Positioning the mouse would be easy. But the position of the mouse isn't relevant, its the position of the pointer on the screen that's relevant. And what effect a change in position of the mouse will have on the pointer on the screen is so unclear as to be variable across systems.
Most likely the 5 inch devices projects or has an interface that is very dynamic and predicative. You don't have a 15 inch screen. The same way that laptops don't have the same hardware as desktops did.
That's up to Microsoft. Microsoft can make whatever policy they want with regard to OSes. In the Vista era they didn't want the backlash to impact OEM sales. Now they have more serious problems to worry about than a few bad quarters.
Try performing tasks with a mouse when not looking. You perform acts with your fingers with obscured vision every day. You have a very precise built in subsystem for positioning your hand in 3D space and make fine muscle adjustments. You do not have that subsystem for moving a mouse.
Blech. I want to drive the ball with my thumb. Logitech Trackman marble for something like 15 years, I've just switched over to the trackpad but no way am I using a center ball.
How exactly is the first genuinely success mobile store / marketplace for software on phones bad for consumers? Apple managed to eliminate the friction that kept people from buying lots of mobile software
(2) I think the better example of consumer replacement is how Microsoft moved from small business into the enterprise. How they disrupted IBM, DEC and Unisys to win control of the corporate desktop.
(3) I'm not sure the goal is to play there. Microsoft's OEMs: Dell, HP, Toshiba, Acer... are not consumer electronics manufacturers. They will not be LG and Samsung on who can make a device more cheaply. What Microsoft can potentially do is offer far far better enterprise features. Things like Office 365 are starting to bring Sharepoint like services to small business. Microsoft has a fantastic Universal Communications suite. They have an excellent CRM for Microsoft tablets as sales tablets. Office and all the associated ecology around Office is a really huge feature if Microsoft can focus all their division on offering Small Business solutions even though it does little for the bottom line in the short run.
They don't have to lose money on every sale. They can't afford to. But they will have to play in consumer the way they did in the 80s.
Exactly. They still have the power to reorient the market. 4-5 years from now they may not have that power. If they are going to have to fight Google for the consumer space far better to start in 2013 than in 2017 when Google will be ready.
but how does torpedoing the only OS business you aren't getting stomped in make ANY sense at all?
Because you like to have it both ways in your analysis. If all customers care about is price and not quality. Microsoft is done. It doesn't matter if they aren't getting stomped now, they will get stomped soon. There is no way to make an x86 laptop the same price as an arm. Dell cannot beat Samsung or LG in a who can build devices cheaper.
Microsoft is going to not allow themselves to be disrupted from below. To do that they are going to get the x86 market moving much faster through improvement cycles. And right now those parts are expensive. Suzie the checkout girl may not want to buy a $150 hinge for her computer but ultimately Microsoft can make that the only reasonable option either she steps up and buys a better system, or she steps off to Android / iOS / Linux whatever.
That's not answering the question its just repeating the assertion another way. You are obviously the kinda guy who wouldn't have felt the need to upgrade Vista to Windows 7, and the differences between the Android OS versions are not nearly that stark.
No I meant inferior, you are free to disagree but not to redefine what I said. And if you want to disagree list areas of traditional Unix functionality in which OSX is superior.
but lets not pretend that Open Office is on par with Office.
I didn't say on par, I said capable of stealing share. There is a $300 price difference per head. Microsoft itself got its marketshare in many areas by offering a somewhat worse product at a much better price. February 2010 in Germany, Open Office passed the 20% mark (MS Office was at 72%). There isn't good data for the US but anecdotally I know of lots of home users using OpenOffice/Libre Office / NeoOffice. I know of multiple small business that have switches and I know of some a few midsized businesses that make it their default. Open Office is stealing marketshare and the reason is price.
And your own comments BTW are perfect examples. You use OpenOffice because it is free and you don't care much. You use it as a stand-in at work. That's stealing share. You don't have to love it, you just have to pick it, to count.
As for features, I have 5 office suites: MS Office, iWork, NeoOffice & Libre Office, Mellel & Omni (together they make a suite). I'm switching for the next year away from MS Office not because I don't think all around its not the best of the 5, but because they haven't fixed their font problem for retina and that outweighs everything else.
No that doesn't mean much of anything. The Open Group pays money to certify Unixes, OSX paid years ago and Linux never did. Linux has replaced big box Unix vendors all over the world and has become the core development platform for Unixes. SGI (IRIX) switched to Linux, IBM (AIX) switched their focus to Linux, SCO switched to Linux (during the Ransom Love years, not after), HP (HPUX and Digital Unix) switched their focus to Linux....
I'd say that outweighs anything the Open Group could ever say.
Well 95 you could pick if you were lucky. Otherwise you had to try and find the right settings in a how-to. Those days were tough. But as I see it, probing now works that time in the between was the pain for the gain.
I just switched to a retina so my PPC apps are gone. Going to be on 10.8 soon but I just spent the last month on 10.7. I rather like the Virtual Desktops with a trackpad. I'm a fan of Mission Control, best virtual desktop setup I've ever used. I only wish that
a) I could name them b) They didn't switch positions
I hate the new scroll bar on 10.7. Other than that, pretty much the same.
Homebrew is even more meager in its offerings. Postgres, Apache... run well on Windows. I understand you are getting what you want from Mac, I am too most of the time. But that's different than saying Macs are remotely comparable to Linux boxes when it comes to the depth of Unix software.
No they weren't. In 1994 when/.'s parent company got into the Linux workstation business a good Sun ultra was $7k, though you could get the bottom line for $4,295. Used Indigos were coming down to the $2k range. The Indy was out. The spread was between the $2k x86 desktop and the $7k low end workstation.
And no, they were never 10x the price of comparable PC hardware. PC wasn't comparable in 1995. You were getting a much worse system for a lot less money.
I run a Mac too. But there is no question it is an inferior Unix to Linux. When I need to Unix stuff, and not desktop productivity stuff I use Linux. And I believe that's generally the case. Look at how lightly supported Macports is.
Yes they have made their decision. They believe the desktop form factor and the tablet / phone form factor are fundamentally different and will stay different. The two can borrow for one another but they should have different functions and thus different types of applications. Microsoft is choosing an opposite approach. Consumers are going to get a real choice.
You might have been saved by being at 640x480. Often the higher video resolutions had chip specific settings but VGA was a standard.
There were plenty of window managers. I used (and still often use) WindowMaker. TK is a graphical toolkit, so was Motif. But a GUI is much more. -- Consistent Policy -- Higher level widgets -- An object broker -- Sound support -- desktop applications
I get your point though. The answer is precise movements aren't supported by touch but they are supported and supported better by a stylus. Your entire life your hand/fingers have been doing extremely precise operations with restricted viewing when you reach out and grab things. Inside your brain you have a dedicated subsystem to handle that. It is capable of making extremely precise 3D models, tying hundreds of muscle movements to those 3D models making continuous adjustments and all those calculations happen so quickly you aren't even consciously aware of the mental effort involved. But watch a newborn that hasn't learned to operate that system yet. You do not have, nor will you ever have a dedicated move a mouse subsystem. If you are designing software, why wouldn't you want to use your already existing precise movement subsystem which is going to inevitably than any possible mouse based system?
The problem with the mouse is because you lack the subsystem that it isn't terribly precise. If I told you to look at a screen and move your finger to any part of the screen you would hit inside of 30 milliseconds. If I had you do it with a mouse it could take you over a second and the act would be distracting from your conscious train of thought.
Maybe. Its still rather hard to do since OSX is a dev machine. Macports needs to keep working. But I assume the barriers are high enough that this is a useful out.
On the commercial side: the combination of pushing customers to the App Store and the App Store imposing restrictions is starting to change the software culture. On several products I buy the App Store version and the downloadable versions are different. I'd imagine those companies are going to be switching to App Store only within a few years.
That being said, the walled garden on iOS isn't too bad so far.
Yeah. When I started using Linux in 1995 it was rather challenging to get X to run at all. To get a good functioning X people often had to buy a commercial X server. There were 0 GUIs. Microsoft announced they would not be porting their IE for Unix to Linux and people were upset. There were real questions as to why would anyone use Linux when for not much more money you could get an SGI or Sun workstation, there were also alternatives like SCO on x86 and AIX.
Today there exist 2 major GUIs with large suites of applications. There exists a full office productivity suite which is capable of stealing market share from Microsoft Office, on the Windows platform. With the exception of Trident all the major browser engines are either open source of available for LInux. The server space is dominated by Linux and Linux desktops play an important role in server development. SGI, Sun and SCO are all dead, AIX is weak. No one who primarily wants a Unix workstation goes anywhere else but Linux. The Linux kernel is arguably the most advanced kernel available.
That's real progress. Maybe not enough to beat Windows and OSX but there is no question there has been progress.
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Positioning the mouse would be easy. But the position of the mouse isn't relevant, its the position of the pointer on the screen that's relevant. And what effect a change in position of the mouse will have on the pointer on the screen is so unclear as to be variable across systems.
Most likely the 5 inch devices projects or has an interface that is very dynamic and predicative. You don't have a 15 inch screen. The same way that laptops don't have the same hardware as desktops did.
