Re: PC or Mac?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <slrna563q2.2g.byron@b60z27hbb464i.ab.hsia.telus.net>,
Byron Q. Desnoyers Winmill <byron@b60z27hbb464i.ab.hsia.telus.net> wrote:
 
> In article <a2trle$ld4$1@merope.saaf.se>, Paul Schlyter wrote:
>> We're talking about the real world here, not about some ideal utopia.
> 
> And you suggested earlier that the Macintosh was not the real world.
 
No...  Macintosh is a small part of the real world.  Most computer
users deal with other machines than the Macintosh.  Therefore, if you
think everyone should follow the Mac paradigm, then you're in some
Utopia, and not in the real world.
 
> People use the 'real world' to describe *their* world and not anything
> which is intrinsically real.  I will not accept such arguments.
 
Neither will I.
 
> (I could say, for example, that the majority of the world lives in
> poverty and cannot afford computers.  Hence your discussion of the
> real world should not include computers: Macintosh or Wintel.)
 
That is indeed a good point.  Which implies that if you want to
introduce a system which should be accessible to everyone, then you
cannot rely on computers for this access, since most people don't
have access to computers.  This matters in some real cases: many
banks, for instance, want to save money by computerizing as much as
they can.  But if the banks should require all their customers to
deposit and withdraw money from their accounts over the Internet,
then a significant fraction of their customers will be left out since
they don't have access to the Internet.
 
>>>> Why can't the Mac be made to write a file as just a simple ASCII
>>>> files
>>> 
>>> That is news to me, my Unix box, and my Apple II.
> 
> You still haven't addressed why you cannot write ASCII files.  You
> suggested that line endings were an issue, but that is an issue
> whichever platform you are using.  Every FTP client will handle
> this translation for you.  Virtually every mail program.  You can
> use vi or sed to do the (whatever)->unix line ending translations
> under unix.
 
:-) ... doesn't running UNIX tools on the Mac require the presence
of a command line of some kind?  Recently I had an email discussion
with someone who shared some C++ code for accessing Apple II disk
images.  I suggested he should try to run my little FID utility
(available at http://home.tiscali.se/~pausch/apple2) on his Apple:
it's written in portable ANSI-C and runs fine on several Unices,
and since he was running Mac OS-X .... but he couldn't, since he
had no CLI installed.  He preferred to use only GUI's....
 
> Under the Macintosh, TeX edit or BBEdit will translate
> from anything to anything (these are general text editors).
> 
> And which software creates a forked text file?
 
Beats me .. you'll have to ask some Mac guru about that.
 
>> FYI: I'm writing this on a 14-year old PC which still works fine.
>> It's used daily to read mail and news.  Using an old system for
>> that has one great advantage: it's completely immune to all those
>> worms and viruses floating around nowadays.
> 
> The same goes for newer Be, OS/2, Macintosh, and Unix boxes.  Very
> few people are interested in writing virii and worms for them.
 
Yep -- virii and worm authors mostly target themselves for the most
popular OS'es.  WinTel combined with MS mail/news software is the
most obvious target, so you'll be much safer if you avoid that
environment for your mail/news activity.  If the Mac had become as
popular as Steve Jobs and others had hoped, then the Mac would have
been the most obvious target for virii and worm authors.
 
>> Fortunately I don't really need that old hardware anymore -- there
>> are plenty of good emulators, and I've now transferred all my old
>> Apple II disks to disk images.
> 
> On your 14 year old PC?
 
Yep!  Guertin's ADT runs fine on that machine, and there are also
several Apple II emulators for it.  My Apple II+ only had the older
Apple Communications Card, so I had to modify the Apple II part of
ADT so it worked on that card.  It worked, but I could only transfer
disk images at 4800 bps (the max possible speed of that card, with
the hardware patches added - wothout them the max speed was 300 bps).
 
That 14 year old PC had been upgraded a bit over the years though:
originally it had 50 MB hard disk space (plenty back then), but
nowadays it has 700 MB HD space -- I've been picking one 500 MB and
one 200 MB HD which were to be discarded anyway.  It also has 5 MB
RAM compared to the 1 MB it had from the beginning.  And the video
card is VGA - originally it was CGA, and while I used the CGA card I
let that computer share monitor with my Apple II.... with a simple
switch I could connect my monitor to either the Apple II or to that
14 year old PC.
 
But of course I've also transferred those Apple II disk images to
more capable machines, to be able to also run fancier Apple II
emulators, such as Oasis (which also emulates Apple II CP/M nicely).
But the actual transfer from the Apple II was done to that 14 year
old PC.
 
