I have a Powerbook G4, and I dual boot between Linux and OS X. Under Linux, I run KDE. Under OS X, I run Aqua and OroborOSX.
I've got to tell you, KDE kicks Aqua's ass as a GUI. The multiple desktops, configurable hotkeys, tabbed Konsoles (with keystrokes for opening new tabs and switching between them), Konqueror, and KMail (with its ability to use gvim for editing) just stomp on the single-desktop, click-to-focus, barely-keyboardable Aqua for sheer productivity value.
I run OS X mostly to play. The ability to (easily) play DVDs; iTunes (hands down the *best* mp3 management software I've ever seen); Fire.app; and the fun of tinkering with a new OS.
For the past couple of days at work, I've booted the powerbook into OS X, but to actually Get Work Done I've fired up OroborOSX and run Konsole and KMail off of my desktop Slackware machine. It's not the prettiest desktop in the world when I do that, but it gets the job done and I get to toy with OS X when I need a break. I'll probably go back to booting it into Linux when I get back from vacation, though, as it's just so much easier to get around in.
Maybe those "it's the applications!" weenies are right... but OS X still seems to have a GUI that's designed around the idea that you'll probably be doing, at most, two things at a time. For a lot of people this isn't the case, and KDE addresses their (our) needs much better.
Incidentally, if you drop below the GUI, I still generally find Slackware easier to work with... it uses a lot more of the GNU software I know and love, which tends to be more featureful and flexible than its BSD counterparts. OS X also feels a bit like you're not really supposed to be running around down there under the GUI, but maybe that's just because I'm not comfortable in it yet.
I haven't had much luck with previous releases (or nightlies, for that matter) under Linux. Konqueror still holds down its position as my favorite browser over there, for a variety of reasons.
But I just got the 0.9.7 binary for OS X, and it kicks all ass. Finally, a Mozilla that is stable, fast, and featureful enough for daily use has been released... and I now have an outstanding (and [Ff]ree!) browser I can use on this OS.
Bye bye, IE. Bye bye, OmniWeb. Thanks, Mozilla team!
That's a nice argument, but even though a small percentage of downloaders actually do this, they are definately in the minority. You can't really base a decision like this on what some people do, rather how it going to be used most of the time.
Are they? That's not been my experience. A poll would be interesting. (Not a Slashdot poll, that would obviously be skewed to hell and back.)
Applying this to software or research and development for any organisation: Does this make it ok for warez kiddies to steal software just because they weren't going to buy it? Does it make it ok for small companies to steal technical secrets from big companies, because they weren't going to research them anyway? [Hint: The answer is no.]
Thanks for the hint. The condescension was both well-placed and well-executed. Wait, no it wasn't. You just missed the point.
I didn't cite Huey's kid by way of justification. The point, as I said in my first sentence, was that the RIAA is fighting an uphill battle against what really seems to be in its own best interest. Obviously they have the right to attempt to fight this thing, but it's really pretty stupid in light of the fact that downloadable music only seems to fuel record sales.
Have I bought every album containing a song I downloaded and liked? No, of course not. But I've bought more music overall because of my ability to first find and listen to it for free. There were interesting reports published in the last couple of years that showed record sales increasing relatively steadily, with a bump upward a little while after Napster became popular. You can treat that as rumor, since I don't have a link to said reports handy, but I think they did show up on Slashdot.
Sometimes, that's a gamble that just doesn't make sense. Nobody's going to stage a download-in, publically load up their laptops with pirated music, and then go to jail en masse.
For one thing, most people wouldn't consider it worthwhile. This isn't about basic human rights, it's about consumer rights, and that's a whole different-- and less urgent-- ballgame.
So, the relevance of this post to yours is hanging by a thread, but this is more or less on the subject of the RIAA fighting a good thing because they're idiots.
Yesterday morning, as I was sitting in traffic on 680 wishing I'd attached an outboard motor to my car, I got to hear an interview with Huey Lewis on a local radio talk show.
