Buying a computer, should I get a Mac?

[Phil Thien]

Just for the record, here's a video of what it takes to get the malware on a mac. I'd say that's a LONG way from being a huge threat....

It is pretty typical of much of what is out there for Windows.

My daughter ran into it yesterday on her Mac.

She was able to force-quit the browser. That is pretty much your only option to get it off the screen. There is no "cancel" or "close" option. Just an "ok."

Many Mac users (and Windows users) don't understand what is going on, and when confronted with a menu that has only one option, will continue to click on that option. Yes, this is low-hanging fruit (relying on the clueless user for mouse clicks), but it worked surprisingly well.

The problem is, there is a code base now. The people responsible for this crap will continue forking/evolving it. Adding code to take advantage of a security vulnerability isn't that difficult.

That has been my experience on Windows, I suspect the Mac will be the same.

It will probably quiet down for a few weeks, and then hit again around the 4th of July. I've noticed major Windows malware attacks centered around holidays. Makes sense, really, as the people that fix this sort of crap like to take time off, too. So a good time to strike. I suspect we will see something new around the 4th of July.

[Bryan Morgan]

To date: It has never crashed.

Never? Ever? Not one single time? We have a number of Macs as I stated, and when they do get used they crash just as much as the Windows machines. They don't crash doing simple tasks but its almost guaranteed to crash when you use any of the Adobe CS stuff or Quark...

[Greg Peterson]

Yeah? Reminds of the movie "The Invention of Lying". A world where lying has never occurred to anyone. But once it is discovered by one man, he has an absolute field day(s).

The IMac at work got this and I had to do a double take. The average Mac usser has never had to deal with a virus or malware, so they represent a target rich environment. In short, they are clueless. Just as in a world where lying doesn't exist, up until now the thought of a virus on a Mac was equally unimaginable by the average Mac user.

[Zach England]

I like Macs, especially Mac laptops...I just think they are overpriced. I use Windows and Linux and consider myself an advanced user (I work in IT), so I can fix any problem I may encounter in my vocational and day-to-day computing. For my money I would have a hard time justifying the pricetag on Mac hardware, but for a lot of people I think it is an decent choice.

[Neal Clayton]

i actually give apple some credit for the attempt to put a pretty UI over a unix OS, something that the free *nixes have failed to do for years, but unfortunately from my experience apple hasn't done that well with it either. "never crashed" is dubious at best...

[Brian Ashton]

I was in an apple shop the other day waiting to get my macbook back... it was the first time I'd seen all the mac products all lined up beside each other. There is a quite the theme going on there. You've got the ipod touch which is a scaled down iphone, which is a mini ipad, which is a keyboardless macbook air, which is a miniture macbook pro... Kinda think they've reached a need to branch off.

[Bryan Morgan]

i actually give apple some credit for the attempt to put a pretty UI over a unix OS, something that the free *nixes have failed to do for years, but unfortunately from my experience apple hasn't done that well with it either. "never crashed" is dubious at best...

What the? Half of everything in the Mac GUI I've seen in various Linux distros for years. One of the guys I work with loves the Linux GUIs and is always showing me all these crazy interface effects and whatnot... Apple is years behind on a lot of it.

[Neal Clayton]

What the? Half of everything in the Mac GUI I've seen in various Linux distros for years. One of the guys I work with loves the Linux GUIs and is always showing me all these crazy interface effects and whatnot... Apple is years behind on a lot of it.

do distros still advertise X as network capable despite not having the bandwidth even now on most networks to support it with modern desktop graphics? (nevermind 20 years ago...)

it's a flawed design, it was flawed from day one. why have a client/server model when literally no one uses them separately?

they started with a stated goal of emulating Windows, but without simple standards for oh...i dunno....inconsequential things like....what the mouse buttons do. then they went back and tried to reverse engineer a set of standards based on what a few X apps that popped up were doing.

and how many distros have stopped shipping gnome entirely? i know slackware did. i'd be surprised if others haven't done so since then, that was a few years ago. fun fact: it is impossible to compile gnome and all of its dependencies from scratch without fixing bugs yourself. there are dependency loops and broken components galore. they have always been broken, the distros have been carrying them for years. why? because KDE was built on a set of libraries that were not free, and only in the past year have been LGPL permissible (so that you could write non GPL software with KDE's libs).

so gnome took KDE's license restrictions as an excuse to not fix much for over a decade. and KDE took gnome's broken'ness as an excuse to continue to not allow use of the QT libs in non GPL software until 2010.

it's like two schoolyard bullies arguing in reverse...

