...when you don't care about being correct. I grabbed a copy of 7.11 to see what's what. It's still blazingly fast, but can't render DOM/JS heavy content that both Mozilla and MSIE can.
The point is not the price of Windows, but that the Windows upgrade path usually involves purchasing a new PC, which only happens every once in a while. The real question is: Do you upgrade GNU/Linux or Windows more frequently? A secondary question is: Do you pay for your Linux upgrades?
The answers to these questions are interesting from two perspectives. First, if I am in the business of selling GNU/Linux distros, frequent upgrades coupled with actual purchases would mean more -revenue-. Second, if I am a consumer or corporate buyer, frequent upgrades coupled with actual purchases would mean more -cost-.
Since the GNU/Linux distro business ain't all that hot, I suspect that GNU/Linux users don't pay for upgrades - especially if they upgrade frequently. Consider, for example, the fact that Google runs almost entirely on RedHat, but pays for a paltry number of licences.
Personally, I use Debian and apt-get so I rarely upgrade in the sense that I go through some monolithic process to convert my Debian installation to the most recent version. Instead, I upgrade each component of my OS the way god intended: Incremently, as the need arises. Periodically I will purchase a Debian box, but only as a token of good faith.
I've read Raskin's latest book - The Humane Interface. He's very idealistic. For example, the user interface of which he seems most proud is for a product called the Cannon Cat, which applies many of the principles to which the osOpinion piece alludes. But I bet you've never heard of the Cannon Cat and certainly no one other than Raskin himself has cited it recently as the epitome of consumer-grade user interface design.
Much of what Raskin has to say is intriguing - even practical, but for the work-a-day UI designer a lot of it is equally useless. For example, he talks about adding "Jump" and other specialized keys to the standard keyboard and throwing out file systems in favor of one really big file in which documents are delimited by special document characters (similar to the way that lines in text files are delimited by \n). Visionary and provocative stuff, but pretty much without value if your goal is to allow someone to read and compose email messages comfortably on a web page or a cell phone.
Raskin has clearly worked ahead of his time (and the Cannon Cat is actually a good, albeit historical, demonstration of the man working his magic), but he's too willing to ignore the inertia that applies to society, economics and technology. He's a great what-if thinker (e.g., What if Apple could afford to make its applications completely incompatible with the rest of the coomputing world?); if you read his website, it's even clear that he's a great how-to guy. Unfortunately, I'd take any "throwback" comments with a grain of salt.
It's not the most elegant technology, but it will certainly get anybody started programming. For kids, it will allow them to do something interesting with web pages. It's fairly trivial to start with more interesting feats than "Hello, Word!" They can make clocks and background changers, etc. Also not limited to Windows, or *nix for that matter.
...why the (admittedly smaller) article that followed the one about the book wasn't mentioned. Using quotes from Gates' own book as evidence, Time called out the signs that MSFT could be dying - and that Gates himself has become a public oxymoron.
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...when you don't care about being correct. I grabbed a copy of 7.11 to see what's what. It's still blazingly fast, but can't render DOM/JS heavy content that both Mozilla and MSIE can.
The point is not the price of Windows, but that the Windows upgrade path usually involves purchasing a new PC, which only happens every once in a while. The real question is: Do you upgrade GNU/Linux or Windows more frequently? A secondary question is: Do you pay for your Linux upgrades?
The answers to these questions are interesting from two perspectives. First, if I am in the business of selling GNU/Linux distros, frequent upgrades coupled with actual purchases would mean more -revenue-. Second, if I am a consumer or corporate buyer, frequent upgrades coupled with actual purchases would mean more -cost-.
Since the GNU/Linux distro business ain't all that hot, I suspect that GNU/Linux users don't pay for upgrades - especially if they upgrade frequently. Consider, for example, the fact that Google runs almost entirely on RedHat, but pays for a paltry number of licences.
Personally, I use Debian and apt-get so I rarely upgrade in the sense that I go through some monolithic process to convert my Debian installation to the most recent version. Instead, I upgrade each component of my OS the way god intended: Incremently, as the need arises. Periodically I will purchase a Debian box, but only as a token of good faith.
I've read Raskin's latest book - The Humane Interface. He's very idealistic. For example, the user interface of which he seems most proud is for a product called the Cannon Cat, which applies many of the principles to which the osOpinion piece alludes. But I bet you've never heard of the Cannon Cat and certainly no one other than Raskin himself has cited it recently as the epitome of consumer-grade user interface design.
Much of what Raskin has to say is intriguing - even practical, but for the work-a-day UI designer a lot of it is equally useless. For example, he talks about adding "Jump" and other specialized keys to the standard keyboard and throwing out file systems in favor of one really big file in which documents are delimited by special document characters (similar to the way that lines in text files are delimited by \n). Visionary and provocative stuff, but pretty much without value if your goal is to allow someone to read and compose email messages comfortably on a web page or a cell phone.
Raskin has clearly worked ahead of his time (and the Cannon Cat is actually a good, albeit historical, demonstration of the man working his magic), but he's too willing to ignore the inertia that applies to society, economics and technology. He's a great what-if thinker (e.g., What if Apple could afford to make its applications completely incompatible with the rest of the coomputing world?); if you read his website, it's even clear that he's a great how-to guy. Unfortunately, I'd take any "throwback" comments with a grain of salt.
It's not the most elegant technology, but it will certainly get anybody started programming. For kids, it will allow them to do something interesting with web pages. It's fairly trivial to start with more interesting feats than "Hello, Word!" They can make clocks and background changers, etc. Also not limited to Windows, or *nix for that matter.
...why the (admittedly smaller) article that followed the one about the book wasn't mentioned. Using quotes from Gates' own book as evidence, Time called out the signs that MSFT could be dying - and that Gates himself has become a public oxymoron.
hmm...
Why duplicate effort? Isn't that one of the things open software is supposed to eliminate?
Why fight yet another religous war?
Who cares if RMS wants to rant about a name?