Wrong. What became NT was an "advanced projects" branch of OS/2 that Microsoft was developing. It was originally called OS/2 NT. It ended up being very different from mainline OS/2 because Microsoft dropped things like support for 16-bit CPUs very early on, but it's still a fork of OS/2.
The original project to replace Windows's DOS underpinnings was OS/2. The alliance was short-lived, but that doesn't mean it never happened. After the split, Microsoft decided to also call it Windows, leaving the OS/2 trademark to IBM. But trademarks are cheap. Source code lineages are where it's at.
That said, the places where he was wrong are more interesting to me. I wonder what Microsoft's business plan was had IBM taken over with OS/2 instead of them?
It was to rake in (slightly less) dough selling OS/2.
OS/2 was originally a joint Microsoft/IBM effort. What became Windows NT was originally going to be the next version of OS/2, but tensions between MS and IBM increased until Microsoft decided to take its ball and go home.
So really, Bill Gates was 100% correct in saying that OS/2 is the wave of the future. It's just that in 1989 he didn't realize that it was going to be renamed "Windows NT" 3 or 4 years later. Had Microsoft instead decided to continue working with IBM, they would probably still have ended up being stinking rich, just a bit less so.
Because those products are ancient. They've been on the market for literally years, about a decade (!!!) each. How can you possibly make money selling a software brand that old? Adobe and Flash are the Chia Pet and Hula Hoop of the industry. Blah.
TFA is very sparse on details what is so much better about apollo and why that can't be done with flash or java.
The big deal is hardware support. If the laptop comes with Windows preinstalled, there's no way of knowing if Linux drivers exist for, say, the wireless card.
If they sell it with Linux, you can at least be sure that Linux drivers exist and that you'll be able to get everything working when you wipe the hard drive and install your favorite distro.
Personally, I think laptops with Linux preinstalled is barking up the wrong tree. I'd much prefer if Dell, HP, etc. were to just provide a list of which of their models and hardware configurations include only hardware that is known to work well with Linux. They can provide just as much of a guarantee to me that I'll be able to get Slackware or whatever working without having to take the effort to set up all the infrastructure for preinstalling Linux.
It's not about pirating the OS, it's about pirating everything else.
I realized that this was probably part of Microsoft's strategy back in college, when I noticed that almost all of my fellow CS students fell into one of two groups:
1) People who use Linux or some other OS which includes the dev tools for free 2) People who pirate Visual Studio
Then I noticed how stupidly easy it is to pirate Visual Studio compared to the copy protection on a whole lot of software that's far less expensive - say, your average video game.
Of course, this lead to the realization that if Microsoft didn't make Visual Studio so easy to pirate that you can barely spill a beer on your keyboard without accidentally obtaining an unlicensed copy, then a whole lot of Windows users who are learning to program would end up switching to something like Linux just because they couldn't afford to be programmers on Windows. Which would lead to a rapid erosion of Windows's developer base, rapid growth of Linux/BSD's user base, and insanely fast growth of its developer base.
If Jupiter didn't exhibit a strong gravitational pull on the probe, it wouldn't be able to have a significant impact on the probe's orbital velocity.
If Jupiter were not moving w/r/t the sun and the probe, the probe's velocity w/r/t the sun would be no greater after the flyby than before.
The way I see it, both gravity and orbital velocity are necessary components of the gravitational slingshot, so it's fair to say that it's a combination of the two that give the spacecraft its speed boost.
If by "nobody" you mean "none of the studies being published in the peer reviewed journals" and by "that" you mean "the proposition that humans are contributing to CO2 levels" then I agree.
If by "nobody" you mean "nobody", then I disagree. Where are all these newspaper articles and random pundit shoutings coming from if not from journalists and pundits?
If by "that" you mean "the extent to which humans are contributing to CO2 levels" then I couldn't disagree more. This is still a very live issue within the scientific community. Every study I've seen on carbon levels, sinking, and emissions is working toward pinpointing the magnitude of the human component of the problem. This is still a [b]very[/b] live issue.
Grandiose statements like what you're saying are only muddying the waters in the global warming situation. Yes, given all the hard data a sane society would be doing a lot more to cover its ass than we are. But trying to reduce the situation to black-and-white and exaggerating the degree to which there's agreement is doing nothing but setting up straw men so the anti global warming crowd can knock them down and say "Look, see, we're right!"
