Not all of our buses; the 'WiFi Bus' stuff is still being rolled out. 48 buses, scattered across 4 routes. Seems to be working well, though, and they plan to roll it out more widely if it proves popular; it mostly seems to be useful for people stuck in traffic on the way to work, so they can pull out a PDA or a laptop and deal with an e-mail or something.
The difference is that Microsoft will license their DRM to anyone who wants it, where Apple keeps Fairplay a bit more tightly-controlled.
Of course, the 'I can play a DRM-protected WMA file from anything on my Windows box, because it just works with the underlying libraries' is sort of silly; the DRM used in iTMS AAC files is also incorporated into Quicktime, and I can play a Fairplay-protected AAC file anywhere on my Mac that uses Quicktime (background track in iMovie or iDVD stuff? No problem! Of course, the RIAA might have issues, but that's a different matter).
I think the original poster meant that it's easier to debug the entire behavior of a C program than a Java program, which which I agree.
In Java, some of the behavior -- indeed, a lot of the underlying behavior -- when it comes to fine-tuning for performance, or 'why does this thing eat 400 megs of RAM?!' is hidden from the user; it's part of the underlying interpreter, and beyond the view of the debugger. In C, I can track my memory allocations and performance much more readily in a debugger than I can in Java.
I suppose I would've phrased it more that debugging a simple process is easier in Java or other interpreted languages, but debugging to performance-tweak is way, way easier in compiled languages than interpreted ones.
To be fair, I think the point they're trying to make is 'if the songs weren't available online, the in-store sales would be higher.' Specifically, I think this argument is meant to counter the people who say 'if it wasn't available online, no one would buy it.'
Now, I don't think either statement is correct. If the songs weren't available online, yah, in-store sales would be higher, for people who'll buy in whatever format is most convenient. I also think there ARE people who wouldn't bother to go to the stores and buy the CD if they couldn't get it online. But this particular 'study' (which I use in a very loose sense of the word) is an example of something both sides are prone to do, i.e., taking things out of context and trying to use it to back up sweeping generalizations and flawed arguments.
So, yeah, I agree with you that these are stupid numbers being twisted out of context.:)
...just to get a worse experience than if you just hopped on P2P and pirated music...
I'd disagree. If I wanted to go download Kazaa (and end up with Gator and god-knows-what other spyware on my machine), then go looking for a specific album -- say, 'Stunt' from the Barenaked Ladies -- I suspect it would take me a good while to find all the tracks. Some of the tracks I would find would probably actually be viruses in disguise. Some would be corrupted. The people I'm downloading from might go offline, and my download slows to a crawl. Etc.
In contrast, I go and open Rhapsody, I enter 'Barenaked Ladies' into the Artist search (or 'Stunt' into the Album search), find the album, and click 'play.' No additional charge; it downloads the album into my local Rhapsody library and voila, plays it. For just browsing music, Rhapsody's already beaten out Kazaa/Gnutella/etc.
On iTMS, I go enter 'Barenaked Ladies' into the search bar, I click on 'Stunt' and click 'buy album.' Again, an easier time.
(Or, of course, I could pick up the album from the used CD shop two blocks from my house and just rip it into iTunes, which is what I actually did. But it made a good example nonetheless.)
The reason I choose to use both Rhapsody and iTMS is that I find iTMS works better with my overall personal style of music management (I don't like Rhapsody's library system, plus it isn't available on Mac as a standalone product). But Rhapsody blows away pretty much everything for just browsing of music, and trying out new stuff to see if I like it. iTMS is great, but a 20-second clip is not really enough for me to judge a song by, most times.
Yeah, the DRM can be annoying at times (more with Rhapsody than with iTMS), but not enough so to counter other factors for me.:)
I'm glad you're happy with your choice not to use a subscription model music service.
Honestly, I tend to think subscription and 'single purchase' models serve different markets. I use both iTunes Music Store (on my Mac) and Rhapsody (on my PC) for different reasons. I've been a Rhapsody user since it first came out, and I love that I can play anything in the Rhapsody library. One monthly fee, and I have access to the whole library.
However, even with the more recent ability to operate while offline, Rhapsody's 'I'm not online' experience is not as good for me as just normal MP3s or stuff I buy from iTMS. So I tend either to buy the music from Rhapsody and burn CDs which I rip back into my iTunes on the Mac, or just buy the tracks from iTMS in the first place.
