User:Kalisphoenix

From Mac Guides

As a person who has bought all but one of my Macs used, accurate and reliable hardware definitions are extremely meaningful to me. Existing resources are fairly scant and often do not enter into enough detail to aid a person installing Linux or another "third-party" operating system on their Macs. There are often features (such as booting from Firewire, booting from USB, booting into target disk mode, and so on) that are possible on some Macs and not on others. Also, many models can only use operating systems within a narrow band of versions.

To that end, I think that combining machines that are superficially identical but completely different on an internal and functional level (such as the Power Macintosh G4 (Yikes) and the Power Macintosh G4 (Sawtooth)) into a single article is fatuous.

• It can lead prospective buyers to equate the two machines and buy one without the full arsenal of necessary information.
• It can lead users into risking their data by entrusting it to unsupported setups (for instance, slave drives on a Revision 1 Blue and White G3).
• Users can mistakenly spend money on peripherals or software that is not supported by their setup.
• Users can throw away machines based on a fault that can be fixed (for instance, throwing away certain iMac G3's that require firmware updates prior to installing OS X and got borked).

These are just a few examples of the harmful effects that can result from incorrect or poorly conveyed information. It is my opinion that combining information on substantially dissimilar models into single pages is never a good policy. There is no noticeable benefit to acting in accordance with that idea.

What's more is that the same ethic is being applied to every other facet of this wiki. Therefore, I'm getting the hell out of here. The whole experience has just been too frustrating, and I only worked on it for a couple of hours!

Peace 8)

Kalisphoenix 19:12, 31 October 2005 (EST)