Linux and OS X are light years ahead of Windows...
Like what? And why should customers care about it?
Well, OS X has drag and drop system services so users and applications can provide universal functionality, like grammar checking in all applications. Linux has more cleanly implemented network services and both have better standards compliance so you don't end up using as many redundant services in mixed OS environments (eg, UPNP and ZeroConf to discover other network services, like when you run Adobe CS on Windows). Both have better and more granular and usable ACLs for userspace applications. I could go on, but I'm not investing a lot of time, especially responding to an AC. Register an account already.
* Viruses - THis is not a OS problem, its a user problem. I could create a.sh file that deleted.config files or something equally evil and tell your grandma to run it and she will... * Malware - Again not specific to Windows.
Let's be clear. Trojans, viruses and worms are all distinct and all problems, but of the three worms are the largest problem and Windows is the most vulnerable due to a variety of design decisions, even if there were no install base disparity. Malware is a theoretical threat on Linux and OS X, but a practical, day-to-day problem on Windows and theories that if market share were to become more balanced are simply that, theories and not applicable to making practical decisions today.
* Applications - All the software in the world at a single spot. i.e. Google for applications. Who addresses commercial software? Who handles payments for this? Who will handle updates? Do users want to download Multi GB Games/Applications? Who pays for the massive bandwidth? What if you're not connected online,etc,etc. Again. Doesnt scale, buddy.
Don't even understand what you're trying to argue here. Please be more clear.
"I can't use target disk." Apple has suggested work arounds (i.e., ghosting) for transferring the system from computer to computer. But how many mainstream users actually use target "I can't use target disk." Apple has suggested work arounds (i.e., ghosting) for transferring the system from computer to computer. But how many mainstream users actually use target basis, if ever.
I've used target disk mode every time I upgrade hardware and so do most users I know. In fact, it's one of a short list of reasons why I generally run Linux in a VM on top of OS X instead of the other way around. It is not a minor feature in my mind.
People complaining about the lack of a FireWire port on the new macbook are a bit stupid. If you want choices in what features your hardware has, buying Macs doesn't make sense at all.
Did you ever think people are buying Macs because they want functionality? OS X offers features no other OS does, but you need a Mac for it (for most people who don't want to waste their time trying to hack together a working solution with third party hardware). Say people want to be able to quickly and easily upgrade hardware so they can use a new laptop every year or two without a huge hassle. The best choice for this is still a Mac with Firewire where you can just plug in the cable, push a few buttons and let the system transfer everything over for you. If you pick a different vendor, even if it has Firewire, this isn't an option because other OS's haven't added this feature yet, so that doesn't really help them.
The flaw in your reasoning is in focusing on hardware features instead of actual usable functionality. Some functionality requires a combination of the right hardware and software so calling people 'stupid' who complain when the only option that provides both goes away... well that's stupid.
My Dell XPS laptop has a Firewire (IEEE-1394) port on it. I've NEVER used it.
I bet your OS doesn't support using it for anything useful either, like seamless one click migration of everything to new hardware.
The world has chosen USB for just about everything.
Yeah and it looks like Apple is following suit. I just hope they figure out a way to restore the same level of functionality using the standard, inferior technologies so we don't have to go back to the old, slow, and painful methods we used before Firewire took off.
I have had a look in OSX (10.4.11) and online and can't find a way to setup mouse gestures without using a third-party program? From your comments I presumed it was an OS feature, are you using a third party app or is it just hidden away somewhere?
I'm using a service (I believe it is called 'cocoa gesture') and it is a third party offering. System services are a function of OS X that allow programs and stand alone services to offer functionality across all applications, instead of just one application (like Opera does). This applies to all programs that use the native APIs for things like text handling, but excludes programs like Opera who just do a quick and dirty port and don't bother with standard APIs. In this way I've been gestures across many applications for many years. You just drop a foo.service file into either/System/Library/Services or ~/Library/Services depending upon if you want it accessible to all users or just one.
Grammar checking, resizable text boxes, automatic language translation, fast and efficient javascript engine, just for starters.
When the platform you choose is the platform of choice for 5% of people...
That's not really pertinent since it is also slower on Linux and Windows, or was last time I tested it. The references I made to OS X were mostly with regard to problems with failing to properly code for that platform and take advantage of the ways it is superior to Windows.
And are you really surprised that WebKit's internal benchmark (Sunspider) runs faster on WebKit-based browsers...?
Gecko based browsers still run it twice as fast as Opera. Are they just biased against Opera in some unspecified way? You still haven't presented a javascript benchmark from which you formed you opinion that Opera is consistently faster. I haven't seen any and I did a little looking. The only benchmarks I've seen where Opera does well are several years old, long before the recent push for fast javascript to enable Web applications.
You would have to do this anyway as you need to interact with different programs in different ways. So you end up with weird cross overs.
This isn't theoretical. I actually use gestures across applications now. There are a lot of common features/functions across applications. Being able to easily specify the same gesture and not have to retrain is a huge time saver. For example, a gesture to save a file that works across a range of image editing and layout programs where I'm not using the keyboard much is a huge help. Also, just not having to learn the interface for setting and training gestures for each individual application is a huge time saver.
Also most programs don't demand the type of interaction that benefits from mouse gestures.
But a significant number do. For some users, especially users using alternative interfaces or interfaces for the handicapped they are incredibly useful even in applications where the average person would not use them. Also, implementing it once and letting every program use it saves resources and reduces complexity.
Spell checking is easy to implement at an OS level as it is consistent between programs, mouse gestures aren't.
Which is why OS's should have a built in system for implementing arbitrary functionality across applications so it is easy to implement spell checking or mouse gestures or any number of other functions that most people may not want, but which are huge time savers for some. Claiming it is hard to do, is just more praise for OS X, where this has been working for eight years now. They did it right and it works better than other OS's in that regard. I don't see how you can argue implementing such functionality separately for each application is superior in any way. Being hard doesn't make something inferior.
You can't really compare Safari to Opera. Safari is about as bare-bones as a browser can be.
