Apple as a company hasn't exactly shown exemplary behaviour at times, but the Xerox PARC/Apple affair strikes me as one occasion where they did behave pretty fairly, and it's not right to accuse Apple of stealing while ignoring Microsoft's underhanded behaviour with regards to starting their own GUI as many people seem to do.
The point I was trying to make in my original post was that progress doesn't happen in isolation, it's by building on the work of others that we have reached the point we are at today, and having an irrational dislike of Einstein doesn't make his work less valid, even though he owes a lot to Newton.
Yeah, that was awful of him to meet with Newton and take credit for a bunch of his work.
I don't think Apple have ever been particularly secretive about the origins of the GUI -feel free to correct me if you can point to an instance where Apple have claimed to invent the GUI, as far as I can tell they only took credit for Mac OS.
Notably, there was a significant amount of apple stock transferred to Xerox PARC, who were unwilling to make a commercial product out out of the Star and Alto GUI systems, what with being a RESEARCH centre and all. Laser printing and Ethernet are other examples of now-ubiquitous technology that PARC failed to capitalise on were they "stolen" as well?
In fact, several key engineers from PARC left Apple so that they could take advantage of the opportunity to be on the team that brought the GUI to the masses.
Finally, have you ever seen what Xerox's GUI looked like? There's no more similarity between the interface of the Star and Mac GUIs than there is between DOS and UNIX, that is to say superficial resemblance only. Drop down menus, drag and drop, double-clicking and many other features that are standard fare on todays computer interfaces originated at Apple, not PARC, though quite probably from the same people.
It'd be nice if people would stick to talking about things they actually have a clue about instead of spreading nonsense about how they would like history to have been.
I suppose you think Bill Gates invented the personal computer industry and Linus Torvalds stole all the code in Linux from SCO as well.
I know, it's tragic when people steal others ideas... what about that thief Einstein, just riding Newton's coat-tails with his theories about gravity. Someone really needs to set the record straight, that Einstein guy is just a fraud.
The major problem I can see is that the user should not even have to care whether a given app is GNOME, KDE or whatever. You set your fonts and colours in the GNOME control panel, then you start a KDE app and it looks like weird-arse shit. WTF?
I agree... I'm one of these weird people who has had to use both GNOME and KDE for many years, and along the way I've picked up preferences for applications that I like to use regardless of what desktop I'm using, but I'm sure we all run into the problem where our favorite application decides to pick up it's preferences from the wrong desktop from time-to-time. That's something that simply can't happen in Windows or OS X.
The most satisfactory solution I've found so far was to use the icons from redhat's bluecurve theme, and a modified version of the bluecurve qt/gtk2/gtk1 theme called QtCurve. Unfortunately it's very KControl-centric, but combined with the GtkQt plugin to copy font settings to gnome, I now have a unified look across all the major toolkits... see this screenshot to see what I'm talking about.
I wish there was a distribution that shipped out of the box with a combined KNOME or GayDE desktop instead of keeping them seperate. Just because they come from the developers a certain way, doesn't mean you can't fix it just like any other bug. I mean-- are linux distributors making their own OS, or are they just stapling and sellotaping together bits and pieces they downloaded off the internet like some saddo making his own porn mag out of printed usenet posts?
When Microsoft or Apple buy an app from another software company, they don't just replace Foocorp.gif with their own logo, they give the app a full makeover and adapt it to their OS. Linux distributors need to stop being such wimps and get their hands dirty, after all they don't even need to buy out the developers to get the source.:D
Anyway, everyone has probably had enough of my off-topic ranting, but I will say this... if any linux distributors are out there and listening; I for one am ready and willing to help you to improve consistency, but you have to be willing to embrace it.
True, I hadn't really considered it, but given that almost all of NeXT's founding engineering staff had been pilfered from Apple it's not surprising that some of the elements of the Mac GUI would make it into NeXTSTEP like the unified menu and spacing buttons at either end of the title bar, as well as more subtle elements.
Given the number of former Be Inc. engineers now employed (and for some, returned) at Apple, it wouldn't be surprising if there are some more subtle elements of BeOS' beginning to show through, and that's only going to get more likely as Apple integrate search deeper into the OS.
Yay for the incestuous nature of highly specialised professions.:)
Boy, I'm really getting the linguistic smack-down over this. I guess I'll have to concede that "diabolically" doesn't neccessarily have anything to do with "diabolical".
