Operating Systems

In my final semester of school, I'm taking operating systems. I'm very excited about this class because unless you do something about it yourself then you will get very little exposure to other systems until you have to deal with them. Luckily, I have experience with various operating systems in Windows, a little Mac experience, and some unix/linux experience. Well, my professor has about 8 operating systems for us to get our hands on this semester and there are only 6 of us in the class. He has 2 mini macs, 1 imac, and 3 other pcs with removable docks and dual booted windows systems as well as Netware with Susa Linux and a copy of Fedora Linux with Gnome. The only unix we get into is when we dig down into the Mac OS X. So I will get much exposure. My professor is good friends with the head guy of operating systems at Microsoft and he was able to get us a beta copy of Windows Longhorn a.k.a. Vista that is coming out later this year. I only played with it for about 10 minutes or so and I have to say that they tightened up the graphics and the interface has a few different features. This is all based off the little time I had with it to notice the difference. I'll get more time with in the next few months and get to know it a little more intimitely, but it will take a little bit to adjust to it. I've just gotten to where I know many ins and outs of XP, but this will be a new challenge. I'm enjoying it and its nice to get to be taught some things instead of having to just figure it out all the time. However, much of Computer Science is just figuring it out. I enjoy it though. I love to study these things and new technologies and look forward to getting to learn the things in our future.