...They practically invented the GUI. ...and if they'd be able to patent it, we'd still all be running DOS, since Xerox never came out with a GUI product. Such is the power of software patents to drive innovation (into the ground).
I can't fault management for not wanting to pay for retraining
Any decent-sized software system is going to require a large amount of training specific to the system at hand. Perhaps, if the thing's all been built from scratch using the technology du jour, then maybe that recent grad will be more valuable than someone with real-world experience working on a large system that developed (shall we say) organically over a long period of time. But most systems are real-world cases.
The problem is that upper management wants to 'acquire' cheap young programmers like widgets. They can't get it through their thick skulls that after these kids finally become useful, they want raises or they're gone. Lather, rinse, repeat. At the back of this mindset is an eventual outsourcing job, where the turnover problem gets 'outsourced' too (in the 'not my problem' sense, not in the 'not a problem' sense). The fact that the resulting project fails 30 to 40 percent of the time is irrelevant. Management types have perfected the art of 'failing up'. They're off to bigger and better things long before the train wreck they set in motion actually occurs.
I'm not sure why everybody seems to think Kubuntu is the place to go for a KDE system. It's really rough around the edges, and Ubuntu doesn't stand behind it at all. That said, it works okay these days.
But if you want a KDE distro that seriously cares about getting KDE to work well, pick a KDE DISTRO. Mandriva is the best IMHO. SUSE is supposed to be 'the best', but SUSE has always thrown too much at their system. Just seems bloated. Mandriva is a really nice newbie system that happens to work really well for experienced users too. And it's had KDE4 working pretty well since 4.1. My only complaint with Mandriva is that they try to steer you to Fluendo, so unless you know about easyurpmi.org, you'll have trouble getting all your multimedia set up. But once you visit easurpmi.org, the Mandriva repos are great. And the Mandriva pagkaging gui is easier to use than Ubuntu's.
It's a shame Mandriva seems to have fallen off of the radar. It's a really nice distro. Maybe they had some shaky ones in the past (I left them for PCLinuxOS for a while, which is also really nice), but they're really on their game these days.
Does this imply that on more or less identical hardware (latest ARM + similar battery), the iPhone will always run apps faster and will always have better battery life than an Android phone?
If JIT produces such a noticeable performance boost, does that suggest that the difference between next-gen Android and iPhone will be negligible, or will there always be a significant gap? And if the gap will remain significant, should we care?
This is exactly why nobody should ever get sucked into Microsoft 'interoperability' ploys. They are not about interoperability. They are always about extending the MS monopoly into areas that they could not reach without paying lip service to interoperability.
Ipods used to sync easily in Linux until Apple encrypted the song database file. At the time I had some sympathy for them. The whole reason they were 'allowed' to sell digital music was that they agreed to not allow ipods to do certain things. The primary restriction was that you couldn't copy songs off of an ipod. So you caould copy songs from your friend's computer to your ipod, but you couldn't copy them from your ipod to your friend's computer. That seemed like a reasonable compromise (and still allowed for some small amount of theft).
Well every linux ipod loader in the old days could also unload songs. So much for that. I'm not saying I didn't take advantage of that capability too. Anyway, now that iTunes downloads aren't DRM'd, and have some kind of personal tracking id embedded, that's probably not the problem any more - if it ever was. But I wouldn't be so quick to assign purely evil motives to Apple's actions. This 'no mention of Android at the app store' bit sounds plain petty. Not quite rising to the level of evil.
Of course an iTunes version for Linux would put to rest any notion that they are trying to use the iPod to somehow stifle competition between Linux and OS/X. Again, I assume it's cheapness/laziness more than evil there.
Y'know what, OSS licenses offer more freedom than some OSS supporters want. Too bad. This is just like complaining about 'Tivo-ization'. Tivo follwed the rules, and if anything, was good for OSS (if only because we could say, "y'know the Tivo - that runs Linux"). Nothing Google or Tivo did prevented anybody from developing Open Source applications (though they couldn't write 'em to run on Tivo hardware), and both made contributions to the state of the art.
