10 Reasons .NET developers should consider the switch to Mac OS

[JDeats]

This may come across as a trolling message, it's not ment to be. It's
intended to share a recent experience I had with Mac OS in an
entertaining way. I'm doing this because I love technology in general
and most programmers I know are passionate about technology,
unfortunately many of them stay away from Mac. Some as if it's the
forbidden fruit (you know you're out there) and others because they
think it's OS for people who aren't intelligent enough "to use a real
computer" as someone recently put it to me. I admit I was one of these
people less than two years ago, but I've found Mac OS to be, frankly
the most power desktop OS I've played with or tried to develop for.
The word "Magic" isn't a perfect fit, bit it's the first word that
comes to mind (Chuck Palahniuk, that's for you).

So I recently had the opportunity to toy around with a Pystar System,
if you are not familiar with this company they produce a generic $399
bare-bones PC capable of running Mac OS retail version without
requiring an OS loader hack. (yes, I know about the legal issues with
their license agreement and doing this, i'm not promoting Pystar and
when I transition to Mac OS it will be on Apple branded hardware, bear
with me).

So having the opportunity to play with Mac OS, Windows XP and Vista on
a $399 Pystar my first observation was performance differences. Simply
put everything is faster- everything. From the apparent refresh rate
as you glide the mouse cursor. To the time it takes programs to
launch, to the response time when shutting programs down. On Mac OS
Leopard 10.5 I was able to open three QuickTime movie trailers at 720p
(HD resolution) and have a windowed Open GL 2.0 game going. With zero
slow down (not even a hiccup) as I clicked through to bring each of
these windows to the top there is no problem. So this leads to my
first of ten reasons I think .NET developers should consider switching
to Mac OS

1. Performance boost for day to day task.

You work on a PC, you play on your PC. While Mac OS won't make Visual
Studio.NET run any faster, it will boost the performance of many of
the other things you do on a computer. In my test on Windows XP and
Vista the results were about the same, after the 2nd 720p QuickTime
trailer got running things really got sluggish.

2. The current version of Mac OS comes with a program called Bootcamp
that makes running XP easy. That's the Apple marketing line, but the
thing of it is it really works and it's really easy. Essentially this
is partion manager, there is no emulation going on and you do need a
licensed copy of Windows to make this work, but support is built in.
So you can install Visual Studio.NET on a Mac through Bootcamp

3. Two different computing environments, one for work and one for
play.
This one will contract with a later point, but if you're a .NET only
developer, the addition of Mac OS to you life may be exactly what you
need to help separate work from play. Ideally most of you play time
would be away from a computer, but everyone does e-mail and everyone
browses the web, everyone makes a family DVD manges photos (the list
goes on). To say Mac OS does these sort of task better would be
subjective, but what I can tell is fact is that Apple provides
exceptional quality software for free to new Mac owners to handle
these task. These applications (e.g. iPhoto, iMovie, iChat, iDVD,
Garage Band) have no equal in the Windows world. The only one of these
apps to have crossed over is iTunes and chances are you're running
that in the background on Windows now. Imagine every application you
use for common task begin that well designed, power and simple to use.
That's what you get.

4. First class test environment for Mono development.
The Mono project (open source project aimed at bringing .NET cross
platform) has become a very serious effort to allow .C# .NET apps to
run on Unix platforms. The effort that's gone into Mono can really
only be appreciated when you bring a .NET .exe you compiled in Visual
Studio over to Mac OS and it just works on Mono unmodified. I have
several utility apps that I experienced this with.


5. First class Java 2 development with exceptional quality free tools
and OS support.
Java programming for Mac OS is a joy. Since Sun Microsystems and Apple
Corp get along rather well what you find on Mac OS is a large amout of
native API support available to Java. Java is as capable on Mac OS
as .NET is on Windows. In fact it's more capable because of the native
UI integration (Mac OS comes with a optimized Java virtual machine
that seems to run near native code speed, with plenty of native API
wrappers ready to go and well documented..... for example want to play
or capture video using QuickTime, you can do that on Mac OS using Java
in a few hours of coding. Want to take advantage of the nice look and
feel of native Apple/Mac OS apps, you don't have to do a thing, Apple
has made it so Java's Swing (their counterpart to WinForms) is mapped
to Mac OS UI components. So Java apps look like native apps on Mac.

