Apple will launch Mac OS X 10.2 around the same time, we're told, and offer it as a 64-bit version. To do so would surely limit users of older hardware to 10.1 and its updates, but that hasn't stopped the company making such moves in the past. The G5's 32-bit support will allow apps to be carried forward, and developers have been told they will be able to make '64-bit clean' apps with a simple recompile.
What does this mean? Are they suggesting that people who own G4's are going to be stuck with 10.1.x?
I CAN NOT watch my DVD's without DeCSS because I only use OSS.
OK you could wrestle with an illegal and clumsy software like DeCSS or you could do what any normal, non fanatic, sane person would do: By a DVD player. Or use an OS that supports legal DVD players. But you won't do that because you use only OSS. Well OSS comes with a price. Can't watch DVD's because somebody else owns the format. Tough luck for you. Move on. Running some rouge hack like DeCSS is not the answer. That's just going to make things worse for open source down the road. SSSCA is a perfect example.
It IS written to to allow the copying of copyrighted material, and you have a RIGHT to do this under the fair use laws.
But the truth of the matter is that people don't write those routines to promote fair use. They write them to promote stealing. Trying to hide behind "fair use" is bullshit. The unspoken truth of the matter is that people write those routines so that illegal copies can be made and distributed.
All this whining about people getting in trouble for writing software to crack CSS and e-books makes me sick. Clearly, the reason this stuff is written is to make copies of copyrighted material.
I have no sympathy. Particularily because the copyrighted material in question is largely crap and not worth stealing anyway. But also because this stuff *should* be protected from blatent infringement. No if's, and's or but's.
But the SSSCA goes WAAAAY the fuck too far. The day the government tells me I got to have certain HW or SW on my machine is the day I stand up and yell FUCK YOU! They can throw me in jail as an example if they want to. But I am NOT going to have this shit on my computer and I am NOT going to hide it.
This is such a blatent violation of my rights and freedoms. It makes me sick.
Attempting to compare software engineering to building a bridge or constructing a house is flawed. The reason bridges are built to such exacting standards is because if they aren't, they FALL DOWN. They cease to function. 100% failure. Poorly built software, on the other hand, can still work well enough to be usuable. It may imperfect at some tasks, but perform adaquately at others. If it were true that anything less than a perfectly engineered piece of software would simply fail to compile, then we'd all be writing perfectly engineered software.
An additional flaw in the analogy is this: The function, or use, of a bridge is quite clear: Extend a roadway over an otherwise impassable divide, such as a river. Simple as that. But deciding what the function or use of a piece of software is much more difficult and complex. Software is told to do many things, and the things it's supposed to do changes over time.
I'm all in favor of well designed software. But his vision is more utopian than useful.
OS X has outstanding font rendering technology, but you don't see any/. posts about it. Somebody produces a half-ass hack for Gnome and it gets press. Typical.
Hey there you go! Write them! Let them know how you feel! And when all 8 or 9 of you write, they'll be sure to release their documentation to Linux folks then! Reality check folks: They could frankly give a DAMN about Linux users! Drop in the bucket! Write them? HAH! MAN is that funny! Quit deluding yourselves. Linux has no market share in the desktop. Hence, HW manufacturers DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU! Suggestion: Get a Mac / OS X. Then you can have your Unix apps AND hardware support. Not to mention a desktop GUI that isn't a piece of crap.
Not sure how that got modded up to my viewing level, as it's trolling.
I assure you, I don't troll. Honest opinions only. I submit that it got modded up because there's plenty of folks who can see through the B.S., that's all. Good to know they're lurking. They should post more though.
I just wiped osx off my G4 tower and replaced it with Debian
Power Mac G4's start at $1699.00 For that sum of money you could've bought a LOT of Wintel hardware to run your Debian system on!! See my point? Of you think OS X sucks (even though your reasoning may or may not be flawed) then, by god, don't run out and buy Apple hardware!! Get more bang for your buck and buy Wintel!
