Say what you will about his business practices, Bill (with, I'm sure, some conscience prodding from his wife) is doing some good stuff with his money.
No no no! I absolutely refuse to think that this makes up for Gates past.
Look - if I went out today on a crime spree, if I robbed bank after bank after bank, became the richest guy in the world from ripping off other people, then hired some smart accountants to make it grow even more would you respect me? No, of course not.
If I then took that illegaly earnt money and spent it on Good Deeds(tm) would you respect me? I hope not.
Please don't lose sight of the fact that Bill Gates is really quite a sad man, he spent his life screwing others in the pursuit of wealth, and now he is richer than even his wildest dreams he's realised that it made him one of the most unpopular men in the industry, and he doesn't even want all that money anyway!
I'd have respected Gates a lot more if he hadn't deadlocked the industry into a monopoly, and actually acted ethically all this time, rather than simply accruing massive wealth then giving it away.
Following this one up, what is your take on OS X as a whole?
You once mentioned that how open the source was is largely irrelevant, what matters is open standards and interfaces. Apple has opened up some their code, but considering that large parts of the most important components are closed, and their interfaces are protected by patents and IP law, should OS X be seen as a threat to open computing?
Re:Two years ahead of the "other guys"
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Hmm, I have some experience writing OpenGL GUIs for the Pythian Project, and I'm interested to see how they make this work
First off, you need a LOT of video ram to make this work fast. I guess 32mb is a lot, but still, if you run out the card starts swapping between video ram and main ram, which is slow. I don't know how much space all those Aqua graphics take up with animations, but I'd be surprised if it's a lot less than 32mb.
Secondly, OpenGL just wasn't designed for 2D graphics! It has virtually NO support for 2D drawing, if you wish to display something it must either be sent directly to the card as pixel data (slow) or uploaded to video RAM and displayed as a texture on a polygon. This seems like a rather strange way to go about things.
Take the lack of support for text in the API. When writing the VGL, which is the OpenGL widget set for my game (btw I'd be the first to admit I'm not a hotshot coder) I had to create my own text/font system. It was fast certainly, but required you to upload the font to video ram again, which placed restrictions on how you managed font textures.
I can't figure out why anyone would want to use 3D acceleration for making 2D stuff go faster. As far as I know, 2D and 3D acceleration are different things - am I wrong?
Who the hell modded this as +5 insightful? This is flamebait, nothing more.
It's funny watching you open source knobbers get all worked up over OS X. Talk about being jealous...
Child. My Mac friend is currently jealous of my positive bank balance, that's for sure.
Apple debuts the most technologically advanced windowing system ever, and it's:
"Aqua/Quartz is so slow! And it doesn't support network transparency! And Aqua is so candy-coated and ugly! Hahahah!" Meanwhile 2,000 different Aqua themes appear on the various themes sites within days.
Most advanced? Wake up and find out what X can do, and Aqua can't. Did you know you can get Windows XP themes for Aqua? No? It requires a lot of hacking but it works. You're assuming everybody thinks in exactly the same way, a classic Apple-fan mistake.
Apple brings third-party developers like Adobe and MS onto the bandwagon - developers which Linux has been trying and failing to emulate since day one - and it's:
"We never needed that proprietary crap anyway, Gimp is 500% better than Photoshop and OpenOffice kills MS Office and... and... and your mom!"
Er, since when has ANY Linux developer wanted to emulate MICROSOFT?!?! Some Linux software looks like Windows (kde for instance), but that's mainly out of necessity - making it easy for people to switch.
Apple retains their trademark simplicity in plug & play. Mice, keyboards, scanners, you name it Just Work. The open-source community replies:
"You can do that today in ObscureLinuxDistro 8.3. You just have to make sure you've got x, y, and z modules loaded, use modprobe for this otherwise type cat/proc/modules and you'll see a list of modules. Now go into the XFree86 config file and make sure you see these lines, and..."
Wake up and smell the roses - Mandrake (not an obscure distro) will auto detect almost anything. Oh yeah, and you know WHY OS X is so good at hardware autodetection? Because Apple users have a choice of all of 3 different pieces of hardware. It's easy to do hardware integration when you control the hardware.
Once again, open source software finishes last place in technology and usability, and its zealotry continue to deny it. Get out of the basement and into the real world, pizzafaces. Your mom.
