Hey, let's watch the snide subject line, guys, librarians are pretty tough people you really don't want to mess with. Just think Giles aka "The Ripper" from Buffy, or that cute dark-haired woman whose name escapes me but whose image is strangely present from The Mummy. They can seriously kick ass; nine of ten superheroes started out as librarians.
...using simple words, why I would want to buy a tablet instead of my current 12" iBook. A tablet doesn't have a keyboard, and I can't shut it to protect the screen; and when it is too old to deal with Mac OS X 14.5 or whatever it will be by then, I can't install Linux on it.
Obviously, Steve Jobs is better at this than I am (or I'd be making one dollar a year plus a few benefits), but this would not seem like a clever move.
So how will they make this fit with the Classic Trek episode Balance of Terror, in which we learned that no human ever saw the face of a Romulan during the Romulan Wars?
Let me explain a little fact about the makers of Star Trek here that should be clear by now: They don't give a flying fuck about continuity, what they care about is sales. If they got the idea that the next film would sell better if it suddenly turned out that Troi was somehow Kirk's mother and actually a Klingon, they'd do it in a heartbeat.
The problem is that the creator of Star Trek, the one person who really, really cared, is dead, and not around to defend his creation from the vultures. Contrast this with "Buffy", where JW made the mistake once of letting other people take control -- the stupid "Buffy" movie that came before the series. He learned from that. This is also why, as sad as it might be for us, it is a Good Thing (TM) that Buffy was brought to a clear, clean, and logical (if badly written) end: Whatever else happens, those original seven seaons are safe.
And this is the way to look at Star Trek: Remember the original series, remember "Next Generation", remember "DS9" if you liked it, too -- and forget the rest. It never happened, it doesn't exist, don't let their greed spoil your memories. In fact , this is also the only way you can stand "The Matrix": Tell yourself that there was only one film, the first one. That was the whole story, don't accept anything else that came after that. As far as you are concerned, those sequels never existed.
Assuming that they guy is right, what we are doing is wrong. Windows is not the state of the art, and if we have to be copying things, it should be from the best: Mac OS X. Though I have serious issues with Apple -- yes, starting with the single mouse button -- it is the best of the best, and that is what we should be aiming for.
Some quick Googling determined that lots of people still have no idea how many inches are in a meter, even after some folks have had big problems because of conversion errors.
Not to put too much of a point on it, but the rest of the planet doesn't have to give a damn about how many inches there are in a meter, because they don't have inches anymore. Or stones. Or bushles. Or cubits. Or zentner. Or... This is a Yanks-only problem: even the Brits can think in meters, their problem is that they can't spell the word right.
You have two choices, my fellow American friend: Either convert to metric like the rest of the world in the 21th Century, or stop complaining.
As great as Slashdot is, this U.S. bias is getting to be a pain in the ass. It is beyond me why a simple complaint about the known problems of math education in the U.S. makes the front page.
When any of my friends starts talking about which operating system to use, I go through this chain of reasoning (well, two questions) with them:
1. Is there an application that you just have to have that runs on one operating system?
If yes, you have no choice. Change your life or live with it.
2. Do you want to just use the computer or want to fool around with the internals?
If you just want to use it as a tool, go out and buy something from Apple. Yes, they are more expensive at first, but they last longer (unless you have a dual USB iBook, of course), are trivial to use, don't get viruses, look great, and you can always run Linux on them if you change your mind. The only drawback is the lack of a good, free office package: OpenOffice.org for OS X just isn't there yet, and it looks like we're going to have to wait at least a year. Apple should have addressed this problem earlier.
If you want to play around with the computer for its own sake, you want Linux. If you are buying a computer from scratch, still buy an Apple, because the hardware is great. Then, install either Gentoo or Yellow Dog. If you have a computer sitting around, just install Gentoo. You will learn all kinds of stuff, and the system will work like greased lightning.
