For schumi, I completely respect your decision not to "engage with me"! I thought I had tried my best not to bash Microsoft, and definitely did not try to peeve you guys! Although, discussions at the same level use English, and not the !#@$@# variety of language! But, anyway... [PS: Windows XP free from MSDNAA doesn't make it a free software either!]
Quote:
A Unique Apple Reseller
Terra Soft, an Apple Authorized OEM VAR (Value Added Reseller) has been granted a unique license to install Yellow Dog Linux on Apple computers and maintain full Apple hardware warranty for home, commercial, education, and government customers.
I guess that does away with the "insecurity" point. Since I don't work for Apple, I can only speak from my point of view!
About the customization:
I agree that you might not want to be constricted in choice of components or companies, but, since they either pick the finest that there is in the market at that time (DDR3 RAM + Nvidia's 9400M GPU this time I think) for the Macbook Pro's and literally whatever you want for the Mac Pro, I think your wishes are mostly taken care of! Plus, I too agree to the fact that they make most of their own hardware, and stick to certain preferred vendors for reasons of profitability as well as making their designer's lives easier. For the consumer, this means that once he has made his pick, things just work! By the way, they have always guided customers better than others in getting after-market upgrades to things like the HDD and the RAM. I guess no other part is user-upgrade-able in most other laptops too!
Well, since you are a CS graduate, I shouldn't have assumed that you are one of those people who find some new computer system hard to grasp for the first time! [Nothing to do with your proficiency at using it once comfortable enough!] Alright, on this one, you'll have to let me know what you didn't find intuitive! I started using my machine without a manual, and almost the moment I took it home! The only weird thing was the one-button mouse, but I don't really feel the need for it anymore! I like the uniformity in keyboard shortcuts too! Not to mention that Expose makes Window management (the user kind) a cake-walk! Please elaborate on what you found amiss, but maybe I am wrong too!
I agree that gaming at this moment is not at all a big thing on the Mac! Maybe Steve acknowledged that in a short and rare lapse in his "Steve-ness", and admitted they needed Boot Camp for games! But, do look up Cider or "Crossover Games for Mac" for playing Windows games on a Mac. Honestly, with market share, games will come too, but right now, they are a small insignificant number for the games industry to target! By the way, I play NFS Carbon and AoE3 on the rare occasion on my notebook, and to my friend's admission (who is a game-phile), it runs better than on his Windows desktop! The fact that I have newer hardware should be negated by the fact that the game is a straight port using Cider instead of being designed "For a Mac"! Since it's a discussion and not a war, I will not use words such as "concede"!
The fact that more Linux users are using Macs comes from observations that can't probably be proved. In the last couple of years, Linux developers' conferences have seen a growing number of Macs being used, and the last time around it was observed that they are close to over-taking Windows machines. Since it was an observation, I will not look around for 10 www links to prove what is just a hypothesis! I believe you were not asking me to prove that Leopard is 100% POSIX compliant, or for that matter that the Mac interface is gorgeous!
About Boot Camp (since no one knows why they did it, we can only speculate):
When I bought this machine, I was also feeling good about being able to install Windows if something didn't work or didn't have a Mac alternate! But, trust me, I have never since given it a thought! None of my colleagues who use Macs in the office too have done anything like that! They boot only into OS X! I have never felt the need to install some sort of virtualization software either, but yes, I agree that before I bought the machine, I had some solace in knowing that the possibility existed to install Windows if things didn't go right! It's just my point of view!
Standardization:
My friend with a 64-bit HP laptop (with Vista Ultimate Professional Blah! Blah! Edition 64-bit installed) has had issues with getting certain hardware to work, as he had to wait for drivers to be launched even nearly a couple of years after the launch of the OS! Also, he doesn't have something as rudimentary as a CISCO VPN Client supported or even hack-able on his system! Maybe that shows how complex it is to program something as important as a driver (the VPN Client too is almost a driver!) for this OS where the difference is only in 32-bit to 64-bit. On a Mac, at least till Leopard, you can write code once, and target 32-bit or 64-bit machines, PPC or x86 architecture, all at once! Maybe this is because the free Xcode is so powerful, but it is also because Apple was far-sighted in it's development! I don't install any drivers for my phone's camera profile or my point-and-shoot camera or my uncle's SLR. He was pretty adamant on finding and downloading the driver from the internet first, then install and reboot the machine to use it for his SLR! But, I was able to convince him to plug it in, and thank God it played right away! If I buy an Apple keyboard (wireless), I can use it even with my Nokia N95! The Apple Webkit has been around for quite a while now. Although it is based on KHTML, it is fast enough and modular enough to be adopted for phones (Nokia S60 browser, iPhone), Mac OS X or Windows' Safari, Google Chrome, and a million other places for ubiquitous computation where people are trying to use it for the browsing experience. I think that speaks volumes about the coding practices of Apple and their "giving back" to the community! And, the example of the keyboard must help you understand the need for standardization! Let me know if I wasn't convincing enough.
I am not saying that the Mac is technically superior to anything! Any OEM could manufacture a machine with similar capability! But, the industrial design, the interface, the seamless functioning of the hardware with the software and many instances of attention to detail make it a more pleasant experience. For instance, when I plug in my headphones, my machine recalls the last volume I used for the speaker port! That means that I have never been greeted with a blast from my headphones! It's the smaller things in life that matter more!
About the virus thing:
1. Like I talked about the Pakistani situation. Let me only say that if I were a Pakistani, I would give a limb to be able to live in India, simply for the safety! Or for that matter, I would go to Norway. Patriotism is one thing, but I have never been a great fan of nationalism! [ Here, I equate it with the love for one's OS!] I guess that answers your comment on the lower RoI for virus-creators for the Mac.
2. Since I live in Norway (have a Mac), yes, I do login only as administrator, and for most purposes, unless the software explicitly doesn't ask me to login as root, I work more openly compared to on a Windows system, where I wouldn't dare run as an administrator (there's no root there, right?) with or without any anti-virus, etc! [A friend of mine, from Norway, is not in the habit of locking his house as they keep the keys hanging next to the door itself!]
About the VS comment. I was only answering "schumi" who pasted a conversation from the internet which said that I belonged to a category of people who knew jack-s*** about computers and was incapable of cross-compiling!
About the Express edition environment, the joke to me was that you can't even mix code! I was big on C++ when their Betas for the express editions came out, and wanted to use C# too, but couldn't, because it would allow me to re-use my C++ code along-side! In case it is not the case right now, I take my words back, and call VS a joke! They should at the very least give out their command line tools for free and charge only for the IDE!!
Sir, Windows Mail is not identical to Apple Mail in any way! Exchange Mail accounts (another horrible implementation from MSFT!) are not supported in Windows Mail, but I use them on Apple Mail. I can directly add phone numbers (auto-detected), addresses, email addresses to my "Address Book". I can add to-dos, alarms, etc right from my Mail.app (Mac nomenclature for .exe) which is auto-detected from the text of emails! I don't even need to select it, copy it and then open iCal (calendar app) to add it! I just need to say "yes" and it is done! They even removed Webdav from Windows Mail! Why remove something that was implemented before!
And, anti-trust laws were meant to stop monopolies. Do you know that there is a MSFT tax to be paid if the Dells and the HPs decide to offer users a Linux version of their systems? These kind of moves made people cry foul and sue Microsoft for a lot many things! Apple gives back to the OSS community in more ways than one. It gives you a lot of software pre-installed, but that's part of the whole machine that you buy, and they don't come with the OS itself! If I buy the next version of the OS, I will not get the next generation of productivity software like iLife for free! Hence, no anti-trust!
You say that .NET 3 has a similar feature, but, what if it was easily implementable, why would the developers not want to do it fails me! On a Mac, if you set up a keyboard short-cut (you can set up custom keyboard shortcuts system-wide!), you can be sure that it will work uniformly, across almost all applications, Apple or non-Apple!
See, every OS has it's pros and cons, and I am not saying that Apple is perfect! For instance, although the white iPOD is the more famous one, I chose the black one! But, the Macs are another thing altogether. To me the system has a lot more pros than cons, and that has out-weighed the premium I had to pay for it! What I have found is that a lot of attention to detail costs only little more maybe, on the manufacturer's part, but for the user, it translates into a lot more bang for the buck.
Questions and comments are always welcome. I might need to do some research and look for some add-ons to my own system as a result, but only if the expression is dignified! There's no point in bashing each other, and I appreciate you ("dude") for that!
No comments:
Post a Comment