That's up to Microsoft. Microsoft can make whatever policy they want with regard to OSes. In the Vista era they didn't want the backlash to impact OEM sales. Now they have more serious problems to worry about than a few bad quarters.
Try performing tasks with a mouse when not looking. You perform acts with your fingers with obscured vision every day. You have a very precise built in subsystem for positioning your hand in 3D space and make fine muscle adjustments. You do not have that subsystem for moving a mouse.
Blech. I want to drive the ball with my thumb. Logitech Trackman marble for something like 15 years, I've just switched over to the trackpad but no way am I using a center ball.
How exactly is the first genuinely success mobile store / marketplace for software on phones bad for consumers? Apple managed to eliminate the friction that kept people from buying lots of mobile software
(2) I think the better example of consumer replacement is how Microsoft moved from small business into the enterprise. How they disrupted IBM, DEC and Unisys to win control of the corporate desktop.
(3) I'm not sure the goal is to play there. Microsoft's OEMs: Dell, HP, Toshiba, Acer... are not consumer electronics manufacturers. They will not be LG and Samsung on who can make a device more cheaply. What Microsoft can potentially do is offer far far better enterprise features. Things like Office 365 are starting to bring Sharepoint like services to small business. Microsoft has a fantastic Universal Communications suite. They have an excellent CRM for Microsoft tablets as sales tablets. Office and all the associated ecology around Office is a really huge feature if Microsoft can focus all their division on offering Small Business solutions even though it does little for the bottom line in the short run.
They don't have to lose money on every sale. They can't afford to. But they will have to play in consumer the way they did in the 80s.
Exactly. They still have the power to reorient the market. 4-5 years from now they may not have that power. If they are going to have to fight Google for the consumer space far better to start in 2013 than in 2017 when Google will be ready.
but how does torpedoing the only OS business you aren't getting stomped in make ANY sense at all?
Because you like to have it both ways in your analysis. If all customers care about is price and not quality. Microsoft is done. It doesn't matter if they aren't getting stomped now, they will get stomped soon. There is no way to make an x86 laptop the same price as an arm. Dell cannot beat Samsung or LG in a who can build devices cheaper.
Microsoft is going to not allow themselves to be disrupted from below. To do that they are going to get the x86 market moving much faster through improvement cycles. And right now those parts are expensive. Suzie the checkout girl may not want to buy a $150 hinge for her computer but ultimately Microsoft can make that the only reasonable option either she steps up and buys a better system, or she steps off to Android / iOS / Linux whatever.
That's not answering the question its just repeating the assertion another way. You are obviously the kinda guy who wouldn't have felt the need to upgrade Vista to Windows 7, and the differences between the Android OS versions are not nearly that stark.
If you've been able to use a 3G this whole time why is running a later version of Android vital?
No I meant inferior, you are free to disagree but not to redefine what I said. And if you want to disagree list areas of traditional Unix functionality in which OSX is superior.
That's not the definition it's the etymology.
No it meant much more than that and long before 1994-5.
Limited drag and drop existed in the original mac OS 1.0, Windows 2.0, OS/2 1.1, etc... A gui even then was far more than a window manager.
but lets not pretend that Open Office is on par with Office.
I didn't say on par, I said capable of stealing share. There is a $300 price difference per head. Microsoft itself got its marketshare in many areas by offering a somewhat worse product at a much better price. February 2010 in Germany, Open Office passed the 20% mark (MS Office was at 72%). There isn't good data for the US but anecdotally I know of lots of home users using OpenOffice/Libre Office / NeoOffice. I know of multiple small business that have switches and I know of some a few midsized businesses that make it their default. Open Office is stealing marketshare and the reason is price.
And your own comments BTW are perfect examples. You use OpenOffice because it is free and you don't care much. You use it as a stand-in at work. That's stealing share. You don't have to love it, you just have to pick it, to count.
As for features, I have 5 office suites: MS Office, iWork, NeoOffice & Libre Office, Mellel & Omni (together they make a suite). I'm switching for the next year away from MS Office not because I don't think all around its not the best of the 5, but because they haven't fixed their font problem for retina and that outweighs everything else.
No that doesn't mean much of anything. The Open Group pays money to certify Unixes, OSX paid years ago and Linux never did. Linux has replaced big box Unix vendors all over the world and has become the core development platform for Unixes. SGI (IRIX) switched to Linux, IBM (AIX) switched their focus to Linux, SCO switched to Linux (during the Ransom Love years, not after), HP (HPUX and Digital Unix) switched their focus to Linux....
