Posted on 01/20/2007 1:24:47 AM PST by Swordmaker
It's wrong to make the differences between Mac OS X and Windows Vista into a horserace -- each OS is most challenged by its own history, limitations, and possibilities.
Does Apple's OS X operating system really shine in comparison with Microsoft's Vista?
That was the headline on a recent InformationWeek.com article. OS X Shines In Comparison to Vista [FreeRepublic Post Link] compares the Vista GUI to OS X and concludes that ". . . as much of an improvement as Vista is over XP, its main competitor, Mac OS X, still stacks up really well and even tops Vista in several important areas."
It is part of a flood of articles and reviews that has grown as Vista finally approaches its January 29th ship-to-consumers date. It shares with many of them a blind-men-and-the-elephant quality: Seize upon one aspect of Vista or another, and draw conclusions about the whole based on the part they can see and understand.
The piece compares and contrasts the two OSes in several areas, including their development histories, the consistency of their UIs (which seems to mean both the UI changes that create a learning curve for each new version, and the ease of use and intuitiveness of the OS), and their relative security.
There is a lot the piece doesn't cover. To begin with, operating systems are hardware-specific, so they must support the hardware well or performance will suffer. Second, clean code is important: OS kernel bugs can make application developers' lives miserable, there's a definite upside to being the least buggy OS. Vista is certainly vulnerable to criticism of its tortured development history, and other reviewers have faulted the finished product for lacking features that were dropped along the way, like the WinFS file architecture. And you can't not comment on the prelaunch marketing hype, which may be a better, more successful product than the operating system it's selling.
Reviewing The UI
You'd think Apple, with its complete control of both its hardware and its user interface, would be able to create a far more coherent user environment than Microsoft's OS, which at least in theory has to run a widely divergent variety of hardware. But that just does not seem to be the case.
Granted, the Windows UI is far from perfect no OS that forces you to click on a button labeled "Start" to stop your computer can claim the moral high ground here. But OS X is not without its flaws and foibles.
What's up with that single mouse button, for instance? Multiple buttons and local menus are a demonstrable ease-of-use improvement. The Mac's Finder UI that separates program controls from the window that the program is running in is has always seemed awkward. And is an unlabeled icon shaped like an apple really any more intuitive than a button labeled "Start"?
(Actually, we're about to learn the answer to that last question. Vista finally does away with the "Start" button and replaces it with an unlabeled icon of the Vista window/flag.)
Learning The OS Language
The point is this: a UI is something you learn, just like a language and just like a language, some of it is structured, clear, and consistent, and some of it is simply learned by rote repetition. The "OS X Shines" piece makes much of a supposed lack of clarity and consistency in Vista, for example, and offers as example a comparison of the number of mouse clicks it takes to discover the network address being used by your computer three for the Mac, six for the PC. Actually, a fluent speaker of Windows can do it in three steps, too:
There are other examples. The "OS X Shines" piece makes a case that it is more difficult to identify the active window in Vista than in OS X., citing as evidence the "back" button in the upper left corner of the Internet Explorer screen that looks active even when it isn't the front window. That might be a problem for Mac users who have learned to look at the upper left corner of a window to see whether it is active, but for Windows users the indicators are different. Up through Windows XP, the title bar is brighter for the active window. In Vista, the title bar is semi-transparent and doesn't change color, so the visual indicator becomes the Close box: it is red in the active window, gray in non-active windows. The difference is far easier to comprehend visually than it is to explain, and in any case it's hardly a failing of either operating system.
A similar argument can be made about consistency. Is Vista any less consistent than OS X because it changes the nomenclature of some of its elements? The "Start" button is one example. Another is the desktop icon that has been labeled "My Computer" since Windows 95, and becomes just "Computer" in Vista.
As "OS X Shines" correctly points out, the Apple OS makes fewer UI changes from version to version because it is on a smoother development path. OS X was first released in 2001, and represented the first complete rewrite of the Macintosh OS. In the years since, it has been updated from 10.0 to 10.4.8 four more-or-less major updates, with a fifth, code-named Leopard, on the way, along with basketful of smaller point fixes.
Windows XP was released the same year, and embodied changes as major as those in OS X. It incorporated the 32-bit NT kernel, and radically reworked the Windows UI. Vista reworks the UI again.
But saying that merely makes a distinction without a difference. It is just as doubtful to say that the obvious UI changes in Vista would convince Windows users to switch to another OS as it is to say that OS X's static look and feel would cause users to abandon it.
