One of the cool features added to Software Update a few versions back is the ability to have it save downloaded packages to your desktop (as opposed to its default behavior of putting them in/tmp/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate and deleting them when it finishes)
Just select the update(s) you want, then choose the "Download selected updates" menu item instead of clicking "Install".. it will download the update as an Installer package which you can then copy to other machines.
Note that if you do this, your Software Update log file won't be updated with the time and date of installation because Installer.app will actually be installing the update.
So there's no need to wait for Apple to post a link to the file on their website anymore! (Unless you forget and accidently click "install".. there's no way to go back and download updates you already have.)
aha.. macfixit.com has the solution. It turns out that for some reason/var/db/SystemConfiguration/preferences.xml is renamed to preferences.xml-old.. so just move it back:
The whole point of Rendevouz (a combination of automatic link-local address assignment, multicast DNS, and service discovery) is to provide all the ease of use of AppleTalk on an IP network.
When you connect two machines together with FireWire and have IP over FireWire enabled, they will assign themselves link-local IP addresses, exchange name information via multicast DNS, and advertise their services (such as file or printer sharing) to each other.
The machines will automatically appear in the Finder's "Connect to Server" window, the same way they would if they were running AppleTalk. Shared printers will automatically appear in the Print Center and in print dialogs.
hmm. I installed it on my powerbook, but it had the annoying side effect of deleting all my network settings. (all of my "locations" are gone in the Network preference pane, had to set them up again)
I've filed a bug report with Apple. Hopefully it was just some oddity with my machine.
AFP (Apple Filing Protocol, what the marketing people call "AppleShare") works great over TCP.
Given Jaguar's support for Rendevous and AFP over TCP, what does AppleTalk get you? AppleTalk's only place in today's world is for compatibility with legacy machines, but that doesn't apply here, as Apple only supplies this software for Jaguar.
Re:I don't find it at all slow
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I also don't like that Mac has Java 1.3, and from what I can tell, you are fixed at that until they decided that they will upgrade it in their own release, regardless of the fact that there is 1.4x out for sometime now, which actually has a lot of things that some of us need and use.
I don't think anyone would complain if Sun or someone else would release an implementation of Java for Mac OS. No one is stopping them. Just because Apple supplies a JVM doesn't mean that no one else could. If you want someone else (such as Sun) to release a JVM for Mac OS, then go bug them about it.
Apple currently has a Java 1.4.x release in testing. Registered developers can download it free from Apple's web site. Just go to the developer login page and sign up for a free membership. Why did it take so long for them to get 1.4.x ready? Well, from what I understand they decided to rewrite the Swing implementation from scratch (in Cocoa rather than Carbon) which understandably took some time.
Re:I'd like to have another look, but..
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
(Let alone pricing outside the US, which is just horrible)
Don't forget that US prices do not include taxes, but European prices do include them. Computers are taxed as luxury items in most European countries, and as such can be taxed at rates up to 20% (or possibly as much as 25% in a few unlucky countries). Find out what your country's tax rate on computers is, apply that to the US prices, and then compare to the European prices. It will probably be a lot closer.
(Note that American prices are shown without taxes because taxes vary from state to state and in many states they even depend on what county or city you are in! Also, one typically does not pay sales taxes on items purchased via the web from companies located in other states, so we can escape taxes entirely by being careful about where we buy things.)
Re:Photorealistic/3D desktops
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Haven't Linux and Windows used acclerated hardware video drivers for drawing their GUI for many years? I'm talking about Windows 95 era, possibly even WFWG 3.11. I'm sorry if it only takes a $30 "hotshot" graphics card to accelerate the rendering of a perfectly usable 2-D GUI in X or Win32, but them's the breaks.
