Bloatware warning

[DS-21]

I'd never, ever buy a Mac (I know, never say never...)

To me, Macs are nice looking PCs. Overpriced. Aimed at the "fashionable" market, or people who love going against stuff.

I don't get where that comes from. When I bought my first Mac (a G4 Titanium PowerBook, ca. 1/2001) perhaps it was true, though everybody else's laptops were hideous, heavy plastic clunkers at the time so comparing them to the TiBook is a little bit like comparing a glued suit from K&G to a Kiton. When I bought my current Mac (a rev. A 17" Intel iMac) equipping a PC the same way ended in higher cost, rather astoundingly resulting in a negative premium for Apple's superior design.

And besides, why waste your time pulling your hair out with MS's new FauxSX Vista when you can use the real thing? And not just on a machine you bought yesterday, but on one you bought in January of 2001, too. All of it, not just parts.

[fjhuerta]

You criticize mac users but then you say you'd buy OS X before Vista if it was made available to non-mac users?

:roll:

And actually, the Mac Pro is competively priced if you really look at its specs.

I never criticized Mac users. Or tried to. Apologies if my post came that way.

I said I'd never buy a Mac because I think you are paying for "cute" looking machines.

But I'd buy OS X if it became available for everyone else. Because I own an ugly Dell, and I'd really love to give OS X a spin. I love Unix, and I really love Linux on the datacenter.

I could go the OSx86 route, but that's highly illegal...

[fjhuerta]

Fact 1. For comparable hardware, Mac's cost less than Dells. Sometimes as much as ~25% less.

???

A basic iMac laptop here costs $3,000 USD. At the time I was shopping for a laptop, it had 512 MB RAM, was the white model, and didn't have any sort of extras.

I got my fully loaded Dell for $2,000 USD (1 GB RAM, DVD burner, NVidia GeForce 7900, 1900x1200 resolution, etc.)

Is the situation that much different in the States???? :E

[Wilk]

[QUOTE]Curious- because fast hard drives are faster than most USB flash drives- my Firewire drives are probably about 4X faster in sequential writes than my Cruzer 4 GB USB2 flash drive.[QUOTE]


Read and write times are faster with large amounts of data, but we are talking about access time when we are dealing with cacheing. ("cacheing" that looks really wrong, but I am in a hurry.) The access time on a full time falsh drive is pretty much zero compared to spinning up, and finding data on a hard drive. I think "ready boost", and "super fetch" are the windows lingo terms for it. www.tomshardware.com has a really good write up on it.

[ThomasW]

A basic iMac laptop here costs $3,000 USD. At the time I was shopping for a laptop, it had 512 MB RAM, was the white model, and didn't have any sort of extras.

The entry level MacBook is $1100 in the US

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore?family=MacBook

[cjd]

Yeah, I think Mac is not even a close call outside the states still (maybe Canada, though I've heard some support nightmares there).

C

[Jed]

Now if they only made FRD tools that would work on a mac, or has someone figured that out?

Jon, how is fuzzMeasure (for mac) working for you?

[Chris7]

Is the situation that much different in the States???? :E

In general now, the MacBook lineup is very price-competitive with equivalent Dell machines in the US, and often slightly cheaper.

This is even more true now with Vista, because the Vista operating system is so much more expensive. Dell charges $180 extra (!) to get Windows Vista Ultimate, which you basically need if you simultaneously want remote desktop or backup/restore (both not in Vista Home Basic or Premium) and the funky features like Movie Maker and Media Center or Bitlocker (not in Vista Business).

Of course, I won't fault Microsoft for choosing a product segmentation scheme that maximizes their revenue by increasing the average likely selling price of Windows, but it does demonstrate a certain degree of indifference or hostility to the actual desires of the customer. (There was nothing wrong with the XP Home / Professional segmentation.) As a product that has to compete on its merits in order to gain market share, it's probably not surprising that there is just one version of OS X for everyone (plus OS X server, intended for servers), included in the computer price, with absolutely no "activation" or serial numbers or copy protection.

[WillyD]

I never criticized Mac users. Or tried to. Apologies if my post came that way.

I said I'd never buy a Mac because I think you are paying for "cute" looking machines.

