[geeks] Princeton Surplus Haul...

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 08:12:40AM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
....
> , and the sheer number of hoops we have to jump
> through to bludgeon passive-aggressive MacOS into approximating what we
> want it to do on the kids' computers is actually more trouble than a
> Windows box would be.  On Windows boxen there are at least workarounds
> to most of the problems involved in setting up kids with restricted
> access and no need to physically handle optical media.  On MacOS, a
> restricted account isn't allowed to mount network shares or disk images.

I really have no idea of what you are talking about. Before OSX, I never
heard of any kind of restricted account at all. There was a front end
program that required a password and limited functions that a school
would not want students to use, but it was real easy to get around.

My oldest son bypassed it the first day in class. He then installed
NetBunny, which had everyone (including the teacher) laughing.

OSX being BSD based supports sudo, so you do anything you want if you
are an uprivledged user if you are in the sudoers file. A simple click
here shell script will do almost anything you want.

The biggest problem that I would have with a house full of old Macs, is
the lack of ethernet support. At one time Apple sold an IP over localtalk
(previously known as appletalk) to IP over ethernet bridge, but I have
never seen it available publicly or bootleg. It ran on any Mac that
had both ports on it. 

In realitly I really don't care much, my wife runs Basilisk II and MacOS
7.1 on her Windows XP machine. It does everything she needs and I have
had it set up to access netowrk shares, CD-ROMS and a printer, but she
has never used it because all she runs is an old game. :-)

The reality of life here is that my wife and middle son want Windows,
my youngest son wants only FireFox, and my oldest son moved out a long time
ago. I get to run what I want, and the Internet router, file server,
DVD player (a MythTV box) run Linux, but they don't know or care.

I occasionaly use a Mac, but most of the time I use my wife's Windows
computer because I feel warm and comfortable when I do. :-)

The only Mac I sold which I wish I kept was an original LC with an Apple
IIe card in it.

Geoff. 
-- 
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