That basically means (this will horrify pruists) idiot proof Linux distros that offer all the same software and functionality as the normal Windows workstation
I don't think you can reconcile the idea of an "idiot proof" distribution and "all the same functionality as the normal Windows workstation."
More seriously, I don't understand why there is this persistent suggestion that Linux should imitate Windows, when it's generally accepted that Windows sucks. It's like aspiring to be mediocre.
It seems that with the officially supported version of X11, Apple has made it sound like it expands the functionality of OSX so that it is able to run any app from any *NIX platform.
Nobody, not even Apple, has said this.
"Easy to port X11 applications With the complete suite of the standard X11 display server software, client libraries and developer toolkits, X11 for Mac OS X makes it even simpler to port Linux and Unix applications to the Mac." -- Apple's X11 Page
What you might not realize is that there are already a significant number of X11 apps that have already been ported. This is what the OP was basing his statements on.
This service has only just launched and there are already 3 different manufacturers players to choose from.
How is that worse?
You completely missed the point.
There may be three players to choose from, but you have to buy one to listen to the music anywhere but at your computer. You can't burn CDs without paying full CD price on top of what you already paid for the subscription.
Contrast this with complaints of Apple forcing consumers to buy iPods, when in fact they can burn CDs for the negligible price of the media.
Your choices with Napster: a) buy a Napster-compatable player b) pay extra money on top of your subscription fee to burn a CD
Your choices with iTunes: a) buy an iPod b) burn a CD for free
I think that makes my point clear, which is that Napster's service does much more "forcing" than iTunes.
(I personally don't consider either "forcing", but that's what people call it. Also, both scenarios assume that you don't already own an iPod or a Napster-compatable player, and that you actually do want to listen to music away from your PC.)
People seem to forget that, even when "purchasing" music, even at $0.99/song, you don't really "own" the music, just the right to play it on a portable device, burn it onto a CD or two, and play it on a few machines that you own..
Wow, when you think of all of the other things I can do with music I ripped : play it on my portable device, burn it onto CDs*, play it on the other machines I own.
Hmm. It looks like the only thing I can't do with these DRMed files is illegally distribute them on the internet.
[*]: saying "a CD or two" is bullshit. You can burn tracks onto an unlimited number of CDs. What you can't do is make a dozen copies of the same album, which I can't understand why anyone would want to do.
The only thing you bought was permission to use a bundle of bits on your hard drive, and that's it.
When you buy a CD, you're paying for the permission to use a bundle of bits on the disc. The only real difference is that they give you the disc, and it's a slightly different bundle of bits.
Not only that, but you paid FULL price for a song encoded with a LOSSY compression scheme!
Actually I didn't. I paid less than full price and I got less than I would have buying the CD. I got it a hell of a lot faster though.
Do you get to listen to it whereever and whenever you want?
Yes, actually. What I think you *mean* is that I can't listen to it *anywhere* and *everywhere* that I *could*, if it were ripped from a CD. There is a pretty significant difference in those two statements.
I don't necessarily disagree with your criticisms of the music stores, but (as Napster will soon learn), calling people stupid is no way to get your point across too them.
For $5 more, I can switch to Napster and have unlimited access to all those songs, PLUS I can take them along with me wherever I go. Sounds like a freaking deal to me.
You can take them with you ONLY if you have a Napster-To-Go branded audio player, which costs money. You can't burn CDs without paying another $1 a song.
For all of the griping about Apple "forcing" people to buy an iPod, this scheme is even worse.
So let me get this straight: even though the school is implicitly and explicitly responsible for minor children during the day, they have no right to keep track of them with technology?
What I find horrifying is that that's all schools are really responsible for these days. Schools are basically prisons, and virtually all of the energy spent on "improving" them seems to be directed at making them more like prisons.
Also, yes/no questions should have buttons with yes/no answers on them, not "OK" and "Cancel"
Of course, you shouldn't be using Yes/No questions if you can possibly avoid it. A generally better idea for the above example would be something like "Format" and "Do Not Format".
Technically superior solutions are constantly being left in the dusk by the effect of bad marketing.
This has some to do with the fact that it's pretty hard to market crap. And a lot of technically superior solutions are crap solutions in other ways. The best solutions tend to be the easiest to market.
First off, every language has its purpose, and just because some of these languages aren't as well designed as the author's languages, that's not a good enough excuse to bash them.
When someone like Alan Kay, with a very inventive and academic background, criticizes the workhorse stuff out in the "real world", he's pointing out where the ideas don't work, rather than the thing itself. Basically, he's thinking on another level than the one most of us are.
