Thanks for all the advice, it does clear a few things up. I'll pass that on to my students if they become confused. I only use OSX as a part of my day job and enjoy using a Linux DE as my productivity desktop (especially for 3D animation/modelling/game development). Regardless OSX isn't free and is too hardware dependent to be useful to me.
It seems you are talking about MS Windows when discussing files being thrown around the place on an uninstall. This is not the case on a modern Linux system where software can be easily and cleanly purged in it's entirety using the onboard package manager. If software is compiled I generally run it out of an archive/folder in my ~/ but generally speaking I dislike this. That said it's easy to make an 'Applications' dir in ~/ and put that dir within one's path - so it appears in the menu and CLI.
Really they have to do something about those icons - it's obvious they were dreamed up in some manky, voodoo swamp while consulting the Hooch.
The squashy home icon is how many years old? Who lives in that ~/, Yoda? Not to mention those back, fwd arrows - like the kind of thing you'd use to take down a Mammoth.
With all the work gone into Gnome (it's an excellent DE BTW), these icons are a stoney anchor holding it back in the dark ages. They should catch up to KDE and actually choose a superior default Icon set from any one of the other excellent sets made by fans at http://art.gnome.org/. What's wrong with good old Gorilla for instance?
You're right, I didn't know that.app was just a container, I suppose that keeps things tidier. I still don't see why this system is in place though, what's wrong with a menu rather than click click clicking through folders to find things.. Students I teach have several different installations of the same software on their machines, some in 'Applications' and others in '/usr/bin' - they don't seem to know what's on their machines and where, and it frustrates them. Their own filesystem is a messy mental image, and they don't know how it got that way.
I don't see this.app as anything of an innovation - especially from a useability perspective - really, there's nothing wrong with the system as it stands; install something and find it in the menu or CLI immediately. Is it ease of use or laziness we're trying to encourage here?
Watching a Mac user run Windows or Linux is painful. They try to move or delete programs and just can't understand why it doesn't work.
Surely then you'd find it equally painful that I, like so many, 'find' the Finder totally confusing, as though all applications are somehow lost in the first place.
From my perspective, and for many other OS9.2 fans, OSX is an abomination of useability, sad but true. It's just what you get used to. For me the ability to 'delete and move applications' is a foolish, illusory and double-edged 'feature'. Wantonly deleting executables themselves makes a horrific mess, I would rather see everyday users (like my sister for instance) get used to the idea of purging unwanted software, something she says she actually enjoys doing on her SUSE Linux system, largely because "I know it's gone" - this was something she couldn't stand about Windows for instance, left overs all over the place. Secondly, a symlink is a convenient shortcut - however the way OSX organises it, many users mistake it for the thing itself. Personally, part of having a clean and sensible system is knowing what's a symlink and what is not.
As an example, I gave a 3D modelling workshop on OSX and Linux machines recently, what a mess these poor OSX users had made of their machines - people running software out of *.dmg's, 2 different/Application folders and whatever. One poor chap told me the software he'd installed "was on the hard disk, not on the desktop". When I explained that the Desktop was also 'on the hard disk', but that the hard-disk he was referring to was just an icon linking to a location on his hard disk, he said "I really hate this". Simply put, how many OSX users actually know their system begins at '/'? At least with any modern Linux desktop you can see it right there in the file browser. From an educational perspective, I'd far rather maintain Linux desktops than OSX - what a mess.
Sometimes a little transparency doesn't hurt - if useability == 'keep them stupid', then I want less 'useable' machines. After all, let them know what they're fscking up - call them stupid if they do it a second time.
Alot of medical imaging, chemistry software for Linux exists, and also alot of proprietary animation/modelling software, like Maya, which can exploit stereo imaging. The freely available Blender can also exploit it, as part of the render chain:
The real question is not what Linux software uses it, but why and when you'd want to use it in the first place. I remember a few years ago a man tried to sell me a pair of USB stereoscopic glasses at a game development conference. He just couldn't believe it when I told him that immersion doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being inside the medium.
