I think if you're paying for programming vs. hardware, you're just paying for different things. I would think that would be somewhat obvious, given their very different nature, but apparently there's still some uncertainty.
The improvements you get from optimizing software are limited but reproducible for free-- "free" in the sense that if I have lots of installations, all the installations can benefit from any improvements you make to the code. Improvements from adding new hardware cost each time you add new hardware, as well as costing more in terms of power, A/C, administration, etc. On the other hand, the benefits you can get from adding new hardware is potentially unlimited.
And it's meaningful that I'm saying "potentially" unlimited, because sometime effective scaling comes from software optimization. Obviously you can't always drop in new servers, or drop in more processors/RAM into existing servers, and have that extra power end up being used effectively. Software has to be written to be able to take advantage of extra RAM, more CPUs, and it has to be written to scale across servers and handle load-balancing and such.
The real answer is that you have to look at the situation, form a set of goals, and figure out the best way to reach those goals. Hardware gets you more processing power and storage for a given instance of the applcation, while improving your software can improve security and stability and performance on all your existing installations without increasing your hardware. Which do you want?
a) have your more powerful desktop machine access applications on your iPhone, or b) have a central storage server maintain all applications which both devices stay synced to.
Both of those options are needlessly complicated if the phone has the processing power you need.
You have a point about laptops, but one important difference there is that for most people, docking stations are not common anymore.
Exactly. Laptops have a keyboard/trackpad and monitor that are big enough, so people don't bother with docking stations. But people always want smaller/lighter laptops, and the downward limit on size is bound by the size of the screen. Unless you develop folding screens or something, you'll never have a laptop with a useable screen size that can fit in your pocket. People are already used to docking their iPhones, though, and you're already talking about a situation where they'd have to dock their iPhone.
A whole lot of people are editing or compressing digital video for example now that digital home video cameras have come of age and are so common.
And a whole lot of people aren't. There will always be power users who need more/faster storage and processing power, and those people will always be getting heftier machines. Turning the iPhone into a USB drive for those people isn't a particularly interesting proposition. It's already doing it on a certain level, and you can hack it to do that outright, plus there are plenty of USB solutions out there.
What I'm talking about are the people who are interested in buying netbooks now because all they're really looking for is the lightest/smallest thing that will work like a real computer and let them type an e-mail on a real (though small) keyboard. Instead you give them a PDA that would also act as a computing core and dock into a laptop shell or desktop shell or whatever kind of shell you want.
Just because you can't think of uses for horsepower, doesn't mean grandma can't. We haven't even scratched the surface of what computers might be able to do for us if we give them enough juice.
No, I've watched grandma, and mom, and my brothers, and my friends. Most of them can't figure out how to do much more than rip an MP3, and that's only because their computers do it automatically when they put a CD in the drive. There just isn't much that people use computers for that their computer from 10 years ago couldn't do.
To give a real world example: why should I wait 4x as long to rip a DVD simply for the pleasure of saying that my iPhone did the crunching rather than a more powerful CPU I had sitting in a small box somewhere on my desk (or even hidden behind the monitor)?
That's assuming you have a small box sitting on your desk with a much faster CPU in it. For most users most of the time, they're just running a word processor, a web browser, and maybe an email application. They might have some other productivity applications.
Now if you have a powerful enough processor to do that on your phone, why would you choose to buy a second processor, deal with a whole new set of power/ventilation requirements, deal with installing and updating all your applications in two places, etc., when you can just dock your phone and run its word processor without any trouble whatsoever?
There was a time when laptops were also too underpowered in comparison with desktops, but now having a slightly slower processor and slightly slower/smaller drive doesn't make that much of a difference. Lots of people opt to just have a laptop and don't bother with the desktop. Maintaining a whole other machine is a hassle.
My iPod Touch is several times more powerful than my first PC. I see no reason why it couldn't be used as a PC-level machine.
Well what I said before was:
Right now, the technology can't meet both of those purposes to a level that would satisfy most consumers.
My theory is that the iPhone is powerful enough to be a PC level machine, but most consumers wouldn't find the experience satisfying enough for Apple to want to do it at this point. As far as running it as a thin client, that makes the whole thing way more complicated. Who's going to be running the central server? What kind of connection will people have to the central server? It's kind of a worst-of-all-worlds setup.
