If your XP box is working for you then it is better to get a Mac mini or an iPhone as an accessory for your XP box rather than paying money for Vista and then using it to destroy your XP box.
An XP box plus a Vista upgrade equals a computer that can't run iTunes, whereas an XP box plus Mac mini upgrade gives you two iTunes systems that represent the entire mainstream computing experience right now. When you compare what you can do with both an XP box and a Mac it is much more than Vista alone.
Mac mini is only $200 more than Windows Vista Ultimate and Mac mini includes the hardware and remote control. That is a lot more value than a Vista DVD and a weekend installing and limping along for a few months waiting on a handful of drivers. Ugh.
The Microsoft stuff is not architected in a modular way. Bill Gates said recently a major feature of Vista is "layers" which will enable them to update some components in isolation from others.
> Obviously you've never done any development on the two OS's.
> WinXP is NOT exactly the same as Win2K. They finally got around to fixing some > of the memory leaks, and memory allocation bugs in WinXP.
> Our 3D convertors (compiled with MSVS.net) allocates various memory sizes, with the total > sizes being around a Gig. On the exact same set of hardware, Win 2K will return NULL on malloc, > where as XP will return the allocated memory.
Wow those are dramatic differences for an operating system that is almost 2 years more recent.
There is no reasonable defense for Clippy. It is wrong in every single way. Had Microsoft taken that interface and put it onto an instant messaging client then maybe you got something. Otherwise it is just wrong in every single way. Whatever Clippy was going to ask you it ought to already know or be able to figure out on its own and do the right thing without interrupting you. Any time that a UI interrupts the user that is a major failure. That is like a band having to stop mid-song and start again, or a movie print breaking midway and the house lights coming up. Especially in a text editor where supposedly the user is focusing on the content of what they are typing, it could be a letter to a dead soldier's family and "Hi! I notice you're writing a business letter! Would you like to make it look prettier?" That is a major disaster in a product demo that would never survive actual competition. It is embarrassing for Microsoft that writers run from Word like it has viruses... oh, wait.
The ribbon should be optional in the first version, duh. It doesn't matter how much testing they did, the real test is a release. By the time they release the next version of MS Office then all of the apps can feature an even more mature ribbon as the sole interface.
They "design" their products by focus group. They brag about it, as if that is how you get customer or user feedback, feeding people donuts and asking them if they like stuff that's shiny. Meanwhile, out in the field their actual users are hurting for the basics and getting false negatives on their product activation codes.
When talking about Microsoft's software development, it really helps to drop the marketing names and use the version numbers.
1995 Windows v4.0 (the first real Windows GUI) 1998 Windows v4.1 (now includes Internet Explorer) 2000 Windows v5.0 (bottom-up rewrite on NT, but not ready for all users yet... see Windows ME) 2001 Windows v5.1 (bottom-up rewrite on NT, now for all users, no more DOS versions, NT is now as good as DOS in every way) 2007 Windows v6.0 (world's largest and most highly-anticipated security patch, plus immature new GUI with outrageous hardware reqs)
The problem I think they are having is that they don't ever build anything with enough quality that they can iterate on it. They shipped Windows Vista v1.0 instead of shipping a true Windows v6.0 with six generations of steady evolutionary advancement in features and functionality.
> And, by the way, Xerox's Page Description Language (PDL) used to typeset documents with its tags, etc., > was the precursor to HTML. We owe a lot to PARC.
No, that's bullshit.
HTML is based on SGML, which is older than PARC.
PDL is the precursor to PostScript and then PDF, not HTML.
Further, HTML and the World Wide Web were created by Tim Berners-Lee alone on a NeXT workstation (co-designed by Steve Jobs) using NeXT's object-oriented rapid development tools (object-oriented programming being the "other" thing that Steve Jobs bought at PARC) which he credits for enabling him to even attempt to do the project because TBL is a physicist, not a coder.
And Adobe was founded to do two things: make Mac software, and sell PostScript, because the guy who made it was one of Adobe's founders, who used to work at PARC.
> Based on past experience this of course will not last, but the point is there are exploits for OSX, even if we only count the > current version. Anyone going around saying that 'there are zero exploits for OSX' is either ignorant, delusional or in denial.
First of all, you need to look up the word "exploit"... I do not think it means what you think it means.
How you can imply that a Mac user might be "ignorant, delusional, or in denial" about security when BILL FUCKING GATES HIMSELF IN THE VERY ATTACHED ARTICLE THAT WE ARE DISCUSSING GOES OFF THE RAILS COMPLETELY ABOUT WINDOW SECURITY.
> Both Microsoft and I are in complete agreement that it is a security update to the Vista December 2005 CTP and Beta 1.
You're killing me... what you're implying is that because Vista is now out of beta it is also bug-free. When has that every been true about any product, let alone a Microsoft one?
Bill Gates says here that the security in Vista is so comprehensive that it took Microsoft the same amount of time to make it as it took Apple to copy all of Vista's other features. He says he dares the world to crack The Windows Machine even once a month.
And yet they had to ship a Security Update to Vista Beta 1. How did a bug so serious that it required a BETA NON-PRODUCTION OS be patched in the field get through this 5 year Security Development LifeCycle?