If that's the case, why did Apple junk their own in house MacOS9 (which blew chunks, it really did) and replaced it with an open core? Oh yeah, I know, it's cos your full of it.....
WTF were you doing trying to use Slackware? Oh, I know, you never actually wanted to give Linux a chance anyway, you'd rather be a cheap corporate mouthpiece for Apple.
If you'd actually spent more than 2 minutes researching your new OS then you'd have found that every piece of literature on the subject says Slackware is highly technical, not meant for newbies and (i quote) "great for people for whom computing is a hobby".
You know what? Go out, buy SuSE 8 (for a PC dammit, PPC support is still experimental), and then install it on a PC. It worked perfectly, first time for me, no hassle.
Quit dicking around and pretending you can comment on something you clearly didn't put any effort into finding out about before you started.
I don't see how Aqua is more technically sophisticated than X really. Aqua isn't network transparent, or themable, or particularly keyboard friendly. It's not hardware accelerated. It looks nice,and, er, that's about it. It's also a CPU hog.
I guess I'm saying that X, as in the extended accelerated XFree version, isn't all that bad.
A few corrections.. hope you don't mind....,
Sure, it's because you get a lot of extra customization, but it overwhelms newbie users. (And, on a similar note, any user who really wants to customize things that badly in OS X need merely get the TinkerTool Panel installed and he can configure a number of out-of-the-way system settings.)
Talking of usability testing, do you have any data to back this up? It's true the KDE Control Centre is bizarrely designed, but in fact it's being restructured for KDE3.1
KDE lacks any functionality close to an iDisk, and you cannot configure things such as webserving with the click of a button like you can in OS X.
Incorrect. There is no centralised free disk service like the iDisk, but on the other hand remember you effectively pay for the "free" mac.com services when you buy a Mac. If you want, you can pay me and I'll give you some FTP space. You'll then find you can browse your "mikeDisk" direct from Konqueror like a normal filing system, and also all your apps will be able to load and save to it directly - you need never know it's on a remote disk. What, you want even more power? Then try InterMezzo, which is a caching, conflict resolving offlineable remote drive system. Not only do you get network transparecy, but also you can disconnect at any point and continue working.
Oh, I almost forgot, there is a KDE panel applet that includes a small webserver, that can be switched on or off with a mouseclick. I think it's included with KDE3 or if not then with 3.1
The excedingly simple directory structure of OS X is completely lacking in all Linux distros.
Switch to root and try again. The whole UNIX directory structure is there, the finder simply hides it. Fine - I can make a version of Konqueror that hides it all as well, would that make it easier to use? Perhaps. I don't know to be honest. It might be something to look into.
You're right in terms of software management, but it's being worked on. Font management is also improving.
What matters is the process - OS X is simply a way of locking you into proprietary Apple hardware and kit. All platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, and the weaknesses you mentioned in Linux are being resolved fast. I could name a lot of weaknesses in OS X too, which I believe Apple are on the verge of solving. So what? What matters is - are you the one in control 5 years from now?
One thing has become very clear in the Linux world over the last couple of years since the dot com bubble burst. Open Source/Free Software is here to stay, and half-way proprietary solutions won't be accepted by the wider community.
Okay, to start, I think you make a lot of assumptions about the community. I will accept totally proprietary solutions depending on what they are. People need to realise that there is a balance to strike between freedom and commercialism. Both are needed, and indeed, are good for Linux.
Look - Free software is great, necessary even, for some parts of computing. The OS is one example, IMHO. The Kernel/display layer/desktop environments should be free software. However, there's ABSOLUTELY NO REQUIREMENT WHATSOEVER for everything to be free/open source! Is Flash core part of computing? No. Therefore, does it have to be open sourced? No. In fact, I think we should be encouraging Macromedia - the SWF format is well documented and free for use by anyone. This is arguably more than can be said for Ogg Vorbis (though of course the ogg docs situation is temporary). Macromedia make a good product, that people are willing to pay for, and they have opened up the SWF format to the community so nobody can be locked in. Good going Macromedia!
NVidia - are drivers a core part of computing. Arguable. Is it realistic to expect a key competitor in the cutthroat world of 3D accelerators to open up their specs? No. Not right now, anyway. As far as I'm concerned, releasing Linux drivers has not backfired at all, if anything I'm now considering an NVidia card for my next computer because I know it'll work with Linux (a priority) and better still, will work WELL. Eventually of course it'd be good for the specs to be opened up, so everyone can use their hardware, but for the next few years at least we must compromise.
