Category: Apple
Apple tells us since years whenever it feels approiate that OS X is based on unix. They are not lying of course. But there are some nasty details. One that drives me crazy right now:
Since it’s beginnings unix always supported tape drives. All of them, sometimes there were updates needed etc etc.
But data management via data tapes was always a thing that just worked. On every unix flavor I know. Actually it worked pretty much the same and usually is very reliable once you are a couple of months away of the bleeding edge and if you don’t have to battle broken hardware.
OS X is different: The parts that make tape archiving work have been removed. OS X is the only unix system where this happened. The hardware is there and it works. The software was there and it works. Just that Apple decided “No Tapes for you”. Which is super lame.
On one side Apple wants to be in the pro market. With XSan they like to become a storage vendor, and on the
other side they cripple the operating system by not creating /dev/mt/tpsXdY or /dev/nstX devices.
This is nothing less than Microsoftesc. It really is lame to break working things, just because you have decided that a couple of tape archiving software vendors is more important than the pro market. No, I can not use “retrospect” to manage a Peta Byte for the the movie that I am working on right now. The linux boxes doing the job would have not moved into this Apple heavy environment if Apple would not have broken OS X. To me OS X is only 95% unix and 5 % got soaked in Koolaid and fell apart. Tape device support is some of that. What a shame.
turns out os x has no ‘fuser’ command. oh well. But
umount -f /your/device/path
does the trick in many cases where the pansy finder rejects to eject (aka unmount) a volume
I am not an Apple fanboy. Really. It has been 8 months since I sent some money to the Infinite Loop. Not counting the “Ride of the Walkyers”. That one euro was an excusable exception: Imagine a middle class car car with it’s hatch open driving through a middle european middle class neighborhood, having two kids on a sled in tow blasting this song. I could not resist to put this mental image into reality. I thought this was the best way to introduce Anton and Ella to Wagner.
So today the HiFi got delivered. A couple of days ahead of schedule. “Apple Deutschland” starts to have decent service. Amazing, not how it used to be.
It’s smaller than I thought. I am a fanboy. A Dieter Rahms fanboy, ever since I saw the first brAun stereo. Logically I like the looks of the thing. The way the iPod is put in on the top I am not crazy about. It comes with lots of plastic inserts to accomodate all those different iPods Apple came out with.
Overall it sounds ok. It is very loud. From what I read I expected it to be really loud, and that is not the case.
The first song on the shuffle playlist was a piano piece by Satie. Tragically this was a very dissapointing performance for the debutant: Mid to high tones are simple not clear. Hearing a couple of more Piano pieces by now I think that the ‘Hi-Fi’ is an orwellian title. If Jobs really wants to give up his stereo for a Hifi then this can only have one of three reasons:
– he spend less than 349 US$ on the one that get’s replaced
– he has the Koolaid coming out his ears
– he tested every 1,000th iPod Apple sold personally and on full volume.
The Hi-Fi is not going back. We needed a decent looking noise maker. And it will work for that. I just had expected better sound from it.
With a fresh set of D batteries it can make for some noise open air noise. I hope somebody comes with a concept to place 50 or so in a public park: “Concerto for 50 iPod HiFis in Central Park”.
They just should not have called it ‘Hi-Fi’. My twenty five year old stereo sounds MUCH better. But that was not 349. Worked for it for months to able to afford it.
Being slashdotted used to be every webmasters dream and nightmare: That one popular website linking to your obscure site would bring you those fifteen thousand clicks of fame and mostly take your webserver with it.
Things have changed:
This page runs on Apples cheapest computer that they offer. It got the ‘link love’ a couple of hours ago, yet it seems unharmed. There are a couple of reasons for this: The page is static html. The connection is able to cope with the load. A mac mini is actually quiet able to handle lots of web traffic. I don’t think that it has anything to do with the fact that slashdot has lost it’s bite.
Trying to dowload a 3.6 MB big .dmg file from Apple. It stalls. Four times at different points in the download. In safari, firefox and wget.
Logging in to a different machine. File downloads without any problem.
Downloading it then file via scp or httpd from the new location to my compueter works.
Something between my machine and apple get’s in the way. It is only level3.net
and the ISP and then akadns.net
Is this a bug or the beginning of ‘traffic shapping’ ?
this video
is the ‘making of’ for the video ipod pictures that where roaming the internets.
No comments on the Microsoft Origami d-kitchen video. Not clear if intended or not.
no! It hasn’t.
But now there is the first
trojan it seems.
You need to download and click on it. It’s finder icon appears to be forged to look like a jpeg file.
Now would be the time to see if the “Broken Windows” theorem holds true.
John C. Dvorak writes that Apple would drop OS X and run Windows. When he mentioned this theory of his on TWiT a couple of weeks ago I bursted out in laughter. I think his full name is probably John -C as in Crazy- Dvorak. The real problem here is that he will continue to be listened too. Credibility seems not really needed anymore after the demise of the MSM.
Actually he is alright on TWiT. His snap judgement remarks are refreshing in all that geek mumbling.
If you machine freaks out at really random points then I would recommend testing it’s memory. The “Techtools deluxe” you find on the CD with the red edge you got from Apple appears to be pointless. Duing 15 minutes of beachballing I was able to click on 3 different messages, but it never worked. At least on the G5 that was broken today it was a complete waste of time.
I downloaded this very very nice memory tester
it it worked right away. Found the bad memory and that was that.
Here a little how to:
1. Install the program
2. Reboot your mac and hold command/apple S while the machine is coming up
3. You will be in the text based single user mode. Don’t be scared
4. type /Applications/memtest/memtest
(tip: hit tab or ESC twice to auto complete the command)
5. see what the test is saying: bad memory kicks out lots of error messages