Hopefully this means I can safely enable journaling on the G4's boot drive again. Well, I probably can anyway since I freed up so much space and have already double checked with hfsdebug that I have at least a few several hundred MB chunks of freespace.
For curiousities sake though, is your boot volume also near full?
The easiest way to work around hotfiles_evict is to free up some space on the drive. The big catch is that the freespace must have a contiguous block large enough to store the file which is being evicted from the hotfiles area.
I had the hotfiles_evict problem on a G4 tower at work. The boot drive was about 98% full. After moving some files onto an external FireWire drive I got down to about 90% full. The problem remained. I then moved more stuff until I got down to about 80% full.
Between the 90 and 80 mark I also disabled journalling on the volume. This, I think, is the easiest way to fix it. Disabling journalling also disables hotfiles and therefore the update daemon will no longer try to manage the hotfiles store.
I haven't seen the problem resurface yet. Note that this was a DP G4 and so update only ate 100% of one CPU (barely noticeable). What I did notice was the fact that my boot drive suddenly had ZERO freespace because the system.log grew to about 6 GB. Yes, I know, this actually exacerbates the problem.
I can only hope that 10.4.2 fixes the issue. I'll probably re-enable journaling and see what happens.
Also, speaking of drive freespace: There is apparently a known flaw in HFS+ with respect to contiguous freespace. When allocating new space for the catalog a 4 MB block of contiguous freespace is required. If you don't have a 4 MB block of contiguous freespace then apparently there is a bug whereby 4 MB will be allocated potentially overtop another portion of the catalog or overtop some file's data. Not good. Best advice from what I've gathered is to never let a volume be more than 80% full. Ever.
wot? i'm pretty sure even tho not "correct" every1 who reads this will understand wot i'm saying.
Do you have any idea how hard that is to read? Read the above (as best you can anyway) then read the following:
What? I'm pretty sure even though not "correct" everyone who reads this will understand what I'm saying.
Now I don't know about the rest of the Slashdotters but when I read the incorrect version I have to sound it out in my brain. Consequently, I cannot read it anywhere near as quickly as I can read the correctly spelled version.
So please, next time you think it's okay to abbreviate your typing please think again. I am fine with using quick abbreviations like l8r or cya in chats. They're common enough and in the conext of a chat they are fine. But I trip over every word in a sentence like the one above. The same thing happens when I see grossly misspelled words like catagory or definate. My brain literally stops to sound out the word.
Although some people have tried to claim the written word is merely a graphic expression of what we hear this is not true. It is in many ways distinct from the spoken word. It's not exactly the same neural pathways.
Bullshit. The KHTML developers brought this discussion on themselves. Apple rightfully took the code, incorporated it into their products, and not only made the modified version available to users of their products but also publicly for anyone wishing to download it.
It appears that the KHTML developers expect Apple to do all the integration work for them. There is nothing in the LGPL that requires this and my reading of both the LGPL and the GPL indicates that requiring modified code to be made available is the spirit of the license. Integrating it back to the mainline is a courtesy but the license specifically does NOT require this.
Sure, it's customary to help integrate it back into the mainline tree but there have been other instances where this hasn't happened. For example, read up on Lucid Emacs (XEmacs) vs. Emacs debacle. You can draw many parallels from that to this. In that case Stallman was working on releasing a new version of Emacs for years and hadn't done it. Meanwhile, Lucid needed certain features and implemented them. When they offered to integrate the work back to mainline Stallman rejected it because he had his own ideas of how it should be written. In addition (and this does not apply in this case) Stallman required copyright assignment to the FSF which was something Jamie Zawinski in particular did not agree with. After much back and forth Lucid gave up and thus the XEmacs fork was born.
The Lucid Emacs developers suggested that their code simply be incorporated into the next Emacs and that if Stallman wanted to rewrite it again that's fine but what they had was already working and better than what was in the tree. Stallman rejected it because he preferred to wait until their rewrite was complete at which point Lucid could try to integrate with the rewritten code.
It should be obvious that this is a *really* stupid decision. The KHTML developers should suck it up and realize that Apple now has a better rendering engine than they do. They should merge in the changes now (including the ones they don't like) and THEN decide to rewrite things if the code is problematic. In the meantime the KHTML users have a better browser. It will take just as long to write code regardless of whether they merge in the Apple changes or not.
This basically amounts to the KHTML developers having a serious case of Not Invented Here syndrome. After trying and failing to get Apple to do the merging work for them they cried foul and posted publicly about how Apple wasn't helping. I'm truly glad it has mostly backfired because it's up to the KHTML project to decide whether they want the code or not. It's not Apple's responsibility to take orders from the KHTML developers. If KHTML doesn't like it then WebCore can remain a fork of KHTML just like Lucid Emacs is a fork of Emacs.
And don't give me any of the shit floating around here about how the KHTML developers merely wanted to point out that Apple wasn't doing the merging work. There are claims in this thread that the KHTML developers are fine with that but they just aren't fine with it looking as if Apple is contributing to KHTML. Well, news flash, Apple *is* contributing to KHTML and if the KHTML developers don't like the way they contribute and didn't want a big media fuss about it then they should have been smart enough not to write about it publicly. It is for this very reason that I *don't* keep a journal on the web.
No, the reason there are no new exploits is that none of these potential exploits are anywhere near as severe as the typical Windows exploit. Most of these are very theoretical. Like, if the admin writes some script that uses some program and doesn't check input before using that program. Or if the admin allows a bash script to be run directly through sudo and so on and so forth.
Let's also not forget that buffer overflows are in general much much harder to exploit on PowerPC where overwriting the stack merely overwrites program data, not the return address or function parameters (which are all stored in registers). To successfully exploit a buffer overflow on PowerPC you'd need to have more specific knowledge of the particular program or library you are exploiting. On x86 you can pretty much count on being able to write some shit into the stack in a certain way and get it run with little to no knowledge of the particular program or library other than how much data you have to overwrite before you start overwriting the stack.
It's always better to buy Macs now rather than waiting. Even if they do come out with something new you can sell your current model at not too much of a loss on eBay (you'll probably get nearly what you paid for it) and buy the new model.
Also, if the cost seems a bit high on the PowerBook one thing you might try if you are a software developer of any sort is joining ADC. A $500 membership fee gets you access to Tiger and many other benefits like updated documentation sent on CD and DVD every month as well as copies of current system software (Panther client and server at the moment).
The really big thing is that you get a significant discount on hardware. Let me put it this way: if you are buying the top of the line 17" PowerBook with the additional VRAM and faster 5400 RPM drive then it's going to cost just shy of $3000. The discount on that works out to slightly more than you pay to join ADC. In addition, if you also want to buy a cinema display at the same time for use with the PowerBook they will often let you do this so you can really make your money back then. You also get a slightly less significant discount on Apple-branded accessories like iPod or wireless keyboards and mice if you buy them all in the same order (you only get to do this once per annual ADC membership).
