This sounds like another "too big to fail" problem and yet another reason to never let any corporation get so big. If you can't upgrade your IT infastructure or anything else of a similar nature, then the company in question probably needs to be dissolved into a number of smaller ones.
It's discontinued and is no longer supported by the original software vendor and you don't have the source code.
I knew a shop that had a critical application that was 30 years old. However, they had enough of a clue to put themselves in the position where they could maintain the product themselves. Many CxO's came and went trying to replace that old dinosaur but newer alternatives could never quite pass muster. They weren't good enough.
Sooner or later all of those "business reasons" you used to justify buying the shiny commercial product from the darling of industry will evaporate.
In other words, it's an engineering failure from top to bottom. Being dependent on one particular version of one particular application is just the tip of a very large iceberg that also happens to be a big frozen turd.
They built a rube goldberg machine without any thought to how they would maintain it or upgrade it.
It seems all of the fanboys got their collective panties in a bunch because someone is not worshiping their pet brand.
The point is not to pretend that the tablet is something that it is not. The point is to honestly acknowledge what it is good at then use THAT for some productive purpose.
Microsoft seems to just be blindly trying to follow Apple rather than honestly appraising where their real strength lies (namely legacy apps) and leveraging that or at the very least making their ARM devices more closely intergrated with the rest of their own ecosystem.
Nonsense. Linux uses the same printing system as a Mac.
is the Mac not ready?
It really takes very little tweaking to turn CUPS into an AirPrint system. It's so easy I don't know why they don't just enable it by default (on both Macs and Linux).
For most pedestrian PC use cases, you don't need a bruiser of a CPU or a GPU. In the case of an HTPC, a lot of people (myself included) get great results out of using just about the most trailing edge kit available. Most home and office users don't push their machines. That's why tablets are so popular.
Most people outside of conspicous consumption gamers just don't push their systems.
Right now, I am not pushing my system. The most important aspect of my desktop right now is not the CPU or the GPU. It's the big fat monitor and nice keyboard. It's all of the parts that aren't the actual PC.
> For the average consumer how has Apple chosen to lock any general use away?
So Apple is the "lowest common denominator" brand now then? It's not for serious users or professionals or geeks or anyone that's the least bit creative?
That's a great brand identity you're building there.
The problem with the Apple approach is it lowers the bar for geeky. Simple things like getting your music back off your device or putting on a single Album suddenly become unecessarily complicated because of a Newspeak definition of "typical".
An average user can never hope to be exceptional. If they do manage to have a creative idea, they will be shouted down by the hive mind.
That's kind of ironic for a brand associated with creative professionals.
Tablets make great media consumption devices. Design your "business use case" around that idea and you're fine. Try to pretend that your iToy is a real PC and you're going to have problems.
There are "media consumption" use cases for the business use of tablets.
The mindless hype isn't entirely bogus. Just mostly bogus.
You're forgetting Apple and their fanboys. They fully expect tablets to displace PCs entirely. It doesn't matter if the task is well suited to the tablet form factor or not.
Now with an HDMI and USB port, there's no good reason one kind of general purpose computer can't act like another. The main limitation is policy and whether or not the guy you buy your device wants to try and lock it down.
> He probably meant more like that OS X is becoming more of a benchmark/reference point to measure your own Desktop OSes usability against than Windows is
This is what happens when you have fanboys that just fell off the turnip truck.
If anything, the gap is getting smaller rather than larger. There was a time when Apple produced a much more robust and interesting product (than Microsoft). As they have morphed into just another PC vendor, that has dissipated considerably. The attempt by some to confuse MacOS with Unix hasn't really helped this much.
One is supposed to be based on VMS and the other is supposed to be based on BSD but the weak point of either is the proprietary user land bits bolted on the very top.
The fact that some company larger than most countries buys it's stuff from one vendor doesn't mean that it will do the same tomorrow. The fact that alternative vendors exist can be used to strike better bargains even if there is little prospect for them to actually switch.
+...as far as that "less diversity" nonsense of yours goes. There's probably no less diversity available in the products available from Lenovo than any other PC vendor.
It appears that you don't actually do anything significant with your laptop. That's what the OP was commenting on. His experience is consistent with my own except I have used low profile PCs rather than laptops.
Macs are less thrilling once you want to put them under load.
That so called "quality" is just superficial fluff for hipsters.