"However, when paired with the phrase "clever", it actually is. Context is really very important."
I'm sorry but that's rubbish. Bad, nasty things can still be "diabolically clever".
It was clever of the Nazis to use a commonly availably pest toxin to exterminate people rather than wasting valuable resources that could be 'weaponized'. Nuclear weapons are devilishly clever inventions. It was clever of Al Qaeda to take control of normal commuter planes and turn them into guided missiles. Having said that, in acknowledging the cleverness involved, I'm in no way endorsing any of these spine-chillingly evil things.
"Damn, I'm coming across like some rabid anti-capitalist. I'm not, I just don't expect companies to benefit from double-standards, don't expect them to behave as anything more than the money-making mechanisms that they are, and have no qualms about punishing them into behaving in a non-destructive manner for the simple reason that their amoral nature means that this is the only method of control."
I don't see how it's anti-capitalist to want lawmakers and those who run corporations to curb exploitive behaviours.
It's "anti-people" to continue along the path of allowing corporations to be a person, or a faceless organisation when it suits them.
It's "anti-people" to support a situation which does little to discourage the exploitation of workers in unsuitable and unsafe working conditions.
It's "anti-earth" to support companies with irresponsible attitudes to the environment.
But most importantly I believe it is anti-capitalist to let corporations continue with no thought to long term sustainability and impact.
There's little doubt in my mind that left to their own devices companies will plunder whatever resources they require using the cheapest possible method, discarding the waste in the cheapest possible way with little regard for anything except profit and skirting along on the right side of the law.
The only thing that stops these companies is worries that if their exploitive activities go too far, some whining commie liberal gay black islamic woman terrorist spy will come along and try to undermine capitalism by telling people about what's happening. Which could be bad for their corporate image.:D
That, and (usually) government regulations.
Still haven't had much sleep, I think I should put my head on a pillow.
"*I* didn't say that they were "evil". I said that "You could say that most companies were "evil" if you wanted to consider it that way."
I was just chiming in with my opinion on companies, sorry if I made it appear that I was attributing to you some kind of hatred of business. I agree with the above comment, and added my amateur analysys of why that is.
You can consider psychpaths to be evil, but the truth of the matter is that they usually act the way they do because they have no concept of (or perhaps are just able to turn a blind eye to) how their actions affect others.
"Oh, and BTW, regarding the moderation of my comment.... offtopic? Bullshit."
I'm one of the few people you can guarantee didn't moderate your comment so that's obviously not aimed at me. For what it's worth I agree with you that your comment's not offtopic.:)
"I know *exactly* why this was modded offtopic. It's because some screechy little Apple fanboy perceived it as a criticism of Apple. Actually, it was intended more generally than that, but never underestimate the knee-jerk zealotry of the Apple fanbase."
As a general rule I'm fond of Apple's products, and being a believer in voting with my wallet, I supported Apple's effort to revive NeXT's technology and supported their efforts to bring Unix to the masses on such a grand scale by buying a PowerBook.
People need to learn to see corporations for what they are and try to ignore the branding efforts of large companies. They sell products, not lifestyles or experiences. Companies will use sweatshop labour and blatantly unsustainable practices to achieve their goals because they are usually obligated to do so for the benefit of their shareholders.
Because I don't support all of the business practices of Apple Computer, Inc. I don't own stock in their company, and will support anything that tries to rail them in with regard to their ecological and human-rights issues.
People need to get it through their heads that companies, no matter how warm and fluffy they may portray themselves, don't give a flying fuck about human suffering because they are structured in such a way that the people who comprise the company are never made personally responsible for the treatment of workers or customers.
I wish that more people could be more agnostic about products, companies and branding, but the reality is that people are prone to getting into stupid religious bitch-fests about things that are almost the same from an abstract enough viewpoint.
Think Chevy vs. Ford, Microsoft vs. Apple, etc. There is usually no logical reason for people to like one and not the other because given the same opportunities companies are designed in such a way as to be compelled to act in much the same way.
When someone gets swept up in the projected image of a company, they need to take a step back and ponder the true scope of the phrase "limited liability".
"You could say that most companies were "evil" if you wanted to consider it that way."
No, companies aren't evil as such, it's just that pretty much all companies are legally bound to act in a way that would be considered psychopathic if they were a person. Which corporations insist on being considered as for certain purposes.
