Because of this, you tend to need to pick up the mouse from time to time to do a drag across the screen. The way the Apple mouse is shaped it's very easy to do this since you just sort of squeeze it.
The way you describe holding the Apple mouse sounds just like the way I hold my Microsoft Optical mouse, and it doesn't work on Apple's. In fact I have yet to be able to pick up the Apple mouse with the button held without releasing the button, so if there's some sleight of hand that makes this "easy" I'd appreciate knowing it.
Because it *is* easy on every other mouse I've ever used. But on on Apple's.
You can't press left and right buttons at the same time! Absolutely useless for gaming, although admittedly you don't need to do this anywhere else (that I'm aware of).
If you use some UNIX apps, either locally or remotely, you need three real buttons and chording.
In effect it only uses one of the capacitive sensors, and it might well only be paying attention to one in fact.
This is a complete deal breaker for me.
I honestly don't see why they can't give up on the long-discredited "one button" look. It's only a look, any more, with the MM it's purely a "style" thing.
They've dropped ActiveX and desktop/browser integration finally?
No?
Then how exactly is "security much higher"? That's the biggest security problem in Windows for the past 9 years, and until it goes away I can't see how anything they could do could make a significant difference. Certainly nothing they've done over the past decade has.
Just provide an API for the power/thermal control module and let someone else write the control panel with the "Cook breakfast [--------^--] Drown out nearby jackhammers" heat/fan-noise slider.
In fact it's the FSF that convinced the CSRG to remove the attribution clause from the BSD license.
Ain't that ironic?
I wish Apple would have partnered with GNU/Linux.
That wouldn't have happened. If the choice had been Linux, BeOS, cutting a deal with AT&T over the System V license, or finishing Copland... Linux wouldn't have made the short list. The license is a deal breaker for anything but an embedded system.
Apple does not take anything from the BSD kernel [...] The Mac OS X kernel is based on the Mach "microkernel"
and it uses a trimmed down BSD kernel running as a server to provide almost all OS services beyond memory management, IPC, and scheduling, and many modern BSDs (including FreeBSD, last I checked) use Mach's VM under a monolithic kernel. Even most Carbon apps go through BSD to get to the file system, the few legacy apps that haven't been ported all the way from Mac OS 9 (like Finder... god I wish we had the NeXT file manager back) are the exceptions.
The division between "what's Mach" and "what's BSD" is awful fuzzy, Mach grew up with BSD and almost all real Mach-based systems depended heavily on BSD right from the start. Claiming that any Mach-based system (even Hurd, one of the few exceptions to the normal approach to building a Mach-based system) "didn't take anything from BSD" is silly.
I'd imagine the BSD developers get annoyed that you don't know the difference between a kernel and userland.
No, I get annoyed that you don't know the difference between a BSD Single Server system like OS X and the kind of academic (pseudo)microkernel like Hurd that you think OS X is.
From Terminal, ssh to a Debian box and run nano on a file at least several screens long, and page down. It doesn't update correctly.
What's $TERM set to on your Debian box when it's misbehaving?
If it's set to something that's got a correct terminfo entry on your Debian box, and nano doesn't update correctly, that *might* be nano's fault, or it *might* be Apple's fault.
If it's set to something that doesn't have a correct terminfo entry, it *might* be Debian's fault, it *might* be OpenSSH's fault, or it *might* be Apple's fault.
If you can fix it by changing $TERM, odds are it's *not* Apple's fault.
Here's an analogy:
If you're using Firefox and you go to a website that doesn't display correctly, do you blame Firefox or the website? Or do you check to see if the website's doing something weird? If you can fix it by changing the browser string to MSIE, do you blame Firefox?
Personally, I consider people who blame Firefox when the website's doing the wrong thing with the browser string lusers.
I demand an open system
An open system is a matter of following publicly defined interfaces and protocols, it's got nothing to do with the source or whether it's bug-for-bug identical to some other open system. In many ways, OSX is more of a traditionally "Open" system than Linux.
I spent 20 years supporting a team of PhD engineers and programmers, and most of them were [non-geeks]. Even a lot of the ones who thought they were, who pulled stupid stunts that ended up with me having to disinfect their computers while they railed at me about how they were special and should be allowed to ignore the security policies that would have kept them from getting infected.
when I mention Linux they respond with "But OS X is Linux" [...] but they say "same thing" it really pisses me off(especially as a Linux user).
How is it that something Apple isn't doing (claiming OS X is Linux) is pissing you off with Apple? There's lots of people who confuse BSD and Linux, but that doesn't make me pissed off with Linux Torvalds.
I cannt imagine what the BSD developers/users feel.