I'd say that outweighs anything the Open Group could ever say.
Well 95 you could pick if you were lucky. Otherwise you had to try and find the right settings in a how-to. Those days were tough. But as I see it, probing now works that time in the between was the pain for the gain.
I just switched to a retina so my PPC apps are gone. Going to be on 10.8 soon but I just spent the last month on 10.7. I rather like the Virtual Desktops with a trackpad. I'm a fan of Mission Control, best virtual desktop setup I've ever used. I only wish that
a) I could name them
b) They didn't switch positions
I hate the new scroll bar on 10.7. Other than that, pretty much the same.
Homebrew is even more meager in its offerings. Postgres, Apache... run well on Windows. I understand you are getting what you want from Mac, I am too most of the time. But that's different than saying Macs are remotely comparable to Linux boxes when it comes to the depth of Unix software.
No they weren't. In 1994 when /.'s parent company got into the Linux workstation business a good Sun ultra was $7k, though you could get the bottom line for $4,295. Used Indigos were coming down to the $2k range. The Indy was out. The spread was between the $2k x86 desktop and the $7k low end workstation.
And no, they were never 10x the price of comparable PC hardware. PC wasn't comparable in 1995. You were getting a much worse system for a lot less money.
I run a Mac too. But there is no question it is an inferior Unix to Linux. When I need to Unix stuff, and not desktop productivity stuff I use Linux. And I believe that's generally the case. Look at how lightly supported Macports is.
Yes they have made their decision. They believe the desktop form factor and the tablet / phone form factor are fundamentally different and will stay different. The two can borrow for one another but they should have different functions and thus different types of applications. Microsoft is choosing an opposite approach. Consumers are going to get a real choice.
Hi Lumpy.
You might have been saved by being at 640x480. Often the higher video resolutions had chip specific settings but VGA was a standard.
There were plenty of window managers. I used (and still often use) WindowMaker. TK is a graphical toolkit, so was Motif. But a GUI is much more.
-- Consistent Policy
-- Higher level widgets
-- An object broker
-- Sound support
-- desktop applications
If you want to precisely move windows, you might want to consider tiling window managers. Microsoft and Apple are both moving in this direction trying to figure out how to get the power of a Unix tiling window manager without all the complexity:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/arrange-windows-side-by-side-on-the-desktop-using-snap
I get your point though. The answer is precise movements aren't supported by touch but they are supported and supported better by a stylus. Your entire life your hand/fingers have been doing extremely precise operations with restricted viewing when you reach out and grab things. Inside your brain you have a dedicated subsystem to handle that. It is capable of making extremely precise 3D models, tying hundreds of muscle movements to those 3D models making continuous adjustments and all those calculations happen so quickly you aren't even consciously aware of the mental effort involved. But watch a newborn that hasn't learned to operate that system yet. You do not have, nor will you ever have a dedicated move a mouse subsystem. If you are designing software, why wouldn't you want to use your already existing precise movement subsystem which is going to inevitably than any possible mouse based system?
The problem with the mouse is because you lack the subsystem that it isn't terribly precise. If I told you to look at a screen and move your finger to any part of the screen you would hit inside of 30 milliseconds. If I had you do it with a mouse it could take you over a second and the act would be distracting from your conscious train of thought.
Maybe. Its still rather hard to do since OSX is a dev machine. Macports needs to keep working. But I assume the barriers are high enough that this is a useful out.
On the commercial side: the combination of pushing customers to the App Store and the App Store imposing restrictions is starting to change the software culture. On several products I buy the App Store version and the downloadable versions are different. I'd imagine those companies are going to be switching to App Store only within a few years.
That being said, the walled garden on iOS isn't too bad so far.
Have we actually gone anywhere?
Yeah. When I started using Linux in 1995 it was rather challenging to get X to run at all. To get a good functioning X people often had to buy a commercial X server. There were 0 GUIs. Microsoft announced they would not be porting their IE for Unix to Linux and people were upset. There were real questions as to why would anyone use Linux when for not much more money you could get an SGI or Sun workstation, there were also alternatives like SCO on x86 and AIX.
Today there exist 2 major GUIs with large suites of applications. There exists a full office productivity suite which is capable of stealing market share from Microsoft Office, on the Windows platform. With the exception of Trident all the major browser engines are either open source of available for LInux. The server space is dominated by Linux and Linux desktops play an important role in server development. SGI, Sun and SCO are all dead, AIX is weak. No one who primarily wants a Unix workstation goes anywhere else but Linux. The Linux kernel is arguably the most advanced kernel available.
That's real progress. Maybe not enough to beat Windows and OSX but there is no question there has been progress.