But not recognising that Apple users are pretty much unique in the tech gadget world for queuing outside stores for a new piece of electronic jewelry, and that therefore the OP was making a valid point, does make you a fanboi.
And let me correct you on one thing - the term "credibility" is not a fixed attribute, it is based solely on opinion - therefore something that may seem credible to me may not seem credible to you. And whilst we could argue our difference of opinions ad infinitum, it is unlikely that either of us would change our viewpoint as a result of the other's reasoned argument. Therefore let's not waste time discussing differences in opinion any further.
However, not recognising that level of credibility is based purely on opinion has in itself allowed you to make a sweeping generalisation in assuming everyone else shares your opinion. Thus you paint yourself as a hypocrite also.
Finally, you also suffer from two dimensional blinkered thinking if you believe that someone with whom you do not share the same opinion automatically becomes your enemy. Who was it who said "I may not agree with what you say but I defend your right to say it"?
Clearly, since this is a discussion web site, I defend your right to say what you like on here, but that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it - and definitely doesn't mean that when I sign off shortly to go to bed that as I fall into slumber I will be plotting the demise of jo_harn. If anything, you also suffer from an inflated ego if you seriously believe I care that much about your opinion in the first place.
So, no, you are not a rabid fanboi. You are a hypocritical rabid fanboi with an over-inflated ego.
As I said in response to someone else, she was from a Third World Muslim country that constantly gets bad press for giving a safe haven to Taliban terrorists and puts women in a lower caste than men, so her achieving what she did is worthy of a mention.
And if a young life that ends so early serves as an inspiration to other teenagers on a path to drug or alcohol addiction, or to an unwanted pregnancy, then maybe it wasn't a totally pointless death.
It's very easy to be sat in a nice big warm house in front of a nice expensive computer and pour scorn down on others rather than sometimes just taking a deep breath and just not saying anything for the sake of a little compassion.
Sheep queue or cluster together because they are about to get something, like food, for example. The above behaviour is more akin to deranged magpies attracted by something shiny and somewhat insulting to sheep.
Not that it's relevant to this story, but as a mainly Linux person, I wonder if her death would have attracted less negative trolling had she been a Red Hat Certified Engineer or a genius BASH shell scripter.
I don't feel proud as a member of the human race when people turn a suite of software tools into a religion - be they Linux, Microsoft or Apple zealot.
...is when you troll gleefully about the death of a teenage Pakistani girl who was a genius with Microsoft stuff but attacked anyone who trolled gleefully when Steve Jobs passed away.
Here are the reasons why this is a news-worthy item here on Slashdot and why she should be credited for what she did:
1. The girl was from Pakistan and therefore unlikely to have been afforded similar social & educational privileges than a 16-year old girl in the USA or Europe.
2. Pakistan is a mainly Muslim country meaning that women have a lower status than men from the moment of birth. Therefore what she did was that little bit more harder for her than for a boy in Pakistan.
3. It's good to occasionally get a new story from Pakistan where everyone isn't portrayed as either a Taliban terrorist in the mountains or a member of the Pakistan government hiding them.
4. Maybe if a few more kids in our rich Western countries (I'm in the UK) took an interest in intellectual pursuits like programming, we wouldn't have so many of them dropping unwanted kids or getting addicted to drugs or alcohol. Maybe just one or two of those kids will read this story and take some inspiration from it, possibly change their own lives.
So now kindly shut the fuck up if you cannot show some compassion.
A lot of major record companies are starting to get the message also.
I personally don't care for digital downloads, I've bought CD albums for around 3 decades (vinyl before that) and just rip them myself for portability. Most of what I listen to is classic (hard) rock, and they're doing a really good job of getting me to part with my money currently with remastered albums, bonus tracks, some in DVD-A mixes and some even including DVD concert discs.
I could care less that it's "old technology" or what anyone else thinks, music is my number one hobby anyway and the record companies are giving me good value products meaning that I don't download music freely.
Like you said above, giving those who already pay to keep paying...
I disagree with nothing that you have said but, in answer to your final question, the threat is from uninformed people setting the precedent at the expense of everyone's personal freedoms.
These days it is MUCH MUCH LESS about the operating system and more about the apps that run on it. If those apps are tightly controlled with closed APIs and file formats, then as more and more people use them, it actually reverses that trend because, for example, in order to use a specific killer app then you may HAVE to buy, say, an Apple device that runs iOS. In other words, maintaining the notion that the platform OS *IS* important.
So the point here is really about getting the message across. It has nothing to do with "Linux is better than Windows", it's more to do with preserving the evolution that is taking place currently where people can choose the devices and platforms they want to use, and for them to do so secure in the knowledge that the one they choose can talk to those by other vendors because the intercommunication and APIs between all of them are based on Open Standards.
The danger is that people flock to buy all of these pretty little gadgets without stopping to consider what they are giving up as a result - yes, a walled garden may give them more security but how much of their personal choice and freedom have they handed over in the process? So it *IS* important to keep getting that message across, rather than bickering about whether or not Microsoft is better than Apple is better than Linux.