yes, they use 2D hardware acceleration for drawing. So did Mac OS 9 (and 8, and 7).. Quartz Extreme is something completely different. It doesn't accelerate drawing, it accelerates compositing
Quartz has two parts:
Quartz 2D: This does the drawing of 2D primitives (lines, rectangles, bezier curves, etc.) in windows... it might be accelerated, it might not be. I'm not sure. Given that Aqua uses mostly Bezier curves and bitmaps, plus the fact that it supports transparency and floating point coordinates, I don't think most 2D hardware would do much to accelerate drawing. (standard 2D hardware doesn't usually do bezier curves, floating point coordinates, or transparency)
Quartz Compositor: This is the part of Quartz which composits all your windows together for display on the screen. Remember that windows are transparent in Quartz, so a particular pixel on the screen may need to be calculated from the cumulative effects of drawing multiple semi-transparent windows, drop shadows, etc. This is slow in software, but this is exactly the sort of thing that 3D hardware does really well. So on a graphics card supported by Quartz Extreme (recent ATI or nVidia cards with 2x or better AGP) this is all done in hardware. Quartz 2D draws into windows the same as it always did, but instead of having Quartz Compositor composite the windows in software, Quartz Extreme just passes the window contents as textures and passes the window coordinates as the vertices of rectangles, and lets the hardware render your desktop as a bunch of texture-mapped polygons:)
no, that doesn't allow you to do what I want. That allows you to turn stylesheets on and off, and it allows you to set the user stylesheet.
If a page provides multiple stylesheets (for example, wired.com's new design has different stylesheets which specify different font sizes) IE will use the default stylesheet and not give you any method of choosing another one.
Mozilla, on the other hand, will list each of the stylesheets in the View->Use Style menu. (try it right now.. go to Wired.com in Mozilla and look at the View->Use Style menu. You can choose between four different stylesheets for that page.)
To do the same thing in IE, you need to go to favelets.com and grab the "choose stylesheet" javascript.
Another cool site which shows off the ability to have multiple stylesheets on the page is this page.. it's much more interesting than Wired's font size changes.:)
MSIE 5.x for Mac OS (classic and OS X) is well known for being the first browser with good CSS support. Mozilla is quite good now too (better in some ways) but has its own set of CSS bugs. I expect that Mozilla will have its CSS bugs fied before IE's CSS bugs are fixed...
one of the most annoying things about IE5.x on Mac OS is that it doesn't provide any method of choosing a stylesheet. (Mozilla has a very handy View->Use Style menu for choosing which stylesheet to use when a page has multiple stylesheets.) There's a useful little javascript which you can put in your bookmarks toolbar to get around this, but it's annoying that there's no built-in GUI for it. (When testing changes to my CSS style sheets, I like to have the page link to both the old and new versions so I can swap back and forth.)
There are two separate issues here: which GUI toolkit to use, and whch language to use. First, choose the GUI toolkit, and then choose one of the programming languages which can be used with that toolkit.
Choose a GUI toolkit
Carbon - a cleaned-up version of the original Macintosh Toolbox. It's big and complicated (as should be expected for something which has been evolving over 18 years) and may be somewhat annoying if you don't have previous Mac Toolbox experience.
Cocoa - the OpenStep API with a few new features. Clean and simple object-oriented interface designed around the Objective C language. Good for rapid development of GUIs.
Swing - Apple provides a Mac OS X implementation of Swing. With a little work, you can make a Swing program look almost native. (But not quite.. a few things end up looking or behaving slightly wrong.) A good choice if you want cross-platform Java code.
QT - The Mac OS X version is based on Carbon, so it should look like any native program. A good choice for cross-platform portability.
Tk - as in Tcl/Tk.. there's a Carbon port of Tk, but I've had some problems with it.
other cross-platform toolkits - There are a few others (wxWindows, for exmaple) but I don't know much about them. As far as I know, they're all built on top of Carbon.
Mac-specific libraries built on top of Carbon - things like PowerPlant (a C++ library from Metrowerks) make dealing with Carbon a bit easier.
Choose a language
Most of the toolkits support multiple languages.
Carbon: It's intended to be used from C (although you'll still find a few remnants of its Pascal roots) so it's not object oriented. You can use it from C, C++ (directly or via object-oriented layers like PowerPlant), RealBASIC, and probably a few others.
Cocoa: It was designed around the Objective C language, but Apple also provides Java bindings. Java isn't a particularly good fit for Cocoa (better than C++ would be, though) so I don't recommend it. There is a Perl binding called CamelBones which works rather well (Perl and Cocoa go together very well in my opinion). I think Python and Ruby bindings may be available as well.
