There Is No Cat - It just works

Groovy '60s Sounds from the Land of Smile!

Thursday, June 26, 2003

It just works

I grumble about Apple a lot lately. I look at the new Finder in Panther and think, "That friggin' Jobs, just when I thought they couldn't make it worse, they did...." I piss and moan about the Dock in OS X. Most of all, I continue to use OS 9, despite having a relatively new computer that's perfectly capable of using OS X. But sometimes I have to admit that they still do some things right.

Our network at home has been flaky this week. It happened with the onset of a heat wave. The long, cool spring this year finally convinced me that the reason our cable modem occasionally blinks out is that the cable run to my office goes through the attic, and when it gets hot, it gets really hot up there and does something to the cable that causes the signal to go out of spec for what the modem needs. The modem is usually fine in the morning, but when I get home, it's a goner. Yesterday, with the temperature outside in the mid-90s, it took until 11 pm for the attic to cool down enough for the cable modem to be able to sync up.

I gave up and moved the cable modem, the router, and the Airport base station downstairs next to the TV, where the cable run doesn't go through such hostile territory, and tonight, we went over the CompUSA and got an Airport card for the G4 upstairs. First off, the fact that a tower model has a built-in slot for the card is a wonder of foresight on Apple's part. Second, the process of opening the machine to install the card is a wonder of simplicity; you just open a latch and everything you need folds right out. Then when I rebooted the machine, it recognized the card, reconfigured the TCP/IP settings to work with the new network interface, and connected to the net via the base station downstairs. It just worked.

It just worked. What a radical concept in the computer world.

Good thing, too, because I had a deadline tonight on a project, and couldn't afford to spend the evening troubleshooting. Nice that I didn't have to.

I still hate what I've seen of the new finder in Panther (and the old one in Jaguar, for that matter). But they do such a nice job of integrating the hardware and software that it's going to be tough to leave.

Posted at 11:42 PM

Comments

Note: I’m tired of clearing the spam from my comments, so comments are no longer accepted.

You cant use OS9 forever! Either come to terms with progress and adopt OSX as the most excellent software product Apple ever made, or go and get a Windows computer.

I have heard lots of moaning about OSX, and spesifically the dock... it is quite a flexible thing... I have my dock set to be rather small and hidden most of the time. Once you have it set up right it does a whole load more than that silly launcher thing that came with OS9.

I have only recently become a mac user. Having been through many versions of Windows and more recently KDE (on Linux), OSX was a dream come true: attracitve, usable and the stability of UNIX. What is there not to like?

Sal

Posted by Salim Fadhley at 3:56 PM, July 27, 2003 [Link]

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio