Although there doesn't seem to be much detail about exactly what Safari is mistakenly doing to cause these bugs, I don't think they would happen to a normal (not in the admin group) user.
Actually I'm a little perplexed about the home directory thing and would like to see more details on what is going on./Users on both of my machines is writable by root and the wheel group, but not the admin group. It doesn't seem like this could happen without write permission to/Users, so it sounds a bit fishy. However, if the user were in the wheel group, that could explain it.
The/tmp thing is easily accomplished if the user is in the admin group since most Apple software updates like to chmod g+w / even when I don't want it that way.
Personally, I run everything as a non-admin user and have a special "admin" account which is the only one in the admin group. I've ranted on this before, but I still think Apple would have been better off telling people, when they first configure the machine, to simply enter a special administrative password, separate from their normal password. Behind the scenes, they would create an admin user, but any non-advanced user would need not even know that administrative privileges are given via a separate account. All they need to know is their regular account (non-admin) password and the admin password. The facilities for this setup are mostly there - many system-type actions (system-wide prefs, software installs) already ask for an administrative user/password. Just dump the user part (defaulting to "admin"), so as not to confuse non-advanced users. Then add stuff in places like the Finder - try to copy a new program to/Applications and get a dialog asking for the password. Make it as seamless as possible.
I really think this sort of scheme would have been better, more in line with the traditional Unix security model while still giving people full control over their machines without absolutely requiring knowledge of "root," "sudo" and other Unixisms. Advanced (or wreckless) users could even be given the option to "give my account full time administrative privileges" (add to the admin group) with proper warnings of possible doom.
This makes me wonder... do ya think Apple's X11 server will use Quartz font rendering when it gets out of beta? Don't know how feasible that would even be to do, but damn, that would rock. Especially if it means all X11 applications can access the OS X native fonts that I can't get at all for X11.
Heh. My wife and I finally decided to bite the wireless bullet and ordered a Linksys base station and Airport card for the iBook last week (we'd been dragging a 100ft cat5 cable around the apartment before that, fun!). Then a couple days later I read the rumors of 802.11g and was thinking, "Crap, I should have waited!" I'm almost glad the new Airport Extreme card won't work in the iBook, so now I don't regret the order, which should arrive today. Only thing is the original Airport card is now $79, so maybe we'll return this one to Amazon and buy one cheaper at the Apple Store tonight.
Most music that's out these days is pure crap. I had no idea that I could take a dump in a jewel case and sell it for $15.99.
Most movies that are out these days are pure crap. I had no idea that I could take a dump in a DVD case and sell it for $19.99. Your point? Yes, you love these movies, as you say. Great, I have no problem with that - I enjoyed them when I saw them too. But to assert that there is some fundamental different between the MPAA and the RIAA because you like a particular movie but not most music is ridiculous.
I think the MPAA and RIAA are really not very different at all. They both sell packaged entertainment produced for very similar media. One is audio only but has the advantage that you can enjoy it while concentrating on something else. The other requires more full attention to enjoy but has the advantage that it includes video in addition to the audio. Not much else is different for the consumer.
So you like movies and don't care much about music. Great. Personally, I like a select few movies and a select few musical artists or albums. My opinion is that the rest of it (well over 99.99%) in boths cases is pure crap. For the ones that I do feel are good, I'm like you in this instance: I'll gladly pay for a good product, even if I own the same thing on another medium. Remastered CDs are a good example - I own two copies of a few that I really like because it was worth it to me to get the improved sound quality of the remaster.
I'm rambling, but my point is only that your generalization about the MPAA vs. RIAA simply cannot be made based on your personal preference alone. As you say, put stuff in the package that people WANT, and they will buy. Music or movies, doesn't make a difference. Or in the case of many consumer sheep, just tell them that they want it, even if it's crap, and they will buy.;-)
Yup, thanks. I'd forgot to mention that I was planning to try that before scrapping things altogether. 2 days later and all seems well, so that's good! It just bothers me when something like a software update gets such a critical error in the middle of things - I'd hope Apple would make these as simple and bullet-proof as possible so as to avoid such situations.
Worked great on my QuickSilver, not so great on the iBook. The iBook got a bus error 74% into the install. After that point, it wouldn't recognize 3404 as a valid update name and I couldn't find any way to force it to re-update (and the softwareupdate man page seems to be gone from Jaguar, phooey!).
Since I did the 10.2.2 and the most recent QuickTime update at the same time, I'm hoping 74% was where it finished 10.2.2 and tried to start QuickTime. Successive tries on the QuickTime update failed with a segfault - I found a log complaining about a different running Framework version - maybe installing 10.2.2 first messed that up? I rebooted and installed the QuickTime update no problem.
So now the question is, do I trust that the update was ok and leave it? Or do I assume something's probably screwed up, backup my data and reinstall Jaguar from scratch? I generally like to be paranoid about this stuff, but it's such a pain. Decisions, decisions. I'm still at work (command-line softwareupdate over ssh rocks, usually!) so I can't tell if the machine really seems ok other than it lets me ssh in still.
