I don't disagree with this, they should be policed more rigorously than the general public, and they usually are. If a cop comes under investigation for a crime, it is a lot more likely to make it to Court than if it is a private citizen, at least in Canada anyways.
Wow, that is certainly not the case in the US. In my state we actually have special exemptions in our handgun laws for police officers because normal people convicted of domestic violence are not allowed to carry concealed pistols... but so many police officers have such a conviction, they made sure to exempt them. My brother used to be a cop. When pulled over for excessive speeding, the police saw he was a cop, chatted a bit, and let him go with no mention of the speeding, not even a warning. I suppose a lot of that falls under the category of police not being investigated when they are likely suspects in crimes, but in general the police are not policed well in the US.
Ok, the solution to that problem is easy: You are using MacOSX that is based on BSD, and using GNU/Linux also. Learn to code
I already paid someone to write that code, Apple when I bought their OS. And people wonder why people who do real work usually prefer to use OS X on the desktop.
Or stop complaining about your free ride, you are not contributing ANYTHING back.
But I am contributing. I'm contributing free criticism/consultation that most companies have to pay for. For that matter, I have contributed to Linux and the BSDs in the past, both as a hobby and because I was paid to.
Not even the simplest contribution of NOT USING PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE.
Umm, I kind of like being able to make a living and computers are my tools. Limiting myself to tools that are unsuited to my needs is not an option.
That's how this works, we all give our 2 cents. You don't.
But I do. If you don't have any interest in the shortcomings of Linux on the desktop and how it can be improved, why are you bothering to read my comments on this subject? Are you so insecure that you take valid criticism of Linux as reflecting on you? Do you have nothing better to do than browse through message boards looking for an attempt to defend your favorite OS and attack people that point out flaws? What benefit, exactly, do you think that provides other than discouraging a few people from using it?
These extra barcodes add about 1 cent per piece. The scary part is they probably have figured it out to be cheaper to eat the loss, or let their insurance company eat the loss, than to pay an extra 1 cent per piece.
Luckily Netflix is one of those companies that understands the value of keeping customers happy. It might be cheaper to replace the DVDs instead of track them closely, but replacing them doesn't stop the DVDs from disappearing when the customer is expecting them. If that happens too often, customers will find another company to do business with.
After a few days of normal use, I suddenly found myself unable to use the Netflix site with Firefox. Basically anything with a bitmap that you click on, like the tabs for Your Queue, etc., is now messed up. Anyone got a workaround?
I've never had a problem using Safari (if you're on Windows or OS X). The one exception is that their streaming movies are Windows+IE only. You'd think after all the other companies started streaming movies and television for free, Netflix would have been able to fix their crap by now. Last I heard they were working on a Silverlight version, ick.
One or two of them actually re-appeared later, not sure if they were found in the back of a truck or if Netflix lost them.
There have been a couple instances now where postal workers were investigated and found to have stolen hundreds of random DVDs from their routes. I also heard of one instance where kids were going through the mailboxes in a neighborhood. Since these incidents are detected, I suspect NetFlix and the post office share data about who loses DVDs and what postal worker's route they are on.
Personally, I don't want "pick n mix" music. Anyone that tells me that a CD contains two good songs and the rest as filler tracks is not searching for music well enough as there are thousands of good albums out there that are worth every penny you pay for them on CD, especially if you spend some time researching & buying music as cheaply as possible.
I'm not with you on this one. There are exactly two songs by Leonard Cohen that I like, but I like both of them a lot and want them in some of my playlists. So I bought them, from Apple in fact, and saved money.
That's why I consider CDs to be the only way to buy music that gives me the freedoms to rip it how I want to whatever device I own.
Generally I prefer to buy on CD as well, but I have unusual taste in music and, frankly, most of what I want is not in any of the local shops. Some of it can be had from the internet, but instant gratification, no shipping cost, and no worries about if the CD will be scratched are very attractive at times (provided there is no DRM or it is easily bypassed).
Whilst I agree record companies are invariably evil themselves, they put a lot of money into promotion & advertising which ultimately leads a lot of people to find the music they like. But how will they do that when there are 10,000,000 groups & musicians all selling their music from their own web sites. How are you going to find the stuff you want to hear?
Probably by harnessing the wisdom of the masses. There are a million blokes out there ready to review and rant about music. and a system ala Netflix that recommends music based upon other music you like would be quite handy. It's not like I really listen to anything currently promoted by the big RIAA companies anyway, so they're not exactly helping.
And in addition to that, what becomes of live music? If demand changes from albums to single tracks, how does a band get together enough material to not only justify playing live in the first place but also to keep having enough new material later on so that fans keep coming to live concerts over and over again?
I don't see that this changes at all. A band usually makes most of its cash touring and selling merchandise. People want to hear the old and new music, because listening to a song live, in concert, is a lot different than listening to a song at home. If bands need new songs to attract people to concerts it is just the same amount of new songs that they needed before.
I've actually seen an upsurge in smaller, indy bands. They play live several nights a week at several different, small venues within walking distance of me right now. The bands get by touring to these small venues and selling merchandise and CDs and getting cuts of the door take. I doubt they'll get rich, but a few eventually do get a large and lucrative fan base. The rest get by and have a good time doing it. Their expenses are low, they get lots of ladies, and fans are usually willing to put them up for the night after a concert.
Let's face it, the current system may be flawed but at least the "album every year" process has worked for nigh on 50 years & has meant a good selection of music artists are able to make money doing what they do.
Again, I'd disagree with the "good selection" part. We have tons of crappy, talentless bands that sound alike and are propped up by the system. Almost every band I've found in the last decade that is new and innovative and really makes me want to go see them has been an indy band the record companies would never have promoted because different is too big of a risk. Let the RIAA and those they promote sink and good riddance.
It shouldn't be hard to implement such a thing on GNU/Linux, since as soon as a text is selected it goes to the clipboard.
And yet, I submitted a feature request years ago for parity with OS X, and no one has done it. Lack of system services is on my short list of reasons why Linux is hosted in a VM on top of OS X on my laptop, and Linux is my second choice for running an application, when a version is not available for OS X.
