Tech Paladin

I just started using ExpanDrive and it has changed my life.

A goodly portion of my job involved SSHing into remote servers and editing text files. This limits me to command-line tools and doesn’t allow me to take advantage of any of the GUI workflow enhancements and productivity boosters I’ve built up over the years, including a heavily-customized TextMate and a knowledge of Mac editing shortcuts. That, and I’m really lousy in vi and emacs.

But ExpanDrive has changed my life. here’s how it works: you type in your SSH credentials, and instead of giving you a terminal window, it mounts the remote volume on your local machine just like a flash drive. Did you catch that? It mounts your remote home directory over SSH. Read: you can interact with your files using GUI tools over an SSH connection! This is nothing short of revolutionary for me, a long-time adherent of powerful GUI tools. Since I started using it last night, my productivity for one particularly annoying task to accomplish purely using a command line has probably doubled.

Under the hood it uses MacFUSE, which, as far as I’m concerned, it basically magic. All I care about is that it lets me mount remote volumes over SSH. I’m still in the 30-day trial period, so haven’t bought it yet, but honestly, whatever it costs, I’ll pay. It’s just that good.

If you spend any amount of time manipulating files over SSH, you owe it to yourself to use this application. No, really. Go download it right now.

This is a multi-part series about my journey on the road to becoming a real PC owner and user. As a Mac guy tired of being left behind when it came to new games, both in terms of software and hardware, I finally decided to take the plunge and build a gaming PC.

Time for the basics. At its most basic hardware level, a computer needs a processor so it can actually do anything, some RAM so that the processor can process more than a few megabytes at a time, a hard drive to store data on, a motherboard to let that stuff talk to one another, a power supply to fuel everything, and a case to dump it all inside.

On top of this, of course, I’d need an optical drive to actually install the operating system for the first time (and probably all the subsequent times in the future as well if you’re using Windows). Since this was going to be a gaming rig, my new computer would also require a beefy graphics card. As I wasn’t interested in stringing ethernet cables all over the place, that meant I’d need a wireless card to connect it to my home network. Happily enough, I already had a keyboard, mouse, and speakers that functioned perfectly well, so I kept those. Finally, I’d need an actual operating system to install. Necessity dictated that some version of Windows was the only choice for games, and I happen to have been lucky enough to already have several licenses of various versions of Windows handy.

There were a couple of restrictions I imposed on myself to guide my search before I actually started surfing for parts. First of all, the case itself would have to fit on the second shelf of my little rolly-caddy thing (hey, what would you call it?) and function normally when laid horizontally:

This put some serious cramps on size, but that’s okay since most of the larger cases tend to look more like car accidents due to all their flashing lights and caution-tape-like aesthetic anyway.

Second, I wanted this thing to be cheap. Not knowing how much to spend on the screen, I decided to shoot for under $500 for the actual computer itself. If you think about it, I sort of cheated, because of course the screen would be extra and would most likely tack on several hundred dollars, but for some reason I wanted to focus on the price of the actual computer itself, so I did. For the record, that’s a full computer consisting of a case, power supply, motherboard, processor, RAM, hard drive, optical drive, beefy graphics card, and wireless card, and in order to keep below that budget, I’d have to spend an average of $55 or less on each component. Time to hit the internet!

Next up: Shopping time!

I bought my current laptop, a now two-year-old 17″ MacBook Pro, for 3D animation and gaming. I figured I’d need its capacious screen for Maya’s enormous and bloated user interface, and that the extra size would allow the machine to squeeze out more power from its X1600 graphics card, which was pretty good in November of 2006.

As usually happens in life, things didn’t work out quite the way I’d planned. First of all, I became more and more frustrated with Maya and eventually ditched it for the far more space-efficient modo, substantially reducing the necessity of not only the machine’s 17″ built-in screen, but also the 24″ Dell display I had purchased for more space in hopes of satiating the screen real-estate monster that is Maya. Not only did I never manage to do so, but when I tossed Maya, I discovered that such an enormous palette really wasn’t necessary for modo, so I sold the screen when cash was tight. The size of the built-in screen had repercussions, too: though at 6.8 pounds, my computer is exceptionally light for a 17″ laptop, that’s cold comfort when I have to carry it around all day, and I must admit that I long for a pound or two shaved off. Even my bag is complaining, as the shoulder strap has begun to tear under the weight.

Second of all, I neglected to understand the rapidity of graphics-related innovation. A decade of Mac fanaticism and a decidedly software-centric focus had left me relatively sheltered from the hardware innovation on the PC side of things, and while I considered my laptop’s midrange X1600 relatively sufficient, the rest of the world was just waiting to laugh at me. In six months, I discovered that I could no longer run games on their highest settings. Within the year, I was down to medium settings for the new ones. A month ago, my fiancée bought me S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky — the sequel to one of my favorite games ever. Unhappily enough, the thing wouldn’t even run on the lowest settings without looking like junk and playing like it derived some perverse pleasure from viewing blue screens of death.

I begged a friend to let me play on his computer, and he generously agreed, but something felt not right about imposing on him. Eventually enough was enough. I started hitting Newegg and shopping for parts, more out of fantasy than any sort of plan, but my jaw dropped when I saw how much prices have fallen in the last year. The time seemed right; I resolved to build my own gaming PC. T’was a night of online shopping.

Stay tuned for more. Next up: plans!

So I’ve spent a lot of time with the latest version of Firefox. I’ve used it as my primary browser, my secondary browser, and tried running with both it and Safari at once to highlight differences. I’ve reeeeeeeeeeally wanted to like Firefox 3, but in the end, I just keep going back to Safari.

Why? Well it’s a variety of things. My biggest gripe is its lack of integration with the Mac OS X Keychain. For the uninitiated, the Keychain is a secure service provided by Mac OS X that can store passwords and the like and make them accessible to applications that bother to integrate with it. Because it’s systemwide, I can be sure that any password I ask Safari to remember will be available to OmniWeb or the Finder, or the Disk Image mounter if they ask and I give permission. In practical terms, it means I can switch browsers and be sure that all my saved passwords will be remembered as long as the new browser is Keychain-savvy. It’s a terribly useful system, and I have pretty much all my passwords in it.

Sadly, Firefox doesn’t use it.

Another thing is the standard Mac OS X text view; developers will know it as an “NSTextView.” What’s so nice about NSTextViews? Well, for one, Appple keeps piling features into it! NSTextViews can check spelling and support a whole range of keyboard shortcuts for text selection and editing. In Tiger, NSTextViews started supporting instant definition and thesaurus lookups via an unbelievably-convenient floating dictionary panel that I use all the frikkin’ time:

In Leopard, NSTextViews can automatically detect links, change straight quotes to smart (”curly”) quotes, and check grammar. In the upcoming version of Mac OS X named Snow Leopard, who knows what they’ll add? The point is, any developer who uses NSTextViews in an application will get free features whenever Apple decided to update the NSTextView class. Thus, over the years, old applications have gotten more useful with the regular infusion of new functionality simply by using the Apple-supplied user interface widgets, and I’ve come to rely on a variety of features offered by NSTextView, in particular the systemwide spelling and dictionary integration and the text editing shortcuts. As with the Keychain, I’ve come to rely on the standardization afforded by NSTextviews.

Sadly, Firefox doesn’t use it.

And then there are all the niggling user interface quirks. Like how Firefox doesn’t respect Mac OS X’s systemwide “smooth scrolling” setting, instead, re-implementing it in what I feel is an overly slow manner. When I leave it on and use the arrow keys or the scroll wheel, it feels like it takes forever to get anywhere, but when I disable it out of annoyance, I have difficulty finding my place whenever I jump by a page-length at a time by hitting page down or the space bar. Sigh. Just use OS X’s built-in setting!