The funny thing is that closed source apps are appearing on Android and not on Linux 'proper'. Is that just because smartphone apps are trendy now, or because of some serious difference between the platforms (either technically or in how they're used). I suspect it's a combination. First of all, there's more free stuff already available on the traditional Linux desktop. It does more than your typical phone app, and would be a lot harder to compete with. And then there's the distro/desktop fragmentation issue. Multiple Android versions are already spurring complaints about 'fragmentation', but they're nothing compared to Gnome vs KDE, Ubuntu vs [everything else]. Ubuntu 8.10 vs 9.4 vs 9.10, etc...
If Oracle wanted to get really tricky, they'd re-license MySQL under GPL3 (or whatever version beyond that that prohibits ASP-based proprietary applications). Stallman would probably be thrilled, but your average commercial LAMP site, not so much. There are many ways for Oracle to turn ownership of MySQL to their advantage without either shutting it down or making it 'non-free'.
That's probably good for the MySQL developers Oracle is likely to employ. For the rest of us, there's still PostgreSQL...
I imagine you're aware of this, but with Linux, you could do all this for free. Citrix'll cost you a ton for client access licenses, and Linux has this kind of thin-client support built in.
Of course, you must be replacing a traditional Windows desktop-centric network, and I guess you have some need for Windows-only apps with no viable Linux equivalent. But don't you wish you didn't have that requirement? Maybe one of these days...
Interestingly, maybe ChromeOS will support a citrix client (or X / NX server). Maybe the new devices built around ChromeOS will make really nice thin-client terminals for more than web-only use. Not clear yet, but that could be enough of a niche to keep the hardware manufacturers onboard. Maybe even Wyse...
>Things like the wobble of the guns and the on-screen feedback that tells you which direction you are being shot from — these were things that id Software invented
Not that I'd advocate it, but stuff like gun wobble and on-screen feedback is exactly the kind of bullshit that's being granted patents these days. Doesn't Apple have a patent on the 'bounce' you see when you scroll past the end of a list on the iPhone? Utterly nuts, but let's imagine for a minute that id had gotten patents on this stuff. What would that have done to the course of game development?
What a ridiculous rationalization. Anybody that really needs IE probably really needs Windows for some other reason as well. But why force Windows on people on the assumption that they need IE? Plenty of people don't - how about all those iPhone users?
And if they really think IE's the issue, they can bundle IE6 (or whatever the latest version is that's known to work) with WINE. Does WINE work on Android?. If not, then why not Ubuntu?
Seriously, are we about to see a new version of 'pay for windows whether you want it or not' that offers a dual-boot Linux option of some kind, but still no linux-only option where you get to save money and not help fatten Microsoft?
Never actually having bought anything at iTunes, I wasn't aware of this. I've only ever downloaded podcasts. For music, I've always loaded my own ripped CD's onto my iPod. Showing my age, I guess.
I've always thought Apple should encourage you to buy whole LP's by setting a price at which it becomes a no-brainer to spring for the whole thing. Something like this:
1. Keep track of which songs a user has bought (I assume they already do this). 2. When you've bought 5 or more songs, offer a 'For $1 more, you can have the whole LP'. 3. Optionally, when you've bought 8 or more songs, offer a 'For $1 more, you can download the rest, and we'll send you a hard-copy CD in the mail.
The point is that you set an LP price that's less than the total of the individual song prices and then let customers 'upgrade' to the LP after sampling a song or two and deciding they like it. LP's end up cheaper than they are today, but they'd end up selling a lot more of them than they do today. Possibly by enough to make up for what they're losing now to single-song downloaders. Even if there's not much more money changing hands, the artists would probably like it. And maybe the return to album consumption would help revive the music industry by deepening the relation between fan and artist.
