Linux will develop every capability the Mac OS has and then some.
On the desktop? Not unless someone comes up with One Distro to Rule them All. Commercial software is the key to success there, and the internally fragmented Linux market makes the old fragmented UNIX market look like a monolith.
On the server? It's the other way around. Mac OS shed too many of the traditional UNIX tools... it's playing catch-up on the server side.
I agree, the idea of OS X becoming a big part of the server market is silly.
One note, though:
Mac OS X desktops do outsell Linux desktops, but that's only because virtually no OEM pre-installs Linux at the moment, so getting true figures on Linux [of any type] penetration in the market is quite tough.
Only?
How about "it does everything every other UNIX (including Linux) does, PLUS you can actually get commercial software for it"?
I realise it's fashionable to dismiss this point, but most people see it as pretty important. Look at the flame wars about the availability of games on the Mac... and consider how few games there are for Linux. I'm not much of a gamer myself, but I've got a fair number of commercial apps on my Macbook... some of which are better than their *Windows* competition, let alone what's available on Linux.
And I was just talking to a guy who does commercial software, and they support Linux. He *hates* supporting Linux, because where they have to test and port their software to a couple of Windows variations, a couple of releases of OS X, and dozens of Linux distros... many of which seem to morph monthly.
Oh, and don't line up the arguments about portable software with me: I wrote portable software, I'm one of the early FreeBSD developers, I recently unearthed a program I wrote 25 years ago in an old Usenet archive... and after fixing a bug that was technically a bug in the original version (it just hadn't mattered on computers that slow) it just ran. I already went through them with him, and at the end I had to admit he had the point. And set. And match.
I'm not sure why he thinks OS X has a big future in the server market.
* It doesn't run on generic server hardware, like all of its competition do. * It's much easier to administer through a command line than Windows, but far harder than any other modern UNIX platform. * It shares Windows' poor support for "headless" operation. * It is missing a lot of APIs that its competitors have retained, including the ability to easily run native servers chrooted and standard UNIX tape drive interfaces. * The native file system, HFS+, is far more fragile and easily damaged than the typical modern UNIX file system like UFS. It doesn't have Linux' wide variety of file system support. * Its NFS support is extremely nonstandard, and running a normal automounter on it is a recipe for disaster. * It's missing the "super-chroots": things like FreeBSD's jails and similar facilities in Linux that give you the encapsulation advantages of virtualization without the overhead. * The Mach kernel still gives it far more system call overhead than its competitors.
All in all, OS X is a mediocre server platform when compared to other variants of UNIX, even if the inability to run it on generic hardware wasn't holding it back.
I'm stating that a $1000 gaming machine CAN do more than a Mac and console.
I don't think that anyone has argued that a $1000 gaming machine won't get you more computer for your money than a Mac and a console, and if you need that much computer (as I noted previously) and that's your budget... the choice is clear. Also, if you really need an application that only runs on Windows, well, the applications barrier to entry is still very real.
If you don't need to do video editing, or 3d modelling, or whatever else you're using your Athlon X2 64 4200+ and nVidia 7800 for, then the Mac and the console can do more than the gaming machine:
1. You can post on Slashdot while your kid is killing zombies. You can kill zombies while your kid is blogging about what a horrible parent you are. 2. You can let your kid use your computer without worrying about getting infected by the latest spyware going around. 3. Your kid can let you use the computer without worrying about you finding his porn collection. And vice versa. 4. You save $40 a year on antivirus software. 5. Both the XBox 360 and the Mac have *excellent* music visualisers. Groovy. 6. There's more good open-source graphical applications available for the Mac than for Windows or Linux.
A lot of the cool stuff about the Mac can be moshed onto Windows, I used to use Interix and MIX and was able to run a lot of FOSS stuff on that, but 90% of the Windows software I've bought in the past decade has been games for the kids...
It is not quite that simple. Using the Apple installer and the Firewire disk mode means you don't have to worry about files, settings, encryption keys, software, user accounts, or anything else. It transfers all of it over, even if the user has no idea where the preferences are stored.
