Creeva’s World 2.0

Some­times things aren’t obvi­ous for being obso­lete in the world of com­put­ers.  If you a Win­dows user it’s com­pel­tely obvi­ous that you are using an older ver­sion of win­dows imme­di­ately when you start using it.   Whether the signs are when you sit down and see Win­dows 98 striped across the start menu or the older ver­sion of Inter­net Explorer 5.0 that starts up, you catch these things and it is notice­able.  The same thing also holds true for Linux, but this is more of aes­thetic issues that become appar­ent, usu­ally graphic issues that are sorted out on newer ver­sions you catch on the older ones.

But what about OS X?

My sis­ter has been hav­ing a prob­lem with her ipod nano she got for christ­mas.   Itunes wouldn’t rec­og­nize it, she would have to upgrade itunes.  Fair enough.   Well itunes won’t load on her Oper­at­ing Sys­tem, which was OS X 10.3.2.   Iron­i­cally the lat­est ver­sion of Itunes works on win­dows 98 and will work with the Nano.    10.3.2 is newer then Win­dows 98, but yet still is forc­ing the upgrade on the OS X users.  Nor­mally I wouldn’t really have a prob­lem with this, I’m also not a nuanced Mac user.   I can’t how­ever tell graph­i­cally an imme­di­ate dif­fer­ence (once the machine is booted) between my sis­ters 10.3.2 desk­top and my 10.5.1 desk­top on my Mac Air.

Do peo­ple just one day stop writ­ing code that should graph­i­cally look the same from OSX desk­top to the OSX desktop?

I’m just con­fused I guess.   Mac is sup­posed to just work, then please just work.

I’m upgrad­ing my sister’s com­puter to 10.4, then she should be able to the load the proper itunes and be able to sync her ipod.    It’s just annoy­ing.    I’m not scared of other oper­at­ing sys­tems, I fixed a net­work­ing prob­lem she had for months that my “com­puter genius” step-father had tried to cor­rect but couldn’t do any­thing “because it’s a mac”.   I knew there was a rea­son I don’t talk to that side of the fam­ily.   Cur­rently my “reg­u­lar” com­put­ing devices include — XP Desk­top for work, Mac Air Book 10.5 for work, Hardy Heron Lap­top for myself,  XP desk­top for home games and movies, Win­dows 2k3 server for home.    My micro OS’s include Maemo on my soon to be deliv­ered n810 and Palm OS and my TX.

At work I’m a main per­son to say that Mac is not built for the enter­prise, they have poorly designed busi­ness soft­ware when it comes to man­ag­ing a mixed envi­ron­ment.    Now the argu­ment back is that Microsoft should make tools to man­age Macs, I believe for accep­tance in the full enter­prise that needs to be reversed.   Apple needs to roll over back­wards fit­ting itself in, I mean I have an eas­ier time work­ing with Linux in an enter­prise envi­ron­ment then Mac.    The ironic thing is I never heard any­one ever say “Linux just works”.

For my step­fa­ther that is scared of alter­na­tive Oper­at­ing Sys­tems, like the big scary Mac.  It took my wife and I a total of 15 min­utes in which she used her N810 teth­ered via blue­tooth to her phone to google the ques­tions I asked her.  She fed me back the infor­ma­tion after she fil­tered it and bang — work­ing networking.

If your not will­ing to work out of your com­fort zone and approach new things, you will never grow.   This means no mat­ter how you look on the out­side and what your resume says about you, like sit­ting down at the 10.3.2 desk­top and not notic­ing any­thing dif­fer­ent, you still need to be upgraded or replaced.   At this point you are no longer truly use­ful except for some obscure things and can not com­pete in mod­ern thought.