Well, now we can honor him as the discoverer of the first dwarf planet. It's still a major accomplishment, and what we call Pluto bears not one whit on the value of his efforts or his discovery.
Yeah, I realize that the distinctions among bodies in the solar system are somewhat arbitrary, but the decision to switch Pluto from being a planet to creating a new category called "dwarf planet" is reasoned and rather insightful. Pluto bears a lot more similarity to all the other bodies that fall into the dwarf planet category than it does to other planets. Meanwhile the only reason I can see for legislating Pluto back into planethood is an obsessive need to hold to tradition.
I don't think tongue-in-cheek list I made is completely dissimilar to this situation, in that I'm trying to highlight the asininity of legislation like this. If the law were based on trying to construct a reasonable definition of a planet they would almost certainly have to include similar objects. Like Eris, which also has a trans-Neptunian orbit but is actually larger than Pluto and in that sense is a stronger candidate for planethood.
Possibly it would have been better to come up with something along the lines of "California re-instates neptunium as a chemical element." Neptunium was originally thought to be an element, but was removed from the list as our understanding of chemistry improved and the definition of a chemical element was refined. But I left that out because it lacks the slapstick qualities of the three I did use.
From what I've seen, the people in the know haven't ignored, laughed, or attacked. They've simply responded with their normal skepticism. Solving Sudoku and throwing around buzzwords like NP-complete is a great way to impress the media and all, but they're waiting for solid proof. They could also improve their case by asking their marketing team to shut up for a while and giving their engineers a chance to say something coherent about the invention.
Quickly producing the prime factors of large arbitrary numbers would probably do much to reduce the level of skepticism - not as much as publishing what they did so someone else can try to reproduce their results, but I doubt they're going to be divulging a trade secret like that anytime soon.
They're pretty insulated from this kind of competition, at least in the USA.
When I signed up for high-speed internet access, I had two choices: AT&T DSL or Comcast cable service. For one, that's only two choices. (Which is actually one more choice than I had at my last home, where it was either cable or dialup.)
Secondly, a decision like that isn't as simple as choosing an internet provider - what if you don't have a phone, are you willing to sign up for a phone line just to get your DSL? What if you don't have a TV, are you willing to pay the exorbitant rates that Comcast charges non-TV customers for internet access? How about those phone-internet-TV-in-one packages that everyone's pushing nowadays?
What about the fact that most consumers really don't know enough about networking and the Internet to make much of an informed decision? In my experience a bullet point comparison sounds like gibberish to most people, and they don't have the patience for a more thorough description that they can understand. I have zero confidence that most people care enough to also try to understand the relative merits of various companies' packet scheduling policies.
So, in a word, no - the ISP that upgrades the speed of connections without charging content providers would probably actually be the one at a disadvantage. There wouldn't be enough knowledgeable customers switching to their better service to cover the added cost of providing better service.
The only services of that type that I've seen mentioned in the US are download services for ringtones, games, etc. I don't think most Americans really use their cell phones for anything but making phone calls, taking the odd photograph, and configuring to play loud, annoying, horribly distorted snippets of Backstreet Boys songs whenever someone calls you.
She was shuffled over to another job, it's just that it's a Navy position rather than another NASA one. That's because she doesn't work for NASA. She officially works for the Navy and was assigned to do astronaut detail for NASA.
For one, I'd assume that there would be nothing simple about attacking the remote control station. Unlike airliners, where pretty much anyone can get on if they can afford a ticket, the remote control station would be heavily secured.
If this system is worth its salt, jamming or hijacking the remote control station's signal should also be extremely difficult. Boeing is a major military contractor, I'm sure they know how to do secure radio communications. I doubt many hijackers have access to the kind of equipment it would take to crack a secure transmission that's even close to military-grade.
Finally, they'd still have to get someone who's willing to go on the plane since the system needs to be triggered somehow. That would make timing really tricky - for the "break into the control station" scenario, you'd have to get your guy on the plane to smack the door and trigger the system and have your team who's broken into the control system in place in time to take over the plane, and then hold off the SWAT team or whoever long enough to do something with the plane.
I'm also assuming that they're smart enough to have plenty of fail-safes hardcoded in so that it's impossible to make the plane do a nose dive straight into the ground or something like that.
