What's Wrong with MAC Language in This Video?

[Evo]

Langauge alert - the F word is said twice during the video, so do not watch if this would upset you.

I may have to delete this if anyone thinks it's inappropriate.

[MEDIA=youtube]F3DCUXswung[/MEDIA]&mode=related&search=[/URL]

 

[scorpa]

Lol that is awesome...saved in my favorites now!

 

[Moonbear]

He obviously has no idea how to actually use a Mac, and must be working on some ancient operating system, because I haven't experienced anything like that since OS 9.x. Sure, Macs have quirks, but the stuff he's describing aren't any of them. It would have been funnier if he talked about those. I did laugh at the "cloverleaf" bit. I have never known what to call that symbol. Fortunately, there's an apple on the same key, so I always call it the "apple key." Since he seems to be trying to compare Mac to PC though, his gripes about using the apple-option-esc combination are pretty funny considering it's not any harder than hitting ctrl-alt-del, except the apple-option-esc combination actually works unlike the PC that is beyond hope by the time you're trying ctrl-alt-del to unfreeze it.

 

[Mk]

Everybody calls it the apple key. The symbol is officially the cloverleaf though because it is the Swedish symbol for "attractions."

 

[Cyrus]

Have you seen the one where E-machines told him to go F himself? It's a classic.

 

[Mk]

It is kind of funny that this guy seems to be an expert in Microsoft Windows and expects Mac OS 8.0 to be exactly the same.

He mentions that programs close without warning. That never happened to me. Maybe he is running and old system with not enough RAM?

He says that once you delete something on a mac, it is gone forever. Not true, just like in Microsoft, only the directory is removed. "If you know what you're doing you can go into DOS" and get the file back, on a Mac too. But just like on a PC, it is pretty much impossible to the average user. (Although the Apple's next operating system coming out in spring has the new integrated "Time Machine" that does this for you)

He talks about shutting down and losing files. With all the new Apple programs I believe this is circumvented by automatically saving a backup, as well as keeping a version somewhere invisble on backup for if you didn't get to save it, and it unexpectadly quits. This usually happens because of programming errors, but the program prompts you if you want to revert back to the unsaved version. (Also, with Time Machine, you don't even have to save)

He talks about shutting down the computer. I've had to do that once or twice, and you just press the button for three seconds. On the old iMacs, if you really had a problem (like he obviously had), you push a button in the back near the wires, and before that you would have poked something inside a little hole to turn it off.

The video is simply outdated.

 

[mattmns]

great post!

 

[Cyrus]

Fact is, both Windows xp and Mac OS are both very very good now.

 

[Mk]

I agree. They are both good.

But Mac OS X is better.

 

[Cyrus]

Ummm no, both have strengths and weaknesses.

 

[Danger]

That's so good that I suspect Apple of having produced it. Notice that he admitted that he had to create it on a Mac.

I'm still using 9.0, on a couple of G3's, with fewer instances of lockups such as he mentioned than I've experienced on W's PC or the one at work (Millenium and XP, respectively). My new laptop, which I should have within a couple of weeks, is a G3 iBook running Jaguar. The only problems that I anticipate involve trying to figure out how to use it.

 

[devious_]

My school recently switched most of its labs to MAC. Man, I have never seen such a sucky operating system UI.

 

[JamesU]

I've had like every problem he's talked about...

THe macs I've used most were at Elementary school(OS 8.2) and Middle School(OS 9) I can never open more than 3 programs, and whenever I want to switch, I have to open some menu. Most of the time the computers froze in the middle of running a program and I had to switch computers...Whenever I tried to unplug a mouse or keyboard and plug it back in(or plug one in if the mac didn't already have one) It wouldn't work...

anyway, I've used OSX once and I like it, no more annoyances

 

[scorpa]

I haven't used a mac since the old 5 inch black and white apples we used to have in the computer lab, but my friend just got a new Ibook and it looks awesome. I can't wait to try it out.

I know mac's are good now but it was still a hilarious video.

 

[ShawnD]

except the apple-option-esc combination actually works unlike the PC that is beyond hope by the time you're trying ctrl-alt-del to unfreeze it.

You use ctrl-alt-del to access the task manager. From there you manually end the process freezing your computer. It works almost every time, and has been this way since Windows 95.

I have experienced some things he mentioned, and some he didn't mention. There's always the annoying generic error message with a picture of a bomb where the only button is "Restart". That's the mac version of the blue screen. Then there's the error saying you have the wrong pallet any time you try to run basically anything. When it runs out of memory, the computer just freezes with a warning saying you've run out of memory. Does MacOS even have a pagefile? Sometimes I wonder.

 

[DeadWolfe]

That's almost as stupid as actual Mac ads.

