The idea of "The Apple Tax" is prevalent and popular. It's also mostly not true.
As an example, one of the "Mini PC" deals from a local computer company costs ~$680 - it lands performance-wise between the $499 and $599 Mac mini, and comes without an OS and logically also without any software. The Mac mini not only already has an OS, but comes with more software than has been bundled with my latest two PCs (and as far as I can tell, most of the software that comes with the mini doesn't suck).
The above example was a fairly well-equipped box, on par with the Mac mini. If we were to go up to the current PowerBook, for example, it'd have Firewire 800, optical audio, gigabit ethernet, Bluetooth 2.0 and a full-sized DVI. I agree that it performance more or less sucks (with a 167MHz system bus, no wonder they're going Intel), but try to find a comparable port setup on a PC laptop for the same price. (The PowerBook also comes with even more software.)
It's true that you can put together an eMachine for $300 with less features that still does everything you want. At that point, there *will* be an overwhelming Apple tax if you were to look at the alternatives, and unless you want OS X, there's no good reason to buy a Mac. It's also true that you can probably find a technically better laptop than the iBook for the same price. To me, this is the only noticable Apple tax. But most of this is also a general tax - if you were buying a better Dell for $500, would you also call that The Dell Premium? No, you'd recognize that it was a higher-end model than your current one, and get on with your life. The only reason this doesn't happen with Apple is because they don't additionally make low-end models as low as the others.
Another scenario: you're trying to buy a Quad PowerMac G5, and you're complaining about the price - a workstation computer costing $3300. I went to Dell's site and configured a Dell Precision 670 MT64 - also billed as a workstation computer - with two Dual-Core Xeons. It cost $4634. $3300 is heinous, but compared to what the market's low-cost provider has, it's cheap.
At very few points, even today, are you paying a $500 premium for Apple computers. If you're not satisfied by a Mac mini and want an iMac, there's an exact $500 difference between the top mini and the low iMac, so if you're in that position and strapped for cash, I pity you. At even fewer points - none? - do you have one PC and one Mac, both with comparable hardware and the Mac costing $500 more.
Your argument that PC users won't switch may prove to be correct. Really switching to the Mac and actually abandoning your current PC is not something you accomplish over an afternoon, and unless you're a "Student/Teacher"; the Mac version of Office isn't cheap either. Even if we consider the people that will like to have one box booting OS X, Windows and natively, or even just the first two, they're practically a rounding error in comparison to potential switchers.
But where I know that you're absolutely full of crap is the bit about driving loyal Apple customers away. Most loyal Apple customers have already been through either OS 9 to OS X or that AND 68k to PowerPC. This transition promises to be a lot smoother, which is astounding, considering how the emulator this time around is crappier. There's absolutely no evidence that the new Macs will be significantly worse than the current Macs, other than possible manufacturing defects with new rounds of hardware - nothing particularly unique to either this transition or Apple products.
Other people have said it better that Apple is making more money than ever currently. Steve Jobs stood on the WWDC stage seven months ago and proclaimed that by summer 2007, every Mac would be shipping with an Intel processor. Since then, sales of would-be-obsolete machines are going up. It's not exactly your average Osbourne effect. If you cared about your profits, you would be nuts to fire Jobs if you were in the position to do so.
I agree with what you said, and you probably get the following too: Don't think that the "new" Intel isn't a product of marketing. Centrino before it, the current brand remaking and the up-and-coming Viiv all smell of nothing but marketing. What Intel's done now is that they've dramatically reduced marketing bullshit on the processor-and-chips-level and let them loose on the "platform"-level and company-level instead.
They did practically hit the wall as far as megahertz goes. Starting at 90nm it got a lot harder to just keep pumping the megahertz up and up to the extent that they had been in the past. Obviously they had to face the facts at some time, and I think Otellini has been doing a nice job at repositioning the company to embrace that. Two years ago, everyone knew Intel's message was "gigahertz = speed"; two years from now, everyone will know Intel's message is "multi-core = speed; low power = good". This is fabulous marketing.
