Tag Archives: os x

Reasons I dislike using Microsoft Windows

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In no particular order, I give you my Windows and Microsoft annoyances. Trying not to favour another OS, and yes, I still use Windows.

File/Folder layout

Yup, this is a killer. Windows over the time has been built up of hack ontop of hack, and it’s file structure has changed several times, but with every change the older folders have been left for legacy applications. In OS X, GNU/Linux and BSD operating systems file locations are some what sensible. /etc for config files, /lib for libraries, /home for homes, /bin for binaries. It’s all placed in logical places.

Application Support files / Install

Windows has no single way to install and setup applications. Installers are not standardised and usually make a mess of the system. There is no one location for start up applications and every time you want to install or remove an application you must use a software vendors application, trusting them to clean up their mess.

Support files for applications are scattered throughout the system and it makes backing up a programs setting is fairly hard. It is slowly improving with Local Settings and Application Data, but still fair from perfect.

Standards

Microsoft can’t even follow their own standards, so how are developers meant to. Microsoft event’s a new standard for each problem they run into, and don’t even bother to look at existing standards to improve on.

EEE

Which brings me to my next point. The good old EEE – Embrace extend and extinguish. The wiki page explains it quite well, and even provides examples :>

DIrectX
Well fuck you DirectX.

Shell / Command Line

Oh dear god. The current standard shell is absolutely use, and has barely improved since DOS 6. Oh well, at least we have tab completion now. YAY! The good news is PowerShell is looking pretty cool. Shame PowerShell isn’t supported on Windows 2000.

Dodgy Virus Protection

Windows has protected once again. To slow down virus they have limited our connections and removed our telnet. It hasn’t stopped viruses, although it has annoyed the hell out of us.

Requirement to have a virii scanner

An operating system that suggests you run a virus scanner is flawed. All that should be required is security updates every several days, not a whole new product by a third party.

5000 versions of the same product (ultimate ect…)

Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Business Premium, Ultimate. This makes maintaing computers an absolute bitch, and just silly. Provide one operating system for all computers. Eg OS X :P .

NTFS not being an open standard

This really isn’t a Windows annoyance, but an announce if you aren’t using Windows. NTFS standard needs to be open so other operating systems can read it.

Updates

Windows is excellent at updating every 3 hours, not to mention updating even when automatic updates has been turned off. This is quite annoying for me, and people that just want to turn off their computers. Instead they have to wait an hour just install a simple update.

Warning Messages

If you ever download an application on Windows Vista or 7, you’ll have just under 8 warning messages to click allow to, and due to this, all users become quite jaded towards the messages, and completely ignore them.

Unrelated Note

On an unrelated note, I would like to see Windows have a unified way to saving application data, and sandbox each applications. When applications want to use other applications data files the OS throws up a warning message asking if the program can have control over those files.

OSx86

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Desktop
TheSkorm – Desktop

I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile but never really built up the motivation to try. I gave it ago this weekend and actually came out with a decent result. I managed to get my AMD Phenom II 940 Black, on an ATI Gigabyte Motherboard, with a GeForce 8600 GT (Yes I had to put away the 260+ since it’s not supported in Leopard… Yet), to boot OS X and run it nicely.

It took a few attempts, and worked out what I needed for the IPC install. The graphics drivers were the hardest to work out, as there is little documentation on the process, and each distro changes.

How I got full support for my 8600 GT was to download the nVidia drivers from here and then modify the EFI strings for Chameleon using OS x86 Tools. My card has a VGA port and a DVI port, however I had to select DVI-I – DVI-I for it to work.

Sound drivers, wireless drivers (my card shows up as an AirPort, however I don’t think draft N is working), network drivers and display drivers all work seamlessly.

HOWEVER I still have one unresolved problem, screen saver won’t ask for a user name and password when I dis activate it. All in all, it took me a few days to work out how ever worked together, and a lot of debugging, but once I got it running “it just worked”.
:P

For the purposes of Apple INC, I own a copy of Leopard, and the EULA is invalid due to the failure of requiring me to accept the contract when I bought the software from the retailer.

iChat

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iChat was one of those programs I just never thought I would like, and never gave it ago. The main problem was that no one used AIM, Jabber or dotMac (now mobile me). While Skyping Peppery thought he would try to out iChat, since we were both using OS X. Once you open the ports, iChat is a fairly sexy IM client.

Screen sharing is amazing to use, and you can switch between your screen and the host easily. The only problem I find with it is that there is no copy and paste.

Webcam chat is fairly good, however it does rape the CPU. The effects worked pretty good for me, but Peppery just had problems everywhere when it came to the backdrops.

