Why Macs are so much better than PCs

It's funny to see that such a capitalstic idea is happening in ole Iran.

$8 a registerable through a Vole Hole.

I hope the little critter doesn't get many paper cuts from all that registering passing through the ol' vole' hole.

Daysum

Subject: scribble of CSI

are you sure that's not a ~4 year old scribble of an opteron/HT system? ;)

hahn

Subject: vista's pretty face

Since all vista has to offer is a pretty face why not mention this option to spending $200 on a drm fiasco.

http://www.windowsxlive.net/?page_id=15

regards
Mike H.

Subject: Apple urges users to delay Vista upgrade

"Apple telling consumers to 'wait' before upgrading seems to suggest that it did not really want punters to upgrade at all."

If apple releases its OS as a stand alone product, i.e. with no hardware...

i'd definitely go for Mac OS, or atleast give it a try...

the question is,,, why aren't they doing so, it will be a good thing for people who are p*ssed off with Vista... and that's including me :D

A.H.A

Subject: numa numa

Since the Everywhere Girl is apparently not suitable material for wikipedia then perhaps it's time to start a campaign to also get this page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numa_Numa removed.

And maybe everything else on this page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_phenomenon

Andy

Subject: Please Bill Gates, save this Russian pirate from the gulag

Hi Desky! ;)

If I would see that a teacher uses stolen software in a school, I would go angry too!

They can work and learn on an good or better Office and Database with a free DEBIAN distribution, FreeBSD, a cheap SUSE LINUX an so on and if they must work on a cheap CAD workstation (3D mechanic, programming, SPICE simulation, PCB layout and more) there can buy an old W2K system, install an free WIDGETS engine (and other free goodies more!) on desk and work with it!

For a school CAD System under W2K SP4 you can use an old 800Mhz CPU with 256MB memory, an good 19" display and a new fast HD drive! (costs an sixpack on a scapyard and it will be enough power for the fastet CAD Software like IronCAD and the best SPICE simulator and VHDL programmer like Electronic Workbench!)

Who understand an OS and can work under Linux or BSD with an computer can also work under MS Windows ..... aaaannnnd ..... who can only work with an pretty shiny stupid Windows thing, sheesh ...... is too rich an too stupid for the real life thing on earth! :)

Have nice week!
Frank-J. Bebber

Subject: Proof reading

Since the four people here who read this can't proof read as well as you, I've institued a new policy - we'll just send it to you first, then after you've proof read it, we'll send it out to the rest of the world. :-)

Thanks
Jon Peddie

Subject: Cracked Vista

I always wonder about these cracked versions. Sounds like a scheme.

I can see Bill at his desk right now: "Yes, yes! THEY ARE EATING IT UP! They won't be smiling when they find out we started this fiasco in the first place - I want to see the look on their faces when 'Sorry, you just got fucked by Microshaft, again.' appears. Kodak Moment"

I agree, Kodak Moment.

Source: Right outta my ass.

Regards,
Mark

Subject: Bill Gate$

Argh, bother me not with that pocket calculator stuff! They invented menu bar?!? Oh noes, Firefox is doomed, Gate$ will sue them for using File, Edit, View... they better change it into File, View, Edit.. just to be safe. In these crowded days you never know whose toes you are stepping onto.

I am sorry but there were systems in use with displays, windows and menus when PC was still amber text on a black background only.

Regards,
Igor Levicki

Subject: Intel CSI diagram scribbled on back of fag packet

Intel's new architecture will differ from Hyper Transport how?

Heath

Subject: Iran

Iran ! Iran ! Iran !

Hackers

Subject: Microsoft has no plans to close Vista upgrade loophole

Hi there,

Interesting article especialy for people who have XP licence and want to do a clean Vista installation after they bought the Upgrade for £20 through the redeemer coupon.

But I cannot understand why someone will buy the upgrade version of e.g. Vista Premium for £133 and not the Vista Premium OEM (£67) plus a mouse worth £2. MS OEM licence state "any kind of hardware including keyboard or mouse". At least the last time I look at it 4 days ago.

Also if someone isn't bothered about Aero, the Vista Home Basic OEM cost less than XP SP2 (£50) and just get a Flash mem stick to use it at SSD Ram.

