If prebinding breaks for a particular application (this could happen if one installs a new version of a Framework) it's really no big deal. The only "bad" thing that happens is that the binding of symbols in shared libraries has to be done at run time. This may add a bit to the launch time of an application (typically about 10-30%, or a few extra "bounces" in the Dock) but when the dynamic linker notices this happening it will actually redo the prebinding on that application so the next time you launch the application it will be nice and snappy again.:-)
Nothing will break, the application will just have a longer than normal launch time once or twice until the system redoes the prebinding.
The automatic prebinding update feature was added in Jaguar.
Apple has documentation concerning prebinding here and here/
At work I use amanda and hfstar to back up my PowerMac G5 using our amanda backup server (which also handles our Solaris and Linux boxes). It works pretty well, although it takes some work to set up.
If you've already got amanda set up for other machines, it's not too much work to add a Mac OS X box to your amanda setup.
If you only have one machine which you want to back up, then amanda is overkill.
As others have pointed out, most stores which sell electronics have recycling programs. Although I'm not sure if I'd trust a typical Radio Shack or Best Buy employee to actually send my used batteries to the recycling program rather than simply tossing them in the trash.
The last time I was at IKEA, though, I noticed several battery recycling bins, and I'd actually trust IKEA to recycle them rather than throwing them out.
Note that the video card in a PowerMac G5 is considered a customer installable part so if you asked nicely they probably would have sent you a new one.
In fact, I did this just this week. A Radeon 9600 Pro in one of our G5s failed (no video out on 9 out of 10 times the machine was booted) so I called up Apple, asked them to send me a new video card, and they did so without making me jump through any hoops. The card showed up the very next day and I replaced it myself with no trouble.
(OK, so some people actually like that series. I only saw two or three of them, and didn't like them, but perhaps I had bad luck and saw the worst of them.)
Yeah, 6502 is easier to learn, because it's so simple. Of course, students aren't going to want to write code for an Apple II or a C64, but give them a good NES emulator, documentation, and an assembler, and they'll have a lot of fun coding for the 6502. (although I must admit, the NES is a weird little machine. The PPU's oddities might cancel out the 6502's simplicity.:-)
Once you know the 6502 it's easy to learn the 65816 (SNES or Apple IIGS) or any of the other popular 70s or 80s microprocessors.
I learned SPARC assembly in college. A very elegant machine (with only a few oddities to learn, such as filling that delay slot after a branch instruction) which teaches you lots of stuff about modern computer architecture. Last semester they used 386 assembly language instead, which the students (and instructors!) found much more difficult.
The real money in a Star Trek show comes from selling old shows in syndication... which requires having a certain magic number of episodes (100, I think)
A miniseries is a one-time "promote it heavily, charge the advertisers a fortune" type of thing which will rarely be shown again. (Although these days you can add "sell it on DVD" to the list of ways to make quick cash if it does well, or "sell it on DVD to the rabid fans who can't believe no one else appreciates it " if it doesn't.:-)
Drives which do both DVD+R and DVD-R are common enough and reasonably priced now, so you might as well get one of those. Unless you want to wait for HD-DVD/BR-DVD to sort itself out.
I have a DVD-R drive at home, because at the time I bought it DVD-R looked like it would be the winner. (Plus, I like to go along with standards when possible.) At work I got a DVD-R/DVD+R drive because it didn't cost any more and that way I can burn whatever blank disc I happen to have. (Yes, I'm ignoring DVD-RAM... that didn't really go anywhere.)
Re:Eerily reminiscent of my Windows days...
on
Friday Security Fun
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Upon further experimentation, it looks like you're right. The CPU slowdown I was seeing appears to be from the Dock resizing icons (to make room for the new minimized window) rather than from the genie effect... I only see CPU usage jump when the Dock needs to scale icons to make everything fit. (Unfortunately, the Dock appears to scale and draw its icons itself, rather than keeping the 128x128 icon in a buffer and allowing the GPU to scale it.)
Re:Eerily reminiscent of my Windows days...
on
Friday Security Fun
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The compositing is done by the video card (remember, Quartz Extreme only accelerates compositing!), but much of the drawing is done by the CPU. The Dock's genie effect, in particular, is drawn by software.
Even on my G5 the CPU does quite a bit of work to draw that effect. Not enough to slow anything down, but enough to be visible in the Activity Monitor.
The scale effect ought to be done all in the video card, although I'm not sure how it was implemented. In any case, it doesn't use much CPU at all, so if CPU usage is a concern, tell the Dock to use the scale effect instead of the genie effect.
We use this system in San Bernardino County in California. It works great. The ballot for the CA governor recall election was funny.. a BIG sheet of paper (perhaps 25cm by 40cm) with names and arrows filling most of both sides..:-)
This certainly beats the horrible Los Angeles County punch card system (butterfly ballot, stylus for punching out little rectangular holes.. big "check your ballot for hanging chads" warnings..)
The installer was unhappy (wouldn't go past license agreement page) on my machine, but I'm running a Panther developer seed (not the GM, that's not on ADC yet) so perhaps I have a buggy copy of Installer.app on my machine. The command-line version of the installer worked fine, though. Just in case anyone else out there needs to use it, here's the magic invocation:
One of the things Apple did in Jaguar to speed up Mac OS X booting was to start services in parallel.
Apple uses a different startup script system (see the references below) than other UNIX flavors, but it's a really cool system. It uses dependency information rather than carefully-assigned integers to determine load order, so when they decided to add parallel service starting it was easy.. the dependency information was already there.
I'd love to see Linux or *BSD distributions adopt this system, as it's really cool to type SystemStarter start foo and have it automatically load all the dependencies for foo before starting foo itself. Plus adding services means just copying a directory into place.. no worrying about making links in/etc/rc?.d or getting the ordering right.
As others have pointed out, Apple didn't sell the same machine for 5 years. Here's a useful chart showing the different versions of the G3/CRT iMac. (I think there may have been some slight variations for the educational market, in terms of memory and drives)
Things which remained the same across revisions:
Shape and size (height and weight changed slightly, I think this was due to CRT changes)
15" CRT (actually, I think different CRTs were used, but all were 15")
USB
CPU type (various revisions of the G3 processor family)
Lack of floppy drive
10/100 Mbps Ethernet
56 kbps modem
Things which changed between releases:
Price (no, it didn't start out as a sub-$1000 machine!)
color (Bondi blue, fruit flavors [strawberry, orange, lime, blueberry, grape], indigo, ruby, graphite, blue dalmation, flower power, snow)
speed (started at 233Mhz, finished at 700Mhz)
memory (32MB... 256MB)
hard disk (4GB... 60GB)
mouse (they eventually dropped that evil hockey puck but it took them too long to do that...)
keyboard (changed when the mouse changed, I think)
video card (Various flavors of ATI Rage cards, from Rage IIc to RAGE Ultra 128)
IR port.. quietly dropped in Revision C (when the fruit flavors were added)
internal expansion.. the never-supported "Mezannine" slot was dropped in Revision c)
Firewire.. introduced to some machines in 1999, but wasn't included with all machines until 2001
Airport (802.11b).. slowly added to product line, same as Firewire
Fan.. Rev. A and Rev. B had fans, the fanless iMac began with Rev. C
optical drive.. CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CD-RW of varoius speeds (I don't think the Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) or SuperDrive (DVD-RW/CD-RW) were ever available)
A number of very different machines, but all basically looked the same (ignoring color) and were sold under the same name.
There are actually more ways to make napalm than you can count, but they all involve, you guessed it, gasoline and a thickening agent. Styrofoam, soap, and supposedly even orange juice concentrate (though that was from the Anarchist's cookbook so I dunno if it's true) will all work.
I love the taste of napalm in the morning... part of a balanced breakfast!
This delay is exactly the sort of little things that make the Mac experience so much smoother -- provided of course it's adhered to consistently, which it always has been. This thing is thought out.
I have to disagree. Apple got it right the first time, back in System 7.x (I don't remember when it was that they first added this feature, but it was a long time ago). The "Mac experience" never included any "wait before dragging" until Cocoa.
I nearly always get my selection right. If not, I shift-click to extend or contract it. Or in an extreme case I click once to deselect the text, and then make my selection again. When using Cocoa apps, I always have trouble because when I try to drag my text, my selection disappears and I have to do it again. Even when I remember to wait, I still end up losing my selection half the time because I either don't wait long enough (there's no indicator of when enough time has passed!) or because my PowerBook's trackpad has decided that I moved my finger even when I don't think I did. (It's not as bad when using a real mouse.)
Do you have to wait for some stupid delay when dragging icons? Or images in the web browser? Or links in the web browser? No. So why have a delay when dragging text? It's inconsistent and annoying. I much prefer the Carbon behavior.
I love Cocoa... I write all of my Mac OS X software in Cocoa. But this is one of the things which it does wrong. (It also has issues with text selection, but I can deal with those. It's the drag & drop implementation which bugs me.)
drag & drop and improved <OBJECT> suppor
on
Safari Beta Updated
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You can now drag & drop text from browser windows. (It previously only allowed dragging links and images.) Unfortunately it uses the silly Cocoa-style delay before allowing you to drag text. (When will Apple finally fix text dragging in Cocoa?!)
