Thanks to Google, I found another article from the KC Star, not coincidentally with a sequential article number. It may have been intended as a sidebar, but I can't find a link from the original article.
It has a picture of a much larger tile with some sort of manifesto written in it, next to the standard Toynbee tile. (This picture is also visible from the picture gallery for the original article.)
Aqua doesn't either. Classic does. It's just an app that happens to run under Quartz/Aqua. Way back in the day (System 7 era), there were environments (even one from Apple, I think) that emulated a Mac on a Unix box. And of course they ran under X Windows.
3. The opcode for sc (system call) is 0x44000002. However, bytes 2
and 3 of the opcode are reserved and therefore not used. With no
other opcodes beginning with 0x44 or ending with 0x02 it is possible
to use any none zero value for bytes 2 and 3 of the opcode without
affecting its operation. The final opcode for 'sc' can therefore
become: -
sc.long 0x44ffff02
It shouldn't be all that hard for Apple to make the 'sc' instruction handler check the other two bytes of the instruction and make sure that they're both zero, instead of ignoring them. The payoff? If you can't make a system call without using a null byte, it becomes much more difficult to write shellcode. Though I suppose clever use of self-modifying code would allow it to be used, it would still be a pain in the ass.
Really. By that definition, my SUV is broadband because I'm moving a few hundred gigabytes around whenever my CD case full of anime fansub AVI files on DVD-R is in the back seat.
Yes, I know you X-windows old farts love your mouse-over focus and mouse button copy and paste to death, whine about the lack of it when someone tells you to try the Mac, and get extremely defensive when someone suggests that it's less than perfect. But it's confusing as hell for those who weren't forced to use it from the start because that's all there was.
Steve Jobs was right about a one-button mouse, although a second button for pop-up menus is arguably useful. But when Ma or Pa slips on the mouse and suddenly they can't type any more, or suddenly this big chunk-o-text appears in the middle of what they were typing, do you think they're going to laugh and say "but it's so convienent to have the paste button right under one of my fingers at all times!"?
And the best reason of all is: because that's the way that the two most popular consumer window-based operating systems work.
Im not saying there can't be some config panel which you can use to enable mouse-over-focus and mouse-copy-paste in your WM, but IMHO these two "features" should be disabled by default on any window manager that's going to be for "mainstream" users.
As I understand it, low-voltage cables like Ethernet and telephone wires do not need conduits. What they do need, however, is to be plenum-grade if they go into a "forced air space" like an air conditioning duct. It's also probably a bad idea to bring them through a hole in the ceiling of your wiring closet like I did:) in my install. But I don't have a good replacement idea other than a bunch of holes drilled from the top of the wall and brought out through a box on the wall.
You can get boxless wall-plates (also for low-voltage use only) that have bendy clips that go around the sheetrock. In a single-story house that means drill down from the attic (and hope there aren't cross-studs in the wall) and fish the wire down to the hole you've cut.
The main thing you can do to "future-proof" your installation is to put in enough wire! It's worse to have to add wires later than to leave spare wires unused for a few years. You can get modular wall plates (at Home Depot, even!) that can take up to six modules, so put four to six Cat5e and an RG-6 everywhere you can. Just cable-tie multiple cables together before you start so you only have one big cable to deal with.
And keep in mind that this can be your telephone wiring too. Just put an RJ-11 jack in the plate instead of an RJ-12, and cram a regular RJ-11 down the jack in your wiring patch panel.
Since you're doing a fresh install, you could get big-ass clips to hold the wire bundle against the stud. Make them vertical to reduce interference with your horizontal power wiring. And make sure that your wiring closet can be in an air-conditioned area.
And forget about fiber, since while there is esentially only one kind of copper for networking these days (unshielded twisted pair), there are at least two kinds of fiber (single-mode and multi-mode), and having the wrong one is just as useless as having no fiber at all. And fiber doesn't like tight bend angles either.
I guess you don't remember the 486 cards from the old days. It was a stunning flop. Too expensive, too underpowered, and almost nobody cared. It was cheaper, simpler, and more flexible to duct tape a real PC to the side of the box and add a KVM switch.
Oh, and by the way, "integrated graphics" is a codeword for "cheap crappy graphics chip that satsfies Ma and Pa, but any serious gamer will disable in favor of his own card". Oops, there's no AGP slot on your PC-on-a-card!
What I want to see is Windows apps running as separate apps in separate windows, just like Apple's X11 does. Not one big window that pretends to be a screen. And no stupid Start menu. Even nicer would be to make the apps support a real menu bar (ditto for X11), but considering all the Windows apps that make the menu bar into a toolbar, this might be tricky.