Notice there is only one case where you might get Windows: If there is an application that you really, really need and that only runs with Windows. The chance of that is getting pretty small for normal people -- I have had lots of fun point out that OpenOffice.org can export directly to PDF whereas MS Office can't. And Firefox and Thunderbird are better already than anything that Microsoft or Apple can offer. In about a year...
One side effect of the SCO case and Groklaw's laser focus on the facts is that the tech press is being exposed in the most brutal way as the bunch of clueless idiots they are. PJ rants a bit about this in her current post. Reading her site and then watching the facts unfold just as she predicted makes you wonder why we even bother with the mainstream press.
Of course, after watching just about every U.S. paper and news channel turn into a miniature propaganda ministery during the Iraq War, only to crawl back tearfully when things start hitting the fan, the question is why anyone still bothers.
Google can do this because they are not a public owned company yet. Once those shares are out there and shareholder value becomes their mantra, too, somebody will stand up and ask why the hell Google's shareholders are funding this sort of thing, and this will end abruptly. Of course, the good people will go, but since that is a long-term problem, nobody will give a damn.
A public owned company by its nature cannot show long-term intelligence, let alone be a cool place to work: Sooner or late, some new CEO with a million-dollar-a-week contract takes over and decides to cut costs -- short-term costs, of course, because he isn't going to be around for more than three or four years anyway. Shareholder value is the evil spell that turns work into hell every single time: You stop caring about the product (just some marketing-inflated object to impress the analysts with), you stop caring about the customers (who cares as long as they buy enough to keep the analysts happy), you stop carrint about your employess (just tools to be used for a s little cost as possible). Everything is reduced to that one single number -- by law.
If you work for Google, enjoy it while you can, because the end is near. Going public is a stupid move by Google, and the beginning of the end for a great company with great values.
Flame me into oblivion if you want to, but I think Brown's polemic shows again that BSD is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Writing code under the BSD license not only means that you are working for free for Microsoft and Co without getting anything in return; you are also creating something that they can use to beat real open source developers over the head with. When somebody like Brown comes out and praises you, you are doing something wrong. BSD is getting to be little more than a pet of the worst kind of software companies.
Richard Stallman is making more sense by the minute.
I don't really see what his problem is. Diablo II has a whole character who is basically a crusader, you kill demons in Quake, and Call to Power lets you build churces all over the place. What else could the Moral Majority want?
Maybe it's me, but every time somebody comes out and wants the entertainment industry to use their powers to do something "good", I get this cold, cold feeling. These people would have wanted to keep Doom off of our computers (violence, blood, gore) and "Buffy" off of our screens (redhead lesbian Jewish witches as main characters, sex with vampires, S&M jokes). In fact, some of the worst parts of "Buffy" were when they tried to transport conservative morals: Remember when Buffy was in high school, sex somehow always had bad consequences? And don't even get me started on "Beer bad"...
There has to be room for adults and adult pastimes in the world. In the end, it is up to parents (which includes myself) to take responsibility for their children. The problem is not that his nephew wants to play the game -- that's only natural -- but that somebody's parents are letting his friends play it. Great. Do his friends get to read Playboy, too?
Stick the blame where it belongs and stop thinking about ways how you can reduce my choices as an adult.
There comes a certain point where people don't care anymore, the laws won't be able to keep up with them (can't sue everyone), and the market will be forced to change.
I think a lot of us would be happy if there were something out there that was worth paying for. For example, I just bought, out of my own money, legally, the Season 7 of Buffy, so I now have the complete set on DVD. I did not feel cheated, it was worth every penny, and I would buy the whole thing all over again. This is called "getting your money's worth."
Honestly, when is the last time you had that feeling with a music CD? Usually, there are two, maybe three good songs, and the rest is "filler", put on so that they can get the damn thing out on the market. I have bought about three CDs the last year (yes, I buy my music), and I'm still mad about two of them. More than 50 percent of the songs were crap.
