…they probably wouldn’t think computers were such a big mystery. The network guy has been at it all day trying to get a wireless card to work in the accountant’s laptop. The laptop’s about four years old, so of course it doesn’t come with a regular ethernet port (I’m trying to remember how far you’d have to go back to find a Mac without an ethernet port…back before the G3 powerbooks, I think). And on the Mac, I just expect the Airport card to work flawlessly – no, even better than that, I expect to be able to use strange networks flawlessly.
Last night I tore the new iBook apart to replace the hard drive (when it bought it it came with 10GB in, and a spare 20GB). The CD is broken – didn’t find a way to fix that. Taking it apart wasn’t that easy – maybe two dozen little tiny screws – but nothing really impossible. Inside is a strange marvel of engineering – not sure why it has to be built the way it is but it’s beautiful in a mysterious technical sort of way. The drive is a standard IDE laptop hard drive – part of the reason I wanted to try this is to see how hard it’ll be to change the drive on my main machine. Installing the new OS was as easy as plugging it into a firewire cable from my other Mac (hold down the T key on reboot); did that this afternoon so we could test the wireless connection, and it works fine.
Here’s another example. I just loaded one of the automatic Microsoft updates. The description of the update goes something like this:
This update addresses an issue in which anyone with access to your IP address could gain control of your computer and remotely launch attacks on the world’s financial infrastructure, possibly affecting the value of Microsoft stock. We won’t tell you exactly what we’re patching, ’cause either we don’t know and we’re just taking a shot in the dark at it, or it’s so obvious it would be embarassing to us to admit it. Sure, we could have created an operating system that didn’t have massive holes like this, but we felt you would be more beholden to us if you had to come back for updates constantly to hold off this sort of thing. Oh, and by the way, this update may affect all sorts of other seemingly unrelated aspects of your computer, like adding Digital Rights Management to your MP3s and sending copies of your emails to the NSA. And no doubt you’ll have to restart your computer to complete installation of this update, perhaps several times. Would you like to sell what little remains of your soul to the devil for the marginal peace of mind you’ll get from this update?
…where an OSX update message tends to be more like this…
This update patches errors in the FTP portion of the TCP/IP stack which could, under extremely rare and mostly hypothetical circumstances, allow an intruder to gain root access to your computer. Since this stack is open source, as soon as someone discovered the vulnerability it was fixed, and within a day or two we verified that and incorporated it into our system. This use of standard UNIX components means less work for us, and a more secure system for you. Another benefit, is that we can’t sneak any software modifications you wouldn’t want in there, because someone could look at our code and notice. If this is an update to proprietary Apple software like the user interface or our cool iTools, you probably trust us to handle it even more carefully than we would open source patches – and it probably adds cool new features! And since we know that uptime is important to you, we’ll only make you restart the computer if it’s absolutely necessary. If you decide not to install this update now, that’s okay with us, too – your computer, your choice, it’ll probably be fine either way.
By the way, the network tech gave up on the Windows laptop, didn’t ever get it to find the network.