Compared to what I've got on OS X. See, I've got an open source kernel, and the ability to run all the open source X11 apps I want, PLUS commercial apps as well when I want them. Best of all worlds.
There are a lot more eyes watching some open source projects than those made by development studios.
I know, I've got two of them. And if you think open source means you don't have incomplete features and deadlines to deal with, you've got a rude awakening coming...
We've all heard the complaints about MS software on OS X, plus the UI inconsistencies of a dozen other programs (some of them Apple's very own).
Why yes. When you have a system where almost everything is consistent, something that's slightly inconsistent stands out more. When you have a system where nothing's consistent, you either give up or you deal with it... but there's no point in complaining about individual applications.
How many of you reading this, when sending an email in Thunderbird actually changed the "from" field? Maybe ten out two hundred; everyone else just keeps it the same, week after week. So why the fuck is that option there? Why isn't it there in Apple's Mail?
It IS there in Apple's Mail.
Right next to the label "Account:".
The problem is, I've got a bunch of tagged accounts, and I *want* to use a different "From" address for different people, so in Apple's mail I have to set up a bunch of different dummy accounts. How the hell is that simpler?
Although I would rather that Apple have picked another processor (e.g. ARM)
Um, no, ARM is not in any sense competitive with Power PC or x86. After HP killed the Alpha there were only two processor families that were good enough for the desktop... and as of 6/6 there's only one.
The Mac user wants a smooth, much-better-than-Windows experience... and is willing to pay for a quality PC to do so.
This Mac user wants a much-better-than-Gnome/KDE experience, and was completely unwilling to pay the Mac Tax and take on the Blue Screen of Debt to do so. Until the Mac mini came out, the only options were saving up 2 grand for a Powermac G5, or buying a used Powermac G3 or G4... so that's what I did.
For native commands I'm fairly certain it is broken up into arg lists like you'd expect it to be;
Native commands don't accept an arg list, they accept a string and break it down to an arg list themselves. That's why there's all these different syntaxes in Windows commands.
Which is where you DO need deep changes in the API, because unless native commands participate in the Monad world, it'll just be another "bash.exe".
If Apple ever releases a generic OS X, or only winks at people who hack Mac OS X86 so it runs on clones, then desktop Linux is dead as a coffin-nail.
If Apple locks Mac OS X into Apple hardware and takes that lock-in seriously (both legally and technically), then Mac OS X86 will only help desktop Linux, especially once someone ports the FreeBSD Linux emulation layer to OS X.
That's the bottom line. Technically, Mac OS X as a desktop is so far ahead of any other UNIX based system that it's got no competition. But if you have to keep paying the Mac Tax to get it, it's only going to increase the interest in other desktop UNIXes.
Macs are price competitive with win/intel boxes right now. Price out a dell with similar specs to a given class of mac.
I haven't doen this with Dell because I have had nothing but trouble with their systems, but when I've done this with HP... come up with a Mac or an HP box to fit my requirements... the Mac's always been more expensive. The only way to get the Mac to come out cheaper is to take the specific feature list that the Mac provides as the requirements, and fudge as hard as you can.
The difference is lower than it's ever been, but there's still a significant Mac Tax.
And, well, since Apple dropped the Beige G3 they haven't even had a straight desktop in their product line. You have the choice of a $2000 tower or a dead-end all-in-one or the laptop-style Mac mini. I ended up buying the mini as the least worst of a bad selection, but what I really wanted they don't even make.
You are told that the best video editing software for Linux is package ABC. You google it and find thousands of entries. You go for one and find that it will not even install because you're on an rpm based distro and the software is a.deb package!
Oh man, I just spent six weeks in this hell, trying to get a collection of dependencies for one application together in one Linux box. I guess I'm spoiled because the same work on FreeBSD was a couple of "make install"s under the ports tree.
The world is so damn ready for a BSD ports based Linux distribution.
Desktop Linux distros come with hundreds of quality desktop applications, installed and license-free, at no cost.
Hardly any of those apps are high quality, and they may be using any of half a dozen different user interface toolkits... so none of them can be said to really be part of your desktop the way Mac and Windows apps are. True, this is due to the way X11 developed as a test platform for user interface design, but it means that the advantage of X11 being native on Linux is a lot less than you're arguing.
Linux being used very often as a server, it's just as simple to install major server apps (Apache, Tomcat, mysql, vsftpd etc.) as other apps.
Mac OS X ships with apache and mysql, and is just as compatible with other server apps. And, well, my only experience with Tomcat is that it'll be a cold day in hell before I consider it as anything but a liability.
The "slick GUI" advantage of OS X [...]
The slickness of the OS X GUI is overrated. The most important feature of the Mac GUI is its internal consistency.
For people who want to be a part of the open source movement, Linux (or BSDs) is the natural choice.
That's why I switched to Mac OS X for my desktop. It's built on open-source UNIX and deeply compatible with FreeBSD... my open-source UNIX of choice.
Linux will run on a TON of hardware, including old hardware, which means you can use to "revitalize" existing machines and save money.
That's true, you may have to pay fifty dollars or more for an old Powermac G3 to run Mac OS X.
