VS.
Posted on 09/15/2005 7:04:44 PM PDT by Swordmaker
VS.
This site attempts to bring some objectivity to the OS wars by comparing over 100 topics relating to Mac OS X (10.4) and Windows XP (Home and Pro).
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(Excerpt) Read more at xvsxp.com ...
It's worse than you think - dragging a floppy to the trash on a Mac doesn't erase it at all, it ejects it. Pretty intuitive, huh? ;)
What has BBEdit being part of the OS have to do with building alternative dialog boxes? BBEdit is, incidentally, available for OSX since April of 2001. There are a lot of text/html editors available for OSX and Unix... and every OSX release ships with a disk of developer tools.
The other thing I noticed that struck me as bizarre about the comparison is the implicit decision that all the listed criteria are equally important. That is, they're all given the same weight on the same ten point scale, and all count the same towards the final score. So something like "handling the capslock key" counts just as much and is just as important as the "secure out of the box" rating. Which is a bit odd - you get things like "Well, on the plus side for XP, it does a better job with the capslock key than OS X. On the plus side for OS X, it didn't explode and kill my whole family the way XP did." To which I say, huh? ;)
Two of the dialog boxes they cite as examples are BBEdit on OS X and Outlook on XP, neither of which are part of the OS, so why should either one reflect on the OS?
Stop Traffic at intersections??? ;^)>
They are on the wrong side and in the wrong order... but I guess it will do for an XP user that wants to lose the "P".
Only on pre-OSX Macs, General...
I've heard that before, but forgot it. I'm afraid I reach the limit of GUI intuitiveness with the red X that means delete. I've pretty well learned that one.
But then I can wreck an automobile while trying to figure out what some new illiterate sign means.
Ooh... Ooh... you're going to warm the globe!
;^)>
Very true, but it is fun to remember the bad old days from time to time ;)
Don't make me spring a leak.
He admits that... do the weighing yourself with the Weighted calculator and see what you get... I did, giving things like security much higher weighting and the caps locks key thing almost no weight.
It's good to know that intuitive interfaces change around a bit from time to time. Prevents boredom.
Anyway, at the end of the day, the two are certainly close enough in basic functionality and bells and whistles that it's more a matter of personal preference than anything else, which is about the least objective criteria possible. That, and maybe whether one or the other has some app you can't live without - other than that, it's kind of like making a ratings system to explore whether chocolate ice cream is really better than strawberry ;)
Re: the bad old days...
One of my clients in the dark ages had one of the very first '286s in California's Central Valley... really fast (well, we thought so).... one day a transistor somewhere on the floppy controller fried itself crispy and unbeknownst to the computer operator had turned the write/erase head on the floppy permanently on - any disk inserted into the floppy was trashed before it could be read.
It just so happened that they had had one of the more nasty crashes (may have been related to the event that made the crispy fries) and lost their office database (all their patients).
The data clerk dutifully called the software publisher and followed their Tech support's instructions to "restore" the database... only to get the dreaded "Abort, Fail, Retry" at the A:\ prompt when she put in the first disk in the first back up set. Tech support said, "OK, Try the last disk in the set." "Abort, Fail, Retry" "That's OK," said the tech support guy, "get the previous backup and put in the first disk." ABF "Well," said the brilliant TS guy on the phone, "try the last disk in THAT set." Dutifully, she did. When that failed as well, the Tech Support guy said, try another backup...
I just happened to walk into the office as the clerk was taking disk 1 of the Third and final (and now ONLY) back-up set out of the box to put it into the floppy drive and asked "What's going on?" when I saw the worried expression on the doctor's face. My buddy the doctor said we've gone through two of our three backups and none of them are any good... we're going to try the last one now."
I stopped them from destroying the doctor's electronic files... Made a client for life that morning.
On the other hand, a database I designed on a Mac containing 32 megabytes of data for an emergency food bank had been working quite happily for two years when a volunteer walked over to the server Mac and picked up the computer with both hands saying "Hey, what's this thing for?"... and hit the powerbutton just as the database was being accessed by one of the work stations. Suddenly, the 32M file was only 4Megs long... and almost two years of data was gone... POOF.
They called me in a panic... and I said, don't worry, you got 3 backups done daily in rotation. They were religiously backing up the DB using Symantec's (Pre-Norton) HD Back Up. I got out the previous night's backup and got to disk 24 when I got dialog box saying "We are sorry, but disk 24 is unreadable. Abort, Continue" Well, I obviously didn't want to abort so I clicked "Continue"... and the back up stopped... with a new requestor that said, "Restore stopped. Your files have not been changed." I tried it again, got to disk 24 and got the same Dialog box... this time I clicked "Abort" thinking it might skip that disk... nope. I got "Restore stopped. etc."
Tried a different floppy drive... same disk, same place. Tried a different Mac... same ol' same ol'... which was getting really old.
I then got set 2, from the previous day... and got to disk 7 before I got the "We are sorry" dialog box. The third and final set of backup disks got to disk 12 before hitting the dreaded dialog box. Attempting to use Disk First Aid on the damaged disks got "We are sorry, but these disks are not formatted in a format that Macintosh recognizes." Turned out ALL of Symantec's backup disks were in a proprietary format... grrrrrrrr.
OK, call Symantec Tech Support. "What," I asked, "do you do when one of the backup disks is unreadable? How can I skip over the data on it and just restore everything else?" I could not believe the answer I got... from successively higher levels of tech support... essentially the answer was "Duh, we don't know."
Idiots.
Ah... Ok. Could be the standards thing... but as I said when I posted this, I disagree with some of his conclusions...
Well, personally, on a scale of one to ten, Chocolate is an "A" and Strawberry rates "Blue Ribbon Status".
If you're happy with LINUX and building your own boxes, there's really no reason at all to think about switching platforms. Computers are tools and you pick the tool that best fits your tasks. I'm an Apple user and believe that most tasks can be done exceptionally well by a Mac, but there are people out there who are unsuited to be a Mac user, and who work best with another operating system.
That said, you could try borrowing a Mac running the latest version of Mac OS X, and then recompiling your LINUX tools to run on it. Just for fun.
I went and tried the weighted calculator. Pure trash. Better development tools on the Mac????? Why do you people waste your time on such trash? Nevermind, it's an obsession. I feel for you.
This is just curiosity on my part, but what do you do on your super fast, super-cooled computers?
Well. let's see what reasons the web-site author gave for his opinion:
IconComposer for turning images into icons
MRJBuilder for building Java applications
Pixie for close ups to check if you are displaying things correctly
Quartz Debug, that shows you how much you are redrawing and how inefficient your drawing code may be
PackageMaker for making application packages
and many more. Also included with the developer tools is documentation and sample code.
Sounds to me like he makes a good point.
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