Sorenson - the hot potato. Is video compression a core part of the OS/core part of computing? I'd say... no, it isn't. Of course preferably we should use open video standards wherever possible, to prevent future lockin, but at the end of the day Sorensen have right to develop a codec and sell it. They don't produce a version for Linux, that sucks and they should change it, but I'm not going to lampoon the company on those grounds. It simply means they're pissing some people off, not at all uncommon for companies I think you'll find.
The fact that the Mac removed this responsibility from the user 10 years before the PC did doesn't make Mac people less intelligent or more creative.
I seem to recall that up until about 2 years ago MacOS 9 users had to manually assign memory allocations? And if you got it wrong, the program would crash?
I love my Mac. I hate my PC. But I want to play Dungeon Seige so I need my PC. I think the platform wars should be winding down in the coming years. I think that with OS X, Apple has the BEST operating system available. Sorry Linux people, but Linux is a pile of crap.
More zealotry. Why do so many Mac users insist on giving Apple free advertising? It's not like they don't buy enough TV airtime anyway! And actually, the platform wars wound down years ago, I think you'll find that the open architecture of the PC, for all it's faults, was the winner.
Sorry Mac people, but saying things like OS X is better than Linux is ridiculous. I for one, will NEVER buy a Mac, not because I'm a poor student (though I am), not because I don't like Apple (though I don't), but because if everybody bought a Mac we'd suddenly be even worse off than we are now. Microsoft showed us what damage a monopoly can do when it controls the standards, a monopoly of Apple would be infinitely worse as they control the hardware too!
The only monopoly that wouldn't cause massive damage would be a monopoly of PC/Linux. Nobody, but nobody, should control the OS/Hardware. I don't give a damn about the software on top, if I want to pay MS for Office then I will, but the OS and hardware are too key.
I hate people who get modded up for saying "I love the good looks and UNIX core of Mac OS X". It's redundant. We don't care. So you like your new Mac, good for you, I guess we just have to hope not everybody is like you, cos if they are then we're screwed all over again.
Wrong. I have IMAP and let me tell you, it's not always obvious what messages are viruses and what aren't. Often it is, but not always. The easiest solution is - don't use Outlook. Period.
I find this sort of attitude strange - surely the easiest way of making yourself immune from these things is to not use Outlook? There are manyother email clients out there - you don't NEED Outlook Express, nobody does.
UK residents can contact their MP by first looking them up and then emailing them
No, don't do this! Why? Simple, it doesn't work. MPs, as a general rule of thumb, are very busy and therefore pay more attention to messages from their electorate when more effort has been put in. An email, in the mind of an MP, requires zero effort. And they are right. A fax requires a bit more. A letter is the gold standard. Preferably hand written (as long as your writing is neat). Don't simply bash out a 5 minute email, write your MP a letter! It'll have more effect.
Fax is tempting, but last time I sent a fax to my MP I never got a reply:( This time, I'll write on paper with my hands. They'll pay more attention, and let's face it, the extra effort is worthwhile.
Might as well insert an ad here for Protonic. It's basically volunteer run tech support, and is surprisingly effective. I signed up for it a few weeks ago, and it's quite good fun. The users seem to appreciate it too. Worth a look.
It's not just in schools, today in the Sunday Times (the Doors section) David Hewson basically said to parents "you should only ever buy Windows XP with Office because otherwise when they go into business they'll hate you for not giving them professional tools" or something like that.
He compared it to Dutch children learning Latin instead of English - an analogy that doesn't make sense considering the vast effort differential between learning a new language and learning a new OS/Office suite.
The time has come for our schools to dump Microsoft en masse and move to Macs (where they can afford them) and Linux (to recycle their existing PCs).
True, but don't forget that Apple is just as ruthless as Microsoft. If it were Apple and Jobs with the 90% market share, I'd be willing to bet they'd be trying the same things. Linux is the only sure bet here in terms of future-proofing. It's far from perfect, but at least you know you won't get screwed.
Isn't that sort of the point? A crippled Microsoft is EXACTLY what the US states want, so giving other companies a chance to fix the mess they've made of the computing industry.
This assertion is based on the assumption that ALL desktop users are beginners. I use Linux on my desktop, and it is viable for me. Please don't make sweeping generalisations. Many users do know more about computer users than the people you deal with on the phone.
