Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

Radios on the way out?
In a sign of digital times, Dixons has confirmed plans to dump analogue radios from the products it sells online - and CD players and boomboxes may be the next to disappear.

I don't think they're going away any time soon, but I do wonder if this is a canary in the mine passing out for a bit. I have no idea who Dixons is, but Macworld UK apparently thinks they're worth noting. So I'll blog on that strength alone.

If there's one "baby with the bath" in the digital revolution, it's radio. I suppose I see the point of replacing even FM stations with digital, since the ranges are paltry and they're often used solely for hi-fi music anyhow, but to force the re-settling, as it were, of public airways [in the US] with digital radio across the board is a mistake. Look at the installed user base for AM radio, for instance. There's barely a car on the roads without it. And AM can broadcast for miles on miles on miles... from time zone to time zone without much trouble. If we needed to broadcast emergency information in the future, that's a very easy way of doing it.

Even then, I'm hard pressed to feel good about saying goodbye to the FM analog band. Is there really any reason we can't achieve the same advance as digital radio with satellite radio? Ah, yes, only one -- we want all our bandwidth to both feed content to the consumer and consume what they want to say right back, if only to ensure they've paid for what we're pumping out of our radio station. No more anonymous audience for public airways.

Lulled by the promise of more public dollars to spend through the use of "more efficient" digital services -- where more companies can now buy up what used to go to one -- the US is reselling bandwidth formerly for analog systems to digital content providers. But it's not a net boon for the average American [as in "my bias to call US cits American cits -- hand over the Victory Gin, prole" American]. We're losing TVs and radios in a forced obsolescence of what were supposed to be durable goods so that companies can sell more expensive players to higher end consumers and charge them for the privilege to ask for services in "real time." The government's making you give up the radio and your anonymous listenership, folk.

Imagine jumping into your 1960s muscle car, turning on the stock radio, and getting nothing. I understand closed formats going digital (what were 8-tracks but a way to commoditize the content for your cars' speakers? Replace 8-tracks with Sirius; I don't care), but to replace all of our airways with zeroes and ones is not only the product of poor motivation. It's bad national strategy and more evidence of one dollar, one vote. I despise the casualties of consumerism.

Another barely coherent, if that, late-night rant brought to you by mfn.

I somehow managed to create a small ripple at apple.slashdot.com with a post a while back essentially giving my standard GNG rant "against" BSD licenses.

I've been meaning to find time to blog about this adequately, but haven't yet. So here goes the important point to me...

It appears that there are some that believe that FreeBSD accomplishes its work precisely by being so "free" that people appropriate it for their own commercial purposes -- but the initial work has so much momentum, its legacy contributions essentially create an interoperable conversation or standard. More simply, FreeBSD's openness meant Apple could choose it as the base of OS X, versus GNU/Linux. FreeBSD's stability, etc, meant that Apple did choose it. And now, no matter how much OpenDarwin whines (again, my characterization of one type of FreeBSD champion-er) about not getting the sort of collaboration from Apple they felt they deserved (apparently some packages from Apple wouldn't even compile, iirc), more Mac users now know how to use, say, the "ls" command than ever before. Apple users now know *NIX, where before they were simply masters of the Extension Manager.

This is a very interesting point. It's a much less idealistic motivation than my reasons behind GNG, and much MUCH less idealistic than Stallman's for GNU. One must also admit that it's been at least partially [very] successful. I'm not sure of an example more powerful than OS X & Free BSD, but that's a very convincing one.

Oh, don't worry. I'm not convinced, personally. Perhaps many FreeBSDers feel the way I've described, above, but many don't. Thus OpenDarwin's frustration. My post, entitled, "BSD's Fault," was only meant to speak directly towards OpenDarwin's predicament, which was the subject of the Slashdot story about which everyone was ostensibly speaking. If you don't want to end up where OpenDarwin is, failing because you expected a commercial company to return the favor they received when grabbing very open BSD'd code, then you don't use nor support BSD.

