My point was that there are different approaches to interface design (which, incidently, I've done that as a job, too). [...] So, if you have users who will just want to memorize the GUI they're given, and not change it, for THEM, consistancy is much better. People who want their UI how they want it, period, will always want more customizability.
And my point is that that is just a wrong conceptualization of what is going on. You think of customizability and consistency as tradeoffs, and I'm saying that that makes no sense.
On the customizability front, if you want a consistent UI on your Windows or SuSE machine, you just use the defaults: you get exactly the same look and feel for your OS no matter what machine you use it on. And that's what the vast majority of users on every platform do anyway: they stick with the defaults. And therefore, even if you walk over to your colleague's Windows or SuSE machine, you'll almost certainly get the same Windows or SuSE desktop you get on your own machine.
On the other hand, if Apple really cared about making life easy for migratory users, they'd make their UI consistent with Windows because that's the most likely situation someone who "walks over" to another machine is going to be in. But, in fact, Apple goes out of their way to make their machines look and feel different from what people are used to. Apple's oddball UIs are about branding: they want their machines to have a recognizably different look. It creates brand loyalty. It's like the ignition key on Saabs or Porsches. It doesn't matter whether the Mac is better (you yourself said that Windows is perfectly usable), it matters that it is different.
One reason is that VNC has very lightweight clients.
Also, the VNC protocol is more predictable; in principle, X11 applications should be more efficient, but many X11 apps are so poorly written that VNC beats them.
Finally, several recently developed and popular X11-based desktop environments aren't designed with remote applications in mind and won't do the right thing.
All I said was that Apple likes to keep its own interface consistant,
You also implied that the Linux GUI lacked such consistency, and that kind of statement just doesn't make sense because you are comparing apples and oranges.
Does this 'letting people with diverse backgrounds feel comfortable using the same platform' make it take less time to customize my desktop?
You don't have to spend any time to configure your desktop--you can just run whatever default your distribution comes with, just like you would on MacOS.
Furthermore, KDE customization is really easy: you pick whether you want a Windows, CDE, or Mac-like desktop when you log in for the first time--that takes a few seconds, and saves you hours in getting used to unfamiliar defaults.
I was saying that each approach ('choices, choices, choices' vs. 'we think this is the best solution, so just use it and don't screw with it') has it's strong points and drawbacks.
And I'm saying that I think Apple's supposed "strong point" is mostly a marketing construct based on some arbitrary notion of what you choose to look at. Yes, up-to-date, uncustomized Macs are consistent with one another, but so are uncustomized SuSE distributions. Beyond that, Macs are consistent with nothing else, and users can customize them as much as any other platform if they really want to.
I think you don't 'get' the degree to which most users don't care. There are so many users out there that just want to use their computer as it is when it comes out of the box. They'll ask "where do I go to turn it off?" and if you say "you can put an icon that will shut down anywhere you like!" they'll say "I don't care. Where do I go to turn it off?" They want to be told "Click here." and they want to know that, whatever the circumstances, clicking there will turn it off. Apple wants these people to feel comfortable with OSX. Are you starting to get it, or am I typing too fast?
Oh, and you think that Gnome, KDE, or Microsoft don't want that? And do you really think that the usability engineers working on Gnome, KDE, or Windows are any less smart than those working on Mac OS?
Portraying Gnome and KDE as some sort of hacker GUIs is a marketing myth, a last ditch attempt by people invested in Windows and MacOS to differentiate themselves from OSS GUI software. But in reality, Gnome and KDE are disgustingly mainstream when it comes to GUIs; their features and customizability are driven by the desire to make the same kinds of customers happy that are happy with Windows and MacOS, and they are succeeding. I actually wish it weren't so.
But, hey, if you actually have some sound, recent data actually demonstrating an overall usability advantage of MacOS over Windows, Gnome, and KDE, why don't you share it?
Look : you may not actually like Java, for whatever reason, but not facing up to the facts (facts that are easily available), won't actually make Java disappear.
What I don't like is people using meaningless numbers and half-truths to prop up some commercial product that isn't even very good technically. As for Java disappearing, it will do that on its own, and I predict, pretty soon.
Please tell me: where can I find that "free, certified complete and compatible, open source implementation of J2EE"?
JBoss and Tomcat.
See, here you are doing it again: you talk about "free, certified complete and compatible, open source", yet that is misleading. JBoss and Tomcat may be free and open source, but they are not all of J2EE, which includes J2SE. And the distinction isn't academic: in order to run JBoss or Tomcat in a "certified complete and compatible" environment, you need Sun-proprietary software. What good is it that JBoss is open source if the open source community has no control over the underlying platform and will never get such control?
Why do people like you keep misrepresenting Java as something that it isn't?
I'm used to this persons arrangement, and am comfortable using it. I stand up, walk to another person's machine, who has an identical SuSE installation, but this guy's running KDE. He also has customized it heavily to his own tastes.
When a Windows or UNIX user walks over to a Mac, the Mac is completely inconsistent with what they are used to, and, worse yet, there is no easy way to make the Mac work like what they are used to.
On the other hand, not only are (say) SuSE setups consistent out of the box (if you walk over to a SuSE machine and log in, you get the same default desktop you get on any other SuSE machine), if you come from a different platform, it takes only a few clicks to make it look and feel close to what you are used to.
The 'the more options the better' view is certainly better for those who want immense control over their interface and have to time to deal with it.
You just don't get it, do you? Those options aren't there because of some geeky obsession with features, they are there to let people with many diverse backgrounds feel comfortable using the same software platform.
KDE and Gnome say "we'll adapt to what you are used to to make things easy for you", while the Mac UI says "we know everything better, so we don't give a damn if you come from a different background and don't like it".
The 'Do it one way, but do that one way well' view is certainly better for Apple's target audience.
And that's fine, for Apple. Apple has captured a few percent of the market that happens to like its particular choices or at least doesn't mind them too much. Just don't present that as the answer for everybody else.
