Joking aside, if Microsoft had made it clear from the start they had no intention of moulding their operating system according to the wishes of movie studios, then what?
Then everyone would just buy $50 made-in-China BD players and Microsoft would have lost their opportunity to get a foot in the door of the "home media hub" market.
As far as it not affecting you unless you go for Blu-ray, I disagree. You think redesigning the OS at that level was free? You think hardware support for it is free?
Your logic is broken, because it applies to every single feature of every piece of software. Further, this little gem:
You think doing everything they can to obfuscate and encrypt is a recipe for *less* bugs?
Implies that any security-type software is inherently buggier and less reliable because it is trying to "obfuscate and encrypt" things.
Which has only one possible noticeable effect, and that is to *prevent* you from viewing something you bought.
False. DRM allows you to play media that you would otherwise be unable to. *That* is the effect the overpowering majority of end users will notice.
There is no reason why DRM support makes Vista any slower, less reliable, or buggier than it would otherwise be, any more than having tools like OpenSSL and SSH would do that to Linux.
Personally, I like signed drivers and kernels. I have a TPM in my Thinkpad notebook which I'm going to use to ensure only signed (by me) Linux kernel can be loaded. But not when it's done with the sole purpose to add more shackles for benefit of MAFIAA.
Well, it's not, so presumably you don't have a problem with driver signing in Windows.
It appears that people do not want to take basic precautions for their personal life remaining personal. I would say more fool them, but their arrogance also affects the wider community.
Most people don't care mainly because they don't really understand that anything they send in the typical text or email is like writing it on the back of a postcard, and once something is on the internet, it's there for good.
Another rather large problem is that there aren't many good tools to make encryption simple and transparent (this is somewhat due to the point above, and somewhat due to the inverse relationship between security and usability).
Countries like Sweden are generally regarded as some of the freest in the world, so the EU can't be all bad.
It depends on your definition of 'freedom'. If you use the American "free to be the biggest arsehole I want and fuck everybody else" definition, then the EU rates pretty poorly.
Ever used Lotus notes? That loses information, has data corruption issues etc. And that was when it was working normally.
There is a vast gulf of difference - especially in the eyes of the law - between data loss from buggy software and data loss from software deliberately programmed to do it with malicious forethought.
I have no contract or agreement whatsoever with those 'strangers', and furthermore given the warnings that i said we'd include in our material and the fact that the 'damage' we'd cause is purely virtual, that few judges would view our response as anything but justified. IANAL, but in the country where my country is based, there is a much less pussified view of the rights of criminals, especially here.
What you are proposing is nothing more than crude vigilantism. I sincerely doubt your legal system - assuming you're not living in some backwards third-world hellhole - takes anything but an incredibly dim view of such behaviour.
There are several big reasons why you would be crucified by the legal system in any remotely civilised country for your plan:
* You have malicious intent. You are seeking revenge, not reparations or prevention.
* It is a calculated and premeditated action.
* It is disproportional. Stopping your software working is one thing. Nuking someone's entire computer (which could have all sorts of irreplaceable data from tax returns to family photos) is a different scenario entirely.
Sure, if someone who _has_ pirated this sued you, you could sue them for copyright infringement, but the punishment for premeditated and malicious damage and destruction of property (likely criminal, not civil charges) are going to be - as they should be - far, far higher, so overall you'll lose. If it ever misfired and hit any legitimate customers, the resulting lawsuits would - justifiably - almost certainly put you out of business (and if they didn't the destruction of your reputation would finish the job).
I'd like somebody to please explain to me why my company should not compile versions of our software for torrent that do horrible and terrible things to the downloaders' PCs after say, the third run.
For the same reason you can't kill someone - then also go out and kill their family, friends, associates, etc - for picking your pocket.
. On an embedded 486/100MHz computer, it can go from LILO's "Loading linux......" to a usable prompt in about 7 seconds. It loads only crond, inetd, sshd, and two user daemons. It's a bit minimal, but it accomplishes its job with only 32MB RAM and 100MB hard disk.