During the 1980s, the Mac was virtually unheard of outside of the US, as was just about every Apple computer that preceded it, like the Apple II for example. Here the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were far more prevalent.
I think you over-estimate Apple's influence at the time, it was the fact that the home computer market was so fragmented across the globe that allowed Microsoft and the IBM PC to capitalise on pushing out a single platform, both for home and business users.
If anything, Commodore, Atari and Apple shared a common trait, namely that they were "run by geeks" and not by true businessmen who understood marketing and product penetration, ultimately that's why they all failed. (Yes, even Apple failed by 1997 when Microsoft bailed them out for it's own interests to the tune of $250M).
Even now the Mac is a very restricted market, it wouldn't surprise me to see Apple drop it completely over the next few years. Most people could care less about the OS platform, those that do run OS X or Linux (like me) on the desktop but we are, and always will be, a minority, that is not helped by the fact that the minority itself is split in two - i.e. highly computer literate like me who want personal freedom at the expense of a steep learning curve and therefore choose Linux, and those Mac people who simply want an alternative to Microsoft that doesn't need much in the way of learning to use.
Personally, I run MAME (have done for years) and I run Chrome, but apart from a quick look to satisfy my inquisitive geekness, I doubt I will use this long term.
No, it's not standard, but neither are the plugins that you can run in Firefox, Chrome, etc. that give you themes, adblocking, download management, etc.
And not that I own a single Apple device either (or plan to) but I assume this will be of interest to Apple users who currently can't load MAME onto their iP*ds/iPhones unless they jailbreak - as far as I'm aware, any emulation is a strict no-no on the App Store (and one of the main reasons I don't give Apple stuff a second glance).
But I assume they can run Chrome and therefore can run MAME in it now. And if it's non-standard in this case then sobeit - it's for a minority of the populace that use Apple devices AND want to retrogame.
So the point of your posting is precisely what? To talk about good design or to diss Linux?
Sure, I fully accept that the majority of people out there want neat and easy to use devices without caring about the underlying operating system and I have no problem with that - these days it's ALL about the applications and the underlying OS is becoming less important. In other words, most of those same people don't care whether it's running OS X, Windows or even Linux.
On top of that, unless you ever used a UNIX shell properly, then you don't know what you are talking about - so stop right there. No, text shells are not for the general populace but they are for power users that want to get things done quickly, especially automated and repetitive tasks. The fact that command shells have existed for about 40 years is a testament to good design. I work with UNIX, Linux and shells every day of my life and in my company people see me as someone who comes up with solutions when it comes to auditing and securing servers, and most of the time I'm doing what I do with shell scripts. The fact that you talk about shells being "from the 90's" illustrates your lack of technical understanding, in reality they originated in the 1970's, slightly sooner if you bring it what DEC were doing on PDP systems from the late 1960s.
You are entitled to your opinions but what you are arguing is entirely subjective. My prime concern for any computing device is how it functions as a tool and how much I can customise it to make it work the way I needed to. How it looks is of minimal importance and, naturally, I won't pay a premium price just because something looks nice. It will therefore come as no shock to you to learn that in 30+ years of being around computers, I've never once felt the need to buy anything by Apple because, in my opinion, nothing they've ever made has been good enough or cheap enough to replace anything that I currently use.
As for Windows, whilst being mainly a Linux user these days, I really like XP with the Classic interface, any GUIs Microsoft have done after that point are cluttered eye candy that burn CPU cycles unnecessarily - whether or not Windows 7 is a better operating system underneath.
As for the"open part", more people need to recognise that Open Standards are the reason why the Internet exploded in the first place, the TCP/IP stack on which everything we now communicate on is open by design. Had that not been the case, then we would not be enjoying cheap and fast Internet because vendors like IBM, Honeywell Novell and Microsoft would still be arguing about who's proprietary networking protocols was best and how much of a license fee they could charge for them. Again, someone who understood this as a fact would realise that he/she is able to do things like Facebook and posting on Slashdot BECAUSE of open standards.
Anyone who SERIOUSLY believes that Linux is a threat to their closed proprietary desktop systems is deluded - there is no "Linux vs. Everyone Else" war so take a deep breath and calm down. It's already here and in daily use in billions of embedded devices from routers to cars, NAS drives, music players, TVs, etc. etc. It's there because anyone can take it, adapt it, scale it up or down, and do neat things with it. It also means that any company that uses it isn't hampered by paying license extortion fees to some big company every time they use. Even Android is outselling iOS by far on a device-by-device basis...
So by all means, go off and enjoy your computing experience and buy what you like from who you like because that's the nice thing about living in a capitalist society. But PLEASE don't base your comments from what "the man in the pub" told you - take this from an expert because most of what you believe is wrong, and when you strip away the untruths, all that's left is a little man who is terrified he might have to turn in his pretty electronic jewelry because of this onslaught by Linux, that scares him so much.
FASA... now there's a glorious name from the past.
Yep, I had the Battletech boardgame, played it more than a few times and loved it.