Oh yes, that's another peeve of mine, Apple has this tendency to tie slick tools to some specific interface, application, or service. There's no reason that you couldn't do this over any other connection between the two computers, such as ethernet, Bluetooth, or 802.11. It's like the way they have all these cool sync tools... that don't quite work right if you have two computers unless you're using ".Mac".
Your personal experience is not an objective analysis of how Apple hardware compares to other vendors.
Neither are self-selected surveys of people who are amazingly willing to give Apple a break no matter how badly they screw things up. Speaking to other people who have had exactly the same experiences as me, but who are Mac fanatics (it's like science fiction: I'm not a fan, I just like the software) you'd never know it. I've done it, and experiences that would have left me livid (or left them livid if they went through the same stuff with an IBM) were turned into paeans for Applecare.
The market for expandable all-in-one machines and small form factor machines is too tiny to be profitable to them.
Apple fans were saying the same kinds of things about headless Macs right up to the day before the mini came out. I got caught up in the zeitgeist and posted an article about how Apple would never wise up and release a headless Mac about a week before the announcement.
And there's more evidence for demand for an at least minimally expandible cheap Mac: the continuing market for G4s and even G3s... and for third-party expansion devices that only make sense in that context. Hell, they came out with a new PCI Radeon 9200 card right before the Mac mini came out*, and there's at least two companies still selling G3 and G4 upgrade cards for G3 and pre-G3 Powermacs.
How many Sonnet, OWC, Newertech, or Powerlogix customers would stick with their cranky old antiques if Apple gave them the option of an updated "slab"?
* The last pre-AGP Mac went off the market last century!
But the $599 Mac mini sporting a 512MB of ram and 40GB harddrive will be handicapped to a system with at least double the amount of ram and 6x more harddrive space
The iMac has the same amount of standard RAM as the Mac mini. The iMac has more disk, yes, and faster disk... but you'll need to upgrade both of them. For video editing I would suggest an external Firewire drive for either.
the MacBook's dual cores while the Mini only has a solo.
Ah, yes, I forgot that the base mini doesn't have the Duo... that does push the price up.
As an aside... it will actually be possible to upgrade the mini to a Merom (Core 2 Duo) because the newer CPU runs cooler... (I'm sure Apple didn't mean people to actually do this, and will make sure that the next version isn't upgradable).
I missed the context of this comment, didn't understand what you were getting at until I popped up a level.
Video editing. If you really want to get technical.
How much difference do the 3d functions missing from the GMA950 make to video editing? The GMA950 is quite a bit faster with 2d than the Radeon 9200 it replaced, and even if Apple had gone with ATI I don't believe they'd have used anything faster than an X200.
But, OK, you have a point there. You've got significantly higher requirements than the average user. Still, my boss had been using Final Cut on his Powerbook as long as I've been working here (he's just splurged on a Mac Pro), and the Mac mini is unlikely to be any slower than a Powerbook...
I was actually counting a Mac mini and a $300 console. If it's $250 that's $850, not $900.:)
But to pay for a mac and a windows install if you're bootcamping can get expensive.
Indeed. I think that Bootcamp is not really a practical tool for every day use. What it mostly gives you is a reassurance that if you need to use Windows for something you've got that option. I don't expect most people will really use that option long term, and I wouldn't count it in the price of the Mac.
When I got my daughter a Mac after going in and cleaning out her Windows machine for the Nth time that year, she begged me to leave her PC just in case. Two weeks later when I checked it, it hadn't been booted in two weeks. A couple months later it hadn't been booted more than twice except when I was checking for viruses and spyware...
Unless it does amazing things over the competition (like make me PB&J sandwiches), i can't justify $600.
It can survive two years of steady abuse from a teenager who managed to render a Windows PC unbootable on the average of 2-3 times a year. I think that's pretty amazing.
What kind of abuse?
Well, when I was checking my daughter's PCs one day I found she'd had run out of disk space on the Mac and gone in removing stuff in/Applications and/Library... the equivalent of going into %systemroot%\system32 and deleting things she didn't use (which she'd done on the PC at one point, with obvious dire consequences). I only noticed because Terminal.app wasn't there and I had to ssh in to clean things up...
The real laugh was that you had to install quicktime to view the ads from Apple's website.