I'm also one that believes GNU/Linux's (and also Tomcat's and MySQL's, etc) adoption by many businesses is a much more powerful set of success stories than those of BSD's. The GPL does a decent job of delineating where its influence ends. With GNU/Linux, etc, where the app stops, many have been able to make a living programming new code (Perl, php, etc) or creating very impressive documentation (ora.net, anyone?) about these more closed, Freely licensed techs. That these techs are more prevalent on the server side means they are relatively invisible compared to, say, OS X, but their power in dollars (as a quickly picked, stereotypical measuring stick) is much much greater.

I believe Apple should feel their ethics demand they give more back to BSD, and help ensure that Darwin, OS X's FreeBSD, compiles for most serious hobbyists. Apple, not caring what these hobbyists add to apps in the future (and in some respects, I don't blame them), is treating and will continue to treat them as third class citizens. That's the fault of an idealistic interpretation of the way BSD works that GNU (or GNG) protects programmers from experiencing, and they still manage to get a whale of a lot of work done.

This leaves me wondering if GNU will ever be a serious contender for the desktop. I don't know.

Labels: F/free, gng, licensing

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Thursday, August 31, 2006
Playlist: Users able to circumvent Windows Media DRM Playlist: Users able to circumvent Windows Media DRM: "Microsoft is aware that a tool recently surfaced that circumvents Windows Media Digital Rights Management technology -- breaking the content protection that our content partners apply to their intellectual property such as music or video content," the company said in a statement provided to Macworld. However, Microsoft is currently working on an update that will stop the application. "Fortunately, the Windows Media DRM system has built-in renewability, we have an update and are working with our partners to deploy this solution," the statement read. I feel like Loke Groundrunner. "WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN??!!?!?!" At least I do about the "renewable" part. Wth? For me, most notable is that it's really not about subscription versus owning just yet. It would appear that de-DRMing on Microsoft boxen does the same thing, namely let you have the digital content freely available forever, except now you can deDRM "as much music as you want," since that's what the article says the MS solutions allow you to download. Pay a single monthly fee, download like mad, deDRM, instant Napster once again, but this time MS is the one putting out the piratable content. All I can figure is that the "renewable" means that the apps will, once the new DRM format comes out, try to find the old stuff and reDRM it. Good luck with that. They only people dumb enough to think that'll work must think that the users bright enough to find and download the deDRMer can't figure out how to move the files. In fact, the only people dumb enough to think renewable will performing swimmingly are those who have no clue about how DRM works in the first place. Luckily that apparently means music execs. In some sense, Apple's "buy it, keep it" might be a safer move, because no matter what the DRM format, it's going to be broken. The less content wrapped up and delivered into the pirate's hands, the better. It's all zeroes and ones, folk. It's all going over the binary medium, and, well, if "you want to get on the back of us and ride, baby, ride; you want on? OK, here's the terms!" (thanks, Ballmer) The terms are binary means easy to subvert. Everyone knows how to crack binary if they can read binary. Unless you want to invent a new, closed medium, it's going to happen. MS admits it, Apple admits it, only the content providers don't. posted by ruffin at 8/31/2006 10:54:00 PM

Sunday, August 27, 2006
VOIPing it. For a while now, I've been using two voice over IP services to give my iBook, with its built-in microphone, something like an embedded phone. I've been using Skype for a while to call out so that, say, when I'm using wireless at the coffee shop and need to make a quick call, not having a cell phone is no problem. I plunked down $10 to make calls to phones, but now using Skype to make calls to phones is free. The quality isn't super, but it's much improved from even several months ago. Three hints: 1.) Use headphones so that the sound doesn't interfere with the mike. 2.) Loud background noise at either end usually kills the reception. 3.) If you get a particularly bad connection, and you can usually tell during the initial rings, hang up and try again. I've never had to try more than twice to get a usuable connection. Finding a way for people to call me was more difficult, but I finally dug up The Gizmo Project's Area 775. This service surprisingly gives you a free phone number somewhere in Nevada that will make your computer ring. Messaging is also free, and will email you voice recordings when people call. It forces you to screen calls, and confusingly requires you to both hit an on-screen button to "accept call" and hit the "1" on the "dial," which only appears after you've discovered the tiniest icon at the bottom left that looks a little like the face of a phone. Still, to be able to both call out and receive calls on your laptop -- or home PC -- for free is a nice thing to have. Free long distance means I can continue to hold off on the cell phone purchase. Okay, okay, well, in the interest of full disclosure, I did grab one of those pay-as-you-go phone for when I need the extra clarity or my laptop's not in a wireless network, but you still might surprise yourself at how well a laptop with a mike can mimic a phone. For free. posted by ruffin at 8/27/2006 11:24:00 AM

