I think the reason that there are lots of macs in Google is that many use the laptops, and the company just caters for the employee's preferences.
It sounds like a reasonable policy to me. It's the same one we had at my last employer. Users choose what works best for them. Since several of those people now work at Google, I imagine they feel right at home.
It's a pity, because the thinkpads are better built and more easily serviced.
Actually, according to Consumer Reports Thinkpads have a higher failure rate than MacBooks or MacBook pros, by a decent margin. At that last employer those were our two pre-approved vendors and our data showed the same thing. As for ease of service, who services their own machines? We put in RAM and the like, which is plenty easy on Apple systems. Anything else, we copied the data to a spare machine (if possible) and shipped the broken one back to the vendor. On site repairs may make sense for servers, but not for laptops. It just isn't worth the employee down time. A couple of spare laptops are a cheap way to keep people working.
Despite the relatively good support for linux laptops at Google, using them remains cumbersome...
I find using them anywhere as a primary desktop is cumbersome. It's come a long way, but there is still a lot of tinkering and hands on work that needs to be done to get them running with whatever infrastructure and keep them that way. I use one daily, but I don't find it to be as painless and enjoyable as OS X for most tasks (although for some tasks it is quite superior).
I'd note most all of the problems you list are probably the result of having a distro not tailored to your hardware. That will hopefully be less of a problem in future as laptop makers customize Linux for their machine and keep it supported.
I probably would use Mac too if it weren't for the absence of the nipple-trackpoint and the user interface that drives me crazy.
Yeah, we all become accustomed to interfaces and the like. I've used ThinPads and they are fairly reliable (number 3 or 4 right now?) but I've never been fond of the nipple-pointer thingy. Over the last couple of years I've noticed that OS X has incorporated pretty much all the old UNIX style interface features I missed, but the big Linux distros are still lacking in reciprocation. Ubuntu still does not ship with an expose clone by default or with two-finger trackpad clicking and scrolling. From what I've seen this has facilitated a large exodus of laptop users away from Linux and to OS X for their primary OS. Where I worked last they went from about 5% to about 70% in the last 4 years, mostly converting Linux people (and a few BSD users). It worries me because a lot of those people are now developing applications and the like to solve problems on OS X and there are even fewer people doing so for Linux on the desktop.
If the release provides stability updates (implying the last paid release is unstable) then it's kinda shitty to charge for them.
Actually, even the rumor did not say "stability updates" just "stability and security improvements." I seriously doubt they are talking about bug fixes. More likely (assuming this rumor has any real foundation) they are talking about extending MAC to help contain unstable applications and better keep them from monopolizing resources. Another interesting thing about this rumor is it could quite easily be based on something true, but which was distorted by those that heard it. We're talking about a presentation at a developer conference. It would be easy for someone with inside knowledge to say, "yeah nothing really new, no new core frameworks ala CoreAnimation, mostly security and stability stuff" and have that interpreted by someone as the next version of OS X will not have any new features, instead of the next version not having new features developers need to worry about. For that matter, the original rumor also didn't mention if Apple will be charging for this release, that's just an assumption. Remember the 10.1 release was free because it included a huge number of stability fixes. Heck, for all we know Apple is in the process of migrating to a subscription payment service.
I agree it would be annoying if Apple released a new version that was just bug fixes and charged for it... but I also think that is highly unlikely.
I'd note you're missing a major reason. Currently Apple competes in the computer system market against Dell and Sony and HP, largely on the strength of OS X, a desktop OS. Selling OS X for generic hardware would put them in the desktop OS market directly, a market monopolized by MS. No businessman in their right mind wants to be competing against a monopoly in the market they have monopolized. It costs significantly more than a normal market with higher risk and less return. Quite likely, Apple would fail in that market, regardless of the relative quality of OS X and Windows.
It would be economic suicide to unbundle OS X and Apple computers until the market is at least somewhat competitive, maybe 70% dominated by Windows. That's still quite a ways off, so Apple is focused on slowly chipping away at Windows market share and hoping they can get there some day.
What? How is it consistent? That they are all big cats?
What you don't see how assigning numerical values to the letters of each cat applying and the secret formula creates a predictable numerical sequence? And you call yourself a nerd.
Okay, all joking aside, 10.3 is not a very memorable brand. Average people have trouble remembering if they are using 10.3 or 10.4. Adding a cat name makes it more marketable (Apple sells more) and gives people the name of a cat, which they're more likely to remember (has more mental connections). It's probably not the best thought out scheme, but it's here and for nerds in the computer industry, not too hard to remember.
Ubuntu does use alphabetically sequential names (Gutsy Gibbon>Hardy Heron>Intrepid Ibex) although while more sensible to an engineer, I'm not sure they are as marketable to the general public as Apple's cat names.
Oops, I forgot an important one. TheDailyGrind is great for tracking how much time you're putting in on different projects. It is essential for a contractor with multiple jobs and good for accounting for your time at a regular job too.
Now that Widgets are fast to appear and disappear (after the first load) and no longer suck (resources constantly) I find myself using a number of them. Many are default widgets even:
Business - yellowpages, being able to get the closest indian food delivery and make the number giant on my screen is really convenient. It's even faster than opening a new tab and using the Web.