Thank you
Panos

Subject: EMF damage the Swedes

the swedish people are right,the damage of WiMax can not be over stated enuff. ck out lighthealing.com their rejuvinizer's(I've had mine for 16 plus years I never take it off) this is NOT spam,what I saying here is that I diligently protect MYself from eletromagnetic damage,this stuff WiFi and WiMax,cell phone EMF damage is NO Joke and this will show to be so,in the coming months,weeks and years as such. thatsd the ONLY reason I'm even recommending the rejuvinzer devices for protection. lighthealing.com blessings and light Bryan Keith. stay conscious,stay free. with NO Bullshit ,sincerley and authentcially,

Bryan

Subject: Apple urges users to delay Vista upgrade

Hello, sign me up, I'll buy OSX.... oh yeah the only problem;

Desktop: CPU: AMD X2 4800+

Laptop: CPU: AMD 64 mobile 3000+

DOH!!

Ah well I guess if they can't do that then I can't buy. Come on Apple open up your OS let us all enjoy your OS even those pesky AMD Fanboi's.

Dan Bastianello

Subject: Apple urges users to delay Vista upgrade

Nick,

This is anything but unbiased reporting. Having given Vista a test drive for the last year in it's various forms, PB1, PB2, RC1 & RTM I'm not surprised by Apple's announcement, bc almost nothing is ready to run on it. Even RTM is quirky and unstable, with tons of new security hooks to throw non MS programmers into a tailspin. I had to use compatibility mode for nearly everything, as nothing will run on it unless it was deliberately programmed for Vista, and nearly nothing has been released that is designed to run on Vista native to date.

What do you gain by demostrating such unenlightened bias? Nearly all the "Wow factor" features of the Aero interface were embedded into Mac OSX years ago when Steve Jobs design folks got the final version of NeXT ported over to the Mach Kernel and released it as Mac OS X 10.0 Beta. And that was 1999! So where's the wow now? Vista is a dog, it eats resources like there's no tomorrow. I have a 3.8GHz P4 with hyperthreading, 2GB's of RAM and both a 100 GB and 60 GB 7200rpm Hitachi hard drives in my Alienware M7700 notebook, and Vista has burned out not one but two NVidia 6800 Go Ultra video cards in the last 6 months, and I'm using it for forensics, not even for high-texellation features like gaming!

What's uncanny is that Microsoft's perpetual ability to write sloppier and sloppier code, hogging eternally more memory without freeing it, code that's ever becoming more and more bloated so that their software inefficiencies more than make up for any gains Intel gives us with it's perpetual doubling of internal clocks and transistor counts. The faster the hardware the slower the OS Mr. Gates gives the minions of the world to run on.

Now that Apple has rolled their systems onto an all Dual Core Intel Architecture you are finally going to see the beginning of the end for Microsoft. Vista is going to flop and big time. Why else would Gates be spending billions on "demand creation" a term I saw in an official MS communique a few weeks ago. Demand creation to generate a need for an OS that won't run well on any mid range machine out there today--just like ME which decimated well running Windows 98 machines, promising an upgraded GUI and delivering a lot of glitz and eyewash without boosting the core OS engine by trimming and optimizing the underlying OS code. Instead it was bloated boggy, and slow. Vista will be a disaster for users who currently are running XP on anything less than a 2GHz machine with a Gig of RAM!

And wait until they get a load of the wonderfully, mind-numbingly annoying User Access Controls which lock your desktop, grey out your screen and ask "Mother may I run this executable" every time you click on a program! It was the first thing that had to go! It's not like using a personal firewall like Black Ice or Zone Alarm, those products actually "learn" which programs you are okay with running--UAC never learns!!!! I couldn't wait to figure out how to turn UAC off so I didn't have to deal with it any more. And then there's the issue of how locked down the accounts are so that even the normal user will have to know his way around the NT permissions controlls like an MCSE in order to do anything Gates' folks think is risky or unsafe, like actually have write permission to your own files! Of course this might actually prevent some of the critical files from being deleted by users too--more on that later...

No I think you're going to see a lot more reviews like this one instead: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/17992/page1/. And that's what Job's is secretly hoping for. Will they move more machines, yes I think so. There's very little reason *not* to buy a Mac now. The price for a good Mac is equivalent to a good PC, and you get a superior OS for nearly everything you do. I got tired of having to repair my PC just to do simple things years ago and have been slowly migrating all of my family over to Apple and Macs. I didn't start out this way. I was a Unix power user and forensic examiner for the US Army and they sent me to a Mac Forensics course to be the resident expert in Mac OS. I was surprised about what I learned about why Macs are so much faster, why they are better at graphics, why they never crash, and why they are just all around better thought out and why they operate better period. I know you are a hard sell, so hear me out and I'll give you some things to thi

