And it’s one of those great pieces of software that won’t work in X, I’m guessing.
The things about Default Folder that I love are the simplest: keep lists of frequently used folders to zip over to, and the ability to click on an open window in the finder and have the dialog box go there…THAT rocks. (And my understanding is that it is a very Mac maneuver. My fiance is always weirded out by the number of open windows I have going in the Finder.)
stoid
Still waiting to hear about all this control that Windows permits that Mac doesn’t. If no one can specifically describe the actual experiences that underlie the accusation about Mac being so idiot-proof that it prevents power users from “controlling” things, then I vote we permanently ban that argument from this debate.
That’s not precisely what I said, though I can see how you came to that conclusion. The drop outs generally occur when big applications are launching, like Canvas or Netscape. Or when my backup is in progress. I only mentioned the mouse and keyboard polling because of your reference to MP3s not playing right when pulling down menus on the Mac.
Dell Latitude CPx, 500MHz Pentium III, 196MB RAM, ATI Rage graphics card, with a Maestro III sound chip (I think)… maybe you can tell me where my weakness is???
Nope.
[quote]
C) You have a crappy sound card, so upgrade (Which you can’t do very much with a Mac).
Maybe, but I think, in this case you’ll have to agree that my upgrade options on my Mac (with one free PCI slot) far outweigh my options on this Dell laptop.
You make such good points elsewhere that I’m amazed at the above statement. Haven’t you ever right-clicked on a file in Windows and selected “Properties”? There’s a checkbox labeled “Hidden”. Check it. Click “Apply”. Click “Ok”.
(Depending on your settings, you might have to change your folder settings so that Hidden files aren’t shown. IIRC, by default they are not shown.)
Hey, I love DOS and I have to say that it IS for weenies.
[quote] Dell Latitude CPx, 500MHz Pentium III, 196MB RAM, ATI Rage graphics card, with a Maestro III sound chip (I think)… maybe you can tell me where my weakness is???
[quote]
Sure, I can tell you where your weakness is…
Loading up ANY application temporarily uses up much of the RAM and system resources of a computer. Running a system backup uses a lot of processor power and HDD read time.
And a minor nitpick, but I think you meant 192 MB of RAM.
Well, if you don’t count getting new PCMCIA devices as upgrading a laptop, maybe.
It’s true, symbolic links are an feature of the HFS file system (as well as NT and many UNIX filesystems). So if you are using the most popular file system on Windows (Win32), then you can’t create symbolic links.
On the other hand, NTFS does have this capability, and since filesystems in Windows are plug-ins, it’s entirely possible for someone to write a HFS plugin for Windows.
I believe there is a company that has done this, but they charge a lot, and it isn’t part of Windows, so it’s fair to say that you can’t do this on most Window’s users machines.
On the other hand. If you want to get down an dirty about which implimentation details differ between the two OS’s then we will have hundredes of thousands of details to compare.
You gave one yourself. (renaming a file while inside the save dialog).
All this means exactly nothing, because the question wasn’t “Are there differences” but rather “Which OS is more expert friendly”. The presense of symbolic links surely doesn’t answer that.
Besides, if we talk EXPERTS: I have not 1 but 4 file systems to choose from on NT. And one of those has support for symbolic links, plus even more goodies. I see your symbolic links and raise you a journalling file system!
Once again, you prove to be seriously misinformed about the Windows architecture. The only polled IO device on a PC is an old style joystick. (i.e. Not the MS Sidewinder or any USB connected joystick). The keyboard and mouse are interrupt driven. In fact, nowdays both can be USB devices. The PC has NEVER had a polled keyboard or mouse, not even the old 8086’s.
The problem with stuttering of MP3 playback has nothing at all to do with the OS. It has to do with how well the MP3 player is written (often badly), or in some cases, is caused by bugs in the audio drivers. Actually, it turns out that there are some video drivers that can cause stuttering audio too. There is a ‘feature’ of the PCI bus design that allows them to better their benchmark scores at the cost of locking the sound card off the bus.
I will admit that it takes quite a bit of specialized knowledge to do audio software properly on a multitasking OS, and Win9x has some gotcha’s that make it easy to fall into the trap of having audio stutter while some other application is being opened or closed.
I can assure you that the audio software the I write for windows doesn’t have this problem.
Since when does “I vote” qualify as an ultimatum?
