I'm not complaining; I'm sharing an experience that contrasts with the OP, who said he found the GUI difficult. I find GUIs easier to use and more productive than CLIs for most circumstances (for example, the split screen SSH or FTP clients, rather than trying to move files around using the CLI).
The reality is that politicians are in the business of pandering and doling favors. They will also grab as much power as feasibly possible. In America it's true of Republicans and Democrats, which is why I always find it hilarious when one side accuses the other of misinformation.
This is particularly true (or so I've been told) for embedded PPC applications and for servers (there are lots of old and not-so-old PPC servers out there).
I suspect that the CLI may be very useful for users who accumulate sufficient lore to use it effectively. I'm trying to do that to some degree, but I have many other cares and burdens aside from my general interest in effective, efficient computing. Some of the commands you list -- especially "q" -- seem fairly obvious in retrospect.
I suspect the real reason more people don't use the command line is the steep learning curve it requires, particularly compared to GUIs. Perhaps the parent or some other poster knows an answer to this question: is there a single, large repository (on the web) of information about the command line, and in particular the OS X terminal?
I use MacOS X, and I find a few things exceedingly hard/tedious to do. One is leaving my home directory and finding my way to the Macintosh HD, which takes exactly one click with Finder and I've never been able to do in the Terminal. When I use SSH and FTP, downloading and uploading to varying folders is much, much harder without a split-frame interface that represents the server on one side and my home, client computer on the other. I'd like an easy way to download into nested directories aside from the home folder, which I've never been able to do. I'd like an easy way to install programs into their proper folder in Applications by default, and have an icon appear in the Dock. When I read a man page, I can't figure out how to drop back into a prompt without scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page.
So far, at least, learning a long string of terminal commands is much harder than using the OS X GUI. Maybe one can chalk this up to differences between the way you and I use the machine and/or what we do.
Now, maybe you'll argue that I'm stupid/ignorant/lazy, but these are things I've tried to do and failed. In the GUI I'm very fast at the things that are important to my work, which is chiefly in word processing and page layout. Even with MS Word I can produce attractive, appropriately formatted documents that export to.pdf very quickly. They integrate well with InDesign when I need it. I have a variety of problems with Word that I'd like to see addressed, but overall the OS X GUI meets my needs fairly well.
These are complaints that, luckily for me (I suppose), most computer users understand, because the majority these days use GUI interfaces. I suspect your colleagues like OS X because they can have what I understand to be a powerful CLI interface combined with an excellent GUI.
The major question will be whether Creative's UI is as elegant, simple and useful as the iPod's clickwheel. If they can -- or if they can just mimic the clickwheel -- I think they'll be able to do it.
Do you/did you actually work for Sun or Apple? It sounds like the latter but I'm not sure. Either way, I'm impressed.
I still think that even if one somebody took over OOo native, it would still take that somebody years just to get OOo native aqua working with all its pieces functional. And that somebody would need greater skill than I possess. I do have sufficient skill to grasp the enormity of the task, though, the scope of which I do not think everyone posting in this story understands.
I haven't actually counted the number of lines in OOo, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were in the millions.
Are you an official Apple rep? You speak like it and perhaps you should identify yourself when astroturing.
Nice combo troll/ad hominem attack. If you bother following the web link in the OP's profile, you'll see that it identifies him and his work. It's hardly astroturfing to point out what's already known. I also wrote a post de-bunking one of the iWork posts, because the cancellation of this particular aspect of OOo on the Mac has nothing to do with iWorks.
Also, please reply directly to people's posts rather than blatently attempting to karmawhore a root level early post to the top of the page.
Sometimes it's more efficient to reply to a recurring and incorrect theme in a number of posts than to reply to each post individually. How the OP is being a "karmawhore" is unclear, since he'd actually gain less karma by posting a single rebuttal than by posting ten different rebuttals in various threads? He posted a legitimate comment and you should respect it as such. The better question is how you got the +1 Insightful that drew my attention, particularly given your posting history.
