Mac hater! (spoken in Dutch accent) (1 Viewer)

[JayV]

Oops, now you're guilty of the same thing you're lashing out at Jeff for.

Hardly. Jeff wants to have a quirky and irrational dislike of Macs. That's fine. I kind of do, too. The difference -- and the reason I posted that reply -- is that I don't choose to sneeringly dismiss Macs based on information I don't have and instead make vague references to facts I don't have available.

So I posted a reply that highlights the irrational nature of his "position". I made reference to many things, including applications like Outlook -- something I notice you didn't point out as being irrelevent. In this, at least, I must have communicated my point well: How is he so surprised by the allegedly bad interface of an OS (with which he isn't even familiar) when he is undoubtedly familiar with really, really bad examples in the Windows world?

I mean, you do see the humor in the situation, don't you? Someone complaining about problems on a system that are present (or recently were) on his system?

-j

 

[Patrick Larkin]

This thread is laughable. Its always humorous to see people that have never used Unix claim that Windows is more customizable.

I don't do video or audio. But we do use ALL Macintosh. We use SERVERS, mainly web and database servers.

I have sitting here next to me one of a dozen servers. This one is the oldest. Its an old beige G3 tower running MacOS X. It runs for an organization of 2000+ users:

Apache SSL
php
OpenSSH (we don't allow telnet or ftp)
MySQL (it has over 35 databases actively used)
Movable Type (perl/MySQL blog server)
Phorum (php/MySQL bulletin board)
Executes about 50 cron jobs written mainly in perl or shell scripts
Filemaker Pro runs in the background interacting with the MySQL databases

This machine is rock solid. All of the processes except FMP are running solely as Unix processes with no GUI whatsoever. I'm not exactly sure where Jeff is getting his information. We switched from Linux and BSD about 3 years ago and run strictly MacOS X. We can get ANY free high performance too we want.

The most hysterical comment is that someone wasn't sure whether OS X had a command line! Bwaahahahaaa!!! A Unix shell makes a DOS prompt look like one of those old TI computers running BASIC.

Lets get informed people!

 

[EdR]

you cannot dispute that Apple's hardware is extremely expensive clock for clock

You're right, I can't and won't. I still buy Macs because for me the UI (and now the OS itself) is superior, as a creative tool it just works for me, the machines come fully equipped with everything from gigabit ethernet and FireWire to USB with a two port hub, wireless networking to truly great software like iMovie, iDVD and Safari. I've been using FinalCut Pro for a couple years now, and I still often use iMovie for small projects because you can get more done in a short period of time than with anything else I've used.

 

[JoshF]

you cannot dispute that Apple's hardware is extremely expensive clock for clock

Absolutely. And to tell you the truth, I'd rather drive a Mercedes than a Hyundai. They're both cars, but the Mercedes sure drives better and lasts a lot longer.

 

[Patrick Larkin]

if you could compare clock speeds, there might be a point.

 

[MichaelBryant]

My parents have an imac and I can attest it is the most confusing and annoying computer I have ever used. I too hate the cutsey animated icons. Everytime my folks have a problem they call Apple and the rep sells them some more overpriced software to make the computer "easier to use". Half they time they can't even open the emails they receive from friends because of incompatibility. Also, Appleworks is hands down the worst word processor program I have ever used. I'd go back to a manual typewriter before I'd use that program again.

I'm no fan of Microsoft(whose products and business practices have major flaws) but I'll take their software products over Apples any day.

 

[Scott H]

Michael, I have a hard time believing that your post in legitimate and sincere.

That would make this first reference I have ever read to an iMac being confusing. It's prob the least confusing hardware on the planet. And in 20 years of use I've never heard of anyone calling Apple with usage problems and being told to buy software. Calling a tech support number may get a suggestion on what would be required to access MS Office/Word files. The only "overpriced" software Apple sells that has anything to do with this would in fact be Appleworks, but it's hardly overpriced, being about 1/4 or less the price of MS Office. And yes, in this case, you kinda get what you pay for. If you need Office, then buy Office. Most Apple software is free and excellent. Email incompatibility? Never encountered it. Unless you are referring to an executable, which yes, Mac OS thankfully will not open. Talk about cutesy and animated, and well, dangerous and bad idea. Animated cutesly icons in Mac OS? Again, Mac 101, turn it off, change it, do any basic preference management.

If someone encountered these problem on an iMac then, with all due respect, it is likely that they would be having a much worse time of it on PC hardware and an MS operating system. Seriously.

Somebody please tell me what these animated icons are that you are complaining about in Mac OS! Seriously, if it's not related to an incarnation of the dock then you are just making stuff up.

 

[Scott H]

Okay, this is for those who haven't even sat in the driver's seat, much less looked under the hood of OS X. Right there under the Apple menu you will find the Dock prefs. Please adjust so as to move past some aversion to a most basic and optional UI setting.