No, technically it's a stylised rehash of Openstep which was a stylised rehash of Nextstep which was a stylised rehash of... well... nothing. Nextstep used a BSD Unix base combined with Carnegie Mellon's Mach microkernel, and used a completely unique object oriented development environment with a lot of other pioneering technology to make something which couldn't really have it's lineage traced back to any operating system that existed before it.
If you want to get really technical, Mac OS X's relationship to BSD is that it runs a server on the XNU microkernel that creates a BSD-like environment for applications, it's not really even fair to say that OS X is based on BSD, let alone a stylised rehash of it. It has just taken elements from BSD and incorporated them into the operating system.
Don't you people with mod points feel even slightly annoyed by someone yelling out what you should do with your mod points? If this guy really cared he'd be the king of meta-moderation and have mod points himself. You probably worked hard, slaving over a hot computer diligently meta-moderating to get those points, and this guy wants to take the easy road by just yelling at everyone. I think it's shameful really.
The menu bar at the top of the screen is a typical example of OS X font rendering, the stuff inside the windows is probably rendered by OS X, but could be done by Freetype or a band of trained dwarves for all I know.
At any rate the fonts and sizes they've chosen to use in the examples wouldn't be used very often on OS X, particularly not in the microscopic point sizes shown in one of the examples.
As I said though, it might help if you were more specific.
" What linux needs for the desktop market is an easy to use, and simple desktop."
Yea, it's called Gnome.
Gnome is getting pretty good, but compared to Windows or OS X the point at which the windows-icons-mouse-pointer paradigm falls down still comes much sooner than in Windows or OS X
Linux is nice, and serves me as a Unix zealot quite well for a home desktop, but I still haven't seen a Linux distribution in which it is as easy to install an application as in the mainstream OSes.
"For example, Sometimes, sound on linux can be an absolute bitch to get going."
What does this have to do with the desktop?
I (like most people with computers) have a large collection of music on my computer, because it's so much easier to manage than a giant pile of CDs. Listening to music from one's computer is a common use for desktop machines these days. There's no way in hell a consumer or non-power-user is going to knowingly choose an OS with such weak audio abilities that it can only play one sound at once without the assistance of some program which makes the sound choppy and/or laggy on certain hardware. I have set up dmixer on my computer which should mean that I should be able do away with those awful sound daemons, and some people have those new fangled cards with a hardware mixer, but the obsolete sound daemons have become so entrenched that they're still required for the respective desktop environments and their applications to function properly.
There is no stable ABI for vendors to create hardware drivers to, the ABI is in a constant state of flux along with the rest of the kernel and drivers compiled for a certain version are progressively more unlikely to work with each successive minor version of the kernel. The situation is nearly as bad for open source drivers which need regular maintenance to remain in sync with the audio API. It's no wonder most hardware vendors don't want to touch Linux with a stick.
The situation with sound in Linux is confusing, fragmented and in many ways just plain broken. I don't know what you do with your desktop, but it's obviously not typical if you don't consider sound to be important.
"The point is, that as long as simple issues like playing a video become mammoth tasks,"
What does this have to do with the desktop?
You don't suppose all those millions of ATA DVD drives being sold are finding their way into servers do you?
Wake up Buck, you've arrived in the 21st century. Playing videos and listening to sounds is actually commonplace nowadays, in fact a nice screen for playing videos was why I chose a midsize laptop instead of a subnotebook, and last I looked there are increasing numbers of wide screens coming onto the market. I'm pretty sure sales of wide screen laptops and monitors isn't booming because of people wanting to put 6 xterms on screen at once.
None of your complaints have anything to do with the desktop. You are wanting applications and drivers.
None of his complaints have very much to do with the GUI but they are certainly related to the experience of trying to use a Linux machine as a desktop operating system.
Few people (except those like me whose brains seem to be running some variant of Unix in muscle memory) are going to choose a desktop that limits their computers abilities. Everything seems pretty straightforward to me and I feel empowered rather than limited by Linux, but I'm a wee bit of a nerd and few of my non-nerd friends who've sampled Linux have kept at it even with remote tech support at their bidding.
Don't get me wrong, I love my PowerBook and can get up to about 5 hours of battery life out of it as you say, but I have friends with Centrino laptops that routinely get 6-7 hours of use out of them. Granted they aren't exactly the latest, fastest CPUs I'm talking about, but generally Centrino based laptops get far better battery life than Apple's portables.
