the specs aren't as crap as the equivalent PC.
How can you just compare one product ? What are you trying to compare it with ? Just went to dell
Well, maybe I am unadventurous, but why change what works for me? (and millions of others world-wide) If you are prepared to spend the time - and if you are a Linux user, then that comes with the territory as far as I can make out - then most operations in the Windows GUI are user configurable to work and appear as you want them. For sure Windows has its little foibles, but then I'm sure that other OSs do as well. The thing about Windows is that it wants to be everything for everybody, and of course, it can't be, just like the Mac OS or Linux or Unix or any other can't be. That said, I think that overall, it does a bloody good job of being relatively easy to use for
*most* people, and that's about the best that you could expect from it.I can only speak as I find, but as a computer *user*, not fiddler, I have found since the first versions of Windows, that most have been pretty stable on my machines, and have done pretty much everything that I have asked of them, reliably and without issue. When I have wanted to add hardware or change out hard drives or whatever, for the most part, Windows has handled the transition smoothly, due in no small part, I suspect, to the fact that the the various Windows kernels across the years are very well known and understood amongst the hardware manufacturers, and drivers that work are easily written in such a way that they just 'bolt themselves in' without much user interaction being required.
On the (very few) occasions that some aspect of Windows *has* caused me a problem, I have found that the support via the MS knowledge base and help desks is extremely good, and failing that, the pool of in depth knowledge available on the 'net from around the world, means that a 'fix' is never far away.
I'm quite sure that a lot of the vitriol often leveled against MS in general, and Windows in particular, are actually 'Gates bashing' by proxy. I think that many people hate the fact that he is as rich and successful as he is, but forget that without his vision in the early days, there is no way on earth that computing would have evolved to the point that anyone from a 5 year old kid to a 95 year old granny, can sit in front of one and perform what actually amounts to complex tasks, without having to be involved in any way other than to learn to use a mouse, and manipulate a few windows. I think that is a staggering achievement, and if dear old Bill has gotten rich beyond his wildest dreams off the back of that, then bloody good luck to him !
Arfa
Indeed it is, but it has nothing to do with Gates or Microsoft.
More to do with Palo Alto and Xerox. My friend set a laptop up with SUSE linux for his daughter to use at 'uni' post uni it broke and she came back 'can I have another one like that please?
Really anyone who has used windows 9X or XP can stumble onto Gnomes desktop GUI and feel right at home. Except the bloody thing doesn't keep crashing.There is almost no setup required. Certainly loading Linux is generally quicker than loading windows, except that comes 'preinstalled'
Everything works pretty much te same way, except it DOES work. Reliably.
And then Apple who extended all the concepts involved and actually made it work at something approaching a reasonable price. I saw the Xerox stuff in 1982 and it was excruciatingly slow and expensive. So I thought it would never gain traction. Still, a good friend of mine had the office next door to Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 or whenever it was and was not impressed at the time. We both made the same mistake: judged the concept by an early implementation.
Yes, we all know the history. It's commercial success that matters.
WHat is that supposed to illustrate?
And then they install the latest release and Gnome is now Unity. That's a far bigger upsate than any change in the Windows UI.
Nor does Windows.
I didn't do any setup for the Windows UI.
Do you mean installing or loading?
On that we can agree (I removed the unneccessary qualification).
MBQ
Well it took copious applications of moores law to make it work.
I have a CPU motor ion my screen top.
I can max out my CPU easily by dragging an open window around the screen. 90% of all te CPU power there is goes in frigging eye candy. Almost none goes in actually 'computing'.
X windows is unbearably slow on anything much less than a pentium.
That a totally non computer literate user is just as happy to be given a pre installed Linux system and it requires zero effort to 'make it work'. Refuting te claim that 'linux is for geeks and hackers.
Android is linux, too.
I means installing, but loading is quicker too.
Wrong. Apple actually threw large parts of it away to allow it to get it to work on the miserable hardware of the day, said hardware accounting for the performance issues you allude to lower down.
Xerox 'D' Machines were fine once they'd booted, but they took 25 minutes to do it.
... kinda ...
I worked there from 1981 to 1993.
The latter point is correct, at least. And Xerox were never very interested in selling any of it.
Fair enough.
I was part of a team visiting from SLAC. We were actually there to see Ethernet primarily.
We started using Ethernet the following year, with boxes that implemented Xerox protocols. The frustration was that Xerox would not release the higher level protocols, so we rolled our own for a while until unix boxes started appearing.
A good questiojn I feel teh same about cars and virtually everything. Why should we install windows 7 when XP has worked for years ?
