Jobs Offers Free Mac OS X For $100 Laptops

bonch writes "Steve Jobs offered Mac OS X free of charge to the $100 laptop effort by the One Laptop Per Child project. However, his offer was declined because the project was looking for a 100% open source solution. The laptops will now be running on Red Hat Linux on AMD chips."

Comments

Ignore the research, it's only research

[dpbsmith]

Apple may have used intuition or good taste when they put a single menu bar at the top of the screen initially, but later on they did research which backed it up.

The edges of the screen are prime real estate and are easy targets to hit because the mouse pointer is constrained by the screen; effectively the menu bar is infinite in height. In order to hit a menu bar at the top of a window, you need to decelerate and hit a target that is fairly small. You need to do precision control in two dimensions instead of only one.

I think one of the reason Windows users are always complaining that using the mouse is slower than the keyboard is because putting the menu at the top of the window makes the mouse slower to use than if it were at the top of the screen.

Bruce Tognazinni devotes an entire chapter--27--of "Tog on Interface," (1992, Addison-Wesley) to this very topic. He cites four or five pieces of research.

But, never mind. It's only research. Tognazinni wrote--in 1990!--"People for years have been explaining to me that in this era of giant screen monitors, we just have to do something about those menu bars way up there at the top of the screen; that menu bars should be attached to windows, or pop up beneath the cursor or something. Anything, just so they aren't up at the top of the screen any more." And I am sure people will be doing it fifteen years from now, too.

Re:Silly?

[humina]

"What?!

In what ways can you tinker with Linux that you cannot tinker with OS X? In fact, OS X gives you far more to tinker with because not only do you have the keys to the kernel and the BSD layer and X11, but also to everything that Apple provides. That answer makes no sense whatsoever."

Well I can't tinker with:
quartz, iwork, iphoto, itunes, airport extreme, spotlight, quicktime, isync, ical,imovie, apple's mail, safari (but you can tinker with safari's rendering engine), ichatAV, garage band, idvd, all the pro applications, and much much more.

Of course by tinker I mean:
-look at the source code
-make modifications to the source code
-distribute the code along with my changes without the possibility of getting sued.

Apple will not allow any of this.

Re:Meh, depends on how you look at things.

[Space cowboy]

I'll feed the troll...

I'm not sure who's trolling here. I do know you're wrong on a fair few points...

1) I've never modified kernel code myself. But if I wanted to, or had to, I could. With an open-source kernel, you're free to change things on a whim. With a proprietary kernel, even if you have the technical ability, you're screwed.

Your point being ... what, exactly ? You *are* aware that the kernel in OS X is open-source, aren't you ? That all the source code is there, available for anyone to hack on ?

2) I don't browse through random source code for fun (though sometimes for profit), but open-source software gives me that warm-and-fuzzy feeling because I prefer the whole community attitude (for the most part) over some monolithic corporation that's more interested in getting me to fork over $100 for their latest app. Others might take a strictly moralistic stance.

Ah, I see, you're *not* aware that it's an open source kernel (google for 'Darwin OS X') at the heart of the mac ? I guess that makes this point moot too...

3) I suppose they could install anything they like. Choice is good.

I can't see how that's an argument in favour/against either. With either solution they can reformat the drive and install whatever they want ...

4) Sure, Cocoa is nice. GCC is also nice. wxWidgets is even nicer, and easily portable across both OSes. Preferences vary from person to person, and YMMV.

*cough*, *choke*, *gurgling death rattle*. You *have* to be kidding. I've used WxWindows for cross-platform apps, and Cocoa blows it away! I've been coding for the last 25 years, and the Mac (and I only started using them a year ago!) is by far the best platform I've ever coded on.

• Key-Value observing and coding - the ability to treat any class just like a dictionary, instance variables as keys within the dictionary,
• bindings - KVO/KVC with transforms and automatic linkage from the UI designer ... I saw a demonstrator build an entire web-browser without typing any code!
• core-graphics, core-image - have you *seen* quartz composer (C-G, C-I) ?
• Core-data, with the fully-integrated UML-like GUI data-model definer ?
• The UI tools (Interface builder) are truly excellent on the mac, and Xcode is developing into something really useful.
• The debugging tools are excellent (gdb, shark, bigtop, CHUD, objectalloc, etc.)
• Finally, the language - objective C is simply gorgeous - all the power of object-orientated coding with precisely 1 syntax addition and ~10 keywords. Stunning in its simplicity and way more powerful than is first apparent because of the runtime binding.

You are also aware the standard compiler is gcc on the mac, right ? I only ask because you didn't seem to know that Darwin was OSS...

5) Silly me, I didn't realize that modern *nix distros were strictly coding environments. And here I've been mixing audio, putting together home movies, editing photos, and doing my daily email/document/browsing/desktop-yada-yada on Linux. Must be a bug.

Er, I don't think there's anything to compare to the iLife suite on Linux. You're aware that people really make entire movies using Macs, right ? Really. The creative tools are second-to-none. And of course, it runs all the stuff that Linux runs because that's all OSS...

6) You misspelled "Mac" as "right".

Well, that's a matter of opinion. I think the Mac way works, but I'd not go so far as to label it the 'right' way. I think it's *a* right way.

Last I checked, if someone gives you $2M and an operating system with no costs attached to it, you aren't paying them anything -- ergo "free". If the source i