So, what we need to do is put up a web site with the name, addresses, routes to work, etc. of the people who put out the Nuremburg Files. Let's see if they like it when their kids are being followed by people carrying guns and there are protesters on their front lawns.
The only good defense against hate speech is more speech...
-jon
Re:Didn't Steve Jobs Speak at MacWorld about....
on
Another Look At OS X
·
· Score: 2
If it were just a matter of driver support, it could have been solved by throwing contractors at the problem.
Welcome to Brooks' Law. It says "adding more developers to a late software project makes it later." If you don't understand why this is true, then you aren't qualified to open your yap about why Mac OS X is missing DVD playback and CD burning.
What, like the Audis that used to have the sudden unwanted acceleration problem?
It turned out that the "sudden unwanted acceleration problem" was most likely due to having the brake and the gas slightly too close to each other. It was, depending on your opinion, operator error or a user interface bug.
People think about UI as minor issues, but in the case of the Audi 9000S, it was pretty serious. Kinda funny, that.
What happened in 1929 is unlikely to happen again. The worldwide economy broke down because of several factors, including stupid tarrifs in the US. Germany was forced to pay reparations to the allies after WWI which were crippling. To pay them off, they just printed more money (which of course triggers inflation). World trade was flowing pretty good during the 20s, so no one noticed the inflation at first. But when the protectionist Hawley-Smoot tarriff kicked in, world trade started to slow down, and bills started coming due.
There were other things, too. Overspeculation on the stock market caused markets to crash (which is what we are seeing right now, but not nearly to the same extent). There was no FDIC insurance on bank accounts, so if the bank went under, you lost all your money. This led to lack of faith in banks, which is a bad thing, because it is banks lending money (and people paying back those loans) which makes an economy grow.
Basically, everything broke down at once and the world economy melted down for about 10 years, followed by those 6 years of fun called WWII. After WWII, several worldwide institutions were set up to make sure that economic conditions couldn't get that bad again (such as the IMF).
So far, they've worked. This isn't to say everything couldn't fall apart again, but since the end of WWII, the recessions have been easier and the depressions non-existant, which wasn't the case before the Great Depression. If you want to see a fun economic century, take a look at the boom-bust cycles in the US in the 1800s...
Actually, Linux is already quite big in India and the government is officially supporting it in China. Meanwhile, KDE is supporting Icelandic, Arabic and the lesser Norwegian dialect.
And how are multi-lingual applications handled? Take a look at the OS X system for i18n, and you'll probably be impressed.
This is the sort of pissing contest an Apple cheerleader simply can't win. Linux can be whatever an particular culture wants it to be.
If that particular culture has the skills to do the hacking, sure. But the cost in time is far greater than if it came from someone else, already localized.
"on its way" has apparently been redefined to mean "has a webpage."
I didn't see any code, any specs, any anything, other than some vague wishes. Apple will have a Unix release in Hindi between June and September, 2001 (my guess is July, at MacWorld Expo NY). When will indlinux.org have their release ready?
Mac OS X will run on an iMac 233, which costs around $250-$300 on eBay. Granted this is still very expensive for poor people, but the cost of the hardware is going to be a problem, whether it's Linux or not. If you're going to have a Graphical UI, you're going to pay for more powerful hardware.
What part of my 3rd world availability did you not agree with? That you cant find a used pc+cheapo monitor for around $200?
If you want to consider used, how much does a 1997-era iMac cost today?
And speaking of third world, I take it that your mythical third-world resident with the spare time to dink around with Linux speaks English. Of course, Apple will be releasing the Hindi version of Mac OS X this summer. Arabic should be out soon, too. Japanese is shipping on March 24th, and Chinese is probably not too far behind. (Yes, I know Japan isn't third-world. But the Kanjii input methods are not going to be dissimilar to the Pinyin input methods. In short, the support for Chinese is probably there.) When's the Hindi (or Arabic or Chinese) version of Linux coming out? Granted, only about 40 or 50 percent of the world's population speaks those languages, so maybe they aren't "third-world" enough for you. Or are you only considering the multi-lingual poor people around the world?
What part of "Mac-OS-X ready" did you understand mister know-it-all? That 800 dollar imac aint gonna run MacOSX worth a shit, and apple knows it. that's why it aint mac-os-X ready.
Funny, isn't it, that Apple is labeling all iMacs released as "Mac OS X ready." I guess you know more than Apple does.
Ok, Maybe a MacOS-X ready Mac wont cost 3,000. Maybe more like 2,200 to 2,500.