Adding this functionality to this shouldn't be hard, considering we already have good spell checkers.
Good is sort of relative. In OS X, when I tell it 'MSDP' is not a misspelling, I do so once and my browser, text editor, word processor, terminal, and layout programs all stop marking it as misspelled. I still constantly have to tell applications in Ubuntu some word is not misspelled, even though it is a word I use all the time, because that program hasn't figured it out yet.
KDE has had system wide spell checking since the 3.x days. In every text box. And it has nothing to do with kparts.
First, grammar checking and spellchecking are not the same thing. Second, I used Kubuntu up until Edgy Eft (which incorporated KDE 3.5) and spell checking sure didn't work in every application I used. I know for a fact that OpenOffice, for example, did not use the same spell checker as Firefox and spellchecking did not work at all in the terminal or in Kate. Spellchecking is sure not universal now in Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) because I'm looking right at it.
Well, let's face it - that "migration" is sure taking it's time then, isn't it?
Not really. They started offering DRM-free songs from any label that wanted to offer them. The only trick is that not all of the labels are interested. Apple has done what they can, but the RIAA is pretty scared of Apple gaining too much power, so they're trying really hard to make deals with other music sellers, even to the point of offering DRM-free songs cheaper to try to reduce Apple's market share. They're a criminal cartel with a lot on influence, what do you expect?
Don't exaggerate. Whenever you use a text edit box in KDE, there's default actions like select all, cut, copy, paste that all work alike in every KDE application. All they'd have to do is add spell check as standard to the KDElibs (or Qt) and all applications in KDE would "magically" get a spell checker.
Wouldn't each individual application need to be recompiled as well in order to access those functions?
The rest well it's not there, but I see how it could be added without drastic effort.
That is not the response from the few developers I've talked to who actually understood my explanation. They seem to think it would be a lot of work. I suppose that is subjective though.
If it's really as useful as you claim, it's probably something that will happen...
I've been using it in OS X for nine years now (as have all the people who use the spellchecker in OS X). Most Linux on the desktop developers I talk to don't even seem to understand what it is or why someone would want it and my feature requests have been ignored. Several people (mostly professional writers and professors) I talked to were quite enthusiastic about it... they then stopped using Linux as their desktop and moved to OS X.
Whether you like it or not, GNOME will be the big one, because nobody controls it. With Nokia owning Trolltech, no other company (whose primary business is not Linux itself) will touch KDE. I know that's not justified, but don't expect large corporations to care.
You may be right, but you may not. Nokia may do a good job of evangelizing and getting others on board or KDE could be forked.
No I doubt it. Linux is a server OS and I really think it is going to stay that way unless there is some huge change in attitudes among the FOSS Community.
Linux is primarily a server and appliance OS right now because that is what companies make money using it for. Those companies pay the lion's share of the developers working on Linux and hence influence what Linux is good at. My point is that companies are starting to use Linux to make money in some desktop roles. Those companies will potentially dump money into fixing what does not work for them on the desktop and change who the Linux OSS community is and what it does.
You have a long list of items to fix with Linux and many of them are quite valid. A lot of the things wrong with Linux as a desktop OS are boring things no one wants to work on. They are also items that will cost companies trying to sell computers with Linux pre-installed money until they are fixed, so fixed they will be. Another big category of problems with Linux are the result of drivers/installation woes. Given that companies are selling computers with Linux installed, those problems go away for everything but peripherals. They simply choose hardware that is supported and pre-install the drivers or they write drivers and pre-install them. The same goes for the applications installed. They will probably be fairly minimal to start as the company will have to support them, but grow more numerous and polished as competition heats up.
I guess you're looking at bottom up change, whereas I'm looking at the potential for a change in the industry that will provide the money and motivation for those problems to be solved from the top down.
I'm not very well-versed in OS X development. Could you tell me how those "system services" work?
I go to/System/Library/Services and drop in a file called "Wordservice.service". Then I copy your text into a text box in Safari (or any other program that uses the standard APIs), I highlight it, and select "Safari: Services: Convert: Rotate13" and the text is instantly transformed into the following:
V'z abg irel jryy-irefrq va BF K qrirybczrag. Pbhyq lbh gryy zr ubj gubfr "flfgrz freivprf" jbex?
In this same way Apple has added a (among many) spelling checker, dictionary/thesaurus/wikipedia lookup, and grammar checker to the OS, accessible to every application (they also added a GUI element in the right-click contextual menu for easier access). Before they added the grammar checker, I just added my own, along with the text manipulation service, language translation services, statistical analysis services, and some more I regularly use. I usually assign hotkeys to them rather than navigate to them from the menus. Even more services are offered automatically by other applications I installed, such as Graphiz offering automatic graphing of any tables of numbers I highlight and my LaTeX front end offering automatic formatting of any bibliography information I highlight.
In short it is drag and drop addition of arbitrary functionality that can be accessed from any application without developers needing to do squat to their applications.
D-Bus is now used by both GNOME and KDE. It can also be installed for any customized DE a user creates.
How informative. You don't mention what it is or what programs make use of it or what it's capabilities are. Luckily, I'm a fast reader so I just read two articles on it.
As near as I can tell it is theoretically possible for someone to write a grammar checking service and connect it to other applications via D-Bus. In order for it to work, the authors of those programs will have to explicitly add D-Bus support. Further, it seems the authors of those programs will have to explicitly create UI elements that will allow the user of the program to pull up the grammar checking application from within their program or write their own UI for using the functionality within their program.
Does all of that gibe with your understanding of the technology?
From my cursory look it seems that users will not be able to simply add a grammar checker start Kate and have grammar checking immediately be usable from within Kate the way a user can simply drop a grammar checker within a/Services directory and start TextEdit and have it immediately usable.
some distros will go for ease-of-use without customization and others will go for customization over ease-of-use, while the whole system gets more and more modular and scripted.
I believe that is a false dichotomy. Adding customizability can increase ease of use when done correctly. Adding the ability to add system services in OS X makes applications more customizable, but does not make them any harder to use.
