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OS X Mountain Lion Out Tomorrow
Apple revealed in its third quarter earnings release today that OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion will be released tomorrow, July 25th. "As a quick recap, the $19.99 software update brings a handful of iOS features to Macs, including the notes and reminders apps. It adds a few other things, like Twitter integration, Apple's Game Center and iMessage services. There's also a new security feature called Gatekeeper, designed to fend off malware by controlling what applications can and cannot be installed." The release also noted that iOS 6 will be coming out this fall, and that the company sold 17 million iPads in the third quarter, up 84% from sales in the third quarter of last year.
Have we actually gone anywhere?
Yeah. When I started using Linux in 1995 it was rather challenging to get X to run at all. To get a good functioning X people often had to buy a commercial X server. There were 0 GUIs. Microsoft announced they would not be porting their IE for Unix to Linux and people were upset. There were real questions as to why would anyone use Linux when for not much more money you could get an SGI or Sun workstation, there were also alternatives like SCO on x86 and AIX.
Today there exist 2 major GUIs with large suites of applications. There exists a full office productivity suite which is capable of stealing market share from Microsoft Office, on the Windows platform. With the exception of Trident all the major browser engines are either open source of available for LInux. The server space is dominated by Linux and Linux desktops play an important role in server development. SGI, Sun and SCO are all dead, AIX is weak. No one who primarily wants a Unix workstation goes anywhere else but Linux. The Linux kernel is arguably the most advanced kernel available.
That's real progress. Maybe not enough to beat Windows and OSX but there is no question there has been progress.
There's a simple lock and unlock function for system preferences panes. So, for instance, you could have GateKeeper turned on for the family Mac, which would give the kids the freedom to install any software that is signed, but you would need the admin password to install unsigned software. It's a step up from the admin-only software install approach.