Sadly, the common answer to Photoshop around these parts is "Gimp". Anybody who's ever used Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Painter, Canvas, Photo Draw will be thoroughly disappointed by Gimp's lack of features and especially it's utter lack of usability.
That's funny because the last time I tried to do something interesting in Gimp, the interface was basically the same as Photoshop. You could use the tutorial for one interchangeably with the other.
Photoshop is just an inherently complex tool. It does non-trivial things. It's not Dazzle Draw.
Any gap, if there really is one, is just down to familiarity. Some have even been willing to admit as much.
Even in companies where you aren't even spending your own money, people won't necessarily spend money as if they never had to earn it. The willingness of corporations to latch onto old versions of Windows and Office are a testament to this.
Then there's change control to consider. You might not want to be the beta testers for new version of whatever kilobuck or megabuck software you happen to use.
You don't have to be a pirate to be disinterested in wasting money or using the bleeding edge version of something.
This is another case where most people simply don't need an overwrought and overpriced professional tool to meet their particular requirements. In the case of Photoshop, there doesn't even seem to be a proprietary file format to lock people in.
No. The FOSS community simply realizes that most of the so-called Photoshop users here are just degenerate pirates. They will happily use a pirated copy of something rather than seeing out a true alternative. The license really is quite irrelevant.
There is this single minded brand fixation that makes you wonder if they're all just too cheap to buy Apple products. The mentality is comparable.
Real professionals will probably just bite the bullet. They are already paying for the product anyways.
It will be interesting to see what the pirates and posers do.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like another "too big to fail" problem and yet another reason to never let any corporation get so big. If you can't upgrade your IT infastructure or anything else of a similar nature, then the company in question probably needs to be dissolved into a number of smaller ones.
It's discontinued and is no longer supported by the original software vendor and you don't have the source code.
I knew a shop that had a critical application that was 30 years old. However, they had enough of a clue to put themselves in the position where they could maintain the product themselves. Many CxO's came and went trying to replace that old dinosaur but newer alternatives could never quite pass muster. They weren't good enough.
Sooner or later all of those "business reasons" you used to justify buying the shiny commercial product from the darling of industry will evaporate.
In other words, it's an engineering failure from top to bottom. Being dependent on one particular version of one particular application is just the tip of a very large iceberg that also happens to be a big frozen turd.
They built a rube goldberg machine without any thought to how they would maintain it or upgrade it.
> It's 100% the vendors fault
I am feeling a strange sense of deja vu here...
Sure I can. Disk space is cheap. Network bandwidth is cheap. The hardware is trivial to identify,
Plus Microsoft is supposed to have this stable device driver ABI that's somehow better than what is done in the Linux kernel.
Being able to "use anything" is actually the whole damn point of using the monopoly product to begin with.
The same goes for if you use vmware or virtualbox instead of duel booting. You still have to maintain the copy of Windows.
MacOS makes you register before you can use it.
It's not as buggy as Microsoft's activation but it's the same kind of nonsense.
> My windows computers do not recognize any of my Ubuntu computers.
And the problem is what exactly? That even lame versions of Linux don't come preloaded with handy root exploits?
It seems all of the fanboys got their collective panties in a bunch because someone is not worshiping their pet brand.
The point is not to pretend that the tablet is something that it is not. The point is to honestly acknowledge what it is good at then use THAT for some productive purpose.
Microsoft seems to just be blindly trying to follow Apple rather than honestly appraising where their real strength lies (namely legacy apps) and leveraging that or at the very least making their ARM devices more closely intergrated with the rest of their own ecosystem.
Nonsense. Linux uses the same printing system as a Mac.
is the Mac not ready?
It really takes very little tweaking to turn CUPS into an AirPrint system. It's so easy I don't know why they don't just enable it by default (on both Macs and Linux).
> Get a new printer and you sure can print from an iOS device directly.
It's still an inferior experience. It's inferior because it's dumbed down and something like quality is completely ignored.
The lowest common denominator approach gets you something like McDonalds. So PhoneOS devices become the Little Mac.
For most pedestrian PC use cases, you don't need a bruiser of a CPU or a GPU. In the case of an HTPC, a lot of people (myself included) get great results out of using just about the most trailing edge kit available. Most home and office users don't push their machines. That's why tablets are so popular.
Most people outside of conspicous consumption gamers just don't push their systems.