People - whitepages, nice and quick. I used this to find someone's phone number the other day when I found their wallet.
Simpletimer - just to set a timer and get notified. This is great for lunch in 20 minutes type things.
Unit Converter - quick way to convert units, nice around the house or when I'm somewhere without internet access.
Weather - a nice, quick weather report and forecast including radar images.
Sure I could run separate applications for all these, but they are lightweight and pulling them all up with a key and dismissing them just as quickly is pretty convenient. I basically think of Widgets as a single, customizable, catch-all application that keeps my dock less cluttered.
IMwheel allows you to set any mouse button to any global action.
Yeah, if only there was a good, Linux expose clone that actually worked all the time to assign to it. That was actually my complaint. Scale/compiz was dog slow and unstable as anything, but that's to be expected at this stage. I never got Skippy to actually work. It compiled and supposedly installed, but wouldn't actually activate.
...as linux distros make much better use of the middle mouse button by default, on both application & a global select and paste level, crippiling it would be fairly stupid.
I never use the middle mouse button in Linux for default actions. I actually have a 4 button mouse, but buttons 3 and 4 are either assigned to a custom action for an application or go unused. I don't know of any applications I run under Linux that have a useful default for the third button.
As for mouse gestures I dont know about Ubuntu, but KDE3 features global mouse gesture settings, and it can even set them up for non-kde apps.
I bailed on KDE about a year ago. It was just too hard to get the applications I wanted to install and run smoothly and stably. I don't mind tinkering for fun, but for my work machine that has to be optional and I founds myself wasting more and more time just trying to get something to run rather than getting my work done using that something. I switched to Ubuntu and it has been a huge difference. I'll give Kubuntu another chance in a year or so, but gestures are not, by themselves, enough to make the difference.
Tapping is already possible and universally used on every linux distro out there.
Tapping works, but two finger tapping doesn't seem to (to activate the second mouse button instead of the first). Not only does it not work by default on my Ubuntu system, there does not seem to be a GUI configuration option for it.
Does anybody know if apple opened up their specs for the hardware implementation? otherwise reverse engineers will be along shortly, but may take a bit longer
Is Apple's hardware actually different to allow this functionality? I doubt Apple's drivers are open, so if it does rely upon their hardware, specifically I can see it would take more work.
How much network bandwidth and hard drive space is wasted because of that?
How much network space was saved when I upgraded from a PPC system to an Intel system and all my applications were just copied over a firewire cable instead of being re-downloaded from scratch? Personally, hard drive space is not my biggest resource constraint. It is really, really cheap. I'd give up a gig on every one of my systems in order to keep the ability to IM working applications to people, even if they're on a different platform. Ditto for being able to burn an application onto a CD or DVD or write it to a network drive and be able to run that application on any system without having to install it or download a different version.
Personally, I hope there is a move towards larger FAT binaries. I wish Solaris and some major Linux distros would adopt the same application format (.app bundles) so I could have one, functional application and download that would work on more systems. It makes a whole lot of sense for desktop systems and regular laptops, but I doubt it will happen because Linux is still primarily a server OS and changes that benefit it in its desktop capacity at the expense of use as a server... well they just don't really happen much.
Mod parent up, Apple shouldn't be immune to criticism
I think most people aren't modding them up, because what they have to say isn't very interesting. Why is it that people think if Apple releases a new version they are forced to pay for it? Lots of people aren't that interested in being cutting edge so they just skip versions they don't particularly want or skip every other one.
If you use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel) on a link it opens it in a new tab - so there one click:)... Unless you are using a mac in which case you are stuck in the mouse stone age
Yeah on a Mac it is cmd-click, by default. On my Mac I have the middle mouse button (scroll wheel button) globally set to activate Expose. Man I wish one of the Linux distros had that working by default, but alas you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get a buggy clone. Speaking of the mouse stone age, has anyone seen a good, universal way to use mouse gestures across Ubuntu (not just in a specific application)? Also, does anyone know if Ubuntu is going to get support for two finger tapping/dragging on the track pad?
Seriously, is anyone surprised when a Republican wants to erode civil liberties?
No. Of course we're also not surprised when a Democrat wants to erode civil liberties. For most people the choice has been which civil liberties are you willing to sacrifice to protect which other civil liberties? Would you like to be able to own firearm for self defense or would you like to be able to read books from the library without the government monitoring you? Pick one or the other... and so on.
"especially for smartphones." Is it really a "widget" then? It's basically a running application there.
I guess that is debatable. In my mind they are widgets because of the stupid simple, Web technology development method. Also, if it is considered an application on the phone, but also runs identically as a pop-up widget on your desktop OS, well, is it a widget or not? I guess I don't care so long as they work.
The only other gadget I would like is something that combines RTM, my calendar, and permits me to "punch in" and "punch out" to activities in my RTM to do list.
I use an OS X Widget called "TheDailyGrind" to manage this last one. If you're on OS X or a bleeding edge KDE system it might be worth checking out.
Oh, really? Where are the mega-bucks coming from our new oil colony? Where's our massive new oil supply? Why are we still so concerned with OPEC decisions? The money from Iraq's oil production goes to the provisional government, not to the US. The facts do not square with your theory.