Personally I like the new logo and I think that the simple "Core Duo" and "Core Solo" reflects much better what the processors are all about. (And personally, I was getting very tired of the Pentium brand, because the products that have been represented during the past seven years have been wildly different to the point where you can't really pinpoint what a Pentium is - is it 64-bit? does it have multiple cores? an L3 cache? is it a laptop CPU? how long is the pipeline? is this CPU clocked at 2.0ghz good or bad, relatively?)
Apparently before the end of the year. The Pentium brand has now been around almost 13 years, and in a way it's past its prime. If Intel is tearing almost every other aspect of its marketing up to start fresh, Pentium, along with Intel Inside, is arguably the most stale, and Intel Inside has already been dumped. It seems like a good place to start. I, for one, welcome our new Core-named overlords...
Regarding Africa: Once some people stop starving, they're going to need education. Education means that they can get a job; take care of their family; cure diseases (both by being able to buy medicine but also by contributing to scientific research); help stop more starvation. Do you honestly think that a good effort towards cheap-but-good material will not make a difference here when you run the numbers high? (But again, that's when some people stop starving. No one's doing anything wrong when they help stop starvation or AIDS, but there's no need to blast other rungs on the ladder because of that.)
My concerns are as high as yours that Wikipedia articles can be partisan, vandalized or simple untrue at times. However, not helping is not going to improve the situation. Do you think that the Panera Bread article is serving Panera? Edit it - cut down on what you reckon is advertising. Question lack of sources or claims that are not backed up. I don't care if you picked that one article as an emblematic case, if you did. If everyone did this, Wikipedia would be so much better for it.
I'm not saying that everyone owes it to Wikipedia to help improve it. I'm just saying that, at times, I wonder if all its critics have actually tried to help out. You may be right that people don't know what to write. You may be right that there are assholes tearing down the advice of experts. But there's an extraordinary opportunity to with very small means make a huge difference. By editing, you're setting a good precedent for others to follow. I'm positive that it will eventually add up.
That's like saying "Sounds like a job for everyone's favorite medium, paper!" (Or I suppose one could even argue that XML is more like wood pulp than paper in this comparison.)
XML allows for the quick creation of data formats, but it doesn't magically make these data formats popular or parsable by actual programs - that's still a real issue. And even when they settle on an internal format, there's the question of getting existing data into that format, or exporting back into popular formats. It's not as easy as just saying "XML", even if XML makes the process of shaping a custom data format and parsing it easier, and allows for XSL-like transformations.
Google just released the specifications to their audio extensions ("Jingle"), and GAIM is working on integrating it, which means that it's not impossible that it'll find its way into the "plain Jabber" features, at which point no doubt other Jabber clients will start to implement it as well. That sounds likely, at least, and it'll mean you won't have to use Google Talk unless you want to.
There's no doubt in my mind that Google Talk is to get dramatically more open and more features. I think what they've done so far is dip their toes in the water, and with the release of the Jingle specs and source code (where copyright goes back to 2004 - I don't think they're likely to drop this) they're really saying "OK, let's do this" and getting some very nice leverage from the community in the process.
I agree with the fact that poor browsers (or WML-only browser) is a case of catching up. However, there's a line between where browsers are not good enough and where your site could use retooling to better suit mobile browsers. (Some browsers are *very* smart about converting 'real' sites to mobile sites, but you can't assume that every single browser is going to work that way, or even in the same way.)
This article on A List Apart - detailing what could be done to improve Slashdot before it switched to CSS for layout, coincidentally - includes a part on browser display that can be quite telling in this kind of comparison: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot2/
No, it's not a matter of time until they "catch up". Far from everything is about bandwidth of connection or capability of the browser - it's also about the size and quality of the screen, and the facts that there's always going to be a demand for small phones with comparatively narrow screens and that you can only make the text so small.
