And we all know that Linux on the servers have not gone well. Right? Oh wait...
I have no idea what #s you are referring to, but Linux already had a pretty strong server marketshare by 1999-2001.
But... the old line was *nix rules in the server world, but the new numbers coming out show Windows with over 50% server marketshare and going up.* Now, "50%" certainly seems like a "tipping point" number to me.
So while Linux is doing well in the Unix Server space, it's not clear if it competing effectively with Windows Server or even harming Microsoft at all.
* These are IDC (not IDG) numbers that are commonly cited by Linux advoactes. For example, they show that Linux has a higher worldwide desktop marketshare than Apple.
The real problem is that partially-scripted Reality Show weirdos are much more interesting characters than professionally written dullard stiffs like "Captain Janeway" and "Captain Archer".
Well, if it's not obvious, I'm one of those Mac users who enjoys rumor mongering and just tried to make a point about the wider implications of this NDA Ueber Alles attitude that Apple Zealots sudden have devised. Otherwise, I could care less what Apple does.
And all I've seen out of you is apologies and FUDDish attacks, so please look at the Sad Little Fucker talking. I guess don't have some pathetic beef with "M$" that has forced me into irrational zealotry, but I'll take that as a compliment.
And surely the mainstream market is going to be put off by sci-fi anyway if they don't like trek.
Well, the reason Rick Berman has been running Star Trek for 15 years is that he did have a formula for getting the "mainstream market" to watch the program -- something Next Generation was very successful with. There's not enough "sci-fi fans" or "trekkies" to keep this stuff on the air so you have to have cross-over appeal.
The eventual result was Voyager, where boring people in uniforms sat around and talked about their boring personal problems for the entire boring show with some boring bumpheaded aliens in the background. This idea had totally played itself out.
The problem is that by 2001 "Star Trek Fan" basically meant "Voyager Fan" -- everyone else had tuned out. So when "Enterprise" came out, they didn't go back and rethink the concept from the bottom up, they just produced rehashed Voyager episodes with a different cast. The Berman/TNG concept had totally played itself out.
Of course, there's lots of good "Sci-Fi" and "Trek" concepts out there. But nobody has any idea how to get the mainstream audience large enough to sustain the production budget.
My understanding is that many OS/2 shops rely older IBM "SNA" protocols, so even if they provided PM APIs for Linux, it wouldn't be enough to move the apps that keep people on OS/2. And the economics of doing this don't really make sense for a "maintenance mode" OS (although I could see a supported VMWare etc solution).
Plus, it's in IBM's long term interest to get the True Blue customers off the older techology suites and onto the new ones (Java, Websphere).
Most of the "snippets and clues... and leaks" were someone violating an NDA somewhere, so I'm not sure how that could be both good and not good. As soon as you enter the realm of pure specuation, the game is basically over -- people like these rumors because they are correct often enough.
That's not much consolation because IBM can support OS/2 internally even after it's been EOLed, or they can just stockpile enough old OS/2 workstations to last until the apocolypse.
OTOH, if OS/2 becomes incompatible with the new Pentium VI or whatever, any OS/2 reseller would be screwed without "support".
I agree - these new Diebold WF ATMs totally suck. Furthermore, they changed the workflow so it's now impossible to deposit and get cash in the same transaction.
IBM has been discouraging people from using OS/2 for a while, and will certainly EOL it as soon as people stop paying the legacy support contracts. I can't imagine why someone would want to build a new product on it.
Speaking of websites where they make stuff up, Mackido is about the least reputable source of information you can find. You take the word of a rambling OS 9 zealot, I'll stick with court cases that Apple definitively lost. (Plus Lotus v. Borland which settle the "Look and Feel" issue for good.)
I also find it funny that Po Widdle Apple signed a contract "under coercion" with a company 1/100th of it's size at the time.
As it happened, the court's approach seemed to invalidate the copyrighting of a broad "look and feel" of a piece of software, though this was not decisively stated in the court's ruling. The fact that Apple and Microsoft had entered into the licensing agreement for Windows 1.0 made a large part of the case a mere contractual matter rather than a matter of copyright law, so it was not necessary for the court to set a precedent in its ruling.
Actually, Apple is making it impossible to remove Safari. It's being integrated into system-level frameworks in a similar manner to the way that IE was integrated into Windows. Apple and 3rd party programs are already using "WebKit", and "Tiger" will have these snazzy deskaccessories that are based on it too.
In otherwords, Safari is just like IE -- you can delete the icon and the executable wrapper, but all of the interesting stuff is still in the OS.
And Microsoft licensed those ideas from Apple. No theft involved.
The entire premisis of this discussion, from the root post down is that Apple had some legal rights to the GUI and that MS "screwed" them.
Well, the facts are Apple took the case up and down to the Supreme Court and lost big time on two major points: (A) Apple had no rights to the concept of a GUI interface. (B) They fucking signed a contract allowing Microsoft to build a clone in return for a word processor.*
Apple threating to sue everyone that made competing GUIs was not their finest hour. The cutural memory of the GNU Boycott of Apple products has been almost entirely forgotten.
* Which considering the eventual popularity of MS Office, turned out to be a very fortunate move for Apple.
Uh, if the Mac Rumor Mill was only talking out of their ass, everyone would ignore them. (For example MacOSRumors, the first rumor site, is now almost totally ignored because of the vast amount of nonsensical BS they've spewed.) The fact is that quite often the rumor sites are right, which is exactly why online Mac fans spend so much time discussing them.
If Apple ever did get "air-tight", there would be a dramatic drop in things for the Mac community to talk about, which would ironically would reduce the Hype Factor for new Apple products.
the release of Darwin and the use of numerous open standards doesn't fit your theory
Yes, but Apple's embrace of open standards was really a "Plan B". They spent most of the 90s building their own proprietary networking stack, which most people just ignored.
By the the OS X came out, their networking installed base was practically 0 and they were literally years behind the functionality of Windows 2000, and had little choice to dump all the stuff they had built up and replace it with stock software like Apache, Samba, and OpenLDAP. (And they've done a remarkable job of catching up in a short period of time.)
Just as an example, look at the user joy over something as trival as "Rendezvous", which mimics a feature that Microsoft introduced with Windows For Workgroups in 1994 (broadcast-based browsing of TCP/IP networks).
Please take a look at any Mac online discussion board -- a huge chunk of the discussion is chewing over rumors and hypotheses about Apple's upcoming products. Practically all people talk about is rumors -- even the tiniest bit of information is reverberated through the echo chamber of the Mac community, with every implication analyzed long before anyone has any idea if it's true or not. It's gotten to the point of ridiculousness, with Mac Fans making fake boxes and photoshopping fake cases.
So on one hand we have Mac consumers, who love rumors. And on the other hand we have Mac Rumor sites which apparently now are seen by the Mac faithful as enemies of the state.
Well, you can't have it both ways! Take away the obsessiveness about Apple's secret plans and all of a sudden nobody cares what The Steve's big announcement is, the online community has nothing to talk about, and new Apple products are greeted with a big Meh.
Apple's Marketing Hype Machine depends almost entirely on the Mac Community's need for the Next Big Thing. Apple walks the line here with ridiculous secrecy to whip up the faithful. But then when the rumor sites actually hits gold, Apple brings out the legal guns. Being an online Mac freak just got a lot less fun, thanks to Apple.
The fact that you had to manage extentions sucked.
That having been said, the user interface was great -- just drag the offending extention either into or out of the proper folder. No other OS has ever come close to making driver installation this easy and idiot-proof, including OS X.
True, but can they do it and still have decent specs, very little fan noise and sell it for $500?
