What's an upside to using Windows?

It's an interesting question though; to turn it on its head, what do you see as being an upside to using other OSs? I assume you're referring to OSX and Linux rather than OS/390 or something :)

;-)

Mac advantages, as I see it right now:

1) a better environment for design and development
2) fewer security issues
3) guaranteed-solid hardware configuration
4) full use of awesome OSX software suites

(xpost)

But an upside as well: software that's more easily cracked.

Certainly the hardware configuration is the case, since there's only one it clearly limits the scope for errors, in driver software in partricular. Same if you want to go and buy an Ultrasparc. Fewer security issues is the case with respect to the media; however, in fifteen years of running windows I've only had a single virus, which was only because I was running IIS, which isn't something most would be likely doing (only available in pro; doesn't install as standard), which didn't do any harm. The last virus I had previous to this was a GEM virus on an Atari ST; again, not harmful. This is not to say there aren't loads more viruses; there clearly are, but assuming you don't click on iloveyou.exe things that turn up in your inbox :)

I couldn't say about design (assuming you mean some sort of graphical design); if by development you mean software development then I would dispute that point, just because of the amount of choice on offer with Windows. I'm sure it's better these days though, particularly with OSX being Linux, I guess that means the likes of Eclipse is available.

What are the awesome software suites?

I've used loads of OSs in my career, but the Mac has largely passed me by. I might buy one of these cheapy things just out of curiosity; maybe I will be a convert, although I have to say I doubt it; not that it won't be great or as good any other option, but it's just a computer and an operating system!

I was thinking, for basic home use, about the iLife programs: iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, etc. They're all beautifully designed and integrated with each other and with the OS.

I hear (around here, especially) a lot of people say, "What's the big deal with iTunes (or whatever) organizing your files for you? I use Winamp and make my own folders, etc." Which is fine, but it's nice to not even have to *think* about such things. The perceived loss of control over your files is far outweighed by the time saved not having to dick around with simple, obvious things like organizing folders.

When I was in college, my friends and I used to make fun of my roomate's Mac. A "Fisher-Price computer," we called it. A lot of things about Mac still feel that way -- so simple it seems dumbed-down. Only now I realize, it's not dumbed-down, just simple. Simple is a great virtue.

(*Note: when I say "simple," I am of course not talking about a lightweight operating system.)

Which I never play.

I'm not sure about organizing folders, I've never had to do anything with Windows Media Player, which works just fine, although it could be a bit faster, but to be fair, the general populace probably doesn't have anywhere near as many records as us lot :)

Completely agree with the simple angle; couldn't agree more, although I do see Windows as pretty simple these days. This was a huge virtue in the past, I'm not so sure it's so much any more (although quite possibly in part).

I like Fisher-price though, it's good fun. I've been referring to them as Beta-macs of late. Better technically, but no use if you can only get Tom and Jerry cartoons on them.

I'm interested in OSX though; how does software built for previous MacOSs run on it?

oh, well by all means get a Mac then.

Poisoned should have you covered.

There are really nice open source apps for OS X for most typical end user tasks. I use Fire for IM, Poisoned for P2P and of course, Firefox.

That said:

1) a better environment for design and development

As someone's already pointed out, saying the enviroment is better for development is probably not accurate. It's different, to be sure, and maybe you'll like it better. It is most definitely not as versatile for development... yet. (Which is to say there just aren't as many development suites, packages, compilers, etc.)

If you mean "development" like front-end HTML type stuff, then I'd prefer the Mac personally because BBEdit rocks nuts. On the other hand Homesite is just as powerful, so that one is really up to user preference. (Fuck Dreamweaver, okay. No need to even talk about it.)

For design I'd disagree that it's better too. (Unless I'm wrong about what kind of design you're doing.) Again it's just different. I've had no problems running Photoshop and Illustrator on either platform, and they both do what I want them to do without crashing or anything. (I've seen Macs go down trying to do hardcore Photoshop and Illustrator stuff at least as often as PCs.) I personally prefer the PC implementation of Adobe's design stuff because it's what I started on and I know all the shortcuts, etc., but that's really the only thing that makes me prefer it.

