I've been a Linux user/fan from the very start, having used many distros (Slackware, Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu, several others), including in very large production sites. I've also used Solaris in a large deployment. In the past year, I've become a Mac user, and done all my development on it.
This past week, my Macbook was off for service (battery issue, power cord, and cracked edges), and I installed Gusty for the heck of it, to see how the distros were coming along these days.
It's definitely the nicest Linux distro that I've tried. But I still find myself popping to the command line, editing GNU configuration files, compiling modules, editing sources.list with additional repos, fighting isues with Flash not working on the latest Opera (still unresolved), and so forth.
I do like it. I even managed to get up SunRay server up with it to play with a few of the dozens of surplus SunRays I have (takers anyone?:P), and with a bit of hacking, it works great. I will keep the distro up, using it to manage my home's central storage array, and as a sunray server, general purpose testing and such.
But when my Mac is back tomorrow, it will become my primary desktop, hands down, once again. The user interface, the clean design, and so forth, make for a better daily experience. (I've done some hacking with drivers for a test hackintosh, and I do like the.kext approach better than linux's modules; just seems to work better and more consistently.)
So as impresed as I was by Gutsy, I will stick to my "develop on OS X, deploy on Linux" approach. (And for deployment on a server, the distro is less important; I generally prefer Debian as first choice; often I have to use CentOS for virtual dedicated hosting, which works, too; for a server, Ubuntu is probably third choice. As a Linux desktop, it's first choice, but as discussed, I just keep falling back to using OS X as the desktop, and Linux as the server.)
Okay, this didn't make a lot of sense to me at first, thinking that electric cars are the last things in the world to be providing excess power to the grid... But in fact, it is a neat idea.
Basically, all of the batteries of these cars, connected to the grid, act as a bit of a buffer/reservoir of power for the grid. Think water tower, where water is stored there temporarily, to be pulled out during times of peak demand. Similarly, the batteries of these cars (presumably only a portion of them) provide some power to the grid during times of peak demand, and charge back up otherwise.
The one downside is that your battery would not be at 100%, if you had been providing some reservoir capacity to the system. Hopefully this would be offset by savings or other incentives. (From my experience, with any battery powered device, I'm not willing to spare any capacity; there never seem to be enough. I've never had an electric car, however).
While I'm not anti-nuke when it comes to power generation (done properly, and carefully), she seems to dismiss Hydro out of hand. As I posted recently, wave and tidale power seem to be vastly underutilized in North America and the world. Is there anything to back up the "maxxed out" premise of hydro?
I'd sooner deal with grumpy fishermen and planning for the oceanic ecological impact, than dealing with the risks and waste associated with nuclear power. The lower-tech of utilizing the wind power of the waves, or the gravitational power of the moon through tidal, just seem like better, underutilized ideas to me. But maybe I'm naive:)
It always surprised me that wave and tidal energy weren't harnessed more. Wave energy is really just wind energy thrown into a thick medium which should allow us to extract it in all its concentrated goodness. (And wind, in turn, is caused by solar heating.)
But what always seemed more dramatic to me, however, are the tides. Especially living in an area with the highest tides in the world, seeing phenomenal amounts of water come in and out with a 6 foot difference, twice a day, always struck me as having a lot more potential (ha ha) than other sources of renewable energy. Effectively harnessing the gravitation pull of our moon through the tides, always seemed to me to be a solution that was too good to be true. There are days when the sea is calm and the wing generators are slower due to lack of wind; coal and oil prices vary wildly. But nothing stops the tides, day or night; the energy available and its cost is 100% predictable, which is a rarity among energy sources.
In Nova Scotia, we have tidal power plant which generates power from the tides. However, it seems to be in a constant state of research, politics, grants, and such, and is fairly small. (Even twenty years ago, it was in this state; instead of referring to it by its name, the "Fundy Tidal Project," people used to refer to it as the "Tidy Fundal Project.") The amount of energy that could be captured from even a small part of the Bay of Fundy is staggering. Yes, it would be quite an engineering feat, but not really anything beyond other megaprojects. It's sad we haven't progressed further in harnessing this.