And if one bug can get through and require patching in Beta 1, surely there's one for the release right? Maybe one waiting in there that won't be found until SP1, or SP2?
I mean, they never ran out of bugs for us before. Why now?
On the very day that Windows was released, known Windows-apologist and IT turnip George Ou managed to cause a Vista machine to trash a folder and then empty the trash by recording the voice commands for that into an MP3 and putting it into a Web page. Why isn't this possible on Mac OS X, which has had voice commands since Mac OS 9? Because in Apple's version of that feature, you have a password that you have to say to activate the commands. So if your Mac is named "Bruce" you set that word to "Bruce" and then you go "Bruce, empty the Trash" and the trash is emptied, but if you go "empty the trash" nothing happens. If you download an audio file or go to a Web page with Flash audio and it says "empty the trash" your trash doesn't empty. Not so on Windows Vista. If you turn on the voice commands then it is all fair game. If somebody walks by behind you while you're working and goes "empty the trash!" then your trash will empty.
Microsoft already said they're not going to fix this.
That only goes to show what a low-quality "Apple Bug" a bug in Unsanity APE is for the MOAB guys. The number of copies of APE that are running in enterprise or production environments is probably 1 and that guy deserves what he gets.
Unsanity is the furthest thing from where MOAB should have been... it is not made by Apple, it is not bundled with Macs, it is not a tool but rather an interface hack, it uses non-standard API's, and it is not even particularly popular. The idea that the bugs in APE have anything to do with the Mac platform or fitness of same for any kind of purpose is absurd.
> I agree, but I consider jobs the ultimate sale's man. nothing more. Gates is one of the great business men of our time.
Yes, Gates is one of the great business men of our time. He signed a killer contract with IBM at one point and the rest is history. He went from rich kid to rich man overnight.
You are wrong about Steve Jobs, though, he is an awful salesman. He is a terrible, terrible salesman. A good salesman can sell anything, be it life insurance or kitchen appliances or what-have-you. If you ask them why they sell stuff they will look at you like why do you breathe? But the only things Steve Jobs can sell are things he's passionate about, and the only things he's passionate about are things that are well-designed through and through. If he weren't Apple CEO, if he had never founded Apple, it's easy to imagine him designing beautiful products at company A for a decent salary rather than selling shitty products for company B and making huge amounts of money. He's the most designery Silicon Valley guy, not the most salesy.
> John Hodgeman is great and people like him better than the Mac guy.
Bill Gates is too down about being beat to see that Hodgeman is stealing the show. It's weird when people knock the Mac guy for being smug or something because he is eminently modest. The PC is not getting mocked or torn down by the Mac... the PC is just struggling to get by in a technological world for which he is unprepared. If you are a Mac user you feel sympathy for poor PC but if you are Bill Gates you are like "stop pointing out reality, I'm trying to be delusional here."
> the Mac would be dead if it weren't for professional users in graphics and publishing during the "dark days."
Duh the PC would be dead if it weren't for professional business users and hobbyists.
Nokia would be dead if it weren't for cell phone users.
The Mac is not popular in graphics and publishing or music and audio because it is pretty. In fact in the "dark days" it was as ugly as anything else. It's because the system is designed for the needs of graphics and publishing and music and audio. There is a full-scale digital audio mixer in the core of Mac OS X (CoreAudio) and a full-scale color management system built-in and running so all you have to do is install Photoshop and you're seeing your documents in the right color space. Adding this stuff to Windows is expensive when it's even possible. Configuring it is hard whereas in so many cases on the Mac, Apple has already done that for you.
> You can tell a magpie from the relatively shallow reasons for their liking of the Mac. If you dig deeper regarding why they > like the Mac, the answers pretty much dry up after "ease of use" and "iPhoto" and tend to peter out in the "oooh, shiny" > territory. I personally could and often do give them much better reasons for liking their Mac than they personally have, > such as the solid underlying OS and its clean architecture (as opposed to the utter and total mess that were the pre-X versions), > and its nice and seamless scriptability, amongst other things.
If you asked my brother, who is a Nurse, why he likes his Mac, he can't tell you any technical reason at all. He isn't a computer geek in the slightest. He doesn't know about the Unix, he doesn't script so he doesn't care about that, and he struggles to use iPhoto sometimes. However he can see the SYMBOL of the inner technical excellence of the Mac in the fit and finish of the whole product, in the ports that are all in one place with no pieces hanging out, and in the shiny parts also. If you ask him why he likes his Mac he'll run his fingers over it lovingly and tell you about the light-up keys and you'll call him a "magpie."
However the real reason he uses a Mac is because he struggled so much with a PC, just trying to do college work with it, that finally I sent him an iMac just so I wouldn't have to hear him read another Windows error to me over the phone. Since then he loves computing and he doesn't dread doing online learning or having to produce a paper or a presentation for work. But he doesn't think in IT terms of productivity and whatnot. If you ask him about his Mac he'll tell you it's slick and he loves it and you'll think it's because it's shiny but what you really should notice is that A NON-TECHNICAL USER LOVES THEIR COMPUTER and gets stuff done with it. He can't tell you why it's stable, but the fact that it doesn't crash makes him trust it and admire it as a useful tool.
