Just two minor corrections in an otherwise well put comment.

Just two minor corrections in an otherwise well put comment.

I liked your comment, including the wordiness, as I tend to get wordy as well.

However, two minor corrections.

1) "Apple can now seriously state that the Mac is THE largest amount of
UNIX systems sold."

According to several stories that have appeared on LWN recently, depending
on who you ask and how they measure, Linux either just passed Apple late
last year, or will pass it sometime this year, as the #2 selling computer OS in
the world. That puts a bit of a kink in your "THE largest amount of UNIX
systems sold" (well, unless you split Linux systems up by distribution, or are a
purist that goes by name rather than behavior).

2) This is a nitpick of sorts, and I'm only raising it because I only fairly
recently realized it myself, when I kept trying to use it under a spell checker
and it kept flagging it as wrong. Thus, don't take offense. Again, I only
recently learned this myself and still catch myself attempting to use it.. which
is probably why it bothers me so much to see it written. <g>

"Irregardless" isn't a word.

What has happened is that folks (including my own parents and others from
which I learned, and they both should know better) have carelessly merged
two different words with roughtly the same meaning. "Regardless", and
"irrespective". Think about it. "Regardless" means exactly what you
INTENDED to say using the non-word "irregardless". The "ir-" prefix which
would normally negate the meaning of the root isn't needed, and indeed,
negating "regardless" isn't what was intended anyway. "Regardless" is the
word intended. The confusion, as I mentioned, traces back to the term of
similar meaning, "irrespective", where the "ir-" prefix DOES properly serve its
negation function, since "irrespective" means the opposite of "respective".

Thus, either "irrespective" or "regardless" can be used correctly, but there is
no such term "irregardless", and if there was, it would mean the exact opposite
of the intended meaning of the non-word as commonly heard.

(As well, the -less suffix also negates meaning, in this case of "regard". Thus,
"irregardless" is incorrect for the second reason that it's a double negative. As
I once saw someone write, "The double negative is a feature not fully
supported in English." I thought that was rather a neat way of putting it,
particularly to an audience of computer techies. <g>)

.. See what I mean about being long winded myself? <g>

Duncan