With all the arrogant, cynical bitching, it appears nobody read the title.
The guy spent 30 days with OSX. This doesn't claim to be a definitive expert review. These are reflections on his experience after 30 days of using a new system from a regular end-user's point of view.
Not that it really matters; I'm sure the only reason the article got linked on Bitchdot was to give everyone something to whine about over coffee.
How refreshing it is to find an objective opinion on Slashdot!
Personally, I don't buy the argument that it hurts the music industry as much as they'd like us to believe, not when I see the huge salaries and over indulgent lifestyles that the the most successful enjoy. I think there's plenty of money to go around, but as is so often the case, it's not distributed very wisely.
Having said that, I'm quite happy to buy the music I listen to, so long as I only have to pay for it once and am then free to make as many copies as I want for my own use. And although I have downloaded quite a few albums off P2P networks, I only listen to the ones that I have since bought the original CD for.
Let's not forget it wasn't long ago that MSFT basically ripped off apple [who rippled off PARC]
I see this attitude a lot here on msbashdot. What's the problem here exactly?
Presumably, the GNOME and KDE teams are also guilty of "ripping off" PARC (let me guess, the argument doesn't apply when the boot is on the other foot).
Is there some unwritten rule that says once somebody comes up with an idea, that nobody else is allowed to use that idea? Well just patent the fucking thing and have done with it.
Do you also bitch about Ferrari for ripping off the idea of using a steering wheel to control the direction the car travels in?
Joe 6-pack doesn't want to read a 5 message boards to find out he needs to hand install some driver or app to get the feature he wants or to fix his machine.
Right, he doesn't want to.
More importantly, the year is 2007. Nobody should have to jump through hoops to get hardware or software to work on their OS; these are fundamental facilities that an OS must provide. If an app or piece of hardware is supported, it should just work. Period. In all cases. Anything the user needs to do to make this happen should be trivial and obvious. After so many decades of OS development these things should be a given by now.
Microsoft has always shoddily produced "good enough for the masses" versions of last year's technology by other people.
The irony of course is, is that only in the last couple years has the Linux community managed to produce software that is good enough for the masses. And part of that process has been reinventing technologies that the masses have taken for granted for years on Microsoft's software.
And as soon as they try and use any software or hardware that wasn't pre-installed and have to start messing around with bash script band-aid in order to get things to work, it gets pretty shoddy for them pretty quick. If you're a techie you take it in your stride, but then you're probably not a member of the "masses" that are targeted by Microsoft's software.
Granted, she wont be editing config files or writing code, but how many outside the IT industry do that on a regular basis?
Quite a lot of people actually, if they want to use a piece of software that isn't in the repositories, or the new printer doesn't work, or they want to edit some video etc...
The routine grandma argument misses the point (or conveniently dodges it). Things that people have taken for granted as "just working" for the last 10 years, should not suddenly become a chore when they boot into Linux (after being told it is so much better than the alternatives), regardless of how experienced a computer user they are.
It's certainly getting there, and for inexperienced home users fresh installs of recent distros makes a great email terminal and word processor, but then... it is 2007 for crying out loud.
I think the author does have a good point. Sadly, all too many replies to this thread have resorted to ludicrous extremes and car analogies in order to dodge the point.
Choice IS good, but it using it as a wildcard argument for hackers to do whatever the hell they want is an abuse of choice. As the author says, choice for the sake of choice serves no practical, technical purpose, save to confuse users and massage the egos of coders with incurable NIH syndrome. I find it ironic that a community that so frequently preaches sermons on the merits of standards is so quick to take issue with anyone who dares to suggest that unlimited choice is a bad thing, especially with respect to the basics.
The choices I take issue with are really the fundamental things, such as where programs are installed in different distros. For example, on my system Open Office is under/usr/share, on other systems it goes under/opt - why? What purpose does this serve? Or package management; why does the community insist on having so many different ways to put an executable under/usr/bin, docs under/usr/share/doc etc. These programs all do fundamentally the same thing just with different command line arguments, why does that require so many different implementations? Why so many sound systems, printing systems, GUI desktop APIs; different user environments is fine, but different APIs and configuration as well, duplicating masses of infrastructure?
