Re: Could we please have a dedicated Developers forum?
I'm afraid. Very, very afraid.
I still miss my Intel Pentium (R) II 400 MHz Compaq box with 256 MB of RAM too, but ever since it's been converted into a virtual machine and run on my 3.4 GHz Core I7, it's been like, WTF did I wait this long? Sometimes it's the little changes that set the bar higher. Of course you don't _have_ to move forward if you don't want to, and I respect you for that, it just seems like a more reasonable and pleasant route to take, is all. You can have better, why not take it?
And trust me, once you've had an SSD, you won't want to go back. That's a speed upgrade XP will not accommodate, unfortunately.
Convenience is just a general observation but let's go with an example specific to me. While I'd love to live inside XP forever, in practise if I want to do anything halfway modern, from virtual ising to using the latest web 2.0 apps, I'm seriously hurting my chances if I'm stuck in 4GB of RAM, without rebooting into multiple OSs. The solution is to run the modern apps on a modern OS, and do all the specific stuff in Linux or Windows VMs, often running one alongside the other. Now, in your case I appreciate that not having a need for Linux in the first place, XP really can do everything that you personally require, so this is less obviously useful, but for me it's essential. I think 3 GB of RAM is fine for you in XP, BTW, but this particular desktop has 16 GB, and the minimum amount is climbing all the time (my sister-in-law has 32 GB in hers). The point is that OS constraints on memory size are an old-world problem. Why have less, when you can have more? Ironically, my Linux VM only requires 2 GB of RAM, and is thus a 32-bit OS.
Security: I do agree that the XPocalypse has drawn way too much attention, but I'm not sure I agree that this is a set-i
t-and-forget-it sort of situation to deal with. Yes, patches do protect the OS, and I think you should at least make some effort to keep parts of the OS away from the network. Firewalls and AV are a kludge at best, although thankfully they're holding tight for now because the only exploits have been droppers in the browser itself, as long as vendors keep pushing updates. However, since you're using both IE and Outlook Express, my guess is that you trust AVG exclusively. At least make sure you're backed up regularly. I've no doubt that Microsoft would be very happy if you would give them more money, but then there's Apple, so it's not like you have to do that, if you don't want to. At this rate though, it seems almost inevitable that you'll come back in five years and say, "See? I ran XP, and nothing happened!"
And, indeed, in some ways I hope you do, because that would say a lot for external threat mitigations. Still, I just think this is one of those better places that you could be in, but it is of course your choice. Needless to say, I will not be laughing if/when you _do_ get infected.
You don't have to use iTunes if you don't want to, any more than on Windows. I won't deny though that your choice of media player is rather more limited on OS X, so you'll have to make some compromises there; even so, VLC works, and absolutely nothing besides iOS requires you to change the way you organise and/or tag your media. Technically speaking, on iOS you don't have to either, but my guess is that you'd prefer to play your music with official apps instead of from within disk-like apps. SLJ would know all about that, since he appears to do that all the time. DVD Player is a standalone application that comes with the OS; you shouldn't have any trouble there.
I almost never use Maps on the Mac. Well, I almost never use it on iOS either. The only use for Maps on the Mac is to transfer a route from desktop to phone, and this is where the increasing iOSification of OS X gets on my nerves. It's best ignored. Same goes for iBooks; it was great until Mavericks, but then they buggered everything up, by making it a requirement that you use the inaccessible iBooks app on your desktop, instead of just pointing to a folder of books in iTunes like you do on Windows and OS X prior to Mavericks. I grit my teeth and put up with it, but I hope they make this better.
I can't really answer to the question of "Why virtualise?"; I think you'd have to try it for yourself and decide. However, especially on flash-based Macs, I personally think virtualisation is a highly non-destructive and natural process that you can easily get into the habit o
f; for example you can have VMWare start a particular VM on startup, and then add Fusion to your startup items, so your XP machine boots as soon as you log in. It's an aspirational sort of environment, you know. Whether, as a matter of fact, you find gaming in a VM a very enjoyable process is something that again I'm not qualified to answer on your behalf, except to say that I and many others here appear to be doing it all the time, without incident. And of course we really ought to be advocating for cross-platform games anyway, IMO. The important thing, in any event, is to realise that OS X is not Windows and shouldn't be compared, feature-for-feature, directly with Windows. This will take a bit of getting used to.
I just asked my backup software, Arq, to tell me how much I'm using of storage: 484 GB. On a BT FTTC 80/20 connection, that ideally means it would
take less than three days for the initial upload; afterwards it's just the changes. Yeah, I think you'll be fine.
Are you an "Ordinary" user? Well, let's see--when was the last time you opened a command prompt? That should be a fairly accurate indicator. It's true that one attraction of OS X for me, at least in the very beginning, was Apple's unashamed use of an excellent foundational operating system, much of it Open Source; this meant I had a very powerful command-line interface at my disposal, and this was very appealing because even on Windows I'd built up quite a dependence on those tools from the Linux world that I liked, such as the rsync file transfer tool or the bash shell. But, again, if you just don't see it, it's
nothing to worry about, and there's a great deal to like about the OS higher up in the stack, which is after all what Apple wants to emphasise. Even developers are being walled off into their own little playground, distinct from the Unix world; increasingly this makes me sad, because it decreases the convenience of using excellent freely-available software, and makes me depend increasingly on Linux in a VM. But there's Apple's idea of "Progress" for you. More generally, I think an ordinary user is simply one who uses the machine as a tool, and although we blind kind will have some specialist tendencies, it ultimately comes down to whether the computer serves you or you serve the computer. Think of it in the abstract as whether or not you like a computer for its features, or whether you like it for its technological components. With that in mind, and also your list of objectives, I think you're probably much more on the "Ordinary" computer sid
e, though there are as always gradations of geekdom.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=178292#p178292
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