I think you're mostly right, in that oil is something of a red herring. I think securing an oil resource was part of the picture and I think making money was a huge part of the picture. The people who made money on oil because of Iraq are the people who drill for it elsewhere (like Texas?) because the cost of oil went up so much do to our disrupting of one of the main supplies and constant destruction of pipelines and reserves in Iraq.
As for a profit motive for the war... those billions we spend on the war are mostly going to big businesses who are not held accountable and many of whom don't even have to bid and offer a competitive price. It's mostly about sucking money from american taxpayers and giving it to americans who are already in the top 2% for wealth. Ignoring the exploitation of Iraq's resources would be a bit blind. We emptied their treasury (which unlike ours was not in debt) and we distributed huge portions of their land and industry to non-native companies. We burned their crops and distributed "free" seed grain to them that happens to be GM and which they will have to pay yearly fees to replant. Iraq has been an orgy of exploitation.
Since when was "open source" just an excuse for releasing a half-finished product? Google is a multi-million-dollar company. Surely they can afford to pay some programmers and testers to produce a finished product before they release it?
Google's development methods are quite different than other companies. Many of these beta services and products they release are not something the company is using to make money, but are the individual projects of the engineers. Each engineer gets 20% of their time where they must work on their own thing. A lot of those "things" eventually get tossed out for the public to play with, usually as betas and often as OSS projects. Sure, Google could pay engineers to work on this full time, but it isn't clear that is really going to make them money. Linux on the desktop improvements aren't exactly a goldmine. Rather, I think it is nice they let the engineer donate this code to Linux and let people help him integrate it into Linux.
Do people really use them? I don't use any of the widgets on my Mac OSX system.
I used to be in the same boat as you. Right up until 10.5, widgets seemed to use up too many resources to make them worthwhile. Since 10.5, however, they are a lot better about being idle in the background, but still coming up quickly enough when desired. I regularly use the white and yellow pages widgets, a widget to track time I put in on various projects, a weather report widget, and a simple timer.
I think widgets are a reflection of improvements in multitasking and resource allocation. Back in the day, if I wanted to play a game at a LAN party, I shut down all my applications. I didn't leave applications sitting open unless I was actually using them. Since about version 10.2 of OS X, I never quit any of my applications that I use daily. I sure don't shut down my big, Adobe CS applications before playing a game. Better resource allocation has really changed the way I compute and Widgets are a reflection of that. Why not have a dozen small applications running in the background all the time, so long as they don't significantly affect performance? It is a lot more convenient than firing them up when needed, one by one. Mind you, there are a lot of useless Widgets and even some I thought I'd use (google maps) I don't because I generally have a Web browser open too. Still, I do think widgets are here to stay; especially for smartphones.
Are there any browsers under Linux that track the current (nightly) Webkit libraries?
There are prerelease versions of Konqueror and Epiphany. The trick is getting them to consistently install. I've had as many failures installing the pre-release version of Konqueror as successes.
The new lesson is that the freedom belongs to the software, not to users. I think the author has a pretty fair understanding...
I think the author is intentionally misleading. The freedom is for the users... not the developers. That is to say, OSS benefits the users of software, not the developers. Anyone developing that GPL code is restricted in a way that continues to benefit the users.
The problem this person has is they are characterizing the developers of software as "users" of that code and the only use for code is to extract money from people in exchange for being able to run it. I don't believe this misuse of terms is unintentional either.
What you are referring to is often called the "OK/Cancel problem" and is a classic HCI issue to avoid.
Absolutely not. It doesn't matter WHAT the dialogs say. The Windows dialogs I'm talking about do NOT in general actually read "OK", there are a variety of approval buttons in use, most of them completely descriptive of what they are going to do.
The problem was named back in the day when that was what pretty much all the dialogues boxes read. It is still used to describe the problem today, even though the button names have changed. The problem is operant conditioning users to reflexively click a given option. What the buttons are named is one aspect of the problem, as buttons that are not action verbs are not descriptive in themselves and those button names are the only part of the dialogue box that are "required reading" for the user to find and click something. Another aspect is if the button names are consistent for all actions or specific to a given action the user is to take. If every dialogue box in every situation has the same two option, even if they are action verbs, the conditioning aspect still occurs (just not as readily). Both of these are part of the problem, but not the entire problem. As such changing the names and making them unique partially mitigates the issue.
The problem is that unnecessary approval dialogs are being used at all. OS X's only advantage here is that there are... for the moment... fewer of these.
The term "unnecessary" is wholly subjective. The criteria upon which these need to be evaluated from a usability and security perspective is if they cause more or less accidental execution of malware. This requires a formal test to be certain (which I'm sure Apple performed) but the identifying of software as software (not data) is alone probably enough to justify the existence of these checks.
A sandbox that is complete enough to actually prevent malware from escaping will be too restrictive. Anything less than full MAC (orange book class B, at every level, default closed, under explicit user control) will be no better than Microsoft's sandbox for IE (which has had demonstrated failures right from the start), and full mandatory access control has proven too cumbersome everywhere it's been implemented.
Just bolting on a sandbox, obviously, would not work. That said, sandboxes can and do work today, with MAC as used on hardened Linux and Solaris workstations and, even the MAC Apple is using now to sandbox some of their default services. The trick is to make it usable enough that it doesn't get in the way, which will probably require additional work including application signing (already implemented), signatures including ACL from major developers (like the iphone but more greylisting), and a transitional phase with Apple requiring compliance from developers going forward.
