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PC vs MAC

I just thought I'd add my two cents in the mp3 discussion. I have an RCA Lyra which works great for me for many reasons. No software needed, it just shows up as a hard drive. Songs are played in the order they are loaded. My music is organized just using the file system on my computer, why is software needed for that? I can pop the SD card out and put it in the SD card slot on my car stereo (a major plus) and play the same songs. My SD cards are all about 1 gig, not huge compared to Ipod, but stores more than enough songs for, say, a 4 hour drive, plus I use them in my camera as well as use them for data transfer.

I'm not an audiophile, I just like to listen to music, and my favorite part is just the plug-and-play ease of it. It cost all of thirty bucks. I've had for about a year and had one for about a year before that before I lost it, which didn't bother me because it was such a small purchase. All four of my kids have one, something I couldn't have afforded with Ipod. Also, I've never had a song not play because of any licensing issue.

I don't know, I've never used an Ipod, and I'm not knocking it, but from reading this discussion it just sounds to me more like a status thing and sounds more complicated than is needed. I do know one thing, I've yet to see a good review of the Microsoft thing. For entertainment, they should stick to Halo-delivery boxes.
 
rockoon said:
Not suprisingly, the academic circles are way behind the times. You are correct that many acedemic papers are still written in TeX, but why is that? Is it because its the best methodology or is it because its what professors want?

If I was going to appeal to authority on a technology related subject, I wouldnt be appealing to professors. I'd appeal to people who make it their business.



You can mince if you want. The arguement I was addressing was that proprietary formats don't work everywhere. I have demonstrated that that is not a fundamental limitation of being proprietary, and further that 'open' formats do exhibit that limitation.



Typesetting and page layout are very closely related. With the comming of the digital age true typesetting is an obsolete methodology, replaced completely by the more general (and more powerful) desktop publishing. The driving force behind this transition was Adobe and its Page Maker software.

The age of desktop publishing is over 20 years old now and the shortlived need for computer aided typesetting has come and gone. To stay on thread topic, it was the Macintosh which popularized desktop publishing.

Typesetting -> Phototypesetting -> Photosetting -> Desktop Publishing

Typesetting came and went.
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I think you miss the point. DTP is for when you want (or need) to manually control every aspect of the layout. Typesetting (TeX style) is for when you need a standard layout that swallows raw text and makes a nice looking document out of it.

In practical business terms, use DTP to layout sales brochures and typesetting to put together the manuals for your products.

I use LyX for most of my correspondence. LyX is a graphic frontend to LaTeX, and it makes writing properly formatted business letters a snap. The plans I presented to my bank when trying to get a loan approved to start my own business were also written with LyX, and garnered remarks on the neatness of the layout and questions as to how I'd done it.

On the other hand, when I need to layout a flyer, I use something that lets me nudge the elements around the page manually. Adobe InDesign would be one way. I use Scribus.

TeX and LaTex have other advantages. It is pretty easy to generate a LaTex document using a program. The book keeping software I use does just that. It creates a LaTex document of the bill or invoice that I want to print, then gives that to LaTex to generate a PDF. It's much more difficult to do that with InDesign. It's possible with Word files, and Excel as well as the OpenOffice.org pedants though not as straight forward.

Another thing to note is that MS Word and OOo Writer both support both typesetting DTP concepts. Both programs have the concept of "Styles," and both let you manually place objects on the page. Styles give you the consistency advantages of typesetting, and the manual control gives you the flexibility of DTP.

I find I need a mix of both concepts in order to get real work done. When I teach word processing, I include techniques from both sides.
 
MortFurd said:
I find I need a mix of both concepts in order to get real work done. When I teach word processing, I include techniques from both sides.
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Agreed. I've been doing layouts since 1985 and still see the value in typesetting. The big event that screwed up DTP was the devlopment of the WWW. I need to repurpose documents fast, so InDesign/QuarkXPress are reserved for one-offs. Most of my content is in some kind of text markup language, with the occasional conversion to 'pretty formats'. Just try to copy-paste a two-column PDF from Acrobat Reader sometime, and the value of typesetting over layout becomes apparent.
 
Mmmmffff. Another Mac vs. PC thread.

