You make some good points and some not-so-good points. I agree with your concerns about the menu bar on multiple monitors to a degree, but frankly if you had multiple monitors then you probably had a multi-button mouse and most of the menus were available practically anywhere contextually.
Surely you jest. MacOS Classic's context menus were even more woefully underutilised than OS X's are today.
I don't agree with your task switching point. You only needed to use the Application menu if all of your application windows were obscured. Sure that was a problem if you had a couple of dozen windows open simultaneously, but NT/2K was not a lot better when there was that much congestion.
Couple of dozen ? Half a dozen would be more accurate. Maybe 10-15 if you had several and/or huge screens.
Windows is *vastly* better at handling the situation a) because the Taskbar is resizable and b) because it lets you switch directly to an arbitrary window. I personally keep mine at 3 levels and have done so for a decade or more. My current open window count is ~45, and that's nothing particularly high for me. I can see enough information in each Taskbar button to be able to identify nearly any window at a glance.
Contrast this problem with the Windows' MDI where one window could hold (and obscure) multiple documents unless you wanted to launch multiple instances of an application to have independent windows... which some apps would not support. In those days I had a lot more trouble sharing information between Windows documents than I did between Mac documents.
MDI had nearly the same problem that MacOS Classic did (and to a degree OS X still does) - it was application centric. Fortunately it was on its way out by the late '90s and is quite uncommon today.
How was Mac OS 9's multi-tasking "iffy"? It was very similar in capability to NT and was more uniformly integrated into the OS. Both used a cooperative model, but Microsoft never bothered to tell their development community how to cooperate, so it was not uncommon for apps to not play well together.
This is completely wrong. You have no idea what you're talking about.
You had some points in there about 10" screens and earlier versions of the Mac OS, but they were lost on me since they really had nothing to do with OS 9...
Absolutely they do, and that was my main point. The MacOS GUI fundamentally changed little between its first release and OS 9 (and not a whole lot more for OS X).
Also, you seem to be enamored with Expose, [...]
Not really. Like most aspects of OS X's GUI, it looks great in demos but in actual usage its weaknesses start to show. In particular, if you have large numbers of similar-looking windows (eg: Terminal sessions or text-heavy documents) its task-switching superiority disappears, since you need to wipe across every window to see its "description".
[...] which I agree is a nice touch, but prior to Expose, OS 9 supported WindowShade, which in some ways was nicer. I could temporarily hide all but the title bar of windows I was not currently dealing with, to let me focus on only the windows I cared about. This was actually a less cluttered solution to window management than Expose, docks, and taskbars...
It's kind of hard to see how a screen with a dozen titlebars in it could be "less cluttered" than one which was basically empty, except for the exact windows you were working on, or completely filled by the single window you were working in.
Of course, Spaces is a much better solution... Sadly, I've yet to find a decent / stable virtual desktop manager for Windows.
I've never felt the need for virtual desktops in Windows, even though I've used them quite extensively on UNIX-based systems (CDA, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, et al), especially with the windows-grouping introduced with XP (albeit with some fine-tuning so similar buttons are grouped, but never collapse down).
It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behaviour when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).
In other UIs it's irrelevant, because they're window-centric rather than app-centric. You're *always* just closing the window - whether that quits the application as well doesn't matter, because the UI is focused around windows (or "documents", if you prefer) as standalone elements, rather than elements in a child-parent relationship like MacOS does (except when it doesn't).
The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debateable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.
Everyone I know with a laptop connects it to a larger screen quite regularly to use a dual-screen setup, at which point the problems with the single menu bar become *very* apparent, as dissimilar screens in a multi-monitor setup exacerbates them badly.
Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
Every since OSX 10.0 in 2000, Apple's primary objective with its UI design has been looking cool in demos. Utility has followed a far second.
BSD's not dead of course - look only to the Mach kernel in OS X for verification.
"BSD's not dead, you can tell because of the non-BSD kernel in this OS !"
If you want to see how a desktop UNIX-based os should do it right, look at OS X. Say what you will about Apple - I don't care, only own a mac and an iPod (I have a Droid X for my phone) - but they did the desktop RIGHT. It's easy to use, fairly intuitive (passes the grandma test, for the most part), and is oh so easy to support.
