That's an interesting article. Too bad the comments aren't up to the same quality. This kind of thing always ends up in being a flamefest:
Somebody comments: I thought it was just a distribution problem), and since so many people here on Slashdot rave about Debian I thought I'd give it a try. Especially since PGI(progenies graphical installer) is now 1.0.
Big mistake - you should have found out why they rave about Debian first. Hint: it's to do with raw power, not ease of use or nice interfaces.
tshak says: I'll keep trying so that I'm "open minded", but when a company can take a couple years and get unix on the deskop right (OS X) practically the first time (admittidly, it was released a few months too early), I become uninterested in the year after year failures of the OSS alternatives.
First things first, the usability woes of OS X are well documented. The idea that it somehow magically requires no effort to use is a fallacy. I always end up expending more effort when using a Mac than when using Linux or Windows simply because the Mac needlessly breaks habits to which the vast majority of computer users are accustomed to. This isn't me complaining about things being different, I have no problems with things being different, what I have problems with is the Mac doing things differently simply because that's the way they've always been done, not because it's better. Take the non standard keyboard for instance. Why? Apps don't close when the last window closes, meaning I constantly forget to quit them manually. Why? Software only ejects. Why? These are all usability booboos that you have to force yourself to become used to.
Second point, there's nothing hard about making a desktop based on UNIX. Unix, or rather, POSIX is just a set of standard technologies. What's hard is building a truly free (in both senses of the word) collaborative OS that is flexible enough to appeal to everybody, and yet integrates well enough to be very easy to use. It's hard. We're getting there. Comments like that don't make it any easier.
Tackhead writes: Precisely. Another part of the problem is that OSS developers, typically being geographically-disperse and having little access to funding, have no contact with their end users during the design and development phase and cannot do usability testing.
This applies to most software: any software in fact that isn't produced by a large group usually will not have dedicated usability experts on the team. I don't see people flaming the Windows shareware scene, despite it being home to some of the worst UI atrocities in history. And what do you know, the largest open source projects (gnome, mozilla, kde) have usability teams. It mirrors real life. The idea that all commercial software is more "usable" than open source software is imho a stereotype that's only loosely grounded in reality.
ChileVerde: "It raises the question though, how will the need for usability specialists fit in the current model for developing OSS? AFAIK, most of the usability/interface work on the projects are handled by programmers, who doesn't necessarily have the background on this topic."
Havoc is a great example of a programmer who "gets" usability (though perhaps a bit over the top). I always think of usability when designing my interfaces. Programmer != GUI monster. Often though they're not experts, but that's why we have experts such as the guys from Sun working on GNOME. They already are fitting into the open source model.
There may be a connection. A closed project allows one person to impose their will religiously throughout an interface. Open source ultimately is about concessions and cooperation, which may negate this type of centrist control.
No, it's about cooperation. That doesn't necessarily involve concessions. An open source project is like any other project - the leaders can impose their will with an iron first, or they can be weak and agree with everything. This happens in the commercial world as well.
ACK!! says "The other side of the coin that these folks do not take into account is the fact that OSS application developers for all the desktop adoption talk are not coding for the masses. They might think they are but they are not."
Important insight here - the GNOME flamewars demonmstrate this very well. Some people felt GNOME2 was being taken away from them and retargeted at the corporate desktop user. It had a lot of "crack" features stripped out. It took balls to do this. The flamewars on the lists weren't pretty, and still the trolls keep trolling on forums like slashdot and FootNotes. This is a good example of a large open source project (that doesn't even have one leader) taking the initiative with usability. GNOME proves that a lot of the FUD in this thread is simply wrong: open source can be very usable, and it can be written for non-developers.
I have seen open source overcome every problem it has encountered so far, back when I was excited about this new new thing called Windows 95. I have seen it go through "toy OS", "can run web servers but will never get enterprise acceptance", "good at servers but will never get enough apps for the desktop", "too hard to install" and now "software isn't usable enough".
Every single one of those problems has been solved. This one is being solved too. Tomorrow I release autopackage 0.2 - it's CLI interface was designed with usability in mind. It uses colour to make the text easier for the eye to process, it uses simple, obvious command names (with aliases to facilitate guessing) and it comes with documentation. Open source is dead. Long live open source.
Not to be anal retentive or a Troll or anything, but Apple is actually now the leader distributor of UNIX, with OS X. Of course there's no arguing that in it's markets, Sun is the leader of commercial UNIX, but overall...Steve Jobs slings the most *nix licenses. That's just info.
Statistics please? Where did you get this information? Last time I checked, this was most certainly not the case. Or are you just assuming stuff based on what you think is probable, rather than what actually is?
Macs are only expensive if you buy the Dual Processor models, or the UberCool G4 Titanium Powerbook (portable space heater). Recall the recent price drop on the iBooks? The low-end model is only $999.
Hmmmm, I think we have different definitions of "inexpensive". My desktop machine cost me £250 as it was an upgraded box I bought dirt cheap, and it's a pretty fast. There's "cheap" and then there's "cheap". You'd be surprised just how cheaply you can get computers if you try a bit and know where to look/who to talk to.
It's somewhat difficult to explain, but psychologically time is less valuable than money.
