posted 04-18-2001 11:56            

Call me a heathen if you will. All of your geek-speak means nothing to me. The O/S makes intuitive sense to me and really didn't crash all that much until I started encountering Java. And that would not be a problem with a current machine.

Note, I do NOT endorse iMacs. But the G4's make me swoon.

Now excuse me whilst I don my flame-retardant jumpsuit.

posted 04-18-2001 12:32            

I'll add my 2 cents (carefully phrased with highly convincing arguments, for your reading pleasure):
Mac sux0rz, Wintel rox0rs!

posted 04-18-2001 13:33            

If it makes your penis feel bigger to know linux or unix or every arcane detail about the latest Intel chip, well, yippie. But since I'm not a geek and I like to be able to do what I want without spending hours and hours trying to figure out some uber-stoopid system, I'll stick to my preferences.

That being said, I'm using Clme's ghetto machine because my mac sucks and I'm poor. I'm just saying, in a perfect world, I'd have a Mac.

So thppt.

posted 04-18-2001 14:33            

I admit, that I do like macs, not because of the OS, but because they're built cleaner than your averave IBM-clone. Although I wouldn't exactly say that I would buy one, it sure does look nice. If there was one to buy I would have to get a Titanium Ibook, because thats just damn sexy.

Oh dear, I think i've done it. Here goes the great debate, again. When I was in highschool my teacher used to say that "Macs will soon remove Ibm-compatible's market share and rule the world." Well, if Microsoft keeps making crappy stuff, yeah, its going to happen. I personally would run MacOSx or BSD on a iBook.

Heh, can you feel the geek-o-meter spiking? Sure I could buy a regular laptop, but that would deny me the pleasure of telling someone "HAHAH, its BSD, stfu."

posted 04-18-2001 14:48            

MacOS: I'd actually have to say the opposite of what you said about the Mac OS. You can sit down and do what it will LET you do. The way the kernel and everything is put together on the MacOS (X is excluded) it is so tightly locked down that your only allowed to do what they let you. Course on the positive side, they've made a rock solid OS with a great GUI. On top of the OS being a bit to limiting you also find that Mac systems cost way to much, and there is little to no software available for it. The G4 is a fine fine machine, I love it, I had 2 at my old job. I really enjoy them but I'm not going to plunk down the cash for it. Really way to overpriced for a system that has little to no software support. For the price of a G4, you and clme could have your own kick ass i386 based machines.

*nix: I don't think it makes anyones penIs feel large by knowing or using *nix. The main reason *nix has not been successful in the home desktop market is because it is far from user friendly and a bit over powering for the average user. The main reason *nix is the base platform of anything important (high traffic web servers, etc) is because it is a rock solid OS and it lets you do pretty much anything. The linux community is making leaps and bounds in making a friendly desktop gui for the home user. When was the last time you checked out an install of Gnome or KDE. Twice as easy to use as windows you just have to use nutscrape..

Windows: I've never been impressed with windows. I will only use Win2k or NT4 for pretty much anything I do windows related. Yet I need to work with it because it is the standard and I'm in charge of the health of various NT4/2k servers.

I've owned Macs, Amigas, Apple //s, i386 based machines and realisticly if I could afford it I'd have a G4 running linuxPPC or MacOSX but it won't happen because the price will always be insane.

posted 04-18-2001 15:17            

I dunno, "rock solid" isn't how I'd describe an OS that locks all CPU cycles as long as the mouse button is held down.

I haven't used OS X, but I have used MacOS and I was not freakin' impressed. The OS might be "rock-solid" if you didn't attempt to DO anything with it, but between "features" like the entire system crashing to a halt, waiting with bated breath for you to release the mouse button and the evil, evil thing Apple calls "cooperative multitasking", the system is completely at the tender mercies of whatever brainless retard is operating it, not to mention whatever software they install.

Don't get me wrong, any time you give a user the power to install software, you give them a handy monkey wrench to throw in the gears, capering and gibbering all the while, and that's exactly what they do... but at least in the Windows world you have a CHANCE of surviving the experience of an app malfunctioning. If you're running NT or 2K instead of 9x, you're almost guaranteed to survive it - since apps are run in "virtual machines", if an app starts hanging up and bleeding memory like an arterial cut, the OS can just collapse the entire "virtual machine" on it and come away unscathed.

In the MacOS "cooperative multitasking" model, not only is one app at the mercy of another waiting for CPU time, THE OS ITSELF IS TOO. I dunno about you, but I don't trust app vendors to write code that plays well with OTHER app vendors' code so much... and I definitely don't trust users only to INSTALL tightly written code.