Similarly, I remember when Scot Hacker, a tech writer who wrote about BeOS back in the day, switched to Mac OS X and at some point while "moving in" to his Mac, he decided to move all of his MP3's to another location in the file system. Then when he launched iTunes, he expected iTunes to go "hey, where's the music?" but instead iTunes knew where it was because Mac apps typically track files both by name and by a file system ID number, so even though the entire music library now had a different name and was in a different file location, iTunes knew those were the same files because they all have unique ID's. He thought this was some slick iTunes programming, but what he had really hit on was a secret feature of the Mac that causes a lot of stuff to "just work" on the Mac that doesn't elsewhere. You can move stuff around a Mac disk all day and not break anything. You can move a running application to another file system location, you can move files that you're editing in an application, you can rename files you have open in an application and go back to that app and the renamed file is still open. All of these things sound like absolutely MAD things to do to COMPUTER NERDS but that is the shit that users are doing with their systems and that's why many users love their Macs but they can't explain this to you other than to say "it just works". These users sit down at Windows and move a file that they have open in an application and error, error, error and then they call a geek and the geek goes "WTF were you doing?" and can't imagine why you wouldn't have KNOWN that you have to close a file before you rename it and move it somewhere else.
Most of my competition in graphics and publishing here in the San Francisco Bay Area is using Macs and we're all getting a shitload done compared to the Windows people... that's my point. The Windows people are already sticking out for their funky decision to do art with a typewriter and then they turn in stuff that you would just never do on a Mac where you can see the file system, where you have AppleScript to easily automate repetitive stuff, and where a color management system is built into the OS. It is hard to explain the difference, but you see the work and you just know. It is like you have to do archaeology to get the juice out.
I've had Windows users ask me at Photoshop conferences: "what image editor do you use when you're not running Photoshop?" and I'm like "why would I not be running Photoshop?" and they tell me "system resources" and I say "I got 2+ GB RAM since 1999, that's enough to run Photoshop 24/7 365 as nature intended" and they are FLOORED that you would do such a thing. I am FLOORED that someone with Photoshop skills would ever Quit Photoshop and then they want to open images in something else? Same goes for when somebody talks about "Photoshop startup times" and I'm like "it is in my login items I am getting a coffee while that stuff happens... how long does it take?" there is a distinct lack of focus on Photoshop amongst Photoshop-Windows users. It's almost like their computers are interrupting them all the time or something, breaking their concentration.
> PHP, Apache and Ruby (IIRC, my experience with OSX is very limited) and I've seen some security alerts regarding all of them > since last release of OSX. I bet you could find some local exploits in them
Apple doesn't write their own PHP or Apache from scratch. They are the same tools you find on other Unix systems. They are open source and well-supported and mature and when a flaw is found in them, Apple patches it the same as other Unix vendors. One of Apple's security updates over the past 5 years was only to patch SFTP or maybe it was curl. But what you see is that as the system moves from 10.4.3 to 10.4.4 and 10.4.5 they will update the Unix tools to keep them current.
> There was also 5.1 SP1, but besides that, there have also been numerous updates ("hotfixes") pushed down on a regular basis > (I think it's called "patch tuesday"). If you count all those, theres probably been hundreds of versions.
Hundreds of nearly-random untested, insecure configurations isn't the same thing as a well designed, modern system being iterated on regularly in response to changing security concerns. Also, the fact that Software Update actually WORKS means that the community can move together off of 10.4.0 or some other ".0" which is the most untested version. When you install Mac OS X the first thing it does is just update itself (after asking for go ahead) and it doesn't need any activation or fucking around to do it, so it actually happens. You go up to systems "in the wild" and you find that they're running 10.4.8 not 10.4.0 or 10.4.3, and they have all the security updates. That's without any IT... these are systems that are being taken care of by plain users and they're patched and up-to-date and running a stable tested configuration.
I have Windows XP Home SP1 with Explorer 6 running in a window on a Mac for Web site testing and I wanted to update to Explorer 7 on a duplicate of that disk, again for testing. The Windows Update site is a disaster... in installs ActiveX controls and then even after that it never knows who you are, what you're doing, what your system is or what it's doing. It takes forever to come up with updates, and then it installed 60 updates and after a restart I thought I would be running SP2 and Explorer 7 but it was still SP1 and Explorer 6. So I went back to Windows Update where it took an hour to tell me it can't figure out what updates I need so I should open a support incident. This is a couple of hours of this thing chugging away and I can't get Explorer 7 it is a disaster.
At this point, you ought to be able to point a Windows XP Home SP1 computer with Explorer 6 at update.microsoft.com and in less than three steps you should be running SP2 and Explorer 7 and all the security updates. You can install Panther on a system right now and the first thing you'll see on the Desktop will be a little Software Update window with 23 things in there (from the whole life of Panther) and if you say go within a short time you'll be running the very best Panther configuration possible. Windows users are BEGGING for that.
Macs have cameras built-in. That is the point of the commercial. Every MacBook and MacBook Pro has a camera in it already. Every iMac since the iMac G5 about two years ago also. For Mac Pros there is an Apple camera that attaches with any one of about 5 different mounting kits it has in it, including magnets, so you can set it up so it looks great and is solidly attached so you can aim the camera or just use it without it bouncing around.
