Re: Why no Newsreader.app? AND MORE!

In article
<40461369-fd53-4ef8-bd17-2d8cd297397a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Paul <u53net@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

one set of problems is now a different set of problems.

But the sets of problems are not equivalent.

i never said they were equivalent. it's just that people think os x is
this wonderful change from that old buggy classic mac os. yes, os x is
better in many ways, but it is also worse in other ways.

everything has both good and bad points. does that mean i want to go
back to os 9? no. but there *are* aspects of os 9 that were better
and they have been lost forever.

In OS 9, extension conflicts were so endemic that sorting them out was
a regular chore, and Apple had to write Extension Manager to deal with
them, and for many people buying Conflict Catcher was a good idea
(though I never did).

i remember seeing people with several *rows* of extensions, most of
which were pointless eye candy like putting eyes in the menubar or
adding theme support so they can have goofy looking dialogue boxes.

if you install crap like that, then you risk having problems. there was
one init that played custom beep sounds on various events and it had a
knack of trashing parts of the system. the screen saver after dark
patched over 100 system calls! that's just *begging* for problems.

yet despite many of those extensions known to cause problems, people
would insist on running them. there's not a lot that apple can do if
people write buggy extensions, just as there's not much apple can do if
they write buggy kernel extensions.

and now, there are haxies that offer similar tweaks and do all sorts of
undocumented things that cause problems. i know a number of developers
who will discard any bug report that has evidence of a haxie being
installed.

In OS X, neither I nor my many Mac-using friends
run into kernel panics very often. Most of my Mac friends, who are
largely non-technical, have never even seen a kernel panic. Which
means you either "get to" spend time "easily" figuring out OS 9
conflicts, or in OS X you don't spend time on it at all.

just recently, i installed a driver for an aircard and it includes a
kernel extension. now i have a lot of problems switching network
interfaces and often need to reboot. that never happened before i
installed it. so while it's not an outright kernel panic, the aircard
driver and kext are seriously messing up the networking settings.

what's the solution? uninstall the driver and lose the ability to use
the card, or just accept the fact i might have to reboot to switch
networking interfaces.

The only
point I will concede is that while OS X rarely has major problems, if
it does have a problem it's going to be a pretty serious one. But in
OS X you still have the ability to narrow down problems because of the
nested settings levels. The most common issues are merely local to the
preferences files in a specific user account, and doing some
maintenance on that often clears it up.

sometimes it can be subtle. on one mac, i have a menu extra that draws
to the *right* of the spotlight icon. on other macs, the same menu
extra is on the left (where it should be). why? i have *no* idea. it
still works fine, and it doesn't seem to be causing any other problems.


13 swap files is another extremely rare problem. I don't think I've
seen more than 9, and that was just once. Again, the Mac users I know
just don't run into those problems.

it was a buggy geotagging app that i tried one day. i dragged a couple
photos onto it and it seemed to work, so i dragged a folder of several
hundred photos onto it. apparently, it leaked like crazy and allocated
ridiculous amounts of memory. i guess they never tested it with that
many photos. once i was able to kill it, into the trash it went.

I also don't buy that "the user is no longer in control" in OS X.
That's just not true.

os 9 you were essentially root. you could do *anything*. now, you
must ask permission to do certain things. of course, always being root
has its drawbacks too, but the user does have less control than before.


OS 9 had no command line; in OS X you can dig
pretty deep into the Unix internals if you care, and modify routines
like launchd, the firewall, the network settings, the built-in web
server, the Hosts file, etc.

you could do similar things in classic mac os, but in a different
manner than editing text files. sometimes it was merely using resedit
and sometimes it required a third party utility.

I edited a simple text file so I could
control which of my drives mounts on startup. I do not like the
command line, so fortunately, many of those hidden features can now be
controlled by utilities that are nothing more than easy-to-use GUI
front ends to Unix, providing the point-and-click convenience of any
OS 9 utility.

there are a lot of undocumented preferences in os x, and utilities like
tinkertool make it easy to tweak them. the latest version of itunes
removed a few preferences, but leaving them accessible via hidden
defaults write calls. only by hearing about it online did i know that
they were still there and how to toggle them. i don't really consider
that a good thing.

I've got all kinds of utilities that let me poke around,
change, and when needed, troubleshoot OS X to a degree I just didn't
have in OS 9.

you could poke around classic mac os too, but as i said, it was
different.

And after experiencing OS X, I will never forgive OS 9 for letting
individual applications lock up the whole system (can't switch to
email if video is rendering, because the video app is alllowed to
hijack all the cycles),

if it locked up the system, it was a buggy app. you had to go out of
your way to hold the cpu hostage. a properly written app yielded. of
course, there were buggy apps then, just as there are buggy apps now.

ever use os x late at night when the cron jobs kick in? those
background tasks (namely the locate database updating) can use up a lot
of cpu and slow things down for the apps the user is running in the
foreground. it's less of a problem now that macs are faster, but it
can still be an issue.

plus, there's an intuitive logic in the frontmost app having the
highest priority. if you want a certain app to run 'faster' you simply
brought it to the front.

and also for allowing a simple menu click to
pause the entire system.

another misunderstood issue. apps like itunes and quicktime player did
*not* pause the entire system when the mouse button was held down. it
was very easy for an app to handle this situation, but unfortunately,
many did not.
.

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