I mortgaged my future with a Mac
rachelbythebay.com
rachelbythebay.com
Similarly, for iPhoto, much of the metadata is attached to the photos themselves. The album information is in very simple XML. I'm not sure how the cropping, rotation, etc, are stored, but the final JPEG can be exported from the UI, and nearly all these applications are highly scriptable.
Storing data in any application results in some restrictions in how that data can be transformed and/or used in the future. The iApps use fairly transparent data formats that are accessible to pretty much any programmer. I'm not sure if there's any open source alternatives to these apps that make it much easier to pull out data. Putting data in these apps is not mortgaging your future as much as putting your documents in MS Office format, for example.
Really, I think the article should have been titled: I am Now Dependent on Modern Technology and Don't Like the Alternative
I think she meant it like "I'm dependent on MAC Technology and I can't get out".
How would that be different with any Open Source application?
There is NO common interchange format for music information besides the embedded mp3 metadata. Of course iTunes (and ANY other player, OSS or not) has to store non-standard stuff outside those. And even if it stored them inside, there is no consensus about the naming and interoperability for metadata not in the standard list.
So there's nothing in her points that can be particularly applied to Apple or iTunes.
It just makes no sense to say "I'm going to use Ubuntu mp3 players because of this" -- because the situation there would be the same.
In theory the Unix way is to have plain text as input and output. This has meant that many open source softwares use nice plain text files for their data storage stuff.
In the olden days, the Unices had some coherence and core principle. After the OSS explosion at the end of the nineties that doesn't hold true anymore.
For example all the Gnome/KDE apps are not combinable command line utils with GUI front ends, but backend+GUI apps in one. And the architecture, UX and ways they use are far from what the UNIX of old used. For example Gnome/KDE were directly inspired from MS Windows (first) and from OS X (in subsequent versions), to the point that traditional UNIX users complained.
>In theory the Unix way is to have plain text as input and output. This has meant that many open source softwares use nice plain text files for their data storage stuff.
iTunes also used a plain XML file for its database. IIRC, it has moved it to binary plist files for performance reasons several versions ago.
And not all applications are equal in that regard. I store plenty of data in Dropbox, never run into any problems. Same with git, mutt, Shotwell, Rhythmbox... Usually, exporting doesn't involve any action. All the data is just stored in files that can be used by any application.
There is a strong correlation between free software and convenient data formats. Why pretend that all software has those same problems to a similar degree?
I don't think Linux storing MP3s in a directory is superior to iTunes storing them in a directory structure (organized by artist name).
I'm not seeing it. This "Apple doesn't care about the Mac" "OS X is going downhill" griping is lost on me. Was 10.4 -> 10.5 really a much bigger change? Or 10.5 -> 10.6? OS X has always had very incremental, gradual changes, and now that it's pushing more than a decade old it's pretty mature and doesn't need to be revamped every other day. At the same time, for all the teeth gnashing about walled gardens, Apple still ships the thing with a terminal, there is XCode in the App Store, etc.
There are two different arguments here:
1) Apple axed xserve and basically made it a risk to depend on osx servers (they may decide to axe the mac pro without warning). This is a legitimate argument.
2) The OS feels more consumer based and buggy. I think osx coasted on the lack of popularity for years (if you are writing malware, are you going to target a small mac population or the wide windows population?) and the market penetration is improving. So what we are seeing now is the world adjusting to the idea that osx is a more popular OS.
However they are over that hump and over the past 2 years with Mountain Lion they're moving faster on OS X than they have in the past.
IF they keep to what they said they intended to do, we'll have the follow on to Mountain Lion announced pretty soon.
None of the problems seem like real problems.
Even the concern that Apple is post-Steve is insubstantial. I'm watching for signs of that eventual decline as much as the next Apple user, but there isn't any product degradation evidence... yet.
You're able to get old data back now in a way that you couldn't before... and can't on other systems.
Whoever represented it as some sort of data loss was confused or lying.
