Slashdot Mirror
Apple Gets Testy About GUI
ShogZilla writes "Apple threatened Skinz.org (a windows "skins" site) & Stardock (makers of the win32 app "windowblinds") with legal action if a certain skin
The problem? The skin (winaqua) alters WinOS window frames to mimic the Mac OS Aqua appearance - kinda. It's very altered, the graphics are custom, & the layout is different - but that doesn't appear to matter.
After the threat, both sites initially complied, but have reconsidered & have reposted the skin; it does not use any graphics from aqua, it does not contain any mac logos etc; it's an original work - just inspired by the aqua GUI.
" I'm still waiting for an Aqua theme for E - Aqua just looks so darn /purty/.
So what does that mean for KDE and GNOME etc. Will themes.org be getting cease and desist letters?
-- Steve
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
go to : http://sawmill.themes.org/ themes.phtml?themeid=947266463 .. ... to make thing really pretty use :
I'm using it quite for a while
And
http://gtk.themes.org/themes.p html?themeid=947543904 the matching GTK theme ! YEAH !
No, I like things simple. Small, and simple.
Do the obvious to e-mail me.
Well, this certainly wins the award for most unreadable sentence. Come on guys, at least take a quick glance at what's being posted. It really does make the site look unprofessional.
"Sir, I'd stake my reputation on it."
"Kryten, you haven't got a reputation."
Don't you think Apple deserves to be able to protect Aqua's GUI? Apple has spent thousands of man-hours creating this look for the future OS, and these themes authors have simply lifted it. Unfortunately, the courts don't seem to agree that Apple deserves any protection. It's funny how Apple can sue over the look of their computers, but not their OS? Perhaps Apple can look closely at the themes on these sites, and see if there are any instances where the authors lifted elements from the QuickTime movies on Apple's MacOS X site.
Luckily for Apple, Aqua is a lot more then just a theme. It adds transparency to the entire interface and other refinements that a theme simply cannot duplicate. No one can claim that adding a Window's theme to a Mac or Mac theme to a Windows machine, in anyway duplicates the GUI of the other platform. The GUI is a lot more than a simple theme.
Sig goes here
Life sucks, kill a friend today.
Be careful how you respond,
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Cleartype!!!
;-))
[...]
(just kidding
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What completely freaked me out about the whole Look and Feel case was that Apple was so clearly in the wrong - it had licensed it's technology to Microsoft - and that it had *did not plan* for the possibility that it wouldn't win the case. I love and use Apple products, but there's no excuse for arrogance and NIH. It also looks like Stardock saw the Aqua interface before it was announced at Macworld - the press release announcing and debuting the new skin was released only a few hours after the keynote. Either someone was working *really* fast or they had prior knowedge. At this stage it's difficult to tell because the details are not clear. Another thing; Stardock originally called the skin Object desktop. Check the Stardock press release. Oh, and check out As The Apple Turns for a lighter view of the situations. If you don't get it the first time, trawl through their tape library. If you still don't get it, i give up. ;) Ben ***** 'If it ain't got an animal or a piece of fruit on it, it's worthless."
Golf; a good walk spoiled. -Mark Twain
Having some one copying the style of your gui for an other os
should be considerd a compliment, it means a job well done.
Second of all having your gui look and feel on an other os is a sort of free publicity.
And I am realy disipointed in Mac for playing the big bully game.
"THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT"-Death
42
The theme E-X is available for both E and GTK. Head on over the e.themes.org and gtk.themes.org. They look great but still have some functionality problems.
A computer graphics professional should be able to protect his work, like any artist, against someone who creates a cheap rip-off. The Aqua interface (IMO) is beautiful, and the result of many hours of hard work, trial-and-error processes, refinements, etc.. That kind of investment doesn't deserve to be stolen by some mediocre photoshop kiddie who watched the MWSF keynote address and said "Hey, good idea, I think I'll swipe it."
Gross.
COM
I don't think its a hack at all. The Dock was around in NeXTStep, which is now part of apple. They are taking the best parts of NeXTStep and putting it into MacOS X. Personally, I've always liked the dock idea. Each to their own I guess.
"Sir, I'd stake my reputation on it."
"Kryten, you haven't got a reputation."
MS BOB, The Word paper clip guy, That hidden game in Excel and leet filenames like: filen~1.txt
I have to return some videotapes...
I seem to recall that Apple sued Microsoft a while back, claiming that the "Look and Feel" of Windows was too close to their copyrighted MacOS. It's been obvious for a while that they still don't get it. Maybe one of (IBM, RedHat, VA Linux) could acquire Apple, depose CEO For Life Steven Jobs, open up the specs to some of their proprietary "standards," welcome the cloners back with open arms, and use the LinuxPPC as a base to sell hardware. Hmm.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Actually, it's because they have to lure them away from M$ and the DOJ lawsuit!
They might want to be careful, I don't know US law, but could their initial removal of the material (offending or not) be seen as implicit acknowledgement of wrongdoing? (A la the reason why most discussion boards are fully censored or not at all - you censor one and effectively take responsibility for the rest)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Pleas note the use ot the ":)" smiley at the end of the original post. Also consider the rather light, almost humorous tone of the entire post, including the reference to Linux programmers as "Longhairs" and the reference to Windows as having a user interface.
These are two strong signs that the author may be using some form of irony. Irony, for those not familiar with the concept, can be described as "when the actual opinion is the opposite of that stated". Ironys are in other words obvious lies, and are used as a way of stating the obvious in a humorous manner. (Do you understand the concept humour?)
In other words: Your post is redundant. One can then use induction, combined with the first law of moderation conclude that this post is also redundant.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Plug and Play?
The taskbar?
DirectX?
Um, Office?
Much as I hate Microsoft as much as the next corporation, some of the features in Office (particularly Excell) are gobsmacking. (Win32, on the other hand, is bollocks, but credit is due for Office). This is why they have a monopoly.
Microsoft have even been spotted posting RFC's and drafts for open standards recently. They've finally started behaving themselves (thank God).
Apple have no right to tell us what we can and cannot put on our desktop. If they can't sell products on merit of being better products then they clearly can't keep up with technology. Why doesn't MacOS have themes yet?
I actually see Apple being a great deal more of a threat to open-standards than M$ (remember the Indeo codec?).
Next thing you know they are going to be going after the sawmill MacOS X themes. Anyone got a mirror of these windows themes?
I have to return some videotapes...
The look and feel (I know, the "skin" just duplicates look) is part of the value of the OS. Granted, it probably wouldn't be the one thing that makes a user say "I'm going Mac over PC because the interface looks so much better", but it's a value added part of the OS, and if people using Windows can have it, it's one less reason for them to switch.
So, I'm certainly not saying I agree, but I can understand where they're coming from. They probably wouldn't threaten anyone for making a BeOS version, or even an X window manager version, unless they needed to be consistent.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Yes, Apple deserves to be able to protect their GUI. _If_ you define the GUI as the total of theme+window manager. In Apples case this means, theme+window manager+kernel.
Does Apple have the right to protect a 'theme'?
No, it does not. There are countless references to this, unless the copycat _duplicates_ an art _exactly_, this is when copyrights kick in, "design" an sich, is not protected.
Relevant court material can probably be found in the Apple vs Microsoft "look and feel" case.
Is it funny that Apple can protect their hardware looks, but not their software looks?
Not really, just on the surface perhaps, but the fact is, Hardware lookalikes will directly impact Apple sales, this can be prooven.
Software lookalikes will have NO IMPACT whatsoever on Apple sales, UNLESS the COMPLETE OS will be copied. I cannot imagine an Apple Artist buying a windowz workstation, JUST because theres an aqua theme. Its therefore utterly stupid to fight themes.
It also contradicts the recent Apple "willingness and flirtations" with Open Source. It therefore is not even from a marketing viewpoint sensible. What? Open Sourcing the (parts of) OS but sueing on a theme?? Get a grip.
(This should get through the ThickBoned Head of Marketing guru Jobs.)
Greetz SlashDread
macos has had themes since system 8.0 which is a few years ago dude
That's because PC manufacturers don't have anything innovative to protect. Heck PC manufacturers have acknowledged as much by signing away their rights to sue MS over patent-infringements.
I find this scary just because they were threatening to sue because their OS's look has been mimicked.
Those of you who are running themeable window managers such as enlightenment windowmaker etc. are probably aware of the existence of themes that mimic various OSes' appearance.
Please check out www.themes.org to get an idea of what I am talking about.
Do the theme authors risk a similar lawsuit threat? Is themes.org heading for trouble?
I hope some kind soul on slashdot can enlighten us about these questions.
This theme, apparently, is supposed to be inspired by the 'look & feel' of aqua.
Didn't Apple lose a case about the 'look & feel' of their GUI before? Isn't that why windows95 is allowed to.. uh.. borrow most of the GUI elements from System7 (MacOS7)?
Wonder why Apple thinks they can win this time around.. Sounds like website bullying to me.
check out9 34
http://e.themes.org/themes.phtml?themeid=947644
not totally finished though
OLE springs to mind. Linking a spreadsheet object to a word object and having both display in one application window was, I think, a true innovation at the time.
Possibly some professor had done the same in a lab 5 years earlier, but that hardly counts, any more than saying the internal combustion engine is just a copy of the steam engine because they both use the compressed-gas-cylinder-camshaft technology.
Anywa, here are some more, these are all just IMHO, so please correct me if I'm wrong:
docking toolbars and menus
DHCP (and very good it is too)
realtime spell checking (wiggly red lines in word)
ODBC
A comprehensive approach to disabled users
Comprehensive (if occasionally random) support for non-roman charactersets and languages
And finally, MS get big bonus points for ditching ASCII and shifting to unicode everywhere WAY before anyone else.
Flames to me personally if you must, please...
-----
i don't like docks much, the apps are in the menu anyway, maybe we can turn it off in the final release
The little desktop that crayola built. LOL! Sorry, no offense to the creator or those who like desktops that look like this; I'm just a more subdued theme kind of guy. :)
But seriously, this and the Yahoo cease and desist story posted just before this one raise an interesting question: How do trademarks apply for displayed computer content and what is the limit on what can be trademarked? In the Yahoo case, it is quite obvious that it is based on Yahoo, as they use a direct copy of their logo, so it is very likely that Yahoo will have a legal leg to stand on, but in this case, it is the overall appearance that is being "copied", although the appearance isn't quite what the Aqua's is. If I hadn't seen it in conjunction with this story, I would have thought that the creator of the skin simply liked bright, happy colors and that it bore a semblance to the Aqua look. I mean, it is fairly generic and doesn't use any logos that make it obvious that it is an Aqua copy. With millions of webpages out there and more being made every day, I would imagine that there are a lot of unintentional look-alikes, so where do you draw the line between similar and "stolen"?
Deosyne
How many lawsuits has Apple filed since the iMac release? Quite a few. Why so many? Because now that Apple is back and competitive again, they want to prove it by swinging their legal stick at anything that may involve and iMac but not produced by Apple. Even something silly like an Aqua skin for windows. I agree, it's an assinine idea, but a team of Apple's lawyers shouldn't be stifling the creativity (or lack of) of skinners out there.
