On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Phillip H. Zakas wrote:
Apple is a pretty computer and everything, but there's so much to be desired from their os programmers (not saying microsoft is the best, just saying the mac os really stinks.)
There's kind of a feedback loop here; Windows achieved critical mass and Apple didn't. Hence, MS can afford to hire lots more engineers to work on their CRAPPY os than Apple can hire to work on their mediocre os. So, after a while, Windows got better than the MacOS. I remember how hard Win3.11 sucked compared to MacOS 5. But once true multitasking was under WinNT3.51, it was about Neck-and-neck for quality with MacOS 7. And like Mr. Zakas, I'm pretty convinced that even though MacOS 10 has true multitasking, it has definitely fallen behind WinNT 4. ObCryptoStuff; this same kind of "critical mass" phenomenon affects lots and lots of the stuff we're looking at. Freenet, Mojo Nation, Napster, Gnutella, Digital Cash, etc, even PGP and GPG - All have a value that depends directly on how many other people are using them. If they don't grow beyond a certain threshold size, they remain less useful than the disk space they occupy. But where is the threshold and when is it passed? And how do you get there? If P2P agents were distributed with a couple of the major linux distributions (say Red Hat and SuSE) they'd probably achieve critical mass fairly fast (especially if they were set up and configured during install, the way Apache increasingly is). And if they were opensource, they'd probably get into ALL linux distributions within a few years. But so far most of the people doing P2P are trying to make a buck off of it, so with the exception of gnutella, there aren't open- source agents. Bear