I thought little-endian mode was a part of the PowerPC spec, and wasn't optional. But I don't know for sure, so it's possible that it is optional and also possible (though IMHO unlikely) that IBM wouldn't support it in the 970 (I think they even support the legacy POWER instructions that haven't been in a PPC since the 601). Maybe there's something missing in the external bus logic that makes little-endian mode not work.
Right now, my money's on Microsoft talking out of their ass. Although this makes for a nice forced upgrade path, wouldn't you admit? Version 1 wouldn't run on a G3, forcing an upgrade there, and now the current version won't work on a G5.
I think that the people who wrote VPC were just coding a little too close to the bare metal. It's hard to make a user app incompatible with a new CPU, but I suppose it's possible. Maybe it's even an interaction between VPC and the Darwin kernel that doesn't work on a 64-bit CPU.
The patch for this exploit under Windows 2000 requires Service Pack 2 be installed first. I know that all the downloading for the patch is causing these network problems, but just assume for a moment that the patcher worm gets to a W2K system that has never had a Service Pack upgrade. If it's not perfectly written, it'll download the patch, try to install it, then reboot the computer, right?
So what if it's sitting there saying "This patch requires Service Pack 2", and the worm reboots? The result: a still unpatched system! Even if the worm were to consider its work done, after reboot the computer can be re-infected. Which means another download of the patch gets started! Can you say "Sorcerer's Apprentice"?
Even if the worm were smart enough to download a service pack, we're talking over 100 megabytes. That can take a while if you don't have good broadband, and meanwhile it's providing a nice accidental DDoS against microsoft.com.
Does Chewbacca not have fur on his arms? Does Chewbacca not have fur on his legs? Does Chewbacca not have fur on his face? Does Chewbacca not have over a million hairs in his fur?
A bit of advice: When telling them how old the Macs are that they are comparing against, why not say they are 10 years old?
1) They probably have sufficient innumeracy (even the math teachers) that they wouldn't be able to figure it out even if they saw a manufacture date sticker on the bottom of those crappy old Macs.
2) 10 sounds at least twice as big to people with innumeracy than 7 does. 'Cause it's got twice as many numbers, of course.
You didn't even tell the best part about the "food pyramid". I heard that when it was realized that the thing was total crap that someone pulled out of their ass, they went ahead with anyhow because they had already printed up the glossy 4-color propaganda to go along with it.
I'm lucky I got a good deal on a closeout Power Computing box, because it got me to sell off the 4400 that I had recently bought. That was probably the worst computer Apple ever made, with fun things like DIMMS that no other computer on this planet ever used. The 8.0 that came with it would lock up randomly.
The 61xx series were close behind. The most fun problem of that era is that when the CMOS battery dies, the video stops working! You can get it back with command-option-P-R, but who's going to know that unless they've seen this problem before? Then there was the 8100, with its extremely stupid case design that required you to almost completely disassemble it to install RAM. (And I've heard that the 8500 kept this stupid design, too.)
I think the crappiness of the 61xx series, followed by Apple's retreat from caring about educational market (ensuring that schools have 6100s lying around to this day, giving a wonderfully crappy image of Macs) is a main reason why Apple has such a bad time in the education market right now.
I'll second that. VLC runs like crap on my Pismo for playing 640x480 DivX videos. In fact, only the most recent 0.6 releases have had it run at any rate at all. I've also seen it run like crap on a Snow iBook. But I love it on my dual-1GHz MDD.
OTOH, Quicktime based DivX codecs (which require an annoying "Doctor" or "Validator" step) run at 15-20 fps. And Apple's DVD player runs fine except on DVDs with lazy compressionists who set everything to 8Mbits/sec or so.
I hope now someone gets the clue to write a script to make a nightly backup of the MD5 files to a different computer. It's not like they're big or anything.
Exploding Pintos don't suddenly cause other Pintos in the vincinity (or even halfway across the planet) to explode.
The fact is that not only is OS X relatively insignificant on the market, but so is the CPU architecture that it runs on. AFAIK, there still hasn't been a virus or worm written for OS X.
And Apple has been good about making security patches available through Software Update. Good patches, that don't happen to unpatch previous security patches, like Microsoft's non-Service Pack patches have a tendency to do. (Something which was a problem when the Slammer worm hit.)
But when I boot OS-X, the OS prints its messages on the VGA screen, not on the serial port.
