“I sat down at my Macintosh at home to do some photo editing when I realized the pictures I wanted were on a Windows computer. Although the two machines are just a few feet from each other, moving the files from one to the other would, until recently, have required me to copy the pictures to some sort of removable storage unit, probably a recordable CD. Then plunk that into the Mac.” Read the article at BusinessWeek.
//until recently, have required me to copy the pictures to some sort of removable storage unit, probably a recordable CD. Then plunk that into the Mac//
Oh, the pain! Oh, the misery! How terrible! Wasting dozens of seconds of your precious life, on data transfer!
Slave to the marketing machine.
Big Deal.
I am really going to buy a mac just so I can access files on my windows file server… I already have a windows/beos laptop and they both do that.
Back to work.
Is this guy clueless, or what? While Jag makes the process easier, what he describes has been possible from day one on OS X via the Finder. And the free SMB Browse utility even provided a ‘Network Neighbourhood’ workalike …
monty
“Oh, the pain! Oh, the misery! How terrible! Wasting dozens of seconds of your precious life, on data transfer!”
I guess people invented the multitudes of networking and file sharing technologies that exist today for nothing.
People, stop trolling.
It’s elitist to assume and expect the entire world to become computer experts. “That’s so easy, just an extra step! Gosh, what a dummy!” Well, stop dissing my mom.
Attacking companies that are trying to make it easier for ordinary folks, so they are less confused by their “Personal Confuser” is elitist and childish at the same time.
the over all trend here is reassuring. Apple’s focus on value add via ease of use and integration/communication with the rest of the world (win pcs, pda, phones) is getting notice. That is nice because apple deserves to have at least 20% share in the market and this is part of solution to get there.
The days of selling PCs strictly on processor speed are long gone. Intel and MS won’t get though and this is also good.
// “That’s so easy, just an extra step! Gosh, what a dummy!” Well, stop dissing my mom. //
If your mother has a LAN in her home with WinTel and Mac machines interconnected, then she is BY_NO_MEANS an “ordinary folk.”
Think of a better example, or shut the hell up.
Man, unlax or something. That’s a really big example. I’m on my way to China to teach English, so I’ve been home for about five weeks. I have networked my laptops w/my parents’ desktop.
*Gasp* A lan! One they don’t know how to use. My mother is an ordinary person, as is my father. They have *no idea* how to move stuff around (iBook has no floppy). At least, ’til I showed ’em how.
Don’t get overly defensive or anything, but you’re wrong.
Sheesh… and stop cursing at strangers.
Peace,
TLFord
You really need some sort of user controlled moderation system on here. Every single forum turns into a flame war, or an all out offtopic argument. Let’s put trolls in their place.
Yes, ordinary people are just too dumb to even want to have, or try to have, multiple PCs of different kinds in their home. That’s for the experts, don’t they realize that!
// That’s a really big example//
Come again???
//I have networked my laptops w/my parents’ desktop.//
Hmm…so, your mother setup the LAN, right? No, your father did…no, wait … _YOU_ did.
So, you aren’t “ordinary folk,” either. Had you not setup the LAN, your folks would have no idea about file transfers between WinTel and Mac via a LAN. They’d have to go to the extreme trouble of “burning files to a CD-ROM” (which, from all the Apple ads I’ve read, is easier than picking your nose), and then inserting said CD into their PC.
Tough. Really tough. You could teach your ma and pa how to do this in about 3 minutes. You need to give your folks more credit.
while this article might be interesting for mac newbies, I’m farily sure that this article won’t enlighten a single soul on this sight. I’m sorry for bitching Eugenia, but what made you post it here?
I would think there could be some people on this site, whose job involves working on OS’s and applications. Many of the consumers of such products would like easier to use products. So it’s informative for those people at least.
m dad is not a computer geek, he is not even able to move around a GUI (he loves his old Apple IIe) but, he can go to Buest buy, pick up a home wireless networking kit that uses USB networking, and plug them all in to the computers….what apple had done is make it easier to network Apple computers to Windows computers.
Networking has become no brainer in the last few years pal. get with the times.
bloody hell rockwell what’s the point in arguing?
burning a cd-r to transfer pictures or any other file from a computer to another computer 10 feet away is incredibly wasteful.
macintosh with os 10.2 has made connecting to a pc over a network easy for the laymen. what is your issue?
it’s as simple as that. i don’t even know why you’d feel like arguing about it.
slave to the marketing machine… whatever, most people just don’t have the knowledge to set up a network without easy to follow prompts.
aivars
I do computer support at a big drug company. I’m hardly a novice…we support mostly NT, some Linux and I’m tossing OS X on a machine this afternoon.
