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[Kung Fu Jedi]

Personally, I think Macs are over rated in general. Some things designed to make things "simple" seem so stupid to me and make no sense what so ever. The only comparison I can think of is AOL. Simplicity over done.

Why is it when I burn a cd on my mac at work(OSX), to initilize the actual burning process I must throw the cd icon into the trash can? This is just one of many things that may in fact be "simple" but is just plain stupid to me. I have a whole list of other stuff too. Using a Mac just makes me feel like I'm using the "AOL" of computer hardware. It just feels dumb and over-simplified. *shrug*

Well, you don't actually have to drag it to the trash, but that is one way of doing it. You can also Control-Click on the CD and select "Burn CD" from the contextual menu, or if you have a window open under OS X 10.3, you'll see all your drives/disks, etc. listed in the toolbar along the left side. The CD will be listed there and there should be a yellow and black burn button next to it that you can select to burn it as well. Thats not to mention burning it directly from iTunes or another application.

 

[Zelda-Bitch]

Well, you don't actually have to drag it to the trash, but that is one way of doing it. You can also Control-Click on the CD and select "Burn CD" from the contextual menu, or if you have a window open under OS X 10.3, you'll see all your drives/disks, etc. listed in the toolbar along the left side.

Ok, but lets say I'm a new computer user. I have some things on my desktop that I want to burn to a cd. First I try to drag the items to the cd. check. So far so good. Now, I'm supposed to figure out "Control Click" or throwing it in a fucking trash can to get the damn thing to burn? How is that all intuitive and easy to someone who's not use to computers or apples in general?!! Why can't I go to a file menu and select "burn cd"? This is what I'm talking about. I'm not saying there aren't other easy methods of doing things.

 

[Kung Fu Jedi]

Ok, but lets say I'm a new computer user. I have some things on my desktop that I want to burn to a cd. First I try to drag the items to the cd. check. So far so good. Now, I'm supposed to figure out "Control Click" or throwing it in a fucking trash can to get the damn thing to burn? How is that all intuitive and easy to someone who's not use to computers or apples in general?!! Why can't I go to a file menu and select "burn cd"? This is what I'm talking about. I'm not saying there aren't other easy methods of doing things.

Check the File Menu at the Finder. You should find "Burn Disc..." as an option. I was just offering you some other ways of doing it.

 

[Phoenix]

yeah so why not run freebsd , both are great platforms, and Mac doesnt exactly have a huge library advantage over BSD.

Because Linux/BSD is still a god-awful desktop environment and if you don't think that OSX has an obscenely large library advantage over BSD - you've been living in a cave or something.

 

[tedtropy]

Sure. Despite regularly maintaining my PC, running FireFox with multiple tabs, GAIM, iTunes, and doing just about anything else (spyware scans in particular) absolutely kills my computer's responsiveness. If I'm ripping a CD, I may as well start making sandwiches. And I often do.

That's my experience, but if you have any suggestions as to what could potentially speed things up barring expensive hardware upgrades, I'm all ears. I've certainly put time into customizing Windows and maintaining it, but the payoff has been exponentially less than it has been with the time I put into Mac OS X.

Ignatz Mouse: I'm sure you know it judging by your post, but I do hope you're aware that Quicksilver is far more than just an app launcher.

How much physical memory is in this machine? XP will run on 256MB, but I'd highly suggest 512 for a comfortable environment. I can safely say I've never had any multitasking beefs with XP on any moderately powered PC. That it acts sluggish for you with just those few apps going seems more indicitive of something other than the operating system...

 

[Phoenix]

Why is it when I burn a cd on my mac at work(OSX), to initilize the actual burning process I must throw the cd icon into the trash can? This is just one of many things that may in fact be "simple" but is just plain stupid to me. I have a whole list of other stuff too. Using a Mac just makes me feel like I'm using the "AOL" of computer hardware. It just feels dumb and over-simplified. *shrug*

Nope. When you drag any burnable media the trashcan turns into the eject command. The Trash Can area is context sensitive depending on what you're dragging and much of this will change in the next release of the OS as well. Nevertheless I always drag all of my stuff to be burned onto the CD/DVD icon and right click and tell it to burn.

 

[tedtropy]

Because Linux is still a god-awful desktop environment.

Exactly, although heaven forbid you tell some *nix fanboys that. They'll hurl their Redhat distro discs at you...

 

[tedtropy]

I work as a system administrator for a small private mid-west University. My department is mixed Mac and PC. I have a Mac and a PC on my desk, and at home I have a PC. I'd much rather support and work on the Mac's any day of the week. OS X is very stable (although to be fair, XP is pretty stable as well) and far easier for the average person to get up and working on in a short time. Apple has done a great job of creating a solid, modern operating system and OS X server rocks too. That said, Microsoft has come a long ways with Windows. It's a much better product over all then it was in the 95/98 days and the gap has closed between the two OS's considerably.