I can see why people go online to steal their music. Yes, it is illegal, yes, it is wrong, no, I don't do it, but what the fuck does the industry expect? At those prices, people do not feel they are getting value for money, they feel they are getting robbed, and they're probably right. CDs are too expensive, too much of what is on them is terrible.
The industry is going to have to lower prices, start producing less crap, or find an alternative way of getting the songs to the user. Everything else is just wasting everybody's time.
[...] flames will be ignored and taped onto my refrigerator.
You have got to get yourself some kids to paint for you...
...would work a lot better, too, if it had Longhorn technology, I bet Microsoft would say. Can anybody think of something that wouldn't be better with Avalon in his eyes?
Come on, people, Microsoft might not be up against the wall with this release, but they have a lot riding on Longhorn. Some people have actually signed up for the subscription model, but they are going to have to wait until 2006 (at least) for a new version. Apple could be at Mac OS X 10.6 by then, flashier than ever, Linux at 2.8.0, more powerful than ever. Two more years of weekly patches are all the Microsoft costumers get. And remember: The really cool Longhorn features like the new filesystem were already cut out.
Microsoft is going to spend the next two years putting out a stream of propaganda about how great everything is going to be once Longhorn gets here: World peace, a cure for cancer, a pony for every child. They will say anything to keep people waiting instead of looking around to see what the alternatives are.
It shouldn't be difficult to counter the spin when the facts are on your side.
Yeah, that's what the rest of the world was hoping when the U.S. kept babbling about all of those WMD that were supposed to be in Iraq and how somebody just had to do something about them before Saddam kills us all. Go back and watch a tape of Powell spinning, nay, lying his ass off in front of the United Nations.
Facts don't help in the face of pig-headed egotistical stupidity, as the daily death of U.S., British, and Polish soldiers in Basra and Baghdad shows quit clearly. Facts gain most of their power in hindsight. Watch for lots of 20-20 "analyst" visions after SCO crashes and burns.
I dunno, being litigious bastards makes a disturbing amount of sense from a purely business perspective.
Only under the American 18th Century, mucho-upgefuckt bizarro-head legal system. Note that the German courts just bitch-slapped them and they haven't even tried to go after people in Britain. Real courts in countries with real legal systems aren't impressed by this sort of crap.
SCO, like 90 percent of all spam, is an American-made problem that is affecting the whole world. The fact that SCO could keep this suit alive as long as it has been able to is symptom of just how messed up the U.S. legal system is. While U.S. companies are spending their time and money in court, somebody in Bangalore is figuring out how to prefect that interface. Sooner or later, this is going to have an effect.
We treat anybody who walks into a hospital, regardless of where his or her wounds come from -- this is one of those famous "cornerstones of civilization". In this case, it is even worse, because the people affected pose a threat to everybody else, too.
So: Would we treat somebody in a hospital because he caught an infectious disease while doing something illegal? Yes. Then, the same should be true for patches.
And about the same thing is true of all your other complaints: if you prefer VLC to the builtin DVD player, use VLC. If you prefer Thunderbird to Mail.app, use Thunderbird.
Actually, I am now using VLC, Thunderbird and Firefox, and will be loading Yellow Dog Linux as soon as the version that supports the G4 comes out -- I use all three with KDE as well, by the way. But my point was a different one:
You seem to have this idea that Apple is forcing you into using only the applications they provide, but I really can't see any sense in which this is the case.
To avoid any missunderstanding: I love my iBook, and I would rush out and buy another one this evening if silicon monsters ate mine this afternoon. When my kid sister said she needed a laptop, I told her not to screw around (always good advice for a kid sister) and buy an iBook, too. It is small, light, has great battery time, and yeah, it looks great. Not that I am influenced by that, of course.
Mac OS X, too, is a fantastic operating system for anybody who wants to use computers as a tool and is unwilling to learn anything more than how to turn it on. I tell co-workers with virus problems to stop complaining and buy a Mac.
