Slashdot Mirror
Ground Rules for the Windows vs. Mac War
FreshlyShornBalls writes "The New York Times is running a story that I think needs to be seen by everyone on both sides of the on-going Macintosh vs. Windows debate (i.e. just about everyone who posts on Slashdot): Some ground rules for the Windows vs. Mac War." From the article: "Last week, I wrote about some of the changes Microsoft has in store for the next version of Windows, which is slated for the end of 2006. Interestingly, very few of you responded to that column, probably because so much may change in the next 19 months. But a few of you fired off diatribes about how I'm either a Microsoft 'shill' or an Apple 'apologist' (or maybe it was the other way around). It's not just me, either; it's a running sardonic joke among tech columnists that you can't even USE the word 'Apple' or 'Microsoft' without getting hate mail from somebody or other."
From bugmenot.com, u/p: yourmom915/yourmomshouse
Last week, I wrote about some of the changes Microsoft has in store for the next version of Windows, which is slated for the end of 2006. Interestingly, very few of you responded to that column, probably because so much may change in the next 19 months.
But a few of you fired off diatribes about how I'm either a Microsoft "shill" or an Apple "apologist" (or maybe it was the other way around). It's not just me, either; it's a running sardonic joke among tech columnists that you can't even USE the word "Apple" or "Microsoft" without getting hate mail from somebody or other.
It's kind of amazing that various extremists could find the same column too pro-Microsoft AND too pro-Apple. But hey--that's the nature of ideological soldiers, whether they're in the conservative-liberal war, the evolutionist-creationist war or the Hummer-Prius war.
The Mac-Windows war, though, is especially pointless, protracted, and winnerless. There will always be people on each side who are every bit as rabid and un-convincible as those in any other religious war.
Still, I'd like to suggest, as a starting point of civility, a few pointers for participants in the O.S. war. Consider it one man's version of, "Can't we all just get along?"
1. Hate something for its failings, not for its success.
It's totally fine to criticize something because of its flaws--to hate Windows because it's bloated and cryptic, for example, or the iPod because it's too easily scratched. But condemning something just because it's the dominant product is just sour grapes. Arguments along the lines of "I hate Bill Gates because he's rich" or "I hate the iPod because everyone has one" add nothing to the dialogue.
2. No condemning something until you've tried it.
If everyone abided by this idea, about 95 percent of all the Windows-Macintosh diatribes would evaporate overnight. But here it is: If you haven't tried something, then you really have no basis to comment.
3. Execution matters.
I'm so tired of reading discussions like this: Person A: "I love Mac OS X Tiger! That Spotlight thing is so cool: press a keystroke, type a few letters, and get an instantaneous listing every file, folder and program containing that text."
Person B: "You pathetic loser! It's called hard-drive indexing, and Windows XP has had it from Day One." Of course, the truth is that Windows Indexing Service is to Spotlight as Thomas the Tank Engine is to a bullet train. In Indexing Service, you can't search with a single keystroke, the speed is nothing like Spotlight's, you can't search for metadata (115 kinds of secondary information, like music genre, Photoshop layer names, camera settings in digital photos, etc.), the index isn't updated in real time as you create or delete documents, and so on.
It goes the other way, too. "I love how Windows XP lets me delete or rename files right in the Open or Save dialog boxes."
"What's the big deal? On the Mac, we just switch to the desktop and delete or rename things there."
Sorry, but that's just not as good as being able to do it within the dialog boxes.
The bottom line: How well something works and how elegantly it's been built is also relevant to the "which is better" discussion.
4. Don't make grandiose purchasing plans by guessing on technology's future.
This pointer is directed exclusively at Mac-bashers, particularly the ones on the nation's boards of education.
If you decide to standardize on Windows across all schools, fine. But make sure you have legitimate reasons like economics or the need to run some Windows-only software suite.
"We want the kids to learn what they'll one day use in the business world," however, is NOT a good reason. If you think you know what anyone will be using in 2020 (when today's first graders will graduate from college), you must have a heck of a magical crystal ball.
Truth is, by 2020, no operating system will look an
Last week, I wrote about some of the changes Microsoft has in store for the next version of Windows, which is slated for the end of 2006. Interestingly, very few of you responded to that column, probably because so much may change in the next 19 months.
But a few of you fired off diatribes about how I'm either a Microsoft "shill" or an Apple "apologist" (or maybe it was the other way around). It's not just me, either; it's a running sardonic joke among tech columnists that you can't even USE the word "Apple" or "Microsoft" without getting hate mail from somebody or other.
It's kind of amazing that various extremists could find the same column too pro-Microsoft AND too pro-Apple. But hey--that's the nature of ideological soldiers, whether they're in the conservative-liberal war, the evolutionist-creationist war or the Hummer-Prius war.
The Mac-Windows war, though, is especially pointless, protracted, and winnerless. There will always be people on each side who are every bit as rabid and un-convincible as those in any other religious war.
Still, I'd like to suggest, as a starting point of civility, a few pointers for participants in the O.S. war. Consider it one man's version of, "Can't we all just get along?"
1. Hate something for its failings, not for its success.
It's totally fine to criticize something because of its flaws--to hate Windows because it's bloated and cryptic, for example, or the iPod because it's too easily scratched. But condemning something just because it's the dominant product is just sour grapes. Arguments along the lines of "I hate Bill Gates because he's rich" or "I hate the iPod because everyone has one" add nothing to the dialogue.
