We have come a long way with user friendliness of computers, but we still have a ways to go. Two examples, just from today:
A local friend (hi Mary) had moved and needed to go online with her Mac, and wirelessly. She went with BT, bless her optimistic little heart. They don't send out an engineer these days, they ship the hardware and you're on your own. Of course she needed to call Support.
I had mentioned to her that she probably did not need the BT software CD to get her machine online, but of course the supporters pushed her to install it. (Me, I've had half a dozen ISP over the years, and I never needed their software. I don't know what it's supposed to do.)
Well, after hours of messing with the machine and clueless supporters, she finally got a guy who had actually touched a Mac before. He revealed to her what had not been evident anywhere on the packaging: their software is not Mac-compatible...
And of course, like I hinted to her, it turned out that she basically just needed to turn on the modem, wireless router, and the Mac, and she was online automatically. Bet that doesn't happen on Windoze.
And then myself: I put in a second hard disk in my new Mac Pro, for running backups. Well, the disk did not turn up after I started up the machine. Well, I could see the disk in the software, but not a "volume" which you need to use the disk at all. It was hinted somewhere that I needed to Format the disk. And I knew what software to use for it, but there was no option for formatting!
Well, after I had been studying for a while, I guessed that "format" is the same as "erase", and even if there are no data on the disk at all, you still need to "erase" it to make it work! There was no "format" button, but there was an "erase" button, and that was the one I needed to use. I only figured it out because I vaguely remembered that the two things were synonymous from the old time DOS language, but I figured the modern Mac had clearer language than that! Well, not always. :)
(You try clicking on a button that says "erase" without being sure of what you're doing!)
"even if there are no data on the disk at all, you still need to "erase" it to make it work"
ReplyDeleteWell, d'uh! How obvious is THAT? Man, haven't you ever used a blank sheet of paper to write on before? Of course you need to erase it before you can use it!
How else can you get rid of all that useless white filling it, hunh? :-P
Oh, and don't forget your eraser's running in before you start, otherwise it'll be slow for the first 150 pages. Gosh! Must one explain EVERYTHING to you people?
I bet when your car breaks down for no apparent reason, you don't even have the basic reflex to turn it off and on again. Or to knock on the driver's side window frame, just there, in the upper-right corner...
And you probably never heard of the [Steering Wheel+Horn+Handbrake] manœuver for emergency stops, either. :-P
(Control+Alert+Decrease, in pro's lingo.) Sheesh...
Helpdesks unforunately rarely know about Macs. I remember from when I worked for an ADSL helpdesk, people tended to toss the Mac customers (there are very few - I think they either don't dare call or they know what they're doing) through to me. That was because I'd worked with the old OS8 and OS9 (and even the DOS verions, but that was close to 15 years ago). And because I knew where the screenshot website was and knew I couldn't think in Windows terms. Still..... those were always tricky calls!
ReplyDeleteBut to have all those support people realize that the cd wasn't Mac compatible? New low in the helpdesk world!
There is a big difference between formating and erasing. (This is pretty technical.)
ReplyDeleteDisk drives are arranged in cylinders, tracks, and sectors. When you read about seek time, that is the physical movement of the read heads between cylinders and is very slow. Once the read head moves to the correct cylinder, it must decide which track to read. Older drives had multiple read heads, one for each physical rotating disk (and some drives had 20 rotating disks). Once you are on the right track [pun coincidental], the read head must then wait until the right sector comes under it before reading, otherwise the wrong data will come in.
"Formatting" means writing the addressing information to each sector -- the information that the read head will use to determine that you are reading the right information. This is relatively fast compared to moving the head from cylinder to cylinder, since the disk is spinning at 7200 revolutions per second, but modern drives have a LOT of sectors per track. And then each sector is read back in to determine if there is a bad spot on the disk at that location. Bad sectors are collected in a special table and not used for data storage. Formatting means actually writing the addressing information to every one of the sectors (typically 512 bytes per sector) on the drive, and will take hours. Maybe days if you are formatting a 345Gb drive. All modern drives are preformatted, so this process is rarely, if ever, performed.
"Erasing", however, means rewriting the file directory on a formatted drive. The file directory contains information on which sectors have been assigned to saved files. If you are erasing a drive, that means that there is no useful information there anymore, and all sectors are to be returned to available storage. Erasing takes only seconds, since the file directory is so small compared to the drive.
So there is a huge difference between formatting and erasing. Boring, but true.
Dave the nerd
Thanks Dave.
ReplyDeleteThe Apple PDF manual procedure for putting in a hard drive is stupid then. The last page says:
"Formatting the Drive
After installing a new drive, you must format it by the following steps:
Open Disk Utility and select the drive in the list to the left.
Note: If you are formatting the primary drive, use the Disk Utility program on the Install Disk.
Click on the Partition tab.
Click on “Options” and verify GUID is selected if this is a bootable drive.
Apply the change by clicking on the “Partition” button."
Even if somehow it is correct to say "format" instead of "erase" here, why am I asked to Partition? To "partition" when you only need one partition is as stupid as it is to "erase" when there is nothing to erase.