Sorry, I'm just genuinely of the opinion that the best solution is to run everything locally on the iPhone-like device, once such a device is powerful enough to do so. Not that it has to be super-powerful, but it would have to run a full desktop environment and office suite at acceptable speeds.
If you've already got the keyboard/monitor/mouse at the docking station, then you're 75% of the way to a desktop system.
What's the difference, then, really? If you have the iPhone docking with a computer and the computer hosting the apps and doing all the work, then all you're really asking for is for the iPhone to be a portable drive, which is something it already does.
What I'm saying is that you could have a completely portable system. Essentially, take all the benefits you get out of having a portable LiveUSB install, and then add on the prospect of being able to have a screen on that USB drive that allows you to run all the same apps (though perhaps with a specialized mobile GUI) and access all your documents without plugging it into a computer. So the idea is like a very small form-factor tablet computer that also happens to be a phone.
It's a much better solution, but the hardware to run it doesn't quite fit into the iPhone form factor. Yet.
Anyway, self-washing kitchens were something that actually showed up in some of those "house of the future" exhibits in the 50s and/or 60s (don't remember exactly). The idea was that the whole room could seal and be water-tight, and you just flooded the room with soapy water, rinsed it, and dried it.
Linux could clean Windows' clock if the GUI were more dependable. Right now it's pretty good, but occasionally falls flat on its face.
The thing is, I think it's good enough for most people doing most things. I'm not going to begin to say it couldn't use some more work-- it could-- but if your computer is already set up, X is already configured, and you're doing normal web browsing and stuff, then you probably won't have serious trouble.
Mac OS X shines in that it's pretty, stable, and reasonably easy to use. And the command line doesn't suck, although package management isn't anywhere near as good as Debian/Ubuntu.
I completely agree. If there's one thing for me that stands out with OSX as a technical/admin problem, it's that every application has their own little method for staying up to date. If Apple could make their Software Update support 3rd party repositories, and create a secure method for people to add the repositories for all their apps, I think it would be a huge improvement.
On the other hand, computer's don't scare me. They scare my mom. And when I envision giving my mom a linux computer I also see one day in the future where she's trying to install some suborn piece of hardware or software and it's bad.
I think that excepting new hardware/software installs, Linux is pretty un-scary these days. Even installing new software is, in some ways, easier than Windows. If there's a good package manager with a good GUI, then I think it's easy for a Linux user to get software while avoiding malware.
That's a particular use, but are you just talking about using the iPhone as a secure USB key (external storage device)?
What I'd like to see eventually is a all-in-one device that can be used for everything. Like you take your phone, and drop it into a docking station that attached a keyboard/mouse/monitor, and the UI changes to work as a normal OSX desktop machine. Yank the iPhone from the dock, and you retain the same functions, same access to the same documents, and scaled-back GUIs for your applications (but you're running the same applications). That sort of thing would be fantastic.
Two problems with the idea:
Everyone writing an application would have to create two different UIs, one for the phone mode and one for desktop mode. (not insurmountable)
The iPhone isn't powerful enough to handle this. Give it a few years, and it may be.
One of the advantages is that you could have your computer with all your settings and all your files in your pocket all day long, every day.
But that's not an issue of innovation. The idea has been around for a while. The problem is having something small enough and energy efficient enough to be a phone, while powerful enough to be a desktop machine. Right now, the technology can't meet both of those purposes to a level that would satisfy most consumers.
I'm referring to a particular concept that common a few years ago (1990s-2003?) where you essentially don't really have anything like a directory structure, but everything instead magically appeared where it was supposed to when it was supposed to.
This was a feature that supposedly every OS was going to have by 2005, and it was one of the features famously dropped from Vista. Many people have pointed to Apple's iTunes, iPhoto, and Smart Folders as models for this sort of thing, where you're interacting with data and files without worrying about where the "real" location of that file is, but I've never gotten a clear explanation of how this would actually play out system-wide, nor why it would be particularly helpful (to ditch a directory structure in favor of that sort of thing).
Because every time Linux has done something different it's never gained traction. The innovations from Linux don't come from widespread appeal and revolutionary ideas; usually it comes from old-fashioned principles that are being ignored.
