I work at a small business with 3 people and 2 computers with a travelling promoter... we sell discipline management tool kits to teachers... this is just a part time student as this year i start as a CS major at UTD..

When im on the macs at work i feel like ive been forced to dumb myself down to the level of the machine... People say its easier to use but really it just easier to master... The software for a mac is not more stable than that of a pc... the G4's at work crash at least once a day in quicken or quark or IE... It is very sickening to have worked an hour on A/P in quicken and then have the fucking machine crash and the computer not respond to the flower shift interupt command.. and then not respond to the power button... and then finally unplug ut from the wall... But my biggest problem with macs has to be the incompatability with anything...

The PC at home i built myself, its a 2.53 ghz p4 with 1024 megs of ram 120 gb hd a gf4 ti 4200 8xagp sound blaster audigy vid card and a soyo dragonlite mobo.... i built this computer for around 1200 dollars at my local frys electronics with absolutely no problem.. I currently run windows xp pro and in 5 months i have never had a system crash... where do people get off saying pc's are hard to use crashing peices of shit :\ My laptop is a sony VAIO running on a p4 2.6 ghz processor with 512 megs ram and 40 gigs hd space... i bought this for around 1500 again from my local frys... And before i read this article i saw a mac desktop advertised in the newspaper with half the power of my laptop for more than my laptop and PC combined...

What do you people who are in CS major/field think... My personal experience with people who use macs is that they are hippies ^_^ and really know next to nothing about computers or..... anything and they should be banned from life... and tortured... etc.

dito

it sounds like you are using the old Mac OS (given that you mention Quark). in that, I feel your pain. While the Classic Mac OS was certainly better for UI reasons than Windows up through 98, 2000 and XP (or nearly any common linux WM) are good enough to overcome any advantages the Mac OS had over Windows. system instability, lack of a true multi-user sytem, etc were all serious downsides to the old Mac OS.

The Classic Mac OS was easy to learn, and easy to master, sort of... once you get beyond simply using the machine, and you want to start using it well, I'd recommend looking into Apple Script. A fully scriptable system is a good thing. being able to write small applications which will 1)mount CD image, 2)check RAm availablility, 3)launch application from HD (which required CD to be present to work), using settings based on the current RAM availability levels, is a GOOD thing! I wrote an apple script in college that would grab all the calls to the Computer lab Network printer, so we could track who was printing what, and how much they were being charged for it, without having to worry about people skipping out w/o paying. Took about 5 hours to go from "what's applescript?" to having a working counter.
Recording application and Finder actions is even more useful. Automate the script creation process!

Even better, move on up to Max OS 10, and enjoy 85% of the OS 9 UI good stuff, plus all the Unix fun you could ever want (or not, you can not look at the Unix side if you don't want to). And you can still use Apple Script if you want! :D And Panther is looking like it will be within 15% of the speed of OS9 on the same HW. Showing a 30% speed increase over Jaguar, from what people have told me.

Oh, and I'd recommend InDesign over Quark any day. As soon as your purchasing manager goes for the next software upgrade cycle, vote for InDesign.

Last point, one thing that OS9 still has going for it is security. the Classic Mac OS is nearly inpenitrable to remote hacks.


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I currently run windows xp pro and in 5 months i have never had a system crash... where do people get off saying pc's are hard to use crashing peices of shit :\
XP is just as stable os OS X. however, when XP does go down, it tends to go down HARD. My roomate's CSony VIAO desktop has died twice in the past year, two different problems, booth required a base re-install of the system, resulting in the loss of alot of his data. My Mac OSX machine has needed a re-install once, it took 25 minutes, and all of my applications, preferences, and personal files were still there once it was done.
Where do people get the idea that Windows is a POC? years of using Windows 3.1, Win 95 and Win 98 in the same department as a bunch of Macs.

And before i read this article i saw a mac desktop advertised in the newspaper with half the power of my laptop for more than my laptop and PC combined...
Macs are more expensive than PC, particularly if you build yourself. However, for the non-home brew group, the price, in comparison with the equipment you get, is a fairly good deal. especially considering that Macs hold their reslae values longer than PC's.

That said, I don't know how long ago you saw this ad. I would not have purchased a Macintosh Tower for the last three years. the Price vs the real world performance was not worth it, considering how much a mid-range Dell cost. Or how easy it was to build my own system.
While the "megahertz myth" that Apple was spouting for years was, for the most part, tripe, there is a difference in the amount of work that can be done by two differently designed chips at the same clock speed. AMD has helped prove this over the last few year with their XP xxxx+ rating system. An AMD XP chip running at 1.6Ghz is comperible in nearly every area to a 2.0Ghz Intel P4 chip. The Apple G4's, while certainly not on par with the P4's and XP's in scalar math, could hold their own in many FP, graphics creation applications. Also, for audio, Macs were king, despite their lack of raw power, significantly shorter latancies make for a better responding system, even if calculations take longer.

I will say, though that the new G5's appear to be comperable in most tests with the TOL AMD offerings. We will have to see how they, plus the new version of OSX, work in real world situations. Give them a try, and you may just change your tune.


edit:
some good Photoshop numbers are available here:
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=48409524&m=6300981285

only the 1.6Ghz is available for the tests, which are pitted against everything from AMD 2200+ to Dual Xeons 3.06

My beef is that even after all this time, Windows XP has some really terrible flaws. I worked (doing a little part time tech support) on a couple of Windows XP boxes that had serious problems with their anti-virus software. The first originally ran McAfee with the firewall enabled. A relative of the owner had attempted to uninstall the firewall part for some reason, but didn't uninstall it correctly. Turns out that even though McAfee didn't "have" a firewall anymore, the firewall was still active and blocking Internet traffic going in and out. I fixed it by reinstalling McAfee plus firewall, then deactivating the firewall.

The second problem was with Norton anti-virus (NAV). Someone got bit badly by the blaster worm. I follow the copious instructions on Norton's site to install the MS patch and clean out the worm. No problem. However, Norton anti-virus doesn't work for some reason and the customer really wants NAV running. I then run Norton's cool automated tech support applets. Diagnosis is reinstall NAV. Ok, go to instructions. First, uninstall NAV. Oops, there's a problem. The uninstall fails. No kidding. Ok, reading up, I need to fix the Windows registry. Things are looking "up" already. I delete the entry that I was told to delete. Uninstall works. Fine.

I install NAV downloaded from web and find out more problems. NAV install can halt a few seconds away from completion and then "rollback" everything it did. All without telling you why, even in the log file once you find that. I eventually find out that it's failing in the registry and none of the instructions deal with that. I send an email to Norton's tech support.

The customer hates me because they need their PC right now. They take it back. NAV isn't installed, but the worm is gone. So I did something right.

At least, Norton gets back to me inside of 24 hours. Turns out I would need to edit the registry some more and get rid of yet more entries. Then I could install NAV.

My point here is that I dealt with two messy problems with Windows XP. The firewall thing really was McAfee's fault though I'd have known about the firewall an hour sooner if it wasn't for the fact that XP, like all the other Windows systems, hides important stuff from you. The NAV registry problems are just unforgivable for Microsoft. Why is Windows XP still using a registry? I know of no more effective way to permanently screw up a windows system than to start altering stuff in the registry. And virtually every program fiddles with the registry.