Mac OS X 10.2.2 Update Available 518
Fork420 writes "Apple has released the 10.2.2 update. According to Apple: The 10.2.2 Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for the following applications and technologies: Address Book, iChat, IP Firewall, Mail, Print Center, Rendezvous, Sherlock and Windows file service discovery. The update also includes the updated services previously delivered in Security Update 2002-09-20.
For detailed information on this Update, please visit http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n107140 (when this story was posted, this link was not yet working)
Enjoy..."
Re:Journaling File System (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One Problem: (Score:5, Insightful)
It's possible that perhaps the UNIX community needs to move past case-sensitivity in filenames and foldernames. Just because UNIX has been doing it that way for 30 years doesn't mean that it needs to be done that way, and apparently both Windows and MacOS have a hard time cooperating with it.
Example - I'm doing development on a local machine with Visual Studio 6. I try to move my project to a Samba share so that I can work with it in a different lab...but suddenly my project won't build. It turns out that Visual Studio makes assumptions about lowercase letters in the pathing for the various files it creates during compilation. UNIX obviously doesn't abide by this, and so returns "file not found".
Sloppy? You bet. Important? Outside of anal-retentiveness, I can't think of a single reason that you'd *WANT* to be able to support filenames that differ only by case. It's an HCI issue for one thing, and the system incompatibility issues that are now surfacing are making the issue more visible.
I'd welcome some examples of places/functionality where case is of critical importance.
To make everything UFS and keep things nice: (Score:2, Insightful)
Before I erased OS X, I did this sucessfully with Bryce(now running under MoL) and Flash MX (now running under MoL).
If I do go rackmount, it will be with Xserves, provided I can return OS X and go Linux.
Multiple partitions (Score:2, Insightful)
I used Apple's own HD partitioning util, too. Its just an older version. (3.5 or something like that)
It can still be found on the web, and will still work.
Re:One Problem: (Score:5, Insightful)
That's an overstatement. ATA/IDE/whatever storage is pretty cheap, but SCSI and Fibre Channel disks are still pricey. In order to protect a 1 TB filesystem with RAID 0+1, you'd have to have 2 TB worth of (let's say) Fibre Channel drives. That extra terabyte would cost you many thousands of dollars. But to protect the same filesystem with RAID 3 or RAID 5, you only have to have (at least) one spare drive. That's a lot cheaper than the 6 or 8 or 16 or whatever drives you'd have to buy to mirror the whole filesystem.
I'd say that for filesystems in the range of 0-500 GB using inexpensive disks, RAID 3 and RAID 5 are probably unnecessary. But outside that set of conditions, RAID 0+1 just isn't practical.
Re:Cupertino, we have a problem! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really not that hard to wrap your head around this idea, y'all. It's not necessary to make a lot of noise about it every single time OS X comes up on Slashdot.
Re:Cupertino, we have a problem! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That is correct (Score:5, Insightful)
Bull. Apple has released far more of their code than they had to (zero). And it's not all modifications to existing software either, quite a bit was written from scratch.
OSX gives some of what Linux's had all along.
More accurately, OS X gives what Linux has been trying to achieve for years: a desktop OS usable by non-geeks.
Re:Journaling File System (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, it's pretty theoretical. Speaking for myself, the Mac I'm using now hasn't crashed since I bought it back in August.
I'll say one thing for Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny how Apple can have software update facilities that must be handing out several hundred thousand 25Mbyte updates a day.....and many websites can't even cope with the traffic Slashdot sends their way
-psy
Re:Journaling File System (Score:3, Insightful)
wont that totally screw up the disk spin down like jounal commit under ext3 does?
Re:10.2.2 Changes (Score:5, Insightful)
Aaaaaarrrrrggghh! Apple replaces one Wrong Thing with another. Before 10.2.2, Apple's installer would blindly write files into /Applications/Mail.app/contents/resources without first checking to see whether Mail.app was still in the /Applications folder.