I can and do compare them when trying to pick a browser for everyday use.
I am all for not bundling in unecessary bloat but I find Safari pretty much unusable after having used Opera.
That's a fine opinion, but your supporting facts are a bit questionable.
Custom searching - you can do this with a plug-in, but it is a valid point.
mouse gestures - I prefer mouse gestures implemented at the OS level. I actually do use mouse gestures in Safari and in a lot of other programs. It would suck to have to configure them separately for every program using a different interface.
dynamic tabs - have been in OS X for quite a while.
session management - integrated with bookmarks and has been for a while now
being able to choose where to save a download - right click and select "Download Linked File As" to specify the location. This has been there since the earliest betas of Safari.
I think maybe you're just more familiar with Opera and haven't bothered to figure out how to use many of Safari's features. The big advantages of Safari in my mind are:
Support for system services - default spell checker, grammar checker, text manipulation, language translation, mouse gestures, dictionary/thesaurus lookup, etc.
resizable text fields - I love being able to drag the text box on Slashdot bigger so I can actually see my whole post. It's been over a year now people, why hasn't this been copied by other browsers?
Speed - Opera is just really slow to render pages and especially to execute javascript. They've fallen way behind there.
Opera's rendering engine (Presto/WinGogi) and WebKit (used in Chrome / Safari) both reached 100/100 on the 26th and 27th of March, respectively.
True, but that wasn't the original requirement, even if it is the most we home users can conveniently test.
Introducing "smoothness" requirements means a browser may pass or fail the test depending on what hardware it's running on (and the opinion of the person watching the test - smooth for you might not be smooth for me). IMO the point of the Acid test is to check standards-compliance, not performance. If a browser gets 100/100, it passed.
They supplied specified reference hardware and rates, so there is no ambiguity. You can define the test as it is acceptable to you, or course, I'm just pointing out why some people can reasonably disagree. Both engines are pretty good for compliance in any case.
In fact, they were so good at "cloning the neato features of other browsers" that they often cloned those features months (sometimes years) before the other browsers had them (in some cases, before those browsers even existed).:-)
You misunderstand. Opera has introduced many new features, and other browsers have been slow to copy them, but Opera has always been quick to clone any useful features from other browsers. Or they were quick to maintain feature parity until the last year or two when browser development has ramped up from multiple camps. This is how things have changed.
If you're going to pick one platform to optimise (or if you're going to pick one platform to benchmark), it makes sense to pick the platform with 90% market share (Windows) over one that barely reaches 5% (OS X), no?
No. I'm going to pick the most featureful and preferred platform for my own use. What platform you choose is up to you. There's no reason you can't optimize code for multiple platforms or at least use the native APIs for each platform. My point being, a quick test on the platform I prefer shows that Opera is not particularly fast compared to all the options out there. I mentioned Opera 9.6 comes in at about 6900 on my laptop. That compares to 900 on the same laptop with Webkit with the new Javascript engine and 3500 with Firefox's new javascript engine. Twice as slow as Firefox and seven times slower than Safari on OS X doesn't seem to me to indicate it "consistently wins JS benchmarks" as you originally stated. I'm not saying Opera is always that poor on all platforms. I just thought it was important to point out there is significant room for a different view.
Or test all platforms and then weigh the final scores based on each platform's share.
I've actually done that several times in the past and posted the results in these discussions. Opera has, in general, faired worse than average even when factoring in all platforms. This may be unfair to some degree because Opera failed to complete the Sunspider test for a good while and because I often compared nightly releases of Webkit and Gecko to beta versions of Opera (since Opera nightly releases are not available for download by the public). The last time I ran a full set of tests the Opera beta was about twice as slow as the betas of the others. Since then, Opera has sped up by about 25% while the others have improved a great deal more; on all platforms. I don't know where you're getting your javascript benchmarks, but Opera wasn't king a year ago and since then both Firefox and Webkit have pushed really hard to improve and make Web apps that rely upon javascript more viable. Opera has not pushed so hard and has fallen behind.
In case you weren't baiting for a flame war.. GP never said that Firefox doesn't have these things, he said that they are implemented better in Opera. Also, Opera is where mouse gestures started, and even though I use a FF plugin to have them at work, I still think that Opera implemented them better as well.
You make valid points and I agree that Opera's implementation of mouse gestures on Windows is better than FF, but I still think it is wrong. Mouse gestures, spell checking, grammar checking, and similar functions should be implemented at the OS level and usable by applications the way they are in OS X. I mean why would you want to have to re-enter and retrain your mouse gestures for each application individually and just go without them in the majority of applications where the developer did not bother to implement them? The same goes for spell checking. I already told my word processor that 'MPLS' is not a misspelling. My layout program, mail program, browser, text editor, and chat program all use the built in spelling checker so they know it as well. Then Opera goes and ignores the built in service and implements their own spelling checker and their own mouse gestures and does not offer them as services or even use the standard APIs. That sucks. It also means in order to use the built in grammar checker I have to copy text out of my text field in Opera and into any one of the programs I listed above, check the grammar, then copy and paste it back into Opera. It's like I'm back in the 90's again.
I truly wish Linux and Windows would implement system services like OS X does, but that would probably be a lot of work and too much to hope for. On the other hand, wishing Opera would learn to code for OS X instead of making their program act like a weak port from Windows, doesn't seem like too much to ask. What's the point of having a better OS with a superior way to implement these features if a large number of major developers still focus on Windows and ignore those better ways of doing things? That's probably one of the reasons why Opera on OS X is so unpopular.
You're kidding, right? Opera was the first browser to get 100/100 in ACID3 (unsurprisingly, BTW, since the ACID test is co-developed by some guys from Opera Software), one day before WebKit [slashdot.org]...
Actually, according to the writers of the test, no engine passed completely until September 25th, when Webkit managed to render the animation portion smoothly (it is still choppy in the latest dev versions of Opera).
...and consistently wins JS benchmarks (only being narrowly beaten in some of them by FF3 - FF2 got hammered).
