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It's funny. Laugh. OS X Operating Systems Software Windows IT

OS X Vs. Vista — In Spandex 302

Posted by Zonk from the sounds-like-a-normal-weekend-to-me dept.
An anonymous reader writes "CNET UK compares Vista Vs. Apple OS X in a Romeo and Juliet, spandex-wearing, Shakespearean English style. Two guys dress up as their favorite operating system and fight with swords, guns, and fists, while a third guy, dressed as a woman, awaits the winner. 'Usability - Act 3, Scene 2: Swords clash, sparks fly and men grunt, but the showdown ends in stalemate ... [Vista] has a far better user interface than XP -- the file and application search facility is vastly improved and the cascading Start menu has been banished, but it only takes a few moments of use to discover pointless idiosyncrasies. Microsoft constantly reminds us of how great Flip 3D is, but this feature doesn't help us find the right application window much faster than Alt-Tab did. It's very time consuming when you have many application windows to flip through, and it's in no way as efficient as OS X's Exposé feature ... We're calling this one a draw. They're just as good as each other, and in some cases just as bad -- a pox upon both your houses! Score: Mac OS X - 2, Windows Vista - 2'"
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OS X Vs. Vista — In Spandex More

OS X Vs. Vista — In Spandex

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  • Win2K had better searching than XP. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28, 2007 @02:40PM (#18913437)
    [Vista] has a far better user interface than XP -- the file and application search facility is vastly improved and the cascading Start menu has been banished, but it only takes a few moments of use to discover pointless idiosyncrasies.

    XP's searching capabilities are shite compared to Windows 2000. What the hell is up with that stupid dog image when using the XP search? So it's better to compare Vista's searching with that of Windows 2000. At least then you're comparing Vista's capabilities against something that's usable.

    Same with the Start menu. It's really simple and sensible under Windows 2000. But then XP came along and made it really awkward to use. So again, don't compare against XP, since it was a step backwards. Compare against Windows 2000!

    • Re:Win2K had better searching than XP. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Cygfrydd ( 957180 ) <cygfrydd.llewellyn@gmail. c o m> on Saturday April 28, 2007 @03:06PM (#18913591)
      You are, of course, given the option of turning off the animated character and enabling advanced search behaviour, which makes for a far more 2k-like experience.
    • You can turn off the dog really easily.

    • Re:Win2K had better searching than XP. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by R.Mo_Robert ( 737913 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @03:22PM (#18913691)

      I happen to like XP's Start menu a lot better than 2000's, particularly the list of the most frequently used applications. (Yes, I know you can put stuff at the top level of the old Start menu ... but not automatically--and there are no shortage of applications that abuse this privilege. XP intentionally doesn't let programs do this on the new Start menu. Plus, XP's Start menu provides easier access to My Computer, Network Places, and all that jazz without having to dig out the desktop.)

      That, and you can go back to the Windows 2000-style Start menu anyway if you like in XP In fact, I think I could do that in the Visa beta I tried, unless my memory is just failing. Either way, I wouldn't call XP's Start menu "awkward."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pembo13 ( 770295 )
        I would... programs just spit stuff onto it. Very little organisation. Ofcourse, I suppose one could say that my critique isn't the fault of the start menu itself, but it comes that way in its default state.

      • Re:Win2K had better searching than XP. (Score:5, Funny)

        by bussdriver ( 620565 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @04:38PM (#18914159)
        >I tried, unless my memory is just failing.

        Thats ok, my memory failed to contain Vista as well.

      • Re:Win2K had better searching than XP. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by xlsior ( 524145 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @04:48PM (#18914233)
        I wouldn't call XP's Start menu "awkward."

        It all depends on how you use the OS -- as someone who pretty much lives by keyboard shortcuts over the point & click stuff, I find the default XP start menu extremely awkward simply because it's two-column design is near impossible to navigate with the keyboard. You can't easily switch between the columns, since half the options expand into submenu's instead. Luckily one can still switch to the classic mode to make it usable again.

