a systems company that manages to reach demographics that most other technology companies (systems or not) don't target and/or don't reach, making them uniquely profitable.
So often the discussion on Slashdot is simply a matter of comparison: "The Apple ____ is similar to the Microsoft/Sony/HP/YouNameIt ____ but with a very narrow focus, therefore it is insufficiently flexible, particularly at a premium price point."
This kind of logic is often couched in "objective" terms but in fact represents a very particular value seen primarily in the technology/hacker community: general applicability/maximal flexibility. In this community these values are claimed to be "objective" goods, while other values like ease of use, system(s) integration, industrial design, simplicity, and even inflexibility (which is often, frankly, a need) are openly mocked as "objective" negatives.
In fact, what's at work here is a difference in users' value orientations. Apple often care less about flexibility/generality than other things, and there's nothing wrong with that just as there's nothing wrong with Slashdot geeks caring more about flexibility/generality than other things.
But it is not a stretch to say that the rest of the world doesn't see it as particularly "cool" that a single handheld device can (a) multi-boot four operating systems, (b) provide a remote login for multiple root accounts textual and graphical, (c) act as a remote control for multiple household entertainment systems, (d) be dropped into a Toyota as an engine ECU with real-time wireless reprogrammability, (e) be used as a logic probe and oscilloscope by plugging in optional cables, (f) receive HAM radio signals and run a version of KA9Q, (g) simulcast FM and Internet radio on/from user-chosen frequencies/addresses, (h) provide access to IMAP email and the mobile web, (i) act as a flashlight by turning the screen white, (j) offer a built-in high-resolution CCD capable of being programmed to operate as a scanner, as a camera, or in AI research for visual perception experimentation, and (k) with the addition of a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, act as a complete general-purpose computing system capable of playing all of the latest FPSes available to the operating systems mentioned at the start of this list in (a), all while fitting in a shirt pocket and light enough to be put on a keychain.
For a Slashdot user, this description is of a kind of "holy grail" device. For a non-Slashdot user, this is an incredible constrictive description of a device that likely requires extensive programming, extensive management, long and detailed user interface interactions to accomplish even simple tasks, low task parallelism, and a risky concentration of many functions into a single, no doubt highly expensive, device.
The goals are different. Apple is amazingly able to grok and fulfill the particular goals of one class of very productive user that does not happen to be the Slashdot user by designing fully integrated, high-usability, cost-effective systems to suit their needs.
because I was a longtime Fedora (since Fedora 1) and KDE (since KDE 1.0 Beta 3) user. When Fedora 9 (I believe) shipped with KDE4, I installed and determinedly used it for about a month and a half before it became clear that it was a time sink, unstable, poorly integrated, lacking in features and documentation and so on. It was, frankly, in my way.
Between Fedora 9 and Fedora 12 I used GNOME and logged into KDE periodically to see whether things had improved.
Throughout it all I submitted multiple bug reports and got back a whole bunch of WONTFIX, RESOLVED that didn't fix the problem at all, and instructions that if I wanted something fixed, I would have to do it myself. Each successive release would break any progress I'd made in getting the previous release to work the way that I wanted/needed it to, and major need didn't get addressed in either environment. And then GNOME announced the whole GNOME Shell fiasco to match the KDE4 fiasco and I immediately switched to Mac OS.
I still have a Linux install on my system (had been a Linux user since '93), but I only use it to do a few serious technical/maintenance tasks, which means that it rarely (once every 2-3 months) gets started.
Looking across the field at Firefox, OpenOffice, and Linux these days, it's starting to seem as though OSS is in danger of losing relevance.
KDE considers yet another massive reorganization and new version! Certainly this won't affect usability or the long term future of the project at all, just like the transition from KDE3 to KDE4 didn't!
the gray area of "all you have to do is spend X days, Y hours hacking on it and Z dollars buying cables and spare parts and you can *likely* get it to work, if you've followed the unofficial/hobbyist-written documentation correctly."
Apple's way saves you time and money. You know the limitations immediately, leaving you free to address them using other products/tools that are appropriate to the task. That is actually the Zen of Apple.
for far too long. I owned nothing Apple and had limited experience with Apple products from about 1985-2008. My biggest experience was with Newton, which I actually liked a lot, but of course that was some time ago.
In late 2008 I got an iPhone 3Gs. The device impressed the living hell out of me in comparison to other smartphones. iPad came out and the same thing happened; my first experience testing one made clear to me that this device was light years ahead of the other tablets I'd owned -- a Vadem Clio, a Fujitsu Stylistic, a Toshiba M200 -- in actual *usability* for general-purpose consumer information tasks.
So this summer I started playing with "hackintosh" OS X distros on a Thinkpad T60, even as my frustration with KDE4 (and the pending switch to Gnome Shell) grew to epic proportions. Within a few weeks it was clear I would eventually switch and the only question was when.
