the names were not chosen by marketers - or open source developers. the names were chosen by the original Bell Labs researchers who developed it. the same guys who named their last OS Plan 9, after Plan 9 from Outer Space, an earlier window system 8½ after the movie by the same name, and an earlier OS Unix, as a pun on a the last project they were involved in, Multics.
Inferno was developed by the same lab - and many of the same individuals - who developed Plan 9 and, earlier, Unix. that lab did all the early development, and while the primary development is now done by Vita Nuova, there remains collaboration between them (and it helps that Plan 9 and Inferno are very similar under the hood).
Of particular note is that Dennis Ritchie has written exactly two language reference manuals in his life: C and Limbo. that says a lot to me, anyway.
name dropping aside, Limbo really is a huge win for user-mode programming. the channel stuff isn't bizarre at all - it's a very elegant way to handle inter-process communication. Python's got nothing on Limbo for this.
Re:Air pollution is not strictly a recent phenomen
on
More on Global Dimming
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· Score: 1
And London's pretty much the same as it ever was.;-)
this sort of air pollution, however, was isolated in scope. there's other cities that have had pollution problems (more commonly water, dumping sewage into the river), but the phenomenon of people producing so much pollution that it impacts the climate on a global scale is a comparatively new thing.
Now multiply that 40 some by the thounsands of techs just like me...
yeah, and we get what, $400,000? maybe $4M? do you realize that, based on their last quarter's results, that's one hour of microsoft's overall revenue? not even. (assuming 30 day months and 24 hour days) they can either spend that money looking to prevent worm X (knowing full well that, unless they're going to spend 100 times that much to fix the more fundamental issues, worm Y is just going to come along), or they can spend it implementing some other lock-in "feature" for their word processor. not a hard math question for them.
what's more, they don't care because they don't pay the bills. do you realize how many people simply consider this the part of the cost of doing business? the majority of companies out there just don't see an alternative. we (our R&D and IT departments) have managed to force ours to pay attention (all our new services will be deployed on Xserves, and all our R&D and IT staff have Apple laptops), but a few upper management types still just don't see that there's another choice.
mean, back to your car reference: If you drove through a bad neighborhood and a guy runs out, beats your window in with a baseball bat, and steals your backback, is the car company responsible for not making unbreakable windows?
no, you're quite right, this is ridiculous. but if some guy were to run out, beat your window in with a baseball bat, and periodically when this happened your car and six randomly chosen cars nearby (all by the same manufacturer) blew up, and the car company new this when selling the cars, is the car company then partially responsible? i certainly think so, and i think case history backs that.
first, a minor point: Great Britain also refers to the island upon which England, Scotland, and Whales are located, not just the political entity. the political entity's name derived from the geographical entity. the former was made official in 1707, the later became common during the 16th century as an effort to distinguish the island from the French peninsula of Brittany, or Lesser Britain.
A country can only afford to have ONE culture
and here's the second point. this is just nonsense. i mean, c'mon. read your own post. have you been to northern ireland? wales? heck, i'm in london, maybe a mile from brick lane, and that's like another country. i'm from america, and i can tell you that there's very little cultural commonality between, say, northeast New Jersey and rural Tennessee, or San Francisco and Louisiana. Hawai'i has different cultures from block to block, and Texas is just plain different. and america's nothing compared to canada or a half dozen european countries i could name.
sure, it's important to have a common baseline, and while i personally think a common language is a good thing to include there, it's by no means necessary, and we've got existence proofs for that. like, um, whales.
WTF?!? no offence intended to parent - it had to be done, and someone was bound to (and it actually manages to be relevant this time) - but how in creation did this get moderated as "Informative"?
i'm going over to meta-moderate right now just on the hopes of getting that mod.
i call nonsense! you still have source. you can still release patches. the fact that they'll only work with one distribution is a minor deal, if what you're really after is fixing some problem with that distribution or adding some feature to it. patches are seldom valid across version of the same code line, either. this is not any form of vendor lock in. i'm not stuck with Red Hat here. in the MS world, you nobody else is able to produce these patches. that's vendor lock-in.
