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Journal tomhudson's Journal: I have an iMac at the office 28

Journal by tomhudson on Sunday October 17, 2010 @11:25AM

Yes, that's right - there's an iMac on my desk at work.

Why? Because nobody else wants to use it. Which is why it sits on my second desk, because *I* don't want to use it either. Having to drag the USB stick to the trash can to eject it is *so* intuitive. Ranks right up there with clicking "Start" to stop.

It's pretty lame when our graphic artist would rather have a Windows box ... and nobody else wants it either ...

So it just sits there and sulks, mostly. I think I'm going to rename it the whyMac ... or something equally lame.

-- Barbie

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I have an iMac at the office

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Yup (Score:2)

by Captain Splendid ( 673276 ) * writes:

Got a Mac Mini at work which I'm right now replacing with an MSI Atom based "Nettop".

It's fucking horrendous what Apple have done with OSX and their hardware. It's 2010, and the two biggest OS' are candy-coated pieces of shit.
- Re: (Score:2)
  
  by peacefinder ( 469349 ) writes:
  
  If they're intel machines and you really want to get rid of them, I can provide you with my shipping address...
  - Re: (Score:2)
    
    by tomhudson ( 43916 ) writes:
    
    They were asking if we could install Windows or linux on it - I suggested we just keep it as a compatibility testing machine. It's also got lots of free disk space, so it'll probably end up as a file dumpster.
    the iDump!
    -- Barbie
    - Re: (Score:2)
      
      by Shadow Wrought ( 586631 ) * writes:
      
      My folks have a Mac Mini and on my recent road trip I had to use it to move pictures off my Xd memory card onto a USB stick. OMFG was that process painful. I was foolish enough to actually want to look at the pics. So, silly me, I double clicked one. It opened this picture viewer and I tried to figure out how to move to the next one. No such way. Indeed I had to select all the pics, then click, and then it opened the picture viewer with the files in a holding area of some sort where I could use the ar
      - Re: (Score:3, Informative)
        
        by peacefinder ( 469349 ) writes:
        
        As compared to walking up to an unfamiliar debian install and trying to figure out which firewall config package it uses. :-)
        The thing with mac is that it tries to be an all-inclusive system for home users. (It can go outside of that, but there's its core strength.) Within the core realm of osx + iLife it is unparalleled in excellence. Step outside, and things get squirrely, sometimes right away.
        The trouble you were having is that you were thinking like a techie: you wanted to look at the files on
        
        Re: (Score:2)
        
        by tomhudson ( 43916 ) writes:
        
        Osx is a task-centered system, not a file-centered system.
        
        ... in other words, they purposefully broke the unix "everything is a file" model. I don't see how dragging a usb stick to the trash can to unmount it is good design - or how saving as "plain text" results in a fugly rtf file ... maybe I'm not "blonde" enough :-)
        Oh well, maybe I'll play around with it for a few minutes ... but I like the way that I can right-click on an html file in linux and get 29 (yes, I counted them I have *lots* of packages
        
        Re: (Score:2)
        
        by Shadow Wrought ( 586631 ) * writes:
        
        The main thing I have to keep in mind when sitting down behind a Mac is not beating it to smithereens with its own keyboard :-) In actuality I have actually recommended Macs to folks. I know it is somewhat like arguing as to why blue is better than green, but, dammit, it is! I went from AmigaOS to Windows and now to Linux at home, XP at work. The advice about task centric sounds about right, I just don't think in that direction :-)
        
        Re: (Score:2)
        
        by peacefinder ( 469349 ) writes:
        
        The very first time I tried to connect an OSX machine to a secured wireless network, it took me FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. I was hunting all around the control panel trying to figure out where to type in the damn WPA key.
        Then I noticed the little wireless icon in plain fucking sight on the menu bar, and two clicks later I was entering the key. Arrgh.
        It was an important lesson, though. I was thinking like a windows admin, so my natural inclination was to dig through control panels. But if I'd been thinking like a h
- Re: (Score:2)
  
  by tomhudson ( 43916 ) writes:
  
  Apparently that's how you unmount it ...
  Under linux, you can just type sync /whatever_it_is_mounted_as and yank it out when the prompt returns a fraction of a second later and be done with it if you already have a shell open. The commit interval is only 3 to 5 seconds under linux anyway, so unless your machine is heavily loaded, you can pull the plug if you haven't been doing anything for the last 10 seconds - I've never had a machine refuse to come up afterwards (when the lightning starts, I don't bother
  - - Re: (Score:2)
      
      by tomhudson ( 43916 ) writes:
      
      umount will do a sync first ... but I usually just type sync (with no parameters), and all the drives, flash cards, usb keys, etc., get flushed.
- Re: (Score:2)
  
  by tomhudson ( 43916 ) writes:
  