It will be interesting to hear these people come up with a definition of "P2P" or "software that encourages children and teenagers to infringe copyrights". Any definition I can think of would include most Internet software and, for that matter, Microsoft Windows.
If you want to use that kind of environment, it's still there. You can run Apple II Basic in emulation (faster than ever) or run native Basic implementations. If you want something more modern, there are plenty of environments that make getting started with programming easy: Python, Matlab, PLT Scheme, etc.
But if you want to write real-world applications, you have to deal with complexities: when there are dozens of applications, windows, and GUI elements on the screen, you just have to know what that means. It's like driving on a private racetrack (where the choice of destinations is limited) and driving on public roads (where there are lots of choices, but you need to know how to live with other drivers).
However, I think Apple's principle here is that if a feature is done right, then people won't need alternatives.
Yes, but the definition of "right" depends on the users and target audience. That's why we all drive different cars, eat different foods, watch different movies, wear different clothes, etc.
The free market solution is to have everybody offer what they think is "right" and to let end users make informed choices according to their own needs. It's unfortunate that that option doesn't exist right now when it comes to software: both Microsoft and Apple still have unfair advantages in the market resulting from their size, which allow them to impose "right" solutions on users that aren't necessarily "right" for them. But that's going to change in the long run.
But this is the issue from the point of view of Apple: look around at linux desktops. Heck, just find some screenshots online somewhere- they all look different. Both KDE and Gnome are very customizable. Great. But a lot of users are going to find it confusing. Here's an example:
That's just a bad analogy. Linux is a kernel. It corresponds to Darwin in the Mac world. Both Linux and Darwin support many GUIs. People don't say that "Darwin desktops are inconsistent" either.
Mac OS is a single OS distribution from a single vendor with a single choice of GUI and desktop desktop. Of course, it's going to be consistent. That's no great achievement--Apple would have to be schizophrenic for it not to be. Its analog is something like SuSE or Fedora.
Apple also happens to make their systems not very customizable. Some desktops that happen to be based on Linux make the same choice, others don't. I think the jury is still out on what is better in the long term.
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While not many people blame Apple for keeping Quartz closed source, many would argue that at least the APIs should be exposed.
The problem isn't that Quartz is closed source, the problem is that it is based on proprietary and non-standard APIs. Both Apple and Sun are trying to emulate Microsoft in this regard: set proprietary API standards and tie software developers and users to the company.
I think it's a gamble that they are bound to lose: open APIs catch up quickly and they will be the long term winners.
Re:Undocumented API calls
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When Microsoft does it, it's an evil plan for world domination, when Apple does it, people are looking for excuses and explanations.
In fact, it is true that whether Apple publishes these APIs or not makes not one iota of a difference: they have such a niche market and they already control it so tightly that their position doesn't change. When Microsoft does it, it does harm competitors.
Both companies probably do it without much thought or reflection.
You can file whatever patent you like; the patent should just not get granted. Unless they are doing something else clever, this is simply not patentable.
Has Python 'relegated Perl to the scrap heap'? No. Has PHP done this? No.
Oh, I think PHP has relegated Perl to the scrap heap. In absolute numbers, Perl usage may still have grown, but relative to PHP, Perl has become irrelevant.
Java is used primarily for server-side middleware - interfacing with databases.
Such layers and application server platforms exist for many other languages, including Python and PHP.
I might just as well say that ASP.NET is doomed because server side development on Solaris is moving to Java!
Well, if you actually believe that Solaris has much of a future, then that may be a reasonable argument to make...
Mono's.Net is not.Net - its an incomplete subset, and on Mono's website they say that it always is likely to remain an incomplete subset.
Yup, but they are targeting exactly that subset that people need to move their Windows-based ASP.NET applications to Linux.
I guess when Java stops its phenomenal year-on-year growth, and its constant spread in to new markets and technology (this year, embedded and real-time applications)
Yeah, sure. Is Java running the real-time systems in my car? Is it in my router? My webcam? My digital camera? It isn't. Sun keeps grinding out one set of APIs after another, and people may try them out for a year or two and say that they are "using Java", but that is not the same as actually spreading into a market.
clustered application servers, where Java dominates.
Well, that isn't all that surprising, since other web development platforms often don't have a need for complex "clustered application servers"--they scale without it.
or free, certified complete and compatible, open source implementation of a system like J2EE that is supported by dozens of companies?
Please tell me: where can I find that "free, certified complete and compatible, open source implementation of J2EE"?
Not unless time traverl were practical, too. The problem is that encoding often happens well before display. How do they know when they make the DVD what you
Well, duh, obviously, you wouldn't use it with DVDs.
Even if you're talking about point-to-point real-time video display, there are very few cases where the bandwidth is low enough to require heavy encoding and the latency is also low enough to allow the encoder to respond to eye movements quickly enough.
Yes, but there are important applications where this kind of encoding is useful or even essential. For example, for head mounted immersive displays, trying to transmit an entire visual field at foveal resolution is infeasible and, fortunately, completely unnecessary. But if you "compress" by transmitting images only at the resolution the eye can perceive, dependent on where it is actually looking, then today's WiFi would be sufficient.
The truth is out. There is no more use pretending. Finland doesn't actually exist. The Europeans are pretending that there is a country there to hide the fact that there is a vast, cross-national research area there, where European scientists experiment with alien artifacts, antigravity, and the perfect Martini. A kind of European Area 51, just with reindeer, bartenders who know what they are doing, gorgeous Italian lab assistants, and the scientists are generally better dressed than their Area 51 counterparts.
Of course, if you are trying to hide the existence of a huge secret cross-national government research lab, you have to do some fancy footwork. After some people got dangerously close to the truth, desparate measures were needed. Since the Europeans don't like Microsoft or AT&T anyway, they decided to kill two birds with one stone: the secret government labs churned out a UNIX-work-alike operating system and pretended it came from someone from Finland. Nobody would have guessed that any organization would have had the resources or the guts to do something like that just to hide the non-existence of an entire country.