We all assume that the kernel is the kernel that is maintained by kernel.org and that Linux won't fork the way UNIX did..right?
not unless we're fscking idiots we don't. who's ever assumed that? can we not see history? it's not like this is ancient history buried in the deepest reaches of time, unless that means twenty years back. the motivations that led to forking unix are exactly the same ones that have - not will, have - led to forking linux.
but y'know what? forking is manageable. unix systems interoperate. programs can be written mostly-portably. it could be better, but it could be a hell of a lot worse. forking isn't fatal.
the x-term + back-room server model works great if you already have an IT staff on-site for other reasons. but it involves running the server and keeping the terminal hardware up. again, x-terms are great. i've admin'd sites with that model, and it's wonderful to be able to just replace the whole unit and have to do near-zero config when one breaks. but they do break. on our floor of ~30 NCD x-terms, we swapped out about one a month. note, also, that x-terms aren't as cheap as you'd think - i'm constantly surprised by how expensive they are, actually. that is, if you're buying from a reputable vendor, but the dirt cheap ones usually have a corresponding increase in problems.
i've done the x-term thing, and i've admin'd mac networks. for about 90% of the applications, the later has better cost factors. not to mention usability factors. remember that the most expensive thing in this question is almost always human time. oh, and i've also admin'd large Win32-based networks. that makes sense about 0% of the time.
i'm not normally prone to responding to sigs, but since it's related in kind to the grammar discussion being had in the message body, i figured i'd go for it.
there is, in current english, no difference in meaning between "while" and "whilst". the former is older, and the later derives from it. the exact form or time of the derivation is not known, but the leading theory is that it originated in southern england based on confusing the -s ending (whiles) with the -st ending (thus, whilst). the -s ending was added to make the word genitive. the first hit off google gives a reasonably good explanation.
we actually have a british client that requested the use of "whilst" in parts of our systems. i still find it's use by non-brits (who can be excused because they grew up with it) pretentious.
what?!? usenet's been home to some of the best (most skillful and most tasteful) april fool's jokes on the net ever! check your history. google for kremvax, which made its debut 20 years ago today.
you're right, that was too simplistic. Apple was not beyond reproach in that, as (as you noted) much did indeed come from Xerox PARC. but the main thrust of the suit was not that, but the "look and feel" - hence the name. the main issues of contention were the metaphor and the specific design choices. oh, and Xerox weren't the only people doing overlapping windows back then. again, the blit/jerq family had them before the Mac came out, and i believe they were the first with concurrently running multiple overlapping windows. anyway, that's not the core point here (although it's certainly interesting). while i was simplifying, the point remains that Apple does not have microsoft's history of using litigation as a core business tool.
but your observation raises another question: i wonder if Apple would have been more successful had they stuck to more constrained suits. huh. i could probably draw parallels here to another current lawsuit that should've stayed a pure, simple contract dispute, but the plaintiff has blown way out of proportion, thus torpedoing their own case. but i won't do that. nope.
You have a good point that, without competition, other systems, such as MacOS or OS X, would not be as good as they are today. but how much better would they be if they had real competition. microsoft stifles competition - there's simply no question on this (even the US courts have agreed - they just haven't decided what to do about it yet). what if microsoft hadn't pushed out all the other competition? microsoft competes primarily with market share and legal weight - not innovation or technology. i'd love to see apple have to contend with, say, a Be that wasn't trashed by anti-competative business practices, or an OS/2 that wasn't stolen from and sank so MS could go do WinNT. Apple would be better if MS either didn't exist or wasn't big enough to kill any real innovation from outside sources. hell, Windows would be better if it had to contend with more competition for longer.
i know how to pay my dues and respects well, too. Kernighan, Ritchie, and Thompson, for example, have my eternal gratitude. so do the folks at PARC who's names i don't remember. Gates and MicroSoft have stifled competition and slowed the pace of innovation, and for that they have my contempt and disgust.
When Microsoft came out with Windows, Apple sued Microsoft in the famous 'look-n-feel' lawsuits.
If Microsoft hadn't prevailed in those lawsuits, Apple would own the GUI market and be it's sole vendor.
um, no.
Apple sued Microsoft not because they had produced a GUI, but because they had produced a GUI that was largely a clear derivative of Apple's. i really wish Apple had won that suit. not because i wanted to see MicroSoft get it (hey, i thought Macs were dumb back then, and was a DOS user!), but because it would've forced them to do something else. there are other ways to do GUIs. look at the dozens of X11 window managers that use totally different designs (okay most are trying to be just like MS or Apple, but some aren't). Look at Plan 9, with rio and especially Acme - or Oberon, for that matter. there's tons of sucky examples, too (Bob!). hell, some were even concurrent with Apple's work! read up on the blit/jerq from Bell Labs and all the PARC stuff Apple got their ideas from.
