Apple makes money on hardware, not operating systems, so it behooves them to make their operating system work on their hardware. The nice thing about this is that they make some damn nice harware
This ignores the fact that they're still the ultimate in proprietary lock-in.
Plus, OS X is a Unix
But not in any useful way (I hate how unix has become a buzzword.)
which means it plays nicely with other Unices, and it behaves like a Unix on the command line -- so I get all the power of pipes, vi, Bash, the BSD ports collection (a la Darwinports), gcc, and so on.
So? You can on windows with cygwin too. That doesn't mean it's very useful. The power of unix is how all the systems are interoperable open and modular and everything is controllable from the commandline. With MacOS, it's like having a unix emulator strapped on the side of a run of the mill proprietary desktop platform.
On the GUI side, it behaves like a Mac -- and I think you'd be hard-pressed to fault Apple for their GUI design.
You obviously hang around with a lot of Apple apologists and armchair UI experts.
MacOS's DVD player is just as useless as Windows in this regard. So you should all buy Macintoshes, because they've, like, got really cool logos and shit.
The thing is that even if it is the default browser, to connect to the internet, 95% of users will pop in the cd their ISP sent them, which will almost certainly set it to a (probably branded) version of IE.
There should be a mechanism through which applications can be chosen based on the functionality they offer, rather than on the basis of whatever name their creator chose for it.
That might be why in KDE the default configuration is to call applications things like 'Instant Messenger (Kopete)' , 'Multimedia Player (XMMS)' and 'Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)'.
The article is a bit thin, but it raises an excellent point.
No it doesn't. Is it saying 'Linux' (?) should start giving things super-generic names? Well that's a great idea. Let's call things 'Media Player'. But who gets to decide which media player gets named the definitive 'Media Player'? And they may not realise that most obvious super generic names are already trademarked by someone.
I don't see anything wrong with Gnu (General?) Image Manipulation Program. Rather effective description if you ask me.
It's not like the windows world isn't full of stupid Win* names is it? Winamp? WTF? It's a pretty tenuous link that you're supposed to guess that 'Amp' means an MP3 player.
Re:Typicall awful font rendering on Linux
on
aMSN 0.95 Released
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· Score: 1
Hey, I'm going to start posting screenshots of dodgy windows shareware written by russian 15 year olds and talk about how much windows sucks because of it.
X developers are more interested in code than buzzwords like PDF. So if you think differently then yes, you should probably buy a computer from Apple.
I'm sure you're one of these people who believe that OSX's interface is all vector based and completely opengl accelerated and all based on PDFs. Well here's some news - 99% of it isn't.
What? How do you know? It's closed & proprietary. You have no way of verifying its integrity. How do you know AOL employees aren't sitting at the head office giggling at your conversations?
16 bits is 65536 *levels* of amplitude.That's a difference of 15 microvolts per level for each volt of audio signal level. You think the human ear is going to differentiate between two adjacent levels?
Mmm. Doesn't quite work like that.
A 16bit sampled piece of audio will have a maximum theoretical dynamic range of ~96.3dB. Typical acoustic guitar playing for instance has a dynamic range of ~115dB. The human ear can hear a difference.
Collaberating on a 32x32 (if that) bitmap? Call me a cynic, but I don't give a flying fudge.
Come on. It's a 32bit RGBA image, 32 by 32 pixels. That means it could have been (2^32)*32*32 - 1 = 4,398,046,511,103 other things. But they chose that one. That has to mean something.
Did the inventor of the gun think "I can get dinner faster with this" or "I can smite my enemies with this"?
"I can scare my enemies with this". The early guns (yes that's potentially a wide scope) were pretty useless for hunting. But they made a hell of a noise and were great at making the enemy flee. Occasionally with bits of lead in them.
And no, I'm not saying it's a bad invention. That's a pointless hypothetical to argue.
(BTW - as far as I can tell, the "purpose" of nuclear bombs depends on who made them; The good guys have them to deter the bad guys from doing bad things. The bad guys have them to threaten the good guys, to cower them into doing nothing about the doing of other bad things.)
WTF? What the hell sort of reasoning is that? Who the hell are the "good guys"? Who the hell are the "bad guys"?
Only in America would such wooly headed thinking be accepted as valid reasoning.
If you bring up a Gnome file dialog and just start typing a file name Gnome will open a text box and allow you to enter the file name with tab completion.
But how the hell are you supposed to know that? That's the sort of thing I (an 'experienced' computer user) might only stumble upon after a year or so.
Why in god's name does posting your opinion on something immediately mean you think a lot of your own opinion and are growing too big for your boots?