I find Rhapsody's DRM more of a hassle than Apple's, and I don't like wasting a CD to burn unprotected copies from in Rhapsody if I only want to buy one or two tracks. But I find Rhapsody infinitely better for just browsing and sampling stuff I might be interested in. I think my music experience would be the poorer without both.
Well, true. I'd been assuming the service would be designed more by folks like Kutaragi's team (who I stand by my statement on them being some pretty sharp folks) than by, say, the Everquest team.:)
...Sony says it will be better than the Xbox 360's features.
'cause no company, anywhere, has ever made claims like this as a matter of course. I mean, I'm sure Sony actually/will/ put together a good service; they have the know-how over in the Sony Online Entertainment division. But did that even really need to be quoted in the article? It's pretty much a given that Company A is going to say, when hyping their product, that it will be better than Company B's.
I mean, can you imagine Nintendo, for instance, coming out and going, "Yes! The Revolution is cool...! But the Xbox 360 is a better product." Even if it were true (and of course, the jury is still out on the competition to the 360), of course they wouldn't say it.;)
For example, Itunes requires your portable mp3 player to be Apple Ipod.
Actually, as long as you are only using non-DRM music in your iTunes, there's actually an API to allow other mobile devices to appear in iTunes (at least under Mac, and presumably so under Windows as well). My Windows Mobile PDA has an option in its synch software to appear in iTunes; I can then synch it just like an iPod, but any Fairplay music is disallowed.
Now, you're right that the iTunes Music Store requires you to have a Fairplay-enabled device, which thus far is only the iPod (and a few iPod-compatible things like phones, where they licensed the tech from Apple). Apple/does/ license Fairplay, I gather... just evidently it's really difficult to find out the terms.:/
I think this is the key; there's no one solution that's perfect for everyone. Me? I find my HTC Blueangel works well. PocketInformant (the PIM I use on Windows Mobile) suits my needs much better than any other mobile device PIM I tried; the GSM/GPRS nature of the phone lets me run mobile AIM (which is actually useful to me, even for work-related stuff), as well as use sshCE if I have to get to one of my servers to fix it. And the built-in keypad, while no real keyboard, is perfectly sufficient for small stuff. (Plus, when on the road and not near a hotspot, I can put the Blueangel near a Bluetooth-enabled laptop and voila, use it as a GPRS wireless modem.)
Blackberry wouldn't work for that, for me, but I know people for who Blackberry/is/ the ideal solution. E-mail on my Blueangel is, to say the least, painful, and not something I routinely do.:)
I was actually commenting based on the Whedonesque thread about that article.:)
The article said he was done with the 'verse entirely, and Joss Whedon corrected it on Whedonesque saying (to paraphrase at least how most people I know read his response) "they were way off; I'm not done with the 'verse, but I don't see it continuing as a TV series."
(Except in typical Whedon-posting-on-the-net manner, he made the response a rambling silly thing with sidelines into Nathan Fillion smelling of turnips.)
Honestly, it's not FOX I see as the roadblock, at this point. It's Joss Whedon and the cast.
Whedon's said that while he still has "other tales to tell in the 'verse," they aren't ones to be told on TV; he's moved on to other projects, and has said that Firefly -- as a TV series -- is done. The cast, after the film, have moved on to other projects as well.
Actors (and director/producer/writer sorts) have to make commitments to projects. With the movie, they were pushing for it too. But now they've had to move on to other jobs, and it seems unlikely that they will all be able to drop everything and run back for a second season.
The only reason the Intel iMac and MacBook Pro can't run Windows, as I understand it, is that they don't have BIOS on the board, but do have 32-bit CPUs.
In the existing x86 world, all 32-bit stuff is still stuck on the old legacy BIOS system, whereas all the 64-bit stuff has moved on to EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). 64-bit versions of Windows will boot out of EFI just fine, but the 32-bit versions only support BIOS. Since the dual-core is a 32-bit CPU...
David Pogue's stuff is pretty hit and miss (I agree that he should be shot for 'Intellese'), but he's right inasmuch as someone probably/is/ going to hack together something that'll load in EFI and pretend to be a BIOS long enough to get Windows loaded. It will not, of course, be a 'driver pack.';)
Nope. The MacBook Pro is the renamed Powerbook, with the new Intel dual-core processor. (I suspect this is partly because power-user sorts would howl bloody murder if the iBook got a generational jump before the Powerbook -- sorry, 'MacBook Pro' -- did.)
I'd imagine the iBooks won't get updated until later in the year.