When the new version of Opera shipped (9.6) I ran it through the Sunspider javascript speed test. It scored about 6900 versus 6100 for the production version of Safari (3.1.2), so at least on OS X, Opera is significantly behind and that's even without the fancy new javascript engine in the dev versions of Webkit (which is way, way faster).
And what sense does it make to say that it's "falling behind" while "other browsers are catching up"...? Falling behind what, exactly?
I believe the intention is to state that Opera is losing ground to other browsers in the areas of performance, compliance, and features. Opera has some nice features that give it a leg up on other browsers, but other browsers are likewise gaining a leg up on Opera by adding new features of their own. For example, Opera provides nice rollover images of pages when a tab is hovered over, but Safari allows you to dynamically resize text boxes so you can see your whole Slashdot comment without scrolling. Which is better is a matter of preference, but it used to be that Opera had pretty much cloned all the neato features of other browsers, whereas lately they have not been able to keep up with the accelerated pace of development from other teams.
Personally, I like Opera on Windows quite a bit and it may be my favorite browser on that platform... but I don't browse in Windows unless I need IE, and for other platforms, it is kind of slow and still has a lot gotchas where you realize they coded it for Windows and half-assed it when implementing on Linux and OS X. It's not nearly as bad as it was when Opera for OS X was years behind the Windows version, but it isn't good enough for most power users either.
It's a lot lighter weight than FF and has everything built in including IRC and BT, spell check uses gnu-aspell, and the email client rocks.
On OS X, it's never really been much of a contender. I checked out this release. It does better for standards compliance, but is still slower than Safari in general. For javascript it is still slower than the stable version of Safari and nowhere near the performance of the Safari betas with the javascript performance improvements. Using gnu-aspell is a minus in my book, at least on OS X, where there is a system-wide spell checking service. Training yet another spell checker for another application that has been ported but ignored the features of the OS to which it was ported is quite inconvenient. It also lacks support for the built in grammar checking and other system services (like gestures).
For Windows, Opera is one of the better browsers, but it is still badly focused on that platform. Linux and OS X versions are better than they were five years ago, but still not great and not really competitive.
Then the other group. The ones that think that theory means fact.
I don't believe in this group. Who here or elsewhere has ever claimed that "theory means fact"? Theories can be well supported enough so that reasonable people accept them as facts for all practical purposes, but other theories can be almost completely unsupported. I've never heard anyone argue that theories are inherently facts.
Evolution != atheism. There are plenty of religious people who have no problem reconciling evolution (and all other scientific theories) with their own particular faith.
Indeed. Most organized christian faiths accept evolution as not in conflict with their beliefs, more so by percentages of the population than their adherents. If most of the people in the US who answer surveys saying they don't believe in evolution asked their religious leaders, they would find themselves in conflict. Even the pope of the Catholic church explicitly stated that evolution did not conflict with their doctrine.
I'm certainly a cynic, most of us become so with age. As for bigotry, I have no problem at all with people holding different beliefs than I do, but that doesn't mean I blind myself to the most likely motivations of those presenting any given information.
i would like to point out that all the crap you are spouting was shoved into your head by people with agendas also.
Really, who do you suppose it was that shoved those ideas into my head? What motivations do you think they had? Please be specific.
if you weren't a narrow minded brainwashed non thinking minion of the leftist pseudo intelligentsia and were capable of independent thought...
Leftist intelligencia? I don't think anyone who knows me would describe me as leftist since I'm a strong advocate of so many beliefs and policies left wing politicians object to.
...and apologize for being an idiot, jerk, and hypocrite. oh and your belief system sucks too.
I'm rubber and you're glue? I really hope you're twelve years old. Your favorite OS sucks.
I don't live in the US, but have read heaps about this topic. My real question is why the subject is even being considered being added to the US school curriculum.
Money.
Seriously, televangelists have made bucketloads of cash by making people feel like they are persecuted or like "those people" are trying to force them to change. Politicians get elected using the same. They use that money to market misinformation and undermine education. It's just a way to make money and gain power.
In most countries there is not a lot of profit in misinforming citizens in that way, so no one does it and said misinformation is less intentional. Marketing works if it is well funded which is why the US is slightly less educated than Latvia on the topic of evolution. The same phenomenon can be seen in both the US and (to a lesser extent) the UK on the topic of global warming. There isn't a lot of serious scientific debate on the fundamentals of either issue, but due to huge marketing expenditures, there's a lot of debate and disagreement among the average people, who don't read scientific journals or critically assess facts, but who do watch TV and believe some of what they see.
What's really bugged me the most about Intelligent Design is that its proponents attacked the wrong target.
That's because you and the religious fundamentalist leaders have different goals.
If *I* were in charge of promoting/legitimizing ID, I would put it up against the Big Bang/String theorists and the like.
ID isn't about finding science that is sufficiently speculative and trying to insert "God". It's about finding science that is sufficiently confusing to the average person so that some will be able to be convinced while others will not. If there isn't strong controversy, then people don't get emotional and angry and feel they need to fight and give exploiters money to help with the fight.
If they weren't laughed at so hard, they'd be arguing that the sun revolves around the earth, because that is in conflict with absurdly literal interpretations of the bible. In fact, in some poorly educated communities, they are making that argument. It's just too absurd for the mainstream US (who can understand enough astronomy or at least see the pictures, to understand otherwise). So they pick the most outrageous untruth possible that they can talk a significant number of ignorant saps into believing. That way there are two "sides" and the religious can feel they are being attacked and need to strike back, by sending their money in and casting their votes to fight for their religion... even though mainstream christianity moved on and has accepted evolution (and heliocentrism) for a long time.
Evolution is just too well researched and tested a subject to topple (logically and rationally, that is).
And that is where you fail. They aren't interested in logic or reason, but in emotionally charged attacks and intentionally spread confusion as a way of manipulating the sheep. Seriously, how many of these so called scientists and preachers do you think have any interest in really promoting christianity instead of making a buck or getting elected? If they were really christians they'd be focusing on the core message of Jesus, which is still not well understood; things like reacting to violence with nonviolence and treating people you disagree with peacefully and respectfully in spite of said disagreement.
