When I was working for NASA, on the NISN network, we'd get these weird router crashes for the old Cisco router located at (or very near) the South Pole in Antarctica. It was always a memory problem, and I'd always have to call someone to get them to powercycle the router. It irritated me to keep bothering those guys, so I opened a case with Cisco TAC.
The TAC guy sent a terse response, saying that particular crash was a "transient memory error" due to "alpha radiation or sun spots." That really pissed me off -- Cisco TAC just gave me a standard BOFH response! I escalated, and swung the NASA club around some, and finally got a senior engineer on the phone. "You said this router's at the South Pole, right? So that means it's at very high altitude, with very little ozone shielding, right?" "Umm, yeah." "Well there you go. There's a lot more radiation at that altitude than at sea level. Our stuff's only rated for sea level. See if they can.. I dunno, put a lead blanket over it or something."
I relayed the info to my contact at McMurdo, and he laughed and said he'd figure something out.
On a hunch, I checked the other two "high-altitude" routers we had, and sure enough, they both had a statistically higher failure rate for "transient memory errors".
You don't need the whole Cygwin beast for this. Get the small compiled rsync binary from the BackupPC folks: http://sourceforge.net/projects/backuppc/files/ (scroll down, and look for 'cygwin-rsync'.
In 1995, my pal Robert (or was it Jeff?) downloaded a Slackware distro -- via slow modem, onto floppies. It took about a week.
We all passed the floppy set around, installing Linux onto our computers. By February of 1996, id had released the Quake demo. I had Win95 on my old craptastic Packard Bell, but it simply wouldn't run Quake. I spent hours trying to get the SVGALib Quake to run. I distinctly recall nuking my system in an effort to get X running, and somehow typing (as root) "rm -rf / usr/local/lib". See that extra space? Yeah, that was fun.
I got a new computer, but couldn't get Win95 to run, so I switched to OS2/Warp. It wouldn't boot at all. Linux would run, but would crash a lot. I finally discovered that the scumbags who sold me the computer had swapped the new 486 Intel chip for a much older and slower Cyrix chip, and overclocked the hell out of it so that it'd show the appropriate Mhz at boot.
I finally switched that POS out for a new computer, and ran dual-boot Linux and Win95 for several more years. Today I use Macs, but they're mainly pretty window dressing for terminal sessions on Linux machines.
Pine is still my mail reader of choice. Every so often, I'll try using mutt again, and every time I'll switch back to Pine, because those keystrokes are embedded in my brain. I know mutt can "be made to look almost like pine", but there's a big difference between 'almost' and 'exactly'.
Ten years ago, I vaguely recall killing time pretending to work as an unpaid sysadmin at a horrible fly-by-night ISP called Quest Internet. This was a place that condoned and even encouraged playing Quake on the main (only) server. A pal of mine was reading this neat site called Slashdot, so I started reading it too.
I suffered through iTerm's flakiness for years -- effectively since its creation. Updates dropped to nil after 0.87 (?), so I stopped looking for them after a few months. I just expected copy/paste to be weird and for it to randomly crash. A month or so ago, I checked the site, and wow, there was a whole new release!
It had true X-like select-to-copy and middle-to-paste, configurable tab positions, UI style support, fullscreen, autoupdating, and so on.
One of my favorite features has been the ability to specify what characters should be included as part of a word on a doubleclick -- this means doubleclick copy of IPs or paths.
The updates for this rebirth of iTerm have been on a near weekly basis. I'm not sure of the politics around this new burst of development, but it looks like maybe someone new got involved, or the original authors finished school (or quit playing WoW?;) )
Way back in 1998, I got a job doing tech support for AIRnet, an ISP which serviced north Alabama. AIRnet had covered most of north Alabama, and was pushing farther and farther south -- towards areas that didn't know much about electricity, much less The Interwebs.
One of the high-growth areas was Blountsville, county seat of Blount County, Alabama. Blount being the opposite of 'sharp', I suppose.
One afternoon, the receptionist called out, "I've got a live one! It's from Blountsville! Who wants it?"
I volunteered, knowing what I was getting myself into.
"AIRnet tech support, how can I help you?"
"Yeah, I bought the internet the other day," the woman said. (Wow, deep pockets on this one.)
"OK, ma'm, what can I help you with?"
"Well, I can't get on," she said.
"Can you be more specific," I asked. "What happens when you try to connect?"
"Well I call that number that you give me, and it just squeals in my ear."
Oh boy.
"Ma'm, do you HAVE a computer?" I asked.