The interviewer asked Huey what he thought of the whole "downloading thing", and his answer was that it was "complicated", but that his son downloads stuff all the time (that's hearsay, you Feds, you leave Huey's kid alone!) and when he finds something he likes he buys the album. So Huey didn't really have a problem with it.
When the interviewer mentioned that he himself downloads a fair bit of music, but doesn't buy many CDs, Huey pointed out that people their age just never bought (or sold) much music anyway, relatively speaking... it's far and away a kids' market.
Um, this is kinda sorta completely different in that KaZaa isn't the executive branch of a damned thing, and the court could most certainly have its order enforced on them.
KaZaa may be lucky enough to wiggle out of this one because of the prior court order. This is hardly them staring down The Man.
I wanted to like FFVII and FFVIII, I really did. They had some really nifty effects, some interesting character design, and some really cool gameplay elements (Chocobos!).
Unfortunately, interesting character design and nifty effects only go so far. The cool gameplay elements are really few and far between, and more often than not turn out to be less fun than you'd think. After thirty hours of step, fight, step, fight, step, fight I just got bored. Well, more accurately, the games each got to a point where I wasn't entirely certain what I was to do next, and I didn't really get the opportunity to find out because of all the freaking battles I was getting sucked into.
Then again, Chrono Cross didn't have that problem, and I pretty much got tired of it after a while, too. Maybe it's just the formulaic gameplay. With the rare exception of a handful of puzzles, these "RPGs" seem to consist entirely of nearly-identical battles broken up by cutscenes that present you with excruciatingly long chunks of bland melodrama. And the game goes on forever in this manner. I have incomplete savegames for each of the aforementioned titles.
That really sucks, too, because the Final Fantasy games are always so pretty. I'll actually probably end up buying FFX just so I can summon me some badass Ifrit or something. Sigh.
First of all, I never called anyone an idiot. So you can eat me.
Second, a trademark is a trademark. Whether it's a company name or a product name is irrelevant. Even if for some reason you think it should, in some alternate universe where logic is based primarily on coin flips, be relevant as a matter of degree, you might recognize that Windows is Microsoft's flagship product. Calling your OS "Lindows" is tantamount to naming your company Nicrosoft.
And incidentally, I don't think "Lindows.com" is going to stay in business for very long, and one could make a very sound argument that Microsoft has "earned its place".
Okay, so that means I'm not allowed to make any operating system component with a name ending in "indows"? This is almost as bad as McDonalds trademarking the "Mc" prefix. AAARRRRGGH!
No, this is more analagous to you opening up a fast-food hamburger chain called "McRonald's" with a clown named Donald McRonald for a mascot and a big golden "R" as your logo.
"indows" constitutes nearly every letter and sound in "[WL]indows", and the product is ridiculously similar by intent.
"I'm a completely original character, like Monald Muck, or Ricky Rouse!"
First of all, it's "copyright", not "copywrite". As in "right to copy", dig?
Second, this isn't about copyrights. It's about trademarks. And if someone pops up in your market with an extremely similar name and a product that aims to subsume the functionality of yours, it is not unreasonable to consider that an infringement of your trademark.
You're splitting some pretty fine hairs if you consider these products to be in different markets.. they're both operating systems for x86 computers, and the entire point of Lindows is to offer the same functionality (and then some) of Windows.
Thats too true. Rumor has it Nintendo lost the Square franchise over, essentially, their adamant game guidelines put in place to maintain their image as a youngster friendly system.
I don't buy that rumour... Gamecube is going to be carrying the Resident Evil series for a while, after all.
Re:Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris
on
Happy Birthday Perl!
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· Score: 4, Insightful
That's False Laziness. A real lazy programmer documents his code thoroughly, so that he doesn't have to put any effort later into understanding or explaining it.
This is going to ramble a bit, because I'm already going to be late for work...
You know, nobody who actually develops software thinks like this. The problem is simply that people who develop software tend to be very comfortable with a lot of interface ideas, and therefore tend to pick whichever one works the best for a given piece of their application, without so much realizing that in the overall scheme of things they might be better off simplifying it a bit.
