Mine too. I remember MK1 and Doom being common clips on CNN back in the day when doing anything related to game violence.
Then I noticed the author considers Microsoft extending warranties and making customers with broken systems happy a scandal, too, and he suddenly became someone I don't consider bright enough to give his words much credence.
As for numbers, anyone with a few brain cells understands public companies don't disclose things they don't have to. Then again, he may just be a kid and doesn't know wtf.
You can find flaws in anything you dislike already. It's too easy.
It seems with Windows threads, folks like you seem to demand every bit of user responsibility must be stripped before it has a chance at being good, but then the restraint placed by the lack of responsibility would just be a new reason to complain.
As noted in the above posts, most users do not have a problem like these two boobs, since it's common sense that Microsoft will have updated their document formants. It's a given.
You obviously never got stuck having to purchase their exclusive pseudo hippie, overpriced, kitty litter.
I love the meats and dairy there, and the prices aren't too bad. I just hate that they won't sell cigarettes, but they'll happily sell wine/beer and use a third of the store as a new age snake oil shack, chock full of products with too much "all natural" and "organic" labeling and not a lot of facts.
My Internet access was so awesome that I had to donate to get distro cds and had listened to someone who hadn't been wrong about anything until that point.
I ended up selling the card, then just using el cheapo Cirrus Logic, which worked pretty good.
I swore off Matrox in 1995 after spending $400 on a card, all to find out there was no way to get X running in more than 16 color mode without spending several hundred more dollars on Accelerated-X licenses at the time.
I thought the cash cow was game rentals and sales? Who is actually stupid enough to decide whether or not they will purchase a game based on how it was covered at E3 four years ago when they released the first game movies of "futuristic" game play?
Back in 1990, when I was doing this type of computer repair, every single tech at every single company made copies of software for themselves off customer computers.
Of course, there weren't mp3s and such, but there was a lot of porn pictures and games. I'd say a solid 10% of machines had a "warez" directory where they'd keep their archive once internet connectivity became more common around 93 or so (common, in the sense of customers with broken machines bringing them in with some form of connectivity to the internet).
"An Australian developer blog writes that the iPhone root password has already been cracked.....
Though interesting, it doesn't seem as though the password is good for anything. The article theorizes it may be left over from development work, or could have been included to create a 'false trail' for hackers."
No, It's not really interesting. This sounds pretty normal and if your employer is listening, he needs to quickly fire you for wasting his resources on this lame shit about the iPhone.
What's next? Another story about how 2% of something customer service related at Apple or ATT is A GODDAMNED MOTHERFUCKING EPIDEMIC?
I own a couple of your games and can honestly state they do not seem very original. For instance, I have seen a multitude of games similar to Bejeweled for years. Take a look in family arcades and bar-top arcade systems, jewel + puzzle games of this style have been around for about 15 years longer than Pop-cap has been in business.
It is very tempting to go through my MAME screenshot repository and find games PopCap did that look like older arcade titles, then begin sending email to each of these companies to make their own determination if PopCap is, in fact, the real copy-catter.
Anyone else with a library of screens for MAME, feel free to join in. If we could get PC to drop one game over a lawsuit, we'll never hear such dribble out of them again!
I don't get the whole "Exchange is my god!!" thing.
Nobody is saying they like exchange. It is just if you go running something that is "compatible" with the corporate exchange server, and it screws up on one important engagement due to errata, then you've lost more in one screw up than buying Office for an office of 20 would have cost.
You'll come to understand these things when you get your first job.
It sounds a lot more fun to stack up some laptop motherboards for this, instead.
Unfortunately, it looks like the discussion here immediately went the route of folks thinking the USB dongle is the same thing as the eval kit, which is 5"x7" and requires external power. Which makes this only practical if you forget that in the same 5"x7" form, you could fit a 2GHz core2duo w/ pci express video, sata2, and several I/O ports we all know and love, only using laptop parts.
I get the feeling, most bloggers would be pretty open about this. "Hey guys, look. Microsoft wants to pay for me to come up with a 30 word comment on how I feel about __________. What an awesome deal! mood: chipper status: lonely music: brittney spears"
I concur. Let's start a nickel fund, or some kind of slashdot fund raiser to get some support for this. I bet if the Internet cut them a check for the cost of the wing, they'd break us a damn wing and record it in hi-def for us.