By September I'd become a Mac user with Linux installed on a drive (just because I'd somehow feel naked without Linux around somewhere) but not actually in use for day-day computing at all. With iTerm and Mac ports on Snow Leopard, I have a more stable and serious Unix feeling than I think I've had since the days of SunOS on a Sun 3/80 when I was a CS undergrad. It just feels right. It feels more Unix than Linux did in a surprising way, despite the odd filesystem layout and massive changes in things like the init system.
And the software purchasing ran downhill like a flood. I thought I was an OSS person, but within a month of switching I'd also bought Adobe CS5, Aperture, Office 2008/Mac, and iLife. And using these things seriously makes me regret the years spent coaxing every last bit of life out of GIMP, Gthumb, OpenOffice.org, and so on, not to mention the total absence of things like pervasive drag-and-drop from Linux environments.
Really, it amounts to growing up. I didn't realize how much productivity I lost to the ideological limitations of OSS platforms over the years (and I wrote a number of Linux and OSS books in the '90s and early '00s, so I'm no n00b) until the last few months with OS X.
The/. crowd may hate Apple, but if this were a three-way to-the-death between Microsoft, KDE/GNOME, and Apple, I'd be cheering for Apple all the way. They may be totalitarian, but their totalitarian world is damn near the utopian system that makes totalitarianism okay.
I started using Linux in 1993. This summer I switched to Mac OS X in frustration over usability issues, despite my technical preferences. I'd gladly pay $$$$ for a Linux based system with the integration, polish, and commercial-product-availability of Mac OS.
Unfortunately, such a system doesn't exist and is unlikely ever to exist, which is why I am now a Mac OS user.
You jailbreak, unlock, and do what you want. It stays jailbroken. I'm not saying that the Evo's not a nice phone (it's hella tempting from where I sit), but for all the handwringing about how the iPhone is a jail and Android is freedom, it certainly sounds as the differences are much more ideological than practical.
Mac Box Set (Mac OS 10.6.3, iWork 2009, iLife 2009) $169.00
Windows 7 Home + Office 2010 Home $328.00
Nevermind that the Microsoft set doesn't have any equivalents at all (much less included in the cost above) for iDVD, iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, or GarageBand.
And it's patently ridiculous on its face to suggest that Mac OS X users can only accomplish a "restricted to the point where success is a lot less meaningful" subset of tasks with their computing environments. That's troll territory.
Even Apple haters want things like what Apple produces - just not from Apple - witness Android phones and tablets. Google touches everybody too. We all use one or more Google services.
Best description I've read yet of the "irrational haters" in technology, who want the same features that everyone else is excited about, but can't admit it because they'll lose their "l33t" cred, so they "hate" all the companies/product offering said features, call everyone that buys such products or uses such features "mindless fanbois," then go off and buy either inferior kirf versions or they try inadequately to re-create the very same things via Sourceforge projects that languish in half-completedness for a decade as they badger people in Slashdot discussions about not using the "evil" products they've tried to copy.
Sorry haters, I have no problem admitting that I like commercial products if they do the job. And no, the alternatives often don't. Android is not an iPhone alternative; it simply doesn't offer the same benefits. No, no, no it doesn't. The social benefits (the app store and its cleanliness) are not equivalent; not even close. Same thing with Mac OS, which has superior social benefits (metaphor, signification/representation, visual cues, conceptual elements like filesystem layout and software packaging practices). But Slashdotters, true to stereotype, don't understand anything human or social; they fetishize technology. It's actually Slashdotters that are blind, self-defeating enthusiasts -- of grungy, dystopian metal-and-led assemblages, of overcomplicated user interfaces and APIs, of convoluted mashup projects, and of "open" code (even in cases in which it's actually totally nonfunctional; because it's not the function that matters to Slashdotters, but the form) which they conceptualize as some sort of rebellion against power.
In short, Slashdotters are basically wedded to the fantasy that they are living inside a dystopian cyberpunk novel and mock anyone that doesn't want to play along the way RPG gamers make fun of people that don't walk through Manhattan wearing suits of armor, carrying plastic swords, and speaking in Shakespearean English. Everybody else sees it as pitiful, but they wear that plastic sword like a badge of honor and are sure that it's everyone else that's a loser.
They use it because it... goes with their shoes. It has nothing to do with the fact that Apple software does the job it was meant to do, for less money, and with a better interface than the alternatives (Windows in the first case, Linux in the second).
and seeing how many of these fruits of your labor actually end up in future releases. (Hint: none, even if the bug does things like solve massive NTFS corruption or critical on-screen corruption in the ATI 2D driver, both of which are real attempts of mine.)
They say "U Want? U Fix!"
Then you do and they say it doesn't:
Fit with project goals Adhere to project style or standards Offer regression data about other use cases Solve a big enough problem to justify effort to include
Or they'll just ignore the hell out of you and eventually (as you noted) mark the bug as "solved" simply because bug submitters stop responding to repeated nonsense bug labor/reply requests after 2-3 years... even if there are replies (SOMETIMES DOZENS OF THEM) in the Bugzilla threads linking to WORKING PATCHES.