As suggested above, go and work with the users to figure it out, and then implement it.
I take that a step further - don't just go work with the users. Take some time to do the users' work. This is the absolute best way to get an understanding of their workflow - observing is good and also needs to be done, but when you sit down and do all the tasks yourself it becomes much easier to see which parts of their job are annoying, which parts can be sped up, etc.
At my last job they actually had me doing production work with the people I was designing software for a large portion of the time. This was huge, because it meant that on top of getting a better understanding of how the software I was assigned to work on should behave, I was also able to see spots where new software would be useful and began initiating projects on my own.
Having had that experience, I'm convinced it's the only way to design software. Otherwise it's a blind men and the elephant problem. People who don't know much about software development can't really provide a decent spec because they probably don't know a thing about software design. People who only hack on code can't provide a decent spec because they only have the a foggy, secondhand understanding of the problem domain. Users and programmers getting together for meetings is an improvement, but only a marginal one because there isn't a whole lot of overlap among their knowledge sets, which is a huge barrier to communication.
It's really not that simple. I used to live in a fairly small town (Galesburg, IL) where there was really only one provider for high-speed internet access. As a result, the price of broadband was very high, prohibitively so for most the residents in the town, which had a relatively depressed economy.
Several years back, the local government tried to set up a municipal ISP to provide cheap broadband for no profit. The final decision of whether or not to go for it was left to a referendum. In the months leading up to it, the local cable company (who would lose a lot of money if this went through) ran a massive campaign to turn public opinion against the municipal broadband project. At the same time, the law did not allow the city to run a similar campaign in favor of the plan. So the only information being disseminated to most voters was completely anti (FUD, mostly), and few of them got much of a chance to hear the other side of the story, let alone a reasoned and balanced overview of the pros and cons of municipal broadband.
Naturally, it got voted down. And it wasn't because the electorate was dumb. Due to the nature of the law and the fact that money is speech and the cable company had all the money, most voters simply were not informed on the issue - and it's a blue collar town, so most the people simply didn't have enough knowledge of technology to really be able to inform themselves. Maybe the plan still would have broken down had the whole situation not been a complete failure of democracy, but saying it's as simple as the electorate being able to ask for it if they're smart enough is a gross oversimplifcation of reality.
"Can Apple subvert IT departments' love of Microsoft and IBM?"
I'm not sure it's even a love of Microsoft and IBM so much as a love of control and hostility to change, especially change not implemented by them.
I've seen a government office's IT department refuse to send a standard USB mouse to a team that needed one for a Mac they had purchased because "we don't know how to support a Mac." Even after the head of the team had calmly explained to them that all they need to know in this particular case is how to tell a USB connector from a PS/2 connector. I don't see anything there but the IT department trying to play power games - something that I see hints of every single time I go out to visit a client site.
Because more of his other customers are moving to Macs, and now that he's had to use them, he actually PREFERS THEM! He's thinking about getting one for himself!
That story is becoming more and more common. I became a Mac person after having worked at a job where I had to provide tech support for PC's running Windows and Linux and Macs running OS9 and OS X. OS9 has never impressed me, but I quickly moved over to the Mac camp because I found them so much easier to work with, especially when it came to fixing broken ones. Same thing happened for a number of other people I worked with at the same job.
I don't have any concrete numbers, but I used to work at a company that used run a mixed Mac/PC shop. Story goes, a couple years before I started they transitioned to being nearly 100% Mac because the cost to develop & maintain in-house sofware was much higher on Win than OS X.
Having recently switched from being a ObjC/Cocoa developer at that company to being a VB.NET developer at the new job, I'm willing to believe it.
My biggest pet peeve on dialogs is that quite a few Windows apps I use at work display dialogs with two buttons, "Cancel" and "No". In a situation like this, "Cancel" is usually the one you want to click to say "Yeah, I really did want to do that," but sometimes it's "No."
(This usually happens in the context of clicking an abort or stop button.)
True, window shadows are huge. Oftentimes when I have a lot of overlapping windows on Windows, my eyes start to cross. If there's a window stacked behind the one I'm currently working with but shifted slightly to the right, I'm much more likely to grab its scrollbar (instead of the one for the current window) in Windows than I am in OS X, because Windows provides absolutely no visual depth cues.
From a perspective like this, Aero's use of transparency is a step in the wrong direction; the visual cues that come from it are all confusing.