Since you say you have been using Linux I assume you probably have at least a little development experience. If you plan to use your Mac for software development then you qualify for the discount. I use my PB to work on wxCocoa as well as projects for work. I even do Windows development on my PB using a cross GCC and Virtual PC for testing.
the CRT monitor will let us move to an easier resolution as her eyes wind down.
OS X has a zoom feature using Command+Option+[+-] to zoom in and out on the screen. Furthermore, Cocoa (and Carbon's CoreGraphics) use all floating point coordinates and affine transformations so it's only a matter of time before Apple brings back perfect scaling instead of the fixed 72 dpi interface they have now.
This would allow you to continue to use high resolution but scale things up (text and images) using a sytem preference. If done right this would likely be preferrable to just kicking the resolution down as the text would be both larger and more clear using this method.
Immediately obvious problems; no IR remote, no IR power-on, no TV out, no DVB in, no PCI slot to add DVB, no Linux (MythTV on Mac is almost but not quite usable).
Actually, there is an IR remote available for it (look on the accessories page). Power on is not an issue as you'd just leave the machine on all the time as there is no reason to turn it off. It does in fact have a TV out (either DVI to an HDTV or with an adapter to an S-Video or Composite set). Also I should note that Macs can run Linux; Debian has a PPC port, YellowDog makes a Fedora-based version and Fedora is now working on their own PPC version.
Some (not all) of those problems can be fixed with USB attachments but I'm thinking, the Mac Mini is not a good MythTV box (yet).
Actually, the lack of video in or PCI isn't that big of an issue. Also don't forget it does have FireWire. Know what else has FireWire? Every HD cable box, by law.
I've actually recorded some streams (both standard definition and high definition) from Cox's provided Motorola box onto my PowerBook using Apple's Virtual DVHS (it's a developer sample). Unfortunately, even with a 1.5 GHz G4 I can barely manage to play them back using QuickTime. Here's hoping QuickTime 7 that comes with Tiger actually uses the MPEG-2 decode hardware on the graphics card. I suppose I could find this out for myself but if I did I wouldn't be able to tell you.
Encoding is obviously not an issue as the streams are already in MPEG-2 as they come out of the FireWire port on the cable box.
If this Mac mini somehow can be made to decode 1080i streams you had better believe I'll be getting one. With some minor Cocoa programming I could easily take Apple's Virtual DVHS and write a nice front-end for it.
Now all I need to do is do all of this then profit.;-)
So the tradeoff becomes do you want to have it in user space (where it would still vulnerable to DoS in this case) and sacrifice some speed
It's not just vulnerable to a DoS in terms of execution speed. The Linux kernel really loves killing inappropriate processes at inappropriate times when the OOM killer goes crazy. In a real micro-kernelish design, these processes would be granted exemption from the OOM killer.
Actually I was thinking DoS in that with the file system running as a process you could still crash that process with this exploit. However, you are right, the Linux OOM killer BLOWS. I use spamass-milter on the mail servers here which tags both inbound and outbound mail. Got a call one night that the mail server was down; came in and found all of the processes had died but had no clue what the hell was going on. Rebooted it and it all seemed normal. Came in the next morning to find it had crashed again in the middle of the night.
Well it turns out that someone sent a 500 MB attachment out of here which caused spamass-milter and SpamAssassin to eat up all the RAM and swap on the server at which point the Linux kernel killed every process. Since then I now have a 50 or 100 MB limit on e-mails because obviously if someone inside could do it by accident someone outside could do it on purpose and kill the server. Of course, the interfaces would still be up but no ssh. I also took care to run a null modem between it and another server with a getty running. The getty will be refired by init if it gets killed so if for some reason something similar to this happens again I can at least fix it remotely.
Pissed me off too, the night that it happened I had been drinking quite heavily at the local bar and wound up coming in to work at 11 pm totally plowed. On the bright side some ugly chick had been hitting on me so it gave me a good excuse to get the hell out of there.:-)
She does email. $10 a month is more service than she needs.
That's all fine and good except what I've found with my parents is that having broadband, particularly the always-on aspect, has caused both of them to use the Internet more often. Particularly my mom because she can just open up her PowerBook anywhere in the house and look something up. My dad uses it primarily for e-mail and to download his bank transactions. He did not like having to wait for the modem to connect.
My mom has made the comment to me several times that she has no idea how we got by without having the Internet instantly available. She's right. Having the ability to just look something up whenever one feels like it is very empowering. I recommend to anyone who can afford it to get broadband.
Pardon my ignorance.... What is the smbfs doing in kernel space? Shouldn't that be the domain of Samba?
Filesystems by necessity have to be implemented to some extent in the kernel because they have to hook the VFS layer. However, you make a very good point that it does seem to be a big risk to implement the entirety of smbfs in kernel space.
Recent Linux kernels (I think 2.4 onward) have a mechanism for doing what are called user space filesystems. Basically, the kernel only knows enough to talk to a daemon which implements the filesystem and exposes it to the kernel. In this manner there is a very well defined interface between the kernel and user code which hopefully is bug free.
In some ways this is sort of a partial microkernel design. With that comes the inherent loss of speed having to do the context switches between kernel and user mode. In the normal filesystem case you have a context switch from user to kernel mode, the file is accessed, and then back to user mode. In the case of a filesystem implemented in user mode you have to switch from user mode to kernel mode, then to user mode in the FS daemon then back to kernel mode then back to user mode in the process trying to access the file. And that is the best case. Throw in a scheduler without the knowledge of which process is waiting for what and messaging between two user space processes through the kernel can be extremely costly!
In this case, yes, I think I probably would have recoded smbfs to use the user mode filesystem handler. But the code was already written years ago to live entirely in kernel space before there was really any sort of well defined standard for a user space file system. Given that this is as far as I can remember the only major bug in it one might say that it hasn't really been that bad having it in kernel space.
So the tradeoff becomes do you want to have it in user space (where it would still vulnerable to DoS in this case) and sacrifice some speed or do you want it to run in the kernel at full speed?
Are you really so naive with the Iraq war? This Fox thing really gets to people's heads.
Be careful who you call naive. You people against the Iraq war seem to think that people for it just don't know anything. Well let me clue you in. I *know* it is a project to go over there and rework the middle east. It's not like this is a vast right-wing conspiracy or anything. Bush and Cheney both consistently say they went to Iraq because it was the best place to start reshaping the middle east. I am okay with that! You are obviously not! But don't call me naive and say I don't know anything about it. I do know about it and I still support the war in Iraq, probably more so.
The US failed miserably at everything in post war Iraq. From rebuilding the basic facilities to establishing a sane socio-economic system that would allow the country to pick itself off the floor.
It has been not even 2 years and you are already marking it down as a failure? I knew going into Iraq that it was going to certainly extend past Bush's first term of office and probably past his second if he gets one.