God I've had it with having to rebuild half of my packages from.src.rpm each release using hacked and rehacked patches, version after version, from Bugzilla discussions that never, ever seem to make it into the code year after year and release after release because arrogant maintainers have their heads up their asses.
THIS is why I'm done with FOSS. Just done. I loved it and the community in the '90s. Now it's mostly arrogant young hotshots with no particular interest in getting actual work done apart from the work of coding for coding's sake, implementing new experimental unstable (if not useful) features at the expense of old, stable, useful ones that most users rely on.
After all, u want... u fix! (But not in my project -- build your own codebase from scratch!)
I haven't replied to many posts in this thread because I am beyond tired with this discussion. That's why I switched to OS X.
But let me tell you: "your figure alone tells us nothing useful" is precisely why some of us switch. Maybe it tells you nothing useful, but to a bug reporter the bug is TREMENDOUSLY IMPORTANT and they very much hope that you FIND IT USEFUL.
I used to contribute patches. They used to be included. Then they were included less, and less, with discussions about project aims. Then I stopped sending patches and would just send bug reports. And they would at least stay in the system. Then I started getting detailed instructions on how maintainers wanted bug reports submitted. Then they started asking me to do things like build the latest revisions of KDE or GNOME subsystems and re-test, or buy another [laptop|display card|monitor|hard drive] and see if the problem persists. Then bugs started getting closed out more and more quickly with "WONTFIX" and snide comments about how the behavior I desire is ideologically incorrect.
The last straws were a series of "WONTFIX" and "NOT AN INTERESTING BUG" responses, despite me suffering things like massive data corruption.
"Behaves badly," "not that interesting," "won't fix," and "_nothing_ useful" are precisely the sorts of things that will quickly drive a person to another operating system, especially when three or four years ago they had a perfectly working Linux system and workflow but somehow a couple years later they're fighting system and maintainers All The Freaking Time to hold it together.
I'm a user. I'm not interested in being a developer. I want to USE.
Elsewhere in this thread someone said that in Windows/Mac OS you never actually get to personally interact with the maintainers, implying that this makes FOSS better.
Two responses to that:
(1) In other systems you know quite simply what the system does and what it doesn't do and you buy/choose accordingly. In FOSS you live in the fuzzy gray world of questions: How is it supposed to work? Is this a bug? Is it a feature I'm not using correctly? Should I file a report? Will the feature I'm using now disappear next month because my use case isn't interesting? There is an undercurrent of instability here demonstrating that the fact that you feel the need to talk to maintainers all the time is not necessarily a Good Thing[TM].
(2) 90 percent of the time these days, what you get from FOSS maintainers is: WONTFIX, UNINTERESTING, BEHAVES BADLY, or UWANT-UFIX. That's not actually all that much better than simply sending off a bug report to M$ and then crossing your fingers for the next three years that someone helps you out while doubting that it will occur.
from Linux this month after using Linux since 1993, I think this applies to all of FOSS.
Somehwere around 2000-2006 FOSS was basically head-and-head with commercial software in practical usability and maintainability, with its own distinct advantages and a relatively small learning curve.
Then there was this veer into "if you ever want all the Windows users to switch..." thinking, and in an effort to eliminate the learning curve FOSS threw away pretty much all of its advantages as well. If FOSS is just Windows/Mac OS/IE by another name, why choose FOSS?
Particularly when Windows/Mac OS/IE win on the polish, compatibility, and accessibility fronts by virtue of their being cathedral-built software?
With Firefox slow and cumbersome, Thunderbird choking on Gmail IMAP continuously while Apple's Mail.app sails along happily, and KDE4/GNOME3 being emblematic of the many ways in which FOSS has lost its way, I just decided I'd had enough of the nonsense. I'm ready to be able to walk into Best Buy, purchase any device, and expect that it will work seamlessly with the current generation of computing devices, without options, without Bugzilla (and condescendingly dismissive developer retorts), and without lots of consulting Google to find out how the gconf infrastructure has changed in the last two years or how HAL has been replaced by DeviceKit or policies moved from/etc tree A to uneditable dynamic filesystem B (but just use this easy command line management tool to set options...)
It just plain saves me a boatload of time and headache to use something else, like OS X plus Google apps plus Chrome. The pending desktopization of FOSS has fizzled thanks to the politics of the bazaar.
and to maintain dual Windows/Linux installs with latest OS versions and partitions full of applications and games.
DRM and serials and keys and activation actively ended my Windows partition. I eBayed off thousands of dollars in software, I stopped buying the latest version Windows and now just download the media and install whatever version is on the license sticker on my hardware and nothing more, and I do it in a tiny partition "just in case" I need access to Windows.