It also now supports embedding HTML with the <OBJECT> tag, although it will stop drawing the embedded content if you use the Back/Forward buttons. Also, if you click in the <OBJECT> and scroll it with the keyboard, then clicking on links outside of the <OBJECT> sometimes doesn't work unless you first click outside of the <OBJECT> area and scroll the main page with they keyboard. (weird, but it happens.. check out the W3 CSS1 test suite pages)
Another nice change is that stylesheet change on Dave Hyatt's weblog [mozillazine.org] actually works now.
But there's still no GUI for choosing a stylesheet, though (which is why Dave Hyatt has to have JavaScript for it). A user-accessible method for choosing which stylesheet to display isrequired by the CSS 2 spec. (section 3.2, point 5)
It's hard to choose a "best" episode, so I won't try. But if asked to name the episode which made me laugh the hardest, it would be episode 3G03, titled "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala-D'oh-cious":)
This is the Shary Bobbins episode, which is a great parody of the Disney version of "Mary Poppins." Those who haven't seen the Disney movie probably won't appreciate just how funny this episode is. (Based on the comments at the snpp.com episode guide I'd say that a number of people didn't get it for that reason.) This episode certainly has some weak moments (which probably keep it off a lot of "best episodes" lists) but it also has some of the funniest moments.. it's probably my favorite episode for the 1997 season, and it's probably better than some entire seasons.
Shary: Hello, I'm Shary Bobbins.
Homer: Did you say Mary Po...
Shary: No, I definitely did not. I'm an original creation, like Rickey Rouse, or Monald Muck.
And then of course there was the song "Cut Every Corner" which almost killed me. o/~ It's the American Way
currently there is no standard for the medium the transmits your IP packets so it is unlikely for two IP stacks to work over IEEE 1394.
Huh? What about RFC 2734? It's a standards-track protocol for sending IPv4 over IEEE 1394. Apple has a beta implementation for Mac OS X and I believe Microsoft has an implementation for Windows XP.
Also see RFC 3146 (IPv6 over IEEE 1394) and RFC 2855 (DHCP for IEEE 1394).
Slashdot Mirror
If prebinding breaks for a particular application (this could happen if one installs a new version of a Framework) it's really no big deal. The only "bad" thing that happens is that the binding of symbols in shared libraries has to be done at run time. This may add a bit to the launch time of an application (typically about 10-30%, or a few extra "bounces" in the Dock) but when the dynamic linker notices this happening it will actually redo the prebinding on that application so the next time you launch the application it will be nice and snappy again. :-)
Nothing will break, the application will just have a longer than normal launch time once or twice until the system redoes the prebinding.
The automatic prebinding update feature was added in Jaguar.
Apple has documentation concerning prebinding here and here/
Also, see the man pages for update_prebinding, redo_prebinding, and fix_prebinding
Did you splurge and get the Radeon 9800 Pro video card? If so, that's the problem ... the thing comes with a rather noisy fan.
If you need a quiet G5, buy one with a Radeon 9600 Pro.
The case fans and CPU fans are pretty quiet unless the machine heats up too much (or you remove the plastic panel).
At work I use amanda and hfstar to back up my PowerMac G5 using our amanda backup server (which also handles our Solaris and Linux boxes). It works pretty well, although it takes some work to set up.
If you've already got amanda set up for other machines, it's not too much work to add a Mac OS X box to your amanda setup.
If you only have one machine which you want to back up, then amanda is overkill.
As others have pointed out, most stores which sell electronics have recycling programs. Although I'm not sure if I'd trust a typical Radio Shack or Best Buy employee to actually send my used batteries to the recycling program rather than simply tossing them in the trash.
The last time I was at IKEA, though, I noticed several battery recycling bins, and I'd actually trust IKEA to recycle them rather than throwing them out.
Note that the video card in a PowerMac G5 is considered a customer installable part so if you asked nicely they probably would have sent you a new one.
In fact, I did this just this week. A Radeon 9600 Pro in one of our G5s failed (no video out on 9 out of 10 times the machine was booted) so I called up Apple, asked them to send me a new video card, and they did so without making me jump through any hoops. The card showed up the very next day and I replaced it myself with no trouble.
Well, Star Trek seemed to recover just fine following Star Trek: The Animated Adventures :-)
(OK, so some people actually like that series. I only saw two or three of them, and didn't like them, but perhaps I had bad luck and saw the worst of them.)