This is not like trying to argue we don't need different types of car/fruit/pick you favourite analogy. These are fundamental things that affect Linux based OSs as stable, consistent targets to develop for, which is important from a testing and support perspective as well.
It's easy (and fashionable) to hate Microsoft, and acknowledging what's good about what they produce seems to be treated as an unforgivable sin. But the Linux community would do well to understand what developers genuinely like about developing for Windows, and what they don't like about developing for Linux, and standardise on some solutions.
Why is it so often the case that the knee-jerk reaction to the suggestion that there might be problems/shortcomings with Linux based OSs, is to bash Microsoft?
Citing problems with Windows does not justify the kinds of problems people have with Linux.
5. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you're not adult enough to be independent. Guns should only be handled by adults. If you're not adult enough to sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you're not grown up enough to handle a gun. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. A permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.
I can't decide if this is just funny or scathingly close to the truth.
So generally speaking then, there's not much wrong with Microsoft or their software if slashdotters feel the need to scrape this petty issue out of the bottom of the barrel, otherwise people would post about the real problems right?
I don't recall Kubuntu giving me a choice about which browser I use. I don't recall OSX giving me that choice. And I don't recall it ever being a problem on any platform, be it Windows, Linux, or Mac, to go and download, install and use the browser of my choice, or the media player for that matter.
And I don't want to be asked which browser I get to use during install either. Why stop there, why not ask about text editors, media players, file managers, email clients and a million and one other things to make installation take even longer. If a clueless user was presented with the option to pick a non Microsoft alternative, do you think he'd pick it anyway?
Even before "Set Program Access and Defaults" was introduced, I was using Sonique, and tried out different browsers. When was the last time you saw a business offer a competitor's product by default? When was the last time you saw Coca Cola offering free Pepsi?
Consider that this is a Microsoft employee responding to Slashdot questions. He could have said anything, and people would still bitch. No answer is good enough to satisfy the relentless nitpicking and determination to find fault with everything associated with Microsoft.
So what's your point exactly? That Opera implemented tabbed browsing first, therefore nobody else is allowed to (except Mozilla, naturally)? That anybody else that does has to credit them with the idea everytime someone raises the issue? If that's what your suggesting, which is what it sounds like, then that is tantamount to advocating patents.
It may surprise you to learn this, but it is quite common for teams/organisations/businesses in all industries to adopt features introduced by competitors that have proven popular with users. I notice that the KDE and Gnome teams never get flamed for introducing features or design idioms that are uncannily similar to OSX and Windows designs, yet if Microsoft dare to introduce something even remotely familiar, everyone gets their knives out.
I take my hat off to the IE7 guys for taking the time to respond to a bunch of arrogant bitching kids. It hardly seems worth their while.
I read an interview with that guy, and he was going on about how the main character and sister's parents died and how they've been estranged ever since. Let me guess, over the course of the movie they sort out there differences, triumph of the human spirit, blah cliche blah cliche blah fucking blah.
Why do writers have to make such lame efforts to inflict character where it is just not required, or find some excuse to have the token woman whose real purpose serves nothing more than to please audiences.
This could be an awesome, scary, atmospheric cult classic with arty spooky cinematography. I'm thinking of Japanese horror directors, like the guy who directed Ring (the original) or Eye would do a great job of this.
Unfortunately, it's gonna be just another failed computer game inspired summer teen popcorn flick.
A third solution is that they're not necessarily any more technically advanced than we are.
There's always the assumption when talking about ET life that they fly around in space ships and are incredibly advanced. Why should that be?
It is just as likely that they are still figuring out how to make fire, or communicate over 100s of miles, let alone through space. They may not even be aware of what planets or stars are yet, or may not be interested in trying to understand noise transmitted from who-knows-where thousands of years ago.
Wouldn't it be scary if the only intelligent life to be found anywhere in the universe, on any of the millions of inhabited worlds, is human and no different or older or more technically advanced than we are? That would be scarier than finding a planet full of face-huggers.
GeforceFX - The dawn of cinematic computing starts here.
(Actually, it started with the R300 - maybe nVidia forgot to set their alarm. Or perhaps it's just the time zone difference between California and Canada. Still the sun continues to shine).
