The US kills a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians and you don't give a shit.
A tsunami kills a couple hundred thousand Asians and you don't give a shit.
One American female who wants to die and every hypocritical rightwing Christian piece of shit comes out from under their rocks and makes a big deal out of it.
That wasn't the point of the post, if I'm not mistaken.
The point of the post is that Apple did NOT copy Microsoft as Thurrott has alleged.
And actually, yes, I DO believe that Microsoft would indeed go through the patents files and cherry-pick ones they want to implem^H^H^H^H^H^H "embrace and extend and extinguish".
Gates has been "announcing" desktop search for the last ten or fifteen years or so...
So, sure, anybody who actually does it since then is "copying".
Never mind that Gates has yet to actually deliver a product, of course.
Of course, one could go back to Jerry Pournelle who predicted twenty years ago that most of human knowledge would be available via the PC and claim Gates just copied him.
This is how Microsoft works - Gates predicts that the next version of their software will be "the best", "awesome", whatever. This keeps his customers hooked on Windows. Every biography of Gates has mentioned this characteristic of his.
Dan Ackroyd called this in the "Blues Brothers": "It's not lies. It's just...bullshit!"
"Most aspects of the Windows GUI are blatently obvious"
You've blatantly obviously forgotten how you learned Windows and also have blatantly obviously never seen a co-worker struggling to do so.
I had to learn Windows three years ago (at the same time I learned Linux) and I can testify that there is almost NOTHING obvious about it (other than being aware that clicking a mouse on something makes something happen. Duh!)
Well, you know they're supposed to be "UNIX technology leaders" - who can't do a ps2pdf run...
Or maybe their finances are so bad they don't have enough employees around to do one...
This really plumbs the depths of pathetic and petty. A company who behaves like this really should be shut down by the courts as a matter of public decency.
Of course, if that were true, most of the corporations in America would be out of business by Tuesday.
Windows 2000 Pro dropped my system two weeks ago because the piece of shit couldn't handle a 160GB (>137G) hard drive while dual-booting with Windows XP.
The piece of shit would actually format a partition to FAT32, tell me it's "healthy", then Bart's PE XP kernel would tell me it was STILL NTFS!
And it would then proceed to store data written to that partition to some other partition - including the Windows XP partition - crashing both systems.
Oh, you say, that was fixed in Service Pack 3?
Oh, yeah (again)?
Look up the Microsoft Knowledge Base article that says Windows 2000 SP3 can't read the partition table correctly on "some hard drives". Supposedly corrected in SP4 - which however, I applied separately after installing Windows w/SP3 - where the damage was already done.
WHICH hard drives? WHY? WHEN? Oh, perish forbid that MS would tell anybody this.
I'm now limited to Windows XP (and RH 7.3) on this machine because I CANNOT TRUST Windows 2000 at all on something this basic.
Of course, I've had Linux do the same thing on my old Compaq, so MS is not the only one that STILL can't get the goddamn partition table right after TWENTY YEARS.
ONE GODDAMN SECTOR and NOBODY can get it right YET.
This is completely illustrative of what is WRONG with the IT industry - commercial AND open-source.
Check out the currently-in-release (actually next week, I believe, for most of the US) "The Boys and Girl From County Clare", with Colm Meany, Bernard Hill, and Andrea Corr. A comedy/drama about two estranged brothers competing with each other in a traditional Irish music competition - with an underlying love story involving Andrea and Shaun Evans (now her real-life boyfriend) and family secrets.
Lots of trad Irish music - not that much comedy. Good character actors - and new-comer Andrea got a "Best Actress in a Comedy" award from the HBO Comedy Film Festival.
Getting mostly good reviews.
They're promoting Andrea heavily for the film, even over the old-timers Meany and Hill, her being a rock star and all. But everybody agrees she did a good job.