I recall that XPostFacto has a menu that can select the console device. However, I'm sure that it will only work under MacOS 9. Which means it won't be useful on anything with a FireWire 800 port.
They were DB-9, but they were a completely different DB-9 than the PC uses. The pinout was definitely not an industry standard. And to the person who mentioned about the mouse, that was a third DB-9 port with yet another pinout. I think it was the opposite gender too.
I didn't get Applecare with my Pismo and I wished I had. First of all, 11 months later the battery is almost dead, but I didn't recognize the symptoms (immediate falloff from 75% to 0%), then a few months later the DVD-ROM drive dies.
I probably could have gotten Apple to replace the battery (I've heard of it being done before), and it was probably the fault of OS X anyhow, by not turning everything off when in sleep on that particular model.
The DVD-ROM drive I simply gave up on and got a combo drive instead. But I was going on a trip in the interim, so I hacked up an old Dell laptop CD-ROM that I was lucky to find on short notice. Even then, a year or so later, the bezel from that drive broke and fell off, so I've got ugly CD-ROM guts showing on the side.
And while it didn't happen to this model, other Powerbook models in the past have had problems with the clutches that hold the screen up when open. That's not a cheap repair either.
Laptops get a lot of rough handling. My next Powerbook gets Applecare.
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It has a picture of a much larger tile with some sort of manifesto written in it, next to the standard Toynbee tile. (This picture is also visible from the picture gallery for the original article.)
Aqua doesn't either. Classic does. It's just an app that happens to run under Quartz/Aqua. Way back in the day (System 7 era), there were environments (even one from Apple, I think) that emulated a Mac on a Unix box. And of course they ran under X Windows.
"sudo -s" works better.
It shouldn't be all that hard for Apple to make the 'sc' instruction handler check the other two bytes of the instruction and make sure that they're both zero, instead of ignoring them. The payoff? If you can't make a system call without using a null byte, it becomes much more difficult to write shellcode. Though I suppose clever use of self-modifying code would allow it to be used, it would still be a pain in the ass.
Really. By that definition, my SUV is broadband because I'm moving a few hundred gigabytes around whenever my CD case full of anime fansub AVI files on DVD-R is in the back seat.
Really. Zzzzzzz. Wake me when they catch the guy who's been writing SoBig.
I think you really need to learn to get a long with people better. :-)
Steve Jobs was right about a one-button mouse, although a second button for pop-up menus is arguably useful. But when Ma or Pa slips on the mouse and suddenly they can't type any more, or suddenly this big chunk-o-text appears in the middle of what they were typing, do you think they're going to laugh and say "but it's so convienent to have the paste button right under one of my fingers at all times!"?
And the best reason of all is: because that's the way that the two most popular consumer window-based operating systems work.
Im not saying there can't be some config panel which you can use to enable mouse-over-focus and mouse-copy-paste in your WM, but IMHO these two "features" should be disabled by default on any window manager that's going to be for "mainstream" users.
As I understand it, low-voltage cables like Ethernet and telephone wires do not need conduits. What they do need, however, is to be plenum-grade if they go into a "forced air space" like an air conditioning duct. It's also probably a bad idea to bring them through a hole in the ceiling of your wiring closet like I did :) in my install. But I don't have a good replacement idea other than a bunch of holes drilled from the top of the wall and brought out through a box on the wall.
You can get boxless wall-plates (also for low-voltage use only) that have bendy clips that go around the sheetrock. In a single-story house that means drill down from the attic (and hope there aren't cross-studs in the wall) and fish the wire down to the hole you've cut.
The main thing you can do to "future-proof" your installation is to put in enough wire! It's worse to have to add wires later than to leave spare wires unused for a few years. You can get modular wall plates (at Home Depot, even!) that can take up to six modules, so put four to six Cat5e and an RG-6 everywhere you can. Just cable-tie multiple cables together before you start so you only have one big cable to deal with.
And keep in mind that this can be your telephone wiring too. Just put an RJ-11 jack in the plate instead of an RJ-12, and cram a regular RJ-11 down the jack in your wiring patch panel.
Since you're doing a fresh install, you could get big-ass clips to hold the wire bundle against the stud. Make them vertical to reduce interference with your horizontal power wiring. And make sure that your wiring closet can be in an air-conditioned area.
And forget about fiber, since while there is esentially only one kind of copper for networking these days (unshielded twisted pair), there are at least two kinds of fiber (single-mode and multi-mode), and having the wrong one is just as useless as having no fiber at all. And fiber doesn't like tight bend angles either.
