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Harvard Concludes Linux Will Remain Second Best
watzinaneihm writes "A Harvard Study which uses formal economic modelling to determine "Will OSS ever displace traditional software from its market leadership position?" came to a (not so?) surprising result. Linux is likely to remain second best as long as Microsoft has a first mover advantage."
Interesting paragraph from TFA
In addition to this main result, we were also surprised to find that piracy may end up increasing Microsoft's profits. To understand why, notice that there are two types of pirates: those who would not have bought Windows in the first place because it is too expensive, and those who would have bought Windows but now decide to pirate it. The first category increases Windows' installed base without affecting sales. As a consequence, this group increases the value of Windows. And thanks to these pirates, Microsoft is able to set higher prices in the future (because the value of the system goes up). In addition, having these pirates means that Linux's installed base does not grow as much as it would have if piracy weren't there. The second type of pirates (those who in the absence of piracy would have bought Windows) reduces Windows' sales and profit. Thus, if the proportion of first-type pirates is sufficiently large, Microsoft's profits will increase with piracy.
It isn't exactly 'minimizing', but there's always 'Hide [AppName]' and 'Hide Others' on the Application menu. So you can switch to Firefox and choose 'Hide Others' to reduce your clutter to only incode Firefox windows.
There are also various little extra things you can do with, for instance, the Option key. Click on an application window whilst holding the Option key and the target application will be activated while the current will be hidden. Hold down the Option key and click the minimize button on a window (or while pressing Cmd-M) and all windows in the application will be minimized. While you're looking through the menus in may applications (chiefly it's the Apple ones that actually implement this, so try Finder & Safari), tap the Option key. You'll likely see some items change -- Minimize Window becomes Minimize All. Close Window becomes Close All Windows. The ellipses after things like shutdown, restart, logout, and empty trash all disappear (meaning it won't put up an 'Are you sure?' prompt).
On the whole, the Macintosh interface is designed to make the things you need readily accessible -- in the words of Penny Arcade's Tycho, it's goal is that of "exposing functionality" -- and it does this pretty well. However, you'll likely find yourself surprised at the amount of more advanced functionality that's tucked just out of sight, yet always close enough that it isn't difficult to reach. The Option key is very often involved here, enough so that I sometimes just try doing normal things while hold Option, just to see if something different will happen...
Hope this helps,
-Q