The typical Linux environment is highly, highly scriptable.
Not as scriptable as Mac OS X, by a long shot. Not only does it come with bash, tcsh, perl, python, and tcl, it's also got GUI scripting through Applescript, and now Javascript in Dashboard.
Desktop Linux isn't dead because of OS X, it's dead because it was never alive. I tried hard, for decades, to find a desktop UNIX that didn't suck, and desktop Linux is nowhere near the top of the short list. But a couple of years ago, when I put OS X on an old Beige Powermac, I even trashed my shortlist... OS X is it, it's the only hope for desktop UNIX.
, and none of them are scriptable the way Mac OS applications are.
Linux/Unix people are going to use the shell features of OSX. Non-Linux people aren't.
Technical people are going to use the shell features of OSX. Non-technical people aren't. But not all technical people using Macs are old UNIX types. Apple's long had an active community of amateur hackers doing their scripting with Applescript, and these people are hooking Applescripts into shell scripts, and taking advantage of the way Apple's extending the hooks Applescript's using into other languages. The platform is at least as scriptable as UNIX.
Mac OS X currently ships with Perl, Python, Tcl, bash and tcsh, Applescript, PHP, and now Javascript scripting in Dashboard.
Any near monopoly Microsoft has is only due to government enforced IP laws.
Absent the enforcement of property rights, no market can exist, because nobody could own anything that they did not at that instant hold in their direct posession... whether it be land, physical goods, shares in a cooperative venture such as a corporation, or any other property physical or not. Even a "water monopoly" only exists because it is enforced by a government.
So there's no point in trying to find examples of a monopoly that one can't trace back to government intervention, because you can't trace back ANY feature of any market - good or bad - that doesn't depend in some way on the ability of government to create and enforce property rights.
You can argue about the details of property rights, and whether they should be changed... but that's hardly a new debate or one that's restricted in intellectual property. Look at all the restrictions on and variations in real estate, concepts like adverse posession, rights of way, freehold versus leasehold, crown property... all these are part of the same discussion about rights.
Historically there is an ongoing evolution in property rights as the laws so slowly adjust to the reality of the changing environment. But the market has to operate within the laws that create the environment in which it exists, and monopolies are one of the problems the law has to deal with... and right now it's not doing so well.
Natively, both forwardslash and backslash are allowable as separators.
That was true in the MS-DOS 2.11 shell. Microsoft took that out of the shell about the time they dumped Xenix.
It looks quite interesting, but what I want to know is how this new shell interface works with applications running under Windows. One reason that the UNIX shell is so powerful is that the interface between the shell and applications is so tight. An application doesn't get passed a command line from the shell, for example, it gets passes a pre-parsed list of strings, with all variable substitution, filename expansion, and quoting already performed. This means that you can call a UNIX application from another one (a web browser, say) with the same pre-tokenized list confident that the application won't proceed to re-parse it and open some file other than the one you expected it to (or, worse, pass part of the command line back to the shell and let a bad guy into your computer).
This is not to say that all UNIX programs are careful to call applications this way, but this is what the native API does... unless the program explicitly calls the shell to parse a command line, it doesn't get reparsed.
Currently, Windows applications don't have this option. With Monad, what happens? Is this going to be another environment with new applications having to be written to fully take advantage of it, or will Microsoft "Monadize" existing applications to operate on the objects that Monad makes available, or does Monad "marshall" a string of monads into a conventional command line when calling external applications?
That is, is this just a new scripting language, or is there going to be a deep change to the Windows API that really integrates existing and new applications into it? Because without that, it can't ever become for Windows what the shell is for UNIX.
If Microsoft's making deep changes to the Windows API, I have a few suggestions. The first is, they ought to comple their port of BSD TCP/IP and make sockets and file handles equivalent.
Interesting that they chose to emulate the appearance of a 7 segment LCD, when e-ink can be used to make numerals of any shape whatsoever.
So can LCDs: the technology of LCDs has pretty much the same constraints on it that this does... it's a matter of where you lay down the conductors that activate (or in this case flip) the display elements. It's just more efficient (and thus cheaper and for a new technology more reliable) to build them with the minimum number of segments.
That's why LCD numerals used the same seven segment design of the original LED and plasma displays they (mostly) replaced, even though they no longer had to manufacture and place individual components in each segment but could instead lay them down using a mask.
As an aside to your aside, before I go on, Soviet Russia wasn't a communist economy, it was a centrally planned socialist economy. Communism itself scales so badly that it's never existed outside relatively small worker-owned cooperatives: it requires a market system to actually come into existence. Marx actually seems to have known that, though he saw it as being a successor to a doomed capitalist society rather than something that could grow as an enclave inside one.
As an aside to your aside, Captialism is not immune. Capitalism (again, ideally) rewards extra work with extra pay. It is less vulnerable to free riders, because a person receives an immediate, tangible benefit from hard work. When, as happens often in Capitalist countries, an individual worker loses that connection -- he/she no longer feels that work helps him/her get ahead -- there are enough others willing to step in and fill the gap for the often marginal extra pay. It sounds brutal, and it is, but it makes Capitalism less vulnerable to the "free rider" syndrome collapsing the entire system. However, once enough workers feel that hard work does not help their situation -- a state of affairs, one could argue, the United States is fast approaching this century -- that system is as surely doomed as were the Communist Bloc countries at the end of the last century.