They most certainly could (Pentium-M both uses less power and is faster than G4), but who would buy it when you could get a more full-featured system for the same price?
The main reason the Mac Mini is desirable is because it's the only Mac option at the price. The form factor is purely secondary.
Why aren't x86 desktop processors more popular in those applications?
Are "desktop" PPCs popular for embedded applications?
I must not have phrased it well because people are confused. The issue is that if the window is not mimimized, it is not in the Dock. If it's just hidden behind another window, you have to go to expose to find it. When you have many windows open, it is difficult to remember the exact state of every window.
Also, most windows tend to look alike in the dock (white square with black text), but that's another issue.
That's exactly my point! Having to go hunt for windows that may be minimized or may just be hidden is not efficient. I've got better thing to do that memorize the state of a window that I may have not used for some time. Add an option to put all open windows in the Dock please and the "switchers" will love it.
Untrue; Expose. QED.
Expose is a great feature, but it's also a tacit admission that the first plan (the Dock) has problems. It would be nice if they went back and fixed the Dock to be more adaptable to different work styles.
Plus even Expose doesn't work well past 5-6 open windows (at least on my powerbook screen). Even with Expose, my threshold of multiple window pain is much lower on Macs than on Windows or Gnome.
Stick your most used applications in the dock, go to the application dir through finder;
Did you read the guy's post? The lack of a start menu was his big complaint. I know it is the "Mac Way", but the Finder really is an inefficient start menu substitute (for accessing lesser used programs). It requires many more user actions. Fortunately, docked folders work well (if a little slow because the contents apparently aren't cached).
FFS! It DEFAULTS to F9, F10 and F11, jeez!
Whoa settle down. The place for Expose is the mouse button (so long as you aren't using Apple's mouse.) F9/F10/F11 require moving your hands.
As you point out, the Mac Mini is ridiculously small -- much smaller than the average user needs a computer to be.
If anything the size is more of an excuse for the for the inevitibility that a low-end Apple model will have poor specs compared to more expensive Macs. That is, Apple's product matrix demanded the G4 no matter the size.
That having been said, if PC manufacturers can shove a desktop P4 or Athlon64 in a laptop, they could also shove it into a approximately Mini-sized computer.
Well, the Mac fans are flaming you, but I think you have a point. Window Management under OS X is more inconsistent than it is in Windows, and therefore task switching seems slower at first.
The biggest problem is that using the Dock(ing station) requires you to memorize the state of all your open Windows -- was that browser window minimized or not? You have to go hunt for it. The Windows taskbar presents a consistent view no matter what you are doing -- the icon is always in the same place.
Just as a simple example, opening a new browser window on the Mac takes 3 steps (click Safari to restore window, click New Window, minimize the first window), while on Windows it only takes 1 step (click quicklaunch icon). For something that I might do dozens of times a day, it starts to add up.
I think the OS X interface is designed to accommodate people who are using only a small number of open windows and applications. (Keep in mind that OS 9 had serious technical limitations to multitasking, so many Mac users just avoided it.) I'll probably get trollbombed here, but the OS X UI is really designed for the Single Mouse Button crowd -- there's one simple way to do things, and while it may work well, it's all you have.
Finally, it seems even most Mac fans admit that the Finder is a pain-in-the-ass. (Personally, I don't understand the utility of that column view at all, especially in Save dialogs)
That having been said, it's not horrifically inefficient, and if you adapt to how OS X works, you'll hardly notice the difference after a while.
Tip 1: Stick your Applications folder in the Dock and use it like a start menu. Tip 2: Bind Expose to a convenient mouse or keyboard button.
As for Leo, I'm undecided if he's a real/. troll, or just your ordinary unstable internet kook. I thought he was the latter, but the comment about DRM was out-of-the-blue enough to make me wonder. Whatever he's up to, he's getting away with it and I'm trollfood.
Slashdot Mirror
And we all know that Linux on the servers have not gone well. Right? Oh wait...
