One more question about the Mac Pc issue. Are there any other problems that I should be aware of, things that concern a Mac owner in a Pc world?
Availability of programs, sharing files between Mac and windows etc.
Why can’t I be both?
It’s true that there’s a fraction of the number of applications available for the Mac as for the PC. I could be wrong, but they seem on average to be of higher quality. What’s undeniable, though, is that a much higher proportion are freeware and shareware.
Any comments on this subject will soon be obsolete, however; when Leopard (OS X 10.5) comes out (this month, supposedly) it will include a utility called “Boot Camp” that allows you to set up a separate boot partition on your hard drive and install Windows on it. Then a Mac owner can run any Windows app with no speed penalty. Apple has signed an agreement not to port OS X to run on a PC, but the same hackers who distributed a software patch like Boot Camp to allow Windows to run on a Mac within days after the Intel Macs came out, are bound to do the same to allow Leopard to run on a PC. Then everyone can have the best of both worlds.
Alltogether possible. Harder to tell though. (BTW the smiley face was to indicate that I was more kidding than serious.)
Thanks for your answer to my last question.
Salve!
As I mentioned in a previous post, you have to buy MSOffice for Mac; the one you have now (if you have one) will be incompatible.
I also found out that the freeware Audacity cannot record streaming audio on a Macintosh. So that’s gone. My Disk Cleaner is also gone.
My advice, before purchasing, make an inventory of all the programs you depend on in Windows, then do a Google search to see if there are versions of the same that are compatible with OSX. If there aren’t, look for similar programs.
As for sharing files between the two operating systems, if you are sharing via FTP, make sure text is sent as ASCII, otherwise they’ll get corrupted. (This I learned yesterday)
Hope this helps.
One more comment and then I promise I’ll shut up. I admit I’m much more up on the politics than the technical aspects anyway.
As Amadeus says, Microsoft Office for the Mac is different and must be purchased separately. It also may be a wasting asset. The reason Apple agreed not to port OS X to the PC (which is Microsoft’s biggest fear) is so that Microsoft will continue to update Office for the Mac. If (when) somebody writes a software patch to do the job, they’re bound to blame Apple and stop updating it.
I’m sure in that event Apple is ready with a version of Open Office to put in its place. If you’re a little more tech-savvy than I am, though, you can get the jump on that by downloading Open Office and running it under X11, which is a utility that comes with OS X and allows you to run Linux applications in an X-window environment inside the Mac OS.
Per a previous posting, I’m very happy to see Linux prospering as well as it is. Linux and Unix are of course very similar (that’s the whole idea, after all) and that means that at bottom Linux and OS X are much more similar than might appear on the surface. I think they will continue to converge in the future, and hopefully take more and more of the market away from Windows. In its present state, though, Linux requires more expertise than I have to use properly. Maybe it’ll get easier and I’ll get smarter and sometime in the future the twain shall meet.