Right now, I am not pushing my system. The most important aspect of my desktop right now is not the CPU or the GPU. It's the big fat monitor and nice keyboard. It's all of the parts that aren't the actual PC.
> For the average consumer how has Apple chosen to lock any general use away?
So Apple is the "lowest common denominator" brand now then? It's not for serious users or professionals or geeks or anyone that's the least bit creative?
That's a great brand identity you're building there.
The problem with the Apple approach is it lowers the bar for geeky. Simple things like getting your music back off your device or putting on a single Album suddenly become unecessarily complicated because of a Newspeak definition of "typical".
An average user can never hope to be exceptional. If they do manage to have a creative idea, they will be shouted down by the hive mind.
That's kind of ironic for a brand associated with creative professionals.
Every year? VGA is about a decade out of date. It's fine as a legacy technology but it's certainly not something to feel limited to.
Besides, it's not terribly portable.
People are idiots.
Tablets make great media consumption devices. Design your "business use case" around that idea and you're fine. Try to pretend that your iToy is a real PC and you're going to have problems.
There are "media consumption" use cases for the business use of tablets.
The mindless hype isn't entirely bogus. Just mostly bogus.
You're forgetting Apple and their fanboys. They fully expect tablets to displace PCs entirely. It doesn't matter if the task is well suited to the tablet form factor or not.
Now with an HDMI and USB port, there's no good reason one kind of general purpose computer can't act like another. The main limitation is policy and whether or not the guy you buy your device wants to try and lock it down.
They even sell specialty "supercomputer" boxes running Linux stuffed with high end GPUs running CUDA.
> He probably meant more like that OS X is becoming more of a benchmark/reference point to measure your own Desktop OSes usability against than Windows is
This is what happens when you have fanboys that just fell off the turnip truck.
If anything, the gap is getting smaller rather than larger. There was a time when Apple produced a much more robust and interesting product (than Microsoft). As they have morphed into just another PC vendor, that has dissipated considerably. The attempt by some to confuse MacOS with Unix hasn't really helped this much.
One is supposed to be based on VMS and the other is supposed to be based on BSD but the weak point of either is the proprietary user land bits bolted on the very top.
The fact that some company larger than most countries buys it's stuff from one vendor doesn't mean that it will do the same tomorrow. The fact that alternative vendors exist can be used to strike better bargains even if there is little prospect for them to actually switch.
+...as far as that "less diversity" nonsense of yours goes. There's probably no less diversity available in the products available from Lenovo than any other PC vendor.
It's Lenovo, not Apple.
It appears that you don't actually do anything significant with your laptop. That's what the OP was commenting on. His experience is consistent with my own except I have used low profile PCs rather than laptops.
Macs are less thrilling once you want to put them under load.
That so called "quality" is just superficial fluff for hipsters.
Sadly, the common answer to Photoshop around these parts is "Gimp".
Anybody who's ever used Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Painter, Canvas, Photo Draw will be thoroughly disappointed by Gimp's lack of features and especially it's utter lack of usability.
That's funny because the last time I tried to do something interesting in Gimp, the interface was basically the same as Photoshop. You could use the tutorial for one interchangeably with the other.
Photoshop is just an inherently complex tool. It does non-trivial things. It's not Dazzle Draw.
Any gap, if there really is one, is just down to familiarity. Some have even been willing to admit as much.
Even in companies where you aren't even spending your own money, people won't necessarily spend money as if they never had to earn it. The willingness of corporations to latch onto old versions of Windows and Office are a testament to this.
Then there's change control to consider. You might not want to be the beta testers for new version of whatever kilobuck or megabuck software you happen to use.
You don't have to be a pirate to be disinterested in wasting money or using the bleeding edge version of something.
This is another case where most people simply don't need an overwrought and overpriced professional tool to meet their particular requirements. In the case of Photoshop, there doesn't even seem to be a proprietary file format to lock people in.
No. The FOSS community simply realizes that most of the so-called Photoshop users here are just degenerate pirates. They will happily use a pirated copy of something rather than seeing out a true alternative. The license really is quite irrelevant.
There is this single minded brand fixation that makes you wonder if they're all just too cheap to buy Apple products. The mentality is comparable.
Real professionals will probably just bite the bullet. They are already paying for the product anyways.
It will be interesting to see what the pirates and posers do.