that would be insane, apple is now shipping the most widely distributed Unix in the world!
I think there are good reasons to doubt that. In web statistics, Linux usually is twice as popular as all Macintosh platforms combined (pre-OSX and OSX). Even on the desktop, OSX is probably a fraction of Linux system, and a small fraction of total UNIX-like systems.
And who will do the programming (which has to be done on a per-application basis)?
By whoever wants to make their application or toolkit conform with Apple guidelines. And, no, it doesn't have to be done on a per-application basis in most cases.
So I can right-click on any toolbar [... lots more if-buts deleted...]
You already can't in many native Macintosh aplpications. Macintosh applications already don't conform to Macintosh guidelines.
You are setting the bar higher for X11 than for Quartz. Many people don't care. Many users don't care either. My parents (who use Macs) doesn't care. Many developers won't conform no matter what you do.
Supporting X11 as another API in addition to Cocoa and Quartz will just give developers more free time to work on conformance.
Not conforming to the guidelines in Cocoa means changing the default behavior, which doesn't apply to X11-apps.
If you believe that merely using Cocoa APIs makes your application conform to Macintosh style guidelines, I have a bridge to sell you.
[Scientists and engineers] should be able to install XDarwin without Apple's help.
Even if I can, why should I bother? So far, for me, Mac OSX has made a nice replacement for Windows machines, but it is way more hassle than UNIX or Linux workstations for scientific work.
btw, was one of the first developers to work on XDarwin, so don't think I dislike it. I think there are places where it belongs to, but Apple's default install ain't one of them.
Apple can do whatever they like. But if they want to become a good alternative to UNIX and Linux workstations, as they advertise themselves as being, they must support UNIX and Linux standards more fully. Until they do, OSX will largely remain an OS for home users, students, and some artists, a nice alternative to Windows, but not much more.
I don't see why this is so hard to understand: "fink" and setting up XFree86 on OSX is beyond the capabilities of most Macintosh users. Trust me. I have been there, trying to help people do it.
Furthermore, if there is no binary package for something in fink, fink has to recompile the sources, and that does require downloading and installing the development environment.
You both display the kind of geekiness in your attitudes that Macintosh is supposed to protect users from. Come on, the main reason to use a Macintosh over some other UNIX workstation is that it "just works". Anything that requires downloading and fiddling around dozens of megabytes of stuff and going into the command line doesn't "just work".
What's your point? I didn't claim they were "equal". Theming is part of making applications look like OSX applications. The "theme" lets you adapt much of the visual appearance of an application to OSX guidelines, the "interaction style" lets you adapt most of the behavior. And the rest is a bit of programming to make X11 apps fully conforming to Apple's guidelines, running through an X11 server.
Cocoa and Quartz are side shows today--faintly 1980's in their design and without any ground breaking advantage.
Ok, you just admitted that you've never used them.
I own several Macs and have written some smaller Cocoa applications to see how much it had changed from NeXTStep. I have also used Objective-C on-and-off since the mid 1980's.
What about things like extension mapping, drag and drop, pasteboards, services, single mouse buttons, dock icon updates, dock menus, NSToolbars, etc...?
Drag an drop and clipboards are not only supported by X11 toolkits, they could be mapped transparently by the X11 server for the most common uses. Services can be supported with a small extension to the toolkit. Most toolkits already have support for arbitrary remapping of mouse actions, and that mapping can default for single-button mice, just like it does for native apps. Dock icons can be supported automatically. NSToolbars don't look or feel substantially different from any other kind of toolbar. Etc.
More generally, providing an X11 server for windowing doesn't mean that an application absolutely can't access Carbon or Cocoa. Quite to the contrary--by supporting X11 officially, Apple could define X11 equivalents for any Apple-specific desktop functionality, just like Gnome and KDE already do for their desktops.
I'm using [Mac style] on KDE, it feels like somebody removed the menu bar from the single window application and put it on the top of the screen. Not quite like Mac apps, where you can have multiple windows in a single app.
It's the same on both desktops. For example, you can only have a single window open with OSX "System Preferences", while you can have multiple windows open with KDE's Konqueror.
