I guess you totally skipped Ahunter’s post and Lemming’s posts. Universal compatibility? Please. Open standards? That’s a flat out lie.
By the way, OS X isn’t everything it’s been made out to be. It can’t even support DVD or CD-RW drives. It also has problems running much of the previous software, and ships with OS 9.1 with it so you can dual boot between both of them.
So only MS can mess up an OS, huh? It seems they’re doing pretty damn fine with 2000, and XP is supposed to be much better than 2000 is.
About what? People’s sheep-like natures? The fact that most people have no taste and will take whatever they are given? Because I would have to agree that the market never lies about that.
But the market, as you are using it, is a damn poor indicator of what is really worthwhile, well-made, or of premium quality. Or perhaps it is… if “the market” is buying it in droves, you can pretty much bet it’s none of the above. As exhibit A, I offer you McDonalds. The best hamburger you can buy? Not even close.
The market never lies… Bill, you surprise me.
You also surprise me because so far, no matter what you think of what Chas has said or how he’s said it, it seems like you aren’t offering any solid information to refute it, merely saying that it is wrong, bad, biased. The only evidence you speak of here is the fact that it is less popular…is that it?
More evidence that popularity does not equal premium quality:
VHS
Jurassic Park
Garth Brooks
Britney Spears
The American standards of measurement
Wonder bread
And I’m sure we can think of many more. The market does not tell us what is the best anything, the market determines what is popular. They are not the same.
Au contraire, mi amigo. The market is God. The market is reality. The market says Dodos dwindle and eventually die. The market says VHS is better, and in fact it was. The technical advantages of Beta were miniscule compared to the enormous benefit of being able to get the movies you wanted on VHS. The market says Garth Brooks is a winner, and he is. The fact that I don’t care for him (and apparently you don’t either) is completely irrelevant.
There’s nothing magic about the market: the market is you and me. The market is us and the market has spoken: macs are far less desirable than PCs.
Frankly, I don’t even like answering Chas.E’s actual claims, because they are so silly. But since I’ve now been asked to three times, here goes:
Chas.E wrote
Nonsense. Anyone who has ever done serious coding on both platforms will laugh at this. And your cite of some mac development material shows absolutely nothing.
Cite please, showing that Apple has spent more money researching user interactions. Can’t find it? No problem; your retraction will be happily accepted.
Cite please, showing even one significant GUI benefit MS can’t build because of patents held by Apple. Can’t find it? No problem; your retraction will be happily accepted.
That is your idea of a huge stumbling block in usability? Please.
Please name one possible reason this is useful.
That’s pure opinion. And if as you imply, opinion makes it right, then think about this: 90% of the world (that is the 90% using PCs) will tell you that the mac is the non-intuitive platform.
That’s just silly. Mac is far more proprietary, both by design (noone else can sell the hardware) and by poor acceptance in the market (i.e. there aren’t many software vendors writing for the mac). MS is forced to be much more open because they need to interoperate with so many third parties. And don’t kid yourself about IEEE and other standards bodies. Both Apple and MS work with standards bodies where they believe it will make them money. Apple isn’t some free-love operation either.
And the user is dis-serviced how?
Cite please, showing MS has this in mind. Can’t find one? No problem; your retraction will be happily accepted.
I read the article. This is dumber than your complaint about the start button. Do you really consider this a substantial advantage? The prettier colors are more significant.
Please give me one reason why the average person would see a benefit in this.
No. Please cite even one source that substantiates that mac conforms to more standards than PCs. And not some silly opinion article. Give me a cold list of both vendors.
That’s just political crap. What sort of facts are in that statement that should be of value to the average user?
Hey! something factual in your post.
Are you referring to that dumb menu thing? Is that your idea of “intolerant” and “inefficient”? Please.
>Frankly, I don’t even like answering Chas.E’s
>actual claims, because they are so silly.
Frankly, I don’t like answering someone’s that can’t come up with a better argument than “oh yeah, so what?” or “oh yeah, prove it.” I get the distinct impression that I’m arguing with a teenage kid. Well, FYI, I was writing assembly language on IBM mainframes in the early 1970s, I’ve seen it all and nothing bores me more than your type of argument. But if you insist, I’ll demolish your arguments one by one.
I apologize to the readers for quoting in Usenet style from time to time, but the normal quote style is too timeconsuming to format.
