I haven’t checked Word, but Excel certainly allows it, at least under NT. I often work with Excel with multiple windows (which you’re right means multiple instantiations of Excel). When you’re dealing with big sheets and lots of numbers and there are a lot of cross links, using the “Window” menu is unacceptable. Excel normally wants to open up multiple files in the same window frame, but you can force it to open into multiple window frames by relaunching the application… This can be a memory pig, but its the only way I can get the job done with a reasonable margin of sanity.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Netscape 4.06 lets me right click to to open in a new browser window. I’ve been doing it on the Mac for several revisions back. Which reminds me, for those used-to-be PC people who miss their three button mouse, I’ve had a Logitec 3 button mouse on my Mac for about 5 years, so in most applications right click behaves just like on the PC… no big whoop…
Actually, I’ll wager that I can do more with my mouse than a typpical PC user can with his/hers…
Regarding the copying to disk thing - still don’t think some of you are getting my point:
In Windows, it doesn’t work a lot of the time. Whether it be some “cockamamie” technique or not, it doesn’t frickin’ work a lot of the time! DOESN’T WORK!!! Windows will not give the correct numbers, and you’ll think you have enough room, but you won’t. Besides, if I’m getting all this right, when you copy files to a disk (that already has a few things on it) don’t you have to:
(1) Check to see how much space is left on the disk.
(2) Check to see if what you want to copy onto the disk will fit.
(3) Copy to the disk and hope that the numbers you were given were correct, and that it’ll all copy on there.
With the Mac you:
(1) Start to copy, and either it will copy to the disk, or tell you that there isn’t enough room, right off the bat.
But this is a small detail for some. For me, it has been a bone of contention with Windows, and to now discover that the Mac doesn’t have this problem is a real eye-opener.
Also, regarding the apparent mobs of Mac people cornering PC people: I’ve never seen it happen that way. I have been a PC person, (but more open-minded about Macs, right from the start.) I am still technically a PC person, since I have a nice PC that I’m not getting rid of. And during my days of being exclusively PC, I saw some examples (in my own family, even) of rabid Pro-PC people rag on Macs, but never the other way around.
One thing I remember - I told one Anti-Mac guy that JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena) uses a lot of Macs, and in fact, I believe not too long ago used only Macs. (I have a friend who works there - I’m pretty sure that JPL was all-Mac for a while.) Well, this Anti-Mac guy just would not believe that JPL used Macs. Just would not accept this fact. Hey, I know someone who works there, he doesn’t. (And, please, no cracks about JPL’s failures recently. They’ve had lots and lots of good days too!) The point was, this pro-PC guy refused to believe that a MAC could be valued at JPL, ever. Talk about denial! I’ve met far more anti-Mac people than I have met anti-PC people.
So how do these multitudes of PC people get such an “attitude” about Macs and Mac people? Mac people are in the minority. So I daresay that the average PC user rarely encounters a Mac user. And would rarely experience a Mac user that was abrasive and confrontational. (Since not all Mac users are that way.)
So I hardly see how an average PC user can think that the reason they have a dislike for Macs (or those fanatical Mac users) is because they are hounded constantly by Mac people in their everyday life!
“I often work with Excel with multiple windows (which you’re right means multiple instantiations of Excel). When you’re dealing with big sheets and lots of numbers and there are a lot of cross links, using the “Window” menu is unacceptable. Excel normally wants to open up multiple files in the same window frame, but you can force it to open into multiple window frames by relaunching the application…”
Isn’t the “window in a window” way that documents are treated in Office good enough? Go to “Window”->“Arrange”. I must admit that I am completely puzzled as to the dislike for an application that closes when you tell the application to close. If you don’t want it to close, just minimize it, don’t kill it. If you don’t like to look at the taskbar, the taskbar can be hidden. You can also reorient it so it’s on the side of the screen instead of the bottom (if you have a ton of windows open, this can be more convenient).
“[my Mac in emulation mode is faster on a lot of applications] (I can describe them all to you, if you want)”
More details would be helpful, especially with regard to the system configurations of the two machines. From the excel example, it sounds as if you have a slow hard drive on your windows machine. Do they have the same amount of memory?
??? If I want to have multiple Excel windows open, I go to the “Window” menu and choose “New Window”, then drag it to the second monitor. (I have one workbook that I use often in which Sheet 1 contains the data that Sheet 2 graphs as a 3D bar chart). Why would it be necessary, useful, or anything other than a waste of system resources to run the program itself twice in two separate memory spaces?
OK, I get your points. Being a Mac user, I suppose anytime you brought up Macs, some PC guy was there ready to pounce (since almost everybody these days is a PC user). However, never really having used Macs previously, I would never bring up a Mac in a conversation, and thus only see the Mac/PC discussions after a Mac person had brought it up. (Of course, if there was a Mac in your office, I could see PC people bringing it up for that reason too.)
