Welcome to organic conversational threads. Same thing happens when chatting around a dinner table. The topic veers of and sometimes I wonder how we got there from where we started. In any case, I was just replying back to the content of Scott's previous message, not the subject. Hope you found it interesting if not illuminating.

CB

On 6/16/16 1:17 PM, Ray Foret jr wrote:
As the originator of this thread, I wonder what in the name of sanity this has 
got to do with macOS Siera?  Answer, not a single thing.


Sent from my Mac, The only computer with full accessibility for the blind 
built-in

Sincerely, The Constantly Barefooted Ray
Still a very happy Mac, Verizon Wireless iPhone6+ and Apple TV user!!!!!

On Jun 16, 2016, at 12:15 PM, 'Chris Blouch' via MacVisionaries 
<[email protected]> wrote:

I used to do enterprise computing stuff back in the day but it was an all Mac 
shop with a few islands of Windows. I don't think there is a lot of work to 
integrate the two but in an all Windows shop any little thing that goes wrong 
is probably going to get blamed on the Mac. I've certainly run into it helping 
other Mac users trying top open Microsoft Word files and other snags. A few 
months ago I was helping somebody who was trying to open a form in Pages 
created by somebody else in Word on Windows. The Windows user had chosen a 
custom font and then found some invalid characters, which show up as squares in 
Word, to make checkboxes. When that file was opened in Pages the checkboxes 
were now some other symbol. Of course that was all the Mac's fault according to 
the person making the file. Once I figured out what was actually going on I had 
to teach the Windows users how to make actual checkboxes in Word so their 
documents would work on the Mac (and eventually as PDFS). If it had been an 
all-PC shop they would have been oblivious to their hacks being non-portable. 
In a school these kinds of issues would go on and on. Teachers have been 
trained by the county on how to operate Windows, access shares, print to 
printers, log attendance etc. Just like VoiceOver on the Mac is a whole 
different thing, any teachers switching to Macs, or Chromebooks, would have to 
re-learn everything and the couldn't call the central help desk for anything 
because they won't support non-Windows stuff. It's the standard technology 
lock-in playbook and I just don't have the bandwidth to buck it. I'm probably 
not telling you anything you haven't heard before.

CB

On 6/15/16 12:39 PM, Scott Granados wrote:
Well, first, integrating Macs in to windows environments is very simple.  At 
least it has been in the examples I’ve seen which are fairly large rollouts.  
Granted I don’t know how this was in the Leopard or Lion days but more recently 
the integration has been very good.

You could harden the devices to make them more kid proof than they are out of 
the box.  Depends on the over all budget though, generic PCs may well be the 
least expensive way to go.

        Maybe it’s my industry then because I’m not seeing the use of Windows 
nearly as much.  You still see it on the administrative side, there’s usually 
large active directory farms and such but as far as the end clients laptops, 
almost all Mac in my experience.  Then again, I’m seeing Macs everywhere now, 
Starbucks, on the train.  It was shocking me the wide use of macs when we were 
having the discussion of the mac disappearing because they are everywhere, at 
least up here in the North East US.

I’ve also seen a lot of the back end Windows stuff being replaced with Linux.  
There’s some real good open source alternatives out there and even Big 
companies (TripAdvisor being one) switched to a linux backend with Macs for the 
employees.

Maybe other industries are more Windows saturated.  I’ve heard for example that 
Microsoft has the federal market cornered.

On 6/15/16, 12:13 PM, "'Chris Blouch' via MacVisionaries" 
<[email protected]> wrote:

I suspect the Mac v. Win population numbers are driven by bulk
institutional purchases. While there are a few all-Mac shops there are
many more all-Windows shops. I was just at a PTA meeting at my kids
elementary school last night where they were going to help fund buying
60 computers for the school. Of course I would love for them to be Macs
but I also understand how painful it would be to integrate/support them
in an otherwise all Windows place. Plus they were $400 a pop with all
the apps installed. For generic web surfing and wordprocessing boxes
that little kids are going to beat up, do you really want to put pearls
before swine? You won't find wood fired chestnut pancakes or pasta
ncasciata in the school cafeteria either. For those who have thought
about it and get to choose, the Mac is a compelling solution.

CB

On 6/15/16 10:09 AM, Scott Granados wrote:
No need for a sick bag here, I’m pretty much in agreement with you.

Interesting you mentioned Woz.  Oh how I wish his influence has persisted.  Not 
to date myself to heavily here but I was a huge fan of the Apple 2 
architecture.  I cut my teeth on that architecture.  I remember being a wee 
sprout saving and saving and saving for almost a year working random odd family 
jobs and such to raise the 3500 US I needed to buy the setup I wanted.  That’s 
when computing was still fun.  Ah the things I did with my Apple Cat modem.  (I 
would like to personally thank who ever thought it was a good idea to include a 
full function tone generator, voice synthesizer, DTMF decoder, sampler and 
expansion capabilities on a modem and the FBI would not like to thank you but 
that’s for another list)  The point is, that was solid thinking I coul get 
behind.  The battle between the Steves for the number of expansion slots, the 
great built in language (Apple Soft), and on and on and on.  Woz was definitely 
more on the openness side and so am I so I can see your hope that he would rise 
again although I’m not betting on it.
        I had the privilege of meeting him a few times once at a very small 
Scotch and Cigar function with maybe 25 people.  Very grounded, friendly, 
unassuming guy, totally a geeky engineer which I totally dig.  Funny how 
opposite the two Steves were.

