IRAF and More - For Mac Using Astronomers and Astrophysicists
Well, Apple just can’t keep Kerberos working. Upon the most recent Apple security update, again with the ssh segmentation violations. It’s getting highly annoying.
The trick is to use Pacifist to replace the Kerberos.framework file (or something) with that from the 10.4.9 update. Described, more or less, in this thread here.
.A nice profile on a collaborative effort between Astronomers and medical researchers at Harvard is up at Apple’s Site. Check it Out.
.Hmm, so first we had this post about 42 reason why people might switch to the Mac. (Hooray!). Then later we got this response of nine reasons people should stick with PCs. It’s a doozy. Let’s go over it.
- Cost:PCs are cheaper
Well, there are PCs that are much cheaper than the cheapest Mac but they are also much, well ,cheaper than the cheapest Mac. Slower, with less features. If you compare similarly equipped Macs and PCs, the Mac is even or ahead. This shocked people when the Mac pro came out, but it’s true.
2: Operating System: yes, some may laugh, but with a PC you’ve got choices.
You’ve got Windows, which is precisely why people would want to flee the PC, and Linux . Linux runs on Macs too, but OS X has all the goodness of Linux anyway. If you’re sticking with the PC for Windows, well, God help you. Plus with Parallels you can run all these other OSes anyway, should you want, including Windows.
3: Software: The is a huge smorgesboard of software available for PC’s. Mac on the other hand suffer from a serious lack of options.
There may be a few situations where some specific application is unavailable or lacks a counterpart for MacOS X. But these are rare situations that will not effect 95% of PC Users. People don’t want 20 different programs that do the same thing poorly, they want one or two that does it well. Plus, you can run Windows within Parallels or boot camp if need be.
Gaming
This is a legitimate advantage for PCs. If you want to play the latest games, and that’s your priority, a PC is for you. You can Boot Camp it with a Mac and play them at good speeds, but you’ll have to drop some serious dough for Windows. Blizzard is awesome about Mac support, and Aspyr and others do some great ports, but gaming (due to people programming for DirectX) is something better done in Windows.
Servicability: something gone wrong with your Mac? not a problem, if you’re lucky enough to live near a Apple shop they’ll fix it for you…. Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, Apple doesn’t like you tinkering under the hood so you can fix it yourself. Something with my PC goes wrong, I flip the lid and have a look, or I take it to any number of PC shops that do repairs all within close driving range.
If you live far from an Apple authorized service provider, this might be a problem. If under warranty, Apple will overnight you a box which you can overnight a Mac back in.. at least, they do this for laptops. For heavier equipment this may be a problem indeed. For Mac Pros, they are quite serviceable by the user for something like a HD replacement. Most “regular” PC users aren’t going to want to perform surgery on their PC anyway, I thought this list for was “regular” computer users?
Parts/ Upgrading
I somehow doubt most 59 year old mothers are going to want to open up a PC and perform an upgrade. I thought this was about “regular users.” Anyway, the Mac Pro is the easiest computer to upgrade on the planet, with an awesome case design that allows for easy hard drive upgrades and access to all the PCI slots. The iMacs and Macbooks… not so much. All laptops are typically a real pain to open up, but the MacBook has a very simple hard drive bay, and RAM is easy on both the MacBook and Macbook Pro. The MBP has an express card slot. Most Macs have things built in like wireless networking and firewire that upgrades aren’t that neccesary. The biggest problem would be hard drive upgrades on an iMac. You’re sort of stuck with firewire or usb drives. Nor can you upgrade the video card on an iMac (that is lame). But, the notion that all peripherals work with PCs because of “extensive driver support” must be a joke. I’ve seen PC users struggle with getting hardware to work more times than I can count. (Let’s not even talk about Linux’s hardware support).
Peripherals: …Sure you can plug something into a Mac the same way as a PC, but will it work with a Mac? Believe it or not theres more to peripherals than digital cameras, which all work with a PC anyway.