What annoys me no end, though, is that Apple is pushing a product that is already behind the curve for a very expensive price, and is fooling around with eye candy (like Expose) instead of concentrating on the basics (like.DS_save). I don't know if you have had the chance to take a look at KDE lately, but if you ignore the cool Quarz-based special effects, there is not much that Steve Jobs can offer that Konqi the Dragon doesn't have.
Apple is in a tight spot because Open Source projects like KDE are attracting more and more people, while Apple will probably not be able to double its crew of developers in the next two years. Now that the XFree cabal is not blocking the evolution of X anymore, things might go very fast in the graphics department.
In short, I feel somewhat cheated by Mac OS X because I know from the Open Source side that they could do better for free. I believe that this will pass -- Apple has shown that it is willing to adopt Open Source for OS X when they have to (see Safari), and so in about two years I expect them to get behind OpenOffice.org so that the Mac finally has a real office suite. Apple is too small to hold their own with a closed operating system -- heck, the armies of Microsoft can't, either -- and it would be better off for everybody if they just accepted it and provided the best of both worlds before they fall behind far enough that their reputation for providing a premium product gets ruined.
You don't make money on operating systems any more, you concentrate on the hardware and provide the OS as a service. The hardware is fantastic, and I will happily continue buy it -- if I had to get a new system from scratch, I'd certainly be drooling over a dual G5.
Anyway, thank you for this discussion. It has been wonderfully un-Slashdot-like (grin).
So it would make sense that a checkbox labelled "Use SSL" would turn on using SSL by either method.
Unless, of course, you actually know a thing or two about computers...this is sort of like putting rabbits and hares in one pen in the zoo because, well "they're pretty damn close".
Where did you get your information (which I notice you've been repeating in all of your posts for weeks) that Mail.app doesn't support TLS?
By looking at the application, reading what passes for docs [it would of course been trivial to see what Mail.app actually can do if you had access to the source, you know, but I guess I paid money not to be able to do that], and trying to get it to work with my provider, who requires TLS. Mail.app doesn't work with "SSH" with me, whereas Kmail and Pegasus and Thunderbird all work just fine. Kmail and Thunderbird let you choose between TLS and SSL; I can't remember about Pegasus.
I'm glad it works for you; it certainly doesn't here. I will, however, remove it from my list of arguments about the stuff that Mac OS X has to change, and move it to the list of confusing documentation. That is, however, a much shorter list.
Now, about those.DS_save files I was talking about...
I think it would take design genius even beyond Apple's to come up with an even more obvious interface than a checkbox labelled "Use SSL" which you check when you want to use SSL.
Maybe he should have taken a short trip to the Wikipedia to look up on TLS then, which would have taught him that SSL and TSL are not synonyms. This is why, and this was in fact my original point, modern mail programs such as Kmail (even all the way back to KDE 3.1) include the option of SSL or TLS. Mail does not, it only provides SSL. Which brings us back to the point that Apple has a lot of work to do.
Not to be sarcastic, but I just paid a lot of money (based on the fact that there are a heck of a lot of free first-class operating systems out there) to have Apple's famous Usability, and here you are telling me to Google for a standard feature?
I thought the idea with paying money is that I don't have to do that sort of stuff. Gentoo, yeah, I google, but then Gentoo is free. Mac OS X, no, I want it to work out of the box, because I paid for that service.
It would be nice if Apple stopped adding cute features like Expose and concentrated on getting the core programs up to industry standard -- for example, it would be great if Mail joined the rest of the world in finally supporting TLS, or Mac OS X didn't have splatter its.DS_store file all over the bloody network.
Mac OS X 10.3.3 is a nice start, but Apple has a long way to go before the goods match the hype.
...I don't think anybody will be using any format for anything anymore, let alone buying CDs. Has anybody listened to the Top 10 in their country the last few months and actually liked something their heard?