It depends, but I would say, yes. For example, on facebook, I'm allowed to see the detailed profiles of people who are on my friends list (authenticated by my cookie). The URL's are specific to each user, but the cookie associates my credentials for what I am allowed to see.
There are undoubtedly cases where it's not necessary, and the cookie can carry all the state, but I think that actually leads to *more* confusion. (If someone is left logged in, and you go to your favorite bookmark, seeing their stuff would be confusing, whereas seeing a "you don't have permission for this, dude" is a more reasonable experience.)
One can imagine a post-apocalyptic future a la Road Warrior, where instead of gasoline being more valuable than gold, the seeds for food crops are the valuable commodity for survival. With the evil Monsanto in charge. Would make a good movie.
If you're going to make URLs user or session specific you need very long random-looking strings. I disagree. That's the ugly (and wrong, in my opinion) way of doing it. I think the better approach is having nice, consice, meaningful strings (http://blah.com/info/?uid=200 is just fine). *BUT*, you authenticate your session with a login (or other authentication) cookie (and do it over an HTTPS session).
Long complicated strings are almost an ugly security through obscurity approach; requiring login credentials appropriate to a given URL is the more proper approach. I hate long URL's, and have never needed them in every secure site I've ever designed.
So let me get this straight, C average or above to get rewarded with laptops and scholarships?
Way to keep setting that bar higher and higher, America! You can win by being average!
(In all honesty, I think affording more kids accessibility to laptops and University is a great thing. Just why not make it universal, rather than "C average or above," which makes it a bit comical... Those with F averages aren't going to be qualify for University in the first place. In fact, at least here in Canada, I believe those with C averages wouldn't get in, either. Oh wait, making higher education accessible to all is probably gonna be shot down by Bush as being too socialistic, just like the children's health plan thing... [Shakes head...])
I offered to assist a friend open his iPhone to another carrier (here in Canada, where we can't get AT&T if we wanted to).
His uses the latest ROM, 1.1.2, and they've upgraded the bootloader in this version to close the hole that was in the previous versions. There is currently no software crack for this phone, although hopefully someone will figure something out. (TurboSIM, a sim interceptor card, which makes the iPhone think it's talking to AT&T, when in fact it's not, is apparently a hardware solution.)
So accusing Apple of not trying to lock it down for AT&T, is just plain wrong. Yes, they can't do much for older, existing phones, but the newer phones coming out do have the hole plugged.
Being a hook for Parallels (as some have suggested) isn't super efficient (a whole virtual PC just to run Windows apps is a lot of overhead; Parallels is awesome, but I doubt Apple is catering specifically to them).
Emulating or copying in some form or other the hundreds of COM objects isn't practical either.
But what if they allowed you to pop in your XP (or Vista, ugh) CD, and do an install of XP right inside OS X (a bit Xen-like) and cross-launch apps seamlessly, sharing the file system (in a Crossover Office-like way). That would really rock. (Keeping the Windows apps appropriately sandboxed of course.) Crossover Office (and coLinux, to a degree) achieve inter-OS compatibility by leveraging actual OS code, with native hooks into the host operating system. When it works, it's far more efficient that emulating an entire machine.
The more I think about it, the more I'm hoping that will be their approach.
If they can have XP (or Vista, once again, ugh) run, properly licensed, inside/alongside OS X seamlessly, it would bring people to Apple in droves. The switch to X86, allowing people to bail to Windows if their "switch" didn't work, and the efficiency of Parallels on an X86 platform (no emulation of every instruction), truly won over a lot of people to the Mac camp, myself included. This final step would be a major coup, and a natural final step in helping people get away from dependency upon Windows as their sole operating system...
With the data rates we pay in Canada, it's probably not going to be much of a viable option up here for awhile.
