Valve quietly teases a Left 4 Dead release date for Mac

In a post on Valve’s official Left 4 Dead blog that previews a new piece of downloadable content for Left 4 Dead, the company suggest that the new content will be available for Left 4 Dead October 5 on the PC, Xbox 360… and Mac. If the add-on is coming to the Mac, as Valve’s post states, then the actual games required to play it must be along for the ride as well.

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What just turned 10… Mac OS 10! Here’s my list of best features introduced in MOSX.

Well, Mac OS X has turned 10…  Let’s take a look back at my list of best features that Mac OS X has introduced…

  • Time Machine – Quite simply, this has brought backups to virtually everyone that wants it.  While Retrospect, and other applications have their followers, Apple introduced a simple system that just by connecting another drive, your backup concerns are virtually eliminated.  While not perfect, it is a major step forward and raises the bar on the commercial backup market.
  • Native PDF support – All versions of Mac OS X have offered native PDF creation, reading, editing, and modification support.  From any print dialog you can create a PDF file, really.  Most people don’t understand that Acrobat Pro is only really needed for modifying forms, and other niche PDF features.
  • Spotlight – It’s like having Google Desktop (TM) on your computer, searching your own system, and the other networked macs in your home lan.
  • Boot Camp – The ability to run any Windows application or game you want, as long as you bring your own copy of Windows.
  • Unix Support – The ability to use virtually any Unix based application, as well as the built-in File Sharing (Simba), and Web server (Apache), give us control and features that were undreamed of in the Mac OS 9 days.
  • Quick Look – The ability to hit a key or a mouse button, and have the document opened immediately in the Quick Look browser…

 

Items to look forward to:

  • OpenCL & Grand Central – Simplify multiple threaded applications, and simplify the use of multiple CPU cores, which have the potential to help optimize the performance of every CPU core you have in your system….

Finder reporting -10004? What’s that?

Snow Leopard introduced significant changes in user permissions. That error is:

-10004 A privilege violation occurred.

Now in layman’s terms, what does that mean?

It simply means that whatever user is attempting to write to the directory doesn’t have permission to do so.  In otherwords, let’s say that the computer has two users:

  • Parents Account
  • Kids Account

And the Parent’s install “Wonderful Kids Game ABCDEF”.  When the kids login, and attempt to run “Wonderful Kids Game ABCDEF”, and it works for a few minutes, but then dies with a -10004 error…

Why?  The game was designed to save to a folder that the kids can’t write to.  That could be the Game’s folder in the Applications folder, or a different folder, but the Kids account doesn’t have access privileges to write to that folder.

Now often, this doesn’t happen, but this scenario is what the -10004 error is designed to report.

It likely means that you’re trying to write to a directory that isn’t writable (after your upgrade) from the IndigoServer process. You’re going to have to look carefully through any directories you write to and make sure that they are writable by the same user that launches the IndigoServer process.

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