Saucemaster

Reporter trades in his PowerBook for a notebook with Microsoft’s new OS.

Wow, this story already sounds like Microsoft-funded pure fiction, kinda like that whole Mac-to-PC switching fraud from a few years ago.

The new system font, Segoe UI, is simple and elegant.

And don’t forget plagiarised. Lucida Grande, the system font for Mac OS X, enjoys no similar controversy.

Lucky for me the HP notebook was powerful enough to show off Vista’s much anticipated Aero touches.

Yes, wasn’t that lucky, but I do find it strange that you neglect to mention that Apple’s consumer notebooks have been Quartz Extreme capable as early as November 2002.

I pressed Windows + Tab to see another cool Aero feature — Flip 3D — which overlaps windows for all running programs and documents like a Rolodex, shuffling the front screen to the back with each additional press of the Tab key. Positively gorgeous — and as useful as the Mac’s F9 Expose feature, which miniaturizes all open windows to fit on the screen so you can see everything in a single glimpse.

Well maybe not quite as useful as Expose. Whereas Expose shrinks and tiles every visible window, letting you at a glance point at the window you want to switch to, Flip 3D forces you to cycle through every window one at a time until you find the one you want to switch to. If the window you want is at the back of the Flip 3D deck, there’s no doubt you’re going to waste a lot more time hunting for that window than you would using Expose.

Minimizing a few windows to the task bar, I was wowed by miniature live glimpses of the running programs as I moused over each. A video game trailer I’m viewing on Gamespot, for instance, continues to play in the miniature, minimized window.

Again, why not take the time to mention that Mac OS X has shown the live contents of minimized windows in the dock since the first version of Mac OS X shipped, March 24, 2001. Further, there’s no “mousing over” required, the icon for the minimized window is the scaled down version of the window. If you’re playing a movie and minimize the window, the movie keeps playing scaled down, in the dock. If you’re playing a movie in Vista and minimize the window you get a rectangle embossed with the title in the taskbar that you have to mouse over to see the live preview.

Given the subtext of your article is a comparison between Vista and Mac OS X, you seem to be doing your best to avoid comparing the two. Now why would that be? Smells like intellectual dishonesty to me.

With everything downloaded, I dove into Outlook 2007, whose all-in-one approach I’ve always admired. This interrelation between mail, contacts, calendar, tasks and notes is great, particularly when it comes to making an appointment based on an email invite, or getting a quick, month-at-a-glance look at upcoming birthdays.

You may prefer Outlook 2007’s all-in-one approach, however Outlook does not ship with Vista. What does ship with Vista are three separate applications dedicated to email, calendars and contacts. If you like the all-in-one approach of Outlook on Vista, I’m amazed you never bought Office for the Mac, and used Entourage which is Outlook’s equivalent on the Mac.

Vista’s bundled Photo Gallery is better than iPhoto, which I hate because it organizes pictures by “rolls” that correspond to the date they were taken, but there’s no way to simply organize iPhoto by existing folders.

Nope, you’re plain wrong, iPhoto does not organise photos by “rolls”. All photos are stored in a single library, and you create albums to organise the photos. You can tag your photos, rate your photos, create photo books, calendars, and great slideshows (with the Ken Burns effect). The “rolls” thing is a misnomer, because iPhoto includes a couple of smart albums by default that show your last few imported rolls.

The only transfer I’ve seen go so smoothly is when using the Mac’s Migration Assistant to move from an old PowerBook to a newer one.

Nice, and let me remind you that this feature debuted with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, April 29 2005, and you just need a plain old firewire cable.

Times have changed. And I’m happy to report — and Microsoft no doubt even happier — that I’ve had zero indication of any kind of net-related badness since switching to Vista. Microsoft now bundles in a more powerful firewall program for controlling access in and out of your computer. It also includes Windows Defender, an anti-spyware program.

Sounds to me as if you are comparing Vista to XP here, not to Mac OS X. If you’re switching from the Mac to Vista, who cares if Vista is better than XP because you weren’t using XP were you?

In fact, Vista’s system-wide search in some ways beats the Mac because it requires only one keystroke — the Windows key — to bring up the Start menu, where you can immediately type.

By default, to start a Spotlight search in Mac OS X you press Cmd-Space. Of course you could always remap the shortcut for Spotlight to a function key to save that one keystroke. Can you even remap shortcuts in Vista?

