i am not saying they should need to. though perhaps, an argument, akin to the one supporting the initial learning difficulties of unix due to the greater facilities available, can be made here. you could go buy a PC loaded with all the hardware (CD burner, etc) and software needed, today.
>>and in the interest of an open society and communal effort, and all
>>those good principles ;-), isnt it better to go with the less closed
>>OS/hardware i.e., intel + windows?
>
> Hello? This is the code that the Feds and states have had to go to court to
> get access to?
>
> Apple's OS X is an open source flavour of Unix, as I understand it.
i am told thats true, or as i hear it, its based on the mach kernel from CMU. which is good, but i am not sure how much of the OS is really exposed as a result of this. i was referring to the historical issue that as a hardware/software platform the mac was kept quite closed, even with respect to windows. i have never really used (other than helping some folks fix some problems) an apple, nor have i developed for one (though i do have bad stories to tell about the noisiness of appletalk as a protocol). if my perception, based on talking to cross-platform developers and hardware designers, regarding the openness of apple hw/sw, is wrong, i apologize, and accept the correction.
>>of course all this might be moot. whatever hardware you buy, your son
>>will probably have linux loaded on it in a year or two ;-).
>
> Why assume that he's a fellow geek?
again, a possible misconception on my part, perhaps. i was referring to what seems to be the high level of computer expertise (at least with respect to using/modifying hardware/software) among college kids today.
> By the way, Joanna, when your son says "there aren't any applications", does
> this by any chance mean "there aren't as many games"? If so, my first
> inclination would be to say "buy your own time-wasting stuff" (tho' my
> second would be to reflect on the unwisdom of forcing my own predilections
> on the young).
though perhaps inappropriate for this list, since this info might be of use to a large section of non-computer-savvy list users, perhaps it would be worthwhile to get deeper into this. how many applications are available for the mac? my very quick search makes me curious. for instance, take opera, probably the fastest web browser today: their latest version 6.0 has been out for a while now. however, the latest version they seem to offer for the mac is 5.0. similarly, realplayer: their latest player, realone, which unifies a lot of their components (player, jukebox, etc) and touts great advantages, is not available for the mac. and there are more. the latest version of internet explorer available for the mac seems to be 5.1. 5.5 introduced support for CSS2 and a host of changes that are important for future HTML compatibility. add to that the custom javascript/DOM/VM issues of IE, which when used in web pages will make them unviewable on the mac. over on cnet.com, a rough search showed 48 alternative browsers for the mac but 148 for windows (whether this difference is meaningful is quite arguable, i admit).
then there is the question of file formats, long-term compatibility and availability of hardware/software, and the price of these (as compared to the volume market for windows).
if it was up to me, everyone would be running netBSD on their machine, so my point is not to defend microsoft here! ;-) i am trying to undestand what mac lovers hold out as the real advantages of an apple over a windows PC, today.
the URL below does an interesting comparison of various OSs (the website is more server oriented but the page below is interesting with respect to comments above): http://www.osdata.com/holistic/holistic.htm
here's an older page comparing windows95 and macos, thats an interesting read: http://www.execpc.com/~yadilos/ics/features.html http://www.execpc.com/~yadilos/ics/studies.html http://www.applelinks.com/articles/1999/11/19991125124714.shtml
--ravi