He isn't intentionally spreading FUD... he thinks that is the truth. He spends all his time surrounded by Microsoft people using Microsoft products and all full of the Microsoft passion and slapping each other on the back and throwing chairs around and whatnot. He really is amazed that you fools use OpenBSD with all of its terrible bugs when you could be using MS Windows with all of its rich marketing experiences. Sure, it is fine to implement sudo in UNIX but what good is that because UNIX is old and hard to use. Windows is modern and innovative and made from the best bits on Earth.
It is like the Bush administration. They are not kidding around. They really are out of touch with reality.
The problem is not that Microsoft included an HTML renderer ("mshtml") in their OS. That is a fine thing to do. Mac OS X also has an HTML rendering library ("WebKit") that is used by Safari, iTunes, Help Viewer, Sherlock, and other applications. That is reusable code and it is good technology.
The problem is that Microsoft integrated the Web browser application Internet Explorer with the GUI shell Explorer, thus also making the Web browser application a vital system component. On the Mac, the Web browser application Safari is an entirely separate application from the Dock/Menubar/Spotlight/Finder. If you don't want to use the Safari browser you put it into the Trash and that's that, your system is not affected. You browse the Web with Firefox instead of Safari and everything else is OK. On Windows, you can't quit or uninstall Internet Explorer without also crippling the GUI shell. The problem comes when massive vulnerabilities are found in Internet Explorer and then you want to quit it or uninstall it and find that you can't. You don't use it to browse the Web yet you have to run it on your computer 24/7 in order to browse local files and folders.
The right way for Microsoft to do things would have been for Explorer to use mshtml to render its HTML content, then IE could be uninstalled like any other app. In other words you have a separate Web browser and file browser that both use the same HTML rendering engine. That is 1000 times more secure. The file browser doesn't even have to talk to the Web at all.
If it wasn't for all the geeks fixing their relatives Microsoft PC's then Microsoft would have had to spend some of their cash hoard on making Windows better.
As my friends have switched to Macs they will sometimes still want me to come over and "set it up" and I go over and just hang around while they set it up themselves it is so easy. Then they find the Dock and get into iTunes and there is no looking back. Most of the Mac users I know have never experienced a kernel panic so there is much less user panic.
There are five or ten basic troubleshooting things you can do to a Mac and they are all very easy and all GUI based, and only require the OS boot disc that came with your computer, which has diagnostics and utilities and the Mac OS X installer on there. There is a manual with the computer that shows how to do all the diagnostics with pictures and very concise instructions. AppleCare for an iMac is $160 and for that you can call them up whenever for three years and they help you with anything and fix everything within three days at no charge. There is no Microsoft tells you to call Dell, Dell tells you to call Microsoft thing either.
With Macs starting at $499 and only $1299 for an iMac with Intel Core Duo it is hard to justify spending a lot of time supporting a DOS-based PC. The hours and headaches add up fast and the best you are going to end up with is a DOS-based PC. Another option is a used Mac because it is so easy to start with one used Mac and one Mac OS X Tiger (or previous) disc and in about half an hour you will have an as-new system automatically downloading updates and patches from Apple. There are no licence keys or authorizations or strange configurations or missing drivers. Any G4 with 512MB RAM can run Tiger and that is a lot more system than a DOS-based PC for very little money.
If you replace a 10 year-old Windows 95 system with an iMac with Intel Core Duo then that user should be able to run the iMac until 2016 which is only $129 per year.
Tell them to get Macs. Then your support calls stop and after a while YOU call THEM and see if they are still computing and they tell you about the DVD they just made. This has happened time and time again to me over the past five years. The Windows machines go and suddenly everyone is connected to the Internet all the time and can print all the time and can burn discs all the time and so on, with no phone support at all.
I hate to defend an MS guy, but if you think back to 2001, the Windows 95/98/Me (DOS-based Windows) thing was a major legacy IT nightmare like XP is today. The big push was to finally get your "home" or "consumer" user off of DOS and onto "NT-based" MS Windows XP. This was the start of a new golden era for Microsoft customers, a new modern system designed with the Internet and digital media in mind.
So I can see how an MS guy who is casually supporting a mix of 95/98/Me home users could be all fired up with Microsoft "passion" and basically say to his family "everybody get onto XP and that will be the end of all of our support woes!"
In retrospect right now we know that XP is a pile of shit and that users were in for years and years of outrageous problems so we see it as an upgrade-or-die move where they went from frying pan to fire but I think for this MS guy it was like when Mac OS X came out and a new era was dawning. He was enthusiastic for his family to get off DOS and onto The Windows Experience.
There is an industry standard of security that Microsoft is well below. If MS Windows were in the same league as Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, Solaris, and other UNIX systems then we would have an entirely different situation. MS Windows was simply not well designed or well built and it has not survived the stress tests of the real world. If you buy a new MS PC right now, you start it up and the first thing you do is run Internet Explorer as root and load up the first of many strange Web sites to come. That's not acceptable in 2006. They are making boats that aren't seaworthy.
