8th May 2006, 4:38 PM
(This post was last modified: 8th May 2006, 4:52 PM by Dark Jaguar.)
It's true, SP2 did pretty much rewrite a large amount of the core functionality of the OS, and it was free. Further, I was able to "slipstream" (as they call it/rip off Voyager) the update into the install files for XP (since the original installation is so open to virii that you can literally install it and be infected DIRECTLY over the internet without even doing anything and before you can install the latest update) and burn a new disk, ugly as it may be, so I can install straight up to SP2 fresh on my computer in the future, should the need occur. I'm not saying MS is god for doing this, I EXPECT as much actually, but it is something they do.
I decided to check out the updates added to the "cat family" updates of OSX, and to be honest, that sort of stuff is not worth paying for. The OS proper? Sure, I've heard lots of good things about the OS, as a system, and it sounds neat. But those updates? Not worth it. An updated search utility or, and this is just terrible, "added hardware support" in the form of supporting the new switch to Intel cores? I'm sure a lot of code was reworked for that, but that really should have been a free update, and yet they charge full price to update each time. Apple is master at one thing at any rate, extoring money out of people who won't settle for less. Only they could release music players with LESS memory and get people who have ones with more memory to actually willingly pay for it. And, need I mention the dreaded iLamp? A frickin' screensaver to read your book by, and that's worth MONEY somehow?
Sorry if I seem a little angry. I'm not saying the Mac as a system and as an OS isn't a good one. I'm just saying all that fluff just doesn't matter to me.
The OS runs everything, and so as I said it is central to the operation of the system. It is the layer between software and hardware, and should be designed easily enough that you can find your files and run your programs. Other than that, it's all fluff to me. And I say that marking everything from the browser to word processor as seperate programs and not really something I consider "part of the OS", even if there is integration.
There are clearly big issues with Windows that need to be addressed, and these, thanks to the new found stability of XP (and ABF, that is the main reason you would want to update) center around security and protection of the users from themselves. Mac users don't have to worry about screwing up their systems themselves because they don't have the ABILITY to do that. That's not really a bad thing. If I can run my programs well, I won't need to mess around with my OS, and if the OS is hardware locked, I really don't need such capabilities at all. Further, as the article notes, security on a Mac or Linux is pretty effective by just forcing a pop-up to appear to allow any programs doing admin'y type stuff to do their thing. This is something that has been lacking for too long and XP is only now starting to do that by including these warnings, to an extent, in the system, but they are limited in what they do.
Now then, there is one other aspect. Users need to start being educated more. A computer is meant to have a lot of different stuff used on it. It is a multipurpose machine, and that requires a certain level of freedom that will inevitably result in users screwing up any machine. The mac isn't even immune. Need I mention extensions? No security system, save completely locking out the function entirely, will prevent a user from "clicking here to see the cute bunnies". They will click on any "okay to proceed" box or type in whatever password is needed to get at those bunnies. So, education is the most important factor left if MS can get their act together in terms of security.
What's left is the fluff, which MS is adding to Vista, but I don't care about (ooh, glassy menu boxes, pfft yeah I'll be shutting THAT off immediatly, don't need any extra cycles hogged by my OS thank you). So, I pick my OS based on the fact that I know how to run a secure system, I can be trusted to tweak my OS at a deep level without screwing things up (most of the time), and that's the system all my games are available for. Also, I'm not buying an entirely new computer just for one OS, but I probably won't need to. Since OSX now runs on Intel machines, I can see someone creating a translation shell for the OS so it can run on PCs. All that'll be needed are the right drivers.
Oh yes, and MS is really in deep for not supporting the replacement for the system BIOS. The BIOS standard is fading and a new one is emerging. A lot of new OSes already support it, but not Vista. They wanted to but it was another one scrapped and pushed to the next OS. This replacement takes the entire driver layer and pushes it from the OS to the actual hardware itself. Driver updates and firmware updates will be synonemous, and drivers will be OS independant (to the extent that OSes at least need to support the standard and have their little communication layer communicate with "BIOS2" of course). One of the side effects will be that BIOS's replacement can actually look pretty for once :D. Of course this only concerns PCs, but it's a pretty big move on a platform that has as one of it's main features the ability to use whatever hardware you wish and interchange all of it. Oh yes, all those config utilities for all the high end hardware everyone's used to? That'll all be tied into the updated BIOS as well. If they do it right, there's hints that you could actually alter the new standard's settings from inside the OS itself, and thus would still have inside-os access to hardware settings, only without wasting memory on keeping the stuff resident like that (I imagine that a number of the bigger changes one might make would still require a good old fasioned restart though).
