Spenglerian pessimism

The always interesting Steve Jobs gave recently this interview to MacWorld. Besides the joke (or was it ?) about pirates 'burning in Hell' this passage struck me as  interesting:

“Apple does that better than any other company in the world. What makes us different? Most of our competitors don’t have engineers anymore. Everyone else designs in the Far East.”

They don't have engineers anymore. Of course they haven't been actually manufacturing anything for more than a decade, now. And to-day they're not even designing anything. They just live on marketing the stuff, apparently - support has been outsourced to India, of course.

Local 'remote' Mathematica Kernel on Mac OS

Say, you run Mathematica 5.x locally on a system (Mac OSX 10.4.1 for intel with Rosetta, for instance) where communication between the frontend and MathKernel has problems. You can work around the problem running remotely the local kernel. Here's how:

- create a /sbin/math.sh file with this one line of text

/[path to Mathematica /directory/Mathematica 5.2.app/Contents/MacOS/MathKernel $@

- chmod +x /sbin/math.sh

of course. Of course you have to know how to use the Terminal and some basic unix knowledge.

- ssh-keygen -t rsa

you have to be logged on as the user you use normally (not root)

- Enable remote login in System Preferences - Sharing - this enables sshd

- Start the fronted, go to Kernel, Kernel options, add a new remote kernel using /sbin/math.sh 2&>/dev/null as remote command, localhost as remote host. Define the defaults at your will. Upon launching the kernel you should be asked for the user password, but at last the frontend should communicate normally with the kernel.