The physical CD part would be really nice too, though there'd be some real costs involved with that one, and maybe it would be considered too retro for iTunes.
Presumably, if Adobe doesn't establish Flash as a cross-platform dev environment for mobiles, then Microsoft will manage to foist Silverlight as it's own bloated slow lane for mobile devices. And the same devs that give us IE-only web apps will start producing Silverlight-only stuff for mobiles.
Now maybe Miguel would disagree, but I think it's better to have a truly cross-platform bloated enviroment than to have a single-platform bloated environment (I assume Silverlight/Mono is at least close to Flash in bloat). Sure, I'd take streamlined before bloat, but cross-platform trumps streamlined.
By the way, aren't Android apps based on Java? Since when is that a paragon of efficiency? Or does Google use some kind of 'compiled to machine code' Java variant? Likewise WebOS apps - aren't they largely Javascript? Who said mobile device platforms weren't bloated already?
Good examples of what I would consider patent-worthy inventions: Java virtual machine,.NET(yep, I said it), MS Office "ribbon" UI(even though I fucking hate it).
I'd be willing to be there's prior art on all of these. Hell, the Java virtual machine is probably prior art to 90% of.NET. If that were patented, the 'innovative' parts of.NET wouldn't have a platform to have been innovated onto.
Doesn't Symphony have it's own 'ribbon' in the form of a sidebar tool thingy? Putting this kind of thing on a sidebar makes more sense than across the top. Widescreen displays have room to spare on the sides, not at the top.
>A good operating system is discoverable and user-centric.
I tend to agree with you on that, but for what it's worth, in my occasional forays into Apple software, I haven't found things to be particularly discoverable (or even all that well designed). I occasionally use iTunes (granted, the Windows version), and it amazes me that stuff like the blue dot next to podcasts offers no explanation of what it is or does. It seems to indicate that the podcast hasn't been listened to yet, but doesn't always reset after listening (there must be some minimum percentage you have to play before it goes off). Didn't Apple 'invent' balloon help? So why don't they use it?
That's a trivial example, but there's stuff like that all over. It seems to me that the Apple philosophy is 'easy to teach' rather than 'easy to discover'. i.e. they assume somebody's going to show users how to do things, and after that, it'll all make sense. And that fits with an orientation toward non-technical (if not computer-phobic) users. That kind of user wants to be shown what to do - and then do that and nothing else.
To tell the truth, I think Windows does 'discoverable' better, and to the extent that KDE follows the Windows model (lots of right-click context options, 'advanced' features tabs, etc), it does a pretty good job too. Where Windows and KDE break down is in having too many options and too many ways to do the same thing. Not too sure about GNOME, but I tend to agree with the 'GNOME is too stripped down' argument. Isn't there some happy medium between too much and too little configurability? In any case, GNOME definitely has Mac envy - I just haven't yet figured out what is so enviable about it.
>Desktop apps have their purpose, web apps do as well. Find what suits YOUR needs and use the best choice
You're right, of course. Except that the current state of things is that most desktop apps and web apps use completely different file formats to accomplish the same thing. That's where ODF could come in and really enbable best of breed stuff in both arenas. A common format allows you to innovate in the apps without losing the ability to share your data with other people.
It'll never be perfect, but it'd be nice if the various vendors were even trying. And some of them are (to some extent). Microsoft, of course, is trying - trying to prevent interoperability from ever happening. It's customers that need to demand better. Barring that (and taking past law-breaking into account), governments are the next best hope.
Y'know not all off the netbook retreat to XP was driven by Microsoft's pressure (though I'm sure there was plenty of that too).
The various netbook Linux'es were not great. Just read Slashdot, etc. Everyone was happy, happy, happy that Linux netbooks were being sold... and then they went on to say that the distros on the netbooks were crap - you should replace them with distro X. Is it any wonder that once the price advantage was gone, the netbook OEM's went with XP? Linux may well have worked better on their netbooks... but which Linux?
