Re: [MLUG] Mac moving to Intel

[Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

> Uh...sorry.  I've never had a Mac OS box rooted.
I can root an OS X box but why bother?

> 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. Although I don't think it was your 
request so I can't really blame you. If I remember it was somebody elses 
request. ;)

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

> 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. 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.

Try installing about 6000 fonts and see how OS X handles it. 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.

> 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. What use is this 
so called clean imaging model used for besides the totally retarded 
stuff they've done such as their candy colored taskbars with crappy 
looking magnification effects, transparent drop down boxes, stupid 
colored titlebar buttons that don't even show the purpose of the 
buttons. Ugly and painful scrollbars that stupidly put the buttons both 
at the bottom. Certainly nothing I haven't seen done in Linux and 
decided to disable as a stupid Apple-like idea with no real use.

> 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. Just today I spent a couple hours fixing a quirk in 
Safari's broken implementation of Javascript. I've spent a lot of time 
fighting OS X and it's stupid apps on every level. It's broken for the 
sake of being different and it's poorly documented to boot.

> 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, 
various other Unix's, AS/400, and now OS X. At least Linux is well 
documented and provides expert help when asked for.. the others I can't 
say I've had the same experience with. The only things OS X and Windows 
make easier are the things that were easy anyway. Linux certainly has 
shortcomings, as I frequently point out and try to fix, but in my 
experience it has far less.

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. 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.

> 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. Preview isn't bad but I certainly 
don't think it's great. What about it makes it great? All I want is a 
freakin browser that reads PDF as HTML like Google. Why render text as 
anything but text?

> 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.

> 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. 
What difference does it matter to me how good any of their software is 
if it isn't opensource? Using it still ties you to a single vendor which 
can choose to abuse you any way they want doesn't it? IMO this is 
especially bad for tools that you use to store important data. I suppose 
any presentation that doesn't suck would have important data in it such 
as research data or something. I still don't know why you wouldn't just 
create a DVD presentation though.

> Safari 2.0 is among the very best web browsers on the planet.
Besides having really bad Javascript support?

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

> 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.

> What would Wine give them?
Games. OS X could take over as the gamers OS of choice if they really 
don't have a performance problem or they can fix it (the hardware shift 
is the perfect time to fix it). OS X would be great for a gaming 
interface because it is fairly simplistic. I can't see it as a real work 
OS but for a dozen or so apps that are unlikely to need to run together 
it'd be pretty good. Much better than Windows.

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.

> Mac OS X runs Office natively, and the number of windows-only programs you really need on on OS X currently that have no equal or superior replacement from Mac or open source
> sources is really, really small.
I could say the same about Linux. The reality though is that being able 
to run Windows programs is a huge selling point.

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

> 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.

--
Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>
http://kavlon.org

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