Comparing Tiger and Vista Beta 1 678
UltimaGuy writes "This article is an excellent comparison between the features of Apple Tiger and Windows Vista Beta 1. The point it raises - 'Windows Vista Beta 1 is a much-needed demonstration that Microsoft can still churn out valuable Windows releases, after years of doubt. For Mac OS X users, however, Windows Vista Beta 1 engenders a sense of déjà vu."
Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple/Microsoft comparisons are moot (Score:4, Insightful)
The home computer market is the same story. MacOS has its fans and that gives it something like 10% of the home market, but Windows (in any incarnation) has always been more popular. It's never been simply about "OS xyz has feature abc while the competition doesn't". It's always been about getting the operating systems preinstalled on hardware. Now MacOS will be delivered on x86, and that ought to be interesting. But if customers can only buy MacOS from one vendor, that means that they won't have very much choice in hardware selection.
In the grand scheme of things, though, Apple is the largest single hardware vendor, and that's where they excel. Their software is excellent, but it's always been the hardware that keeps them financially viable.
desktop search (Score:5, Insightful)
What do I care how many users are out there with some kind of desktop search. A million, a hundred million or just two. I don't care. I don't care if you use it or how you use it.
The only thing that matters with regard to desktop search is if I can use it and if it finds my stuff.
This isnt the first time.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone remember the claims against Windows 3.1?
Re:i hate to take their side (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, I think it's perfectly fair to make a comparison of features, since if Vista is truly Beta, then new features shouldn't be added.
Explain why you disagree?
BoBW: Dual Booting (Score:4, Insightful)
If the gaming on OSX ever gets up to par with the windows systems, then it would be my OS of choice. It's no where near as fast as the Windows system is for this. And that's assuming the game you want to play is even ported to OSX.
Though the drawback to this is of course siding with Steve Jobs. *cries*
Re:64-bit? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's your answer.
Re:I'm going to hold off... (Score:2, Insightful)
So a word of advice,. don't hold your breath that it will be able to get you any good frags (or that it would even let you see them for that matter) in CS.
Re:i hate to take their side (Score:5, Insightful)
is it fair to compare Tiger to a Beta?? 'ha! our completed OS OWNS your beta OS. unf unf in your face'
Well, I'd say it is not really fair. What needs to be said is "our current OS is still better even then your new OS that won't even be out for another year or two. " By the time Vista is released Apple's current offering will probably be another few years ahead of it and While Windows users are drooling over the "new" features, OS X users will be running a system comparable to what MS will release a few years after that.
After reading about Vista, and then about what features are actually going to be into it I was pretty annoyed to discover most of the core features are either weak copies of OS X features or ways to lock-in the user even more. They are adding in DRM galore, trying to kill openGL and move everyone to their proprietary DirectX, trying to kill PDF and move everyone to their proprietary alternative, etc., etc. Too bad most purchasers are so uninformed. I wonder if they will be able to buy the EU to avoid getting beaten for all this continued monopoly abuse and move to closed, proprietary formats that contradict EU purchasing policies and further illegally extend MS's monopoly.
Comparing either Shipping OSs (Score:4, Insightful)
Comparing Tiger to a beta OS is hardly fair. And even so, Tiger comes out on top.
Re:In bed with Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
In case you hadn't noticed, in the past few months this "MS Shill" has been singing the praises of Tiger far more than Longhorn.
In addition, his review actually points out a lot of things that Apple does well that Longhorn tries to copy and gets wrong but, in addition, he points out some other stuff which they do better.
The news here is that Microsoft's biggest fan is slowly backing away from them. If they can't keep the loyal ones, then they need to realise that there could be a problem.
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Inquiring minds want to know, (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Quick Notes... (Score:2, Insightful)
I love MacOS X. I cannot imagine using anything else for desktop work (and I cannot imagine using Windows for anything). But at the end of the day, OS X is still a work in progress. It is [b]not[/b] perfect! As long as we can accept that, we can help Apple build a better OS with our feedback, and that's what we all want.
