Mac or PC?

[Pete from Boston]

Whatever works I'm fine with, although the Mac fanboys acting like they're some kind of superior people puts me off from Macs for that reason.

Yeah. Same thing is true when people talk about their mobile phones.

It embarrasses me a little to see folks get all hot about what they paid for vs. what someone else paid for.  Hints at an unrealistic idea of personal achievement via purchase.

[froggie]

Technically, running both*.  Went with a MacBook for my laptop because I got tired of Windows and their near constant "security upgrades".  Viruses played a factor too.

Sure, one pays an arm and a leg for a MacBook, and yeah, there are some stuck-up Mac users out there.  But Apple's customer support is by far the best in the business.  I have no regrets over switching to Mac.

* running Parallels and Windows 7 in order to run ArcGIS.

[wanderer2575]

I'm Windows at home, but that's more by default than anything else.  I started with Windows and I don't have the know-how/strength/patience to try switching to a Mac.  I don't play video games and hear that maybe Linux would work for my purposes, but installing and running that?  You might as well tell me to build my own spaceship and fly to Jupiter. 

I'm strictly a user and know nothing about the technical side.  (I used to be really good with a Commodore 64, but that was many moons ago.)  I wouldn't have clue one what I would need to do to port all my documents from Windows to Mac.  Listening to some oh-so-superior geek at the Apple store talking technobabble over my head is not an experience I need.  As it is, any software install or update I run never works correctly.  Example:  Just before typing this post, I spent the better part of an hour trying to install a Garmin GPS map update three times -- the installer says "You're Updated!" but when I take the thing outside and turn it on, it says "no detailed maps are installed" -- which is a major step backward from where I started.  I'll try again later.  This is the norm for me and software. 

I don't have a definitive opinion on Windows 10's spying and reporting back to Big Brother Central.  It shouldn't be anyone's business what I do, but then again what I do is no big deal.  It's interesting listening to the outrage from some of the same people who tweet and text their every move, down to going to the bathroom to take a dump, to their "friends" and "followers."

[Scott5114]

I've been using Linux as my primary OS for 10 years now. It's come such a long way since then. I like it because it does what an OS should–runs applications and gets the hell out of my way. Any time I use a Windows computer I feel like I have to fight the OS to let me do what I want. I've never actually used a computer with OS X but I've gotten into a few such fights with iOS, so I don't have much hope that it would be much better.

I don't have a definitive opinion on Windows 10's spying and reporting back to Big Brother Central.  It shouldn't be anyone's business what I do, but then again what I do is no big deal.  It's interesting listening to the outrage from some of the same people who tweet and text their every move, down to going to the bathroom to take a dump, to their "friends" and "followers."

The difference there is that they are choosing to share that information with people they care about, rather than being forced to share it with a corporation who could benefit financially from the information.

I have nothing to hide either but I don't have a glass door on my bathroom.

[1995hoo]

Technically, running both*.  Went with a MacBook for my laptop because I got tired of Windows and their near constant "security upgrades".  Viruses played a factor too.

Sure, one pays an arm and a leg for a MacBook, and yeah, there are some stuck-up Mac users out there.  But Apple's customer support is by far the best in the business.  I have no regrets over switching to Mac.

* running Parallels and Windows 7 in order to run ArcGIS.

The Windows updates are what have me in a pickle this week. Our desktop PC in the home office was running Windows 7 Home Premium, but last week it downloaded Windows 10 (shame on me, I guess, for not double-checking the "Optional Updates" screen when installing updates) and then it kept nagging me and interfering with things so much that I finally allowed the installation. It seemed to go fine until after I was logged back in with the new OS running, at which point it told me to reboot. It then bricked the system. Went to a BSOD every time with an error message. None of the info I could find online about how to fix it worked (due in no small part to most of the "solutions" requiring you to be able to start Windows 10, which I couldn't do–the BSOD was an endless loop). All I could do was use recovery media to get to a DOS prompt. Couldn't even do a "repair" installation because it always wanted to reboot first, which took me to the BSOD. Thankfully, I had backed up almost all of my data, and the stuff that was new and not backed up was on a separate physical drive from the boot drive. So I haven't lost any data, and just to be safe I did some extra copying to a flash drive via the DOS prompt. A couple of friends who work in IT confirmed I was out of luck on the Windows 10 installation, and one of them said in her experience it's very dangerous to try to go directly from 7 to 10 rather than from 7 to 8.1 to 10. That's nice, but the underhanded way in which the 10 download was pushed through kind of screwed me over there.