I don't think that pretty widgets were meant to be a productivity booster,and any article that says that you can be productive on a mac for more than the generic things and like 2-3 specialized apps has a built in bias.
No offense, but I see a lot more built-in bias in automatically discounting any article that says you can be productive on a Mac.
Anybody worth their salt will agree that the pretty widgets, animations, etc. on OS X are nothing but eye candy. But there are plenty of solid arguments for why OS X's interface still does a better job of facilitating productivity. Here are a few that come to mind. (Note that all of these points are orthogonal to cosmetic issues such as the particular bitmap that is used to draw a button.)
The standard Mac OS widgets offer a wider range of functionality than most equivalent Windows widgets. I find that I'm much more likely to feel the need to develop custom interface elements on Windows in order to get the behavior I need for exactly this reason. This leads to less consistency among applications, since different people tend to come up with different solutions to the same problem. Cocoa has done a much better job of cutting this off at the pass. A strong example is tables and tree views on Mac OS versus Windows.
OS X's interface doesn't condescend to the user as much or demand as much attention. There's also a much stronger culture of consistency for dialog messages. When using Windows, I spend a lot more time dismissing unnecessary dialogs and trying to figure out whether to click "yes" or "no" on a confusingly-worded confirmation dialog. (Like I said, this is largely cultural, but I put a lot of blame on Microsoft for this since they set an exceedingly bad example in their own OS - it's not uncommon for me to have to read a warning from the OS itself two or three times to figure out exactly what Windows is trying to say.)
OS X's interface is much more stable. For example, the sidebar in the Finder is static. The sidebar in the Explorer is constantly rearranging itself, adding and deleting items, etc. based on what folder or whatever-the-hell it is (control panel, network places) I'm looking at. It even changes when I select items. This leads to a lot of time spent scratching one's head trying to figure out, say, where the "Create New Folder" sidebar item went, or wondering why the Desktop link went away.
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OS/2 and NT are different animals.
Wrong. What became NT was an "advanced projects" branch of OS/2 that Microsoft was developing. It was originally called OS/2 NT. It ended up being very different from mainline OS/2 because Microsoft dropped things like support for 16-bit CPUs very early on, but it's still a fork of OS/2.
The original project to replace Windows's DOS underpinnings was OS/2. The alliance was short-lived, but that doesn't mean it never happened. After the split, Microsoft decided to also call it Windows, leaving the OS/2 trademark to IBM. But trademarks are cheap. Source code lineages are where it's at.
That said, the places where he was wrong are more interesting to me. I wonder what Microsoft's business plan was had IBM taken over with OS/2 instead of them?
It was to rake in (slightly less) dough selling OS/2.
OS/2 was originally a joint Microsoft/IBM effort. What became Windows NT was originally going to be the next version of OS/2, but tensions between MS and IBM increased until Microsoft decided to take its ball and go home.
So really, Bill Gates was 100% correct in saying that OS/2 is the wave of the future. It's just that in 1989 he didn't realize that it was going to be renamed "Windows NT" 3 or 4 years later. Had Microsoft instead decided to continue working with IBM, they would probably still have ended up being stinking rich, just a bit less so.
Because those products are ancient. They've been on the market for literally years, about a decade (!!!) each. How can you possibly make money selling a software brand that old? Adobe and Flash are the Chia Pet and Hula Hoop of the industry. Blah.
You would clearly make a terrible manager.
The big deal is hardware support. If the laptop comes with Windows preinstalled, there's no way of knowing if Linux drivers exist for, say, the wireless card.
If they sell it with Linux, you can at least be sure that Linux drivers exist and that you'll be able to get everything working when you wipe the hard drive and install your favorite distro.
Personally, I think laptops with Linux preinstalled is barking up the wrong tree. I'd much prefer if Dell, HP, etc. were to just provide a list of which of their models and hardware configurations include only hardware that is known to work well with Linux. They can provide just as much of a guarantee to me that I'll be able to get Slackware or whatever working without having to take the effort to set up all the infrastructure for preinstalling Linux.
It's not about pirating the OS, it's about pirating everything else.
I realized that this was probably part of Microsoft's strategy back in college, when I noticed that almost all of my fellow CS students fell into one of two groups:
1) People who use Linux or some other OS which includes the dev tools for free
2) People who pirate Visual Studio
Then I noticed how stupidly easy it is to pirate Visual Studio compared to the copy protection on a whole lot of software that's far less expensive - say, your average video game.