One reason this happens is that the large companies that so many people are working for, the ones that are supposed to act as the agents of the market and provide people with the feedback that their hard work is essential to their well-being, have more and more come to resemble centrally planned socialist economies. Workers see so many people acting as free riders in the system and getting away with it because there's no accountability. They see the board of directors and executive officers as so far away and apparently completely unaware of what's actually happening in the company, they keep making the same kinds of decisions they keep hearing about as causing the downfall of Soviet Russia. Which is why they simply feel equally doomed no matter what they do.
Can you give me a few real-life examples of this happening?
What, other than the one we're talking about right now where one actor (Microsoft) has expanded to the limit of its market segment (personal computer operating systems) and choked off competition (only Mac OS has any noticable usage, and it's survived by creating a separate market segment where Windows doesn't run)?
The one where this actor (Microsoft) has leveraged this dominant position to dominate other markets (such as office automation software) even more effectively (Office even dominates the Mac's share of that market segment, and even when their competition gives their software away for free nobody uses it).
The one where despite this one actor deliberately causing massive problems for users (insert litany of security problems, viruses, design flaws) people simply don't see an alternative being viable, and manage to convince themselves that there can't be an alternative that didn't have these problems (although it's easy to trace each individual change that was introduced to Windows and where the resulting problems started happening).
There's been examples of monopolies before, of course, this one is just particularly appropriate to this subthread. Especially the way Microsoft took advantage of their monopoly position to deliberately cripple the OpenGL implementation in Windows by limiting it to work only on a single screen, so that games that used multiple displays could only be accelerated if they used DirectX instead. This meant that people who played flight sims had to buy DirectX capable cards and buy software that used DirectX, so that companies that made game libraries had to use DirectX or lose access to that important market segment, and once they're all using DirectX, why bother with OpenGL any more? I suspect that if it wasn't for the tiny amount of competitive pressure that Apple supplies, video card makers wouldn't bother with OpenGL support either... but there's no corresponding contrary pressure for game software, so there's no longer any effective competition to Windows in that market.
In the absence of the Windows monopoly and Microsoft's ability to abuse it, they wouldn't have been able to effectively exclude the open standard interface (that anyone could implement on any OS, in hardware or software) with one that they controlled and could use to lock games so it wasn't economically practical to port them to other platforms, which further entrenches their monopoly in a positive feedback loop that has let them expand to the limits of the home computer game market and choke off competition.
And they're trying to use this feedback loop to do the same thing for console gaming.
Re:I only wish BeOS was a member of the UNIX famil
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I'm not going to respond point for point here. I'm just going to take this comment and explain what I really do mean, because you're still focussing on implementation rather than design:
When you say "UNIX family", you mean a system that is capable of behaiving like what would now be called an archaic "UNIX", using the minimal interfaces that didn't change much before a more modern era of standardisation and advancement.
When I say "UNIX family", I am referring to those systems that follow the UNIX design. Because far from being "archaic", the design features I'm talking about are absolutely critical to the success of UNIX in areas where it's proven strong.
The two biggest areas where UNIX diverged from every other operating system before it, and most since, is the integration of a huge amount of functionality into a very small collection of fundamental concepts that could be applied over and over. What UNIX did to the computer world was really as revolutionary as Newtonian physics, or as the modern atomic theory of matter. Before UNIX, every separate object or interface in a system was unique, built by trial and error unto a library or a set of system calls that were used by that object. The system that inspired UNIX, Multics, brought some of these together but it was nowhere near as well integrated.
Thus simplicity and consistency are an important part of the UNIX model. This lets systems like BeOS or AmigaOS that have a simple and consistent (albeit different) design more easily fit into the UNIX family. I would place AmigaOS outside it because the basic operations have such different details, but BeOS lets you apply "UNIX physics" often enough that you can treat it as a UNIX system and most things "just work".
The core design features of UNIX are two basic concepts (two fundamental forces, if you like) and a very small collection of system calls (the atoms, or fundamental particles, perhaps) that brought them all together.
The first concept is that every object has a name in the same name space. UNIX was not completely successful in this, but it was very close.
The second concept is that every object is accessed through an opaque object (file descriptor) and that all file descriptors, whetehr created by opening a file, inherited from the parent process, or created through a system call like pipe(), behaved as similar as was possible for the object they were providing access to could manage.
The fact that in UNIX a socket is a file descriptor means that you can have a single program monitoring a variety of network connections, you can write a program that provides a network service without using a single network call, and run it from inetd, and it just works.
Windows NT and BeOS do not do this (unless this is different in Bone). This means that you can't "wrap" a service or daemon in NT or BeOS the way you can in a system that's a closer relative to UNIX. This means that you can't run a program from a superserver like inetd. This means that you have to write different code for operating on data if you're reading it from the network. This interface, the Berkeley socket, is a "unix family" interface in traditional UNIX systems and because it is network connections can be dealt with using "classical UNIX physics".
