I give this website one sha-wing up.
I posted this in comments so long ago I can't even find it anymore.
To be fair, when I clicked through I vaguely remembered seeing it before. But you know, penises blur together after awhile.
Oh good. I knew I'd seen this somewhere, and was getting worried that it was it from here.
You know, I figured it had probably been posted in comments already, but, eh.
Well I missed it in comments so it's new to me and I am a fan!
I clicked through the last time it was linked, and it was kind of sweet. Not an area where I expected to see helpful, constructive criticism.
My workplace has a generous definition of "safe for work" (makes sense considering what we do), but I still don't want to click through from where my nice big desktop monitor faces the hallway....
nice big desktop monitor
Well, that's a new one.
Truly a generous spirit of criticism. Like the best of Ebert. (I read his review of demonlover last night, which was a good reminder of how he came by his reputation of being anti-intellectual).
Not an area where I expected to see helpful, constructive criticism.
I havent clicked the link, so this comment confuses me.
which was a good reminder of how he came by his reputation of being anti-intellectual
Say more?
15: The whole "Being on TV with a cute catchphrase" thing never immediately ingratiates you with the New York Review of Books set.
I havent clicked the link, so this comment confuses me.
Thanks for sharing!
Also NSFW (the title says it all). About a new trend, orgasmic meditation, sweeping San Francisco. Practitioners who are experts are called "master strokers." It will solve workplace disputes! The article is repetitive but utterly hilarious to me.
16: was the NYRB way into "demonlover"? Oh yeah that's right, the last thing Tony Judt wrote was a review of it: a way forward for French culture after the shadow of postwar Maoism had finally, finally retreated or something.
Caveat 1: I'm pretty sure I've shared the following link previously.
Caveat 2: The authors don't appear to be updating it any longer, and the best writing is found if you read it in reverse order, from the earliest posts to the last.
Caveat 3: It's even more NSFW than the link in the post (and my bar for NSFW is set pretty high).
With those caveats out of the way, allow me to recommend one of the interweb's greatest pages of all time: luriddigs.com. Wherein the ostensible subjects of gay cruising profile photos are ignored in favor of the interior decorating disasters in which they are set.
Hi, I take this as the reasonably active opennish thread.
OT: So if you had a Mac, and it wouldn't start, what would you do?
By "wouldn't start" I mean that when you turn it on, it just shows the pretty apple figure at the center of the screen and just sits there. And sits there, and sits there, until you become disgusted after 20 minutes or so.
As a PC user, I'd try to boot from disk. My housemate the Mac user doesn't know what that means. He thinks he should just abandon ship and buy a new computer, a laptop, but in all honesty, he has a lot of stuff on there that it would be a serious bummer to abandon.
Then I think, well, as a PC user, I'd bring it in to my favorite Jamaican PC fixer guy Winston, who has saved me and my machines a handful of times. I've advised my housemate to find a Winston for Macs.
What would you do, though? I totally don't speak Mac. A friend did run something called DiskWarrior on it a couple of days ago, but that was when it actually booted up. That friend downloaded and installed Firefox at the time, since the problem began when housemate updated Safari. After the DiskWarrior cleanup plus Firefox (plus, I believe, Google Chrome), it will not start up at all.
Lurid digs is fantastic.
I have no advice regarding 23.
Also amazing, this ad from the lurid digs sidebar. Oh, that's what it is!
25 to 18, also. But mostly tl:dr to 18.
Or rather, to the story linked in 18.
Before you take the advice in 25, look up troubleshoot+(model of your housemate's Mac). You will find instructions on various things you can do to try to boot up and maybe see if the problem is a bad logic board. In any case, if he has to get a new computer he likely won't lose the stuff; he can take out the hard drive and transfer his files with something like this.
On preview, 30 is correct.
Okay! 25 wins. Thanks, all. There is no such thing as a PC store, so the idea of bringing it to a dealer (like the car dealer) hadn't occurred to me. Hopefully it doesn't cost lots of money to do that, and they're totes cool and reasonable with that kind of thing.
33 before seeing 32. Basically I don't want to do this for my housemate, and there's no way he's inclined to troubleshoot it himself. Macs are supposed to be trouble free, don't you know.