Keychain encrypts and stores passwords as you work.
If you want to secure you documents, use Disk Utility to create an encrypted disk image and store the documents on there. The process is the same as initializing a disk except instead of a physical disk the data is stored in a single AES-128 encrypted file which when opened and authenticated, mounts as a disk and can be used to store files and folders of any kind. When you Eject the disk all of the data is stored in the single encrypted file. This has been around since Mac OS v7 or maybe even earlier. The features used to be in an application called DiskCopy which was merged with Disk Utility in Mac OS v10.2 or so.
You can also encrypt your whole home folder with a feature called FileVault if you are running Mac OS v10.3 or later. You turn this on and when you are logged out your home folder is stored as a single AES-128 encrypted file. When you are logged in your home folder is decrypted on-the-fly for you transparently. The on-the-fly encryption really has incredible performance.
The key comparison isn't which issues get patched in what priority but whether the vendor gets security or not and whether their systems are being good network citizens or not, whether their customers are generally secure or not during day-to-day use.
From my own experience I see Mac OS X systems running day-in and day-out with very little administration and very few problems and they are patching themselves regularly with a system that children can use. On the other hand, I see Windows systems being cleaned and authorized and patched daily by professionals and five years between major upgrades. On the Mac you have the open-source UNIX core OS ("Darwin") and the kernel xnu which is a far cry from the black box that Windows is sitting on with who knows what going on in there. You can also track GUI applications easily in the Dock and processes in Activity Viewer (or top) so you know just what's going on with the processes on your system. And the application platform on the Mac is fully POSIX permissions savvy and users run as standard or low-grade admin, with no root access at all by default. That is something Microsoft has yet to even roll out.
There are quite a few differences between what Apple and Microsoft are doing with desktop operating systems and security.
> The browser is not decoupled in either Mac OS X or KDE. Both share a very similar > architecture to Windows.
No, that is outrageous bullshit. On this issue Mac OS X / KDE are are polar opposites from Windows.
Mac OS X has a built-in HTML rendering library for developers to utilize in their applications. It is called Webkit and it is based on the open-source KHTML project, which is what KDE uses. It renders HTML to W3C standards and is very lightweight and very fast. Similarly there are libraries for rendering PNG images or AES encryption or AAC encoding. As the HTML renderer is just a system library that any application can use, it is featured prominently in Apple's Safari, Mail, Spotlight, iTunes (Music Store), Sherlock, Help Viewer and probably others. It is also used by third-party applications like feed readers. It's just a library.
Safari utilizes the Webkit library but if you don't want to use Safari as your browser, you can put it in the Trash and the Webkit library is still maintained by the system for other apps. Getting rid of Safari doesn't cause any system issues at all. It is easy to run another browser instead... whatever browser you set as your default is what will be used. Firefox is a clone of Safari and is very easy to drop-in as a replacement. The layout of the buttons and address and search fields is the same and the key shortcuts and many operations are the same as Safari. You can easily forget which browser you're using from time to time if you use both. You can put the two best open-source renderers side-by-side very easily by running Safari and Firefox, which is great for Web development. Firefox for Mac OS X is also just a single icon like most Mac apps so it is easy to install, update, remove. Even a very low-tech user can easily install and use Firefox on Mac OS X. The procedure for a Safari to Firefox transplant on a new iMac is like a short one-page article with a step-by-step with like 5 steps if that and all the most basic GUI actions.
With IE there are special uninstaller tools and many issues surrounding the removal of the browser application itself. And if you don't remove the browser there are issues with the user being able to choose another browser as a default and true replacement for the bundled browser. None of that is the case on Mac OS X. If you set Firefox as you default browser (run Firefox and choose Firefox > Preferences to do so) then that is what the system will use.
> What's the difference between running IE as Administrator, and running any other application as > Administrator? There's no difference, so the point is moot.
There is a difference. A browser spends all day hooking up to arbitrary Web sites and running strange code. It is a little sandbox for remote applications. It is like a window with sealant to keep the malware out, and running it as root is like not having a second pane of glass.
If you don't want to use Safari on your Mac you can pick up the Safari icon with your mouse and put it in the Trash and hit Empty. Hopefully you will have remembered to download Firefox first. The Safari rendering engine (Webkit/KHTML) is just a system library that apps can use or ignore. Apple's Help Viewer, Safari, Mail, iTunes, and probably other apps use the library. So do some third-party Web browsers and news readers and other apps. Firefox and Opera have their own rendering engines. This gives developers the choice to use the standards-compliant system renderer or roll their own.
Most of the time if you want to get rid of a particular Mac application you just put it in the Trash. They are all just single icons. Nothing prevents the user from putting the whole iLife suite in the Trash in under a minute if they want to (by the way, iLife is free with your Mac purchase, but is not bundled with Mac OS X... in the future you upgrade your Mac OS X with one retail box and your iLife with another). The Mac application platform is designed with the user in mind first, not industry partners and marketing concerns and anti-competitive business practices, so you see stuff being built technically sound from the start and none of this monkey business that Microsoft engages in.
