I just had an absolutely shattering experience trying to install software on a friend’s Mac. It was software that I have used for nearly two decades and that has been compiled for every combination of hardware and OS under the, ah, sun. I had the distribution CD that claimed to have the program for the Mac and it seems to have installed properly, it installed on the Unix part (in the /usr directory) and the Mac GUI will not go there. The bottom line is that I could not find the executables. After several hours of poking around with Unix find and other things. Part of the problem is that I couldn’t figure out how to even recognize the executables. In PCs, you simply look for the suffix .exe. For all I know I was expected to run a makefile, but the woeful documentation didn’t explain that (or much of anything). Sure this was a problem partly of poor documentation, but installation on a PC is just a matter of inserting the CD, making a couple of trivial choices (or accepting the defaults) and sitting back. Yes, another part of the problem is that the distribution is handled by Unix hackers, but it is also that no one appears to care enough about the Mac to do it right. Perish the thought that I would ever go near a Mac again.
Four words: Billy Gates’ marketing skills.
Um, no. The biggest reason is MS strong-armed OEMs to bundle Windows after it had established a stranglehold with MS-DOS.
You must be kidding. How long have you worked in technical support?
Copyright is not the same as the sort of draconian EULA that MSFT puts out.
It is still highly debatable whether EULA can be enforced or not.
Hari Seldon
Ah, a UNIX app. Did you try typing the name of the program from the command line of Terminal, or, if it’s a GUI Unix app, from the command line within the X11 environment?
(If it’s not a Unix app, why the heck put it in /usr?)
If it’s not a Unix app, it sounds to me like you’re blaming a bad installer. An acceptable Mac installer deposits a report on every file it created and where it put it, along with a README file that tells you everything and anything you need to know to get it up and running. A good installer consists of the program itself on the CD and to “install” it you drag the bloody thing to any location you want on your hard drive and it copies there and it’s wherever you put it).
I guess it is a Unix app, although versions did exist for the old Mac OS. And when I looked at the path, there was no path to anything in the new directories created. And there were a lot of them and I had no idea where to look. The distribution files are mostly zipped or tarred, so you couldn’t just copy them. On a PC, the same installation was easy.
But your real point is that my criticism is of Unix, not Mac. That is partly true. What I do object to though is that the Unix part of the disk is hidden from the Mac GUI and there is no X Gui installed as far as I could tell.
Yeah, for the most part if you want to run an X11 environment, you have to install it separately, although that’s likely to change real soon. Apple’s own X11, available in beta as a separately installed free download, will probably be incorporated into the standard install once it is out of beta. You can also snag and compile standard XFree86 and run that instead, and thereby get an entirely separate GUI.
Meanwhile back at the Aqua GUI, you can make all the hidden Unix files and directories visible if you wish. The default is “hidden” on the assumption that a great many Mac users are not going to want or need to know about /usr and /bin and /etc and etc 
Since it isn’t your own computer this is probably irrelevant to your situation, but TinkerTool does a great job of “unprotecting you from yourself”.
(In all fairness to Apple, a significant feature of Unix in general is the protecting of one–or the computer that one is using–from oneself. I don’t much care for it either. I’m on a bloody laptop, not a refrigerator-sized mini, and I could do without wrestling with permissions and the rest of the multi-user crap)
quote:
Did anybody catch the underlying message of one set of Apple advertisement?
“Hi, I’m Bob. I had a PC machine, but was too stupid to use it so I bought an Apple.”
So the underlying message is that Macs are easier to use, right?
but if you ask who likes Apple or Windows, ask if they play a musical instrument, or write. I think it is the gui thing. Some thought patterns respond better with Apple, I am lost. I like Windows, my mind is rooted in Basic.
bojon, that’d be waaaay too much of an overgeneralization. I’m an engineer! And only humbleness stops me from calling myself an “expert” in computers. And I’m not anything close to leftist. I’ve owned almost as many clones (that’s how we used to say Windows-based PC’s with a single word) as Macs. But yet I’m still a Mac user first.
Why is it that we’re all labelled as liberal, artistic, stupid, poofy computer users? I could make the opposite (wrong) generalization and say Windows users are all democrats because they’re poor and can’t afford Apples and thus vote for the government that gives them free prescription drugs so they can erase their self-awareness and live in a drug haze where they think they’re just as happy using a non-Macintosh computer. 
Because your computer is blue. Or grape. Or raspberry for Og’s sake. C’mon, if you’re an engineer you should know that anything other than a beige box is pointlessly overspecified.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is the absolute mountains of documentation that Microsoft will provide to anyone that wants to become a Windows developer (or at least used to. Things might have changed lately).
