One thing that is worrying me about Dashboard is that the list of languages Apple says it will
works with doesn't include Python:
Any UNIX command or script, including those written in sh, tcsh, bash, tcl, Perl, or Ruby as well as AppleScript, can be accessed from the widget object.
Is Apple just being an "insensitive clod" here, or what seems to be the problem?
I am well aware that Apple has invented and supports a whole number of open formats and protocols and where they have been using open source products (like Darwin, Safari, or Cups) have been good about feeding things back. I'm sure Apple is very aware that this is the only reason why they are still around.
However, and this is where we get to things like Ogg Vorbis or OpenOffice XML, Apple has this thing called the "80 Percent Solution" in their software design guide: If it is not used by 80 percent of the users, Apple doesn't do it.
This is actually a very good rule of thumb. However -- and this is where Apple gets into trouble -- like all rules, you have to know when to break it, otherwise you get into the situation that Apple is in now: You can never lead with your features, you always follow, and this annoys a lot of people who demand more for what is a pretty hefty price tag.
Some examples of the "Curse of the 80 Percent Rule":
1. Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is not used by many people, but has been shown to be the best compressed format out there, beating MP3 by a kilometer. Double-blind tests like the big one Germany's "c't" magazine did a while ago have show this pretty well, and so the people who care use Ogg Vorbis, which is why companies like Rio are putting it in their players even if there is a small user base. Apple, however, is sticking to their 80 percent rule, which in this case sends the message that they don't care about those people who care about quality. What do they expect me to do, re-rip my whole CD collection to an inferior format?
2. TLS. Open Mail on Panther and try to set TLS as a transport encryption standard. No go. Of course, TLS is not widespread, and so Apple decided not to support it. Some providers demand it (like mine), because they say it is more secure, and so people like me switch to other products like Thunderbird [I have been told that Apple has included TLS as "SSH", which would be confusing enough and violate their other design rules about letting the user decide at all times, but even so I can't get it to work with my provider].
3. OpenOffice XML (OASIS): The free and open file standard now in use by OpenOffice.org and Koffice and probably soon to be accepted by the European Union as a ISO standard is another victim of the 80 Percent Rule, because not many people use it right now. Given the increasing number of people who are switching to OpenOffice and the potential of all the EU goverments supporting it, this is one risk that Apple should be very willing to take: Be the first commercial vendor after Sun to include it in their products.
In these three cases, the 80 Precent Rule keeps Apple from supporting what is a minority, but a well-thought of solution. In all cases, we are talking about free things that Apple could include with little problems if only their own guildlines weren't in the way.
This is what I ment with Apple not being good at supporting free solutions; I can see, however, that my first post was probably misleading. Sorry.
One more thing then:
Apple is also a hardware company. Not supporting this configuration out of the box provides greater incentive for those who want that functionality to spend several hundred dollars by purchasing a PowerBook.
Fine, except for one small thing: I paid for that hardware. Apple paid ATI for that chip and you'd better believe they passed that cost on to me, but here I am with a chip in my iBook I paid for with functions I paid for but I can't use out of the box. No, this is wrong. I expect the operating system to support the hardware I paid for to the max, not artificially keep me from getting the most of my property.
This really, really pisses me off when I think about it: No other operating system creator around, not Microsoft and certainly not Linux or FreeBSD, would even dream about writing something that
I use OOo with Apple's X11 and right off the bat I have to confirm what other people have said here: It works (except that you don't get italics on some fonts), but it is slow, poorly integrated and looks like crap once you are used to Aqua. You don't notice this that much with KDE/Linux or Win XP (the other two systems in our house) because their icon sets are cruder than Aqua anyway, but it is really glaring with OS X.
But it works, and since we got so fed up with different file formats at home and switched everything to the free OpenOffice XML (OASIS) format, this is what counts here. Those of you who think OpenOffice XML is some isolated open source thing should keep in mind that the European Union (400 million people and counting) is probably going to make OASIS an ISO standard (Sun is pushing this like mad), and that open source projects of all kinds are converging on it as a common standard: Koffice is the biggy next to OpenOffice.org. The standard is here to stay. If you want to play the game, sooner or later you either have to have a monopoly or support it.
Which brings us to the reason why this new announcement is more of a problem for Apple than for the average Slashdot user: The OS X platform does not offer a free full-fledged office suite. AppleWorks is a joke, basically one of those toy apps left over from when they had that toy operating system OS 9, and iWorks is neither a full suite nor does it support OASIS. And there is no way I am going to pay for Microsoft Office, since it does little more than OpenOffice for some ridiculous price. I mean, when it comes down to it we're talking about the choice between buying an iPod or buying Microsoft Office. Duh!
I've said this before and I'll say it again: Apple should do a Safari (Darwin, Cups, GCC...) here and admit that they can't produce a first rate office suite by themselves. Keep Keynote if you must, but get the rest of the people wasting their time with iWorks behind an Aqua OpenOffice port. This would rid Apple of the last area where they are dependent on Microsoft, and give them the office capabilities the Mac currently lacks.
This has nothing to do with computers and everything to do with marketing. In fact, computer marketing is still pretty cerebral compared to what car builders do: Stupid films with their products ripping up the lane markers, stupid films with their pickup trucks getting loaded up to the brim with more rocks than will fit in the average garden...
