Brenda Archer

That reason is one I have to agree with.

Fade Languish

I hate OS wars. Whatever works for the task you need it for, is best. I buy mine specced for audio, mac is a decent choice for that. Anything else it might do is nice, but not important. Except for the basic things that they all do like the internet, which kinda is important to me.

Joshua Nightshade

I agree, the wars are stupid.

Windows is better.

Harvey Swenson

That's kinda like claiming Bush and Cheney haven't done anything wrong because they haven't been convicted of anything and it's ignoring the times when companies settled out of court or went bankrupt due to legal costs.

I might google something later if I can really be bothered but I'd guess if you've been in the industry since 1988 you actually know most of the crap MS get up to and just ignore it.

The biggest problem here is that microsoft uses it's knowledge of the operating system to stifle competition and give it's own products an advantage and it's economic size to side step market competition.

This has actually reduced choice considerably and even though there is more software available for windows than other operating systems, when producing it's own software (office or visual studio or internet explorer etc...) Microsoft operates in a predatory manner often offering it's own software free or at a huge discount (eg Microsoft Access) in order to remove the competition and generally results in a monopoly.

Since there is then a monopoly there is less innovation, and reduced choice.

Chip Midnight

They're still overpriced, but their hardware has finally gotten impressive after they ditched Motorola. If I was setting up an Avid or Pro Tools system, or if I was a Maya user rather than 3ds Max, I'd think seriously about a Mac.

Chalice Yao

Man, Opera is really crying for attention there, aren't they?

Most unsavvy computer users who have a problem with spyware, viruses and hijacks introduced by improper surfing, and get helped along by a friend, get alternatives installed. Mostly Firefox.

It's not Microsoft's fault that most users chose to do so. Opera just wants more presence by being pre-installed on the OS.

So, what happens to Firefox? Can they then sue Microsoft and Opera for excluding them? Right in b4 Safari, Mozilla Seamonkey, Chrome, and let's not forget the ascii-laden overlords of Lynx, Links and ELinks protesting that Microsoft oppresses them by not including a text-based browser on the command line.

Which reminds me, that also means Mozilla should go after them for preinstalling Outlook Express/Windows Mail without also adding Thunderbird. And The Bat. And There come the ascii overlords again demanding mutt and nails.

Paint? GASP? Call in the EU-cops. Clearly GIMP should be on there as well. Right along with Paint shop Pro. Irfanview, too. After all we can't allow those Microsoft terrorists to dominate the market with the built-in preview and thumbnail view in the Windows Explorer.

What do you mean, Microsoft does not offer alternative apps to change your desktop wallpaper? Is that a...folder explorer thingamajic I see there? Think of the Midnight commander! *shakes fist*



If I were Microsoft and this continues to go on, I'd just add a few default shortcuts on the desktop that point to a few http addresses (which open in IE >:3) and call it a day. Hey, they offer alternatives! Users get them pointed out. And the shortcuts'd point to some alternative browsers. Like Amaya. After all it's the w3 reference browser. Opera didn't say that there should be a pointing out of -their- browser, now did they?

*shifty eyes*

__________________
"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" - George Carlin

Harvey Swenson

It's probably the best reason for the average person too

Joshua Nightshade

Personally I feel that as a company Apple is responsible for offenses equally on par with Microsoft, but they get away with it because Apple has cultivated themselves as a fashion statement or a social revolution icon, and thus it's cool to insult Microsoft because that's what all the other advantaged intellectual elites are doing.

At least they've made inroads in allowing bootcamp to let you install Windows finally. But I still think they would make significant improvements in OS adoption if they allowed OSX to run on something other than the hardware they supply. Ofcourse to do that would knock their revenue stream and end the choruses of "OSX is better because it just works!"

No, it's better because it runs legitimately on a finite number of systems that Apple has complete control over, while Windows is expected to run on everything from phones to Eees to ten year old laptops to the latest machines.

Joshua Nightshade

And if I had the option to dual boot between Windows or OSX on my own machine, not having to buy a regular desktop at a 80% premium with hardware that they make obsolete every few months, I would.

Brenda Archer

So why don't "they?" they, as in Them.

I'm not being facetious. The customer seems to be asking for appliances and wizards and so forth, but they don't buy them, unless it's a side effect of something else.

They keep buying general purpose computers they hardly know how to use. Then I hear the earful about just how hard it is. Yet it's massively simpler than it used to be. Both the MS and Apple GUIs are quite tolerant of know-nothingness.

If I make suggestions to boil a task down to its most simple version they are usually summarily rejected.

There really needs to be another layer where these users have a human layer between themselves and any actual software decisions, but that would be prohibitively expensive for most people and now we're back where we started, exactly the situation M$ is making a living on (and you too from the sound of it).

For sure sufficiently advanced software could be a buffer, but now we have the problem of not being able to reach a goal because we don't know what it is supposed to be.

Often what people are asking for is to be told "what the goal is" but then they don't want it. I imagine that's a frustrating position to be in. Everybody is on the interwebs but where do they go? It's like looking for a party that closed down ten minutes ago.

