Well, duh... if they wanted to try to make good operating systems, they wouldn't have put all that time and effort into monopolizing the market. The whole point of having a monopoly is so that you don't have to do a good job anymore.
I agree. To spell it out: The name (along with the icon) call up the idea of a pigeon. Like a carrier pigeon, a messenger. Also there's the actual meaning of "pidgin", as an intermediary means of communication, between people speaking different languages, as the different IM protocols available in Pidgin are sort of "different languages". Also, the idea of people using a "pidgin language" of sorts when they IM: omigod, I mean, WTF???:)
I think it's more like "maturation". There's a recognition that functionality isn't as valuable when usability is poor, and that appearance matters. GAIM/Pidgin is fairly feature-complete for what a lot of people want out of an IM client (for me, I just want IM), and so it makes sense to invest a little time into making it pleasant to use as well.
What are you talking about? Graphics to make a UI match the iPod....?
Look, you can only trademark rather specific things: Logos and names, basically. You can copyright specific graphics or patent UI features, but that's totally different from what we're talking about. In short, no, you can't trademark the GUI in the way you're describing.
There is no "loophole". What do you think Debian would do if I started distributing my own version of "Debian Linux" using their branding, artwork, and logo, including my own spyware, and selling it commercially at www.debian-linux-for-sale.com? They'd stop me. And that's how it goes-- GPL software means you have access to the code, but not necessarily to the identity of company/project.
You don't like it? Well it really isn't that fricken hard to remove a logo and brand name.
I don't really understand why people seem to think a GUI is the be all and end all of intuitive user interfaces. It's not. It's very unintuitive. In many ways a command line can be easier and quicker.
"Quicker and easier" is not the same as "intuitive". GUI isn't the end-all be-all of UI, but it has its advantages for finding settings that you don't use often or haven't used before. Even if the GUI is essentially a long list of check-boxes and drop-boxes to give you all the possible options, it allows you to quickly ascertain what settings are available and what choices are possible for each setting in a succinct form. To do the same thing with a CLI often involves reading several pages of text, talking to someone who is familiar with the tool, and/or looking up best practices and pitfalls online.
Since OOo is software libre, I don't see how it's possible to 'sabotage' a fork except by refusing to cooperate with it. And given that the fork's license is incompatible with the main tree, I can see why they would refuse to cooperate.
Again, this is my recollection from the public statements when NeoOffice was starting, but originally they were working with OOo, not on a separate project, so I don't believe the license was different at that time. After they put in a certain amount of work, Sun made it clear that they had no real interest in supporting OSX and made changes to the main OOo fork that broke all the OSX work that the Aqua-port people had done. Some of those Aqua people left and started NeoOffice.
And sure, you can strip out all references to the trademark and recompile. Too bad the OOo source tree is so opaque that almost no one is capable of doing that.
Really? OOo is so opaque that you can't change the splash screen, about screen, and icons? Or so some sort of search for the string "NeoOffice"? Damn, OOo must really be written by morons, then.
If you put proprietary code into your GPL program and release it, that code is now released to the GPL. That's the way it works, so no, there's no loophole there.
But this is the same thing as the Firefox/Iceweasel issue. You strip out a couple trademark graphics and replace them with anything, change a couple pieces of text, and you're done. You haven't lost any functionality.
So basically you can redistribute NeoOffice however you want, but you just can't necessarily call it "NeoOffice" or use their logo.
A lot of it's functionatly can't even be done through the GUI any more.
That doesn't sound like a great idea to me. Personally, I want access to as many settings as possible through both CLI and GUI. When it's all CLI, you have to track down the appropriate commands and the correct syntax, and often the documentation isn't clear enough so there's a lot of trial and error involved. When it's a GUI, it's hard to automate and requires a remote GUI for remote administration.
Isn't it about time we had the best of both worlds? Like standardized config files that can be edited through a text editor, a CLI, or a GUI? I've never understood why that was such a difficult concept.
That's one meaning of the word "native". Often, when Macintosh users are talking about an application being "native", they mean using the native OSX GUI (Aqua). For some people, the word goes as far as to suggest that the application Cocoa and all native widgets. Some consider Camino to be "native" while Firefox is not.
You might wonder, "Why do people care?" Well, some of it is visual. Native applications tend to "fit" better with the other applications you're using. Some of it is consistency. Non-native applications will behave differently. Finally, some of it is functional. Apple provides many hooks into their operating system and into other applications provided they're all using the same framework. (the various "Core" technologies, spell-checking, etc.)
