Text 1921, 146 rader
Skriven 2006-06-07 13:41:00 av Robert E Starr JR (2367.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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* * * This message was from Josh Hill to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *
         * * * and has been forwarded to you by Lord Time * * *         
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On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 22:06:54 +0000 (UTC), Rob Perkins
<rperkins@usa.net> wrote:

>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>> I think it's more than that. The Mac was always /cutesie/ -- smiling
>> faces, icons, omitting the definite article as one might when talking
>> to a baby.
>
>I never got a "cutsie" vibe from the Macintosh, which is actually a 
>breed of food apple. Hence the name.
>
>> Combine that with Jobs's stubborn insistence on removing power and
>> expandability from his machines -- the tiny built-in monochrome
>> monitor on the original Mac, yada -- and the platform's proprietary
>> elements, and I think it's no accident that it was seen as a computer
>> for high school kids and artsy technophobes.
>
>Buh? Have you looked lately? Every Mac is a unix machine, the mouse I 
>have plugged into mine has five buttons (all of them work), there are no 
>proprietary hardware elements, and I can compile and run almost 
>everything GNU publishes, because all of the GNU compilation tools are 
>present.

Sure. But I was referring to it's historical reputation; I went on to
mention OS X, below.

>> That may well be true. OS X is certainly a better OS than Windows XP:
>
>No, it really isn't; for robustness and stability they're about the 
>same. Most XP crashes stem from non-compliant drivers or the relentless 
>hammering XP gets from malware. Because Apple controls the hardware, and 
>writes its own drivers for everything it ships, there is an appearance 
>of stability Microsoft can't touch. Because the Mac is "below the 
>radar", malware authors don't target it.
>
>Besides, I think in the last few years, the iPod and its cousins, along 
>with the iTunes content business, have outsold the Mac by orders of 
>magnitude. It isn't hard to see that the Mac is secondary to that.

I didn't focus on stability: I've found XP to be pretty stable,
although Microsoft did make it too vulnerable to flaws in drivers,
e.g., when they moved the video drivers into Ring 0 in NT 4.0, and
I've seen particularly meddlesome apps blue screen it or even destroy
an installation, e.g., Norton Goback.

But XP is bug riddled and saddled with Microsoft's refusal to address
prior mistakes both in their own architecture and third party apps. It
still uses shared DLL's. It requires too many restarts. It can go
south and become unfixable without a reinstall, thanks to Microsoft's
refusal to fix known bugs.

I just spent several days rebuilding an XP system from scratch to fix
a flaw caused by a security release that makes some files invisible
over the network. A web search found that it's a known bug, and that
Microsoft said "Sorry, we feel your pain, but we have no plans to fix
it." Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Many of XP's features don't work. For example, two of the three
machines here won't hibernate. A search showed that MS had released a
couple of bug fixes, but admits that hibernation will still fail if
memory becomes too fragmented. Oops, sorry.

To give yet another example, I was troubled for the longest time by
strange behavior in Explorer -- several copies of the desktop would
appear in the folders pane, each with a different icon, Explorer would
become unusable, and I'd have to close it and reopen it, sometimes
several times in a day. Surprise, surprise, turns out to be a known
bug again, which occurs when you open the desktop in a toolbar. Now I
can't use the desktop in my toolbar. And as usual, they've known about
this for years, but didn't bother to fix it, figuring I suppose that a
feature few know about and use (but that is invaluable to those of us
who do) wasn't worth fixing.

I could go on.

And then there's the spaghetti code, which is so unmaintainable that
MS had to give up on it when they wrote Vista. The confusing API --
ever see an autohid toolbar have conniption fits and become
inaccessible when you close an app? Happens all the time, apparently
because the API is too damn confusing. And the obvious features
they've left out. For example, the start bar belongs at the top, near
the applications menus. Anything else is ergonometric foolishness. But
when you put it at the top, some apps get stuck under it. And this has
been true ever since they introduced it in Windows 95. Now they could
fix that in the OS -- there used to be a shareware app that did
exactly that -- but they just didn't bother.

And then there are the tie-ins with apps like Interent Explorer. And
the lousy security, notwithstanding that, as you point out, Windows is
a more attractive target for virus writers. It lacks modularity, it
lets just about any app change anything and it's impractical to run as
anything but an administrator -- something they've finally address in
Vista, I understand, but in a typically braindead way -- seems they
won't even let you remove a shortcut from the desktop without jumping
through hoops, which means that people will -- guess what -- turn off
the security and go back to being administrators.

Now, every time you shut it down, XP is a nightmare -- it hangs on
everything, rather than forcing clumsy apps to close. Of course, you
can make it do that, but oh horrors, you might lose some unsaved
files. The app makers could fix that easily -- just save a temp file
-- but heaven forbid they should have to do so.

When you try to copy a large number of files, XP is a nightmare,
hanging on situations it shouldn't have permitted in the first place,
e.g., illegally long paths, and then crashing out of the copy. It's
just riddled with annoyances. It shakes and rattles and huffs and
puffs like a jalopy -- ever notice, forex, how you sometimes have to
reboot twice to get something to work?

OS X is of course based on Unix, an advantage. Then too, XP's
interface, while better than Apple's in some respects, such as its
keyboard friendliness, power, and the avoidance of over-reliance on
cryptic icons, lacks the consistency and elegance of OS X as well as
many of its enhancements and features. Finding settings is a real
chore, even when you've used it for years, because it lacks top-down
design and organizational elegance. Its historically scattershot
approach to file organization makes it hard to back up files, and its
difficult to move installations to new disks and new machines. Nothing
is general -- there are exceptions to just about everything, which
makes it hard to learn and reduces the functionality of all manner of
features. And so forth.

I could point out some XP advantages as well, and some Mac
liabilities, but I don't think I know anybody familiar with both who
doesn't prefer OS X. And I don't speak as an Apple partisan: I've
never owned a Mac and was anything but shy about criticizing the Mac
OS back in the days when it was inferior to NT and, hard as it is to
believe, Win 9x.

-- 
Josh

"I'm not going to play like I've been a person who's spent hours involved with
foreign policy.
I am who I am." - George W. Bush
                            
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