Another note:
What about this: here is a link to several iMac winamp skins:
http://www.customiz e.org/view.pl?iMac%20Collection%3A%3Awinamp2
shouldn't these also be scrutinized?
Thanks for reading
ope
Jesus is coming! Everyone look busy!
Compared to the quantity of mp3's, funny movies, half-uninstalled software (got I hate RPMS - time to switch to debian), quake maps, KDE bloat, etc..etc.., I'm not *that* worried about 128x128 icons. In fact, if they're going to be scaled I'd rather they were bigger than that. They've also FINALLY got anti-aliased fonts right (RISC-OS users, shush :-)) which means it may be the first resolution-independant desktop :)
Why so many? Because now that Apple is back and competitive again, they want to prove it by swinging their legal stick at anything that may involve and iMac but not produced by Apple.
Yes. And No. Apple probably can't win some of these (the eMachine's suite is iffy), but what it does is set PRECEDENCE. Similar to when Sony sued Connectix over Virtual Gaming Station, the PSX emulator. Sony pretty much knew they couldn't win, but they also knew that by flexing their legal muscle a little bit, any company that writes another emulator will triple check their legal bounds.
IMHO, that pretty much spells out what Apple is doing here. There ARE other motives to a lawsuite than money and domineering control of one's property....
woof!
So... James Gosling has a patent on "translucent" dialog boxes. It is on IBM's patent site.
Maybe someone should put the smack down on Apple!!!
Start-button
Now you name one from apple (not any of the Xerox stuff please)
Why can't Apple protect the appearance of their UI elements like buttons, icons, title bar? They are works of art like paintings or poems. Fonts seem to be well protected, but interface elements are free-for-all? I think Apple has a case here.
Apple's been down this road before. I remember an old lawsuit by which they said MS was intruding on their look and feel for desktop GUIs. Now, anyone who's ever used both PCs and Macs knows that they look and act nothing alike. However, the fight went on, back and forth, until Xerox (the real inventors) brought out a demo of an Altos box. Here's where it gets interesting. See, the Macintosh team (at least one of them) had seen one of Xerox's systems at PARC back in the late 70s/early 80s. And had _blatantly_ ripped off the UI. In fact, if you look at the 2-color System 1-6 GUI, it's the same (and I mean _identical_) as what Xerox had put together. I take that back. There was one difference, instead of the apple logo on the apple menu, there was the Xerox stylized "X". And that was the ONLY difference. Xerox started making rumblings that if MS and Apple didn't stop this silly shit (it was inciting lots of other lawsuits), they were going to start playing the part of the 9000-pound gorilla (with evidence to boot!) that invented the GUI, and bitch-slap both companies into receivership with legal fees and licensing fees and other back fines, etc.
Apple and MS backed off, and there (to my knowledge) hasn't been a similar lawsuit in ages. Until now. You'd think that Jobs'd learn from his mistakes. You just can't sue over look and feel.
I'm patiently waiting for the folks at Universal Church of Sidus Julium (a bunch of people worshiping Julius Caesar as a deity) to launch a lawsuit against Apple, claiming a look-and-feel violation from Apple's use of Roman numerals in the name of OS X. After all, years of research and development that went into inventing the Roman-numeral system, and Apple is clearly a latecomer hoping to cash in on the numeral X's sexiness and consumer appeal.
I normally tend to support Apple, but this one is rediculous.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
By all means look at the URL in the above post, but please bear in mind that everything at www.mackido.com is biased in a way that makes the worst Linux zealot flamer on slashdot look like blind justice herself.
-----
If memory serves, Mac OS (circa 6.x or early 7.x) had something similar to OLE. Sadly, I think it failed due to lack of support by M$.
(I could be wrong. It's been a LOOONNNGGG time since I did layout for the college paper. Back when the 68040 was l33t)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I think alot of people will stick with or upgrade to MacOS 9 because of this. Apple really threw out the UI completely
---
I'm pretty sure that System 7's Publish and Subscribe, though awkward at times, predated OLE by some time.
I really doubt that MS came up with DHCP, but I could be wrong.
Apple has certainly been transitioning to Unicode since Mac OS 8.
And the MacOS supported the Japanese language for the entire OS about ten years ago, I think.
Apple has made efforts to make the OS easier for disabled users for a long time. There was the screen magnification control panel, there is Macintalk that shows up a lot.
I'll give you docking toolbars and the real-time spell checker. That's not very impressive a list, though, is it?
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Okay. QuickTime. That's a pretty major one.
Consistent, easy plug and play for hardware.
Installer technology that doesn't give you ulcers.
There are many others.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Let me add a few too...
The taskbar - Hewlett Packard developed this neat little taskbar program called Dashboard later bought by Starfish Software.
These other "inventions" I have seen the likes waaaay before Microsoft implimented them. I used the VMS desktop and seen office apps years before "Microsoft Office" came out.
Nuf Said? :)
The Taskbar doesn't really show the list of running apps, it shows the currently open windows. And it is a disaster to use when one is actually intensely using one's computer.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Just curious, but in the story itself and the postings, I don't see any kind of reference to a source for this story. Maybe I'm missing it - I usually see comments right away when someone posts an unattributed story.
--
--
E2 IN2 IE?
As far as looks go, yes it's a very unique look. Lots of artistic talent in designing the "look" with gratuitous usage of special effects that I'm sure rival Microsoft's animated paper clips (though you'll still want to turn them off after using it for 5 minutes). The feel hasn't changed much. It still uses the same windows and icons concept that has been around for 15 years-just cuter looking
---
yeah themes weree to have been a feature of Copland
FWIW, MS's DHCP is a steaming pile of krud which ignores basic stuff like the hostname.
--
Then there's the Case of the Transplanted Programmers. Early on in the article, we are told that "Apple had hired some people from Xerox (like Jef Raskin, Bruce Horn) who believed in concepts of a Graphical User Interface." and "by no stretch of the imagination could this be called 'ripping-off'." But later, we find out that "Microsoft took [Apple's] best Mac Programmer, and had him making almost every design decision for early windows." This, of course, proves that "Microsoft on the other hand did rip-off Apple." Wow.
As the other poster mentioned, MacKido generally makes Linux zealots look wishy-washy. But this one goes beyond that into some creepy cultish nether realm. Mr. David K. Every seriously needs a quick course in critical thinking skills, perhaps some elementary logic, or, failing that, a job in marketing. Seriously, read the article, people. It's just bizarre.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
(And here are 2 links about Chairman Jobs. Issue one and Issue two
And remember: Apple's action is typical of the corporation. Just because they say 'they are different' doesn't mean they ACT different.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
How can one stake ownership to the aesthetic feel that a theme provides to it's underlying window manager. A theme by today's standards provides no more than this.
:).
In my opinion, the real situation would be different if the themes in question were able to provide functionality that could emulate the MacOS, but they cannot. They neither acheive this nor reproduce copyrighted material of Apple.
What would follow next if Apple succeeded in their petty argument, would web designers be able to sue other sites for coding, from scratch, a site that has the same look and feel as their own?
Perhaps Apple should be quiet and accept the fact that if people are going to the trouble of creating look-alike themes from scratch, then they are both advertising Apple's original OS existance and advertising how cool it is (Aqua, cool
I neither use nor endorse Apple products, I find a bitter aftertaste from using previous products of theirs. But like many others, I find the existance of themes representing (read: merely looking-alike) the MacOS system making me more and more curious as to how 'cool' the original platform is.
Perhaps because of these theme's creations, I may even purchase a new Mac since I have almost tried before I've buyed...
Cow of ThirdEye
> Is Office really a technology? yeah its a technology outta control!!!!
Also check out the article in the MS knowledge base "Wind ows 95/98 DHCP Client Modified for RFC2131 Retransmission Compliance" which states that "This issue can occur because the DHCP client-retry mechanism in Windows 95 and Windows 98 is not in compliance with RFC 2131."
They finally fixed it in Windows 98 Second Edition. NT is ok. Not that I want to bash MS or anything, I just hate to see them get credit for developing an open standard when they don't even comply with it themselves.
well if theme support is kept then we can just use our old themes, yay! system 7 theme on OSX!!
Damn people, you amaze me. This is about Apple being pricks about the whole Skins thing. If Microsoft did the same thing there would be enough noise to wake the dead. However mention Apple and all the Mac Nuts come out of the woodwork and make this into another Microsoft bashing session. Lets get real here boys and girls. Apple is INFRINDGING on our rights to SKIN something, not copy the features of an OS, not taking code from a program... Once again Apple proves they are the Whores of the Computer Industry. SOME AC asked what Microsoft invented lately. Well last time I checked Microsoft was a SOFTWARE company NOT a hardware company (well OK they do make joysticks, keyboards and mice, ALL of which are original, and most of which even the staunchest Linux fans seem to like). Just what has Apple invented lately? AGP? Nope that was Intel. USB? Nope that was Intel too. The G3/G4? Nope that was Motorola. IDE? Nope Western Digital and Intel. MacOS X? Nope that was NeXT. Hmmm... you know the ONLY thing I can think of is FireWire... which they invented in 1993! (go check the patent on it.) Gee they made a fruity case! Big deal...
It should be a fairly trivial matter to add theme support, although I don't expect Apple to be working on it any time soon.
From what I've heard, Aqua is customizable enough that you should be able to make it suit you. I like Platinum too, and those mice (and keyboards) do suck, but until you've tried using Aqua for at least a few weeks (I mean the real version of Aqua under Mac OS X, not an incomplete rip-off theme on another OS), don't complain prematurely.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I believe that the Dock does not have to be on. I seem to remember that Jobs was running OS X without the Dock initially, and then turned it on. Russell Ahrens
Uhh... Sorry, but the Windows 95 "Start" button is a rip-off of the Apple Menu.
There are two differences: a lot more marketing was thrown at the idea when 95 came out, and Win32 installers throw a bunch of shortcuts in there automatically. Which personally annoys me. (In MacOS, you do it yourself, which come to think of it, is decidedly Linux-like, n'est-ce pas?)
The only "innovation" here on MS's part was the name.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Much like a newborn puppy...
If you want, I can dig around and determine where I read that.
Russell Ahrens
Actually, for all the crap that we give Microsoft now, we probably have to thank them a little bit. Before you go hitting the reply link with a flamethrower in hand, realize that I don't like the company much anymore either. One of the reasons we probably have to thank them, is that without them many of us would probably not be the computer geeks that we are, or have the jobs that we have. Windows is the software that has brought computing to the masses. I mean face it, even though I like Linux, its stable, its fun to work with, and it actually takes a little bit of thinking every once in awhile, it is most definitely not for the average home user. Without all these home users, we wouldn't have the net the way it is today, we wouldn't have people investing so much money in tech, etc. Even if you are developing some huge e-commerce site and serving it on Linux, its all the Windows using home users that are going to be flocking to the site and making you money. Anyway...while Microsoft has been unfair/scandalous/*insert phrase here* in the past several years, they definitely deserve their place in history.
> This isn't a flame, but like anyone in the Linux community should talk.
