Asymmetrical Information

I'm not a huge fan of Macs, but at least they offer an alernative to Windows. Microsoft products are rubbish.

That's funny. The polemic is an underappreciated art form.

(For what it's worth, I'm typing this on a MacBook, which I love.)

Yes, this was very funny. I never learned anything about Macs -- mainly because I have indeed had this experience that Brooker mentions, of going into the game store, looking at shelf after shelf of PC games, and seeing the pathetically meager shelf of games for the Mac. No thanks! Not going there!

the main thing I learned from the article is that the British casting choices have the same effect as the American ones - to make me feel like by owning a Mac I've become smug and obnoxious. anyone who knows me can vouch that I would be like this with or without my computer.

I've never been fond of Macs, probably because all my experiences with them have been bad. On reflection, my experience with the school Macs hasn't been any worse than my experience with the school PCs, but I have my own PC and I know what it's like to work on a decent Windows system that's set up so that it's actually usable. Never really done that with a Mac, but the effort needed to figure out how to make everything work right probably isn't worth it.

Macs do have one big advantage: a native implementation of a decent command shell. But if that's really what you want, you can either get Cygwin, a port of a bunch of GNU tools including the Bash shell, or just switch all the way to Linux, which isn't that hard to learn, runs on the hardware you already have, is free, and doesn't launch annoying graphics in your face and attempt to prevent you from doing actual work.

Disclaimer: I find the US adverts to be quite amusing. I bought my first Mac after wrestling with installing a Microsoft product on Microsoft Windows98 SE for two or three weeks, only to wind up with an unstable system that crashed with stunning monotony. Online help didn't solve it. Helpline didn't solve it. It still isn't solved, but I don't care because OS X solved my problem completely. I don't miss having games on that platform because it's for work anyway, but I do undestand that overclockers, hotrodders and high end gamers are not going to be happy with what Mac sells.

Now, rants about Mac vs. PC in terms of "I sit down to use this, and get annoyed because..." had some substance 20 years ago, when PC's still used DOS and had a command line, while Mac's were all about icons and drop 'n drag. But ever since Windows 3.1 came out, the user interface has been ever more GUI on both platforms. What's the diff between double clicking on a tool icon on a Windows box vs. doing the same thing on a Mac box? Not one heck of a lot. So now the difference is under the hood: can you do stuff using scripts and . files in ASCII, or must you resort to magic canopeners that reveal what's hidden inside of those .DLL binaries? Returning to what drove me away from Microsoft, do applications designed for the O/S load onto the platform with ease and boot seamlessly? All the stuff I've put onto Macs works first time, every time. No way that's true of the stuff I've put onto Windows boxes, from 3.1 to 98 to 2000. So of the two alternatives, I find it a lot easier to get stuff done, and done the first time, on the Mac platform than on the Windows one.

The third alternative, I guess on the gripping hand, is Linux. Happily, the gnomes of Redmond can't keep you from installing it on a dualboot drive and thus having a real O/S to work with. Unhappily, different distributions of Linux have different bugs/features/etc. Amusingly, I know several system administrators who keep a CD Rom distribution of Linux around specifically to boot from on virus-infested Windows machines as the first step in any "cleanup". I believe that distro can be loaded onto a USB device of sufficient size (1 GB or larger) and if the PC in question will boot off of the USB port, one can avoid using Windows entirely, even on machines where that's the only thing installed. That's got to be fun.

Oh, criminy, I'm going to be wasting search time now to find the Fawlty Towers map for Counterstrike...and I don't even own the game.

I can see why desperately cool people who only use their computers for myspace and flash games would prefer Macs. While I don't particularly like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs has me convinced that there are levels of asshole I have yet to encounter. And, since I never learned carpentry, gardening, or, well, anything useful, I enjoy putting my own computers together. Steve won't let you do that. Now if only people would learn not to click "yes" on every dialog box that pops up in their web browsers or while installing software asking them if they would like to install a FREE COPY of IdentityHacker and Virus Plantation toolbar helper . . .

I don't care how fancy and superior they might be, Macs are too damn expensive.