Like I said, it's a bit tricky to explain why this is so, but I'll try anyway. Note that time does have value, I'm sure some of our best hackers today got into Linux after spending all day making their sound card work or something and thinking "I'm not giving up now!". However, if you spend a Saturday doing something, and fail, that failure "hurts" less than if you spent a days wages on something then realise that it wasn't what you wanted.
I think it's because money represents opportunities for people in their minds moreso than time. Maybe I wasn't really planning on doing anything important on that saturday so the loss wasn't so bad after all. But a days wages has lots of possibilities.
I'm afraid I'm reaching the limits of my psychology training here, but I'm 99% sure that time is different to money in this context.
Why do you say that? I know Qt has more widgets, but assuming you don't need SQL integration (ie the majority of desktop apps) in what areas to kde/qt outshine gnome?
Not a troll, but does anyone else feel that strategically, TrollTech should have made QT LGPL?
KDE is much more tightly done than GNOME and the overall effect is defnly smoother, kinda like Windows done right!
Not a troll either, but an opposing point of view. If you'd been comparing Gnome 1.4 with KDE3 then yeah, I'd agree, but I'm using gnome2 on both my desktop machines and it definately feels smoother, slicker, more professionally done than KDE IMHO. The usability efforts Sun has been putting in really, really show through. It's light on features at this time compared to KDE, and some parts of KDE are undeniably better, but to me Gnome2 just hangs together better.
What also surprised me was that once I threw off my preconceptions and started digging into the developer platform, I discovered it was really nice. I grew up on objects, so the idea of everything being written in C kind of seemed rather dumb to me, but as I talked to people the reasons became clear. I'd also assumed Bonobo was horribly complex, unwieldy and slow. All those preconceptions turned out to be false. GTK2 is a really nice toolkit actually, with excellent C++ bindings if you want to use that language.
Of course, it'd help if their developer documentation didn't suck so much, then I'd simply have been able to read proper material and probably wouldn't have got these preconceptions in the first place.
Wow, slashdot is really proving itself interesting tonight. I should get a subscription but student, no cash, blah de blah.
This is almost psychic though. I was just talking to my flatmate (we both work for former ministry of defence research) whether it'd be possible to get a project code for my open source project and try and get a grant from the LinuxFund, the idea being that I could "bill" the Fund for my time working on the project. Often the fund gives out money and the projects don't really know what to do with it, I think the best use I can think of is to let me work on it fulltime.
Of course, as Dan rightly pointed out, there are all sorts of ugly issues with that plan, noteably the overhead my company would charge, and the fact that they have a tendancy to eat IP for breakfast. Even though the project doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before, they might try to "own" the code, which wouldn't do any good at all.
Still, I think I might talk to my boss about it tomorrow. I get paid jack all basically so I'd be able to make $1000 go a long way.....
And when it's compromised? I have set all my passwords to be the same for about a year now, and it's the only way I can stay sane with the number of separate accounts/identities I have. My password has been compromised twice now:(
Luckily both times the people who saw it were friends. The first time I had to tell Adam my password so he could setup my new email/shell account for me. The second time a stupid MS connection wizard of all things printed out the password in plaintext at the end, just to helpfully confirm you'd chosen it right.
Not to mention the difficulties I had finding a password that was easy to remember but fitted into all the various rules some sites/systems have about passwords
Good passwords should be changed regularly. To do that, you need 1 password. To do that, you need digital identities.
Full disclosure time, I work for Andre Durand who setup Jabber Inc and whos latest venture is PingID. We got together, along with Adam Theo (who got our server slashdotted with the ransom thingy a few weeks back) because we'd been working on open source digital identity for about a year. Andre knows the balance between commercial and open source well in our opinions, and he's been sponsoring the effort.
I've been to DIDW 2002, met the guys designing the protocols and met Justin Taylor from Novell. All those links were to say, I've been following this scene since before people were talking about "identity" and I want to shout my thoughts loud and clear.
Firstly, the idea that Microsoft have authentication tied down is laughable. Passport is in its current incarnation a piece of crap. By version 3.1 I'm sure it'll be peachy, but right now it stinks. The extent of their "integration" with Windows is having IE6 use some native dialog boxes instead of web forms and being able to automatically sign on when you login (does anybody actually use that?). It is most definately possible to do something better than this in a seamless enough way that users would go for it. In fact when I was in Denver me and Adam sketched out an idea for how to do it.
Secondly, the Alliance is a rather mixed organisation. It's made up of lots of big corps who are not in fact enormous big baddies who want to steal your privacy just for the hell of it, but they do want to enable better business relationships. The example Esther Dyson gave was that the airline company should remember whether she likes window seats or not. I'm sure some Slashdotters would find this freaky/scary but she is a smart lady and she knew that she wanted that kind of information to make her life easier.
BUT - the LA is attempting to tackle a slightly different problem to the one that interests me and Adam. What we want to do is simple: we want to be able to run a server on theoretic.com that lets me sign in to Slashdot with my network address, lets me sign up for mailman mailing lists without inventing passwords each time, links my Jabber account with my email account with my personal profiles so people can locate me based on interest, so I can sign in to Linux GDM with my network address and get my roaming desktop and so on. We have LOTS of ideas!:)
What the LA are doing is linking currently existing identities together. They gave a demo of the technology in Denver. In fact, it was Justin Taylor who did this demo. It was entirely corporate focussed, they started from an intranet and were automatically signed in to some flight reservation service. That sort of tech has its place, and they're being realistic in that linking identities is a good way to start until people start getting their own identities hosted for them like email addresses.
