There are even bits of Linux code here and there in Darwin. Darwin borrows from a whole bunch of sources. I believe a lot of the command-line tools are from OpenBSD, for instance. A lot of people enjoy this "best of the best" aspect of Darwin.
If Windows 3.0 had never happened, we'd all be bitching about IBM right now, though I think Apple would have had a much healthier 1990s.
Your point? The world now knows there are viable alternatives, and they can be had for historical lows on price.
"The world?" I assume by that phrase, you're referring to the geek development community. Your implication is that said community didn't know about viable alternatives before, which is balogna--UNIX has been around for a long damn time, and in the meantime there has been OS/2, BeOS, NeXTStep, BSD, etc.
The mainstream world still has no clue about Linux. The mainstream hype of Linux reached a fervor around 1999 and died out. Linux is just one of many choices out there for hardcore geeks and server admins, but not "the world."
What's that? The project and its followers expect respect, yet any features requests or criticisms are met with sarcastic "we're a volunteer group, damn you" responses?
Oh.
People judge on results. Don't hype something up and then dismiss any criticisms with lame excuses about volunteering. Nobody's forcing them to volunteer--if they don't want to do it anymore, they shouldn't, and people will just use some other kernel if they aren't already.
Basically, I'm tired of the "I'm a hero because I volunteer" attitude in OSS.
I keep re-reading your post, and I'm still no less confused.
Based on your words, you are saying:
1.) You don't want your drivers to be able to restart when they "crap out." This means you want the whole kernel to die instead?
2.) You say the drivers are buggy and take the whole house down, requiring fixing. You prefer the whole house to be taken down rather than just restarting the driver in userspace to stay running?
3.) You talk about buggy, closed-source drivers right after you've already said open source drivers are buggy and take the whole house down. So what's the difference?
4.) You argue against a fixed driver interface like every other modern operating system has, allowing for both open source and commercial driver development (that whole choice thing, right?). Your only supporting evidence appears to be that "Linus is against it." Linus is not a perfect developer whose words should always be followed.
But if it only happens on Firefox, it's a condition that applies to Firefox. Firefox should be able to handle such HTML. The other browsers do, even Opera. Saying "the fix is coming" in every article after every month is getting annoying.
I'm happy to see Slashdot posting more front page Apple stories. I guess the release of the Mac mini has intrigued the geek masses. For the most part, Apple really is a good company and the biggest competitor to Microsoft right now.
I must have missed the point at which desktop Linux had 1000+ developers working on it and a billion dollars to play with.
Linux has 1000+ developers, and you don't need a billion dollars. The point I was making, which clearly shooshed right over your head, was that Darwin draws from open source technologies like BSD.
No, they did massive imports from code bases they either bought or were BSD licensed. It's certainly not "completely new".
They installed a Mach kernel with BSD subsystem, created a new version of the NeXTStep APIs called Cocoa, and created the Aqua interface on top of it. Yes, it's a new OS, unless you're going to discount every operating system that draws from other sources, in which case Linux would be one of those.
Linux has had hardware accelerated graphics for a very long time now. You must mean hardware window compositing, but... wait. It has that too, albiet still an immature implementation you need a good box to run. But that's true of MacOS and Longhorn as well.
The classic OSS response. "We have it too! Well, not really, it's immature and 'coming soon.'" Referencing random unfinished Sourceforge projects whenever someone mentions features Linux doesn't have makes you look foolish. Meanwhile, you didn't refute the point whatsoever--OS X uses the GPU for its window compositing. Let me know when GNOME/KDE get around to it.
I won't bother replying to the rest as it's simply provocative opinion (there's a shorter word for that).
I acknowledge your lack of a valid counterargument.
Linux has 1000+ developers, and you don't need a billion dollars. The point I was making, which clearly shooshed right over your head, was that Darwin draws from open source technologies like BSD.
No, they did massive imports from code bases they either bought or were BSD licensed. It's certainly not "completely new".
They installed a Mach kernel with BSD subsystem, created a new version of the NeXTStep APIs called Cocoa, and created the Aqua interface on top of it. Yes, it's a new OS, unless you're going to discount every operating system that draws from other sources, in which case Linux would be one of those.
Linux has had hardware accelerated graphics for a very long time now. You must mean hardware window compositing, but... wait. It has that too, albiet still an immature implementation you need a good box to run. But that's true of MacOS and Longhorn as well.
The classic OSS response. "We have it too! Well, not really, it's immature and 'coming soon.'" Referencing random unfinished Sourceforge projects whenever someone mentions features Linux doesn't have makes you look foolish. Meanwhile, you didn't refute the point whatsoever--OS X uses the GPU for its window compositing. Let me know when GNOME/KDE get around to it.
I won't bother replying to the rest as it's simply provocative opinion (there's a shorter word for that).
I acknowledge your lack of a valid counterargument.
On the contrary, I think a lot of people here are warming up to this search engine. It really does return great search results. And let's face it, Google has been stagnating lately and not making any attempt to clean out its search results of cruft. A lot of search terms in Google that give me crap give me much more meaningful results than Google does. And, my god, it's fast. I don't know if it's because it's new and has less sites indexed or what.
I think Microsoft is great as a technology/software company (Microsoft had its big start as a software developer on the Mac). It's their OEM licensing and operating system implementations that most people think suck. Here's hoping marketing doesn't take over this search engine and make it suck.
Maybe the best part is that Google will feel the heat a little and feel motivated to improve.
Has anyone on/. actually seen Clippy in five years? He hasn't been in a default install since 2000. I last saw him in '98.
Like blue-screen jokes and Microsoft Bob, I don't get the continuing obsession, but that's just me. Every time I read one of these posts, I hear a cheesy "ba-dum-splash!" from a drumset in my head and roll my eyes.
Give this GUI Linux desktop stuff some time to mature. In five years, nothing else will compare, no matter what the price.
That's what people five years ago were saying.
I am fully convinced now that Linux will never mature on the desktop due to the very nature of OSS. There are no global standards or goals. Instead, toolkits compete with each other, entire desktops compete, packaging systems compete, and so on. That's nice if you want to preach about "choice" but it won't get you anywhere with a powerful, standardized GUI for the masses, if that is indeed what the goal is. The kind of polish and consistency required to succeed on the desktop is so far away from today's hacky KDE/GNOME-on-top-of-an-X11-protocol desktop environment emulators that it's still a chore just to drag a window around without it tearing up on the screen.
It's sad, because when Linux desktops first came out in the 90s, there was great potential, but I've watched the directions they've taken (look like Windows but with 10x the buttons and sidebars!) and shaken my head. They should have based everything around a standard such as an evolved GNUStep and beaten OS X to the gate back in the late 90s. But that's not how it happened at all.
The motivation in the OSS world is that of scratching an itch. That is a vague, unreliable mantra to rely on. In the commercial world, however, developers have financial incentive to polish up and finish every last detail to complete the user experience, and they are under the reigns of team leaders who make sure everyone follows a single vision, right or wrong, rather than argue and debate endlessly about different ways to do things. Think about it. Darwin/Aqua is a totally new thing that took them about five years, drawing from the same kind of open resources available to Linux at the time. In five years, they had a completely new OS shipped and ready. On the other hand, Linux has been around for an entire decade now, and the desktops still look like they're competing with Windows 98 in a non-accelerated, 2D world of "Start" menus and taskbars. Even Longhorn is finally utilizing a new display format to compete with OS X's PDF via Avalon. Hell, NextStep was using Postscript in the 80s.
A desktop succeeds when it is truly seamless and integrates all of its technologies. OS X has already accomplished that using the same kinds of resources available to Linux, such as OSS and BSD software. Windows finally got there with the NT code and its abandonment of DOS. Linux is still trying to figure out how to have it so users don't have to install TWO ENTIRE DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS just to run all the apps available. I don't know what it is about OSS interfaces that make them suck, as there is plenty of freeware OSS available for Windows and OS X that looks gorgeous and is a joy to use. I can only presume it's the development environments and developer attitudes.
