This blog is about helping people, you know. For example, I also helped the person who said that "Daily Show" embedded video was autoplaying. I edited in a page break so you'd have to click "more" to get to it, even though another commenter (rh) had already given some tech advice about how to prevent autoplay — which is something, I guess, that's built into Safari, because it wasn't autoplaying for me, but I don't want it autoplaying for anybody.
And Kevin asked (about the photo at the Café): "Was that imac back in the corner bad? Is that why you gave it a 'time-out'?" So I'm helping Kevin by answering: That computer is bad, but it took its own time out, and the time out that it chose was forever. If only mild, maternal chastisement would restore its goodness, but it was good for a long time, and I'd love to give it a nice send-off, but it's hellishly hard to rid oneself of an old computer. Even though I have tech people to help me, I have 25 years of expired Macintoshes in corners of my various rooms, all unburied.
Quaestor drops down out of his tree to poop on iMacs:
All iMacs are bad and should be relegated to the darkest corner of the unsold merchandise warehouse. With a lot of swoopy plastic style to wow the yokels, and a lot more instant obsolescence built in (not a bug, but a feature)....Not a bug, but a moth......... Hey, Quaestor, my last 4 iMacs are metal and they're no more "swoopy" than an iPhone, which wowed people — those whom you call "yokels" — with the simplest possible design, in glass and metal, back when they were used to plastic phones with the kind of linear ridges about which carmakers are sometimes delusional.
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21 comments:
Ahhhhhhh! The post ends on a Silvio Cliffhanger! I can hear the music! Dun-dun-DUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHH!!!!
That computer is bad, but it took its own time out, and the time out that it chose was forever.
There are people that specialize in getting those things running like new again.
The Audi, like almost all new car designs of the past decade, looks clunky and ugly, a cartoon vision of an automobile.
"but it's hellishly hard to rid oneself of an old computer"
No, it's very easy. The Salvation Army accepts computers for recycling. If they are not fixable they'll dispose of them properly.
If you're into media production and you've got the bucks, an iMac is great.
If you're into being entirely sensible about cost versus performance, you're gonna buy some sort of PC.
Obsolescence is just reality. Processor power and memory increase in accordance with Moore's Law. Software install and execute files balloon to take advantage. Five years of that cycle and a developer who doesn't upgrade to a new computer will find himself waiting for quite a while for video and animation to render.
...with the kind of linear ridges about which carmakers are sometimes delusional.
Clarify and expand on that? 'Cause I concur with Paco @8:28 and a thread on recent car design would be interesting.
Macs are computers for people who don't want to or are not interested in learning about computers other than the bare minimum needed to use them. Which is why I like them. I have a seven year old Mac. It does what I need ( including running windows natively for those programs I need) and I see no reason to buy another one until such time as the newer versions of what I need require a near machine.
"No, it's very easy. The Salvation Army accepts computers for recycling. If they are not fixable they'll dispose of them properly."
You are really missing the point.
As noted in the post, I have a tech office in the building who will cart these things off for me and dispose of them properly. My concern is about the privacy of whatever I've written over the course of the life of that computer.
Or is that all meaningless now that the government has all our email?
What difference at this point does it make?
"The post ends on a Silvio Cliffhanger!"
I'm not giving up Silvio. It's vintage now. Unreplaceable. The new TTs don't appeal to me, and nothing else out there appeals to me like the old one.
It's me and Silvio forever.
(Even though we do have another car, a utility vehicle, for the more Meadely side of the family activities.)
"Macs are computers for people who don't want to or are not interested in learning about computers other than the bare minimum needed to use them. Which is why I like them. I have a seven year old Mac. It does what I need ( including running windows natively for those programs I need) and I see no reason to buy another one until such time as the newer versions of what I need require a near machine."
Steve Jobs recognized that most people would want computers to do things other than to pursue an interest in computers.
I've used Macs since before the other computers had Windows, when the other people in my office were looking at amber letters with lots of code on a black screen. These people bragged about the seriousness of their machines.
And these people were intellectuals, not mechanics. They didn't really know much or care much about the machinery. What a waste of time!
I wish the law school had chosen back then to give everyone a Mac. I was the only one, by some fluke of getting a grant to pick out my own computer when I first arrived in the 1984-1985 academic year.
They pushed me to give it up, but I never did.
Althouse is a Mac person !!?! AAAAAGH!
Say it isn't so, Ann.
Yokels are people who are impressed by what the product looks like, not how it performs or whether it can be upgraded. After the purchase of four iMacs Althouse is strongly in the yokel domain, smack-dab in the middle of the Venn diagram; one might say the paradigm case.
Wow. That shor' am ah purdy cum-pew-tor. My friend Jenny says Macs are cool. Lieutenant Dan says I should invest in Apple.
