I HATE APPLE

I am looking forward to buying a Mac Mini so I can get rid of mp3 stuff on this one.

can't seem to reset PRAM (no idea why it won't do it).

would like to smash it with a hammer, and might even have to suffer the expense and final humiliation of getting someone to look at it JUST SO I CAN REINSTALL OSX & THEN SELL IT.

Mac 'problems' are SO MUCH more intractable than Windows it's not even funny.

Going to bed at maximum pissed off.

How do you know the PRAM isn't resetting? Have you tried resetting it from Open Firmware?

I agree that 'problems' should be in quotes.

Going to bed with a girl.

holding down option at power on give me a nice padlock though. Something amiss in open firmware? That'll be fun to break.

Cheers stet, I am BACK IN CONTROL. That felt bleak :(

(intractable problems also, sometimes, means *good security* that is unfortunately un-userproof -- like all *nixes)

Waht exactly that accomplishes security wise when I have been able to wipe & reinstall the machine many times without being asked for it(??) I am not sure, but it said "security" so I added it.

That above post is a shining example of "things not to try when you should have been going to sleep already"... embarrased.

Anyway, in the process I finally realised (after some googling) putting Linux on this thing isn't going to be feasible after all. The WIFI will NEVER work, because Apple/The airport card manufacturers simply won't allow drivers to be written for it for other people.

So finally I have my definitive reason to sell it. Goodbye iBook.

APPLE ARE YOU READING THIS? THE 'FINDER' IS *SO* BROKEN THIS EX-WINDOWS USER CANNOT, AFTER MONTHS OF TRYING TO ADJUST, LIVE WITH IT ON A DAILY BASIS WITHOUT -EXTREME- FRUSTRATIONS AND IS ACTUALLY (NOW i CAN'T USE LINUX INSTEAD) GOING TO GO AS FAR AS REVERTING TO THE INTEL/WINDOWS WORLD WITH A LOSS OF MONEY TO MYSELF & PUT UP WITH VIRUSES & INSTABILITY & CRAP OF WINDOWS... BECAUSE IT'S _STILL_ A BETTER ALTERNATIVE TO TRYING TO USE THE (OTHERWISE GREBT!) OS X OPERATING SYSTEM WITH A *MIND-BOGGLINGLY AWFUL FILE BROWSER*. AND SOME OTHER PROBLEMS, BUT THEY ARE SMALL BEER IN COMPARISON TO THE 'FINDER' ISSUE.

(the finder 'alternatives' ALL suck massively too)

there used to be a cute "genius" but i don't see her around today.

Without it being fixed, replaced or viable alternatives becoming available. It actually IS enough to make me switch platforms unfortunately. The whole Apple users always downplaying it's importance (and the importance of anything else wrong with OS X - see,hear,speak no evil about it) is something I find kind of hilarious.

http://daringfireball.net/2003/05/steaming_pile
http://daringfireball.net/2002/11/that_finder_thing

If it works for you, I'm happy! But I find it genuinely un-liveable-with. Ho hum.

have you tried pathfinder, fandango? i think it's sweet. you can even quit the finder while you're running it.

xpost ?

Pathfinder didn't really solve all my issues Tracer, it felt to me like what it was: a buggier, overfeatured & inconsistently thought-out, third-party replacement for something that shouldn't need replacing.

I mean I know some people have problems with (for comparison) Windows Explorer's performance & bugs... but I never ever got to the point of desperately wanting to try alternative shells like I did with 'Finder'.

Do you have a logitech mouse?

What's probably happening to you Tracer is that when you click on the file, you're telling the window to redraw it's contents, which often will change file positions, and always creates a weird second copy of the file for a second, so if you just double click, things are moving around, you'll get files you don't want.

the most pervasive problems with OSX aren't issues once you realize that that the window contents don't update right away.

this is fucking stupid too

This IS ass-backwards, but it's fixed in Tiger apparently.

jon, i'm not using a mouse at the moment, i'm using the trackpad.

xpost right.

Picking the selection up by the icon in this view always works.

eh? i always view files this way, and i never have any problems moving them around.

it's called "[tracer] - hard disk - 1998 - mac os"

what struck me was how neat and organized everything was. everything in subdivided folders. everything in its place. i had added little icons to everything. i think i know why. because i got to choose where everything went. with os x you don't get to choose. it chooses for you. now i've got like 80 files on the desktop, two different "tmp" folders... yeesh.

where i think apple went wrong in the beginning is not offering a quick guide to the fundamental differences between OS9 (and below) and OS X. i knew just enough about unix to be very wary of moving anything in X; where a lot of users went wrong in the early days was by blithely shifting vital folders from place to place and renaming them, then wondering why their entire system had fallen over.

i'm not saying the finder's perfect: it annoys me the way icons on the desktop occasionally get moved around, for instance. but, er, this happened before X as well. i mean, i'm writing this on an OS9 machine at work - i can't do any work because uShare has just died, meaning we've lost access to all our unix mounts - and i would give anything to be using X.

fandango, if you're really going to go back to a windows box: i wish you luck. but i think, in the long term, you'll have made a big mistake. still, like i've said to you before: horses, courses etc ;)

ooh: that's the servers back up. back to work.

exactly. this is what made the original mac os so wonderful and what inspired such bizarre loyalty. as long as you didn't mess around with the mysterious "system" folder you could do whatever you damn pleased.

Dan: Nice idea, but aliases don't resolve correctly between cocoa/carbon -- and cocoa does it by fucking STRINGS, so you can end up with folders that won't open. The finder is really, really woeful and I won't defend it for a minute.

exactly. i navigate nimbly through the unix-ness with a series of aliases that take me exactly where i want to go. and i'm running two machines, each with two users and all the shared items/permissions stuff that brings.

(i have just thought of something i HATE about the way it handles aliases to files on shared mounts, but fuck it. i don't expect perfection, yet with OS X i think i'm about 80 per cent of the way there. OS 9 was 60%. windows is in the low 40s.)

As for aliases, they're a *complete joke* -- you can't make them to anything other than local disks, and they resolve to the file-in-that-place first, unlike the OS 9 ones, which kept track of the actual file and where you'd moved it. The brain-dead behaviour is now universal ... EXCEPT ONLY SOMETIMES, because apps using FSRef (the good old OS 9 system) WORK CORRECTLY. The inconsistency is the worst bit. Grrrr. For the v. technical: http://rentzsch.com/macosx/pathmaxBlackholing

Stationery: also fucked. If you set something to be a stationery pad, then open it, it creates a copy first then opens that. No more folders of template documents then, Apple?

fandango, if you're really going to go back to a windows box: i wish you luck. but i think, in the long term, you'll have made a big mistake. still, like i've said to you before: horses, courses etc ;)

In the long term, they might have switched over to an intel architecture, and, FIXED THE FUCKING FINDER. Maybe they'll even allow me to do something about the bizzare window management *chuckles* :-)

However, until hell freezes over, I'm far more content typing this from a Windows box and have had NO REGRETS about switching back.

isn't that what it always did? i know i could check, but i'm busy.