Posted on 05/27/2005 10:53:28 AM PDT by Swordmaker
I have been Macified. After not owning a Macintosh for more than 12 years I finally decided that the undeniable coolness and beauty of the hardware and particularly of OS X meant that it was time to get religion!
The beast, which arrived a couple of weeks ago, is a Power Mac G5 with dual 2-GHz processors and 1.5G bytes of RAM running OS X Tiger. What a gorgeous piece of engineering! It is an elegant design even under the hood: When you need to take off the side to, for example, add extra RAM, one latch frees the panel. And all the subsystems are plug-ins, making it incredibly easy to work on. Heaven.
Then when you run up OS X, again, wow. The operating system has a remarkable polish - just as if someone had thought about the design as a whole rather than finding and assembling a collection of spare parts and forcing them to fly in formation.
Anyway, back to the Macification: First I fooled around checking out all the cool new features. Tiger has a lot of really well-implemented new stuff that makes it significantly more powerful.
Next I decided to load my photographs into iPhoto. My photo collection is fairly large, weighing in at 14,618 files for a total of 18.7G bytes.
I copied the files to the Mac from my Windows desktop, an XP system that is misbehaving to the point where it is time to wipe it and start again. < digression > It is amazing that XP systems can get to a condition where it is easier to erase and re-install everything than diagnose and fix what's wrong. < /digression >
So now that I had the image files on the Mac I could start loading them into iPhoto. All seemed to go well with iPhoto doing its indexing and thumbnailing, then it finished - crash.
I restarted iPhoto. The program ran for a couple of minutes then, thud! I re-imported the photos. IPhoto finished the import, stayed up again for a couple of minutes, then thud. In the middle of this the 10.4.1 release of OS X came out, which apparently included some iPhoto improvements, but nothing I could find mentioned the problems I was seeing. I applied the upgrade and resorted to clearing out about 5,000 pictures and iPhoto seemed to become stable again.
Now, let's review: This was a brand-new machine, the system detected no problems and iPhoto hadn't been used before, but handling just less than 15,000 images made it blow up. And I thought Mac applications were generally considered to be better than Windows applications. Evidently this is not the case.
According to discussions I've had on lists and in Apple forums, there's no obvious explanation for my problems with iPhoto. According to Gary Stock, CTO of Exfacto: "From a Mac perspective, the surprising part is that iPhoto even tried, rather than warning you when you crossed some threshold or advising you to reduce the dataset."
Exactly! Which makes me think the problem is more fundamental than bad error-handling in the application, unless you are willing to believe that Apple's programmers are not very skilled.
From my experiences with Windows and now OS X, maybe when it comes to sophisticated, multimedia applications it doesn't matter what platform we're using. It may be the case that humans are not capable of creating stable software for the level of complexity required.
Maybe there's a sort of code-complexity limit that we have crossed in the latest generations of computer systems that makes software stability probabilistic rather than deterministic. If so, it makes for some interesting implications for systems engineering.
To begin with, managing systems in the future might be more like psychiatry than programming.
Despite these snafus I still love the Mac. It is just that my illusions are shattered.
Condolences to backspin@gibbs.com.
I had a few corrupted image files from my old XP system that I also brought into iPhoto on my new Mini. iPhoto just gave me an error message and refused to add them to the library, but it didn't crash.
There are millions of cockroaches for every human, does that mean that cockroaches are more desirable than humans?
Millions of people bought the first generation Hyundai crapboxes, far more than people who bought Mercedes. Does that mean that Hyundais are a better car?
The Left tends to use Macs more than the general populace, but many major conservative figures use Macs. Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, and President George W. Bush are all avid Mac users. I believe ambassador-nominee Bolton also uses a Mac, along with Condi Rice (when she *has* to). They just want to get their work done instead of having to fix the computer so they *can* get their work done.
Windows is the IT field's full employment act. It pays my bills, and generates much repeat and new business for me - but my laptop, server, and primary desktop all came from Apple and there's only one PC in my home. It's a Dell used as a testbed. I work on/with/around Windows all day, the last thing I want to do is come home and have to fix a machine because Windows broke *again*.