"Apple's problem has never been technological, they have some ass stomping programmers. Be OS would have been transformed from something cool into something SWEET if they had gotten a hold of it."
Correct. Apple's problem was marketing, they'd spent so many years targetting their marketing at their own customers that the rest of the world was losing interest in them.
Having the world's coolest operating system didn't make half as much difference as having a CEO with a mind for marketing to the masses, the big turnaround for Apple (as far as profits are concerned) was the original iMac which was around before OS X.
"At the time Apple bought NeXT, THEY didn't have anything like Cocoa. Apple built Cocoa from the ground up for the platform that they did have. They could have done it on a Be OS foundation."
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
Apple didn't build Cocoa from the ground up. They took OpenStep and wrapped it up in a pretty compositing window server and tacked on the carbon libraries as a way of migrating 'classic' Mac OS toolbox applications.
They would have missed out on the cross platform compatibility, multi-user abilities, bundles, RAD tools, UNIX base and a host of other things that have been very good for Apple Inc, and OS X users had they chosen BeOS.
I'm sure BeOS would have made a very nice next generation MacOS, but I wouldn't have been as keen to use it as I was to use a revamped version of OpenStep.
"It's unknown if Apple could have implemented a POSIX compliant framework for Be OS and this is one of the big strengths of OSX."
Apple probably could have adapted BeOS to be able to do a lot of the things that OS X is capable of, but OpenStep had most of the very useful qualities that they are leveraging now before Apple ever touched it. As you say, it's just ONE of the strengths of OS X.
The switch to Intel probably wouldn't be happening right now without OS X's OpenStep heritage, which meant that OS X arrived on the PPC platform prepared to concurrently support multiple binary architectures, as OpenStep had for many years.
"What we're seeing now isn't so much the survival of the Macintosh platform as it is the survival of Apple in any form necessary. I can understand that Apple had their reasons for doing so, but abandoning the PPC architecture will change them. Instead of a cool company with uniquely good hardware and an OS with its own strengths they will become what Dell would be if they bought Mandriva or Red Hat."
What utter nonsense, if Dell bought a Linux distributor, they'd just be selling Dells with a Linux distribution installed.
They'd have to hire top knotch industrial designers to make their cases, and some of the leading people in OS research to design a new Linux distribution from the ground up with the desktop in mind, or find another NeXT waiting to be snapped up for a song.
It would take many years and billions of dollars of research to turn Dell into Apple, and in the meantime people who want a seamless desktop Unix would just keep buying Apple, no matter what CPU is inside the box.
"It wasn't really a big deal to pay premium Apple prices for Mac OS on PPC, but aside from die hard Mac fans, who will pay them for the same Intel processors that can be had from Dell, HP, IBM and Gateway?"
Me.
When I bought my PowerBook the G4 was clearly ahead of the game as far as battery life vs. processing power was concerned. Why would I not buy an Intel equipped PowerBook for the same reason?
It's the first developer pre-release of an operating system on a completely different platform that expects to retain binary compatibility with the old platform, and you say it has bugs?
I would presume that they are going to break binary compatibility with every release until they release the intel version of OS X to the public.
Apple only released OS X for intel in a bundle with a Mac OS X developer preview TPM equipped motherboard inside a G5 case. The computer doesn't even belong to the developers who have them, they have to hand them back to Apple when they're finished.
It's not unreasonable in these circumstances to expect the developers to keep the OS up to date, and breaking binary compatibility is just one way to encourage them.
Personally, I don't forsee it affecting anyone who has the OS legitimately, and to those who weren't using it legitimately... tough. Thems the breaks when you use a hacked, pirated version of pre-release software.
"Apple doesn't own the towers. He who operates the cellular networks has a fair bit of say over what phones get service."
Obviously the phone companies are interested in peddling cellphones that consumers want though, all the stores that sell iPods have a fair bit of say over whether they sell iPods or not, but they don't want the trendy young hipsters to go to the store (or cellphone service provider) next door because they don't stock the product that the yoof are after.
I'm pretty sure that if Apple made a real iPod phone that all the service providers would be falling over each other to offer it first.
Slashdot Mirror
His point was valid, so what the fuck does his spelling of a non-word have to do with anything.
You're a dick.
Apple as a company hasn't exactly shown exemplary behaviour at times, but the Xerox PARC/Apple affair strikes me as one occasion where they did behave pretty fairly, and it's not right to accuse Apple of stealing while ignoring Microsoft's underhanded behaviour with regards to starting their own GUI as many people seem to do.
