<br>
<br>
<p>The big three operating systems in the consumer and server world are
Linux, OSX and Windows in their various flavors. OSX and Windows come
in consumer/business and server variants. If you develop software, you
probably want to target these three operating systems. If you are a
developer and you need to develop and debug on these three platforms,
then you’re best off buying Macs for your developers as they can run
all three operating systems.</p>
<p>Software engineers with a Windows focus tend to develop on Developer
Studio. Software engineers with a focus on portability tend to develop
in a Unix environment using something like CYGWIN to emulate the Unix
environment on Windows so that they can use their Unix build scripts
to build their products on Windows with a common source code base. So
there is a benefit to outfitting software engineers with Linux systems
but then you have to have staff to deal with the typical issues that
you run into with Linux and devices. This is much less of a problem
with Mac OSX because Apple dictates the hardware.</p>
<p>On consumer systems Mac OSX has the advantage in security through
obscurity. One may argue that Windows is more secure or that OSX is
more secure from a software engineering perspective but malware
writers target Windows systems in far greater numbers than they do OSX
systems and there is a large historical base of viruses already out
there in Windows-land. You have to run anti-malware programs on
Windows - you don’t have to with Mac OSX. You can choose to run
anti-malware programs on Mac OSX but their workload should be light as
there is so little out there.</p>
<p>My point about the average user was simply a paraphrasing of the other
dude’s original point for emphasis before I countered it by
questioning his use of the computer scientist example. Finally:</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>No it isn’t. The angle bracket coding was used decades ago in email
and newsgroup quoting. It’s still commonly used on email list servers
today.</p>