If you need 'support' for a word processor, you shouldn't be at university.
Really, because way back when I was having problems with automatically pulling data in WordPerfect from Matlab, Using SunOS. I e-mailed support and they helped me script around the bugs in their interface. Should I have dropped out at that point to satisfy your weird view of the world?
Ferrari caters to the uber-wealthy and their products aren't supposed to have high sales volume and mass market appeal. The same cannot be said for Apple.
Apple is selling a device to the extreme high end of the market, just like Ferrari. If they max out there production for the first two years they will probably manage to make enough for about 0.1% of the cell phone market. That may not be as small a share as the Ferrari, but based upon initial demand it seems like they will be selling them as fast as they can make them on the high end. After a year, the price will come down and they will aim for one step down from the super high end. It makes sense to me.
If Google makes these applications save out and email their work in ODF, M$ had better work with ODF or risk losing the other half of the market to Open Office even faster then they are.
Well, the idea is basically that you keep the document in Google docs and make it readable or readable and writable to someone else, which is, in a way, better than ODF. Right now the export options from the word processor are ODF, HTML, RTF, Word, and PDF. Google Docs is interoperable with other programs which is probably enough to weaken MS's format lock-in.
So, you are suggesting that somehow it's OK for people in the education sector to have "documents and communication all run, unencrypted to a third party"?
In most cases, yes. I don't see that Google is any less trustworthy than any of the third party companies IT is outsourced to now. No one really wants to steal your undergraduate term papers, and in many cases they are already both published and submitted to third parties for archival in anti-plagiarism services. When you look to k-12 education this becomes even less of an issue, in my opinion.
That's not the fault of the package manager. The developer could choose to distribute it in a repository and add some sort of license or registration on the "config" step, and have the program refuse to run until it's completed.
If a developer already has to implement their own update mechanism to insure this for new versions and the initial registration and host their own "repository" for the software, why shouldn't they just roll their own service entirely? I mean if they have to choose between rolling their own service or, rolling their own slightly less functional service and trying to write a script for each of the many existing package managers, why should they do the latter?
Technically they could to the former, but it does not make a lot of sense for them. In order to simplify package management for user I think the package managers need to be made easy to use for all the needs of commercial developers in order to actually getting them using it and improve the platform. This means defining and using standards for package management and including everything needed by developers in that standard.
However, I suppose you could add this to package managers. They already have support for a generic concept of a license, and I believe Ubuntu will ask you the first time it finds a strange license, and then not ask you again if you say yes.
I think it is vital that a standard for packages and package management include an official registration channel for licensing as well as a standard location within the package for such a license in order to get developers on board.
So IM isn't the obstacle here, really, it's pulling a package out of your running system. The only package manager I know of that will do this is Gentoo's Portage, but it could serve as a model for others.
The basic idea is not only the ability to extract a portable package from an installed application, but to do so in a very user friendly way. If I drag my application icon into my IM window or e-mail or to a CD, it should "just work." You could do this with great complexity by having the OS recognize those export methods, create the bundle, and recognize incoming bundles on the other end and automatically install them, but I think that is a whole lot harder than simply adopting OpenStep style packages within your package manager in the first place.
Games don't store them in the game binary. Just because it's in a.app does not magically mean people will store resources separately, instead of in the binary -- and just because it's a package and a normal binary doesn't mean people will be stupid enough not to put music into some folder, like everyone else.
We're not just talking about music, but also images and movies and the like. Simply having a standardized location within the package greatly simplifies finding these items, means development tools are more likely to make use of that location, and means third party tools designed to extract these and convert them to more common formats know here to look. This is not a huge win, but it is more elegant and results in better and more predictable behavior from developers in my experience.
However, assuming most of this was commercial software, the right thing for a package manager to do would be to give you an easy way to grab all your license keys and a list of software, and let it re-download everything.
Why? Why re-download everything when you already have it? What if it was never available for download in the first place and you got it from a network share at work or a CD-ROM you bought at Walmart? What if you have a slow internet connection, or don't have any internet at the time of the upgrade? What if you paid for software, but the copy of the serial number was lost in a fire or when you moved? Is it really a good idea to work from a clean slate every time?
You're in school for christ sake, how about have a class or two about the libre software tools in the 100 level?
Umm, how does this help mitgate any of the points I made?
The rest of your comment is nonsense. There are plenty of schools that have made the move to libre software already. And they haven't collapsed in upon themselves as you are alluding.
I never said they would collapse, I simply pointed out some of the many reasons why Google Docs is more suited to the academic setting than OpenOffice. Calling someone an idiot because they did not move to OpenOffice instead is what is nonsense.
As for the mac users, isn't there a port of OpenOffice to that already?