So yeah, Vista isn't supporting the new standard and as a result, BIOS and the new standard are going to be put on upcoming motherboards, so you can select between them (via either a startup keyboard comand or a little circuit switch on the board itself) when you turn on the system. It is stupid that they would have to resort to that though...
I decided to check out the updates added to the "cat family" updates of OSX, and to be honest, that sort of stuff is not worth paying for. The OS proper? Sure, I've heard lots of good things about the OS, as a system, and it sounds neat. But those updates? Not worth it. An updated search utility or, and this is just terrible, "added hardware support" in the form of supporting the new switch to Intel cores? I'm sure a lot of code was reworked for that, but that really should have been a free update, and yet they charge full price to update each time. Apple is master at one thing at any rate, extoring money out of people who won't settle for less. Only they could release music players with LESS memory and get people who have ones with more memory to actually willingly pay for it. And, need I mention the dreaded iLamp? A frickin' screensaver to read your book by, and that's worth MONEY somehow?
Sorry if I seem a little angry. I'm not saying the Mac as a system and as an OS isn't a good one. I'm just saying all that fluff just doesn't matter to me.
The OS runs everything, and so as I said it is central to the operation of the system. It is the layer between software and hardware, and should be designed easily enough that you can find your files and run your programs. Other than that, it's all fluff to me. And I say that marking everything from the browser to word processor as seperate programs and not really something I consider "part of the OS", even if there is integration.
There are clearly big issues with Windows that need to be addressed, and these, thanks to the new found stability of XP (and ABF, that is the main reason you would want to update) center around security and protection of the users from themselves. Mac users don't have to worry about screwing up their systems themselves because they don't have the ABILITY to do that. That's not really a bad thing. If I can run my programs well, I won't need to mess around with my OS, and if the OS is hardware locked, I really don't need such capabilities at all. Further, as the article notes, security on a Mac or Linux is pretty effective by just forcing a pop-up to appear to allow any programs doing admin'y type stuff to do their thing. This is something that has been lacking for too long and XP is only now starting to do that by including these warnings, to an extent, in the system, but they are limited in what they do.
Now then, there is one other aspect. Users need to start being educated more. A computer is meant to have a lot of different stuff used on it. It is a multipurpose machine, and that requires a certain level of freedom that will inevitably result in users screwing up any machine. The mac isn't even immune. Need I mention extensions? No security system, save completely locking out the function entirely, will prevent a user from "clicking here to see the cute bunnies". They will click on any "okay to proceed" box or type in whatever password is needed to get at those bunnies. So, education is the most important factor left if MS can get their act together in terms of security.
What's left is the fluff, which MS is adding to Vista, but I don't care about (ooh, glassy menu boxes, pfft yeah I'll be shutting THAT off immediatly, don't need any extra cycles hogged by my OS thank you). So, I pick my OS based on the fact that I know how to run a secure system, I can be trusted to tweak my OS at a deep level without screwing things up (most of the time), and that's the system all my games are available for. Also, I'm not buying an entirely new computer just for one OS, but I probably won't need to. Since OSX now runs on Intel machines, I can see someone creating a translation shell for the OS so it can run on PCs. All that'll be needed are the right drivers.
Oh yes, and MS is really in deep for not supporting the replacement for the system BIOS. The BIOS standard is fading and a new one is emerging. A lot of new OSes already support it, but not Vista. They wanted to but it was another one scrapped and pushed to the next OS. This replacement takes the entire driver layer and pushes it from the OS to the actual hardware itself. Driver updates and firmware updates will be synonemous, and drivers will be OS independant (to the extent that OSes at least need to support the standard and have their little communication layer communicate with "BIOS2" of course). One of the side effects will be that BIOS's replacement can actually look pretty for once :D. Of course this only concerns PCs, but it's a pretty big move on a platform that has as one of it's main features the ability to use whatever hardware you wish and interchange all of it. Oh yes, all those config utilities for all the high end hardware everyone's used to? That'll all be tied into the updated BIOS as well. If they do it right, there's hints that you could actually alter the new standard's settings from inside the OS itself, and thus would still have inside-os access to hardware settings, only without wasting memory on keeping the stuff resident like that (I imagine that a number of the bigger changes one might make would still require a good old fasioned restart though).
So yeah, Vista isn't supporting the new standard and as a result, BIOS and the new standard are going to be put on upcoming motherboards, so you can select between them (via either a startup keyboard comand or a little circuit switch on the board itself) when you turn on the system. It is stupid that they would have to resort to that though...
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)