You're right that it's a waste for lots of sites, but some sites can really take advantage of being available for cellphones and PDAs, in which case you should not just hope that the plethora of very varying mobile browsers can all figure out how to render a complex layout designed for a four to six times wider screen correctly. If you put any effort at all into making your site accessible to mobile browsers, you had better have a grip on how you can tailor it to look good in them specifically, and not just acceptably shrunk down.
Is it *proven* that Apple took down the software link as a direct cause of a nastygram and not because the author of the software told them to? Is it also given that Apple should be liable to protecting the products of others or to fix legal help for those companies? Even if I, like you, think it would have been nice if it had happened, I don't think that it's an inherent right that you have just because you get your app in a product listing, no matter what company hosts it. I also think that bringing down lyrics software and web sites is a complete crock, for what it's worth.
If you just want to bitch about Apple's legal department, there are several other very legitimate areas to choose instead.
The very best way to serve up 'baked' pages using WordPress is Staticize Reloaded, which also allows some parts of a page to stay 'fried' on load, with other pages 'baked' for you. This is a way better solution than building your own caches.
WordPress (PHP) is an amazing piece of software. I used to use Movable Type, and their respective pros and cons tend to cancel each other out, so it's really a matter of taste and priorities. There are tons of other solutions - TextPattern (PHP) and Typo (Ruby on Rails) are also popular and widely supported, and if neither will do, check your favorite search engine's index.
And yes, the word "blog" is an amazing eyesore, and it's just a contraction for the hell of it. "Weblog" or even the accepted ancestral "log" means so much more that it's hard to believe why people would use the four letter alternative other than to feel special.
I will say that at least we slashdotters don't think we're "journalists."
The people who have any ambition to call their own writing journalism probably have a streamlined posting system. This doesn't mean that everyone that has a streamlined posting system - call it a news page or a weblog or a journal or a column - thinks that they're journalists. If I had to make such an extremely sweeping generalization, I'd much rather assign them the label "casual writers". But I think that in reality, very few people consider themselves either just because they're able to write on a web site, and I believe it's a label that's forced upon them by people somehow upset with a precious few.
If what you're really after is further restricting the user by preventing them from changing any of the default settings of your OneTrueWay®, I don't think your distro would gain much of a following.
I totally agree. However, I apply the term "Aqua" not so much as to how the widgets look, but how everything works. UI conventions. Things that dictate to put the "OK" button to the right and "Cancel" to the left, and that holding down alt means to copy when dragging and dropping. (Apple themselves define Aqua as the way Mac OS X works, not *just* how it looks. Their handwriting recognition, speech recognition/synthesis and accessibility interface are all placed under Aqua in that menu to the right.)
What was I saying? I was saying that *if* the screenshot's intent was to show that the skin, the plugin and Konqueror could look exactly like the Finder, they could have done things differently. I'm not saying that it's a sin to configure how you want your GUI to look and work - it's a perfectly reasonable stance to take - or that Baghira is bad at what it does. I'm not even saying that I believe any one approach to be better than another - or that there is a one true way, however you want to spell that to make me look like an Apple suck-up, apologist or overall evil villain.;)
But, more than anything, I was also saying that I don't believe a skin of desktop environment A for a desktop environment B that works differently can easily convey the same feel of desktop environment A. I also think that based on this, to say that "Aqua is available for Linux" is not true. "A skin with Aqua-like buttons and some extras for other programs to make them look or behave more like OS X counterparts" would be more accurate.
I agree as a Mac OS X user myself that it's a fairly spectacular translation of how the widgets look. But there's so much more to UI than how the widgets look. It's about how it feels and how it works. It's about making the sidebar automatically downsize the icons, making sure as many items as possible can fit before it puts a scroll bar in there. It's about having that question mark in the title look like a button, similarly to the other buttons in there (this is just a general style rule - Mac OS X's help button never appears as a title bar widget). It's also about leaving out the pinstripe background from the icon view, because it never ever appears outside of the window chrome itself - you wouldn't normally have "window gray" in there, would you?
