I am OS ambidexterous, equally at home with John Hodgeman and Justin Long. I grew up on Macs, switched to Windows, and now I have an HP desktop running XP and a MacBook running Leopard. I have no experience with Vista aside from playing around with Microsoft Office software on it for 5 minutes. I've updated this blog from both my Mac and my HP with no problems. Many moons ago I knew some UNIX, but I didn't think I came across it or Linux. But I guess Mac's OS is built off of UNIX. Screen shots of Linux at work make it seem similar to the other OSs we read about this week.
I prefer Mac's OS X to XP - the Time Machine and Dashboard features in particular are very cool - but I can see how people would have trouble moving from one to the other. My wife and I tried to talk her mom out of getting a MacBook last week for this very reason. For me, OS X is significantly more intuitive, and because Macs have such a slim market share, they're safer; few people care enough to write viruses for them. Marketing gimmicks aside, if you can get your hands on one, please play around with OS X and tell me it doesn't make more "sense."
Most people, myself included, remain shockingly ignorant about things such as operating systems (and our food supply, but that's another story), and I think this lack of knowledge contributes to our frustrations when computers let us down. Much like building a computer would help one understand computers, learning more about Linux and other open source software would help demystify, and "democrafy" (sorry) these machines.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
It was interesting reading your comment in regards to being tricked to switch from XP to Vista. Until the readings and viewing others comments, I didn't know they were one and the same company. Coming from a state of Information Technology Illiteracy I guess that was part of my confusion.
Jake,
I just read your comments on my blog. Thanks for the input.
I am half-way tempted to get a Mac because, at least from what I've heard (and read on this blog), it is safer and seems to run better. Do you think it's worth the switch? Also, if I do ever switch, how big do you think the learning curve will be? I've been on PC ever since I've used a computer, and while I've used a Mac briefly before, I agree with you concerning the daunting nature of switching to a new OS.
Post a Comment