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Archive 2012 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

Tomser
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p.10 #1 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

carstenw wrote:
Have you looked at the new screen? While it is still glossy, it is a lot less so than previous iterations.

Still looks very glossy to me; but it's just a laptop anyway , not a screen made for editing images or movies .
I do like the matte 15" option, though, there's a fine display, considering what it is .
The retinas suffer from a number of compatibility issues due to the high resolution, so I don't think I'll get one anytime soon .

FlyPenFly wrote:
I think people also seemed to have forgotten how mind blowingly slow 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2 were.

How the hinges on the titanium G4 were near worthless, how incredibly asinine it was to upgrade the G4 Powerbook and all of them up until the Unibody.... etc. How incredibly uncompetitive all Macs were until the Intel transition.

The current state of macs is the best it's been in a very long time.

Good points, and I've been suffering through all of that myself .
The early OSXs might or might not have been slow, but the hardware certainly wasn't up to it .
10.0.0 on a G3 - you needed the patience of a saint.
The G5 towers were doing ok, but the Intel machines were a revelation .

As for the current state, if the latest hardware ran on 10.6, I'd agree it'd be the best ever, and very competitive .

Oct 16, 2012 at 11:33 AM

FlyPenFly
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p.10 #2 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

The new retina screens have no air gap which helps reduce reflectivity 75% IIRC.

Also, matte screens always look like someone put a sandpaper'd haze filter on top of the screen. It annoys the crap out of me.

Oct 16, 2012 at 11:38 AM

uhoh7
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p.10 #3 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

Bifurcator wrote:
There's the .DS_Store in every single folder. When these go bad and they VERY often do there's a whole host of troubles it can cause - like not remembering the display states of folders or your desktop, or not displaying icons properly or at all.

There's .bom files for every single app install usually found in /Library/Receipts/. Each .bom file contains a list of files installed for an app by the installer along with the correct permissions for each and every file. These don't go bad so often but the actual permissions do and Apple seems unable or unwilling to scan those files and reset permissions as they should be according to the relative .bom files. They kinda try to do it with Apple software but nothing from them AFAIK will clean up your non-apple apps once the permissions get corrupted - and they do quite often!

There's ACLs (Access Control Lists) - when ACLs go bad you get problems like finder always asking you for your password even on folders and files it shouldn't - as just one example. ACLs go bad quite often! Lots and lots of troubles with them! Especially in later releases of OS X. They can just ruin a server installation!!

The "LaunchServices" DB is responsible for the link between documents of a given type and the application that gets executed. It also keeps a list of all installed and previously executed apps. You feed it everytime you open a new type of document and you modify it everytime you select a different default app to open a file or general file type with - in the "Get Info" panel. When it goes bad and it VERY often does, you start seeing duplicates in the "Open With" menus, you can get wrong or corrupt looking icons, it can keep associations with deleted applications, or simply execute the wrong app on a double click.

The DYLD (DYnamic LoDer) uses a sort of DB known as a shared cache in simpler terms, to load all the frameworks, dylibs, and bundles needed by a given application's process - system or other. This DB (shared catch) gets whacked all the time and can cause kernel panics on occasion! Mostly shite just stops working tho. This DB gets rebuilt during Apple's "Monthly Scripts" execution which happens once a month blind to the end user.

There's the MEI which is an indices for all the mail and mail folders on your system. It gets messed up pretty often too and can cause all kinds of troubles with mail reading, display, and searching. If you only have tens of thousands of messages on your system it either doesn't corrupt often or the affects of the corruption aren't obvious. Using and managing hundreds of thousands of messages over multiple accounts however and the instability becomes both obvious and extremely annoying! In the worst cases you can lose whole message bases. I have! :P

There's a Help system DB that's responsible for connecting help lookups with the associated app. This goes corrupt a lot. When it goes you get messages stating "There is no help for this topic." when actually there is. Or you can get really really slow look-ups, and I've even seen system crashes from this. Don't ask me how tho... <shrug>

And this is just the short list of just one particular weakness in OS X which I thought was the most obvious to end users. I certainly haven't met anyone who hasn't experienced at least one of these problems. And they've not only been happening from the beginning but they've gotten progressively worse and worse with every release. To the casual user they're often little more than an annoyance. They can be a major headache for a workstation user depending on the machine to do actual job related work. And they can be critical in the survival or death of a server installation!
...Show more →

Excellent post and helpful. I am trying to get up to speed on the best disc maintenance tactics for ML:

e.g.
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/repairprocess.html

But as you later admit......"still not as bad as the windows registry" and of course the threat level online to 7 adds an entire layer of threat to windows systems that is not currently present for OSX--sure it's possible to screw up OSX online, but its much much harder.