In any case, the changes in Vista's UI are relatively minor: Vista resembles its predecessor XP far more than XP resembled Windows 2000, despite all the hype surrounding Vista's new Aero interface. Aero's sleek semi-transparent window borders, redesigned window controls, and widgets like the new Sidebar give Vista a different look, but not a different feel. The controls still work the same. The language the operating system speaks has not changed. It's added some new words, which users will have to pick up in conversation with it, but it is still clearly understandable.
(Aero itself isn't a cause of differences in Vista, but the result of major changes that will manifest themselves over time. The new interface and the tricks it can do, like the spin-the-Rolodex view of open windows, are product result of the way Vista deals with screen graphics through DirectX and the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) which replaced the 15-year-old Graphics Device Interface technology.)
When you look beyond the UI, by the way, Windows is undoubtedly the more consistent, compatible OS. Over its history, the Macintosh OS has introduced new versions that were incompatible with old applications so incompatible that if you wanted to run the old app you had to keep multiple operating systems installed on your Mac. That has never happened with Windows, and Vista continues Microsoft's tradition of excellent software compatibility.
Look Under The Hood
Throughout the development process that led to Vista, Microsoft has been its own worst enemy. It has over-promised and over-publicized, with the result that there has been far too clear a view of the sausage being made. The process of creating an operating system clearly spiraled out of control in the increasingly rigid Microsoft corporate environment. Apple, in comparison, has done a better job of managing its development process and the expectations of its customers. OS X has been a well-managed evolutionary process; Vista has been a poorly managed attempt at a revolutionary product.
Paradoxically, Vista is actually an evolutionary success as well. It's not the revolutionary OS Microsoft promised, but it has turned out to be a logical extension of Windows in the light of current technologies. While the spectacular failures like WinFS, which was intended to replace Windows' hierarchical file system with a relational data structure have dominated the news, many of the core components of Microsoft's OS technology have been quietly and very effectively redesigned. Vista networking, for example, finally implements IPv6, a necessary expansion of the address space that allows for the next generation of networked devices and applications. (OS X has had this for a while one results of its smoother development process.) WDDM and DirectX graphics technology won't have much relevance until hardware and applications are widely available that actually take advantage of them, but that will happen with time.
And perhaps not too much time, at that: Vista brings far greater changes for developers than for end-users. The Windows programming APIs are being replaced by .NET Framework 3.0, which wraps up four "foundations," or code bases that combine in the creation of applications for Vista:
Is It Safe?
More problematic are Microsoft's efforts to make Windows Vista a more secure operating system. Security has never been something Microsoft did well. It has always subordinated practical measures for protecting users of its products against malware to, say, an ideological dedication to the cross-application scripting of Active X controls.
With Vista, the company seems not so much to be building in security for users as deniability for itself by explicitly making the user responsible for security wherever it can and applying a definition of "security" that seems to confuse the safety of its customers' computing environments with its own interests in digital rights management (DRM).
Vista extends the discomfort of Microsoft's existing Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy intrusionware with its Software Protection Platform, which requires even more validation of the software's legality. At the same time, Vista doesn't seem to do much more to protect users' PCs and data from malware attacks than XP. The "OS X Shines" article may be overly strident about whether the new User Account Control (UAC) represents "authentication" or "approval," but it is correct about the result: UAC is certainly annoying.
The UAC feature requires the Vista user to explicitly approve every interaction involving the installation or execution of external code. And it is not smart about it. It makes no distinction between installations that are explicitly initiated by the user from the keyboard and those that might be initiated by a malicious Web site. It simply makes it all the user's responsibility by popping up endless dialog boxes.
This problem is, in a way, an artifact of Windows' history: Windows was created to run on stand-alone PCs long before the Internet was even thought of. As a result, it has always lacked the kind of user account controls that are basic in the Unix world, which has dealt with networks and the threats they represent and that includes Unix offspring like Linux and OS X. Microsoft had an opportunity with Vista to fix this shortcoming, but it chose not to. Unfortunately, that makes Vista an operating system that shifts the blame rather than actually tackles the problem.
Overall, Vista's efforts at enhancing PC security seem weak and tentative, still bogged down in Microsoft ideology and "not invented here" hubris rather than implementing what's proven to work for users. But this is the first version of Windows that's really paid any attention to security, and Microsoft is famous for getting things right the second time. Vista security will doubtless get better eventually.
Reviewing The Hype
Vista has been a long time coming, and Microsoft has had no choice but to keep stoking the marketing fires through the long winter of its dysfunctional development. As a result, Vista is perhaps the most over-anticipated Windows release ever.
