now, as many of you know, i’m a windows user, and never had much love for the macs, but one thing i could never counter about Mac OS’ was their built in fail safe protections preventing users from doing very bad things to their computers. well it seems that this is not the case (under certain circumstances) in Os 10.3.
as far as i’m concerned that is neither here nor there. i won’t harp on it. what’s is overwhelmingly amusing to me is the term Spinning Pizza of Death, an obvious relative of window’s blue screen of death. not being in the apple community i have never heard this term, and well it made me laugh aloud.
13 responses so far ↓
1 rcg // Dec 12, 2003 at 11:29 am
Apple *still* advertises OSX as a system that never crashes, which is a load of hoopla. Now Unix on most other workstations, though not nearly as pretty… that a hard nut to crack. Pretty close to bullet-proof, though even then I’ve had to pull the power cord out of an SGI to get a reboot because I had no other options.
Now, if there’s an OSX box in your office, go to it, open a shell/terminal, and then (OK, don’t *really* do this) type:
cd /bin
then type
rm *.*
Oh what fun it is to ride…
Anyone there? Anyone…? Whaddyou mean “geek”?
2 jefke // Dec 12, 2003 at 11:47 am
cripes, there was not a single thing i understood in all of that.
3 rcg // Dec 12, 2003 at 8:09 pm
You don’t deserve a “geekisms” category.
4 Michael Hanscom // Dec 13, 2003 at 1:47 am
jefke: Just for your amusement (and because I knew I was in no danger), I did exactly what you said. Here’s a cut and paste of the results:
[dsl231-044-xxx:~] djwudi% cd /bin
[dsl231-044-xxx:/bin] djwudi% rm *.*
override rwxr-xr-x root/wheel for zsh-4.1.1? y
rm: zsh-4.1.1: Permission denied
[dsl231-044-xxx:/bin] djwudi%
All system files in Mac OS X have permissions associated with root, and none of the user accounts (including the “owner” or any administration-abled acounts) have root access. Because of this, normal users are prevented from being able to hose their system as easily as you implied. One can enable the root level if necessary, but even then a ‘rm *.*’ on the /bin directory (or any other system directory) would require a password authenticated ’sudo’ command in order to accomplish anything.
Good try, though.
5 Michael Hanscom // Dec 13, 2003 at 1:50 am
Oops I guess that should have been addressed to rcg, not jeffke. My mistake!
6 rcg // Dec 14, 2003 at 12:06 pm
Oh well. Here at work we’re on an IRIX network and the root password is passed around willy-nilly. We’ve had a few mishaps.
So has your OSX box ever crashed?
7 Natty // Dec 14, 2003 at 12:06 pm
This may be the most celebrity-esque post ever received at jefke.com.
8 rcg // Dec 14, 2003 at 12:27 pm
Oh yeah. That’s why I recognized the name. Tried to place it. Couldn’t.
We’ll there you go. Maybe if I try more Mac-bashing (kinda ironic, though, that I should play that role here) we can attract more big names: maybe Steve Wozniak’ll chime in. Or the big Jobs.
Mac’s are terrible. The G5 is a slug. iTunes will bring down the recording industry. OSX is just a copy of Windows — a GUI with access to a command prompt. Um…
9 Steve Jobs // Dec 14, 2003 at 12:56 pm
I’ve got my eye on you, jefke. You and your sorry bunch of friends. And what’s up with Wawa? He’s one sick son of a b.
10 jefke // Dec 15, 2003 at 8:27 am
hey steve thanks for stopping by, what an honor. hey howsabout you guys stop desiging electronics that look like they’re out of alien (the first one),that movie gattaca, or the volkswagen bug. i’m sure i’d start buying stuff then. cheers.
Jefke
11 jefke // Dec 15, 2003 at 8:34 am
as for the “you don’t deserve to have a geekisms category”, well as you know geekyness happens on a scale and if i have to listen to natty say “stop talking about tech crap” then i get to have a geekisms section. yeah so i’m not talking about code or hacking or anything, but hell i’m not whistlin dixie either (dunno if that fits, but i wanted to say it, imagine the search engine hits…”whistling dixie AND hacker”)…
12 Kurt // Apr 8, 2005 at 12:48 pm
I’ve spent the last 3 years of my career working on a G5 here at work (high-profile graphics business) while my personal machines in my home studio have always been custom built PC’s. In terms of a side-by-side comparison in ALL areas, the Mac is an absolute PIG. I will never *EVER* waste my time, money and sanity on an all-Mac art department again. I’ll go head to head with ANYONE, Steve Jobs included, on the whole Mac vs. a properly configured windows machine debate. There’s no contest. My $2K PC runs circles around my $4K Mac. Apple should spend a little less time on nifty-wowee looking cases and packaging, and a little more on things like…oh, I don’t know…. SYSTEM STABILITY, maybe? Just a thought…maybe I’m expecting too much from 7% of the market share? heh..
13 Kurt // Apr 8, 2005 at 2:02 pm
I’ve spent the last 3 years of my career working on a G5 here at work (high-profile graphics business) while my personal machines in my home studio have always been custom built PC’s. In terms of a side-by-side comparison in ALL areas, the Mac is an absolute PIG. I will never *EVER* waste my time, money and sanity on an all-Mac art department again. I’ll go head to head with ANYONE, Steve Jobs included, on the whole Mac vs. a properly configured windows machine debate. There’s no contest. My $2K PC runs circles around my $4K Mac. Apple should spend a little less time on nifty-wowee looking cases and packaging, and a little more on things like…oh, I don’t know…. SYSTEM STABILITY, maybe? Just a thought…maybe I’m expecting too much from 7% of the market share? heh..