You should be able to do at least this....
At the moment, I'm really quite happy with things in my life. I like my new job, things are going nicely, the other people in the group are all great, without exception. I have my own space in the lab, and a corner desk (not yet quite the corner office;-)). I like the desk, and there would be even more space for myself and all the accouterments of doing science (papers, folders for results, lots of catalogs... stuff, in less words), if I didn't have to share my desk with one of the communal Dell PCs.
For people who know me, this must be a bit of a shock. I try not to be as ardently outspoken as many other Mac fans, but I do pride myself in the knowledge that I've been lucky enough to have always had a Mac at work. It's just standard in my part of science. This has been the case in each and every lab I've worked in so far, and in many labs I know around at different universities. But now, there is a Dell on my desk. Fine. I've learnt to deal with hiccups. We can make this work. How hard can it be.
Turns out, it isn't hard. A few minor details are different. Imperceptibly so, or annoyingly so. I asked our lab IT person to let me install Firefox, I have the login password, I can do stuff. Hey, Windows kinda does it. It crashed the first time I inserted my (Mac formatted) USB stick, and couldn't reformat it for the life of it. But hey, that's like asking an American to understand a sentence in French. No can do. Fine, I'll deal with it. Removed the USB stick, plugged it into my PowerBook, and asked the Mac to reformat it. It does so. Being a member of a smaller nation, it is invariably multilingual. The PC now accepts the memory stick without a struggle.
There are a few things I haven't mastered yet. Like getting a new Windows Explorer window with a keystroke (akin to command-N in OS X). I use the mouse. Works ! New folders, ditto. I miss the ability to view the contents of folders by having collapsable hierarchies
(this is what I mean), and can't for the life of me understand why Windows won't calculate the size of a folder, even if the 'size' column appears in list view. Surely, a Pentium IV must have enough oomph to perform sums.
I like the task bar at the bottom, but that sidebar thingy in each window has yet to provide me with any appreciable use. Of course, I severely miss Exposé. Yesterday, I ended up with five, yes, five, windows of the desktop open, because I hadn't realised there was another one open behind the browser window already. Or another two, or three, or actually four.
I admit, these are all very basic tasks. It should be able to do them well, after all, the system has been in development for over two decades. I was therefore a little suprised when I encountered something else which I had considered a basic task until then. At least (and now I'm entering full 'the Mac can do this eeaasily' mode..), I've never had any problems with something like this before. What I was trying to do was to move a folder from one location to another. Filesystem stuff. Basic. The one complication was that one of the files contained in the folder was open. I was viewing the file. While trying to move it. Aah, well. Ok, now we have a problem. Windows started the job. It ran into said problem, and, ... yes. It notified me of the issue. Good! It told me that it was having a hard time with something that I had asked the filesystem to do.
The results were a bit confused. As probably everyone in Windows world knows, you end up with two folders. And, again, as probably everyone has been taught to live with, the contents of the folders differ, and represent a job half finished. The file which is open remains at the source location, whereas the others have been moved to their intermittent destination (I say intermittent, because I was trying to move the folder to an altogether different location, and chose the desktop just as a halfway point in its short voyage across the filesystem).
Now, this is just plain silly. I got the impression that Windows was being prissy here. I asked it to do something fairly simple, maybe overlooking some of the hidden complexity of the task, and what I ended up with was a message saying: 'Can't do that, that's way to hard, I'm going', and it leaves me with a half finished job I have to clear up. Look, this is really your job, Windows. Move an item from A to B. You should be able to do this. Isn't this the prime purpose of a filesystem ? To keep files (and, by logical extension, folders) organised and to respond to user input when changes in this organisation are required ? This is the umpteenth iteration of Windows, and this issue must have arisen before, at some point. I'm actually pretty sure John Gruber wrote about this a while ago (I wish I could link to his article directly, but, as I said, it was a while ago, I can't remember the heading of his piece, and his headlines are just about as opaque and unhelpful as mine). Others must be aware of this, too.
For people who know me, this must be a bit of a shock. I try not to be as ardently outspoken as many other Mac fans, but I do pride myself in the knowledge that I've been lucky enough to have always had a Mac at work. It's just standard in my part of science. This has been the case in each and every lab I've worked in so far, and in many labs I know around at different universities. But now, there is a Dell on my desk. Fine. I've learnt to deal with hiccups. We can make this work. How hard can it be.
Turns out, it isn't hard. A few minor details are different. Imperceptibly so, or annoyingly so. I asked our lab IT person to let me install Firefox, I have the login password, I can do stuff. Hey, Windows kinda does it. It crashed the first time I inserted my (Mac formatted) USB stick, and couldn't reformat it for the life of it. But hey, that's like asking an American to understand a sentence in French. No can do. Fine, I'll deal with it. Removed the USB stick, plugged it into my PowerBook, and asked the Mac to reformat it. It does so. Being a member of a smaller nation, it is invariably multilingual. The PC now accepts the memory stick without a struggle.
There are a few things I haven't mastered yet. Like getting a new Windows Explorer window with a keystroke (akin to command-N in OS X). I use the mouse. Works ! New folders, ditto. I miss the ability to view the contents of folders by having collapsable hierarchies
(this is what I mean), and can't for the life of me understand why Windows won't calculate the size of a folder, even if the 'size' column appears in list view. Surely, a Pentium IV must have enough oomph to perform sums.
I like the task bar at the bottom, but that sidebar thingy in each window has yet to provide me with any appreciable use. Of course, I severely miss Exposé. Yesterday, I ended up with five, yes, five, windows of the desktop open, because I hadn't realised there was another one open behind the browser window already. Or another two, or three, or actually four.
I admit, these are all very basic tasks. It should be able to do them well, after all, the system has been in development for over two decades. I was therefore a little suprised when I encountered something else which I had considered a basic task until then. At least (and now I'm entering full 'the Mac can do this eeaasily' mode..), I've never had any problems with something like this before. What I was trying to do was to move a folder from one location to another. Filesystem stuff. Basic. The one complication was that one of the files contained in the folder was open. I was viewing the file. While trying to move it. Aah, well. Ok, now we have a problem. Windows started the job. It ran into said problem, and, ... yes. It notified me of the issue. Good! It told me that it was having a hard time with something that I had asked the filesystem to do.
The results were a bit confused. As probably everyone in Windows world knows, you end up with two folders. And, again, as probably everyone has been taught to live with, the contents of the folders differ, and represent a job half finished. The file which is open remains at the source location, whereas the others have been moved to their intermittent destination (I say intermittent, because I was trying to move the folder to an altogether different location, and chose the desktop just as a halfway point in its short voyage across the filesystem).
Now, this is just plain silly. I got the impression that Windows was being prissy here. I asked it to do something fairly simple, maybe overlooking some of the hidden complexity of the task, and what I ended up with was a message saying: 'Can't do that, that's way to hard, I'm going', and it leaves me with a half finished job I have to clear up. Look, this is really your job, Windows. Move an item from A to B. You should be able to do this. Isn't this the prime purpose of a filesystem ? To keep files (and, by logical extension, folders) organised and to respond to user input when changes in this organisation are required ? This is the umpteenth iteration of Windows, and this issue must have arisen before, at some point. I'm actually pretty sure John Gruber wrote about this a while ago (I wish I could link to his article directly, but, as I said, it was a while ago, I can't remember the heading of his piece, and his headlines are just about as opaque and unhelpful as mine). Others must be aware of this, too.
posted by sven at
10:14 pm
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