I believe the colorful bit you're reaching for is "whipped cream on a
road apple." At least, that's what I heard Scott McNealy call it many
times when I worked at Sun a few years back. ;-) To add my $0.02 to
the discussion about operating systems... I've been a long-time user of
both UNIX and various PC operating systems; had MS-DOS back on one of
the early Compaq luggables, and have had one at home pretty much all
along. Most of my educational and career experience has been running,
managing, and writing software on and for UNIX boxes.
At Sun, my group had UNIX boxes which ran heavily-trafficked (thousands
of interactive users) transaction systems on them which would report
300+ days of uptime. At my current gig, most of the infrastructure,
information systems, and so on run on NT, and those boxes tend to have a
MTBR (Mean Time Between Reboots) of, oh, two weeks. For whatever
reason. OTOH, *commercial, supported* (as opposed to high-quality,
free, mostly-unsupported) software is both more plentiful and cheaper on
NT, which I guess is attractive to some. Draw your own conclusions...
jb