Microsoft's at it again. I'm starting to regret buying my Microsoft mouse.

The MSN Virtual Earth "service" is a bit inaccurate. Of course, perhaps it's intentional. Apple headquarters have been erased from the map! Coincidence? Perhaps, but I have my doubts.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/200..._deletes_aple/

 

Microsoft owns Apple anyway. There is no escape! Wal-soft will own the entire world soon.

 

I wouldn't be sure. I'm sensing a revolution on the brinks.

 

You're feeling it to Jason? i'm thinking open source will come up w/ a 'better' OS than linux and become more mainstream.

 

Open source? Na. Open source will never gain the real market acceptance for operating systems. Browsers, perhaps, but not operating systems.

Mac OS X is going to rip through Microsoft's share by 2010. Firefox is going to take at least a third to a half of browser share by 2008. Other computer manufacturers, including Dell, will even start shipping with Mac OS X. That's my guess, at least.

Microsoft is really starting to fight off a lot of beasts, all of a sudden. Google, Apple, Mozilla, not to mention lawsuits and government action (Europe...)

 

Apple yes, open source no ?? You may wish to look at OS X's foundation Darwin a bit closer. Or where Safari branches from.

We have three active OS X boxen, and one Linux box in the house. All happily surfing the web, reading email, and performing day to day tasks. I am the most user savvy, but by no means technical. My wife and 13 year old use the Linux box too, for things as varied as reading MS formats to getting a correct rendering of Hebrew, to just cruising around the OS and playing with programming.

Open Source software is the cornestone of a connected world, because proprietary formats are carry too high a social cost in terms of money, exclusivity, security, privacy, and friction. It is not by chance that governments are prohibiting MS formats.

NO, to MS tax, windows malware, and monopolistic business practices. MS is an extremely rich, but dying company. It is about time, and I am glad to be rid of them. That does not mean MS will disappear; only that they, like Apple, will have to learn to compete as a value added company on top of open source. And that is as good as gone, compared to the MS that exists now.

 

Are you saying OS X is open-source? From my understanding of the term, it most certainly is not. I could be mistaken, though. I think the open-source status is a huge target for the media, whether warranted or not.

Linux is good for some things, sure, but I don't see it making that same penetration that Mac is. And, I'm not saying Mac and Microsoft will be the only players, but rather that Microsoft is going to slip from its high tower soon enough.

 

I am saying that Darwin is open source -- BSD, to be precise. The BSD license allows proprietary software to be grafted on without restriction, so Apple has attached its frameworks (API set) to the core.

Why do you think Apple was able to transition to Intel hardware so relatively easy ?

Take away Darwin, and see how useable our Mac is. There are loads of people that load X11 on top of Darwin on Apple hardware, to make nice useable unix boxes.

 

I guess Bill does not want to list sites he's copied from.

Could this be Bill Gates' fate?

 

The core of the OS is open source, but Mac OS X is not open source. They built the basics (the parts that do the real work) out of a version of unix that was free, BSD... They called this Darwin. Then they added lots of proprietary software (the bells and whistles) and call it OS X, thus making it non-free. They acquired all this when Apple bought NeXT.

I got into using open-source Linux (X11) software on Mac OS X by downloading Debian packages that were built for OS X with a program called Fink. After a while of getting used to the idea of X11 and how it worked I then decided to install Linux onto my main machine (Intel) and I've been using it ever since. My Mac was my webserver, so I left it that way for a while, but it was having some issues of dropping requests occasionally and I couldn't run anything newer than OS X 10.2.0. So I built a crappy old P200 into a temporary webserver running plain Debian (it was painfully slow) while I formatted and installed Debian on my Mac. It was a bit tricky because I have an oldschool Mac G3 333 (beige) and they don't like booting from the CD-ROM drive unless it's a Mac bootable CD... Anyhow, once booted it installed and worked perfectly, been up for 226 days now. My parents have the blue & white G3 350 and are still using Mac OS X 10.3

I think Linux has a big future, it's getting to the point where it's superior in many ways to Windows and Mac OS X, unfortunately it lacks some of the polish found in the commercial OS's but it's coming along, especially with some of the live versions, like MEPIS that don't even need to be installed to try out.