Mac 10.1 vs Windows XP

solrac

solrac

Mac Ninja
Ok, are we gonna start seeing VS. articles cropping up everywhere?
The microsoft web site TOTALLY dummies down XP for newbie users and doesn't even show detailed technical specs.

However I saw one improvement already in XP better than OS X.

The login screen works about the same way, but you can switch users without logging off! So if one user is logged in with a million apps open, you can switch to another user, and they can open their own apps and shit, and then you can switch back to the original user and all the apps and windows are exactly how you left them.

Apple should provide an update to login with this feature. Or a 3rd party tool? OS X must always stay ahead of WinBlows XP and the lame new artwork in the OS.

-solrac-
 
I think this feature is TOTALLY USELESS. They are really digging to find "new" features to add to the OS. Seriosly....how much would you ever use this? It just seems like a total waste of code and further bloats the OS into the conglomeration of shit that windoze has already become.
 
so what happens if someone opens up a bunch of memory hogging programs and than the other user logs on... are the resources of the computer being used by the other programs? what if that person leaves and the current user can't go in and close those other programs so the computer is slow and useless?
 
Originally posted by Fahrvergnuugen
I think this feature is TOTALLY USELESS.
Click to expand...

There are many times where this would be very handy to use in OS X. Here are a few off the top of my head.

a) quickly switching being regular user and root user. EXAMPLE: I'm the webdesigner testing some new features on the webserver. The webadmin comes to the webserver, needed to make some emergency alterations to the server at the root level. He simply logs on, makes the change, logs out, and I am right back to where I was before. Currently with OS X I would have to close everything, log out, log back in, and reopen everything.

b) running processes at the root level without interupting your current work

c) this would pave the way [finally] to having ONE larger, more powerful computer running everyone's account, but each person has a small, imac/ibook dumb-terminal connection. (one step closer to true net-booting)

d) 2 or more people can work at one desk(physical) and easily be able to access things on their personal workspace(digital) without having to switch computers or deal with networking software, sharing permissions, etc.

e) files that should not be publicly or privately shared are now easily accessible to that user when sitting at another computer.

Demand will always create a product, but a product can also create demand.

The usability of this product will most likely increase as time goes on. This feature is also much more likely to be used in a situation with multiple networked computers where the digital workspace is no longer associated with the physical computer being used, but the owner of that workspace.

You will see the usability of obscure OS X features increase also(like Services).

FaRuvius
-------------------------
"Flush Hard to Stay Strong"
 
To do something as root [or as any other user] open up a terminal and type su username. if you want to execute a command as root, use sudo. This is the best way to do this, and making it so that you can log our and not close all of your applications IS USELESS.

On top of that, your admin should be able to telnet in and make whatever changes he needs to make without having to make you get out of your chair.
 
I am another person to say that this feature, ideally implemented, would be greatly beneficial towards the users' computing experience. What I mean by ideal implementation is that the state (primarily memory) of one user gets saved on the drive, as with hibernation in windows 2000, then all resources are freed up for use by the next user.

If you think of it, I am amazed why people think this feature is unnecessary in the first place. We are still trapped in the single-user, single-app paradigm of computing where we 'start programs', then 'open documents inside that program', and 'save and close all work after it's finished'. Why should computers work like that when today's technology provides more than enough computing power to make computers usable at any point of time? Why should my computer not boot up with all my docs and apps previously in use? Thought of that?

Having said that, I think that Microsoft is not capable enough to implementing such a user-friendly feature properly, looking back on their implementations of standby and hibernation modes. Indeed, in the PC sector it may well be that the current standards of ACPI, PC9x and whatever are too loose to impose the whole industry, including graphics card vendors and memory-resident software vendors etc, to come up with products that 'work with one another'. As for Apple, I think they're simply past the era of interest in user interface. But it would be a welcome feature to see on any OS.
 
I can't imagine anyone at my work would use that feature, we all have our own box or two or three, mix of mac and win. i guess this feature's usefulness just depends on what kind of work environment you're in. How many work environments really require multiple people to log into a machine in a hot-seat fashion? Changing shifts doesn't count, the person going home would be logging out for the night.
 
I was at Comp USA yesterday and had a chance to use Windows XP for a while. It was a terrible experience. I have three main complaints. First is that MS tried to make things simpler by putting frequently used commands and tasks right in front of the user. That sounds good however all this does is clutter the interface. There are TOO many things to click on and look at. The UI is a cluttered mess. If I were a new user, I wouldn’t know where to click to get what I wanted. Even as an experienced user it was difficult. Second, everything you can possibly point your mouse at lights up. Taskbar buttons, Start button, menus, links, scroll bars, etc….ALL of those items light up when you float your mouse over them. This makes it very confusing and distracting when things are so overactive. Again, poor UI design. MS made Windows XP look like it was created by a first time 14-year-old web designer…the ones that love to add GIF animations everywhere. My last complaint is the Start Menu. It is WAY to huge. MS crammed everything they could into the Start Menu. It’s very hard to see what you’re working on when you click on your Start Menu and it covers ¼ of the screen. Poor design by putting everything in there. All in all, it was sad to see Windows XP after all of hype around it. I still say that if you want an amazing computing experience, get Mac OS X!
 