Should have heard Andrea Corr on the Richard and Judy show in England get irritated when they quoted some idiot journalist who reported she had trouble with the accent in "The Boys and Girl From County Clare" movie (currently in release).
Then they COMPOUNDED the stupidity by doing a skit in which their English researchers imitated various stupid concepts of Irish phrases - including the obligatory "Lucy Charms" reference.
They only escaped being lynched by Andrea by admitting the concept was thought up by one of their staff - who actually was Irish.
The Corrs have been very clear about the fact that there is a "new Ireland" and they don't want to be saddled with the old stereotypes any more.
OTOH, they also admit they don't mind drinking a bit...if it gets a laugh, anyway.
Having spent the last couple MONTHS trying to get a Web site to:
1) Load external content using iframes or object tags in four different browsers;
2) use CSS to emulate frames in four different browsers (all current - forget about the older ones entirely);
it is clear to me that the Web industry is screwed up beyond all recognition.
Big surprise - it's a part of the IT industry...
First, the Web was never intended to be either an application platform or a desktop publishing platform - which seems to be what a lot of Web site designers and standards committees want to achieve.
Sorry, the technology simply isn't there in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to do this.
Second, the industry has as usual spent all of its time producing dozens of browsers - NONE of which support the standards in their ENTIRETY and ALL of which are incompatible with every other browser in existence in at least some respects.
Microsoft of course, as usual, is the worst offender. Web designers talk about the "IE factor" - the incompatibility and bugginess of IE with respect to virtually every standard which adds twenty percent or more to the development time for a Web site.
The industry has a LONG way to go to get the same functionality as client-server approaches to app implementation.
And as long as Microsoft is in the game, it ain't ever gonna happen.
My advice:
1) Stop trying to make your Web site FANCY (which is not the same as making it LOOK GOOD) and start trying to make it USEFUL to people.
2) If you want a "Web app", use other technology than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
"One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a flawed standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it.'"
Sure.
We'll support standards Real Soon Now...
Bullshit.
This release is just to counter FireFox's rise and has absolutely no other purpose but to give people any excuse to stay attached to IE.
Angelina Jolie is the one. Nobody can kick ass like her! Watch her kick Brad Pitt's ass in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" this summer.
Besides, she has the mouth...
Although I gotta admit, I really liked the way Cathy Lee Crosby played the role in the TV movie years ago. The bit with the snake and the dish of milk was cool.
All of which is irrelevant to my point: that having two separate desktop platforms leads to faster evolution of them both than would occur if they were one single monolithic group.
As for the desktop metaphor, if Windows and Apple did not exist, somebody would have eventually rediscovered the Xerox PARC machines which stimulated Apple (and of course Windows is just a poor copy of Apple).
As for whether either KDE or GNOME are "revolutionary", I never said they were. Irrelevant to my point.
Faster than they would if they were one monolithic project. Is that comprehensible to you?
"Faster than Apple" is irrelevant. Apple was faster to begin with and is still faster than Windows - unless of course you count the stupid "drag files to be ejected to the trashcan" idiocy.
Microsoft probably has tons more developers working on the Windows GUI than Apple has on its GUI. Do you see Windows GUI better than Apple?
I didn't think so.
Throwing bodies at a project makes it worse - which was proven thirty or forty years ago at IBM.
As for the menus still being confusing, I suspect that is more the fault of the idiots at the distros than the developers writing the underlying code for the desktop platforms. In any event, some of the distros are waking up to the fact and some of their menus are getting better.
I didn't say I couldn't figure out how to switch to classic. I said the default menu was too different from classic to be tolerable - especially since it was SERIOUSLY "dumbed down" with long sentences instead of clearly defined functional sections.
Your suggestion that forks cause the "splitting in half" of development teams is nonsense. Development teams are not babies to be split in half by Solomon. Both teams watch what the other is doing, and any significant advances in either will eventually find their way into the other one (unlike in proprietary systems where the code is "patented").
You simply don't understand the concept of competition at all, apparently.