Most PC enthusiasts think they are better than the average user because they want to muck with the hardware and aren't afraid to pull and reseat a CPU, or add memory, or add a hard drive or whatever. And they like the freedom to do just that. Well, if you've ever worked on a Mac, you'd know that for years, the form of the Mac is just as important as it's function. At least since Jobs came back and rescued Apple from it's love affair with beige, and we've seen for years that Macs are uncannily physically beautiful from both a physical Art Deco standpoint and from an engineering standpoint--they are as much a pleasure to open and work on as they are to look at. All of the edges are either ground smooth or the sheet metal is folded over and rounded--you'll never scrape or cut your knuckles open in a Mac Case. Go to CompUSA and open the side panel on a G5/Pro model and you'll see what I mean. The cooling system is divided into zones and the fans are thermostatically controlled so they

The file system is likewise a beautiful thing. I am referring to the Hierarchical File System, and the Hierarchical File System Extended (which equate to FAT-16 and FAT-32 on a PC) which are far superior to either FAT for reasons which I will now enumerate:

1) instead of using a maximum of 4 physical partitions with numerous logical partitions in the fourth partition like the original IBM/MS partitioning scheme, Mac's can have as many as 64 partitions--as many as you want, and you aren't limited to an assignment to a corresponding drive letter. In fact, it is not uncommon for a Mac to have a dozen or more partitions, and here's why:

2) There is great logic in the way Macs are partitioned: The first partition is the Partition Map Partition, it is 64 sectors long and each sector provides a pointer to a separate physical partition. Its a roadmap to the rest of the drive's layout...

3) On the Mac, each device driver sits in it's own separate personal physical partition--There are separate drivers for the Internal and External SCSI Chains for older SCSI-based Macs, theres a separate driver for the Primary and Secondary IDE chains on IDE based Macs, there's a separate partition for the IOKIT module which deals with all the IO devices, (keyboard/mouse, video and audio), theres even a partition for Apple driver updates, and for firmware pushes, and finally there's as many User partitions as the user wants to create from the remaining space as evenly divided out, left over space (less than a single allocation unit) is allocated to a partition called "Apple Free."

Okay, you buy that this is different, why is it superior?

How many times have you had a BSOD because some file in Windows got corrupted? Like when the $MFT can't find the $Boot file and you get "NTLoader not found?" Has this ever happend to you? It happens all the time--the NT bootstrap loader $Boot's pointer in the master file table $MFT gets lost and $Boot can't find the cross reference to NTLDR which has the actual boot strapping instructions. Why does this happen? Because all of these critical files $Boot, $MFT, and NTLDR are all in the root of Drive C: the user accessible area.

4) On the Mac all of the bootstrap code is in a /MacBoot partition that is not visible to mere mortals, nor are any of the device drivers, such as you find in a PC in C:WinrootSystem32Drivers.

5) Because they are unaccessible, neither virii, nor mere mortal mac users can inadvertently corrupt them. But the OS Kernel knows where they are and that location never changes and is never stepped on, never accidently deleted.

Now let's address file system inefficiencies.

Let's say you work in an office where all of the filing cabinets have all of the files but they are organized by the date of creation. So the oldest files are in the left most cabinets and the newest files are in the right most cabinets. Someone calls you and you are not allowed to ask how long the customer has been with your company. How do you find the file? You start at the left and begin there and work forward until you find their file right? It could be the first or it could be the last file in the last drawer, you have no way of knowing until you pull it. So on average you have to pull half of the files before you will find the customer's file. Best case is it's the first, worst case it's the last average is half. That's how FAT filesystems work. Chronological storage with no hierarchy. It's a flat file lookup, and yes I know that NTFS is a hybrid but it still suffers from what amounts to a basically flat architecture within the $MFT itself.

6) In contrast with that is the HFS/HFS+ file system where everything is stored on not one but two hierarchical binary trees. Unix and linux use a single tree, but Macs are superior to both and here's why: the Catalog tree in HFS stored the first three fragments of a file in HFS+ it's 8. In the Extents tree, the remaining fragments are stored (in HFS 4-End of File (EOF) in HFS+ its' 9-EOF)

7) To use our corporate Analogy imagine you're working in the same office and the same customer calls you and gives you the same information--his name, and just his name. The difference is that now instead of being sorted chronologically, the file cabinets are sorted Alphabetically, and even though there's still no labels on the drawers the sorted order of the file system leads to much greater efficiencies in house keeping: Say the customer's name is Mr. Smith, On the PC you start at the beginning looking for Mr. Smith and you stop when you get there.

On the Mac you start at the middle of the file system at the master index node and then you play high-low to find Mr. Smith's file. The binary trees enable you to quickly divide and conquer the entire file system in just a few splits.