I don't see a way out of the box except to educate most users so they're super-users and even technicians. A lot of high schools now expect that they have to do exactly that.

It's no different than how you can hardly find any male of fifty who doesn't know how to change the oil in his car. That won't be true or necessary in 30 years, but the same guy's son is now graduating high school with an A+ cert and possibly even knowledge of at least one computer language.

Fade Languish

They are overpriced I think. I feel like I've had value though anyway, as I've put things together with it it's all gone smoothly. The biggest downside for me is the frequency of their OS updates (probably a positive for some), because of the third party plug in update lag, which can often take ages, while at the same time new things get released which may not support backwards too many versions. Then by the time every one catches up, there's a new one.

Fade Languish

Buying Logic was pretty evil of Apple, I have to say. They've done a good job with it, but it would have been better if it was still cross-platform.

Chalice Yao

What irks me most, personally, about OS X isn't even anything that is OS X specific per se. Then again, I'm a tinkerer. The way to annoy me is to have sucky performance, mostly.

What annoys me is that it seems the Mac community is in the Shareware mindset of the 90's, in that even trivial alternatives for the apps that come with OS X seem to be limited Shareware apps. Whenever I do some google searches for OS X apps, Shareware pops up as the top results, usually.

Yes, I know there are free alternatives. However, that's mostly those that also exist on other platforms in the first place, Like FF, VLC and such. Or those that exit as Linux apps and can be, more or less, installed as well.


Don't get me wrong, I don't mind paying for software. But many of the shareware apps are often, as I said, very trivial, and you'd usually find them as freeware for the other OSes.
I have a feeling that mac-exlusive freeware is alot more rare than on the other platforms. As I said, maybe it's just me, but it's what I instantly got reminded of when I went app-searching.

Harvey Swenson

I thought I'd post a couple of links to explain my original post a little better.

The first is a comment made by someone regarding a senate enquiry into microsoft, it's not an article just a comment to an article but it explains the situation of MS Dos quite well

Microsoft vs. Congress: I think I should explain things better. The company I am talk

The second is regarding Microsoft vs Borland. It's quite long but I'll post a couple of quotes from it regarding how Microsoft removes competition and avoids being 'Technically' classed as criminal

Conspiracy Theory: Microsoft's .Net IS Borland's Product

I know most of this is unimportant to end users of windows, but to software developers or website designers it's very important.

For example, if Borland hadn't been interfered with by Microsoft, we would already have the situation that a computer program could be developed on any platform (Windows, Linux, Mac ...) and it would work on any platform, transparently.

Chalice Yao

Developer Resources for Java Technology
Ruby Programming Language
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
The Perl Directory - perl.org
Python Programming Language -- Official Website
Tcl Developer Site

http://www.ogre3d.org
GTK+ - About
Qt Cross-Platform Application Framework — Qt Software - Code Less. Create More. Deploy Everywhere.
Home - OpenAL
OpenGL - The Industry Standard for High Performance Graphics
Simple DirectMedia Layer
http://www.fox-toolkit.org

Harvey Swenson

lol yes quite a nice list of interpreted languages and I'm guessing you know what's required to make sl cross platform and also guessing you know that it wouldn't have been required and you could have used any language you wanted if borland had it's way.

Additionally Borland had a lot of fairly mainstream products rather than a list of scripting languages running on mid range unix systems and remember that this was happening 10 years ago.

Edit : If it helps, imagine that 10 years ago 80% of windows software developers suddenly got a checkbox on their compiler that said Create linux package, Create Mac Package etc... without them doing anything other than clicking a check box their software is available on any platform

Fmeh

Google is not a web browser that only works on ONE operating system with proprietary self-made standards that don't get shared with the rest of the web community. Yes, they've MADE a web browser, but that browser conforms to standards--they're not trying to make their own standards that you can only find on ONE operating system. If you're going to start a web standard, make it so others can use those standards as well. If MS still made IE for other platforms, there could be less complaints about it because you're not locked to ONE operating system to be able to use those proprietary functions. Either way, however, as much as people don't like it, they really shouldn't have the right to sue Microsoft over it.

I agree that these lawsuits are ridiculous.

__________________

Eirik

It CAN be a problem in Fallout 3 also.

Someone made a mod to wear glasses and helmets together. When you wear the helmet with the glass visor and then wear glasses underneath, it causes graphical glitches though that aren't too different from SL's.

And AFAIK FO3 uses Direct3D.

Just to give another example.

Standardization doesn't exist in the PC industry because Microsoft always actively opposed it with their Embrace, Extend, Exterminate tactics.

The Borland example pointed out is also a great example. I honestly don't have a problem with Windows being the biggest OS itself, but I do get annoyed when idiots claim that Microsoft is somehow at the spearhead of standardisation, protecting us from the evil incompatibility.

Opensource software creators have been fighting for standardisation forever and have been stopped in their tracks by MS every time.

