I guess its an "official support" type of deal, not as if anything in the tech has changed.

Performance of the virtualized machines was great, the management of the VMs, however, is why you want VMWare if you're serious.

"support" is probably in the form of first-class integration software and drivers, possibly for improved I/O performance, time synchronization, shutdown, disk shadow support, etc.

Other example: Apple introduced random playlists on iPods years ago. Now people noticed that some songs got played more than once before all others were played. Can't be random! There's a bug! Well, no. Still, Apple had to modify their software to make the choice actually LESS random (by have no song being played twice) to make it appear "really" random to the users.

I've never had an iPod with a random feature. However, it does have a shuffle feature, which implies that each song will be played once (assuming repeat is not enabled), and this is exactly what the feature does.

iTunes has a random Smart Playlist feature that can randomly select songs from a selected set of songs.

Who's talking about kernels here.

You are. You said:

They should get on with the program and scrap the pile of shit they call Windows and build something around the UNIX kernel

You backpedaled quickly when I called you on something you must have known was wrong. There's nothing Microsoft could implement on a Unix kernel they couldn't implement on a Windows kernel.

You are dishonest, arrogant, and deluded.

Honestly, these things are completely unnecessary now, because desktop is not where it's at. Your comment and thinking is still stuck in the 90s desktop mentality (kind of like entire Microsoft).

Did you read the first half of my comment? I mentioned modern OS features used by all kinds of systems - whether it be a iOS device, desktop computer, web server, whatever - and described how these are not exclusive to Linux at all.

I'm talking about the Web 2.0 startup world, where Microsoft is literally dead (in the sense that no new Web startup is afraid of Microsoft or is worried Microsoft is going to destroy them).

Outside of Netscape and Opera, who has ever had this fear?

But you won't see Google or Facebook or any new Web startup deploying on their tools or OSes.

Of course not. But they do that because there are better and cheaper alternatives - not because Microsoft tools are fundamentally uncapable of running modern applications, and not because the unix way is the only way to run modern applications.

I'm 40 now, I learned my way around UNIX 25 years ago and kept at it.

I think your narrow focus on UNIX has blinded you.

You are definitely doing it wrong. My MacBook Pro (running Mac OS X or Windows 7) resumes from sleep in about two seconds.

Google didn't create Android in reality, either.

Because customers call all the time to tell you that their 5 year old system is still working fine, right?

There are some damn nice features that 7 has I wish my Mac would copy. Namely: snap to sides.

This feature is in BetterTouchTool, which I recommend if you use a Magic Mouse or a mutlitouch trackpad on a Mac (even without the snap to side feature).

They should get on with the program and scrap the pile of shit they call Windows and build something around the UNIX kernel and run legacy apps in VM like they virtualize XP now.

And what is so different about a modern Unixlike kernel compared to the Windows NT kernel?

• Most device drivers run as part of the kernel
• Processes on both kernels run in their own virtual protected memory space
• Processes can have multiple native, independently-scheduled threads that share the same memory space
• Both kernels are written in C
• Both kernels support C as the primary development target
• Processes interact with the kernel via system calls or native calls using C function call semantics
• Processes belong to users and groups
• File system handling (including security enforcement) occurs in the kernel using a common API, regardless of the underlying filesystem type (direct attached disk filesystem, network filesystem, fake filesystem like FUSE etc.)
• Users and groups have rights to access certain resources and files, both via traditional ownership and more complex ACLs
• Networking is handled by the kernel in a layered fashion, with the device driver at one end and, sockets API at the other, and others in between
• File and network APIs use a file handle or descriptor to identify a resource and write/read to it
• File operations can occur by reading/writing arrays of bytes or memory mapping files
• File operations can also be performed on block or character devices
• Multiple facilities exist for inter-process communication, including message passing, shared memory, domain sockets/named pipes, etc.

The major differences are in the kernel level APIs. The Windows API is a lot more verbose (

POSIX can be implemented on top of Windows (as in Services for UNIX or whatever they call it now, and as in Cygwin) because Windows NT isn't that different in functionality than Unix. All of the major kernel level operating system features are in both.

Meanwhile everyone else that matters in post Microsoft world uses open OSes, leveraging their investment is stable APIs, great free tools and go on about innovating with the only cost being hardware and (usually smarter) people.

The Windows API is one of the most stable for certain types of applications. The same Windows graphics APIs used to build basic applications are still supported a few decades later and still get new/additional features (without breaking backwards compatibility). Compare to the many toolkits for X over the years; the switch from Gtk+ 1 to Gtk+ 2; switches between the various versions of Qt...