Originally posted by AlanCE
I can't imagine anyone at my work would use that feature, we all have our own box or two or three, mix of mac and win. i guess this feature's usefulness just depends on what kind of work environment you're in. How many work environments really require multiple people to log into a machine in a hot-seat fashion? Changing shifts doesn't count, the person going home would be logging out for the night.
Click to expand...
This is much more of a "home user" feature than an at work feature. Think about it. A family of 3 has one iMac. Son, dad, mom. Each individual user has their own individual prefs. When they want to check their mail (they would more than likely be using mail.app), they cant just open up Mail and check it when anyone is logged in. Mail using your individual prefs for username, password, etc. If i'm doing web stuff (which i am quite a bit), and have 5 or 6 apps open at once (which is very common), and my mom wants to check her email, i dont want to quit out of all my apps, log out, have my mom log in, check her email, log out, then i log back in, open up all my apps and docs to where they were an resume work. It would save a lot of time and be much less of a hassle if this multiple login thing were a feature.

Also, to whoever saying that being able to do this is totally useless if you wanted to do stuff as root... well GUESS WHAT BUDDY! Sometimes, you want to run GUI apps as root. Not just shell commands.

I for one would welcome this feature.
 
Yeah i know that the new GUI is kind of lame and they screwed up but there is a lot of cool features like the remote control for example: You can take control of another computer right from your own screen and help your friends. This is great, I used it to help my father resolve some problems with is computer, imagine all the time you can save. And now the os is more stable It' been like a week since i didn't have to reboot my computer. This is great don't hate, the new XP is just a good alternative to X.
 
Originally posted by The Genius
Yeah i know that the new GUI is kind of lame and they screwed up but there is a lot of cool features like the remote control for example: You can take control of another computer right from your own screen and help your friends. This is great, I used it to help my father resolve some problems with is computer, imagine all the time you can save.

This was always achieveable using Netmeeting Desktop Share.
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yeah but not everyone was aware of that and in Xp they've made it more obvious. I am not tryin' to promote Xp on this board but they've made a lot of good improvements with Xp.
 
Originally posted by FaRuvius


a) quickly switching being regular user and root user. EXAMPLE: I'm the webdesigner testing some new features on the webserver. The webadmin comes to the webserver, needed to make some emergency alterations to the server at the root level. He simply logs on, makes the change, logs out, and I am right back to where I was before. Currently with OS X I would have to close everything, log out, log back in, and reopen everything.
Click to expand...

Ok, if your webadmin needs to work on the server he should just open the terminal app and use sudo (sudo is better than su, since it doesn't need to have the root account enabled). Also it would be better if he just SSH'ed in to the server and did work on it, that way you can both work at the same time, something that the Switching users ablity doesn't allow for.



b) running processes at the root level without interupting your current work
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You can do this on OS X right now, as you are working there are quite a few root level processes that are running in the background, and its easy to SSH into a machine and run programs in the background while there is a user at the terminal.

I would much rather see a good implementation of display forwarding in OS X than this user switch feature....
 
Originally posted by billybob
Also, to whoever saying that being able to do this is totally useless if you wanted to do stuff as root... well GUESS WHAT BUDDY! Sometimes, you want to run GUI apps as root. Not just shell commands. [/B]
Click to expand...

sudo open application.app

Or get a program called SNAX if you are so scared of the CLI. It lets you run any thing as root from a GUI.

Figure out what you are talking about before you run your mouth.
 
To let your mom check her mail without logging out open up the terminal and do this:

cd /Applications/

su momslogin
pasword: momspassword

open Mail.app


Mail will open using your mom's prefrences and she can check her mail. The only catch is you can't have Mail.app open before you do this. A simple solution would be to make a copy of the program. Maybe there is a way to run two copies of the same application? There is probably a away to make a shell script or apple script to do all of this for you.

Being able to log out without quiting all of your applications is getting more useless by the second.

=====================================================
UPDATE:
This is working on my machine but not my friends. I'm not sure why this is, so if it doesn't work for you and you figure it out, let me know. He is getting this error:

kCGErrorIllegalArgument : CGSNewConnection cannot get connection port
kCGErrorIllegalArgument : CGSNewConnection cannot get connection port
kCGErrorInvalidConnection : CGSGetEventPort: Invalid connection
 
mightyjlr: so what happens if someone opens up a bunch of memory hogging programs and than the other user logs on... are the resources of the computer being used by the other programs? what if that person leaves and the current user can't go in and close those other programs so the computer is slow and useless?
Click to expand...

This won't happen in OS X, and probably not XP. This is a myth.

Idle applications aren't allocated resources like they are under Mac OS 9... 100 idle applications are not going to bog you down the way they would under 9 - just a very small footprint.
 
Idle apps SHOULDN'T hog resources (memory or processor) if they're programmed correctly. However, many Carbonized applications have been Carbonized poorly...instead of handling Carbon Events the way they're meant to be handled, they keep polling for events in the OS 8/9 way...I've seen Carbon apps that should be idle eating 5-10% of the processor time because someone did a half-job of Carbonizing their event loops. AppleWorks, although improved in 6.2.1, is particularly guilty of this. GraphicConverter is one of the few Carbon apps that goes to sleep properly on a consistent basis.
 
I have to say that this is something that problably wont get used anyway, at least in XP. Not many families have multiple accounts set up. They usually dont care at all about their preferences and use almost 100% of the default configuration. So when mom wants to check her mail, bobby is problably going to have to log off AOL (standard choice of microsoft users) anyway, so that his mom can sign on, so there really is no need for this.

(This is all banking on the chance that M$ doesn't drop support for AOL.

Now, this feature does serve a purpose, but it only helps out advanced users who know how to set up accounts, who problably own their own box anyway, or know shortcuts that allow them to skip logging out.
 
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