Check out how many car ads have semi-naked women running around in them, drooling at the sight of a man behind the steering wheel. Now, I'm the last person to object to semi-naked women, and under the right circumstances, I could probably take the drooling, but just what does this have to do with the product?
Right, nothing. Pure marketing. I'm sure the time will come when computers will be marketed with sex, too, but until then, keep in mind that we've still got it good.
If apple supported OASIS, all the better, but until people are actually using the format it's not going do very much. It is a chicken or the egg arugement.
If I remember correctly, the European Union is considering making OpenOffice XML an ISO standard. Sun is really pushing this, of course. With a population easily larger than that of the U.S., we're talking about one very, very big egg. Apple would be stupid not to support it, as it is free.
But then we all know that Apple doesn't do too well when it comes to including free standards, don't we: Those iPod still don't have Ogg Vorbis support. Rio and a bunch of other people have it, so it can't be rocket science. Some times, I just don't get Apple. This is on my duh list right up there with non-activated spanning on the iBook.
As for iWorks: We have three operating systems at home: Mac OS X, Linux und Win XP. So: If it doesn't support OASIS, it's not going to fly here. I always thought that Apple would be better off doing a Safari when it comes to office packages: Admit they can't compete on their own, and put their people behind the OpenOffice project. Now we're going to have to wait for OOo 2.0, and then how many months?
I can only second that. In fact, in old age, I am increasingly loosing patience with Windows users bitching about their spyware and viruses -- unless you are at work (and then it isn't your problem, but your employers), it is your own bloody fault.
And now, with the Mac Mini, you don't even have an excuse if you are clinically addicted to computer games: For the price of one of those high-end graphics cards you people keep buying, you can get a second computer just for your email and surfing needs. It will fit on the shelf between your StarCraft and Gunman boxes, and it won't make much noise, and it won't crash.
If the geometry is right (that is, if the outside wall of your house doesn't reach right up to the street), why doen't you buy a good WiFi access point so you can limit the range instead? Even Apple's Airport Express lets you do that. We've cut the signal strength to 50%, and instead of potentially giving half the neighborhood access, it is limited to our living- and bedroom (don't ask).
I mean, that can't be more expensive than painting your whole house, can it?
You rehashed my complaints pretty well, but obviously you don't understand the problem.
Mark (not: cut) and paste with left and middle (not: right) mouse buttons works for just about every form of text under X11, not only one application. It is enormously important for people like me who do lots and lots of text work with different applications -- with my iBook, I'm forced to use the keys where it used to be mouse only. This has really hit my productivity. Thanks to the single mouse button, I don't get things done as fast on the iBook.
Second, "useful" is not good enough. It is true that the right button, after you have paid more money to have one, brings up a menu, but it is only a small, pitiful menu with just about zero contextual intelligence. They are an obvious afterthought, badly executed.
For example, put a music CD in your Mac. ITunes will show it on the source list to your left. Now, right click on the "Audio CD" entry. All you get are iTunes help, Open, Get Info, Eject disc, Copy to play order, Reset play order. That's all. What you do not get is, for example, "Get CD track names", even though this is probably one of the most common actions with unknown audio discs. To do that, you have to move all the way up to the menu bar on the top; if you have two screens and iTunes is on the secondary one, you even have to move all the way up and over.
Explain to me again why this is clever design.
As for the third mouse button: The scroll wheel is not a third mouse button, it is a scroll wheel, the "fourth feature", if you want. OS X doesn't seem to support the middle mouse button at all, and so you loose the ability to call up a whole new menu. KDE, for example, uses it so you can quickly jump between applications. Since OS X doesn't have virtual screens (but that is a different rant), this would be even more important on Macs than KDE. Exposé is cute, but it takes too much time.
Of course, you will not be convinced. And frankly, I have come to see the single mouse button as something that is a religious issue for the older generation of Mac users, who will defend its inadequacy for its own sake, and even in the face of just about every single person who has switched from a different operating system to OS X. It was a good idea when mice first came out (80's?) and were potentially confusing, but now it is simply an atavism. The sooner it goes the way of the ADC interface (I note with interest that it's DVI with all new machines) and Apple starts getting serious about providing and supporting the other buttons, the sooner we can all get our work done faster.
Let me see how is apple a threat to open source? Their base os is open source, last time I checked they are a supporter.
Then I'm sure you can point me to the source code for Quartz, Quartz Extreme and especially Aqua then. Or Xcode, for that matter. I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in porting all of that to Linux.
Apple is being very pragmatic about Open Source in that they admit where they are beat (Safari is Konqueror, CUPS, Darwin, etc), use these free programs, and are in fact very good about sharing in these cases. However, the normal state of affairs is closed software: They are not like IBM, donating large pieces of high-quality software to the community. Why not, for example, just open source OS 9?
Apple is a threat because their closed-source GUI is simply the best in the world with no competition in sight, and at the same time, they give you Unix power. This is very attractive to people who would otherwise be inclined to go use Linux. There is no simple way you can make X do the tricks that Quartz lets Aqua do (which is why Apple didn't use X), and don't get me started on how superior the hardware is. The reason I switched was simply time -- I turn my iBook on, it works. I press "software update", it works. I plug in the printer, it works. Linux, even pre-installed Linux, currently can't offer that. Things that really save you time are always going to be popular.