Anyway, it will be interesting to see what arguments the Mac people have against PCs when Windows 2000 becomes mainstream. Most of the stuff I see now is just: I like to do it this way, and PCs don’t do it that way, they do it some other way. There are very few features that either machine has that the other doesn’t.
I’ve never seen any real problem with the out of disk space thing because I don’t usually run out of disk space that often. There’s not much stuff I need to keep on my own hard drive (and with 23GB, there’s plenty of room for data), and the big stuff I keep on servers which have plenty of room. The only time I might run out of space on my own hard drive is when I’m installing some software, and when that goes on, the software installation tells you you don’t have enough space before trying to copy anything. It just never affects me.
One more point I might add: A lot of the arguments here are about the differences between operating systems. The operating system is not what defines a PC, the hardware is. If you don’t like Windows 98, install Linux, or BEOS, or WINNT, or Windows 2000 or just DOS, or old Windows 3.1, or vanilla UNIX, or get a Mac emulator. A great thing about PCs is their versatility. When my Pentium Pro 200 got too old for me this summer, and I wanted to buy something faster (ok, I like to play games), I installed NT Server on it and got a new computer. Now I can still use it for file storage and playing around.
Oh, and for the record, I don’t understand people who get real upset about the whole thing either. It seems a non-issue to me, but sometimes interesting to debate
Argh… I hate MDI (Multiple Document Interface) more than anything. With MDI I have to dedicate enough screen real estate to allow for the extent of both windows, so if one window-let is short and wide and the other window-let is narrow and tall, I may chew up the entire screen.
You’re still missing the point. Windows kills the APPLICATION when I close the last currently open WINDOW. Have you never wanted to continue using an application, even though you’re done with a particular document?
My mac is a beige G3 mini tower. CPU bus 300MHz, data bus 66MHz. 6GB hard disk. 128MB RAM. ATI Rage video (built-in).
My PC is a DELL Latitude CPi (Pentium II). CPU bus 366MHz, data bus 66MHz. 6GB hard disk. 128MB RAM. NeoMagic 2200 video.
I don’t have the disk drive specifications for either, off hand, but I doubt that this is the fundamental difference. The fundamental difference is RISC versus CSIC. I haven’t seen the BYTEMark analysis of my specific Mac, but I did see a comparison of a 400MHz G3 PowerBook against a 400MHz DELL Latitude, and the Mac (due to it’s RISC architecture) was more than twice the performance (13.1 BYTEMarks versus 6.0 BYTEMarks).
As for my tests in Excel, fairly simple.
Test 1: Load a large file from disk. The file was just large sections of the same data duplicated, over and over and over.
Test 2: Make small change in above file and save to disk.
Test 3: I forget precisely which formulas I used, but basically I took the first cell in a sheet and linked it into several different formulas, Then I used the results of these formulas to feed duplicates of themselves, which fed duplicates, which fed duplicates, etc., etc… Then I change the first cell and see how long it takes to recalculate the final result.
I did some other tests involving the time to recalculate and redraw a chart, but they were too short to to get statistical differences and I couldn’t figure out how to magnify the differences by extending the complexity of the charts easily.
Hey, it wasn’t rocket science, but I was only doing it to satisfy my own curiosity.
The “window in a window” thing (technically Multiple Document Interface, or MDI) totally sucks. And here’s why:
Document windows are constrained by their application window, which means that for all practical purposes, you have to have your application window maximized to work effectively on multiple documents. This hides other documents and windows from view, and makes switching between docs in different applications tedious.
Document windows aren’t visually distinct from their application window, so you can’t tell right away where you are allowed to drag a window.
A maximized document window inexplicably has its minimize/maximize/close buttons in the applications menu bar, and its title gets put in the applications title bar [in square brackets]
Document windows don’t show up in the task bar.
Now, MS does have the right idea, that some programs need to seperate the document from the application (which is what some people were getting at here). For programs which are quick to load up, like Notepad, a single document interface is fine, but other programs have a large overhead that you’d rather not want to deal with every time you close the programs last window. For example, photoshop takes forever to load, because of all its filters, so you don’t want to do that more than necessary. So what you want is a way to keep photoshop open even though you aren’t currently editing any documents.
So my complaint isn’t the idea (which is a good one), but the implementation. And the fact that MS even breaks their own rules with Internet Explorer is telling. Think of what a pain it would be if all your web browser windows were trapped inside an application window, or if every time you started a new browser window it would have to go through all that initialization.
Now, I don’t think apple quite did this right either. There isn’t any immediate way to know what applications are currently running (because they may not have any windows open), and even telling which application is in the foreground is harder than it ought to be. (I hear MacOS X has a task bar, which should make this better)
No it doesn’t…err, at least, it’s not supposed to. As long as you select ‘close’ and not ‘exit’, the current document will close but the app will stay open. Also, in most programs, you should see two sets of control buttons in the top right corner: the upper one controls the app, the lower set controls the current doc, so you can rearrange multiple docs within the same app.