Another annoyance of mine is the perennial ignorance of the difference between a pop-up menu button and a drop-down menu button. The issue arises from the fact that in Windows, there’s one user interface element for both things. But there’s a subtle difference in OS X. A pop-up menu is used to select state; it lets you choose from a list of items to determine which one you want to be looking at or interacting with. When you make a selection, the widget itself changes its title to show you which item you’ve selected, since you may need to refer to which item you’re looking at.

A drop-down menu, on the other hand, is used to issue commands. Drop-down menus have fixed titles because they’re closely related to the menus at the top of the screen (or on the top of the window in XP or Vista). That is, the menu’s title lets you know what kinds of commands you can issue, and clicking on it brings down a list of these commands.

I’m always getting confused in Windows because both of these user-interface concepts are jammed into one widget. Whenever I click on a drop-down menu in Windows, I don’t know if I’m about to tell the program to do something or just change my selection. Usually the only cues it provides are the wording of the menu items: strong action verbs usually denote commands, but this has the unfortunate side effect of causing homographs to complicate things. Will the item labeled “Tag Field” select a thing called a Tag Field, or will it somehow tag or highlight all the fields?

Sadly, Firefox opts to adopt the confusing, inferior, Windows-like hybrid drop-down/pop-up menu universally, even on the Mac version. Sigh.

Now, don’t get me wrong; Firefox is a great browser. It’s fast, loaded with features, and feels great on Windows. My problem is that it still isn’t a first-class Mac citizen. I, like most Mac users, chose my platform because of the perceived superiority of the software bundled with and capable of running on Macs. This perceived superiority arises from useful, tightly-integrated systemwide services like the Keychain and Time Machine, and the clean, intuitive user-interfaces favored by Mac developers. In other words, we want to see our choice vindicated by using software that takes advantage of the features that set our platform apart from the alternatives. Firefox still doesn’t do this. And so I’ll stick with Safari.

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked (in the role of Windows IT guy) to fix printing problems, install various basic PDF utilities and disinfect malware-infested computers, I’d have enough money to buy all the Macs needed to banish these routine issues for good.

Seriously! It’s 2008 and Windows still doesn’t include PDF support or anti-virus software out of the box,¹ and keeping printers working reliably is still a nightmare.

1. let alone not needing it to begin with [↩]

Are you an IT person? No? Well, pretend that was a yes for a moment. I’d like to take a few moments to talk about Microsoft Windows as it relates to IT. The particular issue I’ve been having at the moment that out of the box, WIndows XP, well, just can’t do anything. You have to install some crufty third-party software to do extremely basic things, such as:

• Disk image creation
• Disk image mounting and management
• Hard disk cloning
• PDF reading
• PDF creation
• PDF editing (watermarking, rotation, etc)
• The capacity to install the operating system on a USB-connected external hard drive

I actually lied a little on that last one. You see, that last one simply isn’t possible at all! The situation was this: I had a small form-factor PC that needed a 2.5″ IDE hard drive. So I figured, with my Mac-accustomed brain, “I’ll stick its blank hard drive into an external enclosure, plug that into a PC, then run Windows setup from there, setting the external hard drive as the target of the install.”

No dice. Now first of all, the procedure that I just illustrated works in the Mac world. It works. I can install OS X on any sort of connected hard drive; via USB, via Firewire, from one Mac directly to another’s hard drive over Firewire, over the network via netboot—any way I like with whatever infrastructure I have available. So it was somewhat frustrating when Windows stubbornly refused to install. It would see the drive; I could even partition and format the drive, but install Windows? Nope, nada. Sadly, I’m pretty used to this sort of cantankerous hocus-pocus, so I started thinking about how I could actually get around the problem to accomplish the goal.

I had a mad combination of external enclosures that supported different drive standards and some of which didn’t work on some computers, and I also had several types of drives; 2 SATA and 1 IDE. Here’s what I wound up doing: connecting one of the 2.5″ SATA drives to some PC’s internal SATA connector, thus temporarily making it an internal drive. I then installed Windows on it. When I was done, I removed the drive, reconnected the PC’s original 3.5″ internal drive, and booted it up. Then I put the 2.5″ SATA drive into an external enclosure and attached that to the PC, and then did the same with a 2.5″ IDE drive. Now, as luck would refuse to have it, the IDE drive was being used for backup, so couldn’t just clone the SATA drive onto the IDE one unless I didn’t care much about that backup. So I copied its backup onto the SATA drive, giving me a SATA drive with a Windows install on it sitting alongside a copy of the backup, and an IDE drive with the original backup. The next step was to clone the SATA drive with everything on it onto the IDE drive, whereupon I deleted the backup from the IDE drive (didn’t need it there) and deleted Windows from the SATA drive (don’t need Windows on a backup disk). Finally (finally!), I put the IDE drive into the computer and…

DISK BOOT FAILURE

…and so on and so on and so on. The nightmare continued throughout the whole day, and in the end, I still didn’t manage to get the PC up and running. In the end, I ended up attaching an internal optical drive to the motherboard’s ATA connector¹ and an AC to molex adapter, and then I installed Windows from there finally I went through the refreshingly usual nonsense of hunting down drivers, and even then it took about 3 hours to get the LAN drivers working for some still unknown reason. Thank goodness it was only two days of lost time.

By contrast, here’s what the process would look like if this situation had involved Macs:

1. Boot the Mac into Firewire Target Mode and connect it to another Mac.
2. Pop an install DVD into the connected Mac and use it to install Mac OS X on the Firewire Target Mode computer.

It takes about an hour. I’m serious; deadly serious. I’ve done this process literally dozens of times, and it’s alarming how much more time-efficient is is than swapping drives, cracking open cases, modifying ATA cables to fit, or fiddling and diddling with Windows. Even the installation of Mac OS X takes about half the time that installing Windows does; the copy of Windows I installed just this morning took an hour and 22 minutes, and that’s before I installed the drivers. By contrast, The version of OS X I installed about a week ago that needed no such post-install mumbo-jumbo completed in more like 40 minutes.

This is not my first IT job. Based on my experiences here at CLIQK Digital as well as those as my previous job, I can confidently say that Macs running Mac OS X are significantly more robust than either Windows PCs, or even those very same Macs when they’re running Windows. The Macs in my last workplace were a dream to support compared to the Dell PCs we had which routinely fell over and died as a matter of course. I can’t even begin to express how many times I spent a whole morning attacking a Windows problem so unique in its randomness that it surprised the entire department.

As an IT person, my primary goal is to make the machines I supports as robust and fault-tolerant as possible, for the simple and selfish reason that it makes my job easier. When PCs get overrun with malware or confused by floppy disks, it wastes my time fixing problems that don’t ever happen in Mac-land and prevents me from accomplishing other tasks, which often consist of far more meaningful things like updating important websites, creating policies for new computer use trends, training staff in new software, or transitioning to more efficient back-end systems. Having to install Acrobat Reader for the zillionth time or re-re-explain that opening random email attachments will result in lost time for everyone just adds to my already-full plate of technical tasks.

The intertubes are filled with stories of organizations that overcame their institutional inertia and saved trucktons of cash by switching to Macs or Linux. I believe it. Microsoft’s IT-centric technologies like Exchange and Active Directory are hellishly complex and notoriously unreliable without full-time support staffs (staves?) and backup servers up the wazoo. This is to say nothing of the tens of thousands of dollars routinely shelled out for outrageous per-user licensing fees for these products. And it’s not just lost money, it’s lost time; in my current workplace, we don’t even have the “luxury” of all of our computers being from one brand, so all of them need different drivers to run and different keystrokes to enter the BIOS, which, as you may be able to imagine, wastes. a. lot. of. time. Bottom line: Windows is expensive and unreliable; the very bane of IT. The sooner it’s replaced by something—anything—easier to maintain, the better.

1. Also, for some reason, this motherboard ATA connector actually used pin 20, so I had to poke a hole in my ATA cable to get the damn thing to fit, go figure. [↩]

3G iPhone blah blah blah, GPS yadda yadda yadda, app store neener neener neener.

If you’re here I’ll just assume you know about all those things are already desperately holding back the pulsating waves of techno-lust from consuming your body from some sort of all-encompassing orgasmic tinglefest. I’ve been told Apple products do that to people, or something. Yes, yes, the new iPhone is the shit and all, and 3rd party applications will set the world on fire and burn it to bloodied cinders, and the U.S. Army uses the iPhone to coordinate clusterfucks with the power of touch, but the thing that really jolted me awake about Monday’s keynote was the revamping of Apple’s .Mac service, with a name change to “MobileMe.”

Nobody seems to like the MobileMe logo, and I’ll admit that I’m not quite sold yet. It seems a little too cutesy, but I also think it does a great job of getting the point across what with the whole cloud and everything. But my primary objection is the god-awful name. “MobileMe!?!” Is that a noun? A conjoined verb? A command? “Hey, you! MobileMe right now!” What’s with the “Me?” Us Mac users have been making fun of Microsoft’s use of first person pronouns since the virtual dawn of time (My Computer, My Documents, My Spittle-Flecked Rage, etc), so what’s Apple doing adopting the same? I guess it eventually had to go both ways; Microsoft copied Apple’s garish transparency fetish in Vista just as Apple was coming to its senses, and now Apple begins to start smoking the first-person pronoun pipe just as Microsoft kicked the habit.

MobileMe. Feh.

Operating systems are like governments; they serve functions that individual citizens/users could not realistically accomplish on their own. Governments often raise armies, bail out natural disaster victims, and lay roads. Many go beyond this and offer additional services, such as emergency first responders, education, healthcare, and subsidies for certain privileged businesses.

Operating systems are just the same. They all offer basic functionality such as the ability to draw windows and trace cursor movement, and come with a few built-in applications for text editing and web browsing. Some, however offer far richer built-in software libraries and functionality in exchange for flexibility or speed–just like governments offering more services in exchange for higher taxes, a more bloated bureaucracy, or financially irresponsible spending habits.

There are certain qualities of both governments and operating systems that can be identified as “liberal” and “conservative” based on the philosophical origins of their ideas. But first of all, what the hell do “liberal” and “conservative” really mean, anyway? These days, it’s pretty much up for grabs, so I’ll add my own personal definitions to the already muddy political puddle of re-framing.

“Liberal” describes a focus on helping the less fortunate by utilizing the superior knowledge and abilities of experts to care for them. Liberal systems tend to generate organized collections of such experts, and are often marked by safety nets that benefit the many at the expense of the few. In a liberal system, the beggar is pitied and given minimal funds to live on. He uses them to buy beer.

“Conservative” is any system that preserves individual liberty, sacrificing for community support. The more self-reliant and informed you are, the better you’ll fare in a conservative system, and any centralized authority the purports to know what’s good for others is mistrusted and shunned. In a conservative system, the beggar is encouraged to get a job, go back to school, take up a hobby, and is given nothing to send him on his way. He remains penniless.

That out of the way, and given that I’ve claimed that operating systems are akin to computer governments, what are their characters and political orientations? Here goes:

Windows XP

Windows XP is a solidly conservative operating system. XP ships with no DVD playback, no PDF viewer, poor screenshot support, and few drivers for third-party hardware, and little effort is put into aiding the user to solve these holes. Windows is saying, “If you want these features, get them yourself! If you don’t need them, you’ll have a lighter, faster OS!” This is a very conservative ideology. That each XP user is forced to make individual choices about what features he does or does not need is a given, and one that nobody ever questions.

As a result, a lucrative aftermarket in what would ordinarily seem to be necessities exists for Windows XP. 3rd party archive managers, terminal emulators, PDF viewers, disc burning utilities, screenshot utilities, file copy utilities, junk cleaner utilities, and more, simply to fill the holes Windows assumes its users would enjoy filling on their own.

