week 3 readings

An update on the windows road map
This first article was rather short and very straightforward. It was an e-mail written by Bill Veghte the Senior VP of Microsoft. The e-mail talked about the new Windows Vista and touched on how it effected Windows XP and its users. I have always been a Windows user, but have not yet switched to Vista do to hearing some negative things about it from people. I also have a lot of software on my PC that I use for school and other everyday things. I am worried if some of these things including any games I would want to play would be compatible with Vista. When April 2014 roles around and they no longer offer updates and such for us XP users I like many others may finally have to bit the bullet and switch to Vista if we want to make sure we are secure and can receive technical support when needed.

What is Mac OS X
I did not think this would be a hard article to read. I expected it to talk about a bit about the history of the Apple company and how Mac came to be invented. It did do just that in the beginning. I also expected it to go into the differences between Mac and Windows and the different kind of software available for a Mac such as imovie and Opera. When I saw the article I expected a general overview of the Mac operating system, however, what I got was a complex reading with many terms I did not understand. It was not general at all and instead was more in depth and complex. I find this article interesting for one reason. The author states in the beginning that he wrote this document as a supplement to a speech he gave to people who knew nothing about Mac's to begin with. Yet in my opinion the article is far too technical for a first time Mac user. My guess is that these people have some experience with computers because the authors states that "...the implicit assumption is that you are familiar with fundamental concepts of one or more of BSD, Mach, UNIX, or operating systems in general." I do not know if this just me or not, but I feel that since I am taking this class it means I am not as educated about PC's as others and would not know the things this author is assuming I am familiar with, therefore, the article goes right over my head. Even basic things like when he used the word kernel I immediately thought corn kernel and had to look it up to see how it related to computers. Knowing nothing about Macs and only the basics of computers I had a thought time following along especially the section on the open firmware and others that showed boxes with computer text in them because I had know clue what the text meant or what was being accomplished there. After muddling my way through this article I can see how complex a Mac really can be.

Mac OS X- Wikipedia
I enjoyed this article a lot more than the other one on the Mac. This article was a lot easier for me to comprehend. This article mentions a software development tool called Xcode which was not talked about in the other article. I did not quite understand what that software did. I saw in the article that "The API's that Mac OS X inherited from OpenStep are not backward compatible with the earlier versions of Mac OS"which sounds as if it could be a pain to people. The Carbon API sounds like it is a great idea because applications written with it can be used in both old Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X thus making the transition smooth like the article stated. One interesting thing I learned from this article and the other is that the X in Mac OS X is the roman number ten and not the letter "X" like I thought it was. I knew nothing about Mac before reading these article so that is the reason I did not know this. I also found another interesting point in the article. It said that Mac OS X versions after named after big cats. What will happen when they run out of big cat names? Will they reuse names they already did or will a Mac OS 11 be out by then?

Linux
The Linux book was interesting to read seeing as I had no previous experience with Linux at all. I have seen the red hat computers in the computer lab that run Linux. I tried to use one once, but I could not understand it. Reading this book cleared things up for me a bit, but it still seems harder to me to learn. I like how easy Windows is to navigate. I found it interesting how Linus Torvald who was only a college student was able to do so much for Linux. Linux does seem like a good operating system that could be comparable to Windows or Mac OS X. While reading the article I did notice that it had a lot of pros for using Linux. The fact that it is free is a pretty cool thing that should have people flocking to it because of how over priced an instillation cd for Mac or Windows can be, but it does seem difficult to navigate and does not look quite like Mac or Windows which makes people shy away from it. I feel a lot of people do not give Linux a fair shot and neither have I. If I really took the time to learn it though I might actually end up liking it. What seemed confusing to me though is all the different distributions of it and having to decide which one to choose. I also liked the idea of the open source were people can modify it and when there is a problem it can be fixed as soon as possible rather than waiting for a company to do it. The only problem is that people shy away from Linux because not all program support it and people do want to be able to play there ganes and other acitivies such as listen to music on their pc's. I noticed that 11.2.2 says "Some distributions don't allow you to play MP3's without modifying your configuration, this is due to license restrictions on the MP3 tools. You might need to install extra software to be able to play your music." I nor anyone else do not want to have to do extra work just to do simple basic taks on our computer. Linix overall seems interesting, but I'll take my Windows OS anyday over Linux.