Death to PC's, and spyware, and viruses

[Melodybe]

Sorry the stupid mac thing below was complete BS, our mac is wonderful, and oh yeah when I buy mac products, my money goes to a democrat, unlike anyone that buys a dell.

Don't talk about macs, they look better, they work better, they are better.

[frylock]

1. honestly, the whole mac v. pc wars on this board get so tiring..

they each have their pros and cons. Why people have to get so worked about it is a mystery to me. It reminds me of the Calvin pissing on a Ford logo vs. Calvin pissing on a Chevy Bowtie. THEY'RE JUST FUCKING COMPUTERS PEOPLE!!! :eyes:

[rawtribe]

2. You don't even

want to get into the Sirius vs XM debate.....

Choose a side the wagons a circling...

[Tux]

5. WTF?!

Relaly, where have you been? Geeks generally hve no lives (like me) and love to debate their favorite computer brand or operating system.

Personally, i prefer AMD over Intel as AMD makes cheaper and better CPUs. Intel adds goofy tech just to increase the price.

For operating systems, Linux, BSD, or the new somewhat open source Solaris are great choices. Usually free, you can contact the creators of the software for suggestions or bug reports, and it creates a community. The community part gets people defensive over thier favorite OS.

Besides, buying Windows supports Microsoft who supports Bush who supports Bin Laden by letting him run free. Think about it.

[Clark2008]

14. Hee hee... you should make an ad!

:)
Seriously - it would be the anti-anti-drug ad. ;)

[Tux]

47. Kids

This is your brain. This is your brain after reading Tux's posts. Any questions?

[frylock]

32. well i guess since i'm a windows systems administrator..

that makes me one of al Qaeda's lieutenants or something.

[bpilgrim]

34. no

it makes you over worked and stressed trying to keep them boxes up and running :evilgrin:

(from a linux/os x sys admin ;->

peace

[Tux]

48. Nope

It means you're overworked, sick of viruses/spyware that sneak into the system by users that have to click "yes" for everything and run any attachment they get in their emails.

You need a vacation. Besides, I'm an extremeist right now. I want my country back from neocons and anti-American CEOs who ship jobs overseas.

[bpilgrim]

7. computers have revolutionized our society

and vital complex tools that impact all our lives.

this is certainly not a trivial subject... even if you mainly use your computer for games, email and surfing.

peace

[malmapus]

3. Aye both have pros and cons

Don't have a Mac myself, but with my PC I try to stay away from MS products and go with Open Source instead.

[The Blue Knight]

4. I used to hate MACs, but then I was converted

I now see the light.

And yes, it soothes me knowing my money goes to that of a Dem.

[Llewlladdwr]

6. Hmmm...if Macs are so wonderful....

how come no one uses 'em? I mean, less than 2 out of every 100 users is on a Mac. More people are on Linux. I just have a difficult time understanding why Macs are so rare if they're so great.

[Downtown Hound]

8. Beta was widely considered the superior format to VHS

but we all know which one won out. A product's popularity can be based on all kinds of things, not necessarily whether or not it is the better one. The main reason why PC's dominate is because they took over the business market in the 90's. Apple let that market go and focused more on the creative professional market. A big mistake, but Apple would never have survived it if they didn't have loyal customers that kept coming back in a world dominated by a rival format. They must be doing something right to produce such die hard fanatics.

[TreasonousBastard]

16. PC's took over the business market because...

IBM put them in offices in the 80's and it was a natural transition to stay with with Wintel boxes after that.

Apple and Radio Shack were big in the schools back then, but eventually lost out to Wintel boxes.

[hyphenate]

20. This could essentially be true

But I also think part of it is that there is a far wider array of software choices for PC users. That once wasn't completely true in the very beginning, but because Apple held the only distributors' licenses for Mac, they were far too expensive for the open market of potential users.