How about large scale open source? That's a pretty frickin' huge innovation.
Ryan
I feel pretty comfortable saying that most linux users have quite a bit of experience with windows machines. Very few people started out on linux. Since so many linux users SWITCHED from windows, I think we're justified in saying windows sux. After all, how many linux users do you know that switched back?
Ryan
If anyone uses an Aqua theme in an advertisement for a computer or software package that isn't actually running on Mac OS X, I think Apple should sue them for everything they've got. They're trying to make money off their products and freely using Apple's GUI to help them do it.
That's not the case here! Nobody's selling anything, and just because I can make my Linux or Windows box look sorta like Mac OS X, that's not going to make me any less interested in buying a G4 running Mac OS X later this year. No way in hell a mere theme is going to have the fluid animation, awesome-looking drop shadows, and other GUI elements that Mac OS X uses (it sounds like DisplayPDF rocks).
Also, we mustn't forget the "feel" half of "look and feel". I tried a Mac OS Platinum theme on KDE for awhile, then took it off. It looked like the Mac OS, but the feel was closer to Win95 than it was to a Mac. The inconsistency bugged the hell out of me so I got rid of it. The appearance of Aqua without the feel isn't anything special.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Other things Apple ripped-off:
the 3 peace computer (monitor,KB,CASE/CPU).
Directorys- or as apple calls them "folders"
COLOR screens
Use of a harddrive
Does it really matter WHO had WHAT idea first? No. Some ideas suck, others are good. You pick the good ones and use them.
I have to return some videotapes...
I have been reading /. for awhile now, actually a little over 2 years. One thing I have noticed, especially in comments on the MacOS, Gnome, K, etc is a lack of understanding of what makes a good GUI. Winaqua DOES NOT replicate the MacOS GUI. It merely mimics the MacOS Desktop. Winaqua CAN NOT replicate the MacOS GUI, because the underlying Windows code is not there to support it. In other words, the GUI is more than a set of icons, dock, desktop, theme. Now, alot of Linux desktop managers (they are not quite even GUIs yet) LOOK ok. They have neat buttons, sliders, icons, docks, etc. All the bells and whistles. They do not, hovever provide as decent a GUI as even MacOS 7, much less 9 or X. Why? They may look kewler. Hell, they DO look cooler, but their interface considerations, consistency, depts of admin capability do not even touch nT, which itself can not touch the Mac OS. Apple should leave well enough alone. Do not flame me here. I am a Apple/Lisa/Mac head thru and thru since 1979. But Winaqua is a joke. MacOS X is more about Mach, BSD, OpenGL, Quartz, Consistency and the overall fit and finish that it is about a set of dials and buttons. Oh, and one more thing...Windows did not invent any of the above items. I do not know if anyone here refuted the arg that they invented taskbar, menus yet, but these were also invented at PARC, and HEAVILY improved by the first MacOS designers.
1. There's a difference between imitating GUI concepts (such as curved edges and other 'look and feel' factors) and blatantly copying a piece of copyright art, even if done using the 'look and copy' method rather than the 'cut and paste'. People going on about GUI similarities between WIN95 and MacOS should look at this GIF animation showing a screenshot off sawmill.themes.org, with elements of the original MacOS X screenshot differenced out. Black means identical pixels.
2. Being able to emulate MacOsX's precise look on Win32 and X machines will harm Apple's campaign to market Macs as a trendy alternative - which is why they spent so much time and money developing it. Of course, you are are perfectly entitled to develop a similar look using their ideas. You shouldn't be able to just copy it directly.
3. This isn't about the right to emulate. That was settled in Apple's case versus Microsoft. This is about the right to copy.
As an analogy, think of Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Originally a masterpiece. However, any half-decent artist can paint a very good copy of it. The true artist, though, takes the eyes, the smile and the use of color and paints his own masterpiece.
OLE is a technology that Microsoft licensed from Big Blue. This isn't just a thing Microsoft copied, it's a thing they continue to shell out cash to include in their product.
.jp news site, took him weeks to convince Win98 to let him do it.
DHCP is an extension of the bootp protocol, which is older than you.
Realtime spell checking was available as a shareware app for OS/2 2.0 well before Office implemented it. It's called Spellguard, and it dates back to before Win95 was released, let alone the versions of Office that implement it. see HERE if you don't believe me. A friend of mine wrote it.
ODBC - don't be silly, it's one more protocol for a concept older than you are.
MacOS and OS/2 both had extensive support for disabled people as far back as 1993.
Microsoft's foreign language support used to be pretty impressive, they've cut back quite a bit lately. I couldn't tell you if other OSs did a better job, I don't really know, but it's hardly an innovation - their implementation has generally be exceedingly buggy. Inbetween jobs i Y2K tested Win95 in several foreign languages, so i know first hand.
And their Unicode support is less than acceptable. I have a friend who speaks japanese and wanted to read a
As for docking menus and toolbars, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that. Didn't the edit window of SimCity have a docking toolbar? That was out before *Windows* man.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
To say that the skin is an original work is like saying a forgery of the Mona Lisa is an original work. Looking at the skin indicates to everyone that the source of the images used for the buttons, window controls, etc is MacOS X. If a user interface can be considered a work of art then it deserves the same protection as any other art form.
I have often seen unauthorized copies of Enlightenment windows on the Skinz site. The least these guys could do is ask the original author for permission to 'port' these window designs and accept it when the author says 'NO'.
Copying with permission is fine, copying without is theft!
M.T.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"Think Different. Or else."
I'm waiting for an Aqua Kaleidoscope scheme for the Mac OS.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
AFAICR, a lot of Risc OS's "innovations" came from NeXTSTEP. I think the taskbar was one of them -- Acorn took NeXTSTEP's dock and ran with it.
Microsoft shamelessly lifted a huge chunk of NeXTSTEP's look-and-feel for the Chicago interface... compare the Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 looks against the NeXTSTEP look.
I can't remember which bits were NeXT and which were Acorn. I think NeXTSTEP was in 1988, while Acorn were still running the Arthur OS. Risc OS was a few years later.
MacOS X is pretty much what would've become NeXTSTEP 5.0, with bits on (like Carbon, Classic and Aqua). Go figure.
Why is every God damn thing on this site turned into a debate about Microsoft? Will you people grow up!? Microsoft is a business, trying to make money, and they are very good at it. Who cares if they never invented anything? Who cares if they never will?
Just took another look at Arthur:
/acorn/emulation/arthur/
http://www.cybervillage.co.uk
I'm not sure whether that thing at the bottom could really be called a taskbar. It was more of a launcher. It's a close call.
"After all, how many linux users do you know that switched back? "
2
1 linux ppc user, uses windows and BeOS now.
1 standard windows "power" user, uses BeOS too.
How many linux users do I know? 3. Me, and them.
I use all of them, (linux, be, win).
later
dan
Dan
Like I said on the post on Geeknews.net - Apple already lost this fight in the past. Apple vs. MS over look and feel of the GUI.
Apple keeps running around in one big circle, repeating mistakes that they have made in the past. They haven't learn a damned thing IMO. I feel that they are nothing more than a bunch of whiney bastards that are so arogant that they are really destroying any change of becomming a good company.
Apple IMO is as evil as M$ in business practices, or even worse.
-Ellis of Geeknews.com
First, Apple engenders bad vibes by their constant legal rumblings. I'm sure those skinz creators and others as annoyed as myself will forevermore associate Apple with warm and fluffy thoughts...um, right.
Second, Apple needs to just plow on and concentrate on bringing good product to market. I'd hardly call a theme a major asset that deserves to be protected by legal bullying.
The notable exception to this, I think, would be the DeCSS software, which really was an technological breakthrough, in the sense that it allowed people to do something they never could before.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
These are two strong signs that the author may be using some form of irony. Irony, for those not familiar with the concept, can be described as "when the actual opinion is the opposite of that stated". Ironys are in other words obvious lies, and are used as a way of stating the obvious in a humorous manner. (Do you understand the concept humour?)
Actually, the word you are looking for is "sarcasm." You're not alone, though. Alanis Morrisette doesn't know what Irony is either: "Rain on your wedding day" is not ironic. A sword-swallower choking on a toothpick is ironic.
Great, now I'm the irony police...
Having made the switch from Mac to the Evil Empire, it seems to me that the biggest reason Mac does not have the difficulties that Windows does with plug and play and installer installation is that Mac makes and/or controls most of the hardware.
There are less problems simply because there aren't as many options.
Look at the PC market... count the number of hardware manufacturers of motherboards, video cards, sound cards, etc. So many different configurations are possible. It's an amazing feat that Windows runs on most of them.
I'll give you this though. Microsoft makes exceptionally poor Mac software.
cheers,
To tell you the truth, the skin doesn't impress me that much. :) I don't know what all the fuss is about...
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Bzzt. Wrong. IBM had nothing to do with COM. COM was developed in cooperation by Digital and Microsoft.
"Actually they can"...umm no they can't. MS vs Apple proved that.
"Funny, no one tries to rip off those advanced GUIs Gnome or KDE. I wonder why..." Oh get a clue you silly slashdoter. How old is KDE/Gnome now? And how good was MacOS in 1985? Thought so...
oh wait..Doesnt MAC OS X have tinted windows? Where have i seen that before
I have to return some videotapes...
I think alot of people will stick with or upgrade to MacOS 9 because of this.
Right. The same amount people that kept their Performas because they didn't like the "crazy colors" of the iMac. Darn newfangled gadets.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
It does have themes... since the early alphas of 8.2 (now 8.5). It has really nice themes. -Jesus
Agent Technology (otherise known as the Paperclip)
Intellieye Technology (the Optical Mouse. Yes there were optical mice before, but they required a special mousepad to work)
Touch Sensitive Mouse (it was featured in slashdot somewhere as a device being developed)
Intellisense Technology. (The sometimes annoying feature that track what features you use the most in a toolbar and hides what you dont use. Office 2000 and Windows 2000 use a ton of this.)
Unfortunalty, a lot of their products aren't innovative, they usually see a technology that interests them, and standarize it. I mean, how many wheel mice did you see before the Intellimouse came out?
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
They need to forget all the propriatry hw garbage and make OS X for x86 and other processors. While they're at it, they need to make some of their cool periphials (the Apple Cinema 22" flat panel - ahah definately not the 1 button mouse) available and compatible for x86 machines as well. Apple has so much style they just dont spread the wealth around. I'd love to toy with their OS, I just don't want to have to buy a G4 to do it. While we're at it, who came up with this one architecture per OS business? BeOS targets multiple chips, Linux targets multiple chips, heck Solaris targets multiple chips. If we're going to have x86 OS choice, why not give us the full gamut. I think that Apple could make $$ from x86 users wanting to run a really grandma-user-friendly OS.
-Xen
Memory hogs?
;)
;)
;)
(from wintop.exe -- a great program, part of MS Kernel Toys)
Word: 5192K Allocated / 3016K In Memory / 1868K In Use
Excel: 2556K Allocated / 1256K In Memory / 828K In Use
Outlook: 9836K Allocated / 2732K In Memory / 1460K In Use
Both Word & Excel have average-sized documents loaded.
