Bill's Blog

1 - Ah, the light...three more in the past two weeks...Liz, Viktor and Julian are all basking in the glow of the apple...

2 - Bill you need to give windows 7 a fair chance!

3 - The hardware costs involved in "moving towards the light" are still far too expensive I'm afriad to say. Well, for me they are.

Nope, I'll happily live with Windows 6.0 (and probably 6.1) on a £400'ish notebook any day of the week.

Besides, I like to "tinker" with all things OS related far too much anyway ..!

4 - Frank - we both know Vista will go like a slug racing across a salt mine on a 400 quid flaptop. Best stick with XP in that case..

And as for give Windows 7 a fair chance ? You jest. Mr B! The MS marketing machine isnt in the habit of peddling fact is it ?



---* Bill

5 - Choice 1) Expensive hardware with a cheap DRM OS (Mac)

Choice 2) Cheap hardware with an expensive DRM OS (Windows)

I'll take option 3, cheap hardware with free, non-DRM OS - Linux of course

6 - I too have linux systems, but now and again isnt it nice to boot a machine and see it start up, or double click on an application and have it work without thinking "Will I have to download patches, kernel hack, and/or break out to the command line for some monkey magic to make this work".



---* Bill

7 - Speaking as a non-programmer we use both platforms.

Our production software runs on PC's. Much of our pro-production is done on Macs (and some PC's)

Setting up a Mac server took less than 1/2 hour.

Added a new laptop this week - put in my user name and .mac details - and boff - intergrated into the network and all my mail, bookmarks, calendars etc all just appeared.

Looking at the presentation I've just put together in the new Keynote - blows the socks off the usual "death by powerpoint" - and I can use my iPhone to control the presentation - at the additional cost of 59p

What's not to love?
{ Link }

8 - Bill, windows 2000 was NT5. Windows XP was 5.1. Are you going to tell me that XP was just a minor update for a cludge? In reality it was not. Not only was it a major interface change, it was also a major change under the hood, whilst being (mainly) compatible with Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 drivers.

As time went on with service packs et al, XP became much more than 2000 and ever less compatible with the driver set.

Banging on about a Beta and also the primary OS from MS (Vista), which can't be all that bad since just about every PC running windows today is sold with it, shows more about your fervor with Apple than it does about the lack of quality in Vista.

My current laptop doesn't go any faster with XP, but then again it doesn't go any slower with Vista. Which tells you that the current hardware crop is designed for Vista and not XP. Or maybe it tells you that X64 Vista is faster than X32 XP. Which is a moot point since X64 XP is a no go area due to manufacturers simply refusing to provide drivers for it.

You say that Vista will not run well on the £400 laptop of today. True, but in 2 years time it will run as well, or better, on the £400 laptop with 2 gig of RAM as XP ran on the £400 512mbyte machine of 2 years ago. Except that 2 years ago XP was 6 years old and Vista is less than 2 years old today and will be 2 years ahead of the XP position in 2010.

I had a look at Windows7 this weekend. I'm reasonably impressed, however (as I would expect in a beta this early), my 3g dongle can't initialise the RAS service so I can't use it here.

Also you might have considered that the reason that there are a bunch of battery programs for the MAC which tell you the number of recharges and max recharge state is that Apple has added that hardware functionality to the battery and it only needs to be accessed to display it. Something which doesn't exist for PC batteries (Dell excepted I guess and potentially HP too). I guess you have to get something for the extra cash they require.....??

It seems to me, Bill, that when Vista shipped you were touting the fact that Apple pushed out Leopard in a very short period of time and that it was a good thing to do incremental updates of this kind. Yet when MS do the same it's laughable and derisible. MS never called Vista Windows 6 and they never called XP Windows 6 either. The fact that Windows7 is built on the next significant version number 6.1 is neither here nor there. Unless you don't like Microsoft that is.

I suspect that in 9 years time people will love Windows7 much as they love XP today (or perhaps more) and will be ranting about the Next release from MS and how crap it is in comparison with 7....

Life goes on. Nothing changes much.

9 - 10 years ago there was not really a credible alternative to MS office. now there is

10 years ago, there wasnt really a credible alternative to microsoft windows. Now there is.

Why ?

Because the crap that MS peddle is substandard, buggy, insecure, hard, expensive.