All current indicators (not that there are many) shows that the ATI's cards are the best of the bunch, and nVidia have had a bad year what with dubious driver optimizations and inferior image quality / performance. They're really struggling to save face and it's a nice change to see the tables turned. NV40 had better be a big improvement.
I really hope that Gabe Newell is being honest about the fact that HL2 contains no ATI optimisations, as suspicious as it seems. Although the fact that The Carmack did say that the ARB OGL path in Doom3 runs better on the R3xx (and looks better) than on NV3xx, and that nVidia only gets the lead on the NV optimised code path, does seem to support what Valve claim to have demonstrated with the HL2 benchmarks. Different API but still using next-gen features.
If that's the case that really would be a lesson to all graphics hardware makers to not depend on getting in bed with games developers so that games are optimized for particular GPUs to achieve maximum performance. The whole fucking point of graphics APIs like D3D and OGL is that developers can write one code path and it'll work well on all hardware for which there is a driver for that API - the hardware makers should be optimizing the hardware to accelerate these APIs period, not specific apps. Developers certainly shouldn't encourage hardware makers by agreeing to got to the effort of writing code optimised for specific GPUs. Bundling games with graphics cards is one thing, but coding them to work better with different cards goes to defeat the object of having a common graphics API. Let's not go back to the OGL mini driver days of Quake - one for nVidia, one for 3dfx, another for Rendition etc.
End of Rant.
I've not seen it in person but I agree this game looks awesome and has been quite overlooked. I think that's good though cos too much hype is a bad thing. I'm looking forward to this much more than Doom 3 cos it appears to offer so much more. Half Life 2 is still top of my list though.
No - nobody is copying anybody. It makes perfect sense for companies to adopt competitors good ideas that their customers want. This happens in all industries with all products.
Bitching against Microsoft for "copying" Apple (who "copied" Xerox or whatever...) is like bitching against BMW or Chrysler or Ferrari for "copying" Henry Ford's concept of a steering wheel (or whoever first came up with it - that's besides the point).
There are so many other things really wrong with M$ this "who copied who's GUI" crap is really scraping the barrel.
"Programming is just a tool to an engineer."...That's why they're such bad SOFTWARE engineers. It's true anybody can write code, but designing and writing good software is another thing entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
With all the arrogant, cynical bitching, it appears nobody read the title.
The guy spent 30 days with OSX. This doesn't claim to be a definitive expert review. These are reflections on his experience after 30 days of using a new system from a regular end-user's point of view.
Not that it really matters; I'm sure the only reason the article got linked on Bitchdot was to give everyone something to whine about over coffee.
How refreshing it is to find an objective opinion on Slashdot!
Personally, I don't buy the argument that it hurts the music industry as much as they'd like us to believe, not when I see the huge salaries and over indulgent lifestyles that the the most successful enjoy. I think there's plenty of money to go around, but as is so often the case, it's not distributed very wisely.
Having said that, I'm quite happy to buy the music I listen to, so long as I only have to pay for it once and am then free to make as many copies as I want for my own use. And although I have downloaded quite a few albums off P2P networks, I only listen to the ones that I have since bought the original CD for.
I see this attitude a lot here on msbashdot. What's the problem here exactly?
Presumably, the GNOME and KDE teams are also guilty of "ripping off" PARC (let me guess, the argument doesn't apply when the boot is on the other foot).
Is there some unwritten rule that says once somebody comes up with an idea, that nobody else is allowed to use that idea? Well just patent the fucking thing and have done with it.
Do you also bitch about Ferrari for ripping off the idea of using a steering wheel to control the direction the car travels in?
Right, he doesn't want to.
More importantly, the year is 2007. Nobody should have to jump through hoops to get hardware or software to work on their OS; these are fundamental facilities that an OS must provide. If an app or piece of hardware is supported, it should just work. Period. In all cases. Anything the user needs to do to make this happen should be trivial and obvious. After so many decades of OS development these things should be a given by now.
The irony of course is, is that only in the last couple years has the Linux community managed to produce software that is good enough for the masses. And part of that process has been reinventing technologies that the masses have taken for granted for years on Microsoft's software.