Apple is well within their rights to pick on shitty cameras and most especially their terrible mounting systems. They make the best internal cameras and the best add-on. Go look at them.
> OK, how about the ad that claims that the PC needs special drivers for the camera, but the Mac doesn't?
No that ad is not just about drivers. Once you are just talking to the camera, that is not success. It is only the extremely low standards of the PC industry that have you thinking this is about drivers. You're saying "hey, Windows can connect to a camera! Job done!" no that is not really anything at all. A computer that can hook onto the Internet but doesn't have a Web browser is not going to work for most people even if you can ping stuff all day long.
On a Mac, when you plug in a camera, iPhoto offers to import the photos, as easily as importing a CD into iTunes. Once they are in there, you can do basic corrections like Red Eye, rotations if necessary, apply keywords, and then archive to CD or DVD, send over the Internet for printing, even design a photo book, all within iPhoto, all with the same UI and ease of use as iTunes. You're in this one window with all your photographs and you can move them around and make albums and slideshows, like iTunes playlists. To the user, there is iPhoto and there is the camera. There are no drivers, there is no software to install... I bought a digital camera last year and threw all the discs that came with it in the trash and took some shots and then plugged it into my Mac and boom you are in iPhoto and you're working with photographs. There was no configuration. You don't even have to look at your camera's memory as a disk or work with it in any way other than as photographs.
Also, on a Mac you expect to open any professional image or movie or audio format and it just plays. This even extends to Camera Raw images from any manufacturer. So even though I hadn't installed any software on my Mac for my Nikon camera, I could still open its camera raw images on my Mac. These are not real digital images, but rather camera sensor data and all the camera's settings, so it is not a small thing to make them just work.
So you can clearly copy files from one disk to another with a PC... even if one disk is in a camera. However on a Mac you can do photography... working with the photographs as files and disks is optional and secondary. I would bet you there are many iPhoto users who would be surprised to find out their photos are stored as files, same as many iTunes users would be surprised that each song is a file. The interface enables you to see photographs and audio/video clips instead of files and folders.
> The point, of course, is that it takes being the kind of person that wants a C++ GUI programming guide to actually enjoy > and really understand Windows.
No, the PC is not a user. He is a PC. The point is that C++ is what the PC is good at, what he's done historically, and what the PC knows. He can't conceive of making a photo book because he doesn't have that software. He comes with C++ developer tools but he doesn't come with iLife.
We the users are watching this drama play out, and we can easily see which is the right tool for the job.
A lot of people don't understand the concept of software, huh? You simply can't explain to them that there is a hardware thing and a software thing, or that each computer could conceivably contain an entirely unique software configuration. It is hard to explain to many users that one iMac and another might have different software installed if they look the same on the outside. If you are knowledgeable about computers you might find the idea that you can take a computer out of the box and THEN identify, procure, install a range of software tools, and only THEN get down to work to be totally awesome. Most people don't think that way, though. Whatever their computer can do when they first take it out of the box and turn it on, that is what it's going to get used for. Not just because they don't know how to actually install software, but because they don't know what software is and they don't know how to judge whether they might want to replace iPhoto with a third-party solution.
It is tempting for a technical user to look down on the above-mentioned user, but keep in mind that person might be a doctor, artist, lawyer, firefighter... they may be very accomplished in their non-Computer Science field, and they may need to do Web and email and they need stability and security and they need a complete set of tools if they are going to get good results from their digital camera and DVD burner and blog. That stuff has to be in there already for this user.
Now imagine that you are the above user watching the C++ commercial and you realize "oh wow, some computers are made for photography, and some are made for programming" and sometimes that is accompanied by thinking "hey, the photography computer is for ME" because lots of people suffer under the illusion that all computers are for programming, all are made for very technical people only and everybody else has to suffer and suffer as they use them even to do basic things.
Fundamentally, what's behind this commercial is the fact that the basic software configuration and capabilities of the average Mac and PC are very different and people should know that before they buy, no matter what they buy. We are used to seeing computer spec sheets that have RAM and CPU speeds and such and we list software titles, but really what is more and more important is the stuff the box can actually do without further configuration. We all know you can radically reconfigure a Mac or PC due to tens of thousands of third-party applications but that doesn't mean that the initial configuration of software shouldn't be carefully designed, top quality stuff that acts as a foundation for whatever you add or replace. Having iLife there teaches people all about digital media and sometimes that is how they fall in love with movie making or photography, because they already have the basic tools in an easy to use high-quality versions. After a couple of years of photography you might replace iPhoto with Aperture or another tool or not but you'll never have no photo management tools at all.
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If your XP box is working for you then it is better to get a Mac mini or an iPhone as an accessory for your XP box rather than paying money for Vista and then using it to destroy your XP box.
An XP box plus a Vista upgrade equals a computer that can't run iTunes, whereas an XP box plus Mac mini upgrade gives you two iTunes systems that represent the entire mainstream computing experience right now. When you compare what you can do with both an XP box and a Mac it is much more than Vista alone.
