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Mac OS X Versus Windows Vista, The Rematch
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek follows up its widely read review where Mac OS X beat out Windows Vista in a head-to-head comparison, with a reader debate on which is really the superior operating system. From the article: 'Mac users love venting about Windows... Any company that calls their techs "geniuses" thrive in forums like this. They think they are "cool" and "hip," they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes. Windows Vista all the way. If Windows sucks soooo much, how come more people are familiar with it than Mac OS X? Last time I checked, Windows wasn't just a business operating system. Tons upon tons of people use it and like it.'"
Do people still use Appletalk?
I have two Macs at home and I can not remember using it.
Hah, use it? Yes. Like it? Nooooo. Tolerate it like a drunk uncle grabbing your ass at a wedding. Windows sucks ass.
But it's where the games are. First of Linux or Apple OS to get all the games Windows gets, and I'd change in a heartbeat.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
I seem to recall a lawsuit regarding Microsoft's predatory practices by making it financially difficult for vendors to sell any operations system other than Dos and Windows - then there's the code stealing (Doublespace), the intential breaking (DR DOS), and other practices that, over time, have helped to lead to not just Microsoft's and Windows domination, but also the discouragement of any other operating systems from gaining hold.
I thought there was a whole court case about this, Microsoft being found guilty or something. But since there was no punishment, I must be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Tons upon tons of people use [Windows] and like it.
Huh? In my experience, almost all Windows users hate it. They use it because they have no idea that there's a choice. They didn't buy "windows", they bought "a computer", and that mysterious thing called "Windows" came with it. From the name, they understand that "Windows" is the thing that draws the windows on the screen. All computers do that, so they all have "Windows", right? Even those who have heard of Apple tend to think that Macs run Windows, because you can look at the screen and see the windows.
An important reason for all this is that Microsoft has an advertising budget larger than the budgets of all their competitors combined. This simple situation is all you need to understand MS's market dominance. (Though their ability to lock out competitors via their contracts with retailers also helps.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
There was also a time when the vast majority of people thougth that the world was flat...that didn't work out so well, either.
Same here. Of course, the terminal I usually go running for is called Terminal. :-) (I.e., most of my Unix work these days is on OS X.)
This happened just last week.
My company has a policy where by all purchase orders must be submitted using a form in Outlook. Forms are the one thing my Mac can't do because Microsoft dosen't want Macs to have Outlook. (Run OS 9 to get Outlook? Get real, I haven't run "classic" Mac OS in over 6 years. It's not even installed on any of my Macs.)
So I fire up my PC. Outlook is hosed. No problem, just uninstall and reinstall from the company file server. Connect to the VPN, go out to the file server and AUTHENTICATION DENIED.
WTF? Try several times, on the phone with company tech support. They check my permissions in the domain, still can't get in. Finally I say, "Hang on, let me try something."
I close the VPN tunnel on the PC. Connect to the VPN on my Mac. Go straight to the file server and login without a problem using the same domain credentials. Download the Outlook installer and then map a drive letter on my PC to my Mac to get the software to my PC.
Ironic isn't it? Windows would not authenticate with a Windows file server in a Windows Active Directory Domain. But my Mac just waltzed right in and got what I needed.
I don't hate Microsoft because of Windows. I hate Microsoft because they made mediocre software the standard.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
I would be highly interested in knowing what useless processes are in Vista that i can safely turn off.
There are a few in Vista, just as there are some in OSX and other OSes, but nothing as bad as XP.
They tend to be personally subjective in Vista, rather than what people saw as non-sense in XP. UPnP was big one people that was goofy in XP, and for the timeframe it was, but now that most routers and home networking devices utilize it, it is no longer something you would want to turn off, since using UPnP applications can easily access router for applications like bittorrent.
If you don't need defender, you can kill it (but don't recommend for novice users) as it is the final defense against spyware if the user is stupid enought to fully click through to allow a bad application to run.
You can also kill the TS server if you don't ever have more than one person logged in or plan on remote log in, but again, this is a feature most families and geeks use.
There is also stuff like the DNS cache like in XP, but this means it has to grab the DNS from your server each time, and also considering it is about 16K of space used in System RAM, it is not a big service. (Many of even the 'extra' XP services were quite lite that many people would go around turning off, all less than 128K combined.)
You could also kill the Search system, but since it has almost no utilization on the system once the system is indexed, it would be a waste to lose its functionality.
Of course you can turn off the themes manager or DWM, however by turning off DWM and AERO, you actually lose a lot of performance on application screen redrawing, and even if you are using Vista Basic the DWM uses DirectX7 Video card to accelerate GDI and WPF application drawing that you lose with this turned off.
There are a few other services that people will tell you can live without, as they are supporting new specifications and new technologies that are NOT widely used, however when you do start using these technologies on your computer or network, you will want to get them turned back on, and again, they are under 512K in total RAM usage and sit dormate until used.
Vista has more 'sense' to the services installed and turned on than XP, but again this is really subjective. For example XP installed a disabled Telnet Server and active client, and people complained, yet in Vista this is not installed by default, and guess what, people are complaining...
I find it highly crazy that people think Windows is the only OS with lots of underlying process/services when that is what makes up all OSes, whether they are apparently visible or not...
As I understand it, the problem comes from the fact that the VM subsystem is in the Mach layer. This means that every VM operation (e.g. mapping or unmapping a page) has to go through two layers of indirection, the second of which is incredibly slow.
I wrote some code recently that mmap'd a large data structure (a few GBs). Actually, there were a few back-ends, one used mmap, one used POSIX AIO. On FreeBSD, they were both roughly the same speed. On OS X, the mmap back end was not just an order of magnitude slower than AIO, it was an order of magnitude slower than a userspace demand-paging approach (no pre-fetching). To me, this says something is seriously wrong with the VM subsystem. I should have had more overhead from all the extra system calls and extra copies doing the demand paging myself than the kernel would have had.
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