First, a humorous story... I had my powerbook in the office when I was in Seattle last week (turns out, I love to develop on it ;). On Friday, I got an e-mail and a remedy ticket auto-submitted on my behalf for having a virus on my machine. Rafael, the deskside support guy, came to check out my machine (my work laptop), and couldn't find anything so he started asking questions like... "Do you login to a different PC"... "Umm no, but I do have a Mac, and I did run Virtual PC." The day before, I had given a friend a demo of the machine; showed off X11 (with KDE, Gnome etc.), all of the iApps, popped up Virtual PC. "Check this out! I can run MacOSX, Un*x, and Windows XP all at the same time!" It turns out that Windows is so secure that it can get a virus under an emulator! I don't know which is more true; MacOSX is cool or Windows is lame.
Second, a Mac, er Powerbook complaint. Why on earth can't it have any sort of lights for CPU/Disk usage feedback? I don't know how many times I've clicked on something and after waiting an uncomfortable amount of time wondered whether it was actually doing anything. Maybe I've still got bad PC addictions, and Mac is actually the correct way to do UI/feedback. However, it feels like maybe Apple was being a little too snobby about their "clean industrial design" that they couldn't be bothered to have a light for disk feedback. How about this.... Why not use the light in the "lid open button" which blinks when sleeping? I bet it's probably even possible to hack this somehow.
use the load monitor, I'm pretty sure it reports CPU and disk activity, though I'm not sure about that. surely something reports disk activity somewhere. versiontracker is your friend. but not perversiontracker.
ReplyDeletethis is implemented under linux-ppc in the kernel options.
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