Who ate the cow?

It was the Tiger who ate the Longhorn of course.

Having become a bona fide born-again Maclot for a little over five months has led me to realize what confounded nonsense I had been putting up with in my days of tolerating Windoze. A lot of people (me included) often call Mac users crazy militants. Well the reason why we are so impatient with anything and anyone entrapped in the deluded Windoze universe is because Windoze is truly some fucked-up shit (And not just the ordinary floater shit you find in the toilet mind you. It's offensive crap that, to rub salt into the wound, they actually demand that you pay real money for).

The dumbest thing about the whole Windoze entreprize is that the best thing Microsoft has going for it now is Longhorn. It is going to have Aero, when OS X had Aqua all along. It is going to have Avalon - essentially a GPU accelerated user interface, when OS X had Quartz Extreme since Jaguar. It is also going to have WinFS for quick file searches, when OS X has Spotlight in Tiger and a relatively fast Find in OS X since it premiered in 2001 before Windoze XP (NB: WinFS is canned from Longhorn. Presumably they don't have enough time - five years if you count since Windoze XP - to get it right for 2006.)

And therein lies the greatest problem with the current Windoze XP: PC users have the fortune to be able to use any Radeon, GeeeeForce whatchamacallit PRO gazzillion megabyte graphics card in the universe and guess what? The stupid inane Microsoft piece of crap doesn't even know how to make use of the GPU to accelerate the user interface. So you bought that new dual overclocked Intel Extreme 3.5GHz machine and want to do some video encoding. And once you set it up to do that, you can't do anything else, because even though your computer has the juice to do a whole lot more, your whole screen freezes since the CPU has to handle the windowing on your 21 inch display as well as encode that video. And mind you CPUs don't do graphics very well. That's why we have Graphics Cards.

And yet idiots like Paul Thurrott can spew more shit like this site.

In Windows XP, everything begins, appropriately enough, with the Start button, which launches a new Start Menu. This menu contains just about everything you need to get to work, your most commonly accessed applications, your most recently used documents, and a list of commonly accessed system locations. In Mac OS X, there is no equivalent to this. You are forced to hunt and peck for things. Let's say you want to change the resolution of the screen. How might you accomplish this in OS X? Holding down the mouse button on the desktop does no good. Choosing View from the Finder menu offers no clue. Choosing Finder Preferences lets you change icon sizes, but not the screen resolution. And so on. How about System Preferences? In System Preferences, the Mac equivalent of the Windowa Control Panel, we see a set of icons much like that used in versions of Windowa circa two years ago. Let's se... hmm.... Is it Displays, General, or Screen Saver?

The approach in XP is different. You could still spend some time wandering around, I suppose, though right-clicking the desktop and choosing Properties would work. But if you choose Control Panel from the Start Menu, you will see categories of options, rather than a slew of icons. One of them says Appearance and Themes, and none of the other categories could possibly be misconstrued as a possible choice. When you click this, you are confronted with tasks. One of them is "Change the screen resolution." Done.

Ok, can I have whatever he is smoking? What is his malfunction siah? The Start Menu thing is the most weird out invention Microsoft's ever invented lah. To a computer moron touching a PC for the first time the Start button might be indicative and slightly amusing. But even said computer moron would eventually be somewhat accustomed to the workings of the computer and would be wondering why he must 'Start' there all the time according to Microsoft. To show an idiot how to use a computer for the first time might be important, but to clutter the interface with 'Wizards' and 'Tasks' ad nausuem can be impossibly irritating. And the most irritating part is that most of those 'Wizards' and whatnot don't even do what they purport to. Honestly, they must be the 'Wizards' of the evil Saruman variety that is out to confuse you into downloading spyware and crashing your computer (Not that Windoze doesn't support that feature out-of-the-box already).

In fact, when I first installed Windoze XP last time, one of the first things I did was to disable the convoluted Control Panel action that was going on to supposedly aid novice users, because for the life of me, I could not figure out where everything was. Did I mention that Windoze sucks?

To end of on a lighter note, here's a little quote I gleaned off Apple's OS X Tiger site:
Running Mac OS X v10.3 Panther or Mac OS X v10.2 Jaguar? Don’t have a cow — see how Tiger will take your Mac to the next level.