Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

In awe at Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard

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I’ve upgraded my MacBook to Mac OS X 10.5 also known as Leopard. And I love it!

I have been using computers proficiently for, let’s see, around 20 years now and I am as excited with Leopard as when I first got my Commodore Amiga 500 around 1990 and I first discovered Linux around 2000. This has nothing to do with being an Apple fanboy or whatever. I am just an ecstatic geek.

Of course, I dislike the translucent menu bar and the new dock but I can confidently say that I am in awe at the 298 remaining enhancements. Funnily, I resisted upgrading to Leopard for weeks as I thought that Tiger was perfect. Now that I have been using Leopard for a few days, I can see how wrong I was…

Luckily, making the translucent menu bar opaque is easy as there is an option for that in the Desktop & Screen Saver system preference window. To have a saner dock, you only have to issue the following in a terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

and maybe install Quicksilver.

I did not come up with this terminal incantation by myself. Instead I got it in one of the most comprehensive and exhaustive reviews I’ve ever read in my life. It’s (of course) John Siracusa’s review of Leopard for Ars Technica. I spent hours reading this review today and ingesting and trying everything. I hope that one day I’ll manage to write something similar comparable.

I’ll finish with John’s conclusion:

The stage is set for Mac OS X 10.6 to triumph beyond the bounds of its ancestors. In the meantime, it’s the Mac development community’s opportunity to shine. Whether it reigns for two and a half years, like Tiger, or even longer, I’m looking forward to my time aboard starship Leopard.

A new look for Noulakaz.net

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What do you think of the new look of my weblog? I’ve tried to keep things simple while enhancing navigation. I’ve also doubled the number of Google adverts in order to get more money :-)

As you’ve noticed, I’ve used a Mac-inspired theme which I find really nicely done. I’ve also added a Random Posts widget in the right sidebar as I feel that this will allow people to (re)discover ancient posts that might be useful to them. Personally, I’ve just spent 30 minutes reading my old writings and they are not too bad…

I’ve still some work to do. I have to put more obvious links to the photos, music and videos I’ve put online. I’ll do that tonight while the kids are sleeping…

What is the fair use policy?

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Since the rebranding, Orange in Mauritius has quietly imposed on us its fair use policy which is described as follows on the website of Mauritius Telecom:

[The Fair Use Policy] is designed to make sure your broadband service is as fast as possible and reliable whenever you are connected.

Some of our broadband customers use file sharing software and download large files like music and videos. This uses up lots of network capacity leaving less available for others. This means that the speed of your broadband service is then affected.

Am I likely to be affected by the Fair Use Policy?

If you don’t regularly use file sharing software or download large files from the internet it’s unlikely you’ll ever be affected by this policy.

What will happen if my use is very high?

If you only occasionally have very high usage, we’re unlikely to be concerned. If your usage continues to be very high, we’ll advise you if your usage is excessive. Ultimately, if your usage still remains excessive, we may have reduce the transmission speed of the service whilst we monitor your usage.

In general, this seems like a good thing. Those who continuously download too much will first be contacted by the MT personnel and if, consequently, they don’t reduce their bandwidth requirements then they’ll be penalized. This seems like the most sensible thing to do given the geographical situation of Mauritius and the limited number of Internet links we can have access to.

There are two aspects that somewhat disturb me though:

  • The Fair Use Policy has been retrofitted in our existing contracts. Is this legal? Or should have we been contacted by Mauritius Telecom to sign a new contract?
  • The Fair Use Policy system is not transparent. What happens if the son (or daughter) of one of the big-bosses of Mauritius Telecom (or a Minister) uses too much bandwidth? Will the MT technicians contact him or her? Will they have the courage to limit his/her bandwidth? I have some doubts. For the system to work (i.e. so that people do not complain), it must be 100% transparent (i.e. everyone should know what all other Internet subscribers have used as bandwidth) but this looks a lot like a privacy violation to me…

Opinion?

[Thanks to Ajay Ramjatan for initiating this whole thought process…]