Originally, things were easy: the code got created, distributed over networks, and everybody thought there was an actual person from "Finland" behind it who created it. However, things backfired and they ended up needing a real person. Eventually, a Greek sailor by the name Linos Torvalos volunteered to undergo the necessary physical alterations (and live with hair dye products until the day he dies) in order to be passed off as someone from the non-existent nation of Finland.
The SCO lawsuit, however, really has them in a bind: on the one hand, it is quite clear that their original story that a "Finnish student created Linux in his spare time" can't possibly be true, given the sheer volume of code, but on the other hand, they can't reveal the true origin of the code, the army of programmers in an undeground bunker (which they refer to as "Santa's Little Helpers"), that created Linux.
We are all waiting with bated breath for the resolution of this real-life drama of espionage, deception, and government coverups.
It's just a good sales pitch by a startup. Every video compression technology takes advantage of the human visual system and drops out things people can't see. That can take all sorts of forms, including identifying important image parts, modifying colors and textures, etc.
If eyetracking were practical, encoders would even only transmit what you are looking at, but do you want to wear a few pounds of gear on your head to watch television? Once eye trackers get cheap and small enough, however, even that will happen.
"Yes, and having watched enough regular people struggle with Macintosh and Windows"
I've seen people struggle with it too. I've also seen people struggle with VCR's and answering machines. A lot of these people are from a generation that didn't grow up surrounded by such gadgets so they feel intimidated. The thought of these sorts of people working with a command line interface is laughable.
Why do you keep bringing up "command line interfaces"? I didn't say anything about "command line interfaces". Linux has the same kind of GUI that Windows and Macintosh have, with all its good and bad points.
What I dispute is your claim that the Macintosh and Windows GUIs are ahead of Linux in terms of usability; they aren't: people struggle as much with Windows and Macintosh GUIs as they do with Linux GUIs.
I don't know if it was unsupported or not.
You bought a $1000 piece of hardware (Dells are expensive) with an operating system on it and you don't remember whether it came with Windows or Linux originally? Do you suffer from amnesia? Here is a simple test: do you have a Linux restore CD for the machine? Can you get one from the manufacturer? If not, Linux isn't supported on it by its manufacturer.
I got one running on my Mac in about 15 minutes.
Well, gee, given the price of Macs and the fact that their OS runs only on their hardware, I sure hope so--you should be getting something for your money. Of course, if had bought a Linux PC, it would have been less work and cost you about half.
And thank goodness it does!! Because you know what? If I had to go and install all that crap myself I would have never used Linux in the first place. Those pre-installed apps at least allowed me to be marginally productive with the system in a relatively short period of time. The 4 or 5 additional apps I needed were still painful to install. But better 4 or 5 than 20 or 30.
Linux distros deliver what Macintosh claims but fails to deliver: one-click installs. On something like SuSE, you really do just click on a software title you want in the software catalog and it gets installed, with any and all dependencies, automatically updated over time. Macintosh or Windows don't even come close.
If you think that Linux software installs are "painful", you have never really used a good Linux distro.
"It's because people like you think that Apple's hacked up version of NeXT's poor copy of the look of a Xerox PARC research system is the best we can do that things don't get better. Sadly, like most people, you lack the imagination to think beyond what some company's PR department sells you."
Wow. I now realize I'm giving you a better reply to your post than you really deserve. You're trolling. Ah, well, there's a sucker born every minute!
Well, I suppose your response is not surprising: if ignorance like yours were easy to stamp out, we wouldn't be running NeXTstep on our Macs 20 years later.
The real problem here is and remains the lack of a separate Java standard. If there were such a thing, we'd be talking about Sun's 1.5 implementation of the Java99 or Java04 standard.
Sadly, Java has turned out to be much more like Visual Basic or Perl (a single implementation defines the "standard"), as opposed to open languages like C or C++; people just don't confuse C++ standards versions with, say, gcc versions.
These languages are being used for different purposes. For example, at the moment, C# seems mainly used as a Visual Basic replacement for client-side development under windows.
ASP.NET is the biggest threat to Java: that's where server-side development is moving on Windows (Windows developers don't care about "proprietary"); Mono's.NET implementation then gives those people the option to deploy on Linux when they come to their senses.
Why should they? Python hasn't relegated Perl or C to the scrap heap, neither has PHP.
Perl has relegated awk to the scrap heap. And Python has pretty much killed Perl's aspiration in several areas (GUI development, Matlab replacement, etc.). PHP is probably far more common than Perl for server-side development now. And all of them have taken away a lot of "market share" from C.
Languages don't usually die, but they can become less and less relevant. And that can even happen pretty quickly.
It's all economics, as you must distinguish between choices that are made initially (clean PC) and choices that involve switching (pre-installed windows).
Yes, switching is costly. We established that. But that wasn't your original point; you claimed that there was an advantage to using Windows independent of any cost of switching.
So, the predominant advantage to windows is the reduction of risk. Of course not the real risks, like virii etc, but the perceived personal risks,
So, you are saying the risk people perceive is different from the actual risk. That's my point exactly: people are choosing irrationally because they falsely assess costs and risks.
This is of course not related to the actual inner workings of the OS, but only to the dominant market position.
The perception may be related to Microsoft's dominant market position, but the perception is wrong. Half a dozen years ago, Microsoft's dominant market position made using Linux hard (I know, I was there). In 2004, Microsoft's dominant market position doesn't make it any more costly or difficult for you to run Linux than if Microsoft didn't exist (Microsoft keeps trying to make it hard, of course, but they aren't succeeding anymore). You can buy Linux PCs at your local computer store or mail order for less money than Windows PCs, they are supported, they come with tons of software preinstalled, and they just work better. Packages like OpenOffice even interoperate with Office well enough for most day-to-day use.