Hence why I've spent this weekend installing and partitioning a new boot drive and then doing a clean installation of a new copy of Windows 7 (the "Professional" version this time because it's what Micro Center had). You want to talk about OS updates, though....I knew there were bound to be a lot of them. Started the process running last night shortly before 7:00. It says it finished searching for updates at 4:24 this morning and, as I type this, it's installed 230 of 241 updates so far. Wow!

For obvious reasons I'm doing all the configuring, installing drivers, downloading updates, etc., before I put that data drive back into the machine. Paranoia? Maybe, but given what happened last Sunday, it feels like justifiable paranoia. I'll probably wind up re-purchasing some software, but I guess that's life because I probably would have had to do so had I bought a new computer. If the solution of buying a new boot drive and a clean copy of Windows 7 hadn't worked, I was probably going to buy a Mac. But I didn't want to spend that much money right at this particular time. Among other reasons, we have a guy coming tomorrow to give us an estimate on replacing our roof. There's no damage up there, but the roof is 23 years old and on borrowed time, so I want to replace it as a preventive measure.

[wanderer2575]

I don't have a definitive opinion on Windows 10's spying and reporting back to Big Brother Central.  It shouldn't be anyone's business what I do, but then again what I do is no big deal.  It's interesting listening to the outrage from some of the same people who tweet and text their every move, down to going to the bathroom to take a dump, to their "friends" and "followers."

The difference there is that they are choosing to share that information with people they care about, rather than being forced to share it with a corporation who could benefit financially from the information.

I have nothing to hide either but I don't have a glass door on my bathroom.

Point taken.  Of course, you have no choice on what "the people (you) care about" do with that information after you share it with them, which has led to more than one awkward situation, but people still don't get it. 

[1995hoo]

I don't have a definitive opinion on Windows 10's spying and reporting back to Big Brother Central.  It shouldn't be anyone's business what I do, but then again what I do is no big deal.  It's interesting listening to the outrage from some of the same people who tweet and text their every move, down to going to the bathroom to take a dump, to their "friends" and "followers."

The difference there is that they are choosing to share that information with people they care about, rather than being forced to share it with a corporation who could benefit financially from the information.

I have nothing to hide either but I don't have a glass door on my bathroom.

Point taken.  Of course, you have no choice on what "the people (you) care about" do with that information after you share it with them, which has led to more than one awkward situation, but people still don't get it. 

This is one reason I'm thankful I was a kid when I was and not nowadays. Kids have always had a remarkable ability to be cruel to each other and to make each other the subject of ridicule, but in the 1970s and 1980s you had to do something pretty damn remarkable for the whole school to find out about it. (I'm thinking of, for example, the time when I was in high school and the student body president for some inexplicable reason chose to use a mild profanity over the PA when giving the morning announcements.) Of our relatives' kids in Florida, the oldest one is 12, and he's said nowadays anything embarrassing almost invariably gets blasted to the whole school within minutes due to the ubiquity of mobile phones and the like.

Obviously that's not quite the same thing as people who stupidly post everything they ever do on the Internet and then complain when they lose control of the information, but it's somewhat related in the sense that it's dangerous to trust even the people you consider your closest friends.

I'm astonished by the way kids these days think information they put online isn't "supposed to be" used by potential employers or the like. Who are the kids to decide that? The dumbest example I can think of was former UVA quarterback Peter Lalich getting busted for underage drinking and being put on probation conditional on his not consuming alcohol. He then posted Facebook pictures of himself, while on probation, drinking beer with other players after practice. Obviously the judge was not amused.