Mac OS X Leopard

Leopard, on the other hand, is a very liberal operating system. It ships chock-full of features you may or may not need, such as virtual desktops (Spaces, in Apple marketing-speak), a personal backup system (Time Machine), a reference dictionary and thesaurus, dozens of professional fonts (such as the well-regarded Helvetica) and many others. Whether or not you want or will use these features doesn’t matter; you get them anyway, and many of them, like Spaces or Time Machine, aren’t easily removable. Your configuration options are also quite limited, as if Apple has decided what is or isn’t acceptable usage patterns regarding its software. You also pay a premium for the operating system since the only way to get it is by using a Mac made by Apple. Macs are priced less competitively at the low end, and you have nowhere near the degree of choice in your hardware than if you bought a PC.

In spite of these liberal traits, though, Leopard is conservative in one very obvious way: it’s sleek and fast. Leopard is appreciably faster than its predecessor and doesn’t get pokey under a heavy load. It seems almost devoid of the bloat that typically accompanies expansive liberal systems.

Windows Vista

Vista is a conservative operating system that is desperately trying to be liberal. Perhaps in response to criticisms of Windows XP being too bare-bones, Vista attempts to do more out of the box, while maintaining the 3rd-party extensibility that makes Windows so beloved of hobbyists and geeks. To that end, Vista includes photo management software, DVD playback capabilities, more robust disc burning, instant file searching, and many liberal built-in features. Microsoft has even gotten in trouble for its attitude change! Google has charged that a built-in search feature represents monopoly bundling; Microsoft has agreed to open the architecture of the feature to third parties (such as Google). If that isn’t technologically a conservative backlash against liberality, I don’t know what it.

At the same time, Vista is still extensible and open to third parties to arbitrarily replace most of its core functionality, and it tries to maintain compatibility with software written for older versions of Windows. However, all these compromises have taken a heavy toll; Vista was released several years late, has been roundly criticized for its sluggish performance, and requires far more memory and hard drive space than any other release of Windows. The liberality Vista has attempted has cost it dearly, because it hasn’t managed to offset it with any sort of streamlining; it just piles on features irrespective of how they will be received or whether they really solve problems, and has become bloated and lethargic in the process.

Linux

Like Windows Vista, Linux is a conservative operating system trying on a liberal coat. However, the depths of its conservatism run far deeper, and its recent fling with liberal ideals are far shallower. Linux itself was created by a frustrated hacker who wrote its kernel in his spare time; its primary audience was the technically adept programmer crowd–the digital equivalent of a bunch of libertarian gun nuts. They know what window manager they wanted and what programming toolkit they were going to use, and you can’t take it away from then, dammit! These users reject the mollycoddling attempts of more consumer-oriented operating systems to make decisions for them since they already know their positions on everything and hate it when they can’t do what they want–that’s why Linux is so extensible.

In fact, a great debate rages about whether Linux is becoming “dumbed down” in the service of increasing its user base beyond these tech fanatics. As more graphical tools arrive and the less technically inclined Windows refugees start pouring in, the Linux community becomes split down the middle between the altruists who welcome the technically shaky newcomers and the old-school purists who feel their operating system is being diluted by those who don’t “walk the walk.”

People follow personal philosophies all the time, and many companies have corporate philosophies as well. Holding true to a core set of beliefs that inform and guide your decisions is a sure way to not only infuse your life or company with a sense of purpose, but also to attract those who agree with your philosophy.

This is why so many Mac and Linux users are rabidly fanatical about their operating system choices: they’ve found their ideal philosophical computing environments. Those who cherish digital freedom and love to tinker and build literally have a paradise in Linux, while the ones who appreciate the elegance of a well-designed whole and want maximum efficiency find their own heaven with Mac OS X.

Windows, on the other hand, has nothing of the sort. It’s a purposeless, directionless blob of features bound to the corporate aspiration to remain top dog forever.

The original mac had a goal: bring computing to the masses with brilliant interfaces that matched the way people thought. Linux too began with an idea: that computer users should be free to alter, modify, improve, and redistribute any and all of their software free of charge in order to further computing for all. These ideas didn’t exist in the tech world before their pioneers brought them into existence through technical skill and sheer force of will.