And the problem with this is what, precisely?
Are you concerned that Apple will install a backdoor in your system through Quicktime, or that having Quicktime installed will otherwise reduce the security, reliability, or performance of your system?
I assume that you have some other streaming media program you prefer.
Would that be Windows Media, by any chance? If so, Windows Media comes with the system backdoor pre-installed by Microsoft, and since it uses the HTML control to render content using Windows Media Player or the WMP plugin is just as dangerous as using Internet Explorer or Outlook on Windows.
Which of course you, not being stupid, don't do... right?
Entry level imac is $1299 (Mac Mini doesn't count)
If you're not playing games on it, why not?
The lack of 3d support pisses me off, but if it came down to buying a Mac or not buying a Mac I'd drink my blood on that one.
So now you're down to $900, vs a $1000 PC.
Re:That's why they call it a "Wintendo"
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It's cheaper to buy a decent gaming PC than a Mac and a console.
Yeh, but I'd have to buy the Mac anyway, because all I'd be using the PC for was playing games.
The only way Bill Gates could get me to take Windows seriously again would be for him to start over at around 1997 with NT 3.x and build a serious, professional operating system with a solid POSIX subsystem, a Win32 API for compatibility, and the best of the stuff that he promised us when I was setting up our first Windows NT network on NT 3.1. Where's the object oriented desktop, Bill, and the hard boundaries between subsystems, and the improved file system, and everything else you laid out for us in the '90s? Most of it hasn't even made it into Vista, because you're trying to build Vista on top of the abused child that is the NT 5 kernel... and that's just cruel.
For pretty much everyone pulling a laptop's disk drive out, putting it in an external case (which you have to buy), transferring the data, and then putting it back into the old laptop so that you can resell it, is a huge pain in the ass.
Yep, the way Apple makes it a pain to replace the drives in their laptops is another pet peeve of mine about the Mac. On my old Thinkpad it was a matter of undoing one screw and four clips.
But... what I don't get here... is why, if the laptop is in a good enough condition to sell, you can't just copy your files off over the network? I've only used target mode for recovery from trashed hardware.
Apple makes some pretty decent quality gear, but it is not to everyone's taste.
As an owner of a Rev A G3, a Rev A iMac, and a pre-AGP G4, I have to say that I haven't found that Apple's gear achieves "decent quality". And the problem is that they're not just "not to everyone's taste"... they seem deliberately designed to limit their appeal.
The way to deal with the "combinations of hardware" problem is to make sure there's at least one product in each category that's expandible. It doesn't have to be *very* expandible. Take the Mac mini's internals and put them in a slab with one PCI-E slot and two 3.5" hard drive bays and I'd pay $700 for it.
I won't pay $600 to "upgrade" to the current intel mini, though.
You can install OS X on your homebrew PC 'til the fat man croaks, but where's your command key, your startup chime, your flashing disk on startup, your magnetic power connector, your backlit keyboard, your FireWire target disk mode?
The command key on my Mac has a Windows logo on it. The only items from that list that my current desktop actually has are the firewire target mode and the startup chime. And the firewire target mode only matters because the stupid thing is so crippled by Apple's desire to make it "tiny" that pulling the drive is an ordeal. My previous desktop Mac didn't even have firewire, so that one's down to the startup chime... and Apple quit using *custom* startup chimes ten years ago!
My Macbook Pro has all of that, but none of my other Macs are Macs by your logic.
And, well, I'd rather have a non-backlit keyboard I could actually stand to type on, and a non-magnetic power connector that didn't fall out every time I moved the notebook, and another trackpad button. I carry around a compact Bluetooth keyboard and mouse because I literally can't use the built-in ones for more than half an hour without pain.
If you're right about what makes a Mac a Mac, I'd rather not have one, thanks.
If you don't see OS X as being worth a premium over Windows, then why would you even want to buy a Mac? If you do, then you know that premium is really the de-facto price of OS X, and you need to rephrase the question... maybe "why does Apple charge so much for OS X"?
Me, I'd still pay as much for OS X -- the real price, not the retail costs of what's effectively an upgrade (yes, I know Apple *also* sometimes sells upgrade packs for people who bought a Mac close enough to the release of a new version of OS X... but that's more like a promotional discount, they don't sell these as upgrades for the general market) -- whether it was running on a Mac or not.
