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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Mac OS X Secrets of the Elite 132

Posted by CmdrTaco from the for-the-advanced-users dept.
anti-drew writes "Stepwise has posted a list of fantastic secrets in MacOS X, which reveals all of the hidden features that you just knew were lurking in there, including preferences you can set from the command line to make everything 10% faster, and extensive class libraries and undocumented Objective C APIs that take all the work out of coding. Literally. Check it out!"
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Mac OS X Secrets of the Elite More

Mac OS X Secrets of the Elite

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  • April (Score:5, Funny)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Monday April 01, 2002 @01:02PM (#3266056) Journal
    April 1st post? :)

    • If you insist! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Brian Kendig ( 1959 ) on Monday April 01, 2002 @01:34PM (#3266236)
      Apple Announces Next Version of Mac OS X

      New Version 10.2 To Be Available For Macintosh And Pentium 4 Computers

      CUPERTINO, California--April 1, 2002-Apple® today announced Mac® OS X version
      10.2, the second major upgrade to Apple's UNIX-based operating system. Mac
      OS X v10.2 will deliver significant performance improvements and new
      features and will add support for Intel® Pentium® 4 computers. Mac OS X
      v10.2 will be available at the Macworld Expo San Francisco during the week
      of July 15, 2002.

      Mac OS X v10.2 is the ultimate digital hub, with the ability to create a
      music library and burn music CDs with iTunes, burn data CDs from the Finder,
      make movies with iMovie(TM) 2, watch DVDs with the DVD Player and create DVDs
      with iDVD.

      Throughout the operating system, Apple has ensured that Mac OS X v10.2 fully
      leverages its UNIX-based design, significantly increases performance and
      provides new features. The groundwork for Pentium 4 compatibility was laid
      two years ago when Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, was made available for
      PowerPC and Intel platforms under an open development model. Since then,
      Darwin customers and developers have helped make it a powerful and efficient
      operating system. Because Mac OS X v10.2 is identical on Macintosh and
      Pentium 4 computers, applications written for one can be made to run on both
      with little or no additional development effort.

      "With this new version of Mac OS X, Apple brings the most advanced operating
      system on the market to computers using Intel Pentium 4 processors," said
      Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Mac OS X v10.2 includes the Aqua(TM) interface and
      allows users of Intel-based computers to experience the performance and the
      ease of use which Macintosh users have enjoyed for years."

      Availability & Requirements
      Mac OS X v10.2 will ship this July and will be available as a full retail
      package through The Apple Store® (www.apple.com), at Apple's retail stores
      and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $129
      (US). Mac OS X v10.2 will be available for current Mac OS X users as an
      upgrade package through Apple's Mac OS Up-to-Date program for $19.95 (US).

      Using Mac OS X on a Macintosh computer requires a minimum of 128MB of memory
      and is designed to run on the following Apple products: iMac(TM), iBook(TM), Power
      Macintosh® G3, Power Mac(TM) G4, Power Mac G4 Cube and any PowerBook introduced
      after May 1998. Using Mac OS X on an Intel Pentium 4 computer requires a
      minimum of 128MB of memory. Refer to http://www.apple.com/macosx for a
      complete list of hardware compatibility.

      Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple
      II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the
      Macintosh. Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing
      experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers
      around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet
      offerings.

      Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Apple Store, Aqua, iBook,
      iMac, iMovie, Power Macintosh, Power Mac and PowerBook are trademarks of
      Apple Computer, Inc. Intel and Pentium are trademarks of Intel
      Corporation. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their
      respective owners.

      • If you'd said that it was for the Itanium I would take it seriously.

        I recently ran across a rumor (on Slashdot, so you know it's guaranteed!) that Apple, Compaq, etc. were going to be merging this month.

