Lion has a different model. We can use that one as well.
instead mean dialog windows, I've never had this problem. An app in another Space will pop up an alert/error in its own Space and bounce the Dock icon. Works like a charm.
Not my experience at all. And things like "bring all to front" may not even expose the notification window.
As for the majority of your comment, you are intermixing: a network protocol and hardware abstraction layer (X), the windowing manager (not sure which ones you used), and the GUI (stuff like gconf). You original claim was about virtual desktop management on OSX vs. Unix. Virtual desktops on Unixes come well before there were any GUIs. Here is an example of configuring exactly what you are excited about from a window manager that is essentially unchanged for the last 18 years virtual desktops in window maker.
If you want to look at one that's more modern (only about 5 years old): x-monad tour.
Now the GUIs add additional levels. For example KDE has the notion of activity so you can tie applications dealing with specific data to windows. So for example a word processor opening files a particular directory can automatically different windows. That's beyond application configuration.
[configuration]... I want to enjoy using it. I don't want to tolerate it, and that's exactly what I have to do when I use Unix / X / Windows.
For enjoyment I don't think you can beat OSX. That is a different question than "most power". I may enjoy using OSX more, but OSX window managers don't hold a candle to modern tiling window managers, where each virtual desktop can have different window management behaviors. OSX barely even has behaviors that are configurable.
Slashdot is not a bad example of incredible amounts of javascript. Washington Post, Huffington Post. Frum Forum has become unusable even with dual core, 4gs ram....
1) Is X innovative 2) Is X popular 3) Do you personally like X
Your original claim was that Microsoft wasn't innovative. The.NET compiler is an example of heavy innovation in compiler design. That has nothing to do with it being popular, nor much to do with the criteria for which you like Ruby on Rails.
As far as popularity, compiled languages & desktop applications are much less popular than they were 2 decades ago. Further desktop application development is extremely expensive, and most of the work is outsourced to the 3rd world at this point. There probably are far more.NET / Visual Studio developers now than 15 years ago, but fewer in the western world. That being said, Visual Studio is generally the market share leader in most areas. For example in PPM Microsoft Project Server 2010 put it in 1st place as far as sales for the PPM market.
As far as dynamic languages and IDE's everyone has failed at that. There are no good IDE's for dynamic languages, that cross over to the static languages. IBM / Eclipse has the same problem, and remember IBM owns rational so they are even larger, as did Embarcadero (the old Borland people). However with F# Microsoft was able to extend their IDE to the functional paradigm which is a major success. Companies like Active State have been able to create useful dynamic IDE's but they are nothing like the static language ones. So you are pointing to a failure that everyone else has had as well.
Now if you mean Rails is a better framework for development of light apps than Microsoft..,.. I'd say most of the analysis that applies to Rails vs. J3EE and J2EE would apply to Rails vs. Microsoft offerings. There are plusses there are minuses of the two approaches, but Microsoft really doesn't play in the light space. When they did: VBScript and ActiveX were extremely impressive technologies. It looks like they are starting to step away from that with their new work in Javascript and Windows 8. Assuming this isn't vaporware I think you will see them step up strongly.
Essentially for Microsoft to do what you would want regarding Ruby, they would fork Visual Basic further away from C#. That is not a technology or innovation problem they just don't want to create applications with no easy migration path. That's one of their strategic advantages vs. technologies like PowerBuilder.
modern computers are pretty much as powerful as most people need.
Hah! Have you tried websites lately. Megs and megs of interpreted code with function calls multiple levels deep. Javascript is a power hog that is going to make the GUI revolution look like nothing. Its just the hardware guys aren't improving things as fast as they used to. I've love to buy a machine 10x faster than the one I have.
You should look at the statistics at work from home and the savings in terms of real estate which was always Sun's position. Sun (Scott McNealy) was absolutely right about the whole distributed computing paradigm. The problem was there was no compelling reason to use Sun to implement it and Java may very well have hampered the effort.
Pretty good, like most regulated markets. Customers trust Apple and so are willing to spend more. The iOS app market is 7x the size of the Android, Blackberry and Nokia smart phone app markets combined. Regulated capitalism is more profitable than anarchy for developers and better for consumers.
_____
In the end....it's the consumers who lose. Less choice. Few alternatives.
That was the scenario under Java Mobile. The carriers controlled software. Under Blackberry and Palm you had an unregulated free market but it was tiny. How exactly are consumers under iOS experiencing less choice?