Linux is fun to play with for me, but I would use it as a server alongside the BSDs. It is far, far, FAR from ready being a mainstream, accessible desktop to bring computing to the masses. The community attitude is simply not in the right place to cater to users (right now, users are often looked-down upon as nuisances who complain to much rather than pristine sources of human-computer-interface feedback). There's simply no academic or artistic approach to bringing a mainstream desktop to users in this community. It's all about "Micro$haft is doing this? Well, we'll do that but with five more buttons and the ability to move it anywhere on screen!" There's a distinct lack of taste or culture to the desktop offerings, though the least bad I've used would be Gnome.
I'm extremely curious why the Linux desktops haven't implemented the drag-and-drop install and uninstall of OS X applications. It's really nice to be able to just drag apps anywhere--even while they're running--and to uninstall them, simply drag them to the trash can. At most, apps will leave behind some small text configuration files here and there that you can remove.
Instead, the Linux desktops have veered off into the direction of Windows and went for the "registry" approach. That is, a database of sorts that tracks what's installed and uninstalled, because files are scattered all over the place.
You know, I really don't get Slashdotters' obsession with Microsoft Bob. It wasn't a major release. It was just a simple application shell for Windows, was released over ten years ago, and it wasn't like it was marketed heavily as some big, new thing. It was just some desktop accessory. Slashdotters', in there haste to hate anything Microsoft, have latched onto it and built it into some huge thing it never was. I don't even remember Microsoft Bob until someone on Slashdot mentions it yet another time.
Do you realize how many third-party replacement shells existed at that time? I remember buying an AST Advantage! computer that completely replaced Program Manager with a customizable interface that looked gorgeous in comparison. Trouble was, you couldn't install anything, so I learned to enable Program Manager and never go back.
Point being, Microsoft Bob is not that big a deal. I doubt Bill Gates even cared all that much about it, despite his wife's involvement. Microsoft was busy trying to get Windows '93 out the door to kick OS/2's ass and wouldn't succeed until two years later.
Nice way to avoid criticism of Firefox. Excellent deflect to random Microsoft criticism that was totally irrelevant. "We may suck, but at least we're not Microsoft." That'll go far.
They've never gone and done anything nefarious (Micro$haft)
Disregarding your weird insult toward Microsoft ("Micro$haft"?! What does that even mean?), I have to take issue with your claim that Google's never done anything nefarious. They've removed search results due to legal threats or ideological differences, refused paying people for Google ads (search Slackersguild for "Google" and read first-hand accounts), replaced Google Groups with a horrible barely-readable format, and aside from all that have not updated the search engine to make it suck less. I hate searching for things now because I get crappy spam pages that put the search terms in their HTML filenames. They do this because Google places higher value on pages with search terms directly in the URL. I also get tons of online catalog pages. It's extremely frustrating to search for reviews of anything because you always get twenty or so online catalog pages that are merely product descriptions with an empty "user review" section. I want a real review, not some store product description page.
Google is not the perfect company we all came to love in the late 90s. Here's hoping they learn from their mistakes before they get surpassed by someone else much worse.
How's the deathmatch? Do just players stand up and throw their pieces at each other? Whoever rolls the bigger number scores a hit? Do I hide my piece behind the sofa to "camp?"
Slashdot Mirror
Amusing, then, that Windows 95 is what KDE/GNOME "borrow from" the most. Start menus in the bottom-left? Taskbars?
There are even bits of Linux code here and there in Darwin. Darwin borrows from a whole bunch of sources. I believe a lot of the command-line tools are from OpenBSD, for instance. A lot of people enjoy this "best of the best" aspect of Darwin.