...an issue I submitted through Developer bug reporting...
For those of us who aren't as involved with the Apple developer community, I'm curious what's the avenue for this kind of bug reporting? I've submitted several bug reports for 10.2.1 through Mac OS X feedback on the Apple website, but I seriously doubt that's the best path to the right developers within Apple. I also have my doubts as to whether these bugs have been fixed (they're pretty obscure), but I suppose I'll cross my fingers til I get home tonight and can test 10.2.2.
They appear to have dropped the 2-disc plan mentioned elsewhere. Oh well.
Really? I still have it as an option, and in fact I downgraded my standard service to that plan a week or two ago. It's supposed to take effect this Thursday, when my current month of service ends.
It looks like maybe they now only offer it to customers who don't rent much. Under Your Account -> Upgrade or Downgrade Membership, it says for me:
And a special offer based on your usage of the service!
Netflix Lite (2 out)
A special program for our infrequent renters, our Lite Program lets you have 2 movies out at a time for a flat monthly fee of $13.95.
We haven't been watching many movies lately (too busy!) so maybe our account got flagged as eligible for Netflix Lite. It's nice that we have the option since we haven't really gotten our money's worth the last couple of months on the standard plan.
I'm curious - did it just lock up the drive, or did it actually make the system become unusable? I've seen the latter happen with a malformed mixed-mode CD (I was working on creating one and it took a couple tries to get everything right). Didn't crash the OS, but might as well have. I couldn't start new gui programs but I could ssh in ok. However, sudo reboot would never actually reboot the machine - it would take down most processes and then hang waiting for something (presumably in the CD I/O subsystem). Basically I had to hit reset at that point.
When I got my CD burned properly, it was no problem. But even with bad data, the system should never hang like that, so I hope they will fix it! (yes, I submitted feedback about this, but I suspect it's not the most direct path to the developers involved)
Heh. Whoops, forgot to mention that both of my machines have 640 MB memory. I suppose that would help after going on about how you have to take such things into account. Doofus!
Widely varying accounts
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Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Something I've noticed is that there are very widely varying accounts of OS X's speed on various hardware. To some people it's unbearable, while to others it's snappy. Let's try to take a look at some of the factors:
Opinion. Yes, most Mac lovers will tend to rate OS X as faster than Mac bashers will. Part of it is blind allegiance to or against the cause. The other part, I think, is that UI responsiveness doesn't seem to matter to many folks beyond a certain point. So what if your window resizes in 0.2 seconds rather than 0.00005? Yeah, if you sit there resizing windows nonstop, it'll hurt, but for most people that's not a big deal. What makes OS X great for many of us is that it allows us to work faster overall, regardless of whether certain things take a second or fraction thereof longer than on other platforms.
Along these lines, some people can put up with a much more sluggish UI - thus the "I run OS X on my Mac Classic and it runs fine!" posts. And on the other end of the spectrum, anything less than instantaneous is unacceptable to some people. Again, I think allegiance one way or another can play a part in this.
Jaguar? When someone says OS X is slow, make sure they're talking about Jaguar. If not, it's pretty meaningless because Jaguar did come with major improvements in speed. I was skeptical, but I noticed the difference immediately after I installed. Not an "I think it may be faster" placebo effect, but measurable results. My time from login to when I could actually do something went from 30-45 seconds down to 2. Why was it so slow in 10.1? No idea, but thankfully Jaguar fixed that. Applications open in one or two bounces instead of 6 or 10. Plenty of room for improvement, but fast enough that I don't find myself waiting for the machine much these days.
Installation. Before installing Jaguar, I'd read that installing some of the extra localization packages and Japanese fonts can slow things down considerably. I made sure those were unchecked, so I can't comment personally on the difference, but I have no complaints with my setup!
Hardware. Obvious. The biggest factor being memory, the next biggest being machine model/CPU. If someone complains about OS X being slow when they're running out of memory, well, duh.
That said, my own personal opinion is that it's fast enough for me. I run it on a G4 733 MHz tower and a 600 MHz iBook. In general, speed is such a non-issue that I never think about it. I have plenty of things on my wishlist for OS X to improve, and while speed is there, it's not terribly high. I don't find myself ever frustrated by a lack of speed with anything. I use iMovie, iDVD, XDarwin, Mozilla/Chimera, Quicken, iTunes, Terminal, and plenty more pretty extensively. Again, take my hardware, OS version (Jaguar) and personal biases (like Mac, OS X) into account.
Even so, lately the iBook has been taking several seconds to login, where it used to be about 2 seconds when we first got it. Not sure why, but cleaning out ~/Library always seems to help. If not that, then it's probably something in/System or/Library. I'm not too thrilled that OS X seems to exhibit its own version of "registry rot," slowing down over time. I'd like to say that sort of problem only afflicts MS users but it's not my experience with OS X. Hopefully they're working hard on fixing and optimizing this stuff - and before it gets to a point where I do think it's too slow!
