Just for geeks

The joys of comparative advertising : Mac vs. Ms Vista

Comments

[GG]

Actually I don't think it's that much a troll, it's just Apple's way to do advertising (afaik this is a real ad, right?) As always, they just forget to talk about the roots of the things. Did they ever mention the lack of interoperability in their iPod ads? They also launched their latest generation of systems by announcing an awesome 5x performance jump. However they didn't mention is that it only occurs in very specific cases in very specific applications...
Their "Think different" campaign (check http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No1MxAnHuJM for the main piece of the campaign) is another good example of these methods : what's the link between Gandhi and computers (don't take me wrong, it's my favorite ad) ?
Btw, would you happen to know the people pictured on this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHineBZTpNw 2007 remake of that ad, I can only recognize the Mythbusters people, Michael Moore and Stephen Hawking

[headmaster]

Of course it's a troll, Angus. And it does work, doesn't it ?
Seriously, thanks for your most enlightening commentaries, both of you.

[Angus]

WoW ! Amazing comment GG ! I don't know what to add...

This video is funny, yeah, but this is a "troll", I know you understood, you're so clever ;-) Anyway, I don't really like Mac OS nor Windows (whatever the release is). Fan-boys from Apple, who don't know a thing about computers but spend their time explaining PCs are crap compared to their macs make me lose my mind. And I've been a Windows user for years, but now that I use Linux, I feel like re-discovering what a computer is...

Because Linux is more than just an operating system : it is also a way of thinking. If you want to learn about free software (and how to grow your beard), there are two options :
- ask GG in real life ! He is easy to recognize, he is always in company with a gnu.
- go to the free software meeting, which will take place in Amiens this year (http://www.rmll.info/rubrique1.html)

To conclude, I'd say that GG is (once again) right about Apple and DRM... Never buy an iPod, your freedom is worth better (2 iPods ?).

[GG]

Woops, I guess I forgot to mention that at some point of Vista development, 7 operations were needed to remove a single shortcut... (check http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=151250154&size=o).
As far as I know (I haven't tried latest Vista builds and definitely don't plan to do so - who wants to pay for software when there are softwares free as in "freedom"?), this has been dramatically reduced later.

[GG]

Erm, this is quite fun indeed. It's true that Microsoft has jumped out of the frying pan to the fire - XP and the previous Windows releases were running a weak user access policy, where everyone was running as administrator with full priviledges, since user accounts were too restricted to be usable, and there were no way to easily gain these priviledges for a short time period to achieve the administration tasks. Consequently, it was really easy when a critical 0 day flaw was found to exploit it to gain access to millions of computers and do things (run services or spawn background process in order to, for instance, send spams, or spread trojan horses) that wouldn't be possible under an unpriviledged account. Starting from Vista, the user accounts policy has been completely refactored and there's no more an administrator account : when the user wants to do things that requires priviledges, the operating system asks the user to validate the action (hence the repeated "Allow or Cancel" bit) or, for more critical operation, to input an administrator password. Even though this way sounds quite appropriate, Microsoft implementation seriously harms usability, constantly interrupting the workflow with annoying - and sometimes unappropriate - warnings, that the user eventually doesn't read anymore and blindly validate.

Anyway, I feel this is quite ironic. Apple is making fun about Microsoft security problems, but Mac OS X doesn't even powers 5% of the running workstations ; with a so restricted user base it's not an interesting (as in profitable) target for crackers or spammers. The distinction between PCs and Macs is amusing as well - first since last year Macs are nothing more hardware-wise than common PCs delivered with Mac OS X, and reducing PCs world to Microsoft market is completely wrong - where are the Unixes? This is even more funny since OS X is mostly a graphical user interface and a set of polished software built on top of a modified FreeBSD (an Unix flavour) kernel. OS X user policy (common users and a priviledged account you can switch to on the fly to do administration tasks) is mainly the same than in Linux or *BSD, so where's the glory? You might know about Ubuntu, the most popular and widespread Linux distribution, which is based on another one called Debian (this ones runs around half of the webservers all over the world, maybe even more). Ubuntu is an african word that means "We are what we are, because of what we all are", which is often joked on as "We are what we are because of what we stole to Debian". I think that a similar sentence can be used here : "We are what we are because of what we stole to FreeBSD". Making fun of others is never really a good idea, especially when you aren't that clean yourself.

Last but not least, Apple is still the main retailer of DRM protected and interoperable (as in "iPod only") multimedia files. And there you don't even have the choice between allow and cancel : allow payment, cancel freedom.