It is quite possible to make sandboxing a very usable reality, it just hasn't been really needed yet except for Windows (who have failed to create workable UI, big surprise) and in high security environments, where the UIs can be less forgiving.
Users don't necessarily need to now everything software does (and will never understand such) they just have to decide who they trust and to what degree and hopefully be given the option to make use of the expertise of those they do trust.
Apples[sic] design is the result of a mistake they made in Safari in 2004... making 'open "Safe" files' on by default... and backed out of last year...
This has nothing to do with the problem we're discussing and does not seem to have influenced the design to use confirmation dialogue boxes.
...but having put their money on stupid approval dialogs they seem unable to consider a better approach...
You assert that they are stupid and decrease security, but you've offered no
The first thing I thought when I opened the PDF was how nicely formatted it is.
Interestingly, they put it together using Framemaker v 6.0, according to the meta data. That is to say, they're using software from 2000, because none of the current versions run on Mac OS (and that version only runs on OS X using classic on a PPC system). It will be interesting to see what they transition to to retain that high quality of formatting.
This is sort of off topic, but the PDF metadata claims it was made using Adobe Framemaker 6.0 and a Macintosh version of Adobe Distiller. That strongly implies this guide to securing the latest and greatest version of OS X, was actually put together and created using a PPC Mac running classic. I wonder what Apple plans to do in this regard going forward, since none of their currently offered systems can run this software and their are really not many alternatives for said niche. Maybe Adobe will face one more Apple product as a competitor in the next year or so, if Apple decides to bring an OS X native program to market as they have in other cases like this.
Long story short, I thought the oft repeated community attitudes towards OS X security were echoed by Apple: namely that there was little need for security measures.
I'm not sure you should completely abandon that conception. Apple's attitude towards security has been a bit erratic. My perception is that the old-school Apple developers and UI gurus pay little attention to security and some projects are dominated by such people. On the other hand, the people from Next and who were hired on for their UNIX experience care a lot more about security and projects they dominate fare much better.
Apple has certainly been taking steps towards better OS X security. FileVault is functional, if not perfect and OS X in general seems to have at least some security review going on for default settings. They added secure deletion and support for security cards (probably requirements for government purchases). Their new Mandatory Access Control framework and application signing frameworks in Leopard show they are committing resources to proactive security improvements, even ones that their user base as a whole really doesn't need yet. I actually have more hope for MAC in OS X than in Linux, since Jobs can make the hard decision to require it for all new software, whereas there really doesn't seem anyone capable of doing the same for Linux and consensus is hard to reach.
Better Trojan horse protection. Mac OS X v10.5 marks files that are downloaded to help prevent users from running malicious downloaded applications. The main result of this is to train people to click "OK" to security dialogs.
What you are referring to is often called the "OK/Cancel problem" and is a classic HCI issue to avoid. This is different from Windows though in several ways. First, OS X does not have other, identical dialogue boxes that routinely have to be clicked in order to "make Windows work". This means users are not being conditioned to click "ok" in response to any dialogue box that appears. OS X does not present useless dialogue boxes that only have the OK option to further condition users. Second, the options are not "OK" and "Cancel" like any other such dialogue box, but "Cancel" and "Open". This is better than Windows, but not ideal. Open is an action verb, one of the primary requirements for bypassing this problem. It means even if the user does not read the dialogue box, they still know what the button they are clicking is going to do, it will open something. I'd argue "Run program" would be a better label for the button, but it is not a complete disaster. Third, this option only applies to programs, not data and as such differentiates the two. This box does not appear when you double click a file from the internet the first time; it only appears when you do so with an application, making it much less frequent (less conditioning) and informing users that this is an application and not data, so they can't be tricked into thinking it is just a movie file or a zip file of images. Fourth, on Windows, when the OK/Cancel box appears, people need to choose and may not have all the information they need. On OS X, there is also a button to open the Website from which the application was downloaded, thus giving users the option of easily looking into it and helping to resist the temptation to just run it and see what happens.
To summarize, OS X does not fall afoul of the OK/Cancel problem to anywhere near the same degree as Windows, but there is room for improvement. Ideally, the user should know what is an application and what is an executable before clicking on it. Ideally, they should be able to run it without a warning and the OS should appropriately sandbox it, by default, so that it can be run safely, even if it is malware. I suspect that is the direction of the future, but we're not there yet. Apple's design seems like a pretty good compromise to me. It's not great and revolutionary, but it is better than, well, anyone else's solution I've seen.
...and there is little point in running it.
With regard to Leopard's new firewall, the idea is layered security. If malware slips onto the machine, the Firewall may still be able to limit the damage it can do. If a worm can't connect to its control channel, it basically does nothing. I'd also note that the new firewall is application based, not port based. That means it can restrict some new game from accessing port 80, while allowing your Web browser to do so. Sadly, it is not used to its full potential, but having it on any running can save your butt. Just be careful to note that the new firewall is not the old firewall and running both can be better yet. There are a lot of ports I don't want to communicate on and even if I don't knowingly run a service on one, does not mean some trojan has not done it for me. The firewall is a way to detect and stop that action.
Documents like this will encourage people like me to at least look at Apple when considering purchases.
I understand that there are environments where the default level of security of workstations is insufficient and hardening is needed. The thing is, if you're administrating such an environment and need to harden your systems a bit more, you should already have read the similar hardening guide for OS X that was published by the NSA (or at least be aware of it since it was discussed in hundreds of security forums when released). It was for Panther at the time, but not much has changed since then, at least as far as practices. Or you could use the hardening guide Apple released for Tiger. In any case, this guide probably should have little to do with your purchasing decisions.
The KHTML team has never decided to kill KHTML and go with Webkit. In fact, the KHTML code from the 4.1 branch is the best KHTML ever, and an extremely capable HTML engine.
The best ever? When was a new release of a Web rendering engine not the best release ever? From what I've heard most of the major developer, including those paid by Trolltech started working on pulling features over from KHTML to WebKit with the goal of using WebKit for Konqueror going forward. Further, the input from Apple, Nokia and others has clearly left KHTML falling further and further behind.
Webkit is a fork of KHTML, and some of the bugfixes are ported from Webkit over to KHTML. The two engines are basically sisters, and both continue to be developed.
I don't think anyone really thinks that is the plan going forward. I think there are still a few holdouts that will continue with KTML, but it seems pretty much out of the running as I understand.
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It sounds like a reasonable policy to me. It's the same one we had at my last employer. Users choose what works best for them. Since several of those people now work at Google, I imagine they feel right at home.
It's a pity, because the thinkpads are better built and more easily serviced.Actually, according to Consumer Reports Thinkpads have a higher failure rate than MacBooks or MacBook pros, by a decent margin. At that last employer those were our two pre-approved vendors and our data showed the same thing. As for ease of service, who services their own machines? We put in RAM and the like, which is plenty easy on Apple systems. Anything else, we copied the data to a spare machine (if possible) and shipped the broken one back to the vendor. On site repairs may make sense for servers, but not for laptops. It just isn't worth the employee down time. A couple of spare laptops are a cheap way to keep people working.
Despite the relatively good support for linux laptops at Google, using them remains cumbersome...I find using them anywhere as a primary desktop is cumbersome. It's come a long way, but there is still a lot of tinkering and hands on work that needs to be done to get them running with whatever infrastructure and keep them that way. I use one daily, but I don't find it to be as painless and enjoyable as OS X for most tasks (although for some tasks it is quite superior).
I'd note most all of the problems you list are probably the result of having a distro not tailored to your hardware. That will hopefully be less of a problem in future as laptop makers customize Linux for their machine and keep it supported.
I probably would use Mac too if it weren't for the absence of the nipple-trackpoint and the user interface that drives me crazy.Yeah, we all become accustomed to interfaces and the like. I've used ThinPads and they are fairly reliable (number 3 or 4 right now?) but I've never been fond of the nipple-pointer thingy. Over the last couple of years I've noticed that OS X has incorporated pretty much all the old UNIX style interface features I missed, but the big Linux distros are still lacking in reciprocation. Ubuntu still does not ship with an expose clone by default or with two-finger trackpad clicking and scrolling. From what I've seen this has facilitated a large exodus of laptop users away from Linux and to OS X for their primary OS. Where I worked last they went from about 5% to about 70% in the last 4 years, mostly converting Linux people (and a few BSD users). It worries me because a lot of those people are now developing applications and the like to solve problems on OS X and there are even fewer people doing so for Linux on the desktop.
Actually, even the rumor did not say "stability updates" just "stability and security improvements." I seriously doubt they are talking about bug fixes. More likely (assuming this rumor has any real foundation) they are talking about extending MAC to help contain unstable applications and better keep them from monopolizing resources. Another interesting thing about this rumor is it could quite easily be based on something true, but which was distorted by those that heard it. We're talking about a presentation at a developer conference. It would be easy for someone with inside knowledge to say, "yeah nothing really new, no new core frameworks ala CoreAnimation, mostly security and stability stuff" and have that interpreted by someone as the next version of OS X will not have any new features, instead of the next version not having new features developers need to worry about. For that matter, the original rumor also didn't mention if Apple will be charging for this release, that's just an assumption. Remember the 10.1 release was free because it included a huge number of stability fixes. Heck, for all we know Apple is in the process of migrating to a subscription payment service.
I agree it would be annoying if Apple released a new version that was just bug fixes and charged for it... but I also think that is highly unlikely.
I'd note you're missing a major reason. Currently Apple competes in the computer system market against Dell and Sony and HP, largely on the strength of OS X, a desktop OS. Selling OS X for generic hardware would put them in the desktop OS market directly, a market monopolized by MS. No businessman in their right mind wants to be competing against a monopoly in the market they have monopolized. It costs significantly more than a normal market with higher risk and less return. Quite likely, Apple would fail in that market, regardless of the relative quality of OS X and Windows.
It would be economic suicide to unbundle OS X and Apple computers until the market is at least somewhat competitive, maybe 70% dominated by Windows. That's still quite a ways off, so Apple is focused on slowly chipping away at Windows market share and hoping they can get there some day.
What you don't see how assigning numerical values to the letters of each cat applying and the secret formula creates a predictable numerical sequence? And you call yourself a nerd.