No, Mac OS X is a threat to Open Source operating systems, the best parts of it are closed software, and the sooner the Linux crowd stop their silly fixation with Windows and realize whom they should be really aiming for, the better.
Interestingly enough, OS X supports the functions of multi-button mice; you just can't buy an Apple-made multi-button mouse.
I have an external USB mouse by now and no, it is still crap: The second mouse button is next to useless compared to what KDE offers, and the middle mouse button is totally useless. The ability to add an external mouse with more than one button is clearly an afterthought, grudgingly supported.
This simply comes nowhere near what KDE lets you do with the mouse: Most of KDE is a series of right-button, left-button combinations that let yo do almost everything, and let you do it fast. All X normally lets you mark (left button) text and paste (middle button) with the mouse, which Apple has decided to kill with OS X -- stupid, because you now have to used Command c and Command v and such. Takes for bloody ever.
I've come to the conclusion that the single mouse button is actually something of a marketing issue that is kept in the face of switcher exasperation to give the Macs their own character. Apple has gotten rid of the ADC interface in favor of DVI -- it is time they admitted that more than one mouse button lets you get stuff done faster, too, and stop this kind of "different for its own sake" crap.
Just about everybody grows up with more than one mouse button these days. It's a standard feature. People want it. What do see more of, new Mac users running around saying "thank God, that second mouse button was just too confusing" or new Mac users running around saying "wait a minute, what happend to my other button?"
I said it before when it was just a rumor and I'm going to put my money where my mouth was now that it is reality: I'm going to go out and buy my dear old mother a Mac Mini. It is time she got a computer that Just Works, and this is going to be it.
As somebody who has just switched his main personal computer from a Linux/KDE system to an iBook running OS X, let me state that Apple is now the single greatest threat to open source operating systems. The things really just work, especially the hardware (I'm so fucking sick of USB problems with Linux), the interface is beautiful (execpt, for course, for that stupid single-button mouse), and you can still drill down and use bash.
Forget Windows: The gold standard now is Mac OS X. That's what KDE and Co. should be aiming for.
One of the more touching American mental holdovers from the 50's is the idea that the U.S. is a leader in technology or adoption of
technology. An amazing number of Americans still truely believe they are more advanced than everybody else in just about everything that has to do with electricity and are honestly stunned when they find out that they lag behind in quite a few areas.
For example, take mobile phones, where the Europeans -- and especially the Scandinavians -- are far ahead; the U.S. is still stuck with various incompatible networks, and texting ("SMS") is still in its infancy. South Korea is far ahead in broadband usage and Japan has all the cool electronic gadgets (remember the discussion in "Back to the Future"?).
There are, of course, various exceptions to this rule, starting with the iPod, online shopping, and the spread of public WiFi, where the U.S. does in fact lead hands down. The point is, though, that large parts of the American public just assume the U.S. is number one in everything and then are baffled when they are told that some Europeans or Asians are ahead. But, but, but we're Americans! they cry. We almost made the guy who invented the Internet president! How can this be?
This is actually the normal, pre-WWII state of affairs, and no cause for panic; the U.S. was never the leader in everything except for a very short period where everybody else had been bombed to the bedrocks. Parts of the U.S. (those in the middle, mainly) are still today rural to a point inconceivable to Europeans, who only really grasp the significance of this in election years. The U.S. has been shouldering an enormous military budget ever since WWII, and while enjoying U.S. protection, countries like (West) Germany, Japan and South Korea have been free to skimp on defense and invest in infrastructure and public education.
Now, finally, and for all the wrong reasons, the U.S. is getting its troops out of countries rich enough to defend themselves. Still, it is important to realize that other countries have clever engineers, too, and with populations more inclinded to take interest in toys not directly related to hog feeding, there will simply never be that form of 50's domination again. This is a Good Thing, because it means that the rest of the world is not scrambling through ruins or starving.
Really? I didn't think that SCO sued anyone in Germany.
Briefly, what happened was this: SCO started running around in Germany claiming that these IBM guys have ripped off their code and they would be suing everybody and their dog three ways to Saturday any day now. This is obviously bad for Linux, RedHat, IBM, and of course SuSE, and so somebody filed what would be an injunction in the U.S. (Einstweilige Verfügung). This said something to the effect that if SCO wanted to go around dissing IBM, they'd better have some proof.
Ah, SCO said. Proof. No, we'd rather not show proof. Can't we just run around for a few months making these claims, telling everybody what evil people IBM, RedHad, and SuSE are without any proof like those nice American judges are letting us do? When we get around to sueing them here, too, we'll show you plenty of proof. We do have it, honestly. We just don't want to show it right now.
To which the German court responded: No, we are not going to let you run around destroying the reputations of these companies without proof because there is this thing called slander and we think you are displaying malice here. If you don't want to show us some evidence, shut up, or you will be financing the next Autobahn.
End of story for SCO in Germany.
Now, this has absolutely nothing to do with free speech in any country. If you read up on the First Amendment (here would be a good start), you will see that you are not allowed to shoot off your mouth if you are displaying malice in the States, either. The difference is that German law recognizes that you can destroy a business merely with FUD and aims to protect that business from such attacks until you have shown that they are justified. The U.S. system will get you in the end, too -- but by then of course the damage is done. This wasn't a problem in the 18th Century, but in the age of mass media, it is serious.