Unfortunate Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sort of amazed that every mention of Vista or Mac OS in the press focuses entirely on GUI widgets and desktop search (the feature of the month, apparently)- and in comparing these two things between Windows and Mac OS X.
Frankly, I am a fan of both of these OSes (and others), but comparing the two in this way is silly, because their target audiences and development focuses are wildly different.
Sure Vista is going to include some updated UI elements, and this will inevitably generate comparisons with Mac OS, but I believe that for the Windows folks updating the UI is a tiny frilly prize at the end of a much more substantial journey. (I think) Most of the work going into Vista is not related to wow-ing an individual user with the splashy out of box experience (though there will be some of this). Instead, most of the work going on is targeted at corporate IT installations of tens of thousands of machines and the associated management costs. Things like new deployment options, services hardening, re-engineering to provide functionality while reducing attack surface, expanding on multiple layers of management frameworks, expanding on policy enforcement, network access protection, using AES for more and more crypto functions, etc, etc, etc... In some cases Vista will represent a radical advance in the plumbing of the Windows platform.
I guess it is understandable that a reviewer wouldn't be interested in these more important things, focusing entirely on UI widgets, but it is unfortunate that a project as substantial as Vista, one which will likely affect all of us, is only represented in the press with the thought "Now includes desktop search! Sort of like Mac OS!"
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:3, Insightful)
What about Exopsé? (Score:1, Insightful)
What gave it away? (Score:4, Insightful)
What gave it away? The fact the site is named "Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows"?
I actually had my questions about the unbiasedness of the site while I waited for the page to load and noticed the
Re:Not impressed by Tiger (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know that I agree. My sisters both use the dashboard alot. They are not super tech saavy (or any more than girls growing up in an engineer family would be), but they find it useful.
I still like Tiger better than XP, even if work and research dictated that I use XP and Cygwin (it is my last IBM-comp... I am convinced of that now). Features that I love having in Tiger and wish were in XP:
This guy is a fan boy for MS and I will give him credit: he gives Tiger something of a fair shake... kind of. Some of his claims are a bit crazy. Does he actually expect us to believe that MS had the idea for desktop search before Google, etc? I call shenanigans! He claims that the screenshot in here [winsupersite.com] and a 30 second Bill Gates clip Bill Gates clip [winsupersite.com] serve as evidence of MS and desktop search. Yeah right!
Windows had a search, and a crappy one at that. Search is not a new idea, exactly. But Google and others did it differently because the MS way was broken. And despite his review, Windows desktop search is NOT as good as Google (it builds a bigger cache and you can't pick where it goes...grumble). WinFS is/sounds like XML based meta data for files and database related ideas for searching on that meta data. This does not imply "building an index" as much as it implies a hashing schema for file structures. I.e. certain meta data allowing lookups based on hash values for the file.
WinFS is going to be slower... precaching is what makes Google Desktop fast.
But like I said, because Longhorn is so far from release and OS X is four gens deep, these are not even good comparos. Also consider that Darwin runs on multiple CPUs well. With the multi-core processors on the horizon, this is really the future of computing. I think/hope Longhorn/Vista is a disaster and helps to break the MS stranglehold a bit.
Meta-data (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that Apple has chosen, wisely, NOT to do anything with this. They have a really great R&D lab there, there must be a reason that they've never exposed this functionality for an end user. I bet it's just too complex for a user. Who wants to tag the files we create? So you only get the benefit if YOU ACTIVELY do it. What if you just dont understand it?
I understand the power of having fully user editable meta data, but there are just some times when you dont want an end user messing with things like that.
I think that's why apple lets you tag files with a label. It's just simpler, and users can understand it.
Captain Obvious here ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought the whole point of calling something BETA was that this is what you'll release once the major bugs are fixed. In this case, they're treating it like a "feature beta," which from a security standpoint is a nightmare. What ever happened to "test what you fly and fly what you test"?