(pauses to dodge incoming bombs)
Anyway, notice that now that Google's in the mix, Asus, etc are coming back. It's not because Google's a sure thing. It's not even because it'll be better than what they were using before (though Google's no slouch - their stuff's pretty great). It's because the OEM's want a single alternative OS, and Google's name recognition guarantees that people will have heard of it.
Linux distros are great. I use Mandriva, when I'm not using Fedora or Ubuntu. That's right. I'm part of the 'problem'. And if I don't like Chrome OS, I'll replace it with what I want. But I'm not Joe Consumer. And Asus is selling to good old Joe. I'm ready to stop blaming Asus for their timidity or their lack of software development savvy. It's not their job to be great OS developers (or even supporters). And if Google's willing to take on that job, that's great news.
The only problem I see with this is that Google's conceding the desktop application market to Microsoft. Making this a 'web-only' device is very limiting. Limiting to what Google is happy to have you limited to, but limiting nonetheless. If there were a 'standard' Linux distro that had enough mindshare (and was good enough) for the OEMs to annoint it the standard, that might have produced something we Linux fans would've liked better....and then we could have junked it and put on our distros of choice. That's CHOICE as in 'always good, no matter what, no matter where'. Except when it's not.
Any 'web book' is gonna need Flash. It's too ubiquitous to ignore, but at least it's more cross-platform than Silverlight. If Google were to buy it and 'make it free' (one way or another), that might be good for us all. Maybe that's why they're hedging about supporting Ogg video in HTML5.
It's not that they bundle a browser. It's that they bundle IE, which through MS's previous law-breaking, spawned an ecosystem of non-standard, IE-only websites. These days, those 'websites' are largely web-based corporate functions (like time tracking systems and incident tracking systems). Those packages have been able to continue down their IE-only garden paths on the assumption (supported by Microsoft marketing) that IE will already be there on 95% of computers sold, and if a business standardizes on Windows, 100%.
That has contributed to Windows lock-in, which was the basis of the original IE antitrust action. So, while it'd be okay if Microsoft were to bundle Firefox or Chrome, bundling IE is still problematic. Now, they could remove all the non-standard stuff from IE and then bundle it relatively harmlessly. But, of course, the non-standard stuff is the reason Microsoft built IE in the first place - so they could extend their monopoly position to the web, making non-Windows desktop systems that much less viable. And it would've worked, except for Firefox, which being open source was not 'killable'. As it is, the web has gravitated towards standards despite IE. But that'd have been much harder to do without a first-class browser like Firefox able to survive in the vacuum created by IE. And without firefox, there probably never would've been Safari, iPhone, Android, etc.
Still, even though Microsoft hasn't been as successful as they'd have liked in monopolizing the Internet, they still have had some success, especially in the corporate arena. So what's the EU to do? Nothing?
You're right, but X86 emulation still has a place in the mix (to the extent that running x86 win32 binaries matters - a lot to some people).
And x86 emulation doesn't mean you need to emulate the entire win32 api along with the application binary. As soon as the emulator makes any kind of system call, it can emulate that call in native code. Your average app probably spends 80% of its time in system calls, so emulation done that way works remarkably well (I assume that's how Apple's Rosetta works). Certainly in the usable range.
That's why I think Linux + ARM WINE + a win32 binary would make an ARM Linux netbook more useful than an ARM Win7 netbook. Of course, there's nothing to prevent Microsoft from providing an equivalent (and more accurate) version of the same feature. But WINE ought to do it first - for mindshare if nothing else.
The big deal is that Apple's not supporting iTunes interfacing with the Pre. The support is coming from Pre's side.
If that's true, then the Pre could emulate one of the non-ipod devices and sync to iTunes. Can Apple sue Palm for emulating a Rio? Possibly, I guess, if Rio's paying royalties for the privilege of syncing to iTunes...
Slashdot Mirror
Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, and we know how that worked out. Scary enough for you?
...They practically invented the GUI.