My phone is EVDO capable, but I make sure I turn it off (although I can't seem to connect with it anyway). If it did connect at EVDO speeds, it could rack up hundreds of dollars of charges in a few minutes, with the dollars-per-megabyte we pay up here.
Here's hoping the Canadian government's push to open up the spectrum to new competition will help make these things a bit more reasonable.
I wish Facebook would add a feature that allowed grouping your friends into categories (coworkers, friends, etc.) for your own organization purposes. I used to have a bunch of former co-workers, and distant former friends on my friends list. But I live far from most of them now, never come in contact with them, and probably won't, except in rare cases. So I don't need to know that Jane painted her living room and is waiting for the hottub to be installed. It got ridiculous all the status updates for people that I really didn't interact with.
So I pruned my list down to mainly people I am actively friends with, or with whom I keep some lines of communication open.
It'd be nice to be able to put users into categories with different features; I don't want to see status updates for former co-workers, and so forth.
(And on a side note, please kill Funwall.:) It's the new equivalent of mass-mailings of cutsie-pie stuff.)
While I think it's laughable to call it a failure at all, especially a failure on the order of Vista, Leopard, as released, does have a number of disappointments for me. I expect them to be automatically fixed in a software update before long, which is far less painful than a massive SP2 or whatever. Here's what I've found:
Some application incompatibility; most Softphones I've tried won't connect to their server. X-Lite won't, and after pointing the finger to Apple (and somewhat rightfully so), have grudgingly stated they will come out with an update for it. But what magical thing could they be using on a TCP/IP stack that would suddenly break??? Something weird must have changed at quite a low level. (The free SJPhone, which works with Vonage, does seem to be one of the rare ones that does work, which will do for now.)
While Spotlight does offer more features and flexibility now, it does come with a performance penalty. I seem to get reindexing and indexing more often than before, slowing down the system.
General system performance seems more sluggish, and boot times a fair bit higher than Tiger. Things like Expose' seemed a little jerkier than in Tiger. (Although this seems a bit better lately, perhaps 10.5.1 update helped this.)
I had one program (Azureus) that wrote to syslog with a bunch of exceptions; Leopard now keeps its syslog in a database (/var/log/asl.db). When this file got large due to Azureus, syslogd suddenly started taking up 99% of the CPU, dragging down the system. It took awhile to chase this one down, having to remove asl.db and kill syslogd (so it auto-restarted). That's a pretty sloppy hole for a consumer OS, in my opinion. (Although one could partially blame Azurues/Java for dumping excessive amount of exceptions to syslog in the first place.)
I've seen my first OSX crashes with Leopard, as well. The were all centered around plugging/unplugging USB devices; in this case, a dying/dead USB MP3 player. Yes, the player was not responding well (bad ram), but it's no excuse for the USB driver bringing down the system. I haven't seen this repeated, so maybe it was isolated to that one bad device, or maybe the 10.5.1 update fixed it.
I have seen one or two occasions where the system just got so sluggish and unresponsive that I had to reboot. Rebooting to make the system run better was unheard of in Tiger.
Adobe Professional's PDF virtual printer thingy doesn't work in Leopard. Adobe has acknowledged this, and promised an update early in the new year. Ugh. Thankfully OS X's print dialog has a save-to-pdf option, which will do for now, although I find it's not quite as good generated PDF content as Acrobat printer produces. (Sometimes, hauling things into Acrobat, then optimizing/saving them, works out okay.)
iWork's "Pages" consistently crashed whenever I tried to edit a table (unless I kept the mouse *extremely* still after clicking in the table, d'oh). An auto update a couple of weeks after Leopard's release seems to have fixed this one nicely, though.
There were a couple of low-levelish kernel extensions that no longer worked for me, but that's not terribly surprising in a major upgrade, and they were nothing core to my work, just curiosities.
Mounting Windows shares seems to be a bit less reliable than before. Some times it won't connect, and once or twice I had to reboot because finder was wedged trying to mount a share, and I couldn't even relaunch Finder. Not great. But things seem to be working better lately (maybe 10.5.1 helped that).
