As for OS X, it's a plus if you like being told how you can use your computer, because you can be sure as hell that Apple won't let you change one damn thing.
Really? So what are all those options in the System Preferences tool that let you change things?
When I do a clean install of OS X, I spend a few hours tweaking obscure plist files and installing all sorts of tools to make it more bearable and I'm still not satisfied in the end.
Why would you do that? I've never know anybody else do that. It's not that you're trying to configure OSX to be like Windows is it? Which would be a pretty stupid thing to do, and one should note you can't successfully configure Windows to be like OSX either.
Heck, why would you do a clean install in the first place? Certainly that's been something good to do with Windows from time to time to stop it grinding to a halt. But OSX doesn't have the flaw of a registry. It doesn't need a clean install. I'm effectively on the same installation of OSX I started with 10 years ago, upgraded through several major versions, and living on two different Macs.
My settings are such that unless an AC scores a 4 or 5, which is a rare occurrence, I don't get a notification that anyone has responded. In the thread itself I get a "reply beneath your current threshold" message, so if I'm reading a logged-in-users reply, I sometimes see that. And sometimes I expand it and read it. And usually realise I've wasted my time.
My sig is fair warning that I probably won't see a response from an AC. And it's an encouragement to such people to grow a pair of balls and post under a username rather then as a coward.
It's not a hypothesis, it's a theory. Like gravity and evolution.
I don't think you do like science so much, otherwise you'd actually have respect for the work of scientists who work in a field you have relatively little knowledge of yourself. Scepticsm of the consensus of climate scientists is a useful function when it's from someone who is an expert in that field. Scepticism (actually more usually plain denial) by the layman is self-indulgent nonsense.
Interesting that the rest of the mobile phone industry tries to copy it then.
As for the OS, Apple has always stripped out what they couldn't make idiot proof for your grandmother. When you narrow down your customer base to zealots and people that still think color television is neat it's not hard to impress.
If you're trying to sell hard-to-use as a feature, I'm afraid you're going to fail.
Thankfully, common sense, just like old wives tales, are not allowed as a basis for making medical claims. In order to make a medical claim, you have to get approval, after having performed 3 phases of trials. A process which will typically take around 10 years. And the trials involve testing against a control. I'd suggest that the most reasonable control against which to test bottled water is water. And I'd further suggest that the bottled water companies would be wasting their time doing that, because it's going to show that their product is no better at reducing the chances of dehydration.
There's no problem at all with bottled water companies claiming their product quenches thirst - that's not a medical claim. And everybody would understand exactly what they mean by that. But they are quite rightly prevented from trying to bamboozle people with disingenuous medical claims.
The inconvenient truth is that the FOSS movement doesn't develop good applications. There's an old saying that a camel is a horse designed by committee. And there seems to be something of that in software development. A good app with a good UI requires a visionary designer. And open source projects don't tend to have that, or don't give the authority to that one person to make the decisions.
There's perhaps an exception when there's a single developer who is also a good designer, who starts a project and progresses it singlehandedly to a viable level. But developers who are also good designers are as rare as hens teeth.
Note that the one exception, Inkscape, had such a singular person at it's beginnings (as "Gill") - Raph Levien.
Most FOSS proponents on Slashdot are leeches. They love OSS because it gives them software for nothing. Few of them have ever contributed anything. Far fewer still are those rare individuals that are actually capable of creating good software, and willing to do it for no salary. Maybe a handful out of the millions with Slashdot accounts.
Look at the holy war over Ubuntu - most value the old KDE UI - a Windows rip-off. The new Unity UI us an OSX copy and most users don't like it. After 20 years there's still no good original Linux UI. If the OS UI isn't even good, what chance the apps will be good?
Of course there are many factors that vary the rate. You should take a good, long, hard look at yourselves. The richest country in the world, yet other than a few banana republics, the one with the highest per cap gun deaths.
From inside the US, it's probably difficult to see why your country is different in that way. From the outside, where we haven't had your culture trained into us from birth, it's very easy to see. The two, huge, glaring reasons are: 1) You have huge social inequality. 2) You have a unique gun culture. There are other civilised countries where gun ownership is wide, but the guns are considered tools for hunting, sport or as national defense as part of an official militia. Only in America are they held for the notion of household and personal defense, with people shouting about their pride to do that.
