[Sigia-l] Re: Findability

[Listera]

"Simon Wistow" wrote:

> Currently we have three main contendors - Macs, Windows and *nix.

Depends on your scope. Actually, there are many OSes around, tailored for
many specific tasks, from real-time to embedded OSes.
 
> When working with Macs, things just work[tm]. Most of the time. And this
> is good. Although $diety forbid it doesn't or you try and do any task
> outside Apple's fairly limited idea of what you should be doing. At this
> point things get nasty and just don't work [tm] and there's little you
> can do about it to try and fix it your self or find out why it's going
> wrong.

This is factually wrong on just about every level. The Mac OS X core
operating system (open-sourced as Darwin) is a complete BSD UNIX
implementation, derived from the original 4.4BSD-Lite2 Open Source
distribution. You can tinker with it all you want and look at your Console
output till the cows come home. Indeed, there are a ton of CLI and GUI
utilities to let you fiddle with all aspects of the OS, if you don't want to
bother yourself.

> Still with me?

Nope. Because, as the Mac OS X case indicates you can have a 'tinkerable'
foundation *and* a sufficiently articulated, coherent and polished interface
to it. It doesn't have to be an either/or case.

Best,

Ziya