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OS X Vs. Vista — In Spandex
An anonymous reader writes "CNET UK compares Vista Vs. Apple OS X in a Romeo and Juliet, spandex-wearing, Shakespearean English style. Two guys dress up as their favorite operating system and fight with swords, guns, and fists, while a third guy, dressed as a woman, awaits the winner. 'Usability - Act 3, Scene 2: Swords clash, sparks fly and men grunt, but the showdown ends in stalemate ... [Vista] has a far better user interface than XP -- the file and application search facility is vastly improved and the cascading Start menu has been banished, but it only takes a few moments of use to discover pointless idiosyncrasies. Microsoft constantly reminds us of how great Flip 3D is, but this feature doesn't help us find the right application window much faster than Alt-Tab did. It's very time consuming when you have many application windows to flip through, and it's in no way as efficient as OS X's Exposé feature ... We're calling this one a draw. They're just as good as each other, and in some cases just as bad -- a pox upon both your houses! Score: Mac OS X - 2, Windows Vista - 2'"
To a degree, but the more interesting argument was that new hardware tends to be released with windows drivers first. Apple also doesn't offer anywhere near the range of choice in (say) powerful video cards.
... yes... DirectX10, and, ultimately, Vista. It's conceivable that Apple will persuade AMD or NVidia to design for some next-generation Apple video standard, but it doesn't seem likely.
Finally, next generation video cards are being designed for
I find all that persuasive. What I didn't find persuasive was the article leaving out the fairly serious performance problems Vista has with many games (vs. XP) on the same hardware.
I also thought the article's dismissal of bootcamp/parallels was a little too quick.
You left out the part where pressing the eject button isn't enough, you have to hold it. Nor the fact that most of these shortcuts are so numerous and obscure that you may as well just print them out and tape them to your display rather than try to memorize them.
And don't get me started with iTunes, a media player that doesn't even let you adjust the brightness when watching a movie. Oh you get a ten band equalizer with 20 some odd presets, a "preamp" and volume leveling. But if your movie is too dark you've got to dig it up elsewhere and play it in QuickTime. Thirty bucks please if you want that in full screen. Add to that incompetently slow navigation and fast forward and rewind so bad they shouldn't have bothered. All of which are gloriously quick in QT.
I could go on and on, and most surely will another time. But for now I'm going to rein it in and let the apologists come in with their bog standard "shut up idiot" routine.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Today, I had to get a new Mac Mini. Turning it on and getting to the desktop took all of 3 minutes. I had it updated, and configured to my liking in about 45 minutes (most of which was taken up downloading a ton of updates, as his Mini had been on the shelf for a while at CompUSA.
In contrast, a few weeks ago I was working for a company that needed a new laptop. The laptop we got was very similar to the Mini I purchased today. Intel Core 2 Duo, and it actually had much more memory stock in it (still need to crack open the Mini and upgrade to 2GB). It took a full 45 minutes to get Vista to boot for the first time. Between just getting the software updated (which was a super painfully slow process in comparison), it took over 3 hours to get it even usable, let alone the hour it took to install Microsoft Office 2007, and then update it. Then it took another few hours to figure out how to Vista actually, well, less like Vista. This was some Acer laptop BTW.
I liked Windows XP in comparison a lot, and still think that Windows 2000 was super-stable in comparison to XP. I still haven't figured out what Vista does for the end-user that XP doesn't do- asides from being a PITA and making you purchase new hardware. In fact, I'm going to do a Bootcamp install of XP in a few minutes.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
PC World quietly tackled this months ago, and gave the nod to OS X.
The Right Operating System for You
I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
Also means less real estate is wasted having menus on each window.
On the other hand, on my 30" monitor I now find the menu is now often ridiculously far away from the window I'm working in.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
I wouldn't call XP's Start menu "awkward."
It all depends on how you use the OS -- as someone who pretty much lives by keyboard shortcuts over the point & click stuff, I find the default XP start menu extremely awkward simply because it's two-column design is near impossible to navigate with the keyboard. You can't easily switch between the columns, since half the options expand into submenu's instead. Luckily one can still switch to the classic mode to make it usable again.
As far as 'Win2K had better searching than XP' is concerned: the old-style Win2000 search ability is still present in XP as well, but it does require some magic to get back. You can also speed up the XP search tremendously by some registry tweaks preventing it from looking inside of zip files.
(Kind of ironic though, that to make the OS usable, step #1 is to turn off all the 'enhancements')
I am somewhat amused at your query, though. There appears to be the tacit assumption that girls aren't supposed to use computers. Which, I'm afraid, isn't very politically correct (or accurate).
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
Windows even allows you to "Undo" deletes, renames, moves, and copy operations, as long as the action was performed on a local disk- network and removable drives don't have that option.
The reason iTunes is shit is, quite frankly—and I'm sure I'll be modded down by offended PC users—because Apple has had to cater to you troglodytes ever since 2003, which is when iTunes was first released for Windows. Every other iApp has advanced by leaps and bounds in the interim. iTunes is the only one that hasn't been retooled in Cocoa, for example, since that would make cross-platform development (in the literal-minded sense) more difficult.
It's sad to see things get to the point where you PC users are retarding progress not only on your own platform, as has been the case for decades, but now for us Mac users as well.
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
How the hell did this get insightful?
Look, iTunes is probably one of apple's biggest programs (not for any apparent reason). If they don't have enough dev teams to make it up to date on the 2 systems they support, then they should ether get more devs or get rid of windows support. But the last will never happen, because they want to control the DRM infected media market, and they can't do that without iTunes working on windows.
Stop trying to blame other people for apple's products not being up to par. No one forced them to support windows, they just seen dollar signs and jumped at it.
Great Intellect...
Am I missing something?
Microsoft buys more ads than Apple at C|NET?
Actually, it's more complex that that - C|NET can't go recommending OSX over Vista, even if they want to.
They depend on people thinking they're in-touch, relevant, right, have some foresight, etc. If they truly love the Mac (and it appears they do), let's think about what would happen if they recommended OSX over Vista. First, 5 years from now, I don't expect OSX to have over 50% marketshare in the commercial PC OS space. So, Vista will be what more people use. If C|NET starts recommending OSX, people will start to think that nobody listens to their recommendations, that they pick the wrong racehorses, that they don't 'get' what their readership wants [to hear], and that's going to affect their bottom line. Part of this is recognition that even with their industry presence, they don't have enough power to influence something this big.
But declaring a tie -- that's the strongest possible recommendation C|NET can give to OSX and by using their prose to point out its advantages, while ignoring them in the executive summary - read between the lines. Just don't expect to find what you're looking for on the lines.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You don't "delete" the drive. You drag it to the place where the trash can used to be, but which is conveniently replaced by the "Eject" icon.
Because of Apple's penchant for one-button mice, this actually makes a lot of sense.
Every PC zealot I know will claim some other jukebox software is somehow superior, yet everyone I try is trash. For average consumers, iTunes + music store has NO competition...period.
Maybe you anti iTunes guys should try it on a Mac for a month, and your opinions might change.