I have an old DOS machine that boots in about 1/3 that time - and, like your 486, is utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
How nice of you to notice that. Of course, some operating systems (not Vista) allow the user to REMOVE functions they have no interest in and gain the corresponding performance benefits.
What performance benefits do you think you're going to see by removing a feature that isn't being used ?
You're spot on about the Dock being an application switcher and not a task (window) switcher, but really, when you've got 30+ windows open all you ever see in the Taskbar is a few letters for each. That might be enough, but my experience isn't so good with many windows in the Taskbar.
My primary screen is a 27" @ 1920x1200 and my Taskbar is 3 levels high. I also have that idiotic 'collapse many buttons into one' turned off (although I do have application grouping enabled). I can usually find the window I want just fine.;)
Generally I need to have 50+ windows open before identifying them becomes a chore.
Personally I think the Taskbar is one of Microsoft's genuine UI triumphs. My only real complaints about it are that I can't rearrange the buttons arbitrarily, I can't drag & drop objects directly onto a button, and that there's only one of them to cover all screens (ideally, I'd like one per screen, for the windows on that screen - although in some ways that would not work as well).
I have yet to use a better task-switching UI - although Expose isn't any _worse_ with relatively low (5-10) window counts (assuming you have it bound to a mouse button), and looks a lot cooler, so I suppose it could be considered "better" within those constraints.
The point of the paper was that the DRM increased various costs associated with the OS. Thanks to DRM implementation, Vista took longer to develop, has more bugs (and therefore is less stable and less secure from attacks which matter to you, the user), and has fewer working drivers. DRM hurts everyone who is using Vista, all the time, why is that so hard to understand?
This argument is meaningless. It could be made about every single aspect of Vista that delivers some form of functionality you personally have no interest in.
Perhaps you missed the part where I was talking about the Dock ?
Besides, Expose has its own set of problems, especially with large numbers of windows and multiple screens.
Even more so there are two ways of "alt-tab" in OSX, one is between any app and the other is between windows of the same application.
This is not "two ways", this is one way with two steps.
I contend that if you are working with 30 windows open of numerous apps there is something very wrong in your workflow.
Typically a dozen or more of those windows are SSH sessions to servers, many of which are doing things like tail -f/var/log/all.log. Regardless, why should I close things (and lose state) just because I won't be using it for a while ?
There's nothing wrong with my workflow, it's been serving me well for over a decade. The OS X UI just doesn't handle heavy (and arbitrary) task switching very well. MacOS Classic was the same.
It's slower, even more so because I have 3 screens.
Or just click on the icon on the Dock.
It's also slower, and broken in the way I have just described.
The only time the problem you describe actually shows itself are for applications that are GDI-style, and those are few and far between these days.
No, the problem shows itself with every application that has multiple document windows.
The Dock is fine as an app switcher for 99% of the cases. If you want to bring Mail to the front, you click on it. How could that be any simpler?
The Dock sucks as a task switcher because it is application-centric. Ie: to get to an arbitrary window, you need to first click on the application (to bring all of its windows to the top), then on the actual window you want. Or, alternatively, right-click on the app icon and select the window you want from their (but this seems to have a ~1 second delay built-in before the context menu appears).
In contrast, the ("classic") Taskbar lets you immediately, and with a single click, bring any window to the top of the stack. It is a vastly superior task-switching UI.
This "new" Taskbar (and, the "classic" one with that incredibly annoying "button groups collapse" mis-feature is making exactly the same mistake Apple did with the Dock. Fortunately, at least, from what I've read, those of us who actually multitask heavily will be able to get the "classic" behaviour.
Alt-Tab is the obvious answer here. Why would you use the mouse for switching windows?
Because when you've got 30+ windows open and the one you want to switch to is "far away" in the stack, it's quicker and easier to click the button in the taskbar than hit Alt+Tab 10-15 times.
If this is true, why would Microsoft release 32-bit Windows 7 at all? All new PCs come with 64-bit chips.