After almost 15 years of reading these articles with predictions of Apple dominating the desktop because of short-term, temporary advantages, I really feel ashamed to even have to reply to this.
Once you shut off the zealotry, the blogger who is journalist by night and mcdonalds cashier technician by day, the writer who feels the need to 100% of the time write in a manner to agree with absolutely the most opinions regarding readership, etc, you no longer see things nearly the same.
What I see is my investment portfolio with two companies who have done exceptionally well in my time paying attention to such things. One thing that it seems like the entire world, except for the guy who bought a little bit of the company, like to form snap opinions based on what's in their face at that very moment and not anything remotely resembling a future reality adjusted to whatever licensing schemes, sales schemes, etc either could come up with. For instance, this whole discussion seems to be stuck in an alternate world where Microsoft and Apple will make a decision, go with it, never adjust, until one of them is sunk. Think about how absolutely moronic that is to even discuss!
The little girl who got paid to write this article needs to keep doing whatever physical favors she is performing for the publisher to keep her job. Obviously, writing factual articles is not her cup of tea.
Vulnerabilities aren't bugs and bugs don't always get fixed. Note how nothing in her FUD-laden drivel there's nothing about anything actually impacting her. It's all about the things that don't affect her, she doesn't understand, and shouldn't be spewing forth on the internet in paid fashion.
This is the type of remark that makes me want to smash the teeth in on your average power user / paid review writer.
Ok, the Commodore came with a single motherboard design for years. Is that not a platform? The 2600 was not a platform either?
See sir, when you use extra words in a vain attempt to sound witty, you end up making the whole article something I'd rather just skip than risk being bamboozled by more, equally stupid remarks, which tend to only be equalized by the mass of popup attempts and java script ads on the sites that host such poor quality articles.
By the way, why am I looking at a nearly 6 month old 8 core system on the floor in front of me? Did I miss the exciting re-release of quad core processors?
Then you should remove your article full of guesswork and write a new one in 2009 when you know the answers.
All these articles end up ever being is more hype for an unreleased product. Free advertising for the manufacturer, and setting up future buyers to be disappointed due to hyped expectations. Then, within a month of it's release, the attitude of articles posted by/. will go from this to years of "Is this the next iPhone killer?" and thus more hype, this time negative, over any minor limitations or design errors.
I needed to rebuild my T60 with a fresh OS. Which was easier? MS Windows with a factory install disk, separate disks for Office and for Virus protection and then a lot of hunt-and-peck downloading for various apps like Thunderbird, Firefox, SSH, and Calendar or....Ubuntu with one CD and an OS that includes an integrated, extensible, and slick software package manager where all the software is approved and tailored to the installation?
You are a Linux administrator and you have to "hunt" and "peck" for your common applications? The majority of what you listed, the product names are the domains involved. You consider changing disks or even opening your disk binder some kind of hassle?
2) Buy a Symantec subscription because I was done with the 90-day free trial - $49.
Here we go again. Another "expert" who can't seem to locate ClamAV? I am about sick of articles where the person doing the review claims to have expertise in IT, then immediately turn around and not find one of the most common, cost saving tools you can get for Windows. It's here, for the apparently IT experts who have yet to hear of it: http://www.clamwin.com/
3) Buy an extra 512MB of RAM because XP couldn't run Firefox, Thunderbird, MS Word, MS Excel, and SSH all at once with 512MB of installed RAM - $104.
Ok, show me a screenshot of what happens when you attempt to run these applications all at once. Explain what, exactly, the computer does to notify you of this. I inquire because I ran XP for years with 512MB of RAM and I had OpenOffice, World of Warcraft, cygwin-x, 3-7 rxvt sessions, ssh tunnel to work, and Thunderbird open just about eight hours a day, five days a week. Sure, it wasn't like when the system is running nothing, but it certainly wasn't too slow. Unless you have swap turned off, then there's no reason why the system would magically quit opening new programs.
4) Install all of the above with product keys along the way - four hours? Maybe six? Maybe more because the tools for getting 2GB-3GB of mail data back into Thunderbird in Windows aren't nearly as good as the same tools in Linux.
