Goodbye to PPC for now?

[eyoungren]

This is my wife & I’s approach. We operate out of joint accounts & legally our assets are bound together through marriage. There is no his and hers, only our money. Checking in with each other about some purchases is about respect & openness for us and is not in any way policing or judging each other. This cooperative approach works pretty well for us.

My wife long ago elected to just let me deal with the bills (and the anxiety). Primarily that was because I was the only one working, but she also hates it. But in the last few years with the kids being older she is working again. She makes more than I do, but her job has the better benefis so more is taken out.

All she really wants to know is how much she can spend and when. It's expected that I keep the lights on and so on with both our money, whomever's paycheck that comes from. Sometimes it means a moratorium on any personal buying.

Just this past weekend we forked out over $500 for brakes on the car. We'll be eating in until her next paycheck.

 

[paardenkapper]

This is a really interesting part of the conversation. Of course you have to make financial decisions as buying a PPC mac won't make me money in any way. I cannot create websites in Adobe PageMill or GoLive like 20 years ago or so.

I have decided upon setting a certain monthly budget limit to my expenses which is hard sometimes because I come across a piece of hardware that I'd really love to have but have already spent my budget.
In the end this is also a matter of impulsive buying and instant gratification for dopamine.

Aside from the financial aspect I sometimes wonder how tech Youtubers who buy whole systems on a regular basis even store all that stuff.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

My wife long ago elected to just let me deal with the bills (and the anxiety). Primarily that was because I was the only one working, but she also hates it. But in the last few years with the kids being older she is working again. She makes more than I do, but her job has the better benefis so more is taken out.

All she really wants to know is how much she can spend and when. It's expected that I keep the lights on and so on with both our money, whomever's paycheck that comes from. Sometimes it means a moratorium on any personal buying.

Just this past weekend we forked out over $500 for brakes on the car. We'll be eating in until her next paycheck.

You are on the opposite side of our current fiscal dynamic. Actually when we first started living together, I managed all the finances, but for the past 5 years or so, my wife has been managing that, so with it keeping an eye on non essential purchases fund.

 

[eyoungren]

You are on the opposite side of our current fiscal dynamic. Actually when we first started living together, I managed all the finances, but for the past 5 years or so, my wife has been managing that, so with it keeping an eye on non essential purchases fund.

Well…

When we first got married I had this stupid idea that there'd be her account, my account and then 'our' account. But that only works to keep the bills paid if both people are paying from 'their' accounts into 'our' account. It's tough to do if your focus centers around buying what you want from 'your' account.

I had to adjust (grow up) from spending solely for me to paying for both of us. I had come from an environment as well were I was not paying any of the bills. That took a while and wasn't fully realized until early 2022 because there had always been someone else who could 'help' with the bills from time to time. We don't have that now.

But yeah, I ended up with the job because my wife just doesn't want to think about it or have anything to do with it.

 

[kby]

I totally agree that PPC has become pretty difficult to use, mostly through no fault of its own. I still maintain my quad G5 server for several reasons, but it has not gotten as much use for normal things like browsing and e-mail. I need to update OpenSSL for the system to make the web server functionality. I have only heard of rumors to deal with OAUTH2 for e-mail since Micro$loth in particular as well as gmail require it to do authenticated e-mail: Using even a currently approved authentication over TLS isn’t good enough any more for my work campus which submits to the theory that if it came from a DHCP IP for a consumer broadband block, it must be spam. This changed just as I got sendmail (the SMTP server I use) to authenticate to different hosts with different credentials.

Most of these are (IMHO) draconian mostly misguided attempts to solve real problems.

Much of the reason I keep the server running is I built a lot of custom stuff for it over the last 20 years and rebuilding all of that for new platform, or even finding what it all is, will be difficult.

Another reason is old documents. I have old Excel spreadsheets written with very complicated Excel-4 style macros (pre-VB). Modern versions of Excel that I’ve used say they support them still (unlike VB), but they don’t work with these macros, even though there’s an ”acceptable” modern ”update” it doesn’t work for me.

The fact that even web pages for simple things are now written so they require complicated javascript and mostly reject browsers they don’t recognize is also frustrating. How difficult does it have to be to log in to my bank and see my balances? How difficult can it be to submit a simple web form to my work tech support system?