[Pete from Boston]

I don't have a definitive opinion on Windows 10's spying and reporting back to Big Brother Central.  It shouldn't be anyone's business what I do, but then again what I do is no big deal.  It's interesting listening to the outrage from some of the same people who tweet and text their every move, down to going to the bathroom to take a dump, to their "friends" and "followers."

The difference there is that they are choosing to share that information with people they care about, rather than being forced to share it with a corporation who could benefit financially from the information.

I have nothing to hide either but I don't have a glass door on my bathroom.

Point taken.  Of course, you have no choice on what "the people (you) care about" do with that information after you share it with them, which has led to more than one awkward situation, but people still don't get it.

In all of those cases, you are sharing even info kept "private" with a close circle of people that includes the Facebook Corporation or whoever it is in your case.  It is safe to assume they never actually "get rid" of any of it.  This is one of the reasons I hesitate to join Facebook, despite considering myself a fairly sociable person.

[AlexandriaVA]

I don't have a definitive opinion on Windows 10's spying and reporting back to Big Brother Central.  It shouldn't be anyone's business what I do, but then again what I do is no big deal.  It's interesting listening to the outrage from some of the same people who tweet and text their every move, down to going to the bathroom to take a dump, to their "friends" and "followers."

The difference there is that they are choosing to share that information with people they care about, rather than being forced to share it with a corporation who could benefit financially from the information.

I have nothing to hide either but I don't have a glass door on my bathroom.

Point taken.  Of course, you have no choice on what "the people (you) care about" do with that information after you share it with them, which has led to more than one awkward situation, but people still don't get it. 

This is one reason I'm thankful I was a kid when I was and not nowadays. Kids have always had a remarkable ability to be cruel to each other and to make each other the subject of ridicule, but in the 1970s and 1980s you had to do something pretty damn remarkable for the whole school to find out about it. (I'm thinking of, for example, the time when I was in high school and the student body president for some inexplicable reason chose to use a mild profanity over the PA when giving the morning announcements.) Of our relatives' kids in Florida, the oldest one is 12, and he's said nowadays anything embarrassing almost invariably gets blasted to the whole school within minutes due to the ubiquity of mobile phones and the like.

Obviously that's not quite the same thing as people who stupidly post everything they ever do on the Internet and then complain when they lose control of the information, but it's somewhat related in the sense that it's dangerous to trust even the people you consider your closest friends.

I'm astonished by the way kids these days think information they put online isn't "supposed to be" used by potential employers or the like. Who are the kids to decide that? The dumbest example I can think of was former UVA quarterback Peter Lalich getting busted for underage drinking and being put on probation conditional on his not consuming alcohol. He then posted Facebook pictures of himself, while on probation, drinking beer with other players after practice. Obviously the judge was not amused.

Alternatively, when the old-fart Gen Xers and Baby Boomers retire and us hedonistic millennials run the world, perhaps social and professional norms will have changed to the point where it is understood that a large segment of the general public will have regrettable dirty laundry in internet-land.

[Pete from Boston]

I don't have a definitive opinion on Windows 10's spying and reporting back to Big Brother Central.  It shouldn't be anyone's business what I do, but then again what I do is no big deal.  It's interesting listening to the outrage from some of the same people who tweet and text their every move, down to going to the bathroom to take a dump, to their "friends" and "followers."

The difference there is that they are choosing to share that information with people they care about, rather than being forced to share it with a corporation who could benefit financially from the information.

I have nothing to hide either but I don't have a glass door on my bathroom.

Point taken.  Of course, you have no choice on what "the people (you) care about" do with that information after you share it with them, which has led to more than one awkward situation, but people still don't get it. 