I agree, though I probably would have put it more like, "Linux has gained ground not through revolutionary features, but by doing things correctly." My point is that whenever I hear someone complaining that Linux, "isn't doing anything new/revolutionary," they never seem to have actual ideas for new/revolutionary features. To me, that sort of thing doesn't rise to a level of "constructive criticism", but falls more into the category of "pointless complaining about nothing in particular."
Actually I do own an iPhone, but the iPhone interface is no good for a PC. It doesn't allow for very good multitasking. There are lots of instances where Linux is being used as an embedded OS with a custom UI, which is really the same situation.
But still, look at the iPhone again-- what are the input devices? It as a touch screen where you can point at something (essentially the same as a mouse), and a virtual keyboard. Virtual keyboards and touch-screens are good for select applications, but for day-to-day desktop use, their overly gimmicky and ineffective. A real keyboard/mouse setup is far more effective and ergonomic.
If we keep copying whatever Microsoft implemented 3 years ago, we'll never pass them... What we need are real killer applications in completely new spaces.
Yeah, yeah, people keep saying that. In every thread that in any message board where anyone had declared "the year of Linux on the deskop", someone has tried to argue that "the problem with Linux" is that Linux developers are just trying to copy Windows. And the people making that argument always fail to include the same thing: a single idea on what different/new thing Linux developers are supposed to include.
The whole thing hasn't shown itself to be particularly relevant anyhow. We've hit a bit of a dead-end. No one is coming up with any UI that doesn't amount to spacial metaphors and "windows" being navigated by a keyboard and mouse. No one has come up with the "database driven file systems" we were all promised years ago, and no one has made the word processor obsolete. While we're at it, we may as well complain about our lack of flying cars and self-washing kitchens.
I think 2008 already was the year of the Linux desktop. It wasn't as big and flashy as everyone hoped, but for the first time I've seen a non-computer geek running Linux on their laptop-- not for any political or ideological issues, but because it was cheap and easy and did everything they needed. There are distributions that are polished enough that I'm feeling like I could install Linux on my mother's machine and she'd have less trouble than running Windows XP.
But the fact is, it's never that easy to come up with a revolutionary idea, and it's often not necessary. What most people use their computers for is still web surfing, email, the word processor, and maybe storing music and pictures. If Linux is enabling people to do those things easily, reliably, and without frustration, then it has already "passed" Windows.
Amusingly enough, since FF, Opera, Safari and Konqueror have different defaults. Remember, the standard often (usually!) doesn't define defaults.
Yeah, I actually found a CSS file that zeros everything out a while back, and I include that in pretty much everything, and then build the formatting how I want it. The defaults are often sensible enough if you don't want to deal with formatting at all, but if you're trying to format something, I'd rather not fight with them.
While IE really, really, really sucks, and is the bane of my existance as a web dev too, its not like the others are magical. Especially if you add Javascript in the equation, and older versions
Not magical, but to a large extent you can code to the HTML and CSS standards and end up with a layout that's roughly what it should be. At least that was the case a few years ago, and I doubt it's gotten much worse. Of course, if you through CSS3 or Javascript into the mix, that's another thing.
I would agree that every browser could stand to be improved, but when I was doing it, IE really stood out as a serious problem on a regular basis.
Oh, I didn't mean to say it was hard to do, it just seems like it's not necessarily worth doing. When I've done it in the past, there were enough problems to turn me off of it. I ended up seeing files through SMB that were there to hold the resource forks in SMB, and sometimes it seemed to allow for different file naming conventions, which caused me some problems.
Now maybe I was just doing something wrong, but I've never had great luck with netatalk or with Linux's HFS support.
I forget the details, but SMB works well enough, and then at least OSX knows it's dealing with a non-Apple server. Except for creating some hidden files, it generally plays nice with others. If there's a big performance improvement in AFP, I never saw it in my limited testing.
Yes, I'm sure this is a conspiracy! Everyone gather up your torches and pitchforks so we can go after CmdrTaco!
I think I actually had the "blue screen" problem that you're referring to. I say "I think" because I'm not sure what you're referring to. The only upgrade problem I've heard about is the one I had, which was very minor and nothing like a "blue screen of death". During the upgrade process, the upgrade stopped working and just sat there. It didn't crash, but it just sat there. If you did a hard reset, the system returned to the state it was in before you attempted the upgrade.