Linux hasn't had any major changes in the past three years, why would you think it'll have any in the next three?
Sure it has, just not for the desktop. The reason some believe it might improve more over the next few years is that companies are starting to use it as the pre-installed OS on low-end and low-power systems. Those companies have a direct, financial incentive to spend money on making it a better desktop OS.
maybe it'll be like ms word? Will it be capable of, correcting grammar?
Sadly, it looks like KParts is the closest Linux has come to adding functionality to multiple apps. With OS X, Apple implemented system services, so adding grammar checking in 10.5 for all apps was just adding one service and it works nearly everywhere (including this text box I'm typing in). With KParts, the best they can do is add a standard grammar checking library and hope developers building apps for KDE will incorporate it in the next version of that app. I'm uncertain if user training of grammar checking from within one application will be able to easily make a difference in other applications as well (the way it does in OS X).
Today, when you have ridiculously powerful personal computers running massive 3D simulations with thousands of concurrent interacting users - you'd think the game industry could innovate just a little bit around the idea of character "health".
Amen!
Back in the day there was a game (well a game/screensaver) called "Lunatic Fringe". It was sort of like asteroids, but instead of a health bar for your ship, you had several health bars. On was for your guns, one for your engine, one for your turning jets, one for your long range radar, etc. If you were shot or ran into an asteroid you took damage to one or more of them and those parts of the ship began to malfunction. If your guns were slightly damaged they might fail to fire one time in ten. If they were severely damaged they might only fire one time in ten. If your turning jets were damaged you sometimes you could turn the ship and sometimes you couldn't or it would turn the wrong way. The gameplay was absolutely awesome!!! Ever since I've been looking for a game that incorporated this same gameplay element.
For a new Diablo style game you could start moving more slowly and erratically staggering. Your spells could fail. Your attacks could go in the wrong direction, hitting no one or the wrong person, maybe even allies. Your blocks with your shield could become less frequent or stop as an arm was disabled. Your vision could blur or become jumpy.
Just count me as one very strong vote in favor of your idea.
... they combined a sleek sexy music player with a cheap source of music, through the itunes store. I've explained to countless people they can make mp3's from most audio cds, and in general instead of learning a new program they ask ME to do the leg work of encoding their music. it takes money to use itunes, but it's easy to use.
While having the store to buy from is important to the iPod's success, realistically most of the music on iPods does not come from the iTunes store. According to industry research only about 15% of iPod owners have ever bought anything from the iTunes store and it accounts for less than 2% of the music on the average iPod.
A big factor in the iPod success story is Apple's iTunes software making it easy for the average person to rip their CD collection. I know smart people who downloaded the program solely for that purpose because they could not figure out how to do it with WMP or whatever shipped with the player they bought. Remember, when the iPod came out, WMP ripped to DRM'd WMA by default, adding DRM to music from CDs that did not have any to start with and resulting in a lot of people who ripped their collection and then could not get it to work on their portable player.
It took simple hardware, easy to use software, and an easy store with DRM that did not significantly get in the user's way to make it happen. That's where Apple really excels, in putting together solutions that address all of a customer's workflow and needs. It's working for the smartphone market too.
If you weren't in it for the long term you should have sold when they spiked at over $200 last year. A lot of people did.
They have executed amazingly well over the last decade, but they also got lucky.
Turning around their Mac business with OS X was the first one. The iPod was the second. The iPhone is pulling the cash in again. How many times do they have to get "lucky" before you suspect maybe they have a good team and a repeatable strategy for selling tech?
The iPhone is doing well, but it faces heavy competition from companies that are much more prepared this time around.
The iPhone looks on track to grab 1% of the market and BestBuy just announced they'd start carrying them, with most analysts figuring that will push them well beyond. I don't think there is a lot of doubt that smartphones are a big growth segment of the cell phone market and Apple is almost certainly going to grab a good chunk of that. Mac sales are slowly and steadily increasing as well and also pulling in the cash. I side with the analysts on this one, Apple is going to keep going up for a while here.
Apple's use of slick looking devices and clean, optimized UI gives them an advantage and allows them to mark up prices. However, other companies are going to learn to do these things nearly as well, and then Apple will have to compete more on price.
I'd like to think other companies will manage to put together teams that can consistently focus on overall workflow and making things "just work" but historically it hasn't happened much. People focus on only one of a few of the vital elements and they fail. Many will focus on a clean UI and industrial design, but neglect the optimized services, or lose focus on keeping the applications within acceptable parameters. Many more will focus on bullet point features and price as has been the traditional case. Some will neglect proper marketing and some will fail to place themselves where they have enough leverage to keep the phone companies from undermining them.
It takes a certain genius to put everything together in one package and still be agile enough to avoid being crushed by the cartels and monopolies who will present you with short term gains at the cost of long term viability, and realistically most executives (especially americans) these days don't care about the long term.
But I think they've peaked.
There will be peaks and troughs, but it will take a real change to prevent Apple from continuing to grow. Jobs retiring, or MS or the RIAA pulling the rug out from under things, or some other major change or disruptive technology. It certainly could happen, but Apple seems a good bet for growth for a while yet, IMHO.
Apple is doing well because it is no longer a boutique computer company.
Apple turned its fortunes around long before they started selling anything other than Macs. First it was focusing on the home market with the iMac, then OS X and things really changed. Apple has since diversified into iPods and iPhones, but Macs still bring in most of the money and are still a growing business for them, not a shrinking one.
Apple has grown by becoming a different company. Essentially, Steve Jobs shut Apple down, gave the money back to the shareholders, then asked them to invest in a new company with the same name and address.
I disagree. He took what they had from Apple and what they had from Next and combined them to play to their strengths. Then he evolved that in whatever way he thought would bring in the dough in the long term. It worked and along the way the iPod was a happy success they managed t duplicate for the cell phone.
There's a lot of stuff that the FOSS community cannot run with because they'd have Apple's lawyers on their asses. And for a lot of other features, when it comes down to it, they aren't being adopted because they are bad features and don't stand up to scrutiny.