Contrary to what you keep saying, many users have no rational reason to prefer Windows over Linux. They are either reasoning irrationally or they have incorrect information about Linux and Windows. And where do they get that incorrect information from? From statements like you made in your original post, where you made silly claims like "[Windows hardware] just works out of the box".
Please take a moment to consider this tired old phrase: Time is money
I agree with that.
Linux and windows are both part of this free market. For both products you pay a combination of time and money. Some like paying more money and saving time, some like paying more time and saving money, that's all there is to it.
You may think that Windows saves you time, but I think that doesn't hold up to objective scrutiny.
For example, your notion that it takes a lot of time to choose among different distros is just illogical: it takes no more time to choose SuSE than it takes to choose Windows; you don't have to evaluate every Linux-kernel-based distribution before making your choice.
You are actually using Windows for the same reason people use lots of products: you happen to know it and it's not worth your time to switch because it works well enough for you. That's legitimate. It's not legitimate, however, to present that as if there was some intrinsic advantage to using Windows.
My last install (correction: attempted install) of Linux was actually quite recent.
Well, I think we just diagnosed your problem: you buy Macintosh with supported hardware, but you attempt to install Linux on unsupported hardware. It makes no sense to compare the two situations.
But beware: Just because it all seems easy and intuitive to YOU does not mean that it's easy or intuitive for the masses.
Yes, that's what you should realize: just because you have gotten used to the graphical gibberish on your Macintosh, Windows, Gnome, or KDE screen doesn't mean it's "intuitive". It's, in fact, something that takes everybody a long time to master.
Regular people have significantly different expectations and priorities.
Yes, and having watched enough regular people struggle with Macintosh and Windows, I can assure you those systems are far from intuitive. But Macintosh/Windows junkies like you wouldn't notice because you have gotten so used to the obscure visual language and assumptions that all mainstream GUIs use and copy from each other. You're like a native speaker of Japanese saying "oh, but Japanese is so intutive".
But please don't have a stinkin' geekfest with it though, OK? Fire it up, browse the web, check your email, install a few commercial apps, run Software Update. Import some photos into iPhoto. Make a movie. Use it like a normal human being uses it.
You know why those things work on a Macintosh? Because they are preinstalled on the Macintosh.
And you know what? A good Linux distro comes with even more end user software preinstalled, all with a consistent look and feel, and that's why it just works better for regular users: you put a preinstalled, preconfigured Linux machine on someone's desk, and chances are it will just keep running and doing every job the user needs to get done until the hardware finally dies.
I've been programming professionally for 21 years and I'm sick and tired of dealing with mundane technical BULLSHIT all the time.
If you want to know where this "bullshit" comes from, look in a mirror: it's people like you that create it and people like you that keep it alive.
It's because people like you think that Apple's hacked up version of NeXT's poor copy of the look of a Xerox PARC research system is the best we can do that things don't get better. Sadly, like most people, you lack the imagination to think beyond what some company's PR department sells you.
Not everyone likes to know everything about everything. Just becuase we are into computer doesn't mean everyone has to be. When you car breaks down, do you fix everything by yourself becuase you have the "freedom" to choose what parts you want or do you just want it fixed so it will "just run"?
That analogy is wrong. What you said was (in car terms) that cars from Manufacturer A are better because Manufacturer A only offers a single model, while Manufacturer B forces you to choose among four different models.
But the existence of Gentoo has no bearing on your choice between SuSE and Windows. You just pick Windows because it is popular and doesn't require thinking about it, that's all. If SuSE had 90% market share, you'd pick it, and you wouldn't go on bitching about getting confused about the half dozen other Linux distributions there are.
Thank you for trolling and thinking we all must be like you or else we are communist, have a nice day!
I didn't use the term "communist", I used the term "central planning". Central planning does exactly what you want it to do: it reduces the cost of making a choice for most people. You argue in favor of central planning, in this case at the hands of a big corporation, because it reduces your cost of making choices. That's all there's to it. Sorry if you don't like the implications of your argument.
Mono definately has legal issues that need to be cleared up before it should be used. Microsoft can currently kill Mono anytime they wish.
With their patent portfolio and cash position, Microsoft can kill any open source project any time they wish, provided they are willing to accept the antitrust and PR backlash.
If anything, Mono is probably in a better position than other systems because this issue has been scrutinized so much.
Microsoft can start charging fees at any time for implimenting a C# VM.
If you know a legal basis for this, I'm sure the Mono project would like to know about this because they are actually quite dilligent about legal issues.
Sun's ACSLP is a totally different story.
ACSLP is just a source license; Microsoft has released a VM under similar licenses. Neither makes any difference for open source implementations or independent third party implementations because they grant you few rights.
What is a different story is the licenses on the specifications. The ECMA C# specifications are available from ECMA. But the Java specifications are available only under a restrictive license agreement with Sun.
However from a users perspective, the big difference is that you can get a SDK and VM directly and legally from SUN.
OK, so you seem to have just given up on the idea of running software based on open source systems. Instead, you choose to insulate yourself from those issues by picking a proprietary platform backed by a big company. Fine, no problem: you share that view with millions of Windows developers. I can deal with that. But please don't portray your choice as something other than what it is: the choice of one commercial vendor over another. Also, your choice has its own risks, like, for example, Sun going out of business or Sun starting to charge for their software.
Personally, I still believe that open source is a feasible proposition. Legally, I think Mono is actually in better shape than many other open source platforms because people have worried about this so much. I certainly view it as less of a risk than Java. C#'s Microsoft heritage clearly is a PR problem, however, and may mean that Mono never becomes the overwhelming success that it might become otherwise. Time will have to tell. Maybe something completely different will come along in a few years and make the point moot.
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The apps usually are completely network-ignorant, they don't know the difference between running locally and remote.
No, sadly, that's not the case for Gnome and KDE apps because those environments have introduced communications mechanisms that bypass the X11 server.
Also, the drawing and redraw logic in those apps (as well as applications like Mozilla) doesn't work well on remote displays.