 

[Moonbear]

You use ctrl-alt-del to access the task manager. From there you manually end the process freezing your computer. It works almost every time, and has been this way since Windows 95.

Oh, no, I have a very special knack for freezing computers very thoroughly, no half-measure for me. If I get to that point, it needs to be shut down.

I have experienced some things he mentioned, and some he didn't mention. There's always the annoying generic error message with a picture of a bomb where the only button is "Restart". That's the mac version of the blue screen. Then there's the error saying you have the wrong pallet any time you try to run basically anything. When it runs out of memory, the computer just freezes with a warning saying you've run out of memory. Does MacOS even have a pagefile? Sometimes I wonder.

I haven't encountered any of those since...hmmm...a LONG time. Definitely not since OS X has been out. Oh, wait, I did get the mac version of the blue screen of death, on an old laptop (the black plastic ones) that had been used and abused by many people before me...a week later the motherboard fried, so it was more likely a warning of the more dire things to come. I've periodically had a program stop responding, but those have only been microsoft programs...I don't blame my poor mac for getting all itchy when I use those.

 

[Moonbear]

That's almost as stupid as actual Mac ads.

Hey, wait! I love the new Mac ads! My favorite is the one where PC is trying to hide from the spyware.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Mac... Hah! Try to work in the real world with one of those.

 

[scorpa]

The lost mac ads:
[MEDIA=youtube]zNoOom8wng0[/MEDIA][/URL]...the last one with the ipod is the best

 

[Gokul43201]

Oh you poor misguided souls! Windows and MAC OS, both svck. Linux (and sometimes OS/2) are the way to go!

 

[Mickey]

I have one thing to say about the coolness of the Mac.

www.mydreamapp.com[/URL]

Okay. Maybe two things.

[url]https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1090215#post1090215[/url]

 

[Anttech]

Mac... Hah! Try to work in the real world with one of those.

Yeap, only of the shelf, everything works, Unix OS, with eye candy, for the desktop. In the real world most servers are *nix. I always said I would never use a mac until they were able to give me the tools I need, now it does. Mac has basically stolen all the best bits of Opensource and added them to the OS, fink/Darwinports for distrubution, many network tools, x11 to run those Unix/Linux apps. Cant ask for more really, (ohh well they could make it totally 'free', but hey Jobs isn't going to do that just yet)

 

[Chi Meson]

It is kind of funny that this guy seems to be an expert in Microsoft Windows and expects Mac OS 8.0 to be exactly the same.

He mentions that programs close without warning. That never happened to me. Maybe he is running and old system with not enough RAM?

He says that once you delete something on a mac, it is gone forever. Not true, just like in Microsoft, only the directory is removed. "If you know what you're doing you can go into DOS" and get the file back, on a Mac too. But just like on a PC, it is pretty much impossible to the average user. (Although the Apple's next operating system coming out in spring has the new integrated "Time Machine" that does this for you)

He talks about shutting down and losing files. With all the new Apple programs I believe this is circumvented by automatically saving a backup, as well as keeping a version somewhere invisble on backup for if you didn't get to save it, and it unexpectadly quits. This usually happens because of programming errors, but the program prompts you if you want to revert back to the unsaved version. (Also, with Time Machine, you don't even have to save)

He talks about shutting down the computer. I've had to do that once or twice, and you just press the button for three seconds. On the old iMacs, if you really had a problem (like he obviously had), you push a button in the back near the wires, and before that you would have poked something inside a little hole to turn it off.

The video is simply outdated.

Well, I was just about to say that. (All of that).

He was obviously referring to OSX when he mentioned the "dock" popping up on the bottom. So don't put you icons there. And if your Mac crashes, you need more RAM. That's the ONE RULE!

Still, it was funny. I think I have encountered each problem he mentioned,
at least once
since I started using a Mac
in 1986

 

[Mk]

The bouncy thing is kind of annoying you don't want to click on it. I always click on it, then close it, hide it, or minimize it though.

I don't like how Windows computers (in my experience) take so long to start up. Because Microsoft had the great idea that you should turn everything on when you start the computer so you don't have to wait later. I just end up having to close all the programs in the taskbar, because most of them I can't figure out how to make it so it is not activate on start up. GAH! It should be in the options/prefs shouldn't it??

 

[Kalimaa23]

I've worked with both, and I think that as with all systems, they work well when well maintained. One thing that I do not like about Windows pc's is that you need to reinstall the OS once every few years or so due to the registry being filled up with junk, something that isn't nescessary with mac (or so I'm told).

 

[Anttech]

OSx doesn't work with a registry hive. But you should clean up you bin folders of orphans every now and then.

