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Apple Polishing Mac OS X for Uncle Sam?
polarfleece writes "A report on Macteens that the latest build of Panther contains strong evidence that it is being customized for U.S. Government applications.
I, for one, can't wait to see a whole lot of Apples being toted by gummint men (and women). Of course, do we REALLY want those gummint agents having access to the same technology we Apple users enjoy so much? On the other hand, to quote story author Clark Mueller, 'it just might be one of the more intelligent steps taken towards U.S. national defense.'"
Well since MacOS X *IS* NeXTSTEP (except it can run Office!) I think your unnamed agency would pick it up with no problem and run their code cracking software (or whatever they want, I have no idea which agency it is ;-) with minimal changes.
The NeXT has/had *THE* best OS and development environment and I'm so glad it lives on in Mac OS X. Using project builder I can write complete, beautiful apps in an *afternoon*. I still can't be as productive with Java & Eclipse or vi and Perl/Ruby etc. Those NeXT engineers really knew what they were doing.
Actually, Mac cubes ran many of the displays on the STNG Enterprise set.
Wouldn't the adoption of Apple tie you down to a single software *and* hardware vendor?
Perhaps, but only for the client machines. Thanks to Apple's wholehearted adoption of open standards, you can mix and match to form the rest of your network, if you desire-- whereas Microsoft's stuff only plays nice with competitors' products grudgingly, when it plays nice at all.
~Philly
the point obviously was that a Mac does not lock one in any more than a windows, which was a direct response to the original comments. You proved that point.
In many offices, however, there is a notion that MS only has an advantage because of a common management scheme. Again, in direct response to the original assertion, a valid observation was made that OS X has the advantage of, at some level, using the same skillset of other *nix., another point that was refuted.
Also, the original comment specifically spoke of single vendor lock in. It is very common for a firm to purchase a Windows system, install an MS webserver, an MS database, and develop with MS tools. This is what the original post probably was speaking to. If a firm purchases a Windows system then installs MySQL and Apache, then the firm is no longer tied to a single software vendor, and the case in the original post does not apply, unless they like many comapnies only use MS Windows.
Again, the response only tangentially spoke of Windows. The main thrust was that Apple can be a part of an efficient diversified IT setup. It would be useful to add, however, that given MS licensing schemes and increasingly aggressive marketing, one can assume that most shops would find it easier to single source, especially if, as in the case of dual booting machines, alternatives would anger the MS salesforce.
...both here and here .
C'mon people - a little Google can take you a long way.
QA implies some kind of quality to begin with.
The Federal Government won't be purchasing OS X boxes in mass quantity until the operating system is usable by somebody who is blind. E&IT Accessibility Standards
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!