At the same time, there’s something more literally hands on with the Mac, as far as how folders are simply organized and the way programs are a single file rather than a whole folder full of files that generally cannot be moved from where they’re installed.

Imagine this, to install an application I drag its icon to wherever I want (usually the Applications folder), and to uninstall that application, I just delete the icon or drag it to the trash. The icon is the application. That’s how it works on a Mac. So you can keep your Add/Remove Programs, uninstallers, registry hacks, and other hateful esoterica invented by misanthropic C++ programmers.

But I really miss that peaceful, Zen-like quiet I felt with my Mac when I’d wake it up or put it instantly to sleep. For me, it just works right, without really having to think about it. So I decided to switch again. From Vista, back to the Mac — to the brand new, white MacBook on which I told this story.

So this is the punchline: after using 3 different Vista notebooks and supposedly falling in love with Vista you end up buying a brand new Mac. So what’s with the disingenuous title of your article? You didn’t fucking switch to Vista, you tried it for a while, thought it was fine, and then went back to using the Mac.

In a field near Sandwich in Kent, Alan Gibbs, a local model maker, is firing up his steam engine. Its chimney is coughing out irritated little clouds of smuts and its pistons are bobbing up and down.

At a table, curator Rob Tufnell is using an Apple Mac powered by the engine. For this is the Steam Powered Internet Machine: the latest deeply eccentric project from Turner-prizewinning artist Jeremy Deller and his collaborator Alan Kane. “We were thinking about something that connects the industrial revolution and the digital revolution,” said Deller. Kane added: “They are worlds apart but there’s also a proximity. The steam age and the digital age are not so far apart.”

The Guardian: Art brings steam power to the digital revolution

In the same theme that Sausage has started, I thought it might be time to mention the OS-tans which I find both amusing and interesting.

The OS-tans are an Internet phenomenon on Futaba Channel; the OS-tan or simply OS Girls are the personification of several operating systems (OSes), most famously Windows, by various amateur Japanese artists. A pure fan creation, the appearance of each OS-tan is generally consistent across artists. OSes are almost always portrayed as women, the Windows girls usually as sisters, despite sometimes seeming the same age.

The concept is reported to have begun as a personification of the common perception of Windows Me as unstable and prone to frequent crashes. Discussions on Futaba Channel likened this to the stereotype of a fickle, troublesome girl. The personification became expanded, with the creation of Me-tan (dated to August 6, 2003) followed by the other characters.

Breast Size, Hunger, and Memory -
It has been suggested from time to time, that the breast sizes of the individual OS-tans represent their RAM size. Because Windows XP is considered a memory hog due to its increased resource consumption, XP-tan is incredibly well endowed (and she has no qualms for getting “upgraded” from time to time). 2K-tan normally rates as a close second, whereas the DOS pair are at the distant end of the spectrum.

Another theory states that the breast size of an OS-tan represents the overall “fanciness” of their graphical user interface. Since XP was designed with bells and whistles, she has the largest breasts, but DOS, being no more than a command prompt, is at the other extreme.

An alternate method of displaying memory or resource requirements in general is through the character’s appetite. XP is often seen eating ridiculous amounts of food (yet never gaining an inch except perhaps on her bust) because of her heftier demands on hardware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-tan

Since most of us must be using Windows XP, I’ve added a background for everyone of XP-tan.

If only XP looked this good!

Since I started using Mac OS X, I have been struck by how Apple make things simple to understand and use in comparison to other operating systems (especially Windows), but I was never able to really define why that is. The basic concepts are the same: graphical interface, windows, pull-down menus, mouse and keyboard. So how can two operating systems that are pretty much the same, Windows and Mac OS X, feel so different?

Out of interest, I started compiling a list of the names of comparable things in each operating system, see the table below. A couple of things are immediately apparent: (1) Microsoft is more verbose and (2) Microsoft is self-referential.

One might argue that verbosity is a good thing, and that it makes it easier to understand new concepts. I disagree: it shows a weakness of mind and a lack of clarity, and taxes the reader with a dizzying number of words, burdening the memory. It lacks Art.