(speaking of Mac being user centered)
>Nonsense. Anyone who has ever done serious
>coding on both platforms will laugh at this. And your
> cite of some mac development material shows
>absolutely nothing.
I’m not even going to respond to this one, the “everyone knows” argument won’t cut it. Try again.
>Cite please, showing that Apple has spent more
>money researching user interactions. Can’t find it?
>No problem; your retraction will be happily accepted.
Apparently you don’t read too good. I never said they spent MORE on user interaction research. In fact, I am sure that MS has spent far more than Apple ever has, which is all the more reason to wonder how millions of dollars could be spent by MS, and when they finally determined what a human-centered GUI was, they released:
Microsoft Bob.
>Cite please, showing even one significant GUI benefit
>MS can’t build because of patents held by Apple. Can’t
>find it? No problem; your retraction will be happily accepted.
I think that’s enough to prove my point. You see, I actually know what I’m talking about, I’m not just making it up as I go along like you are.
(I said) Everything on Windows is ass-backwards. To shut down the machine, you hit “Start.”
>That is your idea of a huge stumbling block in usability? Please.
No, I cite it as an example of the philosophy of MS. They’re doing everything backwards.
(I said) Any success of Windows systems is solely due to how successfully they copy the Macintosh interface. And Microsoft copies it poorly, giving the appearance of a proper GUI without actually doing it right.
>That’s pure opinion. And if as you imply, opinion
>makes it right, then think about this: 90% of the world
>(that is the 90% using PCs) will tell you that the mac is
>the non-intuitive platform.
I guess I could expect this line of argument from someone who has offered nothing but opinion of their own, without any facts to back it up. Go back and read the website I cited, it gives a fair analysis of MS vs. Apple GUIs, and awards MS points when it is due, and bashes Apple when it is due. It is really quite a fair analysis, which is why I cite it repeatedly. Unless you can find specific reasons why the Mac is counterintuitive, I have nothing to respond to. Just because you got used to something doesn’t mean it is THE proper and efficient way to do things.
>And don’t kid yourself about IEEE and other standards bodies.
>Both Apple and MS work with standards bodies where they believe it will make them money.
>Apple isn’t some free-love operation either.
There is a huge difference between working with standards and subverting standards. Perhaps you don’t recall the recent controversy over MS’s subversion of the Kerberos protocol, in a deliberate attempt to break the Unix/MIT Kerberos system and force users to stop using Unix and use solely MS Kerberos.
You really should read the DoJ briefs in the recent antitrust lawsuit. I’ve read all the docs, both DoJ and MS, and it really is quite an astonishing tale of how MS deliberately destroyed open standards repeatedly, even bollixing up HTML itself. In fact, this whole thread between you and me reminds me of the DoJ filings. DoJ came up with reams and reams of damning documentation, and all MS could come up with was “Nuh huh, we didn’t do nuthin illegal, and our s**t doesn’t stink.”
>And the user is dis-serviced how?
I don’t suppose engineering standards like “no single-point failures” mean anything to you. Remember what happened when a low-level techie at MS made a few typos and Microsoft’s entire network disappeared from the Internet for 2 days? Anyone who puts all their eggs in one basket is just begging for someone to come by and put them out of business. And that is precisely what MS wants you to do, put ALL your data in ONE server in Redmond.
>Cite please, showing MS has this in mind.
>Can’t find one? No problem; your retraction will be happily accepted.
This article specifically describes Microsoft’s “Secure PC” initiative. It is designed to prevent piracy, and in the process, prevents mp3s, even ones you create yourself, from being moved from one hard disk to another. All files would only run on ONE device, unless authorization codes are bought from the vendor. You really ought to keep up with the current technological debate, the SMS and SPC debates have been raging across the internet.
>I read the article. This is dumber than your complaint about the start button.
>Do you really consider this a substantial advantage? The prettier colors are more significant.
It is absolutely THE most significant advantage. How many thousand times a day do you navigate a menu? I train people on PCs too, and in my experience, the most common cause of cursing and griping is a menu that goes poof when you’re about 3 levels down a hierarchy. Yes, it wastes about 10 seconds. It wastes about 10 seconds about a hundred times a day. And the menu problem is just ONE of the myriads of problems like this in Windows.
And THIS is the difference between Mac and MS. Let me tell you a little story, it is part of the Apple legend and is still part of their paradigm today.