The LA has some good points to it, don't mindlessly bash it. However, it also has some bad points. One is the stupid requirements for membership, which they admitted to me privately are basically to keep the little guys out. Another is the hideous complexity of their protocols. The ones we've developed sacrifice a small amount of flexibility for a huge increase (imho) in implementability and understandability.
Well having plugged it now (i seem to be plugging a lot of my projects today), I guess I'd better point out that what we're doing actually consists of two parts. The first is the protocol. This is (currently) called the Genio Protocol, and will be getting its own website soon (look for an announcement here when it does). It's simple, open and as far as we know free of IP claims. The second is the SourceID reference server, which is under a pseudo open source license.
We have user profiles working, and I was coding up basic tickets functionality (authentication/authorization tokens) last weekend. Hopefully genioprotocol.org will be up soon and then it'll make more sense.
Believe me, this is totally scratching an itch on my part (though I do get paid for it now too [grin]) because I think a good set of solid open digital identity protocols will make my life easier, and totally kick ass into the bargain.
I think you wrote an excellent article which explained your point quite well. I consider you 100% wrong but that shouldn't diminish a high quality post which does deserve to be modded up.
LOL, thanks:)
Were your argument true, that is that the behavior is based on price and lack of market share there should have been no difference between the behavior on/. before and after OS9.
Yes, you're quite right, I did oversimply things, somewhat deliberately. Partly it was because the post was already too long and I didn't want to write even more, and partly for effect (ie your point is more easily understood if it's not full of qualifications). Oh yeah, also partly because I too am biased (i'm a guy who digs philosophy).
Yes, I know they do. The main advantages are not localisation and interaction, they are distro neutrality and decentralisation.
Linux has a big problem with software packaging. Deb files are debian specific. The answer is not for everybody to use debian, it's to build packages that are not specific to a particular distribution. If you never ever want software that's more up to date than the stuff in Debian, if you think dpkg is the essence of perfection itself and cannot be improved in any way, then my project is not for you. Sorry:(
For people who don't use Debian though (ie the majority) I think this system has major advantages.
I'm a *nix user, and I've recently switched almost entirely to Mac.
IMHO that kind of post is pretty much redundant. We can sit here all day and say "I used to use operating system A and then I switched to operating system B for reasons C and D". A good number of posts on Slashdot are little more than that.
It is however nothing more than anecdotal evidence. A post slightly above this one says "every Linux user I know has or wants to have a Mac". Again, totally anecdotal, the exact opposite is true where I live and for the people I know. This kind of stuff is fun to argue about, but if you want to get an objective view of what's going on in the markets you don't rely on what you read on Slashdot, you ask the big statistics companies.
No, their measurement systems are not perfect, that's impossible. They are a good deal more informative than "I know 4 people with PowerBooks!". When you look at the numbers however, it seems that Apple is doing rather less well than a lot of people here would say. You don't have to believe me, go search the archives of OSNews, they have reported on it, and Eugenia is pretty much OS neutral if you ignore BeOS.
If anything, I expect we're getting a seriously warped view of Apples market penetration here on Slashdot due to the mod system. A post that says "I haven't bought a Mac" is redundant and quite rightly modded so. Posts that say "I have bought a Mac" are also redundant but get modded up because sometimes people have interesting reasons, but mostly because advertising psychology says that people are inclined to agree with views that appear to justify their own purchasing decisions. There is a post at the top of this thread about it, although there's a lot more to it than just cognitive dissonance.
In particular, psychologists have found that people pay more attention to adverts for a product after they have bought it, which seems counterintuitive until you realise that these people having made a purchasing decision are keen on reassuring themselves that they made the right choice, and so listen more to things that tell them this. It's also been found (sorry, don't have the reference to hand) that this effect increases in proportion to cost, ie if you buy something that costs £10 you're less likely to get upset at reading a bad review of it than if it had cost £10,000.
I think this is what happens with operating systems. Why does Apple garner such loyalty? The Mac loyalists usually say it's to do with the technology but I think it can be better explained by psychology (watches karma drop...).
Windows has an effective cost of zero, as it's included in the hardware price when you buy the machine. What's more, it's a monopoly, people feel they have to use it, so they know they've made the correct purchasing decision - really they couldn't make any other. Because they know this, people are happy to bitch about MS products they use all the time, simply because nobody can turn around and say "well don't use it then". (karma: excellent -> good). There is little cognitive dissonance.
Linux suffers from a different problem. It also has an effective cost of zero, because it's given away for free. As such, using it has no personal investment except of time (which is different). Because of this, people are happy to try it, formulate an opinion sometimes within hours, and then either keep it or erase it and go back to what they were using before. There is no justification need here either, because it cost you nothing, so there is no incentive to put effort into it. For people who do like it, sometimes they dig the whole philosophy thing, and become Linux evangelists.