6. Imagine this: all the best development tools for the Mac OS
platform are 100% free to use.
Apple's coutnerpart to Visual Studio.NET is XCode, this tool and all
compilers come included on the Mac OS DVD or can be downoaded free for
commercial and private use. With XCode you can develop native Mac OS
applications using Objective-C and Cocoa.

NetBeans 6.1 (Sun's open source Java IDE) seems to run at least twice
as fast on Mac OS and will make Visual Studio.NET developers feel at
home. When you install the Mac OS version of NetBeans all desktop apps
you build with Swing will maintain much of the look of native apps and
will run near (or at) native code speed. This is also free.


7. iPhone development tools are free
Last week it was reported that iPhone applications are expected to
boom to a $1 billion market in 2009. All the development tools you
need (including desktop iPhone emulator) are 100% free to download,
but they only run on Mac OS.


8. A true next generation operating system capable of running 64-bit
and 32-bit code side by side
Another little marketing spill that lives up to it's hype. You can use
the for mentioned FREE development tools to output 64-bit or 32-bit
binaries and test, run, debug them side by side on the current version
of Mac OS


9. It's Unix under the hood.
You can run many Linux applications on Mac OS because it's Unix based.
Every commercial OS except Windows it seems is based on Unix and
confirms to many Unix standards under the UI. Windows remains
isolated. That was fine and good 10 years ago when Windows 95 was all
the rage, but over the years the OS itself has become a bloated mess.
With no built in intelligence or corporate demands to stop poorly
designed device drivers (finally with Vista, but that's lead to
another mess) and more importantly a cluttered task manager and
background processes that do God knows what.

From an architecture stand point and user experience over time Windows
(yes, even Vista) seems archaic

10. Mac OS pampers its users and you deserve to be pampered.
In this industry chances are you're not doing too bad for yourself
when it comes to earning a living. Do you like the nice things in life
such as luxury cars and fine dining? Well then why wouldn't you want
a luxury OS? Yeah, you pay a bit of a premium for Apple branded
hardware, but they are constantly rated #1 in customer service and
that extreme attention to detail bleeds over in their software design
as well.

Silly tv commercials aside, why would you settle for less doing what
you do?

I originally started this post bashing Microsoft for doing such a
horrible job evolving Windows and it was apathy that led me to avoid
that path. I like Microsoft a great deal and their technologies have
helped me earn a good income, but the thing with technology is things
are always changing and it's in the nature of our line of work to
anticipate change and to stay current. Sadly, this company that has
put out so many great things for the corporate world has failed it's
desktop users and I believe at this point they are in danger of
letting everything slip away. That won't come next year or the year
after, but ten years down the road if Windows continues to try and
play catch up with other OS's (like Mac OS) they will be abandoned.

 

[JDeats]

Also I could have added this, which no one talks about.

11. Buying a Mac doesn't hurt Microsoft. Since most Mac users are
running a licensed copy of Windows through bootcamp or parallels from
Microsoft's perspective Mac customers are potential Windows customers.
Those TV ads of Apple's with the "I'm a PC", "I'm a Mac" are on the
surface aimed at Microsoft, but really if you think about t they are
really aimed at boosting Mac hardware sales which competes directly
with PC hardware vendors (Dell, Gateway, HP, etc...) and not so much
Microsoft.

Point is, when you boil it down to the technical level. Buying a Mac
Book, iMac or Mac Mini is just buying a Intel Core 2 Duo based
personal computer capable of running Windows, Linux just like any
other Intel based PC can, but with the added benefit of coming
preinstalled with and being able to legally run Mac OS.

