I upgraded my Manila server at school today to Mac OS X and Frontier 8.05. Wow — talk about a speed boost. Very cool. Almost worth all the frustration it took to get it running on OS X. What a pain that was.
Apple Remote Desktop. Pretty cool, but bittersweet. The controller app runs on OS X, and the client runs on anything from 8.1 to 10.1, but the controller app won’t run on 8 or 9. That’s bad news for those still running a dual platform shop. I like to be able to sit at any computer in a lab and copy out from there. I won’t be able to do that using ARD unless I upgrade all my lab computers to OS X, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
Macintouch asked readers for their WWDC (Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference) concerns and ideas. They got an awful lot of hardware suggestions for a Developer Conference. My favorite is the hosehead who says: Migrate features from MacOS X like preemptive multitasking and Memory protection to MacOS 9.x without bringing the UNIX baggage with it. This can be done now more than ever before due to Carbon is making this possible. Ummm, isn’t the impossibility of that task the whole reason for Mac OS X? Remember Copland? Remember Rhapsody? He goes on: As for virtual memory, memory is cheap, and MacOS application footprints are tiny. Most Mac users turn it off anyway. Good idea. Memory’s cheap, so we don’t need virtual memory. Memory protection although may save your OS from crashing, does little to prevent data loss as a result of a crashing application. To say nothing of the other running applications that won’t lose data as a result. Hosehead.