What it comes down to is this: people can and will write lots of Cocoa-based applications that don't conform to Apple guidelines. They already have, in fact. Much of that will happen through C++ frontends to Cocoa libraries.
Supporting X11 will simply let more scientists and engineers get their work done and give people more choices for the software they want to run. If Apple doesn't support it, fewer people will be using the Mac and fewer useful GUI apps will be available for the Mac. And that's not a good thing.
The only thing I noticed breaking was xterm. I downloaded the source and recompiled it under gcc 3.1 without incident. [...] I agree it would be nice if Apple bundled XFree86. However, installing it is not hard.
Requiring people to download X11 source code, fink, and the entire development environment in order to be able to pop up an xterm is absolutely ridiculous. That is both way beyond either the capabilities or patience of most scientific or engineering users.
People who haven't already switched to Windows are on UNIX workstations for a reason. If Apple wants them as customers, it is not sufficient to come out with a prettier and more robust version of Windows--they need to take workstation software standards seriously. BSD was a good start. X11 is the next step.
X11 apps use a plethora of ugly widget sets, all of which look and feel completely different from one another and from Aqua.
Apple won't stop those widget sets coming to Mac OSX--they'll just get Quartz backends and otherwise behave just like they did under X11. Apple could actually make the situation better by taking control of X11 on OSX, improving it, and standardizing things, as well as by allowing KDE and Gnome to provide native-looking OSX themes.
What this is really about isn't usability, it's about Apple trying to tie developers to their proprietary APIs. But I predict that's a losing battle: Cocoa and Quartz are side shows today--faintly 1980's in their design and without any ground breaking advantage. Most non-Carbon Mac development is happening, and will continue to happen, with C++ wrappers and Java.
Can you name a single X11 app that comes even close to conforming to the Apple UI guidelines?
Gnome, KDE, and many other X11 desktops and toolkits are completely themable and reconfigurable. You can make them look and behave as close to OSX as Apple's lawyers will allow. KDE, for example, already has options to put the titlebar at the top of the screen and choose Macintosh style focus behavior and shortcuts.
The availability of X11 native on OS X would discourage developers from making their applications at all Mac-like in appearance or functionality, leading to less mindshare for Apple's way of doing the GUI.
Yeah, and the lack of availability of X11 just discourages developers, period.
I have heard the arguments before, and my prediction is: Apple is hurting themselves big time by trying to herd developers to Cocoa-based ports. The should celebrate the fact that they have gotten a lot of interest from scientists and engineers and support their (potential) new customers; they can then worry about how to help those new customers and developers to develop Macintosh-y applications using their chosen tools.
Sadly, there is no X11 support in Mac OSX--X11 on OSX requires a separate download. It works acceptably well, but it is not well integrated with the OS. Also, when you upgrade to Jaguar, your X11 installation breaks and you need to reinstall it.
Apple really needs to support X11 officially alongside with Cocoa and Carbon. Vendors of OSX software (e.g., Matlab) clearly want to use it. Users need it for tens of thousands of educational and scientific packages that are not going to get rewritten. Supporting X11 would be very little cost or overhead, and it would make the machines a lot more interesting and attractive for scientific and engineering uers.
You don't need NVRAM--kernel panics don't result in a loss of dynamic RAM contents. Just write the data into a known chunk of RAM. Of course, on PCs, the BIOS may clear that, but that's a problem with the BIOS. The technique is much, much older than AIX.
If a laptop can play havoc with navigation and landing systems, there is something wrong with the navigation and landing systems. Banning laptops isn't going to fix this. Installing shielding or more robust airplane electronics are solutions.
Well, the video hardware clearly is working (though perhaps unaccelerated), since something is being displayed, so that paragraph is out of date. The question is: what point are they at now?
I couldn't find a lot of details on the web site. I suspect this involves changing the BIOS, right? Or can this be run simply by sticking a CD/DVD into the machine and powering it up?
How far are we from a Linux distribution for the Xbox that can be booted from CD? I think that would be great for a web server farm (or a home web server).