-paul
Three common OS:es and their capabilities (Score:1, Insightful)
Mac: some included, pay for every upgrade.
Ubuntu: everything included, no need to pay.
Now, what were those choices again?
Re:Quick Notes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Under the Mac OS Finder you can't launch 2 copies of anything, no matter how many times you click on the Dock. Every click just keeps activating the same single instance of the application. Give it a try, you can click once, twice, ten times. You'll never get more than one instance of an application to launch.
The only easy way to launch an application multiple times under the Mac OS Finder is to make a separate copy of the application on your hard drive and launch that. If you don't want to do that then there are ways through the terminal that you can launch multiple instances of an application from one copy on the disk but honestly it's almost never needed. This is a feature of Mac OS by the way, not a limitation. Mac OS is set up for one instance of an application being able to handle the jobs of multiple instances of applications, to simplify the launching and handling of apps.
One of the main ideas of the Mac OS UI is that there are hardly any buttons that say "OK". They are pretty much all verbs that describe what is going to happen when you press the button. For example in save dialogs the buttons are usually "Cancel" and "Save". For the most part you always know what action will be taken when you press a button. This is true of all the programs written by Apple and most third party developers follow this UI convention also. I'm willing to bet any confusion in buttons that you see is a third party application, not an Apple one.
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:5, Insightful)
- I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows XP, despite people saying I would
- I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows 2000, despite people saying I would
- I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows 98, despite people saying I would
- I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows 95, despite people saying I would
In short, everytime someone has said I would require new hardware for a Microsoft operating system release, I have had a perfectly usable system after upgrading to the new OS without buying hardware. Thats what makes me think I won't need to buy new hardware for Vista.And no, Im not running XP on the same hardware I ran Windows 95 on
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:5, Insightful)
The choice of most users is A) what the machine came with when they bought it. Most people don't have the foggiest clue what an operating system is.
Re:desktop search (Score:3, Insightful)
Poster's point is valid whether you "care" about it or not.
Consumer software is an amalgam of relatively incompatible data types and proprietary platforms. Critical mass in the user base is thus very important to the success of a company's software, again, whether you "care" about it or not.
A poor analogy: I'm posting in english, (and I could be wrong) but you'll probably reply in english in order to ensure that your data is properly conveyed. Thus you're adhering to this critical mass pressure to conform, as most posters post in english. You could post in some obscure language (just as good as English or better, no doubt) but what would be the point?
Interestingly, Bill Gates has done interviews where he blatantly acknowledges Apple's innovation as its competitive advantage. In fact, he's been a valiant supporter of MSFT products for Apple when they struggled as a manufacturer. One can make the argument (poorly, albeit) that Microsoft's continued support of Office for Apple products during the lean years staved the company's death. Now that Apple has moved into consumer electronics, the dependence is less important. Gates also acknowledges that they look to Apple as an incubator for innovation which they then incorporate into their own products. This is all well documented. That makes Gates smart - why reinvent the wheel? For what? Microsoft doesn't seek to innovate - for better or worse - they seek to dominate. Apple is good at what it does, and thus far, Microsoft has been good at what it does.
Again, I submit, that poster's point about critical mass being advantageous to the producer as correct. Again, I submit that selfsame critical mass exerts pressure to conform on the industry as data types become standardized.
Microsoft's real threat is google. A google barebones OS perfectly integrated with an increasingly impressive suite of server side apps... and let's not forget that they'd release the OS for free. This is the only way I can see that Linux, any iteration thereof, can defeat the OS giants. Microsoft knows it, and they will try to crush Google at every chance going forward.
Again, I humbly submit, your post is not insightful.
They should have a disclaimer on the link (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm sorry, because I keep wanting to buy a Mac, but they're f-ing SLOW. Maybe they can run Photoshop filters like no one's business, but I actually spend a lot more time manipulating files in the Finder/Desktop or whatever than I do actively running filters or rendering frames or something.