Yep they all do, but some more than others.
Perhaps but those users in general have only used windows so know of nothin= g else.
=20
What was the first version as that didn;t work very well at all. "The first independent version of Microsoft Windows, version 1.0, released = on 20 November 1985, achieved little popularity. It was originally going to= be called "Interface Manager" but Rowland Hanson, the head of marketing at= Microsoft, convinced the company that the name Windows would be more appea= ling to customers.
The first PC I uused didn;t have hard drives.
That's not really true.
Again not true that's one reason why registary errors were so common. I know people that build PCs. I have about 40 in my lab 3 of which aren't working. =20
That's not what others have found.
That is an advantge buit mostl;y the only reason that works is because peop= le have previously come across the problem.
Perhaps but I don;t see it that way.
I don;t I quite admire him in many ways especailly his charity work.
did he have vision, he worked at Apple with steve J.
You forget Turin who developed the siftware and ghardware to decode the eni= gma,
Rank xerox did that first.
I=20
Yeah, that was another of the huge mistakes they made - not telling anyone how this stuff all worked. Should have asked me, I could have given you the XNS specs. Although the time travel involved might be a struggle.
The Wall Street Journal rates Xerox's failure to exploit what came out of PARC second only to AT&T's failure to exploit Unix in Great Technology Cockups of all time. And I completely agree with that. The senior management were only ever interested in stuff that spat sheets of paper.
specs aren't as crap as the equivalent PC.
Any Apple will do. Dell tell you the exact CPU. Apple say
"One 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor One 3.33GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon processor [+ £400.00] "
The notes tell you it has turbo boost and hyperthreading, and the cache size, so I could probably work it out - but the number is _so_ much easier.
To be fair BTW you should probably look at Dell Workstations. an i5 (probably) doesn't compare.
Andy
They do actually give quite a bit more information than that - but not in the promotional bits.
E.g.
Mac Pro (Mid 2012) - Technical Specifications Size and weight
Height: 20.1 inches (51.1 cm) Width: 8.1 inches (20.6 cm) Depth: 18.7 inches (47.5 cm) Weight: 12-core 41.2 pounds (18.7 kg)1 Quad-core 39.9 pounds (18.1 kg)1
Processing
12-core (standard configuration) Two 2.4GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5645 processors 12MB of fully shared L3 cache per processor Turbo Boost dynamic performance up to 2.67GHz Hyper-Threading technology for up to 24 virtual cores Quad-core (standard configuration) One 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon W3565 processor 8MB of fully shared L3 cache per processor Turbo Boost dynamic performance up to 3.46GHz Hyper-Threading technology for up to 8 virtual cores Advanced Intel microarchitecture Integrated memory controller 128-bit SSE4 SIMD engine 64-bit data paths and registers Optimized for energy efficiencyYou can find all current products here:
I'm wear a dumb users hat. To perform the same action one should always perform the same action. Context is just confusing, it's an icon if I want to start the action associated with that icon it should be the same action no matter where that icon is.
As a user I don't care which bit is at failt it's all "windows". I've yet to come across a program that doesn't suffer from it.
The few times I've played with a Linux based GUI it's annoyed me there as well. It's one of the reasons I stick with OS/2 and Presentation Manager.
I eventually moved over to a UNIX-like system from OS/2, due to problems with hardware support. One main reason was that I have been using UNIX since 1975.
I tried KDE, but eventually settled on LXDE. I can tweak it pretty well any way I like, and make the UI look fairly like OS/2! But based on FreeBSD, not Linux.
A rather better than average OS to be sure.
Actually I think the double click thing is configurable on gnome. Or nautilus at least
Yup. I just got round to looking an hey presto its now set to single to select, double to open!
The wonders of Linux. You have a CHOICE.
Another good choice.
I never got involved with FreeBSD because the third party support was all going linux.
I never tried KDE or LXDE becasue gnome was what came with debian and debian was what a mate had a disk for.
I wasn't looking to find the ultimate distro,. just a stable server initially, and then a stable desktop to launch programs from.
I have spent so much of my working life setting up computers I don't really want to spend more: It works well enough for me and when running well leave well alone.
As a computer professional the 'latest and greatest' is always something I shun. It tends to be the most unstable as well.
In still running Lenny...cant be arsed to upgrade. It works. End of.
They hide it? Why? Anyway, I compared that (£3099) with a Dell T5500 with the same RAM, CPU and hard disc. I couldn't match the graphics - Dell don't have anything that old. Dell's price? £2468.
Andy
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