Aqua in Mac OS X isn't a skin, it's the whole UI. There are exactly two (official) skins (called appearances) in Mac OS X - Graphite and Blue, which change the title bar widgets, the Apple menu and the Spotlight icon to be gray or in color. I can appreciate the effort put into this kind of stuff, but for all intents and purposes, you're certainly not getting "Aqua". You're getting something that vaguely looks like the "Blue" appearance, and a Konqueror sidebar that looks like the Finder sidebar, and that's a world of difference.
Outsourcing is letting a third party handle something in your or your company's place. Offshoring is outsourcing something to other countries, including India, and China. So the call centers are outsourced, but not offshored.
Noone's going nuts over it looking like that on the outside. They were one of the first with a player of that format. The player controls have been in pretty much the same place for the last few players and remains one of the places where Creative's players really differ from the iPods. There's no skin off Creative's back for this. None.
Furthermore, noone's going nuts about it being marketed in white and black. Noone's going nuts about its menu color scheme looking an awful lot like the iPod's (which was introduced with "iPod photo" last year - white menu system, subtle gradients, blue selections, green battery), or about the menu arrangement being similar to the iPod's. It's the fact that Creative are more or less marketing the device with photos featuring all these combined, making it look remarkably similar to the iPod and *in the same breath* broadcasting the fact that they will strike down people who copy them that makes the situation ironic at best.
The grandparent poster's referring to the look and feel of the M vs the 5G iPod, not the Nomad vs the iPod in general or the first of each one. The M is undeniably looking very similar to the 5G iPod, approaching something that's almost completely identical to the iPod menu-wise (especially when considering earlier models), AND is marketed as basically having the same features "and then some" of the very same iPod model. This is not a coincidence, and it's tough to *not* write this off as a rip-off. It's one thing to follow whoever has the most market share and compare your products to them - that's just smart marketing. This on the other hand is just shameless.
(And obviously, patents of simple interfaces like this are bullshit, no matter who files them - Apple, Microsoft, Creative or my grandma. I'm not one of the apparently many people who believe that Windows should not be allowed to exist because it has a successful GUI, and Apple was the first company to sell computers with successful GUIs in the millions (Xerox didn't). I don't personally mind Creative having intuitive menus, but I reserve my right to get pissed off with a company that does this sort of relative cloning and calls it sunshine.)
Copilot uses VNC but has some extra software around it to facilitate charging and yet some to provide tunneling and encrypted connection. In effect, it's no more incompatible than any other pimped-up VNC server you could set up - it's certainly less incompatible than any non-VNC server! But I don't think that Copilot is to be compared on equal ground with remote connection software, because if you're using it as that it's clearly going to suck, paying day passes all the time.
I think that Copilot is a good service because it definitely fills a need. Let's say your uncle calls you and says "hey, this program keeps crashing on me" or "I can't figure out how to do stuff in this program". In a minute or two, without prior arrangements, you can tell him to go to a web site, type in a number, download a program and all of a sudden he's got you helping him and controlling the computer. You haven't left the phone. You certainly haven't spent 15 minutes (conservative estimate) setting up software, arranging secure connections for him just-in-case and making sure that the damn thing works across firewalls. In a situation like this it's a godsend.
I'm not very hot for any other Fog Creek product, I haven't ever needed to use it (thankfully) and I'm certainly not getting kickbacks for saying this. I'm also not saying that it's precisely what you use to control one of your boxes from another one of your boxes, because it isn't. I'm just saying that it's potentially a very useful product that looks to be done right and that it has earned the attention it gets, and if you're knocking it as an incompatible implementation of remote controlling, I think you've completely missed the point.
Slashdot Mirror
667 MHz frontside (system) bus. 500 MHz more than what's in the current laptops!
If this is a nightmare, I, for one, don't want to wake up.
The idea of "The Apple Tax" is prevalent and popular. It's also mostly not true.