In fact I'd rather do that. My main problem with Macs isn't that they're expensive, it's that they're such screwed up computers. I've got a Mac mini and a Macbook Pro, and if they weren't the only way to run OS X I'd never have considered either of them for a minute.
"Well, I can do all of those things as well, and also fun stuff like playing all of the latest games."
"Yeh, Microsoft makes great game machines. My owner's got an XBox, but he seems to like his Playstation better."
If your main reason for buying a computer is playing games, the gap between computer and console is narrower every year. Why not save the money and just get one?
But unlike IE and ActiveX controls, you can only install Firefox extensions from sites on a whitelist
This, at the worst, means you need to insert a XSS attack in your exploit.
I don't think having a simple, in-the-browser interface for installing browser extensions is inherently bad
Not if the extensions are sandboxed, no.
Whether they run with local user privileges or system privileges is a secondary issue.
This is similar to Apple's decision to have "Open Safe Files AFter Downloading" turned on by default. They consider an installer a "safe file" because the user has to approve a dialog before the install proceeds. To begin with, there are no "safe files", there are simply "safe applications"... and an installer is NOT a safe application to use to open an unsafe file. In addition, an approval dialog is not a security mechanism, whether that dialog requires you to wait for a 10 second countdown or not.
Firefox has something like 10-15% of the browser market these days, doesn't it? How much Fx extension malware has there been?
Firefox is considerably safer than IE, true. It is, however, unsafe in a way that doesn't improve the user experience, and is completely unnecessary, and that Konqueror isn't unsafe in.
The same argument can be made for Safari. Apple has an increasing share of the desktop market, and even with stupid design decisions Safari or Firefox (or even Internet Explorer on the Mac:) ) are significantly safer than IE. That doesn't mean that it's a good thing for them to play with fire the way they're doing. Especially when following reasonable security guidelines actually improves the user experience by removing annoying extra dialogs.
(and, note, Safari is KHTML-based... this is not a flaw in Gecko or KHTML/Webcore the way the IE flaw is a flaw in any application that uses Microsoft's HTML control, it's a flaw in Firefox itself)
Instead, you have to explicitly download and install an extension,
Last time I wanted to do that I had to install an extension to let me install an extension from a downloaded XPI file on my local disk rather than installing it directly from a web page through an "install" link.
It was a few days after that I switched to KHTML-based browsers, though I've been using Camino a bunch lately... the problem isn't inherent in Gecko, the way Microsoft's ActiveX flaw is inherent in their HTML control... it's just that Camino is the only decent Gecko-based browser I've found.
Anyway... the fact that following the install link (which doesn't actually require the user clicking on the link) pops up a bunch of annoying dialogs that ask you to whitelist the source site* and then wait through a countdown before clicking "OK" doesn't change the fact that the actual request to perform the install is made by the document you are viewing, not by the user. It doesn't matter whether the "extensions install program" is the browser or not, what matters is that it's possible for a web page to request that install.
* This just mean an attacker needs to come up with a XSS attack on at least one site that serves a popular extension.
Why is it, then, that every HP or Dell computer (and probably others) comes with Java preinstalled with Windows?
Microsoft and/or HP or Dell has paid Sun the necessary license fees to redistribute it for general use. The free Java is only available direct from Sun or as part of a Java-based software package.
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Linux will develop every capability the Mac OS has and then some.
On the desktop? Not unless someone comes up with One Distro to Rule them All. Commercial software is the key to success there, and the internally fragmented Linux market makes the old fragmented UNIX market look like a monolith.
On the server? It's the other way around. Mac OS shed too many of the traditional UNIX tools... it's playing catch-up on the server side.
I agree, the idea of OS X becoming a big part of the server market is silly.
One note, though:
Mac OS X desktops do outsell Linux desktops, but that's only because virtually no OEM pre-installs Linux at the moment, so getting true figures on Linux [of any type] penetration in the market is quite tough.
Only?
How about "it does everything every other UNIX (including Linux) does, PLUS you can actually get commercial software for it"?
