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Apple vs Microsoft Both Copycats
jdbartlett writes "Yesterday, we read Paul Thurrott's response to Apple's Leopard preview. In his TechBlog, Jim Thompson trims Thurrott's bloated opinion piece and presents an alternative take on four major new features, admitting that each may have been inspired but certainly not by Microsoft. Thompson ignores 6 features; some (Core Animation, Accessibility improvements) needed no defense, but perhaps not all Thurrott's points were invalid."
I posted this before, but thought it was good enough to post again...
a ts_whiners.html
Oreillys radar's site take on the new features of the OS (by nat):
A good read actually:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/apple_e
Digital Unix on Alpha in the early nineties.
"each may have been inspired but certainly not by Microsoft." Just like Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" was 'inspired' by Queen's "Under Pressure"
If one wants to be nitpicky about "stealing ideas," then both Windows Search and Spotlight are stolen from BeOS.
English is easier said than done.
If true, why is that important?
Supporting mixed models is not a new concept even if 64 bit itself hasn't been done. OS/2 did it, Win95 did it. Ultimately there is no reason for the end user to care.
Notice how in his iChat bashing he neglected to mention desktop sharing. Which I would also neglect to mention if I had to say that there were no major features. Adding desktop sharing is indeed a major feature.
Text to Voice support in Windows XP is dismal to say the least. The built-in text-to-speech softrware is a joke. It works yes, but only in Microsoft applications.
There is a 3rd party software package called "JAWS" which costs around $400 - $500, is locked down with DRM so if you have to reinstall your system or upgrade you have to reactivate it. Also, the software is very picky as to what kind of video card and sound card you have, and its prome to crashing. The software had also been none to deactivate itself for no reason, thus requiring you to reinstall it and reactivate it.
I looked at VoiceOver in Mac OS X and I was very impressed. Someone with no vision at all (I have some, I just need an extra large monitor) would have little trouble navigating the system using it. I know a few people with no vision at all and they were also extremely impressed with Voice Over, and I know at least one person who will benefit from Mac OS X Leopard's support for Braille displays. Also, the APIs and tools needed to make Mac OS X apps work with Voice Over are freely available to developers so any Mac app can be made Voice Over compatible with minimal effort. For JAWS its much harder.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Thanks for that NOVA Ep recap i saw 15 years ago. Apple didn't copy btw, they purchaced it along with the mouse that Xerox didn't feel was viable. The OS has matured a long way, and just like music its all about building upon the shoulders of giants. Apple did it better on the surface, and under the hood while Microsoft did it better in the engine.
the debate here is between Windows and OS X, not Unix.
OS X is just a peculiar Unix distro.
I find it fascinating that Linux can borrow BSD features, and AIX can mimic Solaris features, but when Apple steals a feature for its particular Unixling, it's a big event.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
I'm so sick of people bringing up Xerox Alto to zing Apple. You have never used a Xerox Alto - and you never will and you never would have even HEARD of the damn thing if Apple hadn't come out of the GUI. First, the interface on the Alto was very primite compared to the Mac. Second, Xerox would never have allowed the Alto - or anything else from PARC such as Ethernet or Smalltalk - to see the light of day left to their own devices. Third, many of the people who worked on the Alto came over to Apple to work on the Lisa and/or Mac. Fourth, many of the ideas that the Alto was based on came from Jef Raskin's PhD. dissertation (Jef Raskin started the Mac project at Apple). Fifth, Apple PAID Xerox 80 million dollars to use ideas from the Alto.
The fact is that there were people shopping some good ideas around Silicon valley at that time. Apple was the only company at the time with the guts to bring these radical ideas to market. Not Microsoft. Not Xerox. Not IBM. Not Digital Research (they made CPM and were a big deal at the time).
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
The "obscure version of NT that was never officially released" was actually the very first version of NT, NT 3.1, which had multiple desktops. The problem was that there was no UI that allowed for the user to access them.
:)
But the support has been in NT since the beginning.
Not that it really matters
I'm sorry, but anyone who simply calls Time Machine an "incremental backup" solution has lost all credibility. Yes, it's BASED ON an incremental backup solution, and it certainly offers that. But the real revolutionary concept here is that it provides a way for applications to look into their own past. You can go back in time WITHIN iPhoto, and look around at what your collection looked like a month ago. You can do queries in Address Book, and if you don't find a record you expect, go back in time and have it automatically find the first time the query returned something... WITHIN the Address Book application. And while browsing in the past, the application's UI is functional. Then, you can record just one record of the address book-- you don't need to pull an entire file to the present. And, of course, it'll be built in to every copy of their consumer OS with an auto-configured simple setup.
Thus, both Thurrott and this article appear to have largely missed the point in their attempt to show prior art here.
E pluribus unum