Believe me, we want to make it easy for the user. The easier the software is to use, the happier people will be with it, the better it will sell, the less you'll have to go back and rework interface elements.
Sometimes, if the target audience has a bit more experience or you're working on a technically specialized application, you tend to make things easier for your target users by using interface ideas that would make it harder for someone who just walked in off the street and decided to play with your software. That's generally as it should be... if I'm working on a handy little Unix utility, I generally shouldn't bother to slap a GUI around it and design a nice icon; what my users are going to want is a solid set of (long and short) commandline options, a useful configuration file, and the ability to pass in data on stdin.
At any rate, accusing your post's parent of elitism seems entirely uncalled-for... he's right: The concept of a big empty desktop behind your windows never confused anybody. The big expanding tree structure does suck hard when you apply it to a large directory structure. People who learn the keyboard shortcuts for their apps do generally have far better performance.
And someone else brought up an interesting point, which is that most people spend most of their time in a few applications... only so much time and effort should be spent trying to unify the interfaces of all applications, and it really shouldn't be done at the expense of optimizing for each application.
The flipside is that advanced users tend to recommend applications that have very powerful interfaces, which newer users tend to have trouble with because they're so highly optimized: vim, emacs, Excel, Photoshop, ksh... And they're right, if you learn to use those programs, you will discover that they're very powerful. If you can't be bothered to learn their interfaces, well, you'll just be relegated to using less powerful generically-interfaced software. This is not elitism, it's just a matter of optimization.
This comes up every single time there's an interface discussion... frankly, I just don't understand it.
What would be the advantage? Extra space? We have multiple desktops and three or four methods of window minimization and hiding. Easier navigation? Since when can't you map a tree into 2D perfectly adequately, and simply? We have a few ways of doing that, too. More intuitive interface? Sorry, but there's nothing intuitive about having to look around in multiple dimensions (mapped, incidentally, to two dimensions on your monitor) to find a window or icon or whatever you've misplaced.
As long as our data is primarily text-based and our displays are physically two-dimensional, 3D interfaces are going to both be pointless and suck. And you'd be hard put to convince me that a physical 3D interface would be practical for most applications.
Sorry, but the gee-whiz-neato-"imagine all the pretty polyhedrons" just doesn't translate into "good idea".
Repeat after me: "I have five DVD-capable machines in one room. I am not most people."
Keep that up until you realize that you are not the control case.
Re:If you can't beat them, Join them
on
Sony vs Modchips
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· Score: 2
On one disc, yeah. More annoyingly, I have an "Aliens: Special Edition" disc that the PS2 won't read at all.
I'm mad at Sony for not telling me whether their new drivers address such issues, and mad at Fox for selling me a transparent DVD (which I vaguely suspect may be the problem).
I'm working on a PS2/DVD compatibility database, and may or may not finish it. If I do, I'll put it online with a decent interface so people can update it with their own findings... the couple of lists I've found online are manually compiled and infrequently updated.
Re:If you can't beat them, Join them
on
Sony vs Modchips
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· Score: 2
You know, I'm all for this sort of thing from software publishers in general.
I don't really care about import games, and I'm not particularly interested in pirating domestic releases, either. Let's face it, there aren't enough good games to make piracy worthwhile... I'll just buy the handful that don't suck. But I'm interested in a mod chip so that I can play burned copies of the games I've licensed and leave the originals in their cases. If Sony would happily replace any disc that got damaged (for a nominal replication fee, even), my interest in a mod chip would be nil.
Of course, Sony isn't exactly "customer-oriented", so we'll probably never be so lucky. I think the PS2 is going to be my last Sony electronics purchase... the DVD issues (with absolutely no information on their new drivers, other than that you can buy them with a $20 remote) have pretty much sealed that for me.
its really nothing more than a psychological warefare mission to put fear into the hearts of the enemy
Are you kidding? I mean, yeah, it's obviously got a psychological impact... but carpet bombing is massively destructive. Nobody launches a precise, laser-guided missile per vehicle at an enemy convoy. They just drop a shitload of bombs on the general area and call it a day.