I realise it's fashionable to dismiss this point, but most people see it as pretty important. Look at the flame wars about the availability of games on the Mac... and consider how few games there are for Linux. I'm not much of a gamer myself, but I've got a fair number of commercial apps on my Macbook... some of which are better than their *Windows* competition, let alone what's available on Linux.
And I was just talking to a guy who does commercial software, and they support Linux. He *hates* supporting Linux, because where they have to test and port their software to a couple of Windows variations, a couple of releases of OS X, and dozens of Linux distros... many of which seem to morph monthly.
Oh, and don't line up the arguments about portable software with me: I wrote portable software, I'm one of the early FreeBSD developers, I recently unearthed a program I wrote 25 years ago in an old Usenet archive... and after fixing a bug that was technically a bug in the original version (it just hadn't mattered on computers that slow) it just ran. I already went through them with him, and at the end I had to admit he had the point. And set. And match.
I'm not sure why he thinks OS X has a big future in the server market.
* It doesn't run on generic server hardware, like all of its competition do.
* It's much easier to administer through a command line than Windows, but far harder than any other modern UNIX platform.
* It shares Windows' poor support for "headless" operation.
* It is missing a lot of APIs that its competitors have retained, including the ability to easily run native servers chrooted and standard UNIX tape drive interfaces.
* The native file system, HFS+, is far more fragile and easily damaged than the typical modern UNIX file system like UFS. It doesn't have Linux' wide variety of file system support.
* Its NFS support is extremely nonstandard, and running a normal automounter on it is a recipe for disaster.
* It's missing the "super-chroots": things like FreeBSD's jails and similar facilities in Linux that give you the encapsulation advantages of virtualization without the overhead.
* The Mach kernel still gives it far more system call overhead than its competitors.
All in all, OS X is a mediocre server platform when compared to other variants of UNIX, even if the inability to run it on generic hardware wasn't holding it back.
But this whole discussion IS NOT ABOUT THAT. I don't know of any other way to explain it to you.
:)
Uh, that's my subject line up there. I think this discussion is precisely about that.
I'm stating that a $1000 gaming machine CAN do more than a Mac and console.
I don't think that anyone has argued that a $1000 gaming machine won't get you more computer for your money than a Mac and a console, and if you need that much computer (as I noted previously) and that's your budget... the choice is clear. Also, if you really need an application that only runs on Windows, well, the applications barrier to entry is still very real.
If you don't need to do video editing, or 3d modelling, or whatever else you're using your Athlon X2 64 4200+ and nVidia 7800 for, then the Mac and the console can do more than the gaming machine:
1. You can post on Slashdot while your kid is killing zombies. You can kill zombies while your kid is blogging about what a horrible parent you are.
2. You can let your kid use your computer without worrying about getting infected by the latest spyware going around.
3. Your kid can let you use the computer without worrying about you finding his porn collection. And vice versa.
4. You save $40 a year on antivirus software.
5. Both the XBox 360 and the Mac have *excellent* music visualisers. Groovy.
6. There's more good open-source graphical applications available for the Mac than for Windows or Linux.
A lot of the cool stuff about the Mac can be moshed onto Windows, I used to use Interix and MIX and was able to run a lot of FOSS stuff on that, but 90% of the Windows software I've bought in the past decade has been games for the kids...
How exactly do you save money over buying a gaming PC by buying a console + Mac?
:)
$40 a year on antivirus.
It is not quite that simple. Using the Apple installer and the Firewire disk mode means you don't have to worry about files, settings, encryption keys, software, user accounts, or anything else. It transfers all of it over, even if the user has no idea where the preferences are stored.
Oh yes, that's another peeve of mine, Apple has this tendency to tie slick tools to some specific interface, application, or service. There's no reason that you couldn't do this over any other connection between the two computers, such as ethernet, Bluetooth, or 802.11. It's like the way they have all these cool sync tools... that don't quite work right if you have two computers unless you're using ".Mac".
Your personal experience is not an objective analysis of how Apple hardware compares to other vendors.
