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Mac OS X Versus Windows Vista
An anonymous reader writes "With Macworld set to start Jan. 8, InformationWeek has a detailed comparison that pits Mac OS X against Vista. According to reviewer John Welch, OS X wins hands down. The important point: he doesn't say Vista is bad, just that technically speaking, OS X remains way ahead. Do you agree?"
Technical superiority doesn't mean as much when you can't get vendor support. This is sad but true. For a long while to come Vista will enjoy all the attention and benefits of a larger install base regardless of technical merits (or lack thereof).
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
Use [tab] to select and [space] to "click". You need to look after the faint blue highlight around the button though, and if you press [Enter], the blue button is selected, not the higlight.
Isn't this strange. Why don't they wait for the just-around-the-corner Leopard to compare with Vista. At least they would be comparing apple with oranges instead of pineapples and watermelons! ;-)
Animoog.org
In my opinion the only place where Windows is really far ahead of Mac OS X is .NET. Or more specifically: C# 2.0. C# is simply the nicest programming language and .NET the most consistent and easiest API that I've ever used. I went from a Java and Obj-C advocate to a C# maniac in about one month of using it. The biggest drawback with .NET is Visual BASIC which is horribly verbose and seems to attract idiot developers.
.NET I think Mac OS X 10.4 and the up-comming 10.5 are still much better operating systems than Vista. Mac OS X is more consistent, nicer to use and is more stable than any version of Windows I've ever seen.
I think it would be great if Apple would adopt C# as the future of development on Mac OS X. I hate to say this but in comparison Objective-C 2.0 looks positively dated.
Other than
...I don't think I've ever seen so many ad hominem attacks against a non hominem. ;)
Saying that OSX is better than Vista because OSX hasn't changed its UI much since 2001 (at least regarding buttons) and Vista has changed the look of the window bar buttons? That's just stupid.
Spending most of the first page of the article beating the dead horse of Cairo promises regarding WinFS and other things which have nothing to do with comparing Vista to OSX?
I'd much rather read an article by a Linux or Windows fanboy bashing each other unapologetically than listen to that author say "I'm going to compare A and B" and then spend half their time talking about C.
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f you believe all the hype, installing the new Windows Vista operating system will solve world famine, end the AIDS crisis and bring about world peace.
If those windows zombie botnets were used for scientific work instead of sending spam I'm sure it would in fact have a positive impact.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
His example is of Safari in the background of something else, and the Back/Forward/Reload/Stop buttons being greyed out. On Vista, he points to the similar buttons still being full colour and equating that to confusion.
The only reason his Safari buttons are grey is because he hasn't loaded a web page and has nothing to go back to, reload or stop. In OS X, with a page loaded those buttons would indeed look active. Yes, I just tested ;)
Only big ligs use sigs.
Different platforms, different programs, different needs.
I think it was more on the grandparents post on the idea that the fact that Vista can run more games and application.
But it is a moot point if it can't run the one application I need it to run. The fact that it can run more may not be the right tool for the right job. Like having a swiss army knife when you really need a plain phillips head screw driver.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Agreed. Technically, you can do more stuff on Windows -- just as you can technically go more places in a SUV than you can in a sedan. But in reality, you never end up taking advantage of every little feature, relying instead on a core library of features. And when it comes to that "core library", Windows can't touch Mac OS X.
The real litigious bastards...
Not by default. First you have to go into the Keyboard & Mouse preferences and select the full keyboard access for "All controls".
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Anyone who looks at my post history will see that I am a Mac zealot, but I have to correct a small bit of misinformation in the review.
He praises Mac OS X for dimming toolbar buttons when windows are in the background, using the example of a Safari window behind a Finder window. Unfortunately, the reason the Safari window's toolbar buttons are dimmed is not that it's in the background, but that it's not displaying any page. Put a Safari window displaying any page into the background and its toolbar buttons (unfortunately) stay active. The behavior he describes is application-specific.
For example, both the Finder and Path Finder do the right thing.
There were other inconsistencies in the review. Two examples: First, he slammed Vista for requiring UAC approval for installations where it might not seem necessary, where OS X does the same thing. Second, he praised Vista's interface consistency, without mentioning the lack of consistency that has been typical of Mac OS X in recent years. (This lack of consistency, because it is strictly cosmetic and apps have remained well-executed, is something I think is OK or even valuable... but there are a whole lot of Mac users out there who violently disagree with me.)