Mac mini is only $200 more than Windows Vista Ultimate and Mac mini includes the hardware and remote control. That is a lot more value than a Vista DVD and a weekend installing and limping along for a few months waiting on a handful of drivers. Ugh.
Windows Me Too ... whatever Steve Jobs can do Bill Gates can do better.
The Microsoft stuff is not architected in a modular way. Bill Gates said recently a major feature of Vista is "layers" which will enable them to update some components in isolation from others.
If Leopard has a hypervisor or a new user experience for consumers then Bill Gates is going to be hopping mad that Apple copied him again.
> Obviously you've never done any development on the two OS's.
.net) allocates various memory sizes, with the total
> WinXP is NOT exactly the same as Win2K. They finally got around to fixing some
> of the memory leaks, and memory allocation bugs in WinXP.
> Our 3D convertors (compiled with MSVS
> sizes being around a Gig. On the exact same set of hardware, Win 2K will return NULL on malloc,
> where as XP will return the allocated memory.
Wow those are dramatic differences for an operating system that is almost 2 years more recent.
> Yes, just like XP Home refuses to upgrade over Windows 2000. This is neither new nor unexpected
You just said:
- same old problem
- nothing new
- nothing unexpected
That is a typical Vista review from a major IT publication.
There is no reasonable defense for Clippy. It is wrong in every single way. Had Microsoft taken that interface and put it onto an instant messaging client then maybe you got something. Otherwise it is just wrong in every single way. Whatever Clippy was going to ask you it ought to already know or be able to figure out on its own and do the right thing without interrupting you. Any time that a UI interrupts the user that is a major failure. That is like a band having to stop mid-song and start again, or a movie print breaking midway and the house lights coming up. Especially in a text editor where supposedly the user is focusing on the content of what they are typing, it could be a letter to a dead soldier's family and "Hi! I notice you're writing a business letter! Would you like to make it look prettier?" That is a major disaster in a product demo that would never survive actual competition. It is embarrassing for Microsoft that writers run from Word like it has viruses ... oh, wait.
The ribbon should be optional in the first version, duh. It doesn't matter how much testing they did, the real test is a release. By the time they release the next version of MS Office then all of the apps can feature an even more mature ribbon as the sole interface.
They "design" their products by focus group. They brag about it, as if that is how you get customer or user feedback, feeding people donuts and asking them if they like stuff that's shiny. Meanwhile, out in the field their actual users are hurting for the basics and getting false negatives on their product activation codes.
When talking about Microsoft's software development, it really helps to drop the marketing names and use the version numbers.
... see Windows ME)
1995 Windows v4.0 (the first real Windows GUI)
1998 Windows v4.1 (now includes Internet Explorer)
2000 Windows v5.0 (bottom-up rewrite on NT, but not ready for all users yet
2001 Windows v5.1 (bottom-up rewrite on NT, now for all users, no more DOS versions, NT is now as good as DOS in every way)
2007 Windows v6.0 (world's largest and most highly-anticipated security patch, plus immature new GUI with outrageous hardware reqs)
The problem I think they are having is that they don't ever build anything with enough quality that they can iterate on it. They shipped Windows Vista v1.0 instead of shipping a true Windows v6.0 with six generations of steady evolutionary advancement in features and functionality.
> So what? Nobody is denying Xerox had the basic concepts.
The mouse is like 20 years older than Xerox. Computer research didn't start there, neither did the GUI, or hypertext.
> And, by the way, Xerox's Page Description Language (PDL) used to typeset documents with its tags, etc.,
> was the precursor to HTML. We owe a lot to PARC.
No, that's bullshit.
HTML is based on SGML, which is older than PARC.
PDL is the precursor to PostScript and then PDF, not HTML.
Further, HTML and the World Wide Web were created by Tim Berners-Lee alone on a NeXT workstation (co-designed by Steve Jobs) using NeXT's object-oriented rapid development tools (object-oriented programming being the "other" thing that Steve Jobs bought at PARC) which he credits for enabling him to even attempt to do the project because TBL is a physicist, not a coder.
And Adobe was founded to do two things: make Mac software, and sell PostScript, because the guy who made it was one of Adobe's founders, who used to work at PARC.
> Whether or not this will eventually translate to a bunch of things affecting Mac users - time will tell.
So far it's been 23 years and it's going pretty well. I think the Mac was only networked for 22 years of that, though.
Mac OS X actually has fewer viruses (0) than Classic Mac OS (2 - one for Word, one for Excel, in the VBA).
> Based on past experience this of course will not last, but the point is there are exploits for OSX, even if we only count the
... I do not think it means what you think it means.
> current version. Anyone going around saying that 'there are zero exploits for OSX' is either ignorant, delusional or in denial.
First of all, you need to look up the word "exploit"
How you can imply that a Mac user might be "ignorant, delusional, or in denial" about security when BILL FUCKING GATES HIMSELF IN THE VERY ATTACHED ARTICLE THAT WE ARE DISCUSSING GOES OFF THE RAILS COMPLETELY ABOUT WINDOW SECURITY.
> Both Microsoft and I are in complete agreement that it is a security update to the Vista December 2005 CTP and Beta 1.
... what you're implying is that because Vista is now out of beta it is also bug-free. When has that every been true about any product, let alone a Microsoft one?