My point was that there are different approaches to interface design (which, incidently, I've done that as a job, too). [...] So, if you have users who will just want to memorize the GUI they're given, and not change it, for THEM, consistancy is much better. People who want their UI how they want it, period, will always want more customizability.
And my point is that that is just a wrong conceptualization of what is going on. You think of customizability and consistency as tradeoffs, and I'm saying that that makes no sense.
On the customizability front, if you want a consistent UI on your Windows or SuSE machine, you just use the defaults: you get exactly the same look and feel for your OS no matter what machine you use it on. And that's what the vast majority of users on every platform do anyway: they stick with the defaults. And therefore, even if you walk over to your colleague's Windows or SuSE machine, you'll almost certainly get the same Windows or SuSE desktop you get on your own machine.
On the other hand, if Apple really cared about making life easy for migratory users, they'd make their UI consistent with Windows because that's the most likely situation someone who "walks over" to another machine is going to be in. But, in fact, Apple goes out of their way to make their machines look and feel different from what people are used to. Apple's oddball UIs are about branding: they want their machines to have a recognizably different look. It creates brand loyalty. It's like the ignition key on Saabs or Porsches. It doesn't matter whether the Mac is better (you yourself said that Windows is perfectly usable), it matters that it is different.
One reason is that VNC has very lightweight clients.
Also, the VNC protocol is more predictable; in principle, X11 applications should be more efficient, but many X11 apps are so poorly written that VNC beats them.
Finally, several recently developed and popular X11-based desktop environments aren't designed with remote applications in mind and won't do the right thing.
All I said was that Apple likes to keep its own interface consistant,
You also implied that the Linux GUI lacked such consistency, and that kind of statement just doesn't make sense because you are comparing apples and oranges.
Does this 'letting people with diverse backgrounds feel comfortable using the same platform' make it take less time to customize my desktop?
You don't have to spend any time to configure your desktop--you can just run whatever default your distribution comes with, just like you would on MacOS.
Furthermore, KDE customization is really easy: you pick whether you want a Windows, CDE, or Mac-like desktop when you log in for the first time--that takes a few seconds, and saves you hours in getting used to unfamiliar defaults.
I was saying that each approach ('choices, choices, choices' vs. 'we think this is the best solution, so just use it and don't screw with it') has it's strong points and drawbacks.
And I'm saying that I think Apple's supposed "strong point" is mostly a marketing construct based on some arbitrary notion of what you choose to look at. Yes, up-to-date, uncustomized Macs are consistent with one another, but so are uncustomized SuSE distributions. Beyond that, Macs are consistent with nothing else, and users can customize them as much as any other platform if they really want to.
I think you don't 'get' the degree to which most users don't care. There are so many users out there that just want to use their computer as it is when it comes out of the box. They'll ask "where do I go to turn it off?" and if you say "you can put an icon that will shut down anywhere you like!" they'll say "I don't care. Where do I go to turn it off?" They want to be told "Click here." and they want to know that, whatever the circumstances, clicking there will turn it off. Apple wants these people to feel comfortable with OSX. Are you starting to get it, or am I typing too fast?
Oh, and you think that Gnome, KDE, or Microsoft don't want that? And do you really think that the usability engineers working on Gnome, KDE, or Windows are any less smart than those working on Mac OS?
Portraying Gnome and KDE as some sort of hacker GUIs is a marketing myth, a last ditch attempt by people invested in Windows and MacOS to differentiate themselves from OSS GUI software. But in reality, Gnome and KDE are disgustingly mainstream when it comes to GUIs; their features and customizability are driven by the desire to make the same kinds of customers happy that are happy with Windows and MacOS, and they are succeeding. I actually wish it weren't so.
But, hey, if you actually have some sound, recent data actually demonstrating an overall usability advantage of MacOS over Windows, Gnome, and KDE, why don't you share it?
Look : you may not actually like Java, for whatever reason, but not facing up to the facts (facts that are easily available), won't actually make Java disappear.
What I don't like is people using meaningless numbers and half-truths to prop up some commercial product that isn't even very good technically. As for Java disappearing, it will do that on its own, and I predict, pretty soon.
Please tell me: where can I find that "free, certified complete and compatible, open source implementation of J2EE"?
JBoss and Tomcat.
See, here you are doing it again: you talk about "free, certified complete and compatible, open source", yet that is misleading. JBoss and Tomcat may be free and open source, but they are not all of J2EE, which includes J2SE. And the distinction isn't academic: in order to run JBoss or Tomcat in a "certified complete and compatible" environment, you need Sun-proprietary software. What good is it that JBoss is open source if the open source community has no control over the underlying platform and will never get such control?
Why do people like you keep misrepresenting Java as something that it isn't?
I'm used to this persons arrangement, and am comfortable using it. I stand up, walk to another person's machine, who has an identical SuSE installation, but this guy's running KDE. He also has customized it heavily to his own tastes.
When a Windows or UNIX user walks over to a Mac, the Mac is completely inconsistent with what they are used to, and, worse yet, there is no easy way to make the Mac work like what they are used to.
On the other hand, not only are (say) SuSE setups consistent out of the box (if you walk over to a SuSE machine and log in, you get the same default desktop you get on any other SuSE machine), if you come from a different platform, it takes only a few clicks to make it look and feel close to what you are used to.
The 'the more options the better' view is certainly better for those who want immense control over their interface and have to time to deal with it.
You just don't get it, do you? Those options aren't there because of some geeky obsession with features, they are there to let people with many diverse backgrounds feel comfortable using the same software platform.
KDE and Gnome say "we'll adapt to what you are used to to make things easy for you", while the Mac UI says "we know everything better, so we don't give a damn if you come from a different background and don't like it".
The 'Do it one way, but do that one way well' view is certainly better for Apple's target audience.
And that's fine, for Apple. Apple has captured a few percent of the market that happens to like its particular choices or at least doesn't mind them too much. Just don't present that as the answer for everybody else.
