i am a fire alarm technician. my largest customer uses an addressable fire alarm network programmed in dos. the software is proprietary, and doesn’t even act like other dos software i have used. i type lots of exciting lines like:
ala 00 04 14 53 smoke detectorstudent center third floor room 351
06 0650 activate presignal four minute delay sequence
02 00 00 15 02 main hvac fan shutdown relay
Unfortunately, once you get past basic Windows programming you start running into API calls that are undocumented, underdocumented, or straight up do not do what they claim to do (or, worse, do exactly what they claim in a way that’s not useful in practice; Raymond Chen gives one example in his excellent blog, The Old New Thing). Then there are COM objects, which were really gross for a long time. I’m told that there’s some .NET infrastructure for creating them automagically now, which if so, yay.
I got my Mac experience in college (the PC computer clusters were always full, the Apple orchards were generally empty), but I could never get past the different ALT-Tab behavior. My usual pattern is to have 15-20 windows in 5 or 6 applications open at any one time, with 2-3 windows of active interest at once. Having to switch between Command-Tab and Command-Escape AND either hold shift or not was too much for me.
Yeah, thanks for pulling the quote out of the context of the post in order to make that point. :rolleyes:
I said no such thing, and in fact, while I find OS X to be superior in many ways to Windows (which is sort of like pitching a race between a Corolla and a Pinto) it is by no means the “perfect utopia” of operating systems. The GUI is shiny and pretty consistant but not as accessible from the CLI as I’d like. It’s also very top-heavy and resource intensive, moreso than X.org (and given what a boehemeth that is, it’s saying something). It does many things right but there are other things that could be done much better. And while the underlying system, Darwin, is based upon the best refinement yet of Unix (the FreeBSD kernel), it still brings a lot of legacy junk from Unix. Apple itself is a peculiar company–half invested in open source code and robust, well-specified hardware, half obnoxious, pandering, money-grubbing jerks who charge an arm and a leg for an OS revision and yank the community that supports their core system back and forth. So don’t go casting me as a starry-eyed Mac fan. I like a lot about what they do, but it’s far from perfection.
If by scripting language you mean VBA, color me unimpressed. And I have to admit a bias toward the way Perl and Python function uniformly on Unix-like OSs, whereas they operate in a kind of flaky way on Windows, and can’t interface well (if at all) with most Windows apps. AppleScript, although (deliberately) limited in functionality, provides good-to-excellent interoperability between applications that a user can pick up quickly, and Apple presses developers to make their functionality available to AS calls. I’m surprised that Windows hasn’t developed anything like it. (And please, no pointing fingers at the marginally functional, crippled OLE/ActiveX controls and the poorly supported ActiveX scripting. And nothing I’ve seen about .NET makes me impressed with the ease, consistency and functionality of it. You can do an impressive amount of AppleScript coding without ever opening an IDE, whereas JScript and VBScript require a fairly extensive base of knowledge before you can begin to crawl.)
Except for the more common Windows APIs, much of the interface specifications are treated as proprietary and available only to favored developers (especially GUI APIs), and even then, are not consistent between versions; software that works fine on 2000 goes seriously wonky on XP. (I won’t even enter into the discussions the abominations that are 95 and 98, and it wouldn’t be germaine anyway, since equally vaild arguments could be made toward pre-OS X versions of MacOS.) Apple, on the other hand, makes their Cocoa and Quartz specs completely open to developers, and the core Darwin system is completely open source (though some hardcore FreeBSD advocates will take issue with Apple’s licensing scheme and attitude toward BSD developers…nonetheless, the source code is available for download from Apple’s site.)
It makes it easier for the user; you can uniformly rely on OS X applications to operate in a (pretty) consistent manner, whereas Windows apps each tend to have a widely varying feel and operation. Admittedly, Windows has gotten somewhat better about this in XP (though the stock GUI looks like something dreamed up by a Fisher-Price ad exec) but Apple has made operational consistancy a core development goal, even back well into the pre-OS X days.
On the whole, aside from security and infection issues, there isn’t a great amount of difference in usability between the two OSs for the average user, and while I think OS X has a slight edge in consistancy and functionality, Windows gets a substantial plus for having a lot more applications available to run on it. (We’ll sidestep the emulation/virtualization issue at this point, but it’s worth noting that an Intel Mac can do most of what a Windows PC can do–aside from high end hardware accelerated gaming–and still do the things OS X does well.) And regarding laptop computers, I find the premium that Apple charged for the PowerBook to be well worth it compared to comperable PC laptop.
Unless you are an open-source/Unix developer either will work, and transitioning from one to the other is merely a matter of becoming acclimated to the interface quirks each has. From the perspective of getting under the hood and playing with the engine, or developing robust, cross-platform applications, OS X is superior.
When my old Windows 98 computer died (actually, I think it was the C: drive that died), I thought I’d never see the data on the D: drive (I had the foresight to keep applications and data files on sepatate drives) again.
When I upgraded on the Mac side from an old PPC 7200 up to a shiny new G4, I saw that Apple had ditched SCSI hard drives if favor of ATA drives. My old PC had been sitting in the corner, awaiting the day I bought a new one into which I could install that D: drive full of data. Well, it had been a couple years and I’d never gotten around to buying a new Windows machine, and the data on that D: drive wasn’t all that important. So I popped the drive out of the PC and installed it into the second ATA slot of my G4, intending to simply reformat it and use it as a second Mac drive.
I was pleasantly surprised when my Mac mounted that FAT32-formatted drive and showed me all that data I hadn’t seen in two years. Got it all back
Most of the little differences will frustrate you because they seem arbitrary. They are, but this is why you shouldn’t worry about them; you’ll just gradually develop new habits of shortcut keys, navigation, naming conventions, etc. I’ve been Mac/PC ambidextrous since 1995, have used both systems wide and deep and long, and for so, so many reasons I prefer Mac to PC by a factor of gajillion.
Congratulations on crossing over from the dark side.
Do you know that Windows Media Player is also available for OSX, and there’s a thing called flip4mac that lets you play wmv’s right in Quicktime? The latter is better because you can move around to directly where you click on the “timeline” at the bottom…
Anyway, I grew up with the Apple //e and then Macs. They were all hand-me-downs until I got my current Emac. I’ve always had software to move from one to the next and it’s what I’m used to. It has always sounded crazy to me that anyone would deal with all the viruses and things of Windows.
Cool. Thanks TimeWinder for the info! I’m thinking about buying a Macbook Pro (15" which looks suprisingly big, and more cost efficient than the 17"). The computer I built last year is already obsolete, not only is my processor old, but so is my motherboard. On top of that, the new top of the line AMD chip is like $1200, which is more than what it cost me to build the computer. I saw Oblivion on the Mac, and it looks pretty damn good. Plus, since I’m out and about a lot, I would rather take the Mac around with me than my new Thinkpad (seeing as how, one is for work and all).
This ought to tell you something, though. There are many people who are fanatically devoted to their Macs. There are no people, near as I can tell, who are similarly fanatically devoted to Windows. Many people love the Mac OS; I know of no one who loves Windows (yes, there are people who strongly prefer Windows to the Mac for whatever reasons, but I’ve never heard such people speak of prefering Windows because they just love so much about it, the reasons are more pragmatic). So the Mac, clearly, has something that can engender that kind of devotion, while Windows does not. Looking down on or eschewing something for no other reason than that many people really love it and are devoted to it, and instead favoring something that people merely accept and use, seems oddly backwards somehow.
Well…theres lots of people fanatically devoted to a lot of things. No need to go into examples here. My point is that I actually find fanatical devotion repugnant, so that, for better or worse, tends to taint whatever the product is, be it Oprah, the Beatles, the OC, or Apple…even if the product may indeed have some innovative features.
Anyway, thats clearly my problem and I have no regrets about it.
You may be right, but that something may not be any feature intrisic to the actual Macs themselves; Fanatic devotion can be a cultural thing, brought on by group dynamics, or the simple fact of being a downtrodden, obscure, misunderstood or underestimated minority, for example.
