Response to Phil Of Mac
Mac OS X is based upon BSD Unix.
That's not "artificial" product differentiation. It is a "complete departure" because System 7 wasn't hacking it anymore....
As for that interface: OS X does have an Apple menu. Oh, you meant to launch applications from. Heh. How quaint. You probably think the designated hitter rule was the death of baseball too.
You missed the entire point of what I said. I was commenting on the features -- such as the limitation on the Apple menu and the forced use of the Dock. (I'll point out that under System 8, you could get something very similar to the Dock IN ADDITION TO the Apple menu. Greg's Buttons, anyone?)
Incidentally, the DH does ruin baseball and is why NL baseball is much more exciting than AL baseball.
As for WindowShade: again, how quaint! What are you running your resolution at, 640 by 480?? It's not that hard to minimize, folks. And you can even resize the Dock. Do you really want big ol' title bars all over the screen when you can just have your windows in a little box in the Dock?
1280x854 -- standard resolution on the new PowerBooks. Minimizing eliminates your ability to see what's on your screen simultaneously. It also requires you to take the time to go to the bottom of your screen to bring the window back up. And you have to run your cursor over a series of tiny thumbnail windows to find the one you want. If you are web browsing, for example, and a site doesn't name its pages uniquely, that poses a really annoying problem. The process is much quicker by collapsing window menu bars. So do answer your question, YES, I want "big ol' title bars all over the screen." So do lots of other people -- hence the popularity of the WindowShade haxie.
Your arguments were heard in 2001, and you were proven wrong.
Proven wrong? Haha, this is the most amusing part of your angry little tirade! These are opinions of style, and we are all entitled to them. If anything, the only cogent proof provided by anyone is by me and my citation of the popularity of third party hacks to the OS. Just go to versiontracker.com and read the comments on programs like WindowShade and Fruitmenu. Clearly, there are many of us who miss lots of great FEATURES from the previous OSes.
It wouldn't be unreasonable to allow you to totally turn off text smoothing, but that's availible in the Terminal and makes everything ugly as sin, so I can understand Apple's decision not to allow that.
Wasn't ugly in OS 9....
The performance hit is there just because it's a more sophisticated OS, not because of various GUI elements. My OS 9 System Folder is less than 300 megs, but the OS X System is well over 700 megs. There's just more there, and you can't optimize that out of existence.
What a waste of space. If you think bloated code isn't a reality, I'd suggest that you're not in touch with reality itself. Or, put more nicely and accurately, that you don't know much about code and programming.
"True power users" have been disabling these things in the Terminal ever since Public Beta.
And my point, which I thought was made so clearly that a retarded gorilla would understand it, was that we should not have to. It's a Mac. If I wanted to fool around with code, I'd have bought a real UNIX machine or fiddled around with DOS.
Your arrogant decision to dismiss comments like mine is very interesting, and how angry your post was brings up more questions than I can count. Most of those are far off-topic, so we'll just leave it at that.
You comment that:
We needed protected memory, preemptive multitasking, dynamically allocated memory, symmetric multiprocessing, and all the other hallmarks of a "modern operating system".
At the risk of not being sufficiently prospective and forward looking, I ask, "Why?" How many Mac users really do true multitasking? And how much of the time are they multitasking? I'd wager that given a true power user, he or she would save more time using 9 than X over the course of an average week. But that's just me, and I'm sure you'll disagree since you like to be argumentative.
Nevertheless, I still contend that limiting options is not the way for a company like Apple to maximize its profits. In case any of you failed to notice, Apple posted its second quarterly loss today. Seems to me that a company posting losses should focus on giving its customers options and not trimming its user base at the edges.
My education and IQ are both quite good, and your attempt to attack my intelligence only illustrates to me that you are increasingly aware of your own inability to answer my criticisms. That's too bad.