If Windows 3.0 had never happened, we'd all be bitching about IBM right now, though I think Apple would have had a much healthier 1990s.
Your point? The world now knows there are viable alternatives, and they can be had for historical lows on price.
"The world?" I assume by that phrase, you're referring to the geek development community. Your implication is that said community didn't know about viable alternatives before, which is balogna--UNIX has been around for a long damn time, and in the meantime there has been OS/2, BeOS, NeXTStep, BSD, etc.
The mainstream world still has no clue about Linux. The mainstream hype of Linux reached a fervor around 1999 and died out. Linux is just one of many choices out there for hardcore geeks and server admins, but not "the world."
What's that? The project and its followers expect respect, yet any features requests or criticisms are met with sarcastic "we're a volunteer group, damn you" responses?
Oh.
People judge on results. Don't hype something up and then dismiss any criticisms with lame excuses about volunteering. Nobody's forcing them to volunteer--if they don't want to do it anymore, they shouldn't, and people will just use some other kernel if they aren't already.
Basically, I'm tired of the "I'm a hero because I volunteer" attitude in OSS.
I keep re-reading your post, and I'm still no less confused.
Based on your words, you are saying:
1.) You don't want your drivers to be able to restart when they "crap out." This means you want the whole kernel to die instead?
2.) You say the drivers are buggy and take the whole house down, requiring fixing. You prefer the whole house to be taken down rather than just restarting the driver in userspace to stay running?
3.) You talk about buggy, closed-source drivers right after you've already said open source drivers are buggy and take the whole house down. So what's the difference?
4.) You argue against a fixed driver interface like every other modern operating system has, allowing for both open source and commercial driver development (that whole choice thing, right?). Your only supporting evidence appears to be that "Linus is against it." Linus is not a perfect developer whose words should always be followed.
But if it only happens on Firefox, it's a condition that applies to Firefox. Firefox should be able to handle such HTML. The other browsers do, even Opera. Saying "the fix is coming" in every article after every month is getting annoying.
What got/keeps people at slashdot? Content or optimization?
The correctly-spelled original content that never appears more than once.
I'm happy to see Slashdot posting more front page Apple stories. I guess the release of the Mac mini has intrigued the geek masses. For the most part, Apple really is a good company and the biggest competitor to Microsoft right now.
I must have missed the point at which desktop Linux had 1000+ developers working on it and a billion dollars to play with.
... wait. It has that too, albiet still an immature implementation you need a good box to run. But that's true of MacOS and Longhorn as well.
Linux has 1000+ developers, and you don't need a billion dollars. The point I was making, which clearly shooshed right over your head, was that Darwin draws from open source technologies like BSD.
No, they did massive imports from code bases they either bought or were BSD licensed. It's certainly not "completely new".
They installed a Mach kernel with BSD subsystem, created a new version of the NeXTStep APIs called Cocoa, and created the Aqua interface on top of it. Yes, it's a new OS, unless you're going to discount every operating system that draws from other sources, in which case Linux would be one of those.
Linux has had hardware accelerated graphics for a very long time now. You must mean hardware window compositing, but
The classic OSS response. "We have it too! Well, not really, it's immature and 'coming soon.'" Referencing random unfinished Sourceforge projects whenever someone mentions features Linux doesn't have makes you look foolish. Meanwhile, you didn't refute the point whatsoever--OS X uses the GPU for its window compositing. Let me know when GNOME/KDE get around to it.
I won't bother replying to the rest as it's simply provocative opinion (there's a shorter word for that).
I acknowledge your lack of a valid counterargument.
Next.
Linux has 1000+ developers, and you don't need a billion dollars. The point I was making, which clearly shooshed right over your head, was that Darwin draws from open source technologies like BSD.
No, they did massive imports from code bases they either bought or were BSD licensed. It's certainly not "completely new".
They installed a Mach kernel with BSD subsystem, created a new version of the NeXTStep APIs called Cocoa, and created the Aqua interface on top of it. Yes, it's a new OS, unless you're going to discount every operating system that draws from other sources, in which case Linux would be one of those.
Linux has had hardware accelerated graphics for a very long time now. You must mean hardware window compositing, but
The classic OSS response. "We have it too! Well, not really, it's immature and 'coming soon.'" Referencing random unfinished Sourceforge projects whenever someone mentions features Linux doesn't have makes you look foolish. Meanwhile, you didn't refute the point whatsoever--OS X uses the GPU for its window compositing. Let me know when GNOME/KDE get around to it.
I won't bother replying to the rest as it's simply provocative opinion (there's a shorter word for that).
I acknowledge your lack of a valid counterargument.
Next.
On the contrary, I think a lot of people here are warming up to this search engine. It really does return great search results. And let's face it, Google has been stagnating lately and not making any attempt to clean out its search results of cruft. A lot of search terms in Google that give me crap give me much more meaningful results than Google does. And, my god, it's fast. I don't know if it's because it's new and has less sites indexed or what.
I think Microsoft is great as a technology/software company (Microsoft had its big start as a software developer on the Mac). It's their OEM licensing and operating system implementations that most people think suck. Here's hoping marketing doesn't take over this search engine and make it suck.
Maybe the best part is that Google will feel the heat a little and feel motivated to improve.
Because these articles generate discussion, and therefore page hits. Which is good for OSTG's ad clients who display banner ads up top.
Considering Microsoft's own search page is more HTML-compliant than Slashdot's, it's kind of silly to bitch about anything.
Has anyone on /. actually seen Clippy in five years? He hasn't been in a default install since 2000. I last saw him in '98.
Like blue-screen jokes and Microsoft Bob, I don't get the continuing obsession, but that's just me. Every time I read one of these posts, I hear a cheesy "ba-dum-splash!" from a drumset in my head and roll my eyes.
Basically, you're saying the GPL is anti-freedom and anti-choice? You're seriously saying it's "illegal" to have such support?
Give this GUI Linux desktop stuff some time to mature. In five years, nothing else will compare, no matter what the price.
That's what people five years ago were saying.
I am fully convinced now that Linux will never mature on the desktop due to the very nature of OSS. There are no global standards or goals. Instead, toolkits compete with each other, entire desktops compete, packaging systems compete, and so on. That's nice if you want to preach about "choice" but it won't get you anywhere with a powerful, standardized GUI for the masses, if that is indeed what the goal is. The kind of polish and consistency required to succeed on the desktop is so far away from today's hacky KDE/GNOME-on-top-of-an-X11-protocol desktop environment emulators that it's still a chore just to drag a window around without it tearing up on the screen.
It's sad, because when Linux desktops first came out in the 90s, there was great potential, but I've watched the directions they've taken (look like Windows but with 10x the buttons and sidebars!) and shaken my head. They should have based everything around a standard such as an evolved GNUStep and beaten OS X to the gate back in the late 90s. But that's not how it happened at all.
The motivation in the OSS world is that of scratching an itch. That is a vague, unreliable mantra to rely on. In the commercial world, however, developers have financial incentive to polish up and finish every last detail to complete the user experience, and they are under the reigns of team leaders who make sure everyone follows a single vision, right or wrong, rather than argue and debate endlessly about different ways to do things. Think about it. Darwin/Aqua is a totally new thing that took them about five years, drawing from the same kind of open resources available to Linux at the time. In five years, they had a completely new OS shipped and ready. On the other hand, Linux has been around for an entire decade now, and the desktops still look like they're competing with Windows 98 in a non-accelerated, 2D world of "Start" menus and taskbars. Even Longhorn is finally utilizing a new display format to compete with OS X's PDF via Avalon. Hell, NextStep was using Postscript in the 80s.