All my Mac friends (and for the record I used to be one -- I can see my SE sitting on a shelf 5 feet away from me as I write this) are like "you can turn off all the slow Finder animations," but no one at the Mac store has ever been able to demonstrate this to me. Whereas with XP, in like two minutes I had it looking like Windows 95 with no time-wasting animations or giant, child-size icons.
I know this is going to come off as a troll and I'm sorry: I really want to buy a Mac, but the UI speed seems slower than it was in System 7.0 on my Centris, and that's just frustrating.
Simplicity vs. Completeness (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, so the argument here is that one of Vista's big advantages over Tiger is that it ships with pre-made Virtual Folders. I can think of lots of reasons why Apple didn't do that.
Apple's fervently pursuing switchers, users who are new to the Mac. Try explaining the difference between folders and smart folders to someone who's not, as people often say, "good with computers." Tell them something like, "well, OK, you see, the file's there, but it's not really there. It's actually in a real folder somewhere else." You're likely to get a glazed expression from that one, and possibly an existential argument about "is anything really where it is?"
The moral: smart folders are an advanced feature. People who want them will know how to find them. People who don't understand them won't have to worry about them.
Again, from TFA:
Spotlight relies on Spotlight Importers, little bundles of code that know how to read files and return metadata about them. More often than not, the importers are written by the original application designer, who should know better than anyone what bits of data are most important in a document. Apple's implicit position is that metadata should be either derived from the document on its own, or that metadata should be provided in some manner by the creating application (which the importer can then retrieve).
Again, should people have to care what "metadata" is? There are lots of ways the programs themselves can gather all the metadata you'd care about. Standard info, such as the file's author and what-not, can easily be provided automatically by the program. That's the way it should be, because programs can automatically add relevant metadata that improves searches without the user ever having to do a thing. Plus, there's a matter of confidence. If Vista's got a great big box for me to enter metadata, should I take that to mean that there's a good chance Vista doesn't really know how to index my files? If that's the case, then forget about it. I'm not going to add metadata to every document I've ever written just so I can find it.
The moral of the story is this: having a wide arsenal of tools is great. But many users don't know how to use them, don't need them, and don't much care to learn. Vista seems to favor forcing users to learn how to use these new features. A forcing function is a good idea sometimes, but forcing users to use features that just complicate their experience is foolishness. The crux of Thurott's complaints against Tiger is that it's not complicated enough. There aren't enough exposed features. I've learned that in UI design, the more buttons you give someone to push, the better the chance is that they'll pick the wrong one, and the better the chance they'll blame you for it. And they'll be right.
Re:Apple/Microsoft comparisons are moot (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know if you can label "Spyware and Viruses" as a feature.
But seriously most non-tech people don't really care about how much ram, hard drive space, or ghz a computer runs at beyond what the sales person tells them they need at the store.
Most of their experience is how bad the computer treats them after they buy it... As you are well aware of many of these same people will not even bother to try to fix it and then just buy a new one.
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Where were those people when Nextstep was available for x86? And BeOS, before the focus shift? And OS/2?
No, I think the market has shown little passion for non-Windows operating systems.
Undermines the Whole Article (Score:4, Insightful)
"They never would have been announced during 2004 had Microsoft not first revealed that it was making the feature a standard feature of the next Windows."
This is patently false; Apple hired Dominic Giampaolo [wikipedia.org], developer of BeFS (which was specifically developed to have the sort of 'fast search' that is finally showing up in mainstream operating systems), in February of 2002. The intent was clear, back in 2002, that it was Apple's intent to bring the innovations of BeFS to OS X, a year before Microsoft announced the feature.
Phrasing the chain of events as "When Microsoft announced [it] in October 2003, the race began." is ridiculous. Apple effectively announced the plan 18 months prior, and even then it was clear that it was too late to make it into 10.2, the 10.3 release was unlikely, and that therefore... it would show up in 10.4. Just like it did.
