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David Pogue Takes On Vista
guruevi writes to let us know about a review of Microsoft Vista in the NY Times, in the form of an article and a video, by the known Mac-friendly David Pogue. In the article, Pogue recasts Microsoft's marketing mantra for Vista: "Clear, Confident, Connected" becomes "Looks, Locks, Lacks." Pogue writes that Vista is such a brazen rip-off of Mac OS X that "There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express." But the real fun is in the video, in which Pogue attempts to prove that Vista is not simply an OS X clone.
kdawson, the link to video not working...can you fix it?
Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.
Microsoft is just trying to express how much they love Apple.
Since the poster broke the link to the video, it is available here:8 aabc2:10f959c69f8:-76e0&fr_story=d14603c1e23e6ce37 920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&st=1166446268999&mp=FLV&cp f=false&fvn=9&fr=121806_075108_718aabc2x10f959c69f 8xw76df&rdm=415999.3568509814
http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=a71
This is a double feature. Its a "Slashdot Editors Suck" article AND a "Someone Doesn't Like Vista" article!
Its like Christmas a week early!
I didn't notice when I clicked on it, was it Zonk?
I've been testing Vista Business edition all weekend and so far I really like it. I'm also a Mac user, so I can compare the two firsthand. Vista takes a lot of the nice features of OS X and does them the right way in Vista. The gadgets are so much nicer in Vista than in OS X. They're easier to manage and they work more smoothly. The Vista user interface is absolutely beautiful from an eye candy point of view, and yet it doesn't seem to take any significant performance hit. My Mac Book Pro is not nearly as fluid in running OS X as my Dell laptop is with Vista. Both OS'es are 64-bit also. Even Photoshop CS3 runs much faster on Vista than on OS X.
Microsoft may have copied a lot of features and look from Apple, but they left the bad, took the good and have a much better implementation in my opinion.
Now if only Linux worked this well....
might remember that even before OS X was launched for its first version, the "vista" "road map" had been published clearly stating what major components would be part of Vista, on WinFS never made it while another, "Aero" has always been slated as part of the opertating system. Unlike apple Microsoft likes to get feedback from their customers before throwing something at them. So of course Mac users see 3d components, 3d windows and naturally assume that MS just ripped off the idea, however it's not fully the case - and the line isn't clear. The thing is: if you strip away the UI of vista and compare OS X and Vista based simply on their progamming models and underlying architecture - they are decidedly different. It would seem this author however is not qualified to make this evaluation.
Two, actually, if you plan on counting dupes.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
According to TFA: If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost.
Would that really give you that much of a speed boost over using swap? Granted most USB sticks are pretty close to random access(a hell of a lot closer than hard drives at any rate), and have decent bandwidth, but wouldn't all of a sudden popping memory out of your system cause some serious system panicks? Also would you have to clear out the stick whenever you eject it? I am curious as to how microsoft did this.
I guess I will just have to wait to see some benchmarks to see how it performs.
Monstar L
For instance, when I found out that Mac OS's had the Unix shell I was happy & enthusiastic at the same time. Not because I use Mac but because I like that shell over so many others & I hope to see every operating system standardize their shell. I would also like to see the same done with security schemes.
Now, whether widgets came first or gadgets came first--I don't care. What I care about is that my job (and I'm sure a lot of people reading this are the same way) forces me to use Windows & sooner or later they'll get Vista. Should I really be bitching and making fun of Vista being an OS X clone? Or should I sit back and enjoy the fact that something is changing and--since they're mimicking an already successful operating system--it must be for the better.
I guess this is some form of operating system snobbery I'm not accustomed to.
My work here is dung.
Guess which feature the majority of users will disable.
Seriously, I hope there is some sort of privilege separation, only requiring password authentication for applications that need escalated privileges, otherwise this feature will be ignored left, right and centre.
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if that was either total bunk, or gross misrepresentation by the author.
The idea of using a flash drive to supplement main memory is assenine for a number of reasons. Like the above, yanking it out would leave the OS in a totally assed up state. As well, flash only has ~ 1-2 million write cycles. Your thumb drive would be toast in just a week or two if you were using it as RAM.
You could read the article and find out, that the link is prominently displayed in the lefthand side. But then again.. This is Slashdot... ;-)
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
There needs to be less shit thrown about who came up with what first. I don't really care who stole from who, all I care about is who does it best, and quite often thats the person who learns from the creator's mistakes and does it better.
Yes. And when Vista's successor is announced, we'll get "Vista didn't have this crap" and "At least with Vista, you could ..." articles. Every day. It is the Slashdot way, grasshopper.
"Some of the big-ticket Vista features and programs are eerily familiar, too. The biggest one is Instant Search, a text box at the bottom of the Start menu. As you type here, the Start menu turns into a list of every file, folder, program and e-mail message that contains your search phrase, regardless of names or folder locations. It's a powerful, routine-changing tool, especially when you seek a program that would otherwise require burrowing through nested folders in the All Programs menu.
A similar Search box appears at the top of every desktop (Explorer) window, for ease in plucking some document out of that more limited haystack. "
This stuff sounds like the google desktop search that sits in my coworker's taskbar as well as the toolbars that have been attached to everyones' browser for years; not some ripoff of the MacOS per se. By bet is that MS was likely looking at heading Google off at the pass and keep them off the desktop.
"Are we going to get a "someone doesn't like Vista" article every day until the operating system is released to the general public?"
Great. Another year and a half of these articles then.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
It's a bloody pain in the ass to port UNIX/POSIX/Linux software to it, unlike OS X.
http://outcampaign.org/
From the article
There's now a keystroke (Alt+up arrow) to open the current folder's parent window, the one that contains it.
Backspace opens the parent folder in XP & probably even in previous Windows version.
A summary of the fine article:
Sigh.
With a little effort, Microsoft could fit the David Pogue Takes On Vista review onto a sticker to put on the retail boxes. Until then, let's hope some enterprising Slashdot reader downloads a copy of Vista and offers something more substantive for discussion.
How does one steal something that is made to be given away for free with no strings attached?
MS has a desktop monopoly.
Please don't redefine words as you wish.
I guess that by your own definition of monopoly, Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly, as they only controlled 91% of U.S. production at their highest ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
"Are we going to get a "someone doesn't like Vista" article every day until the operating system is released to the general public?"
Yes...and then we'll get a "everyone doesn't like Vista" article every day. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
You falsely represent it as your own original work.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
a recent typical USB thumbdrive is something like 10x faster at random access of 4KB chunks than even the fastest hard drives. So Vista can use one of these USB drives as a cache for the pagefile, speeding up a system quite a bit *IF* it is using the pagefile quite a bit. That is, if you're a bit low on RAM and the pagefile is getting hit pretty hard. Pop in a USB stick and allow it to use a portion for this feature and you should get a pretty decent boost. If, however, you already have tons of RAM you aren't likely to see as big of a gain. On my 2GB machine I can't tell the difference with a stick in or not. If it only had 1GB, or god forbid 512MB or less, perhaps this feature would be more noticable.
They say it needs cookies enabled and a Flash plugin. My browser (Mozilla Camino on Mac OS) has both, but doesn't play the video. Neither does Safari, which the NYT lists as a supported browser (it displays a gray rectangle).
F***. Learn from Youtube or Google video, or better yet, post the video there...
I believe if you go read MS's FAQ on the ReadyBoost feature they state that today's flash drives should be good for 10 years or so for this duty. I guess in part because flash drives already randomize write locations to spread out the duty, and because MS uses some algorithm to ensure the cache is used for frequent pagefile contents.
Some might argue that since Apple doesn't support OS X on non-Apple kit and, therefore, doesn't compete with Microsoft. But (a) OS X can be installed and run quite nicely on non-Apple kit and (b) users of newer Apple hardware have a clear choice to continue the OS X upgrade path or the Windows upgrade path (or both).
Not to mention that many new Apple products compete head to head with Microsoft products. iTunes vs. Media Player, iPod vs Zune, Keynote vs Powerpoint, Pages vs Word, OS X Server vs Windows Server, Apple Developer Tools vs Visual Studio ...
That's what filesystem cache is for.
Indeed. When you have RAM to spare for caching.
What they're saying really is that Vista is going to blow the RAM on all of the existing PCs out there, and this is a kludge to get round spending the extra £20 for the RAM rather than a USB stick.
No, they're saying if you do this, your system will be faster, because it will.
Even on machines with multiple gigabytes of RAM, it will *still* provide a performance boost (albeit a relatively small one) because in many cases reading from a USB flash disk is faster than reading from a hard disk.
Read about what this technology is, how it works and what it's objectives are, rather than commenting from ignorance.
>>Sadly enough, i think that's more or less right.
Why are you sad? Sounds like you think Vista is a good thing. And BTW, nobody can make you upgrade your current computer to it, and probably for a year or more you'll still be able to buy XP systems from all the major vendors.
Can anyone comment on this? Last time I checked flash memory (and USB, even 2.0) are S_L_O_W. Caching flash to system memory for faster access to the flash drive I could see, but this just doesn't make sense.
Most Vista reviewes (and the /. reactions) fail to consider the mission of Vista in most big corporations. Sure, there might be some comparisons to Macintosh for the look & feel, but in a corporate (> 500 employees) environment, the Windows platform really shines. From a robust permission scheme, remote control of group policies and really easy deployment there's nothing like Windows. (The macintosh really falls down in a controlled environment.
Can any one of the Mac fanboys come up with one Fortune 500 company (other than Apple) that has deployed more than 50% Macs?)
If you add Exchange to the mix, Windows really shines in the shared environment. Sure, for "grandma's" use and other special applications the Mac is a bright and shiny object, but it's just not a good team player.
A common gripe I have with the Mac OS community is this seeming insistence that everything that is cool or nifty, or even useful, is somehow a rip-off of something Apple did first. If you look at articles like this one, you'd think Apple invented the on-desktop search bar (Google), or widgets/gadgets (DesktopX, Konfabulator).
Apple often does things *better* than other companies (with the exception of Dashboard) but they usually don't do it FIRST. This makes the claim that everyone rips off their stuff from Apple pretty silly.
Lets look at some of these claims in the article regarding what Microsoft is "stealing" from Apple:
1. Glowing Min/Max/Close Buttons
Ugh, I'm sorry, but this is not an Apple first thing. I've seen this in Windows custom UIs (WindowBlinds for example) for a good long while now, not to mention game UIs and a bunch of Flash applications. This is a very nice design element, and yes Apple did it well, but they didn't do it first.
2. "Instant Search"
Yes, I know... you're trying to compare it to Spotlight and the traditional Sherlock tool. Guess what though, well before Spotlight there was Google Desktop which gave you the in-frame search box. I like Spotlight a lot, it makes navigating files on my system a hell of a lot easier, but it's not new, and all similar search systems aren't instantly copycats of it.
3. Sidebar and Gadgets/Widgets
Like I said before, the Gadget/Widget thing has been around a LOT longer than Apple fans like to think. Dashboard was the first attempt to integrate them straight into the OS as a bundled feature, but it was pretty poorly implemented. Apple in this regard was several years late to the party. The MS Sidebar is also a fairly poor implementation... so I guess if anything you can accuse MS of stealing some of Apple's own bad design work.
4. The bundled apps "Photo Library" "DVD Maker" "Chess Titans" etc...
Umm... ok... I'll give you Apple folks this one. With the way MS broke apart the Outlook features into individual apps is a little too close to the iCal, Address Book, Mail.app scheme. This one is probably a straight-rip from the Apple playbook.
5. Flip3D a poor man's Expose
Bull. Flip3D is a cheesy way to show off the 3D capabilities in the desktop layer. It has nothing to do with Expose and the multiple ways to display everything currently running. I think Expose does things way better. Flip3D is a gimmick, nothing more. If MS wanted to ape the Expose design, they could have easily done it better.
There are a lot of things Apple does well, and the article does admit that Apple borrows, often even from Windows, to get its feature set. However, the claim that these features were taken from Apple as opposed to being taken from wherever Apple themselves snagged them is presumptuous.
Worked for me using camino on mac when I saw it a few days ago. Do you have the latest flash?
Crawl with it would be more likely. OS X doesn't even run fast on a modern dual core processor or dual G5's. I'm always having to wait on my Mac to open up windows and dialog boxes. I never have this problem with Windows of Linux of any version.
There's not a lot of fame and glory from writing that Microsoft hit a home run. It's much better to recycle the old "Microsoft copied it from Apple" line. Who cares about who was first.... it's called building on prior art.... now it's up to Apple to see what they can build on from Microsoft (see fast user switching, ethernet) and dropping the failures (see appletalk, ADB, newton, cyberdog, OS 1-9).
Imagine a user who just bought an x86 Macintosh running OS X 10.4. Apple would like to sell that user a desktop upgrade when 10.5 comes out. Microsoft would like to sell that user a desktop version of Windows. That makes Apple and Microsoft direct competitors on the Intel desktop PC market.
The question to ask, is, why use a knockoff like Windows when you can have the original?
;)
Because I can't find a place that sells Xerox Altos?
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
I watched the video, which was actually some nice tongue-in-cheeck humor. Now I don't have much experiance with Mac OS, besides once getting frustrated because as a Windowised user I could find my way around and being too impatient to learn more about it.
Now having played with Vista and finding my way around it, the video suggest that the move to OS-X would be easier then ever!
Supporting MS products doesn't mean you have to like them.
you are attributing a hobby two two names, which refer to the same flesh&blood individual?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Microsoft copied the Apple Mac Computing metaphor (that was copied from xerox) They can do it again and again. In fact, this is the way of American Business today. Let the competition innovate and then offer the truly good ideas to the marketplace at a reduced cost. The courts said it is ok to do that.
-- Anybody here remember the Atari 800?
they use an author of numerous books and websites that are clearly OSX fanboy books. I use a Mac, and have read his books. However, to use Pogue as a reviewer crosses the line by a mile-- for Vista. Sure, Vista is a dry-rip of OSX components. Microsoft is clearly predatory. But the guy isn't a neutral observer. Shame on the NYT.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I have been running Vista on my laptop (HP nc6320) since it was released to business users. My laptop is a Core Duo 1.66Ghz with 512MB of ram. It was sold as "Vista ready" and even had that wonderful 100% Vista Compatible sticker on the side. Sadly, it was not.
Vista failed to recognize almost all of the hardware. Thankfully, it did recognize the wireless card, so I was able to go to HP's site and download most of the hardware. It never did recognize the fingerprint reader (likely bad drivers) and there were two devices that came up as unknown device which I have yet to be able to track down. Also, since the video card is shared memory, I do not get all of the nice visual features on this laptop that I would on a more powerful desktop.