 

[Mr. Arnold]

I originally started this post bashing Microsoft for doing such a
horrible job evolving Windows and it was apathy that led me to avoid
that path. I like Microsoft a great deal and their technologies have
helped me earn a good income, but the thing with technology is things
are always changing and it's in the nature of our line of work to
anticipate change and to stay current. Sadly, this company that has
put out so many great things for the corporate world has failed it's
desktop users and I believe at this point they are in danger of
letting everything slip away. That won't come next year or the year
after, but ten years down the road if Windows continues to try and
play catch up with other OS's (like Mac OS) they will be abandoned.

They said the same thing about mainframe technology 15 to 20 years ago.
Mainframe technology has not gone anywhere and is still kicking strong to
this day. ;-)

 

[Mr. Arnold]

Also I could have added this, which no one talks about.

11. Buying a Mac doesn't hurt Microsoft. Since most Mac users are
running a licensed copy of Windows through bootcamp or parallels from
Microsoft's perspective Mac customers are potential Windows customers.
Those TV ads of Apple's with the "I'm a PC", "I'm a Mac" are on the
surface aimed at Microsoft, but really if you think about t they are
really aimed at boosting Mac hardware sales which competes directly
with PC hardware vendors (Dell, Gateway, HP, etc...) and not so much
Microsoft.

Point is, when you boil it down to the technical level. Buying a Mac
Book, iMac or Mac Mini is just buying a Intel Core 2 Duo based
personal computer capable of running Windows, Linux just like any
other Intel based PC can, but with the added benefit of coming
preinstalled with and being able to legally run Mac OS.

If I need a MAC I'll go out and get one. You're no better than someone
standing up on their high soapbox trying to preach Linux.

Why didn't you cross post to a MAC advocacy NG while you're at it?

 

[JDeats]

See below:

That said, let's assume you're serious. I have a Mac. It's my "daily
driver". While it's certainly adequate, I don't find it to be the vastly
superior product that Apple fanatics claim it to be.

Please answer these two questions honestly: 1. Is your Mac an Intel
Core 2 Duo based Mac? and 2. Is it running Leopard or Tiger?

And absolutely, from
a programming perspective, .NET is _fun_ while Mac programming is, at
least for me, something you do because you have to. A huge part of that
is the difference between C# and Objective-C, the former being a lovely,
clean, robust language while the latter is a red-headed stepchild sibling
to C++, with lots of dangerous pitfalls that offer very little benefit
over C#.

There isn't much to love about Objective-C. Java programming on the
Mac I've found to be nearly as "lovely" as C#. Having turned away from
Java years ago because of it's performance on Windows and now seeing
how it can truely be a jewel in rough under the right circumstances
(i.e. when Sun and the OS vendor actually get along), I begin to
question why I remain programming in C#. A quick job market search on
monster and computerjobs.com shows that, if anything Java is gaining
ground over C# again.

I mean, really...if I'm going to use a language that encourages me to
shoot myself in the foot, I'd really much rather be using C++ than
Objective-C. At least in C++ I can always be sure that my object's
constructor was executed.

I agree about Objective-C, why on earth it was chosen over C++ to be
their choice for native app development beyond me. Having said that,
the XCode tools are 100% free.

As for your specific points:

You have something wrong with your Windows computer then. I have found
that, if anything, my "day to day" tasks tend to be slower on the Mac.

I would suspect that's because of your familiarity with the software
you have selected to run on Windows and the way you work to keep your
OS tidy. On this budget end $399 Pystar system I was dealing with
fresh installs of Windows and Mac OS, so let's be clear there was
nothing interfering and the overall responsiveness/performance of the
applications I tested Anyone can perform this test to verify the
results:

1. Partion or install two hard drives, Install fresh copies of Mac OS
10.5 Leopard and Windows on a Pystar
2. Install current version of QuickTime for both OSes and the Quake 4
demo on both. Begin opening 720p HD quicktime movie trailer windows
and run Quake 4 in the background.

So this isn't a measured bench-test. It's a real world, practical test
of how well these operating systems handle multi-tasking, let me tell
you Windows seems to struggle, quite a bit. This test circumvents the
driver layer Bootcamp provides and the emulation layer Parallels
provides and just puts the two OSs to the test apples for apples on
the same hardware.