It will be interesting to hear these people come up with a definition of "P2P" or "software that encourages children and teenagers to infringe copyrights". Any definition I can think of would include most Internet software and, for that matter, Microsoft Windows.
If you want to use that kind of environment, it's still there. You can run Apple II Basic in emulation (faster than ever) or run native Basic implementations. If you want something more modern, there are plenty of environments that make getting started with programming easy: Python, Matlab, PLT Scheme, etc.
But if you want to write real-world applications, you have to deal with complexities: when there are dozens of applications, windows, and GUI elements on the screen, you just have to know what that means. It's like driving on a private racetrack (where the choice of destinations is limited) and driving on public roads (where there are lots of choices, but you need to know how to live with other drivers).
However, I think Apple's principle here is that if a feature is done right, then people won't need alternatives.
Yes, but the definition of "right" depends on the users and target audience. That's why we all drive different cars, eat different foods, watch different movies, wear different clothes, etc.
The free market solution is to have everybody offer what they think is "right" and to let end users make informed choices according to their own needs. It's unfortunate that that option doesn't exist right now when it comes to software: both Microsoft and Apple still have unfair advantages in the market resulting from their size, which allow them to impose "right" solutions on users that aren't necessarily "right" for them. But that's going to change in the long run.
But this is the issue from the point of view of Apple: look around at linux desktops. Heck, just find some screenshots online somewhere- they all look different. Both KDE and Gnome are very customizable. Great. But a lot of users are going to find it confusing. Here's an example:
That's just a bad analogy. Linux is a kernel. It corresponds to Darwin in the Mac world. Both Linux and Darwin support many GUIs. People don't say that "Darwin desktops are inconsistent" either.
Mac OS is a single OS distribution from a single vendor with a single choice of GUI and desktop desktop. Of course, it's going to be consistent. That's no great achievement--Apple would have to be schizophrenic for it not to be. Its analog is something like SuSE or Fedora.
Apple also happens to make their systems not very customizable. Some desktops that happen to be based on Linux make the same choice, others don't. I think the jury is still out on what is better in the long term.
While not many people blame Apple for keeping Quartz closed source, many would argue that at least the APIs should be exposed.
The problem isn't that Quartz is closed source, the problem is that it is based on proprietary and non-standard APIs. Both Apple and Sun are trying to emulate Microsoft in this regard: set proprietary API standards and tie software developers and users to the company.
I think it's a gamble that they are bound to lose: open APIs catch up quickly and they will be the long term winners.
When Microsoft does it, it's an evil plan for world domination, when Apple does it, people are looking for excuses and explanations.
In fact, it is true that whether Apple publishes these APIs or not makes not one iota of a difference: they have such a niche market and they already control it so tightly that their position doesn't change. When Microsoft does it, it does harm competitors.
Both companies probably do it without much thought or reflection.
You can file whatever patent you like; the patent should just not get granted. Unless they are doing something else clever, this is simply not patentable.
Has Python 'relegated Perl to the scrap heap'? No. Has PHP done this? No.
.Net is not .Net - its an incomplete subset, and on Mono's website they say that it always is likely to remain an incomplete subset.
Oh, I think PHP has relegated Perl to the scrap heap. In absolute numbers, Perl usage may still have grown, but relative to PHP, Perl has become irrelevant.
Java is used primarily for server-side middleware - interfacing with databases.
Such layers and application server platforms exist for many other languages, including Python and PHP.
I might just as well say that ASP.NET is doomed because server side development on Solaris is moving to Java!
Well, if you actually believe that Solaris has much of a future, then that may be a reasonable argument to make...
Mono's
Yup, but they are targeting exactly that subset that people need to move their Windows-based ASP.NET applications to Linux.
I guess when Java stops its phenomenal year-on-year growth, and its constant spread in to new markets and technology (this year, embedded and real-time applications)
Yeah, sure. Is Java running the real-time systems in my car? Is it in my router? My webcam? My digital camera? It isn't. Sun keeps grinding out one set of APIs after another, and people may try them out for a year or two and say that they are "using Java", but that is not the same as actually spreading into a market.
clustered application servers, where Java dominates.
Well, that isn't all that surprising, since other web development platforms often don't have a need for complex "clustered application servers"--they scale without it.
or free, certified complete and compatible, open source implementation of a system like J2EE that is supported by dozens of companies?
Please tell me: where can I find that "free, certified complete and compatible, open source implementation of J2EE"?
Not unless time traverl were practical, too. The problem is that encoding often happens well before display. How do they know when they make the DVD what you
Well, duh, obviously, you wouldn't use it with DVDs.
Even if you're talking about point-to-point real-time video display, there are very few cases where the bandwidth is low enough to require heavy encoding and the latency is also low enough to allow the encoder to respond to eye movements quickly enough.
Yes, but there are important applications where this kind of encoding is useful or even essential. For example, for head mounted immersive displays, trying to transmit an entire visual field at foveal resolution is infeasible and, fortunately, completely unnecessary. But if you "compress" by transmitting images only at the resolution the eye can perceive, dependent on where it is actually looking, then today's WiFi would be sufficient.
The truth is out. There is no more use pretending. Finland doesn't actually exist. The Europeans are pretending that there is a country there to hide the fact that there is a vast, cross-national research area there, where European scientists experiment with alien artifacts, antigravity, and the perfect Martini. A kind of European Area 51, just with reindeer, bartenders who know what they are doing, gorgeous Italian lab assistants, and the scientists are generally better dressed than their Area 51 counterparts.
Of course, if you are trying to hide the existence of a huge secret cross-national government research lab, you have to do some fancy footwork. After some people got dangerously close to the truth, desparate measures were needed. Since the Europeans don't like Microsoft or AT&T anyway, they decided to kill two birds with one stone: the secret government labs churned out a UNIX-work-alike operating system and pretended it came from someone from Finland. Nobody would have guessed that any organization would have had the resources or the guts to do something like that just to hide the non-existence of an entire country.