That being said, I am very happy with the performance of this latop. The boot time is significantly nicer, and it runs Office 2007 perfectly. I also enjoy the menu structure so much more. Some of the layout reminds me of Mac/Linux, such as not having a "Documents and Settings" folder, but instead having a "Users" folder on the root drive. Things like this are not massive changes to the user experience, but for someone like me, who works on both Macs and PCs all day, it seems more natural, and I do feel I'm a little more productive during the day.
I would actually like to replace Windows XP on my home machine with Vista, which can handle the special effects, but as I have a very old Brooktree tv tuner card, I will likely be stuck with XP until I can afford a new tuner card as well. The Beta releases of Vista did not recognize the card, so I don't have any hope for the final release.
Also, for those wondering, Windows ReadyBoost has done wonders for my latop performance. I can actually tell a difference in the opening/closing time of office documents when I have my 1GB thumb drive attached. My older 256MB drives were not even offered the option of ReadyBoost, but they are not USB2.0 native, so that is likely the issue with those units.
"It's a powerful, routine-changing tool, especially when you seek a program that would otherwise require burrowing through nested folders in the All Programs menu."
So is that because Vista is good or because XP was so badly designed...? (Everything in a single menu???)
"A similar Search box appears at the top of every desktop (Explorer) window, for ease in plucking some document out of that more limited haystack."
Where has Microsoft been for the last 12 years? I had that in IRIX back in the early '90s.
Still, the most insidious thing of all has to be the five different versions, with all except the "Ultimate" being crippled in some sneaky way that you won't figure out until you've paid your money thinking you've got the operating system you need. By the time you notice it, you've already gone to all the trouble of installing Vista, finding drivers, etc. so you'll pretty much be forced to pay for "Ultimate" - at $400 a copy.
No sig today...
I want to call this article redundant for a variety of reasons. First, it is somewhat superificial and hasn't move beyond what other superficial reviews have done in the past (This is the 50th time I heard the copy OSX routine). Second, does it matter how well Microsoft did its latest incarnation of Windows? If you buy a computer in the next year that is not from Apple computer, you will buy some version of Vista. It is not like you can choose something else to run your computer unless you do it aftermarket. Who short of a geek will bother?
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Deleted
Which is exactly why we need competition. It's not just because Windows is teh suxor, or Gates is the devil. (true as that may be
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
You are missing the point. RAM is orders of magnitude faster than USB flash disks, both in sustained reads and random access reads (and the gap is even wider for writes). The argument is that if you add a bit more RAM and use it to do the same thing you are using the USB drive to do then you will get even more benefit without all the added complexity. Windows has traditionally used memory fairly inefficiently in this way, marking things as stale and getting rid of them.
Now there is a real counter-argument for this, and that is you can get a lot more storage space for $20 in flash memory rather than RAM. So where the cost/benifit analysis comes down is a bit more complicated. Oh, and you do have to add in the fairly high processor usage cost for going through USB to this.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
If the review seems superficial, it's because of Pogue's target audience being average end users. I thought the actual review was quite balanced (features x,y,z seem to be taken straight from OS X but Apple also also rips off other dev shops and they aren't the only new features, for example q) and contained appropriate content for the target market. Most users don't really care about the guts of the system. They care mostly about the eye candy, whether it will work with their existing programs and peripherals, and how fast or slow things are going to run.
Taligent was in projet before Win95 hit the streets.
Shure, it didn't get to market, like Copland too, but they were trying to get there too, it just got longer (it's called backward compatibility, you know..)
Menzoberranzan Networks
Just a few questions:
.deb's -- Huh? That won't work either?
Where can I download the DVD iso's so that I can try it on a spare PC?
Huh? I have to pay for it? Oh. -- You mean like I have to contribute to a user group for the cost of the blank media, Right? -- No prob. I'll give 'em $5 and bring donuts to the install party.
What?! They demand a larger contribution?! How Rude!
Does MythTV 0.20 install OK on it? Once I get it loaded, I can just type 'yum install mythtv-suite', and I'll be set, right?
Huh? It doesn't use RPMS?! No prob, I'll just install the
What?! -- There aren't even any package repositories at all?!
You mean I'll have to build everything from source? -- Well, OK, I can see the benifits of that. -- No problem, I'll just download the Tarballs and type 'make'
Huh? I doesn't include a compiler?!
Frankly, I don't think the mirror sites will get much traffic for this distribution!
It's pretty ironic that all the features in Vista Pogue is making fun of as having been "ripped off" by Apple were themselves things Apple "ripped off" from others: desktop search, dashboard, and 3D chess. The same is true of many other features Apple marketing likes to brag about: hardware accelerated windowing, metadata file systems, the Cocoa libraries, translucency, WIMP interfaces, etc.
None of this would really matter much: it's fine for companies to copy from each other. The only reason to even discuss it is because Apple's favorite marketing meme is that everybody is "ripping them off". So, Apple and Microsoft, since you're not willing to acknowledge where the ideas you are using actually have come from, can you both please STFU about "innovation" altogether?
So 2 million write cycles * 4 GB flash drive = 8,000,000,000 MB of total writing capacity. Typical throughput to a flash stick is on the order of 10 MB/s. 8,000,000,000 MB / 10 MB/s = 800,000,000 second lifetime. 800,000,000 second / 60s/min / 60min/hr = 222,222 hours / 24hrs/day = 9,259 days / 365days/year = 25 YEARS! If you were writing to the drive at a constant 10MB/s the entire time!!
1 million writes, and 1 gig flash = 3.125 years of CONSTANT usage to wear out the drive.
And either the OS or the flash stick can ensure that writes are evenly spaced around the physical drive while appearing logically just like a normal disk.
I think you will do just fine.
If you tried to engineer something like USB in the 80s, it would have been cost prohibitive. USB took tremendous efforts to bring the whole industry together. ADB was created by one guy, Woz, in a few weeks. And ADB worked very, very well and was very reliable and it was amazingly cheap to manufacure. That would be like calling the carburetor a failure because it has been replaced by fuel injection.
Also, I would not call AppleTalk a failure either. It did a lot to help people who were trying to network groups of Mac systems together. For its time, it was a good system. The fact that the industry standardized on IP does not mean AppleTalk was a failure. In fact, the whole ZeroConf effort comes out of trying to bring discovery that AppleTalk had from the beginning to IP networks.
And calling MacOS a failure? Give me a break. I suppose DOS was a failure. And the Apple II. And the telegraph.
You are an ignorant Microsoft fanboy.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
And then read some of his conclusions:
Granted, he does offer criticism along with the praise and does have some barbs. But over all, it was a fairly well balanced review.
What a fucking sad day this is, when swapping to usbflash is a "feature" (instead of having a proper swap architecture that _naturally_ allows swap on any device).
And what a fucking sad day this is when you have to explain generously to persistent ignorants why this is a bad idea. Swap to floppy, children, and witness computing at the speed of your own minds.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
It's slower, [...]
OS X is the slowest mainstream OS on the market. Heck, Vista on an old ~500Mhz P3 laptop is snappier than OS X on my 1Ghz iBook. Windows XP or 2003 even more so. XP or 2003 on a 1Ghz iBook-era PC laptop absolutely trounces it.
OS X has a lot of nice features and very cool technology. Performance, however, is *not* a feature.
[...] not in fact cheaper, [...]
Well, that depends entirely on how much value you assign to Apple's software bundle and small hardware footprints. I assign little, since most of the functionality it bundles I'm not particularly interested in and I have loads of empty space under my desk. Add in the significant expense to get any sort of decent hardware flexibility and the comparison is even worse.
[...] particularly when you consider the average life of a Windows PC is about 3 years and a Mac, closer to 5 years.
Of course, the PC likely only cost 3/5th as much as the Mac in the first place or has 7/5 the performance.
This "Macs last longer" canard carries about as much truth as the "Macs have lower TCO" line. Apart from a handful of exceptions, over the last 5 - 7 years, PCs have consistently delivered more powerful hardware at equal or lower cost to Macs. Combine this with OS X's atrocious performance (especially in the past), lack of hardware options and configurability (especially on the low end) and the idea that Macs "last longer" in any sort of competitive sense is laughable. People may well hold onto their Macs for longer, but a Mac that's X years old will be slower in an absolute sense than a PC of equivalent age, and in a relative sense (how fast the whole package is) it will be slower still. You need a G5 class Mac with a gig of RAM or more for OS X to deliver the kind of responsiveness Windows XP can on ~1Ghz PCs with half as much memory.
Windows is so clearly a knockoff. It's the classic knockoff strategy, looks similar but lower quality.
For most of the things *I* care about, Windows does them better and has been doing them for longer. I fail to see where the "knockoff" is in this equation.
I don't use an Apple... I'm not a Mac zealot, and I'm speaking from experience in a corporate environment.
So where's the evidence of Macs having a lower TCO ? I'm not aware of any recent third-party studies, and I've done the maths before as to evaluate the possibility, with Macs being distinct losers (largely due to an incredibly rigid and uncustomisable hardware lineup).
I have a problem with choosing this specific reviewer, whose income and livelihood surrounds a competitive offering. I have to dismiss the content, no matter how good it is, because the reviewer derives his livelihood from Apple. It has inherent bias.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
What a fucking sad day this is, when swapping to usbflash is a "feature" (instead of having a proper swap architecture that _naturally_ allows swap on any device).
ReadyBoost is not swapping.
And what a fucking sad day this is when you have to explain generously to persistent ignorants why this is a bad idea. Swap to floppy, children, and witness computing at the speed of your own minds.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Ironic that you should be calling other people "ignorant".
You are missing the point.
No, I'm not. I understand what you are saying perfectly.
*You* are the one not getting the points that *adding more RAM is not always possible* and *this is not meant to replace real RAM, but to supplement it*.
ReadyBoost is, essentially, a DIY version of harddisks-with-builtin-flash.
I don't think clearly labelling it and putting the source code out in accordance with the licence of the software plus returning contribution to the community in the case of Safari. They aren't doing it in the nicest possible way (massive patch instead of incrementals), but in a way isn't something better than nothing. And in all fairness they didn't steal it all from FreeBSD given that the underlying kernel is Mach, so getting it the BSD code to work on a differnt kernel takes a bit of effort - especially since they've managed to get the thing working on two different platforms without having too many issues with compatibility (e.g. I haven't seen one Apple user complain that Flash doesn't work for them. This is across 32-bit/64-bit PowerPC and Intel. Both Windows and Linux have issues with this on the 64bit platform, though Linux at least has wrappers to provide support).
I always wondered where this setting was...
There were plenty of other competitors to the Mac besides Microsoft Windows: Amiga, NeXT, GEM, etc. Apple would still have been forced to innovate, or maybe they would have been steamrolled by PCs running NeXT, or the Amiga.
Which is basically my point. It's never been just Microsoft and Apple.
You get the feeling that Microsoft's managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, "Copy that."
If you believe what Marlin Eller (a former Microsoft exec) wrote in his book, Microsoft has been doing this since Windows 1.0. Why did the first few versions of Windows use cooperative multitasking? Because the Macintosh didn't do multitasking at all, and because cooperative multitasking made running a single app seem faster and more responsive to Bill Gates as he shuffled between the team developing Windows and the team working on the Applications Apple was writing for the as-yet-unrevealed Macintosh.
Bill Gates loved the Macintosh, and I suspect he still does... he sees Apple as Microsoft's unpaid unofficial brainstorming lab. He doesn't care if a few geeks think of Vista as an OS X clone, because he knows that 99.44% of the customer base simply don't care.
Being released to the public would be great. I suspect that it will only be licenced.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
The much improved Internet Explorer 7 (also available for Windows XP) alerts you when you're visiting one of those fake bank or eBay Web sites (called phishing scams).
... unique among all browsers and other applications that display untrusted files ... a sign of improbable (and probably criminal) incompetance or mind-bogglingly callous cynicism.
Unfortunately Internet Explorer, Active X, and the Desktop are still the same incestuous codependant family, with he least competant member... the HTML control... left in charge of security.
The level of integration in applications that use the HTML control is so great that it's inherently impossible to prevent cross-zone attacks. I can only categorize their continued use of this bankrupt approach
No, he's probably looking at his monthly bills for antacids after shifting from Windows systems to Macs. I know that moving from Win2003 server to OS-X Server took 10 points off my blood pressure. (so did Linux, but I had a tendency to run around yelling "Peace, man!", "Power to the People", and "F* the Pigs!" while wearing tie-dye when I used Linux)
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
How nice of Pogue to put that link in there. I wonder if he gets a kickback.
Unlikely, as addressed by other posters, apple has had next gen OS operations running almost continuously throughout their entire existance, innovation is key to non monopoly players survival. And the mac while popular at times was never near the monopoly level MS has gained.
It's faster, cheaper and runs more software. Oh, and it's not a "knockoff".
Also not true, I read your secondary post, im not sure where you think XP can outperform a mac on 1/2 the hardware, i HAVE clean XP installs with performance tuned to minimum impact on PIII 800mhz w/512mb ram. That alongside a 3rd gen G3 imac with OSX 10.4. And the iMac is WAAAAAYYYY faster (still slow for me). Mac's have always performed better under cmparable hardware under their contemporary OS's. Also, a 5 year old mac is much more usable than a 5 year old PC. I understand you may not agree, but if you look in peoples houses and offices, you will find much more older macs still being actively used with much less complaints than any PC counterpart, this eventually address's the issue of cost. There is no question a PC at purchase is outright cheaper, but when you factor in maintence and lifespan, the equation balences out and begins to tilt towards the mac over time.
as to programs, there is no question at all that a MS has magnitudes more software than OSX, i used VPC, and now parallels and boot camp offer near full speed alternative, but i dont think those are admissible comparisons. MS simply has way more market, and with that way more programs. But of course if you want the best, cutting edge media programs that is about the only stronghold Apple has.
Are you Mac Zealots still talking about that TCO study that compared Windows 3.1 and System 7 ?
It never ceases to amaze me that some ... PC zealots? ... think its untrue. I myself am a deeply experienced windows & network admin from IOS to NT through 2k3. I tend to prefer windows for my day to day work, but that doesnt negate the advantages of OSX and apple's all in one hardware package. the TCO IS LOWER for 90% of purchasers, i myself am not a fan of the high initial cost, and thus buy macs only with explicit need, but that doesnt belie the fact that they simply hold their value longer and tend to break less often as well as remaining productive for a greater period of time.
sorry fella, most windows boxes are hard core thin margin commodity products of just passing grade quality to keep the razor/blade sales rolling through the largest manufacturers. I personally think this is a good thing, as economicaly the cost of PC's continues to drop for the average joe, but it does come with its own caveats.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
I can tell you right now that I will likely never have a mac for a desktop. I know I can get more value if I build it myself, since Intel's offerings for desktops are pretty affordable now and I enjoy having more control over my desktop. However, if I get a new laptop, it will probably be a Macbook Pro. Those things are really sweet. I would get it for the screen alone. I hope they can get the graphics drivers for linux on the macbook fully working, because that's what I really want on there.