Well, if you were using TB before, you can just drop your mail folder on the new system unchanged and open the application. Why aren't you more specific here? Is it because you are continuing to try and shed Windows in a negative light without being able to attack it from a technical standpoint? Much like a few of your prior remarks in this story, Linux gets some kind of free pass continually, while the teenies little thing in Windows is a big deal breaker.
1) Viruses - I no longer worry and I no longer need to check my PC - that's a relief. You can pick nits here about security but the bottom line is Ubuntu is orders of magnitude better.
So you said that knowing it is stupid. True, it's better, but you are trusting strangers with your candy any time you have any kind of machine on the Internet. Replies from people who get stuck on this one will be disregarded.
2) Vulnerabilities - Windows is like Swiss cheese with so many vulnerabilities that it's sick - you can't connect XP to a public Internet connection (i.e., behind a router is OK but direct to the net isn't). Ubuntu? It's Linux - no worries.
True, XP SP1 will get destroyed shortly after getting an IP on an open network without security updates. This, too, isn't really a good point of review. Why don't you go grab a Linux CD from October 25th 2001 and install it under the same circumstances you claim XP is so bad for and let's see how long it lasts without updates or securing.
3) Thanks to #1 and #2, I'm free from products like Symantec and Norton and the dollar expense, the complexity of administering them (those pop-ups are annoying and a productivity hit), and wondering when they expire next.
Sounds great. See my responses to #1 and #2, then grab ClamAV. I've never run Norton or Symantec on XP and never had any problems. It's
No, I didn't miss the point. I am simply pointing out how flawed the article is. If you really want to stand up for the same person who wrote such crazy things as insinuating that the average Linux user writes his own software to replace commercial applications only found in Windows, then be my guest. Every article reads like that of a 13 year old who's excited about gaming and little else.
If you want to take that line of thinking further, then review the Vista comparison. That should have been done by a person who never used Windows before, since about 90% of the interface is the exact same thing with a more osx-looking title bar at the top. Alternatively, as this same thinking should have been applied to switching to Linux. In order to take on that task, there were three outlets of support mentioned as last resorts before giving up on any issue.
The things you have issue with are the things any OSX user will find within 10 minutes if they are a former windows or linux user. Spotlight is on the desktop at all times, it even looks like a search function to someone who has had SOME form of computer exposure in the past, as it has the icon of a magnifying glass.
Expose/Dashboard/Spotlight are all covered in way too much detail on the apple's switch site, the tiny little quick start manual that comes with the system, and all over the internet. This isn't just a case of a new user not being able to figure out how to progress with their new system, this looks more like someone sat around getting frustrated and calling something stupid before they even bothered to approach the problem with some logic. Other things, like the applications he couldn't find that were at his fingertips. Not to mention, how Apple sort of made these features key points in all their switch advertising text. These are of the few things that differentiates the brands anymore, and our hardware expert wasn't aware of any of them.
In 30 days, if you have not found your applications folder or spotlight in osx, you probably just want to go back to playing Q4 on Windows and calling yourself a "power user". The fact he missed the Applications folder's beauty is another bit of evidence of the personality we are dealing with. For those who aren't mac-inclined, it's like the Program Files folder in Windows, only without all the settings and clutter. Typically, there's just a list of.app files and the occasional folder for a productivity suite or other big program that doesn't stick to this simple convention.
I'm certainly going to put a Windows XP partition on Whakataruna for the near future - but I've decided to keep the bulk of my hard drive - and most of my day-to-day operations, in Linux. XP is going to be my OS for gaming, audio loop editing, and Photoshop, but for everything else, Linux has transformed into an attractive, utility-driven, customizable, and generally easy-to-use interface that takes all of the virtues and none of the faults from the other major OSes and gives it to the consumer for free.
Here's some more chatter from your friend. If he had actually been using ubuntu since that text was written, he would have probably had something to say about how nice it is to be able to run his xapps off his Linux box on the laptop. He probably would have known what apt is by now, thus not crying about the lack of software. There probably would have been mention of how nice it is having a terminal icon on the desktop, so he could do things the way he did them in Linux. Can't have none of that, mainly because I don't believe much of what happened in the article reflects upon any reality outside of his teenage tech fantasy land.
I suppose the thing I find most annoying is the fact that I picked up osx and started using it right away, with no problems, using only google. My new boss came in one day and sat down new little macbook and said "Here's your laptop!". Within half an hour of first boot, I made it further and had used more features than this sap found in 30 DAYS. I'm not some
Yeah, and ultimately you end up running the X server a lot, which is a bit of a memory hog on top of the already memory hoggy OSX.