Apple on the other hand is boosted by this effect. It's a textbook case of this type of psychology. Buying a Mac is a big investment in terms of cost, and because it has such low market share compared to Wintel PCs there is a strong need to justify not going with the crowd. Hence we see arguments like "it's easier, it works better" etc. One thing that's pretty clear is that once you've bought a Mac, you're not going to just dump it, nobody just dumps something that cost over a thousand dollars after a few hours. There is a high internal need for the purchase to be seen as a good one, so people adapt to the quirks of the platform etc.
They then become very defensive when people criticize that purchase, and very friendly towards people who back them up - hence the fact that Mac users seem to get together into groups and the "Mac logo" effect mentioned in the article. An example: slashdotter A says "Mac's are slow, look at their CPU speeds for what you pay!!!". Slashdotter B says "but it doesn't matter, because it feels fast to me (of course it does) and because Mhz is a myth". There is an attack (probably provoked by over enthusastic promotion by slashdotter B, often people criticize stuff simply because it's an alternative viewpoint in the presence of lots of positive viewpoints), and a defensive reponse (karma:good -> terrible).
As such, they are more likely to mod down anti-Mac posts and more likely to mod up pro-Mac posts. Non Mac users on the other hand are unlikely to have a view one way or the other, hence moderation gets somewhat bent. Hence, the fact that if you read Slashdot a lot it seems that everybody is buying Macs.
Phew! That drifted rather offtopic for a bit in the middle, but I think you get the gist of my theory.
BMW has a monopoly in the BMW market. GM has a monopoly in the GM market. And yet, they both sell cars and compete against each other. I guess that's why this guy is only a visiting professor of economics.;)
Bad analogy methinks. Cars are compatible, no matter if you drive a BMW or a GM car, you can use the same roads. It requires no effort to switch between a BMW and a GM car.
If you buy a Mac or Windows however, the lockin effect starts to occur and you find that it's unnaturally difficult to change to something else, which distorts the natural rules of competition. The comment about crack might have been closer than they thought.
Or do you think that had OS X been open and Apples OS X was merely a "distro" that they'd have been able to get away with a $120 upgrade tag?
See my sig (autopackage.org). Debian package distribution has a number of issues that I won't go into here (about to go home) but I'll happily explain in IRC sometime or on the mailing list. I hope to improve on debians apt by quite some way.
One problem I ran into was what libraries you could expect to be installed on any given platform. Sure, there's the LSB, but does the LSB specify a base set of packages that make up a desktop or a server?
Nope, you're right, but autopackage can figure out what libraries are present and retrieve (assuming they've been packaged) the libraries from a DNS style distributed network, apt style.
My aim was a little different from yours though. I was going for complete binary packaging from beginning to end. No source building, as automated./configure; make; make install;s tend to make distro specific code.
Hmmm, how did you get the impression that autopackage is source based? A.package is a binary package from end to end, the user doesn't need to compile anything.
All I provided was an archive format and a self extracting gui or command line installer that totaled under 50k of overhead
We're using a similar idea except the scripting language and front end code is external and installed-on-demand when you run a.package file if it's not already present to minimize package file bloat.
Maybe I should start it back up. It's not like I have much else going on lately. hmm...
If you're interested in the problem, please take a close look at autopackage first, feel free to hop onto IRC (freenode#autopackage) and talk to us first. We're normally around in the evenings GMT (both the core developers are in europe). It'd be a shame to duplicate effort when our projects sound so similar.
The thing I'm most looking forward to is the better scheduling under heavy disk load. This'll hopefully make Linux a lot more responsive when compiling software, at the moment my machine can get bogged down and jerky when doing this.
Of course, the real solution would be to not need to compile software (plug plug:)
Actually SGI ported XFS to Linux some time ago, and Linux is like 99% POSIX compliant. I'm not sure what you mean about a "Unix heritage". You're probably right about CPU scalability.
I was under the impression though that the thing that made Irix special was its X Server, which is appareently one of the best going, hence its popularity in graphics work.
Nah, I didn't, but I don't follow the mac rumour scene.
Anyway, possible intention to expand isn't grounds for this kind of legal harassment. Any company could pretty much decide to do anything in future - if they aren't in an industry then they can't really target other companies called Apple in different industries.
But a telecommunications company is fair game since Apple does telecommunications.
I don't buy that. Apple do hardware: computers and MP3 players in fact. Where can I sign up for Apple network connectivity? They haven't even announced any intention to be in that business.
Apple Communications sells a service, namely bandwidth. Apple Computer sells hardware. Yes, I know they sell.Mac as well, but webmail services are not the same as bandwidth.
Actually the connection is both are in the IT industry
I think most people would regard the telecoms industry as separate to the IT hardware industry actually.
Not to mention that the telecom would indirectly benefit from Apple Inc's advertising...etc.
Er, how? Apples advertising is almost all designed to try and sell a very particular type of hardware. That has absolutely no repercussions on sales of bandwidth whatsoever, and assuming that 99% of people can tell the difference between their local bits'n'pieces store and their telephone company, they should also be able to tell the difference between a computer hardware company and a telephone company.
Re:Love/Hate... screw it, I love my Powerbook.
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Apples problem is that they have a lot of extremely vicious lawyers working for them, which for no good reason at all they have kept around for years.
I expect that in the absence of anything really happening at Apple that needs them, in order to justify their wages they go around causing hassle for people. This strikes me as almost certainly some lawyer in Cupertino thinking "hmm, what can I do today". It's utterly stupid, because it simply gives Apple a worse name than they already have, for no return at all.