Well I say only in America. There are other countries where it's done. e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia. I was talking about civilised countries.
Interesting isn't it that I should mention an official militia. That is the reason the founding fathers put gun ownership as a right. Now in places like Switzerland they do that properly - young men serve in the army for a few months, and get their basic training. And then they keep their assigned weapon. Locked away in case of war. A duty rather than a right.
I would have fewer objections if you were willing to start with the police and army.
I come from England. Our police are mostly unarmed and I hope it stays that way. And I don't think war is a good thing so I'm quite happy to see the military shrunk and/or disarmed.
Why should the majority give up their most effective defense against that minority?
Again from the perspective of England, it doesn't look like your ownership of firearms has helped you one bit. Quite the contrary in fact. It looks rather like a mental patient who thinks repeatedly banging his head against a wall is going to make him feel better.
That's a very disingenuous claim by the gun lobby. WHO is focussing on Children? YOU are.
In fact accidental drowning is responsible for about 1 death per 100,000 people in the US. Not just swimming pools, but all forms of drowning.
Whereas firearms are responsible for about 15 per 100,000.
The only way you can make the stat work to make swimming pools look more dangerous than guns is by ignoring all deaths but children's deaths. And then blaming the other side for the fact that you did it.
Here's a couple of suggestions: Don't have a swimming pool if you have young children. Don't have a gun if you're a human being.
And that is only one aspect of design. Apple selling Windows PCs or Android Phones wouldn't be nearly as popular. The software and ecosystem design is even more important than the industrial design.
I'm English, so they don't come any more native English speaking than me. You obviously don't pay much attention to business if you're unfamiliar with the use of market cap to define the Largest Company.
The Railway Children was a good movie with Bernard Cribbins in it. Probably not the sort of movie that would appeal to a lot of Slashdot readers, unless they saw it as a child. But good movie non-the-less.
I know very well that GSM is a European Standard. But that's not what I was commenting on. I only mentioned GSM at all because the parent did. The requirement for all phones to be able to make emergency calls without hindrance is a US requirement.
The reason all GSM phones have it is because it's a US requirement. Having developed the feature for the US market, the easiest thing is to have it on all phones, no matter where they are sold.
Microsoft was pushing Windows for Tablets for years. No one was interested. Tablets certainly do not need a desktop type OS. Furthermore, the ease and consistency of download and install with the App Store has been a boon to OSX. There's a way in which learning lessons from iOS is good for OSX.
I don't believe for one moment that is does have low adoption. A couple of days ago an ad company called Chitka put out a press release saying Lion adoption was slowing. But everything other than that, including from sources that are well known, indicate that Lion has had the fastest adoption of any OSX version up to now.
iOS5 and Lion certainly have had some teething problems. But only the kind of things one would expect to get fixed in point releases. I see from another post of yours that you are sticking with Leopard. Which is odd, because Snow Leopard was a great OS, an improvement over Leopard in every way bar one - it dropped Power PC support. Is perhaps your reason for not advancing because you still have an old Power PC Mac?
Slashdot Mirror
As for OS X, it's a plus if you like being told how you can use your computer, because you can be sure as hell that Apple won't let you change one damn thing.
Really? So what are all those options in the System Preferences tool that let you change things?
When I do a clean install of OS X, I spend a few hours tweaking obscure plist files and installing all sorts of tools to make it more bearable and I'm still not satisfied in the end.
Why would you do that? I've never know anybody else do that. It's not that you're trying to configure OSX to be like Windows is it? Which would be a pretty stupid thing to do, and one should note you can't successfully configure Windows to be like OSX either.
Heck, why would you do a clean install in the first place? Certainly that's been something good to do with Windows from time to time to stop it grinding to a halt. But OSX doesn't have the flaw of a registry. It doesn't need a clean install. I'm effectively on the same installation of OSX I started with 10 years ago, upgraded through several major versions, and living on two different Macs.
My settings are such that unless an AC scores a 4 or 5, which is a rare occurrence, I don't get a notification that anyone has responded. In the thread itself I get a "reply beneath your current threshold" message, so if I'm reading a logged-in-users reply, I sometimes see that. And sometimes I expand it and read it. And usually realise I've wasted my time.