Friday, August 25, 2006
Oh, you're back home, are you? http://lowendmac.com/newsrev/06/0825.html#5: Hawk Wings reports: 'A month ago Tim Bray and Mark Pilgrim torched off a mini-firestorm in the blogosphere by announcing that they were switching away from Mac OS X to Ubuntu. 'Hawk Wings covered it because of Mail.app's central role in Mark Pilgrim's decision to switch away. 'Now Tim Bray is almost having second thoughts. He has posted a list of things that Mac OS X does better and things that Ubuntu does better. Mac OS X wins out in some important areas.' So much for geek clout. Looks like function wins over form (here, the form is being k3w1) once this guy's finished trading wives. Not to say OS X won, but that after living with the mistress for a while, the guy finds out both choices are, underneath his fantasies and projections, real-life OSes. posted by ruffin at 8/25/2006 01:40:00 PM

Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Today's lessons Today's lessons: 1.) On Mac OS X (and elsewhere; that's where I am right now), it's very easy to concatenate many jpgs into a single pdf using image magick. Much much easier than, say, using jpg2pdf. `convert img1.jpg img2.jpg -adjoin out.pdf` Even more fun is that you can also manipulate the jpgs before concatenating. So if you've scanned text into jpgs and need to rotate 90 degrees to read the scans as well as put 'em all into a single pdf for easy viewing... `convert -rotate 90 img1.jpg img2.jpg img3.jpg ... -adjoin out.pdf` Very nice. You can grab image magick easily -- so easily I could do it -- using fink on OS X. Thanks to jvm for the continued image magick tutorial there. 2.) Cable upload speed es stinkio. 3.) The scanning software for the Epson 2580 works well on OS X, but grabs about 30% of my proc power (G4 1.2 GHz) sitting still. Very bad if, say, you're trying to rotate and concatenate 30 fairly large jpgs into a single pdf. posted by ruffin at 8/22/2006 06:53:00 PM

Friday, August 18, 2006
Macworld: Mac OS X Hints: Verify Mail attachments are attached Heh... I'd been meaning to write something like this, and if I ever get off of my duff and write a full-featured mail handler, it'll have it. Solving the attachment issue: The Attachment Scanner plug-in is the solution to the "no attachments attache" problem. Once installed, the plug-in sits quietly in the background until you press the Send button. When you press Send, the plug-in goes to work, scanning your text for "attachment" words, and making sure that there's actually an attachment attached if such words are found. If there is, nothing happens -- your message is sent as you would expect. But if you try to send a message that references attachments, without actually attaching your file, you'll see this instead: [alert:Message Has No Attachment]" posted by ruffin at 8/18/2006 06:03:00 PM

