Any reason I shouldn't get a Mac Mini to replace my old pc?

In My Humble Opinion
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grep.

Further, Microsoft has (at last count) cscript, wscript, and now a new CLI called Monad.

The problem isn’t that they don’t have the capabilities, it’s that they’ve got three ways of doing it, all different, and you don’t know when support for one is going to go away because they decide it’s not in their best interests to support it.

Microsoft’s problem is that they never stopped selling on features. If you used 50 of 60 commands in Word 3.0, and 52 of 150 commands in word 98, and 54 of 1500 commands in Word 2000 and 54 of 2500 commands in Word 2003…why on earth would you pay to upgrade to Word 2005 (with 3400 features!)? Oh yeah, because Microsoft is going to break backward compatibility with Word 2000.

How is this good for me?

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(I know this is off-topic but no kidding. I just installed the newest version of Photoshop on my machine, and it’s the first thing in a while that made my PC feel slow. (I use a console for games.) The old version of Photoshop does 99% of what I want, so why should I upgrade?)

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You’re able to grep from the commandline, you just need to install a version of grep. Likewise, you cannot run grep from a Unix commandline if you do not have a copy of grep.

Granted, all Unices I’ve heard of come with grep, and Windows does not. However, Windows does come with findstr. If you simply prefer a particular syntax, that’s fine. But Windows XP does come with a regular expression / file searching commandline tool by default. It no more makes sense to criticize Windows for this than it makes sense to criticize OS X for not shipping with Notepad, ignoring that it does come with a basic text editor.

Also, you complain that there are three different ways of doing things, yet there are how many different shells for Unix? The existence of choice among shells was brought up by Absolute as being a positive for OS X.

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You missed the part about them supporting many things, then letting them die.

I don’t think the problem is ‘What can X do that Y cannot’. To be honest, I had a hard time thinking of something that you couldn’t do in the Windows CLI that the average joe would want to do.

But being fully educated on BOTH platforms, I’ll take OS X every single time. It has the underlying power of Unix, the Pretty GUI of Windows, and the viral resistance of, well, OS X.

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      • or of Linux. Except that Linux is free and works on faster PC’s already… Don’t forget! Apple just recently took top honors for “Best Home-Computer Hardware of 1999”.

Before they changed it to “Think Differently”, their slogan was “You can buy faster hardware, but you can’t make us use it”. :smiley:
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Bzzt wrong. The script kiddies like a poorly implemented Linux box even MORE than an unpatched Windows Box.

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      • Over on the Ars forums, people have a thread in the Battlefront forum where they were arguing over the error rate of a OS-tracking site (that tracks search engine user statistics), with regards to if any type of OS would have been significantly underrepresented.

I decided as a generally-screwball argument to compare the ratio of usage statistics to the ratio of posts in the relevant Ars forums, based on the assumption that most posts are by people having problems, or of others offering solutions that don’t work. This wasn’t really what the main course of the thread was -actually about-, but derailling is not a bannable offense. It also explains why the post is a bit tongue-in-cheek.
And anyway, I kinda got curious about the numbers myself.
The results surprised me; I honestly did not expect to see such huge differences in “problem ratios”.

http://www.norcom2000.com/users/dcimper/assorted/inanities/my_penis/isbiggerthanyours.html

… what’s most interesting about this is that so many people hold the wide belief that Windows is simply riddled with problems–but it would seem that the reason that most PC users (who also use Windows) only think this because they have not tried using Mac or Linux.
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All your stats show is that Mac and Linux folks are more talkative, when compared to lurkers. Without digging deeper into your numbers (argueably not possibly) you don’t Distinguish between “I’m having a problem”, 4 “Here’s the solution” posts, and 38 “Am too! Are NOT!” posts.

I’ll not say I’ve ever had problems with ANY computer I’ve used. I’ve had much fewer, and HAVE fewer ongoing ‘tuning, tweaking, cleaning up after the mess’ problems with the mac.

Your statistical sample also only looks at the population that’s on Ars…NOT a valid sample to make this kind of determination from. Especially since it’s got a lot of banboi-type ‘My Distro is more 733t that Your Distro’ chaff, sprinkled in with the wheat.

So, your assumptions are specious, and your statistics unsound.

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This has an interesting overlap with another thread and shows that correlational research is not casual, and naturalistic observation of web-based activity is just a snapshot with precursors and antecedents that are impossible to explain.

Btw, interesting URL path you have there… I see you ahve been answering your e-mail SPAM!

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Try Windows key + M

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      • Yea, that’s the first reply it got over on Ars–along with a “wtf does that have to do with this thread?” response–but claiming that really doesn’t make any sense, does it? …Because it presumes that an extremely high percentage of the posts in the Windows-concerned forums is about a problem or a failed solution for a problem, and most of the posts in the Mac forum and nearly all the posts in the Linux forum are people chatting about the new spring fashions from Paris. There’s no reason to believe that’s true–and if you skim through the posts, it certainly doesn’t appear to be so.
  • Also what I am guessing is that Mac and Linux use is considered “specialized”, where PC use is considered “standard”–and that some people using Mac or Linux would rather go find a means of internet discussion that deals only with their particular operating system. Which means that if anything–the Mac and Linux numbers are underrepresented on the Ars forums, but not in the use statistics. The actual “problem factors” of Mac and Linux would likely be higher if more forums were included, particularly those that only deal with Mac and Linux use.
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You REALLY need a course on statistics…preferably one that includes info on the Scientific method.