VMS would like a word with you. :-)
You'll find all of your music neatly organized here: /Users/username/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Music
Another problem is going to be iPhoto. I've cropped, rotated, geotagged, sharpened, level-adjusted, and done countless other things to my thousands of pictures. They all also live in some database which is effectively opaque. While there's probably some way to get it out, it will be far from trivial.
It's pretty trivial:
http://macs.about.com/od/appleconsumersoftware/ss/Iphoto-Lib...
You can export the original or current versions, as well as converting to JPEG, TIFF, or PNG, retaining location info, metadata, etc (depending on the chosen format). Exported photos can be assigned filenames by title, original filename, sequence, or album name with number.
When you're on your own and might appreciate a distraction from the day-to-day coding by, you know, source-patching your open-source media player to fix an irritating bug, the Linux ecosystem provides endless opportunities.
There's a lot to be said for both environments. If you want to be an active participant in building the software you use on a daily basis, Linux is certainly more open in that regard. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of first-class open-source packages on OS X that can be contributed to.
I use Windows 8, Linux, and Mac OSX boxes on a daily basis. I play music from all of them. I watch movies, view photos, and browse the web from all of them. I code on all of them.
The reason I'm able to do this is because I've relentlessly managed my data and set up systems to allow that data to be shared effectively between environments.
All of these people who say, "this OS is way better!" are missing the point. Each one does a good job at something. Here's a surface analysis:
Linux: Best for automation. LAMPP. Industrial strength box for administration, security, and development. Great performance. Has problems with applications that require advanced graphics or specific sets of drivers (read: games). Can accomplish almost all basic computing tasks without an issue. All of these things make it a great server OS and great for high performance applications too.
Mac: Best for consumption. Beautiful UI, intuitive software, merging of hardware and software. Has problems with any sort of software that requires performant hardware because hardware is far more expensive. Can accomplish almost all basic computing tasks without an issue. All of these things make it a great laptop OS.
Windows: Best for games. Good performance. Not as good performance as linux, but incredible driver support means that most users will see better performance on Windows. Can accomplish almost all basic computing tasks without an issue. Makes Windows by far the best gaming box, but also very comparable to other OS in other applications (except server role.)
The lesson here is: Use the right tool for the right job, and make your data tool agnostic.
pro-tip: 5th level marketing droids can be defeated if you ask them to sell something to themselves...
I've got my vim files set up to be mostly cross compatible between OS X and Ubuntu, but I recently borfed my build process on Ubuntu (12.04) by upgrading vim to a newer version on a custom PPA.
I'm being somewhat sarcastic, but also honest - I used KDE as a primary desktop for several years, but v4 was too radically different, and migrating away to another system was not fun.
That said, I'm an Xfce user, and I love it because things never change.
KDE people just reused the name because of marketing.
nothing stops you from writing code on OSX. Plenty of people do it for their business. IOKit is strange coming from a Linux world, sure, but it works as well as you would expect. It's a pain but it's possible to write kexts and other low level osx stuff.
"All of my music is in iTunes, having been re-imported from the original CDs over a period of time. I can just re-rip all of it on my Linux box, but that's going to suck. Or, I can try to grovel around in their grungy database and try to make sense of it and "export" things, but I'm sure that will be even worse."
I don't understand the itunes complaint here. If you are leaving the mac ecosystem, the most you lose is the playlists -- the metadata is still stored in the individual files and VLC is perfectly competent in playing those files. It's not like itunes magically combined all the files in one big mess.
"Then there's my phone. How do you use one of these things without a computer upon which to sync your data and backups?"
Windows VM?
That only works when you disable USB on the host (which makes USB keyboards and mice temporarily unusable) while the Windows VM is running. And even then it sometimes just stops working after a while.
It's one of the reasons I ditched my iPhone and got an Android device.
It is (or was, don't know, this was about two years ago) a known problem: http://www.ivankuznetsov.com/2009/10/upgrading-iphone-firmwa...
Indeed, I've found working with IOKit and kernel-mode bits in OSX a nicer experience than in Linux. Some of the things were very well thought out and quite elegant, and their documentation is surprisingly good.