But the highlight of the FASA catalogue was definitely the Star Trek Tactical Combat Simulator, where you could pit all manner of Federation starships against all manner of Romulan and Klingon starships - *AND* have big sheets for each ship where you could boost your shield power, repair damage weapons and do emergency turns to bring certain weapon arcs to bear on the enemy. You could spend an entire evening playing what turned out to be about 2 minutes of real-time ship combat...
And FASA also did the Doctor Who RPG, I seem to recall.
About the only company that can make good margins on consumer-level computing devices these days is Apple, and that''s because their customers are prepared to pay a premium for buying into a brand name.
Anyone else who sells hardware has to make additional profits through value added services like support contracts and selling applications for the hardware. That in turn means having a heap of developers ready to start churning out the applications as soon as the customers start buying.
I'm with you, I'll never buy Apple as long as it's a walled garden ecosystem, how good their products actually are is irrelevant to me beyond that point. But I just don't see it happening unless it's cheaply-made Chinese crap that distributors can put enough of a margin on - and then you'll end up hacking something that something that starts off as a piece of crappy hardware, whereas the Touchpad (now the HP-employed missus has managed to get one) is actually a nicely made and nicely specc-ed bit of hardware.
The missus works for HP and up to the point she came home with a cheap Touchpad, neither of us owned a tablet.
As the household Linux/UNIX geek, I set the thing up for her and both of us thought it was okay but nothing special.
However, I then had a read through the stuff regarding Preware, optimising the speed of the tablet by turning off unnecessary logging and throwing on the UberKernel so you could push the CPU clock speed up by a few hundred megahertz - and did all that stuff on it.
The difference was quite amazing, it turned from something that was quite sluggish to use into a very nippy and quick little device - plus the access to the Preware stuff opened up thousands of new apps that there was previously no access to.
Which begs the question, why didn't HP just do the above on all Touchpads in the first place? At least have presented the device in as best a way as possible.
I still think tablets are a gimmick and there's no way I'd ever buy into a walled garden ecosystem, no matter how good the iPad may or may not actually be. But having played about and hacked about with the Touchpad, I can start to see the appeal. Had it been my Touchpad, Android would also be on it now but although the missus wants it on there, I've told her to wait until it's a bit more mature.
...in the meantime, what have all these advertising standards watchdogs being doing about the huge great juicy McDonald's burgers filled with the crispest, freshest lettuce in TV adverts but that are impossible to actually buy in their restaurants?
Or the electrically inductive Coca Cola lorries capable of illuminating Christmas lights merely by driving past them? For how long in that advert am I actually shown the product that I am supposed to be buying?
...I do work in security for a telecoms product manufacturer and maintainer and there are a HUGE number of companies out there that store credit card data in plain text.
However, you cannot just look at that one particular issue to make a determination as to whether or not the data is secure - it's also about how the system on which that data is stored is isolated from the real world, what firewalling and access controls are in place to restrict who can get to that data, whether or not they update the systems regularly, etc. etc.
This is NOT a security exploit, there's no report of any security hole that makes that data available to the rest of the world, unlike what happened to Sony - so some prespective needs to be put on this.
Any wise company conducts regular Risk Assessments on their infrastructure to determine what potential security risks exists, how big those risks are and how much it will cost to fix it. In this particular case, it might be that using encrypted credit card information might entail having to upgrade very expensive applications to a later version, all of which will factor into the cost of fixing the issue. If Google has determined that the risk of an outside party getting to that data is extremely low, then they may not consider it worth the expense of the upgrade.
Every company will do this, even Apple and Microsoft, and many of them do choose to adopt PCI (Payment Card Industry) guidelines on storing this kind of data correctly.
It could be argued that someone stealing a file of encrypted credit card data from a company is a much bigger issue than someone (so far) not being able to steal unencrypted data from a company - so it's always wise to put some perspective around these kinds of statements.
I credit my posting above in that case because it looks to me like you've really had to struggle to pick out something out of it that allows you to argue.
Even Apple themselves will admit that their devices have a premium price - it's about buying into a *BRAND*, exactly the same thing when you buy a Mercedes car or a Rolex wristwatch - part of what you are paying covers permission to display that brand, it's *PRECISELY* why all of those, and Apple, have a visible logo and/or design look that gives no doubt to anyone else who made the product.
There may be one or two top-end Android products that have a price that is close to the nearest Apple equivalent but you can guarantee that when Android tablets start flooding the market, Samsung's expensive tablets will drop in price, as will all the premium Android brands. Let's wait and see what Kindle Fire does to Android device prices.
I'll admit now that I don't own one single Apple product because I won't buy into walled gardens (if others do then that's their choice) so I don't claim to be anyone other than someone on the periphery looking in at what Apple does. But when was the last time *THEY* reduced the prices of any of their products? Maybe some of the low end iPods got a bit cheaper but the high-end stuff won't, in the same way that Mercedes cars and Rolex watches won't get any cheaper.
*ALL* of those brand names are aimed at an exclusive end of the buyer spectrum at people who, for whatever reason, like to display brands.