Originally, things were easy: the code got created, distributed over networks, and everybody thought there was an actual person from "Finland" behind it who created it. However, things backfired and they ended up needing a real person. Eventually, a Greek sailor by the name Linos Torvalos volunteered to undergo the necessary physical alterations (and live with hair dye products until the day he dies) in order to be passed off as someone from the non-existent nation of Finland.
The SCO lawsuit, however, really has them in a bind: on the one hand, it is quite clear that their original story that a "Finnish student created Linux in his spare time" can't possibly be true, given the sheer volume of code, but on the other hand, they can't reveal the true origin of the code, the army of programmers in an undeground bunker (which they refer to as "Santa's Little Helpers"), that created Linux.
We are all waiting with bated breath for the resolution of this real-life drama of espionage, deception, and government coverups.
It's just a good sales pitch by a startup. Every video compression technology takes advantage of the human visual system and drops out things people can't see. That can take all sorts of forms, including identifying important image parts, modifying colors and textures, etc.
If eyetracking were practical, encoders would even only transmit what you are looking at, but do you want to wear a few pounds of gear on your head to watch television? Once eye trackers get cheap and small enough, however, even that will happen.
"Yes, and having watched enough regular people struggle with Macintosh and Windows"
I've seen people struggle with it too. I've also seen people struggle with VCR's and answering machines. A lot of these people are from a generation that didn't grow up surrounded by such gadgets so they feel intimidated. The thought of these sorts of people working with a command line interface is laughable.
Why do you keep bringing up "command line interfaces"? I didn't say anything about "command line interfaces". Linux has the same kind of GUI that Windows and Macintosh have, with all its good and bad points.
What I dispute is your claim that the Macintosh and Windows GUIs are ahead of Linux in terms of usability; they aren't: people struggle as much with Windows and Macintosh GUIs as they do with Linux GUIs.
I don't know if it was unsupported or not.
You bought a $1000 piece of hardware (Dells are expensive) with an operating system on it and you don't remember whether it came with Windows or Linux originally? Do you suffer from amnesia? Here is a simple test: do you have a Linux restore CD for the machine? Can you get one from the manufacturer? If not, Linux isn't supported on it by its manufacturer.
I got one running on my Mac in about 15 minutes.
Well, gee, given the price of Macs and the fact that their OS runs only on their hardware, I sure hope so--you should be getting something for your money. Of course, if had bought a Linux PC, it would have been less work and cost you about half.
And thank goodness it does!! Because you know what? If I had to go and install all that crap myself I would have never used Linux in the first place. Those pre-installed apps at least allowed me to be marginally productive with the system in a relatively short period of time. The 4 or 5 additional apps I needed were still painful to install. But better 4 or 5 than 20 or 30.
Linux distros deliver what Macintosh claims but fails to deliver: one-click installs. On something like SuSE, you really do just click on a software title you want in the software catalog and it gets installed, with any and all dependencies, automatically updated over time. Macintosh or Windows don't even come close.
If you think that Linux software installs are "painful", you have never really used a good Linux distro.
"It's because people like you think that Apple's hacked up version of NeXT's poor copy of the look of a Xerox PARC research system is the best we can do that things don't get better. Sadly, like most people, you lack the imagination to think beyond what some company's PR department sells you."
Wow. I now realize I'm giving you a better reply to your post than you really deserve. You're trolling. Ah, well, there's a sucker born every minute!
Well, I suppose your response is not surprising: if ignorance like yours were easy to stamp out, we wouldn't be running NeXTstep on our Macs 20 years later.
The real problem here is and remains the lack of a separate Java standard. If there were such a thing, we'd be talking about Sun's 1.5 implementation of the Java99 or Java04 standard.
Sadly, Java has turned out to be much more like Visual Basic or Perl (a single implementation defines the "standard"), as opposed to open languages like C or C++; people just don't confuse C++ standards versions with, say, gcc versions.
These languages are being used for different purposes. For example, at the moment, C# seems mainly used as a Visual Basic replacement for client-side development under windows.
.NET implementation then gives those people the option to deploy on Linux when they come to their senses.
Same purposes:
GUI development: C#/.NET (Windows), C#/Gtk# (Linux), Python/Gtk (Linux), Python/wxWindows (cross-platform)
Server Side: ASP.NET (Windows, Linux), PHP, Python, Perl
Cross Platform: C++/wxWindows, C++/Qt, Python/wxWindows
ASP.NET is the biggest threat to Java: that's where server-side development is moving on Windows (Windows developers don't care about "proprietary"); Mono's
Why should they? Python hasn't relegated Perl or C to the scrap heap, neither has PHP.
Perl has relegated awk to the scrap heap. And Python has pretty much killed Perl's aspiration in several areas (GUI development, Matlab replacement, etc.). PHP is probably far more common than Perl for server-side development now. And all of them have taken away a lot of "market share" from C.
Languages don't usually die, but they can become less and less relevant. And that can even happen pretty quickly.
It's all economics, as you must distinguish between choices that are made initially (clean PC) and choices that involve switching (pre-installed windows).
Yes, switching is costly. We established that. But that wasn't your original point; you claimed that there was an advantage to using Windows independent of any cost of switching.
So, the predominant advantage to windows is the reduction of risk. Of course not the real risks, like virii etc, but the perceived personal risks,
So, you are saying the risk people perceive is different from the actual risk. That's my point exactly: people are choosing irrationally because they falsely assess costs and risks.
This is of course not related to the actual inner workings of the OS, but only to the dominant market position.
The perception may be related to Microsoft's dominant market position, but the perception is wrong. Half a dozen years ago, Microsoft's dominant market position made using Linux hard (I know, I was there). In 2004, Microsoft's dominant market position doesn't make it any more costly or difficult for you to run Linux than if Microsoft didn't exist (Microsoft keeps trying to make it hard, of course, but they aren't succeeding anymore). You can buy Linux PCs at your local computer store or mail order for less money than Windows PCs, they are supported, they come with tons of software preinstalled, and they just work better. Packages like OpenOffice even interoperate with Office well enough for most day-to-day use.