For new development, I'd strongly recommend using Cocoa with Objective C. Don't be afraid of Objective C! It's a very simple extension to plain old ANSI C. The additional syntax is minimal (unlike C++) and most of the code you write will be plain old C. Once you've learned Cocoa using Objective C, you may want to use it in Perl via CamelBones. But I'd strongly recommend using Objective C to learn Cocoa, otherwise you won't understand a lot of the reasons why things work the way they do. Don't use Cocoa with Java, unless you don't know C. And even then I'd recommand learning C so you can use Cocoa with ObjC.
If you want a plain old non-OO API, Carbon isn't all that bad. You'll need to get a good reference, as there are a lot of functions and types to learn about. (Whereas Cocoa is predictable enough that you can usually guess method names!) Or you can use one of the C++-based wrappers such as QT or PowerPlant.
Ugh. IRIX. I used to have to deal with IRIX machines. I was very, very, very happy when we junked those and replaced them with Suns.
The SGI hardware was nice, but very expensive. (weird nonstandard memory which cost 10 times what it should, etc.) Whereas the Suns took standard parts which we could buy anywhere (DIMMs, PCI cards, etc.)
But the hardware and associated costs were a very small factory in why we (Harvey Mudd College computer science department) moved away from them... the reason was the fact that IRIX just plain sucked.
IRIX has the worst security of any UNIX-like OS I've ever used. Unpacking an SGI meant spending hours fixing holes before letting it come anywhere near a network.. (deleting default [passwordless] users, turning off insecure network software, etc.) And even then they weren't secure at all due to fundamental flaws (mostly design decisions to make the machines "user friendly")
They were also annoying for an admin because IRIX is just plain _weird_ if you're used to other versions of UNIX (I dealt with Solaris, Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD at Mudd)... The admin tools and config files are in strange places, use non-standard options, etc.
yes, the had good OpenGL support (duh). But so does everybody these days. Today it's more imporotant to have good security and easy administration.
Plus it's still as ugly as it ever was. Give me Gnome or Mac OS X any day. (Heck, even Windows XP looks better, and that's saying something!)
The scrollbars has to be moved from left to right otherwise existing Mac users (and Windows users, too) would have complained excessively and would probably have refused to use Mac OS X at all. Yes, having scrollbars on the left makes a lot more sense. But getting people to switch would be.. difficult.
Making it a user preference would be great, but it wouldn't be practical.
Yes, an NSScrollView could easily be modified to put scrollbars on the left or right depending on user prefs, but not every scrollbar is part of an NSScrollView. Applications which position their own scrollbars would have to check the user preference, and I'm sure many application writers wouldn't bother. (especially for old Carbon code being ported over to OS X)
If Apple had done this, we would have ended up with a few programs which respect user prefs, a bunch of Carbon programs with scrollbars hardcoded on the right, and a few Cocoa programs from long-time NeXT users with the scrollbars hardcoded on the left.. probably from people trying to convince people to convert. It would be a big ugly mess.
Get a copy of LPD running on your Windows box. (Or if Windows comes with an LPR server, start it up.) If Microsoft hasn't included it, then someone out there must have an LPD implementation for Windows.
All versions of Mac OS X (and the last couple of versions of Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9) speak LPR.
Mac OS X 10.2 does IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) too, now that it uses CUPS for printing.
Windows (like Mac OS 9) uses your graphics card's 2D hardware to do its drawing. It doesn't use it to do compositing (of images with alpha channels) because 2D chipsets (at least all the ones I've ever seen) don't handle transparency.
Your 3D hardware, on the other hand, does do transparency, so Quartz Extreme uses it to do all the work of compositing. (which is a lot of work, if there are five or six transparent windows with transparent shadows overlapping.. but to your 3D hardware, that's just a couple of polygons.. no problem for it.)
Yeah, they used to make $500, $1000, $5000, and even a few $10000 notes. And the six or so ridiculous $100000 notes.
Today we have these things called credit cards. Why would you ever need a $500 bill when you can use your credit card? Or a debit card or a personal check? The main uses for such a thing would be the illegal ones.
