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Follow-up To Critique of BeOS & Mac OS X
UnknownSoldier writes: "Scot Hacker has posted a great follow-up to his Tales of a BeOS Refugee entitled Reactions to Tales of a BeOS Refugee. (Hopefully everyone involved in implementing 'Linux on the Desktop' will eventually incorporate the best ideas of Be and Mac OS X for smoother usability in Linux.)"
Next time Apple releases a new super-duper OS that requires you to buy a new Mac and renew your entire collection of software you bought with your hard-earned cash, I and my headache-making Linux box running on my PII-266 shall taunt you a second time.
buying into a hardware platform that is less flexible than the current x86 standard, is single-sourced, and thus considerably more expensive. If OS X ever makes it to the x86, it will be hard to resist.
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The funny thing I've noticed is that a lot of the BeOS and Linux types are migrating straight for OSX for exactly the reasons brought up in the article. It's UNIX, it's got a great interface, etc, etc, etc. On the other end of the coin, people who have been with the Mac for decades (me included) have yet to migrate over. I have my excuses - no photoshop, and it runs nice and slow on my 3-year old Blue G3. OSX works fine on my Powerbook, which actually came with it installed, but I downgraded as I didn't feel I had enough disk space to warrant running a 1 GB OS. That's another thing... Macs don't age nearly as fast as PCs do... hell, I'm still using a 3-year old 350 MHz box for professional web design, Photoshop and video editing, and it works just fine. Rendering takes a few more seconds, but it's not noticable. As soon as I went over to OSX, it just got really choppy.
While I think it's great that OSX is getting so much new blood into the Mac, power users at that, I simply don't find that OSX has enough to offer me yet. I won't go so far as to say I hate it, as some of my other iPod-toting hardcore-Mac friends have said, it just has a little more way to go.
NerfOnline - Because Nerf Guns aren't just for kids -
Gentlemen, light your flamethrowers.
I don't care if my software is open. Open source hase wonderful advantages, but it's more important to me that software is good. OS X is the best operating system I've ever seen. I don't care if it's closed, I don't care if they had to drive a steamroller through a kitten factory to make it. It's that good.
It's amazing how people will put up with crap software just because it's open source, and denounce great software just because it's closed. Last time I checked, the purpose of open source was to create great software, not to stick to ideals.
there's more than one way to do me.
What type of machine were you running it on? I just received a new Powerbook G4 (550/512MB) and it runs great on it. Very stable and fast. It has taken me a few days to find out where everything is, but I really like it once I got used to it. I'm a PC user, but Apple really tempted me with their notebook design and the promise of a great GUI on top of *nix. I think they delivered in spades. I've already compiled Apache/PHP4/MySQL on it and have a backup of my main site running so that I can test different things. It's a great combo. Add Airport (which I did) and I can work on development anywhere in and around my house.
To test their claims, I've plugged my digital camera and digital video camera in it and was pleasantly surprised that no drivers were needed and the correct apps popped up automatically. iTunes is a great MP3 ripper and manager as well. My wife and I played with iMovie this weekend and found it to be a great entry level movie editor. It even connects to my Samba server and WinXP desktop with no add-ons. Very cool, everything just works!
Jason
"FORMAT C:" - Kills bugs dead!
ACK.
.. If a user can, by a few judicious choices, really improve the interface, we probably have done a poor job.
One of the major points why I don't like KDE is that they don't make any choices but make everything a user decision. Having the menu bar in the window or on the screen top does not result in having the best but the worst of both worlds.
I'd like to remind all the people working on a user interfaces of this quote from the KDE UI pages:Avoid rampant customisation.
Speaking as a recovering BeOS user/developer, I can say that BeOS is/was great software. But because it was closed source, it is now orphan-ware, getting more obsolete every day. When I to upgrade to a new machine, I most likely won't be able to run it at all anymore, since the new hardware won't be supported. If BeOS had been open source, it would still be a viable OS today, since the Be developer community would have taken over development when Be keeled over. (indeed, they are still trying to do just this, but Palm couldn't care less)
The moral of the story is this: for certain "platform" types of software that require a lot of time/money/software investment from the user (such as operating systems, APIs, languages, etc), one of the most important "features" that must be considered is whether or not the software product will continue to be supportable and developed. You can either make that guarantee by being too rich to ever go out of business (if you're Microsoft), or by making the code open source (if you're anybody else).
Or to put it more succinctly, it's gonna be a bummer for all the OS/X users if/when Apple goes out of business, and drags OS/X down with it. Users of open source operating systems have no such worries.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You should try winXP. Since you have finally graduated from the "my life is my computer" stage. You would most probably appreciate its stability and features. Really, I used to dualboot linux and NT/2k for 4 years. I got XP Pro(for free) and didn't think I would like or even need it. But after using it for a month now, I can say it has NEVER crashed and is now my only desktop OS.