I admit it wouldn't be a bad idea to know how the hell this happened in the first place. I mean, I'd want to know, in order to avoid the same practices or behaviors in future. But he just wants a fix.
There is no such thing as a PC store
There are Microsoft stores now, which look almost exactly like Apple stores but with a slightly different color scheme.
Probably. I think they just directly copied the Apple model.
But but. Microsoft is a software company, not a hardware company. Right? Or am I confused. I mean, people's PCs can be any and all manner of configurations; it just seems like a hell of task to agree to repair whatever piece of patched up thing someone might bring you.
But hey, if they want to do that, okay. Repair shops are good. I wonder if it's expensive, or if they'd half the time tell you that you have to just get a new machine; I wouldn't want them to crowd out the small independent repair shops.
The advantage of getting it running now is that he can back up his files; then it won't matter as much if the problem persists and he has to get a new computer, see?
40: It's really more of a continuous process than a series of distinct episodes of plagiarism.
39: Understood, sure. I'll discuss it with the housemate. He has a really low tolerance for having to solve these kinds of problems on his own, because Macs are supposed to be trouble-free, he feels, and he gets all pissy about it. And I don't want to have to solve the problem for him. Yet I've gone so far as to ask you guys about it!
The guy is a metal sculptor! You'd think he'd be able to grapple with a physical object! But no, he wants to just throw it away.
Not all physical objects are the same.
At the Microsoft stores I've been to the only Microsoft-made hardware I've seen is the Surface. Also, I guess the xbox. Everything else was made by the usual laptop and tablet makers. There's enough variety that it doesn't feel quite like an Apple store.
5 years? 6? Not more than that.
45: I know, but it's been hard for me to make sense of how an artist's, a sculptor's, mind works. He's a sculptor who makes actually very aesthetically pleasing and intriguing things, through complex, detailed, and laborious manipulation of basic materials. But you have no idea what a horrible interior decorator he is. He shoves things here and there willy nilly. He puts pictures up on the walls, or rearranges furniture, all out of proportion to the shape of the room. No sense of proportion or aspect: his feng shui sucks. So it's weird, because his sculptural work is great, so he clearly has a sense of balance there. He's also a ridiculously impatient and bad cook, can't mange the notion that you have to chop some things smaller than others because they take longer to cook. Isn't that like understanding how to work with basic materials? Apparently not.
I don't really get it, but it's been a lesson in how things apparently don't translate in the way I'd think they would.
5 years? 6? Not more than that.
Still pretty old in computer terms.
My age has nothing to do with it. Computers just aren't designed to last very long, and after a few years they tend to start to break in various ways. Even Macs.
I say to you from a computer that's about 11 years old. Upgraded two or three times.
But mostly tl:dr to 18.
Jesus, no kidding. I got progressively more annoyed and bailed.
I think my previous laptop was about six years old when it started breaking down so much that it was no longer reliable enough for me and I bought this one. It was a PC, though.
Did you try installing Linux on it?
I jest, I jest.
Sorry, teo. I'm a fan of upgradability and replaceability. Component parts. I think a lot of computers sold these days -- especially laptops? (but I'm not sure) -- aren't really upgradeable and don't really have replaceable parts. Not entirely sure if that's true, but with the desktops I've always relied on, the things that break can often be fixed/replaced without having to buy a new machine.
Sorry, teo.
It's okay. I just get touchy about people condescending to me because of my age.
I fashioned my computer entirely of birch bark, blackstrap molasses, river rocks, and the chopsticks they give away -- for nothing! -- at Panda Express. It's every bit as good as whatever you kids use to do your computing. And if something goes wrong, I just go to the Arboretum here in town for more raw materials. Unless I need chopsticks, in which case I head over to the strip mall. Either way, it's convenient.
Why don't you just whittle your own chopsticks? Kids these days.
Sounds like someone needs a sharper knife.
59: I was not condescending to you because of your age. I was thinking that the view that computers must inevitably be entirely replaced every 5 years or so is a relatively recent idea. Go ahead and do that if you need to, obviously.
I was not condescending to you because of your age.
