Mac or PC?

[Randy-Darkshade]

Who still uses the word 'slave' when refering to a hard drive? :X Are we in the 90's again and no one told me?

It's what I have always called it. o.o

Secondary drive sound better?

It does actually sound better.

 

[I Am That Is]

Program windows could not maximize. The maximize button didn't do anything.
Programs would shut down if you clicked outside of their respective window. Keeping in mind that the windows couldn't maximize, I think I had to restart Flash about once every time I tried to scroll the canvas down, because the mouse wasn't very responsive, which resulted in a lot of misclicks.
Trying to find a way to fix this proved futile, as hardware and peripheral operations weren't listed in any known system menu that was accessible.
Playing a 3 megabyte Flash file lagged the system so badly that I couldn't effectively preview the project.

Just wondering, did you ever try simply repairing permissions? I have all kinds of computers at my house. I have a custom build gaming rig, a custom build hackintosh, a Macbook, and an iMac (iMac was used, macbook from a friend). Personally, I have my uses for both of them, for example, I use my custom PC for gaming (duh) and I use the hackintosh for Unity3D and Lightwave3D mostly, and I use the laptop for travel, and the iMac for everything else. I dont see why people call macs over simplified. If you know your way around, you can do just as much on a Mac as on a windows machine.

 

[BlueStreak98]

I run PC. My phone is Apple, but Windows shall remain my desktop/laptop OS.

 

[ArielMT]

On the topic of how the files are organized, I find Windows to be much more intuitive.

You have your C drive (along with others most of the time). Your C drive has a directory for your users, a directory for your programs, a directory for your OS, and anything other files and directories YOU want there. If you want something just for yourself, you put it in your user's directory. If you don't particularly care, put it in Program Files. It's a tree system. I haven't used Mac's file system a whole lot, but I haven't been able to see it as a comparably logical organization. Whether this is because of a lack of experience or inferior organization is to be seen.

Just from first impressions, though, it feels like the latter.

https://www.e621.net/data/d5/81/d58106e74d0ae256effb654e9b7e51f9.png

Also, why do drives have to be mounted above the root and accessed by arbitrary (and arbitrarily changing) single letters? That's CP/M; that's the legacy of an OS that hasn't been used on PCs since the IBM 5150 of 1981, the original IBM PC from which all clones, compatibles, and modern Windows PCs sprang. It's also CP/M legacy that dictates Windows 7 hard drives and SSDs have to start with letter C -- the third drive, not the first -- because letters A and B were reserved for floppy drives. That survives in Windows 7 even though no big-name PC is sold with a floppy drive anymore. There's nothing intuitive about that.

FHS, the filesystem hierarchy standard used by most Unix and Linux distros (Mac OS being a notable exception), is infinitely more intuitive, and even some of Apple's departures from FHS (such as /Applications, /Library, and /Users if my memory isn't completely failing me) are more intuitive still.

 

[Nineteen-TwentySeven]

Also, why do drives have to be mounted above the root and accessed by arbitrary (and arbitrarily changing) single letters? That's CP/M; that's the legacy of an OS that hasn't been used on PCs since the IBM 5150 of 1981, the original IBM PC from which all clones, compatibles, and modern Windows PCs sprang. It's also CP/M legacy that dictates Windows 7 hard drives and SSDs have to start with letter C -- the third drive, not the first -- because letters A and B were reserved for floppy drives. That survives in Windows 7 even though no big-name PC is sold with a floppy drive anymore. There's nothing intuitive about that.

That's one thing I never understood, why my floppy drive was A:\, my hard drive was C:\, my disk drive was D:\, and why of all letters my mapped network drive was Z:\

 

[greg-the-fox]

All I know is that I pretty much know where every single file is on my mac, or at least how to find it, off the top of my head. I frequently use my library folder for instance, moving files around and shit (I'm a really anal micromanage down to the megabyte kind of guy because I have a small HDD)
In mac it looks very neat to me, in windows it's a complete mess inside the program files folders

 

[ArielMT]

That's one thing I never understood, why my floppy drive was A:\, my hard drive was C:\, my disk drive was D:\, and why of all letters my mapped network drive was Z:\

Please pardon the storytime that follows.