Nine years ago Apple introduced system services in OS X. It allowed all applications to have spellchecking, using the same dictionary (only had to train it once). Nine years ago you could drop a third-party service in your services directory and instantly add grammar checking to all your applications, without the developers of those applications having to do any work. For all this time we've been able to add arbitrary global functionality with a simple drag and drop. Language translations, dictionary/thesaurus lookup, text manipulation scripts, etc. Do explain how that technology, now nearly a decade old, is a "bad idea" and doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I think you're full of it and I think the popularity of OS X and the exodus of people from Linux on the desktop to OS X on the desktop is fair evidence that most people agree.
They introduced innovative UIs (dock and expose).
There's nothing "innovative" about either of those.
Wow. Should I even bother continuing to read your reply? You seem hopelessly biased. Apple (and Next who took over Apple) were the first real, mainstream implementations of these technologies that I've ever heard of. If they're not innovative, why haven't they made it into mainstream Linux disros yet? Why are Linux implementations of them so immature and poor?
There were several init replacements before LaunchD. LaunchD was so poor that people didn't adopt it.
Really, because right after Apple released it I saw a lot of discussion of it and it seemed that it was not adopted at the time because of of uncertainty over Apple's weird license. How many LanchD projects that are not making their way into other OS's and distros were started within those six months?
Apple moved a lot of directories around, but there's no evidence that their structure is any better.
Sure it's better, if only by virtue of being the most common, de facto standard structure. The argument for years against rearranging them in BSD was that people knew the current system best so change would cause confusion. OS X's structure is now more common than any other because so many more people use and work on OS X than any other.
ACLs have been in Linux and UNIX for years; they have been widely rejected by users and administrators because they are a bad idea.
Yes, ACLs have been around a long time, but Apple did a great job of adopting code from TrustedBSD and making it workable. As to your assertion that ACLs are a bad idea, well I think that's a load of crap. I've been working in the security industry for many years now and not once have I heard any security expert claim ACLs were a bad idea. The arguments have always been about how to implement them and where they are needed and when.
OpenStep is derived from the Smalltalk libraries and it's 20 year old technology
Who cares what it evolved from. Next and Apple have made it into a great way to have drag and drop application packages that can run without installation and be transferred easily. They are easily extendable for new uses and provide unprecedented functionality. Functionality no one else has managed and yet no one has bothered to copy it.
System services is an obscure gimmick for geeks.
My girlfriend may not know why she can use her grammar checker in her text editor, e-mail, word processor, and presentation program, but she sure as hell does use it. System services is why she can. Your assertion that it is just for geeks is a load of crap. I'll tell you what, why don't you whip up a way for me to use a grammar c
Apple is using a lot of open source code, and they have released some open source code themselves. But what have they actually contributed to the open source community? I can't think of any significant piece of Apple software that runs on any Linux distribution.
Apple has made very significant contributions to what is now Webkit, to zeroconf, to the shared BSD subsystem, etc. But you have a very real point. When Apple invents something from scratch and contributes it (like LaunchD) it is occasionally cloned, but rarely do developers take Apple's code and run with it. This is important, but ties into your next comment.
They have raised the bar for software/hardware technology in general.
With what? Quartz, HFS+, Cocoa, Darwin, and XCode do not "raise the bar" on anything. Apple fans like to point to USB, OS X, Bonjour, Quicktime, and similar technologies, but Apple's contributions there were either to adopt an existing standard that was coming anyway, or to take an existing technology, tinker a little with it, and release it under their own name.
Apple has raised the bar. They took many rough standards and turned them into powerful and usable tools (zeroconf). They introduced innovative UIs (dock and expose). They took old and crufty parts of UNIX and redesigned them (LaunchD, basic directory structure, ACLs). They introduced powerful technologies that are all their own (OpenStep, signing framework, system services).
Despite all this and despite their popularity, the OSS community has a lousy track record of adopting those technologies and ideas. Their still isn't a dock clone that has all the functionality of Apple's. There still isn't a major Linux distro that ships with a dock or expose working by default. None of the Linux distros I've used have successfully cloned Apple's ubiquitous application of zeroconf. No Linux distro has yet copied OpenStep or even tried for compatibility with OS X. If you talk to Linux on the desktop users (people who should know what the competition does) 99% of them don't even know what Apple's system services are and if you explain it, they eventually agree it is really cool, but way too much work for them to try to clone.
There are a lot of reasons for this state of affairs. In some cases Apple has not played as nicely as they could, with licensing issues and their culture of secrecy. In many cases Apple makes sweeping changes to optimize OS X for the desktop and there is no central authority in the rest of the OSS community to mandate the same or even develop a real consensus. In many cases, Linux developers are a lot more interested in Linux as an appliance or server and specifically don't want to make changes that will help for a desktop but may add bloat for other uses. In some cases the OSS community is simply ignorant of what Apple does because they don't use Apple products due to philosophical differences or simply because Apple is not as common as Windows.
Whatever the reason, my perspective is Apple gives and takes from the OSS community about as well as many other mixed contributors, but because they are working in the desktop OS space and because of the reasons above, their contributions are ignored by Linux on the desktop developers (which is the only relevant market they're innovating in). Apple has been pretty good about adopting useful stuff from Windows and Linux (virtual desktops, filesystem improvements, misc code) but while their are projects to try to clone some of Apple's new tech, for the most part those are small projects and they are not integrated into mainstream Linux distros. That's one of the reasons why gOS's adoption of the dock was both encouraging (yay OS X feature parity) and disheartening (poorly done with only a little bit of the functionality).
In short I think you're right that the OSS community is not benefiting much by what Apple has been doing, but I think that is largely the fault of the OSS community for not takin
Slashdot Mirror
I don't disagree with this, they should be policed more rigorously than the general public, and they usually are. If a cop comes under investigation for a crime, it is a lot more likely to make it to Court than if it is a private citizen, at least in Canada anyways.