** ul·ti·ma·tum **
A statement, especially in diplomatic negotiations, that expresses or implies the threat of serious penalties if the terms are not accepted.
Although I understand you don’t want any of your anti-Mac arrows taken from your quiver - what exactly is the problem in my asking that they be either backed up, or discarded? Hmm? How many times have you demanded evidence for an assertion? Hmm? How many times have you made such a demand, and coupled it with a demand for abandonment, lacking such evidence? [sub]How many times have you also thrown in an insult to your opponent, just for good measure? [/sub] Is this not a fundamental of debate? And you are going to give me shit about it because…?
Stoid, one thing I know can be done on a PC is that you can tinker with the registry and .ini files of Windows. My friend is heavy into learning everything he can about computers…he’s practically memorized his standard Windows Registry. He’s optimized it to the point that his computer starts up nearly 30 seconds quicker than it normally would.
Now, while he has had his share of problems doing this, he’s also had some pretty cool results.
However, that’s an INSANE user level of Windows (Kinda like Nightmare mode on Doom).
Mac has a program that freaks me out called “ResEdit” - resource editor. All kinds of screwing around going on in there, but not interesting to me. But it’s been around since forever and tons of Macheads I know dick around with it.
I figure someone around here must be talking about something or other with these claims…maybe they just haven’t been reading my pleas?
I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
stoid
PS: Spoofe: coulda fooled me. Your communication needs work.
Yes. While this does enable most of the visible/invisible opportunities, it doesn’t let me make “Network Neighborhood” or “Hummingbird Neighborhood” and some other files invisible.
Monster:
I would count that, but both PCMCIA slots are full of network and modem cards…
Tejota:
I beg your pardon? I’m using NT. Mind telling me how to “enable” this capability?
No. It’s merely one of several. If you can actually demonstrate how to get real symbolic links in Windows, as Hunter has demonstrated how to get file management in Mac OS file dialogs, then I’ll dismiss this one.
You’ve been invited, on a number of occasions, to show how a Windows machine is more configurable than a Mac. No one seems to be able to do this. I suspect that there are two reasons for this:
The Wintel supporters are clueless about what a Mac is really capable of. The blinders are on and they are unwilling to accept the possibility that the most popular OS may not be the best or most powerful.
The Mac, because it supports all of the traditional architectural features of an OS, plus more, will always be able to do the same things as other OSes rooted in ‘antique’ architectures. Whereas, Windows is limited by the nearly 30 year old architecture that it is based on.
Ummm… The MacOS (since version 8) supports a partial journaling files system. Likewise, NT only has a partial journaling solution. Neither are fully JFS compliant, and for good reason - performance.
I find about a hundred documents at the Microsoft Knowledge Base that say otherwise. I’d point you at them, but their urls are funkified by the search engine. But you can do the same searches I did:
http://search.support.microsoft.com/kb/c.asp
Search for “keyboard polling” and “keyboard interrupt”. What you’ll find is that the OS does both, depending on what level your at… at the hardware level, it’s polling. However, it’s quite possible that USB devices do, in fact, generate hardware interrupts at the lowest level. This is of no consequence to me, since I run must NT…
I never said it did. Monster suggested that the MacOS was responsible for sound drop outs on the Mac and I was just defending that point.
I was waiting for someone to mention this. [evil grin]
The reason that the Mac doesn’t support registry editing is that the Mac doesn’t have a registry. From Microsoft:
The difference is that, in the MacOS this “database” is distributed. These attributes are associated with each file, which is why associations are not global. Many of these attributes are stored in the resource forks of the file and, as stoid pointed out, ResEdit is your tool. ResEdit gives you much more flexibility and access to the Mac OS than RegEdit does to Windows.
So both systems ultimately have databases to manage these attributes - no difference right? Wrong. I’ve only had the “delight” of using RegEdit a few times. One of those times I failed to make the appropriate change in all of the right places in the registry… DISASTER!!! This precipitated one of those “clean installs” I mentioned earlier and now I’m terrified of RegEdit! On the other hand, I’ve screwed up in ResEdit too. Consequences: That particular file may be corrupted (usually not). The distributed database is better. Not only is it more robust, it’s more portable. If I create a new icon for a file or change it’s resource fork in any way, then share that file with a friend - the modified resources go along with it. The reason Windows has to resort to a global database is, again, the results of it’s “antiquated architecture”.