2. No condemning something until you've tried it.
If everyone abided by this idea, about 95 percent of all the Windows-Macintosh diatribes would evaporate overnight. But here it is: If you haven't tried something, then you really have no basis to comment.
3. Execution matters.
I'm so tired of reading discussions like this: Person A: "I love Mac OS X Tiger! That Spotlight thing is so cool: press a keystroke, type a few letters, and get an instantaneous listing every file, folder and program containing that text."
Person B: "You pathetic loser! It's called hard-drive indexing, and Windows XP has had it from Day One." Of course, the truth is that Windows Indexing Service is to Spotlight as Thomas the Tank Engine is to a bullet train. In Indexing Service, you can't search with a single keystroke, the speed is nothing like Spotlight's, you can't search for metadata (115 kinds of secondary information, like music genre, Photoshop layer names, camera settings in digital photos, etc.), the index isn't updated in real time as you create or delete documents, and so on.
It goes the other way, too. "I love how Windows XP lets me delete or rename files right in the Open or Save dialog boxes."
"What's the big deal? On the Mac, we just switch to the desktop and delete or rename things there."
Sorry, but that's just not as good as being able to do it within the dialog boxes.
The bottom line: How well something works and how elegantly it's been built is also relevant to the "which is better" discussion.
4. Don't make grandiose purchasing plans by guessing on technology's future.
This pointer is directed exclusively at Mac-bashers, particularly the ones on the nation's boards of education.
If you decide to standardize on Windows across all schools, fine. But make sure you have legitimate reasons like economics or the need to run some Windows-only software suite.
"We want the kids to learn what they'll one day use in the business world," however, is NOT a good reason. If you think you know what anyone will be usi
Just like most religious wars, the casuses of the hatred (on both sides) are historical. The here-and-now is of little import.
First you'd have to get people to RTFA, for starters.
I'm often amazed however at how many non tech literate people I know simply refuse to even try OSX even when I offer to show them how to. These are people who are completely frustrated by Windows but stick with it only because it's what they know and cannot even fathom an alternative.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
You must be a zealot, if you think that Altivec makes the Mac special. Yes, it's true that MMX is not used by developers, but that's only because there are better instruction sets now, like SSE2 or SSE3, that do exactly the same thing as Altivec or VMX They just don't have as catchy a name, which I guess is the only thing that matters to zealots. Do yourself a favor and lookup SIMD on Google. You might be surprised that Apple didn't invent it.
Oh yeah? http://www.winplosion.com/
Yes, it's 10 bucks and not included with the os, but guess what, there's plenty of counter examples too. (e.g. 3'rd party trackpad driver 'side track' which was pretty much required until very recently)
.sig
Altivec doesn't enable anything like expose; I'm on an iBook G3 currently and when I press F9 I get this effect that is... oh, wait, expose! (Hint: The G3 doesn't have Altivec).
Of course you are confusing Altivec, a very boring-and-not-very-important vector instruction set with Quartz and Quartz Extreme, something that is much more cool, but hey, who cares -- why let facts get in the way?!
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
I don't really agree with most of what you are saying; Microsoft has really tightened up their security lately and it's nearly a non-issue on Windows Server 2003 (probably the only decent server product MS has ever made).
However, I do agree with your point about Apple being a 'sole supplier'. This is very important for people to understand. With Apple being the sole supplier for both hardware and software, they can never really be as efficent as two seperate companies working flat out on improving their efficiency and cost control -- look at the x86 hardware market, Dell, HP and IBM are competitng like crazy. It is impossible to suggest that similar gains in efficency would be effected inside one, huge corp.
I think that it could be time for Apple to switch to x86 once and for all. We are seeing the performance gap grow and grow between PPC chips and x86, especially with this weeks launch of the dual-core Pentium D.
If Apple were to switch to Intel they could recompile the entire OS: kernel, device drivers, windowing stack and 'core' applications and emulate the rest of the legacy PPC apps. This would be slow, but no where near as bad as most people make out - in Cocoa the vast majority of the time is spent executing the various libraries, which Apple would of recompiled to x86. Carbon would probably be a bit slow.
Apple would also have to roll out XCode 3 which could produce PPC/x86 binaries. Give it a year or two and the vast majority of the apps people will be running will be entirely x86 native and only a small proportion of them emulated. We must also not forget that the x86-64 architecture is a lot more PPC like than plain ol' x86 and it has many more registers which would aid PPC emulation.
The results of this for Apple would be great -- 2 companies competiting for their processors, access to all the latest-and-greatest x86 motherboard features (SLI) not to mention huge cost savings.
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
No they wouldn't.
Apple could roll out a design with an Intel processor that was completely nothing like a PC. And they likely would, because if it evolved from their architecture, it wouldn't have the Pee-Cee BIOS and all the legacy cruft. It would have nothing resembling an ISA bus, etc. It could and would be just as impossible for a clone vendor to produce as their current PPC-based line.
It is entirely possible that if Mac OS X had the marketshare of Windows it would be compromised as often.
Compare:
It is entirely possible that if brick houses had the market share of straw houses the Big Bad Wolf would have been able to blow it over.
If that doesn't reveal just how idiotic your statement is, nothing will. There are more viruses for certain cell phones that have less market share than Apple, for Bob's sake! Virus writers would love to infect Macs, just to prove it can be done.
(I know everyone likes to use the IIS vs. Apache market share/vulnerability comparison here, but the three little pigs is so much better at illustrating the absurdity of the argument to laymen. Vulnerability is based on design and implementation, not on popularity or market share.)
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.