Yep, that's how it goes. My wife and I bought a 600 MHz iBook with DVD drive and 30 GB disk about 6 weeks ago, knowing full well that Apple would likely update the line before year's end. We decided we'd rather have it "now" (at the time) than wait and possibly get something better. Even if Apple released new models the next day.
Looking at the Apple store, I see now we could get 700 MHz for $200 less than we paid, or 800 MHz + 32 MB video memory + Combo drive for $50 less. But that's how it goes in computers. Buy what you need now, or forever wait for the next better, cheaper thing. Sure, I wouldn't mind the nicer computer and/or savings, but I'm also glad we've already had the thing for over a month.
Yep, that's how it works as an NFS client. However, I was rather upset the other week when I discovered that it does not work this way as an NFS server. Let me explain.
I recently got a new iBook and was setting it up to work with my PowerMac, also running Jaguar, and my FreeBSD PC. NFS mounts all around, everyone's happy (or so I think). I can read/write files with resource forks from either Mac to any NFS server and I get the._FileNames. Works great.
But if that server is also a Mac serving up a HFS+ filesystem over NFS, the resource forks don't get translated to._FileNames. Bad! I couldn't read my Quicken data files over NFS because of this. Instead I had to mount the directory as AFS, which is a pain in the butt because it's a per-user mount rather than system-wide like NFS. Every time I login and want to access files with resource forks, I have to reconnect to the AFS server, making an extra hassle. Yeah, I can automate this too, but it's a kludge and still only works per user.
By my reckoning, if they were going to kludge NFS to support resource forks, they needed to make sure it works both ways. Pissed me off royally that night, but even so, OS X is still the best Unix I've ever used. I just wish it were a tiny bit better.;-)
And for what it's worth, MOTU already made a similar announcement back in July (pdf, screen shot). When that happens, I'll no longer have a use for my trusty old 7600, which runs Digital Performer on OS 8.6 since the QuickSilver runs OS X only.
Hmm, that's about it. Would be nice if they could include an option for the installer to download from a web url, but I imagine they don't have the resources to throw at little details like that. I do have Mozilla configured to save tardist files to disk, so I can skip the step of opening a new installer.
The only problem is when installing packages directly over the internet and a dependency package turns out to be needed too.
Just download the tardist and add it as another distribution. freeware.sgi.com rocks.;-)
Re:The one button + mods == three buttons fallacy
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Flirting With Mac OS X
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· Score: 1
Just now getting to replying. Maybe you'll see this, maybe you won't.;-)
They don't really care, we are supposed to adopt the "Mac Way" like some sort of cult. Screw that.
All they're doing by providing a one-button mouse is making easier for people who've never used a computer before. That's a substantial part of their market and they know that multiple buttons confuse totally new users (ask anyone who's done tech support). Anyone else can spend $30 (which is nothing compared to the initial system cost anyway) to get more buttons or use modifier keys.
Still, I'll admit you have a valid point - a build-to-order option for multiple buttons on a laptop would be great. Only problem is it'd likely increase production cost a lot to have multiple configurations, and it'd confuse those totally new users who assume "more is better" and get the multibutton version without knowing what it really means. But yeah, I'd love one, myself.;-)
> man ditto
Did. Now go read www.macosxlabs.org where they report that using the switch to copy resources causes unexplainable failures.
Interesting. A quick perusal of their site didn't show that report obviously, but I'm curious what happened. I've used ditto since I found out about it (after realizing my backups using tar did not preserve the resource fork - ouch!) with no problems. Backed up and restored 40 gigs of user data last week when I upgraded to Jaguar and decided to repartition the drive as part of the process. If it does have problems, then certainly they should get fixed, but I saw none myself.
It is obvious you are a Mac user who has read up a bit on this "unix thing" that they dropped on you with OSX but you probably don't depend on those subsystems yet. I'm a UNIX user exploring OSX starting from their promise it was "UNIX with a pretty face." It ain't.
Heh. I must not be very transparent. I've been using Unix as my primary OS for 9 years, including Linux (started with 0.99p12), FreeBSD (my PC Unix of choice now), IRIX, Solaris, SunOS, HPUX, AIX, etc, etc. Yes, I've used Macs in that time and had an older PowerMac (currently running OS 8.6) which was for music only, but my Linux or FreeBSD pc was always the main machine. Until OS X.
I'm like you - bought a newer Mac specifically for OS X. But I suppose the difference is that I love it, while you still have issues with it. That's fine. There are still plenty of things I'd like to see "fixed" or upgraded. Jaguar was a major upgrade for me - I held off for a month because 10.1.5 was "good enough." But when my login time went from 30+ seconds to 2, and most apps now open in 1 bounce instead of 5-10, I'm quite the happy camper. It's been less than a week, so I can't comment on overall stability yet. But I do hope it's improved over 10.1.5.
Anyway it's been an interesting and enjoyable discussion.;-)
Re:The one button + mods == three buttons fallacy
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Flirting With Mac OS X
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· Score: 2
Programs like GIMP use all three buttons alone AND in combination with the 'bucky bits.'
