If they turn against us - which isn't outside the realms of possibility at the moment - they will be able to put up one hell of a battle because we've been selling them advanced weaponary for decades.
I'm sure that the contingency of American-weapons-buying friendly countries turning to enemies has been considered, if not from the beginning then since at least 1979, when the revolution in Iran occurred and replaced a pro-US government with a very anti-US one-- this after the Iranian Air Force had taken delivery of a bunch of F-14s. Those F-14s, by the way, were rendered useless via a US embargo that made obtaining spare parts very difficult, plus the planes were sabotaged so they couldn't fire missiles (it is still not known for certain who did the sabotaging).
As for a European-owned GPS network, I believe there are already weapons in the US arsenal that are capable of taking out satellites-- From what I've read, I know the Soviets definitely had them 20 years ago or more, so it's a safe bet we've got them too and they'd just need to be taken out and "dusted off" if need be.
So Microsoft should be taking their lead from a company with, what, 3% market share?
<sarcasm>Yeah, I laugh at the very notion that Microsoft would ever copy anything Apple does.</sarcasm>
If backwards compatibility is the reason why Mac users see but a tiny fraction of the OS vulnerabilities that Windows users must deal with, then you can keep your damned backwards compatibility. It's not like it saves companies much money, they spend it all on cleanup every time the Windows worm du jour blows through their systems and shits on everything.
Another interesting fact is that the US traced where exactly the balloons were being launched from by small samples of dirt that had contaminated the payloads.
They didn't have to go over the balloons to find dirt samples, it wasn't quite so "CSI" as that... the balloons had several sandbags to provide ballast, and the sand that filled those is what gave away the launch location via the mineralogical surveys.
Imagine the psychological impact of a heartland attack like that.
We don't have to imagine it... the U.S. did the same thing via the Doolittle raid, though that was more to boost the morale of the U.S. citizenry after Pearl Harbor than to strike fear into the Japanese.
If you need a new machine, there's no time like the present to buy one. As for which model, let your finances decide. Buy the best machine you can afford.
If the machine is going to have to last you a long time, you'll might want to plan ahead in terms of future storage and RAM needs-- consider getting the next fastest machine from what you can afford, and spending the difference in cost to upgrade the base RAM and hard drive that that model comes with, and not necessarily with an Apple-supplied drive or RAM.
Been waiting for this day for a long time. This morning, I ordered this rig:
Dual 2.5GHz PowerPC G5 1GB DDR400 SDRAM (PC3200) - 2x512 250GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm 8x SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW) ATI Radeon 9600 XT w/128MB DDR SDRAM 56k V.92 modem Bluetooth Module Apple Keyboard & Apple Mouse - U.S. English Mac OS X - U.S. English Accessory kit iSight Applecare for Power Mac
Estimated Total: $3,273 (I work for a reseller, so I get my toys at cost).
Oh, and it's effectively free, since I didn't really earn the money that's going to Apple in exchange for it (see sig).
Has anyone tried using a RAMdisk as their OS drive?
Many moons ago, it was possible to make a RAM disk on a Mac, install an OS on it, and (warm) boot from it. It would remain in memory and work perfectly as long as the computer wasn't shut down-- it could only be restarted. I tried it once or twice just to check it out, and the computer booted and ran like lightning compared to the normal hard drive boot.
One of the utility suites back then (Central Point Utilities?) even had a feature where the machine would boot from a RAM disk with the utils on it, to fix the occasional really serious Mac problem.
Booting from a RAM disk stopped being possible after Apple made a hardware change in newer Macs that had the side-effect of making the RAM non-persistent through warm-reboots (i.e., your RAM disk would go bye-bye). I forget exactly when it happened... perhaps after the first generation of Power Macs, when they went from using NuBus to using PCI?
Here's another interesting fact. The Macintosh Classic, released in 1990, had System 6.0.8 (IIRC) burned into its ROM-- you could boot it disklessly from the OS in ROM by holding down Command-Option-O-X at startup. Nobody really knows what that feature was intended for.
Wake me when it can drop a scale-model atomic bomb. Bonus points if the bomb it drops is functional. Double bonus points if the bomb it drops is being ridden by a scale-model Slim Pickens that emits a digitized rebel yell on the way down.:-)
Seriously though, that is really friggin' cool.
~Philly
Fixing Mac font problems made easy
on
Fix a Troubled Mac
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
First, find all files that end in.dfont on the Mac and get rid of them. I usually move them to/Shared/unused_fonts or something like that.