B1-Bs are faster, can fly lower, avoid radar better, and have better electronic counter-measures, but the biggest cause of loss to our bombers crashing isn't speed, altitude, radar detection, or anti-aircraft missiles, it's that they break!
Well, that sort of follows, doesn't it? If you greatly reduce the number of losses due to problesm relating to speed, altitude, radar detection, and anti-aircraft missiles, of course the biggest cause of loss is going to be breakage. Process of elimination, and all that.
Now, if we were losing more money (and people, that's important) invested B1-B bombers to breakage than we were money invested in B-52 bombers to all of those other factors, it could make more sense to scrap the B1-B and revert to B-52 production.
But you also have to factor in the building cost of the B-52 and the maintenance cost of the B1-B, which you haven't.:)
Why is a five-kilometer clearance not good enough? Is it that the people tracking the two objects weren't certain enough of their calculations, or that it was likely something would alter the course of the rocket fragment? How far away from that 5km pass-by were the two objects when the call was made?
So, just because I'm curious and have the karma to burn... how exactly is my previous post offtopic? The poster of the parent was clearly pining for a user-edited discussion site, and I pointed him to one he might like. I was all over his topic.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got to tell you, KDE kicks Aqua's ass as a GUI. The multiple desktops, configurable hotkeys, tabbed Konsoles (with keystrokes for opening new tabs and switching between them), Konqueror, and KMail (with its ability to use gvim for editing) just stomp on the single-desktop, click-to-focus, barely-keyboardable Aqua for sheer productivity value.
I run OS X mostly to play. The ability to (easily) play DVDs; iTunes (hands down the *best* mp3 management software I've ever seen); Fire.app; and the fun of tinkering with a new OS.
For the past couple of days at work, I've booted the powerbook into OS X, but to actually Get Work Done I've fired up OroborOSX and run Konsole and KMail off of my desktop Slackware machine. It's not the prettiest desktop in the world when I do that, but it gets the job done and I get to toy with OS X when I need a break. I'll probably go back to booting it into Linux when I get back from vacation, though, as it's just so much easier to get around in.
Maybe those "it's the applications!" weenies are right... but OS X still seems to have a GUI that's designed around the idea that you'll probably be doing, at most, two things at a time. For a lot of people this isn't the case, and KDE addresses their (our) needs much better.
Incidentally, if you drop below the GUI, I still generally find Slackware easier to work with... it uses a lot more of the GNU software I know and love, which tends to be more featureful and flexible than its BSD counterparts. OS X also feels a bit like you're not really supposed to be running around down there under the GUI, but maybe that's just because I'm not comfortable in it yet.
But I just got the 0.9.7 binary for OS X, and it kicks all ass. Finally, a Mozilla that is stable, fast, and featureful enough for daily use has been released... and I now have an outstanding (and [Ff]ree!) browser I can use on this OS.
Bye bye, IE. Bye bye, OmniWeb. Thanks, Mozilla team!
Are they? That's not been my experience. A poll would be interesting. (Not a Slashdot poll, that would obviously be skewed to hell and back.)
Applying this to software or research and development for any organisation: Does this make it ok for warez kiddies to steal software just because they weren't going to buy it? Does it make it ok for small companies to steal technical secrets from big companies, because they weren't going to research them anyway? [Hint: The answer is no.]
Thanks for the hint. The condescension was both well-placed and well-executed. Wait, no it wasn't. You just missed the point.
I didn't cite Huey's kid by way of justification. The point, as I said in my first sentence, was that the RIAA is fighting an uphill battle against what really seems to be in its own best interest. Obviously they have the right to attempt to fight this thing, but it's really pretty stupid in light of the fact that downloadable music only seems to fuel record sales.