With PCs, there was enough shareware, freeware, and productivity software that was relatively inexpensive, and when they introduced the eMachines and the Celeron processor, they made it possible for perhaps millions of people to own their own computer for under $1000.

I always wanted a Mac in the beginning, especially that cute little "all-in-one" unit which has since become obsolete, but I could get more jobs on PCs, software wasn't a problem, and I had enough knowledge to dissect my own computer and upgrade it at will. I worked steadily on a Mac for awhile, but found it highly frustrating. I wanted to take it apart and see what made it tick, but it wasn't worth the pain in the end.

In some ways, the PC has surpassed the Macs because PCs have the ability to morph into whatever machine you need or want. It can be a superior game machine, with all the right hardware; it can become the ultimate office machine, with a good selection of high-end software; it can become your very own filmmaking unit with the ability to make great (or not so great!) movies for the family; and almost any other configuration you are looking for or need. I suppose these things can also be accomplished with a Mac, but there just isn't the same amount of software available to utilize the amount of diversity available for PCs.

At least that's my thinking: I've been online and a computer user now for 16+ years.

And in addition, I have a confession: I'm a download-aholic and a font-aholic. If I were a Mac user, I wouldn't have those addictions.

[Downtown Hound]

21. All of those things you mention can be done on a Mac

I download all of the time in every format and have no problems. I will give the gaming edge to the PC, but that's it. A mac is basically a movie studio to go right out of the box. Imovie 5 can edit in high definition. Garage band can create movie soundtracks. IDVD can burn DVD's. This is the basic package that you get with a mac and it blows Windows movie maker out of the water. I have Windows movie maker on virtual PC, and it doesn't even compare to imove for ease of use or capabilities.

Now if your talking about forking over the extra dough and getting a professional setup, virtually all major applications that are available for the PC are available for the mac. Adobe programs, Macromedia programs, Apple's own Final Cut Pro and Shake, Maya, Lightwave, Cinema 4d, you name it. There are overall more software programs available for the PC but there is nothing you can do on a PC that you can't do on a mac. There are thousands of applications available for Mac OS X, more than enough to keep anyone entertained and busy for the rest of their lives.

As for machine speed, currently the edge is given to Apple because of the G5 chip. I don't expect it to stay that way for long. PC's will eventually mass produce their own 64-bit processor and then the playing field will be much more even. It might even go to the PC. But as of this moment, Apple has the fastest computers out there.

The major difference between the two lies in the operating system, and this is where in my opinion, mac's simply blow PC's out of the water. I have owned a PC before. I've used them at work, every girlfriend I've ever had has had one, my mother has one, my sister has one. I don't care what anyone says, mac's simply work better. I almost never experience problems with my mac. I most definitely can't say the same for PC's. My girlfriend is always having problems with her Dell. I nearly beat my Gateway into rubble with a bat it was so frustrating. My mom's PC has so many firewalls and anti-virus software on it that it is the slowest machine in the world. And she has a DSL connection. But try surfing the web on her computer, and you'll feel like it was 1995 on AOL all over again.

That to me is the central core of the argument. Ultimately both macs and PC's do roughly the same tasks at more or less the same rates. The question is, which one works better? In my experience, it's the mac.

[bpilgrim]

9. if bush is so terrible why is he our prez?

if gates didn't force manufactures to pay for a copy of windows for every machine they sell would the field be more level?

if betamax was of superior quality to VHS why did they go the way of the 8track (cept for the pros, of course)

there are LOTs of reasons...

though times and fortunes are a changing ;->

November 24: mi2g Intelligence Unit (London) reports that Mac OS X and BSD Unix are the "world's safest and most secure 24-7 online computing environments". Their conclusion? ...