OK, here's the deal: I'm a CS professional. I don't mind cutesie UIs, but quite frankly I want access to the internals in case I either want to do something the designers never anticipated, or want to fix something the designers never anticipated. From that viewpoint, the older Mac UI and Windows BOTH left a lot to be desired.

Hey, I'm a programmer; for what I like to do, UNIX is the best OS, period. Now, lately, Macs have command line access, and since they are based on the UNIX kernel and now reputedly have at least some of the standard UNIX utilities available from the command line, they are probably more attractive on that basis to me than Windoze PCs.

But hangonaminnit. Here comes Linux. And it's the best of all worlds, to me; I can tinker with the kernel, tinker with the filesystem, do whatever I want on the command line. It has cutesie UI if I want that; if not, it will screw off and leave me alone, and BTW getting rid of it will increase the performance of the system by a hell of a lot.

And to top it all off, I can set it up multiboot with Windoze if I insist on the cutesie UI. So I get everything I want, and Mac hardware costs more; more per megabyte of memory, more per gigabyte of disk, more per gigahertz of CPU, and more per square inch of monitor. So why should I pay more? No reason I can see.

For someone who doesn't have my expertise in CS, sure, a Mac is prolly a great idea; and I'm glad it exists for those people. The price difference is not exorbitant; and if it works better, great.

I kind of liked the car lot analogy: Windoze PCs are like station wagons you have to buy at normal prices; Linux boxes are like free tanks, the drawback being you have to learn to drive a tank and be careful not to blow the gun off in populated areas; Macs are sleek, expensive Euro-sedans; and BeOS boxes are fully functional Batmobiles. Hey, if you like Euro-sedans, great; you oughta drive one. If you like Batmobiles, you oughta drive one; too bad the company that makes 'em went tits up. If Euro-sedans are too pricey, and Batmobiles and tanks intimidate you, then you prolly oughta get a station wagon. Me, I like tanks. And not only do I know how to drive a tank, and how not to shoot the gun off in populated territory, but I LIKE driving a tank. Ya know? And occasionally, I need a station wagon; and when I do, I have one at my beck and call; I was willing to pay to have it. And I'm using it now. But when I need the tank, I have the tank; and it's, well, a tank. And you can't beat a free tank. :D
 
phyz said:
Wait, wait! Is it a poorly-scripted parody of the "I'm a Mac" ads where the PC guy gets the upper hand?

Man, that would be original, ironic, and hilarious! Well, it would be if it hadn't been done "ad nauseum" since about 1984.
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The parody happened before the commercial?! Someone contact Randi!
 
delphi_ote said:
The parody happened before the commercial?! Someone contact Randi!
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Sorry, delphi; I was unclear on the meaning of "it." Something akin to "pronoun trouble" in Daffy Duck parlance. Parodies using the latest Mac campaign motif but turning it against the Mac likely go back to 1984. They've certainly blossomed since the "Switcher" campaign of a few years ago. The first occurrence was amusing, the myriad that followed were second-derivative. Every bit as funny and original as asking a guy named Adam, "So where's Eve?"

The better of the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" parodies are the "I'm a Christian/I'm a Christ Follower." Now that's some funny [rule 8].
 
rockoon said:
Not suprisingly, the academic circles are way behind the times. You are correct that many acedemic papers are still written in TeX, but why is that? Is it because its the best methodology or is it because its what professors want?

If I was going to appeal to authority on a technology related subject, I wouldnt be appealing to professors. I'd appeal to people who make it their business.
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You clearly have never had to do any serious math typesetting (or "desktop publishing", which is in fact essentially the same thing) in word or pagemaker or whatever. Otherwise, you wouldn't be talking such nonsense.

Your distinction between typesetting and desktop publishing is also nonsense. You can do the same thing in latex, and in fact you do when you run dvi2ps on your dvi file generated by latex from your latex file.

And finally, the jibe about academia being "behind the times" is utter nonsense. I went to grad school in CS at CMU. At that point, there were maybe half a dozen companies capable of doing that kind of work. Now there are more, but an awful lot of them were started by professors.

You have absolutely no idea at all what you are talking about.
 
totoro said:
You have absolutely no idea at all what you are talking about.
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I'd like to second this post. The idea that professors aren't in the business of technology is hysterical. Also, the idea that they don't know how to write papers is a riot.
 
