News flash!!!! Vista is a work in progress.
Now that I have your attention, let me explain whay that's good for the Linux and Mac communities. First, while Microsoft spent 5 years building Vista, a product they say is a work in progress, RedHat has released several releases. If memory serves correctly, they were on RedHat 7 or 8 when Longhorn was announced. Since then, they've released RedHat 9, migrated from a one distribution model to one with a community edition (Fedora) and an enterprise server (RedHat Enterprise) Fedora is now on release 8, and probably had about 6 before Vista came out, RHE is on 5 and probably had 4 before Vista came out. Why is this important? It shows that by building on what was already available rather than starting from scratch, they were able to add features, and make a product more usable than those of yesteryear, all without making the public wait years for a release. In that same time frame, Debian Linux had several releases, as did SuSE. Ubuntu came into existence and is now one of the best distributions for beginners.
Given that I like to talk about Linux so much, you may be wondering WHY I brought up Mac. Apple did something truely extraordinary in that same time frame. They REWROTE their entire operating system. Mac OSX (that's OS "10") is based on entirely different kernel than before. OSX is based on FreeBSD with a Mac interface. This was a good thing for Apple. The reason being is it allowed them to gain some of us "unix heads" by giving us access to a command window where we can use all the unix tools we're used to, such as sed, awk and shell scripting to name a few. Second, it put them on an open platform; one that allowed them to do the extraordinary. They changed their supported cpu from IBM and Motorola based Power PC RISC chips to Intel based architecture. So, in the same time Microsoft was "tinkering" with Windows so they could release a "Work In Progress" Apple moved to a new platform, new hardware, and STILL makes computers that "Just Work." Maybe it's time we all "think different".
Given that I like to talk about Linux so much, you may be wondering WHY I brought up Mac. Apple did something truely extraordinary in that same time frame. They REWROTE their entire operating system. Mac OSX (that's OS "10") is based on entirely different kernel than before. OSX is based on FreeBSD with a Mac interface. This was a good thing for Apple. The reason being is it allowed them to gain some of us "unix heads" by giving us access to a command window where we can use all the unix tools we're used to, such as sed, awk and shell scripting to name a few. Second, it put them on an open platform; one that allowed them to do the extraordinary. They changed their supported cpu from IBM and Motorola based Power PC RISC chips to Intel based architecture. So, in the same time Microsoft was "tinkering" with Windows so they could release a "Work In Progress" Apple moved to a new platform, new hardware, and STILL makes computers that "Just Work." Maybe it's time we all "think different".
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