However, almost everything that makes OS X interesting and compelling, has nothing to do with it being a UNIX.
There are a number of government jobs where you get wages and benefits above what is earned in private industry and you get long term job security on the order of decades.
While the job security does tend to be good, as do the post-retirement benefits, you don't work for the government because of the salary, which is usually well below that in private industry.
You have your goals pretty much completely backwards. The first and foremost objective of the justice system should be to separate those breaking laws from everyone else, to minimise the harm they can do. The second objective should be to provide a way for injured parties to seek redress and reparations for any losses suffered. The third objective should be to rehabilitate offenders, so you no longer have to expend resources keeping them isolated.
Only as a last resort should the threat of harsh punishment be used to coerce lawful behaviour ("deterrence"). IMHO if you need to do this at all, your society is already failing in that area. Deterrence should *never* be a major objective of a legal system.
I had said that "trust funders" aren't truly wealthy because, by definition, they do not donate to charity and do not make money work for them by investing. They spend money until it's gone.
You apparently have a different definition of "trust funder" to everyone else. For most people, it simply means someone who inherited (large amounts of) money. What they do with it afterwards is irrelevant.
Incidentally, if you're rich - regardless of whether you inherited it or earned it - it's damn near impossible *not* to "put it to work" (unless you're keeping gold bars under your bed) since pretty much anywhere you're going to stash millions of dollars is going to be "working" that money one way or another.
That same laptop could perform the same function using free software.
In many cases it can not.
That same laptop is one out of many competing laptop designs, and over the years this competition has resulted in massive price decreases and technological improvements. Conversely, windows has improved far more slowly than hardware and is now more expensive than it used to be.
Accounting for inflation, Windows costs the same (if not less) today than it did 10, 15, 20 years ago.
Software is only worth the value of any advantages it has over whatever free software exists, minus any disadvantages it has.
No, software is worth whatever someone who wants its functionality is prepared to pay.
As I said, the hardware is an interchangeable, generic commodity. Its only value (to the vast, vast majority of customers) lies in the software it runs.
If a proprietary application is equivalent or only marginally better than a free one, and yet costs $400 is it really worth it?
If that "marginally better" lets you generate tens of thousands of dollars a year in revenue ? A laughable no-brainer.
Compared to other OSes *that are actually sold*? The key point is that you can make an OS available for free, therefore that is the base price.
Only if that "free" OS provides the same functionality. The volume of people lining up to pay >$0 for multiple OSes demonstrates that is not true.
For hardware, the base price is the lowest cost to manufacture (because it requires raw materials etc).
Er, no. Things don't design themselves.
Ultimately, the "base price" is whatever people are prepared to pay.
So compared to the actual cost of producing an OS, windows is extremely expensive.
You haven't said a thing about "the actual cost of producing an OS".
The fact that someone else can produce an equivalent product much cheaper is how the free market works, [...]
You have not demonstrated this is a fact.
[...] and now you must try to compete with that free product somehow.
Both Microsoft and Apple seem to be "competing" just fine.
I'm not sure why you don't believe it hasn't morphed - the term personal computer has been around long before IBM introduced its PC;
I don't believe it because it hasn't happened. "PC" has been synonymous with "IBM compatible PC" and "x86 PC" since the mid-80s, and the only slightly vague muddying of the term during that period has been with the recent introduction of x86 Macs.
and even today PC refers to the OS (Windows) that a program requires rather than the underlying architecture. It just so happens that is most likely an Intel x86 variant.
The is simply flat-out wrong. Essentially the only media that makes "PC" and "Windows" synonymous are Apple's ads. Pretty much everyone else uses the term "PC" to refer to an x86-compatible home computer [that isn't a Mac], then further differentiates with "Windows PC", "Linux PC", etc, as necessary. This has been true since the mid-80s.
Even then, for a good bit of it's life PC's that ran Windows were not necessarily IBM compatible.
Which PCs are you thinking of that have been around for "a good bit" of the last 25 years, ran Windows, but "were not necessarily IBM compatible" ? You do realise that even the newest, flashiest PC today starts up looking nearly identical to the original IBM PC, right ?
No, I don't use Windows. And I've never been able to buy one without Windows - so I always paid between 50-100 too much. For me it is really a "Windows tax".
Then take it back and get your refund. Don't be surprised when it's not 100 though.
Other OS's can not compete on an equal basis. Not on price, not on quality. In most shops in Europe you'll find Acer, HP sometimes Asus... and none offer other OS's. There is no choice.
If there was any significant market interest in Linux laptop, vendors would be selling them.
There is no other OS you can compare with given these rules.
MacOS is sold (albeit an upgrade license only). RHEL is sold. In the past there was also OS/2.
What GUI "limitations" are you talking about? I'm serious. And how does Windows or whatever GUI you think is better do them better?
The single menu bar does not scale well to large and/or multiple screens, *especially* when they are running in different resolutions or orientations. The whole GUI was (and still is, though Expose has worked around it reasonably well) application-focused, making it cumbersome to switch quickly between arbitrary windows (Windows 7, sadly, has duplicated much of this problem with its new Taskbar - though at least that stupidity is configurable). In Classic MacOS, the Application Menu (for those of you who are unfamiliar, basically a less functional, vertically oriented version of the left half of the Dock) made for inefficient task-switching (especially since you'd then have to switch to the right window, after changing apps, not to mention switching apps would bring *all* of that applications windows to the foreground, potentially masking something else you wanted to watch and/or interact with).
Much of the GUI awfulness from the perspective of task switching went unnoticed, since multitasking itself in MacOS was iffy at best, so people tended to focus on a single application for extended periods of time. However, when they recycled basically the same GUI (with a few things shuffled around) into OS X - which despite its poor performance was still leagues ahead of MacOS Classic for multitasking - the problems quickly became apparent, so they dusted off "tile/untile all windows" and tarted it up into "Expose" to sidestep the issue.
I'm wondering if you think that "simplicity" is inherently limitation-based, instead of being done on purpose.
It certainly was in the early days - the OS simply couldn't multitask, and even if it could, trying to do so on a 10" screen is painful. Similarly, the single menu bar isn't really a problem with a tiny screen and a non-multitasking usage pattern.
Also, didn't Macs do multiple-monitor support with a single desktop _years_ before Windows did?
Yes. That doesn't change the problems the GUI has when using multiple monitors.
(And didn't you used to have to log out/reboot when you changed resolution in Windows?)
Sure, back around 1993 or so. Personally I didn't understand this argument even then - who changes screen resolutions often enough for it to be a concern ?
Buy a cheap laptop and 10-20% of the price is windows. Want a "professional" or "ultimate" version? Need Office software? Virus scanner? That part can then easily rise to 50%.
I'm always confused when people believe this is some sort of argument. The laptop's only real value lies in the software it can run, and to that end whether Windows costs 5% or 95% of the price is basically irrelevant. You're paying for the functionality Windows provides, the laptop is just an arbitrary black box to run it on.
This point is particularly well highlighted when you consider high end professional software, that may cost tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of dollars, and run on hardware worth mere hundreds or thousands of dollars. Outside of a statistically irrelevant minority, people don't buy hardware for the sake of the hardware. They buy it so they can complete some task using the software that runs on it.
MS's anti-competitive behaviour is well documented. If anything, they kept the market closed and therefore the prices artificially high.
Compared to other OSes *that are actually sold*, the cost of Windows is average, and pretty much always has been (if not on the relatively cheap side).
A lot of the NBN is about the same as what was planned for 2000 back in 1996 before Telstra decided to do the absolute minimim it could get away with.
The NBN is exactly what privatising Telstra *should* have produced. A government-owned and -controlled base infrastructure that private entities resell bandwidth from.
Seriously, compared to other OSes available in 1999, what specifically was crap about Mac OS 9?
Unstable, no generic SMP support, poor memory management (eg: statically sized disk cache), poor CPU scheduling (essentially incapable of multitasking), GUI designed around the limitations of the original Macintosh (a problem that in many ways lives on in OS X today, albeit with a few tacked-on features like Expose to try and work around it), tied to expensive hardware.
What OS would you hold up as a superior product? NT?
NT 4 or Windows 2000, by a large margin. Windows 95 or 98 or OS/2 by somewhat smaller ones.
While Apple has been getting better Microsoft has been getting worse, steadily.
If you think NT 3.x was in any meaningful way better than 7, Vista, 2003, XP, 2000 or even NT4, you're living in a fantasy world.
It has some improved security features but overall less security baked-in.
Please elaborate on how a system built from the ground up to extensively use per-user ACLs throughout (Windows NT) has "less security baked-in" than one based on a traditional UNIX security model with ACLs tacked on afterwards (OS X).
I have a long history of Dell hatred, but I will say that my 2707WFP monitor works extremely well and has a build quality that beats most things I've seen from Apple recently. Dell, like many large companies, is a sort of Jekyll and Hyde beast where some parts are evil/crappy/incompetent, while other parts are actually pretty good.
As with most things, it's usually a simple matter of getting what you pay for.
Buy some bottom-end, crap machine like an Inspiron ? Likely it's going to give you trouble. Spend more on a Latitude latop, Precision desktop, or Ultrasharp-series LCD ? Chances are high it'll be rock solid.
Never said it was - just that the term "personal computer" has morphed in meaning over time; it was even applied to the HP-65 at one point.
The person you originally replied to was, which is why I'm in this thread.
Further, my point is that it hasn't really morphed over time - it's remained basically stable for ~25 years now. For the majority of the time the term has existed, it's been a synonym for so-called "IBM Compatible PCs".
Someone is wealthy simply because they inherited money is NOT a capitalist. The "truly wealthy" could not be trust-funders because money disappears unless you put it to work.
Huh ? Of course they could (and typically are). If you already have a lot of money, it's relatively easy to make a lot more (if for no other reason than being able to responsibly take on riskier, more profitable investments).
Actually, it has changed quite a bit since its early usage - from a discriptor to delineate small desktop machines from terminals and big iron to today's use as a generic term for Windows based machines.
"PC" has been used almost exclusively to refer to x86-compatible computers since the mid-80s. It has never, ever been a commonplace term for a Mac.
The point is that computers aren't contextually aware enough to handle every situation.
Computers aren't handing out the fines, people are. They're just doing it from behind a desk rather than by walking down the street.
Try fighting so-called 'computer evidence' in a traffic court full of techno-illiterates.
Why is the technical literacy of the court relevant when your argument is not that you didn't break the law, but that it was justified in the circumstances ?
No, the word "America" in the singular refers to the USA only in the common usage in the USA. In most of the rest of the world, this is simply not true.
Which "rest of the world" are you talking about ? Because pretty much everywhere I've ever been (Australia, New Zealand, a good part of Western Europe, Japan), "America" refers to the USA. No-one would ever use "America" and expect to be inclusive of, say, Mexico or Chile.
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That might be, except for the fact that "creating Mac compatibles" wasn't Apple's complaint with Psystar.
Absolutely it was. It was just argued more subtly than that.
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Why don't you build a similar model on Dell and see how much it costs you.
A similar Dell T3500 will be between $500 and $1000 cheaper. Further, if you're prepared to forego ECC RAM (the only thing a Xeon gets you over a non-Xeon these days) you can probably knock nearly as much off again.
Read my post above about why Apple doesn't make a generic desktop. They won't make much money as the market is saturated and they have to compete with the likes of Dell whose business model is to sell at very little profit for lots of volume. It's not a matter of can't; it's a matter of that there isn't enough profit in it for them. And businesses are in it to make money for them.
It's got nothing to do with competing with Dell, and everything to do with competing with themselves. A reasonably-priced Mac Desktop would *slaughter* high-profit Mac Pro sales.
If confusion follows then you are not using the word in its commonly accepted fashion. Languages evolve - and words take on new meanings. There are plenty of words whose modern meaning differs from the older meaning; or whose meaning is very context specific.
Though this is not an example of that. The contextual meaning of "PCs" has been essentially unchanged for 2-3 decades now.
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You make some good points and some not-so-good points. I agree with your concerns about the menu bar on multiple monitors to a degree, but frankly if you had multiple monitors then you probably had a multi-button mouse and most of the menus were available practically anywhere contextually.
Surely you jest. MacOS Classic's context menus were even more woefully underutilised than OS X's are today.
I don't agree with your task switching point. You only needed to use the Application menu if all of your application windows were obscured. Sure that was a problem if you had a couple of dozen windows open simultaneously, but NT/2K was not a lot better when there was that much congestion.
Couple of dozen ? Half a dozen would be more accurate. Maybe 10-15 if you had several and/or huge screens.
Windows is *vastly* better at handling the situation a) because the Taskbar is resizable and b) because it lets you switch directly to an arbitrary window. I personally keep mine at 3 levels and have done so for a decade or more. My current open window count is ~45, and that's nothing particularly high for me. I can see enough information in each Taskbar button to be able to identify nearly any window at a glance.
Contrast this problem with the Windows' MDI where one window could hold (and obscure) multiple documents unless you wanted to launch multiple instances of an application to have independent windows... which some apps would not support. In those days I had a lot more trouble sharing information between Windows documents than I did between Mac documents.
MDI had nearly the same problem that MacOS Classic did (and to a degree OS X still does) - it was application centric. Fortunately it was on its way out by the late '90s and is quite uncommon today.
How was Mac OS 9's multi-tasking "iffy"? It was very similar in capability to NT and was more uniformly integrated into the OS. Both used a cooperative model, but Microsoft never bothered to tell their development community how to cooperate, so it was not uncommon for apps to not play well together.
This is completely wrong. You have no idea what you're talking about.
You had some points in there about 10" screens and earlier versions of the Mac OS, but they were lost on me since they really had nothing to do with OS 9...
Absolutely they do, and that was my main point. The MacOS GUI fundamentally changed little between its first release and OS 9 (and not a whole lot more for OS X).
Also, you seem to be enamored with Expose, [...]
Not really. Like most aspects of OS X's GUI, it looks great in demos but in actual usage its weaknesses start to show. In particular, if you have large numbers of similar-looking windows (eg: Terminal sessions or text-heavy documents) its task-switching superiority disappears, since you need to wipe across every window to see its "description".
[...] which I agree is a nice touch, but prior to Expose, OS 9 supported WindowShade, which in some ways was nicer. I could temporarily hide all but the title bar of windows I was not currently dealing with, to let me focus on only the windows I cared about. This was actually a less cluttered solution to window management than Expose, docks, and taskbars...
It's kind of hard to see how a screen with a dozen titlebars in it could be "less cluttered" than one which was basically empty, except for the exact windows you were working on, or completely filled by the single window you were working in.
Of course, Spaces is a much better solution... Sadly, I've yet to find a decent / stable virtual desktop manager for Windows.
I've never felt the need for virtual desktops in Windows, even though I've used them quite extensively on UNIX-based systems (CDA, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, et al), especially with the windows-grouping introduced with XP (albeit with some fine-tuning so similar buttons are grouped, but never collapse down).
It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behaviour when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).
In other UIs it's irrelevant, because they're window-centric rather than app-centric. You're *always* just closing the window - whether that quits the application as well doesn't matter, because the UI is focused around windows (or "documents", if you prefer) as standalone elements, rather than elements in a child-parent relationship like MacOS does (except when it doesn't).
The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debateable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.
Everyone I know with a laptop connects it to a larger screen quite regularly to use a dual-screen setup, at which point the problems with the single menu bar become *very* apparent, as dissimilar screens in a multi-monitor setup exacerbates them badly.
Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
Every since OSX 10.0 in 2000, Apple's primary objective with its UI design has been looking cool in demos. Utility has followed a far second.
BSD's not dead of course - look only to the Mach kernel in OS X for verification.
"BSD's not dead, you can tell because of the non-BSD kernel in this OS !"
If you want to see how a desktop UNIX-based os should do it right, look at OS X. Say what you will about Apple - I don't care, only own a mac and an iPod (I have a Droid X for my phone) - but they did the desktop RIGHT. It's easy to use, fairly intuitive (passes the grandma test, for the most part), and is oh so easy to support.
However, almost everything that makes OS X interesting and compelling, has nothing to do with it being a UNIX.
There are a number of government jobs where you get wages and benefits above what is earned in private industry and you get long term job security on the order of decades.
While the job security does tend to be good, as do the post-retirement benefits, you don't work for the government because of the salary, which is usually well below that in private industry.
You have your goals pretty much completely backwards. The first and foremost objective of the justice system should be to separate those breaking laws from everyone else, to minimise the harm they can do. The second objective should be to provide a way for injured parties to seek redress and reparations for any losses suffered. The third objective should be to rehabilitate offenders, so you no longer have to expend resources keeping them isolated.
Only as a last resort should the threat of harsh punishment be used to coerce lawful behaviour ("deterrence"). IMHO if you need to do this at all, your society is already failing in that area. Deterrence should *never* be a major objective of a legal system.
I had said that "trust funders" aren't truly wealthy because, by definition, they do not donate to charity and do not make money work for them by investing. They spend money until it's gone.
You apparently have a different definition of "trust funder" to everyone else. For most people, it simply means someone who inherited (large amounts of) money. What they do with it afterwards is irrelevant.
Incidentally, if you're rich - regardless of whether you inherited it or earned it - it's damn near impossible *not* to "put it to work" (unless you're keeping gold bars under your bed) since pretty much anywhere you're going to stash millions of dollars is going to be "working" that money one way or another.
That same laptop could perform the same function using free software.
In many cases it can not.
That same laptop is one out of many competing laptop designs, and over the years this competition has resulted in massive price decreases and technological improvements. Conversely, windows has improved far more slowly than hardware and is now more expensive than it used to be.
Accounting for inflation, Windows costs the same (if not less) today than it did 10, 15, 20 years ago.
Software is only worth the value of any advantages it has over whatever free software exists, minus any disadvantages it has.
No, software is worth whatever someone who wants its functionality is prepared to pay.
As I said, the hardware is an interchangeable, generic commodity. Its only value (to the vast, vast majority of customers) lies in the software it runs.
If a proprietary application is equivalent or only marginally better than a free one, and yet costs $400 is it really worth it?
If that "marginally better" lets you generate tens of thousands of dollars a year in revenue ? A laughable no-brainer.
Compared to other OSes *that are actually sold*? The key point is that you can make an OS available for free, therefore that is the base price.
Only if that "free" OS provides the same functionality. The volume of people lining up to pay >$0 for multiple OSes demonstrates that is not true.
For hardware, the base price is the lowest cost to manufacture (because it requires raw materials etc).
Er, no. Things don't design themselves.
Ultimately, the "base price" is whatever people are prepared to pay.
So compared to the actual cost of producing an OS, windows is extremely expensive.
You haven't said a thing about "the actual cost of producing an OS".
The fact that someone else can produce an equivalent product much cheaper is how the free market works, [...]
You have not demonstrated this is a fact.
[...] and now you must try to compete with that free product somehow.
Both Microsoft and Apple seem to be "competing" just fine.
I'm not sure why you don't believe it hasn't morphed - the term personal computer has been around long before IBM introduced its PC;
I don't believe it because it hasn't happened. "PC" has been synonymous with "IBM compatible PC" and "x86 PC" since the mid-80s, and the only slightly vague muddying of the term during that period has been with the recent introduction of x86 Macs.
and even today PC refers to the OS (Windows) that a program requires rather than the underlying architecture. It just so happens that is most likely an Intel x86 variant.
The is simply flat-out wrong. Essentially the only media that makes "PC" and "Windows" synonymous are Apple's ads. Pretty much everyone else uses the term "PC" to refer to an x86-compatible home computer [that isn't a Mac], then further differentiates with "Windows PC", "Linux PC", etc, as necessary. This has been true since the mid-80s.
Even then, for a good bit of it's life PC's that ran Windows were not necessarily IBM compatible.
Which PCs are you thinking of that have been around for "a good bit" of the last 25 years, ran Windows, but "were not necessarily IBM compatible" ? You do realise that even the newest, flashiest PC today starts up looking nearly identical to the original IBM PC, right ?
No, I don't use Windows. And I've never been able to buy one without Windows - so I always paid between 50-100 too much. For me it is really a "Windows tax".
Then take it back and get your refund. Don't be surprised when it's not 100 though.
Other OS's can not compete on an equal basis. Not on price, not on quality. In most shops in Europe you'll find Acer, HP sometimes Asus... and none offer other OS's. There is no choice.
If there was any significant market interest in Linux laptop, vendors would be selling them.
There is no other OS you can compare with given these rules.
MacOS is sold (albeit an upgrade license only). RHEL is sold. In the past there was also OS/2.
What GUI "limitations" are you talking about? I'm serious. And how does Windows or whatever GUI you think is better do them better?
The single menu bar does not scale well to large and/or multiple screens, *especially* when they are running in different resolutions or orientations. The whole GUI was (and still is, though Expose has worked around it reasonably well) application-focused, making it cumbersome to switch quickly between arbitrary windows (Windows 7, sadly, has duplicated much of this problem with its new Taskbar - though at least that stupidity is configurable). In Classic MacOS, the Application Menu (for those of you who are unfamiliar, basically a less functional, vertically oriented version of the left half of the Dock) made for inefficient task-switching (especially since you'd then have to switch to the right window, after changing apps, not to mention switching apps would bring *all* of that applications windows to the foreground, potentially masking something else you wanted to watch and/or interact with).
Much of the GUI awfulness from the perspective of task switching went unnoticed, since multitasking itself in MacOS was iffy at best, so people tended to focus on a single application for extended periods of time. However, when they recycled basically the same GUI (with a few things shuffled around) into OS X - which despite its poor performance was still leagues ahead of MacOS Classic for multitasking - the problems quickly became apparent, so they dusted off "tile/untile all windows" and tarted it up into "Expose" to sidestep the issue.
I'm wondering if you think that "simplicity" is inherently limitation-based, instead of being done on purpose.
It certainly was in the early days - the OS simply couldn't multitask, and even if it could, trying to do so on a 10" screen is painful. Similarly, the single menu bar isn't really a problem with a tiny screen and a non-multitasking usage pattern.
Also, didn't Macs do multiple-monitor support with a single desktop _years_ before Windows did?
Yes. That doesn't change the problems the GUI has when using multiple monitors.
(And didn't you used to have to log out/reboot when you changed resolution in Windows?)
Sure, back around 1993 or so. Personally I didn't understand this argument even then - who changes screen resolutions often enough for it to be a concern ?
Buy a cheap laptop and 10-20% of the price is windows. Want a "professional" or "ultimate" version? Need Office software? Virus scanner? That part can then easily rise to 50%.
I'm always confused when people believe this is some sort of argument. The laptop's only real value lies in the software it can run, and to that end whether Windows costs 5% or 95% of the price is basically irrelevant. You're paying for the functionality Windows provides, the laptop is just an arbitrary black box to run it on.
This point is particularly well highlighted when you consider high end professional software, that may cost tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of dollars, and run on hardware worth mere hundreds or thousands of dollars. Outside of a statistically irrelevant minority, people don't buy hardware for the sake of the hardware. They buy it so they can complete some task using the software that runs on it.
MS's anti-competitive behaviour is well documented. If anything, they kept the market closed and therefore the prices artificially high.
Compared to other OSes *that are actually sold*, the cost of Windows is average, and pretty much always has been (if not on the relatively cheap side).
A lot of the NBN is about the same as what was planned for 2000 back in 1996 before Telstra decided to do the absolute minimim it could get away with.
The NBN is exactly what privatising Telstra *should* have produced. A government-owned and -controlled base infrastructure that private entities resell bandwidth from.
Seriously, compared to other OSes available in 1999, what specifically was crap about Mac OS 9?
Unstable, no generic SMP support, poor memory management (eg: statically sized disk cache), poor CPU scheduling (essentially incapable of multitasking), GUI designed around the limitations of the original Macintosh (a problem that in many ways lives on in OS X today, albeit with a few tacked-on features like Expose to try and work around it), tied to expensive hardware.
What OS would you hold up as a superior product? NT?
NT 4 or Windows 2000, by a large margin. Windows 95 or 98 or OS/2 by somewhat smaller ones.
While Apple has been getting better Microsoft has been getting worse, steadily.
If you think NT 3.x was in any meaningful way better than 7, Vista, 2003, XP, 2000 or even NT4, you're living in a fantasy world.
It has some improved security features but overall less security baked-in.
Please elaborate on how a system built from the ground up to extensively use per-user ACLs throughout (Windows NT) has "less security baked-in" than one based on a traditional UNIX security model with ACLs tacked on afterwards (OS X).
I have a long history of Dell hatred, but I will say that my 2707WFP monitor works extremely well and has a build quality that beats most things I've seen from Apple recently. Dell, like many large companies, is a sort of Jekyll and Hyde beast where some parts are evil/crappy/incompetent, while other parts are actually pretty good.
As with most things, it's usually a simple matter of getting what you pay for.
Buy some bottom-end, crap machine like an Inspiron ? Likely it's going to give you trouble. Spend more on a Latitude latop, Precision desktop, or Ultrasharp-series LCD ? Chances are high it'll be rock solid.
Never said it was - just that the term "personal computer" has morphed in meaning over time; it was even applied to the HP-65 at one point.
The person you originally replied to was, which is why I'm in this thread.
Further, my point is that it hasn't really morphed over time - it's remained basically stable for ~25 years now. For the majority of the time the term has existed, it's been a synonym for so-called "IBM Compatible PCs".
Someone is wealthy simply because they inherited money is NOT a capitalist. The "truly wealthy" could not be trust-funders because money disappears unless you put it to work.
Huh ? Of course they could (and typically are). If you already have a lot of money, it's relatively easy to make a lot more (if for no other reason than being able to responsibly take on riskier, more profitable investments).
Actually, it has changed quite a bit since its early usage - from a discriptor to delineate small desktop machines from terminals and big iron to today's use as a generic term for Windows based machines.
"PC" has been used almost exclusively to refer to x86-compatible computers since the mid-80s. It has never, ever been a commonplace term for a Mac.
The point is that computers aren't contextually aware enough to handle every situation.
Computers aren't handing out the fines, people are. They're just doing it from behind a desk rather than by walking down the street.
Try fighting so-called 'computer evidence' in a traffic court full of techno-illiterates.
Why is the technical literacy of the court relevant when your argument is not that you didn't break the law, but that it was justified in the circumstances ?
No, the word "America" in the singular refers to the USA only in the common usage in the USA. In most of the rest of the world, this is simply not true.
Which "rest of the world" are you talking about ? Because pretty much everywhere I've ever been (Australia, New Zealand, a good part of Western Europe, Japan), "America" refers to the USA. No-one would ever use "America" and expect to be inclusive of, say, Mexico or Chile.
That might be, except for the fact that "creating Mac compatibles" wasn't Apple's complaint with Psystar.
Absolutely it was. It was just argued more subtly than that.
Why don't you build a similar model on Dell and see how much it costs you.
A similar Dell T3500 will be between $500 and $1000 cheaper. Further, if you're prepared to forego ECC RAM (the only thing a Xeon gets you over a non-Xeon these days) you can probably knock nearly as much off again.
Read my post above about why Apple doesn't make a generic desktop. They won't make much money as the market is saturated and they have to compete with the likes of Dell whose business model is to sell at very little profit for lots of volume. It's not a matter of can't; it's a matter of that there isn't enough profit in it for them. And businesses are in it to make money for them.
It's got nothing to do with competing with Dell, and everything to do with competing with themselves. A reasonably-priced Mac Desktop would *slaughter* high-profit Mac Pro sales.
So, with CPUs idle, my main PC uses 250W, when playing a GPU and CPU intensive game it's 400W.
That is ridiculously high. I have 8-core VMware servers with dozens of gigabytes of RAM and 15k SAS drives that draw less power.
Something is wrong. Do you have any power-saving features enabled at all ?
IBM coined the term PC, but today's machines don't have ANYTHING in common with the hardware that IBM introduced (It's evolved too much).
Actually - and in some senses, sadly - they do.
Pretty much every PC on the planet, until it boots some modern OS, acts just like that first IBM PC did back in 1981.
If confusion follows then you are not using the word in its commonly accepted fashion. Languages evolve - and words take on new meanings. There are plenty of words whose modern meaning differs from the older meaning; or whose meaning is very context specific.
Though this is not an example of that. The contextual meaning of "PCs" has been essentially unchanged for 2-3 decades now.