Some of those dfonts are crucial, like Helvetica. Google for a minute and you'll find a list of them somewhere, I'm feeling lazy right now. Put ordinary Postscript versions of the crucial fonts where the dfonts were. Some of these actions require the use of sudo in the Terminal.
After that, things will be much improved. You should also get a decent font management app. I usually recommend Suitcase. I had a couple clients try Font Reserve, and it gave them way too many problems. Plus Extensis now owns both Suitcase and Font Reserve, and based on the frequency of updates it's pretty clear that Font Reserve is getting short shrift and is probably living on borrowed time.
Anyway, once you get your font management app installed, be sure to configure it to manage your system fonts for you.
Once you do the above, you should have far fewer problems (but Quark still sucks, especially when it's version 4.x running in Classic).
FWIW, The Day After had a realistic representation of the effects of nuclear war.
Not really-- it was made just before the "nuclear winter" theory was developed, so it shows a bright if not sunny day not long after the war (when the farmer's daughter freaks out and runs outside, chased by Steve Guttenberg).
If you want to see the most realistic representation (IMHO) of the effects of nuclear war, find a copy of Threads. Threads makes The Day After look like a sitcom. I caught it when PBS broadcast it back in '85, when I was 12 or 13, and it really stuck with me. I haven't seen it again since, but some of the scenes still make me shudder a little even now when they cross my mind. For those of you reading this who have seen it, three words: melting milk bottles.
Nothing is simple with a company the size of Comcast. They'd have to create a system for people to do this, and that cuts into profits. Furthermore, it's a safe bet that the vast majority of Comcast users aren't interested in running their own mailservers, since most of them are apparently too dumb to even know their PCs have been owned and made into spam zombies. In short, it's not worth Comcast's time or money to take steps to accommodate the small fraction of their users who both have a clue and want to run their own servers.
That's what providers like Speakeasy are for. I switched to them in January of 2002, and I have never been happier with my service. If you can, switch.
How can something like this surprise anyone who lived through the 'Street Fighter' video game inspiring a 'Street Fighter' movie which then inspired a 'Street Fighter: The Movie' video game?
...it did happen to a woman right in front of me at Micro Center in Radnor, PA, several years ago. She was in front of me in line at the service desk, where I was waiting to either drop off my PowerBook for repair, or pick it up. That I don't remember.
I overheard her exchange with the guy manning the service counter. Apparently her PC kept running out of RAM and someone else had suggested the presence of a "memory leak." The service counter guy assured her that the machine's RAM was solid and not liquid, therefore there was no chance that it could leak from the computer.
I don't know how I managed to keep a straight face.
However, why are OS's designed to let such a small mistake have such a dire consequence?
If you want an OS that won't give you complete control over your own data, I think Microsoft will oblige you in a few years, and I'm sure hard drive manufacturers would also welcome an operating system that never let a user delete anything.:-)
Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows are all designed to let the user have control of their own files, up to and including the ability to delete them without confirmation. There are no dire consequences in this particular case with Mac OS X, the system is fine: it remains bootable, the other user accounts present on the system are untouched, and the affected user account is still perfectly usable, reverting to default settings for everything. Yeah, the victim's data is gone, but if you don't make backups you're just asking for trouble anyway.
This is nothing at all like a car having a self destruct button-- we're not talking about a special command that does nothing but trash the system here, we're talking about a perfectly valid command with perfectly valid uses. To adjust your analogy, this is like a car having an accelerator that you could push to the floor, and a steering wheel that you could use to guide it into the path of an 18-wheeler heading in the opposite direction.
Maybe it's time that OS makers realize that computers aren't just used by sys admins, but real people, which includes kids, morons, and the gulliable.
Microsoft did. This realization begat "Bob." 'Nuff said.
Even if 50% of Mac users were infected with it, it would barely make the news
<sarcasm> Yeah, anyone who wrote a Mac OS X virus that worked would be instantly forgotten, because nobody ever remembers anything that's remotely embarassing to Apple.
Just like those two or three incidents of the PowerBook 5300 Li-Ion batteries that caught fire, nine years ago. It's so seldom talked about, that it might be news to you that there was a problem at all. </sarcasm>
Your definition of "play nice" differs from mine. Entourage's Exchange connectivity stinks, I know, because I've tried it. It does not work as well as Outlook 2001, period-- and I'm far from the only person who feels that way. When Microsoft finally released the Exchange updater for Entourage, there was a brief burst of joy, and then people tried it and found out how hard it sucked, and outrage ensued over them making up wait a year for such a half-assed piece of crap.