@tariq yes, in regards to my personal machines I am really just now making the switch. But I've been helping my customers for a long while, and frankly have not seen the issues mentioned above. I've been amazed at how well the 5-6 year old macs handle the os upgrades without obvious issues.

On the other hand hardly a week passes that I don't have to remove rouge anti-virus from windows machines, and over the years how often I've had to nuke and pave my folks machines.

I have NEVER needed to do that on an OSX machine---I'm sure it happens, but not so much.

Then there is the endless fiddling with drivers and weird software----what a waste of time I could be shooting yellow leaves

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8327/8092840313_9e4f13c389_b.jpg
n5n elmarit 28 pre asph

Oct 16, 2012 at 12:15 PM

Tariq Gibran
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p.10 #4 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

Tomser wrote:
As for the current state, if the latest hardware ran on 10.6, I'd agree it'd be the best ever, and very competitive .

Wow, wouldn't that be nice! I can't tell you how often I have had to suggest to a friend or colleague over the past six years or so to NOT update to the latest greatest OS right away or buy that just released sexy Mac that only runs on the next OS X version because of all the compatibility issues they would see with their job critical software (raid software, font programs, design software, toast...you name it)...there are always sure to be casualties and headaches and it seems to be getting worse with every new major OS release. I often wonder if Window users must update and upgrade their mission critical software as often as us Mac users.

Oct 16, 2012 at 01:33 PM

theSuede
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p.10 #5 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

Yes almost. There are some DOS-based simulation programs that I had to abandon when migrating to Win7-64 from XP on my main (personal) computer at home. Just couldn't get them to work right.

But then again, then copyright date on two of them says "1996".... :-)
Does that count as "often"?
.............

Specific softwares depending on OS-specific API's no longer present may cease to function, but most of those are driver- or bus-control related. And most of those driver related issues are graphics cards and sound cards - since they are the ones that get the most attention in development, and hence also the most frequent hardware abstraction layer updates.

Oct 16, 2012 at 06:19 PM

theSuede
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p.10 #6 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

uhoh7 wrote:
Excellent post and helpful. I am trying to get up to speed on the best disc maintenance tactics for ML:

e.g.
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/repairprocess.html

But as you later admit......"still not as bad as the windows registry" and of course the threat level online to 7 adds an entire layer of threat to windows systems that is not currently present for OSX--sure it's possible to screw up OSX online, but its much much harder.

@tariq yes, in regards to my personal machines I am really just now making the switch. But I've been helping my customers for a long while, and frankly have not seen the...Show more →

There's one sentence in there that tries to give the the usual religion-induced false sense of security some more continuum.

Windows 7 had a reported headcount of class 1 security risks that ended up at ~1300 in 2011

That may sound like a lot, but then you have to consider that safety is a living thing, new holes are discovered by hackers and security analysts every day, and other developers (and of course Microsoft themselves) do their best to keep up. That's why Win7 has very frequent "security updates" to download when you set the Windows update to automatic, periodic - as you should.

OSX10.6 had slightly fewer class 1 risks reported - about 1200. As compared to the "much higher risk Windows environment" 1300.

The main difference between the systems is that MOST OF THE HOLES are still there in the OSX systems. Apple doesn't bother with most of the updates, they kind of count on people to update their entire system to a new subversion every year, and the updates will (maybe?) come with that large update.
..................

That people put their trust in OSX "to keep them safe" shows very clearly in another statistic:
There are more (a higher percentage of users) people suffering economic loss due to (lack of) computer safety on the Windows platform. And since Windows has more than 90% of the user hour count world wide (OSX <5%) they of course stand for the main part of the economic profit due to network / internet based economic crimes.
But:
Looking at each individual victim, and their loss from the crime in which they were victimized, there now is a clear trend towards higher earnings from the OSX users. The latest figure I saw from a reputable source stated about 300% higher profit per hit on OSX users. Given that they're no harder to hack/infiltrate/leech than a Win-based system - guess which "customer" that's the most desirable for the computer criminal right now?