It's been argued in a number of magazines that I have read recently that if you are a true techie then you will never buy an Apple product - simply because you have the knowledge to find something else that is cheaper to buy that you can hack about with to give you functionality as good as or better than any Apple product.
And please don't take that as a direct attack on Apple because it's not. People that have a "just works" mentality buy Apple products and probably love them, and good luck to Apple for fitting into that niche market. But those products *ARE* priced accordingly and I'm sure Steve Jobs, were he alive today, would be the first to admit that was always his marketing strategy.
I accept your better knowledge of Darwin but the core point is still there - namely that a lot of code is shared between applications across platforms.
I disagree on the second point and you've actually contradicted yourself. A Linux evangelist (of which I am not one) will tell you that any "Linux" OS is a combination of GNU tools and a Linux kernel - therefore, officially, it's full name should be "GNU/Linux". However, because of the popularity of actual distributions, if you say "Red Hat Linux" then that immediately creates an image of a server-level version of Linux, whereas "Ubuntu" translates to being a desktop distribution. In other words, it's the distribution name that often determines what that distro is likely to be used for, but just say "Linux" does not give any information whatsoever.
On the third point, I welcome any evidence that you may have that states I am wrong. Yes, there is a HUGE community of Microsoft developers but a very large proportion of those are working solely in corporate environments developing in-house applications that never see light in the external world. What I took his comments to mean were code contributions into world-accessible projects, whether that's into Open Source or commercial software.
Again, the fact that there is a huge amount of Open Source software ported to Linux, Mac, Windows, other UNIX systems and lots of other CPU architectures suggests to me that it's a very large community. And if you are including ASP and VB developers then, by implication, you should also include shell scripters, PERL developers, and people that write Java, Javascript, CGI, HTML etc. And most of those I mentioned are cross-platform development so are, in effect, contributing code into all platforms.
Microsoft development has really only been around for no more than 20 years but the free software concept predates that by at least another 10 years. If you go back to the personal computer days of Commodore Amiga, Atari St, Apple II, etc. the freeware and shareware communities were absolutely huge even then.
People are talking about "apps" like they've always been around but, in actuality, they are still are very new idea to most of the inhabitants of this world.
My definition of an "app" is a small software application that's designed to do one job particularly well in as small a memory profile as possible - if you're like me and worked with UNIX and Linux for years, you also know that "lots of programs that are designed to do one job very well" has always been the core development concept behind any UNIX-like system and why people complain about it being difficult because they don't know what program to use to do a specific task when there are hundreds of little applications that possibly need to be combined in certain ways to do something specific.
I don't subscribe to walled gardens and therefore don't own any Apple devices and never will whilst that walled garden ecosystem exists. But I do freely admit that there are people out there who are using iPhones and iPads now as their main computing device. As a computer and OS geek, to me an iPad is nothing more than an expensive gadget but a lot of older people I know love iPads which they consider to be easier to use than a PC, some have even replaced their PC with an iPad.
Whilst I personally prefer Android, I don't see the same thing happening with that at the moment. The Android tablet market is still in its infancy and I know of nobody who owns one yet. The nearest comparison I can make is i know quite a few people who took advantage of the cheap HP tablet deal (my wife works for them) and whilst their happy with the price they got them for, none of them have replaced their home PCs with one.
Therefore, the logical assumption I can make here is that there is more money to be made per person from Apple users because many of them no longer spend money on PC software having ditched those.
Another point to consider is the difference in the taget markets for iOS and Android. Apple devices have a premium price, therefore marketing types will perceive Apple users as having more money to spend than someone who owns Android on a £99 mobile phone. If you look at the number of applications that run on iOS, I would say that iOS has far more apps devoted to selling the user something than does Android - e.g. airline ticket bookings, train timetables, local restaurant details, etc.
The point I'm trying to make here is that in the days when people did everything on desktop PCs, 95% of them used a Windows PC and therefore bought software for it as a captive audience. A developer could create a piece of software fairly sure in the knowledge that if it was a good enough application or game, then people would flock to buy it and the developers just needed to develop it for one platform.
However, with mobile devices, now you have multiple platforms of Android, iOS, Blackberry and potentially Windows Mobile (or whatever it's called), you have a demand for smaller and simpler applications, plus a marketplace that was once the domain of big software developers now open to just about anyone who has a good idea for an application and wants to sell it.
Add to that the fact that people are no longer paying £50 or so for a big software application but £3 for a small application, and the whole development scene has become a lot more complicated as a result. Under such circumstances, developers are going to target what they develop for very carefully and where they can get the most money for the least effort.
So ultimately, the number of apps for a platform has absolutely nothing to do with how good its development tools are or whether or not it's a walled garden - it's just down to prioritising to those people who are likely to spend the most money.
Slashdot Mirror
I am an RHCE, you do not need to be an expert shell scripter to pass it - therefore the two are mutually exclusive.
No, it does not.
But not recognising that Apple users are pretty much unique in the tech gadget world for queuing outside stores for a new piece of electronic jewelry, and that therefore the OP was making a valid point, does make you a fanboi.