Back when the Mac was still in development, Steve Jobs was not satisfied with the speed of the Mac booting. He demanded that Andy Hertzfeld, the OS programmer, reduce the boot time by another 30 seconds. Andy said he couldn’t do it. Jobs gave him a lecture about how if there were a million macs, each one was turned on at least once a day, wasting 30 million seconds a day of productive work time. Multiply that times every day, and you’re talking about thousands of lifetimes of wasted time across the population of computers. So Jobs demanded that Hertzfeld reduce the boot time. It took him weeks, but he did it. Nobody notices these details, but they ARE there in Apple products. But MS doesn’t give a damn. Their programs are inefficient because they don’t have to do any better, they have a monopoly and they don’t have to improve things.
>Please give me one reason why the average person would see a benefit in this.
The obvious advantage is that Mac users can run both Mac and Windows without having to purchase two computers. They can work seamlessly between windows and Mac, even running them at the same time. It is the best of both worlds.
But I do agree with you, the average user sees no benefit from Windows once they’ve got a Mac. It is only the closed, proprietary systems that they are required to use at work that would force this to importance.
>No. Please cite even one source that substantiates that mac conforms to more standards than PCs.
>And not some silly opinion article. Give me a cold list of both vendors.
Nope, not going to do it. I don’t have a list of all standards in existence and neither do you. I never said that Apple obeys MORE standards, I said that MS REFUSES to obey ANY standards unless they can turn it into a MS-Proprietary standard. Kerberos, USB 2, MS-Java, the list goes on and on. Go read the DoJ filings, it has lists of hundreds of standards that MS “embraced and extended” solely to keep their OS monopoly intact. The most significant of these is HTML itself. Microsoft actively encouraged developers to use proprietary extensions to HTML that only work with MS Explorer, in a deliberate attempt to destroy Netscape. And they succeeded. Consumers were harmed because innovation was stifled when competition in the browser market was eliminated.
>That’s just political crap. What sort of facts are in that statement that should be of value to the average user?
What value is there for a consumer to pay more for a Microsoft OS than they have to? The DoJ trial proved that consumers pay more for Windows than they have to, because MS CAN charge more, they’re a monopoly. These Findings of Fact cannot be overturned on appeal, it’s an undisputed fact. Even MS doesn’t dispute it.
>Hey! something factual in your post.
I’ll snip the rest of your post because you’re just driveling. Consider your argument demolished. Don’t bother to respond further, I won’t, I don’t have the time to endlessly produce detailed responses to such meager retorts as yours.
I challenge you to show me ANY machine that can run MacOS9.1, Linux, Windows98 and Windows2000 ALL at the same time on one screen. You’d be showing me a Mac. Don’t come back at me with lame emulators like Executor, they can’t even run anything more recent than a MacPlus would run, they struggle to run programs that are 10 years obsolete. But I run those OS simultaneously every day. I can run anything from any platform.
And let me hit you with the most amazing one. I just got a copy of a PS2 emulator for the Mac. Hard to believe, since the PS2 chip is supposedly faster than any PC or Mac chip on the market. But they did it anyway.
BTW, I’m writing this on MacOS X right now. The worst part of it is the piece of crap Internet Explorer they shipped with it. It’s full of hideous bugs. This is a 1.0 release for MacOS X, and it’s stable as a rock. What is Microsoft’s excuse for a version 5.1 being unstable?
How is this a fair and unbiased statement? You list your Mac as being able to run:
OS9, OSX, Linux, Windows 98, and Windows 2000.
and add that you could run:
Solaris, Redhat Linux, and several other popular OS’s.
Then you say no Windows box could run all of these OS’s.
Well…yeah, since Apple is not licensing use of OS9 and OSX for Intel platforms, duh! But Intel machines can run all of the other OS’s. So, in other words, Apple has a proprietary OS that is not licensed for use on Intel machines, Intel machines cannot run this proprietary OS, and thus they are inferior?
Considering that most all new viruses in the last couple years are macro viruses, this statement is not honest. Unless you can show how Mac versions of Word, Excel, etc. are much more resistant to macro viruses.
Wow…these debates normally devolve into collections of taunts, hyperbole, and nonsequiters, but not normally in this manner…I’m impressed. manny was right again.
Allow me to back up and bring you all up to speed in my brain>
For those of us who love the Mac, and do so passionately, there is an investment. Completely apart of whether what we say or believe about it is true, we love it. Therefore, it is very important to us to defend, support, and proselytize about our Macs, simply because the existence of Mac is always somewhat threatened. We who love it don’t want to lose it. We’re fighting to keep it. So our passion for the subject makes sense.