Intel doesn't offer FireWire 800 chipsets is why there is no FireWire 800 on the MacBook Pro. Theoretically, Intel will start to offer this feature and it will appear on future pro Macs along with the 64-bit versions of the Core CPU's.
The iPod loads its music automatically. That's what made it easy enough for anyone to use.
If you want to drop music on it, drop your tunes from Finder, Explorer, whatever onto iTunes. That's it. iTunes is the iPod's "face" within a computer environment. You play and organize your music with iTunes and the iPod is an iTunes accessory. Whatever changes you make in iTunes are "synced" to the iPod. Therefor there is no actual interaction required with the iPod itself. It appears in the Finder interface simply as a disk which is what Finder is good at.
It is very easy in iTunes to do things to audio files that it is not easy to do in a file management interface, such as add album art or ID information, or adjust the playback volume of individual tracks. One thing that made Napster suck was how badly encoded many tracks were... incomplete, no ID information. With iTunes you can easily rip a CD and you get a nice set of audio files with ID information and the right names and they appear on your iPod also automatically.
> my roommate had a problem with his iBook where the > keyboard would actually leave little indents in the screen.
No, they are not "indents." That is the oil from his fingers rubbing off the keys onto the screen. It can easily be removed with a safe solvent like Monster iClean which is made specifically for that very purpose. They sell iClean at the Apple Store and many other places for $14.95 including a lint-free cloth and it is guaranteed safe for LCD and is Apple approved also. The screen will look as good as new in about a minute of scrubbing, which should be done preferably while the screen is off and cold.
>If Apple thought they could sell a device that could only > be populated from iTMS, do you think for a second they > wouldn't do just that?
First: the iPod predates the iTunes Music Store by about 2 years. In fact, there was a "Rip, Mix, Burn" ad campaign that Apple did encouraging people to rip their CD's and make playlists and burn them to mix CD's even before the iPod. iTunes has always had a high-quality MP3 encoder in it and still does to this day. It is not crippled to low bitrates either like many competing products were. There are many iPod users who simply rip their CD's to MP3 and use iTunes and iPod quite happily.
Second: there is a codec in iTunes called "Apple Lossless" that has one purpose which is to enable the user to rip their CD's to full-quality files that can then be played in iTunes or iPod. This importer generates MPEG-4 audio files with the Apple Lossless codec that are much higher quality than the downloadable content from iTunes Music Store. Of course they are also about 6x bigger than AAC files on your hard drive and take more battery life in your iPod to play but they are the exact same audio information as your CD.
Third: the preferred music codec for iTunes and iPod is MPEG-4 AAC which is a true open standard. I rip all my CD's to AAC and it is pristine and it is the true successor to MP3. There is no lock-in there at all. It is not WMA or Real or similar proprietary crap. Even with the "protected" tracks you get from iTunes Music Store using Apple's FairPlay DRM you can burn those tracks to CD and rip them again as MP3 or AAC or rip them into Windows Media Player if you like. You are not locked in. FairPlay simply prevents you from making more than 10 CD's of a particular playlist so you can't become a mass manufacturer. The tunes you download from Apple can be played on an iPod or burned to CD and every other music player reads CD's so there is no lock-in.
Fourth: Apple encourages people to listen to Podcasts and most of those are not through the iTunes Music Store. They have a directory of Podcasts there but it covers just a small segment and that's all. Podcasts are a way to download content to your iPod that totally bypasses Apple's pay-per-song iTunes Music Store.
Fifth: every Mac ships with audio inputs and outputs so you can easily re-record any locked digital content into plain AIFF (RAW uncompressed audio data) and burn to CD or encode as you like.
Sixth: every Mac ships with an easy to use multitrack audio and music application called GarageBand so it is easy for any user to CREATE their own music and GarageBand will even transfer your finished mixes to iTunes+iPod automatically for you. I am an audio pro myself, and a good portion of my iPod time is spent litening to my own mixes, both in-progress and finished stuff.
In short there are a lot of ways to get audio into your iPod that don't involve the iTunes Music Store, and Apple has encouraged those other methods, not discouraged them.
Why not get an FM tuner wedged into your cell phone? At least cell phones have antennas so it makes more sense than in an iPod.
Why not get a TV tuner in your iPod and watch Jerry Springer on the little color screen?
Sony sells AM/FM/Weather band radios for $29 that make great iPod accessories. They are even priced just like iPod accessories. You can use your iPod headphones.
Buy a little Sony radio for chrissakes. You have two pockets.
Although both an iPod and a radio have headphone outputs they are radically different products, one digital, one analog, even invented in different centuries. The iPod has sheilding to keep radio OUT while a radio has an antenna to bring radio IN.