Why do you thnk Mac has grown to 10% ? People are sick of compromising their data, their electronic lives, every time they use windows. They're sick of losing data, being hacked, being taken for a ride.

Office: £500. What ? OpenOffice - does 80% - the 80% that most folk want - and its free. Symphony is free.

Linux is free. Its still pretty much hair-shirt territory (but getting far far better)

And the Mac. 10 years ago, you had to emulate an intel chip on Power PC. That didnt work too well, did it. Now its intel based - we can run windows instead of (as all Macs are windows certified), Alongside (using dual boot) or within (using Parallels, VMWare Fusion, Virtual PC).

We have far far more choice. Standards have went up.

I'm now so used to things just working, and working well - in my little mac world - I expect other stuff to do the same. And every time I come back to windows I think 'Why the feck do I bother'.

Others will discover, as I did, the sheer joy of computing devices which dont act as concrete blocks tied to your genitals, as windows devices are.

Perhaps MS will actually improve code, and turn out stuff that actually works. That fills us full of wonder. The unexpected surprise of something actually working.

People say I paid more when I moved to Mac. I ended up getting THREE laptops for less than my top-pf-the-range Dell XPS blingmaster.

People say its more expensive. But yet I've lost far less computing days in the last year. And time == money

People say that Macs are difficult, non standard - yet my luddite wife picked her new laptop up and started editing DVD's for work. Something that I could never forsee her doing on a PC.


Why put up with Windows crapware any more?

I didnt. And I'm really happy.

I'm a Mac.


---* Bill

10 - I guess it's horses for courses. I had 4 years where I had almost NO crashes or problems with my laptop. The whole thing just worked and the software hardly ever gave me an issue.

OK I had a problem where if I took the power cable out it bluescreened. Crap Windows you say? Not a bit of it, when I changed the memory from the crap I'd been given it stopped.

Given the experience I'm having with my work Dell and the Fujitsu Siemens I have as my personal laptop, I can understand why you think that Windows is Crap. Nothing works properly, they both crash out regularly, life is miserable wondering when the next crapout is going to happen.

The reality is that the two most reliable machines I've ever used have been made by Clevo and HP respectively.

Had I not owned the Clevo I might feel the way you do. Added to the fact that I didn't change the drivers (or feel the need to) for 3 years which makes for a stable system.

Also knowing that the dynadock crapware I forced on my machine caused intermittent USB blowouts and NOT Vista is useful in this comparison.

I'm glad you have found a hardware/software combination which works for you Apple have always made pretty solid hardare. It doesn't work for me though. I simply can't stand the things.

My next laptop will be a HP. It will have a stable driver set and the OS will be stable. I'll enjoy using it and be happy that I have the OS and software set which suits me.

Whilst OSX is a credible alternative to Windows, it will never gain the market share Windows has. Why? Because you can only buy it from one company.

The day that Apple outsource the hardware, software and driver set to other manufacturers will be the day that OSX becomes the same (potentially), buggy crapware that you see in MS today.

Do you know why 90% of all Vista drivers come packaged into an exe?

Because 90% of manufacturers won't submit their drivers for Microsoft certification and Vista won't even Look at them unless they do.

So the manufacturers package the crap they give away with their hardware into exe's which Force their shite down Vista's throat.

Then you wonder why it's buggy crapware that craps out all the time????

11 - Neil - we're agreeing on a number of points..

Which begs the question - why should I go down the windows route ?

And will it get better ? I suspect not.

---* Bill

12 - I understand and agree with your point of view Bill. In the end, your question of "why going down the windows route" is spot on.

Basically if I want something that just works, I'll take a Mac.

If I want something that works with any hardware, cheap, and gives me ownership of my own computer, I'll take a Linux PC

But Windows... why?

13 - And will it get better ? I suspect not.

Bill we are agreeing on a number of points, however I see windows getting better progressively in many areas. Although the continuous attempts to remove Admin rights to users are becoming a little tedious.

Windows 7 goes further to make this restrictive practise easier for users to live within but makes it harder for geeks like me to take control back.

Many will say that this is good and goes further towards making Windows a simple to use OS. Personally it just turns me off, but that's me.

I doubt that this will lead corporates to the MAC though. The massive plethora of tools from MS and others to roll out and manage corporate desktops is not matched in the MAC world. Until that happens the Windows will remain the darling of the Enterprise.