        As far as 'Win2K had better searching than XP' is concerned: the old-style Win2000 search ability is still present in XP as well, but it does require some magic to get back. You can also speed up the XP search tremendously by some registry tweaks preventing it from looking inside of zip files.

        (Kind of ironic though, that to make the OS usable, step #1 is to turn off all the 'enhancements')

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by novakreo ( 598689 )

        Either way, I wouldn't call XP's Start menu "awkward."

        I would. Why do most applications feel the need to have their own Start Menu folder containing some or all of:

        • the program
        • its help (which can be accessed from said program)
        • the readme file (usually with nothing important to say)
        • and the uninstaller (which is what the Add/Remove programs control panel is for)

        when just a simple icon in the 'Programs' sub-menu would suffice?

        On a typical install of XP with an unchanged Start Menu, there are multitudes of folders containing only one important item, each d

    • Who knew (Score:5, Insightful)

      by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) * on Saturday April 28, 2007 @04:10PM (#18913963)
      That it would take XP and Vista for people to understand that Windows 2000 was "simple and sensible."

    • Re Searching in Windows sucks any way you slice it (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jahz ( 831343 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @04:16PM (#18913997) Homepage Journal
      There is so much discussion about Windows 2000/XP/Vista searching here... but they all three really suck! Windows Vista sometimes wont even find "easy to locate" files when I search for them by name AND its painfully slow. Its really quite pathetic! I run Vista, Ubuntu Linux and Mac OSX. Anybody who uses all three would definitely rank them from best to worst as OSX, Linux, Windows. OSX takes the cake because it has Spotlight, Locate, Find and Grep.

      My grandmother could work Spotlight. Its fast, accurate and searches for files based on content and name at once. Its availible at the flick of your wrist and does pretty well. Though, personally I prefer Quicksilver to spotlight because I usually just search by filename and its *instant*. There are also smart folders that you can set up for searches that are done really often.

      Linux comes in second to OSX only because OSX *includes* all the nifty decades-old command line tools that Linux has. The command line utilities are not for everyone... but if you know what you're doing, you can find anything quickly. Locate will instantly find anything that has been on your computer for about a day (usually). For newer stuff, its useless. Find (find / -name blah.txt) is about as fast as Windows search and much more flexible. Then you have recursive grep for locating instances of some term inside arbitrary files.

      Now Windows: After using the above platforms, searching on Windows is just painful. Sometimes it finds what I was looking for... but it can be quicker to just mount my windows drive on my Mac and do it from there :)
      • linux's locate command will find new files if you use the newer rlocate utility, instead of the older, classic, slocate utility.

        rlocate is an implementation of the ``locate'' command that is always up-to-date. The database that the original locate uses is usually updated only once a day, so newer files cannot be located right away. The behavior of rlocate is the same as slocate, but it also maintains a diff database that gets updated whenever a new file is created. This is accomplished with rlocate kernel

      • You know, Nautilus does saved searches and Beagle is "fast, accurate and searches for files based on content and name at once". It's also available in Deskbar, the handy taskbar app, and I find Nautilus' saved searches to be rather more elegant than Finder's...
    • Window's start menu is completely useless when two of the columns hang over the edge of the monitor.

      KDE/Gnome both catergorise programs based on function which makes it far easier to find the program you want.

    • Re:Win2K had better searching than XP. (Score:4, Informative)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @09:20PM (#18915513) Homepage
      What you say has a technical basis: The XP search is a step back from what Windows 2000 offered. In Windows XP, suppose you have a text file name read.me containing "Hello World" in it. Do a search for *.me containing "hello" and you will find nothing. This is because the .me extension does not have a shell search object assocated with it, so XP won't open it. Windows 2000 would do what a normal tool does: open any arbitrary file, determine the encoding, and search it. This mis-feature makes the XP search useless, which has created a small market for free and cheap search tools.