I see this laptop will be marketed at imaging professionals needing a mobile presentation device that serves a larger audience than the standard LCD; Polarisation/blacking distortion is annoying when you're trying to sell your good-looking wares.
Right, I don't see what the problem is. I have a Centrino and the builtin wireless (ipw2200) works out of the box on these machines with Mepis/Ubuntu/Mandrake.
I get 4.5 hrs, including watching a DVD on my Asus M6N, though I don't quite know why this performs so well; considering watching/ripping DVD's is around twice the battery load.
However a major hurdle, and even a glass ceiling, in fact, to Apple adoption is the fact their OS is inseperable from their hardware. Everything considered a switch to Linux is simply easier for many people, they can use what they have already with Linux, and enjoy a performance boost.
Apple however requires a major overhaul in the hardware dept, thus you'll hardly see growth for this reason in poorer economies or in offices for instance - and that's where the real growth is.
Chances are you'll be using Linux in your day job any day soon.
"Since everything in the proprietary world of Microsoft and MacOS has to be copied or rejuvinated within the OpenSource community, is it possible that people are forgetting about innovation and focusing too much on mirroring what others do?"
Uh what?
I really hope you didn't intend too much emphasis on the everything in that comment. If so however, you show great and promising talent - but sadly not in this field..
I'd reccommend you look at advancing other disciplines, like Generalism or any of the other Great Profanities.
It may be they feel the 'market' for OSX is too small; given the snowballing trend of rolling out Linux desktops in goverments and large enterprises (and the existing predominance of Windos) it's perhaps likely that OO on OSX will always be playing catchup.
Users rarely stick with any tool for altruistic or ethical reasons, even proven performance benefits will add up badly against a users' dependency on an existing platform. For this reason the firefox team would do well by continuing to encourage developers to make more really useful extensions - things likes calendars, flash and ad-blockers, bookmarking tools and download managers all make the idea of moving from firefox very remote for me. My own reasons for using Linux are as much about feature dependency (and it's comforts) as FOSS altruism, price and performance.
Tabbed browsing shouldn't be touted as the bastion of firefox's success, afterall it's been around for a long time before FF came on the scene; investing in such triviality when making browser comparisons only strengthens Microsoft's argument that moving from an 'unsupported third-party browser' to a 'supported and integrated browser' is actually sensible. FF has a lot to offer via XUL/extensions, making it more than just another tabbed browser.
It would not be hard to construct a fair system to encourage innovation and to protect the small inventor.
It's called copyright and it's worked for Music, Literature and Software perfectly well. Copyright (like the GPL) protects the authors fine work. Patents attempt to protect the idea, and even do that miserably.
Any software is a 'way of doing something', a solution to a given problem. Patenting an approach to a given problem is ridiculous; the solution cannot be improved, and any would-be breach of this patented concept is only contestable in court.
..Not when you consider what goes on in board meetings and the power of shareholder lobbying. The only real difference here is that everyone is a stakeholder - their ambitious and individual directions could be (albeit unfortunately) considered as a kind of capital investment. Ultimately it's positive, any fork here would produce the equivalent of a sister-company or strategic partner. Regardless it seem the MF is growing out of itself.
Hair on the chest et al; necessary future-proofing for a growing organisation.
Just because it's an open-source driven organisation doesn't mean we should be surprised. Anyway it's not dissimilar to the factions and dissent occuring in any corporation at periods of massive growth.
Only that for the Mozilla Foundation we expect them to be more grown up about it, as it upholds fantasies that open collaboration naturally leads to unity.
The problem is friend that any attempt at patenting software ultimately transpires as an attempt to patent an idea. Software patents are far more than just a threat to IT companies, it is a precedent for the commodification and monopolisation of all forms of human culture. Imagine if I could take a patent out on Literary devices, like Alliteration or the Rhyme, or methods like The Synopsis. Perhaps the latter isn't too far away from the absurdity of filing a swpat on the Preview Window http://l2.espacenet.com/espacenet/viewer?PN=EP5371 00&CY=gb&LG=en&DB=EPD
If programming is itself knowledge production (as so many agree), then we're all going to be pretty stupid in 10 years if Software Patents are allowed to take hold.