My sig is fair warning that I probably won't see a response from an AC. And it's an encouragement to such people to grow a pair of balls and post under a username rather then as a coward.
Yes, I know I'm correct. On both points.
Troed, I know who you are. You used to work at Symbian. You're a programmer, not a scientist. Don't be so pretentious.
It's not a hypothesis. There is massive amounts of evidence for it. It's a theory.
It's not a hypothesis, it's a theory. Like gravity and evolution.
I don't think you do like science so much, otherwise you'd actually have respect for the work of scientists who work in a field you have relatively little knowledge of yourself. Scepticsm of the consensus of climate scientists is a useful function when it's from someone who is an expert in that field. Scepticism (actually more usually plain denial) by the layman is self-indulgent nonsense.
The hardware is meant to be seen, not used.
Interesting that the rest of the mobile phone industry tries to copy it then.
As for the OS, Apple has always stripped out what they couldn't make idiot proof for your grandmother.
When you narrow down your customer base to zealots and people that still think color television is neat it's not hard to impress.
If you're trying to sell hard-to-use as a feature, I'm afraid you're going to fail.
Thankfully, common sense, just like old wives tales, are not allowed as a basis for making medical claims. In order to make a medical claim, you have to get approval, after having performed 3 phases of trials. A process which will typically take around 10 years. And the trials involve testing against a control. I'd suggest that the most reasonable control against which to test bottled water is water. And I'd further suggest that the bottled water companies would be wasting their time doing that, because it's going to show that their product is no better at reducing the chances of dehydration.
There's no problem at all with bottled water companies claiming their product quenches thirst - that's not a medical claim. And everybody would understand exactly what they mean by that. But they are quite rightly prevented from trying to bamboozle people with disingenuous medical claims.
Why would we experience that warming for 1000 years?
If we continue to raise the level of CO2 in the atmosphere it will happen. If we don't it won't. That part at least isn't complicated.
The inconvenient truth is that the FOSS movement doesn't develop good applications. There's an old saying that a camel is a horse designed by committee. And there seems to be something of that in software development. A good app with a good UI requires a visionary designer. And open source projects don't tend to have that, or don't give the authority to that one person to make the decisions.
There's perhaps an exception when there's a single developer who is also a good designer, who starts a project and progresses it singlehandedly to a viable level. But developers who are also good designers are as rare as hens teeth.
Note that the one exception, Inkscape, had such a singular person at it's beginnings (as "Gill") - Raph Levien.
Most FOSS proponents on Slashdot are leeches. They love OSS because it gives them software for nothing. Few of them have ever contributed anything. Far fewer still are those rare individuals that are actually capable of creating good software, and willing to do it for no salary. Maybe a handful out of the millions with Slashdot accounts.
Look at the holy war over Ubuntu - most value the old KDE UI - a Windows rip-off. The new Unity UI us an OSX copy and most users don't like it. After 20 years there's still no good original Linux UI. If the OS UI isn't even good, what chance the apps will be good?
Lightworks is open source. It's not meant to be free + subscription... stop with the FUD.
No it's not open source as yet. There's a promise that it will be and as far as I can see, no promise as to what licence it'll be under when it is. But the subscription model for the pro version is certainly there. £40 per year. Look at the website:
http://www.lightworksbeta.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=122&Itemid=263
You're a typical know nothing AC. Crying FUD when you read a truth you wish wasn't so. This is why I generally have you idiots filtered out.
Your post reveals in inconvenient truth.
Lightworks was developed as commercial software. Now trying a new free version + subscription pro version model.
Blender was developed as commercial software. After bankruptcy a charitable appeal bought it for the open source community.
Paint.net was developed by a Microsoft intern. It's a free download but not open source.
Out of the four, only Inkscape was developed from the start by the FOSS community.
Of course there are many factors that vary the rate. You should take a good, long, hard look at yourselves. The richest country in the world, yet other than a few banana republics, the one with the highest per cap gun deaths.
From inside the US, it's probably difficult to see why your country is different in that way. From the outside, where we haven't had your culture trained into us from birth, it's very easy to see. The two, huge, glaring reasons are:
1) You have huge social inequality.
2) You have a unique gun culture. There are other civilised countries where gun ownership is wide, but the guns are considered tools for hunting, sport or as national defense as part of an official militia. Only in America are they held for the notion of household and personal defense, with people shouting about their pride to do that.