As an example, one of the "Mini PC" deals from a local computer company costs ~$680 - it lands performance-wise between the $499 and $599 Mac mini, and comes without an OS and logically also without any software. The Mac mini not only already has an OS, but comes with more software than has been bundled with my latest two PCs (and as far as I can tell, most of the software that comes with the mini doesn't suck).
The above example was a fairly well-equipped box, on par with the Mac mini. If we were to go up to the current PowerBook, for example, it'd have Firewire 800, optical audio, gigabit ethernet, Bluetooth 2.0 and a full-sized DVI. I agree that it performance more or less sucks (with a 167MHz system bus, no wonder they're going Intel), but try to find a comparable port setup on a PC laptop for the same price. (The PowerBook also comes with even more software.)
It's true that you can put together an eMachine for $300 with less features that still does everything you want. At that point, there *will* be an overwhelming Apple tax if you were to look at the alternatives, and unless you want OS X, there's no good reason to buy a Mac. It's also true that you can probably find a technically better laptop than the iBook for the same price. To me, this is the only noticable Apple tax. But most of this is also a general tax - if you were buying a better Dell for $500, would you also call that The Dell Premium? No, you'd recognize that it was a higher-end model than your current one, and get on with your life. The only reason this doesn't happen with Apple is because they don't additionally make low-end models as low as the others.
Another scenario: you're trying to buy a Quad PowerMac G5, and you're complaining about the price - a workstation computer costing $3300. I went to Dell's site and configured a Dell Precision 670 MT64 - also billed as a workstation computer - with two Dual-Core Xeons. It cost $4634. $3300 is heinous, but compared to what the market's low-cost provider has, it's cheap.
At very few points, even today, are you paying a $500 premium for Apple computers. If you're not satisfied by a Mac mini and want an iMac, there's an exact $500 difference between the top mini and the low iMac, so if you're in that position and strapped for cash, I pity you. At even fewer points - none? - do you have one PC and one Mac, both with comparable hardware and the Mac costing $500 more.
Your argument that PC users won't switch may prove to be correct. Really switching to the Mac and actually abandoning your current PC is not something you accomplish over an afternoon, and unless you're a "Student/Teacher"; the Mac version of Office isn't cheap either. Even if we consider the people that will like to have one box booting OS X, Windows and natively, or even just the first two, they're practically a rounding error in comparison to potential switchers.
But where I know that you're absolutely full of crap is the bit about driving loyal Apple customers away. Most loyal Apple customers have already been through either OS 9 to OS X or that AND 68k to PowerPC. This transition promises to be a lot smoother, which is astounding, considering how the emulator this time around is crappier. There's absolutely no evidence that the new Macs will be significantly worse than the current Macs, other than possible manufacturing defects with new rounds of hardware - nothing particularly unique to either this transition or Apple products.
Other people have said it better that Apple is making more money than ever currently. Steve Jobs stood on the WWDC stage seven months ago and proclaimed that by summer 2007, every Mac would be shipping with an Intel processor. Since then, sales of would-be-obsolete machines are going up. It's not exactly your average Osbourne effect. If you cared about your profits, you would be nuts to fire Jobs if you were in the position to do so.
My last point is that of the double-play
I agree with what you said, and you probably get the following too: Don't think that the "new" Intel isn't a product of marketing. Centrino before it, the current brand remaking and the up-and-coming Viiv all smell of nothing but marketing. What Intel's done now is that they've dramatically reduced marketing bullshit on the processor-and-chips-level and let them loose on the "platform"-level and company-level instead.
They did practically hit the wall as far as megahertz goes. Starting at 90nm it got a lot harder to just keep pumping the megahertz up and up to the extent that they had been in the past. Obviously they had to face the facts at some time, and I think Otellini has been doing a nice job at repositioning the company to embrace that. Two years ago, everyone knew Intel's message was "gigahertz = speed"; two years from now, everyone will know Intel's message is "multi-core = speed; low power = good". This is fabulous marketing.