I'd expect they are more scared that their students have installed truckloads of warez. This is a pretty dirty trick for MS to pull, as they know full well that most schools have some illegal software, often without them even knowing about it.
It's about fear and control, nothing else. It's funny, and a little scary to watch them scrambling like this: it can only help the competition.
Good article. Take for example KDE, nice desktop but too many features. I posted before a comment to the KDE guys that to they should focus on deleting features and just choose good defaults. I am not using KDE anymore, went back to WindowMaker.
Ah ha! You see my friend, you are an example of somebody who likes things light. Light is good of course, but I have tried both WindowMaker and KDE and prefer KDE. Perhaps because I came from the Windows world, I like the Windowish feel and lots of features/functions of KDE. I dunno.
But you clearly prefer something different. Your perfect GUI is different to mine. Therefore, we can conclude that the fact that we can both use whichever GUIs we want, and yet they still interoperate with each other (netwm for instance) is why we are both still using Linux. And that's why if market share for say OS X or Windows was at 100% we'd be unhappy, because we'd be using something that wasn't right for us.
Remember: there is no such thing as the Perfect GUI, in the same way that there is no such thing as the Perfect TV or Perfect Microwave Oven. People have different needs. As long as they all work on standards, that's what counts.
People should not waste their energy on themeing engines or messy options dialogs (my favourite horror is the KDE control center) but focus on one UI style and make that the best. Rather one perfect UI than a dozen so-so ones.
This statement does not do Linux justice - part of the reason that it's grown so rapidly is that people CAN customise their environment if they want to. To pretend everybody is the same, and wants the same thing, is to be immediately contradicted by about 10 million people. Don't assume that the Apple/Microsoft GUIs are perfect, or that you can create one interface that everyone will find works 100% for them. It won't happen.
Also, you appear to be confused about what themeing/skinning is. This is a feature that lets you change the way my GUI looks - I could have a grey windowsish look, a beige Mac look, a heavy industrial greenish look, whatever. It DOES NOT, I repeat DOES NOT change the layout of the interface or how it works. It only affects what it looks like.
If you have a specific complaint about the KDE interface, then please articulate it here. I do not see how KDE is a fancy graphics shell, I do see it has a lot of options. Bear in mind that the KDE Control Centre is coming up for a redesign in KDE3.1 because of it's confusing layout. This says a lot about 1 application, and nothing about OSS UIs in general. I've seen some awful OSS UIs, and some inspired ones.
Hmm. Do the Apple UI guidelines say anything about:
Using a stack based window manager?
Using consistent window switching keys
Designing GUIs to use right-mouse buttons, yet not providing a right mouse button, so hopelessly confusing new users as they struggle to remember which key to press?
Making enter rename a file, and Apple-O open it?
Having a consistent application closing policy
Don't get me wrong, Apple do some good work with UI design, but to pretend that they have the most intuitive UIs is naive. When I first started using my friends Mac, he had to sit next to me and constantly remind me to close the app manually, which button means right click, and so on.
People waay overrate the Mac as GUI perfection. Open software shouldn't just copy it mindlessly.
Well, I'm not a zealot but for about £50 you can buy SuSE Linux Professional which gives you not only an OS but pretty much every piece of software you could ever want. And if there is something missing, you can probably get it for free on the net. Which is a better deal?
Now, I know some people will prefer MS/Apple software which is fine, but the issue is not whether it's a good deal but the fact that they are forced to pay the $14 whether they want it or not. No choices. That is the issue.
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No no no! I absolutely refuse to think that this makes up for Gates past.
Look - if I went out today on a crime spree, if I robbed bank after bank after bank, became the richest guy in the world from ripping off other people, then hired some smart accountants to make it grow even more would you respect me? No, of course not.
If I then took that illegaly earnt money and spent it on Good Deeds(tm) would you respect me? I hope not.
Please don't lose sight of the fact that Bill Gates is really quite a sad man, he spent his life screwing others in the pursuit of wealth, and now he is richer than even his wildest dreams he's realised that it made him one of the most unpopular men in the industry, and he doesn't even want all that money anyway!
I'd have respected Gates a lot more if he hadn't deadlocked the industry into a monopoly, and actually acted ethically all this time, rather than simply accruing massive wealth then giving it away.