The point I was trying to make in my original post was that progress doesn't happen in isolation, it's by building on the work of others that we have reached the point we are at today, and having an irrational dislike of Einstein doesn't make his work less valid, even though he owes a lot to Newton.
Yeah, that was awful of him to meet with Newton and take credit for a bunch of his work.
I don't think Apple have ever been particularly secretive about the origins of the GUI -feel free to correct me if you can point to an instance where Apple have claimed to invent the GUI, as far as I can tell they only took credit for Mac OS.
Notably, there was a significant amount of apple stock transferred to Xerox PARC, who were unwilling to make a commercial product out out of the Star and Alto GUI systems, what with being a RESEARCH centre and all. Laser printing and Ethernet are other examples of now-ubiquitous technology that PARC failed to capitalise on were they "stolen" as well?
In fact, several key engineers from PARC left Apple so that they could take advantage of the opportunity to be on the team that brought the GUI to the masses.
Finally, have you ever seen what Xerox's GUI looked like? There's no more similarity between the interface of the Star and Mac GUIs than there is between DOS and UNIX, that is to say superficial resemblance only. Drop down menus, drag and drop, double-clicking and many other features that are standard fare on todays computer interfaces originated at Apple, not PARC, though quite probably from the same people.
It'd be nice if people would stick to talking about things they actually have a clue about instead of spreading nonsense about how they would like history to have been.
I suppose you think Bill Gates invented the personal computer industry and Linus Torvalds stole all the code in Linux from SCO as well.
I know, it's tragic when people steal others ideas... what about that thief Einstein, just riding Newton's coat-tails with his theories about gravity. Someone really needs to set the record straight, that Einstein guy is just a fraud.
The major problem I can see is that the user should not even have to care whether a given app is GNOME, KDE or whatever. You set your fonts and colours in the GNOME control panel, then you start a KDE app and it looks like weird-arse shit. WTF?
:D
I agree... I'm one of these weird people who has had to use both GNOME and KDE for many years, and along the way I've picked up preferences for applications that I like to use regardless of what desktop I'm using, but I'm sure we all run into the problem where our favorite application decides to pick up it's preferences from the wrong desktop from time-to-time. That's something that simply can't happen in Windows or OS X.
The most satisfactory solution I've found so far was to use the icons from redhat's bluecurve theme, and a modified version of the bluecurve qt/gtk2/gtk1 theme called QtCurve. Unfortunately it's very KControl-centric, but combined with the GtkQt plugin to copy font settings to gnome, I now have a unified look across all the major toolkits... see this screenshot to see what I'm talking about.
I wish there was a distribution that shipped out of the box with a combined KNOME or GayDE desktop instead of keeping them seperate. Just because they come from the developers a certain way, doesn't mean you can't fix it just like any other bug. I mean-- are linux distributors making their own OS, or are they just stapling and sellotaping together bits and pieces they downloaded off the internet like some saddo making his own porn mag out of printed usenet posts?
When Microsoft or Apple buy an app from another software company, they don't just replace Foocorp.gif with their own logo, they give the app a full makeover and adapt it to their OS. Linux distributors need to stop being such wimps and get their hands dirty, after all they don't even need to buy out the developers to get the source.
Anyway, everyone has probably had enough of my off-topic ranting, but I will say this... if any linux distributors are out there and listening; I for one am ready and willing to help you to improve consistency, but you have to be willing to embrace it.
Quick boys! Mod this guy down before anyone finds out the truth!
-Steeviant Jobs
You are a shrill for Nestle
:D
I think you mean shill.
True, I hadn't really considered it, but given that almost all of NeXT's founding engineering staff had been pilfered from Apple it's not surprising that some of the elements of the Mac GUI would make it into NeXTSTEP like the unified menu and spacing buttons at either end of the title bar, as well as more subtle elements.
:)
Given the number of former Be Inc. engineers now employed (and for some, returned) at Apple, it wouldn't be surprising if there are some more subtle elements of BeOS' beginning to show through, and that's only going to get more likely as Apple integrate search deeper into the OS.
Yay for the incestuous nature of highly specialised professions.
Boy, I'm really getting the linguistic smack-down over this. I guess I'll have to concede that "diabolically" doesn't neccessarily have anything to do with "diabolical".
"However, when paired with the phrase "clever", it actually is. Context is really very important."