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Doug, you really have too many unfounded assumptions and wild guesses for your “statistics” to be in any way useful.

In forums like that, you simply cannot make the “assumption that most posts are by people having problems, or of others offering solutions that don’t work.” There are myriad other reasons why people might post to such a forum.

Furthermore, you say that:

But this fails to make any distinction between different types of “problem.”

For example, if i ask a question about a dissappearing user account and loss of files in Windows, then it’s reasonably likely that there is an actual problem with the Windows OS on my computer. So, my thread might be a reasonable one to include in your statistics.

But if i ask a question about how to remove an icon from my system tray, and prevent that program from starting when i start my computer, this does not indicate a problem with Windows; it simply indicates that i lack certain knowledge about how to use the operating system.

Similarly with a Mac, if i ask a question like this one, which i asked on this board almost two years ago, it probably indicates a problem with the Mac itself. Some Mac models had a problem whereby if they were shut down improperly (either due to user error or power outage) the System Folder would become corrupt. I believe the problem has since been fixed.

But if i complain that i can’t get my airport wireless setup to work, there’s a good chance it’s because i haven’t set it up properly, and has nothing to do with the operating system.

In the two operating systems above, the second example in each case is one that many people might have, and might ask questions about, but that is not at all indicative of an actual problem with the operating system itself.

And it seems to me that Linux users are even more likely to ask such questions, because Linux is, in many ways, a more complicated operating system, particularly for people who have never had occasion to use it before. I’ve contemplated making the switch to Linux at some stage in the future, and i know that if i do i’ll probably have to ask a bunch of questions on message boards before i’m properly set up. And none of these questions would reflect badly on the operating system—they would simply indicate my lack of knowledge about it. The fact that i don’t know how to “recompile a kernel” (or even know what that means) is not an indication that Linux is a bad operating system.

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      • If you wanted to detirmine which “product” was the easiest to use, then what you would want to do is compare the user base with the total number of problems reported, right?

  • The main problem with the “thecounter” stats being used (and so with my analysis) is that some people to set their browsers to peform spoofing. The point I would make on that is that as it stands, the Mac problem factor is about 30 (with Windows=1) and the Mac use percentage in the combined Windows/Mac/Linux total stats from thecounter.com is about 2.63%. The browser spoofing doesn affect the number of visitor counts per-computer-type, but doesn’t affect the number of problems posted to web forums–and so to increase the Mac use percentage to 30X (and push the problem factor down to that equal with Windows) would imply that roughly 78% of ALL computers the statistics concern were really Macs. Does that sound probable to you? I seem to recall that the sales figures for Macs were around 5% of Windows at best–which would still only push the problem ratio of Macs down to 15.

  • The second common assertion is that users in the different forums for Windows, Mac and Linux-are using these forums in drastically different ways–and I simply see no evidence of this. In any of the forums–most of the thread starters are concerning a problem, and the reason a thread gets a lot of replies is usually that solutions presented don’t work. When a working solution is found, the thread doesn’t get replied to anymore. It is true that the same questions do tend to get asked repeatedly–but that is true in all three groups–and it is still representative of the difficulty involved in using the computer in question.
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It does not. There are so many HUGE holes in your theory. Here’s just the first few that come to mind:

  1. You’re comparing the percentage gathered over a whole population and trying to shoehorn it into a tech-based forum. You might be able to do some comparison for google, but not Ars Technica, whose membership is, at a mminimum, interested in technical discussion. And the numbers gatherd there are suspect as just about EVERY browser says ‘hey, I’m IE4!’

  2. THIS OP started out as ‘should I or shouldn’t I buy a mac’ and has devolved into theory of interpreting numbers and palm reading. Without looking at each thread in a forum, how can you judge its a valid sample. (hint: you can’t.) For every ‘I have a problem with X’, you need to deal with ‘here’s pics of GF’s system.’

  3. IF a thread were a problem…and a solution (and a dupe or two for good measure), it’d have 3 hits…if it’s JThunder’s Who Am I? thread, it runs into the hundreds of posts. How do you reconcile that?

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      • So no offense, but find any big computer forum that has separate forums for Windows, Mac and Linux, and compare the post numbers to the stats I used. I’m curious, and will do the same for any big sites I can find.
  • Yes browser spoofing is certainly possible, especially on non-Windows platforms–but the problem with that point is that Macs run on different hardware than PC’s, so sales statistics for each are available separately. By the stats I used, Macs were about 2.6% of all computers that visited, so go find some sales figures of Macs vs PC’s for the last few years or so–because to argue that a large number of Macs are spoofing is to argue that Macs make up “much more” than 2.6% of the total number of desktop computers sold. …I don’t know what percentage of the total desktop computers are Macs, but I’d be surprised if it was over 5%, which would still only cut the Mac problem factor down to 15, which would still be way above the Windows factor of 1.

…You could even point out that Macs have much-longer useful lifetimes than PC’s–which I have read elsewhere, and I don’t doubt, just because Macs are more expensive to replace–but even if a Mac is kept twice as long as a PC before it is replaced, that would skew the sales factors for any closed period only 2X in the PC direction–but still only cut the Mac problem factor down to 7.5.
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