X11, though, is not a "UNIX family" interface. It's an OS-independent interface defined in terms of a library. How that library communicates with the window system is open-ended... the connection can be a TCP connection (which may or may not use the socket interface), a local connection (which may be through a UNIX domain socket or a VMS message port), and so on. To the application it's just a string in its own namespace (not the file system namespace) that the library can use to communicate with the display server.
There are UNIX-family window systems. In 8½, for example, the mouse and keyboard and window that a program uses can be accessed by opening files in "/dev". But because X11 doesn't fall inder "unix p
And it took a very long time for Communism to collapse in Russia.
Hopefully it won't take that long for the "Planned Economy" in operating systems run out of Redmond to collapse. If you look at the state of Windows, with its collapsing "health care" system and the use of placebos instead of secure design, the analogy between Redmond and Moscow is very close.
Game developers are not operating in a free market. They can not pick and choose the best tools to write games with, because it's not economically viable to use any tools that haven't been blessed by Microsoft.
As for Haiti, its problem isn't a function of whether its economy is capitalist, socialist, mixed, kleptocratic, or anarchist. Its problem is that the United States has been fighting a covert low-grade campaign against it for as long as it's existed.
IN the US at least we have a mixed economy, because in a pure free market there's a mechanism whereby one actor can establish a positive feedback loop and expand to the limits of their market segment and choke off the competition that's essential to the proper workings of the market. Unfortunately the regulatory mechanism intended to prevent it doesn't work well when the regulators don't understand the market in question.
THe point is, the reason it doesn't pay to do the port is that the market isn't working right, and many of the mechanisms intended to promote competition and advances in the arts and sciences are actually preventing their development.
I don't think there's a way to fix it, but at least in the meantime I would recommend taking a less simplistic view of the "market".
For example, one of the reasons that it's expensive to port a game is that the market leader has managed to make it uneconomical for game developers to use the most sidely used and portable graphics API on their operating system, in favor of one that they control and can use to discourage ports to other platforms. If it wasn't for this barrier to entry it would actually be practical to write a game using components that ran on all current platforms, and so a port to another platform would be a matter of weeks or even days for a small team, rather than a near-reimplementation that can take months.
You know that the word "metaphor" isn't in the dictionary?
The only thing violating the license means is that they won't support you.
If you think that won't change if people actually start buying Mac OS X and installing it on generic PCs in any significant numbers you're fooling yourself. Apple makes their money from the Macintosh line because peple buy Macintoshes to run OS X on, because the only way you can run OS X is to buy a Macintosh. If Apple doesn't do anything but "not support" non-Macs running OS X, then it will have a significant impact on the sales of Macintoshes, because frankly Apple's hardware line-up is not all that enticing without the OS to justify the high price.
I would happily pay Apple the "Mac Tax" in cash if that'd enable me to install Mac OS X on a Thinkpad instead of one of their lousy laptops.
The same may be true for Intel Mac OS X.
You don't actually believe that. Not with Apple making up to 40% margin in an industry where 4% is good and some companies have accepted negative margins so they could make a profit on the interest.
Yes, you can pull all kinds of tricks to install Mac OS X on a computer that Apple doesn't license you to install Mac OS X. That's beside the point. The point is that however it's implemented legally you are only licensed to run Mac OS X on a genuine Apple Macintosh. You know that. You have said as much.
Legally, that Macintosh is required. Apple doesn't have to try hard to make it happen (though they do perform checks, which is why you need XPostFacto to install Panther on a Beige G3 or Tiger on a tray-loading iMac, so the drivers required to let you pass those checks are there).
So you can quit being a literal minded idiot. I assume you're being a literal minded idiot deliberately, as a debating tactic, and not because you're actually as stupid as you're making yourself out to be.
If you respond to any part of this message above this paragraph I'll assume that's what's going on. In the meantime, on to the meat of the message.
Why is it required?
It's required because Apple charges more for a Macintosh than they could charge for a similar computer that wouldn't run OS X. That difference in price is greater than Apple charges for OS X and the bundled software separately. On the higher end models it's getting close to four figures.
Why can they do it?
Because people are willing to pay that extra money to run OS X.
That difference is the amount Apple is actually recoving for OS X's development costs, promotion, and so on. That is the real, unobscured, full price you are paying Apple for an OS X license when you buy a Macintosh running OS X. The retail price is only a portion of the total.
That's the bottom line.
And that's why you can come up with an estimate of the minimum Apple would have to charge for a retail OS X for a generic Intel box, IF they were to (for example) license OS X to Dell.
Which is where I came in. That is the whole point of this thread. That is the whole point of my original message. Nothing you have written in any of your messages has addressed that, all you've done is whined about a metaphor. Quit whining about the metaphor and consider what's behind it.
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Compared to what I've got on OS X. See, I've got an open source kernel, and the ability to run all the open source X11 apps I want, PLUS commercial apps as well when I want them. Best of all worlds.
There are a lot more eyes watching some open source projects than those made by development studios.
I know, I've got two of them. And if you think open source means you don't have incomplete features and deadlines to deal with, you've got a rude awakening coming...
