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The Achilles Heel for me when surfing the web on my iBook is that if I go to a site with lots of ads, or lots of animated GIFs (forums and their smilies) CPU usage shoots up to 100% and I can barely type into text boxes such as this one. I don't know who to blame: the web browser, or Quartz. I know for a fact that PCs with lesser specs than my iBook can handle such websites just fine, and I'm using Mozilla/Firefox on both platforms. Same results in Safari on the iBook, which supposedly is a better browser.

iBook G4 1 GHz, 256 MB RAM.

The achilles heel on any new Mac is memory. OSX LOVES! memory. My 1ghz Powerbook was the same way when I first got it. $125 later I had 1gb of ram and all was well. I will point out that the entire system performance shot way up too. Most others I've talked to see it the same. Its all about lotsa ram with OSX.

Yeah! I know the problem. There is a solution, though. Try out adblock for Firefox. It solves the problem as it enables you to stop all the ads. It works quite fine for me.

Good luck!

the problem is that even as a second machine, a Mac is an expensive proposition.

That's more or less what's keeping Apple off my desk. Pity, guess FreeBSD will have to do.

Not any critisism.. but I've had two ibooks. 2usb 700mhz and then the 900mhz. Both started with 256MB RAM. I maxed out the ram to 640MB and It made WORLD of difference. I cant tell you the over all speed increase and snappyness of the machines after this. Actually. Now I have a Dual 876 G4. When I bought it (used) it had 256MB of RAM. I kid you not, that my ibook 700 w/ 640MB felt alot quicker. Then I added ram to it. viola! Fast. Macs need alot of ram. Ram is cheap. Just a heads up. It's definitly worth it. Now i doubt this is why your browser is slow and hitting your processor so hard. but i never ran into that issue.

-adam

The "deal breaker" for me and I assume many others has always been the same. I simply can't justify the price.
My daughter who is currently running Xandros on less than 400.00 bucks worth of of hardware, really wants an Apple.
How do I justify going from a 500.00 system to megabucks? For the sake of OS X? Not a chance.

This is the second iBook I've owned. The first one I maxed out the RAM to 640, but obviously since the new ones use DDR RAM I couldn't just migrate the RAM. Even with my old iBook (G3 700) running Jaguar web sites still dragged my system performance down. I'm running Panther now and it's a little better but CPU usage stills leaps to 100% on some websites.

What blows my mind is: I had XCode running, actively compiling, I'm listening to music in iTunes, and I'm doing a bunch of other things, all this still on the stock 256 MB of RAM. It's quite impressive. But why is it that a website - even if the browser is the only other program I have running - can bring this system to its knees?


@Adapt/Adam
Actually RAM is not that cheap, at least when upgrading a Mac. Just browsing through various Mac forum sites, there's always discussions of how Apple updates their firmware to be more and more picky about RAM modules. Today, Macs won't just take any ol' memory module, it has to be brand name, or worst case scenario it has to be the one sold through Apple or partners. I can appreciate the fact that buying cheap RAM can/will lead to problems, but it almost seems like there's always a premium we have to pay just to use a Mac.

After reading all the points he mentioned I can say KDE is not that much worse than OSX when it comes to desktop usability. Sure they're far from being able to control what hardware they're running on, but the desktop part is very decent.

I don't think Macs are too expensive-- especialy not if you look at what you get: you get an all-in-one package that works from the moment you put in the power-plug; no building, no setting up, no driver searching.

If you compare Mac's to x86 equivelants, such as the Sony Vaio product line, you'll see that Mac's arent that expensive. Especially iBooks, they are very priceworthy.

just wanted to point out that my cousin uses a compaq presario. his wife uses a mac powerbook.

they're both not really computer literate. just basic users who type, surf, email, download, listen to music and play videos, etc.

the compaq is only about 8 months old. the powerbook is 3 years old.

i've had to help my cousin with the slow startup times. i've removed services, unneeded software, cleared up the registry Run list of software, etc. run ad-aware, defragmented, scanned for viruses. i've done this more than a couple of times already.

his wife chuckles since her 3-year old powerbook boots up in about 30 seconds, the compaq about 5 minutes on a good day.

the powerbook is a g4 800mhz machine with 256mb ram i believe. the compaq is a p4 2.6ghz machine with 256mb ram.

i'm sure he could just wipe the compaq clean and reinstall everything. but i don't really wanna bother helping with backups of documents, emails, bookmarks, etc. it's just too much hassle for a machine he uses for work. he's now getting an ibook, based on the firsthand experiences of his wife and the powerbook. the ibook is cheaper. but the actual sane usage is the same.

is the mac worth it? for peace of mind, less headaches, definitely. plus where a pc lasts maybe 3 years, the apple can be uesd at double that time.

personally i just avoid windows and use linux on my thinkpad t30.

Instead of just reading the posts, try OSX (not for 5 seconds please). I am running OSX and KDE and there is a HUGE difference between them. As much as i love my Linux machine, the OSX one is by far the best one from a user perspective.

...the achilles heel on os-x is that it's slower, overall, everything is simply a little slower than windoze. Just read the review, at least the GUI is beefed with lags and stuff. The core may be just a effective as Win, but the GUI is still laggy. Sad, but true.

I'm using a mac and can't stand crapsettling.

Win XP sucks ram up to, both of mine do.

shame about OSX is the lack of of a full screen button. when i'm *REALLY* working on something I want it to be fullscreen even if the app doesn't need it. I get too easily distracted with even just a bit of my desktop showing. I gave up trying to learn Delpi since the IDE drove me NUTS.

I'm sure there must me a pluging that could add a fourth button to the window that turns everything not used by the application black. Anyone know of one?

I thought it was a good article overall, but the author claims OS X's file system is disorganized compared to Windows. I feel exactly the opposite way. For instance, system-wide applications go in /Applications. Applications installed only for a particular user go in ~/Applications. Settings for an application go in ~/Library/Preferences. Etc. I'm a professional Windows software developer, but I do hobby development on OS X on the side, and I can tell you that from the perspective of a developer, OS X is hands-down better organized.

I'm not aware of any "behind-the-scenes" copying of files that goes on when an application is dragged to its installation location (which should always be /Applications or a subfolder of /Applications except under special circumstances). Launch services reads the application bundle to cache things like icons, etc., but that's all I'm aware of. Applications are responsible for creating their own prefs.

There's also a rough one-to-one correspondence:

C:Documents and Settings -> /Users
C:Program Files -> /Applications
C:Windows, C:WindowsSystem32 -> /Library

I don't understand his criticism.

"Win XP sucks ram up to, both of mine do."
Who cares how much RAM the OS takes; when you are running a game that wants half the RAM on the damn planet? Sort of like claiming your pickup truck sucks lots of gas, while your pulling a 27 foot travel trailer.

How do I justify going from a 500.00 system to megabucks? For the sake of OS X? Not a chance.

I used to think the same way. Here's the arguement I made for the purchase before finally taking the dive. BTW, the Mac is now my main machine, and my 3Ghz P4 is my secondary. The P4's nothing to sneeze at, which should give further boost to the quality of the Mac.

Macs hold their resale. PC's do not. When I bought my Mac, after drooling over them since the G5's hit the market, the one thing that made the decision the right one for me was the realization that if I didn't like the Mac, I could sell it via Ebay or somewhere, and loose, at most, $300-400 dollars. Realistically, I'd probably lose $200, based off current pricing. While $200 is a considerable sum, it's not bad when we're talking a $2500 machine. Truth be told though, I have no plans to get rid of it.

No downtime's nice too! I'd talked to several users to see if the myth of "Mac stability" was a valid one or not before I purchased, and I'm glad to say that it's 100% true. While my P4 rarely has problems itself (whether running XP or Linux), the Mac has only locked on me twice in the last 8 months, and both of those locks were largely me screwing around with 10 different CPU-intensive things while burning DVD's. I suspect that when I up my memory from 512 to 2.5gb soon, such lockups will disappear altogether since the freezes were just GUI freezes, while the hard drive was thrashing around trying to keep up.

Even after buying my Mac, I was weighing whether to keep it or not for the first several months. In fact since I've got Windows XP so tweaked out with my personal customizations, I found myself switching boxes just to quickly get something done, rather than try and learn a new way to do it one the Mac.

This was driving me nuts too, as after switching to the Windows box to do something, I'd find myself opening up a browser, or doing something else while a process ran in the background, and before I knew it, I'd spent several hours working in Windows while my shiny new expensive Mac sat there unused.

What finally made the Mac decision for me, as well as allowing me to work in the Mac 100% of the time, which in turn forced me to pick up the new "Macisms" of the computing experience was when I came across the OSX Remote Desktop component! I run dual monitors, and I can Remote desktop to my Windows box as needed, full screen, in one of my monitors, while remaining in OSX. I get the best of both worlds, speeds are fantastic, and now that I've learned the Mac way to do my common tasks, I'm much more efficient with both!

And I have to say that the geek "ooh!" factor of overlaying your full screen, native XP desktop with an OSX app is memorable. You can share clipboard content back and forth, and as long as you have a 100MB netowrk connection or greater, the speed's amazing. I imagine that when I up my home network to a gigabit backend, it'll be native speeds for working on XP within the ol' Mac.

And once you can spend all your computin' time in the Mac, you can discover some of the Apps that really make the Mac a standout computer for the power users out there:

Quicksilver is a must-have app, and is freeware. I feel naked working without it now. You'ev never been as productive as you will be with this app! Seriously.

Devon Think is a packrats dream come true! Anything you want is instantly at your fingertips, and as you train this app, it'll do all the backend sorting/categorizing and such for you. I'm using it for everything from images to code snippets. It also supports movies and such, though I've yet to do much more with movies than confirm this works.

Office for the Mac is what Office for the PC should be.

In fact, I'm spending less and less time with the PC, as it's slowly being relegated to being a server box for me, handling web development tasks, and automated tasks for my home network, while allowing me to focus on productivity with the Mac.

Enough of my sales pitch though. Seriously... If you consider yourself a computer "power user", and you're looking for that next tweak which will make you a bit more productive, consider switching to a G5 Mac. With Tiger right around the corner, there's never been a better time to jump fences and try one. If you don't like (and you will like it!), you lose a couple of hundred, which is likely something we'd all spend without realizing it on frivolities (beer, bar, PC addons, games, etc.).

At least it's that rationale that made me make the switch, and I don't regret it one bit.

This article gives you a very good impression of what OSX is like to use and will probably save me a lot of time if ever I get around to buying a Mac.

I am a recent convert to Linux. There is no way that my version of XP was ever going to run for months at a time, but the author has made me consider that the hardware and software I was using might have contributed to a problem I blamed entirely upon XP.

Of course the big problem with the Mac alternative is cost. The 'whole widget' approach is an expensive solution, especially when compared with Linux. I would be quite upset to spend $3000 on a machine that did not have enough memory to do basic things, but that not insignificant point aside, the article does convince that OSX is a superior operating system.

However, if you are looking for an alternative to Windows it seems you can save a lot of money and still have a very good OS by adopting a good Linux distribution.

try maybe dragging the window o fill the screen.


what is that you say? that is not the point? well the + button works the way Apple wants it to and I almost never use it myself because I want full screen some times, but rather than complaining about something that will not change, I just drag the window open more.

Yeah! I know the problem. There is a solution, though. Try out adblock for Firefox. It solves the problem as it enables you to stop all the ads. It works quite fine for me.

That's not really the problem. The problem is that you should be able to view a webpage containing a bunch of animated gifs with an 1GHz iBook. If a computer with that kind of power is unable to do that, then there's some kind of flaw.
Removing the animated gifs doesn't really make that flaw disappear does it?

I used to have that problem with mozilla on BeOS, but nowdays it works fine. I'm not sure what solved it though.

I thought it was a good and fair article from the Windows perspective. It's always interesting to see what a thoughtful user of Windows will find in a Mac. Being a hard-core Mac user (and recovering Windows user), I no longer have an objective perspective on the two platforms.

I assume then that you do not work with a lot of open windows in XP do you?

my XP machine drags and gurgles and craps itself when I have 15 windows open and try to get anything done.

OS X does not do that to me.

" Well, to install an application, you simply drag the application's installer to any folder on your hard drive and it's "installed". Doing so actually triggers a number of files to be copied to various places on your drive, but the fact that you are separated from that process, it really made me feel like I wasn't in control of my system."

---What the heck is he talking about? When you copy an .app folder it just copies the folder doesn't it? He make it sound like the OS is coppying .DLL files into your WIN32 folder behind your back.

Oh I wasn't complaining... just looking for a shortcut that's all.

umm, the flaw is the memory. 256 MB is paltry to say the least.

The devil is in the details.

KDE is a nice DE, but you can really put it in the same class as Mac OS-X. There are alot of little things that just make OS-X a better product.

Jack wrote:

"the problem is that even as a second machine, a Mac is an expensive proposition."

That's more or less what's keeping Apple off my desk.

This is a question which I'm curious about: how much money do you (generic you) spend on your PCs? I mean not just the initial purchase price, but also the interim upgrades (CPU, Graphics, RAM, cooling system, etc etc).

Anonymous@comcast wrote:

My daughter who is currently running Xandros on less than 400.00 bucks worth of of hardware, really wants an Apple. How do I justify going from a 500.00 system to megabucks? For the sake of OS X? Not a chance.

Well, it boils down to priorities: Apple simply isn't in the low-cost low-quality market, and if for her OS-X isn't worth saving up some money herself by forgoing other expenses, and maybe looking at used systems, then she can't be wanting an Apple that bad.

And honestly, a Mac isn't that expensive anymore: a midrange quality PC can easily cost as much as a midrange Mac.

This was overall an excellent review, and having owned both pc and mac, I can relate to alot of the things mentioned. I'm a welder by trade, making above average coin, and 3000 is alot of money. The points made about overall quality of components was bang on. you definately get what you pay for.
The fact that seperates the mac and any pc was also spelled out loud and clear: "OSX". And another truth was pointed out here, great, not perfect. There's alot of things I had to learn all over again, and if time was money, I could see a windows guy being in a knot, at first. It does take a bit of reading, alot of googling, and unthinking the windows way of doing things. But the rewards, however, are great. Time spent learning comes back as time saved, over and over. It's quite rewarding when you "get it", and relize how much time you can save...

Now, if the auther had poked around a little more, and relized that there are some real gems out there in the *unix arena just waiting to be discovered... like fink, for example. It was the most fun I had on the mac, getting X11 and KDE, Gnome, Windowmaker, XFCE4, ect. up and running on my desktop.. brilliant. alot of good folks working hard on these projects, and alot of excellent help to get it all working...

I'm back on a pc, running SimplyMepis, and missing my G5... Waiting for my next G5 (Imac g5, 1.8 20", 2gig of ram) to arrive. I think the years spent toiling away on Linux have helped me to switch between mac osx and Linux easily. There's simply no fear to it at all, it mostly just all works. It would have made little sense jumping straight from xp to osx. I hate to sound ungratefull to windows, it's where i started, but I won't be heading back that way any time soon. Got sick of the lack of help, acusation's of stealing Xp (switched to a new computer, kept old hd!!), viri, spyware, malware, bland desktop, lack of community....
No regrets here, and some will disagree, cause for most people, xp is all they can afford, or all they know. And that's a fair point of view.

"I've always been a fan of trying alternate Oses " - he dual boots Win ME and Win XP!!!!

Yes, I wrote him an email about his incorrect comments conerning DnD of Apps, as well. Frankly, I don't understand how he got the impression that dragging an app to a folder would silently install crap elsewhere... Unless he just hasn't comprehended the reality of self-contained apps, yet.

The other issue was with the way Windows handled having so many windows opened; after a certain number of windows were opened, stability and performance both went down the drain. Sometimes applications could no longer spawn additional windows or dialog boxes, requiring me to close a handful before I could continue doing anything, and other times, applications would simply crash.

Where are the good old days were you clicked a link and
more then 30 windows popped up.heh?Close one, and you get
even more popped up.Bit off topic ok.

Well, it boils down to priorities: Apple simply isn't in the low-cost low-quality market, and if for her OS-X isn't worth saving up some money herself by forgoing other expenses, and maybe looking at used systems, then she can't be wanting an Apple that bad.

And honestly, a Mac isn't that expensive anymore: a midrange quality PC can easily cost as much as a midrange Mac.

For the price of that i-mac G5 i could build myself a PC
which performances exeeds that of an G5,to be honest i like the design of the "real" G5 but since design adds nothing to performance and hardware efficiency.

Do you seriously think that running an OS and a webbrowser should require more than 256MB RAM?
There's really something wrong there. Developers should try to optimize the software, so that you will be able to use those extra cycles for useful things like signal processing and stuff.

Instead of just reading the posts, try OSX (not for 5 seconds please). I am running OSX and KDE and there is a HUGE difference between them. As much as i love my Linux machine, the OSX one is by far the best one from a user perspective.

That would be just your personal preference, I own two macs G4 and G5 (OS9 and OSX). When forced to go working on them I choose OS9 and avoid OSX if possible. But still anything to do with browsing, mailing, RSS, File Mangement or administration I always do on Gnome.

p.s. That would be personal preference too, but that doesn't mean that OSX is not as good as Gnome for the whole world. It's just that I don't like it.

I stuck a 256 stick of 2100DDR from a Dell someone left in my house into my dual 867 and it works perfect.

"For the price of that i-mac G5 i could build myself a PC
which performances exeeds that of an G5"

Yes, we know, its been said millions of times now, but it still can't run OS X. (hehe)

IMHO, "Computer Experience" is simply more than the sum of its parts, in that regard, I view computers as more than just memory and speed.

"Outperforms" isn't always better than "More Convenient".

For Example: my digital camera "Just Works TM" with iPhoto. No driver needed and iPhoto came bundled with the cmputer. On a PC, you need to get some third party photo app (one might have been presintalled, granted) and install the drivers for the camera. From that perspective, my computing experience with regards to my digital camera "exceeded performance" on a PC.

i like the design of the "real" G5 but since design adds nothing to performance and hardware efficiency.

Nope but it does add to the experience and usability. This isn't only a consideration for Apple's though. For example my Acer TravelMate is fairly weak (800Mhz PIIIm, 256 RAM, 20 GB, 8 Mb video card, 12" screen) and for the same money I paid for it I could gotten a full-powered gaming laptop. Why didn't I? Because being a TabletPC provided a better experience.

Now how to justify a Mac? Simple. Will the difference in cost be worth the benefit to her? If she just wants one to be trendy then probably not. If she is a graphic artist that doesn't know much about computers then yes.

I gotta agree with Rain. 1 GHz and 256 MB of RAM should be enough to just surf the web. Right after a cold boot, OSX doesn't use even half my current RAM. With one browser window opened my web browser (be it Safari/Firefox/Camino) still doesn't touch the page file.

Debman did you see my other post? I said I ran XCode (compiling) and iTunes and a few browser windows and everything was still snappy, except for when I'm viewing a "busy" website.


@Adapt
I stuck a 256 stick of 2100DDR from a Dell someone left in my house into my dual 867 and it works perfect.

Good for you, I'm glad to hear that, but I also hear of other unfortunate souls who couldn't do the same.

Anyone who praises OSX for its stability, and believes in the "It's a Mac, it just works" marketing phrase, should really just take a gander at the trouble-shooting forums for Macs. They have the same problems PC users have too. Only difference is PC users don't always have to wait a year and plunk down $130 to see if the next upgrade fixes the problem. :p ok that was a back handed joke I'm sorry.

or if she is a graphic artist that knows a lot about computers. or a musician, or a scientist, or a unix fan.. quite a few reason...

For the price of that i-mac G5 i could build myself a PC
which performances exeeds that of an G5,to be honest i like the design of the "real" G5 but since design adds nothing to performance and hardware efficiency.

And as I said in the same post: it comes down to priorities, which by their very nature are different for every individual. If you want the most processing power per buck -> PC. If you want a good OS -> Mac. If design is of at least passing importance, it's a toss-up, depending on your taste. And you can probably think of a couple other criterias yourself.

In other words: Once you look beyond the cheap low-end systems, the choice between Mac or PC is not a no-brainer.

It's not a bad idea if you are paranoid and need the web services or a personal vpn. Being able to run my personal svn repository beats worrying about USB keys or backpack hard drives..

If money didn't count i would buy a G5 true,don't know
what i would install, maybe gentoo or debian for ppc,i have never touched Mac OsX so perhaps it's very nice as well who know's. :-)

An eMac only cost $799 retail (cheaper if you are a college student or work for an educational institution). So how does going from $500 to $800 considered megabucks that is only 60% higher cost, and you get a lot with it.
Why is it everytime people say Mac's are too expensive they always point to the most expensive one and then compare it to the least expensive offerings from other vendors?

perhaps 'cause all they look at is the cpu megahertz numbers?

I can't believe you people complaining about how expensive Macs are. Stop it already.

If you really figure it out, the price is either very compatible or even cheaper sometimes. All you guys are thinking are the "high end" Macs.

Listen, even the lowely cheap eMacs are waaay more than anyone needs to for any internet, email and office stuff. New eMacs start at $799. Excuse me?