Have I bought every album containing a song I downloaded and liked? No, of course not. But I've bought more music overall because of my ability to first find and listen to it for free. There were interesting reports published in the last couple of years that showed record sales increasing relatively steadily, with a bump upward a little while after Napster became popular. You can treat that as rumor, since I don't have a link to said reports handy, but I think they did show up on Slashdot.
For one thing, most people wouldn't consider it worthwhile. This isn't about basic human rights, it's about consumer rights, and that's a whole different-- and less urgent-- ballgame.
Yesterday morning, as I was sitting in traffic on 680 wishing I'd attached an outboard motor to my car, I got to hear an interview with Huey Lewis on a local radio talk show.
The interviewer asked Huey what he thought of the whole "downloading thing", and his answer was that it was "complicated", but that his son downloads stuff all the time (that's hearsay, you Feds, you leave Huey's kid alone!) and when he finds something he likes he buys the album. So Huey didn't really have a problem with it.
When the interviewer mentioned that he himself downloads a fair bit of music, but doesn't buy many CDs, Huey pointed out that people their age just never bought (or sold) much music anyway, relatively speaking... it's far and away a kids' market.
KaZaa may be lucky enough to wiggle out of this one because of the prior court order. This is hardly them staring down The Man.
Unfortunately, interesting character design and nifty effects only go so far. The cool gameplay elements are really few and far between, and more often than not turn out to be less fun than you'd think. After thirty hours of step, fight, step, fight, step, fight I just got bored. Well, more accurately, the games each got to a point where I wasn't entirely certain what I was to do next, and I didn't really get the opportunity to find out because of all the freaking battles I was getting sucked into.
Then again, Chrono Cross didn't have that problem, and I pretty much got tired of it after a while, too. Maybe it's just the formulaic gameplay. With the rare exception of a handful of puzzles, these "RPGs" seem to consist entirely of nearly-identical battles broken up by cutscenes that present you with excruciatingly long chunks of bland melodrama. And the game goes on forever in this manner. I have incomplete savegames for each of the aforementioned titles.
That really sucks, too, because the Final Fantasy games are always so pretty. I'll actually probably end up buying FFX just so I can summon me some badass Ifrit or something. Sigh.
Even the implied humor is apropos! I'm so subtle I can hardly stand it.
Second, a trademark is a trademark. Whether it's a company name or a product name is irrelevant. Even if for some reason you think it should, in some alternate universe where logic is based primarily on coin flips, be relevant as a matter of degree, you might recognize that Windows is Microsoft's flagship product. Calling your OS "Lindows" is tantamount to naming your company Nicrosoft.
And incidentally, I don't think "Lindows.com" is going to stay in business for very long, and one could make a very sound argument that Microsoft has "earned its place".
See you in hell, dinner plate.
No, this is more analagous to you opening up a fast-food hamburger chain called "McRonald's" with a clown named Donald McRonald for a mascot and a big golden "R" as your logo.
"indows" constitutes nearly every letter and sound in "[WL]indows", and the product is ridiculously similar by intent.
Second, this isn't about copyrights. It's about trademarks. And if someone pops up in your market with an extremely similar name and a product that aims to subsume the functionality of yours, it is not unreasonable to consider that an infringement of your trademark.
You're splitting some pretty fine hairs if you consider these products to be in different markets.. they're both operating systems for x86 computers, and the entire point of Lindows is to offer the same functionality (and then some) of Windows.
Sorry, but MS is in the right on this one.
[ insert snide remark about tech geeks and their disdain for reading comprehension skills ]
I don't buy that rumour... Gamecube is going to be carrying the Resident Evil series for a while, after all.
That's False Laziness. A real lazy programmer documents his code thoroughly, so that he doesn't have to put any effort later into understanding or explaining it.
You know, nobody who actually develops software thinks like this. The problem is simply that people who develop software tend to be very comfortable with a lot of interface ideas, and therefore tend to pick whichever one works the best for a given piece of their application, without so much realizing that in the overall scheme of things they might be better off simplifying it a bit.
Believe me, we want to make it easy for the user. The easier the software is to use, the happier people will be with it, the better it will sell, the less you'll have to go back and rework interface elements.
