Posted on 12/11/2001 9:11:38 PM PST by toupsie
I just spent two days helping a neighbor get her "plug it in and it works" IMAC, with MAC OS 9.x, to do the most basic of things, such as printing to her Hewlett Packard inkjet printer. Someone had put Netscape on it, and printing from Netscape scrambled the HP drivers. The only way I could get it to work was to remove Netscape and go with Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
MAC OS, through the 9-series (not including NeXSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody/OSX), is quite possibly the WORST operating system and graphical user interface ever conceived by the mind of man. How do you explain to a little old lady that there is a layer of abstraction between an application and a window, so that closing a window does NOT close the underlying application? If you close a window in MAC 9.x, without closing the underlying application, you can't get a new window for the application without forcing one open, via e.g. the keyboard shortcut CMD-n.
If a user double clicks an icon on the desktop to launch, say, a web browser, closes the window of the web browser, then double clicks the icon again, NOTHING HAPPENS!!! The user has to hit CMD-n to force open a new window! This is insane! What's worse, if the user doesn't double click the icon the second time, but only single clicks it (MANY users can't click fast enough to get a good double click) and hits CMD-n, then instead of getting a new window for the web browser, the user gets a new empty folder on the desktop (because the single click, in place of the double click, highlighted the desktop, NOT the icon)!!!
MAC OS 9.x is utter and complete garbage.
[And MAC users are real idiots. I once spent a whole morning on an emergency service call because a user couldn't find one of her applications. Turns out she had dragged a folder inside of itself - so the application was one layer deep than normal.]
Is "Not finding an application" unique to that particular OS?
Furthermore, don't Macs have a find file feature?
If so, any competent technician should have been able to tell her how to find the application in less than a minute.
Here is why MS looks worse. When a bug is found in MS, it is lambasted across every computer publication known. When open source software is found to have a bug, a programmer simply changes it. No need to go all the way back to the originator. Also the vast majority of inexperienced admins and users use MS because it is the most user friendly, and therefore you will see far more mistakes made with MS. Whereas open sourced systems such as Linux are predominately used by experienced and advanced users who know how to keep a secure system.
The public, then ends up with a disproportionate view of MS.
But also, MS software just has far more errors than most other software.
The issue is 'incentive'. With a 95% marketshare, MS does *not* have any incentive to improve their coding practices. As long as they could use contracts to prevent any kind of 'free market' at the OS distributor level, they were don't increase sales thru better software.
That's one of the biggest reasons that a Soviet-style 'single provider' market is sooooo bad. That's why 'capitalism' is so much better.
If you can apply that logic to any monopoly, then it is meaningless. Try applying it to government schools.
'Perfect'? No one is asking for 'perfect'.
Just 'basically safe'.
Look, MS has been making web browsers for *almost a decade* now. And they *continually* put out new versions with serious vulnerabilities. In many cases, known vulnerabilities from the last version that they should have patched. Did you read where MS doesn't consider this significant, and may not even put out a patch!?
And they do this with *all* their products.
How many versions of IIS have been released with the *known* buffer-overrun hole?
This is a poor quality product.
It is only the 'best' browser left standing because MS literally 'murdered' the competition illegally.
I can tell you that 9 of 10 people I know like it. I can tell you that 7 of 10 geeks I know like it.
And Brittney Spears is the top selling 'vocal' artist.
So? The one argument I can not understand in defense of MS is, 'but they have the volume'! Massive volume in our corporate/socialist economy comes from control of the distribution channels. Autos, music, movies, software.
American corps sell low-quality crap by controlling the auto dealerships/radio stations/movie theatres/OEM's.
Would you consider, "But they sell more" to be an argument that a Ford is a better car than a Lexus? Or that 'Harry Potter' is the best film of all time?
I don't think so. And it doesn't apply here, either.
MS is where they are because they were willing to commit the corporate equivilant of assault and murder.
Any computer is going to require some level of experience with it in order to become proficient. The Mac OS is far from perfect, but it has served me well for a long time, I'm also quite comfortable with the various windows os's as well - both have strong and weak points. It is just that your argument against the Mac OS could easily be just as well applied to any other OS.
"Oh, this thing broke and this other thing is confusing (to me), so the OS and the whole platform sucks." <- This is not something unique to the Mac OS BTW!
Then why, in the states which might settle the private lawsuits with MS, can the consumers not get compensation for being cheated by MS?
Because in those states, the law says that '3rd parties' can't get compensation in lawsuits.
The 'consumers' don't select or buy Windows. The distributors -- Dell, Compaq, etc, do. The 'consumers' simply buy whatever computers the major distributors offer.
The law actually considers 'end users' a 3rd party to the choice to purchase an OS. By far, most consumers do *not* choose. They have it chosen for them.
No, because by definition, there cannot be a choice. There is obviously a choice with OS's.
Try applying it to government schools.
They are unconstitutional to begin with. Everything done by the gov, must be done by force. So the free market cannot apply to the gov. So that is a bad analogy.
Oooh. Nice point.
If MS doesn't have a monopoly, then neither do the public schools. Or the Post Office, for that matter.
The problem is that many people don't understand economics beyond a 4th grade level. They think the only kind of monopoly is one with 'exclusive' control, with no competitors.
In the real world, monopolies are created thru controlling distribution channels. But most people don't understand how you it is even possible to use contracts with distributors to create a Soviet 'single-supplier' market.
But if 'exclusivity' is the only definition of a monopoly, then the Post Office and Public Schools aren't even monopolies. And I hope no one would make *that* case.
It's a perfect analogy. He/she is a genius.
If 'having other choices' proves something isn't a monopoly, then the public schools aren't a monopoly.
And neither is the post office.
Both are just publicly funded industries much like the 'airlines' industry.
You are right to say that no Internet-connected machine is really 100% secure, your implication that the fact that Linux is open source somehow makes it less secure is questionable, at best.
Many, many people (including me) would argue the opposite: that its open source development process tends to make it more secure, not less.
Still, nothing can replace good administrative practices.
With this kind of leverage, only an incompetant company could fail to gain market share.
The reason Apple dropped market share is simple: price. For any given price point you can get more hardware and software with a PC. Especially more software. Much of what home users have is pretty much free (And not always illegal. I have many sophisticated programs that are simply a version behind the latest. I get them dirt cheap at garage sales, or at the office when we upgrade or replace computers.)
Apple has everything possible to avoid price competition on their hardware. As a result there are fewer machines out there and less demand for software, and less production of software.
Another reason for loss of marketshare is AppleTalk, the world's most inefficient networking OS. Maybe easy to install, but crap for more than a few users. Until recently, IP on a Mac was difficult and required third party software, like "Dave" to use network printers.
A third reason for loss of market share is Apple's indifference to database applications and connectivity to mainframes. Not everyone makes their living running Quark.
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