Just curious.. Mac v. Win?

[superfob7]

i'm just curious.. what're your opinions on macs and windows? personally i hate macs, especially that one button mouse and the freakin imac. or if you prefer another os: unix, sgi, etc

death to macs! long live DOS!

 

[catseye]

I reserve judgement until I see OS X. As it stands, mac is okay but it doesn't make the most of the hardware without virtual memory and preemtive scheduling, something windows and *nix have done for years.

 

[rc5]

Mac sucks. They are lame, slow, buggy and fragile.

 

[Sebastian]

Mac alright machines for "most" people. Most being people who doesn't know what diablo2 is and doens't want to run quake3 at 1 million fps.

Personally it's a little too slow for me. The puck mouse that cames with the iMac is the most stupid piece of design i have ever seen. I can't use the thing haft decent and my hands are not blasketball player size. Can you imagin a NBA guy trying to use that mouse?

The OS sucks abit being the old win 311 style multitasking and crashing happens dispite Mac advocate's "otherwises". What is really annonying is the difficulty of install even simple hardware. Following instructions my friend can't get his USB scanner and webcam working. Yet when we plug it into someone's vaio it work right out.

 

[DarkManX]

installing is a PAIN!!!!!!! Windows plug and play is awsome compared to macs, I hate dealing with the extensions and all the other crap on the mac, it took me about an hour to get a digital camara to work, photoshop woudnt see it, I had to put in 10000 plug-ins in that folder, since there is no other software that Could have been used to get the pics from the camara, and same thing with installing a USB scanner. WHAT A PAIN!!!! I never had this much problems installing PC hardware. I can put together a PC faster then get a few peripherals working on a mac

 

[jsm]

Macs are actually pretty good with hardware. The problem is usually the manfucaturer who makes the install disk/script.

Macs, from many perspectives, are quite antiquated. Their cooperative multitasking is pathetic, and lack of protected memory means that the average user is familiar with Type 11 error.

Macs do have a few good things that I feel people overlook.

1. Ease of use. The interface on the Mac is incredibly easy.
2. Security. No remote login (ie: telnet) make it a great web server. Macs are one of the top recommended web servers by the W3C for security. I run a Mac as a firewall at my apartment and I have yet to have anyone touch it, though my NT server gets smacked down sometimes from script kiddies running DOS attacks.
3. Velocity Engine is, in theory, one of the best SIMDs out - which should outperform SSE & 3DNow! handily.
4. Form factor/visual appeal. A lot of people like the fact that a Mac comes in a variety of colors. Also, the G3/G4 case is one of the easiest cases to work on in the world.
5. ColorSync. The PC, as far as I know, has nothing like this. This is why the Mac excels at DTP.

They're way too expensive/overpriced (for just about anything), there are few games, ATI cards suck (and there is no GeFoce for the Mac), lack of SMP support, instability. The Mac keyboard/mouse combination is non ergonomically correct and is foolishly shipped with even their highest end machines. Macs also have problems with USB (try using the original iMacs keyboard on the latest DV iMac), though the person who architected USB at Apple disagrees with me.

On the other hand, MacOS X is great. It's like using a Macified NeXTStep/OpenStep. If you hop on the terminal, you get to take a look at all the BSD under the hood. I'm running DP4 of MacOS X on a G3 Yosemite and it seems a little slow. Maybe I should be running it on my G4s w/Velocity Engine..?

Summary: Macs & PCs are both slow pieces of crap when compared to ASCI white or a lowly Compaq GS320 or SGI 2800 server.

 

[Soybomb]

Jsm, I'd like to take another look at your security beliefs. I've never really had a chance to play with a NT server, but I would imagine you could disable remote login's someway....maybe not. But anyway, out of curiosity how are script kiddies downing your NT box and not your Mac box? Most script kiddies just use alot of pings, etc, I'm aware there are some security holes in NT, but is it that bad? You think maybe they just haven't found the mac box yet or ir doesnt look interesting? I know the linux webserver I'm around has telnet access of course, but for all but a couple users the shell is set to /dev/null so it isn't an issue. Just curious!
Thanks
John

 

[jsm]

My security beliefs are based upon reports from the W3C web site and what the Army recommends/uses. The Mac server I have is pointing a couple of ports through to my web/email/secondary DNS servers. The NT box just points to my primary DNS yet it DOSed on a regular basis. I've sat with a packet sniffer and watched the same kinds of packets hit both servers. The NT box stops responding after a few minutes or so. The Mac doesn't even budge. The biggest known exploits on a Mac are usually when running AppleShareIP, Macintosh Personal Web Server or with File Sharing enabled - all of which most web servers don't run.

This following URL is a great resource for information regarding UNIX, Linux & NT holes.

http://www.sans.org/topten.htm

 

[Sebastian]

Secure? But in what way? First off no remote login means no remote administration it's a trade off. Second it's widely agreed as far as i know that the only reason there isn't security holes is because no one has really brothered to look at it. Think about it this way. You said no protected memory. Great.. doens't that mean a virus can do stuff you can't in windows or unix? Such as write all over your memory... oh wait.. in windows this works too. But as far as i know you cna't do that in linux.

The actual problem with using a mac for a webserver is software as usually. Perl works but i don't know of a distribution of mysql for macs yet.. maybe OSX will be better but it's BSD as in BSD holes will most likely be part of it.

 

[jsm]

According to the W3C, there is only one known bug with WebStar and it has an easy work around to prevent/patch it.

So, I should probably clear up a couple things concerning the Mac, though I am no means a guru concerning the inner workings of one. When I say no remote login, I mean no telnet access, etc. Someone can log in using something like Timbuktu or VNC and do their remote administration. But, yes, for the most part, it is a trade off. Someone can still capture packets along the wire and do their evil deeds.

I don't necessarily agree that no one has looked at the Mac for security holes - people have. Just not as many as other OSes.

Of course, the Mac is a slow OS despite what Apple says about the G3/G4 killing the Pentium. It's good that they stopped running those ads since they are no longer true. Besides, Intel hired away most of the good Motorola engineers that were working on the PowerPC chips.

 

[Marine]

Check any enterprise and see what OS they are running - certain to be some version of Windows...except for the graphics department.

 

[Charles]

Max OS X looks really cool with that Aqua Theme and semi-transparent GUI.

 

[jsm]

From what I have witnessed, backend servers, ie: mission critical servers, are almost always UNIX machines of some sort. Don't get me wrong - NT servers are there, but they handle the wimpy stuff. For instance, file sharing, user authentication, etc. The serious stuff -database server, ftp, www, mail, are more often UNIX.

Macs, tho, you'll never see them in the enterprise. Not even at Apple. The only Macs I ever saw at Apple doing the hard core enterprise work was the stacks of 9500s as web servers.