You're killing me
Bill Gates says here that the security in Vista is so comprehensive that it took Microsoft the same amount of time to make it as it took Apple to copy all of Vista's other features. He says he dares the world to crack The Windows Machine even once a month.
And yet they had to ship a Security Update to Vista Beta 1. How did a bug so serious that it required a BETA NON-PRODUCTION OS be patched in the field get through this 5 year Security Development LifeCycle?
And if one bug can get through and require patching in Beta 1, surely there's one for the release right? Maybe one waiting in there that won't be found until SP1, or SP2?
I mean, they never ran out of bugs for us before. Why now?
On the very day that Windows was released, known Windows-apologist and IT turnip George Ou managed to cause a Vista machine to trash a folder and then empty the trash by recording the voice commands for that into an MP3 and putting it into a Web page. Why isn't this possible on Mac OS X, which has had voice commands since Mac OS 9? Because in Apple's version of that feature, you have a password that you have to say to activate the commands. So if your Mac is named "Bruce" you set that word to "Bruce" and then you go "Bruce, empty the Trash" and the trash is emptied, but if you go "empty the trash" nothing happens. If you download an audio file or go to a Web page with Flash audio and it says "empty the trash" your trash doesn't empty. Not so on Windows Vista. If you turn on the voice commands then it is all fair game. If somebody walks by behind you while you're working and goes "empty the trash!" then your trash will empty.
Microsoft already said they're not going to fix this.
That only goes to show what a low-quality "Apple Bug" a bug in Unsanity APE is for the MOAB guys. The number of copies of APE that are running in enterprise or production environments is probably 1 and that guy deserves what he gets.
... it is not made by Apple, it is not bundled with Macs, it is not a tool but rather an interface hack, it uses non-standard API's, and it is not even particularly popular. The idea that the bugs in APE have anything to do with the Mac platform or fitness of same for any kind of purpose is absurd.
Unsanity is the furthest thing from where MOAB should have been
> I agree, but I consider jobs the ultimate sale's man. nothing more. Gates is one of the great business men of our time.
Yes, Gates is one of the great business men of our time. He signed a killer contract with IBM at one point and the rest is history. He went from rich kid to rich man overnight.
You are wrong about Steve Jobs, though, he is an awful salesman. He is a terrible, terrible salesman. A good salesman can sell anything, be it life insurance or kitchen appliances or what-have-you. If you ask them why they sell stuff they will look at you like why do you breathe? But the only things Steve Jobs can sell are things he's passionate about, and the only things he's passionate about are things that are well-designed through and through. If he weren't Apple CEO, if he had never founded Apple, it's easy to imagine him designing beautiful products at company A for a decent salary rather than selling shitty products for company B and making huge amounts of money. He's the most designery Silicon Valley guy, not the most salesy.
> John Hodgeman is great and people like him better than the Mac guy.
... the PC is just struggling to get by in a technological world for which he is unprepared. If you are a Mac user you feel sympathy for poor PC but if you are Bill Gates you are like "stop pointing out reality, I'm trying to be delusional here."
Bill Gates is too down about being beat to see that Hodgeman is stealing the show. It's weird when people knock the Mac guy for being smug or something because he is eminently modest. The PC is not getting mocked or torn down by the Mac
> the Mac would be dead if it weren't for professional users in graphics and publishing during the "dark days."
Duh the PC would be dead if it weren't for professional business users and hobbyists.
Nokia would be dead if it weren't for cell phone users.
The Mac is not popular in graphics and publishing or music and audio because it is pretty. In fact in the "dark days" it was as ugly as anything else. It's because the system is designed for the needs of graphics and publishing and music and audio. There is a full-scale digital audio mixer in the core of Mac OS X (CoreAudio) and a full-scale color management system built-in and running so all you have to do is install Photoshop and you're seeing your documents in the right color space. Adding this stuff to Windows is expensive when it's even possible. Configuring it is hard whereas in so many cases on the Mac, Apple has already done that for you.
> You can tell a magpie from the relatively shallow reasons for their liking of the Mac. If you dig deeper regarding why they
> like the Mac, the answers pretty much dry up after "ease of use" and "iPhoto" and tend to peter out in the "oooh, shiny"
> territory. I personally could and often do give them much better reasons for liking their Mac than they personally have,
> such as the solid underlying OS and its clean architecture (as opposed to the utter and total mess that were the pre-X versions),
> and its nice and seamless scriptability, amongst other things.
If you asked my brother, who is a Nurse, why he likes his Mac, he can't tell you any technical reason at all. He isn't a computer geek in the slightest. He doesn't know about the Unix, he doesn't script so he doesn't care about that, and he struggles to use iPhoto sometimes. However he can see the SYMBOL of the inner technical excellence of the Mac in the fit and finish of the whole product, in the ports that are all in one place with no pieces hanging out, and in the shiny parts also. If you ask him why he likes his Mac he'll run his fingers over it lovingly and tell you about the light-up keys and you'll call him a "magpie."