The original Macintosh was a classic exercise in hippy bullshit. Released months before a network of skilled developers had even generated, the Mac could do virtually nothing useful, the electronic analog of a flower child. There was an interpretive BASIC available for those with the diligence to look for it, but it was slower than molasses in January. The first Macintosh buyers were yokels with cash -- people with the same mentality then as those who queue up for the latest iPhone a week in advance of THE DAY now. They cheerfully plucked down $1500 or more for the next minorly improved Macintosh.
A shame really, because the Mac could have been computer, instead of a shiny object for the amusement of idiots. The Motorola 68000 was a serious processor, considerably more advanced that the 16-bit Intel competition. I had the official in-house manual for the chip, which included a bootable assembler on a 3.5" floppy, but one couldn't run the damn thing on a Mac unless one had the warranty-voiding determination to reprogram the boot ROM. The G1 Macs couldn't boot from the floppy drive.
Quaestor ought to have followed Mickey Kaus's love letters to Chris Bangle when CB was head of design at BMW. There was some swoopy metal getting under someone's skin real bad.
"You are really missing the point..."
Somehow my eyes scanned right past "Even though I have tech people to help me..." without it registering.
"My concern is about the privacy..."
But it should be easy to do this. There are lots of apps to wipe a hard drive. Take the drive out of the dead machine, put it in an external drive enclosure, and run the app.
I never did really get the Mac-vs-PC religious wars. It's all a matter of the various trade-offs such as Macs being easier for most people to use while forcing the user to do things the way the folks at Apple have decided is the One True Way, while PC's may be harder for most people to learn and master but allow the user more choice in how to do things. Take stock of what is most important to you and make your choice. End of problem.
The only aspect of the Mac-PC war that I really sympathize with is the annoyance at Mac evangelists, who can be as obnoxious as any religious fanatics.
The hard drive is the only part of a computer that could compromise your privacy. If you don't want to go to the trouble of zeroing it out, just remove it and throw it in a drawer. It's smaller than a paperback book. Dispose of the rest of the computer. No need to keep them hanging around forever.
"But it should be easy to do this. There are lots of apps to wipe a hard drive. Take the drive out of the dead machine, put it in an external drive enclosure, and run the app."
That's not something I've ever done. Maybe it sounds easy to you, but when I have a dead computer and a new computer and a.lot of work to do, the dead computer just sits there for years.
And by years, I mean more than 20 years.
Hard drive destruction is quite simple. There are a couple of options: Mr. Dewalt, or Black and Decker (and their clones, of course). Then send it for recycling.
Having moved to a Mac recently, I can definitely see why people buy Macs. They really are just 'better', in the way that a Mercedes E class is 'better' than a Geo Metro. Of course, they both do the same job, the cheaper one even has better running costs, but I don't think there are many people who will choose a Geo Metro because it has a better cost performance ratio.
Quaestor, I'm not sure why you are bitching about how crappy macs were back in the day; the PC was not much better, but IBM - along with Microsofts marketing shenanigans - became dominant. All computers were pretty shitty back then; but 20/20 vision and all that.
Put it this way, I got fed up of pissing away hours, screwing around with a PC to get it to do what I needed. Things are pretty well designed and very usable - things tend to be 'one way', in the same way that driving a car is one way, clutch/brake/gas and steering wheel are in very well defined positions, and if you don't like it, that's tough.
As far as car design goes, we are really at the subtle stage of design. But bottom line is the more expensive the car, the nicer it is. I rent a lot of cars. The cheap compacts are really pretty crap. The expensive full size/premiums are nicer to look at, drive better, quieter, smoother. While there's a lot of subjectiveness, there is such a thing as 'good' design and 'bad' design - you can't learn it like you learn arithmetic or read about it in a book. You just 'know'.
"That's not something I've ever done. Maybe it sounds easy to you, but when I have a dead computer and a new computer and a.lot of work to do, the dead computer just sits there for years."
I sympathize extremely with the "a lot of work to do" syndrome.
But when you DO feel you have a little time, it really will be simple to do. It's one of those things that feels difficult only because it's unfamiliar. So:
1. Check ahead of time with your tech office, to talk with somebody and get reassurance that it will be easy and to get a cursory understanding of how it will be done.
2. If you don't want to drop off the machines with the tech office, they can come to you and do it in your office. The drive wiping can take a long time (overnight?) if the drive is large or slow.
3. Alternatively, you can keep all your old machines, displayed reverently in a Mac Shrine. :-)
"Hard drive destruction is quite simple. There are a couple of options: Mr. Dewalt, or Black and Decker"
:-)
One tech office mentioned using a drill press. A mil blogger once joked about taking old drives (and prematurely malfunctioning printers) to the gun range.
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