I think this was a reference to burnout from work, not a complaint about the OS X dev environment.
Right-click -> "Export" -> Select M3U8
It's possible to export from both iTunes and iPhoto, and probably not particularly harder than it would be to export from a similar application for Linux.
edit: gender.
I'm not entirely informed as to the details of the export procedure. But I think it's a fair expectation for an OS X user to not to deal with all of the nitty-gritty details of Linux. Saying "its as easy to do in OS X as it is in Linux" isn't really a fair defense.
That's not the case IMO. There's just no perfect procedure for moving your data from iPhoto or iTunes to anything else. Most of the things the author lists (preferences, usage data, starring etc) can't be storred in any universally compatible format under any OS. You can export all your photo at once, but it will be the bare files and anything that can't be storred as exif or id3 data will be gone, except if you are willing to deal with the nitty gritty stuffs, and make a script to move these data by yourself.
Actually she's ranting about the lack of a universal data format keeping as much information as iPhoto or iTunes keeps in database. That's a gvalid rant I think, but it's a problem of a higher level than iPhoto or iTunes export functions, or using OS X or linux.
If it's "easy" that she wants: drag and drop her music/pictures from iTunes/iPhoto window to a network drive/USB drive/Firewire drive.
So, please allow me to register my sadness on this matter. It is poor form for anyone to be ignored, and certainly not OK for them to be ignored based on their opinions on a board called Hacker News. Its not surprising (we're much better as a species at saying stuff than we are at living up to those words) but it's still sad.
Android: sell your soul to Google.
The thing is, I already did the second one to a far greater degree than most people ever do. I'm not about to repeat it.
Nobody is forcing you to use Google apps on an Android device. If the market decides that the Google experience is subpar, they will be replaced. This has already sort of happened with the Kindle Fire. It forced Google to respond with a better device (the Nexus 7).
"The market" has done no such thing (the atrocious Kindle Fires excepted) so if you have a beef with the "Google experience" (I personally don't) you're pretty much screwed.
There are no good, Google-free options for Android. I don't find that to be a problem but I can understand why others would.
Because the market has decided that it likes the Google experience.
And let's get one thing really very straight: the rhetorical appeal to "the market" is a bald-faced attempt to discredit differing opinions. It's argumentum ad populum fanboy crap. Stop it.
Rachel-by-the-bay is a dyed-in-the-wool linux-sysadmin so I gather from her Web pages, and has recent experience with software defined radio. Ubuntu phone is 'proper' linux but at a very early stage of development, see
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/23/ubuntu_tablets_first...
Sounds like rachel-by-the-bay's skillset fits Canonical's development plan.
Say what you like about Shuttleworth and Canonical, but you won't have to sell your soul to them and the development will be handled in public through the bug tracker and mail lists. They do respond to feedback. Shuttleworth needs to transition Canonical to profit/self sufficiency hence all the Amazon integration, but I think they learned their lesson over the Unity search integration. There will be an off switch in any future experiments of this nature I'm sure.
PS: my new year's resolution is a Web page per week which I owe to rachel-by-the-bay's Web site.
Edit: Thanks guys. I wasn't aware that we already had a work-around.
Ref: http://askubuntu.com/questions/192269/how-can-i-remove-amazo...
It is business phone, so all the mail-contact-calendar data live on Exchange server, not on Gmail.
The only one thing that you really need google account for is the Play Store. If you do not need anything from there or can get the applications from elsewhere, I cannot not see why you could not use Android phone without google account.
She also paints the consumption-only device picture, yet it has nothing to do with the machine, only herself; that and the post-steve thing makes it look like she's just regurgitating the stereotypical anti-Apple ideas.
I resisted Apple products for a long time for the same reason. As someone who was brought up with a command line OS and a basic knowledge of file structure I hate how Apple "tries" to take this away from their users.