The masses buy what is cheap and sort of works. Those few who know better buy what works well, no matter what the price. Goes for Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari, H&K, Lockheed fighters, Bang and Olufsen, and many other consumer products - including Macs.
It might depend on the degree of corruption... and type.
In the old days we would call it cognitive dissonance. But what the hay.
Sure it is, just unplug the PC, disconnect it from the network, throw it in a vault and weld the door shut. ;-)
As someone who is sitting with an absolutely gorgeous Mac Cube, which cost over $3000. and is now obsolete, discontinued and unexpandable...I'm thrilled to know it's on display at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.
[smile], Don't take me too seriously! True about Rush Limabaugh and I could never figure it out! - at one time I thought he wanted to get apple to advertise in his show. I did not know about the the pres and Carl Rove, Bolton etc... and I ask the same question WHYYYYY...???? Bush and a Mac????.. does not make sense. You said Condi too?... that's it, she lost my vote. You are right, that is what the Mac tries to be, the Mercedes of the computers. Although I have to say I own a Toyota and a Honda!.. Although these cars are just economical workhorses really, nothing special about them. Anyway on a more serious note, enjoy your computer(s), they are a lot of fun aren't day? :)
There are video card, hard drive, and processor upgrades for the Cube.
However, it was overpriced from day one. That's been remedied with Son Of Cube, i.e., the Mac mini.
"Then check the ownerships and permissions on that file."
When I first read this, I thought it said "perSIMMONs on that file."
I was wondering, "Why the heck does a computer file have persimmons?"
They use Macs because Macs simply *work* (like a Honda or Toyota or Mercedes or BMW) instead of sometimes working, sometimes exploding, sometimes acting randomly, sometimes having parts fall off (PCs, Chevrolet New Malibu/Impalas, Ford Taurus, Ford Escorts, etc, etc.)
All this suggests that the Mac is perceived to be trouble-free because there aren't many users, or there isn't much software, or users haven't been very demanding.
I might add that in my years as a software developer I always assumed that data would be corrupted and always did sanity checks to any incoming data befor accepting it. This means readin a byte or fixed length block at a time.
It really annoys me that so many programs crash with corrupted data.
>>have to fix a machine because Windows broke *again*.<<
This is just idiotic. As if those of us legitimate power users have this experience -- windows breaking. For the most part we don't. The problems we do experience are just like problems that mac folks experience. Read an apple support forum on their site and you'll see things like kernal panics that are every bit the same thing as a crash. I've had exactly ONE crash with Windows 2000, and none on XP. That's with 8 or 9 different machines. I crashed OSX at the store on 2 occassions, though I will admit that was 10.1 or something.
However, in fairness, I don't think iPhoto is the application for this guy. There are much better and more powerful image browsers. I use Breeze Browser (Windows only), but I hear good things about Photo Mechanic (Mac and Win). Neither are free, but both are less than $120. Anyone that has 18 gig of pics pretty well qualifies for a graphics power user whether they want to be or not -- at least as it relates to loading them all up in a photo browsing app of some kind.
I think everyone should use the right tool for the job, or use the tool they want to use. If that's a Mac, use it. If its a PC, use it. But its ridiculous for Mac users to pretend that Macs are perfect and Windows is always causing problems.
Correction: ...but I have *NO* problems with it. (One word can make the difference!)
Momentum is hard to kill. People today still think Macs have an old, broken OS, are totally proprietary hardware, and are slow, and have little software although that hasn't been true for years.
Have you noticed that in many movies in Hollywood, when a PC comes into view, especially a home PC, it's always an Apple, Mac, whatever? and they make sure to show you the logo.
That's because it's product placement. Apple paid to have those computers there as a form of advertisement. Anybody can do it.
They are expandable. Procesor and video upgrades are out there.
"The masses buy what is cheap and sort of works. Those few who know better buy what works well, no matter what the price."
Snob.
To begin with, managing systems in the future might be more like psychiatry than programming.
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