It’s a funny definition of “last” that means “before Microsoft”. I don’t know if Windows behaves that way now, but it sure didn’t when OSX came out.
Quoth AaronX:
You edit a program’s settings through that program, just like you do in Windows (at least, when nothing goes wrong). They’re usually stored in the Library/Application Settings folder, but every app has its own subfolder for its own settings, so if an application screws up something with its settings, it only affects that app, instead of mangling everything on the computer. And even if, for some reason, you do need to do something with those settings files directly, they’re usually text files, which you can edit in the same way (including using a GUI) that you edit any other text file. What commands do you think you need to memorize?
Windows NT has been fully PMT from the first version released in 1993. Windows 9x (may it rest in hell) was fully PMT for 32-bit programs. OS X didn’t arrive until 2001.
Well, strictly speaking,A/UX was released in 1988, and ran on standard Macintosh hardware. So, Apple had a preemptive multitasking system before Microsoft.
Can we drop discussion of features that both OSes have had for a half decade or more? Arguing about preemptive vs. cooperative multitasking, single-button mice, general protection faults, ADB vs USB, parallel & serial ports, multi-tasking, overlapping windows support etc. may be fascinating, but it doesn’t really contribute to the discusion of the OSes as they’ve worked in any recent timeframe.
And to answer the OP directly: no, nothing ever goes wrong with a Mac. They’ve been built not only with self-repairing capability for failing hard drives (little Mac Gnomes that live in the fan casing), but they can also draw power directly from the ether if you trip over the power cord. They’re immune to bad memory chips via “ElephantNet”, wherein the data stored on them us psychically transmitted to the mothership in Cupertino, and Apple’s strict guidelines for app development completely eliminate any developer having bugs in their code; even nearby Windows machines run better with a Mac on the network. Early Macs could be shut down by nearby nuclear blasts, but these days they have an oleophobic coating that protects from all external influences up to and including proton decay.
Personal, anecdotal experience: My first experience with computers was with Apple IIe’s during my senior year of high school (1983-84). After that, I didn’t touch another computer until a couple years after when I attended a vocational/business school from 1986-87. At that school I was trained in using PCs running MS-DOS 2.x. So up to this point, my entire experience with computers involved text-based, command line, no-GUI-in-sight machines.
In 1989 I enrolled in classes at the local community college, and my English Comp class required using the “Mac Lab”, a room full of Macintosh SE computers. In less than an hour, without cracking open a manual and with only minimal instruction from the teacher, I understood how to do everything I needed to be able to do on those machines. Everything about how the system worked made perfect sense, and learning one application taught me much about what I needed to know to operate any other application. The design philosophy resulted in a system that was so consistent and intuitive that I could launch a completely new app that performed a function completely different from anything I’d previously used, and I could start using it productively in a very short amount of time.
Granted, my own previous “computer experience” probably gave me something of a leg up, but there were also plenty of “older” students with no previous computer experience whatsoever who also grasped the Macs quickly and easily.
“Permissions” are nothing more than flags that are set for each individual file. There are three possible settings: “No Access” (x), “Read Only” (r), and “Read/Write” (rw), plus additional information specifying who (in a multi-user environment) has what kind of access to the file. To the best of my knowledge, each file stores its own permissions; there isn’t one monolithic file keeping track of everything. I’m open to being corrected on that point, though.
The user can manually set the various permissions on an individual file by selecting the file’s icon in the Finder and using the Mac OS’s “Get info” command (similar to Windows “Properties” command), which brings up an info window for that file, including a place to set/change that file’s permissions. To “repair permissions” automatically, system-wide, the user who knows how can type the appropriate command in the Terminal; the less-knowledgeable user can do it with the click of a button in Disk Utility, an Apple-provided GUI disk maintenance app.
In college, 1987, had to write up something pretty short for a class starting in about 15 minutes. I had never used a Mac before, they gave me about 60 seconds of instruction and I was off and running. That experience always stuck with me how Apple had really done a good job with the interface to make it that easy to pick up.
While your point stands, it’s a little bit incorrect to use 1993 as a legit date as NT was not usable in a production environment at that time and for years to come.
We had customers that had “standardized” on NT but were forced to actually use OS/2 because NT would not stay up and OS/2 was solid. When I asked one CIO his comment was “well, that’s our standard, but we can’t exactly shut down the business just to stick to our standard”.
Well, those files aren’t hidden (they doesn’t start with a ‘.’).
com.apple.xxx are preference files, and as such they are stored in the global system preference directory - /Library/Preferences. Preferences that are set on a per-user basis are stored in each user’s Preference directory - HOME/Library/Preferences
I played around with a few computers in the late '70s and early '80s, including a friend’s Apple II (with an audio cassette interface for loading programs), a dumb terminal that connected to a university mainframe via modem, and a few IBM PCs running some version of MS-DOS. However, I never owned a computer myself, and as of my senior year in high school, I was still typing papers on a typewriter.
When I got to college in the fall of 1986, I was introduced to the computer lab at my university, which included dozens of Macintosh 512K computers. These machines did not have internal hard drives, so you had to buy a 3½-inch floppy disk that contained the System software and some simple programs, like MacWrite.
I don’t recall any learning curve whatsoever in picking up how to use the Mac.
In particular, I remember having seeing ads where they showed the mouse, but I couldn’t envision how it was used until I actually sat down in front of a Mac. I remember being amazed at how easy they were to use.
I did have to use PCs for a few specialized applications around the same time frame, and thought they were much more difficult to use. In fact, I never really learned how to comfortably use a PC running MS-DOS. I didn’t get comfortable with PCs until Windows 95 came out.
(I also used Sun workstations during college, which used a version of UNIX, but they also had a GUI for the terminal windows.)
That’s a WPA, WEP, or similar key: basically a password for your wireless router to keep the riff-raff off your network. You probably set one when you set up the router. If you don’t remember it, most routers have a “reset” switch on them somewhere that will revert them to their factory configuration, but you’ll have to set up your network again.
This isn’t uniquely a Windows issue, by the way, you’ll need it for any device you want to connect to the network (Mac, Windows, iPad, etc.), although you only need to enter it once per device, usually.
If you’re using an AirPort base station (Apple’s name for their wireless router), this might also help if you need to convert the key to a standard hex string. Try what TimeWinder said first, though.
I generally don’t have any problems with the OS. I’ve had a couple of problems with hardware, but not only am I exceptionally rough on my mobile goods, but Apple parts are all off-the-shelf, same as PC’s. The build quality on my last Dell was much worse, with ports breaking off in all different directions.
I have had a macbook pro for about a year and a half. Just around the year mark, the hard drive failed. Warranty to the rescue, they reloaded it and life is good again.
I’ve had to zap the pram on old PPC based macs as well, due to weird errors, in one machine’s case, due to a bad CPU fan, as after replacement, the errors ceased.
In short, things break, regardless of the vendor. Even a Cray can break.
DLL hell, registry corruption, lack of pre-emptive multitasking, etc. It seems some people are stuck in a time warp when it comes to discussing Windows (I don’t even use Windows, almost 100% Linux here and recognise many of these tropes are completely outmoded).
As a Mac user since the PowerPC days, I still get people going on about single button mice now even though I have never owned a Mac that had a single button mouse.
My bigger problem these days with Windows 7 is that the security model has gone too far the other way. Having to launch Notepad as an Administrator just so I can add something to the hosts file (something I have to do quite regularly as part of my job) is a pain in the arse. As is being told that I can’t copy files to certain places. No “enter your password and you can do it”, you’re just stopped from doing it, even though my user is an administrator on that machine. Bloody irritating.
The registry is still a very, very bad idea though.