Where people can display proof or make a good case, they can go around saying all kinds of things in Germany. A large corporation, Müller, just lost a court case against Greenpeace who had been running around calling their milk "gene milk" (as in genetically engineered, which is the kiss of death in marketing terms in Germany) -- you can read the details here, albeit in German. The point is, Greenpeace could provide a rational argument for this attack on the company, which the court recognized.
Germany's laws about Freedom of Speech are in fact far less powerful than those in America -- this is one area where nobody on the planet comes close to the freedoms enjoyed in the States. But this has no relevance in the SCO case.
As despressing as this is, Zypries' opinion is not law, just her opinion. Is there are court case where somebody has been convicted for having made a private copy?
Obviously you are not a journalist, because for them, the money they get from VG Wort can be the equivalent to one month's pay. For freelancers, this is a very, very important system.
The VG Wort publishes very detailed information on what they do, why they do it, and who gets the money here. You might want to take a look.
If the Americans here could stop foaming at the mouth for a few minutes and listen to what the Germans here are trying to tell them they would realize that this not only makes complete sense, but also shows how much more sane the German system is.
The important legal difference is that private copies are legal in Germany. Again: In Germany, I can take a DVD, CD, video, whatever, and rip a copy for my own private use. Of course, if I start distributing that copy or screen it in a public place etc. they get to throw the book at me, and will do so very, very hard.
This Recht auf eine Privatkopie is something German consumer groups have been fighting tooth and nail to keep in he face of massive industry pressure to adopt an American-style "sorry sucker, you can't do jack" system. On the long run, this new ruling will actually work for the consumer, because it weaves the right to a private copy tighter into the greater legal fabric. Now, when I buy a computer, I have paid for that private copy, so industry can just go shove a bratwurst up their Po, with mustard. Or they can try to get the VG Wort system changed -- and good luck with that, because it touches just about every scrap of printed matter in Germany, from newspapers to pornographic novels.
All the talk here about "guilty until proven innocent" is pure crap by people who haven't taken the time to read the background kindly provided by the Germans on the list and should be modded down as ranting, if not German-bashing.
As somebody who has lived in Germany for a while let me say that German law for the most part is a very sane, logical, and balanced system that almost across the board is superior to the 18th Century money-comes-first atavism that the U.S. is forced to suffer through. The SCO case proved this quite well: German courts took about a week to bitch-slap Darl's minions back into the real world, while, what is it now, years? later IBM and RedHat are still forced to pour millions into legal fees.
Long, long overdue. The only thing that would annoy me about this is that they didn't get it in time for X-Mas sales -- a Mac for under 500 bucks would have been exactly what I would have gotten my dear mother as a present to replace her little AMD K6.
One of the reasons I am leaning towards a Mac as my next machine despite the cost of buying a whole computer instead of just upgrading components is the PowerPC CPU. I have a G4 iBook and the thing is just completely silent -- I have managed to push it hard enough to make it turn on the fan, but you really have to work on it. Heat doesn't seem to be a problem at all. You can tell the difference when you sit next to some guy with his Dell when it starts making those airplane noises with the fan. Apple has some pretty cool hardware going here.
Now if only Yellow Dog Linux would cleanly support the iBooks's sleep mode...
Why is Slashdot now running Microsoft's FUD campaigns on the front page now? For the shock value? What is next, maybe "is Canada really more free than North Korea?"
Crappy editorial decisions like this make me glad I'm not a subscriber.
I agree, but the obligatory Slashdot Bizarro twist... what if this was about Microsoft Word locking out OO.org with respect to "protected.doc" files....
Again: Microsoft is a monopoly. This has been established by courts. Though it is not illegal to have a monopoly in the U.S., there are certain rules that apply. Apple does not have a monopoly. Therefore, these certain rules do not apply.
Once a court rules that Apple has a monopoly -- the way the other players suck, that might not be too far off -- I'll agree with you. Until then...
I probably am the last person here to figure this out, but in the last two weeks, I have grown to love two features of Firefox I wasn't aware of before:
Open in Tabs. Make a bookmark folder of the websites you want to be open when you sit down and start browsing. When opening that folder the Bookmarks menu, use the last entry -- "Open In Tabs" -- and go get your coffee. When you come back, the browser is ready: All the sites are nicley pre-loaded in tabs.
RSS Feeds. If you haven't tried this yet, do yourself a favour and do so. For those clueless people like me, what you do is click the little RSS button on the bottom right of the browser, which creates a new bookmark folder. Inside that folder, the links to the stories of the day are created automatically for that site.
Yeah, I know, you've been doing this for ever, what's next, Nice2Cats will discover these things called fax machines. But for slow people like me, this is just awesome. Combine this with the adblock extension, and there is no way in hell IE can compete anymore.
The U.S. firefoxers are badly lagging behind here: The German local group "Firefox kommt!" had their ad with about 2,400 signatures in Germany's premier economics paper "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (FAZ) on the 2nd of December 2004. You can see the ad here (includes various mirrors). The response in the German press was fantastic.
