Chambers wrote:
> I didn't see mention of them in the wikipedia articles, 

Yeah. In general, there's a whole bunch of stuff that end-users rarely 
see. The whole protection bit, the whole secure-desktop-communication 
bit. Stuff like System Restore in XP, and other stuff that programs can 
use but which end-users don't really see (like transactional file 
systems) keep showing up.

There's really only so much an OS can do for a user. You can make the 
apps better, and Apple "improves" the OS by making better apps to come 
with it. If MS did that, people would start suing them for monopoly 
practices again.

So there's a number of things that either lead to better performance 
(like the memory management) or to easier programming, but not a whole 
lot you can do that the user is going to see vividly.

Of course, if it doesn't work, it's going to suck regardless of what 
it's *supposed* to do.

> making the entire file system a relational database?  IIRC, they didn't 
> drop that one because of implementation problems, but because in 
> practice it sucked.

Actually, it worked quite well for some systems. Like PR1ME, a business 
mainframe. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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