Now you might ask, "what about the data you lost during the hard reset?" That might be a concern, except that the upgrade process froze at a point when you were essentially in the middle of rebooting anyhow.
The whole thing was solved by downloading the installer for the update rather than using Apple's "Software Update" tool.
Is that what you're referring to? Because I don't think anyone is too concerned.
I agree completely. It's been a while since I've done any significant web design (Safari was still new the last time I designed a web page), but IE's rendering was the most painful part of the job. I was never that great at web design (it was never my primary job), but the process was always:
Come up with a design
Figure out how to code it according to how HTML/CSS works
Write the markup according to the standards
Now it probably works fine in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, and pretty much every web browser except for IE, so it's time to load it into IE and see what happens.
Oh crap, it doesn't look right at all. Now it's time to troubleshoot, experiment, screw around, and figure out what tags aren't working right in IE.
Now that I've figured out what isn't working, I have to spend a few hours Googling for how other people have addressed IE's rendering bugs.
After implementing some ugly hacks and major revisions, come up with something that looks roughly the same in all browsers.
Yeah, you'd think that a "release candidate" meant that it was a candidate for the "release" version if no huge problems popped up. That was what the term was invented to mean, AFAIK.
But people abuse these terms pretty heavily, and you have to know how each developer is using them. It seems like Microsoft considers "release candidate" to mean "late beta". They never have any intention of releasing RC1, and they usually have a roadmap includes multiple "release candidates" be released for testing purposes before they consider actually releasing the thing. When it gets up to RC3, it's probably close to release.
the only revolution apple has ever pulled off is a marketing revolution.
I guess that's true to an extent, since product design is part of marketing. Lots of people miss that-- they think "marketing" = "advertising", but many people define marketing to include the process of "designing products that the market wants."
And yes, it's true, one of Apple's strong points is that they tend to build products that people really want. Yeah, you could argue that, technically, everything you can do on an iPhone you could do on phones for years prior to the iPhone release. But the problem is that doing those things on phones prior to the iPhone (and even most phones after) was riddled with bugs, instability, poor design, and sluggish user-unfriendly interfaces.
I'm not sure why you're upset by Apple's success, but it seems silly to me to say that the iPod and iPhone didn't bring something to their respective markets that wasn't available in those markets before their release.
I thought OS/X supported Windows networks out of the box. Odds are very good that if it supports Windows OS/X will work.
Yes, OSX supports SMB via Samba, which means it has solid support for Windows file sharing. You can run AFP on Linux or Windows, but frankly it's not really worth it. I'd be interested to know if anyone wants to make a case that AFP is necessary, but my personal opinion is that it's only worth using if you're running an OSX server.
An even better solution is to put all your passwords into some kind of encrypted file, and memorize the password to that encrypted file. Then you can have a different long password for each service, random and invulnerable to dictionary attacks.
Just make it something where you have to copy/paste it manually rather than having your browser automatically fill it in. Then you're only vulnerable to phishing attacks, other social engineering, or someone getting ahold of your vault & vault password.
Not only that, but as far as I'm concerned, Samba has successfully made SMB into a nice cross-platform protocol to use. It's decently fast, secure (AFAIK), pretty easy to set up (perhaps excluding some authentication issues), and is well supported in pretty much every platform. What's the problem?
I don't know, I just find it unusual how you can accumulate TBs worth of critical information...
I assure you it's not hard if your company deals with lots of audio/video files. To take an extreme case, uncompressed 1080p video can bitrates as high as 3Gbps. Given that, 1 TB can hold as little as 45 minutes of video.* Is it really so hard to imagine that someone somewhere might have multiple terabytes of critical data?
I've personally considered just getting an external hard drive and making daily backups to it, and then burning any videos/music I might have to CDs and DVDs...
That's a fine backup strategy for your personal data. When I'm talking about video, though, I'm not talking about archiving my iTunes video collection.
But how many times do you delete a file and decide you want it back?