Macworld UK - Dixons dumps analogue radios Radios on the way out? In a sign of digital times, Dixons has confirmed plans to dump analogue radios from the products it sells online - and CD players and boomboxes may be the next to disappear. I don't think they're going away any time soon, but I do wonder if this is a canary in the mine passing out for a bit. I have no idea who Dixons is, but Macworld UK apparently thinks they're worth noting. So I'll blog on that strength alone. If there's one "baby with the bath" in the digital revolution, it's radio. I suppose I see the point of replacing even FM stations with digital, since the ranges are paltry and they're often used solely for hi-fi music anyhow, but to force the re-settling, as it were, of public airways [in the US] with digital radio across the board is a mistake. Look at the installed user base for AM radio, for instance. There's barely a car on the roads without it. And AM can broadcast for miles on miles on miles... from time zone to time zone without much trouble. If we needed to broadcast emergency information in the future, that's a very easy way of doing it. Even then, I'm hard pressed to feel good about saying goodbye to the FM analog band. Is there really any reason we can't achieve the same advance as digital radio with satellite radio? Ah, yes, only one -- we want all our bandwidth to both feed content to the consumer and consume what they want to say right back, if only to ensure they've paid for what we're pumping out of our radio station. No more anonymous audience for public airways. Lulled by the promise of more public dollars to spend through the use of "more efficient" digital services -- where more companies can now buy up what used to go to one -- the US is reselling bandwidth formerly for analog systems to digital content providers. But it's not a net boon for the average American [as in "my bias to call US cits American cits -- hand over the Victory Gin, prole" American]. We're losing TVs and radios in a forced obsolescence of what were supposed to be durable goods so that companies can sell more expensive players to higher end consumers and charge them for the privilege to ask for services in "real time." The government's making you give up the radio and your anonymous listenership, folk. Imagine jumping into your 1960s muscle car, turning on the stock radio, and getting nothing. I understand closed formats going digital (what were 8-tracks but a way to commoditize the content for your cars' speakers? Replace 8-tracks with Sirius; I don't care), but to replace all of our airways with zeroes and ones is not only the product of poor motivation. It's bad national strategy and more evidence of one dollar, one vote. I despise the casualties of consumerism. Another barely coherent, if that, late-night rant brought to you by mfn. posted by ruffin at 8/18/2006 01:20:00 AM

Tuesday, August 15, 2006
SoundJam -- Responsible for OS X Brushed Metal? When I write, I tend to do it on an old Mac running OS 8.6, for the simple reason that I don't waste nearly as much time doing things like I'm doing now. There's no browser that runs on this Mac that can post to Blogger easily, espn.com barely loads, and doing anything particularly multimedia-esque runs a fair chance of blowing up the Mac, forcing a reboot in this old-timer's OS. It is very good for word processing (Word 98, fwiw), and, thanks to SoundJam, listening to mp3s while I work. So when I minimized SoundJam today, the grandfather of iTunes (literally) reminded me so much of what iTunes looks like today I had to blog. Why? Because the current Finder's appearance, iTunes, and a number of other apps took their styling cues directly from this app. Don't believe me? Check this out. Face it, that mini-player looks nearly exactly the same, especially that resize button. Nor do I recall another app with the brushed metal look on OS 8.x. I included the error message because I believe the same text, give or take, still comes up in iTunes if you try to edit several tracks' info at once. For archaeological purposes only, of course. In any event, brushed metal was and remains a very good look for OS X, I believe (its being dropped, I think, from Leopard nonwithstanding). I wonder what going with Audion (same link as earlier one) would have meant for this very popular look and feel in Aqua. Would brushed metal have made a splash in X? Or would there have been Audion's cartoonish look instead? Or would we simply have been saddled with Pinstripe Aqua? Ick. Did the choice of SoundJam over Audion help position Mac's resurgence with OS X, iTunes, and the ambiance of iPod? Far-fetched sounding, but I bet there's something there. Ah, the butterfly beating its wings in Africa... posted by ruffin at 8/15/2006 12:46:00 PM

Sunday, August 13, 2006
iPhone, iSight The new Apple iPhone will finally bring videophones to the masses. You heard it here first. (CMA: I didn't say the first iPhone...) posted by ruffin at 8/13/2006 03:58:00 PM

Friday, August 11, 2006
Macworld: Mac 911: Editing OS X's spell checking dictionary Perhaps a useful Note to Self for later -- how to mess with your cross-application dictionary on OS X. Macworld: Mac 911: Editing OS X's spell checking dictionary: If by "synchronize" you mean replacing a puny spell checking dictionary on one Mac with the more robust dictionary from another Mac, here's the way: Travel to ~/Library/Spelling and copy the en file to the same location on another Mac, replacing the en file on that Mac. More on editing in a text editor later, but not rocket science. posted by ruffin at 8/11/2006 04:26:00 PM

Thursday, August 10, 2006
It's your service, dang it. Please Microsoft, Mac Business Unit, VB.NET team, the mail room, whoever. For the good of all that's nearly holy, fix Entourage's integration with Hotmail. It's been broken for over a year. I am getting tired of the good old -18588 error that you can't delete the message from Hotmail -- for nearly every message you receive. Goodness. posted by ruffin at 8/10/2006 08:32:00 PM