If you want consistency over choice, constrict yourself to KDE.
Why would I do that when I can get consistency with choice by using Mac OS X?
We've all heard the complaints about MS software on OS X, plus the UI inconsistencies of a dozen other programs (some of them Apple's very own).
Why yes. When you have a system where almost everything is consistent, something that's slightly inconsistent stands out more. When you have a system where nothing's consistent, you either give up or you deal with it... but there's no point in complaining about individual applications.
How many of you reading this, when sending an email in Thunderbird actually changed the "from" field? Maybe ten out two hundred; everyone else just keeps it the same, week after week. So why the fuck is that option there? Why isn't it there in Apple's Mail?
It IS there in Apple's Mail.
Right next to the label "Account:".
The problem is, I've got a bunch of tagged accounts, and I *want* to use a different "From" address for different people, so in Apple's mail I have to set up a bunch of different dummy accounts. How the hell is that simpler?
Although I would rather that Apple have picked another processor (e.g. ARM)
Um, no, ARM is not in any sense competitive with Power PC or x86. After HP killed the Alpha there were only two processor families that were good enough for the desktop... and as of 6/6 there's only one.
The Mac user wants a smooth, much-better-than-Windows experience... and is willing to pay for a quality PC to do so.
This Mac user wants a much-better-than-Gnome/KDE experience, and was completely unwilling to pay the Mac Tax and take on the Blue Screen of Debt to do so. Until the Mac mini came out, the only options were saving up 2 grand for a Powermac G5, or buying a used Powermac G3 or G4... so that's what I did.
For native commands I'm fairly certain it is broken up into arg lists like you'd expect it to be;
Native commands don't accept an arg list, they accept a string and break it down to an arg list themselves. That's why there's all these different syntaxes in Windows commands.
Which is where you DO need deep changes in the API, because unless native commands participate in the Monad world, it'll just be another "bash.exe".
Which would be a pity.
If Apple ever releases a generic OS X, or only winks at people who hack Mac OS X86 so it runs on clones, then desktop Linux is dead as a coffin-nail.
If Apple locks Mac OS X into Apple hardware and takes that lock-in seriously (both legally and technically), then Mac OS X86 will only help desktop Linux, especially once someone ports the FreeBSD Linux emulation layer to OS X.
That's the bottom line. Technically, Mac OS X as a desktop is so far ahead of any other UNIX based system that it's got no competition. But if you have to keep paying the Mac Tax to get it, it's only going to increase the interest in other desktop UNIXes.
Macs are price competitive with win/intel boxes right now. Price out a dell with similar specs to a given class of mac.
I haven't doen this with Dell because I have had nothing but trouble with their systems, but when I've done this with HP... come up with a Mac or an HP box to fit my requirements... the Mac's always been more expensive. The only way to get the Mac to come out cheaper is to take the specific feature list that the Mac provides as the requirements, and fudge as hard as you can.
The difference is lower than it's ever been, but there's still a significant Mac Tax.
And, well, since Apple dropped the Beige G3 they haven't even had a straight desktop in their product line. You have the choice of a $2000 tower or a dead-end all-in-one or the laptop-style Mac mini. I ended up buying the mini as the least worst of a bad selection, but what I really wanted they don't even make.
You are told that the best video editing software for Linux is package ABC. You google it and find thousands of entries. You go for one and find that it will not even install because you're on an rpm based distro and the software is a .deb package!
Oh man, I just spent six weeks in this hell, trying to get a collection of dependencies for one application together in one Linux box. I guess I'm spoiled because the same work on FreeBSD was a couple of "make install"s under the ports tree.
The world is so damn ready for a BSD ports based Linux distribution.
Desktop Linux distros come with hundreds of quality desktop applications, installed and license-free, at no cost.
Hardly any of those apps are high quality, and they may be using any of half a dozen different user interface toolkits... so none of them can be said to really be part of your desktop the way Mac and Windows apps are. True, this is due to the way X11 developed as a test platform for user interface design, but it means that the advantage of X11 being native on Linux is a lot less than you're arguing.
Linux being used very often as a server, it's just as simple to install major server apps (Apache, Tomcat, mysql, vsftpd etc.) as other apps.
Mac OS X ships with apache and mysql, and is just as compatible with other server apps. And, well, my only experience with Tomcat is that it'll be a cold day in hell before I consider it as anything but a liability.
The "slick GUI" advantage of OS X [...]
The slickness of the OS X GUI is overrated. The most important feature of the Mac GUI is its internal consistency.
For people who want to be a part of the open source movement, Linux (or BSDs) is the natural choice.
That's why I switched to Mac OS X for my desktop. It's built on open-source UNIX and deeply compatible with FreeBSD... my open-source UNIX of choice.
Linux will run on a TON of hardware, including old hardware, which means you can use to "revitalize" existing machines and save money.
That's true, you may have to pay fifty dollars or more for an old Powermac G3 to run Mac OS X.
The typical Linux environment is highly, highly scriptable.
Not as scriptable as Mac OS X, by a long shot. Not only does it come with bash, tcsh, perl, python, and tcl, it's also got GUI scripting through Applescript, and now Javascript in Dashboard.
