As I sit here re-re-uploading images to a site where I'm hoping to order some prints, I'm just realizing how tired I sometimes get of being a Mac guy and being incompatible with simply everything. These people evidently don't want my files. I've tried three different browsers and two FTP clients, and finally got one of the FTP clients to work, but then *poof!* the files disappeared, along with the album that contained them, so I get to spend another 45 minutes or so uploading them AGAIN to see if they'll "take" this time. And the galling thing is they're not even MY pictures... doing someone a favor, and as the saying goes, "no good deed goes unpunished."
So, is it time to go over to the dark side and get a "Windows" machine of some sort? Seems some can be had ridiculously cheap, so maybe it would be worth getting one just for times like this when there's something I want to do, but a PC would make it much easier. Or the times when someone is asking ME questions about how to do someting on their PC, at least I'd have a way of looking at the same menus and shit they're looking at.
"Oh, but Gary, the NEW Intel Macs can run Windows, too!" -- I highly doubt it, honestly. I messed around with "Virtual PC" and those other emulation things back in the day, and they were virtual useless. I have a hard time believing it's going to be any better now, plus I'd have to buy the emulation software AND a copy of Windows (Not Vista), and for that I can practically get a cheap Dell with it's own monitor and everything.
My so-called state-of-the-art Mac's performance has been less than impressive over the past 11 months. Sometimes, the beach ball of doom just will NOT go away. Who knows? Maybe I'm unwittingly hosting dodgy websites which is using all my CPUs and DSL bandwidth, but Apple doesn't acknowledget that problems can occur, therefore there are no decent diagnostic tools to determine just WTF is going on under the hood. Read this week that someone has written one of the first "Trojan Horse" malware programs that will target Macs, too... maybe it's just the first one they've found.
And to top it off, Apple stock has dropped 10% or so in the past couple days, along with the rest of the collapsing market...
The dark can sometimes be good, though, as evidenced by Lynz and Penny, yet again.
Friday, November 09, 2007
The Dark Side
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4 comments:
I'm not sure if you are saying your Mac is only 11 months old or not, but if it is then you should take advantage of a Genius at your nearest Apple store and it should only cost you your time and they will be able to tell you if you are having any problems. I won't go into how to debug your Mac in this comment but I can tell you it's actually MUCH easier to debug Mac OS X than Windows. Also, with Intel Macs there is no more emulation, it is actually called VIRTUALIZATION which means Windows will run at very near native speed while still running OS X. One more thing, if any FTP program is not working then it has nothing to do with your Mac because FTP is a standard that is not open to interpretation like browser HTML rendering is.
I agree with the previous comment. FTP is a standard. It's not Mac or PC specific. If your images won't upload via ftp, it's definitely a problem with the service. It has nothing to do with the fact that you're on a Mac.
On the subject of virtualization, it is much MUCH better than emulation ever was. Virtual PC always sucked, but I've been using VMWare Fusion with some very good results.
The other option is Boot Camp. When you install Windows via Boot Camp, it's not using emulation or virtualization. You are simply running Windows. It's exactly the same as if you had a Dell sitting on your desk. There is no reduced performance whatsoever.
fyi... I found Windows XP Home for $85. It's the OEM version, so you don't get books, or tech support form Microsoft, but it's exactly the same version of Windows that would come in a retail box, so you do get all the updates and patches... and there are a lot of them. After installing Windows XP Home sp2, there were over 100 security updates to download. I think that's an endorsement for the Mac right there.
LOL, the way to get comments on this blog seems to be to start a computer debate, not with the photography. I'll have to remember that.
My point was I'm confident that if I'd been using a PC, I could have used the site's little Java utility to upload the pictures, but since it wouldn't even ATTEMPT to run with Safari, and required a non-existant plug in to run on FoxFire, I had to resort to Netscrape, which sort of ran it, but very poorly to the point where it was pointless. So, there was an FTP workaround, but Transmit would connect but not seem to upload, so I had to revert to Fetch, which would connect and upload. So once the files were uploaded, they disappeared from the Fetch window, but were not visible on the site -- in fact the whole "album" folder was gone. So I tried again, and again the files vanished. Reloading didn't help, and I tried a variety of things to see if the albums were there, but just hiding. Finally, quit Netscape, relaunched and there they were, TWO copies of each file. So, it did eventually work with several kluge fixes, but it's far from the workflow the system was obviously designed for, which I'm pretty certain most decent PCs would have no trouble with. It was SO aggravating at the end of a long day, that I found an option to MAIL them a CD, which I almost resorted to doing.
This particular Mac is about 11 months old, but I've been using them since the dawn of time, and it's always felt like being Betamax in a VHS world (to use a dated analogy). I bought one of the first Intel iMacs because it was going to allow Aperture and eventually the new Photoshop to run native at much faster speeds, but in reality, the screen has such a poor viewing angle that it's worthless for working with photos. I'm told the new ones are better, but what do I do with this one?
Someone was telling me about a great spam filter service that updates real-time and catches virtually all spam without false positives, but hey, guess what? Windows only...
I'm not saying I want to abandon my Mac, but maybe supplement it with a cheap PC. I'm tired of pounding nails with the handle of a screwdriver.
Well - since I'm not a MAC person, I'll refrain from commenting on that, and focus on the images themselves. I think you shoot this style of dark images better than most anybody. I particularly love the second image. Beautiful!
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