They could call it "initiate" or anything people would understand.
But why is it even necessary? Last time I bought a drive it just showed up, no erasing necessary. That one was *not* from Apple, this one was.
Sometimes things are already formatted, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're pre-formated. Fun! :)
ReplyDeletePartitioning allows you to have two or more separate operating systems on the same physical hard drive.
ReplyDeleteThis is very valuable if you have to test software compatibility with a new OS and make sure it still works on an older OS.
Also, if you are as cheap as me, and your older applications won't run on the new OS, keeping the older system intact on a separate partition save money, if at the time cost of rebooting.
Finally, if your OS corrupts itself so badly that it no longer will boot, you can use the older one to boot up and proceed with real work.
"They could call it "initiate" or anything people would understand."
ReplyDeleteIf everybody could understand computer talk, what would we do with all our useful nerd friends like Dave? :-)
"Sometimes things are already formatted, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're pre-formated."
I've always wondered about that expression. It it like "pre-chewing" your food? Suddenly, I feel like a digital ruminant. I'd rather be a nerd!!!
Partitioning is creating partitions, i.e. volumes, even if you only need one. With Apple's "Disk Utility" software, formatting the disk is done as the next step following the partitioning.
ReplyDeleteYou will notice that if you select the disk, rather than the volume, in Disk Utility, that another tab called "Partition" shows up (that's because you can partition a disk but not a partition=volume).
Insofar, Apple's manual is correct (even though it's a bit odd that it tells you to partition when there obviously already *is* a partition you can select - did you try just mounting it? Of course it might've come pre-formatted with NTFS or so...).
If you give me the choice between the Windoze way of partitioning and formatting - i.e. you've got one choice, two if your disk is < 31GB (even though FAT32 itself supports 127GB partitions Windoze doesn't offer it as an option, and definitely not anything non-M$) do you want it? - and Disk Utility, I know what I prefer. You can make as many, or few, partitions as you like, and you can format them with any file system you like - try that with Windows.
Of course I'm not saying it couldn't be made (much) more user-friendly, I just wrapped my head around the way it works but I still found that much less challenging than trying to even just work with Winblows.
(Another howler is that you cannot just erase/reformat CD-RWs in the Finder but have to use Disk Utility for that - that leaves most people stumped and believing they can only be used once on a Mac - took me a while to find out, too...)
As for your friend and her ADSL connection, usually all you need to configure are your username and password. Good that the BT people didn't realise she is using a Mac because the standard response you get when telling people that is that it won't work - regardless if it does or not.
Of course, Windows-software does not (by default) work on the Mac, but most hardware you can buy nowadays just works out of the box and without the need for any extra drivers so the software is just not needed. Of course, most Windows users cannot imagine something like that to be possible... ;-)
Thanks, Ronald, you're right.
ReplyDeleteI mainly get impatient with small glitches in userfriendliness on Macs because Apple is usually so far ahead in this field that you come to expect the world.
One thing that keeps bugging me is the rudimentarity (or whatever that word is) of the desktop decoration app. For instance, if a picture is vertical and taller than the screen, it can't scale it to fit the hight! This has now not been fixed for five years.
You'll have to make a copy of and edit the image you want to use then. I do that on occasions, when I seek a special framing.
ReplyDelete"For instance, if a picture is vertical and taller than the screen, it can't scale it to fit the hight!"
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if that's what you're after, but if you look under
Apple Menu -> Desktop & Screen Saver -> Desktop
you will see a popup menu with the options
"Fill Screen" (which will crop top and bottom of your picture)
"Stretch to fill screen" (which will deform the pic to fit the screen)
"Center" (which will scale it down to fit on the screen, leaving the rest of the screen empty - lots left and right in the case of a portrait format but this seems to be what you're asking for)
"Tile" (which will scale it down to fit on the screen and fill the otherwise empty space with further instances of the picture)
Honestly, I couldn't think of any more options without going into serious picture editing.
Apple Menu -> System Preferences...
ReplyDeletethen
Desktop & Screen Saver -> Desktop
that is...
No, "center" does not scale, it cuts off top and bottom if the picture is taller than the screen.
ReplyDeleteYes, I edit pictures for it all the time, but why should I have to when OS X for graphics sophistication, and shareware could do this thing even ten years ago?
No, "center" does not scale, it cuts off top and bottom if the picture is taller than the screen.
ReplyDeleteUh, you are right - seems the pic I played with had just the right height...
This is odd indeed - have you told Apple about it? (It can take a while for them to fix things but they *do* listen to user input.)
http://www.apple.com/feedback/
I've always made my desktop pictures to fit but I agree that you shouldn't need to - after all you're using a Mac...
Good idea, I've written them.
ReplyDeleteDesktop pictures are important to me. I keep the desktop free of icons, and I remove all windows too when I leave the computer.
"you shouldn't need to - after all you're using a Mac..."
ReplyDelete(^_^) This expression should be in the daily language, like "Catch 22" and a "Jerry Springer family"...