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Child molesting spankings aside, in all seriousness, I've had every windows version from 3.1 to xp and am now learning to use 2003. In all my years, I have had a total of one blue screen of death in win3.1 and never have I ever lost any data (keep my os on c:, data on d:, reinstall and life is good). Reinstalling is a hour or two process and thus even that isn't a pain.

I've been using xp for years now and I have never had a crash, never had a virus or trojan horse, and never lost any data; perfectly stable as far as I'm concerned. Am I lucky or unusual? I don't think so. Here's my personal viewpoint:

Windows is like 3DGS in a lot of ways.

When something goes wrong with 3DGS programming, the newbies are quick to blame the engine as "buggy". But 99 percent of the time, it's because of improper understanding of the engine or faulty programming or faulty hardware; nothing to do with the 3DGS engine. Same with windows; if you don't know what you are doing (for example, you use weak passwords or open every attachement you get or set up shared folders improperly or don't patch or etc etc), then you get hacked, cracked, and virus and blame windows for being a "buggy" system. Much like the 3DGS user, the windows user says "Oh it can't be me, it has to be the OS".

Windows is only as secure as the users. And since there are so many more windows users, there are correspondingly greater chances of messing up. So all I know is that in my experience, windows has been a fantastic system.

Now as to macs, my only experience with them lately is that my last university deployed macs in every classroom. Guess what, our of 8 machines, on average, 2 to 3 where always down every week. Do I blame the OS and Mac? Nope, I blame our admin for not setting up securities and user accounts properly and letting the students run amok on our systems. Again, it's the user not the program.

Finally, and this is undeniable, the amount of software and the bredth of scope of that software is much higher on win than mac. Thus, if I was a general user, I would be better served using windows and not macs as I would be guaranteed to find a piece of software. I think the public knows this, I think Conitec knows this, and that's why I think 3DGS won't be ported to Macs any time soon; spending 100% of your time pursuing 1% market share doesn't sound like good business.

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