And let me correct you on one thing - the term "credibility" is not a fixed attribute, it is based solely on opinion - therefore something that may seem credible to me may not seem credible to you. And whilst we could argue our difference of opinions ad infinitum, it is unlikely that either of us would change our viewpoint as a result of the other's reasoned argument. Therefore let's not waste time discussing differences in opinion any further.
However, not recognising that level of credibility is based purely on opinion has in itself allowed you to make a sweeping generalisation in assuming everyone else shares your opinion. Thus you paint yourself as a hypocrite also.
Finally, you also suffer from two dimensional blinkered thinking if you believe that someone with whom you do not share the same opinion automatically becomes your enemy. Who was it who said "I may not agree with what you say but I defend your right to say it"?
Clearly, since this is a discussion web site, I defend your right to say what you like on here, but that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it - and definitely doesn't mean that when I sign off shortly to go to bed that as I fall into slumber I will be plotting the demise of jo_harn. If anything, you also suffer from an inflated ego if you seriously believe I care that much about your opinion in the first place.
So, no, you are not a rabid fanboi. You are a hypocritical rabid fanboi with an over-inflated ego.
As I said in response to someone else, she was from a Third World Muslim country that constantly gets bad press for giving a safe haven to Taliban terrorists and puts women in a lower caste than men, so her achieving what she did is worthy of a mention.
And if a young life that ends so early serves as an inspiration to other teenagers on a path to drug or alcohol addiction, or to an unwanted pregnancy, then maybe it wasn't a totally pointless death.
It's very easy to be sat in a nice big warm house in front of a nice expensive computer and pour scorn down on others rather than sometimes just taking a deep breath and just not saying anything for the sake of a little compassion.
...the the fast approaching 15th Anniversary of Apple's bankruptcy bailout by Microsoft wasn't listed anywhere.
Erm, how about those that queue on a day when nothing new is released but just because it's a new Apple store that's opening?
Sheep queue or cluster together because they are about to get something, like food, for example. The above behaviour is more akin to deranged magpies attracted by something shiny and somewhat insulting to sheep.
Stopped reading here.
I am a rabid Apple fanboi.
There, corrected that for you.
Not that it's relevant to this story, but as a mainly Linux person, I wonder if her death would have attracted less negative trolling had she been a Red Hat Certified Engineer or a genius BASH shell scripter.
I don't feel proud as a member of the human race when people turn a suite of software tools into a religion - be they Linux, Microsoft or Apple zealot.
...is when you troll gleefully about the death of a teenage Pakistani girl who was a genius with Microsoft stuff but attacked anyone who trolled gleefully when Steve Jobs passed away.
Congratulations! In two decades of using Linux you're the first sick fuck who has got me to question the wisdom of that decision.
Here are the reasons why this is a news-worthy item here on Slashdot and why she should be credited for what she did:
1. The girl was from Pakistan and therefore unlikely to have been afforded similar social & educational privileges than a 16-year old girl in the USA or Europe.
2. Pakistan is a mainly Muslim country meaning that women have a lower status than men from the moment of birth. Therefore what she did was that little bit more harder for her than for a boy in Pakistan.
3. It's good to occasionally get a new story from Pakistan where everyone isn't portrayed as either a Taliban terrorist in the mountains or a member of the Pakistan government hiding them.
4. Maybe if a few more kids in our rich Western countries (I'm in the UK) took an interest in intellectual pursuits like programming, we wouldn't have so many of them dropping unwanted kids or getting addicted to drugs or alcohol. Maybe just one or two of those kids will read this story and take some inspiration from it, possibly change their own lives.
So now kindly shut the fuck up if you cannot show some compassion.
I'm a Gentoo user but I still think you're a sick fuck.
A new word for your vocabulary is here.
A lot of major record companies are starting to get the message also.
I personally don't care for digital downloads, I've bought CD albums for around 3 decades (vinyl before that) and just rip them myself for portability. Most of what I listen to is classic (hard) rock, and they're doing a really good job of getting me to part with my money currently with remastered albums, bonus tracks, some in DVD-A mixes and some even including DVD concert discs.
I could care less that it's "old technology" or what anyone else thinks, music is my number one hobby anyway and the record companies are giving me good value products meaning that I don't download music freely.
Like you said above, giving those who already pay to keep paying...
I disagree with nothing that you have said but, in answer to your final question, the threat is from uninformed people setting the precedent at the expense of everyone's personal freedoms.
These days it is MUCH MUCH LESS about the operating system and more about the apps that run on it. If those apps are tightly controlled with closed APIs and file formats, then as more and more people use them, it actually reverses that trend because, for example, in order to use a specific killer app then you may HAVE to buy, say, an Apple device that runs iOS. In other words, maintaining the notion that the platform OS *IS* important.
So the point here is really about getting the message across. It has nothing to do with "Linux is better than Windows", it's more to do with preserving the evolution that is taking place currently where people can choose the devices and platforms they want to use, and for them to do so secure in the knowledge that the one they choose can talk to those by other vendors because the intercommunication and APIs between all of them are based on Open Standards.
