getting a severe headache the first time I walked in the hallway.
My point was more that for a hardware company, Apple tends to push a lot of software upgrades. You would expect that Apple would be pushing hardware instead. My G3 (over 6 years old) was only dropped last year. It was upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1 to 8.5 to 8.6 to 9.0 to 9.1 to 9.2 to 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2 and now 10.3 (unofficially). 10.3 runs better on that machine than any of the X releases before it. If Apple wants me to give up that machine and sell me an upgrade, they need to try harder (although my primary machine is now a Tibook). I can't think of anyone using an out of date OS on a mac.
In many cases, people won't upgrade a Windows box. Either it sticks with what OS it came with (many of my clients won't move off Win98) or they will replace the whole box to get the OS upgrade. I just haven't come across upgraded machines.
In a stock configuration the X won't be great. You'll want to bump the ram at minimum as X is very ram hungry.
My machine is a Beige G3 with a G4 upgrade card and a lot of ram (the parts were cheap, so why not?). Thanks to XPostFacto it's running 10.3 even though it's not supported. The machine handles its regular load well - in fact better than my powerbook which outspecs it, but carries a much heavier load (ram doesn't go far when each app tries to claim 100 mb). When my powerbook is down the difference is noticeable though.
However, my mom uses a second generation iMac (266 Mhz G3). All I've done is bump the ram. It runs 10.3 just fine and handles email and web. There's no point in upgrading as it won't run any of her tasks faster.
Apple vs MS:
Apple - Apple is a hardware company so they want to sell boxes, not software, yet each release of OS X is faster than the previous one. Tiger is expected to continue this trend.
Microsoft is a software company so they want to sell software, not boxes, yet each release of Windows is far slower than the last one.
There's a reason why I can still use a 6 year old mac with the current OS.
Hmm... thumbnails. Revolutionary.
MS is throwing more and more UI concepts out the window.
It's one thing to make a thumbnail of a graphic, but of a word document that nobody will be able to read? I can tell the difference between an icon with a big W and other types. But a bunch of white documents with various black lines?
Give me better metadata anyday.
Not to mention the performance hit that's going to take to render each word document.
Does rebooting from a CD or in single user mode count?
They're automated probes and the ISP's don't care. You're not paying them.
I get false SSH login attempts all the time even with a very threatening ssh banner. (untilI firewalled it off)
I have a G4/800 and it runs warm when CPU load gets high. I'd expect a G5 to be a fire hazard or at least contribute to global warming, based on the desktop's cooling design.
The G4 powerbooks took forever, and the G5 is even more of a challenge.
Something I've thought about though (but IANA thermal engineer)... What if the heat was dumped behind LCD making it a giant heatsink/radiator? Rather than dumping heat out the bottom (the current model), and now attempting to draw air across the board (there's only so much air can do in a given space). The hot air should rise to the top of the unit, and if you still need cooling incorporate some sort of fan.
I've always wondered...
Couldn't Apple do something like the DX2's? Double clock, tell marketing that machine is faster, even though the chip runs at half that speed?
Of course, when it gets out eventually it would just be proof of the Mhz myth (see? We can make it go any speed we want!)
I've always wondered why PC's still don't seem to include firewire. Apple vs Intel? Even finding firewire devices can be hard. I can find many flash card readers for USB 2. I've found only one for firewire (my notebook has USB1) and it's 3-5 times the price.
The advantage to PCI is that it's internal and harder for users to mess up. How many times do people drop, trip, unplug or otherwise destroy external devices? One of my clients has a large stack of devices carefully balanced on the tower, and a basically empty case.
Maybe what we need is a standard for stacking firewire devices.
WIth PCIe and it's various types of slots, my question is how this will actually work? Before AGP, if you wanted to you could run as many video cards as you had slots. How do you avoid having open slots of the wrong type?
Not to reply to my own post (/., give us an edit button for 10 min or so!)...
It's just like the 100 Base-T USB 1 adapters (ie: 12 Mbps). There's no way the thing can do more than 10 base-T, but since it will physically plug in to a 100 base port the marketing people called it 100 Base.
I blame all the companies who mis-labeled their USB 1 devices USB 2 so that they wouldn't lose sales of people who didn't understand the concept of backwards compatibility.
Firewire 800 having a different connector is an inconvenience, but at least it prevents the "Firewire 800 low-speed" marketing. Of course, if they continue this pattern than firewire will be the new SCSI.
Still, we don't have this problem with things like IDE or memory. Maybe because you shouldn't touch them if you don't know what you're doing?
IIRC, people were confused between USB 1 and 2 (which were USB low speed and high speed). People would see a USB 2 low speed device, not realize that it would work just fine on USB 1 and panic?