And fair enough too, Genius should be rewarded. I spend sleepless nights just trying to approach some of these unprecedented, tangential and visionary works - an inspiration to any developer seriously committed to nourishing the culture of software development.
Sadly, while my patent on "A Method for Entering a Room Before Someone Else" was granted, I simply can't afford to defend it; my own Mother claims prior art.
And to my fellow entrepreneurs: I ask you hereby consider this comment evidence of prior art for the invention of Sarcasm.
Sure, it depends what and where you read; the page I gave you has alot of material, Gartner tends to be a bit stingey, with IDC offering much higher stats. For instance this article I found in MacNewsWorld entitled "Linux Set To Unseat Apple as Number Two Desktop OS" has some interesting statistics that perhaps put things a little more in perspective than mere bar graphs and aged OS sniff stats.
Regardless, I look forward to Linux greatly benefitting from Apple's new choice of kernel architecture, and vice versa - a strong partnership is available to both kernel relatives to greatly improve the state of the Desktop generally.. Lets keep it that way; cross-pollinating innovations as they emerge. Afterall, you realise Linux and OSX are far from being competitors;)
Apple is far from the largest 'shipper' of UNIX in the world, especially considering it's small place in the server market. I figure you're speaking within the context of desktops albeit.
And to be clear, you need to remember that these statistics generally only count as far as recorded *sales* (or subscriptions) of desktop versions of Linux (http://novell.com/, http://mandrake.com/ et al). As Linux is a freely available OS, this needs to be taken into account.
I'm talking desktop operating systems. I will be very impressed if you can find any statistics that indicate Linux has a bigger installed base than 2% on the desktop.
Linux was 2.8% in 2002, just behind Apple at 2.9%. It's growth has been exponential since then, in fact many argue it's the fastest growing desktop OS.
Sure, but interestingly enough I can't think of a single example of new open-source software Apple have created and given back to the community.
Compared with other companies their size they have been surprisingly stingey.
Secondly while they use FOSS software and advance it's development, in the case of some products (like KHTML, a http://kde.org/ innovation) they return it in an undocumented patch-b0rken state.
Slashdot Mirror
.. sure though modern distributions are excellent for out-of-the-box video playback. albeit the software is a little non-free.
Windows users especially have a hell of a time hunting down codecs most Linux users never need to think about.
Thanks for all the advice, it does clear a few things up. I'll pass that on to my students if they become confused. I only use OSX as a part of my day job and enjoy using a Linux DE as my productivity desktop (especially for 3D animation/modelling/game development). Regardless OSX isn't free and is too hardware dependent to be useful to me.
It seems you are talking about MS Windows when discussing files being thrown around the place on an uninstall. This is not the case on a modern Linux system where software can be easily and cleanly purged in it's entirety using the onboard package manager. If software is compiled I generally run it out of an archive/folder in my ~/ but generally speaking I dislike this. That said it's easy to make an 'Applications' dir in ~/ and put that dir within one's path - so it appears in the menu and CLI.
Really they have to do something about those icons - it's obvious they were dreamed up in some manky, voodoo swamp while consulting the Hooch.
The squashy home icon is how many years old? Who lives in that ~/, Yoda? Not to mention those back, fwd arrows - like the kind of thing you'd use to take down a Mammoth.
With all the work gone into Gnome (it's an excellent DE BTW), these icons are a stoney anchor holding it back in the dark ages. They should catch up to KDE and actually choose a superior default Icon set from any one of the other excellent sets made by fans at http://art.gnome.org/. What's wrong with good old Gorilla for instance?
You're right, I didn't know that .app was just a container, I suppose that keeps things tidier. I still don't see why this system is in place though, what's wrong with a menu rather than click click clicking through folders to find things.. Students I teach have several different installations of the same software on their machines, some in 'Applications' and others in '/usr/bin' - they don't seem to know what's on their machines and where, and it frustrates them. Their own filesystem is a messy mental image, and they don't know how it got that way.
.app as anything of an innovation - especially from a useability perspective - really, there's nothing wrong with the system as it stands; install something and find it in the menu or CLI immediately. Is it ease of use or laziness we're trying to encourage here?