The danger is that people flock to buy all of these pretty little gadgets without stopping to consider what they are giving up as a result - yes, a walled garden may give them more security but how much of their personal choice and freedom have they handed over in the process? So it *IS* important to keep getting that message across, rather than bickering about whether or not Microsoft is better than Apple is better than Linux.
Just to correct you on one point as a European...
During the 1980s, the Mac was virtually unheard of outside of the US, as was just about every Apple computer that preceded it, like the Apple II for example. Here the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were far more prevalent.
I think you over-estimate Apple's influence at the time, it was the fact that the home computer market was so fragmented across the globe that allowed Microsoft and the IBM PC to capitalise on pushing out a single platform, both for home and business users.
If anything, Commodore, Atari and Apple shared a common trait, namely that they were "run by geeks" and not by true businessmen who understood marketing and product penetration, ultimately that's why they all failed. (Yes, even Apple failed by 1997 when Microsoft bailed them out for it's own interests to the tune of $250M).
Even now the Mac is a very restricted market, it wouldn't surprise me to see Apple drop it completely over the next few years. Most people could care less about the OS platform, those that do run OS X or Linux (like me) on the desktop but we are, and always will be, a minority, that is not helped by the fact that the minority itself is split in two - i.e. highly computer literate like me who want personal freedom at the expense of a steep learning curve and therefore choose Linux, and those Mac people who simply want an alternative to Microsoft that doesn't need much in the way of learning to use.
Personally, I run MAME (have done for years) and I run Chrome, but apart from a quick look to satisfy my inquisitive geekness, I doubt I will use this long term.
No, it's not standard, but neither are the plugins that you can run in Firefox, Chrome, etc. that give you themes, adblocking, download management, etc.
And not that I own a single Apple device either (or plan to) but I assume this will be of interest to Apple users who currently can't load MAME onto their iP*ds/iPhones unless they jailbreak - as far as I'm aware, any emulation is a strict no-no on the App Store (and one of the main reasons I don't give Apple stuff a second glance).
But I assume they can run Chrome and therefore can run MAME in it now. And if it's non-standard in this case then sobeit - it's for a minority of the populace that use Apple devices AND want to retrogame.
So the point of your posting is precisely what? To talk about good design or to diss Linux?
Sure, I fully accept that the majority of people out there want neat and easy to use devices without caring about the underlying operating system and I have no problem with that - these days it's ALL about the applications and the underlying OS is becoming less important. In other words, most of those same people don't care whether it's running OS X, Windows or even Linux.
On top of that, unless you ever used a UNIX shell properly, then you don't know what you are talking about - so stop right there. No, text shells are not for the general populace but they are for power users that want to get things done quickly, especially automated and repetitive tasks. The fact that command shells have existed for about 40 years is a testament to good design. I work with UNIX, Linux and shells every day of my life and in my company people see me as someone who comes up with solutions when it comes to auditing and securing servers, and most of the time I'm doing what I do with shell scripts. The fact that you talk about shells being "from the 90's" illustrates your lack of technical understanding, in reality they originated in the 1970's, slightly sooner if you bring it what DEC were doing on PDP systems from the late 1960s.
You are entitled to your opinions but what you are arguing is entirely subjective. My prime concern for any computing device is how it functions as a tool and how much I can customise it to make it work the way I needed to. How it looks is of minimal importance and, naturally, I won't pay a premium price just because something looks nice. It will therefore come as no shock to you to learn that in 30+ years of being around computers, I've never once felt the need to buy anything by Apple because, in my opinion, nothing they've ever made has been good enough or cheap enough to replace anything that I currently use.
As for Windows, whilst being mainly a Linux user these days, I really like XP with the Classic interface, any GUIs Microsoft have done after that point are cluttered eye candy that burn CPU cycles unnecessarily - whether or not Windows 7 is a better operating system underneath.
As for the"open part", more people need to recognise that Open Standards are the reason why the Internet exploded in the first place, the TCP/IP stack on which everything we now communicate on is open by design. Had that not been the case, then we would not be enjoying cheap and fast Internet because vendors like IBM, Honeywell Novell and Microsoft would still be arguing about who's proprietary networking protocols was best and how much of a license fee they could charge for them. Again, someone who understood this as a fact would realise that he/she is able to do things like Facebook and posting on Slashdot BECAUSE of open standards.
Anyone who SERIOUSLY believes that Linux is a threat to their closed proprietary desktop systems is deluded - there is no "Linux vs. Everyone Else" war so take a deep breath and calm down. It's already here and in daily use in billions of embedded devices from routers to cars, NAS drives, music players, TVs, etc. etc. It's there because anyone can take it, adapt it, scale it up or down, and do neat things with it. It also means that any company that uses it isn't hampered by paying license extortion fees to some big company every time they use. Even Android is outselling iOS by far on a device-by-device basis...
So by all means, go off and enjoy your computing experience and buy what you like from who you like because that's the nice thing about living in a capitalist society. But PLEASE don't base your comments from what "the man in the pub" told you - take this from an expert because most of what you believe is wrong, and when you strip away the untruths, all that's left is a little man who is terrified he might have to turn in his pretty electronic jewelry because of this onslaught by Linux, that scares him so much.
