Seeking Windows Alternatives

[Huked on Fonick]

Re: Just hope that...

Originally posted by pdeli
... Apple won't make a foolish move instead of using this window of opportunity. I often have the impression that when a company makes a bad move the competition tends to follow rather than use it for its own benefit. I hope that if the article is right, Apple will be able to take advantage of it.

Cheers all,
Pit : )

++++

Can we say...... (.NET was introduced..... then along comes apple with .MAC and during the keynote steve jobs talked about .NET) i fear what u said is comming true just look at how unpopular .mac and .net are... lol

 

[kenohki]

Re: Re: Just hope that...

Originally posted by Huked on Fonick



Can we say...... (.NET was introduced..... then along comes apple with .MAC and during the keynote steve jobs talked about .NET) i fear what u said is comming true just look at how unpopular .mac and .net are... lol

.Net is totally different from .mac though. Although there is the general theory that .Net will provide the ability to easily deploy web services, it really isn't a set of web services. It's a framework (similar to Cocoa ar J2EE) that pretty much directly competes with Java.

Unfortunately there's some confusion to the whole thing because of the tech industry's inability to get it's hands around this whole web services monster and clearly communicate it and market it.

 

[kenohki]

With all this talk of Linux I can't help but bring up the fact that although Linux is a good core OS and is developing the workspace environments needed to be deployed as a desktop OS (read KDE), it's nowhere near the level of sophistication of other OSs.

Granted, the kernel has some very modern design philosophies which is good. The Linux kernel developers revise code again and again until it's extremely efficient. But it still needs work to have feature parity with Unix. It's been written as a desktop/lighweight server/blade OS. Linux still has problems scaling in SMP environments (don't even get me started on NUMA) where a single system image is required. MACH on the other hand has the potential to scale beautifully in a single system image because of it's inherent microkernel design. (Apple would need to revert it's monolithic MACH kernel back to something more "MACH-like" though in order to enable this. And we'd need the damn hardware to exploit it.)

Much of the software in Linux environments lacks the innovation (and value) provided by more sophisticated features in Mac OS X as well. A window manager that provides transparent windows by simply copying the background is different than an OS that provides true alpha blending system-wide with hooks for any application that wants to use it. And QuartzExtreme is a frikin great concept that puts Apple squarely ahead of the competition for a while still. ColorSync technology (or some equivilant) still doesn't exist on Linux. Rondezvous is neato whiz-bang stuff. And I think the iApps are great. From an end user perspective, there's not a lot of innovation coming out of the Linux camp, they're scrambling still to get feature parity with other OS environments.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to bash Linux here. I just don't think that it is mature enough (YET) to replace other OS solutions on the desktop or Unix in the high end. However, the thing about Linux is that it has an extremely rapid development rate. That's what's got Microsoft scared. And with the potential investments that IBM and Sun could put into Linux, that may help to accelerate it's maturation to the point where in the next few years, it will become viable.

Anyway, just my thoughts.