He's not really saying Java just sucks. He's Java sucks insofar as it was founded on some bad ideas. That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't do real work in it. It just means that there are limits to what you can do with it. Someone like Alan Kay can't really get over this, which is part of what makes him a genius.
Paul Graham (who, of course, is a big fan of Lisp), has written quite a bit on language design. I think I would have reacted to this interview the same way you have had I not read The Hundred-Year Language, and others. I highly recommend them.
My point was that Synaptic is just a front-end to an implementation of an idea -- the idea being the real innovation. Unfortunately, as soon as an idiot moderator slaps that Flamebait label on you, people feel free to flame you.
apt-get like systems just isn't possible in proprietary systems, that's why windows update et. al. sucks.
If you read my other comment, you'll see that I talk about exactly this. In fact, I say pretty much the exact same thing you are.
Tell me, how are you gonna use windows update to update to the next version of Windows?
I'm not. I haven't used Windows in three years. Why is there always the assumption that someone that criticizes something can't also be a user of that thing?
Saw this coming. It's impossible to bring up Apple's market share without at least one fanboy reminding us all of the beloved car analogy.
Good design is good design.
Software, hardware, cars, typefaces, guns, knives, tools, chairs, buildings, bridges, watches -- you name it.
Apple just happens to be the only personal computer maker with a significant investment in good design. Of course they will draw comparisons to makers in other industries with similar investments in good design.
Getting back to market share, the OP is pretty much right. Market share is only important in regards to competition. A company with 90% of a market can still tank. Selling the absolute most units is not the only path to success -- there is more than one way to run a business. A company with 3% of the market can still be profitable, which is the only real sign of success.
In fact, it should be obvious that most companies, in most industries, don't have very large shares of their respective markets. There wouldn't be very many companies if there were.
(You may wonder why companies with good design tend to not have large market shares. It's not because of price, which most people leap at the chance to criticize. Price is subject to supply and demand. It's because most people have bad taste. If you don't think that most people have bad taste, please explain the following: reality television, Britney Spears, Wal-Mart, Taco Bell, Jerry Springer, fanny packs, George W. Bush, AOL, and most of human culture since the dawn of time.)
It basically boils down to the differences between open and proprietary systems. Any package management system will only be able to work smoothly for packages that are controlled by the maker of that package system.
On Windows, yeah, they can only install or patch Microsoft's products and libraries. On Mac OS X, they can only support Apple's products (including things like libssl).
If you're running Debian, most if not all of your installed software will come from Debian's repositories (or Gentoo, FreeBSD, etc.). I ran Debian for a long time, and I don't think I ever added anything to my sources list. I don't think that's uncommon. (To clarify: I think this is a good thing.)
If you do add sources, you have to trust that those packages won't depend on other packages not available via apt, or else the situation gets a lot less elegant.
Getting back to the original topic, I think that something like Synaptic (that I again confess I've never used) isn't really a big deal compared to the greater reality of APT (or BSD ports or Gentoo's emerge) -- the idea of the whole system, including applications, installed and updated from a single common source.
How many similar programs exist on Windows or Mac? It updates installed packages and allows new packages to be installed, whilst resolving dependencies...
Windows and Mac OS X both have similar installer and update functionality. The difference is that they are both more stable platforms (in terms of whether or not certain packages are available) -- you don't need the same kind of dependency management that you need with Linux.
I'm not saying Synaptic isn't cool (I wouldn't know), just that it's not a point against other platforms.
It loads a kernel based on os9. I don't see how it can be anything else.
Now you're just making shit up. The Mac OS X kernel is called XNU and is based on Mach and BSD, and has nothing to do with OS 9.
"XNU's BSD component uses FreeBSD as the primary reference codebase (although some cod might be traced to other BSDs). Darwin 7.x (Mac OS X 10.3.x) uses FreeBSD 5.x. As mentione before, BSD runs not as an external (or user-level) server, but is part of the kernel itself. " -- XNU : The Kernel
Now of only someone will start an open source project to imitate the things about Mac OS X that are worth imitating.
That isn't to say that the above aren't good things, but it's a little sad that open source projects always seem to be either skeletons (like GNUStep), or skins (all of the Aqua-clone themes and skins out there), without ever getting to the meat (the things that make computers truly useful).
All it would take would be for Apple to release OS X for the PC. Any chance Linux had at serious penetration of the desktop market would evaporate.
