jcl

"I need to buy another T61, but the off-center screen on my current T61 drives me nuts." Hive mind.

That's nearly identical to the T61 I spec'ed out last week before deciding that the slightly off-center screen would drive me nuts.

The first thing you need to do is get a feel for the language. If you haven't already, try writing a few short programs (a few dozen to a few hundred lines) and executing them by hand. Variety is good. Then try sketching a grammar in EBNF and an operational semantics. Defining the semantics in terms of an abstract machine would give you an outline of an interpreter for free. If you planning to compile to another language -- say, JavaScript -- or existing an interpreter then you can just adopt the semantics of the target. In fact, if you're compiling to JavaScript you might be able to get away

No. The Princeton team discovered that the contents of DRAM can be recovered after it's powered off. At room temperate the data persists for up to a minute or so. Cooling the chips with an air duster extends that to around ten minutes. Liquid nitrogen extends it to at least an hour. So, you can grab the machine, reboot into a friendly system, and recover the decryption keys. Or you can grab the machine, yank the RAM, cool it, install it in another machine, and recover the keys. There's no obvious way to protect against this attack on standard hardware.

# dpkg -r $PACKAGE removes $PACKAGE. Replace -r with -P to remove config files as well. If you don't know the exact name of the package, $ dpkg-query -l $PATTERN prints a list of packages whose names match $PATTERN and $ dpkg-query -S $FILE prints the package that owns $FILE. If you use bash, installing the bash-completion package should give you tab completion on the package utilities. If you had a package named "songbird" installed, "dpkg -r song<TAB>" should expand to "dpkg -r songbird" (or give you a list of packages matching "song*" if there's more than one).

Mac is short for Macintosh. Or it was. Mac has been more common since... around the introduction of the iMac, I guess, though it wasn't uncommon before then. Apple is the company that created the Mac.

What do you mean by "type my new script on a html file"? Do you want to embed the scripts in HTML or use the scripts to process HTML?

That was a trick question: the answer is always "because I'm accustomed to it" Actually, from a broader programming perspective, I think you're right and OS X is wrong. It really doesn't make sense that you can have headless applications sitting around. The problem is that there's a conflict between OS X's document-centric interface and process-centric architecture. You shouldn't have to worry about whether closing a window terminates the application because there shouldn't be applications: there should be documents and software components that present documents to users. Apple tried to move

Possibly. Do you assume that closing the window will terminate the app because that's the correct behavior or because that's the behavior to which you're accustomed? In the context of their respective interfaces, I think both behaviors are correct. I think OS X's behavior is more correct than Windows's, but that's neither here nor there. (For the record, I think other aspects of Window are more correct than OS X.)

Random comments. If you factor in the FLOSS that supports OS X I'm not sure that's true. The gap is certainly smaller than it might appear at first glance. That's not a clear win for Windows. The GNU userland supports OS X well enough, so all you're missing is Linux (the kernel), glibc, and a smallish number of non-portable programs. Symlinks? I suppose I might have different standards of "ease". OS X doesn't identify windows and applications. There's a theory behind it but I can't recall the details at the moment. It's more sensible than the normal Windows behavior when you're dealing wi

No one believes that. No one thinks that people wake up one morning and say to themselves "What's the best way for me to promote the free exchange of information? Oh, I know, I'll break into other people's computers. Off to IRC.". People's privacy doesn't care about your motives. And that hat is off-white.

It's in a database somewhere. It looks like you use the dscl utility to access the database. The user-interface seems to be a bit opaque from the examples I've seen. Not unlike accessing the Windows registry via the command-line utilities. I think # dscl . append /Groups/wheel GroupMembership $USER will add $USER to wheel but I offer no warranty. Also, I don't know if OS X has a wheel group or if being a member of wheel lets you su.

The same way they work everywhere else, more or less. Yup. Search examines all (well, most) of the metadata associated with videos, including tags. It's better to have exactly the right number.

Is your account a member of groups wheel or admin? (You should get a complaint about group membership if that's the problem, but I don't recall su producing particularly helpful error messages.)

E17 w/ Bling Bling theme, fresh from CVS.

Heh. DR17 has been 'coming soon' for at least six years.

Apple would sue apple trees if they thought they had a chance in court. I can think of commercial uses that should be non-infringing but I can imagine Apple suing over all of them. Sigh.

Nit: it's infringement if the use of the trademark "is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive". (IANAL, TINLA, etc.)

The list.

AFAIK Time Machine performs full backups. The hard link magic is an implementation detail. [Edit: That is, at least one full backup.]

That's a CD-ROM read error, if I'm not mistaken.

BC code translations: Access violation. Access violation, same page. Corrupt PTE/PFN. (Never seen that before.) NTFS driver error.

*cough* Did someone come up with a persuasive argument for naturalism when I wasn't paying attention?

OS X requires (for some value of requires) 128 MB of RAM and I think the last version that supported the Bondi Blue iMac was 10.3. It's an interesting pair of machines. The Quadra 610 and the Bondi both have symbolic value: the 610 was one of the last 68k Macs, released the year before the first PowerMacs, and the Bondi was the first iMac. One represents the end of the Old Macintosh, the other the beginning of New Mac.

See also Nick Bostrom's Simulation argument. [insert obligatory criticism of New Scientist here.]