This is all very nice, and maybe Gimp isn't there yet for professionals, but the Adobe crowd should remember a few things:
1. Time is on the Gimp's side. Graphics, just like text editing and operating systems, has a point where things are "good enough" -- OpenOffice.org, for example, has reached that point, which is why it is starting to slowly but surely eat into Microsoft Office. Once the Gimp reaches that point, and it will, Adobe will have a problem charging its insane prices
2.The Gimp is good enough for semi-professional use, and with this price tag, it is going to attract a lot of attention and get a lot of feedback. Feedback is the life-blood of Open Source. And there are always a lot more people who are semi-professionals than professionals.
3. Ease of use isn't everything. Mac users (for the record: I own an iBook, too) love to go on and on about how their interface is standardized, easy to use, etc. True, but if that were to translate into sales, the world would have been dominated by Macs even before OS X came along. People can and will cope -- heck, they piced MS DOS over the Mac. If Gimp can do 80 percent of what Photoshop can do for free with whatever interface, Adobe is toast.
The Christian game I am really looking forward to is Crusades:
In the name of Jesus and with the blessing of the Pope, invade countries that are your technical, scientific, and cultural superiors, slaughter the inhabitants, and on the way there, get rid a few of the Church's main Christian rivals.
The other one that looks good is Witch Hunt:
In the name of Jesus and with the blessing of the Pope, go whole hog on S/M: Randomly pick women to torture, rape, and murder (not necessarily in that order). Women who have helped liberate France from foreign invaders get extra points!
I've heard there is a newer version of that called Stone the Homosexual, but then I'm probably going to get modded down enough as it is.
Seriously, people, where does this idea come from that Christian games will be any more tolerant, life-loving, or enlightening than the past 2,000 years of Christian history have been?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, let's watch the snide subject line, guys, librarians are pretty tough people you really don't want to mess with. Just think Giles aka "The Ripper" from Buffy, or that cute dark-haired woman whose name escapes me but whose image is strangely present from The Mummy. They can seriously kick ass; nine of ten superheroes started out as librarians.
Obviously, Steve Jobs is better at this than I am (or I'd be making one dollar a year plus a few benefits), but this would not seem like a clever move.
Let me explain a little fact about the makers of Star Trek here that should be clear by now: They don't give a flying fuck about continuity, what they care about is sales. If they got the idea that the next film would sell better if it suddenly turned out that Troi was somehow Kirk's mother and actually a Klingon, they'd do it in a heartbeat.
The problem is that the creator of Star Trek, the one person who really, really cared, is dead, and not around to defend his creation from the vultures. Contrast this with "Buffy", where JW made the mistake once of letting other people take control -- the stupid "Buffy" movie that came before the series. He learned from that. This is also why, as sad as it might be for us, it is a Good Thing (TM) that Buffy was brought to a clear, clean, and logical (if badly written) end: Whatever else happens, those original seven seaons are safe.
And this is the way to look at Star Trek: Remember the original series, remember "Next Generation", remember "DS9" if you liked it, too -- and forget the rest. It never happened, it doesn't exist, don't let their greed spoil your memories. In fact , this is also the only way you can stand "The Matrix": Tell yourself that there was only one film, the first one. That was the whole story, don't accept anything else that came after that. As far as you are concerned, those sequels never existed.
It's your choice.
Forget Windows. Aim higher.
Not to put too much of a point on it, but the rest of the planet doesn't have to give a damn about how many inches there are in a meter, because they don't have inches anymore. Or stones. Or bushles. Or cubits. Or zentner. Or... This is a Yanks-only problem: even the Brits can think in meters, their problem is that they can't spell the word right.
You have two choices, my fellow American friend: Either convert to metric like the rest of the world in the 21th Century, or stop complaining.
As great as Slashdot is, this U.S. bias is getting to be a pain in the ass. It is beyond me why a simple complaint about the known problems of math education in the U.S. makes the front page.
1. Is there an application that you just have to have that runs on one operating system?
If yes, you have no choice. Change your life or live with it.