(and for comparison, cause we all love Netscape to death
Netscape: 11104K Allocated / 8992K In Memory/ 8132K In Use
One browser running, this page as I'm typing up this message.
For MS Office's full suite on a typical install (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access & Outlook), the total disk space including shared files hovers around the 200 meg mark. That's around 100 less than Office 97 took up, I believe. That's actually VERY impressive, if those numbers don't lie.
These are just the facts on my machine -- take them with a grain of salt, if you will. However O2K hasn't crashed on me ONCE, and to MS's credit, Outlook 2K does a great job as a personal information manager. It's years above what Office 97 was. Plus, PGP integrates itself seemelssly into it. Before Outlook 2k, whenever I was in Windows I was using PC-Pine, so that should tell you something
And YES, the Office Helper can be turned off, hell it even asks you "Do you want to turn me off permanently?" if you hide it a bunch of times (and turning it off is only a matter of right clicking, choosing options, and clicking the box that says "turn off the office helper").
It's monolithic, yes, but it's an Office Suite, they're not ment to be under 100k in disk size. If you find one that is, let me know, better yet, if you create one and decide to sell it, rather then GPL it, let me in on your IPO
Apple was right to sue the look-alike manufacturers. but this is different, specially if you consider that whoever did this seems to be getting no money off it. Apple won against the iMac look-alikes 'cause they were benefiting (finacially) from Apple's marketing work for the iMac.
...
Yes, I know I ramble and my spelling isn't quite up to scratch. If you wish to complain,
Plug & Play is an attempt (which in my experience is fairly successful) to isolate users from the architecture of the x86 systems. This architecture is NOT microsoft's fault. If you want to blame someone try IBM, maybe Intel at a push, but not MS.
And as for why no-one rips off "advanced" Gnome & KDE...I'm not even going to start on that one. I'm not a Mac guy but the stuff I've read on OS-X looks very impressive...mind you so did beos and NextStep. Shame really...
And on a side note...look how I've managed to complete an entire post without the use expletives. Take it from me - it is possible. You might want to give it a try someday...maybe when you leave school
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
The earliest Acorn GUI was the 'Welcome' or 'Desktop' program that came with the Master Compact (which was a cut-down Master 128, which was a beefed-up BBC Micro). This was a simple toy desktop environment, with a calculator, calendar, that sort of thing. IIRC it had a bar at the bottom with icons for the different 'applications', although you couldn't add new apps. This was in 1986.
The Desktop in Arthur (the OS for the Archimedes when launched in 1987) was rather like this; it was implemented as a BASIC program which called the OS's windowing routines (making it very fast as the windowing routines were written in assembler). It featured icons on the left for drives and networks, and icons on the right for calculator, 'palette' and other junk.
RISC OS 2.0 (the first version, replacing Arthur 1.2) was released in 1988. Its desktop was part of the OS proper, and featured nonpreemptive multitasking. For the first time (I think) you could write your own apps which used the GUI, making it a useful environment rather than a toy. It also included drag-and-drop and all the nice things which have been discussed previously on Slashdot.
I have no idea how much of this was copied from NeXT; what year did the NeXT Cube come out? I thought it was 1987.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Damn straight, baby.
If it weren't for Windows, I'd still be using overpriced Macs.
Joe says it best.
cheers,
When I finally found the official objection, it turned out to be a rant (more or less) against Apple. What I want to see is: The official letter from some official Apple representative stating the official objections Apple had. Until I see it, I reserve judgement.
Why? Here are some possibilities that "clear Apple's name":
Post the official objection. The wording will be more telling of Apple's position than the hearsay we've seen so far.
Uh, Mac OS 7 came out *after* Win95...
When Win95 came out, Apple had just introduced, if I remember correctly, OS 6.5.
They were criticised severely for it because it was the first upgrade for a long time (at the time) and din't resolve almost any of the problems of OS 6.
...
Yes, I know I ramble and my spelling isn't quite up to scratch. If you wish to complain,
too bad opendoc was developed by apple as well!
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
Would IBM still be around if there where no IBM compadables? Apple couldnt make it work. And some said cheap clones made Apple look bad..well do the packardbells and el'cheapo K-mart brand PC's make the DELLs and GW2Ks look bad? No they make them look better. I think Apple would be alot bigger if they opened the hardware, they would still have to sell a copy of macos to everyone. If they did this early on just think of how big apple would have been. MS HAD JACK SHIT for a GUI os in the 1980's.
I have to return some videotapes...
It's years above what Office 97 was
:)
How many? Maybe 3?
+&x
I start to wonder why people post while he don't even know the real situation is.
I wasn't talking about the look. Themes can't change the feel-the fact that Apple fired their entire original UI team to come up with something that copies the worst mistakes of Microsoft and Unix.
---
It's very altered, the graphics are custom... it does not use any graphics from aqua, it does not contain any mac logos etc; it's an original work - just inspired by the aqua GUI.
Were we looking at the same skin? If you compare apple's screenshot of the MacOS X desktop with the screenshot of the skin, the graphics are identical! Look at the "traffic light," the check box, etc. I think they pure and simple used the graphics from that screenshot. Just look at them side-by-side.
While I don't think Apple should waste their breath on these idiots, I think they have a right to. This is obviously a blatant copy of their work, especially considering that the real OS X is not even yet available! If this sort of thing is allowed to go on, manufacturers will be forced to keep their designs secret until the release, and we will be robbed of any sort of previews of upcoming stuff.
DirectX Perhaps? That's really the only one of any importance I can think of.
Perhaps this will help to clear things up:
Sec. 106. Exclusive rights in copyrighted works
Subject to sections 107 through 120, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
Sec. 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include -
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
Ginko
not really. You could just play the DVD on Windows. The big question is what can one do on linux that you can't do on windows? Don't tell me 'well it doesn't crash' because that has nothing to do with the final result.
---
For those who are interested : here is the theme for AfterStep that makes it look like OS X. No need to wait for E theme.
Property of AfterStep Window Manager.
Only on /. would a story about Apple turn into
:)
an MS bash about what they have/have not invented.
Don't believe me? Set your threshold to -1 and
count the number of posts that are completely off this topic. Of course, you're already at -1,
'cuz you're looking at this one
Do anal-retentive people hyphenate 'anal retentive'?
Exactly the mac has real themes that Windows still doesn't have.
---
I think that a good percentage of people who mainly use Linux but also dual-boot into Windows have that Windows partition there primarily for games (and possibly family members who aren't savvy). Am I right here, gang? iD and Loki aside, most game developers release for Windows first, then maybe Mac, and Linux if they feel like it.
Plug and Play? What are you joking? Not only did they not develop it, they still can't get it to work.
--The day MS makes something that doesn't suck will be the day they start making vacuum cleaners.
too bad they dumped it
---
Thanks for starting this thread man (or woman!)
It has a lot of nice pointers and factoids (and even more non-facts) about who did what when (not how).
First, I think that this is a valid point for discussion (and as an IP owner (I'm a photographer) I believe that Apple is within their rights here) but it needs to be discussed in the framework of its effect on open-source technologies and various *nix windowing environments.
My question,is: why are we letting this discussion on Slashdot be framed by a couple of intarticulate 12-year-old Windows zealots? What would it have taken to find out that the guy who submitted the story was the admin of the site in question, before the story was posted and he drummed up a ton of banner ad revenue for his Windows-only site?
I think a bit more fact-checking needs to be done before stories are posted.
These claims sound like serious revisionist history, if you ask me. Richard Stallman's article on the GNU boycot of Apple may not have included everything, but you can be very sure he wouldn't have simply declared such a boycot because he was bored.
Oh, and you might want to note that Apple -failed- to mention that Xerox had developed a GUI before Apple, which was part of why they lost the case against Microsoft.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Nah, nah, nah, you've got it all wrong, mate.
That none of the allegedly ironic examples given in the song are actually ironic is deliberate. It's ironic that the song, called Ironic, is not ironic, thus making the song ironic. Thus the non-ironic song is thus very ironic, which is itself doubly ironic, or meta-ironic... er... or something.
Therefore Alanis is not a silly moo at all, but in fact very clever. Unless she really is dumb and is just being ironic about it all.
--
This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
Java creation team's leader
Yes, 3 :)
:P
:P )
But it's obvious they were hard at work for at least 1.5 of those years
(Office could still become more refiend, less bloaty, and more useful, but to their credit, they did a great job, even impressing a skeptic such as myself
The big question is what can one do on linux that you can't do on windows?
Enjoy the time you spend computing.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I just thought about it, you know the Hard drive in my Pentum pro (the worst of the worst heat wize for a microcomputer) are louder than the CPU fan. it's not even a very fast hard drive, only 5400 rpm. Are you sure it's the CPU fan that bother you. BTW the loudest fan on a PII is the power supply, I can't even hear the processor fan on mine. Now, if you are willing to work without a fan on your power supply, I hope you don't leave you mac up as long as I leave my PCs up. The last time my P pro went down was during a black out.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
> Apple is no better then MS. If they had MS's > > market share thay would be worse. God help you > > if you make anything for the Mac with out > > checking with Apple 1st. Remember the clones?
A lot of people simply don't understand Apple's market strategy. They aim to produce quality products for professional niche markets (education, design) and the home-user who wants to _produce_ something with his or her computer without learning the technical aspects of computer operation. Steve Jobs has said in the past that "the world doesn't need another Compaq."
Apple does a lot of business with small customers who damn well expect to be getting quality products with, for example, a consistent human interface. That's why you have these strict human interface guidelines for Apple developers. And, you know what? They work.
So, the point of all this is:
1) Apple doesn't want Wintel's market share.
2) The leadership at Apple is very sensitive about quality control, as well as the protection of their trademarks. Consider how sensitive the average GNU user is about the use of the term "open source" by everyone else in the world, ranging from Apple to Al Gore.
This doesn't justify belligerence toward skin makers, but it does explain why Apple would be a little testy.
Often, in litigation strategy, you have to go after the little guy who's not making money by copying you in order to establish precedent against the eventual AquaWebPC that's going to be one year down the road.
Though Apple may be a bunch of two-face jerks-- wearing an "Underdog" T-shirt and "Moneygod" hat-- I think a lot of people on Slashdot could learn a thing or two from them. Why does everyone here post, at least once a day, about how cool it would be if Linux were EVERYWHERE? I'm not sure if its really enthusiasm for Linux that drives this thinking, or a MS-based viewpoint of the world.
Huh.
Russell Ahrens
1) mass-market software. Interpreted BASIC was nothing new, but marketing software to individuals was innovative.
:)
2) The usable footnote in Word 1.0. I know the lion's share of readers here don't go back that far, but footnotes on a micro before that were a bear--really no better than a typewriter. A method of automatically landing them on (usually) the right page was a God-send. OTOH, you sometimes ended up with bizarre gaps as it erroneously moved to the next page to get enough room. I was shocked about three months ago to find that the current versions can still do this, and there's still no fix other than to write an extra paragraph to fill space . . .
3) Bob?
Good Lord, they're about due for another one, aren't they? Oh, wait, they already did it--they invented a new way to abuse monopoly power [using it to advance a product they didn't care about just to destroy a competitor, forgoing the revenue in the process]. OK, we're safe for another ten years.
Cobra and ORB are used by IBM, not COM. I'd rather use Cobra and ORB. They are grounds up built instead of "ohmygodapplehasopendocwhatarewegonnaslaponnow?"
Lowmag.net
Err, publish/subscribe. Publish/Perish is academia
But on a fast machine for the time (SE/30 8mb), it was painfully slow to use and I gave up on it.
Apple engages such fierce loyalty because it has (according to many) a superior user experience. As the primary differentiator for thier product (Mac OS/Macintosh computers) it makes sense for them to protect it. Whether they are legally or morally entitled to such protection are two seperate issues.
If an enterprising group of people with a lot of time on their hands reimplmented the MacOS X apis (Carbon & Cocoa) on top of Linux (see GNUStep for the Carbon APIs), and coded a user environment that mirrored the look and feel of aqua (including the dock, finder etc) would Apple be ethically entitled to sue? What about morally?
Considering how much they ripped off Xerox Parc,
and the result of the last time they sued MS look-and-feel, you'd think they'd learn to keep their big legal mouths shut.
But nooo, they had to go complain about something they clearly have no legal right to fight, and make the company look like they have
more lawyers than software engineers.
Considering the amount of silly lawsuits Apple
does have when they score a hit, and their current market share, I can't help but wonder if we are not better off with Microsoft's monopoly than we'd with an Apple one (shudder!).
>Very few people started out on linux.
At about 6, she'd ask for "daddy's game", the one with colored faling sticks (xjewel?), in preference to the games we had for the mac and the like. She also would ask me to play "the kitty" game--nethack, where the kitten follows you--while telnetted into my linux box.
I came home and panicced when I found my freebsd box off--i thought my wife had hit the power. Nope, my daughter had rebotted to play a dark-side game, and then turned it off (internet is only through freebsd).
If the ever increasing size of software is scary, the alternative is even more frightening, at least to me. Look at Adobe InDesign, their new desktop publishing program, or Quark killer, or doorstop, call it what you will.
Fully installed I believe its in the 100-200 MB range. But the core application is 1.3 MB.
Thats right, you could fir it on a floppy. Everything else is plugins and extensions. How well could this possibly work? When 98% of your program is extensions piled upon more extensions? Thats why MacOS isnt all it could be. Its OS9 on top of OS8 on top of OS7 etc. Its the software equivalent of Gibson's retrofitted bridge Heaven and it has to come crashing down sooner or later.
IDE hard drives practically grow on trees these days, why would anyone complain about a 200 MB office suite?
"Eagles may soar, but weasels dont get sucked into jet engines."
Why should linux have to be able to do something that windows can't? Both OSes run on the same hardware(i386, plus linux will run on many, many other platforms)...everything feature-wise is just a matter of programming. Linux is better for many people because it's open source, it's more stable, it runs on more hardware platforms, it's more secure, it is more easily remote administered...etc...etc...
But as far as functionality, there's nothing linux can do that windows can't, with the right software. Macintosh comps can't do anything that windows boxen can't either.
-RN
How about Virus Speading Technologies? Nobody can even come close to creating the number of ways to allow an OS to spread viruses and hose a system. Seriously though, there isn't that much real "new" things just a lot people put together old things in new ways. Microsoft has been successful at looking at others and putting it together in their own way (good or bad). It is really amazing how quick they can change and adapt for as large as they are. I mean they can steal(borrow) a good idea faster than Scott McNealy can say "Microsoft is the devil".
I'll give you your (1) (maybe), but automatic footnoting is hardly a Microsoft innovation. I had it in my FORMAL portable text formatter back in 1979-1980ish, which I believe pre-dates Word 1.0. And I probably cribbed it from Waterloo Script or one of the other text processors around.
:)
As for "Bob", the less said the better
-- Alastair
But... assuming it is. When MacOS 7 was out, a program was released called kaleidoscope that allowed people to retheme the MacOS. There were some themes done that Aqua looks suspiciously like... So Apple should be sued... I can't find links to them right... But they had that whole crystal/jeweled look.
(Disclaimer: I didn't go to MacWorld, myself, this info is second hand) My boss was describing some of the new functionality of Aqua... and it sounded a lot like stuff in the Unix world... (although I suppose they could have gotten a lot from NeXt)
At any rate, Apple shouldn't be so uptight. Good design is good design and should be copied. No one can copyright an idea... that's what patents are for :-) But, then again, no one can patent a visual design.
Maybe another slashdotter can remember the series of schemes that were jeweled? I can't remember the names.
Even being an absolutely positive antim$ person as I am I must say that I absolutely agree with what was said. I believe that without the evil inspiration of microsoft we may not be where we are today. I also think that apple may have been there instead. In otherwords all of the homeusers might have some scary fruit colored mac instead of pc's with windows. But who knows.
What a minute! I thought that was the strong point of Windows. It runs on all hardware. It Linux that no need to pay attention to the hardware with, because there are "no drivers".
If I have to pay attention to a "supported products" list, then what's the advantage to paying attention to the Windows list, over the Linux list?
-Brent-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
QuickTime was invented by Apple's Advanced Technology Group.
The music is not in the piano -Clement Mok
That logic requires believing that if it weren't for Microsoft no one else would have brought computers to the masses. I won't believe it. If Microsoft wouldn't have been there, some one else would have. Therefore, we can't attribute mass computing to a sole Microsoft feat, even though they were the ones who did it.
If it wasn't Microsoft it would have been someone else. Please remember that.
-BrentBzzt!! See this.
-BrentIt was Entrega (who no longer exists BTW). Entrega simply let Intel handle most of the advocacy since they had more resources. Just a little nitpick.
You might say, well...Microsoft hasn't really innovated on the GUI front...And that is mostly true, but Aqua is not really original either. Yes, its very pretty and looks nice, but please point out a single feature it has that hasn't already appeared in some previous GUI. This isn't meant as a rant on Aqua's unoriginality, as Aqua is quite nice, and certainly riskier and better than what Microsoft is offering for Win2K and Millenium...However Apple's stupidity in trying to harrass the skin-sites really sucks.
Heh, I'm posting this from a 3 1/2 year old PowerTower 180e!
I bought this particular machine because it was cheaper/faster than what Apple had at the time. My Micropolis HD died after 3 months, and I got it replaced. You'll notice Micropolis is no longer in business. The replacement Seagate is a trooper and a half!
How many of you have 3 1/2 year old "PC's" that work well for what you want to do these days?
The PPC 603-based clones were the most problematic, and unfortunately, those were the ones aimed at the Consumer market. Jeez, I'd take an iMac over a Starmax anyday.
I am a loyal MacOS user, because I hate Windows, and the Mac lets me get my work done the way I want to with the least amount of hassle! I was happier than hell to get rid of my 386 (and Windows) and get a 68040 Mac, and I've never looked back. Now I'm saving for a G4.
I'm not a hard-core gamer who thinks that 48fps is much better than 44fps and is worth spending hours to configure my hardware and software to make it happen, and I'm not a programmer.
I mean, jeez, can your OS/WM do this??
Yep, I create and organize my work flow my COLOUR. Sorting by Name, Date or Kind won't work, because I work with other people and need to keep their work separate from mine, but together in the hierarchy of the web server. For other work, I label by colour to indicate new or old versions. Until there's another OS that can do this, I'll stick with my Mac, thank you very much!
PS. Futurama fans might like this 800x600 desktop I made.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The one and only innovative thing Microsoft has ever come up with is that little red squiggly line under misspelled words. I mean, they are a 500 billion dollar company and all, but still, I think that was a pretty good invention.
And to think, if the DOJ breaks them up we will never see another invention so daring, so groundbreaking, so absolutely incredible as that red squiggly line.
We must think long and hard about that before we do something so rash as spliting Microsoft.
Of what I've seen of it, it is definitely"Fugly". Wouldn't be so bad if Apple was including theme functionality. But if they're actually removing themability, then it looks like it's time for Apple to go under. We only have so much patience with their boneheaded decisions (such as not licencing clones early enough, then killing the clones once they started). Granted, there is probably enough open source code for OS-X available that someone fould programme a replacement shell (like LiteStep is for Windows), but where are we going to find hackets who actually programme for the MacOS???
Let's face it, the folks that buy iMacs, who're not likely haunting /., are easily confused. These are the people that NEED the simplicity of the MacOS. When you mimic Aqua, and plop it onto some foul looking Win-based iMac wanna-be, you're going to end up simply fooling some poor sap into buying something they shouldn't be buying. Something that, in the end, will dissatisfy them. I, for one, believe that Apple should be allowed to create a unique user experience and protect the public from confusion -- and from an inferior product. 'Nuff said.
Apple persecuted this vigorously, too, and there was much discussion and ranting and noise about the matter, but the end result was the removal of HiTech themes 'from the wild'. If you wanted a high tech theme, you had to *gasp* make one up. Seeing as on the kaleidoscope scheme archive there are 127 different schemes from authors with names beginning with 'A' alone, there are a lot of alternatives to using a clone of HiTech- or Aqua.
Plain and simple- don't blatantly rip Apple's expensive and fancy interface designs until _after_ they are released. They are less pissy when their product is actually shipping. When it's a nebulous project (HiTech, which got 'steved') or the next big thing that's being built as a replacement to Apple Platinum (Aqua), they get real pissy about someone heisting a facade of what they're building and offering it around.
Think Go Computing and Pen Windows. In what way is making a thin facade of Aqua with only the look of certain elements, little of the behavior or animation, and little debugging, NOT like the classic vaporware tactic? I'm sure it's less prone to dry up investor support in Apple ;) but it's the same thing, releasing a facade of the new Apple interface to confuse, lessen the impact, and raise questions as to whether it's just the look of a window or a whole system involved.
Oh no, the dreaded Apple is stealing its, uh, its own graphical user interface. It's ruthlessly denying people free immediate hacking to largely arbitrary and artistic interface details that... geee, that _it_ paid handsomely for. Funny how that works, isn't it? Hire yer own damn graphic designers ;) or just keep on keeping on. I've been playing with Afterstep a bit. I may like to make it look like classic NeXT (ahhhh) but I feel no need to make it look like Aqua.
To give credit where credit is due, MS spends a decent chunk of change on original research. Check out research.microsoft.com to see what they're up to.
And as for other technologies, they seem to be leading the way in hardware products (or is that just me being ignorant about hardware trends?). If I recall, they were the first with the ergonomic keyboard, the wheel doohicky, the intelliEye (didn't someone tell the marketing people not to put so many vowels together? oh well) optical system, that bad-ass phone that you could hook up to your PC, the Timex watch data synchronization thing...
And the paper clip guy is pretty cool too, from a technical standpoint (if not from an actual usefulness standpoint). It's a Bayes (belief) network- you can find out how it works by rooting around for that topic on the MS research site.
-jacob
Although we may not like it, look and feel is a standard business concern. Companies are pretty much obligated to defend their products and trademarks. It would be the same situation if some upstart cola bottler imitated a certain blue white & red circular logo, or if eMachines made an all-in-one PC out of translucent blue plastic (oh wait, that actually happened)...