Right. And Gimp was never designed for Mac. Really, not much design went into its user interface at all: it's pretty horrid by any professional gui developer's standards. I hear they're seriously revamping it for the next big version - hope so. That said, I love Gimp and use it nearly every day - with my multibutton scroll wheel mouse under OS X. Works great.
Three buttons are vital to productive use of non-trivial GUI apps on a *NIX workstation, iBooks, having but one button, therefore are NOT suitable for serious UNIX work, QED.
If you can't get along with modifier keys (and Xdarwin allows you to setup 3-button emulation so you do get all 3 buttons), then fine. Don't get an iBook. Or get an external mouse and use that.
Macs were never designed to use software with crappy user interfaces - anything that requires multiple buttons plus multiple modifier keys simultaneously is not a good interface. Necessary for the extreme power user, perhaps (see CAD, et al). But still arguably not good. And I'd argue that the vast majority of Unix software (especially open source) has bad interfaces because the programmers lacked any knowledge on what consitutes a good user interface. They're geeks coding for geeks, so they don't worry about this stuff. Apple does - it's their core market. They can't be everything to everyone (and they don't even want to!) so they concentrate on this. They're happy being the BMW of computer makers, as long as they keep making a profit overall.
It is painfully obvious that the BSD portions of OSX is just as much a neglected stepchild as the old POSIX subsystem in NT.
Examples? One I can think of off the top of my head is that "w" is still not fully functional: it doesn't actually display what the users are running. And utmp isn't updated when somebody logs out. Sloppy, perhaps, but critical? Not for me. Apple has finite resources and I'm sure this is pretty damn low on the priority list. (darn, I'm sounding like an Apple apologist fanboy, better cut it out)
Try moving an OSX filesystem from one location to another.
man ditto
But again, I agree with you in part. I think the standard unix utilities do need to be modified to handle Mac-specific quirks. Like handling carriage returns transparently as newlines in vi and less. Or cp, tar, et al handling resource forks (ditto does, but only with a command-line option).
As others have pointed out, the question of whether Apple might move to x86 has been brought up numerous times before. So far any such speculation is just that - speculation. And in my opinion, very short sighted and/or overly hopeful. Sure, I always wanted to run OS X on my PC. But that was a pipe dream so I bought a new Mac. Couldn't be happier.
Let's go over this one last time. First, Apple will never release OS X to run on a generic Intel PC. If they did, they'd sell about 100,000 copies to geeks who don't want to buy Apple hardware. When those geeks find out that there's no software for OS X/Intel, they'll gradually move back to dual booting Linux and WinXP, leaving OS X as an interesting oddity like the copy of BeOS they installed once too. I mean, you can only watch the genie effect or transparent Terminal windows on top of a screensaver running on the desktop so many times before it gets old.
Let's not even get into the nightmare that it is to support every piece of crap cheapo PC hardware combination like MS has to. Apple does not want that, period.
Why will there be no software? Look at how long it took (and is still taking in many cases) vendors to update their software for OS X. Now imagine Apple pissing them off by telling them to recompile and retest under OS X for Intel. Sure, that part probably won't be as big as moving from OS 9 (unless they've got a lot of endian or other hardware specific code), but recall how long it took vendors to switch to PowerPC native code. Ain't gonna happen. Let's imagine: OS X Intel comes out; Apple tries to convince developers to support it, but they (wisely) wait and see how it goes. Nobody buys it, and software vendors see that it's going nowhere, so they don't bother with it. No software == no point. Good luck!
Furthermore, what's the incentive to port to OS X Intel if (a) it's a relatively small, untested market, and (b) more importantly, they already have a Windows version that works fine? Along these lines, for Apple to provide any sort of VMware-like Windows emulation under OS X Intel would be suicide for the platform. Application vendors would just tell their customers to run it under Windows/VMware. What then is the incentive to develop a version for OS X Intel?
For Apple to move their own hardware to Intel would also piss off a lot of people. They pulled it off once with PowerPC, but that was truly necessary. It went amazingly smoothly, but it was really a couple of years before PowerPC native apps starting showing up in numbers and the newest PowerPCs were fast enough to emulate the old 68ks as fast as the last ones. Does anyone really want to go through all that again? It would be a couple of years before Apple would even hope to be up to par with Windows in performance! Not gonna happen.
Sure, I don't doubt that Marklar exists. It does give them that last desperation option, when there's no hope for anything else. But perhaps more importantly, it serves to improve the OS X codebase simply by making it platform transparent. The one instance where I could possibly see an Intel-based product from Apple would be XServe. Just a thought - but if you're not likely to be running PhotoShop or ProTools or Quark on a server, perhaps an Apple branded unit with Intel would work out with all Apple server software.
The only intelligent thing Haddad says is in the second to last paragraph, where he essentially acknowledges that software would be the biggest roadblock. Developers will likely balk at the prospect of porting to yet another platform, and "without software support, the Mac would truly be dead." Exactly.
Of course, the most likely scenario lies with the rumors of the Apple/IBM collaboration on a next generation PowerPC chip. That's where I'd put my money. Nobody knows if/when G5 will ever come out and Motorola doesn't seem to care about the non-embedded market. Hopefully IBM can bring Apple back to the days when PowerPC really did crush the Pentium. We'll see.
