Smells Like Tiger

Today, MacWorld posted an interesting story regarding Micro$oft's next-generation operating system, now called Windoze Vista (nee Longhorn).

The first Beta 1 code of Windoze Vista was released to 10,000 technical beta testers recently, in order to troubleshoot new technologies. This is the first peek the PC world has seen in the new OS, which has been in development for at least two years.

You better believe Mac users were excited to see what Micro$oft has been keeping under lock-and-key for so long. Since the Mac community has seen three major upgrades to their operating system in the time since the release of Windoze XP, they were wondering if Bill Gates had really come up with something original, or if Micro$oft is still having troubles building a stable, secure, easy-to-use operating system.

I am sure many Mac users were snickering while reading the document, which pointed out that many technologies introduced in Vista have already been implemented in OSX Tiger. With Apple's next revision of OSX (code-named Leopard) due in late 2006, it seems that Vista might be left in the dust when it comes to innovative software technologies.

Point for point, this site tried to make an objective comparison between OSX Tiger and Windoze XP. Though I consider it a completely subjective task, where there will always be bias towards one operating system or the other, this site did its' best to level the playing field. I am gloating, of course, that Tiger came out on top, though the competition was generally tight.

I am a user of both Power-PC and Intel architectures... At least this year. I use both Windoze XP and OSX Tiger, so I would hope my opinions are warranted. I really think Apple makes a better operating system. I think it is easier to use, it provides a slicker user-interface that is more intuitive than Windoze. It is built on a Unix kernel, so it is more stable and secure than the Windoze counterpart. OSX (and other *nix derivatives) are more efficient operating systems, which means faster overall performance.

But if you are a gamer, you gotta stick to a PC, mainly for the availability of titles. Mind you, the gaming consoles developed by Sony, Nintendo, and Micro$oft are going to end up out-performing brand-new computers, so we may see a paradigm-shift in what kinds of systems gamers use.

In a similar tangent, this article published by Extreme Tech was explaining the struggles chip makers such as Intel, AMD, IBM, and Motorola are having accelerating the clock speeds on their chips. When we were seeing processor speeds double every year in recent history, these chip manufacturers are running into all kinds of excessive heat issues.

The bottom line is that the chips are running too hot. My iMac G5 just cooks. You could fry an egg on the processor. I have been reading horror stories from other iMac G5 users who have had the innards of their computer melt on them. Furthermore, putting these chips into laptops would just be a safety hazard. People would be suing computer manufacturers for liability due to burns on programmers' legs, and greatly-reduced sperm counts.

This topic sure took a strange twist. I had better quit before I go off the deep end.