Wow, that is certainly not the case in the US. In my state we actually have special exemptions in our handgun laws for police officers because normal people convicted of domestic violence are not allowed to carry concealed pistols... but so many police officers have such a conviction, they made sure to exempt them. My brother used to be a cop. When pulled over for excessive speeding, the police saw he was a cop, chatted a bit, and let him go with no mention of the speeding, not even a warning. I suppose a lot of that falls under the category of police not being investigated when they are likely suspects in crimes, but in general the police are not policed well in the US.
Ok, the solution to that problem is easy: You are using MacOSX that is based on BSD, and using GNU/Linux also. Learn to code
I already paid someone to write that code, Apple when I bought their OS. And people wonder why people who do real work usually prefer to use OS X on the desktop.
Or stop complaining about your free ride, you are not contributing ANYTHING back.
But I am contributing. I'm contributing free criticism/consultation that most companies have to pay for. For that matter, I have contributed to Linux and the BSDs in the past, both as a hobby and because I was paid to.
Not even the simplest contribution of NOT USING PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE.
Umm, I kind of like being able to make a living and computers are my tools. Limiting myself to tools that are unsuited to my needs is not an option.
That's how this works, we all give our 2 cents. You don't.
But I do. If you don't have any interest in the shortcomings of Linux on the desktop and how it can be improved, why are you bothering to read my comments on this subject? Are you so insecure that you take valid criticism of Linux as reflecting on you? Do you have nothing better to do than browse through message boards looking for an attempt to defend your favorite OS and attack people that point out flaws? What benefit, exactly, do you think that provides other than discouraging a few people from using it?
These extra barcodes add about 1 cent per piece. The scary part is they probably have figured it out to be cheaper to eat the loss, or let their insurance company eat the loss, than to pay an extra 1 cent per piece.
Luckily Netflix is one of those companies that understands the value of keeping customers happy. It might be cheaper to replace the DVDs instead of track them closely, but replacing them doesn't stop the DVDs from disappearing when the customer is expecting them. If that happens too often, customers will find another company to do business with.
After a few days of normal use, I suddenly found myself unable to use the Netflix site with Firefox. Basically anything with a bitmap that you click on, like the tabs for Your Queue, etc., is now messed up. Anyone got a workaround?
I've never had a problem using Safari (if you're on Windows or OS X). The one exception is that their streaming movies are Windows+IE only. You'd think after all the other companies started streaming movies and television for free, Netflix would have been able to fix their crap by now. Last I heard they were working on a Silverlight version, ick.
One or two of them actually re-appeared later, not sure if they were found in the back of a truck or if Netflix lost them.
There have been a couple instances now where postal workers were investigated and found to have stolen hundreds of random DVDs from their routes. I also heard of one instance where kids were going through the mailboxes in a neighborhood. Since these incidents are detected, I suspect NetFlix and the post office share data about who loses DVDs and what postal worker's route they are on.
Personally, I don't want "pick n mix" music. Anyone that tells me that a CD contains two good songs and the rest as filler tracks is not searching for music well enough as there are thousands of good albums out there that are worth every penny you pay for them on CD, especially if you spend some time researching & buying music as cheaply as possible.
I'm not with you on this one. There are exactly two songs by Leonard Cohen that I like, but I like both of them a lot and want them in some of my playlists. So I bought them, from Apple in fact, and saved money.
That's why I consider CDs to be the only way to buy music that gives me the freedoms to rip it how I want to whatever device I own.
Generally I prefer to buy on CD as well, but I have unusual taste in music and, frankly, most of what I want is not in any of the local shops. Some of it can be had from the internet, but instant gratification, no shipping cost, and no worries about if the CD will be scratched are very attractive at times (provided there is no DRM or it is easily bypassed).
Whilst I agree record companies are invariably evil themselves, they put a lot of money into promotion & advertising which ultimately leads a lot of people to find the music they like. But how will they do that when there are 10,000,000 groups & musicians all selling their music from their own web sites. How are you going to find the stuff you want to hear?
Probably by harnessing the wisdom of the masses. There are a million blokes out there ready to review and rant about music. and a system ala Netflix that recommends music based upon other music you like would be quite handy. It's not like I really listen to anything currently promoted by the big RIAA companies anyway, so they're not exactly helping.
And in addition to that, what becomes of live music? If demand changes from albums to single tracks, how does a band get together enough material to not only justify playing live in the first place but also to keep having enough new material later on so that fans keep coming to live concerts over and over again?
I don't see that this changes at all. A band usually makes most of its cash touring and selling merchandise. People want to hear the old and new music, because listening to a song live, in concert, is a lot different than listening to a song at home. If bands need new songs to attract people to concerts it is just the same amount of new songs that they needed before.
I've actually seen an upsurge in smaller, indy bands. They play live several nights a week at several different, small venues within walking distance of me right now. The bands get by touring to these small venues and selling merchandise and CDs and getting cuts of the door take. I doubt they'll get rich, but a few eventually do get a large and lucrative fan base. The rest get by and have a good time doing it. Their expenses are low, they get lots of ladies, and fans are usually willing to put them up for the night after a concert.
Let's face it, the current system may be flawed but at least the "album every year" process has worked for nigh on 50 years & has meant a good selection of music artists are able to make money doing what they do.
Again, I'd disagree with the "good selection" part. We have tons of crappy, talentless bands that sound alike and are propped up by the system. Almost every band I've found in the last decade that is new and innovative and really makes me want to go see them has been an indy band the record companies would never have promoted because different is too big of a risk. Let the RIAA and those they promote sink and good riddance.
It shouldn't be hard to implement such a thing on GNU/Linux, since as soon as a text is selected it goes to the clipboard.
And yet, I submitted a feature request years ago for parity with OS X, and no one has done it. Lack of system services is on my short list of reasons why Linux is hosted in a VM on top of OS X on my laptop, and Linux is my second choice for running an application, when a version is not available for OS X.
Adding this functionality to this shouldn't be hard, considering we already have good spell checkers.