Wrong. http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/07/ 2359256
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I use Windows XP at work and OSX, FC3, Win2000 and XP at home. I am a heavy duty business user and student developer. I offer the following observations: /.
1. I use OSX primarily, on a pre-Intel iMac. Speed is good. System slowdowns are generally longer under Windows than OSX, but the 'pinwheel' in OSX drives me insane.
2. The UI and system administration tools in OSX are hands-dows way easier to use. I used every version of Windows from 3.1, and worked at a support desk in college - and once I learned OSX (ok, BSD) - style system maintenance and operation, I never went back. *NIX is far more discoverable and has a well-engineered feel that I like.
3. I have yet to run into any software package that I needed that did not have a counterpart on Mac.
4. I still have not played Half-Life 2. I do not need to, but I would like to, and I bought WinXP just to do so. I can't really blame Apple for this. In fact, Apple, by moving to Intel, has made it easier for their user base to access windows apps. Microsoft, by making it more difficult (from what I've read - haven't tried it yet) to run Vista in any kind of virtual environment is not really helping the user base much. Although they probably don't care about Mac users, there are many business reasons to support virtual environments, from posts I've seen on
5. Searching in OSX returns better results than WinXP or 2000.
6. Mac help, for system related issues, returns more relevant results than WinXP or 2000.
7. Mac hardware just works. I have a hetogenous network - my Mac has no problems, nor does my FC3 laptop. I have a dual-boot PC with WXP and 2000 - 2000 recognized my wirelss card and the built-in ethernet adapter. WXP doesn't have a driver for the built in. The wireless card has a driver, but cannot acquire a network address from my AirPort. Win2000 has no problems with the wirelss card or network address. The driver in both OSes is up to date. I should NOT have to put in this much effort, especially for supposedly supported hardware - it stuns me that 2000 is actually better at 'figuring out' what to do than XP. Needless to say, the Mac setup has never caused any problems for my Mac hardware.
8. Development - I do mostly Java and Ruby. Java runs pretty much identically on both boxes, but setting up newer versions of the Java environment is more difficult on Mac. Installing and configuring Ruby also requires a lot more effort. However, it is easier to troubleshoot in the Mac environment. XP and 2000, the installs seem to 'just work' but if they go wrong or there is a misconfiguration, it is a lot harder for me to figure out what went wrong.
9. Licensing - I can install my OSX CD/DVD on any Mac I have, no registration necessary. I do not do this, but I can. Windows XP, I installed and because it couldn't get on my network, I had to use the dial-in service to validate my copy of XP, which was a PITA.
10. I took C in college, working in a UNIX environment. It was amazing and taught me a ton. I took Java in college, working on a PC with NetBeans. Worked great. I used VBA to do corporate work and learned two things - first, an IDE is very nice, especially to learn UI implementation and second, VBA makes it way too easy to write crap code. You can write crappy Applescript too, but I've seen far less of it. Xcode is a nice balance and can hit multiple targets. I like it, although I've not done much Objective C work.
11. I like scripting and *NIX tools. Scripting is far easier in a *NIX-like environment than on Windows. Yes, there is Cygwin, but that was designed to remedy the lack of such tools in Windows.
12. C# for web development is, in a word, crap. Sure, it is easy to learn. Sure, it is free. Sure, the MS IDE is ok if you choose to use it. HOWEVER, it is so wrapped up in Microsoft-specific 'stuff' it sucks to use. Example - to simply change the color of a button in a web-form, I spent several hours working through my code to see what went wrong. I sent it to my professor, who told me it was fine and worked. I was mystified
Off topic a little (okay, a lot), but your comment applies to programming languages as well. When I was coding for the MCS6502 on an Apple ][ in 1978 or so, I had every instruction, every variation, every addressing mode in my head. The code just flowed. No need to waste time referring to documentation once I had learned the instruction set ... my fingers never left the keyboard.
