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I mortgaged my future with a Mac

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#61

Post by ChrisClark »

mtts wrote: post #45
niggler wrote: post #29

"So, I just sat there and lived the passive life of a consumer at home. I clicked around the web and read stuff. I talked to people online. I listened to my music and watched the latest cat videos. I watched a lot of TV. But I didn't write any code. Oh no." nothing stops you from writing code on OSX. Plenty of people do it for their business . IOKit is strange coming from a Linux world, sure, but it works as well as…

>> "Then there's my phone. How do you use one of these things without a computer upon which to sync your data and backups?" >> Windows VM? That only works when you disable USB on the host (which makes USB keyboards and mice temporarily unusable) while the Windows VM is running. And even then it sometimes just stops working after a while. It's one of the reasons I ditched my iPhone and got an Android device.

You don't have to disable USB completely. With VirtualBox I just pass through the specific USB device I want to use, everything else remains working on Linux for me.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#62

Post by kintamanimatt »

> Android is obviously out of the question since it's just a different flavor of the same garbage

I'm not sure this makes sense. Prior to this she seems to be saying she'll be having issues using her iPhone without OS X. Is she saying she'll also be having issues syncing an Android phone with Linux?

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#63

Post by rosser »

crististm wrote: post #51
crusso wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because the author mentioned that it's some kind of Mac problem. You'd have the exact same problems switching from "free" software running on Linux. Really, I think the article should have been titled: I am Now Dependent on Modern Technology and Don't Like the Alternative

No, what? You end up confirming what I said: it's an application issue - be it free or proprietary. But in her case, phone syncing in a proprietary world is more of a problem. I think she meant it like "I'm dependent on MAC Technology and I can't get out".

(FYI, an appreciable number of the downvotes you're receiving are probably because you're consistently using male pronouns for the author of a post on rachelbythebay.com. You might want to fix that, and your assumptions...)

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#64

Post by gammarator »

niggler wrote: post #29

"So, I just sat there and lived the passive life of a consumer at home. I clicked around the web and read stuff. I talked to people online. I listened to my music and watched the latest cat videos. I watched a lot of TV. But I didn't write any code. Oh no." nothing stops you from writing code on OSX. Plenty of people do it for their business . IOKit is strange coming from a Linux world, sure, but it works as well as…

"But I didn't write any code. Oh no."

I think this was a reference to burnout from work, not a complaint about the OS X dev environment.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#65

Post by derefr »

joshlane4 wrote: post #59

I agree with the author. I resisted Apple products for a long time for the same reason. As someone who was brought up with a command line OS and a basic knowledge of file structure I hate how Apple "tries" to take this away from their users. I say try. I bought a MBP in 2009 because I loved the physical machine (aluminum unibody). With time I was able to use the OS without it controlling me. All of my music is ripped…

> All of my music is ripped on EAC in MP3 VBR format.

Why exactly? MP4 (M4A) is a less patent-encumbered format, and also has higher sound quality for the same filesize, and still plays on everything (except, I guess, decade-old MP3 players.) I can understand not wanting to use DRMed/fingerprinted songs downloaded from iTMS, but the file format itself is just better. Or are you one of those people who sticks to using RARs now that 7zip/libxz exists?

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#67

Post by MatthewPhillips »

I'm constantly amazed by how many informed people have allowed themselves to be locked into the iTunes ecosystem. Apple has made it pretty clear in recent years that iTunes for Windows was the exception, and that they are never going to build software for other platforms ever again.

I know that there is some convenience to buy iTunes if you are using Apple devices. Of course, most of that convenience is due to restrictions in the platform that make in impossible for others to be profitable and convenient at the same time.

But nevertheless, it amazes me that some people are so content with the Apple world that they can never foresee themselves leaving it. I've never been that content with anything I purchase, so maybe it's just me.

Remember that Apple makes its money selling hardware. So they'll never have a reason to make it easy for you to use iTunes-bought content anywhere else. That's why I buy from Amazon. It's content selection is just as good, but it is available on nearly every platform imaginable. It does this because content is its business. So I can feel confident when I buy a new tablet or set-top box that I can probably watch all of the Amazon content I've purchased over the years.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#68

Post by derefr »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #8
ybaumes wrote: post #2

This post would constitute a good/constructive reply to the latter article : 25 Years to Mac - How Ubuntu Pushed Me Away from the PC[1] [1][ http://randomdrake.com/2013/02/23/25-years-to-mac-how-ubuntu... ]

Based on that article, I think Ubuntu probably would push me away from the PC, too. I used a variant called "Goobuntu" (guess where...) during my tenure at one particular company, and it was a mixed bag. I'm not sure how much was due to Ubuntu itself and how much was from the local meddling, but it was wonky in ways my Linux boxes normally aren't. Put it this way - my machine at work was some beastly multi-proc Penti…

> Still, my machine at home was far more responsive than my workstation ever was. There were tons of weird glitchy times where it would just sit there and lag for no apparent reason.

I never worked for Big G, but I've felt that exact pain before--that sounds like the classic "enterprise diskless workstation problem." Lots of big companies like to obviate reimaging their Linux boxes by just mounting /usr over NFS. Then, they don't fan-in correctly, so they have too few servers serving too many clients with too little disk locality between requests, so your request to read, say, a font from /usr/share/fonts has to sit in a queue.

Please, if you are a sysadmin who does this: just run a daemon which, in effect, rsyncs the system to the disk server instead. Your workstations have big disks, sitting around doing nothing. You can be as clever as you want, serving squashfs underlay images over bittorrent in the background and then switching out the rootfs link on download completion--just, please, do something other than NFS. NFS is meant for shared filesystems that change; it has absolutely no advantages for a shared read-only rootfs.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#69

Post by mgkimsal »

philiac wrote: post #52
miles wrote: post #36

But, I'm stuck. All of my music is in iTunes, having been re-imported from the original CDs over a period of time. I can just re-rip all of it on my Linux box, but that's going to suck. Or, I can try to grovel around in their grungy database and try to make sense of it and "export" things, but I'm sure that will be even worse. You'll find all of your music neatly organized here: /Users/ username /Music/iTunes/iTunes…

The author seems to desire a needlessly complicated way to make these things happen.

Perhaps converting some of those processes in to shell scripts that invoke libraries which only compile with custom-patched versions of GCC would help. Having the entire set of scripts be solely located in a ZIP file on a tumblr page from 3 years ago would be icing on the cake.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#70

Post by scholia »

dechols wrote: post #28

It does not matter the platform you use. The data you use is far, far more important. I use Windows 8, Linux, and Mac OSX boxes on a daily basis. I play music from all of them. I watch movies, view photos, and browse the web from all of them. I code on all of them. The reason I'm able to do this is because I've relentlessly managed my data and set up systems to allow that data to be shared effectively between environ…

You left out: "Windows: Best for business and enterprise software"
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