... the old line was *nix rules in the server world, but the new numbers coming out show Windows with over 50% server marketshare and going up.* Now, "50%" certainly seems like a "tipping point" number to me.
I have no idea what #s you are referring to, but Linux already had a pretty strong server marketshare by 1999-2001.
But
So while Linux is doing well in the Unix Server space, it's not clear if it competing effectively with Windows Server or even harming Microsoft at all.
* These are IDC (not IDG) numbers that are commonly cited by Linux advoactes. For example, they show that Linux has a higher worldwide desktop marketshare than Apple.
The real problem is that partially-scripted Reality Show weirdos are much more interesting characters than professionally written dullard stiffs like "Captain Janeway" and "Captain Archer".
Well, if it's not obvious, I'm one of those Mac users who enjoys rumor mongering and just tried to make a point about the wider implications of this NDA Ueber Alles attitude that Apple Zealots sudden have devised. Otherwise, I could care less what Apple does.
And all I've seen out of you is apologies and FUDDish attacks, so please look at the Sad Little Fucker talking. I guess don't have some pathetic beef with "M$" that has forced me into irrational zealotry, but I'll take that as a compliment.
And surely the mainstream market is going to be put off by sci-fi anyway if they don't like trek.
Well, the reason Rick Berman has been running Star Trek for 15 years is that he did have a formula for getting the "mainstream market" to watch the program -- something Next Generation was very successful with. There's not enough "sci-fi fans" or "trekkies" to keep this stuff on the air so you have to have cross-over appeal.
The eventual result was Voyager, where boring people in uniforms sat around and talked about their boring personal problems for the entire boring show with some boring bumpheaded aliens in the background. This idea had totally played itself out.
The problem is that by 2001 "Star Trek Fan" basically meant "Voyager Fan" -- everyone else had tuned out. So when "Enterprise" came out, they didn't go back and rethink the concept from the bottom up, they just produced rehashed Voyager episodes with a different cast. The Berman/TNG concept had totally played itself out.
Of course, there's lots of good "Sci-Fi" and "Trek" concepts out there. But nobody has any idea how to get the mainstream audience large enough to sustain the production budget.
My understanding is that many OS/2 shops rely older IBM "SNA" protocols, so even if they provided PM APIs for Linux, it wouldn't be enough to move the apps that keep people on OS/2. And the economics of doing this don't really make sense for a "maintenance mode" OS (although I could see a supported VMWare etc solution).
Plus, it's in IBM's long term interest to get the True Blue customers off the older techology suites and onto the new ones (Java, Websphere).
Most of the "snippets and clues ... and leaks" were someone violating an NDA somewhere, so I'm not sure how that could be both good and not good. As soon as you enter the realm of pure specuation, the game is basically over -- people like these rumors because they are correct often enough.
That's not much consolation because IBM can support OS/2 internally even after it's been EOLed, or they can just stockpile enough old OS/2 workstations to last until the apocolypse.
OTOH, if OS/2 becomes incompatible with the new Pentium VI or whatever, any OS/2 reseller would be screwed without "support".
I agree - these new Diebold WF ATMs totally suck. Furthermore, they changed the workflow so it's now impossible to deposit and get cash in the same transaction.
IBM has been discouraging people from using OS/2 for a while, and will certainly EOL it as soon as people stop paying the legacy support contracts. I can't imagine why someone would want to build a new product on it.
Speaking of websites where they make stuff up, Mackido is about the least reputable source of information you can find. You take the word of a rambling OS 9 zealot, I'll stick with court cases that Apple definitively lost. (Plus Lotus v. Borland which settle the "Look and Feel" issue for good.)
I also find it funny that Po Widdle Apple signed a contract "under coercion" with a company 1/100th of it's size at the time.
You can apologize and admit your ignorance now.