Apple would actually be negligent to its shareholders if it didn't bring suit against people who copy Apple designs. Aqua cost Apple some amount of money to come up with, and imitators cause that work to be diluted in value.
It's evil lawyer stuff, and the only way to prevent it is to change the entire trademark/brand name system.
Plug and Play? For years before Windows featured Plug and Pray, you could plug almost anything into a Mac and have it work right away. Why doesn't MacOS have themes yet? Kaleidoscope has been around for years, and has the same functionality as WindowBlinds, as far as I can tell. And, MacOS 8+ has (unfortunately) undocumented support for "Themes" built into the operating system.. Anybody remember "Architect"?
I hardly know where to begin. Back in the days of the very first commercial home computer game ('Mystery House' by On-Line systems, later known as Sierra On-Line- 'Mystery House' was sold as a disk and a photocopied sheet in a baggie :) ), the game was shopped to Apple for possible distribution. It took Apple a _year_ to get back to the Williamses, because by that time Apple was _already_ a multimillion-dollar business, wealthy and kind of sluggish and dim. By the time it got back to the Williamses, they were already doing a roaring business as On-Line Systems...
Honestly, those who make accusations of revisionist history should either learn genuine history of some sort (even a small effort would do!) or should be old enough to have seen some of this happen. Just because you don't like the truth doesn't mean it's impossible. Apple was a huge business at the time, seller of Apple IIs to the exploding home market in its first big boom and to schools in their original marketing campaigns that got them so established in education back then. They were the Microsoft of that era. Microsoft was still coding Typing Tutor in Bellevue, Washington at the time. They not only had that much stock, it was worth a lot, and they did indeed pay Xerox for the right to go in, gawk like mad at everything and take notes and then go home and use whatever they saw or thought they saw.
MacOS has had themes for years: WDEFs. Can you replace the WINDOW MANAGER in Windows? No (although you can now overpaint it with windowblinds). I had my Mac looking like BeOS for a while.
And check out this freaky shit: here, and here. With Kaleidoscope, you can even use Enlightenment Themes!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Used this heavily in the win3x days when I had to be in windows.
office apps years before "Microsoft Office" came out.
I was using Appleworks in 1986...
--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
Fine, I'll bite. Not that anyone cares...
What Linux Can Do That Windows Can't:
- Run a stable and fast dynamic-content webserver.
- Useably Multitask under heavy load.
- Run reliably for... lessee... 3.5 years (and counting) of heavy use without a reinstall, without a crash, and only about 15 reboots. (this is just my system of course... YMMV.)
There are a lot of home-user apps Linux can't run, that windows does reasonably well. But don't suggest that Windows is a serious Network Operating System. I know MSCE's who laugh at that idea.Artists and engineers have no intrinsic right to their creations. The reason for copyright is not to protect producers but users.
.tar.gz) everyone uses, but it isn't popular because of a lame patent that was put on the algorithm.
:)
As RMS puts it, an idea or design is not spaghetti that only one person can eat; it can be enjoyed by everyone, therefore it should be owned by everyone. Artists don't have the right to punish _the whole world_ because they came up with an idea first.
A good example is the case of the bzip compression format; from what I've heard, it's much better than the LZW compression format (.zip,
This is exactly the same; if Apple has an intrinsic right to their GUI, that means that none of their innovations can be used by anyone else, thus disadvantage everyone. Imagine if the author of the first text editor with scrolling believed he had an intrinsic right to the technique, and sued everyone else who used it; millions would still be suffering with 'ed'-like editors
Broccolist
Let's see... First there's Kaleidescope, which I probably spelled wrong. For a couple of bucks or a minor startup annoyance, you can alter your GUI to look like anything that's availalbe for download, or create your own. Some of these are VERY nice... Also, with OS 8.5 and up, there's a "theme" option of a sort, the Appearance tag under the Appearance menu in the Appearance control panel. MacOS comes with "platinum" as the default, and the others are VERY hard to come by, but include "Hi-Tech", "Gizmo", "DSG-Theme", and "Drawing Board". These are a hell of a lot better than the Kaleidescope options because they're FREE and don't bug you to register on startup. You can, if you have the patience, modify them using ResEdit. So Mac has had themes, for awhile. MacOS itself since 8.5, and Kaleidescope, which has been around since at least 7.6.1. M-kay?
>> realtime spell checking (wiggly red lines
... no? "Thunder" on the Atari ST had
... it's just sad. Through it all, Apple has made their own stuff, or bought tech from Xerox, bought tech from NeXT.
>> in word)
> Err
> that WAY before MS.
WordPerfect 3 for Macintosh has this feature, too. It's ancient.
MS "innovation" is a pretty sad subject, really. I mentally congratulated them when I heard about ClearType. Hearing a little later that Wozniak's patents had just expired from the same thing on the Apple II was a major disappointment. Sort of like when I saw a NeXT machine from 1989 after thinking Windows 95 had a bold new look.
I don't even use Windows anymore, but for a company to be around this long and have such market and mindshare and not have contributed something
LOL!
> Start-button
> Now you name one from apple (not any of
> the Xerox stuff please)
You're joking right? Apple gave shares to Xerox for the PARC research. PARC's GUI was very basic and they built on that extensively.
Apple invented pull-down menus, for chrissake (and File Edit View). The Xerox stuff had context menus under the mouse.
And the Start button is a bad ripoff of the Apple menu. Amazingly bad, in fact. In the Apple menu, clicking on a folder instead of an application opens that folder. Objects are still objects, even in the menu.
This isn't a flame, but like anyone in the Linux community should talk. What amazing innovations have come out of us? It's mostly reimplementation of closed-source tools.
... use the flag of your choice) is the development model. It's not what the software does (end results), but how it is produced (how you get there) that's significant.
The biggest "innovation" of the community for which Linux is currently the poster child (Open Source, Free Software,
I put "innovation" in quotes because in the digital world it's a pretty nebulous term and hard to define. Ideas and code and software are extremely promiscuous and incestuous. Pick any "innovation" of the last 5 years and you will find antecedants from the 80s and 70s and 60s.
Linux is a hotbed of "innovation" because it lives in an environment stripped of the rules and taboos forbidding sex. Anybody can screw anybody else, mixing genes and chromosones with glee and abandon, creating offspring similar but not quite the same as anything else. Gene swapping is common in the proprietary world too, but's hampered and restricted.
It's mostly reimplementation of closed-source tools.
True, many portions are reimplementations of closed-source tools. But many closed source tools are implementations of open source academic research products.
>> Okay. QuickTime. That's a pretty major one.
> AVI
> Quicktime a major one, oh please, it's
> just a video playback system.
You know nothing about QuickTime.
so, I downloaded WindowBlinds and the Aqua theme from Skins.org.
Don't tell me what to do... just let me choose!
-- War Freedom
* "Uncle this droid is malfunctioning" -- Luke Skywalker
I'm confused. You're talking about NextStep, right? So you have the companies and product name all mixed up, eh? The Next OS ran on Intel, and not on Power PC. So when Apple bought Next, they had to throw away the Intel part of it and warp it into working on PPC. It's probably taken them several revs to get it running on PPC, but it's on the way now. You can blame Apple for the uglier parts of the code, though.
You're right...I think it had the word Thunder in its name somewhere. I saw a demo of it and thought it was more annoying than anything else. I think the red underline is really annoying as well.
Didn't their red underline show up with Word 97?
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
How times have changed!
Recent Apple efforts including the derisory Quicktime 4.0 seem more interested in kewl than usable, often at the expense of slashing "expert" features, overriding user preferences and general dumbing down. Perhaps they think advanced features might confuse those addle-brained - and let's face it, stupid - newbies.
So is Aqua any different? Not at all judging by the screenshots. Apple seem more interested in silliness such as transparent menus, aquatic buttons, huge taskbar icons etc. than making efficient use of screen space, adding functionality and making MacOS a true multitasking OS both in spirit and design. You'd think MacOS was a single tasking system by the efforts Apple seem intent on expending to hide windows from the user. Perhaps it will be kewl and usable but I'm not holding my breath.
The Web (UNIX Internet and a GUI developed on NeXT) brought computing to the masses, not Microsoft. Bill Gates wrote "The Road Ahead" in 1995 and mentioned the Internet once. He had a whole chapter about the coming CD-ROM era, though.
... all the major vendors except Apple stopped bothering. That's why a lot of people are more interested in things that circumvent that dead market: set-top boxes, PDA's, etc.
Still, more than half the people in America don't use a computer. I have lots of friends who sit down at Windows machines and can't make them work. They have uncountable problems. The sound card stops working, documents suddenly have a different icon and open with a different application, they can't get on the Web all of a sudden. It's a nightmare for "the masses". They only buy it because that's all there is in the commodity market
If not for Microsoft, maybe we'd be accessing the Web on Macs, Amigas, Ataris, etc. which would be more reliable, easier to use, and ironically, make sharing information easier because many platforms would have to stick to standards like HTML in order to survive in a multi-platform world. Who knows what benefits competition over the last few years would have brought?
QuickTime is altogether quite a bit more than a video playback system. It is a very impressive bit of technology.
.zip or .tar.gz. How often have you ever _really_ had a problem with a stuffit file? If you can't figure out how to use Stuffit Expander, you're probably in way over your head on your Cray.
Hair-tearing hard plug and play? I've been using Macs in bizarre and unusual setups for well over ten years and have never had an inconsistent or hair-tairing moment. The only problem that I have ever had is with SCSI voodoo, but that is very easily solved. I really don't know where you are coming up with this. And with regard to the Cray comment, if Macs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, you'd probably be able to replace processors without going down as well. And people already complain that they're overpriced! Sheesh.
The Mac OS installer is great to use, but writing install scripts can be tricky. Sit and hqx are simply the compression and encoding processes. They are no different from
InstallShield is nasty. The assorted installers for MacOS (Apple's and Aladdin's) are both pretty good programs.
And OS installation is a breeze. Have you ever installed Windows 95 or NT? It is a breathtakingly unsettling process. Particularly NT.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Let's see, here's a story where Apple - a closed source champ - bullies former OS/2-only current Windows95/98/Y2K/NT-only developer Stardock - known Open Source badmouthers - over Apple's eye candy.
The result: Apple gets bad publicity, Stardock gets the sympathy vote and publicity that they wanted, and the Slashdot crowd goes wild about... Microsoft?
Well, maybe this fell into the category of "news for nerds" because this surely isn't "stuff that matters".
Back to regular programming...
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Correction: For years, you could plug any of a rather limited number of Apple-approved hardware upgrades into a Mac and have it work right away.
And if a hardware manufacturer tried to put hardware out onto the market without first kissing the Apple ring, they found themselves in court defending against a lawsuit.
Apple has always been big on Plug and Prey.
I'm not sure what the legal status of "look & feel" is. The Apple vs. MS case was determined on the basis of Apple's licensing fuckup, not on the validity of "look & feel" as intellectual property.