Tuesday, August 08, 2006
People, please I've been listening to pandora.com for a while, and it seems, after an initially very promising run of songs based on some of my favorite songs/bands, to have crashed. Not literally, as it keeps spitting out songs, but they're now very unlikely to be things I enjoy. Look, people building things that are supposed to act like people, when things start going horribly wrong get a person involved. If someone trashes 8 out of the last 9 (I'm zero out of the last five, by the way) new Pandora.com recommendations (or starts acting funny in World of Warcraft, etc), intervene. This is the way we'll be able to build convincing virtual worlds, as cyborgs, at least for a while. The idea is that, using the tools provided by digitalism, we'll enable one person to maintain a much larger virtual world than they could at, say, a one-person theatre show. (This is putting it mildly.) Imagine if, every so often, one of the vendors in your favorite MUD started conversing with you in ways you'd never seen it do before? Or Pandora all of a sudden made some very obvious shifts in genre with its suggestions, but the shift worked? I have to imagine, early in the development of, say, chess-playing computers, the computers would occasionally glitch and make horrible moves, moves so horrible even the programmers saw they were bad news. Instead of taking the move back, those programmers probably just took the info and went in hacking again. But imagine if you had one of today's chess computer feeding Kasparov his lines... don't you think he could play 20 grand master games at once? posted by ruffin at 8/08/2006 11:23:00 AM

Monday, August 07, 2006
Slashdot \| Apple Announces New Open Source Efforts I know, posting a /. article to your blog is much like telling someone something they were already thinking, but here goes: Today Apple announced a few expanded open source efforts. First, beginning with Mac OS X 10.4.7, the Darwin/Mac OS X kernel, known as 'xnu', is again available as buildable source for the Intel platform, including EFI utilities. Second, iCal Server, Bonjour, and launchd are moving to Apache 2.0 licensing. Welp, that's interesting. There's also talk about an Apple-"sponsored" replacement to DarwinPorts, and this would also seem to be a replacement for OpenDarwin, the project that recently closed for perceived lack of Apple's support in the open source sector. So this can be interesting on a number of levels. I wonder if OpenDarwin didn't know the annoucement was coming and closed to make a statement. Sure, it looks like Apple's doing open source right now, but we all had high hopes with Apple Open Source 1.0, which went into the crapper. OpenDarwin was about to see its usefulness dry up with the Apple sponsored site, and decided to make the point at the last hour. So now that Apple's back, OpenDarwin helps us ask why we should believe the cry of wolf again? Isn't the fact that Apple's 'doing right' by open source now, so to speak, mean that it was doing wrong by open source earlier? I think this story at /. is a pretty clear admission by Apple that they were not toeing the ethical line. Combine this screw up on open source that needed redressing with Apple's new IncrediMail.app (perhaps more precisely pictured here), blasting the plain text email movement to heck, and there's a dark, slimy underbelly coming out that I would've preferred I ignore. Ah, well, I have burned an Ubuntu CD recently. Maybe I'll get uppity and pretend to switch like all the "cool" Mac hardware users, mainly because I don't have a Mac with an Intel chip and can't install Windows like it sounds like the whiners really wanna. posted by ruffin at 8/07/2006 11:29:00 PM

Goodbye plain text email This is the worst news I've heard at an Apple keynote in a while. Hello, Incredimail.app. Attach the goofy contraptions you want in your mail, don't put them in the body. sigh posted by ruffin at 8/07/2006 02:30:00 PM

Saturday, August 05, 2006
The last of the day's MySQL notes to self from here: I can guarantee you that it's not using unix domain sockets. They're not supported by Java. Are you sure CocoaMySQL is Java-based, I assume it's Objective-C and uses libmysql, which can support unix domain sockets. My guess is your server is started with --skip-networking (see the configuration files for the MySQL server), which means the JDBC driver won't be able to connect, since it requires TCP/IP on Unix. Sure enough, if you're not able to get to MySQL with the default installation [of MySQL] on OS X Server, the problem is likely that it's not accepting network connections. Open up the "MySQL Manager" application and click "Allow network connections". Voila. I've got to say, one great thing about using OS X Server is that you can pretty quickly Google up answers by adding "OS X Server" to your search terms. Just enough is kept constant from one Xserve to the next that your needle's haystack becomes much more managable. The joys of losing the battle on the server-side! posted by ruffin at 8/05/2006 05:32:00 PM

