You know, once you get used to it, you sort of stop maximizing applications as you are used to doing in Windows.

It's an application specific thing -- ToeTag, for example, will maximize to fill the entire screen because as a level editor that's the right choice. As does Photoshop. But text editors don't really need to take the entire screen up, nor do web browsers. They just need to get "as large as the application needs them to be" which is what that button does.

It's not a real issue once you start using it day-to-day.

You start to navigate differently after awhile. F11 to show/hide the desktop (which actually works correctly in OSX - in Windows it minimizes all the apps which is dumb), F9 to see all the running apps in Expose, F10 to see all documents open in the current app, etc.

ALT+TAB is the same as CMD+TAB in OSX so I'm not sure what people are going on about there.

Don't get me started on Spaces - SO nice.

And a quick note about the colored ball buttons ... there are 3 of them there and they are colored. It's not hard to remember what does what.

As always, this conversation is pretty controversial and will be plagued with flames and trolling as well as ultimately being pointless. The best you can hope for here is clearing up a few misconceptions people may have but nobody is going to be convinced to switch operating systems because of it.

And megaman ... you're trapped in a time warp. They don't design operating systems for people like you anymore. Walk into the light. 

well, i've only been using it 8 hours a day for 16 months, so maybe i shouldn't be so quick to form judgements. :)

apple-tab isn't identical to alt-tab (doesn't show multiple windows for the same app) but F9 is a pretty reasonable alternative.

photoshop doesn't fill the screen for me, but i'm using CS3 so maybe your version does.

the colored balls are fine, but take the point that hiding the icons (which are somewhat informative) and only showing colors (which have no inherent meaning to a new user) has no functional justification. It merely looks nice.

Anyway, you may be tired of OS talk, but I find it useful as a software/game design type person to examine software/game design and clarify why things work or don't work. Getting into the details about it also helps clear up misconceptions, as you say. 

well, i've only been using it 8 hours a day for 16 months, so maybe i shouldn't be so quick to form judgements. :)
As I said, nobody is going to change their minds. If you don't like it, you don't it. Nothing said here will change that. The only reason I really post in these threads is maybe learn something and hopefully clear up misconceptions that other people might have.

photoshop doesn't fill the screen for me, but i'm using CS3 so maybe your version does.
You might be right there. I can't remember clearly. At any rate, it's an application specific thing. In OSX that button means, "get as large as you need to" not "fill the screen".

the colored balls are fine, but take the point that hiding the icons (which are somewhat informative) and only showing colors (which have no inherent meaning to a new user) has no functional justification. It merely looks nice.
Arguably, it fits into the overall aesthetic of OSX which is minimal UI and clutter. Removing those symbols cleans up the UI in a small way which is fine with me. I don't need those symbols there to remember what the buttons do - and if I do need to be reminded, I'll be shown when I move the mouse up there.

Anyway, you may be tired of OS talk, but I find it useful as a software/game design type person to examine software/game design and clarify why things work or don't work. Getting into the details about it also helps clear up misconceptions, as you say.
I tire of trolling and random flames and "my OS is better than yours" crap. I'm all for discussing pros and cons of design in a mature manner. 

Oh, and in OSX's defense, one thing that mitigates the need to mimic the Windows maximize behavior is that applications remember where they last were on the screen. I believe it's a magic feature that everyone gets for free. So once you size the app to where you like it, it will remember that position and size every time you open it.

Windows relies on the individual applications to write code to do this and they seldom do - so maximizing is a quick way to remove the issue. 

And to complete my posting hat trick, let me throw in a gripe about OSX that I don't like. I don't like having to use the bottom right corner to resize windows. I think Windows has a far better solution where it allows you to drag any edge or corner to resize a window.

So there's a point for Windows design IMO.

I guess it's arguable. In OSX you get a little more screen area for working since you don't need the thick border around the entire window and from a UI design point of view, it's very clear that when you see the ridged box that you can use that to resize something.

Still, I find it annoying many times. 

From what i've heard it's getting good feedback, and they may have finally straightened out some of vista's bugs. But the real news is they're giving away licensed copies of XP (running under Virtual PC), with expensive versions of Win 7.
http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/04/24/secret-no-more-revealing-virtual-windows-xp-for-windows-7.aspx
At first i thought "well... they know it's shit, and are giving away what people want [XP]. What a joke", but the bigger issue is this, and it's positive. The Windows code base is a ponderous mess because they've always offered backwards compatability. By including a virtual box for legacy programs (especially business apps) they can cut that shit out of the new operating system, and finally move forward. Security, bugs, performance and UI consistency should all benefit.

To what degree they can achieve this is debatable however. Obvious problems i can see are
1. Gamers are still in the cold as virtualisation is of negative
benefit to them, and gamers made microsoft imho.
2. Windows still has UI-design and strategy issues that are unresolved, which are huge issues the company has
never had to properly address before, unlike Apple.
3. Removing legacy functionality from the core OS ~will~ hurt people, and do they have the will to really do it ? 

