Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Windows vs. Mac: I'm starting to change.
f0dder:
My computer life took a new direction a while back and I also grew tired simply keeping up with Microsoft's turns and twists, primarily with document formats. I could no longer afford to chase them version after version within their proprietary format. Then came ODF.-zridling (October 02, 2009, 12:07 PM)
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ODF sucks almost as much as OOXML; both formats are pretty much XML memory dumps of the internal structure, rather than being sane; the only positive thing about ODF is that it's specification is shorter than OOXML.
Having an XML-based document format for document exchange is nice, but because of the fscktarded nature of both formats, they're only useful when being loaded in their native word processor - and thus the exchange part falls flat and useless on the ground. If you've ever poked around inside the guts of an OOXML or ODF document, you'd hopefully hate them as much as I do. PDF is the only proper "portable" document exchange format, but it's read-only.
Choosing an XML-based document format as the default in a word processor approaches level 10 retardedness. It works fine for small documents, but when you're working with 100+ pages... gah. The old .DOC format might be proprietary and all, but only updating modified sections in an efficient binary format sure as hell beats streaming out several megabytes of crap-XML, especially since the bloat of the crap-XML is hidden by the use of ZIP compression...
As for the cloud computing rambling, I find that as likely to happen as everybody moving to thin clients. It works for simplistic uses, and sure thing a lot of internal applications are done via web-based apps - more power to that. But games and compute-intensive stuff isn't leaving the desktop for years++ to come, and thanks DOYC for that. I'm pretty happy of having control of my own data, Google's "do no evil" my ass :)
Stoic Joker:
The thing that's always killed me about the ODF quest is that while "they" are trying to find a common method of rendering formatted/rich text on any platform ... (which is a great idea...) ... nobody has even managed to even pull that off with a plain ASKII text document. Basically because there appears to be about 5 different methods of defining a line break. :wallbash:
I do agree with Adobe's .PDF as the best yet attempt at a cross platform document (considering it really does actually just work), but damn that thing is turning into a cagey pita with all the other (Swiss-Army-Knife style) crap they keep trying to squeeze into it.
superboyac:
The thing that's always killed me about the ODF quest is that while "they" are trying to find a common method of rendering formatted/rich text on any platform ... (which is a great idea...) ... nobody has even managed to even pull that off with a plain ASKII text document. Basically because there appears to be about 5 different methods of defining a line break. :wallbash:
I do agree with Adobe's .PDF as the best yet attempt at a cross platform document (considering it really does actually just work), but damn that thing is turning into a cagey pita with all the other (Swiss-Army-Knife style) crap they keep trying to squeeze into it.
-Stoic Joker (October 03, 2009, 02:37 PM)
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Yeah, and these bloat and speed issues is my main frustration with just about every mainstream program/OS that i run into. When you step back and consider the power that we have available now in our computer (CPU, RAM, GPU, etc.) it's very surprising that programs are not zip-zip fast. I'm not saying anything is slow on my new computer, they are not slow. But it definitely could be faster.
Why is Acrobat such an enormous application? It's all bloat. Don't come to me with the features that 0.001% of the people use. I bet the program could be 20 MB and nobody would notice. And a hell of a lot faster. It should open and close almost before you click the button.
Same with Office. Let's talk Outlook. All it does is email and calendar stuff. So slow. There's no need.
Same with any large mainstream software. Nero, Mcafee, Norton, Photoshop. It just doesn't seem like we are able to enjoy the processing power we have today. The more power we get, the more bloated programs get. And if the OS is bloated or inefficient, then we're instantly off to a bad start.
Josh:
Why is Acrobat such an enormous application? It's all bloat. Don't come to me with the features that 0.001% of the people use. I bet the program could be 20 MB and nobody would notice. And a hell of a lot faster. It should open and close almost before you click the button.
-superboyac (October 03, 2009, 04:17 PM)
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Why is it so big? Because companies do use a lot of the functionality built into it. Heck, the company I am with has very few people compared to some organizations I have dealt with, and we use quite a few of the PDF distribution capabilities that acrobat provides. But, also remember, that Adobe ACROBAT is not designed solely as a reader. It is designed for the business/user which wants to control distribution of their documents, provide change tracking, add form capabilities to documents, and quite a lot more. The functionality I list above is only the tip of what acrobat can and is used for. The biggest thing I see people making the mistake about acrobat is using it as an "editor". Acrobat is NOT DESIGNED to edit documents. It is designed to convert your existing documents into a cross platform distributable document with the type of security or modifications you require. Most users think that a PDF document is meant to be a SOURCE document, which it is not (minus, again, form-based documents). You still require a word processor/3rd party application to create the base document.
Same with Office. Let's talk Outlook. All it does is email and calendar stuff. So slow. There's no need.
-superboyac (October 03, 2009, 04:17 PM)
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Outlook does FAR MORE than just calendar and email "stuff". Again, my small organization (~300 people worldwide) uses outlook quite often. We share calendars, exchange email, perform task processing and tracking, manage our organizational contact lists, conduct meetings, and quite a bit more with outlook. Plus, outlook is designed to interact with our user portal so we can share information between outlook and our web-based portal so that users can access this info anywhere in the world. I have yet to meet a program which can do as much as outlook is capable of, minus notes but we won't touch that monstrosity.
Same with any large mainstream software. Nero, Mcafee, Norton, Photoshop. It just doesn't seem like we are able to enjoy the processing power we have today. The more power we get, the more bloated programs get. And if the OS is bloated or inefficient, then we're instantly off to a bad start.
-superboyac (October 03, 2009, 04:17 PM)
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With more processing power comes more ability to perform. Application developers adapt to what their users request. The issue with power users is that all they want is something small but power users, as much as I hate to say it, are not the majority (Minus photoshop/video editing professionals). Nero added most of it's media processing applications to the Nero suite because end users requested it. Nero started as a very basic CD burner but with the change in technology came a change in the end-user requirements for what they hoped the application could do.
Now please, do not get me wrong, some of these changes should be optional and selectable at install (and in Nero's case, they are), but most of what is included has been requested. The vocal MAJORITY determine, in most cases, what is important. Look at Microsoft, the users complained and complained about vista (although I personally had no issues with vista) and now we have Windows 7 which is lighter and as fast, if not faster depending on hardware, as Windows XP.
cmpm:
The plus of macs imho, is that you can reload it/reformat and get everything back without 3 days of updates. And downloading things to make it do what it needs to.
My son in college uses a mac, and I told him to be sure to save his work to the college's servers or his flash drive. Just in case.
And I feel like he has more time to do his college work then mess with a pc.
The problems he has run in to has been more in the format area. Such as not being able to read or write to ntfs. And problems converting certain videos, divx for one. So then there is a search for mac compatible converters, and reading the user guide a lot, just to figure out how to do things the mac can do.
Overall, even with the price I paid, I'm glad he has a mac to do his college work. Cause he would be distracted with a pc, with it's games and it's flexibility to get almost any program to accomplish any task. While finding a program to convert divx to something a mac can read I have not found. Of course the divx came from a pc.
Personally I will stay with a pc, but I hear the student for mac deal, as a parent. Half of his dorm has macs. I know he's not playing most of his games cause he can't.
I don't know enough about macs to do what I can on a pc.
Which may be the bias for me.
edit- in case you were curious,
he wanted the macbook pro
i tried to talk him into a pc notebook
but a macbook pro is what he wanted
so he has it
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