The solution is just to fire almost all the lawyers and hire them in on a contract basis as needed. But Jobs doesn't do this. Does that make Apple a bad company? Yes, I think it does, as regardless of the internal structure, you have to judge a company by what it does. Some people like Apples products, great. But they are still a bad company looking at them in terms of their actions.
Re:Oh, someone explain to me
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And for those who use RealPlayer w/ Mozilla on Linux, run realplay and use this URL:
LOL! That's hilarious. What a hoot. Microsoft really shoot themselves in the foot sometimes don't they?
So let's see, we go to the MD of an old-skool UNIX place and say "we want to use Linux", the MD says "So tell me, who's switching to Linux and who's switching to Windows?".
We say, "Banco de Brazil is using it, that's 70,000 employees and millions of customers", Microsoft say "Hard Rock Cafe dumped Linux in favour of Windows", and we say ".... and now they have an average uptime of 4 DAYS".
Zing! We win that round I think..... 4 days is pathetic even for Windows. Max uptime of a month? What on earth are they doing??
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody comments: I thought it was just a distribution problem), and since so many people here on Slashdot rave about Debian I thought I'd give it a try. Especially since PGI(progenies graphical installer) is now 1.0.
Big mistake - you should have found out why they rave about Debian first. Hint: it's to do with raw power, not ease of use or nice interfaces.
tshak says: I'll keep trying so that I'm "open minded", but when a company can take a couple years and get unix on the deskop right (OS X) practically the first time (admittidly, it was released a few months too early), I become uninterested in the year after year failures of the OSS alternatives.
First things first, the usability woes of OS X are well documented. The idea that it somehow magically requires no effort to use is a fallacy. I always end up expending more effort when using a Mac than when using Linux or Windows simply because the Mac needlessly breaks habits to which the vast majority of computer users are accustomed to. This isn't me complaining about things being different, I have no problems with things being different, what I have problems with is the Mac doing things differently simply because that's the way they've always been done, not because it's better. Take the non standard keyboard for instance. Why? Apps don't close when the last window closes, meaning I constantly forget to quit them manually. Why? Software only ejects. Why? These are all usability booboos that you have to force yourself to become used to.
Second point, there's nothing hard about making a desktop based on UNIX. Unix, or rather, POSIX is just a set of standard technologies. What's hard is building a truly free (in both senses of the word) collaborative OS that is flexible enough to appeal to everybody, and yet integrates well enough to be very easy to use. It's hard. We're getting there. Comments like that don't make it any easier.
Tackhead writes: Precisely. Another part of the problem is that OSS developers, typically being geographically-disperse and having little access to funding, have no contact with their end users during the design and development phase and cannot do usability testing.
This applies to most software: any software in fact that isn't produced by a large group usually will not have dedicated usability experts on the team. I don't see people flaming the Windows shareware scene, despite it being home to some of the worst UI atrocities in history. And what do you know, the largest open source projects (gnome, mozilla, kde) have usability teams. It mirrors real life. The idea that all commercial software is more "usable" than open source software is imho a stereotype that's only loosely grounded in reality.
ChileVerde: "It raises the question though, how will the need for usability specialists fit in the current model for developing OSS? AFAIK, most of the usability/interface work on the projects are handled by programmers, who doesn't necessarily have the background on this topic."
Havoc is a great example of a programmer who "gets" usability (though perhaps a bit over the top). I always think of usability when designing my interfaces. Programmer != GUI monster. Often though they're not experts, but that's why we have experts such as the guys from Sun working on GNOME. They already are fitting into the open source model.
There may be a connection. A closed project allows one person to impose their will religiously throughout an interface. Open source ultimately is about concessions and cooperation, which may negate this type of centrist control.
No, it's about cooperation. That doesn't necessarily involve concessions. An open source project is like any other project - the leaders can impose their will with an iron first, or they can be weak and agree with everything. This happens in the commercial world as well.
ACK!! says "The other side of the coin that these folks do not take into account is the fact that OSS application developers for all the desktop adoption talk are not coding for the masses. They might think they are but they are not."
Important insight here - the GNOME flamewars demonmstrate this very well. Some people felt GNOME2 was being taken away from them and retargeted at the corporate desktop user. It had a lot of "crack" features stripped out. It took balls to do this. The flamewars on the lists weren't pretty, and still the trolls keep trolling on forums like slashdot and FootNotes. This is a good example of a large open source project (that doesn't even have one leader) taking the initiative with usability. GNOME proves that a lot of the FUD in this thread is simply wrong: open source can be very usable, and it can be written for non-developers.
I have seen open source overcome every problem it has encountered so far, back when I was excited about this new new thing called Windows 95. I have seen it go through "toy OS", "can run web servers but will never get enterprise acceptance", "good at servers but will never get enough apps for the desktop", "too hard to install" and now "software isn't usable enough".
Every single one of those problems has been solved. This one is being solved too. Tomorrow I release autopackage 0.2 - it's CLI interface was designed with usability in mind. It uses colour to make the text easier for the eye to process, it uses simple, obvious command names (with aliases to facilitate guessing) and it comes with documentation. Open source is dead. Long live open source.