More damning, though, is that Microsoft has announced this feature a number of times, every time they've announced that a future OS (starting with NT 5, IIRC) would feature a database-driven filesystem. Why didn't anyone else jump on getting the feature first then, rather than this time? I'll tell you why: it's a hard feature that took a lot of time to work on, and every one had been working on it the whole time.
The real problem here, though, is that I bet Paul Thurrott doesn't know any of this. All he knows is, Spotlight Search was announced when 10.4 was announced, which was after Microsoft announced it. And without looking at it any closer, he decided he knew the whole story and that he could speak authoritatively on the subject. I can't be bothered to read the rest of the article if it has the same empty authoritative voice.
2nd Most Important Feature (Score:2, Insightful)
New System running Windows: $250 from Dell, hell, let's go extra conservative at $400 monitor included.
New System running Tiger: Mac Mini at $499 (2.5 inch slow hard drive, one stick of RAM, no monitor), or eMac at $799 (can't change monitor).
Availability encompasses many things.
Re:Does that include startup? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:desktop search and Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's real threat is google.
This gets said a lot, but I'm not convinced it's true, and the fact that Microsoft is paranoid about it doesn't change my skepticism -- Microsoft is paranoid about everyone. Google does not have a desktop platform, they have an advertising service.
As John Gruber put it recently [daringfireball.net], "What makes something a platform is that you can't take it away without the stuff that's built on it falling down." You can port programs from Windows, but you can't just move them onto another platform. They need Windows. What has Google produced that meets that litmus test? Changing your web site from using Google Search or Google Maps to Yahoo's equivalents is changing a few lines of code somewhere; Google Mail and Google Talk rely on the fact that moving to/from them is trivial; Google's few actual software products are for Windows.
Google makes virtually all of their money from advertising, either by driving you to their web site or by getting their ads in front of you on other web sites. They're really good at what they do, they've got a bunch of best-in-class web applications, but for the foreseeable future, they're competing with Yahoo! and other portal/search providers. They may be competing with Microsoft's MSN and Hotmail divisions, but not on the desktop.
Re:2nd Most Important Feature (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Apple/Microsoft comparisons are moot (Score:3, Insightful)
We are a small shop, (500 PCs) and we just this summer upgraded to XP. (Once the SP2 was released.)
After all the work we've put into cleaning up spyware, a couple of virus infections, updating and configuring patches, there's no thinking about switching to anything from a (relatively) stable XP SP2.
I would imagine there are other shops like us out there.
Re:Big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
The short answer: yes.
The longer answer: the issue isn't limited to "finding files on their own computer," although it's easy to misinterpret it that way. Usually, finding an individual file isn't that hard, assuming you already know what the file is. What if...
The fact is that the standard "directory/filename" method of organizing data requires a lot of consistent upkeep to work well over time, and is just terrible at storing information that other apps want to keep organized for you (eg, any mail application). Want to see this in action? Go to any medium-or-larger sized organization, browse to their file server, and drill down into a couple of random folders. Point at the screen and ask someone to tell you what's stored there. I'll bet money that the majority of people will have no idea what they're looking at, and it only gets worse once the people who put the files there leave, or the projects get stale - tons of files noone needs, sitting there because noone thinks they have the authority to say "I can go ahead and delete this now."
One more brief example: I recently bought the PDF version of Agile Web Devlopment with Rails [pragmaticprogrammer.com] online, and saved it - along with every "beta book" they sent me - in my "~/Documents/Documentation/" folder. Not hard to remember that at all, but it's still faster for me to hit command-space, type "agile rails", and click on the first result, than it is for me to double click the finder, drill down to that directory, and double-click the file.
Re:Quick Notes... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sure it's got something to do with Apple hiring Dominic Giampolo to work on HFS+ after Be folded. The filesystem (BFS) he designed for BeOS was doing searches similar to Spotlight, almost 10 years ago.
