[MLUG - DISCUSSION] Re: [MLUG] Mac moving to Intel

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

(Moved to discussion.)

On 6/7/05, Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> 
> >Uh...sorry.  I've never had a Mac OS box rooted.
> >
> I can root an OS X box but why bother?

Baloney.  Really, I disbelieve you.  What are you going to do to a
fully patched system remotely?  You do know that by default, or
services are off, right?
 
> >I can hardly say the same about Linux.
> >
> I remember once you had a problem with Linux and it was because you had
> certain security features turned off. 

I think that was Ed, not me.  And a system of Jeff's got toasted
because somebody installed RT Linux and didn't patch it.  My point
isn't that Linux is inherently insecure or anything, but a claim that
OS X has worse security flies in the face of a lot of evidence.

> Other than that I've never had a Linux box rooted.. certainly not one I
> was managing.

And how many OS X boxes have you had rooted?  That was the comparison here.
 
> >The last time the OS (and not just an app)
> >unrecoverably crashed on me on a Mac was round about Mac OS X
> >10.0something.
> >
> It's apps crash for me more than daily under medium stress.

But that (to me) isn't what you mean by OS stability.  App crashes
never take down the system.

> I do
> horrible nasty things to Linux and it just keeps running. I doubt there
> are many people alive that stress systems more than I do. Again, under
> other users I haven't seen OS X do nearly as bad. It' fairly stable for
> normal users although I have seen apps crash for others. I can blame
> that squarely on poor app programming though.

So what's your point?  You can't tell us what you do to OS X to make
it misbehave.
 
> Try installing about 6000 fonts and see how OS X handles it.

How did Linux handle it?  That's the comparison, right?  I will admit
that I can evaluate this claim since I only seem to have 200-odd fonts
installed here.

> That just fscked the crap out of almost every app on the system. I had to manually
> remove the fonts which wasn't very easy and is certainly beyond the
> abilities of average users that OS X is supposed to be for.

What did Font Book do here?  What average user installs 6000 fonts? 
What did it do to the apps?
 
> >Faster so obviously depends on what you're doing that
> >I consider it to be a throw away comment.  The "UI fetishes" you rave
> >about are, as usual, unspecified.  Show me another OS whose overall
> >imaging model is as clean as Mac OS X, and maybe we'll talk.
>
> Clean in what way? OS X isn't even network transparent.

Uh...it is if you want it to be.  You can certainly run X.  You can
run VNC.  There's also a remote client offered by Apple.  What you say
is...well, what are you saying?

> What use is this
> so called clean imaging model used for besides the totally retarded
> stuff they've done such as

Everything can be PDF.  Seriously, this is immensely important.  You
confuse the imaging model with the parts of the UI you don't like but
don't bother to turn off, as people have suggested now *dozens* of
times.

> >The one thing you do have right is the "lower cost" part...if the only
> >part of cost you are considering is the hardware.  I've spent more
> >time chasing down sTuPiD Linux quirks over the last 14 years than I
> >would ever care to admit.
> >
> And I've spent hours and hours recently trying to hunt down fixes to
> stupid OS X quirks. 

Such as?

> Just today I spent a couple hours fixing a quirk in
> Safari's broken implementation of Javascript. 

Put up or shut up.  Show us the Javascript, and tell us why it's
broken.  Again, I disbelieve you.

> I've spent a lot of time
> fighting OS X and it's stupid apps on every level.

You give no specifics.

>  It's broken for the sake of being different and it's poorly documented to boot.

You must be freaking kidding here.  Poorly documented compared to
*what*?  What docs do you lack?
 
> >No, I don't think that's all the fault of
> >Linux developers, but it's a cost you do pay for unless your time has
> >no value.
>
> No doubt. I've spent thousands of hours learning the secrets of Linux,

So your time has no value. That's fine. 

> Also I have to point out that spending hundreds of hours on Linux a few
> years ago doesn't count towards how difficult it is todays. It really
> has made huge strides forward in the past few years. Pop a new video
> card in the machine and XP freaks and puts you through an hour of hell
> while Fedora simply flickers and adjusts itself on the spot.

Or just dies.  I've seen both happen.  I don't know anything about XP here.

> I haven't
> been able to compare OS X on the same hardware but I've seen nothing to
> lead me to think it can make as wide a selection of hardware so easy to
> use as Linux does.

But what hardware do you so want to use?  I *will* have sympathy with
you if you say "a really high end video card".  I won't if you say "my
fax modem" or "a sound card" since the whole *point* of the Mac is
that stuff is built in so you don't have to fiddle.
 
> >Bollocks.  Show me *any* PDF viewer better than Preview.
> >
> PDF is hideous to begin with. It's a horrible technology that is both a
> pain to create and a pain to use.

OK, so you have no idea what you are talking about.  As long as we've
got that established, we can move on.

> Preview isn't bad but I certainly
> don't think it's great. What about it makes it great?

Other than the fast and complete searchability, the ability to select
and copy text and graphics (as PDF, text or whatever), the trivial
ability to make anything PDF, the (new) ability to do PDF
annotations...seriously, you don't like PDF, but I have to deal with a
lot of it, and there's really no other free PDF tool anywhere near
this good.

>  All I want is a
> freakin browser that reads PDF as HTML like Google. Why render text as
> anything but text?

Because maybe the layout is important to you.  Maybe, just maybe it is
supposed to be printable in an exact form without you worrying about
the user's font settings or something.
 
> >Show me any
> >photo software better than iPhoto.
> >
> Never tried it. What is it for exactly? I have my own software for photo
> organization if that's all it is and I'm pretty sure mine is more
> powerful than anything Apple would publish.