All that being said, I was amazed at how smooth the update from Tiger went; coming from the Windows world, I expected a reinstall to be the only feasible upgrade option. The upgrade to Leopard, however, went off without a hitch. (I did extensive backups, and a test install on an external drive, being so paranoid of losing my stuff in the upgrade, but it wasn't needed, it seems.) Almost everything worked, except for the bits mentioned above. Parallels was one app
This guy has a subtle wisdom, insight, and modesty, that makes me expect great things from him before long, probably along the lines of fiction writing. Another post summed it up pretty well, with the "don't hate the player, hate the game" aspect of Wesley Crusher. Wil played the character very well; the character just happened to be annoying to many (myself included).
And I was guilty of associating the actor with the character; reading his stuff (primarly through/. links) makes me realize there's far more to the guy, and we should expect to see more cool things from him.
I fear for Vonage's demise. At least here in eastern Canada, no one can touch the rates they offer. I'm quite happy with the service, more than happy with the features, and love the great price. I dread being forced back to an expensive, featureless Aliant land line, all because of big US telcos beating up on Vonage. Hopefully someone else will step in if they die, but it sounds like some of these patents are so broad (sending packetized voice data, blah blah blah) that without patent reform, nobody will be able to.
I'm not terribly out of the loop when it comes to development technology, but have never heard of Android (in this context) nor Dalvik. Come on, editors, would ensuring a four or five word summary of what the heck these are, really be that hard to enhance the article, and avoid a few wikipedia lookups to simply read the news???
Then the cops involved are suspended with pay during the official investigation, which will find that the cops could not be reasonably expected to have known that the person had a pacemaker, so they will be off the hook, AS USUAL. As it should be. You make it sound like it should be otherwise.
People with health conditions that get into chases or fights with cops shouldn't expect the cops to be aware of their special needs and to handle them especially "delicately". They have a very simple option: pull over. If I were to get into a fight or a chase with cops, I shouldn't expect it to be a stroll in the park. So I choose not to do that.
Exactly. I prefer this approach. Fork it if you want to do your own independant thing, but if you want to belong to our trade group, then agree to the non-fragmentation agreement. Everybody should be happy.
I prefer the Apache and BSD style licensing myself, it's really what freedom is all about to me (including the freedom to have your own private fork if you wish). The Apache license hasn't exactly led to the Apache web server itself going to hell in a handbasket due to fragmentation. People are free to fork, but the mainstream is tasty enough that it's what most people use.
Trust me, it *does* make a difference. I used to travel semi-regularly with a late-arriver (very frustrating). I'd check in an hour before the flight, often the first one there; he would typically be the last one there. His bags always came off *wayyyy* before mine, usually near the start; mine were most often the last ones off. I'm pretty sure it's LIFO, but it could vary by airport, of course. (This was flying out of Toronto Pearson.)
I bought one of the first palms, and remember disassembling the ROM, and looking through it. It was lean, elegant, and straight forward enough that one could do that. Try that with Windows Mobile, or probably even the newer palms (oh wait, they are windows mobile now, aren't they?)
Now, I do appreciate the greater flexibility of Windows mobile devices, and prefer it over the palm, but the speed, elegance, battery life, and so on, just aren't there. Too bad we can't have the best of both of these worlds...
True, there's a lot of prior art, but IBM has been around awhile (1888!), and might just be able to claim the lead in this practice; perhaps why they applied for the patent. Although claiming to be one of the first active bullies might not be great for PR value.:)
(I remember working at IBM labs in Toronto, and they had a little historical display in one building, showing some meat cutters and cheese slicers, early products of the company...)
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I've been a Linux user/fan from the very start, having used many distros (Slackware, Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu, several others), including in very large production sites. I've also used Solaris in a large deployment. In the past year, I've become a Mac user, and done all my development on it.