"More and more smart individuals, government agencies and corporations are shifting towards Apple and BSD environments in 2004," according to DK Matai, Executive Chairman, mi2g. "For how long can the truth remain hidden that the great emperors of the software industry are wearing no clothes fit for the fluid environment in which computing takes place, where new threats manifest every hour of every day. There is an accelerating paradigm shift visible in 2004 and busy professionals have spotted the benefits of Apple and BSD because they don't have the time to cope with umpteen flavours of Linux or to wait for Microsoft's Longhorn when Windows XP has proved to be a stumbling block in some well chronicled instances."

source...
http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/021104.php

see also...
http://xvsxp.com

psst... pass the word ;->

peace

[nolabels]

10. Linux will be my next big step

Gates MS is such a piece

[Melodybe]

11. I love that Europe is moving from windows to Linux

open source is the future of computers.

Did you know in many European countries they are using open source for their election software, we DO NOT do that here. They reward anyone that can find flaws in the sytem. By using opensource their elections are transparent and secure, wish we could do that here.


Macs rule and I can't wait to buy our Apple stock, they are going to have a great year.

[bpilgrim]

12. Asia decide to switch to opensource over a year ago as well

maybe i'll be able to get a job after all... in another country anyways.

:hi:

peace

[bitchkitty]

19. They aren't used more because

they are expensive. You get what you pay for in this case - I wish I could afford a Mac.

[bpilgrim]

29. heres a brand new MAC for under $500...

more...
http://www.apple.com/macmini

i've seen it with a keyboard and mouse bundle for $494 online, too =)

peace

[frylock]

33. $$$

[Clark2008]

13. Just use a Firefox browser

and you still don't have to worry about it.

[TreasonousBastard]

15. And cost a lot more, and...

weren't put into offices years ago cuz it's all marketing.

If Windoze actually worked, there shouldn't be much difference between the two, but yesterday:

WordPerfect gave me a "low resources" warning

Quattro became "unstable" and ran some stupid wizard

I got the blue screen of death four seperate times, and had to reboot

Windoze decided to reboot itself three times

While watching that stupid video about someone trashing Macs, Windoze froze and I had to reboot.

The latest Woody's Windows Watch says that less than half the spyware out there is detected by the major spyware programs

This is bullshit-- I'm getting a Mac.

I just want something that works for what I do, and doesn't need constant care and feeding.

[Occulus]

22. You sound like you have a hardware problem

Make sure your fans are clean. The symptoms you describe could be attributed to heat; the exact same thing happened to my system when the fan went out and I didn't know it. RPM = 0 is NOT a good thing.

The memory issue is seperate. If you have 512M of RAM, you shouldn't ever see a low memory warning unless you're really chowing down on mem space in the first place.

The blue screen/rebooting, well, that could be heat-related, as I said.

(I leave my machine on all the time; reboot about once every day or two, and run huge complex apps all the time, in XP no less, and the only time I have problems is when there's a hardware issue.)

[TreasonousBastard]

36. That's what I thought, but...

it's a Compaq problem. And, resources have little to do with memory-- that's a registry thing. I rarely get low mwmory warnings, but it does happen with some stuff with bad memory leaks.

I have two boot drives. The one with most of the heavy software on it came from a Compaq that had the same problems. The other drive is a clean Windows install that came from a new MS disk and never has a problem, even when I run a bunch of serious stuff on it.

The Compaq drive is loaded with their "enhancements" that screw things up. The registry is hopelessly messed up after years of installs and uninstalls, and Compaq has some wierd versions of dlls, vxbs, and who knows what else.

The obvious answer is to transfer the programs I use to the good drive, but some of the installation disks are gone, and using stuff like Aloha Bob is out of the question because the damn thing tends to choke on files over about 10-15MB.

That file limitation, whatever its cause, also stops me from moving large data files, and has been driving me crazy. If I get yet another machine, I can transfer stuff over a network like I used to do-- it's only a problem on drives within the machine, and happened on both computers. Go figure.

One other small aggravation-- if I set my network card's buffer to 238kb, I can get the dsl speed up from 738 to over 1 million kbs. But, with both of the cards I have, I can only set it to 64kb. Windoze or old cards? Who knows?