Anyway, go to the Post Office and get a $500 money order if you really want an anonymous way to carry $500 on a single piece of paper. (see www.usps.com for more info on money orders.)
they didn't recall the gold coins. they just made it illegal to own gold (other than certain exceptions, such as family heirlooms and such)
after that law was repealed, it was perfectly legal to start spending gold eagles and such. Of course, by that time, not many were left so it would be stupid to spend them, as they were worth much more than $20.:)
American currency goes through the wash just fine.
The paper is made from 1/4 linen and 3/4 cotton, not wood pulp.
On the other hand, I've heard that it doesn't fare well in microwave ovens. (so if you have some wet dollar bills, don't try to dry them off in the microwave.)
it used to be that dimes were made of silver, nickels were made of nickel (go figure), and pennies were made of copper.
silver cost much more than nickel or copper, so the dime had to be smaller.
today, of course, they're mostly zinc. (well, the dime is actually zinc-clad copper.)
I read somewhere that even Canada isn't making its nickels out of nickel anymore. that sucks. Canadian nickels used to have so much nickel in them that they were magnetic. (if you dropped one in sand, it would be covered in bits of iron when you fished it out.)
I once knew someone who had fun carrying around uncut sheets of $2 bills (you can buy them from the mint at www.usmint.gov, but they're expensive).. he'd go into a store, buy a pack of gum or something, and when it was time to pay for it he would take out his scissors and start cutting bill from the sheet.. watching to see how a cashier would react was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It was great to go from store to store doing that to see all the different reactions you'd get.
The uncut sheet thing would work with other denominations, but it's best with $2 bills because half the time the cashier has never seen one and won't believe it's real money (especially after watching you cut it out)
if the cashier refuses to accept your $2 bills, pull out a rolll of half dollars.;-)
Actually, it wasn't the states which were making their own currency, it was banks.
Can you imagine having Citibank currency, BofA currency, WaMu currency, Wells Fargo currency, etc.? Of course, each probably wouldn't accept any other bank's currency, so you'd probably have to convert everything into coins (hey, a use for dollar coins) as those have always been made by the Federal government.
Camelbones works pretty well, but the documentation is nearly non-existant, unfortunately. But if you've used AppKit and Foundation from Objective-C (or Java, I suppose) then it shouldn't be too hard to figure out from the examples.
I made a few simple test programs and didn't have any trouble, but I have a feeling that some of the more esoteric bits of Cocoa might not work too well.
The PerlObjective-C bridge is pretty good. Perl is pretty well suited for interacting with Objective-C (better than Java, certainly) due to its dynamic nature.
Hmmm, I was just about to get a 160GB drive. Suppose I'll have to opt for a samller drive - I've got a 10GB and a 30GB drive at the moment and as far as I'm aware I will have to remove one of them to install another IDE hard drive - or else get a SCSI card. Is this right or am I going to be able to install another IDE drive in some other way?
You could just get an ATA card. There are ATA-133 cards out there, which should allow you to use a 160 GB drive. Go to the Macintosh Product Guide and search for "ATA PCI card" or something.
I ordered a new Powerbook in Dec., which took the same route. Seems some of Apple's products are assembled in Taiwan, then routed via FedEx to Anchorage (customs), then the main FedEx hub in Memphis (ala 'Cast Away'), then to destination.
FedEx has multiple hubs. My iMac didn't go through Memphis because I live in southern California.. it went straight from Alaska to California.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the cool features added to Software Update a few versions back is the ability to have it save downloaded packages to your desktop (as opposed to its default behavior of putting them in /tmp/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate and deleting them when it finishes)
.. it will download the update as an Installer package which you can then copy to other machines.
.. there's no way to go back and download updates you already have.)
Just select the update(s) you want, then choose the "Download selected updates" menu item instead of clicking "Install"
Note that if you do this, your Software Update log file won't be updated with the time and date of installation because Installer.app will actually be installing the update.