More notes to self: mysql login I could've sworn I've blogged this before. To log in with a specific user name and password, use the following syntax: `mysql -u my_user_name -p` This will force a password prompt. posted by ruffin at 8/05/2006 04:16:00 PM

Mac OS X Server 10: Web service uses ports 80 and 16080 by default The fix: Mac OS X Server 10: Web service uses ports 80 and 16080 by default How to enable or disable Performance Cache Click to select/deselect the checkbox for 'Enable performance cache' in the Server Admin application. This setting is located in the General pane of the Web Service module of Server Admin. Except that in 10.4, it's found under Sites -- double-click the site you're changing, then the "Options" tab for that site. Checkbox est la. posted by ruffin at 8/05/2006 02:31:00 PM

You call this a default behavior? More MOSXS fun (Mac OS X Server):: It will keep specific types of data stored in RAM instead of having to read them off disk everytime they are requested. HTTP requests for content which it cannot or should not cache are passed onto Apache running on the same machine. In order to do it's thing, the Performance Cache must take over listening on the web server port (port 80). It then determines whether to pass on the request to Apache which is now listening on port 16080. Ignoring the screw up in "it's" for now, this, which appears to be true, is a bizarre default behavior. Faster? Great. But what firewall has port 16080 open? And isn't a URL like http://www.myUrl.com:16080/~userName a little wack? posted by ruffin at 8/05/2006 02:29:00 PM

Friday, August 04, 2006
Xserve + PCI RAID == This pdf I'm involved with a project that just got its Xserve this week, and spent some of today setting it up. It's a very nice piece of hardware, and the G5 runs rings around my 1.2 GHz G4. I'm a little upset that there doesn't seem to be a sound-out port, what with the MacQuake 4 demo being released today (just kidding, of course -- I guess), but with a PCI RAID card, three 500 gig hotswap drives, video-out, and 2 gigs of RAM, it's well configured. Here are two things I've learned: 1.) Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) runs VNC by default. Open up Sharing from System Preferences, click on ARD, and hit Confugure (or whatever it is, exactly). Make sure you enable VNC with a password. Voila. Very nice. I'd rather have OSXvnc working with ssh tunneling. Still having some trouble getting that working for some strange reason. 2.) If you've got the PCI RAID card in your Xserve and want to know how to configure it, you need to grab "Xserve G5 PCI Hardware RAID Card Specifications." The file name is Xserve_G5_PCI_HW_RAID_Users_Guide.pdf, and it's on Apple's site. It's a good pdf showing how to use the `megaraid` command. For me, it's very simple to set up the three drive bays in RAID 5. The command is simply... `megaraid -create auto` Very nice. You also use `megaraid` to set up alarms and other options. It's all in the pdf. Um, and our Xserve came with the drive bays attached to the SATA connectors on the RAID card, but without setting it up as a RAID. Once I saw the three drives listed my first boot up, I was off to booting from the DVD and using "Utilities -- Terminal" from within the Installer to run megaraid, then Disk Utilitiy to format before reinstalling the OS and starting from scratch. A pain, and lazy on Apple's part, but it really is, so far, a great machine. MySQL and php tomorrow and then we'll be ready to roll. posted by ruffin at 8/04/2006 10:27:00 PM