The best thing about NT/2K as compared to 9x (much less MacOS) is that almost every conceivable way to crash the box through poor coding is walled off from the application - apps can't touch "bare metal" directly, they have to go through the OS to do it. This means in the event of a problem, the error is trapped and the offending app terminated without damage to everything else the box is doing.

If you see an infamous BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death), it's almost definitely not the fault of your applications - it's the fault of your drivers. They're the code that DOES get to touch bare metal, and that's a very very very good reason why you should try to avoid stuff that isn't on the HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) - it has a TREMENDOUS impact on how stable your system is. Doesn't matter how "rock solid" your OS is, if you have a buggy driver, you're gonna be seeing lots of bluescreens.

:pant: :pant: :pant:

posted 04-18-2001 15:58            

By rock solid I meant in the average user sense.. Typically a home user just buys whatever is sold.. With apple they really don't allow many people to make much hardware for their machines. They keep it pretty locked down and under their control.. So in the home user market buying random mac stuff is fairly safe compaired to the pc market. People don't check the HCL unless they work with the actual computer or understand how it works. You think Johnny at CompUSA selling various cards and what not is going to know whatt he HCL is and if he did, think he'd want to loose a sale over something he could claim ignorance on?

posted 04-18-2001 17:22            

What I was referring to, however, was the effect of Mac SOFTWARE that's poorly written. Unlike NT (and to an extend 9x, though 9x was VERY imperfect on this), MacOS relied on "cooperative multitasking." This meant that once an app had the CPU, it OWNED - 0wn3d - the CPU completely until IT chose to release it.

So if some poorly-coded piece of crap software for the Mac decides that it's super important and it shouldn't relinquish the CPU for the next 50 million cycles, you have a big plastic paperweight sitting on your desk until it finally executes the code to release the CPU again.

NT, on the other hand (and 9x, imperfectly) uses a pre-emptive model - meaning that instead of trusting the app to do a good job of giving the CPU up, the OS itself assigns timeslices to apps based on their priority level, only allowing each app access to the CPU when the OS decides it's time for the app to have it. This model limits your risk of crashing the entire system due to poor app coding IMMENSELY - as long as the OS itself is solid, there are now a lot fewer ways for an app to hang the whole system.

NT also is far more protective of "bare metal" than either 9x or MacOS - under NT, all direct access to resources is done through the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). Again, this is to prevent poor code from crashing the system - if you manipulate "bare metal" improperly, the whole system dies. If you manipulate the HAL improperly, on the other hand, the system just says "wtf?" reports an error in the offending application, and you keep right on trucking.

Finally, under NT every application runs in a complete "virtual machine." As far as that app can tell (unless it opens DDE channels to another app), it's the only application running on the whole machine, with as much RAM as it needs, etc, etc. So if the application "leaks memory" (requests memory be allocated to it but "forgets" to relinquish the memory when it is no longer needed), once the application is completely closed the "leaked" memory comes back into the system - the "virtual machine" keeps track of all RAM used, and it didn't forget any of that RAM; so when IT closes, it gives all the RAM back to the OS again.

Under 9x or MacOS, apps can "leak" memory and that memory cannot be reclaimed without rebooting the computer. Suck!

posted 04-18-2001 19:32            

1) i remember the first time i ever ever saw a computer crash. it was a mac, of course, circa 1990. i still remember that little bomb icon and asking my teacher what it meant. ahh, the sweet naivette of that time. i wish i could return to that.

posted 04-18-2001 19:34            

To me there's nothing more intuitive than the click/double-click/right-click system in Windows machines... if you click it once, you select it. If you double-click it, you execute it - or execute the application designated to handle it, and automatically load it within that application, if it's a data file. If you right-click it, you get a context menu showing you properties, help, options like cutting and pasting, you name it.

On a Mac with those retarded cyclops mice, you don't have the convenience of being able to right-click almost anything to see what you can do with it - no, you have to know where the properties of that item are tucked away and where you can dig to find them. This is not even close to being an intuitive process much of the time - the infamous "drag the floppy to the trash can" bit being a good example of just how counterintuitive this scheme can be.

I find the context menu model FAR more intuitive. Under that model I know that, say I've got a new Zip drive and I've never ever ever used a Zip drive before, I can right-click it and see a selection of all possible operations to perform on that device. "Eject" will be one of those operations, and I found it by clicking with my right mouse button ON THE DEVICE that I wanted to perform the operation on and then just selecting which operation it was I wanted.