Really, how could you not know going into the war in Iraq that the real agenda was to reshape the middle east and that it was going to take time? I knew this going in to the war and I supported it then and I still support it now. If you honestly believed we were going in there for the sole purpose of finding WMDs then you are the one who is naive, not I.
Unfortunately, things starting turning south towards the end of his [Clinton's] term. Anybody who had money in the stock market knows that it started turning south before Bush took office.
I should mention that I don't think that Clinton caused this recession either. The recession was the.com bubble bursting and it was right for Clinton to let it grow properly. Everyone knew it would burst at some point, just not when.
Realistically, Clinton could not have stopped it and more importantly it would have been wrong to try to do so. The recession does not make Clinton a bad president and it does not make Bush a bad president. It is unfortunately a necessary evil in a free market economy.
I think the big problem is that most analysts thought that.com burst would only affect the.com companies. Unfortunately, it drug the whole economy with it. That was in many ways simply unforeseeable.
Sure enough, Kerry is pretty much the unknown in this equation, but honest to goodness could his record be any WORSE than Dubya's? Is the status quo really WORTH preserving here?
Kerry is not an unknown. He says he's going to increase government spending and he says he's going to make you pay more taxes as he goes and spends more money (pay as you go, his phrase, not mine).
His strategy for Iraq is crap, he wants to turn it into another Vietnam. He talks about getting the guys that are there back home and sending in replacements. Bush did the *right* thing by extending the stay of our servicemen that are over there now. Where we got screwed in Vietnam was that the troops were rotated so frequently that no one had an effing clue what was going on.
Kerry is by far not an unknown. He has said exactly what he wants to do with the economy and what he wants to do in Irq and just about everything he has said is not how I would want it done. That is why I will not vote for Kerry.
Bush's record certainly isn't spotless but it's not bad. He successfully fought a recession by pushing tax breaks through congress. After 9/11 he put the world on notice that we are not afraid to use military force. First he went into afghanistan and devistated the command structure of the taliban (even though he didn't get the top guy). Then he went into Iraq and took Saddam out of power. Despite what Kerry says, diplomacy was already used. It had already failed. Saddam for over a decade had ignored the UN and was openly hostile towards the US. After seeing what a leader with an openly hostile US message (e.g. bin Laden) could do, Bush decided it wasn't worth the risk trying to deal with another one. So he made the command decision to go in and take him out.
Now you can respectfully disagree with the premise that the war in Iraq was the right thing to do. However, what you cannot do (but many people like to do anyway) is claim that Bush is an idiot for going into Iraq. It was a calculated command decision to take out a dictator hostile to the U.S. If I had been president and had just been attacked by one guy I'd probably start thinking the odds of being the attacked by the next guy are looking stronger. So I too would have taken Saddam out.
Still, I fear that you will probably not listen to anything in this message because you have already been indoctrinated with the "Bush bad" mentality. It's not hard to spot. Your message lacks any clear reason but contains a plethora of buzz words. See for yourself:
(war mongering, dogma based policy bordering on theocracy, junk science, militarization, shady deals
That's not an argument, it's a collection of buzz words straight from the left wingers.
I have never seen Kerry's 'Economic Plan' explained like this. Do you have a source? I'm not being a smart-ass or flamer. I'm genuinely curious.
Yes I have a source. I watched all of the presidential debates and the vice presidential debate. I watched the democratic national convention. I listened to what Kerry had to say. He is not shy when it comes to telling you about all of the social programs he wants to implement. In particular, he wants a national health care system. And he also won't even think about letting younger workers such as myself divert at least some of our social security tax into investments of our choosing.
He specifically talked about pay as you go. That is where he refuses to run a budget deficit even if it would make sense to do so. That means that in order to pay for all of these programs he's going to have to immediately raise taxes if he wants to stick to his word of having a budget surplus.
Of course, he dodges the issue quite well claiming he's only going to raise taxes on the top 1% of earners. First of all, I think that that plan is economically stupid (in fact _VERY_ stupid) even if it is politically popular. Secondly, I think he's full of shit when he says that's the only tax increase he's going to need. If he's serious about creating all of these new programs then he will need more income to pay for it. It's just that simple.
Let me go a step further though. He has claimed that his health care plan will be "optional". That it will be your choice if you want to buy in. Now, what's going to happen is that a lot of people are going to buy in to it if the price is right. At that point the competition with it is going to be scarce and basically you're going to be forced to either have that or to not have insurance. Now, if your rich you can get by without having insurance because you can pay for your own medical bills. This is exactly what rich people in countries with socialized medicine do. They have their own private hospitals and they pay in full. Meanwhile the average joe gets screwed because now he no longer has any choice but to use the government system.
I like Bush's plan for health care a lot better. Keep health care as a benefit to employment. Help ease the transition of health care when moving between employers. Let smaller companies band together in co-ops to get the bulk rates that large companies get. Kerry's plan is just socialized medicine that he is afraid to call socialized medicine.
I don't know. I'm one of those 'undecided'. My major issues are the environment and economic prosperity. Bush has failed miserably in these areas, but I have seen little promise in Kerry on these fronts. To be honest, I just don't know. I expect I would vote Nader, but I can't where I live.
I'll be the first to admit that if you vote for protecting the environment no matter what the cost then Bush is not your man.
As for economic prosperity, I think you are clearly wrong about Bush failing miserably. Bush's predecessor, Clinton, took over a growing economy and did a damn good job of continuing the growth. Despite the super-liberals he surrounded himself with (particularly his wife) he showed restraint and let the economy grow.
Unfortunately, things starting turning south towards the end of his term. Anybody who had money in the stock market knows that it started turning south before Bush took office. Bush then inherited the beginning of a recession.
To ease the recession he pushed tax cuts through congress. Now, some (Kerry in particular) claim that Bush's tax cuts only helped the rich but in reality most everyone got that little bit of extra money they needed to maintain their standard of living.
Kerry has come out and said he's going to increase government spending. As part of the pay as you go program that he loves to talk about so much he's going to raise taxes to do it. This is what he has said he's going to do. Increase federal programs and increase taxes to pay for it.
I certainly don't think that increasing spending and increasing taxes is going to help our economy. In fact, I think it could easily cause a recession about two years down the road (you normally figure 1-2 years between the time of the action and the result of it).
'Who are we to say how God created or didn't create the World. God could've could've chosen to create the creatures in 7 days or God could've chosen to create the creatures in the world with evolution'
Cognitive dissonance is a terrible thing.
Hmmm. It looks like the part of the Bible about everything being created in seven days is wrong. But I can't question the Bible, because that would mean confronting the fact that my beliefs could be mistaken. I guess I'll just conveniently skip over the bits that are wrong and pretend I don't see them.
I think you are making the same mistake that the hardcore bible-thumpers make: taking the Bible literally. I did myself carefully read Genesis I and I think even if you do believe in evolution (and I do, I think it's the best theory we have to date) that the account of it in the Bible is really accurate.
