Aside from this, I will thank you for your defense of common sense.
There’s just too many easily mislead people out there in the world.

Given that I’d just end up running Windows on my Mac anyway, I have a Dell.

I’ve been barefoot on the Web since 1993, until two months ago when I got DSL and the router’s firewall was installed.

No viruses. Garageband – and a world full of audio tools if I want them. MS Office. Several browsers.

I find a lot of people identify, empathize, anthropomorphize their computers based on how involved they are with them. Updating antivirus and antispyware counts. You love your car because you wash it, too, not just driving it. Even though you didn’t buy it to wash.

I use XP Pro at work, and I have a laptop here at the house with XP on it, too. That makes it apparent that cheap hardware is the only thing that makes the OS viable. I know you’d hate Windows on 900MHz – I’ve fixed a friend’s 1.3 GHz Celeron box and it was pitiful – but OS X runs pretty swiftly on two G4s summing that speed. Why is it, now, that bunches of people and businesses are downgrading to XP from Vista?

It doesn’t matter to you, of course. I’ve been running this thing for eight years. I am ticked at Apple for cashing in on the “fix this” market, though, and for changing file architecture at least three times. I can’t run my copy of Excel v0.0B on this thing. But if you have something that works – and I acknowledge that tinkering is an enjoyable hobby – well, have at it!

Right now, Staples has a special on a 4-core Phenom box from HP for $700 that looks good. I’d have to subscribe to a couple of services, but I see the appeal.

That PC is cheap!

Perhaps it was a gift? Or perhaps he’s inspired by the same kind of misguided elitism that leads the stereotypical mac-head or linux-head to go out of his way to make a system that’s inferior for (you can’t get much more inferior than “just plain won’t run”) some of the most common user applications as his primary desktop.

For the record, Vista works fine. It has some annoying features and yes, it is bloated, but it’s stable enough, secure enough, and entirely functional. Really, it’s almost as good as XP.

XP blows OSX and Ubuntu clean out of the water in terms of usefulness for the home user. The chances are good that anyone who will tell you otherwise:
1) Has never used XP, and thinks it’s like Windows 95/98/ME (for reference, MacUsers, this is about like me evaluating OSX based on my extensive and mainly negative experience with OS9)
2) Is smoking or shooting something.
3) Actually knows something relevant that I don’t, in which case I’d like to know what it is.

I used Firefox for a while. Then I used Opera for a while. Then IE7 had tabbed browsing and worked fine and I realy haven’t bothered with anything else since.

NO? Really? Nobody in the writers’ group would ever file a complaint about drug dealers in their forum. Google has to be bugged because there’s no other possible way for statements made on a public forum to reach the NSA, FBI, or any other government agency.

this seems to be a not-so rare artefact of a suboptimal redrawing algorithm in the Mozilla XUL system, the front end of all Mozilla-based products like SeaMonkey, Thunderbird and Firefox. A simple off-by-one-error in the calculation of “redraw regions” can lead to this. In the older OSses, iconifying/moving the window out of the side of the screen and in again/moving a window in front of it had the effect of immediately redrawing the window area.

Combined with Apple’s Quartz (the display layer of OS X) and font antialiasing, the off-by-one-error leads to these ugly, but mostly harmless artefacts. Quartz double-buffers window contents in order to things like Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard effects etc. Font antialiasing causes the text to slightly “bleed out” of its bounding box sometimes.

I wrote “mostly harmless” because, yes, I’m a Douglas Adams fan, but also because it sometimes can be indicative of memory corruption, too. If parts of an offscreen buffer are erroneously overwritten and the buffer is then displayed, you get funny pixels — if not a crashing app.

One easy solution: change the window size slightly. A resize operation forces pretty much everything in a window to redraw.

Check this page on modifying Firefox.

And the video thing is common. The IBM box at work (XP Pro, 2.13 Core Duo 2, 2GB, running Notes, Word, Excel, Access and a few IE7 windows and two custom applications) leaves entire windows painted on the desktop when it gets confused. Part of why it does that is interference from programs installed by a Federal agency in charge of computer “security”; they can’t spell, and can’t get the law right in their logon warning message, but hey..You got somebody pretending their stuff is super, it’s just because it isn’t doing anything.

But hey, I’ll tell on ya, Phil. You spend so much time doing your real job, astronomy that you haven’t studied your OS. That’s OK. Life is too short to spend watching progress bars. Hey, even Ubuntu has screen-painting problems according to a quick search.