Personally I like the new logo and I think that the simple "Core Duo" and "Core Solo" reflects much better what the processors are all about. (And personally, I was getting very tired of the Pentium brand, because the products that have been represented during the past seven years have been wildly different to the point where you can't really pinpoint what a Pentium is - is it 64-bit? does it have multiple cores? an L3 cache? is it a laptop CPU? how long is the pipeline? is this CPU clocked at 2.0ghz good or bad, relatively?)
Apparently before the end of the year. The Pentium brand has now been around almost 13 years, and in a way it's past its prime. If Intel is tearing almost every other aspect of its marketing up to start fresh, Pentium, along with Intel Inside, is arguably the most stale, and Intel Inside has already been dumped. It seems like a good place to start. I, for one, welcome our new Core-named overlords...
Regarding Africa: Once some people stop starving, they're going to need education. Education means that they can get a job; take care of their family; cure diseases (both by being able to buy medicine but also by contributing to scientific research); help stop more starvation. Do you honestly think that a good effort towards cheap-but-good material will not make a difference here when you run the numbers high? (But again, that's when some people stop starving. No one's doing anything wrong when they help stop starvation or AIDS, but there's no need to blast other rungs on the ladder because of that.)
My concerns are as high as yours that Wikipedia articles can be partisan, vandalized or simple untrue at times. However, not helping is not going to improve the situation. Do you think that the Panera Bread article is serving Panera? Edit it - cut down on what you reckon is advertising. Question lack of sources or claims that are not backed up. I don't care if you picked that one article as an emblematic case, if you did. If everyone did this, Wikipedia would be so much better for it.
I'm not saying that everyone owes it to Wikipedia to help improve it. I'm just saying that, at times, I wonder if all its critics have actually tried to help out. You may be right that people don't know what to write. You may be right that there are assholes tearing down the advice of experts. But there's an extraordinary opportunity to with very small means make a huge difference. By editing, you're setting a good precedent for others to follow. I'm positive that it will eventually add up.
But much like most modern feed readers, most people have built-in autodiscoverability.
That's like saying "Sounds like a job for everyone's favorite medium, paper!" (Or I suppose one could even argue that XML is more like wood pulp than paper in this comparison.)
XML allows for the quick creation of data formats, but it doesn't magically make these data formats popular or parsable by actual programs - that's still a real issue. And even when they settle on an internal format, there's the question of getting existing data into that format, or exporting back into popular formats. It's not as easy as just saying "XML", even if XML makes the process of shaping a custom data format and parsing it easier, and allows for XSL-like transformations.
Er. Correction:
It's the wrong interface - Uniform Driver Interface instead of the Unified Display Interface.
It's the wrong interface - Uniform Driver Interface instead of the Universal Display Interface.
Google just released the specifications to their audio extensions ("Jingle"), and GAIM is working on integrating it, which means that it's not impossible that it'll find its way into the "plain Jabber" features, at which point no doubt other Jabber clients will start to implement it as well. That sounds likely, at least, and it'll mean you won't have to use Google Talk unless you want to.
There's no doubt in my mind that Google Talk is to get dramatically more open and more features. I think what they've done so far is dip their toes in the water, and with the release of the Jingle specs and source code (where copyright goes back to 2004 - I don't think they're likely to drop this) they're really saying "OK, let's do this" and getting some very nice leverage from the community in the process.
I agree with the fact that poor browsers (or WML-only browser) is a case of catching up. However, there's a line between where browsers are not good enough and where your site could use retooling to better suit mobile browsers. (Some browsers are *very* smart about converting 'real' sites to mobile sites, but you can't assume that every single browser is going to work that way, or even in the same way.)
This article on A List Apart - detailing what could be done to improve Slashdot before it switched to CSS for layout, coincidentally - includes a part on browser display that can be quite telling in this kind of comparison: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot2/
No, it's not a matter of time until they "catch up". Far from everything is about bandwidth of connection or capability of the browser - it's also about the size and quality of the screen, and the facts that there's always going to be a demand for small phones with comparatively narrow screens and that you can only make the text so small.