  • No three way stand off? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hennell ( 1005107 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @02:41PM (#18913441) Homepage
    And yet again poor old linux if left alone in the corner with only a lute for company..

    ---
    At what point can you call a spade a shovel?
    ---

  • What?! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @02:42PM (#18913443) Homepage Journal

    it's in no way as efficient as OS X's Exposé feature ... We're calling this one a draw.
    If one is "no way as efficient" as the other, how can it be a draw?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If one is "no way as efficient" as the other, how can it be a draw?
      Because of the three paragraphs between "it's in no way as efficient as OS X's Exposé feature" and "We're calling this one a draw."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lars T. ( 470328 )

        If one is "no way as efficient" as the other, how can it be a draw?
        Because of the three paragraphs between "it's in no way as efficient as OS X's Exposé feature" and "We're calling this one a draw."
        With one paragraph going on about how the three differently coloured buttons in the top left of a window don't look any different.

    • Re:What?! (Score:5, Informative)

      by MouseR ( 3264 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @03:34PM (#18913771) Homepage
      The entire article is bullcrap. It goes on to decide a draw based on Vista's and it's app's crashyness and the featureless aspect of OSX's Front Row application.

      That's complete nonsense.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gumbi west ( 610122 )
      I agree. My reading of the above writeup appears to be, "evidence: Vista is better than XP in some ways and not as good as OS X in some ways. Conclusion: Tie between OS X and Vista." Am I missing something?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrMr ( 219533 )
        Yes, you are clearly missing the higher management logic:

        Product 1 sucks less Windows XP
        Product 2 also sucks less than Windows XP
        That makes it a draw.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Iriel ( 810009 )
        I think they're giving Vista an "A" for effort.

      • C|NET maintains status-quo (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Saturday April 28, 2007 @11:51PM (#18916077) Homepage Journal
        Am I missing something?

        Microsoft buys more ads than Apple at C|NET?

        Actually, it's more complex that that - C|NET can't go recommending OSX over Vista, even if they want to.

        They depend on people thinking they're in-touch, relevant, right, have some foresight, etc. If they truly love the Mac (and it appears they do), let's think about what would happen if they recommended OSX over Vista. First, 5 years from now, I don't expect OSX to have over 50% marketshare in the commercial PC OS space. So, Vista will be what more people use. If C|NET starts recommending OSX, people will start to think that nobody listens to their recommendations, that they pick the wrong racehorses, that they don't 'get' what their readership wants [to hear], and that's going to affect their bottom line. Part of this is recognition that even with their industry presence, they don't have enough power to influence something this big.

        But declaring a tie -- that's the strongest possible recommendation C|NET can give to OSX and by using their prose to point out its advantages, while ignoring them in the executive summary - read between the lines. Just don't expect to find what you're looking for on the lines.
    • You "draw" a giant "WIN" on the OS X side of the board.

    • Re:What?! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hxnwix ( 652290 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @04:26PM (#18914053) Journal
      It's political.

      Just like, "McCain voted for torture and lives in a self-manufactured reality, but Edwards got a haircut ... We're calling this one a draw."
  • I don't see Vista as having a "far better" user interface. In fact, compared to Windows XP and the basic configuration things, Vista requires traveling through a lot more menus and clicks to get where you want to get.

    Apart from Vista's new eyecandy UI, it's pretty much the same deal. Sure, there's a neat thing here and there - like the disk space bars and renaming files when you have viewing extensions on. Other then that, I don't see all that much of a difference.

    It's not a terrible thing, I mean - Wi
    • ... and I bet I'm not the only one.

      I find the XP level of eye candy pointless and destracting. More sugar coated pixels in Vista are unlikely to be a Good Thing.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MikShapi ( 681808 )
      The start menu search feature (that text box where the cursor is immediately placed the moment you open the start menu) which searches through the start menu and program files (on my gentoo box I call this katapult) is actually a VERY VERY big improvement on intuitive, kb-driven UI. Not to be confused with the regular file search which is an entirely different thing).