Now Apple's installer looks for /Applications/Mail.app, and aborts the install if it isn't there. For the love of Tog, how hard is it to actually find Mail.app, considering that the OS already has this ability built in??
MacOS X can find where Microsoft Excel is hiding on my hard drive every time I double-click on a spreadsheet - how hard can it be to find /Applications/Apple/Mail.app? Why should I be forced to organize my /Applications folder in a particular way (or, more accurately, why should I be prevented from organizing the folder) just to satisfy Apple's brain-dead installer scripts?
Now I have to re-construct the /Applications folder to look exactly the way it did after a clean install, or I can't get application updates. MacOS 9 didn't require this. I could understand Apple's installer getting uppity if I turned /bin or /usr into my personal carnival of idiosyncracies, but I can't understand why Apple's new and improved OS is hard-wired to implode when I move an application from one folder to another.
NO!? er NO!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Wrong.
The whole idea is to remove any possiblity for confusion.
If I have a picture of my pet then what's the difference in meaning between Dog and dog? They are the same I don't want the complexity of the possibility of those two files being able to exist in the same place at the same time.
This is another reason why file extensions being part of file names is evil. Dog.jpg, dog.gif or dog.png? Surely they're all just the same picture of my dog?
Coding case-insensitivity into a file system is a lot harder to implement than doing without it. The Macintosh filesystem and other subsequent systems have gone to lengths to include the feature for very good reasons. It reduces complexity and eliminates an area of confusion.
It is the UNIX world that should change for the better. Do you not want Linux to succeed on the desktop? Features such as this subtly improve the user experience.
One reason why Mac OS has been considered easier to use than Windows for years. Fundamentally they are the same, it's the many small considerations that make all the difference.
I've seen some people in the Linux crowd really getting a handle on this which is great and I really respect what's the Red Hat team are trying to do. The Nautilus project was also a big move in the right direction.
I also don't see how case insensitivity makes it more difficult to spell check filenames. If you'd like to explain the problem then maybe I'll be able to understand your point of view better.
Re:One Problem: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's not. I talk about the one and only use letters were designed for, to be read and written by humans. This is how they are designed. Fact remains, filenames are metadata designed to be read by humans primarily. The fact that such a system also is useful for the computer and that it's convinient for them to use the same system as humans in many situation doesn't change this. To limit the usefulness of metadata for humans just because the computer also likes to use it is ass backwards. If that's the problem the right thing is instead to invent a parallell system for the computer to use where the problems doesn exist for the computer. I repeat, if filenames were primarily designed for computers to read, they would be file numbers.
That you like to think of words on the computer as different than words anywhere else doesn't change the fact that this is a lousy interface decision for humans, because words are words even in a filename.
> That's like saying domain names are just for humans to use and computers should just use IP addresses.
Exactly.
> This is clearly not true as if a computer needs to change IP and if there was no lookup system via the DNS then none of the other computers would be able to find it and it's resources again.
Problem found, analysis deficient. URLs are designed for one purpose, to make addresses human readable (one can argue whether they succeded or not but...). The fact that it can _also_ fill a function for computers is superflous. Sure it can, but it wasn't designed primarily for this, and every time this secondary use hampers the primary use you're doing things the wrong way.
Re:One Problem: (Score:2, Insightful)
So, in a sense, the filesystem might be better of if it could accomodate both types of needs with different tools. The average users need to treat filenames as sensible labels by which they recognise and organize their data. This is the HCI view. The system administrator o.t.o.h. needs to treat filenames as one needs to treat strings in programming language, often with great precision and exact matching, no guesses on what the computer might consider equal. I'm not entierly certain that it's not the culture that should change (in the long run), but at any rate one needs to be practical and plotical right here and right now. So is there any way one could accomodate both sides equally without creating a quagmire of redundancy? I have this sinking feeling there might not...
> Oh, and on a personal note, thanks for the debate...it's not often you get sensible replies on slashdot
The feeling is 100% mutual I assure you =)