At 01:15 PM 8/9/06 +0200, dc wrote: >And even if it isn't, why couldn't the OS itself be profitable if it could >compete and compare favorably with other OS's?
Maybe it could now. Maybe. In the old days, you could whip anything inside a PC and use a driver disk. There were conflicts the user had to resolve, and many products were quirky. But the amount of hardware was staggering (and handmade applications also proliferated). Some hardware is now outside the box via high-speed interfaces, and what's inside the PC meets more stringent standards -- even more stringent in the next version of Windows. PCs and Macs are more similar that way, so perhaps Apple could at first make a profit selling their OS separately. But selling their OS would dramatically increase the support demand, and I think Apple's hardware monopoly has managed to keep those costs down. Imagine the groundswell of disaffection if a large number of PCs simply couldn't run the Mac OS; very bad publicity and horrific support. I'm not one to defend Apple (ever, for political reasons), but they'd be wise to keep their OS out of the marketplace. It could kill them if everybody with a big box store PC decided it would be cool to have Mac OS too. Keeping control has kept them profitable. Meandering now... I wish there were a streamlined alternative to either OS. Save for a few that I depend on, I've let most applications go version-stale. I'm a function guy who marginally likes icons, and hates glitter & glam. I don't want to see OS or application design in my face. (Adobe put hateful little non-functional designy tabs on their display elements in Audition.) After a year of running Win98 and WinXP side-by-side, I have found almost nothing to speak for the latter other than for its improved uptime because it seems to compensate for 'memory leaks' (though it still locked up to the point I've had to take the battery out -- on pre-installed software, now gone). I've stripped the WinXP GUI to look like my Win98 setup, getting rid of all the cute borders & animation & transparency (Audition turns the animation back on. Grrr.), replacing icons with text on toolbars, reducing menu and border sizes, increasing the contrast, disappearing the toolbar, etc. The cluttery media applications are the worst with all their big-ass buttons; really, I can use a simple forward triangle or, heaven forfend, even *read* the words "play" or "stop" and tap the keyboard instead of positioning a mouse. I really love my Win98 desktop -- not for Win98, but because I've made it unobtrustive & somewhat invisible. It works smoothly, it is very responsive, no popups demand my attention, it has a detailed & customized context menu, etc. No, I don't want a return to a command-line interface, though I still use many commands, such as the wild-card REN command to change, for example, all the Canon camera's CRW_ files into IMG_ files so they sort properly. If I could install some WinXP 'core' under what I have now without disturbing what I see or how it functions, I'd do that. (Memory leaks very badly in Finale 2004-2006 running under Win98, requiring a system restart at least every half hour.) I can only assume people like the increasingly prettified GUIs because the designs sell. But I just want screen real estate and no distractions. From what I've seen, neither the new Mac nor the upcoming Windows provide that. (I've tried Linux; right now it seems to be the worst of both worlds.) Dennis -- Please participate in my latest project: http://maltedmedia.com/waam/ My blog: http://maltedmedia.com/bathory/waam-blog.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