Because you hear the hard drive in the radio, and you can hear the radio when you're listening to digital tunes. The iPod is totally digital and radio is totally analog. If you put them together you have to put in sheilding and it still doesn't work well.
I carry an iPod and a little Sony radio Walkman ($29) and that is a much better solution than a combined product. Of course you can use the same headphones and the radio lasts for 24 hours on one AA so one of them is always working no matter what kind of long day I've had.
I love the Mac, I've been using them for years. Also I got the first iPod and another since, they are great. I make multimedia content so Apple is like a sort of Mecca for me. Mac OS X is amazing, just amazing. QuickTime is such a big part of my life I consider a Q tattoo every once in a while.
However I can confirm that service at the Apple Store is generally shit.
Yeah, there are many horror stories with PC support.
However Apple is always at the top of support statistics. Their customers are happier and their machines fail less than the rest of the industry. If you buy AppleCare they treat you really well for three full years. My PowerBook went in for repair three times and each time took only a few days and one of the times I had knocked the whole screen off (or rather an ape-like friend had knocked the whole screen off) and no complaints from them. Another time I lost two little rubber feet off the bottom of a PowerBook G3 and they sent out a new pack of 5 feet for no charge. Even without AppleCare you get a year from Apple when Dell gives you only 90 days.
I'm also glad to know it's so durable. A friend of mine took a look at the iPod nano and said "I'll break it too quickly" because she thought small equaled breakable. This review made her want one now that she has seen it is durable.
Apple should send these guys a replacement nano because they are going to sell even more units due to the sacrifice of this one unfortunate nano. It's hard to communicate "durable" through electronic media but "we ran over it with a car and it still worked" does a pretty good job.
You can hook up a bunch of FireWire 800 drives and it is really fast. Faster than gigabit Ethernet in the real world.
Over the next few years storage is going to get faster and fewer moving parts and FireWire will continue to look better and better.
I also expect the next generation of PC's that Apple and Intel are working on together to have both USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 and gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi(g) and Bluetooth 2.0 all from the start and we'll use all of that connectivity in different ways.
When the first iPod shipped it was FireWire only and there were no USB 2.0 computers. Now even Apple has been shipping USB 2.0 for quite some time so the iPod nano is quite happy on USB.
Even if FireWire were slower than USB it has many benefits that make it better for digital video and similar real-time applications. The really small amount your PC manufacturer saves by not including FireWire on your system or by including a lousy FireWire implementation really harms the user over the life of that system. Putting a hard drive on the same port as your keyboard is not good for either of those devices.
Also another reason for the slow transition to Intel is that as easy as the recompile of a PowerPC application is if you are using Apple's XCode developer tools, it is much harder if you are using Metrowerk's CodeWarrior. First you have to switch your developers all over to XCode, then start updating your application to be cross-platform. And guess who are the two biggest CodeWarrior users? Why it is the two biggest Mac developers: Adobe and Microsoft.
While Microsoft's stuff is not very CPU intensive and will run just fine in Rosetta, Adobe makes some heavy duty applications. And for the Photoshop user you have to run all of your plug-ins in the same environment, so you can run your PowerPC Photoshop and PowerPC plug-ins in Rosetta, or you can run your Intel-native Photoshop and Intel-native plug-ins natively. So there is a lot of work for Adobe and their plug-in makers to do before a Photoshop user will want a Mactel. Another reason why the G5 systems will be the last to change over.
They're not selling Intel boxes right now because they're not going to sell Macs with Pentiums in them. If you notice Apple always says "Intel" not "x86" and not "Pentium." The Pentium is a huge ugly chip with enormous power and heat dissipation needs. What Apple wants is the next generation of Intel chip which is derivative of the Centrino, is 64-bit, and is high performance for low power. The head of Intel spoke at the same Apple event at WWDC and he showed the old Apple commercial where they toasted the Intel bunny man and he said "maybe Apple was trying to tell us to make our chips run cooler and we listened." Apple has been making PowerBooks since the early 1990's and small desktops since at least 1998 with the iMac so they are not excited by the Pentium. And the Pentium Mobile is a really bad chip, so slow that Intel uses a different benchmark system on it so you can't easily compare Pentum's and Pentium Mobiles to each other.
Apple's current problem is not the G5 or their desktop machines. I use a Power Mac G5 to run Photoshop all day and it rocks so hard and is totally silent and has 4 GB of RAM in it also. The CPU's are never slowed down because they get too hot. Day to day they are much better than a box with a P4 in it. But I am thinking of replacing my 4 year-old PowerBook G4 and all Apple can offer me is another PowerBook G4. Sure the new ones are faster and better industrial design and many attractive features but I am a little underwhelmed by it. What Intel is making for Apple is essentially a "G6" that they can move their portable and Mac mini G4 lines over to right away and later replace their G5 desktops.
