h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thanks,

that's tons of material now...

no problem. any questions, just post them here, and I will try and answer them.

ps any chance of a link to the work in progress that will become the edited page?

Well you could do a search for it...

...or you could click here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A630523

"and the Mac OS system for special characters such as accents is superior"



The only way to show 'Old English' characters on a Mac is to install the Icelandic font set.

Not what I would call superior.

I will keep an eye on that page, to see how it changes as the improvements go in.

The only way to display Icelandic characters on *any* computer is to install the appropriate font - it's not just a Mac thing. Windows happens to come with that font already installed - that's all.

Mac OS X is fully Unicode compliant, so any characters from any font - even chinese - are right there, providing you have them installed. You'll still have to use the appropriate Unicode, of course, because there simply aren't enough keys on a Western keyboard.

I've been programming for and running Mac OS X since March, and it is excellent. It's not crashed once yet, either. Just gorgeous to use as well - so well thought out.

Re: old english characters, its because the windows font system is designed to meet ISO standards, in pre OS X mac's this is not the case.

I've just started working on this, and I can see a few problems. Now that the new Windows operating system, 'Windows XP' has been released, much of the information is irrelevant. Also I'm a bit confused as the entry seems to mix up the idea of the 'PC' and 'Windows'. Are they basically the same thing?

>the entry seems to mix up the idea of the 'PC' and 'Windows'. Are
>they basically the same thing?

No.

No.

No. No. No.

no, no, no, no, no, no, no

no....

Is it fair to talk about comparing a PC with Apple and only talk about Windows then? Should it be Apple v Windows?

No, it isn't fair. See my other thread in this forum.

However, you hit problems. You could compare MacOS with Windows, but then surely you'd have to ignore hardware (since we wouldn't be discussing architecture, only platforms).

I suppose it *is* fair to compare Mac with Windows, in that half the point of Macs in that Mac-the-platform and Mac-the-architecture is blurred (though recent things have made this distinction much sharper).

But really I'm not convinced this is a well-formed topic. Surely it should be 'Computing Platforms' as a title, and then discuss Mac, Windows, Unix, Linux, Amiga, Playstations, etc., obviously feeling free to wqeight things according to popularity, but not ignoring things altogether, or it should be 'Computing architectures', in which case you are more general, and don't really discuss Windows, and only discuss Macs because of this blurred boundary thing...

Sorry. Need to sleep, hence rather generalised and strange. Maybe be clearer in the morning...

I think I need to sleep too. I'll think about it in the morning...

Hi folks,

I took this entry on to sub myself, and after an hour or so of going through this thread, and rearranging (and rewriting) parts of the entry, I have to agree with your general comments - that it is a little unbalanced not yet ready for the Edited Guide. I would have needed to change too much of it to reflect the current facts, and this is something we're loath to do - it tends to override the author's own style too much.

Please accept my apologies for previously accepting this entry for subbing: I was obviously feeling a little over-optimistic that day. Thanks for all your comments, though - I hope they can be incorporated into a final, definitive entry.

I will send this thread to the Writing Workshop, and if the author has no wish to update it, I will then move it to the Flea Market.

Cheers,

Chris

Editorial Note: This conversation has been moved from 'Mac or PC- which is better?' to 'The Writing Workshop'.

Sorry guys...

I've upgraded to OS X and love it. It makes my Mac by far the best Internet appliance I own.

Not ocvered in this entry: the Mac will boot and run from CD in full GUI mode - great for system recovery; also you can run MacOS from a floppy disk(!) - not an option for any version of Windows. In fact hardware specs for Macs are generally significantly less than for PC equivalents of the same software.