By why do Wintel people care? I recognize that many do not, but Bill H., for instance: why the hostility? The vehemence? Macs are no threat to your platform of choice. The spread of Macs in the world will never threaten the machine you prefer. You have nothing to lose and nothing to gain in this debate, yet you (like many others, you just happen to be the one here) are behaving as though this was a battle between two equally popular systems, one must win, and there’s a chance it won’t be yours. When we all know that that is simply not true. Or if it is, the number of years between now and such a thing coming to pass would put us all in our graves twice over.
So I ask: We know why we care. Why do you? Because if I was a Wintel user, this debate would be completely uninteresting to me.
Pump Action Gerbil says it’s because Mac people are smug. But that hardly seems right… if I believed what Bill H. believes, MacAddict smugness would make me laugh, not make me hostile.
So can anyone explain?
And Bill, I really don’t mean to pick on you, you are just the most, umm… radical? So you are standing in for your Wintel brethren.
Not a choice for me. All the software I use is not available for macs, end of question. And no, it cannot be run on a mac using emulation software, I’ve tried.
Now, on the other side of this issue, I just bought a new p4 box, hottest one available, for less than half of what a comparable Mac would cost. And if that company didn’t give me great service, there are a dozen other companies out there who can sell me the same thing. And if I wanted to build it myself, out of component parts from a dozen companies, I could. And though it might be a challenge to make it all work, it’s a ton of fun, to me. Macs are just too packaged and too no-user servicable parts inside. I like to mess with stuff.
If this is “THE most significant advantage”, then there is no advantage at all, because Windows (at least 98, I don’t have any copies of 95 left in service right now) doesn’t show the behavior you describe.
Let me make sure I’m replying to the right thing. You said “if you do not keep PRECISELY inside the target zone, the menu evaporates and you have to select the whole menu from the beginning”. This just isn’t true. Hang on a sec, I’ll try it right now. Ok, I clicked Start, then pointed at (you don’t have to click menu items to get sub-menus, but you can if you want) Programs, Accessories, WordPad, and then moved my mouse pointer all the way to the other side and the top of the screen, several inches from any menu.
The Menu just sits there, waiting for me to come back and click on something. No evaporating menus, it works just fine. I went back and tried moving my mouse pointer off the menus at each stage, and again, the menus just sit there waiting for me to click on something outside the menus, or to return to the menu and select something there.
Again I say, If this is “THE most significant advantage”, then is even less to this debate than I thought. If you’re training people on PCs, and it is actually true that “in my experience, the most common cause of cursing and griping is a menu that goes poof when you’re about 3 levels down a hierarchy”, then I’d suggest your training is lacking a little.
My take on the PC vs. Mac? For 90% of home users, it would make no difference. There is enough software available for both to do what they want to do. Most of these users do not want to play with the hardware, any more than they want to play with the hardware on their telephone, washing machine, or bread-maker. The computer is just another household appliance. They don’t care how it works, why it works, only that it does work. For these users, running a few commercial apps, either machine (and OS) will work fine.
For “power” users and business users, the situation is a little different. For business, it a matter of dollars and cents (not that businesses always make the correct decisions there, either). In theory, they will find the box that will do what they need done that has the lowest cost of ownership. Cost of ownership includes (among other things) purchase cost, installation, training, support, and maintenance.
In my experience, the cost of ownership leads to “wintel” for most companies. There are more apps available, more custom written software, more programmers, more trained technicians, etc. This makes it easier to find people with experience (or at least familiarity) with the software and systems. Purchase cost is generally lower for similar performance. Parts are (relatively) cheap, and available from a wide variety of sources. Support may be less on Macs, but this tends to get scrutinized less, as it is a longer term cost than some of the others. And it’s not like you can get away with no support staff at all (once you get to certain size).
Small businesses and some vertical markets are different. Training is less of a problem with fewer users. Support is more important because it’s not necessarily done by IT staff, it’s a part time job for someone who has other work to do. And most important in vertical markets is simply finding the best app for your job. This may dictate the box, and give you no choice. So here the Mac is more even (and enjoys a larger part of the market), and dominates in some markets).
Which is a better box? Neither. I’ve seen good and bad apps on both. I’ve seen good and bad behavior on both. The ranting done on both sides (although I see more from the Mac side) does little good for anyone. Macs are not blessed by god, Bill Gates is not the devil, they’re both just boxes that do a job (the PC that is, not Bill. Although I do wonder sometimes. Hmmmm?)