Desktop Linux isn't dead because of OS X, it's dead because it was never alive. I tried hard, for decades, to find a desktop UNIX that didn't suck, and desktop Linux is nowhere near the top of the short list. But a couple of years ago, when I put OS X on an old Beige Powermac, I even trashed my shortlist... OS X is it, it's the only hope for desktop UNIX.
, and none of them are scriptable the way Mac OS applications are.
Linux/Unix people are going to use the shell features of OSX. Non-Linux people aren't.
Technical people are going to use the shell features of OSX. Non-technical people aren't. But not all technical people using Macs are old UNIX types. Apple's long had an active community of amateur hackers doing their scripting with Applescript, and these people are hooking Applescripts into shell scripts, and taking advantage of the way Apple's extending the hooks Applescript's using into other languages. The platform is at least as scriptable as UNIX.
Mac OS X currently ships with Perl, Python, Tcl, bash and tcsh, Applescript, PHP, and now Javascript scripting in Dashboard.
If that's a jail, freedom is slavery.
Any near monopoly Microsoft has is only due to government enforced IP laws.
Absent the enforcement of property rights, no market can exist, because nobody could own anything that they did not at that instant hold in their direct posession... whether it be land, physical goods, shares in a cooperative venture such as a corporation, or any other property physical or not. Even a "water monopoly" only exists because it is enforced by a government.
So there's no point in trying to find examples of a monopoly that one can't trace back to government intervention, because you can't trace back ANY feature of any market - good or bad - that doesn't depend in some way on the ability of government to create and enforce property rights.
You can argue about the details of property rights, and whether they should be changed... but that's hardly a new debate or one that's restricted in intellectual property. Look at all the restrictions on and variations in real estate, concepts like adverse posession, rights of way, freehold versus leasehold, crown property... all these are part of the same discussion about rights.
Historically there is an ongoing evolution in property rights as the laws so slowly adjust to the reality of the changing environment. But the market has to operate within the laws that create the environment in which it exists, and monopolies are one of the problems the law has to deal with... and right now it's not doing so well.
Natively, both forwardslash and backslash are allowable as separators.
That was true in the MS-DOS 2.11 shell. Microsoft took that out of the shell about the time they dumped Xenix.
It looks quite interesting, but what I want to know is how this new shell interface works with applications running under Windows. One reason that the UNIX shell is so powerful is that the interface between the shell and applications is so tight. An application doesn't get passed a command line from the shell, for example, it gets passes a pre-parsed list of strings, with all variable substitution, filename expansion, and quoting already performed. This means that you can call a UNIX application from another one (a web browser, say) with the same pre-tokenized list confident that the application won't proceed to re-parse it and open some file other than the one you expected it to (or, worse, pass part of the command line back to the shell and let a bad guy into your computer).
This is not to say that all UNIX programs are careful to call applications this way, but this is what the native API does... unless the program explicitly calls the shell to parse a command line, it doesn't get reparsed.
Currently, Windows applications don't have this option. With Monad, what happens? Is this going to be another environment with new applications having to be written to fully take advantage of it, or will Microsoft "Monadize" existing applications to operate on the objects that Monad makes available, or does Monad "marshall" a string of monads into a conventional command line when calling external applications?
That is, is this just a new scripting language, or is there going to be a deep change to the Windows API that really integrates existing and new applications into it? Because without that, it can't ever become for Windows what the shell is for UNIX.
If Microsoft's making deep changes to the Windows API, I have a few suggestions. The first is, they ought to comple their port of BSD TCP/IP and make sockets and file handles equivalent.
That certainly seems to argue for the legitimacy of Bittorrent, and I'm not sure that the DMCA is really in compliance with the letter of this treaty.
Interesting that they chose to emulate the appearance of a 7 segment LCD, when e-ink can be used to make numerals of any shape whatsoever.
So can LCDs: the technology of LCDs has pretty much the same constraints on it that this does... it's a matter of where you lay down the conductors that activate (or in this case flip) the display elements. It's just more efficient (and thus cheaper and for a new technology more reliable) to build them with the minimum number of segments.
That's why LCD numerals used the same seven segment design of the original LED and plasma displays they (mostly) replaced, even though they no longer had to manufacture and place individual components in each segment but could instead lay them down using a mask.
The UK subscribed to the Decaration of Paris back in 1856 when most European countries gave up the right to issue [Letters of Marque]
You got an online copy of that? I wanna see what it says about copyright violations and encryption technology.
As an aside to your aside, before I go on, Soviet Russia wasn't a communist economy, it was a centrally planned socialist economy. Communism itself scales so badly that it's never existed outside relatively small worker-owned cooperatives: it requires a market system to actually come into existence. Marx actually seems to have known that, though he saw it as being a successor to a doomed capitalist society rather than something that could grow as an enclave inside one.