Every day in this country business use any of 8 billion Windows applications that you’ve never heard of but are vital to their business. Ever heard of Amicus (for law firms)? Or DanceWorks (for dance studios)? Having done desktop support for years, let me say that if there is some business out there - even one as small as forensic cleaning services - there is a Windows app for it.
Linux is fine. It’s getting more stable and usable by the day. The learning curve that an “average Joe” would need to convert from Windows to Linux is also shrinking by the day. But there are so many Windows apps out there that are not and might not be ported to Linux. It’s all well and good for the Linux zealots to scream “But there’s OpenOffice!!” when there’s so much more than that.
But that’s just my opinion.
Hmm, four Macs in my house, two are white and two are silver. (Titanium cases.) I haven’t seen a blue Mac in several years, certainly not a new one. But you’re confusing form with function. A bondi G3 was still a powerful piece of computing equipment when it was released, regardless of what its case looked like. The Flower Power and Dalmation iMacs contained a great home user experience in a fun shell – just like all the PCs out there running in intentionally (and extra cost) modded cases.
Let’s see… a Mac SE, Mac Colour Classic, Quada 636, Power Mac 6400, iMac Graphite, PowerBook 5400, PowerBook Lombard, PowerMac G4 QuickSilver – not a fruity color anywhere in the whole lot! And the first four of those were beige boxes!
That will teach me. Try to make a joke to a Mac user and all you get is righteous indignation. I think we have a crucial distinction for the OP right there.
raspberry!! 
micco, maybe the problem was that a.) the joke wasn’t anything like funny and b.) Mac users (generally speaking) are sick and tired of having to justify and defend our tools because a single model of them came in colors and designs which had absolutely no bearing on the work that they did.
Actually it is funny, at least in my crowd. As noted earlier, I use Macs too, but I’m usually seen as a PC guy by my peers since that’s my predominant platform. Some of my hard-core Apple friends kid me about my ugly-ass beige boxes, several of which don’t even have cases anymore. I kid them about their shiny baubles (all the while wishing Dell or IBM could make my laptops look as good). It’s all in good fun.
My original comment to Balthisar was tongue-in-cheek because I didn’t think his complaint was all that serious. The serious answer to his question about why Mac users are “all labelled as liberal, artistic, stupid, poofy computer users” is that Apple’s marketing has both created and played to that image. But, of course, that’s kind of obvious and I assumed his question was rhetorical.
I’m really very sorry that you took offense. You hadn’t even posted to this thread yet, so I certainly wasn’t asking you to justify or defend your tools. Even if you had posted something substantively pro-Mac, I wouldn’t expect you to justify your choices except in the context of the OP’s desire for exactly that kind of information. I understand the separation of form and function, I certainly admire Apple’s design sense and, my jokes aside, I think their good looks are an asset, not a fault you need to justify or dismiss. I respectfully submit that if Mac users (generally speaking) would lighten up, the comments from the other side would cease; a little good-natured ribbing is pointless if the recipient doesn’t take the bait. I also apologize to the OP for derailing his thread with a rather pointless joke, especially since I could have easily predicted the result.
…and it’s made up of those silly kindergarten pictures, oh, sorry, “icons”. And to run it you aim an arrow around the screen and point at things (gee mister computer, I’d like that file), holding onto a (get this…) “mouse”. Is it a mickey mouse perhaps? To go with your mickey mouse computer? Hah, you call that a word processor? You can’t even reveal codes, can you? So the only way you can tell if a section of your document has a formatting attribute is to look at it on screen. And how do you remove formatting, huh? Oh, I see, you point at it and go to your little baby list of commands and uncheck them. ‘Pweeze, don’t be bold no more’. Oooh, and look at those cute little baby-disks. Hard plastic floppies, so wittle Mac user doesn’t bweak his wittle files. Like a Tommee Tippee cup, ha ha. Awww, it’s got a twash can, that’s so adorable, is that how you delete files on a Mac? Oh please…get that toy out of here and get a real computer…
You’re kidding, right? I wonder, have you ever heard of another kind of intellectual property that is protected by copyright law. It’s been around for a few years and you probably have a few in your own home. It’s called a book. When you buy a book, you’re buying the book. You’re not buying a license for it.
You can read it, you can scribble notes in the margin, you can dogear pages, you can rip out pages, you can copy out quotes to put in your own work or in a review, you can lend it to your friends (one at a time, though), you can sell it, and you can give it away.
None of these things interfere with the copyright owner’s rights (and wouldn’t regardless of whether it was a traditional book or software). However, if you photocopied the whole book and started giving it away, or you published it yourself and sold it – that would be violating the copyright owner’s rights and they have legal means to stop you