I spent my last few months with OSX using Fink and installing Xwindows to use on top of osx
Sounds like a phenomenal waste of time to me. Wow. Do you work for a living? I wish I had time like that to tinker. But I have real programming projects to attend to. Even Slashdot is a luxury. My suspicion is that the folks who do this kind of nonsense (installing Linux on Ti PB's, for example) are not doing it for practical real world benefit. They do it only because it is possible. And, perhaps it is fun and entertaining. Practical? Of course not. Cost effective? No.
OK so you take a terrific machine (Ti PB) and a terrific operating system (OS X) and you toss out the OS and put Linux on it? Why??? OS X is a posix system that runs much of the same software as Linux does, plus it has a GUI that, unlike Gnome and KDE, is extremely well designed and doesn't look like Windows. I can think of no decent reason to replace something as incredible as OS X with something as rum-dum as Linux on a machine like this. Doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Not in the least bit practical. One common argument for Linux on Wintel hardware is that Wintel hardware is cheaper. Thus I can see the modivation. But to replace OS X with Linux on expensive Apple hardware defies logic completely. Linux has it's place. But not on a Ti PB. Sorry.
OK I've read a dozen or so posts dissing Java because it's "Stupid" or "Slow" or "None of the apps I run are written in Java" or whatever -- which forces me to say this: Programmers who write in Java are writing code for distributed enterprise applications. They're professional computer programmers, not ether breathing geeks such as ourselves. I say it's waaaay past time that we all collectively pull our heads out of our asses and realize that the world doesn't revolve around Linux/Perl/GCC and Kernel patches!! There's a whole world of programmers out there (who DON'T generally post to this forum because they're too busy getting work done) who don't live and breath everything Linux day in and day out. They work for a living.
One of the nastiest things about working in a cube farm is the direct overhead fluorescent lights. They get installed in offices without even so much as as second thought. But they're awful. They turn everything into a weird unreal hue and they blink and flitter and they just generally suck.
I was fortunate enough to work for a company (for 8 years) that had indirect lighting that was mounted at the intersection of four cubes, shining upward against the white ceiling tiles. So much nicer. That combined with a small incandescent desk lamp (I had a green banker's lamp) and you're all set. Of course, there's no substitute for ample amounts of natural light coming from windows.
But then I eventually ended up with fluorescent overhead lights for a while. Covering the top of the cube occured to me! But they wouldn't have let me get away with it. Now I work at home. Complete control! At the moment I have no lights on. Just the window!
Get an LCD Display, if you haven't got one already. Saves a ton of room. Better yet, get one mounted on a hinged suspension arm. Another idea: Arrange to telecommute once or twice a week.
Why the hell do we have to run out and invent new stuff all the time? I like the web just like it is. I can call up pages and see things. I can interact with pages and do things. Works great. Just because MS and the Java crowd are all busy making more work for themselves doesn't mean I'm going to panic and re-write my web apps. Until browsers fail to render HTML 4.0 / XHTML adaquately I'm going to stay put. Maybe Fortune 500 has a need for all this crap, but I don't.
This is no doubt why Red Hat is getting into the DB game: So they can sell support for PostgreSQL.
I worked in a smallish Sybase shop for a while (tiny I suppose in comparison to a major credit card company) and I remember our DBA running around tweaking this and tweaking that to get the DB to run more efficiently. What struck me is that we had maybe 6 or 7 logical DB's all on one machine with no single table exceeding a million rows -- and he spends all day tweaking? Why didn't the damn thing just sit there and run? Why the need for all the tweaks? Sybase exposed so much configuration detail that even a competent DBA is bound to shoot themselves in the foot once in a while. Seems to me a decent DB system should hide and deal with as much complexity on it's own as possible.
MySQL uses Progess? I had no idea. I used Progress for a short time and found it to be one of the most ridiculous and obtuse pieces of crap I've ever seen. But MySQL? Love it. My recollection of Progress is that it was more of an integrated development environment, with the DB wrapped in with code. Is this not true?
When I saw this post I thought "something's up" because I have a hard time believing that people accustomed to running Windows could switch to KDE and not absolutely HATE it.