The time when OSX was safe due to lack of interest from the internet crime factions was over several years ago, and the interest is still accelerating. The trouble is, Apple just doesn't seem to give a sh*t - even though this isn't "just an early warning", it's already happening.

Oct 16, 2012 at 06:42 PM

mawz
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p.10 #7 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

Tomser wrote:
Good points, and I've been suffering through all of that myself .
The early OSXs might or might not have been slow, but the hardware certainly wasn't up to it .
10.0.0 on a G3 - you needed the patience of a saint.
The G5 towers were doing ok, but the Intel machines were a revelation .

As for the current state, if the latest hardware ran on 10.6, I'd agree it'd be the best ever, and very competitive .

Personally, I found 10.1 on the G3 to be quite usable (10.0 wasn't, but Apple fixed that pretty quickly) as long as you had enough RAM, but I had 1GB in my B&W G3, an upgrade from the 768MB that my Beige G3 had, and which I also ran OS X on. If you really want to experience how slow OS X can be, try NeXTSTEP on a Colorslab with 8MB of RAM. That was entertaining, I had a Monoslab and a Colorslab for a while as toys. Nice machines, but while the OS was nicely polished (Most of the issues with early OS X versions were related to the architecture port and the Macification of the UI compared to the much less Mac-like OpenSTEP/NeXTSTEP which it evolved out of), the NeXT hardware was never as well designed as what Apple would come up with later.

That said, I've always been multiplatform. Got my start on PC's, but had a number of Mac's starting in 1996, mostly ones that were somewhat older (my first Mac was a IIsi, followed by a PowerBook 170). I've actually just started using OS X as a primary OS again after 6 years, when I replaced my eMac with a PC. Overall I like OS X, but I find the IOS additions (LaunchPad and Mission Control, as well as the App Store) to be much less useful and refined than Metro on Win8, I've a marginal preference for OS X over Vista/7 otherwise, despite a few other niggles (I'm not a fan of the Dock overall, especially in how poorly it indicates running applications and Finder remains a UI disaster, as it has been ever since Public Beta. But I generally like the UI otherwise and being a longtime Unix user, Terminal is a lot more comfortable to me than PowerShell.

I agree though that 10.6 seems to have been the peak for OS X of late. There were just too many poor UI changes in Lion (Natural Scrolling, Ugh, it isn't natural on a trackpad, only on a touchscreen)

Oct 16, 2012 at 07:28 PM

Bifurcator
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p.10 #8 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

Bifurcator wrote:
One of the more obvious things for me is the their damaged DB files!

carstenw wrote:
Which DB files are you talking about; could you point me at one?

Bifurcator wrote:
There's the .DS_Store in every single folder. When these go bad and they VERY often do there's a whole host of troubles it can cause - like not remembering the display states of folders or your desktop, or not displaying icons properly or at all.

There's .bom files for every single app install usually found in /Library/Receipts/. Each .bom file contains a list of files installed for an app by the installer along with the correct permissions for each and every file. These don't go bad so often but the actual permissions do and Apple seems unable or unwilling to scan those files and reset permissions as they should be according to the relative .bom files. They kinda try to do it with Apple software but nothing from them AFAIK will clean up your non-apple apps once the permissions get corrupted - and they do quite often!

There's ACLs (Access Control Lists) - when ACLs go bad you get problems like finder always asking you for your password even on folders and files it shouldn't - as just one example. ACLs go bad quite often! Lots and lots of troubles with them! Especially in later releases of OS X. They can just ruin a server installation!!

The "LaunchServices" DB is responsible for the link between documents of a given type and the application that gets executed. It also keeps a list of all installed and previously executed apps. You feed it everytime you open a new type of document and you modify it everytime you select a different default app to open a file or general file type with - in the "Get Info" panel. When it goes bad and it VERY often does, you start seeing duplicates in the "Open With" menus, you can get wrong or corrupt looking icons, it can keep associations with deleted applications, or simply execute the wrong app on a double click.

The DYLD (DYnamic LoDer) uses a sort of DB known as a shared cache in simpler terms, to load all the frameworks, dylibs, and bundles needed by a given application's process - system or other. This DB (shared catch) gets whacked all the time and can cause kernel panics on occasion! Mostly shite just stops working tho. This DB gets rebuilt during Apple's "Monthly Scripts" execution which happens once a month blind to the end user.