No, they don't. Every Atom-based NetBook, for example, only has a 32-bit CPU.
To say nothing of the people who might want to upgrade their existing 32-bit machine to Windows 7, or need to stay on a 32 bit OS for software compatibility reasons.
I do, actually. It seems at first like a huge rip-off of Mac OS X's dock, and Microsoft is nothing if not consistent about trying to rip-off Apple.
I will reserve judgement until I've actually used it, but from the demoes I've seen it duplicates the single biggest reason the Dock is broken as a task-switching device:
There is no way to easily switch from one arbitrary window to another. First you need to hover over the application icon (or right-click it with the Dock), then click on the window within the application that you want.
I use Linux as my desktop (both at home and at work). I don't have to make decisions about whether to allow installation of some random cr*p that I had not asked for.
Which distro ? Because the current distro of the moment - Ubuntu - most certainly pops up "random" messages about installing software (amongst other things), just like Vista does (eg: trying to play a video file it doesn't have a codec installed for).
Vista's UAC is conceptually the same as [gk]sudo, and implemented in an almost identical fashion.
You can tell me Linux is cheaper, and that's great. I use Linux on most of my servers, but it's not really relevant here, since we're talking about Apple taking business away from Microsoft.
Actually, *I* was comparing hardware prices, as per "In short, TCO isn't just marketing-speak. Apple hardware isn't *that* expensive, and if a little extra money up-front can save me more money in the long-run [...]". In particular, that Apple's hardware is only "a little extra". I wouldn't call ~20 - 300% "a little".
You cannot compare software costs without also accounting for functionality. It's meaningless (which you implicitly acknowledge by talking about CALs and "unlimited users").
If you want to laud the quality of Unix operating systems, though, you may as well through OSX in there, since it's not really inferior to the others.
Arguably it is, given how little time it's had to mature. Things like kernel locking on SMP systems, or Volume Management, for example, still have a long way to go on OS X. My comment, however, was more aimed at the implication that UNIXes are equivalent and drop-in replacements for each other simply because they're UNIXes.
Just get back to me when you can tell me whether that Dell is actually cheaper than the Xserv.
The Dell _hardware_ most certainly is, which is the only point I was making.
Ok, then add 50 CALs for file sharing, terminal services, and Exchange into your figures. And the cost of Exchange itself. How do the costs compare then?
Compared to the functionality ? Quite reasonably. Especially when you consider Terminal Server, which Apple has no alternative to whatsoever.
People carry on about CALs like they're this massive cost that drive Windows-using businesses into the ground, but in reality they're amortised per employee, over the lifetime of the hardware. The ~$150 per user in CAL costs works out to $30-$50 per *year* - your employees probably cost you more than that every year in cigarette breaks and watercooler gossip every *month*.
Or, of course, they could be running Linux on that Dell server. In which case it's a simple case of $1700 in their pocket vs Apple's, or a 3:1 ratio of Apple servers to Dell servers at the low end.
Nope, it's as much Unix as Unix is, which is to say it's Unix.
Which is to say... Nothing relevant at all. "UNIX" is not a useful standard when it comes to systems administration. Heck, these days it's barely a useful standard for anything at all.
What's particularly funny is those people (you're probably one of them) who carry on about how the differences between the various releases of Windows over the last 10-odd years makes them so hard to move between, then turns around and says "but if you know UNIX you can be productive on any UNIX box".
Someone switching from AIX to Solaris, or Solaris to FreeBSD might have a few moments where they have to adjust to the fact that they're working on a different OS, but it's all Unix.
It will be *much* more than "a few moments". To say nothing of how they'll have to then get their head around all the stuff you do the Apple way, rather than the "UNIX" way (whichever one of half a dozen that might be), or balls things up trying to run their OS X boxes like Solaris or Debian boxes.
A FreeBSD (say) admin will not be anywhere near as productive with OS X servers as they would be with FreeBSD servers, nor as productive as someone who knows OS X server (even if they don't know any other UNIX) would be (and vice versa). It's a matter of different mindsets, as much as hard skills, which is why UNIX admins tend to make awful Windows admins (and vice versa).
