Yes, fluffemutter, please do say more. What's wrong with Miley Cyrus exactly? You don't like her music, I presume, can't say I know much about it myself but I imagine it's quite well-produced and it seems to upset the cultural elite quite a bit, which I always think is a good thing.

Maybe, when things are popular, we shouldn't automatically assume that they are generally rubbish in consequence. I'm certainly guilty of this from time to him (Transformers movie? Pah! Although I did see that and it was rubbish).

No it isn't. It's like there only being one way to make the car go faster, and one way to slow it down. Of course, like all analogies, this is imperfect since one can use the engine to slow the car, or use the brake pedal, or even the handbrake.

OS X is full of complex features. Folder actions, automation, launchd for user and system daemons, usable system backup for everyone (no other OS has this out of the box), network locations (unlimited sets of network configurations for when you use your machine in different places that require different setups), custom scripting for applications, services, unix command line, timer coalescing for low power, mach microkernel. Not to mention higher level features like airplay, and the server package.

Which OS features are you referring to when you suggest they lack features that other OS's have?

Not via USB, and it'll have to be an MP4 I believe, but over wifi you could use this :
Air sharing

Anyway, I don't dispute that if you want to use an iPhone or iPad (which I don't personally, but plenty of people do) then you'll need either a Windows machine or a Mac or that airsharing thingy. Or neither of course, if you just want to use the thing as a mobile device without moving files around, which is also perfectly fine for lots of people.

Gosh. You are clever.

Well yeah, but it's still a pain, and requires a contiguous file, and multiple commands to set up, and isn't the default.

So I'm sticking with - Windows-like swapfile support.

I don't think that there's any evidence that the linux swapfile performs better - and in any case why would it being unfragmented be an advantage? Memory access is random, and so swapfile access is random, and so why does having it non-contiguous cause an issue? Added to which, SSDs are becoming much more widespread, meaning the fragmentation issue vanishes.

In any case, can you make Linux use a swapfile permanently? One system I look after needs more swap, and I really don't want to repartition the entire drive just to increase the available virtual memory.

You're joking, but:

Windows threading and synchronisation primitives
Windows memory management, and flexible swapfile (linux's swap partition is bonkers).
Linux low-overhead processes and fast filesystems
OS X use of launchd, and its UI

That probably depends on what you believe constitutes public sector workers, and whether or not you imagine running the tax system (say) is of no value. If public sector workers build roads, for instance, then I'd argue that they are contributing. But I'm just a crazy lefty.

No. But thanks for writing a bunch of words about it that was safely able to avoid reading. It meant that I could avoid the bit about aesthetics being the opposite of usability, which is fortunate because it was such complete nonsense that I might have had to write something about it.

And I've seen lots of Dell and Samsung too. Are you suggesting that they buy slashdot stories? And I don't watch music videos because I don't see the point, but I wouldn't think that Apple are the only people placing their products.

You speak of Greece as though it were not comprised of people. What do you think the Greeks will do if they 'drown in it'? They won't stay within their borders, and it most assuredly will not be pretty. We, as humans, will have a moral obligation to do something about what will happen to the people of Greece. That is very likely to be much more expensive than solving the problem today while Greece is still a country.

In what sense? Another thing I hear a lot is 'vendor lock-in', but it's never clearly described. In what sense am I 'locked in'? I could go out tomorrow, and buy a wintel laptop, and continue doing all the things I do today. My photographs are stored as RAW files, and I can export everything easily. All the source code is just text, of course. Recorded music is stored as AIFF files, also perfects standard. And all my email would just be redownloaded from google of course.

What does vendor lock-in really, actually, mean? And in what sense is Apple any different from any other OS with respect to whatever the meaning of 'vendor lock-in' actually is.

iPhoto doesn't compress all your files into a single database either. It doesn't necessarily store them in a format that you'd like, but they are stored as individual files and they always have been. Can we all try to stick to the facts please.

Think about it, which is easier from a software engineering point of view?

A: Use the database-like features of the filesystem to store your assets, and index into that from an actual database to store all the metadata that the filesystem either doesn't support or doesn't support efficient indexing into.

B: Re-invent the database-like features of the filesystem, but the rest is the same.

So *not* using the filesystem to store *files* is a poor engineering decision, and not one that I believe Apple have made in any of their software products. Unlike Microsoft, I'm looking at you Outlook and your PST file....

It's not just eye candy, but I am yet to understand why people hate the the idea that things ought to look nice. I also like regular candy, and prefer things to taste nice even though from a purely nutritional point of view this is completely unnecessary.

OS X is about things looking nice, and about there being as few ways of doing a particular thing as possible. This reduces testing, UI design and software engineering costs. People generally like that, I know I do, but you evidently don't. That's completely fine, I hope you enjoy modifying the behaviour of desktop Linux to better suit your needs. I used to do exactly the same, back in the 90's, but when the time came to do actual work with my computer I decided to go for something simpler. I have never looked back.

Favourite troll.

No - you're not reading the post you just replied to.

Apple have never stored their music as 'one big blob'. Ever. On any system or device. They didn't 'add' a feature to organise their files sensibly, iTunes has always organised your files sensibly, and has always given you the option to organise them yourself in you prefer.

So this, like the great majority of the nonsense about how Apple products work that's being thrown around in this thread, is completely false;

Did you seriously believe that this was true? And how did you arrive at that incorrect conclusion?