In the corporate marketplace, Microsoft has done what it can to push companies into Vista by pushing its other, older products over the cliff. Windows 2000, still widely used on corporate desktops, is now unsupported by its maker, and new versions of Microsoft's most popular applications, Internet Explorer and the Office suite, won't run on it. Windows XP faces a similar planned obsolescence in a very few years.
In the consumer marketplace, Microsoft has sold the applications bundled into Vista the photo album, the parental controls, the media center and streaming video rather than the OS itself, as if the eye candy of the Aero interface would help us take better photographs and raise safer children.
Microsoft doesn't just want the world to want Vista: it needs the world to want Vista, to generate the sales and revenues that have made the company so phenomenally successful. In a marketplace where PC sales are flattening out and alternatives to Windows are growing more capable, Microsoft needs a hit and it's selling the eye candy hard to get one.
Ironically, Vista's long-term success is assured by exactly the things Microsoft isn't selling. The reworked internals of the operating system the graphics, services, and programming APIs will give Vista a leg up on the competition. Linux, OS X, and every application software developer large and small will have to play catch-up because 90 percent or more of computer hardware will continue to be built to Microsoft specifications. Unless Linux and OS X make major inroads, 90 percent of all corporate desktops will eventually be forced off Windows 2000 and XP and onto Vista. And 90 percent of all consumers will eventually upgrade to Vista when they buy their next PC.
On the other hand, Vista's short-term success is anything but assured, and Microsoft may still be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. If it continues to cling to its vision of DRM and User Account Control, if it continues to behave as if it had a divine right to 90 percent market share, Microsoft will create a situation that makes inroads by other OSes inevitable.
To Each Its Own
It is business decisions like these, not technology, that shape the OS marketplace. OS X and Vista are both capable operating systems with effective user interfaces. But it is Microsoft's business practices, legal and illegal, that have historically driven its dominance of the market. And it is Apple's continuing decision to sell OS X only with its own hardware, not any shortcoming of OS X, which relegates it to a tiny fraction of the OS market. In fact, it is Apple's stunning expertise at hardware design that continues to drive its success, not any superiority in the OS, and certainly not in its UI.
By the same token, Microsoft's dysfunctional development process doesn't make Vista any less successful a product. On a technical level, Vista arguably puts Microsoft in the lead: DirectX, the .Net "foundations," and other new technology make Vista an OS that takes full advantage of the most advanced hardware technologies, and the basis for a new generation of Windows applications.
The competition between the two OSes is far more complex than a simple horserace that's won or lost by minutiae like which operating system makes it easier to distinguish the active window. Even when limited to the context of the UI, the statement that OS X "tops Vista in several important areas" is dubious, and to expand that conclusion to the OS as a whole is faulty logic. Despite Vista's dysfunctional development history and outrageous hype, it is a worthy update to Windows, and on January 29 it will be the world's best-selling operating system for good reasons.
Another lie, of course. I never gave it a pass, I simply refuted your claim it was a criminally punishable offense, which you attempted to claim as an excuse for the actual criminal actions of the foreign hackers you have endlessly supported with other lies. Just like when you lied and tried to claim the US DoD extensively used software from Russian hackers as an excuse for their criminal actions, a charade you carried on for months before finally admitting it was complete BS. There's obviously nothing you won't try as an excuse your foreign hacker heroes, it has now gone on for almost a year and you're still lying and attempting pitiful misdirects with every single post.
I never claimed it should be. I showed in law where it can be, and that law applies exactly the same to the "criminal" (according to you) OS X hackers and DVD backups. And I showed how by your previous logic, using your own posts, how you think such actions are illegal, if not criminal. However, in post #56 you don't seem to think backing up one's own media is a bad thing.
Back to the question: Why do you rail against some circumventions that violate the DMCA and not this one? Remember, it's your opinion I'm asking for to add some perspective that would make your posts consistent. There's no previously unmentioned legal or technical aspect like I've caught you on before.
Just like when you lied...
Since you keep posting this over and over and over, I can only assume that my little test had a far greater effect that I could have ever imagined. A woman scorned...
No I simply refuted your inference from 45 it was criminal, which it isn't, nor do you have any case history to show it can be, meanwhile you've endlessly lied in the face of case history that your foreign hacker heroes couldn't have possibly been criminal, even attempting to trot out the "180 day rule for criminal prosecution" on their behalf and calling Apple's letter threatening criminal prosecution quote "BS". You can keep lying and lying lying trying to lower the bar for the criminal actions of your foreign hacker heroes, but there's no way to lie your way out of what you're trying to do, talking in circles and trying to put words in my mouth is obviously failing for you as well.