But I'd buy OS X if it became available for everyone else. Because I own an ugly Dell, and I'd really love to give OS X a spin. I love Unix, and I really love Linux on the datacenter.

I could go the OSx86 route, but that's highly illegal...

Just saw this as a criticsim, thats all..

"Aimed at the "fashionable" market, or people who love going against stuff."

But yeah, The OSx86 route is something to consider.

[JonMarsh]

OK, we've got the LspCAD + Vista problem sorted out, it took a beta Vista 32 bit driver from the Keylok company, and a manual install procedure, but now LspCAD runs under Vista. :T

Two thumbs up to Ingemar for sorting this out as quickly as he did, weekend and all! :T :T

~Jon

[JonMarsh]

Oh, BTW, the Microsoft help system used in Speaker Workshop is NOT supported in Vista either, one more way they want you to upgrade everything (but you can't); the reason they did this is to try to force people to upgrade older copies of MS Office.

~jon

[Dennis H]

You can download winhlp32.exe to view the old-style help files in Vista.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=82148

[JonMarsh]

Thanks for the heads up, Dennis! I wonder if it would need a registry update to fully "activate" it?

[digital desire]

Oh, BTW, the Microsoft help system used in Speaker Workshop is NOT supported in Vista either, one more way they want you to upgrade everything (but you can't); the reason they did this is to try to force people to upgrade older copies of MS Office.

~jon

Which is why I down loaded openoffice on my new laptop....

[Dennis H]

Thanks for the heads up, Dennis! I wonder if it would need a registry update to fully "activate" it?

Well the installer should take care of all that. But who knows when you're dealing with MicroBloat.

[Evil Twin]

You can download winhlp32.exe to view the old-style help files in Vista.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=82148

And it's got the Windows Genuine Advantage (sic) requirement just to download the application. Which means I have to be running my copy of windows to download it.

I've heard of people being in circular hell because they needed an update to get their system running in a communicable form again, and couldn't download it from another PC running Linux.

[cjd]

You do NOT need windows, you need to not have an illegal copy of windows... Linux can pass the Genuine Advantage test...

I am going to be trying Speaker Workshop through Linux to do measurements shortly, very curious how it works (if it does!). Other options would be great. I'm moving away from the FRD stuff just because of the Excel requirement. I don't boot Windows at home if I can help it (though I'll be trying a new trick I found to run it on virtual machine absolutely seamlessly since I already run the required compositing engine)

Some days, I hate Microsoft. Other days, I really really hate them. They DO Make nice keyboards though.

C

[ThomasW]

I am going to be trying Speaker Workshop through Linux to do measurements shortly, very curious how it works (if it does!).

After talking with Jon several times yesterday and hearing over and over what a absolute POS Speaker Workshop is (can't model an all-pass filter?) I don't anticipate him using it again.

Some days, I hate Microsoft. Other days, I really really hate them. They DO Make nice keyboards though.

That they do... :T

[cjd]

I'm not putting money into Windows tools, so... I'll see where I can get with Speaker Workshop. And I'll keep digging around for other options. :P

Can't model an all-pass though? I'm surprised. It's definitely not polished software, but... ahh well.

C

[JonMarsh]

To clarify Thomas's comment, when setting up goals for a filter, you can specify a low pass goal, a high pass goal, but not a bandpass goal in SW. The "all pass" was perhaps a little fatigue on ThomasW's part...

[cjd]

Oh. Goals. Who uses goals? :P

I actually never use that part of SW, I work a little differently with the tool. It models fine under Linux for me... (under WINE of course)

C

[jonathanb3478]

Vista is a major security upgrade vs XP. There are some excellent "infrastructure" changes in the OS that really kick things up a notch. Too bad many of the changes have been present in other, non-MS OSes for some time.

Vista shows me that MS is finally trying to implement real security, at least. They employ enough developers that they should be able to get things ironed out, eventually (something about enough monkeys pounding on enough keyboards, right? ).

I must say in learning how things are different in Vista vs XP, I was also saddened about the state of Windows security, in general. This is because my Sun Solaris 10 training was progressing in parallel to my investigation into Vista. The more I learned about both, especially the history, the more sad I got, since it became very obvious exactly how irrelevant real security concerns were to the development of Windows for so very long a period of time.

