Bam!
It’s pretty hard to get excited about hard drives. Magnetic media’s most reliable trick is that it keeps getting bigger; solid state on the other hand is obliterating every bench mark out there, but remains expensive per gigabyte. Fortunately, something has come along to fill the gap.
Seagate’s Momentus XT is awesome and we’ve got some.
Snow Leopard: Defeated
After spending years professionally beating irrational computers into acting rationally again, it’s a humbling experience to almost get beaten by a simple software update. That’s not to say software updates are without their eccentricities, but you can at least count on the problems to begin either after the software has finished installing, or right in the middle (ideally at a critical and irrecoverable point). It’s not often that problems begin before the installation takes place, or so I thought until I was staring down Snow Leopard’s missive that “You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume.”
“Can’t, or won’t?” I thought, in my best Kevin Conroy voice.
The problem, it turns out, is somehow related to the destination drive’s partition map, about which a few theories are being floated by others who have been affected. I hear you, PowerPC veterans, exclaiming “Of course! He must have an Apple Partition Table. How 2006.” Not so fast: the issue affects the requisite GUID Partition Table, and while there seems to be a few different causes, you’re more likely to run into this problem if you’ve chopped up your hard drive for a dual or multi-boot machine, or say installed Fedora and added a 2GB swap partition.
At least the solution is simple: pop open Disk Utility and resize your destination partition a couple times. Whatever the reason, most users are back in business after this digital flexing. My computer understands that I’ve made a profession out of fixing far worse nightmares, and would have none of this quick fix nonsense. Disk Utility managed to ratchet up the difficulty level by arbitrarily hating the ext3 file system upon which Fedora was installed, and crashed whenever asked to modify the partition map.
My computer forgets who its dealing with: someone who keeps a full back up and isn’t afraid to erase the partition map. Long story short, the software is installed.
Reinventing the Wheel
I found something neat today called ReactOS. The goal is to recreate an open-source successor to Windows XP based on the Windows NT kernel. The analogy has probably been done to death, but it sounds a lot like another open source OS that re-implemented an existing one. It sounds like a great idea, or at least a very ambitious one, intending to put a stranglehold on Windows’ security holes and optimize the hell out of it. Interestingly, they had this to say of a group of operating systems that already accomplished this:
Modern incarnations like Mac OS X put a fancy graphical user interface on top of UNIX, to hide system details and focus mainly for beginners and likely advanced users are left out in the rain. In contrast, various Linux and BSD flavors have been put together originally for server usage and are therefore very console centric. Most advanced features cannot be accessed from the basic graphical user interface. Almost all UNIX flavors retain some of the original design flaws and binary compatibility between various versions is usually non-existent
Now, it’s probably a bad idea for me to argue with a group of people who are capable of building their own operating system, but there are some flaws with these arguments. We’ll deal with Mac OS X first, because it’s the easiest, and applies to all the popular *nix windowing environments:
Hiding in Plain Sight
Though the terminal is probably the most easily-recognizable tool to get past the GUI, it’s not the only one. Most windowing environments provide a processor viewer similar to top, a log viewer, and even a SELinux policy generator with my copy of Fedora. It’s true that a GUI is meant to hide the complexities behind something simpler, but advanced users are hardly forced to deal with a Fischer-Price OS when more advanced tools are so readily available.
The assertion that server versions are the polar opposite is at least partially true; the most powerful features tend to require some advanced tinkering, after all, it’s a server. It’s hard to simplify that which must be equal parts accessible to trusted clients and guarded against those who aren’t. Some efforts have been made to putting a friendlier face on administrating network services, and while I’m a fan of Mac OS X Server’s admin tools, others simply prefer the control afforded by the more venerable terminal.
The final argument about legacy flaws and binary incompatibilities may as well be true. These operating systems have all been around for a long time, and the potential for junk to pile up (not unlike my closet) is a given. Are these issues so entrenched as to make it impossible or merely difficult to overhaul? Is the solution to renovate, or throw out decades of hard work and begin fresh? I don’t envy the people staring down these decisions. Binary incompatibilities is an issue I’m barely qualified to touch on, so let’s leave it there.
As for ReactOS:
In contrast to UNIX, ReactOS was designed for people familiar and comfortable with the Windows environment. Everything can be done through the well known Win32 user interface and advanced users are free to automate tasks with scripts or use the console.
“Everything,” which I’m assuming they don’t mean literally, can be done through the GUI, and advanced users can write scripts and access the console. This all sounds rather familiar. ReactOS sounds like a very cool project, but I think we’ll have to disagree about the current state of *nix operating systems.
New Ground
A few days after deciding to embark on this crazy plan, it occurred to me that perhaps I should get used to running a real Linux distro on my MacBook if I’m to make this work. Sure, Mac OS X is pretty UNIX’d up, but the goal here is to get used to something a little more unfamiliar. The MacBook was happily running Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) a few months ago, but was sadly just a curiosity at the time and didn’t get much love. So, about a month ago I formatted the drive and threw on Jaunty Jackalope which mostly pleased except for one big problem: gksu crashed and crashed hard.
