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

[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.