"Why, hell no -- that's what I pay you people twenty dollar a month for!"
At some point within the last few months, Google removed the "Remove this site from search results" button. I made heavy use of it, perma-banning resultspammer sites like ExpertSexchange.com and its ilk.
Sadly, this button is now gone from Personalized Search, and the resultspammer sites are steadily reducing Google's usefulness to me. Where I could once search for specific tech terms and get a good batch of reference resources, now I'm getting junk portal pages for the top five results.
Sure, I could report a link as spam, but that's a lot more time-consuming than the button, and it doesn't appear to have any immediate results for my searches.
This makes me sad. I've loved Google since I first met her, but I can't be with her if she's going to continue mainlining spam.
There's absolutely no way the Yankee group can claim to be unbiased if they allowed the Didiot within fifteen hundred meters of a report on Open Source or Linux.
"The sad part is, it takes legislative action to get media distributors to stop them activly pissing off their paying customers."
No, the sad part is that the paying customers are fucking stupid because we are still paying customers.
It's still entirely passive-aggressive laziness to whine to your congresscritters when bad ole Sony installs the DRM that ass-rapes your mother and kills your dog.
Did you get that?
No, really, please understand this point: Lawsuits don't fucking help.
Lawsuits are tax-deductible. They're an acceptable business risk. They don't get CEOs fired. CEOs only get fired when the business stops making money.
Companies like Sony will continue to rape you until you -- yeah, you, the one sitting there reading Slashdot on a Friday night on one Sony monitor while playing EQ2 on the other, you fat fuck -- YOU stop paying them.
Stop paying them.
Stop. Paying. Them.
Really. Otherwise you're just fucking asking for it. And you deserve no sympathy for when your computer suddenly crashes because of the DRM you bought and paid for, or when you get sued for piracy that you didn't commit but that the spyware that the latest Sony DVD installed had a glitch and mis-reported your personal data to them.
Stop paying Sony.
What, you wanted to have that neat new DVD but also be able to skip the 30 minutes of previews?
Fuck you, whiner.
You put the ball in Sony's hands, and they really, truly do not give a shit about you. They dictate the terms because you fucking let them.
You fucking idiot.
Every Sony DVD you buy hurts you. Every CD. Every movie. Every neato electronic widget.
"You can create relationships by dragging objects about (say a picture of a dog onto an email to family members) and SpotLight remembers them in detail (the dog metadata in the image is then in a relationship with the people in the email address fields, as well as the email itself and any objects inside it)."
No, you can't.
That's a potential future of Spotlight, but not a current capability.
Clicking the 'X' doesnt actually close the application. This annoyed me to start with, but ive slowly gotton used to it.
As someone replied earlier, this is a new paradigm in app management: the top menu controls the application, and the window menu controls the window. More importantly, OSX apps are designed to be left open -- keep them open, close or hide their windows, and they'll use virtually no resources, but will start significantly faster the next time you use them.
Having to select the application window before I can quit it using the application menu. Or I have to right click on the dock icon to quit. Annoying still.
Learn your keyboard shortcuts. Take the ten minutes to learn them, and you'll regain hours of your time. Cmd-Q is the shortcut for quit, for example. If you're used to Windows machines, you can switch the cmd key with the Windows key.
Love the dock. Its just..... right.
Check out Quicksilver, from http://quicksilver.blacktree.com . Once you get used to it [and once it gets used to you], it's phenominally faster than the Dock.
The ability to access the underlying BSD OS easily. Love it.
iTerm, from http://iterm.sourceforge.net , is a great OSX terminal app.
Here's a list of favorite OSX apps I posted a while back. Most are free/OSS, and they're all some of the best apps for any platform.
Actually an important factor may be HD speed, as posted later on. My / drive is a 10KRPM Quantum SCSI drive; yours is maybe 5200RPM in that laptop.
Also, do what the other replier said, and leave the apps running-but-minimized. You can even leave Photoshop running; if it doesn't have pictures loaded or tons of stuff in its clipboard, it won't use any resources when minimized.
Slashdot Mirror
I have many memories of Slashdot, some good, and some bad.
9/11
That Jon Katz asshat
Natalie Portman, and hot grits.
But I never visit any more.
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Apple already tried a gaming platform back in the day. It was called the Pippin.
Is this idea gonna fly?
Yes.
Do we really need yet another Apple-controlled walled garden? Don't we have enough of those already?
Yes. No.
When I was working for NASA, on the NISN network, we'd get these weird router crashes for the old Cisco router located at (or very near) the South Pole in Antarctica. It was always a memory problem, and I'd always have to call someone to get them to powercycle the router. It irritated me to keep bothering those guys, so I opened a case with Cisco TAC.