Since I develop software, and in my market the vast majority of machines in use are PC/Windows, I use windows boxes. I’m a small business, and I can’t afford to spend the money for multi-platform development, and I’d be a fool to do software development on a different box than the customers will be using. If I were writing some other kind of software, the situation could well be different.
I thought software wasn’t supposed to be an issue in this thread. Not that it matters, since just about any machine that is currently running Windows can run all of those, and more. Provided it is programmed to do so. Or do you doubt that the hardware (i.e. the “machine”) of PC’s is capable of running those OS’s? (I think you meant to compare OS capability, not machine capability.)
I know very little about Apple computers, having not used any of them since grade school. Since you seem to know much more about them than I do, perhaps you can answer this question: What tools/utilities/programs come bundled with the OS on a typical Mac? I’m curious how this compares to the programs and utilities that come with typical PC’s.
I personally never much liked the Macs that I’ve used. They “hide” too much from the user. (Yes, Windows does too, but I think it’s a little better.) For most people, this is a good thing. I’m a computer nerd though, and I like to know what the computer is doing and how. shrug To each his/her own.
Many macro viruses, particularly the most virulent and malicious ones, have a VBscript or ActiveX component. Theses viruses cannot run on a Mac.
The Mac has a different security model than Windows, it does not default to allow insecure software to run without asking the user first. I can’t count all the times my friends came over to print a PC Office document on my printers, and my Mac caught macro viruses that their PCs never detected.
You know, I remember reading one article by a ZDNet analyst, complaining that the Mac version of Office was better than the PC version, and bitterly griped that Microsoft writes better Mac software than PC software. I had to laugh. Well of COURSE the Mac version is better. The Mac GUI is coded in every program, it HAS to be better than the PC version.
Good point. However, AFAIK VBScript is an optional thing to install that comes with Internet Explorer - are you certain that a Mac with the latest IE would not also have VBScripting installed? I do know that my NT machine does not have it installed. However…you have a good point.
FTR - my PC which is on the Net and downloading things continuously has never been infected by any virus at all - .exe or macro. And I’ve been on the net for 12 years or so, downloading everything imaginable. I just simply:
Don’t run strange software without scanning it first, and
Don’t open e-mail attachments without scanning them.
Now…about your complaint that Intel machines can’t run an operating system that they are not licensed to use…any comments?
There’s so much in this thread that is so outright WRONG that I don’t know which to bring to light. Most of the pro Mac arguments sound as ‘logical’ as fatherjohn’s arguments against SUV’s.
First, the Start button. It doesn’t matter what the button is named. The reason it is called the “Start” button in the first place is because from that one location, I can run anything on my computer, find any file on my computer, perform any function of my computer. When I want to shut down my computer, I click shut down.
Next…
:rolleyes:
My PC doesn’t need to run 4, 5, or 30 OSes at the same time. You know why? Because I have ONE OS that has all the functionality I need to run all the software I want. Why would I want to run Mac OS 9.1? My Windows 98 SE has more functionality than it. Mac OS X? Don’t make me laugh. Windows 2000 is just as stable as OS X, and can also utilize DVD and CD-RW’s. Give OS X a year, then you can compare it to Windows XP.
Please, refresh me of the exact circumstances of that incident, and when it took place. Then, maybe you can look at the measures enacted to prevent it from happening again.
If you “know what you’re talking about”, then you obviously know it’s standard procedure to back up data with multiple redundancies. That’s the whole reason RAID exists, it’s the whole reason to have back up servers. The .NET initiative is something new, something that hasn’t been tried to such a large extent. Will it work right? I don’t know. No one does. I bet I can safely assume no matter how it works, Apple fans will still claim their ‘superiority’.
You make a very horrible lawyer. You are sadly mistaken if you think the DoJ came up with reams of damning documentation. Just because MS is a large, successful company doesn’t mean it’s a monopoly. The only reason it was found to be a monopoly is because the judge Penfield Jackson is largely biased against MS. Now that he’s removed from any further proceedings, I wonder what will happen?
Now, I found this one very interesting:
Considering that this teenager is helping to sort out your lies and twisted logic, I would take this to be a compliment. If you’re an example of how adults are supposed to argue, then it’s a wonder that adults could ever make any valid points in a debate.