2) fewer security issues

You are most definitely correct about this one.

3) guaranteed-solid hardware configuration

Yes, with the small exception being that if you attempt to buy 3rd party hardware later you'll have to look harder to find compatible stuff than you would with a PC. The other caveat as I see it is that Mac hardware (and compatible hardware like 3rd party memory) is more expensive. It's the one thing I despise about Apple, but then I know they're not the only fuckers making proprietary hardware, so whatever.

4) full use of awesome OSX software suites

I suppose you mean stuff like iLife, etc.? Beats me... I was never all that impressed with any of it except for iTunes. (Garage Band is cool and all, but it ticks me off that Mac just bought out Logic and then fucked over all of its devoted users on the PC. I'm not a Logic user, but I feel for them, you know?)

But yes, software + OS is really the main reason I'd switch platforms or dual boot or whatever. You know what apps you want to be able to run and which ones you don't give a shit about.

Also...

PC games are amazing. Complexity at very high-resolutions is intoxicating.

I think many PC games are terrific. The problem is that by the time you fork over the dough for the graphics card and the system to be able to run Half Life 2 at 1600x1200 without lagging framerates, you've spent so much money that you might as well have bought a Mac and a damn Xbox and played Halo instead.

This is indeed what I meant, although maybe I should just let people believe that I write software. That would make me seem cooler, I think.

And I prefer Mac for this, too: Unix OS, easy switching between the command line and, say, Photoshop -- it's everything you need to put together a website.

Depends what you mean by issues I suppose, but in terms of security-related defects, I would suggest that one thing Windows gets is attacked a lot, and patched a lot. Unless you've reason to believe that either the MS developers are daft, or that other operating systems' developers are cleverer, then it seems to me unlikely that OSX or Linux has any less.

If you mean in terms of the end user, then clearly there are more issues on Windows; naturally this is what most people are going to care about, so fair enough.

By way of interest, the history of Unix has a lot of serious security issues; perhaps the best being that you were at one point able to go:

lpr -P /etc/passwd

And print out the unencrypted password file, because lpr ran setuid to root and could see in the password file.

If it's just for your own personal use, you can get what feels right and suits your needs, but if you work with those pesky OTHER people, it sure does help to be able to pass things around with minimum fuss.

As a publications-type person, I will say that the long history of MacDominance in graphic design is a two-edged sword. To wit, it's very hard to find design people who are not Mac-only. They grew up when Macs were truly better at graphics handling; many have never done anything on the PC.

Now that the gap has closed somewhat, and Quark/PageMaker/Photoshop/Illustrator work fine on PCs, these designers' MacBigotry is not an asset but rather a liability, in an office setting. This is because non-design publications people (writers, editors, etc.) almost always work on PCs, necessitating conversion back and forth every. god. damn. time. you. do. something. Almost every publishing and communications concern I know of has a dual-platform system. Technical support costs twice as much. Fonts change, special characters go bye-bye, text re-flows, etc.

And once something has gone over the MacWall, then a designer must do everything on it. Let's say it's 10 p.m. and the designers have all gone home, and a copy editor just wants to change a comma on a designed publication; if everybody's on one platform it's a snap. If it's a two-platform office, it's a much bigger headache.

So I tend to go with PCs just because, as a writer, I have to work with people, send them stuff, have them send me stuff, take work home. This is easier to do if you use the more common OS, applications, file formats, etc.

You will have crashes and corruptions and whatnot on both platforms. My general perception is that on the PC, it's slightly easier to "open the hood" and figure out what's wrong and fix it, but that's true only sometimes.

I completely agree, I used to have a G3 (which crashed constantly) and a PC side by side. There is no inherent advantage to designing on a Mac. The only thing I like better is the mouse action (which I can't even really describe).

The problem is that by the time you fork over the dough for the graphics card and the system to be able to run Half Life 2 at 1600x1200 without lagging framerates, you've spent so much money that you might as well have bought a Mac and a damn Xbox and played Halo instead.

Haha, I'm buying a new PC this week and the video card is at least a third of the cost. I'm actually getting an SLI mobo, but I'm only getting one card for now and get another one when it's like $50 in 2 years...

Yea, I hear they don't have Word for Mac.

-- KeithW (keithmatthewwatso...) (webmail), January 14th, 2005 2:04 PM. (kmw) (link)

BZZT: wrong. /etc/passwd has ALWAYS been world readable and encrypted. Maybe you meant that you could lpr /etc/shadow and get shadowed (and still crypted) passwords?

I'd imagine that its the overhead of running the Cocoa graphical widgets on top of Windows' bitmap based graphical system instead of on a vector graphics rendering system like OS X's.

I've never had any problems with Quicktime feeling bloated on Windows in years.

Are you kidding? It's *enormous*. Better than it used to be, but I can't not use Winamp on my PC. There's should never be a load time between songs on a playlist, fer chrissakes.

But that doesn't mean that a file saved in PCWord looks and acts exactly the same when opened in MacWord.

I can't remember the detail. It matters not really. However, perhaps they were encrypted. DES encryption is what was used back then, which is very weak (with respect to today's standards); hence, being able to get hold of the encrypted version makes it liable for cracking.

Why did you refer to someone else back there as a moron?

this is not true.

Also, I much prefer CDisplay for reading cbr files, rather than the sequential image viewers for the mac. I would love to have a 12" ibook though, they are the perfect backpack size.

Going on my own personal experience of BBEdit, I'm going to avoid it like the plague in future. It has completely fucked-up files I've been working on. Admittedly, we're talking about files in a really, really stupid format; but BBEdit fucked them up, and Emacs handled them fine. It fucked them up because it decided that the files looked slightly corrupt and needed cleaning up a bit. Which it did silently. I don't want to use *any* software that decides to silently fix things that aren't actually broken.

(the bug is, if BBEdit comes across a text file which it thinks has a mixture of line-ending formats, it silently "sanitises" the file to look like a Mac text file. Not good if you're trying to edit a delimited text-file which - I said, it was stupid - uses LF characters for line endings and CR characters as a field delimiter)

Yea, it used the unix Crypt algorithm which IIRC is DES encryption using the following as a key. A string composed of two random characters (called a "salt") followed by enough of the password to pad it out to 56 bits long. I think it used 7 bit ascii and I also think that the 2 characters only amounted to one byte in the key (they wanted to keep them alphanumeric so the passwd would be word readable). Then the password is encrypted against this string.

The salt was made so you couldn't just keep a dictionary of every password and its crypted version around.

Keith, I'm pretty sure you must be refering to lpr stealing the shadow file....

http://www.unix.geek.org.uk/~arny/www.8lgm.org/3.UNIX.lpr.19-Aug-1991

The internet is a mine of information isn't it. Back then, I used to post a lot on usenet groups. Glad to say none of you know my email address at the time, cause at the time I thought it was all going down the toilet, then google put it all online. Got a hell of a shock reading the sort of rubbish I wrote back then! I'm sure the same will be true of today in fifteen years' time.

k...@uk.ac.ed.dcs
Keith.

Half-Life 2 is actually, quite good from what I understand. But then I like first person shooters a lot, so...

Mind you I do almost all of my gaming on consoles because I'm not yet willing to build yet another high end specialized machine. (I did that for the machine that currently acts as my multitrack recorder a couple years ago.)

Admittedly, we're talking about files in a really, really stupid format; but BBEdit fucked them up, and Emacs handled them fine.

Uh, BBEdit isn't even the same idea as Emacs. I mean Emacs will handle just about any ascii based file just fine. BBEdit is designed to handle certain kinds of files. It's a tool... It's cool if you prefer rolling out the HTML in a (damned powerful, I should add) text editor, but I prefer an editor that is a little smarter out of the box (without having to go get a bunch of extra modules etc.), that's all. I've been doing front-end web stuff for over a decade now, and along the way that's the preference I've picked up.

Now, you want to talk about an editor fucking up code, let's roll out the WYSIWYGs and dissect their performance...

youch. Let's not.