I hate Macs

ComputerWorld blogs ^ | Tue, 10/16/2007 - 12:09pm | By David Ramel

[Aliska]

Now THAT is encouraging. Thank you for taking the to explain it. I don't like change, but these sites are finding ways around popups, popouts, popdowns, blatant in-your-face, you name it, and I have read that Firefox stops all or most all of them dead in their tracks. I have a popup blocker, but it doesn't catch so many now.

Some sites don't hassle you with those, but one I really like to spend a lot of time on is awful.

Right now I'm getting a bunch of photos and permissions, etc., to enter into a contest, and this week is shaping up to be hellish, but when things calm down, that will be high priority, dl, install, configure, figure out, and try to get used to Firefox. Then I will wager I won't want to look back :-).

I think I like Netscape for email because I am so comfortable with it, don't have to look up a bunch of things. It does resort your messages sometimes if you use the search function, and I have to go back in and make it sort the way I want, date>descending.

I was using IE mail feature for my newsgroups, but that is screwed up now. So I switched back to Netscape for that, and they changed that, partly better, partly worse. I can't flag messages and threads like I used to be able to with a couple easy clicks, but it had a bug where it would run out of space, so I would have to unsubscribe and resubscribe, and it crashed a lot. Overall it is more stable now.

[Redcloak]

Perhaps I have a reading comprehension problem, but I couldn’t find the part where his productivity will go down “30%” if numbnuts is forced to use a Mac. What the —— do black jeans, ponytails, stubble, the iPod Shuffle, or shiny computer cases have to do with how the application software runs?!

What a maroon.

[grey_whiskers]

Re: your cartoon.

(Sound of grey_whiskers purring.)

Cheers!

[Turbopilot]

If you all of a sudden had to do everything you currently do on computers in a whole new way, do you think you could guarantee that you could do it all at least 70% as efficiently as you do now? I know I couldn’t, and I’ve tried.

I would be surprised if I could get half the stuff done in a given month as I do now if I were forced to do it in a way completely unfamiliar to me. If the ‘’boss’’ in the original post is really forcing his employees to switch to something they don’t know and don’t care to know, he’s not a very good boss (and I say that as a ‘’boss’’). The same would apply to a Mac-based office that wanted to make everyone switch to Windows, by the way, if that makes your flames any less hot.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

On a slightly related vein, guy at work sends me an email with a power point attachment, an important one. I try to open it with Power Point 2002, no dice. It asks me if I want to trouble shoot it. Sure, I say. The helpful debug message was, “I see you’re using Power Point 2002. You should upgrade to 2007.” I sent it home and opened it with Power Point ‘97, no problem. Thanks, but no thanks, Bill.

[MrsEmmaPeel]

Yeah, I could put out a rant against Windows, but the only problem is, there are so many, it would get lost amongst the cacophony of Microsoft discontent.

[Redcloak]

If you all of a sudden had to do everything you currently do on computers in a whole new way, do you think you could guarantee that you could do it all at least 70% as efficiently as you do now? I know I couldn’t, and I’ve tried.

As far as I can tell, all this guy does is whine and complain. I'm sure that he could do that just as efficiently on a Mac as a Windows PC. In fact, an Etch-A-Sketch would probably do for his computing needs.

[antiRepublicrat]

And please, let’s try to remember that Macs have menu commands structured nearly identically to PCs

There's an advantage right there. Macs have the one menu across the top instead of wasting space and slowing down the user by having several all over the screen.

[antiRepublicrat]

I would be surprised if I could get half the stuff done in a given month as I do now if I were forced to do it in a way completely unfamiliar to me.

I'm a decades-long Windows user and I got a Mac a few months back. It was very fast and easy to get up to speed. I still use Windows at the job more than the Mac at home, but already Windows feels like the unfamiliar territory. After a short learning curve, workers may be 30% more efficient on the Mac due to the superior GUI that just lets you do your work instead of getting in the way all the time.

[Space Wrangler]

If you like Sabayon, you really should check out PCLinuxOS 2007. I’m a recent Sabayon convert myself to it. I still have Sabayon running as a partition, but it’s getting ready to get relegated to a VM. I’m now running PCLOS 80%+ of the time. It’s the best thought out and deployed distro I’ve seen to date.

[Turbopilot]

Really? I could have sworn I saw you on anti-Microsoft threads before just a couple months ago.

Regardless, I don’t really care what I use. But I do know the software I use, as well as the hardware. And if my company were forced to switch platforms (which would require me to learn and set up those new platforms) we would be in a HUGE hole. Not quite as unrecoverable as, say, the death of a principal, but I think I’d rather have an unexpected 6 figure liability than have to change over our computer infrastructure. That’s how debilitating that kind of change can be to a modern business.

[Turbopilot]

LOL! I hope y’all aren’t selling that as a ‘’feature’’. Completely disassociating a menu from the window in which its program is functioning is arguably the worst part for anyone who chooses to go to the whole Mac ‘’thing’’. That, like the inability to maximize a window, is a weakness that y’all should minimize as best you can.

[Space Wrangler]

My initial reaction to Office ‘07 was pretty much the same as yours, but after working with it for a month or so, I have found that the layout actually makes more sense. Users of previous versions always grumble about it for the first few weeks, but it’s been my experience that even the most hardened users of previous versions are off and running in a fairly short time period, and then grumble about going back to the same previous versions they loved so much just a few weeks before. There are a number of “here’s where the common tasks are” guides available on the internet that are helpful in reducing the learning curve.

