In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
"Pete C." wrote:

Joseph Gwinn wrote:

In article ,
Cydrome Leader wrote:

In rec.crafts.metalworking Gunner wrote:
Ok..for all you Linux junkies...this has been driving me nuts for
months and months and ... well you get the idea.
Originally..I thought this issue was hardware....but now...

What are you trying to do that justifies all the time wasted on
trying to
run anything but windows?

Huh? Compared to MacOS, Windows is a notorious timewaster, so clearly
you will be switching to MacOS immediately?

Joe Gwinn

Only for the clueless.

I made my living as an embedded realtime programmer for 20 or 30 years.

I use MacOS at home (where I'm the IT Department), and Windows plus UNIX
at work. MacOS is simply less trouble, by a lot.

I must say that I have little hands-on experience with MacOS as I find
the UI infuriating.

GUI preferences are very much a matter of opinion, being in the eye of
the beholder. There are some parts of the WinXP GUI I'd like to see in
MacOS, and vice versa. This cross-migration is happening, but slowly.

But in total I find the MacOS GUI less annoying than the Windows GUI.

That said, these both are still computers, and are very frustrating
until one has learned the basics, so one cannot judge either GUI from
ten minutes effort.


I do however have several friends that use Macs to
varying degrees and all have had plenty of problems. One friend is a
teacher who uses both Macs and PCs extensively and reports that the Macs
crash at least as often as the PCs.

With students messing with them? In education, that has been the prime
problem. Schools have always liked Macs because the teachers could keep
them running without needing an IT guy.


Another friend uses Macs almost
exclusively and in 5 years and like three Macs she had a ratio of about
20:1 to the Windoze problems I had during that time. I did not see any
decrease in the frequency of problems with the switch to OSX either.

My experience was and is the exact opposite.


MacOS was total crap up until Apple finally
realized they lacked the expertise to write an OS and put their UI over
someone else's Unix core. Now instead of being a crappy UI on top of a
crappy OS, it's a crappy UI on top of a so-so OS.

Don't mistake me for a Windoze bigot either, ...

Could have fooled me. Listen to yourself, listen to the music.

How do you figure that? Anyone with any technical knowledge knows that
the pre OSX versions of MacOS were hopelessly deficient in many areas,
particularly the lack of memory management. OSX fixed many of the core
problems, but the UI that I can't stand (I hated the UI on the first
Lisa as well) remains. If I wanted an alternative to Windoze it
certainly would not be Mac as there is simply no advantage whatsoever to
MacOS over Linux or another Unix variant.

I submit that your answer above proves my point in spades. Listen to
the tone of voice, and parse the implicit assumptions.


...I use Windoze for a lot of
things for two reasons:

1. When you have a clue, Windoze is perfectly stable. Over five
different systems, two of which run 24x7, I average one Windoze crash /
problem every couple years. I have also never had a virus on any of
these systems despite the fact they are on a cable modem connection full
time. People who have problems with Windoze primarily bring it on
themselves and will do the same regardless of the OS.

You are very fortunate. One wonders how long your luck will last. The
rest of the world must be pretty clueless, because they have all these
problems, in spades. and the computer mags are full of sad tales.

My "luck" has lasted for at least 15 years and I expect it will last a
lot longer. It does appear that the world at large is rather clueless as
it seems that they happily download the latest Napster variant or other
program from questionable sources and then wonder why they have
problems.

Ah. Now we come to the core. Keep your machine away from the internet,
and all is well. Well, Macs don't need to be protected against the web.


My machines that have essentially no problems are devoid of the Napsters
and their ilk. My machines have such things as TurboCAD, Mach3, WinIVR,
MPLAB, Deskengrave, Photoshop Elements, P-Touch utilities, WinZip and
the usual assortment of odds and ends like MS office, Netscape, etc. You
will note a lack of any "questionable" software.

Yep. And this is my plan for that planned Dell. Safety through
isolationism.

The poor Macs will have to carry the heavy burden of world travel, while
the PC toils away in the basement, in darkness and solitude, a drudge.


As for security problems, there are tens of thousands of viruses et al
for Windows, maybe ten for MacOS (none that still work), and essentially
zero for most flavors of UNIX.

There are many, many security problems that affect most flavors of Unix.

Yes and no. While it's true that no commonly used OS can long resist
knowing attack by experts, some are far harder than others, and the
first-order question is resistance to automated attack.

Simply put, viruses et al are practical problems only for Windows.
Because such malware spreads itself, the problem grows exponentially and
far faster than systems can be attacked manually.

And as a class, Macs and UNIX boxes are far harder to manually
compromise than Windows anything, but none are totally secure. Nothing
that complex ever will be.


If you want a secure OS, look at VMS or the Tandem and Stratus OSs.

Oh my, a blast from the past. True enough. VMS was my favorite
command-line OS of that era. If Ken Olsen had had a religious
conversion and had made VMS open in time, he might have killed UNIX in
the crib. But it didn't happen. So, now VMS has the security of the
dead.

Tandem and Stratus are still around I think, but sell into a very
specific niche, where perfect hardware reliability is needed. These
were used in some air traffic control systems, but have a key conceptual
flaw - the custom-built application software is the common cause of
failures, not hardware failures. So most ATC systems have total dual or
triple redundancy, and the hardware is just another (minor) cause of
failure and subsequent switchover (within one tenth of a second
typically).