Remember that the Bible is best read when you take it to be what it claims to be: the word of God with the caveat that it has been written by men. In the case of the old testament this was many thousands of years ago and it has been through several translations since then.
Pretend that you are God and you want to impart some knowledge to the beings you created about how they were created. You wouldn't just go out and explain the details because they would not understand. What you can do is talk about it allegorically. This story is then fairly easily passed on through the generations and finally someone writes it down along with other stories into a book.
In fact, the entire theory of evolution is really based on what the Bible says about creation. Over many years scientists have used what the Bible says about creation as the basis for forming more complete theories by filling in the blanks. This study (AFAICT, I can't read it due to the server being down) simply fills in more blanks. Anybody who thinks the Bible literally means God created the world in 7 days as we know them today is reading it incorrectly. Had Darwin thought it literally meant 7 days we wouldn't even have the theory. But Darwin took it to be a great story and began studying how it really happened. Do you think Darwin dreamed up his theory out of the blue? Wouldn't you think he starts with the assumption that animals come before man and works his way from there?
Basically what I am saying is that without the Bible the entire theory of evolution doesn't exist because no one would even know where to begin! Consider Genesis I to be the "Cliff's Notes" version of what really happened and we're still trying to write the real story.
I strongly recommend that you consider the Macintosh platform for use in your public library. Not only are the computers easy to use, but they are also easy to administer. Apple makes Mac OS X Server, a turn-key directory, file, e-mail, and print server at a reasonable cost ($1k for unlimited clients or included with an Xserve).
The only real disadvantage to Macintosh is that you cannot run Windows programs on it, although you cannot do that on Linux either. In a public setting this may be taken as an advantage as it prevents people from running the common Windows viruses.
Microsoft Office is available and well supported on the Mac which gives it an advantage over Linux. Microsoft Office for Mac is fully compatible with Office for Windows.
As another bonus, printing to PDF is built in. This can be very handy for people who wish to save something such as a web receipt to a file rather than print out a hardcopy. Also, the printing support in OS X is very good. Should a printer fail, as typically happens when a printer is used day in and day out, it is trivially simple to drag the document from one printer to another. The printers don't even have to be similar.
With respect to keeping the computers clean you could either import your database of library card holders into Open Diectory and give everyone his own user account, or you could set up a guest account, or both. For guest accounts you would of course want something that keeps the account clean. OS X is a true UNIX based system so normal user accounts are restricted to their home directory. It is trivially simple to write a script to wipe out the directory and replace it with a skeleton. Unlike Windows where a new user account has several values preloaded from the default user, on OS X a new user account only contains a few folders for storing data and one or two UNIX dotfiles.
As you mention, Linux would also be a good choice although Linux administration is generally more difficult. With OS X you've got a system already built for situations like yours. There is no need to ensure the OS will work with your hardware because Apple makes both the hardware and the OS. There is no need to figure out how to get OpenLDAP working on your own. There is no need to setup Samba or NFS on your own.
Sure, Linux has all the same backend software as OS X and Linux can be a very good choice. I know there are plenty of other people here who have extoled and will extole the virtues of it. However, if you want something that just works with a minimum of hassle then what you really want is a Mac.
And I bought a used Mac and used it with an MS trackball for the longest time then it died so I bought the zero-button mouse like I use with my Mac at work.
I typically get some wrist pain from using a traditional 2 or 3 button mouse which is why I started using trackballs over 10 years ago. Now that I know how a mouse is supposed to work I haven't looked back.
There is something very nice about the zero-button mouse. It fits nicely in my hand, which is amazing because I have very large hands with long fingers. The oblong shape seems to promote good mousing technique. I notice my wrist is always straight when I'm using it. Because I do have such long fingers they actually hang off the front of the mouse quite a bit so to click I am actually pressing down with my three middle fingers (index, middle, and ring) using the entire length of my fingers to push down rather than just pressing buttons located at the tips of my fingers.
Do I miss the three button mice that I'd become accustomed to? Maybe a little but not really. Whenever I am prone to right click I just use my left thumb to hold down the control key for a bit and that is that. I usually rest my left hand just to the left of the keyboard which is why control is often under my thumb. When I'm really using my computer I have both my hands on the keyboard anyway and just move my hand onto the mouse for brief moments to move the pointer and click.
I am a software developer and I do my text editing with gvim (no mouse involved there) and compiling using the command-line. I find that the mouse is best used for the very limited purpose of moving the pointer around and clicking. There is no need to clutter it up with extraneous functionality when the keyboard can provide everything. Why do I need a scroll wheel when there are plenty of movement keys on the keyboard?
Still, I will also admit that I'd find it impossible to use Windows or any of the popular Linux desktops with a Mac mouse. None of them are designed with 1 button in mind. For instance, Macs inherently have "gestures" which make 1-button mousing easier because you can always quickly hit the menubar and select a command.
For me, the hinged mouse is quite ideal. I'm sick of people bitching about how multi-button mice are somehow superior to the hinged mouse. To me, a multi-button mouse is like training wheels for the keyboard. If you are in fact using a Mac full-time I urge you to try out the oblong hinged mouse that comes with recent Macs. Force yourself to use it with your OS X machine for a month and then tell me how much you like your bulky 3-button mouse compared to the lightweight and easy to click hinged mouse.
I've got an idea for this. First of all I'm going to follow these instructions to make myself a GCC and cctools that target OS X on PPC. Then I'm considering going back and compiling Apple's GCC targetting Linux because I'm rather curious to get wxWindows (err, wxWidgets now) for Cocoa working with GNUstep. The apple version of GCC should still be able to target linux and of course does have an Objective-C++ compiler which I need for wxCocoa.
There's a trick here: hold down option when you click on Add. When you do so your add printer sheet will have an Advanced choice which will let you do everything you can do from the web interface.
Some may disagree with this, but I think this is actually a good interface. It hides the less common options from normal users but allows advanced users or administrators who know exactly how they want to configure the printer to do so exactly the way they want to.
Since this printer is attached to a Windows machine it should have been as simple as selecting Windows Printing and browsing through the network neighborhood to it, but sometimes the network neighborhood can be hosed (and this is a problem with MS networks in general, not Macs).
Being a NetWare administrator I can say without a doubt that NetWare is not a very "sexy" kernel. In fact, it's showing its age.
However, what makes NetWare a great OS is not its kernel but rather what runs atop that kernel. The NetWare file services have no equal. The file permissions are a breeze. The admin tools, while somewhat slow and cumbersome due to being Java applications, are quite powerful. NDS (now eDirectory) is unbelievably great.
Right now there is Nterprise Services for Linux which gives you eDirectory integrated with file and print services such as iFolder (a WebDAV based service) and Samba (CIFS, I'm sure you know what this is). The beauty of it is Novell's single sign on which allows users to log in once to eDirectory and gain access to everything, including some non-Novell services.
