other
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response 4 of 28:
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Sep 19 21:31 UTC 2006 |
Darwin road leads to Hell. (From the east, anyway.)
I'm a pretty sophisticated user of Mac OS X, including enough of its
underlying Mach BSD system to have done some shell scripting --
including a simplified interface for the fs_usage utility -- and
combining of shell- and apple-scripting into functional tools like a
clickable app that takes a partial app name as an input and pauses or
unpauses the matching processes (using kill -STOP and kill -CONT) and a
script in a FileMaker database that automatically uploads a compressed
copy of itself to a webserver upon closing (using curl, in the
background, and only if the file has been modified).
I don't have a lot of experience using other modern OSs except Windows,
so I haven't a lot of basis for comparison except to say that I have had
very little difficulty figuring out a way to make my Mac do just about
anything I want, and I have had extensive difficulty making Windows
machines not do any particular thing I don't want them to do.
I recently used an Ubuntu machine and was very impressed with the LAMPP
set of tools and the easy interface of the VNC system. I downloaded an
ISO for my older G3 laptop, but haven't been sufficiently motivated to
install it.
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cross
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response 6 of 28:
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Sep 20 04:17 UTC 2006 |
I use Mac OS X as my primary environment these days. I hope never to have
to go back to the days of sitting in front of a "standard" Unix workstation,
or one of the monstrosities that is a typical X11-based environment (KDE,
GNOME, etc). I just dont like those interfaces (I realize that's partly my
own bias; I consider them bloated and they feel constricting. If you can use
them and get your work done, then more power to you...).
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twenex
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response 7 of 28:
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Sep 20 14:18 UTC 2006 |
I haven't used a Mac in ages, but i remember it had some features that I
thought were particularly stupid; I like the idea of software eject, for
example, but Apple's implementation of it (at least in System 6, and, as I
understand, all the way up to Mac OS 9 if not X) is just brain-damaged: you
drag a disk icon to the trash to eject it. Common sense not only suggests that
if you drag an icon of a disk to the trash, it's because you either want to
empty its contents, or format it, but that the "Eject Disk" button on the
Special Menu should do "what it says on the tin" (as the saying goes here in
the UK), and furthermore without asking you to replace the disk for apparently
no reason.
My main problem with Macs, though, is that they come from one supplier. I have
been sufficiently burned in the past, both by products limited to one supplier
(Commodore Amigas), and crap-but-locked-in products in a supposedly free
market, that I simply can't bring myself to put myself in a
reliant-on-one-supplier position again.
I don't know if they have since changed this, but i understand that in Mac
OS X, Apple changed the Finder so that it only displayed one window, with the
contents of the directory you're in, at one time, instead of opening the
contents of each directory you've gone through; thus you have to use a special
mode of the finder to find another directory into which, say, you want a drag
a file. Nasty.
That, and the presence of the Dock, also presumably mean the death of a really
cool feature - tabs for open windows at the bottom of the screen. What a
shame.
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