Maybe if you actually read the article, you'd see that both global warming and this possible mini ice-age would be due to greenhouse gas emissions. We don't know which is going to happen, but if either happens, the US would carry a large share of the responsibility.
Imagine if the GPL had such a patent clause. Apple now could not easily sue any other user of GPL'ed software for patent infringement anymore because they would immediately lose use of some software, like gcc, that they critically depend on. But they can still make money from their patents through commercial licensing to other producers of closed source software.
I don't know whether the patent clauses in these new licenses work out correctly for that purpose, but I wouldn't dismiss the idea. Something like it may well be the best protection from silly patents we can get for open source software.
Bush likes to talk about accepting responsibility for one's actions. Since the US is a huge greenhouse case emitter and currently derives enormous financial and economic benefits from cheap energy, if greenhouse gasses cause a massive shift in climate, the US will be willing to accept responsibility for its share and pay trillions of dollars annually to other nations who are frozen, parched, or flooded, right? (If nothing is going to happen, as the Bush administration contends, there is nothing to worry about...)
If you want a good, shrink-wrapped solution, one of the commercial VNC companies will probably be happy to sell you something.
If you want it for free, you have to dig around on Google for "winvnc", "dll", and the like. I've lost track of which version goes with which version of Windows--Microsoft keeps changing things around.
I think this isn't packaged better because people don't quite see why they should bother. Most VNC use involving Windows is for occasional administrative work, and for that it doesn't matter if it's a little sluggish. Also, you can use TightVNC, which is faster already, and tell it to poll more aggressively; with that, you get something that pretty good, albeit with much higher CPU usage than the "hooked" version.
and the ability to function without the need for a video card.
Yes, right after Microsoft makes Windows open source--that's necessary to do that.
Even at the best compressions its performance pales in comparison to that offered by Win2K Termianl services and XP's Remote Desktop feature
Well, first, you haven't installed it for optimal performance. Second, Windows is closed source, and it's pretty much impossible for anybody to beat Microsoft at hooking into their operating system.
Besides, why should open source programmers bother?
Seriously, it's usable even at ISDN speeds with X11. On Windows, you get iffy performance even on fast lines unless you install the VNC video driver hooks--without them, VNC has to guess at where updates are happening, and that takes a while. Sorry, but Microsoft doesn't have an open API for this sort of thing, otherwise VNC would be using it.
No. The next bandwidth crunch comes when Microsoft gets more serious about buffer overflows and sends out 30Mbyte servicepacks to everybody again and again. Internet radio can't compete with that, and Microsoft has more buffer overflows than the RIAA has songs:-)
That kind of device cries out for a USB or FireWire interface. It doesn't need the extra bandwidth of the PCI bus, but it would be nice to be able to move it from machine to machine without having to take the computer apart.
Something in that direction is the ICOM PCR-100 receiver (serial port for control, audio output for--audio). Unfortunately, open source software seems less common in the amateur radio and shortwave communities--people seem to come from a DOS world, which limits what you can do with many of the computer controllable receivers and radios. Still, there is some software, e.g., http://qsy.to/pcr/control.html.
However, keep in mind that it's not very efficient: for Xvnc, the server is fully instrumented and can send minimal updates. For x0rfbserver, it has to guess for updates. So, it's nice when you need it, but Xvnc is usually a better choice.
If you do this a lot, you are much better off just starting an Xvnc server and using it wherever you happen to be, even if that is on the local machine.
Is VNC secure enough to run on a couple of high-traffic, high-exposure web servers?
If you need to ask, it probably isn't, for you.
The correct way to use VNC on any machine where security matters the least bit is to allow only local connections to it (-localhost flag) and use an ssh or stunnel connection to connect to it (both work on Windows, MacOSX, Linux, and UNIX).
Another approach is to have the VNC server make an outgoing connection to a known host and to use the vncviewer with the "-listen" flag. That lets you use a VNC server even if it's behind a firewall.
Seeing as how it now comes with Win XP Pro the general consensus will be that RDC is the new "standard" to be emulated by everyone else.