All kidding aside, I don't know how much Jobs or Gates can be considered engineers or developers any longer. Does anyone really know how long it's been since either of these guys has done hands-on anything? My guess is that Gates hasn't coded in well over 15 years. I wonder if the boy could even do a group policy edit if he had to.
You do not need up-to-date, hands-on experience to be able to understand the capabilities and potential uses of technology.
My boss, for example, cannot reel off bus speeds, disk interface, standard server configurations, and the like from memory like I can. However, when I talk to him about particular machines being CPU-bound vs disk-bound, or why it's pointless to put more than a certain amount of memory in a certain machine, he understands what I'm talking about.
Contrast this to our "VP of Tech Ops", who asked - in all seriousness - the other day: "so colo facility A can give us 6,500 watts per rack, and colo facility B can give us 8 kilowatts per rack, that means B is higher, right ?". After a few meetings with our CIO, I'm amazed he has enough technical ability to plug in a USB drive.
Someone like Bill Gates, who hasn't done any "hands-on" work in probably 15+ years, is a towering technical intellect compared to most of his peers. Even someone like Jobs, who has never really been part of the technical side of things, is leagues ahead of the average upper-level manager/executive in terms of knowledge and understanding.
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Microsoft told us that that Vista would be their last 32 bit OS and that future OSs would be 64 bit.
When ?
Joking aside, if Microsoft had made it clear from the start they had no intention of moulding their operating system according to the wishes of movie studios, then what?
Then everyone would just buy $50 made-in-China BD players and Microsoft would have lost their opportunity to get a foot in the door of the "home media hub" market.
As far as it not affecting you unless you go for Blu-ray, I disagree. You think redesigning the OS at that level was free? You think hardware support for it is free?
Your logic is broken, because it applies to every single feature of every piece of software. Further, this little gem:
You think doing everything they can to obfuscate and encrypt is a recipe for *less* bugs?
Implies that any security-type software is inherently buggier and less reliable because it is trying to "obfuscate and encrypt" things.
Which has only one possible noticeable effect, and that is to *prevent* you from viewing something you bought.
False. DRM allows you to play media that you would otherwise be unable to. *That* is the effect the overpowering majority of end users will notice.
There is no reason why DRM support makes Vista any slower, less reliable, or buggier than it would otherwise be, any more than having tools like OpenSSL and SSH would do that to Linux.
Personally, I like signed drivers and kernels. I have a TPM in my Thinkpad notebook which I'm going to use to ensure only signed (by me) Linux kernel can be loaded. But not when it's done with the sole purpose to add more shackles for benefit of MAFIAA.
Well, it's not, so presumably you don't have a problem with driver signing in Windows.
Swiss, being 100% surrounded by other countries, is occupied by them?
<NITPICK>
In English, it's "Switzerland".
</NITPICK>
It appears that people do not want to take basic precautions for their personal life remaining personal. I would say more fool them, but their arrogance also affects the wider community.
Most people don't care mainly because they don't really understand that anything they send in the typical text or email is like writing it on the back of a postcard, and once something is on the internet, it's there for good.
Another rather large problem is that there aren't many good tools to make encryption simple and transparent (this is somewhat due to the point above, and somewhat due to the inverse relationship between security and usability).
Countries like Sweden are generally regarded as some of the freest in the world, so the EU can't be all bad.
It depends on your definition of 'freedom'. If you use the American "free to be the biggest arsehole I want and fuck everybody else" definition, then the EU rates pretty poorly.
Ever used Lotus notes? That loses information, has data corruption issues etc. And that was when it was working normally.
There is a vast gulf of difference - especially in the eyes of the law - between data loss from buggy software and data loss from software deliberately programmed to do it with malicious forethought.
I have no contract or agreement whatsoever with those 'strangers', and furthermore given the warnings that i said we'd include in our material and the fact that the 'damage' we'd cause is purely virtual, that few judges would view our response as anything but justified. IANAL, but in the country where my country is based, there is a much less pussified view of the rights of criminals, especially here.
