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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

#111

Post by lucisferre »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #105
nirvana wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you did call a directory structure that is easy to navigate "opaque", and all of your criticisms are like those from someone who hasn't bothered to even try and figure out how to accomplish what you claim to want to do. It would be better if your tech skills really were sub-par, because that would mean your integrity isn't called into question by the dishonesty in your post.

Ah, I'm disreputable and dishonest, too. Got it.

This sarcasm isn't adding much weight to your argument. Though I'll agree the parent's criticisms are unnecessarily rude (asinine?).

For my own needs I feel like I've been following a similar path as you were. I've consolodated more and more of what I do around Mac and Apple. However I don't yet see the problem as you appear to have.

I'm very happy with it as an all around platform and as a connected ecosystem. While far from my ideal vision of a tech enabled future, it still seems to be better than anything else I could cobble together today. As far as being a decent development environment I have few problems, I use Iterm2, zsh, tmux and VIm (not macvim) and rarely leave the shell for anything other than Chrome. Homebrew is great too (sort of reminds me of when I used Gentoo, but with far fewer hiccups).

I also love a few of the well designed apps that I use which are Mac only too. Sparrow is heaven sent for e-mail (too bad about the acquihire though). Fantastical + Google Calendar makes working with appointments better than anything I've ever used.

I know that I'm probably getting a bit locked in and one day I may pay a price for that. For now, I'll gamble on today's convenience amortized against tomorrows pain. When (and if) that day eventually comes, the entire technology ecosystem will have practically turned over, the decision I make will be different for reasons I couldn't even guess at today and I'll be (hopefully) a smarter person. Maybe it will be Linux I pick again, but I'm happy to kick that decision one down the road with Apple for a bit.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#112

Post by javajosh »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #110
javajosh wrote: post #108

Hi Rachel. What timing. Just yesterday I realized what I call the "primordial criticism": Good products get used. Usage creates dependency. Dependency is bad. Therefore, good products are bad. Since bad products are bad, and good products are bad, all products are bad! You have just plugged in OSX into the syllogism. But the syllogism results in a contradiction. So one of our assertions is wrong. I'll leave it as an…

They were fine. They changed. You can't not upgrade, either, since then you're subject to security holes and other anomalies as the upstream provider decides to leave you behind. My original iPad had this happen to it last year. My Mac will follow soon, I'm sure.

I hear ya. I needed to compile PhoneGap (now Apache Cordova) last week and found that my 'old' version of XCode wouldn't work. I was running Snow Leopard/XCode 3. The new version of XCode requires Mountain Lion. So I had to upgrade the OS, even though I didn't want to. (And it refused to install to a hard drive without a reformat, which was, of course, deeply unpleasant.)

Personally, I really like the idea of Chrome OS but with most of "the cloud" hosted locally, backed by (mostly) straight up files. This cloud only listens on localhost, and so security is less of an issue. Moving to a new machine should be an rsync command.

One can dream.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#114

Post by onedognight »

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…

> If you are leaving the mac ecosystem, the most you lose is the playlists

Right-click -> "Export" -> Select M3U8

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#115

Post by Tichy »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #11
conroe64 wrote: post #3

It had me until she wrote (when comparing to iOS) " Android is obviously out of the question since it's just a different flavor of the same garbage". How can an opensource OS be just another flavor of the entirely closed and walled off iPhone?

iOS: sell your soul to Apple. Android: sell your soul to Google. The thing is, I already did the second one to a far greater degree than most people ever do. I'm not about to repeat it.

Apparently you can install Ubuntu on the Galalxy Nexus and the Nexus 4. Might be an option? Firefox OS is also coming up...

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#116

Post by Gorbzel »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #105
nirvana wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you did call a directory structure that is easy to navigate "opaque", and all of your criticisms are like those from someone who hasn't bothered to even try and figure out how to accomplish what you claim to want to do. It would be better if your tech skills really were sub-par, because that would mean your integrity isn't called into question by the dishonesty in your post.

Ah, I'm disreputable and dishonest, too. Got it.

Apparently you just don't do well when people challenge your preconceived notions. Given that you seem completely unable to defend some of your assertions, it's understandable that most people write you off as plain wrong. It sucks too, because you seem to be a pretty good writer. Unfortunately, you don't take the time or effort to supplement your article with any meaningful technical detail.

> I needed a development box again. My Mac wasn't cutting it, and so my Linux box was returned to active duty.

Why? Absolutely no discussion of why OS X wasn't cutting it as a dev environment for you. Given that tons of devs use OS X machines as their primary coding machines, this just seems completely off the wall.

