Updated: 11/19/05; 12:33:59 PM

 Thursday, September 15, 2005
Mac Takes Honors as Best Unix Desktop
A picture named bestunix.jpg eWeek has just published an article declaring Mac OS X as the Best Unix Desktop. During recent keynote addresses, Steve has made mention that Apple is now the worlds largest Unix vendor (which surprises me) but considering the rich history of Unix, it's pretty amazing what Apple has been able to accomplish in just a few short years.

Apparently, eWeek isn't the only one singing the praises of Mac OS X, even PC World & PC Magazine has repeatedly awarded it as one of the best products of 2003, 2004 (2005 isn't in the books yet).

From the eWeek article:

Opinion: GNOME is nice, KDE is fine and the forthcoming Looking Glass may be wonderful, but the best Unix desktop is the one in the Macintosh.

When I first started using Unix, my favorite "desktop" was the Korn shell. It's still my favorite command line interface.

As the years went by and interfaces grew graphical, I grew fond of SCO's Open Desktop. Or, as I sometimes called it on days when my top-of-the-line ATI Ultra card with its 1MB of RAM was grinding away at putting a glorious 256-color display on my monitor, Open Deathtrap. Then, along came Linux, and life got a lot better. I've used both KDE and GNOME and a host of more obscure Linux desktops such as Enlightenment. These days, though, I've become a confirmed KDE user.

Of course, none of these is even close to being in the running for the best Unix desktop. No, the best Unix desktop is Aqua, and you'll find it running on any Mac running Mac OS 10.x.

5:13:28 PM    
Bill Gates goes to College

A picture named billg_pdc_2.jpg

Continuing this weeks Microsoft PDC coverage, I thought I'd cut them a little slack and post a link to this years parody video that they showed at the PDC. For those of you who are not familiar, for years, Microsoft has put together these absolutely fantastic spoof / parody videos, usually featuring Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and they are always tied to a current movie / commercial / song that is big in pop culture.

To my knowledge, they have never published these short videos anywhere so you had to attend one of the events to actually get to see them. Not being a lawyer, I can't say for sure but the reason that I heard given for not publishing them was possible legal action but I always thought parody was explicitly exempted from that type of lawsuit. However, times have changed and just about everyone is walking around with a camera phone or digital video camera so it was inevitable that someone at this years PDC would catch the moment on film and before long it's on the net for all to enjoy.

This years parody is based on the movie Napoleon Dynamite and the quality isn't all that great but it's funny as hell. Enjoy!

12:27:41 PM