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John F. Kennedy
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
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3 days 22 hours ago
Forgotten what Linux is?
Fair enough point that Linux is the kernel, to be precisely technically correct. I guess I when I said "Linux" environment, I could have better termed that "x86 Unix-y environment," that I agree with. But I think it is you who have missed the larger point - Linux is what you *use* it for in the sense that I was speaking.
To you, or anyone compiling their own kernel, or working with embedded devices, or tweaking file I/O and threads or what not, it's more about the kernel - true. Nevertheless, to 99% of user's it's about what they run on it (sure they need the OS, filesystem, security, device drivers, I/O, etc, but that is the foundation, it's not the foreground task).
My point was about what I use it for, and that's what the "great aunt" or "neighbor" test relates to as well. When I constantly had to recompile my audio support with every kernel update, or rebuild Mplayer from source to get the codecs I wanted, or any number of other frankly annoying tasks from a USERS perspective - I quit using Linux on my x86 laptop. I still use it heavily for X86 servers, but even there the reason I use it is performance/security/open aspect along with the fact that it runs my Java apps, runs Apache httpd, runs my Sendmail, and so on - it's about more than the "kernel" in the big picture.
Apple has their own problems, yes, agreed (I hate a lot of the things they do as a company too - but I can often understand why they do them, such as the DRM crap in iTunes - whereas I also dislike Microsoft for a lot of their corporate moves, but their motive often seems a bit more underhanded [and because their products are not as good in my real world experience in terms of reliability and security]).
The bottom line though, is that my Apple laptop works really damn well, it has the UI polish I want, and the audio player works with the current kernel - and that kernel is also Unix based which makes my day to day development life a lot more productive. The "safer and better" part is accurate and applies, to BOTH Linux and OS X (and frankly also to other open/free BSDs, and other x86 unix offshoots).