Well, I can't speak for the entire world, but I can tell you that there are plenty of Mac users in Canada, England, France, and the Netherlands. I'd say it's only slightly less than the US from casual observations.

Even better ... they should pack their crap up and head to lovely Somalia, the ideal capitalist society, no laws, no taxes, no government! Yeah, they have no infrastructure, no health care system (public or private), no education system, rampant disease, lack of food, and no police to stop people from killing you for what you do have, but hey, that's why you're the self reliant type and don't need no stinkin' government. In addition, there's no socialist pensions or medicare, mostly because people die in their late 40s on average, but hey it's one more thing you won't be paying taxes for! In fact, Somalia is so free, you can even chose to become a pirate, yes a pirate, and live a responsibility-free life in a tropical paradise. So, feeling oppressed by the tyrannical, thieving, socialist US government? Well, head to Somalia, no visas required, all are welcomed ... oh ... and bring lots of food, medicine, and money, they love that, and the government there promises nobody will kill you for it. Well ... if they had a government ... but that's part of the charm, and remember, come to Somalia, we've got pirates ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSBoO4GzHaI

There are some hardcore old timers on this page ... my first brush with Linux was RedHat 5.1 in 1998, paired with an Oracle install. RAID card wasn't supported at the time. I had a baaaaaaad time and had to crawl back to NT 4.0 instead. I remained interested and when the chance produced itself in 2001 to setup a bunch of Linux servers, I lept. I've had at least 2 machines running Linux since early 2001 and as many as 2 dozen at one point, spread across a bunch of data centers. Linux is just sooooo nice on servers ... absolutely love it. I did Linux on a laptop for about 5 years too, but use a Mac now since it has the same UNIX goodness underneath.

Bullshit ... no way ... I remember the bad IBM and the good IBM only came after techs turned their backs on what was Big Blue. MS has alienated a lot of developers, they're poised for some serious pain in the coming years. They may turn it around, but they'll have to stop their lock-in games, just like IBM did, and that's gonna take away all their pricing power. MS won't go away, but it won't look anything like the company are today before the bleeding stops.

To be fair ... NT had a numbering scheme. In fact, NT was the main reason why I liked MS back in the day. That came to a screeching halt right after W2K though. W2K is the last piece of MS software that I can say I liked, but I still think the NT 3.x line was the best stuff they ever put out. NT 4.x was when the "edition" forks started and everything started degrading from then on.

from Lifehacker

As for being as slick as OS X, well, spoken like somebody who obviously doesn't own a Mac. It's nice, but there's no way it's even in the same neighborhood that the ballpark for OS X is in. I'm gonna light a small fire here, but I wish a super talented artist would redesign the widget set for Gnome, it's very very dated as it stands now. KDE is far better looking but even it is getting long in the tooth.

Ahhh ... SGI Irix ... how I miss thee ... truly ahead of it's time back in 1993 ... I mean the thing had a freaking web cam before there was a web to use it on!

Ditto ...my very best code happens between 8AM and 12PM, the more noise the better ... earbuds in ... music banging ... foot tapping ... I can get on a hell of a roll ... but if you interrupt me, god help me, I'll kill you. I don't want to talk to anybody before lunch. Besides, there's too much workplace "noise" after lunch to get a good 4 hour block of coding in.

Good post ... good to hear he's in it for the right reasons and not the lobbyist perks. Hope he keeps the tech innovation in this country moving forward instead of mired in IP litigation.

Umm ... no ... it is not security through obscurity. If you want to be obscure, you don't post your source code on the internet like this:

http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html

When you post your sources, you practice security through peer review. The ones who do security through obscurity are the guys up in Redmond.

Also, don't kid yourself, IE8 fell on it's first attempt too. It just so happens that Miller got the first try in the contest and who could blame him for wanting the Mac hardware over the PC hardware.

Wow, what an utter crock of shit those stats are. I'd say that when I'm on the road (read: not in an office), easily 1/3 of laptops I see people using are Macs. I was on a university campus near here a few weeks ago and I'd say the Mac/PC laptop mix there favored Macs 2 to 1. There's no way, and I mean absolutely no way, that number is true for laptop users. In fact, I'd say, from the peeks I've gotten, that OS X outnumbers Vista 3 to 1. That may change since the Windows computers I see are mostly old junkers, with a rare nice Sony VAIO here and there. Having done some support work against Vista, I can understand why too. I think Vista means Popup Window in Latin. It is by far the most annoying end user OS ever, secure or not. I wish I saw more people running Linux, but laptop Linux sightings are still very rare in the wild.

I agree, there is a premium, but it's not signficant on the high end. I just spent $2700 on a 17" MacBook Pro. I think that's a lot of money. However, I bought it because it's thin, light, and has an 8 hour battery life. Could I have gotten a better spec'ed machine for that money? Almost certainly. Could I get a full work day without needing to plug in for a recharge in a package as thin and light as the MBP? No. So ignoring OS X, that Mac bests anything in it's price range for portability.

Ehhh ... do some Python for a while, once you get used to indenting, move back over to COBOL. :-P

Funny enough, COBOL was the first comp-sci class I took in college. It's one of those things that make you wonder how in the hell did it gain such widespread adoption in the first place. I guess there really weren't many options when it first came out.

Oh really?!? Please post a link to the Sliverlight video file format specification. Here is the one for Flash:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/

Go ahead, surprise me ...

If all the ice in the world were to melt, and the odds of this happening are virtually 0, then we're looking at a 200+ft rise in ocean levels. However, the higher probability estimates are for a 24 inch rise by 2100. Not a great source in itself but the references are not bad: http://science.howstuffworks.com/question473.htm