Posted by bob on May 8, 2000, at 23:17:04
In reply to Re: Metamorphing a Mac?, posted by medlib on May 7, 2000, at 21:00:04
Cam:
You may want to upgrade to OS9. It's going to be the last MacOS for those of us without a G4 ... apparently the G4 with the more modern motherboard as well -- not those 350's with the old G3 (hah! "old" G3!) design. I actually am enjoying it far more than I thought I would, given all the dire warnings the Mac-erati issued upon its arrival.If you need something a bit more modern than what you have but want something a bit less taxing than 9 may be on your hardware, check out the back of a MacAddict or MacWorld. Some of the vendors back there are selling MacOS 8.6 dirt cheap ($30). Get it before it's gone.
Noa:
Waaaaaaaay too funny!! Reminds me of something that must be archived somewhere on the web. Back in the earliest days of the very first PDA with handwriting recognition -- the Newton 100 Messagepad -- someone came up with the idea of writing in the poem "Jabberwocky" and letting the recognition software + Newton dictionary, well, "recognize" it. "Jabberwocky" became "Tablespoons". Only other thing I can remember (other than it being an absolute scream, especially since I knew the lead programmer for the handwriting recognition project!) is:"Oh fractious day! Cartoon! Cathay!
He chortled in his joy"Hmmm ... considering the nonsense words in the original, I guess that WAS a pretty good translation.
medlib:
Thanks for mentioning your post -- I would have missed all of this!!LOL -- laugh out loud
ROTFL -- rolling on the floor laughing
FTF or F2F -- face to face (as opposed to online)
IM(H)O -- in my (humble) opinionJust a few ... then there's Babbleland's own YMMV.
> Just bemused by your struggles to resuscitate your moribund Mac--mania or masochism?
Well, if you read my post up in the "issues" thread, you'd think masochism. But it's love for a dying friend ... doing anything to extend its life. Hell, I'd still be working on my "Fat Mac" if I could!
So, maybe "delusional" would be a better descriptor.
And now, more Technobabble on Psycho-Babble:
> Curious about why you installed OS9 on top of 8.1, or is that the Mac way? ... On PCs, I *always* removed the old version before installing an upgrade of *anything*--to forestall instability.But you can still boot a PC from a floppy and still have room on the disk for CD drivers plus HD formatting and repair utilities. Aren't you glad Gates was lying when he said they removed all the DOS code from Windows?
Of course, we Mac folk tend to eschew such minimal media as floppy disks in favor of DVD-RAMs and such (... yeah, right!).
Yeah, that's the Mac way. Installing the new system removes the old system in the process. There's also the option of a "clean" install that pulls out all the third-party system extensions and such into a separate folder since those little snippets of code are the things that destabilize a Mac more often than not, particularly when old extensions meet a new OS.
> Are you going to be working on your/Dr. Bob's project from your home computer this summer?
Well, I still need to work out the details with Dr. Bob on that -- way behind in my email. Before any work begins, it's gotta get approved by his institutional review board (since I'm "freelancing" on this one and don't have an IRB to report to) ... among other things. But, for those interested in the analysis of hypertext, the tool I would use IF this gets off the ground is a program called Palimpsest by Western Civilization (www.westciv.com). All of the research tools I've seen that try to use hypertext to analyze any other sort of text have been rather disappointing. I know the programmer for Palimpsest and have a great deal of respect for his work (I use a CSS editor of his) as well as his knowledge of and approach to this aspect of computing. Plus, Palimpsest was written to deal with hypertext, as opposed to being a program that tries to analyze texts through a hypertext interface. I don't know if I'm being too subtle with the distinction, but I personally find it a compelling difference.
I also think that the fact he named this software Palimpsest (look it up) shows the depth of his grasp of using hypertext to deal with hypertext.
> Anyway, hope both your "surgery" and desip. increase are successful; let us know if the patient(s) lived. Happy coding and annotating!
Just got my June MacAddict in the mail today -- the superduper How-To issue -- and had the chance to read it on the commute to my pdoc's.
And had one of those Homer Simpson "DOH!" moments....
What I had failed to do in all of my surgeries was kind of the technical equivalent of having to tie off the carotid to perform some delicate procedure and then FORGETTING to untie it ... no wonder my Mac was having seizures!!
I don't know about PCs, but Macs have a hardware reset button on their motherboards. It completely erases all the hardware parameter information from the Mac's memory, forcing it to re-examine what components it has instead of plodding along in blissful ignorance of any changes. This is a particularly important thing to do when you upgrade something major, such as an L2 cache card or, say, your CPU.
DOH!
Well, my RAM also arrived today, so I got to change two variables in my experiment at once. So far, I've been up and running with no program or system crashes in over four hours -- when yesterday I was averaging 2 of either an hour or so. So, even though I cannot precisely determine the cause I my Mac's new-found stability, the patient seems to be resting comfortably and seizure-free.
> (BTW,I've always considered IE for Macs to be Bill Gates' vengance against Steve Jobs--bet B. gets a charge out of every embedded bug....
Those aren't bugs, those are features.
Besides, when Gates spent $150M on Apple stock -- just as Jobs returned as iCEO -- the share price was about $30 per. Recently, it's been over $100 per and posting even higher than MS's stock. ;^)
The other (sad but true) fact is that Mac IE 4.5 is the most standards-compliant browser around of any of the Netscape or Microsoft releases (from what I've heard, Opera may be the best out there ... and rumor has it coming to the Mac soon!), particularly when it comes to rendering Style Sheets. Mac IE 5 has some nice tweaks, but it actually takes some steps backwards wrt standards compliance. Both kick the tar out of Netscape (sorry, Dr. Bob, but its true -- Netscape 4.x has the wrong DOM and it can't handle much of CSS1, let alone CSS2) ... but that should change quickly when Netscape 6 is released.
*IF*, that is, you can meet the hardware requirements to run Netscape 6 ....
I took pictures of the brain surgery -- should have them online sometime before This Old Mac actually kicks the bucket.cheers,
bob
poster:bob
thread:32557
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000508/msgs/32848.html