You refuted nothing. You in the past called criminal the same action (circumvention) on another copyrighted work. I was just applying your logic to the situation. What I want to know is what is different about the two situations that makes one criminal/illegal and the other not.
you've endlessly lied in the face of case history that your foreign hacker heroes couldn't have possibly been criminal
Lie. I said your claim to them being criminal was unsupported since there was 1) no evidence of financial gain, and 2) they weren't distributing OS X itself in quantities to qualify for criminal prosecution (that's the "180 day rule" that is our law that you keep mocking).
LOL don't worry, your attempted BS is perfectly clear, you've been defending your foreign hacker heroes that distributed hacks for months insisting they couldn't have been criminal, despite criminal case history and letters from Apple threatening criminal prosecution, but you now want to claim personal backups somehow ARE criminal, instead. It's obviously just a failed ploy on your behalf to yet again attempt to excuse your foreign hacker heroes that create and distribute illegal hacks by bluring the lines between what is criminal and what is not. Obviously not working, you exposed your evil intent long ago by trying to cite the "180 day rule" on behalf of the foreign criminals, making up lies about the US DoD using software written by foreign hackers, calling Apple's letter threatening criminal prosecution of your heroes "BS", etc etc etc.
You still haven't told me why you think DVD backups are fine, but the others aren't.
More deceit and talking in circles, completely backwards in fact. I said personal backups of LP's are fine, and what you should have done instead of illegally downloading digital copies from someone else without a license, which you have admitted to doing instead. You simply can't face the facts of the discussion in a single post, your lies are so thick they consume your every word and you appear to be babbling incoherently at this point LOL.
No, this was, as I told you, in response to #56. In that post you don't seem to have a problem with personal backups.
The word "DVD" never even appears in post 56, which is simply further proof of you lies. Personal backups of some things such as LP's are fine, and I was clearly referring to you illegally downloading digital copies from someone else without a license, which you have admitted to doing instead of making LEGAL personal backups. You simply can't face the facts of the discussion in a single post, your lies are so thick they completely consume your every word.
Context. #56 is a reply to my #45, which was written to someone who rips (backs-up) his DVDs to his hard drive. Backing up DVDs is the context of this whole conversation, so don't try to pull it off context.
which you have admitted to doing instead of making LEGAL personal backups
Which I can't do, as you know. So if backups of an LP are legal, are backups of DVDs legal too?
I have Photoshop, so .NET paint is pretty much useless for me. But .NET is rather fun. I call 1.1 a beta, but 2.0 just works great. Almost anything I need is automatically in the libraries. I went to do some encryption and ta-da! everything I needed was right there, easy to use with only Intellisense to guide me.
Yes, your post 45, which started your latest lies when you inferred it was "criminal", while you have no proof it is criminal, yet in fact have admitted to lying for months on behalf of other actual criminals, namely the Russian hackers that distributed cracks of Apple's OSX operating system. That is clearly the context that brought on your latest batch of lies, trying to equate non-criminal actions to the actual criminals you've been supporting with lies all along, now desperately trying to put words in my mouth and laughably claim I support illegal much less criminal activity. LOL you're the perfect example of liberal madness, what's great is you don't mind being on endless display. I don't think I've ever seen anyone melt down to the level you have, all in the defense of foreign criminals LMAO.
No, I inferred that by your previous logic it might be criminal. What, no more "The word "DVD" never even appears in post 56"? Your attempt at an out-of-context diversion didn't work.
now desperately trying to put words in my mouth and laughably claim I support illegal much less criminal activity
Actually, I'm asking you why you don't appear to think that backing up a DVD, or the tools with which to do it, are illegal.
No, Factually, that is another lie, since you're not asking that at all, you understand the difference between "illegal" and "criminal", and are now simply trying to blur the terms in an attempt to excuse actual criminals. Here are your own words LOL over what constitutes a criminal offense: Simply violating a license by not abiding by the terms (if those terms are deemed enforceable by the court) is a civil tort, not a crime, thus, no "criminals." .
LOL you can't just keep jumping from thread to thread trying to claim something completely opposite, although it's quite obvious you're trying to lower the bar and falsely claim something is criminal, to make an excuse for something else that actually IS criminal, and obviously worse. That link is hilarious though, you beg and beg on behalf of those foreign hackers that what they did wasn't criminal, only to go down in flames, just like you are here.