2. Do you want to just use the computer or want to fool around with the internals?
If you just want to use it as a tool, go out and buy something from Apple. Yes, they are more expensive at first, but they last longer (unless you have a dual USB iBook, of course), are trivial to use, don't get viruses, look great, and you can always run Linux on them if you change your mind. The only drawback is the lack of a good, free office package: OpenOffice.org for OS X just isn't there yet, and it looks like we're going to have to wait at least a year. Apple should have addressed this problem earlier.
If you want to play around with the computer for its own sake, you want Linux. If you are buying a computer from scratch, still buy an Apple, because the hardware is great. Then, install either Gentoo or Yellow Dog. If you have a computer sitting around, just install Gentoo. You will learn all kinds of stuff, and the system will work like greased lightning.
Notice there is only one case where you might get Windows: If there is an application that you really, really need and that only runs with Windows. The chance of that is getting pretty small for normal people -- I have had lots of fun point out that OpenOffice.org can export directly to PDF whereas MS Office can't. And Firefox and Thunderbird are better already than anything that Microsoft or Apple can offer. In about a year...
Of course, after watching just about every U.S. paper and news channel turn into a miniature propaganda ministery during the Iraq War, only to crawl back tearfully when things start hitting the fan, the question is why anyone still bothers.
Thank God for PJ.
We'll find something
new to do now.
Here is lots of
new blue goo now
New goo. Blue goo.
Gooey. Gooey.
Blue goo. New goo.
Gluey. Gluey.
If only he had read "Fox in Sox" before coming out and saying these things...
A public owned company by its nature cannot show long-term intelligence, let alone be a cool place to work: Sooner or late, some new CEO with a million-dollar-a-week contract takes over and decides to cut costs -- short-term costs, of course, because he isn't going to be around for more than three or four years anyway. Shareholder value is the evil spell that turns work into hell every single time: You stop caring about the product (just some marketing-inflated object to impress the analysts with), you stop caring about the customers (who cares as long as they buy enough to keep the analysts happy), you stop carrint about your employess (just tools to be used for a s little cost as possible). Everything is reduced to that one single number -- by law.
If you work for Google, enjoy it while you can, because the end is near. Going public is a stupid move by Google, and the beginning of the end for a great company with great values.
Richard Stallman is making more sense by the minute.
Maybe it's me, but every time somebody comes out and wants the entertainment industry to use their powers to do something "good", I get this cold, cold feeling. These people would have wanted to keep Doom off of our computers (violence, blood, gore) and "Buffy" off of our screens (redhead lesbian Jewish witches as main characters, sex with vampires, S&M jokes). In fact, some of the worst parts of "Buffy" were when they tried to transport conservative morals: Remember when Buffy was in high school, sex somehow always had bad consequences? And don't even get me started on "Beer bad"...
There has to be room for adults and adult pastimes in the world. In the end, it is up to parents (which includes myself) to take responsibility for their children. The problem is not that his nephew wants to play the game -- that's only natural -- but that somebody's parents are letting his friends play it. Great. Do his friends get to read Playboy, too?
Stick the blame where it belongs and stop thinking about ways how you can reduce my choices as an adult.
In other words, they are enormous fun...which some of us happen to think has a social value in itself.
The old I get, the more distain I have for self-styled intellectuals.
I think a lot of us would be happy if there were something out there that was worth paying for. For example, I just bought, out of my own money, legally, the Season 7 of Buffy, so I now have the complete set on DVD. I did not feel cheated, it was worth every penny, and I would buy the whole thing all over again. This is called "getting your money's worth."
Honestly, when is the last time you had that feeling with a music CD? Usually, there are two, maybe three good songs, and the rest is "filler", put on so that they can get the damn thing out on the market. I have bought about three CDs the last year (yes, I buy my music), and I'm still mad about two of them. More than 50 percent of the songs were crap.
I can see why people go online to steal their music. Yes, it is illegal, yes, it is wrong, no, I don't do it, but what the fuck does the industry expect? At those prices, people do not feel they are getting value for money, they feel they are getting robbed, and they're probably right. CDs are too expensive, too much of what is on them is terrible.