...and if they'd be able to patent it, we'd still all be running DOS, since Xerox never came out with a GUI product. Such is the power of software patents to drive innovation (into the ground).
I can't fault management for not wanting to pay for retraining
Any decent-sized software system is going to require a large amount of training specific to the system at hand. Perhaps, if the thing's all been built from scratch using the technology du jour, then maybe that recent grad will be more valuable than someone with real-world experience working on a large system that developed (shall we say) organically over a long period of time. But most systems are real-world cases.
The problem is that upper management wants to 'acquire' cheap young programmers like widgets. They can't get it through their thick skulls that after these kids finally become useful, they want raises or they're gone. Lather, rinse, repeat. At the back of this mindset is an eventual outsourcing job, where the turnover problem gets 'outsourced' too (in the 'not my problem' sense, not in the 'not a problem' sense). The fact that the resulting project fails 30 to 40 percent of the time is irrelevant. Management types have perfected the art of 'failing up'. They're off to bigger and better things long before the train wreck they set in motion actually occurs.
I'm not sure why everybody seems to think Kubuntu is the place to go for a KDE system. It's really rough around the edges, and Ubuntu doesn't stand behind it at all. That said, it works okay these days.
But if you want a KDE distro that seriously cares about getting KDE to work well, pick a KDE DISTRO. Mandriva is the best IMHO. SUSE is supposed to be 'the best', but SUSE has always thrown too much at their system. Just seems bloated. Mandriva is a really nice newbie system that happens to work really well for experienced users too. And it's had KDE4 working pretty well since 4.1. My only complaint with Mandriva is that they try to steer you to Fluendo, so unless you know about easyurpmi.org, you'll have trouble getting all your multimedia set up. But once you visit easurpmi.org, the Mandriva repos are great. And the Mandriva pagkaging gui is easier to use than Ubuntu's.
It's a shame Mandriva seems to have fallen off of the radar. It's a really nice distro. Maybe they had some shaky ones in the past (I left them for PCLinuxOS for a while, which is also really nice), but they're really on their game these days.
Does this imply that on more or less identical hardware (latest ARM + similar battery), the iPhone will always run apps faster and will always have better battery life than an Android phone?
If JIT produces such a noticeable performance boost, does that suggest that the difference between next-gen Android and iPhone will be negligible, or will there always be a significant gap? And if the gap will remain significant, should we care?
This is exactly why nobody should ever get sucked into Microsoft 'interoperability' ploys. They are not about interoperability. They are always about extending the MS monopoly into areas that they could not reach without paying lip service to interoperability.
Ipods used to sync easily in Linux until Apple encrypted the song database file. At the time I had some sympathy for them. The whole reason they were 'allowed' to sell digital music was that they agreed to not allow ipods to do certain things. The primary restriction was that you couldn't copy songs off of an ipod. So you caould copy songs from your friend's computer to your ipod, but you couldn't copy them from your ipod to your friend's computer. That seemed like a reasonable compromise (and still allowed for some small amount of theft).
Well every linux ipod loader in the old days could also unload songs. So much for that. I'm not saying I didn't take advantage of that capability too. Anyway, now that iTunes downloads aren't DRM'd, and have some kind of personal tracking id embedded, that's probably not the problem any more - if it ever was. But I wouldn't be so quick to assign purely evil motives to Apple's actions. This 'no mention of Android at the app store' bit sounds plain petty. Not quite rising to the level of evil.
Of course an iTunes version for Linux would put to rest any notion that they are trying to use the iPod to somehow stifle competition between Linux and OS/X. Again, I assume it's cheapness/laziness more than evil there.
Y'know what, OSS licenses offer more freedom than some OSS supporters want. Too bad. This is just like complaining about 'Tivo-ization'. Tivo follwed the rules, and if anything, was good for OSS (if only because we could say, "y'know the Tivo - that runs Linux"). Nothing Google or Tivo did prevented anybody from developing Open Source applications (though they couldn't write 'em to run on Tivo hardware), and both made contributions to the state of the art.