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He isn't intentionally spreading FUD ... he thinks that is the truth. He spends all his time surrounded by Microsoft people using Microsoft products and all full of the Microsoft passion and slapping each other on the back and throwing chairs around and whatnot. He really is amazed that you fools use OpenBSD with all of its terrible bugs when you could be using MS Windows with all of its rich marketing experiences. Sure, it is fine to implement sudo in UNIX but what good is that because UNIX is old and hard to use. Windows is modern and innovative and made from the best bits on Earth.
It is like the Bush administration. They are not kidding around. They really are out of touch with reality.
SUPERUSR ON -msignore
Welcome to what it feels like to be a Mac user. Microsoft has been inventing Mac features on Windows for some time also.
> Assuming the AC was correct, there's no evidence that what he describes is commonplace
Except for MS Windows itself and its entourage of malware.
The problem is not that Microsoft included an HTML renderer ("mshtml") in their OS. That is a fine thing to do. Mac OS X also has an HTML rendering library ("WebKit") that is used by Safari, iTunes, Help Viewer, Sherlock, and other applications. That is reusable code and it is good technology.
The problem is that Microsoft integrated the Web browser application Internet Explorer with the GUI shell Explorer, thus also making the Web browser application a vital system component. On the Mac, the Web browser application Safari is an entirely separate application from the Dock/Menubar/Spotlight/Finder. If you don't want to use the Safari browser you put it into the Trash and that's that, your system is not affected. You browse the Web with Firefox instead of Safari and everything else is OK. On Windows, you can't quit or uninstall Internet Explorer without also crippling the GUI shell. The problem comes when massive vulnerabilities are found in Internet Explorer and then you want to quit it or uninstall it and find that you can't. You don't use it to browse the Web yet you have to run it on your computer 24/7 in order to browse local files and folders.
The right way for Microsoft to do things would have been for Explorer to use mshtml to render its HTML content, then IE could be uninstalled like any other app. In other words you have a separate Web browser and file browser that both use the same HTML rendering engine. That is 1000 times more secure. The file browser doesn't even have to talk to the Web at all.
If it wasn't for all the geeks fixing their relatives Microsoft PC's then Microsoft would have had to spend some of their cash hoard on making Windows better.
As my friends have switched to Macs they will sometimes still want me to come over and "set it up" and I go over and just hang around while they set it up themselves it is so easy. Then they find the Dock and get into iTunes and there is no looking back. Most of the Mac users I know have never experienced a kernel panic so there is much less user panic.
There are five or ten basic troubleshooting things you can do to a Mac and they are all very easy and all GUI based, and only require the OS boot disc that came with your computer, which has diagnostics and utilities and the Mac OS X installer on there. There is a manual with the computer that shows how to do all the diagnostics with pictures and very concise instructions. AppleCare for an iMac is $160 and for that you can call them up whenever for three years and they help you with anything and fix everything within three days at no charge. There is no Microsoft tells you to call Dell, Dell tells you to call Microsoft thing either.
With Macs starting at $499 and only $1299 for an iMac with Intel Core Duo it is hard to justify spending a lot of time supporting a DOS-based PC. The hours and headaches add up fast and the best you are going to end up with is a DOS-based PC. Another option is a used Mac because it is so easy to start with one used Mac and one Mac OS X Tiger (or previous) disc and in about half an hour you will have an as-new system automatically downloading updates and patches from Apple. There are no licence keys or authorizations or strange configurations or missing drivers. Any G4 with 512MB RAM can run Tiger and that is a lot more system than a DOS-based PC for very little money.
If you replace a 10 year-old Windows 95 system with an iMac with Intel Core Duo then that user should be able to run the iMac until 2016 which is only $129 per year.
Tell them to get Macs. Then your support calls stop and after a while YOU call THEM and see if they are still computing and they tell you about the DVD they just made. This has happened time and time again to me over the past five years. The Windows machines go and suddenly everyone is connected to the Internet all the time and can print all the time and can burn discs all the time and so on, with no phone support at all.
I hate to defend an MS guy, but if you think back to 2001, the Windows 95/98/Me (DOS-based Windows) thing was a major legacy IT nightmare like XP is today. The big push was to finally get your "home" or "consumer" user off of DOS and onto "NT-based" MS Windows XP. This was the start of a new golden era for Microsoft customers, a new modern system designed with the Internet and digital media in mind.
So I can see how an MS guy who is casually supporting a mix of 95/98/Me home users could be all fired up with Microsoft "passion" and basically say to his family "everybody get onto XP and that will be the end of all of our support woes!"
In retrospect right now we know that XP is a pile of shit and that users were in for years and years of outrageous problems so we see it as an upgrade-or-die move where they went from frying pan to fire but I think for this MS guy it was like when Mac OS X came out and a new era was dawning. He was enthusiastic for his family to get off DOS and onto The Windows Experience.
There is an industry standard of security that Microsoft is well below. If MS Windows were in the same league as Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, Solaris, and other UNIX systems then we would have an entirely different situation. MS Windows was simply not well designed or well built and it has not survived the stress tests of the real world. If you buy a new MS PC right now, you start it up and the first thing you do is run Internet Explorer as root and load up the first of many strange Web sites to come. That's not acceptable in 2006. They are making boats that aren't seaworthy.
