Confused.com

Ah yes, I recall the sad acts who had a BBC B and thought that they knew something about computers.

"Hello I'd like to apply for the job as a secretary."

"Any WP experience?"

"Yes I've used View on a BBC B."

That doesn't mean that MS haven't been doing their usual behind the scenes blackmail. They do it with every other maker and they've done it with Acer in the past.

Are you really the barm-pot that the above makes you look? MS only have to strongarm the makers, not the users.

I was actually very impressed with the way they handled a bug in ADAM for me. 75 quid charge (or something like that) to get support on it (ADAM is free to use), but they put a fair amount of time into diagnosing the problem, worked it out, and didn't charge me. The most important bit was the person helping me seemed pretty clueful. I guess the rather steep call cost filters out numpties, so the people are used to dealing with real problems.

The customer demand for Windows drivers and customers returning Linux netbooks in their droves had nothing to do with Microsoft.

The users led the demand...

I can sell you a really nice bridge.

Eh?

Ahha! You're confusing me with most users then?

In the course of developing software for MS Windows over an 18 years period I've put in 3 requests for information and the 1st 2 resulted in no response at all, the last one was a bug/feature in Visual Studio

2003 a couple of years ago and was successfully resolved. As a paid up member of MSDN or working for a company that was, I consider the resolution rate poor, in my experience, and it was refreshing that the last query was responded to and resolved satisfactorily.

Yes, they will. And I understand; Apple products are "nice." They are also expensive. And if you ever look at a proper Mac then look at the cheap model, it's a bit "eww" really.

Ultimately, though, I have to buy whatever (easily) runs the applications I use the most. Buying a Mac then buying a Windows XP licence makes no sense to me.

My sister and BiL are proper geeks (professional physicists). They're not beautiful enough to spend a lot of time in starbucks or wear fashionable hats but Mac seems to work a lot better than Windows for what they do.

Last time I reported an issue they referred me to an existing bug - that had been re-reported and immediately closed many many times.

Basically it's entirely down to a decision made by Microsoft, *but* the consequences only affect people who use a mix of Windows and Linux...

Wonder why they won't fix it? Curious that older versions of the same software didn't do it, isn't it?

Well if you can write down some incredible load of old bollocks and pretend it's what I'm saying, I thought you'd be happy if I did the same for you.

Hence saying "some". There are people that use them because they work for what they do. Personally, I don't get on with Mac, but that's probably because I use it rarely.

*waves* That's pretty much my story. Scientific computing is much better provided for under OSX than under windows, but without the headaches of Linux.

That said, the keyboard shortcuts on the Mac are not as slick (some basic operations I still find easier on a PC with XP), you can't have a proper implementation of auto-raise and I definitely disagree with SteveF wrt windows on the mac - office 2004 and 2008 are *lame* on my macbooks and vastly less responsive than their equivalents running on XP, even under parallels on the same machine! The proper solution to this is of course to write docs in LaTex...

I didn't say anything about Windows on the Mac.

Who the f*ck would run Office in a VM when you can run Office native on MacOS?

It appears Albert T Cone finds Office running in a windows VM is more responsive than Office running native.

I suspect that if that is what he meant then he's plain wrong.

I can't see how you can deny the widely reported facts.