Stumble upon your own words. Platform superiority is for wankers.
Over the past few days this site has had a ridiculous number of hits outside its ordinary audience. This seems to be due to two particular referrals at the same time, both referencing my post on Leopard showing networked PC’s with blue screens of death:
Unfortunately, the StumbleUpon community seems to be somewhere around the Digg level of maturity when it comes to reviews:
We have a Warren-esque remark about how the site content is “OLD” (let alone the fact that it was written in June, and was a spur-of-the-moment type thing based on a preview copy of Leopard). Strike one.
We also have a superior-than-thou comment about how the poster has never seen a BSOD on XP, and is now going to play some “award-winning games” on his machine. I can hear the Comic Book Guy’s snickering now.
I’ve had kernel panics on OS X. I’ve had random “bus error” messages appear while using Disk Utility on the Mac - hence the title of this freaking weblog. (I’ve never had that horrible of an error message occur personally on any other operating system.) And I’ve had blue screens on 2000, XP, 2003 Server, and Microsoft’s latest pride and joy, Vista - and in Vista, they’ve been incredibly perplexing to troubleshoot.
Operating systems of all kinds can and will die unexpectedly. I don’t play the game of platform superiority anymore. I find Windows does better for certain tasks, such as a seamless 1.8TB storage pool for all my media and personal files. (I’ll have a post on Windows Home Server and its ass-kickery soon enough.)
I find the Mac does better for other tasks, such as managing my 60GB+ music library with iTunes. I don’t have the time or patience to determine why a Core 2 Duo E6750 can’t organize folders locally in half the time my MacBook can over the LAN. After years of tweaking Windows settings, I’m content to let the Mac manage things and find out solutions to idiotic problems when it’s convenient, not when I want to listen to Mims.
In any event, users probably wouldn’t notice XP bluescreening anyways, as its default settings are to dump memory contents to disk and reboot immediately. I’ve fixed many a system with dodgy motherboards that needed this option disabled, to confirm that the chipset drivers were acting up. A split second is not enough time to ascertain the driver file name or the STOP message.
So, commenters of StumbleUpon, I salute you for your wonderful sense of timing and self-satisfied gaming. Any other takers?
Warren Gray:
OLD.
But in all seriousness, it is true that the default behavior for Windows is to attempt to hide the BSOD and reboot. It’s also true that there are some hardcore Mac haters around. At this point, I’m convinced that the platform that you choose is completely based on a) what you’re going to be using it for, and b) personal preference.
I own a Windows PC, and my logic behind going with that platform is the amount of games that I play combined with my background knowledge of the operating system. I know my way around, and the interface is very familiar to me. However, it’s not all black and white. I have tried playing around with the Mac OS, and while I found it entirely entertaining and fairly simple to use, it doesn’t suit my needs as well as Windows does, and combined with the lack of hardware customization, is not worth investing in for MY needs.
If I ever find myself in need of something that’s easy to use and very portable (physically), I’ll definitely consider a Mac in the future.
October 8, 2007, 7:39 pmWarren Gray:
Additionally, people who still attempt to use leet-speek in their names are obviously lacking in the maturity department, so the first response is not surprising.
October 8, 2007, 7:41 pmJake Billo:
Oh snap, and Warren’s already here to defend himself!
Yeah, the first response, if you look at the profile, is a fifteen-year old who’s got a hax0rish WordPress blog and allegedly owns a Mac mini, so I’d probably initially group him in the fanboy category. You know, one of those people that gets physically upset when they see anything they don’t like on MacRumors. I’m probably grouping people unfairly, but then again, that’s what I do to people; especially those prone to wearing cat ears.
The part of OS X I like, though, isn’t necessarily just the simple part. It’s the ability to run simple applications, and then with Ctrl+Space+T-E [Enter], use QuickSilver to launch a terminal. A few more commands gets me logged into the Solaris environment at UW or SilenceIsDefeat or whatever remote server I want. And it’s all incredibly seamless.
Windows? I like the fact that I can play UT2004 like a fiend.
October 8, 2007, 7:49 pm