I use osx, x11, xp (parallels), firefox, thunderbird, itunes, etc all day long on 1GB w/ a 2GHz MB. The last time I saw the pin-wheel was during bootup sometime last week.
BUT.. if we want to complain, Linux and Windows is always still there for the taking. I, personally, just think it is nice to have so many tools available in such a newbie OS without needing a credit card. Mind you, this is getting outside the realm of what the OP was driving home:
The guys over at HardOCP are just being the idiots they can't help but be. Whatever opinion is 'cool' in the gaming community, at any given moment, will be what they blindly repeat and get all opinionated over, and instantly dislike anything that doesn't "fit" with the "scene".
Things the author missed that were so painfully stupid are all over the article. Just like the whole deal with Windows having ready access to openoffice. If these chaps knew anything about this free software they need and support, then they should know there's a branch named Neo Office which works just dandy with OSX. Just like how the author could not find a "wordpad-like" program.. TextEdit anyone? It's Wordpad on steroids, and it's built into the operating system. Don't get me started on the simple things missed, like Dashboard and Spotlight. Spotlight should have been the first thing he clicked on when unable to find things.
Don't trust these articles for anything, really. The only reason Linux didn't get a complete thumbs down is due to it being "cool" in the "scene" (note above), ever since Carmack did some fps dev under Linux back in the day. So, regardless of how little he understood, how much trouble things were to get done, Linux had to have a good review or else he would not fit in with his gamer buddies. That's the impression I get when OSX gets knocked for having some of the exact same tools, with same level of knowledge needed to make them work in either OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Mine too. I remember MK1 and Doom being common clips on CNN back in the day when doing anything related to game violence.
Then I noticed the author considers Microsoft extending warranties and making customers with broken systems happy a scandal, too, and he suddenly became someone I don't consider bright enough to give his words much credence.
As for numbers, anyone with a few brain cells understands public companies don't disclose things they don't have to. Then again, he may just be a kid and doesn't know wtf.
You can find flaws in anything you dislike already. It's too easy.
It seems with Windows threads, folks like you seem to demand every bit of user responsibility must be stripped before it has a chance at being good, but then the restraint placed by the lack of responsibility would just be a new reason to complain.
As noted in the above posts, most users do not have a problem like these two boobs, since it's common sense that Microsoft will have updated their document formants. It's a given.
Yeah man, way to go. I'm reading this reply while everything is closed around here. :)
You obviously never got stuck having to purchase their exclusive pseudo hippie, overpriced, kitty litter.
I love the meats and dairy there, and the prices aren't too bad. I just hate that they won't sell cigarettes, but they'll happily sell wine/beer and use a third of the store as a new age snake oil shack, chock full of products with too much "all natural" and "organic" labeling and not a lot of facts.
My Internet access was so awesome that I had to donate to get distro cds and had listened to someone who hadn't been wrong about anything until that point. I ended up selling the card, then just using el cheapo Cirrus Logic, which worked pretty good.
I swore off Matrox in 1995 after spending $400 on a card, all to find out there was no way to get X running in more than 16 color mode without spending several hundred more dollars on Accelerated-X licenses at the time.
I thought the cash cow was game rentals and sales? Who is actually stupid enough to decide whether or not they will purchase a game based on how it was covered at E3 four years ago when they released the first game movies of "futuristic" game play?
Alternatively, you could use one of the many gui builders with buttons that launch command lines, and simply have them throw regedit values for you.
/. is suddenly promoting Vista shareware. Those tools are for the bottom-end of the tweaking crowd.
I am stumped as to why
Back in 1990, when I was doing this type of computer repair, every single tech at every single company made copies of software for themselves off customer computers.
Of course, there weren't mp3s and such, but there was a lot of porn pictures and games. I'd say a solid 10% of machines had a "warez" directory where they'd keep their archive once internet connectivity became more common around 93 or so (common, in the sense of customers with broken machines bringing them in with some form of connectivity to the internet).
"An Australian developer blog writes that the iPhone root password has already been cracked. ....
Though interesting, it doesn't seem as though the password is good for anything. The article theorizes it may be left over from development work, or could have been included to create a 'false trail' for hackers."
No, It's not really interesting. This sounds pretty normal and if your employer is listening, he needs to quickly fire you for wasting his resources on this lame shit about the iPhone.
What's next? Another story about how 2% of something customer service related at Apple or ATT is A GODDAMNED MOTHERFUCKING EPIDEMIC?
Thanks.
I got tricked, what can I say! Ninja Bee to the rescue!
Dear PopCap,
I own a couple of your games and can honestly state they do not seem very original. For instance, I have seen a multitude of games similar to Bejeweled for years. Take a look in family arcades and bar-top arcade systems, jewel + puzzle games of this style have been around for about 15 years longer than Pop-cap has been in business.
It is very tempting to go through my MAME screenshot repository and find games PopCap did that look like older arcade titles, then begin sending email to each of these companies to make their own determination if PopCap is, in fact, the real copy-catter.
Anyone else with a library of screens for MAME, feel free to join in. If we could get PC to drop one game over a lawsuit, we'll never hear such dribble out of them again!
I don't get the whole "Exchange is my god!!" thing.
Nobody is saying they like exchange. It is just if you go running something that is "compatible" with the corporate exchange server, and it screws up on one important engagement due to errata, then you've lost more in one screw up than buying Office for an office of 20 would have cost.
You'll come to understand these things when you get your first job.
It sounds a lot more fun to stack up some laptop motherboards for this, instead.
Unfortunately, it looks like the discussion here immediately went the route of folks thinking the USB dongle is the same thing as the eval kit, which is 5"x7" and requires external power. Which makes this only practical if you forget that in the same 5"x7" form, you could fit a 2GHz core2duo w/ pci express video, sata2, and several I/O ports we all know and love, only using laptop parts.
I get the feeling, most bloggers would be pretty open about this. "Hey guys, look. Microsoft wants to pay for me to come up with a 30 word comment on how I feel about __________. What an awesome deal! mood: chipper status: lonely music: brittney spears"
I concur. Let's start a nickel fund, or some kind of slashdot fund raiser to get some support for this. I bet if the Internet cut them a check for the cost of the wing, they'd break us a damn wing and record it in hi-def for us.
After almost 15 years of reading these articles with predictions of Apple dominating the desktop because of short-term, temporary advantages, I really feel ashamed to even have to reply to this.
Once you shut off the zealotry, the blogger who is journalist by night and mcdonalds cashier technician by day, the writer who feels the need to 100% of the time write in a manner to agree with absolutely the most opinions regarding readership, etc, you no longer see things nearly the same.
What I see is my investment portfolio with two companies who have done exceptionally well in my time paying attention to such things. One thing that it seems like the entire world, except for the guy who bought a little bit of the company, like to form snap opinions based on what's in their face at that very moment and not anything remotely resembling a future reality adjusted to whatever licensing schemes, sales schemes, etc either could come up with. For instance, this whole discussion seems to be stuck in an alternate world where Microsoft and Apple will make a decision, go with it, never adjust, until one of them is sunk. Think about how absolutely moronic that is to even discuss!
The little girl who got paid to write this article needs to keep doing whatever physical favors she is performing for the publisher to keep her job. Obviously, writing factual articles is not her cup of tea.
Vulnerabilities aren't bugs and bugs don't always get fixed. Note how nothing in her FUD-laden drivel there's nothing about anything actually impacting her. It's all about the things that don't affect her, she doesn't understand, and shouldn't be spewing forth on the internet in paid fashion.
"One motherboard does not a platform make."
This is the type of remark that makes me want to smash the teeth in on your average power user / paid review writer.
Ok, the Commodore came with a single motherboard design for years. Is that not a platform?
The 2600 was not a platform either?
See sir, when you use extra words in a vain attempt to sound witty, you end up making the whole article something I'd rather just skip than risk being bamboozled by more, equally stupid remarks, which tend to only be equalized by the mass of popup attempts and java script ads on the sites that host such poor quality articles.
By the way, why am I looking at a nearly 6 month old 8 core system on the floor in front of me? Did I miss the exciting re-release of quad core processors?
The answer may not come until 2009
/. will go from this to years of "Is this the next iPhone killer?" and thus more hype, this time negative, over any minor limitations or design errors.
Then you should remove your article full of guesswork and write a new one in 2009 when you know the answers.