RDC/RDP isn't a standard: as usual, Microsoft took a bunch of ITU standards and hacked them up to make them incompatible with everything else.
Nor is there much to emulate. Microsoft's RDP isn't even in the same league with X11 in terms of functionality or performance over LANs. For dial-up connections, there are also good X11 protocol compression solutions. VNC outperforms RDP greatly in another area: it's a very simple, well-documented, open protocol that is easy to implement and works pretty much everywhere. There are VNC servers for 8bit machines, even. Furthermore, X11 and VNC clients and servers are available for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX, so you can already talk from any platform to any other platform with the open protocols.
People will be able to interoperate with Microsoft RDP via projects like RDesktop--as long as Microsoft lets them and on those odd days when they ship it (Windows XP Home doesn't come with it). Building anything else on top of RDP is like building on quicksand since the world can shift from under you whenever Ballmer feels like it. If Microsoft wanted you to use RDP for anything else, they would have picked an open standard.
You can perform iris scans without a person's knowledge--all you need is a reasonably high resolution camera or a pan/tilt/zoom camera.
These things can be spoofed pretty easily because they generally do not verify very well what they ought to verify: that they are looking at a live iris, not a contact lens. Worse, such contact lenses can be manufactured from photographs taken without a person's knowledge.
And "being completely voluntary" doesn't mean something doesn't invade someone's privacy. If you are being tracked, your privacy is being invaded--the only question is whether the invasion has other bad consequences, now or in the future. A lot of these mechanisms are well-intentioned when they start out, but future politicians figure out how to abuse them.
Furthermore, putting unreliable biometrics somewhere greatly increases my risk that my identity is being stolen (see above), and I certainly consider that an invasion of my privacy. I'd much rather have a hard-to-duplicate physical token--if I lose that, I know it, and I only have myself to blame.
Oh, that I can agree with. WinGimp might well have a Windows-like UI, with all the features that Windows and Photoshop users love, at least if the goal is to make Windows users happy. If the goal is to get Windows users to start getting used to Linux UIs, then maybe it shouldn't.
But the thread somewhere along the line deteriorated into an unqualified "the Gimp interface is worse than Photoshop", and that I don't agree with.
Because then you don't have to search for "exit" or "help" You just press the "X" in the top right corner, or press "F1"
I do. I wouldn't think of pressing "F1", I would type "man program".
Making Gimp and Linux like Windows is convenient for Windows users. But why should that be the goal of UI development on Linux? Can't we have multiple paradigms for interacting with computers? I can't fly a plane, but that doesn't mean that I demand that planes get the same user interface as cars just so that I can fly them more easily.
A few reasons really. Mainly comfort factor and learning curve.
Your comfort and your learning curve, not my comfort and my learning curve.
For most users a PC is just a tool for writing letters, web browsing, playing games or some other task.
Good for them. So, why don't they keep using PCs running Windows? Why does my computer have to become just like theirs? My computers are used for very different purposes. It stands to reason that they should have a different interface.
That wraparound screen actually looks pretty cool and potentially useful.
Sure. And generations of researchers and engineers before Microsoft have discovered that. Sun had an even nicer concept, where your desktop surface itself also was a screen. Every few years, this becomes a "hot idea", and then it cools down again when people look at what it costs to deliver it.
This will, of course, happen sooner or later. But it's the display hardware wizards, not the folks in Redmond that will do it. Who gets the credit is, as usual, a different question.
UNIX filesystems don't support file attributes which weren't invented 30 years ago and they follow the stupid methodology that everything-is-a-file-found-at-a-static-path.
The UNIX designers, in fact, realized 30 years ago that attributed file systems were a lousy idea and rejected the idea; in UNIX, if you want a bunch of things together, you stick them into a directory. Apple is now coming around to that idea, which is why applications now are usually small directory trees of components in OS X. Congratulations.
Only Microsoft hasn't figured it out yet (they are usually a little late), which is why they are gung-ho on building a Rube Goldberg attributed file system that will make Macintosh look like a toy. Microsoft will get over it, too, in a decade or two.
Most of the problems you talk about are due to UNIX being a piece of crap.