No. The last major drop in Israeli security was under Ford/Carter, regarding settlements and Soviet threats. Since then Israel hasn't had serious threats and has been warmly within the US sphere.
First off, China has done some copyright enforcement within its borders. That's one of the reasons old version of Windows are common but newer ones are not. Second, even if you were right, so what?
I would love the advantage of physical film. It is important to be just be able to pass them around, or to hold a stack or have different people looking at different pictures. Actual film feels better than a digital image. I don't know if it feels $1-3 per picture better.
I agree with you regarding cool. That's exactly what happened with Android tablets. The kinds of customers who would drop $500-1000 on a tablet perceive Apple as a luxury brand and Motorola and Samsung as common. So at essentially the same price they will pick the Apple over the Android unless the Android is obviously better. It is an "unfair" competitive advantage that will help Apple for years.
The discussion about OSX having garish and loud features: bright buttons, genie effects... in 10.0-10.2 and having slowly moved to being subtle and understated in 10.7 while Microsoft has gone the other way (i.e. response to aero) is a good example. It shows the key issue about the cool kids, they work at being cool. They set the trend. So I agree with what you are saying. comic.
But it is not just. The issue with Apple is that Apple is deeply concerned about end user experience "don't make crap". Moreover the OSX/iOS community thinks of itself as a community that has community interests. And Apple sets the tone. For example for the last year or two Apple has been losing money on the Applecare warranty because customers expected it to cover breakage. So Apple has been covering breakage and losing money, rather than get the bad publicity of "I had an Apple and they suck, they don't honor their warranty..." that's the sort of thing Android vendors just won't do. They don't protect the brand. Apple works at being cool.
Apple end users (iOS or OSX) complain loudly when the software company is cutting corners. Flaws are made obvious. Apple developers on iOS understand that Apple will take whatever action they think they have to, to protect the brand in terms of bans. Which means effectively all iOS developers work for Apple. Fundamentally the idea that you are part of a community that has community standards is something Android users and developers would strongly rebel against.
It is not just acid washed jeans. Mac users really do experience an upgrade in overall quality, that is effortless. They are often are not getting the best value for their money, but a pretty good value and they never get screwed huge. In return the developers (and Apple) get a customer base that isn't shopping for the best value but rather is open to them making a decent margin. I'd say a better analogy is business in Europe (Apple) vs. business in the USA (Android).
OK I get what you are saying on teletype. I think you have me on age.:) By the time I was computing teletypes were more rarely used and doubled as line printers. I never was in a teletype only environment. I do remember/// for backspace etc... but that was never a primary environment. Which of course brings me to my position that the transition was then:
teletype -> dumb terminal -> terminal app on PC -> rich-client application -> distributed client server with associated user interfaces command -> command -> curses / ansi -> curses / ansi or windows -> windows or web
Yep. There is a cult of mac. Mainly it comes from being responsive when the screw up and being better in a lot of areas. They have good judgement, but your Takbir analogy is justified.
As for home desktops, OS X and Linux have made significant inroads.
I don't see much evidence that Linux has made any kind of inroad and OSX market share is still not up to the levels it was when Microsoft started being thought of as a monopoly. Depending on whether you count iPads Microsoft's market share is 85-90% range.
On the browser side, no question they have genuinely lost market share down to about 40%. That still makes them about 70% larger than either webkit or Gecko based browser families. And that's one of Microsoft's areas where they are doing the worst.
On the Apache side, Apache always had larger market share. IIS didn't start showing up in statistics until about 1996 and by then Apache was already at about 25% taking share from NCSA. Around 2000 when the early servers were gone, Apache was never below 50% market share and IIS never above 30%. If you want to look at an up and comer in the market it would be nginx.
As for MySQL everything is a few years out of date but MySQL is in 3rd place with 50% of companies having deployed it in production and an additional 13% in development. SQL Server, in 2nd place is around at 68% and 11% respectively. On the web, no question MySQL has much larger market share it is part of the original LAMP stack like apache.
But "forward-thinking?" Maybe once. I don't see it today.
I pointed you to their research group. Take a look. For that matter the.NET compiler is the most sophisticated compiler on the market used by a major platform. Their kernel is excellent and continues to be innovative.... I see lots of innovation, admittedly they are conservative and have a conservative user base but I think there is a lot of bright spots. Similar to IBM 20 years ago, lots of dead weight but lots of interesting innovations.