Yeah, 6502 is easier to learn, because it's so simple. Of course, students aren't going to want to write code for an Apple II or a C64, but give them a good NES emulator, documentation, and an assembler, and they'll have a lot of fun coding for the 6502. (although I must admit, the NES is a weird little machine. The PPU's oddities might cancel out the 6502's simplicity. :-)
Once you know the 6502 it's easy to learn the 65816 (SNES or Apple IIGS) or any of the other popular 70s or 80s microprocessors.
I learned SPARC assembly in college. A very elegant machine (with only a few oddities to learn, such as filling that delay slot after a branch instruction) which teaches you lots of stuff about modern computer architecture. Last semester they used 386 assembly language instead, which the students (and instructors!) found much more difficult.
The real money in a Star Trek show comes from selling old shows in syndication ... which requires having a certain magic number of episodes (100, I think)
:-)
A miniseries is a one-time "promote it heavily, charge the advertisers a fortune" type of thing which will rarely be shown again. (Although these days you can add "sell it on DVD" to the list of ways to make quick cash if it does well, or "sell it on DVD to the rabid fans who can't believe no one else appreciates it " if it doesn't.
Drives which do both DVD+R and DVD-R are common enough and reasonably priced now, so you might as well get one of those. Unless you want to wait for HD-DVD/BR-DVD to sort itself out.
... that didn't really go anywhere.)
I have a DVD-R drive at home, because at the time I bought it DVD-R looked like it would be the winner. (Plus, I like to go along with standards when possible.) At work I got a DVD-R/DVD+R drive because it didn't cost any more and that way I can burn whatever blank disc I happen to have. (Yes, I'm ignoring DVD-RAM
Upon further experimentation, it looks like you're right. The CPU slowdown I was seeing appears to be from the Dock resizing icons (to make room for the new minimized window) rather than from the genie effect ... I only see CPU usage jump when the Dock needs to scale icons to make everything fit. (Unfortunately, the Dock appears to scale and draw its icons itself, rather than keeping the 128x128 icon in a buffer and allowing the GPU to scale it.)
The compositing is done by the video card (remember, Quartz Extreme only accelerates compositing!), but much of the drawing is done by the CPU. The Dock's genie effect, in particular, is drawn by software.
Even on my G5 the CPU does quite a bit of work to draw that effect. Not enough to slow anything down, but enough to be visible in the Activity Monitor.
The scale effect ought to be done all in the video card, although I'm not sure how it was implemented. In any case, it doesn't use much CPU at all, so if CPU usage is a concern, tell the Dock to use the scale effect instead of the genie effect.
Safari 1.1 (and 1.1.1) uses some new features of Panther which aren't in Jaguar. Hence it is not compatible with Jaguar, and wouldn't work.
We use this system in San Bernardino County in California. It works great. The ballot for the CA governor recall election was funny.. a BIG sheet of paper (perhaps 25cm by 40cm) with names and arrows filling most of both sides.. :-)
This certainly beats the horrible Los Angeles County punch card system (butterfly ballot, stylus for punching out little rectangular holes.. big "check your ballot for hanging chads" warnings..)
I guess it's just 7B74 (or maybe just my installation) which didn't like it.. I'm glad to know it works for other people. :)
The installer was unhappy (wouldn't go past license agreement page) on my machine, but I'm running a Panther developer seed (not the GM, that's not on ADC yet) so perhaps I have a buggy copy of Installer.app on my machine. The command-line version of the installer worked fine, though. Just in case anyone else out there needs to use it, here's the magic invocation:
installer -pkg /path/to/itunes4.mpkg -target /
You can find it in SystemStarter directory of the CVS repository. (The above link is to the CVSWeb page .. you can also get direct CVS access)
Note that most of Apple's code relies on their CoreFoundation libraries, so you may have to snag those as well.
One of the things Apple did in Jaguar to speed up Mac OS X booting was to start services in parallel.
Apple uses a different startup script system (see the references below) than other UNIX flavors, but it's a really cool system. It uses dependency information rather than carefully-assigned integers to determine load order, so when they decided to add parallel service starting it was easy .. the dependency information was already there.
I'd love to see Linux or *BSD distributions adopt this system, as it's really cool to type SystemStarter start foo and have it automatically load all the dependencies for foo before starting foo itself. Plus adding services means just copying a directory into place .. no worrying about making links in /etc/rc?.d or getting the ordering right.