Basically, the hardware and software industries lost a customer that used to spend rather a lot of money on gaming hardware and on software of all kinds. Rather than continue to fight it all and feel cheated, I went 100 percent Linux. These days I'e started buying Mac OS X and installing in on PC hardware and paying for Mac OS applications instead. They're cheaper, the OS is better, and the DRM isn't as onerous.
I'm totally willing to buy software, but only if it's actually useful/usable long-term. DRM makes it useless/unusable or limits its utility to one or two installs that only work with a single version of Windows or a very limited and historically specific set of hardware.
I suppose what they want is for me to have to re-buy thousands upon thousands of dollars in software and hardware every six months. Not gonna happen. They should have been satisfied with once every 2-3 years.
I had thousands of dollars in games that I actively played in my spare time in the late '90s. I maintained an entire system just for gaming. Now I have just a handful of old Loki games under Linux that I play, mostly turn-based strategy. DRM and the resulting compatibility and durability/backup issues with the vast majority of PC games just made me feel like I was being had. The balance of "gaming time" shifted from actual gameplay to troubleshooting, DRM-fighting, hardware-DRM-compatibility researching/installing, and so on.
Totally not worth it, and today I basically wouldn't game again if DRM ended tomorrow. It was a fun hobby that I found meaningful in some way until I finally ended up completely disillusioned, and once that happens, you can't really get it back.
is not necessarily something that we should automatically accept.
Code should work. At least, that's the value I embrace.
If we say that "it works for 50 percent of the people and doesn't work for the other 50 percent," I'd say that that's equitable in some abstract way, but not desirable.
In fact, saying "it works for 90 percent of the people and doesn't work for the other 10 percent" is still subpar in my opinion, if "doesn't work" is a matter of actual bugs, not missing features or differences in UI preferences.
So to me, when someone says "codebase X is seriously unstable for me in situation Y," that's a far more important and/or critical datapoint than when someone says "codebase X works as expected for me in situation Y."
In fact, you might say that that's much of my frustration with the Linux community these days. Maybe I was just young and idealistic and I'm looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but it seems to me that in the '90s in the open source world, developers and other users really wanted to hear about bugs and there was a kind of "it should work everywhere and we should test for every contingency and all failures should be elegant" philosophy.
These days, it seems as though there's a lot more "It works for most of the people most of the time, so there's no reason we should try to serve a disgruntled minority. You're doing it wrong/change your hardware/sucks to be you."
I think this is one of the reasons I'm spending this weekend transitioning nearly 20 years of Linux-based life into Mac OS X 10.6.4. I've become too busy as my career has progressed to spend time dicking around with my own systems every time there's a hardware upgrade, software update, or the phase of the moon changes.
Back in the day, my Linux installs were rock solid and it was the "spare" partition for Windows that couldn't be depended on. The last 3 years or so, I've had the regrettable experience on any number of occasions of having to say "damn, that's suddenly not working and I don't have time to track down the issue and dick around with logs right now... I'll just reboot into Windows and do it there."
Yes, but you're not the only one that teaches in LA. Presumably if the numbers were released, you also wouldn't be at the bottom of the list and separated from the pack by an order of magnitude in performance.
It's not a witch hunt if all teachers are placed along a large spectrum of performance in which they can be compared against averages and their deviation in performance from said averages measured. And if you did happen to come up as somehow measurably worse than the vast majority of the other thousands of teachers, then you probably should be put on some sort of notice and evaluated very closely going forward.
(though at NYC colleges, not LA K-12), release the metrics. I'd have nothing to hide, and I'd suspect any teacher that doesn't want such things made public. As far as I'm concerned, prospective students have a right to know how other students have fared in my classes, what other students thought of my teaching, and how both have changed over time. If that makes a lot of people want to avoid my classes, maybe--just maybe--I'm in the wrong field of work.
The ATI X1400 works fine in Windows (can even game for hours some weekends without trouble), though the driver support files had to be edited to make the driver installable, given that ATI no longer supports the chipset, so no Windows 7 drivers.
That's 2D + 3D, rock solid.
In Linux, even in 2D (no 3D) with KMS disabled on an unpatched radeon driver (both in F12 and F13), I get icon corruption, cursor corruption and tearing, and risky Xrandr operations. All gets much, much worse if you start to try to use external monitors with higher resolution than the internal resolution.
A hack install of OS X Leopard with zero X1400 support using the X1000 driver works better, though you have to install Mouse Locator as a hack to hide cursor tearing. But once you do that, all is well, and it's much easier than installing all the needed patches for the radeon src.rpm to get stable graphics in Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Look around you, boy! What country do you think you're living in?
a systems company that manages to reach demographics that most other technology companies (systems or not) don't target and/or don't reach, making them uniquely profitable.
So often the discussion on Slashdot is simply a matter of comparison: "The Apple ____ is similar to the Microsoft/Sony/HP/YouNameIt ____ but with a very narrow focus, therefore it is insufficiently flexible, particularly at a premium price point."