Neither are self-selected surveys of people who are amazingly willing to give Apple a break no matter how badly they screw things up. Speaking to other people who have had exactly the same experiences as me, but who are Mac fanatics (it's like science fiction: I'm not a fan, I just like the software) you'd never know it. I've done it, and experiences that would have left me livid (or left them livid if they went through the same stuff with an IBM) were turned into paeans for Applecare.
The market for expandable all-in-one machines and small form factor machines is too tiny to be profitable to them.
Apple fans were saying the same kinds of things about headless Macs right up to the day before the mini came out. I got caught up in the zeitgeist and posted an article about how Apple would never wise up and release a headless Mac about a week before the announcement.
And there's more evidence for demand for an at least minimally expandible cheap Mac: the continuing market for G4s and even G3s... and for third-party expansion devices that only make sense in that context. Hell, they came out with a new PCI Radeon 9200 card right before the Mac mini came out*, and there's at least two companies still selling G3 and G4 upgrade cards for G3 and pre-G3 Powermacs.
How many Sonnet, OWC, Newertech, or Powerlogix customers would stick with their cranky old antiques if Apple gave them the option of an updated "slab"?
* The last pre-AGP Mac went off the market last century!
the $600 i was talking about wasn't the mac mini, i was actually refering to Sony's PS3.
/Applications and /Library. That's kinda humorous.
:)
Holy Mother of Mario, six hundred bucks for a console?
I like your part about deleting the
I can laugh about it now.
She didn't delete all of them, just programs and big files she "didn't use".
But the $599 Mac mini sporting a 512MB of ram and 40GB harddrive will be handicapped to a system with at least double the amount of ram and 6x more harddrive space
The iMac has the same amount of standard RAM as the Mac mini. The iMac has more disk, yes, and faster disk... but you'll need to upgrade both of them. For video editing I would suggest an external Firewire drive for either.
the MacBook's dual cores while the Mini only has a solo.
Ah, yes, I forgot that the base mini doesn't have the Duo... that does push the price up.
As an aside... it will actually be possible to upgrade the mini to a Merom (Core 2 Duo) because the newer CPU runs cooler... (I'm sure Apple didn't mean people to actually do this, and will make sure that the next version isn't upgradable).
I missed the context of this comment, didn't understand what you were getting at until I popped up a level.
Video editing. If you really want to get technical.
How much difference do the 3d functions missing from the GMA950 make to video editing? The GMA950 is quite a bit faster with 2d than the Radeon 9200 it replaced, and even if Apple had gone with ATI I don't believe they'd have used anything faster than an X200.
But, OK, you have a point there. You've got significantly higher requirements than the average user. Still, my boss had been using Final Cut on his Powerbook as long as I've been working here (he's just splurged on a Mac Pro), and the Mac mini is unlikely to be any slower than a Powerbook...
I was actually counting a Mac mini and a $300 console. If it's $250 that's $850, not $900. :)
/Applications and /Library... the equivalent of going into %systemroot%\system32 and deleting things she didn't use (which she'd done on the PC at one point, with obvious dire consequences). I only noticed because Terminal.app wasn't there and I had to ssh in to clean things up...
But to pay for a mac and a windows install if you're bootcamping can get expensive.
Indeed. I think that Bootcamp is not really a practical tool for every day use. What it mostly gives you is a reassurance that if you need to use Windows for something you've got that option. I don't expect most people will really use that option long term, and I wouldn't count it in the price of the Mac.
When I got my daughter a Mac after going in and cleaning out her Windows machine for the Nth time that year, she begged me to leave her PC just in case. Two weeks later when I checked it, it hadn't been booted in two weeks. A couple months later it hadn't been booted more than twice except when I was checking for viruses and spyware...
Unless it does amazing things over the competition (like make me PB&J sandwiches), i can't justify $600.
It can survive two years of steady abuse from a teenager who managed to render a Windows PC unbootable on the average of 2-3 times a year. I think that's pretty amazing.
What kind of abuse?
Well, when I was checking my daughter's PCs one day I found she'd had run out of disk space on the Mac and gone in removing stuff in
The real laugh was that you had to install quicktime to view the ads from Apple's website.
And the problem with this is what, precisely?