Not necessarily. Even if it's stored locally (taking broadband out of the equation entirely), a graphics-intensive page -- or one with Flash advertisements -- will always take a longer time to render than one which is, say, mostly text and CSS. Occasionally it will take a MUCH longer time.
This is because of the actual cost of laying out and rendering the page, which is something that can be affected by CPU performance. (If I have a Pentium 233 and a Pentium 4 on the same network link, both running Firefox 1.5, pages will still come up faster on the Pentium 4 than they do on the Pentium 233.)
I suspect that this was what the NYTimes reviewer was referring to, even if he wasn't really *clear* about it.:)
It's not a university-sponsored blog. It's a student-built and student-run service -- www.DogEars.net is the URL. However, you're right that they do rate (and rip on) teachers by name, and they get to do so anonymously. And that the school links to the service, even though they include a disclaimer that 'we take no responsibility for the content.'
Specifically, to elaborate. I remember there being multiple server binaries, each named XF86_card where 'card' was a specific accelerator. I recall -- perhaps erroneously -- running XF86_Mach64 for the Mach 64 chipset, XF86_S3 for the S3 Virge chipset, or XF86_SVGA for a generic SVGA driver.
I admit I haven't used XFree86 for years, but when I did, I recall there having been separate XFree86 compiles for certain different hardware accelerations.
If I mis-recall, or the drivers were already made modular in the time since I stopped using X11, then no, folks are right and this probably really doesn't really have much end-user impact.:)
I would think that there'd be an initial delay, but that in the long run it will actually be rather faster this way. Since if a video card driver wants to not share their info, they can now in theory write a modular driver for X11 and release a little binary video driver module, instead of having to release binaries of the entire X11 system.
Granted, the reality may be different than the ideal, but we can hope, right?
Yeah, pretty much. It's disappointing, but it's also worth withholding final judgment until they're actually done.
To be fair, s2s is a real headache to implement. I can absolutely see Google wanting to open Google Talk and get people playing with it to test the load-balancing on their servers while they work with s2s.
I mean, the fact that they have made a decentralized, stable IM server capable taking on that many connections is not something to be sneezed at; it's not revolutionary, but it's also still a lot of work. They didn't use a stock XMPP server, after all.
The fact that it speaks XMPP is great. Yeah, it doesn't do everything in XMPP yet -- s2s, it doesn't support storing off vCards, it doesn't support pubsub or even disco -- but presumably they'll continue to work on it.
I write Mac software in my spare time, even if I do Windows software for a day job. You'll find no disagreement from me.:)
That said, they started making Carbon specifically to make it possible to move to Mac OS X as painlessly as possible. I'd be willing to bet you money that an old Mac OS 7 program, non-Carbonized, would pretty well have to be rewritten under OS X.
Either way, the idea of moving from one system to a completely different one/did/ force Apple to examine stuff starting back at OS 9, and I think it benefited as a result.
In summary, Microsoft provided the ability to make the system more secure using non-privileged accounts and groups like every other major OS, but application developers are not taking advantage of it. I always run as a non-privileged user, and I am getting sick of applications that have no reason to need administrator privileges not running correctly.
Good assessment. I'd elaborate by adding that the/reason/ people don't program things to do non-administrator (or multi-user) stuff properly is because of legacy stuff, alas.
Let's say you're writing a program. You write it under Win95. Time goes on, Win98 comes out, then WinME, and finally XP. Now, with XP, you can do multi-user stuff... but by now you have a codebase you don't want to have to go back and rewrite all of. Or even with more recent programs, people complain that they want it to run on Win95, or 98, because they don't want to upgrade to XP.
It's really a pain to write something to do everything properly NT-ish/XP-ish multi-user/and/ run on single-user Win9x as well.
Whether or not Mac OS X is inherently 'better,' they picked up a bit of a benefit by the 'throw out the old system and start over with OS X' tactic. By basically creating an entirely different operating system, people really had to redesign their apps for it. Huge investment in time and energy... but as long as they're rewriting their apps anyway, they can rewrite them properly for a multi-user environment.
(Disclaimer: While I write Windows software for a living, Mac OS X software for a hobby, and use both, the Mac is my machine of choice for casual browsing and productivity.)
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Not all of our buses; the 'WiFi Bus' stuff is still being rolled out. 48 buses, scattered across 4 routes. Seems to be working well, though, and they plan to roll it out more widely if it proves popular; it mostly seems to be useful for people stuck in traffic on the way to work, so they can pull out a PDA or a laptop and deal with an e-mail or something.
