http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No4GzXzNIY8



*Hides from Kate*

__________________
Lawrence

Well, yeah, I mean windows machines are so great!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgriT...elated&search=

Ah the infamous USB demo on Win98, I haven't seen that for a few years. Just ever so embarrassing for our friend Bill.

I knock Windows as much as anyone but it's one of those necessary evils you have to put up with in life.

My OS of choice? FreeBSD, it may be free but Yahoo and Sony use it on their servers and there's even rumours that M$ use it on some of their internal servers. Incidentally it's what MAC OS X is built around but Jobs in his infinite wisdom decided to cripple it my locking the kernel If Apple hadn't of done this then it would be a much more powerful and flexible OS than it is today. Locking the kernel on FreeBSD is like sawing the legs of a Chippendale table.

__________________
Lawrence

Kate, I think Lawrence would secretly really like a Big Mac [no pun intended], and I know he's owned an Apple before, because he gave me one.

__________________



http://www.ediblegraphics.com

"Gave it away" says a lot.

__________________
Lawrence

PCs have their good points (do you have an hour or so to wait while I think of one?), but having switched four years ago I doubt that I'll ever go back to using one as my main machine. Installing and uninstalling programs on a Mac is a dream - nothing to do but drop them onto the Mac HD Icon, no endless screens asking what you want to do or where to store it, no need for Wizards who never are. To uninstall you simply drag the unwanted program to the trash can and it's gone. No little warnings bobbing up to ask if you really want to delete a dll file that 'might' be needed by other applications, no registry to mess around with. Bliss! Add to that the fact that more and more buyers are switching from PC to Mac year by year, plus the fact that both Windows and Macintosh programs can now be run side by side, and what advantage is a PC left with?

Besides none.

Kate

You seem to confuse the terms PC and Windows!

Try running a Linux/BSD server on a Mac! What does the majority of the internet run on? not Macs!

What happens when the mother board packs up on a Mac and the warranty has expired? Oh dear, looks like you need to buy a new Mac. On a PC, just pop down to your local PC store, pick up a new one for ?60 and you're back in business the same day.

What about essential business apps like SmartStamp? (I used to use daily)
From the Royal Mail website

Unfortunately, SmartStamp? does not currently run on Apple Macs. If you have an Apple Mac, try online postage

what about drivers for some of the less common pieces of H/W?

I think those points answer your question.

The Mac could have been and should have been a great machine, but Apple crippled it. They took one of the best operating systems ever and removed the bits that make it great, then they stuck it on a propriety piece of hardware so you have to rely on Apple for everything.

The greatest machine Apple build was the AppleII and contrary to popular belief, they didn't invent windows style operating systems with the Mac, there were versions around in the 70s. They were just the first to mass market it.

Apple's are more about style than substance, it's like owning a Bang & Oulfson stereo, it looks good, you can show it off to your mates and it has an over inflated price tag, but the sound isn't all that.

__________________
Lawrence

Nuts! The only reason to run Linux is to get away from Windows and Bill. With a Mac I don't need to.

The only reason motherboards are so cheap for a PC is because so many of them fail, they can be churned out like liquorice allsorts. How many times have you heard of a Mac's motherboard failing?

Why would the average person need to use SmartStamp? Me, I support my local post office and hope it won't get axed, that way I actually get a parcel receipt to claim on in case anything gets lost.

And as of now I haven't found any bits of hardware that I'd need a driver for which isn't already installed - so no, those points don't answer my question they just raise a few more.

Yes, in design they leave PCs waiting at the bus stop, but the highly-priced claim doesn't hold water. You can certainly get cheap emachines and others of that ilk, but go for a high spec PC and you will shed just as many pounds/dollars as you would spend on a Mac.

And finally, a Mac is for life - a PC is there only until the next MS upgrade, so unless you're a dedicated gamer, or want to d/l streaming video et al, a PC has no visible advantages. And now - courtesy of Intel and Steve Jobs - you can run Windows on a Mac and get all the 'joys' of a PC without the grief.

Only thing that worries me is if Windows brings its favourite blue screen along with it...

Kate - dedicated Mac supporter.

I've never had a PC MB fail on me and I've been building my own PCs since the 80's, you get what you pay for with MBs so it's alway worth spending a little more to get a quality one. No one ever hears about Mac MBs failing because when a Mac dies there's not much point investigating the cause of it because there's not a lot you can do about it.