Google marketted the Android as fully open, no excuses. Either you can install VoIP apps and they were being truthfull, or you can't and they were lying.
Yup, and Google has provided Android as fully open (except some dev versions that haven't been generally released yet). That doesn't mean T-Mobile can't take the code and lock it down or that Goggle themselves can't offer closed services that interoperate with Android phones. In fact, they'll almost certainly have to if they want Android to actually be used by and significant number of people.
Besides, many people here are saying that VoIP wouldn't work over 3G anyway, but I seem to remember the phone supporting WiFi, and in any case, if the OS is trully open, it won't be trying to discriminate which applications use data connections over the mobile network.
Just because an OS is open source doesn't prevent it from blocking applications or uses. It just means other people can modify it, recompile, reinstall, and get around that problem. That doesn't mean the recompiled version will be supported or be able to work with services offered by T-Mobile (although it might).
All of this, however, is beside the point. Google did not market android to end users, just to phone developers. Google and Apple both have a vested interest in allowing any application that is not a security threat, but they're not the only ones able to make decisions about their platforms as they are allowed to run on proprietary cell phone networks.
I love how people defend the abusive practices of google, apple, tmobile, etc. "But, but, theyre watching out for us. Clearly you cant have VoIP over a cell data network!"
Let's think about this. Apple and Google allow VoIP applications. Customers are happier and buy more phones and both companies make more money. Sounds like a win except, neither company has a cell pone network so they have to sell the idea to a partner like AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile who currently make more money charging exorbitant sums of money for regular voice calls.
Look, I think locking down phones like this sucks as much as the next guy, but seriously, this is on the cell network operators, not the phone/OS makers like Google and Apple who have to kowtow in order to even get into the game. Put the blame where it belongs on the cell phone companies and on the FCC for their irresponsible handling of the spectrum.
While this is annoying, the size of a modern cell phone really does make it pretty darn hard to put in a normal 3.5 mm jack. As much as I hate it, it's just too darn big.
...and yet the iPhone has one and is about the same dimensions, but significantly thinner. Sorry, it can be done and if T-Mobile gave a rat's ass about the total customer experience it would have been a design requirement.
Fix things for them, that might happen on occasion, but has anyone created an "interoperable system" based on that source?
Sure they have. Unsanity created APplication Enhancer (APE) which opened up cool new ways to do things (and broke stuff occasionally). Security geeks in my office wrote some cool kernel extensions for locking down specific processes that would not have ben possible without the source. Would KDE even have been able to port their kit to OS X in a reasonable amount of time without that source? It helps certain developers quite a bit.
Then look at other technologies like Bonjour, Apple's ZeroConf implementation. It sure helps to have that source if you're writing zeroconf for Linux or even for an application on Windows, like CS3.
I also recall reading that the macFUSE/proc implementation was based on unpublished APIs. I don't think it was the Darwin source that made it work.
I bet they did look at the source and almost certainly for the SpotlightFS support and the like.
In any case, having the source is always preferable if you're trying to create an interoperable system because when it comes right down to it, all documentation has deficiencies and sometimes the easiest way to resolve an ambiguous part of a standard or poorly explained interaction is to look and see how the other party actually coded that part.
Of course we would copy a car and all those other objects, if they could be copied by mere bit replication. They can't (yet), so we don't.
That was sort of my point. In truth, if anyone ever invents a device that can make perfect copies of physical objects, like cars, I strongly suspect rather than revolutionizing the world, it will immediately be restricted by laws to protect the profits of all the manufacturing industries. They'll pass a law to make noncommercial patent infringement a crime, just as they did with noncommercial copyright infringement in the 70's. It would be the same crap all over again, favoring keeping things stable and money coming in to the people invested in the "old way" rather than rewarding the people who invented this amazing new tech. I've actually been considering writing a short story with that premise.
I think what we have to do, as a community, is stop bitching at the game developers, and start bitching out the dirty bastards who steal games and ruin it for the rest of us!
Why? People stealing games (are you talking about shoplifting?) don't harm me. Companies that add DRM do, because they are making my purchases harder or in some cases impossible to use. As for people who make illegal copies of games (copyright infringement), well they're mostly not affected by DRM, so my opinion is that DRM's purpose is probably not to stop them from doing so, or if it is it is completely ineffective so there is no point to it anyway.
Seriously, hardly any breath is spent on criticising these leaches[sic].
Likewise few people spend time on Slashdot criticizing people who embezzle millions from large corporations, because very few of us suffer because of such behavior.
If it becomes socially unacceptable, people will stop doing it so much.
Yeah, sure. It is publishers and their lobbyists that are harming me these days. Just recently they passed a law to use my tax dollars to prosecute their dubious and unconstitutional civil lawsuits. That's much, much worse than anything a copyright infringer has done to me.
Right now, stories like this just work as justification for more theft.
What does this story have to do with theft? Do you even know what theft is?
You wouldn't copy a car.
You wouldn't copy a handbag.
You wouldn't copy a television.
You wouldn't copy a dvd.
Downloading pirated games is copying.
Copying is against the law.
If Microsoft's blundering starts hurting the bottom line of these big companies, they will take matters into their own hands
MS's bundling and gouging has been hurting these companies' bottom line for many years. The real question is, will any of them be able to create a valid competitor and will any of them trust the court system to stop MS from killing them for offering an alternative and do so in time to make any difference. The fact that no major OEM has tried to sell a mainstream desktop OS (aside from Apple) is basically a vote of no confidence in the US court system. Heck, most American companies go straight to the EU courts these days and even there they have to wait many, many years for little compensation. So far there have been a few niche products outside the mainstream and that's about it. Vista isn't the real problem for OEMs introducing Linux, inefficient courts and murky, incompetent bureaucracies that are very conservative are. The best, practical hope is *shudder* Walmart who is not scared of MS and will hit them hard if given reason.
