[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2003/09/08]
This will be another unfocused hate. More like a seething cloud of hate rather than a rock hard fireball. I had a long weekend in which I shouted a fair bit at my laptop. This is the result. The general recipient of this hate is my Mac. I'm goign to steer clear of the hardware in general but they're so intertwined, the hardware and the OS and all the software, that some bitterness may leak over. Now most hates that I've seen are about Mac OS X. And if there was a sister list, hates-hardware, then I imagine that there would be plenty of anti-iBook hates. Actually, know I don't. The number of people I know who've had horrific problems with their iBooks yet remain staunchly Apple apologist, is incredible. My Vaio didn't have this many problems and I treated that like shit. But I hate my Vaio too. But this is not hates-hardware. I digress. So, where were we? Oh yes. My Mac. I aquired it when a company I was working for went bust. It's an old G3 powerbook. A Lombard I think. It's fairly slow. It has problems running QT movies and won't run MacOS X. Still, I quite liked it. It has all the right ports and stuff. It looks nice. But it runs MacOS 9. Now, the interface to MacOS 9 is nice and I have to admit that I do like that fact that, in general, stuff just works. But I loathe the fact that it's not pre-emptively multitasking. And has no memory protection. I know that Apple did have a project to try and fix this (Copland?), and eventually went with the beast known as Mac OS X, but still. My fucking ST had pre-emptive multitasking back in 1990 or so. I've heard people say that they don't notice. Those people are either lying, stupid or kidding themselves. Networking seems to be particularly braindead. True the point and drool interface works aslong as it's working but when it doesn't fixing things seems to be a pray and reboot situation. And what's with not having a button to refresh or apply the current settings. It means that if I want to update my DHCP or experient with settings then I have to go into network setting, select another network interface, hit ok (which closes the dialogue) then go into the network setting again and turn it back to the interface that I want. Gah. And if I close the lid then it drops all my network connections. Instantaneously. Grrr. And takes a fricking age to wake up again when I open it again. If I then fire up Internet Explorer and try and go to a page then ineveitably my machine locks up. Hard. Dead. If I wait a bit before I do anything, or fire up another app (such as MacSSH) before I fire up IE then it seems to work. But if I forget then there's nothing I can do but reboot. Because there's no 'kill process'. Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh. And how do I reboot? Ctrl-Alt-Delete? Nah. Hit the pwoer button. Umm, no. Apple+power button. Sometimes. But generally I just have to pop the battery and pull out the power cord. Nice. Of course half the time the Mac then does the blinking question mark thing until I leave it for half an hour and try again. KILL! KILL! KILL! So I finally reboot. And I'm using IE and most stuff looks ok in it and network lookups aren't *too* slow as long as I'm not trying to do anything else at the same time of course. And suddenly I get a "Cannot load Flash plugin. Error 2 of 5. Out of Memory". On every page. Until I quit IE and load the whole thing again. RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE! So finally I manage to download say, a QT trailer. And I try and run it. And it runs like a pig. So I download the smaller, postage stamp sized one and drag that onto Quicktime. Which obediently does nothing. I try again. Nada. Zip. I have to open up the file browser and navigate to it. *Sigh* -- the illusion of knowledge without any of the difficult bits
Generated at 14:02 on 01 Jul 2004 by mariachi 0.52