What is, sadly, sorely lacking is the excellent NCP file services and the NetWare file system. The latest buzz is that Novell will be porting NSS (their advanced file system and volume management) to Linux. I hope they also decide to port NCP for accessing it.
This is very exciting stuff because it's going to firmly plant NetWare far above competitors. It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few years.
Am I the only one who thinks "United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Air Force" should not be a valid patent assignee?
huh? The U.S. government is a quite good patent assignee. Think of technology developed by or for NASA. In fact, I work on an image enhancment technology which was originally done by my company for a NASA contract. If you read the patent application, it has our employee's names on it along with the U.S. government.
After developing this we turned around and purchased a license so we could use the algorithm in our own software projects (i.e. PhotoFlair). That means that the government is able to use the technology and so are we. The government doesn't have to pay us anything to use our algorithms.
I don't think there's anything at all wrong with that. The algorithm was developed on their dollar and so they have the rights to implement the algorithm however they wish.
In fact, it seems to me that (for a change) the patent system is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing!
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I assume you mean 10.4.2 fixed it? Good news!
Hopefully this means I can safely enable journaling on the G4's boot drive again. Well, I probably can anyway since I freed up so much space and have already double checked with hfsdebug that I have at least a few several hundred MB chunks of freespace.
For curiousities sake though, is your boot volume also near full?
The easiest way to work around hotfiles_evict is to free up some space on the drive. The big catch is that the freespace must have a contiguous block large enough to store the file which is being evicted from the hotfiles area.
I had the hotfiles_evict problem on a G4 tower at work. The boot drive was about 98% full. After moving some files onto an external FireWire drive I got down to about 90% full. The problem remained. I then moved more stuff until I got down to about 80% full.
Between the 90 and 80 mark I also disabled journalling on the volume. This, I think, is the easiest way to fix it. Disabling journalling also disables hotfiles and therefore the update daemon will no longer try to manage the hotfiles store.
I haven't seen the problem resurface yet. Note that this was a DP G4 and so update only ate 100% of one CPU (barely noticeable). What I did notice was the fact that my boot drive suddenly had ZERO freespace because the system.log grew to about 6 GB. Yes, I know, this actually exacerbates the problem.
I can only hope that 10.4.2 fixes the issue. I'll probably re-enable journaling and see what happens.
Also, speaking of drive freespace: There is apparently a known flaw in HFS+ with respect to contiguous freespace. When allocating new space for the catalog a 4 MB block of contiguous freespace is required. If you don't have a 4 MB block of contiguous freespace then apparently there is a bug whereby 4 MB will be allocated potentially overtop another portion of the catalog or overtop some file's data. Not good. Best advice from what I've gathered is to never let a volume be more than 80% full. Ever.
Do you have any idea how hard that is to read? Read the above (as best you can anyway) then read the following:
What? I'm pretty sure even though not "correct" everyone who reads this will understand what I'm saying.
Now I don't know about the rest of the Slashdotters but when I read the incorrect version I have to sound it out in my brain. Consequently, I cannot read it anywhere near as quickly as I can read the correctly spelled version.
So please, next time you think it's okay to abbreviate your typing please think again. I am fine with using quick abbreviations like l8r or cya in chats. They're common enough and in the conext of a chat they are fine. But I trip over every word in a sentence like the one above. The same thing happens when I see grossly misspelled words like catagory or definate. My brain literally stops to sound out the word.
Although some people have tried to claim the written word is merely a graphic expression of what we hear this is not true. It is in many ways distinct from the spoken word. It's not exactly the same neural pathways.
Bullshit. The KHTML developers brought this discussion on themselves. Apple rightfully took the code, incorporated it into their products, and not only made the modified version available to users of their products but also publicly for anyone wishing to download it.
It appears that the KHTML developers expect Apple to do all the integration work for them. There is nothing in the LGPL that requires this and my reading of both the LGPL and the GPL indicates that requiring modified code to be made available is the spirit of the license. Integrating it back to the mainline is a courtesy but the license specifically does NOT require this.
Sure, it's customary to help integrate it back into the mainline tree but there have been other instances where this hasn't happened. For example, read up on Lucid Emacs (XEmacs) vs. Emacs debacle. You can draw many parallels from that to this. In that case Stallman was working on releasing a new version of Emacs for years and hadn't done it. Meanwhile, Lucid needed certain features and implemented them. When they offered to integrate the work back to mainline Stallman rejected it because he had his own ideas of how it should be written. In addition (and this does not apply in this case) Stallman required copyright assignment to the FSF which was something Jamie Zawinski in particular did not agree with. After much back and forth Lucid gave up and thus the XEmacs fork was born.
The Lucid Emacs developers suggested that their code simply be incorporated into the next Emacs and that if Stallman wanted to rewrite it again that's fine but what they had was already working and better than what was in the tree. Stallman rejected it because he preferred to wait until their rewrite was complete at which point Lucid could try to integrate with the rewritten code.
It should be obvious that this is a *really* stupid decision. The KHTML developers should suck it up and realize that Apple now has a better rendering engine than they do. They should merge in the changes now (including the ones they don't like) and THEN decide to rewrite things if the code is problematic. In the meantime the KHTML users have a better browser. It will take just as long to write code regardless of whether they merge in the Apple changes or not.
This basically amounts to the KHTML developers having a serious case of Not Invented Here syndrome. After trying and failing to get Apple to do the merging work for them they cried foul and posted publicly about how Apple wasn't helping. I'm truly glad it has mostly backfired because it's up to the KHTML project to decide whether they want the code or not. It's not Apple's responsibility to take orders from the KHTML developers. If KHTML doesn't like it then WebCore can remain a fork of KHTML just like Lucid Emacs is a fork of Emacs.
And don't give me any of the shit floating around here about how the KHTML developers merely wanted to point out that Apple wasn't doing the merging work. There are claims in this thread that the KHTML developers are fine with that but they just aren't fine with it looking as if Apple is contributing to KHTML. Well, news flash, Apple *is* contributing to KHTML and if the KHTML developers don't like the way they contribute and didn't want a big media fuss about it then they should have been smart enough not to write about it publicly. It is for this very reason that I *don't* keep a journal on the web.
No, the reason there are no new exploits is that none of these potential exploits are anywhere near as severe as the typical Windows exploit. Most of these are very theoretical. Like, if the admin writes some script that uses some program and doesn't check input before using that program. Or if the admin allows a bash script to be run directly through sudo and so on and so forth.
Let's also not forget that buffer overflows are in general much much harder to exploit on PowerPC where overwriting the stack merely overwrites program data, not the return address or function parameters (which are all stored in registers). To successfully exploit a buffer overflow on PowerPC you'd need to have more specific knowledge of the particular program or library you are exploiting. On x86 you can pretty much count on being able to write some shit into the stack in a certain way and get it run with little to no knowledge of the particular program or library other than how much data you have to overwrite before you start overwriting the stack.