Of course, this lead to the realization that if Microsoft didn't make Visual Studio so easy to pirate that you can barely spill a beer on your keyboard without accidentally obtaining an unlicensed copy, then a whole lot of Windows users who are learning to program would end up switching to something like Linux just because they couldn't afford to be programmers on Windows. Which would lead to a rapid erosion of Windows's developer base, rapid growth of Linux/BSD's user base, and insanely fast growth of its developer base.
If Jupiter didn't exhibit a strong gravitational pull on the probe, it wouldn't be able to have a significant impact on the probe's orbital velocity.
If Jupiter were not moving w/r/t the sun and the probe, the probe's velocity w/r/t the sun would be no greater after the flyby than before.
The way I see it, both gravity and orbital velocity are necessary components of the gravitational slingshot, so it's fair to say that it's a combination of the two that give the spacecraft its speed boost.
If by "nobody" you mean "none of the studies being published in the peer reviewed journals" and by "that" you mean "the proposition that humans are contributing to CO2 levels" then I agree.
If by "nobody" you mean "nobody", then I disagree. Where are all these newspaper articles and random pundit shoutings coming from if not from journalists and pundits?
If by "that" you mean "the extent to which humans are contributing to CO2 levels" then I couldn't disagree more. This is still a very live issue within the scientific community. Every study I've seen on carbon levels, sinking, and emissions is working toward pinpointing the magnitude of the human component of the problem. This is still a [b]very[/b] live issue.
Grandiose statements like what you're saying are only muddying the waters in the global warming situation. Yes, given all the hard data a sane society would be doing a lot more to cover its ass than we are. But trying to reduce the situation to black-and-white and exaggerating the degree to which there's agreement is doing nothing but setting up straw men so the anti global warming crowd can knock them down and say "Look, see, we're right!"
Mod parent up.
Nobody's denying that CO2 is a greenhouse gas or that the levels of it are increasing. The debate is over where all this extra CO2 is coming from.
Well, now we can honor him as the discoverer of the first dwarf planet. It's still a major accomplishment, and what we call Pluto bears not one whit on the value of his efforts or his discovery.
Yeah, I realize that the distinctions among bodies in the solar system are somewhat arbitrary, but the decision to switch Pluto from being a planet to creating a new category called "dwarf planet" is reasoned and rather insightful. Pluto bears a lot more similarity to all the other bodies that fall into the dwarf planet category than it does to other planets. Meanwhile the only reason I can see for legislating Pluto back into planethood is an obsessive need to hold to tradition.
I don't think tongue-in-cheek list I made is completely dissimilar to this situation, in that I'm trying to highlight the asininity of legislation like this. If the law were based on trying to construct a reasonable definition of a planet they would almost certainly have to include similar objects. Like Eris, which also has a trans-Neptunian orbit but is actually larger than Pluto and in that sense is a stronger candidate for planethood.
Possibly it would have been better to come up with something along the lines of "California re-instates neptunium as a chemical element." Neptunium was originally thought to be an element, but was removed from the list as our understanding of chemistry improved and the definition of a chemical element was refined. But I left that out because it lacks the slapstick qualities of the three I did use.
Illinois to vote on a bill to define pi as 22/7.
Oklahoma's legislature to say that eclipses really are dragons eating the moon.
North Carolina is considering a bill to re-instate earth, water, air, and fire as elements.
From what I've seen, the people in the know haven't ignored, laughed, or attacked. They've simply responded with their normal skepticism. Solving Sudoku and throwing around buzzwords like NP-complete is a great way to impress the media and all, but they're waiting for solid proof. They could also improve their case by asking their marketing team to shut up for a while and giving their engineers a chance to say something coherent about the invention.
Quickly producing the prime factors of large arbitrary numbers would probably do much to reduce the level of skepticism - not as much as publishing what they did so someone else can try to reproduce their results, but I doubt they're going to be divulging a trade secret like that anytime soon.
They're pretty insulated from this kind of competition, at least in the USA.
When I signed up for high-speed internet access, I had two choices: AT&T DSL or Comcast cable service. For one, that's only two choices. (Which is actually one more choice than I had at my last home, where it was either cable or dialup.)
