Egg Freckles

December 2013

• ADB, the Epitome of…

  Lightning, the Epitome of Apple is one of the best things John Gruber has written all year. The Lightning adapter epitomizes what makes Apple Apple. To the company’s fans, it provides elegance and convenience — it’s just so much nicer than micro-USB. To the company’s detractors, it exists to sell $29 proprietary adapters and to further enable Apple’s fetish for device thinness. Neither side is wrong. Of course Apple wasn’t always this way. In 1986 Apple needed a low-cost bus for connecting devices like keyboards and mice to its computers. The large headphone-style jack for the Lisa keyboard was too unreliable, and the phone-style jack used for the Macintosh 128K was too fragile. Apple needed a system that was rated for hundreds of insertions that could allow devices to be daisy-chained together without the need for hubs or complicated routing. It took Steve Wozniak one month on his own to come up with the answer, the Apple Desktop Bus. In keeping with Apple’s 1980’s philosophy of…

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November 2013

• Killing the Xserve

  On November 5th, 2010 Apple killed the Xserve. At the time I thought killing the Xserve was a mistake. Like so many thousand Macintosh IT Professionals I thought Apple’s future in the Enterprise was tied to the existence of a shiny 1U rack-mountable Macintosh server. Without it how would the PC System Administrators ever take us seriously? And what about all of the core Mac OS X technologies the Xserve was supposed to bring us? Features like a new filesystem to protect us against data corruption, and improved parallel computing to allow our applications to work smarter? Every new release of Windows reaps the rewards of features first developed for the Microsoft line of server operating systems. Without a similar strategy how was Apple supposed to keep up in key areas like endpoint management, and virtualization where Microsoft already holds a clear advantage? I feared without a flagship server, Apple would fall behind on the essential technologies needed to keep Mac OS X competitive.…

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• The Price of Windows

  Ben Brooks brought this post by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes to my attention. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is a long-time Windows power user who now prefers OS X, iOS, and Android for their simplicity and reliability. My primary work system is a MacBook Pro, and in the ten months I’ve had it it’s flawlessly done everything I’ve asked of it, from run Microsoft Word to render 4K video. I’ve lost count of the number of notebooks I’ve owned over the years, but this MacBook Pro is, by far, the most reliable system I’ve owned, and I put part of that down to the fact that it doesn’t run Windows. And, on tablets: My experience of Windows on tablets closely resembles that of my ZDNet colleague James Kendrick. Bottom line, they let me down too much to want to bother with them. Why would I trade a reliable iPad or Android tablet for an unreliable Windows 8.1 tablet? Why trade a tablet that just works for one that regularly sends me on quests, roaming the Internet looking for the right elixir to fix the…

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August 2013

• Repair Disk…

  Readers ask me when is a good time to Repair Disk Permissions? My answer, “when is the last time you booted into Mac OS 9?” Many things you install in Mac OS X are installed from package files (whose filename extension is “.pkg”). Each time something is installed from a package file, a “Bill of Materials” file (whose filename extension is “.bom”) is stored in the package’s receipt file, which is kept in /Library/Receipts/ in Mac OS X v10.5 and earlier. These files don’t take up much disk space and you shouldn’t put them in the Trash. Each of those “.bom” files contains a list of the files installed by that package, and the proper permissions for each file. In Mac OS X v10.5 or earlier, when you repair disk permissions Disk Utility reviews each of the .bom files in /Library/Receipts/ and compares its list to the actual permissions on each file listed. If the permissions differ, Disk Utility reports the difference and corrects them. Prior to 10.6 you could use any version of Disk…

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July 2013

• Coffee Break

  Apple has a long history of including Java in its desktop operating systems. The Macintosh Runtime for Java included a JIT compiler developed by Symantec, the standard Java class library from Sun, additional classes providing Macintosh-specific functionality, and the Apple Applet Runner for running Java Applets on the Classic Mac OS without the overhead of a browser. Macintosh Runtime for Java 1.5 works on computers with 68030, 68040 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 is what Apple had to say about Java in 1999. “Our customers want better Java performance in Mac OS and we’re committed to giving it to them,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s Interim CEO. “We are working hard to make our Java implementation second in speed to none other in th world.”…

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May 2013

• Fast Times & Short…

  Fusion Drive, we barely knew you. Announced as part of an Apple event held on October 23rd, 2012, Fusion Drive combined the large capacity of a conventional hard drive with the speed of a 128 GB flash storage to create a single logical volume with the space of both drives combined. The operating system automatically managed the contents of the Fusion Drive so the most frequently accessed applications, documents, photos, and other data are stored on the faster flash storage, while infrequently used items moved or stayed on the hard drive. Users benefited from the affordable large-capacity data storage Fusion Drive provided, while still experiencing the quick boot times and fast application launch speeds of an SSD. Unfortunately many of Apple’s most popular Macs could not accommodate Fusion Drive due to a lack of space. Fusion Drive required space for a conventional 2.5 inch hard drive as well separate flash storage, and only the 2013 iMac and Mac mini could include one as a…

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April 2013

• DEFCON

  DEFCON is a real-time strategy game created by independent British game developer Introversion Software. Inspired by movies like Dr. Strangelove, and WarGames: > Players are given a 1980s vector graphics computer-themed world map, a varied arsenal of nuclear and conventional weaponry, and a primary objective: destroy as much of the enemy’s population as possible while having as little of one’s own population destroyed as possible. A typical game will see civilian casualties numbering in the millions (megadeaths) while players try their hand at annihilating their opponents. In most games, all sides take heavy losses. “Nobody wins, but maybe you can lose the least.” Games last 30 to 40 minutes while real-time gameplay can last more than eight hours. Game time can be varied by a consensus among players configuring the speed at which events progress from real-time. DEFCON is a streamlined real-time strategy game, with no unit production, resource collection, or…

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