Well, if that were the case, then Apple made the wrong choice. Are you going to switch to Windows? Windows has an attributed file system throughout, and many of the other features you love so much on paper.
It's all in the network preference pane. I did... I have... etc.
Well, how nice for you. But to a normal user, the whole concept of a "network preference pane" is an anathema.
I'm not saying it is utter perfection, but I feel like these are areas where OS X/Jaguar particularly shines.
OS X does a few very simple things well, and Apple is trying hard to fix things where they can--they really are. But when it comes down to it, unless someone is a nerd like you or me, they will have to turn for help in order to get anything but the simplest networking and peripherals working, just like they do with any other OS. OS X doesn't walk on water, although at least it manages to tread it.
The improvements that OS X offers over, say, Windows do make it worthwhile in my opinion, which is why I keep recommending it to people. But, in the end, I think OS X is a dead end of GUI development, just like Windows, Gnome, and KDE--the whole paradigm just doesn't work well.
For example, I can already tell that someday when I figure out how to use netInfo without making mistakes I will love it a lot more than the/etc/hosts/etc/fstab mess that we call linux.
You seem determined to dislike Linux. If you don't like the textual configuration files, you never have to touch them: just use GUI tools. That part is really no different from OS X, since it, too, has the text files and a GUI. The difference is that in OS X, things are even more complicated because there is also the Netinfo database.
On linux, which I dearly love, the number of ways to fuck up is almost endless. The sticky points on apple are partly a matter of getting used to them, not true problems.
Yup: problems are problems until you learn how to deal with them. Same for every system, even Linux and Windows.
The parent post was a very good summary of the real nuiscances I have found in OSX. But...and I dont know how to emphasize this enough... Those are ALL of the REAL nuiscances. ALL of them!
Well, no. Like any big system, there are plenty more, buried in APIs, system management, and other places.
ext3 is mainly useful when your computer does not gracefully survive crashes. I have noticed my mac is much more robust and thus has less need. but like RAID 5 its in the works and will be out.
That is just BS. "Gracefully surviving crashes" is a function of the file system and pretty much nothing else. "ext3" is the means by which a Linux system survives crashes gracefully and recovers very quickly afterwards, and it does (it mostly comes into play when a Linux laptop runs out of power). OS X manages to fix its file system most of the time, but it seems to take a long time to boot after a crash. And while OS X is almost as stable as Linux, it certainly isn't better in that regard.
And, come on, RAID 5 isn't an answer for desktop or laptops. Those come with one disk, and they should boot fast and reliably.
Altogether, you just keep making excluses. "Well, OS X does this, but it really doesn't matter...", "Well, OS X can't do this, but you are really a fool for wanting it to...", etc. Just face the facts: no operating is perfect. Linux requires a lot of fiddling in one area, and OS X requires a lot of fiddling in other areas.
But to the laptop user, those are not so relevant.
Well, as I was saying: OS X is quite a nice system, otherwise I wouldn't be using it myself. But it just isn't a replacement for Linux or UNIX systems: sometimes OS X is better, and sometimes Linux or UNIX is better, even on laptops, depending on what it is being used for.
To set up Airport I selected "Airport Active" from the menu bar.
That makes your machine a client of an AirPort network. I'm talking about setting up and configuring the AirPort device itself.
To set up the computer to the network I plugged it in. Automatic setup.
Yes, Apple has DHCP and (now) Rendezvous. Obviously, if you can use them, it's easy to get your machine on a network.
It gets hard when you need to set up things like PPPoE, dial-up, and direct Ethernet connections. Getting a fully functional setup with AirPort and DSL requires going through dozens of dialog boxes. Think that's some obscure setup? Think again: I had to talk several DSL users in my family through this over the phone. It's not pretty. Let's hope Rendezvous will improve the situation.
To set it up for the printer, I... well, I didn't do ANYTHING. That's right. I did nothing. From the first time I clicked print, there is a dropdown menu with the names of all the printers on the network, some I didn't even realize were hooked up.
Again, you live in an environment where someone has bothered setting up the network for you to make your life easy.