This kind of logic is often couched in "objective" terms but in fact represents a very particular value seen primarily in the technology/hacker community: general applicability/maximal flexibility. In this community these values are claimed to be "objective" goods, while other values like ease of use, system(s) integration, industrial design, simplicity, and even inflexibility (which is often, frankly, a need) are openly mocked as "objective" negatives.
In fact, what's at work here is a difference in users' value orientations. Apple often care less about flexibility/generality than other things, and there's nothing wrong with that just as there's nothing wrong with Slashdot geeks caring more about flexibility/generality than other things.
But it is not a stretch to say that the rest of the world doesn't see it as particularly "cool" that a single handheld device can (a) multi-boot four operating systems, (b) provide a remote login for multiple root accounts textual and graphical, (c) act as a remote control for multiple household entertainment systems, (d) be dropped into a Toyota as an engine ECU with real-time wireless reprogrammability, (e) be used as a logic probe and oscilloscope by plugging in optional cables, (f) receive HAM radio signals and run a version of KA9Q, (g) simulcast FM and Internet radio on/from user-chosen frequencies/addresses, (h) provide access to IMAP email and the mobile web, (i) act as a flashlight by turning the screen white, (j) offer a built-in high-resolution CCD capable of being programmed to operate as a scanner, as a camera, or in AI research for visual perception experimentation, and (k) with the addition of a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, act as a complete general-purpose computing system capable of playing all of the latest FPSes available to the operating systems mentioned at the start of this list in (a), all while fitting in a shirt pocket and light enough to be put on a keychain.
For a Slashdot user, this description is of a kind of "holy grail" device. For a non-Slashdot user, this is an incredible constrictive description of a device that likely requires extensive programming, extensive management, long and detailed user interface interactions to accomplish even simple tasks, low task parallelism, and a risky concentration of many functions into a single, no doubt highly expensive, device.
The goals are different. Apple is amazingly able to grok and fulfill the particular goals of one class of very productive user that does not happen to be the Slashdot user by designing fully integrated, high-usability, cost-effective systems to suit their needs.
because I was a longtime Fedora (since Fedora 1) and KDE (since KDE 1.0 Beta 3) user. When Fedora 9 (I believe) shipped with KDE4, I installed and determinedly used it for about a month and a half before it became clear that it was a time sink, unstable, poorly integrated, lacking in features and documentation and so on. It was, frankly, in my way.
Between Fedora 9 and Fedora 12 I used GNOME and logged into KDE periodically to see whether things had improved.
Throughout it all I submitted multiple bug reports and got back a whole bunch of WONTFIX, RESOLVED that didn't fix the problem at all, and instructions that if I wanted something fixed, I would have to do it myself. Each successive release would break any progress I'd made in getting the previous release to work the way that I wanted/needed it to, and major need didn't get addressed in either environment. And then GNOME announced the whole GNOME Shell fiasco to match the KDE4 fiasco and I immediately switched to Mac OS.
I still have a Linux install on my system (had been a Linux user since '93), but I only use it to do a few serious technical/maintenance tasks, which means that it rarely (once every 2-3 months) gets started.
Looking across the field at Firefox, OpenOffice, and Linux these days, it's starting to seem as though OSS is in danger of losing relevance.
KDE considers yet another massive reorganization and new version! Certainly this won't affect usability or the long term future of the project at all, just like the transition from KDE3 to KDE4 didn't!
Yeah, because MS Silverlight is *so* easy to view in Linux in comparison to HTML5.
Ideology is spread pretty thick around these parts.
also runs iOS.
the gray area of "all you have to do is spend X days, Y hours hacking on it and Z dollars buying cables and spare parts and you can *likely* get it to work, if you've followed the unofficial/hobbyist-written documentation correctly."
Apple's way saves you time and money. You know the limitations immediately, leaving you free to address them using other products/tools that are appropriate to the task. That is actually the Zen of Apple.
for far too long. I owned nothing Apple and had limited experience with Apple products from about 1985-2008. My biggest experience was with Newton, which I actually liked a lot, but of course that was some time ago.
In late 2008 I got an iPhone 3Gs. The device impressed the living hell out of me in comparison to other smartphones. iPad came out and the same thing happened; my first experience testing one made clear to me that this device was light years ahead of the other tablets I'd owned -- a Vadem Clio, a Fujitsu Stylistic, a Toshiba M200 -- in actual *usability* for general-purpose consumer information tasks.
So this summer I started playing with "hackintosh" OS X distros on a Thinkpad T60, even as my frustration with KDE4 (and the pending switch to Gnome Shell) grew to epic proportions. Within a few weeks it was clear I would eventually switch and the only question was when.