You are *so* full of it, Michael.  Really.  Completely full of it.
 
> >Show me presentation software better than Keynote.
> >
> Presentation software is again kind of a retarded tech. It exists for
> the sole purpose of letting people with very little to say make it look
> like a lot more. I suppoe it can be useful but probably 99% is total
> crap. I've never seen a Powerpoint-type presentation that didn't suck.

I didn't ask you whether you liked the category; I asked you to show me better.

> What difference does it matter to me how good any of their software is
> if it isn't opensource?

You're changing the subject.  You're welcome to say you prefer Open
Source, but the point/question was why does anybody think Mac OS X is
any good?

> Using it still ties you to a single vendor which
> can choose to abuse you any way they want doesn't it? 

Only if you can't export your data into some other format.

> IMO this is
> especially bad for tools that you use to store important data. 

Data I collect/create/use is stored generally as either binary files
of known format, flat ASCII, XML, Whatever Ocatave and R can dump as,
or images in known formats.  There are proprietary formats, but I
don't use many of them for data.

> I suppose
> any presentation that doesn't suck would have important data in it such
> as research data or something. 

See above.

> I still don't know why you wouldn't just
> create a DVD presentation though.

If I wanted to create a DVD presentation, I'd use iDVD.  And it would
be huge, and probably more bloated than the average Powerpoint
presentation.
 
> >Safari 2.0 is among the very best web browsers on the planet.
> >
> Besides having really bad Javascript support?

Again, I disbelieve you here. You've yet to give any concrete example
of something that's broken or bad about it.
 
> >(It does have one huge problem: the default PDF handling they are touting as a feature absolutely sucks, and I haven't found a way to turn it off yet.)
> >
> Never really paid any attention to how it handles PDF. Enlighten me?

Somebody decided it would be a great idea to always render PDF into a
browser window (because they could).  This is, however, lame given the
fact that Preview is such an outstanding PDF viewer while
Safari...isn't.  You can save the PDF and then view it with Preview,
but that old behavior in Safar 1.2.x and below was way more useful in
my opinion; it should at least be an option.

>  OS X in general seems to demand it save these temp files to the desktop
> even when I tell it not to.

Uh...no.  You can tell it where to put downloaded files, and it does
so.  One thing I could have sympathy with is that, if you use multiple
browsers, you do have to tell each one where you want the files.  That
said, I don't know of any system right now where this isn't true.

> It really irks me when writing programs to
> generate PDF.. where I have to look at 100's of in-progress PDFs. My
> desktop gets filled with the damn things and nothing seems able to keep
> them from being saved there.

Well, I guess you're just not very highly skilled in this area.  If
you're writing a program that generates PDF, and you can't tell that
program where to put files, then I'm not sure what to say.
 
> >I've done both, and I'm not going back, at least not at this time.
> >
> >
> I detest Gnome and KDE but I still like them better than OS X or Windows.

OK, but you haven't really said why, other than you can (presumably)
manipulate their appearance to meet your notion of eye candy.
 
> >What would Wine give them?
> >
> Games.

I don't play those, so I guess I don't know how well (or not) they
play under Wine.

> OS X could take over as the gamers OS of choice 

Why?  It's  a sucky OS, right?

> With all my bitching about OS X remember that I like it much better than
> Windows and think it could be great if they'd try. Likewise I think OS X
> can become the sort of hell Windows is by ignoring their stability and
> performance issues and UI issues. Apple seems as arrogant as Microsoft
> (possibly with more right) and to me that is a bad thing.

I think you're wrong about stability, unlikely to be right for most
users about performance, and your kvetch about the UI is that you
don't like some button styles, and you think scroll bar arrows are in
the wrong place.  Frankly, I rarely use a mouse with OS X, so I don't
care where the scroll bars are, and my windows are all maxed in size
most of the times.
 
> I could say the same about Linux. The reality though is that being able
> to run Windows programs is a huge selling point.

I've never really seen this.  99% of what most people (not me, maybe)
do is what you get with OS X already, Office, and I guess Quicken or
some tax program.  Sure, I know people who have funky windows or dos
program needs, but they tend to be programs that aren't supported well
by anybody.  And there are games; if your life is games, than that
isn't easy under LInux or OS X or anything that's not Windows or a
game console.
 
> > If Apple has brains, they will make sure that every single Open source program that 
> > currently runs on the Mac is ready to go (and maybe improved) for the new 
> > hardware.
>
> They should definately be able to run every OSS program. Which is
> something that they purposely break which seems bizzare and wrong to me.

What??  What are you talking about here?

> Why not make it easy for all those OSS apps to run on OS X?

Uh...almost anything I use already does?  What are you missing that
you can't at worst case just re-compile?  That said, the biggest
source of incompatibilities I know of is one (regrettable) file system
issue involving filename capitalization.  Another one (mostly past,
now) was programs that assumed they know where (say) temp files would
be created or how ints were laid out...the usual non-portable stuff.
 
> >But, once again, the real problem Apple face is that the just EOLed
> >their current hardware without a concrete replacement date; I think
> >they'll survive this (unlike Osbourne Computer of yore), but it could
> >cost them billions.
>
> It does seem a bit much. If it were me I'd have just put out OS X for
> both platforms side-by-side during the transition. Especially given how
> easy they claim porting porting both the OS and apps is.

That is what they're doing.  I just suspect a lot of people who would
buy today or soon will end up waiting for the new/better thing.  The
problem with telling peope that the new stuff is better is that they
might believe you. :-)

jking

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