Me personally? It's happened a couple times, but it's very rare. But how many times has one of my users accidentally erased or overwritten data that they or someone else needed? That happens all the time. And it also happens sometimes that one of our scripts purges something it shouldn't have, or that someone changes data in one of our databases that shouldn't have been changed.
* (1sec/3Gb)*(1min/60sec)*(8Gb/1GB)*(1024GB/1TB)=~45 minutes per Terabyte
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I think if you're paying for programming vs. hardware, you're just paying for different things. I would think that would be somewhat obvious, given their very different nature, but apparently there's still some uncertainty.
The improvements you get from optimizing software are limited but reproducible for free-- "free" in the sense that if I have lots of installations, all the installations can benefit from any improvements you make to the code. Improvements from adding new hardware cost each time you add new hardware, as well as costing more in terms of power, A/C, administration, etc. On the other hand, the benefits you can get from adding new hardware is potentially unlimited.
And it's meaningful that I'm saying "potentially" unlimited, because sometime effective scaling comes from software optimization. Obviously you can't always drop in new servers, or drop in more processors/RAM into existing servers, and have that extra power end up being used effectively. Software has to be written to be able to take advantage of extra RAM, more CPUs, and it has to be written to scale across servers and handle load-balancing and such.
The real answer is that you have to look at the situation, form a set of goals, and figure out the best way to reach those goals. Hardware gets you more processing power and storage for a given instance of the applcation, while improving your software can improve security and stability and performance on all your existing installations without increasing your hardware. Which do you want?
a) have your more powerful desktop machine access applications on your iPhone, or b) have a central storage server maintain all applications which both devices stay synced to.
Both of those options are needlessly complicated if the phone has the processing power you need.
You have a point about laptops, but one important difference there is that for most people, docking stations are not common anymore.
Exactly. Laptops have a keyboard/trackpad and monitor that are big enough, so people don't bother with docking stations. But people always want smaller/lighter laptops, and the downward limit on size is bound by the size of the screen. Unless you develop folding screens or something, you'll never have a laptop with a useable screen size that can fit in your pocket. People are already used to docking their iPhones, though, and you're already talking about a situation where they'd have to dock their iPhone.
A whole lot of people are editing or compressing digital video for example now that digital home video cameras have come of age and are so common.
And a whole lot of people aren't. There will always be power users who need more/faster storage and processing power, and those people will always be getting heftier machines. Turning the iPhone into a USB drive for those people isn't a particularly interesting proposition. It's already doing it on a certain level, and you can hack it to do that outright, plus there are plenty of USB solutions out there.
What I'm talking about are the people who are interested in buying netbooks now because all they're really looking for is the lightest/smallest thing that will work like a real computer and let them type an e-mail on a real (though small) keyboard. Instead you give them a PDA that would also act as a computing core and dock into a laptop shell or desktop shell or whatever kind of shell you want.
Just because you can't think of uses for horsepower, doesn't mean grandma can't. We haven't even scratched the surface of what computers might be able to do for us if we give them enough juice.
No, I've watched grandma, and mom, and my brothers, and my friends. Most of them can't figure out how to do much more than rip an MP3, and that's only because their computers do it automatically when they put a CD in the drive. There just isn't much that people use computers for that their computer from 10 years ago couldn't do.
To give a real world example: why should I wait 4x as long to rip a DVD simply for the pleasure of saying that my iPhone did the crunching rather than a more powerful CPU I had sitting in a small box somewhere on my desk (or even hidden behind the monitor)?
That's assuming you have a small box sitting on your desk with a much faster CPU in it. For most users most of the time, they're just running a word processor, a web browser, and maybe an email application. They might have some other productivity applications.
Now if you have a powerful enough processor to do that on your phone, why would you choose to buy a second processor, deal with a whole new set of power/ventilation requirements, deal with installing and updating all your applications in two places, etc., when you can just dock your phone and run its word processor without any trouble whatsoever?
There was a time when laptops were also too underpowered in comparison with desktops, but now having a slightly slower processor and slightly slower/smaller drive doesn't make that much of a difference. Lots of people opt to just have a laptop and don't bother with the desktop. Maintaining a whole other machine is a hassle.
My iPod Touch is several times more powerful than my first PC. I see no reason why it couldn't be used as a PC-level machine.
