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> But the beachball doesn't always lock up my entire Mac mini (which is > hatefully spelled with a lower case m for mini). Most of the time it > just happifies the current application (yes, Safari) including the > global menu bar. That's because the menu bar is not global, it exists separately in each application. Which is hateful. Mac OS X's user interface uses the Windows-style "the application context handles ALL the user interface related to the application" design, instead of the X11-style "the application context handles everything inside the window border, the window manager takes care of everything outside that" design. You know what the beachball means, right? There's a timer at a very low level in the user interface code. The application can change the value, but it doesn't handle it. When the application hasn't responded to any messages from the user interface (the WindowServer I believe) in that time, it puts up the beachball to let the use know the application is hung. You can think of it as a "hate target". It helpfully points out which application you should be hating.There's stuff above here
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