However the real reason he uses a Mac is because he struggled so much with a PC, just trying to do college work with it, that finally I sent him an iMac just so I wouldn't have to hear him read another Windows error to me over the phone. Since then he loves computing and he doesn't dread doing online learning or having to produce a paper or a presentation for work. But he doesn't think in IT terms of productivity and whatnot. If you ask him about his Mac he'll tell you it's slick and he loves it and you'll think it's because it's shiny but what you really should notice is that A NON-TECHNICAL USER LOVES THEIR COMPUTER and gets stuff done with it. He can't tell you why it's stable, but the fact that it doesn't crash makes him trust it and admire it as a useful tool.
Similarly, I remember when Scot Hacker, a tech writer who wrote about BeOS back in the day, switched to Mac OS X and at some point while "moving in" to his Mac, he decided to move all of his MP3's to another location in the file system. Then when he launched iTunes, he expected iTunes to go "hey, where's the music?" but instead iTunes knew where it was because Mac apps typically track files both by name and by a file system ID number, so even though the entire music library now had a different name and was in a different file location, iTunes knew those were the same files because they all have unique ID's. He thought this was some slick iTunes programming, but what he had really hit on was a secret feature of the Mac that causes a lot of stuff to "just work" on the Mac that doesn't elsewhere. You can move stuff around a Mac disk all day and not break anything. You can move a running application to another file system location, you can move files that you're editing in an application, you can rename files you have open in an application and go back to that app and the renamed file is still open. All of these things sound like absolutely MAD things to do to COMPUTER NERDS but that is the shit that users are doing with their systems and that's why many users love their Macs but they can't explain this to you other than to say "it just works". These users sit down at Windows and move a file that they have open in an application and error, error, error and then they call a geek and the geek goes "WTF were you doing?" and can't imagine why you wouldn't have KNOWN that you have to close a file before you rename it and move it somewhere else.
Bill Gates doesn't get any of this, of course.
Most of my competition in graphics and publishing here in the San Francisco Bay Area is using Macs and we're all getting a shitload done compared to the Windows people ... that's my point. The Windows people are already sticking out for their funky decision to do art with a typewriter and then they turn in stuff that you would just never do on a Mac where you can see the file system, where you have AppleScript to easily automate repetitive stuff, and where a color management system is built into the OS. It is hard to explain the difference, but you see the work and you just know. It is like you have to do archaeology to get the juice out.
... how long does it take?" there is a distinct lack of focus on Photoshop amongst Photoshop-Windows users. It's almost like their computers are interrupting them all the time or something, breaking their concentration.
I've had Windows users ask me at Photoshop conferences: "what image editor do you use when you're not running Photoshop?" and I'm like "why would I not be running Photoshop?" and they tell me "system resources" and I say "I got 2+ GB RAM since 1999, that's enough to run Photoshop 24/7 365 as nature intended" and they are FLOORED that you would do such a thing. I am FLOORED that someone with Photoshop skills would ever Quit Photoshop and then they want to open images in something else? Same goes for when somebody talks about "Photoshop startup times" and I'm like "it is in my login items I am getting a coffee while that stuff happens
> PHP, Apache and Ruby (IIRC, my experience with OSX is very limited) and I've seen some security alerts regarding all of them
> since last release of OSX. I bet you could find some local exploits in them
Apple doesn't write their own PHP or Apache from scratch. They are the same tools you find on other Unix systems. They are open source and well-supported and mature and when a flaw is found in them, Apple patches it the same as other Unix vendors. One of Apple's security updates over the past 5 years was only to patch SFTP or maybe it was curl. But what you see is that as the system moves from 10.4.3 to 10.4.4 and 10.4.5 they will update the Unix tools to keep them current.
> There was also 5.1 SP1, but besides that, there have also been numerous updates ("hotfixes") pushed down on a regular basis
... these are systems that are being taken care of by plain users and they're patched and up-to-date and running a stable tested configuration.
... in installs ActiveX controls and then even after that it never knows who you are, what you're doing, what your system is or what it's doing. It takes forever to come up with updates, and then it installed 60 updates and after a restart I thought I would be running SP2 and Explorer 7 but it was still SP1 and Explorer 6. So I went back to Windows Update where it took an hour to tell me it can't figure out what updates I need so I should open a support incident. This is a couple of hours of this thing chugging away and I can't get Explorer 7 it is a disaster.
> (I think it's called "patch tuesday"). If you count all those, theres probably been hundreds of versions.
Hundreds of nearly-random untested, insecure configurations isn't the same thing as a well designed, modern system being iterated on regularly in response to changing security concerns. Also, the fact that Software Update actually WORKS means that the community can move together off of 10.4.0 or some other ".0" which is the most untested version. When you install Mac OS X the first thing it does is just update itself (after asking for go ahead) and it doesn't need any activation or fucking around to do it, so it actually happens. You go up to systems "in the wild" and you find that they're running 10.4.8 not 10.4.0 or 10.4.3, and they have all the security updates. That's without any IT
I have Windows XP Home SP1 with Explorer 6 running in a window on a Mac for Web site testing and I wanted to update to Explorer 7 on a duplicate of that disk, again for testing. The Windows Update site is a disaster
At this point, you ought to be able to point a Windows XP Home SP1 computer with Explorer 6 at update.microsoft.com and in less than three steps you should be running SP2 and Explorer 7 and all the security updates. You can install Panther on a system right now and the first thing you'll see on the Desktop will be a little Software Update window with 23 things in there (from the whole life of Panther) and if you say go within a short time you'll be running the very best Panther configuration possible. Windows users are BEGGING for that.