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:3, Insightful)
And to be fair, premature optimisation is the root of all evil. Windows has been "optimised" from the get go, with the downside being that adding things too it tended to result in hacks and cruft. I kind of appreciate the philosphy of aiming for a good architecture and then optimising that as you go.
Your point remains quite valid though: there's no magic to OS X's speed improvements, it merely a matter of actually optimising what they've got.
Jedidiah.
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Slow Finder animations" is the biggest crock. I can't even click a stopwatch fast enough to time it, and it isn't as if your cursor is frozen or you can't go on to do the next thing. Command-Shift-N, Command-Delete - no animation, a folder appears, then disappears, all in less than a second.
Even if there was a real delay, I've wasted more time trying to get wireless networking going on a Windows machine than I've EVER used waiting for some icons to plot when opening a folder with lots of files. There are delays when doing that in Windows as well, so I don't know why you think that Mac OS X is any slower.
If Vista is anywhere close to as good as a Mac at configuring a network connection, it will be a vast improvement.
Bogus claims on Spotlight by this --Paul Thurrott (Score:3, Insightful)
This guy --Paul Thurrott, is pretty awesome, yeah? :-)
He claims that the race for development was on after Microsoft announced integrated desktop search functionality in Longhorn in October 2003. Then he goes on to say about these products "They would never have been announced in 2004 had Microsoft not first revealed that it was making the feature a standard feature of the next Windows."
And then he goes on to say "If you go back and look at the WWDC 2004 keynote video, you'll see Steve Jobs demo virtually every single major new feature in Tiger, A year later, when the product actually shipped, little had changed and nothing major was added."
What an interesting claim!
Let's say for the sake of argument that he is right. OK?
What he actually says is that in the time from October 2003 till May 2004 - basically 6 months, and I guess Apple did not get the sourcecode from Microsoft; Apple did not only figure out the more or less complete UI of Spotlight, but also implemented a kernel level, system wide search engine almost to perfection. 6 months!
What did Microsoft do in these 6 months? - and I guess they must have had some code and prototypes for this great idea since they'd decided to make it an integral part of their OS? Dunno!
Mr Paul Thurrott writer, the only thing we have seen from Microsoft, and it is soon 18 months since WWDC 2004, is a half baked beta. According to yourself Apple did the job almost to perfection in 6 months. Go figure!
Nah, the way Microsoft does system development kinda resembles this:
Optional point: Slip in a patent filing, just before Apple gets around to do it. Or better on Apple announcement day.
Wicked tongues said some time ago that the reason why WinFS was pulled from Vista, was because Microsoft did not have anyone they could copy the implementation from. Now that they are about to figure out the combination of HFS+ and Spotlight, it is safe to put it back on the table again. But not in Vista, in case they have not quite figured out the logic by ship in November 2006.
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:2, Insightful)
Reboots? No. XP only requires reboots after certain hardware and/or software installs, and runs. Why is it I have to restart X to change my mousepointer? How about if I want to switch the panel clock from 24ht time to 12hr time? Why the heck would that require a restart of the GUI?
Security? Talk to me when your OS has 95% of the market share. We can argue it all day, but neither of us really knows for sure until that's the case.
Software? Show me something for the Mac where there isn't a Windows version that as good or better. To me, there's just no reason to switch. They can port OSX to anything they want, unless there's a real reason to switch, I won't do it.
Resources? (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea of splitting up into separate "programs" (processes) is that each is isolated by hardware from others. So an error (bug) will disturb one but not others.
The OS itself (and, I believe that MAC OS X core does this as well) shares code pages anyway. The incremental cost of a new "program" is then the data used, and the scheduling (which is typically insignificant).
The ONLY thing is that it becomes difficult to share material (documents) BETWEEN the processes (because of the isolation).
In a system that shares the single application instance, I imagine that you spend a lot more time saving important material.