Why does everyone look at it this way? The "Apple can/should/could/will crush Linux" way? Linux, as it stands, is only marginally more tolerable than Windows (on the desktop, at least.), dispite it's significant technical chops.
If Linux had something that approached the quality of Mac OS X (and I don't mean making it look like it), then Linux would have a serious chance to make it on the desktop.
A.) It may be cheap and sexy, but it's hard to find apps for. Best Buy, for example, carries no Mac software.
This has more to do with the software retail industry being a big racket than anything else. Small players, if they can get on the shelves at all, generally don't see a cent of the profits. The costs involved in getting it on the shelves (all that packaging, shipping, etc.) can overshadow what meager returns they see.
All of the large Mac software producers I can think of also produce Windows software. Adobe, Microsoft, Blizzard, etc.
On the web, it's a different story. Some of the most interesting new Mac software available is only available online. OmniOutliner, Delicious Library, NetNewsWire, SubEthaEdit, etc. I don't think that any of these producs are really losing out not being on the shelves at BestBuy.
it has a 'bsd like' micro kernel. How does that make it linux/bsd? Why do people think the entire os is based on bsd? what a joke.
You don't know anything about Mac OS X, do you?
"Darwin 7.0.x (corresponding to Mac OS X 10.3.x) consists of over 250 packages. Many of these ar Apple packages (including the Mac OS X kernel and various drivers), while the others originat from *BSD, GNU, etc. Apple has leveraged a lot of existing open source software by integrating i well (usually) with their system: apache, bind, binutils, cvs, gcc, gdb, gimp_print, kerberos, mysql openssh, openssl, pam, perl, postfix, ppp, python, rsync, samba, and many more BSD/GNU/othe packages... are all part of Darwin." -- Architecture of Mac OS X
Slashdot Mirror
It may not be perfect but it's better then windows.
It may be better than Windows, but it's worse than Mac OS X.
For Linux to make any dent on the desktop for non-programmers, it will have to set it's sights higher than "better than Windows". A lot higher.
That basically means (this will horrify pruists) idiot proof Linux distros that offer all the same software and functionality as the normal Windows workstation
I don't think you can reconcile the idea of an "idiot proof" distribution and "all the same functionality as the normal Windows workstation."
More seriously, I don't understand why there is this persistent suggestion that Linux should imitate Windows, when it's generally accepted that Windows sucks. It's like aspiring to be mediocre.
It seems that with the officially supported version of X11, Apple has made it sound like it expands the functionality of OSX so that it is able to run any app from any *NIX platform.
Nobody, not even Apple, has said this.
"Easy to port X11 applications
With the complete suite of the standard X11 display server software, client libraries and developer toolkits, X11 for Mac OS X makes it even simpler to port Linux and Unix applications to the Mac." -- Apple's X11 Page
What you might not realize is that there are already a significant number of X11 apps that have already been ported. This is what the OP was basing his statements on.
This service has only just launched and there are already 3 different manufacturers players to choose from.
How is that worse?
You completely missed the point.
There may be three players to choose from, but you have to buy one to listen to the music anywhere but at your computer. You can't burn CDs without paying full CD price on top of what you already paid for the subscription.
Contrast this with complaints of Apple forcing consumers to buy iPods, when in fact they can burn CDs for the negligible price of the media.
Your choices with Napster:
a) buy a Napster-compatable player
b) pay extra money on top of your subscription fee to burn a CD
Your choices with iTunes:
a) buy an iPod
b) burn a CD for free
I think that makes my point clear, which is that Napster's service does much more "forcing" than iTunes.
(I personally don't consider either "forcing", but that's what people call it. Also, both scenarios assume that you don't already own an iPod or a Napster-compatable player, and that you actually do want to listen to music away from your PC.)
People seem to forget that, even when "purchasing" music, even at $0.99/song, you don't really "own" the music, just the right to play it on a portable device, burn it onto a CD or two, and play it on a few machines that you own..
Wow, when you think of all of the other things I can do with music I ripped : play it on my portable device, burn it onto CDs*, play it on the other machines I own.
Hmm. It looks like the only thing I can't do with these DRMed files is illegally distribute them on the internet.
[*]: saying "a CD or two" is bullshit. You can burn tracks onto an unlimited number of CDs. What you can't do is make a dozen copies of the same album, which I can't understand why anyone would want to do.
The only thing you bought was permission to use a bundle of bits on your hard drive, and that's it.
When you buy a CD, you're paying for the permission to use a bundle of bits on the disc. The only real difference is that they give you the disc, and it's a slightly different bundle of bits.
