Re: OT: Crash Humor

"Bob Noel" <ihatessppaamm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ihatessppaamm-DAC850.07225030062006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
You don't recognize that there are people who dislike Windows because of
their experience with it? It's not a matter of being predisposed. It's
been
a matter of learning and experienceing the poor quality of the product
(poor being a relative term).

Nope, not in the context of bitching and moaning about it in a piloting
newsgroup (as if venting one's ire about an OS has any relevance whatsoever
here). To a one, the people I know who go around bad-mouthing Windows at
the drop of a hat like that, they go beyond "I've had a frustrating
experience with Windows". Way beyond. They insist that Windows is THE
worst OS in the world, that Microsoft and Bill Gates are the devil
incarnate, and that if only Microsoft would disappear, the world would be
utopian. They never miss a chance to tell everyone just how MUCH they think
Windows sucks.

On the other hand, there's the "I love my Mac" attitude (often exhibited by
these very same people). They overlook all sorts of bad behavior on the
part of the Mac, including crashes, hangs, drivers not working right, etc.
Of course, as is the case with Windows, these sorts of problems don't affect
everyone. Not even close. But when they do happen, the Mac lovers are so
blinded by their passion, they just figure out what's going wrong, fix it
and move on.

Which, frankly, is what everyone ought to do with whatever OS they are
using.

People have this skewed sense that the Mac is somehow superiorly engineered,
just because you don't hear about problems with it as much. But those
people forget that Windows has literally an order of magnitude larger market
share than the Mac, and that Apple restricts their OS to a very tiny set of
hardware. The market share difference obviously affects the total number of
reports proportionately, and the hardware restrictions makes it MUCH easier
to find a Mac that's properly configured with all the right drivers, and
without buggy third-party software.

And lest you think I'm a Mac hater, far from it. I have loved Apples since
the II, and their GUI computers since I first saw a Lisa at a computer
conference. I still love that Apple is all over the industrial design.
Their computers truly are works of art. But, I also have enough experience
with Macs to know that they are NOT worthy of being praised as having
superior robustness, and to know that when properly maintained, both a
Windows PC and a Mac PC can be equally reliable.

[...]
In my case, my windows laptop is entirely managed by the government. I
don't
install anything on it. I don't administer it in any way. Thus, you
cannot
claim that I abuse it in anyway. Yet, explorer does crash, not everyday
but
still way more than other browsers that I use. And the ms office apps do
crash. And the government pushes updates to the machine, with resulting
reboots required.

Huh. You're pretty funny. You have zero control (apparently) over your own
computer. You have government employees handling the maintenance and
configuration decisions. And yet you think that is somehow a situation that
allows you to make generalizations about Windows?

That is just the kind of narrow-minded, blinder-think that I'm talking
about. You are so eager to bad-mouth Windows, that you do not for a moment
stop to consider alternative explanations for why *your* personal experience
sucks so much.

[...]
With all the security patches and updates pushed down to my windows laptop
at work, I cannot ever expect to avoid multiple reboots weekly even if the
computer didn't crash.

Simply false. There are not weekly updates. They are released monthly,
except in the very rare case of something that is especially urgent (has
happened only two or three times in the last year or so).

But even if you did have to reboot weekly for updates...so what? How does
that hurt your experience? No one makes you reboot when you actually need
to get something done; it's not like updates to the OS cause any sort of
interruption to your work, or lost data, or anything like that that would be
actual cause for concern.

Jim's post is right on the money. Crashes in Windows are practically
always
due to buggy hardware drivers, usually video or audio. Windows itself is
fine, and if you have problems with it crashing all the time or requiring
regular reboots, it's because of some third-party software you installed,
NOT because of Windows itself.

I love the claim that Window itself is fine. An OS without applications
is an
interesting piece of trivia. To be useful, a computer must have
applications
and utilities. Are you saying that we should only run apps from microsoft
on
our windows computers? Oh wait, that's pretty much what I have.

No that's not what I'm saying, and quit putting words in my mouth. Just
because *some* third-party software causes problems, that doesn't mean *all*
third-party software causes problems.

If you are having problems with your PC crashing all the time, the solution
isn't to abandon all third-party software. It's to abandon the third-party
software THAT IS CAUSING THE PROBLEM.

Duh.

and Jim claimed that all would be fine if only you have a windows xp
computer. That simply is not true.

In what way is it not true? He said "without other non compatible
programs", which to me means you avoid those third-party software that cause
crashes. I agree that simply having Windows XP does not guarantee a lack of
problems, but when that is qualified by warning one off of programs that DO
cause problems, I don't see how the claim is false.

And beyond that, as is the case with pretty much any modern OS with
protected memory (which Mac OS *finally* is, after lagging behind Windows
for so long), only buggy drivers can cause serious problems. Plain old
applications may crash themselves, but they don't take everything else down
with them. So in that respect Windows XP (and all the NT-based versions of
Windows before it) *does* protect you from having serious problems, as much
as any operating system could anyway.

Pete


.

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