It’s a bit of a show-stopper, since this is the process by which admin access is granted through the GUI, meaning that the whole system grinds to a stop whenever the system tries to do something like install an update to patch bugs. On the other hand, this can’t be affecting every Ubuntu user, or there would probably be a lot more talk about it. Chances are, there’s a very specific set of circumstances that conspire to invoke the bug, and I’m just unlucky enough to match said circumstances. The whole thing could probably be fixed up by patching the system via command line instead, but after a week of this I had already moved on:
Instead of getting familiar with just one distro, why not a few? Ubuntu was nuked and replaced by Fedora 10. This might seem a slightly crazy idea with Fedora 11 just around the corner, but the purpose of this exercise is after all to get used to installing and using different distros, so why not? Fedora also supports HFS+ out of the box, which is tremendously cool. Not only can I mount my Mac OS X partitions, but it even supports the directories’ permissions. Better yet, Fedora apparently is one of the focuses of the *nix admin course. Sold. So far so good, and only getting better.
Formula 1 in your Phone
Here’s something cool. Racetrack memory is one of those technologies that promises to do everything, right down to being bundled with rainbows and unicorns. We’re told that it will be fast, spacious, and cheap (R&D costs not included). To give you an idea of how far the conventional spinning platter hard drive lag behind newer memory technologies in terms of speed, it’s worth considering that memory access times were measured by nanoseconds even in the 80s, whereas today’s spinning platter hard drives are still measured in milliseconds.
It may not seem like big deal, but your operating system is made up of tens of thousands of files, and indexing those thousands of small files takes far longer than indexing a few large ones, even if those large files take up more room that the group of small files. Seek time adds up. This actually one of the lesser-known bottleneck for the average user, because seek time has only improved from 20ms in the late 80s to 5-15ms today, a 4x improvement at best. This is such a gradual improvement that most of us actually don’t know what we’re missing.
In truth it’s not actually end-of-the-world dire; better buffering, smarter file systems, and RAID mean that our hard drives are still a huge improvement from the past (not to mention larger and smaller at the same time), but it doesn’t hold a candle to semiconductor improvements. CPU speeds have improved from a modest 8MHz in 1984 to today’s 4.7GHz monsters, a figure which will probably be out of date before I even finish typing this. The 4x improvement pales a little compared to 587.5x, and that’s not even taking into account improvements the accompanying chipsets and the ubiquity of multi-core processors.
This is old news though. Flash-based solid state drives have already slain this dragon apart from a few missteps, and while there’s the usual rogue’s gallery of bar graphs to support the claim of victory, even the anecdotal accounts agree that solid state is a winner. Racetrack though, somehow unsatisfied, wants to take wicked-fast and give it a jetpack. It’s exciting stuff, and the cherry on top is that it will probably be even more energy efficient than conventional memory, so the dolphins win too.
Soapbox for the Ungeniused
I stumbled upon an interesting blog earlier today and have spent a few hours consuming what I can. Ungeniused, written by a former Mac Genius, provides some interesting insights into the workings of one of Apple’s best-known customer services, the Genius Bar. The author, Jeremy, apparently worked his way up through several important positions within Apple before landing himself a job as a Genius during Apple’s initial push into the retail scene. Geniuses, like just about anyone in tech support and customer service, get a fair amount of flak, and I’ve even been on the giving end when hearing about a particularly bone-headed diagnosis, but it wasn’t always this way.
Jeremy and a colleague write that the Genius Bar during its genesis was in fact staffed with Apple’s top-tier support professionals, drawing from their large southern campuses at the time. These were no amateur enthusiasts to be sure. I remember that as the Apple Stores expanded, numerous local techs would send resumes in droves for the privileged position of “Mac Genius,” so you can bet that there was a large talent pool to draw from even as Apple’s internal human resources began to dry up. This should have ensured that the Genius Bar would consistently be staffed with the best of the best, as new talent received training from Apple’s elite, so what happened?
Apparently, the iPod.
Pretty soon after the iPod exploded onto the market, the Genius Bar began seeing a lot of appointments for iPods while Mac users had their appointments pushed back. iPods do not present the same technical challenges to the Genius Bar as a Mac; Geniuses don’t have the option to repair broken iPods, only to replace them. Sure, the faulty iPod goes back to Apple where someone repaired and it’s resold as a refurbished product, but the Genius’ entire role is still reduced to making a quick assessment and then filling out some paperwork. Put simply, this is very unfulfilling work for someone exceptionally bright and talented. Faced with a sea of iPods, fewer challenges, and less opportunity to grow and learn, some of the best and brightest left in droves for greener pastures.
I can’t fairly praise or disparage the current generation of Mac Geniuses since my shop rarely deals with them; if our shop needs to communicate with Apple, it’s through other channels. Still, it’s a very interesting and informative article (and blog as a whole) and I’d recommended it to anyone in the tech and customer support industry. It bears keeping in mind that the article is a good two and a half years old and that this is an industry that rarely sits still, but the history is very relevant.