A desktop succeeds when it is truly seamless and integrates all of its technologies. OS X has already accomplished that using the same kinds of resources available to Linux, such as OSS and BSD software. Windows finally got there with the NT code and its abandonment of DOS. Linux is still trying to figure out how to have it so users don't have to install TWO ENTIRE DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS just to run all the apps available. I don't know what it is about OSS interfaces that make them suck, as there is plenty of freeware OSS available for Windows and OS X that looks gorgeous and is a joy to use. I can only presume it's the development environments and developer attitudes.
Linux is fun to play with for me, but I would use it as a server alongside the BSDs. It is far, far, FAR from ready being a mainstream, accessible desktop to bring computing to the masses. The community attitude is simply not in the right place to cater to users (right now, users are often looked-down upon as nuisances who complain to much rather than pristine sources of human-computer-interface feedback). There's simply no academic or artistic approach to bringing a mainstream desktop to users in this community. It's all about "Micro$haft is doing this? Well, we'll do that but with five more buttons and the ability to move it anywhere on screen!" There's a distinct lack of taste or culture to the desktop offerings, though the least bad I've used would be Gnome.
Just my opinion.
I'm extremely curious why the Linux desktops haven't implemented the drag-and-drop install and uninstall of OS X applications. It's really nice to be able to just drag apps anywhere--even while they're running--and to uninstall them, simply drag them to the trash can. At most, apps will leave behind some small text configuration files here and there that you can remove.
Instead, the Linux desktops have veered off into the direction of Windows and went for the "registry" approach. That is, a database of sorts that tracks what's installed and uninstalled, because files are scattered all over the place.
You know, I really don't get Slashdotters' obsession with Microsoft Bob. It wasn't a major release. It was just a simple application shell for Windows, was released over ten years ago, and it wasn't like it was marketed heavily as some big, new thing. It was just some desktop accessory. Slashdotters', in there haste to hate anything Microsoft, have latched onto it and built it into some huge thing it never was. I don't even remember Microsoft Bob until someone on Slashdot mentions it yet another time.
Do you realize how many third-party replacement shells existed at that time? I remember buying an AST Advantage! computer that completely replaced Program Manager with a customizable interface that looked gorgeous in comparison. Trouble was, you couldn't install anything, so I learned to enable Program Manager and never go back.
Point being, Microsoft Bob is not that big a deal. I doubt Bill Gates even cared all that much about it, despite his wife's involvement. Microsoft was busy trying to get Windows '93 out the door to kick OS/2's ass and wouldn't succeed until two years later.
More on Mac Word 6.0, from the horse's mouth.
What about BSD?
Nice way to avoid criticism of Firefox. Excellent deflect to random Microsoft criticism that was totally irrelevant. "We may suck, but at least we're not Microsoft." That'll go far.
Rather like when Slashdot posts a "Firefox Gaining Marketshare!" article solely based on some insignificant technical dev site's usage logs. :)
Obviously, Slashdot posted this rather meatless story just to reaffirm Slashdotter hopes with a blaring headline that Google was "still ahead." :)
They've never gone and done anything nefarious (Micro$haft)
Disregarding your weird insult toward Microsoft ("Micro$haft"?! What does that even mean?), I have to take issue with your claim that Google's never done anything nefarious. They've removed search results due to legal threats or ideological differences, refused paying people for Google ads (search Slackersguild for "Google" and read first-hand accounts), replaced Google Groups with a horrible barely-readable format, and aside from all that have not updated the search engine to make it suck less. I hate searching for things now because I get crappy spam pages that put the search terms in their HTML filenames. They do this because Google places higher value on pages with search terms directly in the URL. I also get tons of online catalog pages. It's extremely frustrating to search for reviews of anything because you always get twenty or so online catalog pages that are merely product descriptions with an empty "user review" section. I want a real review, not some store product description page.
Google is not the perfect company we all came to love in the late 90s. Here's hoping they learn from their mistakes before they get surpassed by someone else much worse.
How's the deathmatch? Do just players stand up and throw their pieces at each other? Whoever rolls the bigger number scores a hit? Do I hide my piece behind the sofa to "camp?"