Clearly, because this BSD developer/user isn't pissed off with Apple at all. Some Linux users, though, really need a free whack with a clue stick.:)
No, most of the time they're just barely within the terms of the licenses.
The GPL simply requires that they make the source available for a nominal charge, not that they provide a free and continually updated repository.
The BSDL simply requires that they retain the copyright intact, and yet they are *still* providing updates for most of their BSD licensed source.
Neither the BSDL nor the GPL, not any of the other open source licenses, require that they release their own code as open source.
Calling Apple's open source releases "barely within the terms of the license" is ludicrous. If you're actually competant to comment on this subject, then you're making stuff up. If you knoestly believe this, then you can't have so much as looked at what Apple's actually released.
Microsoft's OS is all propritary. It wasn't ever copied wholesale from an Open Source project.
I was one of the 386BSD "patchkit" era developers back before it became FreeBSD, and I'm 100% in agreement with McKusick and the rest of the *original* BSD team in supporting anyone's right to use it and release as much or as little of it as they want. Whether that's Microsoft (who've used an awful lot of BSD code over the years), Apple, Network Appliance, IBM, HP, or Sun. If the people who wrote the code and worked on the code don't have a problem with it, who the hell are you to complain?
Oh, right, you're the guy who thinks Apple's just been minimally complying with their OSS licenses.
And, as I've said, Microsoft isn't touting themselves as a good OSS supporter.
So what? I care about what they do, not what they say.
Java is just as popular as it ever was with OSS, which is to say, not very popular.
Dear god, I wish that was true. I've got weeks of my life I'd love to have back that have been wasted on dealing with projects like Tomcat.
C is syntactically and semantically poorly suited to object oriented programming, and it doesn't matter how much radioactive spider venom you pump into it it's never going to start swinging from building to building like some comic-book super hero. Even wrapping a powered exoskeleton around it is iffy, but at least there's some realistic hope that you can implement something that'll make the transition from the funny pages to the front page that way.
C++, of course, is the spider-man standin, and Objective C is our metaphorical iron man. I'd rather program in Javascript than either of them... at least Javascript is built around the object model from the start in a way that even Java (the "new spider man") hasn't managed.
What we really need is to for someone rip the dregs of Xerox PARC's ugly-sister user interface out of Smalltalk or Squeak and just use Objective C as a bridge to an open-source programming language that doesn't suck, but alas the Smalltalk crowd's got this horrible baby-duck fixation on the worst parts of the platform...
Well, basically, it's like this: the people who know enough to work on it are, for the most part just using Mac OS X, and most of the Linux crowd can't really tell the difference between GNUStep and Gnome (ie, they actually believe Gnome is good enough).
God, you're such a cynical bastard. Alas, I agree with you 100%.
what Mac apps would you want to run on Linux that you can't find a windows version to run on Wine or some windows emulator.
Running apps under Wine is about as insecure as running apps on Windows, because it's the Win32 subsystem and all the COM-derived code like ActiveX that are the source of Windows security woes. All you're doing by running Win32 on a Linux kernel instead of an NT kernel is bringing all the things that make Windows suck so badly over to the UNIX world, in a less convenient and lower performance package. You're better off just using VMware or dual-booting.
OS X apps, on the other hand, are UNIX native at the lowest level, and even ports of Windows apps to OS X generally benefit from that. On Linux or a non-Mach-infected BSD they'd likely run *faster* than on OSX.
it seems to be more of a full system (with GNOME and WindowMaker)
Now if they were going ahead and building on GNUstep, I'd be interested. But sticking Windowmaker on top of yet another Gnome clone isn't very interesting.
When you see reactions like this from the open source community it's no wonder Apple's gotten a mite miserly over recent months. Back when Rhapsody was first brought to the table Apple wasn't planning on even shipping the "BSD subsystem" beyond what was absolutely necessary to run the OS. I'm not talking about source code here, I'm talking about binaries. You were going to have to download your awk and sed and vi and grep and maybe even eventually the shell from Apple IF you wanted it. UNIX hackers the world over, inside and outside Apple, responded in shock... and someone managed to convince the Steve to tear down the wall.
From their point of view they've bent over backwards, going far beyond the requirements of the FOSS licenses on the software they've used. What have they gotten in return? They've got slander, libel, words you never heard in the Bible. They responded to the complaints about Safari by setting up a new repository for Webkit. They've released a whole boatload of packages that were completely developed inside NeXT and Apple, including netinfo, HFS, launchd,... you can cavil about the usefulness of these packages if you like, but if Microsoft had released one percent of their comparable code it'd be a miracle. Hell, Microsoft's gotten proportionally more milage out of a smidgen of effort.