Well written piece. I definitely wouldn't use "minicomputer" for DOS and "dumb terminal" is the more common term for what you are calling "teletype". I'd say the KDE 3 -> KDE 4 change is a lot smaller than the teletype -> DOS -> GUI change. It is not the same sort of transition.
Actually after I posted I noted OpenGEU is paused. There are a bunch of enlightenment choices, I don't know which is best for you. I'd just look. Bodhi, is a well respected one but that might be a step too far.
I think you want an advanced window manager and not a GUI. There are a bunch but I'd try enlightenment Since you are an Ubuntu guy, OpenGEU might be a distribution (live CD available) you would like that is a nice transition. They use enlightenment but with a more minimal version of Gnome.
I agree the best application GUI I ever saw for an app which wanted to support a range of users had 4 levels. The problem is that developers often don't choose what should be at each level thus forcing all users into the more advanced one. The old Office menus is a good example of this.
But I absolutely love the idea of interface levels of difficulty.
The new scrollbars are an interface disaster. You should never make scrollbars smaller and harder to see and use, but that's what they did. They are about half as wide as before, and gray instead of in color. Not only that, but by default they disappear after a few seconds, and you have to hover your mouse on the edge of the window to get it back. I'm sure that saves valuable space on a tiny screen but in a desktop work environment it's just plain bad design, and worse: a waste of time because you have to hover and wait for it all the time. In very long documents, people are used to looking at their scrollbar to keep track of where they are. With the default behavior, you can't do that anymore.
I think you are missing the point. Scrollbars are essentially a passive way of dealing with the window. It comes from a paradigm that the window is passive relative to the mouse. That doesn't have to be the case, think about all the activity that occurs in an IDE; or even the mouse overs in many web applications. What Apple is moving away from is passive windows.
For certain OS X applications, they changed the behavior to something far from the norm, by making documents auto-save, even when you don't want them to.
That's going to be the norm across the board. They are moving away from notion of explicit save and moving towards explicit version naming and automatic saves. The idea being that with SSD the user has an experience of all of their applications always being in a fully running state. There is no distinction between a running and a non running application.
which used to be in color, are now a washed-out shade of gray.
Apple has been moving towards less garish and more grey with every version. They are moving from "insanely great" to "subtle elegance". Apple doesn't have as much to prove. And the contrast with the garishness of the Aero works in their favor.
I've been using virtual desktop systems since OSX 10.0. I started using spaces. Spaces is low functionality and still apps are not spaces aware often screwing up where they put notification windows. That never happens on Unix / X apps.
I love virtual desktops, but there is no comparison between X's and Apple's. hyperspaces gives you an example of missing features from Apple's spaces that are on Unix desktops.
Slashdot Mirror
Lion has a different model. We can use that one as well.
Not my experience at all. And things like "bring all to front" may not even expose the notification window.
As for the majority of your comment, you are intermixing: a network protocol and hardware abstraction layer (X), the windowing manager (not sure which ones you used), and the GUI (stuff like gconf). You original claim was about virtual desktop management on OSX vs. Unix. Virtual desktops on Unixes come well before there were any GUIs. Here is an example of configuring exactly what you are excited about from a window manager that is essentially unchanged for the last 18 years virtual desktops in window maker.
If you want to look at one that's more modern (only about 5 years old): x-monad tour.
Now the GUIs add additional levels. For example KDE has the notion of activity so you can tie applications dealing with specific data to windows. So for example a word processor opening files a particular directory can automatically different windows. That's beyond application configuration.
For enjoyment I don't think you can beat OSX. That is a different question than "most power". I may enjoy using OSX more, but OSX window managers don't hold a candle to modern tiling window managers, where each virtual desktop can have different window management behaviors. OSX barely even has behaviors that are configurable.
Slashdot is not a bad example of incredible amounts of javascript. Washington Post, Huffington Post. Frum Forum has become unusable even with dual core, 4gs ram....
I think you are confusing 3 different topics:
1) Is X innovative
2) Is X popular
3) Do you personally like X
Your original claim was that Microsoft wasn't innovative. The .NET compiler is an example of heavy innovation in compiler design. That has nothing to do with it being popular, nor much to do with the criteria for which you like Ruby on Rails.
As far as popularity, compiled languages & desktop applications are much less popular than they were 2 decades ago. Further desktop application development is extremely expensive, and most of the work is outsourced to the 3rd world at this point. There probably are far more .NET / Visual Studio developers now than 15 years ago, but fewer in the western world. That being said, Visual Studio is generally the market share leader in most areas. For example in PPM Microsoft Project Server 2010 put it in 1st place as far as sales for the PPM market.