"So what if some company wants to write some application for linux, what do they choose?"
Whichever one they want since most distros load both libraries. And I don't think it's a good idea for a distro to settle on one without loading both libraries as a hedge. There are good programs in both platforms and the user should be allowed to choose which ones they want to use.
If grandma has never used Windows, she will have absolutely no problem learning Linux. That has been established for some time now by numerous persons who have described exactly that occurrence.
No, I did not answer my own criticism. Do you expect "grandma" to even know what switching back to "classic view" even means - if she can find it? I love how "grandma" can ALWAYS figure out Windows - even if she's never used it - but can NEVER figure out Linux. In other words, bullshit...
"We" do not need a standard desktop. A given corporation can standardize on any desktop it wants. That's what a corporation needs. Individual users should have more choice (in fact, I'd argue that even many corporations, depending on size and support needs, need choice.)
"Under Windows, most programs just run a setup.exe or install.exe (sometimes replace exe with msi)"
In fact, you're supposed to go through the Add/Remove Programs process - and when you do that in 2000 and XP, it will by default only show you msi programs. You can have to use the drop-down menu in the Open dialog to see other types of programs - which, since most apps still install using other types of programs - is a PITA.
"There is no easy way to setup users and permissions or anything like that unless you RTFM."
Oh, horseshit! Linux has had Webmin for ages, now. And if you think using Windows 2000 and XP control panel and NTFS permissions are easy, then why are there CLASSES AT COLLEGE LEVEL in those subjects? Why did Microsoft move Group Policy to its own Management Console? Because admins couldn't figure out how to use it, that's why.
Windows is NOT a task oriented interface - even with its so-called "Wizards". Doing anything beyond the obvious is absolutely not "intuitive" in any sense of the word.
AND it's a bug-ridden piece of shit. For the last two weeks, my system has been down and out while I tried to figure out why Windows 2000 and XP crashed when I crossed the 137GB boundary despite having 2000 Service Pack 3 and 4 and XP Service Pack 1 and 2. The other day I found an obscure Microsoft Knowledgebase article that points out that Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 doesn't read the partition table correctly for "some hard drives"! Thanks a whole fucking lot, Bill! Why not tell us WHICH hard drives, WHEN and WHY?
Not only that, the piece of shit Disk Manager in Windows 2000 set up and formatted a partition as FAT32 - and declared it "healthy" - and when I booted with Bart's PE, that XP kernel declared the partition to still be NTFS! (Confirmed by Partition Magic!)
And then for grins I had the defragmenter look at the root partition - and despite the partition being up only three days with only a couple programs installed, the defragmenter recommended defragging! And when it was defragged, the dual-boot Windows XP partition reverted to default screen settings!
Don't try dual-booting Windows 2000 and XP on "some" hard drives larger than 137GB! They will drive you NUTS with phantom partitions and files that can't be seen by either OS - even though they are allegedly on the exact same FAT32 partition.
"I can see how someone could get used to Linux and therefore they are more familiar with it, but it has never seemed intuitive to me."
Well, I had to learn Linux and Windows AT THE SAME TIME. And I can tell you from that experience that NEITHER are particularly "intuitive" in any sense of the word that I am familiar with.
Which is why I re-iterate: anybody who says Windows is easier to use than Linux is simply wrong.
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Which matters to you how?
The US kills a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians and you don't give a shit.
A tsunami kills a couple hundred thousand Asians and you don't give a shit.
One American female who wants to die and every hypocritical rightwing Christian piece of shit comes out from under their rocks and makes a big deal out of it.
Fuck you AND your God, homes.
No chance.
Google mindshare is WAY too big to be overtaken by something embedded in Longhorn. The Netscape case doesn't even compare.
That wasn't the point of the post, if I'm not mistaken.
The point of the post is that Apple did NOT copy Microsoft as Thurrott has alleged.