I don't see this
Surely then you'd find it equally painful that I, like so many, 'find' the Finder totally confusing, as though all applications are somehow lost in the first place.
From my perspective, and for many other OS9.2 fans, OSX is an abomination of useability, sad but true. It's just what you get used to. For me the ability to 'delete and move applications' is a foolish, illusory and double-edged 'feature'. Wantonly deleting executables themselves makes a horrific mess, I would rather see everyday users (like my sister for instance) get used to the idea of purging unwanted software, something she says she actually enjoys doing on her SUSE Linux system, largely because "I know it's gone" - this was something she couldn't stand about Windows for instance, left overs all over the place. Secondly, a symlink is a convenient shortcut - however the way OSX organises it, many users mistake it for the thing itself. Personally, part of having a clean and sensible system is knowing what's a symlink and what is not.
As an example, I gave a 3D modelling workshop on OSX and Linux machines recently, what a mess these poor OSX users had made of their machines - people running software out of *.dmg's, 2 different
Sometimes a little transparency doesn't hurt - if useability == 'keep them stupid', then I want less 'useable' machines. After all, let them know what they're fscking up - call them stupid if they do it a second time.
Alot of medical imaging, chemistry software for Linux exists, and also alot of proprietary animation/modelling software, like Maya, which can exploit stereo imaging. The freely available Blender can also exploit it, as part of the render chain:
http://ltc2.smm.org/visualize/node/64
The real question is not what Linux software uses it, but why and when you'd want to use it in the first place. I remember a few years ago a man tried to sell me a pair of USB stereoscopic glasses at a game development conference. He just couldn't believe it when I told him that immersion doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being inside the medium.
I see this laptop will be marketed at imaging professionals needing a mobile presentation device that serves a larger audience than the standard LCD; Polarisation/blacking distortion is annoying when you're trying to sell your good-looking wares.
Right, I don't see what the problem is. I have a Centrino and the builtin wireless (ipw2200) works out of the box on these machines with Mepis/Ubuntu/Mandrake.
I get 4.5 hrs, including watching a DVD on my Asus M6N, though I don't quite know why this performs so well; considering watching/ripping DVD's is around twice the battery load.
. http://store.agearnotebooks.com/asusm6nphotos.htm
I run a fairly light window manager, which I'm sure hits the GPU and processor with a softer hand albeit.
... that comes between you and the solid unix programming, choking the gfx card and swalling system memory.
However a major hurdle, and even a glass ceiling, in fact, to Apple adoption is the fact their OS is inseperable from their hardware. Everything considered a switch to Linux is simply easier for many people, they can use what they have already with Linux, and enjoy a performance boost.
Apple however requires a major overhaul in the hardware dept, thus you'll hardly see growth for this reason in poorer economies or in offices for instance - and that's where the real growth is.
Chances are you'll be using Linux in your day job any day soon.
Uh what?
I really hope you didn't intend too much emphasis on the everything in that comment. If so however, you show great and promising talent - but sadly not in this field..
I'd reccommend you look at advancing other disciplines, like Generalism or any of the other Great Profanities.
good timing && fantastic, thanks..
It may be they feel the 'market' for OSX is too small; given the snowballing trend of rolling out Linux desktops in goverments and large enterprises (and the existing predominance of Windos) it's perhaps likely that OO on OSX will always be playing catchup.
Users rarely stick with any tool for altruistic or ethical reasons, even proven performance benefits will add up badly against a users' dependency on an existing platform. For this reason the firefox team would do well by continuing to encourage developers to make more really useful extensions - things likes calendars, flash and ad-blockers, bookmarking tools and download managers all make the idea of moving from firefox very remote for me. My own reasons for using Linux are as much about feature dependency (and it's comforts) as FOSS altruism, price and performance.
Tabbed browsing shouldn't be touted as the bastion of firefox's success, afterall it's been around for a long time before FF came on the scene; investing in such triviality when making browser comparisons only strengthens Microsoft's argument that moving from an 'unsupported third-party browser' to a 'supported and integrated browser' is actually sensible. FF has a lot to offer via XUL/extensions, making it more than just another tabbed browser.