That's when I read they've been running Unixware for the last several years. Hell, they're accustomed to clunky interfaces! Moving from one clunky interface to another is no big deal. They simply don't know what they're missing.
I've seen secretaries and the like jumping through hoops trying to use poorly designed character/terminal interfaces in corporate environments who were PLEASED as PUNCH! Why? They didn't have a better system to compare it to.
So before you all start patting yourselves on the back, I think you need to give those secretaries some credit: Anybody can learn how to do most anything given time. There's no specific reason why a secretary can't learn to deal with clunky interfaces like KDE or Gnome just as easily as they can learn to deal with some hideous 1980's character based interface.
This says nothing about KDE's usability. It's still clunky. These folks simply don't know what they're missing.
Since when did it become the responsibility of the OS to insure that third party software / drivers work adaquately? Clearly this is a ploy by Microsoft to wrestle even more control from third party vendors.
I've been using Windows on the desktop (more out of necessity than anything) for several years. But I am *not* going to upgrade to XP. No sir. I'm going to jump ship to the only other viable desktop alternative: Mac OS X.
Although the internet and the GPL might be able to co-exist in a capitalistic society, they are not themselves capitalistic creations. Both can survive quite nicely without much, if any, economic support. They do not exist solely to facilitate the exchange of goods and services in a free market. They might be socialist or libertarian or something, but they are NOT capitalistic by any streatch of the imagination.
The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws
And there it is. The internet has slammed right up against the face of capitalism. Capitalism is the national religion of America. If it doesn't involve money, it isn't American. So when something as un-capitilistic as internet comes along, the proud American capitalists amongst us become angry and upset. The notion that the internet needs some 'excuse' to not comply with basic economic laws drives home just how pervasive capitalism is in our society.
What's missing here is perspective: Since when does everything have to revolve around capitialism? That's what this yo-yo missed. Yeah, the internet isn't capitilistic. Tough. Get over it. Move on. Same with the GPL. It doesn't suprise me one bit that MS and others would call the GPL "un-American". It IS un-American insofar as it's not capitalistic.
What's needed here is a broader appreciation in America for things in life that don't have to do with money. What's the point of life, after all? Happiness. So long as we're happy, it doesn't matter how we got there. And I think there would be many more happy people out there once we all start to realize that money isn't everything.
Then he said that even though they are slower than PC's, they are really faster
Doublespeak. You should go into politics. Mhz does not always translate into speed. As a Linux geek you should know that. FUD.
Then he said that Mac OS 10.1 will fix many of the things that makes Mac OS 10 blatantly unusable for most people.
No he didn't. What he might have said is that the best consumer operating system is getting better. OS X is so mind-boggling superior to Linux from a usability standpoint it makes Linux look like a broken toy.
Still, unless I had a really compelling need for some of that closed source software, I would be a chump for buying one.
OS X now supports a staggering amount of open source software. Darwin, Apache, PHP, MySQL, SSL, etc., etc., etc. Did I mention the Gimp? It's a posix system, for crying out loud! Besides which, a great number of 'closed source' applications happen to do things much better than any open source software could ever hope to.
You need to read Taco's earlier post about attitude my friend.
I agree that it wasn't quite as spectacular a keynote as it could have been. But it's not quite as dismal as you suggest. First of all, two of the three new PowerMacs are available right now, not in a month like you said. And they are faster than their predecessors. The iMacs are also faster. Additionally, it's quite true that "Mhx doesn't matter" -- at least when it comes to comparing Intel to the PowerPC. Apples and oranges (no pun intended). The keynote demoed a 867mhz PowerMac next to a 1.7 ghz Intel box. Guess who won?
Additional keynote coverage can be found here. Also, there's a synopsis of the upcoming OS X 10.1 on Apple's website. Note that 10.1 won't be available until September. But you gotta love it! Now if I could only afford that 22" cinima display.
Slashdot Mirror
Why wreck a perfectly excellent machine by installing Linux on it when you can run OS X?