So there's no need to wait for Apple to post a link to the file on their website anymore! (Unless you forget and accidently click "install"
aha.. macfixit.com has the solution. It turns out that for some reason /var/db/SystemConfiguration/preferences.xml is renamed to preferences.xml-old .. so just move it back:
/var/db/SystemConfiguration/
cd
mv preferences.xml-old preferences.xml
The whole point of Rendevouz (a combination of automatic link-local address assignment, multicast DNS, and service discovery) is to provide all the ease of use of AppleTalk on an IP network.
When you connect two machines together with FireWire and have IP over FireWire enabled, they will assign themselves link-local IP addresses, exchange name information via multicast DNS, and advertise their services (such as file or printer sharing) to each other.
The machines will automatically appear in the Finder's "Connect to Server" window, the same way they would if they were running AppleTalk. Shared printers will automatically appear in the Print Center and in print dialogs.
AppleTalk is not any easier than that!
hmm. I installed it on my powerbook, but it had the annoying side effect of deleting all my network settings. (all of my "locations" are gone in the Network preference pane, had to set them up again)
I've filed a bug report with Apple. Hopefully it was just some oddity with my machine.
Why would you want and/or need AppleTalk?
AFP (Apple Filing Protocol, what the marketing people call "AppleShare") works great over TCP.
Given Jaguar's support for Rendevous and AFP over TCP, what does AppleTalk get you? AppleTalk's only place in today's world is for compatibility with legacy machines, but that doesn't apply here, as Apple only supplies this software for Jaguar.
I also don't like that Mac has Java 1.3, and from what I can tell, you are fixed at that until they decided that they will upgrade it in their own release, regardless of the fact that there is 1.4x out for sometime now, which actually has a lot of things that some of us need and use.
I don't think anyone would complain if Sun or someone else would release an implementation of Java for Mac OS. No one is stopping them. Just because Apple supplies a JVM doesn't mean that no one else could. If you want someone else (such as Sun) to release a JVM for Mac OS, then go bug them about it.
Apple currently has a Java 1.4.x release in testing. Registered developers can download it free from Apple's web site. Just go to the developer login page and sign up for a free membership. Why did it take so long for them to get 1.4.x ready? Well, from what I understand they decided to rewrite the Swing implementation from scratch (in Cocoa rather than Carbon) which understandably took some time.
(Let alone pricing outside the US, which is just horrible)
Don't forget that US prices do not include taxes, but European prices do include them. Computers are taxed as luxury items in most European countries, and as such can be taxed at rates up to 20% (or possibly as much as 25% in a few unlucky countries). Find out what your country's tax rate on computers is, apply that to the US prices, and then compare to the European prices. It will probably be a lot closer.
(Note that American prices are shown without taxes because taxes vary from state to state and in many states they even depend on what county or city you are in! Also, one typically does not pay sales taxes on items purchased via the web from companies located in other states, so we can escape taxes entirely by being careful about where we buy things.)
yes, they use 2D hardware acceleration for drawing. So did Mac OS 9 (and 8, and 7) .. Quartz Extreme is something completely different. It doesn't accelerate drawing, it accelerates compositing
Quartz has two parts:
no, that doesn't allow you to do what I want. That allows you to turn stylesheets on and off, and it allows you to set the user stylesheet.
If a page provides multiple stylesheets (for example, wired.com's new design has different stylesheets which specify different font sizes) IE will use the default stylesheet and not give you any method of choosing another one.
Mozilla, on the other hand, will list each of the stylesheets in the View->Use Style menu. (try it right now.. go to Wired.com in Mozilla and look at the View->Use Style menu. You can choose between four different stylesheets for that page.)
To do the same thing in IE, you need to go to favelets.com and grab the "choose stylesheet" javascript.
Another cool site which shows off the ability to have multiple stylesheets on the page is this page .. it's much more interesting than Wired's font size changes. :)
MSIE 5.x for Mac OS (classic and OS X) is well known for being the first browser with good CSS support. Mozilla is quite good now too (better in some ways) but has its own set of CSS bugs. I expect that Mozilla will have its CSS bugs fied before IE's CSS bugs are fixed...
one of the most annoying things about IE5.x on Mac OS is that it doesn't provide any method of choosing a stylesheet. (Mozilla has a very handy View->Use Style menu for choosing which stylesheet to use when a page has multiple stylesheets.) There's a useful little javascript which you can put in your bookmarks toolbar to get around this, but it's annoying that there's no built-in GUI for it. (When testing changes to my CSS style sheets, I like to have the page link to both the old and new versions so I can swap back and forth.)
