Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It Just Works

danielandrews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 192 posts

Re: It Just Works

#171

Post by kybernetyk »

wineisfine wrote: post #149
kybernetyk wrote: post #110

I'm frustrated with Apple when it comes to services. Don't misunderstand me: I love their hardware. I love OS X. It's the best computing experience since my C64 days. But when it comes to services I tend to avoid them as much as I can. Latest example: Apple music. I was a little annoyed by Spotify's continuously disappearing music tracks so I was eager to try out iTunes Music. But the problems started when I tried to…

That's strange I'm Dutch, living in Germany and don't have these issues with my Dutch Visa card. You do know you can change your country/App Store country? I can even hop between country store and use different visas per store.

Is your iTunes account maybe registered to your old Dutch address? Because the iTunes error I get (and the people on the Apple support line) tells me that I need a credit card for the country my iTunes acc is registered in.

>You do know you can change your country/App Store country?

Not that easily. (I'm not talking about clicking the flag in the iTunes store front but changing the personal data associated with the account). For that I need to contact Apple support. And then there's the issue that there are enough stories where people who frequently used their iTunes account from foreign countries got their account suspended. (Add a fake address in the Netherlands I would have to use and this is a risk I don't want to take).

/edit: That's the message I get: http://i.imgur.com/IWfI8np.png

Re: It Just Works

#172

Post by tim333 »

mkozlows wrote: post #48

It's certainly the case that OSX, at least, has gotten flaky as heck, but at the same time: What's the competition? While Apple was releasing Yosemite, Microsoft was going down the Windows 8 rabbit-hole, releasing the worst version of Windows since ME. And while desktop Linux has been getting better over time, I don't think anyone would say that it "Just Works" yet. The only desktop/laptop OS that actually does "Just…

>The only desktop/laptop OS that actually does "Just Work" is ...

I find you can get much more of a 'just works' experience by ignoring the latest shiniest and using the debugged version of a couple of years back. I'm running Mavericks on the Mac and 7 on the pc and have very few issues with either. At the other extreme I tried ios8 beta when that first came out and everything was broken. It takes a while to debug stuff.

Re: It Just Works

#173

Post by tim333 »

aikah wrote: post #66
baldfat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 8 has been solid (Except people don't like the GUI) Windows 10 gives you the start button back (I don't like start buttons) Linux - There really are good use cases for Linux. Your's might fit this one. Works for me and I dual boot for the odd time I need another OS (About twice a quarter) Chromebook - Limited to "normal" users workflow cases.

The whole Metro UI stunt was a mistake, It should never have happened. I'm really curious about who's to blame for that stuff, I don't think it's Sinofsky, because it's just so stupid. But at the same time there is very little difference between 7 and 8 so why would anyone want to buy yet another license ? That's the problem right here with Windows. Worse it looks like they removed some features from 7 to 10. Aside f…

Yeah, I'm also curious how 8 happened. I think it may have been some institutional committee type effect because it seems to dumb for a smart individual to do. It didn't really effect me because I just skipped 8 but three of my friends / family who don't follow tech bought a new computer unaware of what Microsoft had done and were shocked / horrified to find things didn't work as before. My cousin figured it took him about 100 hours to get some stuff working again and the other two basically stopped using their computers. It was particually painful with my dad whos 80ish and slowing down a bit but who could use 7 but who was unable to work 8. I have lasting resentment to Microsoft over that - the amount of pain and inconvenience they caused their regular users. And for what? I think the brilliant reasoning was if they force people to use a phone interface on their computers they'll be used to that interface and buy windows phones and tablets. That worked out well for them with the recent $7.6 bn write off on Nokia and presumably lots of well meaning employees losing their jobs. At least the new management seem to have returned to trying to treat their customers well rather than inflicting unpopular stuff in a misguided attempt to get more money.

Re: It Just Works

#174

Post by baldfat »

sosborn wrote: post #61
baldfat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a HUGE Apple Hater so take this as it be. I have always had issues with stability with Apple's OS. Everyone else always said I was crazy but I have dozens of people see me repeat the crash over and over again doing simple one or two step processes. Start with Apple OS 7 up to just yesterday when Adobe Photoshop crashed every time I switch the color palate to 2 color.

> Adobe Photoshop crashed every time I switch the color palate to 2 color. You can probably blame Adobe for that. In their infinite wisdom they implemented their own window management system for their products on OS X.

Well you can blame 95% of Windows problems the same way.

Don't blame Microsoft vendor A implemented it their own way ...