Now, quite a lot of people tried to post this on Slashdot, but for some reason, these stories seem to have been rejected wholesale. I fail to see the reasoning behind this: Being U.S. centered is one thing, trying to supress the first example of an ad that the world has been holding its breath for quite another. It would be nice if the editors forced themselves to give a reason when they rejected postings or at least created a section where people can look at them.
I can see getting rid of the desktop PC business, but it is simply stupid from a branding point of view to hand over their ThinkPad line to a Chinese company. Where I work, ThinkPads are a status symbol and living proof of IBMs claims of superior quality. There are the first, most important, and in most cases only IBM product that average people come into contact with. They're throwing away one of their most important marketing instruments here.
By coincidence, I just ordered what I suspect will now go down in computer history as one of the last "real" ThinkPads -- a R51 for my wife for X-Mas. While I was in the store, the saleswoman did one of the most impressive stunts I have every seen a computer salesperson do: She took the X31 that was on display, held it at the upper edge of the unfolded screen, and presented the machine to me that way. Then she just kind of waved it around in the air, still holding it by the screen's edge...yeah, I was impressed. This was probably the single most important moment for defining my view of IBM products. In fact,
I was going take a very, very serious look at the X31 as a replacement for my iBook when it breaks -- but not any more, I guess. Having been in China, I do not want to have any part with a machine that was tested by Chinese quality control.
In a way, this is like the day when HP stopped making RPN calculators and started turning out cheap TI clones: A sad day for geeks in general.
On the other hand, this is a good day for Apple, because it removes the one serious rival for portable computers if you want something that is of higher quality than a Dell or a Toshiba or any of those other brands that all look and run like they were designed by the last engineers of the Soviet Union. Now, the replacement for my iBook when it wears out will be another iBook -- but man, that 12" ThinkPad X31 was cool.
You know...what's disturbing about the theme of this article, is there is so much free software out there that doesn't require spyware, and all of these people are completely unaware.
This is not a question of free- vs. closed source but one of Microsoft vs. everything else. You could just as well go out and buy a Mac and avoid all of this crap. I use Linux at home, but for a lot of the no-tech people, going out and putting a little more cash down for a computer that Just Works would be the best way to go.
But try telling that to somebody who has been bombarded with "Intel Inside" ads all of their life...
Slashdot Mirror
Any UNIX command or script, including those written in sh, tcsh, bash, tcl, Perl, or Ruby as well as AppleScript, can be accessed from the widget object.
Is Apple just being an "insensitive clod" here, or what seems to be the problem?
However, and this is where we get to things like Ogg Vorbis or OpenOffice XML, Apple has this thing called the "80 Percent Solution" in their software design guide: If it is not used by 80 percent of the users, Apple doesn't do it.
This is actually a very good rule of thumb. However -- and this is where Apple gets into trouble -- like all rules, you have to know when to break it, otherwise you get into the situation that Apple is in now: You can never lead with your features, you always follow, and this annoys a lot of people who demand more for what is a pretty hefty price tag.
Some examples of the "Curse of the 80 Percent Rule":
1. Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is not used by many people, but has been shown to be the best compressed format out there, beating MP3 by a kilometer. Double-blind tests like the big one Germany's "c't" magazine did a while ago have show this pretty well, and so the people who care use Ogg Vorbis, which is why companies like Rio are putting it in their players even if there is a small user base. Apple, however, is sticking to their 80 percent rule, which in this case sends the message that they don't care about those people who care about quality. What do they expect me to do, re-rip my whole CD collection to an inferior format?
2. TLS. Open Mail on Panther and try to set TLS as a transport encryption standard. No go. Of course, TLS is not widespread, and so Apple decided not to support it. Some providers demand it (like mine), because they say it is more secure, and so people like me switch to other products like Thunderbird [I have been told that Apple has included TLS as "SSH", which would be confusing enough and violate their other design rules about letting the user decide at all times, but even so I can't get it to work with my provider].
3. OpenOffice XML (OASIS): The free and open file standard now in use by OpenOffice.org and Koffice and probably soon to be accepted by the European Union as a ISO standard is another victim of the 80 Percent Rule, because not many people use it right now. Given the increasing number of people who are switching to OpenOffice and the potential of all the EU goverments supporting it, this is one risk that Apple should be very willing to take: Be the first commercial vendor after Sun to include it in their products.
In these three cases, the 80 Precent Rule keeps Apple from supporting what is a minority, but a well-thought of solution. In all cases, we are talking about free things that Apple could include with little problems if only their own guildlines weren't in the way.
This is what I ment with Apple not being good at supporting free solutions; I can see, however, that my first post was probably misleading. Sorry.
One more thing then:
Apple is also a hardware company. Not supporting this configuration out of the box provides greater incentive for those who want that functionality to spend several hundred dollars by purchasing a PowerBook.
Fine, except for one small thing: I paid for that hardware. Apple paid ATI for that chip and you'd better believe they passed that cost on to me, but here I am with a chip in my iBook I paid for with functions I paid for but I can't use out of the box. No, this is wrong. I expect the operating system to support the hardware I paid for to the max, not artificially keep me from getting the most of my property.