Not only that, but you paid FULL price for a song encoded with a LOSSY compression scheme!
Actually I didn't. I paid less than full price and I got less than I would have buying the CD. I got it a hell of a lot faster though.
Do you get to listen to it whereever and whenever you want?
Yes, actually. What I think you *mean* is that I can't listen to it *anywhere* and *everywhere* that I *could*, if it were ripped from a CD. There is a pretty significant difference in those two statements.
I don't necessarily disagree with your criticisms of the music stores, but (as Napster will soon learn), calling people stupid is no way to get your point across too them.
For $5 more, I can switch to Napster and have unlimited access to all those songs, PLUS I can take them along with me wherever I go. Sounds like a freaking deal to me.
You can take them with you ONLY if you have a Napster-To-Go branded audio player, which costs money. You can't burn CDs without paying another $1 a song.
For all of the griping about Apple "forcing" people to buy an iPod, this scheme is even worse.
So let me get this straight: even though the school is implicitly and explicitly responsible for minor children during the day, they have no right to keep track of them with technology?
What I find horrifying is that that's all schools are really responsible for these days. Schools are basically prisons, and virtually all of the energy spent on "improving" them seems to be directed at making them more like prisons.
Yes, we can all name exceptions, but how much of the market share do these exceptions have?
I think it's sad, but understandable, that one has to bring up "market share" in a discussion ostensibly about art.
Also, yes/no questions should have buttons with yes/no answers on them, not "OK" and "Cancel"
Of course, you shouldn't be using Yes/No questions if you can possibly avoid it. A generally better idea for the above example would be something like "Format" and "Do Not Format".
Technically superior solutions are constantly being left in the dusk by the effect of bad marketing.
This has some to do with the fact that it's pretty hard to market crap. And a lot of technically superior solutions are crap solutions in other ways. The best solutions tend to be the easiest to market.
First off, every language has its purpose, and just because some of these languages aren't as well designed as the author's languages, that's not a good enough excuse to bash them.
When someone like Alan Kay, with a very inventive and academic background, criticizes the workhorse stuff out in the "real world", he's pointing out where the ideas don't work, rather than the thing itself. Basically, he's thinking on another level than the one most of us are.
He's not really saying Java just sucks. He's Java sucks insofar as it was founded on some bad ideas. That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't do real work in it. It just means that there are limits to what you can do with it. Someone like Alan Kay can't really get over this, which is part of what makes him a genius.
Paul Graham (who, of course, is a big fan of Lisp), has written quite a bit on language design. I think I would have reacted to this interview the same way you have had I not read The Hundred-Year Language, and others. I highly recommend them.
Also: Isn't it odd that perl is the one language that hardly ever makes it past the slashdot lameness filter?
Yeah, but the lameness filter *is* perl.
Some days I really fucking hate ACs.
My point was that Synaptic is just a front-end to an implementation of an idea -- the idea being the real innovation.
Unfortunately, as soon as an idiot moderator slaps that Flamebait label on you, people feel free to flame you.
apt-get like systems just isn't possible in proprietary systems, that's why windows update et. al. sucks.
If you read my other comment, you'll see that I talk about exactly this. In fact, I say pretty much the exact same thing you are.
Tell me, how are you gonna use windows update to update to the next version of Windows?
I'm not. I haven't used Windows in three years. Why is there always the assumption that someone that criticizes something can't also be a user of that thing?
Saw this coming. It's impossible to bring up Apple's market share without at least one fanboy reminding us all of the beloved car analogy.
Good design is good design.
Software, hardware, cars, typefaces, guns, knives, tools, chairs, buildings, bridges, watches -- you name it.
Apple just happens to be the only personal computer maker with a significant investment in good design. Of course they will draw comparisons to makers in other industries with similar investments in good design.
Getting back to market share, the OP is pretty much right. Market share is only important in regards to competition. A company with 90% of a market can still tank. Selling the absolute most units is not the only path to success -- there is more than one way to run a business. A company with 3% of the market can still be profitable, which is the only real sign of success.
In fact, it should be obvious that most companies, in most industries, don't have very large shares of their respective markets. There wouldn't be very many companies if there were.
(You may wonder why companies with good design tend to not have large market shares. It's not because of price, which most people leap at the chance to criticize. Price is subject to supply and demand. It's because most people have bad taste. If you don't think that most people have bad taste, please explain the following: reality television, Britney Spears, Wal-Mart, Taco Bell, Jerry Springer, fanny packs, George W. Bush, AOL, and most of human culture since the dawn of time.)