By September I'd become a Mac user with Linux installed on a drive (just because I'd somehow feel naked without Linux around somewhere) but not actually in use for day-day computing at all. With iTerm and Mac ports on Snow Leopard, I have a more stable and serious Unix feeling than I think I've had since the days of SunOS on a Sun 3/80 when I was a CS undergrad. It just feels right. It feels more Unix than Linux did in a surprising way, despite the odd filesystem layout and massive changes in things like the init system.
And the software purchasing ran downhill like a flood. I thought I was an OSS person, but within a month of switching I'd also bought Adobe CS5, Aperture, Office 2008/Mac, and iLife. And using these things seriously makes me regret the years spent coaxing every last bit of life out of GIMP, Gthumb, OpenOffice.org, and so on, not to mention the total absence of things like pervasive drag-and-drop from Linux environments.
Really, it amounts to growing up. I didn't realize how much productivity I lost to the ideological limitations of OSS platforms over the years (and I wrote a number of Linux and OSS books in the '90s and early '00s, so I'm no n00b) until the last few months with OS X.
The /. crowd may hate Apple, but if this were a three-way to-the-death between Microsoft, KDE/GNOME, and Apple, I'd be cheering for Apple all the way. They may be totalitarian, but their totalitarian world is damn near the utopian system that makes totalitarianism okay.
I started using Linux in 1993. This summer I switched to Mac OS X in frustration over usability issues, despite my technical preferences. I'd gladly pay $$$$ for a Linux based system with the integration, polish, and commercial-product-availability of Mac OS.
Unfortunately, such a system doesn't exist and is unlikely ever to exist, which is why I am now a Mac OS user.
with MyFi?
You jailbreak, unlock, and do what you want. It stays jailbroken. I'm not saying that the Evo's not a nice phone (it's hella tempting from where I sit), but for all the handwringing about how the iPhone is a jail and Android is freedom, it certainly sounds as the differences are much more ideological than practical.
Simple bullshit.
Mac Box Set
(Mac OS 10.6.3, iWork 2009, iLife 2009)
$169.00
Windows 7 Home + Office 2010 Home
$328.00
Nevermind that the Microsoft set doesn't have any equivalents at all (much less included in the cost above) for iDVD, iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, or GarageBand.
And it's patently ridiculous on its face to suggest that Mac OS X users can only accomplish a "restricted to the point where success is a lot less meaningful" subset of tasks with their computing environments. That's troll territory.
Even Apple haters want things like what Apple produces - just not from Apple - witness Android phones and tablets. Google touches everybody too. We all use one or more Google services.
Best description I've read yet of the "irrational haters" in technology, who want the same features that everyone else is excited about, but can't admit it because they'll lose their "l33t" cred, so they "hate" all the companies/product offering said features, call everyone that buys such products or uses such features "mindless fanbois," then go off and buy either inferior kirf versions or they try inadequately to re-create the very same things via Sourceforge projects that languish in half-completedness for a decade as they badger people in Slashdot discussions about not using the "evil" products they've tried to copy.
Sorry haters, I have no problem admitting that I like commercial products if they do the job. And no, the alternatives often don't. Android is not an iPhone alternative; it simply doesn't offer the same benefits. No, no, no it doesn't. The social benefits (the app store and its cleanliness) are not equivalent; not even close. Same thing with Mac OS, which has superior social benefits (metaphor, signification/representation, visual cues, conceptual elements like filesystem layout and software packaging practices). But Slashdotters, true to stereotype, don't understand anything human or social; they fetishize technology. It's actually Slashdotters that are blind, self-defeating enthusiasts -- of grungy, dystopian metal-and-led assemblages, of overcomplicated user interfaces and APIs, of convoluted mashup projects, and of "open" code (even in cases in which it's actually totally nonfunctional; because it's not the function that matters to Slashdotters, but the form) which they conceptualize as some sort of rebellion against power.
In short, Slashdotters are basically wedded to the fantasy that they are living inside a dystopian cyberpunk novel and mock anyone that doesn't want to play along the way RPG gamers make fun of people that don't walk through Manhattan wearing suits of armor, carrying plastic swords, and speaking in Shakespearean English. Everybody else sees it as pitiful, but they wear that plastic sword like a badge of honor and are sure that it's everyone else that's a loser.
They use it because it... goes with their shoes. It has nothing to do with the fact that Apple software does the job it was meant to do, for less money, and with a better interface than the alternatives (Windows in the first case, Linux in the second).
and seeing how many of these fruits of your labor actually end up in future releases. (Hint: none, even if the bug does things like solve massive NTFS corruption or critical on-screen corruption in the ATI 2D driver, both of which are real attempts of mine.)
They say "U Want? U Fix!"
Then you do and they say it doesn't:
Fit with project goals
Adhere to project style or standards
Offer regression data about other use cases
Solve a big enough problem to justify effort to include
Or they'll just ignore the hell out of you and eventually (as you noted) mark the bug as "solved" simply because bug submitters stop responding to repeated nonsense bug labor/reply requests after 2-3 years... even if there are replies (SOMETIMES DOZENS OF THEM) in the Bugzilla threads linking to WORKING PATCHES.
