Re: Final solution..XP?

Clever Monkey wrote:
Tim Streater wrote:
In article <1187621652.1922.0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
The Natural Philosopher <a@xxx> wrote:

[snip]

Apple COULD address this easily by opening up OS-X to 3rd party hardware, and doing the necessary work to replace postcript as the 'one true way' of printing, and writing printer drivers left right and centre..or even finding a away to use most of the windows drivers..the printing is for me the worst aspect of the MAC, apart from lack of software to run on it.

I don't know where you get this funny idea that no printers run under OS X. What do you think Mac users do for printing, eh? All the printers here at work print at a reasonable speed using drivers provided by the manufacturer and which come, by and large, with OS X. The same applies for my Canon printer at home, which when purchased two years ago even came with OS 9 drivers. These I use regularly as I run PageMaker under Classic.

So perhaps you would like to explain why you think Apple should write "printer drivers left right and centre" when the third party vendors have already done it.

[This sort of thing really belongs over on *.advocacy. Follow-ups set.]

Not to mention that I hook up all our printers and a scanner to an Airport attached to an internal network and every single computer on our local net can access all devices painlessly and automatically, and without regular panicked "I can't print my paper" calls from my SO when I am at work. I literally plugged the printers in and walked away. (The photo scanner, of course, was more involved, but Canon makes it easy to setup on a Mac).

To me, this was the best part about moving everyone to Macs, with an OpenBSD backbone. I do far less internal technical support and talking panicked PhD students down from ledges. I had no idea this would be a spin-off from switching. I just though OS X was a real operating system, the dev tools looked superior to anything else, and the hardware was sufficient for our purpose.

I didn't really care all that much about the platform I booted up, only that I wanted something better than Windows 2000 (which was the contemporary of the OS X I got on my G4) or Linux. I use XP at work, and for the most part it is much better than earlier releases. The UI totally sucks, of course, but I only know that because, from a usability stand-point, OS X is just that much better. Opinion, yes; but an /informed/ opinion.


In what way? I haven;t actually found much difference when running any given application. I mean take Word. the same menus in the same places..except on the mac the menu bar is at the op of the screen. The rest of the dross is identical.

Once you have a machine set up to do work, as poosed to randomly exploring its 'features' you have all the stuff you need where you can get at it. On a mac that tends to be in the doc. On a XP that tends to be in the popup windows menu thingy, or in both cases a clickable desktop item is an option.

I am ALWAYS having to help my wife sort out WHERE she has put fies on her mac since it tries to hide that from you. On windows you have to know where you out it in order to actually put it anywhere at all.


But, everyone knows that if you have legacy hardware or software you *need* to use, and know to expect problems when not using Windows for this purpose, then it makes no sense to switch. Why introduce stress into your life? Who cares what platform one uses?

well exactly.

In the end its just down to what suits what you want to do...except that round here it isn't. You MUST do what MAC allows you to do, and anything else isn't worth pissing around with.


My point being that as good as it is, OS-X isn't good *enough* to be more than a minority interest.

There are very few things that are of any great note that you can do on a mac that you can't do on a probably cheaper PC..the reverse is overwhelmingly NOT true. As I have painfully discovered.


But anyone who says that round here is a 'wintroll' or if its the Mad Cow, a 'motherfucking fuckwit'.




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