p2pnet - rss feed: Apple and I
p2pnet.net News:- The Inquirer’s Ryan Hunter says giving up a PC running Windows in favour of a Mac is akin to buying ten boxes of nicotine patches - expensive, but worth it in the end.
In a How-I-Stopped-Worrying-and-Learned to-Love-Apple piece, he says 22 years of personal experience with the Windows/x86 platform made him, "want to get out from its legacy, security weaknesses, and its gotchas".
There are plenty of gotchas, he says, "but like becoming a vegetarian, you don’t really see the differences until you get away from the Windows business model."
And "Windows is highly vulnerable to a myriad of problems," as are Linux, xBSD, Mac OS/X. But somehow, says Hunter, "they have an odd karmic immunity from the tenacity of evil people."
When XP SP2 hits the decks, Microsoft will gone a long way towards addressing inherent Windows architectural deficiencies. but, "I’m not going to wait around," he continues.
"It’s been sixty days today since I left Windows. I feel much better now. There are certainly OS/X foibles that I have to deal with, and the one-button mouse setup had to go. There is an equivalent to the hourglass in OS/X– it’s called the spinning ball of death (SPOD). It’s a busy signal. For the most part, it goes away randomly just as it arrived. The PowerBook that I’m using has WiFi built-in (ExtremeG as it’s called). There’s a nice display. Underneath is BSD, although I can also use ‘fink’ to download then recompile most of the library of Linux and BSD software that lazes on a thousand servers across the world.
"The most important item to note is that computers are tools - we control them. I can do most all of the work done before on a litany of breathtaking (for the first month that it’s in release) hardware. I have no desire to overclock the G4 in this machine or the G5 on my desktop. It runs very well, thanks. Squeezing the next hyperthreaded over-coded game has no interest for me. In the corner is a machine - a newly purchased HP Pavilion that’ll do the majority of the Windows compiling and testing that I need. It’s imaged, and wakes up freshly like JayBee Corbell in Larry Niven’s World Out of Time.
"But my personal rat race with bugs, fixes, exceptions, gotchas, driver madness, synchronization bipolar disease, and the sheer Prozac of it all, is over.
"And I care not one whit whether your PC is running an overclocked, freon-cooled, ultra-finned CPU. Your machine might be faster than my G5. Oh well. It’s not how fast it is, but what you can do with it that counts. In two years, Apple has gone from a closed architecture with moldy applications to an open hardware and software model that’s still too expensive. But that’s the sacrifice - it’s like ten boxes of nicotine patches."