What does the "robust permission scheme" matter when Internet Explorer is always there to give that "typhoid mary" effect to the OS.
Oh, I know, I know, every new release of Windows comes with new tools to cripple all your applications so they don't have to fix the fundamental design flaws in COM/ActiveX-based applications like IE and Word. But by now even the biggest Windows fans have to admit, surely, that this band-aid approach can't work... the basic design has to be fixed at the application level.
"Without Microsoft, you would probably still be using MacOS Classic on a PowerPC, dreaming of the day you could smoothly run multiple tasks and not have one crashing program bring down the whole OS with it."
Actually, we have NeXT Software, Inc. to thank for the change. Microsoft's in our Office today, taking away our VB support, which is symptomatic of how little we've ever received from Redmond.
"It's faster, cheaper and runs more software. Oh, and it's not a "knockoff"."
'Faster' than what? $300 per seat, enforced through the most obnoxious WGA, for a version of Vista roughly comparable to Mac OS X, isn't my idea of 'cheap.' And I rather believe that Microsoft took Apple's WWDC tweak, "Redmond, start your photocopiers" to heart.
"Are you Mac Zealots still talking about that TCO study that compared Windows 3.1 and System 7 ?"
System 7 isn't mentioned often in these days of Mac OS X, but in spite of Vista's novelty, I'm certain you're still nostalgic for those days of Windows 3.1, when you finally showed us Mac Zealots (snerk) what's what.
I wonder if the Slashdotters who modded you 'Funny' did so because 'Silly' wasn't available?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Remember that Jobs left Apple for a decade or so to found NeXT. If MS didn't exist, I suspect that NeXT would have filled the vacuum with cheaper systems running NeXTSTEP. So we might have all been running NeXTSTEP 11 in 2006 (kinda like OS X except for a much "cleaner" filesystem design, since no need exists to emulate the UI of OS 9).
-b.
Dunno why you think Windows is faster than Mac OS X, but in my daily experience, Mac OS X is faster.
How is Windows cheaper than Mac OS X? Have you even seen the prices for the pro-level copies of Vista?
Does it run more software? Probably, but the apps which run on Windows and not on Macs are
Most people probably need neither of these, and for everything else, Mac OS X generally has better apps than Windows.
Oh, and yes, it is a knockoff. Although admittedly a poorly done knockoff.
From someone's sig he on /. (visualize the Apple vs PC commercial)
Apple: Hey, what you got there?
PC: Games...
Apple: Can I play, too.
PC: Nope.
Nuff said.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
nonsense, you have no idea what you're talking about.
apple's Mail program stores its mails in mbox format, i.e. one file per mailbox. spotlight finds your mails perfectly. Same for addressbook records.
Bart
It's faster, cheaper and runs more software. Oh, and it's not a "knockoff".
One of the MANY things you don't realize is that even to a Windows user, that one line means "I don't know what the hell I'm talking about."
Which is a very big clue that the rest of your post is equally excremental.
What about "Looks, locks, lacks" don't you understand? Vista can easily be "infinitely more pleasant to use" than any previous Windoze incarnation and still suck eggs next to every other OS. Microsoft's unstable, disorganized, binary registry configured, single screen user interface is not much of an improvement over Windoze 3.1 and hard to make worse. DRM and treacherous computing are the things that can actually make things suck more, so Vista is heavy on that. The consensus opinion is that Vista will give you some eye candy at tremendous hardware and software cost. At ten gigs, it still does not match what NeXT gave the world back in 1991. Mac gives you much more and GNU/Linux will deliver more for much less cost to your current hardware.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
IE7 is not "improved" unless you mean "doesn't run right". And I suggest that M$ fire the idiot who put IE7 on the Automatic Updates "Critical" list.
I've seen enough installs (My dept manages 5500 pcs) of IE7 trying (operative word) to run on underpowered machines with not enough resources (poor school district) that the system becomes completely useless. I mean, what the hell is a browser doing using 150 MB Ram upon being opened?
I absolutely believe that M$ knew that this was going to happen, and is trying to get people to upgrade perfectly good computers because "the internet is broken", after IE7 has been installed. Our Dept is taxed enough trying to keep the machines functional, and we don't need any more "job security" from M$, thank you very much.
Suffice it to say, I've uninstalled IE7 from every computer its been installed on, because it simply doesn't work on any of them I've seen. I think I'm gonna scream the next time someone calls me and says "the internet is broken" when all it is, is IE7!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
oh -- it's this guy !!!!
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
Actually, I'd probably be running a better distro of OS/2 without the microsoft crap still in it. I'd probably be running Photoshop/2, 3D Studio Max/2 or insert any other windows title with a '/2' after it.
When did it stop being a good thing to look at the completion and attempt to take the best parts of what they do and try to do it better? You see this type of behavior in every market, it's nothing new nor is it something to whine about. Sure there needs to be some genuine innovation, but there is nothing wrong with saying "hey those guys did a pretty decent job with this feature, we like it, but we can probably improve it a little."
proxy
if not redundant, here's a mirror of pogue's video http://youtube.com/watch?v=MDNuq94Zg_8
Unlikely, as addressed by other posters, apple has had next gen OS operations running almost continuously throughout their entire existance, [...]
Just like Microsoft, you mean ?
And the mac while popular at times was never near the monopoly level MS has gained.
If you apply equal standards, Apple has had the kind of monopoly Microsoft could only dream of.
Also not true, I read your secondary post, im not sure where you think XP can outperform a mac on 1/2 the hardware, [...]
Because I can look at my iBook sitting next to my Armada and compare. While the iBook smokes the Armada at single CPU-intensive tasks (as is expected), in terms of general UI responsiveness under typical (light, because it's all the iBook can take) workloads, Vista is marginally faster (I'll give OS X the benefit of the doubt and call it a draw) while Windows 2003 or XP are significantly more responsive.
With that said, I wouldn't recommend Vista on anything less than a 1Ghz, 1GB RAM PC - but since a machine like that is ca. 5 years old, it hardly seems unreasonable (I have such a PC here and it runs Vista quite snappily). By my same standards, I wouldn't recommend OS X on anything less than a G5 based iMac or 1Ghz+ dual G4 with 1.5GB RAM.
(I've got to admit I was surprised at the results. I only installed Vista on that old laptop for a laugh, much like the time I installed XP on a ca. 1995 dual Pentium machine to see if it would work.)
[...] i HAVE clean XP installs with performance tuned to minimum impact on PIII 800mhz w/512mb ram. That alongside a 3rd gen G3 imac with OSX 10.4. And the iMac is WAAAAAYYYY faster (still slow for me).
Bullshit. OS X is unbearably slow on anything sub-G4 (I have used it on Beige G3 PowerMacs and G3 iMacs, and have the bald patches to remember it by). To say it's better than Windows XP on a 800Mhz P3 - a machine more than capable of comfortably handling a typical browsing, email and office workload - doesn't even pass the laugh test.
I don't know what you're doing to your PCs to cripple them, but there's no need for them to be unusably slow like a G3 running OS X is. Heck, XP is usable for light tasks on P2 class machines with under 256M of RAM.
Mac's have always performed better under cmparable hardware under their contemporary OS's.
By what measure ? OS X was an atrociously poor performer until 10.3, when it made it up to just a very poor performer. 10.4 helped again by bringing that up to just "slow", but it remains at that - slow. On the hardware side, with a few notable (and short lived) exceptions like the G5 introduction, Macs haven't been faster since the very first round of G4-based PowerMacs.
Even ignoring just "feel", there are numerous sound technical reasons why Windows performs and scales better than OS X - not least of which is maturity.
Also, a 5 year old mac is much more usable than a 5 year old PC.
A 5 year old PC is ca. 1 - 1.4GHz P3 or ca. 1.5 - 2 Ghz P4 (or equivalent Athlons). More than adequate for day to day use and even contemporary gaming with a video card upgrade. A 5 year old Mac is a ~600Mhz G3 iMac or ~700Mhz G4 PowerMac.
Heck, it was only a year ago my main work PC was still a ~5 year old dual P3, and I used to run app workloads on that all the time which have brought every Mac I've tried short of a quad core G5 to their knees.
I understand you may not agree, but if you look in peoples houses and offices, you will find much more older macs still being actively used with much less complaints than any PC counterpart, this eventually address's the issue of cost. There is no question a PC at purchase is outright cheaper, but when you factor in maintence and lifespan, the equation balences out and begins to tilt towards the mac over time.
I will agree that the overall cost over, say, 5 years is about the same - but the difference (and my point) is that at the end of that 5 years you have (and have a
I beg to differ. I worked at a part time job at my college in University Relations and they had an old 400mhz clunker with OS X on it. I didn't even know it was a 400mhz Mac. OS X was very responsive and pretty much the only thing that took a long time was the disk load time.
You either had the fastest 400Mhz Mac in the world, or exceptionally low standards.
Having run Vista personally I am wondering if you have even run Vista. The idea of running Vista, even Windows XP, on a 500mhz PC and trying to get anything done makes me shudder in fear and terror.
I think you're trolling. XP is well and truly usable on a ~500Mhz P3 w/512M of RAM. It doesn't get iffy until you're down into 300Mhz P2, 256MB RAM territory.
I must admit I was surprised at how fast Vista was on my old laptop. I wouldn't use it on that machine over XP, but it *was* fast enough for web browsing, email, office, and the like. I wouldn't feel bad about giving it to my mother to use.
Windows XP on a 1ghz PC is fine if you just browse the web and edit word documents, but it's sluggishly slow, especially if you have an antivirus agent and are trying to do multiple things at once.
Your 1Ghz PC is broken if it is "sluggish" running Windows under any sort of reasonable load.
A G5 Mac is incredibly powerful and responsive. Some guys at my part time work had one and I was blown away by how smooth everything was (they use a lot of multimedia apps like Photoshop, the Macromedia suite, etc.) I've had direct experience of both of those types of hardware and IME at any rate, I found the opposite to be true.
I've used just about every Mac ever made. A G5 Mac is, indeed, a very powerful machine in an absolute sense, but OS X brings it to its knees. Any more than a couple of Safari windows with half a dozen tabs each, a few terminals, Thunderbird and maybe a Word document or two, and my mum's 1.9Ghz, 1.5GB RAM iMac can't keep up.
I'm not sure that's the issue here. We're talking about Vista. The eyecandy in Vista is the part of the product that is being marketed to customers, and appears to be the only interesting feature that Microsoft was interested in completing.
If you think the only interesting thing in Vista is the GUI, you don't know anything about Vista.
Personally, *I* don't care about anything in Vista either. That's why I'm sticking with Windows 2000 and Windows XP on my parents' machines. Windows XP just got pretty stable. After the horrors Microsoft brought with Windows XP I really don't think I'm going to upgrade to Vista for a long time. Say, 5 years.
My two highest priorities are UI responsiveness and the ability to multitask lots of stuff. Windows absolutely shits all over OS X from a great height at both of these things, so I prefer Windows. I do own an iBook, however, and use OS X quite regularly both personally and professionally. There's a lot I like about it, but the poor performance is just a showstopper as far as I'm concerned.
Wait wait, wouldn't uncustomizable hardware be a lower cost of ownership, because you don't spend money on upgrades every 6 months?
No, it added _significantly_ to the initial purchase price because to get a decent dual monitor configuration, we would have had to purchase quad-core Mac Pros.
TCO isn't *only* about ongoing costs (and there's little to indicate they would have been lower anyway).
However, if I get a new laptop, it will probably be a Macbook Pro. Those things are really sweet. I would get it for the screen alone. I hope they can get the graphics drivers for linux on the macbook fully working, because that's what I really want on there.
Laptops are a different matter. After waiting a couple of months for the bugs to be shaken out, I'm eagerly awaiting the MacBook Pro work has purchased me. Even if I end up running Windows on it full-time, it's still a damn nice machine. The only things missing are a multibutton mouse and a decent docking station (and the ability to drive two external LCDs, but that's off into fantasy territory).
I don't care that M$ blatantly ripped of OSX (and they did) - I don't have a mac so I can't run OSX (legally). Also, there is one feature that I value in Windows that OSX doesn't have. I can't play any of my games, or run any of my programs on OSX.
End of story.
Thanks for all the feature R&D apple - I'll enjoy most of it on my PC now (actually truth be told I will turn most of the shiny off straight away - I like my solid grey windows with blue titlebars).
Feel free to make this a PC vs Mac ad.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
1: The most probable is that most existing machines won't have remotely enough RAM spare for caching and so Vista will suck badly. And they won't have enough RAM spare because
2: They think the NTFS buffer cache is crap.
You choose. Either way it's a kludge which just doesn't make any sense any other way.
Deleted
While you'ld be proudly switching DOS tasks in something Microsoft stole from some poor schmuck - just without those stupid icons.
OS/2 and Windows NT beg to differ.
Deleted
Dunno why you think Windows is faster than Mac OS X, but in my daily experience, Mac OS X is faster.
Because I have extensive experience with Macs, MacOS "Classic" and MacOS X.
Because I can put my 1Ghz iBook next to a ~500Mhz P3 laptop and *watch* Vista and OS X handle similar workloads practically identically, despite the iBook being more than twice as fast.
Because I think OS X has some really cool technology and I'd like to use it more, but I find the poor performance too annoying to do so.
How is Windows cheaper than Mac OS X?
Because the minimum buy-in point is lower. To get the features I want, I'd have to buy a Mac Pro. I can buy a PC with all the features I want for substantially less.
Have you even seen the prices for the pro-level copies of Vista?
It's irrelevant (and compares reasonably if you add up all those OS X upgrades anyway). I'm comparing the whole package, including the hardware, not retail prices of just the OS.
Does it run more software? Probably, but the apps which run on Windows and not on Macs are
But by running the same software on OS X, I have to subsequently put up with the relatively poor perfomance.
Oh, and yes, it is a knockoff. Although admittedly a poorly done knockoff.
No, it's not. Windows has been doing the things I'm interested in longer and better than MacOS has.
Although, it's a struggle to see how anything meaningful in Windows is a knockoff of OS X *at all*, regardless. Vista's compositing layer is much more advanced, its GUI behaves quite differently, its kernel is much more capable and mature, etc, etc.