Apple has certainly used litigation to achieve some goals in the past, but i've seen no evidence of them holding the same "we'll sue you if we can't come up with a better way to own everything" model MicroSoft seems to have. i can see no support for the statement that Apple was trying to "own" the GUI market or the GUI - although you could argue that they were trying to "own" the metaphor and design. but i think that's justifiable, and would likely have been a good thing, forcing people to come up with other ideas.
Yes......Building codes are ways for government and unions to assert control over individual builders.
nonesense. the fact that some people did, indeed build safe buildings for a variety of reasons before the widespread adoption of building codes does nothing to change the fact that codes have generally made buildings substantially safer. i've had the benefit of being involved in small-scale construction projects in areas with various degrees of strictness in their codes (or just none at all for the scale we were working on), and i can tell you first hand the codes result in a much safer construction on average.
[on private-owned roads]
Again, yes, like the Dulles Greenway...
having lived in the DC area, this is indeed a tempting example, but one example does not an argument make. as a counter, i would point to the entire US Interstate system - much larger in scope, highly efficient non-toll, and federally defined. the US Route system is a less formal example of much the same thing.
[on Communications Standards]
How long do you think the market would stand two incompatible standards before one of the two started specing in some interoperability?
quite some time, and we've all seen it! GSM vs. CDMA? DVD*? MP3 vs. WMA vs. Real vs. whatever? PPTP vs L2TP? the list goes on. there's plenty of innovation here, but it's all hugely inefficient. AT&T, for all their faults, did an excellent job of offering a unified, consistent, and efficient communications system to their users, and without a tenth the abuse much smaller modern monopolies heap out on people. the result is the PSTN and SS7, which provides a solid framework so that users are assured some minimal interoperability, but other operators still have the ability to innovate. recognition of this is why people like vonage and packet8 are "real", and all the folks who're just doing VoIP without paying attention to the PSTN are toy players.
[on the Civil War - wow] okay, i totally agree that the parent is off in attributing such importance to the difference in rail gauge... but you're on pretty thin ice yourself.
...the big problem was that Lincoln's government was trying to dictate what the States could and could not do, imposing one set of standards for radically different geographies and economies.
that's a pretty darned one-sided view of things. the South was also pissed that the federal government wouldn't impose the standards they wanted. the north was perfectly happy (as political entities, anyway - not all the people) to have slavery continue in the south, they just didn't want to have to respect it. there was a huge issue around the South's desire to force the North to recognize their individual laws. you could even say that this tension was all caused by the lack of firm, clear standards early on, and that - as is always the case - back-fitting them afterwards caused things to break. but, of course, this was a real war, not a point in an argument, and the real reasons were tremendously more complex than we're going to work out in a slashdot article.
[on the early and current Internet]
...the early internet was controlled by the DoD......Even now, one corporation controls DNS
the early internet was a DARPA project, yes, but implemented by a handful of universities. there were mandated standards, yes, but that's exactly the point! these standards allowed interoperability, but were minimal enough to allow for a tremendous amount of innovation (even if much of it does suck - i'm no fan of most Internet tech). and i'm curious which company you think controls DNS. it's a cooperation between a number of companies appointed by an organization (supposedly?) operating in the public trust. verisign's recent stupidity with SiteFinder should show that there's less central control t
back in school, me and a friend of mine used to go back and forth all the time. i was firmly on the PC side, even DOS/Windows (i've since gotten better), she was mac. this was about system 7 and 8 days. she loved the fact that things "just worked", i liked the fact that i could make the thing do anything i wanted by editing text files, poking at the registry, and mucking around with things in DOS.
then i got a job.:-)
i got hooked on Unix myself, then eventually Plan 9 and Inferno (still hooked). and i came to hate windows. when i got moved from my job supporting ~50 unix users at various sites and one server to supporting 5-10 windows users and no servers, and the later took far more time and energy, i was just plain done with it. later on, at another job, i admin'd a group doing cross-platform development. we had maybe 10 combinations of unix OS and hardware platform. it was easy (except for AIX - stupid SMIT). we also had a few Mac guys doing marketing work - and after setting them up, i never touched them again. really. and that's when it hit me: they just worked. we were running system 8.
after that, i basically broke things down like this: BSD on PCs for tech workers, Solaris on Sparc or Irix for servers, Macs for everyone else. it just became obvious how dumb giving the various secretaries and business folks anything but a mac was. they didn't need or care about the Unix power, they wanted it to just do what they expected it to, and i didn't want to have to fiddle with it.
now, it's even better. i can solidly and confidently recommend Macs for almost everything (the "almost" being a few friends who want to run specific games, our finance people at work, and portions of our ops staff that has to run a custom Win32 app we're in the process of replacing with something cross-platform - so the need for Win32 is decreasing!).
so yeah. i kinda hated macs in school, then realized that they had their place for non-tech people. and now, "their place" is everywhere! the best unix workstations on the planet.