Again, I can’t actually think of anything you can do in RegEdit on Windows that you can’t do, at least as well, on the MacOS.
BTW, ResEdit on the Mac is more than just a niffty gizmo. It’s a fundamental tool for software development. It provides GUI interfaces to develop GUI interfaces.
I got to thinking about something I wrote earlier and decided I didn’t like it. Therefore I’ve decided to amend my comments. This is a bit like beating the dog for something the cat did, since mouse and keyboard polling are not central elements to my thesis that the Macintosh actually gives the power user greater flexibility and access to the OS. In fact, it would fit better under the thesis that Windows is less user friendly and more aggrivating than the Mac OS… while I think I could make that point, too [grin] - it’s not the point I’m after.
So here’s my problem. I said that the Mac’s mouse and keyboard are interrupt driven while the Windows’ were polled. However, truth be told (and that is my goal), all mice and keyboards are polled from somewhere. The point I should have been making is that the polling from the drivers in Windows has some impact on responsiveness and performance. Why do I make this claim? Simply, because Microsoft provides low level access to the polling routines for programmers to tweek, changing the mouse sampling rate (SampleRate), number of buffered mouse events (MouseDataQueueSize) keyboard timeout (PollingIterationsMaximum), number of buffered key events (KeyboardDataQueueSize) etc…
The MacOS doesn’t need to support these because the Mac hardware has had dedicated processors doing the polling since the SE (I believe). I know that some Wintel hardware, also has dedicated polling hardware (i8042), but that’s not on all configurations and the controller actually gets polled, as well. Microsoft calls it an interrupt, but it’s not an interrupt in the traditional sense. I do not know if USB is handled differently because, as I said earlier, I don’t use it on my Wintel machine.
Again, my main point is regarding user flexibility, not niggling little irritations that may be caused by a jumpy mouse or lost keystrokes. I just felt compelled to make my earlier statements more clear.
No I didn’t. Stop going back and trying to change your previous positions.
You stated:
To which I responded:
Then you said:
But previously you said:
**
Tejota then says:
Then you say:
See where I’m getting at? YOU suggested that the Windows OS was responsible for sound drops. YOU gave a BS reason for why it happens. Then Tejota and I gave REAL reasons for why sound would drop. Then YOU turn your story around, claiming you didn’t say something you DID say, and try to claim that I made a claim against a Mac and that you were merely defending a point!
My bad. I attributed a statement made by Mr2001 to you by mistake.
Mr2001 said:
Directly attibuting mp3 playback failures to the lack of “real multitasking” when it comes to menus in the MacOS.
For some reason, when I looked back to that quote, I thought it was from you. I probably missed the break between that post and yours immediately before it. My sincerest appologies.
I have not actually been attributing this problem to an OS issue. I claimed it was a hardware issue. The only “previous position” that I’ve tried to change is the implication that the Mac architecture does not poll its mouse and keyboard. I think I was pretty open and honest about that mischaracterization and tried to clear it up before anyone else had a chance to challenge it.
I can certainly see why you thought I was associating these two. I ran two independent thoughts together in the same paragraph. Mr2001 had just made the claim that the Mac improperly played mp3s when responding to menus. I was pointing out that this should not happen with the mouse driver implementation on the Macintosh. (That was the second sentence) The part about Windows (the first sentence) was just an observation that I have mp3 playback problems in Windows much more often than in MacOS. I was not trying to associate this problem with the Wintel mouse drivers… I tried to clear this confusion up later when I wrote:
By that time the question of whether Windows polls it’s I/O came up and I was off defending that parenthetical phrase.
Clearly, I could have communicated my ideas better if I had not run those two separate thoughts together and had fact-checked the source of the offending quote. Again, I appologize for misattributing the earlier quote and for bringing I/O polling into this discussion (it’s not really relevant).
Ah, now I see where your polling confusion comes from. Allow me to clear it up: The PC Keyboard and PC Mouse are both intelligent devices. Not some of them all of them. Each has an on-board microprocessor and talks via a bi-directional serial protocol to the computer. (similar in concept to ADB, but in this case each has a different protocol between keyboard and mouse)
Basically, when you change the polling rate of the mouse or turn on the caps-lock-light on a keyboard, what you are really doing is sending a message to the microprocessor on the mouse/keyboard and telling it to modify it’s parameters.
The at the level of the main CPU, the keyboard/mouse are indeed interrupt driven rather than polled, and they always have been.