All these articles end up ever being is more hype for an unreleased product. Free advertising for the manufacturer, and setting up future buyers to be disappointed due to hyped expectations. Then, within a month of it's release, the attitude of articles posted by
They still believe in the businesses model of the "Underpants Gnomes" from the "South Park" TV show.
/.!
* Step 1: Create a DRM system.
* Step 2: ???
* Step 3: Profit!
Nope, this guy doesn't read too much Fark and
I needed to rebuild my T60 with a fresh OS. Which was easier? MS Windows with a factory install disk, separate disks for Office and for Virus protection and then a lot of hunt-and-peck downloading for various apps like Thunderbird, Firefox, SSH, and Calendar or....Ubuntu with one CD and an OS that includes an integrated, extensible, and slick software package manager where all the software is approved and tailored to the installation?
You are a Linux administrator and you have to "hunt" and "peck" for your common applications? The majority of what you listed, the product names are the domains involved. You consider changing disks or even opening your disk binder some kind of hassle?
2) Buy a Symantec subscription because I was done with the 90-day free trial - $49.
Here we go again. Another "expert" who can't seem to locate ClamAV? I am about sick of articles where the person doing the review claims to have expertise in IT, then immediately turn around and not find one of the most common, cost saving tools you can get for Windows. It's here, for the apparently IT experts who have yet to hear of it: http://www.clamwin.com/
3) Buy an extra 512MB of RAM because XP couldn't run Firefox, Thunderbird, MS Word, MS Excel, and SSH all at once with 512MB of installed RAM - $104.
Ok, show me a screenshot of what happens when you attempt to run these applications all at once. Explain what, exactly, the computer does to notify you of this. I inquire because I ran XP for years with 512MB of RAM and I had OpenOffice, World of Warcraft, cygwin-x, 3-7 rxvt sessions, ssh tunnel to work, and Thunderbird open just about eight hours a day, five days a week. Sure, it wasn't like when the system is running nothing, but it certainly wasn't too slow. Unless you have swap turned off, then there's no reason why the system would magically quit opening new programs.
4) Install all of the above with product keys along the way - four hours? Maybe six? Maybe more because the tools for getting 2GB-3GB of mail data back into Thunderbird in Windows aren't nearly as good as the same tools in Linux.
Well, if you were using TB before, you can just drop your mail folder on the new system unchanged and open the application. Why aren't you more specific here? Is it because you are continuing to try and shed Windows in a negative light without being able to attack it from a technical standpoint? Much like a few of your prior remarks in this story, Linux gets some kind of free pass continually, while the teenies little thing in Windows is a big deal breaker.
1) Viruses - I no longer worry and I no longer need to check my PC - that's a relief. You can pick nits here about security but the bottom line is Ubuntu is orders of magnitude better.
So you said that knowing it is stupid. True, it's better, but you are trusting strangers with your candy any time you have any kind of machine on the Internet. Replies from people who get stuck on this one will be disregarded.
2) Vulnerabilities - Windows is like Swiss cheese with so many vulnerabilities that it's sick - you can't connect XP to a public Internet connection (i.e., behind a router is OK but direct to the net isn't). Ubuntu? It's Linux - no worries.
True, XP SP1 will get destroyed shortly after getting an IP on an open network without security updates. This, too, isn't really a good point of review. Why don't you go grab a Linux CD from October 25th 2001 and install it under the same circumstances you claim XP is so bad for and let's see how long it lasts without updates or securing.
3) Thanks to #1 and #2, I'm free from products like Symantec and Norton and the dollar expense, the complexity of administering them (those pop-ups are annoying and a productivity hit), and wondering when they expire next.
Sounds great. See my responses to #1 and #2, then grab ClamAV. I've never run Norton or Symantec on XP and never had any problems. It's
This article should be deleted because it's written like shit and reads like shit because it's full of shit!!! ha ha.
:)
I think I could have saved a lot of typing had I responded with that phrase alone.
No, I didn't miss the point. I am simply pointing out how flawed the article is. If you really want to stand up for the same person who wrote such crazy things as insinuating that the average Linux user writes his own software to replace commercial applications only found in Windows, then be my guest. Every article reads like that of a 13 year old who's excited about gaming and little else.
.app files and the occasional folder for a productivity suite or other big program that doesn't stick to this simple convention.