Is this a joke? It’s often a driver install fest on PCs to get perihperals to work most things work on Macs that don’t even say they support OS X. What peripherals is this guy talking about anyway? USB memory cards work, no drivers. USB Printers work with the gimp-print drivers, or the driver from the manufacturer. USB Mice work, just plug in and go. External hard drives, plug in and go. Macs probably support a smaller set of hardware in totem, but it’s much more likely to work.
Better Peripherals: more choice and no stupid 1 button mouse. PC mice also come with a scroll wheel for scrolling, a Mac Mouse…well a weirdish rubber button thingy.
It’s fast becoming obvious this guy has never used a Mac. All USB 3 button / scroll wheel mice just work on Macs. I bought a $20 USB Kennsington mouse with 2 buttons and a scroll wheel and both the scroll wheel and all 3 buttons are recognized and used by OS X; I didn’t even install a driver. Mac Pros and iMacs have come with the 3 button “mighty mouse” for almost a year now. (not 100% sure about that time frame, but the mighty mouse is standard issue.) A legitimate critique would be say, force feedback joysticks and such; a Mac won’t know what to do with them. But, this goes back to the gaming thing, which I already conceded.
Usability: for the average person who doesn’t live in Silicon Valley, PC’s are actually more usable, after all, not only do you hardly ever find a Mac in an average (ie non-tech firm) business, very few other places run them, where as PC’s are everywhere and virtually everyone has exposure to Windows.
Yes, you’ll have to adapt from your Windows-entrained ways to use a Mac. Because the Windows-way is usually so complex and confusing that it may shock you when something is much simpler on the Mac. There is always inertia when moving to a different platform, but just because you use Windows at work is not a reason to tolerate it at home.
All in all, a very unimpressive list. Other than for gaming, I can’t imagine why I personally would ever want to deal with Windows.
.Wow, this tip really works. Probably more so on slower machines (like my iBook G4) than newer ones (like the Mac Pro in my office.)
Via Daring Fireball, it’s on the Hawk Wings web site. You use sql lite to do something to the Envelope Index file. There’s no period once you get into sql lite. The only suggestion I have is that there’s no period on the vacuum command of course, so once at the sqlite> prompt just type:
vacuum subjects;
and then wait for a bit while it vacuums. Afterwards, Mail really is significantly snappier at loading folders.
.Pfeiffer consulting group has apparently analyzed the ease of use of theinterfaces of Vista, XP, and OS X. Their conclusion is that Vista is worse than XP, and both lag far behind OS X.
I don’t know exactly the metrics they used to determine this “friction” score, but I would hazard to guess that Macs have a high score due to better adherence to Fitts’ Law. Basically, in order to maximize the ease of accessing a user interface element, it should be a) close, b) a large target.
Take for example the menu bar in OS X versus Windows. The menu bar in OS X is an infinitely large target, at least vertically. You just throw the mouse to the top of the screen and it stops on the menu bar. Or, take for example, pop-up menus. On a Mac the current selection is under the mouse on a pop menu, but not so on XP. (This is another reason I use Safari or Camino rather than Firefox, Firefox has generic non-Mac pop-up menu behavior.)
So, I’m not surprised that OS X comes out ahead of Windows, but I am a bit surprised about Vista lagging behind XP. That’s a trend in the wrong direction.
.Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Make Historic Joint Appearance At the Fifth Annual ‘D: All Things Digital’ Conference: Financial News - Yahoo!
Finance. This should be quite interesting. Gates got, shall we say, upset, in a recent interview with Newsweek. He’s probably tired of reading about OS X in every article about Vista. 
Monolingual is a handy tool that removes extra localizations from MacOS X and installed Applications. Buried within many .app bundles and other parts of OS X lie specific localization directories. In fact, if you wanted, you could probably switch your Mac to Chinese or German or Spanish at this very moment using the International system preference panel.
And while that’s kind of fun to show off the Mac’s multi-language abilities, you can reclaim a decent bit of space by clearing out languages you won’t use. I reclaimed 600 MB on my iBook. So, for those of us with laptops needing to squeeze out every last bit of space for storing astronomical data - cleaning out the unused localizations may be a useful step.
.