Schneibster said:
OK, here's the deal: I'm a CS professional. I don't mind cutesie UIs, but quite frankly I want access to the internals in case I either want to do something the designers never anticipated, or want to fix something the designers never anticipated. From that viewpoint, the older Mac UI and Windows BOTH left a lot to be desired.
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Which particular internals, the kernel? Windows has a pretty full api, and other than monkeying with the kernel, you can do pretty much anything. And the windows threading api blows the doors off pthreads in 2 important ways.

1. waitForMultipleEvents
2. it doesn't have the evil pthread_cond_wait/pthread_cond_timed_wait spurious wakeup issue, which is the source of many bugs

Schneibster said:
Hey, I'm a programmer; for what I like to do, UNIX is the best OS, period. Now, lately, Macs have command line access, and since they are based on the UNIX kernel and now reputedly have at least some of the standard UNIX utilities available from the command line, they are probably more attractive on that basis to me than Windoze PCs.
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Why? I'm a programmer too, and have done lots of cross-platform c++. I usually do most of my development on windows because it has a proper ide, and only work on linux (at least for c++) when I have to. Yes you can do everything you can do in devstudio with emacs/make/grep/find/gdb, etc, but you're deluding yourself if you think you can do it as quickly as you would in an ide you knew well. For java, this is clearly a moot point, since you can use eclipse everywhere.

As far as unix command line tools go: for windows, you have cygwin. Osx is bsd layered over mach it doesn't just have some command line utils, it is a unix. But it has a somewhat broken threading model (google on osx threading performance problem funnel if you're interested).

Linux and Osx both have core files, and windows doesn't. This _can_ be a pretty big deal, especially if you have some big multithreaded process crash.

Haven't seen anything here to indicate that linux is across the board to develop on. Maybe osx is the best in this respect, actually, since it is a unix and therefore has core files (and it has a decent ide).

Schneibster said:
But hangonaminnit. Here comes Linux. And it's the best of all worlds, to me; I can tinker with the kernel, tinker with the filesystem, do whatever I want on the command line. It has cutesie UI if I want that; if not, it will screw off and leave me alone, and BTW getting rid of it will increase the performance of the system by a hell of a lot.
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Are you saying that you often run without X? If so, great for you. If you're running gnome or kde, i'm not sure i follow you. OSX actually doesn't use a ton of resources to run (windows xp can clearly be a bit piggy, and vista would appear to be pretty much unacceptable).

Schneibster said:
For someone who doesn't have my expertise in CS, sure, a Mac is prolly a great idea; and I'm glad it exists for those people. The price difference is not exorbitant; and if it works better, great.
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I'd be willing to bet that my CS creds are at least as good as yours, and I use all three OSes. Your post seems to me to be mostly about snobbism.

The only clear advantage I see linux having is something you didn't mention. Vista is ridden through and through with drm ********. Osx isn't _now_, but you never know. This is a pretty big deal for me. The only downside to linux I can see is that the c++ tools aren't very good, although both linux and osx have core files, which windows sadly doesn't (and there is no way I'll accept the claim that Dr Watson is an acceptable substitute.

I'm keeping an xp box around just for devstudio, but as I seem to be spending more and more time developing in java, the drm issues are becoming more overwhelming for me personally. My next computer will probably be a laptop running ubuntu (although there is a hassle factor there, clearly) because of this.
 
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I use both, though Windows far more, but I think I made my feelings on Macs quite clear after a few beers on chat the other night.
 
merentha said:
Apart from the software's lack of drag-and-drop, a problem shared by the iPod, it doesn't have the iPod's many shortcomings.
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If you mean iTunes doesn't support drag-and-drop, you're mistaken. If you mean the iPod doesn't support dragging music files directly to the device, you're correct.
 
HarryKeogh said:
If it was just their marketing shouldn't their computers have more than a 4% market share? (If I remember correctly it's 4% up from 2% from a few years ago)
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To be fair, it depends on how one defines the market. What is Apple's market share if we restrict our analysis to the segments of the personal computer market in which Apple actually competes? I don't think they're on top but I bet they fare better than 4%.
 
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