I'm sorry but that's rubbish. Bad, nasty things can still be "diabolically clever".
It was clever of the Nazis to use a commonly availably pest toxin to exterminate people rather than wasting valuable resources that could be 'weaponized'. Nuclear weapons are devilishly clever inventions. It was clever of Al Qaeda to take control of normal commuter planes and turn them into guided missiles. Having said that, in acknowledging the cleverness involved, I'm in no way endorsing any of these spine-chillingly evil things.
"Damn, I'm coming across like some rabid anti-capitalist. I'm not, I just don't expect companies to benefit from double-standards, don't expect them to behave as anything more than the money-making mechanisms that they are, and have no qualms about punishing them into behaving in a non-destructive manner for the simple reason that their amoral nature means that this is the only method of control."
:D
I don't see how it's anti-capitalist to want lawmakers and those who run corporations to curb exploitive behaviours.
It's "anti-people" to continue along the path of allowing corporations to be a person, or a faceless organisation when it suits them.
It's "anti-people" to support a situation which does little to discourage the exploitation of workers in unsuitable and unsafe working conditions.
It's "anti-earth" to support companies with irresponsible attitudes to the environment.
But most importantly I believe it is anti-capitalist to let corporations continue with no thought to long term sustainability and impact.
There's little doubt in my mind that left to their own devices companies will plunder whatever resources they require using the cheapest possible method, discarding the waste in the cheapest possible way with little regard for anything except profit and skirting along on the right side of the law.
The only thing that stops these companies is worries that if their exploitive activities go too far, some whining commie liberal gay black islamic woman terrorist spy will come along and try to undermine capitalism by telling people about what's happening. Which could be bad for their corporate image.
That, and (usually) government regulations.
Still haven't had much sleep, I think I should put my head on a pillow.
Eep, I see now why people dispute the micro-ness of the kernel.
:)
And I stand corrected.
I woke up at 6 am yesterday, last night/today I got no sleep at all. It's 2:22pm on Friday and I'm barely able to see. I should probably go to sleep.
Fortunately I just finished a contract last night so I haven't had to do anything today.
"*I* didn't say that they were "evil". I said that "You could say that most companies were "evil" if you wanted to consider it that way."
:)
I was just chiming in with my opinion on companies, sorry if I made it appear that I was attributing to you some kind of hatred of business. I agree with the above comment, and added my amateur analysys of why that is.
You can consider psychpaths to be evil, but the truth of the matter is that they usually act the way they do because they have no concept of (or perhaps are just able to turn a blind eye to) how their actions affect others.
"Oh, and BTW, regarding the moderation of my comment.... offtopic? Bullshit."
I'm one of the few people you can guarantee didn't moderate your comment so that's obviously not aimed at me. For what it's worth I agree with you that your comment's not offtopic.
"I know *exactly* why this was modded offtopic. It's because some screechy little Apple fanboy perceived it as a criticism of Apple. Actually, it was intended more generally than that, but never underestimate the knee-jerk zealotry of the Apple fanbase."
As a general rule I'm fond of Apple's products, and being a believer in voting with my wallet, I supported Apple's effort to revive NeXT's technology and supported their efforts to bring Unix to the masses on such a grand scale by buying a PowerBook.
People need to learn to see corporations for what they are and try to ignore the branding efforts of large companies. They sell products, not lifestyles or experiences. Companies will use sweatshop labour and blatantly unsustainable practices to achieve their goals because they are usually obligated to do so for the benefit of their shareholders.
Because I don't support all of the business practices of Apple Computer, Inc. I don't own stock in their company, and will support anything that tries to rail them in with regard to their ecological and human-rights issues.
People need to get it through their heads that companies, no matter how warm and fluffy they may portray themselves, don't give a flying fuck about human suffering because they are structured in such a way that the people who comprise the company are never made personally responsible for the treatment of workers or customers.
I wish that more people could be more agnostic about products, companies and branding, but the reality is that people are prone to getting into stupid religious bitch-fests about things that are almost the same from an abstract enough viewpoint.
Think Chevy vs. Ford, Microsoft vs. Apple, etc. There is usually no logical reason for people to like one and not the other because given the same opportunities companies are designed in such a way as to be compelled to act in much the same way.
When someone gets swept up in the projected image of a company, they need to take a step back and ponder the true scope of the phrase "limited liability".
"You could say that most companies were "evil" if you wanted to consider it that way."