It's always better to buy Macs now rather than waiting. Even if they do come out with something new you can sell your current model at not too much of a loss on eBay (you'll probably get nearly what you paid for it) and buy the new model.
Also, if the cost seems a bit high on the PowerBook one thing you might try if you are a software developer of any sort is joining ADC. A $500 membership fee gets you access to Tiger and many other benefits like updated documentation sent on CD and DVD every month as well as copies of current system software (Panther client and server at the moment).
The really big thing is that you get a significant discount on hardware. Let me put it this way: if you are buying the top of the line 17" PowerBook with the additional VRAM and faster 5400 RPM drive then it's going to cost just shy of $3000. The discount on that works out to slightly more than you pay to join ADC. In addition, if you also want to buy a cinema display at the same time for use with the PowerBook they will often let you do this so you can really make your money back then. You also get a slightly less significant discount on Apple-branded accessories like iPod or wireless keyboards and mice if you buy them all in the same order (you only get to do this once per annual ADC membership).
Since you say you have been using Linux I assume you probably have at least a little development experience. If you plan to use your Mac for software development then you qualify for the discount. I use my PB to work on wxCocoa as well as projects for work. I even do Windows development on my PB using a cross GCC and Virtual PC for testing.
OS X has a zoom feature using Command+Option+[+-] to zoom in and out on the screen. Furthermore, Cocoa (and Carbon's CoreGraphics) use all floating point coordinates and affine transformations so it's only a matter of time before Apple brings back perfect scaling instead of the fixed 72 dpi interface they have now.
This would allow you to continue to use high resolution but scale things up (text and images) using a sytem preference. If done right this would likely be preferrable to just kicking the resolution down as the text would be both larger and more clear using this method.
Actually, there is an IR remote available for it (look on the accessories page). Power on is not an issue as you'd just leave the machine on all the time as there is no reason to turn it off. It does in fact have a TV out (either DVI to an HDTV or with an adapter to an S-Video or Composite set). Also I should note that Macs can run Linux; Debian has a PPC port, YellowDog makes a Fedora-based version and Fedora is now working on their own PPC version.
Actually, the lack of video in or PCI isn't that big of an issue. Also don't forget it does have FireWire. Know what else has FireWire? Every HD cable box, by law.
I've actually recorded some streams (both standard definition and high definition) from Cox's provided Motorola box onto my PowerBook using Apple's Virtual DVHS (it's a developer sample). Unfortunately, even with a 1.5 GHz G4 I can barely manage to play them back using QuickTime. Here's hoping QuickTime 7 that comes with Tiger actually uses the MPEG-2 decode hardware on the graphics card. I suppose I could find this out for myself but if I did I wouldn't be able to tell you.
Encoding is obviously not an issue as the streams are already in MPEG-2 as they come out of the FireWire port on the cable box.
If this Mac mini somehow can be made to decode 1080i streams you had better believe I'll be getting one. With some minor Cocoa programming I could easily take Apple's Virtual DVHS and write a nice front-end for it.
Now all I need to do is do all of this then profit. ;-)
Darwin is now licensed under the APSL version 2 which according to Stallman is a GPL-incompatible free software license. Richard also provides a more detailed opinion.
Actually I was thinking DoS in that with the file system running as a process you could still crash that process with this exploit. However, you are right, the Linux OOM killer BLOWS. I use spamass-milter on the mail servers here which tags both inbound and outbound mail. Got a call one night that the mail server was down; came in and found all of the processes had died but had no clue what the hell was going on. Rebooted it and it all seemed normal. Came in the next morning to find it had crashed again in the middle of the night.
Well it turns out that someone sent a 500 MB attachment out of here which caused spamass-milter and SpamAssassin to eat up all the RAM and swap on the server at which point the Linux kernel killed every process. Since then I now have a 50 or 100 MB limit on e-mails because obviously if someone inside could do it by accident someone outside could do it on purpose and kill the server. Of course, the interfaces would still be up but no ssh. I also took care to run a null modem between it and another server with a getty running. The getty will be refired by init if it gets killed so if for some reason something similar to this happens again I can at least fix it remotely.
Pissed me off too, the night that it happened I had been drinking quite heavily at the local bar and wound up coming in to work at 11 pm totally plowed. On the bright side some ugly chick had been hitting on me so it gave me a good excuse to get the hell out of there. :-)
That's all fine and good except what I've found with my parents is that having broadband, particularly the always-on aspect, has caused both of them to use the Internet more often. Particularly my mom because she can just open up her PowerBook anywhere in the house and look something up. My dad uses it primarily for e-mail and to download his bank transactions. He did not like having to wait for the modem to connect.
My mom has made the comment to me several times that she has no idea how we got by without having the Internet instantly available. She's right. Having the ability to just look something up whenever one feels like it is very empowering. I recommend to anyone who can afford it to get broadband.
Dude.. That is SCARY. She really does look like Ron Jeremy without the mustache! How very appropriate that she has an androgenous name: "Casey".
Filesystems by necessity have to be implemented to some extent in the kernel because they have to hook the VFS layer. However, you make a very good point that it does seem to be a big risk to implement the entirety of smbfs in kernel space.
Recent Linux kernels (I think 2.4 onward) have a mechanism for doing what are called user space filesystems. Basically, the kernel only knows enough to talk to a daemon which implements the filesystem and exposes it to the kernel. In this manner there is a very well defined interface between the kernel and user code which hopefully is bug free.
In some ways this is sort of a partial microkernel design. With that comes the inherent loss of speed having to do the context switches between kernel and user mode. In the normal filesystem case you have a context switch from user to kernel mode, the file is accessed, and then back to user mode. In the case of a filesystem implemented in user mode you have to switch from user mode to kernel mode, then to user mode in the FS daemon then back to kernel mode then back to user mode in the process trying to access the file. And that is the best case. Throw in a scheduler without the knowledge of which process is waiting for what and messaging between two user space processes through the kernel can be extremely costly!
In this case, yes, I think I probably would have recoded smbfs to use the user mode filesystem handler. But the code was already written years ago to live entirely in kernel space before there was really any sort of well defined standard for a user space file system. Given that this is as far as I can remember the only major bug in it one might say that it hasn't really been that bad having it in kernel space.
So the tradeoff becomes do you want to have it in user space (where it would still vulnerable to DoS in this case) and sacrifice some speed or do you want it to run in the kernel at full speed?
Be careful who you call naive. You people against the Iraq war seem to think that people for it just don't know anything. Well let me clue you in. I *know* it is a project to go over there and rework the middle east. It's not like this is a vast right-wing conspiracy or anything. Bush and Cheney both consistently say they went to Iraq because it was the best place to start reshaping the middle east. I am okay with that! You are obviously not! But don't call me naive and say I don't know anything about it. I do know about it and I still support the war in Iraq, probably more so.