Loads of people make kde-gnome comments on lists all the time (usually much more pompously and obnoxiously). Are they all egomaniacs who have too many yes men behind them? The difference simply is that slashdot doesn't report on everything they post. Is Linus not allowed to voice his personal opinion on anything for fear of what the tabloids might say?
Honestly, it's like you guys are more interested in drama these days than technical discussion.
I've heard this one thrown around quite a lot. I don't think it washes. There are a lot of very complex pieces of software that run on Linux and are built with gcc and they don't constantly have performance problems.
But don't let everything I'm saying make you think I hate OO.o or something. Generally it works pretty well. It's the best we've got. For now.
Openoffice is so wierd and often buggy precisely because it follows the closed source mentality. A huge amount of insane staroffice code was realeased by Sun. It had been internally developed. It had/has wierd custom build mechanisms. It misuses integers as pointers (hence making it non-amd64 safe). It didn't use common printing mechanisms like cups. It used/uses its own very strange widget set. It used/uses its own font handling mechanisms. It used/uses its own spellchecking system. It's practically a desktop in itself.
It's wierd because it spent the first 90% of its life as a closed app. And it shows. Remeber when netscape released their code and the open source world had to basically start from scratch writing gecko because the code was so (dare I say it?) awful? Well OO.o is a project that is several times the size only they haven't had the opportunity to do a rewrite. On top of that it's mainly written by three (traditionally closed development) companies who are trying to pull it in slightly different directions (Sun, IBM & Novell).
Contrast with open-from-the-start projects such as koffice, abiword and gnumeric, which are generally accepted as being much better behaved, even though they might not have all of the features.
Thankyou. This is the first thing I noticed too. Obviously something that hasn't changed since its netscape days when they needed to be able to show something to PHBs who made purchasing decisions. A big dumb 'START SERVER' button. Please god let them unix-ise the software in the next few versions.
Because all other open source projects under the planet are licensed under the GPL, presumably?
No, but the most significant members of the Free software toolchain are.
No. The code is available to the community forever.
To do what with? The issue is not whether Sun can suddenly change its mind, but that you can't do something Sun doesn't want you to do with it. If you've grown to depend on the software and hit this restriction, it's almost as bad as being locked into proprietary software.
You seem to have a wide assortment of readily-available asses out of which to pull "creative" new ideas. If it can't be ported to another architecture,
And you seem to have a great talent for strawman attacks. I didn't say it "couldn't" be ported to other architectures. The powerpc port exists because Sun has embraced it and approves of it. If it were not in Sun's company interest to have Solaris (etc.) running on a particular family of processor (i.e. new architecture XYZ is a threat to their product lines), they could disallow it.
Also, on what do you base the idea that you can't fork it?
Ah, now you see this is where it gets complex. I too on first reading thought that it would allow forking, glossing over the patent paragraphs as that (I thought) was a seperate issue. You hit on it in your final paragraph. It's all about the patent licenses. Now as you say there are different interpretations on whether forks are 'protected*'. I personally interpret it to mean that they are not. Sun has one of the largest patent portfolios in the computer industry. Combining these factors, to me it doesn't really look like a nice stable place to base my long term software decisions on.
BSD stuff isn't under the GPL. Are you saying it's bad to license code purely under the BSD license?
Wow. Hyperbole strawman.
No. The (modified) BSD license is GPL compatible. It's a good license. I wouldn't personally use it.
In fact, if someone had their own source for a new project that they wanted to release and they were considering either the CDDL or the BSD license, can you make any kind of argument (other than "the BSD license existed first") that the BSD license isn't worse for maintaining the principles of open source software than the CDDL is?
This is irrelevant, but it depends what you mean by 'advise'. 'Advise' him on what would be better for the software and community in the long term or 'advise' him on the best license if he wanted control over the project and was perhaps thinking of going insane and filing hundreds of software patents? The CDDL would be great for that.
And what about Apache? That's licensed under the Apache License
No, it's not GPL compatible. But that's less objectionable because a) There isn't a huge intersection of code between the big GPL toolchain and Apache code. There is with opensolaris - it is basically performs the same function and there are huge amounts of code that could be shared. b) It isn't done (apparently) intentionally to drive an incompatibility wedge through the middle of the Free software world.
Really all I wanted to say is there we are rather poorly reiterating a huge thread that has been going on in debian-legal and lwn and rather than continue a huge ridiculous slashdot thread, it would be much better to read them. Because this is stupid.
* - 'protected' in the sense of 'sure would be a shame if your restaurant got firebombed.'