Re: It Just Works

#175

Post by baldfat »

tim333 wrote: post #173
aikah wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole Metro UI stunt was a mistake, It should never have happened. I'm really curious about who's to blame for that stuff, I don't think it's Sinofsky, because it's just so stupid. But at the same time there is very little difference between 7 and 8 so why would anyone want to buy yet another license ? That's the problem right here with Windows. Worse it looks like they removed some features from 7 to 10. Aside f…

Yeah, I'm also curious how 8 happened. I think it may have been some institutional committee type effect because it seems to dumb for a smart individual to do. It didn't really effect me because I just skipped 8 but three of my friends / family who don't follow tech bought a new computer unaware of what Microsoft had done and were shocked / horrified to find things didn't work as before. My cousin figured it took him…

I don't view it as a tablet/phone interface. It really reminds me of my tiled window managers I use on Linux. Well at least I use it that way.

Re: It Just Works

#176

Post by vacri »

stdbrouw wrote: post #41
benologist wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dismissing bug reports because "it works on my machine" is also a kind of dangerous extrapolation, especially with the near-certainty that any large piece of software has bugs.

Not dismissing anything, just pointing out that the author's standard of evidence is somewhat lacking.

"anecdata!" is not a rebuttal to "hey, this is how I feel about X, from my experiences".

Re: It Just Works

#177

Post by ohitsdom »

jen729w wrote: post #157
ohitsdom wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify seems determined to force me to listen to albums on shuffle.

After you've tapped a track in the main list of tracks to start it playing, tap the skinny "playing" bit at the very bottom. It should pop up the full screen player. Is the shuffle icon selected (green)? I had the same issue a while back and I was infuriated at myself for not figuring out the solution.

No I found that, but it switches back pretty often. Can't find a pattern, it's annoying.

Re: It Just Works

#178

Post by vacri »

joshstrange wrote: post #142
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #83

I don't understand why the hacker scene these days is full of proud OSX users. What happened to the proud Linux hackers we've always had? They told me to use OSX at the job I recently started, and I only lasted a week before I told them I wanted to install Linux.

Because maybe we value our time a little more than our "geek-cred".... While I agree with 90% of the OP's points the base OS is still ROCK SOLID compared to ANY linux desktop distro. I have been slowly migrating away from OSX's core apps but I won't even dream of leaving the OS anytime soon. I've got better things to do then rebuild my entire desktop environment every few months when a graphics driver pukes or simila…

> the base OS is still ROCK SOLID compared to ANY linux desktop distro.

At my last work, my desktop was an ubuntu LTS version. It was rock solid, and ran as fast the day that office closed down as the day I set it up. The same could very much not be said of the macs in the office - almost all of which had slowed down considerably. One macbook with 4GB of RAM had zero free memory on a fresh boot with nothing loaded! I had to install some 'ram compactor' tool to get the laptop to actually load some office software in a reasonable time. Occasionally I'd get called over to help troubleshoot this or that with the various macs, and usually in the first couple of minutes, I'd be saying something along the lines of "how can you work with it this slow?". The mac users in this office were a mix of normal users and power users. The only expert user had a top-end model less than a year old, so he wasn't getting the same problems, of course.

So no, I don't agree that the base OS is ROCK SOLID compared to ANY linux desktop distro. You say you have better things to do than rebuild your entire desktop environment every few months? I have better things to do that wait for my desktop environment in day-to-day work. Unless, of course, I'm willing to throw gobs of money at the upgrade treadmill, which means replacing the hardware regularly, which means... rebuilding the desktop environment on the new machine...

Re: It Just Works

#179

Post by kaffeinecoma »

jre wrote: post #143
kaffeinecoma wrote: post #52

Do you rely on Time Machine? Drop to the shell right now and try "tmutil compare -n" to see which files are not making it onto your backups. For me, Time Machine randomly ignores certain files, for no discernible reason. Files that have sat on my disk literally for years will never get backed up. It's happened to me on two different Macs, and I've lost data because of it.

I ran into the same issue. After a restore from my time machine backup, I discovered that some files where missing (with no apparent pattern). Fortunately, I had a non time machine backup, but pheew that was a close one...

I discovered it when visiting an old project after a whole OS wipe-and-restore from TM. A week later I found that 'git' wouldn't recognize a project dir due to some missing pieces. I had a 2nd TM drive, and was able to manually restore files.

For my other machine, no such luck. I had a 2nd backup offsite (Backblaze) but it was months before I noticed the damage, and so the old files were no longer available via the offsite. I think the worst part is not knowing what you've lost. I have thousands of music and photos on that machine, and every once in a while I come across something that's gone.

Re: It Just Works

#180

Post by ihnorton »

1000x this. I've turned to dtrace twice in the past several weeks to find fixes for serious issues on other people's computers. One was a segfault at startup in iTunes caused by a corrupted cookie cache. The other one was a corrupted plist that prevented adding new exchange accounts or calendars to mail (with no indicators at all -- the new account would just hang indefinitely).
Post reply on HN