What part of $800 didn't you understand? You can go right now to any of a dozen places on the web, and they will ship you an $800 iMac. It will run OS X just fine if you don't want to run Mac OS 9 apps. If you do want to run OS 9 apps, spend an additional $20 and buy 64 MB of RAM. This summer, when Apple plans to pre-install OS X, I'm sure that all iMacs, even the $800 ones, will ship with 128MB of RAM.
Heck, go hog-wild and spend $80 and buy 256MB of RAM. Then you can run Virtual PC for OS X when it ships this summer. That'll add an additional $99 onto the price.
And, troll-boy, please price out a comparable PC to that $800 iMac. Just try to tell me there will be more than $50 difference in the price. If you're able to buy a computer, you can afford $50 to get something better.
Munging text files is the only way to make sure they work. Microsoft used the same arguments for the Winblows 95 registry. No more config files to edit. The all-encompassing registry 'will do it' (tm). Windows 'simply works' (tm).
Mac OS X uses text files (formatted as XML) underneath it all. There is just a pretty face on top. I know it's hard for Linux bigots to understand this, but most people see a computer as a means to an end, not as the end. Spending time tweaking properties in emacs is not worth it; clicking a radio button in a nice UI is far better.
And for the 0.0001% of the time where you need to hack the files directly, guess what? They're there! No registry hell to deal with.
It'd be nice if you actually knew something about what you were criticizing. But that would probably disqualify you from posting on/.
This means that despite the fact that MacOS X is probably the best user-oriented *nix we'll ever see, it will never gain the kind of marketshare that the major Linux Distros currently occupy.
If you can get reliable market share numbers for some "major Linux Distros", I'd gladly take this as a bet.
By the end of the year, Apple will likely have shipped more *NIX than any company except Sun.
Besides, what counts is boxes IN USE. People who get RedHat to dink around but don't use it shouldn't count.
OK, troll-boy, half of the people on this planet have never even used a phone. Computers don't even enter into it. Your math is as defective as you are.
As for the probably 20% of the planet's population who actually have stable phone, water, and power, they could probably get by with OS X on an $800 iMac. For 3 grand, they could buy a dual processor G4 with a flat-panel screen.
Honestly, if uneducated volunteers can accomplish a feat like that and give the results away then you almost have to feel sorry for those people in the business of creating proprietary operating systems. Basically they are screwed.
No, they aren't.
It's impressive that they've gotten a tiny piece of a modern operating system up and running. But commercial OSes have LOTS more functionality. And they have a little something called support. By and large, you are paying for support with most software (news flash: shrink-wrap software for consumers is a tiny bit of the entire software market. The real software industry is business software).
I don't think the dropout and his buds are going to be an impressive support organization for companies in the Fortune 1000. Or, heck, the Fortune 10,000.
I'm sick of being told that my tax dollars will fund massive military programs but that if I want poor people to have access to health care, the Internet, or information on birth control, I have to pay out of my own pockets. Bullshit
So what you really want is lower taxes. If the government can't afford the massive military programs, then they won't exist.
Personally, I like massive military programs. Worst case, the spinoffs of the research help everyone. Best case, no one attacks the US because they know that the slightly crazy fuckers who run the US will pound them to dust.
I also like giving people access to information on birth control and an unfettered Internet. I'm just not convinced it's a government job to do so.
Health care for poor people is a toughie. No one wants to see sick people not getting the care they need, but someone has to pay the doctors, and doctors have $100,000 loans from medical school to pay off (and probably another $50,000-$100,000 from their undergraduate work). And then there's the cost of equipment and the cost of researching new drugs and devices (and the cost of educating researchers). Medicine is an expensive business.
Someone's gotta pay somewhere along the line, or we have to significantly slow down the pace of research. Which is better: doing the best we can for poor people today, or finding cures sooner for people tomorrow? I'm not wise enough to make that call.
It comes from citizens' paying taxes; the government just decides how to allocate it.
Yes, and the government decided to allocate it in a wildly stupid way because McCain et al are too stupid to understand the technology they want to regulate.
The real solution is the removal of the tax. I'm with the Libertarians on this one. There are some things of national need which are best run by the government and funded via taxes. For example, I put roads, schools, police, firefighters, military, and maybe utilities in this category. (complete aside: the one part of California which isn't subject to rolling blackouts is the City of Los Angeles. That's because LA owns its own power generation capacity) Internet access for libraries is not one of those things.
How much would it really cost to provide a dial-up connection to every library in the country? This doesn't require any sort of central planning or administration. Just walk into your nearest library with your checkbook and the phone number for a local ISP. Heck, I bet the ISP would provide service at a discount in exchange for the publicity...
Here's a good opportunity for geeks to put up or shut up.