Oh, and by the way, "integrated graphics" is a codeword for "cheap crappy graphics chip that satsfies Ma and Pa, but any serious gamer will disable in favor of his own card". Oops, there's no AGP slot on your PC-on-a-card!
What I want to see is Windows apps running as separate apps in separate windows, just like Apple's X11 does. Not one big window that pretends to be a screen. And no stupid Start menu. Even nicer would be to make the apps support a real menu bar (ditto for X11), but considering all the Windows apps that make the menu bar into a toolbar, this might be tricky.
Right now, my money's on Microsoft talking out of their ass. Although this makes for a nice forced upgrade path, wouldn't you admit? Version 1 wouldn't run on a G3, forcing an upgrade there, and now the current version won't work on a G5.
I think that the people who wrote VPC were just coding a little too close to the bare metal. It's hard to make a user app incompatible with a new CPU, but I suppose it's possible. Maybe it's even an interaction between VPC and the Darwin kernel that doesn't work on a 64-bit CPU.
Don't forget 210.0.0.0/7 (Korea)!
So what if it's sitting there saying "This patch requires Service Pack 2", and the worm reboots? The result: a still unpatched system! Even if the worm were to consider its work done, after reboot the computer can be re-infected. Which means another download of the patch gets started! Can you say "Sorcerer's Apprentice"?
Even if the worm were smart enough to download a service pack, we're talking over 100 megabytes. That can take a while if you don't have good broadband, and meanwhile it's providing a nice accidental DDoS against microsoft.com.
If Chewbacca is furry, you must convict!
1) They probably have sufficient innumeracy (even the math teachers) that they wouldn't be able to figure it out even if they saw a manufacture date sticker on the bottom of those crappy old Macs.
2) 10 sounds at least twice as big to people with innumeracy than 7 does. 'Cause it's got twice as many numbers, of course.
You didn't even tell the best part about the "food pyramid". I heard that when it was realized that the thing was total crap that someone pulled out of their ass, they went ahead with anyhow because they had already printed up the glossy 4-color propaganda to go along with it.
The 61xx series were close behind. The most fun problem of that era is that when the CMOS battery dies, the video stops working! You can get it back with command-option-P-R, but who's going to know that unless they've seen this problem before? Then there was the 8100, with its extremely stupid case design that required you to almost completely disassemble it to install RAM. (And I've heard that the 8500 kept this stupid design, too.)
I think the crappiness of the 61xx series, followed by Apple's retreat from caring about educational market (ensuring that schools have 6100s lying around to this day, giving a wonderfully crappy image of Macs) is a main reason why Apple has such a bad time in the education market right now.
OTOH, Quicktime based DivX codecs (which require an annoying "Doctor" or "Validator" step) run at 15-20 fps. And Apple's DVD player runs fine except on DVDs with lazy compressionists who set everything to 8Mbits/sec or so.
I hope now someone gets the clue to write a script to make a nightly backup of the MD5 files to a different computer. It's not like they're big or anything.
The fact is that not only is OS X relatively insignificant on the market, but so is the CPU architecture that it runs on. AFAIK, there still hasn't been a virus or worm written for OS X.
And Apple has been good about making security patches available through Software Update. Good patches, that don't happen to unpatch previous security patches, like Microsoft's non-Service Pack patches have a tendency to do. (Something which was a problem when the Slammer worm hit.)
would prevent the worm from copying itself to your system?
I recall that XPostFacto has a menu that can select the console device. However, I'm sure that it will only work under MacOS 9. Which means it won't be useful on anything with a FireWire 800 port.
They were DB-9, but they were a completely different DB-9 than the PC uses. The pinout was definitely not an industry standard. And to the person who mentioned about the mouse, that was a third DB-9 port with yet another pinout. I think it was the opposite gender too.
I probably could have gotten Apple to replace the battery (I've heard of it being done before), and it was probably the fault of OS X anyhow, by not turning everything off when in sleep on that particular model.
The DVD-ROM drive I simply gave up on and got a combo drive instead. But I was going on a trip in the interim, so I hacked up an old Dell laptop CD-ROM that I was lucky to find on short notice. Even then, a year or so later, the bezel from that drive broke and fell off, so I've got ugly CD-ROM guts showing on the side.
And while it didn't happen to this model, other Powerbook models in the past have had problems with the clutches that hold the screen up when open. That's not a cheap repair either.
Laptops get a lot of rough handling. My next Powerbook gets Applecare.
One word: Apple.