>> Aren't you twisting the facts here?  The image quality of modern PC's
>> are always clearly superior to the image quality of the good ol'
>> Apple II+.  Yes, nostalgia is fun, but you shouldn't let it take
>> over your mind completely.
> 
> I was talking about Macintosh with the 13" and 17" monitors.
 
Ooops.... the word "Apple" is here quite ambiguous....
 
>>> Do not count on compatibility unless you plan on upgrading your
>>> hardware or software regularly.
>>  
>> I upgrade mine irregularly, usually skipping every other version or
>> so.
> 
> I use a version of Word from 1992 or so.  I simply don't need anything
> more sophisticated, except maybe to exchange files.  AFAIC skipping
> every other version is still upgrading regularly.
 
Sometimes I skip two or three versions -- is that irregular enough for
you?  Or I upgrade to a version which just is about to get obsolete
because a new version is available -- then the old version can be had
much cheaper, and I'm not left THAT far behind....
 
>>> Adobe's software is garbage.  I cannot get Acrobat to print to a
>>> PostScript printer with genuine Adobe ROMs reliably.  Illustrator 9
>>> will not even print to my PostScript Level 1 printer (or so it
>>> claims).  This is both in a PC and Macintosh environment.
>>  
>> I've never had any problems with Acrobat Reader on PC's.
> 
> Have you ever tried printing to a six or 10 year old printer?
 
Yep!  The printer on my home computer is now 6 years old.  That PDF
file my wife was unable to print on her Mac: we took it home and
printed it on the home PC here, on that 6 year old printer....
 
>> So if the Acrobat Reader cannot be installed on the Mac, are there
>> any other alternative to read PDF files on the Mac?  Or do I have
>> to transfer it to a PC to read it?
> 
> Install Linux, then run xpdf or ghostscript.  ;)  Actually, I think
> there is a port of ghostscript to Macintosh.
 
Ghostscript doesn't handle PDF files, does it?
 
>>> OTOH, the Macintosh of the olden days was easy to use, just like
>>> the Apple II is easy enough to use, because of its relative
>>> simplicity.
>>
>> ....and because people only expected these older computers to do
>> simpler tasks.  My old Apple II+ cannot print a PDF file either,
>> but I never expected that.
> 
> But you could print a PostScript file from your old Apple II+,
> which is the father of PDF.
 
Of course - but I would be unable to display it on the Apple II+
screen.  As far as the Apple II+ is concerned, the Postscript
file is just plain ASCII - it's the printer which does the
translation.
 
But there would be one serious practical difficulty though: the Apple
II floppies are only 140K large.  Of these 140K, 12K are system
tracks, leaving you with max 128K for your files (Actually a little
less, since the directory/etc also requires some space).  And most
Postscript files are much larger than that.  Yes, there were
harddisks for the Apple II+, byt _my_ Apple II+ never had one, and
never will have one.
 
> Many of the demands I view as being artificially created.  For
> example: why can a 68030 handle most (if not all) aspects of word
> processing, yet trouble free web browsing require a Pentium or
> PowerPC?  Similarly for PDF: it is simply presenting a canned
> formatted document.
 
Web browsing and PDF are not quite the same thing: PDF is just a
particular document format, while "web browsing" can be so many
different things.  Web browsing can be anything from just browsing
plain text with Lynx to browsing complex web sites which uses HTML 2,
Javascript, VBscript, Java, Active-X, etc etc or any combination of
them.  The web contains so many different kinds of things, and if you
want to be able to display them all, then you need the very latest
web browser, and those broswers require a Pentium or PPC -- just like
the very latest word processing programs do.  But if browsing just
text, using Moasic or perhaps even Lynx, is all you need, then you
can do fine without a Pentium or a PPC.
 
> Now these are not Apple II's, but the point is this: if the
> hardware can handle a task, the software should be written to
> support it.  This does not always seem to happen.
 
That's because the principle "Running light without overbyte" (which
btw was part of the title of Dr Dobb's Journal long long ago) seems
to have been abandoned.  This in turn is due to the fact that
hardware today is much more powerful than almost all of us need - in
suhc a situation many people start wasting cycles and bytes.
 
BTW biology seems to do the same: most of the DNA in our cells appear
to be "garbage DNA" which serves no purpose.
 
>> But thanks for your comments - I think yours is the first balanced
>> view about this I've read here.
> 
> Thank-you.  That's only because I think all computers suck, and no one
> sucks less.  I simply choose not to use Windows because of Microsoft's
> near monopoly status.
 
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at saaf dot se
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