To end the confusion, Intel decided to rename USB 1 as USB 2 full speed, giving us the non-confusing USB 2 and USB 2.
I'm waiting for USB 3 - Warp speed.
It doesn't. Apple's trying to force you to upgrade. There's nothing in the OS itself preventing it from working.
FWIW, my beige G3 (and many older machines) is happily running 10.3 thanks to XPostFacto. I expect something similar for 10.4. (Why 10.3? My 10.2 discs wouldn't read)
It's no longer my main machine, but my G3 still proves to be useful as a backup/alternate/iTunes machine.
If a company doesn't want its secrets published it shouldn't allow the leaks.
Other than an NDA (a legal contract), what's your big idea? Duct tape? If you don't understand it, too bad. Most contacts have something along the lines of "I understand what I'm signing. I've had the opportunity to consult an independant lawyer before signing."
Apple had a legal contract which said "don't talk". Someone broke it. Apple's trying to find out who broke the contract. If they get a name, they'll move on.
I can understand if Apple was doing something illegal. Trade secrets aren't the last time I checked, and are an important part of operating a business. I have some unique business plans which depend on my competition not finding out about them. I can't impliment them myself. What do you think I should do? I make a deal with you not to tell anyone. If you tell someone and I lose money as a result, what do you think my next action will be?
The only reason this person is refusing is because he knows that he'll never get information again. If your business model depends on doing things which are legally questionable, what kind of business are you running?
I wonder how the newspapers would feel if, say, a blogger approached an advertising company (who had an NDA with the publisher), discovered details about an upcoming product launch, blogged about it, and a competitor used that information to quickly push out their product?
Maybe someone should start a rumor site for various newspapers. They would need contacts within the company to feed the information to the site. Wonder how long any of it would last.
It also reminds me of a technique Apple used in the past. Different rumors (all false) were circulated, just to see where the leaks were.
Tight isn't required, but I'd love to see Apple release a more powerful version of Mail/iCal/AddressBook (maybe as part of iWork?). I hate Entourage, but the interface concept makes sense after a while if you use your calendar for everything. Contact management takes this to an even further level and it's used all the time in business (ie: when was the last time I called/emailed Bob? Do I need to followup?)
First, I always leave mail running. iCal sometimes runs (reminders tell me what to do), AB doesn't unless I need to change something. Which means I need to launch the appropriate app first. Second, I can't transfer information that easily. I want to take an incoming email request and turn it into a To-Do item easily. I can applescript, but again, that requires launching iCal.
Apple's design is to not integrate things (back in OS 8.x/9, the web was just another application), but it can make sense sometimes. As long as it's an option, I don't see much of a problem. I'd love to see Apple's interface on a contact manager type app.
My take on this...
It's my understanding that proper security requires a layered approach. A firewall should only be a firewall and run no other services. Obviously IDS needs to run on the external interface, but proxy servers shouldn't (they're basically a yes/no application, not something that needs direct external connectivity), and things like VPN need to live on the internal side. A network diagram would look like:
Internet
|
Firewall/IDS ------- Incoming only log box with console access only
|
DMZ (web, incoming smtp, pop/imap if you want it outside, wireless)
|
Second firewall / proxy
|
Internal network (workstations, servers, VPN, etc)
(and if you really want...
|
Firewall 3
|
Jail for virused/compromized/etc machines)
Part of the reason for the layers is that you want to limit the damage a hole can cause. What if the app you're running on your firewall has a remote root exploit?
So, how do these securiity companies get away with providing a single box to do all this? I can't say I'd trust all those services running on a single machine.
My BSD firewall has 4 network interfaces (external, internal, dmz, jail), connecting to two other servers (one for external services, one for internal services). That's all it does - all the other services run on one of the two other machines.
However, putting all the proxies in the right place is why I haven't used that setup fully (ie: I can stick my web server on the DMZ, but then it would be blocked from nfs mounting my raid on the internal side unless I allow the traffic or tunnel it, defeating the purpose. Without the mount, I have no backup and it becomes harder to publish content. Or, my VPN server needs to live on the internal side, but I don't want my primary LDAP/NFS server accepting incoming traffic from the outside.). I don't have the budget (or demand) to install a rack of servers to properly segment services.
Once I know where everything belongs I'll be able to put together packages (or even a big meta-package) with the various config files required to quickly duplicate the setup. I don't think we need a separate distro (and they are out there), but just a better collection of packages. I should be able to pkg_add meta-security-package which will configure the firewall, add squid, ask me to connect to the ldap/active directory/nis/etc. The only advantage the commercial vendors have is that they are providing meta-security-package.