There are two separate issues here: which GUI toolkit to use, and whch language to use. First, choose the GUI toolkit, and then choose one of the programming languages which can be used with that toolkit.
Most of the toolkits support multiple languages.
For new development, I'd strongly recommend using Cocoa with Objective C. Don't be afraid of Objective C! It's a very simple extension to plain old ANSI C. The additional syntax is minimal (unlike C++) and most of the code you write will be plain old C. Once you've learned Cocoa using Objective C, you may want to use it in Perl via CamelBones. But I'd strongly recommend using Objective C to learn Cocoa, otherwise you won't understand a lot of the reasons why things work the way they do. Don't use Cocoa with Java, unless you don't know C. And even then I'd recommand learning C so you can use Cocoa with ObjC.
If you want a plain old non-OO API, Carbon isn't all that bad. You'll need to get a good reference, as there are a lot of functions and types to learn about. (Whereas Cocoa is predictable enough that you can usually guess method names!) Or you can use one of the C++-based wrappers such as QT or PowerPlant.
Ugh. IRIX. I used to have to deal with IRIX machines. I was very, very, very happy when we junked those and replaced them with Suns.
The SGI hardware was nice, but very expensive. (weird nonstandard memory which cost 10 times what it should, etc.) Whereas the Suns took standard parts which we could buy anywhere (DIMMs, PCI cards, etc.)
But the hardware and associated costs were a very small factory in why we (Harvey Mudd College computer science department) moved away from them... the reason was the fact that IRIX just plain sucked.
IRIX has the worst security of any UNIX-like OS I've ever used. Unpacking an SGI meant spending hours fixing holes before letting it come anywhere near a network.. (deleting default [passwordless] users, turning off insecure network software, etc.) And even then they weren't secure at all due to fundamental flaws (mostly design decisions to make the machines "user friendly")
They were also annoying for an admin because IRIX is just plain _weird_ if you're used to other versions of UNIX (I dealt with Solaris, Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD at Mudd)... The admin tools and config files are in strange places, use non-standard options, etc.
yes, the had good OpenGL support (duh). But so does everybody these days. Today it's more imporotant to have good security and easy administration.
Plus it's still as ugly as it ever was. Give me Gnome or Mac OS X any day. (Heck, even Windows XP looks better, and that's saying something!)
The scrollbars has to be moved from left to right otherwise existing Mac users (and Windows users, too) would have complained excessively and would probably have refused to use Mac OS X at all. Yes, having scrollbars on the left makes a lot more sense. But getting people to switch would be.. difficult.
Making it a user preference would be great, but it wouldn't be practical.
Yes, an NSScrollView could easily be modified to put scrollbars on the left or right depending on user prefs, but not every scrollbar is part of an NSScrollView. Applications which position their own scrollbars would have to check the user preference, and I'm sure many application writers wouldn't bother. (especially for old Carbon code being ported over to OS X)
If Apple had done this, we would have ended up with a few programs which respect user prefs, a bunch of Carbon programs with scrollbars hardcoded on the right, and a few Cocoa programs from long-time NeXT users with the scrollbars hardcoded on the left.. probably from people trying to convince people to convert. It would be a big ugly mess.
NeXT users lost their "spinning disc" cursor in 10.2 and Mac users lost their "Happy Mac" icon.
But both get a much improved OS.
Get a copy of LPD running on your Windows box. (Or if Windows comes with an LPR server, start it up.) If Microsoft hasn't included it, then someone out there must have an LPD implementation for Windows.
All versions of Mac OS X (and the last couple of versions of Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9) speak LPR.
Mac OS X 10.2 does IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) too, now that it uses CUPS for printing.
Windows doesn't do this. (Longhorn will, though.)