The pane looks like this:



The pull down menu options are Scale (non-animated) and Genie (animated).

One might note, however, that this level of animation does not exist in any Windows OS. Contrary to Jeff's assertions, the dock is derived from NeXT, and the animation capabilities are a result of Quartz's ability to scale dynamically. You can learn about it here:
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/1...s-x-gui-6.html

Beyond the defeatable genie effect, perhaps some of you are confusing such trivial (but advanced) animation with Aqua's capacity to scale icons for basic Dock functionality, such as when adding many items to it and the icons automatically resizing to accomodate (though not exceeding a user specified size). And there are, of course, many third party apps to make countless other mods to the Dock. It's really a rather remarkable PDF rendered environment. Info:
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/1...s-x-gui-4.html

Quoting John Siracusa, of ArsTechnica, "What do Quartz and Aqua mean to the industry as a whole? To paraphrase Steve Jobs once again, it's very clear to me that every computer will work this way someday. No, I don't mean that the world's computer screens will be covered with candied window widgets and genie animations a few years from now. I mean that third generation display layers are clearly the future. Pundits frequently predict the rise of the 3D (fourth generation?) interfaces, but I think vectorized 2D has to come first. Apple is the first of the major players to bring this to market..."

 

[Joseph S]

The pull down menu options are Scale (non-animated) and Genie (animated).

You did a great job Scott, but you neglected to mention the fabled "Suck" effect? It's not there anymore for pull down use.

To enable:
1) Open Terminal
2) Enter
defaults write com.apple.Dock mineffect suck
3) Hit return

To undo:
1) Pick an option in Dock prefs

 

[Scott H]

Joseph, I don't like my OS to suck, ya know what I'm sayin?

Seriously, though... I really don't tweak that much. Performance wise I do, and interface wise I get minimalist and get stuff out of my way and then I use the damn machine.

 

[Rob Gardiner]

Hey everybody,

One (or actually two) quick question(s) before I go on vacation for a week: what can the command line in OS X do, and who uses it? I ask because a friend of mine, who is getting rid of all his PCs in favor of a Mac with ProTools, says that no one uses the command line, and it was only included for show! I'm sure that's not the case, but I wanted to hear from you folks . . . how useful is it, and who uses it?

 

[Anthony Volpe]

Joining the thread late. Wish I never read any of it.

Mac Hater movie: Stupid. Cloverleaf-period-spacebar. RIIIIGHT. None of that crap EVER happens in the Windows world.

"Sure they were only able to get the thing stable by giving it a UNIX Core, but that still doesn't mean that programs are stable "

No s#@!, Sherlock. Apple has no control over who writes apps for its OS (incorrectly). Same applies with Windows, UNIX, Amiga, Atari 2600, Gamecube, Nokia cell phone, lather, rinse, repeat...

"ive never bought a mac, and never will, but i'd be disappointed if they left the marketplace. all the mac users would be forced to use our crappy PCs"

No, I'll use pencil and paper.

"And you still can't do anything with OS X until they remove the 70,000 roadblocks in your way and kill the cute"

My G4 hasn't had one system crash in the year that I've owned it, it does what I need it to do when I need it to be done, and my productivity on it is three times as fast as it would be on a WIndows98 machine. Three down, 69,997 to go.

By the way: one man's "cute" is another man's "thank God I don't have to spend 10 times as long doing this by typing a command line."

"Wayne is correct. For 3K I can set up 3 3GHZ machines and do distributed processing, which will blow your render times out of the water even with a dual G5

...which won't come out until August, at which point you can justify your claim with an independent benchmark

"I supported Macs for close to 6 years (middle through HS), and I learned heck of a lot about them because our teacher was incompetant.

Your Win98 machine have spellcheck? Nice choice of word to misspell, BTW.

I still find an elegance in the DOS prompt that lacks in any GUI

Real life has no DOS prompts. GUI's were meant to emulate the way people do things in the real world. Do you type "run removebreadfrombag.exe", "run putbaloneyonbread.exe", "run putcheeseonbread.exe", "run closesandwich.exe", and "run chewchewchewswallow.exe" when you make a sandwich? If you wish the world worked that way instead, get help. NOW.

"Just because Apple gets to the party a decade too late (how long did it take them to get pre-emptive multitasking? Something AmigaOS had in 1990?) doesn't mean they should be heralded as the greatest ever."

I agree. I just wanted a computer that doesn't need a Masters in CompSci to build just so that I can rebuild it in a month when the damn motherboard melts.

And the final nail in the coffin:

"Scott. The only point I'm making is that I HATE MACOS. I hate its inherent cuteness, I find it cloying, I can't stand it, and it does not support the projects I do to the level I need them to be - THEREFORE - What I have stated as fact remains."

EXCUSE ME???

fact (fakt) n. anything done; anything actually true; anything which has actually happened

opinion (a-pin'yan) n. judgment or belief; estimation

Now if you'll all excuse me, I need a break from this forum for another month

"run getmethehelloutofhere.exe"

 

[Ken Chan]

what can the command line in OS X do, and who uses it?