...I think its time for the ACCC to say to SCO 'wait for the U.S outcomes before taking action here.
um, what? why? one country's legal system shouldn't be beholden to another's. this is true regardless of the outcome. SCO shouldn't have to wait to start sending out licenses or lawsuits in any jurisdiction outside the US - and every other country should have to wait to say "bugger off!" or the nearest local equivalent. why the hell is the US legal system some sort of benchmark for the world? (asked by an american)
oh, come on!
first of all, if they question your "reasons to upload", tell 'em "because i pay you to be able to". second, surely you can think of something creative? you run a web site and need to upload new pages. you exchange (your own) photos with a friend. hell, you do video chat! there's plenty of reasons to upload that verizon won't have any problem with.
Slashdot Mirror
the names were not chosen by marketers - or open source developers. the names were chosen by the original Bell Labs researchers who developed it. the same guys who named their last OS Plan 9, after Plan 9 from Outer Space, an earlier window system 8½ after the movie by the same name, and an earlier OS Unix, as a pun on a the last project they were involved in, Multics.
you, um, may have heard of that Unix project.
Inferno was developed by the same lab - and many of the same individuals - who developed Plan 9 and, earlier, Unix. that lab did all the early development, and while the primary development is now done by Vita Nuova, there remains collaboration between them (and it helps that Plan 9 and Inferno are very similar under the hood).
Of particular note is that Dennis Ritchie has written exactly two language reference manuals in his life: C and Limbo. that says a lot to me, anyway.
name dropping aside, Limbo really is a huge win for user-mode programming. the channel stuff isn't bizarre at all - it's a very elegant way to handle inter-process communication. Python's got nothing on Limbo for this.
And London's pretty much the same as it ever was. ;-)
this sort of air pollution, however, was isolated in scope. there's other cities that have had pollution problems (more commonly water, dumping sewage into the river), but the phenomenon of people producing so much pollution that it impacts the climate on a global scale is a comparatively new thing.
// ...dropped an average of 10% since the 1950's.
// What accurate instruments were we using 100 years ago...
1950 wasn't 100 years ago.
Now multiply that 40 some by the thounsands of techs just like me...
yeah, and we get what, $400,000? maybe $4M? do you realize that, based on their last quarter's results, that's one hour of microsoft's overall revenue? not even. (assuming 30 day months and 24 hour days) they can either spend that money looking to prevent worm X (knowing full well that, unless they're going to spend 100 times that much to fix the more fundamental issues, worm Y is just going to come along), or they can spend it implementing some other lock-in "feature" for their word processor. not a hard math question for them.
what's more, they don't care because they don't pay the bills. do you realize how many people simply consider this the part of the cost of doing business? the majority of companies out there just don't see an alternative. we (our R&D and IT departments) have managed to force ours to pay attention (all our new services will be deployed on Xserves, and all our R&D and IT staff have Apple laptops), but a few upper management types still just don't see that there's another choice.
sure, it's important to have a common baseline, and while i personally think a common language is a good thing to include there, it's by no means necessary, and we've got existence proofs for that.
like, um, whales.
Hey, if it means we can "outsource" GWB.....
WTF?!? no offence intended to parent - it had to be done, and someone was bound to (and it actually manages to be relevant this time) - but how in creation did this get moderated as "Informative"?
i'm going over to meta-moderate right now just on the hopes of getting that mod.
i call nonsense!
you still have source. you can still release patches. the fact that they'll only work with one distribution is a minor deal, if what you're really after is fixing some problem with that distribution or adding some feature to it. patches are seldom valid across version of the same code line, either. this is not any form of vendor lock in. i'm not stuck with Red Hat here. in the MS world, you nobody else is able to produce these patches. that's vendor lock-in.
but y'know what? forking is manageable. unix systems interoperate. programs can be written mostly-portably. it could be better, but it could be a hell of a lot worse. forking isn't fatal.
no, it's not.
the x-term + back-room server model works great if you already have an IT staff on-site for other reasons. but it involves running the server and keeping the terminal hardware up. again, x-terms are great. i've admin'd sites with that model, and it's wonderful to be able to just replace the whole unit and have to do near-zero config when one breaks. but they do break. on our floor of ~30 NCD x-terms, we swapped out about one a month.