Windows (like Mac OS 9) uses your graphics card's 2D hardware to do its drawing. It doesn't use it to do compositing (of images with alpha channels) because 2D chipsets (at least all the ones I've ever seen) don't handle transparency.
Your 3D hardware, on the other hand, does do transparency, so Quartz Extreme uses it to do all the work of compositing. (which is a lot of work, if there are five or six transparent windows with transparent shadows overlapping.. but to your 3D hardware, that's just a couple of polygons.. no problem for it.)
Yeah, they used to make $500, $1000, $5000, and even a few $10000 notes. And the six or so ridiculous $100000 notes.
Today we have these things called credit cards. Why would you ever need a $500 bill when you can use your credit card? Or a debit card or a personal check? The main uses for such a thing would be the illegal ones.
Anyway, go to the Post Office and get a $500 money order if you really want an anonymous way to carry $500 on a single piece of paper. (see www.usps.com for more info on money orders.)
they didn't recall the gold coins. they just made it illegal to own gold (other than certain exceptions, such as family heirlooms and such)
:)
after that law was repealed, it was perfectly legal to start spending gold eagles and such. Of course, by that time, not many were left so it would be stupid to spend them, as they were worth much more than $20.
American currency goes through the wash just fine.
The paper is made from 1/4 linen and 3/4 cotton, not wood pulp.
On the other hand, I've heard that it doesn't fare well in microwave ovens. (so if you have some wet dollar bills, don't try to dry them off in the microwave.)
it used to be that dimes were made of silver, nickels were made of nickel (go figure), and pennies were made of copper.
silver cost much more than nickel or copper, so the dime had to be smaller.
today, of course, they're mostly zinc. (well, the dime is actually zinc-clad copper.)
I read somewhere that even Canada isn't making its nickels out of nickel anymore. that sucks. Canadian nickels used to have so much nickel in them that they were magnetic. (if you dropped one in sand, it would be covered in bits of iron when you fished it out.)
I once knew someone who had fun carrying around uncut sheets of $2 bills (you can buy them from the mint at www.usmint.gov, but they're expensive) .. he'd go into a store, buy a pack of gum or something, and when it was time to pay for it he would take out his scissors and start cutting bill from the sheet.. watching to see how a cashier would react was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It was great to go from store to store doing that to see all the different reactions you'd get.
;-)
The uncut sheet thing would work with other denominations, but it's best with $2 bills because half the time the cashier has never seen one and won't believe it's real money (especially after watching you cut it out)
if the cashier refuses to accept your $2 bills, pull out a rolll of half dollars.
Actually, it wasn't the states which were making their own currency, it was banks.
Can you imagine having Citibank currency, BofA currency, WaMu currency, Wells Fargo currency, etc.? Of course, each probably wouldn't accept any other bank's currency, so you'd probably have to convert everything into coins (hey, a use for dollar coins) as those have always been made by the Federal government.
Camelbones works pretty well, but the documentation is nearly non-existant, unfortunately. But if you've used AppKit and Foundation from Objective-C (or Java, I suppose) then it shouldn't be too hard to figure out from the examples.
I made a few simple test programs and didn't have any trouble, but I have a feeling that some of the more esoteric bits of Cocoa might not work too well.
The PerlObjective-C bridge is pretty good. Perl is pretty well suited for interacting with Objective-C (better than Java, certainly) due to its dynamic nature.
Hmmm, I was just about to get a 160GB drive. Suppose I'll have to opt for a samller drive - I've got a 10GB and a 30GB drive at the moment and as far as I'm aware I will have to remove one of them to install another IDE hard drive - or else get a SCSI card. Is this right or am I going to be able to install another IDE drive in some other way?
You could just get an ATA card. There are ATA-133 cards out there, which should allow you to use a 160 GB drive. Go to the Macintosh Product Guide and search for "ATA PCI card" or something.
I ordered a new Powerbook in Dec., which took the same route. Seems some of Apple's products are assembled in Taiwan, then routed via FedEx to Anchorage (customs), then the main FedEx hub in Memphis (ala 'Cast Away'), then to destination.
FedEx has multiple hubs. My iMac didn't go through Memphis because I live in southern California.. it went straight from Alaska to California.