        Well, after a bit of thought, I decided that it made sense. The 64 bit chips present a whole new ball game, and one can expect "great and frightening changes". So just suppose you create General Computers on the model of General Motors. You place Apple where Cadillac was, and HP where Chevrolet was, and, O, Compaq where Buick was. (I don't really know my cars, so I forget who the middle tier players were, but you get the point.) Now Apple has their custom *nix layer (Darwin) and a really snazzy interface, and a bunch of fans, etc. They'll be likely to be the big cheese here, and get most of the stock, but there'll be shares for everyone, and one real benefit is that everyone gets out from under the heel of MS.

        This sure doesn't sound like a sure thing to me, but it sounds like a plot with real potential. And it would explain the HP/Compaq merger/fight so nicely...

        • > Well, after a bit of thought, I decided that it made sense. The 64 bit chips present a whole new ball game, and one can expect "great and frightening changes".

          The Macintosh uses the PowerPC chip which has a 32-bit and 64-bit version on the architecture (although currently only the 32-bit versions are currently made), so when Apple wants to transition to 64-bit, it will have an easier time than everyone else (assuming that by then Motorola or IBM make 64-bit chips) because it can just keep using PowerPC.

          I'm hoping 64-bit makes it into the G5. It was supposed to into the G4.
          • The 64 bit are made. IBM uses them in the iSeries (AS/400) and pSeries machine. Nothing special, but they exist, they work, and they're nice.
            • I think those are POWER chips, not PowerPC. They are similar architectures that have subtle differences, so are not directly comparable and certainly not quite compatible (unless the architectures have converged without anyone telling me). PowerPC was originally based on POWER.

  • Compiler directives... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Glove d'OJ ( 227281 ) on Monday April 01, 2002 @01:04PM (#3266075) Homepage
    I espcially liked the Compiler directive:

    --dwimnwis (Do what I mean not what I said)

    Kind of like WYSIWYG, or WYWINWYS (What You Want Is Not What You Said.)

    I wonder if the new documentation explains the ID-10T errors?
    • I espcially liked the Compiler directive:

      --dwimnwis (Do what I mean not what I said)

      April fools aside, I actually wish there were a switch for this.

      Compilers are often smart enough to be able to parse out what you mean (how many times have you gotten a perl error saying "You left a quote off up there at line 123"?).

      I'd like to see a switch that gives the compiler (interpreter, whatever) the authority to try to fix, for itself, some of these stupid issues. If other non-recoverable errors happen later, then fine, it doesn't have to complete the compile. But if I drop a semicolon and get a hundred new errors as a result, and the compiler can see that if that semicolon is replaced, then why can't I ask it to replace that, warn me what it did, and see if it works?

      Just a thought...
      • So basically, you want a compiler to do what web browsers do that everyone who gives a crap about standards hates, which is clean up code and allowing the coder to be lazy?

        That being said, I'd like one too.
        • Aside from the at-best-questionable disirability of automatic error-correction, you guys have surely seen this [tuxedo.org], right? There are times when you'd really rather have the machine ask you to explicitly what you wanted instead of having it try to guess, with potentially dire consequences.
      • (how many times have you gotten a perl error saying "You left a quote off up there at line 123"?)

        That's a bad example (or a good example depending upon your point of view). Perl tells you "... probably a runaway quote starting on line 123." or words to that effect. Perl can tell you where the likely unterminated string starts but it is really hard to figure out where it should have ended.

        The danger is that sometimes the auto-correction will be wrong. Not wrong enough that you notice it, just wrong enough to cause subtle bugs in the code. Refusing to compile such errors makes the programmer figure out exactly what was wrong, no matter how obvious it seems to be.

        PL/1 used to fix all sorts of errors for you. It was great when it worked but it really cost you badly when it seemed to work.
      • TeX does this when it's run interactively. If it comes across an error, it tries to fix it; it then dispays the message on the screen, and gives the user several options (they can accept what TeX did, type in a replacement, quit, edit the original file, etc.) It then generates a log file for the user to fix the errors in the original source file.
    • I dunno. The best way my old High School computer lab teacher taught me was simply by saying: "It's doing _exactly_ what you're telling it to do". Many many times I imagined strangling the guy for saying that...it really was the best thing he did for me.

