[X Newbies] Crash city

[Vincent Cayenne]

At 11:14a -0500 2003.02.14, TheMacintoshLady wrote:
>Please know what you are talking about before you complain.

I'm taking the above out of context but it's ever so relevant. I'm 
sure that assisting others for 14 hours out of the day leaves little 
time for much else but it might behoove you to at least spend a 
little of your own time staying up to date on the information side. 
For someone facing the challenges that you have with OS X, I strongly 
recommend that you at least give MacFixit, Macintouch and MacNN  the 
daily once-over. Also, for each of the applications that you deal 
with, look up the application on VersionTracker and note the 
comments. Finally, find one of the Mac OS X books that has a writing 
style you find comfortable and spend some time learning OS X (as 
opposed to only trying to find how to do things the OS 9 way using OS 
X). O'Reilly seems to be rolling out what amounts to a library of OS 
X material. There's also an "OS X Unleashed", 2nd Ed. (orange cover) 
that I consider a veritable bible while David Pogue's offerings cover 
a lot of ground.

Efforts in that direction would have led to the fact that FaxSTF has 
been almost universally panned by the user community. I do _not_ say 
this from experience but my reading has led to a singular lack of 
desire for me to even try the beast if it were offered. The same 
reading has shown that nothing on OS X has yet compared to the 
defunct GlobalFax (which I owned from inception and loved). Page 
Sender is garnering excellent reviews. Cocoa Efax is a contender.

In the same vein, with your evident misfortunes with OS X long before 
now, one would think that your research would have apprised you of 
the fact that there were _some_ new machines that would not boot OS 
9. If you were buying a brand new machine at a time when this is the 
case, you should at least find out where your proposed purchase would 
lie on that front. If the fact that the machine would not boot OS 9 
was not revealed to you ** when you asked that obvious question at 
the time of purchase ** you should return the machine because of the 
misrepresentation.

There are several resources which have grown up around the known 
shortcomings, flaws and omissions in OS X. These convey information, 
present workarounds, list other resources, offer help, explain 
shortcuts, make patches available, etc. OSXHints, MacSlash, 
MacOSXApps, Randy B. Singer's invaluable troubleshooting guide, the 
sites mentioned earlier, the world of Usenet with 
comp.sys.everythingbutthekitchensink - all available through Google 
Groups or any news reader.

While no one know it all, and it's hard sometimes to even know a lot, 
it's hard to countenance that you have been picking away at OS X for 
three years! You seem to have been trying to make OS X _be_ OS 9 for 
much of that time. OS X is _NOT_ OS 9. It is as "Macintosh" as we 
could ever hope for but it is DIFFERENT. Give it and yourself a real 
chance: pretend that it is a new operating system. See my sig.

One of the best things about OS X is that anything that is missing 
will probably be added. What's just "different" may actually 
represent progress. May...
-- 
There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good."
And one says, "This is new, and therefore better"
  - John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider"