Times are looking bleak for the OS know-alls who delight in telling us it is OS TEN and not OS Eks. It’s a godsent opportunity to demonstrate your prowess with Roman numerals when talking knowledgeably about operating systems. Not much longer, it seems. Hidden in the latest build of El Capitan is a reference to MacOS, the successor to OS X. Apple, it seems is leaving Rome to the pedants.
It’s a logical move, of course, and will bring the MacOS into line with iOS, at least in terms of nomenclature. Another worry with OS X that has been troubling Apple for some years is where to go after X. It’s a dilemma all brands (except baked beans) suffer when they get past 10. Maybe that’s one reason we never had a Leica M10. And OS XI just doesn’t seem right (it’s even more open to mispronunciation) except, perhaps, to the odd Latin scholar or cricket fan.
But could this change also represent an impending narrowing of the gap between Mac and mobile operating systems? Are we about to see the 15-year-old Mac system graced with a touch or a gesture.
I hope not. It’s still a strange feeling to prod at a vertical screen; I’ve tried it often enough in error when I’ve temporarily forgotten I was using the Mac and not the iPad. To have to keep swapping between keyboard and screen doesn’t sound fun at all.
We will have to wait until the World Wide Developers’ conference in mid June to hear the fate of the much mangled X.
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Oh and the telephoto (Fuji X-T1 and 50-230mm Fujinon) really brings cricket to life… Very nice Bill.
Very nice John. But in my day men were men and wore white, just as the gods decreed.
It never ceases to amaze me how short termist people are… Particularly politicians and civil servants.
Remember the London telephone number shortage?
My childhood telephone number was WOO (Woolwich) 0906… Which after my family left that address, presumably became 854 0906…
Then in short order…
01 854 0906
081 854 0906
0181 854 0906
And lastly an at last somebody understood the issue 🙂
020 8854 0906
What was needed was an extra digit at the beginning of the local area code… 020 being for London, obviously in the long term the permutations will run out, and you simply change it to something else, other than a 7 obviously.
UK number plates anyone?
Now don’t get me started on UK car number plates. What a bugger’s muddle. I have long since given up trying to decipher those cryptic dates which are purely for the benefit of lazy policemen. I understand the government wanted to introduce a more logical system without the dates and the twice-year-scramble for new registrations. But it was resisted by Commissioner Plod and his associates. This bunch of incompetents then went on to preside over Operation Washout.
The German system, which in general is designed to show where the owner of the car resides, is a logical confection that still stands up after seven decades. Logic was lost in the British system round about 1903 and it has never made a comeback.
That reminds me, a friend of mine was once a bigwig in Dunlop and sported A1 on his company car. He was constantly stopped by said Plod: "I hope you don’t mind but I wanted to get that one in my book, the lads at the nick will never believe it."