And it comes with most everything you need.

Stop it already.

Plus, you will be free from spyware/adware/virus. And think about all the money. headache and time (or your friend's time) you will be saving because Macs hardly ever need and maintenance or trips to doctors.

.

You are a weird individual.

I have five Macs in my house (thats still being used). Apple has always found ways to squeeze money out of me since I had them. Fixing two laptops cost a fortune, but I loved the OSX experience.

I was an Emagic Logic user for about 11 years and I saw apple buy them out. I upgraded Logic from 5.5 to 6.4.2. An apple rep told me to go ahead and upgrade. One week later they release 7.0, and REFUSED to honor me with an incremental upgrade price. They have absolutely no regard for good customers.

I will never a buy another apple product again. Been there, done that.

Be careful if you buy their products....

This is a fair and balanced article, and I have little to complain about. Anand is wrong about a few things, and points out a few problems that, in fact, have easy solutions (ex: he says you can't navigate a "save sheet" with keyboard shortcuts; though you can, of course). but all in all, it seems thorough and thoughtful.

Another small point. This review has just been published, but it's based on Anand's experiences back in March, or 8 months ago. He does mention this point at the beginning, but I don't think he should be moaning about this being a $3,000 machine. It's not, it's a $2500 machine. That's a small but important point.

He does mention that OS X can be slow in a few mundane areas, and points to scrolling as one concrete example. But if memory serves - and I know you will all correct me if I'm wrong - isn't this by design? Does the Mac OS slow scrolling so you can actually see the pages (in Word, for example) that you're scrolling through.

As well, he points out correctly that this machine is fast, fast, fast when it comes to multitasking, a point that more Mac reviewers should be at pains to point out.

But for me, the real surprise is that he likes the PowerMac and OS X as much as he does. Didn't anyone here have the same thought?

I mean he talks about using Microsoft Word and Excel, and Macromedia Dreamweaver extensively, and in my opinion, these are the three slowest Mac applications I have ever seen... And they're the apps that crash most often (for me). (In fairness, Anand also uses Photoshop a lot).

That Anand spent his time surrounded by mediocre code, and still enjoyed himself, almost blows me away. Imagine how glowing this review would be if he used the iLife apps, the various incarnations of Final Cut, DVD Studio Pro, the Logic family, or Motion.

He missed out on the best parts!

There is a 15 days return policy.. In all Apple Store products..

I'm a mac user and that will not likely change.

HOWEVER, while the internals of an $800 emac are just fine for me, the monitor is not. It's too small and no where near as crisp as my older, bigger mitsubishi.

I'd sure love to see apple make a cheap, headless tower or desktop machine.

An emac or imac without the monitor component would make me just thrilled.

Those g5 towers are really nice, but I don't need nearly that horsepower, and it seems kind of silly to be forced to spend 1800 bucks just to use a monitor that I already have.

[i]Listen, even the lowely cheap eMacs are waaay more than anyone needs to for any internet, email and office stuff. New eMacs start at $799. Excuse me? [i/]

I only know the i-mac G5, they cost here in Europe about 1700 .- euro.

So how does going from $500 to $800 considered megabucks that is only 60% higher cost, and you get a lot with it.

Well going from $500 to $800 is a %62.5 exact increase in costs.

There is a 15 days return policy.. In all Apple Store products..

Only if you buy the product @ the apple store...
The apple rep told me SPECIFICALLY to buy the upgrade @ Sam Ash. Emagic was honorable regardless of where you purchased or upgraded your product.

Apple is getting ready to screw loyal customers to make wall street happy.

I just built a new PC - nice black HTPC case (Antec Overture), Athlon XP-M 2500+ running at 2.2GHz, 512MB RAM, GeForce4 MX440 (OK, that part sucks, I'm holding out for the 6600GT, which will add maybe $200-250 for much higher quality gfx than a Mac - I could get a 9600 card for $100 or so, I think, currently), onboard SoundStorm (i.e., very good quality for onboard) audio, Seagate 160G SATA hard drive, Lite-On DVD+-RW drive and very quiet cooling system consisting of a Thermalright ALX-800 heatsink with a Vantec Stealth 80mm case fan for a grand total of CAN$820. No monitor, as it's an HTPC, but I could add a very good quality 19" CRT for CAN$200 (AOC 9KLR) or a decent 17" LCD screen for maybe $500. That's a big, big price difference. I don't expect I'll spend much on upgrades either - that 6600GT gfx card when it's out, so I can play Doom3, and probably another 512MB of RAM sometime, and that will be it for several years.

"For Example: my digital camera "Just Works TM" with iPhoto. No driver needed and iPhoto came bundled with the cmputer. On a PC, you need to get some third party photo app (one might have been presintalled, granted) and install the drivers for the camera. From that perspective, my computing experience with regards to my digital camera "exceeded performance" on a PC."

not actually true, under Windows *or* Linux, for any camera that identifies itself as a mass storage device (i.e., most of them these days). Both Windows XP and recent versions of consumer-oriented Linux distros (SuSE, Mandrake, Fedora) will detect the camera and stick it on the desktop. Some Linux distros will also take a stab at non-mass-storage devices, using gphoto.

"I just built a new PC - nice black HTPC case (Antec Overture), Athlon XP-M 2500+ running at 2.2GHz, 512MB RAM, GeForce4 MX440 (OK, that part sucks, I'm holding out for the 6600GT, which will add maybe $200-250 for much higher quality gfx than a Mac - I could get a 9600 card for $100 or so, I think, currently), onboard SoundStorm (i.e., very good quality for onboard) audio, Seagate 160G SATA hard drive, Lite-On DVD+-RW drive and very quiet cooling system consisting of a Thermalright ALX-800 heatsink with a Vantec Stealth 80mm case fan for a grand total of CAN$820. No monitor, as it's an HTPC, but I could add a very good quality 19" CRT for CAN$200 (AOC 9KLR) or a decent 17" LCD screen for maybe $500. That's a big, big price difference. I don't expect I'll spend much on upgrades either - that 6600GT gfx card when it's out, so I can play Doom3, and probably another 512MB of RAM sometime, and that will be it for several years."
Thanks for proving the point that has been put out there time and time again. You can mish mash together this part and that part and come with something that may , or may not work nicely with windows/and or linux. I've built a few of them, and she's hit or miss, as far as I'm concerned. Mostly works, but check out /var error messages after you run Linux for a few reboots. Not all north/south bridge's are equal, nor agp ports, ect.
So you add 512mb ram, and the nice 17" lcd for 500, and you end up with a machine that is 820+140 for ram=960 . 960+500for lcd=1460. oh then 1460+250 for better vid card=1710cnd. uh , that's pretty close to 1750 for the 1.6 g5 17" imac. and 1,999 for a 17" 1.8 g5. And if you think your 2.2 mhz amd is faster... you'd be mistaken. I run the xp 2400+ with 512mb ram. It's a dog compared to the 1.6 g5 i had. I can't wait for the new imac g5, ditching all the cables and clutter on my desktop. And to those folks who think style doesn't matter, what kind of car do you drive, pants you wear, haircut, color???? It matters to most folks i know

yeah, but your nice black 900 dollar machine can only run windows.

Completely useless if you hate windows and love OS X.

I know I'm not the only one, but I'd rather pay the Apple "hardware tax" to be able to run OS X.

And that wouldn't change, even if windows were free.

I've never been a fan of Windows, and although XP is nice and stable it doesn't do it for me. For the last few (say 9 or 10) years I've been using Linux/BSD on x86 and although in the late 90's with companies like Loki I thought Linux might really take off as a desktop OS it didn't really happen. Late last year I purchased an iBook G4 and have to say I wasn't too impressed, about a month later I wasn't using the Linux box anymore. OS X takes a little getting used to, but once you have it's an amazing thing.

I don't buy in to the Macs are expensive thing either. My current desktop machine is a Power Mac G5 Dual 1.8 GHz, 2GB RAM, 256MB Radeon 9800 XT, 160 GB SATA HDD, Bluetooth, 20" AL Apple Cinema Display. While I agree it costs a lot of money, I see it as worth the money. Yeah I could buy a PC for $1000 but does it really compare? You can throw specs at me all day, but like they say "But does it run OS X?".

I have no problem with gaming on my hardware, but then the amount of games on OS X is amazing when you come from a Linux background .

At work I deal with a lot of XP/Windows 2000/2003 Server boxes and I have to say I don't buy the XP is faster argument at all, the P4 3GHz + boxes at work don't compete at all with my G5, the boxes I'd compare it mostly too would be the Dual Xeon 3.06 GHz boxes I work with constantly, but once again they don't run OS X either.

I'm a UNIX junkie and IMHO Mac OS X is the best desktop UNIX out there, in fact I'll go as far as to say it is the best desktop OS out there.

Feel free to flame me, but it's just an opinion and we all know what they say about opinions.

Thanks for the price point!

Not news from the western front.
This is boring me...

I have used Macs since 1984 and absolutely think they have always had the best OS out there...especially OSX. Nothing else comes close to the easy interface and seemless configuration. The hardware is beautiful. Everyone has spent millions (and done it through often questionable and even illegal methods) trying to copy Apple and they have only made a bunch of half baked frankenstein type boxes with clunky GUI's. I have used Windows since 3.1 and Linux for some years...and I really Linux...but none of these other offerings can touch the Mac. Long live to Mac!

You hit the nail on the head! OS X IMHO as well is hands down the best Desktop on the market, and anyone who has used it with an open mind for more than 5 minutes would indeed find that to be true. I also agree that the only thing I found upsetting about the article is that it didn't touch on some of the most powerful iApps that come for FREE with OS X. They are simply unmatched on any other OS period.

We haven't even gone into the UNIX underpinnings and the loads of quality free software available to OS X users either. The G5's are work horses as well, seriously powerful machines! I just feel like there are still many many things to get into with OS X, applescript is one tiny powerful nugget, and the free included DVD software kills anything on the windows side that you have to pay for. I feel that one thing many OS X power user must truly appreciate is the fact that he OWNS his machine. Any *nix geek out there knows that he is ROOT of his box, yet it's very hard for any windows user to say with confidence that they too have total control of their machine. Painful to admit, yes, but true. I manage several hundred windows boxen, and personally do not feel in total control of anything but my Macs! As far as customer support goes I have also never been treated better by a company than I have by Apple, my first powerMac was a 733mhz G4 and the day that it arrived it worked perfectly, however the hard drive sounded funny to me, after no more than 10minutes on the phone I was assured that a new Hard Disk would arrive soon. The very next morning there it was on my door step, complete with instructions that even a child could follow to replace it. Sending the old one back was a dream as well, simply placed old HD in the new box and peel away one label and it set it on the door step. I've never been more pleased with a "total computing experience" I'd pay anything.

as long as apple doesnt make an atx-board they are way too expensive for me.
why should i throw away what i already have?
and as long as there is no real os for it it's useless to buy one (linux, osx and apple-software in general are just not written for me).
maybe 500mhz and 192mb ram are not enough to play mp3s with itunes, but they are enough to watch mp4s while browsing with 4*ie...

If you're happy using a computer with very limited upgradability and a built in monitor then I'd agree that the eMac is competitive with PCs. Personally I find those limitations unacceptable, I want a computer I can upgrade and use with a dual headed display.

My current PC cost around $800, including a 19" monitor and much better graphics card than a 32Mb ATI Radeon 9200. I've added two extra internal hard disks and a SCSI card so that I can use an external SCSI hard disk as a backup device. I've connected a space 17" monitor as a secondary display and I can upgrade the CPU and graphics card at a later date. I like Mac OS X, but there's no way I'd be willing to trade my PC for an equally priced Mac. The only Mac I'd be happy with is a is a tower case system, but they're much more expensive.

"yeah, but your nice black 900 dollar machine can only run windows"
Heard of Linux? Or *BSD, which is what OSX is based on...
x86 != Windows. There are alternatives.

I salvaged one of the original orange iMacs from going to the dump after a user switched to the PC. He was running Mac OS 9 with 32MB of Ram.
I added one 256MB Ram stick and installed Mac OS X. First 10.2 then 10.3.
It is running great. I have Office X, Dreamweaver MX, Skype and couple of other applications installed. All run as fast as I can use the apps. The whole machine boots into a usuable state in half the time of my Windows XP 2Ghz computer. True, if you do a fresh install of XP it is incredibly snappy. But start installing updates and applications and uninstalling, in short just doing some work then the Window XP machine will boot slower overtime. Especially even after logging in you can't do anything until some background tasks finish starting.
I have to install and remove apps on a regular basis due to my job and the 'normal' users might not be doing that but my experience with XP has been that overtime it will get slower and slower and slower.
Spending quite some time disabling services, removing system tray apps, cleaning up registry and temp files. Many times I had to go to people because they complain how slow their computer is (some even bought a new computer before even trying to clean up or reinstall).

Mac OS X has a lot of room to improve as well, but fortunately Apple is improving the OS. Every point release has seen significant speed improvements which is very different to new versions of Windows. To usually run well enough you tend to have to upgrade your computer. If you get new hardware fully designed for XP it works pretty well. Installing it on older hardware can work out or can cause big issues.

I have for years resisted to buy a Mac due to the cost factor but finally broke down and bought a Powerbook. The one area where I think Apple is really skimmping is on the memory and graphic cards side.
The 'lower' end models should come with 512MB, the 'middle' range with 1GB and the higher end ones with 2GB. The same should be applied for the graphic cards. Otherwise you get a lot for the money. Great hardware/design and actual useful software.
To the person that build his own PC I didn't see any mentioning of Software cost such as the Operating System and Applications to just match all the programs you get with the Mac (unless he was planning to use Linux but I didn't see that mention either).

Overall this was a refreshing article that showed once again that every operating system and computer architecture has its place and use and that before buying a new computer each of them deserve the attention to find out which one would do your work the best. If the application develeoper would provide versions for more OS's it would be much easier for many people as the one killer app you are using might only be available on one platform. So keep your mind open and see if there is another app on the other platform that could do the job as well.

most of the build your own machines have focused on desktops/workstations. There is no doubt that you can build (non mac e.g windows, linux, freebsd) a much cheaper high end workstation or a desktop. However, what about comparing laptops?

The largest growing segment within the computer industry is laptops. Are window laptops much cheaper than mac laptops? Can you build a much cheaper windows laptop than buy a mac laptop?

parv

I am from India and I have noticed this undying loyalty of Indians towards Intel or Intel like processors and Microsoft Windows. The author in my opinion is biased, how many 64 bit powerpc macines are there in the market that run at 2.5 ghz with front end bus speed being 1.25 ghz, also something that the author should know PowerMac G5 has a dual channel RAM that maximes the throughput from the processor to the RAM. PowerMac G5 is the best machine for now money can buy and also games normally are written for the PC's and then ported to mac, else how can an xbox having 733 mhz PIII and a real old graphics card deliver more fps than G5's with the latest graphics cards. Tell me one game devevloper that re-wrote the whole game for the mac platform, none of the games available are optimized for the mac it's always been a choice between bad or worse.

Mac OSX was belittled in the article when the author termed the multi-tasking capabilty if OSX similar to that of WindowsXP, come on man. What's with being Indian and Pro-Microsoft, pro x86 platform.

...at work I develop on XP Pro. At home (and I do tunnel into work from home) I use Mac OS X on my G4 dual and ubuntu linux on my dual Athlon MP machine.

I think the article was decent. OS X definitely has some issues that still need ironing out... but with each release of OS X Apple DOES eliminate some major issue and each release has gotten faster (imagine OS X 10.0! - Sloooow). But, I can tunnel into work, use Office, mount my work drives, etc. all on my Mac (and actually on my linux machine too).

My Mac also serves up several web sites (family, and my wife's business). It's a nice machine and Apple put it together nicely.

re:

"my XP machine drags and gurgles and craps itself when I have 15 windows open and try to get anything done.

OS X does not do that to me."

I hear ya! I get pretty frustrated at work sometimes when I am compiling/running/debugging code and the system bogs down and suddenly you click on a window and you can count to 10 waiting for it to get focus and paint. But I also understand that I am running Oracle Application Server on it, which eats 800 MB of my 1 GB of ram all on its own, leaving a pittance for Windows and Outlook, etc.

Mike

He didn't mention what is probably one of OS X's nicest features - at least for laptop owners - "Network Locations".

OS X makes it trivial to move between numerous network configurations by allowing a complete network configuration switch just by picking an option from the Apple menu. If you've got a laptop and often move between different locations, it's freakin' fantastic.

I can see how someone mainly using Desktops probably wouldn't even see it, but it's one of OS X's best features.

Interesting article, but very biaised.

Firstly, Windows has never been efficient with RAM. Hell I remember reading a Microsoft kbase article saying that more than 512mb RAM was not recommended as it could cause stability issues with the system (Windows 2000, XP will be the same). Microsoft Windows loves using hard drive cache instead of RAM - don't believe me have a look. No idea why, but it's one of the reasons why Windows is such a poor operating system design. Disk cache was for the days when RAM was mega expensive. These days it isn't, design an o/s Microsoft that uses RAM and not disk cache and you'll see performance improvements.

2. Windows servers more stable than Linux servers due to hardware requirements. Bullshit. Anandtech has been pro Windows for years, only recently it's started covering Linux and only then cos a number of members are using Linux so they think to jump on the bandwagon...

3. MS Office 2004 for Mac - yeah well...It is a Microsoft product after all. Internet Explorer for Mac has been a dog for years. Much worse than the Windows counterpart, rarely has Microsoft fixed bugs/security issues for the Mac platform. Why? Cos Microsoft doesn't really give a shit. AppleWorks is a competent Office environment that does everything you need and maintains good compatibility with office documents. It's stable as, and integrates well/looks good within the Mac OS X environment.

4. Games - hey don't blame the Mac system please. Let the developers get off their fat lazy asses and write software for the Mac platform. That's not Apples fault. Linux has the same problem, and it's purely because of the fact that Microsoft puts a LOT of pressure on application/games developers not to develop for anything else other than the Windows platform. I mean, if Microsoft says "if you develop for non Windows platforms we'll withhold API information", what would you do as a developer? You'd go the way of what will make you the most buck.

5. Hardware support - see point 4 above

6. Usability - Mac OS X is a lot more usable than either any Linux desktop environment or Windows environment. Period. That said I'm not a Mac user (I use a PC at home running Libranet Linux, KDE 3.3).

7. One button mouse/right click - puhlease! How hard is it to command click? Christ. Get over it Anand.

8. Safari - Internet Explorer is a tiny bit faster than Safari/Konqueror/FireFox etc, but not a huge deal. It's mainly due to the fact (and Anand kindly admits this) that most pages are explicitly written for Internet Explorer and nothing else. And the fact that most pages don't conform to w3c standards. Anyone who's done any basic html and bothered to not use crap like Frontpage will know this. I'm not expert web designer, but at least the pages that i've done conform to html-en transitional 4 thanks.

9. Forums - yeah right...well...has anyone bothered to read the EULA for the Anandtech forums? I took one look at it and declined. That says enough about that site.

Dave

"The author in my opinion is biased, how many 64 bit powerpc macines are there in the market that run at 2.5 ghz with front end bus speed being 1.25 ghz, also something that the author should know"
I thought it was quite an unbiased article actually. In response to your question - afaik there's one, the 2.5GHz Mac. What's your point?

"else how can an xbox having 733 mhz PIII and a real old graphics card deliver more fps than G5's with the latest graphics cards"
One day I'll see one of these mythical G5's with the latest graphics card - all the ones I see for sale have average cards. You can't compare to a console regardless though, the XBox will slaughter any general-purpose computer by the specs, because it's a dedicated platform.

Anyway, lay off the poor guy - it's a bit rough (I'll refrain from saying typical) to assume he's biased against the platform just because he came out with some negative points. And the fact that he's Indian really has nothing to do with anything.

Easy. Buy a secondhand machine.

I got a Powermac G4 450 MhZ AGP, added memory to 1GB and OS X, added an extra hard disk and this has cost me much less than buying new. In fact it has cost me equivalent of 500 UK Pounds.

I find the machine fine, as fast as my old PC was, and good enough to become my only machine.

Windows isn't drastically inefficient with RAM - it and OSX both like their RAM, as does Linux. I'll grant you that OSX probably has better memory management, but that's not hard - Windows really is abominable with swapping, as you said. But that's not quite the same as the amount of RAM you need.
I've never heard of that >512MB issue - I did hear of a similar one with >256MB and 9x, but I highly doubt having a GB of RAM is an issue now.

2. True, you can't call Windows more stable than Linux, especially for servers where Linux has major advantages, ie. being able to run without a GUI.

3. Yeah okay, but let's face it: People are more than likely going to have to deal with Office docs, and I highly doubt AppleWorks handles them perfectly. From a Windows users perspective, this is an important point.

4. I don't really think it matters to the users *why* there aren't any games, just that there aren't. We know why this is, but from a customer's perspective they don't care what MS do with their API, only that they can't play most games.

5. See 4, again :-)

6. I disagree. This is a personal choice thing - I can list all sorts of things I don't like about it. Let's leave it there.