If you install the printer yourself, you may have to download drivers, install them, answer a bunch of odd questions, and go through some odd sequence ("don't plug in the printer before...", "now press the something-or-other"). Once the printer is plugged in, if there is a printer fault, like if it's turned off or out of paper, all printing stops and doesn't restart automatically. Restarting the printer is a minefield of dialog boxes and unobvious choices for a non-technical user.
This is in 10.1; I have no idea whether Apple has fixed this in 10.2, but that's besides the point. My point is that Apple, too, ships software that is hard to use.
Honestly, not only are these things not hard on OS X, but I couldn't imagine them being easier!
Well, you obviously haven't talked novice computer users through such configurations over the phone. You'd be surprised how many ways people can find in screwing up and how unobvious and unintuitive the OS X user interface is through the eyes of a novice.
To be honest, the only times things go smoothly are when I can tell people "type the following into a Terminal exactly as I say". Thank God that OS X has a good command line. The problem is that I don't have any idea of how to, say, configure the AirPort base station using command line tools, if it's even possible.
I think as Moshe continues to use it, he will either turn into a dedicated Mac zealot, or he will discover that OS X isn't quite the smooth integration of slick GUI and UNIX that he imagines.
For example, he may think he was editing/etc/hosts, but reality is somewhat different. He may copy files with "cp" and discover that some important bits didn't make it. Cocoa looks really nice and descriptive (and I really like Objective-C's named arguments and object model), but it also has its dark sides, for example in the areas of resource management, error handling, and type safety. He'll also discover that there are two different kinds of path names that don't quite mesh and three different sets of APIs, no single one of which gives him complete access to the machine. Carbon and Cocoa applications take different key bindings and handle text differently. A "ps" and some graphics benchmarks will show him that Aqua really has a very hefty footprint and isn't all that speedy. He'll also discover that the Apple file systems (HFS+, UFS) are not all that great compared to what he can get on Linux (ext3, ReiserFS, XFS,...).
Don't get me wrong: I think it's great that Apple is using a UNIX base, and I think they have done a great job with migrating from OS 9 to OS X. There are some really great programs on that platform. And I think there are quite a number of things Linux would do very well to copy from OS X. But the suggestion that OS X is the heavenly integration of UNIX and GUI that the world has strikes me as not realistic.
Why all this moaning about Linux GUIs?
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Flirting With Mac OS X
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't get it--why do people keep moaning about Linux GUIs? I use an OS X machine daily. It has a pretty interface. It also has a few really slick applications and accessories, foremost, perhaps, its 802.11b support.
And it's not like that OS X has figured out how to eliminate user confusion, as you will find out when you try to talk computer novices through installations or system configuration over the phone. Yes, even OS X has lots of GUI tarpits: the printer system, AirPort configuration, and network configuration are pretty bad.
But when it comes down to it, I just don't see much difference between Gnome, KDE, OS X, and Windows. All of them let you move files around in roughly the same way, all of them associate files with applications, all of them have lots of dialog boxes with buttons and little rectangles to type into, etc. And all of them run roughly comparable sets of applications. What more do you want?
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Maybe if you actually read the article, you'd see that both global warming and this possible mini ice-age would be due to greenhouse gas emissions. We don't know which is going to happen, but if either happens, the US would carry a large share of the responsibility.
I don't know whether the patent clauses in these new licenses work out correctly for that purpose, but I wouldn't dismiss the idea. Something like it may well be the best protection from silly patents we can get for open source software.
Bush likes to talk about accepting responsibility for one's actions. Since the US is a huge greenhouse case emitter and currently derives enormous financial and economic benefits from cheap energy, if greenhouse gasses cause a massive shift in climate, the US will be willing to accept responsibility for its share and pay trillions of dollars annually to other nations who are frozen, parched, or flooded, right? (If nothing is going to happen, as the Bush administration contends, there is nothing to worry about...)
If you want it for free, you have to dig around on Google for "winvnc", "dll", and the like. I've lost track of which version goes with which version of Windows--Microsoft keeps changing things around.