There's the MEI which is an indices for all the mail and mail folders on your system. It gets messed up pretty often too and can cause all kinds of troubles with mail reading, display, and searching. If you only have tens of thousands of messages on your system it either doesn't corrupt often or the affects of the corruption aren't obvious. Using and managing hundreds of thousands of messages over multiple accounts however and the instability becomes both obvious and extremely annoying! In the worst cases you can lose whole message bases. I have! :P

There's a Help system DB that's responsible for connecting help lookups with the associated app. This goes corrupt a lot. When it goes you get messages stating "There is no help for this topic." when actually there is. Or you can get really really slow look-ups, and I've even seen system crashes from this. Don't ask me how tho... <shrug>

And this is just the short list of just one particular weakness in OS X which I thought was the most obvious to end users. I certainly haven't met anyone who hasn't experienced at least one of these problems. And they've not only been happening from the beginning but they've gotten progressively worse and worse with every release. To the casual user they're often little more than an annoyance. They can be a major headache for a workstation user depending on the machine to do actual job related work. And they can be critical in the survival or death of a server installation!
...Show more →
uhoh7 wrote:
Excellent post and helpful. I am trying to get up to speed on the best disc maintenance tactics for ML:

e.g.
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/repairprocess.html

But as you later admit......"still not as bad as the windows registry" and of course the threat level online to 7 adds an entire layer of threat to windows systems that is not currently present for OSX--sure it's possible to screw up OSX online, but its much much harder.

Yep, very true. And then, lol... a few months after every Windows release since 2.0 a legitimate and credible computer scientist shows that MS intentionally installed government backdoors in the OS! With Apple so far we're only left with guesses as to whether they are there or not.

If your main purposes with either of these OS's are on the static side (Image processing, email, net surfing) the solution is pretty easy tho:

Keep your data folders off the (dedicated) System Drive.
Get everything set up perfectly (use for about a month or two to ensure).
Clone the System Drive
At the first sign of trouble restore from the clone overwriting the System Disk's format.

Alternatively doing the same thing in round-robin between two dedicated system HDDs and then using the migration tools in either OS X or Windows will let you keep any new passwords, forum accounts, and so forth that you've accumulated before restores. With 3TB drives recently hitting the $100 mark and 1TB drives going for as low as $50 there's not many excuses left not to keep system clones on a shelf or whatever.

My recent OSX setup is huge IMO and it's only about 400GB.

I'm trying something kinda weird this time around. The MacPro box is stuffed with multiple RAID0 software arrays and the system boots off an external USB/firewire drive cradle.

http://www.everythingusb.com/images/list/siig-usb-3.0-hard-drive-installed-view.jpg
http://www.everythingusb.com/siig-usb-3.0-hard-drive-dock-with-fan-19478.html

Oct 17, 2012 at 05:27 AM

Tomser
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p.10 #9 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

FlyPenFly wrote:
The new retina screens have no air gap which helps reduce reflectivity 75% IIRC.

Also, matte screens always look like someone put a sandpaper'd haze filter on top of the screen. It annoys the crap out of me.

It's the outmost layer that determines reflectivity, as far as I know .
But it doesn't really matter, as laptop screens can't be used for proper editing anyway .

Bifurcator wrote:
I'm trying something kinda weird this time around. The MacPro box is stuffed with multiple RAID0 software arrays and the system boots off an external USB/firewire drive cradle.

Careful with those things, I've had a few and they were not entirely reliable, to say the least .

Oct 17, 2012 at 11:10 AM

FlyPenFly
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p.10 #10 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

As far as I know, screen reflectivity isn't just about the top most layer.

Oct 17, 2012 at 11:13 AM

AhamB
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p.10 #11 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

Tomser wrote:
It's the outmost layer that determines reflectivity, as far as I know.
But it doesn't really matter, as laptop screens can't be used for proper editing anyway .

No, internal reflections are just as significant. Canon has reduced the air gap on their DSLR displays too, which has lowered their reflectivity.

Oct 17, 2012 at 11:23 AM

alwang
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p.10 #12 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

Bifurcator wrote:
I'm trying something kinda weird this time around. The MacPro box is stuffed with multiple RAID0 software arrays and the system boots off an external USB/firewire drive cradle.

If I were to do something like that, I'd install an eSATA port on my box, and use that for the cradle. More reliable than USB or Firewire for a boot drive.