I really wish Tom's Hardware or some other hardware oriented site
would do proper bench test against these two OS, it would be
interesting to say the least.

Safari has fewer
features, but at least it always looks nice).

I use Google Mail for all personal mail so I wouldn't know about
that.... Have you tried Safari 3? Firefox runs about the same on
Windows on Mac and remains my primary browser. Even given it's
ocassional crash and overall stability issues, it's feature set make
it much more appealing the IE.

It's easy. But "really works"? Nope. I mean, it works fine as long as
you stick to the tried and true, but my Mac running Windows reboots on a
semi-regular basis while trying to play video games, and has some sort of
problem with the audio driver that prevents me from running my games in a
"limited" user account.

What kind of Mac do you have? If you have a Mac Mini or plan Mac Book
(not Mac Book Pro) for example, you're dealing with a Intel GMA 950
integrated graphics adapter which is not advertised to play games
well. I have a friend who uses Bootcamp entirely for gaming on his
iMac and claims to have no problems whatsoever.

You don't need. For those of us who tend to work in our personal time
I'm sudguesting an entirely different OS environment would help create
a distinction between work and play. I believe this has to potential
to make some more productive. If you are incredible good at managing
your time then perhaps not, but my observation is most people aren't
that good at time management and most people waste a lot of time
during work hours on non productive task.

Yes, it definitely would be.


Absolutely false. There are lots of similar products for Windows.

There are similar products for Windows, but they are all from
different vendors and they are not bundled free with the OS as iLife
currently is (let's not get technically on that, iLife 08 comes with
every new Mac available today). If I want to do serious video editing
my favorite app is going to be Sony Vegas, because it's balance of
power and ease of use are perfect for me, but having said that. iMovie
puts an incredible amount of power in your hands right away, it makes
professional features easy and obtainable to a complete novice. Yes,
it does limit you in many aspects, but it allows a novice to create a
professional (albeit canned) product. This is the theme we see with
all of these tools. iDVD, iWeb and Apple's iWork 08 product. They
take a common set of pro-grade features and make them accessible to a
novice and a very intuitive fashion and again all of this is free and
supported by a single video. As with Windows, there are alternatives
out there. But I completely disagree, since Microsoft does not have
counterparts to these applications and since Apple does not publish
these applications on Windows there are no equals in the Windows world

You left out an end-paren. In any case, the above is just plain silly.
.NET has fantastic integration with the native API and is very
performant. A Windows application in .NET looks like a Windows
application, and inasmuch as Windows supports video capture through
DirectShow, you can very easily "in a few hours coding" accomplish the
same in a .NET application through p/invoke.

Java 6 has been available for Mac X Leopard 10.5 since the end of
April 2008.
http://developer.apple.com/java/

Just scanning some articles it seems part of the blame for the delays
for Java releases on Mac is because of Apple's involvement and
commitment to Java (I suppose they want to subject it to testing and
update their wrapper libraries, etc... that's a guess)

There is no real P/Invoke counterpart in Java to call native APIs on
Mac OS. I'll agree with that, but then again calling native Win32
API's through C# can be a living nightmare and a lot of this
functionality should have native wrappers. Want to play a sound file
in .NET you have to call a native API or go through DirectX, it's
insane. But now we're getting off topic.

Apple has quite elegantly put togeather and documented Java libraries
for a lot of their API functionality.

Um, iPhone SDK is still under NDA. You're not supposed to talk about it.
Apple's very touchy about their NDAs, no matter how stupid those NDAs
might be.

Well, now it's clear. You're trying to be confrontational or maybe you
mean this in a light hearted way, who knows. Regardless I didn't sign
a NDA and one doesn't have to in order to discover the SDK is free.

Yup. Likewise you have to have iTunes to talk to your iPod. Remind me,
why is it that Apple's DRM-based technology locking is a _good_ thing?