I hate to reply to my own post, but the other thing to keep in mind is that license politics played some role too, which didn't help. See this post in the OOo mailing list. I'm speaking specifically of these paragraphs:
I thought that, apart from bug-fixing the 1.1.x effort, we would get
together with the 2.0 tree, and start adding the Aqua gui on the basis
what Ed and Patrick have done and learned.
Now that Ed and Patrick have problems with the license that is imposed,
that does not change most of this arrangement. Only their Gui-code
would reside outside the official OpenOffice tree. NeoOffice imports
the complete OpenOffice tree, and builds on top of that.
So there could be as many as three OS X versions -- NeoOffice/J, X11 and "native." With different license possibilities for each. It gives me a headache just trying to keep it straight on paper, let alone trying to somehow coordinate all three of these efforts.
No, iWork didn't kill a native OOo Mac port. Primarily technical considerations killed it, as I mention in my post here. When I first looked at OOo last summer when I got my PowerBook and didn't know anything about Aqua I was quite idealistic and foolish in thinking that porting OOo can't *really* be that hard. But then I hadn't looked at the codebase, which is still enough to give me nightmares. Furthermore, most of the contributors, or at least those on the mailing list, don't give a damn about iWork. Some just moved to NeoOffice/J. Others were frustrated there was a schism at all.
I think plenty of Mac users would "bother" with OOo if it was native, both for political and cost reasons. iWork has nothing to do with the cancellation, and if you think it does, remember that work does continue on NeoOffice/J.
I'm sorry (but not surprised) to hear the formal announcement. It's particularly strange to see so soon after I wrote this post on/. alluding to the technical challenges. Anyway, if you want to see the larger reasons why the port isn't going to happen, look at Patrick Luby's post here. The highlights:
2. Event handling, fonts, and printing will take up most of your time
Most of the postings that I have seen about Aquafication refer seem
to focus solely on getting Aqua widgets on the screen. In other words,
everyone gravitates to the "sexy" engineering work. Surprisingly, this
is not the hard engineering work. The really hard engineering work is
getting all the tedious details of event handling, font layout and
rendering, and printing implemented correct. Essentially, VCL is a
full-featured cross-platform GUI framework (similar to QT, Java AWT,
etc.) so you need to reimplement almost all of that framework before OOo
becomes even reasonably stable.
When I first NeoOffice/J, getting native windows, buttons, lines,
etc. to draw on the screen was finished rather quickly. But
implementation slowed to a crawl when I implemented event handling and
font rendering. Why? Because the native event handling and font
rendering behavior is wildly different on Mac OS X than it is on X11 but
your VCL framework implementation must ensure that this different
behavior is properly mapped to VCL's platform independent behavior.
I looked at OOo with the thought of helping out with the native port, but recoiled when I actually looked at ths sheer size and complexity and skill necessary. Another important point in the linked post is that moving to Aqua will take "a couple thousand hours of developer time," which I actually think is being optimistic. Unless an experienced somebody or, more likely, team of sombodies is willing to put their nose to the project 40 hours a week, like it's a full time job, it's not going to happen. And even if it does happen, it will break compatibility with the rest of OOo.
OOo, I'm sorry to see you go. At this point it might be easier to start from AbiWord and move out to develop a full office suite on the Mac. The tension between being "Mac-like" and coordination with the rest of OOo -- which isn't anywhere near as mature as MSO, yet, anyway -- is too great.
Are you under the delusion that Open Office doesn't run on Windows?
No, obviously not -- I'm saying any improvements Apple would theoretically make would be ported to other platforms (including Windows), which would piss off Microsoft because open source office suites pose a real threat to it, while Apple's iWorks does not. My previous post was enumerating the reasons why this isn't likely to work.
As for NeoOffice/J, it's an interesting effort but has nothing to do with my original post, which is dedicated to the reasons one is unlikely to see Apple support for OOo or other open source office suites in the near future.
I suspect you underestimate the amount of work necessary to port OOo to the Mac, natively. I've thought about contributing in a meaningful -- until I realized that it would require a massive time committment and more coding skills than I have just to get OOo to compile properly, let alone actually be useful. Even then, with 2.0 allegedly around the corner, much of the work would have to be repeated. Most of the OOo codebase, as far as I can tell, dates back to the mid-90s. I'm guessing it was easier for Apple to create Pages than it would have been for them to use OOo, particularly because of the high standards of usability to which Apple generally holds itself.