But really, the resource sharing is done by the kernel anyway, so that isn't a valid argument. (and, as an aside, it is possible to determine if an application is running and being serviced by an X server, and the open instance can be vectored to the running instance. It is also possible to find a machine on the local net that is already running your application, and vector the execution to that machine, which is something I used to do to reduce application start-up times, and something that the original commenter may have done as well).
I agree that MAC OS X GUI isn't too shabby. The transparent terminals are a feature to die for. The other features? Pretty much ho-hum, in my opinion.
Ratboy.
Vista Peetration Will Be than XP's (Score:3, Insightful)
Simply, it has more to doing with the corporate hardware aging cycle than to a repudiation of xp. If you go back to the year 2000, a lot of companies just upgraded hardware and software because of the Y2K fears. XP came out a year later so it is not unreasonable to assume xp came out too early in the aging cycle to motivate companies to upgrade.
My company didn't upgrade to win2k. We went from nt and win 98 to 2003 on the server side and xp with new desktop hardware leapfrogging win2k. Count on a lot of companies leapfrogging xp to vista as longhorn has been hyped for a couple of years now.
Whatever happens though, they won't be upgrading to OSX products.
Re:i hate to take their side (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering how many times the .DOC file format has changed, can you still open up .doc files you made in Word 1.0 with Word 2k3? The answer is YES, so the closed format and not being able to view it in 10 years is mute. You don't think MS will support their own formats 10 years from now?
First, just because they "support" one format going forward does not mean they "support" all of them. There are plenty of deprecated Microsoft file formats that are no longer readable. Second, have you ever opened a really old .doc file with a new version of Word? The fonts and layout are invariable messed up and and mathematical equations are gibberish in Word documents just two versions old. I have a number of four year old .doc files bequeathed to me at work and only about half of them display correctly. I have three that will not even open in Word, but will in OpenOffice. So to answer your question, no I don't think I'll be able to properly view MS's PDF replacement files after 10 years. And no I don't think MS removing all competition from yet another set of applications and then leaving them to stagnate along with much of the rest of computing is a good idea.
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:3, Insightful)
The wizard thing is just, in my mind, a fundemental problem. With Windows connecting to a wireless network requires a couple of dialogues and a pop-up. OSX just finds the network and connects. There's a subtle difference, but I find it all over the place. Yes, you can dismiss wizards and even disable them, but some are the primary way to use things, like digital cameras.
Furthermore, ACDSee and Photoshop Album are both handled by iPhoto--which is free, how much were the two programs?--and I can't think of an equivalent to GetRight, but I'm sure something exists.
Lastly, you don't need to know anyone who has a Mac, you can borrow one [macobserver.com] for 30 days.
You may not like OSX, you may not like the Mac Mini or any of the other machines, but I think it would be interesting for you to try one. And, I know Chevy mechanics--good ones at least--who also work on Fords.
At least make a honest choice.
Re:Vista is a total rip-off of Tiger... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep, I've got both. On a clean install, XP isn't too bad - boots up quickly, etc. However over time XP gets slower, whereas OS X doesn't.
Launching an application? Seems quick enough on my iBook - could be a little quicker, but not anything majorly different from my 2GHz Athlon XP system.
You must have a pretty poor folder layout if you spend a lot of time manipulating files. I tend to save them in the correct location in the first place myself. As for the desktop
What slow Finder animations? You do realise that effects like the genie minimisation are actually worthwhile features, they show you where the window has minimised to on the dock. They're quick anyway.
Great, you can make XP look like a dog. Good on you. In the meantime I'll have my realtime, extremely fast, good looking, alpha-channel windows on my Apple laptop. And what giant child-size icons? You do know you can set the size of the icons?
Oh wait, but maybe you are just trolling, because you can't have actually
Mac OS X has issues, some of the applications have some bad things - iPhoto - to save a photo in your library somewhere else you have to use the Export menu item. Fair enough, except this isn't under the File menu. WTF?!