When the monitor is connected to the Mac through the KVM switch, the Mac (a G5) shuts itself down immediately. I haven't yet figured out why it does this or whether there's a workaround.
You must like playing with fire. I still don't trust Panther in a large production environment, and that's been out for six months and has seen three fairly major service releases-- you want to buy a just-released 10.x.0 and roll it out in the space of a couple months?
One of my clients is about to move to OS X, and I'm moving them to a proven, well-tested-by-select-endusers build based on Jaguar (10.2.8) even though they're buying Panther licenses. One reason is because they live and die by Outlook, and Panther and Outlook 2001 in Classic are not best friends (and no, Entourage X is not a solution because the Exchange connectivity is shit and will be until they give it MAPI).
I own a mac and I'm tired of system upgrades every year.
Nobody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to upgrade your OS. My G4 running Jaguar did not magically stop functioning on October 24th when Panther was released. It's still running 10.2.8 right now, because I'm not moving to Panther until I get a rev. B G5 this summer.
I'm also tired of getting 50mb system updated in apple software update.
Again, nobody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to click the "Install" button in Software Update, if for some reason you have a beef with Apple fixing flaws in their software and/or optimizing some things. Me, I'd rather get the bugfixes and security updates.
The only point you'll get much agreement on is that Apple should have an upgrade price for people who bought the previous version retail.
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If they turn against us - which isn't outside the realms of possibility at the moment - they will be able to put up one hell of a battle because we've been selling them advanced weaponary for decades.
I'm sure that the contingency of American-weapons-buying friendly countries turning to enemies has been considered, if not from the beginning then since at least 1979, when the revolution in Iran occurred and replaced a pro-US government with a very anti-US one-- this after the Iranian Air Force had taken delivery of a bunch of F-14s. Those F-14s, by the way, were rendered useless via a US embargo that made obtaining spare parts very difficult, plus the planes were sabotaged so they couldn't fire missiles (it is still not known for certain who did the sabotaging).
As for a European-owned GPS network, I believe there are already weapons in the US arsenal that are capable of taking out satellites-- From what I've read, I know the Soviets definitely had them 20 years ago or more, so it's a safe bet we've got them too and they'd just need to be taken out and "dusted off" if need be.
~Philly
So Microsoft should be taking their lead from a company with, what, 3% market share?
<sarcasm>Yeah, I laugh at the very notion that Microsoft would ever copy anything Apple does.</sarcasm>
If backwards compatibility is the reason why Mac users see but a tiny fraction of the OS vulnerabilities that Windows users must deal with, then you can keep your damned backwards compatibility. It's not like it saves companies much money, they spend it all on cleanup every time the Windows worm du jour blows through their systems and shits on everything.
~Philly
The WinXP article is dated June 7. The link points to a Silicon.com article about a security flaw in OS X, and that article is dated May 26.
It was on June 7, the same day, that Apple released a second Security Update that fixed the remaining vulnerabilities.
~Philly
...just in time to drive it to the store to pick up your copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
Better put your deposit down at a dealership today!
~Philly
Upon further review, it seems that the Doolittle raid is actually what prompted the Japanese to begin using the balloon bombs.
Learn something new every day. Thanks, Google!
~Philly
Another interesting fact is that the US traced where exactly the balloons were being launched from by small samples of dirt that had contaminated the payloads.
They didn't have to go over the balloons to find dirt samples, it wasn't quite so "CSI" as that... the balloons had several sandbags to provide ballast, and the sand that filled those is what gave away the launch location via the mineralogical surveys.
~Philly
Imagine the psychological impact of a heartland attack like that.
We don't have to imagine it... the U.S. did the same thing via the Doolittle raid, though that was more to boost the morale of the U.S. citizenry after Pearl Harbor than to strike fear into the Japanese.
~Philly
If you need a new machine, there's no time like the present to buy one. As for which model, let your finances decide. Buy the best machine you can afford.
If the machine is going to have to last you a long time, you'll might want to plan ahead in terms of future storage and RAM needs-- consider getting the next fastest machine from what you can afford, and spending the difference in cost to upgrade the base RAM and hard drive that that model comes with, and not necessarily with an Apple-supplied drive or RAM.