Can you download the source to Microsoft's HTML control (based on NCSA Mosaic), NTFS, or even Microsoft's BSD-based software like the Interix and TCP userland? No. Yet even with the tiny crack of support for Open Source that Interix and the carefully selected open source honeypots^Wreleases at Sourceforge represent Microsoft's gotten tremendous traction. Even the FSF backed down on killing GCC on Interix (even as they knocked back Dave Korn and U/WIN!).
It seems like the best way to get good press from the open source community is to be a bastard. It doesn't pay to be the nice guy.
Sun got the same message, didn't they? Open up Java a bit too much, Microsoft turns it into a honeypot. Pull back, you get slapped, and the FOSS community jumps aboard the dotnet bandwagon with Mono. They're probably saying "thank god we never Open Sourced NeWS...".
As a bridge between OS X and other BSD-based platforms, they were doing a great job. But I guess that wasn't what they had in mind. If the goals were to create a platform compatible with OS X but independant of Apple, which is what it sounds like, they were in trouble from the start.
Those are great operating systems, and if I had more than a nugatory choice of commercial applications for them I wouldn't have even considered OS/X.
But I ran Windows on my Thinkpad despite being a FreeBSD developer since before FreeBSD was FreeBSD, because (like most people) I run operating system on notebooks in order to actually DO things... and while there's a lot of stuff you can do without deigning to sully yourself with commercial software there's a lot you can't... even if you're dedicated enough to free OSes to pick the underdog.
Even if they were as easy and troublefree to install and maintain as Windows (let alone OS X) that's a deal breaker for most people. Even OS X is fighting an uphill battle there... BSD and Linux aren't in the same league. They're not even playing the same game.
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I'm using a Microsoft Optical mouse, the basic version, and it's the best optical mouse I've found. Can I get it in Bluetooth? Not bloody likely.
Logitech's Bluetooth mouse isn't the same hape as their basic mouse either.
Just what's going on here?
Because of this, you tend to need to pick up the mouse from time to time to do a drag across the screen. The way the Apple mouse is shaped it's very easy to do this since you just sort of squeeze it.
The way you describe holding the Apple mouse sounds just like the way I hold my Microsoft Optical mouse, and it doesn't work on Apple's. In fact I have yet to be able to pick up the Apple mouse with the button held without releasing the button, so if there's some sleight of hand that makes this "easy" I'd appreciate knowing it.
Because it *is* easy on every other mouse I've ever used. But on on Apple's.
You can't press left and right buttons at the same time! Absolutely useless for gaming, although admittedly you don't need to do this anywhere else (that I'm aware of).
If you use some UNIX apps, either locally or remotely, you need three real buttons and chording.
Yes! Apple's iThemed keyboards are horrible.
Bring back the ADB-II mouse and the Pro keyboard, with two buttons and a scroll wheel on the mouse and an eject button on the keyboard.
In effect it only uses one of the capacitive sensors, and it might well only be paying attention to one in fact.
This is a complete deal breaker for me.
I honestly don't see why they can't give up on the long-discredited "one button" look. It's only a look, any more, with the MM it's purely a "style" thing.
I had one of these.
It was from kensington, I think.
It sucked. Badly.
"Security is much higher than IE6"?
They've dropped ActiveX and desktop/browser integration finally?
No?
Then how exactly is "security much higher"? That's the biggest security problem in Windows for the past 9 years, and until it goes away I can't see how anything they could do could make a significant difference. Certainly nothing they've done over the past decade has.
Even if they do it under the table, I don't care.
Just provide an API for the power/thermal control module and let someone else write the control panel with the "Cook breakfast [--------^--] Drown out nearby jackhammers" heat/fan-noise slider.
In fact it's the FSF that convinced the CSRG to remove the attribution clause from the BSD license.
Ain't that ironic?
I wish Apple would have partnered with GNU/Linux.
That wouldn't have happened. If the choice had been Linux, BeOS, cutting a deal with AT&T over the System V license, or finishing Copland... Linux wouldn't have made the short list. The license is a deal breaker for anything but an embedded system.
Apple does not take anything from the BSD kernel [...] The Mac OS X kernel is based on the Mach "microkernel"
and it uses a trimmed down BSD kernel running as a server to provide almost all OS services beyond memory management, IPC, and scheduling, and many modern BSDs (including FreeBSD, last I checked) use Mach's VM under a monolithic kernel. Even most Carbon apps go through BSD to get to the file system, the few legacy apps that haven't been ported all the way from Mac OS 9 (like Finder... god I wish we had the NeXT file manager back) are the exceptions.
