The Mac Factor – Exploding Myths

Exploding Myths

My Spanish home is not on city gas, and so the hot water heater in my house is connected to two butane bottles which last approximately two to three weeks in the winter and four or five weeks during the summer. A few nights ago, the bottles were depleted and the hot water pilot light went out. I dutifully changed the bottles and attempted to light the pilot.

I bent over, held the pilot light button in for a few seconds, and then pushed the spark button. The next thing I remember I was across the room with the hair on my hands and my eyebrows literally smoking. I’m sure there was a mighty flash though I’m not certain of the duration or intensity. I recall sitting by the opposite wall, shaking in fright, and examining my extremities for any serious damage.

I suppose I am fortunate I was wearing glasses and there was no serious damage to my eyes. In fact, I was physically lucky in several ways. Psychologically, though, it took me awhile to put this incident in perspective. During the healing process, I did a lot of self-examination and fatalistically concluded that life is too short for misspent enthusiasm.

The Mac – No Longer a Factor

It has now been some ten years since I began writing my monthly Macintosh column. The ‘Mac Factor’ was first published in Personal Computer World Magazine in the UK and later moved to My Mac Magazine. During those years, I covered the best and the worst of the Macintosh—the exhilaration of the early years, the disappointment of corporate Apple’s blunders, and the belated hope of the early days of the iMac. It was an exciting time to work as a computer journalist and I’ll always remember those years as golden.

As a freelance writer and columnist, I always tried to be brutally honest. I unabashedly dished out praise and criticism and let the chips (so to speak) fall where they may. In this, my last column for My Mac, I will give you a frank assessment on the state of the Macintosh. Many readers might not like what I have to say, but I stand by my arguments and hope that even the most zealous Mac fanatic will at least hear me out.

Mac Toast

I’m quitting this column because the Macintosh is doomed: dead, finito, gonzo, kaput, toast, finished… It’s time for all of you—Mac aficionado or Mac beginner—to recognize that if the journey is to continue to be the reward, then that journey must inevitably include Windows NT.

There are those users out there that will be repelled at this suggestion. Many simplistically equate Microsoft with the ‘evil empire’ and, through some distorted twist in logic, associate Microsoft’s success with Apple’s failure. In fact, Microsoft’s success was achieved irrespective of Apple’s failures. Bill Gates learned early on that if his company produced the goods, everything else would follow. And with Windows NT, Microsoft has delivered the goods to dominate the market for the foreseeable future. Microsoft is good. Microsoft is cool. Microsoft is God.

Windows NT Superiority

There are an enormous number of reasons why Windows NT is superior to the Mac OS and I will list a few of the majors:

• Windows NT provides the user unparalleled simplicity. Either it works or it doesn’t work. In the latter case you reinstall the operating system. There’s none of this ‘turning off extensions’ nonsense or looking for conflicts of any kind. It’s so much easier to pop the old CD in and click reinstall. You may lose some settings, but you’ll get used to it.

• Windows NT error messages are completely unintelligible and therefore place no burden on the user. When the old “Missing file MB0003.DLL” shows up on the screen, you brush it off. If it’s really a problem, you go to #1, above.

• Microsoft doesn’t pretend their operating system will work as delivered. You simply download their latest ‘service pack’ and though that doesn’t fix everything, you know there will be another service pack that won’t fix everything available in a few months.

• Managing multiple users under Windows NT is as easy as building a house of cards. The Windows Registry is one of the great intellectual works of our century. Though there are some who criticize its complexity, I often open the file and browse through, admiring all the quaint and curious ‘flags’ and ‘settings.’ It reminds me of a chapter from Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead—if you remove a wee bit of the logic.

• Unlike the Macintosh, Windows NT offers protected memory and preemptive multitasking. That is, if you’re running multiple applications and one crashes, it’s still possible to return to another and crash that one as well.

• There’s a whole lot more software out there for Windows NT. Most of it is worthless and very little of it works, but the stores are full of titles.

• Microsoft Access is reason enough to switch to NT. I’m sure it’s much more powerful than FileMaker, though I’ve never been able to create a simple database to test it.

• Windows NT is the precursor to Windows 2000 and should be released by 2005. It makes sense to start getting familiar with the errors now rather than sit on the sidelines or select an ‘error-free’ goody-goody machine like a Macintosh. It’s time to get down and dirty!

• Hardware expansion under Windows NT is never a worry; it’s way too complex to even contemplate. First you buy a piece of equipment that might be compatible and then you must find an ‘NT driver’ or try Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows 98 drivers. The Mac, on the other hand, is so easy to expand via SCSI, USB, or FireWire that you’re constantly under pressure to buy the latest and greatest peripheral.

• Installing Windows NT means you get to play with all new equipment, as it’s a bear to configure older peripherals. I recently spent several hours unsucessfully trying to get an H-P ScanJet 5P to work with NT. Remember, that’s an H-P Scanner that sold in the thousands, and neither H-P nor Microsoft have made an effort to provide proper drivers for the scanner or the SCSI board. What do you suppose they’re trying to tell us?

• Windows NT offers a ‘profile manager’ for setting up multiple users’ desktops. Of course, the profile manager must be run from a different machine, but that’s pretty straightforward.

• Windows NT offers security for literally thousands of technical support specialists throughout the country. The interaction between users and technical support types promotes technical breadth and is therefore a breadth of fresh air.

• The Pentium III processor is vastly larger (and therefore superior) to the PowerPC. The ‘complex’ instruction set minimizes the ‘risk’ of oversimplifying programming code and the Pentium generates a lot more warmth than the relatively cold PowerPC.

• You aren’t required to decide whether ‘Windows NT for Dummies’ is an appropriate book choice. If you purchased NT, you already meet those requirements; buy the book.

• Purchasing Windows NT directly supports Bill Gates and Microsoft and this must be a good thing—otherwise why would he be so damn rich?

• NT users earn their stripes. That is, it’s cool to talk about the latest Pentium, but deep down, everyone shares the same pain and earns the same grudging admiration—at least from each other.

• The Mac is ‘too cool’ to put in a serious place of business. Customers expect to see boring beige and a secretary with a puzzled look on his face.

• Macs are faster and cheaper than comparable PCs and therefore there must be something wrong with them.

• Windows NT lets anybody do just about anything. That is, if you don’t sort out the user-rights problem, any user can change a setting in a control panel that will take you weeks to discover. If you’re lucky, you might be able to change it back. There are times, however, when NT merrily deletes a file in response to a changed setting and this can be a whole lot of fun to fix.

• Microsoft Office 97 for Windows NT provides a customizable toolbar that every user will eventually misplace. Attempts to recall the toolbar and correct the problem are particularly adventuresome as you take a trip through profile lane.

• Microsoft advertised on their website that Windows NT 4.0 had ‘tens of thousands of bugs’ that NT 5.0 would fix. This candor was laudable though apparently the company inadvertently deleted this web page.

I could go on for some time, but you get the point. There’s certainly no comparison between Windows NT and the Mac OS. I’m sorry if my brutal honesty put you off. Enjoy April 1st and I’ll see you next month!