Macs have cameras built-in. That is the point of the commercial. Every MacBook and MacBook Pro has a camera in it already. Every iMac since the iMac G5 about two years ago also. For Mac Pros there is an Apple camera that attaches with any one of about 5 different mounting kits it has in it, including magnets, so you can set it up so it looks great and is solidly attached so you can aim the camera or just use it without it bouncing around.
... I bought a digital camera last year and threw all the discs that came with it in the trash and took some shots and then plugged it into my Mac and boom you are in iPhoto and you're working with photographs. There was no configuration. You don't even have to look at your camera's memory as a disk or work with it in any way other than as photographs.
... even if one disk is in a camera. However on a Mac you can do photography ... working with the photographs as files and disks is optional and secondary. I would bet you there are many iPhoto users who would be surprised to find out their photos are stored as files, same as many iTunes users would be surprised that each song is a file. The interface enables you to see photographs and audio/video clips instead of files and folders.
Apple is well within their rights to pick on shitty cameras and most especially their terrible mounting systems. They make the best internal cameras and the best add-on. Go look at them.
> OK, how about the ad that claims that the PC needs special drivers for the camera, but the Mac doesn't?
No that ad is not just about drivers. Once you are just talking to the camera, that is not success. It is only the extremely low standards of the PC industry that have you thinking this is about drivers. You're saying "hey, Windows can connect to a camera! Job done!" no that is not really anything at all. A computer that can hook onto the Internet but doesn't have a Web browser is not going to work for most people even if you can ping stuff all day long.
On a Mac, when you plug in a camera, iPhoto offers to import the photos, as easily as importing a CD into iTunes. Once they are in there, you can do basic corrections like Red Eye, rotations if necessary, apply keywords, and then archive to CD or DVD, send over the Internet for printing, even design a photo book, all within iPhoto, all with the same UI and ease of use as iTunes. You're in this one window with all your photographs and you can move them around and make albums and slideshows, like iTunes playlists. To the user, there is iPhoto and there is the camera. There are no drivers, there is no software to install
Also, on a Mac you expect to open any professional image or movie or audio format and it just plays. This even extends to Camera Raw images from any manufacturer. So even though I hadn't installed any software on my Mac for my Nikon camera, I could still open its camera raw images on my Mac. These are not real digital images, but rather camera sensor data and all the camera's settings, so it is not a small thing to make them just work.
So you can clearly copy files from one disk to another with a PC
> The point, of course, is that it takes being the kind of person that wants a C++ GUI programming guide to actually enjoy
... they may be very accomplished in their non-Computer Science field, and they may need to do Web and email and they need stability and security and they need a complete set of tools if they are going to get good results from their digital camera and DVD burner and blog. That stuff has to be in there already for this user.
> and really understand Windows.
No, the PC is not a user. He is a PC. The point is that C++ is what the PC is good at, what he's done historically, and what the PC knows. He can't conceive of making a photo book because he doesn't have that software. He comes with C++ developer tools but he doesn't come with iLife.
We the users are watching this drama play out, and we can easily see which is the right tool for the job.
A lot of people don't understand the concept of software, huh? You simply can't explain to them that there is a hardware thing and a software thing, or that each computer could conceivably contain an entirely unique software configuration. It is hard to explain to many users that one iMac and another might have different software installed if they look the same on the outside. If you are knowledgeable about computers you might find the idea that you can take a computer out of the box and THEN identify, procure, install a range of software tools, and only THEN get down to work to be totally awesome. Most people don't think that way, though. Whatever their computer can do when they first take it out of the box and turn it on, that is what it's going to get used for. Not just because they don't know how to actually install software, but because they don't know what software is and they don't know how to judge whether they might want to replace iPhoto with a third-party solution.
It is tempting for a technical user to look down on the above-mentioned user, but keep in mind that person might be a doctor, artist, lawyer, firefighter
Now imagine that you are the above user watching the C++ commercial and you realize "oh wow, some computers are made for photography, and some are made for programming" and sometimes that is accompanied by thinking "hey, the photography computer is for ME" because lots of people suffer under the illusion that all computers are for programming, all are made for very technical people only and everybody else has to suffer and suffer as they use them even to do basic things.
Fundamentally, what's behind this commercial is the fact that the basic software configuration and capabilities of the average Mac and PC are very different and people should know that before they buy, no matter what they buy. We are used to seeing computer spec sheets that have RAM and CPU speeds and such and we list software titles, but really what is more and more important is the stuff the box can actually do without further configuration. We all know you can radically reconfigure a Mac or PC due to tens of thousands of third-party applications but that doesn't mean that the initial configuration of software shouldn't be carefully designed, top quality stuff that acts as a foundation for whatever you add or replace. Having iLife there teaches people all about digital media and sometimes that is how they fall in love with movie making or photography, because they already have the basic tools in an easy to use high-quality versions. After a couple of years of photography you might replace iPhoto with Aperture or another tool or not but you'll never have no photo management tools at all.