That's fine if you're the only person who uses the machine. But when you share with someone else (my wife in my case), you find yourself logging in and out at least once a day, if not more. Waiting for everything to start up again each time can be a real drag if it takes more than a second or two per app. Especially when it's something as simple as Terminal, which by all accounts should open more or less instantaneously.
But then again, an iBook with Airport is high on our Christmas wishlist, so perhaps this won't be a problem in the future. Instead of fighting over who gets to use the PowerMac, we'll fight over who gets to roam around the house instead of being chained to the desk.;-)
I haven't been following any IRIX roadmaps lately, but it seems that IRIX 7 will likely never happen. I went to SGI's Developer Forum in '97, when 6.5 was relatively new. Several of the sessions talked about all the great things that they were doing for IRIX 7, due out no later than the following summer. 5 years later and we're on something like 6.5.17. SGI continues to pump out minor maintenance and feature releases, but you certainly get the feeling that IRIX isn't going much further these days.
'Tis a shame, really. Back in the day, IRIX was the best Unix out there, bar none (my opinion, of course). It has some fantastic technologies that still aren't matched in most other Unices (guaranteed rate realtime I/O - would love to see this in OS X, NUMA, hundreds of processors running off a single system image, OpenGL integration, more) and had the best/easiest user interface and admin tools at the time. Sadly, SGI has struggled the past 5 years and has done little of interest with their OS. As others here already said, I recall reading that they're working on adding some of their high scalability technology to Linux so it will run on their big iron. If this is their current direction, R.I.P. IRIX.
I still like my O2 at work, but now I'm just bummed that my request to replace it with a new PowerMac was denied. OS X rocks.
Don't know why it isn't linked to the main iCal page, but maybe you can give Apple some feedback on this. They've been reportedly pretty good about listening to user feedback the last couple of years (but we'll see if they fix those iMovie or iTunes bugs I reported last weekend...).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I'm a little perplexed about the home directory thing and would like to see more details on what is going on. /Users on both of my machines is writable by root and the wheel group, but not the admin group. It doesn't seem like this could happen without write permission to /Users, so it sounds a bit fishy. However, if the user were in the wheel group, that could explain it.
The /tmp thing is easily accomplished if the user is in the admin group since most Apple software updates like to chmod g+w / even when I don't want it that way.
Personally, I run everything as a non-admin user and have a special "admin" account which is the only one in the admin group. I've ranted on this before, but I still think Apple would have been better off telling people, when they first configure the machine, to simply enter a special administrative password, separate from their normal password. Behind the scenes, they would create an admin user, but any non-advanced user would need not even know that administrative privileges are given via a separate account. All they need to know is their regular account (non-admin) password and the admin password. The facilities for this setup are mostly there - many system-type actions (system-wide prefs, software installs) already ask for an administrative user/password. Just dump the user part (defaulting to "admin"), so as not to confuse non-advanced users. Then add stuff in places like the Finder - try to copy a new program to /Applications and get a dialog asking for the password. Make it as seamless as possible.
I really think this sort of scheme would have been better, more in line with the traditional Unix security model while still giving people full control over their machines without absolutely requiring knowledge of "root," "sudo" and other Unixisms. Advanced (or wreckless) users could even be given the option to "give my account full time administrative privileges" (add to the admin group) with proper warnings of possible doom.
This makes me wonder... do ya think Apple's X11 server will use Quartz font rendering when it gets out of beta? Don't know how feasible that would even be to do, but damn, that would rock. Especially if it means all X11 applications can access the OS X native fonts that I can't get at all for X11.
Heh. My wife and I finally decided to bite the wireless bullet and ordered a Linksys base station and Airport card for the iBook last week (we'd been dragging a 100ft cat5 cable around the apartment before that, fun!). Then a couple days later I read the rumors of 802.11g and was thinking, "Crap, I should have waited!" I'm almost glad the new Airport Extreme card won't work in the iBook, so now I don't regret the order, which should arrive today. Only thing is the original Airport card is now $79, so maybe we'll return this one to Amazon and buy one cheaper at the Apple Store tonight.
Most movies that are out these days are pure crap. I had no idea that I could take a dump in a DVD case and sell it for $19.99. Your point? Yes, you love these movies, as you say. Great, I have no problem with that - I enjoyed them when I saw them too. But to assert that there is some fundamental different between the MPAA and the RIAA because you like a particular movie but not most music is ridiculous.
I think the MPAA and RIAA are really not very different at all. They both sell packaged entertainment produced for very similar media. One is audio only but has the advantage that you can enjoy it while concentrating on something else. The other requires more full attention to enjoy but has the advantage that it includes video in addition to the audio. Not much else is different for the consumer.