~Philly
Been waiting for this day for a long time. This morning, I ordered this rig:
Dual 2.5GHz PowerPC G5
1GB DDR400 SDRAM (PC3200) - 2x512
250GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm
8x SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW)
ATI Radeon 9600 XT w/128MB DDR SDRAM
56k V.92 modem
Bluetooth Module
Apple Keyboard & Apple Mouse - U.S. English
Mac OS X - U.S. English
Accessory kit
iSight
Applecare for Power Mac
Estimated Total:
$3,273 (I work for a reseller, so I get my toys at cost).
Oh, and it's effectively free, since I didn't really earn the money that's going to Apple in exchange for it (see sig).
~Philly
Has anyone tried using a RAMdisk as their OS drive?
Many moons ago, it was possible to make a RAM disk on a Mac, install an OS on it, and (warm) boot from it. It would remain in memory and work perfectly as long as the computer wasn't shut down-- it could only be restarted. I tried it once or twice just to check it out, and the computer booted and ran like lightning compared to the normal hard drive boot.
One of the utility suites back then (Central Point Utilities?) even had a feature where the machine would boot from a RAM disk with the utils on it, to fix the occasional really serious Mac problem.
Booting from a RAM disk stopped being possible after Apple made a hardware change in newer Macs that had the side-effect of making the RAM non-persistent through warm-reboots (i.e., your RAM disk would go bye-bye). I forget exactly when it happened... perhaps after the first generation of Power Macs, when they went from using NuBus to using PCI?
Here's another interesting fact. The Macintosh Classic, released in 1990, had System 6.0.8 (IIRC) burned into its ROM-- you could boot it disklessly from the OS in ROM by holding down Command-Option-O-X at startup. Nobody really knows what that feature was intended for.
~Philly
/me waits for the inevitable "Redundant" mod.
~Philly
Wake me when it can drop a scale-model atomic bomb. Bonus points if the bomb it drops is functional. :-)
Double bonus points if the bomb it drops is being ridden by a scale-model Slim Pickens that emits a digitized rebel yell on the way down.
Seriously though, that is really friggin' cool.
~Philly
First, find all files that end in .dfont on the Mac and get rid of them. I usually move them to /Shared/unused_fonts or something like that.
Some of those dfonts are crucial, like Helvetica. Google for a minute and you'll find a list of them somewhere, I'm feeling lazy right now. Put ordinary Postscript versions of the crucial fonts where the dfonts were. Some of these actions require the use of sudo in the Terminal.
After that, things will be much improved. You should also get a decent font management app. I usually recommend Suitcase. I had a couple clients try Font Reserve, and it gave them way too many problems. Plus Extensis now owns both Suitcase and Font Reserve, and based on the frequency of updates it's pretty clear that Font Reserve is getting short shrift and is probably living on borrowed time.
Anyway, once you get your font management app installed, be sure to configure it to manage your system fonts for you.
Once you do the above, you should have far fewer problems (but Quark still sucks, especially when it's version 4.x running in Classic).
~Philly
FWIW, The Day After had a realistic representation of the effects of nuclear war.
Not really-- it was made just before the "nuclear winter" theory was developed, so it shows a bright if not sunny day not long after the war (when the farmer's daughter freaks out and runs outside, chased by Steve Guttenberg).
If you want to see the most realistic representation (IMHO) of the effects of nuclear war, find a copy of Threads. Threads makes The Day After look like a sitcom. I caught it when PBS broadcast it back in '85, when I was 12 or 13, and it really stuck with me. I haven't seen it again since, but some of the scenes still make me shudder a little even now when they cross my mind. For those of you reading this who have seen it, three words: melting milk bottles.
~Philly
Nothing is simple with a company the size of Comcast. They'd have to create a system for people to do this, and that cuts into profits. Furthermore, it's a safe bet that the vast majority of Comcast users aren't interested in running their own mailservers, since most of them are apparently too dumb to even know their PCs have been owned and made into spam zombies. In short, it's not worth Comcast's time or money to take steps to accommodate the small fraction of their users who both have a clue and want to run their own servers.
That's what providers like Speakeasy are for. I switched to them in January of 2002, and I have never been happier with my service. If you can, switch.
~Philly
You gotta be fucking kidding me.