Second part first: people with a Unix background probably use it a lot, while people with a Mac background may never use it at all. And of course there are people in the middle.

What can it do? It's very similar to the Command Prompt in Windows, just better Instead of thinking of them as a "command line", it's really a "terminal window" (with a character-based display) with a "shell". You can type commands for the shell, or run programs from the shell; those programs can run graphically in the main UI, or inside the terminal window.

Modern shells on Unix, including Mac OS X, are much more capable than the shell for Windows. You can get better shells for Windows, like 4NT, but most people don't bother.

If you remember your DOS commands, COPY was a function of the shell, while XCOPY was a separate program, XCOPY.EXE. In Unix, almost everything is a program, including the equivalents of COPY and DIR (cp and ls). But a Unix shell will have a (comparatively) sophisticated scripting language, command line editing and history, more configurability, and so forth.

So it's not that the "command line" itself is useful, although in a Unix shell, the command line has many features. It's that you have many programs that are intended to run inside a terminal window, and those programs are useful by themselves, and -- this is important -- in combinations.

//Ken

 

[Max Leung]

Reading this thread reminds me of how great the Amiga was. The perfect integration of command-line and GUI in the history of computing! Ah, the good old days...true pre-emptive multitasking, 3 chip coprocessor system with true hardware DMA (ie. play music, format a disk, and run an 8 line chat BBS without breaking a sweat), and the full GNU Unix-like tools and libraries in a dynamically-loaded library (aka DLLs). And this is 1991!

The Amiga was mentioned in a few electrical and computer engineering journals for its hardware power and design elegance, and the OS design is a work of art (I still refer to the original Amiga Kernal documentation for embedded system programming ideas...the best OS documentation ever written!).

Ah, sweet nostalgia!

 

[Max Leung]

Oh yeah, and the flamewars were fun...all you needed to do was bring out the multitasking bat to beat down the crazy PC and Mac advocates...it's like having Canadian peace-keeping troops kick the ass of the Croats and Serbs when they get into a tuffle!

 

[Scott H]

Rob, the terminal app isn't included for show. Any Unix OS is going to have command line behind the GUI.

To put all this into perspective one has to understand what Mac OS X is:

Aqua is the Mac UI.
Darwin is the core OS.

Darwin combines Mach (based on Mach 3.0 from Carnegie Mellon University) with BSD (customized version of FreeBSD 4.4 from the University of California, Berkely).
Darwin is an open source Apple project.

info:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/darwin.html
http://www.applelust.com/alust/termi...al041202.shtml


Because I was curious, I forwarded your question to a good friend of mine, just for grins. Here is his response:

I ask because a friend of mine, who is getting rid of all his PCs in favor of a Mac with ProTools, says that no one uses the command line, and it was only included for show!

that depends on what you use a computer for. think about cars; do you want to drive a car, or now how to build one from the ground up? obviously it's an extreme example, but if you know some commandline, it can augment your computer experience by allowing you to do things that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise, simply because you know how things work. if you learn a little scripting you'll start to see the power that the commandline can offer. when I started in Linux 5 years ago, I worked strictly in the commandline for the first 6 months, and it was the best thing I could have done. I understand how the 'backend' works, and know that the GUI is simply a show; like the Wizard of OZ. so it works for what it's needed for, but it is not the 'OS'. most machines I admin now have no GUI, everything is done remotely through a SSH session shell, which I'm in 90% of my time. once you've learned some commandline, you can be comfortable in Linux/AIX/Solaris/HP-UX/*BSD/Darwin/etc.



Okay, that's his repsonse.

The typical Mac user? Well, I recommend referencing the countless pages you will find with a google search. As an example, the last thing that I did was telnet into a router to set a parameter not available via the web browser UI options.

Think about the Matrix films. I think everything is done via command line, and it's not a bad analogy.

Here are some pages:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/unix.html
http://www.mcelhearn.com/unix.html
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/li...arnunixos.html
http://www.westwind.com/reference/OS...ine/admin.html
http://www.macworld.com/2001/07/bc/howtoosxcommand/
http://www.macosxhints.com/
http://www.secretaboutbox.com/site/a...s/terminal.php
http://www.bombich.com/mactips/commands.html
http://www.macobserver.com/tips/maco...20021122.shtml
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl...id=156&tid=187


Hopefully, you get the idea...

 

[Patrick Larkin]

what can the command line in OS X do, and who uses it?

I use it daily. But I admin a lot of Unix based servers. Any time I compile new software, I use it. whenever I need to change permissions, I use it. whenever I need to quickly edit a config file, I use it. whenever i need to ping something, nslookup, tracert, etc etc.

There are literally hundreds of books on unix and the command line. Once you enter the world of *nix, it is utterly amazing the power of the shell. DOS promt is a joke comparatively speaking.