      If you want to be stuck on something you've learned to use a decade ago and resist any positive UI progress, go right ahead. I'd rather my cho

  • Delete Key (Score:5, Informative)

    by stewbacca ( 1033764 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @02:45PM (#18913463)
    Why can't you delete a file in OS X with the delete key? Because you need to use a modifier key (in this case, the command key) so as not to inadvertently delete items. Anytime you make a critical key stroke (such as deleting), a modifier key should be used to avoid unintended consequences. What happens if the user isn't paying attention and they hit the delete key to remove a string of text, but actually where clicked on an important document? With the command key, the USER is telling the system that he or she REALLY wants to do something. It is simply sound interface design...something PC people never seem to understand, as they continually pound the "del" key on a Mac, then bitch that their Windows-centric mentality doesn't work on a Mac. This goes for nearly EVERY niggling complaint I've ever heard from a PC user about Macs...."Why doesn't this thing do it like Windows???"...um, because it is decidedly NOT Windows.

    • Re:Delete Key (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28, 2007 @02:48PM (#18913479)
      You dolt, that's because Windows users have to constantly delete spyware and other junk files. Remember to consider the context first.

    • Re:Delete Key (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28, 2007 @03:00PM (#18913559)
      Yeah, that makes sense. The PC people should pick up on these little usability things and put the eject button directly next to the power button, which doesn't require holding the command key to turn the machine off. Or they could have you eject by deleting the drive. That makes perfect sense. Or, even better, don't put an eject button anywhere and only have an eject button on the keyboard. That's exactly where I'd expect to find it. Opening the drive when it doesn't have media in it should be a scavenger hunt!

      Just because you happen to be used to the stupid idiosyncracies in the Mac interface doesn't mean that the Mac method is in any way better.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by earnest murderer ( 888716 )
        You left out the part where pressing the eject button isn't enough, you have to hold it. Nor the fact that most of these shortcuts are so numerous and obscure that you may as well just print them out and tape them to your display rather than try to memorize them.

        And don't get me started with iTunes, a media player that doesn't even let you adjust the brightness when watching a movie. Oh you get a ten band equalizer with 20 some odd presets, a "preamp" and volume leveling. But if your movie is too dark you'v

        • Re:Delete Key (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Tickletaint ( 1088359 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @06:59PM (#18914751) Journal
          The reason iTunes is shit is, quite frankly—and I'm sure I'll be modded down by offended PC users—because Apple has had to cater to you troglodytes ever since 2003, which is when iTunes was first released for Windows. Every other iApp has advanced by leaps and bounds in the interim. iTunes is the only one that hasn't been retooled in Cocoa, for example, since that would make cross-platform development (in the literal-minded sense) more difficult.

          It's sad to see things get to the point where you PC users are retarding progress not only on your own platform, as has been the case for decades, but now for us Mac users as well.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by tbo ( 35008 )
        Yeah, that makes sense. The PC people should pick up on these little usability things and put the eject button directly next to the power button, which doesn't require holding the command key to turn the machine off.

        Turning the machine off with the power button requires either that you confirm onscreen (Restart/Sleep/Shutdown/Cancel), or hold the power button down for 5 seconds to force a restart. Seems reasonable.

        Or they could have you eject by deleting the drive.

        That was stupid, but was fixed a while ago.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by adolf ( 21054 )
          Eh? Just because there's a button physically on the drive, does not mean that said button overrides the wishes of the OS.

          The eject button of a CD-ROM drive in Vista behaves as it should: It simply notifies the OS that the user would like to eject the media. After that, Windows finishes any pending writes and does whatever else needs done, and then ejects the media.