And as soon as they try and use any software or hardware that wasn't pre-installed and have to start messing around with bash script band-aid in order to get things to work, it gets pretty shoddy for them pretty quick. If you're a techie you take it in your stride, but then you're probably not a member of the "masses" that are targeted by Microsoft's software.
Quite a lot of people actually, if they want to use a piece of software that isn't in the repositories, or the new printer doesn't work, or they want to edit some video etc...
The routine grandma argument misses the point (or conveniently dodges it). Things that people have taken for granted as "just working" for the last 10 years, should not suddenly become a chore when they boot into Linux (after being told it is so much better than the alternatives), regardless of how experienced a computer user they are.
It's certainly getting there, and for inexperienced home users fresh installs of recent distros makes a great email terminal and word processor, but then... it is 2007 for crying out loud.
I think the author does have a good point. Sadly, all too many replies to this thread have resorted to ludicrous extremes and car analogies in order to dodge the point.
/usr/share, on other systems it goes under /opt - why? What purpose does this serve? Or package management; why does the community insist on having so many different ways to put an executable under /usr/bin, docs under /usr/share/doc etc. These programs all do fundamentally the same thing just with different command line arguments, why does that require so many different implementations? Why so many sound systems, printing systems, GUI desktop APIs; different user environments is fine, but different APIs and configuration as well, duplicating masses of infrastructure?
Choice IS good, but it using it as a wildcard argument for hackers to do whatever the hell they want is an abuse of choice. As the author says, choice for the sake of choice serves no practical, technical purpose, save to confuse users and massage the egos of coders with incurable NIH syndrome. I find it ironic that a community that so frequently preaches sermons on the merits of standards is so quick to take issue with anyone who dares to suggest that unlimited choice is a bad thing, especially with respect to the basics.
The choices I take issue with are really the fundamental things, such as where programs are installed in different distros. For example, on my system Open Office is under
This is not like trying to argue we don't need different types of car/fruit/pick you favourite analogy. These are fundamental things that affect Linux based OSs as stable, consistent targets to develop for, which is important from a testing and support perspective as well.
It's easy (and fashionable) to hate Microsoft, and acknowledging what's good about what they produce seems to be treated as an unforgivable sin. But the Linux community would do well to understand what developers genuinely like about developing for Windows, and what they don't like about developing for Linux, and standardise on some solutions.
That explains a lot.
Why is it so often the case that the knee-jerk reaction to the suggestion that there might be problems/shortcomings with Linux based OSs, is to bash Microsoft?
Citing problems with Windows does not justify the kinds of problems people have with Linux.
I can't decide if this is just funny or scathingly close to the truth.
So generally speaking then, there's not much wrong with Microsoft or their software if slashdotters feel the need to scrape this petty issue out of the bottom of the barrel, otherwise people would post about the real problems right?
I don't recall Kubuntu giving me a choice about which browser I use. I don't recall OSX giving me that choice. And I don't recall it ever being a problem on any platform, be it Windows, Linux, or Mac, to go and download, install and use the browser of my choice, or the media player for that matter.
And I don't want to be asked which browser I get to use during install either. Why stop there, why not ask about text editors, media players, file managers, email clients and a million and one other things to make installation take even longer. If a clueless user was presented with the option to pick a non Microsoft alternative, do you think he'd pick it anyway?
Even before "Set Program Access and Defaults" was introduced, I was using Sonique, and tried out different browsers. When was the last time you saw a business offer a competitor's product by default? When was the last time you saw Coca Cola offering free Pepsi?
Consider that this is a Microsoft employee responding to Slashdot questions. He could have said anything, and people would still bitch. No answer is good enough to satisfy the relentless nitpicking and determination to find fault with everything associated with Microsoft.
So what's your point exactly? That Opera implemented tabbed browsing first, therefore nobody else is allowed to (except Mozilla, naturally)? That anybody else that does has to credit them with the idea everytime someone raises the issue? If that's what your suggesting, which is what it sounds like, then that is tantamount to advocating patents.
It may surprise you to learn this, but it is quite common for teams/organisations/businesses in all industries to adopt features introduced by competitors that have proven popular with users. I notice that the KDE and Gnome teams never get flamed for introducing features or design idioms that are uncannily similar to OSX and Windows designs, yet if Microsoft dare to introduce something even remotely familiar, everyone gets their knives out.