If you want poor areas to have Internet access in libraries, but you don't want stupid government censorship, raise the money yourself and give it to these schools!
It's not like charity _has_ to come from the federal government...
The classic case of this is the waterbed. Someone tried to patent it in the 1960's. However, Robert Heinlein described a waterbed in "Stranger in a Strange Land", which placed it in the public domain. The patent was tossed.
The end result id natural language programming. You literally tell the computer what you want it to do, and its amazing compiler will produce perfect code.
And you base this theory on what? The perfect understanding that people have when communicating using natural languages? Give me a break.
Artificial programming languages are never going to go away, because they are clear (to the computer) exactly what you mean. The evolution you are talking about in programming languages is making the languages clear to the people who use the computers. But there still needs to be a good mapping between the high level language used for programming and the low-level language the high level language is morphed into. This is why understanding pointers is important for Java programmers, even if you can't directly manipulate them in Java. I don't see English or Russian or even Esperanto being able to provide the same sort of mathematical mapping.
I do think you are right, though. Programmers are going to be the assembly line workers of the 21st century.
Would you care to place a wager on your numbers? Nothing short of a nuclear blast in Redmond is going to reduce Windows to 50% of the desktop market in 2-4 years.
If you want to put your money where your mouth is, let me know. I'd be more than happy to take this bet.
It's not just the Internet which owes innovation to porn. Anyone remember Virtual Valerie? It was one of the first "Killer Apps" for CD-ROM drives in the early 90's. It's a porno game on CD-ROM which helped spawn the "multimedia" concept.
If the UK take Sealand they have a huge legal problem in that their courts will rule that they are there illegally and order them out.
This reminds me of a little lesson from US history. Andrew Jackson wanted to move an American Indian tribe (the Cherokees) from Georgia. The Indians appealed, and the Supreme Court said that the federal government couldn't deport the Indians. Jackson told the court, "oh yeah, try to stop me" and the Indians were forced to walk. Their forced trip is now known as the "Trail of Tears."
(See http://statelibrary.dcr.state.nc.us/nc/bio/public/ jackson.htm#Presidency for details)
Until there is a public outcry or the courts get guns and cops of their own, the federal branch (or in the case of a parlimentary system like England, the legislative branch) can do what it wants, more or less.
I'd agree with the idea that IBM was still a mover and a shaker if the context was still in mainframe computing, but have you ever tried websphere?
Yes, I have used WebSphere quite a bit. And I agree; it's shite. It was chosen before I was hired due to its integration with VisualAge. Now, none of our programmers are using VisualAge (JBuilder and NetBeans have pretty much won) and I've tried to push my company into looking at other app servers. The fact that it's possible is a testament to how spiffy J2EE is.
I didn't say that IBM products fall into the "best of breed" category. The thing is that WebSphere (like many IBM products and services) is good _enough_. IBM is so big that for enterprise customers, the IBM good enough products combined with IBM's good enough service are good enough to seal the deal.
To the dismay of geeks worldwide, mediocrity usually wins the day. And a giant mediocre company is a mover and shaker by any measure.
Since IBM hasn't been such a mover and shaker in 10 years, it's more appropriate to Microsoft.
In what world is IBM NOT a mover and a shaker today?
If you want an enterprise system, IBM is a great place to go. They have good enough stuff in enough areas, and enough people to throw at any problems that need to be solved.
If you're talking PCs, then IBM doesn't matter, which is kinda ironic. But there's no money in PCs (besides a few companies). In Enterprise computing, it's still raining moolah.
Slashdot Mirror
The only good defense against hate speech is more speech...
-jon
Welcome to Brooks' Law. It says "adding more developers to a late software project makes it later." If you don't understand why this is true, then you aren't qualified to open your yap about why Mac OS X is missing DVD playback and CD burning.
-jon
It turned out that the "sudden unwanted acceleration problem" was most likely due to having the brake and the gas slightly too close to each other. It was, depending on your opinion, operator error or a user interface bug.
People think about UI as minor issues, but in the case of the Audi 9000S, it was pretty serious. Kinda funny, that.
-jon
What happened in 1929 is unlikely to happen again. The worldwide economy broke down because of several factors, including stupid tarrifs in the US. Germany was forced to pay reparations to the allies after WWI which were crippling. To pay them off, they just printed more money (which of course triggers inflation). World trade was flowing pretty good during the 20s, so no one noticed the inflation at first. But when the protectionist Hawley-Smoot tarriff kicked in, world trade started to slow down, and bills started coming due.