7. I always find this one amusing... what makes Mac users like to pretend they only need one button? The very fact that you have to "command-click" indicates a need for a right button. I like 5 and a scroll wheel, at least - you can't say you can get that sort of functionality with the same ease from only one button.

8. Anand are being a bit rougher on the browser than they have to be I think. I prefer Firefox, but Safari is pretty good - IE's a total mess, even if it is faster. Hands down win for OSX on that point I'd say.

Point 6 is really down to personal preference I agree. Points 4 & 5 I also agree with, but it's frustrating as hell. I mean counterstrike/doom 3 on Linux outperform their Windows counterparts - and that's with Nvidia drivers for Linux not being quite as good as their Windows counterparts. Oh and counterstrike is via wine, which will slow things down a bit imho. Imagine if it ran natively!

Windows from a technical point of view is not a fantastic gaming environment, it's performance is horrid when compared to other operating systems. Linux, OS X, the BSDs are all much better designed/efficient systems. Kudos to Microsoft for realising that computers were going to explode into popular usage, and that games were the real way to take advantage of this and build a monopoly. Whilst I disagree with Microsofts morals, from a business point of view it was smart. Very smart.

Point 7 - I used a Mac for 9 months and it took me all of a day to get used to it. In fact I never even really noticed it being a negative. It was quick and a natural behaviour. Oh and i'd never used a Mac before, prior to starting working for Apple Australia. I'd used Windows, Linux, some BSD (freebsd)...in the words of Master Yoda "you must unlearn".

Point 8. I prefer konqueror in Linux. It's faster than ephiphany (which looks simply dreadful), firefox, opera, netscape, mozilla. It renders 95% of pages without issues. Of the 5% that it doesn't, it's either because the website designer only designed for Windows, it's non-conforming w3c code, or it's a design issue with konqueror (very small % imho). And Safari uses khtml I might add, so it's very similar. Interestingly, some sites that don't work with Konqueror work fine with Safari. Makes me really wonder if Apple honestly gave back all of the improvements to the KDE community that it made to the khtml engine.

Apples prices aren't that bad. You get a carefully put together system, runs well, excellent operating system and it looks a million dollars. A dual Opteron 64 bit system wouldn't be that much cheaper either I might add...i'll go figure it out and do the sums and post...

Dave

Windows from a technical point of view is not a fantastic gaming environment, it's performance is horrid when compared to other operating systems.

And you base this on...?

I used a Mac for 9 months and it took me all of a day to get used to it. In fact I never even really noticed it being a negative.

I expect there's at least one area that took you more than a day to get used to - navigating around text (ie: the behaviour of Home/End/PageUp/PageDn/arrows/etc.

Apples prices aren't that bad. You get a carefully put together system, runs well, excellent operating system and it looks a million dollars. A dual Opteron 64 bit system wouldn't be that much cheaper either I might add...i'll go figure it out and do the sums and post...

Apple's prices are reasonable at the absolute top end of their product line and for their laptops (particularly the iBooks). Everything else they sell is well and truly into "expensive for what you get" territory.

Firstly, Windows has never been efficient with RAM. Hell I remember reading a Microsoft kbase article saying that more than 512mb RAM was not recommended as it could cause stability issues with the system (Windows 2000, XP will be the same).

You remember incorrectly.

Microsoft Windows loves using hard drive cache instead of RAM - don't believe me have a look. No idea why, but it's one of the reasons why Windows is such a poor operating system design. Disk cache was for the days when RAM was mega expensive. These days it isn't, design an o/s Microsoft that uses RAM and not disk cache and you'll see performance improvements.

The correct term is "virtual memory" (or "swap"). Given you don't even know that (or why it's still relevant, even with lots of real RAM), I'm not sure why you think you're qualified to comment on operating system design.

What do I base my comment on? Well if a game *designed* to run on Microsoft Windows, being run on another system (Linux) via Wine (I know it's not an emulator but it's still a layer that the system has to go thru and will affect performance) can outperform the same game being played in its native Windows environment, I think that says a LOT about Windows gaming. And I might add that the vast majority of games that are accessible to Linux via Wine/Cedega etc outperform their Windows counterparts. You do the maths.

Point 7 - read my *original* post please. I was referring to the one button mouse. Of course the rest of the Mac OS X system took me longer to get used to. That said, it was easier to get used to OS X than Mac OS 9 (a truly crap system imho).

Apple is more expensive than the PC counterpart, yes. It always has been. It's a gripe that I do have with Apple, but they still make nice systems, and they are still reasonable value for money. Apples hardware prices have dropped a lot over the past 5 years, I suspect mainly cos of the fact that they've had an increase in sales. The commodity rules will always mean that as a manufacturer, Apple doesn't have the same buying power as HP, Dell, Compaq etc and therefore will not get the same price. That said, most of the PC vendors have very poorly put together systems (buildwise). Dell uses the cheapest, nastiest parts available that it can find. At least with Apple you do get quality parts. No cheap shit.

Onto prices...the equivalent to a Dual G5 (well the closest in the PC world) would be an Opteron 246 2ghz. This is a street price...most people pay this...

http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10777&RequestTimeout=...

$787. Oh, you need 2 of them. That's nearly $1600 there alone. Add a good tower (say, a Lian Li, pc60usb, that's approximately $250 or so). We're now up to nearly $1900. Add the motherboard.

http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=11234&RequestTimeout=...

$856...doesn't take pc3200 400 mhz ram for starters...stuck with pc2700 333 mhz ram...mmm not good ;-) that's less than the PowerMac G5 ram for starters in terms of features.

Our price is now up to nearly $2700 or so.

Time for RAM - we need registered ECC RAM - say a gb...

http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10031&RequestTimeout=...

That's another $508...grand total? $3200. Yup. Now add a video card (ATI 9600) - $187:

http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10773&RequestTimeout=...

we're now up to $3400...not looking good eh? Add a soundcard (<$100 or so)...a cool $3500. Oh and we haven't even looked at the monitor yet (I know the PowerMac G5 doesn't come with a monitor...that's why I mentioned it to be fair). Oh and this is retail prices. You still have to put it together. Or you can buy this system, add another $250 markup price to it for being pre-built. We're now up to around $3900.

Oh and add Windows XP - that's another $350 or so for a full edition. $4250. Oh and it doesn't run 64 bit...oh my oh my...sure you can download the 64 bit beta, but it's a beta, not a production version. Oh and it's been beta for quite some time. A bit of a worry eh?

I think i've proved my point...

Dave

Windows from a technical point of view is not a fantastic gaming environment, it's performance is horrid when compared to other operating systems. Linux, OS X, the BSDs are all much better designed/efficient systems.

Riiiight, and I guess from a technical point of view, Betamax was better than for watching movies than VHS. So, what's your point?

"Usability - Mac OS X is a lot more usable than either any Linux desktop environment or Windows environment. Period. That said I'm not a Mac user (I use a PC at home running Libranet Linux, KDE 3.3)."

It depends for a great deal on skills of the user.What's usable anyway?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;253912

That's for Windows 98, my mistake there, doesn't apply to Windows 2000/XP systems. Been a while since I read that kbase article ;-)

The correct term can be virtual memory, swap (they're windows names for it btw). Hard drive disk cache is a term used in Unix/Linux areas for the same thing. And yes I know the terms virtual memory, swap thanks, doesn't mean I have to use them.

I'll quote the hdparm man page from a Linux system (man hdparm | grep cache):

"melkor@melkor:~$ man hdparm | grep cache
Reformatting hdparm(8), please wait...
-f Sync and flush the buffer cache for the device on exit. This
-T Perform timings of cache reads for benchmark and comparison pur-
Linux buffer cache without disk access. This measurement is
cache, and memory of the system under test. If the -t flag is
cache to the disk without any prior caching of data. This mea-
head. To ensure accurate measurments, the buffer cache is
"

Sorry about the formatting...As to swap being still needed, that's again bullshit, and shows that you don't really know what you're talking about. If you have enough RAM, swap is not needed. It's still a good idea to use it, but you don't need it. Especially on a Unix or Linux system. Windows you need it, because Windows does NOT efficiently use RAM. That was my entire point.

As to not being qualified to comment on operating system design, good comment. I'm not a kernel hacker, but i've used a few operating systems in my time (how many have you used?). That does give me a "feel" for a operating system and how it works. I've never once heard my hard drive thrash under Linux. Not in all the years i've been using it. True, i've usually had systems with sufficient RAM (one of my earlier systems was a p2 400, it had only been on the Australian market for 2 weeks or so when I got it, so it was cutting edge. I was using 256mb of RAM, back when the average was 32mb, moving towards 64mb). Windows would still thrash on this system, Linux behaved.

Dave

the compaq is only about 8 months old. the powerbook is 3 years old.

[...]

the powerbook is a g4 800mhz machine with 256mb ram i believe. the compaq is a p4 2.6ghz machine with 256mb ram.

A 3 year old Powerbook will be one of the original 400Mhz TiBooks. Perhaps more importantly, it would have cost a fortune new (I remember they were $5000ish Australian, so probably ca. $2500 US) whereas that POS Compaq probably wouldn't even have cost half that.

Also, having owned a 667Mhz PB ~18 months ago, and currently owning a 1Ghz iBook, I'd be highly sceptical of anyone who would consider a 400Mhz PB "fast".

[quote]That said, most of the PC vendors have very poorly put together systems (buildwise). Dell uses the cheapest, nastiest parts available that it can find. At least with Apple you do get quality parts. No cheap shit.[/quote]

Between my dad and I, we've bought 5-6 Dells over the years and have never had much of a problem with any of them. I'm typing this on a Dell I bought last February .. runs like a dream and is quiet as a tomb. I suppose anybody who needs a computer with training wheels would consider Macs to be a godo value (there are a lot of good people out there who need a computer like this and I am not knocking any of them), but most of us who are PC-literate and have gotten comfortable enough with an x86-based OS to the point where it is now our bitch just couldn't be bothered to spend the extra $$. I mean, I haven't seen anything on the Mac that would make me more productive than I am now, and the 'it just works' argument just doesn't work on a power user - you'll have to do better than that.
I always laugh at Mac fanatics who talk about 'cheap PC hardware' .. I just retired a PC earlier this year after 14 years of service, and that's only because I didn't need it anymore.

[quote]Onto prices...the equivalent to a Dual G5 (well the closest in the PC world) would be an Opteron 246 2ghz. This is a street price...most people pay this... [/quote]

I dunno .. I've played with OSX (10.3) on a dual G5. It just didn't feel any faster than what I'm running now. Of course, iTunes was running on the system, which is probably why

Oh and add Windows XP - that's another $350 or so for a full edition.

Where the hell did you come up with that price? Find somebody who's got an old Win95 CD lying around and get WinXP Pro for $190.00 at Amazon.

Yes, in fact Betamax was a better system. Still is. It was poorly marketed, and the legal fighting about it made sure it died. Pity, it was inherently better than vhs in nearly every aspect.

Jophn, yep, and I said that in my reply to Archangel. Usability is very subjective. That said, OS X is more stable than Windows 2000/XP, and that's a big part of usability in my eyes. If it's unstable then you can't use it, yes? That means usability goes out the window. I know Windows 2000/XP are a LOT better than their Win9x brethren, and I also admit that they're not totally crap systems. They are usable, and mostly reliable.

Security is a huge issue with Windows (not that OS X appears to be any more secure) - and that security issue comes down to the way applications talk to the Windows kernel via system calls and APIs. Microsoft wanted to tie applications to the kernel to encourage development, unfortunately these ties between kernel/app introduce a lot of security issues. Even now, SP2 is still a joke - it's a PR attempt by Microsoft to make it look like it's tightening security. If Microsoft was serious about security it would force users to have a user account with normal permissions for starters. The Unix method has been going for a lot longer than Windows, and is a time proven way of having a secure system. True, no system is perfect, or totally reliable, or bug free, or totally secure. Microsoft does not want to encourage users to have strong user accounts etc, because that would make their system more difficult to use, and quite frankly most of the dumbasses that use it would be lost.

Dave

http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=7741&RequestTimeout=1...

$247. I was a hundred bucks out, gimme a break. And if memory serves me correct - win95 is *not* one of the operating systems that allow you to buy the upgrade version of Windows XP. It was Win NT 4, Win ME (for XP Home) or Windows 2000 if memory serves me correct. Your average person isn't going to fart ass around hunting on ebay etc for a used CD disk just so they can save a few bucks on an upgrade...

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/upgrading/matrix.mspx

there ya go!

Dave

I had some w2k cd laying around so i bought the academic version of windows xp-professional for $80.

Quote: "A 3 year old Powerbook will be one of the original 400Mhz TiBooks. Perhaps more importantly, it would have cost a fortune new (I remember they were $5000ish Australian, so probably ca. $2500 US) whereas that POS Compaq probably wouldn't even have cost half that."

I agree with you. Most probably a 600mhz. It's been 13 months or so since I left Apple and they were just introducing the PowerBook 1.25ghz machines then...the 1ghz machines had been around for 5 or so months. That makes 18 months or so ago for the 1ghz...the 800mhz would have been six months prior to that i'd suspect, so we're looking at 2 years for that...most probably a 400-600mhz machine.

That said, Apple' CPUs have always been *faster* than their Intel counterparts on a mhz per mhz basis. Comes down to the design of the CPU. I'd rate a 800mhz G4 about equivalent to a p4 1.6 or so in all honesty. Some really intensive stuff will favour the p4 for sure (image editing etc).

All of that said, I still wouldn't call a 400mhz G4 PowerBook super 'fast' when compared to todays beasts. That said, I noticed a big improvement when going from the p2 400 to the Athlon 1ghz machine. Going from that to an Athlon 3000+ XP CPU has elicited a much smaller and noticeable performance increase. Generally usage here. Games wise, performance is up, but these days I rarely game - I just don't have the spare time or money to buy the latest games :-(

The other thing i'll point out - restoring your Apple system using the supplied Apple disks is a breeze. To be fair, i'm comparing them to OEM/retail versions of Windows XP. Manufacturers restore disks would be much better in this respect I totally agree!

Dave

Quote: "I had some w2k cd laying around so i bought the academic version of windows xp-professional for $80."

yeah, but my point was that not everyone has a spare disk lying around, and if they do, it might not qualify for an upgrade. My dad bought a PC 18 months ago and got Windows XP - he had to buy full retail. No upgrade there, and there are a lot of new users to computers in the past 2 or so years that will be in the same boat. And not everyone qualifies for a academic version either. I'm using an average example, brand new, retail disk of Windows XP.

I still consider Windows XP outrageous in pricing. You get the operating system, a media player, a messening system, simple text editor and that's about it. You want a graphics editor? Go and buy it. You want to do some coding? Go and buy a compiler. You want to do some dvd editing/composing? Go and buy it. You want an office suite? Go and buy it (I know OpenOffice is there, but your average PC user has never heard of it and doesn't know what it's about and quite frankly doesn't care). You want to do webdesign? Go and buy the software. It all adds up. BSD & Linux give me the vast majority of this type of software - at no or little financial cost. Sure, not all of it works very well, there are some dud applications out there, but they usually die a quick death. Successful OSS/FSF/GNU applications usually are very good and very reliable and very powerful.

Oh...you want to run a server? Sure, why not. You need a server version of Windows for that m'lad. Server 2003 single license is around $1200...

http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10125&RequestTimeout=...

I'm going to pay that much for an insecure system? I don't think so. Oh and i'm limited to 5 licenses. No thanks. I can download Debian and configure a mailserver, webserver, print server etc etc and very little cost, it runs, runs well, is secure and efficient.

Dave

PS I've used the same online retailer purely because I knew they'd have the items i'd be quoting prices on etc. You can get cheaper prices out there, by how much is the million dollar question...

Onto prices...the equivalent to a Dual G5 (well the closest in the PC world) would be an Opteron 246 2ghz. This is a street price...most people pay this...

[URL]http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10777&Request...[/URL]

$787. Oh, you need 2 of them. That's nearly $1600 there alone. Add a good tower (say, a Lian Li, pc60usb, that's approximately $250 or so). We're now up to nearly $1900. Add the motherboard."

Well here in Europe an Opteron 246 costs about EUR 339,00.
Even is the euro:dollar rate would do 1:2 this would still
be $678.With a lian Li this comes to the grand total of $1600.A Tyan Tiger K8W S2875ANRF motherboard costs about $250 + DDR400, ECC, 2x512MB, KRX3200K2/1G (EUR 429,00) ,256 MB GDDR3 GeForce FX6800 Ultra AGP 8x (EUR 599,00),2x SATA Deskstar 7K250 (80 GB) (EUR 68 each),Plextor SATA PX-712SA
DVD±R/±RW, CD-R/-RW (EUR179),makes the grand total of:
EUR2279,- A comparable G5 (2.0 Ghz) tower starts at that prize and a monitor is allso an option.

[QUOTE]Well here in Europe an Opteron 246 costs about EUR 339,00."[/QUOTE]

Sry i mentioned the Opteron being EUR339 here in Europe,it
actually is EUR549 which makes the mentioned grand total
EUR2699,-

How do I justify going from a 500.00 system to megabucks? For the sake of OS X? Not a chance.

Are you now claiming that US$799 for an Apple eMac as too much? are you then going to claim that an eMac isn't enough "expandibility" for your daughter?

Geeze, and to think I was tight! <mumbles like old fart, remembering the good old days when people used to save a little bit each week so they could afford something>

I've been happier with Windows XP than any previous Microsoft OS (except maybe the good ol' DOS days)

Ah, ok! The guy liked MS-DOS! The article is in serious trouble from there on. Don't get me wrong, I was a full-time DOS power user for close to 10 yrs since the late 1980s and it was cool! So no-nonsense, so bare-metal, so simple! Yet every time I even looked at some *NIX station, or any of those, you-know-which home or personal computers with Motorola inside I said to myself: man do DOS and PeeCees suck! Haven't lost that feeling even today with much more capable, advanced and truly much *better* Redmond OS's. I don't know why! I can't qulify it. It is just like the article author said... a "review of experience".

Go and buy the software. It all adds up. BSD & Linux give me the vast majority of this type of software - at no or little financial cost. Sure, not all of it works very well, there are some dud applications out there, but they usually die a quick death. Successful OSS/FSF/GNU applications usually are very good and very reliable and very powerful."

This amongst other reasons made me switch to Linux.
As i don't like wine and friends ( the software),and its
not that difficult to get a playstation bios emulator,no
need to say that ther're a lot of game titles for the play
station.

Oh...you want to run a server? Sure, why not. You need a server version of Windows for that m'lad. Server 2003 single license is around $1200...

I don't know if their stackguard (compiler switch /GS)
is still broken.But if you would like to experiment with
setting up a server , it's very hard to get around Linux,
?.BSD.

"I'm going to pay that much for an insecure system? I don't think so. Oh and i'm limited to 5 licenses. No thanks. I can download Debian and configure a mailserver, webserver, print server etc etc and very little cost, it runs, runs well, is secure and efficient."

It's certainly not more secure out of the box , but way
better to control to the last bit.It is as secure as
you configure it.Besides that its waiting for the next
0day,as with every other OS.That is if you don't install
additional pro active security features.

I thought it was a good and fair article from the Windows perspective. It's always interesting to see what a thoughtful user of Windows will find in a Mac. Being a hard-core Mac user (and recovering Windows user), I no longer have an objective perspective on the two platforms.

There were a few comments there I think indicated either a lack of knowledge of Windows or, more likely, someone who still uses Windows XP like they used to use Windows 3.1 (or maybe 95). I also think he was rather harsh on running multiple tasks on Windows. I run dozens of applications (obviously with even more open windows) all day, every on my old dual P3 machine and it handles it exceptionally well.

What do I base my comment on? Well if a game *designed* to run on Microsoft Windows, being run on another system (Linux) via Wine (I know it's not an emulator but it's still a layer that the system has to go thru and will affect performance) can outperform the same game being played in its native Windows environment, I think that says a LOT about Windows gaming. And I might add that the vast majority of games that are accessible to Linux via Wine/Cedega etc outperform their Windows counterparts. You do the maths.

Sorry, I don't keep track of game benchmarks - what examples are you thinking of ? Do they take into account how long it takes to get everything working first ?

Incidentally, WINE shouldn't add much overhead at all, if any. Indeed, if the WINE developers have reimplemented a particular Win32 API more efficiently than Microsoft, it's quite possible for it to be faster.

Apple doesn't have the same buying power as HP, Dell, Compaq etc and therefore will not get the same price. That said, most of the PC vendors have very poorly put together systems (buildwise). Dell uses the cheapest, nastiest parts available that it can find. At least with Apple you do get quality parts. No cheap shit.

Bullshit. Indeed, I think you'll find Dell and Apple actually use the same Taiwanese manufacturer for their laptops, for example. Macs have the same OEM hard disks, RAM, Superdrives, etc in them as name-brand PCs.

One of my previous employers had a preferred supplier deal with Dell, so I've seen a *lot* of Dell computers - desktops, laptops and servers. Most of them are very solidly put together. Of course, the absolute bottom of the barrel dirt cheap machines aren't, but since Apple don't even have competitive products in that market segment, it's kind of hard to compare.