True, but we're not talking about the violation of a license. We're talking about the violation of the DMCA, which forbids circumvention of DRM. If you backup a DVD (a violation of Sec. 1201, DMCA) and it saves you the purchase price of a new DVD, then you've personally gained financially from the circumvention, which invokes Sec. 1204 of the DMCA, making the backup liable for criminal prosecution.
Now that's simply the law. And it is the same law you have, even if unknowingly, applied to the HD-DVD cracker and the OS X crackers who committed the exact same act (circumvention of a copyright protection device).
So what is your opinion? Do you think backing up a DVD is at least illegal? This is your opinion I'm asking for, not the law, not precedent, just GE's opinion as to whether backing up your own DVD is illegal.
I have Photoshop also... some people cant afford it... paint.net is a good editor for FREE.. ;)
More lies, as clearly a portion of the Apple case involved cracking Apple's DRM, which you insisted for months couldn't have been criminal. Remember you trotting out the "180 day rule for criminal prosecution" on behalf of your foreign hacker heroes, and insisting they had to distribute the entire O/S to qualify as criminal, which of course turned out to be a another lie. Yet here you are trying to lie your way out of it again, being an admittedly Godless man who has no morals, no shame either obviously but I'm willing to keep bumping this thread because while it's mainly a waste of bandwidth it shows the depth of your evil and how far you're willing to go to defend foreign criminals.
... according to the information in the article, which showed no financial gain on the part of the hackers. Why do you keep going around in circles?
Remember you trotting out the "180 day rule for criminal prosecution" on behalf of your foreign hacker heroes, and insisting they had to distribute the entire O/S to qualify as criminal
You were the one falsely claiming they were distributing the OS itself, which would allow prosecution under a law different than the DMCA. I explained that law to you, and you keep mocking that law. This is just a rehash too in order to avoid the issue at hand, which is DVD backups.
Yet here you are trying to lie your way out of it again, being an admittedly Godless man
I can always tell when you are losing, because you bring this up. You were caught on doing this before.
So back to the question: In your personal opinion, which can't be right or wrong, just your opinion, is backing up your own personal DVD illegal? If not, why?
More lies, as I've already shown you to be the one talking in circles, trying to claim the Russian hackers weren't criminal but that personal backups somehow are, which of course you know to be false and still have no case history or letters threatenning criminal prosecution, as I have repeatedly shown in the case of the Russian hackers that you laughably called "BS".
You were the one falsely claiming they were distributing the OS itself
Yet another obvious lie, as I have already linked above your exact quotes claimming the Russian hackers had to be distributing OSX itself before their actions could be criminal, and where I clearly exposed your lie and showed criminal prosecution of other Russians who simply distributed a crack and not the software package itself.
is backing up your own personal DVD illegal?
An irrelevant question, with the clear intent of bluring the lines between criminal and illegal, as you continue your attempts to excuse the actual foreign criminals you've been defending with lies for months, which started again on this thread in post 45. LOL you're so far gone even your hell hound FLAMING DEATH has abandoned you this time LMAO.
Simply wrong. I said the article showed no evidence that what they were doing could be liable for criminal prosecution, since no personal financial gain was shown. It is the financial gain that is necessary for criminal prosecution in a DMCA circumvention case. Despite the lack of evidence, you continued to call them criminal. You didn't say possibly criminal, you said criminal.
which of course you know to be false and still have no case history or letters threatenning criminal prosecution
I don't need those. I simply need the law, which as clearly stated can make personal DVD backups criminal.
and where I clearly exposed your lie and showed criminal prosecution of other Russians who simply distributed a crack and not the software package itself.
Again you confuse the applicable laws. You said they were distributing OS X itself, which was a lie. Distributing OS X would not require personal financial gain or profit to be criminal according to the NET Act. But this is about the DMCA, circumvention. And as you've been told many times before, the Elcomsoft case started with an admitted for-profit motive, as opposed to this one.
A good lawyer knows not to use a precedent when it actually hurts his case. Take the advice.
An irrelevant question, with the clear intent of bluring the lines between criminal and illegal,
No, it goes back to the beginning of this, which you have been avoiding. ALL of your previous posts on the subject of circumvention have shown you think it is illegal, if not criminal. I want to know if you think that applies to personal backups.
To mollify your cries of "equivalence" I will state that I do not think that a hacker ripping DVDs so he can put them on the 'net is a good thing. That makes him a bad person who infringes on the rights of others and raises the prices for all of us. I don't use the term "theft" because that is legally incorrect and too soft a term -- they violated someone's rights, which is worse than theft in my book. And as you know I am on the record for supporting fair use despite DRM measures that try to prevent it.
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