  • No comments yet and the site's coming up 404. I wonder if it really exists. That would be a good April Fool's joke.

  • Please, make it stop, my head hurts!

    (one can only deal with so much sarcasm in one day)

    • one can only deal with so much sarcasm in one day


      What? Try being British, and a student, at a technical university, volunteering in a students union. Now that's sarcasm! Fun times though.

      :-)

  • Aha! (Score:5, Funny)

    by CoolVibe ( 11466 ) on Monday April 01, 2002 @01:06PM (#3266093) Journal
    defaults write com.apple.EOModeler CrashRandomly No

    I was looking for that setting... Great article!

    • defaults write com.apple.EOModeler CrashRandomly No

      I'm pretty sure this is a twist on an old MS joke [google.com], except that the default setting for Windows was of course TRUE.

  • April Fools. (Score:3, Informative)

    by saintlupus ( 227599 ) on Monday April 01, 2002 @01:06PM (#3266095)
    Oh, God, when will this stupid-assed holiday end?

    It would be funny if there were one or two joke stories. But this just ruins the "Slashdot experience" for a day every year. Annoying and funny are not the same thing, editors.

    --saint
    • And what exactly is this "Slashdot experience?" that's being ruined here?
      • And what exactly is this "Slashdot experience?" that's being ruined here?

        Why, "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." of course.

        I read this site, and especially the comments, because they contain a lot of information I can't find anywhere else in such a concentrated form. I like reading about news in hardware and software and science, I like reading commentary from people who've been in this business longer than me. Hell, I even like some of the trolls.

        Despite all the bitching a lot of people do, this is still a hell of a resource for geeks like me. It's just annoying that the very valuable, very appreciated service is suspended once a year for unbelievably clumsy and juvenile attempts at humor.

        Hell, if I wanted something painfully unreadable and irritating, I'd unblock Katz.

        --saint

        • Re:April Fools. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by cjpez ( 148000 )
          Have you considered that maybe the whole "basically make the site worthless for a day" thing you're perceiving is actually a part of the "Slashdot Experience?"

          Sure, Slashdot's fun. Slashdot brings me some "news" items I might not have heard about otherwise. But it's not like the world's going to end if, for one day out of the year, there's a bunch of bogus stories.

          • But it's not like the world's going to end if, for one day out of the year, there's a bunch of bogus stories.

            True enough. Maybe I'm just irritated because this is the third year I've been reading Slashdot on April 1, and I can't remember any of the prank stories _ever_ being funny.

            Ah, well, fuck it. Tomorrow is another day. Oh, and to the fellow who called me a Karma Whore, bugger off. I've been at the cap for months.

            --saint
            • Maybe they aren't supposed to be funny? Some of them are amusing, but I think the funny part lies in the fact that they get to read through all these comments and listen to all of us complain about how stupid slashdot is and how april fools stories suck. If I worked up there, I'd be laughing so hard all day my entire cube would be filled with my own urine. Actually, I'll take that back, I find it amusing here too. Amusing that so many people take /. so seriously that a day of crap news and they're lives are going to end. Now THAT is hilarious.
              • I don't know about you, but the following exchange made me spit coffee out my nose:

                cjpez: And what exactly is this "Slashdot experience?" that's being ruined here?

                saintlupus: Why, "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." of course.

            • Oh, and to the fellow who called me a Karma Whore, bugger off. I've been at the cap for months.

              You're right. How silly of me. Karma whores NEVER reach the cap... It just wouldn't make sense. ;-)

      • And what exactly is this "Slashdot experience?" that's being ruined here?


        • "Check out this cool case mod!"
        • News of scientific discoveries from a couple of years ago.
        • "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of..."
        • Jon Katz
        • Ask Slashdot: Can you guys do my homework for me?


        (!)