  I watched the person who's been using it - if they are a casual mac user and they can't figure it out, it's because the UI is a fail. It has nothing to do with me.
  Besides, why would one go through a bunch of menus when there's a label on the desktop that identifies the usb stick? And how come no matter what you do to it, it doesn't offer to unmount it?
  -- Barbie
  - - Re: (Score:1)
      
      by Com2Kid ( 142006 ) writes:
      
      To remove a USB memory key on Windows you just unplug it.
      Because, well, duh. Having to do anything else is just stupid. Windows Vista and 7 don't buffer writes to USB memory keys because people just expect to be able to pull it out.
      - Re: (Score:1)
        
        by arb ( 452787 ) writes:
        
        If that's true then it's the first thing Windows has got right in a bloody long time. Previous versions of Windows however are just like Mac and *nix - if you yank the drive out prematurely you run the risk of file corruption. Of course, it is dead easy to correctly eject a USB drive on a Mac, so long as you are not a brain-dead luser as Barbie seems to be - you just click Eject from the context menu (right mouse button, or ctrl-click for single button mouses), or click the Eject icon beside the drive in Fi
        
        Re: (Score:2)
        
        by tomhudson ( 43916 ) writes:
        
        Part of the problem is the mouse - it's totally useless, and should be replaced with one that has buttons on the top - I hate mice with side buttons. It's too easy to click when moving, and too hard to click when you're not.
        
        Re: (Score:1)
        
        by arb ( 452787 ) writes:
        
        You do realise that any USB mouse will work just fine on a Mac? If you don't like the mouse, plug your favourite mouse in and problem solved!
        
        Re: (Score:1)
        
        by Com2Kid ( 142006 ) writes:
        
        There were blog posts a plenty about this when Vista came out.
        Only a software engineer would be f*cking stupid enough (note: I am a software engineer) to think that the perf boost from caching writes is worth confusing the living shit out of users.
      - Re: (Score:2)
        
        by LordBodak ( 561365 ) * writes:
        
        You've obviously been very lucky if you've never lost data by simply unplugging a USB drive. Anything left in cache that hasn't physically been written out will be lost and, occasionally, the drive will end up corrupted. I've had both of these happen.
        
        Re: (Score:1)
        
        by Com2Kid ( 142006 ) writes:
        
        Again, that is what Windows Vista and 7 solve. There is no cache, as soon as the red light on your USB drive turns off, all data has been written to it.
Macs ruled... (Score:1)

by Bill Dog ( 726542 ) writes:

...when PC's drooled. (The DOS days.) I used only Macs and the school's UNIX systems in college, but Mac programming jobs were too hard to come by so I had to abandon the dream. Thankfully a couple of years after graduating, OS/2 finally died off and I had been introduced to this thing called Windows NT (3.51, then). It didn't have the cool factor, and the hobbyist gadgets and customizations, but it was fast and stable, and I needed to get more serious anyways.
Linux drools for those who are not sysadmins by
I'm not going to argue (Score:2)

by Doctor O ( 549663 ) writes:

Because, frankly, you all have your opinions set in stone already. It won't matter to you that the trashcan becomes an eject symbol once you grab a volume. It won't matter you can simply press Cmd-E to eject, just as it worked since System 7 at least, because casual users don't figure it out (and don't look through the menus either).
Different OSes are just that, different. I've been using Mac OS, OSX, Windows and Linux in various flavours in the last 15 years. Knowing OSX's evolution (and being around skill
- Re: (Score:2)
  
  by tomhudson ( 43916 ) writes:
  
  but I have no idea about your server and VM fu
  
  well, my last job was writing several multi-threading servers for bsd and linux in c ... so I like to think I can run a server, though I'm sure not as well as someone who does it full-time as their main job. There's a difference between muddling through networking and someone who can set up a 10,000 box system, and I know I'm not that woman :-)
  I figure I'll play with it when I have some spare time - but it's got one of those awful "mighty mouses" ... I'm go
  - Re: (Score:2)
    
    by Doctor O ( 549663 ) writes:
    
    You're right, herding servers is very different from writing them - I'd say I'm on middle ground on both fronts, but my writing skills would be the weaker ones relatively. I've written some proprietary middleware servers for business processes, but those weren't exactly under high load. OTOH, they were rock-solid security-wise. (I know, we've thrown professional pen testing from different companies at them.)
    That said, I find it sad that Diaspora will be going nowhere. The funding has shown that people have
    - Re: (Score:2)
      
      by tomhudson ( 43916 ) writes:
      
      > Oh well, so many ideas, so little time
      I know the feeling :-(

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Journal tomhudson's Journal: I have an iMac at the office 28

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I have an iMac at the office

Yup (Score:2)

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Macs ruled... (Score:1)

I'm not going to argue (Score:2)

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