If you want to take that line of thinking further, then review the Vista comparison. That should have been done by a person who never used Windows before, since about 90% of the interface is the exact same thing with a more osx-looking title bar at the top. Alternatively, as this same thinking should have been applied to switching to Linux. In order to take on that task, there were three outlets of support mentioned as last resorts before giving up on any issue.
The things you have issue with are the things any OSX user will find within 10 minutes if they are a former windows or linux user. Spotlight is on the desktop at all times, it even looks like a search function to someone who has had SOME form of computer exposure in the past, as it has the icon of a magnifying glass.
Expose/Dashboard/Spotlight are all covered in way too much detail on the apple's switch site, the tiny little quick start manual that comes with the system, and all over the internet. This isn't just a case of a new user not being able to figure out how to progress with their new system, this looks more like someone sat around getting frustrated and calling something stupid before they even bothered to approach the problem with some logic. Other things, like the applications he couldn't find that were at his fingertips. Not to mention, how Apple sort of made these features key points in all their switch advertising text. These are of the few things that differentiates the brands anymore, and our hardware expert wasn't aware of any of them.
In 30 days, if you have not found your applications folder or spotlight in osx, you probably just want to go back to playing Q4 on Windows and calling yourself a "power user". The fact he missed the Applications folder's beauty is another bit of evidence of the personality we are dealing with. For those who aren't mac-inclined, it's like the Program Files folder in Windows, only without all the settings and clutter. Typically, there's just a list of
I'm certainly going to put a Windows XP partition on Whakataruna for the near future - but I've decided to keep the bulk of my hard drive - and most of my day-to-day operations, in Linux. XP is going to be my OS for gaming, audio loop editing, and Photoshop, but for everything else, Linux has transformed into an attractive, utility-driven, customizable, and generally easy-to-use interface that takes all of the virtues and none of the faults from the other major OSes and gives it to the consumer for free.
Here's some more chatter from your friend. If he had actually been using ubuntu since that text was written, he would have probably had something to say about how nice it is to be able to run his xapps off his Linux box on the laptop. He probably would have known what apt is by now, thus not crying about the lack of software. There probably would have been mention of how nice it is having a terminal icon on the desktop, so he could do things the way he did them in Linux. Can't have none of that, mainly because I don't believe much of what happened in the article reflects upon any reality outside of his teenage tech fantasy land.
I suppose the thing I find most annoying is the fact that I picked up osx and started using it right away, with no problems, using only google. My new boss came in one day and sat down new little macbook and said "Here's your laptop!". Within half an hour of first boot, I made it further and had used more features than this sap found in 30 DAYS. I'm not some
Yeah, and ultimately you end up running the X server a lot, which is a bit of a memory hog on top of the already memory hoggy OSX.
I use osx, x11, xp (parallels), firefox, thunderbird, itunes, etc all day long on 1GB w/ a 2GHz MB. The last time I saw the pin-wheel was during bootup sometime last week.
BUT.. if we want to complain, Linux and Windows is always still there for the taking. I, personally, just think it is nice to have so many tools available in such a newbie OS without needing a credit card. Mind you, this is getting outside the realm of what the OP was driving home:
The guys over at HardOCP are just being the idiots they can't help but be. Whatever opinion is 'cool' in the gaming community, at any given moment, will be what they blindly repeat and get all opinionated over, and instantly dislike anything that doesn't "fit" with the "scene".
Things the author missed that were so painfully stupid are all over the article. Just like the whole deal with Windows having ready access to openoffice. If these chaps knew anything about this free software they need and support, then they should know there's a branch named Neo Office which works just dandy with OSX. Just like how the author could not find a "wordpad-like" program.. TextEdit anyone? It's Wordpad on steroids, and it's built into the operating system. Don't get me started on the simple things missed, like Dashboard and Spotlight. Spotlight should have been the first thing he clicked on when unable to find things.
Don't trust these articles for anything, really. The only reason Linux didn't get a complete thumbs down is due to it being "cool" in the "scene" (note above), ever since Carmack did some fps dev under Linux back in the day. So, regardless of how little he understood, how much trouble things were to get done, Linux had to have a good review or else he would not fit in with his gamer buddies. That's the impression I get when OSX gets knocked for having some of the exact same tools, with same level of knowledge needed to make them work in either OS.