Are you concerned that Apple will install a backdoor in your system through Quicktime, or that having Quicktime installed will otherwise reduce the security, reliability, or performance of your system?
I assume that you have some other streaming media program you prefer.
Would that be Windows Media, by any chance? If so, Windows Media comes with the system backdoor pre-installed by Microsoft, and since it uses the HTML control to render content using Windows Media Player or the WMP plugin is just as dangerous as using Internet Explorer or Outlook on Windows.
Which of course you, not being stupid, don't do... right?
Entry level imac is $1299 (Mac Mini doesn't count)
If you're not playing games on it, why not?
The lack of 3d support pisses me off, but if it came down to buying a Mac or not buying a Mac I'd drink my blood on that one.
So now you're down to $900, vs a $1000 PC.
It's cheaper to buy a decent gaming PC than a Mac and a console.
Yeh, but I'd have to buy the Mac anyway, because all I'd be using the PC for was playing games.
The only way Bill Gates could get me to take Windows seriously again would be for him to start over at around 1997 with NT 3.x and build a serious, professional operating system with a solid POSIX subsystem, a Win32 API for compatibility, and the best of the stuff that he promised us when I was setting up our first Windows NT network on NT 3.1. Where's the object oriented desktop, Bill, and the hard boundaries between subsystems, and the improved file system, and everything else you laid out for us in the '90s? Most of it hasn't even made it into Vista, because you're trying to build Vista on top of the abused child that is the NT 5 kernel... and that's just cruel.
For pretty much everyone pulling a laptop's disk drive out, putting it in an external case (which you have to buy), transferring the data, and then putting it back into the old laptop so that you can resell it, is a huge pain in the ass.
Yep, the way Apple makes it a pain to replace the drives in their laptops is another pet peeve of mine about the Mac. On my old Thinkpad it was a matter of undoing one screw and four clips.
But... what I don't get here... is why, if the laptop is in a good enough condition to sell, you can't just copy your files off over the network? I've only used target mode for recovery from trashed hardware.
Apple makes some pretty decent quality gear, but it is not to everyone's taste.
As an owner of a Rev A G3, a Rev A iMac, and a pre-AGP G4, I have to say that I haven't found that Apple's gear achieves "decent quality". And the problem is that they're not just "not to everyone's taste"... they seem deliberately designed to limit their appeal.
The way to deal with the "combinations of hardware" problem is to make sure there's at least one product in each category that's expandible. It doesn't have to be *very* expandible. Take the Mac mini's internals and put them in a slab with one PCI-E slot and two 3.5" hard drive bays and I'd pay $700 for it.
I won't pay $600 to "upgrade" to the current intel mini, though.
I have yet to see anything done on a Mac that I can't do on a Windows machine. Nothing.
Show me something comparable to OsiriX (no, Osiris ain't it), and I'll kiss you.
You can install OS X on your homebrew PC 'til the fat man croaks, but where's your command key, your startup chime, your flashing disk on startup, your magnetic power connector, your backlit keyboard, your FireWire target disk mode?
The command key on my Mac has a Windows logo on it. The only items from that list that my current desktop actually has are the firewire target mode and the startup chime. And the firewire target mode only matters because the stupid thing is so crippled by Apple's desire to make it "tiny" that pulling the drive is an ordeal. My previous desktop Mac didn't even have firewire, so that one's down to the startup chime... and Apple quit using *custom* startup chimes ten years ago!
My Macbook Pro has all of that, but none of my other Macs are Macs by your logic.
And, well, I'd rather have a non-backlit keyboard I could actually stand to type on, and a non-magnetic power connector that didn't fall out every time I moved the notebook, and another trackpad button. I carry around a compact Bluetooth keyboard and mouse because I literally can't use the built-in ones for more than half an hour without pain.
If you're right about what makes a Mac a Mac, I'd rather not have one, thanks.
When I go to conferences lately, I see Macbooks and Macbook Pros. Oceans of them. It has become the only serious choice for a professional notebook.
And it's all because of the OS. The hardware is awful.
They need to hire a bunch of ex-IBMers from Lenovo who actually know how to make a good laptop.
I'd buy a Mac if I didn't feel it was overpriced.