 

[Evo]

I've worked with both, and I think that as with all systems, they work well when well maintained. One thing that I do not like about Windows pc's is that you need to reinstall the OS once every few years or so due to the registry being filled up with junk, something that isn't nescessary with mac (or so I'm told).

They have some good free registry cleaners available.

The video was just in fun. All of the "creative" types I know that do a lot of computer generated images use MAC.

 

[turbo]

I have worked with Macs (had an employer who was stupid enough to buy all-new application software every time there was an OS upgrade!) and my own PCs running CP/M (yes, I am that old) DOS and Windows. I far prefer the Microsoft products for their backward compatibility. Yes, there is a learning curve to figure out how to keep the OS as bug-free and protected as possible, but for years there was a certain satisfaction is being able to hop to command-line mode and run Word-Star. That WP would scream on a 286.

 

[rcgldr]

some ancient operating system

Which is what Macs ran for years (no pre-emption in the OS, how many years after Windows NT and it's offspring were released until OSX?) Regarding hardware, until the 1990's Macs had no DMA, but PC's had DMA since day 1 (1981). The real downfall of Mac happened when they decided to raise prices in late 1989, and cheap 286 color PC's with Windows came out in 1990, later followed by 386 boxes, 486, pentiums, ... They went from about 20% market share down to around 5%. Then again, so did IBM, as clones took over, and IBMs decision to only include 386 cpus in their PS/2 machines which many mistakenly thought could only run OS/2. I still have my "Microsoft OS/2" coffee cup as a a reminder of those old days. PC-Limited, which became Dell, eventually dominated with it's then orignal concept of purchase by phone/mail and later internet.

It is an old video, here's a link to the original, with some info on the parody.

http://www.happynowhere.net/mac_parody.php

 

[Anttech]

That's because once you've installed all the usefull applications for the Mac, both of them, there's aren't enough entries to cause problems.

http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/index.php?phpLang=en

"The database was last updated at 15:09 GMT on Wednesday, September 20 and currently lists 6937 packages in 23 sections"

osX = Unix

NT was horrible, 2000 was good, xp is very good. (I used to admin NT servers: reboot after every install, massive service packs, security problems, services hanging...) Pre-osX wasnt so good, but it was on par with pre-2k Windows enviroments.

I prefer *nix its a lot more robust, and has way more geeky tools and dev enviroments than Windows. .Net is good, and will be ported to osX enventually.

 

[rcgldr]

One thing that I do not like about Windows pc's is that you need to reinstall the OS once every few years or so due to the registry being filled up with junk, something that isn't nescessary with mac (or so I'm told).

That's because once you've installed all the usefull applications for the Mac, both of them, there's aren't enough entries to cause problems.

In case someone is wondering how Anttech went back in time, I reposted my response here.

 

[rcgldr]

That's because once you've installed all the usefull applications for the Mac, both of them, there's aren't enough entries to cause problems.

"database was last updated at 15:09 GMT on Wednesday, September 20 and currently lists 6937 packages in 23 sections"

I did say useful, and I may have been exaggerating just a tad, sort like a current Mac ad.

NT was horrible, 2000 was good, xp is very good. (I used to admin NT servers: reboot after every install, massive service packs, security problems, services hanging...) Pre-osX wasnt so good, but it was on par with pre-2k Windows enviroments.

NT 4.0 was descent, espeicallly for servers, and there was Xenix / Unix available for PC's since the late 1980's. Apple also had their Unix, AUX. So did IBM, AIX, for the IBM system, a bad pun for it's version was "AIX (pronounced "aches") and panes".

 

[Anttech]

Yeah, but the osX is now a best of both worlds, easy for the novice, as easy as Windows, infact installing apps ia the gui in osx is easier; you just drag the .app to the app folder, and it is powerfull for the geeks. Its what Linux wants to be, and probably will be if given the resources osX was given.

 

[Anttech]

I have parraels running right now, and just did a top:

Processes:  54 total, 3 running, 51 sleeping... 180 threads            23:36:05
Load Avg:  0.66, 0.68, 0.67     CPU usage:  4.6% user, 14.2% sys, 81.2% idle
SharedLibs: num =  165, resident = 31.9M code, 4.59M data, 6.93M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num =  7316, resident =  154M + 13.7M private,  746M shared
PhysMem:   745M wired,  245M active,  970M inactive, 1.92G used, 67.8M free
VM: 8.59G +  110M   32007(0) pageins, 736(0) pageouts

hardly any impact...

 

[Anttech]

Here's a picture to prove it

http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/6764/osxyu2.th.jpg

 

[ShawnD]

OSx doesn't work with a registry hive. But you should clean up you bin folders of orphans every now and then.