There were other things, too. Overspeculation on the stock market caused markets to crash (which is what we are seeing right now, but not nearly to the same extent). There was no FDIC insurance on bank accounts, so if the bank went under, you lost all your money. This led to lack of faith in banks, which is a bad thing, because it is banks lending money (and people paying back those loans) which makes an economy grow.
Basically, everything broke down at once and the world economy melted down for about 10 years, followed by those 6 years of fun called WWII. After WWII, several worldwide institutions were set up to make sure that economic conditions couldn't get that bad again (such as the IMF).
So far, they've worked. This isn't to say everything couldn't fall apart again, but since the end of WWII, the recessions have been easier and the depressions non-existant, which wasn't the case before the Great Depression. If you want to see a fun economic century, take a look at the boom-bust cycles in the US in the 1800s...
-jon
And how are multi-lingual applications handled? Take a look at the OS X system for i18n, and you'll probably be impressed.
This is the sort of pissing contest an Apple cheerleader simply can't win. Linux can be whatever an particular culture wants it to be.
If that particular culture has the skills to do the hacking, sure. But the cost in time is far greater than if it came from someone else, already localized.
-jon
I didn't see any code, any specs, any anything, other than some vague wishes. Apple will have a Unix release in Hindi between June and September, 2001 (my guess is July, at MacWorld Expo NY). When will indlinux.org have their release ready?
Mac OS X will run on an iMac 233, which costs around $250-$300 on eBay. Granted this is still very expensive for poor people, but the cost of the hardware is going to be a problem, whether it's Linux or not. If you're going to have a Graphical UI, you're going to pay for more powerful hardware.
-jon
If you want to consider used, how much does a 1997-era iMac cost today?
And speaking of third world, I take it that your mythical third-world resident with the spare time to dink around with Linux speaks English. Of course, Apple will be releasing the Hindi version of Mac OS X this summer. Arabic should be out soon, too. Japanese is shipping on March 24th, and Chinese is probably not too far behind. (Yes, I know Japan isn't third-world. But the Kanjii input methods are not going to be dissimilar to the Pinyin input methods. In short, the support for Chinese is probably there.) When's the Hindi (or Arabic or Chinese) version of Linux coming out? Granted, only about 40 or 50 percent of the world's population speaks those languages, so maybe they aren't "third-world" enough for you. Or are you only considering the multi-lingual poor people around the world?
Thought so.
-jon
What part of "Mac-OS-X ready" did you understand mister know-it-all? That 800 dollar imac aint gonna run MacOSX worth a shit, and apple knows it. that's why it aint mac-os-X ready.
Funny, isn't it, that Apple is labeling all iMacs released as "Mac OS X ready." I guess you know more than Apple does.
Your turn, troll-boy.
-jon
What part of $800 didn't you understand? You can go right now to any of a dozen places on the web, and they will ship you an $800 iMac. It will run OS X just fine if you don't want to run Mac OS 9 apps. If you do want to run OS 9 apps, spend an additional $20 and buy 64 MB of RAM. This summer, when Apple plans to pre-install OS X, I'm sure that all iMacs, even the $800 ones, will ship with 128MB of RAM.
Heck, go hog-wild and spend $80 and buy 256MB of RAM. Then you can run Virtual PC for OS X when it ships this summer. That'll add an additional $99 onto the price.
And, troll-boy, please price out a comparable PC to that $800 iMac. Just try to tell me there will be more than $50 difference in the price. If you're able to buy a computer, you can afford $50 to get something better.
-jon
Mac OS X uses text files (formatted as XML) underneath it all. There is just a pretty face on top. I know it's hard for Linux bigots to understand this, but most people see a computer as a means to an end, not as the end. Spending time tweaking properties in emacs is not worth it; clicking a radio button in a nice UI is far better.
And for the 0.0001% of the time where you need to hack the files directly, guess what? They're there! No registry hell to deal with.
It'd be nice if you actually knew something about what you were criticizing. But that would probably disqualify you from posting on /.
-jon
If you can get reliable market share numbers for some "major Linux Distros", I'd gladly take this as a bet.
By the end of the year, Apple will likely have shipped more *NIX than any company except Sun.
Besides, what counts is boxes IN USE. People who get RedHat to dink around but don't use it shouldn't count.
-jon
As for the probably 20% of the planet's population who actually have stable phone, water, and power, they could probably get by with OS X on an $800 iMac. For 3 grand, they could buy a dual processor G4 with a flat-panel screen.
-jon
No, they aren't.
It's impressive that they've gotten a tiny piece of a modern operating system up and running. But commercial OSes have LOTS more functionality. And they have a little something called support. By and large, you are paying for support with most software (news flash: shrink-wrap software for consumers is a tiny bit of the entire software market. The real software industry is business software).