You're right that it's a waste for lots of sites, but some sites can really take advantage of being available for cellphones and PDAs, in which case you should not just hope that the plethora of very varying mobile browsers can all figure out how to render a complex layout designed for a four to six times wider screen correctly. If you put any effort at all into making your site accessible to mobile browsers, you had better have a grip on how you can tailor it to look good in them specifically, and not just acceptably shrunk down.
Cellphones. PDAs.
Is it *proven* that Apple took down the software link as a direct cause of a nastygram and not because the author of the software told them to? Is it also given that Apple should be liable to protecting the products of others or to fix legal help for those companies? Even if I, like you, think it would have been nice if it had happened, I don't think that it's an inherent right that you have just because you get your app in a product listing, no matter what company hosts it. I also think that bringing down lyrics software and web sites is a complete crock, for what it's worth.
If you just want to bitch about Apple's legal department, there are several other very legitimate areas to choose instead.
I have it on a server that *could* get very busy very quick, but haven't so far. However, there's some fairly impressive benchmarks...
The very best way to serve up 'baked' pages using WordPress is Staticize Reloaded, which also allows some parts of a page to stay 'fried' on load, with other pages 'baked' for you. This is a way better solution than building your own caches.
WordPress (PHP) is an amazing piece of software. I used to use Movable Type, and their respective pros and cons tend to cancel each other out, so it's really a matter of taste and priorities. There are tons of other solutions - TextPattern (PHP) and Typo (Ruby on Rails) are also popular and widely supported, and if neither will do, check your favorite search engine's index.
And yes, the word "blog" is an amazing eyesore, and it's just a contraction for the hell of it. "Weblog" or even the accepted ancestral "log" means so much more that it's hard to believe why people would use the four letter alternative other than to feel special.
I will say that at least we slashdotters don't think we're "journalists."
The people who have any ambition to call their own writing journalism probably have a streamlined posting system. This doesn't mean that everyone that has a streamlined posting system - call it a news page or a weblog or a journal or a column - thinks that they're journalists. If I had to make such an extremely sweeping generalization, I'd much rather assign them the label "casual writers". But I think that in reality, very few people consider themselves either just because they're able to write on a web site, and I believe it's a label that's forced upon them by people somehow upset with a precious few.
If what you're really after is further restricting the user by preventing them from changing any of the default settings of your OneTrueWay®, I don't think your distro would gain much of a following.
I totally agree. However, I apply the term "Aqua" not so much as to how the widgets look, but how everything works. UI conventions. Things that dictate to put the "OK" button to the right and "Cancel" to the left, and that holding down alt means to copy when dragging and dropping. (Apple themselves define Aqua as the way Mac OS X works, not *just* how it looks. Their handwriting recognition, speech recognition/synthesis and accessibility interface are all placed under Aqua in that menu to the right.)
What was I saying? I was saying that *if* the screenshot's intent was to show that the skin, the plugin and Konqueror could look exactly like the Finder, they could have done things differently. I'm not saying that it's a sin to configure how you want your GUI to look and work - it's a perfectly reasonable stance to take - or that Baghira is bad at what it does. I'm not even saying that I believe any one approach to be better than another - or that there is a one true way, however you want to spell that to make me look like an Apple suck-up, apologist or overall evil villain. ;)
But, more than anything, I was also saying that I don't believe a skin of desktop environment A for a desktop environment B that works differently can easily convey the same feel of desktop environment A. I also think that based on this, to say that "Aqua is available for Linux" is not true. "A skin with Aqua-like buttons and some extras for other programs to make them look or behave more like OS X counterparts" would be more accurate.
No. Look at the screenshot of the modded Konqueror for example: http://baghira.sourceforge.net/pix/finder.jpg.
I agree as a Mac OS X user myself that it's a fairly spectacular translation of how the widgets look. But there's so much more to UI than how the widgets look. It's about how it feels and how it works. It's about making the sidebar automatically downsize the icons, making sure as many items as possible can fit before it puts a scroll bar in there. It's about having that question mark in the title look like a button, similarly to the other buttons in there (this is just a general style rule - Mac OS X's help button never appears as a title bar widget). It's also about leaving out the pinstripe background from the icon view, because it never ever appears outside of the window chrome itself - you wouldn't normally have "window gray" in there, would you?