As an aside to your aside, Captialism is not immune. Capitalism (again, ideally) rewards extra work with extra pay. It is less vulnerable to free riders, because a person receives an immediate, tangible benefit from hard work. When, as happens often in Capitalist countries, an individual worker loses that connection -- he/she no longer feels that work helps him/her get ahead -- there are enough others willing to step in and fill the gap for the often marginal extra pay. It sounds brutal, and it is, but it makes Capitalism less vulnerable to the "free rider" syndrome collapsing the entire system. However, once enough workers feel that hard work does not help their situation -- a state of affairs, one could argue, the United States is fast approaching this century -- that system is as surely doomed as were the Communist Bloc countries at the end of the last century.
One reason this happens is that the large companies that so many people are working for, the ones that are supposed to act as the agents of the market and provide people with the feedback that their hard work is essential to their well-being, have more and more come to resemble centrally planned socialist economies. Workers see so many people acting as free riders in the system and getting away with it because there's no accountability. They see the board of directors and executive officers as so far away and apparently completely unaware of what's actually happening in the company, they keep making the same kinds of decisions they keep hearing about as causing the downfall of Soviet Russia. Which is why they simply feel equally doomed no matter what they do.
Can you give me a few real-life examples of this happening?
What, other than the one we're talking about right now where one actor (Microsoft) has expanded to the limit of its market segment (personal computer operating systems) and choked off competition (only Mac OS has any noticable usage, and it's survived by creating a separate market segment where Windows doesn't run)?
The one where this actor (Microsoft) has leveraged this dominant position to dominate other markets (such as office automation software) even more effectively (Office even dominates the Mac's share of that market segment, and even when their competition gives their software away for free nobody uses it).
The one where despite this one actor deliberately causing massive problems for users (insert litany of security problems, viruses, design flaws) people simply don't see an alternative being viable, and manage to convince themselves that there can't be an alternative that didn't have these problems (although it's easy to trace each individual change that was introduced to Windows and where the resulting problems started happening).
There's been examples of monopolies before, of course, this one is just particularly appropriate to this subthread. Especially the way Microsoft took advantage of their monopoly position to deliberately cripple the OpenGL implementation in Windows by limiting it to work only on a single screen, so that games that used multiple displays could only be accelerated if they used DirectX instead. This meant that people who played flight sims had to buy DirectX capable cards and buy software that used DirectX, so that companies that made game libraries had to use DirectX or lose access to that important market segment, and once they're all using DirectX, why bother with OpenGL any more? I suspect that if it wasn't for the tiny amount of competitive pressure that Apple supplies, video card makers wouldn't bother with OpenGL support either... but there's no corresponding contrary pressure for game software, so there's no longer any effective competition to Windows in that market.
In the absence of the Windows monopoly and Microsoft's ability to abuse it, they wouldn't have been able to effectively exclude the open standard interface (that anyone could implement on any OS, in hardware or software) with one that they controlled and could use to lock games so it wasn't economically practical to port them to other platforms, which further entrenches their monopoly in a positive feedback loop that has let them expand to the limits of the home computer game market and choke off competition.
And they're trying to use this feedback loop to do the same thing for console gaming.
I'm not going to respond point for point here. I'm just going to take this comment and explain what I really do mean, because you're still focussing on implementation rather than design:
When you say "UNIX family", you mean a system that is capable of behaiving like what would now be called an archaic "UNIX", using the minimal interfaces that didn't change much before a more modern era of standardisation and advancement.
When I say "UNIX family", I am referring to those systems that follow the UNIX design. Because far from being "archaic", the design features I'm talking about are absolutely critical to the success of UNIX in areas where it's proven strong.
The two biggest areas where UNIX diverged from every other operating system before it, and most since, is the integration of a huge amount of functionality into a very small collection of fundamental concepts that could be applied over and over. What UNIX did to the computer world was really as revolutionary as Newtonian physics, or as the modern atomic theory of matter. Before UNIX, every separate object or interface in a system was unique, built by trial and error unto a library or a set of system calls that were used by that object. The system that inspired UNIX, Multics, brought some of these together but it was nowhere near as well integrated.
Thus simplicity and consistency are an important part of the UNIX model. This lets systems like BeOS or AmigaOS that have a simple and consistent (albeit different) design more easily fit into the UNIX family. I would place AmigaOS outside it because the basic operations have such different details, but BeOS lets you apply "UNIX physics" often enough that you can treat it as a UNIX system and most things "just work".
The core design features of UNIX are two basic concepts (two fundamental forces, if you like) and a very small collection of system calls (the atoms, or fundamental particles, perhaps) that brought them all together.
The first concept is that every object has a name in the same name space. UNIX was not completely successful in this, but it was very close.
The second concept is that every object is accessed through an opaque object (file descriptor) and that all file descriptors, whetehr created by opening a file, inherited from the parent process, or created through a system call like pipe(), behaved as similar as was possible for the object they were providing access to could manage.
The fact that in UNIX a socket is a file descriptor means that you can have a single program monitoring a variety of network connections, you can write a program that provides a network service without using a single network call, and run it from inetd, and it just works.
Windows NT and BeOS do not do this (unless this is different in Bone). This means that you can't "wrap" a service or daemon in NT or BeOS the way you can in a system that's a closer relative to UNIX. This means that you can't run a program from a superserver like inetd. This means that you have to write different code for operating on data if you're reading it from the network. This interface, the Berkeley socket, is a "unix family" interface in traditional UNIX systems and because it is network connections can be dealt with using "classical UNIX physics".