It is my understanding that a Mac mouse/keyboard are also smart devices so I’m surprised that the ability to change their polling rates is unavailable to an expert Mac user. It would seem to me that this is partial proof that the PC gives an expert more control than a Mac does.
Of course a full proof of your contention would involve counting up all possible things that an expert could tweak on each machine and then comparing the sums. This is not only an exhausting exercise, but I believe it to ultimately be pointless because it’s impossible to determine how fine to dice these feature lists fairly.
For instance, in pointing out the ways you can modify mouse and keyboard behavior, were you listing 1 expert feature? or was it 2? or maybe 4?
You see the problem: your challenge/question is ultimately unanswerable. It isn’t meaningful to compare Macs to PCs at that level of detail. And therefore it isn’t reasonable to claim that you have evidence that Macs are more expert friendly. Especially since you keep demonstrating the limits of your PC knowledge.
Then neither is it reasonable to claim the reverse (which is claimed about 1000x more often, and that’s what was claimed right here in this thread, setting all this off)
And the next time someone does, I’m gonna point them right here.
Whoops. My bad too…I had missed his statement as well. Good thing we got this cleared up.
I just want it known that I’m not against Macs, I just prefer PC’s (I know that sounds contradicting somewhat…). If it wasn’t far out of my price range, I would probably get one. The only reason I was able to get my PC is because I was able to buy it piece by piece.
So, if and when I have a few thousand extra bucks lying around (After I get a car and insurance), maybe I’ll get myself a Mac.
Here’s another difference. To me, this difference counts as a “Mac superiority”, but to be even-handed about it, I’ll point out the trade-offs…
I bring my Mac to my friend’s office and I want to make a TCP connection over Ethernet; let’s say that this Mac has heretofore used nothing but a modem for such connections. I select the TCP/IP Control Panel, select Configurations (it’s a menu item somewhere, or Command-K which is what I use) and make a new TCP Configuration, I’ll call it “Ethernet at Tom’s”, and make that configuration active. Click on the “Connect via…” and select “Ethernet”. Then I can select DHCP or I can type in an IP address and a router and subnet mask and name server address if I prefer. Close the Control Panel and open Netscape or other internet software and I’m connected. No reboot.
The next time I come over, it’s even easier: I open TCP/IP Control Panel, go Command-K, switch to “Ethernet at Tom’s”, and I’m good.
So my friend Tom comes to visit me in MY office and brings his Sony or Toshiba or whatever PC laptop he uses at home. He wants to make a connection, and, as was the case with me originally, his laptop is not configured to make Ethernet connections, although he does have an ethernet PC card. He opens Control Panel, goes to Network. Adds the ethernet PC card and arranges for the TCP/IP protocol to be supported over the card. Closes the Control Panel.
His computer demands that he insert his Windows installation CD. He digs it out of his CD case and complies, explaining to me as he does so that there is some method of installing Windows that keeps it from demanding the CD every time he changes a setting but this is how it was set up when he bought it.
Windows queries him on a half-dozen files for which duplicates exist on his computer already–wanna keep the newer versions on your hard drive, or install over them with the older ones on the CD? He says no to all, he’ll keep the newer ones. (I ask him if this is a no-brainer or if it sometimes causes problems to keep the newer drivers. He says in this case it is a no-brainer.)
Windows then reports that he must restart before the changes can take effect, so he restarts. After reboot, he is able to launch a browser and get on the internet.
Next time he comes over (this is the trade-off), he doesn’t need to change ANY settings, even though he’s been using PPP over a regular modem at home in the mean time. He just hooks up a cable to the ethernet card and he’s live. (Windows supports different physical implementations of TCP simultaneously, so you can have TCP over ethernet and over PPP).
I should also acknowledge that when I added DSL, which is not natively supported by MacOS 8 (or 9), that required loading drivers from Verizon following which I had to restart, too.
But when Tom starts using his Toshiba in his office–and therefore uses TCP over Ethernet–he has to make changes to the settings for Ethernet TCP connection, thereby overwriting what he had put to make connections in my office. If he then comes to visit, he has to overwrite those in turn with the ones appropriate for my office. And he has to restart after making the changes. I can move from my office to his office and switch from the “Ethernet at Tom’s” setting to the “Ethernet at My Own Office” setting and back at will and I don’t have to restart each time.
If I may quote: