It's really up to you. You may want to wait until Apple starts putting out hardware with Intel inside, but either way, I don't think that the fear of viruses should be an incentive to avoid considering a Mac. Viruses and insecurities are Windows features that should make you look into alternatives.
There are tons of positive reasons to look into buying a Mac: stability, more secure by design, superior search features, more quality bundled software (iMovie, iPhoto, etc.), native PDF handling, good choice of browsers (I use Firefox, but Safari is also a nice browser, as is Camino), scriptability (Automator, Applescript, shell scripts), graphically superior GUI, and hundreds of other items that aren't readily coming to mind.
Seriously, what out of the box version of Windows allows you to safely host web content (IIS doesn't count, and as far I am aware only ships with the 'server' versions of Windows), login remotely, or transfer files with SFTP?
I was a big fan of Dunn when he played for the Buccaneers. It's nice to see that not only is he a good player, he's also willing to donate part of his salary to help others.
Professional sports (and other handsomely paid professions) could use more people like this.
Seriously, this is still there, and I use it on multiple platforms. It's under the Tab menu, about a third of the way down, "Undo Close Tab". Or you can select from a list of recently closed tabs to re-open, one item below that ("Recent Closed Tabs").
On windows, the shortcut is Ctrl-Shift-Z for "Undo Close Tab", and Alt-R for "Recent Closed Tabs".
if you haven't tried it already, you may want to look into VLC. IMO, it's a much more capable player than Mplayer, with builtin support for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc., and can play DVDs, VCDs, as well as a number of streaming formats.
i think the biggest plus for me is that it's capable of switching the audio track playing, and can handle video files with included subtitles and most external subtitle formats, so it's great for watching multi-language rips.
and in my experience, the playlist feature is far more stable in VLC than Mplayer OS X.
I've read a lot of nonsense lately about how Microsoft products are superior to Open Source offerings, because Microsoft is committed to interoperability. Unfortunately, from my personal experience with Microsoft products this seems to be absolutely contrary to reality.
When I used Outlook and Microsoft's IME to send e-mail in Japanese, I was absolutely unable to import my saved e-mail from a previous version of Outlook to the (then) current one...Outlook refused to recognize the files. The solution? Use Netscape's mail client to import my mail from the old version of Outlook, then export it for Outlook.
At work we've tried repeatedly to use a data merge between Word and Excel (on Windows 2000 and XP) to generate forms in Word, and in two different versions of Office, we continually get random cases where, instead of having the integer that is in the Excel spreadsheet appear in the merged Word document, it picks up a random decimal, usually to about 9 decimal places. Yet when I create the same merge at home, on my Mac, it works almost flawlessly...as long as I replace any dates in the Excel spreadsheet, as they become an apparently random month and day, years in the future.
It's also been my experience that Word documents are notoriously incompatible between Word on different platforms and versions of Word, despite having identical copies of the font(s) used on each machine.
Yet perhaps the most interesting example of incompatibility has to be Internet Explorer. Without testing pages that use standards that IE refuses to support, I've seen the same HTML be misrendered in ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WAYS on each version/platform of IE tested. If IE for Mac breaks the page in one way, IE 5 and 6 on various versions of Windows can be counted on to mis-render the page in exciting and new variations. Yet Mozilla's family of browsers can be counted on to render the same code consistently, regardless of platform.
How exactly do you rationalize Microsoft's claims for interoperability?
i'm kind of surprised that no-one else has mentioned this, but Piro's excellent TabBrowser Extensions for Mozilla/Firebird/etc. includes this, as well as a ton of other options to greatly enhance tabbed browsing.
personally, i've yet to find a browser that compares to Firefox with AdBlock and TBE.
Somewhat tangential, but pertaining to the IE parallel: Apple did choose to follow Microsoft's lead with Internet Explorer, with Safari/Mail.app in 10.3 (Panther). while you can delete iTunes, and have no problems with playing music, if you opt to delete either Mail or Safari, it becomes impossible to change your Mail or Internet settings afterwards. I'm still quite irritated with Apple for choosing to remove the Internet PrefPane, and wish more people would e-mail Apple about this. Hopefully with enough negative commentary on this decision, this PrefPane would return.
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Actually, BitTorrent was created by Bram Cohen (not Brian). You can find his website here.
It's really up to you. You may want to wait until Apple starts putting out hardware with Intel inside, but either way, I don't think that the fear of viruses should be an incentive to avoid considering a Mac. Viruses and insecurities are Windows features that should make you look into alternatives.
There are tons of positive reasons to look into buying a Mac: stability, more secure by design, superior search features, more quality bundled software (iMovie, iPhoto, etc.), native PDF handling, good choice of browsers (I use Firefox, but Safari is also a nice browser, as is Camino), scriptability (Automator, Applescript, shell scripts), graphically superior GUI, and hundreds of other items that aren't readily coming to mind.
Seriously, what out of the box version of Windows allows you to safely host web content (IIS doesn't count, and as far I am aware only ships with the 'server' versions of Windows), login remotely, or transfer files with SFTP?
I was a big fan of Dunn when he played for the Buccaneers. It's nice to see that not only is he a good player, he's also willing to donate part of his salary to help others.
Professional sports (and other handsomely paid professions) could use more people like this.
Seriously, this is still there, and I use it on multiple platforms. It's under the Tab menu, about a third of the way down, "Undo Close Tab". Or you can select from a list of recently closed tabs to re-open, one item below that ("Recent Closed Tabs").
On windows, the shortcut is Ctrl-Shift-Z for "Undo Close Tab", and Alt-R for "Recent Closed Tabs".
if you haven't tried it already, you may want to look into VLC. IMO, it's a much more capable player than Mplayer, with builtin support for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc., and can play DVDs, VCDs, as well as a number of streaming formats.
i think the biggest plus for me is that it's capable of switching the audio track playing, and can handle video files with included subtitles and most external subtitle formats, so it's great for watching multi-language rips.
and in my experience, the playlist feature is far more stable in VLC than Mplayer OS X.
you can find it at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
disclaimer: i have no involvement with VLC other than using it far, far too much. @.~
I've read a lot of nonsense lately about how Microsoft products are superior to Open Source offerings, because Microsoft is committed to interoperability. Unfortunately, from my personal experience with Microsoft products this seems to be absolutely contrary to reality.
When I used Outlook and Microsoft's IME to send e-mail in Japanese, I was absolutely unable to import my saved e-mail from a previous version of Outlook to the (then) current one...Outlook refused to recognize the files. The solution? Use Netscape's mail client to import my mail from the old version of Outlook, then export it for Outlook.
At work we've tried repeatedly to use a data merge between Word and Excel (on Windows 2000 and XP) to generate forms in Word, and in two different versions of Office, we continually get random cases where, instead of having the integer that is in the Excel spreadsheet appear in the merged Word document, it picks up a random decimal, usually to about 9 decimal places. Yet when I create the same merge at home, on my Mac, it works almost flawlessly...as long as I replace any dates in the Excel spreadsheet, as they become an apparently random month and day, years in the future.
It's also been my experience that Word documents are notoriously incompatible between Word on different platforms and versions of Word, despite having identical copies of the font(s) used on each machine.
Yet perhaps the most interesting example of incompatibility has to be Internet Explorer. Without testing pages that use standards that IE refuses to support, I've seen the same HTML be misrendered in ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WAYS on each version/platform of IE tested. If IE for Mac breaks the page in one way, IE 5 and 6 on various versions of Windows can be counted on to mis-render the page in exciting and new variations. Yet Mozilla's family of browsers can be counted on to render the same code consistently, regardless of platform.
How exactly do you rationalize Microsoft's claims for interoperability?
i'm kind of surprised that no-one else has mentioned this, but Piro's excellent TabBrowser Extensions for Mozilla/Firebird/etc. includes this, as well as a ton of other options to greatly enhance tabbed browsing.
personally, i've yet to find a browser that compares to Firefox with AdBlock and TBE.
Somewhat tangential, but pertaining to the IE parallel: Apple did choose to follow Microsoft's lead with Internet Explorer, with Safari/Mail.app in 10.3 (Panther). while you can delete iTunes, and have no problems with playing music, if you opt to delete either Mail or Safari, it becomes impossible to change your Mail or Internet settings afterwards. I'm still quite irritated with Apple for choosing to remove the Internet PrefPane, and wish more people would e-mail Apple about this. Hopefully with enough negative commentary on this decision, this PrefPane would return.