It's called copyright and it's worked for Music, Literature and Software perfectly well. Copyright (like the GPL) protects the authors fine work. Patents attempt to protect the idea, and even do that miserably.
Any software is a 'way of doing something', a solution to a given problem. Patenting an approach to a given problem is ridiculous; the solution cannot be improved, and any would-be breach of this patented concept is only contestable in court.
Good ideas are everywhere, good software isn't.
..Not when you consider what goes on in board meetings and the power of shareholder lobbying. The only real difference here is that everyone is a stakeholder - their ambitious and individual directions could be (albeit unfortunately) considered as a kind of capital investment. Ultimately it's positive, any fork here would produce the equivalent of a sister-company or strategic partner. Regardless it seem the MF is growing out of itself.
Hair on the chest et al; necessary future-proofing for a growing organisation.
Just because it's an open-source driven organisation doesn't mean we should be surprised. Anyway it's not dissimilar to the factions and dissent occuring in any corporation at periods of massive growth.
Only that for the Mozilla Foundation we expect them to be more grown up about it, as it upholds fantasies that open collaboration naturally leads to unity.
Oh, you mean brilliant new, intuitive interfaces like these?
1 00&CY=gb&LG=en&DB=EPD
http://webshop.ffii.org/
The problem is friend that any attempt at patenting software ultimately transpires as an attempt to patent an idea. Software patents are far more than just a threat to IT companies, it is a precedent for the commodification and monopolisation of all forms of human culture. Imagine if I could take a patent out on Literary devices, like Alliteration or the Rhyme, or methods like The Synopsis. Perhaps the latter isn't too far away from the absurdity of filing a swpat on the Preview Window http://l2.espacenet.com/espacenet/viewer?PN=EP537
If programming is itself knowledge production (as so many agree), then we're all going to be pretty stupid in 10 years if Software Patents are allowed to take hold.
http://webshop.ffii.org/
And fair enough too, Genius should be rewarded. I spend sleepless nights just trying to approach some of these unprecedented, tangential and visionary works - an inspiration to any developer seriously committed to nourishing the culture of software development.
Sadly, while my patent on "A Method for Entering a Room Before Someone Else" was granted, I simply can't afford to defend it; my own Mother claims prior art.
And to my fellow entrepreneurs: I ask you hereby consider this comment evidence of prior art for the invention of Sarcasm.
Sure, it depends what and where you read; the page I gave you has alot of material, Gartner tends to be a bit stingey, with IDC offering much higher stats. For instance this article I found in MacNewsWorld entitled "Linux Set To Unseat Apple as Number Two Desktop OS" has some interesting statistics that perhaps put things a little more in perspective than mere bar graphs and aged OS sniff stats.
http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/35688.html
Regardless, I look forward to Linux greatly benefitting from Apple's new choice of kernel architecture, and vice versa - a strong partnership is available to both kernel relatives to greatly improve the state of the Desktop generally.. Lets keep it that way; cross-pollinating innovations as they emerge. Afterall, you realise Linux and OSX are far from being competitors
One off the cuff, but this perhaps serves his point well: http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=P2398.
Apple is far from the largest 'shipper' of UNIX in the world, especially considering it's small place in the server market. I figure you're speaking within the context of desktops albeit.
And to be clear, you need to remember that these statistics generally only count as far as recorded *sales* (or subscriptions) of desktop versions of Linux (http://novell.com/, http://mandrake.com/ et al). As Linux is a freely available OS, this needs to be taken into account.
Linux was 2.8% in 2002, just behind Apple at 2.9%. It's growth has been exponential since then, in fact many argue it's the fastest growing desktop OS.
Sure, but interestingly enough I can't think of a single example of new open-source software Apple have created and given back to the community. Compared with other companies their size they have been surprisingly stingey.
Secondly while they use FOSS software and advance it's development, in the case of some products (like KHTML, a http://kde.org/ innovation) they return it in an undocumented patch-b0rken state.
They really are taking more than they give.
eek s/Linux/FOSS/g ;)