Add the motherboard. $856...doesn't take pc3200 400 mhz ram for starters...stuck with pc2700 333 mhz ram...mmm not good ;-)

I think you probably meant this one:

http://www.cougar.com.au/index.cfm?ID=33&PART=10402&RequestTimeout=...

Time for RAM - we need registered ECC RAM - say a gb...

Remembering that the G5 doesn't even *support* ECC RAM, of course...

Add a soundcard (<$100 or so)

The motherboard has onboard sound.

Oh and add Windows XP - that's another $350 or so for a full edition.

No need, buy OEM for about $250.

$4250

Well, according to the Apple store, a dual 2.5Ghz G5 with 1GB of RAM is about AU$5700, so there's still about $1300 worth of headroom there to add in a hard disk, Superdrive, etc. Although a fairer comparison is probably a dual 2Ghz with 1GB, which only clocks in at about $4750. Of course, since I already agreed the dual G5s are reasonably priced, I'm not entirely sure why you've used them as an example at all...

You should at least compare better:

A Dell Precision 470 with Dual 2.8Ghz Xeon-64s, 1GB of RAM, 160GB SATA drive, a 3 year warranty and a 16x Superdrive costs about $5050. Bump it up to dual 3.4Ghz and it's about $6250.

For reference, a dual 2Ghz G5 with 1GB of RAM, 160GB SATA drive, 1 year warranty and 8x Superdrive costs about $4750. Dual 2.5Ghz is about $5700.

So the Dell costs more, but gets you an optical drive twice as fast and 3x the warranty.

Oh and it doesn't run 64 bit...oh my oh my...sure you can download the 64 bit beta, but it's a beta, not a production version.

OS X doesn't "run 64 bit either". Not that it's particularly relevant in 99.9% of cases.

Oh and it's been beta for quite some time. A bit of a worry eh?

Most people consider long beta tests to be a *good* thing. You know, ironing out the bugs ?

I think i've proved my point...

Yes, you've proved you're an obnoxious tool. For starters, you reply to a post where I stated Apple's top end machines and laptops are the only areas where their prices aren't high by...comparing comparing one of those machines. You then proceed to try and artificially inflate the price you're comparing. You close by advocating 64 bit computing, despite its irrelevance to most present day computing tasks and the lack of such a functionality in OS X.

A few assorted points here...
The dual Opteron may be similar on paper, but one of the advantages of a PC is that you don't have to get an expensive dual-CPU setup to get decent power. That second CPU won't be getting so much use while you're playing any games, although it may be nice for a spot of multitasking.
It is nice to build an "equivalent" system to compare, but $4250 is huge money - I could put together a fast as system for half that. It wouldn't be *as* fast, but near as dammit in any practical sense.
And no, there's no XP 64-bit edition yet (there is 64 bit Linux though). Interestingly enough, there's no 64 bit OSX either - note that the current versions run on G4's as well, which are a 32-bit CPU - hence it can't be 64-bit, unless it installs different versions of everything for the G5's, which I somehow doubt.

Apple's CPUs generally have been a bit faster per Hz than an Intel one, but I would say that 800MHz G4 you mentioned would be eaten alive by a 1.6GHz P4. The difference has never been as much as Apple tried to make out.

I agree with what you say about Windows pricing - on a cost basis, you can't beat Linux - it's free. Server 2k3 is expensive yes, but OSX Server isn't cheap either, and comparing 2k3 to Debian is a little off topic really :-)

The one-button mouse thing - sorry, I won't give on this. You may have gotten used to a 1-button mouse quickly, but it wasn't efficient. How do you go forward or back a page in Safari? I use my thumb buttons in Firefox - but of course the mac mouse doesn't have those. It doesn't have the scroll wheel, so I can't use that either, nor a middle button to open a link in a new tab... efficiency has been killed dead.

"Are you now claiming that US$799 for an Apple eMac as too much?"
Yes. I would. Being as that's the cheapest on offer - I can get a cheap-ass PC for NZ$799, which is roughly half that. It'll be in all likelihood faster, I can happily run Linux on it if I don't like XP and get a refund on Windows.

That being said, I would never actually buy one.... but it's an example.

Oh, and Stalker: "If you love her, open your wallet." I seriously hope you were joking there...

The correct term can be virtual memory, swap (they're windows names for it btw).

"Swap" is a unix term. The equivalent "Windows" term is "pagefile". "Virtual memory" is a generic term.

Hard drive disk cache is a term used in Unix/Linux areas for the same thing.

No, it isn't. You appear to be deeply confused as to what you are talking about.

I'll quote the hdparm man page from a Linux system (man hdparm | grep cache):

hdparm has nothing to do with swap. It *does* have something to do with "hard disk cache", but not in the sense you were using the term previously. "Hard disk cache" has nothing to do with virtual memory, or "thrashing" - the symptom you were describing earlier.

As to swap being still needed, that's again bullshit, and shows that you don't really know what you're talking about. If you have enough RAM, swap is not needed.

Most every virtual memory system in mainstream use is designed and tuned with the assumption swap space will be available. They generally do not perform as well without the presence of swap space even if they don't actually swap anything out.

Windows you need it, because Windows does NOT efficiently use RAM.

By default, Windows' VM system is tuned to maximise the amount of free physical RAM (and hence the size of the disk cache). Because of this, it is fairly aggressive about paging out unused memory. So you can end up with a bit of an additional delay if you flick back to an application that hasn't had focus for some time.

Personally, I find that more usable than the near-universal sluggishness of OS X.

I'm not a kernel hacker, but i've used a few operating systems in my time (how many have you used?).

I could probably make up a list if you want.

That does give me a "feel" for a operating system and how it works. I've never once heard my hard drive thrash under Linux.

I find that exceptionally difficult to believe, assuming you're actually using comparable workloads and hardware configurations (which is an iffy assumption at best - usually what happens when people say Linux is "so much faster" they're doing something like comparing XFCE running a few xterms to Windows XP running a few Office apps and IE).

True, i've usually had systems with sufficient RAM (one of my earlier systems was a p2 400, it had only been on the Australian market for 2 weeks or so when I got it, so it was cutting edge. I was using 256mb of RAM, back when the average was 32mb, moving towards 64mb). Windows would still thrash on this system, Linux behaved.

What were the relevant workloads and specifications ? Given you're talking ca. 1997, it's highly unlikely you were using any remotely comparable applications or GUI under Linux. Not to mention you were probably comparing to Windows 95 and not NT.

That said, OS X is more stable than Windows 2000/XP, [...]

You say this as if it's some universal truth.

Security is a huge issue with Windows (not that OS X appears to be any more secure) [...]

OS X is no more secure by design. It does, however, benefit greatly from its lower marketshare.

[...] and that security issue comes down to the way applications talk to the Windows kernel via system calls and APIs. Microsoft wanted to tie applications to the kernel to encourage development, unfortunately these ties between kernel/app introduce a lot of security issues.

I really don't think you know what you're talking about.

It's kind of hard to say Windows apps are "tied to the kernel" when they run equally well on two *completely* different kernels (Windows 9x vs NT).

Even now, SP2 is still a joke - it's a PR attempt by Microsoft to make it look like it's tightening security.

And you base this on...? There's a limit to what *Microsoft* can do to "tighten security" when the vast bulk of security problems are caused by *users*.

Microsoft does not want to encourage users to have strong user accounts etc, because that would make their system more difficult to use, and quite frankly most of the dumbasses that use it would be lost.

I've been using NT from a regular user account for ~8 years without any major problems, although I'm far from a "typical user". However, OS X shows that it's possible to make regular user accounts usable when you don't care much about legacy support. Microsoft *do* care a great deal about legacy support (because inevitably when software breaks, Microsoft gets blamed), which is why users are still Administrators by default.

That said, Apple' CPUs have always been *faster* than their Intel counterparts on a mhz per mhz basis.

Compared to P4s, yes. Compared to (later model) P3s or Pentium-Ms ("Centrino"), not really. The G4s, in particular, are crippled by slow bus speeds.

Comes down to the design of the CPU. I'd rate a 800mhz G4 about equivalent to a p4 1.6 or so in all honesty. Some really intensive stuff will favour the p4 for sure (image editing etc).

That's pretty generous. I'd call a 800Mhz G4 a touch slower than a 1.4Ghz P4. Of course, the early P4s sucked, so the discepancy isn't as large as you move further up the line.

My dad bought a PC 18 months ago and got Windows XP - he had to buy full retail. No upgrade there, and there are a lot of new users to computers in the past 2 or so years that will be in the same boat.

All were eligible to buy an OEM copy of XP (basically it's available with any "major" piece of hardware - motherboard, CPU, hard disk, etc). OEM XP is about $250 AU. For the likes of Dell, it probably costs closer to $150.

I'm going to pay that much for an insecure system?

It's no less secure than any of the alternatives.

I can download Debian and configure a mailserver, webserver, print server etc etc and very little cost, it runs, runs well, is secure and efficient.

If your time is free. For example, even a modestly paid sysadmin like myself typically costs a company in the area of $55/hr. So $1200 is about half a working week. Taken over the 3 - 5 year lifecycle of a system using it, that's chicken feed.

Not forgetting of course that if you want to run something like Oracle, Debian isn't even an option.

I've used the same online retailer purely because I knew they'd have the items i'd be quoting prices on etc. You can get cheaper prices out there, by how much is the million dollar question...

No company of any size pays retail prices. If you're much over the 200 desktops mark, you're probably going to be eligible for a Select agreement and a minimum of 10% off retail price.

The Australian Dollar is worth around .58 Euro. ie 6/10...so recriprocal is 10/6 ie 5/3. Divide 2699 by 3 and times by 5...and that's about 4500 australian dollars...

Dave

Arguing on the side of the Mac guy... this feels wrong. Nonetheless...

Yes, Windows is aggressive about maximising the amount of free memory. In my book this is inefficient - free memory is a useless commodity. Linux is much, much better at using memory - despite the fact it likes to use 90% of my 512MB all the time. In particular, something huge like UT2004 feels much more responsive in Linux - because it's not hitting the hdd constantly. I rather imagine OSX would be the same, as it's built in very similar technology - of course it's near impossible to measure, since the hardware differs so drastically.

"OS X is no more secure by design. It does, however, benefit greatly from its lower marketshare."
No and yes. Lower marketshare helps it a lot. But Windows has some serious basic flaws:
- Just about everything depends on RPC. This (and any other sevice with "remote" in it) shouldn't be running by default - but it is.
- Ports open by default: Too many.
- Users are all administrators. In XP Home this isn't a default, it's mandatory - good work there MS. In XP Pro you don't have to be, but say you want a game of Diablo 2 - oh look, you have to be an admin That's the last example I can think of where I wasn't an admin - it's pretty common though. Basically to get anything done you ahve to be an admin, a lot of which is because there's no su/sudo to temporarily receive privileges.

"It's no less secure than any of the alternatives."
That's laughable after Blaster and Sasser.

You're probably right about legacy support - unfortunately if legacy support for Office 97 comes with a gaping security flaw, I'd be abandoning the legacy support. It's nice, but not at too high a price.

"Not forgetting of course that if you want to run something like Oracle, Debian isn't even an option. "
Not everyone uses Oracle... we're quibbling over $250/$350 Windows licenses, I don't think tens of thousands on an Oracle license really fits this picture. Can you run Oracle at all on OSX anyway?

"I've never once heard my hard drive thrash under Linux."
I agree with him *partially*. I certainly have been impressed by the speed of my Linux install at times - I suspect this is a consequence of better memory management and a faster filesystem. I wouldn't say it hasn't thrashed at all though...

Like the author said if used with the correct (not cheap crap) hardware, such as compaq proliants etc.. then the server never breaks down. Ive never had a problem with Windows NT, 2000 and 2003 server crashing. They have been up for year without a reboot (i had a P166 64MB Fujitsu server, serving a workgroup of 15 for 4 years without a reboot or crash,before they needed an upgrade to exchange which required more power).

You put windows server on a cheap put togeather pc and it will crash.

This comment is not putting down apple or linux down in anyway, all of these computers have there place and we are lucky in that we are living in an age of computers where we don't have to worry about barriers (we can do video editing take photographs) without crashes (or pretty much without them). I used Windows XP Pro before Win2k Pro and they never BSOD. I use Windows for games, video editing and image manipulation and windows will just keep running. My brother uses a Mac G5 at college using finial cut pro and that just keeps running.

One thing i have noticed (in a Very good way) is that the Three Main OS's (Windows, MacOS X and Linux) will all "borrow" the best features from each other. Which is making your/my desktop of choice evolve in a more productive way.

sorry the statement

"I used Windows XP Pro before Win2k Pro and they never BSOD"

Meant to be "I USE Windows XP Pro, before that win2k pro and i have never had a BSOD"

In XP Pro ................. there's no su/sudo to temporarily receive privileges.

Not quite, In XP professional you have the (sudo like) opportunity to run [runas] from command prpmt e.g.:

runas /user:admin /savecred explorer

or to make a shortcut to nero.exe:
runas /user:admin "cmd /k "C:Documents and SettingsUserDesktopBatch.bat"

in Batch.bat : put runas /user:admin /savecred "cmd /k "C:Program FilesNeroBurningRomNero.exe""

or remove a user from group users and put him in the
administrators group on the cmd prmpt with:

runas /user:Admin /savecred "cmd /c net localgroup Administrators User /add && net localgroup User <username> /delete

Only drawback with runas is , there isn't an file like
in all ?.BSD, Linux etc which gives a fast opportunity
to configure just one specific user who is entitled to
issue runas unlike sudo in [etcsudoers] file.

You put windows server on a cheap put togeather pc and it will crash.

Agree, it's fortunately not black and white.However, correct me if i'm wrong, i remember MS migrating windows update services to Linux and/or FreeBSD , with the worm issue,as in infected PC's flooding MS update servers.Serving a workgroup of 15 or the whole internet is a different kind of magnitude.

Quote: "By default, Windows' VM system is tuned to maximise the amount of free physical RAM"

Uhuh! Maximise the amount of free physical RAM. ie use slower hard disk "swap" as you want to call it, instead of much faster RAM. Great performance. NOT.

Quote: "Linux is "so much faster" they're doing something like comparing XFCE running a few xterms to Windows XP running a few Office apps and IE). "

I'm actually use KDE 3.3 which uses a bit more memory than XFCE (btw 4.2 beta is very nice). I'll quite often be compiling software, have several IMs open, several instances of Konqueror open, running various housekeeping commands, etc etc. Linux behaves. Oh and tell me, if Windows locks up, can you go to another console and kill rogue apps? Nope. Reboot time! Task manager? Hell, it doesn't even bloody show all the apps running.

Quote: "OS X is no more secure by design. It does, however, benefit greatly from its lower marketshare. "

Ah yes it is thanks. You're not a superuser for starters. It is disabled. You have to go thru reasonable lengths to enable it. Windows? You're administrator out of the box. Great one! Say, if i'm on a Windows XP system, with multiple users. All admins (which is by default). Let me see here, if one gets a virus, the whole system is screwed. I'd be pretty pissed off if I was one of the other users at the user who got the virus. Unix/Linux/BSD? No problem. If you weren't running as superuser, your home a/c is trashed but that's about it. What's more secure?

Quote: "What were the relevant workloads and specifications ? Given you're talking ca. 1997, it's highly unlikely you were using any remotely comparable applications or GUI under Linux."

Usual workstation usage. Redhat 5.2. GUI. The Linux kernel didn't have as good a VM as it does today either. I stand by my comments that Linux outperformed Windows (it was 95, NT 4 was even more of a memory hog and would have ran like a dog on the same comparable equipment).

Quote: "OS X is no more secure by design. It does, however, benefit greatly from its lower marketshare. "

I and many, many others disagree here. It is more secure by design. Marketshare has minimal impact on security issues. That's a fallacy that Windows users like to use to make up for the fact that their choice of operating system is so poor in terms of security.

Quote: "It's kind of hard to say Windows apps are "tied to the kernel" when they run equally well on two *completely* different kernels (Windows 9x vs NT). "

Really? Try install a application designed to run only on 95 on a NT 4 box. Install will fail. The kernels are completely different, system calls are completely different. I seem to remember Mr Bill Gates testifying that they couldn't remove internet explorer without "breaking" Windows. Great one!

Quote: "There's a limit to what *Microsoft* can do to "tighten security" when the vast bulk of security problems are caused by *users*. "

Disable administrator for a start? And most Windows users are pretty stupid. If you want to disagree there, you've obviously never worked on a helpdesk. We are advanced users, 95% of people aren't. Never give more power to a dumb user than you *really* have to. Why did Microsoft introduce Active Server? I'll tell you why - to allow system/network administrators to lock down workstations to stop users from stuffing the workstations up. I remember a guy when I was working at Toshiba - he disabled the anti virus software because 'it made my system go slow'. The result? Virus. He lost all of his "important data". My heart really bled for him. NOT.

Quote: "However, OS X shows that it's possible to make regular user accounts usable when you don't care much about legacy support."

I fail to see your point here? In 9 months of using a Mac I had no issues as a normal user. It was only rare that I needed to access superuser rights, and I was able to go about my normal business without issues. How do you define legacy support? OS X is completely different to OS 9 and you most probably realise, so what's compiled for 9 won't work with X. I presume that's what you are referring to? I'll counter that by saying the reason why Microsoft had so many issues with reliability/security a few years back was because they hung onto the DOS crap for backwards compatibility. Once they went to the NT kernels security and reliability improved dramatically. OS 9 was a dog as far as i'm concerned.

Quote: "That's pretty generous. I'd call a 800Mhz G4 a touch slower than a 1.4Ghz P4. Of course, the early P4s sucked, so the discepancy isn't as large as you move further up the line. "

Quote: "All were eligible to buy an OEM copy of XP (basically it's available with any "major" piece of hardware"

How so? My father doesn't know how to put a PC together, and I don't live close enough to him to do it for him (otherwise I would have). He bought a PC, which was built for him. He may have talked them into giving him an OEM version of XP, but technically speaking he isn't entitled to one. He's bought a PC with a blank hard drive - n o o/s preloaded. He bought XP and they installed it for him and set it up. My dad wouldn't know what a CPU was, let alone what to do with it. Well back then anyways, now he knows a bit better at least.

Quote: "If your time is free."

It takes time to setup Windows as well. So time, isn't free, for either Linux or Windows. It might take some more initial time to setup Linux (depending on who's setting it up I guess), it might be slightly easier to configure a Windows Server, but the uptime counts. The time spent patching a Windows operating system, anti virus software etc etc all adds up. The total cost of ownership over the mid to long term certainly favours a Unix style system (preferably BSD, Linux due to the costs involved with a proprietary Unix). Look at up times on webservers from the netcraft site. The first Windows server is like way, way, way, way down the list. That says it all.
Yeah, 1.4-1.6 sounds about right from my experience.

Quote: "No company of any size pays retail prices. If you're much over the 200 desktops mark, you're probably going to be eligible for a Select agreement and a minimum of 10% off retail price."

I agree. But Anand was buying the PowerMac G5 workstation for himself, a single one. That's why I quoted retail.

As to Oracle, they chose to work with Redhat. I wouldn't touch Redhat these days. Any rpm based distro for that matter ;-)

Oh and Archangel, i'm actually a Linux guy!!! I just happened to work for Apple Australia in their tech support area for 9 months. I didn't agree with some of what Anand said etc etc.

Anyways, good conversation guys (archangel & drsmithy). I guess we all have our own point of views, but at least we're having a good debate about it :-)

Dave

yeah, good points - but - how many typical windows users are going to know/use that? In reality here. And it's not very clearly advertised by Microsoft either. Microsoft wants to make PCs easy to use and maintain (Mr Gates said this very recently). Ease of use will sacrifice security. If you said that sort of thing to normal, average Microsoft users they'd look at you blankly and continue using Windows like they normally do. Or they'd say "that looks too bloody hard, stuff that!" With Unix/BSD/Linux I can either use SU or sudo. Which is easier to do - the Windows way you've just described, or the Unix way? It still doesn't solve the fact that Windows is distributed and installed by default with the normal user having administrative rights. That is the key issue at hand.

Dave

"And you base this on...? There's a limit to what *Microsoft* can do to "tighten security" when the vast bulk of security problems are caused by *users*."

In what context do you see "users"?Does that mean Administrators included? Then i would would go a long for a while with your statement.However problems caused by users
are in my opinion off topic since they are a constant factor on every OS.What's more relevant is in my humble opinion the design of an OS and its implementations.I would agree with
the fact that on most MS platforms there're to much unnecesary services turned on by default.Furthermore its sadly but true that as stated earlier on : on a MS XP home edition platform everybody is admin like it is the case on win9?.SP2 could have added the ntfs rights feature of the professional version together with a decent default policy.

"It still doesn't solve the fact that Windows is distributed and installed by default with the normal user having administrative rights. That is the key issue at hand.".True.As i thought MS would change this by means of
SP2 amongst other things,it's somewhat dissapointing see what they have achieved in the huge amount of time frame they had.