I say try. I bought a MBP in 2009 because I loved the physical machine (aluminum unibody). With time I was able to use the OS without it controlling me. All of my music is ripped on EAC in MP3 VBR format. I add the folders to iTunes and do not allow it to "organize" the folders for me. I do not use iPhoto because of the way it treats the files. I maintain my own file structure. I can see how this would frustrate a lot of people. I put up with it because I think it's the best combination of hardware and software available at this time.
Why exactly? MP4 (M4A) is a less patent-encumbered format, and also has higher sound quality for the same filesize, and still plays on everything (except, I guess, decade-old MP3 players.) I can understand not wanting to use DRMed/fingerprinted songs downloaded from iTMS, but the file format itself is just better. Or are you one of those people who sticks to using RARs now that 7zip/libxz exists?
I haven't spent the time to stay up on codec development. I by all of my music in a physical format (usually a CD). I like the redundancy and the DRM free-ness of it. The last time I seriously investigated (and ripped the bulk of my library) was in 2005 when I was also active on Oink. The prevailing opinion then was that EAC with LAME and VBR was the best trade off of a secure rip, high audio quality and small file size. To let iTunes rip with it's default AAC codec produced to many errors. Also, at the time I was on a Windows machine and iTunes was so bloated and slow I refused to use it. I had an early iPod with Rockbox which freed me from the need to ever use iTunes.
When I got my MBP, I initially used RubyRipper. Then I found XLD and have been happy with it since (using LAME+VBR settings).
Good products get used.
Usage creates dependency.
Dependency is bad.
Therefore, good products are bad.
But the syllogism results in a contradiction. So one of our assertions is wrong. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which it is.
P.S. use Picasa on OSX, not iPhoto. And iTunes does indeed suck and I don't understand why someone hasn't written a replacement for it that fits the Sparrow:Mail==X:iPhoto equation. Perhaps I'll take a crack at it.
You can't not upgrade, either, since then you're subject to security holes and other anomalies as the upstream provider decides to leave you behind. My original iPad had this happen to it last year. My Mac will follow soon, I'm sure.
Personally, I really like the idea of Chrome OS but with most of "the cloud" hosted locally, backed by (mostly) straight up files. This cloud only listens on localhost, and so security is less of an issue. Moving to a new machine should be an rsync command.
One can dream.
I think where your article puts up a strawman is this idea that you can't use an iPhone or even an Android because of lock-in. That's just silly since these phones are 100 times more useful than a dumb-phone even if you don't put any data in the cloud at all. Put another way, it's easier to set up a system that extracts your photos from an iPhone into your Linux system and just do that regularly than to carry a Nokia and a Canon at all times.
The future of consumer tech may not be what the geeks dreamed of, but as long as there is free software and open hardware we can bend it to our will as we always have.
I don't think iTunes sucks, but someone has solved the equation you mentioned. It's called Enqueue: http://www.enqueueapp.com
I'm confused about this line. I ripped all of my CDs to AAC using iTunes over the years and recently upped all of it to Google Music without any issue.
Oddly enough, the only format that has ever given me any problem with interoperability has been OGG.
[1][http://randomdrake.com/2013/02/23/25-years-to-mac-how-ubuntu...]
Put it this way - my machine at work was some beastly multi-proc Pentium 4 something or other, and my machine at home was some random gunk I put together using old parts from Micro Center. It was so old, I had to special order the CPU online because nobody in town still had them in stock. I live in the valley, and could drive to AMD in under 15 minutes. That's just nuts.
Still, my machine at home was far more responsive than my workstation ever was. There were tons of weird glitchy times where it would just sit there and lag for no apparent reason. I didn't even get the worst of it, since I ran a minimal window manager. People who went for the full-on "desktop environment" (KDE? GNOME? whatever it was on that distribution, I don't know) had even more anomalies.
When I hit my hotkey to pop open an X terminal and don't get my shell prompt in a blink of an eye, something is very wrong.
Edit: forgot something. My home machine was faster over my cable modem + ssh tunnel to work than my work machine was sitting on the corp gigabit Ethernet. Think about that.
Once Canonical have the device drivers sorted for native linux on a range of hardware, there is nothing stopping anyone putting arch or slackware on the same platforms. Perhaps some extra gunk in the kernel.
I never worked for Big G, but I've felt that exact pain before--that sounds like the classic "enterprise diskless workstation problem." Lots of big companies like to obviate reimaging their Linux boxes by just mounting /usr over NFS. Then, they don't fan-in correctly, so they have too few servers serving too many clients with too little disk locality between requests, so your request to read, say, a font from /usr/share/fonts has to sit in a queue.
Please, if you are a sysadmin who does this: just run a daemon which, in effect, rsyncs the system to the disk server instead. Your workstations have big disks, sitting around doing nothing. You can be as clever as you want, serving squashfs underlay images over bittorrent in the background and then switching out the rootfs link on download completion--just, please, do something other than NFS. NFS is meant for shared filesystems that change; it has absolutely no advantages for a shared read-only rootfs.
I'm typing this on a 7-year-old Thinkpad X60s, and with the right Firefox add-ons, surfing feels more responsive than on my (untuned, unoptimized) i7. The clunker is way more fun.
Getting something relatively "perfect" and finished is just not as fun as having something which needs a lot of fixing, assembly, experimentation, etc. If only for the feeling of control, transparency and understanding how things work, it's worth it.
I understand David Drake's issues with Ubuntu 12.04 with the bloated GUI that comes out of the box - but there are less problematic alternatives, such as Xubuntu. Still, he was right about the time he spent searching for how to fix configuration issues. I would love to hear his take 6 months after he has been on MacOSX if he uses it for serious coding outside of the Apple ecosystem. I use Homebrew on my MacBook Pro and do just as much searching for how to get some code to port because of idiosyncrasies in OSX. Still, I do like my 2009 MBP on Mountain Lion.
Not quite:
I'm pretty sure there are already some decent options, though, especially for a programmer.
Regarding the commentary on the phone, it doesn't sound like the complaint is specific to Apple. The author categorically lists every major type of phone and dismisses them all.
There comes a point where it's useless to talk about what you don't like, and figure out what you do like. I take all of these "I'm going to start carrying around a regular phone, a regular camera, a Fodor's guide to the city I live in, a compass, a map, a notebook, a pen, and a gameboy" posts with a grain of salt.
For example:
>They're going down a road where I don't want to follow.
What road exactly is that? Anything concrete, or simply you don't like the Mac UI anymore? Because the "lock-up" things are just BS. There's nothing you cannot do in a modern OS X that you could in OS 10.1. The App Store just makes it more convenient, and sandboxing is optional.
>I don't intend to use whatever comes after Mountain Lion -- not that they even talk about OS X any more.
They don't? Last time I checked they had two Keynote presentations about Mountain Lion, which was released half a year ago. And they announced IIRC that they OS X will be released in an annual basis. Plus, they released several new laptops with some state-of-the-art features (hi-dpi displays) in the last 10 months and the redesigned iMacs. And yes, those are meant to run OS X.
>But, I'm stuck. All of my music is in iTunes, having been re-imported from the original CDs over a period of time. I can just re-rip all of it on my Linux box, but that's going to suck. Or, I can try to grovel around in their grungy database and try to make sense of it and "export" things, but I'm sure that will be even worse.
What exactly will be worse? Just copy the files over. You can even arrange iTunes to put it in nice folders based on album/artist for you. The mp3 metadata will still be there, because it's in the file. You might lost some data like "scores" and "recently played" but the same would be true with any player, open source or not. There's not a standard format to interchange such things.
>Another problem is going to be iPhoto. I've cropped, rotated, geotagged, sharpened, level-adjusted, and done countless other things to my thousands of pictures. They all also live in some database which is effectively opaque. While there's probably some way to get it out, it will be far from trivial.
Really? Because I find it quite trivial. Just drag the bloody images out of iPhoto and to the desktop. Or "export". Or use one of ten utilities to help you with the process and offer more control. Or write a ten minute Applescript.