          Which is, I'd guess, about how OS X works. Except that, on a PC, the eject button is where it belongs instead of on the keyboard.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by RedBear ( 207369 )

        Just because you happen to be used to the stupid idiosyncracies in the Mac interface doesn't mean that the Mac method is in any way better.

        A) The power button doesn't turn the machine off unless you hold it down for 5 seconds. If you just press it, normally a dialog appears that lets you choose between Restart, Sleep, Cancel and Shutdown. Or, depending on your power preferences it will go to sleep, but that can be disabled and in my long experience Macs wake up a lot faster and more reliably than PCs.

        B) Mac

    • This goes for nearly EVERY niggling complaint I've ever heard from a PC user about Macs...."Why doesn't this thing do it like Windows???"...um, because it is decidedly NOT Windows.

      "Why doesn't this thing do it like [OS X|Linux|Amiga]?" Because it's Windows.

    • well damn.

      I set 'd' to be my delete key in rox-filer.
    • you get a dialog box asking if you want to delete the file (by default) - so you have to hit enter to confirm your deletion.
      The file by default gets shoved in the recycle bin as well, so easy to get back if you've realized you've made a mistake.
      You have the option if you wish to remove the prompt on the delete, or skip the recycle bin by holding shift.
      I think the point I'm trying to make about XP/Vista is that when you press the delete key, the OS assumes that you are actually trying to delete a file (qu

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by macslut ( 724441 )
        That's silly. By default, it takes two actions in Windows to move something into the Recycle Bin. You can modify this to be one action. The problem here with the default is that one action can be made by a kid or cat banging on the keyboard, and the second action can eventually occur by the same banging away. Compare this to OS X, where one action is needed, but two keys need to be pressed. OS X, like Windows is not option-less, you can modify your keyboard mappings and have it just be the delete key
      • I think the point I'm trying to make about XP/Vista is that when you press the delete key, the OS assumes that you are actually trying to delete a file (quite sensibly) and respond to you accordingly.

        First, we're talking about the Windows Explorer interface, on 2000/XP/Vista, not the the OS. Many apps, of course, emulate the behaviour, but we're not talking about other apps any more than we're talking about different file managers.

        Second, the default action is not to delete the selected file, but to move i
    • If you want a serious answer it's because there shoul dbe no dangerous keys on the keyboard. Period. making something a delete key is pretty dangerous. Your cat could delete your file system.

    • Re:Delete Key (Score:5, Informative)

      by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @03:16PM (#18913653) Homepage Journal

      What happens if the user isn't paying attention and they hit the delete key to remove a string of text, but actually where clicked on an important document?
      Then the document ends up in the "Recycle Bin"/"Trash"/Whatever-you-call-it and the user can easily recover the file. I actually think GNOME handles this quite nicely. If you hit delete it simply gets sent to the Trash, and you can quickly recover it when you spot your mistake. There is also a modifier key version (shift-delete) which lets you by pass the Trash and permanently delete a file -- the brings up a warning dialog about permanent deletion of course. Seems to elegantly combine the best of both approaches to me.

      • Re:Delete Key (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28, 2007 @03:56PM (#18913879)
        So you mean precisely in the same way that Windows does it.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Coryoth ( 254751 )
          Probably, I have no idea how Windows does it since I don't use Windows. The fact that GNOME does it well does not preclude other systems doing it well also.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by ADRenalyn ( 598918 )
          Windows even allows you to "Undo" deletes, renames, moves, and copy operations, as long as the action was performed on a local disk- network and removable drives don't have that option.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by oyenstikker ( 536040 )
      "What happens if the user isn't paying attention and they[sic] . . ."

      . . .hits the gas on his car instead of the brake and drives through a building?
      . . .sets the toaster to dark and burns his toast?
      . . .holds his knife by the wrong end and cuts his hand off?
      . . .hits the hang up button on his phone instead of the answer button, and hangs up on his mother?
      . . .sets the pressure on his compressor to 120psi and breaks his 90psi impact wrench?