Yes, Windows is aggressive about maximising the amount of free memory. In my book this is inefficient - free memory is a useless commodity.

No, it's not, because it's used for disk caching to speed up disk access. It also makes starting applications faster.

Linux is much, much better at using memory - despite the fact it likes to use 90% of my 512MB all the time. In particular, something huge like UT2004 feels much more responsive in Linux - because it's not hitting the hdd constantly.

An active process won't be swapping in Windows. It's not _that_ agressive.

The Windows VM is also reasonably tunable. There's the "optimise for applications or background processes" dialog as well as a bunch of registry settings that can be twiddled if you're tuning for specific circumstances (eg: Exchange or DB servers).

I rather imagine OSX would be the same, as it's built in very similar technology - of course it's near impossible to measure, since the hardware differs so drastically.

It's been a while since I really gave OS X a workout, but back in the 10.1 and 10.2 days OS X's VM was pretty tragic. I'm pretty sure they overhauled it in 10.3 though - one of the reasons for its performance increases.

Just about everything depends on RPC. This (and any other sevice with "remote" in it) shouldn't be running by default - but it is.

Binding to a localhost adapter by default pretty much solves that - that and running the RPC service as a low-privileged user (something SP2 changes).

- Ports open by default: Too many.

That's not a basic flaw, it's a configuration semantic.

- Users are all administrators. In XP Home this isn't a default, it's mandatory - good work there MS.

Uh, it is ? Can't say I've ever even seen an XP Home box, but I find it hard to believe you can't create a non-Administrator user _at all_.

In XP Pro you don't have to be, but say you want a game of Diablo 2 - oh look, you have to be an admin That's the last example I can think of where I wasn't an admin - it's pretty common though. Basically to get anything done you ahve to be an admin, a lot of which is because there's no su/sudo to temporarily receive privileges.

Right click -> Run As. It's shift+right-click for a few things (like Control Panel applets). Shfit+right click also applies for Windows 2000.

That's laughable after Blaster and Sasser.

Uh huh. Because no other OS has ever suffered from a remote buffer overflow exploit, right ?

Not everyone uses Oracle... we're quibbling over $250/$350 Windows licenses, I don't think tens of thousands on an Oracle license really fits this picture.

At that particular point, by my understanding, the "picture" was on servers.

Can you run Oracle at all on OSX anyway?

You can, but OS X isn't free, is it ?

Uhuh! Maximise the amount of free physical RAM. ie use slower hard disk "swap" as you want to call it, instead of much faster RAM. Great performance. NOT.

It does that to use the RAM for caching disk I/O and making program startup faster.

I'm actually use KDE 3.3 which uses a bit more memory than XFCE (btw 4.2 beta is very nice). I'll quite often be compiling software, have several IMs open, several instances of Konqueror open, running various housekeeping commands, etc etc. Linux behaves.

And I'm regularly running a couple of VMWare machines, 3 or 4 firefox windows (with 10+ tabs each), word, outlook, excel, a dozen putty windows, a few Cygwin/X windows, a few notepad windows, etc, etc. Windows behaves.

Oh and tell me, if Windows locks up, can you go to another console and kill rogue apps? Nope. Reboot time! Task manager? Hell, it doesn't even bloody show all the apps running.

If your Linux box locks up you can't do it either. That's what "locks up" means.

Ah yes it is thanks. You're not a superuser for starters. It is disabled. You have to go thru reasonable lengths to enable it.

Uh huh. 'sudo bash' and type in your password. You're root. Tough stuff indeed.

Windows? You're administrator out of the box. Great one! Say, if i'm on a Windows XP system, with multiple users. All admins (which is by default).

Actually creating additional users offers the choice of a regular user or an admin right there in the dialog.

Not to mention on Windows XP with modern apps, those that need higher privileges will detect that and prompt for an admin password, just like OS X does.

Let me see here, if one gets a virus, the whole system is screwed. I'd be pretty pissed off if I was one of the other users at the user who got the virus. Unix/Linux/BSD? No problem. If you weren't running as superuser, your home a/c is trashed but that's about it. What's more secure?

You're comparing apples and oranges. Admin users on one and regular users on the other ? True and keep at least the illusion of objectivity.

Usual workstation usage. Redhat 5.2. GUI. The Linux kernel didn't have as good a VM as it does today either. I stand by my comments that Linux outperformed Windows (it was 95, NT 4 was even more of a memory hog and would have ran like a dog on the same comparable equipment).

NT4 would have performed _vastly_ better in your scenario. Again, you compare apples and oranges and for some reason think you're drawing valid conclusions.

I and many, many others disagree here.

That doesn't make you right.

It is more secure by design.

Explain how. In detail.

Marketshare has minimal impact on security issues.

It has a *massive* impact.

Really? Try install a application designed to run only on 95 on a NT 4 box. Install will fail.

Undoubtedly. But you weren't talking about the tiny minority of Windows 95-only applications, you were painting the entire Windows application base with broad strokes.

Disable administrator for a start? And most Windows users are pretty stupid. If you want to disagree there, you've obviously never worked on a helpdesk. We are advanced users, 95% of people aren't. Never give more power to a dumb user than you *really* have to.

Unfortunately, you *have* to give all those people at home running unmanaged systems all that power so they can fully use their computers.

Why did Microsoft introduce Active Server ?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "Active Server".

I'll tell you why - to allow system/network administrators to lock down workstations to stop users from stuffing the workstations up.

And...? You make it sound like Microsoft are the only people who do this (or need to)...

I fail to see your point here?

That's because you're too tied up in your rhetoric. I was pointing out that OS X shows you *can* let users run without high privileges all the time and still have a usable system.

How do you define legacy support?

Running old software and utilising old hardware. Apple are not known for bending over to help their end users accomplish either.

How so? My father doesn't know how to put a PC together, and I don't live close enough to him to do it for him (otherwise I would have). He bought a PC, which was built for him. He may have talked them into giving him an OEM version of XP, but technically speaking he isn't entitled to one.

Of course he was. You are entitled to purchase an OEM version of XP with any major hardware purchase. I'd call a computer a reasonably major hardware purchase. If the store used a retail copy, then they were ripping him off.

The only time you need to buy a *retail* copy of Windows is if you already have a computer that doesn't have some version of Windows eligible for an upgrade license. That's a pretty tiny minority of the computing public these days.

It takes time to setup Windows as well.

Yes, but generally it takes _less_ time. Since, for business, employee time is generally the biggest expense, things that save employee time are very highly valued.

So time, isn't free, for either Linux or Windows. It might take some more initial time to setup Linux (depending on who's setting it up I guess), it might be slightly easier to configure a Windows Server, but the uptime counts.

It's not particularly difficult keeping a Windows server available as much as a Linux server if you have a rough idea of what you're doing. These days, service availability depends a lot more on the competency of the sysadmin than it does the OS they're using.

The time spent patching a Windows operating system, anti virus software etc etc all adds up.

So does the time patching a Linux server. Your point ?

The total cost of ownership over the mid to long term certainly favours a Unix style system (preferably BSD, Linux due to the costs involved with a proprietary Unix).

Your evidence ?

The fact that Linux is free to acquire is basically irrelevant to any long term TCO study. The running costs of systems generally so far exceed the purchasing costs that they're often not even worth putting into the equation.

Look at up times on webservers from the netcraft site. The first Windows server is like way, way, way, way down the list. That says it all.

The world is not just web servers. Indeed, web serving - particularly large scale web clustering - is something Linux is very well suited for.

I agree. But Anand was buying the PowerMac G5 workstation for himself, a single one. That's why I quoted retail.

I was under the impression we'd moved to purchasing software in the business world.

As to Oracle, they chose to work with Redhat. I wouldn't touch Redhat these days. Any rpm based distro for that matter ;-)

Then you've pretty much ruled out any Linux distro that would be seriously considered by the corporate world. Thus, you've probably moved outside valid comparisons with Windows (IOW, the people who would seriously consider something like Debian or FreeBSD for a particular task, would probably never consider Windows at all).

In what context do you see "users"?

Um, people who are using the computer (there are other contexts ?).

Does that mean Administrators included?

Of course.

However problems caused by users are in my opinion off topic since they are a constant factor on every OS.

Ah, but there are a lot *more* Windows users, so the negative effects of any mistakes they made are much, much greater than dumb users on other OSes. Not to mention the proportion of dumb users on Windows is going to be much higher than just about every platform except Mac. The "user factor" is *not* a constant. It can't be ignored. If the userbase demographics for all platforms were the same then it could be considered irrelevant - but they aren't.

The simple fact is that - relatively - the number of remotely exploitable security holes is small (and they're nearly always patched before exploits actually appear in the wild). If a security breach occurs and it's not a remote exploit (or it's a patched remote exploit), then *the user* is the one responsible.

What's more relevant is in my humble opinion the design of an OS and its implementations.

Not really. Every mainstream OS now is multiuser and has been for years. Broadly speaking, the fundamental design of them all - from a security perspective - is identical.

I would agree with the fact that on most MS platforms there're to much unnecesary services turned on by default.

This is not a design issue, it's a configuration semantic. If it was a *design* issue, you wouldn't be able to fix it with 5 minutes of trivial configuration changes.

Furthermore its sadly but true that as stated earlier on : on a MS XP home edition platform everybody is admin like it is the case on win9?.SP2 could have added the ntfs rights feature of the professional version together with a decent default policy.

I don't have a copy of XP home to check with, but from a bit of googling it appears XP Home allows both Administrator and "Limited" users to be configured. So, you are incorrect.

Like the author said if used with the correct (not cheap crap) hardware, such as compaq proliants etc.. then the server never breaks down. Ive never had a problem with Windows NT, 2000 and 2003 server crashing. They have been up for year without a reboot (i had a P166 64MB Fujitsu server, serving a workgroup of 15 for 4 years without a reboot or crash,before they needed an upgrade to exchange which required more power).
So that means that for the whole year you never applied a single critical security patch to that machine?
Almost every security patch on Windows requires a full reboot.
A couple of security patches on Mac OS X also require reboots and the platforms with most security patches without reboots are the *nix (almost only a new kernel will require a reboot).

...Where the hell did you come up with that price? Find somebody who's got an old Win95 CD lying around and get WinXP Pro for $190.00 at Amazon. ...

...I had some w2k cd laying around so i bought the academic version of windows xp-professional for $80. ...

...No need, buy OEM for about $250. ...

That's what I just love. In order to compare fair let's take the full retail price.
Microsoft Windows XP Pro : $299 (From Microsoft's site)
Microsoft Windows XP Pro Upgrade : $199 (From Microsoft's site)
Apple Mac OS X: $129 (From Apple's site)
Apple Mac OS X for 5 computers: $199 (again from Apple's site)
Oh, and for the academic guy up there:
Apple Mac OS X Academic: $69 (again from Apple's site)

With Mac OS X you get not only the OS but fully capable apps such as iDVD, iPhoto, iMovie, Sherlock2, full developer tools(Xcode), create PDF's, email/calendar/address, Expose, full range of full fledged OSS software such as webserver (apache), ssh, ftp server, etc.

So yes, again you can build a 'cheap-ass' PC that performs pretty decent, but before you can do anything with it you have also to buy the OS and apps to fill the gaps. Some will go the extra mile to find ways to reduce the price they have to pay for Windows. Most people I have seen doing it just slap a copy they already own for another PC or they get another copy from P2P networks.
Even on the cheapest Mac you get the full OS and apps included. So if you take that EMac the ~$700 doesn't look that bad compared to your cheapest PC's.
And for the PC's that come bundled with Windows you have to find models/bundles that include Windows XP Pro to be fair in your comparison to Mac OS X and you don't get Windows XP Pro on your $500 PC's.

But looking at the above numbers, it doesn't really matter. Mac OS X is the cheaper OS no matter how you aquire Windows (unless you pirate it).
The only cheaper alternative to the Mac OS X are the linuxes and bsd's out there which can give you equivalent functionality and more for nothing or at little cost.

The correct term is "virtual memory" (or "swap"). Given you don't even know that (or why it's still relevant, even with lots of real RAM), I'm not sure why you think you're qualified to comment on operating system design.

First virtual memory is not just swap. You really shouldn't comment on OS principles when you yourself don't have a clue. Also Windows always had a very bad paging habit. The hard disk grinds on windows more than any other OS that does demand paging (which is most of them).

Anand mentions that himself in the article. I have heard nary a peep from My harddisk on my mac/linux or Solaris box but any Windows box with any amount of memory consistently accesses the disk.

Also windows has a nasty habit of slowing down over time, which no other OS does.

Bullshit. Indeed, I think you'll find Dell and Apple actually use the same Taiwanese manufacturer for their laptops, for example. Macs have the same OEM hard disks, RAM, Superdrives, etc in them as name-brand PCs.

Bullshit. Volume dictates pricing for any vendor. You many use the same Taiwanese vendor but if you have 10 or 100 times less volume your pricing with be higher. Also most of Apple's desgins are custom, custom mother boards, fans, power supplies cost more. ecspecially with the volumes Apple has when compared to Dell.

Ever wonder why Dell can undersell any major computer manufacturer? because they have more volume and can negotiate better pricing.

When i said problems caused by users are a constant factor i meant it has allways been there and allways will be.You could patch your system but what can't be patched is the lack of common sence.

The simple fact is that - relatively - the number of remotely exploitable security holes is small

Who's fact is that?What number of remotely expoitable vulnerabilities is small?Did you have a particular OS in mind or are we talking in general here?

(and they're nearly always patched before exploits actually appear in the wild

Ther're a lot expoits who find its way in the wild first.
I hope you don't realy think that what is discovered is allways patched or mentioned.There are a lot of exploits
yet to be discovered in every OS on the planet.

If a security breach occurs and it's not a remote exploit (or it's a patched remote exploit), then *the user* is the one responsible.

Not the one who made the patch?Are we talking in the admin context or about every person behind a piece of equipment?

Not really. Every mainstream OS now is multiuser and has been for years. B.

XP home edition is multi-admin in the security context and
automatically multi-user in the normal operating context.
You can on XP Home edition share your files , in that context you can alter the file/folder permissions, but
in order to do that you have to share them first.Unlike the professional version where you can right click on a file and specify the ntfs rights.

Broadly speaking, the fundamental design of them all - from a security perspective - is identical.

What does that fundamental design from the security point of view look like?

I don't have a copy of XP home to check with, but from a bit of googling it appears XP Home allows both Administrator and "Limited" users to be configured. So, you are incorrect.

It is indeed possible to change the group membership from admin to limited via control panel.But that's it,the settings are pre defined.Unlike the prof version where it has the default permissions after a clean install and you can change them on a per file/user/folder/group etc basis.
Ntfs rights , what i was talking about,is more then changing
the account type in Xp Home edition from Administrator to
limited.ntfs rights feature of the professional version.You could ask instead is it relevant for the average XP user.

I would agree with the fact that on most MS platforms there're to much unnecesary services turned on by default.

Did i say it is a design?Perhaps i should have left some space underneath to make clear i'm going to the next point.
The point is that XP has to many unnecesary services on in its default state.Design would be a browser that is to much
integrated with the OS.As one has stated here before ,where do you draw the line?Where do you implement an specific OS .
Will you embed a w2k form in a particular device or not.

OS X is no more secure by design. It does, however, benefit greatly from its lower marketshare.

It is more secure by design. OS X doesn't turn on any unnecassary serivces for instance. OS X is more secure out of the box than windows 2000/XP.

OS X requires authentication to do anything system wide even if you are logged in with admin privileges.

I can go on but a quick search on google should give you more.

Oh, and for the academic guy up there:
Apple Mac OS X Academic: $69 (again from Apple's site)

I think you forgot to mention the XP professional academic upgrade.Which was EUR80,- 2 years ago,- now about EUR129.

Oh, and for the academic guy up there:
Apple Mac OS X Academic: $69 (again from Apple's site)

I think you forgot to mention the XP professional academic upgrade.Which was EUR80,- 2 years ago,- now about EUR129.


It was in the quote in my message where someone said he bought the academic version of XP Pro for $80. But I guess I should have added it to the main list. Thank you for the remark.

But my point is still valid: Windows Xp Pro is more expensive in any version than Mac OS X and doesn't offer all the apps :-)

[quote]$247. I was a hundred bucks out, gimme a break. And if memory serves me correct - win95 is *not* one of the operating systems that allow you to buy the upgrade version of Windows XP.[/quote]

You remember wrong. You can upgrade to WinXP Pro using a Win95 CD .. I just did it about a month ago - $180. The information on the Microsoft site isn't very accurate.

As for the price WinXP vs. MacOSX, I bought my first copy of XP back in 2001 (OEM copy - $100) and haven't paid to upgrade it since How many times have you paid $100+ to upgrade OSX?

As for the price WinXP vs. MacOSX, I bought my first copy of XP back in 2001 (OEM copy - $100) and haven't paid to upgrade it since How many times have you paid $100+ to upgrade OSX?


Yup, like I mentioned you can buy Windows XP in cheaper ways in some gray areas. But as an individual you cannot buy the OEM version from Microsoft.

And then let's add up the cost for the additional software to get up to par with Mac OS X and upgrades to these programs over the last three years.

Not that I am the biggest fan of the upgrade policy with apple either. But so far each upgrade has provided significant improvements and new features.

I have been an OSX user for a little more then 2 years and this windows-guy showed me some nice OSX-tricks!

Apple machines really should come with a good manuel, too many tricks are just not easy to be discovered, that's a pitty.

I allways thought that running the OS from the keyboard was easier with Windows, this article is a funny correction on that.

Accept for some speed issues, it was a great article, thanks.

Too many comments to read them all.

Has anyone mentioned yet that Mac hardware is too expensive?

Linux is much, much better at using memory - despite the fact it likes to use 90% of my 512MB all the time.

Not 'despite' - 'because'!

Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

the problem is that even as a second machine, a Mac is an expensive proposition.

Agreed, a $50 distro or a $500= mac. I pick the $50 distro.

I actually liked the XP theme when it first came out

We have a Playschool fan here.

Well I was joking.
The Mac threads are always the same. No matter what the subject, the conversation always devolves into, "I could buy a $100 computer! You are stupid!", etc.

Meanwhile, in the Alien computer thread, the same people are drooling.

Good piece. More interresting is when you consider the laptop platform.

OSX on a Mac laptop is so much nicer. From wireless configuration to sleep/wake times it make the nicest Sony's that are just as expensive seem poorly done.

On the desktop I do admit I built a 3200+ radeon 9800 Pro All in wonder system with a sata drive a 1 GB or ram for $1000. Now add 300 -500 for name brand and you still have a box that is a much better value. XP works as well most of the time.

Integrated platforms like the ipod and the laptop are where the apple magic is. My 1 1/2 old ti book with 1 GB is consistanly as useful as the XP box. It weighs 5.5 LBS and has a great screen. Now there is probablly 4K of investment into the thing but the Sony or the IBM would cost the same and note have nearly the quility of experience.

Office on the Mac is horrible. Often incompatable and different just cause.

"Not 'despite' - 'because'!

Unused RAM is wasted RAM"

Yep. That was the point I was making - even if I used the wrong word in there somewhere :-)
From a Windows user's perspective it is "despite" - they only feel comfortable with lots of free RAM, because that's where Windows is comfortable. Some of us know better of course.

I like Appleworks over Office, but hey I just write school papers and it's all I need.

C'mon, now! $1299 for a new iMac G5 is not "megabucks". Cry me a friggin' river.

"Oh and Archangel, i'm actually a Linux guy!!"
Sorry about that :-D

"I wouldn't touch Redhat these days. Any rpm based distro for that matter ;-) "
Fair call there - am I safe to assume you use Debian?

On the OEM thing - your father should be eligible for one if he bought a prebuilt workstation. The retailer may not have been up with that though?

I'm not sure the price comparisons have been totally fair anyway - I don't think you can compare slightly dodgy OEM copies of Windows with full retail OSX. We don't know how much OEM OSX "costs" because the only way to get it is to buy it in a bundle through Apple.
Full retail: OSX hammers XP. My local prices are (NZ$, inc GST):
OSX retail: $281.25
XP Pro Upgrade: $499
XP Pro Full: $799
XP Home Upgrade: $279
XP Home Full: $539

I'm not even going to touch the 5-license OSX family thing, because it whups Windows in price enough as it is. The Windows upgrade prices are nice, and afaik Apple doesn't offer any, so they will be advantageous to a lot of users. But nonetheless OSX is well cheaper, except for Home upgrade, and Home's a bit crippled in features by comparison.

Admittedly I do think OSX should be cheaper, simply because Microsoft have developed their entire OS, whereas OSX is built on BSD and uses a lot of publically available open source stuff (samba etc). Which I find a bit off when people praise Apple for the more technical features of OSX; nonetheless they have done quite a lot of work on it, and I guess you're paying for the wee apple logo as much as anything.

The Windows "Run As" thing: Yes, okay, technically you can - but as David said, no average user is going to know or do that. And you have to explicity do it, whereas KDE or OSX etc will prompt you for the password and hold your hand through it - see K3B for a perfect example of how to do such a thing.