I know that there is some convenience to buy iTunes if you are using Apple devices. Of course, most of that convenience is due to restrictions in the platform that make in impossible for others to be profitable and convenient at the same time.
But nevertheless, it amazes me that some people are so content with the Apple world that they can never foresee themselves leaving it. I've never been that content with anything I purchase, so maybe it's just me.
Remember that Apple makes its money selling hardware. So they'll never have a reason to make it easy for you to use iTunes-bought content anywhere else. That's why I buy from Amazon. It's content selection is just as good, but it is available on nearly every platform imaginable. It does this because content is its business. So I can feel confident when I buy a new tablet or set-top box that I can probably watch all of the Amazon content I've purchased over the years.
The often discussed but rarely given the credit it deserves in such discussions value in linux/open source software is the, well, openness.
As I just mentioned in one other post, I loved Ubuntu until 10.10. With Unity, they pulled the rug from under me. It became buggy even after choosing Gnome-Classic etc to be used with latter versions.
But I had tens of options to choose from without affecting my workflow too much. Colleagues have since moved to Linux Mint without as much as a 'I miss this from Ubuntu..' and I have moved to Lubuntu.
There's Arch and Slackware if you know what you're doing.
None of these make you wonder what tomorrow will bring and if it does bring something you don't like, you're not cornered. You can choose what to do.
I mean this is the simplest most obvious advantage of choosing Linux. Some people choose to give in to the walled garden for the seamless experience, but you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
And that's really okay, just choose what works for you best.
I also don't understand the author's preferences. Macs weren't good enough for programming, so (s?)he switched to Linux. This was the whole cause of the iTunes trouble. Why does it, then, matter whether Macs are going downhill or not?
The same arguments you can use to move away from Mac OS X for development, you can also use to move away from certain Linux distros. Ubuntu's Unity is not something you could call stable for the first few releases. Looking at all the changes between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3, that also scared away many users, or at least left many at GNOME 2, who still don't look forward to upgrading...
I'm not sure this makes sense. Prior to this she seems to be saying she'll be having issues using her iPhone without OS X. Is she saying she'll also be having issues syncing an Android phone with Linux?
I'm not attached to any one device in particular because all of my content is stored on a third party that can be accessed from anywhere.
I could drop my Macbook Pro or iPhone 4 at any time and not feel like I'm missing something.
Good thing about Apple products is that they last awhile, my Macbook Pro is now 3 years old, and my iPhone 4 is 2 years old, and I haven't had any issues and don't plan on upgrading them until they break.
Posted from my almost-8-year-old desktop running Windows XP.
And I have no idea why someone would stay on iOS 5. iOS 6 has quite a lot of new features. Only reason to stay on an older version would be to make sure that your phone stays speedy(I have noticed that iPhones tend to get a bit slower with each major upgrade).
I played with a Mac in a showroom today and it seemed much better than the mess that Windows 8 is right now(tried it for 3 months, now back to 7!)
Now when I'm coding I put it on random, go through the list pruning away all the crap I'm not in the mood for (which takes about 1 or 2 minutes) and then I've got an hour or 2 of solid music that's random but vetted. It's great for setting up a nice zone.
I used to get yanked out of my zone every time something came on that I didn't want to hear (it's a small yank, but a yank nonetheless).
Sorry, but that sounds like what I often read in photography forums: "If I had a better/more expensive camera I'd be making better pictures."
Mountain Lion was the first of a once-a-year update cycle, and contrary to "not even talking about it anymore" they are updating it more frequently than ever. (we're due for the announcement of the next version in a few weeks.)
iTunes - Stores music you ripped in standards based format, AAC or MP3. It's easy to get at as it all lives in folders on your machine that aren't exactly opaque (it even organizes your music by artist, etc.) The database file is just an index of the music that keeps track of play counts, etc. You don't need that.
iPhoto - Again, stores all your images in standard formats. You can export the photos with all your changes if you want. They, again, live on your hard drive in a reasonable standard directory structure, and if you want you can export within iPhoto. Not only is there no opaque database it is QUITE trivial to get your data out.
iPhone Syncing- you don't need a machine to do that anymore you can do it online, including backing up to the cloud if you wish. Maybe because she deliberately hasn't updated its software it doesn't have that feature, but that's her choice, not a problem with the product.
iCloud- the idea that you'd have to be "crazy" to do that is BS.