Anyone who uses the post a lot could benefit from using SmartStamp (Don't forget this is an eCommerce forum ). Before I started using it I used to have to queue in the PO for 20mins then stand there while all the packages were weighed and stamped which could often take another 10-20mins, while this was happening I'd have to put up with snide comments and dirty looks from everyone stuck behind me. When I started using SmartStamp I could print the stamps off in a batch, stick them on the respective packages then drop them off in a bag at the PO. Up to 40mins a day was saved six days a week. At Christmas this saving could be an hour or more a day. If you value your time then SmartStamp is the smart way to do it.

I can name two pieces of H/W off the top of my head that I own that you can't get drivers for on a Mac, My PIC chip programmer and my Plotter Cutter, there's probably more that won't work but I can't be bothered to look them up for the sake of this thread,

As for cost against performance, I think the Gadget show demonstration showed that you just don't get the same performance per pound from a Mac, I could probably find the clip on YouTube if you still doubt me Of course you can get cheap Macs as Nick can verify, I gave him one for free! I wouldn't have done the same with one of my PCs!

You mention the famous BSOD, well you're a bit behind the times, that went out with Win98/ME.

You can use a Mac for making pretty pictures and the odd video clip but if you want to use your computer for much more than that then you're better off with a PC.

Don't get me wrong, I still think MS sucks but you've got to look at the practical side of things.

__________________
Lawrence

I'm with Kate, we've got class

__________________



http://www.ediblegraphics.com

Class is no substitute for content.

__________________
Lawrence

I totally disagree. Can I ask exactly how many Mac motherboards you have personally known to fail? As for Macs 'dying' - I haven't yet been to any funerals but I suppose some ripe old-agers succumb occasionally.

The main reason for not using smart stamp still stands. There is no proof of postage. Perhaps if the alternative was to stand in a long queue at a main post office I might change my mind, but I don't, I use a local sub-PO and hope the added weight will help it avoid the coming cuts. That said, your packages were bulky and mine are not. Horses for courses.

I don't think bits of hardware designed specifically for PCs can be counted as negatives where a Mac is concerned. To begin with, exactly how useful would these bits of gear be to the average Mac user? Mac users are, on the whole, media people, and there isn't a PC out there that can match a Mac in that environment.

Macs are not expensive in comparison to the same specifications in a PC - and as you yourself have admitted, in design they wipe the board. As far as I'm concerned they wipe it in usability, too. This from someone who has used PCs since the ZX80 came out. Certainly there are some things that can't be found on a Mac - amend that to 'couldn't' since they will now run Windows in addition to OS X. Spider solitaire for example. Fragments of supposedly uninstalled programmes that can mess up smooth running. The need to defrag. I could go on. :-)

And speaking of Gadget shows - remember how Vista died so fast at its launch show? And I can match you on cheapness. As Nick got a cost-free Mac, so have others gained free PCs from me. No chance that will happen to the Mac.

Nope, the blue screen didn't stop with ME. XP also produced the BSOD - and ME was a total crock from start to finish. As for pretty pictures, well, if they can't be produced on a PC everyone here is trouble. More of a slog of course, but you can get there in the end.

And what is it that a PC can do that a Mac cannot? Outside of Geekdom, that is. Being, as you said, practical of course. :-)

Kate

Who knows what causes a Mac to die? Most of the owners have never opened the case and even if they did, it would make little difference because there wouldn't be a whole lot they could do about it.

A plotter cutter can hardly be described as a piece of H/W designed specifically for a PC, it's a piece of hardware that is mainly used in the graphics and design industry (Mac's home turf) yet the one I have has no Mac drivers available for it. It's certainly not a geek peripheral, it's used by exactly the type of people who the Mac is marketed at yet there is no support on the Mac for it, well there wasn't the last time I checked.

It is true that if you want a receipt for postage then you still need to queue in the PO if using SmartStamp, but when you weigh the amount of time queueing in the PO against the cost of replacing "missing" packages then in my case the advantages far outweighed the disadvantages. Time is money after all. If I had been selling other good of a more "nickable" nature then I would have be queueing with everyone else or using a courier. It depends on what you are selling, but with a Mac you don't even have this option available to you.

I don't suffer from left over pieces of departed S/W as I tend to tidy up the registry and delete the left over bits of badly written programs by hand after an uninstall, though admittedly this option is within everyone's ability.

You may be able to run some Windows apps on a Mac, by no means all of them. I'm sure you'll find an extensive list on the net if you look for it.

As for BSOD, as far as I can remember I haven't suffered it on XP, even before SP1. I do agree with you on one point though, ME was the biggest load of tosh that MS has produced since DOS4. I've never used Vista and have no great desire to either. I'm no defender of Windows, it sucks in many ways and as previously mentioned the architecture the PC is based on was held back for years by lack of forward thinking by both MS and IBM though I assume in an age when every "PC" used different H/W and operating systems they had no idea how dominant they would become in the industry and the legacy they would leave in their wake.