Witness exhibit (A): “Windows Picture and Fax Viewer”. Firstly, it is self-referential but it could be worse and I am thankful that it is not called “Microsoft Windows Picture and Fax Viewer”. A full 27% of the characters in this string are dedicated to reminding us that we’re using Windows. Why bother? It’s not like they’ve developed a “Picture and Fax Viewer” for Linux and they have to differentiate them. It’s a horrible mix of cross-promotion and ra-ra marketing: Windows Windows Windows!!! It’s like I’m trying to hold a conversation with a twitchy insecure 14-year old nerd with bad acne who simply has to mention how great his best friend, Windows, is in every sentence: “Yeh, Windows is great. He can do everything and even view pictures and faxes at the same time!”

Secondly, why is this a picture and fax viewer? Consider that there is no way to run this program directly, instead you have to double-click or open an image (or fax?!?) to view it. Also consider that a fax is just another type of image anyway. So it’s not really a fax viewer per se, it’s an image viewer and because faxes are images it can also view faxes. By this logic it could be called the “Windows Porn and Fax Viewer”, if specificity is what they wanted. Why not keep it simple and call it “Viewer”?

Compare this with Apple’s “Preview”, which does pretty much the same thing for images and PDF’s. It isn’t self-referential, and it is succinct. In this example, Microsoft uses 3o characters for its name, and Apple uses 7.

This isn’t an isolated case either. Microsoft consistently expresses operating system concepts using verbose language littered with self-referential or redundant noise. On average Microsoft uses 15.23 characters per concept, whereas Apple uses 9.03 characters per concept. That makes Microsoft a whole lot (1.7 x) more verbose than Apple.

This is indicative of the difference in approaches between Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft’s mind is muddy, there is no clarity of thought or vision, marketing and cross-promotion are more important than usability, verbosity is mistaken for being easy to understand.

Everywhere you look in Windows XP, things are named as if they are the sons of rich pompous dukes, with three or more parts (”William Rupert Byron Winchester the 3rd” anyone?). On my Windows desktop sits a shortcut for Outlook, but in typical fashion the name of the shortcut reads “Microsoft Office Outlook 2003.” I’ve just renamed it to “Mail.”

Here’s a really pedantic bug I found in Mac OS X 10.4.2 Software Update: while you are installing more than one update if you reorder the list of updates by clicking on one of the column headings the spinner’s (the clock-like circle to the left of Quicktime in the first figure), which is a visual indication of which update is currently installing, position remains static. It doesn’t move when the list is reordered, so in the second figure it now appears that iTunes is being installed.

rdar://problem/4319901

Downloaded the new version of QuickTime to the iBook last night, and was surprised to find that the QuickTime player now has two “Help” menus!

So in keeping with Apple Bug Friday the bug was filed as rdar://problem/4300762.

I just finished reading Paul Thurrott’s comparison of Mac OS X and Windows Vista Beta 1. What a total cunt that guy is, and now I’m going to have to tear that guy a brand new cunt with a few choice quotes of his horse shit.

Though Windows XP features a much nicer and more colorful user interface than Windows 2000 and previous Windows versions, it’s still a far cry aesthetically (depending on your taste) and technologically from the Aqua UI in OS X (Figure). Indeed, Mac fans have often sneered at the “Fisher Price” look of the XP UI, which is a bit unfair (I find it highly usable and attractive enough) but understandable. OS X, by comparison, is clean, nicely rendered, and features many interesting transitions and other eye candy.

What the fuck does he mean “depending on your taste” or “attractive enough”? What a cop out. Come on, if you think that Windows XP looks like anything but a poorly designed fisher price toy for toddlers then you actually have no fucking taste at all. None. Taste isn’t some sliding scale for fuck’s sake, you either have it or you don’t. Microsoft doesn’t. And nor does Paul Thurrott.

Note that Thurrott conveniently doesn’t provide a screenshot of Windows XP to compare to the screenshot of Mac OS X in his article, so I’ve appropriated an appropriate image from The GUIdebook. Let’s take a look at the initial desktop after installing Windows XP.

Look at the bottom left hand corner. Look at the state of the word “start”, the jagged hideous italics and blocky drop shadow. And why is it “start” and not “Start”? The ugliness is plainly obvious to the eye, and just try and find the setting to turn anti-aliased text on to ease the eye sore - it’s in there somewhere, but can you even find it?