Contrary to what you keep saying, many users have no rational reason to prefer Windows over Linux. They are either reasoning irrationally or they have incorrect information about Linux and Windows. And where do they get that incorrect information from? From statements like you made in your original post, where you made silly claims like "[Windows hardware] just works out of the box".
Please take a moment to consider this tired old phrase: Time is money
I agree with that.
Linux and windows are both part of this free market. For both products you pay a combination of time and money. Some like paying more money and saving time, some like paying more time and saving money, that's all there is to it.
You may think that Windows saves you time, but I think that doesn't hold up to objective scrutiny.
For example, your notion that it takes a lot of time to choose among different distros is just illogical: it takes no more time to choose SuSE than it takes to choose Windows; you don't have to evaluate every Linux-kernel-based distribution before making your choice.
You are actually using Windows for the same reason people use lots of products: you happen to know it and it's not worth your time to switch because it works well enough for you. That's legitimate. It's not legitimate, however, to present that as if there was some intrinsic advantage to using Windows.
My last install (correction: attempted install) of Linux was actually quite recent.
Well, I think we just diagnosed your problem: you buy Macintosh with supported hardware, but you attempt to install Linux on unsupported hardware. It makes no sense to compare the two situations.
But beware: Just because it all seems easy and intuitive to YOU does not mean that it's easy or intuitive for the masses.
Yes, that's what you should realize: just because you have gotten used to the graphical gibberish on your Macintosh, Windows, Gnome, or KDE screen doesn't mean it's "intuitive". It's, in fact, something that takes everybody a long time to master.
Regular people have significantly different expectations and priorities.
Yes, and having watched enough regular people struggle with Macintosh and Windows, I can assure you those systems are far from intuitive. But Macintosh/Windows junkies like you wouldn't notice because you have gotten so used to the obscure visual language and assumptions that all mainstream GUIs use and copy from each other. You're like a native speaker of Japanese saying "oh, but Japanese is so intutive".
But please don't have a stinkin' geekfest with it though, OK? Fire it up, browse the web, check your email, install a few commercial apps, run Software Update. Import some photos into iPhoto. Make a movie. Use it like a normal human being uses it.
You know why those things work on a Macintosh? Because they are preinstalled on the Macintosh.
And you know what? A good Linux distro comes with even more end user software preinstalled, all with a consistent look and feel, and that's why it just works better for regular users: you put a preinstalled, preconfigured Linux machine on someone's desk, and chances are it will just keep running and doing every job the user needs to get done until the hardware finally dies.
I've been programming professionally for 21 years and I'm sick and tired of dealing with mundane technical BULLSHIT all the time.
If you want to know where this "bullshit" comes from, look in a mirror: it's people like you that create it and people like you that keep it alive.
It's because people like you think that Apple's hacked up version of NeXT's poor copy of the look of a Xerox PARC research system is the best we can do that things don't get better. Sadly, like most people, you lack the imagination to think beyond what some company's PR department sells you.
Not everyone likes to know everything about everything. Just becuase we are into computer doesn't mean everyone has to be. When you car breaks down, do you fix everything by yourself becuase you have the "freedom" to choose what parts you want or do you just want it fixed so it will "just run"?
That analogy is wrong. What you said was (in car terms) that cars from Manufacturer A are better because Manufacturer A only offers a single model, while Manufacturer B forces you to choose among four different models.
But the existence of Gentoo has no bearing on your choice between SuSE and Windows. You just pick Windows because it is popular and doesn't require thinking about it, that's all. If SuSE had 90% market share, you'd pick it, and you wouldn't go on bitching about getting confused about the half dozen other Linux distributions there are.
Thank you for trolling and thinking we all must be like you or else we are communist, have a nice day!
I didn't use the term "communist", I used the term "central planning". Central planning does exactly what you want it to do: it reduces the cost of making a choice for most people. You argue in favor of central planning, in this case at the hands of a big corporation, because it reduces your cost of making choices. That's all there's to it. Sorry if you don't like the implications of your argument.
Mono definately has legal issues that need to be cleared up before it should be used. Microsoft can currently kill Mono anytime they wish.
With their patent portfolio and cash position, Microsoft can kill any open source project any time they wish, provided they are willing to accept the antitrust and PR backlash.
If anything, Mono is probably in a better position than other systems because this issue has been scrutinized so much.
Microsoft can start charging fees at any time for implimenting a C# VM.
If you know a legal basis for this, I'm sure the Mono project would like to know about this because they are actually quite dilligent about legal issues.
Sun's ACSLP is a totally different story.
ACSLP is just a source license; Microsoft has released a VM under similar licenses. Neither makes any difference for open source implementations or independent third party implementations because they grant you few rights.
What is a different story is the licenses on the specifications. The ECMA C# specifications are available from ECMA. But the Java specifications are available only under a restrictive license agreement with Sun.
However from a users perspective, the big difference is that you can get a SDK and VM directly and legally from SUN.
OK, so you seem to have just given up on the idea of running software based on open source systems. Instead, you choose to insulate yourself from those issues by picking a proprietary platform backed by a big company. Fine, no problem: you share that view with millions of Windows developers. I can deal with that. But please don't portray your choice as something other than what it is: the choice of one commercial vendor over another. Also, your choice has its own risks, like, for example, Sun going out of business or Sun starting to charge for their software.
Personally, I still believe that open source is a feasible proposition. Legally, I think Mono is actually in better shape than many other open source platforms because people have worried about this so much. I certainly view it as less of a risk than Java. C#'s Microsoft heritage clearly is a PR problem, however, and may mean that Mono never becomes the overwhelming success that it might become otherwise. Time will have to tell. Maybe something completely different will come along in a few years and make the point moot.