Take a handheld with an 802.11b card. Install VNC on it (comes preinstalled on the Zaurus, small download for PocketPC or Palm). Fire up your X10 home control software on your PC. Connect to your PC from the handheld using VNC. Control all your lights, stereo, MP3 player, etc. from your handheld.
If you want things to work a little more nicely, get Linux/X11-based X10 software, run an X11 server on your handheld (e.g., the handhelds.org distribution on your iPaq), and run the X11 application with the handheld as the display (that way, the application knows that the screen is small). Or, you can also run one of the open source Java or C based remote control apps directly on a Linux-based handheld and have it connect to the X10 home control device through a network serial port.
I think calling any of this "research" is really stretching things. Next thing you know, those people will patent it, and nerds like myself that have been doing this for a few years will have to buy their cumbersome software.
We don't imprison and kill people because we don't like what they say.
Sure we do--read your US history. The Haymarket Massacre and Kent State come to mind immediately. The history of American Indians, slavery, suffrage, and the civil rights movement provide plenty more examples.
There are lots of other ways in which speech or information can get you imprisoned for a long time or executed: "espionage", "child pornography", "promotion of terrorism", "treason", "incitement of civil unrest", etc.
Don't belittle our freedom or China's suffering by such a comparison.
It has nothing to do with belittling or judging the relative merits of the US and Chinese forms of governments. The US today is clearly freer and kills fewer of its citizens than China.
But you have to understand the history and the inconsistencies in our own position in order to deal effectively with the Chinese. When we think they restrict free speech, they think they are preventing riots and political instability. If we want them to change, we better make some pretty convincing arguments. Your kind of self-righteous drivel isn't going to cut it.
And there is plenty more work we have to do at home. Free speech in the US is not exactly all that alive and well, given the concentration of media power in a small number of private hands. Sure, we can talk here, but 99% of Americans are going to believe the junk that FOX feeds them. And try to hold a public rally or demonstration in a mall or any other place where most people actually spend their time--most have gotten privatized and don't have to bother with niceties like allowing free speech.
Colloidal silver won't cure AIDS or a lot of other diseases, and I wouldn't want to endorse the mail order trade in it. But it's important to remember that silver and silver compounds were, and still are, used for treating or preventing some infections and except for occasional skin discoloration seem quite safe. Conceivably, they might have some other uses if someone invested the money to do the research.
The real reason people don't look at such medicines is not a conspiracy but lack of economic incentive: unpatentable medicines are of little economic interest to drug companies. That's why we get dozens of useless cold treatments and no drugs for many other diseases.
So, China doesn't like its citizens to see subversive or immoral content on the Internet. The US sends in the FBI when people look at the latest Windows distribution, teenagers having sex, or a bootlegged Britney Spears video on the Internet.
In my opinion, both the US and China have, in different ways, crossed the line of what is reasonable in terms of controlling on-line information. Both societies seem to be driven by irrational fear, and neither is afraid to crush people with the full force of the respective government and police force.
(What would be reasonable you ask? In the US, copyright violations should be treated as civil matters, not criminal matters. Tax payers shouldn't have to pay for enforcing conformance to bizarre contractual obligations imposed by companies like Microsoft.)
The existence of a patent somewhere in the world should not affect the GPL. After all, there are many places where MP3 isn't patented--should a patent in one part of the world invalidate the GPL license of a piece of software somewhere else?
Basically, all the GPL can do is keep someone who holds a patent from redistributing the software unless the patent holder allows the patent to be used freely with the GPL'ed software and its derivatives.
I can't tell whether this is just some sort of Slashdot hangup or whether people actually think the plural of "virus" is "virii". Look it up in a dictionary. The plural of "virus" is "viruses"--no other form is acceptable in English.
Re:At $100, this could be a good platform
on
An R2 Of Your Own
·
· Score: 2
If you don't get it, perhaps we should revoke your nerd membership. Also, this has nothing to do with "open source", as you seem to suggest. The fact that when a bunch of unrelated people collaborates on something, the result ends up being open source is incidental.
What I find much more tedious is that whenever a bunch of people want to do something fun with hardware or software, a bunch of people like you come out of the woodworks who put it down. Go back to hacking MS SQL Server and stop bothering us.