What you are proposing is nothing more than crude vigilantism. I sincerely doubt your legal system - assuming you're not living in some backwards third-world hellhole - takes anything but an incredibly dim view of such behaviour.
There are several big reasons why you would be crucified by the legal system in any remotely civilised country for your plan:
* You have malicious intent. You are seeking revenge, not reparations or prevention.
* It is a calculated and premeditated action.
* It is disproportional. Stopping your software working is one thing. Nuking someone's entire computer (which could have all sorts of irreplaceable data from tax returns to family photos) is a different scenario entirely.
Sure, if someone who _has_ pirated this sued you, you could sue them for copyright infringement, but the punishment for premeditated and malicious damage and destruction of property (likely criminal, not civil charges) are going to be - as they should be - far, far higher, so overall you'll lose. If it ever misfired and hit any legitimate customers, the resulting lawsuits would - justifiably - almost certainly put you out of business (and if they didn't the destruction of your reputation would finish the job).
I'd like somebody to please explain to me why my company should not compile versions of our software for torrent that do horrible and terrible things to the downloaders' PCs after say, the third run.
For the same reason you can't kill someone - then also go out and kill their family, friends, associates, etc - for picking your pocket.
. On an embedded 486/100MHz computer, it can go from LILO's "Loading linux......" to a usable prompt in about 7 seconds. It loads only crond, inetd, sshd, and two user daemons. It's a bit minimal, but it accomplishes its job with only 32MB RAM and 100MB hard disk.
I have an old DOS machine that boots in about 1/3 that time - and, like your 486, is utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
How nice of you to notice that. Of course, some operating systems (not Vista) allow the user to REMOVE functions they have no interest in and gain the corresponding performance benefits.
What performance benefits do you think you're going to see by removing a feature that isn't being used ?
You're spot on about the Dock being an application switcher and not a task (window) switcher, but really, when you've got 30+ windows open all you ever see in the Taskbar is a few letters for each. That might be enough, but my experience isn't so good with many windows in the Taskbar.
My primary screen is a 27" @ 1920x1200 and my Taskbar is 3 levels high. I also have that idiotic 'collapse many buttons into one' turned off (although I do have application grouping enabled). I can usually find the window I want just fine. ;)
Generally I need to have 50+ windows open before identifying them becomes a chore.
Personally I think the Taskbar is one of Microsoft's genuine UI triumphs. My only real complaints about it are that I can't rearrange the buttons arbitrarily, I can't drag & drop objects directly onto a button, and that there's only one of them to cover all screens (ideally, I'd like one per screen, for the windows on that screen - although in some ways that would not work as well).
I have yet to use a better task-switching UI - although Expose isn't any _worse_ with relatively low (5-10) window counts (assuming you have it bound to a mouse button), and looks a lot cooler, so I suppose it could be considered "better" within those constraints.
Do you know that key-repeating applies to alt-tab as well?
Yes, but if I want to play whack-a-mole I'll go down to the arcade, where I can at least have the satisfaction of hitting something.
So if you have 30 windows open, the furthest away the window you want could be is only 15, which if you overshoot, you can just go back one or two.
And it would still be quicker and easier to just click straight on the Taskbar button for the window I want.
The point of the paper was that the DRM increased various costs associated with the OS. Thanks to DRM implementation, Vista took longer to develop, has more bugs (and therefore is less stable and less secure from attacks which matter to you, the user), and has fewer working drivers. DRM hurts everyone who is using Vista, all the time, why is that so hard to understand?
This argument is meaningless. It could be made about every single aspect of Vista that delivers some form of functionality you personally have no interest in.
Windows 3.1 and 95 were just alternate shells for DOS.
Windows 95 did more than enough to be closer to an "Operating System" than a "shell".
So did Windows 3.1 (and especially 3.11), for that matter.
Expose allows arbitrary switching easily.
