Macintosh Forums

[Drake Tungsten]

Originally posted by Asher
I'm glad you're comfortable with it.
Keep buying Mac.

I plan on it. And thanks for putting me in your sig, I sure am flattered.

[Asher]

About the MSN thing: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=tp_pr

[Drake Tungsten]

I already saw that. Just saying "oh, my bad" doesn't negate the fact that Microsoft was trying to force people to use its browser. The fact that they even attempted such a thing is appalling. Thank god that public opinion actually made them stop their uncompetative practices, at least in this instance.

[bradman]

Originally posted by Asher

I was completely unaware you could port heavy DirectX games 'with ease' to the Mac. Can you give some examples of some Direct3D games ported to the Mac?
Are you saying Max Payne is coming to the Mac ala Westlake?

Tony Hawk 2 is the most recent D3D game we've done. The most recent D3d game ported was Giants. I can't comment in any official capacity about Westlake and Max Payne. We are working on an unannounced "Morphine" project though.

While it is true most people don't even come close to needing that power, why would you pay the same, or more, for a chip that will do less for you?

Not everyone buys a PC just for the chip inside, and I think it's more than a little ignorant to say that the G4 does less than the P4. The P4 has a 20-stage pipeline just to get the clock speeds up. Most people are too ignorant to notice that their P4 really doesn't perform all that well by comparison to the P3 or K7 due to the all the instruction caches being flushed at every stall because those "Mega-hertz thingies" are so high.

Mouse: Sorry, didn't Xerox do that?
Laser printer: Sorry, didn't Xerox do that?

Xerox did not make or market these devices towards consumers. Apple did and took the risk. Find me a PC company that introduces new technology into their lineups first with even half as much frequency as Apple.

If the computer is an overwhelming thing, why would they "not love x86"?

There are many different types of people in the world. Some are computer neophytes. Some are not. Those that have had any familiarity with low-level x86 vs. well, any other chip can see that the x86 is a total pile to program for by comparison. The limited register set in this day and age is really crippling. That is one of the reasons why I personally would never make an x86 my main machine.

I urge you try become acquanted with Windows XP and then judge how "hard" it is to use Windows now.

I'm all-too-familiar with Win2k. The faults I have with Windows are fundamental issues, like it's insistence on realigning all the icons on the left of the desktop if I move them, the clunkiness of the file explorer compared to the MacOS Finder, the way 2k tries at first to keep you from hurting yourself because it's too stupid to deal with you moving files out of the win32 system directories while it's running, the notion that my hard drive is referred to as "C:\", using "\" as a path separator, etc.

Brad

[Wiglaf]

Okay then.
A P4 1.7GHz, 256mb RAM, DVDROM (16x), a warranty (1 year -- you dont need any more w/ Dell), a 40GB (7200 rpm, UltraATA/100) hard drive, 17" monitor, 16x/10x/32x CD-RW, and Windows XP:
$1,507.00
Try it out for yourself.

that's SDRAM, no mention of a video card, and a questionable warranty that throws out dell's entire service and support reputation (which wouldn't be around in the first place if their PCs didn't break).

[Asher]

Originally posted by bradman
Not everyone buys a PC just for the chip inside, and I think it's more than a little ignorant to say that the G4 does less than the P4. The P4 has a 20-stage pipeline just to get the clock speeds up. Most people are too ignorant to notice that their P4 really doesn't perform all that well by comparison to the P3 or K7 due to the all the instruction caches being flushed at every stall because those "Mega-hertz thingies" are so high.

The P4 has a long pipeline for a number of reasons. Mostly because SMT would remove lots of the problems associated with the long pipeline, it's too bad SMT had to be disabled on the production line due to it not working entirely properly at the P4 launch.
It'll be in some upcoming core revisions, though.

Xerox did not make or market these devices towards consumers. Apple did and took the risk. Find me a PC company that introduces new technology into their lineups first with even half as much frequency as Apple.

I will give Apple credit for gunea-pigging their users like that.

I'm all-too-familiar with Win2k.

First, the Windows XP interface differs from 2K in some ways.

The faults I have with Windows are fundamental issues, like it's insistence on realigning all the icons on the left of the desktop if I move them

This is an option, and is actually disabled by default. (Right click on the desktop, go into the 'Arrange Icons By' and turn off 'Align to Grid' and/or 'Auto-arrange'.

the clunkiness of the file explorer compared to the MacOS Finder

That's purely based on what you're used to.
I feel castrated in the finder, myself.

the way 2k tries at first to keep you from hurting yourself because it's too stupid to deal with you moving files out of the win32 system directories while it's running

You can move things in the System directories as long as they're not in use. That seems logical to me: Don't move drivers that are in use by devices or programs. Why would you want to, anyway?

the notion that my hard drive is referred to as "C:\", using "\" as a path separator, etc.