X11, though, is not a "UNIX family" interface. It's an OS-independent interface defined in terms of a library. How that library communicates with the window system is open-ended... the connection can be a TCP connection (which may or may not use the socket interface), a local connection (which may be through a UNIX domain socket or a VMS message port), and so on. To the application it's just a string in its own namespace (not the file system namespace) that the library can use to communicate with the display server.
There are UNIX-family window systems. In 8½, for example, the mouse and keyboard and window that a program uses can be accessed by opening files in "/dev". But because X11 doesn't fall inder "unix p
And it took a very long time for Communism to collapse in Russia.
Hopefully it won't take that long for the "Planned Economy" in operating systems run out of Redmond to collapse. If you look at the state of Windows, with its collapsing "health care" system and the use of placebos instead of secure design, the analogy between Redmond and Moscow is very close.
Game developers are not operating in a free market. They can not pick and choose the best tools to write games with, because it's not economically viable to use any tools that haven't been blessed by Microsoft.
As for Haiti, its problem isn't a function of whether its economy is capitalist, socialist, mixed, kleptocratic, or anarchist. Its problem is that the United States has been fighting a covert low-grade campaign against it for as long as it's existed.
We have something called a 'market economy.'
IN the US at least we have a mixed economy, because in a pure free market there's a mechanism whereby one actor can establish a positive feedback loop and expand to the limits of their market segment and choke off the competition that's essential to the proper workings of the market. Unfortunately the regulatory mechanism intended to prevent it doesn't work well when the regulators don't understand the market in question.
THe point is, the reason it doesn't pay to do the port is that the market isn't working right, and many of the mechanisms intended to promote competition and advances in the arts and sciences are actually preventing their development.
I don't think there's a way to fix it, but at least in the meantime I would recommend taking a less simplistic view of the "market".
For example, one of the reasons that it's expensive to port a game is that the market leader has managed to make it uneconomical for game developers to use the most sidely used and portable graphics API on their operating system, in favor of one that they control and can use to discourage ports to other platforms. If it wasn't for this barrier to entry it would actually be practical to write a game using components that ran on all current platforms, and so a port to another platform would be a matter of weeks or even days for a small team, rather than a near-reimplementation that can take months.
We assume she is not searching the royalty free or pirated stuff.
The Queen does not need to engage in Piracy, She could simply issue Letters of Marque authorizing a Privateer to undertake the mission on Her behalf.
I don't know why you keep calling it an upgrade
You know that the word "metaphor" isn't in the dictionary?
The only thing violating the license means is that they won't support you.
If you think that won't change if people actually start buying Mac OS X and installing it on generic PCs in any significant numbers you're fooling yourself. Apple makes their money from the Macintosh line because peple buy Macintoshes to run OS X on, because the only way you can run OS X is to buy a Macintosh. If Apple doesn't do anything but "not support" non-Macs running OS X, then it will have a significant impact on the sales of Macintoshes, because frankly Apple's hardware line-up is not all that enticing without the OS to justify the high price.
I would happily pay Apple the "Mac Tax" in cash if that'd enable me to install Mac OS X on a Thinkpad instead of one of their lousy laptops.
The same may be true for Intel Mac OS X.
You don't actually believe that. Not with Apple making up to 40% margin in an industry where 4% is good and some companies have accepted negative margins so they could make a profit on the interest.
Yes, you can pull all kinds of tricks to install Mac OS X on a computer that Apple doesn't license you to install Mac OS X. That's beside the point. The point is that however it's implemented legally you are only licensed to run Mac OS X on a genuine Apple Macintosh. You know that. You have said as much.
Legally, that Macintosh is required. Apple doesn't have to try hard to make it happen (though they do perform checks, which is why you need XPostFacto to install Panther on a Beige G3 or Tiger on a tray-loading iMac, so the drivers required to let you pass those checks are there).
So you can quit being a literal minded idiot. I assume you're being a literal minded idiot deliberately, as a debating tactic, and not because you're actually as stupid as you're making yourself out to be.
If you respond to any part of this message above this paragraph I'll assume that's what's going on. In the meantime, on to the meat of the message.
Why is it required?
It's required because Apple charges more for a Macintosh than they could charge for a similar computer that wouldn't run OS X. That difference in price is greater than Apple charges for OS X and the bundled software separately. On the higher end models it's getting close to four figures.
Why can they do it?
Because people are willing to pay that extra money to run OS X.
That difference is the amount Apple is actually recoving for OS X's development costs, promotion, and so on. That is the real, unobscured, full price you are paying Apple for an OS X license when you buy a Macintosh running OS X. The retail price is only a portion of the total.
That's the bottom line.
And that's why you can come up with an estimate of the minimum Apple would have to charge for a retail OS X for a generic Intel box, IF they were to (for example) license OS X to Dell.
Which is where I came in. That is the whole point of this thread. That is the whole point of my original message. Nothing you have written in any of your messages has addressed that, all you've done is whined about a metaphor. Quit whining about the metaphor and consider what's behind it.