God I've had it with having to rebuild half of my packages from .src.rpm each release using hacked and rehacked patches, version after version, from Bugzilla discussions that never, ever seem to make it into the code year after year and release after release because arrogant maintainers have their heads up their asses.
THIS is why I'm done with FOSS. Just done. I loved it and the community in the '90s. Now it's mostly arrogant young hotshots with no particular interest in getting actual work done apart from the work of coding for coding's sake, implementing new experimental unstable (if not useful) features at the expense of old, stable, useful ones that most users rely on.
After all, u want... u fix! (But not in my project -- build your own codebase from scratch!)
I haven't replied to many posts in this thread because I am beyond tired with this discussion. That's why I switched to OS X.
But let me tell you: "your figure alone tells us nothing useful" is precisely why some of us switch. Maybe it tells you nothing useful, but to a bug reporter the bug is TREMENDOUSLY IMPORTANT and they very much hope that you FIND IT USEFUL.
I used to contribute patches.
They used to be included.
Then they were included less, and less, with discussions about project aims.
Then I stopped sending patches and would just send bug reports.
And they would at least stay in the system.
Then I started getting detailed instructions on how maintainers wanted bug reports submitted.
Then they started asking me to do things like build the latest revisions of KDE or GNOME subsystems and re-test, or buy another [laptop|display card|monitor|hard drive] and see if the problem persists.
Then bugs started getting closed out more and more quickly with "WONTFIX" and snide comments about how the behavior I desire is ideologically incorrect.
The last straws were a series of "WONTFIX" and "NOT AN INTERESTING BUG" responses, despite me suffering things like massive data corruption.
"Behaves badly," "not that interesting," "won't fix," and "_nothing_ useful" are precisely the sorts of things that will quickly drive a person to another operating system, especially when three or four years ago they had a perfectly working Linux system and workflow but somehow a couple years later they're fighting system and maintainers All The Freaking Time to hold it together.
I'm a user. I'm not interested in being a developer. I want to USE.
Elsewhere in this thread someone said that in Windows/Mac OS you never actually get to personally interact with the maintainers, implying that this makes FOSS better.
Two responses to that:
(1) In other systems you know quite simply what the system does and what it doesn't do and you buy/choose accordingly. In FOSS you live in the fuzzy gray world of questions: How is it supposed to work? Is this a bug? Is it a feature I'm not using correctly? Should I file a report? Will the feature I'm using now disappear next month because my use case isn't interesting? There is an undercurrent of instability here demonstrating that the fact that you feel the need to talk to maintainers all the time is not necessarily a Good Thing[TM].
(2) 90 percent of the time these days, what you get from FOSS maintainers is: WONTFIX, UNINTERESTING, BEHAVES BADLY, or UWANT-UFIX. That's not actually all that much better than simply sending off a bug report to M$ and then crossing your fingers for the next three years that someone helps you out while doubting that it will occur.
from Linux this month after using Linux since 1993, I think this applies to all of FOSS.
Somehwere around 2000-2006 FOSS was basically head-and-head with commercial software in practical usability and maintainability, with its own distinct advantages and a relatively small learning curve.
Then there was this veer into "if you ever want all the Windows users to switch..." thinking, and in an effort to eliminate the learning curve FOSS threw away pretty much all of its advantages as well. If FOSS is just Windows/Mac OS/IE by another name, why choose FOSS?
Particularly when Windows/Mac OS/IE win on the polish, compatibility, and accessibility fronts by virtue of their being cathedral-built software?
With Firefox slow and cumbersome, Thunderbird choking on Gmail IMAP continuously while Apple's Mail.app sails along happily, and KDE4/GNOME3 being emblematic of the many ways in which FOSS has lost its way, I just decided I'd had enough of the nonsense. I'm ready to be able to walk into Best Buy, purchase any device, and expect that it will work seamlessly with the current generation of computing devices, without options, without Bugzilla (and condescendingly dismissive developer retorts), and without lots of consulting Google to find out how the gconf infrastructure has changed in the last two years or how HAL has been replaced by DeviceKit or policies moved from /etc tree A to uneditable dynamic filesystem B (but just use this easy command line management tool to set options...)
It just plain saves me a boatload of time and headache to use something else, like OS X plus Google apps plus Chrome. The pending desktopization of FOSS has fizzled thanks to the politics of the bazaar.
and to maintain dual Windows/Linux installs with latest OS versions and partitions full of applications and games.
DRM and serials and keys and activation actively ended my Windows partition. I eBayed off thousands of dollars in software, I stopped buying the latest version Windows and now just download the media and install whatever version is on the license sticker on my hardware and nothing more, and I do it in a tiny partition "just in case" I need access to Windows.