So you like movies and don't care much about music. Great. Personally, I like a select few movies and a select few musical artists or albums. My opinion is that the rest of it (well over 99.99%) in boths cases is pure crap. For the ones that I do feel are good, I'm like you in this instance: I'll gladly pay for a good product, even if I own the same thing on another medium. Remastered CDs are a good example - I own two copies of a few that I really like because it was worth it to me to get the improved sound quality of the remaster.
I'm rambling, but my point is only that your generalization about the MPAA vs. RIAA simply cannot be made based on your personal preference alone. As you say, put stuff in the package that people WANT, and they will buy. Music or movies, doesn't make a difference. Or in the case of many consumer sheep, just tell them that they want it, even if it's crap, and they will buy. ;-)
XPostFacto. Haven't tried it myself, but it reportedly works.
Yup, thanks. I'd forgot to mention that I was planning to try that before scrapping things altogether. 2 days later and all seems well, so that's good! It just bothers me when something like a software update gets such a critical error in the middle of things - I'd hope Apple would make these as simple and bullet-proof as possible so as to avoid such situations.
Since I did the 10.2.2 and the most recent QuickTime update at the same time, I'm hoping 74% was where it finished 10.2.2 and tried to start QuickTime. Successive tries on the QuickTime update failed with a segfault - I found a log complaining about a different running Framework version - maybe installing 10.2.2 first messed that up? I rebooted and installed the QuickTime update no problem.
So now the question is, do I trust that the update was ok and leave it? Or do I assume something's probably screwed up, backup my data and reinstall Jaguar from scratch? I generally like to be paranoid about this stuff, but it's such a pain. Decisions, decisions. I'm still at work (command-line softwareupdate over ssh rocks, usually!) so I can't tell if the machine really seems ok other than it lets me ssh in still.
Fun!
For those of us who aren't as involved with the Apple developer community, I'm curious what's the avenue for this kind of bug reporting? I've submitted several bug reports for 10.2.1 through Mac OS X feedback on the Apple website, but I seriously doubt that's the best path to the right developers within Apple. I also have my doubts as to whether these bugs have been fixed (they're pretty obscure), but I suppose I'll cross my fingers til I get home tonight and can test 10.2.2.
Really? I still have it as an option, and in fact I downgraded my standard service to that plan a week or two ago. It's supposed to take effect this Thursday, when my current month of service ends.
It looks like maybe they now only offer it to customers who don't rent much. Under Your Account -> Upgrade or Downgrade Membership, it says for me:
We haven't been watching many movies lately (too busy!) so maybe our account got flagged as eligible for Netflix Lite. It's nice that we have the option since we haven't really gotten our money's worth the last couple of months on the standard plan.When I got my CD burned properly, it was no problem. But even with bad data, the system should never hang like that, so I hope they will fix it! (yes, I submitted feedback about this, but I suspect it's not the most direct path to the developers involved)
Heh. Whoops, forgot to mention that both of my machines have 640 MB memory. I suppose that would help after going on about how you have to take such things into account. Doofus!
Along these lines, some people can put up with a much more sluggish UI - thus the "I run OS X on my Mac Classic and it runs fine!" posts. And on the other end of the spectrum, anything less than instantaneous is unacceptable to some people. Again, I think allegiance one way or another can play a part in this.
That said, my own personal opinion is that it's fast enough for me. I run it on a G4 733 MHz tower and a 600 MHz iBook. In general, speed is such a non-issue that I never think about it. I have plenty of things on my wishlist for OS X to improve, and while speed is there, it's not terribly high. I don't find myself ever frustrated by a lack of speed with anything. I use iMovie, iDVD, XDarwin, Mozilla/Chimera, Quicken, iTunes, Terminal, and plenty more pretty extensively. Again, take my hardware, OS version (Jaguar) and personal biases (like Mac, OS X) into account.
Even so, lately the iBook has been taking several seconds to login, where it used to be about 2 seconds when we first got it. Not sure why, but cleaning out ~/Library always seems to help. If not that, then it's probably something in /System or /Library. I'm not too thrilled that OS X seems to exhibit its own version of "registry rot," slowing down over time. I'd like to say that sort of problem only afflicts MS users but it's not my experience with OS X. Hopefully they're working hard on fixing and optimizing this stuff - and before it gets to a point where I do think it's too slow!
Take a look at google's cache from the Apple Store. Previously we had:
- $1199 600 MHz 12"
- $1249 Custom Built 600 MHz 12" (adds DVD drive)
- $1499 700 MHz 12"
- $1799 700 MHz 14"
I don't see any 14" model for $1499.Today we have:
- $999 700 MHz 12" ($200 less)
- No low end Custom Built
- $1299 800 MHz 12" ($200 less)
- $1599 800 MHz 14" ($200 less)
- $1849 800 MHz 14" Custom Built with more stuff (no previous equivalent)
Works out, huh?Looking at the Apple store, I see now we could get 700 MHz for $200 less than we paid, or 800 MHz + 32 MB video memory + Combo drive for $50 less. But that's how it goes in computers. Buy what you need now, or forever wait for the next better, cheaper thing. Sure, I wouldn't mind the nicer computer and/or savings, but I'm also glad we've already had the thing for over a month.