Perhaps you missed the part where I was talking about the Dock ?
Besides, Expose has its own set of problems, especially with large numbers of windows and multiple screens.
Even more so there are two ways of "alt-tab" in OSX, one is between any app and the other is between windows of the same application.
This is not "two ways", this is one way with two steps.
I contend that if you are working with 30 windows open of numerous apps there is something very wrong in your workflow.
Typically a dozen or more of those windows are SSH sessions to servers, many of which are doing things like tail -f /var/log/all.log. Regardless, why should I close things (and lose state) just because I won't be using it for a while ?
There's nothing wrong with my workflow, it's been serving me well for over a decade. The OS X UI just doesn't handle heavy (and arbitrary) task switching very well. MacOS Classic was the same.
Or just use Expose.
It's slower, even more so because I have 3 screens.
Or just click on the icon on the Dock.
It's also slower, and broken in the way I have just described.
The only time the problem you describe actually shows itself are for applications that are GDI-style, and those are few and far between these days.
No, the problem shows itself with every application that has multiple document windows.
The Dock is fine as an app switcher for 99% of the cases. If you want to bring Mail to the front, you click on it. How could that be any simpler?
The Dock sucks as a task switcher because it is application-centric. Ie: to get to an arbitrary window, you need to first click on the application (to bring all of its windows to the top), then on the actual window you want. Or, alternatively, right-click on the app icon and select the window you want from their (but this seems to have a ~1 second delay built-in before the context menu appears).
In contrast, the ("classic") Taskbar lets you immediately, and with a single click, bring any window to the top of the stack. It is a vastly superior task-switching UI.
This "new" Taskbar (and, the "classic" one with that incredibly annoying "button groups collapse" mis-feature is making exactly the same mistake Apple did with the Dock. Fortunately, at least, from what I've read, those of us who actually multitask heavily will be able to get the "classic" behaviour.
Alt-Tab is the obvious answer here. Why would you use the mouse for switching windows?
Because when you've got 30+ windows open and the one you want to switch to is "far away" in the stack, it's quicker and easier to click the button in the taskbar than hit Alt+Tab 10-15 times.
If this is true, why would Microsoft release 32-bit Windows 7 at all? All new PCs come with 64-bit chips.
No, they don't. Every Atom-based NetBook, for example, only has a 32-bit CPU.
To say nothing of the people who might want to upgrade their existing 32-bit machine to Windows 7, or need to stay on a 32 bit OS for software compatibility reasons.
I do, actually. It seems at first like a huge rip-off of Mac OS X's dock, and Microsoft is nothing if not consistent about trying to rip-off Apple.
I will reserve judgement until I've actually used it, but from the demoes I've seen it duplicates the single biggest reason the Dock is broken as a task-switching device:
There is no way to easily switch from one arbitrary window to another. First you need to hover over the application icon (or right-click it with the Dock), then click on the window within the application that you want.
That's great except other OSes do this too, including Linux and OS X.
Neither Linux, or OS X, will "seed" the cache like Superfetch, as far as I know.
Unfortunately, since Windows Vista has a brain-damaged task scheduler, the implementation isn't nearly as it is on those other OSes.
How so ?
Only brain-damaged filesystems need to be defragged (FAT32, NTFS)
All filesystems fragment. 99% of the time defragmentation makes no difference, anyway.
I use Linux as my desktop (both at home and at work). I don't have to make decisions about whether to allow installation of some random cr*p that I had not asked for.
Which distro ? Because the current distro of the moment - Ubuntu - most certainly pops up "random" messages about installing software (amongst other things), just like Vista does (eg: trying to play a video file it doesn't have a codec installed for).
Vista's UAC is conceptually the same as [gk]sudo, and implemented in an almost identical fashion.
You can tell me Linux is cheaper, and that's great. I use Linux on most of my servers, but it's not really relevant here, since we're talking about Apple taking business away from Microsoft.