Flash forward twenty nine years. Nowadays, programming environments are so complex (I won't use the term "sophisticated", necessarily) that no mere human mind can easily encompass them in their entirety. Yes, there may be a function that does exactly what you want, but odds are you won't remember it's there (if you ever did know) and will just write it yourself anyway. Most developers I know (myself included) settle for a "core library" of features and functions in a particular language, functions that do the majority of what we need. To do otherwise would mean continually searching through programming manuals trying to find some little-used feature which might (or might not!) actually be there and might (or might not!) do what you really want. Not worth the effort: just do it yourself and get it over with.
Language and operating system designers rationalize the insane complexity of their creations by saying, "yes, it's true, no programmer/user will ever use all of what we provide, but the subset of features each programmer/user chooses will be different, so we have to put in the kitchen sink." Now, that is true to a degree, but I think that in many cases they have simply gone too far and productivity has actually suffered as a result. At the very least, a large percentage of their oh-so-valuable features go unused by a large percentage of users.
The reality is that it is usually the marketing departments that demand more and more stuff be added in order to make their claims of "ours is new and improved!" so they can achieve some unquantifiable degree of "market differentiation".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
And it's worth pointing out that there's a reason for that. Generally, under MacOS X, anything 'advanced' is off by default. If you're the sort of person who wants to use keyboard shortcuts then you're the sort of person who's able to go to the preferences and activate them.
Conversely, on Windows, in general *everything* is enabled at start up. Confuses the hell out of novice users. The Mac approach - simplicity and usability with the option for power use - wins out every time.
The thing about PC gaming is that games on PC don't really use the operating system at all
Except for the sound, video, keyboard, mouse, monitor, network card, hdd, cd/dvd and other drivers the OS provides.
Windows isn't just the fancy GUI, it's a standard interface to non-standard hardware. Anyone who used DOS for gaming will remember the absolute nightmare of getting sound, video, network and CD drivers all running for every game.
Well, among other things, he spends most of a page discussing the difference between authentication, which OS X does, and approval, which Vista does.
Authentication means you actually enter a password to prove you're the person who has rights to modify the machine.
Approval means you just click a "yes, go ahead and do it" button.
The article then discusses the weakness of 'approval' from a security standpoint: i.e.: it doesn't stop J. Random Passerby from hosing your system, it just means he has to push the 'Okay' button to do it.
In practice, this means that if the two of us are sitting side by side, you on a Vista box where only you know the admin password, me on a Mac where only I know the admin password, I can change the settings of your machine while you step away for coffee, but you can't change the settings on my machine while I step away for coffee.
"As a cross-platform developer"
I assume you realize you represent less than 1% of the computer using public's needs/wants as a cross platform developer (most of them wouldn't even know what that means).
"At the end of the day though, I can do MORE stuff on Windows, and Vista will be no exception."
Like what? You may be right, but usually in a "discussion" thread you have to actually put up examples. My mom used to use Word, a browser and an E-mail app on her old Dell. With a Mac she now plugs in her digital camera to get photos as soon as I told her she didn't have to do a thing outside of plugging in the camera to the machine (no driver installs, no app installs), and she's been playing with iMovie, something she wouldn't have dreamed she could have done so easily on a Windows machine.
So, while you may be right, I think the majority of the computer using public couldn't care less about your statement, and more about what they want to do rather than what they can do. Remember, I may admit you are right (without examples that would be pertinent to the general public I can't argue anything), but for most people, OS X and their bundled apps are going to be far more rewarding, fun, stress free than anything similar on Vista. For games, BootCamp!
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
C# 2.0 is lightyears ahead of Java. But compared to other languages, Java shows signs of severe mental retardation, and C# 2.0 looks like a preschooler.
Unfortunately I have to develop software in the real world. This (for the most part anyway) completely rules out every language you suggested. It sounds like you lack experience programming in the real world.
In the past I have worked with trading companies on various exchanges (FTSE in London, NYSE in New York, CBOE & CME in Chicago, etc.). It doesn't get much more "real world" than winging around millions of dollars, pounds, and euros electronically in markets where seconds can mean the difference between profit and loss. Many of the infrastructure components for the real-time trading systems used were written in Python (the speed of development and platform flexibility made it invaluable), so your notion that Python programming isn't done in "the real world" is more than a little misguided. Of course, if your "real world" is limited to the subset of computers running Microsoft Windows, then I can understand how your impressions of "real-world" computing may have been skewed.