It has been not even 2 years and you are already marking it down as a failure? I knew going into Iraq that it was going to certainly extend past Bush's first term of office and probably past his second if he gets one.
Really, how could you not know going into the war in Iraq that the real agenda was to reshape the middle east and that it was going to take time? I knew this going in to the war and I supported it then and I still support it now. If you honestly believed we were going in there for the sole purpose of finding WMDs then you are the one who is naive, not I.
Replying to myself to clarify something here:
I should mention that I don't think that Clinton caused this recession either. The recession was the .com bubble bursting and it was right for Clinton to let it grow properly. Everyone knew it would burst at some point, just not when.
Realistically, Clinton could not have stopped it and more importantly it would have been wrong to try to do so. The recession does not make Clinton a bad president and it does not make Bush a bad president. It is unfortunately a necessary evil in a free market economy.
I think the big problem is that most analysts thought that .com burst would only affect the .com companies. Unfortunately, it drug the whole economy with it. That was in many ways simply unforeseeable.
Kerry is not an unknown. He says he's going to increase government spending and he says he's going to make you pay more taxes as he goes and spends more money (pay as you go, his phrase, not mine).
His strategy for Iraq is crap, he wants to turn it into another Vietnam. He talks about getting the guys that are there back home and sending in replacements. Bush did the *right* thing by extending the stay of our servicemen that are over there now. Where we got screwed in Vietnam was that the troops were rotated so frequently that no one had an effing clue what was going on.
Kerry is by far not an unknown. He has said exactly what he wants to do with the economy and what he wants to do in Irq and just about everything he has said is not how I would want it done. That is why I will not vote for Kerry.
Bush's record certainly isn't spotless but it's not bad. He successfully fought a recession by pushing tax breaks through congress. After 9/11 he put the world on notice that we are not afraid to use military force. First he went into afghanistan and devistated the command structure of the taliban (even though he didn't get the top guy). Then he went into Iraq and took Saddam out of power. Despite what Kerry says, diplomacy was already used. It had already failed. Saddam for over a decade had ignored the UN and was openly hostile towards the US. After seeing what a leader with an openly hostile US message (e.g. bin Laden) could do, Bush decided it wasn't worth the risk trying to deal with another one. So he made the command decision to go in and take him out.
Now you can respectfully disagree with the premise that the war in Iraq was the right thing to do. However, what you cannot do (but many people like to do anyway) is claim that Bush is an idiot for going into Iraq. It was a calculated command decision to take out a dictator hostile to the U.S. If I had been president and had just been attacked by one guy I'd probably start thinking the odds of being the attacked by the next guy are looking stronger. So I too would have taken Saddam out.
Still, I fear that you will probably not listen to anything in this message because you have already been indoctrinated with the "Bush bad" mentality. It's not hard to spot. Your message lacks any clear reason but contains a plethora of buzz words. See for yourself:
That's not an argument, it's a collection of buzz words straight from the left wingers.
Yes I have a source. I watched all of the presidential debates and the vice presidential debate. I watched the democratic national convention. I listened to what Kerry had to say. He is not shy when it comes to telling you about all of the social programs he wants to implement. In particular, he wants a national health care system. And he also won't even think about letting younger workers such as myself divert at least some of our social security tax into investments of our choosing.
He specifically talked about pay as you go. That is where he refuses to run a budget deficit even if it would make sense to do so. That means that in order to pay for all of these programs he's going to have to immediately raise taxes if he wants to stick to his word of having a budget surplus.
Of course, he dodges the issue quite well claiming he's only going to raise taxes on the top 1% of earners. First of all, I think that that plan is economically stupid (in fact _VERY_ stupid) even if it is politically popular. Secondly, I think he's full of shit when he says that's the only tax increase he's going to need. If he's serious about creating all of these new programs then he will need more income to pay for it. It's just that simple.
Let me go a step further though. He has claimed that his health care plan will be "optional". That it will be your choice if you want to buy in. Now, what's going to happen is that a lot of people are going to buy in to it if the price is right. At that point the competition with it is going to be scarce and basically you're going to be forced to either have that or to not have insurance. Now, if your rich you can get by without having insurance because you can pay for your own medical bills. This is exactly what rich people in countries with socialized medicine do. They have their own private hospitals and they pay in full. Meanwhile the average joe gets screwed because now he no longer has any choice but to use the government system.
I like Bush's plan for health care a lot better. Keep health care as a benefit to employment. Help ease the transition of health care when moving between employers. Let smaller companies band together in co-ops to get the bulk rates that large companies get. Kerry's plan is just socialized medicine that he is afraid to call socialized medicine.
I'll be the first to admit that if you vote for protecting the environment no matter what the cost then Bush is not your man.
As for economic prosperity, I think you are clearly wrong about Bush failing miserably. Bush's predecessor, Clinton, took over a growing economy and did a damn good job of continuing the growth. Despite the super-liberals he surrounded himself with (particularly his wife) he showed restraint and let the economy grow.
Unfortunately, things starting turning south towards the end of his term. Anybody who had money in the stock market knows that it started turning south before Bush took office. Bush then inherited the beginning of a recession.
To ease the recession he pushed tax cuts through congress. Now, some (Kerry in particular) claim that Bush's tax cuts only helped the rich but in reality most everyone got that little bit of extra money they needed to maintain their standard of living.
Kerry has come out and said he's going to increase government spending. As part of the pay as you go program that he loves to talk about so much he's going to raise taxes to do it. This is what he has said he's going to do. Increase federal programs and increase taxes to pay for it.
I certainly don't think that increasing spending and increasing taxes is going to help our economy. In fact, I think it could easily cause a recession about two years down the road (you normally figure 1-2 years between the time of the action and the result of it).
I think you are making the same mistake that the hardcore bible-thumpers make: taking the Bible literally. I did myself carefully read Genesis I and I think even if you do believe in evolution (and I do, I think it's the best theory we have to date) that the account of it in the Bible is really accurate.
Remember that the Bible is best read when you take it to be what it claims to be: the word of God with the caveat that it has been written by men. In the case of the old testament this was many thousands of years ago and it has been through several translations since then.
Pretend that you are God and you want to impart some knowledge to the beings you created about how they were created. You wouldn't just go out and explain the details because they would not understand. What you can do is talk about it allegorically. This story is then fairly easily passed on through the generations and finally someone writes it down along with other stories into a book.
In fact, the entire theory of evolution is really based on what the Bible says about creation. Over many years scientists have used what the Bible says about creation as the basis for forming more complete theories by filling in the blanks. This study (AFAICT, I can't read it due to the server being down) simply fills in more blanks. Anybody who thinks the Bible literally means God created the world in 7 days as we know them today is reading it incorrectly. Had Darwin thought it literally meant 7 days we wouldn't even have the theory. But Darwin took it to be a great story and began studying how it really happened. Do you think Darwin dreamed up his theory out of the blue? Wouldn't you think he starts with the assumption that animals come before man and works his way from there?