I have a 15" 500 Mhz G4 powerbook, it's fucking great, good battery life, runs os x great. Of course i had to jack up the ram to 1GB, but it's based on sdram, pc133 or 100, i forget, but it's a great machine, you should buy one off ebay like I did.

@Anon: No, there hasn't been a more insecure OS than Windows. MS-DOS was probably the high point, because it's bloody hard to connect it to a network!

@keath: Yes.

@The Raven: I think it's expensive for what it is. Some would disagree; they'd say the piece of fruit on it justified paying twice as much.

@bonjour: Not bad, but 500MHz doesn't go all that far. A lot of people aren't keen on eBay though, for obvious reasons. Personally I don't bother even looking any more because when I did practically everyone said "Will only ship in the US" which pretty well killed that for most of the world's population.

Quote: "Unfortunately, you *have* to give all those people at home running unmanaged systems all that power so they can fully use their computers. "

Utter Bullshit. BSD & Linux don't need to do it that way, why does Microsoft Windows?

Quote: "I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "Active Server". "

Active directory, my typo. I'm sure you knew what I meant.

Quote: "And...? You make it sound like Microsoft are the only people who do this (or need to)... "

Pretty much yes, since it's such a poorly designed operating system (i'm referring to the security aspect). Internet Explorer - major security hazard. Guess what? it's tied to the operating system. That leaves a lot of potential holes to exploit even if you don't use IE. Your average Windows user is stupid - again, you've obviously never worked in a helpdesk with real users. The ones that go, "Oh I doubleclicked on that file in my email because I thought it was from a friend...". Yup, another virus. Stupidity is, stupidity does. The average Windows user is pretty damn stupid.

Quote: "Yes, but generally it takes _less_ time. Since, for business, employee time is generally the biggest expense, things that save employee time are very highly valued. "

Stop twisting my quotes - I mentioned that Windows servers may be *quicker* to set up in the post that you're referring to. Factor in all the patches you need to apply, general maintenance etc etc and it all adds up. My argument is that total maintenance time for a Unix/Linux/BSD server will be much less than a Microsoft Windows server over a reasonable period of time.

Quote: "Your evidence ? "

Pretty much all of the non Microsoft sponsored TCO studies. Note that only the Microsoft sponsored studies favour Windows in long term TCO. I wonder if it has a anything to do with all that lovely money Microsoft bribed (oops I mean paid) the institutions.

Quote: "Then you've pretty much ruled out any Linux distro that would be seriously considered by the corporate world. "

Actually, in the large corporate world you are right with this comment. The small to medium enterprise which allows their sysadmin to actually use their brains and capabilities is a different story. Slackware and Debian are very popular choices. Redhat is considered a defacto standard in the Linux world because it has such a big name - that is the corporate idiots who only understand $$$ have heard of it and tie it to being Linux and they wouldn't even most probably realise that other distributions even exist.

Dave

Quote: "The information on the Microsoft site isn't very accurate."

Well that says a lot doesn't it ;-)

Quote: "As for the price WinXP vs. MacOSX, I bought my first copy of XP back in 2001 (OEM copy - $100) and haven't paid to upgrade it since How many times have you paid $100+ to upgrade OSX? "

Very good and valid point. And it's something that I disliked about Apple. But, to be fair to Apple they've done an awful lot with OS X and the applications that are bundled with it etc. So, I guess they have to recoup the money somehow that they've spent on developing the software or improving it. 10.0 was dodgy, showed potential, but dodgy. 10.1 was an improvement. 10.2 was when it started to shine, I have very fond memories of 10.2.6. 10.3 doesn't seem greatly changed in performance imho, well I haven't really noticed on my work PowerBook G4.

Dave

Quote: "Apple machines really should come with a good manuel, too many tricks are just not easy to be discovered, that's a pitty."

I totally agree. What the Mac users get is pathetic in terms of documentation. It's a trend that hits most operating systems these days i'm afraid to say. Remember the hefty manual you got with Windows 3.11? It was decent. Now, compare that to Windows XP. All downhill. It's all electronic online help. Apple is no better, in fact i'd say that the inbuilt help/documentation is better from Microsoft than Apple. I've noticed a worrying trend with Apples kbase of late - the quality of online documentation is getting worse. I'm sure this is to "encourage" users to pay for APPs etc...

Dave

Quote: "Sorry about that :-D "

hehehe tis OK. People got confused cos I was actually sticking up for the Mac system. For too long Windows users have had fun "mac bashing". It's one thing that really annoys the hell out of me, even well and truly before I'd ever used a Mac. And yes, I use a Debian based system (Libranet 2.8.1). I've played with Woody for nearly a year, and it was just a pain in the ass to maintain even for some of the simpler things. Easier to go with Libranet - I want to be able to use my PC as well as tinker ;-) Libranet packages are getting a bit old in the tooth now, but they're still very good for the average user who doesn't "need" the latest & greatest. Libranet 3 is around the corner anyways...doesn't bother me cos I just apt-get what I need but for new users...

Quote: "On the OEM thing - your father should be eligible for one if he bought a prebuilt workstation. The retailer may not have been up with that though?"

That's a very good point and to be truthful I never even looked at it from that way. In that instance I'd say he's been ripped off. Ahh well, next time I visit him i'm going to set up a dual boot with Libranet. He really only surfs the web, sends emails, uses messenger and does online banking from time to time. Linux will handle that nicely, what worries me is that he likes to tinker, so no admin password for him lol. I don't care if he owns the damn machine, if he's too stupid not to know how to use a computer properly i'm not prepared to give him the admin password. Microsoft does. That's the root of Microsoft Windows issues.

Dave

BTW did you perchance play Diablo 2 (given the your handle and I think you mentioned Diablo 2 earlier on in a post). I seem to remember an archangel from years ago, circa 97 who hung out on the Diablo bnet aust retail 1 channel...

"And then let's add up the cost for the additional software to get up to par with Mac OS X and upgrades to these programs over the last three years. "

Well, most computers come with software like MS Office included.

And it's not liek you have to pay for it, most equvialents are free.

That's what I just love. In order to compare fair let's take the full retail price.

No, to be fair you should take the *OEM* Windows price. It's also relevant to point out that *all* OS X versions are "upgrades", since it can't be used (legally) without having already paid for some earlier version of MacOS.

With Mac OS X you get not only the OS but fully capable apps such as iDVD, iPhoto, iMovie, Sherlock2, full developer tools(Xcode), create PDF's, email/calendar/address, Expose, full range of full fledged OSS software such as webserver (apache), ssh, ftp server, etc.

Most of which have freely available equivalents from Microsoft. And, of course, we all remember what happened last time Microsoft bundled in a fully fledged application with Windows...

And for the PC's that come bundled with Windows you have to find models/bundles that include Windows XP Pro to be fair in your comparison to Mac OS X [...]

Why ? Which machines that bundle with XP home do you think are going to miss the features XP Pro has ?

But looking at the above numbers, it doesn't really matter. Mac OS X is the cheaper OS no matter how you aquire Windows (unless you pirate it).

Only if you don't take into account the cost of the hardware to run it on. The five user home license is a good idea though - I'd be surprised if Microsoft don't do the same thing with their next major consumer OS release.

Who's fact is that? What number of remotely expoitable vulnerabilities is small?Did you have a particular OS in mind or are we talking in general here?

Can you please put some spaces in your sentences - they're very hard to read.

It's a fact you can see just by looking at the statistics. Go out and look at all the 'holes' that cause security breaches. If you take the ones that are remote exploits caused by programming error (and not, say, poor configuration) then they are a small proportion of the total. That applies to pretty much any OS.

Ther're a lot expoits who find its way in the wild first.
I hope you don't realy think that what is discovered is allways patched or mentioned.There are a lot of exploits
yet to be discovered in every OS on the planet.

No. I said that remote exploit holes are *usually* patched before any exploits for them appear in the wild. Not always, but *usually*.

Not the one who made the patch?Are we talking in the admin context or about every person behind a piece of equipment?

Anyone. If your machine gets owned because you didn't apply a freely and easily available update, that's *your* fault.

XP home edition is multi-admin in the security context and
automatically multi-user in the normal operating context.
You can on XP Home edition share your files , in that context you can alter the file/folder permissions, but
in order to do that you have to share them first.Unlike the professional version where you can right click on a file and specify the ntfs rights.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Are you talking about 'sharing' in the context of network sharing or just between users on the single machine ?

What does that fundamental design from the security point of view look like?

Basically, the ability to run as a user that can't cause widespread damage to the machine without taking some deliberate action to elevate their access permissions.

It is indeed possible to change the group membership from admin to limited via control panel.But that's it,the settings are pre defined.Unlike the prof version where it has the default permissions after a clean install and you can change them on a per file/user/folder/group etc basis.
Ntfs rights , what i was talking about,is more then changing
the account type in Xp Home edition from Administrator to
limited.ntfs rights feature of the professional version.

NTFS permissions are a relatively small issue here. I've no doubt they exist in XP Home, even if something specific has to be done to enable access to them. I'd also be pretty sure that if you are a "Limited" user than the NTFS permissions will be such that you can't delete system files, etc.

You could ask instead is it relevant for the average XP user.

More accurately, you could ask how many average users are going to be able to understand the concepts ?

Bullshit. Volume dictates pricing for any vendor.

I was actually commenting more on the idea that Apple somehow use super-duper high-quality components with that comment, rather than volume.

Also most of Apple's desgins are custom, custom mother boards, fans, power supplies cost more. ecspecially with the volumes Apple has when compared to Dell.

Um, not many Dell machines are using standard ATX cases, power supplies and motherboards...

Ever wonder why Dell can undersell any major computer manufacturer? because they have more volume and can negotiate better pricing.

Yes, but the amount is usually tiny. Macs tend to be *much* more expensive.

It is more secure by design.

Well, technically it's not. It only has primitive unix permissions, for example - no ACLs.

OS X doesn't turn on any unnecassary serivces for instance.

THIS IS NOT A DESIGN ISSUE. IT'S A CONFIGURATION SEMANTIC.

You can't fix *design* issues with 5 minutes of trivial reconfiguration.

OS X requires authentication to do anything system wide even if you are logged in with admin privileges.

An "Admin" in OS X is *not* the same as an "Administrator" in Windows (or root in unix, for that matter). So, that comparison isn't really fair.

I don't think you can compare slightly dodgy OEM copies of Windows with full retail OSX.

Of course you can, since you can't even *run* OS X without buying a Mac from Apple.

What's a "slightly dodgy" OEM copy of Windows ? Anyone buying a computer is going to be eligible for one.

The Windows upgrade prices are nice, and afaik Apple doesn't offer any, so they will be advantageous to a lot of users.

Every copy of OS X is an 'upgrade'. You can't run it without having previously bought a copy of MacOS.

The Windows "Run As" thing: Yes, okay, technically you can - but as David said, no average user is going to know or do that.

Not that dropping to a commandline and running 'sudo' is any easier.

And you have to explicity do it, whereas KDE or OSX etc will prompt you for the password and hold your hand through it - see K3B for a perfect example of how to do such a thing.

Actually that happens in Windows as well - assuming the developer has the intelligence to check whether or not higher privileges are needed and ask for them (just like OS X).

No, there hasn't been a more insecure OS than Windows. MS-DOS was probably the high point, because it's bloody hard to connect it to a network!

DOS was a single user OS with no memory protection mostly written in assembler. That's about as insecure as you can get.

Utter Bullshit. BSD & Linux don't need to do it that way, why does Microsoft Windows?

You can't, for example, patch a Linux machine without root privileges.

Active directory, my typo. I'm sure you knew what I meant.

I didn't, actually - and Active Directory is about a hell of a lot more than "locking down desktops".

Pretty much yes, since it's such a poorly designed operating system (i'm referring to the security aspect).

Look, this is just insanity. First you go on about how Windows is so bad because it doesn't restrict users by default. Then you say OS X is good because it does restrict users by default. Now Windows sucks because you have to restrict users to make the system secure.

Can you at least *try* to get a coherent, somewhat objective argument and stick to it ?

Internet Explorer - major security hazard. Guess what? it's tied to the operating system. That leaves a lot of potential holes to exploit even if you don't use IE.

Not really.

Interestingly enough, no-one seems to be attacking Apple for doing pretty much the same thing with Safari and WebCore (although they haven't finished yet).

Your average Windows user is stupid - again, you've obviously never worked in a helpdesk with real users.

No, I've never done anything as soul destroying as working in a helpdesk. However, I do regularly get reminded of the lack of knowledge the average end user has. I'm not entirely sure why you think you need to tell me about it.

ur average Windows user is stupid - again, you've obviously never worked in a helpdesk with real users. The ones that go, "Oh I doubleclicked on that file in my email because I thought it was from a friend...". Yup, another virus. Stupidity is, stupidity does. The average Windows user is pretty damn stupid.

Right. Yet for some reason you think those same stupid users *won't* run weird programs that get emailed to them under OS X or Linux ?

Stop twisting my quotes - I mentioned that Windows servers may be *quicker* to set up in the post that you're referring to. Factor in all the patches you need to apply, general maintenance etc etc and it all adds up.

Patching is a constant, it can be ignored. General maintenance is a big issue and the point is that Windows should be easier.

My argument is that total maintenance time for a Unix/Linux/BSD server will be much less than a Microsoft Windows server over a reasonable period of time.

Your argument requires *substantial* supporting evidence, not hand weaving and unix cheerleading. I've run a lot of unix systems (albeit much fewer Windows systems). At *worst* I'd call the maintenance overheads about the same and I suspect if I had more Windows experience they would be easier.

Pretty much all of the non Microsoft sponsored TCO studies. Note that only the Microsoft sponsored studies favour Windows in long term TCO. I wonder if it has a anything to do with all that lovely money Microsoft bribed (oops I mean paid) the institutions.

So have you checked into who funds the non-Microsoft TCO studies ? Have you even bothered to *read* the Microsoft-funded ones to see if they are biased, or are you just doing the typical paranoid-conspiracy-theorist trick and assuming they must be ?

Redhat is considered a defacto standard in the Linux world because it has such a big name - that is the corporate idiots who only understand $$$ have heard of it and tie it to being Linux and they wouldn't even most probably realise that other distributions even exist.

Redhat are highly valued in the corporate world - along with Suse - because they understand what it is coporate users *want*.

Quote: "Of course you can, since you can't even *run* OS X without buying a Mac from Apple."

Again, bullshit! There is an emulator that will run OS X very nicely thanks. So, you don't have to have a Mac to run OS X.

Quote: "You can't, for example, patch a Linux machine without root privileges. "

Well duh! That's the whole idea isn't it? Administration of the computer is up to the admin/administrator/root user/superuser, whatever you want to call it...that's called security!

Quote: "Can you at least *try* to get a coherent, somewhat objective argument and stick to it ? "

eh? I'll make it clear for you since you're having conceptual problems comprehending what I was saying (funny no one else seemed to have any comprehension issues).

1. Letting users do anything on their computer is a bad way of designing an o/s

2. Unix/BSD/Linux/OS X all limit normal user accounts with the explicit purpose of stopping them from stuffing their machines up

3. Windows doesn't. Microsoft Windows does not enforce users with normal priviledges. It openly encourages them to have any rights that they want! Do what they want! I think you spend too much time in the server room where you're the only one using the computer and not enough time in the real world, where real users use a computer. I suggest you get out a bit more...

Quote: "Active Directory is about a hell of a lot more than "locking down desktops"."

Ask most sysadmins/network admins why they use Active Directory and they'll all answer the question the same way "to lock down systems so users can't run amok on them, thus saving the admin time on fixing potential problems".

Quote: "I've never done anything as soul destroying as working in a helpdesk"

It's not necessarily soul destroying. There are some smart users out there. You can approach a helpdesk two ways:

1. Try and teach your users some basic things about using their computer. Most users do actually learn something if you take the time & patience to explain it to them in words that they can understand.

2. Not really give a hoot and offer their the very minimal support that you can possibly get away with and a RTFM attitude.

Quote: "Right. Yet for some reason you think those same stupid users *won't* run weird programs that get emailed to them under OS X or Linux ? "

On the average, yes. Your average BSD, Linux user is smarter than your average Windows user. OS X is a bit of a conundrum as the system is quite well designed, but the users aren't always really computer savvy. That said, in 9 months working at Apple, I found the vast majority of Mac users quite computer savvy, much more so than the Windows counterparts on average. I'm not sure why, since the common misconception is that stupid users buy Macs.

Quote: " Patching is a constant, it can be ignored."

That explains why so many Windows boxes get taken down by viruses...great attitude. After a comment like that I certainly would hire your ilk in my company to look after the systems.

Quote: "So have you checked into who funds the non-Microsoft TCO studies ? Have you even bothered to *read* the Microsoft-funded ones to see if they are biased, or are you just doing the typical paranoid-conspiracy-theorist trick and assuming they must be ?"

Yes I have actually. There's a website out there that lists who sponsored what for these TCO studies, and it quite thoroughly investigates them. I'll try and find it and post. Microsoft is a known monopolist, convicted twice in the US, under investigation in Israel, Japan and Europe. Their business pratices leave a LOT to be desired. Obviously you like Microsoft, that's your choice. If you want to believe all the Microsoft FUD then you can, others don't.

Quote: "Redhat are highly valued in the corporate world - along with Suse - because they understand what it is coporate users *want*."

Partly true. Most large corporates want someone to "contact" in times of trouble. They want support. Linux does lack that to a large degree. Suse & Redhat offer support to a certain level on a corporate enterprise environment. That's what corporates want to see. You could have a better implementation of a Linux distribution, with a much better package management system but if it doesn't have that "official" support that the corporates want it'll get ignored. The problem is that most corporates are used to the Microsoft world, where you pay expensive amounts of money for support. They're used to it, it's the norm. Anything less is totally alien to them.

Look, we could argue here for days on this and never see eye to eye. I'm not going to waste anymore time on this. I have my views, you have yours. I'll respect your views but disagree. You can choose to do likewise or just ignore my views altogether (and that of many others).

Best wishes,

Dave

Um, not many Dell machines are using standard ATX cases, power supplies and motherboards...

I thought I already anwsered that. Volumes..

Yes, but the amount is usually tiny. Macs tend to be *much* more expensive.

Have you ever participated in price negotiations on components? When you take a tiny amount here and there add them together then multiply by the volume you expect. Things get expensive.

Also Dell does not do custom ASICS. They buy chipsets straight from intel. Apple designs and has to design and contract out thier System Contoller (Northbridge) manufacturing. Silicon Fabs are expensive and are also priced by volume.

An "Admin" in OS X is *not* the same as an "Administrator" in Windows (or root in unix, for that matter). So, that comparison isn't really fair.

Hunh, wouldn't that be better design than windows. The root user account it disabled by default. Unless I am missing the point, which I am not. That is better design and finer granularity in terms of what users can and can't do with elevated privilege. For example, damage other users data even if they have admin privilege.

Well, technically it's not. It only has primitive unix permissions, for example - no ACLs.

Well that will be fixed soon with tiger server.

Look, this is just insanity. First you go on about how Windows is so bad because it doesn't restrict users by default. Then you say OS X is good because it does restrict users by default. Now Windows sucks because you have to restrict users to make the system secure.

As I explained and you mentioned too. OS X has a better granularity where it restricts users from doing stupid things and still allowing them certain privileges.

The admin account for example has just enough to make life simple and secure at the same time. Unlike windows in which you get everything or nothing.

No, to be fair you should take the *OEM* Windows price. It's also relevant to point out that *all* OS X versions are "upgrades", since it can't be used (legally) without having already paid for some earlier version of MacOS.

So if I buy a used mac off ebay, Are you insinuating that I can't purchase OX 10.3 and install it legally? Go proof for this ridiculous claim.

If you can clean install from a disc it is not an upgrade, Stop spreading misinformation.

Right. Yet for some reason you think those same stupid users *won't* run weird programs that get emailed to them under OS X or Linux ?

Right, because they can't harm anyone but themselves. I don't have access to other users files even with admin privileges.

Also you can always put limitations on what users can and can't do.
For example, mail won't open any files attached by default unlike outlook which would even if you just previewed the message.

I took MS how long and customers how many millions of dollars, before they disabled that feature.

How about the assanine method of identifying file type by extension. Resulting in all sorts of worms. Bad desgin again.

What I meant by "slightly dodgy" was that people have been quoting prices for OEM copies of Windows over eBay etc - the price you *could* get Windows for, as opposed to a straight retail copy of OSX.

"Every copy of OS X is an 'upgrade'. You can't run it without having previously bought a copy of MacOS"
Are you serious there? I thought a retail copy of OSX on the Apple website would be a proper standalone version.
If every copy is an upgrade, what are you meant to buy exactly to kick off this chain of upgrades in the first place?

"Not that dropping to a commandline and running 'sudo' is any easier"
The commands quoted were things like
"runas /user:admin "cmd /k "C:Documents and SettingsUserDesktopBatch.bat"". That's not very attractive - I'll take sudo any time. Most users wouldn't consider that easy, but hey.