How is this any different than a town building a road. A solid internet infrastructure is just as important to city/state growth as a the transportation system. It's just simple.
Actually, a better analogy is the power transmission industry. This is exactly what happened in the early days of electric power, with power companies suing cities and trying to lobby to pass laws and bribe officials to prevent cities from rolling their own... even when those same power companies were unwilling to invest in serving those cities.
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Linux and OS X are light years ahead of Windows...
Like what? And why should customers care about it?
Well, OS X has drag and drop system services so users and applications can provide universal functionality, like grammar checking in all applications. Linux has more cleanly implemented network services and both have better standards compliance so you don't end up using as many redundant services in mixed OS environments (eg, UPNP and ZeroConf to discover other network services, like when you run Adobe CS on Windows). Both have better and more granular and usable ACLs for userspace applications. I could go on, but I'm not investing a lot of time, especially responding to an AC. Register an account already.
* Viruses - THis is not a OS problem, its a user problem. I could create a .sh file that deleted .config files or something equally evil and tell your grandma to run it and she will... * Malware - Again not specific to Windows.
Let's be clear. Trojans, viruses and worms are all distinct and all problems, but of the three worms are the largest problem and Windows is the most vulnerable due to a variety of design decisions, even if there were no install base disparity. Malware is a theoretical threat on Linux and OS X, but a practical, day-to-day problem on Windows and theories that if market share were to become more balanced are simply that, theories and not applicable to making practical decisions today.
* Applications - All the software in the world at a single spot. i.e. Google for applications. Who addresses commercial software? Who handles payments for this? Who will handle updates? Do users want to download Multi GB Games/Applications? Who pays for the massive bandwidth? What if you're not connected online,etc ,etc. Again. Doesnt scale, buddy.
Don't even understand what you're trying to argue here. Please be more clear.
"I can't use target disk." Apple has suggested work arounds (i.e., ghosting) for transferring the system from computer to computer. But how many mainstream users actually use target "I can't use target disk." Apple has suggested work arounds (i.e., ghosting) for transferring the system from computer to computer. But how many mainstream users actually use target basis, if ever.
I've used target disk mode every time I upgrade hardware and so do most users I know. In fact, it's one of a short list of reasons why I generally run Linux in a VM on top of OS X instead of the other way around. It is not a minor feature in my mind.
People complaining about the lack of a FireWire port on the new macbook are a bit stupid. If you want choices in what features your hardware has, buying Macs doesn't make sense at all.
Did you ever think people are buying Macs because they want functionality? OS X offers features no other OS does, but you need a Mac for it (for most people who don't want to waste their time trying to hack together a working solution with third party hardware). Say people want to be able to quickly and easily upgrade hardware so they can use a new laptop every year or two without a huge hassle. The best choice for this is still a Mac with Firewire where you can just plug in the cable, push a few buttons and let the system transfer everything over for you. If you pick a different vendor, even if it has Firewire, this isn't an option because other OS's haven't added this feature yet, so that doesn't really help them.
The flaw in your reasoning is in focusing on hardware features instead of actual usable functionality. Some functionality requires a combination of the right hardware and software so calling people 'stupid' who complain when the only option that provides both goes away... well that's stupid.
My Dell XPS laptop has a Firewire (IEEE-1394) port on it. I've NEVER used it.
I bet your OS doesn't support using it for anything useful either, like seamless one click migration of everything to new hardware.
The world has chosen USB for just about everything.
Yeah and it looks like Apple is following suit. I just hope they figure out a way to restore the same level of functionality using the standard, inferior technologies so we don't have to go back to the old, slow, and painful methods we used before Firewire took off.
I have had a look in OSX (10.4.11) and online and can't find a way to setup mouse gestures without using a third-party program? From your comments I presumed it was an OS feature, are you using a third party app or is it just hidden away somewhere?
I'm using a service (I believe it is called 'cocoa gesture') and it is a third party offering. System services are a function of OS X that allow programs and stand alone services to offer functionality across all applications, instead of just one application (like Opera does). This applies to all programs that use the native APIs for things like text handling, but excludes programs like Opera who just do a quick and dirty port and don't bother with standard APIs. In this way I've been gestures across many applications for many years. You just drop a foo.service file into either /System/Library/Services or ~/Library/Services depending upon if you want it accessible to all users or just one.
Such as...?
Grammar checking, resizable text boxes, automatic language translation, fast and efficient javascript engine, just for starters.
When the platform you choose is the platform of choice for 5% of people...
That's not really pertinent since it is also slower on Linux and Windows, or was last time I tested it. The references I made to OS X were mostly with regard to problems with failing to properly code for that platform and take advantage of the ways it is superior to Windows.
And are you really surprised that WebKit's internal benchmark (Sunspider) runs faster on WebKit-based browsers...?
Gecko based browsers still run it twice as fast as Opera. Are they just biased against Opera in some unspecified way? You still haven't presented a javascript benchmark from which you formed you opinion that Opera is consistently faster. I haven't seen any and I did a little looking. The only benchmarks I've seen where Opera does well are several years old, long before the recent push for fast javascript to enable Web applications.
You would have to do this anyway as you need to interact with different programs in different ways. So you end up with weird cross overs.
This isn't theoretical. I actually use gestures across applications now. There are a lot of common features/functions across applications. Being able to easily specify the same gesture and not have to retrain is a huge time saver. For example, a gesture to save a file that works across a range of image editing and layout programs where I'm not using the keyboard much is a huge help. Also, just not having to learn the interface for setting and training gestures for each individual application is a huge time saver.
Also most programs don't demand the type of interaction that benefits from mouse gestures.
But a significant number do. For some users, especially users using alternative interfaces or interfaces for the handicapped they are incredibly useful even in applications where the average person would not use them. Also, implementing it once and letting every program use it saves resources and reduces complexity.
Spell checking is easy to implement at an OS level as it is consistent between programs, mouse gestures aren't.
