[OM] Re: [OT-ish] PC vs Mac - A SERIOUS discussion, and opinions wanted

[jking]

I have never used a mac. However, looking at the hardware the two are a
lot closer together than they used to be. In the early days the PC was
qute frankly a joke. right down to being advertised by charlie chaplin!
IBM did not expect them take off and still believed that the sales where
in maintrames. Apples first offering was far in advance of the joke IMB XT
both in terms of hardware and software. Heck the IBM Pc could hardly do
sound and the less said about the graphics the beter - I would not even
call MSdos an operating systwem because it lacks several of the features
required to classify as a modern operating system like resource
management!
However, over the years the PC has narrowed the gap simply because of trhe
number of developers (both hardware and software cmopared to Apple who for
a long time tried to run the apple architecture as a monopoly) and
recently apple because of manufacturing costs has had to  adopt more and
more PC technology right down to the PCI bus and (s)ata interfaces. This
process has come to the point where you can argue there is not a lot of
difference in hardware between the two apart from the processor (over
simplification I know but bare with me).
Software wise there are still big differences. Apple switched to a UNIX -
well design operating system design for BIG sstems and as home computers
got biger it fited better and better (however it was difficult to use
because it was written by programmers for programmers not ordinary users)
so the solution was to put a nice interface over the well designed core. I
was brought up on UNIX and later Linux and love it. It was so stable that
I never backed up and never saved until I shut the computer down. When I
moved to windows I was allways losing work until I got the save every
change mentality. Windows? well with a lot of experience and cursing I can
get it to be *fairly* reliable i.e. about as reliable as my Linux system
when *totally* misconfigured and messed up.
to me the real question is what do you want the computer to do?
what software do you want to run?
and go for the system that has the best software support for your task.
regards and hope this adds a little to the debate
James



==============================================
List usage info:     http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies:        olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================