I hasten to add that I am not actually stating those things to be true of Mac users, only the general principl that fanatical devotion need not necessarily reflect anything of value about the object of devotion.
As **Longhair’s ** post about the unhappy experience with getting the new Mac to work on a network was closed, I want to add here…
The Mac was just fine. Whatever the “genius” did could have been easily undone by simply deleting the relevant prefs files. ** It IS the network that’s Mac-phobic. ** I had a hell of a time a few months ago when my Linksys broadband router died, and Linksys does not support setup of the current version of the device (same model number, but completely different insie) manually or with a Mac. The installation and setup now works only in Windows. The original router was easily configured by a web page and was completely computer- and OS-agnostic. The new one is crippled so that a “wizard” is required. As a result, I had to pull an old Windows PC into service for five minutes to get the network running.
Once that was done, my network’s back up and it’s now equally available for our Macs or any visiting Windows laptops.
With regard to the network connection issue (why was that thread closed) it sounds like more of a protocol problem. Aside from the encryption comm getting unsynced with WPA occasionally, I’ve never had a problem connecting with a standard 802.11b/g, although I’ve seen some problems with the various proprietary pre-N schemes used by various router makers if you don’t have the compatible card. (They’re all supposed to be 802.11g compliant but some seem to be kind of wonky.) So I have to go with something being out of spec with the router. (The Airport Extreme, aside from the inclusion of WDS for creating ad hoc WiFi networks, is straight 802.11g, and I’ve never heard of anyone–Mac, Windows, or Linux–being able to connect to it.) So don’t blame Apple because WiFi vendors can’t adhere to an accepted bloody standard.
One thing to note about PowerBooks (and especially the Titanium Macs) is that the case, being metal, does tend to shield the internal antenna. I get somewhat less range on my PowerBook than a plastic-cased PC notebook, and significantly less distance than a computer with an external antenna. But this shouldn’t be an issue if you’re right up next to the router.
And yeah, the Version 5 revision on the WRT54G was a seriously grotty move on the part of Linksys. Fortunately, they now offer what is essentially the previous version as the WRT54GL and the WRTSL54GS, so you can flash a Linux OS onto it and make it dance and sing instead of sit and blink.
Either you’ve been poking around in my garage, which is where my LAN hardware lives, or I’m not the first person to be completely pissed at Linksys and had an email to customer support asking why they became PC-only cheerfully ignored.
First, if you’ve decided to switch from Windows to Mac (or even get a Mac while continuing to run Windows), then pick up a copy of Switching to the Mac. It’s a great book. My favorite section is the one that takes common actions on Windows and shows how to do them on OS X.
I’ve used every release of DOS since 2.0, ever Windows since 3.0, and every MacOS from 1 to 8 and from 10.2 to current. I still keep a Windows PC on my desk next to my MacBook Pro, because when I switched back to Mac I simply couldn’t afford to re-purchase all of my software.
I find myself doing everything on the Mac that I can, and going to the Windows machine only when forced to–and that’s after 8 years of not using Macs. For the most part, the Mac is the appliance that Steve Jobs originally intended. It just works. Take it out of the box, plug it in, turn it on, and it runs.
That router used to be renowned for its flexibility. Once you flashed out the resident firmware for a third-party Linux-based firmware like DD-WRT you could make it do all sorts of things that the default firmware didn’t support including running IPtables, acting as an ssh server, et cetera. Plus it had a lot of RAM and memory which were cut in half with Ver. 5. Big suck.
the manager of the apple store called me this evening. she is really trying to work my problem she is setting an appointment for me with her lead tech. i am boxing up the router too. we will see how it turns out…
it took bekka two hours to configure my linksys router to work with both a macbook and my ibm thinkpad at the same time. point to those trying this: evidently d-link routers work better on a mac/pc network. back home, my router back in place, all the wired machines are up. the thinkpad and my daughter’s dell are up on the wireless connection. i am about to boot up the macbook.