Which is why OS's should have a built in system for implementing arbitrary functionality across applications so it is easy to implement spell checking or mouse gestures or any number of other functions that most people may not want, but which are huge time savers for some. Claiming it is hard to do, is just more praise for OS X, where this has been working for eight years now. They did it right and it works better than other OS's in that regard. I don't see how you can argue implementing such functionality separately for each application is superior in any way. Being hard doesn't make something inferior.
You can't really compare Safari to Opera. Safari is about as bare-bones as a browser can be.
I can and do compare them when trying to pick a browser for everyday use.
I am all for not bundling in unecessary bloat but I find Safari pretty much unusable after having used Opera.
That's a fine opinion, but your supporting facts are a bit questionable.
I think maybe you're just more familiar with Opera and haven't bothered to figure out how to use many of Safari's features. The big advantages of Safari in my mind are:
Well, to each their own.
Opera's rendering engine (Presto/WinGogi) and WebKit (used in Chrome / Safari) both reached 100/100 on the 26th and 27th of March, respectively.
True, but that wasn't the original requirement, even if it is the most we home users can conveniently test.
Introducing "smoothness" requirements means a browser may pass or fail the test depending on what hardware it's running on (and the opinion of the person watching the test - smooth for you might not be smooth for me). IMO the point of the Acid test is to check standards-compliance, not performance. If a browser gets 100/100, it passed.
They supplied specified reference hardware and rates, so there is no ambiguity. You can define the test as it is acceptable to you, or course, I'm just pointing out why some people can reasonably disagree. Both engines are pretty good for compliance in any case.
In fact, they were so good at "cloning the neato features of other browsers" that they often cloned those features months (sometimes years) before the other browsers had them (in some cases, before those browsers even existed). :-)
You misunderstand. Opera has introduced many new features, and other browsers have been slow to copy them, but Opera has always been quick to clone any useful features from other browsers. Or they were quick to maintain feature parity until the last year or two when browser development has ramped up from multiple camps. This is how things have changed.
If you're going to pick one platform to optimise (or if you're going to pick one platform to benchmark), it makes sense to pick the platform with 90% market share (Windows) over one that barely reaches 5% (OS X), no?
No. I'm going to pick the most featureful and preferred platform for my own use. What platform you choose is up to you. There's no reason you can't optimize code for multiple platforms or at least use the native APIs for each platform. My point being, a quick test on the platform I prefer shows that Opera is not particularly fast compared to all the options out there. I mentioned Opera 9.6 comes in at about 6900 on my laptop. That compares to 900 on the same laptop with Webkit with the new Javascript engine and 3500 with Firefox's new javascript engine. Twice as slow as Firefox and seven times slower than Safari on OS X doesn't seem to me to indicate it "consistently wins JS benchmarks" as you originally stated. I'm not saying Opera is always that poor on all platforms. I just thought it was important to point out there is significant room for a different view.
Or test all platforms and then weigh the final scores based on each platform's share.
I've actually done that several times in the past and posted the results in these discussions. Opera has, in general, faired worse than average even when factoring in all platforms. This may be unfair to some degree because Opera failed to complete the Sunspider test for a good while and because I often compared nightly releases of Webkit and Gecko to beta versions of Opera (since Opera nightly releases are not available for download by the public). The last time I ran a full set of tests the Opera beta was about twice as slow as the betas of the others. Since then, Opera has sped up by about 25% while the others have improved a great deal more; on all platforms. I don't know where you're getting your javascript benchmarks, but Opera wasn't king a year ago and since then both Firefox and Webkit have pushed really hard to improve and make Web apps that rely upon javascript more viable. Opera has not pushed so hard and has fallen behind.
In case you weren't baiting for a flame war.. GP never said that Firefox doesn't have these things, he said that they are implemented better in Opera. Also, Opera is where mouse gestures started, and even though I use a FF plugin to have them at work, I still think that Opera implemented them better as well.
You make valid points and I agree that Opera's implementation of mouse gestures on Windows is better than FF, but I still think it is wrong. Mouse gestures, spell checking, grammar checking, and similar functions should be implemented at the OS level and usable by applications the way they are in OS X. I mean why would you want to have to re-enter and retrain your mouse gestures for each application individually and just go without them in the majority of applications where the developer did not bother to implement them? The same goes for spell checking. I already told my word processor that 'MPLS' is not a misspelling. My layout program, mail program, browser, text editor, and chat program all use the built in spelling checker so they know it as well. Then Opera goes and ignores the built in service and implements their own spelling checker and their own mouse gestures and does not offer them as services or even use the standard APIs. That sucks. It also means in order to use the built in grammar checker I have to copy text out of my text field in Opera and into any one of the programs I listed above, check the grammar, then copy and paste it back into Opera. It's like I'm back in the 90's again.
I truly wish Linux and Windows would implement system services like OS X does, but that would probably be a lot of work and too much to hope for. On the other hand, wishing Opera would learn to code for OS X instead of making their program act like a weak port from Windows, doesn't seem like too much to ask. What's the point of having a better OS with a superior way to implement these features if a large number of major developers still focus on Windows and ignore those better ways of doing things? That's probably one of the reasons why Opera on OS X is so unpopular.
You're kidding, right? Opera was the first browser to get 100/100 in ACID3 (unsurprisingly, BTW, since the ACID test is co-developed by some guys from Opera Software), one day before WebKit [slashdot.org]...
Actually, according to the writers of the test, no engine passed completely until September 25th, when Webkit managed to render the animation portion smoothly (it is still choppy in the latest dev versions of Opera).
...and consistently wins JS benchmarks (only being narrowly beaten in some of them by FF3 - FF2 got hammered).
When the new version of Opera shipped (9.6) I ran it through the Sunspider javascript speed test. It scored about 6900 versus 6100 for the production version of Safari (3.1.2), so at least on OS X, Opera is significantly behind and that's even without the fancy new javascript engine in the dev versions of Webkit (which is way, way faster).
And what sense does it make to say that it's "falling behind" while "other browsers are catching up"...? Falling behind what, exactly?