They have DRM locking because the record labels demanded it which
iTunes store pioneered the way, but DRM in general is slowly fading
away. You can already buy some DRM free music through iTunes, this
problem is not specific to Apple and not relevant to someone wanting
to take advantage of a booming market for application development.
iTunes marshalls sync operations with the iPhone/iPod Touch because, I
suspect because these devices were designed as digital music players
and the other features are turning them into PDA like devices.

This is different from 64-bit Windows how? And tell us again, when did
the respective 64-bit versions of the operating systems come out?

Oh it's much different. 64-bit Windows is a joke and a real pain in
the ass, 32-bit applications take a noticable performance hit on 64-
bit Windows if they run at all. I'm sure Leopard isn't without its
bugs but the fact is Apple unified Leopard as a single product 64-bit/
32-bit OS. 64-bit Windows is far from a mainstream product. IMO this
is one of Microsoft biggest failures with Vista. Absolutely
unforgivable given how long AMD has had reasonable priced 64-bit
processors on the market.

When I have this discussion with a Microsoft zelot (I mean someone who
tends to be negative towards anything non-Microsoft) and this subject
comes up generally the importance of 64-bit gets downplayed and that's
so sad to me. The importance of us moving to 64-bit development can
not be overstated.

You don't seem to have a lot of exposure to "commercial operating systems".

Perhaps not. At this point I can claim to have worked with the
following operating systems in the last ten years:
Sun Solairs, IBM AIX, IBM OS/400, Apple Mac OS, Linux, SGI Irix,
FreeBSD, Windows.
6 of the 8 are Unix or based on Unix. OS/400 and Windows are having
worked for an IBM business partner I know their OS/400 business isn't
so hot anymore.

Just curious, what are some other commerical desktop/server OS's
available that are not Unix or Linux based?

Actually, one thing anyone considering getting a Mac should understand:
Mac OS X isn't actually Mac OS. It's NeXT with a Mac wrapper.

In its day, NeXT was like a super computer a head of its time and is
essentially a shell on top of BSD (Unix). the few that did get sold
went to work on number crunching research at labs sucha s CERT. The
system didn't get the respect it deserved.

 

[Peter Morris]

Simply put everything is faster- everything

In my experience Photoshop took longer to start than it did on Windows, same
machine too. Other than that I had different software so I couldn't
compare.

2. The current version of Mac OS comes with a program called Bootcamp
that makes running XP easy

I am on an iMac now, I never even boot into MacOS any more at all.

That's the Apple marketing line, but the
thing of it is it really works

Yeah, "It just works". Oh, except for my printer. On XP I plugged it in
and it "just worked", on MacOS I had to go and find drivers for it, and I
seem to recall it wasn't an easy process. As for my USB scanner, that never
did work at all on MacOS.

is partion manager, there is no emulation going on and you do need a
licensed copy of Windows to make this work, but support is built in.
So you can install Visual Studio.NET on a Mac through Bootcamp

I find BootCamp to be a more permanent solution, Parallels was better if you
like using MacOS but need to use Windows for work.

This one will contract with a later point, but if you're a .NET only
developer, the addition of Mac OS to you life may be exactly what you
need to help separate work from play.

I am unaware of anything like VS2008 for MacOS so my play would have to
alter.

would be away from a computer, but everyone does e-mail

In the end I only used MacOS for reading emails and using newsgroups.
However, I could not find a NG reader with the three following features that
OutlookExpress has (and I tried a lot!)

A: Group threads in a tree view and still have the newest threads at the top
(most expand the threads when you sort by another other than subject)
B: Allow secure connections to newsgroups (which I needed for private field
tests)
C: Allow more than one user/pass combination on a secure newsgroup (when I
was on more than 1 FT with the same company). The only one I found that
could do this used the server address as the unique key for storing the
group names, so when I logged in as B I would get a list of groups from user
A that I could not post to.

As a consequence I started using Outlook Express. Ultimately I had
Parallels full screen all day long, so I decided to switch to Windows.

these task. These applications (e.g. iPhoto, iMovie, iChat, iDVD,
Garage Band) have no equal in the Windows world.

