mercurio said:
Possible, but it does not make the software suddenly aware of its right-button, and provides very handy context-sensitive menus. You'd have to hand-program everything into the OS, for every machine. Yikes.
um, actually, the OS and it's applications support a right-click via a left click+the control key. The advantage of this is that the basic single-button mouse can do contextual menus, and my Logitech "windows only" mouse works fine as well (the generic three-button USB mouse driver accepts right-clicks as a cnlt+click).
the support for two buttons and a scroll wheel is built into the OS. no re-writing needed.
the scroll wheel scrolls, the right-button brings up context menus and moves troops in War Craft III and World of Warcraft.
Both OSX and Linux are Unix-type OS's. Linux has the advantage of having a cleaner kernel, OSX has the advantage of having tons of more surrported hardware, a more consistent GUI, and the support of major applications, like Oracle and Photoshop, etc.
Windows is more inharently less secure for one major reason : buffer overrun protection. windows does not have the built-in support for checking that an application is only executing code that is supposed to be executed.
AMD is helping in this area by introducing a NX (no execute) bit into its hardware, which windows supports in XP SP2. Better than nothing.
The filesystem in both OSX and Windows is sub-par; OSX support for meta-data has suffered in moving away from the split-fork file design of the old AMc OS, but the trade-of have been well worth it, IMO.
the Unix type OS's (OSX, Linux, *BSD's, etc) are more robust Systems than Windows on a base level, but Windows has the marketshare and out-of-the-the-box support for more hardware than most of the Unix-type OS's. Linux has made huge strides over the past decade, but it is still far from a "joe-anybody" desktop OS.
IMO, OSX is cool because it has nearly the same level of hardware and SW support as Windows, works on windows networks out of the box, etc.
IMO and IME, it's the best of both worlds.
plus, I can run Windows apps in VPC (though it not fast enough for games), and most Linux apps in the X11 environment. It's the ultimate Geek machine software-wise.
Apple's consumer-level iBooks are very competive price-wise, and a top-end pre-built AMD64 based tower system will still run you somewhere in the $2000 range.
Which is the better system is wholy dependant on your needs, though it's good to note that a number of Windows Longhorn's features(most notably the new graphics layer 'Avalon') which are being broken up and pushed back until 2006 or later, are already in OSX
it's good to be ahead of the curve.