I think this isn't packaged better because people don't quite see why they should bother. Most VNC use involving Windows is for occasional administrative work, and for that it doesn't matter if it's a little sluggish. Also, you can use TightVNC, which is faster already, and tell it to poll more aggressively; with that, you get something that pretty good, albeit with much higher CPU usage than the "hooked" version.
Have you installed the VNC video driver hooks?
and the ability to function without the need for a video card.
Yes, right after Microsoft makes Windows open source--that's necessary to do that.
Even at the best compressions its performance pales in comparison to that offered by Win2K Termianl services and XP's Remote Desktop feature
Well, first, you haven't installed it for optimal performance. Second, Windows is closed source, and it's pretty much impossible for anybody to beat Microsoft at hooking into their operating system.
Besides, why should open source programmers bother?
In order to get good VNC performance with Windows, you need to install the video hook; it's usually not a bandwidth issue.
Seriously, it's usable even at ISDN speeds with X11. On Windows, you get iffy performance even on fast lines unless you install the VNC video driver hooks--without them, VNC has to guess at where updates are happening, and that takes a while. Sorry, but Microsoft doesn't have an open API for this sort of thing, otherwise VNC would be using it.
No. The next bandwidth crunch comes when Microsoft gets more serious about buffer overflows and sends out 30Mbyte servicepacks to everybody again and again. Internet radio can't compete with that, and Microsoft has more buffer overflows than the RIAA has songs :-)
Something in that direction is the ICOM PCR-100 receiver (serial port for control, audio output for--audio). Unfortunately, open source software seems less common in the amateur radio and shortwave communities--people seem to come from a DOS world, which limits what you can do with many of the computer controllable receivers and radios. Still, there is some software, e.g., http://qsy.to/pcr/control.html.
http://www.hexonet.de/software/x0rfbserver/
However, keep in mind that it's not very efficient: for Xvnc, the server is fully instrumented and can send minimal updates. For x0rfbserver, it has to guess for updates. So, it's nice when you need it, but Xvnc is usually a better choice.
If you do this a lot, you are much better off just starting an Xvnc server and using it wherever you happen to be, even if that is on the local machine.
If you need to ask, it probably isn't, for you.
The correct way to use VNC on any machine where security matters the least bit is to allow only local connections to it (-localhost flag) and use an ssh or stunnel connection to connect to it (both work on Windows, MacOSX, Linux, and UNIX).
Another approach is to have the VNC server make an outgoing connection to a known host and to use the vncviewer with the "-listen" flag. That lets you use a VNC server even if it's behind a firewall.
RDC/RDP isn't a standard: as usual, Microsoft took a bunch of ITU standards and hacked them up to make them incompatible with everything else.
Nor is there much to emulate. Microsoft's RDP isn't even in the same league with X11 in terms of functionality or performance over LANs. For dial-up connections, there are also good X11 protocol compression solutions. VNC outperforms RDP greatly in another area: it's a very simple, well-documented, open protocol that is easy to implement and works pretty much everywhere. There are VNC servers for 8bit machines, even. Furthermore, X11 and VNC clients and servers are available for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX, so you can already talk from any platform to any other platform with the open protocols.
People will be able to interoperate with Microsoft RDP via projects like RDesktop--as long as Microsoft lets them and on those odd days when they ship it (Windows XP Home doesn't come with it). Building anything else on top of RDP is like building on quicksand since the world can shift from under you whenever Ballmer feels like it. If Microsoft wanted you to use RDP for anything else, they would have picked an open standard.
These things can be spoofed pretty easily because they generally do not verify very well what they ought to verify: that they are looking at a live iris, not a contact lens. Worse, such contact lenses can be manufactured from photographs taken without a person's knowledge.
And "being completely voluntary" doesn't mean something doesn't invade someone's privacy. If you are being tracked, your privacy is being invaded--the only question is whether the invasion has other bad consequences, now or in the future. A lot of these mechanisms are well-intentioned when they start out, but future politicians figure out how to abuse them.
Furthermore, putting unreliable biometrics somewhere greatly increases my risk that my identity is being stolen (see above), and I certainly consider that an invasion of my privacy. I'd much rather have a hard-to-duplicate physical token--if I lose that, I know it, and I only have myself to blame.
