Sold out for osx and wow

[Karlos]

I have to endure a 1.25GHz eMac at work running 10.3 in 256MB ram on a third rate graphics card. Naturally, I love it...

[Karlos]

@Doobrey

On capable hardware I have no doubt OSX performs very well, just not at work on the machine I have to use.

Still, for a while I had to use OSX 10.2 on an original iMac 400MHz G3 with 128MB, I was close to punching that every day ;-)

One of my principal gripes with OSX relate to my super evovled next generation colour perception and the fact that OSX still doesn't let me define "highlighted text foreground colour = X, highlighted text background colour = Y". You may only set the background colour or invert the whole scheme (as part of the accessibility options - :lol:)

I mean, how elementally simple is that? I know it is mac tradition to limit the complexity of the interface so that even the interior designer types can get to grips with it, but please, even they can grasp the idea of more than one colour at a time :lol:

As for the local fileserver (OSX Server) dying to the point of total non bootability because file permissions may have been messed up (despite only allowing remote access to the staff), that is just pathetic. When informed that 'you did keep an eye on permissions and repaired them to keep it all tickety boo' by my local mac expert I was aghast. I mean wow, I have to remember to fix problems that shouldn't really arise anyway and before they do?

It was just a local file repository on the LAN with individual user accounts, none of which had any kind of permission to access stuff outside their home folder. How could it get so corrupted in the first place :-?

Hence my sentiment now: "Don't be fooled by the glitz of OSX, some day it is going to come and bite you hard on the arse."

[Karlos]

nyteschayde wrote:
@Karlos

Oh Karlos you're so jaded.

Seeing as you're a mate I'll let you get away with that...

That and the fact it is so bloody true :lol: If I used them as a home machine I expect I'd be a lot less critical, but they have caused me a lot of needless headaches at work ;-)

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:

It seems someone at at Apple was listening to you... since I suffer a similar (if not the same) affliction, I also needed to change the highlighted text colour... so I went to system preferences and then selected appearance... lo and behold there is a setting in Tiger that allows one to set that very feature. :-D

That must be one of the 'dozens of updates' in Tiger then. Still stuck with 10.3.9 here and I sure don't have that option anywhere. Are you sure it lets you independently set the back and foreground text colours?

All I get is this:



-edit-

Thank god that was a png and not the tiff it saved as :-D

[Karlos]

If it is a problem with the machine than that says it all. This is a completely "out of the box" eMac with the OS that shipped with it. Just as the server was an out of the box G4 workstation with nothing but OS X Server.

;-)

[Karlos]

You are missing the issue, I want to get "white on dark blue" for highlighted text as that is the most visually obvious thing to me. Virtually every other OS I've ever used lets me do this.

Here on 10.3.9 the text foreground colour is always black, you are just changing the background highlight colour, nothing more :-/

Hell, let's see what happens if I make highlihhted text black.... :lol:

-edit-

Oh wait, I do think I missed a sarcastic note there :lol:

[Karlos]

Alas we don't have tiger here and wether it gets installed or not is not my decision.

So it really took them until tiger to implement something like this?

To damn busy with rotating login screens I expect :-P

[Karlos]

@AntonioX

Ah. I think you don't understand what I am complaining about. I want basic text (in any text editing application or browser etc) after I highlight it by dragging over it with the mouse to change from 'black on white' to 'white on blue'.

I cannot find an option for this anywhere here :-/

[Karlos]

AntonioX wrote:

@ Karlos

I am not sure if I am right again but do you mean like changeing the colours in say textedit?

Yeah, any application really where you can select text. In the "Appearence" Prefs (see earlier window grab) the only option for text highlight seems to affect the selected texts background colour only.

[Karlos]

@Oliver

Isn't all that *exactly* the sort of 'typical windows maintnance' type of thing MacOS is supposed to save you from? :lol:

Multi GB installs and not working on their own hardware out of the box. How they can lambast MS is beyond me ;-)

[Karlos]

Oliver wrote:
hmm, thinking about Apple's maketing strategy of the past 5 years or so, which has focussed somewhat on the 'hairdresser' market (please, I really don't mean to offend anyone, honest), having out of the box installations that hamstring performance really does seem to be a bit of a dull move.  Really good way to annoy and befuddle one's customers.

Substitute "hairdresser" for "as seen on tv interior designer type" and you can be as offensive as you wish and I'm with you 100%...

[Karlos]

@Vic20owner

Good for you, I'm glad you found a system you like.

he security and power of unix/linux/bsd and the convenience of a mac with the compatibility feeling of windows. Everything is soooo well designed, there was very little learning curve.

Sure it's fantastic as a home OS, provided you don't have any rare sight problems ;-)

One word of advice - do not *depend* on all this security. OS X Server _failed_ totally, in a way I have never seen any OS do before (I've only ever seen hardware failures that compare) at work, having been doing nothing more than allowing people to log in from their eMacs and save work to there in case they have to work on another station another day.

My 1.25GHz G4 eMac at work often crawls when running Mail, BBEdit, Firefox, Transmit and couple of bash terminals concurrently which are the absolute bare minimum tools I need to do my job. Occasionally I need to use XL to prepare data for my boss, or OmniGraffle to make diagrams. Unless I close down some other apps, it will literally show me the spinning candy mouse pointer anything from 10 to 30 seconds, in which time I cannot actually click on anything.

Typically I have to boot my machine twice a day at work. I am sure a hefty ram upgrade would help but I don't see it happening soon. My colleagues (non technical) use them just for firefox, mail and office, occasionally some other apps and they have many of the same issues.

These are already higher spec systems than the mac mini you intend to buy.

[Karlos]

amigadave wrote:

I thought the "eMacs" were the lowest spec Mac you could get, or maybe the same spec as the mini.  I would think any company that wanted to use Macs would invest in higher spec machines, specially for your position where you are running so many apps at once.  Tell them to get you a new dual G5 Power Mac @ 2.5mHz with 4gb RAM, that should fix all your problems and the prices should start coming down as they get ready to switch to x86, specially if you can find a used one.   :-D

As far as I know the mac mini is lower spec than the eMac, but I don't know for a fact :-)

As for the G5, dream on :-) It's a small place ;-)

Prior to the eMac I had to use an old iMac G3 433 (I think, could have been 500) with even less memory than this ;-)

-edit-

Seems out of the box the mac mini 1.25GHz and eMac 1.25 GHz are pretty similar, but the eMac is more expandable...

-edit-

Mother of all stupid typos :lol:

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:

Karlos wrote:
Seems out of the box the mac mini 1.25GHz and eMac 1.25 GHz are pretty similar, but the eMac is more expandible...

I read that as "expendable"...

We can wish ;-)