The funny thing is that closed source apps are appearing on Android and not on Linux 'proper'. Is that just because smartphone apps are trendy now, or because of some serious difference between the platforms (either technically or in how they're used). I suspect it's a combination. First of all, there's more free stuff already available on the traditional Linux desktop. It does more than your typical phone app, and would be a lot harder to compete with. And then there's the distro/desktop fragmentation issue. Multiple Android versions are already spurring complaints about 'fragmentation', but they're nothing compared to Gnome vs KDE, Ubuntu vs [everything else]. Ubuntu 8.10 vs 9.4 vs 9.10, etc...
If Oracle wanted to get really tricky, they'd re-license MySQL under GPL3 (or whatever version beyond that that prohibits ASP-based proprietary applications). Stallman would probably be thrilled, but your average commercial LAMP site, not so much. There are many ways for Oracle to turn ownership of MySQL to their advantage without either shutting it down or making it 'non-free'.
That's probably good for the MySQL developers Oracle is likely to employ. For the rest of us, there's still PostgreSQL...
I imagine you're aware of this, but with Linux, you could do all this for free. Citrix'll cost you a ton for client access licenses, and Linux has this kind of thin-client support built in.
Of course, you must be replacing a traditional Windows desktop-centric network, and I guess you have some need for Windows-only apps with no viable Linux equivalent. But don't you wish you didn't have that requirement? Maybe one of these days...
Interestingly, maybe ChromeOS will support a citrix client (or X / NX server). Maybe the new devices built around ChromeOS will make really nice thin-client terminals for more than web-only use. Not clear yet, but that could be enough of a niche to keep the hardware manufacturers onboard. Maybe even Wyse...
>Things like the wobble of the guns and the on-screen feedback that tells you which direction you are being shot from — these were things that id Software invented
Not that I'd advocate it, but stuff like gun wobble and on-screen feedback is exactly the kind of bullshit that's being granted patents these days. Doesn't Apple have a patent on the 'bounce' you see when you scroll past the end of a list on the iPhone? Utterly nuts, but let's imagine for a minute that id had gotten patents on this stuff. What would that have done to the course of game development?
What a ridiculous rationalization. Anybody that really needs IE probably really needs Windows for some other reason as well. But why force Windows on people on the assumption that they need IE? Plenty of people don't - how about all those iPhone users?
And if they really think IE's the issue, they can bundle IE6 (or whatever the latest version is that's known to work) with WINE. Does WINE work on Android?. If not, then why not Ubuntu?
Seriously, are we about to see a new version of 'pay for windows whether you want it or not' that offers a dual-boot Linux option of some kind, but still no linux-only option where you get to save money and not help fatten Microsoft?
Never actually having bought anything at iTunes, I wasn't aware of this. I've only ever downloaded podcasts. For music, I've always loaded my own ripped CD's onto my iPod. Showing my age, I guess.
Never mind.
I've always thought Apple should encourage you to buy whole LP's by setting a price at which it becomes a no-brainer to spring for the whole thing. Something like this:
1. Keep track of which songs a user has bought (I assume they already do this).
2. When you've bought 5 or more songs, offer a 'For $1 more, you can have the whole LP'.
3. Optionally, when you've bought 8 or more songs, offer a 'For $1 more, you can download the rest, and we'll send you a hard-copy CD in the mail.
The point is that you set an LP price that's less than the total of the individual song prices and then let customers 'upgrade' to the LP after sampling a song or two and deciding they like it. LP's end up cheaper than they are today, but they'd end up selling a lot more of them than they do today. Possibly by enough to make up for what they're losing now to single-song downloaders. Even if there's not much more money changing hands, the artists would probably like it. And maybe the return to album consumption would help revive the music industry by deepening the relation between fan and artist.
The physical CD part would be really nice too, though there'd be some real costs involved with that one, and maybe it would be considered too retro for iTunes.