The difference is that Microsoft will license their DRM to anyone who wants it, where Apple keeps Fairplay a bit more tightly-controlled.
Of course, the 'I can play a DRM-protected WMA file from anything on my Windows box, because it just works with the underlying libraries' is sort of silly; the DRM used in iTMS AAC files is also incorporated into Quicktime, and I can play a Fairplay-protected AAC file anywhere on my Mac that uses Quicktime (background track in iMovie or iDVD stuff? No problem! Of course, the RIAA might have issues, but that's a different matter).
I think the original poster meant that it's easier to debug the entire behavior of a C program than a Java program, which which I agree.
In Java, some of the behavior -- indeed, a lot of the underlying behavior -- when it comes to fine-tuning for performance, or 'why does this thing eat 400 megs of RAM?!' is hidden from the user; it's part of the underlying interpreter, and beyond the view of the debugger. In C, I can track my memory allocations and performance much more readily in a debugger than I can in Java.
I suppose I would've phrased it more that debugging a simple process is easier in Java or other interpreted languages, but debugging to performance-tweak is way, way easier in compiled languages than interpreted ones.
To be fair, I think the point they're trying to make is 'if the songs weren't available online, the in-store sales would be higher.' Specifically, I think this argument is meant to counter the people who say 'if it wasn't available online, no one would buy it.'
:)
Now, I don't think either statement is correct. If the songs weren't available online, yah, in-store sales would be higher, for people who'll buy in whatever format is most convenient. I also think there ARE people who wouldn't bother to go to the stores and buy the CD if they couldn't get it online. But this particular 'study' (which I use in a very loose sense of the word) is an example of something both sides are prone to do, i.e., taking things out of context and trying to use it to back up sweeping generalizations and flawed arguments.
So, yeah, I agree with you that these are stupid numbers being twisted out of context.
...just to get a worse experience than if you just hopped on P2P and pirated music...
:)
I'd disagree. If I wanted to go download Kazaa (and end up with Gator and god-knows-what other spyware on my machine), then go looking for a specific album -- say, 'Stunt' from the Barenaked Ladies -- I suspect it would take me a good while to find all the tracks. Some of the tracks I would find would probably actually be viruses in disguise. Some would be corrupted. The people I'm downloading from might go offline, and my download slows to a crawl. Etc.
In contrast, I go and open Rhapsody, I enter 'Barenaked Ladies' into the Artist search (or 'Stunt' into the Album search), find the album, and click 'play.' No additional charge; it downloads the album into my local Rhapsody library and voila, plays it. For just browsing music, Rhapsody's already beaten out Kazaa/Gnutella/etc.
On iTMS, I go enter 'Barenaked Ladies' into the search bar, I click on 'Stunt' and click 'buy album.' Again, an easier time.
(Or, of course, I could pick up the album from the used CD shop two blocks from my house and just rip it into iTunes, which is what I actually did. But it made a good example nonetheless.)
The reason I choose to use both Rhapsody and iTMS is that I find iTMS works better with my overall personal style of music management (I don't like Rhapsody's library system, plus it isn't available on Mac as a standalone product). But Rhapsody blows away pretty much everything for just browsing of music, and trying out new stuff to see if I like it. iTMS is great, but a 20-second clip is not really enough for me to judge a song by, most times.
Yeah, the DRM can be annoying at times (more with Rhapsody than with iTMS), but not enough so to counter other factors for me.
Still, to each their own.
I'm glad you're happy with your choice not to use a subscription model music service.
Honestly, I tend to think subscription and 'single purchase' models serve different markets. I use both iTunes Music Store (on my Mac) and Rhapsody (on my PC) for different reasons. I've been a Rhapsody user since it first came out, and I love that I can play anything in the Rhapsody library. One monthly fee, and I have access to the whole library.
However, even with the more recent ability to operate while offline, Rhapsody's 'I'm not online' experience is not as good for me as just normal MP3s or stuff I buy from iTMS. So I tend either to buy the music from Rhapsody and burn CDs which I rip back into my iTunes on the Mac, or just buy the tracks from iTMS in the first place.
I find Rhapsody's DRM more of a hassle than Apple's, and I don't like wasting a CD to burn unprotected copies from in Rhapsody if I only want to buy one or two tracks. But I find Rhapsody infinitely better for just browsing and sampling stuff I might be interested in. I think my music experience would be the poorer without both.