Unfortunately, though, this application gives new meaning to the words 'slow' and 'bloated'.
Well, it's not snappy, but it's certainly better than the "nothing" that OpenOffice has been offering in terms of native OSX ports.
The author has also chosen to make its license (GPL) incompatible with OO.o's (LGPL) so that his porting efforts cannot be contributed back to the main project. That makes NeoOffice a very hostile fork.
I'd probably be hostile, too. IIRC, the backstory with NeoOffice was that they were trying to work with OOo on a native OSX port, and not only did Sun refuse to help, but they basically sabotaged their efforts. Rather than give up, these guys split off and started their own project, and because of that, OSX users have had a very functional free office suite for OSX for a couple years now.
What's more, he is trying (against the terms of the GPL/LGPL) to limit free distribution by using the trademark loophole.
Protecting your trademark is not a "loophole". All sorts of projects, whether they're commercial (Redhat) or not (Mozilla), protect their trademarks. Worst case scenario?-- you take the source and strip out trademarked graphics/names, recompile, and then you're free to distribute the results however you want (under the GPL).
I don't want to be misunderstood: I'm happy that Sun is finally porting OpenOffice to OSX. The result may very well be superior to NeoOffice, and if so I'll use Sun's version. However, they've been taking their sweet damn time, and in the mean time, the NeoOffice team has made a very useful bit of software. I don't think we should be belittling the NeoOffice team and their terrific efforts simply because they don't have the resources to perfect their port. They've been doing a lot with very little while OOo has been doing practically nothing with their bounty.
I remember one idea that Microsoft was talking about with Monad that actually sounded like a noteworthy innovation-- but I don't know if it still exists. They claimed that any program developed for Vista or Longhorn would have all of their GUI elements automatically scriptable. This seemed potentially useful since I actually have a lot of Windows programs that I have to use for highly repetitive tasks, and I have to use special automation software to accomplish this.
Microsoft's command-line certainly needed to be overhauled in order to be useful for scripting, and I might imagine some ways that I'd like to see bash changed, but that doesn't excite me too much. The idea, however, of all Windows programs automatically having their functions controllable through a command-line actually seemed like something worth mentioning. Does Powershell have this functionality?
Apple certainly isn't being hurt by the fact that they can now install x86 Linux and Windows on their laptops to run natively, or that there are no grounds to argue that Apple machines are slower than their Dell counterparts.
Of course, AMD is still x86, but Apple would do well to make sure they stay on-par with the regular cast of OEMs, which they can't do by taking hardware manufacturing in-house. They're much better off being able to buy the same basic hardware that Dell is buying.
It's true that.NET used to be something totally different (some sort of internet computing initiative), and then it wasn't clear, Microsoft seems to have settled on it as an actual product. It's a programming framework. I'm not a programmer so I can't tell you what's good about it, but it seems to be an actual thing now.
Except buying Nintendo might make sense, if Apple thought they needed to compete with the 360 to gain control of the living room. A hybrid Wii/iTV could be pretty darn nice.
I'm not saying that's likely, but at least there is some imaginable reason that it might make sense. I can't think of any reason why Apple would want to buy AMD.
Also there's the fact that Apple just went through a big transition to move to Intel so they could be "just like everyone else". For a company in Apple's position, it makes much more sense to stay neutral in these things, and pick the best processor available instead of tying themselves to anyone in particular.
They've had display mechanisms for sudo in OSX, Linux for some years, and I believe you can monitor sudo more than the default setting if you want to (am I wrong?).
Where UAC is different--and also where I think many power users would completely freak out--is in its mistrust for full Administrators. While your average Linux distro will allow you to run as root and give you complete control without prompts (Ubuntu's default settings excepted, of course), Vista's UAC still prompts Administrator users as though they're not admins.
No, that's not different-- as it mentions elsewhere in the article, that's what sudo does. In fact, you can give users sudo rights for only a single command. Ubuntu, Apple, and pretty much everyone else has given users access to this sort of setup for years.
There are some users who feel as though being an Admin should mean no interruptions or calls for authentication from the OS, but Microsoft's message seems to be this: the days of the mighty Administrator should come to an end. In Microsoft's vision, any and all "Admin activity" should be flagged as such and prompted for verification.