Look at the use of rounded corners to the start menu and the dumb (annoying) speech bubble. Why the fuck aren’t they anti-aliased - why do I have to put up with jagged ugly curves everywhere I look? If Microsoft were too lazy or too stupid to implement an anti-aliasing algorithm, why the fuck did they then have to rub my face in it with ugly jagged round-rects in every interface element in Windows XP? And I really don’t understand why the speech bubble requires a meta-speech bubble with an “i” inside it to tell me it’s a speech bubble. It’s worthless clutter. Yeah and why does the speech bubble refer to the “start” menu as the “Start” menu - make up your minds already.

Look at the icons in the start menu for “My Documents”, “My Pictures” and “My Music” and compare it to “My Computer”. So why is the icon for the first three basically the same, almost impossible to tell apart unless you look hard, but “My Computer”, is markedly different. Why didn’t they make the icon completely different for the pictures and music folders - you know, one a picture, the other some notes on a scale? Nope, Microsoft likes the small details to be plain, mediocre, boring.

And finally, look at the MSN messenger icon in the system tray - don’t you think it’s shocking to be confronted with an icon showing two nameless faceless men with a big red cross over them the first time you run Windows? Is this some kind of homophobic or anti-casual-gay-sex message from Microsoft? Crass, right-wing pandering is ugly too you know.

And can you actually believe that Paint makes it into the prominent list of recent apps in the start menu? So IE, Outlook Express, MSN Explorer (what is that?), Windows Media Player, Windows Movie Maker, some XP tour I’ll never watch, some file transfer wizard I’ll never use, and Paint (!) are the jewels in the Windows XP crown. These are the apps Microsoft thinks everyone should see and try out after installing XP. The best of the best. It’s a pretty poor showing by anyone’s reckoning. And you’ve got to love their insistence of naming everything Microsoft Something or Windows Something, you know so everyone knows exactly who’s to blame for the bugs and bad interface design.

So Thurrott, face it, it’s definitely not “attractive enough” - it’s a complete fucking eye sore. Windows XP is what you get when a tasteless whore fucks a retarded kid and gets pregnant. Ugly, stupid, and confused.

Windows Vista Beta 1 closes the gap, though I don’t think the beta Aero UI we’re seeing now is quite as nice looking as Tiger’s Aqua. In Vista Beta 1, Microsoft has added a number of visual effects that Mac users have enjoyed for four years, including translucencies, high-resolution icons, and animation effects that are both attractive and functional.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Check out the screenshots of Aero, or whatever the fuck Microsoft calls the shit Windows Vista user interface. There’s no subtlety there - I’d definitely argue that Vista is much uglier than XP. The jellybean green start button, still not called “Start”, is too reflective. The awful search field at the bottom of the start menu, or the windows explorer toolbar making it so much easier to do an ego search of your own fucking computer (Thurrott really is a wanker). Way too much transparency everywhere, it looks like every window is smudged and dirty and in desperate need of a shot of windex and a wipe with a sheet of crumpled newspaper. Even Paint is still there, sitting proud in the list of recently used programs, along with something called “Turn UAP Settings On or Off”. I mean what the fuck is that, and if it only has two states, on or off, why do you need a program for it? Huh? And all the black and purple - what’s with the purple? We’ve gone from fisher price face painting to nu metal goth lipstick and mascara.

Compared to Windows, the OS X Tiger Finder presents more traditional file system views. There are no “special shell folders” as in Windows per se, but rather specific folders under your Home folder–Documents, Pictures, Music, and so on–with which you are encouraged to store files of specific types (Figure). And though Tiger lets you create Smart Folders (saved searches), this feature is neither easily discoverable nor particularly integrated into the system. Specifically, Tiger doesn’t ship with pre-made Smart Folders for commonly-accessed searches.

By comparison, Windows Vista Beta 1 presents you with a well-rounded list of stocked, pre-made virtual folders–such as All Documents, All Pictures and Videos, and All Music–which, in essence, replace similar special shell folders in previous Windows versions (Figure). This is important, because many people store file types (like images) outside of the recommended place (Pictures and Videos).

Let me get this straight - so on the Mac, you get some good simple default folders for your stuff, you get your Home folder, and in that a Documents folder, Music, Movies, etc. On Windows your home is Documents and Settings (great fucking name that one), and in there you get My Documents (who else’s fucking documents would they be?), My Music, My Pictures, My Downloads, etc. I think the My prefix is just a little fucking redundant and it adds a lot of complexity. I’ve overheard conversations like “just go to your my documents folder and click on the…” - “your documents?” - “no, my documents”. All the result of some Microsoft cunt, propelled by the love of cunts like Thurrott, who didn’t want to emulate Unix directory structures too closely. Verbose ugly shite.