Well what I said before was:
Right now, the technology can't meet both of those purposes to a level that would satisfy most consumers.
My theory is that the iPhone is powerful enough to be a PC level machine, but most consumers wouldn't find the experience satisfying enough for Apple to want to do it at this point. As far as running it as a thin client, that makes the whole thing way more complicated. Who's going to be running the central server? What kind of connection will people have to the central server? It's kind of a worst-of-all-worlds setup.
Sorry, I'm just genuinely of the opinion that the best solution is to run everything locally on the iPhone-like device, once such a device is powerful enough to do so. Not that it has to be super-powerful, but it would have to run a full desktop environment and office suite at acceptable speeds.
If you've already got the keyboard/monitor/mouse at the docking station, then you're 75% of the way to a desktop system.
What's the difference, then, really? If you have the iPhone docking with a computer and the computer hosting the apps and doing all the work, then all you're really asking for is for the iPhone to be a portable drive, which is something it already does.
What I'm saying is that you could have a completely portable system. Essentially, take all the benefits you get out of having a portable LiveUSB install, and then add on the prospect of being able to have a screen on that USB drive that allows you to run all the same apps (though perhaps with a specialized mobile GUI) and access all your documents without plugging it into a computer. So the idea is like a very small form-factor tablet computer that also happens to be a phone.
It's a much better solution, but the hardware to run it doesn't quite fit into the iPhone form factor. Yet.
But aren't cats self-washing?
Anyway, self-washing kitchens were something that actually showed up in some of those "house of the future" exhibits in the 50s and/or 60s (don't remember exactly). The idea was that the whole room could seal and be water-tight, and you just flooded the room with soapy water, rinsed it, and dried it.
Linux could clean Windows' clock if the GUI were more dependable. Right now it's pretty good, but occasionally falls flat on its face.
The thing is, I think it's good enough for most people doing most things. I'm not going to begin to say it couldn't use some more work-- it could-- but if your computer is already set up, X is already configured, and you're doing normal web browsing and stuff, then you probably won't have serious trouble.
Mac OS X shines in that it's pretty, stable, and reasonably easy to use. And the command line doesn't suck, although package management isn't anywhere near as good as Debian/Ubuntu.
I completely agree. If there's one thing for me that stands out with OSX as a technical/admin problem, it's that every application has their own little method for staying up to date. If Apple could make their Software Update support 3rd party repositories, and create a secure method for people to add the repositories for all their apps, I think it would be a huge improvement.
On the other hand, computer's don't scare me. They scare my mom. And when I envision giving my mom a linux computer I also see one day in the future where she's trying to install some suborn piece of hardware or software and it's bad.
I think that excepting new hardware/software installs, Linux is pretty un-scary these days. Even installing new software is, in some ways, easier than Windows. If there's a good package manager with a good GUI, then I think it's easy for a Linux user to get software while avoiding malware.
That's a particular use, but are you just talking about using the iPhone as a secure USB key (external storage device)?
What I'd like to see eventually is a all-in-one device that can be used for everything. Like you take your phone, and drop it into a docking station that attached a keyboard/mouse/monitor, and the UI changes to work as a normal OSX desktop machine. Yank the iPhone from the dock, and you retain the same functions, same access to the same documents, and scaled-back GUIs for your applications (but you're running the same applications). That sort of thing would be fantastic.
Two problems with the idea:
One of the advantages is that you could have your computer with all your settings and all your files in your pocket all day long, every day.
But that's not an issue of innovation. The idea has been around for a while. The problem is having something small enough and energy efficient enough to be a phone, while powerful enough to be a desktop machine. Right now, the technology can't meet both of those purposes to a level that would satisfy most consumers.
I'm referring to a particular concept that common a few years ago (1990s-2003?) where you essentially don't really have anything like a directory structure, but everything instead magically appeared where it was supposed to when it was supposed to.
This was a feature that supposedly every OS was going to have by 2005, and it was one of the features famously dropped from Vista. Many people have pointed to Apple's iTunes, iPhoto, and Smart Folders as models for this sort of thing, where you're interacting with data and files without worrying about where the "real" location of that file is, but I've never gotten a clear explanation of how this would actually play out system-wide, nor why it would be particularly helpful (to ditch a directory structure in favor of that sort of thing).