I had that not-really-a-problem with Linux. I would remove programs but I wouldn't remove the bin files. Eventually I'm left with all these shortcuts to programs and I'm not even sure which ones are valid. Bin is sort of like the Unix version of the Windows registry. It eventually just gets filled with trash.

 

[Anttech]

How are you installing your packages, through a package manager? Typically they should remove all files on uninstall, if they were packaged correctly. I am sure on sourceforge there are some until's for clean that up

 

[rcgldr]

If you ever wrote programs for the older Mac OS's, there was just too much legacy involved. The MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop) just put up the equivalent of a DOS console window, and you ran batch files to assemble, compile, and link programs/resources. I loaned a set of 5 year old MPW books to a friend working on a MAC app, and he stated there was virtually no change to the MPW tools. Think C, had evolved into a 4th gen language by then though, similar to Visual Studio and it's pre-cursors. Microsoft was coming out with major updates to it's development tools all the time. Even in the DOS days, they had a lot of window's like enviroments for building and testing applications. Borland also made nice development tools. Symantec made good tools for both the PC and Macs. MPW never had any significant changes (at least not by the mid 1990's).

One of the legacy issues with the older Mac OS's was tied to the extreme way it conserved memory, which might have been needed with just 128K of ram, but not needed a few years later as ram sizes increased. Programs on the Mac used pc relative offsets, and you had to manually split up program components into 32k chunks (Think C did this graphically, MPW required you edit batch files). The other quirk was the Mac concept of handles. In the first part of each 32K chunk, you had pointers to chunks of allocated memory, normally used for the "resources" of a program. On almost any system call, the system, might page out or move all of your programs resources, so you had to make a series of calls to get your handle pointers reset (and the resources loaded back into memory if they were paged out). Bascially you ran a 32-bit CPU (68000 series) in the equivalent of an extended 16-bit mode. Because Apple was reluctant to do away with backwards compatablity, this environment went on for decades.

As mentioned previously, it was years before Macintoshes had DMA, something that PC's, and their CPM predecessors had since the late 1970's. With DMA, the system continues to run, without getting tied up waiting for I/O from a DMA driven device, and there are no time contraints on either the system or the device. On a Mac, you had to use a software handshake to get the first word of a 512 byte transfer (sector size on a SCSI hard disk), then use load multiple instructions combined with a hardware handshake called "blind transfer mode" for the rest of the words. During the hardware handshake, the entire machine was locked up. The device had to respond within 16 microseconds of each transfer request or else the machine would "bus timeout" to prevent the lockup from causing a RAM refresh cycle from being missed. Maybe not having DMA was a cost saving measure, but it wasn't passed on to the end-user as Macs were relatively expensive, especiallly after the price increases during late 1989, someone had to pay for all those parties and the working life style of Apple employees.

Mac's might have been "user" friendly, but they weren't programmer friendly. Personally, I've never owned one, but I did develop backup applications for a tape drive company, so I have had a lot of experience with the older machines and systems. I remember the promises that the next OS would be a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS, from version 6 through version 9 (they finally did it in version 10, doing away with the backward compatablity).

 

[ShawnD]

How are you installing your packages, through a package manager? Typically they should remove all files on uninstall, if they were packaged correctly. I am sure on sourceforge there are some until's for clean that up

make --install

It puts files all over the place and you have no idea where they are. Worst of all is that if you want to ever uninstall the program properly, you need to keep a copy of the source so you can do a make --uninstall.

 

[Anttech]

use a package manager, it makes life a tad easier debian apt, or red hat rpm, or any of the other disto's depending on what your flavour is. Anyway if you do a make install, it typically creates a log file, right? Can you not use this to do a tidy up afterwards (If you really want, because as u said, its not *really* a problem)

 

[rcgldr]

Regarding recovery of files, it's harder on the older Mac OS's (not sure if this is true on OSX), because each directory entry has the first 3 links to clusters, and then extensions include the rest of the link chain. Lose thse links and there's no relibable way to recover a file. On a PC, the entire chain structure is stored twice in two copies of the cluster allocation unit area of a partition, and for deleted files, only the top bit of a cluster allocation pointer is set, making it much easier to recover the cluster chain and in the process recover a deleted file, even if the directory information is long gone.

Not to say that windows is perfect either. Install enough applications (in my case applications and games), and the system starts having issues with icons, especially if two apps associate with the same icon. Some of this can be resolved by deleteing the icon cache database with is located here:

\Documents and Settings\YourName\Local Settings\Application Data\IconCache.db

Other times, the only fix is to re-install an application and re-install the updates, or (update), ask on the Microsoft forums to find out in some case the icons are kept in the installation source directories, some of which are only temporary.

Getting back on topic, it's interesting to see the original and some old comments made:

It is an old video, here's a link to the original, with some info on the parody.

http://www.happynowhere.net/mac_parody.php