Heck even my 17” Wintel MacBook Pro (late 2011) no longer can read mail with Apple Mail or browse my campus learning management system with the default Apple stuff. I could probably switch to Thunderbird for mail and can usually use Firefox to access the LMS, but why do those things need to be so complicate and be compute hogs?

As a former software developer, I see it as the cost of modern software development tools that enable people who don’t really know how to program to right code that kinda works sort of some of the time and get it out the door, hence the poor [design] quality and many of the security issues of a lot of modern software. That and the incessant drive to get it out the door and focus on bells and whistles instead of fixing what’s broken.

 

[barracuda156]

I totally agree that PPC has become pretty difficult to use, mostly through no fault of its own. I still maintain my quad G5 server for several reasons, but it has not gotten as much use for normal things like browsing and e-mail. I need to update OpenSSL for the system to make the web server functionality. I have only heard of rumors to deal with OAUTH2 for e-mail since Micro$loth in particular as well as gmail require it to do authenticated e-mail: Using even a currently approved authentication over TLS isn’t good enough any more for my work campus which submits to the theory that if it came from a DHCP IP for a consumer broadband block, it must be spam. This changed just as I got sendmail (the SMTP server I use) to authenticate to different hosts with different credentials.

While I am not sure it addresses your issues, OpenSSL should be straightforward to install from MacPorts, and you can use Claws-Mail for e-mails, it supports TLS and confirmed to actually work. GUI is archaic, but it is functional.

As a former software developer, I see it as the cost of modern software development tools that enable people who don’t really know how to program to right code that kinda works sort of some of the time and get it out the door, hence the poor [design] quality and many of the security issues of a lot of modern software. That and the incessant drive to get it out the door and focus on bells and whistles instead of fixing what’s broken.

What did you work on by the way? Anything on PowerPC?

 

[swamprock]

An update from this post from a year ago.

I still use my Mini, which is stuffed into a Cube shell (sans core, which I'm saving for a new mainboard if I can find one) with a MiniMax external hard drive/ports expansion (yep... both fit in the shell), for Dreamcast hobbyist game development. On the go, I now use a 14" iBook G3 for the same purpose, and just swap files via file sharing when I get home. My at-work tools have changed to Intel (2013 Macbook Pro Retina), as both of my TiBook have issues (the 667 has a faulty screen, and my 1.0ghz has graphics overheating issues). Still have the same iPhone and iPads serving their purposes.

 

[Minghold]

View attachment 2198951

Every time a Mac owner installs an OS that kills 32bit, a demon gets its wings and the NSA makes salacious groaning noises.

(I'd kill to be able to run old versions of the OS on silicon hardware rather than the other way around.)

 

[Minghold]

Every time a Mac owner installs an OS that kills 32bit, a demon gets its wings and the NSA makes salacious groaning noises.

(I'd kill to be able to run old versions of the OS on silicon hardware rather than the other way around.)

Further note: even though you can (easily) run older OSes in virtual-machines (via Parallels, etc), OpenGL will NOT work in any of them AFAIK --which means HO retro-gaming, and anything else requiring OpenGL won't work either.

 

[rampancy]

Further note: even though you can (easily) run older OSes in virtual-machines (via Parallels, etc), OpenGL will NOT work in any of them AFAIK --which means HO retro-gaming, and anything else requiring OpenGL won't work either.

Which really makes the preservation of old Mac hardware and software all the more important.

 

[Minghold]

Which really makes the preservation of old Mac hardware and software all the more important.

Honing in: with each year that passes, it is becoming more and more apparent that ostensibly useful utilites such as CCC, OCLP, and Parallels ate bending over backwards to placate Apple before their users.

It behooves the community to finally admit to themselves that their are no corporate white-hats tending to their interests, and that they're going to have to fork MacOS 10.X themselves.(I propose the name "MacOS Mojo", which is essentially Mojave-optimized, with bits and kext from Catalina brought down, and likewise brought up from the "cat" OSes. Result would be something with Rosetta/PPC as well as Silicon/APFS support, and Snow Leopard speed after all the bloat is carved out.)