OS X Odds & Ends: Be nice; USB panic?; UNIX viruses?; more

Be nice? This MacFixIt Forums thread (Terminal Tricks Speed up OS X) talks about the merits of using the nice/renice commands to speed up Mac OS X (and also resolved a controversy involving similar information posted to Applelinks.com). Some say it is of value; others say no.

USB devices leads to kernel panic? Pieter Coolsma has been getting kernel crashes linked to having his USB Umax Astra scanner connected. He adds: "A collegue of mine got the same kernel panic while a Sagem USB adapter was plugged into his USB port, also without Mac OS X drivers."

Update: Pieter Coolsma replies: "USBdevices without drivers are not the conflict. I have disconnected all USB devices from my iMac and then booted Mac OS X. When I dialed in at my ISP, I got another kernel panic. Maybe the problem lies at the serial drivers of OS X. I only get kernel panics when I am online." Hmmm...this may in fact be the problem described here previously.

Will OS X be vulnerable to UNIX viruses? A reader pointed us to this Computerworld article which describes "a dangerous worm spreading across the Internet and infecting Linux servers." While the Mac does not appear to be vulnerable here, it raises the general issue as to whether UNIX and/or LINUX viruses may potentially put OS X systems at risk.

Update: A reader suggests: "Unless the virus is self-compiling (I doubt it) it probably won't run under Mac OS X."

Web browser user agent data does not separate OS 9 and OS X Noah Mittman notes that the user agent for OS X web browsers (such as Explorer and OmniWeb) have not been updated to reflect that they are running from Mac OS X specifically (as opposed to just a Mac). This could cause problems for web sites that check such values before deciding the compatible version of a plug-in to download at a user's request. Some may work in OS X but not OS 9 or vice versa.

No DV support either Following up on our item on the lack of MIDI support in Mac OS X, William Kucharski notes a similar lack of digital video editing support: "The Mac makes a great DV editing platform. However, none of the three professional DV editing products available (Adobe Premiere, CineStream 3, or Final Cut Pro) run native under Mac OS X, and the Classic environment does not provide access to the FireWire ports (!). Further, aside from the issue of when Premiere or CineStream 3 may support Mac OS X, Apple hasn't even give a date for when FCP2 may support it. Thus the only DV editor that runs on Mac OS X is... iMovie2."