We start at the Middle drawer and find the first folder is McInerney, so we split the distance between M and Z 13/2=6.5 so we go to the 7th drawer from M and we discover the first file is Simmons, now we divide the drawer's contents in half and voila we are in the Smith's and have to find the first name. With an ordered hierarchical file system it is rare for the OS to have to do more than 7 divisions. The OS makes up for this by creating a series of Index nodes which point to the bottom-rung leaf nodes which actually contain the pointers to the sectors containing the files out on the hard drive. The number of index nodes constantly grows as files are added at the leaf node level, so that no index node tracks more than 7 leaves.

This is an extremely efficient way of storing data. The user doesn't ever know the machine is doing this, they just know that when they ask their mac to bring up a file, it's got a lightning fast response time, and that's why. 8) It doesn't matter if you're running OSX on the latest Intel Mac Pro, or on the oldest slowest Motorola-based G3, or even older Motorola 68K series machines running Mac OS 6--the HFS file system was the same, so file accesses are extremely quick even on a slow hard drive.

Why are Macs so great at graphics?

9) I don't know that they will be any more, because the key to fast graphics was the Big Endian vs Little Endian way of processing data. In graphics it is key to know what you are drawing/displaying. The Motorola chips functioned by processing the most significant nybble of the byte first--the high order nybble, then the low order nybble. Intel based processors do the exact opposite, processing the low order nybble before the high order nybble. If you're painting a shade of lipstick it's more important to know that the color is Red or Pink first, then rendering the exact shade of Fire Engine/Candy Apple Red or Coral Sea Pink. Make sense? The intel is trying to give a specific shade number to a GPU that wants to know what end of the RGB spectrum are we in first, and it has to do this for every stinking pixel it renders all day long 60 thousand times per second (at 60Hz refresh rate) Do you see why this mattered to graphic artists? Do you see why many still prefer to use a G5 t

Okay, so why are Mac's so great at iLife type things:

10) Because, well let's face it Steve Jobs is well, a little bit of a nut. He's a severely ADD type, an out of the box eccentric who knows what's cool, what's hip and what real people are into. He cares about what they're into because he likes people, and also because he's a blatent opportunist who wants to make his next billion by making products that people love and want to use. You can't get there by making an inferior product and he knows that.

Gates does not. Bill Gates is a real geek who's out of touch with how real people interact, how they work, and in general with how they live. And the results show up in the product. He cares only about getting a mediocre product out to the public--getting it good enough that people will buy it. And just barely good enough at that. And he expects that advertising will convince the uninitiated and the inexperienced that Bill knows best what you want and need, and that he has the "cool factor" or as they're actually calling it the "demand creation field" the "Wow factor."

11) Apple on the other hand has understood the real needs of real people for years and years. Mac OS 8 had the concept of building network profiles so that you could connect to various networks with your laptop. Once you built that profile once and all the settings were stored including whether the network was DHCP or Static IP, what the gateway and router and DNS servers were, what your primary printer was on that network, and even what time zone the location was in for all the jet-setting types, all you had to do was select the appropriate profile for that location on the Mac from the Apple Menu, or the Power Strip and all of those settings changed instantly without rebooting. Vista's so-called "Automatic" network discovery features don't do that. Vista's Automatic Discovery features only work when you change from one static network to another. Move from Static Network to a DHCP and it'll futz up every time, and you're back to the comparatively painful process of havi

And on a PC wireless is even harder with WPA settings etc.

12) Whereas Airport just works. Set it up once, build an Airport profile, the WPA key is stored in your keychain and you are automatically connected as soon as you click on the Airport icon in the menu bar and select the profile you want to connect onto. That's how real people work.

13) And the Ethernet network routines are compiled into the Mach kernel, just as they were in Mac OS 6-9.22 OS Kernels, which has always made Mac's superior at networking whether you were surfing the net or FTP'ing the file from hell across the globe using Timbuktu. Vista still has networking functions external to the kernel as if it's optional to be connected to other people in 2007... Get a grip will ya Bill!!!

There's a few thousand other reasons why Macs are far superior to PCs but I'll spare you those. For instance there's the power of open source code, Open Firmware, (Running XP in Parallels so you can run a PC app if you have to), Macs don't have tons of extra drivers so the installation process is quicker when you do need to rebuild a drive, or migrate to a new system, I could go on and on and on, but you can go revel in your ignorant "Bliss" in XP or in your new "Wow Factor" Aero desktop...

Sincerely,

Tom

Thomas P. Milley, Mac Forensic Examiner dNovus RDI Systems