Good is sort of relative. In OS X, when I tell it 'MSDP' is not a misspelling, I do so once and my browser, text editor, word processor, terminal, and layout programs all stop marking it as misspelled. I still constantly have to tell applications in Ubuntu some word is not misspelled, even though it is a word I use all the time, because that program hasn't figured it out yet.
I, for one, would like to know how you used OSX [wikipedia.org] 2 whole years before Apple released it!
To quote the article you link to, "The first version released was Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999". We had one in the lab at my university.
KDE has had system wide spell checking since the 3.x days. In every text box. And it has nothing to do with kparts.
First, grammar checking and spellchecking are not the same thing. Second, I used Kubuntu up until Edgy Eft (which incorporated KDE 3.5) and spell checking sure didn't work in every application I used. I know for a fact that OpenOffice, for example, did not use the same spell checker as Firefox and spellchecking did not work at all in the terminal or in Kate. Spellchecking is sure not universal now in Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) because I'm looking right at it.
Well, let's face it - that "migration" is sure taking it's time then, isn't it?
Not really. They started offering DRM-free songs from any label that wanted to offer them. The only trick is that not all of the labels are interested. Apple has done what they can, but the RIAA is pretty scared of Apple gaining too much power, so they're trying really hard to make deals with other music sellers, even to the point of offering DRM-free songs cheaper to try to reduce Apple's market share. They're a criminal cartel with a lot on influence, what do you expect?
Don't exaggerate. Whenever you use a text edit box in KDE, there's default actions like select all, cut, copy, paste that all work alike in every KDE application. All they'd have to do is add spell check as standard to the KDElibs (or Qt) and all applications in KDE would "magically" get a spell checker.
Wouldn't each individual application need to be recompiled as well in order to access those functions?
The rest well it's not there, but I see how it could be added without drastic effort.
That is not the response from the few developers I've talked to who actually understood my explanation. They seem to think it would be a lot of work. I suppose that is subjective though.
If it's really as useful as you claim, it's probably something that will happen...
I've been using it in OS X for nine years now (as have all the people who use the spellchecker in OS X). Most Linux on the desktop developers I talk to don't even seem to understand what it is or why someone would want it and my feature requests have been ignored. Several people (mostly professional writers and professors) I talked to were quite enthusiastic about it... they then stopped using Linux as their desktop and moved to OS X.
Didn't Apple launch DRM in iTunes about 3 years ago and isn't Windows Vista embracing DRM at this very moment?
iTunes has had DRM for five years and they started migrating away from it on songs Apple sells about a year and a half ago.
Whether you like it or not, GNOME will be the big one, because nobody controls it. With Nokia owning Trolltech, no other company (whose primary business is not Linux itself) will touch KDE. I know that's not justified, but don't expect large corporations to care.
You may be right, but you may not. Nokia may do a good job of evangelizing and getting others on board or KDE could be forked.
Sounds interesting I'll check it out. I lost a good 6 months of my life to Rogue and Angband back in the day. Oh well, here we go again.
No I doubt it. Linux is a server OS and I really think it is going to stay that way unless there is some huge change in attitudes among the FOSS Community.
Linux is primarily a server and appliance OS right now because that is what companies make money using it for. Those companies pay the lion's share of the developers working on Linux and hence influence what Linux is good at. My point is that companies are starting to use Linux to make money in some desktop roles. Those companies will potentially dump money into fixing what does not work for them on the desktop and change who the Linux OSS community is and what it does.
You have a long list of items to fix with Linux and many of them are quite valid. A lot of the things wrong with Linux as a desktop OS are boring things no one wants to work on. They are also items that will cost companies trying to sell computers with Linux pre-installed money until they are fixed, so fixed they will be. Another big category of problems with Linux are the result of drivers/installation woes. Given that companies are selling computers with Linux installed, those problems go away for everything but peripherals. They simply choose hardware that is supported and pre-install the drivers or they write drivers and pre-install them. The same goes for the applications installed. They will probably be fairly minimal to start as the company will have to support them, but grow more numerous and polished as competition heats up.
I guess you're looking at bottom up change, whereas I'm looking at the potential for a change in the industry that will provide the money and motivation for those problems to be solved from the top down.
I'm not very well-versed in OS X development. Could you tell me how those "system services" work?
I go to /System/Library/Services and drop in a file called "Wordservice.service". Then I copy your text into a text box in Safari (or any other program that uses the standard APIs), I highlight it, and select "Safari: Services: Convert: Rotate13" and the text is instantly transformed into the following:
V'z abg irel jryy-irefrq va BF K qrirybczrag. Pbhyq lbh gryy zr ubj gubfr "flfgrz freivprf" jbex?
In this same way Apple has added a (among many) spelling checker, dictionary/thesaurus/wikipedia lookup, and grammar checker to the OS, accessible to every application (they also added a GUI element in the right-click contextual menu for easier access). Before they added the grammar checker, I just added my own, along with the text manipulation service, language translation services, statistical analysis services, and some more I regularly use. I usually assign hotkeys to them rather than navigate to them from the menus. Even more services are offered automatically by other applications I installed, such as Graphiz offering automatic graphing of any tables of numbers I highlight and my LaTeX front end offering automatic formatting of any bibliography information I highlight.
In short it is drag and drop addition of arbitrary functionality that can be accessed from any application without developers needing to do squat to their applications.
D-BUS: have you heard of it?
Nope.
D-Bus is now used by both GNOME and KDE. It can also be installed for any customized DE a user creates.
How informative. You don't mention what it is or what programs make use of it or what it's capabilities are. Luckily, I'm a fast reader so I just read two articles on it.
As near as I can tell it is theoretically possible for someone to write a grammar checking service and connect it to other applications via D-Bus. In order for it to work, the authors of those programs will have to explicitly add D-Bus support. Further, it seems the authors of those programs will have to explicitly create UI elements that will allow the user of the program to pull up the grammar checking application from within their program or write their own UI for using the functionality within their program.
Does all of that gibe with your understanding of the technology?