The industry is going to have to lower prices, start producing less crap, or find an alternative way of getting the songs to the user. Everything else is just wasting everybody's time.
[...] flames will be ignored and taped onto my refrigerator.
You have got to get yourself some kids to paint for you...
Come on, people, Microsoft might not be up against the wall with this release, but they have a lot riding on Longhorn. Some people have actually signed up for the subscription model, but they are going to have to wait until 2006 (at least) for a new version. Apple could be at Mac OS X 10.6 by then, flashier than ever, Linux at 2.8.0, more powerful than ever. Two more years of weekly patches are all the Microsoft costumers get. And remember: The really cool Longhorn features like the new filesystem were already cut out.
Microsoft is going to spend the next two years putting out a stream of propaganda about how great everything is going to be once Longhorn gets here: World peace, a cure for cancer, a pony for every child. They will say anything to keep people waiting instead of looking around to see what the alternatives are.
Yeah, that's what the rest of the world was hoping when the U.S. kept babbling about all of those WMD that were supposed to be in Iraq and how somebody just had to do something about them before Saddam kills us all. Go back and watch a tape of Powell spinning, nay, lying his ass off in front of the United Nations.
Facts don't help in the face of pig-headed egotistical stupidity, as the daily death of U.S., British, and Polish soldiers in Basra and Baghdad shows quit clearly. Facts gain most of their power in hindsight. Watch for lots of 20-20 "analyst" visions after SCO crashes and burns.
Only under the American 18th Century, mucho-upgefuckt bizarro-head legal system. Note that the German courts just bitch-slapped them and they haven't even tried to go after people in Britain. Real courts in countries with real legal systems aren't impressed by this sort of crap.
SCO, like 90 percent of all spam, is an American-made problem that is affecting the whole world. The fact that SCO could keep this suit alive as long as it has been able to is symptom of just how messed up the U.S. legal system is. While U.S. companies are spending their time and money in court, somebody in Bangalore is figuring out how to prefect that interface. Sooner or later, this is going to have an effect.
So: Would we treat somebody in a hospital because he caught an infectious disease while doing something illegal? Yes. Then, the same should be true for patches.
Actually, I am now using VLC, Thunderbird and Firefox, and will be loading Yellow Dog Linux as soon as the version that supports the G4 comes out -- I use all three with KDE as well, by the way. But my point was a different one:
You seem to have this idea that Apple is forcing you into using only the applications they provide, but I really can't see any sense in which this is the case.
To avoid any missunderstanding: I love my iBook, and I would rush out and buy another one this evening if silicon monsters ate mine this afternoon. When my kid sister said she needed a laptop, I told her not to screw around (always good advice for a kid sister) and buy an iBook, too. It is small, light, has great battery time, and yeah, it looks great. Not that I am influenced by that, of course.
Mac OS X, too, is a fantastic operating system for anybody who wants to use computers as a tool and is unwilling to learn anything more than how to turn it on. I tell co-workers with virus problems to stop complaining and buy a Mac.
What annoys me no end, though, is that Apple is pushing a product that is already behind the curve for a very expensive price, and is fooling around with eye candy (like Expose) instead of concentrating on the basics (like .DS_save). I don't know if you have had the chance to take a look at KDE lately, but if you ignore the cool Quarz-based special effects, there is not much that Steve Jobs can offer that Konqi the Dragon doesn't have.
Apple is in a tight spot because Open Source projects like KDE are attracting more and more people, while Apple will probably not be able to double its crew of developers in the next two years. Now that the XFree cabal is not blocking the evolution of X anymore, things might go very fast in the graphics department.
In short, I feel somewhat cheated by Mac OS X because I know from the Open Source side that they could do better for free. I believe that this will pass -- Apple has shown that it is willing to adopt Open Source for OS X when they have to (see Safari), and so in about two years I expect them to get behind OpenOffice.org so that the Mac finally has a real office suite. Apple is too small to hold their own with a closed operating system -- heck, the armies of Microsoft can't, either -- and it would be better off for everybody if they just accepted it and provided the best of both worlds before they fall behind far enough that their reputation for providing a premium product gets ruined.