Indeed, you're right. After thinking about it I came up with a clearer idea, posted over in my other reply..
It basically boils down to the differences between open and proprietary systems. Any package management system will only be able to work smoothly for packages that are controlled by the maker of that package system.
On Windows, yeah, they can only install or patch Microsoft's products and libraries. On Mac OS X, they can only support Apple's products (including things like libssl).
If you're running Debian, most if not all of your installed software will come from Debian's repositories (or Gentoo, FreeBSD, etc.). I ran Debian for a long time, and I don't think I ever added anything to my sources list. I don't think that's uncommon. (To clarify: I think this is a good thing.)
If you do add sources, you have to trust that those packages won't depend on other packages not available via apt, or else the situation gets a lot less elegant.
Getting back to the original topic, I think that something like Synaptic (that I again confess I've never used) isn't really a big deal compared to the greater reality of APT (or BSD ports or Gentoo's emerge) -- the idea of the whole system, including applications, installed and updated from a single common source.
How many similar programs exist on Windows or Mac? It updates installed packages and allows new packages to be installed, whilst resolving dependencies...
Windows and Mac OS X both have similar installer and update functionality. The difference is that they are both more stable platforms (in terms of whether or not certain packages are available) -- you don't need the same kind of dependency management that you need with Linux.
I'm not saying Synaptic isn't cool (I wouldn't know), just that it's not a point against other platforms.
It loads a kernel based on os9. I don't see how it can be anything else.
Now you're just making shit up. The Mac OS X kernel is called XNU and is based on Mach and BSD, and has nothing to do with OS 9.
"XNU's BSD component uses FreeBSD as the primary reference codebase (although some cod might be traced to other BSDs). Darwin 7.x (Mac OS X 10.3.x) uses FreeBSD 5.x. As mentione before, BSD runs not as an external (or user-level) server, but is part of the kernel itself. " -- XNU : The Kernel
I'm not talking about the packages that come with it.
So, where exactly do you draw the line? What does it not do or not have that makes it not based on BSD?
That's funny, I don't remember elves, dwarves and dragons in Neuromancer.
Of course not, those came from Tolkien.
Microkernel, unix-like userspace, Nextstep-based application development?
Now of only someone will start an open source project to imitate the things about Mac OS X that are worth imitating.
That isn't to say that the above aren't good things, but it's a little sad that open source projects always seem to be either skeletons (like GNUStep), or skins (all of the Aqua-clone themes and skins out there), without ever getting to the meat (the things that make computers truly useful).
All it would take would be for Apple to release OS X for the PC. Any chance Linux had at serious penetration of the desktop market would evaporate.
Why does everyone look at it this way? The "Apple can/should/could/will crush Linux" way? Linux, as it stands, is only marginally more tolerable than Windows (on the desktop, at least.), dispite it's significant technical chops.
If Linux had something that approached the quality of Mac OS X (and I don't mean making it look like it), then Linux would have a serious chance to make it on the desktop.
A.) It may be cheap and sexy, but it's hard to find apps for. Best Buy, for example, carries no Mac software.
This has more to do with the software retail industry being a big racket than anything else. Small players, if they can get on the shelves at all, generally don't see a cent of the profits. The costs involved in getting it on the shelves (all that packaging, shipping, etc.) can overshadow what meager returns they see.
All of the large Mac software producers I can think of also produce Windows software. Adobe, Microsoft, Blizzard, etc.
On the web, it's a different story. Some of the most interesting new Mac software available is only available online. OmniOutliner, Delicious Library, NetNewsWire, SubEthaEdit, etc. I don't think that any of these producs are really losing out not being on the shelves at BestBuy.
it has a 'bsd like' micro kernel. How does that make it linux/bsd? Why do people think the entire os is based on bsd? what a joke.
... are all part of Darwin." -- Architecture of Mac OS X
You don't know anything about Mac OS X, do you?
"Darwin 7.0.x (corresponding to Mac OS X 10.3.x) consists of over 250 packages. Many of these ar Apple packages (including the Mac OS X kernel and various drivers), while the others originat from *BSD, GNU, etc. Apple has leveraged a lot of existing open source software by integrating i well (usually) with their system: apache, bind, binutils, cvs, gcc, gdb, gimp_print, kerberos, mysql openssh, openssl, pam, perl, postfix, ppp, python, rsync, samba, and many more BSD/GNU/othe packages