MUCH, much better.

posted 04-18-2001 20:03            

why didnt that sound as good as when bex said it?

posted 04-18-2001 20:25            

Seriously. Mac's are fine for design and development- we use a lot of them here. But I'm surprised people use them for home use...
I'm developing a VERY processor intensive flash effect for my company's homepage (texture-mapped 3d, if you care), and did some benchmarking. The several G4's we have in the office got about 3-4 frames/second. My pIII-850 gets about 25. The oldest i386 we have in the office, a pII-300 or so, got 5-6. My point being, Optimized for photoshop, Mac is. Powerful for flops/memory usage, Mac isn't.

posted 04-18-2001 20:32            

::perturbed look:: Ok, I can see how someone who has to play with everything would dislike a system that doesn't give you much breathing room. But, I don't like to futz with every little detail of my machine. I want to sit down and start doing what I came to do.

I love the look, feel and function of the Mac O/S. I still don't have the hang of two mouse buttons and never really felt I was missing anything by not having them. I use the right button now mostly to cut and paste, and I always used to just use command c and v instead. So it's not saving me too much time. I'm just not some major techno-dweeb. I'm smart enough to not make most of the major bonehead tech support customer mistakes, but I don't care enough to go the extra mile the way you guys do.

And yes, this is like cars. I drive a Geo and as long as it doesn't die in the middle of the road, I'm pretty happy. Good gas milage, small and maneuverable and I feel comfy in it. I don't feel compelled to buy fuzzy dice, a killer CD player (or a 40 gig portable hard drive for playing mp3's like someone I know), or tinted windows. I'm also not overly impressed by guys who drive cars with lots of extra "features".

Ok, so that being said, I do agree with the fiscal complaints about Macs. They're expensive and they shot themselves in the foot in the early-mid 90's by not allowing clones. I remember model after model being hyped and then underproduced to the point where there were long waiting lists to get one. Someone who wants to buy a new computer for Christmas is not going to wait 2 months for a machine on backorder when there's a Dell sitting there waiting to go home with them. Even when the software support disparity wasn't as great as it is today, it was still an issue.

I think if there hadn't been some damn lousy marketing decisions in the days when the market share race was a lot closer, Macs would rule the world. They held the educational market, at least here at the UW for a long time, even after PC's took over the home and business markets.

Zippy, when I get moist it doesn't sound like a medical condition.

posted 04-18-2001 21:47            

quote:

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Originally posted by fenomas:
Once you add in shift-clicking for robustness, you have real full-featuredness. Who could get confused?

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Ggaaah! Dude, all the ctrl-shift-alt-double-bucky modifiers aside, there is nothing - NOTHING - I hate worse than being required to manipulate keyboard buttons in order to modify an action being performed by the mouse.

That's kinda like asking somebody to press a button on the car door in order to unlock the shifter to change gears. Wtf?! If you have to have a modifier button, LOCATE IT PROXIMALLY TO WHAT IT MODIFIES...

I know you know this, fen, but there's other folks reading too. Like...

quote:

---

the lovely and talented Bex declaimed:
I love the look, feel and function of the Mac O/S. I still don't have the hang of two mouse buttons and never really felt I was missing anything by not having them. I use the right button now mostly to cut and paste, and I always used to just use command c and v instead. So it's not saving me too much time. I'm just not some major techno-dweeb. I'm smart enough to not make most of the major bonehead tech support customer mistakes, but I don't care enough to go the extra mile the way you guys do.

---

Bex, this isn't about "going an extra mile." The context menu isn't just for "super-arcane shit", it's about providing a single comprehensive list of everything you can do to an object ON THAT OBJECT.

All you need to know about the right mouse button is "it gives me a list of things to do to or with what I clicked on."

Instead of having to go somewhere else to find controls that you can then apply to the thing you're looking at - or to figure out WHAT you can do to or with the thing you're looking at - you can just right-click.

Right-click a ZIP drive, and you see operations like "format", "eject", and "properties." None of these are "arcane" or represent "going the extra mile", they are all operations that you often NEED TO PERFORM on Zip disks!

ESPECIALLY given that Iomega has a nasty habit of NOT INCLUDING AN EJECT BUTTON on the drive itself, it is very very very comforting to know ahead of time that I will be able to find this essential function on the context menu of the device. I do not need to know ANYTHING about the device itself to know this - only that "if you right click it, you'll get a list of stuff to do to it."

quote:

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I use the right button now mostly to cut and paste, and I always used to just use command c and v instead. So it's not saving me too much time.

