Mad as hell, switching to Mac

Network World ^ | 05/23/05 | Winn Schwartau, Network World

[N3WBI3]

Author says it best "Windows is complex, trying to be everything to everyone. This complexity comes at a terrible price: downtime, help desks, upgrades, patches and the inevitable failures."

In my view windows is the swiss army knife of software, it will do almost anything it just does few if any of them very well...

[frogjerk]

[Jet Jaguar]

ping.

[N3WBI3]

Here is another rant by the same guy:

Unscheduled Rant:

A lot of folks are asking, "what sent you over the top?"

Well, I've been married to Spousal Unit #1 for 26+ years. (Had to ask her. :-) And for those of you who are as lucky, going over the top is often inexplicable. Hey! It's true!

But, in this case it was building, over the last few O/Ss or so. :-) But, really, in the last few months, my frustration went over the top because I openly admit I am tough on laptops. I schlepp two of 'em everywhere 'round the world and I see no reason a $2000 box should not be able to take $2000 worth of airport abuse.

So, my beautiful new Sony 17" VAIO with 1920X1200 res (Freaking gorgeous) began to have mechanical problems. I can recognize a HW versus SW prob and this was hardware but the Sony folks, in an effort to save having to send a guy to me, tried to convince me "Reinstall Windows." NO! That is wrong! This is a HW problem.

The Sony guy came, and had the wrong parts. So he came back and when he left, the machine was in worse shape (fried Darlington power pair - I grew up analogue!) Sony is becoming useless, so my backup and I build a new one in the Dell 9200 (great machine when it works, and calling New Delli for help ("Ah to be reinstalling Windows") is an exercise in BabelFish.

Sony dude: back three times. Left 21 screws out. Sony says, "Time to reinstall Windows" and I scream LEMON LAW! - just give me a new box. (This one was 3 months old, 4 visits, Windows did NOT need a reinstall, and I had bought a 4 year in home service warranty.)

3 months into this, Sony says, "OK, it must be the HW."

The sheer amount of time I wasted was extraaordinary - to get a WinTel vendor to cop to the fact that HW does break, and all I needed was a HW fix - NOT reinstall XP Pro.

That was me. I like to think my time is valuable. So, if I spent 100 hours (conservatively) on this, how much is that worth? To me - I would have bought ANYTHING to make WinTel go away.

My wife's Dell box was rapidly turning into a disaster with a rebuild because the Reinstall disks do NOT match original OEM build. That really sucks for Ma&Pa customers because their machines will never be the sam again. Then they call New Delli and all they get is "Reinstall Windows".

NOTE: I really am not blaming ANY of this on MS. As my "Mad As Hell" series will hopefully, I have decided to look at PC/WinTel Security from a Systems Engineering View (SEV) - the world and discipline I grew up in at the turn of the last century:

My wife spent a gazillion hours in recovery, rebuild, reconfig, add security... and her time iss more valuable than mine! (she says....:-)

Our CTO had a WinTel meltdown. My daughter had a WinTel disaster. My son already uses Linux and only uses WinTel for gaming.

The cost - the unacceptably immense financial premium that the WinTel world demands of its users - is going to be the straw that breaks the WinTel back! I could no longer afford WinTel.

OWNING WINTEL IS TOO DAMNED EXPENSIVE for anyone who cares one whit about their money or their profits.

In this series, I am going to PROVE it.
Please hang around.

PERSONAL NOTE:

I want to thank the literally thousands of people who have come forward to voice their support of "Mad As Hell". This means a great deal to me personally (people actually do care) and I think it is one of the best ways to create an inviting community where mass migration of the Ma&Pas can find a secure and functional home.

[1FASTGLOCK45]

I've been using Windows most my life,
you just got to learn how to bend to your every whim.
The only apple i like is the one that grows on trees, the only other apple i have is an IMac i bought from someone as a favor, and it sits in my garage rusting in peace.

[HKMk23]

Winn bashing Wintel was previously posted here.

[Mortikhi]

The reason Macs and Linux boxes are more secure is that there are less people using those operating systems, which means less programmers creating viruses for them.