Okay, all joking aside, 10.3 is not a very memorable brand. Average people have trouble remembering if they are using 10.3 or 10.4. Adding a cat name makes it more marketable (Apple sells more) and gives people the name of a cat, which they're more likely to remember (has more mental connections). It's probably not the best thought out scheme, but it's here and for nerds in the computer industry, not too hard to remember.
Ubuntu does use alphabetically sequential names (Gutsy Gibbon>Hardy Heron>Intrepid Ibex) although while more sensible to an engineer, I'm not sure they are as marketable to the general public as Apple's cat names.
Oops, I forgot an important one. TheDailyGrind is great for tracking how much time you're putting in on different projects. It is essential for a contractor with multiple jobs and good for accounting for your time at a regular job too.
Now that Widgets are fast to appear and disappear (after the first load) and no longer suck (resources constantly) I find myself using a number of them. Many are default widgets even:
Sure I could run separate applications for all these, but they are lightweight and pulling them all up with a key and dismissing them just as quickly is pretty convenient. I basically think of Widgets as a single, customizable, catch-all application that keeps my dock less cluttered.
Yeah, if only there was a good, Linux expose clone that actually worked all the time to assign to it. That was actually my complaint. Scale/compiz was dog slow and unstable as anything, but that's to be expected at this stage. I never got Skippy to actually work. It compiled and supposedly installed, but wouldn't actually activate.
...as linux distros make much better use of the middle mouse button by default, on both application & a global select and paste level, crippiling it would be fairly stupid.I never use the middle mouse button in Linux for default actions. I actually have a 4 button mouse, but buttons 3 and 4 are either assigned to a custom action for an application or go unused. I don't know of any applications I run under Linux that have a useful default for the third button.
As for mouse gestures I dont know about Ubuntu, but KDE3 features global mouse gesture settings, and it can even set them up for non-kde apps.I bailed on KDE about a year ago. It was just too hard to get the applications I wanted to install and run smoothly and stably. I don't mind tinkering for fun, but for my work machine that has to be optional and I founds myself wasting more and more time just trying to get something to run rather than getting my work done using that something. I switched to Ubuntu and it has been a huge difference. I'll give Kubuntu another chance in a year or so, but gestures are not, by themselves, enough to make the difference.
Tapping is already possible and universally used on every linux distro out there.Tapping works, but two finger tapping doesn't seem to (to activate the second mouse button instead of the first). Not only does it not work by default on my Ubuntu system, there does not seem to be a GUI configuration option for it.
Does anybody know if apple opened up their specs for the hardware implementation? otherwise reverse engineers will be along shortly, but may take a bit longerIs Apple's hardware actually different to allow this functionality? I doubt Apple's drivers are open, so if it does rely upon their hardware, specifically I can see it would take more work.
How much network space was saved when I upgraded from a PPC system to an Intel system and all my applications were just copied over a firewire cable instead of being re-downloaded from scratch? Personally, hard drive space is not my biggest resource constraint. It is really, really cheap. I'd give up a gig on every one of my systems in order to keep the ability to IM working applications to people, even if they're on a different platform. Ditto for being able to burn an application onto a CD or DVD or write it to a network drive and be able to run that application on any system without having to install it or download a different version.
Personally, I hope there is a move towards larger FAT binaries. I wish Solaris and some major Linux distros would adopt the same application format (.app bundles) so I could have one, functional application and download that would work on more systems. It makes a whole lot of sense for desktop systems and regular laptops, but I doubt it will happen because Linux is still primarily a server OS and changes that benefit it in its desktop capacity at the expense of use as a server... well they just don't really happen much.
I think most people aren't modding them up, because what they have to say isn't very interesting. Why is it that people think if Apple releases a new version they are forced to pay for it? Lots of people aren't that interested in being cutting edge so they just skip versions they don't particularly want or skip every other one.
Yeah on a Mac it is cmd-click, by default. On my Mac I have the middle mouse button (scroll wheel button) globally set to activate Expose. Man I wish one of the Linux distros had that working by default, but alas you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get a buggy clone. Speaking of the mouse stone age, has anyone seen a good, universal way to use mouse gestures across Ubuntu (not just in a specific application)? Also, does anyone know if Ubuntu is going to get support for two finger tapping/dragging on the track pad?
No. Of course we're also not surprised when a Democrat wants to erode civil liberties. For most people the choice has been which civil liberties are you willing to sacrifice to protect which other civil liberties? Would you like to be able to own firearm for self defense or would you like to be able to read books from the library without the government monitoring you? Pick one or the other... and so on.
I guess that is debatable. In my mind they are widgets because of the stupid simple, Web technology development method. Also, if it is considered an application on the phone, but also runs identically as a pop-up widget on your desktop OS, well, is it a widget or not? I guess I don't care so long as they work.
I use an OS X Widget called "TheDailyGrind" to manage this last one. If you're on OS X or a bleeding edge KDE system it might be worth checking out.
I think you're mostly right, in that oil is something of a red herring. I think securing an oil resource was part of the picture and I think making money was a huge part of the picture. The people who made money on oil because of Iraq are the people who drill for it elsewhere (like Texas?) because the cost of oil went up so much do to our disrupting of one of the main supplies and constant destruction of pipelines and reserves in Iraq.