I hope what you say comes to pass in that at least something will persist on 
the notebook side.

I’m a little surprised of the downfall of the mac only because of how many are 
out there now.  Up here anyway, every Starbucks is full of people on Macs, huge 
employers are all Mac now including Fidelity and Thomson International, and 
since about 2013 or so all the gigs I’ve worked on were Mac shops not by choice 
but by luck.  With such a hold on laptops especially I’d think they would like 
to keep that but I fear your right.  The cool enhanced Unix environment is 
slowly being squeezed.  I wonder if there will be a day where terminal isn’t 
included with the Mac.  I believe that would be the day I go elsewhere.




On 6/15/16, 6:00 AM, "Sabahattin Gucukoglu" <[email protected] on 
behalf of [email protected]> wrote:

Rant ahead; get your sick bags handy. :)

Honestly, I’d be fine with trying out a giant iPad for my daily work, if Apple 
were honest in acknowledging their estrangement from the Mac as a proper 
workstation OS with proper character and robustness, and were instead committed 
 to fully transitioning to iOS for everything, because a workstation OS is 
something I believe a certain class of computer users (including me and 
probably you, Scott, as well) really need.  A commenter on OSXDaily ( obsolete 
name as of now :) ) by the name of Steve Steele ( awesome name :) ) sums it up 
very well:

I hate that Apple has taken OS X from being a super cool and modern UNIX 
workstation that started life powering Job’s NeXT Cubes, and turned it into a 
candy colored silly sidekick to iOS.

For a few glorious years we had Steve Jobs wanting revenge on the tech world, 
and OS X was his centerpiece.

Now we have Tim Cook’s macOS.

I say off with his head and the rest of the focus groups inside of Apple that 
have neutered our once lean and mean workstation OS. I seriously now hope there 
is a coup happening inside of Apple.

Woz, where are you?

Stay strong osxdaily.
Yeah.  This.  A thousand times this.

I started seriously with OS X—sorry, macOS—in Leopard, on my own MacBook, in 
2008 when Vista was the final straw for me and the iPhone was booming.  Others 
here will have used Tiger and maybe even the classic Macintosh.  Things have 
changed a very great deal since Jobs fell in love with his newest iCreations 
and Apple became a consumer electronics company.  The neglect of the Mac has 
gone from being a minor but understandable irritant to a full-scale domestic 
assault.  Lion was the start of it, you’re right.  I should have seen that.  
But it did offer exciting new features, and at least one of them, Resume, is 
noticeably absent on Snow Leopard and Windows.  I won’t rehash my views about 
the systemic degradation of OS X since Snow since I’ve flogged it to death on 
here before ( and you know how it is with people who think Apple is perfect no 
matter what they do :) ), but suffice it to say that I (and, it would appear, 
many others) thought I was getting something better at the time Lion came out: 
an operating system that combined the robustness of the Mac with some of that 
rare, task-oriented simplicity and beauty of iOS.  But instead of a pair of 
operating systems each suited ideally to its tasks, with its own personality 
and paradigm, and perhaps with the ambition to benefit from the others’ 
virtues, or an inevitable transition to a lean, mean, mobile platform that’s 
open enough to be used as a proper computer all by itself, we get a locked-down 
toy OS that struggles to be taken seriously as a proper computer OS, despite 
the fact that it’s competition is succeeding it in Business (Microsoft 
Surface), and an increasingly useless and trivialised desktop OS with nothing 
to recommend it over the laughingstock that was its former competition, and 
whose usefulness is severely being compromised by its need to lock you in to 
Apple’s services, the lack of upgradability of hardware, and the need for 
Apple’s other ecosystem devices.  Oh my, how things have changed …

Still I hold out hope that the transition will eventually be completed.  The 
Mac will die (sorry fanboys, but it’s true) and iOS, while it will be inferior 
because of its close ties to Apple, will be one platform for doing your 
computing.  Maybe that’s a version of reality I could cope with.  Apple would 
cater to the demands of the market, either destroying the Mac’s advantages 
(say, by hosting services for you) or improving the hardware.  The form factor 
that the Mac represents, especially the keyboard-and-mouse interface, or maybe 
even the keyboard-and-touchscreen, will be catered for, as will the necessary 
peripherals.

Please dispose of your sick bags in the receptacles provided. :)

I’m using VMWare Fusion to run the Mac VM.  It’s imperfect (sound a bit 
stuttery), but it works well enough.

You can learn more about “Apple File System” (APFS) here:
https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/schedule/#/details/701

Per-object and metadata encryption, sparse files, de-duplication on copy, 
low-overhead crash safety, snapshots, atomic directory renames … good show. And 
yes, a very big improvement over HFS+, indeed. :)

Just now, using APFS (on disk images and external devices) is a dangerous and 
advanced business, fit only for people who have good backups and command-line 
foo.  If you follow that link, you’ll find documentation.  If you Google it, 
you’ll find lots of geeky insights, which will really work for you if you like 
that kind of depth of understanding.  Testing is limited to data files; Time 
Machine isn’t supported yet, you can’t export to AFP (HFS legacy, that) and you 
can’t actually boot the system from an APFS volume group.  But Apple says that 
stuff is coming.

Object recognition in photos, like grouping pictures based on related objects, 
and identifying particular objects.  I’d be interested to see how this 
manifests itself in VoiceOver: whether, for instance, we will hear descriptions 
of positively-identified objects.

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