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Peeve Farm
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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Friday, March 1, 2002
15:08 - No, not those kinds of extensions...
http://www.osxfaq.com/Tutorials/extensions_hell/index.ws

(top) link
...And not those kinds either.

Ever wonder what's become of System Extensions-- those little bits of persnickety code that every Tom, Dick, and Iomega could insert into your system to jink the kernel's operation in some direction that might be favorable to a certain program's operation-- at the expense of its continued functionality with all the rest of your software?

As a correspondent has just said to me, Mac OS 9 and earlier is the only environment where arbitrary software developers have the power to install code that fundamentally changes the operation of the OS. System Extensions are potentially even more damaging to a system's operation than the Registry is-- but, importantly, the old Mac OS provided a clean and easy interface for managing those extensions. Hold down Shift while booting, and none but the factory-default set of extensions load, booting the system in a factory-clean state. Open the Extensions Manager, and all your extensions are there to be individually turned on and off-- they're discrete modules with independent mobility, unlike Registry entries in Windows (which are just textual database keys, with no inherent meaning or interrelation other than what the individual programs might assign to them), which has no such interface for troubleshooting and eliminating conflicts.

Well, System Extensions are gone in Mac OS X-- and good riddance. Now, instead, we have... Extensions. Huh?

Read this article, if you're confused by this. It explains what Extensions in OS X are (short version: they're kernel modules, whose sole purpose is to enable particular pieces of hardware; conflicts are avoided by an elegant cascading matching system). The application-specific functionality that used to be loaded as System Extensions by programs like anti-virus scanners and AOL Instant Messenger are now only permitted to exist in userland, like good little apps-- and they can't screw anything up from there.

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© Brian Tiemann