As for a profit motive for the war... those billions we spend on the war are mostly going to big businesses who are not held accountable and many of whom don't even have to bid and offer a competitive price. It's mostly about sucking money from american taxpayers and giving it to americans who are already in the top 2% for wealth. Ignoring the exploitation of Iraq's resources would be a bit blind. We emptied their treasury (which unlike ours was not in debt) and we distributed huge portions of their land and industry to non-native companies. We burned their crops and distributed "free" seed grain to them that happens to be GM and which they will have to pay yearly fees to replant. Iraq has been an orgy of exploitation.
Google's development methods are quite different than other companies. Many of these beta services and products they release are not something the company is using to make money, but are the individual projects of the engineers. Each engineer gets 20% of their time where they must work on their own thing. A lot of those "things" eventually get tossed out for the public to play with, usually as betas and often as OSS projects. Sure, Google could pay engineers to work on this full time, but it isn't clear that is really going to make them money. Linux on the desktop improvements aren't exactly a goldmine. Rather, I think it is nice they let the engineer donate this code to Linux and let people help him integrate it into Linux.
I used to be in the same boat as you. Right up until 10.5, widgets seemed to use up too many resources to make them worthwhile. Since 10.5, however, they are a lot better about being idle in the background, but still coming up quickly enough when desired. I regularly use the white and yellow pages widgets, a widget to track time I put in on various projects, a weather report widget, and a simple timer.
I think widgets are a reflection of improvements in multitasking and resource allocation. Back in the day, if I wanted to play a game at a LAN party, I shut down all my applications. I didn't leave applications sitting open unless I was actually using them. Since about version 10.2 of OS X, I never quit any of my applications that I use daily. I sure don't shut down my big, Adobe CS applications before playing a game. Better resource allocation has really changed the way I compute and Widgets are a reflection of that. Why not have a dozen small applications running in the background all the time, so long as they don't significantly affect performance? It is a lot more convenient than firing them up when needed, one by one. Mind you, there are a lot of useless Widgets and even some I thought I'd use (google maps) I don't because I generally have a Web browser open too. Still, I do think widgets are here to stay; especially for smartphones.
There are prerelease versions of Konqueror and Epiphany. The trick is getting them to consistently install. I've had as many failures installing the pre-release version of Konqueror as successes.
I think the author is intentionally misleading. The freedom is for the users... not the developers. That is to say, OSS benefits the users of software, not the developers. Anyone developing that GPL code is restricted in a way that continues to benefit the users.
The problem this person has is they are characterizing the developers of software as "users" of that code and the only use for code is to extract money from people in exchange for being able to run it. I don't believe this misuse of terms is unintentional either.
What you are referring to is often called the "OK/Cancel problem" and is a classic HCI issue to avoid.
Absolutely not. It doesn't matter WHAT the dialogs say. The Windows dialogs I'm talking about do NOT in general actually read "OK", there are a variety of approval buttons in use, most of them completely descriptive of what they are going to do.
The problem was named back in the day when that was what pretty much all the dialogues boxes read. It is still used to describe the problem today, even though the button names have changed. The problem is operant conditioning users to reflexively click a given option. What the buttons are named is one aspect of the problem, as buttons that are not action verbs are not descriptive in themselves and those button names are the only part of the dialogue box that are "required reading" for the user to find and click something. Another aspect is if the button names are consistent for all actions or specific to a given action the user is to take. If every dialogue box in every situation has the same two option, even if they are action verbs, the conditioning aspect still occurs (just not as readily). Both of these are part of the problem, but not the entire problem. As such changing the names and making them unique partially mitigates the issue.
The problem is that unnecessary approval dialogs are being used at all. OS X's only advantage here is that there are ... for the moment ... fewer of these.
The term "unnecessary" is wholly subjective. The criteria upon which these need to be evaluated from a usability and security perspective is if they cause more or less accidental execution of malware. This requires a formal test to be certain (which I'm sure Apple performed) but the identifying of software as software (not data) is alone probably enough to justify the existence of these checks.
A sandbox that is complete enough to actually prevent malware from escaping will be too restrictive. Anything less than full MAC (orange book class B, at every level, default closed, under explicit user control) will be no better than Microsoft's sandbox for IE (which has had demonstrated failures right from the start), and full mandatory access control has proven too cumbersome everywhere it's been implemented.
Just bolting on a sandbox, obviously, would not work. That said, sandboxes can and do work today, with MAC as used on hardened Linux and Solaris workstations and, even the MAC Apple is using now to sandbox some of their default services. The trick is to make it usable enough that it doesn't get in the way, which will probably require additional work including application signing (already implemented), signatures including ACL from major developers (like the iphone but more greylisting), and a transitional phase with Apple requiring compliance from developers going forward.
It is quite possible to make sandboxing a very usable reality, it just hasn't been really needed yet except for Windows (who have failed to create workable UI, big surprise) and in high security environments, where the UIs can be less forgiving.
Users don't necessarily need to now everything software does (and will never understand such) they just have to decide who they trust and to what degree and hopefully be given the option to make use of the expertise of those they do trust.
Apples[sic] design is the result of a mistake they made in Safari in 2004... making 'open "Safe" files' on by default... and backed out of last year...
This has nothing to do with the problem we're discussing and does not seem to have influenced the design to use confirmation dialogue boxes.