But the thread somewhere along the line deteriorated into an unqualified "the Gimp interface is worse than Photoshop", and that I don't agree with.
I do. I wouldn't think of pressing "F1", I would type "man program".
Making Gimp and Linux like Windows is convenient for Windows users. But why should that be the goal of UI development on Linux? Can't we have multiple paradigms for interacting with computers? I can't fly a plane, but that doesn't mean that I demand that planes get the same user interface as cars just so that I can fly them more easily.
Your comfort and your learning curve, not my comfort and my learning curve.
For most users a PC is just a tool for writing letters, web browsing, playing games or some other task.
Good for them. So, why don't they keep using PCs running Windows? Why does my computer have to become just like theirs? My computers are used for very different purposes. It stands to reason that they should have a different interface.
Sure. And generations of researchers and engineers before Microsoft have discovered that. Sun had an even nicer concept, where your desktop surface itself also was a screen. Every few years, this becomes a "hot idea", and then it cools down again when people look at what it costs to deliver it.
This will, of course, happen sooner or later. But it's the display hardware wizards, not the folks in Redmond that will do it. Who gets the credit is, as usual, a different question.
The UNIX designers, in fact, realized 30 years ago that attributed file systems were a lousy idea and rejected the idea; in UNIX, if you want a bunch of things together, you stick them into a directory. Apple is now coming around to that idea, which is why applications now are usually small directory trees of components in OS X. Congratulations.
Only Microsoft hasn't figured it out yet (they are usually a little late), which is why they are gung-ho on building a Rube Goldberg attributed file system that will make Macintosh look like a toy. Microsoft will get over it, too, in a decade or two.
Most of the problems you talk about are due to UNIX being a piece of crap.
Well, if that were the case, then Apple made the wrong choice. Are you going to switch to Windows? Windows has an attributed file system throughout, and many of the other features you love so much on paper.
Well, how nice for you. But to a normal user, the whole concept of a "network preference pane" is an anathema.
I'm not saying it is utter perfection, but I feel like these are areas where OS X/Jaguar particularly shines.
OS X does a few very simple things well, and Apple is trying hard to fix things where they can--they really are. But when it comes down to it, unless someone is a nerd like you or me, they will have to turn for help in order to get anything but the simplest networking and peripherals working, just like they do with any other OS. OS X doesn't walk on water, although at least it manages to tread it.
The improvements that OS X offers over, say, Windows do make it worthwhile in my opinion, which is why I keep recommending it to people. But, in the end, I think OS X is a dead end of GUI development, just like Windows, Gnome, and KDE--the whole paradigm just doesn't work well.
You seem determined to dislike Linux. If you don't like the textual configuration files, you never have to touch them: just use GUI tools. That part is really no different from OS X, since it, too, has the text files and a GUI. The difference is that in OS X, things are even more complicated because there is also the Netinfo database.
On linux, which I dearly love, the number of ways to fuck up is almost endless. The sticky points on apple are partly a matter of getting used to them, not true problems.
Yup: problems are problems until you learn how to deal with them. Same for every system, even Linux and Windows.
The parent post was a very good summary of the real nuiscances I have found in OSX. But...and I dont know how to emphasize this enough... Those are ALL of the REAL nuiscances. ALL of them!
Well, no. Like any big system, there are plenty more, buried in APIs, system management, and other places.
ext3 is mainly useful when your computer does not gracefully survive crashes. I have noticed my mac is much more robust and thus has less need. but like RAID 5 its in the works and will be out.
That is just BS. "Gracefully surviving crashes" is a function of the file system and pretty much nothing else. "ext3" is the means by which a Linux system survives crashes gracefully and recovers very quickly afterwards, and it does (it mostly comes into play when a Linux laptop runs out of power). OS X manages to fix its file system most of the time, but it seems to take a long time to boot after a crash. And while OS X is almost as stable as Linux, it certainly isn't better in that regard.
And, come on, RAID 5 isn't an answer for desktop or laptops. Those come with one disk, and they should boot fast and reliably.