FASA... now there's a glorious name from the past.
Yep, I had the Battletech boardgame, played it more than a few times and loved it.
But the highlight of the FASA catalogue was definitely the Star Trek Tactical Combat Simulator, where you could pit all manner of Federation starships against all manner of Romulan and Klingon starships - *AND* have big sheets for each ship where you could boost your shield power, repair damage weapons and do emergency turns to bring certain weapon arcs to bear on the enemy. You could spend an entire evening playing what turned out to be about 2 minutes of real-time ship combat...
And FASA also did the Doctor Who RPG, I seem to recall.
Great days...
It's a nice idea but it can't work in practice.
About the only company that can make good margins on consumer-level computing devices these days is Apple, and that''s because their customers are prepared to pay a premium for buying into a brand name.
Anyone else who sells hardware has to make additional profits through value added services like support contracts and selling applications for the hardware. That in turn means having a heap of developers ready to start churning out the applications as soon as the customers start buying.
I'm with you, I'll never buy Apple as long as it's a walled garden ecosystem, how good their products actually are is irrelevant to me beyond that point. But I just don't see it happening unless it's cheaply-made Chinese crap that distributors can put enough of a margin on - and then you'll end up hacking something that something that starts off as a piece of crappy hardware, whereas the Touchpad (now the HP-employed missus has managed to get one) is actually a nicely made and nicely specc-ed bit of hardware.
Case in point...
The missus works for HP and up to the point she came home with a cheap Touchpad, neither of us owned a tablet.
As the household Linux/UNIX geek, I set the thing up for her and both of us thought it was okay but nothing special.
However, I then had a read through the stuff regarding Preware, optimising the speed of the tablet by turning off unnecessary logging and throwing on the UberKernel so you could push the CPU clock speed up by a few hundred megahertz - and did all that stuff on it.
The difference was quite amazing, it turned from something that was quite sluggish to use into a very nippy and quick little device - plus the access to the Preware stuff opened up thousands of new apps that there was previously no access to.
Which begs the question, why didn't HP just do the above on all Touchpads in the first place? At least have presented the device in as best a way as possible.
I still think tablets are a gimmick and there's no way I'd ever buy into a walled garden ecosystem, no matter how good the iPad may or may not actually be. But having played about and hacked about with the Touchpad, I can start to see the appeal. Had it been my Touchpad, Android would also be on it now but although the missus wants it on there, I've told her to wait until it's a bit more mature.
...in the meantime, what have all these advertising standards watchdogs being doing about the huge great juicy McDonald's burgers filled with the crispest, freshest lettuce in TV adverts but that are impossible to actually buy in their restaurants?
Or the electrically inductive Coca Cola lorries capable of illuminating Christmas lights merely by driving past them? For how long in that advert am I actually shown the product that I am supposed to be buying?
...I do work in security for a telecoms product manufacturer and maintainer and there are a HUGE number of companies out there that store credit card data in plain text.
However, you cannot just look at that one particular issue to make a determination as to whether or not the data is secure - it's also about how the system on which that data is stored is isolated from the real world, what firewalling and access controls are in place to restrict who can get to that data, whether or not they update the systems regularly, etc. etc.
This is NOT a security exploit, there's no report of any security hole that makes that data available to the rest of the world, unlike what happened to Sony - so some prespective needs to be put on this.
Any wise company conducts regular Risk Assessments on their infrastructure to determine what potential security risks exists, how big those risks are and how much it will cost to fix it. In this particular case, it might be that using encrypted credit card information might entail having to upgrade very expensive applications to a later version, all of which will factor into the cost of fixing the issue. If Google has determined that the risk of an outside party getting to that data is extremely low, then they may not consider it worth the expense of the upgrade.
Every company will do this, even Apple and Microsoft, and many of them do choose to adopt PCI (Payment Card Industry) guidelines on storing this kind of data correctly.
It could be argued that someone stealing a file of encrypted credit card data from a company is a much bigger issue than someone (so far) not being able to steal unencrypted data from a company - so it's always wise to put some perspective around these kinds of statements.
Oh, PUHLEEAASE!
I credit my posting above in that case because it looks to me like you've really had to struggle to pick out something out of it that allows you to argue.
Even Apple themselves will admit that their devices have a premium price - it's about buying into a *BRAND*, exactly the same thing when you buy a Mercedes car or a Rolex wristwatch - part of what you are paying covers permission to display that brand, it's *PRECISELY* why all of those, and Apple, have a visible logo and/or design look that gives no doubt to anyone else who made the product.
There may be one or two top-end Android products that have a price that is close to the nearest Apple equivalent but you can guarantee that when Android tablets start flooding the market, Samsung's expensive tablets will drop in price, as will all the premium Android brands. Let's wait and see what Kindle Fire does to Android device prices.