I recently got a new iBook and was setting it up to work with my PowerMac, also running Jaguar, and my FreeBSD PC. NFS mounts all around, everyone's happy (or so I think). I can read/write files with resource forks from either Mac to any NFS server and I get the ._FileNames. Works great.
But if that server is also a Mac serving up a HFS+ filesystem over NFS, the resource forks don't get translated to ._FileNames. Bad! I couldn't read my Quicken data files over NFS because of this. Instead I had to mount the directory as AFS, which is a pain in the butt because it's a per-user mount rather than system-wide like NFS. Every time I login and want to access files with resource forks, I have to reconnect to the AFS server, making an extra hassle. Yeah, I can automate this too, but it's a kludge and still only works per user.
By my reckoning, if they were going to kludge NFS to support resource forks, they needed to make sure it works both ways. Pissed me off royally that night, but even so, OS X is still the best Unix I've ever used. I just wish it were a tiny bit better. ;-)
And for what it's worth, MOTU already made a similar announcement back in July (pdf, screen shot). When that happens, I'll no longer have a use for my trusty old 7600, which runs Digital Performer on OS 8.6 since the QuickSilver runs OS X only.
Hmm, that's about it. Would be nice if they could include an option for the installer to download from a web url, but I imagine they don't have the resources to throw at little details like that. I do have Mozilla configured to save tardist files to disk, so I can skip the step of opening a new installer.
Just download the tardist and add it as another distribution. freeware.sgi.com rocks. ;-)
They don't really care, we are supposed to adopt the "Mac Way" like some sort of cult. Screw that.
All they're doing by providing a one-button mouse is making easier for people who've never used a computer before. That's a substantial part of their market and they know that multiple buttons confuse totally new users (ask anyone who's done tech support). Anyone else can spend $30 (which is nothing compared to the initial system cost anyway) to get more buttons or use modifier keys.
Still, I'll admit you have a valid point - a build-to-order option for multiple buttons on a laptop would be great. Only problem is it'd likely increase production cost a lot to have multiple configurations, and it'd confuse those totally new users who assume "more is better" and get the multibutton version without knowing what it really means. But yeah, I'd love one, myself. ;-)
> man ditto
Did. Now go read www.macosxlabs.org where they report that using the switch to copy resources causes unexplainable failures.
Interesting. A quick perusal of their site didn't show that report obviously, but I'm curious what happened. I've used ditto since I found out about it (after realizing my backups using tar did not preserve the resource fork - ouch!) with no problems. Backed up and restored 40 gigs of user data last week when I upgraded to Jaguar and decided to repartition the drive as part of the process. If it does have problems, then certainly they should get fixed, but I saw none myself.
It is obvious you are a Mac user who has read up a bit on this "unix thing" that they dropped on you with OSX but you probably don't depend on those subsystems yet. I'm a UNIX user exploring OSX starting from their promise it was "UNIX with a pretty face." It ain't.
Heh. I must not be very transparent. I've been using Unix as my primary OS for 9 years, including Linux (started with 0.99p12), FreeBSD (my PC Unix of choice now), IRIX, Solaris, SunOS, HPUX, AIX, etc, etc. Yes, I've used Macs in that time and had an older PowerMac (currently running OS 8.6) which was for music only, but my Linux or FreeBSD pc was always the main machine. Until OS X.
I'm like you - bought a newer Mac specifically for OS X. But I suppose the difference is that I love it, while you still have issues with it. That's fine. There are still plenty of things I'd like to see "fixed" or upgraded. Jaguar was a major upgrade for me - I held off for a month because 10.1.5 was "good enough." But when my login time went from 30+ seconds to 2, and most apps now open in 1 bounce instead of 5-10, I'm quite the happy camper. It's been less than a week, so I can't comment on overall stability yet. But I do hope it's improved over 10.1.5.
Anyway it's been an interesting and enjoyable discussion. ;-)
Right. And Gimp was never designed for Mac. Really, not much design went into its user interface at all: it's pretty horrid by any professional gui developer's standards. I hear they're seriously revamping it for the next big version - hope so. That said, I love Gimp and use it nearly every day - with my multibutton scroll wheel mouse under OS X. Works great.
Three buttons are vital to productive use of non-trivial GUI apps on a *NIX workstation, iBooks, having but one button, therefore are NOT suitable for serious UNIX work, QED.
If you can't get along with modifier keys (and Xdarwin allows you to setup 3-button emulation so you do get all 3 buttons), then fine. Don't get an iBook. Or get an external mouse and use that.
Macs were never designed to use software with crappy user interfaces - anything that requires multiple buttons plus multiple modifier keys simultaneously is not a good interface. Necessary for the extreme power user, perhaps (see CAD, et al). But still arguably not good. And I'd argue that the vast majority of Unix software (especially open source) has bad interfaces because the programmers lacked any knowledge on what consitutes a good user interface. They're geeks coding for geeks, so they don't worry about this stuff. Apple does - it's their core market. They can't be everything to everyone (and they don't even want to!) so they concentrate on this. They're happy being the BMW of computer makers, as long as they keep making a profit overall.
