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Archive for May, 2005

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Saturday, May 28th, 2005

A little less than a month since Tiger was released, I’m sure some of you aren’t satisfied and you’re looking for more. Of course the real changes may not come until the end of 2006, in time to trump Microsoft’s Longhorn, if that is ever released. So there’s plenty of time for Apple to consider the changes it wants to make for 10.5, and perhaps do a few in a Tiger maintenance update.

Now it’s true that maintenance updates, like the recently released 10.4.1, are designed mainly to fix bugs and make things run better. But if you recall Panther, and the memory is fading I’m sure, you’ll remember that an irritating shortcoming in the login dialog brought up when you clicked Network in the Finder was fixed. The shortcoming? That it didn’t have an option to remember passwords for the next session, for example.

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Saturday, May 28th, 2005

You have to feel smug when you hear the statistics. Over 80% of PC users have been infected by spyware, and, dozens of spyware applications are typically found on their computers. Even the fastest Pentium-based workstations can slow to a crawl under this abuse. If you want to get a small picture of the damage Windows users face, read attorney Eric J. Sinrod’s article in USA Today on the subject. No wonder Congress is struggling over bills to protect us against the malware scourge.

Of course, these are Windows problems, right? Serves them right for using an operating system that wasn’t originally designed with security in mind. Whether home or business computers, I just wonder how many hours of work are squandered fighting the losing battle against these security leaks. Shouldn’t they all just switch to the Mac and enjoy a safe, secure computing experience? I mean, when was the last time a Mac OS X virus appeared, other than a few “proofs of concept”? In fact, when was the first time such a threat appeared?

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Saturday, May 28th, 2005

An application quits, and you see a message asking you to decide what to do next. You can, among the choices, decide you just want to reopen the application and maybe subject yourself to more punishment. Perhaps click the button that promises to send a report about the problem to Apple, hoping that, among thousands and thousands of other reports, someone will take notice and do something about it.

But that’s just the beginning. Your Mac begins to slow down big time after installing new software, perhaps that 10.4 upgrade you just received. All too often you see a multilingual message telling you that you must restart your computer. Nothing works the way it should, and you wonder whether it’s all worth the fuss and bother. If you’re a switcher from the Windows platform, you begin to regret your decision. You come to believe you’re simply trading aggravation for more aggravation. Why are personal computers so unstable?

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Saturday, May 28th, 2005

Do you recall the scene? Apple VP Phil Schiller jumps onto the stage during a Macworld Expo keynote to stage a bakeoff between a Power Mac and a PC with an Intel processor. Invariably the Mac is faster than an Intel chip of equivalent clock speed; in fact, much faster in most cases. All right, there are some of you out there who don’t believe those benchmarks. Maybe the Macs were souped up, the Wintel boxes crippled. Maybe Apple concocted a set of tests that would only favor the Mac. Maybe.

But in my experience, this sort of nasty speculation is has no factual basis whatever. If you do use the same tests and methods as Apple, and similarly configured hardware (based on the published configurations) you’ll get results that are remarkably similar. I know. I’ve done it a number of times over the past few years.

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