The division between "what's Mach" and "what's BSD" is awful fuzzy, Mach grew up with BSD and almost all real Mach-based systems depended heavily on BSD right from the start. Claiming that any Mach-based system (even Hurd, one of the few exceptions to the normal approach to building a Mach-based system) "didn't take anything from BSD" is silly.
I'd imagine the BSD developers get annoyed that you don't know the difference between a kernel and userland.
No, I get annoyed that you don't know the difference between a BSD Single Server system like OS X and the kind of academic (pseudo)microkernel like Hurd that you think OS X is.
With Afterstep 2.x it died for me. I haven't found a desktop manager I'd like since then, and I tried really lots.
Windowmaker?
I jumped from Afterstep to Windowmaker as soon as it jelled anough to be usable, and it's been totally stable for me since.
From Terminal, ssh to a Debian box and run nano on a file at least several screens long, and page down. It doesn't update correctly.
What's $TERM set to on your Debian box when it's misbehaving?
If it's set to something that's got a correct terminfo entry on your Debian box, and nano doesn't update correctly, that *might* be nano's fault, or it *might* be Apple's fault.
If it's set to something that doesn't have a correct terminfo entry, it *might* be Debian's fault, it *might* be OpenSSH's fault, or it *might* be Apple's fault.
If you can fix it by changing $TERM, odds are it's *not* Apple's fault.
Here's an analogy:
If you're using Firefox and you go to a website that doesn't display correctly, do you blame Firefox or the website? Or do you check to see if the website's doing something weird? If you can fix it by changing the browser string to MSIE, do you blame Firefox?
Personally, I consider people who blame Firefox when the website's doing the wrong thing with the browser string lusers.
I demand an open system
An open system is a matter of following publicly defined interfaces and protocols, it's got nothing to do with the source or whether it's bug-for-bug identical to some other open system. In many ways, OSX is more of a traditionally "Open" system than Linux.
I spent 20 years supporting a team of PhD engineers and programmers, and most of them were [non-geeks]. Even a lot of the ones who thought they were, who pulled stupid stunts that ended up with me having to disinfect their computers while they railed at me about how they were special and should be allowed to ignore the security policies that would have kept them from getting infected.
when I mention Linux they respond with "But OS X is Linux" [...] but they say "same thing" it really pisses me off(especially as a Linux user).
:)
How is it that something Apple isn't doing (claiming OS X is Linux) is pissing you off with Apple? There's lots of people who confuse BSD and Linux, but that doesn't make me pissed off with Linux Torvalds.
I cannt imagine what the BSD developers/users feel.
Clearly, because this BSD developer/user isn't pissed off with Apple at all. Some Linux users, though, really need a free whack with a clue stick.
No, most of the time they're just barely within the terms of the licenses.
The GPL simply requires that they make the source available for a nominal charge, not that they provide a free and continually updated repository.
The BSDL simply requires that they retain the copyright intact, and yet they are *still* providing updates for most of their BSD licensed source.
Neither the BSDL nor the GPL, not any of the other open source licenses, require that they release their own code as open source.
Calling Apple's open source releases "barely within the terms of the license" is ludicrous. If you're actually competant to comment on this subject, then you're making stuff up. If you knoestly believe this, then you can't have so much as looked at what Apple's actually released.
Microsoft's OS is all propritary. It wasn't ever copied wholesale from an Open Source project.
I was one of the 386BSD "patchkit" era developers back before it became FreeBSD, and I'm 100% in agreement with McKusick and the rest of the *original* BSD team in supporting anyone's right to use it and release as much or as little of it as they want. Whether that's Microsoft (who've used an awful lot of BSD code over the years), Apple, Network Appliance, IBM, HP, or Sun. If the people who wrote the code and worked on the code don't have a problem with it, who the hell are you to complain?
Oh, right, you're the guy who thinks Apple's just been minimally complying with their OSS licenses.
And, as I've said, Microsoft isn't touting themselves as a good OSS supporter.
So what? I care about what they do, not what they say.
Java is just as popular as it ever was with OSS, which is to say, not very popular.
Dear god, I wish that was true. I've got weeks of my life I'd love to have back that have been wasted on dealing with projects like Tomcat.
C is syntactically and semantically poorly suited to object oriented programming, and it doesn't matter how much radioactive spider venom you pump into it it's never going to start swinging from building to building like some comic-book super hero. Even wrapping a powered exoskeleton around it is iffy, but at least there's some realistic hope that you can implement something that'll make the transition from the funny pages to the front page that way.
