What an idea!
Hmmmm…
Hey Kev, give this URL to your excuse for a SysAdmin.
You may have to click on the “Macintosh hangs or freezes when accessing a DAVE volume. ” link.
If 37Signals Controlled The World (Or At Least Apple)
SU at SVN sent me his rendition of what it might look like if Apple sort of backed off on the ‘Aqua-bubble’ look, and stuck with a cooler Platinum-looking/IHT interface. Which brings up whether or not Apple will build into OSX what would make it truly a next-generation (no pun intended) operating system: full system-level control over the interface.
Remember The ArmyBook?
A reader sent in some info regarding the ‘Hack Mac‘ image I posted a few weeks ago.
Apparently, this French dude does mockups (referred to in the email as reality hacking) of false products, ads etc. Too bad my high-school French is wearing off. Beware: the site uses Flash, and rather poorly. But check it out anyway.
More Mac Books in Bookstores
I just went to Borders today, and was surprised by the increase in number of Mac-related books in the computer section, at least compared to my last visit (admittedly, that was probably 2 years ago). Although the number of Linux-oriented books was fully triple that of the Mac books. But still.
Mac vs Win Article
(I’m pretty excited. This is my first reference to IHT.)
This article might be worth your time, it might not be. It’s a fairly bland consumer-oriented response to the age-old ‘chicken or the egg’ that is the Mac vs Windows argument, and (let’s face it) we’ve all been a part of it, at one time or another. Although the writer does say something to the effect of both OSs crashing a lot, unless you can spend the time to tweak them into stability. This is misleading, I think. My parents’ iMac has never had any problems whatsoever, and their Apple menu is exactly how it was when the damn thing was shipped to CompUSA (not that the Apple menu is that important, it just tells you how very little they do in the ‘customization’ department). So yeah, Macs crash, but I think you need to do an awful lot more to them to get them there than you do with Windows. I had Windows 2000 lock up on the INSTALLATION. But that conversation is old and tired, isn’t it?
Thaddeus Rocks
We’re finally getting this site to where we wanted it to be a year ago, with the help of Thad Batt, the resident PHP expert at my place of employment. What did he help me do? Well, now (unlike in regular Blogger-type blogs) if you wish to send someone a link to a specific story on the site, you can click-and-hold (Mac) or right-click (PC) on the new ‘View this item only’ link supplied with each story and put that bastard in an email, or put it in your own blog. Whatever. The possibilities are endless, although this feature is currently only on the homepage, so older stories don’t have it yet. But they will.
We Want to Know What You Think
If you look to the left of the homepage now, you might be rather startled to see the addition of a poll to our site. In our never-ending quest to be just like MacOSRumors, we decided that we needed one. So we have one. Use it, so we can know about you and what you think. Right now, you can flood it every 10 seconds with votes, but we’d rather you didn’t do that. So vote your conscience, and try to just vote once per poll. Insert your own reference to the botched presidential election…. -HERE-
Another Q&A
If you read the story below first this will make more sense. I was *almost* hired at the same Denver New Media shop as Kevin… Problem was I knew Design, HTML, and Network Administration and wanted to be paid like someone who knows and will use all those abilities. So, was I right in requesting more money than say a “low-end” designer would make? I think so, BUT they don’t. Funny thing is, I know Macintosh like the back of my hand as well as Windows and several flavors of UNIX. In fact, I can think of at least 3 or 4 ways to get that piece of shit Dave off the godamn desktop whether they are using NT or Solaris. Damn. Fuck. I hate people in high places in the tech industry, they seem to know nothing except that they *should* use Microsoft products. What a crock of shit that is. Think different and think for yourself.
Simple Question, Not-So-Simple Answer.
Okay. So here’s the question I pose to you, the reader.
As some of you know, I am a web designer working at a midsize web shop in Denver. We have a CTO, a VP of Technology, and a Network Admisitrator. Now, the Network Administrator has had a number of servers (Sun and otherwise) delivered to him to set up, and an entire TEMPERATURE CONTROLLED server room built for him. So far, no problem. Where the friction starts is here: over half of our staff uses Macintosh computers, in some form or another (iMacs, G3 PowerBooks, G4 towers, etc.), and all of the aforementioned technology people have ZERO experience either maintaining or using Macs. I’m surprised the network admin even knows what one looks like.
Fully half the office needs to use a piece of shite software to connect to the filesharing servers, and the one that most of us work from is a tiny PC-shaped box. It isn’t even rack-mounted. It just sits on the floor and takes our abuse. Now, Dave (conveniently the name of both the SMB software and the network admin) is very unstable and crashes our computers often. And besides that, as most casual Mac users, the designers manage to get their machines in horrible states of crash and sub-crash, and guess who comes to the rescue? Me. Because our tech people could give a shit about us or our OS.
I’ve always been the person in the class that the kids come to instead of the teacher for computer help, from elementary school on up through college, but right now, I’ve got other shit to do. How come I’m the only one the designers trust to set up a new machine that comes in? I don’t get paid to do Mac support, but my question is, should I? I mean, I love doing it (most of the time), but sometimes it’s just a bitch to do, and I could be doing other things. The admin and myself tend to butt heads on a lot of issues, and I’ve just kind of given up on trying to be cordial to him. I mean, I understand that an OS is not nearly as important as another human being, but he honestly pisses me off sometimes. I’ve often thought of just ignoring the cries of my co-workers, and sending them over to have the admin help, but I know that if I were to do that, he would just come back to me with a question, and undoubtedly anything he did would have to be undone and done right by myself. And I would do all that, too, because I care that much about people having stable Macs to use. So there’s the second part of the question: Are he and I destined to be mortal enemies? Let me know what you think.
Entourage Is Pretty Nice
I just… er.. acquired a copy of Office:Mac (MS Office 2001), and I must say… Entourage is pretty nice, although I’m kind of confused about something: You know how in the OSX-native ‘Mail’ app, when you type in a mail address, it remembers that address forever, without it being added to your address book? Well Entourage does the same thing. Here’s what confuses me: it even suggests to me addresses that I typed into Outlook 5, which I imported into Entourage. So if Outlook 5 was saving all those addresses, then how come it didn’t have that same functionality? Oh, well. No big deal, I guess.
Right now, I’m either moving to Entourage and IE5 for my internet needs, or Netscape 6 for all of them (including FTP, which it has a kind of neat way of handling.. check it out, you’ll see). On one hand, I have a couple semi-stable products to depend on, albeit developed by MS, or one quasi-stable app to depend on, but by doing so, I support open-source and a non-MS browser/email client. Honestly, I’m liking this ‘Orbit’ theme for Netscape right now. I’ll let you know.