Even if one disregards the significant technical problems, however, one comes to the political problem of MSO support for OS X. I wrote a longer comment to this regard but I can't find it in my history (*mutters about needing to be a subscriber to see my own history*). The short of it, however, is that Apple needs MSO for compatibility and ease-of-transition reasons, and the only real threat to MSO is open source office suites, mostly OOo. So as long as Apple makes its own lightweight (read: not useful to people who actually use all those advanced formatting and other features, which includes myself), they're not any threat to the MSO crown jewel. The second Apple starts helping OOo, on the other hand, they're actively helping the chief threat to MS, which means that there will be no more MSO:Mac in short order.
Even if you say "But wait! Apple would only release OOo on the Mac..." remember that someone will port it to Windows, and MS needs every machine possible to run MSO to keep the monopoly alive.
He should also have used articles and used them properly -- the first sentence should read "Being an alumnus of an Ivy..." (assuming that he only went to one Ivy).
If ex-virus writers are employed in writing anti-virus software, how should the consumer of anti-virus software know that the guy writing his software isn't the same guy writing his viruses?
Re:They forgot the 2nd Middle Ages, and immigratio
on
In the Year 2020
·
· Score: 1
First of all, the first world's population will be radically altered from the vast number of people emigrating from 3rd world countries to 1st world countries. This is has prons and cons: it will definitely give a boost to local economies, due to more young people working, but it will also bring havoc to social peace.
I doubt immigration to the U.S. will "bring havoc to social peace," since people have been arguing this in various forms since colonial times. They said it about Germans, Irish, Southern Europeans (Italians, etc.); more recently, they've been saying it about Mexicans and others from south of America. By almost any measure, however, these people have assimilated, while adding their own culture to the larger U.S.
More and more, people don't use their critical thinking and logic and they are based on emotion, faith and mysticism. Although technology has done quantum leaps in the last century, the average person (average, when including 3rd world countries, of course) has no clue about mainstream science and attributes everything to God (just like with the recent tsunami being viewed as a punishment from God).
Speaking of critical thinking, do you actually have any evidence for this point, or are you just making the sort of generalizations you might chide others for making?
There is a possibility of a 3rd World War, much more devastating than the first two, especially if politicians keep ignoring the facts that the west's wars are viewed as religious wars by East.
There has always been a "possibility" of another World War, but it seems to be that the world is a much safer place today in terms of massive wars than it was when the Soviet Union existed.
... and you probably don't have children, and not everyone who lives in your area makes 60K a year. Wherever you live may make 60K a year sound like a lot, but isn't in New York.
Plus, I doubt many people making 60K a year have "two H2's [sic] in their driveway" -- that sort of strawman doesn't help support your argument.
Your overall thrust, which is that people should probably save more, I agree with, but your examples aren't very good. If you want to knwo why you should save more, simply read The Millionaire Next Door, which discusses wealth accumulation and distribution, among other things, and demonstrates some fairly surprising findings about who is wealthy -- which is different from "rich" -- and who is not.
I think you meant You should never depend on a single layer of protection. Multiple (and redundant, if possible) protections are less likely to fail at the same time.
That's why I always wear condoms and my gf is on the pill.
Oh, sorry, didn't realize we were still dealing with kernel security...
The guy from main had 2 firewalls, spyware and antivirus software. Still 1 machine had a virus that killed it that the vendor was behind on, and the second had spyware that brought it down to its knees. I think as a (l)user he did a fairly good job and a huge effort compared to 90% of the internet users.
And to think -- I just have a Mac, and I've never had problems with spyware or viruses or anything else.
But odds are that in todays super-competitive least-necessary-change news market the WSJ has done nothing substantial to improve the accuracy of their paper and instead just inserted a column to improve the image.
I think the WSJ is valuable precisely because it doesn't succumb to the sensationalizing impulse that seems to infect so many media outlets today. Many of its stories are informative, balanced and nuanced. For example, see the series of stories on rising health care costs and who gets hurt by them or their series on the working poor.