No, companies aren't evil as such, it's just that pretty much all companies are legally bound to act in a way that would be considered psychopathic if they were a person. Which corporations insist on being considered as for certain purposes.
So no, companies aren't evil, just mentally ill.
No, technically it's a stylised rehash of Openstep which was a stylised rehash of Nextstep which was a stylised rehash of... well... nothing. Nextstep used a BSD Unix base combined with Carnegie Mellon's Mach microkernel, and used a completely unique object oriented development environment with a lot of other pioneering technology to make something which couldn't really have it's lineage traced back to any operating system that existed before it.
If you want to get really technical, Mac OS X's relationship to BSD is that it runs a server on the XNU microkernel that creates a BSD-like environment for applications, it's not really even fair to say that OS X is based on BSD, let alone a stylised rehash of it. It has just taken elements from BSD and incorporated them into the operating system.
Don't you people with mod points feel even slightly annoyed by someone yelling out what you should do with your mod points? If this guy really cared he'd be the king of meta-moderation and have mod points himself. You probably worked hard, slaving over a hot computer diligently meta-moderating to get those points, and this guy wants to take the easy road by just yelling at everyone. I think it's shameful really.
But isn't that how you got them?
Which font antialiasing are you talking about?
The menu bar at the top of the screen is a typical example of OS X font rendering, the stuff inside the windows is probably rendered by OS X, but could be done by Freetype or a band of trained dwarves for all I know.
At any rate the fonts and sizes they've chosen to use in the examples wouldn't be used very often on OS X, particularly not in the microscopic point sizes shown in one of the examples.
As I said though, it might help if you were more specific.
" What linux needs for the desktop market is an easy to use, and simple desktop."
Yea, it's called Gnome.
Gnome is getting pretty good, but compared to Windows or OS X the point at which the windows-icons-mouse-pointer paradigm falls down still comes much sooner than in Windows or OS X
Linux is nice, and serves me as a Unix zealot quite well for a home desktop, but I still haven't seen a Linux distribution in which it is as easy to install an application as in the mainstream OSes.
"For example, Sometimes, sound on linux can be an absolute bitch to get going."
What does this have to do with the desktop?
I (like most people with computers) have a large collection of music on my computer, because it's so much easier to manage than a giant pile of CDs. Listening to music from one's computer is a common use for desktop machines these days. There's no way in hell a consumer or non-power-user is going to knowingly choose an OS with such weak audio abilities that it can only play one sound at once without the assistance of some program which makes the sound choppy and/or laggy on certain hardware. I have set up dmixer on my computer which should mean that I should be able do away with those awful sound daemons, and some people have those new fangled cards with a hardware mixer, but the obsolete sound daemons have become so entrenched that they're still required for the respective desktop environments and their applications to function properly.
There is no stable ABI for vendors to create hardware drivers to, the ABI is in a constant state of flux along with the rest of the kernel and drivers compiled for a certain version are progressively more unlikely to work with each successive minor version of the kernel. The situation is nearly as bad for open source drivers which need regular maintenance to remain in sync with the audio API. It's no wonder most hardware vendors don't want to touch Linux with a stick.
The situation with sound in Linux is confusing, fragmented and in many ways just plain broken. I don't know what you do with your desktop, but it's obviously not typical if you don't consider sound to be important.
"The point is, that as long as simple issues like playing a video become mammoth tasks,"
What does this have to do with the desktop?
You don't suppose all those millions of ATA DVD drives being sold are finding their way into servers do you?
Wake up Buck, you've arrived in the 21st century. Playing videos and listening to sounds is actually commonplace nowadays, in fact a nice screen for playing videos was why I chose a midsize laptop instead of a subnotebook, and last I looked there are increasing numbers of wide screens coming onto the market. I'm pretty sure sales of wide screen laptops and monitors isn't booming because of people wanting to put 6 xterms on screen at once.
None of your complaints have anything to do with the desktop. You are wanting applications and drivers.
None of his complaints have very much to do with the GUI but they are certainly related to the experience of trying to use a Linux machine as a desktop operating system.
Few people (except those like me whose brains seem to be running some variant of Unix in muscle memory) are going to choose a desktop that limits their computers abilities. Everything seems pretty straightforward to me and I feel empowered rather than limited by Linux, but I'm a wee bit of a nerd and few of my non-nerd friends who've sampled Linux have kept at it even with remote tech support at their bidding.