From my cursory look it seems that users will not be able to simply add a grammar checker start Kate and have grammar checking immediately be usable from within Kate the way a user can simply drop a grammar checker within a /Services directory and start TextEdit and have it immediately usable.
some distros will go for ease-of-use without customization and others will go for customization over ease-of-use, while the whole system gets more and more modular and scripted.
I believe that is a false dichotomy. Adding customizability can increase ease of use when done correctly. Adding the ability to add system services in OS X makes applications more customizable, but does not make them any harder to use.
Linux hasn't had any major changes in the past three years, why would you think it'll have any in the next three?
Sure it has, just not for the desktop. The reason some believe it might improve more over the next few years is that companies are starting to use it as the pre-installed OS on low-end and low-power systems. Those companies have a direct, financial incentive to spend money on making it a better desktop OS.
maybe it'll be like ms word? Will it be capable of, correcting grammar?
Sadly, it looks like KParts is the closest Linux has come to adding functionality to multiple apps. With OS X, Apple implemented system services, so adding grammar checking in 10.5 for all apps was just adding one service and it works nearly everywhere (including this text box I'm typing in). With KParts, the best they can do is add a standard grammar checking library and hope developers building apps for KDE will incorporate it in the next version of that app. I'm uncertain if user training of grammar checking from within one application will be able to easily make a difference in other applications as well (the way it does in OS X).
Today, when you have ridiculously powerful personal computers running massive 3D simulations with thousands of concurrent interacting users - you'd think the game industry could innovate just a little bit around the idea of character "health".
Amen!
Back in the day there was a game (well a game/screensaver) called "Lunatic Fringe". It was sort of like asteroids, but instead of a health bar for your ship, you had several health bars. On was for your guns, one for your engine, one for your turning jets, one for your long range radar, etc. If you were shot or ran into an asteroid you took damage to one or more of them and those parts of the ship began to malfunction. If your guns were slightly damaged they might fail to fire one time in ten. If they were severely damaged they might only fire one time in ten. If your turning jets were damaged you sometimes you could turn the ship and sometimes you couldn't or it would turn the wrong way. The gameplay was absolutely awesome!!! Ever since I've been looking for a game that incorporated this same gameplay element.
For a new Diablo style game you could start moving more slowly and erratically staggering. Your spells could fail. Your attacks could go in the wrong direction, hitting no one or the wrong person, maybe even allies. Your blocks with your shield could become less frequent or stop as an arm was disabled. Your vision could blur or become jumpy.
Just count me as one very strong vote in favor of your idea.
... they combined a sleek sexy music player with a cheap source of music, through the itunes store. I've explained to countless people they can make mp3's from most audio cds, and in general instead of learning a new program they ask ME to do the leg work of encoding their music. it takes money to use itunes, but it's easy to use.
While having the store to buy from is important to the iPod's success, realistically most of the music on iPods does not come from the iTunes store. According to industry research only about 15% of iPod owners have ever bought anything from the iTunes store and it accounts for less than 2% of the music on the average iPod.
A big factor in the iPod success story is Apple's iTunes software making it easy for the average person to rip their CD collection. I know smart people who downloaded the program solely for that purpose because they could not figure out how to do it with WMP or whatever shipped with the player they bought. Remember, when the iPod came out, WMP ripped to DRM'd WMA by default, adding DRM to music from CDs that did not have any to start with and resulting in a lot of people who ripped their collection and then could not get it to work on their portable player.
It took simple hardware, easy to use software, and an easy store with DRM that did not significantly get in the user's way to make it happen. That's where Apple really excels, in putting together solutions that address all of a customer's workflow and needs. It's working for the smartphone market too.
If I had Apple stock, I would sell.
If you weren't in it for the long term you should have sold when they spiked at over $200 last year. A lot of people did.
They have executed amazingly well over the last decade, but they also got lucky.
Turning around their Mac business with OS X was the first one. The iPod was the second. The iPhone is pulling the cash in again. How many times do they have to get "lucky" before you suspect maybe they have a good team and a repeatable strategy for selling tech?
The iPhone is doing well, but it faces heavy competition from companies that are much more prepared this time around.
The iPhone looks on track to grab 1% of the market and BestBuy just announced they'd start carrying them, with most analysts figuring that will push them well beyond. I don't think there is a lot of doubt that smartphones are a big growth segment of the cell phone market and Apple is almost certainly going to grab a good chunk of that. Mac sales are slowly and steadily increasing as well and also pulling in the cash. I side with the analysts on this one, Apple is going to keep going up for a while here.
Apple's use of slick looking devices and clean, optimized UI gives them an advantage and allows them to mark up prices. However, other companies are going to learn to do these things nearly as well, and then Apple will have to compete more on price.
I'd like to think other companies will manage to put together teams that can consistently focus on overall workflow and making things "just work" but historically it hasn't happened much. People focus on only one of a few of the vital elements and they fail. Many will focus on a clean UI and industrial design, but neglect the optimized services, or lose focus on keeping the applications within acceptable parameters. Many more will focus on bullet point features and price as has been the traditional case. Some will neglect proper marketing and some will fail to place themselves where they have enough leverage to keep the phone companies from undermining them.
It takes a certain genius to put everything together in one package and still be agile enough to avoid being crushed by the cartels and monopolies who will present you with short term gains at the cost of long term viability, and realistically most executives (especially americans) these days don't care about the long term.
But I think they've peaked.
There will be peaks and troughs, but it will take a real change to prevent Apple from continuing to grow. Jobs retiring, or MS or the RIAA pulling the rug out from under things, or some other major change or disruptive technology. It certainly could happen, but Apple seems a good bet for growth for a while yet, IMHO.
Apple is doing well because it is no longer a boutique computer company.
Apple turned its fortunes around long before they started selling anything other than Macs. First it was focusing on the home market with the iMac, then OS X and things really changed. Apple has since diversified into iPods and iPhones, but Macs still bring in most of the money and are still a growing business for them, not a shrinking one.
Apple has grown by becoming a different company. Essentially, Steve Jobs shut Apple down, gave the money back to the shareholders, then asked them to invest in a new company with the same name and address.
