nilp's Profile

"No cursing, no name calling, just an acceptance. Hey, it's only a hard disk corruption." I've seen this attitude too ... I was in a series of meetings recently, and the guy running them was using a PC to project a Word document so we could all see it. Out of ten meetings, he had to reboot three times because Word seized up on him - even trying to kill Word from Task Manager didn't work. But this was accepted - we just sat around and chatted while his PC rebooted, and he didn't think about taking his PC to IT get it looked at. He had a workaround after all, rebooting his machine. However, it might be changing - I walked past an office yesterday and was surprised to see someone (a diehard Windows user) using an iMac. I asked him how the hell did he get that, and he said his team was doing an experiment to see how well they could do Java code development on a Mac, and it was a success. While he had had to reboot his PC daily, his iMac was faster, more stable and had been running for two weeks flawlessly. That doesn't mean we will be changing en-masse to Macs at work (even though we could all get MBPs for less than the cost of our Dell laptops even with the 20% corporate discount), but there is a small but growing number of techies at work using their own Macs or planning to buy one. As for Vista, maybe it'll be more stable, maybe not, but at work we won't be moving to it any time soon. It took till late 2004 before we were all using XP.

'"Nature has its own way of handeling those who fail to adapt.” ...or those who fail to spell handling. ' Notice the little flag? How about you try translating your comment into German to give us a laugh?

[i]CompUSA does have a nice selection of Apple HW/SW, but they do mark up the units quite a bit.[/i] The CompUSA near me has Macs that cost exactly the same as the Apple retail price, and the software appears to be the same or lower price than elsewhere. Perhaps being the Bay Area, near to Apple Stores, keeps this store honest?

Actually, if you got to www.sourceforge.net, you get an incredible amount of Open Source cross platform code, too much to mention here.

To Ben Hall "Actually, the numbers would be less than 5 and more than 20 * 5,000" No, the issue is the increase in OS vulnerabilities in the period 2003-2005, as mentioned in the first paragraph of the article. For the Mac, that's larger than 7 (ie. difference between 12 and 7) but I don't really know what it is for Windows and can't be bothered right now researching it. But rest assured the absolute figures are much, much larger than for Mac OS X. And that's just vulnerabilities ... actual exploits is even more weighted towards Windows. If you look at http://www.wildlist.org/WildList/200603.htm there were 733 confirmed virus outbreaks on Windows in March (following their strict definition of an outbreak) and 4376 unconfirmed outbreaks. For any other OS, the number is zero.

Actually, the source of 114,000 is Sophos ... Quote from its white paper: "The number of new threats has continued to grow at rates thought by some to be unsustainable. By December 2005, Sophos Anti-Virus was identifying and protecting against over 114,000 different viruses, worms, Trojan horses and other malware." Of course we don't trust anti-virus companies to be truthful, and I never caught a virus in 20 years of using MS OSs, but you're just dismissing the figures because you couldn't be bothered following the links on the http://www.apple.com/getamac/viruses.html web page.

My switcher story involves an iPod, but the initial eye-opener for me was about three years ago. I was always a PC guy. I usually had to use Windows but preferred Linux, and although I loved the stability of it once I had it configured, I was always frustrated by how difficult it was to actually get Linux the way I wanted. That was fine sometimes. Tinkering was how I got into Linux in the first place, but as my professional life progressed, I didn't have the spare hours to spend recompiling the kernel. I found Windows a pain, but easier to use as long as nothing went wrong. I used Windows for word processing, Outlook etc, and Linux for Java coding. I discounted Macs because of the "high cost" and they "weren't compatible" anyway. So anyway, about three years ago I was at my wife's sister's wedding. Some of use had digital cameras and probably took a couple hundred photos between us. The next day, the immediate family met up at the in-laws' house and we decided to put on a slideshow from the previous day. The bestman had his PowerBook with him, but I decided to use my father-in-law's PC to download from my camera since of course it would be better ... This was pre-SP2 days (SP2 IS better for this) and I found that his PC wouldn't recognise my camera, so I had to go to the Canon website to look for the drivers. After downloading the drivers, I started to copy over the photos (via the USB1.0 connection) but was called into the living room. There, the bestman had already copied all the photos off my camera (via his USB2 port) and a couple of other cameras and set up a slideshow, while I was searching for the drivers. This was an eye-opener for me, I threw away all I thought I knew about Macs, and I took a serious look at Macs, beginning to like what I saw, and thinking that maybe I would get one if the price ever dropped low enough. Then my brother got an iPod. The moment I touched it, I was hooked. It fitted my hand perfectly, the interface was easier than I ever thought possible. So I had one within weeks (40GB iPod Photo). Many of you will understand the impressions I got from opening my first Apple product ... the packaging was more impressive than the contents from some other manufacturers. The iPod has been hardly out of my possession since then. After that, resistance was futile. I knew the next computer I was going to buy was going to be a Mac. Every visit to the Apple store reinforced this. But the Dell desktop I was using had the surprising habit of remaining stable and trouble free, and SP2 did help with several things. Still, I twice almost bought a PowerBook, and late 2005 I almost bought the last G5 iMac, but something made me hold on. My Dell finally died permanently in January (removing any resistance my wife might have had for getting a new computer), and I had an Intel-powered iMac a week later. My wife needs a new computer, and we're getting one of the new i.Mac.Books, if they're ever released. Now, I find the *nix underpinnings of a big bonus - I can get my command line interface fix, and do things like build Apache and Tomcat, while also having a GUI that's certainly easy on the eye. I don't feel that it's quite as rock-steady as Linux, but it's so much easier to use - with Parallels, I've been able to run Linux on it anyway. I haven't found any software that I need that doesn't run on it. It's as fast, if not faster, at Java development as Linux, so I now do everything on the iMac. So, did the iPod make me switch? It had a large part to play and I might still have gone Dell for a new computer without it, but I think each experience with Apple products reinforced the other. I may still have switched, but maybe not so early. And yes, I'm still the starry-eyed recent convert, but nothing yet has made me regret my decision.