Aqua in Mac OS X isn't a skin, it's the whole UI. There are exactly two (official) skins (called appearances) in Mac OS X - Graphite and Blue, which change the title bar widgets, the Apple menu and the Spotlight icon to be gray or in color. I can appreciate the effort put into this kind of stuff, but for all intents and purposes, you're certainly not getting "Aqua". You're getting something that vaguely looks like the "Blue" appearance, and a Konqueror sidebar that looks like the Finder sidebar, and that's a world of difference.
They already sort of had that with the panels in the Google Desktop sidebar.
Outsourcing is letting a third party handle something in your or your company's place. Offshoring is outsourcing something to other countries, including India, and China. So the call centers are outsourced, but not offshored.
Noone's going nuts over it looking like that on the outside. They were one of the first with a player of that format. The player controls have been in pretty much the same place for the last few players and remains one of the places where Creative's players really differ from the iPods. There's no skin off Creative's back for this. None.
Furthermore, noone's going nuts about it being marketed in white and black. Noone's going nuts about its menu color scheme looking an awful lot like the iPod's (which was introduced with "iPod photo" last year - white menu system, subtle gradients, blue selections, green battery), or about the menu arrangement being similar to the iPod's. It's the fact that Creative are more or less marketing the device with photos featuring all these combined, making it look remarkably similar to the iPod and *in the same breath* broadcasting the fact that they will strike down people who copy them that makes the situation ironic at best.
The grandparent poster's referring to the look and feel of the M vs the 5G iPod, not the Nomad vs the iPod in general or the first of each one. The M is undeniably looking very similar to the 5G iPod, approaching something that's almost completely identical to the iPod menu-wise (especially when considering earlier models), AND is marketed as basically having the same features "and then some" of the very same iPod model. This is not a coincidence, and it's tough to *not* write this off as a rip-off. It's one thing to follow whoever has the most market share and compare your products to them - that's just smart marketing. This on the other hand is just shameless.
(And obviously, patents of simple interfaces like this are bullshit, no matter who files them - Apple, Microsoft, Creative or my grandma. I'm not one of the apparently many people who believe that Windows should not be allowed to exist because it has a successful GUI, and Apple was the first company to sell computers with successful GUIs in the millions (Xerox didn't). I don't personally mind Creative having intuitive menus, but I reserve my right to get pissed off with a company that does this sort of relative cloning and calls it sunshine.)
Copilot uses VNC but has some extra software around it to facilitate charging and yet some to provide tunneling and encrypted connection. In effect, it's no more incompatible than any other pimped-up VNC server you could set up - it's certainly less incompatible than any non-VNC server! But I don't think that Copilot is to be compared on equal ground with remote connection software, because if you're using it as that it's clearly going to suck, paying day passes all the time.
I think that Copilot is a good service because it definitely fills a need. Let's say your uncle calls you and says "hey, this program keeps crashing on me" or "I can't figure out how to do stuff in this program". In a minute or two, without prior arrangements, you can tell him to go to a web site, type in a number, download a program and all of a sudden he's got you helping him and controlling the computer. You haven't left the phone. You certainly haven't spent 15 minutes (conservative estimate) setting up software, arranging secure connections for him just-in-case and making sure that the damn thing works across firewalls. In a situation like this it's a godsend.
I'm not very hot for any other Fog Creek product, I haven't ever needed to use it (thankfully) and I'm certainly not getting kickbacks for saying this. I'm also not saying that it's precisely what you use to control one of your boxes from another one of your boxes, because it isn't. I'm just saying that it's potentially a very useful product that looks to be done right and that it has earned the attention it gets, and if you're knocking it as an incompatible implementation of remote controlling, I think you've completely missed the point.