The TAC guy sent a terse response, saying that particular crash was a "transient memory error" due to "alpha radiation or sun spots." That really pissed me off -- Cisco TAC just gave me a standard BOFH response! I escalated, and swung the NASA club around some, and finally got a senior engineer on the phone. "You said this router's at the South Pole, right? So that means it's at very high altitude, with very little ozone shielding, right?" "Umm, yeah." "Well there you go. There's a lot more radiation at that altitude than at sea level. Our stuff's only rated for sea level. See if they can .. I dunno, put a lead blanket over it or something."
I relayed the info to my contact at McMurdo, and he laughed and said he'd figure something out.
On a hunch, I checked the other two "high-altitude" routers we had, and sure enough, they both had a statistically higher failure rate for "transient memory errors".
FYI BackupPC is pretty nice, itself.
In 1995, my pal Robert (or was it Jeff?) downloaded a Slackware distro -- via slow modem, onto floppies. It took about a week.
We all passed the floppy set around, installing Linux onto our computers. By February of 1996, id had released the Quake demo. I had Win95 on my old craptastic Packard Bell, but it simply wouldn't run Quake. I spent hours trying to get the SVGALib Quake to run. I distinctly recall nuking my system in an effort to get X running, and somehow typing (as root) "rm -rf / usr/local/lib". See that extra space? Yeah, that was fun.
I got a new computer, but couldn't get Win95 to run, so I switched to OS2/Warp. It wouldn't boot at all. Linux would run, but would crash a lot. I finally discovered that the scumbags who sold me the computer had swapped the new 486 Intel chip for a much older and slower Cyrix chip, and overclocked the hell out of it so that it'd show the appropriate Mhz at boot.
I finally switched that POS out for a new computer, and ran dual-boot Linux and Win95 for several more years. Today I use Macs, but they're mainly pretty window dressing for terminal sessions on Linux machines.
Pine is still my mail reader of choice. Every so often, I'll try using mutt again, and every time I'll switch back to Pine, because those keystrokes are embedded in my brain. I know mutt can "be made to look almost like pine", but there's a big difference between 'almost' and 'exactly'.
No, it was 'Questtek' in Alabama. Yeah, they were also illiterate morons.
I think I signed up about 10 minutes after the announcement of user IDs.
Ten years ago, I vaguely recall killing time pretending to work as an unpaid sysadmin at a horrible fly-by-night ISP called Quest Internet. This was a place that condoned and even encouraged playing Quake on the main (only) server. A pal of mine was reading this neat site called Slashdot, so I started reading it too.
I suffered through iTerm's flakiness for years -- effectively since its creation. Updates dropped to nil after 0.87 (?), so I stopped looking for them after a few months. I just expected copy/paste to be weird and for it to randomly crash. A month or so ago, I checked the site, and wow, there was a whole new release!
;) )
It had true X-like select-to-copy and middle-to-paste, configurable tab positions, UI style support, fullscreen, autoupdating, and so on.
One of my favorite features has been the ability to specify what characters should be included as part of a word on a doubleclick -- this means doubleclick copy of IPs or paths.
The updates for this rebirth of iTerm have been on a near weekly basis. I'm not sure of the politics around this new burst of development, but it looks like maybe someone new got involved, or the original authors finished school (or quit playing WoW?
And who, exactly, are you to declare what is and what is not appropriate to be discussed on a public forum?
Way back in 1998, I got a job doing tech support for AIRnet, an ISP which serviced north Alabama. AIRnet had covered most of north Alabama, and was pushing farther and farther south -- towards areas that didn't know much about electricity, much less The Interwebs.
One of the high-growth areas was Blountsville, county seat of Blount County, Alabama. Blount being the opposite of 'sharp', I suppose.
One afternoon, the receptionist called out, "I've got a live one! It's from Blountsville! Who wants it?"
I volunteered, knowing what I was getting myself into.
"AIRnet tech support, how can I help you?"
"Yeah, I bought the internet the other day," the woman said. (Wow, deep pockets on this one.)
"OK, ma'm, what can I help you with?"
"Well, I can't get on," she said.
"Can you be more specific," I asked. "What happens when you try to connect?"
"Well I call that number that you give me, and it just squeals in my ear."
Oh boy.
"Ma'm, do you HAVE a computer?" I asked.
"Why, hell no -- that's what I pay you people twenty dollar a month for!"
"Hold please, while I transfer you to Billing."