So, hey, make sure your favorite computer magazine subscription is up-to-date, and read the thing. The editors will have seen everything you do already. Just think of all the junk your box has to do to edit text in a Firefox window with Windows fonts while building the Web page you’ve just called up. So it stutters. No big deal.

Robust – adj. – a measure of the amount of time it will take to recover your computer system when it crashes.

FF2 works great. FF3 is poop, because it doesn’t let me turn off the “awesome” bar and revert to the way FF2 does things. Yes, I know I can disable it entirely, but that’s not really a helpful solution, is it? And don’t point me at oldbar – it does NOT restore the old functionality. And show me one site that works in FF3 which doesn’t work in FF2.

And FWIW, I get these little guys on my Mac all the time. I think they’re artifacts from sloppy tab-closing routines. I just ignore them.

So before you dismiss those little niggling bits, know that yes, we’re being watched, and no, we’re not just paranoid.

No idea where the control is for clearing the cache is on a Mac, other than under the Advanced options in the Network tab. Options are available under Tools in Windows, and under Edit in Linux, so it may be one of the two for Macs.

These cooties are one pixel’s worth of whatever is displayed under the window — text from another window, your desktop pattern, a drop shadow, etc.

Slide the window up and down, and you’ll see what I mean.

The fact that Phil was able to take a screenshot of the cooties without the use of a camera suggests it has nothing at all to do with the monitor.

Bame me oop, Scootty,,,

GAry 7

Mac vs. PC: believe I’ll be sticking with my Vista laptop here. After a year and a half of use, I can honestly say that I’ve never had any of the big problems that people claim Vista is prone to. My laptop stays up and running for days and weeks at a time. 24 hours a day kind of running. About the only reboots it ever needs is when some of the updates come through. As for Apple, they make some pretty things, but i have way too many programs and games that are not in any way, shape, or form compatible with a Mac. And while I do know there is software that supposedly lets some one run them on a Mac, the idea of needing software to run software because the main software can’t run the software seems.. well, it seems like a crash waiting to happen.

No need to tell me to try a Mac. I tried one a couple of years ago, and lets just say, it was slower than my nearly 8 year old desktop, and didn’t even meet the same specs as said desktop. The Mac had a slower processor, less ram, a smaller hardrive, and wasn’t able to run a fairly high portion of the programs I use on a regular basis… all for 3 times the price i paid for my old well-used Emachine.

On the other hand, I wish both sides would stop the war. Apple makes some products that a lot of people find very useful and simple to use, they just handcuff people who want to design a system by telling you what you WILL have in your system. PCs are great for people who want a custom system, but on the other hand it can be twitchy because too many geeks want to overclock and push things to the very limit which leads to crashes and errors. Apple makes new designs that inspire people to think of better and better gadgets. Microsoft supplied some of the code that was use by apple way back in the day, and provided the bailout cash to keep Apple solvent.

It all boils down to what you as a user like. If you like one system over the other, use it. I’ve tried Mac, and I’ve tried Linux (which I couldn’t WAIT to get off of my systerm), and found that I prefer my windows. A friend of mine used windows for years then bought a Mac and found that she prefers that instead. Shrug.

just rememer that any time you see a plain spraing !CONTRAILS! to get on your gas mast. All so be sure to rememer to remove the TACMARS marker stickers off the back of the street sines in your home towns so the govmint wont be able to find there hiden detintiun camps and supply stash’s.

One last thing to rememer. the reason the eleetist’s want nucular power is so they can ship raidioation through the power line’s into the homes of the poor peple in small emounts so they can make us all not be able to have chilldrun. them govmint and sinetist’s grupes won’t to cleer out all us reglar peeple sos they can have there own little fascits-comunists world.

the conspeeracist-theoriser!

When I asked my Son why he quit working for Microsoft and went to work for Apple, he said,” I got tired of working on cr*p,,,”

From one who has worked both sides of the fence,,,

There are no perfect operating systems. All have bugs. Just some bugs are more lethal than others.

The iMac my Son gave me last year came with Safari and works just fine for me. The old PC in my office worked ok(with a lot of auto reboots) but it was the old 2000 system. I hear Vista needs some serious rework,,,

Computers were a lot more fun before Gates ran all the other competitors out of business(except for Apple).
I really, really dislike monopolies,,,

Gary 7