I don't think the dropout and his buds are going to be an impressive support organization for companies in the Fortune 1000. Or, heck, the Fortune 10,000.
-jon
So what you really want is lower taxes. If the government can't afford the massive military programs, then they won't exist.
Personally, I like massive military programs. Worst case, the spinoffs of the research help everyone. Best case, no one attacks the US because they know that the slightly crazy fuckers who run the US will pound them to dust.
I also like giving people access to information on birth control and an unfettered Internet. I'm just not convinced it's a government job to do so.
Health care for poor people is a toughie. No one wants to see sick people not getting the care they need, but someone has to pay the doctors, and doctors have $100,000 loans from medical school to pay off (and probably another $50,000-$100,000 from their undergraduate work). And then there's the cost of equipment and the cost of researching new drugs and devices (and the cost of educating researchers). Medicine is an expensive business.
Someone's gotta pay somewhere along the line, or we have to significantly slow down the pace of research. Which is better: doing the best we can for poor people today, or finding cures sooner for people tomorrow? I'm not wise enough to make that call.
-jon
Yes, and the government decided to allocate it in a wildly stupid way because McCain et al are too stupid to understand the technology they want to regulate.
The real solution is the removal of the tax. I'm with the Libertarians on this one. There are some things of national need which are best run by the government and funded via taxes. For example, I put roads, schools, police, firefighters, military, and maybe utilities in this category. (complete aside: the one part of California which isn't subject to rolling blackouts is the City of Los Angeles. That's because LA owns its own power generation capacity) Internet access for libraries is not one of those things.
How much would it really cost to provide a dial-up connection to every library in the country? This doesn't require any sort of central planning or administration. Just walk into your nearest library with your checkbook and the phone number for a local ISP. Heck, I bet the ISP would provide service at a discount in exchange for the publicity...
-jon
If you want poor areas to have Internet access in libraries, but you don't want stupid government censorship, raise the money yourself and give it to these schools!
It's not like charity _has_ to come from the federal government...
-jon
The classic case of this is the waterbed. Someone tried to patent it in the 1960's. However, Robert Heinlein described a waterbed in "Stranger in a Strange Land", which placed it in the public domain. The patent was tossed.
-jon
And you base this theory on what? The perfect understanding that people have when communicating using natural languages? Give me a break.
Artificial programming languages are never going to go away, because they are clear (to the computer) exactly what you mean. The evolution you are talking about in programming languages is making the languages clear to the people who use the computers. But there still needs to be a good mapping between the high level language used for programming and the low-level language the high level language is morphed into. This is why understanding pointers is important for Java programmers, even if you can't directly manipulate them in Java. I don't see English or Russian or even Esperanto being able to provide the same sort of mathematical mapping.
I do think you are right, though. Programmers are going to be the assembly line workers of the 21st century.
-jon
If you want to put your money where your mouth is, let me know. I'd be more than happy to take this bet.
-jon
-jon
-jon
-jon
This reminds me of a little lesson from US history. Andrew Jackson wanted to move an American Indian tribe (the Cherokees) from Georgia. The Indians appealed, and the Supreme Court said that the federal government couldn't deport the Indians. Jackson told the court, "oh yeah, try to stop me" and the Indians were forced to walk. Their forced trip is now known as the "Trail of Tears."
(See http://statelibrary.dcr.state.nc.us/nc/bio/public/ jackson.htm#Presidency for details)
Until there is a public outcry or the courts get guns and cops of their own, the federal branch (or in the case of a parlimentary system like England, the legislative branch) can do what it wants, more or less.
-jon
Yes, I have used WebSphere quite a bit. And I agree; it's shite. It was chosen before I was hired due to its integration with VisualAge. Now, none of our programmers are using VisualAge (JBuilder and NetBeans have pretty much won) and I've tried to push my company into looking at other app servers. The fact that it's possible is a testament to how spiffy J2EE is.
I didn't say that IBM products fall into the "best of breed" category. The thing is that WebSphere (like many IBM products and services) is good _enough_. IBM is so big that for enterprise customers, the IBM good enough products combined with IBM's good enough service are good enough to seal the deal.
To the dismay of geeks worldwide, mediocrity usually wins the day. And a giant mediocre company is a mover and shaker by any measure.
-jon
In what world is IBM NOT a mover and a shaker today?
If you want an enterprise system, IBM is a great place to go. They have good enough stuff in enough areas, and enough people to throw at any problems that need to be solved.
If you're talking PCs, then IBM doesn't matter, which is kinda ironic. But there's no money in PCs (besides a few companies). In Enterprise computing, it's still raining moolah.
-jon