      When you use your things wrong, things break. That is what happens.

      O

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by stewbacca ( 1033764 )
        And this is why the science of UI is so important. Users WILL make mistakes. Why is everyone so quick to blame the user? To the UI designer, this is like blaming the customer. If the users are making mistakes, it is the UI designer's job to make mistakes less likely, or less damaging when they do happen. Based on the posts so far, most of you don't understand this, which also explains the lax attitude and willingness to accept such poor UI choices from Microsoft the past 10 years.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bob.appleyard ( 1030756 )

        O.T.P.S: When did people start replacing "his" with "their" and proceed to screw up all the verb conjugation? Is it an attempt at political correctness?

        1400s at the latest. Chaucer did it, for instance. It's intended to describe a set of people of unknown gender and number. The number may be one. So it isn't really a replacement.

        I am somewhat amused at your query, though. There appears to be the tacit assumption that girls aren't supposed to use computers. Which, I'm afraid, isn't very politically correct (or accurate).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by miscz ( 888242 )
      If you deleted text from document there's always undo. If you deleted file there's always trash (unless USER told system that he REALLY wanted to delete file and used something like shift-delete). It's the OSX designed that's flawed IMO, it's too restricting. BTW, you're using a personal computer too, it seems Apple PC people never seem to understand that.

  • Forged from Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Shaiken ( 743878 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @02:47PM (#18913473)

    Count OS X, by comparison, is counting on his few enemies to see him through. His armour is forged from the fires of Linux, which he hopes will keep him safe from the common viruses that plague the land.
    Clueless reporters. They're either unable to clearcly express that OS X is a unix-like system _like_ linux, or they simply don't know. My money is on number two.

    • Re:Forged from Linux? (Score:4, Funny)

      by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @02:59PM (#18913553) Homepage Journal
      Even better -- his armor was forged by the fires of the BSD daemon!
    • The play is really just for infotainment. The purpose is not technical accuracy and probably only wants to use sound bites that people have heard of.
    • I like this one:

      "Buy an Apple PC and you can be confident of safety. It ships with all communication ports closed. Native services such as FTP access, remote login and printer sharing are all switched off by default so the chances of a hacker attack are minimal to say the least. Even without all this *fancy *protection, nobody's bothering to make viruses for Macs anyway,"
      [emphasis added]

      If closing ports to incoming traffic is "fancy" then, um... I can't think of a funny way to finish that.

      Is it fancy to, um
  • In their performance section, Vista won because more games are compatible with it, and PCs have more HDDVD and Blu-Ray options available? I don't get how this has anything to do with performance of the operating system.

    • Re:Performance = Compatibility? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @02:58PM (#18913551) Journal
      I believe you are hitting a sore point for many. The tireless ability of people to call MS products the 'standard' that all other products should emulate is, in a word, tiring.

      Even if you invent something better than Windows it will still be compared to Windows and declared lame because it isn't Windows. This is what Apple and the Linux distributions are up against. As pointed out, it's arguably fair to say that Vista isn't the best product that MS has ever rolled out, yet it's the new 'standard' that people will use.

      Reviewers shouldn't be comparing OSs head to head. They should be comparing them to a neutral set of standards that judge ease of use, performance, stability etc. If the top score possible on such a test is 10, and Vista only gets an 8 it is no longer 'the' standard, at which point people can make the decision for themselves. If both Apple and Microsoft only get an 8, then the choice between them is one of taste, not perceived performance.

      In that vein, if a Linux distro only got a 6, well, it lets the community in general know what to fix next.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Holmwood ( 899130 )
      To a degree, but the more interesting argument was that new hardware tends to be released with windows drivers first. Apple also doesn't offer anywhere near the range of choice in (say) powerful video cards.

      Finally, next generation video cards are being designed for ... yes... DirectX10, and, ultimately, Vista. It's conceivable that Apple will persuade AMD or NVidia to design for some next-generation Apple video standard, but it doesn't seem likely.

