6 ms·

How come people talk about 30 years of Mac but no one talks about 25+ years of Windows or Linux for that matter. I saw numerous blog posts of parroting this ad

How come people talk about 30 years of Mac but no one talks about 25+ years of Windows or Linux for that matter. I saw numerous blog posts of parroting this advertisement, even in my morning daily commute news paper.

hayksaakian 13y ago
Maybe its PR (as in they got paid to publish news about this)
- Doctor_Fegg 13y ago
  That isn't what PR means.
oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
Linux: I think because it's less of a 'concrete' thing (e.g. so many distros, very steady 'word of mouth' growth rather than a big launch) Windows: People just don't have the same affection for Windows: it tends to be something that's used, grudgingly, often for work, rather than something that people are genuinely pleased by. I'm sure people will disagree, of course, that's just a big generalisation. Also, since Windows is available on a whole range of hardware, it suffers (in this specific regard) from the same fragmentation as Linux: there's isn't so much one single thing to get attached to.
- collyw 13y ago
  Mac users are annoyingly vocal.
  - Angostura 13y ago
    I must admit sweeping generalisations like that might just make me so.
  - sbuk 13y ago
    No more than any other group. That's just your cognitive bias showing.
csmithuk 13y ago
This is normal. They are the poster boy for a corporation despite having screwed up incredibly so many times over the years, nearly fallen off a cliff and treating their customers like crap ("you're holding it wrong" for example) and still only maintaining a minority market share on the desktop and handset market. Also they have several system architectures and complete API rewrites over the years that mean their client-base rewriting the entire universe every time they move the goalposts. For comparison: MSDOS is 32 years old. Stuff still runs from day one. Windows is actually 28 years old. Stuff still compiles from day one (windows' original API isn't much different to today's windows). Stuff still runs from circa 1995 on current machines. Unix is 45 years old. Stuff still compiles and runs from circa 1974.
- peterkelly 13y ago
  Windows is incredibly hampered by the desire to maintain backwards compatibility. There's a ton of ugly stuff that could have been jettisoned by now if it wasn't for the need to support some program written in 1990 for the windows 2.0 API. I agree there are many benefits to backwards compatibility, and in some cases it is warranted (though these days you can use virtual machines to achieve much the same goals). Apple made a different choice, and their platform is all the better for it. I like that they deprecate things and don't keep us held back by ancient technology.
  - ksk 13y ago
    Do you have any specific examples of how its "incredibly hampered"?
    - peterkelly 13y ago
      The most extreme I can think of was one reported by Raymond Chen on his "The Old New Thing" blog which I can't find the specific link for, but is discussed in an article by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html To quote: "I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."
icebraining 13y ago
People did celebrate the 20 years of Linux, back in 2011: http://content.linuxfoundation.org/20th/ http://content.linuxfoundation.org/20th/ The thing is, Linux doesn't have the PR machine that Apple does, nor the number of fans among journalists, nor the recognition by the public.
racl101 13y ago
Really? Are you really gonna ask why software like Windows or Linux, that don't have the marketing behemoth that Apple has (or is), aren't celebrated with the same pomp and circumstance? Microsoft could put the money behind it, no doubt, but given that their history of commercial and advertising (e.g. Ballmer selling windows 1.0 like your local mattress store salesman as compared to Apple's 1984 commercial), even Microsoft couldn't give Windows the parade it deserves.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

hayksaakian 13y ago

Maybe its PR (as in they got paid to publish news about this)

Doctor_Fegg 13y ago
That isn't what PR means.

oneeyedpigeon 13y ago

Linux: I think because it's less of a 'concrete' thing (e.g. so many distros, very steady 'word of mouth' growth rather than a big launch) Windows: People just don't have the same affection for Windows: it tends to be something that's used, grudgingly, often for work, rather than something that people are genuinely pleased by. I'm sure people will disagree, of course, that's just a big generalisation. Also, since Windows is available on a whole range of hardware, it suffers (in this specific regard) from the same fragmentation as Linux: there's isn't so much one single thing to get attached to.

collyw 13y ago
Mac users are annoyingly vocal.
- Angostura 13y ago
  I must admit sweeping generalisations like that might just make me so.
- sbuk 13y ago
  No more than any other group. That's just your cognitive bias showing.

csmithuk 13y ago

This is normal. They are the poster boy for a corporation despite having screwed up incredibly so many times over the years, nearly fallen off a cliff and treating their customers like crap ("you're holding it wrong" for example) and still only maintaining a minority market share on the desktop and handset market. Also they have several system architectures and complete API rewrites over the years that mean their client-base rewriting the entire universe every time they move the goalposts. For comparison: MSDOS is 32 years old. Stuff still runs from day one. Windows is actually 28 years old. Stuff still compiles from day one (windows' original API isn't much different to today's windows). Stuff still runs from circa 1995 on current machines. Unix is 45 years old. Stuff still compiles and runs from circa 1974.

peterkelly 13y ago
Windows is incredibly hampered by the desire to maintain backwards compatibility. There's a ton of ugly stuff that could have been jettisoned by now if it wasn't for the need to support some program written in 1990 for the windows 2.0 API. I agree there are many benefits to backwards compatibility, and in some cases it is warranted (though these days you can use virtual machines to achieve much the same goals). Apple made a different choice, and their platform is all the better for it. I like that they deprecate things and don't keep us held back by ancient technology.
- ksk 13y ago
  Do you have any specific examples of how its "incredibly hampered"?
  - peterkelly 13y ago
    The most extreme I can think of was one reported by Raymond Chen on his "The Old New Thing" blog which I can't find the specific link for, but is discussed in an article by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html To quote: "I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."

icebraining 13y ago

People did celebrate the 20 years of Linux, back in 2011: http://content.linuxfoundation.org/20th/ http://content.linuxfoundation.org/20th/ The thing is, Linux doesn't have the PR machine that Apple does, nor the number of fans among journalists, nor the recognition by the public.

racl101 13y ago

Really? Are you really gonna ask why software like Windows or Linux, that don't have the marketing behemoth that Apple has (or is), aren't celebrated with the same pomp and circumstance? Microsoft could put the money behind it, no doubt, but given that their history of commercial and advertising (e.g. Ballmer selling windows 1.0 like your local mattress store salesman as compared to Apple's 1984 commercial), even Microsoft couldn't give Windows the parade it deserves.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]