I HATE APPLE

well it took two hours in the store and on the phone but apparently apple is going to ship me a new MBP with fedex labels to ship the old one back. they took my CC # as insurance and i guess i'm going to have to sign some sort of agreement too.

hmm i forgot to ask whether i am going to be able to transfer the apple care or not.

also they weren't clear whether they'd be sending an '07 or an '08

xpost: http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/power.users.html

-- Catsupppppppppppppp dude 茄蕃, Monday, 2 June 2008 19:59 (Yesterday) Link

http://i26.tinypic.com/n225ph.png

i would say it's an argument for verbose and clearly worded warning messages when a non-root account attempts to do something that will break a dependency, but my undergrad was in liberal arts.

I can't disagree with this. I would have appreciated a warning before I did that. Even a taunt would have been acceptable.

"Hey there, FancyPants! You're about to render your machine totally unbootable. That's awesome if that's your bag, but let me go ahead and link you to the HowTo page for FireWire Target Disk Mode, because that's what you're looking at here."

Computing is so still at the stage of "do we put the clutch here as a pedal, or make it a button under the seat, or what? Ach, we'll make it a lever on the passenger side. If they read the manual, do research and use common sense they'll figure it out."

To be fair, Apple still leads the way in finding (acceptably) intuitive ways to build the interface. There are many seemingly little things about OS X that now drive me nuts when they're not there, like (oh god this name) Exposé. One of the things I like about gnu with compiz is that you can closely mimic a lot of functionality like that -- my hot corners are the same on both my desktops.

how much do you think i could get for my 12"PB 1Ghz 512MB ram?

when someone's mail notes stopped working (moonship?), the problem turned out to be user optimization: the note font had been removed or deactivated! That's classical PEBKAC, and no matter how mature the industry becomes, it'll still happen.

I can't disagree with this, either. You just try to stop me from fiddling with shit until I break it. Go ahead, try -- I dare you.

That doesn't make me a "Power User" by any means, at least not yet. Just makes me willful and reckless. At the very least, I have learned how to back everything up, in some cases twice. Not only is that good in case of disaster, it's useful if you just want to clear some cobwebs, which Time Machine restores are perfect for. I did it just the other day, just to knock out some odd speed issues on startup and shutdown. Wipe the drive, reinstall the OS, restore the apps and files. Runs like a dream again now.

Slocki -- g4? Titanium? Those can still pull a cool $500-600 on Craigslist, I'll betcha.

G4, aluminum.

yeah, i'm in the same boat. 12" 1.5 ghz g4. it just feels ridiculous when i pick it up again

my 12" G4 is still my primary machine for everything ... i'm planning on getting a new iMac in the next month or so, but this is the best mac i've ever had/used, and it ain't going anywhere.

My point being -- ownership and permissions is some mission critical shit -- don't mess with it if you don't absolutely have to

i still recall fondly a usenet post back in ... whenever it was X came out ... from some poor bastard who'd upgraded, gone "what are all these untidy folders on my hard disk about, then?" and moved half the system about in order to "make everything neater".

sort of understandable. maybe. actually, no. dick.

"As an aside, I noted that my computer was purchased a year ago, actually a year and 3 weeks, making it out of warranty now. Every. Single. Computer. I. Have. Ever. Owned.* Has. Done. This. Do they design computers to die at warranty, in general? "

the last 2 mac laptops i've bought both f*cked up big time about 2 weeks after the warrantee expired. both. big stuff too. bastards.

not sure a pc would be better, but it would be cheaper.

I just bought a new iMac the other week there and made sure I got three years AppleCare with it after reading this thread.
It helped that I got an educational discount.

Eh, the last PC I bought did that too (glad I got the extended applecare for my current mac, it must be universal). In fact, pretty much every electronic device I've ever bought has died a few weeks after the warranty expired. PCs are cheaper though.

i'm touching all kinds of bits of wood here, but the only apple kit that's died on me is my original iPod ...

... which i did drop on a stone floor.

longest-serving thing: a PowerBook 5300 from 1996/1997. actually, i don't know where it *is* right now ... <rummage> ... ah, it's in the bottom of a drawer. still works perfectly, despite having a ceiling collapse on it some years back.

as far as those untidy folders...it was a big change. Pre OSX you know what almost everything was and where it belonged. You didn't have to "uninstall" anything, there were no obscure folders, there was just the occasional extension that you couldn't remember what it did, and if you had to troubleshoot, you could turn it off. Yeah, that sucked endlessly rebooting with different extension sets, but at least you knew what everything was without knowing much about computers. Now you've got endless amounts of files in all sorts of mysterious directories. Just saying I can't blame someone for thinking a mac should or would still be as simple as it used to be, and is supposed to be!

Also, I wonder how much of the technical problems with macs related to them stuffing components in laptops and iMacs. I hear endless complaints of physical problems, but I've owned 3 desktop macs over the years and they all lasted for years and years and years.

I've heard of an alarming number of MacBook drive deaths in the last year, way more than any other Apple laptop.

oh am i tempting fate by having had no applecare for the past two years? i mean i've only had two crashes on three macs so it seems a little superfluous

i'm so awesome

new imac is big fast and shiny

"Backing up 775,292 items"

yay!

when i get the replacement, should i use disk utility to just copy over my HD or use migration assistant? hmmm ...

use migration assist unless you did some dark voodoo shit

as far as those untidy folders...it was a big change. Pre OSX you know what almost everything was and where it belonged. You didn't have to "uninstall" anything, there were no obscure folders, there was just the occasional extension that you couldn't remember what it did, and if you had to troubleshoot, you could turn it off. Yeah, that sucked endlessly rebooting with different extension sets, but at least you knew what everything was without knowing much about computers. Now you've got endless amounts of files in all sorts of mysterious directories. Just saying I can't blame someone for thinking a mac should or would still be as simple as it used to be, and is supposed to be!

Also, I wonder how much of the technical problems with macs related to them stuffing components in laptops and iMacs. I hear endless complaints of physical problems, but I've owned 3 desktop macs over the years and they all lasted for years and years and years.

-- dan selzer, Tuesday, June 3, 2008 8:49 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Link

OS X was not preceded by MacOS; the two are only superficially connected by the now-deprecated "Classic" application and the somewhat-deprecated "Carbon" API (which is vastly outdated by Cocoa).

Apple's engineering team has been replaced by the people who did this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6b/OPENSTEP_Workspace_Manager.jpg

I know...and you know what I mean. To all Mac users, that was the transition we had to make.

it even has a shitty home icon

s/shitty home icon/awesome early 90s style icon/

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement.html

man i love high end unix workstations!

whoa

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-For-X11.gif

Grab.app

I'm pretty impressed with the longevity of NeXTStep -- interface builder is 20 years old ffs

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/vpc/images/nextstep.jpg

nice cd player guys

i'm getting quite sold on this

http://www.technologyreview.com/files/10987/0507-Next_x400.jpg

Apparently the website for GNUstep still exists. Open source NeXT-alike that was supposed to reimplement the next apis, but then OS X happened. Apparently they implemented "some" Cocoa stuff and you can cross-compile! I fully expected the website to be mothballed from a few years ago

http://www.gnustep.org/

Yeah, that was what I was referencing, obv

can i run mortal kombat on it?

I ran WindowMaker for much of 1998-2004.

I ran AfterStep for quite a while before WindowMaker came out then switched over, around the time I religiously hunted for ebay deals on a NeXT machine and pondered whether I could afford one of them off deepspacetech.com (which now apparently sells presentation boards).

I just need a gender changer and soon I will be running Solaris 10 on a SunBlade 100!

the screen on this fucking thing is too big for my brain

worth it?

repair CD drive on 12" and reinstall with latest OSX and then spring for newest shiniest iMac when school starts?

scrap 12" and drop $$$ on MBP?

the former seems like a better idea

but more $$$

I bought an external (like $60) and then sprung for this beast - newest shiniest iMac - when the lemon finally bled out.

can you live with an external optical drive until school?

I'm never owning an apple "top of the line" laptop again

whoah i didn't even know that externals were that cheap! i just want the 12" to stick around because it is tiny and awesome. i'd basically just use it for notes/email/web when on campus and leave any sort of heavy-lifting to new and shiny desktop

I learned to program properly (like not QBasic) on a NeXT workstation. Oxford Physics computing lab had rather eccentric tastes in the late 90s. Hearing the "Ping" system sound on OS X, which was the default beep on NeXT, makes me feel 18 again.

Honest to god, gen-1 NeXT keyboards are the 2nd-most RSI-matic keyboards in the world.

yeah gbx thinking about how cheap commodity peripherals actually are is one of those things mac kids are bad at because of the all-in-one package concept they trick us into. it's never bad to have a few buddies of the *nix/MS vmware-everything newegg.com bookmarker stripe