[ALUG] Anybody else ever tried fast-user-switching as context-switching?

[Ruth Bygrave]

(sorry about the length of this; I'll settle down in a few days when  
I've got over my, 'I had nobody to talk to about all this stuff for  
the last n years' problem)

On 20 Jun 2007, at 10:50, David Reynolds wrote:

> On 20 Jun 2007, at 10:26 am, Ruth Bygrave wrote:
>
>> (bouncebouncebounce!)
>>
>> This list is so cool! If I tried to go to my Mac user-group and  
>> ask that, I'd get 0 response within 100 miles, because they are  
>> all ghetto Mac users despite the rise of 'switching' in the past  
>> few years. They wouldn't know what I was on about, and Adrian says  
>> 'Why indeed should they?' He has a point.
>
> Hey!
>
> I'm a Mac user and I know what you're talking about!

(giggle) But the 'path' I had to follow to get to somebody like you  
wasn't as obvious as I originally thought.

The local Mac user group for Ipswich is made up of 1) Professional  
photographers who all know each other very well, 2) Dumb users whose  
friends and family all have Macs, and 3) the local geek.

The local geek was an *astonishing* amount of help pointing me at  
where to go when I bought a secondhand clamshell ibook on e-bay (as  
an auxiliary user machine for Applescript script-kiddie stuff and  
ordinary user stuff and oh I want it to run Panther at least please  
because then I can have a go at using Darwin) and I didn't realise  
where to go to get the downloadable one-step-at-a-time don't-pay-any- 
money updates for putting it up to late-OS 9. (The main problem I had  
being that I assumed OS 9 had proper Mass Storage drivers, because  
whenever I see a USB drive it says, Mac OS 9 upwards. But it's more  
like the Win98 braindead-kludge for USB Mass Storage, in fact. When I  
one-stage-at-a-time patched it up to 9.2 and updated the firmware  
(ow! hairy!) (which is where it suddenly started seeing Mass Storage  
in the way I'd expected to start with) I could then clone Panther  
from something else and it worked like a charm). The one remaining  
problem it has is that I *think* the boot-loader is still OS9 and I  
don't really know how to fix that (or if it's possible or indeed  
necessary). Since I never intend to run OS9 on it ever-ever, because  
it would be 0 use for the things I 'assume to be there', there seems  
to be no point in leaving it with an OS9 boot-loader, but I don't  
know if there's any sense in trying to fix this...or if it's in fact  
too low-level to mess with.

But the local geek is also 'Mac-ghetto'.

A lot of the first Spectacularly Dumb User questions I had to ask  
were cross-platform things of the I-don't-particularly-like-Windows- 
but-I've-been-using-it-for-20-years -- how do I deal with the  
learning-curve? kind. For whatever reason, I never came across a  
single user in my increasingly-frantic visits to three or four Mac  
user groups who was coming from where I'm coming from
-- wanting to use the Mac as a 'fun non-commercial no-viruses  
consumer box for playing with', 20 years or so experience of using  
Windows, likes The Unix Way but is scared of the 'distro soup' and  
'you are your own sysadmin' thing in Linux.

In the Mac world there is a very frustrating amount of advocacy- 
zealotry.  I can completely get why they feel beleaguered, but it  
means that somebody like me is a 'bad fit' for Mac user groups, even  
if I love the whole 'comfort, design and fold-away Unix' idea. I'm  
fairly sure I'd be able to find people a bit like me in California,  
but I didn't think this was much use to me...

So when I spoke from cross-platform experience, I suspect they saw it  
as a bit more of an attack than was meant.

I kept hearing 'But It Just Works', which was absolutely utterly  
infuriating from my problem-with-mixed-network printing issue.

I have no prayer of removing Adrian from his 'welded to Windows'  
approach -- and I knew nobody except the Mac-ghetto users at the user  
groups who used Macs. I don't want to pry anyone away from their  
platform-of-choice anyway. I just want to be able to gently tweak  
without being my own sysadmin and building from source:

-------geek joke------------
"Make"

"Shan't"

"Make --please"

"Not a chance."

"Compile --and try to check your own dependencies"

"Are you root? Well are you root then? Am I bovvered then? Does my  
prompt look bovvered?"
-------/geek joke (referencing Catherine Tate's 'bored teenager' sketch)

This is the first venue where I've felt able to talk about any of  
this...

> I agree that most other mac users probably wouldn't know what you  
> are on about - this is why I unsubscribed from the NMUG mailing list!
I'll stay subscribed to it for Dumb User questions, for which it's  
quite good.

Regards, Ruth
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