At some point within the last few months, Google removed the "Remove this site from search results" button. I made heavy use of it, perma-banning resultspammer sites like ExpertSexchange.com and its ilk.
Sadly, this button is now gone from Personalized Search, and the resultspammer sites are steadily reducing Google's usefulness to me. Where I could once search for specific tech terms and get a good batch of reference resources, now I'm getting junk portal pages for the top five results.
Sure, I could report a link as spam, but that's a lot more time-consuming than the button, and it doesn't appear to have any immediate results for my searches.
This makes me sad. I've loved Google since I first met her, but I can't be with her if she's going to continue mainlining spam.
There's absolutely no way the Yankee group can claim to be unbiased if they allowed the Didiot within fifteen hundred meters of a report on Open Source or Linux.
No, they haven't.
"The Shuffle is a flimsy, easily damaged product"
Er, my Shuffle sat outside for two weeks. It was rained on for about a week straight, and when it wasn't getting rained on, a dog was gnawing on it.
When I finally got it back, I plugged it in and it worked fine. It still does.
"The sad part is, it takes legislative action to get media distributors to stop them activly pissing off their paying customers."
No, the sad part is that the paying customers are fucking stupid because we are still paying customers.
It's still entirely passive-aggressive laziness to whine to your congresscritters when bad ole Sony installs the DRM that ass-rapes your mother and kills your dog.
Did you get that?
No, really, please understand this point: Lawsuits don't fucking help.
Lawsuits are tax-deductible. They're an acceptable business risk. They don't get CEOs fired. CEOs only get fired when the business stops making money.
Companies like Sony will continue to rape you until you -- yeah, you, the one sitting there reading Slashdot on a Friday night on one Sony monitor while playing EQ2 on the other, you fat fuck -- YOU stop paying them.
Stop paying them.
Stop. Paying. Them.
Really. Otherwise you're just fucking asking for it. And you deserve no sympathy for when your computer suddenly crashes because of the DRM you bought and paid for, or when you get sued for piracy that you didn't commit but that the spyware that the latest Sony DVD installed had a glitch and mis-reported your personal data to them.
Stop paying Sony.
What, you wanted to have that neat new DVD but also be able to skip the 30 minutes of previews?
Fuck you, whiner.
You put the ball in Sony's hands, and they really, truly do not give a shit about you. They dictate the terms because you fucking let them.
You fucking idiot.
Every Sony DVD you buy hurts you. Every CD. Every movie. Every neato electronic widget.
So stop.
Or at least shut the fuck up about being a slave.
"You can create relationships by dragging objects about (say a picture of a dog onto an email to family members) and SpotLight remembers them in detail (the dog metadata in the image is then in a relationship with the people in the email address fields, as well as the email itself and any objects inside it)."
No, you can't.
That's a potential future of Spotlight, but not a current capability.
Why bother?
Adium stomps the snot out of all other messenger clients, and it's OSX-only.
As someone replied earlier, this is a new paradigm in app management: the top menu controls the application, and the window menu controls the window. More importantly, OSX apps are designed to be left open -- keep them open, close or hide their windows, and they'll use virtually no resources, but will start significantly faster the next time you use them.
Having to select the application window before I can quit it using the application menu. Or I have to right click on the dock icon to quit. Annoying still.
Learn your keyboard shortcuts. Take the ten minutes to learn them, and you'll regain hours of your time. Cmd-Q is the shortcut for quit, for example. If you're used to Windows machines, you can switch the cmd key with the Windows key.
Love the dock. Its just ..... right.
Check out Quicksilver, from http://quicksilver.blacktree.com . Once you get used to it [and once it gets used to you], it's phenominally faster than the Dock.
The ability to access the underlying BSD OS easily. Love it.
iTerm, from http://iterm.sourceforge.net , is a great OSX terminal app.
Here's a list of favorite OSX apps I posted a while back. Most are free/OSS, and they're all some of the best apps for any platform.
Radio is dead. Apple knows this.
Feh, we did that in 1999 at the Huntsville Space & Rocket Center IMAX theater.
Sonic Adventure was truly nausea-inducing on the big screen, but Crazy Taxi was a blast. And then, there was multiplayer Goldeneye.
Actually an important factor may be HD speed, as posted later on. My / drive is a 10KRPM Quantum SCSI drive; yours is maybe 5200RPM in that laptop.
Also, do what the other replier said, and leave the apps running-but-minimized. You can even leave Photoshop running; if it doesn't have pictures loaded or tons of stuff in its clipboard, it won't use any resources when minimized.