Keychain encrypts and stores passwords as you work.
If you want to secure you documents, use Disk Utility to create an encrypted disk image and store the documents on there. The process is the same as initializing a disk except instead of a physical disk the data is stored in a single AES-128 encrypted file which when opened and authenticated, mounts as a disk and can be used to store files and folders of any kind. When you Eject the disk all of the data is stored in the single encrypted file. This has been around since Mac OS v7 or maybe even earlier. The features used to be in an application called DiskCopy which was merged with Disk Utility in Mac OS v10.2 or so.
You can also encrypt your whole home folder with a feature called FileVault if you are running Mac OS v10.3 or later. You turn this on and when you are logged out your home folder is stored as a single AES-128 encrypted file. When you are logged in your home folder is decrypted on-the-fly for you transparently. The on-the-fly encryption really has incredible performance.
The key comparison isn't which issues get patched in what priority but whether the vendor gets security or not and whether their systems are being good network citizens or not, whether their customers are generally secure or not during day-to-day use.
From my own experience I see Mac OS X systems running day-in and day-out with very little administration and very few problems and they are patching themselves regularly with a system that children can use. On the other hand, I see Windows systems being cleaned and authorized and patched daily by professionals and five years between major upgrades. On the Mac you have the open-source UNIX core OS ("Darwin") and the kernel xnu which is a far cry from the black box that Windows is sitting on with who knows what going on in there. You can also track GUI applications easily in the Dock and processes in Activity Viewer (or top) so you know just what's going on with the processes on your system. And the application platform on the Mac is fully POSIX permissions savvy and users run as standard or low-grade admin, with no root access at all by default. That is something Microsoft has yet to even roll out.
There are quite a few differences between what Apple and Microsoft are doing with desktop operating systems and security.
> The browser is not decoupled in either Mac OS X or KDE. Both share a very similar
... whatever browser you set as your default is what will be used. Firefox is a clone of Safari and is very easy to drop-in as a replacement. The layout of the buttons and address and search fields is the same and the key shortcuts and many operations are the same as Safari. You can easily forget which browser you're using from time to time if you use both. You can put the two best open-source renderers side-by-side very easily by running Safari and Firefox, which is great for Web development. Firefox for Mac OS X is also just a single icon like most Mac apps so it is easy to install, update, remove. Even a very low-tech user can easily install and use Firefox on Mac OS X. The procedure for a Safari to Firefox transplant on a new iMac is like a short one-page article with a step-by-step with like 5 steps if that and all the most basic GUI actions.
> architecture to Windows.
No, that is outrageous bullshit. On this issue Mac OS X / KDE are are polar opposites from Windows.
Mac OS X has a built-in HTML rendering library for developers to utilize in their applications. It is called Webkit and it is based on the open-source KHTML project, which is what KDE uses. It renders HTML to W3C standards and is very lightweight and very fast. Similarly there are libraries for rendering PNG images or AES encryption or AAC encoding. As the HTML renderer is just a system library that any application can use, it is featured prominently in Apple's Safari, Mail, Spotlight, iTunes (Music Store), Sherlock, Help Viewer and probably others. It is also used by third-party applications like feed readers. It's just a library.
Safari utilizes the Webkit library but if you don't want to use Safari as your browser, you can put it in the Trash and the Webkit library is still maintained by the system for other apps. Getting rid of Safari doesn't cause any system issues at all. It is easy to run another browser instead
With IE there are special uninstaller tools and many issues surrounding the removal of the browser application itself. And if you don't remove the browser there are issues with the user being able to choose another browser as a default and true replacement for the bundled browser. None of that is the case on Mac OS X. If you set Firefox as you default browser (run Firefox and choose Firefox > Preferences to do so) then that is what the system will use.
> What's the difference between running IE as Administrator, and running any other application as
... in the future you upgrade your Mac OS X with one retail box and your iLife with another). The Mac application platform is designed with the user in mind first, not industry partners and marketing concerns and anti-competitive business practices, so you see stuff being built technically sound from the start and none of this monkey business that Microsoft engages in.
> Administrator? There's no difference, so the point is moot.
There is a difference. A browser spends all day hooking up to arbitrary Web sites and running strange code. It is a little sandbox for remote applications. It is like a window with sealant to keep the malware out, and running it as root is like not having a second pane of glass.
If you don't want to use Safari on your Mac you can pick up the Safari icon with your mouse and put it in the Trash and hit Empty. Hopefully you will have remembered to download Firefox first. The Safari rendering engine (Webkit/KHTML) is just a system library that apps can use or ignore. Apple's Help Viewer, Safari, Mail, iTunes, and probably other apps use the library. So do some third-party Web browsers and news readers and other apps. Firefox and Opera have their own rendering engines. This gives developers the choice to use the standards-compliant system renderer or roll their own.
