intx13 said:
bryanc, pooky, and rueyeet: I appreciate the facts and information you supplied. I'm happy to hear that X can indeed run two instances of the same task, and I guess the reason the GUI prevents it is to go along with their method of "give em so little power they can't break anything".
Keep in mind, that's just the behaviour of the Finder and the Dock. You could easily make a third party tool to do the behaviour you prefer. For example, a script could be made, and you could drag the application icon onto that script's icon, and it would then create the new process for you. I've seen countless newbies use web browsers, who double click on web links, thus causing the page to load, stop, and then load again, and I've seen countless newbies continuously click on application icons until the program has loaded. It's like they don't see the hourglass or beach ball or whatever. That's probably why the Dock and Finder default to multiple clicks merely bringing forward the existing app. Plus, you have to remember that the dock is a location to start new programs, and track existing programs, which is different the the windows Start bar, which has those operations separated.
intx13 said:
Chris H: "Dude! You like never ever ever challenge "Murphy's Law"!! " Umm, I don't know about you, but my operating systems run on more than chance. I've had my linux box (mandrake 9.2) run for months without a crash. I only had to reboot because I wanted to toss in a tv tuner card.
I believe he was refering to the application potentially crashing, or the user accidentally closing the wrong one, etc. Not the OS crashing. Anyways, that's covered above by the example of how to execute more than one process of the same application.
intx13 said:
chris H: "LINUX IS NOT FREE!" ... I downloaded Mandrake 9.2 (the iso's), burnt them to cd's, and i was good to go. The distrobution came with OOo, KDE, gcc, kdevelop, and thousands of otehr programs. Now granted, some versions of Linux are not free, but most are, and many of these free versions contain everything to do anything with your computer. From serving (apache) to graphical editing (gimp) its all there. I've never paid a dime for my linux systems.
He was saying that there is a cost beyond dollars, which is your time. Since you're younger, you are luckily free from that constraint of life, but when you get older you'll see that it really is a big factor. I'm only 24, but I live on my own, etc., so I've seen that transition occur over the past few years. If I play around on my debian system, configuring postfix or djbdns or whatever, then that is that much less time I can work, or study... Count yourself lucky that you missed the years where xfree86 on Linux required you to hand enter your CRT monitor's refresh rates if you wanted anything better than 640x480! There comes a point when you'll have explored all the intricacies of the software, and then you'll just want to get a task done as quick as possible, and at that point, a system that requires you to micromanage will probably seem less appealing, even if that micromanaging comes with more control.
intx13 said:
Basically, it all comes down to two things: power and stability. Mac OS limits me. I can't (without using command line apparently) run multiple instances of the same app. I can't do simple things like decrasing the volume from the speakers without corrupting data being exported to a video camera (this is because the volume adjustment is a SOFTWARE interrupt... not just a button on the speaker, and so things get crazy when it gets called). I can't right click without pressing a keyboard button. I can't even write my own operating system on a mac wihtout an emulator or burning it to a disk every time I want to test it... no floppy drives! I can't even reset the damn thing without holding down a keyboard key and pressing a hard to find button for 5 seconds. I can't even get an error report when an app crashes. I just get "so-and-so has unexpectadly quit". I can't do anything that an advanced user might want to do.
I described a method above to graphically execute multiple processes.
I'm surprised you can't decrease the volume without using so many CPU cycles. But, since I'm sure that your PC uses external speakers, then you could always use external speakers on the Mac too, thus giving you hardware volume control. Plus the sound will probably be better.
You can get an external floppy drive, or you can write your image to the hard-drive, and use the open firmware's multi-booting capability, since you're willing to reboot anyway. The hard-disk will be much faster than the floppy anyway. Although, I'd recommend using something like bochs or vmware, like most kernel programmers do.
I fully agree with you that the one button mouse on the Mac is useless, but I also think that a two button mouse just doesn't cut it either. Actually, it's since I've used X11 (first in Solaris, then Linux, now OS X) that I can't go back to the limited two button mice. So, I always buy a three button mouse, or even better, where the middle "button" is a scroll-wheel. Anyways, the point is, when you get a prepackaged PC, like the Mac is, you tend to have to get a better mouse anyways.
You can reset from a menu, or you can reset from a button that's on the top right of the keyboard. This is actually something that's always been easier on a Mac than a PC. What's hilarious is when newbies reset a PC when they're trying to open the CDROM drive
If you need to get better errors when applications crash, then you should install the free development software, and the debugging libraries. The docs explain how to trap errors to the debugger, and log errors, etc.
intx13 said:
Second, it crashes. now I keep hearing that its so stable, that X never crashes, but the fact is, EVERY mac running ANY version of X that I have seen has crashed at some point or another while I was watching someone use it. Now, if you blame this on the techs that service the machine or the users that use it: how can a system that is so stable be crashed by incompetents so easily? Shouldn't it at least be SOMEWHAT difficult to crash it? Linux takes some effort to crash. Linux is used to run hundreds of users across networks at once, it has to be difficult for the average bozo to crash the whole system. But if, as many mac people have told me, the users and techs are at fault for every crash of every mac, then the system can't be admin'd with ease, and so defeats its very purpose. A system that can't be admin'd by the average tech without causing multitudes of fatal errors is no system I'll use.
I find this quite surprising. I've never had to do any special administration on my Mac, and it just works. I agree that if a typical technician can't maintain it, then that's bad, but at my University they have labs of Macs that just work, so potentially your school's techs are particularly inept. If your samples are all from the same sampling pool, then many occurances have no more significance than a few occurances, as it can still be from a single, propogated, fault. You have to take samples from a completely different pool to see if there's an actual trend.