note, also, that x-terms aren't as cheap as you'd think - i'm constantly surprised by how expensive they are, actually. that is, if you're buying from a reputable vendor, but the dirt cheap ones usually have a corresponding increase in problems.
i've done the x-term thing, and i've admin'd mac networks. for about 90% of the applications, the later has better cost factors. not to mention usability factors. remember that the most expensive thing in this question is almost always human time.
oh, and i've also admin'd large Win32-based networks. that makes sense about 0% of the time.
i'm not normally prone to responding to sigs, but since it's related in kind to the grammar discussion being had in the message body, i figured i'd go for it.
there is, in current english, no difference in meaning between "while" and "whilst". the former is older, and the later derives from it. the exact form or time of the derivation is not known, but the leading theory is that it originated in southern england based on confusing the -s ending (whiles) with the -st ending (thus, whilst). the -s ending was added to make the word genitive. the first hit off google gives a reasonably good explanation.
we actually have a british client that requested the use of "whilst" in parts of our systems. i still find it's use by non-brits (who can be excused because they grew up with it) pretentious.
// ...the iPod has enough resources, processing power, to run a good OS.
so then why's it running Linux?
(/me gets fire extinguisher ready...)
well, except you'd have to keep going out with her until 2007...
/. reader with a girlfriend? hah, i get it: April 1st.
and a
what?!? usenet's been home to some of the best (most skillful and most tasteful) april fool's jokes on the net ever! check your history. google for kremvax, which made its debut 20 years ago today.
you're right, that was too simplistic. Apple was not beyond reproach in that, as (as you noted) much did indeed come from Xerox PARC. but the main thrust of the suit was not that, but the "look and feel" - hence the name. the main issues of contention were the metaphor and the specific design choices.
oh, and Xerox weren't the only people doing overlapping windows back then. again, the blit/jerq family had them before the Mac came out, and i believe they were the first with concurrently running multiple overlapping windows.
anyway, that's not the core point here (although it's certainly interesting). while i was simplifying, the point remains that Apple does not have microsoft's history of using litigation as a core business tool.
but your observation raises another question: i wonder if Apple would have been more successful had they stuck to more constrained suits. huh. i could probably draw parallels here to another current lawsuit that should've stayed a pure, simple contract dispute, but the plaintiff has blown way out of proportion, thus torpedoing their own case.
but i won't do that. nope.
You have a good point that, without competition, other systems, such as MacOS or OS X, would not be as good as they are today. but how much better would they be if they had real competition. microsoft stifles competition - there's simply no question on this (even the US courts have agreed - they just haven't decided what to do about it yet). what if microsoft hadn't pushed out all the other competition? microsoft competes primarily with market share and legal weight - not innovation or technology. i'd love to see apple have to contend with, say, a Be that wasn't trashed by anti-competative business practices, or an OS/2 that wasn't stolen from and sank so MS could go do WinNT. Apple would be better if MS either didn't exist or wasn't big enough to kill any real innovation from outside sources. hell, Windows would be better if it had to contend with more competition for longer.
i know how to pay my dues and respects well, too. Kernighan, Ritchie, and Thompson, for example, have my eternal gratitude. so do the folks at PARC who's names i don't remember. Gates and MicroSoft have stifled competition and slowed the pace of innovation, and for that they have my contempt and disgust.
Apple sued Microsoft not because they had produced a GUI, but because they had produced a GUI that was largely a clear derivative of Apple's. i really wish Apple had won that suit. not because i wanted to see MicroSoft get it (hey, i thought Macs were dumb back then, and was a DOS user!), but because it would've forced them to do something else. there are other ways to do GUIs. look at the dozens of X11 window managers that use totally different designs (okay most are trying to be just like MS or Apple, but some aren't). Look at Plan 9, with rio and especially Acme - or Oberon, for that matter. there's tons of sucky examples, too (Bob!). hell, some were even concurrent with Apple's work! read up on the blit/jerq from Bell Labs and all the PARC stuff Apple got their ideas from.