Well, of course that's your choice, but this isn't a new issue or debate. Some Linux admins I know use root, while others insist on using sudo for everything. It's because some don't want the hassle of typing sudo, while others don't want to have the rights to do anything crazy unless they specifically tell the computer "let me act as a super user."
So there really I don't see anything new or different about UAC, except maybe that the implementation seems worse to me.
In the MS philosophy, success of a new product is not that it generates a profit, but that it has market share. Just take a look at xbox. Even MSN is more concerned with market share than profit. This is the old we will make in volume what we lose in profit.
I think you're almost right. Microsoft is more interested in market share than profit, but it's the old "we will use all our resources to drive competitors out and try to secure a monopoly so that we can control the market in the future."
Also, I'm going to hazard to guess that, if Apple does get a 2% market share, some of that share is going to be taken out of Microsoft's share. I mean, right now, Microsoft's market is "people who are willing to buy expensive smart-phones instead of the free comes-with-service-contract phone". Where do you think Apple's 2% will come from?
They want to sell you crap music for 15c/track you won't buy for 99c. More importantly, they want to charge you $2/track for whatever's hip right now, to drive cd single sales.
Well it's not very clear what they wanted. Publicly, all they said is that they wanted "variable pricing", but the rumor was that it was more about pushing some tracks up to $2.00 than pushing other tracks down to $0.15
Generally I would expect that not needing packaging, delivery trucks, shelf space, etc, would result in the end product being cheaper due to the lack of need to pay for all that stuff... but no, somehow delivering less is a "feature" that makes sense to pay extra money for.
First, convenience is a feature. I can have a song through iTunes delivered directly to my home in under a minute. What CD shipper will give me that?
Second, one might expect that not needing packaging, delivery trucks, shelf space, etc. would result in cheaper prices, but if you want to complain about that, complain to the record companies. Apple's cut of iTunes sales is relatively small, and they have to pay for the store's development and maintenance, customer support, and bandwidth. Those aren't free. The record companies, on the other hand, aren't paying for anything and are giving the artists smaller cuts of revenue on online sales. They've managed to cut the distribution prices and cut their artist royalties without dropping the price-- good for them, but it's hard to see how that's justified.
Apple designs iPods in California and ships out a complete description of it to China where the pieces are put together.
But what they're selling is software-- and where are the "pieces" of software put together? The problem with your interpretation is that the software is complete when it has been written and compiled, but iPods are not complete when they've been designed. Therefore, writing the software is not the "design" phase-- it's the construction of the product being sold.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, duh... if they wanted to try to make good operating systems, they wouldn't have put all that time and effort into monopolizing the market. The whole point of having a monopoly is so that you don't have to do a good job anymore.
I agree. To spell it out: The name (along with the icon) call up the idea of a pigeon. Like a carrier pigeon, a messenger. Also there's the actual meaning of "pidgin", as an intermediary means of communication, between people speaking different languages, as the different IM protocols available in Pidgin are sort of "different languages". Also, the idea of people using a "pidgin language" of sorts when they IM: omigod, I mean, WTF??? :)
I think it's more like "maturation". There's a recognition that functionality isn't as valuable when usability is poor, and that appearance matters. GAIM/Pidgin is fairly feature-complete for what a lot of people want out of an IM client (for me, I just want IM), and so it makes sense to invest a little time into making it pleasant to use as well.
Really? Just enough time to say, "Hi!"?
What are you talking about? Graphics to make a UI match the iPod....?
Look, you can only trademark rather specific things: Logos and names, basically. You can copyright specific graphics or patent UI features, but that's totally different from what we're talking about. In short, no, you can't trademark the GUI in the way you're describing.
There is no "loophole". What do you think Debian would do if I started distributing my own version of "Debian Linux" using their branding, artwork, and logo, including my own spyware, and selling it commercially at www.debian-linux-for-sale.com? They'd stop me. And that's how it goes-- GPL software means you have access to the code, but not necessarily to the identity of company/project.
You don't like it? Well it really isn't that fricken hard to remove a logo and brand name.
"Quicker and easier" is not the same as "intuitive". GUI isn't the end-all be-all of UI, but it has its advantages for finding settings that you don't use often or haven't used before. Even if the GUI is essentially a long list of check-boxes and drop-boxes to give you all the possible options, it allows you to quickly ascertain what settings are available and what choices are possible for each setting in a succinct form. To do the same thing with a CLI often involves reading several pages of text, talking to someone who is familiar with the tool, and/or looking up best practices and pitfalls online.