Because every time Linux has done something different it's never gained traction. The innovations from Linux don't come from widespread appeal and revolutionary ideas; usually it comes from old-fashioned principles that are being ignored.
I agree, though I probably would have put it more like, "Linux has gained ground not through revolutionary features, but by doing things correctly." My point is that whenever I hear someone complaining that Linux, "isn't doing anything new/revolutionary," they never seem to have actual ideas for new/revolutionary features. To me, that sort of thing doesn't rise to a level of "constructive criticism", but falls more into the category of "pointless complaining about nothing in particular."
I take it you don't own an iPhone?
Actually I do own an iPhone, but the iPhone interface is no good for a PC. It doesn't allow for very good multitasking. There are lots of instances where Linux is being used as an embedded OS with a custom UI, which is really the same situation.
But still, look at the iPhone again-- what are the input devices? It as a touch screen where you can point at something (essentially the same as a mouse), and a virtual keyboard. Virtual keyboards and touch-screens are good for select applications, but for day-to-day desktop use, their overly gimmicky and ineffective. A real keyboard/mouse setup is far more effective and ergonomic.
If we keep copying whatever Microsoft implemented 3 years ago, we'll never pass them... What we need are real killer applications in completely new spaces.
Yeah, yeah, people keep saying that. In every thread that in any message board where anyone had declared "the year of Linux on the deskop", someone has tried to argue that "the problem with Linux" is that Linux developers are just trying to copy Windows. And the people making that argument always fail to include the same thing: a single idea on what different/new thing Linux developers are supposed to include.
The whole thing hasn't shown itself to be particularly relevant anyhow. We've hit a bit of a dead-end. No one is coming up with any UI that doesn't amount to spacial metaphors and "windows" being navigated by a keyboard and mouse. No one has come up with the "database driven file systems" we were all promised years ago, and no one has made the word processor obsolete. While we're at it, we may as well complain about our lack of flying cars and self-washing kitchens.
I think 2008 already was the year of the Linux desktop. It wasn't as big and flashy as everyone hoped, but for the first time I've seen a non-computer geek running Linux on their laptop-- not for any political or ideological issues, but because it was cheap and easy and did everything they needed. There are distributions that are polished enough that I'm feeling like I could install Linux on my mother's machine and she'd have less trouble than running Windows XP.
But the fact is, it's never that easy to come up with a revolutionary idea, and it's often not necessary. What most people use their computers for is still web surfing, email, the word processor, and maybe storing music and pictures. If Linux is enabling people to do those things easily, reliably, and without frustration, then it has already "passed" Windows.
You got me. That's a good reason to use AFP.
Amusingly enough, since FF, Opera, Safari and Konqueror have different defaults. Remember, the standard often (usually!) doesn't define defaults.
Yeah, I actually found a CSS file that zeros everything out a while back, and I include that in pretty much everything, and then build the formatting how I want it. The defaults are often sensible enough if you don't want to deal with formatting at all, but if you're trying to format something, I'd rather not fight with them.
While IE really, really, really sucks, and is the bane of my existance as a web dev too, its not like the others are magical. Especially if you add Javascript in the equation, and older versions
Not magical, but to a large extent you can code to the HTML and CSS standards and end up with a layout that's roughly what it should be. At least that was the case a few years ago, and I doubt it's gotten much worse. Of course, if you through CSS3 or Javascript into the mix, that's another thing.
I would agree that every browser could stand to be improved, but when I was doing it, IE really stood out as a serious problem on a regular basis.
Oh, I didn't mean to say it was hard to do, it just seems like it's not necessarily worth doing. When I've done it in the past, there were enough problems to turn me off of it. I ended up seeing files through SMB that were there to hold the resource forks in SMB, and sometimes it seemed to allow for different file naming conventions, which caused me some problems.
Now maybe I was just doing something wrong, but I've never had great luck with netatalk or with Linux's HFS support.
I forget the details, but SMB works well enough, and then at least OSX knows it's dealing with a non-Apple server. Except for creating some hidden files, it generally plays nice with others. If there's a big performance improvement in AFP, I never saw it in my limited testing.
Yes, I'm sure this is a conspiracy! Everyone gather up your torches and pitchforks so we can go after CmdrTaco!