If you think the WSJ is inaccurate, please cite specific examples instead of making generalized accusations. I'd love to see your evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not complaining; I'm sharing an experience that contrasts with the OP, who said he found the GUI difficult. I find GUIs easier to use and more productive than CLIs for most circumstances (for example, the split screen SSH or FTP clients, rather than trying to move files around using the CLI).
The reality is that politicians are in the business of pandering and doling favors. They will also grab as much power as feasibly possible. In America it's true of Republicans and Democrats, which is why I always find it hilarious when one side accuses the other of misinformation.
This is particularly true (or so I've been told) for embedded PPC applications and for servers (there are lots of old and not-so-old PPC servers out there).
I suspect that the CLI may be very useful for users who accumulate sufficient lore to use it effectively. I'm trying to do that to some degree, but I have many other cares and burdens aside from my general interest in effective, efficient computing. Some of the commands you list -- especially "q" -- seem fairly obvious in retrospect.
I suspect the real reason more people don't use the command line is the steep learning curve it requires, particularly compared to GUIs. Perhaps the parent or some other poster knows an answer to this question: is there a single, large repository (on the web) of information about the command line, and in particular the OS X terminal?
Just like individual men can and do excel in spelling.
Just not on /..
I kid, I kid...
I may not be any good at having them, but boy, I sure am good at making them.
Really? Could your direct me to any websites that catalog such differences?
So far, at least, learning a long string of terminal commands is much harder than using the OS X GUI. Maybe one can chalk this up to differences between the way you and I use the machine and/or what we do.
Now, maybe you'll argue that I'm stupid/ignorant/lazy, but these are things I've tried to do and failed. In the GUI I'm very fast at the things that are important to my work, which is chiefly in word processing and page layout. Even with MS Word I can produce attractive, appropriately formatted documents that export to .pdf very quickly. They integrate well with InDesign when I need it. I have a variety of problems with Word that I'd like to see addressed, but overall the OS X GUI meets my needs fairly well.
These are complaints that, luckily for me (I suppose), most computer users understand, because the majority these days use GUI interfaces. I suspect your colleagues like OS X because they can have what I understand to be a powerful CLI interface combined with an excellent GUI.
The major question will be whether Creative's UI is as elegant, simple and useful as the iPod's clickwheel. If they can -- or if they can just mimic the clickwheel -- I think they'll be able to do it.
I still think that even if one somebody took over OOo native, it would still take that somebody years just to get OOo native aqua working with all its pieces functional. And that somebody would need greater skill than I possess. I do have sufficient skill to grasp the enormity of the task, though, the scope of which I do not think everyone posting in this story understands.
I haven't actually counted the number of lines in OOo, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were in the millions.
Nice combo troll/ad hominem attack. If you bother following the web link in the OP's profile, you'll see that it identifies him and his work. It's hardly astroturfing to point out what's already known. I also wrote a post de-bunking one of the iWork posts, because the cancellation of this particular aspect of OOo on the Mac has nothing to do with iWorks.
Also, please reply directly to people's posts rather than blatently attempting to karmawhore a root level early post to the top of the page.
Sometimes it's more efficient to reply to a recurring and incorrect theme in a number of posts than to reply to each post individually. How the OP is being a "karmawhore" is unclear, since he'd actually gain less karma by posting a single rebuttal than by posting ten different rebuttals in various threads? He posted a legitimate comment and you should respect it as such. The better question is how you got the +1 Insightful that drew my attention, particularly given your posting history.
So there could be as many as three OS X versions -- NeoOffice/J, X11 and "native." With different license possibilities for each. It gives me a headache just trying to keep it straight on paper, let alone trying to somehow coordinate all three of these efforts.
I think plenty of Mac users would "bother" with OOo if it was native, both for political and cost reasons. iWork has nothing to do with the cancellation, and if you think it does, remember that work does continue on NeoOffice/J.