Windows traces much of its filesystem lineage (at least how it's presented to the user) down the MS-DOS line. While the last vestiges of DOS itself had been excised from home computing by Windows XP, Microsoft's first version of Windows NT (based heavily on VMS) for consumers, several legacy issues needed to be maintained because most Windows programs assumed a DOS-like system underneath the Windows interface. Even Windows NT versions before XP needed to maintain this illusion, most famously so that middle managers could use their expensive Windows 3.1/Windows for Workgroups programs in Windows NT 3.5, and Windows 95/98 programs in Windows NT 4.0.

MS-DOS and every DOS-compatible OS, such as DR-DOS and OS/2, had no concept of filesystem mount points or unified filesystems. Every disk drive had to be assigned a drive letter, and Microsoft made the decision that letters A and B would be reserved for the two floppy disk drives. As an aside, there was no established requirement on how networked file shares should be mapped, but Novell Netware admins quickly learned that starting from the end and working backward with drive letter assignments made for the fewest headaches and all but eliminated the chance that a network share would conflict with a local drive.

As another aside, MS-DOS had no concept of nested directories until version 2.0, but convention had already established that programs use the slash ["/"] to indicate switches: "dir /w" to get a wide directory listing instead of the normal one, for example. Using the slash for directory path separators, as Unix did, would lead to confusion, so Microsoft chose the less ambiguous backslash ["\"] instead. That's why Microsoft's operating systems are almost completely alone in using the backslash as the drive/directory/file path separator.

Now, the reason drives A and B were reserved for the floppy drives is because MS-DOS assumed every system had at least two disk drives. If this assumption wasn't made, then it would be impossible for users to perform basic operations like copying disks or copying files from one disk to another. Since most IBM compatibles in the days of DOS were sold with only one floppy drive, not two, this assumption meant that MS-DOS had to emulate two drives: the one physical drive became two virtual drives, with MS-DOS telling users when to switch out the disk for Drive A: with the disk for Drive B: and vice versa. Every version of MS-DOS from 1.0 through 6.22, and every DOS-compatible OS, made and documented this assumption. When hard drives started being sold for PCs, this assumption had to be preserved, so they used the first available letter that wasn't either a real or virtual disk drive: C.

All of this happened because, when Microsoft got the contract to make an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer, they did what has since been recognized as Microsoft tradition: they bought an OS called QDOS from Seattle Computing (QDOS standing for "quick and dirty operating sytem"), which was a clone of CP/M specifically made for the 16-bit Intel 8086/8088 CPU. (The actual CP/M was targeted mainly for the 8-bit Zilog Z80 or Intel 8080 CPU.) Microsoft dressed up and rebranded the CP/M clone and licensed it to IBM for the PC, and the rest is history.

One more aside: One of the most legendary pivotal moments in computing history was IBM's decision to commission Microsoft instead of Digital Research for the PC's OS. Had IBM gone with Digital Research instead, few things would be different today. IBM would've shipped the actual CP/M itself instead of a clone trying to pass itself as not a clone. Today's PCs would be using a GUI called GEM instead of Windows, with the same CP/M legacy issues.

Linux, Mac OS, and Unix also have some rather ancient legacies, some far older than CP/M, but of the three only Mac OS's is traced to an origin in low-power home/office computing.

 

[Leafblower29]

https://www.e621.net/data/d5/81/d58106e74d0ae256effb654e9b7e51f9.png.

Patachu.

 

[Dj_whoohoo]

I'm on a Linux, I thought GNU?

 

[Ruby Dragon]

Whatever I am doing alters what I want. For video editing, photo editing, and school projects, I liked OSx because the file system is so streamlined and minimalist. I like Windows for everything else because one can do practically anything on Windows.