Her saying the mac isn't good for development makes me question her tech skills. Either that or she just cant' be bothered to discover homebrew or to notice that all the open source projects support the mac for development these days.
Sigh, just another mindless, dishonest, ant-Apple rant.
The thing is, if Apple was so bad, you could bring up legitimate criticisms, rather than use "I can't be bothered to spend 2 minutes goggling therefore it cant' be done" type claims.
I am a fraud.
It would be better if your tech skills really were sub-par, because that would mean your integrity isn't called into question by the dishonesty in your post.
For my own needs I feel like I've been following a similar path as you were. I've consolodated more and more of what I do around Mac and Apple. However I don't yet see the problem as you appear to have.
I'm very happy with it as an all around platform and as a connected ecosystem. While far from my ideal vision of a tech enabled future, it still seems to be better than anything else I could cobble together today. As far as being a decent development environment I have few problems, I use Iterm2, zsh, tmux and VIm (not macvim) and rarely leave the shell for anything other than Chrome. Homebrew is great too (sort of reminds me of when I used Gentoo, but with far fewer hiccups).
I also love a few of the well designed apps that I use which are Mac only too. Sparrow is heaven sent for e-mail (too bad about the acquihire though). Fantastical + Google Calendar makes working with appointments better than anything I've ever used.
I know that I'm probably getting a bit locked in and one day I may pay a price for that. For now, I'll gamble on today's convenience amortized against tomorrows pain. When (and if) that day eventually comes, the entire technology ecosystem will have practically turned over, the decision I make will be different for reasons I couldn't even guess at today and I'll be (hopefully) a smarter person. Maybe it will be Linux I pick again, but I'm happy to kick that decision one down the road with Apple for a bit.
> I needed a development box again. My Mac wasn't cutting it, and so my Linux box was returned to active duty.
Why? Absolutely no discussion of why OS X wasn't cutting it as a dev environment for you. Given that tons of devs use OS X machines as their primary coding machines, this just seems completely off the wall.
Then some more stereotypical ranting about how Apple's going off the rails with SJ gone, again without really any meaningful analysis of why this is true. Lion and 2010 era Apple products are supposedly terrible, yet you refuse to upgrade to versions that fix the problems. I'm sure that Linux never needs upgrades.
And then you just go off the rails. AAC files with XML based meta data is so proprietary and will SOOOO difficult to use in *nix, same with JPEGs. EVIL EVIL CUPERTINO! DUMB PHONES FOR EVERYONE! TAKE THAT GOOGLE! Life is so much freer now that you're using desktop linux again! No configuration ever! Everything's trivial!
Except everyone on HN knows that's a joke. You may be wonky, but you're not any meaningfully more "free" (who knows what that means) and now your sarcasm comes just comes across as hand-waving over the lack of any technical detail in your writing.
and
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/09/14/mac/
Lack of technical detail, that's me, all right.
Namely, the HN posts that you link completely call it: Why do you insist on tackling any problem that you encounter with exactly the same toolchain and/or mindset that you would on Linux? And then, when inevitably different approaches are required, you complain that Apple/OS X (but usually any other BSD alternative) is terrible. Well, yes, when you go into any situation expecting failure, don't be surprised when it turns out that way.
I'm looking into your radar issue, but even you note that's been fixed. Won't be able to take advantage of those type of fixes if you never upgrade OS X, there will you? Can't go down that path that even you admit "you don't want to follow".
Thanks for the background read though. I guess you're pretty popular around these parts, must have missed it. I'll now know to avoid trollbait articles that rehash tired cliches about Apple's downfall, why Linux's way is always the best way (compromise be damned), and the lazy end users.