The article says in part:
Apple will launch Mac OS X 10.2 around the same time, we're told, and offer it as a 64-bit version. To do so would surely limit users of older hardware to 10.1 and its updates, but that hasn't stopped the company making such moves in the past. The G5's 32-bit support will allow apps to be carried forward, and developers have been told they will be able to make '64-bit clean' apps with a simple recompile.
What does this mean? Are they suggesting that people who own G4's are going to be stuck with 10.1.x?
I CAN NOT watch my DVD's without DeCSS because I only use OSS.
OK you could wrestle with an illegal and clumsy software like DeCSS or you could do what any normal, non fanatic, sane person would do: By a DVD player. Or use an OS that supports legal DVD players. But you won't do that because you use only OSS. Well OSS comes with a price. Can't watch DVD's because somebody else owns the format. Tough luck for you. Move on. Running some rouge hack like DeCSS is not the answer. That's just going to make things worse for open source down the road. SSSCA is a perfect example.
It IS written to to allow the copying of copyrighted material, and you have a RIGHT to do this under the fair use laws.
But the truth of the matter is that people don't write those routines to promote fair use. They write them to promote stealing. Trying to hide behind "fair use" is bullshit. The unspoken truth of the matter is that people write those routines so that illegal copies can be made and distributed.
All this whining about people getting in trouble for writing software to crack CSS and e-books makes me sick. Clearly, the reason this stuff is written is to make copies of copyrighted material.
I have no sympathy. Particularily because the copyrighted material in question is largely crap and not worth stealing anyway. But also because this stuff *should* be protected from blatent infringement. No if's, and's or but's.
But the SSSCA goes WAAAAY the fuck too far. The day the government tells me I got to have certain HW or SW on my machine is the day I stand up and yell FUCK YOU! They can throw me in jail as an example if they want to. But I am NOT going to have this shit on my computer and I am NOT going to hide it.
This is such a blatent violation of my rights and freedoms. It makes me sick.
Attempting to compare software engineering to building a bridge or constructing a house is flawed. The reason bridges are built to such exacting standards is because if they aren't, they FALL DOWN. They cease to function. 100% failure. Poorly built software, on the other hand, can still work well enough to be usuable. It may imperfect at some tasks, but perform adaquately at others. If it were true that anything less than a perfectly engineered piece of software would simply fail to compile, then we'd all be writing perfectly engineered software.
An additional flaw in the analogy is this: The function, or use, of a bridge is quite clear: Extend a roadway over an otherwise impassable divide, such as a river. Simple as that. But deciding what the function or use of a piece of software is much more difficult and complex. Software is told to do many things, and the things it's supposed to do changes over time.
I'm all in favor of well designed software. But his vision is more utopian than useful.
OS X has outstanding font rendering technology, but you don't see any /. posts about it. Somebody produces a half-ass hack for Gnome and it gets press. Typical.
Hey there you go! Write them! Let them know how you feel! And when all 8 or 9 of you write, they'll be sure to release their documentation to Linux folks then! Reality check folks: They could frankly give a DAMN about Linux users! Drop in the bucket! Write them? HAH! MAN is that funny! Quit deluding yourselves. Linux has no market share in the desktop. Hence, HW manufacturers DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU! Suggestion: Get a Mac / OS X. Then you can have your Unix apps AND hardware support. Not to mention a desktop GUI that isn't a piece of crap.
Not sure how that got modded up to my viewing level, as it's trolling.
I assure you, I don't troll. Honest opinions only. I submit that it got modded up because there's plenty of folks who can see through the B.S., that's all. Good to know they're lurking. They should post more though.
I just wiped osx off my G4 tower and replaced it with Debian
Power Mac G4's start at $1699.00 For that sum of money you could've bought a LOT of Wintel hardware to run your Debian system on!! See my point? Of you think OS X sucks (even though your reasoning may or may not be flawed) then, by god, don't run out and buy Apple hardware!! Get more bang for your buck and buy Wintel!
