jtimleck

2000 Volkswagen VR6 - coilovers and other goodies...

There are a number of books written even on the difference of Mac-heads and windoze users... (The Cult of Apple, I believe is one). It gets to an interesting phenom - that mac users will actually proselytize non-users that they are basically going to hell, and they spend their time, like religious fanatics, "recruiting" and "converting" windoze folk. (disclaimer, I user a mac - I feel dirty every time I user windoze). From the end point of usability macs are just more straight forward. windows constantly throws unexpected curves at you (try having two drives in a windows machine and taking one out... or scrub a drive and put it into a windows machine - get ready for 8 hours of fun - "Disk Error...No OS found..." (no crap Sherlock, but of course you can't install the OS then either). I spent 2 hour ripping down and reinstalling Leopard into a mac. In equivalent terms (same level machine, same level OS) I spent 12 HOURS re-installing XP and updating it (Service Packs are never compiled into "all in one" there are like a billion pieces). And windows notorious attitude (under the software hood, I mean) of railroading users into their system is always annoying. Take the recent implementation of Silverlight - supposed to be the next Adobe Flash killer. MS and NBC (under MSNBC, duh) joined forces and crammed this down folks digital throats when they discovered the ONLY way to watch live video around the world for the Olympics was to install this plug in. They even made it for Mac users. Problem. It ONLY works on *very* high end (recent) macs AND pcs - Macs *must* be Intel-based for example. So, in an opportunity to show case new software they pissed off about 90% of mac users that don't have intel machines, and probably 50% of window users. And all during a time when people would REALLY want to be watching something they can't get anywhere else. So for me it's a no brainer - but mac (apple, more correctly) has been following some of these monopolistic cues as well - like iTunes, iWeb and the recent launch of iPhone and the Apps store with Me.com that all but eviscerated all mac.com users usual experience with dotmac for a bunch of new folk getting shiny phones (and the launch was an abysmal mess - which they admit). But on the other end still macs provide start to finish product control. Their design is simply unparalled. Windoze boxes (until recently with HP and Dell maybe) have been some of the UGLIEST pieces of industrial design EVER conceived. They have always been something you HID from view. Macs are meant to be on display! Now folks might think that's quibbling but that means a fundamentally different relationship with the materials you are using = and the likelihood you'd use it more (the washing machine is usually in the basement for a reason.)

Your other option is to install Parallels for Mac http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/ This way you have the best of both worlds and you're NOT emulating - you're actually running windows. And run XP, don't waste your time with Vista. But if you must use your current set up and want drag and drop between the OSes then you can use Leopard to at least (in most cases I understand) to dynamically resize your hard drive partitions so you install Panther at least and then VPC (I'm not sure about Tiger, Panther was the last OS I had it running on). I need it to run ArcGIS and MS Access - I feel your pain - but feel mine - I have a G4 and am being left behind as Parallels only runs on Intel-based macs...

cars.com I found to to be the best compendium of sellers currently available - it has readily accessible sort and find options (price, year, location, etc.) that make filtering out all the crap much easier and much quicker than trolling from site to site. gl