The last aggravation is that the Canon software for my digital camera crashes, so I have to do a workaround uploading images.

Nope, I'm sick of this crap. Mozilla, Opera and Eudora have Mac versions, all my printers have Mac drivers and iWork does just about everything I do in WordPerfect. And the Mac has some sort of uploading from cameras built into the OS, so I don't even need the Canon drivers. Or the Kodak or Nikon drivers, if I get another camera.

I'll keep a Wintel box around for some things, but that little mini Mac for 500 bucks will do most of what I need and save me one hell of a lot of time and aggravation.

[phylny]

42. Same here. I have a PC, run Windows, and use

Mozilla. I have no problems. I don't have viruses, although I scan daily, I use other software to rid my computer of spyware, and my biggest problem in the past year (after I figured out how to properly install XP) was a hardware issue - my keyboard wasn't working.

This computer is about 4 years old, works great. Computer upstairs is about 8 years old, works great.

No issue here.

[bowens43]

17. Too bad no one writes software for you Mac.....

[Downtown Hound]

24. No one?

There are thousands of software applications available for the mac. This is another myth put out by PC folks about mac's. As a mac owner there are far more software programs than I could ever even hope to afford or have time to learn available to me. And when I run them on my mac, they actually work.

[bpilgrim]

25. r u kidding?

not only do we got plenty of the big boyz writing for us, even MS, we now have MOST of the opensource community, which is HUGE...

http://sourceforge.net
http://freshmeat.net

enjoy ;->

peace

[ReverendDeuce]

18. A sane reply to your statement...

I remember back about ten years ago when the Amiga evangelists were harping on Mac/Windows users in much the same way. Since the Amiga is no more, the Mac and Windows users now bicker amongst themselves.

I am not going to say "both have pros and cons", I think that has been beaten to death. But, what I will say is this:

I am a UNIX goof. I have been for about ten years when I started with BSDi and Solaris systems. Now, that said, what do I use for a desktop? Windows. Why? Because it just works. I'd love to have an OSX system because it is, more or less, a UNIX system underneath (I believe it's a FreeBSD userland). However, I doubt I will do this for the following reasons:

1. Performance. Now, before someone jumps down my throat with "don't compare clock speeds" prattle, let me add this: The fastest G5 is what, 2.5GHz? The fastest AMD Opteron is 2.4GHz. Both are 64-bit CPUs. One is a commodity (AMD) and the other is an expensive beast (G5). But guess what? The Opteron is faster -- not only in benchmarks, but in terms of OS usability as well.

2. Apple stubbornness. Apple may be Democratic, but their business strategy is "love it or leave it". Steve Jobs' direction for OSX is commendable from a technology standpoint, but the whole "we will control everything" attitude is downright shameful these days. I can go buy commodity PC parts anywhere. One cannot say the same with a Mac with their virtually non-existent upgrade path and third-party hardware support.

3. The iPod fanboys scare the piss out of me. The iPod is really not all that great compared to its competition these days. But, people still buy them because it's fashionable, not because it's the best product. Same with Apple systems.

I consider myself an alpha-geek. I think OSX is technically very cool! If OSX were available for x86, I'd switch. But I am not going to invest my money in Apple hardware which is overpriced and doomed to obsolescence after the next Mac expo where Steve Jobs whips it out and beats it against his podium.

[bpilgrim]

26. folks have been foretelling the demise of apple since 1990

when i got my first mac and that we are on a UNIX platform with it's proven stability and performance i feel more secure than ever, not to mention the wild popularity of the iPods.

as far as being over priced i guess you haven't heard about the sub $500 mac mini...



a real work of art.

progress is something to be celebrated not berated.

if anyone would like to get into the nitty-gritty details between the 2 current OS's then i would highly recommend checking out this site...
http://xvsxp.com

it even has a discussion board ;->

peace

[sleipnir]

28. A Fantastic Post!

Congrats! You hit the nail straight on the head.