Relevant documentation:
As others have pointed out, Apple didn't sell the same machine for 5 years. Here's a useful chart showing the different versions of the G3/CRT iMac. (I think there may have been some slight variations for the educational market, in terms of memory and drives)
Things which remained the same across revisions:
- Shape and size (height and weight changed slightly, I think this was due to CRT changes)
- 15" CRT (actually, I think different CRTs were used, but all were 15")
- USB
- CPU type (various revisions of the G3 processor family)
- Lack of floppy drive
- 10/100 Mbps Ethernet
- 56 kbps modem
Things which changed between releases:- Price (no, it didn't start out as a sub-$1000 machine!)
- color (Bondi blue, fruit flavors [strawberry, orange, lime, blueberry, grape], indigo, ruby, graphite, blue dalmation, flower power, snow)
- speed (started at 233Mhz, finished at 700Mhz)
- memory (32MB
... 256MB)
- hard disk (4GB
... 60GB)
- mouse (they eventually dropped that evil hockey puck but it took them too long to do that...)
- keyboard (changed when the mouse changed, I think)
- video card (Various flavors of ATI Rage cards, from Rage IIc to RAGE Ultra 128)
- IR port
.. quietly dropped in Revision C (when the fruit flavors were added)
- internal expansion
.. the never-supported "Mezannine" slot was dropped in Revision c)
- Firewire
.. introduced to some machines in 1999, but wasn't included with all machines until 2001
- Airport (802.11b)
.. slowly added to product line, same as Firewire
- Fan
.. Rev. A and Rev. B had fans, the fanless iMac began with Rev. C
- optical drive
.. CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CD-RW of varoius speeds (I don't think the Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) or SuperDrive (DVD-RW/CD-RW) were ever available)
A number of very different machines, but all basically looked the same (ignoring color) and were sold under the same name.I love the taste of napalm in the morning... part of a balanced breakfast!
I have to disagree. Apple got it right the first time, back in System 7.x (I don't remember when it was that they first added this feature, but it was a long time ago). The "Mac experience" never included any "wait before dragging" until Cocoa.
I nearly always get my selection right. If not, I shift-click to extend or contract it. Or in an extreme case I click once to deselect the text, and then make my selection again. When using Cocoa apps, I always have trouble because when I try to drag my text, my selection disappears and I have to do it again. Even when I remember to wait, I still end up losing my selection half the time because I either don't wait long enough (there's no indicator of when enough time has passed!) or because my PowerBook's trackpad has decided that I moved my finger even when I don't think I did. (It's not as bad when using a real mouse.)
Do you have to wait for some stupid delay when dragging icons? Or images in the web browser? Or links in the web browser? No. So why have a delay when dragging text? It's inconsistent and annoying. I much prefer the Carbon behavior.
I love Cocoa ... I write all of my Mac OS X software in Cocoa. But this is one of the things which it does wrong. (It also has issues with text selection, but I can deal with those. It's the drag & drop implementation which bugs me.)
You can now drag & drop text from browser windows. (It previously only allowed dragging links and images.) Unfortunately it uses the silly Cocoa-style delay before allowing you to drag text. (When will Apple finally fix text dragging in Cocoa?!)
It also now supports embedding HTML with the <OBJECT> tag, although it will stop drawing the embedded content if you use the Back/Forward buttons. Also, if you click in the <OBJECT> and scroll it with the keyboard, then clicking on links outside of the <OBJECT> sometimes doesn't work unless you first click outside of the <OBJECT> area and scroll the main page with they keyboard. (weird, but it happens .. check out the W3 CSS1 test suite pages)
But there's still no GUI for choosing a stylesheet, though (which is why Dave Hyatt has to have JavaScript for it). A user-accessible method for choosing which stylesheet to display isrequired by the CSS 2 spec. (section 3.2, point 5)
Give me a View->Use Style menu like Mozilla!!
It's hard to choose a "best" episode, so I won't try. But if asked to name the episode which made me laugh the hardest, it would be episode 3G03, titled "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala-D'oh-cious" :)
This is the Shary Bobbins episode, which is a great parody of the Disney version of "Mary Poppins." Those who haven't seen the Disney movie probably won't appreciate just how funny this episode is. (Based on the comments at the snpp.com episode guide I'd say that a number of people didn't get it for that reason.) This episode certainly has some weak moments (which probably keep it off a lot of "best episodes" lists) but it also has some of the funniest moments.. it's probably my favorite episode for the 1997 season, and it's probably better than some entire seasons.
And then of course there was the song "Cut Every Corner" which almost killed me. o/~ It's the American Way
Huh? What about RFC 2734? It's a standards-track protocol for sending IPv4 over IEEE 1394. Apple has a beta implementation for Mac OS X and I believe Microsoft has an implementation for Windows XP.
Also see RFC 3146 (IPv6 over IEEE 1394) and RFC 2855 (DHCP for IEEE 1394).