Because MacOS is only for the clueless, it cannot be that the lack of
trouble on Macs is due to clued-in users. So there must be some other,
simpler explanation.

I have not seen this purported lack of trouble on Macs. Every single Mac
user I have known (dozens) has reported plenty of problems.

You need a better grade of Mac users. By your own analysis, the
clueless make their own trouble; this will be platform independent.


2. Many pieces of software I use are only for, or run best on Windoze
and they run without any problems whatsoever on my systems. In the Linux
world there are open source substitutes for some of these programs,
however they are inconsistent, are often missing important features and
have essentially no support.

I do have to run Windows to use some applications, but they are odd
ones, like FEMM. Not to mention many CAD-CAM apps, and the like.

CAD, CNC, IVR, development utilities for microcontrollers, etc.


Mainstream stuff is available on both MacOS and Windows, but less so on
Linux.

Exactly.

Yep.


I agree that lots of Linux applications require some fiddling to use,
but this is due more to their being open-source versus commercial.

Open source is the source of some of its own problems. One of the
largest problems in this area is the lack of consistency in UI structure
and documentation.

Yep.


With
the growth of Linux in the market, more commercial apps will support
Linux, so this advantage is likely to erode over time.

The upcoming homogenization of the hardware market will help this a lot.
The switch to OSX was one step towards Apple getting out of the hardware
business which they have never been very good at. Now they have
announced they are abandoning IBM's antiquated CPUs.

The PowerPC architecture is hardly "antiquated", and is about twice as
fast per CPU clock cycle than Intel.

The problem is that IBM is more interested in making large massively
multiprocessor servers the size of commercial refrigerators than little
desktop systems, and so IBM's direction increasingly deviated from what
Apple needed to win the CPU horsepower races.

This deviation was particularly acute in laptops.

Also, as part of their "fit in but stand out" strategy, Apple wanted
Macs to be able to run Windows apps at full speed, rather than in
emulation at a fraction of full speed.

The PowerPC architecture (from both IBM and Motorola) basically rules
the military and industrial embedded realtime markets, with something
like 70% market share.

The Intel architecture is actually older than the PowerPC architecture,
by many years, so by longevity alone, Intel is antiquated. So what
exactly do you mean by "antiquated"?


In the near future you will simply select a generic hardware platform
from the vendor of your choice and in the size / expandability / fault
tolerance for your application, and then select your favorite OS to run
on it from a field of dozens of variants that all run on the same
hardware platform.

For MacOS, it won't happen soon, as Apple makes far too much money on
hardware. Probably one will be able to run Windows on Mac intel
hardware, but will not be able to run MacOS on generic intel PCs.

Mac hardware is far less trouble to assemble and configure, and is far
more reliable than most PCs, largely because in Macs there is a single
design agent, Apple, ensuring that it all fits together and meets
minimum standards of design and implementation quality.

This is a major reason that people have been willing to pay somewhat
more for Apple hardware. It's simply less trouble.


If you want a rock solid, secure and reliable OS you will not find it in
Windoze, MacOS or Linux, you also will not find it for free.

Well, I agree that it won't be free. It will cost time and/or money,
one way or the other.

There are several out there, but they are in the "midrange" and
"mainframe" space and none are cheap. At least one (VMS) is now running
on three different hardware platforms including Itanium.

I don't think anyone is going to migrate to OpenVMS that isn't already
there.


MacOS is rock solid; this I know from direct personal experience.

Well, from indirect personal experience, my Mac using friend reports
problems on a weekly basis for one machine while my five Windoze
machines keep chugging along happily. I expect that with OSX (and
beyond) MacOS has the *potential* to be rock solid, just as Windoze
does, but it seems the ultimate determinant of stability is the
operator.

There may be a clue mismatch here.


The real reason for a metalworker to use Windows is that many of the
standard apps for metalworking and manufacturing are currently
Windows-only, but these are slowly picking up Linux support. I'm
planning to get a Dell PC at home for just this reason, but this PC will
be well-isolated from the Internet.

I got a stack of surplus Dell Optiplex systems for $100 ea and they are
great for quite a few things including CNC control. All my systems are
on a common network and have no problems. The firewall / router provides
a first line of defense and the only machine that has any inbound ports
mapped to it has a software firewall as well.

Yep. I'll probably get one of those $700 Dell boxes. Already got the
hardware firewall.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the market when Macs can
run all these Windows-only apps at full speed, so there is some real
competition between platforms.


The App developers and their customers would dearly love to have an
alternative to Windows, to regain control of their lives, to escape the
Treadmill.

That seems to depend on the app developer. It seems there are a large
number of folks out there pretending to be programmers by gluing
together (poorly) various chunks of purchased code libraries for Windoze
to create hopelessly bloated, unstable and inefficient monstrosities and
calling them applications.

I think we are mixing unlike things here. The desire for independence
and freedom from lock-in exists regardless of the skill of the
programmer, especially as the programmer becomes experienced (and has
been screwed when something he depended upon is made unavailable).
Freedom from lock-in and abuse by marketing-driven companies is its own
good.

Joe Gwinn