This is one reason I'm thankful I was a kid when I was and not nowadays. Kids have always had a remarkable ability to be cruel to each other and to make each other the subject of ridicule, but in the 1970s and 1980s you had to do something pretty damn remarkable for the whole school to find out about it. (I'm thinking of, for example, the time when I was in high school and the student body president for some inexplicable reason chose to use a mild profanity over the PA when giving the morning announcements.) Of our relatives' kids in Florida, the oldest one is 12, and he's said nowadays anything embarrassing almost invariably gets blasted to the whole school within minutes due to the ubiquity of mobile phones and the like.

Obviously that's not quite the same thing as people who stupidly post everything they ever do on the Internet and then complain when they lose control of the information, but it's somewhat related in the sense that it's dangerous to trust even the people you consider your closest friends.

I'm astonished by the way kids these days think information they put online isn't "supposed to be" used by potential employers or the like. Who are the kids to decide that? The dumbest example I can think of was former UVA quarterback Peter Lalich getting busted for underage drinking and being put on probation conditional on his not consuming alcohol. He then posted Facebook pictures of himself, while on probation, drinking beer with other players after practice. Obviously the judge was not amused.

Alternatively, when the old-fart Gen Xers and Baby Boomers retire and us hedonistic millennials run the world, perhaps social and professional norms will have changed to the point where it is understood that a large segment of the general public will have regrettable dirty laundry in internet-land.

Didn't Idiocracy flesh out that slippery slope for us?

It's funny to me that you think a bias against bad judgement must be a generational thing.  It's not dirty laundry that screws you.  Everyone has dirty laundry.  It's going out of your way to advertise your stupidity to people whose trust you're trying to gain that's the issue.  If the insinuation is that someday it won't be a problem because millennials are too dumb to get that, I will not argue.

I hope I'm in the minority in saying that I'm going hire the person that doesn't post photos of a keg party while on alcohol probation.  That way I'll have people with much better judgement working for me than other people will.

[AlexandriaVA]

I recall the same arguments being made with Jews and homosexuals...that if your prospective employer knew, you were out of the running.

Just saying.

[Pete from Boston]

I recall the same arguments being made with Jews and homosexuals...that if your prospective employer knew, you were out of the running.

Just saying.

How did Godwin's Law come into this so fast?

People with bad judgement are not an oppressed minority, and it's pretty disrespectful to those who are to make that comparison.

[AlexandriaVA]

I recall the same arguments being made with Jews and homosexuals...that if your prospective employer knew, you were out of the running.

Just saying.

How did Godwin's Law come into this so fast?

People with bad judgement are not an oppressed minority, and it's pretty disrespectful to those who are to make that comparison.

Wasn't making references to the Hitler government of Germany...was referring to implicit quotas or gentlemen's agreements about not hiring the "wrong kinds of people".

Basically, employers will use social media evidence to validate what they already want to believe. I highly doubt that many graduates of elite business schools have had careers disqualified due to social media hijinks ("he's just good old boy, boys will be boys"). Likewise, you're kidding yourself if employers haven't used social media information to come up with a plausible reason for not hiring or firing someone, when the real reason was something else.

[Pete from Boston]

When you've hired people whose work has an impact on your reputation and bottom line, who then lie about why they're not coming to work but forget that they posted pictures the night before while they were drunk, then let's talk.

[1995hoo]

When you've hired people those work has an impact on your reputation and bottom line, who then lie about why they're not coming to work but forget that they posted pictures the night before while they were drunk, then let's talk.

Bingo. The same sort of thing used to happen prior to social media, of course; I knew someone who almost lost her job because she lied about her arrival time at work (she claimed she was late due to an elevator problem) and the security footage of the lobby showed she was lying (it didn't help her that she was easy to spot on the tape due to being very obese).

[AlexandriaVA]

Fraud is a different issue, and I wouldn't begrudge an employer to use all available evidence to prove a case of such fraud occurring. That is, in many regards, a pretty objective determination - the employee either did or did not defraud the employer.

My concern is with qualitative classification employees based on social media trends. That is, an employer firing an employee that he or she does not like, or is bigoted against, using the cover story of "their social media patterns" as a pretext for termination.