Statistics please? Where did you get this information? Last time I checked, this was most certainly not the case. Or are you just assuming stuff based on what you think is probable, rather than what actually is?
Hmmmm, I think we have different definitions of "inexpensive". My desktop machine cost me £250 as it was an upgraded box I bought dirt cheap, and it's a pretty fast. There's "cheap" and then there's "cheap". You'd be surprised just how cheaply you can get computers if you try a bit and know where to look/who to talk to.
Like I said, it's a bit tricky to explain why this is so, but I'll try anyway. Note that time does have value, I'm sure some of our best hackers today got into Linux after spending all day making their sound card work or something and thinking "I'm not giving up now!". However, if you spend a Saturday doing something, and fail, that failure "hurts" less than if you spent a days wages on something then realise that it wasn't what you wanted.
I think it's because money represents opportunities for people in their minds moreso than time. Maybe I wasn't really planning on doing anything important on that saturday so the loss wasn't so bad after all. But a days wages has lots of possibilities.
I'm afraid I'm reaching the limits of my psychology training here, but I'm 99% sure that time is different to money in this context.
Why do you say that? I know Qt has more widgets, but assuming you don't need SQL integration (ie the majority of desktop apps) in what areas to kde/qt outshine gnome?
A new (secure) protocol?
Not a troll either, but an opposing point of view. If you'd been comparing Gnome 1.4 with KDE3 then yeah, I'd agree, but I'm using gnome2 on both my desktop machines and it definately feels smoother, slicker, more professionally done than KDE IMHO. The usability efforts Sun has been putting in really, really show through. It's light on features at this time compared to KDE, and some parts of KDE are undeniably better, but to me Gnome2 just hangs together better.
What also surprised me was that once I threw off my preconceptions and started digging into the developer platform, I discovered it was really nice. I grew up on objects, so the idea of everything being written in C kind of seemed rather dumb to me, but as I talked to people the reasons became clear. I'd also assumed Bonobo was horribly complex, unwieldy and slow. All those preconceptions turned out to be false. GTK2 is a really nice toolkit actually, with excellent C++ bindings if you want to use that language.
Of course, it'd help if their developer documentation didn't suck so much, then I'd simply have been able to read proper material and probably wouldn't have got these preconceptions in the first place.
This is almost psychic though. I was just talking to my flatmate (we both work for former ministry of defence research) whether it'd be possible to get a project code for my open source project and try and get a grant from the LinuxFund, the idea being that I could "bill" the Fund for my time working on the project. Often the fund gives out money and the projects don't really know what to do with it, I think the best use I can think of is to let me work on it fulltime.
Of course, as Dan rightly pointed out, there are all sorts of ugly issues with that plan, noteably the overhead my company would charge, and the fact that they have a tendancy to eat IP for breakfast. Even though the project doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before, they might try to "own" the code, which wouldn't do any good at all.
Still, I think I might talk to my boss about it tomorrow. I get paid jack all basically so I'd be able to make $1000 go a long way.....
And when it's compromised? I have set all my passwords to be the same for about a year now, and it's the only way I can stay sane with the number of separate accounts/identities I have. My password has been compromised twice now :(
Luckily both times the people who saw it were friends. The first time I had to tell Adam my password so he could setup my new email/shell account for me. The second time a stupid MS connection wizard of all things printed out the password in plaintext at the end, just to helpfully confirm you'd chosen it right.
Not to mention the difficulties I had finding a password that was easy to remember but fitted into all the various rules some sites/systems have about passwords
Good passwords should be changed regularly. To do that, you need 1 password. To do that, you need digital identities.
Full disclosure time, I work for Andre Durand who setup Jabber Inc and whos latest venture is PingID. We got together, along with Adam Theo (who got our server slashdotted with the ransom thingy a few weeks back) because we'd been working on open source digital identity for about a year. Andre knows the balance between commercial and open source well in our opinions, and he's been sponsoring the effort.
I've been to DIDW 2002, met the guys designing the protocols and met Justin Taylor from Novell. All those links were to say, I've been following this scene since before people were talking about "identity" and I want to shout my thoughts loud and clear.
Firstly, the idea that Microsoft have authentication tied down is laughable. Passport is in its current incarnation a piece of crap. By version 3.1 I'm sure it'll be peachy, but right now it stinks. The extent of their "integration" with Windows is having IE6 use some native dialog boxes instead of web forms and being able to automatically sign on when you login (does anybody actually use that?). It is most definately possible to do something better than this in a seamless enough way that users would go for it. In fact when I was in Denver me and Adam sketched out an idea for how to do it.
Secondly, the Alliance is a rather mixed organisation. It's made up of lots of big corps who are not in fact enormous big baddies who want to steal your privacy just for the hell of it, but they do want to enable better business relationships. The example Esther Dyson gave was that the airline company should remember whether she likes window seats or not. I'm sure some Slashdotters would find this freaky/scary but she is a smart lady and she knew that she wanted that kind of information to make her life easier.
