haa.... I meant to reply to selven a couple of days ago. but it unexpectedly turned out I did have (rather a lot of) work to do. (and it's somewhat related to this blog post)

You’re right. OS wars are useless.
sumimasen. I might have (un)intentionally started one with comment number 12. But when faced with 298 walloping enhancements someone had to say something.

Apple, and steve jobs, are the experts at hiding what they are up to. I've read somewhere, I can't remember where exactly, that asking the guy to comment on upcoming products is very simply something that will get you ostracised in the polite macintosh society. They don't speak on what they intend to do. they just come out with it one day, strut around looking very original in a carefully planned way and discreetly suggest how everybody else just copies what they do.

microsoft usually brags on and on on what it intends to do. and often falls short on the supposed deadline...

Apple may be doing things right(as far as delivering the goods), but it would work better if they weren't so conceited about it. I read in Siracusa's review that test version of 10.4 (or something like that) was unstable then they very suddenly came up with a stable 10.5. Anyone who isn't hopelessly infatuated with Steve Job's beard would start to think that they were deliberately holding back just for effect. And that's called being wise after the event...

maddox may be a proficient idiot but he speaks truth when he suggests that macintoshes are specifically designed for technologically inept people. they aren't likely to think about using terminal and all those typically linuxian reflexes. In their head, having linux in their mac equates to stability and that's about as far as it goes. Anything else is just a matter of being distracted by shiny objects. Of course I'm over generalising. But you can see how "effect" can be the major selling point of Apple.

@ Selven though,

As many cats could tell you, if they could talk, there is a major difference between being free and being lost. About the diameter of a bowl of milk.

and no, I'm not trying to suggest that microsoft is trying to bait us with a bowl of milk.

you may feel free in BSD/linux. but most would simply feel lost. especially if you plonk some of them in front of a command line terminal with nothing but a >$ on the screen.

and reverse engineering things isn't the only way to get things done. In fact it's the least appealing thing to get anything done these days. You add stuff to do what you want to do.

think of it as a canvas.

oh alright, an ugly brick wall.

ok ok. an ugly brick wall across the motorway.

you don't usually care about the structure of your brick wall, unless you are an architect or those other people generally concerned with bricks and walls(except I myself have been very curious about the fundamentals of bricks in walls recently). But you can put stuff on the wall to make it look better to you. Eventually, you decide to get out of your car and walk around the wall and discover there was a wide open field behind. By that point you have already forgotten that there even was a brick wall. (doesn't make much sense, but yeah)

someone judiciously told me that nobody should be bothered to program in assembly, or even a lower level language like C, in 2006/7 or whenever it was. I tend to think he may not be wrong.

incidentally, most of my work these days is done in a text editor, I almost never have to go near a word processor and only ever use excel because I quite like tab delimited text files to store raw data. And most of my problems have come down to character encoding and boundary conditions.

but I sometime wish we could just get a brick wall without all the paint already on it. Thus rejoining your women analogy. I wouldn't describe windows as having 1" of make up nor would I say of BSD/Linux that they are hot (sorry, but CLI is NOT hot. even for some nerds.). It can be argued that women wear make up to look... more inviting. But if you know your way, they will take off the make up. And possibly everything else. maybe even put on something a bit more... alluring? In that respect there's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_shell_replacement and there's this funny little http://windows.kde.org/

I could also argue that the *nix (is that the proper term?) may be au naturelle but for the love of whatever things you hold as holy, she's making it very hard to figure out what she expects of you (that damn CLI, terminal etc.). except, again, when you take a look at the direction of certain of the newer *nix, like ubuntu, edgy, fiesty, etc, are taking, I say. They are really starting to pump it up. not exactly makeup if you want, but it definitely looks like a crop top and boyshorts. (seriously, it felt like I was using an orange themed windows xp)

OK but as far as OSes go... I kinda miss windows 98. sure it wasn't perfect. but you have to give some credit for trying to invent their own wheel instead of, as apple has done, strap a pretty (closed source) GUI on a *nix core.

and now @ avinash

today I actually ate a roti with at my PC. and a little bit of the cari inside fell on the keyboard. Which I cleaned without any problem.

I dare you, I double dare you to do the same with that ridiculously precious looking macbook you brought in one of the class tests. without breaking a cold sweat.

I've been trying to think up of things you simply cannot do with a mac but that are taken for granted with a classical desktop PC, but it usually involves food, hot drinks and cats...

oh yeah about the first line of this comment. upgrades break stuff. true story.

(comment was a heck of a lot longer but I think I should save ammunition, seeing as this is a mac lover's blog)