:P), and with a bit of hacking, it works great. I will keep the distro up, using it to manage my home's central storage array, and as a sunray server, general purpose testing and such.
.kext approach better than linux's modules; just seems to work better and more consistently.)
This past week, my Macbook was off for service (battery issue, power cord, and cracked edges), and I installed Gusty for the heck of it, to see how the distros were coming along these days.
It's definitely the nicest Linux distro that I've tried. But I still find myself popping to the command line, editing GNU configuration files, compiling modules, editing sources.list with additional repos, fighting isues with Flash not working on the latest Opera (still unresolved), and so forth.
I do like it. I even managed to get up SunRay server up with it to play with a few of the dozens of surplus SunRays I have (takers anyone?
But when my Mac is back tomorrow, it will become my primary desktop, hands down, once again. The user interface, the clean design, and so forth, make for a better daily experience. (I've done some hacking with drivers for a test hackintosh, and I do like the
So as impresed as I was by Gutsy, I will stick to my "develop on OS X, deploy on Linux" approach. (And for deployment on a server, the distro is less important; I generally prefer Debian as first choice; often I have to use CentOS for virtual dedicated hosting, which works, too; for a server, Ubuntu is probably third choice. As a Linux desktop, it's first choice, but as discussed, I just keep falling back to using OS X as the desktop, and Linux as the server.)
Okay, this didn't make a lot of sense to me at first, thinking that electric cars are the last things in the world to be providing excess power to the grid... But in fact, it is a neat idea.
Basically, all of the batteries of these cars, connected to the grid, act as a bit of a buffer/reservoir of power for the grid. Think water tower, where water is stored there temporarily, to be pulled out during times of peak demand. Similarly, the batteries of these cars (presumably only a portion of them) provide some power to the grid during times of peak demand, and charge back up otherwise.
The one downside is that your battery would not be at 100%, if you had been providing some reservoir capacity to the system. Hopefully this would be offset by savings or other incentives. (From my experience, with any battery powered device, I'm not willing to spare any capacity; there never seem to be enough. I've never had an electric car, however).
While I'm not anti-nuke when it comes to power generation (done properly, and carefully), she seems to dismiss Hydro out of hand. As I posted recently, wave and tidale power seem to be vastly underutilized in North America and the world. Is there anything to back up the "maxxed out" premise of hydro?
:)
I'd sooner deal with grumpy fishermen and planning for the oceanic ecological impact, than dealing with the risks and waste associated with nuclear power. The lower-tech of utilizing the wind power of the waves, or the gravitational power of the moon through tidal, just seem like better, underutilized ideas to me. But maybe I'm naive
It always surprised me that wave and tidal energy weren't harnessed more. Wave energy is really just wind energy thrown into a thick medium which should allow us to extract it in all its concentrated goodness. (And wind, in turn, is caused by solar heating.)
But what always seemed more dramatic to me, however, are the tides. Especially living in an area with the highest tides in the world, seeing phenomenal amounts of water come in and out with a 6 foot difference, twice a day, always struck me as having a lot more potential (ha ha) than other sources of renewable energy. Effectively harnessing the gravitation pull of our moon through the tides, always seemed to me to be a solution that was too good to be true. There are days when the sea is calm and the wing generators are slower due to lack of wind; coal and oil prices vary wildly. But nothing stops the tides, day or night; the energy available and its cost is 100% predictable, which is a rarity among energy sources.
In Nova Scotia, we have tidal power plant which generates power from the tides. However, it seems to be in a constant state of research, politics, grants, and such, and is fairly small. (Even twenty years ago, it was in this state; instead of referring to it by its name, the "Fundy Tidal Project," people used to refer to it as the "Tidy Fundal Project.") The amount of energy that could be captured from even a small part of the Bay of Fundy is staggering. Yes, it would be quite an engineering feat, but not really anything beyond other megaprojects. It's sad we haven't progressed further in harnessing this.
