Joseph Gwinn wrote:

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.

I haven't seen anything I liked in the Mac UI, and I saw nothing new to
like in the XP UI either. I rather prefer the "old" 2K UI, or better yet
the CDE on a "real" OS (like perhaps VMS).


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

I find the opposite to be true and in particular I find that I can
readily disable the most annoying "features" of the Windoze UI where
this does not appear to be the case on the Mac UI.


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.

On that, you are fundamentally wrong. They are indeed both computers,
and regardless of the UI on top, any even remotely useable OS operates
on the same fundamentals. If you understand one OS, you understand
essentially any other, it is only the UI that really differs.

On every attempt to actually accomplish anything on a Mac (usually
trying to help a Mac user who couldn't figure it out either) I have
consistently found that the language, structure and in many cases simply
the existence of proper configuration options was a significant issue on
Macs. These were not simple UI differences.


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.

This teacher *is* an IT guy and reports no difference in the frequency
of crashes between the PCs and Macs.


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.

Which only goes to show that the stability of either system is most
dependent on the operator, not the OS.


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.

Huh? Hardly. I find the Windoze UI vastly more tolerable than the Mac
UI, largely because I can customize the Windoze UI sufficiently to
eliminate the most annoying parts. This does not in any way indicate
that I am a Windoze fan or bigot, simply that I hate the Mac UI. My OS
preference is VMS, however there is a bit of a shortage of affordable
applications for the things I do.


...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.

Huh? Where did you come up with that idea? Every one of my machines has
Internet access. You belief that Macs don't need to be "protected" from
the 'net is also false.


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.

That has nothing to do with "isolationism", it has to do with product
quality. Do you purchase brake shoes for your car from some guy in a
dark alley? Would you expect them to be safe? Why would you expect any
different if you get your software from equally questionable sources?


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.

Huh? Exactly what ratio of Macs to PCs do you see on the plane when you
travel?


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.

Er, please qualify that with "consumer" OS as there are a number of "non
consumer" OSs that do just fine against all attacks. Try my favorite VMS
which can give you C2 qualified security "out of the box".

As for the vulnerability of Macs, that is a false sense of security
simply based on the volume of attempted attacks. If the virus kiddies
decided there were enough Macs to be worth attacking on any scale that
sense of security would evaporate very quickly.


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.

See above. If Macs were more than a single digit percentage of the
computing world the issues would be vastly different. The perceived
security of a Mac is a function of their scarcity, not their security.


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.

I can't recall the last time I heard of a VMS or Tandem or Stratus
system being compromised.


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.

Digital, Compaq and now HP have had no clue how to market VMS, indeed
Comapq and HP have no concept whatsoever of the "enterprise class" world
outside the PC realm.


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).

VMS is still around as well. You don't hear about it much (like Tandem
or Stratus) because it's in applications that don't get hyped, and it
also "just works".

Software is most often the cause of problems and it's only getting worse
as the software gets both more complex and more poorly engineered.


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.

Indeed, and this will likely be found in users who treat the machine as
a tool and not a toy. Since the Mac UI generally seems to appeal more to
the "creative" types vs. the "technical" types, presumably there are
plenty of writers and such that have Macs that are perfectly stable and
also devoid of questionable software. Presumably also if you gave these
same people the same applications on a PC and they treated it the same
(no questionable junk), they would likely see the same stability.


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 PPC architecture has been around for quite some time and was a
rehash of a retired workstation processor. Neither the Intel x86 nor PPC
CPUs are remotely as fast / efficient as the (DEC/Compaq/HP) Alpha and
indeed that's why Intel stole much of the Alpha design for the Itanium
before eventually reaching a "settlement" over the theft.


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.

More importantly Apple has been realizing that they need to get off
proprietary hardware which regardless of any technical merit, they can
never be economically competitive with. OSX was the first step towards
making their OS portable to a generic hardware platform. The
announcement of the switch to Intel CPUs was the next step. In the not
too distant future will be the announcement of MacOS for the PC,
followed later by the announcement of the end of proprietary Mac
hardware.

When the consumer is able to select a "generic" computer platform of the
size, scalability and fault tolerance for their application, and then
independently select from a dozen of so OSes depending on their
preferences, the consumer will be well served.

The common hardware platform will both drive down the hardware cost and
also let each OS stand on it's own merits independent of hardware
differences.


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 need for emulation / Windoze support of course being a function of
market share. Few companies can afford to write Mac only software and
ignore 95% of the market.


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

Not sure where you got that figure, I follow the embedded world to some
extent and I see very few PPCs. In fact, a flip through the Dec '05
Circuit Cellar magazine revealed -0- references to PPC.


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"?

Antiquated in large part means weighed down by "compatibility barnacles"
which limit the ability to adopt significant architectural changes. This
problem has affected both the Intel x86 and the IBM PPC lines.


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.

I predict that MacOS will be available to run on generic PC hardware
within another 2 or 3 years. One of Apples big problems is that the have
to make large profits on the Mac hardware since they sell so little of
it compared to the PC world. This causes them to either have to price
the product too high relative to the competition and try to hype reasons
it's worth the extra money, or to try to compromise to cut manufacturing
cost and risk reliability problems. We've seen examples of both paths
from Apple.


Mac hardware is far less trouble to assemble and configure,

That's because it is largely non-assembleable and non-configurable. You
get saddled with a generic box, you have few choices for options and you
have to pay for included items you may never use.

and is far
more reliable than most PCs

I've not seen any hard data showing any greater hardware reliability for
a Mac vs. PC. All computer hardware these days is far more reliable than
any of the software that runs on it.

, 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.

.... and incompatibility with the rest of the computing world.

Standards, quality and compatibility were issues in the PC world more
than a decade ago. These days quality and interoperability are quite
high. Only on the most complex systems do you run into any configuration
issues and that is infrequent and in areas where Macs simply aren't
applicable anyway.


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

That's the myth, not the reality. These days very few problems on either
platform are a result of hardware problems. Come to think of it, my Mac
friend did have a 17" Powerbook replaced under warranty when it failed
after about 3 months use. I don't have details on what actually failed,
but I know the machine was not physically abused.


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.

Probably not, but that isn't because of any technical reasons.



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.

Indeed, as I noted, stability seems mostly dependent on the operator.
Either OS can be stable or unstable depending on the operator.


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.

An old Optiplex GX100 (P3/733) runs Mach3 just fine under W2K on a
machine that will do 60IPM or so. Nice and cheap used as well.


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.

I don't think that will cause any real competition. What it will mostly
do is remove a handicap from those who prefer the Mac UI. I don't think
there are any significant numbers of people wanting to migrate to a Mac
but being held back by a lack of apps. Those wishing to migrate away
from Windows are more likely to explore free options like Linux that
will run on their existing hardware.


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

The pseudo-programmers I reference are not concerned with such things,
they exist to glue purchased MS code libraries into horrendous "business
apps" for just long enough for them to migrate into the "management"
world.

Pete C.