      I find all that persuasive. What I didn't find persuasive w
    • For Performance

      "We can find a winner even without resorting to talk of clock cycles and gigaflops."

      *sigh. What has happened to journalism? CNET is a pretty well-respected outlet.

      Can you find a presidential election winner without resorting to talk of votes and electoral colleges? (Dieblod, put your hand down!)

  • bad facts (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jcgf ( 688310 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @02:51PM (#18913499)

    Count OS X, by comparison, is counting on his few enemies to see him through. His armour is forged from the fires of Linux , which he hopes will keep him safe from the common viruses that plague the land.

    Everyone knows OS X is derived from Mach and BSD and has nothing to do with Linux. But then anyone who would consider Vista equal to it probably spent more time dressing up and playing with swords than reviewing the products anyways.

  • The summary is misleading (Score:4, Informative)

    by Dr. Eggman ( 932300 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @03:11PM (#18913623)
    What should have been a quote from a specific part of the article, is actually summarized in a way that indicates it was an end result. The actual article affords Vista the victory. But, maybe the article should have stopped at a tie, it seems Vista won because Mac OS has less standard acceptance and because Greenpeace declaired PC's to be more green than Macs.

  • Fitts' Law (Score:5, Informative)

    by Egotistical Rant ( 42993 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @03:18PM (#18913661)
    Why on earth in OS X is the menu bar for any given application not attached to the application itself? Why is it fixed to the top of the screen, detached from the very thing it controls?

    It's called "FItts' Law." The edge-of-screen menu is a much easier target to access. This has been covered to death before. Who wrote this article? A million monkeys with typewriters?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by egomaniac ( 105476 )
      Indeed. Before I switched to Macs, I assumed that (after ten years of exclusive Windows use) the single menu bar at the top of the screen would be annoying. It was annoying for maybe ten minutes, and then it felt completely natural -- and now when I have to use Windows, I find the Windows mechanism far more annoying.

      They're basically complaining "But... but... we're used to the way Windows does it!". It really isn't at all hard to get used to, and once you're used to it I don't see a downside to the Mac

    • Re:Fitts' Law (Score:5, Interesting)

      by taradfong ( 311185 ) * on Saturday April 28, 2007 @03:50PM (#18913855) Homepage Journal
      Also means less real estate is wasted having menus on each window.

      On the other hand, on my 30" monitor I now find the menu is now often ridiculously far away from the window I'm working in.
      • My first thought was that it also means that you cannot see the toolbars of two different windows at the same time. But I cannot think of any situation in which I'd like to do this. Can anybody else?

    • Who wrote this article? A million monkeys with typewriters?
      No; no. They're all busy coding for Vista.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      There is also an issue of habit. Most people expect the standard items to be in the same place all the time. Just think of what happens when you switch cars and the windshield wiper is in a different place. This is also why the Macintosh specs said the top menu items had to be a standard order, with standard options under the same pull down. Recall the Apple innovation was the intuitive WMP interface across the entire OS, where intuitive meant that one a user learned certain basic skills, those skills c

  • What's the the wo .. man? (Score:4, Funny)

    by signore pablo ( 544088 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @03:23PM (#18913701)
    What's it say about these guys if they can't find a real woman to play the part of the woman? ;P
  • Today, I had to get a new Mac Mini. Turning it on and getting to the desktop took all of 3 minutes. I had it updated, and configured to my liking in about 45 minutes (most of which was taken up downloading a ton of updates, as his Mini had been on the shelf for a while at CompUSA.

    In contrast, a few weeks ago I was working for a company that needed a new laptop. The laptop we got was very similar to the Mini I purchased today. Intel Core 2 Duo, and it actually had much more memory stock in it (still need to crack open the Mini and upgrade to 2GB). It took a full 45 minutes to get Vista to boot for the first time. Between just getting the software updated (which was a super painfully slow process in comparison), it took over 3 hours to get it even usable, let alone the hour it took to install Microsoft Office 2007, and then update it. Then it took another few hours to figure out how to Vista actually, well, less like Vista. This was some Acer laptop BTW.