Yeah, I don't know the technicalities, but I think of X11 on OSX as being like WINE on Linux.
Since OOo is software libre, I don't see how it's possible to 'sabotage' a fork except by refusing to cooperate with it. And given that the fork's license is incompatible with the main tree, I can see why they would refuse to cooperate.
Again, this is my recollection from the public statements when NeoOffice was starting, but originally they were working with OOo, not on a separate project, so I don't believe the license was different at that time. After they put in a certain amount of work, Sun made it clear that they had no real interest in supporting OSX and made changes to the main OOo fork that broke all the OSX work that the Aqua-port people had done. Some of those Aqua people left and started NeoOffice.
And sure, you can strip out all references to the trademark and recompile. Too bad the OOo source tree is so opaque that almost no one is capable of doing that.
Really? OOo is so opaque that you can't change the splash screen, about screen, and icons? Or so some sort of search for the string "NeoOffice"? Damn, OOo must really be written by morons, then.
If you put proprietary code into your GPL program and release it, that code is now released to the GPL. That's the way it works, so no, there's no loophole there.
But this is the same thing as the Firefox/Iceweasel issue. You strip out a couple trademark graphics and replace them with anything, change a couple pieces of text, and you're done. You haven't lost any functionality.
So basically you can redistribute NeoOffice however you want, but you just can't necessarily call it "NeoOffice" or use their logo.
... and then, once your movie library stops working, they'll sell you the same movies all over again.
A lot of it's functionatly can't even be done through the GUI any more.
That doesn't sound like a great idea to me. Personally, I want access to as many settings as possible through both CLI and GUI. When it's all CLI, you have to track down the appropriate commands and the correct syntax, and often the documentation isn't clear enough so there's a lot of trial and error involved. When it's a GUI, it's hard to automate and requires a remote GUI for remote administration.
Isn't it about time we had the best of both worlds? Like standardized config files that can be edited through a text editor, a CLI, or a GUI? I've never understood why that was such a difficult concept.
That's one meaning of the word "native". Often, when Macintosh users are talking about an application being "native", they mean using the native OSX GUI (Aqua). For some people, the word goes as far as to suggest that the application Cocoa and all native widgets. Some consider Camino to be "native" while Firefox is not.
You might wonder, "Why do people care?" Well, some of it is visual. Native applications tend to "fit" better with the other applications you're using. Some of it is consistency. Non-native applications will behave differently. Finally, some of it is functional. Apple provides many hooks into their operating system and into other applications provided they're all using the same framework. (the various "Core" technologies, spell-checking, etc.)
Unfortunately, though, this application gives new meaning to the words 'slow' and 'bloated'.
Well, it's not snappy, but it's certainly better than the "nothing" that OpenOffice has been offering in terms of native OSX ports.
The author has also chosen to make its license (GPL) incompatible with OO.o's (LGPL) so that his porting efforts cannot be contributed back to the main project. That makes NeoOffice a very hostile fork.
I'd probably be hostile, too. IIRC, the backstory with NeoOffice was that they were trying to work with OOo on a native OSX port, and not only did Sun refuse to help, but they basically sabotaged their efforts. Rather than give up, these guys split off and started their own project, and because of that, OSX users have had a very functional free office suite for OSX for a couple years now.
What's more, he is trying (against the terms of the GPL/LGPL) to limit free distribution by using the trademark loophole.
Protecting your trademark is not a "loophole". All sorts of projects, whether they're commercial (Redhat) or not (Mozilla), protect their trademarks. Worst case scenario?-- you take the source and strip out trademarked graphics/names, recompile, and then you're free to distribute the results however you want (under the GPL).
I don't want to be misunderstood: I'm happy that Sun is finally porting OpenOffice to OSX. The result may very well be superior to NeoOffice, and if so I'll use Sun's version. However, they've been taking their sweet damn time, and in the mean time, the NeoOffice team has made a very useful bit of software. I don't think we should be belittling the NeoOffice team and their terrific efforts simply because they don't have the resources to perfect their port. They've been doing a lot with very little while OOo has been doing practically nothing with their bounty.
