dhess

All of Apple's 2012 models (save the Mac Pro), and a few of its 2011 models, can drive 2 Thunderbolt displays:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5219?viewlocale=en_US#dispnum

I've done this myself with both the MacBook Air (Mid 2012) and the Mac Mini (Late 2012).

Is there a site for server room photos showing off well-designed rooms? Kinda like Houzz, only for networking geeks?

I signed up. The email announcement encourages students of the course to form study groups. I'd love to join a group of San Francisco-based HNers. Email is web-hn-hcigroup@drewhess.com.

Will there be calendar integration, i.e., add an artist's SXSW showtime+venue to my calendar when I discover something I like? If so, I can stop working on this myself and move on to something else :)

I'm not asking him to pentest my network, just some recommended practices :)

For those of us who go to the trouble of attempting to lock down our internal networks by changing the default passwords; setting up guest wireless networks; and running SSH and Kerberized NFS/AFP; what do you recommend as a reasonable set of measures to defend against internal attacks? What does Matasano do? I'm particularly interested in strategies for layer 2.

Can't imagine using HN any other way. I hope this is resolved soon.

Agreed. Sonic.net has been my ISP for 5 years now, and I've only had a problem with their DSL service once. The problem turned out to be a failing modem, which they replaced, for free, even though the modem had just gone out of warranty.

Can't wait for their SF fiber roll-out.

When I was in London recently, I used the London Transport iPhone app for getting around:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/london-transport/id393119892?...

It was a little quirky (the bus arrival times seemed to be off a bit), but overall quite nice. It includes all forms of transport (bus, tube, DLR, ferry, and even Boris's bikes), lets your limit your travel options to just certain types (e.g., "I only want to see bus routes right now"), and has nice heuristics like whether you prefer to walk, how fast a walker you are, etc.

Fair point.

An independent developers' patent pool, then.

I can't rule that explanation out, but I think it's unlikely in this case: my DHCP server knows the MAC address of all of my machines, uses a static MAC->IP mapping, and doesn't update DNS (which is also static). The IP and hostname (as reported by `hostname`) are always correct; it's just the name as reported in the Sharing preference pane and in Finder from other machines on that network that gets the " (N)" suffix.

When coming out of sleep, my Macs often get a new computer name in the form of a " (N)" suffix; e.g., a Mac named "vision" will come out of sleep and mysteriously change its name (as reported in System Preferences->Sharing) to "vision (2)", then "vision (3)" after a subsequent sleep, etc.

It's annoying. I wonder if this rapid DHCP implementation has anything to do with that.

Here's the best documentary I've seen in years: Please Vote for Me, a film covering 3rd graders in a Chinese primary school running for class monitor:

http://pleasevoteforme.org/

(Available for streaming on Netflix.)

Relevant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tvuDxM7mdE

Consider replacing C-a in screen with C-z by putting this in your .screenrc:

escape ^Zz

C-a interferes with command line editing and Emacs. C-z makes it a pain to background a process in screen, but if you're like me, you probably never do that, anyway.

Interesting. The parallels between ML and Scheme, two languages invented in the '70s and in an academic setting, are striking: the core language is great, but the community is divided into ever-so-slightly incompatible implementations, so, in practice, there's very little sharing. Therefore, it's impractical to do most "large" projects in the language, due to lack of critical mass of useful libraries. ML/Scheme end up being learning languages, for the most part, and then everyone moves on to {OCaml, Haskell}/Common Lisp to get real work done.

I would say these similar outcomes are a repudiation of the idea that multiple implementations of the same language is a good thing, but that hasn't hurt C's popularity. More likely, it has something to do with their roots in programming language research. Maybe ML and Scheme are too good for their own good, and other academics can't resist using them as a basis for their own pet ideas. Perhaps a truly successful (read, "widely-adopted") programming language has to be flawed just enough to discourage anyone from trying to improve on it. Worse is better strikes again?

I'm also puzzled why they don't go all-DC. This thread doesn't appear to be getting any traction here. Is there a HN for datacenter geeks?

Reading Bruner's "Toward a Theory of Instruction" and Piaget's "The Child's Conception of Number." Sawyer's "Vision in Elementary Mathematics" is next.

Trying to get over my distaste for Objective-C so I can translate some of these ideas to the iPad.

Teaching Scratch in Oakland.

I use Self Control from time to time, too, but I wonder if you've experienced the same problem that I have: namely, that some sites which you haven't blacklisted stop functioning, too. For example, often when I block HN, reddit, and MacRumors, and then visit apple.com, none of the images on apple.com will load. Random other sites that apparently have nothing to do with my block list are often blocked altogether.

Last time I had this problem, I took a look at my Mac's firewall rules, using ipfw, and discovered that several of the IP addresses used in the block list belonged to popular CDNs (e.g., Akamai). This could explain why static assets (like images) on unblocked sites don't load, but I haven't gotten to the bottom of the other issues.

I think, in my case, anyway, a simple /etc/hosts solution would probably work better than Self Control. Anyone know of one, something more elegant than hacking the file by hand?

No, sadly, it does not, and the Keychain Integration add-on isn't compatible with FF 4 yet.

Whoa there. Church-Turing tells us that everything that is computable is computable by a universal Turing machine. It also tells us that a universal Turing machine and the lambda calculus are computationally equivalent. The lambda calculus is untyped. (There are typed lambda calculi, but they are not computationally more powerful than the lambda calculus. Some of them are less so.)

> You could even TimeMachine-without-additional-drives... I mean, why should my snapshot system and my backup system be one? How about letting me use TimeMachine locally, and if I plug up an additional drive, TimeMachine asks me if I want to backup to it as well?

Unless something changes between now and RTM, Lion will provide that feature out of the box:

http://www.9to5mac.com/54117/time-machine-can-be-used-withou...

And that's about the only feature that a typical Mac user would benefit from with ZFS, without some kind of "prosumer" or "enterprise-y" external storage device.

> "There's a huge chasm between using Xsan over Fibre Channel and a USB drive with Time Machine," Brady told Ars. "That middle piece is what we're looking at—users that want the convenience of a device like a Drobo, but with more reliability and [easy verifiability]."

So, ultimately, this is a hardware play, then. That makes sense, because most of the features of ZFS don't add any value to a Mac with a single internal drive and at most one or two USB drives, which is how almost all Macs are used.

Everything that gets synced -- bookmarks, preferences, etc. -- or just passwords? Do you have a source for that? I can only find evidence that passwords are encrypted client-side.

This is great! It deserves to be hosted on a dedicated service, though: something with search, at least, and preferably with a link to the software used so that submissions could be crowdsourced.

At least 3 of your questions are answered here in this Reddit thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/fsmuw/ive_got_lion_an...

I think you might like this book: The Paralation Model, by Gary W. Sabot.

http://www.amazon.com/Paralation-Model-Architecture-Independ...

I'm already a happy Linode customer, but for my particular needs, $19/mo is much too expensive for a UK VPN endpoint. I'm looking for something more like prgmr.com prices (also a happy customer of theirs; they just don't happen to have any colo in the UK).

Thanks to lowendbox, I found quickvps.co.uk, which, with a 60% discount offer, offers a 256MB Xen VPS for £3/mo. They appear to be competent so far, even though they did e-mail me my root and web UI passwords :\ Anyway, if it goes poorly, I'm out less than a lunch.

Thanks again for the link!

Wow, lowendbox is a fantastic resource! I've been looking for a cheap UK VPN endpoint for years, and lowendbox has plenty of options. Thanks for the link.