Yup, I agree 100%. I have been fighting my machines for a long time now, dual booting, trying to get different things to work.. unstable this or that after installing this program or that program.. bleah.
I finally went out and bought windows xp home and put it over my win2k/linux partitions and love it. I have an older machine (p130) I use as my home network server and my wife happily uses her g4 w/osx which gives me another full time unix server to play with when necessary.
After discovering Cygwin I have been able to do most of my work related tasks without having to even ssh into my server. I can write scripts and manage my source code (java programmer, yippee) w/CVS and not wack out my code w/CR+LF wack and play all the games I want. None of the new games seem to have a problem and I have normal hardware (tnt graphics card + cheezy integrated sound) that seem to work fine too.
I am ripping dvd's as I type this and divx'ing them. I guess I am just tired of fighting w/my linux desktop. after the thrill of figuring it all out.. I discovered I really just want to play games , surf around and read email... JBuilder runs in anything and now with cygwin it lets me do most of my dev in xp. works for me.
Before you flame me, linux is about choice... to use it or not to use it.
You can't sit down in front of an unfamiliar system and judge its usability. You have to actually USE it for a month or so, getting real work done on a daily basis. Most people I know who have done that with Macs love Macs now, because the platform is simply better, once you get to know it well enough.
And by the way, it's the platform that's better, not just the OS. Mac applications work in a consistent way, there are standards for how they should behave, there are user interface guidelines to ensure that everything feels right, and users shun poorly-designed apps (such as Microsoft Word 6.0, which was a direct port from the Windows version and felt completely backwards and strange to Mac users). This is where Apple has the real edge - Mac apps have been following these guidelines for YEARS. Most other platforms don't even HAVE guidelines, and those that do only started thinking about them recently.
An example of application consistency: what's a keyboard shortcut to paste something you've copied? Now, list three applications on the same platform that don't do it the same way.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
"NFS support is severely lacking. You can't even count on a command-line mount of an nfs volume. If I try to mount with "mount server:/local /mnt/local", the "/mnt/local" directory disappears. The mount doesn't and you can't unmount without rebooting. There is a shareware program that makes it possible to use NFS, but c'mon folks. This is a violation of some basic trust. NFS should just work. "
And it does. The Mac OS X machine I am sitting at RIGHT NOW has two NFS exports and 3 NFS imports. It does "just work". I guess your problem is that NFS doesn't use the set up procedure that are used to. This is because OS X using NetInfo for all set ups. Try using NFSManager for easy setup with no learning curve, or "NetInfo Manager", which is infinitely more powerful. Ingorance is okay and can be cured, but I suspect you are nothing more than a troll, since you outright dismissed using "shareware tools" and wanted it to work your way.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Ok. As irritating as it is, I am going to have to do a point by point rebuttal here. Sorry in advance.
Point One half of Apple's current lineup of computers, the iMac and the iBook (2 computers that I bet make up the bulk of their sales) have NO expansion slots. No PCI slots on the iMac, and no PCMCIA slots on the laptops.
Rebuttal And this is bad why? The vast majority of people in the world out there DO NOT upgrade their computers. EVER. I worked at a computer repair firm for two years, and I would guess that not more than a quarter of PC users actually get new cards installed into their computers. This, contrary to what most people on slashdot feel, is not a limitation for the vast majority of users. Here, think of it like this. Most PC users, when they're adding new stuff to their computers, will get things that can be plugged into serial, parallel, and usb ports. Not PCI. Not AGP. Not (god forbid) ISA.
Point This is nothing more than a stupid, short-sighted attempt by Apple to make the computer not last as long. In essence, your choices become: 1: buy the much more expensive TiBook or G4 tower, or 2: buy the cheap one and it's obsolete, FAST.
RebuttalAnd this is different from those microtower Dells, Compaq iPaqs, etc, in what way exactly? Furthermore, with laptops, what the hell is the point of a PC card slot on a laptop that has video out, firewire, usb, 10/100 ethernet, AirPort (802.11b), and a 56k modem built-in? I actually just bought a TiBook 3-4 days ago (it's still on its way), and I don't have any notion of what I'll actually use the PC card slot on it for. I've been using an indigo iBook for the last 14 months, and I am currently replacing it only because I am starting to find the screen size limiting (it's a pain to use Project Builder and Interface Builder in 800x600 pixels).
Point Apple has end-of-lifed the video cards used in the first generation iMac - users of those computers are never going to get accelerated video drivers in OS X. If those were cheapo PCs with slots, you could at least throw a nicer video card in there and solve the problem.