Windows's device driver interfaces are also much more stable, and better yet, the old interfaces don't get removed when new interfaces are made (allowing old drivers to be used even when the APIs have been replaced). Compare to Linux, which considers unstable kernel APIs a good thing.

Microsoft should just keep pushing good stability features for their crappy OS. Every single OS release is an "oh we got this new x and that new y (both available in other decent OS for ages, except for the occasional innovation)" moment

The Windows 7 graphics stack is still more capable than anything in Linux when it comes to features like switching between GPUs and replacing GPU drivers without closing programs, logging out, or rebooting. This feature greatly reduces the impact of graphics driver crashes, as the graphics driver can be restarted without losing any work, and reduces power usage on laptops with discrete GPUs, as low-power integrated graphics can be used when high-power graphics are not needed.

The audio system is also more stable and more capable than Linux's.

Linux can't get video and audio working with the features and stability seen in Windows or Mac OS X in the mid 00s, let alone today.

That's what Windows should do -- add powerusers to their marketshare (I mean real powerusers).

Of course we all know that No true power user would use Windows right now, right?

Fedora and Debian both provide a core repository and non-core repositories. I'm not familiar with Ubuntu.

The Debian and Fedora repositories are huge.

OpenBSD does the same, and my memory is that freeBSD does, as well. The difference is primarily one of scale. openBSD, for instance intentionally keeps the core repository much smaller than most other distributions, and not just because the team is (intentionally) small.

The base OpenBSD and FreeBSD distributions (without ports) are designed to be an operating system to themselves (usually with all of the source for this core checked into the same repository), similar to what passed for a commercial UNIX system two decades ago. They both happen to provide "ports" systems on top of this. Linux distributions are generally build scripts/SPEC files/whatever used to patch, compile, and package source from upstream in a certain way, and most distributions (RHEL/SLE excluded) seem to have no problem adding lots and lots of packages.

The problem with the Mac, and it's a real problem, is that there is no official repository. Well, wasn't.

Now there is, but it's neither free nor open, as near as I can tell from the outside. (I'm not interested in being on the inside right now, so I'm judging it by the reports.)

The App Store works quite well for end-user facing applications, most of which are written specifically for Mac OS X.

But the app store still doesn't solve the underlying problem of dependency.

The dependency for programs in the App Store is Mac OS X. Generally, the core libraries in Mac OS X are rich enough that applications written for OS X don't need dependencies.

Apple really let us down when they dropped the ball on this one. They have enough money, they could be supporting all three unofficial distros, so that you aren't as restricted by which package manager you've loaded a package by. And they could be encouraging, with financial encouragement, those guys to learn interoperability.

Apple does support one: MacPorts, which is hosted by Apple at MacOSforge. The packages in these distributions are almost all for developer/UNIX power user use, and serve a completely different purpose than the Mac App Store.

$ uname -a ; java -version
Darwin mac.local 10.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.7.0: Sat Jan 29 15:17:16 PST 2011; root:xnu-1504.9.37~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
java version "1.6.0_24"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_24-b07-334-10M3326)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 19.1-b02-334, mixed mode)

You were saying?

Chrome has excellent built-in Developer Tools that provides similar functionality to Firebug; no extensions needed. (Safari has the same tool as well.) It supports editing CSS on the fly.

Each is heinous in its own special way, but the fact that you have three competing package managers, that don't talk to each other has convinced me that Mac users, in the typical hipster fashion, brutally raped the Unix culture, throwing away everything that made it unique because they did not understand it.

Huge binary repositories that try to include as much compatible open-source software as possible (as found in a distribution like Fedora or Debian) are unique to Linux distributions, and specifically those distributions that are openly developed (Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise both include a much smaller set of packages than Fedora or OpenSUSE). Other UNIX operating systems usually have a smaller core set of fully supported software, and then often have a build system or binary repository of additional open-source software; sometimes this is provided by the vendor, sometimes it's not.

And it'll be curtains for the data center's infrastructure.

Very, very poor location for a high level center people.

According to the article, the datacenter handles mobile traffic for the region it's in. Assuming the region is Florida (or most of it), where else would you put such a center?

I don't recall ever seeing a non-SGI MIPS computer on the market

PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, many consumer network devices (including, but not limited to, many Linksys and Buffalo routers), networked video players and Blu-ray players (using Sigma chipsets)...