Basically what I am saying is that without the Bible the entire theory of evolution doesn't exist because no one would even know where to begin! Consider Genesis I to be the "Cliff's Notes" version of what really happened and we're still trying to write the real story.
I strongly recommend that you consider the Macintosh platform for use in your public library. Not only are the computers easy to use, but they are also easy to administer. Apple makes Mac OS X Server, a turn-key directory, file, e-mail, and print server at a reasonable cost ($1k for unlimited clients or included with an Xserve).
The only real disadvantage to Macintosh is that you cannot run Windows programs on it, although you cannot do that on Linux either. In a public setting this may be taken as an advantage as it prevents people from running the common Windows viruses.
Microsoft Office is available and well supported on the Mac which gives it an advantage over Linux. Microsoft Office for Mac is fully compatible with Office for Windows.
As another bonus, printing to PDF is built in. This can be very handy for people who wish to save something such as a web receipt to a file rather than print out a hardcopy. Also, the printing support in OS X is very good. Should a printer fail, as typically happens when a printer is used day in and day out, it is trivially simple to drag the document from one printer to another. The printers don't even have to be similar.
With respect to keeping the computers clean you could either import your database of library card holders into Open Diectory and give everyone his own user account, or you could set up a guest account, or both. For guest accounts you would of course want something that keeps the account clean. OS X is a true UNIX based system so normal user accounts are restricted to their home directory. It is trivially simple to write a script to wipe out the directory and replace it with a skeleton. Unlike Windows where a new user account has several values preloaded from the default user, on OS X a new user account only contains a few folders for storing data and one or two UNIX dotfiles.
As you mention, Linux would also be a good choice although Linux administration is generally more difficult. With OS X you've got a system already built for situations like yours. There is no need to ensure the OS will work with your hardware because Apple makes both the hardware and the OS. There is no need to figure out how to get OpenLDAP working on your own. There is no need to setup Samba or NFS on your own.
Sure, Linux has all the same backend software as OS X and Linux can be a very good choice. I know there are plenty of other people here who have extoled and will extole the virtues of it. However, if you want something that just works with a minimum of hassle then what you really want is a Mac.
And I bought a used Mac and used it with an MS trackball for the longest time then it died so I bought the zero-button mouse like I use with my Mac at work.
I typically get some wrist pain from using a traditional 2 or 3 button mouse which is why I started using trackballs over 10 years ago. Now that I know how a mouse is supposed to work I haven't looked back.
There is something very nice about the zero-button mouse. It fits nicely in my hand, which is amazing because I have very large hands with long fingers. The oblong shape seems to promote good mousing technique. I notice my wrist is always straight when I'm using it. Because I do have such long fingers they actually hang off the front of the mouse quite a bit so to click I am actually pressing down with my three middle fingers (index, middle, and ring) using the entire length of my fingers to push down rather than just pressing buttons located at the tips of my fingers.
Do I miss the three button mice that I'd become accustomed to? Maybe a little but not really. Whenever I am prone to right click I just use my left thumb to hold down the control key for a bit and that is that. I usually rest my left hand just to the left of the keyboard which is why control is often under my thumb. When I'm really using my computer I have both my hands on the keyboard anyway and just move my hand onto the mouse for brief moments to move the pointer and click.
I am a software developer and I do my text editing with gvim (no mouse involved there) and compiling using the command-line. I find that the mouse is best used for the very limited purpose of moving the pointer around and clicking. There is no need to clutter it up with extraneous functionality when the keyboard can provide everything. Why do I need a scroll wheel when there are plenty of movement keys on the keyboard?
Still, I will also admit that I'd find it impossible to use Windows or any of the popular Linux desktops with a Mac mouse. None of them are designed with 1 button in mind. For instance, Macs inherently have "gestures" which make 1-button mousing easier because you can always quickly hit the menubar and select a command.
For me, the hinged mouse is quite ideal. I'm sick of people bitching about how multi-button mice are somehow superior to the hinged mouse. To me, a multi-button mouse is like training wheels for the keyboard. If you are in fact using a Mac full-time I urge you to try out the oblong hinged mouse that comes with recent Macs. Force yourself to use it with your OS X machine for a month and then tell me how much you like your bulky 3-button mouse compared to the lightweight and easy to click hinged mouse.
I've got an idea for this. First of all I'm going to follow these instructions to make myself a GCC and cctools that target OS X on PPC. Then I'm considering going back and compiling Apple's GCC targetting Linux because I'm rather curious to get wxWindows (err, wxWidgets now) for Cocoa working with GNUstep. The apple version of GCC should still be able to target linux and of course does have an Objective-C++ compiler which I need for wxCocoa.
There's a trick here: hold down option when you click on Add. When you do so your add printer sheet will have an Advanced choice which will let you do everything you can do from the web interface.
Some may disagree with this, but I think this is actually a good interface. It hides the less common options from normal users but allows advanced users or administrators who know exactly how they want to configure the printer to do so exactly the way they want to.
Since this printer is attached to a Windows machine it should have been as simple as selecting Windows Printing and browsing through the network neighborhood to it, but sometimes the network neighborhood can be hosed (and this is a problem with MS networks in general, not Macs).
Being a NetWare administrator I can say without a doubt that NetWare is not a very "sexy" kernel. In fact, it's showing its age.
However, what makes NetWare a great OS is not its kernel but rather what runs atop that kernel. The NetWare file services have no equal. The file permissions are a breeze. The admin tools, while somewhat slow and cumbersome due to being Java applications, are quite powerful. NDS (now eDirectory) is unbelievably great.
Right now there is Nterprise Services for Linux which gives you eDirectory integrated with file and print services such as iFolder (a WebDAV based service) and Samba (CIFS, I'm sure you know what this is). The beauty of it is Novell's single sign on which allows users to log in once to eDirectory and gain access to everything, including some non-Novell services.
What is, sadly, sorely lacking is the excellent NCP file services and the NetWare file system. The latest buzz is that Novell will be porting NSS (their advanced file system and volume management) to Linux. I hope they also decide to port NCP for accessing it.
This is very exciting stuff because it's going to firmly plant NetWare far above competitors. It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few years.
huh? The U.S. government is a quite good patent assignee. Think of technology developed by or for NASA. In fact, I work on an image enhancment technology which was originally done by my company for a NASA contract. If you read the patent application, it has our employee's names on it along with the U.S. government.
After developing this we turned around and purchased a license so we could use the algorithm in our own software projects (i.e. PhotoFlair). That means that the government is able to use the technology and so are we. The government doesn't have to pay us anything to use our algorithms.
I don't think there's anything at all wrong with that. The algorithm was developed on their dollar and so they have the rights to implement the algorithm however they wish.
In fact, it seems to me that (for a change) the patent system is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing!