it's getting late. microsoft bashers and conspiracy theorists should be waking up...
Right. We are all to believe that the NYT is suddenly a paragon of objectivity.
On the other hand, I have always said the Mac interface is made for the 'touchy, feely' types. It's very earthy. Well, very slick might be a better way of putting it. It's Starbucks Extreme Hoity-Toity Latte on a screen.
I haven't seen Vista, but there's more to "elegance" than "pretty." An elegant machine isn't just one that looks pretty; in engineering terms, an elegant machine is one that has no unnecessary parts, and in which no task requires any unnecessary effort.
You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.”
Well, it only seems that way because that's what they did. And what they've done with every Mac OS revision since 1984.
Now, before the hate-mail tsunami begins, it’s important to note that Apple has itself borrowed feature ideas on occasion, even from Windows. But never this broadly, boldly or blatantly. There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives’ ears to power the Polar Express.
There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives’ ears to power the Polar Express.
Aw, hell. If they aren't used to it by now, they will never be. That's the root of Apple's obsession with secrecy on upcoming products; Microsoft can't steal what they don't know about yet.
If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost.
You can use a flash drive for swap space? That might be a little faster than using a hard drive, but overall it strikes me as about as useful as teats on a boar hog.
Does Web-based software make operating systems obsolete?
Only the ones that suck.
All the graphic doohickeys don't do much for me. But a good shell with a powerful commandline interface and I no longer have a need for UNIX at work.
I am going to buy a new laptop just for the free Vista upgrade, which will go to my home PC, mostly for gaming and utilizing the dual core 64 bit processor.
Looks: Get rid of 'em. I've got almost all the graphical nonsense in XP turned off, and I imagine I'll have to do the same in Vista. For people who are actually trying to accomplish tasks rather than look at pretty screens for the sake of pretty screens (e.g. tech writers), spending $500 for a graphics card and waiting for your computer to render your fancy 3D elements is simply wasted time. I don't need my Word document or Outlook task to be 6-axis rotatable - I need it to pop up, show me what I need to see, and get out of my way fast when I'm done with it. All the "pretty" nonsense is a huge turnoff for OSX and it'll be a bigger turnoff when it's in an operating system that I'll actually have to use.
Locks: Whatever. I'm 100% secure on my XP Pro system, even running as admin (which I will admit I'd rather not have to do, except it is much more convenient). Every XP system ever can be made equally secure for free; MS could even make it easy by releasing a patch to make the config changes necessary. If ever I got too worried about something nasty making its way across the Internet, I can lock everything down and pop open a VMWare machine. Granted, the free machines are Linux and therefore a relatively large pain to configure, but less so than learning a whole new OS for everything as opposed to just learning how to set up a browser and firewall.
Lacks: Sounds like they missed out on doing things that tech writers would love but people who care only about productivity aren't interested in. The "gadgets" or "widgets" don't work right? Whatever. Waste of time and space in OSX, and I'm sure I'd get rid of them as soon as I could in Vista too. Slide shows don't have music? Well, that's certainly going to kill my productivity. </sarc> Who even cares about Wordpad? The whole planet already has Office. And there are even free alternatives for it. Oddly, the article fails to mention WinFS, which was the one legitimate performance-enhancing addition to Vista that intrigued me and yet got left on the cutting room floor.
Overall, it sounds like they tried to "Mac-ize" Windows, rather than improve the areas in which Windows is strong and leave (as another poster put it) the "Starbucks triple-hoity latte" features to the alternative OSs. For my company, I'll just be buying a couple extra XP licenses over the holidays to ride that out as long as I can.
I worked at a major electronic and appliance store for a few months earlier this year in the computer department, and the feedback I got from a couple guys beta-testing: one hated it completely, the other liked it, as long as you have four gigs of RAM.
My advice to anybody thinking of buying a new lap or desktop: Buy it now!!!