I disagree. He took what they had from Apple and what they had from Next and combined them to play to their strengths. Then he evolved that in whatever way he thought would bring in the dough in the long term. It worked and along the way the iPod was a happy success they managed t duplicate for the cell phone.
There's a lot of stuff that the FOSS community cannot run with because they'd have Apple's lawyers on their asses. And for a lot of other features, when it comes down to it, they aren't being adopted because they are bad features and don't stand up to scrutiny.
Nine years ago Apple introduced system services in OS X. It allowed all applications to have spellchecking, using the same dictionary (only had to train it once). Nine years ago you could drop a third-party service in your services directory and instantly add grammar checking to all your applications, without the developers of those applications having to do any work. For all this time we've been able to add arbitrary global functionality with a simple drag and drop. Language translations, dictionary/thesaurus lookup, text manipulation scripts, etc. Do explain how that technology, now nearly a decade old, is a "bad idea" and doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I think you're full of it and I think the popularity of OS X and the exodus of people from Linux on the desktop to OS X on the desktop is fair evidence that most people agree.
They introduced innovative UIs (dock and expose).
There's nothing "innovative" about either of those.
Wow. Should I even bother continuing to read your reply? You seem hopelessly biased. Apple (and Next who took over Apple) were the first real, mainstream implementations of these technologies that I've ever heard of. If they're not innovative, why haven't they made it into mainstream Linux disros yet? Why are Linux implementations of them so immature and poor?
There were several init replacements before LaunchD. LaunchD was so poor that people didn't adopt it.
Really, because right after Apple released it I saw a lot of discussion of it and it seemed that it was not adopted at the time because of of uncertainty over Apple's weird license. How many LanchD projects that are not making their way into other OS's and distros were started within those six months?
Apple moved a lot of directories around, but there's no evidence that their structure is any better.
Sure it's better, if only by virtue of being the most common, de facto standard structure. The argument for years against rearranging them in BSD was that people knew the current system best so change would cause confusion. OS X's structure is now more common than any other because so many more people use and work on OS X than any other.
ACLs have been in Linux and UNIX for years; they have been widely rejected by users and administrators because they are a bad idea.
Yes, ACLs have been around a long time, but Apple did a great job of adopting code from TrustedBSD and making it workable. As to your assertion that ACLs are a bad idea, well I think that's a load of crap. I've been working in the security industry for many years now and not once have I heard any security expert claim ACLs were a bad idea. The arguments have always been about how to implement them and where they are needed and when.
OpenStep is derived from the Smalltalk libraries and it's 20 year old technology
Who cares what it evolved from. Next and Apple have made it into a great way to have drag and drop application packages that can run without installation and be transferred easily. They are easily extendable for new uses and provide unprecedented functionality. Functionality no one else has managed and yet no one has bothered to copy it.
System services is an obscure gimmick for geeks.
My girlfriend may not know why she can use her grammar checker in her text editor, e-mail, word processor, and presentation program, but she sure as hell does use it. System services is why she can. Your assertion that it is just for geeks is a load of crap. I'll tell you what, why don't you whip up a way for me to use a grammar c
Apple is using a lot of open source code, and they have released some open source code themselves. But what have they actually contributed to the open source community? I can't think of any significant piece of Apple software that runs on any Linux distribution.
Apple has made very significant contributions to what is now Webkit, to zeroconf, to the shared BSD subsystem, etc. But you have a very real point. When Apple invents something from scratch and contributes it (like LaunchD) it is occasionally cloned, but rarely do developers take Apple's code and run with it. This is important, but ties into your next comment.
They have raised the bar for software/hardware technology in general.
With what? Quartz, HFS+, Cocoa, Darwin, and XCode do not "raise the bar" on anything. Apple fans like to point to USB, OS X, Bonjour, Quicktime, and similar technologies, but Apple's contributions there were either to adopt an existing standard that was coming anyway, or to take an existing technology, tinker a little with it, and release it under their own name.
Apple has raised the bar. They took many rough standards and turned them into powerful and usable tools (zeroconf). They introduced innovative UIs (dock and expose). They took old and crufty parts of UNIX and redesigned them (LaunchD, basic directory structure, ACLs). They introduced powerful technologies that are all their own (OpenStep, signing framework, system services).
Despite all this and despite their popularity, the OSS community has a lousy track record of adopting those technologies and ideas. Their still isn't a dock clone that has all the functionality of Apple's. There still isn't a major Linux distro that ships with a dock or expose working by default. None of the Linux distros I've used have successfully cloned Apple's ubiquitous application of zeroconf. No Linux distro has yet copied OpenStep or even tried for compatibility with OS X. If you talk to Linux on the desktop users (people who should know what the competition does) 99% of them don't even know what Apple's system services are and if you explain it, they eventually agree it is really cool, but way too much work for them to try to clone.
There are a lot of reasons for this state of affairs. In some cases Apple has not played as nicely as they could, with licensing issues and their culture of secrecy. In many cases Apple makes sweeping changes to optimize OS X for the desktop and there is no central authority in the rest of the OSS community to mandate the same or even develop a real consensus. In many cases, Linux developers are a lot more interested in Linux as an appliance or server and specifically don't want to make changes that will help for a desktop but may add bloat for other uses. In some cases the OSS community is simply ignorant of what Apple does because they don't use Apple products due to philosophical differences or simply because Apple is not as common as Windows.
Whatever the reason, my perspective is Apple gives and takes from the OSS community about as well as many other mixed contributors, but because they are working in the desktop OS space and because of the reasons above, their contributions are ignored by Linux on the desktop developers (which is the only relevant market they're innovating in). Apple has been pretty good about adopting useful stuff from Windows and Linux (virtual desktops, filesystem improvements, misc code) but while their are projects to try to clone some of Apple's new tech, for the most part those are small projects and they are not integrated into mainstream Linux distros. That's one of the reasons why gOS's adoption of the dock was both encouraging (yay OS X feature parity) and disheartening (poorly done with only a little bit of the functionality).
In short I think you're right that the OSS community is not benefiting much by what Apple has been doing, but I think that is largely the fault of the OSS community for not takin