Actually, Apple is making it impossible to remove Safari. It's being integrated into system-level frameworks in a similar manner to the way that IE was integrated into Windows. Apple and 3rd party programs are already using "WebKit", and "Tiger" will have these snazzy deskaccessories that are based on it too.
In otherwords, Safari is just like IE -- you can delete the icon and the executable wrapper, but all of the interesting stuff is still in the OS.
And Microsoft licensed those ideas from Apple. No theft involved.
The entire premisis of this discussion, from the root post down is that Apple had some legal rights to the GUI and that MS "screwed" them.
Well, the facts are Apple took the case up and down to the Supreme Court and lost big time on two major points:
(A) Apple had no rights to the concept of a GUI interface.
(B) They fucking signed a contract allowing Microsoft to build a clone in return for a word processor.*
Apple threating to sue everyone that made competing GUIs was not their finest hour. The cutural memory of the GNU Boycott of Apple products has been almost entirely forgotten.
* Which considering the eventual popularity of MS Office, turned out to be a very fortunate move for Apple.
Uh, if the Mac Rumor Mill was only talking out of their ass, everyone would ignore them. (For example MacOSRumors, the first rumor site, is now almost totally ignored because of the vast amount of nonsensical BS they've spewed.) The fact is that quite often the rumor sites are right, which is exactly why online Mac fans spend so much time discussing them.
If Apple ever did get "air-tight", there would be a dramatic drop in things for the Mac community to talk about, which would ironically would reduce the Hype Factor for new Apple products.
the release of Darwin and the use of numerous open standards doesn't fit your theory
Yes, but Apple's embrace of open standards was really a "Plan B". They spent most of the 90s building their own proprietary networking stack, which most people just ignored.
By the the OS X came out, their networking installed base was practically 0 and they were literally years behind the functionality of Windows 2000, and had little choice to dump all the stuff they had built up and replace it with stock software like Apache, Samba, and OpenLDAP. (And they've done a remarkable job of catching up in a short period of time.)
Just as an example, look at the user joy over something as trival as "Rendezvous", which mimics a feature that Microsoft introduced with Windows For Workgroups in 1994 (broadcast-based browsing of TCP/IP networks).
Please take a look at any Mac online discussion board -- a huge chunk of the discussion is chewing over rumors and hypotheses about Apple's upcoming products. Practically all people talk about is rumors -- even the tiniest bit of information is reverberated through the echo chamber of the Mac community, with every implication analyzed long before anyone has any idea if it's true or not. It's gotten to the point of ridiculousness, with Mac Fans making fake boxes and photoshopping fake cases.
So on one hand we have Mac consumers, who love rumors. And on the other hand we have Mac Rumor sites which apparently now are seen by the Mac faithful as enemies of the state.
Well, you can't have it both ways! Take away the obsessiveness about Apple's secret plans and all of a sudden nobody cares what The Steve's big announcement is, the online community has nothing to talk about, and new Apple products are greeted with a big Meh.
Apple's Marketing Hype Machine depends almost entirely on the Mac Community's need for the Next Big Thing. Apple walks the line here with ridiculous secrecy to whip up the faithful. But then when the rumor sites actually hits gold, Apple brings out the legal guns. Being an online Mac freak just got a lot less fun, thanks to Apple.
The fact that you had to manage extentions sucked.
That having been said, the user interface was great -- just drag the offending extention either into or out of the proper folder. No other OS has ever come close to making driver installation this easy and idiot-proof, including OS X.
Minimizing windows at all is inefficient. [Just do all these things that require multiple steps]
More inefficient than just clicking on an icon that's always visible.
Minimization is for suckers or people with OCD.
WTF? Certain actions may be clumsy on MacOS, so your answer is to accuse the users of having medical disorders?
True, but can they do it and still have decent specs, very little fan noise and sell it for $500?
They most certainly could (Pentium-M both uses less power and is faster than G4), but who would buy it when you could get a more full-featured system for the same price?
