Appleosity

[serinde]

I have been steadily turning to the Candy-Colored Side since the beginning of my employ. (Including spending most of today frobbing new machines, including the 24" iWhack I was not actually supposed to get, whoopsie!.) Earlier this week I made the final test: I had Boot Camp put a Windows partition on the laptop, booted into it, installed CoH, and tried it out. Seems to work fine, modulo the annoyance of trying to play with a trackpad. (Ah. Mem.: try TeamSpeak.)

So the kool-aid is delicious and fruity, and it seems likely that the next time we need to upgrade something (which is probably soon), I will be switching to a Mac. Jury is still out between iMac and a Mac Pro. Obviously the Mac Pro would be much sweeter, but iMacs are considerably cheaper, and if they are butch enough to do what I need, I may restrain my greed as it is likely to be a generally expensive year.

Comments

[fivetonsflax.livejournal.com]

I have the same problem with font sizes. I'm using a laptop with a higher-than-usual resolution. Supposedly a resolution-independent GUI is in the works, but in the mean time, I use ctrl-scrollwheel to zoom the screen sometimes, especially when I'm reading Doonesbury.

Dunno about automounter. It might be interesting to try to track down the problem. Maybe lock jdev in a room with your computer and a bottle of Mountain Dew ... ? :-) As far as workarounds go, have you considered ditching NFS for some ... less kludgetastic remote filesystem?

Do you get any better results with VLC than with DVD Player?

Apple's music offerings are obnoxiously closed. It's not just the file formats -- there's lots of hardware that you basically can't use except with iTunes (AirTunes, iPod, iPhone). I kind of give them a pass on this because it's a lot of new stuff and there isn't really any competition, and no market leader would behave otherwise -- but only kind of; those aren't good reasons.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

What file system would you recommend? For read-only shares, NFS isn't that bad. Besides, the automounter is the issue, not the file system.

VLC has different but equally bad artificts.

I don't forgive Microsoft for their closed shit (I wish I could sync my phone with Linux, but oh no... needs M$ ActiveSync), so I don't forgive Apple, either. Being a market leader doesn't mean you can't _also_ implement open standards (FLAC as well as AAC, for example). Indeed, if the iPod and iTunes supported FLAC/OGG and Linux then I might have bought a 160Gb Classic. But I won't because it won't work with my preferred setup.

[fivetonsflax.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing that Apple has put the most work into correct behavior with AFS (because it's theirs) and SMB (because they have been pushing Windows interoperability very hard).

Bummer about VLC. I find it hard to believe that there's no decent DVD decoder for Mac OS X ... there's got to be something.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

Well, I just tried 10.5.1 DVD Player (http://sweh.livejournal.com/234652.html) and it looks better... except the playback stutters a lot and the OS crashed! (http://sweh.livejournal.com/234864.html).

I might have to go back to 10.4.11 :-(

[fivetonsflax.livejournal.com]

I am not yet recommending 10.5 to people who don't have some specific need for it. It's the FreeBSD 5 of Mac OS X. FreeBSD 5 had lots of ambitious infrastructural work, and it all hit the tree relatively late, which didn't leave enough time for stabilization before release. I suspect some of the same dynamics were at work in the development of Mac OS X 10.5.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

AFP. AFS is something rather different.

[fivetonsflax.livejournal.com]

Duh, right. I have AFS on the brain, it seems.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

Dunno about automounter. It might be interesting to try to track down the problem. Maybe lock jdev in a room with your computer and a bottle of Mountain Dew ... ?

volfs/Carbon zaniness, maybe? Like, maybe it doesn't activate the mount point if the inode gets magic-chicken-summoned by the FSSpec emulation instead of being namei'ed normally?