It depends, but I would say, yes. For example, on facebook, I'm allowed to see the detailed profiles of people who are on my friends list (authenticated by my cookie). The URL's are specific to each user, but the cookie associates my credentials for what I am allowed to see.
There are undoubtedly cases where it's not necessary, and the cookie can carry all the state, but I think that actually leads to *more* confusion. (If someone is left logged in, and you go to your favorite bookmark, seeing their stuff would be confusing, whereas seeing a "you don't have permission for this, dude" is a more reasonable experience.)
One can imagine a post-apocalyptic future a la Road Warrior, where instead of gasoline being more valuable than gold, the seeds for food crops are the valuable commodity for survival. With the evil Monsanto in charge. Would make a good movie.
If you're going to make URLs user or session specific you need very long random-looking strings.
I disagree. That's the ugly (and wrong, in my opinion) way of doing it. I think the better approach is having nice, consice, meaningful strings (http://blah.com/info/?uid=200 is just fine). *BUT*, you authenticate your session with a login (or other authentication) cookie (and do it over an HTTPS session).
Long complicated strings are almost an ugly security through obscurity approach; requiring login credentials appropriate to a given URL is the more proper approach. I hate long URL's, and have never needed them in every secure site I've ever designed.
So let me get this straight, C average or above to get rewarded with laptops and scholarships?
Way to keep setting that bar higher and higher, America! You can win by being average!
(In all honesty, I think affording more kids accessibility to laptops and University is a great thing. Just why not make it universal, rather than "C average or above," which makes it a bit comical... Those with F averages aren't going to be qualify for University in the first place. In fact, at least here in Canada, I believe those with C averages wouldn't get in, either. Oh wait, making higher education accessible to all is probably gonna be shot down by Bush as being too socialistic, just like the children's health plan thing... [Shakes head...])
I think that's wrong.
I offered to assist a friend open his iPhone to another carrier (here in Canada, where we can't get AT&T if we wanted to).
His uses the latest ROM, 1.1.2, and they've upgraded the bootloader in this version to close the hole that was in the previous versions. There is currently no software crack for this phone, although hopefully someone will figure something out. (TurboSIM, a sim interceptor card, which makes the iPhone think it's talking to AT&T, when in fact it's not, is apparently a hardware solution.)
So accusing Apple of not trying to lock it down for AT&T, is just plain wrong. Yes, they can't do much for older, existing phones, but the newer phones coming out do have the hole plugged.
See the big red "no", in this table.
Adopting Wine would have its limitations.
Being a hook for Parallels (as some have suggested) isn't super efficient (a whole virtual PC just to run Windows apps is a lot of overhead; Parallels is awesome, but I doubt Apple is catering specifically to them).
Emulating or copying in some form or other the hundreds of COM objects isn't practical either.
But what if they allowed you to pop in your XP (or Vista, ugh) CD, and do an install of XP right inside OS X (a bit Xen-like) and cross-launch apps seamlessly, sharing the file system (in a Crossover Office-like way). That would really rock. (Keeping the Windows apps appropriately sandboxed of course.) Crossover Office (and coLinux, to a degree) achieve inter-OS compatibility by leveraging actual OS code, with native hooks into the host operating system. When it works, it's far more efficient that emulating an entire machine.
The more I think about it, the more I'm hoping that will be their approach.
If they can have XP (or Vista, once again, ugh) run, properly licensed, inside/alongside OS X seamlessly, it would bring people to Apple in droves. The switch to X86, allowing people to bail to Windows if their "switch" didn't work, and the efficiency of Parallels on an X86 platform (no emulation of every instruction), truly won over a lot of people to the Mac camp, myself included. This final step would be a major coup, and a natural final step in helping people get away from dependency upon Windows as their sole operating system...
Keeping my fingers crossed...
With the data rates we pay in Canada, it's probably not going to be much of a viable option up here for awhile.
My phone is EVDO capable, but I make sure I turn it off (although I can't seem to connect with it anyway). If it did connect at EVDO speeds, it could rack up hundreds of dollars of charges in a few minutes, with the dollars-per-megabyte we pay up here.