AT writes:
I can see why desperately cool people who only use their computers for myspace and flash games would prefer Macs.

Huh. I wrote my MS thesis on a Mac, have no myspace account and don't play flash games. So, well, sorry 'bout that.

I enjoy putting my own computers together. Steve won't let you do that.

Truth: hardware hacker/overclocker/hotrodder all are well served by the open architecture of the Wintel box. Stuff doesn't always work the first time, though.

Now if only people would learn not to click "yes" on every dialog box that pops up in their web browsers or while installing software asking them if they would like to install a FREE COPY of IdentityHacker and Virus Plantation toolbar helper .

That's a good first step, but as long as security is basically a word that people mention in passing, usually in terms of "Oh, yes, we at Microsoft care about security!" while writing code with more security holes in it than it would take to fill the Albert Hall, it will still be all too easy to fill up a Windows box with spyware, bots, zombies, spiders, pornspamservers & other malware.

Sure, "Secure Unix" is a contradiction in terms, but it's still easier to button either an OS X or a Linux box down than a Microsoft one.

The real irony is that the operating system on your own personal computer of choice matters less today than basically ever in the entire era of personal computing. I wonder whether people don't seem any less defensive (or offensive, as the case may be) about their choice of same in spite of that, or because of it.

Those Mac ads have always amused me, what with the nerd representing the PC. ('cause, what do nerds know about computers?)

I haven't used a modern Mac, but I do get the distinct impression that Mac users self-censor the bad bits in order to protect their psychological investment. I did buy an iPod a year ago. I like it pretty well, but it did not quite live up to the considerable hype. It has its bugs and quirks, and iTunes (for PC) genuinely sucks. Quicktime (again, for PC) is similarly obnoxious and invasive.

Anyone who uses "they only have one mouse button" as a complaint about Macs hasn't seen a non-laptop Mac in at least five years.

I knew a guy once who would always tell me that I should buy a BMW like he did, because doing so made "a statement about yourself".

I came to the conclusion that people who bought products to make statements about themselves were mostly saying they were A-holes.

Even though I use a PC, I hate both Windows and Macs. I took the time and trouble to learn DOS, and the best games and useful programs were (are) DOS games.

So now M'Soft had come out with Vista, which is even worse for me because it (1) changes the look of the beast and (2) introduces new features I will never use. No thanks.

"Anyone who uses "they only have one mouse button" as a complaint about Macs hasn't seen a non-laptop Mac in at least five years."

But laptops are the only platforms where it matters: a desktop mouse can be replaced for $5, but there's no perfect substitute for a laptop mouse.

But if that's really what you want, you can either get Cygwin, a port of a bunch of GNU tools including the Bash shell, or just switch all the way to Linux

Or get Windows Services for UNIX. It was made freely available a couple years ago and can be downloaded from Microsoft. It's based on Interix and possibly doesn't give you quite as much of the *NIX fold as Cygwin, but you have a fully functional CLI that does one thing better: it interfaces directly to the NT kernel, rather than running as an emulation layer.

The logical alternative to the PC is not the Mac, it is Linux.

The problem being Linux lacks all the handy dandy features designed for consumers that the PC has. And there are different dialects (distributions)-- shades of the old UNIX wars.

But the Mac is, like Windows, another closed operating system and user interface. So when it goes wrong, you are basically stuffed.

Linux is far more robust and reliable than either, and is supported by a highly talented and dedicated global Linux community.

Read 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' for some good thoughts on all this.

I expect over time that more and more commercial computing will migrate to Linux, leaving only the individual users and the front end users using Windows machines.

Mac I suspect will remain a marginal group, focused on the visual communications community (writing, publishing etc.).

Add to that, I think this is why Microsoft has never crushed the Mac.

It's too useful, from a competition law point of view, to argue in court that they have a real competitor.

Linux on the other hand, they have done everything possible to impede or crush. Giving away software to governments, opening up their source code to the Chinese, financing SCO, a bankrupt shell company, so it can pursue its litigation against *all* Linux users.

Microsoft can see the danger in Linux.

Mac isn't even a distraction to them.