Don't get me wrong, I love my PowerBook and can get up to about 5 hours of battery life out of it as you say, but I have friends with Centrino laptops that routinely get 6-7 hours of use out of them. Granted they aren't exactly the latest, fastest CPUs I'm talking about, but generally Centrino based laptops get far better battery life than Apple's portables.
whom cares?
"Apple's problem has never been technological, they have some ass stomping programmers. Be OS would have been transformed from something cool into something SWEET if they had gotten a hold of it."
Correct. Apple's problem was marketing, they'd spent so many years targetting their marketing at their own customers that the rest of the world was losing interest in them.
Having the world's coolest operating system didn't make half as much difference as having a CEO with a mind for marketing to the masses, the big turnaround for Apple (as far as profits are concerned) was the original iMac which was around before OS X.
"At the time Apple bought NeXT, THEY didn't have anything like Cocoa. Apple built Cocoa from the ground up for the platform that they did have. They could have done it on a Be OS foundation."
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
Apple didn't build Cocoa from the ground up. They took OpenStep and wrapped it up in a pretty compositing window server and tacked on the carbon libraries as a way of migrating 'classic' Mac OS toolbox applications.
They would have missed out on the cross platform compatibility, multi-user abilities, bundles, RAD tools, UNIX base and a host of other things that have been very good for Apple Inc, and OS X users had they chosen BeOS.
I'm sure BeOS would have made a very nice next generation MacOS, but I wouldn't have been as keen to use it as I was to use a revamped version of OpenStep.
"It's unknown if Apple could have implemented a POSIX compliant framework for Be OS and this is one of the big strengths of OSX."
Apple probably could have adapted BeOS to be able to do a lot of the things that OS X is capable of, but OpenStep had most of the very useful qualities that they are leveraging now before Apple ever touched it. As you say, it's just ONE of the strengths of OS X.
The switch to Intel probably wouldn't be happening right now without OS X's OpenStep heritage, which meant that OS X arrived on the PPC platform prepared to concurrently support multiple binary architectures, as OpenStep had for many years.
"What we're seeing now isn't so much the survival of the Macintosh platform as it is the survival of Apple in any form necessary. I can understand that Apple had their reasons for doing so, but abandoning the PPC architecture will change them. Instead of a cool company with uniquely good hardware and an OS with its own strengths they will become what Dell would be if they bought Mandriva or Red Hat."
What utter nonsense, if Dell bought a Linux distributor, they'd just be selling Dells with a Linux distribution installed.
They'd have to hire top knotch industrial designers to make their cases, and some of the leading people in OS research to design a new Linux distribution from the ground up with the desktop in mind, or find another NeXT waiting to be snapped up for a song.
It would take many years and billions of dollars of research to turn Dell into Apple, and in the meantime people who want a seamless desktop Unix would just keep buying Apple, no matter what CPU is inside the box.
"It wasn't really a big deal to pay premium Apple prices for Mac OS on PPC, but aside from die hard Mac fans, who will pay them for the same Intel processors that can be had from Dell, HP, IBM and Gateway?"
Me.
When I bought my PowerBook the G4 was clearly ahead of the game as far as battery life vs. processing power was concerned. Why would I not buy an Intel equipped PowerBook for the same reason?
It's the first developer pre-release of an operating system on a completely different platform that expects to retain binary compatibility with the old platform, and you say it has bugs?
I would presume that they are going to break binary compatibility with every release until they release the intel version of OS X to the public.
Apple only released OS X for intel in a bundle with a Mac OS X developer preview TPM equipped motherboard inside a G5 case. The computer doesn't even belong to the developers who have them, they have to hand them back to Apple when they're finished.
It's not unreasonable in these circumstances to expect the developers to keep the OS up to date, and breaking binary compatibility is just one way to encourage them.
Personally, I don't forsee it affecting anyone who has the OS legitimately, and to those who weren't using it legitimately... tough. Thems the breaks when you use a hacked, pirated version of pre-release software.
"Apple doesn't own the towers. He who operates the cellular networks has a fair bit of say over what phones get service."
Obviously the phone companies are interested in peddling cellphones that consumers want though, all the stores that sell iPods have a fair bit of say over whether they sell iPods or not, but they don't want the trendy young hipsters to go to the store (or cellphone service provider) next door because they don't stock the product that the yoof are after.
I'm pretty sure that if Apple made a real iPod phone that all the service providers would be falling over each other to offer it first.