Apple may be trying to protect it's reputation in some way -- if someone downloads a "Mac OS X" skin and finds that it sucks in some way, it may turn them off the actual Mac OS X completely without actually using it. After all, there's no way that a skin can accurately mimic the real way that an OS works.
Does Apple really think that this will do any good? It'll build up resentment, antipathy towards apple among the geek community (as if there wasn't already enough!), slashdotters will mirror the skins by the bazillions and more people may download the skin now than would have otherwise.
Maybe they're thinking that there's no such thing as bad publicity? If so, someone's been hanging out at Pixar too much. It may be true in Hollywood; it's definitely not true in Silicon Valley.
I was a huge fan of Dashboard, back in the Windows 3.x days, and it had nothing resembling the taskbar, in either appearance or function.
Dashboard was a glorified program launcher. Windows 95's Start menu was pretty much a direct rip-off from Dashboard, as were Windows 98's toolbars (e.g. Quick Launch).
But the taskbar owes nothing to Dashboard.
begin 644
Actually, HP developed the technology for the new optical mice that MS has been hawking.
And there have been agents (and the promise of agents) for a really long time before Office had the stupid paperclip, which is not a great one anyway.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
As mentioned, MacOS has had themes capability for a few years, and before that you could use Kaleidascope (ugly!). The reason MacOS only comes with one theme, Platinum, is because Jobs supposedly didn't like visual inconsistancies with apps that weren't theme-ready, so the other themes (which, by the way, have awesome 3d sound effects) were cut. By inconsistancies, I mean things like funky menus that assume silver-gray is the background color and hard-code it in or whatever, so the edges are all messed up. You can find the other themes like Gizmo on the internet or from people who have the dev versions of MacOS.
a prophet on the burning shore
Tivo.
Empeg.
Also, innovations is a sketchy subject. Linux is an OS for the developers, and as such has every feature developers need, which other NIXen have had for a while before linux came out.
In consumer-land, innovation means "inventing something consumers think they can't live without even though humanity has for thousands of years before."
Tivo.
Empeg.
Beowulf (clustering is not linux's innovation, but dirt-cheap clustering?)
Also, innovations is a sketchy subject. Linux is an OS for the developers, and as such has every feature developers need, which other NIXen have had for a while before linux came out.
In consumer-land, innovation means "inventing something consumers think they can't live without even though humanity has for thousands of years before."
I switched back. I bought Windows 98 over a year after it was released. I ran a pure-linux desktop machine at home for over a year before that.
I am having a lot more fun generating music and such on a Windows machine. Not pokeing around in makefiles trying to get sound hardware to work, not fumbling around in Python GUIs (a la Red Hat) wondering why my sound card isn't found.
But I have several fine Linux machines still, and a pile of older 486 boxes running a mix of BSD os'es, just to play around with networking.
I'd never seriously consider using Linux as my primary deskto OS again. What a mess.
Where have you seen it documented that the icons are stored in some sort of PDF format? I am under the distinct impression that PDF is a vector format. On the other hand, the specification of width x height resolution (128x128) suggests that the icons are actually being stored as raster images.
1. There is an "icon" even if the window is open. This idea seems to have eluded all the X and Mac (and the older Windoze) designers for years. Everybody else was convinced that the window icon should only be visible if the window was "iconized".
2. They finally realized that the TEXT is important, far more important than some image "icon". Though they did not get rid of the image, which might have been far too daring, they did shrink it down a lot, so that it is almost invisible. (now if only they would do that for their "desktop icons".
MicroSoft also made a major innovation in making a desktop design that got rid of a divider line between the "window border" and the window contents. I actually did this many years earlier with some work I did on the NeXT machine, and I'm sure others did, but it was never seen in a real product until Windows 95.
I would not call Plug&Play an innovation, the idea is rather obvious and apparently the implementation is bogus, seeing as to how much trouble they are having. Working around bad original machine design, no matter how difficult, is really not innovative since it is obvious it needs to be done.
DirectX is also pretty obvious. Apparently there are no real clever ideas in the enormous amount of interface that DirectX defines. For instance it is rather uniformly believed that OpenGL provides a superior 3-D interface, it would seem MicroSoft could have "innovated" something better, seeing as they had all of OpenGL already existing to refer to!
I believe Office contains many innovations in GUI. MicroSoft did invent the Shift+navigation to extend text selections. Also the use of squiggly lines to indicate spelling errors and many other little things that have greatly expanded the common knowledge database of graphical icons, making it easier for programs to present information without lots of "help" info.
What I'm saying is that if it would be possible to acquire them, you could leverage their technology to shore up several key Linux weaknesses (Most notably, streaming video) while continuing to let the company do its own thing with only a few changes to make its business model conform to one that has been PROVEN to be successful, namely the one used by the X86 world. Since Jobs would never accept any of that, he'd obviously have to go.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What scares me more than the legal battle is that with windowblinds, windows users now have the abilty to use skins (I'm assuming that windowblinds is the first application that allows this in the windows world). While KDE and Gnome have had this for a while, it seems now that windows users have caught up, and, from looking at the screenshots at www.windowblinds.net, surpassed both KDE and Gnome in many aspects. For example, with windowblinds it is possible to apply different skins to different applications! (I know that's not currently possible with KDE - not sure about Gnome). Also, it seems possible to make any Windows window transparent (http://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/odn t-april99.jpg).
I don't know if these features are planned for either *nix desktop environment. It really sucks to see them done first in windows...
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
M$ isn't a technology company. They are a MARKETING company, this is where to majority of their innovation and successes have been.
+&x
Dang, slashdot needs a cancel-post feature for registered users.
Lest I confuse anyone with my poor quoting,
this is most certainly NOT in the US Constitution:
The purpose of IP laws is to protect the owner of the IP.
Which is a self-referencing definition.
In other words, how does one own a legal abstraction without the law that defines that legal abstraction?
I believe you're wrong about shift+navigation to extend text selections. This has been in the MacOS as far back as I can remember.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
Exactly none of that is true.
Apple hired engineers from Xerox PARC.
Apple's design team visited PARC and PARC's team showed them what they were doing. PARC was a research lab, and Steve Jobs pitched them the idea that Apple was the perfect company to implement their ideas and take them to the public. There was no misunderstanding on either side about this.
Apple signed an agreement with Xerox, giving them stock worth millions of dollars, to be able to use some ideas from PARC.
And Apple extended the desktop metaphor way beyond what Xerox had done. The PARC had some innovative ideas but the Macintosh was much more usable and brought the whole concept together.
If you'd like to learn more about this myth you're propagating, read MacKiDo or SteveWozniak on the subject. Or just read some thoughts of Jef Raskin:
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Yes, the Dock can be turned off. Or it can be set to autohide, and show up only when you mouse down to the bottom of the screen.
I'm startled (although I shouldn't be) at how many news sites are saying the Dock is like the Windows taskbar. Have they never heard of Next? Yeesh.
"I have a cunning plan..."
So yeah, maybe the Open Source community has brought forth a "rediscovery" of quality software design. But where are the innovations? And by "innovation" I mean something new. Something that changes the way you use your computer. Linux hasn't changed the way I use my computer, it's just made it a little easier in some places. Don't let the wild world of the Open Source Extravaganza blind you to what it's really worth.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
True, I don't disagree with you there. I was just saying that Microsoft was one of the first companies to actually get a lot of people using home machines. Now that I think about, I should have been more specific in my comment maybe, and just mentioned that it was Microsofts marketing department that was so innovative. *grin* Who knows. I do appreciate the constructive replies though...its actually nice to have a real discussion on here instead of seeing everyone yell at each other.
surely using PDF means many CPU cycles devoted to decoding and rendering vector descriptions for each icon.
Admittedly, the load would not be great, but all these little drains on performance add up.. one of the reasons i have largely switched to Linux is that my P200 running RH6.0 / Enlightenment / Gnome just feels faster than my Celeron400 running Windows 95.
Surely, for small, often photograph-based images, bitmaps are much more efficient than PDF?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Apple may or may not be legally right, but in terms of marketing, this seems like a dumb move. The more computers don't look like Windows, the more acceptable it will be for people to use non-Windows machines.
Apple achieved "Plug & Play" by controlling the hardware, no matter who made it.
That explains the high cost.
I'm with you. I'll never go back to it.
cheers,
First its windows, then the IMAC, now this, Apple computers is like the guy that claims Paramont Stole is cool idea for a Star Trek Episode.
One word. DirectX. Yea, it may be a little buggy, but it is much better these days. Sure D3D is kinda flaky, but the other APIs are more or less solid. Most of all, it ONE high-performance interface to the system under ONE API. When you learn one DirectX interface, it take very little extra to learn the others. I don't know about some of the earlier OSes (maybe Amiga or NEXT had them) but no modern OS as of yet has this kind of feature. The API essentially pushes aside the OS and make a high performance layer between the app and the hardware. (How else do you think most games work with Windows? Just the latency in the normal sound API would make games sound like some bad Japanese movie.) Even the technology itself is not a big achievment. (DirectX is mainly 80% windows pusing aside code) but the concept.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Correct me if I'm wrong, didn't DirectDraw (the first direct something) come out of Intel? They then took that concept and started the GameSDK which eventually became DirectX. I don't thing it was purchased from outside, or else D3D wouldn't be as crappy as it is originally.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I agree with most of your comments except DirectX and Office. DirectX is just not an accelerated graphics API. It is A) A consistant programming interface for the ENTIRE multimedia subsystem. That includeds graphics, sound, input, force feedback, networking, the works. B)It is a means for games to get the OS out of the way. You can write an entire game using very few calls to windows functions. All you have to deal with for windows is threads, interapp comm, and window handling. Everything else is just calls to DirectX. (Which are really fast because they don't have to be as concerned with interacting with other programs as normal API functions do. When you are in full screen DirectDraw, you have precedence over even the GDI and get some obscene amount of proc time.) So don't dis DirectX.
And Office is really cool. It just has more features and usability stuff than other word processers. Plus you usually get it free.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Actually DOS Edit had this back when Apple was still pushing AppleWorks, which did not have this capability. Whether it came from one of the two companies is probably moot, as I imagine it came from a 3rd party editor first.
But I'll play by your rules -- How about the WWW? I would definitely call it an "innovation". Sure, the Internet was around much earlier, but web-browsers? Nothing close.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I also made some screenshots of LiteStep:
LiteStep 1
LiteStep 2
--
life would be much easier if you could have a look at the sourcecode
They weren't the first with an Ergonomic Keyboard or the Optical Mouse. The ergonomic keyboard was around way before Micosoft had one, and Honeywell had an optical mouse about 5 years ago. I think someone else also had a PC phone doohickey.
Now the paper clip guy, I'll give them credit for. But all I do is close him first chance I get. If I'm forced to use MSOffice in the first place.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
I know what this thread is turning into so I might as well diverge it into it's own thread.
A graphical user interface can do everything a command line interface can. WYSIWYG is an important thing if done properly.
Note: This Command Line vs GUI, not GNU/Linux vs Windows NT or GNU/Linux vs MacOS.
Configuration scripts make little sense from an interface point of view. The formats are not consistent. If they were consistent so you only need learn it once, then I would have no gripe with them. But you must learn it again and again for each application.