They "Ideal Size" was important because everybody who copied Palm's size noticed improved sales.
That is why Palm products tend to have the same size?
Several PDAs had the same size and comparable feature set at around the same time.
Maybe, but remember, Palm founders had a lot of industry experience (with hand-held products) which would likely increase the odds of success and a date with Lady Luck.
Of course, it took someone with experience to succeed. Luck came in when this particular device, rather than a dozen others around at around the same time, made it. Luck also came in with the acceptance of Graffiti, which was really a long shot and likely does not represent a preferred input method for most users--it simply appealed to the all important initial user population.
It wasn't luck, it was market research. [...] Palm's experience developing the software for that handheld led them to develop a more ideal device. This is how the industry works,
Really, it was luck. Palm wasn't the first to figure out this form factor and feature set--several other companies had done it before, but they were a little too early to market. On the other hand, if Palm had delivered their product, say, a year later, they'd probably have failed as well as other products were coming along.
linux users that can even launch netscape wthout creating kernel panics.
That is both an obnoxious misrepresentation and absurd. Both Linux and OS X are highly reliable. Running the two side-by-side, I'd say that, if anything, Linux is a little more stable than OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there are good reasons to doubt that. In web statistics, Linux usually is twice as popular as all Macintosh platforms combined (pre-OSX and OSX). Even on the desktop, OSX is probably a fraction of Linux system, and a small fraction of total UNIX-like systems.
By whoever wants to make their application or toolkit conform with Apple guidelines. And, no, it doesn't have to be done on a per-application basis in most cases.
So I can right-click on any toolbar [... lots more if-buts deleted ...]
You already can't in many native Macintosh aplpications. Macintosh applications already don't conform to Macintosh guidelines.
You are setting the bar higher for X11 than for Quartz. Many people don't care. Many users don't care either. My parents (who use Macs) doesn't care. Many developers won't conform no matter what you do.
Supporting X11 as another API in addition to Cocoa and Quartz will just give developers more free time to work on conformance.
Not conforming to the guidelines in Cocoa means changing the default behavior, which doesn't apply to X11-apps.
If you believe that merely using Cocoa APIs makes your application conform to Macintosh style guidelines, I have a bridge to sell you.
[Scientists and engineers] should be able to install XDarwin without Apple's help.
Even if I can, why should I bother? So far, for me, Mac OSX has made a nice replacement for Windows machines, but it is way more hassle than UNIX or Linux workstations for scientific work.
btw, was one of the first developers to work on XDarwin, so don't think I dislike it. I think there are places where it belongs to, but Apple's default install ain't one of them.
Apple can do whatever they like. But if they want to become a good alternative to UNIX and Linux workstations, as they advertise themselves as being, they must support UNIX and Linux standards more fully. Until they do, OSX will largely remain an OS for home users, students, and some artists, a nice alternative to Windows, but not much more.
Furthermore, if there is no binary package for something in fink, fink has to recompile the sources, and that does require downloading and installing the development environment.
You both display the kind of geekiness in your attitudes that Macintosh is supposed to protect users from. Come on, the main reason to use a Macintosh over some other UNIX workstation is that it "just works". Anything that requires downloading and fiddling around dozens of megabytes of stuff and going into the command line doesn't "just work".
What's your point? I didn't claim they were "equal". Theming is part of making applications look like OSX applications. The "theme" lets you adapt much of the visual appearance of an application to OSX guidelines, the "interaction style" lets you adapt most of the behavior. And the rest is a bit of programming to make X11 apps fully conforming to Apple's guidelines, running through an X11 server.
Cocoa and Quartz are side shows today--faintly 1980's in their design and without any ground breaking advantage.
Ok, you just admitted that you've never used them.
I own several Macs and have written some smaller Cocoa applications to see how much it had changed from NeXTStep. I have also used Objective-C on-and-off since the mid 1980's.
What about things like extension mapping, drag and drop, pasteboards, services, single mouse buttons, dock icon updates, dock menus, NSToolbars, etc...?