The perfect "PC" would be built using a decedent of the 68000 processor, which the Mac does and using Unix or one of it's derivatives as an OS which the Mac also does, but what Apple did wrong is to build a system using a closed architecture so you are dependent on one company for your H/W and they took what is probably the best operating system ever written (FreeBSD) and crippled it by disabling it's most powerful features (OMG, they've killed Hexley! ). If the H/W was more open, used a decent core OS where you can access it's Kernel and there was more support then I might be tempted to use one myself.

Despite it's many flaws, a Win/PC combo is the most practical system to use in the home or office, I've never worked in a design studio so I won't comment on it's effectiveness there. I would like to see this situation change but I can't see it happening in the near future.

To answer your last question "And what is it that a PC can do that a Mac cannot? Outside of Geekdom, that is. Being, as you said, practical of course. :-)"
How about run the largest media and design resource known to mankind? The internet! Is that practical enough?

This little vid I found on YouTube sums it up nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mJ5k...related&search=

__________________
Lawrence

My brother swears by macs.Never used one myself to be honest, but his does windows too. Not even getting into this argument though , think the guys are just trying to get you to bite Kate, My brothers original macs are still going strong too

__________________

Childrens Fancy Dress Costumes and Party Dresses
Childrens Costumes and Dancewear

Macs don't die, like old soldiers they simply fade away. :-)
A plotter-cutter add-on isn't needed for a Mac, that facility is already included in Illustrator and Corel Draw. And on the new Mac Pros all Windows apps can be run - even the plotter-cutter you mentioned. And running Linux is a snip. As for running the Internet, well a racehorse wouldn't be used to pull a cart, would it? :-)

The oldest Macs that can run Apple's latest operating system have just celebrated their eighth birthday, yet all but a handful of the oldest Vista-ready PCs were still just kit and components this time last year. Macs are often criticised for being overpriced, but when you spread the cost over their respective working lives, the Mac comes out cheaper than a PC.

Macs can crash, but the tightly controlled Unix-based operating system is far more capable when it comes to isolating and terminating problematic applications than Windows. PCs come from the baby-and-bathwater school of conflict management and throw out the whole lot - data, app and OS - in exchange for a garish blue screen and a forced reboot.

The very first version of Office was out a year before the PC, and it continues to innovate under Mac OS X, with many features appearing on Apple hardware first. Plus, the operating system's built-in support for creating PDFs means Mac users have been rolling out their spreadsheets as Acrobat files for more than half a decade, while Windows workers have only just been granted that feature with Office 2007 (and even then, it's an optional download).

And then there's security. For one thing the operating system is built on a Unix core, with all the restricted and tiered permissions management that affords. For another, the fact it has a smaller user base than Windows counts in its favour, since for the last 20 years hackers and script kiddies have largely left it alone. Long may it last.

As for other OS apps, there are Mac-specific builds of several Linux distributions, but the real feather in the Mac's cap is the fact you can run Windows, Linux and Mac OS X simultaneously, using virtualisation. This is a world away from the lame emulation afforded PC users by Virtual PC, and it gives alternative operating systems direct access to the Apple hardware. So, while Windows can barely run three native applications at once, with a Mac you can run The GIMP under Red Hat, Keynote under OS X and Access under Windows on the same screen, at the same time.

Another plus is that the hardware and the operating system (and often the software) are all made by a single company - Apple - and so they're guaranteed to work well together. The OS is optimised for the computer line-up, the mouse and hardware are designed with the OS in mind, and the applications are tuned to take advantage of every tweak and innovation in both. Only a Mac can deliver a smooth, well-thought-out experience end-to-end, and only with a Mac do you know exactly where to go for help and support. With a PC you'll be batted back and forth between Microsoft and whoever made your ugly beige box, as they spend the next month blaming each other for your problem.

And then there?s the way people view a Mac. Take the small and large screens for example. Hollywood has a tendency to make its baddies use PCs, and its heroes use Macs. Fact. That's why Jack Bauer and his CTU colleagues on 24 solve major terrorist threats using machines built for OS X. And when Jeff Goldblum wanted to infect the Independence Day mothership with a virus to save the world from destruction, what did he use? A PowerBook 5300. Except, of course, it's difficult to find a virus on a Mac...

Case rested.

Kate

The last time I saw a Mac in a box, the box wasn't large enough to include a 5' piece of hardware!



And I still can't find a Mac driver for mine.

I shall reply to your other comments later.

__________________
Lawrence