    • Who in their right mind would want their very serious issue/product/idea/news to be posted an April 1?


      Be it so plain as "this statement is true", noone will ever believe it in any context, bar idiots.


      The FIRST THING many people do when faced with a dubious, or controvesial story is CHECK THE DATE.
      Anything Apr1 is tagged <Disinformation type="Humourous">


      So stop whining, and go away

      • Personally, I have no problem with posting things that are serious on April fools day, in factI held off posting something until today because I find it a bit funny to have them in doubt...
    • i happen to enjoy it a little. example: my school's newspaper, The Triangle, publishes The Rectangle every April 1. They go to great lengths at writing a complete edition of made-up-stories, complete with spoofed photos of ceremonys (like the school president shaking hands with Snuffy from Sesame St), made up advertisements and even classified ads. On some levels, they are writing the paper by following The Onion's style of humor.
      • I woke up, and turned on the news and I saw that the Queen Mum had died. I thought CNN had gone all slashdotty on me for 4/1.
    • Since when was it declared a holiday? To me, a holiday means a day off work. In some countries, it is a holiday: Easter Monday. But that is just a coincidence.

      As for your sentiments, I couldn't agree more. It seems every web site and their dog are posting April Fools stories for the sake of it. Unfortunately, most of the stories are extremely dumb and unfunny. Did all of these authors throw out their sense of humour before writing these stories?

    • Re:April Fools. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by sllort ( 442574 )
      Annoying and funny are not the same thing, editors.

      Yes, they are. That's the first rule of Trolling. The point isn't to make you laugh, it's to make you complain, so they can laugh at you. I think they're doing a fine job.

    • April Fool's isn't a holiday, and it isn't stupid. You know what day it is, and complaining about the goings on of that day are like whining about flag-wavers on July 4th, or turkey eaters on Thanksgiving. Deal with it -- tomorrow is another day, and you won't have to be bothered for another year. Be grateful it's not Christmas that gets on your nerves.
    • this just ruins the "Slashdot experience" for a day every year.

      Yet you're still here today. Why? So that you can post redundant karma-whoring rants about how much it sucks?

      Seriously, if the April 1 stories annoy you that much, just go away and come back tomorrow. Or does someone have a gun to your head?

    • Re:April Fools. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Mignon ( 34109 ) <satan@programmer.net> on Monday April 01, 2002 @01:51PM (#3266311)
      Oh, God, when will this stupid-assed holiday end?

      April second, by my calculations.

    • Slashdot is useless the other 364 days of the year. April fools has the most on-topic stories I've seen in months!

    • Get a friggin' life! Some people have no sense of humor....just like the jackasses that changed the name of Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia into Dr. Dobbs Journal of Software Tools for the Professional Programmer. Sheeesh.
  • Now they're not even trying. I guess the longer this goes on, the harder it is to come up with something moderately believable.

    Enough with the April Fool's jokes already.

    defaults write com.apple.installer TrashSymbolicLinks No
    defaults write com.apple.finder RunSlowly No
  • why do all these OS's have "secrets" books? do they intentionally leave all this information out of their manuals to get extra mullah from the "secret book publishers"? i never got this idea. the only real excuse is the patronization of the user: "oh THAT feature? don't document it, because the user would have to be smart like US to use it." i saw some attempts of making linux secret books. they fell flat on their face. because you need to be a friggin' rocket scientist to use linux at all. once you're a rocket scientist, there are no secrets left. i guess they could write a good linux secret book: "Chapter One: There is only one secret in Linux - that if you bought this book, Linux is not for you!!"
    • do they intentionally leave all this information out of their manuals to get extra mullah from the "secret book publishers"?
      I think the word you're looking for is "moolah", unless you're referring to the Taliban ;)
    • Secrets are quite often "intended" features that were never fully implemented, or ended up being more support hassle than they were worth.

      The main software that our group puts out has a few "secrets" too... things that sounded cool at the time, or things that were put in by developers to help them debug their code or use it while it was still half-baked.