...but having put their money on stupid approval dialogs they seem unable to consider a better approach...
You assert that they are stupid and decrease security, but you've offered no
Interestingly, they put it together using Framemaker v 6.0, according to the meta data. That is to say, they're using software from 2000, because none of the current versions run on Mac OS (and that version only runs on OS X using classic on a PPC system). It will be interesting to see what they transition to to retain that high quality of formatting.
This is sort of off topic, but the PDF metadata claims it was made using Adobe Framemaker 6.0 and a Macintosh version of Adobe Distiller. That strongly implies this guide to securing the latest and greatest version of OS X, was actually put together and created using a PPC Mac running classic. I wonder what Apple plans to do in this regard going forward, since none of their currently offered systems can run this software and their are really not many alternatives for said niche. Maybe Adobe will face one more Apple product as a competitor in the next year or so, if Apple decides to bring an OS X native program to market as they have in other cases like this.
I'm not sure you should completely abandon that conception. Apple's attitude towards security has been a bit erratic. My perception is that the old-school Apple developers and UI gurus pay little attention to security and some projects are dominated by such people. On the other hand, the people from Next and who were hired on for their UNIX experience care a lot more about security and projects they dominate fare much better.
Apple has certainly been taking steps towards better OS X security. FileVault is functional, if not perfect and OS X in general seems to have at least some security review going on for default settings. They added secure deletion and support for security cards (probably requirements for government purchases). Their new Mandatory Access Control framework and application signing frameworks in Leopard show they are committing resources to proactive security improvements, even ones that their user base as a whole really doesn't need yet. I actually have more hope for MAC in OS X than in Linux, since Jobs can make the hard decision to require it for all new software, whereas there really doesn't seem anyone capable of doing the same for Linux and consensus is hard to reach.
What you are referring to is often called the "OK/Cancel problem" and is a classic HCI issue to avoid. This is different from Windows though in several ways. First, OS X does not have other, identical dialogue boxes that routinely have to be clicked in order to "make Windows work". This means users are not being conditioned to click "ok" in response to any dialogue box that appears. OS X does not present useless dialogue boxes that only have the OK option to further condition users. Second, the options are not "OK" and "Cancel" like any other such dialogue box, but "Cancel" and "Open". This is better than Windows, but not ideal. Open is an action verb, one of the primary requirements for bypassing this problem. It means even if the user does not read the dialogue box, they still know what the button they are clicking is going to do, it will open something. I'd argue "Run program" would be a better label for the button, but it is not a complete disaster. Third, this option only applies to programs, not data and as such differentiates the two. This box does not appear when you double click a file from the internet the first time; it only appears when you do so with an application, making it much less frequent (less conditioning) and informing users that this is an application and not data, so they can't be tricked into thinking it is just a movie file or a zip file of images. Fourth, on Windows, when the OK/Cancel box appears, people need to choose and may not have all the information they need. On OS X, there is also a button to open the Website from which the application was downloaded, thus giving users the option of easily looking into it and helping to resist the temptation to just run it and see what happens.
To summarize, OS X does not fall afoul of the OK/Cancel problem to anywhere near the same degree as Windows, but there is room for improvement. Ideally, the user should know what is an application and what is an executable before clicking on it. Ideally, they should be able to run it without a warning and the OS should appropriately sandbox it, by default, so that it can be run safely, even if it is malware. I suspect that is the direction of the future, but we're not there yet. Apple's design seems like a pretty good compromise to me. It's not great and revolutionary, but it is better than, well, anyone else's solution I've seen.
...and there is little point in running it.With regard to Leopard's new firewall, the idea is layered security. If malware slips onto the machine, the Firewall may still be able to limit the damage it can do. If a worm can't connect to its control channel, it basically does nothing. I'd also note that the new firewall is application based, not port based. That means it can restrict some new game from accessing port 80, while allowing your Web browser to do so. Sadly, it is not used to its full potential, but having it on any running can save your butt. Just be careful to note that the new firewall is not the old firewall and running both can be better yet. There are a lot of ports I don't want to communicate on and even if I don't knowingly run a service on one, does not mean some trojan has not done it for me. The firewall is a way to detect and stop that action.
I understand that there are environments where the default level of security of workstations is insufficient and hardening is needed. The thing is, if you're administrating such an environment and need to harden your systems a bit more, you should already have read the similar hardening guide for OS X that was published by the NSA (or at least be aware of it since it was discussed in hundreds of security forums when released). It was for Panther at the time, but not much has changed since then, at least as far as practices. Or you could use the hardening guide Apple released for Tiger. In any case, this guide probably should have little to do with your purchasing decisions.
The best ever? When was a new release of a Web rendering engine not the best release ever? From what I've heard most of the major developer, including those paid by Trolltech started working on pulling features over from KHTML to WebKit with the goal of using WebKit for Konqueror going forward. Further, the input from Apple, Nokia and others has clearly left KHTML falling further and further behind.
Webkit is a fork of KHTML, and some of the bugfixes are ported from Webkit over to KHTML. The two engines are basically sisters, and both continue to be developed.I don't think anyone really thinks that is the plan going forward. I think there are still a few holdouts that will continue with KTML, but it seems pretty much out of the running as I understand.