Re: A2Central News

["Chris Morse" <win32mfc@gmail.com>]

Terry Olsen wrote:

> I don't get this either. Back when Apple was in the process of dumping it's
> loyal II users and trying to convince them to jump on the Mac bandwagon,
> there was serious hatred for Apple. On the BBS's I frequented, people were
> swearing never to buy another Apple product. The cry of the day was "I'll
> turn Blue before I ever buy a Mac". The word "Blue" of course was referring
> to Big Blue, IBM. One of the BBS's I was on was called "Sculley's Hatred". I
> don't know if that was referring to Sculley's Hatred of the Apple II, or
> Apple II users' hatred for Sculley.

I went from Apple IIe to IBM (a Compaq Portable 386, 20MHz luggable
with 1MB RAM, 20MB HD, 5.25" floppy) in 1988 about 6 months before I
left for college.  I was already taking classes at the local tech
college, while in high school, and was doing assembler, pascal and C.
It was obvious to me at that point that the IBM platform was where it
was at in terms of accessability to compilers (I was using Turbo C
1.5), information, and friends..  Of my computer friends, one had an
Apple II, another had an IBM PC.  My friend Altan had a //e, IIgs and
was then using and programming on a Mac.

> I'd like to know what happened to those people who swore never to buy a Mac
> and then did. What was it that swayed you? I never took a 2nd look at a Mac,
> so I don't know if it would have been the "platform that fits me best".

Good question.  I don't know anyone that went from Apple IIe to IBM to,
finally, Mac..

> I went to Best Buy last night looking to see if they carried any of those
> $50 VRFM9 USB/MP3/FM Modulators. The 19 year old kid then proceeded to start
> preaching to me about the iPod and Macs. When I told him I preferred PC's,
> he laughed and remarked that I must not mind the BSOD. I told him that I
> haven't seen that since Windows 98 & Windows NT. He laughed again and
> practically called me a liar.  He then called his buddy over and asked him
> "Have you ever seen Windows XP BSOD?" to which came the reply "Oh, all the
> time!"  It takes an idiot to do that to XP.

I never used Windows 95 or 98.  I went from Windows 3.1 (which I used
only briefly, at work, mainly) to Windows NT 3.51.  Then I went to NT
4.0 then 2000 now XP pro.  Let me say that with XP, a BSOD is VERY rare
for me.  For (1), I can count the number of times it's happened on one
hand, and for (2) those times it did happen, on my current machine over
a year old, it was because of Kerio Personal Firewall.  Ie, third party
software.  The only other times I've had BSOD's was actually because I
had BAD MEMORY that needed to be replaced.

In my experience, BSOD's happen on XP because of either real hardware
faults or crappy low-level drivers (which usually seem to be in the
Video or Network arena.)

> He then went on to tell me how the Mac is "un-crashable". Well, maybe he
> hasn't crashed his, but there's lots of blogs out there with stories of
> crashed Macs. Of course, they all blame 3rd party software or hardware for
> their particular crash.  All examples of the "Apple can do no wrong"
> mentality.

The Mac has their own BSOD, it's just not blue.  But you can make it
look just like a Windows BSOD if you want to.  Check this article, from
5 days ago:

    http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/11/2137257


> He also told me how there weren't any viruses on Macs. I called him on that
> one because I know that there have been. See
> http://antivirus.about.com/od/macintoshresource/. Then he told me that "all
> I have to do is reboot and the virus is rendered useless."  That's funny. I
> thought there weren't any viruses on Macs, and isn't rebooting considered
> faux pas for a Mac user?

The Mac doesn't have the population to be a good target yet.  I have no
doubt that if the Mac had the market saturation of Windows, it *would*
have lots of viruses.  If anyone denies that, they're kidding
themselves... or trying to sell you a Mac.. or both..

> Then he boasted about how he had Windows XP loaded on his Mac. Hmmm... I
> thought Windows XP sucked. Why would he load a piece of crap like that on
> his beloved Mac? "So...", I replied. "I've loaded OSX onto a PC."
> "Ahh...but can you dual-boot?", he asked. Why would I want to? For me,
> loading OSX onto a PC was just a novelty. So that I could play with it for a
> while. I found nothing spectacular about it and moved on.

Mac OS/X looks pretty interesting, being a commercially developed,
supported, and affordable unix system (hardware and software) for the
masses.  I must say, also, that the Virtual ][ emulator looks really
nice.

BTW, how did you get OS X to install on non-apple hardware?  Aren't
they trying to avoid that from happening?  As a side note, I wonder how
stable OS X would be if it ran on the gamut of hardware out there that
Windows has to run on.  With OS X running on a controlled platform,
it's much easier to make it stable.

// CHRIS