      Now, having said that, a few of those secrets are still pretty cool... but as the Product Manager, I'd hate to have to support people using them, or having problems with them (after all, we never did get to do extensive QA on those features). The features are there, but not documented. If you find them, great. If you have problems, great. Don't call me about them. q:]

      MadCow.
  • defaults write com.apple.finder RunSlowly No
    defaults write com.apple.EOModeler CrashRandomly No

    Always wished for options like these in any OS ;-D
  • Very nice "lickable" image components up there, guys.

  • I hope it has the feature... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by !splut ( 512711 ) <sput@alum.rp[ ]du ['i.e' in gap]> on Monday April 01, 2002 @01:11PM (#3266124) Journal
    I hope it has a feature that allows you to turn off april fools jokes. Anything that lessens the tide of fools joke spamming is a plus in my book.
  • To speed up your system

    format c:
  • Who here thinks that slashdotting the poor Stepwise [stepwise.com] server is an April Fools joke?

    So ... since it's slashdotted ... and I can't read the article to make any funny/amusing/trolling comments about it ... I won't make any comments whatsoever ...

  • Goatse.cx sued under DMCA (Score:3, Funny)

    by Pope Slackman ( 13727 ) on Monday April 01, 2002 @01:14PM (#3266142) Homepage Journal
    from the stare-into-the-abyss dept.
    MEEPT! wrote in to report that the famous troll site goatse.cx [linux.com] has been shut
    down under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act by a gay linux industry trade group called the
    Alternative Network OS and Gay Anus Penetration Enthusiasts. Michael S, an ANOSGAPE spokesman,
    was quoted as saying "goatse.cx has made a mockery of the anal fisting industry, and left themselves spread
    wide open to litigaytion. We hope this anal action will send a clear message to this "trolling" community
    that wide-open man-holes are not a laughing matter." The goatse.cx webmasters were optimistic, however,
    stating that the graven image, now sacred to trolls and crapflooders everywhere, was found in the
    pubic domain and was in no way infringing on any GAPE copyright.
    Similar sites such as Comp-u-geek [slashdot.org] and "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porno!" were unaffected.
  • seems that those that are enfuriated by the once-a-year April fools postings could rather than complain, just take the day off from reading slashdot.
  • Commander Taco Arrested For DDOS attack involvement.

    Slashdotting is DDOS, we all know it. Keep those Microsoft links coming in.

  • The Great Slashdot Moulting (Score:5, Funny)

    by TrevorB ( 57780 ) on Monday April 01, 2002 @01:29PM (#3266210) Homepage
    OK, I've about had it with April Fools, and I have a suggestion to end this nonsense. I call it "The Great Slashdot Moulting"...

    Every year, when April 1st comes along and the Slashdot stories are nothing but repetative joke-fare, all of us with karma > 20 should flood the system with crap, ALL POSTED AT +1 bonus. First posts, Second posts, 50th posts, Taco's wife ain't so hot, whatever...

    Better yet, if you've got mod points, mod the crap UP. :)

    Evryone blow all their karma IN ONE DAY... (-3 per post * 17 posts is about -50 karma). Then on April 2nd, create a new account and start over for the year.

    The system will clog up with so many moderator requests it will either break the system or they'll actually HAVE TO STOP POSTING THIS CRAP on April 1st. They can't put us all in jail! Or that whatever that user flag that Taco appears to be weilding around like a penis replacement. Bwahahaha!

    What the hell is karma good for if you can't burn it all in one amazing burst of glory? And imagine everyone doing it at once. An orgy of reverse karma whoring ... WOOHOO!!!

    Let the modding war on this post begin.
  • "including preferences you can set from the command line to make everything 10% faster"

    Is this so in case they don't think of anything new or develop improvements by the time the market demands an upgrade they can make these preferences the defaults and cover their tails?

    Oh well, MICROSOFT SUCKS.