Apparently you weren't smart enough to read the "M$" bulletins that showed how to disable the automatic updates for IE7. I guess that's their fault. And I call bullshit on the 150MB on opening. I have about 4 plug-ins running and opening IE7 takes far less RAM than that. Also, if you want to talk about memory use let's have a gander at Firefox first. Run FF 2.0 for a few hours and then let me know how many hundreds of MBs of RAM it's using.
Balanced? That's a joke. It's pretty obvious he's a huge Mac fan. It takes about 2 minutes to Google and do a YouTube search and see what kind of bias this guy has.
For your benefit, i went as far as reading up on it. If you google a bit, you find:
Matt Ayers, who is the Program Manager in the Microsoft Windows Client Performance group and basically owns the ReadyBoost feature, answers:
Q: What happens when you remove the drive?
A: When a surprise remove event occurs and we can't find the drive, we fall back to disk. Again, all pages on the device are backed by a page on disk. No exceptions. This isn't a separate page file store, but rather a cache to speed up access to frequently used data.
So what these gentlemen at Microsoft have is some data on disk that by having just been read or any other reason is deemed as desirable to be cached for faster access. In any sane architecture, you cache to RAM because that's where the orders-of-magnitude-benefit is to be found. But when you run out of ram you have to dump data to a storage device, like this USB solution. That is swapping, and these gentleman are swapping their disk cache to disk, which is telling. This design assumes that a multi-gigabyte RAM system is trashing and:
1) The data required to regain responsiveness is to be found on the fast seek swap (USB device)
2) That data is also small enough that reading it from USB with AES encryption will be done in smaller time than a direct read from hard drive (which is heavily scheduled due to trashing)
3) That the load level is just enough to trash the high-transfer-speed hard drive but not trash the easily overwhelmed USB thingy they gave you at the last trade show.
4) Data write scenarios aren't even considered, since your data is either all the way to the hard disk (like a man, dammit) or still on a USB drive that can be surprise-removed without system failure (no failure but no integrity either)
What these gentlemen at Redmond wished they had written was a performance-aware multi-device swap system. Which would have been somewhat praise-worthy, if you ignore the fact that a single dedicated kernel hacker could probably do the same in Linux in a long afternoon.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
Tried to read article. Article requires login. Sucks. Hunting for alternate link right now.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I'm glad Pogue likes Vista but I'll be honest, my next machine won't be running Windows. I'm tired of the Microsoft game, particularly with the Zero Day crap that's been running around.
I just find it awfully odd that the Word Zero Day flaw comes out the same week as general distribution of Office 2007 happened, and because 2007 used docx, it isn't affect. Riiight!
Interesting. So do I. In addition to that, I have a very recent 64-Bit Dell under my work desk, and a very recent dual-core iMac (which, by the way, cost half as much as the Dell). The iMac smokes the Dell in just about anything. The most astonishing difference, however, is disk speed. The iMac has a very slow disk, compared to the Dell, but searching through the whole project in IntelliJ takes about a tenth of the time on the iMac. The iMac is faster in pretty much everything: compiling, starting up, Java... Admittedly, the Dell is faster while accessing our SMB network drives.
Really, who cares about your 1GHz PPC iBook. You can't tell me OS X is slow and then talk about what amounts to ancient hardware running on a discontinued chip architecture.
This is true. If you're interested in sub-600-$-pcs, Apple has nothing for you. However, if you compare computer above that price, Apple's pricing is very competitive.
Okay, now that's precious. First, the price of the OS is irrelevant when comparing prices. Second, not having an upgrade in half a decade is suddenly a feature, since if you don't have upgrades, there's nothing to buy? Are you for real?
So Windows is not a knockoff because it has features which OS X does not have? Does not compute.
Yeah, because the whole Desktop ideas, overlapping windows, the menu bar, the whole graphic style and all that recent junk, that's all not meaningful.
While I haven't looked into Vista's new graphics layers (and I do welcome Microsoft for finally having copied that, since it'll probably make my job easier eventually), I do frankly question your grasp of the Mac OS X graphics layers, Quartz and the Mac OS X typography features in particular.
Also, if you really think the Vista kernel is more mature than Mach and BSD, you're delusional.
Dude, can we just kill the "who did widgets first" argument forever?
n tosh&story=Desk_Ornaments.txt
Here: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Maci
The idea is from 1980's ferchrissakes. And the dashboard is the best implementation of widgets I've seen. I don't WANT them sitting on my screen. I want press and hold F12 to check things out and I want them to disappear when I release the button. That's what Widgets do.
You sound like a guy who's never used Mac OS X for more than 5 minutes. There's life outside Microsoft bubble and it's pretty vibrant and exciting. Macs just are not what they used to be in mid 90's. Mac OS X stomps all over Vista in pretty much all regards that matter to the consumer (business customers are another story). I pity the fools who are too lazy or stupid to check it out.
See how useless this game is? Both NetBIOS and AppleTalk were very useful - in their time. DOS Shell was an attempt at a user interface - something that DOS users only had through third-party applications. OS/2 was a failure only because Microsoft wanted it to be. If OS 1-9 were failures, so were analog telephones, black and white TVs, vinyl records and multitudes of other technologies that were eventually supplanted with better ones.
Clippy and Bob? Well, those really were failures.
Call BS all you want. I've seen it. I have seen the M$ bulletins on how to disable the automatic updates of IE7, and that seems to be rather backwards, at least to me. M$ should have made the bulletins on how to automatically install IE 7 (MSI anyone???).
As for FF taking up huge amounts of ram, not on first load. Right now, mine is only 40m, which is a lot less than the IE 7 installs I've seen.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I think pogue forgot that mac os is a rip off in its self Hello, its Darwin (a free os) with a pretty gui, thats pretty much a commercial rip off of gnome/kde widgets, lol, look in kde/gnome for those as well mac os is about as inventive as microsoft windows
There's an article!?
If you must!
Does anyone take this guy seriously? He's not only the lowest life form known on this planet, a fanboi(with an "i") he's also a spammer and been known to abuse digg's(for example) system to get his articles on the first page. Just skip this one...
Even for the end user, what new features might interest them. Eye candy was so 2003. Right now, I am looking at eye candy provide by OSX. Yawn!! How can I find out whether any of these features will improve the general computing experience of those around me (who have not open up to OSX). I don't want to buy Vista to figure that out. Then, the end user has 3 version to choose at both ends of the price scale. Do they take basic or shell out for ultimate? Do you see the questions left open by his review?
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
single screen user interface
To what are you referring to here?OS/2 was an IBM OS, not a Microsoft product.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The 10Mbps Ethernet (10-base-T) standard was published in 1990. The first Apple computer to offer an included Ethernet NIC was the Quadra 700, released in 1991.
Where exactly was the Microsoft innovation which Apple copied in this area?
Oh, and btw, Appletalk works just fine over Ethernet...
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
The link in the blurb worked fine for me without logging in, but otherwise there's always Bugmenot. HTH.
How do you figure? http://www.hyperosforum.co.uk/images/LAURENT/VISTA /Vista15a%20-%20Games,%20Chess%20Titans.jpg
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I was about to post a very analogous, if more subjective, comment before I accidentally closed my browser window.
My girlfriend and I both just got new computers. Mine is a 2.0 GHz Core 2 iMac, and hers is a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Dell. Both have 2 GB of RAM. For what it's worth, the Dell (not including its monitor) cost slightly under twice the price of my new Mac. While I can't compare the two at any specific tasks as I've only used her computer for basic web browsing and such, my general impression has been that OS X on my iMac is (subjectively) even more responsive than Windows XP on her high-end gaming machine.
It's funny that the parent poster brought up his 1 GHz iBook G4, as I own one of those as well. It's a solid machine (and it's treated me exceptionally well, considering how much I beat it up on a daily basis), but keep in mind that those G4s were famously hobbled by an abysmal 133 MHz FSB. (No, a 1 GHz G4 with a 133 MHz FSB is emphatically not twice as fast as a 500 MHz P3, generally speaking). The parent poster cites the poor performance of OS X on his old iBook G4 as evidence of OS X's general "slowness", but I wonder whether, in reality, the poor performance of some of those PowerPC processors was what forced Apple to fine-tune OS X into the relatively quick system it is today.
Looking ahead, OS X 10.5 will include native support for 32-bit applications under the 64-bit operating system. OS X users can avoid the performance hit incurred by the WOW64 emulation layer, needed to run Win32 applications under 64-bit XP or Vista. Perhaps once people start to compare 64-bit Windows with 64-bit Leopard, this old myth about OS X's performance will finally be killed off.
Somehow, why I am not surprised that this has already been modded Flamebait???? It's good information... I may actually be able to talk someone into letting me test on Vista here in the office! :D
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
I just installed Vista on my laptop over the weekend, and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the biggest new feature of the OS...
Solitaire--basically unchanged from Windows 3.0 to Windows XP--has been totally overhauled. It's a DirectX game now. It's even been rated E by the ESRB. (Minesweeper, OTOH, is rated M for extreme violence and nudity.)
Have you even tried OS X on modern hardware? I have one of those 1 GHz iBook G4s too. It's dog slow, but that's because its FSB only runs at 133 MHz. It has nothing to do with the operating system.
I also have a Core 2 iMac, and one of the first things I did when I got it was to try out Windows XP Pro on Boot Camp. I didn't take the time to perform any thorough tests or benchmarks before I deleted the partition, but my general impression was that OS X was notably more responsive than XP on the same hardware - especially when it came to disk operations, for whatever reason. In short, I think your blanket assertion that OS X is "slower" than Windows, based on an uninformed and incomplete comparison of two different and outdated computers, could benefit from a little more research.
Uhm? Whut? First of all the Mac IS a PC.
Umm, huh? They were comparing a mac and a "Windows PC." Read more carefully.
A custom made, locked-in PC.
Locked in? Have you ever used a mac?
What's great about the Mac is the OS. The hardware isn't in any way better. It just looks better.
I agree that the software is the big draw for Mac users, but as to the hardware, according to Consumer Reports and pretty much every other reputable review publication, it is among the highest quality and most reliable hardware among desktop computer sellers. It isn't something magical and special, but it is in the same bracket as Sony and Lenovo, at the top of the heap, and much better than Dell and the like who sell cheap junk.
Second, I have a Damn Small Linux running on a 5 years old PC (turned into a "media Center") just fine, running all the new codecs (xvid, h264) just fine...
So, my media center is actually a dual 533Mhz G4, powermac and it has been chugging away or 5 years, and has not had more than a few days down time at any point (when I moved a few times).
Third, I've installed civilization 4 on an "old" dual G4 with 1Gb ram and it runs like shite. It runs fine on a really old Athlon XP 1.5Ghz/256Kb with 1Gb ddr... I bought it second-hand at about half the price of a mac mini..
Anecdotal evidence is pretty useless to start with, but at least be consistent. It runs better on a given PC than a given mac and cost less than half the price of a different mac? And this is useful information for what reason?
I made a piece-by-piece comparison to the new Intel iMacs and I found out I can build an equivalent machine made from high quality components (ie: best quality ASUS mobo and video card etc) and it costs about 250E less than the iMac. I don't give a fuck that it includes the OS. I can download my favourite distro and install it.
Again, this is anecdotal. Independent studies show Macs cost, on average, 7% more than the same hardware elsewhere, with the largest difference on the high end. Mac minis seem to be cheaper than the same hardware elsewhere, even without any software involved.
Plus, it looks like Apple lost its mind entering an arms race with x86 CPUs. The best thing Apple has now are crappy Core 2 Duos...
Umm yeah, those crappy chips currently winning the fight at all the credible review sites. What chip is it that you think they should be shipping?
And when was the last time you could change the cpu on a Mac?
Have you done any actual research. You can change the CPUs out on current, desktop macs and servers and several review sites and hobbyists have done just that.
And did you look at "Apple memory" (wtf) prices?
Yeah, that's why I buy memory from a different vendor. Did you have a point?
And I'm not even factoring in things like AMD's integrated coprocessors and stuff to come in 2008...
Good. Arguments that depend upon your prediction of what one company is going to do with regard to some other company's potential products that aren't even finished with development, let alone testing, is pretty pointless. For all you know, they will be slow as crap and Apple will be using them.
Macs are customized PCs with a really great OS.
Macs are a brand. "PCs" is a term usually reserved for Windows systems, but that isn't even the term used. It was "Windows PCs." Macs are above average quality computer hardware, that happens to come with a pretty neat OS. That doesn't make them great in some way, but neither does it make them particularly overpriced or average.
Apple: Hey, what you got there?
PC: Spyware, rootkits, trojans, and viruses.
Apple: Can I play, too.
PC: Nope.
Nuff said.
The real problem with BOB is that it didn't really matter. It keeps getting brought up as a scapegoat however, as it if were Microsoft's one problem from back when, and "hoo-boy, wasn't it a funny thing and what where they thinking?"
Noise about BOB entirely distracts from the fact that BOB wasn't Microsoft's one mistake, but rather characteristic of everything Microsoft has done since: a bad idea designed by committee and given a ridiculous interface that looks lame and insults the user.
Does his rant about BOB even make sense? Is he trying to say that entire tech media conglomerate has a conspiracy to fool all of us, and they are using BOB to do it? I enjoyed reading the article up to the BOB part. The parallels of Cairo to Vista are interesting and worth thinking about. But after the BOB and Cringley, thing, I don't know... I don't get it.
*shrugs, closes browser, gets back to work*
Sorry the Mach kernel is the kernel BSD includes in their pay distributions, you know like BSD Unix and netBSD. One of the things that caused so much excitement about OS X was the fact that Apple "licensed" a kernel designed for mini/mainframes to build their new OS on.
No Apple did not steal from Xerox, Apple licensed and paid for Xerox's technology they used in the Mac, unless the patents expired Apple is probaby still paying Xerox royalties.
Windows XP runs very well on older systems ( I have a 600 Mhz Celeron with XP, and we have several 400 Mhz Pentium IIs).
The key is having enough memory, with 256 Mb it's slow but useable, but with 512 Mb+ the difference for light office apps and normal web surfing between a 400 Mhz PII and a newer computer is not noticeable.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
The read speed of a hard drive is ABOVE the read speed of a USB stick.
Even the fastest USB memory has a read speed of 20-30 Mbps, and a write speed even less. Hard drives routinely have 40+ Mbps read/write speeds.
So once again, I fail to see the benefits of supplementing your memory with a flash disk, when hard-drive based swap would be faster in almost all circumstances.