As far as dynamic languages and IDE's everyone has failed at that. There are no good IDE's for dynamic languages, that cross over to the static languages. IBM / Eclipse has the same problem, and remember IBM owns rational so they are even larger, as did Embarcadero (the old Borland people). However with F# Microsoft was able to extend their IDE to the functional paradigm which is a major success. Companies like Active State have been able to create useful dynamic IDE's but they are nothing like the static language ones. So you are pointing to a failure that everyone else has had as well.
Now if you mean Rails is a better framework for development of light apps than Microsoft. .,.. I'd say most of the analysis that applies to Rails vs. J3EE and J2EE would apply to Rails vs. Microsoft offerings. There are plusses there are minuses of the two approaches, but Microsoft really doesn't play in the light space. When they did: VBScript and ActiveX were extremely impressive technologies. It looks like they are starting to step away from that with their new work in Javascript and Windows 8. Assuming this isn't vaporware I think you will see them step up strongly.
Essentially for Microsoft to do what you would want regarding Ruby, they would fork Visual Basic further away from C#. That is not a technology or innovation problem they just don't want to create applications with no easy migration path. That's one of their strategic advantages vs. technologies like PowerBuilder.
Hah! Have you tried websites lately. Megs and megs of interpreted code with function calls multiple levels deep. Javascript is a power hog that is going to make the GUI revolution look like nothing. Its just the hardware guys aren't improving things as fast as they used to. I've love to buy a machine 10x faster than the one I have.
You should look at the statistics at work from home and the savings in terms of real estate which was always Sun's position. Sun (Scott McNealy) was absolutely right about the whole distributed computing paradigm. The problem was there was no compelling reason to use Sun to implement it and Java may very well have hampered the effort.
Pretty good, like most regulated markets. Customers trust Apple and so are willing to spend more. The iOS app market is 7x the size of the Android, Blackberry and Nokia smart phone app markets combined. Regulated capitalism is more profitable than anarchy for developers and better for consumers.
_____
That was the scenario under Java Mobile. The carriers controlled software. Under Blackberry and Palm you had an unregulated free market but it was tiny. How exactly are consumers under iOS experiencing less choice?
No. The last major drop in Israeli security was under Ford/Carter, regarding settlements and Soviet threats. Since then Israel hasn't had serious threats and has been warmly within the US sphere.
First off, China has done some copyright enforcement within its borders. That's one of the reasons old version of Windows are common but newer ones are not. Second, even if you were right, so what?
I get the subsidies and often sell the phones if I don't need them. NIB phones do well on ebay.
There you go! You get it.
I would love the advantage of physical film. It is important to be just be able to pass them around, or to hold a stack or have different people looking at different pictures. Actual film feels better than a digital image. I don't know if it feels $1-3 per picture better.
I agree with you regarding cool. That's exactly what happened with Android tablets. The kinds of customers who would drop $500-1000 on a tablet perceive Apple as a luxury brand and Motorola and Samsung as common. So at essentially the same price they will pick the Apple over the Android unless the Android is obviously better. It is an "unfair" competitive advantage that will help Apple for years.
The discussion about OSX having garish and loud features: bright buttons, genie effects... in 10.0-10.2 and having slowly moved to being subtle and understated in 10.7 while Microsoft has gone the other way (i.e. response to aero) is a good example. It shows the key issue about the cool kids, they work at being cool. They set the trend. So I agree with what you are saying. comic.
But it is not just. The issue with Apple is that Apple is deeply concerned about end user experience "don't make crap". Moreover the OSX/iOS community thinks of itself as a community that has community interests. And Apple sets the tone. For example for the last year or two Apple has been losing money on the Applecare warranty because customers expected it to cover breakage. So Apple has been covering breakage and losing money, rather than get the bad publicity of "I had an Apple and they suck, they don't honor their warranty..." that's the sort of thing Android vendors just won't do. They don't protect the brand. Apple works at being cool.
Apple end users (iOS or OSX) complain loudly when the software company is cutting corners. Flaws are made obvious.
Apple developers on iOS understand that Apple will take whatever action they think they have to, to protect the brand in terms of bans. Which means effectively all iOS developers work for Apple. Fundamentally the idea that you are part of a community that has community standards is something Android users and developers would strongly rebel against.
