Microsoft Commercials...

[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.

Comments

[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.

[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.