Secondly, I wrote this at damn near midnight after a few glasses of wine (YES, wine with dinner, and it was a dry Chablis). I’m not proving my case too well, am I?

Thirdly, for third, thrice?, I’m not a fan of the blockquote scheme either. I’ll do some tweaking to break it out a bit. [*fixed]

You two have fun this weekend, you damn dirty apes…

I think we’ve wasted a golden opportunity here…

Despite my algebra level education, I like numbers. I crunch them. I average them. I calculate them. I use them to determining fuel data for my 2006 Nissan Frontier NISMO. I use them for body composition, weight lifting programs

These guys think that’s absolutely fabulous

-Sean

p.s. I’ll shoot you an e-mail when I get home (*grumbles*stupid NMCI*grumbles*)

Don’t get me wrong… I am a PC guy, but as I age I am beginning to wonder if I was always a mac guy at heart, and I just couldn’t bring myself to buy one because they are “Computers for Dummies” personified… Can an inanimate object personify something? Who cares… my point is valid.

I have been playing around with Mac’s here at work for a while, and the small things begin to matter… latches that remain hidden until that last second before the laptop closes. Window scrolling accomplished by placing TWO (yes two) fingers on the touch pad and sliding them up or down. Batteries that have level indicator LED’s build into them as a small thin line of holes on the casing. Backlit Keyboards (as previously mentioned). etcetera etcetera… but is all of that worth the extra two grand? Probably not.

I recently purchased a new laptop with Vista on it, and in every way it is comparable to the 15″ Macbook Pro.

2.0 GHz Core 2 duo (no, that isn’t a quad core)
2 Gigs of RAM
256 MB Nvidia GeForce 7800
160 GB HDD
15.4″ Widescreen
TV Tuner
Bluetooth and wireless

And I paid $1100 dollars at Fry’s Electronics. So every word I have said is just conjecture, and it amounts to nothing when exposed to the light of day… I am a PC guy through and through.

Mountain Dew anyone?

(And hey Sean, drop me an email [mortenson_r@hotmail.com])

First, I’ll reiterate your observation that you can’t get rid of Windows entirely and still do everything you do now. I would have switched exclusively to Linux *years* ago, but there are certain things that are simply not supported outside of Windows. This is an important point.

Second: dual-booting OS’s is like kissing your sister. I’ve done it (dual-booted, not kissed my sister. Get your mind out of the gutter. When you run separate OS’s (in my case, Gentoo and XP) you basically end up with two computers that you have to access sequentially. Data becomes a problem…

Internet bookmarks and passwords? You need to keep two copies. Browsing history? Can’t be exported. All of that music on your Windows partition? Is on your Windows partition… it appears that a Mac can mount the Windows NTFS partition read-only, but that means that you can’t do anything to your music (other than listen) while running as a Mac. No adding songs, no fixing tags, no creation of playlists…

That goes for all of your data. Anything you create on the Mac has to be exported via external media (like a thumbdrive). In my experience, you end up using the non-Windows OS for it’s own sake (it’s so cool!!), rather than because it makes you more productive.

(And if you’re a fan of the super-sweet look, the Panasonic Y5 is a pretty cool box).

As far as hardware goes, Mac has a simultaneous advantage and disadvantage, which Rick has hinted at… their advantage is that they’re a hardware company and write all of their own drivers (proprietary hardware is also the main reason why a Mac costs so much more than a comparable PC–that cost is also why they don’t have a better market share. BTW, hardware vendors write their own drivers. MSFT has nothing to do with it outside of their “driver signing”). The flip side of that is that they simply don’t support third-party hardware, which means that you can’t upgrade them. Ever.

Not so much an issue with laptops, granted, but it’s the main reason I will never buy a Mac desktop.

As far as the “Mac Experience” goes, this guy pretty much sums it up:

I’ve spent WAY too much time tweaking settings to bend computers to my will (MWAHAHAHAHA) to be comfortable letting MAC OS do everything for me.

Bah. And get off my lawn.

-Sean

But here is where I can shine some light your conundrum. It is called Bootcamp, and it will set you free. Bootcamp is a free piece of software that will partition your hard drive in half, and allow you to format half of the hard drive as NTFS. Then, you simply install Windows XP on your Macbook and BAM… your running both the Mac OS, and Windows XP on one machine. Plus you get the sleek fancy lines.

You are not emulating anything, and therefore you have complete support for every PC and every Mac program ever created that is supported by OSX Tiger and Windows XP.

So why didn’t this happen before? RISC vs CISC… it all comes down to that. when Apple made the leap from Reduced Instruction Set Command processors and went to intel based Complex Instruction Set Command processors, they had to change a multitude of other things as well… the motherboard chipset, the video card, the sound card… the list goes on. A Mac is nothing but a PC with a fancy wrapper now, and any Mac guy would be loathe to admit it.

The only really unique “Mac” aspects even remaining are things like the ROM drive… the keyboard and mouse of course… but this magical “Bootcamp” I had mentioned previously contains drivers for all of these things.

So now… we just need someone to go the other way. Create a “Bootcamp” for the PC users that will allow not just emulation (as Parallels and Virtual PC allow on the Mac) but a true self contained install that runs independent with full support for all of the software available only to Mac… like that Apple puzzle game.

-Rick