Bill Gates Last Day

[Engels]

Windows and Apple are only here because UNIX was fragmented, companies couldn't get their shit together, didn't fully appreciate what they had on their hands, and snubbed their noses at the masses.

FIFY

[naum]

1. Apple is UNIX now, or more precisely a BSD variant, but no different than how Sun did Unix, IBM did AIX, HP did HPUX, Linus did Linux, etc.… Apple did what Sun had yearned to do, bring Unix to the desktop. Yes, Linux got there first, but they didn't get the mass appeal that finally is swaying Apple way — especially in laptops, Apple is selling like hotcakes (just hang in an Apple Store for a little bit, and the dozens of clerks can't keep running fast enough to keep up with all the MB and MBP (as well as iPods) flying out. That most don't have a clue they're running a *nix system underneath the hood doesn't make it any less relevant… …that Apple made a break with an inferior legacy OS while MS keeps bringing the cruft forward…

2. Richard Stallman and FSF drove the whole GNU/Linux deal. While his Herd OS (have no idea if this is even still being pursued, it's almost 20 years past since its inception) project failed, Linus, without Stallman's GCC (C compiler) and Emacs (text editor) would not have accomplished his great feat (as well as many key contributors that eagerly joined in w/Torvalds). Stallman never lets the world forget it and thus, the GNU/Linux moniker. Torvalds, who shys away from the political controversies (he's just a hacker at heart), still credits Stallman and his tools that made his development possible. And the impetus behind Linux was a lot of free time for a undergrad on a 6+ year plan and a big desire to get his machine on the internet, or at least the university mail system. Minux was never intended to be anything more than a toy, a real life demonstration of textbook concepts. Oddly, Torvalds old professor is now the votemaster at electoral-vote.com, applying his energies to constructing scalable HTTP servers.

3. Windows didn't push the bar forward, they just copied what Apple did (which copied the PARC Xerox work in large part) and forged market dominance with exclusivity and (what should have been prosecuted under antitrust law) trust alliances with hardware manufacturers.

4. In fairness to MS, in recent years, on a few fronts, they've tried to be out in front but have failed — tablet PCs (which Gates himself is a big proponent of) and speech processing (which I'm not sure if even first fruits have been harvested), and which Gates never fails to emphasize.

[Tale]

1. Apple is UNIX now, or more precisely a BSD variant, but no different than how Sun did Unix, IBM did AIX, HP did HPUX, Linus did Linux, etc.… Apple did what Sun had yearned to do, bring Unix to the desktop. Yes, Linux got there first, but they didn't get the mass appeal that finally is swaying Apple way — especially in laptops, Apple is selling like hotcakes (just hang in an Apple Store for a little bit, and the dozens of clerks can't keep running fast enough to keep up with all the MB and MBP (as well as iPods) flying out. That most don't have a clue they're running a *nix system underneath the hood doesn't make it any less relevant… …that Apple made a break with an inferior legacy OS while MS keeps bringing the cruft forward…

This has caused a complete role reversal in who uses which OS at my workplace. I'm a creative type and on Wednesday I had a meeting with a technical type. My notebook was a PC and his was a Mac.

2. Richard Stallman and FSF drove the whole GNU/Linux deal. While his Herd OS (have no idea if this is even still being pursued, it's almost 20 years past since its inception) project failed, Linus, without Stallman's GCC (C compiler) and Emacs (text editor) would not have accomplished his great feat (as well as many key contributors that eagerly joined in w/Torvalds). Stallman never lets the world forget it and thus, the GNU/Linux moniker. Torvalds, who shys away from the political controversies (he's just a hacker at heart), still credits Stallman and his tools that made his development possible. And the impetus behind Linux was a lot of free time for a undergrad on a 6+ year plan and a big desire to get his machine on the internet, or at least the university mail system. Minux was never intended to be anything more than a toy, a real life demonstration of textbook concepts. Oddly, Torvalds old professor is now the votemaster at electoral-vote.com, applying his energies to constructing scalable HTTP servers.

Two of my former colleagues spent a few days with Richard Stallman and came back mentally scarred. He can be, um ... difficult.

[Engels]

10 percent of mac users are very computer savvy. the remaining 90 percent can barely operate a microwave. that is to apple's credit.