Of course, I quite like Ruby, but Python is very nice for what it does, and has many more real-world applications already in use than you realize.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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Final Cut Pro is making more and more inroads on Avid's territory due to the fact that it is just so much more cost-effective. Avid is a system with machines in racks in a term gear room. Final Cut Pro is a Mac tower with some displays and an editing keyboard. Avid is still used more, I know this, but Final Cut is a very attractive alternative. We use both daily at CNN.
Oh, for crying out loud... if you're a power user, and confused, R-T-F-M! Or visit a web forum, like Mac OSX Hints or better, google's Mac search page. Or maybe you're not really a power user, just well-adapted to using windows--I've noted the distinction, people who understand how to do things with windows really well, but aren't clear on why it works that way.
I'm constantly amazed at how people switch to a graphic interface and command line that is widely reputed to be "better" and yet expect it to work just like the one they abandoned.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I don't know about Java, but you can do much of this in .NET:
.NET by design. You can't allocate anything on your own.
1. Enumerate all the subclasses of a given class, or classes that implement a particular interface, including those supplied in plug-ins, at runtime.
** You can, through reflection
2. Call methods by name.
** You can, through reflection
3. Query whether a delegate object implements a given method, allowing for informal protocols.
** You can, through reflection
4. Handle the case where an object tries to call a method on my object that doesn't exist, to allow the simple creation of generic proxy objects.
** That can never happen in C#
5. Add methods to a class, even if it's part of the standard library and I don't have the source code (I can even do this at runtime, although it's messier, and I haven't ever needed to).
** What's wrong with inheritance?
6. Separate the allocation and initialisation of an object into separate methods, to allow different allocation policies to be implemented (e.g. pools for commonly re-cycled objects) transparently to users of the class.
** Not needed in
OK, I think you're confusing iMovie (free, or nearly) with FCP ($300 - $1200 or so, depending on discounts). Final Cut is not easy, nor prescriptive. I can edit, colour correct, audio edit, capture, etc. in dozens of ways, depending on workflow and habits. In fact, other than media management and settings (both of which SUCK on FCP), it's pretty much like Avid's functionality--and complexity.
None of what it accomplishes can't be done using other programs. And I feel more in control picking and chosing components. Plus, the existence of 'Final Cut Pro' on the Mac platform crowds out and eliminates the motivation for other people to come in and develop competing products.
Well, one can build a house with a can opener and a rock, but who wants to? FCP is the rage in the industry because it has an excellent balance of usability, reliability, and power, and it scales fairly well, including sliding into many an established workflow, especially now that it handles multiple cameras and better formats. No other programs offer that combination. In a sense, it breaks the rule of "cheap, fast, good: pick two." THATS why it dominates on the Mac, when Premiere and Avid were well entrenched leaders for... well, a decade. They dropped the ball.
I also cannot justify spending the tons of money for a new Macintosh, and all the new software I'd have to buy to get equivalent performance with other tasks.
Well, I guess you aren't billing $80/hr as an editor. Downtime (do you hear me, cinelerra?!) is costly, and in an afternoon of lost business, you've lost any price advantages; at 20 minutes per day of lost productivity, over the course of a year, well, that's just bad math, because at 40 weeks per year, that's $4800 you've sacrificed to the gods of false frugality.
Damn those pesky terrorists
People stop being noobs by exploring the options and prefs dialogs, not by fumbling around. I doubt many people are able to figure out which random keypress triggered the action they wanted. But with something as complex as Windows or OS X, you can always discover new features by digging through the preference panes. THat is the experimentation that really helps.
Care to enumerate them?
I can name a few off the top of my head:
I'm sure there are more items I'm forgetting and again I want to stress that OS X is not ahead in all areas and can really benefit from improvements. It is just that some of these things have been on OS X for quite a while and most Linux developers I talk to don't even recognize the value in them. A lot of them are things that you can work around on Linux, or hack something that works in one instance, but until they are available to average and novice users, they are just ignored anyway. I'd love to see Linux catch up to OS X on the desktop, I just don't anticipate it happening anytime soon. I don't think Linux developers are willing to make some of the hard choices needed or will be willing to accept complexity on the server for the sake of making Linux nice on the desktop.
Highlight and [cmd]- C to take data from X11 to the apple side.
Hold down [opt] and click to paste from the apple side into X11 (That's the middle-click emulation)
I had this question earlier today, and looked it up.