You once mentioned that how open the source was is largely irrelevant, what matters is open standards and interfaces. Apple has opened up some their code, but considering that large parts of the most important components are closed, and their interfaces are protected by patents and IP law, should OS X be seen as a threat to open computing?
First off, you need a LOT of video ram to make this work fast. I guess 32mb is a lot, but still, if you run out the card starts swapping between video ram and main ram, which is slow. I don't know how much space all those Aqua graphics take up with animations, but I'd be surprised if it's a lot less than 32mb.
Secondly, OpenGL just wasn't designed for 2D graphics! It has virtually NO support for 2D drawing, if you wish to display something it must either be sent directly to the card as pixel data (slow) or uploaded to video RAM and displayed as a texture on a polygon. This seems like a rather strange way to go about things.
Take the lack of support for text in the API. When writing the VGL, which is the OpenGL widget set for my game (btw I'd be the first to admit I'm not a hotshot coder) I had to create my own text/font system. It was fast certainly, but required you to upload the font to video ram again, which placed restrictions on how you managed font textures.
I can't figure out why anyone would want to use 3D acceleration for making 2D stuff go faster. As far as I know, 2D and 3D acceleration are different things - am I wrong?
It's funny watching you open source knobbers get all worked up over OS X. Talk about being jealous...
Child. My Mac friend is currently jealous of my positive bank balance, that's for sure.
Apple debuts the most technologically advanced windowing system ever, and it's: "Aqua/Quartz is so slow! And it doesn't support network transparency! And Aqua is so candy-coated and ugly! Hahahah!" Meanwhile 2,000 different Aqua themes appear on the various themes sites within days.
Most advanced? Wake up and find out what X can do, and Aqua can't. Did you know you can get Windows XP themes for Aqua? No? It requires a lot of hacking but it works. You're assuming everybody thinks in exactly the same way, a classic Apple-fan mistake.
Apple brings third-party developers like Adobe and MS onto the bandwagon - developers which Linux has been trying and failing to emulate since day one - and it's: "We never needed that proprietary crap anyway, Gimp is 500% better than Photoshop and OpenOffice kills MS Office and... and... and your mom!"
Er, since when has ANY Linux developer wanted to emulate MICROSOFT?!?! Some Linux software looks like Windows (kde for instance), but that's mainly out of necessity - making it easy for people to switch.
Apple retains their trademark simplicity in plug & play. Mice, keyboards, scanners, you name it Just Work. The open-source community replies: "You can do that today in ObscureLinuxDistro 8.3. You just have to make sure you've got x, y, and z modules loaded, use modprobe for this otherwise type cat /proc/modules and you'll see a list of modules. Now go into the XFree86 config file and make sure you see these lines, and..."
Wake up and smell the roses - Mandrake (not an obscure distro) will auto detect almost anything. Oh yeah, and you know WHY OS X is so good at hardware autodetection? Because Apple users have a choice of all of 3 different pieces of hardware. It's easy to do hardware integration when you control the hardware.
Once again, open source software finishes last place in technology and usability, and its zealotry continue to deny it. Get out of the basement and into the real world, pizzafaces. Your mom.
If that's the case, why did Apple junk their own in house MacOS9 (which blew chunks, it really did) and replaced it with an open core? Oh yeah, I know, it's cos your full of it .....
If you'd actually spent more than 2 minutes researching your new OS then you'd have found that every piece of literature on the subject says Slackware is highly technical, not meant for newbies and (i quote) "great for people for whom computing is a hobby".
You know what? Go out, buy SuSE 8 (for a PC dammit, PPC support is still experimental), and then install it on a PC. It worked perfectly, first time for me, no hassle.
Quit dicking around and pretending you can comment on something you clearly didn't put any effort into finding out about before you started.
I guess I'm saying that X, as in the extended accelerated XFree version, isn't all that bad.
You have to buy a Mac to use the mac.com services, they are paid for out of the Apple hardware sales.
Talking of usability testing, do you have any data to back this up? It's true the KDE Control Centre is bizarrely designed, but in fact it's being restructured for KDE3.1
KDE lacks any functionality close to an iDisk, and you cannot configure things such as webserving with the click of a button like you can in OS X.
Incorrect. There is no centralised free disk service like the iDisk, but on the other hand remember you effectively pay for the "free" mac.com services when you buy a Mac. If you want, you can pay me and I'll give you some FTP space. You'll then find you can browse your "mikeDisk" direct from Konqueror like a normal filing system, and also all your apps will be able to load and save to it directly - you need never know it's on a remote disk. What, you want even more power? Then try InterMezzo, which is a caching, conflict resolving offlineable remote drive system. Not only do you get network transparecy, but also you can disconnect at any point and continue working.
