Technology: All Is Not As It Appears

Technology: All Is Not As It Appears
by Richard Phillips

There are at least two instances where you should not trust your senses: mirages and television commercials. Neither is what it appears to be, and in at least one of the two, your misapprehension is deliberate. Television commercials are designed to convince you that something (theirs) is good, while something similar (someone else's) is bad. It puts me in mind of election advertising, that season being just behind us. Neither ever tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

What has brought on this train of thought is the recent series of Apple commercials showing one young man (“Hi, I'm a PC.”) being caught in some rather silly situations by another young man (“Hello, I'm a Mac.”). The whole thrust of these commercials is that the newest Microsoft Windows operating system—Vista—is no good and you should buy Apple's Mac with its infinitely better operating system. To which I say, “Scoff, scoff—bull biscuits!”

The facts are these. When Vista was just first released, it was too powerful and too much a drain on (the then) system components such as the microprocessor, memory, hard drive space and graphics processing. Wow, the four main pieces of a personal computer! The computers at that time did not, repeat, not have enough oomph in those areas as well as in several others. Consequently, the people who upgraded their computer from Microsoft Windows XP to Vista suffered terrible system bog-downs and crashes. That's where Vista first got such a terrible reputation.

In addition, Microsoft had expanded on some of the “fail safe” features, which attempt to make your surfing around the Internet more carefree and safe. Thus, User Account Control asks you, every time you go to install a new program, “Are you sure you want to allow this?” It's like the pop up that occurs when you go to delete a file, “Are you sure you want to delete filename?” They are both safeguards, and in User Account Control's case, it's safeguarding against the inadvertent installation of a program, which piggybacked on an e-mail, which appeared to be from one of your good friends.

Malware, they call it; spy ware, viruses, Trojan Horses, worms and the like. The only problem is that in guarding against inadvertent installations, Microsoft had to include intentional installations of programs you have bought. It's a price you have to pay to be safe, similar to having to take off your shoes as you check in for an airline flight. Annoying, but necessary, in this day and age.

As to the Mac operating system's “freedom” from these same kinds of problems, if Apple had a larger market share of the personal computer marketplace, they'd be in the same boat. The malware programmers (thieves, cutthroats, pirates, hackers) are going to put the majority of their efforts into the area, which will yield the greatest results, and in Apple's case, that ain't it.

Don't get the wrong idea—I like Apple products and the Mac and the iPod and the iPhone are wonderful gadgets, but I also like the truth. Today's PC running Vista is equally wonderful!