[Trippy]

1. Apple is UNIX now, or more precisely a BSD variant, but no different than how Sun did Unix, IBM did AIX, HP did HPUX, Linus did Linux, etc.… Apple did what Sun had yearned to do, bring Unix to the desktop. Yes, Linux got there first, but they didn't get the mass appeal that finally is swaying Apple way — especially in laptops, Apple is selling like hotcakes (just hang in an Apple Store for a little bit, and the dozens of clerks can't keep running fast enough to keep up with all the MB and MBP (as well as iPods) flying out. That most don't have a clue they're running a *nix system underneath the hood doesn't make it any less relevant… …that Apple made a break with an inferior legacy OS while MS keeps bringing the cruft forward…

MS made their break on the OS side when they switched the desktop OS from DOS to NT (Windows 98/ME to XP or maybe 2000 if you were in a corporate environment). NT was and is a decent enough kernel built by lots of ex-DEC people. The cruft that Windows is saddled with is their Win32 API for apps. That's what's killing them right now. Apple planned for their transition by having both Carbon (more similiar to the older Mac OS APIs) and Cocoa (new to Mac OS X and based on Objective C) APIs but they were also willing to break backwards compatibility with the pre-Mac OS X stuff where they had to to make sure the new stuff was as clean as possible while MS has obviously been reluctant to do that.

[Trippy]

This has caused a complete role reversal in who uses which OS at my workplace. I'm a creative type and on Wednesday I had a meeting with a technical type. My notebook was a PC and his was a Mac.

Yup many Unix hackers who want to be able to use real GUI apps as well (it's hard to admit it but sometimes the command line is not enough) and have given up on the various Linux desktop efforts have been switching to the Mac with the release of Mac OS X. E.g. I've mentioned it before but all the "cool" Ruby on Rails hackers develop on Macs.

[Engels]

Although one might think Apple 'daring' for switching to APIs that killed backward compatibility with older Mac OS versions while Windows clings to Win32, one should also take into account software market share. From a business point of view, cutting off Windows XP for a hypothetical Vista w/o win32 APIs, would tempt people to switch platforms altogether. If Mac had a competitive office suite to compete with MS Office, switching to a new API would be positively suicidal for MS.

[naum]

…If Mac had a competitive office suite to compete with MS Office, switching to a new API would be positively suicidal for MS.

While, I shun all word processor applications (please don't make me use Word and thank Gates, I don't have to anymore since I left the corporate rat treadmill), Apple does have the superior office suite now - iWork:

* Pages or whatever it's called, can read Word documents and it is OS X friendly (unlike the abomination that is Word lumped onto OS X)

* Numbers > Excel, by a large "spread", it's not even close…

* KeyNote > PowerPoint

[Teleku]

While, I shun all word processor applications

So, you hand write everything now?

[Engels]

I didn't know that apple made a 'serious' office suite. Again, however, its an uphill battle for Apple, especially since I doubt that its available for anything other than Apple operating systems, correct?

[naum]

While, I shun all word processor applications

So, you hand write everything now?

You've heard of text editors? Real programmers don't use word processors…

[Viin]

Your write your resume in a text editor?

[Trippy]

Your write your resume in a text editor?

Sure why not?

[naum]

Your write your resume in a text editor?

Absolutely.

It is in HTML/Latex format and I can output to .html and .pdf. And it looks a lot better than any Word document.

And I don't bother with potential employers that are stringent about a receiving a Word document. Once, I had a recruiter insist on a Word document because she didn't know how to cut and paste out of a Adobe PDF file.

Sorry, any outfit insisting on a Word document is not a place I want to work for.

Only so much time in this life.

[Engels]

My boss is ludicrously old school.

Email : Pine console
Text stuff: emacs NOT OLD ENOUGH! vi for this man
PDF : Ghostscript

he's positively antideluvian.

[naum]

TextMate is my editor of choice these days though I still drop down into vi (especially in server mode) - you can't match it's fine keyboard control…

In TextMate, for text documents, use Multi-Markdown (a wiki like syntax) and then use the built in bundles to generate HTML/Latex/PDF/etc... …TextMate has so much other "bundle" power, that basically make any chore a one-keystroke/click affair from "look up Google I'm feeling lucky for this selected text and make a URL link out of it" to column mode to "run and show me debugger output", etc....

If I were to use a word processor, it would be Scrivener (Mac only I believe), and not Word, it is a writer's word processor with notecard ability and whole bunch of other nifty writer features in addition to easily generating PDF and other doc formats...