I looked at OOo with the thought of helping out with the native port, but recoiled when I actually looked at ths sheer size and complexity and skill necessary. Another important point in the linked post is that moving to Aqua will take "a couple thousand hours of developer time," which I actually think is being optimistic. Unless an experienced somebody or, more likely, team of sombodies is willing to put their nose to the project 40 hours a week, like it's a full time job, it's not going to happen. And even if it does happen, it will break compatibility with the rest of OOo.
OOo, I'm sorry to see you go. At this point it might be easier to start from AbiWord and move out to develop a full office suite on the Mac. The tension between being "Mac-like" and coordination with the rest of OOo -- which isn't anywhere near as mature as MSO, yet, anyway -- is too great.
No, obviously not -- I'm saying any improvements Apple would theoretically make would be ported to other platforms (including Windows), which would piss off Microsoft because open source office suites pose a real threat to it, while Apple's iWorks does not. My previous post was enumerating the reasons why this isn't likely to work.
As for NeoOffice/J, it's an interesting effort but has nothing to do with my original post, which is dedicated to the reasons one is unlikely to see Apple support for OOo or other open source office suites in the near future.
Even if one disregards the significant technical problems, however, one comes to the political problem of MSO support for OS X. I wrote a longer comment to this regard but I can't find it in my history (*mutters about needing to be a subscriber to see my own history*). The short of it, however, is that Apple needs MSO for compatibility and ease-of-transition reasons, and the only real threat to MSO is open source office suites, mostly OOo. So as long as Apple makes its own lightweight (read: not useful to people who actually use all those advanced formatting and other features, which includes myself), they're not any threat to the MSO crown jewel. The second Apple starts helping OOo, on the other hand, they're actively helping the chief threat to MS, which means that there will be no more MSO:Mac in short order.
Even if you say "But wait! Apple would only release OOo on the Mac..." remember that someone will port it to Windows, and MS needs every machine possible to run MSO to keep the monopoly alive.
You may now remove your tinfoil hat.
Also, "idiom" isn't the right word. Phrase or joke might work better.
If ex-virus writers are employed in writing anti-virus software, how should the consumer of anti-virus software know that the guy writing his software isn't the same guy writing his viruses?
I doubt immigration to the U.S. will "bring havoc to social peace," since people have been arguing this in various forms since colonial times. They said it about Germans, Irish, Southern Europeans (Italians, etc.); more recently, they've been saying it about Mexicans and others from south of America. By almost any measure, however, these people have assimilated, while adding their own culture to the larger U.S.
More and more, people don't use their critical thinking and logic and they are based on emotion, faith and mysticism. Although technology has done quantum leaps in the last century, the average person (average, when including 3rd world countries, of course) has no clue about mainstream science and attributes everything to God (just like with the recent tsunami being viewed as a punishment from God).
Speaking of critical thinking, do you actually have any evidence for this point, or are you just making the sort of generalizations you might chide others for making?
There is a possibility of a 3rd World War, much more devastating than the first two, especially if politicians keep ignoring the facts that the west's wars are viewed as religious wars by East.
There has always been a "possibility" of another World War, but it seems to be that the world is a much safer place today in terms of massive wars than it was when the Soviet Union existed.
... or Linux on the desktop. Strange.
Plus, I doubt many people making 60K a year have "two H2's [sic] in their driveway" -- that sort of strawman doesn't help support your argument.
Your overall thrust, which is that people should probably save more, I agree with, but your examples aren't very good. If you want to knwo why you should save more, simply read The Millionaire Next Door, which discusses wealth accumulation and distribution, among other things, and demonstrates some fairly surprising findings about who is wealthy -- which is different from "rich" -- and who is not.
That's why I always wear condoms and my gf is on the pill.
Oh, sorry, didn't realize we were still dealing with kernel security...
And to think -- I just have a Mac, and I've never had problems with spyware or viruses or anything else.
I think the WSJ is valuable precisely because it doesn't succumb to the sensationalizing impulse that seems to infect so many media outlets today. Many of its stories are informative, balanced and nuanced. For example, see the series of stories on rising health care costs and who gets hurt by them or their series on the working poor.
If you think the WSJ is inaccurate, please cite specific examples instead of making generalized accusations. I'd love to see your evidence.