Secondly, a decision like that isn't as simple as choosing an internet provider - what if you don't have a phone, are you willing to sign up for a phone line just to get your DSL? What if you don't have a TV, are you willing to pay the exorbitant rates that Comcast charges non-TV customers for internet access? How about those phone-internet-TV-in-one packages that everyone's pushing nowadays?
What about the fact that most consumers really don't know enough about networking and the Internet to make much of an informed decision? In my experience a bullet point comparison sounds like gibberish to most people, and they don't have the patience for a more thorough description that they can understand. I have zero confidence that most people care enough to also try to understand the relative merits of various companies' packet scheduling policies.
So, in a word, no - the ISP that upgrades the speed of connections without charging content providers would probably actually be the one at a disadvantage. There wouldn't be enough knowledgeable customers switching to their better service to cover the added cost of providing better service.
The only services of that type that I've seen mentioned in the US are download services for ringtones, games, etc. I don't think most Americans really use their cell phones for anything but making phone calls, taking the odd photograph, and configuring to play loud, annoying, horribly distorted snippets of Backstreet Boys songs whenever someone calls you.
She was shuffled over to another job, it's just that it's a Navy position rather than another NASA one. That's because she doesn't work for NASA. She officially works for the Navy and was assigned to do astronaut detail for NASA.
For one, I'd assume that there would be nothing simple about attacking the remote control station. Unlike airliners, where pretty much anyone can get on if they can afford a ticket, the remote control station would be heavily secured.
If this system is worth its salt, jamming or hijacking the remote control station's signal should also be extremely difficult. Boeing is a major military contractor, I'm sure they know how to do secure radio communications. I doubt many hijackers have access to the kind of equipment it would take to crack a secure transmission that's even close to military-grade.
Finally, they'd still have to get someone who's willing to go on the plane since the system needs to be triggered somehow. That would make timing really tricky - for the "break into the control station" scenario, you'd have to get your guy on the plane to smack the door and trigger the system and have your team who's broken into the control system in place in time to take over the plane, and then hold off the SWAT team or whoever long enough to do something with the plane.
I'm also assuming that they're smart enough to have plenty of fail-safes hardcoded in so that it's impossible to make the plane do a nose dive straight into the ground or something like that.
As suggested above, go and work with the users to figure it out, and then implement it.
I take that a step further - don't just go work with the users. Take some time to do the users' work. This is the absolute best way to get an understanding of their workflow - observing is good and also needs to be done, but when you sit down and do all the tasks yourself it becomes much easier to see which parts of their job are annoying, which parts can be sped up, etc.
At my last job they actually had me doing production work with the people I was designing software for a large portion of the time. This was huge, because it meant that on top of getting a better understanding of how the software I was assigned to work on should behave, I was also able to see spots where new software would be useful and began initiating projects on my own.
Having had that experience, I'm convinced it's the only way to design software. Otherwise it's a blind men and the elephant problem. People who don't know much about software development can't really provide a decent spec because they probably don't know a thing about software design. People who only hack on code can't provide a decent spec because they only have the a foggy, secondhand understanding of the problem domain. Users and programmers getting together for meetings is an improvement, but only a marginal one because there isn't a whole lot of overlap among their knowledge sets, which is a huge barrier to communication.
It's really not that simple. I used to live in a fairly small town (Galesburg, IL) where there was really only one provider for high-speed internet access. As a result, the price of broadband was very high, prohibitively so for most the residents in the town, which had a relatively depressed economy.
Several years back, the local government tried to set up a municipal ISP to provide cheap broadband for no profit. The final decision of whether or not to go for it was left to a referendum. In the months leading up to it, the local cable company (who would lose a lot of money if this went through) ran a massive campaign to turn public opinion against the municipal broadband project. At the same time, the law did not allow the city to run a similar campaign in favor of the plan. So the only information being disseminated to most voters was completely anti (FUD, mostly), and few of them got much of a chance to hear the other side of the story, let alone a reasoned and balanced overview of the pros and cons of municipal broadband.
Naturally, it got voted down. And it wasn't because the electorate was dumb. Due to the nature of the law and the fact that money is speech and the cable company had all the money, most voters simply were not informed on the issue - and it's a blue collar town, so most the people simply didn't have enough knowledge of technology to really be able to inform themselves. Maybe the plan still would have broken down had the whole situation not been a complete failure of democracy, but saying it's as simple as the electorate being able to ask for it if they're smart enough is a gross oversimplifcation of reality.