Microsoft's unstable, disorganized, binary registry configured, single screen user interface is not much of an improvement over Windoze 3.1 Sorry, but that's totally laughable. The NT-Line is pretty much a very different platform in comparsion to the DOS-based Windows. The early network-stack of the first NT was pretty similar to the BSD-Stack at that time. Of couse, that's only because microsoft hired some very skilled BSD-Developers. All that talk about how the one OS is so superior and the other is 10 years behind... todays desktop OS are not THAT different in their core functionality. Linux, NT and even the Darwin/Mach-Kernel, all three are more ore less monolithic/hybrid kernels, all have lots of kernelmode-drivers, protected memory, multitasking, networking integrated. So after all there seems to be a some kind of design-approach that all popular, modern Desktop-OS share. And as long as it benefits my user experience, I really don't care who invented it. I am also still trying to find a graphical Systemmanager for linux, which gives me the same power the registry or the MMC does in Windows ...
I disagree with your characterization of Apple's development methodology. In fact they have a lot of salaried people working directly on the kernel, incorporating the functionality Mac OS X needs for features like Disk Journaling, Spotlight and Time Machine, the design and incorporation of which are determined by the OS team. It's true that Apple includes a lot of open-source software and established standards in the OS, but frankly both Apple and Microsoft suffered for a long time from the Not-Invented-Here prejudice. I see Apple's willingness to use well-designed open source tools and standards as a refreshing change.
Also, although the Mac OS X kernel uses BSD in its subsystems, it is not "mostly BSD." The kernel is a hybrid of Mach 2.5 with BSD subsystems available. But you don't even need the BSD subsystem to use Mac OS X. The BSD subsystem is an optional part of the OS installation. Just in terms of raw bytes, the majority of the OS resides in the frameworks. The lowest-level frameworks like Foundation and ApplicationServices were originally developed by NeXT and are brilliantly executed. The choice of Objective-C may seem like a strange choice now, but it's lean, easy to learn, and makes software development far simpler. If NeXT/Apple only ever used what they could get out of the Darwin project, there wouldn't be very much to excite us about Leopard. So frankly, Apple is far more innovative than most Windows fanboys think.
The transition from Motorola 680x0 to PPC is a good example of Apple innovation at its best. The transition was sometimes ugly, but overall amazingly smooth. The transition from IBM Power64 to Intel Core was perhaps less innovative, simply because they were using a state-of-the-art kernel. Nevertheless, the transition was almost completely transparent from a developer point of view. I'm amazed how quickly I made my Application into a Universal Binary.
You really have to give Apple some credit here. A lot of salaried guys at Apple worked long hours for years to keep Mac OS X running well on Intel hardware when no one else was aware of it. The kernel source is just endian-agnostic, it's not rocket science. There wasn't anything much deeper than that to build Mac OS X on Intel. But where they deserve serious credit is in making the developer tools, the headers, the excellent developer documentation... and providing it all for FREE and nicely ahead of their OS releases. Microsoft doesn't come close in its support of developers, nor in having the courage to revisit and rip out the crumbling foundations of their OS.
I agree that technically Windows in the 90's had some better things going on under the hood than Mac OS 7 through 9, but I still preferred Mac OS during those years. The main thing that kept me on the Apple platform was the consistency, aesthetics, organization, and manageability of the OS. Some of the things that bothered me about Windows at that time were:
- The centralized and cryptic registry (vs Mac OS Preferences folder)
- DLL Hell (vs Mac OS Extensions folder)
- BSOD from several fronts (vs Mac OS mysterious lockups)
- That flat, gray feeling (vs Mac OS sleekness)
- Inconsistent menus and interfaces (vs Mac OS well-established Human Interface Guidelines)
- Inconsistent text editing behavior (vs consistent Mac OS text services)
- Ugly font rendering (vs Mac OS decent typography)
- The word "Microsoft" preceding everything (vs no market-speak in Mac OS)
Meanwhile, there were some things that bothered me about Mac OS at the time:
- Mysterious lockups, requiring several long Conflict Catcher sessions
- Rare use of threading in software, system-modal dialogs
- No free developer tools
- No protected memory, often making software development into a reboot-fest
- The best VM system was third-party
- Expensive! hardware
- Not even an option to show the folder hierarchy in a Finder sidebar (Apple should copy MS here)
- Mac OS toolbox tedious to use (but lots of cool APIs and SDKs)
- The dark years (3rd-party licensing, dwindling marketshare, Copland...)
But all that is behind us, thank goodness! The future is in Unix and Unix-like systems with all the great strengths we had only been dreaming of all those years.
-- thinkyhead software and media
It's much simpler to look at it another way.
A 4 GB flash drive takes ~ 400 seconds to fully write at 10 MB/s.
400 seconds is 6.67 minutes.
To overwrite each cell 1 million times, assuming constant overwriting, would therefore take 6.67 million minutes, or 12.68 years.
But you're making a HUGE ASSUMPTION there that each cell has 1 million write cycles. That's actually the average number for the whole drive. Some cells have less, some more. As cells fail they are mapped off the disk.
So the lifetime could be less.
What if Microsoft patents its entire business model, products, etc.? Would that be a viable way of of getting the state to ENFORCE their monololy instead of trying to BREAK IT?
Anti-trust + Intelectual Property Rights = Doublethink
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Microsoft did not steal anything from apple!
They stole it from GNU/Linux! duh...
Nope. We were given a free G4 450Mhz. Over a period of a couple of months, the whole family migrated off the other boxes, including a dual P3 1.4Ghz Gentoo box to the G4. G4 450Mhz with 10.4.5 was just sweet.
OTOH, I once gave away a 2+Ghz PIV and kept my 1Ghz PIII at work because my PIII was far faster, for the things I needed.
Most of those features are already available in linux, albeit probably not completely standard in the distributions. Compiz for 3d features (including exposé like functionality), tomboy for writing notes, deskbar-applet + beagle for searching (though ubuntu is apparently going to use something else, forgot the name), etc.
I'm not sure who came up first with what. For instance, I remember KDE having a note-taking application way back when, but it didn't allow you to link notes. In any case, I am apparently still one of the few people who think the nautilus spatial browser is a very good and clean design. If you go to the non-spatial version it also looks very similar to the new ms browser. (albeit a bit more bland, which I actually like)
Personally I don't mind everybody copying from everybody. I think it clearly shows how innovation happens in the computing industry as opposed to other engineering disciplines. On a philosophical note, you cannot really "steal" an idea. If the other person gets to know the idea of the first person both of them have it, it is not lost to either of them. People who use this kind of language are usually the same people who support software patents, and entirely for the wrong reasons.
Most Vista reviewes (and the /. reactions) fail to consider the mission of Vista in most big corporations.
My employer only completed its migration of client machines to Windows XP not quite a year ago. Most of those machines still run Service Pack 1 and the XP service pack 2 rollout will not be fully executed until after the public release of Vista. Out lineup of software products was only fully validated against SP2 this past spring. IE7 breaks most of our corporate intranet--it was (inwisely IMO) designed against IE6 and even Firefox handles it more gracefully than IE7--the default browser.
The reason that most vista reviewers overlook the "mission of Vista in most big corporations" is that it is basically IRRELEVANT to Vista's fortunes. I would say that a large-scale XP-to-Vista migration in our company would take almost as much time, money and effort as a migration to Linux would. None of our software is validated against Vista and we won't widely support our products on Vista for another year. Though I can see Vista client machines starting to filter in some time in 2008 there are no plans for a comprehensive, wide-scale deployment until FY2009. This sort of situation is typical of large enterprises (those with 10000+ computers to manage).
The early adopters of Vista are the individual/retail customers and smaller organisations. That is where MacOS shows its strength and that is what MS has to market against. Big corporate adoption simply doesn't happen quickly, so if MS can't retain and grow its home and small/medium enterprise with Vista it is in SERIOUS TROUBLE.
From a robust permission scheme, remote control of group policies and really easy deployment there's nothing like Windows. (The macintosh really falls down in a controlled environment.
My experience with Mac OSX is limited to the desktop so I cannot fairly comment on its abilities. However I have a great deal of exposure to Windows in large corporate environments (my employer is a fortune 500 companies and I've been to two fortune 500 customer sites in the past month--these are true LARGE enterprise situations). I'm not sure what you mean by "robust permission scheme" but I've found security (authentication and access control) for Windows to be a royal pain in the a$$--dealing with ugly mixes of NT4-style and AD-style domains, DCOM configurations, etc...MS is supposed to be about seamless integration but when they make a sea change it might as well be a mixture of MacOS, UNIX and Windows. Eight years ago where I worked they were migrating from old AT&T UNIX machines to ProLiant's running Linux (yes--this was eight years ago before all the hype and before the internet bubble really started to inflate). For all the fragmentation in the UNIX world that migration was smoother than what I've seen when upgrading VERY large systems from NT4 to Server2003 Active Directory. To be fair though the end result with Windows 2003 "looked prettier" and was a big improvement, but it sure took a lot of work.
I'd say that for the strengths of Windows that you are touting are more significant for real enterprise systems, and in that space MS is not competing with Apple at all--it is competing with Red Hat, Novell, Oracle and IBM--specifically their Linux- and UNIX-based solutions. UNIX-style platforms have a LOT more history in the enterprise environment andwhile they might not be "point and click" easy, they are MUCH more powerful and robust.
Can any one of the Mac fanboys come up with one Fortune 500 company (other than Apple) that has deployed more than 50% Macs?)
My mother worked for the largest newspaper chain in Canada. I'd venture to say that most of their worksataions were Macs by far. I do not believe they are a fortuen 500 company but they were big nonetheless--it was a multinational company that owned newspapers all over North America and in the UK. Macs still have a commanding presence in their niche markets--publishing being one of them.
PLEASE copy the damn menu bar up the top.
I don't know what it's called, but I used osx*cough*86 for a couple of days about a month ago and frankly that menu bar up the top is a fantastic, logical design decision.
This comes from the fingers / mouth of someone who DOESN'T like licking the asshole of apple too,........ but honestly it's just such a fanstastic, simple design decision which made me embarassed for Microsoft.
The bar changes depending on which app you have open, but generally maintains a consistent layout at all times, awesome.
Also the widget "engine" in OSX is substantially quicker than the one which Yahoo provides (and I can say this as a fact, since I did try on exactly the same machine for both - 1gb ram Dell 8600)
I've installed a third party app called "topdesk" now for switching apps (along with alt-tab of course) - because it's quite similar to apples expose, not bad but just not as good as Apples solution unfortunately.
I only upgraded to IE6 from IE5.5 because I had to. I'll upgrade to IE7 when I have to.
On my old laptop, a Toshiba Libretto with 64M (and that was the max you could fit in it) I used Opera as the browser.
I'm kind of at a loss as to why anyone running into resource limits on a Windows PC would use anything else
their corporate solution could've evolved from XENIX and could've much more closely resembled the competition of the day
:)
Oh, god, I loved where Microsoft was taking Xenix before they abandoned it to those clowns at SCO. We had seamless networking between Xenix, MS-DOS, and VMS to the point where someone on DOS could open a tape drive on Xenix from a DOS port of tar and it would *just work*. We had programs on DOS and VMS talking through named pipes on Xenix and they *just worked*. Their Windows based networking has never reached this level of integration, and I haven't found a "native" UNIX network to touch it.
Thanks ever so much for opening up these old wounds. You're a lovely bastard...
While you'ld be proudly switching DOS tasks in something Microsoft stole from some poor schmuck - just without those stupid icons.
OS/2 and Windows NT beg to differ.
Thanks for proving my point about Microsoft claiming to have mamde something themselves.Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The average PC user wont know or care that things were stolen from Apple OS X. They dont even know about IE7 ripping off Firefox, or all the other things that were innovated elsewhere but then copied into Windows over the years.
But the reviewer does. I have Pogue's missing manuals. His bias is clear and known, but only to those that have read his books. Unrevealed to the reader is the fact that what Apple does clearly lines his next, not directly, but as a consequence. I'm amused that he did the Missing Manual for OSX3 on a PC-- a confession of his. He also gets facts wrong about both Windows in that book, as well as OSX-- and key points.
It's the fanboy quality of his background and his income derivation that makes me believe that he's the wrong reviewer for that spot. It's not like hiring Gates to review Google; rather to have Cringely review InfoWorld. You can't expect a non-biased opinion; and an opinion that's has outcome in his income depending on what he says, whatever it is. If he was a neutral reviewer, an even hand with his books and sites, then I'd not cry foul. But that's not the case here.
Bias on the part of the reviewer queers the review. He has this bias. It's like asking Gartner.... the result is always suspect because they're so handsomely paid off by vendors.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
OS/2 was an IBM / MS joint venture until MS bailed and used it to form the base for NT. You think it is a coincidence that NT could run OS/2 1.1 software?
What's wrong with your hardware? I dual boot Linux and 10.4.8 on my old 500 MHz G3, and they both run fine. In fact, I'm amazed at how well a 6-year old machine runs Apple's latest OS. Saying that OS X is "unbearably slow" sounds like either trolling or hyperbole to me.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
I have Tiger running on my old Yosemite G3, and the performance is more than adequate. I've pretty much retired that box to media service duties, but I'll occasionally use it for other things. It's still able to do useful work, and it has successfully run 5 OS revisions since I bought it in 1998.
Show me a Windows box that can do that without installing Linux on it.
Oh, come. Calling something infinitely better than something which satisfied consumers is not faint praise. And how about "Windows Vista is not, as the Web's chorus of caustic critics claim, little more than a warmed-over Windows XP"? That's a piece of FUD that's been circulating slashdot from before it was even called Vista, and this guy, who's tried Vista, is completely contradicting that. Is it not even noteworthy?
There has never been a 900MHz P4. The lowest-clocked P4 is 1.3GHz.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Thanks for proving my point about Microsoft claiming to have mamde something themselves.
Microsoft's contributions to OS/2 were significant.
NT was solely a Microsoft project.
I'm guessing RAM is very important to Windows. OK not guessing, I know it is. XP runs pretty much like crap on a 900MHz P4 with 128MB RAM, and I can pretty much guarntee Vista wouldn't run at all. I'm not even sure my 2-year-old machine at work would run Vista well. I don't have enough OSX experience to compare, though.
RAM is important to all modern OSes. However, Windows XP is significantly less RAM-hungry than OS X (IMHO Vista is marginally less RAM-hungry than OS X, but I'm happy to call it a draw).
256MB is probably a reasonable minimum for XP. IME, 768MB is that same reasonable minimum for OS X and Vista.
You know, as much as I try to take discussions in the spirit they are presented I have a hard time taking anyone that goes around spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign seriously. If you think Apple is doing what they are doing for anything less than maximum benefit of their shareholders you are seriously deluded.
What's wrong with your hardware?
Nothing that I'm aware of - especially since every other equivalent machine I've used acted the same way.