[AlexandriaVA]

For example, should a bakery be able to fire me if they saw my Facebook page "liking" a gay rights organization? It seems like a digital equivalent to the days that the Carnegies and Rockefellers of the world would employ private detective agencies, like the Pinkertons, to keep an eye on their workforces.

[Pete from Boston]

Egregious civil rights violations fall outside the scope of "regrettable dirty laundry," as you put it, responding to a discussion of someone being judged for really bad decision-making concerning drinking.

Yes, bad people will use against you all kinds of things.  But that was not what we (or you) were talking about.

[Pete from Boston]

It makes me wonder how much a "good" laptop costs.

A minimum of $899 for an 11-inch MacBook Air with a 1.6 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of PCIe-based flash storage, all of which are soldered to the logic board and not upgradable.

BACK ON TOPIC... This is why I can't go Mac.  More money, less ability to stretch out that investment down the road.  I've also heard too many stories of "Software requires me to upgrade the OS, which makes the machine nearly grind to a halt," something also common to iPhones.

The form and design is great, but I can forgive not having it when decent PC laptops are cheap and upgradable.

[1995hoo]

Going back to the Mac v. PC topic....

What's a reasonable configuration for a Mac these days? I was thinking about that the other day when I was trying to get a rough idea of pricing before starting the rebuild process on my PC. I think I have a reasonable sense for what sort of configuration I would want were I to buy a new IBM-compatible (to use the traditional term), based in large part on how my current PC (it's an HP, for whatever that's worth) was configured prior to its crash. But I have no sense for what sort of RAM requirements, hard drive space, etc., are reasonable in the Mac world. I'd kind of like to know even if I don't want to buy something new any time soon, just because I like to have a sense of what the market is if something were to happen.

[Thing 342]

Going back to the Mac v. PC topic....

What's a reasonable configuration for a Mac these days? I was thinking about that the other day when I was trying to get a rough idea of pricing before starting the rebuild process on my PC. I think I have a reasonable sense for what sort of configuration I would want were I to buy a new IBM-compatible (to use the traditional term), based in large part on how my current PC (it's an HP, for whatever that's worth) was configured prior to its crash. But I have no sense for what sort of RAM requirements, hard drive space, etc., are reasonable in the Mac world. I'd kind of like to know even if I don't want to buy something new any time soon, just because I like to have a sense of what the market is if something were to happen.

I haven't ever really looked at getting a Mac, but based upon experiences of others, I can tell you that the lowest-priced models are generally not worth buying, largely due to cheapness on the components (e.g. The entry-level MBP having a 5400 rpm mechanical drive, despite the rest of the line having Fusion drives)

[froggie]

You'll spend some buckage to upgrade, but it's worth it.

Since you ask about RAM, I've survived on 8GB (which, unfortunately for my MacBook model, is not upgradeable), but if you have the opportunity for 16, I'd take it.

[kkt]

I am kicking around the idea of an Imac.  Gorgeous 27" display.  But a pain in the butt to get fixed if the hard drive, motherboard, or power supply goes out, and not only is it hard to change them but you'd lose the beautiful display at the same time.  Stupid design.  Okay, it's supposed to be the Ferrari of computers or something.  But even a Ferrari doesn't make you pull the engine in order to change the oil.

[Pete from Boston]

I am kicking around the idea of an Imac.  Gorgeous 27" display.  But a pain in the butt to get fixed if the hard drive, motherboard, or power supply goes out, and not only is it hard to change them but you'd lose the beautiful display at the same time.  Stupid design.  Okay, it's supposed to be the Ferrari of computers or something.  But even a Ferrari doesn't make you pull the engine in order to change the oil.

Why would you "lose the beautiful display"?

[wolfiefrick]

But a pain in the butt to get fixed if the hard drive, motherboard, or power supply goes out ...

I've owned a Mac for almost five years and used it very heavily and put it near and above its paces, and nothing has managed to break yet. I bet the stock hard drive inside of it has been formatted probably upwards of twenty times.