Presumably, if Adobe doesn't establish Flash as a cross-platform dev environment for mobiles, then Microsoft will manage to foist Silverlight as it's own bloated slow lane for mobile devices. And the same devs that give us IE-only web apps will start producing Silverlight-only stuff for mobiles.
Now maybe Miguel would disagree, but I think it's better to have a truly cross-platform bloated enviroment than to have a single-platform bloated environment (I assume Silverlight/Mono is at least close to Flash in bloat). Sure, I'd take streamlined before bloat, but cross-platform trumps streamlined.
By the way, aren't Android apps based on Java? Since when is that a paragon of efficiency? Or does Google use some kind of 'compiled to machine code' Java variant? Likewise WebOS apps - aren't they largely Javascript? Who said mobile device platforms weren't bloated already?
Good examples of what I would consider patent-worthy inventions: Java virtual machine, .NET(yep, I said it), MS Office "ribbon" UI(even though I fucking hate it).
I'd be willing to be there's prior art on all of these. Hell, the Java virtual machine is probably prior art to 90% of .NET. If that were patented, the 'innovative' parts of .NET wouldn't have a platform to have been innovated onto.
Doesn't Symphony have it's own 'ribbon' in the form of a sidebar tool thingy? Putting this kind of thing on a sidebar makes more sense than across the top. Widescreen displays have room to spare on the sides, not at the top.
>A good operating system is discoverable and user-centric.
I tend to agree with you on that, but for what it's worth, in my occasional forays into Apple software, I haven't found things to be particularly discoverable (or even all that well designed). I occasionally use iTunes (granted, the Windows version), and it amazes me that stuff like the blue dot next to podcasts offers no explanation of what it is or does. It seems to indicate that the podcast hasn't been listened to yet, but doesn't always reset after listening (there must be some minimum percentage you have to play before it goes off). Didn't Apple 'invent' balloon help? So why don't they use it?
That's a trivial example, but there's stuff like that all over. It seems to me that the Apple philosophy is 'easy to teach' rather than 'easy to discover'. i.e. they assume somebody's going to show users how to do things, and after that, it'll all make sense. And that fits with an orientation toward non-technical (if not computer-phobic) users. That kind of user wants to be shown what to do - and then do that and nothing else.
To tell the truth, I think Windows does 'discoverable' better, and to the extent that KDE follows the Windows model (lots of right-click context options, 'advanced' features tabs, etc), it does a pretty good job too. Where Windows and KDE break down is in having too many options and too many ways to do the same thing. Not too sure about GNOME, but I tend to agree with the 'GNOME is too stripped down' argument. Isn't there some happy medium between too much and too little configurability? In any case, GNOME definitely has Mac envy - I just haven't yet figured out what is so enviable about it.
>Desktop apps have their purpose, web apps do as well. Find what suits YOUR needs and use the best choice
You're right, of course. Except that the current state of things is that most desktop apps and web apps use completely different file formats to accomplish the same thing. That's where ODF could come in and really enbable best of breed stuff in both arenas. A common format allows you to innovate in the apps without losing the ability to share your data with other people.
It'll never be perfect, but it'd be nice if the various vendors were even trying. And some of them are (to some extent). Microsoft, of course, is trying - trying to prevent interoperability from ever happening. It's customers that need to demand better. Barring that (and taking past law-breaking into account), governments are the next best hope.
Y'know not all off the netbook retreat to XP was driven by Microsoft's pressure (though I'm sure there was plenty of that too).
The various netbook Linux'es were not great. Just read Slashdot, etc. Everyone was happy, happy, happy that Linux netbooks were being sold... and then they went on to say that the distros on the netbooks were crap - you should replace them with distro X. Is it any wonder that once the price advantage was gone, the netbook OEM's went with XP? Linux may well have worked better on their netbooks... but which Linux?