[MarkL]

Vi rocks! Who needs arrow keys?

[esc]:wq

Mark

[MarkL]

There’s no place like 127.0.0.1

Phhhht! Decimal! What a luser!

Real *IX types use octal! 177.0.0.1!

Mark

[George W. Bush]

I don't like change, but these sites are finding ways around popups, popouts, popdowns, blatant in-your-face, you name it, and I have read that Firefox stops all or most all of them dead in their tracks. I have a popup blocker, but it doesn't catch so many now.

Firefox can really place you in absolute control, especialy if you install the right extensions.

These extensions come in the form of extra toolbars, menus, windows, preference settings. statis bar gadgets or any combination of them.

The ones that everyone likes the most:

• NoScript - allows you to restrict or allow Javascript execution on any site. This stops a lot of popups.
• AdBlockPlus - allows you to filter all the common ad sites, flash, images, videos, etc. You can right-click most anything like this and just AdBlock it from the menu. Or enter a wildcard and block everything from that site (e.g. http://zombietime.com/* would block all photos and videos from that gross zombietime.com website). As with NoScript, you can also whitelist certain sites (like FR) that you trust.
• Filter Set G Updates - downloads daily freshened lists of all the ad sites you want to block with AdBlockPlus.

With those three installed, you'll never have to see a popup again. And very few ads. It takes a bit to configure them the way you want them but they are addictive.

You can get these from the secure Mozilla server at addons.mozilla.org. And they will stay updated. They're peer-reviewed for security and good code before they release them to the public.

There are other extensions like Stylish (restyle web pages by injecting CSS formatting) to remake a web site completely. I do this to my My Comments page here at FR. They have a centralized site (userstyles.org) where people share their page styles for sites like Google, Wikipedia, the news sites, etc. You can also eliminate ads and block images with Stylish too.

Greasemonkey is a crazed extension that lets you inject JavaScript into pages. If you write code, you can use it to extract or save or manipulate all kinds of stuff. You can literally do almost anything to those helpless web pages and just remake web pages and sites to your liking. They have scripts for it so that you can shop at Amazon and it will automatically look and fetch from Barnes and Noble the price on the exact same item and inject the prices right into your Amazon pages. Very powerful stuff, very subversive. Hardcore shopping types really like it. They have a ton of Greasemonkey scripts for all kinds of stuff like downloading YouTube videos and such.

They have lots of web developer stuff for it. Web Developer extension, Extension Developer extension, the awesome Firebug extension, it's just great stuff. And it's all free. And it's open-source so you can look at it and know what it does and that it isn't spying on you or compromising your machine.

I guess I really like Firefox, huh?

I even wrote a Firefox extension for FR to re-style it, add YouTube videos, make a mini-editor (which I'm using right now). I'm still not sure there's really any demand for it here at FR. FR is kind of a traditional bare-bones HTML crowd, not given to fancier web features generally.

Since Firefox 2.0, it has a built-in dictionary (which you can enable or disable on a per-site basis) so it checks my spelling in FR's text boxes as I type, underlining words it doesn't recognize, offering alternate spellings if you right-click the word, just like a word processor. It's a really nice feature at FR.

You can also set it up as Portable Firefox and store a standalone version on a USB drive so you can carry your bookmarks, extensions, stored passwords and everything else around with you. Just plug it in and you instantly have your custom Firefox environment with you anywhere you go.

I think I like Firefox a little too much maybe. LOL.

[George W. Bush]

Vi rocks! Who needs arrow keys?

Well, I never got past using nano personally. But I am spoiled with TextMate. Truly a brilliant contextual editor for Mac. A really unique editor with all kinds of macro stuff and packages and plug-ins. Some of the blogger pros and website editors say they'd own a Mac just to use TextMate and it would be worth it. I'm no expert with it but it is astonishingly powerful because of the plugins.

[MarkL]

That said, vi is the tool of Satan. ;-)

I ain't using any text editor that "lisps!"

Mark

[MarkL]

Real *IX types use octal! 177.0.0.1!

Oops... I hang my head in shame... That should be 0177.0.0.1 ... Hey, what can I say, it's been a long day at work, and I'm working on a 64bit MS SQL server!

Mark

[antiRepublicrat]

LOL! I hope y’all aren’t selling that as a ‘’feature’’. Completely disassociating a menu from the window in which its program is functioning is arguably the worst part for anyone who chooses to go to the whole Mac ‘’thing’’

It's part of two proven usability concepts. One is Fitts' Law: the bigger something on the screen is, the faster it can be clicked on. The menu being on the top gives it what is known as "infinite height," making it effectively far bigger, and thus faster to click, than individual window menus.

The second is motor memory: your hand remembers where to click. The window always being on top means you can always get to it faster with motor memory. You use both of these concepts to click the Start button fast in Windows, but you lose both of these with window-based menus.

And overall, it promotes your workspace as document-centric. If you're working on something, the menu for it is always right there at top. There's no wondering which menu to click out of the 12 currently showing. As far as the OS cares, whatever you're working on is what the OS is currently oriented towards.

That, like the inability to maximize a window, is a weakness that y’all should minimize as best you can.

Maximizing a window blows the whole multitasking windowing interface to hell.