And actually, yes, I DO believe that Microsoft would indeed go through the patents files and cherry-pick ones they want to implem^H^H^H^H^H^H "embrace and extend and extinguish".
Well, in one sense, Paul is "right".
Gates has been "announcing" desktop search for the last ten or fifteen years or so...
So, sure, anybody who actually does it since then is "copying".
Never mind that Gates has yet to actually deliver a product, of course.
Of course, one could go back to Jerry Pournelle who predicted twenty years ago that most of human knowledge would be available via the PC and claim Gates just copied him.
This is how Microsoft works - Gates predicts that the next version of their software will be "the best", "awesome", whatever. This keeps his customers hooked on Windows. Every biography of Gates has mentioned this characteristic of his.
Dan Ackroyd called this in the "Blues Brothers": "It's not lies. It's just...bullshit!"
"Most aspects of the Windows GUI are blatently obvious"
You've blatantly obviously forgotten how you learned Windows and also have blatantly obviously never seen a co-worker struggling to do so.
I had to learn Windows three years ago (at the same time I learned Linux) and I can testify that there is almost NOTHING obvious about it (other than being aware that clicking a mouse on something makes something happen. Duh!)
Apple didn't bring PCs to the masses?
Oh, you were born after the 1980's, right?
Moron.
Not according to SCO.
Everything derivative is theirs.
Oh,wait, I forgot - Microsoft funded them, too.
Never mind.
Well, you know they're supposed to be "UNIX technology leaders" - who can't do a ps2pdf run...
Or maybe their finances are so bad they don't have enough employees around to do one...
This really plumbs the depths of pathetic and petty. A company who behaves like this really should be shut down by the courts as a matter of public decency.
Of course, if that were true, most of the corporations in America would be out of business by Tuesday.
Oh, yeah?
Windows 2000 Pro dropped my system two weeks ago because the piece of shit couldn't handle a 160GB (>137G) hard drive while dual-booting with Windows XP.
The piece of shit would actually format a partition to FAT32, tell me it's "healthy", then Bart's PE XP kernel would tell me it was STILL NTFS!
And it would then proceed to store data written to that partition to some other partition - including the Windows XP partition - crashing both systems.
Oh, you say, that was fixed in Service Pack 3?
Oh, yeah (again)?
Look up the Microsoft Knowledge Base article that says Windows 2000 SP3 can't read the partition table correctly on "some hard drives". Supposedly corrected in SP4 - which however, I applied separately after installing Windows w/SP3 - where the damage was already done.
WHICH hard drives? WHY? WHEN? Oh, perish forbid that MS would tell anybody this.
I'm now limited to Windows XP (and RH 7.3) on this machine because I CANNOT TRUST Windows 2000 at all on something this basic.
Of course, I've had Linux do the same thing on my old Compaq, so MS is not the only one that STILL can't get the goddamn partition table right after TWENTY YEARS.
ONE GODDAMN SECTOR and NOBODY can get it right YET.
This is completely illustrative of what is WRONG with the IT industry - commercial AND open-source.
"What could be better than a clean conscience?"
A BIG porn collection?
Check out the currently-in-release (actually next week, I believe, for most of the US) "The Boys and Girl From County Clare", with Colm Meany, Bernard Hill, and Andrea Corr. A comedy/drama about two estranged brothers competing with each other in a traditional Irish music competition - with an underlying love story involving Andrea and Shaun Evans (now her real-life boyfriend) and family secrets.
Lots of trad Irish music - not that much comedy. Good character actors - and new-comer Andrea got a "Best Actress in a Comedy" award from the HBO Comedy Film Festival.
Getting mostly good reviews.
They're promoting Andrea heavily for the film, even over the old-timers Meany and Hill, her being a rock star and all. But everybody agrees she did a good job.
Here's the Web site.
Ireland was already ahead...
They had the Corrs...
Got that right!
