pasithea

Tired, so I'm watching a little TV and being bombarded by advertisements. Always likely to put me in a mood.

Anyhow. I'm really being struck by the Microsoft "I'm a PC" advertisements.

Let me see if I understand the premise... So... Microsoft finds some inbred rube and says, "We'll buy you a computer if you jabber inanely for a few minutes on camera"

... And somehow, bribing someone with a free computer equates to their OS not being a flaming pile of dog shit?

... I'm kinda confused. I mean... If you have to bribe someone to do your advertising, it seems like your product is full of fail.

But perhaps I'm merely basing my opinion on having used Windows. C'mon Microsoft, give me two grand to buy a computer. I'll get something way better than a stinking piece of crap Dell Boat Anchor and it won't even be a single-purpose machine. I'll be able to use it for just about anything.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

dv-girl.livejournal.com

But they're still comparing apples to oranges. Dell isn't Microsoft. It's like saying, "Here! Compare the price of this shitbox used car to this brand new car and that will tell you which one has a better radio."

If you compare software to software, Mac OS is way cheaper and more reliable, and their iWork package is smaller, more stable, and more functional than Office. Microsoft has never come even close to anything resembling sane memory management, etc. If you take the same crappy Dell and put a bootleg of MacOS on it or Linux, it will run two to three times faster than with Windows and be considerably more stable even though it's running free or unsupported software.

Windows is just the biggest piece of crap out there. I really can't figure out why anyone still uses it. Every time I have to boot into Windows at work it costs me many hours of productivity that I don't lose when I'm working on Mac or Linux.

As for hardware... I learned a very important lesson when I used to work on my car. Buy decent tools. Sure, you can get tools at WalMart for 1/3rd the price of say Snap-On tools, and you'll find that they're worth exactly what you pay for them. WalMart's Snap-Off tools (see that clever thing I did there?) are really crap. If you're doing a quickie job, maybe they're okay but if you're doing any serious work or planning to use them for any amount of time, buy good tools.

Yes, an Acer is cheaper than a Mac. A Chevy Cavalier is cheaper than a Honda Accord. However, five years down the road, the transmission is going to fall out of the Cavalier and it has a resell value that only compares favourably with the redemption value of an empty beer can. The accord is going to retain most of it's value and perform more reliably later in life. The Mac I bought 3 years ago retains about 75% of it's purchase price on the secondary market. The Acer or Dell depreciates about 75% within six months.

So. I dunno. For my money, an OS that costs less and doesn't waste my time (by being continually broken, susceptible to viruses, running virus scans, bad installers that trash the registry making you re-install the entire OS, bad uninstallers that make you re-install the entire OS. Calls to some call center in Hell because your license is fucked because you re-installed the OS too many times, etc, etc, etc, etc) on more expensive hardware that generally performs better (in terms of being fully compatible with the OS, better battery life, and better weight) and retains a lot more of its resale value? ...

I'll skip WalMart and buy the better tool for my needs.

From:

ff00ff.livejournal.com

I like your car analogy. I think using a Mac rather than a PC is like buying a Lexis instead of a Toyota. Even though they're virtually the same car beneath the body work one is marketed as a luxury car and comes with a considerable price markup.

Of course that metaphor doesn't begin to address why open architectures are superior to proprietary ones. The problems you have with Microsoft PCs, at least the ones you've described recently sound a lot like your IT department's fault for not maintaining the machines or configuring them in a sensible manner for the work you're doing. Tell me, does your office network use AppleTalk, or an open OSI? There's a reason for that. Apple proponents have forever fallen back on vague and unsubstantiated claims of superior computing speed and now that Macs use the x86 architecture as well there isn't the mysterious hardware factor, so you just claim that the software is inherently faster and more stable, claims I never see substantiated.

But what the fuck, we were arguing about commercials. You didn't like the Microsoft commercial where a diverse caste of filthy real people said "I'm a PC" just because PCs have virtually the entire home and business computing market share locked up, so you can't reduce the PC to a nerdy stereotype and have a smarmy avatar of the Mac tease him. You don't like the commercial because you hate Microsoft, but I like it because it's a great rebuttal to dubious claims made in Apple's advertising.

But what do I know, I'm just posting here from the computer ghetto. How did these words get on my screen? I plugged in my keyboard and I saw an error message flash by too fast to read and suddenly this post appeared, Windows is hard!

From:

centauress.livejournal.com

Funny, I don't see Microsoft running commercials about how reliable their software is. How few hours maintenance they take.

You blame IT for not providing a service which isn't even needed on the other platform. How is that an argument?

From:

ff00ff.livejournal.com

She's complained about logging into a windows machine and having to wait for the anti-virus to update and scan. That's something that IT should be taking care of, not her. Macs aren't immune to viruses, they're just such a small part of the market that malware writers naturally don't target them. Similarly since there are so few macs compared to Windos PCs there is no broad base of foundations seeking out malware on that platform and remedying it, so even if infected with a virus you probably wouldn't know it on a Mac.

And what are you trying to argue? That IT professionals shouldn't know how to configure networks? That they shouldn't have jobs because everyone should just use Macs which "just work" except when they don't?

Running commercials about how reliable your software is sounds a little desperate in this generation of OSes, frankly. I suffered through windows 95 and 98 which were pieces of unstable crap I grant, but only when manually editing system files for nefarious purposes or trying to force the use of third party drivers for interesting peripherals unavailable to Mac users due to Apple's proprietary platform do I ever have stability problems. I've been using the same copy of Windows XP for the last seven years, reconfigured it for four different versions of home network, and as the operating system for three different computers I've built and I've never had a crash that I didn't intentionally cause. Even individual programs which may be buggy or crash-prone like games from bad studios don't seem to destabilize the OS once the offending process has been terminated.

I've used the computer for film editing, 3d and 2d animation, rendering of such, hardcore gaming of many descriptions, hacking my version cellphone so I can actually get pictures off it and put ring tones on it like a reasonable human being might expect to be able to do without an added fee. I've never had any sort of crash where I suffered data loss. In seven years. My love for Bethesda Softworks's video games have been the only cause I can remember of sudden reboots, because they can make a great giant sandbox game, but boy do they fill it with major bugs.

I went to a university that used windows XP as their default platform. Classrooms of 50 students would simultaneously load Photoshop or Maya, or backlog the school's dedicated 3D rendering servers with billions of hours worth of work because they'd set their render options wrong, or simply constructed the most inefficient scene possible. It all worked quickly and like clockwork with any anomalies quickly handled by the IT staff who didn't have a clue that every domain on the network was named after things from DUNE, an artifact of the original IT department who set it all up.

It's been stable enough for me is all I'm saying, and the stability argument is, in my opinion, an artifact of long past days of crappier Microsoft operating systems.

From:

dv-girl.livejournal.com

Macs aren't immune to viruses, they're just such a small part of the market that malware writers naturally don't target them.

I'm so very tired of seeing this particularly bad piece of propaganda.

Macs hold ~10-15% of the market. That's a significant enough portion to be interesting. Particularly if they were 'so vulnerable' and their users 'so overconfident'. They'd be sitting ducks.

Second, almost every cryptogeek I've known has been a huge raging ego maniac. They'd revel in the thrill of media frenzy that would surround them if they 'hacked the mac'.

Third, in my security training for .mil net access when I worked at NASA, the national intelligence agency flat out said Macs and Linux are far less exploitable than Windows and the biggest threat they posed was in not being affected by Windows viruses and thus letting you pass them on to Windows machines without knowing it.

Finally, there has been a bunch of media noise over two (count em, TWO, not HALF A MILLION) exploits on the Mac. All you had to do was click on a link and then TYPE IN YOUR PASSWORD. Clearly they're unreliable.

Also, as for the speed thing. Mac OS pre OSX was gawdawful slow. It had good audio and video throughput but the processing was painfully slow. They even had pre-compiled tables of common mathematical expressions to attempt to speed them up.

OS-X, like Linux is just plain faster than Windows on the exact same hardware for anything but animation, and the reason for that is that Mac and Linux use OpenGL which runs on top of the OS. Windows uses Direct-X which is a bloody hack that bypasses the kernel and causes all sorts of potential for memory corruption, exploits, etc. The Windows OS is far worse than mac or linux because they A) Can't write a decent memory manager and B) Can't write decent disk access routines.

If you run more large applications on Windows than you have raw RAM for, it will bog down horribly. Open SecondLife and Maya at the same time, then try to do something in Photoshop. Or try to output some video over FireWire. On the Mac, I've burned a CD while streaming video over FireWire and working in Maya at the same time... And that was my first Mac, a 400Mhz CPU hand-me-down.

Or better yet, try to run two installers at the same time or delete a large directory and try to do anything else. Your XP box will send you on a forced coffee break. Mac and Linux, you can continue to do stuff.

If Windows suits you, bully for you. Personally, I'm really happy to be free of it.

From:

ff00ff.livejournal.com

Also, now that I find myself in a platform argument that I never wanted to have in the first place I think I'll just go off the deep end and mention that Steve Jobs buys kidneys intended for orphans to prolong his brand/lifestyle pushing cachet, whereas Bill Gates is the head of the largest charitable organization in the history of the world.

Please take this as a signal that I would rather this become absurd name calling than go on. I think DV girl doesn't give Windows PCs a fair shake because she isn't used to the interface and is already indoctrinated to the Apple cult, but I haven't got the inclination or technical expertise to dash any and all of her complaints, nor the bankroll to experience a modern mac so I might try to see things from her own point of view.

From:

shatterstripes.livejournal.com

I think DV girl doesn't give Windows PCs a fair shake because she isn't used to the interface and is already indoctrinated to the Apple cult

Um, actually, she used Windows boxes for years. Switching to Macs was a "HOLY SHIT COMPUTERS ACTUALLY WORK NOW" kind of thing for her. If you dig back in her LJ a few years I think you'll find her first posts along the lines of "OH MY GOD IT JUST FUCKING WORKS THIS IS SO AWESOME".

I think she'd just recently switched when I moved in with her so she's only been using 'em since... 2005 I think? rather than being a freak of nature like me who went from the mind-shattering awesome coolness of the Amiga to the Mac and never had to deal with a MS-DOS/Windows box.

From:

dv-girl.livejournal.com

This is true. I have the kind of hate for Windows that only comes from a scornful ex.

From:

dv-girl.livejournal.com

Oh wow. The richest man in the world can hire tax consultants to tell him that 'charitable donations' will let him keep the greatest portion of his wealth and push more of his tax burden onto people like me. How noble. Maybe next, he'll take on the mantle or eradicating a disease that's already in severe decline so that he can have a place in history as a great healer or something. ... Oh wait...

Bill Gates is the master of Oxyclean. In a better world, he's selling ShamWow and various plastic kitchen implements. He's a flimflam man. He's never been good at anything other than scamming people.

From:

ff00ff.livejournal.com

Malaria was already on the decline anyway, DV? Malaria? The most common infectious disease on Earth? And what about Warren Buffet willing his estate to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation? He do that for tax purposes, so he wouldn't have to pay annual taxes... when he is dead?