waffle

Literally five minutes after writing my last post, Windows Doesn’t Suck, I’m being contacted by the old man. “The registry”, it appears, “has corrupted itself over an Automatic Update.” And sure enough, it had.

So there’s one reason right there.

Paul Thurrott makes a big show of pointing out that many Mac or Linux users think Windows is crap. Undoubtedly, that’s true - that they think it is, that is.

Windows is a good operating system. Let me repeat that for emphasis: Windows is a good operating system. The plumbing is now mostly modern with Vista. Viruses and spyware are no longer horrifying torrential problems, and - even though there was a lot of press and inflated statistics that didn’t account for the fact that people will never admit to visiting porn sites - there really was a period where they were, between XP and XP Service Pack 2, give or take a couple of months in both ends. Even despite the bad PR of lazy adoption of and adaption to Vista, it’s still good. And even so, Windows wasn’t that bad off before Vista, it’s just a bit outdated.

No, Windows was never all that bad, and Windows hasn’t truly sucked since 3.11 (for Workgroups!) and before. The thing with Windows is that when it goes downhill, it tends to go downhill at an extraordinary rate. How much of this is attributable to being the result of a ~90% market share and how much is caused by being a bad operating system is always debatable.

Get this though: even after the security enhancements in Vista, holes are still found at a rate that strikes me, here a casual observer, as rather constant when compared to XP’s last months as the latest desktop Windows in town. Much of that is a result of new features being tested the hard way, of course. When will we be able to fairly compare XP and Vista security? My guess is 2008 - almost a complete overlap of Vista’s second year in the market.

No, Windows doesn’t suck anymore. As far as pure feature coverage goes (counting bullet points on the packaging), Windows is as good of an OS as any other OS. Does Windows implement most of these features better than OS X? I’d personally disagree, but I’m inclined to think that Paul Thurrott would agree. When you compare some pieces that OS X is good at to other pieces that Windows sucks at, Windows is “a piece of crap” in that particular aspect. The same goes the other way around - definitely.

At the end of the day, I have incredible respect for Microsoft and for Windows. But there’s also a reason why I’m sticking to my platform of choice, and that reason does not include being part of a ‘cult’. Aside from shying away from Microsoft’s paranoid not-invented-here policy with Windows Media and now OpenGL running “emulated” under DirectX (that never happened but was planned), it just fulfills my needs better. Many people are loud when it comes to this precisely (including at times myself) and I’d like to close with a quote from John Gruber, who I feel is the kind of person Thurrott tries to deride with his reference to “this collection of nauseating wanna-be pundits online”:

The problem hackers had with Mac OS 7-9 wasn’t that it was bad – but that it wasn’t good for the tasks they cared about. And in a hacker’s mindset, if a computer isn’t good for his particular brand of hacking, that computer isn’t good, period.

A few months ago, I posted about an idea I had, called The Storage. That was basically a smart solution where you could attach hard drives to a pool, use the storage pool as usual and at any point remove individual drives and take them with you for use as an ordinary travel drive. Doing this right requires a lot of smarts.

Drobo is a nice big step towards that level of smarts. It’s a black-box storage kit with redundancy built-in and hot-pluggable drives. It uses its own alternative to RAID and you can choose one of NTFS, FAT32 and HFS+, but it looks like it really works, and you just pop in standard Serial ATA disks. Because it’s got redundancy you can also just upgrade to larger drives once it gets full, and you can keep on trucking for a while.

I am seriously impressed by the effort to make it look and work reasonably seamlessly. Good work.

I’d like to clarify my previous post.

It now sounds likely, based on reader comments and feedback, that in fact, most laptop displays use 16-bit displays, and use dithering to present a fair range of the millions of colors you’re used to on any full-size CRT or LCD display. I would like to withdraw the parts of my outrage that chastised Apple for using displays below the common industry standard.

My original reasoning went like this: my PowerBook display was, and is, superb. My MacBook display had issues that were apparent from seconds into actual use. There were artefacts that carried the same symptoms as dithering often does in lower color ranges. When I heard of dithering being used, and unaccustomed as I was to the actual LCD display specifications for laptops, I drew what I thought was the logical conclusion: Apple is, for some reason, using sub-par displays in their laptops, and the display’s tactics for acheiving more color than they are constructed to naturally produce is the source of my worries. It seems that I was wrong.

However.

I’d like to remind people that my actual observed problem does not go away because the technical ground I had derived to be causing the problem was inaccurate. The menu bar on the MacBook did not retroactively stop looking ‘notchy’. When I brought up certain colors on my MacBook as a sizable block, they did not retroactively stop looking like chess boards. The PowerBook I’m fitted with until my MacBook comes back from service has certainly also not gotten worse since learning that it, too, may be of the same ability to display color.

And, what’s more, the people that nodded knowingly in the comments of my last post have not retroactively had their issues wiped either. There’s reason to conclude that Apple is having a problem with some of its newer displays - be that problems with individual display models being worse than other models, or with broken individual displays. That’s still reason to worry.