‘pyooter wars

Well CG, your comment about the dreaded PC versus MAC wars got me thinking*; perish-the-thought.
As far as I’m concerned, the wars over PC versus MAC make as much sense as Ford versus Chevrolet.
I’ve owned and driven both, including PCs and MACs, and don’t feel any is vastly superior, at least not now.
I purchased a MAC mainly because the mighty Mezz was gonna go MAC, which I suppose was superior AT THAT TIME.
My experience with PCs at the newspaper was very frustrating.
The main problem was that our Rastorized-Image-Processor (the RIP) was a PC, and it had to translate everything for a MAC-based image-setter. Quite often it would hang and have to be rebooted.
These hangs would make the paper late.
So techy advisors suggested “what are you doing driving that MAC image-setter with a PC? Why don’t you just bite the bullet and drive it with a MAC?” (There were no PC image-setters AT THAT TIME.)
The other thing was that at that time MAC seemed to be superior for graphic applications: Freehand, Quark and PhotoShop (the big three).
I took a course about eight years ago in PhotoShop, and they had it on PCs. “Please wait while Windoze calculates the value of Pi. OOOHHHHHMMMMMMMM........”
“Sorry about the PCs, students. We couldn’t afford MACs.”
And then there was the time I visited an auto-dealer in nearby Honeoye Falls about replacing our Astrovan — this was three-or-four years ago.
The salesman got on the dealership PC, and started to try to drive the GM-site.
I finally walked out: “OOOHHHHHMMMMMMMM........ Please wait.”
Admitted, I think the salesman was technically-challenged, but we seemed to be experiencing the dreaded PC pattern here.
Last summer we visited my brother-near-Boston to attend his daughter’s wedding. This is the guy who continually trumpets the incredible superiority of Gates.
We started dickering the vaunted Internet with his supposedly fabulous PC-laptop. Again: “OOOHHHHHMMMMMMMM........ Please wait.” 89 bazilyun versions of the hourglass, but hourglass-city.
Moves were taking twice as long as I’m used to.
On numerous occasions I’ve had to drive PCs, like at libraries and motels. One motel had a Red-Hat PC that appeared to be Linux.
Linda has a PC too; that’s what her job used. And I drove it for the week-and-a-half the MAC was in the shop.
As far as I can see, a MAC doesn’t have a leg up on a PC, although it might.
“PhotoShop Elements” on her PC is not as fast as PhotoShop on my MAC — but fast enough.
Mainly the frustration of driving her PC was unfamiliarity with the machine; and this has been the case with library and motel PCs.
Plus things seem a bit more contorted versus a MAC.
But a PC had one advantage over a MAC: mainly, it gives the path of the file you’re in.
The MAC only does that after a “search.”
This has been irksome in the past, since we never knew what file my Quicken was in. —So that updating, or archiving, was at-that-time a guessing-game.
But we noticed that Quicken was saying what file it was in when it fired up, so that setting up Quicken under OS-X was easy.
And I’ve yet to have OS-X crash — don’t know about Windoze.
I had 9.2 crash enough. An app would hang, and take out the keyboard and/or the mouse. OS-X apparently segregates each app in system-memory, so that an app-freeze doesn’t blast the rig.
I’ve had to force-quit often enough — particularly from Internet-Explorer, the browser that comes with OS-X. Maybe I could have force-quit the app under 9.2, but as I recall, the keyboard and/or mouse often bombed too; i.e. the entire rig.
Don’t know if Windoze has finally advanced to this stage — perhaps with Vista they have.
I remember Windoze was dragged kicking-and-screaming (or so it seemed) into the graphical-interface — an Apple idea.
Our first ‘pyooter was a PC; a 386-40, with Windoze 3.0 at first.
Later we upgraded to 3.1; and both were graphical-interface, but the graphical-interface commands were being translated into DOS-commands in the background.
I guess Gates finally dragged into the graphical-interface, but all I remember was that our old RIP-PC, the onliest PC we had remaining when the paper was all-MAC, had Windoze-95, and it wouldn’t shut off unless you pulled the plug.
A reboot — required fairly often — meant the whole stinkin’ kabosh: scan-disk, everything — “please wait.”
The wars with my brother arose out of my saying the MAC was superior to the PC — which he had, and I was only driving a Tinker-Toy MAC. And since the mighty Mezz (like most newspapers; e.g. his vaunted Boston-Herald — and Limberger too) was driving MACs, that explained why the Messenger was so reprehensible.
And AT THAT TIME, it seemed superior. Our image-setter problems, and late papers, were solved by switching to MAC. It probably cost us more than a general PC upgrade, but the Executive-Editor was tired of late papers.
Plus right about that time, Apple began low-balling the IMAC, so that 89 bazilyun were purchased instead of PCs, allowing the reporters (and hourlies like me) to be MAC too.
Classified and Subscriptions remained PC — same ancient rigs they had driven for years. (I remember their monitors were only low-tech cathode-ray with orange text; probably very low rez.)
But Display-Advertising switched to MAC, mainly because that was better for the Big Three.
Plus, as noted, the newsroom went all-MAC. Page-editors, who assembled the pages as a Quark-file for the image-setters (by then we had gone up to three — so we could fully ‘pyooterize) went to MAC G3 towers.
My first MAC — our second rig — was a beige G3 desktop. My current rig is a G4 double-processor tower — I’m told a great workhorse for crunching graphics, like in PhotoShop.
I got 1.2 gigs of RAM on this here rig, mainly because I was tired of getting the “not-enough-memory” message. The hard-drive is 60 gig, and yet to be streamlined; although I’m told the OS part was defragged when it was in the shop.
So for text-files (like this), it’s overkill — but I’ve often done PhotoShop manipulation.
Whether or not a browser played wave-files to me is a function of what players the browser points at — not what platform it is. To get my FireFox to point at my WMP is a question for a ‘pyooter-techy. Ya don’t toss the whole rig into Canandaigua Lake just because it won’t play waves.
I poked around with my FireFox a bit yesterday (Monday, April 24, 2007), but I don’t see a player-pointer.

RE: “*Thinking........”
About 12 years ago I was loudly excoriated by a sports-editor because I made the mistake of saying: “but I thought that was what you wanted.” (I had started the sports-scoreboard page exactly as instructed, and then he went ballistic when his idea crashed mightily in flames.)
“Ya gotta watch that there ‘thinkin’’ stuff,” he said. “I’m the editor; you’re just the hourly.”
Finally I got tired of all his insane blustering, and shouted back at him. “So what is it that you want?” I asked. “Ya say ya want this, and then go ballistic when it doesn’t work, as if I were at fault for following your instruction. You want me to be Kenny Rush, which I’m not; so that you can let someone else do all your pagination. You’ve gotta stop treating me like some kind of imbecile!”

“CG” is Charlie Gardiner, whom I graduated from college with (Houghton College) back in 1966. Charlie drives a PC.

“Linda” is my wife.

“Windoze” is of course “Windows.” “Windoze” came from the MAC-evangelist at the mighty Mezz, the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper where I once worked. The “MAC-evangelist” was Bob Hartle, who worked as an artist in display-advertising, and was extremely ‘pyooter-savvy. (I don’t think he was ever paid what he was worth......)

“Limberger” is of course Rush Limbaugh. I call him “Limberger” because I think he stinks. He drives a MAC.

“WMP” is Windows-Media-Player.

“Kenny Rush,” the so-called “Golden-boy,” was the number-one paste-up hourly when I first started (as paste-up) at the mighty Mezz. At that time the newspaper was still pasted-up — not ‘pyooterized. Kenny Rush died a little over a year ago — Lou Gehrig’s disease. Same age as me.