Sometimes people make really annoying posts “like this”:http://www.tuaw.com/2006/09/08/the-little-things-anti-aliased-fonts-help-mac-os-x-shine/.
As the author was clearly corrected, XP does support anti-aliased fonts. And even his screenshot is a poor example, because the title bar of the shown window has anti-aliased text.
Without ClearType turned on, XP doesn’t anti-alias your font until it hits a certain size. If he’d done a little more homework, he’d notice that OSX does this too. Just load up Terminal, and choose a small size of Monaco.
At what size the system switches AA on or off is a purely subjective design decision, as is most discussion about fonts.
I mean come on, even Linux distros have had anti-aliased fonts for at least a couple years. If Linux has it, then OS X or windows probably had it years ago.
This is just about as bad as “hey OSX is more secure because it was built on a UNIX foundation”, yea whatever that means. As if UNIX code isn’t immune to buffer overflows and other programming mistakes.
The only thing that this post has contributed is through one of it’s comments, which points to a ClearType tuning mechanism, even available “online”:http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearType/tuner/Step1.aspx. That’s pretty cool, though it could be improved slightly (please show us some italics text samples, because diagonal lines is where this stuff really seems to show differences between settings). But you can always download the PowerToy and experiment for yourself.