Having a nice GUI isn't a real competitive advantage for long, with the progress being made in GNOME and X-windows, the advantages of Mac OS X will not last many months.
There's a lot of ways in which even MacOS 9 is way ahead of anything X, and has been for years. Just a few off the top of my head:
Absolutely flawless multi-monitor support. Yeah, yeah, I know about Xinerama, but it doesn't even come close to what the Mac has had for 10 years. You can visually configure the logical relationship between the monitors by dragging them around. You can have monitors with different sizes and bit depths and still drag windows between them. The color palette subsystem which handles that is very sophisticated. I have yet to even hear about anything in the X world that comes close.
Their scriptable, recordable, high-level event model: AppleEvents. It's very powerful to be able to say "record my actions," go do a bunch of things with the GUI, and then have a script appear which will reproduce what you just did. Yeah, yeah, talk to me of CORBA and Perl/Python/Guile/Tcl, I know all about them. They're still not up to the level of usability that Apple's program scriptability is. Recordability of your actions into a program is a huge enabler.
Seamless inter-application data exchange. There's a unioform model and a set of common base datatypes behind the Mac's copy&paste, drag&dropediting, clipping files, and publish/subscribe (aka live copy&paste). (And it's a very clean design, not some hack like OLE.) Yes, there are similar protocols in the *nix world (Xt, CORBA), but usually the best you can hope for is being able to move text between applications with the primary X selection. There are some new things which aim in the direction of the Mac's capabilities, but the Mac has had this for 15 years. It's pervasive, extremely flexible, and very robust.
Most people don't realize just how far ahead of the rest of the UI world the Mac is. Make no mistake, Byte got it right when they said "it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive attempt to keep up with Apple."
It's been pointed out that portions of the Linux source might be deemed offensive by some people. Open source advocates believe that access to source code is important for a number of reasons (the ability to fix somthing that's the broken, the ability to learn from the work of others, etc.). The idea that Linux (or any other Open Source software) might be censored because of comment text worries many of us.
Have there been any examples of this actually happening? Do any of the major censorware products block access to Linux or other source code?
Here's my method, a specific mnemonic technique. Start by picking some specific event or time in your life that's easy for you to recall but is not an obvious one to someone other than yourself. For example "in 1996 when I traveled to Vermont to celebrate Thanksgiving with my best friend Bob," or "when I used to play Shadowrun with John and Paul in college," or "when I first started working for Peter and I had to fix up that unbelievably crappy Perl code the last programmer, Matt, put together." Make a point of choosing a specific event (a particular thanksgiving) not a generic or repeating one (any thanksgiving). Also don't pick something obvious (your wedding) or something someone could easily get information on (if you have a web page about your trip to Mexico, don't use that).
Now take the date, place, activity, and people involved in your chosen event/time-span. For example:
November 1996
Thanksgiving
Vermont
Bob Jones
Pick out specific fragments of those to use in your password:
Nove[mb]er 199[6]
Than[ks]giving
[Ve]rmont
B[o]b Jo[n]es
Glue your fragments together with non alpha-numerics:
mb-6.ks/Ve=on
After typing it a few times, you should be able to get it just by remembering "Thanksgiving at Bob's, 1996."
Of course you still have to remember which password goes with which account. If you find this to be the tricky part, you could probably deal with it by writing down just enough information to get you to remember, like "11-96". Unless someone can guess the event (thanksgiving) and knows the details (at Bob's place in Vermont), they can't even get near your password, and even with all that information the number of permutations makes a brute force approach prohibitive.
Is it just me, or is anyone else annoyed by the way that when a commercial product is released with "Linux support" the implicit assumption is "x86 Linux only"? Since I only run non-x86 Linux (primarily LinuxPPC, although also AlphaLinux), I'm more than a little irked at that bias. Given the fact that Linux is a multi-architecture operating system, I'm tempted to say it amounts to false advertising.
Will software vendors ever wise up and say "x86 Linux" when that's all they mean? Or are we doomed to be stuck with the assumtion the "Linux" means "x86 only" unless otherwise specified as long as x86 is the dominant CPU architecture?
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There's a lot of ways in which even MacOS 9 is way ahead of anything X, and has been for years. Just a few off the top of my head:
Most people don't realize just how far ahead of the rest of the UI world the Mac is. Make no mistake, Byte got it right when they said "it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive attempt to keep up with Apple."
It's been pointed out that portions of the Linux source might be deemed offensive by some people. Open source advocates believe that access to source code is important for a number of reasons (the ability to fix somthing that's the broken, the ability to learn from the work of others, etc.). The idea that Linux (or any other Open Source software) might be censored because of comment text worries many of us.
Have there been any examples of this actually happening? Do any of the major censorware products block access to Linux or other source code?
Here's my method, a specific mnemonic technique. Start by picking some specific event or time in your life that's easy for you to recall but is not an obvious one to someone other than yourself. For example "in 1996 when I traveled to Vermont to celebrate Thanksgiving with my best friend Bob," or "when I used to play Shadowrun with John and Paul in college," or "when I first started working for Peter and I had to fix up that unbelievably crappy Perl code the last programmer, Matt, put together." Make a point of choosing a specific event (a particular thanksgiving) not a generic or repeating one (any thanksgiving). Also don't pick something obvious (your wedding) or something someone could easily get information on (if you have a web page about your trip to Mexico, don't use that).
Now take the date, place, activity, and people involved in your chosen event/time-span. For example:
Pick out specific fragments of those to use in your password:
Glue your fragments together with non alpha-numerics:
After typing it a few times, you should be able to get it just by remembering "Thanksgiving at Bob's, 1996."
Of course you still have to remember which password goes with which account. If you find this to be the tricky part, you could probably deal with it by writing down just enough information to get you to remember, like "11-96". Unless someone can guess the event (thanksgiving) and knows the details (at Bob's place in Vermont), they can't even get near your password, and even with all that information the number of permutations makes a brute force approach prohibitive.
Is it just me, or is anyone else annoyed by the way that when a commercial product is released with "Linux support" the implicit assumption is "x86 Linux only"? Since I only run non-x86 Linux (primarily LinuxPPC, although also AlphaLinux), I'm more than a little irked at that bias. Given the fact that Linux is a multi-architecture operating system, I'm tempted to say it amounts to false advertising.
Will software vendors ever wise up and say "x86 Linux" when that's all they mean? Or are we doomed to be stuck with the assumtion the "Linux" means "x86 only" unless otherwise specified as long as x86 is the dominant CPU architecture?