I spent my last few months with OSX using Fink and installing Xwindows to use on top of osx
Sounds like a phenomenal waste of time to me. Wow. Do you work for a living? I wish I had time like that to tinker. But I have real programming projects to attend to. Even Slashdot is a luxury. My suspicion is that the folks who do this kind of nonsense (installing Linux on Ti PB's, for example) are not doing it for practical real world benefit. They do it only because it is possible. And, perhaps it is fun and entertaining. Practical? Of course not. Cost effective? No.
OK so you take a terrific machine (Ti PB) and a terrific operating system (OS X) and you toss out the OS and put Linux on it? Why??? OS X is a posix system that runs much of the same software as Linux does, plus it has a GUI that, unlike Gnome and KDE, is extremely well designed and doesn't look like Windows. I can think of no decent reason to replace something as incredible as OS X with something as rum-dum as Linux on a machine like this. Doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Not in the least bit practical. One common argument for Linux on Wintel hardware is that Wintel hardware is cheaper. Thus I can see the modivation. But to replace OS X with Linux on expensive Apple hardware defies logic completely. Linux has it's place. But not on a Ti PB. Sorry.
OK I've read a dozen or so posts dissing Java because it's "Stupid" or "Slow" or "None of the apps I run are written in Java" or whatever -- which forces me to say this: Programmers who write in Java are writing code for distributed enterprise applications. They're professional computer programmers, not ether breathing geeks such as ourselves. I say it's waaaay past time that we all collectively pull our heads out of our asses and realize that the world doesn't revolve around Linux/Perl/GCC and Kernel patches!! There's a whole world of programmers out there (who DON'T generally post to this forum because they're too busy getting work done) who don't live and breath everything Linux day in and day out. They work for a living.
End of Rant.
One of the nastiest things about working in a cube farm is the direct overhead fluorescent lights. They get installed in offices without even so much as as second thought. But they're awful. They turn everything into a weird unreal hue and they blink and flitter and they just generally suck.
I was fortunate enough to work for a company (for 8 years) that had indirect lighting that was mounted at the intersection of four cubes, shining upward against the white ceiling tiles. So much nicer. That combined with a small incandescent desk lamp (I had a green banker's lamp) and you're all set. Of course, there's no substitute for ample amounts of natural light coming from windows.
But then I eventually ended up with fluorescent overhead lights for a while. Covering the top of the cube occured to me! But they wouldn't have let me get away with it. Now I work at home. Complete control! At the moment I have no lights on. Just the window!
Get an LCD Display, if you haven't got one already. Saves a ton of room. Better yet, get one mounted on a hinged suspension arm. Another idea: Arrange to telecommute once or twice a week.
Why the hell do we have to run out and invent new stuff all the time? I like the web just like it is. I can call up pages and see things. I can interact with pages and do things. Works great. Just because MS and the Java crowd are all busy making more work for themselves doesn't mean I'm going to panic and re-write my web apps. Until browsers fail to render HTML 4.0 / XHTML adaquately I'm going to stay put. Maybe Fortune 500 has a need for all this crap, but I don't.
Excellent post. Mod 'em up!
This is no doubt why Red Hat is getting into the DB game: So they can sell support for PostgreSQL.
I worked in a smallish Sybase shop for a while (tiny I suppose in comparison to a major credit card company) and I remember our DBA running around tweaking this and tweaking that to get the DB to run more efficiently. What struck me is that we had maybe 6 or 7 logical DB's all on one machine with no single table exceeding a million rows -- and he spends all day tweaking? Why didn't the damn thing just sit there and run? Why the need for all the tweaks? Sybase exposed so much configuration detail that even a competent DBA is bound to shoot themselves in the foot once in a while. Seems to me a decent DB system should hide and deal with as much complexity on it's own as possible.
MySQL uses Progess? I had no idea. I used Progress for a short time and found it to be one of the most ridiculous and obtuse pieces of crap I've ever seen. But MySQL? Love it. My recollection of Progress is that it was more of an integrated development environment, with the DB wrapped in with code. Is this not true?