You may not have meant to, but I find it hard to interpret your actual phrasing as anything else. But again, whatever.
Now let's go back to talking about penises.
what a horrible interior decorator he is. He shoves things here and there willy nilly
Sounds uncannily like lurid digs.
I was thinking that the view that computers must inevitably be entirely replaced every 5 years or so is a relatively recent idea.
I've been building computers on and off since 1988. Including a few years when I did it for a living. I still have to occasionally consult on hardware issues.* It has pretty much ALWAYS been the case that computers have been viewed as items with a finite life. Most businesses and academic institutions work on a replacement cycle shorter than 5 years.
And computers assembled bespoke from parts that can be changed later may have been the model for a minority of people, but even there, there's a Ship of Theseus thing going on, with almost everything changed at _least_ every 5 years. Far from previously having been the norm, I'd guess, in fact, that relatively long life-spans for PCs is actually a more recent thing. Post-dating the period when average desktop PCs for fast enough for almost everything,** and when Windows remained relatively stable (from XP on).
* systems set up for image processing and/or big VM boxes, but still, basically the same.
** people sometimes forget just how slow PCs used to be not that far into the past given the range of things we now routinely expect computers to do.
Further to 68: obviously people can and sometimes do keep their hardware for much longer. When I started post-graduate study I was using a 386 based PC that was, at that time, about 10 years old. However, it was almost unusable for anything other than writing with the ancient/obsolete software I ran on it.
I am regularly surprised by colleagues' consumption of computers. They really do seem to forget a password and buy another PC. I had the one before this one for 6 years.
re: 70
Yeah, as it happens my desktop PC at work is about 7 or 8 years old, it got skipped in the last round of replacements because I also have a desktop Mac [which is a fully tooled-up i7 with an SSD and a ton of RAM] and it was felt [by me, as much as by anyone else] that I didn't need it replaced.
My home PC is a ship of theseus job, so while I've owned 'it' for years, I think only the screen and one of the HDDs is more than 5 years old.
As a general rule, I still think it's true that (contra 64) PC lifespans are likely _longer_ now rather than shorter.
Laptops just seem more fragile than desktops, and they also take more knocks. I have had a laptop die from a loose connection on the motherboard (which is not economic to replace). It didn't receive any specific trauma prior to the problem so I assume it was just an accumulation of wear on a weak point. I doubt a desktop would have developed the same problem.
Current desktop (Mac Mini) is 2 years old and still a fine machine. Current laptop (Macbook Pro) is 4 years old and starting to be too slow. However I'm fairly sure a SSD + more RAM would sort that out. If my laptop prior hadn't broken (the one with the motherboard) I would probably still be using it.
Regarding the specific problem in 23: If other suggestions don't work, get a hard disk caddy, extract the hard disk (see iFixit for instructions), see if you can access the disk from another Mac.
32 Exactly the tip I've needed for the past 5 years or so. Disrmboweled Macbook has been lying around forever. I imagine Misty of what's on that drive is nonsense. But also probably pictures!
Di, I have one upstairs that I bought and have never actually used on any of the dead machines we've had. I'd be happy to send it to you.
Speaking of upgrading, I have no idea how, but my wife changed the battery in her iPod (the really old kind with the wheel) with a kit from the internet. It worked.
That would be excellent, Thorn! I'd be happy to send (or bring!) It back after use.
The other thing with laptops is that they keep getting smaller, lighter, and more energy efficient (and hence smaller batteries). This means that the "keep the shell and replace all the innards" model results in having a laptop that is pretty terrible compared to current models.
68: there's a Ship of Theseus thing going on
Yeah. I hesitated a couple of times upthread when writing "same machine", given that this 11-year-old box actually has a replaced fan (unsurprising), additional memory, a replaced/upgraded CPU, and about 5 years ago an entirely new/replaced/upgraded hard drive. Plus added USB ports and an ethernet jack with associated card.
Maybe I should have just acquired a new machine altogether, but my experience has been that these things don't need to be replaced all at the same time, and any new machine I got I would need or want to fix or upgrade somehow in a couple of years anyway. So I tend to max out the box I have. This one is maxed out now. It's not at all creaky or barely useable, but it ain't got no more room in't.
