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JKH on OS X
Jordan Hubbard, co-founder of the FreeBSD Project speaks out about OS X, its significance to the geek, and whether it may be the David that brings about Goliath Microsoft's downfall, in this Salon.com article.
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It's not about how well you write in English, it's whether you are paying attention.
I suppose it will be news to Jordan Hubbard that he doesn't have any interest in the details of the Mach kernel, or that he "failed to explain" things that were not the focus of an article geared toward a general audience. After all, I guess the introductory note that he is one of the "lead developers on the FreeBSD project" really is a trivial detail of no importance.
It's hard to imagine someone reading an article and so completely Not Getting It. Congratulations.
I mean, you can disagree with JKH's views and conclusions, but this is ridiculous.
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Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
True, OS X won't topple microsoft, but it could play a key role. The fact is that Apple is a hardware manufacturer filling a niche market for higher priced / higher quality machines aimed at graphic designers and desktop publishing. OS X is a great move by them to get a more powerful OS underneath and form a great path into taking over another niche market - the one SGI once held so well - namely the higher priced / higher quality machines used for 3D and other movie magic.
The iMac is their product for the consumer 'microsoft' market and while doing well it's never going to be a 'killer' threat to the budget PC market where microsoft lives. If Apple ever moves out of being a hardware manufacturer things may change, but I can't see it happening any time soon.
Technical superiority has never been the key factor in dominance - just look at Win3.1 vs. Mac, or indeed Dos vs Mac.
This is an excellent point and one that has been proven time and time again by the console wars, and truely hammered home by microsoft's dominance. It's not the specs of the console, or the smoothness of the OS. It's the software (and games) you can get for it. Now this is a key point because Apple has just brought across some major players into the UNIX world.
We've now got software companies like Adobe porting to UNIX and I've just finished reading that Maya has been announced for Linux (to be release 'about the same time as the Mac OS X version').
Basically this helps to take out one of the major hurdles to any OS, getting the software there, as once you have ported to one flavor of UNIX it's a small step to port to another. There's more to winning the consumer market that just this but it's one of the biggies.
I'm personally interested to see who will take the next step (ie. show an impressive advantage/reason for the average user to switch from what's pre-built on their machine) and am curious to see if it will be Linux or if some other UNIX (QNX , GNU/Hurd, other) will manage to get in.
Is display PDF all that much different than Display PostScript that the NeXT machines used? Using a vector-based format for display is a cool idea (iirc ps and pdf were vector-based, but maybe I'm just smoken dercrackenpipen).
Anyway, since display postscript hasbeen around a while, that might be a better canidate for some open source activism, rather than the company's latest and greatest. (There may already be a free analog, not sure. If so then even better, the code release would help the free project.) :-) Besides, I think that the possibility of Apple ever being really openis minimal, one second spent with MaCOS or Apple hardware will convince you of exactly how Closed their design philosophy seems to be...
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
[quote]
GUIs pay no dividends until all applications in one user environment not only look but also behave the same. Only then is it easier to use a GUI because then you don't have to learn an interface from scratch. There are two methods to get programmers to adhere to such standards, either publish them and only buy products which adhere to the explicit (and often implicit) UI conventions or create an OO application framework whereby each graphical component (in appearance and behavior) is abstracted from the actual code. Apple Macintosh implemented the former while NeXT OPENSTEP implemented the latter.
[end quote]
typical Apple/M$ fan bullshit. Consistency is nice, but don't presume to tell me what is more or less usable for my windowing environment. I personally like having a very minimal window manager and a shit load of xterms, which most MacOS nitwits would decry as being abyssal in the usability category. Useability depends on the user, you turd!
[quote]
Another reason OS X is a billion times better than your Linux/KDE2 environment is the display server Quartz. Quartz is designed for desktop publishing. Anything seen can be printed (rendered) as PDF, PS, or raster. It also supports Color Sync so when I send a smoke image to an OS X user he will actually be able to see it which is less than I can say about a GIMP user I know.
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Yes, we all know how often we need to send screenshots to grandma as PDF files. Color sync is irrelevant unless you want everyone to use the eaxct same OS. Personally all the color sync I need is 16 shades of gray.
On a side note, attacking his English skills is pretty fucking low since he's obviously not a native speaker by his word ordering. I'm sure he speaks English a damn sight better than you speak his native tongue. Expecting all the world to speak flawless English is incredibly arrogant, and unfortunately that's what most of the world associates with English speakers thanks to people like you. Try taking a Russian or Asiatic language class before you upbraid someone on linguistic matters again...
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I have two computers at home, one with MacOS X PB and one with BeOS 5 Pro. BeOS is nice, easy to use, and fast....but.....it lacks something that MacOS OS X PB does have, utilities. There is currently a movement to "Macify" Unix utilities in MacOS X. One can already get GUI NFS managers, GUI Firewall setups, etc that use the standard BSD utilities that ship with OS X. Along with Carbonization of apps (which are already showing up), MacOS X PB already has more easy to use utilities and apps than BeOS. This isn't meant to knock Be. Be can't control what it's user/developer base does, but the Mac developer base has YEARS of experience in developing easy to use apps, while the Be community does not.
Burn Hollywood Burn
OS X will not be the thing that topples Microsoft.
If Microsoft thought there was any chance of that, they wouldn't have propped Apple up with their development and money (Office suite, IE - both of which keep the Mac alive.)
OS X is very nice, but so is BeOS, and that's not about to topple MS either. Microsoft's genius (or rather IBM's laxness when they made the original IBM PC) is making the software for 30000 different manufacturers - the competition means that 30000 different ads advertise MS-based PCS, whereas only 1 advertises Apple.
Technical superiority has never been the key factor in dominance - just look at Win3.1 vs. Mac, or indeed Dos vs Mac. The technical gap was bigger then - and MS didn't have the vast, vast armies of products tieing people into its OS - server products like Exchange and NT Server, or even a dominant office suite - and it didn't happen then, so it sure as hell ain't going to happen now.
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
Jordan writes that open-sourcing OS X would be a "very bold and aggressively forward-thinking" thing for Apple to do. That may be an understatement; I'm sure there are many at Apple who feel it would be suicide.
Apple makes a lot of their money from selling hardware. Say what you want about the price/performance of that hardware, people buy it not just because of its looks (perhaps in spite of them), but because it is the only way to obtain the Mac GUI and run Mac apps. Open-source all of OS X, and in a matter of weeks the Mac GUI will be running on non-Apple hardware that costs a third of Apple's prices, and in a matter of months the Mac apps will start to follow. At least this would be their fear, and it is hardly a groundless one.
I agree with Jordan that leveraging OS X's open-source-friendly Unix base with the Mac GUI and apps would create a major force to be reckoned with -- perhaps even the Microsoft-toppling force he envisions. But I don't think Apple sees their share of that potential market as offsetting the downside to their hardware business. Perhaps there is a way they can assure a sufficient fraction of the resulting software market to make up for that loss, but I've yet to see a convincing argument of how they could do so.