Here's hoping the Canadian government's push to open up the spectrum to new competition will help make these things a bit more reasonable.
My roomie in univ used to call them "a Flock of Haircuts."
I wish Facebook would add a feature that allowed grouping your friends into categories (coworkers, friends, etc.) for your own organization purposes. I used to have a bunch of former co-workers, and distant former friends on my friends list. But I live far from most of them now, never come in contact with them, and probably won't, except in rare cases. So I don't need to know that Jane painted her living room and is waiting for the hottub to be installed. It got ridiculous all the status updates for people that I really didn't interact with.
:) It's the new equivalent of mass-mailings of cutsie-pie stuff.)
So I pruned my list down to mainly people I am actively friends with, or with whom I keep some lines of communication open.
It'd be nice to be able to put users into categories with different features; I don't want to see status updates for former co-workers, and so forth.
(And on a side note, please kill Funwall.
While I think it's laughable to call it a failure at all, especially a failure on the order of Vista, Leopard, as released, does have a number of disappointments for me. I expect them to be automatically fixed in a software update before long, which is far less painful than a massive SP2 or whatever. Here's what I've found:
Some application incompatibility; most Softphones I've tried won't connect to their server. X-Lite won't, and after pointing the finger to Apple (and somewhat rightfully so), have grudgingly stated they will come out with an update for it. But what magical thing could they be using on a TCP/IP stack that would suddenly break??? Something weird must have changed at quite a low level. (The free SJPhone, which works with Vonage, does seem to be one of the rare ones that does work, which will do for now.)
While Spotlight does offer more features and flexibility now, it does come with a performance penalty. I seem to get reindexing and indexing more often than before, slowing down the system.
General system performance seems more sluggish, and boot times a fair bit higher than Tiger. Things like Expose' seemed a little jerkier than in Tiger. (Although this seems a bit better lately, perhaps 10.5.1 update helped this.)
I had one program (Azureus) that wrote to syslog with a bunch of exceptions; Leopard now keeps its syslog in a database (/var/log/asl.db). When this file got large due to Azureus, syslogd suddenly started taking up 99% of the CPU, dragging down the system. It took awhile to chase this one down, having to remove asl.db and kill syslogd (so it auto-restarted). That's a pretty sloppy hole for a consumer OS, in my opinion. (Although one could partially blame Azurues/Java for dumping excessive amount of exceptions to syslog in the first place.)
I've seen my first OSX crashes with Leopard, as well. The were all centered around plugging/unplugging USB devices; in this case, a dying/dead USB MP3 player. Yes, the player was not responding well (bad ram), but it's no excuse for the USB driver bringing down the system. I haven't seen this repeated, so maybe it was isolated to that one bad device, or maybe the 10.5.1 update fixed it.
I have seen one or two occasions where the system just got so sluggish and unresponsive that I had to reboot. Rebooting to make the system run better was unheard of in Tiger.
Adobe Professional's PDF virtual printer thingy doesn't work in Leopard. Adobe has acknowledged this, and promised an update early in the new year. Ugh. Thankfully OS X's print dialog has a save-to-pdf option, which will do for now, although I find it's not quite as good generated PDF content as Acrobat printer produces. (Sometimes, hauling things into Acrobat, then optimizing/saving them, works out okay.)
iWork's "Pages" consistently crashed whenever I tried to edit a table (unless I kept the mouse *extremely* still after clicking in the table, d'oh). An auto update a couple of weeks after Leopard's release seems to have fixed this one nicely, though.
There were a couple of low-levelish kernel extensions that no longer worked for me, but that's not terribly surprising in a major upgrade, and they were nothing core to my work, just curiosities.
Mounting Windows shares seems to be a bit less reliable than before. Some times it won't connect, and once or twice I had to reboot because finder was wedged trying to mount a share, and I couldn't even relaunch Finder. Not great. But things seem to be working better lately (maybe 10.5.1 helped that).