Then some more stereotypical ranting about how Apple's going off the rails with SJ gone, again without really any meaningful analysis of why this is true. Lion and 2010 era Apple products are supposedly terrible, yet you refuse to upgrade to versions that fix the problems. I'm sure that Linux never needs upgrades.

And then you just go off the rails. AAC files with XML based meta data is so proprietary and will SOOOO difficult to use in *nix, same with JPEGs. EVIL EVIL CUPERTINO! DUMB PHONES FOR EVERYONE! TAKE THAT GOOGLE! Life is so much freer now that you're using desktop linux again! No configuration ever! Everything's trivial!

Except everyone on HN knows that's a joke. You may be wonky, but you're not any meaningfully more "free" (who knows what that means) and now your sarcasm comes just comes across as hand-waving over the lack of any technical detail in your writing.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#117

Post by dasil003 »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #110
javajosh wrote: post #108

Hi Rachel. What timing. Just yesterday I realized what I call the "primordial criticism": Good products get used. Usage creates dependency. Dependency is bad. Therefore, good products are bad. Since bad products are bad, and good products are bad, all products are bad! You have just plugged in OSX into the syllogism. But the syllogism results in a contradiction. So one of our assertions is wrong. I'll leave it as an…

They were fine. They changed. You can't not upgrade, either, since then you're subject to security holes and other anomalies as the upstream provider decides to leave you behind. My original iPad had this happen to it last year. My Mac will follow soon, I'm sure.

Apple was always about relentless forward progress and leaving the previous generation out in the cold. I think you have a point that they passed through a certain sweet spot that would be comfortable for data portability geeks, but to assume that they would maintain some status quo would always have been a laughable thought for anybody with a passing familiarity with tech. Your Linux system may be the best bet for long-term maintenance, but it's still tech and you will still face a whole slew of tradeoffs, dead-ends and difficult migrations.

I think where your article puts up a strawman is this idea that you can't use an iPhone or even an Android because of lock-in. That's just silly since these phones are 100 times more useful than a dumb-phone even if you don't put any data in the cloud at all. Put another way, it's easier to set up a system that extracts your photos from an iPhone into your Linux system and just do that regularly than to carry a Nokia and a Canon at all times.

The future of consumer tech may not be what the geeks dreamed of, but as long as there is free software and open hardware we can bend it to our will as we always have.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#118

Post by gertjanzwartjes »

In my opinion this is just a matter of taste, especially whether Linux or Mac is better for development. I personally use Linux on a daily basis at work and when I'm done with my day job I use my MacBook Air for my hobby projects. Both environments have pros and cons. But to my personal taste, I really love working on my Mac, it feels more stable, hardware and software is much better integrated, it just works all the time.

The same arguments you can use to move away from Mac OS X for development, you can also use to move away from certain Linux distros. Ubuntu's Unity is not something you could call stable for the first few releases. Looking at all the changes between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3, that also scared away many users, or at least left many at GNOME 2, who still don't look forward to upgrading...

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#119

Post by rachelbythebay »

Gorbzel wrote: post #116
rachelbythebay wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I'm disreputable and dishonest, too. Got it.

Apparently you just don't do well when people challenge your preconceived notions. Given that you seem completely unable to defend some of your assertions, it's understandable that most people write you off as plain wrong. It sucks too, because you seem to be a pretty good writer. Unfortunately, you don't take the time or effort to supplement your article with any meaningful technical detail. > I needed a development…

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/09/13/opt/

and

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/09/14/mac/

Lack of technical detail, that's me, all right.

Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac

#120

Post by Gorbzel »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #119
Gorbzel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently you just don't do well when people challenge your preconceived notions. Given that you seem completely unable to defend some of your assertions, it's understandable that most people write you off as plain wrong. It sucks too, because you seem to be a pretty good writer. Unfortunately, you don't take the time or effort to supplement your article with any meaningful technical detail. > I needed a development…

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/09/13/opt/ and http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/09/14/mac/ Lack of technical detail, that's me, all right.

Love the continued one-liners that really never answer the questions people are posing.

Namely, the HN posts that you link completely call it: Why do you insist on tackling any problem that you encounter with exactly the same toolchain and/or mindset that you would on Linux? And then, when inevitably different approaches are required, you complain that Apple/OS X (but usually any other BSD alternative) is terrible. Well, yes, when you go into any situation expecting failure, don't be surprised when it turns out that way.

I'm looking into your radar issue, but even you note that's been fixed. Won't be able to take advantage of those type of fixes if you never upgrade OS X, there will you? Can't go down that path that even you admit "you don't want to follow".

Thanks for the background read though. I guess you're pretty popular around these parts, must have missed it. I'll now know to avoid trollbait articles that rehash tired cliches about Apple's downfall, why Linux's way is always the best way (compromise be damned), and the lazy end users.

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