Couple of other quick points, more software for an OS doesn't always mean better software. Sure Windows has a lot more choices of software, but it also has a lot more crap. The major productivity packages (Office, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc.) are on the Mac and PC.

Also, I think I read somewhere that Longhorn (or Windows eXPerience or what ever the hell they're calling it these days) will come with something very similar to the Dock. It'll also ship with an accelerated desktop graphics engine that is similar to OS X as well, not to mention a few other similar features.

Someone mentioned that Apple will release Tiger soon (OS X 10.4) that keeps adding new features and updating the OS and that all MS has done is release another Service Pack. That's true, but Tiger will cost $120 to upgrade to. Apple has become great at releasing OS upgrades every year to year and a half and charing full price for them. If MS did that, people would be all over them for gouging the market. Hell, there would probably be an investigation by the Department of Justice. The point being that for Apple, it's another revenue stream to help their bottom line, and the Mac faithful line up and take it, while if MS did the same thing, they'd probably be cruicfied.

I agree with alot of your points. All circumstances considered, it's still pretty impressive how XP is on most machines. Of course OS X is going to be more stable from an overall perspective - it's designed explicitly to run only on machines made by Apple. If Microsoft designed every PC in the world, their OS would naturally be as stable, but they don't. They have to contend with about a bazillion potential hardware combinations running on about a bazillion more machines, some of that hardware may be cheap or unstable itself, yet still, XP clips along just fine on most modern PCs. There's a shitload of work behind making that happen. So the next time someone moans about 'another SP or update', you may want to consider that fact. I'm not removing Microsoft from fault for alot of their security issues, but there are others factors involved. And Apple charging what they do for what is essentially incremental OS updates is kinda ridiculous....

 

[Kung Fu Jedi]

Excellent point on the Apple controlling the hardware comment. That really does help bring the quality/stability up while MS has to deal with a lot more hardware and tons of legacy code.

 

[Macam]

Someone mentioned that Apple will release Tiger soon (OS X 10.4) that keeps adding new features and updating the OS and that all MS has done is release another Service Pack. That's true, but Tiger will cost $120 to upgrade to. Apple has become great at releasing OS upgrades every year to year and a half and charing full price for them. If MS did that, people would be all over them for gouging the market. Hell, there would probably be an investigation by the Department of Justice. The point being that for Apple, it's another revenue stream to help their bottom line, and the Mac faithful line up and take it, while if MS did the same thing, they'd probably be cruicfied.

There's nothing stopping Microsoft from releasing non-security related OS upgrades -- I'd love it if they did, even if they did charge for it, provided the updates were substantial. No one's going to pay for security updates alone given the current state of affairs. I'd more than happy to pay for Apple's OS upgrades because the features pay for themselves in my own opinion.. Regardless of whether Windows has to taken into account a near inifinite amount of hardware combinations (something I don't take for granted), it means little if a company has big Microsoft is mired entirely in compatibility and can't afford to advance development in other needing parts of their OS, like security and further enhancements to usability.

tedtropy: 512MB RAM. The system is virus, spyware/adware-free, defragged, has the lastest drivers, and a clean registry. Damned if I know what it is, but it's not a RAM issue.

Zelda-Bitch: Most Mac keyboards have an Eject button and you can even put an Eject button in the menu bar. I mean, really, there's a thousand ways to eject a CD easily.

That said, one of the things I like the most about OS X is the easy to navigate file structure; I moved a couple of plist files to a new user account on the Mac back home, and I was able to instantly have all my user information duped on a brand new machine in 5 minutes. Amazing stuff.

 

[Ignatz Mouse]

Ignatz Mouse: I'm sure you know it judging by your post, but I do hope you're aware that Quicksilver is far more than just an app launcher.

I don't use it for much but that. Unless you mean a app launcher, page launcher, song launcher. Beyond those things, I haven't much explored (I'm relatively newly back to Macs).

And I think it's criminal that its functionality (even just the app launching) *isn't* standard.

 

[tedtropy]

tedtropy: 512MB RAM. The system is virus, spyware/adware-free, defragged, has the lastest drivers, and a clean registry. Damned if I know what it is, but it's not a RAM issue.

That's a weird one. From the things you described in your earlier post, you should have more than enough resources free while doing those things. May want to pull up task manager while you're heavily multitasking, sort the process list my memory usage, then CPU usage, see if you can find some nasty process or program with a memory leak or other quirk. Certainly something odd going on there...