I take my hat off to the IE7 guys for taking the time to respond to a bunch of arrogant bitching kids. It hardly seems worth their while.
"increases happiness"
Say that really fast.
Ahem, I think you mean:
Ewan McGreggor is an actor?
In the words of C3PO: "We're doomed."
In my words: "This movie is gonna fucking suck."
I read an interview with that guy, and he was going on about how the main character and sister's parents died and how they've been estranged ever since. Let me guess, over the course of the movie they sort out there differences, triumph of the human spirit, blah cliche blah cliche blah fucking blah.
Why do writers have to make such lame efforts to inflict character where it is just not required, or find some excuse to have the token woman whose real purpose serves nothing more than to please audiences.
This could be an awesome, scary, atmospheric cult classic with arty spooky cinematography. I'm thinking of Japanese horror directors, like the guy who directed Ring (the original) or Eye would do a great job of this.
Unfortunately, it's gonna be just another failed computer game inspired summer teen popcorn flick.
A third solution is that they're not necessarily any more technically advanced than we are.
There's always the assumption when talking about ET life that they fly around in space ships and are incredibly advanced. Why should that be?
It is just as likely that they are still figuring out how to make fire, or communicate over 100s of miles, let alone through space. They may not even be aware of what planets or stars are yet, or may not be interested in trying to understand noise transmitted from who-knows-where thousands of years ago.
Wouldn't it be scary if the only intelligent life to be found anywhere in the universe, on any of the millions of inhabited worlds, is human and no different or older or more technically advanced than we are? That would be scarier than finding a planet full of face-huggers.
GeforceFX - The dawn of cinematic computing starts here. (Actually, it started with the R300 - maybe nVidia forgot to set their alarm. Or perhaps it's just the time zone difference between California and Canada. Still the sun continues to shine). All current indicators (not that there are many) shows that the ATI's cards are the best of the bunch, and nVidia have had a bad year what with dubious driver optimizations and inferior image quality / performance. They're really struggling to save face and it's a nice change to see the tables turned. NV40 had better be a big improvement.
I really hope that Gabe Newell is being honest about the fact that HL2 contains no ATI optimisations, as suspicious as it seems. Although the fact that The Carmack did say that the ARB OGL path in Doom3 runs better on the R3xx (and looks better) than on NV3xx, and that nVidia only gets the lead on the NV optimised code path, does seem to support what Valve claim to have demonstrated with the HL2 benchmarks. Different API but still using next-gen features. If that's the case that really would be a lesson to all graphics hardware makers to not depend on getting in bed with games developers so that games are optimized for particular GPUs to achieve maximum performance. The whole fucking point of graphics APIs like D3D and OGL is that developers can write one code path and it'll work well on all hardware for which there is a driver for that API - the hardware makers should be optimizing the hardware to accelerate these APIs period, not specific apps. Developers certainly shouldn't encourage hardware makers by agreeing to got to the effort of writing code optimised for specific GPUs. Bundling games with graphics cards is one thing, but coding them to work better with different cards goes to defeat the object of having a common graphics API. Let's not go back to the OGL mini driver days of Quake - one for nVidia, one for 3dfx, another for Rendition etc. End of Rant.
Doom. No question.
...And one more thing - I read slashdot too you asshole.
I've not seen it in person but I agree this game looks awesome and has been quite overlooked. I think that's good though cos too much hype is a bad thing. I'm looking forward to this much more than Doom 3 cos it appears to offer so much more. Half Life 2 is still top of my list though.
No - nobody is copying anybody. It makes perfect sense for companies to adopt competitors good ideas that their customers want. This happens in all industries with all products.
Bitching against Microsoft for "copying" Apple (who "copied" Xerox or whatever...) is like bitching against BMW or Chrysler or Ferrari for "copying" Henry Ford's concept of a steering wheel (or whoever first came up with it - that's besides the point).
There are so many other things really wrong with M$ this "who copied who's GUI" crap is really scraping the barrel.
I love the smell of CPU wars in the morning. Smells like... smells like coffee break.
"Programming is just a tool to an engineer." ...That's why they're such bad SOFTWARE engineers. It's true anybody can write code, but designing and writing good software is another thing entirely.