No Hard Reset
Only giving your computer a soft reset is a sign of too much balls on the part of Apple. Dear Apple, you are not perfect, your software will crash. Give me an easy way to recover. When your keyboard and mouse stop responding, and the screen just stays frozen that is the first sign. When you go to another computer and try to ping your computer and it has stopped responding that is the second. When you go back into your room and all 7 low rpm fans are running at high rpm in your computer you know it is time for drastic measures. So you hold down the power button to engage a reset. Unfortunately it is only a soft reset button. There is no hard reset button on a G5. I had to resort to the human prerogative when dealing with machines: pull the plug.
Fortunately journaling filesystems are already part of os x, I don’t need to wait for zfs to not lose a disc in the process. Also to my mac’s credit, it had been running non-stop since at least Christmas and possibly longer. More than I can say for my poor twice this month BSOD PC. (On the other hand, I can just restart that without yanking the battery.)
June 19th, 2007 at 11:52
Funnily, I have been being annoyed at the lack of a hard reset button on my new work laptop (Sony). It’s not just apple that is overconfident! (And I’d say Apple has better justification for overconfidence, anyway.)
June 19th, 2007 at 14:49
Waaay back when, my first year of college, I really disliked Macs. The dorm setup was a group of Mac Pluses with system folders loaded over the network, and it was a bit fragile. Later on, thinking about it, I was impressed by the ability to boot the OS from afar, but at the time I was just annoyed by the error message when anything bad happened, which was fairly often. You’d get the bomb, and a number, and if you looked the number up in the “manual”, it’d basically say that you weren’t qualified to understand what this means, please call Apple, ‘k, thanks, bye.
It took newer machines and more informative systems for me to become a fan.
June 19th, 2007 at 22:19
Mike, Still trying to decide what to do with the Mac Classic II in original packaging in the basement. I sometimes miss macsbug.
Pam, the problem is that no matter how justified the overconfidence may be, it is still overconfident. I want to be able to turn my machine off. When I used to program robots to move around a room based on vision alone, we always had a big red off switch on top. Maybe I’ve seen too many terminator movies, but I like my machines to be easy to turn off.
June 20th, 2007 at 10:53
Lately, on every computer that I’ve tried it, when I hold down the power button for more than five seconds, it turns off. It works for my laptop, my Mac Book, and a couple of iMacs.
It’s a confusing interface: I removed the battery from my laptop before I knew about it.
Is there a chance that this would work for you, Josh or Pam?
-alain
June 20th, 2007 at 16:55
Alain, that normally works, but it is still a soft reset, just a little harder than the single press which tries to shut down the OS. There is still some software mechanism happening there, and with whatever horrible state I got my mac into, it couldn’t recover from that even with holding the button down for a really long time. (See “hold down the power button to engage a reset” from the main article.) It was a truly impressive hang.