It is painfully obvious that the BSD portions of OSX is just as much a neglected stepchild as the old POSIX subsystem in NT.
Examples? One I can think of off the top of my head is that "w" is still not fully functional: it doesn't actually display what the users are running. And utmp isn't updated when somebody logs out. Sloppy, perhaps, but critical? Not for me. Apple has finite resources and I'm sure this is pretty damn low on the priority list. (darn, I'm sounding like an Apple apologist fanboy, better cut it out)
Try moving an OSX filesystem from one location to another.
man ditto
But again, I agree with you in part. I think the standard unix utilities do need to be modified to handle Mac-specific quirks. Like handling carriage returns transparently as newlines in vi and less. Or cp, tar, et al handling resource forks (ditto does, but only with a command-line option).
Let's go over this one last time. First, Apple will never release OS X to run on a generic Intel PC. If they did, they'd sell about 100,000 copies to geeks who don't want to buy Apple hardware. When those geeks find out that there's no software for OS X/Intel, they'll gradually move back to dual booting Linux and WinXP, leaving OS X as an interesting oddity like the copy of BeOS they installed once too. I mean, you can only watch the genie effect or transparent Terminal windows on top of a screensaver running on the desktop so many times before it gets old.
Let's not even get into the nightmare that it is to support every piece of crap cheapo PC hardware combination like MS has to. Apple does not want that, period.
Why will there be no software? Look at how long it took (and is still taking in many cases) vendors to update their software for OS X. Now imagine Apple pissing them off by telling them to recompile and retest under OS X for Intel. Sure, that part probably won't be as big as moving from OS 9 (unless they've got a lot of endian or other hardware specific code), but recall how long it took vendors to switch to PowerPC native code. Ain't gonna happen. Let's imagine: OS X Intel comes out; Apple tries to convince developers to support it, but they (wisely) wait and see how it goes. Nobody buys it, and software vendors see that it's going nowhere, so they don't bother with it. No software == no point. Good luck!
Furthermore, what's the incentive to port to OS X Intel if (a) it's a relatively small, untested market, and (b) more importantly, they already have a Windows version that works fine? Along these lines, for Apple to provide any sort of VMware-like Windows emulation under OS X Intel would be suicide for the platform. Application vendors would just tell their customers to run it under Windows/VMware. What then is the incentive to develop a version for OS X Intel?
For Apple to move their own hardware to Intel would also piss off a lot of people. They pulled it off once with PowerPC, but that was truly necessary. It went amazingly smoothly, but it was really a couple of years before PowerPC native apps starting showing up in numbers and the newest PowerPCs were fast enough to emulate the old 68ks as fast as the last ones. Does anyone really want to go through all that again? It would be a couple of years before Apple would even hope to be up to par with Windows in performance! Not gonna happen.
Sure, I don't doubt that Marklar exists. It does give them that last desperation option, when there's no hope for anything else. But perhaps more importantly, it serves to improve the OS X codebase simply by making it platform transparent. The one instance where I could possibly see an Intel-based product from Apple would be XServe. Just a thought - but if you're not likely to be running PhotoShop or ProTools or Quark on a server, perhaps an Apple branded unit with Intel would work out with all Apple server software.
The only intelligent thing Haddad says is in the second to last paragraph, where he essentially acknowledges that software would be the biggest roadblock. Developers will likely balk at the prospect of porting to yet another platform, and "without software support, the Mac would truly be dead." Exactly.
Of course, the most likely scenario lies with the rumors of the Apple/IBM collaboration on a next generation PowerPC chip. That's where I'd put my money. Nobody knows if/when G5 will ever come out and Motorola doesn't seem to care about the non-embedded market. Hopefully IBM can bring Apple back to the days when PowerPC really did crush the Pentium. We'll see.
But then again, an iBook with Airport is high on our Christmas wishlist, so perhaps this won't be a problem in the future. Instead of fighting over who gets to use the PowerMac, we'll fight over who gets to roam around the house instead of being chained to the desk. ;-)
'Tis a shame, really. Back in the day, IRIX was the best Unix out there, bar none (my opinion, of course). It has some fantastic technologies that still aren't matched in most other Unices (guaranteed rate realtime I/O - would love to see this in OS X, NUMA, hundreds of processors running off a single system image, OpenGL integration, more) and had the best/easiest user interface and admin tools at the time. Sadly, SGI has struggled the past 5 years and has done little of interest with their OS. As others here already said, I recall reading that they're working on adding some of their high scalability technology to Linux so it will run on their big iron. If this is their current direction, R.I.P. IRIX.
I still like my O2 at work, but now I'm just bummed that my request to replace it with a new PowerMac was denied. OS X rocks.
Ah, ok. I haven't upgraded to Jaguar just yet, so I wouldn't know. ;-)
Don't know why it isn't linked to the main iCal page, but maybe you can give Apple some feedback on this. They've been reportedly pretty good about listening to user feedback the last couple of years (but we'll see if they fix those iMovie or iTunes bugs I reported last weekend...).