My comments about MS-DOS weren't serious, and were meant to imply that it wouldn't get raped just from running for 20 minutes, as Windows does with a default setup when connected to the internet. This simply because it didn't generally have an internet. Again: not to be taken seriously.

Anyway I think Dave's right - we can argue indefinately, and this has been done to death. We're also well off topic too, so let's go and pick on a newer one :-D

Again, bullshit! There is an emulator that will run OS X very nicely thanks. So, you don't have to have a Mac to run OS X.

Check your EULA. You can only run OS X on Apple branded hardware.

Well duh! That's the whole idea isn't it? Administration of the computer is up to the admin/administrator/root user/superuser, whatever you want to call it...that's called security!

*sigh*. So, who do think gets to be administrator on unmanaged home machines ?

1. Letting users do anything on their computer is a bad way of designing an o/s

It's not a design issue, it's a configuration issue. It's always been possible to use (NT-based) Windows as a non-Administrator.

2. Unix/BSD/Linux/OS X all limit normal user accounts with the explicit purpose of stopping them from stuffing their machines up

As does Windows.

3. Windows doesn't. Microsoft Windows does not enforce users with normal priviledges.

Please don't use "enforce" when you mean "configure by default". There's nothing "enforced" about running as a regular user in Linux.

It openly encourages them to have any rights that they want! Do what they want! I think you spend too much time in the server room where you're the only one using the computer and not enough time in the real world, where real users use a computer. I suggest you get out a bit more...

It configures them that way by default so old applications work. It makes configuring a non-Administrative user trivially easy. It even recommends in the online help not to run as an Administrator.

The *only* difference between Windows and OS X in this respect is that Windows sets the first user up as an Administrator by default. It's trivial to turn that user into a non-Administrator after install and it's trivial to create new non-Administrative users afterwards.

Ask most sysadmins/network admins why they use Active Directory and they'll all answer the question the same way "to lock down systems so users can't run amok on them, thus saving the admin time on fixing potential problems".

Except AD isn't *required* for that at all, so you're talking to some misguided admins (particularly if they think that's the only benefit AD offers).

I'm also somewhat confused as to why you criticise Microsoft for not locking down users by default, but then criticise them for providing tools to do it...

On the average, yes. Your average BSD, Linux user is smarter than your average Windows user.

_Now_. If Linux goes mainstream, it's not going to stay that way.

The proportion of unknowledgable users out there is constant. It's their distribution that's the issue.

OS X is a bit of a conundrum as the system is quite well designed, but the users aren't always really computer savvy. That said, in 9 months working at Apple, I found the vast majority of Mac users quite computer savvy, much more so than the Windows counterparts on average. I'm not sure why, since the common misconception is that stupid users buy Macs.

Macs are expensive. The demographic that purchases Macs is in the higher-than-average income group. People in the higher-than-average income group are generally better educated.

That explains why so many Windows boxes get taken down by viruses...great attitude. After a comment like that I certainly would hire your ilk in my company to look after the systems.

All OSes need patching, was the point I was trying to make. Therefore, the time to patch (and frequency thereof) is pretty much independent of platform.

Obviously you like Microsoft, that's your choice. If you want to believe all the Microsoft FUD then you can, others don't.

Actually, no. I just don't *dislike* Microsoft. I don't trust Microsoft any more than I do Apple, Redhat, IBM, Sun or any other company.

Partly true. Most large corporates want someone to "contact" in times of trouble. They want support.

Not to mention defined product lifecycles.

Suse & Redhat offer support to a certain level on a corporate enterprise environment. That's what corporates want to see.

You make it sound like they're stupid for wanting to see that.

The problem is that most corporates are used to the Microsoft world, where you pay expensive amounts of money for support. They're used to it, it's the norm. Anything less is totally alien to them.

Actually they're used to knowing what the product offers, how long it will be around, that it will remain stable for that time and that they won't have to wait for some 15 year old kid in Eastern Europe to post a message on a newsgroup when they need help.

I thought I already anwsered that. Volumes..

The point is Dell's hardware needs to be "custom designed" as well.

The overbearing point I'm trying to get across here is that Apple's mythical "higher quality components" is a load of tripe.

Have you ever participated in price negotiations on components? When you take a tiny amount here and there add them together then multiply by the volume you expect. Things get expensive.

I find it hard to believe it costs anything close to as much more to build a Mac as it does to buy one.

Also Dell does not do custom ASICS. They buy chipsets straight from intel. Apple designs and has to design and contract out thier System Contoller (Northbridge) manufacturing. Silicon Fabs are expensive and are also priced by volume.

And that's about the only piece of hardware that's unique to a Mac. They've got the same hard disks, the same memory, the same PCI slots, etc. Indeed, since IBM sell 970 based machines as well, Apple probably don't even do their own chipsets anymore.

Hunh, wouldn't that be better design than windows.

No, it's just a terminology difference.

The root user account it disabled by default.

But it's still trivial to get root privileges - 'sudo bash'.

Unless I am missing the point, which I am not. That is better design and finer granularity in terms of what users can and can't do with elevated privilege. For example, damage other users data even if they have admin privilege.

Again, you're not comparing apples to apples because of the terminology difference. There is no direct equivalent to an OS X 'Admin user' in Windows. Probably the closest thing is a 'Power User'.

OS X does *not* have finer granularity in its permissions capabilities. It is constrained at the moment by the traditional unix permissions model.

The admin account for example has just enough to make life simple and secure at the same time. Unlike windows in which you get everything or nothing.

Incorrect. It just works differently.

So if I buy a used mac off ebay, Are you insinuating that I can't purchase OX 10.3 and install it legally? Go proof for this ridiculous claim.

No, I'm saying that you've already paid for the copy of OS X that the machine came with. You can't legally run OS X on anything except a Mac, and if you have a Mac then you've bought OS X.

Right, because they can't harm anyone but themselves. I don't have access to other users files even with admin privileges.

Again, that's because Admin under OS X and Admin under Windows are different things - root on a unix box is different again. As a "Power User" under Windows - the closest analogue to an OS X 'Admin' - you can't modify other user's files either.

Also you can always put limitations on what users can and can't do.
For example, mail won't open any files attached by default unlike outlook which would even if you just previewed the message.

As you can in Windows.

Incidentally, Outlook has never opened attachments (without prompting) by default. There were a few buffer overflow exploits - that were patched - that could allow some types of messages to run code, but that's a different thing altogether.

How about the assanine method of identifying file type by extension. Resulting in all sorts of worms. Bad desgin again.

That one I'll agree has some downfalls. Although OS X does it, too and I suspect a few of the X shells also do.

Are you serious there? I thought a retail copy of OSX on the Apple website would be a proper standalone version. If every copy is an upgrade, what are you meant to buy exactly to kick off this chain of upgrades in the first place?

A Mac. You can't - legally - run OS X on anything that isn't an Apple labeled (or licensed) machine. The reason Microsoft have to discriminate with an 'upgrade' version that checks for a previous install is because it's trivial to buy a PC without Windows. Apple don't need to do this because it's basically impossible to use OS X (Pear PC aside, it's not a practical alternative) without having bought a Mac and, therefore, having already paid for an earlier copy of OS X.

The commands quoted were things like
"runas /user:admin "cmd /k "C:Documents and SettingsUserDesktopBatch.bat"". That's not very attractive - I'll take sudo any time. Most users wouldn't consider that easy, but hey.

Those are ridiculously over-complicated examples. I could conjure up some similar unix commandlines as well if you wanted. Typically all that needs to be done is a simple right-click and "Run As".

My comments about MS-DOS weren't serious, and were meant to imply that it wouldn't get raped just from running for 20 minutes, as Windows does with a default setup when connected to the internet.

So does an unpatched Redhat install dating from 2001. I'd also recommend against connecting any unpatched Solaris machines to a network with OS installs dating from 2001 as well, they don't last much longer than 20 minutes on any reasonably fast 'net connection.

Your example is asinine. Not being hacked on an unpatched machine is simply a matter of enabling the built-in firewall before connecting. The simple fact is you'd be foolish to connect _any_ unpatched OS to the internet - or any large network - without a firewall.

this exchange started off interesting but is getting old fast. With far too many vague statements being made. The article clearly intentionaly avoided these issues and focussed on end user experience rather than specs and pricing.

----

""OS X doesn't turn on any unnecassary serivces for instance. ""

"THIS IS NOT A DESIGN ISSUE. IT'S A CONFIGURATION SEMANTIC."

this is getting very silly indeed....

All copies of OSX are in fact upgrades, theres no such thing as a full retail version since the only machines you can run OSX on were shipped with a previous MacOS version preinstalled which you already paid for. Even if it isn't a techical restriction now with PearPC it is still restricted to Apple hardware by the OSX license agreement.

"A. This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time."

Unless someone know how to buy an Apple labeled computer which does not have any version of MacOS preinstalled.

A copy of OSX can be used to upgrade a Mac that was not shipped with OSX, but so can an XP upgrade be used to upgrade a computer that was shipped with Windows 98.

Now the 5 user family pack is definatly good value, to upgrade 5 installs of Win2k to XP would cost a lot more.

Those are ridiculously over-complicated examples. I could conjure up some similar unix commandlines as well if you wanted. Typically all that needs to be done is a simple right-click and "Run As".

Maybe i should give an example to explain it in a more trivial
way what i whas actually referring to.Most PC's nowadays have a burner.On occasion the burning program refuses to work if initiated by a user with non administrative rights.Nero is such an program.The difference between "right click" + runas and runas /user:admin /savecred explorer is that in the latter case the admin credentials are stored.Which means that instead of installing a the admin-rights patch from Ahead , you can just "double click" the shortcut you made and run Nero with admin rights until you delete the credentials.This is more elegant in my opinion than first case described.I used to download a lot of OS-iso's on Xp ,every time issueing the "right click + runas " is boring,just calling the executable with the custom shortcut under alternate credentials is more confortable.But hey everybody its own cow.

...A Mac. You can't - legally - run OS X on anything that isn't an Apple labeled (or licensed) machine. The reason Microsoft have to discriminate with an 'upgrade' version that checks for a previous install is because it's trivial to buy a PC without Windows. Apple don't need to do this because it's basically impossible to use OS X (Pear PC aside, it's not a practical alternative) without having bought a Mac and, therefore, having already paid for an earlier copy of OS X.
...
...All copies of OSX are in fact upgrades, theres no such thing as a full retail version since the only machines you can run OSX on were shipped with a previous MacOS version preinstalled which you already paid for. Even if it isn't a techical restriction now with PearPC it is still restricted to Apple hardware by the OSX license agreement.

"A. This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time."

Unless someone know how to buy an Apple labeled computer which does not have any version of MacOS preinstalled.
...

...Well, most computers come with software like MS Office included...

...Most of which have freely available equivalents from Microsoft. ...


As all you many have brought up how you can buy Win98 or OEM discs on Ebay you can just as well buy a Mac from a user that has totally wiped off the Harddrive.
You can then go to the store, buy a box with Mac OS X and install it happily and fully legal and fully supported by Apple.
If you build your own PC or buy it from a user that has the harddrive wiped off you cannot install a Windows XP Upgrade version on that machine without having some other version of Windows disc handy.

Software upgrades are cleanly defined and differentiated in price and require proof of previous version in various different forms. For MS OS's you have to have a previous OS either installed or the disk handy. The full version sometimes won't install if there is already an OS on the Harddrive. Mac OS X in that sense is both. You can install it on a virgin machine or upgrade whatever OS is already on there.

The whole OEM situation is by most companies/lawyers still considered a gray shaded area. The official sellers require you to buy some hardware to qualify for the purchase. Thanks to some term definition by MS you can get by buying a mouse and get the OS at that price.

And if I look at the offical sellers Windows XP Pro OEM prices they are still higher than one copy of Mac OS X. Newegg.com has it at $145 (oh and whatever hardware you have to buy naturally on top of that).

And yes, you cannot compare Windows XP Home to Mac OS X. There are too many features missing (no matter if you personally use them or not) so you have to take Windows XP Pro into the equation to come at least closer. We have Mac's participating totally happy in our Windows Active Directory network.

I also want to challenge the claim that you can find free (not shareware, but totally free) equivalent software packages on Windows (not Linux) that can at least match all those apps included with Mac OS X and if they exist how much effort it is to find them, install them and keep each and every one of them updated properly.

But we can keep on going with this argument for long, long times. In the end the price for Mac OS X is definitely cheaper. Does it give you more out of the box? Definitely. Is it better than Windows? That is your personal preference. As a PC/Mac/Linux/BSD user I like parts of all of them with the Mac OS bringing a blend of all those worlds together into a great user experience. All of them have great room to improve and end-users should make their choices on what would fit their user-experience the best. It might just be worth the extra money over time.

o You cannot buy an OEM copy of Windows XP from Microsoft
o To 'legally' buy an OEM copy you have to purchase some hardware (such as a case fan, mouse,...) at the same time
o Be careful were you buy your OEM version:

"Hello,

Thank you for contacting the Microsoft Anti-Piracy Team.

We greatly appreciate your efforts in contacting the Microsoft
Anti-Piracy Team and alerting us to the possible unauthorized copying
and distribution of Microsoft software. Please be assured we will
investigate further the authenticity of this product and take the
appropriate action.

Several suspicious software operations around the globe are marketing
their suspicious goods through spam email advertisements. Spam email is unsolicited commercial email otherwise known as junk mail. In an
attempt to mask their location, these counterfeit organizations change
their name and email sources daily. The basic contents of the email
remain the same: "Microsoft Software Offered at Cheap Prices."

The advertisers use terms like "Original Equipment Manufacturer" ("OEM") software, as an attempt to explain why the offered software is so
inexpensive. Spammers also include random dictionary words and
paragraphs of text throughout their email to avoid anti-spam filtering
technology.

Microsoft is working to educate partners and consumers about the risks
of getting software from suspicious sources. We are investigating the
sources of these operations and are doing everything in our power to
stop this kind of activity.

Purchasing from known and trusted sources and avoiding
"too-good-to-be-true deals" are the best ways to avoid suspicious
software offers.

Here are some suspect signs to look for:

Beware of spam emails offering software prices that are too good to be
true.
Beware of offers requesting the wiring of money to foreign banking
institutions.
Beware of software shipping into the United States from overseas.

For more information regarding spam offering suspicious software, please
visit:

http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/genuine/PreinstallGenuine/spam.asp

You may also visit our Internet site on http://www.microsoft.com/piracy
and http://www.howtotell.com to review additional information on
recognizing genuine Microsoft product and Microsoft's licensing
policies.

Again, thank you for your interest in our anti-piracy campaign.

Microsoft Corporation
Worldwide Sales Group
....

o All OEM copies can only be installed clean (that is, the hard drive must be formatted before XP OEM can be installed). They cannot be used to perform an upgrade of an existing Operating System so make sure you back up all necessary data and files BEFORE installing XP OEM, since
the format of the Hard Drive will erase ALL data on it.

o Currently you can transfer (no, not two copies) a non-OEm license to a new machine. You remove XP from the first machine and the license will transfer to the new machine. You call Microsoft and they will issue you a new activation code. You cannot do this with the OEM license. It is for one machine only, the original machine. You will not be issued an activation code for a new machine.

o You will receive no support from Microsoft. You will be referred to the original OEM licensee.

o You cannot upgrade the FULL OEM DSP version. When longhorn or whatever appears this will not be a qualifying license.

o and many more....

So in the end there are plenty of reasons why you shouldn't compare the OEM versions of XP to the "Full", "Legitimate", "Supported" versions of Mac OS X that you can buy at the store.

It depends on if you are discussing ease of installation or licensing.
A mac is licensed to be upgraded to OSX just by being a mac.
A PC is not licensed to have a upgrade copy of Windows XP placed on it just by being a PC.

If the pc was purchased with Windows preinstalled on it, eg it has a sticker with a product key on it, then it is licensed to have an upgrade copy of windows used. If someone sells you a pc with a product key sticker and does not supply a copy of windows either on disk or preinstalled then you should complain because the copy of windows was tied to that machine and should always be destributed with it.

If you buy PC without a sticker, an upgrade edition of XP and an OEM disc of 98 on ebay, (assuming the oem copy was originally distributed with some other pc or you didn't buy the oem98 from the same person as the pc) then you are in fact unlicensed.

If you buy a mac off ebay and it does not have MacOS or OSX installed or supplied, it still counts as an upgrade since just by the fact that it is a mac means someone paid for a copy of MacOS or OSX when they bought it, it just got seperated somewhere.

Now the actual installation characteristics may be different but the installation routine is rather irrelevant compared to the licensing. You could be installing an OS by copying over a disc image from another machine, so long as you have the right licenses it doesn't really matter how you go about the actual installation.

Now in the end it is also irrelevant compared to if it is actually an upgrade or a full version.
In all those cases Mac OS X comes out cheaper. Upgrade/OEM/Full. Doesn't matter. And you don't have to worry if your copy is legit or not.

Except that there is no such thing as a full version of OSX. There is only OEM and upgrade.

Every Mac automatically has an OEM version assigned to it by Apple at manufacture, so we don't know how much that nominally costs, it could be $200 from the price on every Mac that gets put towards OS and Application development.

A boxed copy of OSX is an upgrade since it can only be used on a machine that by its very existance, already has an OEM type license.

when is a g5power/i book coming out

The overbearing point I'm trying to get across here is that Apple's mythical "higher quality components" is a load of tripe.

Having taken apart a G5 and a Dell Dimension, I can assure you that Apples quality is higher. Your assertion based on absouletly zero experience in JDM manufacturing is what is a load of tripe.

I find it hard to believe it costs anything close to as much more to build a Mac as it does to buy one.

If you believe that the cost of building anything is close to the retail price, I have bad news for you about santa claus and the tooth fairy.

And that's about the only piece of hardware that's unique to a Mac. They've got the same hard disks, the same memory, the same PCI slots, etc. Indeed, since IBM sell 970 based machines as well, Apple probably don't even do their own chipsets anymore.

IBM sells 970 based blades, that don't have AGP and have significantly different memory controllers. So the system controller is very different as are the other I/O peripherals the Blade uses a IDE controller where as the G5 uses SATA. Also the interconnect choice is Hypertransport on the G5.

So no IBM only does the processor and fabs Apples design. The System controller is Apple's IP. But you have a tendency to dabble into areas where you have no clue.

Again, you're not comparing apples to apples because of the terminology difference. There is no direct equivalent to an OS X 'Admin user' in Windows. Probably the closest thing is a 'Power User'.

That's because you wouldn't understand better design if it smacked you in the face. I have said it time an again:

Root is the adminstrator equivalent in Windows.
Admin has more privileges than the "power user" group but just enough to make tasks simple.

A normal user account can be limited trivailly on OS X. For Example, users can be given selective permissions to run only certain Apps, enable/disable CD burning privileges, etc. This transcends the traditional unix file permission model.

MacOS X security is based on CDSA so no it is not just based on the UNIX file permission model.

But it's still trivial to get root privileges - 'sudo bash'.

No the user account must be a part of the admin group. A rouge program can't just execute 'sudo bash' and gain root access with out a password.

No, I'm saying that you've already paid for the copy of OS X that the machine came with. You can't legally run OS X on anything except a Mac, and if you have a Mac then you've bought OS X.

If I buy a used machine, I have paid for no such OS. The seller might wipe out the harddrive and sell it to me "As Is". It is perfectly legal for me to install a copy of Mac OS X on a bare machine. You claimed that "all copies of OS X" are upgrades, which is utter bullshit.

Incorrect. It just works differently.

Incorrect, OS X works better.

ncidentally, Outlook has never opened attachments (without prompting) by default. There were a few buffer overflow exploits - that were patched - that could allow some types of messages to run code, but that's a different thing altogether.

But is easy to trick it into running scripts and arbtrary code by playing with mime types. Mail.app won't run script or code. Apple got it right the first time.

BTW the mime-type exploit was not a buffer overflow.

"What makes this worm unique is its ability to infect a system by someone simply reading or previewing an email message. The worm hides in the HTML of the email itself. When the message is previewed or opened by the recipient, the worm automatically takes control and infects the computer"

ncidentally, Outlook has never opened attachments (without prompting) by default. There were a few buffer overflow exploits - that were patched - that could allow some types of messages to run code, but that's a different thing altogether.

You can run OS X on Macs that came with OS 9. You wouldn't have previously paid for OS X.

Yes you can install OSX on any Mac that does not have an existing operating system. But the fact that it is a mac means that it was shipped with an operating system preinstalled that the original purchaser paid for as part of the system. If they decide not to pass on the cost or the media that is entirely up to them. The right to upgrade the OS to another version of OSX cannot be seperated from the computer. You cannot remove the OS license from the machine since if you could it would only possibly be to transfer it to another machine that already has a licence.

And yes, you can upgrade from OS9 as well. Apple lets you move from OS9 to OSX for the same price as moving from early versions of OSX to later versions.

All copies of OSX are upgrades, from some previous version of MacOS, with no specific requirements for installation other than the machine was manufactured by Apple, and thus is already licensed for whatever previous version of MacOS that was preinstalled on it when the machine was manufactured.