BUT - the LA is attempting to tackle a slightly different problem to the one that interests me and Adam. What we want to do is simple: we want to be able to run a server on theoretic.com that lets me sign in to Slashdot with my network address, lets me sign up for mailman mailing lists without inventing passwords each time, links my Jabber account with my email account with my personal profiles so people can locate me based on interest, so I can sign in to Linux GDM with my network address and get my roaming desktop and so on. We have LOTS of ideas! :)
What the LA are doing is linking currently existing identities together. They gave a demo of the technology in Denver. In fact, it was Justin Taylor who did this demo. It was entirely corporate focussed, they started from an intranet and were automatically signed in to some flight reservation service. That sort of tech has its place, and they're being realistic in that linking identities is a good way to start until people start getting their own identities hosted for them like email addresses.
The LA has some good points to it, don't mindlessly bash it. However, it also has some bad points. One is the stupid requirements for membership, which they admitted to me privately are basically to keep the little guys out. Another is the hideous complexity of their protocols. The ones we've developed sacrifice a small amount of flexibility for a huge increase (imho) in implementability and understandability.
Well having plugged it now (i seem to be plugging a lot of my projects today), I guess I'd better point out that what we're doing actually consists of two parts. The first is the protocol. This is (currently) called the Genio Protocol, and will be getting its own website soon (look for an announcement here when it does). It's simple, open and as far as we know free of IP claims. The second is the SourceID reference server, which is under a pseudo open source license.
We have user profiles working, and I was coding up basic tickets functionality (authentication/authorization tokens) last weekend. Hopefully genioprotocol.org will be up soon and then it'll make more sense.
Believe me, this is totally scratching an itch on my part (though I do get paid for it now too [grin]) because I think a good set of solid open digital identity protocols will make my life easier, and totally kick ass into the bargain.
LOL, thanks :)
Were your argument true, that is that the behavior is based on price and lack of market share there should have been no difference between the behavior on /. before and after OS9.
Yes, you're quite right, I did oversimply things, somewhat deliberately. Partly it was because the post was already too long and I didn't want to write even more, and partly for effect (ie your point is more easily understood if it's not full of qualifications). Oh yeah, also partly because I too am biased (i'm a guy who digs philosophy).
Linux has a big problem with software packaging. Deb files are debian specific. The answer is not for everybody to use debian, it's to build packages that are not specific to a particular distribution. If you never ever want software that's more up to date than the stuff in Debian, if you think dpkg is the essence of perfection itself and cannot be improved in any way, then my project is not for you. Sorry :(
For people who don't use Debian though (ie the majority) I think this system has major advantages.
IMHO that kind of post is pretty much redundant. We can sit here all day and say "I used to use operating system A and then I switched to operating system B for reasons C and D". A good number of posts on Slashdot are little more than that.
It is however nothing more than anecdotal evidence. A post slightly above this one says "every Linux user I know has or wants to have a Mac". Again, totally anecdotal, the exact opposite is true where I live and for the people I know. This kind of stuff is fun to argue about, but if you want to get an objective view of what's going on in the markets you don't rely on what you read on Slashdot, you ask the big statistics companies.
No, their measurement systems are not perfect, that's impossible. They are a good deal more informative than "I know 4 people with PowerBooks!". When you look at the numbers however, it seems that Apple is doing rather less well than a lot of people here would say. You don't have to believe me, go search the archives of OSNews, they have reported on it, and Eugenia is pretty much OS neutral if you ignore BeOS.
If anything, I expect we're getting a seriously warped view of Apples market penetration here on Slashdot due to the mod system. A post that says "I haven't bought a Mac" is redundant and quite rightly modded so. Posts that say "I have bought a Mac" are also redundant but get modded up because sometimes people have interesting reasons, but mostly because advertising psychology says that people are inclined to agree with views that appear to justify their own purchasing decisions. There is a post at the top of this thread about it, although there's a lot more to it than just cognitive dissonance.
In particular, psychologists have found that people pay more attention to adverts for a product after they have bought it, which seems counterintuitive until you realise that these people having made a purchasing decision are keen on reassuring themselves that they made the right choice, and so listen more to things that tell them this. It's also been found (sorry, don't have the reference to hand) that this effect increases in proportion to cost, ie if you buy something that costs £10 you're less likely to get upset at reading a bad review of it than if it had cost £10,000.
I think this is what happens with operating systems. Why does Apple garner such loyalty? The Mac loyalists usually say it's to do with the technology but I think it can be better explained by psychology (watches karma drop...).
Windows has an effective cost of zero, as it's included in the hardware price when you buy the machine. What's more, it's a monopoly, people feel they have to use it, so they know they've made the correct purchasing decision - really they couldn't make any other. Because they know this, people are happy to bitch about MS products they use all the time, simply because nobody can turn around and say "well don't use it then". (karma: excellent -> good). There is little cognitive dissonance.
Linux suffers from a different problem. It also has an effective cost of zero, because it's given away for free. As such, using it has no personal investment except of time (which is different). Because of this, people are happy to try it, formulate an opinion sometimes within hours, and then either keep it or erase it and go back to what they were using before. There is no justification need here either, because it cost you nothing, so there is no incentive to put effort into it. For people who do like it, sometimes they dig the whole philosophy thing, and become Linux evangelists.
Apple on the other hand is boosted by this effect. It's a textbook case of this type of psychology. Buying a Mac is a big investment in terms of cost, and because it has such low market share compared to Wintel PCs there is a strong need to justify not going with the crowd. Hence we see arguments like "it's easier, it works better" etc. One thing that's pretty clear is that once you've bought a Mac, you're not going to just dump it, nobody just dumps something that cost over a thousand dollars after a few hours. There is a high internal need for the purchase to be seen as a good one, so people adapt to the quirks of the platform etc.
