Sunday night talkcast: Mac OS X gripefest + Ask TUAW

To Michael Rose above - I had no idea that command existed. It certainly seems to accomplish what I need - thanks for the tip!

Re: copy/merge

Over the weekend I suffered a hard disk controller failure during a copy operation, and the failure deleted about 5% of the data on the disk. The problem is, the data lost was spread out over almost every directory. One file from this directory, two files from that directory, nothing at all lost from that directory, one file lost from that directory - you get the idea.

I had a full backup on a NAS so nothing unrecoverable. But OS X's copy behaviour meant that I had to copy over EVERY FILE rather than just those files that were missing. In order to make sure that I restored every missing file, OS X forces me to copy over the top of a very deep directory tree -- well on the way to a terabyte of data, when the missing files might measure only in the hundreds of megabytes.

Darwin's crippled "cp" wouldn't even let me issue "cp -R -u".

Sorry, but that's retarded. I shouldn't have to go out and buy a backup and restore program when an EIGHT-CHARACTER instruction at a bash prompt would do the job.

In 24 years of using the MAC professionally I have never once noticed the absence of the option to merge the contents of folders. I guess I always simply copied or moved the actual files I wanted to copy or move.

I don't really feel I have suffered.

If they added that feature tomorrow I doubt I would ever use it.

Also...Sorry for the double post....If someone could discuss converting an ISO file so it could be manipulated in iMovie, I would appreciate it. (I am trying to put a highlight reel for my brother's sports team together, but all ew have is dvd's of the games after they were dumped from an HDD camera.

Thanks again.

Could you each talk about what kind of Microphone you are using for the talkcast? Michael Rose, you usually sound the best, but I was not sure if that was because you are hosting or if you just used a superior input device.

Thanks.

I had a question about how to transfer DVR'ed programs to my Mac, or if there was someway to put a TV-tuner of some sort on the mac? I've heard of products like EyeTV, etc. I have no idea on what these products do.. Thanks! I'm basically just trying to record TV programs so I can transfer them to my iPod, iPhone, etc. Thanks!

After the upgrade to 10.5.2 Spotlight has been flakey. It's been indexing my drive for weeks now. Spotlight says '-2147483648 hourse remaining' (yes, that's a negative).

I used Spotless and totally clean up the indexes and removed Spotlight and restarted Spotlight from scratch. No change.

I've used Disk Utilities found no problems. Disk Warrior 4 finds no problems.

Went to the Apple Store, they delete the cache files, Disk Warrior 4, some other "magical things" in the back of the store, but still Spotlight continues to index and take 100% of my CPU.

Any recommendations?

How about we address THE most fundamental problem (IMHO) with MacOS, and that is the piss poor Finder. File management on Mac (without resorting to CLI) is the worst out of all of the major OSes.

Step 1 on that list IMHO is folder merging. If I copy a folder into another, and a folder by the name already exists, it should let me merge the contents of the two, like EVERY OTHER OS DOES ALREADY, instead of simply prompting me to cancel or replace. This is something that we've been begging for since 10.0, and it's sad that something this basic isn't even in.

Step 2 is editing multiple file properties at once. Go now, try this - select a bunch of files, and then go to Get Info, it brings up an inspector for EVERY single file, separately. What it should (and what every other OS does) is merge the settings into one pane, so I can do things like mass-editing of file extensions, or file permissions, or anything else.

Do those two things and maybe MacOS can be on its way to becoming a respectable OS in terms of file management (which, IMHO is a pretty core aspect of the OS).

I've all of a sudden had issues with my Airport Extreme (802.11n) with the 10.5.2 upgrade... Im not alone either.

The only cure is to unplug the frickin thing and run web sharing from the iMac... there is NO WAY im buying another one... HURRAY UP APPLE.

I just made the big switch with an iMac 24" a few weeks. Absolutely no gripes, I'm loving it. Leopard runs smooth and I've been throwing a lot at it. My wife, a non techie, loves it as well. I have to admit that after a lot of worry...migrating from a PC to Mac was a helluva easier than any of the PC to PC migrations I've done.