Most of the time if you want to get rid of a particular Mac application you just put it in the Trash. They are all just single icons. Nothing prevents the user from putting the whole iLife suite in the Trash in under a minute if they want to (by the way, iLife is free with your Mac purchase, but is not bundled with Mac OS X
Intel doesn't offer FireWire 800 chipsets is why there is no FireWire 800 on the MacBook Pro. Theoretically, Intel will start to offer this feature and it will appear on future pro Macs along with the 64-bit versions of the Core CPU's.
The iPod loads its music automatically. That's what made it easy enough for anyone to use.
... incomplete, no ID information. With iTunes you can easily rip a CD and you get a nice set of audio files with ID information and the right names and they appear on your iPod also automatically.
If you want to drop music on it, drop your tunes from Finder, Explorer, whatever onto iTunes. That's it. iTunes is the iPod's "face" within a computer environment. You play and organize your music with iTunes and the iPod is an iTunes accessory. Whatever changes you make in iTunes are "synced" to the iPod. Therefor there is no actual interaction required with the iPod itself. It appears in the Finder interface simply as a disk which is what Finder is good at.
It is very easy in iTunes to do things to audio files that it is not easy to do in a file management interface, such as add album art or ID information, or adjust the playback volume of individual tracks. One thing that made Napster suck was how badly encoded many tracks were
> my roommate had a problem with his iBook where the
> keyboard would actually leave little indents in the screen.
No, they are not "indents." That is the oil from his fingers rubbing off the keys onto the screen. It can easily be removed with a safe solvent like Monster iClean which is made specifically for that very purpose. They sell iClean at the Apple Store and many other places for $14.95 including a lint-free cloth and it is guaranteed safe for LCD and is Apple approved also. The screen will look as good as new in about a minute of scrubbing, which should be done preferably while the screen is off and cold.
>If Apple thought they could sell a device that could only
> be populated from iTMS, do you think for a second they
> wouldn't do just that?
First: the iPod predates the iTunes Music Store by about 2 years. In fact, there was a "Rip, Mix, Burn" ad campaign that Apple did encouraging people to rip their CD's and make playlists and burn them to mix CD's even before the iPod. iTunes has always had a high-quality MP3 encoder in it and still does to this day. It is not crippled to low bitrates either like many competing products were. There are many iPod users who simply rip their CD's to MP3 and use iTunes and iPod quite happily.
Second: there is a codec in iTunes called "Apple Lossless" that has one purpose which is to enable the user to rip their CD's to full-quality files that can then be played in iTunes or iPod. This importer generates MPEG-4 audio files with the Apple Lossless codec that are much higher quality than the downloadable content from iTunes Music Store. Of course they are also about 6x bigger than AAC files on your hard drive and take more battery life in your iPod to play but they are the exact same audio information as your CD.
Third: the preferred music codec for iTunes and iPod is MPEG-4 AAC which is a true open standard. I rip all my CD's to AAC and it is pristine and it is the true successor to MP3. There is no lock-in there at all. It is not WMA or Real or similar proprietary crap. Even with the "protected" tracks you get from iTunes Music Store using Apple's FairPlay DRM you can burn those tracks to CD and rip them again as MP3 or AAC or rip them into Windows Media Player if you like. You are not locked in. FairPlay simply prevents you from making more than 10 CD's of a particular playlist so you can't become a mass manufacturer. The tunes you download from Apple can be played on an iPod or burned to CD and every other music player reads CD's so there is no lock-in.
Fourth: Apple encourages people to listen to Podcasts and most of those are not through the iTunes Music Store. They have a directory of Podcasts there but it covers just a small segment and that's all. Podcasts are a way to download content to your iPod that totally bypasses Apple's pay-per-song iTunes Music Store.
Fifth: every Mac ships with audio inputs and outputs so you can easily re-record any locked digital content into plain AIFF (RAW uncompressed audio data) and burn to CD or encode as you like.
Sixth: every Mac ships with an easy to use multitrack audio and music application called GarageBand so it is easy for any user to CREATE their own music and GarageBand will even transfer your finished mixes to iTunes+iPod automatically for you. I am an audio pro myself, and a good portion of my iPod time is spent litening to my own mixes, both in-progress and finished stuff.
In short there are a lot of ways to get audio into your iPod that don't involve the iTunes Music Store, and Apple has encouraged those other methods, not discouraged them.
Why not get an FM tuner wedged into your cell phone? At least cell phones have antennas so it makes more sense than in an iPod.
Why not get a TV tuner in your iPod and watch Jerry Springer on the little color screen?
Sony sells AM/FM/Weather band radios for $29 that make great iPod accessories. They are even priced just like iPod accessories. You can use your iPod headphones.
Buy a little Sony radio for chrissakes. You have two pockets.
Although both an iPod and a radio have headphone outputs they are radically different products, one digital, one analog, even invented in different centuries. The iPod has sheilding to keep radio OUT while a radio has an antenna to bring radio IN.