That's crap.

iPhoto - It just takes photos doesn't it?
iMovie - Lots of stuff on Windows to do this.
iChat - Skype? CamFrog? Lots!
iDVD - Haven't used it.
Garage band - Yeah, you are right, I'll bet it is unequal to Cubase!

apps to have crossed over is iTunes and chances are you're running
that in the background on Windows now. Imagine every application you
use for common task begin that well designed, power and simple to use.
That's what you get.

Now imagine that the only good software you can buy is written either by
Apple or another large company like Adobe/Steinberg. Now imagine that they
can't write every piece of software you could possibly need. Now imagine
everything else is complete pants and you don't have time to rewrite the
apps yourself. Welcome to MacOS! The reality is that the good software is
excellent, but the bad software is dire! There's plenty of poor 3rd party
software on Windows too, but with the abundance of developers there's also a
lot of in-between to excellent 3rd party software too.

4. First class test environment for Mono development.
The Mono project (open source project aimed at bringing .NET cross
platform) has become a very serious effort to allow .C# .NET apps to
run on Unix platforms. The effort that's gone into Mono can really
only be appreciated when you bring a .NET .exe you compiled in Visual
Studio over to Mac OS

So we switch to MacOS, and then how exactly do we write apps in VS? Besides
Mono is behind, and I like using stuff like LINQ and ASP MVC as soon as they
are release, I don't like having to wait.

6. Imagine this: all the best development tools for the Mac OS
platform are 100% free to use.

So what? I've seen free Fortran compilers but that isn't enough to make me
switch.

7. iPhone development tools are free
Last week it was reported that iPhone applications are expected to
boom to a $1 billion market in 2009. All the development tools you
need (including desktop iPhone emulator) are 100% free to download,
but they only run on Mac OS.

That's a very small market, considering how many people will be muscling in
on it. Now in my market I have about 10 competitors in the whole World, I
prefer that.

10. Mac OS pampers its users and you deserve to be pampered.

This I cannot dispute in the slightest. The hardware is excellent, so
compact and so quiet. I have phoned support four times, once was pre-sales,
once was a noisy fan (was software related), and the last was for info about
maximum memory, each time I spoke to someone who really knew what they were
talking about, it was a very good experience. No employee unfamiliar with
the product reading from a script there, and it shows!

Would you like to know what made me finally switch to Windows full time?
This is why I phoned the fourth time. One day I booted up windows and it
screamed that there were all sorts of problems with the files on the drive,
I tried running some disk recovery tool but it told me basically that they
were screwed. So, how do I fix the problem? Full reinstall from the OS
discs! Not a "reinstall over the missing files and keeping all your files"
install, I am talking a "write every sector of your hard disk" kind of
reinstall. So I popped out to the Mac store and upgraded to the latest OSX
so that I could get bootcamp and install XP.

What do I constantly hear from Apple users? "Oh, I've never heard of it
doing that before!". No consolation!

Finally at work we use wireless printers. Guess what kind of a laptop was
used by the only guy in the office who found it difficult to connect to the
printers, and to retain his connect, oh, and to print to them once
connected!

MacOS = Fun, pretty, fast, but in my experience just isn't as practicle as
Windows.




--
Pete
=========================================
I use Enterprise Core Objects (Domain driven design)
http://www.capableobjects.com/
=========================================

 

[Peter Morris]

I mean, really...if I'm going to use a language that encourages me to

shoot myself in the foot, I'd really much rather be using C++ than
Objective-C. At least in C++ I can always be sure that my object's
constructor was executed.

I agree! I remember being shoked by that, the fact that there was no way to
mark members private etc (It was suggested I mark private/protected members
_Name so that people knew not to call them), and the fact that I had to free
every single string I ever used? Hmm. I like the idea of being able to
send any method to any object as if it were a signal, but that should be an
additional feature to calling method "strongly" and should at least throw an
exception if object does not support it.

I run Boot Camp and also Parallels, and yes...much of the time running
Windows on my Mac is fine. But anything that does something even slightly
out of the ordinary can trip the Boot Camp drivers up. It's enough to
drive a person to hacking.

