A die-hard PC user’s perspective on Macs, by AndandTech.
A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User’s Perspective
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
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! $1299 for a new iMac G5 is not “megabucks”. Cry me a friggin’ river.
“Oh and Archangel, i’m actually a Linux guy!!”
Sorry about that 😀
“I wouldn’t touch Redhat these days. Any rpm based distro for that matter 😉 ”
Fair call there – am I safe to assume you use Debian?
On the OEM thing – your father should be eligible for one if he bought a prebuilt workstation. The retailer may not have been up with that though?
I’m not sure the price comparisons have been totally fair anyway – I don’t think you can compare slightly dodgy OEM copies of Windows with full retail OSX. We don’t know how much OEM OSX “costs” because the only way to get it is to buy it in a bundle through Apple.
Full retail: OSX hammers XP. My local prices are (NZ$, 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 😀 ”
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 😀
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.