You don't make money on operating systems any more, you concentrate on the hardware and provide the OS as a service. The hardware is fantastic, and I will happily continue buy it -- if I had to get a new system from scratch, I'd certainly be drooling over a dual G5.
Anyway, thank you for this discussion. It has been wonderfully un-Slashdot-like (grin).
Unless, of course, you actually know a thing or two about computers...this is sort of like putting rabbits and hares in one pen in the zoo because, well "they're pretty damn close".
Where did you get your information (which I notice you've been repeating in all of your posts for weeks) that Mail.app doesn't support TLS?
By looking at the application, reading what passes for docs [it would of course been trivial to see what Mail.app actually can do if you had access to the source, you know, but I guess I paid money not to be able to do that], and trying to get it to work with my provider, who requires TLS. Mail.app doesn't work with "SSH" with me, whereas Kmail and Pegasus and Thunderbird all work just fine. Kmail and Thunderbird let you choose between TLS and SSL; I can't remember about Pegasus.
I'm glad it works for you; it certainly doesn't here. I will, however, remove it from my list of arguments about the stuff that Mac OS X has to change, and move it to the list of confusing documentation. That is, however, a much shorter list.
Now, about those .DS_save files I was talking about...
Maybe he should have taken a short trip to the Wikipedia to look up on TLS then, which would have taught him that SSL and TSL are not synonyms. This is why, and this was in fact my original point, modern mail programs such as Kmail (even all the way back to KDE 3.1) include the option of SSL or TLS. Mail does not, it only provides SSL. Which brings us back to the point that Apple has a lot of work to do.
Not to be sarcastic, but I just paid a lot of money (based on the fact that there are a heck of a lot of free first-class operating systems out there) to have Apple's famous Usability, and here you are telling me to Google for a standard feature?
I thought the idea with paying money is that I don't have to do that sort of stuff. Gentoo, yeah, I google, but then Gentoo is free. Mac OS X, no, I want it to work out of the box, because I paid for that service.
As I said, a long way to go...
Mac OS X 10.3.3 is a nice start, but Apple has a long way to go before the goods match the hype.
1. Time is on the Gimp's side. Graphics, just like text editing and operating systems, has a point where things are "good enough" -- OpenOffice.org, for example, has reached that point, which is why it is starting to slowly but surely eat into Microsoft Office. Once the Gimp reaches that point, and it will, Adobe will have a problem charging its insane prices
2.The Gimp is good enough for semi-professional use, and with this price tag, it is going to attract a lot of attention and get a lot of feedback. Feedback is the life-blood of Open Source. And there are always a lot more people who are semi-professionals than professionals.
3. Ease of use isn't everything. Mac users (for the record: I own an iBook, too) love to go on and on about how their interface is standardized, easy to use, etc. True, but if that were to translate into sales, the world would have been dominated by Macs even before OS X came along. People can and will cope -- heck, they piced MS DOS over the Mac. If Gimp can do 80 percent of what Photoshop can do for free with whatever interface, Adobe is toast.
We'll see where we are in five years.
In the name of Jesus and with the blessing of the Pope, invade countries that are your technical, scientific, and cultural superiors, slaughter the inhabitants, and on the way there, get rid a few of the Church's main Christian rivals.
The other one that looks good is Witch Hunt:
In the name of Jesus and with the blessing of the Pope, go whole hog on S/M: Randomly pick women to torture, rape, and murder (not necessarily in that order). Women who have helped liberate France from foreign invaders get extra points!
I've heard there is a newer version of that called Stone the Homosexual, but then I'm probably going to get modded down enough as it is.
Seriously, people, where does this idea come from that Christian games will be any more tolerant, life-loving, or enlightening than the past 2,000 years of Christian history have been?