Oct 17, 2012 at 11:36 AM

jzucker
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p.10 #13 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

AndrewTee wrote:
BTW most of engineers run Windows on Macs. Again, we design and build primarily for the MSFT ecosystem (and some Android and iOS), but they prefer the Apple hardware. Both platforms can co-exist : )

Umm wrong.

1000+ engineers on my site. Not a single one running windows on a mac for development.

Oct 17, 2012 at 02:55 PM

jzucker
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p.10 #14 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

popularity doesn't make something "universal" . Do you also believe lady gaga is "better" than Bartok?

chez wrote:
An awful lot of fan boys out there.

IPad sales:

Sept. 21, 2012 - 84 million
April 2012 - 67 million
January 2012 - 50 million
October 2011 - 32 million
June 2011 - 25 million
March 2011 - 19 million
Jan. 18, 2011 - 14.8 million
Sept. 2010 - 7.5 million
July 21, 2010 - 3.27 million
May 31, 2010 - 2 million
May 3, 2010 - 1 million
April 8, 2010 - 450,000
April 5, 2010 - 300,000

Let's just say they sold for $500 each. That makes $42,000,000,000 in sales.

Oct 17, 2012 at 02:57 PM

uhoh7
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p.10 #15 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

excuse me if this has already been posted:
http://www.dailytech.com/Microsoft+Surface+Team+About+Weak+Resolution+Youre+Looking+at+it+Wrong/article27966.htm

MS response to complaints about low rez

Oct 17, 2012 at 03:25 PM

jzucker
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p.10 #16 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

I think they just nailed their coffin shut with the poor display res specs on a $499 RT tablet. The fact that they have to spin an article and tell us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain is more telling than anything else.

I'm still excited about the windows 8 platform on an x86 tablet or netbook though.

Oct 17, 2012 at 03:31 PM

carstenw
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p.10 #17 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

The comments to that article give me a headache.

Microsoft's answer on the resolution issue is kinda lame. I am sure that 1366x768 is fine, but Retina is beautiful to look at, and yes, I can see the difference. Microsoft chose not to offer it; their business. The iPad screen could be less reflective, that is true, but that doesn't lower the resolution, it just forces me to turn a bit until the reflection is somewhere else.

Anyway, this isn't an either-or scenario, I am sure that there is room for both in the market.

Oct 17, 2012 at 03:41 PM

jzucker
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p.10 #18 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

carstenw wrote:
The comments to that article give me a headache.

Microsoft's answer on the resolution issue is kinda lame. I am sure that 1366x768 is fine, but Retina is beautiful to look at, and yes, I can see the difference. Microsoft chose not to offer it; their business. The iPad screen could be less reflective, that is true, but that doesn't lower the resolution, it just forces me to turn a bit until the reflection is somewhere else.

Anyway, this isn't an either-or scenario, I am sure that there is room for both in the market.

I can't see it. Microsoft doesn't offer anything significantly different and has significantly less software at this point and without at least having HD capability, this tablet is less functional than a $159 ASUS running android 4.

Their commentary sound like the political pundits after the debate.

Oct 17, 2012 at 05:11 PM

theSuede
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p.10 #19 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

jzucker wrote:
Umm wrong.

1000+ engineers on my site. Not a single one running windows on a mac for development.

That would be my experience too. And looking at sites like CodeProject, with a couple of million of users, the same seems to go there. Why pay more for a computer that is slower, just to get an Apple badge on the lid?
.......

That said, I do personally run Win7 (dual-boot with 10.6) on a MBP. The MBP is my only Mac, and I need to be able to cross-compile at home too. And when I travel, I don't want to have to lug around with two notebooks.

It's nice when they can coexist.

Oct 17, 2012 at 05:18 PM

mawz
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p.10 #20 · I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet

theSuede wrote:
That would be my experience too. And looking at sites like CodeProject, with a couple of million of users, the same seems to go there. Why pay more for a computer that is slower, just to get an Apple badge on the lid?
.......

That said, I do personally run Win7 (dual-boot with 10.6) on a MBP. The MBP is my only Mac, and I need to be able to cross-compile at home too. And when I travel, I don't want to have to lug around with two notebooks.

It's nice when they can coexist.

Win on a Mac is pretty common around here. But only on laptops, were the Apple hardware is some of the nicest and fastest around. Nobody runs Windows on a Mac Pro (which is overpriced and severely outdated).

Oct 18, 2012 at 08:09 AM

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