I dual boot Linux and 10.4.8 on my old 500 MHz G3, and they both run fine. In fact, I'm amazed at how well a 6-year old machine runs Apple's latest OS. Saying that OS X is "unbearably slow" sounds like either trolling or hyperbole to me.
If you consider OS X "fine" on a 500Mhz G3, then Windows XP should be equally "fine" on, say, a ~266Mhz P2 with 128M of RAM.
Have you even tried OS X on modern hardware?
Yes (eg: I bought my mother an iMac G5 and use it whenever I'm home). It's better, but it's still slow.
I have one of those 1 GHz iBook G4s too. It's dog slow, but that's because its FSB only runs at 133 MHz. It has nothing to do with the operating system.
The FSB on the Armada I'm comparing it to is even slower - 100Mhz.
I also have a Core 2 iMac, and one of the first things I did when I got it was to try out Windows XP Pro on Boot Camp. I didn't take the time to perform any thorough tests or benchmarks before I deleted the partition, but my general impression was that OS X was notably more responsive than XP on the same hardware - especially when it came to disk operations, for whatever reason. In short, I think your blanket assertion that OS X is "slower" than Windows, based on an uninformed and incomplete comparison of two different and outdated computers, could benefit from a little more research.
I've used nearly every Mac ever made and every version of OS X ever released. It's slow. It's certainly (significantly) faster than it was, but it's still slow. It doesn't multitask or scale as well as Windows and it's more resource-intensive. I'll grant that all those flashy effects like Dock icon scaling and Expose remain fairly snappy even when the system is under load, but since most of them don't really *do* anything useful, it's irrelevant.
single screen user interface ... To what are you referring to here?
The whole Microsoft experience. Mostly, I'm talking about their lack of virtual desktops and pagers, for which they substitute that pathetic menu bar. Yes, I've seen their sorry XP power toy. It's does not come close to being as useful as any decent free window manager and the hapless user is forced to use two or three monitors to spread their work out. The ever changing configuration interface and lack of useful programs are also show stoppers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My girlfriend and I both just got new computers. Mine is a 2.0 GHz Core 2 iMac, and hers is a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Dell. Both have 2 GB of RAM. For what it's worth, the Dell (not including its monitor) cost slightly under twice the price of my new Mac.
And it's substantially more powerful, as well.
It's funny that the parent poster brought up his 1 GHz iBook G4, as I own one of those as well. It's a solid machine (and it's treated me exceptionally well, considering how much I beat it up on a daily basis), but keep in mind that those G4s were famously hobbled by an abysmal 133 MHz FSB. (No, a 1 GHz G4 with a 133 MHz FSB is emphatically not twice as fast as a 500 MHz P3, generally speaking).
Yes, it is - probably closer to 2.5x than 2x (the Armada only has a 100Mhz FSB), but I was being generous. (Indeed, if you believe Apple, it would be "up to" 4x as fast.)
A G4 is, clock for clock, about 10% faster than an equivalent P3 in the general case. The G4 in the iBook has twice the L2 cache and 33% higher FSB. I would expect it to be closer to 15% - 20% faster, clock for clock, than the P3 in the Armada. (The iBook has probably also got lower latency SDRAM as well, but I couldn't say for sure.) Saying the iBook is 2x as fast in terms of raw power is actually being conservative (especially if you start taking into account their IO and video subsystems).
I use this comparison because a) it's fresh in my mind as I did it quite recently, b) it's *really* easy to sit the machines next to each other and fire up equivalent tasks on each to compare and c) these sorts of threads are (as this one is) full of people saying how well OS X runs on their 500Mhz G3 iMacs while Windows is t3h suck on their 2Ghz P4.
The parent poster cites the poor performance of OS X on his old iBook G4 as evidence of OS X's general "slowness", but I wonder whether, in reality, the poor performance of some of those PowerPC processors was what forced Apple to fine-tune OS X into the relatively quick system it is today.
This would be a reasonable conclusion if OS X was "relatively quick today". It isn't. Which only exacerbates the relative slowness of older Mac hardware. Any G5 Mac, for example, is an extremely powerful machine in terms of raw power - Windows absolutely flies on comparable PCs - but OS X on, say, my mum's 1.9Ghz G5 iMac as soon as I load it up with a couple of half-dozen-tabbed Safari windows, some Terminals, Thunderbird and some Word docs, starts showing the beachball frequently and is extremely sluggish switching between tasks, or even accessing UI elements (eg: menus, tabs) in the foreground app. Trying to kick off a game without closing most of the other stuff first is an exercise in frustration.
OS X has been "tuned" over the years because it was so abysmally slow to start with. It's improved in leaps and bounds since the 10.0 days, but it's still _relatively_ sluggish.
Looking ahead, OS X 10.5 will include native support for 32-bit applications under the 64-bit operating system. OS X users can avoid the performance hit incurred by the WOW64 emulation layer, needed to run Win32 applications under 64-bit XP or Vista. Perhaps once people start to compare 64-bit Windows with 64-bit Leopard, this old myth about OS X's performance will finally be killed off.
It's not a myth, and the only thing that's going to "kill it off" is if Leopard actually delivers decent performance (I am optimistic that it will, as Apple are hitting about the same relative point of maturity in OS X's development lifecycle Microsoft were at when they released Windows 2000 - I fully expect it to be massively improved internally in terms of scalability and performance, as Windows 2000 was).
Interesting. So do I. In addition to that, I have a very recent 64-Bit Dell under my work desk, and a very recent dual-core iMac (which, by the way, cost half as much as the Dell).
Which would make the Dell roughly twice as fast. Please list the specs to confirm.
The iMac smokes the Dell in just about anything. The most astonishing difference, however, is disk speed. The iMac has a very slow disk, compared to the Dell, but searching through the whole project in IntelliJ takes about a tenth of the time on the iMac. The iMac is faster in pretty much everything: compiling, starting up, Java... Admittedly, the Dell is faster while accessing our SMB network drives.
Sounds like your Dell is broken.
Okay, now that's precious. First, the price of the OS is irrelevant when comparing prices.
No, a comparison of the full retail price of Vista is irrelevant when I'm comparing how much it would cost to buy (or upgrade) an entire computer (actually scratch that, it's flat out wrong). Especially since every retail version of OS X is inherently an upgrade, from a pricing perspective.
Second, not having an upgrade in half a decade is suddenly a feature, since if you don't have upgrades, there's nothing to buy? Are you for real?
if you're trying to compare costs - even pointlessly - they must be compared fairly to be valid. So the Vista cost to compare is an upgrade version, to the sum of the OS X upgrades released since 2001.
So Windows is not a knockoff because it has features which OS X does not have? Does not compute.
If Windows has features OS X does not, how could they have been "knocked off" from OS X ?
Windows is not a "knock off" because all of the things it and OS X has in common are either superficial, common to a whole range of platforms, or blindingly obvious natural progressions of technology.
Yeah, because the whole Desktop ideas, overlapping windows, the menu bar, the whole graphic style and all that recent junk, that's all not meaningful.
1984 called and wants its strawman back.
While I haven't looked into Vista's new graphics layers (and I do welcome Microsoft for finally having copied that, since it'll probably make my job easier eventually), [...]
Saying Microsoft copied its new display system from Apple is like saying Apple copied pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection and SMP support from Microsoft.
Also, if you really think the Vista kernel is more mature than Mach and BSD, you're delusional.
Given that Windows runs on bigger hardware, and has been doing so for far longer, than any version of OS X, provides prima facie evidence of the Windows kernel being both more capable and more mature. This is before even getting into actually comparing things like kernel locking (still very coarse in OS X), async IO (extensively used in NT since day dot), ACLs, etc.
So what these gentlemen at Microsoft have is some data on disk that by having just been read or any other reason is deemed as desirable to be cached for faster access. In any sane architecture, you cache to RAM because that's where the orders-of-magnitude-benefit is to be found.
Which is what Windows does.
But when you run out of ram you have to dump data to a storage device, like this USB solution. That is swapping, and these gentleman are swapping their disk cache to disk, which is telling.
No, they're not. You need to do more reading. This rough outline of data flow might help you understand.
With ReadyBoost:
CPU <-> RAM <-> flash disk <-> hard disk
Without ReadyBoost:
CPU <-> RAM <-> hard disk
This design assumes that a multi-gigabyte RAM system is trashing and:
No, it doesn't (and the correct terminology is "thrashing"). It assumes that a USB flash drive provides better performance for small random reads than a hard disk does, and that better performance can be used to speed the overall system.
What these gentlemen at Redmond wished they had written was a performance-aware multi-device swap system.
ReadyBoost is not swapping, nor is its primary purpose to be used in leiu of real RAM. So long as you labour under that incorrect assumption, your conclusions will be similarly incorrect.
Which would have been somewhat praise-worthy, if you ignore the fact that a single dedicated kernel hacker could probably do the same in Linux in a long afternoon.
Well, maybe one of them will be encouraged to spend that afternoon copying ReadyBoost in the near future, then, so Linux can benefit from this as well (which is about the time Slashdotters will start calling it a "cool idea" rather than a "kludge").
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Reading all of the "Microsoft copied this, copied that" posts, it stretches the imagination to discover that discerning between OS X and Vista seems pretty easy for you...so I imagine it's rather easy to tell the difference between the OS's after all, which probably doesn't bode well for the "copy" conspiracies. My favorite such conspiracy, though, tells of how Apple "copied" Microsoft's support for x86 cpus--not to mention ide, agp, pci, etc., ad infinitum..;)
Personally, I just don't understand the "copy" conspiracy lingo at all. It's not like Apple, after all, invented either the GUI or even the concept of the GUI. Those things clearly predate both Apple and Microsoft. Talking about a GUI is to me like talking about a wheel. All of the automobile manufacturers on earth employ the wheel as a foundational concept, and all of them do it in similar ways, but rationally no one ever thinks that "GM owns the wheel and it isn't fair that Toyota copied GM," etc. Such sentiment would be ridiculous, imo.
Such is the same in personal computerdom--exactly. The concepts that are foundational to the industry--and the GUI is merely one of them--belong to *nobody* and thus are never, ever "copied"--but merely shared. The difference is in the implementation of those concepts, and that's exactly where you can see the differences between what Microsoft and Apple are doing. I believe the differences are stark and very easy to see.
OS/2 was an IBM / MS joint venture until MS bailed and used it to form the base for NT.
OS/2 and NT share no code. Heck, they don't even share any basic architectural similarities.
To put it another way, OS/2 was in no way the "base" for NT.
You think it is a coincidence that NT could run OS/2 1.1 software?
It's not a coincidence, but it's going nothing to do with the reasons you think it does.
At work, I use a Windows XP SP 2 box with a 2 GHz processor, and a gig of RAM.
At home, I use a 1.5 Ghz PowerBook G4 w/ 1.5 gigs of RAM, running OS X 10.4.8.
Maybe it's just the RAM difference, which is admittedly a big deal, and all the crap that the corporate IT guys make us install on our boxes, but I've never had Windows XP run anywhere near as fast as OS X does.
It hasn't got much to do with visible load, either - I've had Windows just chugfest and take literal minutes to recover when I'm running a terminal emulator, Outlook, and Gaim. Again, that could be the AV software and 'let us spy on you!' junk they run in the background - I've never bothered to uninstall that, so I don't know how it would run without it.
Anyway, the Windows box slows to a completely unuseable crawl at least once a week - more often like two or three times a week.
I've never had OS X reach the unresponsiveness level that XP does on a regular basis.
When it's running well, XP does react a bit faster than OS 10.4.8, but the slowdowns are WAY worse than OS X's slowdowns, in my experience.
"Oh, I like geeks way better than I like humans." - Mari Sarris
256MB on Windows XP? It never should have been. Unfortunately, cheap manufacturers started *decreasing* the amount of memory standard equipped (they had started shipping everything with 512, but when prices for RAM went up, they dropped down to 256). No XP box should have ever been sold with less than 512MB, as once you add AV software, and you have your modern .NET video driver controls (NVIDIA and ATI), it takes 30 seconds just to finish logging in to the system. Let's not forget a decent firewall pre-SP2. Not exactly lightweight. Now launch Firefox, fire up a few tabs, and watch your screen refresh slow to a crawl and the disk rattling away as it throws things to and from the swap file.
You seem to be grossly overstating the performance of Windows XP. You can strip a Windows 2K installation to make it run in 256 without major issues, but even 2K should be equipped with 512MB unless you like disk activity to be your constant musical accompaniment. Of course, 512MB is where OS X gets real comfortable, too. Apple also shipped 256MB equipped machines far longer than they should have. But again, you don't wait after logging in to 10.4 with 256MB before you can perform basic functions.
Many "slowdowns" in OS X are related to the foundations. When I run Linux, I don't expect applications to launch as quickly. And in general, they don't. But once open, the OS schedules things very nicely. The same holds true for OS X. Having worked with Mac System 6.x to 9.x, they all felt more responsive than OS X when running one or two tasks. But beyond that, active tasks would really tax the system. While tasks may not feel as initially responsive under OS X, the memory handling is much better, and you can leave lots of applications open without much of a performance penalty.
Stability-wise, OS X wins hands down. Errant processes can take XP down in a heartbeat. And once the CPU is pegged, try even launching the Task Manager. Then when you get in there, discover that the errant process is registered as a service, and has to be stopped from services.msc. Then discover that services.msc becomes unresponsive when trying to stop the service(s). Now the question is, wait 10 minutes for the machine to respond enough to regain control, or take the chance on rebooting without shutting down properly, going into safe mode, and taking care of the problem. If that means uninstalling something, better hope the uninstaller will work in safe mode. Otherwise, you'd better launch the best available startup entry editor, and disable things from there or from services.
Yeah, Windows is a dream. That's why 95% of my income comes from supporting Windows shops, and I maybe visit the Mac folks (about 20% of my customers) once per year for support issues.
Vidar
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Let's not forget a decent firewall pre-SP2.
The only difference SP2 made to the firewall was enabling it by default.
You seem to be grossly overstating the performance of Windows XP. You can strip a Windows 2K installation to make it run in 256 without major issues, but even 2K should be equipped with 512MB unless you like disk activity to be your constant musical accompaniment.
WTF ? A stripped Windows 2000 install will run happily in *64MB* of RAM and be absolutely flying in 256.
Of course, 512MB is where OS X gets real comfortable, too.
768MB - 1GB.
Many "slowdowns" in OS X are related to the foundations. When I run Linux, I don't expect applications to launch as quickly. And in general, they don't. But once open, the OS schedules things very nicely. The same holds true for OS X.
No they don't. The biggest problem with OS X is the sluggishness switching between, and interacting with, multiple tasks. Launching apps is fine. Copying data around is fine. Background processing of tasks is fine. It's interactive multitasking where OS X falls apart.