Oh, I almost forgot, there is a KDE panel applet that includes a small webserver, that can be switched on or off with a mouseclick. I think it's included with KDE3 or if not then with 3.1
The excedingly simple directory structure of OS X is completely lacking in all Linux distros.
Switch to root and try again. The whole UNIX directory structure is there, the finder simply hides it. Fine - I can make a version of Konqueror that hides it all as well, would that make it easier to use? Perhaps. I don't know to be honest. It might be something to look into.
You're right in terms of software management, but it's being worked on. Font management is also improving.
What matters is the process - OS X is simply a way of locking you into proprietary Apple hardware and kit. All platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, and the weaknesses you mentioned in Linux are being resolved fast. I could name a lot of weaknesses in OS X too, which I believe Apple are on the verge of solving. So what? What matters is - are you the one in control 5 years from now?
Okay, to start, I think you make a lot of assumptions about the community. I will accept totally proprietary solutions depending on what they are. People need to realise that there is a balance to strike between freedom and commercialism. Both are needed, and indeed, are good for Linux.
Look - Free software is great, necessary even, for some parts of computing. The OS is one example, IMHO. The Kernel/display layer/desktop environments should be free software. However, there's ABSOLUTELY NO REQUIREMENT WHATSOEVER for everything to be free/open source! Is Flash core part of computing? No. Therefore, does it have to be open sourced? No. In fact, I think we should be encouraging Macromedia - the SWF format is well documented and free for use by anyone. This is arguably more than can be said for Ogg Vorbis (though of course the ogg docs situation is temporary). Macromedia make a good product, that people are willing to pay for, and they have opened up the SWF format to the community so nobody can be locked in. Good going Macromedia!
NVidia - are drivers a core part of computing. Arguable. Is it realistic to expect a key competitor in the cutthroat world of 3D accelerators to open up their specs? No. Not right now, anyway. As far as I'm concerned, releasing Linux drivers has not backfired at all, if anything I'm now considering an NVidia card for my next computer because I know it'll work with Linux (a priority) and better still, will work WELL. Eventually of course it'd be good for the specs to be opened up, so everyone can use their hardware, but for the next few years at least we must compromise.
Sorenson - the hot potato. Is video compression a core part of the OS/core part of computing? I'd say ... no, it isn't. Of course preferably we should use open video standards wherever possible, to prevent future lockin, but at the end of the day Sorensen have right to develop a codec and sell it. They don't produce a version for Linux, that sucks and they should change it, but I'm not going to lampoon the company on those grounds. It simply means they're pissing some people off, not at all uncommon for companies I think you'll find.
Do you know if they're planning to move their widget lib to Qt or GTK?
I seem to recall that up until about 2 years ago MacOS 9 users had to manually assign memory allocations? And if you got it wrong, the program would crash?
I love my Mac. I hate my PC. But I want to play Dungeon Seige so I need my PC. I think the platform wars should be winding down in the coming years. I think that with OS X, Apple has the BEST operating system available. Sorry Linux people, but Linux is a pile of crap.
More zealotry. Why do so many Mac users insist on giving Apple free advertising? It's not like they don't buy enough TV airtime anyway! And actually, the platform wars wound down years ago, I think you'll find that the open architecture of the PC, for all it's faults, was the winner.
Sorry Mac people, but saying things like OS X is better than Linux is ridiculous. I for one, will NEVER buy a Mac, not because I'm a poor student (though I am), not because I don't like Apple (though I don't), but because if everybody bought a Mac we'd suddenly be even worse off than we are now. Microsoft showed us what damage a monopoly can do when it controls the standards, a monopoly of Apple would be infinitely worse as they control the hardware too!
The only monopoly that wouldn't cause massive damage would be a monopoly of PC/Linux. Nobody, but nobody, should control the OS/Hardware. I don't give a damn about the software on top, if I want to pay MS for Office then I will, but the OS and hardware are too key.
I hate people who get modded up for saying "I love the good looks and UNIX core of Mac OS X". It's redundant. We don't care. So you like your new Mac, good for you, I guess we just have to hope not everybody is like you, cos if they are then we're screwed all over again.
end rant
Wrong. I have IMAP and let me tell you, it's not always obvious what messages are viruses and what aren't. Often it is, but not always. The easiest solution is - don't use Outlook. Period.