I believe the intention is to state that Opera is losing ground to other browsers in the areas of performance, compliance, and features. Opera has some nice features that give it a leg up on other browsers, but other browsers are likewise gaining a leg up on Opera by adding new features of their own. For example, Opera provides nice rollover images of pages when a tab is hovered over, but Safari allows you to dynamically resize text boxes so you can see your whole Slashdot comment without scrolling. Which is better is a matter of preference, but it used to be that Opera had pretty much cloned all the neato features of other browsers, whereas lately they have not been able to keep up with the accelerated pace of development from other teams.
Personally, I like Opera on Windows quite a bit and it may be my favorite browser on that platform... but I don't browse in Windows unless I need IE, and for other platforms, it is kind of slow and still has a lot gotchas where you realize they coded it for Windows and half-assed it when implementing on Linux and OS X. It's not nearly as bad as it was when Opera for OS X was years behind the Windows version, but it isn't good enough for most power users either.
It's a lot lighter weight than FF and has everything built in including IRC and BT, spell check uses gnu-aspell, and the email client rocks.
On OS X, it's never really been much of a contender. I checked out this release. It does better for standards compliance, but is still slower than Safari in general. For javascript it is still slower than the stable version of Safari and nowhere near the performance of the Safari betas with the javascript performance improvements. Using gnu-aspell is a minus in my book, at least on OS X, where there is a system-wide spell checking service. Training yet another spell checker for another application that has been ported but ignored the features of the OS to which it was ported is quite inconvenient. It also lacks support for the built in grammar checking and other system services (like gestures).
For Windows, Opera is one of the better browsers, but it is still badly focused on that platform. Linux and OS X versions are better than they were five years ago, but still not great and not really competitive.
Then the other group. The ones that think that theory means fact.
I don't believe in this group. Who here or elsewhere has ever claimed that "theory means fact"? Theories can be well supported enough so that reasonable people accept them as facts for all practical purposes, but other theories can be almost completely unsupported. I've never heard anyone argue that theories are inherently facts.
Evolution != atheism. There are plenty of religious people who have no problem reconciling evolution (and all other scientific theories) with their own particular faith.
Indeed. Most organized christian faiths accept evolution as not in conflict with their beliefs, more so by percentages of the population than their adherents. If most of the people in the US who answer surveys saying they don't believe in evolution asked their religious leaders, they would find themselves in conflict. Even the pope of the Catholic church explicitly stated that evolution did not conflict with their doctrine.
wow your cynicism and bigotry are profound.
I'm certainly a cynic, most of us become so with age. As for bigotry, I have no problem at all with people holding different beliefs than I do, but that doesn't mean I blind myself to the most likely motivations of those presenting any given information.
i would like to point out that all the crap you are spouting was shoved into your head by people with agendas also.
Really, who do you suppose it was that shoved those ideas into my head? What motivations do you think they had? Please be specific.
if you weren't a narrow minded brainwashed non thinking minion of the leftist pseudo intelligentsia and were capable of independent thought...
Leftist intelligencia? I don't think anyone who knows me would describe me as leftist since I'm a strong advocate of so many beliefs and policies left wing politicians object to.
...and apologize for being an idiot, jerk, and hypocrite. oh and your belief system sucks too.
I'm rubber and you're glue? I really hope you're twelve years old. Your favorite OS sucks.
P.S. your shift key is broken.
I don't live in the US, but have read heaps about this topic. My real question is why the subject is even being considered being added to the US school curriculum.
Money.
Seriously, televangelists have made bucketloads of cash by making people feel like they are persecuted or like "those people" are trying to force them to change. Politicians get elected using the same. They use that money to market misinformation and undermine education. It's just a way to make money and gain power.
In most countries there is not a lot of profit in misinforming citizens in that way, so no one does it and said misinformation is less intentional. Marketing works if it is well funded which is why the US is slightly less educated than Latvia on the topic of evolution. The same phenomenon can be seen in both the US and (to a lesser extent) the UK on the topic of global warming. There isn't a lot of serious scientific debate on the fundamentals of either issue, but due to huge marketing expenditures, there's a lot of debate and disagreement among the average people, who don't read scientific journals or critically assess facts, but who do watch TV and believe some of what they see.
What's really bugged me the most about Intelligent Design is that its proponents attacked the wrong target.
That's because you and the religious fundamentalist leaders have different goals.
If *I* were in charge of promoting/legitimizing ID, I would put it up against the Big Bang/String theorists and the like.
ID isn't about finding science that is sufficiently speculative and trying to insert "God". It's about finding science that is sufficiently confusing to the average person so that some will be able to be convinced while others will not. If there isn't strong controversy, then people don't get emotional and angry and feel they need to fight and give exploiters money to help with the fight.
If they weren't laughed at so hard, they'd be arguing that the sun revolves around the earth, because that is in conflict with absurdly literal interpretations of the bible. In fact, in some poorly educated communities, they are making that argument. It's just too absurd for the mainstream US (who can understand enough astronomy or at least see the pictures, to understand otherwise). So they pick the most outrageous untruth possible that they can talk a significant number of ignorant saps into believing. That way there are two "sides" and the religious can feel they are being attacked and need to strike back, by sending their money in and casting their votes to fight for their religion... even though mainstream christianity moved on and has accepted evolution (and heliocentrism) for a long time.
Evolution is just too well researched and tested a subject to topple (logically and rationally, that is).
And that is where you fail. They aren't interested in logic or reason, but in emotionally charged attacks and intentionally spread confusion as a way of manipulating the sheep. Seriously, how many of these so called scientists and preachers do you think have any interest in really promoting christianity instead of making a buck or getting elected? If they were really christians they'd be focusing on the core message of Jesus, which is still not well understood; things like reacting to violence with nonviolence and treating people you disagree with peacefully and respectfully in spite of said disagreement.
Google marketted the Android as fully open, no excuses. Either you can install VoIP apps and they were being truthfull, or you can't and they were lying.
