05/21/2001
by Irene Tosetti
Columnist

Last night, I went to sleep and dreamt of a beautiful stranger, with a familiar face and yet a far-away look in his eyes... his name was Mr. X. He wouldn't answer as I shouted at him ñand you, Mr. X, are telling me I don't have privileges on my own machine?? Are you kidding? I'll sue you!!! This is a free country!

Don't get me wrong: I simply love Apple, and all the Macs ever created on this planet, Jobs, Woz, and everything in-between.... It's just that I'm the no-unix kind of girl! Last night I had my good reasons for not having such a good sleep: after a quick dinner spent with my mind set on the assignment I had to do, I sat down at the desk knowing that I really needed to work hard on my trusty Wallstreet. Well, that was when, for the first time in almost two months, I had my first real problem with OS X.

It's a masterpiece, I can understand that: I see Aqua is just a wonderful creation, so beautiful and simple, yet so complicated. Also, it's served me very well in the past eight weeks. But please let me also say that never (n-e-v-e-r) in my 14 years of experience as an avid Mac user had I found bugs that affected the typical Macintosh user-friendly feeling - last night I did!

What am I guilty of, after all? I just wanted to move some files and apps around, arrange some folders, nothing more... and I found myself lost in a nightmare of privileges, read/write/execute, terminals, netinfomanagers, slashdots, white fonts on black background... all of that just to try and manage to gain my right to organize my working environment the way I liked! And is there any error message more frustrating than you don't have enough privileges when you're sitting at your OWN powerbook ? Tell me, fellow powerbook (and iBook, too!) users: doesn't if feel like being told that you can no longer use a part of your life because you don't have enough privileges? No sir, you can't walk the dog, you don't have enough privileges. I'm afraid you won't be able to drive today, madam. You just don't have the necessary privileges. Here in Europe, history is a big thing, I'm sure you know... this privilege stuff makes me think of France before the Revolution! In the end, I found a nice utility called XFiles on a download site and almost - but not completely - solved my problems. Now what about the fact that I lost 1 hour for such geek stuff instead of my work? If I'd wanted to lose sleep hours on configuration problems, I'd bought a PeeCee laptop!

On a more serious side, this is an issue for the average non-techie user. Apple has this amazing product called OS X, and there are some people who really like to hack everything, and maybe they're completely in love with Unix, and I'm happy about that. But I'm sure that most of us - especially the ones who chose a portable mac system, as we need to move around and still get things done - still consider their very first priority to concentrate on the accomplishment of their personal and professional tasks as quickly and as painlessly as possible. A Unix system that gets in my way is not something I like - I just want a smooth and efficient GUI. I know, I should adjust to this New Deal of Mac OS X and blah blah... and I will, but I need its Unix core to become so perfectly disguised that I just cannot see it. Less privileges, we live in a Democracy or don't we? Hide it even better, Apple, and the ones who want to play around will always have Terminal to do that; the rest of us will just keep living happily ever after with our beloved Powerbooks.