What separates a Mac from a PC?

[Nubclear]

Originally posted by panag
ever wondered why all the other people dont have problems , ...

Input defines output.......

What does that mean for Mac users who claim PCs are too "complicated" and "crash all the time"?

[Nubclear]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
The vast majority (like over 90%) of consumers dont care about kernals, SWIBSDO and Ultra QQRX graphics cards.

I don't even know what they are

[Ben Kenobi]

Windows XP lets you do tons, way more than 99.99% of people know how to do.

Gee. "Bloatware."

[Asher]

Originally posted by obiwan18
Gee. "Bloatware."

You can never win, can you.

Add lots of power-user features, and it's bloatware, while at the same time people complain it doesn't let you do anything.

It's called whining.

[Ben Kenobi]

No. I believe it's called 'proper programming.'


Why add a feature only useful to 1 in every 10,000 people? Surely not proper business form.

[Asher]

Originally posted by obiwan18
No. I believe it's called 'proper programming.'


Why add a feature only useful to 1 in every 10,000 people? Surely not proper business form.

Because it's a necessity when the 1/10,000 is a sysadmin for the company?

Why add airbags if they only go off 1 out of every 50,000 car trips?

[Ben Kenobi]

I'm sure more than 1 in 10,000 people can actually use an airbag when it deploys.

Windows on the other hand...

[Asher]

And I'm sure 1/10,000 users can use the poweruser features if they ever need to, too.

Most people don't need them, sysadmins do need them (most of the poweruser features were cut out of the "Home" edition for this reason, and they're in "Professional").

The features exist because they can be done, and they are useful. Most people don't use them because they either don't know they exist, or they don't care enough.

If MS didn't cater to the powerusers and such, developers would use Windows less. If developers use Windows less, they make less Windows programs. You can see where this is going.

Power user features in professional edition == good.

[Ben Kenobi]

A real answer. Obviously we can't let the unwashed use their computers properly.


Microsoft caters to the elite.

[Asher]

Besides, it's damn fun to theme Windows yourself, alter the max # of connections, prevent applications from stealing window focus, enable X-Mouse styles so when you have the mouse over a window, it's automatically active, clear document history on exit, alter Thumbnail image quality, add a "Open Command Line Window Here" extension to the Explorer right-click, hide/show certain harddrives, alter special folders like "My Music" etc, change the AutoPlay settings, add/remove things from the control panel, do performance logging, access analyzed crash information, add the extra "Debug" button to crash dialogs which opens up the current program states in the Visual Studio Debugger, construct new security policies, partition and reformat drives, etc.

[Nubclear]

Originally posted by Asher
Besides, it's damn fun to theme Windows yourself, alter the max # of connections, prevent applications from stealing window focus, enable X-Mouse styles so when you have the mouse over a window, it's automatically active, clear document history on exit, alter Thumbnail image quality, add a "Open Command Line Window Here" extension to the Explorer right-click, hide/show certain harddrives, alter special folders like "My Music" etc, change the AutoPlay settings, add/remove things from the control panel, do performance logging, access analyzed crash information, add the extra "Debug" button to crash dialogs which opens up the current program states in the Visual Studio Debugger, construct new security policies, partition and reformat drives, etc.

Teach me how to do these things.

BTW, does anybody know if theres a program that automatically bluescreens your computer? Cause I wanna see what Windows XP bluescreen looks like.

[Asher]

TweakUI is a good place to start for "beginners" since it's a lot of common stuff to tweak with a nice GUI: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/p.../powertoys.asp

(click the TweakUI link on the side)

There's also a bunch of other PowerToys (free) you may like (graphing calculator, multiple desktop switcher thing so you can have 4 running at once and just flip between them, alt-tab replacement so it shows screenshots of the windows as you scroll through running apps, etc)

[Agathon]

I can't believe you think Windows Media is better than Quicktime. Oh god. Windows Media is absolute rubbish. I've used QT on the PC and had no problems, so I've no idea what you're talking about.

And why bother using an elegant and restrained interface when you can use something that looks like an explosion at a crayon factory?

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Just to add to that, QuickTime is a whole lot more than a codec, too. Have you seen some of the stuff you can do with it to make video interactive?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Asher
Because it's a necessity when the 1/10,000 is a sysadmin for the company?

Hm, what features are those?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Asher
Besides, it's damn fun to theme Windows yourself, alter the max # of connections, prevent applications from stealing window focus, enable X-Mouse styles so when you have the mouse over a window, it's automatically active, clear document history on exit, alter Thumbnail image quality, add a "Open Command Line Window Here" extension to the Explorer right-click, hide/show certain harddrives, alter special folders like "My Music" etc, change the AutoPlay settings, add/remove things from the control panel, do performance logging, access analyzed crash information, add the extra "Debug" button to crash dialogs which opens up the current program states in the Visual Studio Debugger, construct new security policies, partition and reformat drives, etc.

Who cares? Most of this stuff is literally window dressing. Any features that happen to be useful have been done for ages.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Why should anyone care? As Asher said, it's fun. You know, I spent a good part of last night beautifying bootup messages: Fiddling with /etc/modules.autoload to make sure that only existent modules that are not yet loaded get loaded, removing EVMS libraries whose API version doesn't match with that of the kernel, updating commands in /etc/conf.d/local.start to new paths (needed due to cleaning up the placement of some files in the filesystem). Heck, I haven't even gotten to the literal window dressing part, even though nothing that I did increased my productivity in any way .

[Q Classic]

mostly mucking around in the services section, ur.

and as for quicktime: windows media player runs a lot smoother for me than quicktime player does-- and it doesn't try to steal every single damn file format on install.

careful with the windows power toys--they can only be used on the system they were designed for. i.e., powertoys 95 blows up win98, usw. the multidesktop powertoy, however, is useless. if you have an nvidia or ati card, you're better off using the desktop switcher that came with it; they're faster and smoother.
and if you really want good multidesktop, get linux.

winxp bluescreens are a deeper blue, have smaller font, and usually occur during a memory dump immediately prior to a system restart.
a program that would do this? you got me. usually it's the case when it's a bad driver.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Ari Rahikkala
Why should anyone care? As Asher said, it's fun.

I did that a long time ago, when Windows 3.0 first came out.

Anyway, these "features" are a pain in the neck for network admins and tech support, as we much prefer a totally standard system configuration for any one company. We don't need any of this additional stuff to get in our way. That's why you don't see XP in companies, W2K is the choice for companies that must have Winodws on their desktops.

[tinyp3nis]

Everytime somebody opens quicktimeplayer 100 children die.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Agathon
I can't believe you think Windows Media is better than Quicktime. Oh god. Windows Media is absolute rubbish. I've used QT on the PC and had no problems, so I've no idea what you're talking about.

That's because you clearly don't know what we're talking about.

I don't give a rats ass about the interface of WMP, because the real Windows Media interface is actually a DirectShow frontend. That's what I'm talking about when I say Windows Media. If I meant to say Windows Media Player, I'd say Windows Media Player. It's not that difficult.

Windows Media is a set of codecs and APIs (ASF, ASX, WMA, WMV, etc) that totally kicks QuickTime's codecs & APIs ass. You may think the QuickTime player is better, but suffice to say that even WMP is better than QuickTime on Windows, and Winamp is better than WMP.

There are dozens of Windows Media players out there. How many QuickTime ones are there? Remember that next time Apple trumpets how they're using an MPEG4-based video codec in the new QuickTime. Who cares if that's what uses it, it's still in the .MOV wrapper and quicktime is still the only player for it.

And why bother using an elegant and restrained interface when you can use something that looks like an explosion at a crayon factory?

I've no idea what you're talking about, since I don't use an interface that looks like an explosion at a crayon factor (Luna) or one that looks like some amateur is playing with alpha blending for the first time (Aqua).

[Asher]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Who cares? Most of this stuff is literally window dressing. Any features that happen to be useful have been done for ages.

Maybe you could take the time and actually read the post.

Stuff like preventing windows from stealing focus, activating X-Mouse, changing max # of connections, crash analysis info, debug launching, performance logging, etc isn't exactly "window dressing".

In fact, the only thing in that list that has to do with window dressing is the "theme" part, which is conveniently the first thing in the list, which says a lot of your attention span and how much of the post you read.

[Drake Tungsten]

You really shouldn't knock Aqua, as Luna is obviously a second-rate copy of it. A lot like most of Microsoft's product on that point, being a ripoff of an Apple innovation.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
I did that a long time ago, when Windows 3.0 first came out.

Anyway, these "features" are a pain in the neck for network admins and tech support, as we much prefer a totally standard system configuration for any one company.

What a bunch of horseshit.

If we followed your logic, Linux would have never become a server/workstation OS because it's so customizable!

System admins can lock off people changing these settings, and ghost installs can be done, etc.

Just don't post about Windows, UR, you clearly don't know what you're talking about.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
You really shouldn't knock Aqua, as Luna is obviously a second-rate copy of it. A lot like most of Microsoft's product on that point, being a ripoff of an Apple innovation.

Vice versa. MS just doesn't have to rub it in, while Apple users have a inferiority complex...

And what, exactly, makes Luna a clone of Aqua? The only thing they have in common is a blueish tone, and the Silver Luna is the only one that's tolerable.

[Drake Tungsten]

Luna was Microsoft's attempt to make a flashy, Aqua-like GUI for XP. It ended up being shite compared to the Apple product it copied, but that's never hurt MS in the past. People like you lap it up the second-rate products anyway; how do you think Windows beat Mac OS in the first place?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Luna was Microsoft's attempt to make a flashy, Aqua-like GUI for XP. It ended up being shite compared to Apple product it copied, but that's never hurt MS in the past. People like you lap it up the second-rate products anyway; how do you think Windows beat Mac OS in the first place?

Luna is in no way, shape, or form a copy of Aqua. In fact, the Whistler betas had a new GUI long before OS X even came out.

And for the record, the general consensus in the HCI community (of which my uni specializes in) is the XP interface is the most functional out of the mainstream OSes.

Aqua may be "prettier", but it does so at the expense of extensability (once Aqua is XML based like XP, let me know), functionality (the Dock is a design disaster, and I don't care if you're "used to it" and think it's fine -- it's not), and performance (how many CPU cycles can the interface chew up this time??)

[Drake Tungsten]

And for the record, the general consensus in the HCI community (of which my uni specializes in) is the XP interface is the most functional out of the mainstream OSes.

Aqua may be "prettier", but it does so at the expense of extensability (once Aqua is XML based like XP, let me know), functionality (the Dock is a design disaster, and I don't care if you're "used to it" and think it's fine -- it's not), and performance (how many CPU cycles can the interface chew up this time??)

Wow, I don't give a **** about any of that. OTOH, I rather like how pretty my GUI is.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Wow, I don't give a **** about any of that. OTOH, I rather like how pretty my GUI is.

Don't judge a book by its cover.

It's this reason that people find Mac users so amusing in general: "OMG IT'S SO PURTY, ME WANT ME WANT"

Some of us do research into what we're buying and put thought into it.

[Drake Tungsten]

Some of us do research into what we're buying and put thought into it.

If you really research whether the GUI in a prospective OS is XML-based or not, then I can only feel a profound sense of pity for you. I'd rather just go with what appeals to me on a more basic level than what extensive benchmarking and comp-sci prattle can give me.

BTW, the Dock is awesome. So purty.