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A Mac Fan's Take On Vista

jcatcw writes "Ken Mingis has been running Vista on a MacBook Pro for a couple of weeks. Highlights from his review: 'Apple's UI is called Aqua. Microsoft calls its interface Aero. Hmmmm... Gadgets and widgets. What's that line about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?... The UAC implementation in Vista is heavy-handed and intrusive — it halts what you're doing, even if you want to do something as simple as change your clock. My sense here is that Microsoft has been criticized so often for security vulnerabilities that it decided to club users over the head with its new operating system-in-lockdown-mode... I'm more enamored of Vista's Flip 3D feature, which basically takes all of the open windows on your desktop, stands them up on end and stacks them in a way that you can cycle through to the one you want to use. It's similar to what Apple's Expose does... Vista's method wins on aesthetics.'"

10 of 499 comments (clear)

  1. Painfully Subjective Review by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'll just out and say it -- Ken Mingis is just looking for bells & whistles. He's not in search of the 'best' operating system, just looking for the one that can waste CPU cycles while making the user ooh and ahh.

    Here's something you could have figured out for me: how efficient are these effects? What's the net cost of having Aqua or Aero? Do these graphical interfaces leave sasquatch sized memory footprints? Are Gadgets & Widgets memory efficient? Does all this extra shit cause any more bugs than a regular operating system without them?

    Big deal. Call me when you write an object review. I want to know which of these operating systems will run on my old ass laptop with a low end P4 in it. Not all of us have the new intel core 2 duos.

    Congratulations, four pages of inundating me with ads, bitching about UAC & falling head over heels for Aero. Sounds like every other Vista review I've read.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Painfully Subjective Review by finkployd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Big deal. Call me when you write an object review. I want to know which of these operating systems will run on my old ass laptop with a low end P4 in it. Not all of us have the new intel core 2 duos.

      Neither, you will run XP or Linux/Solaris/*BSD, those are your options. Or buy a new computer, which is really what they want.

      To put it another way, Apple and Microsoft could very easily produce a modern *-lite version of their respective OSes and sell them to people with older or not maxed out hardware and probably keep a high percentage of the population happy with just that. However that will not help Apple (or MS's hardware partners) sell new machines that most people don't really need, so it will not happen.

      Excluding gamers, developers, and people who work a lot with media (photoshop, video editing, etc), a 500Mhz box running windows 98 with office, outlook, and IE serves the vast majority just fine, but where is the profit in that?(*)

      And even though Gnome and KDE are not doing much better, fortunetely there exists fluxbox and xfce for those who think an 1GHz P3 should still be usable as a desktop machine.

      (*) note: windows 98 is criminally insecure, and not being patched anymore, I don't recommend you do this.

      Finkployd

    2. Re:Painfully Subjective Review by finkployd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What you miss, is those new UI features. Are they really that important?

      A better question is: "without those new UI features, is Vista really that important?"

      Most of the really cool features have long been stripped out of Vista, so you are effectivly paying a lot of money for XP+DRM, which is clearly the real reason for Vista to exist.

      Finkployd

  2. Old Arguments. by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well that is the typical Windows vs. Mac Debate. Apple OS method is do what you need to do, and let the OS Do What it needs to do, and try not to step on each others foot. Windows is a working Microsoft Commercial for every feature that help you save time or protect you from trouble it is like Windows says "See Microsoft cares about you because we just protected you", While Mac OS X is more like go do what you need to do we will keep out of it and protect you when you need it, and we will only talk to you when we really have to. Even the Eye Candy. OS X eye candy is subtile while Windows is flashy. It is like a a man in a nice suit vs. a Pimp.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  3. End the madness! by dave420 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Everyone seems to be seeing how OSs fare compared to each other, giving bragging rights to whichever one was the first to use various features, when that doesn't even matter in the slightest. An OS is to be used - it's not your child, you don't have to stand up for it. If it does what you need it to do, then it's great. I don't give a rat's ass who invented "windows flying around revealing themselves" first, I just care if it's of any use to me. It's an operating system, not a political statement. Fucking fanboys.

  4. Re:Flip3D is aesthetic? by ZachPruckowski · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Expose simply looks and behaves so much more efficiently and aesthetically. Try Flip3D when you have 20 windows open, and you'll get an obscured stack of windows that you have to travel through one by one, including the desktop (weirdly, Flip3D puts the desktop in there as a window too). In addition, there's no need to "cycle" through the windows in Exposé, because it displays all windows at once.

    Very true. With a button press (or mouse squeeze on my desktop), I can see all the windows at once. So I'm a button press and a click (or a squeeze and a click) away from anything. However, with Flip3D, I'm a button press, a bunch of scrolling, and a click away from anything.
    Also, Exposé is also useful if I need to see both windows at once, like if I'm typing something based on something I'm reading (summarizing news articles in my case) or if I need to compare 2 or more images for some reason.
    Also, Exposé runs fine on a 1.33 GHz G4 with 32 MB VRAM (although most OS X eye candy like 64 MB VRAM), while Flip 3D will require 64MB or, more likely, 128MB VRAM.

  5. Security nags by dtfinch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The more you tighten your grip, the more star^H^H^H^Husers will log in as administrator.

  6. Re:Missing out on the real features... by Tim+C · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think quite a lot of people moaned about "Documents and Settings" because

    a) it's quite a lot to type
    b) it contains those embedded spaces that can be troublesome for the CLI and some older apps

    Given that they wanted to change it, what else would you call it? And at the end of the day, does it matter that it's the same on OS X?

  7. Re:Vista by Doctor+Memory · · Score: 3, Insightful
    You're running beta software as your primary OS!
    Chill, dude, he's running it on a media server. If it freaks out and melts down, what's the worst? He'll miss an expisode of Lost or something. It's not like he's hosting client apps or anything.
    --
    Just junk food for thought...
  8. "doesn't need a super system"... Oh, the irony... by Dr.+Zowie · · Score: 3, Insightful
    ...XP 1700...1 gig of ram, several 250 gig hard drives ... I will be throwing in an XP 2600 ...


    How zippy is your machine? An XP 1700 wita a gigabyte of RAM is capable of simulating regional weather patterns in real time, or of calculating about 10,000 lunar orbital injection trajectories per second, or of playing 100 competition chess games simultaneously, or of analysing and controlling traffic patterns in a mid-sized city core.

    So, er, your 1700 *is* a super system. With that much horsepower at your disposal, you shouldn't have to wait more than 0.1 second to start up your favorite application. If you notice *any* lag before any dialog box comes up, you should be questioning why.