Why Macintoshes are EVIL

Though more accuarately, this is about MacOS...

Objective reasons:
  • No memory protection. A program can write to any part of memory, including parts it dosn't own. A program can splatter a mac as easily as a dos program can splatter a PC. This is a requirement for multi-tasking.
  • The processor is always in supervisor mode - this is a bit like the above reason, the OS can not protect itself, or other programs, from programs which are broken or malicious.
  • The memory allocation is badly broken, programs must be in contigous blocks of memory. Programs can't allocate memory as they need it, a program might move in above them and block their attempt to grow.

    Slightly less objective reasons:
  • The company has too many lawers (the windowing environment and mouse was invented by Xerox at PARC in 196? Apple copied them, then sued Microsoft for doing the same thing Apple did)
  • A comand line interface is MUCH faster, once you learn to use it. I prefer real use being fast, not just initial use. Manuals are OK to read... really (assumeing there is actualy information in them, unlike some apple manuals I have read)
  • Some of those icons get really uninformative, like the "apple desk-top bus" symbol, it looks like a broken tree to me, not where a keyboard or mouse would be plugged in.
  • Real mice have three buttons, two buttons are usable, but one button is pathetic. (note how most software requires you to use shift and alt in combination with the mouse button, wouldn't several mouse buttons solve the problem better?)
  • The user interface is insulting. I know what I am doing, I can see asking about potentialy stupid stuff like "are your sure you want to format the hard drive?" but a mac treats everyone like a three year old moron.
    Why Power macs are silly:
  • One word: emulation. They havn't even ported the OS??? pathatic! RISC is a good thing, I hope there is a "power PC" in my future, but it would be nice if this fast new processor wasn't spendingg all its time trying to emulate a old CISC chip.
  • They also suffer from all the ills normal macs suffer from.
    Interesting bit o' RISC trivia
    The Power macs were advertised as the first PCs to use a risc processor. Apple is lieing. The first PC machine to use a risc processor was the Acorn Archimedes, it uses the ARM processor, and came out in 1988. The Acorn also runs a real multitasking OS, with memory protection (called RiscOS).

    I have been told that the legendary operating system "Copeland" will solve most/all of these problems, and may even be compiled for the processor on which it would run. I saw a perfect quote in Euggene Tyurin's .signiture to sum this up: "Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly."

    Does anyone else find the term "app" used for a piece of software annoying or is it just me? I figure that something that involves a good 5000 lines of code (which is considered short) deserves a bigger word.

    Click Here for the HCC homepage.