I find this sort of attitude strange - surely the easiest way of making yourself immune from these things is to not use Outlook? There are many other email clients out there - you don't NEED Outlook Express, nobody does.
No, don't do this! Why? Simple, it doesn't work. MPs, as a general rule of thumb, are very busy and therefore pay more attention to messages from their electorate when more effort has been put in. An email, in the mind of an MP, requires zero effort. And they are right. A fax requires a bit more. A letter is the gold standard. Preferably hand written (as long as your writing is neat). Don't simply bash out a 5 minute email, write your MP a letter! It'll have more effect.
Fax is tempting, but last time I sent a fax to my MP I never got a reply :( This time, I'll write on paper with my hands. They'll pay more attention, and let's face it, the extra effort is worthwhile.
Might as well insert an ad here for Protonic. It's basically volunteer run tech support, and is surprisingly effective. I signed up for it a few weeks ago, and it's quite good fun. The users seem to appreciate it too. Worth a look.
He compared it to Dutch children learning Latin instead of English - an analogy that doesn't make sense considering the vast effort differential between learning a new language and learning a new OS/Office suite.
True, but don't forget that Apple is just as ruthless as Microsoft. If it were Apple and Jobs with the 90% market share, I'd be willing to bet they'd be trying the same things. Linux is the only sure bet here in terms of future-proofing. It's far from perfect, but at least you know you won't get screwed.
Isn't that sort of the point? A crippled Microsoft is EXACTLY what the US states want, so giving other companies a chance to fix the mess they've made of the computing industry.
This assertion is based on the assumption that ALL desktop users are beginners. I use Linux on my desktop, and it is viable for me. Please don't make sweeping generalisations. Many users do know more about computer users than the people you deal with on the phone.
It's about fear and control, nothing else. It's funny, and a little scary to watch them scrambling like this: it can only help the competition.
Ah ha! You see my friend, you are an example of somebody who likes things light. Light is good of course, but I have tried both WindowMaker and KDE and prefer KDE. Perhaps because I came from the Windows world, I like the Windowish feel and lots of features/functions of KDE. I dunno.
But you clearly prefer something different. Your perfect GUI is different to mine. Therefore, we can conclude that the fact that we can both use whichever GUIs we want, and yet they still interoperate with each other (netwm for instance) is why we are both still using Linux. And that's why if market share for say OS X or Windows was at 100% we'd be unhappy, because we'd be using something that wasn't right for us.
Remember: there is no such thing as the Perfect GUI, in the same way that there is no such thing as the Perfect TV or Perfect Microwave Oven. People have different needs. As long as they all work on standards, that's what counts.
This statement does not do Linux justice - part of the reason that it's grown so rapidly is that people CAN customise their environment if they want to. To pretend everybody is the same, and wants the same thing, is to be immediately contradicted by about 10 million people. Don't assume that the Apple/Microsoft GUIs are perfect, or that you can create one interface that everyone will find works 100% for them. It won't happen.
Also, you appear to be confused about what themeing/skinning is. This is a feature that lets you change the way my GUI looks - I could have a grey windowsish look, a beige Mac look, a heavy industrial greenish look, whatever. It DOES NOT, I repeat DOES NOT change the layout of the interface or how it works. It only affects what it looks like.
If you have a specific complaint about the KDE interface, then please articulate it here. I do not see how KDE is a fancy graphics shell, I do see it has a lot of options. Bear in mind that the KDE Control Centre is coming up for a redesign in KDE3.1 because of it's confusing layout. This says a lot about 1 application, and nothing about OSS UIs in general. I've seen some awful OSS UIs, and some inspired ones.
Don't get me wrong, Apple do some good work with UI design, but to pretend that they have the most intuitive UIs is naive. When I first started using my friends Mac, he had to sit next to me and constantly remind me to close the app manually, which button means right click, and so on.
People waay overrate the Mac as GUI perfection. Open software shouldn't just copy it mindlessly.
Now, I know some people will prefer MS/Apple software which is fine, but the issue is not whether it's a good deal but the fact that they are forced to pay the $14 whether they want it or not. No choices. That is the issue.
That's almost twice the speed of my the connection I have on my desktop! That's progress for you