Basically, the hardware and software industries lost a customer that used to spend rather a lot of money on gaming hardware and on software of all kinds. Rather than continue to fight it all and feel cheated, I went 100 percent Linux. These days I'e started buying Mac OS X and installing in on PC hardware and paying for Mac OS applications instead. They're cheaper, the OS is better, and the DRM isn't as onerous.
I'm totally willing to buy software, but only if it's actually useful/usable long-term. DRM makes it useless/unusable or limits its utility to one or two installs that only work with a single version of Windows or a very limited and historically specific set of hardware.
I suppose what they want is for me to have to re-buy thousands upon thousands of dollars in software and hardware every six months. Not gonna happen. They should have been satisfied with once every 2-3 years.
I had thousands of dollars in games that I actively played in my spare time in the late '90s. I maintained an entire system just for gaming. Now I have just a handful of old Loki games under Linux that I play, mostly turn-based strategy. DRM and the resulting compatibility and durability/backup issues with the vast majority of PC games just made me feel like I was being had. The balance of "gaming time" shifted from actual gameplay to troubleshooting, DRM-fighting, hardware-DRM-compatibility researching/installing, and so on.
Totally not worth it, and today I basically wouldn't game again if DRM ended tomorrow. It was a fun hobby that I found meaningful in some way until I finally ended up completely disillusioned, and once that happens, you can't really get it back.
is not necessarily something that we should automatically accept.
Code should work. At least, that's the value I embrace.
If we say that "it works for 50 percent of the people and doesn't work for the other 50 percent," I'd say that that's equitable in some abstract way, but not desirable.
In fact, saying "it works for 90 percent of the people and doesn't work for the other 10 percent" is still subpar in my opinion, if "doesn't work" is a matter of actual bugs, not missing features or differences in UI preferences.
So to me, when someone says "codebase X is seriously unstable for me in situation Y," that's a far more important and/or critical datapoint than when someone says "codebase X works as expected for me in situation Y."
In fact, you might say that that's much of my frustration with the Linux community these days. Maybe I was just young and idealistic and I'm looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but it seems to me that in the '90s in the open source world, developers and other users really wanted to hear about bugs and there was a kind of "it should work everywhere and we should test for every contingency and all failures should be elegant" philosophy.
These days, it seems as though there's a lot more "It works for most of the people most of the time, so there's no reason we should try to serve a disgruntled minority. You're doing it wrong/change your hardware/sucks to be you."
I think this is one of the reasons I'm spending this weekend transitioning nearly 20 years of Linux-based life into Mac OS X 10.6.4. I've become too busy as my career has progressed to spend time dicking around with my own systems every time there's a hardware upgrade, software update, or the phase of the moon changes.
Back in the day, my Linux installs were rock solid and it was the "spare" partition for Windows that couldn't be depended on. The last 3 years or so, I've had the regrettable experience on any number of occasions of having to say "damn, that's suddenly not working and I don't have time to track down the issue and dick around with logs right now... I'll just reboot into Windows and do it there."
Not good.
Yes, but you're not the only one that teaches in LA. Presumably if the numbers were released, you also wouldn't be at the bottom of the list and separated from the pack by an order of magnitude in performance.
It's not a witch hunt if all teachers are placed along a large spectrum of performance in which they can be compared against averages and their deviation in performance from said averages measured. And if you did happen to come up as somehow measurably worse than the vast majority of the other thousands of teachers, then you probably should be put on some sort of notice and evaluated very closely going forward.
(though at NYC colleges, not LA K-12), release the metrics. I'd have nothing to hide, and I'd suspect any teacher that doesn't want such things made public. As far as I'm concerned, prospective students have a right to know how other students have fared in my classes, what other students thought of my teaching, and how both have changed over time. If that makes a lot of people want to avoid my classes, maybe--just maybe--I'm in the wrong field of work.
This is the common Linux community response these days. "Works for me."
Hooray. Glad for you. Are you suggesting that I download and install Ubuntu? I have better things to do than jump around from distro to distro.
How about we stop the fanboism and suggest that developers write and maintain code that works well and/or fails *elegantly* for all downstreams?
fanboi. GPU fanboism is the only sort of fanboism more embarrassing than smartphone fanboism.
Xorg ATI driver. Oops.
The ATI X1400 works fine in Windows (can even game for hours some weekends without trouble), though the driver support files had to be edited to make the driver installable, given that ATI no longer supports the chipset, so no Windows 7 drivers.
That's 2D + 3D, rock solid.
In Linux, even in 2D (no 3D) with KMS disabled on an unpatched radeon driver (both in F12 and F13), I get icon corruption, cursor corruption and tearing, and risky Xrandr operations. All gets much, much worse if you start to try to use external monitors with higher resolution than the internal resolution.
A hack install of OS X Leopard with zero X1400 support using the X1000 driver works better, though you have to install Mouse Locator as a hack to hide cursor tearing. But once you do that, all is well, and it's much easier than installing all the needed patches for the radeon src.rpm to get stable graphics in Linux.