This really, really pisses me off when I think about it: No other operating system creator around, not Microsoft and certainly not Linux or FreeBSD, would even dream about writing something that
But it works, and since we got so fed up with different file formats at home and switched everything to the free OpenOffice XML (OASIS) format, this is what counts here. Those of you who think OpenOffice XML is some isolated open source thing should keep in mind that the European Union (400 million people and counting) is probably going to make OASIS an ISO standard (Sun is pushing this like mad), and that open source projects of all kinds are converging on it as a common standard: Koffice is the biggy next to OpenOffice.org. The standard is here to stay. If you want to play the game, sooner or later you either have to have a monopoly or support it.
Which brings us to the reason why this new announcement is more of a problem for Apple than for the average Slashdot user: The OS X platform does not offer a free full-fledged office suite. AppleWorks is a joke, basically one of those toy apps left over from when they had that toy operating system OS 9, and iWorks is neither a full suite nor does it support OASIS. And there is no way I am going to pay for Microsoft Office, since it does little more than OpenOffice for some ridiculous price. I mean, when it comes down to it we're talking about the choice between buying an iPod or buying Microsoft Office. Duh!
I've said this before and I'll say it again: Apple should do a Safari (Darwin, Cups, GCC...) here and admit that they can't produce a first rate office suite by themselves. Keep Keynote if you must, but get the rest of the people wasting their time with iWorks behind an Aqua OpenOffice port. This would rid Apple of the last area where they are dependent on Microsoft, and give them the office capabilities the Mac currently lacks.
Check out how many car ads have semi-naked women running around in them, drooling at the sight of a man behind the steering wheel. Now, I'm the last person to object to semi-naked women, and under the right circumstances, I could probably take the drooling, but just what does this have to do with the product?
Right, nothing. Pure marketing. I'm sure the time will come when computers will be marketed with sex, too, but until then, keep in mind that we've still got it good.
If I remember correctly, the European Union is considering making OpenOffice XML an ISO standard. Sun is really pushing this, of course. With a population easily larger than that of the U.S., we're talking about one very, very big egg. Apple would be stupid not to support it, as it is free.
But then we all know that Apple doesn't do too well when it comes to including free standards, don't we: Those iPod still don't have Ogg Vorbis support. Rio and a bunch of other people have it, so it can't be rocket science. Some times, I just don't get Apple. This is on my duh list right up there with non-activated spanning on the iBook.
As for iWorks: We have three operating systems at home: Mac OS X, Linux und Win XP. So: If it doesn't support OASIS, it's not going to fly here. I always thought that Apple would be better off doing a Safari when it comes to office packages: Admit they can't compete on their own, and put their people behind the OpenOffice project. Now we're going to have to wait for OOo 2.0, and then how many months?
And now, with the Mac Mini, you don't even have an excuse if you are clinically addicted to computer games: For the price of one of those high-end graphics cards you people keep buying, you can get a second computer just for your email and surfing needs. It will fit on the shelf between your StarCraft and Gunman boxes, and it won't make much noise, and it won't crash.
For basic use, it Just Works.
I mean, that can't be more expensive than painting your whole house, can it?
You rehashed my complaints pretty well, but obviously you don't understand the problem.
Mark (not: cut) and paste with left and middle (not: right) mouse buttons works for just about every form of text under X11, not only one application. It is enormously important for people like me who do lots and lots of text work with different applications -- with my iBook, I'm forced to use the keys where it used to be mouse only. This has really hit my productivity. Thanks to the single mouse button, I don't get things done as fast on the iBook.
Second, "useful" is not good enough. It is true that the right button, after you have paid more money to have one, brings up a menu, but it is only a small, pitiful menu with just about zero contextual intelligence. They are an obvious afterthought, badly executed.
For example, put a music CD in your Mac. ITunes will show it on the source list to your left. Now, right click on the "Audio CD" entry. All you get are iTunes help, Open, Get Info, Eject disc, Copy to play order, Reset play order. That's all. What you do not get is, for example, "Get CD track names", even though this is probably one of the most common actions with unknown audio discs. To do that, you have to move all the way up to the menu bar on the top; if you have two screens and iTunes is on the secondary one, you even have to move all the way up and over.
Explain to me again why this is clever design.
As for the third mouse button: The scroll wheel is not a third mouse button, it is a scroll wheel, the "fourth feature", if you want. OS X doesn't seem to support the middle mouse button at all, and so you loose the ability to call up a whole new menu. KDE, for example, uses it so you can quickly jump between applications. Since OS X doesn't have virtual screens (but that is a different rant), this would be even more important on Macs than KDE. Exposé is cute, but it takes too much time.
Of course, you will not be convinced. And frankly, I have come to see the single mouse button as something that is a religious issue for the older generation of Mac users, who will defend its inadequacy for its own sake, and even in the face of just about every single person who has switched from a different operating system to OS X. It was a good idea when mice first came out (80's?) and were potentially confusing, but now it is simply an atavism. The sooner it goes the way of the ADC interface (I note with interest that it's DVI with all new machines) and Apple starts getting serious about providing and supporting the other buttons, the sooner we can all get our work done faster.
Then I'm sure you can point me to the source code for Quartz, Quartz Extreme and especially Aqua then. Or Xcode, for that matter. I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in porting all of that to Linux.
Apple is being very pragmatic about Open Source in that they admit where they are beat (Safari is Konqueror, CUPS, Darwin, etc), use these free programs, and are in fact very good about sharing in these cases. However, the normal state of affairs is closed software: They are not like IBM, donating large pieces of high-quality software to the community. Why not, for example, just open source OS 9?
