Letters to the Editor
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Thats easy,
They have to report to Microsoft what you typed, where you went, what files you had open, if you changed any password, your voting preference, your address book with all contact e-mails, any changes in daily routine, any and all files you might have in secure folders, your social security number, home address, educational history, criminal record and most importantly your school attendance (it goes on your permanent record).
This information is quickly(relative) transmitted to all appropriate Microsoft divisions, from there it goes to FBI, CIA, DEA, CTC, FAA and HUD. Finally homeland security makes a backup and sends police to your domicile to verify your identity by looking in your windows(real glass windows).
Then the all-mighty and powerful Bill G. authorizes it to shut down telepathically.
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Long suspected
A couple of comments here are tongue-in-cheek, but what I long suspected.
PCs (Microsoft) are collecting data and sending it to some database.
However, I don't have a Mac, but no reason to think Apple isn't doing the same thing - just faster.
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Who cares how long it needs to shut down?
Startup time is important. But shutdown time? Who cares? Who sits and stares at the monitor until the computer shuts down? Just turn off the monitor and walk away.
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Linux is even faster . . . on a PC
Mine boots up in 20 seconds, shuts down in 3.
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No excuses for Vista, present situated rooted in history
Vista has no valid excuses for being slower to boot up and shut down. It's simply not as well-designed, and refined, as MacOS X. You have to consider the history of the two operating systems to appreciate this.
One of the common Vista excuses is that it has to run on a wider variety of hardware. This might lengthen the installation time, when the installer has to figure which hardware it needs to boot on. Once installed, Vista should already know what hardware its running on, giving it no reason to boot significantly more slowly than a Mac.
Consider the history of the two operating systems. The core of MacOS X is based on a free variant of UNIX (the GUI is proprietary), and is available open-source under the name Darwin. Free and open source UNIX OS code has been developed and refined over many years to operate on a variety of different hardware (not just Apple's). In fact, Apple and its developers distribute much of their software in a "Universal Binary" format, which can support up to four difference processor types in the same file. This free code has been developed largely on volunteer time, paid for by pride of workmanship, and not by monopolistic zeal. By using free software at its core, MacOS X is standing on the shoulders of many coders who wrote the code out of pure enjoyment.
The proprietary part of MacOS X is the user interface, which Apple has designed far better than any free or commercial alternative. This is what Makes a Mac a Mac, and people are willing to pay money for this.
Windows development was driven not by the pride of volunteers, but by monopolistic and anticompetitive zeal. Numerous elements of Windows design were introduced specifically to break or cause other annoyances if the user were to use competing products with Windows. For example, a version of Windows 3 displayed a false error message if the underlying DOS was a competitor's DOS instead of Microsoft's DOS. An "improvement" to the early 32-bit memory addressing made a trivial change that broke compatibility with IBM's OS/2, which provided an otherwise superior Windows 3 environment. Now, Windows has to live with all of these past design decisions.
Apple's move from its older (and proprietary) MacOS 9 codebase has payed off and Apple handled the transitions well, offering several years of backward compatibility with each architectural change (MacOS 9 to MacOS X, PowerPC to Intel CPUs, Carbon to Cocoa development frameworks, etc.). MacOS X today is the product of steady improvements since 2000 (and even before that, if you count the NeXT and FreeBSD legacy). Because of the modularity of UNIX code, Apple has been able to easily adapt MacOS X to run on other devices, including the iPhone and Apple TV. Compare this to Microsoft's efforts, in which the desktop and mobile versions of Windows are essentially two different operating systems.
Microsoft is crippled by it's legacy of design decisions based on anticompetitive motivations. They can't invent a new operating system (it will take too long to implement). They can try to switch to a UNIX code base, as Apple did in 2000, with MacOS X. If they do that now, they will be ten years behind Apple in refining the OS and they face open competition from free and commercial Linux distributions, including Ubunto and Red Hat.
On the high (i.e. profitable) end of the PC market, people are increasing willing to pay more for well-designed Apple products. Since Apple switched to Intel chips, this price differential is even turned around, when comparing to similarly-configured PCs. In that past, Apple's higher price was the single biggest reason for people not to consider purchasing a Mac, and now that's turned on its head.
The best possible scenario for Microsoft is if they've been secretly developing a UNIX-based Windows all along (as Apple had been doing since before 2000) and it's already a mature product that will wow the customers so much that they forget about MacOS X and Linux.
In the mid- to late-90's, IBM saved itself from imminent demise by making some tough decisions: slash the price of mainframes (their cash cow) and embrace open source. It worked for IBM because they, among the major computer companies, led the way in introducing open source to their corporate customers. Apple's approach started with the consumer, but is steadily working its way into the corporate enterprise. Now, even IBM has a pilot program to replace Lenovo Thinkpad laptops running Windows with Apple MacBook Pros running MacOS X.
Microsoft is late the catch up with market developments (as it's always been), but this time their Windows/Office monopoly does not give them any leverage. Linux is cheaper. MacOS X is better (and also cheaper). Office productivity applications are going on-line (Google docs) and open-source (Open Office).