How can something like this surprise anyone who lived through the 'Street Fighter' video game inspiring a 'Street Fighter' movie which then inspired a 'Street Fighter: The Movie' video game?
~Philly
...it did happen to a woman right in front of me at Micro Center in Radnor, PA, several years ago. She was in front of me in line at the service desk, where I was waiting to either drop off my PowerBook for repair, or pick it up. That I don't remember.
I overheard her exchange with the guy manning the service counter. Apparently her PC kept running out of RAM and someone else had suggested the presence of a "memory leak." The service counter guy assured her that the machine's RAM was solid and not liquid, therefore there was no chance that it could leak from the computer.
I don't know how I managed to keep a straight face.
~Philly
However, why are OS's designed to let such a small mistake have such a dire consequence?
:-)
If you want an OS that won't give you complete control over your own data, I think Microsoft will oblige you in a few years, and I'm sure hard drive manufacturers would also welcome an operating system that never let a user delete anything.
Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows are all designed to let the user have control of their own files, up to and including the ability to delete them without confirmation. There are no dire consequences in this particular case with Mac OS X, the system is fine: it remains bootable, the other user accounts present on the system are untouched, and the affected user account is still perfectly usable, reverting to default settings for everything. Yeah, the victim's data is gone, but if you don't make backups you're just asking for trouble anyway.
This is nothing at all like a car having a self destruct button-- we're not talking about a special command that does nothing but trash the system here, we're talking about a perfectly valid command with perfectly valid uses. To adjust your analogy, this is like a car having an accelerator that you could push to the floor, and a steering wheel that you could use to guide it into the path of an 18-wheeler heading in the opposite direction.
Maybe it's time that OS makers realize that computers aren't just used by sys admins, but real people, which includes kids, morons, and the gulliable.
Microsoft did. This realization begat "Bob." 'Nuff said.
~Philly
Due to the nature of emulation, PearPC is quite slow (the client will run about 500 times slower than the host).
So PearPC is written in Java, then?
Ba-ZING!
...the competition is now known as "Pepsi Presents the Ansari X Prize Competition"
(Why, yes, this was an obligatory Simpsons reference, thank you for noticing!)
~Philly
Even if 50% of Mac users were infected with it, it would barely make the news
<sarcasm>
Yeah, anyone who wrote a Mac OS X virus that worked would be instantly forgotten, because nobody ever remembers anything that's remotely embarassing to Apple.
Just like those two or three incidents of the PowerBook 5300 Li-Ion batteries that caught fire, nine years ago. It's so seldom talked about, that it might be news to you that there was a problem at all.
</sarcasm>
~Philly
Your definition of "play nice" differs from mine. Entourage's Exchange connectivity stinks, I know, because I've tried it. It does not work as well as Outlook 2001, period-- and I'm far from the only person who feels that way. When Microsoft finally released the Exchange updater for Entourage, there was a brief burst of joy, and then people tried it and found out how hard it sucked, and outrage ensued over them making up wait a year for such a half-assed piece of crap.
~Philly
When the monitor is connected to the Mac through the KVM switch, the Mac (a G5) shuts itself down immediately. I haven't yet figured out why it does this or whether there's a workaround.
Have you tried disabling the monitor's power button, just for shits and giggles?
~Philly
You must like playing with fire. I still don't trust Panther in a large production environment, and that's been out for six months and has seen three fairly major service releases-- you want to buy a just-released 10.x.0 and roll it out in the space of a couple months?
One of my clients is about to move to OS X, and I'm moving them to a proven, well-tested-by-select-endusers build based on Jaguar (10.2.8) even though they're buying Panther licenses. One reason is because they live and die by Outlook, and Panther and Outlook 2001 in Classic are not best friends (and no, Entourage X is not a solution because the Exchange connectivity is shit and will be until they give it MAPI).
~Philly
I own a mac and I'm tired of system upgrades every year.
Nobody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to upgrade your OS. My G4 running Jaguar did not magically stop functioning on October 24th when Panther was released. It's still running 10.2.8 right now, because I'm not moving to Panther until I get a rev. B G5 this summer.
I'm also tired of getting 50mb system updated in apple software update.
Again, nobody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to click the "Install" button in Software Update, if for some reason you have a beef with Apple fixing flaws in their software and/or optimizing some things. Me, I'd rather get the bugfixes and security updates.
The only point you'll get much agreement on is that Apple should have an upgrade price for people who bought the previous version retail.
~Philly