Apple is a threat because their closed-source GUI is simply the best in the world with no competition in sight, and at the same time, they give you Unix power. This is very attractive to people who would otherwise be inclined to go use Linux. There is no simple way you can make X do the tricks that Quartz lets Aqua do (which is why Apple didn't use X), and don't get me started on how superior the hardware is. The reason I switched was simply time -- I turn my iBook on, it works. I press "software update", it works. I plug in the printer, it works. Linux, even pre-installed Linux, currently can't offer that. Things that really save you time are always going to be popular.
No, Mac OS X is a threat to Open Source operating systems, the best parts of it are closed software, and the sooner the Linux crowd stop their silly fixation with Windows and realize whom they should be really aiming for, the better.
I have an external USB mouse by now and no, it is still crap: The second mouse button is next to useless compared to what KDE offers, and the middle mouse button is totally useless. The ability to add an external mouse with more than one button is clearly an afterthought, grudgingly supported.
This simply comes nowhere near what KDE lets you do with the mouse: Most of KDE is a series of right-button, left-button combinations that let yo do almost everything, and let you do it fast. All X normally lets you mark (left button) text and paste (middle button) with the mouse, which Apple has decided to kill with OS X -- stupid, because you now have to used Command c and Command v and such. Takes for bloody ever.
I've come to the conclusion that the single mouse button is actually something of a marketing issue that is kept in the face of switcher exasperation to give the Macs their own character. Apple has gotten rid of the ADC interface in favor of DVI -- it is time they admitted that more than one mouse button lets you get stuff done faster, too, and stop this kind of "different for its own sake" crap. Just about everybody grows up with more than one mouse button these days. It's a standard feature. People want it. What do see more of, new Mac users running around saying "thank God, that second mouse button was just too confusing" or new Mac users running around saying "wait a minute, what happend to my other button?"
As somebody who has just switched his main personal computer from a Linux/KDE system to an iBook running OS X, let me state that Apple is now the single greatest threat to open source operating systems. The things really just work, especially the hardware (I'm so fucking sick of USB problems with Linux), the interface is beautiful (execpt, for course, for that stupid single-button mouse), and you can still drill down and use bash.
Forget Windows: The gold standard now is Mac OS X. That's what KDE and Co. should be aiming for.
For example, take mobile phones, where the Europeans -- and especially the Scandinavians -- are far ahead; the U.S. is still stuck with various incompatible networks, and texting ("SMS") is still in its infancy. South Korea is far ahead in broadband usage and Japan has all the cool electronic gadgets (remember the discussion in "Back to the Future"?). There are, of course, various exceptions to this rule, starting with the iPod, online shopping, and the spread of public WiFi, where the U.S. does in fact lead hands down. The point is, though, that large parts of the American public just assume the U.S. is number one in everything and then are baffled when they are told that some Europeans or Asians are ahead. But, but, but we're Americans! they cry. We almost made the guy who invented the Internet president! How can this be?
This is actually the normal, pre-WWII state of affairs, and no cause for panic; the U.S. was never the leader in everything except for a very short period where everybody else had been bombed to the bedrocks. Parts of the U.S. (those in the middle, mainly) are still today rural to a point inconceivable to Europeans, who only really grasp the significance of this in election years. The U.S. has been shouldering an enormous military budget ever since WWII, and while enjoying U.S. protection, countries like (West) Germany, Japan and South Korea have been free to skimp on defense and invest in infrastructure and public education.
Now, finally, and for all the wrong reasons, the U.S. is getting its troops out of countries rich enough to defend themselves. Still, it is important to realize that other countries have clever engineers, too, and with populations more inclinded to take interest in toys not directly related to hog feeding, there will simply never be that form of 50's domination again. This is a Good Thing, because it means that the rest of the world is not scrambling through ruins or starving.
Briefly, what happened was this: SCO started running around in Germany claiming that these IBM guys have ripped off their code and they would be suing everybody and their dog three ways to Saturday any day now. This is obviously bad for Linux, RedHat, IBM, and of course SuSE, and so somebody filed what would be an injunction in the U.S. (Einstweilige Verfügung). This said something to the effect that if SCO wanted to go around dissing IBM, they'd better have some proof.
Ah, SCO said. Proof. No, we'd rather not show proof. Can't we just run around for a few months making these claims, telling everybody what evil people IBM, RedHad, and SuSE are without any proof like those nice American judges are letting us do? When we get around to sueing them here, too, we'll show you plenty of proof. We do have it, honestly. We just don't want to show it right now.
To which the German court responded: No, we are not going to let you run around destroying the reputations of these companies without proof because there is this thing called slander and we think you are displaying malice here. If you don't want to show us some evidence, shut up, or you will be financing the next Autobahn.
End of story for SCO in Germany.
Now, this has absolutely nothing to do with free speech in any country. If you read up on the First Amendment (here would be a good start), you will see that you are not allowed to shoot off your mouth if you are displaying malice in the States, either. The difference is that German law recognizes that you can destroy a business merely with FUD and aims to protect that business from such attacks until you have shown that they are justified. The U.S. system will get you in the end, too -- but by then of course the damage is done. This wasn't a problem in the 18th Century, but in the age of mass media, it is serious.
