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Q. What is Linux/Unix? Q. Do we do Microsoft Windows? What Versions? Q. Do we do Apple Macs? What Versions? We can offer and develop for any of the main computer operating systems Linux,Microsoft Windows (any version) or Apple's Mac OS-X. To know more read on though . . .
About thirty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines - computers - for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a spy satellite, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized." - put in a box and sold to ordinary people. Put simply, Operating Systems - like Windows, Apple's Mac OS-X and Linux/Unix allow programmes written by computer programmers to talk to the computer. Even the least technically-minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tyres of a BMW. The first job that any coder needs to do when writing a new piece
of software is to figure out how to take the information that is being
worked with (in a graphics program, an image; in a spreadsheet, a grid
of numbers) and turn it into a linear string of bytes. These strings of
bytes are commonly called files or (somewhat more hiply) streams. They
are to telegrams what you and I are to Cro-Magnon man, which is to
say the same thing under a different name. All that you see on your
computer screen--your Tomb Raider, your digitized voice mail messages,
faxes, and word processing documents written in thirty-seven different
typefaces--is still, from the computer's point of view, just like
telegrams, except much longer, and demanding of more arithmetic.
When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind's eye: "The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter's box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from home plate." and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions.
This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. An Operating System - like Windows, Apple's Mac OS-X and Linux/Unix - is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you
and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to
convert the information you're working with--be it images, e-mail
messages, movies, or word processing documents--into the string of ones and zeros that are the only things computers know how to work with. The Microsoft family of operating systems have evolved over many years basically from a system designed for ordinary users to use on cheap computers on their desktops. Many of the exact workings are trade secrets of Microsoft (called proprietory) so no-one who is trained in Windows really knows how it all works - they are essentially users or Microsoft technologies just like you are when you use Word or Excel. They have, however, normally been on expensive courses and accreditations and are often highly defensive and hostile to other operating systems. The status of operating systems commands almost religious zeal in programmers and National Web Design are not in the possition of missionaries - we will develop for whatever platform or OS our clients want - and we have a number of .net and Windows programmers. Likewise Apple/Mac (Macintosh) evolved over many years basically from a system designed for ordinary users to use on more expensive computers on their desktops. Until recently even more exact workings of Apple Operating Systems and computers were proprietory. Recently hoever Apple have made a huge change and moved over to a new operating system OS-X (versions are called Jaguar/Panther etc). This is a version of Linux, which is in itself a version of Unix - the sort of grand-daddy of OSs developed for huge mainframe and super-computers. It is Linux - the version of Unix that runs on ordinary desktop PCs that we generally recommend to our clients. Linux is what is known as Open Source - this means that htere areno hidden secrets anywhere - a really good programmer can know exactly how any part works and - if he or she wants - can change any part or Linux to do exactly what they need at any time.
Using Linux rather than Windows or other proprietory operating systems is exactly what companies like IBM and Google do to give their products a huge technical edge. Like Google users, our clients don't have to deal with the complexities but by having smarter, better trained staff we can offer more powerful applications to them by using this super-powerful technology. 
It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect without going into mind-smashing technical detail. The gist of it is explained by the technology writer Neil Stephenson in the following anecdote . . about drills . . .
"The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you
look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills
but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for
homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a
cheap homeowner's drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle
sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube
contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can hold the
handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you
are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg
with one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight off
the counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle
(provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the other
depending on whether you are using your left or right hand to operate
the trigger. This handle is not a sleek, ergonomically designed item as
it would be in a homeowner's drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of
regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber
handle on the other. If you lose it, you just go to the local plumbing
supply store and buy another chunk of pipe.
During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another
worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we were
putting up, climbed up to the second-story level, and used the Hole
Hawg to drill a hole through the exterior wall. At some point, the
drill bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one and only
imperative, kept going. It spun the worker's body around like a rag
doll, causing him to knock his own ladder down. Fortunately he kept his
grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained lodged in the wall, and he simply
dangled from it and shouted for help until someone came along and
reinstated the ladder.
I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it
did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few
six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I
chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down
between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the
first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and
whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest
obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a
spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself
and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe
handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a
wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself,
though not so badly that I couldn't use it. After a few such run-ins,
when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound
with atavistic terror.
But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is
dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound
by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and
neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a
homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger
lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision
the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it.
A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely different reason:
it tries to do what you tell it to, and fails in some way that is
unpredictable and almost always undesirable. But the Hole Hawg is like
the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out his master's
instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited power, often
with disastrous, unforeseen consequences.
Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in hardware stores
with what I thought was a judicious eye, scorning the smaller low-end
models and hefting the big expensive ones appreciatively, wishing I
could afford one of them babies. Now I view them all with such contempt
that I do not even consider them to be real drills--merely scaled-up
toys designed to exploit the self-delusional tendencies of soft-handed
homeowners who want to believe that they have purchased an actual tool.
Their plastic casings, carefully designed and focus-group-tested to
convey a feeling of solidity and power, seem disgustingly flimsy and
cheap to me, and I am ashamed that I was ever bamboozled into buying
such knicknacks.
It is not hard to imagine what the world would look like to someone who
had been raised by contractors and who had never used any drill other
than a Hole Hawg. Such a person, presented with the best and most
expensive hardware-store drill, would not even recognize it as such. He
might instead misidentify it as a child's toy, or some kind of
motorized screwdriver. If a salesperson or a deluded homeowner referred
to it as a drill, he would laugh and tell them that they were
mistaken--they simply had their terminology wrong. His interlocutor
would go away irritated, and probably feeling rather defensive about
his basement full of cheap, dangerous, flashy, colorful tools.
Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix (and Linux)
programmers . . are like contractor's sons who grew up using only
Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play
video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring
themselves to take these operating systems seriously."
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