That's just my $0.02, anyway.
Well, true. I'd been assuming the service would be designed more by folks like Kutaragi's team (who I stand by my statement on them being some pretty sharp folks) than by, say, the Everquest team. :)
...Sony says it will be better than the Xbox 360's features.
/will/ put together a good service; they have the know-how over in the Sony Online Entertainment division. But did that even really need to be quoted in the article? It's pretty much a given that Company A is going to say, when hyping their product, that it will be better than Company B's.
;)
'cause no company, anywhere, has ever made claims like this as a matter of course. I mean, I'm sure Sony actually
I mean, can you imagine Nintendo, for instance, coming out and going, "Yes! The Revolution is cool...! But the Xbox 360 is a better product." Even if it were true (and of course, the jury is still out on the competition to the 360), of course they wouldn't say it.
Yeah, but PocketInformant is the deal-breaker for me. I really loathe the Blackberry's PIM, for whatever reason. Personal taste, I guess. :)
For example, Itunes requires your portable mp3 player to be Apple Ipod.
/does/ license Fairplay, I gather... just evidently it's really difficult to find out the terms. :/
Actually, as long as you are only using non-DRM music in your iTunes, there's actually an API to allow other mobile devices to appear in iTunes (at least under Mac, and presumably so under Windows as well). My Windows Mobile PDA has an option in its synch software to appear in iTunes; I can then synch it just like an iPod, but any Fairplay music is disallowed.
Now, you're right that the iTunes Music Store requires you to have a Fairplay-enabled device, which thus far is only the iPod (and a few iPod-compatible things like phones, where they licensed the tech from Apple). Apple
Different strokes for different folks.
/is/ the ideal solution. E-mail on my Blueangel is, to say the least, painful, and not something I routinely do. :)
I think this is the key; there's no one solution that's perfect for everyone. Me? I find my HTC Blueangel works well. PocketInformant (the PIM I use on Windows Mobile) suits my needs much better than any other mobile device PIM I tried; the GSM/GPRS nature of the phone lets me run mobile AIM (which is actually useful to me, even for work-related stuff), as well as use sshCE if I have to get to one of my servers to fix it. And the built-in keypad, while no real keyboard, is perfectly sufficient for small stuff. (Plus, when on the road and not near a hotspot, I can put the Blueangel near a Bluetooth-enabled laptop and voila, use it as a GPRS wireless modem.)
Blackberry wouldn't work for that, for me, but I know people for who Blackberry
I was actually commenting based on the Whedonesque thread about that article. :)
The article said he was done with the 'verse entirely, and Joss Whedon corrected it on Whedonesque saying (to paraphrase at least how most people I know read his response) "they were way off; I'm not done with the 'verse, but I don't see it continuing as a TV series."
(Except in typical Whedon-posting-on-the-net manner, he made the response a rambling silly thing with sidelines into Nathan Fillion smelling of turnips.)
Honestly, it's not FOX I see as the roadblock, at this point. It's Joss Whedon and the cast.
Whedon's said that while he still has "other tales to tell in the 'verse," they aren't ones to be told on TV; he's moved on to other projects, and has said that Firefly -- as a TV series -- is done. The cast, after the film, have moved on to other projects as well.
Actors (and director/producer/writer sorts) have to make commitments to projects. With the movie, they were pushing for it too. But now they've had to move on to other jobs, and it seems unlikely that they will all be able to drop everything and run back for a second season.
Obviously, Dogbert actually relies on Dog ex Machina. ;)
The only reason the Intel iMac and MacBook Pro can't run Windows, as I understand it, is that they don't have BIOS on the board, but do have 32-bit CPUs.
/is/ going to hack together something that'll load in EFI and pretend to be a BIOS long enough to get Windows loaded. It will not, of course, be a 'driver pack.' ;)
In the existing x86 world, all 32-bit stuff is still stuck on the old legacy BIOS system, whereas all the 64-bit stuff has moved on to EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). 64-bit versions of Windows will boot out of EFI just fine, but the 32-bit versions only support BIOS. Since the dual-core is a 32-bit CPU...
David Pogue's stuff is pretty hit and miss (I agree that he should be shot for 'Intellese'), but he's right inasmuch as someone probably
Nope. The MacBook Pro is the renamed Powerbook, with the new Intel dual-core processor. (I suspect this is partly because power-user sorts would howl bloody murder if the iBook got a generational jump before the Powerbook -- sorry, 'MacBook Pro' -- did.)
