on 7/3/02 4:32 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In a message dated 3/6/2002 3:30:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > >> My website, hosted on a Mac? I can already see William Goodall >> ROTFLHAO... :-) >> >> (For the non-chatters: William and I keep going on against each other about >> >> the inferiority of Windows or Mac OS; poor misguided William still believes >> >> that the Mac OS is the superior OS...) >> > > It *can* be superior for people who have no reason to fuss with settings. I > think of Macs as perfect for people who never, ever look under the hood of > their car.
Why are these car analogies so popular when discussing OS's? They always strike me as inapt. I'm sure a *lot* of people never, ever look under the hood of their car, and of the rest the majority only check the oil and water when they remember. For the rest it goes to the garage. By this analogy the Mac would have 95% of the market and the PC would have the < 5% share that goes with people who have their own inspection ramps, and find draining a sump a fun way to pass Sunday afternoon. > > Many people use Macs with little or no problems because they use a computer > for a single purpose. They will reliably run the same 2-4 programs over and > over again without crashing. My aunt ran Quicken, MSWord, MSPublisher, Excel > and Internet Explorer on her PC for four years. (That's all she has a need > for.) She never, ever changed anything, but the computer had constant > problems -- all OS related. I went nuts trying to keep the thing from > crashing with blue-screen o' death in Win95 for four years. If I had an appliance that was as much bother to run as that, I would defenestrate it, dowse it in petrol, and have a bonfire. Why on earth is it considered acceptable that a PC should be so unreliable and annoying? I first programmed a computer about 27 years ago, and had used (and programmed) both UNIX and VMS quite extensively before I ever used M$ Windows. And realised that I *definitely* didn't want this junk at home. So I bought a Mac. Now Classic Mac OS wasn't without flaws either, but it never managed to annoy me as much as Windows. For a time I had Linux on a second hard drive and used to boot into it occasionally and admire it (I had had Minix running on an Atari ST a few years previously and used to boot into it occasionally and admire it too), but it just wasn't suitable as my full time OS. Then Mac OS X arrived with the nice clean Mac GUI programs *and* all that nice UNIX stuff *and* a great free IDE and toolset inherited from NeXT. What could be better than that (apart from free hardware...) > > Bought her a MacG4 last year. It runs MacOS 9.04. She again runs the same > programs, never changes the settings and never, ever crashes. > > Is her experience typical? Who knows. The Macs in my office work decently, > but I can't stand working on them if I need to do anything complex. > > Perhaps it's all subjective :-) Perhaps. -- William T Goodall [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