Drag an drop and clipboards are not only supported by X11 toolkits, they could be mapped transparently by the X11 server for the most common uses. Services can be supported with a small extension to the toolkit. Most toolkits already have support for arbitrary remapping of mouse actions, and that mapping can default for single-button mice, just like it does for native apps. Dock icons can be supported automatically. NSToolbars don't look or feel substantially different from any other kind of toolbar. Etc.
More generally, providing an X11 server for windowing doesn't mean that an application absolutely can't access Carbon or Cocoa. Quite to the contrary--by supporting X11 officially, Apple could define X11 equivalents for any Apple-specific desktop functionality, just like Gnome and KDE already do for their desktops.
I'm using [Mac style] on KDE, it feels like somebody removed the menu bar from the single window application and put it on the top of the screen. Not quite like Mac apps, where you can have multiple windows in a single app.
It's the same on both desktops. For example, you can only have a single window open with OSX "System Preferences", while you can have multiple windows open with KDE's Konqueror.
What it comes down to is this: people can and will write lots of Cocoa-based applications that don't conform to Apple guidelines. They already have, in fact. Much of that will happen through C++ frontends to Cocoa libraries.
Supporting X11 will simply let more scientists and engineers get their work done and give people more choices for the software they want to run. If Apple doesn't support it, fewer people will be using the Mac and fewer useful GUI apps will be available for the Mac. And that's not a good thing.
Requiring people to download X11 source code, fink, and the entire development environment in order to be able to pop up an xterm is absolutely ridiculous. That is both way beyond either the capabilities or patience of most scientific or engineering users.
People who haven't already switched to Windows are on UNIX workstations for a reason. If Apple wants them as customers, it is not sufficient to come out with a prettier and more robust version of Windows--they need to take workstation software standards seriously. BSD was a good start. X11 is the next step.
Apple won't stop those widget sets coming to Mac OSX--they'll just get Quartz backends and otherwise behave just like they did under X11. Apple could actually make the situation better by taking control of X11 on OSX, improving it, and standardizing things, as well as by allowing KDE and Gnome to provide native-looking OSX themes.
What this is really about isn't usability, it's about Apple trying to tie developers to their proprietary APIs. But I predict that's a losing battle: Cocoa and Quartz are side shows today--faintly 1980's in their design and without any ground breaking advantage. Most non-Carbon Mac development is happening, and will continue to happen, with C++ wrappers and Java.
Can you name a single X11 app that comes even close to conforming to the Apple UI guidelines?
Gnome, KDE, and many other X11 desktops and toolkits are completely themable and reconfigurable. You can make them look and behave as close to OSX as Apple's lawyers will allow. KDE, for example, already has options to put the titlebar at the top of the screen and choose Macintosh style focus behavior and shortcuts.
The availability of X11 native on OS X would discourage developers from making their applications at all Mac-like in appearance or functionality, leading to less mindshare for Apple's way of doing the GUI.
Yeah, and the lack of availability of X11 just discourages developers, period.
I have heard the arguments before, and my prediction is: Apple is hurting themselves big time by trying to herd developers to Cocoa-based ports. The should celebrate the fact that they have gotten a lot of interest from scientists and engineers and support their (potential) new customers; they can then worry about how to help those new customers and developers to develop Macintosh-y applications using their chosen tools.
Apple really needs to support X11 officially alongside with Cocoa and Carbon. Vendors of OSX software (e.g., Matlab) clearly want to use it. Users need it for tens of thousands of educational and scientific packages that are not going to get rewritten. Supporting X11 would be very little cost or overhead, and it would make the machines a lot more interesting and attractive for scientific and engineering uers.
You don't need NVRAM--kernel panics don't result in a loss of dynamic RAM contents. Just write the data into a known chunk of RAM. Of course, on PCs, the BIOS may clear that, but that's a problem with the BIOS. The technique is much, much older than AIX.
If a laptop can play havoc with navigation and landing systems, there is something wrong with the navigation and landing systems. Banning laptops isn't going to fix this. Installing shielding or more robust airplane electronics are solutions.
Some simpler X11-based toolkits should run fine on that kind of machine, but KDE and Gnome are both pretty resource hungry.