One other thing: I’m not an expert on this, but while I will agree that RISC is more efficient than CISC, it’s not realistic to compare a 400 mhz RISC with a 400 mhz CISC. What you should really do is get the top-of-the-line RISC and compare it with the top-of-the-line CISC. I think that would do something like put a G4 550 mhz against a 1 Ghz Athlon or something like that. (also there is some cool new stuff available on the PC side, like RAMBUS – RAM that has an 800 mhz bus speed, meaning it matches the CPU cycles and no translations have to be made.)
The problem with stats, though, is that they represent a subjective truth. (Mark Twain once said, “There are 3 kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.”) Benchmarks and the like shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
The reason they did that with IE is because IE is integrated into the OS. Opening another IE instance looks the same to the kernel as opening up another folder on the hard drive (or something similar). There’s no extra memory overhead for opening another IE window.
Well, theres a minimal amount. From a quick check (with Win95 and IE5), opening the first window takes 9M, and a few seconds. Opening additional windows take 700K and take about a second. Explorer windows (not the tree view) take less than 100k each.
So here, initing IE takes 8M and a few seconds more than adding an additional window. Which is the very reason that additional windows run in the same memory space and share resources. But they don’t run in the same space as the explorer. (well, on NT they don’t, i’m not sure about 9x)
So essentially, IE functions just like an MDI app, except that the windows aren’t constrained by an application window.
It’s actually possible to have your own apps do this (I had to make one of mine act this way), but they don’t say anything about how to do it, or mention it in the user interface guidelines.
I’ve seen separate benchmarks that argue either way. Being an engineer, I know a little bit about how to get numbers to tell what ever story you want to hear. Therefore, I’m not much of a believer when it comes to industry ‘standard’ benchmarks. The only benchmarks that I ever care about are the ones that I conduct myself, because they are always based on the things that I do. That said, it’s entirely possible that the 1GHz Athelon will outperform the 550MHz G4… or maybe it won’t. I’m not likely to find out because I’m not expecting to upgrade to either in the near future. The funny thing is that the average user won’t know the difference either, because the average user’s computer already spends 95% of it’s time waiting… A 1GHz Athelon is just going to wait faster…
[aside]
I haven’t seen a 1GHz Athelon yet, but I have seen a heat sink for one… I don’t expect we’ll be seeing any 1GHz Athelon laptops in the near future…
[/aside]
Again, this issue is tainted by conflicting benchmarks. Some claim that RDRAM is all hype and that it’s performance will actually be lower than SDRAM… Regardless, that’s one of the advantages of RISC - more from less. It takes fewer cycles to get the job done, so the RAM doesn’t have to be as fast to keep up with the CPU.
I’ve got a machine from Dell on order: P3 800 mhz, 128 MB RDRAM. I’ll let you know how it performs next the G4 450 mhz, 128 MB SDRAM I also just ordered…
I meant to chime in on this thread earlier, but I wanted to see how it evolved first.
More in the spirit of the OP, two main reasons why users would favor the PC over the Mac or vice-versa:
The machine which you were first exposed to may be the one that you are more apt to favor. By and large I don’t think that people like to jump platforms unless absolutely necessary, what with the cost of duplicating software, hardware expense, and learning the ins and outs of a different OS. Several people here have done this transition quite well, and I admire your ability to adapt very much. For those that can’t or won’t adapt, the only option is to defend their territory.
Something I call the VHS/Beta effect. Everyone that buys consumer electronics, especially computers, has a deep-seated fear of jumping on the wrong technological bandwagon. I think that we’ve reached the point now where the long-term existence of Mac and PC platforms is assured.
I prefer to use a PC myself, but I have to admit that the IMac is a pretty spiffy looking machine. The only thing that makes me leary about it is having the monitor integrated into the processing unit. I prefer a system which has an external monitor. I guess the higher-end Gx systems would be more to my liking.
Oh, and I hate the hockey puck mouse. Do you Mac people like that thing, or do you use something else?
“It’s only common sense,
There are no accidents 'round here.”
I’ve never tried to use the round one. The previous teardrop mouse was OK, but I typically use a Logitech three button mouse. I started using it when I was X-windowing into unix boxes. There were some really convenient tricks you can do with the extra buttons, so I’ve become fairly dependent on it. The mouse knows what application you’re in and can behave differently in different applications - it’s programmable.
Yeah, Logitech is a good source for a mouse. I use a Macally myself, but next time I’m in the market for a mouse, I’m splurging for a fully optical mouse.
I just bumped up against another thing that I hate about Windows… maybe you Windows experts can tell me how to do this…
On the Macintosh, when I go to print a document, the print driver gives me the option to print with a reduction or enlargement. Windows gives me no such option. This is sometimes essential when the document needs to fit on one page or to a fixed width. Is there some non obvious way to do this in Windows?