It is not just acid washed jeans. Mac users really do experience an upgrade in overall quality, that is effortless. They are often are not getting the best value for their money, but a pretty good value and they never get screwed huge. In return the developers (and Apple) get a customer base that isn't shopping for the best value but rather is open to them making a decent margin. I'd say a better analogy is business in Europe (Apple) vs. business in the USA (Android).
OK I get what you are saying on teletype. I think you have me on age. :) By the time I was computing teletypes were more rarely used and doubled as line printers. I never was in a teletype only environment. I do remember /// for backspace etc... but that was never a primary environment. Which of course brings me to my position that the transition was then:
teletype -> dumb terminal -> terminal app on PC -> rich-client application -> distributed client server
with associated user interfaces
command -> command -> curses / ansi -> curses / ansi or windows -> windows or web
And those are big changes.
Yep. There is a cult of mac. Mainly it comes from being responsive when the screw up and being better in a lot of areas. They have good judgement, but your Takbir analogy is justified.
I don't see much evidence that Linux has made any kind of inroad and OSX market share is still not up to the levels it was when Microsoft started being thought of as a monopoly. Depending on whether you count iPads Microsoft's market share is 85-90% range.
On the browser side, no question they have genuinely lost market share down to about 40%. That still makes them about 70% larger than either webkit or Gecko based browser families. And that's one of Microsoft's areas where they are doing the worst.
On the Apache side, Apache always had larger market share. IIS didn't start showing up in statistics until about 1996 and by then Apache was already at about 25% taking share from NCSA. Around 2000 when the early servers were gone, Apache was never below 50% market share and IIS never above 30%. If you want to look at an up and comer in the market it would be nginx.
As for MySQL everything is a few years out of date but MySQL is in 3rd place with 50% of companies having deployed it in production and an additional 13% in development. SQL Server, in 2nd place is around at 68% and 11% respectively. On the web, no question MySQL has much larger market share it is part of the original LAMP stack like apache.
I pointed you to their research group. Take a look. For that matter the .NET compiler is the most sophisticated compiler on the market used by a major platform. Their kernel is excellent and continues to be innovative.... I see lots of innovation, admittedly they are conservative and have a conservative user base but I think there is a lot of bright spots. Similar to IBM 20 years ago, lots of dead weight but lots of interesting innovations.
Well written piece. I definitely wouldn't use "minicomputer" for DOS and "dumb terminal" is the more common term for what you are calling "teletype".
I'd say the KDE 3 -> KDE 4 change is a lot smaller than the teletype -> DOS -> GUI change. It is not the same sort of transition.
Actually after I posted I noted OpenGEU is paused. There are a bunch of enlightenment choices, I don't know which is best for you. I'd just look. Bodhi, is a well respected one but that might be a step too far.
I think you want an advanced window manager and not a GUI. There are a bunch but I'd try enlightenment Since you are an Ubuntu guy, OpenGEU might be a distribution (live CD available) you would like that is a nice transition. They use enlightenment but with a more minimal version of Gnome.
I agree the best application GUI I ever saw for an app which wanted to support a range of users had 4 levels. The problem is that developers often don't choose what should be at each level thus forcing all users into the more advanced one. The old Office menus is a good example of this.
But I absolutely love the idea of interface levels of difficulty.
Well put.
I think you are missing the point. Scrollbars are essentially a passive way of dealing with the window. It comes from a paradigm that the window is passive relative to the mouse. That doesn't have to be the case, think about all the activity that occurs in an IDE; or even the mouse overs in many web applications. What Apple is moving away from is passive windows.
That's going to be the norm across the board. They are moving away from notion of explicit save and moving towards explicit version naming and automatic saves. The idea being that with SSD the user has an experience of all of their applications always being in a fully running state. There is no distinction between a running and a non running application.
Apple has been moving towards less garish and more grey with every version. They are moving from "insanely great" to "subtle elegance". Apple doesn't have as much to prove. And the contrast with the garishness of the Aero works in their favor.
I've been using virtual desktop systems since OSX 10.0. I started using spaces. Spaces is low functionality and still apps are not spaces aware often screwing up where they put notification windows. That never happens on Unix / X apps.
I love virtual desktops, but there is no comparison between X's and Apple's. hyperspaces gives you an example of missing features from Apple's spaces that are on Unix desktops.
Egypt 1954, Egypt 1967, heavy espionage activity in the 1970s, etc...
I agree $300 is much too high. Especially since you can get a real Polaroid for almost nothing on ebay plus the film is still about the same price...
This story made me look on ebay. The cameras are essentially free and you can get Fuji film for about a dollar a picture....