You want it to be like Unix where you can't differenciate between which drive everything is?
I have no problems with \ has a seperator, either. That certainly doesn't make it more user friendly, especially to the Computer-fearing people we're talking about.

that's SDRAM, no mention of a video card, and a questionable warranty that throws out dell's entire service and support reputation (which wouldn't be around in the first place if their PCs didn't break).

You're right, it is SDRAM. You could spend ~$100 more and get RDRAM. Still a great price for an overly-fast system, don't you think?
As for video card: It was a GeForce 3 Ti200.
And it does come with a full warranty for one year.

[SilexMT70]

Coke vs Pepsi

Do I have clue what kernel, pipeline or BDS is? Not really. Do I give a damn? Nope. Should I? Probably not, unless I really enjoy this kinda of stuff. My philosophy about computers is pretty simple: I want toast, I put bread in toaster, I pull lever down, I wait, I get toast; I don't need to be an electrician to operate a toaster. I doesn't take a plumber to turn on the shower. How many people here can tell how many psi of torque their car can develop? Unless your a mechanic buff, all you need to care about is which pedal to press and where to put the CD, right? So why should you need to be some coding wizard just to operate a computer?

This is why I originally turned to the Mac: that was almost 15 years ago, the glory days of dos: back then even simple word processing was an adventure in itself. And I keep using it because I know it, I feel familiar with the Finder, and it does everything I want it to do. Is XP really better than OS X? I wouldn't know, I haven't tried either. But every review, every commentary I read and heard have all been unanimous in being undecisive, i.e. "one is better in some aspects, but not in others". I'm absolutely convinced that for the majority of people it's strictly a matter of preference, as each os will inevitably get better as it responds to the pressure of the other. For a small minority though, it's more a matter of Faith....

"But the Mac is pricey, and there's not enough games" Chicken-and-egg argument: if there were more Macs available both arguments would disappear (basic laws of supply-and-demand); and indeed it is getting better (well at least compared to five years ago).

To each his own I guess. But one thing's for sure: the worse thing that could happen to the Windows consumer would be for Apple to close down. But as it is now, we got what, 10%? maybe 15% of the market share, and it seems that it's still too much for some of them PC trolls. You ask a question on a message board, you post on a newsgroup, and there they are, popping their little ugly heads with 'get rid of your mac!'. or 'people are still using them?' (my, that's funny, never heard that one before); it's almost like these people are on a crusade or something. I don't know what their problem is: maybe it has something to do with their mother. They probably are 5% of all people who use Windows, but they provide 95% of the aggravation.

Personnally, if I was at the Mac counter in a convention or in some gaming club or whatever, and one of those came by and snickered 'oh look, the kiddie table', I'd give him a mouthful of knuckles. Do your thing, and I'll do mine.

That's all I have to say on this board.

[bradman]

Originally posted by Asher

First, the Windows XP interface differs from 2K in some ways.

Good for it. Why should _I_ care?

You can move things in the System directories as long as they're not in use. That seems logical to me: Don't move drivers that are in use by devices or programs. Why would you want to, anyway?

...

You want it to be like Unix where you can't differenciate between which drive everything is?

These both hilight fundamental flaws in the underlying OS on the PC. The MacOS filesystem is not path-based (not even under 10 for native Carbon apps), all the Windows-based filesystems are. The advantage being that on the Mac, where you move the file often doesn't matter. Along the same lines, you can have two identically-named drives on the Mac desktop and your apps won't get confused. Just another one of those fit-and-finish things that I like so much about the Mac. But if you pay less for a PC, you get the "advantage" of drive identifiers, dot-three extensions and other relics to shore up a crippled filesystem that can only identify and handle files by name alone.

Brad

[Asher]

Originally posted by bradman
Good for it. Why should _I_ care?

Because you went out of your way to criticize the OS for unfounded reasons, because you didn't know where to find the off switch? (Options are fun, it's another advantage of the PC world )

These both hilight fundamental flaws in the underlying OS on the PC.

I'm going to stop you right there: You call having a uniquely identified name for a driver a 'fundamental flaw'? I call allowing two drives under the exact same name a 'flaw', because that's just confusing and not very good design.

The MacOS filesystem is not path-based (not even under 10 for native Carbon apps), all the Windows-based filesystems are. The advantage being that on the Mac, where you move the file often doesn't matter. Along the same lines, you can have two identically-named drives on the Mac desktop and your apps won't get confused.

But your users will. What's the point?

Just another one of those fit-and-finish things that I like so much about the Mac.

Indeed, a non-path-based filesystem that lets you have many drivers under the same name is a great feature worthy of making me switch to Mac alone!

But if you pay less for a PC, you get the "advantage" of drive identifiers, dot-three extensions and other relics to shore up a crippled filesystem that can only identify and handle files by name alone.

You should do a lot more research on NTFS before making comments like that. They're mostly only true for FAT32...
Oh, and dot-three extensions are much more fun than resource forks. By default, newer Windows hides them from the user, but you can have them displayed, change them easily, and also easily see which type of file something is even while listing in the command line. I find that much more useful than a hidden attribute somewhere that tells you which program to launch the file with.

Personnally, if I was at the Mac counter in a convention or in some gaming club or whatever, and one of those came by and snickered 'oh look, the kiddie table', I'd give him a mouthful of knuckles. Do your thing, and I'll do mine.

Well, a comparison can be drawn between PC users and Mac users with human development:
Mac users tend to know not very much about computers (Kids) while many PC users do. That's why the comment about the Kiddy table was made, and it looks like bradman is the only person here with a clue of how computers works and can make decent arguments in the PC vs. Mac debate.

"But the Mac is pricey, and there's not enough games" Chicken-and-egg argument: if there were more Macs available both arguments would disappear (basic laws of supply-and-demand); and indeed it is getting better (well at least compared to five years ago).

Unfortunately this is incorrect. The basic laws of supply-and-demand hinge upon having multiple vendors available.
Apple can set the prices to whatever they want on the Macs, no one else can make them. The market for Apples isn't exactly a free market system, which is why the PC market is considered by most to be much cheaper.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

Well, i just wanted to add my 2 cents. I don't understand much of this technical speech stuff.

i used to have a PC. HP Pavillion. I got it when I was in 5th grade. It lasted about 6 years without upgrades, but CTP severely tested its limits. Now i got a Mac. G4 400, 10 mb harddrive, 17 in moniter. The terminal cost $1600 i think and the moniter was either $399 or $499 (probably the latter) Printer also cost like $200 or $300. I got it because my school only has macs and I had lots of webbuilding and graphics design to do for homework and i wanted to be able to do it at home. i got all the software for free fro mthe school. When I graducate next year, i don't know what im going to get. Might be PC. Might be Mac. But its gonna be based on what I need to do. Does comparing all these tiny techincalities really make a difference when I turn on the computer and surf the web or things like that? not to me. When i work with Photoshop, illustrator etc, do i get out my stopwatch and mesure how long it takes to apply a texture? no.

I havn't had many crashed in the three years that i ve had it. I like OS 9 and im trying to figure out if I want to get OS X just for civ3. Maybe Brad could help me with that. (hint hint )

Yes there are a few drawbacks on mac. I don't get the games at the same time as with PC. I dont think ill be ablt to play Civ3 multiplayer againts my brother. (whos got a PC) THis new OS X comes at a bad time for me because ive jsut gotten all the software i need to do my school work and i don't want to use the classic mode. (which i heard is slower than OS 9) My brother got a Dell for $1400 without moniter or printer and his has like 4* the harddrive, and like 1.5 ghz Pentium III.

Well, anyhow, thats my 2 cents.

[Wiglaf]

You're right, it is SDRAM. You could spend ~$100 more and get RDRAM. Still a great price for an overly-fast system, don't you think?
As for video card: It was a GeForce 3 Ti200.
And it does come with a full warranty for one year.

SDRAM coupled with a P4 and a VERY skimpy warranty? that's a tough purchase to make, especially for the majority of users who want a speedy, yet reliable system. $2000 is more like it for optimal parts. only one or two mac models go that high.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
SDRAM coupled with a P4 and a VERY skimpy warranty? that's a tough purchase to make, especially for the majority of users who want a speedy, yet reliable system. $2000 is more like it for optimal parts. only one or two mac models go that high.

First of all, you're buying the fastest PC you can get, and you're comparing this to buying a low or mid ranged Mac.

Even then, with a full warranty and RDRAM, it's a bit under $1700.
For quite a bit more hardware than the Mac.

And it's not a "skimpy" warranty, the one I chose is a "short" warranty.
To be completely honest, you'd pretty much never need to call Dell tech support for anything except incase they didn't ship it right.
Which is why I went with the one year...

Still, $1700 for a top end PC vs. $3500 for a top end Mac (which is still slower).

[Smash]

I just ordered a dell p4 with 256 rdram,40gb HD,sound card,video card,monitor,speakers,XP blah blah blah for just over $1800 Canadian.About .65 cents CDN to a US dollar.
That INCLUDES shipping and 14% sales taxes.

No Mac around my parts comes close to the bang for the buck.Its sucks, but that is the truth.

fires up Monkey Shines to remember the good ole days!?

[bradman]

Originally posted by Asher

I'm going to stop you right there: You call having a uniquely identified name for a driver a 'fundamental flaw'? I call allowing two drives under the exact same name a 'flaw', because that's just confusing and not very good design.

So this is a case on the PC where less freedom is better? You need to get some more consistency.

Indeed, a non-path-based filesystem that lets you have many drivers under the same name is a great feature worthy of making me switch to Mac alone!

The Mac filesystem doesn't care if you rename directories in an intermediate path to a file. Windows can't cope. And this reminds me of another Win32 abonimation: shortcuts - a much more fragile OS feature I can't imagine, especially when compared to the MacOS equivalent aliases. I submit again that a PC setup is a very fragile thing when the fear of moving data around prevents you from using it to full effect.

You should do a lot more research on NTFS before making comments like that. They're mostly only true for FAT32...

So you're saying that ntfs doesn't identify files by pathname alone or what? What are you trying to say here? NTFS adds the concept of ownership and expanded priviledge control. I don't see how it addresses any of the shortcomings I mentioned.

Oh, and dot-three extensions are much more fun than resource forks.

They aren't even comparable in terms of what role they play in the OS. I don't see why you are drawing a comparison here. The fact that resource forks can hold pictures of naked women and dot-three extensions can only hold 3 characters of data would lead me to believe that "fun" may be an overstatement even if the comparison were valid.

By default, newer Windows hides them from the user, but you can have them displayed, change them easily, and also easily see which type of file something is even while listing in the command line. I find that much more useful than a hidden attribute somewhere that tells you which program to launch the file with.

The Win32 approach is also much less powerful and much less flexible. This is another case where you are saying that less is more just because it's on the PC and not the Mac. Why dot-three and not dot-255? Even though MacOS X allows you to follow the Win32 dot-extension method in the absence of type/creator data, all versions of the MacOS allow for more than 3 characters following a dot extension.

I would also submit that the file type extension on the PC and the type/creator metadata on the Mac isn't something the casual user needs to be aware of - changing .txt to .gif does not make the data change magically. Any power user who needs to change this data can do so anyway with relatively little effort on the Mac and without having to crap up the filename with just 3 characters to do it.

Brad

[Asher]

Originally posted by bradman
So this is a case on the PC where less freedom is better? You need to get some more consistency.

You're making really weird comparisons to try to make unrelated points.
It's not consistent to allow some things like that, so the file system forbids it. It's as simple as that.

The Mac filesystem doesn't care if you rename directories in an intermediate path to a file. Windows can't cope.

Rather: NTFS can cope, it's just that there's no real reason to do that. Because of this, it's explictily forbidden by the OS (and NOT the filesystem!) It's bad design and actually not very user friendly. That's not a feature, that's a flawed design.

And this reminds me of another Win32 abonimation: shortcuts - a much more fragile OS feature I can't imagine, especially when compared to the MacOS equivalent aliases. I submit again that a PC setup is a very fragile thing when the fear of moving data around prevents you from using it to full effect.

1) How are shortcuts evil? They point to a section on the hard drive to alias with another application.
2) Can MacOS's FS even do symlinks (or junctions) ala NTFS?
3) How is the alias implementation on the Mac make it a "less fragile OS"?

So you're saying that ntfs doesn't identify files by pathname alone or what? What are you trying to say here? NTFS adds the concept of ownership and expanded priviledge control. I don't see how it addresses any of the shortcomings I mentioned.

NTFS is not just a modification to FAT32...
It's an entirely different file system, structured completely different.
The filesystem itself is extremely flexible, but the OS regulates the use of it intentionally.

They aren't even comparable in terms of what role they play in the OS. I don't see why you are drawing a comparison here. The fact that resource forks can hold pictures of naked women and dot-three extensions can only hold 3 characters of data would lead me to believe that "fun" may be an overstatement even if the comparison were valid.

So, pray tell, how is having a simple extension (not restricted to 3, it can be any length you want) that tells the filetype evil? It's much easier to just change which application you want to associate with each extension. How would you do something like that on the Mac?

The Win32 approach is also much less powerful and much less flexible. This is another case where you are saying that less is more just because it's on the PC and not the Mac. Why dot-three and not dot-255? Even though MacOS X allows you to follow the Win32 dot-extension method in the absence of type/creator data, all versions of the MacOS allow for more than 3 characters following a dot extension.

Just goes to show you how little you've used a modern Windows system.
I've got files called .h, .rm, .c++, .cpp, .bitmap, .bmp, .html, .randomness. Etc.

It's just dot-three by convention, you don't need to do it by ANY means.

I would also submit that the file type extension on the PC and the type/creator metadata on the Mac isn't something the casual user needs to be aware of - changing .txt to .gif does not make the data change magically. Any power user who needs to change this data can do so anyway with relatively little effort on the Mac and without having to crap up the filename with just 3 characters to do it.

You make it sound like you can't do that on the PC either.

I do have one question about how OS X handles things, though. What if I wanted to change which application I wanted to load .txt files with? Like say from Notepad to Wordpad?

Edit: Oh, and I do have some files without extensions. That way Windows asked me which program I want to open them, and has an option to remember for that particular file for next time.