Get pissy much? I consider it "very cool" in the sense that this is a cool feature that I finally get to use in the OS I prefer to work in.
I don't care if it's been around for decades or done a thousand times before on other OS's, it's being done by them now, and I find it useful.
I'd rather see them do stuff like this and be praised for it than do stuff like this and get shit on by people with the tiresome "it's about time" or "Linux had this a zillion years ago and did it better" crowd.
Actually, I won't have the same attitude... I'll be indifferent, and not comment at all, as I don't really care what Windows does. Even though I use it almost daily for various client work.
When it comes right down to it, I don't buy into this whole OS religion thing. I've had more than a passing exposure to quite a few of them, and they all have/had their place.
Case in point, I started my career on IBM 3081's and PDP-11's. I even have a full rack of gear in my home office that includes a bunch of boxes with various flavours of Linux installed, a Tadpole laptop running Solaris, an operational NeXT Cube, SGI and HP boxes running their Unix variants, a cluster of Sun Netras, and on and on. I've also got a few different laptops with Windows and Linux installed. And a couple of MacBook Pro's.
They all have good features, and bad, but none of them have everything.
Do I care what someone else uses? Nope. Do I care if they gush over it and think it's the coolest thing ever? Nope. Do I feel some overwhelming urge to "educate" them on why their choices are "wrong"? Nope.
I just know what works for me, and am happy to discuss things with like-minded individuals. I'm not a fanboy, and I haven't drunk the Cool-Aid. I also don't think everyone who owns a Mac is like that either.
It's an UltraBookIIe. Needed it when I provisioned 6 racks of Sun gear in an off-shore co-lo for a gaming company, and it was the easiest way to auto install/configure all the OS's and software into bare metal gear. Wasn't the fastest thing on the planet, but it worked really well.
You're damn straight I'm calling you crazy, running Solaris on a Tadpole Sparcbook - If you're running a Sparcbook or even a Sparcbook 2, Solaris is just too slow to reasonably run - choose life, choose SunOS 4.1.3.
Dude, if you're ever in the UK I owe you a beer. Heck, many beers.
To be fair, the main problems I had with Solaris on SPARCbook 2 were more to do with Java being too slow and Sun's insistence on making everything Java-i-fied around the time I was using it.
I'm similarly OS-agnostic in terms of performance and usually recommend Apple gear for people with no preferences. But it still bugs me when people bray about 'revolutionary Apple products' that are really just Apple joining the party. This 'amazing new thing' gets shoved in my face that has been around for ages and I'm supposed to mollify them with vapid oohs and ahs.
Or if someone asks me why I've got an android phone and not an iphone and I casually respond that I don't like the way Apple devices get locked to iTunes, I get groans and eye-rolls. Fuck that shit, you ask me a question and then you socially punish me because I prefer to go a different way, damn right I get pissed off at the 'Apple Cult'.
Fanboys of all stripes are painful as hell, and the Apple Fanboy Cult is currently ascendent, that's all.
OK. As long as you have the same attitude when Microsoft implements the Dock for Windows users, and everyone says, "Microsoft is really cool, this is a great new feature! Way to go Microsoft", without any acknowledgment of the origin.
It's just the whole culture around Mac. Apple gets lavished and rewarded, heralded as "clairvoyant" (the term used in a big thread yesterday about iPad) and similar silly pronouncements, seemingly no matter what they do -- whether the idea and existing implementations are older than the average age of Apple's workforce or not. People go around with Apple bumper stickers and define themselves by their association with the Apple brand. They hire people and choose friends based on whether the candidates use a Mac. And, when Apple finally implements an old idea, they are super awesome for getting around to it 20 years after almost everyone else.
It's just a bit annoying for those of us not infected, I guess.
(I have a MacBook Pro, for the record. I run Arch Linux on it. This has caused several Mac fanboys much distress.)
I'm sure there are. I'm not one of these, generally. I carry around a MBP and consequently display the Apple logo everywhere I use that. I just don't buy into the dogma or the reality distortion field that makes some hail an old style of VNC implementation as innovative and awesome.
I think it all boils down to levels of tech-savvyness. My mother wouldn't know where to start with a VNC what-you-ma-call-it, but by clicking a button that says "See your desktop and files" makes Apple awesome.
Besides, I think there is something valuable in making tech simple. Generally, the applause for Apple is misplaced under "look at feature/concept X" when it should be placed under "feature/concept X 50% simpler".
I don't care if it's been around for decades or done a thousand times before on other OS's, it's being done by them now, and I find it useful.
I'd rather see them do stuff like this and be praised for it than do stuff like this and get shit on by people with the tiresome "it's about time" or "Linux had this a zillion years ago and did it better" crowd.