Yup, and Google has provided Android as fully open (except some dev versions that haven't been generally released yet). That doesn't mean T-Mobile can't take the code and lock it down or that Goggle themselves can't offer closed services that interoperate with Android phones. In fact, they'll almost certainly have to if they want Android to actually be used by and significant number of people.
Besides, many people here are saying that VoIP wouldn't work over 3G anyway, but I seem to remember the phone supporting WiFi, and in any case, if the OS is trully open, it won't be trying to discriminate which applications use data connections over the mobile network.
Just because an OS is open source doesn't prevent it from blocking applications or uses. It just means other people can modify it, recompile, reinstall, and get around that problem. That doesn't mean the recompiled version will be supported or be able to work with services offered by T-Mobile (although it might).
All of this, however, is beside the point. Google did not market android to end users, just to phone developers. Google and Apple both have a vested interest in allowing any application that is not a security threat, but they're not the only ones able to make decisions about their platforms as they are allowed to run on proprietary cell phone networks.
I love how people defend the abusive practices of google, apple, tmobile, etc. "But, but, theyre watching out for us. Clearly you cant have VoIP over a cell data network!"
Let's think about this. Apple and Google allow VoIP applications. Customers are happier and buy more phones and both companies make more money. Sounds like a win except, neither company has a cell pone network so they have to sell the idea to a partner like AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile who currently make more money charging exorbitant sums of money for regular voice calls.
Look, I think locking down phones like this sucks as much as the next guy, but seriously, this is on the cell network operators, not the phone/OS makers like Google and Apple who have to kowtow in order to even get into the game. Put the blame where it belongs on the cell phone companies and on the FCC for their irresponsible handling of the spectrum.
While this is annoying, the size of a modern cell phone really does make it pretty darn hard to put in a normal 3.5 mm jack. As much as I hate it, it's just too darn big.
...and yet the iPhone has one and is about the same dimensions, but significantly thinner. Sorry, it can be done and if T-Mobile gave a rat's ass about the total customer experience it would have been a design requirement.
Fix things for them, that might happen on occasion, but has anyone created an "interoperable system" based on that source?
Sure they have. Unsanity created APplication Enhancer (APE) which opened up cool new ways to do things (and broke stuff occasionally). Security geeks in my office wrote some cool kernel extensions for locking down specific processes that would not have ben possible without the source. Would KDE even have been able to port their kit to OS X in a reasonable amount of time without that source? It helps certain developers quite a bit.
Then look at other technologies like Bonjour, Apple's ZeroConf implementation. It sure helps to have that source if you're writing zeroconf for Linux or even for an application on Windows, like CS3.
I also recall reading that the macFUSE /proc implementation was based on unpublished APIs. I don't think it was the Darwin source that made it work.
I bet they did look at the source and almost certainly for the SpotlightFS support and the like.
In any case, having the source is always preferable if you're trying to create an interoperable system because when it comes right down to it, all documentation has deficiencies and sometimes the easiest way to resolve an ambiguous part of a standard or poorly explained interaction is to look and see how the other party actually coded that part.
Of course we would copy a car and all those other objects, if they could be copied by mere bit replication. They can't (yet), so we don't.
That was sort of my point. In truth, if anyone ever invents a device that can make perfect copies of physical objects, like cars, I strongly suspect rather than revolutionizing the world, it will immediately be restricted by laws to protect the profits of all the manufacturing industries. They'll pass a law to make noncommercial patent infringement a crime, just as they did with noncommercial copyright infringement in the 70's. It would be the same crap all over again, favoring keeping things stable and money coming in to the people invested in the "old way" rather than rewarding the people who invented this amazing new tech. I've actually been considering writing a short story with that premise.
I think what we have to do, as a community, is stop bitching at the game developers, and start bitching out the dirty bastards who steal games and ruin it for the rest of us!
Why? People stealing games (are you talking about shoplifting?) don't harm me. Companies that add DRM do, because they are making my purchases harder or in some cases impossible to use. As for people who make illegal copies of games (copyright infringement), well they're mostly not affected by DRM, so my opinion is that DRM's purpose is probably not to stop them from doing so, or if it is it is completely ineffective so there is no point to it anyway.
Seriously, hardly any breath is spent on criticising these leaches[sic].
Likewise few people spend time on Slashdot criticizing people who embezzle millions from large corporations, because very few of us suffer because of such behavior.
If it becomes socially unacceptable, people will stop doing it so much.
Yeah, sure. It is publishers and their lobbyists that are harming me these days. Just recently they passed a law to use my tax dollars to prosecute their dubious and unconstitutional civil lawsuits. That's much, much worse than anything a copyright infringer has done to me.
Right now, stories like this just work as justification for more theft.
What does this story have to do with theft? Do you even know what theft is?
You wouldn't copy a car. You wouldn't copy a handbag. You wouldn't copy a television. You wouldn't copy a dvd. Downloading pirated games is copying. Copying is against the law.
If Microsoft's blundering starts hurting the bottom line of these big companies, they will take matters into their own hands
MS's bundling and gouging has been hurting these companies' bottom line for many years. The real question is, will any of them be able to create a valid competitor and will any of them trust the court system to stop MS from killing them for offering an alternative and do so in time to make any difference. The fact that no major OEM has tried to sell a mainstream desktop OS (aside from Apple) is basically a vote of no confidence in the US court system. Heck, most American companies go straight to the EU courts these days and even there they have to wait many, many years for little compensation. So far there have been a few niche products outside the mainstream and that's about it. Vista isn't the real problem for OEMs introducing Linux, inefficient courts and murky, incompetent bureaucracies that are very conservative are. The best, practical hope is *shudder* Walmart who is not scared of MS and will hit them hard if given reason.
How is this any different than a town building a road. A solid internet infrastructure is just as important to city/state growth as a the transportation system. It's just simple.
Actually, a better analogy is the power transmission industry. This is exactly what happened in the early days of electric power, with power companies suing cities and trying to lobby to pass laws and bribe officials to prevent cities from rolling their own... even when those same power companies were unwilling to invest in serving those cities.