Woah, Shawn here has some issues.
Can it do spreadsheets? Can it do word processing? Can it do database? DOS/IBM computers could do that; Apple computers could not.
Wtf? Microsoft Word and Excel
started on the Macintosh platform.
In the 90's, MS has been involved in almost all projects imaginable. As a result, MS supports a lot of things well before Apple does.
If they did, then they had a good reason. As I shall explain:
Examples: PCI
x86 moved off ISA at about the same time Apple moved off of NuBus, roughly.
PCIe,
Currently, PCIe has no benefit. AGP 8x still has a lot of power left...why would they bother designing a new board if it wouldn't help? And before you say other than video cards, Apple has had 64-bit PCI and PCI-X for a long time, which works well.
AGP,
When AGP 2x was out, Apple used a 64-bit, 66MHz PCI slot for video. This had about the same speed. When AGP 4x came out and changed that, Apple saw no reason to not change to it, and did.
IDE/ATA/UDMA,
Apple didn't switch to IDE for a long time because it
sucked. SCSI was much faster and less CPU-dependent than IDE/PIO. In '97, PIO mode 4 IDE compared somewhat well to the current 10MBps SCSI bus Apple had been using, so they put it in the beige G3. DMA came out soon after, and they put it in their very next machine.
USB,
Uh...USB hadn't gotten
anywhere before Apple put it in the iMac as the primary expansion port.
PC100/PC133 RAM,
Apple's first PC100 machine came out in 1998. This was comparable to the PC.
DDR RAM,
August 2002. Again, no big difference.
and now SLI.
See the part about PCIe.
On the software end, MS keeps very close ties with developers, and each version of Windows is very backwards compatible.
Stuff still breaks on every release...and all that compatiblity leads to a lot of hacks put in place where they could be fixing the OS.
Apple does the opposite - they change standards over and over, and all it does is annoy the hell out of software developers.
They changed standards once - OS X. Software made for System 6 (1987) work on OS 9 (1999).
Bash on Unix is "bash", on Linux it's "sh".
No, it's "bash". "sh" is a symlink for scripts written for Unix's sh.
Gmake on Unix is "gmake", on Linux it's "make". What the hell?
"make" on Linux is Automake, not Gmake.
More of a problem is having a billion different types of Linux that aren't 100% compatible with each other.
A bit overhyped, I say. VMware has ONE Linux package, and it works on everything with GTK installed. Sometimes you have to compile the kernel modules, but that's not hard - the installer automates that. OpenOffice, same thing. I could go on.
Sometimes you'll find an RPM that is for RedHat, but it doesn't work on your Mandrake install. Why not? Not all versions are the same.
Then get the Mandrake RPM. They have no lack of RPMs.
An even worse problem with Linux is that it doesn't really have anybody guiding it to gain support from developers. How can Linux get support from developers? What is Linux? It's not 1 group or 1 company, it's many groups with many companies and each group is going a different way. It's hard to get support when Linux isn't exactly a unified group.
All the current developers (even the commercial ones) haven't had too big a problem.
The absolute worst problem with Linux is the mentality of Linux users.
:rolleyes: I needn't go further with this one.
Linux users use Linux because they hate Windows and they refuse to use BSD because "omg BSD is too closed source" (open to read, not as open to contribute to)
Yep, see what I roll my eyes at?
Although Linux is very popular, the qustion remains: What kind of company would actually want to support Linux when it's an ununified and somewhat incompatible clone of Unix with a user base that hates closed sourced (read: proprietary) software? It's just not worth it.
There are some companies already. And I use closed-source software on Linux without issue...my favorite has been VMware, which I've mentioned before. The whole "hates closed-source" thing comes from RMS and few others who would like to really use the HURD, not Linux. I
prefer free software, but don't mind using closed-source on Linux if it's benefical.
BSD is amazing for servers. It really has no place in the desktop market.
Didn't we just get done describing how "ununified" Linux was, and how that would stop it on the desktop? And then you dismiss a more unified system? Cripe, get a hold of yourself.
BeOS and YellowTab are great operating systems. The problem is that they lack an enthusiast market, and that leads to a lack of software. Linux and Mac OS may not have close ties with software developers, and the majority of the users are fanatical nutcases (not all users), but they still get support simply because they're popular (actually Linux is the popular one, it's just a strange twist that you can compile Linux stuff on a Mac). If YellowTab had support from software developers, there's no doubt in my mind that its popularity would just explode.
This I can pretty much agree with.