While tasks may not feel as initially responsive under OS X, the memory handling is much better, and you can leave lots of applications open without much of a performance penalty.
You seem to have this completely arse about face. OS X's VM has historically been awful, although it's improved in 10.4 at least to the point of acceptable.
Stability-wise, OS X wins hands down. Errant processes can take XP down in a heartbeat. And once the CPU is pegged, try even launching the Task Manager. Then when you get in there, discover that the errant process is registered as a service, and has to be stopped from services.msc. Then discover that services.msc becomes unresponsive when trying to stop the service(s). Now the question is, wait 10 minutes for the machine to respond enough to regain control, or take the chance on rebooting without shutting down properly, going into safe mode, and taking care of the problem. If that means uninstalling something, better hope the uninstaller will work in safe mode. Otherwise, you'd better launch the best available startup entry editor, and disable things from there or from services.
Pure, unalduterated FUD.
It's a Precision 670, it has some kind of dual-core Xeon processor. RAM is upgraded to 2 gigs.
And no, it's not broken. It's a new computer, with a new OS. Everyone here has the same computer. Some have Dell's factory-installed Windows version, others have a shrink-wrap Windows version, and they all run at the same speed. The Dell isn't slow, it's just that the Mac is a lot faster. My guess is it's due to the file system.
Sure. Unfortunately, even when comparing upgrades, Mac OS X is cheaper, and since it's not technically an update, you then own two full copies of OS X.
Okay, let me explain that to you. "A is a knockoff of B" does not imply that "every feature in A is stolen from B."
As an example, the recent iPod nano copies were knockoffs of the iPod nano, even though they have some features (like support for playsforsure) which iPods have not.
That's just revisionist bullshit.
Way to disprove my points.
Actually, from Unix is probably more likely to be true.
Switch arguments often? I thought we were talking Kernels here. So Windows runs on bigger hardware and for far longer than Mach and BSD? I give you kernel locking: It's better in 10.4 than in previous versions, but still not perfect. However, ACLs are in OS X now.
Unfortunately, as we've already established, Windows pretty much destroys that advantage by being slow as a pig :-P
Your comparisons between a PPC Mac running an old version of OS X continue to be pointless. My claim is that OS X 10.4 is at least as fast as Windows XP sp2 on comparable hardware, not that OS X 10.3 on an old portable G4 is at least as fast as Windows XP sp2 on an old portable X86. This is due to my own experience of having both of these running processor- and disk-intensive tasks right here on my desk. All day long.
And yes, the G5 is a fast processor, but again, the iMac is hardly to computer to make proper use of it - especially when running poorly optimized software like Thunderbird or Word.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Without Microsoft, you would probably still be using MacOS Classic on a PowerPC, dreaming of the day you could smoothly run multiple tasks and not have one crashing program bring down the whole OS with it.
Uh huh. Except the protected memory in OS X came from Next, which wasn't in competition with Windows.
I had seen the mbox files in Mail directories, read about mbox format, and assumed that was the way it worked. Thanks to your post I had a look in the Mail directory, and you are 100% correct.
My apologies.
However; the address book data are in one file (~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Addresbook.data), and spotlight indexes that just fine, as individual records, which was the point of my rant.
Bart
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
But the beef behind both of them came from outside, IBM and DEC/VMS (via Dave Cutler) respectively.
The "beef" for OS/2 most certainly came, at worst, in equal shares from Microsoft and IBM. Given IBM's general disinterest in the PC market in its early years, it's far more likely Microsoft were the ones doing the pushing. Note that IBM were still paying Microsoft loyalties for their OS/2 code as late as Warp 4.
Regarding NT, are you seriously suggesting that a vendor cannot claim credit for a product the developed, simply because some of their employees may have had prior experience elsewhere ? Because that would certainly mean - by your logic - Apple could not claim credit for OS X.
The mental gymnastics some people will impose on themselves to simply to avoid extending Microsoft even the smallest non-negative thought are truly amazing... I must admit I just can't grasp the mentality behind that sort of bias.
It's a Precision 670, it has some kind of dual-core Xeon processor. RAM is upgraded to 2 gigs.
As I suspected. We're talking about a Workstation class "PC" roughly equivalent to a Mac Pro. Hardly surprising it cost twice as much as your iMac (what's surprising is that it didn't cost more).
And no, it's not broken. It's a new computer, with a new OS. Everyone here has the same computer. Some have Dell's factory-installed Windows version, others have a shrink-wrap Windows version, and they all run at the same speed. The Dell isn't slow, it's just that the Mac is a lot faster. My guess is it's due to the file system.
My guess is it's due to your imagination.
Sure. Unfortunately, even when comparing upgrades, Mac OS X is cheaper, and since it's not technically an update, you then own two full copies of OS X.
4* US$129 = US$500.
Vista Home Premium (which is more featureful than OS X) upgrade will apparently retail for US$159.
That's just revisionist bullshit.
So which "stolen" features in Vista don't fit that definition ?
Way to disprove my points.
You didn't have any points to disprove. The comparison is specific features Vista "knocked off" from OS X. Not vague concepts that just happen to be similar between half a dozen different GUIs and Vista and have been around for twenty-odd years.
Suggesting Vista "knocked off" things like the desktop and menus from OS X doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Actually, from Unix is probably more likely to be true.
And equally stupid.
Switch arguments often?
No.
I thought we were talking Kernels here. So Windows runs on bigger hardware and for far longer than Mach and BSD?
No, longer than OS X (or NeXT). Do not conflate BSD and OS X. No matter how much Apple's propaganda might suggest otherwise, they are *not* synonymous.
I give you kernel locking: It's better in 10.4 than in previous versions, but still not perfect.
It's about on par with Windows NT4/Linux 2.2. I fully expect 10.5 to bump that up to about Windows 2000/Linux 2.4 levels and 10.6 to pretty much draw even with contemporary Windows and Linux.
Developing and tuning OSes for good scalability and concurrency is *hard*. There's very good reasons it typically takes a vendor 5 - 10 years to do it. Do not expect Apple to be much different in this respect, although they have the distinct advantage today that multiprocessor hardware that would have been considered extremely high-end a decade ago is now easily accessible to even casual consumers, so we should expect them to be on the quicker end of the scale.
However, ACLs are in OS X now.
ACLs aren't just a filesystem thing. (Not to mention NT has had them since 1993.)
Unfortunately, as we've already established, Windows pretty much destroys that advantage by being slow as a pig :-P
What's this "we" Kemo Sabe ? :)
Your comparisons between a PPC Mac running an old version of OS X continue to be pointless. My claim is that OS X 10.4 is at least as fast as Windows XP sp2 on comparable hardware, not that OS X 10.3 on an old portable G4 is at least as fast as Windows XP sp2 on an old portable X86. This is due to my own experience of having both of these running processor- and disk-intensive tasks right here on my desk. All day long.
I have no idea where you have gotten the impression I am talking about OS X 10.3 from. My iBook runs 10.4 and has since the day it was released (well, earlier than that actually...).
And yes, the G5 is a fast processor, but again, the iMac is hardly to computer to make proper use of it - especially when running poorly optimized software like Thunderbird or Word.
Ah, yes, the old "poorly optimised software" excuse. I was wondering when that would appear. Nevermind that Safari, iPhoto, Mail.app and co. are all just as bad.
I'm interested in why you think the iMac is responsible for slowing down OS X. A G5 iMac, in objective terms, is not a slow piece of hardware.
That was the royal "we", of course :-)
Except when they're not. I've never heard anyone call Safari slow. iPhoto used to have issues with large photo libraries, but they're pretty much gone, and Mail is definitely fast.
Low RAM (per default), slower memory, single-core processor, usually very slow hard disk, usually mediocre graphics card, comparably slow bus speed, etc.
Try a PowerPC G5 which came out at the same time as your iMac, it's quite a lot faster despite both having G5 chips.
If that's the only thing you can come up with, I guess you're basically telling me that I'm right: the PC should be faster. The fact that it is not (and I'm not talking a small difference here, I mean that some actions take between 2 (compiling our app) and 10 times (searching through the project in IntelliJ) as long on the PC) pretty much shows that Windows is most definitely not a faster OS than Mac OS X.
Of course, that makes one thing painfully clear: If you really think that Windows is faster then Mac OS X, it's not my imagination that's running wild here, it must be yours.
And when you say "more featureful," you do of course mean "less featureful, and will stop working after being installed twice." As for pricing: "Suggested retail price for full package product, $239.00 USD. Suggested upgrade retail price, $159.00 USD." Last time I checked, Mac OS X (full version) cost US$129.00, and there's even a family pack (5 licenses) for US$199.00. Not that the normal version actually checked for license violations and suddenly stopped working, like Windows is wont to do.
All of them.
Sorry, but wrong. "Overlapping windows" (to pick one) are not a "vague concept." It's something Apple introduced and Microsoft then copied. Nothing wrong with that, it's better for all of us if good ideas are copied, but claiming that Windows isn't a knockoff of the Mac System is just wrong. As for "specific features," read Pogue's article.
That's why I said "Mach and BSD".
If that's the only thing you can come up with, I guess you're basically telling me that I'm right: the PC should be faster. The fact that it is not (and I'm not talking a small difference here, I mean that some actions take between 2 (compiling our app) and 10 times (searching through the project in IntelliJ) as long on the PC) pretty much shows that Windows is most definitely not a faster OS than Mac OS X.
If the difference is as significant as you say, clearly the PC is not functioning as it should. Were it mine, I"d try to figure out why.
OTOH, if you do that, you'll have one less thing to complain about...
And when you say "more featureful," you do of course mean "less featureful, and will stop working after being installed twice."
No, I mean more featureful. Media Centre, for example.
As for pricing: "Suggested retail price for full package product, $239.00 USD. Suggested upgrade retail price, $159.00 USD." Last time I checked, Mac OS X (full version) cost US$129.00, and there's even a family pack (5 licenses) for US$199.00. Not that the normal version actually checked for license violations and suddenly stopped working, like Windows is wont to do.
Every retail version of OS X is priced as an upgrade, because you can't legally install it on a machine that isn't already running some version of MacOS.
If Apple ever release a version of OS X for generic PCs, you can validly compare "full version" prices.
Incidentally, the reason Apple don't bother with serial numbers and the like is because their OS need a big Apple hardware dongle to run. Microsoft do not have that luxury.
All of them.
I didn't think you'd be able to come up with anything.
Sorry, but wrong. "Overlapping windows" (to pick one) are not a "vague concept."
It most certainly *is* a vague concept, because it certainly isn't a specification or implementation. "Menus" are, similarly, a "vague concept".
It's something Apple introduced and Microsoft then copied.
Unfortunately for you, PARC beat them both to it by a decade with Smalltalk. Not that overlapping windows would classify as a particularly revolutionary _concept_ in the first place to anyone who had seen two sheets of paper on top of each other (although the implementations probably were).
I also find it rather hard to take anyone seriously who implies Vista is the first version of Windows with overlapping Windows. You *do* remember we're comparing Vista and MacOS _X_, right ?
Nothing wrong with that, it's better for all of us if good ideas are copied, but claiming that Windows isn't a knockoff of the Mac System is just wrong.
Yet you seem unable to come up with any concrete examples of Windows "knocking off" OS X. Curious.
As for "specific features," read Pogue's article.
I've read it. His examples are laughable - either for their own sake (eg: Flip3D and Expose, two utterly different task switching methodologies) - or because the entire technology world would have to consist of nothing except Apple and Microsoft - and you would have to subscribe to the ridiculous notion that two entities extremely active in the same field could not independently come up with the same idea - for them to be considered "knockoffs" of OS X (eg: buttons highlighting as the mouse cursor passes over them).
That's why I said "Mach and BSD".
Which most certainly *is* an immature combination, compared to Windows NT, given its only other notable outing has been NeXT, a platform for which the term "niche" is being generous.
Well, must be a P3! I guess it's even crappier than I thought. :-)
I know this is hard for you to accept, but there's nothing wrong with these Dells. That's just how Windows performs.
Mac OS X contains Front Row, which is Media Centre minus the TV stuff. Admittedly, that's a feature less, but at least Front Row isn't such a crappy piece of shit like Media Centre (I own a license to the NT Media Center Edition of Windows - I don't use it anymore, I've replaced it with Ubuntu running MythTV). Additionally, there's tons of stuff in Mac OS X that's not in Windows.
And no, every copy of Mac OS X is not an upgrade. Yes, you do have to own a Mac to be able to run it, but after buying it, you own to licenses to Mac OS X. Legally, you can use your old copy on another Mac with an even older version of OS X. That's not an upgrade, that's an additional license.
Something doesn't have to be "a specification or an implementation" to be ripped off. Ripping off implementation is a copyright violation. I'm not accusing MS of violating Apple's copyright (except when they steal Apple's icons, which they have).
Well, since you now admit that Microsoft copied stuff from Apple before Vista, the discussion is moot. That makes it obvious that Windows is a knockoff of Apple's system. I mean, your argument is that Vista is not a Mac OS knockoff because the most recent version of Windows copied nothing from the most recent version of Mac OS X? Even if it were true - which it is not - it's an absurd argument.
Either way, I don't get the Smalltalk reference. Smalltalk is a programming language. The Alto had no overlapping windows.
And no, I'm not going to give you a detailed list of every feature in Vista which Microsoft took from Apple. I don't have the time. Google it yourself, read this, watch this, or read this:
Moving on...
Yeah, because one of them shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects, while the other one... shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Virtual desktops, at least for me, are a pain in the ass. I have tried using them (on Linux and Windows) and every time they have pissed me off.
Just my opinion, obviously.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
> The only difference SP2 made to the firewall was enabling it by default.
... You seem to have this completely arse about face. OS X's VM has historically been awful,
Umm, I don't remember SP1 asking people if they wanted to unblock an app, but let's pretend it did for the sake of harmony.
> WTF ? A stripped Windows 2000 install will run happily in *64MB* of RAM and be absolutely flying in 256
Yeah, maybe a stripped Windows 2000 install will. I guess we're not worried about running any applications on this machine, then? Do you use Firefox? Why don't you pop that task manager open and tell us that it is using 5MB. It would fit with what you have claimed so far. Hell, I'm in Mozilla right now with only two slashdot windows open (the thread and this reply) and I just opened it 5 minutes ago. It's using 71,272K of memory. Hold on, I'll launch Firefox. 30,200K. Let me launch it in "Safe Mode".
22,252K. Wow. Good thing we have that 64MB to happily run with. Let's hope that we don't start opening any tabs, use email, or do any actual work.