In general iChat is amazing to use and fun. However the limited support for clients and the dual buddy list kinda of ruins it. I just need more jabber friends I guess. I once spent over 3 months without MSN which was really nice.

Happy new year.

Sunset

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I just took this photo from our deck. It’s been raining for the last day and bit which has made it all cold, but I suppose I can forgive it, considering our beautiful of a sunset it was. I hate when you take photos of sunsets, how they never come out as nice as it looks. This one came out pretty damn close, so I’m fairly happy with it. I’m not sure if I should start using the wide shot mode on my camera or not, considering it’s the same lens and that, I gather it just cuts the top and bottom off the photo, it’d make it easier for making wallpapers though.

I also created a panorama shot of the sunset (view) using Calico. I tried using photoshop but it took my CPU and RAM, and left me with a garbled picture. It still hasn’t returned either. Calico is pretty nice software and is simple to use. I like it.

Onto other news, I’ve started using Plurk, for a bit to see what it is, how it works, and that. So far i’ve enjoyed it, and it is a step up from twitter, although it’s lacking features such as IM, free sms and API. I’m thinking of setting up a bot to relay messages between plurk and twitter just for me, so I can get the sms. Since it’s the holidays I might. My account should be linked in the side bar to your right sometime soon.

Bonjour (and wikipedia mirror)

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Opps, I missed a post on Sunday, so this ones a double (for tomorrow)

First off, which is the reason I missed posting on Sunday, is that I am mirroing wikipedia so I can use it as school without an internet connection. It’s a simple, but length process and if you follow this ( guide it’s easy. I’ve been processing pages from Friday and I’m only just half-way through. The compressed download is 3.7gb and the decompressed version is 16gb.

The second thing I would like to touch on is Bonjour which is brilliant networking system made by Apple, which simplifys networking. I’ve been using Leopard and Tiger for more than a year now, and this is the first time I saw it in action. I had a ubuntu box up, and I enabled vnc access. I started searching for some alternatives to Chicken of VNC os OS X since it was getting old, and tried a few, and then I noticed that the ubuntu box was in my finder window. I clicked on it and noticed that it screen sharing button enabled. It’s preformed its job so well and seemless. It’s kinda a mash up of Hamachi and local networking.

iDrive

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yum9me later this week talked about backing up data and online storage solutions. After my hard drive wipe, I thought I’d try something a little differnt. I got a free account at iDrive, whic offers 2GB upload for free, which is plenty for me to upload my school work. The user interface is really nice and the upload speed is amazingly fast. It also does incremental backups to save time and bandwidth. The scheduler feature works excellently and even sends me an email once a backup is done. 

The only thing I do hate is the fact that you can’t change the colour of the little menu bar icon. Which is really annoying because I had a nice forest/tree theme going on. If you’re going to have something so out there, please allow people to change it, if not stay with the standard black icons. Speaking of which, here is my solution.

In finder goto /Applications/IDriveforMac/IDriveMonitor.app/Contents/Resources using the goto folder function in the go menu. Open up IDriveMenuIcon.tiff in your favorite image editor and change the colour or what not.

Blogger Dasboard Widget

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I’m not typically one that has a lot of desktop widgets, as the two I do use are ones I want to be able to check quickly, and widgets take of so long to load on first viewing after a reboot, but using the Blogger Dashboard widget is really handy to have if you don’t want to login to blogger or load up Safari. It’s simple to configure and use. I think’ll be using this a lot. 

PS. This blog post was written on the widget.

Re-install of Leopard

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I reinstalled Leopard today since my OS had become slow and sluggish, xcode wasn’t installing correctly and this install was kinda dodgy (it had been upgraded, backed up with time machine and restored twice, and been trashed). I’ve cut down on the ammount of silly applications I have, and have just restored the ones I need. The general install was nice and I done it in less than a night, including all the restoring and that. 

What I really liked about the reinstall is that OS X makes it so easy to restore stuff. All the main data is kept nicly orangised in folders that are easily accessible, unlike Windows. I’m only restoring the data I need, rather than everything so that has been a big bonus.

Google Reader

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Before using Google Reader, I used NetNewsWire for RSS and Atom news feeds, although it was impossible for me to make it travel. I wanted feeds on any computer I use and any operating system. Google Reader contains a lot of clutter to my dislike, making the overall look and feel of it not too crash hot. It also contains some sort of home area, that I’m week to work out the point, I’d rather just have the “All” feeds part as my default home.

I also tried out the Reader dashboard widget, but I seem to only get a box with “error” inside it. I gather it’s because of my Google hosted domain, which seems to break a lot of programs that tap into Googles API.

Generally it’s very nice, although needs some tweaking to make it more appealing.