Their convictions in EU courts actually are for criminal activity according to our laws. It's not without reason that they were given the highest fine ever.

Which btw wasn't a very high fine at all to start with, but was only increased because after 3 years they still told the EU to fuck off and refused to pay the original fine.

And IMO they still got off lucky. If I get fined by the cops and tell them to fuck off and then run away; they're not just going to increase the fine: they're going to lock me up. Which is exactly what they should have done with MS's CEO.

Personally it seems to me like you're really asking: why make things better?



So I guess I use my Windoze only because I need Direct3D

Not like I run anything else MS related, I even replaced Notepad with an Opensource txt editor.

__________________

Joshua Nightshade

Windows is at the spearhead of standardization by virtue of the fact that they have the largest market share. Like it or not, if you develop standards that the biggest group won't accept, what do you expect?

Microsoft competes with standards all the time. They absorb companies that compete with them. They're a business, not a happy hug cookie factory.

And it's crock to say opensource companies are responsible for standardization. Yeah- THEIRS. How many variants of the GPL are there? BSD licenses? Creative Commons? So on and so forth. Everyone has a standard, everyone wants their standard to be the defacto central one.

Up until recently, Safari, which was bundled in OSX, only ran on Macs. ZOMG! So this is what I don't get. It's unfair for Microsoft to do it, but competing groups can. Why? Because Microsoft is the bigger piece of the pie? So it's cool for those companies that compete with Microsoft to gain popularity and usage via the anti-competitive tactics they complain Microsoft uses, up to the point that they've got the majority stake, then what? They're now going to be subjected to the same lawsuits they pelted Microsoft with?

It reeks of hypocrisy.

CaleVinson

Agreed.

My loathing of Microsoft remains in place, but if people tell me that Apple and Sony have equally anti-competitive practices, I'm more than happy to declare a pox on their houses too.

I'm also of the view that, as a generalization, large companies like MS don't innovate directly themselves, but absorb, Borg-like, the innovations of smaller companies. Examples in the MS space include disk compression (Stacker versus Doublespace), memory management (QEMM versus Himem/EMM386), and of course web browsing (Netscape versus IE). Thus, even as an end-user, one should want small companies to be able to compete on product merit alone with large companies, even if only so that the large companies products are subsequently improved.

Harvey Swenson

Microsoft should have probably thought of this before they released vista since they seem to have developed an operating system that a large % of windows users won't accept.

Since many products are moving to web based fairly quickly, Linux variants are becoming easier to use, and microsoft is essentially pushing users away in an attempt to stop piracy, their existing market share will be irrelevant and microsofts non-standard browser will be a liability more than anything.

Already government and business are moving towards all linux and opensource environments.

Joshua Nightshade

Pushing users away to stop piracy? I've never encountered any restriction on any of my Microsoft products that made me feel that way.

You mean OSX requiring a specific chip in order to be installed in the first place is more open?

Governments and businesses are moving towards Linux because it's generally free. Microsoft charges a lot in licenses. That's their prerogative. Remember how they're not a happy hug cookie factory?

Harvey Swenson

No I didnt mean you, I meant kids that put together their own pc and install a pirate copy of windows or a family with multiple pc's but only 1 legitimate version of windows as well as the drm integration in vista which is 1/2 a seperate issue.

Pirated copies make up a huge proportion of the installed windows user base (eg 5 pc's in a home and 1 legal copy etc...) and MS has been doing it's best to stop these copies working not really understanding that if it succeeds a large % of these people will simply move to linux instead of paying for 4 extra copies of windows.

Edit : + China, I think they've only sold them 1 copy

agree

The software is free so they save a huge amount on licensing, and I would guess that linux support is also much cheaper than windows.

I also think a large argument from a government/large business point of view is that it's more secure, reliable, and less likely to be attacked than the equivelent windows systems and most already have a large amount of in house expertise available from unix exposure.

Joshua Nightshade

What DRM integration?

I've been able to reset my activations on my XP and Vista discs many, many times. I believe technically I'm allowed to install each on one desktop, one laptop. I've exceeded that by a significant margin and every now and then all I have to do is call an automated number and tell the machine I reinstalled my system. Boom, reactivated.

Harvey Swenson

DRM is digital rights management to stop people doing things like copying blue ray disks

this is a bit biased but you should get the gist of it :
Why Vista's DRM Is Bad For You - Forbes.com

You are technically allowed to run xp or vista on one processor, multi processor machines confuse the issue a little but basically 1 license = 1 machine. Office has a different license and I'm pretty sure the copy I have says it can be installed on two pc's at once.

When you upgrade hardware or change to a new pc altogether you need to re-authorise it and when the automated system thinks things have changed too much you need to ring up and get a new authorisation number.

Generally speaking this isnt a big deal however if you're connected to the net and you're using the same copy on two different machines, microsoft knows about it.

I'm not sure about the latest xp service pack but vista is extremely dilligent in telling microsoft what you're up to, it even upgrades itself at times even when you've told it not to.