Altogether, you just keep making excluses. "Well, OS X does this, but it really doesn't matter...", "Well, OS X can't do this, but you are really a fool for wanting it to...", etc. Just face the facts: no operating is perfect. Linux requires a lot of fiddling in one area, and OS X requires a lot of fiddling in other areas.
Well, as I was saying: OS X is quite a nice system, otherwise I wouldn't be using it myself. But it just isn't a replacement for Linux or UNIX systems: sometimes OS X is better, and sometimes Linux or UNIX is better, even on laptops, depending on what it is being used for.
The resource fork. See here for an article that explains it: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/07/02/t erminal_5.html
That makes your machine a client of an AirPort network. I'm talking about setting up and configuring the AirPort device itself.
To set up the computer to the network I plugged it in. Automatic setup.
Yes, Apple has DHCP and (now) Rendezvous. Obviously, if you can use them, it's easy to get your machine on a network.
It gets hard when you need to set up things like PPPoE, dial-up, and direct Ethernet connections. Getting a fully functional setup with AirPort and DSL requires going through dozens of dialog boxes. Think that's some obscure setup? Think again: I had to talk several DSL users in my family through this over the phone. It's not pretty. Let's hope Rendezvous will improve the situation.
To set it up for the printer, I... well, I didn't do ANYTHING. That's right. I did nothing. From the first time I clicked print, there is a dropdown menu with the names of all the printers on the network, some I didn't even realize were hooked up.
Again, you live in an environment where someone has bothered setting up the network for you to make your life easy.
If you install the printer yourself, you may have to download drivers, install them, answer a bunch of odd questions, and go through some odd sequence ("don't plug in the printer before...", "now press the something-or-other"). Once the printer is plugged in, if there is a printer fault, like if it's turned off or out of paper, all printing stops and doesn't restart automatically. Restarting the printer is a minefield of dialog boxes and unobvious choices for a non-technical user.
This is in 10.1; I have no idea whether Apple has fixed this in 10.2, but that's besides the point. My point is that Apple, too, ships software that is hard to use.
Honestly, not only are these things not hard on OS X, but I couldn't imagine them being easier!
Well, you obviously haven't talked novice computer users through such configurations over the phone. You'd be surprised how many ways people can find in screwing up and how unobvious and unintuitive the OS X user interface is through the eyes of a novice.
To be honest, the only times things go smoothly are when I can tell people "type the following into a Terminal exactly as I say". Thank God that OS X has a good command line. The problem is that I don't have any idea of how to, say, configure the AirPort base station using command line tools, if it's even possible.
For example, he may think he was editing /etc/hosts, but reality is somewhat different. He may copy files with "cp" and discover that some important bits didn't make it. Cocoa looks really nice and descriptive (and I really like Objective-C's named arguments and object model), but it also has its dark sides, for example in the areas of resource management, error handling, and type safety. He'll also discover that there are two different kinds of path names that don't quite mesh and three different sets of APIs, no single one of which gives him complete access to the machine. Carbon and Cocoa applications take different key bindings and handle text differently. A "ps" and some graphics benchmarks will show him that Aqua really has a very hefty footprint and isn't all that speedy. He'll also discover that the Apple file systems (HFS+, UFS) are not all that great compared to what he can get on Linux (ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, ...).
Don't get me wrong: I think it's great that Apple is using a UNIX base, and I think they have done a great job with migrating from OS 9 to OS X. There are some really great programs on that platform. And I think there are quite a number of things Linux would do very well to copy from OS X. But the suggestion that OS X is the heavenly integration of UNIX and GUI that the world has strikes me as not realistic.
And it's not like that OS X has figured out how to eliminate user confusion, as you will find out when you try to talk computer novices through installations or system configuration over the phone. Yes, even OS X has lots of GUI tarpits: the printer system, AirPort configuration, and network configuration are pretty bad.
But when it comes down to it, I just don't see much difference between Gnome, KDE, OS X, and Windows. All of them let you move files around in roughly the same way, all of them associate files with applications, all of them have lots of dialog boxes with buttons and little rectangles to type into, etc. And all of them run roughly comparable sets of applications. What more do you want?