I'll admit now that I don't own one single Apple product because I won't buy into walled gardens (if others do then that's their choice) so I don't claim to be anyone other than someone on the periphery looking in at what Apple does. But when was the last time *THEY* reduced the prices of any of their products? Maybe some of the low end iPods got a bit cheaper but the high-end stuff won't, in the same way that Mercedes cars and Rolex watches won't get any cheaper.
*ALL* of those brand names are aimed at an exclusive end of the buyer spectrum at people who, for whatever reason, like to display brands.
It's been argued in a number of magazines that I have read recently that if you are a true techie then you will never buy an Apple product - simply because you have the knowledge to find something else that is cheaper to buy that you can hack about with to give you functionality as good as or better than any Apple product.
And please don't take that as a direct attack on Apple because it's not. People that have a "just works" mentality buy Apple products and probably love them, and good luck to Apple for fitting into that niche market. But those products *ARE* priced accordingly and I'm sure Steve Jobs, were he alive today, would be the first to admit that was always his marketing strategy.
I accept your better knowledge of Darwin but the core point is still there - namely that a lot of code is shared between applications across platforms.
I disagree on the second point and you've actually contradicted yourself. A Linux evangelist (of which I am not one) will tell you that any "Linux" OS is a combination of GNU tools and a Linux kernel - therefore, officially, it's full name should be "GNU/Linux". However, because of the popularity of actual distributions, if you say "Red Hat Linux" then that immediately creates an image of a server-level version of Linux, whereas "Ubuntu" translates to being a desktop distribution. In other words, it's the distribution name that often determines what that distro is likely to be used for, but just say "Linux" does not give any information whatsoever.
On the third point, I welcome any evidence that you may have that states I am wrong. Yes, there is a HUGE community of Microsoft developers but a very large proportion of those are working solely in corporate environments developing in-house applications that never see light in the external world. What I took his comments to mean were code contributions into world-accessible projects, whether that's into Open Source or commercial software.
Again, the fact that there is a huge amount of Open Source software ported to Linux, Mac, Windows, other UNIX systems and lots of other CPU architectures suggests to me that it's a very large community. And if you are including ASP and VB developers then, by implication, you should also include shell scripters, PERL developers, and people that write Java, Javascript, CGI, HTML etc. And most of those I mentioned are cross-platform development so are, in effect, contributing code into all platforms.
Microsoft development has really only been around for no more than 20 years but the free software concept predates that by at least another 10 years. If you go back to the personal computer days of Commodore Amiga, Atari St, Apple II, etc. the freeware and shareware communities were absolutely huge even then.
People are talking about "apps" like they've always been around but, in actuality, they are still are very new idea to most of the inhabitants of this world.
My definition of an "app" is a small software application that's designed to do one job particularly well in as small a memory profile as possible - if you're like me and worked with UNIX and Linux for years, you also know that "lots of programs that are designed to do one job very well" has always been the core development concept behind any UNIX-like system and why people complain about it being difficult because they don't know what program to use to do a specific task when there are hundreds of little applications that possibly need to be combined in certain ways to do something specific.
I don't subscribe to walled gardens and therefore don't own any Apple devices and never will whilst that walled garden ecosystem exists. But I do freely admit that there are people out there who are using iPhones and iPads now as their main computing device. As a computer and OS geek, to me an iPad is nothing more than an expensive gadget but a lot of older people I know love iPads which they consider to be easier to use than a PC, some have even replaced their PC with an iPad.
Whilst I personally prefer Android, I don't see the same thing happening with that at the moment. The Android tablet market is still in its infancy and I know of nobody who owns one yet. The nearest comparison I can make is i know quite a few people who took advantage of the cheap HP tablet deal (my wife works for them) and whilst their happy with the price they got them for, none of them have replaced their home PCs with one.
Therefore, the logical assumption I can make here is that there is more money to be made per person from Apple users because many of them no longer spend money on PC software having ditched those.
Another point to consider is the difference in the taget markets for iOS and Android. Apple devices have a premium price, therefore marketing types will perceive Apple users as having more money to spend than someone who owns Android on a £99 mobile phone. If you look at the number of applications that run on iOS, I would say that iOS has far more apps devoted to selling the user something than does Android - e.g. airline ticket bookings, train timetables, local restaurant details, etc.
The point I'm trying to make here is that in the days when people did everything on desktop PCs, 95% of them used a Windows PC and therefore bought software for it as a captive audience. A developer could create a piece of software fairly sure in the knowledge that if it was a good enough application or game, then people would flock to buy it and the developers just needed to develop it for one platform.
However, with mobile devices, now you have multiple platforms of Android, iOS, Blackberry and potentially Windows Mobile (or whatever it's called), you have a demand for smaller and simpler applications, plus a marketplace that was once the domain of big software developers now open to just about anyone who has a good idea for an application and wants to sell it.
Add to that the fact that people are no longer paying £50 or so for a big software application but £3 for a small application, and the whole development scene has become a lot more complicated as a result. Under such circumstances, developers are going to target what they develop for very carefully and where they can get the most money for the least effort.
So ultimately, the number of apps for a platform has absolutely nothing to do with how good its development tools are or whether or not it's a walled garden - it's just down to prioritising to those people who are likely to spend the most money.