One of the most common things you’ll see on any technology based internet forum (I could name many, but why bother, I’m sure you all have your dungeons, caves, hiding spots, and water coolers that you hang out at), is a mammoth an ugly behemoth-sized cult that’s following reality distortion field religion behind every platform on the face of the planet. Who really knows why?
I’ve been doing some thinking as of late, there has been a lot on my mind and I figured I’d toss this out there.
Have you ever heard the voice nagging in the back of your head–you know, the one that’s always saying “you need a new computer…”–in some sort of off-tone zombie voice that resembles that of a dying cat robotic drone.
We’ve all heard it. But why must one always live on the bleeding edge? Let’s take a look further…
Repeat after me: “Hectuple is not a real word. There is no such thing as a hectuple.”
NeoSmart user David Q. wrote in to let us know that our usage of the word “hectuple” on the EasyBCD download page to refer to a 7-entry multi-boot environment is, quite frankly, wrong:
For the past week or so (what are a couple of 12-hour periods here or there between friends?) isoHunt has been “sick” when accessed from certain regions – but perfectly fine from others.
At the moment, users are being redirected to a tongue-in-cheek “isoHunt is Sick” page, letting them know that isoHunt’s hardware and software services wouldn’t mind a bit more attention and that, hopefully, isoHunt will be back up shortly..
You can always trust The Register to do what it can to twist the facts into a nice, juicy headline. This time, it’s about Windows Vista SP1, and the very short list of software that’s adversely affected by its installation.
Don’t get this wrong: we’ve got our own reservations about SP1 (between performance and usability – or, more accurately, the lack thereof). But Microsoft is not to blame because certain system tools and utilities won’t run on Windows Vista SP1 when it’s released in March.
According to The Register, "Vista SP1 kills and maims security apps, utilities" and that it’s somehow Microsoft’s fault that antivirus/firewall software by BitDefender, Jiangmin, Trend Micro, and Zone Alarm no longer works on SP1 – but it seems they forgot to mention two facts:
Following the recent RTM of Microsoft’s long-awaited Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, Microsoft has created (for limited release) pre-slipstreamed installation media intended for the distribution of PCs with newly-installed copies of Windows Vista.
With Windows Vista, the process of slipstreaming a service pack is no longer as simple as it once was as a result of the new WinPE/WIM based installation procedure. Since the installation media is packaged as a filesystem image, it’s no longer as trivial of a matter to unpack, update, and repack the setup files and ensure they’d still work. With Windows Vista, the only way to create a slipstreamed installation DVD is to install Vista RTM, apply the service pack, then create an image from the newly-installed OS.
This new procedure has multiple drawbacks, including the fact that it can lead to huge installation media sizes, unnecessary bloat, and has been known to create compatibility issues – unless, of course, it’s Microsoft that’s making the image in the first place.
If you’ve been using Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 or 10.5.1 and had previously used the Terminal to make your menu bar opaque, you’re going to notice that something is slightly out-of-order when you upgrade to 10.5.2. Basically, what happens, is the old menu bar opacity hack still works in 10.5.2, but it looks slightly odd; and seeing as the update has the functionality built right in, you might as well just revert the hack.
Reverting the hack is simple. First of all, open a Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and in the console type the following commands:
sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables'
sudo plutil -convert xml1 /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer.plist
sudo chmod 644 /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer.plist
This will delete the hack parameter, convert the com.apple.WindowServer.plist file back to a readable XML format, and then reset the permissions on the file.
Once you’ve reverted the hack, restart the computer, and then you can go ahead and upgrade to 10.5.2. If you’re already running 10.5.2, you can change the menu bar opacity option in System Preferences > Desktop and Screen Saver (the nice thing about this is that it is on-the-fly, no need to restart any more).
Following right on the heels of Windows Vista SP1 RTM, Apple has seemingly one-upped Microsoft by releasing OS X 10.5.2 – the biggest update to OS X ever – effective immediately and available to all.
The release documentation for the OS X 10.5.2 build can be found at the Apple site, and it contains all the gory details about this whopping update. It’s 343 MiB (for comparison, Vista SP1 x86/x64 RTM are 434/726 MiB, but they contain plenty more changes) and contains a number of important fixes.
At the moment, you can download the update via OS X’s “Software Update” feature or directly from Apple’s OS X downloads site here. Updates are also available for OS X Server, the direct download link can be found here (382 MiB).
10.5.2 ships with several important security updates that were not previously disclosed/patched as well – if you don’t intend on updating to 10.5.2 anytime soon, you should definitely grab the standalone security update found here.
The round-robin algorithm is often used as a simple-yet-effective method of distributing requests to a single-point-of-entry to multiple servers in the background. It’s used by DNS servers, peer-to-peer networks, and many other multiple-node clusters/networks.
In a nutshell, round-robin algorithms pair an incoming request to a specific machine by cycling (or, more specifically, circling) through a list of servers capable of handling the request. It’s a common solution to many network load balancing needs, even though it does not result in a perfectly-balanced load distribution, strictly speaking. In the non-ideal world we our servers live in, there are many reasons why the stock round-robin algorithm just isn’t good enough when it comes to properly balancing server loads.
The first and most important thing to keep in mind is that not all servers are created equal. One should be able to take advantage of all available resources, and it’s impossible to guarantee that all the servers available to process incoming requests are capable of dealing with the same load quantities, take as long to carry out each command, and deal with larger/longer queues as elegantly. Nor can all requests be treated the same, either. Some take longer to process than others, involve more work, and are generally more-demanding than the rest – just as others are finished relatively fast and with far-fewer resources.
For the past several months, our support forums have been plagued on and off with a number of weird and inexplicable failed attempts at installing Ubuntu by many users. We’ve finally pinned down the cause of the problem, and it isn’t pretty. Ubuntu (ever since version 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog) will not install properly on a filesystem other than ext2fs or ext3fs.
Unfortunately if you attempt to install Ubuntu with the “/” partition formatted as ReiserFS, JFS, XFS or any other non-standard filesystem, Ubuntu installation will begin like normal and tick merrily along its way until it attempts to install GRUB. At that point, you’ll get a fairly inexplicable and non-verbose “fatal error” message about “grub-install()” failing.