    +1 MS Bashing mod me up.
  • dammit... slashdot stories linking to april fools jokes just don't work... by the time stepwise.com will be reachable again it'll be the 2nd and all this will be very old...

    this sucks :/
  • please spare us! :)
  • Wonder if the uber-mods can bitch-slap an ARTICLE... We'll find out soon enough.
  • THANKS GOD THERE ARE NO PIGEONS ON THIS APRIL FOOL STORY!!!!

    oh damn... since theres nothing better to do (I dont classify reading /. on april fool a good stuff) I found a link with a TV AD from Oracle fscking up Microsoft .NET servers. Does anyone wants the link?
  • sucks... It sucked when I was a little twerpy geek in HS and it sucks now.

    I long for a mac os X that works, just like everyone else. I am forced to investigate crap like this. It takes up useful time.

    You rarely see a real geek running a screen saver because it wastes cycles. Slashdot is like a brain-saver on 100% processor usage on April 1st. Just another useless line dump from ps that needs to be purged.

    the traditional solution:

    ps -A | grep slashdot
    27213 pts/2 1:20:05 slashdot
    kill -9 27213

    the daemontools solution:

    svc -d /service/slashdot

    whatever. Time to get something useful done...
    • You wrote:

      ps -A | grep slashdot
      27213 pts/2 1:20:05 slashdot
      kill -9 27213

      When you meant to write:

      kill -9 `ps -A | grep slashdot | awk '{print $1}'`

      or, slightly more efficient:

      shutdown -F now
  • NSNervousKernelNotification

    This notification is sent by NSProcessInfo whenever the kernel is nervous, but before it actually panics.

    How about #include xanax.h, which will keep the kernel from panicking altogether...

  • defaults write com.apple.conscience CrushHumanity Yes
  • Situation:

    I have lots of PC stuff, and one iMac. The PC's have several CDR's. The iMac has zero CDR's.

    I want to install OSX. (Please, save your "Go to CompUSA you cheap bastard" and "piracy is killing the Mac" rants"--if you had any hope of convincing me, I wouldn't be posting here.)

    I have a toast image of OSX. I have Nero for the PC.

    Thoughts:

    I should be able to point Nero at this image, tell it it's HFS, burn to CDR, and be a happy copyright infringer. In theory. In actuality, I get a disk image that the iMac happily reads, and the PC happily reads, but which does not boot. (Attempting to start the installer from OS 9 results in an "unable to select CD as system disk" error 2.)

    Any constructive suggestions that don't involve the nether regions of my anatomy or purchasing the program are appreciated.

    • I have that same release, it seems. I got a .img file from edonkey that turned out to be actually .img.sit, which then did not de-stuffitize itself on the imac, but did on the pc, producing puma something blah blah macosx .toast, and now I can't do fuck all with it.

      I tried an dfs iso -> real iso program but it said the file wasn't a multiple of (something) long.

      And btw, I wouldn't worry about being off-topic. How can you possibly be off-topic on April-Fools' day with /. posting all this nonsense. (/. editors would get into real trouble if we had another terrorist attack like 9/11 on 4/1 as everyone would think they were making a sick joke...)

      graspee

    • I want to install OSX. (Please, save your "Go to CompUSA you cheap bastard" and "piracy is killing the Mac" rants"--if you had any hope of convincing me, I wouldn't be posting here.)

      I say copy away, dude. You already "paid" for OS X when you bought your iMac, which came with Apple premium R&D included in the form of a $300 price increase over what you would have paid for a Wintel.

      Seriously, Apple fans always justify the price premium by insinuating that it's necessary in order to fund OS development, so since you've already paid by buying the hardware, why feel guilty?

  • - (NSScaryThought *)Steve:(id)Jobs nakedAndPetrified:(BOOL)hotGritsFlag

  • Grr. (Score:2)

    by TheMCP ( 121589 )
    Do not taunt happy fun ball.

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