Well I say only in America. There are other countries where it's done. e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia. I was talking about civilised countries.
Interesting isn't it that I should mention an official militia. That is the reason the founding fathers put gun ownership as a right. Now in places like Switzerland they do that properly - young men serve in the army for a few months, and get their basic training. And then they keep their assigned weapon. Locked away in case of war. A duty rather than a right.
I would have fewer objections if you were willing to start with the police and army.
I come from England. Our police are mostly unarmed and I hope it stays that way. And I don't think war is a good thing so I'm quite happy to see the military shrunk and/or disarmed.
Why should the majority give up their most effective defense against that minority?
Again from the perspective of England, it doesn't look like your ownership of firearms has helped you one bit. Quite the contrary in fact. It looks rather like a mental patient who thinks repeatedly banging his head against a wall is going to make him feel better.
That's a very disingenuous claim by the gun lobby. WHO is focussing on Children? YOU are.
In fact accidental drowning is responsible for about 1 death per 100,000 people in the US. Not just swimming pools, but all forms of drowning.
Whereas firearms are responsible for about 15 per 100,000.
The only way you can make the stat work to make swimming pools look more dangerous than guns is by ignoring all deaths but children's deaths. And then blaming the other side for the fact that you did it.
Here's a couple of suggestions: Don't have a swimming pool if you have young children. Don't have a gun if you're a human being.
You pulled that opinion out of your ass. Apple's products are well built. Apple consistently outdoes the rest of the tech industry on consumer satisfaction ratings.
http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/20/apple-customer-satisfaction-rating-at-all-time-high-dominates-pc-industry/
http://www.changewaveresearch.com/articles/2011/smart_phones_20110718.html
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Apple-iPad-Continues-to-Dominate-Consumer-Reports-Ratings-787644/
http://www.jdpower.com/news/pressrelease.aspx?ID=2011030
And that is only one aspect of design. Apple selling Windows PCs or Android Phones wouldn't be nearly as popular. The software and ecosystem design is even more important than the industrial design.
I'm English, so they don't come any more native English speaking than me. You obviously don't pay much attention to business if you're unfamiliar with the use of market cap to define the Largest Company.
Apple is the largest company right now.
http://www.ft.com/cms/f808f946-ef56-11e0-918b-00144feab49a.pdf
Your self-esteem isn't based on merit, it's based on ignorance. Ignorance of design and ignorance of what motivates people.
It's not choice.
Android is winning in units sold because there are cheap Android phones. Apple is winning in profit because there are cheap Android phones.
It'll be interesting to see what the availability of the iPhone 3S free with a contract does to the market. We'll see when the next results are out.
The extent to which Apple didn't learn from past failures is evident from the fact that they are now the largest company in the world.
The Railway Children was a good movie with Bernard Cribbins in it. Probably not the sort of movie that would appeal to a lot of Slashdot readers, unless they saw it as a child. But good movie non-the-less.
I think you'll find its a European requirement. GSM originally meant "Groupe Spécial Mobile", which is a clue to its origin.
I know very well that GSM is a European Standard. But that's not what I was commenting on. I only mentioned GSM at all because the parent did. The requirement for all phones to be able to make emergency calls without hindrance is a US requirement.
The reason all GSM phones have it is because it's a US requirement. Having developed the feature for the US market, the easiest thing is to have it on all phones, no matter where they are sold.
Microsoft was pushing Windows for Tablets for years. No one was interested. Tablets certainly do not need a desktop type OS. Furthermore, the ease and consistency of download and install with the App Store has been a boon to OSX. There's a way in which learning lessons from iOS is good for OSX.
Why do you think Lion has such a low adoption?
I don't believe for one moment that is does have low adoption. A couple of days ago an ad company called Chitka put out a press release saying Lion adoption was slowing. But everything other than that, including from sources that are well known, indicate that Lion has had the fastest adoption of any OSX version up to now.
iOS5 and Lion certainly have had some teething problems. But only the kind of things one would expect to get fixed in point releases. I see from another post of yours that you are sticking with Leopard. Which is odd, because Snow Leopard was a great OS, an improvement over Leopard in every way bar one - it dropped Power PC support. Is perhaps your reason for not advancing because you still have an old Power PC Mac?