That overview you linked is full of a lot of distracting chatter.
The short and simple answer is: Kernel_task is the kernel.
"Can Apple subvert IT departments' love of Microsoft and IBM?"
I'm not sure it's even a love of Microsoft and IBM so much as a love of control and hostility to change, especially change not implemented by them.
I've seen a government office's IT department refuse to send a standard USB mouse to a team that needed one for a Mac they had purchased because "we don't know how to support a Mac." Even after the head of the team had calmly explained to them that all they need to know in this particular case is how to tell a USB connector from a PS/2 connector. I don't see anything there but the IT department trying to play power games - something that I see hints of every single time I go out to visit a client site.
Because more of his other customers are moving to Macs, and now that he's had to use them, he actually PREFERS THEM! He's thinking about getting one for himself!
That story is becoming more and more common. I became a Mac person after having worked at a job where I had to provide tech support for PC's running Windows and Linux and Macs running OS9 and OS X. OS9 has never impressed me, but I quickly moved over to the Mac camp because I found them so much easier to work with, especially when it came to fixing broken ones. Same thing happened for a number of other people I worked with at the same job.
I don't have any concrete numbers, but I used to work at a company that used run a mixed Mac/PC shop. Story goes, a couple years before I started they transitioned to being nearly 100% Mac because the cost to develop & maintain in-house sofware was much higher on Win than OS X.
Having recently switched from being a ObjC/Cocoa developer at that company to being a VB.NET developer at the new job, I'm willing to believe it.
My biggest pet peeve on dialogs is that quite a few Windows apps I use at work display dialogs with two buttons, "Cancel" and "No". In a situation like this, "Cancel" is usually the one you want to click to say "Yeah, I really did want to do that," but sometimes it's "No."
(This usually happens in the context of clicking an abort or stop button.)
True, window shadows are huge. Oftentimes when I have a lot of overlapping windows on Windows, my eyes start to cross. If there's a window stacked behind the one I'm currently working with but shifted slightly to the right, I'm much more likely to grab its scrollbar (instead of the one for the current window) in Windows than I am in OS X, because Windows provides absolutely no visual depth cues.
From a perspective like this, Aero's use of transparency is a step in the wrong direction; the visual cues that come from it are all confusing.
I don't think that pretty widgets were meant to be a productivity booster,and any article that says that you can be productive on a mac for more than the generic things and like 2-3 specialized apps has a built in bias.
No offense, but I see a lot more built-in bias in automatically discounting any article that says you can be productive on a Mac.
Anybody worth their salt will agree that the pretty widgets, animations, etc. on OS X are nothing but eye candy. But there are plenty of solid arguments for why OS X's interface still does a better job of facilitating productivity. Here are a few that come to mind. (Note that all of these points are orthogonal to cosmetic issues such as the particular bitmap that is used to draw a button.)
The standard Mac OS widgets offer a wider range of functionality than most equivalent Windows widgets. I find that I'm much more likely to feel the need to develop custom interface elements on Windows in order to get the behavior I need for exactly this reason. This leads to less consistency among applications, since different people tend to come up with different solutions to the same problem. Cocoa has done a much better job of cutting this off at the pass. A strong example is tables and tree views on Mac OS versus Windows.
OS X's interface doesn't condescend to the user as much or demand as much attention. There's also a much stronger culture of consistency for dialog messages. When using Windows, I spend a lot more time dismissing unnecessary dialogs and trying to figure out whether to click "yes" or "no" on a confusingly-worded confirmation dialog. (Like I said, this is largely cultural, but I put a lot of blame on Microsoft for this since they set an exceedingly bad example in their own OS - it's not uncommon for me to have to read a warning from the OS itself two or three times to figure out exactly what Windows is trying to say.)
OS X's interface is much more stable. For example, the sidebar in the Finder is static. The sidebar in the Explorer is constantly rearranging itself, adding and deleting items, etc. based on what folder or whatever-the-hell it is (control panel, network places) I'm looking at. It even changes when I select items. This leads to a lot of time spent scratching one's head trying to figure out, say, where the "Create New Folder" sidebar item went, or wondering why the Desktop link went away.