"i suck"
"no i suck, you don't suck nearly as much as me"

if there were a book written about how not to develop a GUI, it would be the history of X, KDE, and gnome. it's such a mess apple wouldn't even bother stealing it, they bought a UI from Sun to modify into Quartz.

[John Coloccia]

do distros still advertise X as network capable despite not having the bandwidth even now on most networks to support it with modern desktop graphics? (nevermind 20 years ago...)

it's a flawed design, it was flawed from day one. why have a client/server model when literally no one uses them separately?

they started with a stated goal of emulating Windows, but without simple standards for oh...i dunno....inconsequential things like....what the mouse buttons do. then they went back and tried to reverse engineer a set of standards based on what a few X apps that popped up were doing.

and how many distros have stopped shipping gnome entirely? i know slackware did. i'd be surprised if others haven't done so since then, that was a few years ago. fun fact: it is impossible to compile gnome and all of its dependencies from scratch without fixing bugs yourself. there are dependency loops and broken components galore. they have always been broken, the distros have been carrying them for years. why? because KDE was built on a set of libraries that were not free, and only in the past year have been LGPL permissible (so that you could write non GPL software with KDE's libs).

so gnome took KDE's license restrictions as an excuse to not fix much for over a decade. and KDE took gnome's broken'ness as an excuse to continue to not allow use of the QT libs in non GPL software until 2010.

it's like two schoolyard bullies arguing in reverse...

"i suck"
"no i suck, you don't suck nearly as much as me"

if there were a book written about how not to develop a GUI, it would be the history of X, KDE, and gnome. it's such a mess apple wouldn't even bother stealing it, they bought a UI from Sun to modify into Quartz.

Several years ago, I was managing/developing a software effort out in California. The servers we were developing on were in San Jose. Most of my team was in Lancaster, CA. Occasionally, we were in Wichita, KS. Another core member of the team was in Boston. We ROUTINELY (i.e. everyday, all day) used X remotely, over a VPN connection no less, with no issues whatsoever.

Not only that, but people ROUTINELY use X in this way, day in and day out. They do things like run their processor intensive software on the mega-machine in the corner, logged in from a remote terminal. Not only does it work, it works seamlessly, and has no equal in the industry. We have been doing this for DECADES and it is a perfectly normal, everyday occurrence as natural as getting your morning cup of coffee. It was designed specifically to do this back when it was common to have a mega-server doing real work, and terminals scattered about controlling the show. This is the typical use of X, not he exception. It's only now that Linux has become popular that the standalone Unix-like workstation has become the norm. In the world of engineering and science, it would be very unusual to have standalone workstations. You most typically several powerful workstations scattered about with less powerful workstations sitting on most people's desks. Again, this is typical, not the exception.

Because X is socket based, it is entirely platform independent. As long as the platform supports sockets, an XServer can be written for it and it can interact with any program on the planet that supports X. It doesn't matter if the server is a Unix machine and the client is a PC, MAC, smartphone or WHATEVER. I can access any machine in the world from any other machine in the world. More, it is common for the terminal to be running multiple applications on multiple servers, in remote locations or not. This is perfectly normal in the Unix world.

Further, X predates Windows by a couple of years, as does the Macintosh GUI. It has absolutely nothing to do with KDE or Gnome, nor does it have ANYTHING to do with what your mouse buttons do or any other behavior. In fact, the X Server knows nothing at all about what window manager you happen to be using on your end. It's no problem for one user to be logged in using KDE while another user across the world is logged in using OpenWindows, and someone else is logged in using FVWM. It makes no difference at all. It is the local window manager that defines the look and feel of the GUI, including what your mouse buttons do, not X. This is part of the design philosophy of X.