I remember one idea that Microsoft was talking about with Monad that actually sounded like a noteworthy innovation-- but I don't know if it still exists. They claimed that any program developed for Vista or Longhorn would have all of their GUI elements automatically scriptable. This seemed potentially useful since I actually have a lot of Windows programs that I have to use for highly repetitive tasks, and I have to use special automation software to accomplish this.
Microsoft's command-line certainly needed to be overhauled in order to be useful for scripting, and I might imagine some ways that I'd like to see bash changed, but that doesn't excite me too much. The idea, however, of all Windows programs automatically having their functions controllable through a command-line actually seemed like something worth mentioning. Does Powershell have this functionality?
Apple certainly isn't being hurt by the fact that they can now install x86 Linux and Windows on their laptops to run natively, or that there are no grounds to argue that Apple machines are slower than their Dell counterparts.
Of course, AMD is still x86, but Apple would do well to make sure they stay on-par with the regular cast of OEMs, which they can't do by taking hardware manufacturing in-house. They're much better off being able to buy the same basic hardware that Dell is buying.
It's true that .NET used to be something totally different (some sort of internet computing initiative), and then it wasn't clear, Microsoft seems to have settled on it as an actual product. It's a programming framework. I'm not a programmer so I can't tell you what's good about it, but it seems to be an actual thing now.
Except buying Nintendo might make sense, if Apple thought they needed to compete with the 360 to gain control of the living room. A hybrid Wii/iTV could be pretty darn nice.
I'm not saying that's likely, but at least there is some imaginable reason that it might make sense. I can't think of any reason why Apple would want to buy AMD.
Also there's the fact that Apple just went through a big transition to move to Intel so they could be "just like everyone else". For a company in Apple's position, it makes much more sense to stay neutral in these things, and pick the best processor available instead of tying themselves to anyone in particular.
They've had display mechanisms for sudo in OSX, Linux for some years, and I believe you can monitor sudo more than the default setting if you want to (am I wrong?).
No, that's not different-- as it mentions elsewhere in the article, that's what sudo does. In fact, you can give users sudo rights for only a single command. Ubuntu, Apple, and pretty much everyone else has given users access to this sort of setup for years.
Well, of course that's your choice, but this isn't a new issue or debate. Some Linux admins I know use root, while others insist on using sudo for everything. It's because some don't want the hassle of typing sudo, while others don't want to have the rights to do anything crazy unless they specifically tell the computer "let me act as a super user."
So there really I don't see anything new or different about UAC, except maybe that the implementation seems worse to me.
I think you're almost right. Microsoft is more interested in market share than profit, but it's the old "we will use all our resources to drive competitors out and try to secure a monopoly so that we can control the market in the future."
Also, I'm going to hazard to guess that, if Apple does get a 2% market share, some of that share is going to be taken out of Microsoft's share. I mean, right now, Microsoft's market is "people who are willing to buy expensive smart-phones instead of the free comes-with-service-contract phone". Where do you think Apple's 2% will come from?
They want to sell you crap music for 15c/track you won't buy for 99c. More importantly, they want to charge you $2/track for whatever's hip right now, to drive cd single sales.
Well it's not very clear what they wanted. Publicly, all they said is that they wanted "variable pricing", but the rumor was that it was more about pushing some tracks up to $2.00 than pushing other tracks down to $0.15
Generally I would expect that not needing packaging, delivery trucks, shelf space, etc, would result in the end product being cheaper due to the lack of need to pay for all that stuff... but no, somehow delivering less is a "feature" that makes sense to pay extra money for.
First, convenience is a feature. I can have a song through iTunes delivered directly to my home in under a minute. What CD shipper will give me that?
Second, one might expect that not needing packaging, delivery trucks, shelf space, etc. would result in cheaper prices, but if you want to complain about that, complain to the record companies. Apple's cut of iTunes sales is relatively small, and they have to pay for the store's development and maintenance, customer support, and bandwidth. Those aren't free. The record companies, on the other hand, aren't paying for anything and are giving the artists smaller cuts of revenue on online sales. They've managed to cut the distribution prices and cut their artist royalties without dropping the price-- good for them, but it's hard to see how that's justified.
Apple designs iPods in California and ships out a complete description of it to China where the pieces are put together.
But what they're selling is software-- and where are the "pieces" of software put together? The problem with your interpretation is that the software is complete when it has been written and compiled, but iPods are not complete when they've been designed. Therefore, writing the software is not the "design" phase-- it's the construction of the product being sold.