No people I find here (which include some pretty tech-savvy personages) seem to be up on the changes in Vista that actually matter, so I tried to gather the bigger ones up and dump them in a thread in a more appropriate section of this site, all with out actually going into SIDs, ACLs, or SACLs to explain the "nuts and bolts". Mostly because I am no OS development engineer, by any stretch of the imagination, but also because it is not needed to cover the gist of the changes.

I read up on Vista mostly because my employer pays for access to technical reference books online that are free for my use. After that, I bought an OEM copy for ~$110 and put it on my main machine (a 3.3Ghz e6600 C2D + 8800GTS 640MB + 3GB of 1066Mhz system RAM + 0 issues in games I play under Vista with this game oriented machine - for those who might actually care ). I was impressed by what I found as I read some of those books, I guess you could say.

Anyway, follow the link above if you're interested. Maybe I am crazy, but I thought you guys might like some information that does not seem to be widely mentioned when Vista's compatibility issues and UAC "feature" are. I think the changes are way worth it. If not now (and not for everyone) then certainly in the long run (and for most people).

[cjd]

Vista will not see its way onto a computer I own due to the EULA. And the fact that it renders my brand new computer only barely usable for some of the photoshop work I do - would have to upgrade the processor and at least double the memory. Oh yeah - it still has broken OpenGL I believe.

I've found a couple interesting Linux tools for speaker measurement and design. I'll be giving them a whirl I think.

[---k---]

I had the wonderful privilege to buy a laptop for my mother-in-law that came with Vista. After spending the weekend installing everything, I basically wanted to shoot myself. Typical process to download a piece of software and install it:

Click to download
Pop up box warning you that the file is an exe and may contain a virus, yes/no
Click on the program to install
Pop up box warning that the file is an exe and may contain a virus, yes/no
Pop up box warning that I must have administrator rights, yes/no

Typically 3 pop up warnings! So called "Security" still relies upon the user not to do stupid things. Out of the box, from HP the default user still has admin rights and can ignore all warnings and hose their box. That is just broken.

I've spent probably 30 hours with that laptop over the last six months. I see absolutely no reason to upgrade. And yeah, it was bloated!

(of course, I have two computers at home that get used daily. The upstairs one ran Win2k up until about 6mos ago when it finally hosed itself. I seriously considered just installing 2k back on it.)

[jonathanb3478]

I was on Windows 2000 until March when I got my copy of Vista. That was based on the whole "Activation" thing and the slow boat MS seems to be on to switch to software subscription licensing. Hopefully that can be held off as long as possible by MS-customer loathing. MS will continue to try really hard for that, though.

Apps I use (read: Games) are starting to Require XP SP2 or newer just to run. What a scam. Little I can do about it, though. That, and the fact my new machine got a DX10 capable video card, led me to "approve" moving myself to Vista. I just totally skipped XP. I certainly don't feel bad about that. I knew W2K wouldn't work for me forever, but all they way through February of '07 is a pretty good run.

Hopefully I can get a similar 8+ years out of Vista...

Yeah, right.

Still, I believe my mom would have way less spyware/malware/virus issues with Vista than with XP. But, totally protecting a computer from a user that does "stupid things" is not possible. I have invested more than 30 hours in "user training" my mom, and it "pays for itself" over time. It helps a lot that she is willing to learn, however. Making it more obvious when better judgement might prevent a potential issue is helpful, but yeah 3 dialog boxes to download and install an app off the internet (even given the huge risk that involves) is not sane.

I think the technical development is heading in the right general direction, if rather slowly. The business practices and the model MS uses to do their "business" all over their customers certainly will not be getting better in the future. Not with out a nice governmental kick to their nuts, anyway. Like that will ever happen. Too bad.

[Raptor550]

in response to Jonathan, I think that just using the least popular ______ does wonders for computer security.

Its a sad world when you can upgrade your hardware by downgrading your software.

[jonathanb3478]

in response to Jonathan, I think that just using the least popular ______ does wonders for computer security.

Its a sad world when you can upgrade your hardware by downgrading your software.

lol

I wouldn't even call it a "downgrade" in most cases. That is the saddest part.

[mefistofelez]

Dear cjd,

you wrote: "I've found a couple interesting Linux tools for speaker measurement and design. I'll be giving them a whirl I think."

If you tried the tools, would you share your experience?

Thank you,

M