Sorry if I misunderstood and assumed bashing. It is hard not to leap
to that conclusion when you cite completely atypical OS behavior and
conclude that the OS is badly designed in that it does not operate as
advertised.
As I said and others have said those are not normal problems. I think
you have probably damaged stuff by assuming you knew enough about the
operating system to play around with Terminal. Almost every help site
that mentions Terminal gives warnings to follow their tested
instructions exactly and not to attempt Terminal input on your own.
It might seem silly to someone comfortable with MS-DOS, but the Mac
isn't MS-DOS and even if it were the structure of the operating
system is completely different.
I used to use a firewire reader, but now I use a USB reader regularly
and I have no such problems. My finder does not crash with a USB
reader or for other reasons. But to be fair I am not dragging Windows
files onto my Mac from a Windows formatted card. Occasionally an
application will quit if there is a problem, but it will not bring
down the operating system. Sometimes applications are not written
well and the OS is designed to shut them down rather than let them
crash the system. If basic things don't work right there is
something seriously wrong. The only way you can correct it I think is
to reinstall the operating system from the disk that came with it and
then do the upgrades. There seems to be some consensus that
downloading and installing the combo updaters from the Apple site
works better than the Software Update because more code is replaced
and will occasionally correct some corrupted code that might be
missed otherwise.
Before doing that you could try setting up a new user and operating
as the new user. If the problem persists it is probably damage to the
OS. If it goes away then you probably have some corrupted preferences
for the main user. That used to happen more in the early versions of
the OS X, but you don't hear about it so much any more.
About the trash, it was never designed to be a storage folder. If you
use it as one then you cannot delete as you discovered. The solution
is to make a storage folder for things you are undecided about and
purge it from time to time. You could make a clipping to check the
purge folder and drop that in the trash so when you take a look
inside before emptying it you can have a reminder. Putting a space at
the beginning of the file name will cause it to be the first on your
trash list. The trash is for stuff you know you want to get rid of,
but you get a second chance to take a look before you empty the
trash. A different philosophy perhaps, but that is what many of us
find engaging about it.
Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA
On Apr 2, 2007, at 9:06 PM, Dan Mitchell wrote:
> Winsor Crosby wrote:
>> It is hard for me to understand the logic of doing a bash on a Mac
>> with problems so unusual as to border on the bizarre in the
>> experience of most Mac users and bringing them to a mostly PC using
>> camera list and asking for help.
>
> That's the thing -- fundamentally, I'm doing one thing here:
>
> 1. Copying files from a USB reader onto the Mac.
>
> First problem is that Finder locks up; so I try to deal with Finder
> crashing, and I hit problems with the interaction between the BSD
> layer
> and the UI layer; then I try and work out how to deal with things just
> at the BSD layer and I hit problems with the filesystem layer, etc.
>
> I'm not trying to "bash Macs". When they work the way they claim
> they
> should, they're great -- I'm just surprised at how many basic things
> simply don't work right as often as they should, and how difficult
> it is
> to fix them when they go wrong.
>
> As for why am I asking here? Well, it's not as if off-topic
> things are
> unusual, and I've seen people who know about Mac stuff posting here. I
> could post to cocoa-dev or something, I suppose [1], but this isn't a
> developer problem, it's a user problem, and (yes, I'll admit I'm lazy)
> after googling for 10 minutes I gave up and asked where I hoped people
> would have the answer.
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