(pauses to dodge incoming bombs)
Anyway, notice that now that Google's in the mix, Asus, etc are coming back. It's not because Google's a sure thing. It's not even because it'll be better than what they were using before (though Google's no slouch - their stuff's pretty great). It's because the OEM's want a single alternative OS, and Google's name recognition guarantees that people will have heard of it.
Linux distros are great. I use Mandriva, when I'm not using Fedora or Ubuntu. That's right. I'm part of the 'problem'. And if I don't like Chrome OS, I'll replace it with what I want. But I'm not Joe Consumer. And Asus is selling to good old Joe. I'm ready to stop blaming Asus for their timidity or their lack of software development savvy. It's not their job to be great OS developers (or even supporters). And if Google's willing to take on that job, that's great news.
The only problem I see with this is that Google's conceding the desktop application market to Microsoft. Making this a 'web-only' device is very limiting. Limiting to what Google is happy to have you limited to, but limiting nonetheless. If there were a 'standard' Linux distro that had enough mindshare (and was good enough) for the OEMs to annoint it the standard, that might have produced something we Linux fans would've liked better. ...and then we could have junked it and put on our distros of choice. That's CHOICE as in 'always good, no matter what, no matter where'. Except when it's not.
Any 'web book' is gonna need Flash. It's too ubiquitous to ignore, but at least it's more cross-platform than Silverlight. If Google were to buy it and 'make it free' (one way or another), that might be good for us all. Maybe that's why they're hedging about supporting Ogg video in HTML5.
It's not that they bundle a browser. It's that they bundle IE, which through MS's previous law-breaking, spawned an ecosystem of non-standard, IE-only websites. These days, those 'websites' are largely web-based corporate functions (like time tracking systems and incident tracking systems). Those packages have been able to continue down their IE-only garden paths on the assumption (supported by Microsoft marketing) that IE will already be there on 95% of computers sold, and if a business standardizes on Windows, 100%.
That has contributed to Windows lock-in, which was the basis of the original IE antitrust action. So, while it'd be okay if Microsoft were to bundle Firefox or Chrome, bundling IE is still problematic. Now, they could remove all the non-standard stuff from IE and then bundle it relatively harmlessly. But, of course, the non-standard stuff is the reason Microsoft built IE in the first place - so they could extend their monopoly position to the web, making non-Windows desktop systems that much less viable. And it would've worked, except for Firefox, which being open source was not 'killable'. As it is, the web has gravitated towards standards despite IE. But that'd have been much harder to do without a first-class browser like Firefox able to survive in the vacuum created by IE. And without firefox, there probably never would've been Safari, iPhone, Android, etc.
Still, even though Microsoft hasn't been as successful as they'd have liked in monopolizing the Internet, they still have had some success, especially in the corporate arena. So what's the EU to do? Nothing?
You're right, but X86 emulation still has a place in the mix (to the extent that running x86 win32 binaries matters - a lot to some people).
And x86 emulation doesn't mean you need to emulate the entire win32 api along with the application binary. As soon as the emulator makes any kind of system call, it can emulate that call in native code. Your average app probably spends 80% of its time in system calls, so emulation done that way works remarkably well (I assume that's how Apple's Rosetta works). Certainly in the usable range.
That's why I think Linux + ARM WINE + a win32 binary would make an ARM Linux netbook more useful than an ARM Win7 netbook. Of course, there's nothing to prevent Microsoft from providing an equivalent (and more accurate) version of the same feature. But WINE ought to do it first - for mindshare if nothing else.
Microsoft's best 'marketing slogan' was never heard by end users. "Pay for Windows on every box, and we'll give it to you really cheap".
The big deal is that Apple's not supporting iTunes interfacing with the Pre. The support is coming from Pre's side.
If that's true, then the Pre could emulate one of the non-ipod devices and sync to iTunes. Can Apple sue Palm for emulating a Rio? Possibly, I guess, if Rio's paying royalties for the privilege of syncing to iTunes...