I've not had any problems with it myself, not even once. I love the
hardware, but MacOS to me ultimately was just eye-candy.



--
Pete
=========================================
I use Enterprise Core Objects (Domain driven design)
http://www.capableobjects.com/
=========================================

 

[JDeats]

Pete,

I think we disagree on too many issues to continue this discussion and
I say that with all due respect. Believe it or not, my goal wasn't to
come in here and start and argument, but to share my experience.
However, my nature is to get difference. I do honestly feel many of
your points are weak, but I also feel that I explored those spots in
my previous post. You also made a few solid points and one thing is
clear, you are a fellow windows developer who has come to your
conclusions about Mac OS from personal experience.

I will admit there are a lot of subjective points in my original post,
but that doesn't mean given the hands on experience the majority
wouldn't agree with me. For example we could go on for days about
iMove vs Windows Movie Maker, and that's just not want I want to do.
Also since you're running Tiger and not Leopard you experience could
be different. Since you don't have Leopard you aren't can't say, can
you? (note: Tiger is not a 64-bit OS) and this is especially true of
Bootcamp which you seem to discredit as an unstable mess, when
actually it's quite stable (again, my experience is with Leopard
10.5.x). Here is an older article detailing some results of Windows
games running on non-Apple hardware and Apple hardware through
bootcamp, things have actually improved since.
http://www.macworld.com/article/50267/2006/04/pcworldtest.html

My experience with Mac OS, from the version of Java I was able to
develop against to the multi-tasking capabilities are all based around
the current crop of Mac's and I feel as if many of your arguments are
invalidated because of false information (as was the case with Java 6
SDK) and the fact that you are not using the current OS. I'm not out
trying to convert the masses to Mac OS as my topic states "10 reasons
to CONSIDER Mac OS". I stand by everything stated in the original post
and appreciate your perspective on some things. I posted this hear
because I think

I suspect your defensive attitude towards has to do with your
annoyance that I would post this thread anyway, which you stated early
on you view as trolling. So I just don't see the point in us wasting
any more of each others time I am curious why you seem to be trying
so hard to discouage people from giving Mac OS a try.
..

-J

 

[Todd Carnes]

Oh it's much different. 64-bit Windows is a joke and a real pain in
the ass, 32-bit applications take a noticable performance hit on 64-
bit Windows if they run at all. I'm sure Leopard isn't without its

Ok, I have to comment on this one. I was going to stay out of this,
but... I use 64-bit Windows XP on my laptop and have done so for quite
some time now. I have seen no performance hit whatsoever when running
32-bit apps on it and I have NEVER had a problem running ANYTHING 32-bit
or otherwise on it.

As for the rest of the crap you guys are arguing about....As far as I'm
concerned they are all non-issues and not worth the bother.

Todd

 

[Peter Morris]

I couldn't format an SD card in FAT 16 format which would be recognised by
anything unless I installed XP32 instead. That's probably the only problem
I ever had with XP64 (that I remember).


--
Pete
=========================================
I use Enterprise Core Objects (Domain driven design)
http://www.capableobjects.com/
=========================================

 

[JDeats]

Ok, I have to comment on this one. I was going to stay out of this,
but... I use 64-bit Windows XP on my laptop and have done so for quite
some time now. I have seen no performance hit whatsoever when running
32-bit apps on it and I have NEVER had a problem running ANYTHING 32-bit
or otherwise on it.

As for the rest of the crap you guys are arguing about....As far as I'm
concerned they are all non-issues and not worth the bother.

Todd

Todd,

Ever try to run 3D games applications on 64-bit Windows? While DirectX
is fully supported on 64-bit Vista, and 32-bit games desinged for
DirectX will run there are a lot of reported issues. Looks like about
1/2 of the 32-bit games seem to run without a problem and others
require a patch from everything to security/copy protection schema
updates to audio glitches.... Pretty much any software that includes
32-bit x86 Assembly language routines (common with security software
and some video editing packages, for example my favorite video editing
software on Windows, SONY Vegas, 32-bit version will not run on 64-bit
Windows.