The main reason the Mac Mini is desirable is because it's the only Mac option at the price. The form factor is purely secondary.
Why aren't x86 desktop processors more popular in those applications?
Are "desktop" PPCs popular for embedded applications?
I must not have phrased it well because people are confused. The issue is that if the window is not mimimized, it is not in the Dock. If it's just hidden behind another window, you have to go to expose to find it. When you have many windows open, it is difficult to remember the exact state of every window.
Also, most windows tend to look alike in the dock (white square with black text), but that's another issue.
Untrue ...if its not there; its not minimised.
That's exactly my point! Having to go hunt for windows that may be minimized or may just be hidden is not efficient. I've got better thing to do that memorize the state of a window that I may have not used for some time. Add an option to put all open windows in the Dock please and the "switchers" will love it.
Untrue; Expose. QED.
Expose is a great feature, but it's also a tacit admission that the first plan (the Dock) has problems. It would be nice if they went back and fixed the Dock to be more adaptable to different work styles.
Plus even Expose doesn't work well past 5-6 open windows (at least on my powerbook screen). Even with Expose, my threshold of multiple window pain is much lower on Macs than on Windows or Gnome.
Stick your most used applications in the dock, go to the application dir through finder;
Did you read the guy's post? The lack of a start menu was his big complaint. I know it is the "Mac Way", but the Finder really is an inefficient start menu substitute (for accessing lesser used programs). It requires many more user actions. Fortunately, docked folders work well (if a little slow because the contents apparently aren't cached).
FFS! It DEFAULTS to F9, F10 and F11, jeez!
Whoa settle down. The place for Expose is the mouse button (so long as you aren't using Apple's mouse.) F9/F10/F11 require moving your hands.
As you point out, the Mac Mini is ridiculously small -- much smaller than the average user needs a computer to be.
If anything the size is more of an excuse for the for the inevitibility that a low-end Apple model will have poor specs compared to more expensive Macs. That is, Apple's product matrix demanded the G4 no matter the size.
That having been said, if PC manufacturers can shove a desktop P4 or Athlon64 in a laptop, they could also shove it into a approximately Mini-sized computer.
Well, the Mac fans are flaming you, but I think you have a point. Window Management under OS X is more inconsistent than it is in Windows, and therefore task switching seems slower at first.
The biggest problem is that using the Dock(ing station) requires you to memorize the state of all your open Windows -- was that browser window minimized or not? You have to go hunt for it. The Windows taskbar presents a consistent view no matter what you are doing -- the icon is always in the same place.
Just as a simple example, opening a new browser window on the Mac takes 3 steps (click Safari to restore window, click New Window, minimize the first window), while on Windows it only takes 1 step (click quicklaunch icon). For something that I might do dozens of times a day, it starts to add up.
I think the OS X interface is designed to accommodate people who are using only a small number of open windows and applications. (Keep in mind that OS 9 had serious technical limitations to multitasking, so many Mac users just avoided it.) I'll probably get trollbombed here, but the OS X UI is really designed for the Single Mouse Button crowd -- there's one simple way to do things, and while it may work well, it's all you have.
Finally, it seems even most Mac fans admit that the Finder is a pain-in-the-ass. (Personally, I don't understand the utility of that column view at all, especially in Save dialogs)
That having been said, it's not horrifically inefficient, and if you adapt to how OS X works, you'll hardly notice the difference after a while.
Tip 1: Stick your Applications folder in the Dock and use it like a start menu.
Tip 2: Bind Expose to a convenient mouse or keyboard button.
Whatever you say man.
It was a lame karma joke, hense the smiley.
/. troll, or just your ordinary unstable internet kook. I thought he was the latter, but the comment about DRM was out-of-the-blue enough to make me wonder. Whatever he's up to, he's getting away with it and I'm trollfood.
As for Leo, I'm undecided if he's a real
Time to take my offtopic mods like a good boy.