Should have heard Andrea Corr on the Richard and Judy show in England get irritated when they quoted some idiot journalist who reported she had trouble with the accent in "The Boys and Girl From County Clare" movie (currently in release).
Then they COMPOUNDED the stupidity by doing a skit in which their English researchers imitated various stupid concepts of Irish phrases - including the obligatory "Lucy Charms" reference.
They only escaped being lynched by Andrea by admitting the concept was thought up by one of their staff - who actually was Irish.
The Corrs have been very clear about the fact that there is a "new Ireland" and they don't want to be saddled with the old stereotypes any more.
OTOH, they also admit they don't mind drinking a bit...if it gets a laugh, anyway.
Having spent the last couple MONTHS trying to get a Web site to:
1) Load external content using iframes or object tags in four different browsers;
2) use CSS to emulate frames in four different browsers (all current - forget about the older ones entirely);
it is clear to me that the Web industry is screwed up beyond all recognition.
Big surprise - it's a part of the IT industry...
First, the Web was never intended to be either an application platform or a desktop publishing platform - which seems to be what a lot of Web site designers and standards committees want to achieve.
Sorry, the technology simply isn't there in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to do this.
Second, the industry has as usual spent all of its time producing dozens of browsers - NONE of which support the standards in their ENTIRETY and ALL of which are incompatible with every other browser in existence in at least some respects.
Microsoft of course, as usual, is the worst offender. Web designers talk about the "IE factor" - the incompatibility and bugginess of IE with respect to virtually every standard which adds twenty percent or more to the development time for a Web site.
The industry has a LONG way to go to get the same functionality as client-server approaches to app implementation.
And as long as Microsoft is in the game, it ain't ever gonna happen.
My advice:
1) Stop trying to make your Web site FANCY (which is not the same as making it LOOK GOOD) and start trying to make it USEFUL to people.
2) If you want a "Web app", use other technology than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
"One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a flawed standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it.'"
Sure.
We'll support standards Real Soon Now...
Bullshit.
This release is just to counter FireFox's rise and has absolutely no other purpose but to give people any excuse to stay attached to IE.
Typical MS crap.
Angelina Jolie is the one. Nobody can kick ass like her! Watch her kick Brad Pitt's ass in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" this summer.
Besides, she has the mouth...
Although I gotta admit, I really liked the way Cathy Lee Crosby played the role in the TV movie years ago. The bit with the snake and the dish of milk was cool.
All of which is irrelevant to my point: that having two separate desktop platforms leads to faster evolution of them both than would occur if they were one single monolithic group.
As for the desktop metaphor, if Windows and Apple did not exist, somebody would have eventually rediscovered the Xerox PARC machines which stimulated Apple (and of course Windows is just a poor copy of Apple).
As for whether either KDE or GNOME are "revolutionary", I never said they were. Irrelevant to my point.
"Faster than what?"
Faster than they would if they were one monolithic project. Is that comprehensible to you?
"Faster than Apple" is irrelevant. Apple was faster to begin with and is still faster than Windows - unless of course you count the stupid "drag files to be ejected to the trashcan" idiocy.
Microsoft probably has tons more developers working on the Windows GUI than Apple has on its GUI. Do you see Windows GUI better than Apple?
I didn't think so.
Throwing bodies at a project makes it worse - which was proven thirty or forty years ago at IBM.
As for the menus still being confusing, I suspect that is more the fault of the idiots at the distros than the developers writing the underlying code for the desktop platforms. In any event, some of the distros are waking up to the fact and some of their menus are getting better.
I didn't say I couldn't figure out how to switch to classic. I said the default menu was too different from classic to be tolerable - especially since it was SERIOUSLY "dumbed down" with long sentences instead of clearly defined functional sections.
Your suggestion that forks cause the "splitting in half" of development teams is nonsense. Development teams are not babies to be split in half by Solomon. Both teams watch what the other is doing, and any significant advances in either will eventually find their way into the other one (unlike in proprietary systems where the code is "patented").
