Of the three articles we were to read regarding operating systems, the one on UNIX/Linux was easily the most interesting. It's a relief to know that before I was even born, someone had the knowledge, motivation, and talent required to design a free, universally-compatible operating system. All I've ever heard about UNIX/Linux has been negative - specifically, that it's difficult to learn to use and that only total geeks opt for it - and while all of that seems to in fact be true, I can't help but have a much healthier respect for the OS now.
The Mac OS X article was for the most part too jargon-heavy for me to make much sense of it. I understand that Macs in general have benefits other than easy media manipulation and system stability. Unless I'm missing something, it seems that OS X is mostly more of the same, but with some nifty new applications such as Exposé and decent speech recognition.
I'm not entirely sure what we are meant to gather from the article on Windows XP, Vista, and a ways-off Version 7 other than what most of us already know: the majority of PC users - such as myself - have XP and see no reason to switch to Vista, yet Microsoft is doing its best to force Vista upon us, even implicitly threatening that we'll never be able to fully acclimate to Version 7 in the future if we don't start learning Vista now. I can't say I'm scared.
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I think the third article is kind of interesting in showing the way the marketing of software works. What's the phrase -- "planned obsolescence"? Last week's readings brought up the same issue for me with Moore's Law. Like, the faster hardware and software "advance" really just means the sooner the consumer has to buy new products. (I don't think Apple is exempt from that either). I guess this is another reason why the tech-savvy like Linux better.
(For the record, I got a new laptop this summer that runs Vista, and I kind of don't understand what all the fuss is about. It's really not all that different.)
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