[geeks] Princeton Surplus Haul...

[Phil Stracchino]

Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
> 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.

MacOS 9 had bolted-on-as-an-afterthought support for multiple users.
The Multiple Users feature was optional, via a control panel.  Once
enabled, it supported three types of user:  unlimited, restricted, and
'panels', a kid-friendly interface similar to EasyFinder.  (It also
recognized the original user account as the "Owner" account, which was
automatically unrestricted and cannot be removed.)


> 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. 

How old are you talking about?  It's been a looooooong time since Apple
last shipped a Mac that didn't have built-in Ethernet.

> In reality I really don't care much, my wife runs Basilisk II and MacOS
> 7.1 on her Windows XP machine.

Ah.  That explains a lot.  Even System 7.5, as per the unofficial (and
disapproved of by Apple) System 7.5 release shirt, "sucks less".

> 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.

In this house, Windows is GameOS and basically nothing else.


-- 
 Same geek, same site, new location
 Phil Stracchino                     Landline: 603-429-0220
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net         Mobile: 603-216-7037
 Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker, Free Stater