Rebuttal Ok. OS X is big. It's a dog on anything less than a 366 MHz G3 with at least 128MB RAM. The original iMac (the bondi blue variety) has a 233MHz G3 processor, and came with 32 mb RAM. The average person is NOT going to run OS X on that thing. They'd be absolutely nuts to do it. Apple knows this. That's a big reason why they will not bother writing accelerated video card drivers for the bondi iMac. No one would use them (or at least they shouldn't). If these people really want to run OS X, they should sell their Bondi iMac off for $350 or $400, or whatever they go for, and pick up the $799 iMac.
PointAnd don't bother posting that it doesn't matter that there aren't any expansion slots because "everything comes built in". Tell that to first generation iBook or iMac owners who like to use the iPod - "sorry, FireWire only". Those computers are less than two years old, and already becoming obsolete.
Rebuttal Ha. Yeah right. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't afford to pick up a new computer every two or three years (the iMac will be 4 next August, and the iBook came out ~one year after the iMac) there is no way in hell you could afford an iPod. The iPod is a toy for those with too much money. Don't get me wrong on this, I'd love to have one, but there's no way in hell I can afford one until I'm out of college (I bought the TiBook because it'll serve a definite purpose. besides, I bought an AVC Soul Player a year ago). These people aren't going to go out and spend $400 on the iPod unless they could afford a new computer anyway. Besides, it doesn't matter, since everything comes built-in anyways, right? ;-)
Point Would you like to have USB 2.0? I will, and I can add it to my 3 year old Dell notebook via a card and it will work fine. The Apple iBook you buy TODAY can't be expanded with a single new tech. beyond what it ships with. Now which comp. is aging faster, the Apple, or the Dell? Even crummy $700 PCs and $1100 laptops have PCI/PCMCIA.
Rebuttal Yet people continue buying iBooks, with their 400 Mbit firewire ports that have devices available for the port today. What idiots! Can you even buy a USB 2.0 card yet? By the way, take a look at your P.S. statement. Hell, I'll quote it here. P.S. I don't want to hear about how you can add all sorts of nifty expansion option via FireWire. I don't want 5 boxes hanging off my computer. But wait, you still want 5 USB 2.0 devices hanging off your computer? I'm confused. It must be because I'm one of those gullible anti-windows mac users (I'm typing this on my self-built coppermine-core system running XP pro right now.).
Point PCI and PCMCIA slots let you add all sorts of stuff to your computer, in effect, "future-proofing" it by allowing you to expand rather than buy a new computer. A computer without expansion options hardly qualifies as "a computer that ages slower than PCs."
Point I just did a search on Micro Warehouse for pc card, and as you can see, basically everything listed is a wireless ethernet card, an ethernet card, a modem, or a usb controller. I HAVE ALL OF THOSE THINGS BUILT INTO MY IBOOK. Jeez. About the only thing I would find useful to buy for a pc card slot would be one of those pc card hard drives (that ibm makes). Even then, I'd rather just burn a cd with the built-in burner. More people have cd-rom drives than pc card slots. Furthermore, let's take a look at the cards I have in my PC right now. 1. An ATI Xpert 2000 (AGP 4x). 2. An SB Live (PCI). 3. A Linksys 10/100BaseT Ethernet card (PCI). 4. A firewire card. There is really nothing else that I am planning on ever adding to this computer. Sure, there are a lot of people out there who need second monitors, but none of them would buy an iMac anyways. They wouldn't be served well by a 15" monitor. The iMac is a consumer machine. The iBook (supposedly) is too (although most business types would probably be fine having one). The Power Mac G4 is a professional machine. Same thing goes for the Powerbook G4. You don't hear people complaining that their Dell Dimension 2100's won't let them install a burner inside the case. If you did, you'd probably ridicule them for not buying a higher-end machine.
You know what, I will go on using my Apple laptop, my Intel/Microsoft desktop, and the god-awful Sun Blade 100 I get stuck using at school, and you can go on using whatever you want to. We'll just call it even.
iRooster, the Mac OS X a
I'd like to reiterate what I wrote earlier in a similar thread which some moron scored down to -1.
I think people have had enough of user interfaces that are based on the twenty-some years old ideas that Windows, MacOS, Gnome and KDE are based on.
Where are the attempts at trying to create somehting exciting and radical?
It's hard enough to convince a Windows-user that MacOS makes you more productive - the interfaces are so similar that it's possible to approach both MacOS and BeOs with a Windows-infused mind and miss out all the good stuff. It's possible to build a user interface that is both obviously different and obviously better - even with Linux, but it seems to me that the Linux community lacks the competence. I would like to be proven wrong.
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
You stop where apple stopped, with case. "Test" and "test" are the same but "One_two" isn't the same as "One two". Apple isn't the only one to go down this path and at least they made it case preserving. "Test" stays as "Test" and will never be printed as "test".