I use performance anytime people try to say Windows/PC systems are a joke. Idiots...the lot...especially those fools who claim you can only edit video on a MAC, as an AMD chip will never work. Not true, it's just that the popular editing software is better and more compatible with OSX.

iPod...the second greatest disaster to befall mankind in the 21st century....

[bpilgrim]

30. "Idiots...the lot..."

hmmm... very convincing argument, not.

http://xvsxp.com

peace

[QC]

23. This topic was done to death years ago,

and constant repetition hasn't improved it any.

[bpilgrim]

27. time marches on...

November 24: mi2g Intelligence Unit (London) reports that Mac OS X and BSD Unix are the "world's safest and most secure 24-7 online computing environments". Their conlclusion? ...

"More and more smart individuals, government agencies and corporations are shifting towards Apple and BSD environments in 2004," according to DK Matai, Executive Chairman, mi2g. "For how long can the truth remain hidden that the great emperors of the software industry are wearing no clothes fit for the fluid environment in which computing takes place, where new threats manifest every hour of every day. There is an accelerating paradigm shift visible in 2004 and busy professionals have spotted the benefits of Apple and BSD because they don't have the time to cope with umpteen flavours of Linux or to wait for Microsoft's Longhorn when Windows XP has proved to be a stumbling block in some well chronicled instances."

more...
http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/021104.php

the reason i love computers is that they never get old and are infinately complex.

:hi:

peace

[DireStrike]

31. I have no spyware or viruses and my PC was cheaper than your mac.

I win?

[bpilgrim]

35. was it cheaper than $500?

and loaded with all these features and ports...

http://apple.com/macmini

did you have to build it yourself and are you constantly patching it with a sys admin level of knowledge?

is it plugged in? :evilgrin:

peace

[DireStrike]

38. So I guess we paid the same...

Has everything I need. I built it myself, patch it periodically but not chronically. I'm not a sys admin, but I'm smarter than your average user.

But the fan on my video card is getting noisy lately... hrm.

[Liberal Veteran]

44. Well, the fact is for 500 dollars, I can go out...

...to any number of vendors and have them build me a system has a 64-bit Athlon 3000 processor, has twice as much RAM, twice the hard drive space, 4 times the video card power, audio in and 6.1 audio out, floppy drive, 4 USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, 10/100 ethernet, modem, a combo cd burner/DVD rom drive, a 6-in-one flash memory reader/writer, keyboard, mouse, and 5.1 speakers.

The Mini-mac is nice machine, but you can get a lot more bang for your buck with an Wintel machine.

[NervousRex]

46. Yep

and you can upgrade it with oem parts for years and years. I built my wintel machine 5 years ago, and have upgraded the video card a few times, and added memory as I needed it. If I feel like it, I can replace the mobo, CPU, and RAM in the same case for a few hundred bucks. This is seriously the only way I can AFFORD to compute. Macs are fine if you have lots of money to throw around every couple of years.

[Massacure]

37. Im 16 years old. When a Mac can run my video games, I'll use one.

[Karenina]

39. Video games

are much like Kool-aid... Cheap and steady supply, nothing of value darin...

[Massacure]

41. Oh well. It's fun playing them with my friends online.

[Karenina]

43. Oh, I know...

They ARE fun. But they suck up INCREDIBLE amounts of time and produce nothing more than Velvetta and chips farts! GO OUTSIDE AND PLAY, DU!!!!
:evilgrin: :evilgrin: :evilgrin:

[Massacure]

45. That is why my parents only let me play them for an hour per day.

But I can browse DU as much as I want. :evilgrin:

[DrWeird]

40. Last I heard, Moore's Law was still in effect.

So it doesn't matter what computer you buy, in three years it will be obsolete.

That's why I buy cheap ass machines and just wait until the curve hits the wall before buying a really good one.