It has nothing to do with the less-used O/S's being coded better.

[ScreamingFist]

I've used Macs, I'll stick with Windows. Yes, tweaking is required. But I like tweaking, and overdriving, and playing with my software and upgrading to play games with graphics running in high res at the speed of light. I keep a mean, clean computing machine. And I could put together 10 of these for the price of a Mac. To each his own.

[proxy_user]

It is not a matter of coding.

Linux and Unix are designed from the ground up not to allow users to change the machine configuration. Only administrators can, and it's very hard to get administrative rights.

[Xenophobic Alien]

I am convinced that 99% of the problems ppl have with windows based pc's are caused by (insert pre-fab pc manufacturer name here I.E Dell, compaq...) Useing sub-par hardware in their machines. I build all of mine using quality parts and have never had any problems with Windows.

You buy crap parts and you will have crap results.

[N3WBI3]

Thanks for pointing that out Ill try to get this dupe pulled..

[sasquatch]

Mad as he$$ is on a Dell, I'll bet.

[Arrowhead1952]

He better think again.

Who Told Me a Mac Will Not Crash

[cryptical]

The reason Macs and Linux boxes are more secure is that there are less people using those operating systems, which means less programmers creating viruses for them.

There's a different privilege model as well, which allows users to run as < admin in a useful manner, so viruses and such have a much harder time infecting the underlying OS.

Could we see userland viruses in the future? Sure, but it'd be a lot less useful for the virus writer, and probably easier to protect against.

[N3WBI3]

is a neon as safe as a saab? no.. is that becauer there are more neons? no..

[ShadowAce]

Already Posted

[Parmy]

Macs are very big in Europe and Asia.

[joesnuffy]

I am convinced that 99% of the problems ppl have with windows based pc's are caused by (insert pre-fab pc manufacturer name here I.E Dell, compaq...) Useing sub-par hardware in their machines. I build all of mine using quality parts and have never had any problems with Windows.

You buy crap parts and you will have crap results.

Good point...nice tag line

Via con queso amigo

[TChris]

If Micro$oft had a clue or two, they would make the KISS SOS. Done right, Windows could be made in such a modular way that it would fit that description.

One of our engineers made a very good point that was touched on briefly in this article: Microsoft seems to have a penchant for kicking users off the top of the learning curve. He pointed out that he, as an engineer, uses around 10-15 Windows applications regularly in order to do his job. If every one of those applications is updated an average of once a year, which is a pretty good guess, then he is forced to re-learn a program approximately every month! This is because software companies, Micro$oft being chief among them, can't leave the dang interface alone. All the menu items et al to which you have become accustomed get jacked around with each new version.

My current pet peeve is MS Outlook. Initially, with Office '97, I had nothing but praise for Micro$oft's flagship PIM/email application. The original interface was something of a wonder, keeping heaps of complexity mostly hidden from the user's view until needed. The "Outlook Bar" was a paradigm of simplicity; the user could simply drag and drop what ever items most frequently used onto the bar and arrange it in a way that made sense. It worked well, and I could train a complete newbie on Outlook in about five minutes.

Along comes Outlook 2003. Everything wonderful about Outlook has been flushed down the toilet. The "Outlook Bar" has been eliminated in favor of a very inflexible lookalike that is both maddeningly complicated and astonishingly counterintuitive. I have been an avid PC user since the advent of Windows 3.1. Never have I been forced -- it is my employer's corporate standard after all -- to wrangle with such an unwieldy pile of crap as Outlook has become. Just installing the application -- selecting only Outlook from the Micro$oft Office 2003 Professional advanced setup wizard -- puts a dent in your hard drive over 100 MB in size. OK, I do some Windows C++ application development as part of my job. 100 MB for what is largely an email client is just nuts.

Micro$oft is continuing to push the Swiss-Army-Knife school of software design. The problem is, most people only use the knife. The extra bulk of the fork, spoon, corkscrew, toothpick, miniature microwave, hot-air popcorn popper, George Foreman grill, Dolby-digital surround sound and handy storage closet are all beginning to make the product less appealing to those who only want the knife.