Where people can display proof or make a good case, they can go around saying all kinds of things in Germany. A large corporation, Müller, just lost a court case against Greenpeace who had been running around calling their milk "gene milk" (as in genetically engineered, which is the kiss of death in marketing terms in Germany) -- you can read the details here, albeit in German. The point is, Greenpeace could provide a rational argument for this attack on the company, which the court recognized.
Germany's laws about Freedom of Speech are in fact far less powerful than those in America -- this is one area where nobody on the planet comes close to the freedoms enjoyed in the States. But this has no relevance in the SCO case.
But I think we're getting pretty off topic here.
The VG Wort publishes very detailed information on what they do, why they do it, and who gets the money here. You might want to take a look.
The important legal difference is that private copies are legal in Germany. Again: In Germany, I can take a DVD, CD, video, whatever, and rip a copy for my own private use. Of course, if I start distributing that copy or screen it in a public place etc. they get to throw the book at me, and will do so very, very hard.
This Recht auf eine Privatkopie is something German consumer groups have been fighting tooth and nail to keep in he face of massive industry pressure to adopt an American-style "sorry sucker, you can't do jack" system. On the long run, this new ruling will actually work for the consumer, because it weaves the right to a private copy tighter into the greater legal fabric. Now, when I buy a computer, I have paid for that private copy, so industry can just go shove a bratwurst up their Po, with mustard. Or they can try to get the VG Wort system changed -- and good luck with that, because it touches just about every scrap of printed matter in Germany, from newspapers to pornographic novels.
All the talk here about "guilty until proven innocent" is pure crap by people who haven't taken the time to read the background kindly provided by the Germans on the list and should be modded down as ranting, if not German-bashing.
As somebody who has lived in Germany for a while let me say that German law for the most part is a very sane, logical, and balanced system that almost across the board is superior to the 18th Century money-comes-first atavism that the U.S. is forced to suffer through. The SCO case proved this quite well: German courts took about a week to bitch-slap Darl's minions back into the real world, while, what is it now, years? later IBM and RedHat are still forced to pour millions into legal fees.
However, better late than never as they say...
Now if only Yellow Dog Linux would cleanly support the iBooks's sleep mode...
Or in other words, I'm slowing going deaf after a life of listening to really, really loud noise. It isn't a bug, I tell my wife, it is a feature!
Crappy editorial decisions like this make me glad I'm not a subscriber.
Again: Microsoft is a monopoly. This has been established by courts. Though it is not illegal to have a monopoly in the U.S., there are certain rules that apply. Apple does not have a monopoly. Therefore, these certain rules do not apply.
Once a court rules that Apple has a monopoly -- the way the other players suck, that might not be too far off -- I'll agree with you. Until then ...
Open in Tabs. Make a bookmark folder of the websites you want to be open when you sit down and start browsing. When opening that folder the Bookmarks menu, use the last entry -- "Open In Tabs" -- and go get your coffee. When you come back, the browser is ready: All the sites are nicley pre-loaded in tabs.
RSS Feeds. If you haven't tried this yet, do yourself a favour and do so. For those clueless people like me, what you do is click the little RSS button on the bottom right of the browser, which creates a new bookmark folder. Inside that folder, the links to the stories of the day are created automatically for that site.
Yeah, I know, you've been doing this for ever, what's next, Nice2Cats will discover these things called fax machines. But for slow people like me, this is just awesome. Combine this with the adblock extension, and there is no way in hell IE can compete anymore.
Now, quite a lot of people tried to post this on Slashdot, but for some reason, these stories seem to have been rejected wholesale. I fail to see the reasoning behind this: Being U.S. centered is one thing, trying to supress the first example of an ad that the world has been holding its breath for quite another. It would be nice if the editors forced themselves to give a reason when they rejected postings or at least created a section where people can look at them.
By coincidence, I just ordered what I suspect will now go down in computer history as one of the last "real" ThinkPads -- a R51 for my wife for X-Mas. While I was in the store, the saleswoman did one of the most impressive stunts I have every seen a computer salesperson do: She took the X31 that was on display, held it at the upper edge of the unfolded screen, and presented the machine to me that way. Then she just kind of waved it around in the air, still holding it by the screen's edge...yeah, I was impressed. This was probably the single most important moment for defining my view of IBM products. In fact, I was going take a very, very serious look at the X31 as a replacement for my iBook when it breaks -- but not any more, I guess. Having been in China, I do not want to have any part with a machine that was tested by Chinese quality control.
In a way, this is like the day when HP stopped making RPN calculators and started turning out cheap TI clones: A sad day for geeks in general.
On the other hand, this is a good day for Apple, because it removes the one serious rival for portable computers if you want something that is of higher quality than a Dell or a Toshiba or any of those other brands that all look and run like they were designed by the last engineers of the Soviet Union. Now, the replacement for my iBook when it wears out will be another iBook -- but man, that 12" ThinkPad X31 was cool.
This is not a question of free- vs. closed source but one of Microsoft vs. everything else. You could just as well go out and buy a Mac and avoid all of this crap. I use Linux at home, but for a lot of the no-tech people, going out and putting a little more cash down for a computer that Just Works would be the best way to go.
But try telling that to somebody who has been bombarded with "Intel Inside" ads all of their life...