Windows began with none of this. Its birth was a reaction to the Macintosh; an attempt to duplicate Apple’s success for Microsoft’s own profit once it saw that graphical computing was the future. Still, it took Microsoft a full 6 years after the Macintosh was released in 1984 to deliver a version of Windows (3.1) that anyone could use without retching. Five years later, despite the fact that Windows 95 was still playing catch-up to the Macintosh, it skyrocketed into dominance as a result of Microsoft’s shady deals with computer manufacturers and brilliant FUD-based marketing.

Windows became popular not because it was consciously selected over its competitors, but because Microsoft managed to position it as the only operating system available to PC manufacturers. When people bought PCs (typically because they were cheaper than Macs, not because they were measurably superior), they automatically got Windows and learned how to use it, unaware of superior alternatives. For those aware of noted alternatives, Windows was “good enough” or considered a small price to pay for customizable hardware, a larger software library, and good legacy support.

But what happens as “good enough” no longer is? What about when the bases are all covered and people start to realize that Mac OS X or Linux offer faster runners? Once people begin to become aware of alternatives, the ones who enjoy tinkering will gradually peel away towards Linux, and the ones who prefer great visual design and maximum efficiency will gravitate towards the Mac. Once the geeky, the practical, the creative, and the efficiency-conscious are gone, who does that leave for Windows?

I firmly believe that there is no place in the future for Windows. Architecturally, Windows is purposeless; it’s utterly devoid of any sort of comprehensive philosophy that might excite or attract choosy computer users. That will basically leave the technological luddites, people for whom Windows is dramatically unsuited due to viruses, malware, and endless driver conflicts and blue screens of death. A platform that caters to the lowest common denominator—especially one created by a company noted time and time again for its shoddy workmanship and draconian practices—is a platform doomed to mediocrity. With escalating security woes, over-complicated technology, ever-increasing restrictions, and a stagnant user base, the Windows ecosystem will begin to rot from the inside out. As users inevitably become more technically proficient and more informed about the choices and alternatives, are any of them really going to stick with Windows?

I got a pretty standard assignment today: a faculty member’s computer is on the fritz, so take a look and replace the machine if you can’t fix it on-site. Fair enough; I went down and took the requisite look. She had a Dell Optiplex something something 26-something, and on the dim screen was a blinking DOS command prompt. I tried typing on the keyboard, but no input was entered. Restarting did nothing, nor did fiddling with the BIOS settings. Eventually, I just grabbed the machine and replaced it with another one while Jesus took a look himself.

By the time I returned to the office, Jesus was happily tapping away at the now-operational Dell. I had figured that I had overlooked something silly, so I asked him what it was he did to fix it. Grinning, he held up a jet-black floppy disk and said, “Here’s the criminal. It was in the floppy drive.”

I was a bit bemused. “What’s so bad about a floppy in the floppy drive?” I asked naively. This was Windows we were talking about, after all.

“In the BIOS, it was set to boot off the floppy drive before the hard drive,” Jesus replied.

“But… is there an operating system on the floppy?”

“No…”

“Soo… why would it get stuck on the floppy if there’s no operating system to boot from, then?” I retorted, fully aware that attempting to make Windows conform to logic was an exercise in futility. Nevertheless, I had to try; my inner Techno-Paladin demanded it.

“Well,” Jesus said, “Sometimes it’ll get stuck on the floppy drive if it’s unformatted or something.”

“But in that case, wouldn’t this have been a routine occurrence back in the days of floppies when everybody used them for everything? I don’t recall an epidemic of stuck machines trying to boot off operating system-less floppies.”

“It could have been the floppy drive or there might be corrupt data on the disk,” Jesus replied, invoking the classic Windows user’s voodoo explanation for a problem with no obvious cause.

“Let’s see what’s on it, then,” I suggested. We popped into the now-functioning computer, and it showed without complaint, displaying two normal-looking Word documents. So much for the data corruption or bad drive theories.