C++, of course, is the spider-man standin, and Objective C is our metaphorical iron man. I'd rather program in Javascript than either of them... at least Javascript is built around the object model from the start in a way that even Java (the "new spider man") hasn't managed.
What we really need is to for someone rip the dregs of Xerox PARC's ugly-sister user interface out of Smalltalk or Squeak and just use Objective C as a bridge to an open-source programming language that doesn't suck, but alas the Smalltalk crowd's got this horrible baby-duck fixation on the worst parts of the platform...
Well, basically, it's like this: the people who know enough to work on it are, for the most part just using Mac OS X, and most of the Linux crowd can't really tell the difference between GNUStep and Gnome (ie, they actually believe Gnome is good enough).
God, you're such a cynical bastard. Alas, I agree with you 100%.
what Mac apps would you want to run on Linux that you can't find a windows version to run on Wine or some windows emulator.
Running apps under Wine is about as insecure as running apps on Windows, because it's the Win32 subsystem and all the COM-derived code like ActiveX that are the source of Windows security woes. All you're doing by running Win32 on a Linux kernel instead of an NT kernel is bringing all the things that make Windows suck so badly over to the UNIX world, in a less convenient and lower performance package. You're better off just using VMware or dual-booting.
OS X apps, on the other hand, are UNIX native at the lowest level, and even ports of Windows apps to OS X generally benefit from that. On Linux or a non-Mach-infected BSD they'd likely run *faster* than on OSX.
it seems to be more of a full system (with GNOME and WindowMaker)
Now if they were going ahead and building on GNUstep, I'd be interested. But sticking Windowmaker on top of yet another Gnome clone isn't very interesting.
Leopard will be Universal (i.e., won't have two trees like 10.4.x does)
:)
Interesting, and Informative. That's worth +2 at least.
"the tiny bit of code sharing they have done."
... you can cavil about the usefulness of these packages if you like, but if Microsoft had released one percent of their comparable code it'd be a miracle. Hell, Microsoft's gotten proportionally more milage out of a smidgen of effort.
When you see reactions like this from the open source community it's no wonder Apple's gotten a mite miserly over recent months. Back when Rhapsody was first brought to the table Apple wasn't planning on even shipping the "BSD subsystem" beyond what was absolutely necessary to run the OS. I'm not talking about source code here, I'm talking about binaries. You were going to have to download your awk and sed and vi and grep and maybe even eventually the shell from Apple IF you wanted it. UNIX hackers the world over, inside and outside Apple, responded in shock... and someone managed to convince the Steve to tear down the wall.
From their point of view they've bent over backwards, going far beyond the requirements of the FOSS licenses on the software they've used. What have they gotten in return? They've got slander, libel, words you never heard in the Bible. They responded to the complaints about Safari by setting up a new repository for Webkit. They've released a whole boatload of packages that were completely developed inside NeXT and Apple, including netinfo, HFS, launchd,
Can you download the source to Microsoft's HTML control (based on NCSA Mosaic), NTFS, or even Microsoft's BSD-based software like the Interix and TCP userland? No. Yet even with the tiny crack of support for Open Source that Interix and the carefully selected open source honeypots^Wreleases at Sourceforge represent Microsoft's gotten tremendous traction. Even the FSF backed down on killing GCC on Interix (even as they knocked back Dave Korn and U/WIN!).
It seems like the best way to get good press from the open source community is to be a bastard. It doesn't pay to be the nice guy.
Sun got the same message, didn't they? Open up Java a bit too much, Microsoft turns it into a honeypot. Pull back, you get slapped, and the FOSS community jumps aboard the dotnet bandwagon with Mono. They're probably saying "thank god we never Open Sourced NeWS...".
As a bridge between OS X and other BSD-based platforms, they were doing a great job. But I guess that wasn't what they had in mind. If the goals were to create a platform compatible with OS X but independant of Apple, which is what it sounds like, they were in trouble from the start.
Intel makes GPUs and nVidia still makes chipsets for Intel motherboards.
Those are great operating systems, and if I had more than a nugatory choice of commercial applications for them I wouldn't have even considered OS/X.
But I ran Windows on my Thinkpad despite being a FreeBSD developer since before FreeBSD was FreeBSD, because (like most people) I run operating system on notebooks in order to actually DO things... and while there's a lot of stuff you can do without deigning to sully yourself with commercial software there's a lot you can't... even if you're dedicated enough to free OSes to pick the underdog.
Even if they were as easy and troublefree to install and maintain as Windows (let alone OS X) that's a deal breaker for most people. Even OS X is fighting an uphill battle there... BSD and Linux aren't in the same league. They're not even playing the same game.