They then become very defensive when people criticize that purchase, and very friendly towards people who back them up - hence the fact that Mac users seem to get together into groups and the "Mac logo" effect mentioned in the article. An example: slashdotter A says "Mac's are slow, look at their CPU speeds for what you pay!!!". Slashdotter B says "but it doesn't matter, because it feels fast to me (of course it does) and because Mhz is a myth". There is an attack (probably provoked by over enthusastic promotion by slashdotter B, often people criticize stuff simply because it's an alternative viewpoint in the presence of lots of positive viewpoints), and a defensive reponse (karma:good -> terrible). As such, they are more likely to mod down anti-Mac posts and more likely to mod up pro-Mac posts. Non Mac users on the other hand are unlikely to have a view one way or the other, hence moderation gets somewhat bent. Hence, the fact that if you read Slashdot a lot it seems that everybody is buying Macs.
Phew! That drifted rather offtopic for a bit in the middle, but I think you get the gist of my theory.
Bad analogy methinks. Cars are compatible, no matter if you drive a BMW or a GM car, you can use the same roads. It requires no effort to switch between a BMW and a GM car.
If you buy a Mac or Windows however, the lockin effect starts to occur and you find that it's unnaturally difficult to change to something else, which distorts the natural rules of competition. The comment about crack might have been closer than they thought.
Or do you think that had OS X been open and Apples OS X was merely a "distro" that they'd have been able to get away with a $120 upgrade tag?
See my sig (autopackage.org). Debian package distribution has a number of issues that I won't go into here (about to go home) but I'll happily explain in IRC sometime or on the mailing list. I hope to improve on debians apt by quite some way.
Nope, you're right, but autopackage can figure out what libraries are present and retrieve (assuming they've been packaged) the libraries from a DNS style distributed network, apt style.
My aim was a little different from yours though. I was going for complete binary packaging from beginning to end. No source building, as automated ./configure; make; make install;s tend to make distro specific code.
Hmmm, how did you get the impression that autopackage is source based? A .package is a binary package from end to end, the user doesn't need to compile anything.
All I provided was an archive format and a self extracting gui or command line installer that totaled under 50k of overhead
We're using a similar idea except the scripting language and front end code is external and installed-on-demand when you run a .package file if it's not already present to minimize package file bloat.
Maybe I should start it back up. It's not like I have much else going on lately. hmm...
If you're interested in the problem, please take a close look at autopackage first, feel free to hop onto IRC (freenode#autopackage) and talk to us first. We're normally around in the evenings GMT (both the core developers are in europe). It'd be a shame to duplicate effort when our projects sound so similar.
Of course, the real solution would be to not need to compile software (plug plug :)
I was under the impression though that the thing that made Irix special was its X Server, which is appareently one of the best going, hence its popularity in graphics work.
Anyway, possible intention to expand isn't grounds for this kind of legal harassment. Any company could pretty much decide to do anything in future - if they aren't in an industry then they can't really target other companies called Apple in different industries.
I don't buy that. Apple do hardware: computers and MP3 players in fact. Where can I sign up for Apple network connectivity? They haven't even announced any intention to be in that business.
Apple Communications sells a service, namely bandwidth. Apple Computer sells hardware. Yes, I know they sell .Mac as well, but webmail services are not the same as bandwidth.
I think most people would regard the telecoms industry as separate to the IT hardware industry actually.
Not to mention that the telecom would indirectly benefit from Apple Inc's advertising...etc.
Er, how? Apples advertising is almost all designed to try and sell a very particular type of hardware. That has absolutely no repercussions on sales of bandwidth whatsoever, and assuming that 99% of people can tell the difference between their local bits'n'pieces store and their telephone company, they should also be able to tell the difference between a computer hardware company and a telephone company.
I expect that in the absence of anything really happening at Apple that needs them, in order to justify their wages they go around causing hassle for people. This strikes me as almost certainly some lawyer in Cupertino thinking "hmm, what can I do today". It's utterly stupid, because it simply gives Apple a worse name than they already have, for no return at all.
The solution is just to fire almost all the lawyers and hire them in on a contract basis as needed. But Jobs doesn't do this. Does that make Apple a bad company? Yes, I think it does, as regardless of the internal structure, you have to judge a company by what it does. Some people like Apples products, great. But they are still a bad company looking at them in terms of their actions.
http://www.hollywood.com/asplocal/redirector.ram?f sname=equilibrium_t_300.rm&contentid=1701124
watch the space!
So let's see, we go to the MD of an old-skool UNIX place and say "we want to use Linux", the MD says "So tell me, who's switching to Linux and who's switching to Windows?".
We say, "Banco de Brazil is using it, that's 70,000 employees and millions of customers", Microsoft say "Hard Rock Cafe dumped Linux in favour of Windows", and we say ".... and now they have an average uptime of 4 DAYS".
Zing! We win that round I think..... 4 days is pathetic even for Windows. Max uptime of a month? What on earth are they doing??
I seriously doubt it is faked. There is always movement between platforms, but for now it appears the movement is in our direction