When I saw this post I thought "something's up" because I have a hard time believing that people accustomed to running Windows could switch to KDE and not absolutely HATE it.
That's when I read they've been running Unixware for the last several years. Hell, they're accustomed to clunky interfaces! Moving from one clunky interface to another is no big deal. They simply don't know what they're missing.
I've seen secretaries and the like jumping through hoops trying to use poorly designed character/terminal interfaces in corporate environments who were PLEASED as PUNCH! Why? They didn't have a better system to compare it to.
So before you all start patting yourselves on the back, I think you need to give those secretaries some credit: Anybody can learn how to do most anything given time. There's no specific reason why a secretary can't learn to deal with clunky interfaces like KDE or Gnome just as easily as they can learn to deal with some hideous 1980's character based interface.
This says nothing about KDE's usability. It's still clunky. These folks simply don't know what they're missing.
Since when did it become the responsibility of the OS to insure that third party software / drivers work adaquately? Clearly this is a ploy by Microsoft to wrestle even more control from third party vendors.
I've been using Windows on the desktop (more out of necessity than anything) for several years. But I am *not* going to upgrade to XP. No sir. I'm going to jump ship to the only other viable desktop alternative: Mac OS X.
It is always nice to spot an occassional reasonable person on Slashdot. Thanks for posting.
Although the internet and the GPL might be able to co-exist in a capitalistic society, they are not themselves capitalistic creations. Both can survive quite nicely without much, if any, economic support. They do not exist solely to facilitate the exchange of goods and services in a free market. They might be socialist or libertarian or something, but they are NOT capitalistic by any streatch of the imagination.
The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws
And there it is. The internet has slammed right up against the face of capitalism. Capitalism is the national religion of America. If it doesn't involve money, it isn't American. So when something as un-capitilistic as internet comes along, the proud American capitalists amongst us become angry and upset. The notion that the internet needs some 'excuse' to not comply with basic economic laws drives home just how pervasive capitalism is in our society.
What's missing here is perspective: Since when does everything have to revolve around capitialism? That's what this yo-yo missed. Yeah, the internet isn't capitilistic. Tough. Get over it. Move on. Same with the GPL. It doesn't suprise me one bit that MS and others would call the GPL "un-American". It IS un-American insofar as it's not capitalistic.
What's needed here is a broader appreciation in America for things in life that don't have to do with money. What's the point of life, after all? Happiness. So long as we're happy, it doesn't matter how we got there. And I think there would be many more happy people out there once we all start to realize that money isn't everything.
Then he said that even though they are slower than PC's, they are really faster
Doublespeak. You should go into politics. Mhz does not always translate into speed. As a Linux geek you should know that. FUD.
Then he said that Mac OS 10.1 will fix many of the things that makes Mac OS 10 blatantly unusable for most people.
No he didn't. What he might have said is that the best consumer operating system is getting better. OS X is so mind-boggling superior to Linux from a usability standpoint it makes Linux look like a broken toy.
Still, unless I had a really compelling need for some of that closed source software, I would be a chump for buying one.
OS X now supports a staggering amount of open source software. Darwin, Apache, PHP, MySQL, SSL, etc., etc., etc. Did I mention the Gimp? It's a posix system, for crying out loud! Besides which, a great number of 'closed source' applications happen to do things much better than any open source software could ever hope to.
You need to read Taco's earlier post about attitude my friend.
I agree that it wasn't quite as spectacular a keynote as it could have been. But it's not quite as dismal as you suggest. First of all, two of the three new PowerMacs are available right now, not in a month like you said. And they are faster than their predecessors. The iMacs are also faster. Additionally, it's quite true that "Mhx doesn't matter" -- at least when it comes to comparing Intel to the PowerPC. Apples and oranges (no pun intended). The keynote demoed a 867mhz PowerMac next to a 1.7 ghz Intel box. Guess who won?
Additional keynote coverage can be found here. Also, there's a synopsis of the upcoming OS X 10.1 on Apple's website. Note that 10.1 won't be available until September. But you gotta love it! Now if I could only afford that 22" cinima display.