Death to Bill Gates...

Started by Harvey Birdman, October 10, 2007, 10:47:02 AM

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Cyber-Angel

Did you know just for the sake of interest that Microsoft own the Patent (Granted 1994) for the Double Mouse click that nearly every UI happens to use except  some that use the single click.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel   

efflux

I never knew that. This is one thing I don't like on my Mac. The mighty mouse. It has a 360 navigation ball which is a cool idea but they chose to use this absurd tiny little ball which gets dirt in it and stops functioning. You can't open it to clean it but I'll forgive them for that since everything else is great.

For Windows users, one thing I consider crucial is Norton Ghost. You install Windows and immediately ghost the whole system to another drive and then you can do it again with all your software. When Windows screws up you simply start ghost, it reboots and restores the whole system in a couple of minutes. However why on earth should you need to do that? In OSX you can do the same thing except the functionality is in the OS without third party software. Have I ever once needed this backup? No.

efflux

#17
This is amazing software:

http://www.nomachine.com/

It's Linux server only though but with Mac and Windows clients. I've tried it and it's fantastic. You can remotely go into any system with full UI desktop. I have a 1 Gbit LAN here and when I use this it's exactly as if I'm at the remote computer with no lag at all. Windows Remote Desktop? - yet another MS joke.

Oshyan

I'll agree on one thing: the color picker on the Mac is much better. On everything else I'm afraid it comes down to A: individual experience and B: user preference. I for one really do very much dislike the OS X approach to things - desktop, dock, etc. It has some great *features* (spotlight, etc.), but the fundamental normal workings of the OS drive me nuts. And as far as individual experience, I won't pretend for a moment that my PC's haven't crashed a good amount on me. But I've seen just as bad - if not worse - behavior on a Mac, and when things go awry there it's harder for me to know how to fix it if I have to "dig in" to the system. Granted the possibilities are there, it is after BSD under the hood, but I'm not too in love with the commandline so I kind of see it like the choice between being an idiot and being a surgeon in the guts - there's no middleground. Anyway I disgress - I also hate iTunes and think it's a giant piece of crap. ;) But the point is, horses for courses.

I'm now running Vista and it hasn't been awful so far, at least once I turned off User Account Control and other nags. It's not really an improvement over XP either though. Apple definitely has MS trumped in the features and updates department, but I'm afraid you just can't say they are *fundamentally* better with OS design and workflow, because that particular workflow to be very annoying, and although that is partly because I'm a seasoned Windows user, I've also seen it get in the way of plenty of native Mac die-hards. Again experience may vary. ;D

Oh, and for remote system control in Windows, no server needed, good performance and features, and free, I use http://www.ultravnc.net/

- Oshyan

efflux

Hi Oshyan.

I've used VNC and it's better than Windows Remote but not like NoMachine. With Nomachine you actually forget which system you are on. There is no difference between working on the local machine or remote. No noticable lags.

The thing that specifically bugs me in Windows is all the windows. There are actually fundamental differences with Unix based systems that makes them at core better than Windows but to argue all the advantages disadvantages of systems would be too long winded. I simply prefer Macs and Linux  8)

efflux

#20
I do agree by the way that Microsoft played a huge role in making computers so prevalent and easy for everyone. From 1995 to XP MS achieved things but now they are negating these advances.

NWsenior07

Personally I'm with Oshyan on this one. I've played with OSX on a few occasions and to me, the interface is in fact more complicated than a windows interface. One giant start button down at the bottom is, at least for me, far more convenient than the five or six different buttons at the top of the OSX interface. While I agree that MS has been unable to produce a significant leap forward with Vista, I'd say that when it comes right down to it, just how far can you take an operating system without digging into a Linux style system that requires the user to either be a programmer in their own right or have vast amounts of time to learn how to run it. To me that is the windows appeal, you get a package that is stupid proof in many regards and though it has its issues, typically does just fine. I've been running vista now for three months or so and granted I've had to reboot it a couple of times, those instances were usually me overestimating how much of a task load the system could handle (like TG2, an apophysis render, internet, media player all at the same time kind of thing). So for the time being I'd say that for all of its quirks, windows really isn't that bad.

efflux

Sometimes you do need to do some stuff in Linux to set things up but generally it's a case of put a CD in and install Linux then you're ready to go. I had a problem with my 24 inch widescreen. The xorg file didn't contain the correct resolution settings. So I entered the correct ones in and it worked and no more problems at all. It's Ubuntu. In my opinion this is very foolproof. The best Linux distribution ever. In fact totally foolproof beyond Windows because it has a superuser account like OSX. The short time it took me to sort that resolution problem (easily found on the net) is a fraction of the time that Windows has wasted for me. I have messed around a lot configuring stuff, learning about Linux but that was generally on poorer distributions from the past.

The Windows start button is actually a thing I don't like because it's menu after menu. There are so many windows for configuring things and ways to get to those windows. You can't even remember it. There is no intelligence in how that UI is thought out.

On OSX I can open system preferences from the dock by moving my mouse there, the dock appears and I click to open the preferences then click on whatever I want to configure so no system window for configuring anything is more than two mouse click away and only one way to get to it. System settings on Windows are a joke of a UI setup. You can get to them from all sorts of locations. tons of various windows upon windows, mazes of UI routes.

On my OSX moving my mouse to the top right corner moves all current windows off the desktop, moving to the top left shows me all open windows which I can click on to focus. Then in the next OSX version Apple have copied the multiple desktops idea from Linux which is brilliant. Going to Windows after this is like entering a UI traffic jam.

Search function in XP - I won't even go there. Where is the dictionary that can spell check everything you write system wide - aren't these things that the average computer user wants?