If I understand correctly, since an Apple computer is sold (or has been sold) with an Apple OS, and since you cannot run an Apple OS on anything but an Apple computer, buying a new Apple OS is just buying an upgrade, even if what you buy is the full OS that you can install on a formatted hard drive?

I confess having a problem with that logic.

Yes you can install OSX on any Mac that does not have an existing operating system. But the fact that it is a mac means that it was shipped with an operating system preinstalled that the original purchaser paid for as part of the system. If they decide not to pass on the cost or the media that is entirely up to them. The right to upgrade the OS to another version of OSX cannot be seperated from the computer. You cannot remove the OS license from the machine since if you could it would only possibly be to transfer it to another machine that already has a licence.

And yes, you can upgrade from OS9 as well. Apple lets you move from OS9 to OSX for the same price as moving from early versions of OSX to later versions.

All copies of OSX are upgrades, from some previous version of MacOS, with no specific requirements for installation other than the machine was manufactured by Apple, and thus is already licensed for whatever previous version of MacOS that was preinstalled on it when the machine was manufactured.

Ok, so for you the Mac OS X box is an upgrade. In the end that still doesn't matter as it is still cheaper than the Windows XP upgrades and you don't have to deal with a lot of the hassles involved with proving that you have the rights to buy an upgrade and activation and and and...

Yes you can install OSX on any Mac that does not have an existing operating system. But the fact that it is a mac means that it was shipped with an operating system preinstalled that the original purchaser paid for as part of the system.

Same thing with a Dell. You can't buy a Dell without OS. If you buy a used Dell from someone who decides not to sell you the OS with it you have to go out and buy a full version of Windows XP to put it on unless you already legally own another qualifing copy of Windows that you are not using on another computer. And as already mention in both cases (upgrade or full) the price is higher.

As all you many have brought up how you can buy Win98 or OEM discs on Ebay you can just as well buy a Mac from a user that has totally wiped off the Harddrive.
You can then go to the store, buy a box with Mac OS X and install it happily and fully legal and fully supported by Apple.
If you build your own PC or buy it from a user that has the harddrive wiped off you cannot install a Windows XP Upgrade version on that machine without having some other version of Windows disc handy.

Yes, but you miss the point as to *why* this is true. Think about the reasoning behind an "upgrade" vs a "full" product.

Apple *know* that to run OS X, you've paid for a Mac and - by paying for that Mac - you've also paid them (one way or another) for a copy of OS X (even if the hard disk on the Mac is wiped clean). Therefore, you're buying an *upgrade* to an earlier version of MacOS, every time.

Microsoft don't have this luxury because buying PCs without Windows is trivial. Ergo, their "upgrade" has to perform a check that you are actually eligible, by looking for a previous install.

Apple don't need different product families - "OEM", "Upgrade", "Retail" because there's only one way you can legally use OS X - by buying a Mac. The same does *not* hold true for Windows and PCs.

Software upgrades are cleanly defined and differentiated in price and require proof of previous version in various different forms.

The "upgrade check" for OS X is the fact you have a Mac at all - if you have a Mac, you've paid for an earlier version of OS X, one way or another.

So in the end there are plenty of reasons why you shouldn't compare the OEM versions of XP to the "Full", "Legitimate", "Supported" versions of Mac OS X that you can buy at the store.

The OEM version was being compared in the context of purchasing a new PC, not to install on/upgrade an existing machine.

Microsoft don't have this luxury because buying PCs without Windows is trivial. Ergo, their "upgrade" has to perform a check that you are actually eligible, by looking for a previous install.

Today, Yes. Prior to the Antitrust suit, No.


Let's get one thing straight. OS X comes in two versions full install and upgrade.

The upgrade version ususally cost $20 and can only be installed if you already have a a version of OS X installed. The full install can be installed clean and costs $129.

Your ridiculous arguments about the definition of upgrade versions not withstanding. All versions of OS X are not upgrades.

The term Upgrade version has a clear definition in the industry. It means that a previous version must be present for the installer to even begin installation. Since the OS X retail version doesn't have that precondition, it is not an upgrade version.

The retail version XP and OS X are comparable because they do not require a previous version of the OS to be present. And the upgrade versions are also comparable for the same reasons.

The "upgrade check" for OS X is the fact you have a Mac at all - if you have a Mac, you've paid for an earlier version of OS X, one way or another.

False, It is possible to have purchased a Mac with OS 9 only in the past and still install OS X. Also almost any branded PC from a major manufacturer also has the same "upgrade check" for windows. And prior to the anti trust settlement it was near impossible to get a branded PC bare.

Further even the bare PCs were levied a microsoft tax the full OEM price of one windows license. The anti trust case changed that a little but not by much.

Apple's market share is going to be less than 1% by the end of next year. The hardware is ridiculously expensive. The OS is unintuitive and user hostile. OS upgrades are too numerous and too expensive. No application diversity. No hardware diversity. No vendor diversity.

And that's not the worst thing: it's the fanatical users who lie, lie, lie and make obscene blatanly false claims to prop up their platform.... like $799 is not expensive for a Mac that runs far slower than a $199 walmart PC.

The Mac is an odd curiosity, like for desk props in movies, but it's not a player in the OS game, consider that Linux already has a larger market share. Apple refuses to change with the times and update their ailing OS, like the one-button mouse, so it will flounder in it's mediocrity of acient conventions and soon fade and die.

Having taken apart a G5 and a Dell Dimension, I can assure you that Apples quality is higher.

Since a Dimension is a cheap, consumer grade machine built strictly to a budget and a Powermac is a high end professional workstation, that's hardly surprising. Did you compare the costs of those two machines ?

How many Precision workstations and PowrEdge servers have you pulled apart ?

If you believe that the cost of building anything is close to the retail price, I have bad news for you about santa claus and the tooth fairy.

That's not what I said.

So no IBM only does the processor and fabs Apples design. The System controller is Apple's IP. But you have a tendency to dabble into areas where you have no clue.

Does the word "speculation" mean anything to you ?

So, you've established Apple need custom CPU chipsets for their machines. That's one component out of quite a lot.

Root is the adminstrator equivalent in Windows.

Not quite. Root has fewer restrictions than Administrator.

No the user account must be a part of the admin group.

I figured that assumption was obvious.

A rouge program can't just execute 'sudo bash' and gain root access with out a password.

I never said it could. I was talking about the user elevating their privileges enough to be able to do things like wipe out other users's files.

If I buy a used machine, I have paid for no such OS.

Yes, you have. A portion of whatever you paid pays for the OS that should be on that machine.

The seller might wipe out the harddrive and sell it to me "As Is".

That's possibly legally questionable (I'm not sure if the OS X license is transferrable), but whether or not they provide with the OS is irrelevant. You're paying for a Mac and part of that payment pays for the OS.

It is perfectly legal for me to install a copy of Mac OS X on a bare machine. You claimed that "all copies of OS X" are upgrades, which is utter bullshit.

All copies of OS X are upgrades because you can't run OS X without buying a Mac, and you can't buy a Mac without *some* of that payment being for OS X.

It's perfectly legal to install an upgrade version of Windows on a bare machine as well - you just need to prove you have an earlier version of Windows to upgrade from.

But is easy to trick it into running scripts and arbtrary code by playing with mime types. Mail.app won't run script or code. Apple got it right the first time.

You can guarantee there aren't any buffer overflows or other exploits in Mail.app or any shared components it uses ?

BTW the mime-type exploit was not a buffer overflow.

Maybe not, but it *was* exploiting a bug - later fixed - and not expected behaviour.

You can run OS X on Macs that came with OS 9. You wouldn't have previously paid for OS X.

Which is why I've been (trying, at least) to write MacOS and not OS X where appropriate.

Every copy of OS X is will only run (legally) on machines that were sold with a previous version of MacOS. Period.


Today, Yes. Prior to the Antitrust suit, No.

Even then it wasn't hard to get a PC without Windows.

The term Upgrade version has a clear definition in the industry. It means that a previous version must be present for the installer to even begin installation.

[oops]

The term Upgrade version has a clear definition in the industry. It means that a previous version must be present for the installer to even begin installation.

Actually, no, it just means the user must have already paid for an earlier version. For example, our "upgrade license" for Veritas was significantly cheaper than the "full version", but at no stage during the installation was any proof of an earlier version actually existing required (it was installed onto a new server and asked for neither earlier version CDs or serial numbers).

If you own a Mac, you've paid for MacOS. You can't buy a Mac without paying Apple for MacOS. If you own a PC, you haven't necessarily paid for Windows. All the different versions of Windows exist *because* you can buy a PC without an OS.

Also almost any branded PC from a major manufacturer also has the same "upgrade check" for windows. And prior to the anti trust settlement it was near impossible to get a branded PC bare.

There's a hell of a lot of "unbranded" PCs out there.

Further even the bare PCs were levied a microsoft tax the full OEM price of one windows license.

Only if the OEM had signed a per-CPU contract with Microsoft. It was _not_ a given. I knew heaps of sellers back in the day who sold bare machines with no "Microsoft tax" whatsoever.

Not quite. Root has fewer restrictions than Administrator.

What restrictions and on what system?

BTW you must be thinking of SYSTEM account which has the highest prvilege on windows NT.

Not quite. Root has fewer restrictions than Administrator.

Where any of them listed on any of the major stock indices?

For example, our "upgrade license" for Veritas was significantly cheaper than the "full version", but at no stage during the installation was any proof of an earlier version actually existing required (it was installed onto a new server and asked for neither earlier version CDs or serial numbers).

Since when is "Veritas" a PC operating system.

There is a distinct definition between a "upgrade version" of a retail product and corporate licensing. Since we are talking retail and vertias is not availble for retail sale at any major computer store, your point is moot.

All copies of OS X are upgrades because you can't run OS X without buying a Mac, and you can't buy a Mac without *some* of that payment being for OS X.

This is getting tiring...... No Apple sells two versions one upgrade on full. I have an upgrade version of Panther. So if there are two seperate version Apple sells then " all versions of OS X are Not upgrades".

Which is why I've been (trying, at least) to write MacOS and not OS X where appropriate.

You have always said OS X.

never said it could. I was talking about the user elevating their privileges enough to be able to do things like wipe out other users's files.

If a user has admin rights it is trivial to enable root, "if one wants to". Note "wants" and not accidentally by running code. Running code in windows and OS X and the damage said code could do was in question not how easy it was to adminster a box on a default install.

Yes, you have. A portion of whatever you paid pays for the OS that should be on that machine.

No the original user paind for it and sold me a machine at a fraction of the cost of the original. So no I haven't paid for MacOS.

It's perfectly legal to install an upgrade version of Windows on a bare machine as well - you just need to prove you have an earlier version of Windows to upgrade from.

Prove it. Install a XP upgrade disk on a bare machine with no prior windows OS on an absoultely blank disk.

If you own a Mac, you've paid for MacOS. You can't buy a Mac without paying Apple for MacOS. If you own a PC, you haven't necessarily paid for Windows. All the different versions of Windows exist *because* you can buy a PC without an OS.

There are also different versions of OS X for price differentiation. You can not by a major branded PC without an OS from Microsoft period. Walk into Best Buy and get me a bare machine.

As pointed out by later posters, Windows isn't the only choice. That nice new box, which I'm typing on right now, runs Mandrake 10.1. Currently playing R.E.M. through Rhythmbox and cranking away on an urpmi --auto-select in the background.

yes, if I were to buy the new gfx card and the expensive LCD, I'd be running near an iMac price (though remember the prices I was giving were CANADIAN dollars, and your maths is off - an extra 512MB RAM stick would cost me $110, when I buy one). However, I haven't had to spend that money yet *and I have a perfectly working system* - the PC route gives me more options. And if I were to add those options the system would be higher performance than the comparable Mac (a 6600GT card is leagues ahead of a 9600, and I doubt that $1750 iMac has 1GB of RAM). If I didn't want to pay that much, well, the 19" CRT is a perfectly good monitor and saves a bunch of cash.

Also, my post was (as its subject indicates), aimed at Lars, who asked how much PC users pay for their hardware - was just contributing. No cables and clutter on my desktop, either - there's two USB gamepads plugged into the front, a keyboard and a mouse (Macs don't come with wireless ones, I don't think) running from the back to the front, an S-Video cable going into my TV, and three 3.5mm audio jacks for 5.1 sound going into my speakers. That's it for cables.

As for the claimed hardware problems - nope, don't have any. Also, ed, I *knew* I wouldn't have any, thanks to a little basic research on the parts I was buying. It's not hard to spend half an hour reading some webpages and finding out that this motherboard and this hard disk play nice with Linux. Is it nicer, for Mac users, to just go buy a box with no research needed? Sure. For me, is it worth a huge price hit? No. If I was rich, maybe it would be. No hardware errors in my logs. Only problem I had, in the interests of disclosure, was with wireless. Man oh man, is 802.11g a pain in the *%!@ing rear end right now. The first card I bought was a Netgear WG311v2. A WG311v*1* would've been fine. The v2, despite having the same model name and being distinguishable from the v1 only once you've bought the card and opened the package, is based on a completely different chipset whose Linux support is pants. (I'm currently wondering whether this is grounds for some kind of lawsuit). After a week of effort I took that card back as a bad job. The second card I bought had the same part 1 of the story; it's an SMC 2802W, which cost an arm and a leg, and which I bought because it's right at the top of prism54.org's list of supported cards. However, once again, it turned out to be a v2 card, again something you can only discover by buying the card, breaking the cellophane and examining the hardware. prsim54 is also supposed to support it, but that seems to be a washout. Finally, I have it working with ndiswrapper, but that's not a week I want to go through again. However, this is mostly my fault - I went into the whole thing with my eyes open knowing that 802.11g cards are a mess. I could've gone for an 802.11b card and had no problems, and that's what I'd recommend to anyone else. (especially since the signal behind my box is so weak it runs 11MB most of the time anyway...sigh)

@pastern:

"Onto prices...the equivalent to a Dual G5 (well the closest in the PC world) would be an Opteron 246 2ghz. This is a street price...most people pay this... "

I'm sure you know this is a highly specious comparison. If you're looking for the most similar processor architecture? Sure. If you're looking for similar capability at the best price? No-one would buy such a beast. Try high-end Athlon XP (32-bit) or bottom end Athlon XP (64-bit), for a much more reasonable comparison. A couple of low-end 64-bit Athlon CPUs will set you back 300 bucks or so.

oops. Bit of a boo-boo, there. Where the hdparm manpage refers to disk cache, it's not talking about reading from swap space. It's talking about reading from the hard disk's onboard cache memory, of which most hard disks have either 2MB or 8MB. This is why hdparm's benchmarks give you about 10x higher score for "cache read" than "disk read".

another thing people often overlook when talking about games on Linux is it has mame. That with a couple of cheapass USB joypads makes for some excellent gaming fun...sure, gaming on Windows is still better, no-one with a brain would claim otherwise. But you can still have plenty of gaming time on Linux if you put your mind to it.

"Uh huh. 'sudo bash' and type in your password. You're root. Tough stuff indeed."

well, if you allow users to run bash via sudo, which I don't believe *any* distro does by default (most don't even use sudo). It's a dumb thing to do. Don't do it. If you're *really* paranoid about security, don't use sudo at all - most distros don't by default, it's a convenience tool. I live without it and have a bloody secure root password which is changed every so often.

I think you lost track of the thread, there. drsmithy was responding to someone who claimed Apple's hardware was higher quality than Dell's - his point was this is quite hard to believe when it's often the SAME hardware...

We're way off topic here, but I have to agree, and throw in another area - games. Remember the manuals for Railroad Tycoon and Civilisation? 200+ plus pages each. With RRT you got a very good potted history of the golden age of railroads. With Civilisation you got a technical explanation of how the game actually *worked*, algorithms included. Game manuals these days? A two-sided sheet of gloss paper with the controls on it. If you're lucky.

quite right, you can't patch a Linux machine without root privileges. Which is why consumer-aimed Linux distros make a point of explaining root and normal users on install and don't make you su to run the update utility, but put it right there on the user desktop and ask for the root password in a nice pop-up dialog when you try and run it. This beats the pants off "let's make everyone an admin!", IMHO.

"So if I buy a used mac off ebay, Are you insinuating that I can't purchase OX 10.3 and install it legally? Go proof for this ridiculous claim."

Of course he's not, because when you do that, you purchase the OS X license off the original owner.

His point, basically, was that buying OEM or upgrade versions of Windows is not in any way "dodgy" if you (in the first case) buy it with a system or a major piece of hardware, or (in the second case) have an older version of Windows. Thus, using upgrade or OEM versions for comparison purposes is fair.

specious stuff on security out of the box. One, if you buy a Linux operating system today, you do not buy one dating from 2001. Of course, to be completely fair, if you buy XP now it's probably not 2001-vintage XP, it'll probably have SP1 incorporated. In a few weeks / months, I expect retail and OEM will have SP2 included. (At least, I really hope so, this is how MSoft have always done it in the past, to give them credit). The correct way to compare is to compare the latest versions available; if one competitor happens to have software a year newer than another on the market - that's tough on the out of date competitor.

Two, firewalls are not panaceas. What does a firewall do to prevent a virus which exploits a local vulnerability to destroy sensitive data? Sweet FA, is what it does. What does Microsoft's firewall do to prevent an exploit to a service it trusts? Ditto.

"As all you many have brought up how you can buy Win98 or OEM discs on Ebay you can just as well buy a Mac from a user that has totally wiped off the Harddrive.:

which brings us to the difference between licenses and software. The fact that you have wiped the software does nothing to negate the fact that you purchased and continue to possess a right to use that software, which is, I think, transferable (though I don't know Apple's licensing terms for sure). This is why it is perfectly legal for the purchaser to reinstall said software. If you could buy a Mac *without paying for an OS X license along with the purchase*, the situation would be comparable. It's possible to do this with PCs, though a lot harder than the person with whom you are debating would have it (buying naked machines from major manufacturers is famously hard and one of the main charges of unfair competition against MS).

He spent $3000 on the machine and later put in a $1050 upgrade to 4 Gig of RAM. He said he even considered using 8 Gig of RAM, that is $4650 more than the 512 the machine comes with. All this and it didn't come with a monitor or real mouse. He had 2 Cinema displays already ($1,300 each) plus photoshop and office. He must have at least $7,500 tied up in that system.

LOL!, I didn't even look to see that it was Anand who wrote the article. I didn't know he still did that. Ignore subject line of above post, it was mostly a rhetorical question anyway.

His point, basically, was that buying OEM or upgrade versions of Windows is not in any way "dodgy" if you (in the first case) buy it with a system or a major piece of hardware, or (in the second case) have an older version of Windows. Thus, using upgrade or OEM versions for comparison purposes is fair.

Likewise one can also obtain OEM and upgrade versions of OS X cheaper than retail. However he contends that every OS X version is an upgrade version. Which is blatantly false. Apple does indeed have two versions of OS X and upgrade and full version.

His definition aside, If there is an upgrade version and a Full version. By basic logic not all versions are upgrades.

I'll agree that every new version of OS X is an upgrade by virtue of fact that it is improved than the version you already have. That is conforming to the dictionary definition.

"another thing people often overlook when talking about games on Linux is it has mame. That with a couple of cheapass USB joypads makes for some excellent gaming fun...sure, gaming on Windows is still better, no-one with a brain would claim otherwise. But you can still have plenty of gaming time on Linux if you put your mind to it."

The market share makes windows a good gaming platform.
Developers of games, or better yet the companies like ID,
Novalogic etc make the games evident for the largest market
segment.Nothing wrong with that.This all has nothing to do
with all the non-windows being not as equal capable of
running the same games as on windows..So one might say that gaming on Windows isn't "better"
, there are just more games written for the windows platform.

You say there are two versions of OS X, upgrade and full.

You said in another post that the upgrade version was $20, while the full version was $129.

AFAIK, what is sold $20 is the exact same thing as what is sold $129. It is sold $20 just for those who bought a Mac in the weeks preceding a new version of the OS.

Having bought my Mac just weeks before its release, I have bought Panther for $20: it was the full version, that I could install on a clean hard disk (4CD).

In fact, there is only one version of OS X (no upgrade CD, what is sold is always the full OS).

Or is it that things are different in my country?

Now, if people want to stretch and squeeze logic and semantics and say that factually if you buy OS X you just buy an upgrade, fine. As far as I'm concerned, an upgrade is, and always will be, something that needs a preexisting version of the OS installed to be put on. And anything I buy that can be installed on a clean disk is, and will be, a full version.

LOL!, I didn't even look to see that it was Anand who wrote the article. I didn't know he still did that. Ignore subject line of above post, it was mostly a rhetorical question anyway.

Illuminate me

Because that´s the 1st thing i noticed... the mere mention of "spending 7000+ just for trying sounds suspicious. (possible, tho suspicious).

Who´s Anand in the end.

Apart from this Blatant flamewar on OS upgrade costs, hardware, and etc... is there anything else somebody would love to say or add to an otherwise completely off-topic thread?

fine, describe it that way if you like. practical result is the same - if your primary purpose in life is playing games, you don't buy a Mac or a copy of Linux.