The bigger underlying problem with Vista 64-bit is the fact that 32-
bit Vista exist at all... Instead of just continuing to support
Windows XP for 32-bit CPUs and moving forward and making Vista an OS
only available in 64-bit they decided to bring Vista forward in both
flavors (no doubt for the cash cow that is Windows).

This has only hurt commercial desktop software developers, because
they have maintain 32-bit and 64-bit versions of their software and on
a budget (which all are) most are opting to develop so their software
can run on the OS with the leading install base, which remains 32-bit
XP. So it's holding things back.

Now contrast this with when Microsoft released Windows 95, they forced
32-bit forward. Vista is a missed opportunity to do the same.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Ever try to run 3D games applications on 64-bit Windows? While DirectX
is fully supported on 64-bit Vista, and 32-bit games desinged for
DirectX will run there are a lot of reported issues. Looks like about
1/2 of the 32-bit games seem to run without a problem and others
require a patch from everything to security/copy protection schema
updates to audio glitches.... Pretty much any software that includes
32-bit x86 Assembly language routines (common with security software
and some video editing packages, for example my favorite video editing
software on Windows, SONY Vegas, 32-bit version will not run on 64-bit
Windows.

Some people are very much into gaming, but this is a programming group.

The majority of people will not be interested in gaming issues.

Especially since code written in the language this group is about
does not have the problem.

The bigger underlying problem with Vista 64-bit is the fact that 32-
bit Vista exist at all... Instead of just continuing to support
Windows XP for 32-bit CPUs and moving forward and making Vista an OS
only available in 64-bit they decided to bring Vista forward in both
flavors (no doubt for the cash cow that is Windows).

This has only hurt commercial desktop software developers, because
they have maintain 32-bit and 64-bit versions of their software and on
a budget (which all are) most are opting to develop so their software
can run on the OS with the leading install base, which remains 32-bit
XP. So it's holding things back.

Now contrast this with when Microsoft released Windows 95, they forced
32-bit forward. Vista is a missed opportunity to do the same.

I suggest you grab the opportunity and create a new OS that will
kick Vista's butt.

Please report back here when your sales pass the 10 million per
month mark.

Arne

 

[Mr. Arnold]

JDeats wrote:

I suggest you grab the opportunity and create a new OS that will
kick Vista's butt.

Please report back here when your sales pass the 10 million per
month mark.

You're funny. This person tickles me. He RMZ in the VB NG while he JDeats in
this NG. The soapbox he is standing on may be wearing out. ;-)

 

[Chris Shepherd]

Also I could have added this, which no one talks about.

11. Buying a Mac doesn't hurt Microsoft. Since most Mac users are
running a licensed copy of Windows through bootcamp or parallels from
Microsoft's perspective Mac customers are potential Windows customers.
Those TV ads of Apple's with the "I'm a PC", "I'm a Mac" are on the
surface aimed at Microsoft, but really if you think about t they are
really aimed at boosting Mac hardware sales which competes directly
with PC hardware vendors (Dell, Gateway, HP, etc...) and not so much
Microsoft.

"on the surface aimed at Microsoft"??? They have made fun of Vista every
chance they get.

IMO use whatever lets you get the job done.

Chris.

 

[Shalom Shachne]

If I need a MAC I'll go out and get one. You're no better than someone
standing up on their high soapbox trying to preach Linux.

Why didn't you cross post to a MAC advocacy NG while you're at it?

I thought this was really informative. We should all be trying new
things, including O/S. I'd hate to think that being on this list
requires being dogmatic, and viewing any pitch to work on non-
Microsoft technology as some kind of heresy.

 

[Mr. Arnold]

I thought this was really informative. We should all be trying new
things, including O/S. I'd hate to think that being on this list
requires being dogmatic, and viewing any pitch to work on non-
Microsoft technology as some kind of heresy.

When it puts some money in your pockets and food on the table, then you
comeback and talk to me. Other than that, your point is moot as far as I am
concerned and so are the OP's posts.