Sometimes, if the target audience has a bit more experience or you're working on a technically specialized application, you tend to make things easier for your target users by using interface ideas that would make it harder for someone who just walked in off the street and decided to play with your software. That's generally as it should be... if I'm working on a handy little Unix utility, I generally shouldn't bother to slap a GUI around it and design a nice icon; what my users are going to want is a solid set of (long and short) commandline options, a useful configuration file, and the ability to pass in data on stdin.
At any rate, accusing your post's parent of elitism seems entirely uncalled-for... he's right: The concept of a big empty desktop behind your windows never confused anybody. The big expanding tree structure does suck hard when you apply it to a large directory structure. People who learn the keyboard shortcuts for their apps do generally have far better performance.
And someone else brought up an interesting point, which is that most people spend most of their time in a few applications... only so much time and effort should be spent trying to unify the interfaces of all applications, and it really shouldn't be done at the expense of optimizing for each application.
The flipside is that advanced users tend to recommend applications that have very powerful interfaces, which newer users tend to have trouble with because they're so highly optimized: vim, emacs, Excel, Photoshop, ksh... And they're right, if you learn to use those programs, you will discover that they're very powerful. If you can't be bothered to learn their interfaces, well, you'll just be relegated to using less powerful generically-interfaced software. This is not elitism, it's just a matter of optimization.
What would be the advantage? Extra space? We have multiple desktops and three or four methods of window minimization and hiding. Easier navigation? Since when can't you map a tree into 2D perfectly adequately, and simply? We have a few ways of doing that, too. More intuitive interface? Sorry, but there's nothing intuitive about having to look around in multiple dimensions (mapped, incidentally, to two dimensions on your monitor) to find a window or icon or whatever you've misplaced.
As long as our data is primarily text-based and our displays are physically two-dimensional, 3D interfaces are going to both be pointless and suck. And you'd be hard put to convince me that a physical 3D interface would be practical for most applications.
Sorry, but the gee-whiz-neato-"imagine all the pretty polyhedrons" just doesn't translate into "good idea".
Keep that up until you realize that you are not the control case.
I'm mad at Sony for not telling me whether their new drivers address such issues, and mad at Fox for selling me a transparent DVD (which I vaguely suspect may be the problem).
I'm working on a PS2/DVD compatibility database, and may or may not finish it. If I do, I'll put it online with a decent interface so people can update it with their own findings... the couple of lists I've found online are manually compiled and infrequently updated.
I don't really care about import games, and I'm not particularly interested in pirating domestic releases, either. Let's face it, there aren't enough good games to make piracy worthwhile... I'll just buy the handful that don't suck. But I'm interested in a mod chip so that I can play burned copies of the games I've licensed and leave the originals in their cases. If Sony would happily replace any disc that got damaged (for a nominal replication fee, even), my interest in a mod chip would be nil.
Of course, Sony isn't exactly "customer-oriented", so we'll probably never be so lucky. I think the PS2 is going to be my last Sony electronics purchase... the DVD issues (with absolutely no information on their new drivers, other than that you can buy them with a $20 remote) have pretty much sealed that for me.
Are you kidding? I mean, yeah, it's obviously got a psychological impact... but carpet bombing is massively destructive. Nobody launches a precise, laser-guided missile per vehicle at an enemy convoy. They just drop a shitload of bombs on the general area and call it a day.
Well, that sort of follows, doesn't it? If you greatly reduce the number of losses due to problesm relating to speed, altitude, radar detection, and anti-aircraft missiles, of course the biggest cause of loss is going to be breakage. Process of elimination, and all that.
Now, if we were losing more money (and people, that's important) invested B1-B bombers to breakage than we were money invested in B-52 bombers to all of those other factors, it could make more sense to scrap the B1-B and revert to B-52 production.
But you also have to factor in the building cost of the B-52 and the maintenance cost of the B1-B, which you haven't. :)
Just curious.
(Yeah, I'm a bit irritable.)
Ah well.