All that being said, I was amazed at how smooth the update from Tiger went; coming from the Windows world, I expected a reinstall to be the only feasible upgrade option. The upgrade to Leopard, however, went off without a hitch. (I did extensive backups, and a test install on an external drive, being so paranoid of losing my stuff in the upgrade, but it wasn't needed, it seems.) Almost everything worked, except for the bits mentioned above. Parallels was one app
This guy has a subtle wisdom, insight, and modesty, that makes me expect great things from him before long, probably along the lines of fiction writing. Another post summed it up pretty well, with the "don't hate the player, hate the game" aspect of Wesley Crusher. Wil played the character very well; the character just happened to be annoying to many (myself included).
/. links) makes me realize there's far more to the guy, and we should expect to see more cool things from him.
And I was guilty of associating the actor with the character; reading his stuff (primarly through
I fear for Vonage's demise. At least here in eastern Canada, no one can touch the rates they offer. I'm quite happy with the service, more than happy with the features, and love the great price. I dread being forced back to an expensive, featureless Aliant land line, all because of big US telcos beating up on Vonage. Hopefully someone else will step in if they die, but it sounds like some of these patents are so broad (sending packetized voice data, blah blah blah) that without patent reform, nobody will be able to.
I'm not terribly out of the loop when it comes to development technology, but have never heard of Android (in this context) nor Dalvik. Come on, editors, would ensuring a four or five word summary of what the heck these are, really be that hard to enhance the article, and avoid a few wikipedia lookups to simply read the news???
Thanks...
Then the cops involved are suspended with pay during the official investigation, which will find that the cops could not be reasonably expected to have known that the person had a pacemaker, so they will be off the hook, AS USUAL.
As it should be. You make it sound like it should be otherwise.
People with health conditions that get into chases or fights with cops shouldn't expect the cops to be aware of their special needs and to handle them especially "delicately". They have a very simple option: pull over. If I were to get into a fight or a chase with cops, I shouldn't expect it to be a stroll in the park. So I choose not to do that.
Exactly. I prefer this approach. Fork it if you want to do your own independant thing, but if you want to belong to our trade group, then agree to the non-fragmentation agreement. Everybody should be happy.
I prefer the Apache and BSD style licensing myself, it's really what freedom is all about to me (including the freedom to have your own private fork if you wish). The Apache license hasn't exactly led to the Apache web server itself going to hell in a handbasket due to fragmentation. People are free to fork, but the mainstream is tasty enough that it's what most people use.
Because, youtube is where we *all* go, when we're looking for HD content. :S
It's kind of an "inside scan sonar!"
Thank you, thank you... I'm here all week... Be sure to try out the buffet!
Oh, the ironing is delicious:
"If you are interested in learning more and hearing LT audio samples, order our complimentary CD."
Trust me, it *does* make a difference. I used to travel semi-regularly with a late-arriver (very frustrating). I'd check in an hour before the flight, often the first one there; he would typically be the last one there. His bags always came off *wayyyy* before mine, usually near the start; mine were most often the last ones off. I'm pretty sure it's LIFO, but it could vary by airport, of course. (This was flying out of Toronto Pearson.)
I bought one of the first palms, and remember disassembling the ROM, and looking through it. It was lean, elegant, and straight forward enough that one could do that. Try that with Windows Mobile, or probably even the newer palms (oh wait, they are windows mobile now, aren't they?)
Now, I do appreciate the greater flexibility of Windows mobile devices, and prefer it over the palm, but the speed, elegance, battery life, and so on, just aren't there. Too bad we can't have the best of both of these worlds...
True, there's a lot of prior art, but IBM has been around awhile (1888!), and might just be able to claim the lead in this practice; perhaps why they applied for the patent. Although claiming to be one of the first active bullies might not be great for PR value. :)
(I remember working at IBM labs in Toronto, and they had a little historical display in one building, showing some meat cutters and cheese slicers, early products of the company...)