...because he's another whiney slashbot tosser who hates Sun for not giving away absolutely everything they own for free.
I don't "hate Sun". I don't give a shit about Sun. I'm just saying why I have absolutely no interest in the products that they're pushing - I already have a lot of very good software that's under a much better license.
And why the Free software community should resist having their momentum disrupted by Sun's apparently generous offer.
If Sun wants to keep their software completely closed and secret then fine. Good for them. That's none of my business.
The license is deliberately GPL incompatible. So you can't use anything from opensolaris for any other project. They're not 'giving' anything to the Free software community, as much as they would like people to believe otherwise.
Most significantly, it doesn't honor the most important freedom of Free software - independence from the vendor. If Sun decides to shut the playground gates tomorrow, that's it. If you've grown to depend on any of it, you're stuck inside.
If they don't want to port it to architecture X (that you need to run it on), you can't fork it. Decision made.
This is 'open source' code in the absolute worst meaning of the phrase, and a red herring as far as I'm concerned. "You can look, but keep your hands in your pockets."
And it's all under a license which is quite similar to the Mozilla Public License.
You're forgetting that Mozilla is dual licensed under the MPL and GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
This ignores the fact that they're still the ultimate in proprietary lock-in.
But not in any useful way (I hate how unix has become a buzzword.)
So? You can on windows with cygwin too. That doesn't mean it's very useful. The power of unix is how all the systems are interoperable open and modular and everything is controllable from the commandline. With MacOS, it's like having a unix emulator strapped on the side of a run of the mill proprietary desktop platform.
You obviously hang around with a lot of Apple apologists and armchair UI experts.
Translation:
MacOS's DVD player is just as useless as Windows in this regard. So you should all buy Macintoshes, because they've, like, got really cool logos and shit.
The thing is that even if it is the default browser, to connect to the internet, 95% of users will pop in the cd their ISP sent them, which will almost certainly set it to a (probably branded) version of IE.
I'm pretty sure GNOME has the same capability.
Yeah, it could be anything to do with audio. To do with audio recording, midi playing, audio synthesis, sequencing...
An MP3 player? I suppose it could be, but most people don't make the connection.
No it doesn't. Is it saying 'Linux' (?) should start giving things super-generic names? Well that's a great idea. Let's call things 'Media Player'. But who gets to decide which media player gets named the definitive 'Media Player'? And they may not realise that most obvious super generic names are already trademarked by someone.
I don't see anything wrong with Gnu (General?) Image Manipulation Program. Rather effective description if you ask me.
It's not like the windows world isn't full of stupid Win* names is it? Winamp? WTF? It's a pretty tenuous link that you're supposed to guess that 'Amp' means an MP3 player.
Hey, I'm going to start posting screenshots of dodgy windows shareware written by russian 15 year olds and talk about how much windows sucks because of it.
X developers are more interested in code than buzzwords like PDF. So if you think differently then yes, you should probably buy a computer from Apple.
I'm sure you're one of these people who believe that OSX's interface is all vector based and completely opengl accelerated and all based on PDFs. Well here's some news - 99% of it isn't.
Because the people in charge of distributing the binary packages are.. the distributions.
They're the only ones who can be trusted to get it right and consistant with their system.
You're just taking their word for it.
Mmm. Doesn't quite work like that.
A 16bit sampled piece of audio will have a maximum theoretical dynamic range of ~96.3dB. Typical acoustic guitar playing for instance has a dynamic range of ~115dB. The human ear can hear a difference.
"I can scare my enemies with this". The early guns (yes that's potentially a wide scope) were pretty useless for hunting. But they made a hell of a noise and were great at making the enemy flee. Occasionally with bits of lead in them.
And no, I'm not saying it's a bad invention. That's a pointless hypothetical to argue.
WTF? What the hell sort of reasoning is that? Who the hell are the "good guys"? Who the hell are the "bad guys"?
Only in America would such wooly headed thinking be accepted as valid reasoning.
Do you all live in an episode of '24'?
So you're supposed to try every meta-key/click combo on every widget to find out what features an app has?
Intuitive.
Why in god's name does posting your opinion on something immediately mean you think a lot of your own opinion and are growing too big for your boots?
Loads of people make kde-gnome comments on lists all the time (usually much more pompously and obnoxiously). Are they all egomaniacs who have too many yes men behind them? The difference simply is that slashdot doesn't report on everything they post. Is Linus not allowed to voice his personal opinion on anything for fear of what the tabloids might say?
Honestly, it's like you guys are more interested in drama these days than technical discussion.
I've heard this one thrown around quite a lot. I don't think it washes. There are a lot of very complex pieces of software that run on Linux and are built with gcc and they don't constantly have performance problems.
But don't let everything I'm saying make you think I hate OO.o or something. Generally it works pretty well. It's the best we've got. For now.
Openoffice is so wierd and often buggy precisely because it follows the closed source mentality. A huge amount of insane staroffice code was realeased by Sun. It had been internally developed. It had/has wierd custom build mechanisms. It misuses integers as pointers (hence making it non-amd64 safe). It didn't use common printing mechanisms like cups. It used/uses its own very strange widget set. It used/uses its own font handling mechanisms. It used/uses its own spellchecking system. It's practically a desktop in itself.
It's wierd because it spent the first 90% of its life as a closed app. And it shows. Remeber when netscape released their code and the open source world had to basically start from scratch writing gecko because the code was so (dare I say it?) awful? Well OO.o is a project that is several times the size only they haven't had the opportunity to do a rewrite. On top of that it's mainly written by three (traditionally closed development) companies who are trying to pull it in slightly different directions (Sun, IBM & Novell).
Contrast with open-from-the-start projects such as koffice, abiword and gnumeric, which are generally accepted as being much better behaved, even though they might not have all of the features.
Won't it go off as soon as it finds its own fritz chip?
Thankyou. This is the first thing I noticed too. Obviously something that hasn't changed since its netscape days when they needed to be able to show something to PHBs who made purchasing decisions. A big dumb 'START SERVER' button. Please god let them unix-ise the software in the next few versions.
No, but the most significant members of the Free software toolchain are.
To do what with? The issue is not whether Sun can suddenly change its mind, but that you can't do something Sun doesn't want you to do with it. If you've grown to depend on the software and hit this restriction, it's almost as bad as being locked into proprietary software.
And you seem to have a great talent for strawman attacks. I didn't say it "couldn't" be ported to other architectures. The powerpc port exists because Sun has embraced it and approves of it. If it were not in Sun's company interest to have Solaris (etc.) running on a particular family of processor (i.e. new architecture XYZ is a threat to their product lines), they could disallow it.
Ah, now you see this is where it gets complex. I too on first reading thought that it would allow forking, glossing over the patent paragraphs as that (I thought) was a seperate issue. You hit on it in your final paragraph. It's all about the patent licenses. Now as you say there are different interpretations on whether forks are 'protected*'. I personally interpret it to mean that they are not. Sun has one of the largest patent portfolios in the computer industry. Combining these factors, to me it doesn't really look like a nice stable place to base my long term software decisions on.
Wow. Hyperbole strawman.
No. The (modified) BSD license is GPL compatible. It's a good license. I wouldn't personally use it.
This is irrelevant, but it depends what you mean by 'advise'. 'Advise' him on what would be better for the software and community in the long term or 'advise' him on the best license if he wanted control over the project and was perhaps thinking of going insane and filing hundreds of software patents? The CDDL would be great for that.
No, it's not GPL compatible. But that's less objectionable because a) There isn't a huge intersection of code between the big GPL toolchain and Apache code. There is with opensolaris - it is basically performs the same function and there are huge amounts of code that could be shared. b) It isn't done (apparently) intentionally to drive an incompatibility wedge through the middle of the Free software world.
Really all I wanted to say is there we are rather poorly reiterating a huge thread that has been going on in debian-legal and lwn and rather than continue a huge ridiculous slashdot thread, it would be much better to read them. Because this is stupid.
* - 'protected' in the sense of 'sure would be a shame if your restaurant got firebombed.'
I don't "hate Sun". I don't give a shit about Sun. I'm just saying why I have absolutely no interest in the products that they're pushing - I already have a lot of very good software that's under a much better license.
And why the Free software community should resist having their momentum disrupted by Sun's apparently generous offer.
If Sun wants to keep their software completely closed and secret then fine. Good for them. That's none of my business.
Most significantly, it doesn't honor the most important freedom of Free software - independence from the vendor. If Sun decides to shut the playground gates tomorrow, that's it. If you've grown to depend on any of it, you're stuck inside.
If they don't want to port it to architecture X (that you need to run it on), you can't fork it. Decision made.
This is 'open source' code in the absolute worst meaning of the phrase, and a red herring as far as I'm concerned. "You can look, but keep your hands in your pockets."
You're forgetting that Mozilla is dual licensed under the MPL and GPL.
Sun's President and COO Jonathan Schwartz announced that Sun will be opening its enterprise software in a manner similar to Solaris 10.
So... not very much then.