Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
12 June 2005
Filed under:Gadgets,Personal at2:10 pm

The contrast between my experiences of owning a Mac for the last five months and recent PC experiences has been instructive.

I recently visited a friend whose PC had become all-but-unusable because of spyware and viruses (not a problem on Macs – at least not for the moment). Now we just acquired a Dell laptop and we’re finding getting it set up to be something of a hassle.

While Bluetooth just works on my Mac, configuring it is a mess on the Dell. XP insists on sticking icons on the desktop that we don’t want, and several of the games I had hoped to run on the Dell (Battlefield 2 and Doom 3 for example) don’t work either, so I’m not even able to profit from the advantage the PC has in availability of games.

And the way XP handles multiple users on the same machine is weirdly inconsistent – sometimes programs are installed for all users – other times they only seem to install for the user who is logged in at the time. Not that I haven’t had a few problems getting to grips with the way Mac users and permissions work, but at least it has seemed more logical in the way it functions.

5 Comments »

  1. With the switch Apple is going to find out the that grass is not always better on the other side. However, Its going to be a interesting time thats for sure.

    Comment by DanoX — 12 June 2005 @ 5:22 pm

  2. >”With the switch Apple is going to find out the that grass is not always better on the other side.”

    Actually, it’s the operating system, not the processor, that allows or doesn’t allow viruses, spyware, etc. Windows XP is like Swiss-cheese (full of security holes). OS X on the other hand, is UNIX-based and built tigter than Fort Knox. Also, being UNIX-based, the underpinnings are open-source and are constantly being strengthened by a world-wide army of collaborative coders.

    Comment by Harvey — 12 June 2005 @ 6:32 pm

  3. I say forget computers and stick with paper and pen

    Comment by me — 12 June 2005 @ 7:11 pm

  4. DanoX is obviously a know-nothing moron… Geez man, get a clue as to the differences between hardware and software, between chips and OS’s.

    Love,

    Melangell

    Comment by Melangell — 12 June 2005 @ 11:40 pm

  5. “Actually, it’s the operating system, not the processor, that allows or doesn’t allow viruses, spyware, etc.”

    Well, yes. And no.

    One difference between PowerPC and Intel–if you’ll excuse the dose of technicalese–is how information gets passed. On PowerPC, where you have an abundance of registers, information will more than likely be put in a register. On Intel, with it’s lack of registers, information will more than likely end up on the stack. This makes it far easier to “overflow” the stack and cause bad things to happen on an Intel machine than on PowerPC (you can’t really overflow registers).

    So Apple may find itself with more exploits on the Intel side than on the PowerPC side merely because of things that happened in PowerPC weren’t as easily exploitable than they will be on the Intel side.

    Comment by Peter — 12 June 2005 @ 11:54 pm

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