[quote]TriGWU wrote:
I grew up programming from an early age and never wanted to let Windows go. But I think one of the things that killed Microsoft was the lawsuit which separated Office and Windows. That is where I feel that my new Mac has some prowess. The programs integrate so much better with the OS.
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Actually, nothing really integrates with the OS on a Mac. It may integrate well with the GUI, but OSX is based on BSD UNIX (the whole philosophy of which is to separate “userland” from the OS).
That isn’t necessarily a Mac thing. That is more a byproduct of the open source BSD background of OSX. There are actually quite a few free pdf converters out there for the Windows platform as well.
We actually had a project at work where we ended up writing native pdf on the fly - since it is really just a postscript file it wasn’t as difficult as one might think.
Well, 95 was little more than a “prettying up” of 3.11. It was still basically just a shell running on top of DOS (even with 98 I believe, you could still change the environment variable SHELL to be equal to PROGMAN and get the classic 3.11 interface). XP, for its faults, is light years away from 95. The GUI still looks similar, but the OS is drastically changed.
Now, I’m no MS lover by any means, but they have done a few things right lately. The whole .NET initiative is amazing. It has totally changed the way the business world programs. I know MS has been putting more emphasis on that than a new OS, and as a programmer I thank them for it.
As a final note, I do like Macs for their aesthetics and Apple’s embracing of open source. I just don’t find them any more or less useful than a PC. Even the old ‘Macs are superior for graphic work’ argument is losing credibility as every major design program is now available on PC. If a Mac’s advantage used to lie in the PPC chip, that will go away as well with the move to Intel.