When we were at the apple store yesterday, we walked past the Dell kiosk that was in the mall. All the Dell employees were wearing orange T-Shirts with this on the back:
“No one wants an Apple for Halloween”
Funnything was there were no people at the dell kiosk, but the Apple store was packed.
One of the things I like about Leopard is that it is UNIX.. With that one of the changes I first noticed was that now you can use “ps -eaf” instead of “ps -aux”. Nice, I hated doing ps -aux, as I use solaris all the time and /usr/ucb/ps is almost never used. The one draw back is that it does not print the username it prints the uid in the output:
Some notes from the ps man page…
and this one is very interesting:
HISTORY
The ps command appeared in Version 4 AT&T UNIX.
BUGS
Since ps cannot run faster than the system and is run as any other scheduled process, the information it displays can never be exact.
The ps utility does not correctly display argument lists containing multibyte characters.
So if you want the output to have usernames in it, do a “ps -ej”
Another change is to the iostat command, the old iostat command mostly printed the disk io and User/Sys/Idle time. Looks like they have now added the load average to every line so it looks like this now:
Another command I found is “zfs”, but it does not appear any where in the gui. So I wonder if it is not fully implemented yet.
They also changed the sar command:
23:29:36 %usr %nice %sys %idle
23:29:37 34 0 42 24
23:29:38 35 0 44 21
23:29:39 24 0 30 46
23:29:40 17 0 22 60
23:29:41 16 0 21 64
23:29:42 19 0 22 59
23:29:43 26 0 30 44
23:29:45 32 0 42 25
23:29:46 28 0 34 38
23:29:47 25 0 31 44
Average: 25 0 31 42
They added a %nice column
It is nice to be notified that your personal information has been lost by UPS. I got a letter the other day from my prior health insurance agency for my prior job. It seems that a “data tape” containing over 200,000 current and prior peoples information has been lost by UPS during transit to a “data analyst”. Some quotes from the letter they sent:
A mainframe computer tape containing your and your dependents’ name, address and social security number was reported as lost by United Parcel Service while in route to XXXXX’s data anaylst.
So what makes a “mainframe computer tape” different from any other computer tape. Nothing just trying to “sound” big and important to the people they are now having to tell that they screwed up.
Every effort possible is being made to recover the missing data tape. The tape is of a type which cannot be read using a personal computer (PC). The tape is only accessible using highly specialized and expensive equipment, usually only possessed by large, sophisticated business entities.
Now the last time I looked a tape is a tape is a tape. It does not matter if you are using a PC or a Mainframe or a Sun box. As long as you have the hardware to physically read the tape then it can be read. Whether you can get data off of it is another thing. I like the second set of buzz words they use too: “only accessible using highly specialized…. usually only possessed by large, sophisticated business entities.”
You can tell they are trying to “calm” the people down to make it seem like it is not as a big of a deal that you would think it is. Funny thing is that if the “person” who has the tape really wanted to read it all they need to do is look at ebay.. I can find a “mainframe” tape drive on there for about $700.
Now here is hoping that the data on the tape is actually encrypted, but I bet it is not because most people don’t even bother encrypting the data they put on tapes… Not that it is hard to do with either software or hardware, they just don’t think they will ever have a problem with “losing” a tape till one is lost.
Any way enough with this rant. Guess it is time to go look and see if any one has actually started to use the data.
Went and picked up MacOSX Leopard today… I decided to do a fresh install instead of trying to upgrade my current Tiger installation on my MacBook Pro. Well after backing up my entire hard drive to a external drive. I started the Installation. It took about an hour for it to install. The funny part is 30 minutes of it, was the installer verifying the integrity of of the DVD. First time I have seen an OS verify the entire disk before it started to even do an install to the hard drive. Anyways, 30 minutes after the verification was done, it was installed. The opening video is pretty cool basically flying through space. I then started the restoration of my files from the external USB Drive. Funny thing was as soon as I plugged the drive in to the MBP, time machine kicked in and asked if I wanted to use the external drive as a back up device. So I said yes and it started backing up what I had just installed while I was restoring files from the same drive.
Some little things I have noticed now:
I also picked up the new iLife 08. I like the new iPhoto. Now to just get everything set back up the way I had it before.. So far I like what I see, and like the new speed..
Got rid of Verizon and ported our number over to Packet8. Took less than a week for the switch to occur. Funny thing is that verizon sent me a UPS overnight “letter” asking me to call them so they could try to keep my business. Nice of them considering the letter inside was a canned letter with nothing about me or my services in the letter. Oh well. Good by verizon.