I'd imagine the iBooks won't get updated until later in the year.
Not necessarily. Even if it's stored locally (taking broadband out of the equation entirely), a graphics-intensive page -- or one with Flash advertisements -- will always take a longer time to render than one which is, say, mostly text and CSS. Occasionally it will take a MUCH longer time.
:)
This is because of the actual cost of laying out and rendering the page, which is something that can be affected by CPU performance. (If I have a Pentium 233 and a Pentium 4 on the same network link, both running Firefox 1.5, pages will still come up faster on the Pentium 4 than they do on the Pentium 233.)
I suspect that this was what the NYTimes reviewer was referring to, even if he wasn't really *clear* about it.
It's not a university-sponsored blog. It's a student-built and student-run service -- www.DogEars.net is the URL. However, you're right that they do rate (and rip on) teachers by name, and they get to do so anonymously. And that the school links to the service, even though they include a disclaimer that 'we take no responsibility for the content.'
Specifically, to elaborate. I remember there being multiple server binaries, each named XF86_card where 'card' was a specific accelerator. I recall -- perhaps erroneously -- running XF86_Mach64 for the Mach 64 chipset, XF86_S3 for the S3 Virge chipset, or XF86_SVGA for a generic SVGA driver.
I admit I haven't used XFree86 for years, but when I did, I recall there having been separate XFree86 compiles for certain different hardware accelerations.
:)
If I mis-recall, or the drivers were already made modular in the time since I stopped using X11, then no, folks are right and this probably really doesn't really have much end-user impact.
I would think that there'd be an initial delay, but that in the long run it will actually be rather faster this way. Since if a video card driver wants to not share their info, they can now in theory write a modular driver for X11 and release a little binary video driver module, instead of having to release binaries of the entire X11 system.
Granted, the reality may be different than the ideal, but we can hope, right?
Yeah, pretty much. It's disappointing, but it's also worth withholding final judgment until they're actually done.
To be fair, s2s is a real headache to implement. I can absolutely see Google wanting to open Google Talk and get people playing with it to test the load-balancing on their servers while they work with s2s.
I mean, the fact that they have made a decentralized, stable IM server capable taking on that many connections is not something to be sneezed at; it's not revolutionary, but it's also still a lot of work. They didn't use a stock XMPP server, after all.
The fact that it speaks XMPP is great. Yeah, it doesn't do everything in XMPP yet -- s2s, it doesn't support storing off vCards, it doesn't support pubsub or even disco -- but presumably they'll continue to work on it.
I write Mac software in my spare time, even if I do Windows software for a day job. You'll find no disagreement from me. :)
/did/ force Apple to examine stuff starting back at OS 9, and I think it benefited as a result.
That said, they started making Carbon specifically to make it possible to move to Mac OS X as painlessly as possible. I'd be willing to bet you money that an old Mac OS 7 program, non-Carbonized, would pretty well have to be rewritten under OS X.
Either way, the idea of moving from one system to a completely different one
In summary, Microsoft provided the ability to make the system more secure using non-privileged accounts and groups like every other major OS, but application developers are not taking advantage of it. I always run as a non-privileged user, and I am getting sick of applications that have no reason to need administrator privileges not running correctly.
/reason/ people don't program things to do non-administrator (or multi-user) stuff properly is because of legacy stuff, alas.
/and/ run on single-user Win9x as well.
Good assessment. I'd elaborate by adding that the
Let's say you're writing a program. You write it under Win95. Time goes on, Win98 comes out, then WinME, and finally XP. Now, with XP, you can do multi-user stuff... but by now you have a codebase you don't want to have to go back and rewrite all of. Or even with more recent programs, people complain that they want it to run on Win95, or 98, because they don't want to upgrade to XP.
It's really a pain to write something to do everything properly NT-ish/XP-ish multi-user
Whether or not Mac OS X is inherently 'better,' they picked up a bit of a benefit by the 'throw out the old system and start over with OS X' tactic. By basically creating an entirely different operating system, people really had to redesign their apps for it. Huge investment in time and energy... but as long as they're rewriting their apps anyway, they can rewrite them properly for a multi-user environment.
(Disclaimer: While I write Windows software for a living, Mac OS X software for a hobby, and use both, the Mac is my machine of choice for casual browsing and productivity.)
Yeah, well, it's hard to accurately type how something /sounds/ with only a US-ASCII charset available. You just tried a lot harder than I did.
:)
You get the general idea of what I meant, though, obviously.