Vista has added some things but it should have been the Microsoft OS that got them to a very sorted position but it's the exact opposite. It's going to put them so far behind OSX and Linux that even despite their huge monoply they will lose users.

efflux

Then you could get into the whole shared .dll thing in Windows. On Linux it is impossible to install an app without knowing about a problem dependency which the package manager automatically sorts out. OSX doesn't have any shared dependency problems either but Windows will allow you to install an app that may not work.

What about the way Windows handles drives compared to Unix systems which create a mount point not a totally seperate drive with it's own tree structure. There is no swap partition, or user space etc so Windows gets all messed up and slows down.

There is no end to it. Microsoft could have reinvented Windows with Vista but instead it's another wallpapering of the same OS.

efflux

Anyway, this thread was bound to start heavy discussion but Bill Gates has has a lot to answer for >:( Maybe he stepped down because he knows this.

rcallicotte

Microsoft made progress with XP, 2000 server and 2003 server because they were taken to court and made to do it right.  The 90s proved successful for the consumer, since the Clinton administration took M$ to task...along with a list of States who wouldn't just roll over.


Quote from: efflux on October 11, 2007, 07:50:19 AM
I do agree by the way that Microsoft played a huge role in making computers so prevalent and easy for everyone. From 1995 to XP MS achieved things but now they are negating these advances.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

Oshyan

Quote from: calico on October 11, 2007, 12:13:51 PM
Microsoft made progress with XP, 2000 server and 2003 server because they were taken to court and made to do it right.  The 90s proved successful for the consumer, since the Clinton administration took M$ to task...along with a list of States who wouldn't just roll over.


Quote from: efflux on October 11, 2007, 07:50:19 AM
I do agree by the way that Microsoft played a huge role in making computers so prevalent and easy for everyone. From 1995 to XP MS achieved things but now they are negating these advances.
Do you *really* believe it was the action of the courts that improved things? As far as I can recall 2000 came out before the results of the trial were even determined, and it would have been so far into development even well before that point that making major changes based on the legal determinations would have been unlikely anyway. Not to mention that the legal case(s) had much more to do with bundling software (which, hmm, Apple isn't really criticized for - instead it is in fact applauded for, go figure) - which MS continues to do - and some strong-arm tactics in the market, neither of which reflect any notable change in direction for the OS that would have had positive outcome.

No, 2000 was good because it was finally shedding the cruft of the old 16 bit DOS back-end, and XP was good because it built on the successful 2000 core with more user-friendly (theoretically) and multimedia-oriented features - 2000 was designed as a pro-oriented OS whereas XP was basically the publicly-oriented successor. Vista, despite all the claims of great change, is a lot closer to XP than I at least would have expected. I was hoping - like Efflux - for more of a "sea change", though I grant it's very difficult to provide that and still maintain good backward compatibility. On the other hand Vista has all kinds of problems even with Windows XP apps, let alone Win95-98 or older, so perhaps that is not even a good reason for the real *lack* of innovation and progress in Vista. Many things were promised and the most interesting of them were dropped before release (WinFS for example).

The sad thing is I definitely do use Windows because there's nothing better (IMO) available, but I also see many flaws in it and wish it were better. Yes, I wish it had a built-in dictionary, built-in disk imaging (some versions of Vista do), built-in efficient file search, etc. I consider many - if not all - of those things to be core OS features (unlike Windows Movie Maker which MS bundles, for example, or Outlook Express/Windows Mail). At the same time I think that if MS did bundle some of that stuff they might be slapped with more lawsuits for being anticompetitive - that's one of the drawbacks of being the market leader. I feel quite confident that if Apple were the market leader they too would have had legal cases brought against them for bundling so many functions with the OS. So in some ways Mac users enjoy certain benefits in their OS because Apple is *not* dominant (and someone else - Microsoft - is). Ironic.

So where's AmigaOS when you need it? ;)

- Oshyan

efflux

I tried Vista and was very disappointed. I was hoping for some radical change. First of all it started telling me my system was not powerful enough for certain things yet Windows was only using a fraction of resources. My systems are powerful despite being a few years old. Then it disabled my digital sound output due to not being DRM. Then the most absurd thing of all. It pretended to be a secure system by constantly asking me if I wanted to do certain tasks that could be harmful to the system but did it stop me. No. "Are you sure you want to do" messages. Absurd. If I do something like this on OSX or Linux I need a password. A box comes up to enter it. If I can't do this I can't change anything critical to the system, end of story. Windows is not a proper multi-user secure system.

Oshyan

The things that are set to actually require admin access *are* passworded. It's just that it asks you for confirmation on a million other things that it shouldn't, or at the least it does so needlessly because, as you said, people can just get into the automatic habit of clicking "OK", "Yes", "Go", "Whatever". Yes, the UAC system is poorly designed and executed. A "proper multi-user system"? I'm not sure Vista falls into your criteria, but I think it is, it's just that the defaults are stupid. ;)

- Oshyan

rcallicotte

Yes, I think the fact Microsoft had to be accountable to a number of States and the Federal government put them under the spotlight and clearly stated to them that they couldn't continue to crap on the consumer.  XP and 2003 came out of this, for sure, but the litigation against them had started during the time 2000 came out...and Active Directory.  I'm not a big fan of AD, liking instead Novell's brand, but that's another discussion.

Anyway, government regulation will be the only way IT gets straightened out <ducking the stones> and anyone in the IT industry knows it's a hodge-podge of stuff that does work some of the time or simply is piece of dung.  We wouldn't put up with the failure rate in automobiles in the same fashion we endure it from the IT world.  As a matter of fact, I believe the IT world has been largely responsible for the throw away society we have along with the lack of concern for quality work. 

Planetside is an exception to this.  Of course.   8)
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?