Okay, and now for the new bit in Vista - we get some prebuilt virtual folders (yeah, like my mother is really going to understand what a fucking virtual folder is - why not smart folder - whoops that’s what it’s called on the Mac, ok, why not live folder or something - no it had to be virtual folder because the loser programmer implementing this couldn’t think outside his C++ vocabulary for a name) like All Documents, All Music and All Pictures. And Thurrott is claiming that Vista beats the Mac on this one because of a few virtual folders that no one will ever fucking use anyways? He’s stretching now if he thinks that a folder that shows all documents on the hard disk is of any use at all if you have proper indexed searching at your fingertips. Oh I know, I need to find this document from a few weeks ago so instead of searching for “what a cunt” I’m going to browse for hours through a folder that shows every fucking document on the hard disk looking for Untitled Document 25.doc. Does Thurrott even spare a minute to think this shit through before he posts it in a “review”? You probably can’t even delete these fucking pre-built virtual folders, welded to your desktop in perpetuam.

Vista Beta 1 also takes it to the next level with its support of meta data. To deliver accurate search results, the indexer in both Vista Beta 1 and Tiger must examine both the contents of files (the actual data) and the meta data that describes those files. Meta data–technically, data about data–is most easily explained with an example. Consider a typical MP3 file, which represents a single a single track on a ripped audio CD. Meta data stored within the file describes the song name, the artist name, the album name, the track number, and so on. But all data files can (and do contain meta data). A Word document, for example, contains meta data that describes the author name and when the file was last accessed, among other things.

You stupid fucking troll. Usually data like the author of a document is stored in the fucking document - the Word file format stores this data, the MP3 file format stores this data. Mac OS X indexes this data. Mac OS X searches this data. I guess Vista does as well, not that you give any evidence of this (your ego search for Paul Thurrrot on your own computer is not evidence). This isn’t fucking meta data, not in the way you mean, you dumb cunt. Meta data would be something like the type of a file - so if I rename a .doc file to a .cunt file does Windows Vista know that this is still a Word file and Word will open it when I double click on my Paul_Thurrot.cunt file? No, of course it won’t. What a stupid idea. Guess what? A Mac can do this. Meta data, as far as file systems are concerned, is data that isn’t stored with the file, like the file type, or the creation date, or whatever other data you want to tag on a file. NTFS lets you add arbitrary attributes to files, and always has done - this isn’t some new Vista feature you dumb prick, so don’t pass it off as one. And guess what? HFS+ on Mac OS X 10.4 allows for arbitrary attributes or meta data to be tagged on files as well.

So a folder in Vista Beta 1 visually resembles a file folder that’s padded with the actual files you’ll see in the folder. And a document icon in Vista Beta 1 visually resembles the underlying document. That is, a Word document icon will visually resemble the first page of the Word document it represents. A graphics file visually represents the underlying graphic. And so on.

Uh, actually the Mac already does this, which you’d know if you’d ever fucking used one, you cunt.

In part 2 of my comparison of Windows Vista Beta 1 and Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger,” I will examine the security, networking and power management features of the two operating systems.

Boy, I can’t wait for the next part…

Cupertino, CA - Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller announced that the next update to its operating system “Tiger” would come with a blue screen of death widget. He said that this is being released in response to users that need to blend in with their corporate standard operating environments.

“Many users prefer to use a Mac at work but fear the persecution from the IT support staff for not complying with the corporate standard,” said Schiller.

Now Mac users can install the BSOD widget and when they see the IT manager approaching simply press “F12.” Their screen instantly becomes filled with an image of the blue screen of death. Not only does this fool the IT manager into believing the user is adhering to the corporate standard, it also sends him scurrying back to his office as quickly as possible to avoid fixing the problem.

Schiller suggested that this continues the trend of making Mac OS X more “enterprise friendly.”

“What started with Windows file-sharing compatibility that only partly works is further improved with the BSOD widget. We at Apple understand that we need to increase our perception of unreliability if we are to compete with Windows in the workplace. The BSOD widget is big step in that direction.”

Sourced from BBspot.