UNIX V7

2009/6/12 Kirn Gill <segin2005 at gmail.com>: Well, as the man said, two out of three ain't bad. It's powerful and it's useful. And in practice, for most people, it *is* free, because it comes with the computer. I am not a programmer, so I have no experience of OS X's development tools. I've been using it since the first version, though, and I think it's the least-sucky OS in the world today. In my opinion, it looks beautiful - the most elegant, stylish and attractive GUI there has ever been, thus far, and in use, it's the most polished and friendly OS there has ever been. Its only serious rival in simplicity and ease of use was its own predecessor, classic MacOS. These are pretty widely-held opinions, too, as far as I can tell, from Walt Mossberg on down. As for the dev tools - well, NeXT's Interface Builder was world-class (it was, of course, the platform upon which the WorldWideWeb was built - and it still is pretty damned good. It's not the technical sophistication of OpenStep that sold it to Apple - BeOS was smaller, faster, sleeker, vastly more efficient and a lot cheaper. It was the dev tools, because without developers, it doesn't matter *how* cool your OS is. To win users, you need apps - good ones and lots of them. And the Mac's got that. It has some world-leading apps, quite aside So, I'd say, fine, you're entitled to your opinions. Some people don't like the Mac and OS X. Most of them don't like it because they've never tried it and they're scared of the new and unfamiliar. This is a very common syndrome and it applies from clothes to vehicles. I'm a goth, myself, or at least used to be in my younger days, and only 2yr ago, a goth girl was beaten to death by a gang here in England just for looking and dressing differently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Lancaster Myself -- being a looming 6'2" male with a less than sunny disposition -- nobody ever gave me any trouble, but then, in another realm, I do. I ride a recumbent bicycle. And just for riding a weird-looking bicycle, I've been stoned, kicked, threatened and on one occassion lashed at with a knife as I rode past. People really don't like the weird. They don't like those who do not conform. So, lots of PC users pour venom and spite on the Mac and Mac users, because they're different, and they go on about how much better it is. But those who actually /try/ it tend to like it, and Apple is winning millions of converts over to OS X, especially now that it's on Intel and you can run Windows in a VM and keep your old Windows apps if you need them. So, be careful with confidently pronouncing opinions as universal truths. It's important to know the distinction between your personal preferences and facts. And beware of proclaiming preferences that may make you seem to be a bigot, because nobody likes bigotry. Well, that's true. But some do suck less than others. And when you are comparing such large and complicated things as 21st-century OSs, well, you can find areas, even just among the big 3 - Linux, Mac OS X and Windows - where each sucks in one area but excels in another. There are things that Windows is good at that OS X is bad at; there are things that Linux does well that the others do badly; there are things that all more or less equally on, good or bad. None of them is clearly and universally better than the others. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508