Wednesday, August 02, 2006
MRJ : Java Glossary I think I'm going to try and post to the blog info on MRJ on Mac OS Classic. MRJ is Macintosh Runtime for Java. I'm trying to find out how far back you can target a Java app, and what processor/OS versions are required. So let the spam begin. MRJ 2.2.5 The latest version of MRJ is Gold Certified by Oracle, and includes numerous enhancements. Everyone with an earlier version of MRJ 2.2.x is encouraged to update to MRJ 2.2.5. System requirements: PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computer Mac OS 8.1 or later Minimum 40 MB of RAM. MRJ 2.2.4 The latest version of MRJ includes an important fix to MRJ 2.2.3. Anyone who has installed MRJ 2.2.3 or is using Mac OS 9.1 is strongly urged to upgrade to MRJ 2.2.4. System requirements: PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computer Mac OS 8.1 or later Minimum 40 MB of RAM. MRJ 2.1.2 requires a PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computer, Mac OS 7.6.1 or later, and at least 32 MB of RAM. QuickTime 3.0 also improves performance. MRJ 1.0.2 works on computers with 68030 or 68040 microprocessors or PowerPC microprocessors. You also need System 7.5 or later, a minimum of 8 MB of RAM (16 MB is strongly recommended) and at least 7 MB of free disk space. Computers with 68030 or 68040 microprocessors must have 32-bit addressing turned on. This can be done by using the Memory control panel. posted by ruffin at 8/02/2006 10:19:00 PM

You want 7-quarter gigs for what?! Seriously, why does OS X have 1.74 Gigs set aside for printer drivers? Can't we download these on the fly? Better yet, can't we have them compressed (300+ megs of Canon drivers zipped up to 153 megs, as an example) until they're needed? posted by ruffin at 8/02/2006 08:01:00 PM

FreeBSD, give until it helps? I somehow managed to create a small ripple at apple.slashdot.com with a post a while back essentially giving my standard GNG rant "against" BSD licenses. I've been meaning to find time to blog about this adequately, but haven't yet. So here goes the important point to me... It appears that there are some that believe that FreeBSD accomplishes its work precisely by being so "free" that people appropriate it for their own commercial purposes -- but the initial work has so much momentum, its legacy contributions essentially create an interoperable conversation or standard. More simply, FreeBSD's openness meant Apple could choose it as the base of OS X, versus GNU/Linux. FreeBSD's stability, etc, meant that Apple did choose it. And now, no matter how much OpenDarwin whines (again, my characterization of one type of FreeBSD champion-er) about not getting the sort of collaboration from Apple they felt they deserved (apparently some packages from Apple wouldn't even compile, iirc), more Mac users now know how to use, say, the "ls" command than ever before. Apple users now know *NIX, where before they were simply masters of the Extension Manager. This is a very interesting point. It's a much less idealistic motivation than my reasons behind GNG, and much MUCH less idealistic than Stallman's for GNU. One must also admit that it's been at least partially [very] successful. I'm not sure of an example more powerful than OS X & Free BSD, but that's a very convincing one. Oh, don't worry. I'm not convinced, personally. Perhaps many FreeBSDers feel the way I've described, above, but many don't. Thus OpenDarwin's frustration. My post, entitled, "BSD's Fault," was only meant to speak directly towards OpenDarwin's predicament, which was the subject of the Slashdot story about which everyone was ostensibly speaking. If you don't want to end up where OpenDarwin is, failing because you expected a commercial company to return the favor they received when grabbing very open BSD'd code, then you don't use nor support BSD. I'm also one that believes GNU/Linux's (and also Tomcat's and MySQL's, etc) adoption by many businesses is a much more powerful set of success stories than those of BSD's. The GPL does a decent job of delineating where its influence ends. With GNU/Linux, etc, where the app stops, many have been able to make a living programming new code (Perl, php, etc) or creating very impressive documentation (ora.net, anyone?) about these more closed, Freely licensed techs. That these techs are more prevalent on the server side means they are relatively invisible compared to, say, OS X, but their power in dollars (as a quickly picked, stereotypical measuring stick) is much much greater. I believe Apple should feel their ethics demand they give more back to BSD, and help ensure that Darwin, OS X's FreeBSD, compiles for most serious hobbyists. Apple, not caring what these hobbyists add to apps in the future (and in some respects, I don't blame them), is treating and will continue to treat them as third class citizens. That's the fault of an idealistic interpretation of the way BSD works that GNU (or GNG) protects programmers from experiencing, and they still manage to get a whale of a lot of work done. This leaves me wondering if GNU will ever be a serious contender for the desktop. I don't know. Labels: F/free, gng, licensing posted by ruffin at 8/02/2006 01:09:00 PM

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