> 768MB - 1GB
Right. What system are we talking about? What are you running on them? I have customers in an office using 400 mhz iMacs with 512MB and 10.4, and they have no problem running Office 2003 and Filemaker Pro 5.5, Apple Mail and Safari. Another uses an eMac with a 700mhz G4 and runs Quark 6 on top of the other items above. Same amount of memory. They don't complain about the speed. In fact, in the last year, the only problem or complaint they have had is with an apparently buggy postscript implementation on a Ricoh multi-function they leased.
> No they don't
> although it's improved in 10.4 at least to the point of acceptable.
Wow. Great anecdote. Too bad that it only has any bearing in the fantasy land you are in.
> Pure, unalduterated FUD.
My point exactly. Your claims of the performance of Windows are far fetched, and your decrying of OS X smacks of inexperience with the product, despite your ibook ownership (slow hard drive, maybe?). I say this typing from Windows XP.
Vidar
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
> Based on this comment and your previous ones, it obvious that you should not be supporting Windows machines.
... *Cue up the irrelevant anecdote about some
You clearly feel upset that I get more service calls from the Windows users. I suppose that when they buy some accessory, plug it in, and the machine blue screens, that I am clearly responsible. Maybe you don't quite understand small business? You see, if you set things up correctly, most small business don't need your help on a daily basis. If you train the staff properly, they can take care of basic tasks on their own, clear their own paper jams, and even rotate their own tapes.
Unfortunately, organizations fall victim to various software problems (I won't include hardware, though I have a slightly lower failure rate for Apple hardware). Software patches cause issues, drivers cause issues that most end users can't solve (or don't have the time to solve), and for new customers of ours, we have to perform virus and spyware cleanups, train them on safer browsing habits, make sure things are being patched regularly, etc.
Most of the Apple customers click OK to get their patches, both optional and critical. Then they may reboot the computer. And the computer is fine. They don't require extensive security suites, just like properly configured Linux boxes don't require them. Every year or so, Windows customers need antivirus updates involving the core application. Even using various distribution systems, hiccups and software issues usually mean that a small office with less than 50 users will require close to 8 hours of service (checking installations, preparing the rollout, making policies, removing and installing software, testing distributions, and cleaning up the installations on up to 20% of machines that may have taken issue with some part of the process.
> Bullshit. XP is not Win9x. Processes can't just "take it down"
> XP machine infected with ten rootkits.*
You apparently have never met CA's eTrust Antivirus. Several revisions and updates have led to ino* or realmon processes pegging the machine at 100% and keeping it there. Plenty of other applications can and do cause the same problem. You also apparently have very little actual experience in varied environments, many of which you as a consultant did not design from the outset. You inherit a lot of problems in this business, and there *are* a lot of incompetents. Most are inexperienced techs who used to work at a corporation with an IT "team" who know nothing but some parts of the Microsoft platform, and think that Dell is God's gift to the PC (don't forget that extended service agreement). Just make sure you remove the MyWay schlock. And don't forget to replace them as soon as they are off-contract.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Hi, I'm the karma whoring AC you replied to...
;)
After reflection I must apologize. I work in corporate IT (have for seven years) and have not done much side work, so are right. After reading your post I had some flashbacks to a few side jobs I have done over the years - one absolutely hellish one in particular, where the network was obviously set up by a borderline retard. I am just used to my managed corporate environment where the thousand or so Windows machines we have "just work".
My point about 256MB of RAM being just fine on XP stands though.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I myself started in corporate while saving to start my company. It has it's own problems, but yeah, it's nice when the Sun workstation monitor that is 10 years old dies, but is attached to a machine 3 years old with a gold contract, and you get a brand new monitor within a day.
.NET. So when this particular workstation finishes logging in, I am looking at 28MB of usage without touching any ATI options (I just checked). Now, some of this may not actually be ATI, and instead is some other .NET app (though I try to run a stripped down environment).
We certainly have met XP machines that have 256 and aren't worth upgrading (customer might use one app on that machine, and they don't need it quickly. If you have a corporate image, and it's been trimmed to the essentials, I can imagine XP using 120MB. Usually we see just the kernel memory taking 80-90MB. Now throw in your antivirus app (pigs, usually), various system tray stuff that can't be feasibly disabled without compromising a customer-desired feature, and backend stuff that installed applications like to run at all times, after login you have maybe 64 mb to play with. Maybe. Consider this: the machine I am typing on uses an ATI GPU (nothing fancy, just don't like waiting for refreshes with integrated graphics). The modern ATI drivers use
512MB is the spot where on a normal installation, with normal tasks, you don't have to listen to and wait for constant paging operations.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
Vidar
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWbl4vQLfr4
Yeah, because you are an mindless Microsoft fanboy and Troll.
Just like you're a mindless Apple fanboy and Troll ?
Try a PowerPC G5 which came out at the same time as your iMac, it's quite a lot faster despite both having G5 chips.
It certainly is, but that doesn't explain why Windows XP on, say, a ~1Ghz P3 (the computer the iMac replaced) runs noticably better than OS X does on the iMac in question (with 1.5GB RAM), under equivalent workloads.
I am not disputing a G5 PowerMac is faster, I'm pointing out that OS X shouldn't feel relatively sluggish on a 1.9Ghz G5 imac with a gig and a half of RAM.
(I should clarify here that I don't regret buying my mum the iMac in the slightest - it meets her needs quite adequately - but _I_ find it a bit frustrating when I'm visiting and have to use it (especially if I have to use it for remote work and multitask).)
I know this is hard for you to accept, but there's nothing wrong with these Dells. That's just how Windows performs.
There is (or it's the software, which is the more likely alternative). It is _not_ "just how Windows performs".
Mac OS X contains Front Row, which is Media Centre minus the TV stuff. Admittedly, that's a feature less, but at least Front Row isn't such a crappy piece of shit like Media Centre (I own a license to the NT Media Center Edition of Windows - I don't use it anymore, I've replaced it with Ubuntu running MythTV).
Front Row is a poor cousin to Media Centre. (Congratulations on getting MythTV up and running though, it's quite a struggle.)
And no, every copy of Mac OS X is not an upgrade. Yes, you do have to own a Mac to be able to run it, but after buying it, you own to licenses to Mac OS X. Legally, you can use your old copy on another Mac with an even older version of OS X. That's not an upgrade, that's an additional license.
It doesn't matter that you have two licenses. You still can't do anything with them without a machine that doesn't already have MacOS on it. In this, it is identical to a Windows updgrade version.
Well, since you now admit that Microsoft copied stuff from Apple before Vista, the discussion is moot.
Stop lying. I said Vista and OS X *and every other GUI on the planet* share common features.
That makes it obvious that Windows is a knockoff of Apple's system.
Sure. Just as obviously as OS X is a knockoff of Microsoft's system. I mean, they both have some similar high level functionality that looks and acts vaguely the same.
I mean, your argument is that Vista is not a Mac OS knockoff because the most recent version of Windows copied nothing from the most recent version of Mac OS X?
No, *your* argument (and the article's argument) is that Vista is a MacOS knockoff because it supposedly copied things from OS X.
*My* argument is that there's nothing in Vista that could qualify as a "knockoff" of OS X because it's all either a) shared amongst numerous GUIS or applications (menus, windows, search, etc), b) an obvious progression of technology (3D acceleration, live search) or c) only similar in a superficial and meaningless sense (Flip3D and Expose).
Even if it were true - which it is not - it's an absurd argument.
Indeed. The ideas that just because two systems have some vague similarities, one copied the other, and that two developers extremely active in the same field, striving for the same broad goal, could not independently come up with somewhat similar ideas, *are* absurd arguments.
Either way, I don't get the Smalltalk reference. Smalltalk is a programming language. The Alto had no overlapping windows.
You need to do some more research. Smalltalk isn't just a language spec.
And no, I'm not going to give you a detailed list of every feature in Vista which Microsoft took from Apple.
I don't want a detailed list. A few examples will suffice.
By the logic (and examples) presented thus far, OS X is *at least* as much a knockoff of Windows (and other Microsoft software).
(OMG !! They both have mouse pointers !!! And menus !!! And windows !!! And search !!!! THE HUMANITY !!!!)
Yeah, because one of them shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects, while the other one... shows all currently open windows in its own superimposed layer using neat warping effects.
They are completely different task switching paradigms. Not to mention Flip3D is the same task-switching methodology that's been around since Windows 95 (or even 3.x, depending on your point of view), with somewhat updated visuals - hardly a "knockoff". About the only common
No, unlike you i'm not mindless.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Yeah, and I should accept your word above my experience why?
Thank you. Indeed it is. Took me the better part of a week to get everything running, but I think it's worth it.
No. Say you have two computers, an older one and a newer one. You bought the newer one to replace the older, but the older is still running as a file server or something along those lines. Buying a new version of Mac OS X for your newer computer allows you to legally move the previous license from the newer to the older computer - this is not the case with Windows. This is a common scenario (although in reality, most people would probably just install the most recent version on all of their Macs).
If you mean to say that Apple copied stuff form Windows, then yeah, that's true. Unfortunately, the magnitude of Apple's intellectual theft quite simply can't compare to what Microsoft has done.
"Supposedly," huh? You're cracking me up.
They would be, if Microsoft stopped at copying functionality. Unfortunately, they also copied the lookd and feel of those apps and features, which makes the idea that this whole thing is just a huge coincidence borderline insane.
Interesting. I had no idea that Smalltalk was a whole IDE/OS/Language combination.
And how is that?
That comparison makes no sense, because the Dock was around before the Start bar, while Flip3D came after Exposé.
So basically, you're telling me that Microsoft took this from NeXT? Could be. I guess they aren't stealing only from Apple.
I find it unlikely that XP SP 2 on a 1GHZ P3 would run faster than Mac OS X 10.4 on a G5 iMac.
What exactly are you running on these computers, and what specific things run slower on the Mac than on the Windows box?
No, unlike you i'm not mindless.
Strange, then, that you seem incapable of engaging in meaningful discussion.
Yeah, and I should accept your word above my experience why?
Because something like iozone says the comparative IO performance of OS X and XP is a wash.
No. Say you have two computers, an older one and a newer one. You bought the newer one to replace the older, but the older is still running as a file server or something along those lines. Buying a new version of Mac OS X for your newer computer allows you to legally move the previous license from the newer to the older computer - this is not the case with Windows.
That would depend on your Windows license (OEM versions, I'll agree, are not supposed to be moved between machines).
If you mean to say that Apple copied stuff form Windows, then yeah, that's true.
No, I didn't.
Unfortunately, the magnitude of Apple's intellectual theft quite simply can't compare to what Microsoft has done.
Yet still no examples that aren't laughably vague, if not simply wrong.
They would be, if Microsoft stopped at copying functionality. Unfortunately, they also copied the lookd and feel of those apps and features, which makes the idea that this whole thing is just a huge coincidence borderline insane.
The "look and feel" of Windows is substantially different to OS X.
And how is that?
Expose presents a spatial view of all visible windows on the screen and is designed primarily to be used with the mouse.
Alt+Tab/Flip3D presents a most-recently-used stack of application windows and is designed primarily to be used with the keyboard.
And you're *still* ignoring the fact that the functionality of Flip3D - with minor cosmetic changes - has been around since Windows 95, so saying it's a "knockoff" of OS X is simply nonsensical.
That comparison makes no sense, because the Dock was around before the Start bar, while Flip3D came after Exposé.
The OS X Dock is substantially different to the NeXT Dock (and almost all the ways it is different, are ways it is similar to the Taskbar).
So basically, you're telling me that Microsoft took this from NeXT? Could be. I guess they aren't stealing only from Apple.
Clearly, you have never used NeXTSTEP, if you think the Taskbar is a copy of its Dock.
find it unlikely that XP SP 2 on a 1GHZ P3 would run faster than Mac OS X 10.4 on a G5 iMac.
It's more responsive.
What exactly are you running on these computers, and what specific things run slower on the Mac than on the Windows box?
Browsers, email clients, terminal windows, word, excel, etc. Individual tasks are faster on the Mac, as the CPU is faster, but the interactive performance - especially when multitasking - is nowhere near as responsive. Menus have noticable delays before showing, there are pauses switching between windows or tabs, the beachball is a common sight.
It's just "sluggish".
Well, I don't. Must be your fault.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
If it doesn't translate into any real-world advantage, it makes no difference to me.
The differences between the Mac Dock and the NeXT Dock are slim (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the two shared actual code in addition to the name) compared to the differences between the Mac Dock and the Start Bar - which, if anything, copied concepts from the Mac's menu bar (Apple-Menu -> Start Menu).
Again, you show your hypocrisy. Claiming that the Windows Start Bar is not a copy of the NeXT Dock, but that the Mac OS Dock have more in common than Exposé and Flip3D, that's just laughable.
Well, yeah, that's your - somewhat absurd - main point. It has become clear that you will not let facts influence your convictions, hence further discussion is pointless.
Well, I don't.
Your posts to this thread indicate otherwise.
Must be your fault.
All I did was ask for a clarification of your argument. Instead of providing one, you engaged in ad hominem attacks, the hallmark of mindless trolling. Not quite sure how the blame for that can be laid at my feet.
If it doesn't translate into any real-world advantage, it makes no difference to me.
It does, however, allow you to figure out where the problem is - and it clearly isn't in the OS.
The differences between the Mac Dock and the NeXT Dock are slim (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the two shared actual code in addition to the name) compared to the differences between the Mac Dock and the Start Bar - which, if anything, copied concepts from the Mac's menu bar (Apple-Menu -> Start Menu).
Clearly, you have never used NeXTSTEP, if you think the Taskbar is a copy of its Dock.
The Taskbar has more in common with UI elements found in Windows *1.0* than it does with the NeXTSTEP Dock.
Again, you show your hypocrisy.
You need to consult a dictionary.
Claiming that the Windows Start Bar is not a copy of the NeXT Dock, but that the Mac OS Dock have more in common than Exposé and Flip3D, that's just laughable.
Please list the similarities you think exist solely between the NeXT Dock and the Taskbar and between Expose and Flip3D.
Well, yeah, that's your - somewhat absurd - main point. It has become clear that you will not let facts influence your convictions, hence further discussion is pointless.
Ok, you don't need to consult a dictionary. This is an excellent example of hypocrisy on your part.
Your posts to this thread are notable in their evasiveness about even giving examples based out of _opinion_, let alone venturing into anything that could be classified as fact.
Your arguments never made any sense. Must be my fault of course. Without Microsoft I'd still be using an Abacus - whatever.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Your arguments never made any sense.
Why ?
Must be my fault of course. Without Microsoft I'd still be using an Abacus - whatever.
Still got a grudge against that straw man, eh ?