Because you hear the hard drive in the radio, and you can hear the radio when you're listening to digital tunes. The iPod is totally digital and radio is totally analog. If you put them together you have to put in sheilding and it still doesn't work well.
I carry an iPod and a little Sony radio Walkman ($29) and that is a much better solution than a combined product. Of course you can use the same headphones and the radio lasts for 24 hours on one AA so one of them is always working no matter what kind of long day I've had.
I love the Mac, I've been using them for years. Also I got the first iPod and another since, they are great. I make multimedia content so Apple is like a sort of Mecca for me. Mac OS X is amazing, just amazing. QuickTime is such a big part of my life I consider a Q tattoo every once in a while.
However I can confirm that service at the Apple Store is generally shit.
Yeah, there are many horror stories with PC support.
However Apple is always at the top of support statistics. Their customers are happier and their machines fail less than the rest of the industry. If you buy AppleCare they treat you really well for three full years. My PowerBook went in for repair three times and each time took only a few days and one of the times I had knocked the whole screen off (or rather an ape-like friend had knocked the whole screen off) and no complaints from them. Another time I lost two little rubber feet off the bottom of a PowerBook G3 and they sent out a new pack of 5 feet for no charge. Even without AppleCare you get a year from Apple when Dell gives you only 90 days.
I'm also glad to know it's so durable. A friend of mine took a look at the iPod nano and said "I'll break it too quickly" because she thought small equaled breakable. This review made her want one now that she has seen it is durable.
Apple should send these guys a replacement nano because they are going to sell even more units due to the sacrifice of this one unfortunate nano. It's hard to communicate "durable" through electronic media but "we ran over it with a car and it still worked" does a pretty good job.
All of the 17" PowerBooks have FireWire 800 also.
You can hook up a bunch of FireWire 800 drives and it is really fast. Faster than gigabit Ethernet in the real world.
Over the next few years storage is going to get faster and fewer moving parts and FireWire will continue to look better and better.
I also expect the next generation of PC's that Apple and Intel are working on together to have both USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 and gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi(g) and Bluetooth 2.0 all from the start and we'll use all of that connectivity in different ways.
When the first iPod shipped it was FireWire only and there were no USB 2.0 computers. Now even Apple has been shipping USB 2.0 for quite some time so the iPod nano is quite happy on USB.
Even if FireWire were slower than USB it has many benefits that make it better for digital video and similar real-time applications. The really small amount your PC manufacturer saves by not including FireWire on your system or by including a lousy FireWire implementation really harms the user over the life of that system. Putting a hard drive on the same port as your keyboard is not good for either of those devices.
Also another reason for the slow transition to Intel is that as easy as the recompile of a PowerPC application is if you are using Apple's XCode developer tools, it is much harder if you are using Metrowerk's CodeWarrior. First you have to switch your developers all over to XCode, then start updating your application to be cross-platform. And guess who are the two biggest CodeWarrior users? Why it is the two biggest Mac developers: Adobe and Microsoft.
While Microsoft's stuff is not very CPU intensive and will run just fine in Rosetta, Adobe makes some heavy duty applications. And for the Photoshop user you have to run all of your plug-ins in the same environment, so you can run your PowerPC Photoshop and PowerPC plug-ins in Rosetta, or you can run your Intel-native Photoshop and Intel-native plug-ins natively. So there is a lot of work for Adobe and their plug-in makers to do before a Photoshop user will want a Mactel. Another reason why the G5 systems will be the last to change over.
They're not selling Intel boxes right now because they're not going to sell Macs with Pentiums in them. If you notice Apple always says "Intel" not "x86" and not "Pentium." The Pentium is a huge ugly chip with enormous power and heat dissipation needs. What Apple wants is the next generation of Intel chip which is derivative of the Centrino, is 64-bit, and is high performance for low power. The head of Intel spoke at the same Apple event at WWDC and he showed the old Apple commercial where they toasted the Intel bunny man and he said "maybe Apple was trying to tell us to make our chips run cooler and we listened." Apple has been making PowerBooks since the early 1990's and small desktops since at least 1998 with the iMac so they are not excited by the Pentium. And the Pentium Mobile is a really bad chip, so slow that Intel uses a different benchmark system on it so you can't easily compare Pentum's and Pentium Mobiles to each other.
Apple's current problem is not the G5 or their desktop machines. I use a Power Mac G5 to run Photoshop all day and it rocks so hard and is totally silent and has 4 GB of RAM in it also. The CPU's are never slowed down because they get too hot. Day to day they are much better than a box with a P4 in it. But I am thinking of replacing my 4 year-old PowerBook G4 and all Apple can offer me is another PowerBook G4. Sure the new ones are faster and better industrial design and many attractive features but I am a little underwhelmed by it. What Intel is making for Apple is essentially a "G6" that they can move their portable and Mac mini G4 lines over to right away and later replace their G5 desktops.