Apple has certainly used litigation to achieve some goals in the past, but i've seen no evidence of them holding the same "we'll sue you if we can't come up with a better way to own everything " model MicroSoft seems to have. i can see no support for the statement that Apple was trying to "own" the GUI market or the GUI - although you could argue that they were trying to "own" the metaphor and design. but i think that's justifiable, and would likely have been a good thing, forcing people to come up with other ideas.
nonesense. the fact that some people did, indeed build safe buildings for a variety of reasons before the widespread adoption of building codes does nothing to change the fact that codes have generally made buildings substantially safer. i've had the benefit of being involved in small-scale construction projects in areas with various degrees of strictness in their codes (or just none at all for the scale we were working on), and i can tell you first hand the codes result in a much safer construction on average.
[on private-owned roads]
having lived in the DC area, this is indeed a tempting example, but one example does not an argument make. as a counter, i would point to the entire US Interstate system - much larger in scope, highly efficient non-toll, and federally defined. the US Route system is a less formal example of much the same thing.
[on Communications Standards]
quite some time, and we've all seen it! GSM vs. CDMA? DVD*? MP3 vs. WMA vs. Real vs. whatever? PPTP vs L2TP? the list goes on. there's plenty of innovation here, but it's all hugely inefficient. AT&T, for all their faults, did an excellent job of offering a unified, consistent, and efficient communications system to their users, and without a tenth the abuse much smaller modern monopolies heap out on people. the result is the PSTN and SS7, which provides a solid framework so that users are assured some minimal interoperability, but other operators still have the ability to innovate. recognition of this is why people like vonage and packet8 are "real", and all the folks who're just doing VoIP without paying attention to the PSTN are toy players.
[on the Civil War - wow]
okay, i totally agree that the parent is off in attributing such importance to the difference in rail gauge... but you're on pretty thin ice yourself.
that's a pretty darned one-sided view of things. the South was also pissed that the federal government wouldn't impose the standards they wanted. the north was perfectly happy (as political entities, anyway - not all the people) to have slavery continue in the south, they just didn't want to have to respect it. there was a huge issue around the South's desire to force the North to recognize their individual laws. you could even say that this tension was all caused by the lack of firm, clear standards early on, and that - as is always the case - back-fitting them afterwards caused things to break. but, of course, this was a real war, not a point in an argument, and the real reasons were tremendously more complex than we're going to work out in a slashdot article.
[on the early and current Internet]
the early internet was a DARPA project, yes, but implemented by a handful of universities. there were mandated standards, yes, but that's exactly the point! these standards allowed interoperability, but were minimal enough to allow for a tremendous amount of innovation (even if much of it does suck - i'm no fan of most Internet tech). and i'm curious which company you think controls DNS. it's a cooperation between a number of companies appointed by an organization (supposedly?) operating in the public trust. verisign's recent stupidity with SiteFinder should show that there's less central control t
back in school, me and a friend of mine used to go back and forth all the time. i was firmly on the PC side, even DOS/Windows (i've since gotten better), she was mac. this was about system 7 and 8 days. she loved the fact that things "just worked", i liked the fact that i could make the thing do anything i wanted by editing text files, poking at the registry, and mucking around with things in DOS.
:-)
then i got a job.
i got hooked on Unix myself, then eventually Plan 9 and Inferno (still hooked). and i came to hate windows. when i got moved from my job supporting ~50 unix users at various sites and one server to supporting 5-10 windows users and no servers, and the later took far more time and energy, i was just plain done with it.
later on, at another job, i admin'd a group doing cross-platform development. we had maybe 10 combinations of unix OS and hardware platform. it was easy (except for AIX - stupid SMIT). we also had a few Mac guys doing marketing work - and after setting them up, i never touched them again. really. and that's when it hit me: they just worked. we were running system 8.
after that, i basically broke things down like this: BSD on PCs for tech workers, Solaris on Sparc or Irix for servers, Macs for everyone else. it just became obvious how dumb giving the various secretaries and business folks anything but a mac was. they didn't need or care about the Unix power, they wanted it to just do what they expected it to, and i didn't want to have to fiddle with it.
now, it's even better. i can solidly and confidently recommend Macs for almost everything (the "almost" being a few friends who want to run specific games, our finance people at work, and portions of our ops staff that has to run a custom Win32 app we're in the process of replacing with something cross-platform - so the need for Win32 is decreasing!).
so yeah. i kinda hated macs in school, then realized that they had their place for non-tech people. and now, "their place" is everywhere! the best unix workstations on the planet.
(asked by an american)
oh, come on!
first of all, if they question your "reasons to upload", tell 'em "because i pay you to be able to". second, surely you can think of something creative? you run a web site and need to upload new pages. you exchange (your own) photos with a friend. hell, you do video chat! there's plenty of reasons to upload that verizon won't have any problem with.