You simply don't understand the concept of competition at all, apparently.
"So what if some company wants to write some application for linux, what do they choose?"
Whichever one they want since most distros load both libraries. And I don't think it's a good idea for a distro to settle on one without loading both libraries as a hedge. There are good programs in both platforms and the user should be allowed to choose which ones they want to use.
If grandma has never used Windows, she will have absolutely no problem learning Linux. That has been established for some time now by numerous persons who have described exactly that occurrence.
No, I did not answer my own criticism. Do you expect "grandma" to even know what switching back to "classic view" even means - if she can find it? I love how "grandma" can ALWAYS figure out Windows - even if she's never used it - but can NEVER figure out Linux. In other words, bullshit...
"We" do not need a standard desktop. A given corporation can standardize on any desktop it wants. That's what a corporation needs. Individual users should have more choice (in fact, I'd argue that even many corporations, depending on size and support needs, need choice.)
Missed the point of "spyware, or a dialer", did we?
Note to Security Administrator: wipe this guy's hard drive before the whole company gets infected.
"Under Windows, most programs just run a setup.exe or install.exe (sometimes replace exe with msi)"
In fact, you're supposed to go through the Add/Remove Programs process - and when you do that in 2000 and XP, it will by default only show you msi programs. You can have to use the drop-down menu in the Open dialog to see other types of programs - which, since most apps still install using other types of programs - is a PITA.
"There is no easy way to setup users and permissions or anything like that unless you RTFM."
Oh, horseshit! Linux has had Webmin for ages, now. And if you think using Windows 2000 and XP control panel and NTFS permissions are easy, then why are there CLASSES AT COLLEGE LEVEL in those subjects? Why did Microsoft move Group Policy to its own Management Console? Because admins couldn't figure out how to use it, that's why.
Windows is NOT a task oriented interface - even with its so-called "Wizards". Doing anything beyond the obvious is absolutely not "intuitive" in any sense of the word.
AND it's a bug-ridden piece of shit. For the last two weeks, my system has been down and out while I tried to figure out why Windows 2000 and XP crashed when I crossed the 137GB boundary despite having 2000 Service Pack 3 and 4 and XP Service Pack 1 and 2. The other day I found an obscure Microsoft Knowledgebase article that points out that Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 doesn't read the partition table correctly for "some hard drives"! Thanks a whole fucking lot, Bill! Why not tell us WHICH hard drives, WHEN and WHY?
Not only that, the piece of shit Disk Manager in Windows 2000 set up and formatted a partition as FAT32 - and declared it "healthy" - and when I booted with Bart's PE, that XP kernel declared the partition to still be NTFS! (Confirmed by Partition Magic!)
And then for grins I had the defragmenter look at the root partition - and despite the partition being up only three days with only a couple programs installed, the defragmenter recommended defragging! And when it was defragged, the dual-boot Windows XP partition reverted to default screen settings!
Don't try dual-booting Windows 2000 and XP on "some" hard drives larger than 137GB! They will drive you NUTS with phantom partitions and files that can't be seen by either OS - even though they are allegedly on the exact same FAT32 partition.
I will repeat my oft-stated point:
WINDOWS IS CRAP!
Linux is ALSO crap!
But Linux is FREE crap.
"Drag and drop is completely counterintuitive? It was the second thing I tried when I started customizing my XP laptop..."
What's wrong with this picture?
"I can see how someone could get used to Linux and therefore they are more familiar with it, but it has never seemed intuitive to me."
Well, I had to learn Linux and Windows AT THE SAME TIME. And I can tell you from that experience that NEITHER are particularly "intuitive" in any sense of the word that I am familiar with.
Which is why I re-iterate: anybody who says Windows is easier to use than Linux is simply wrong.
Since it's been pointed out by Score:0 Redundant that you're an idiot, let me be redundant and re-emphasize that.
You're an idiot.