mac schmack

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From: Simon Wistow
Subject: mac schmack
Date: 16:40 on 08 Sep 2003
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  

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