I'm also confused at the link between KDE, Qt and Gnome. KDE was based on Qt, which was not free at the time. KDE doesn't "own" Qt, and can't decide anything about it. Qt is a Nokia product (was a Trolltech product). Gnome was started because some weren't happy with KDE being based on a non-free (free as in "liberated") product. Since 2005, QT has been available under GPL licensing, making this entire issue moot. LGPL licensing just makes QT and KDE more attractive to commercial customers, but GPL fixed the major philosophical gripe that sparked the Gnome project.

[Curt Harms]

What the? Half of everything in the Mac GUI I've seen in various Linux distros for years. One of the guys I work with loves the Linux GUIs and is always showing me all these crazy interface effects and whatnot... Apple is years behind on a lot of it.

Ubuntu's current Unity has very few effects and little customization. The long time users are making torches and sharpening their pitchforks . Ubuntu is also working on a replacement for X called Wayland. Now if they can get Nvidia, Intel and AMD (ATI) to develop drivers........... I'm no kind of expert on this stuff but there are people that echo Neil's complaint about Gnome 2.x being a mess which is why it's being put out to pasture. I like Gnome 2.x for its simple and straightforward menu structure, way more logical to me than Windows. it must have its issues though.

[John Coloccia]

Ubuntu's current Unity has very few effects and little customization. The long time users are making torches and sharpening their pitchforks . Ubuntu is also working on a replacement for X called Wayland. Now if they can get Nvidia, Intel and AMD (ATI) to develop drivers........... I'm no kind of expert on this stuff but there are people that echo Neil's complaint about Gnome 2.x being a mess which is why it's being put out to pasture. I like Gnome 2.x for its simple and straightforward menu structure, way more logical to me than Windows. it must have its issues though.

Gnome 2.x is being put out to pasture because it's 10 years old and is replaced by Gnome 3.x, the active development project. 10 years is a long time to go without a major update in the computer world.

[Tim Morton]

I am in the market for a computer and I am going to buy a brand new and an upper end model. My needs are as follows
1. internet access
2. word processing
3. working with family photos and videos
4. drawing plans with autocad
My biggest gripes about my 2 current PCs is that after 2 to 3 years they get slow and have virus problems. So I am considering a Mac but having only owned PCs I am still skeptical as far as the price v. quality.
Thoughts, advice, experiences, I am all ears.

fair disclosure..i am a mac person.

Not sure how i missed this...and i am not going to read it all, because it has been beaten to death for ever...and i can predict what was said.

The answer is, if you are interested in buying a mac i think you most likely will love it, but before you do, make sure your autocad software will run on mac. That may be the deal breaker for you.

Good luck!!

[John Coloccia]

fair disclosure..i am a mac person.

Not sure how i missed this...and i am not going to read it all, because it has been beaten to death for ever...and i can predict what was said.

The answer is, if you are interested in buying a mac i think you most likely will love it, but before you do, make sure your autocad software will run on mac. That may be the deal breaker for you.

Good luck!!

You can get it native for Mac now. My guess is that they migrated to a cross platform framework like QT. Powerful stuff THAT ACTUALLY WORKS is available these days making choice of platform less relevant. This is in contrast to powerful stuff that's been available for years that worked like junk.

[Phil Thien]

You can get it native for Mac now. My guess is that they migrated to a cross platform framework like QT. Powerful stuff THAT ACTUALLY WORKS is available these days making choice of platform less relevant. This is in contrast to powerful stuff that's been available for years that worked like junk.

Yeah, but it is $4k. I wonder if they allow for a cross-platform upgrade? It still wouldn't be inexpensive.

I'm sure there have got to be other less-expensive CAD solutions that will read/write ACAD files, for the Mac, no?

[Curt Harms]

Gnome 2.x is being put out to pasture because it's 10 years old and is replaced by Gnome 3.x, the active development project. 10 years is a long time to go without a major update in the computer world.

Kinda like XP? I've experimented a little with Gnome 3 and Unity. IMO at this point Gnome 3 wins.