If you don't see OS X as being worth a premium over Windows, then why would you even want to buy a Mac? If you do, then you know that premium is really the de-facto price of OS X, and you need to rephrase the question... maybe "why does Apple charge so much for OS X"?
Me, I'd still pay as much for OS X -- the real price, not the retail costs of what's effectively an upgrade (yes, I know Apple *also* sometimes sells upgrade packs for people who bought a Mac close enough to the release of a new version of OS X... but that's more like a promotional discount, they don't sell these as upgrades for the general market) -- whether it was running on a Mac or not.
In fact I'd rather do that. My main problem with Macs isn't that they're expensive, it's that they're such screwed up computers. I've got a Mac mini and a Macbook Pro, and if they weren't the only way to run OS X I'd never have considered either of them for a minute.
Why is it that the Mac/PC debate is more likely to cause a knife fight than Harley and BMW owners meeting at a bar?
Because you don't have Harley-only and BMW-only roads and gasoline.
"Well, I can do all of those things as well, and also fun stuff like playing all of the latest games."
"Yeh, Microsoft makes great game machines. My owner's got an XBox, but he seems to like his Playstation better."
If your main reason for buying a computer is playing games, the gap between computer and console is narrower every year. Why not save the money and just get one?
But unlike IE and ActiveX controls, you can only install Firefox extensions from sites on a whitelist
:) ) are significantly safer than IE. That doesn't mean that it's a good thing for them to play with fire the way they're doing. Especially when following reasonable security guidelines actually improves the user experience by removing annoying extra dialogs.
This, at the worst, means you need to insert a XSS attack in your exploit.
I don't think having a simple, in-the-browser interface for installing browser extensions is inherently bad
Not if the extensions are sandboxed, no.
Whether they run with local user privileges or system privileges is a secondary issue.
This is similar to Apple's decision to have "Open Safe Files AFter Downloading" turned on by default. They consider an installer a "safe file" because the user has to approve a dialog before the install proceeds. To begin with, there are no "safe files", there are simply "safe applications"... and an installer is NOT a safe application to use to open an unsafe file. In addition, an approval dialog is not a security mechanism, whether that dialog requires you to wait for a 10 second countdown or not.
Firefox has something like 10-15% of the browser market these days, doesn't it? How much Fx extension malware has there been?
Firefox is considerably safer than IE, true. It is, however, unsafe in a way that doesn't improve the user experience, and is completely unnecessary, and that Konqueror isn't unsafe in.
The same argument can be made for Safari. Apple has an increasing share of the desktop market, and even with stupid design decisions Safari or Firefox (or even Internet Explorer on the Mac
(and, note, Safari is KHTML-based... this is not a flaw in Gecko or KHTML/Webcore the way the IE flaw is a flaw in any application that uses Microsoft's HTML control, it's a flaw in Firefox itself)
Instead, you have to explicitly download and install an extension,
Last time I wanted to do that I had to install an extension to let me install an extension from a downloaded XPI file on my local disk rather than installing it directly from a web page through an "install" link.
It was a few days after that I switched to KHTML-based browsers, though I've been using Camino a bunch lately... the problem isn't inherent in Gecko, the way Microsoft's ActiveX flaw is inherent in their HTML control... it's just that Camino is the only decent Gecko-based browser I've found.
Anyway... the fact that following the install link (which doesn't actually require the user clicking on the link) pops up a bunch of annoying dialogs that ask you to whitelist the source site* and then wait through a countdown before clicking "OK" doesn't change the fact that the actual request to perform the install is made by the document you are viewing, not by the user. It doesn't matter whether the "extensions install program" is the browser or not, what matters is that it's possible for a web page to request that install.
* This just mean an attacker needs to come up with a XSS attack on at least one site that serves a popular extension.
Why is it, then, that every HP or Dell computer (and probably others) comes with Java preinstalled with Windows?
Microsoft and/or HP or Dell has paid Sun the necessary license fees to redistribute it for general use. The free Java is only available direct from Sun or as part of a Java-based software package.
Say it with me: MONEY. Having automated systems is just plain cheaper.
Um.
This isn't about "automated systems versus real support".
This is about "automated systems that don't work versus automated systems that do work".