Sighing, I returned to the faculty member’s office and replaced the replacement computer with the original.

This brings me to my next point: the whole song-and-dance took a little under three hours–three hours that I could have spent doing other work I was assigned. The uselessness of this particular random Windows-related problem wasted 180 minutes of my life. I can accomplish a lot in 180 minutes. Or, I can use that same amount of time to goof off or read the news. Windows prevented me from doing these things with its random problem. In short, it wasted my time. Wasting time is not something that a fast machine typically does.

So why then do PC users constantly claim that PCs are faster than Macs? All the evidence I’ve collected while working with them for 8 hours a day suggests that PCs wear out and get bogged down faster then Macs left in the same condition, and experience more idiotic time-wasting snags by far.

The truth is that when your average PC enthusiast says, “PCs are faster than Macs,” he really means, “I can build a PC from parts I bought on the cheap from Newegg and wind up with substantially faster hardware for less than you paid for your Mac.”

And this is true. But it also falls into the classic PC user pitfall: that of thinking too much about hardware and not enough about software. Once this tricked-out gaming rig is assembled, it’s time for some software. Windows is a must for gaming, but who wants to pay for it? Most PC enthusiasts steal Windows, and the cracking process often results in background daemons that block Windows’ built-in anti-piracy tools from working. That’s a performance hit.

Then come the drivers for all that fancy custom hardware. Windows drivers are typically encrusted with trial software, unnecessary system tray utilities, and replacements for existing components of Windows (I’m looking at you, video and WLAN drivers) that work fine. After installing all this stuff without manually cleaning out all the junkware that hitched a ride, performance is lowered significantly.

Then comes anti-virus and anti-spyware. Generally, the more you pay, the crappier it’ll be and the more resources it’ll take up, but all anti-malware software that runs in the background takes up valuable system resources. That’s another performance hit right there.

Next, it’s time to download all the other utilities and miscellaneous pieces of software that make Windows more functional. First comes Winrar, which integrates into the Windows shell with a standard install, stealing valuable system resources. After that is Acrobat reader, which is so bloated it’s not even funny. Acrobat slaughters idle processor time, so there’s another performance hit for you. Needing to play pirated games that come in ISO and .bin/cue files, these PC power users typically grab Daemon Tools to mount those disk images as virtual CDs. This, as usual, bogs down the system.

Firefox comes at some point, but because of the design of Windows and its Registry, each application installed slows down the system a teensy-weensy bit. The Registry is just a big database; as it grows in size, it takes longer for anything to access a given piece of data, since the whole registry is just one big file. Were it logically split into many small files–say, one per application like Mac OS X’s preferences system, then having more preferences would result in no slowdown whatsoever, since any random preference file that needed to be accessed would be the same size as it was last time. Basically, the more Windows is used, and the more stuff you install, the slower it gets. Big time. Ask any Windows user how fast their Windows is after a year or two; most reinstall it from scratch every 18 to 24 months just to keep the whole thing from collapsing from the weight of its own bloat. And before Vista, reinstalling the OS erases all the user data! Faster, indeed.

This isn’t even including the truly random problems that plague windows as a result of its system administrator-centric design, terrible security model, poor privilege separation, and necessity to run on arbitrary hardware. Windows just falls down and dies regularly–I see it every day. In the long term, Windows is just fucking slow, and that’s a fact of life.

That leaves games. Yeah, Windows plays lots and lots of them, and Mac OS X doesn’t. That’s true. And if you’re a hardcore gamer, you ignore the problems and game away. That leaves your computer as a big fancy game console. Hmm. What about the times when you need to use it as something else? Good luck!

So yeah, your processor is faster than mine. But yours is churning away on protecting you from viruses and spyware that your operating system is too stupid not to automatically install and coughing and wheezing to access the humongous Registry every five seconds, while mine is keeping my system snappy when I have 13 windows and 8 applications open (as it is at the moment).

Remind me again how PCs are faster?