Posted on 01/03/2009 8:48:34 PM PST by Swordmaker
Second record loss in two months for Microsoft; Apple posts record gain
Windows lost nearly a full percentage point of market share for the second month in a row in December, pushing Microsoft Corp.'s operating system to a new low, an Internet measurement company reported yesterday.
Meanwhile, Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X posted a record gain that brought it close to a 10% share for the first time since Net Applications Inc. began tracking operating system use.
In December, 88.7% of the people who browsed the Web sites that Net Applications monitors did so using machines powered by Windows, a 0.94 percentage point drop from November. The slide was Windows' largest in the four years that Net Applications has collected operating system data, and the second record-setting monthly loss in a row for Microsoft's software.
(Excerpt) Read more at computerworld.com ...
Why? Did you uninstall it?
It wasn’t just the public who has shunned vista - it is also IT departments. With damned good reason.
People where hearing so many things about Vista that they flocked to Mac for protection. Microsoft has become the GM of Software.
And what reason was that? I love Vista. It's great. I run it on my Thinkpad, my MacBook Pro and my desktop.
The equivalent of Movie Reviewers in the IT media was anxious to slap Microsoft around. And people took it hook, line and sinker.
First of all, it is not iPage, the iWork application is Pages.
This was not an occasional blip, ipage was crashing so frequently that she couldn’t finish a page. My daughter who loves Mac and uses it at school everday thought that was normal behavior for ipage. Apparantly the technology teacher instructs the student to save every five minutes while they are doing their typing at school because of frequent crashes.
I administer approximately 30 Macs and all of them have Pages. Not one of those Macs has any such problems. Now you claim your daughter's school is having the same problem and that she just assumed it was normal for Pages to crash.
A google search also reveals the same problem.
Can you help me to find your Google references to your pervasive problem? Can you provide a link to posts with numerous people claiming iWork crashes? I have been Googling various search terms trying to find what you are talking about:Quite frankly, I find no such reports of wide spread problems. There are a very few posters with a problem with iWork, but it is not pervasive... and most of the problems were fixed by deleting a preference file.
They recommend a clean install of OS X. I’ve had to do clean installs of Windows in the past but not since XP was released. Now when a computer gets to the point where a clean install is needed, I buy a new computer. It’s usually 3-4 years old and I want a new HD, DVD drive and faster processor anyway.
Who is the "they" who recommends a clean install to cure a problem with an application? The suggestion that the cure is to "clean install" the OS is not something I would expect to see in response to an application issue on OS X. In fact, I did not find that suggested fix to a Pages problem in any of the forums I scanned from the search terms above.If not, and you are serious about this problem, I suggest you listen to the Mac experts here on FreeRepublic and take your new Mac to the nearest Genius Bar (even if it is 45 minutes away) and get it handled because it is a hardware problem. After all, you said Mrs. Doc is taking the classes—so she must be driving there anyway—so taking the computer along shouldn't such an onerous problem—make sure you make an appointment.
try googling without the mac. ipage + crash. 4800 hits.
I’m just telling you what is going on at my house. Take a breath and relax.
Mrs. Doc will check the computer tonight and make sure it is working properly after the updates (which seemed to be the consenses of recomendations). If not she can make the appointment and get it looked at. She’s out of school now so there is no emergency in getting it fixed.
I’ll be happy to give you our local school phone number if you want to help them with their computers. Seriously.
What do you think of the Apple Tv?? I have elgato digital recording on my iMac that I would LOVE to beam to the HDTV in the living room...
Is it worth it? Do you look at photos also using the iTV?
G
Happy New Year Swordmaker!
Wifey is happy owner of a 13”MacBook...she’s really enjoying it, nice and fast.
In the meantime, what do you know about FireFox crashing when viewing videos and pictures? Been reading much about it on the firefox support website, however, their site doesn’t seem to address the issues. I have all the latest versions, addons etc.
Any thoughts?
G
“I was not aware that there were windows only web pages.”
The bane of my work. I do a lot of work on finance sites and over the years more and more proprietary stuff has gotten into MS IE. A ton of Web developers use the proprietary hooks and never bother to test on a Mac. I also have difficulty with webinars, Delta Airlines (although this may have been fixed) and believe it or not CASE Equipment. I HAD to install Parallels and XP to do my job. Sucks.
This is the soft under belly of Mac. Up until two years ago, or so, I had not used a Windows machine in almost two decades. Now 20% of the time! Sucks.
I’ve spent a little time on the wifes macbook now. There are a few issues that I’m sure we’ll iron out but it seems pretty snappy and everything you need is relatively handy. But the bouncy flashy aspects are a little annoying. I’m sure that you can turn them off but Mrs. Doc would kill me.
My biggest fear is that on my next computer Microsoft is going to “borrow” the Mac UI. I turned off all the animation, special effects on Vista but still lost a few of the ways I typically interacted with the UI. I’m afraid they will change everything and I will feel like I am all thumbs like I do on a Mac.
I agree with you change sucks.
I’d buy an Apple notebook PC but only if its a highly capable gaming PC.Otherwise I’ll stick with my Dell 1710 XPS gaming notebook.
Danger, there is NO SUCH THING as "ipage" in the Mac world. Whatever crash reports you found using those search parameters are not related to Apple's iWork application "Pages."
iPage is a professional Content Management System for the Internet, built on SQL, for computers using WINDOWS.
Using your search of ipage + crash" I got your 4884 hits... but, aside from a 4 year old article (pre-Pages) about the Mac startup chime on the first page in the tenth position, I had to go to Google results page 4 and a March 2007 forum posting before I found a link that referred to "iPages" (sic) where one user complained about "iPages" crashing. It had just two responses and the original poster stated in the second response that the problem turned out to be with a flakey external USB drive.
In the first TEN pages, 100 links, of your search there are only THREE hits for anything to do with Macs and only TWO with "iPages" (sic). The second, on page 5, actually is a recommendation to use Pages (iPages, in a second mention in the article) in preference to Microsoft Word which the author describes as "crashing ever so often, forcing me to more paranoid that I ever was on Windows . . .". Oh, the next Mac hit is on page 12.
Seriously, Danger, using my search parameters will get you a lot more pertinent hits to problems with Pages... but they are only a few complaints with few responses.
And since my searches I reported above using the applications proper name also did not find a large number of complaints, I conclude, therefore, that there are no serous systemic or specific problems related to Pages. That means there is probably something wrong with your Mac. Most of the far less than 1% of users who may have a problem were told to check the RAM and my experience tells me that you may have a flakey RAM stick. It happens.
Mrs. Doc will check the computer tonight and make sure it is working properly after the updates (which seemed to be the consenses of recomendations).
That's good... but I doubt that any upgrades will solve this problem since Pages has been relatively trouble free. If the problems continue, take it to the Genius Bar and let them diagnose what is causing your problem. If it's a flakey computer, they'll most likely give you a new one.
One more thing you can try. Toss out the preference files for iWork. There are preference for iWork in both the system Library (the folder called Library in the Root directory of your hard drive [Macintosh HD/Library/preferences], not the Library found in the System folder) and in the User Library (Macintosh HD/users/Mrs.DangerDoc/library/preferences) You need to throw out the following files from BOTH of these locations. (Just drag them to the Trashcan on the Dock.) You will probably need to give the Administrator Name and Password to delete the files in the system's Library.
Don't worry if any of those files do not exist... the names depend on the version of iWork you have installed. Just get rid of them. Any iWork application will re-create them for you as needed. Note, that if you have multiple user accounts and the other accounts are experiencing similar problems, toss the preference files in their User Libraries as well.
One other suggestion is to do a Permission Repair on your hard drive. It's usually a good idea to repair permissions at least once a month. To do this, Double Click on Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility. Select the Hard Drive and then click on the Repair Permissions button at the lower left of the information window. It may take a while, depending on how many users, the number of applications, etc., but be patient. That will make sure that all files that are part of your system have the correct permissions to allow you to use them.
This is a bit tongue in cheek, but I suspect Apple has benefitted from having smarter users. I have no science bhind this opinion, but I suspect that more affluent and richer people have been the first adopters.
If Apple should be so lucky as to gain parity in market share, it will include some of the same folks who click on everything and install everything. It will then attract the same kind of unscrupulous software vendors that MS attracts.
Can't help you with FireFox. I have it but use it only when I run into the rare webpage that will not work properly with Safari.
You might want to install Flip4Mac which works with both Safari and FireFox to display most of the Windows Media Files. (It will not work with DRMed Window Media Files.)
Use Firefox instead of Safari. It is free to download and works so much better.
At some point you get really used to the Mac and it is really hard to use Windows. I have to spend time in IE, therefore windows everyday. Things like finding files and how the clicking works is very nutty to me. I just wish web developers took a few seconds to preview their work on a Mac and not use the proprietary features. It drives me crazy. There are a bunch of workarounds like Flip4Mac and using Firefox with user-agent-switcher set. But it just kills me to be going into a conference call with a client to find the webinar just does not work with Mac.
;^)>
You know what's funny? I just finished reading a comment on one of the other websites reporting this WebApplication report where the commenter—obviously a Windows Fanboy—made the argument that Apple was intentionally targeting the stupidest 10% of the computer market. His arguments included choosing a computer with no software, that it couldn't read files from Windows computers, no peripherals that worked with it other than Apple made, the one-button mouse, the high cost compared to better PCs, and that the Mac was really crash prone. It was self evident, he reasoned, that if they were smart they would buy Windows computers.
However, be it either way, the Mac OS pretty much prevents stupidity in installing something. First of all, on Mac OS X, jumping the execution pointer into the data stack with the intent of executing malicious code hidden in data or buffer overflows from stuff gotten off the web or clicked on just won't work—the data stack and heap memory locations are non-executable. Secondly, standard users cannot install software, or alter the system software, without knowing and entering an administrator name and password. Thirdly, it takes more than a single or double click, even for an administrator, to download and install something from the Internet. A user has to first accept a download of an executable, even if it's hidden inside an image or a codec, then agree to install the application including giving it an administrator name and password, and then again, give it explicit permission to run for the first time. You have to be almost industrial strength stupid to do all of that unconsciously.
On the other hand, I have met some industrial strength stupid people.
Updates installed, Mrs Doc has been using page for about two hours, no crashes, so far so good.
I tried to quantify how many crashes my daughter is experiencing at school. She states that the crashes seem frequent but that is spread over the whole class. She remembers personally having 3 crashes with lost data last semester. She spends 45 min in class and had about 90 classes over the semester which is about 70 class hours. Dividing by three, that is about one crash per 24 hours on the computer.
This was the first hit when I started looking into the problem:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=378337
That is where they recommend reinstalling leopard and iwork.
The next thread I looked at was:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1484288
This is the first place I saw them discussing installing the updates with people verifying that it solved their problem.
Looking in the google tool bar history, I see that the search term was “iwork + crash” “iwork + crashing” “ipage + crashing”
Wish me luck, I stepped away for awhile and my daughter is now using page and so far no crashing for her either after about 3 hours. There were several updates in the que and it looks like they were needed for proper operation of the program.
I bought Mrs Doc a Mac so I would not be doing late night computer trouble shooting. She has one more application to install, hopefully it works and I am out of the Mac IS business once and for all.
Thanks. I think the advice to "reinstall Leopard" was bad advice from someone who really didn't know what they were doing. But the advice to re-install iWork was good advice. The best advice was to do the updates and delete the iWork preferences.
I bought Mrs Doc a Mac so I would not be doing late night computer trouble shooting. She has one more application to install, hopefully it works and I am out of the Mac IS business once and for all.
What's the last thing to install? I might have some advice.
You may have noticed a recommendation to GRRRRR in reply up above. You should do that for your wife as well. That will open 90% of the problem graphics, sound files, and media files that Windows Media format makes difficult because of refusing to release their proprietary file formats. Flip4Mac is free (I think it is now a Microsoft product since they bought out the company that made it).
By the way, it is a good thing to repair permissions both before and after you do a software update.
The other thing you might want to do is to join the FR Mac Ping List. I try to keep everyone posted on latest developments including when it is important to do a Software Update. Let me know if you want on.
Do you have the Mrs. running as an Administrator account or is she set up as a Standard User with a separate Administrator account? If the former, let me know and I will give you the steps to create an administrator account and switch her current account to Standard user. It's the safest way to surf.
The future of malware lies in convincing people that they want it. If you stop and think about how scams work and how they must get some bites, the task of prevention is pretty hopeless.
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