Because I don’t memorize every single feature of every OS on the market, I didn’t know that Jaguar had this ability built in…I figured we’d need to have the user buy a copy of Dave.
So this “useless” article just made my day.
Our friend Kyle, the first to call Adam de Boor a clown, is calling for moderation. He will say that he had a good reason to do so, I will say he had much better reasons not to do so.
O.K. Lets see:
I have a BeOS machine, and a Windows machine.
To access files stored in my windows machine, from my BeOS I use BeServed.
Cost:
$15, BeOS server & client.
$5 Windows server.
5 minutes to set up the shared folders.
To access files stored on my BeOS machine, I use Samba For BeOS.
Cost:
$0, but some 30 minutes of reading and configuration.
Yes, you may say “but this is the guy who was the one ranting at BeServed’s forums.. ”
Well, I just emailed teldar support, they were very very servicial, and I’m using a Beta version of BeServed (v 1.20) which works nearly perfect.
Article.
Cost: $149.
Time: does not say. But lets suppose just 5 minutes.
Big Deal. Incredible innovation.
no, HUGE deal indeed, just look at the price.
Yeah before you flame me. I read wrong, the correct price is 129 for one, 199/5 for a family pack of OSx. Either way BeServed is cheaper.
Much of that time would have been saved if I had read more carefully the instructions.
I never use SMB to move large files in OS X. For some reason the transfer speeds are atrocious. While on a 100bT full duplex network, I’ll get 300kB/s. Using FTP for the same transfer results in speeds of about 8MB/s. It’s just abominable.
Also, the only kernel panics I’ve seen in Jaguar have been while attempting to use SMB. It pops up the old “You need to restart your computer” screen in multiple languages.
Apple has added some cool filesystem support features in Jaguar (including the FTP filesystem) but it all needs some serious debugging.
So I suppose ftp servers just mysteriously went away a few years ago?
BeOS has it built in. Getting an ftp server up and running on Windoze is braindead easy if you use WarFTP Daemon, or others.
Even Mac’s have ftp software, that my mother could figure out.
I don’t see the justification for spending $129 on shareware.
It’s funny there’s so many people on this site that are the same in one respect – they can’t imagine for the life of them that there’s a whole universe of computer users (and potential users) out there who don’t want to learn how to set up FTP between a mac and PC. Lord. No the mac is not for you. But give apple a break for making it for people that aren’t “configuration” junkies.
It’s rather amusing. There are so many people here that keep piping up about BeOS being so much better. Well, it very well may be. Problem is:
BeOS is dead.
Get over it.
It’s the greatest thing since toast. I run my PC headless now, except for games.
http://www.mactopia.com
– they can’t imagine for the life of them that there’s a whole universe of computer users (and potential users) out there who don’t want to learn how to set up FTP between a mac and PC. —
It seems to me Eugenia has to put up one of these fluff articals each week otherwise the apple fans go off at her for for being unfair against macs, this piece isnt relevant to us .. were on osnews.com now newbiemacuserswhocantftp.com
I think we need a little bit of assurance from the mac readers here that Eugenia dosnt have to find a mac fluff artical just to keep u guys happy.
If u dont maybe ill start winging so we can have some articals on how to copy files between 2 windows machines?..95+% of computer users use windows.. so we should have 19* more articals about windows each week?
i think osnews should be the os news.. if mac hasnt done anything we dont need articals like this. if your that desperate for mac news (to learn u can copy files using samba (its actually installed by default finally in this osx!)) then go to a mac site.
I had to help my IT graduate friend set up samba on osx.. i was stunned macosx (pre jaguar) was advertised as connecting to windows networks.. it came with 0 documentation and samba not installed. Hell any unix can run samba.. its not a feature of the OS.. its just someone elses software.
that’s what apple is doing. make fun of it all you want, but people appreciate this.
To you trolls out there:
If you havent noticed, Eugenia is interrested in usability. And thats what this article seems to be about. Not usability for technocrats like ourselves. But for the commoner, which represent about 70-80% of the computer market at least.
Too bad not more people take usability seriously…
I have tried it and – like any version 1.0 M$ product, it’i unstable like hell.
Not serious usable at all.
Ralf.
You probably have a dual CPU configuration Ralf. The Microsoft “solution” to this is to disable one CPU while running RDC. Pathetic. Its been discussed for a while in their newsgroup, but still no fix is available.
rdesktop running under X (install both with Fink) does the trick too and is more stable…
I think ease of use is very important. Sometimes I just want to “use” it!