Someone needs to make a PowerUser's GUI to put all the naysayers to shame. There is nothing inherent in a GUI that makes it more cumbersome for experienced users. We just need someone with some imagination.
Open-source projects like bind and sendmail are both pretty incredible, and didn't really have any peers when they began. Now, they bind the web together.
When you start looking at the user interface, KDE and Gnome have a lot of advantages over Windows or the Mac. I love the concept of virtual consoles which give you plenty of desktop space for applications. I also love being able to customize the environment completely with Enlightenment. Linux still has some ease-of-use stuff to work out, but it's way ahead of the rest in customization.
According to the article at http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/09/ skinz.html, the reason Apple sent off any letters to begin with is because the theme in question used the Apple logo (and, looking at screen shots posted at MacWeek, it *does*). That would be clear trademark infringement and Apple would have EVERY right to have done what they did. According to the article, Apple HASN'T said anything since the skins were reposted sans logo. So *please*, again, make sure you find out the facts as to WHY before assuming it's without any or shaky reason.
"Brown University? We have one of those in Providence!" -- Outside Providence
I was under the impression that while the idea of an optical mouse was nothing new, the MS mouse was leaps and bounds ahead of any other optical mice in that it can track on any surface and whatnot. Am I wrong?
-jacob
Actually, NEXTSTEP originally ran on m68k. The later OPENSTEP, which Mac OS X is based on, was created when NeXT realized that while people in business thought their OS was cool, they didn't really want to pay the money for the hardware, so they ported it to Intel and SPARC. (Wasn't there one other? I can't remember now.)
Most of the nastiness of making the code portable was already done during the move to OPENSTEP. Most of what I've heard about the early days of Rhapsody was that the port to PPC was really easy -- almost all the trouble was in porting the Mach microkernel, which was designed with portability in mind.
As for the uglier code bit, let's not throw stones. We can't forget twm and fvwm no matter how hard we try. But I'm not really sure why I'm responding politely to a troll anyway...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
>Plug and Play?
The MacOS practically invented it. Hell, the phrase "Plug and Play" itself predates Windows.
>The taskbar?
The MacOS did invent it.
>DirectX?
Oh, you mean going straight through the memory protection to the hardware like we used to in the DOS day? Or do you mean 3D acceleration like Glide and OpenGL? Ooo, ooo! Let's not forget that they didn't actually develop the original code for this themselves.
>Um, Office?
Um, you don't think application suites hadn't been done before, do you? Unless you mean the idea of cross-platform, cross-OS virii. Now THAT'S something no one else had done before.
Office has many compelling features, but it's dominance comes down mainly to bundling and other marketing tricks over merit. Microsoft is only posting requests for standards in markets they don't control. You don't see them posting up SMB as an open standard yet do you?
By the way, the MacOS DOES have support for themes in the Appearance Manager. The decision to not publicly distribute the themes that were made (and do actually work if you can find them) is unfortunately one of marketing. They didn't want to 'confuse' customers about the look and feel of the MacOS, according to a quote I remember from Steve Jobs.
As for being a threat to open standards, Apple has been very forthcoming with their APIs and the file formats used for their products, such as Quicktime. Oh, and let's not forget IEEE 1394 while we're at it. As for the Indeo codec, you are forgetting that like DirectDraw, it was orignally done by Intel. It is their decision to keep the codecs closed. Similarly, most of the new spiffy codecs for Quicktime (Sorenson, ClearVoice, and the like) are all made by third-party developers who make their money from the licensing fees from Apple and for selling software to compress movies using their codecs.
I don't suppose it's worth mentioning their contribution to open source to you either. Beyond the basics of Darwin, there is the networking game code that they've released. Apple is hardly as much of a threat to open standards as MS. They been a frequent player in open standards and as someone in the minority position have everything to gain from open standards, unlike Microsoft who can and often does create closed 'standards.'
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Ah, I see the light now. You're trolling for moderation points.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That ugly little hourglass? The blue screen of death? Herpes?
photosMy Photostream
I guess you never saw the DrawingPaper theme developed by Apple Japan, or the various DSG themes.
* ****************
Check these out. ResExcellence
This is DSG: these guys are good
***********************************************
photosMy Photostream
HELLO! This was never a M$ thing, wtf!? StarDock developed this "hack" and Apple gave an underground site that had something that imitates their GUI a had time. Where in the world did this thread start!?
We're not god. Not only are we human but we are sometimes forced to become the devil himself. We're not god
Imitation is the highest form of flattery, is it not?
Smile Apple, we just gave you the official stamp of approval. You did something so cool, we all want a little bit of it for ourselves.
The further you go, the less you know.
I'm an avid (some would say "rabid") Mac user and i follow with great interest what Apple has to offer. However, I must disagree with 'em on this one.
I think they should cut ALL computer users some slack. Heck! they even pulled the Gizmo, Hi-Tech & Drawing Board themes from the Mac OS.
I'm so tired I haven't slept a wink. I'm so tired my mind is on the brink. I wonder if I should get up and fix myself
According to MW:
'I-r&-nE also 'I(-&)r-nE
2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning
btw, 'sär-"ka-z&m
1 : a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain
2 a : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual
What is better about it than other video playback technologies??
Hair-tearing hard plug and play?
Oops, you misread my post :-((
I meant the Wintel kind of PnP.
Have you ever installed Windows 95 or NT? It is a breathtakingly unsettling process. Particularly NT.
Plenty of times (both more than 5 times), nothing too unsettling. I once watched somebody install MacOS 7.5, it wasn't a pretty sight....
You do an excellent job of not naming any mac technologies, good work.
You also mention that there are less options in Mac hardware, thank you for that glowing recommendations of Macs.
And since you probably don't use word on the mac, could you tell me your favorite word processor then?
- ! -
:)
oops. you're right
Lowmag.net
he asked for an innovation... it's subsequent dumping and theft was not the question.
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
The Honeywell mouse that existed long ago also tracked on any surface. It did not have a ball, but had two little "feet" with optical sensors in them. I don't think it was far behind the MS optical mouse as far as tachnology.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
A friend of mine once suggested that the line "It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife" suggests a quantitative measure for irony. A sword swallower choking on a toothpick would rate about 500 kilospoons.
Full City
Xerox did NOT invent the GUI. Apple did NOT steal Xerox technology. This has been hashed out I don't know how many times in the last 15 years, but GET OVER IT!!!!!!
All of the basic components of the GUI were invented before 1970 (PARC founded, IIRC, 1971) by a variety of individuals, including Bush, Englebart, Sutherland, Kay, and Raskin. Of the preceding, I believe only Kay worked at PARC.
Apple's first GUI may have copied a little to closely the icons from Xerox, but the way it *WORKED* was way more advanced.
Furthermore, for those of you who genuinely didn't know, Apple ***PAID XEROX*** (I believe it was something like $1M in stock options) for what they saw. They didn't steal *anything*.
For the last time: Check your facts before posting or SHUT UP!
I don't know who did it first, but this has been around since the late '80s.
I had this feature (probably still do, come to think of it) in an Atari ST word processor I bought in 1987.
Standard in MacOS since System 6 or before.
Unicode was *invented by Apple*. Well, them and one other company (perhaps Xerox), IIRC.
Kudos to MS for supporting Unicode -- but ASCII is still alive and well in Windows.
My bad for not previewing.
[OLE springs to mind.]
I don't know who did it first, but this has been around since the late '80s.
[realtime spell checking (wiggly red lines in word) ]
I had this feature (probably still do, come to think of it) in an Atari ST word processor I bought in 1987.
[A comprehensive approach to disabled users]
Standard in MacOS since System 6 or before.
[Comprehensive (if occasionally random) support for non-roman charactersets and languages]
Unicode was *invented by Apple*. Well, them and one other company (perhaps Xerox), IIRC.
[And finally, MS get big bonus points for ditching ASCII and shifting to unicode everywhere WAY before anyone else.]
Kudos to MS for supporting Unicode -- but ASCII is still alive and well in Windows.
1) I may be a vicious Mac defender, but I'm not an Apple apologist. When Apple does something dumb, I'm right there in line to smack them along with everyone else.
2) Frankly, I'm torn. I do think that it's in extremely poor taste to copy a GUI on a system that hasn't even been released yet, even more so than copying one that's already been released. This said, however, Apple shouldn't be threatening legal action. One, they have no legal grounds for it. Perhaps they could try and nail you on copyright violations (since, at least for now, the only way to get the images used in these themes is to swipe them from Apple's own screenshots). But that's taking things just a bit too far.
3) I don't think OS-based themes should be on the public sites anyway. The major sites like Themes.org are supposed to be for original works. At least, that was my undrstanding. The Aqua-based themes (and the Win9X-based things, and the Amiga-based themes, and the NeXT-based themes, and so on) are not original work by a long shot. Even the AquaOS line for Sawmill (which makes a few trivial changes to the button layout) couldn't be considered truly original. I suppose the Win9X GUI can't either (perhaps it's not really a MacOS ripoff, but the buttons are copied pixel-for-pixel from NeXTStep, not to mention most of the test of the GUI).
4) The Linux community doesn't need an Aqua theme. We've always striven to be original, and succeeded. Witness the BlueSteel theme for E; there's proof right there that the Linux community can turn out a GUI that's even cooler than Aqua. Even those of you who don't like BlueSteel probably have your own favorites, and in most cases I'll bet it bears little resemblance to any existing GUI. Aqua's original. So were NeXTStep and BeOS. The Linux community can make and has made original GUI's in the past. Part of the appeal of Linux is that it isn't Windows or MacOS or BeOS or anything else. Why make it something it's not?
I'm a fan of the Scrollites themes myself. I have them all; even the "classic" three that were never released in 1.5 versions (and so cannot be used with the current version).
And none of them looked anything like Aqua. I suppose you could make a very big stretch and show a small bit of similarity in the scroll bars. The two both use "glassies" but that's not what's being talked about here. The themes in question are pixel-for-pixel copies of Aqua. I don't know if that's "right" or "wrong" but it is in poor taste.
Plug and play? - this has been on the mac so long no one thought to give it a name. the first mac had it. the Taskbar? - the start menu is a copy off the apple menu. other than that its not copting so much. I dont know DirectX and i dont use Office but it sounds like any number of other programs.
What company screamed about how great there operating system was for having plug and play?
(Hint: Microsoft)
ok so apple dosent have these things now and it should have them(processors befor the G3 could do symmetric multiprocessing, i dont know why they took it out.) but this is all being fixed with Mac OS X.
Maybe I'm just one of those hopeless "function" over "form" people...
--
--
E2 IN2 IE?
You do an excellent job of not naming any mac technologies, good work.
That's because that was not my intention. I was commenting on this statment from the previous post:
And since you probably don't use word on the mac, could you tell me your favorite word processor then?
At home on the Mac, Claris Works did everything I needed. On the PC, I have no use for a behemoth like Word. MSWorks does fine. I have been toying with StarOffice though.
At work, we use MSWord. I'm reasonably certain that the software is capable of much more than I (or most of the "office managers") need in a word processor.
cheers,