I think I actually had the "blue screen" problem that you're referring to. I say "I think" because I'm not sure what you're referring to. The only upgrade problem I've heard about is the one I had, which was very minor and nothing like a "blue screen of death". During the upgrade process, the upgrade stopped working and just sat there. It didn't crash, but it just sat there. If you did a hard reset, the system returned to the state it was in before you attempted the upgrade.
Now you might ask, "what about the data you lost during the hard reset?" That might be a concern, except that the upgrade process froze at a point when you were essentially in the middle of rebooting anyhow.
The whole thing was solved by downloading the installer for the update rather than using Apple's "Software Update" tool.
Is that what you're referring to? Because I don't think anyone is too concerned.
I agree completely. It's been a while since I've done any significant web design (Safari was still new the last time I designed a web page), but IE's rendering was the most painful part of the job. I was never that great at web design (it was never my primary job), but the process was always:
Yeah, you'd think that a "release candidate" meant that it was a candidate for the "release" version if no huge problems popped up. That was what the term was invented to mean, AFAIK.
But people abuse these terms pretty heavily, and you have to know how each developer is using them. It seems like Microsoft considers "release candidate" to mean "late beta". They never have any intention of releasing RC1, and they usually have a roadmap includes multiple "release candidates" be released for testing purposes before they consider actually releasing the thing. When it gets up to RC3, it's probably close to release.
the only revolution apple has ever pulled off is a marketing revolution.
I guess that's true to an extent, since product design is part of marketing. Lots of people miss that-- they think "marketing" = "advertising", but many people define marketing to include the process of "designing products that the market wants."
And yes, it's true, one of Apple's strong points is that they tend to build products that people really want. Yeah, you could argue that, technically, everything you can do on an iPhone you could do on phones for years prior to the iPhone release. But the problem is that doing those things on phones prior to the iPhone (and even most phones after) was riddled with bugs, instability, poor design, and sluggish user-unfriendly interfaces.
I'm not sure why you're upset by Apple's success, but it seems silly to me to say that the iPod and iPhone didn't bring something to their respective markets that wasn't available in those markets before their release.
I thought OS/X supported Windows networks out of the box. Odds are very good that if it supports Windows OS/X will work.
Yes, OSX supports SMB via Samba, which means it has solid support for Windows file sharing. You can run AFP on Linux or Windows, but frankly it's not really worth it. I'd be interested to know if anyone wants to make a case that AFP is necessary, but my personal opinion is that it's only worth using if you're running an OSX server.
An even better solution is to put all your passwords into some kind of encrypted file, and memorize the password to that encrypted file. Then you can have a different long password for each service, random and invulnerable to dictionary attacks.
Just make it something where you have to copy/paste it manually rather than having your browser automatically fill it in. Then you're only vulnerable to phishing attacks, other social engineering, or someone getting ahold of your vault & vault password.
Not only that, but as far as I'm concerned, Samba has successfully made SMB into a nice cross-platform protocol to use. It's decently fast, secure (AFAIK), pretty easy to set up (perhaps excluding some authentication issues), and is well supported in pretty much every platform. What's the problem?
I don't know, I just find it unusual how you can accumulate TBs worth of critical information...
I assure you it's not hard if your company deals with lots of audio/video files. To take an extreme case, uncompressed 1080p video can bitrates as high as 3Gbps. Given that, 1 TB can hold as little as 45 minutes of video.* Is it really so hard to imagine that someone somewhere might have multiple terabytes of critical data?
I've personally considered just getting an external hard drive and making daily backups to it, and then burning any videos/music I might have to CDs and DVDs...
That's a fine backup strategy for your personal data. When I'm talking about video, though, I'm not talking about archiving my iTunes video collection.
But how many times do you delete a file and decide you want it back?
Me personally? It's happened a couple times, but it's very rare. But how many times has one of my users accidentally erased or overwritten data that they or someone else needed? That happens all the time. And it also happens sometimes that one of our scripts purges something it shouldn't have, or that someone changes data in one of our databases that shouldn't have been changed.
* (1sec/3Gb)*(1min/60sec)*(8Gb/1GB)*(1024GB/1TB)=~45 minutes per Terabyte