Actually, *I* was comparing hardware prices, as per "In short, TCO isn't just marketing-speak. Apple hardware isn't *that* expensive, and if a little extra money up-front can save me more money in the long-run [...]". In particular, that Apple's hardware is only "a little extra". I wouldn't call ~20 - 300% "a little".
You cannot compare software costs without also accounting for functionality. It's meaningless (which you implicitly acknowledge by talking about CALs and "unlimited users").
If you want to laud the quality of Unix operating systems, though, you may as well through OSX in there, since it's not really inferior to the others.
Arguably it is, given how little time it's had to mature. Things like kernel locking on SMP systems, or Volume Management, for example, still have a long way to go on OS X. My comment, however, was more aimed at the implication that UNIXes are equivalent and drop-in replacements for each other simply because they're UNIXes.
Just get back to me when you can tell me whether that Dell is actually cheaper than the Xserv.
The Dell _hardware_ most certainly is, which is the only point I was making.
Ok, then add 50 CALs for file sharing, terminal services, and Exchange into your figures. And the cost of Exchange itself. How do the costs compare then?
Compared to the functionality ? Quite reasonably. Especially when you consider Terminal Server, which Apple has no alternative to whatsoever.
People carry on about CALs like they're this massive cost that drive Windows-using businesses into the ground, but in reality they're amortised per employee, over the lifetime of the hardware. The ~$150 per user in CAL costs works out to $30-$50 per *year* - your employees probably cost you more than that every year in cigarette breaks and watercooler gossip every *month*.
Or, of course, they could be running Linux on that Dell server. In which case it's a simple case of $1700 in their pocket vs Apple's, or a 3:1 ratio of Apple servers to Dell servers at the low end.
Nope, it's as much Unix as Unix is, which is to say it's Unix.
Which is to say... Nothing relevant at all. "UNIX" is not a useful standard when it comes to systems administration. Heck, these days it's barely a useful standard for anything at all.
What's particularly funny is those people (you're probably one of them) who carry on about how the differences between the various releases of Windows over the last 10-odd years makes them so hard to move between, then turns around and says "but if you know UNIX you can be productive on any UNIX box".
Someone switching from AIX to Solaris, or Solaris to FreeBSD might have a few moments where they have to adjust to the fact that they're working on a different OS, but it's all Unix.
It will be *much* more than "a few moments". To say nothing of how they'll have to then get their head around all the stuff you do the Apple way, rather than the "UNIX" way (whichever one of half a dozen that might be), or balls things up trying to run their OS X boxes like Solaris or Debian boxes.
A FreeBSD (say) admin will not be anywhere near as productive with OS X servers as they would be with FreeBSD servers, nor as productive as someone who knows OS X server (even if they don't know any other UNIX) would be (and vice versa). It's a matter of different mindsets, as much as hard skills, which is why UNIX admins tend to make awful Windows admins (and vice versa).
All kidding aside, I don't know how much Jobs or Gates can be considered engineers or developers any longer. Does anyone really know how long it's been since either of these guys has done hands-on anything? My guess is that Gates hasn't coded in well over 15 years. I wonder if the boy could even do a group policy edit if he had to.
You do not need up-to-date, hands-on experience to be able to understand the capabilities and potential uses of technology.
My boss, for example, cannot reel off bus speeds, disk interface, standard server configurations, and the like from memory like I can. However, when I talk to him about particular machines being CPU-bound vs disk-bound, or why it's pointless to put more than a certain amount of memory in a certain machine, he understands what I'm talking about.
Contrast this to our "VP of Tech Ops", who asked - in all seriousness - the other day: "so colo facility A can give us 6,500 watts per rack, and colo facility B can give us 8 kilowatts per rack, that means B is higher, right ?". After a few meetings with our CIO, I'm amazed he has enough technical ability to plug in a USB drive.
Someone like Bill Gates, who hasn't done any "hands-on" work in probably 15+ years, is a towering technical intellect compared to most of his peers. Even someone like Jobs, who has never really been part of the technical side of things, is leagues ahead of the average upper-level manager/executive in terms of knowledge and understanding.