Well, the video hardware clearly is working (though perhaps unaccelerated), since something is being displayed, so that paragraph is out of date. The question is: what point are they at now?
I wonder whether your German is any better than their English.
How far are we from a Linux distribution for the Xbox that can be booted from CD? I think that would be great for a web server farm (or a home web server).
If you want things to work a little more nicely, get Linux/X11-based X10 software, run an X11 server on your handheld (e.g., the handhelds.org distribution on your iPaq), and run the X11 application with the handheld as the display (that way, the application knows that the screen is small). Or, you can also run one of the open source Java or C based remote control apps directly on a Linux-based handheld and have it connect to the X10 home control device through a network serial port.
I think calling any of this "research" is really stretching things. Next thing you know, those people will patent it, and nerds like myself that have been doing this for a few years will have to buy their cumbersome software.
Sure we do--read your US history. The Haymarket Massacre and Kent State come to mind immediately. The history of American Indians, slavery, suffrage, and the civil rights movement provide plenty more examples.
There are lots of other ways in which speech or information can get you imprisoned for a long time or executed: "espionage", "child pornography", "promotion of terrorism", "treason", "incitement of civil unrest", etc.
Don't belittle our freedom or China's suffering by such a comparison.
It has nothing to do with belittling or judging the relative merits of the US and Chinese forms of governments. The US today is clearly freer and kills fewer of its citizens than China.
But you have to understand the history and the inconsistencies in our own position in order to deal effectively with the Chinese. When we think they restrict free speech, they think they are preventing riots and political instability. If we want them to change, we better make some pretty convincing arguments. Your kind of self-righteous drivel isn't going to cut it.
And there is plenty more work we have to do at home. Free speech in the US is not exactly all that alive and well, given the concentration of media power in a small number of private hands. Sure, we can talk here, but 99% of Americans are going to believe the junk that FOX feeds them. And try to hold a public rally or demonstration in a mall or any other place where most people actually spend their time--most have gotten privatized and don't have to bother with niceties like allowing free speech.
The real reason people don't look at such medicines is not a conspiracy but lack of economic incentive: unpatentable medicines are of little economic interest to drug companies. That's why we get dozens of useless cold treatments and no drugs for many other diseases.
In my opinion, both the US and China have, in different ways, crossed the line of what is reasonable in terms of controlling on-line information. Both societies seem to be driven by irrational fear, and neither is afraid to crush people with the full force of the respective government and police force.
(What would be reasonable you ask? In the US, copyright violations should be treated as civil matters, not criminal matters. Tax payers shouldn't have to pay for enforcing conformance to bizarre contractual obligations imposed by companies like Microsoft.)
Basically, all the GPL can do is keep someone who holds a patent from redistributing the software unless the patent holder allows the patent to be used freely with the GPL'ed software and its derivatives.
Never assume free online dictionaries are complete as to all words existent in a language.
Where do you believe that I assumed that?
"Virii" isn't not a Latin plural of any known word. The most plausible latin nominative plural would be "viri", but some people don't buy that.
What I find much more tedious is that whenever a bunch of people want to do something fun with hardware or software, a bunch of people like you come out of the woodworks who put it down. Go back to hacking MS SQL Server and stop bothering us.
Several PDAs had the same size and comparable feature set at around the same time.
Maybe, but remember, Palm founders had a lot of industry experience (with hand-held products) which would likely increase the odds of success and a date with Lady Luck.
Of course, it took someone with experience to succeed. Luck came in when this particular device, rather than a dozen others around at around the same time, made it. Luck also came in with the acceptance of Graffiti, which was really a long shot and likely does not represent a preferred input method for most users--it simply appealed to the all important initial user population.
Really, it was luck. Palm wasn't the first to figure out this form factor and feature set--several other companies had done it before, but they were a little too early to market. On the other hand, if Palm had delivered their product, say, a year later, they'd probably have failed as well as other products were coming along.
That is both an obnoxious misrepresentation and absurd. Both Linux and OS X are highly reliable. Running the two side-by-side, I'd say that, if anything, Linux is a little more stable than OS X.
The pain doesn't go away--trying to figure out what add-ons are OS X compatible is a lot of work.