> technically the windows "show desktop" feature is
> togglable. I was using windows-M, which is literally
> "minimize all"

Doesn't shift-windows-M un-minimize them ? 

I've just learnt something...

That's very useful. Thanks! 

Always behind whichever the curve is, but this sounds like its worth it. 

I'm going to ditch Windows and install Archlinux now instead. See you next week! 

Vista is alright but damn is it slow doing some basic things. My work machine takes no less than 10 minutes to get from from power up to "ready to work" state. And most of that time is spent after I log into Vista.

Only possible explanation for this is that you have a really silly amount of software set to launch upon logon and this would slow down the boot process of any OS to a crawl.

My home desktop (which is well average by today's standards: E6600 2,4 Ghz, 4 GB ram) goes from cold boot to a usable Vista desktop in under a minute. Even the retarded Fujitsu testbed machines we have at work with 1-2 gb ram launch in under 1,5 minutes and this is with Antivirus and all the regular crap. 

My nearly 7 old Windows desktop is 2 Ghz.

You'd think in the last 7 years that the CPU speed would have evolved more. 

i think there are some design limits that single CPUs have hit in recent years, that's why everything is switching to multi-core. 

Only possible explanation for this is that you have a really silly amount of software set to launch upon logon and this would slow down the boot process of any OS to a crawl.
Not really. It's a work machine. We have a virus scanner and a messenger app and that's about it. There's nothing in the task tray that would explain 10 minutes of disk thrashing every reboot.

This is AFTER you've logged in, mind you. You've entered your password and you're now at the desktop. However, the machine won't be usable for another 5-10 minutes. 

Willem used quote tags!

Have a beer ;) 

We use a similar one. 

Archlinux was easy to setup and runs so very nice.
And thanks to Linux I could transfer all my settings by simple copying files over. 

Archlinux was easy to setup and runs so very nice
What's good about it ?

Check out the new console bootup logo (for linux-2.6.29.x only)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_E2tJnrV_I64/ScE50948gHI/AAAAAAAAABk/9L_wYatqYJc/s1600-h/tuz.png
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stibbons/3216251461/
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-logo.html

Took a little effort to set up since i'm not actually using a 2.6.29.x kernel
(enable vesa framebuffer support, copy logo_linux_clut224.ppm to [kernel_source]/drivers/video/log , "make bzImage" and install new kernel adding this to grub "fb vga=0x315 video=vesafb:pmipal" )
but i now have a graphics enabled console and a cute tuz (tux tasmanian devil) logo. 

Archlinux is very minimal and does (mostly) only what you tell it to. That means I have a lightweight system that does everything I need without bloat. It needs 15 seconds to boot and is fast and snappy (using XFCE as desktop).
Installation and setup was actually easier than Debian (ok, that was some time ago and I am more experienced now). Things like the sound (OSS) or CPU frequeny scaling worked immediately.

The only drawback is that pacman is very inferior to aptitude (no menu for example), there are much fewer packages and using the user-repository ("AUR") requires using a different tool plus packages seem to be often broken or outdated. On the other hand the AUR contains a lot of proprietary software and other things (games) that now are easier to install than on other distros. 

apple owns http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/advisory/TPTI-09-04 

Fixed. :)

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3549 

http://blog.cr0.org/2009/08/linux-null-pointer-dereference-due-to.html

I havent read it up

Since it leads to the kernel executing code at NULL, the vulnerability is as trivial as it can get to exploit: an attacker can just put code in the first page that will get executed with kernel privileges
....
On x86/x86_64, this issue could be mitigated by three things:
* the recent mmap_min_addr feature. Note that this feature has known issues until at least 2.6.30.2. See also this LWN article.
* on IA32 with PaX/GrSecurity, the KERNEXEC feature (x86 only)
* not implementing affected protocols (a.k.a., reducing your attack surface by disabling what you don't need): PF_APPLETALK, PF_IPX, PF_IRDA, PF_X25, PF_AX25, PF_BLUETOOTH, PF_IUCV, IPPROTO_SCTP/PF_INET6, PF_PPPOX, PF_ISDN, but there may be more. (Update: See RedHat's mitigation)
 

at least three days ago :( 

Imho there is absolutely NO reason to switch to win7 when you have vista that runs without problems. I won't spend M$ tax two times for more or less the same.
Gfx perfomance seems to be identical.
http://www.guru3d.com/article/windows-7-vs-vista-vga-game-performance/7 

Willem: it's not the OS (unless it is bad configuration) more likely the network or the machine. I use Vista on a 2Gig Pentium 4 and I am up and running in just over 2 minutes, and I have loads of unnecessary things on startup.

rudl: I agree. The same was true of XP over Vista. But I will say that I have been running Win7 on my laptop for about 4 months and have had no issues at all. Admitedly, I don't use it for games but I do use it for mapping (and FQ for testing) and Photoshop.