    I liked Windows XP in comparison a lot, and still think that Windows 2000 was super-stable in comparison to XP. I still haven't figured out what Vista does for the end-user that XP doesn't do- asides from being a PITA and making you purchase new hardware. In fact, I'm going to do a Bootcamp install of XP in a few minutes.

    • what Vista does for the end-user that XP doesn't do
      It makes things pretty and people who got sick of XP's Blue Luna, Olive Green, silver, and win9x classic themes something new to look at?

  • Bitch-o-meter should judge (Score:4, Insightful)

    by edwardpickman ( 965122 ) on Saturday April 28, 2007 @03:48PM (#18913845)
    The real issue is user complaints not head on comparisons. Most people aren't objective in head on comparisons so they tend to be more about reviewers preference than which is a superior OS. There have been significant customer complaints about Vista where as few if any about Leopard. It's impossible to tell until the final release but all looks good for OSX Leopard. In comparison people are more and more comparing Vista to ME. What other standard is there than customer satisfaction? Comparing the OSs is completely pointless. It'd make more sense comparing OSX and Linux. Vista isn't all bad I'm sure but it's hardly all good. The very fact large numbers of users especially businesses are resisting the shift to Vista and plan to use XP as long as possible is a bad sign. I think you'll find no resistence to Leopard. Which is better will be argued until the next Microsoft OS is released when the arguments will begin anew. The real decider is who is happiest. The vast majority of Mac users are happy where as Vista users seem on the whole very unhappy. You decide.
  • They were fighting over a girl. I mean, c'mon, what male Mac user would even be interested in girls?? He obviously had no motivation to win.

    I'm joking, friends...lighten up ;)

  • More of the same (Score:2, Informative)

    by daybot ( 911557 ) *
    Talk about re-hashing an over-discussed story with a quirky gimmick...

    PCs are definitely the place to go if you want the latest technology. PCs were privileged to the first Intel Core and Core 2 Duo CPU

    Well that's debatable. Apple recently launched the first 3GHz dual Core 2 Quadro Xeon based computer to my knowledge by shoving these bleeding-edge chips into the Mac Pro. Also they do invent (individually and collbaoratively) useful technology, like FireWire. Sometimes you do get things first with Apple.

  • Ok, the article was a bit... fanciful.. but I really have to disagree. I have an 8 month old mac book pro core 2 duo. My co-worker just purchased a brand new HP laptop AMD Turion X2 64, 4GB of RAM, spent just as much as I did for my macbook.

    the macbook absolutely runs circles around his vista machine. It took him 45 minutes yesterday to create a network share. And no, it wasn't a huge directory tree. He created an empty folder so I could upload a couple files to him. Vista took 45 minutes to enable th
  • Certainly this was silly fun and all, and for many people Vista may be the logical winner for their needs and circumstances. But some of the things said by the referee in this contest, CNET, were outright ignorant. The ref needs glasses. Throw the bum out!

    A list of CNET stupidity:

    - Why wasn't Linux in this competition? Didn't fit the cute Elizabethan dual metaphor?

    - Mac OS X 'forged from the fires of Linux.' Linus Torvalds just had an aneurism over that one. It is blatantly and unforgivably WRONG. The kerne

  • Menu Bars (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pkulak ( 815640 ) on Sunday April 29, 2007 @01:26PM (#18919953)
    Why does the author complain about OSX's positioning of menu bars? They are at the top of the screen in OSX because a window is NOT the application: something not made clear with Windows. This makes more sense when you consider apps, like IM clients, that may have very small windows. How are you going to fit 10 drop downs on top of Adium's contacts or chat window? Look at Trillium if you need an example of what devs have to go through in that situation on Windows.

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