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Not saving you any time at all, really - you can use Control-C and Control-V to cut and paste under Windows. I love keyboard shortcuts - every time I have to switch back and forth between keyboard and mouse is another instance of lost time fumbling with physical shit. Interfaces should work very hard to minimize the amount of time spent SWITCHING from one interface to the other.

I know I mentioned this already, but asking a user to "shift-click" or "command-click" is pure agony - if Mac GUI architects wanted to use a modifier to the existing button rather than add a new button, they should have added the modifier button TO THE MOUSE, say as a thumb button.

(Thing is, once you do that, you realize that there's no point in requiring a user to press two buttons when you only had two different functions to perform - so it makes more sense for the "modifier" button to act as a stand-alone. That's why everything but the Mac DOES use two-button mice in their existing configuration, rather than a thumb button to "modify" the action of the main button, mimicking the shift-click.)

quote:

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I think if there hadn't been some damn lousy marketing decisions in the days when the market share race was a lot closer, Macs would rule the world. They held the educational market, at least here at the UW for a long time, even after PC's took over the home and business markets.

---

The Mac's future was maimed by the precise same phenomenon responsible for the actual death of the Apple ][ series: Steve Jobs' ego. (The Apple ][ series got the axe WHILE it was making more money for Apple than the Macintosh line was, because it offended Jobs mightily that people would buy the "inferior" Apple ][ line instead of his beautiful baby camel.)

There is more than simple marketing involved in the bad decisions that have so far prevented Macintosh from going anywhere impressive though: one problem is the insistence on maintaining an utterly closed architecture, ie no clones allowed.

The last time Jobs got the axe and somebody with some sense stepped behind the wheel of Apple Computers, that trend got reversed - manufacturers were issued licenses to build clone Macs (which were, on the average, both better AND cheaper than the Apple factory could make them), a revolutionary and impressive new OS was targeted at the Mac, and public interest soared in what had been an undoubtedly dying dinosaur.

Unfortunately, following what has always been the MO in Cupertino, Apple got jealous about the success of the clone manufacturers and began strangling them with license modifications and outright revocations designed to make it impossible for any outsider to make a better Apple than Apple could - no matter how much better of a job they were doing at it. Similarly, around the same time Apple unilaterally revoked all cooperation with the developers of BeOS, removing that exciting development from the Mac's future.

Marketing, actually, is the one thing that Apple DOES do really well: their "Think Different" series of ads, their godawful jewel-toned economy boxen, their... odd but distinctive aesthetics in more expensive boxen (such as The Cube) all appeal radically to the folks who like to think of themselves as Creative People, who think Function follows Form, and who for whatever reason are just traumatized by the Beige Box that has invaded homes and workplaces everywhere and are lashing out in response, looking for something...

... well, different.

This is a similar ploy to that used by AOL, which is UNARGUABLY anything BUT "easier" than standard browser and email applications (for reasons we can go into in another thread if necessary), but nonetheless appeals to those frightened by all-pervasive technology because it looks all bright and colorful and fuzzy and cheerful and "friendly."

Please note that, for the purposes of this discussion, I am NOT necessarily comparing the functionality of the Mac line to that of AOL: merely its very effective marketing psychology.

In another EXTREMELY successful marketing tactic, Apple Computers donates far, FAR more computers to schools and universities at all levels than any other computer manufacturer in the world. If it were not for this tactic - which indoctrinates children and young adults into the intricacies of the Mac world in FAR greater proportions than would otherwise be the case - the Mac probably would have died a spectacular death in the mid-nineties, instead of simply tanking alarmingly until that egomaniac Jobs could get removed from the helm.

The marketing decisions of Apple have been generally superb - it's the business practices that have bitten them in the ass time and time again, because like the MacEvangelists prevalent amongst their devoted userbase, the attitude in Cupertino tends to be that "Macs own the world, and the peons will realize it soon."

Rather than operating rationally as a niche market that desires to expand into the mainstream, Apple - particularly under Jobs' leadership - all too often operates as though it is the unquestioned market leader, and everybody else in the world will be forced to either accept this (false) status quo or be ground under automatically.

And now, back to Fen...

quote:

---

The several G4's we have in the office got about 3-4 frames/second... The oldest i386 we have in the office, a pII-300 or so, got 5-6. My point being, Optimized for photoshop, Mac is. Powerful for flops/memory usage, Mac isn't.

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