Sure there is. It is just immensely slow. It is actually faster for me to run the Linux native version in Kubuntu, in a VM running on top of OS X, than it is for me to run the last version of NeoOffice I tested. The developers are making progress and I applaud their effort, but in the end Google docs opens instantly and is responsive, while NeoOffice takes a minute or more to load and can't even keep up with my typing much of the time on a machine significantly faster than what the average user will have.
Anyways, bullshit whining. There are libre software choices, you just have to pull your head out of your arse and look around.
You're the one who has to realize that being free and open is a feature, and not a particularly important one to many people. You just assume it is the best choice for someone because it is open, but that is completely a false assumption. Sometime a closed source tool is a better choice for me and for most people in general.
There are two types of people...
...those who assert false dichotomies in an attempt to oversimplify the world so they don't have to think, and those who objectively view every choice without blinders on. You'll find my name on IETF drafts, and I've contributed to many open source projects. That does not mean it is always the best solution to a given problem.
The reason Universities spend SO much money on MS Office and related products is because MS Office programs are used in the overhwelming[sic] majority of businesses.
So you're telling me that five years after a user graduates their skills using MS Office products will be more valuable and translate better to whatever the most popular office tool of the day is than using Google Docs? How do you know that by the time they graduate Google Docs won't be the standard? When I was in school the word processor of choice was WordPerfect, does that hinder my ability to use MS Word somehow? For the most part a word processor is a word processor. A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. If your university is training you to use any specific tool, instead of teaching you general concepts and skills that you can apply across many different tools, then you should probably drop out now and find a better school.
The reason some universities use MS Office products is because MS gives them huge discounts and it minimizes the support costs as it is what most users have on their home machines. There has been a noticable move towards OpenOffice in recent years because it further reduces costs and the users can have the exact same (up to date) version on their home machine further reducing support issues. This is hampered by the difficulty of migrating formats and making changes in general, and by OpenOffice's lackluster Mac support, which is more important in university settings.
Google docs is offering a way to not only almost the functionality MS Office supplies, but also to handle the support for almost all of it as well as server administration costs and duplicating the benefit of having the same product at home and in school while also eliminating the transport problem. If your university is not evaluating at Google Docs as a potential solution, then you are the on likely to be left behind as technology moves on. MS is doing their best to try to move MS Office to an internet service model as well, so you'd better get used to it.
Dear school guy, Use Openoffice. It's free. Run it on top of GNU/Linux. It's also free.
Dear Clueless,
How much does it cost for direct telephone support for all those OpenOffice users? How much does it cost to run e-mail servers for them? How much does it cost for disk space and maintaining redundant backups of the disk? How much does it cost to administer the calendar, e-mail, IM, file, and backup servers? How many students are willing to wipe their macs in order to install Linux and get a reasonable version of OpenOffice? Who will be providing support for the installation of OpenOffice on all those home machines as well as providing a mechanism for transporting the user's files between the two systems and keeping them synched?
Get a fucking clue.
Aside from learning some basic courtesy, make you should learn to think through what all is being provided by Google here and how hard it would actually be to replicate all that functionality in a university setting. There are a lot of cases where OpenOffice is a much, much better solution than Google Docs. At our business, for example, we would not let our documents and communication all run, unencrypted to a third party. We would not relinquish so much control of the functions handled by our servers. For the education sector, however, Google seems to be offering a lot of real advantages over OpenOffice at this time.
I'm not the original poster but the idea of a fully open source system I can freely and legally copy without a license appeals to me very much. It just doesn't appeal to me enough that I'm willing to give up the last 5 years worth of progress and ease of use on my desktop. I consider software being free and open source to be a feature, which I weigh against all the other features. Right now, it is the other features where Linux is falling behind (IMHO).
If the best free and open source OS was a piece of garbage that was 10 times slower then any commercial OS, insecure, and lacking in modern features like a GUI, or ability to address more than 100 meg of RAM, would you use it on your desktop every day or would you go with Windows or OS X? Assuming the latter, then we agree in principal and it is just an evaluation of particular features which is different for us.
I use Linux on the desktop for certain applications and as a server for a lot of applications, but unless Linux somehow catches up for both ease of use and features, it won't be on my main desktop, except in a VM.
Currently there is not one standard for package managers and no package manager offers all the features commercial developers want, so they roll their own installers. As a result, end users have to juggle to methods of managing and updating applications, which sucks for novices. End users have to run some random binary installer and hope it is not malicious.
there has been commercial applications on *nix for a couple of decades and linux can be treated the same way.
Yeah, but commercial software on other platforms has moved on in the mean time. Developers don't want to give you a binary and trust you only install it once, while ignoring widespread illegal copying. Since package managers don't handle this, or even do a good job of handling software installed from a CD-ROM, since their is no official (package manager independent) way to provide repository information for updates of that software, commercial developers almost all roll their own solution, if they target Linux at all.
You do not have to use the package manager on the distro and it may be better to ignore it so that is one less thing to be dependant[sic] on so your application will run on all the recent distros for the same architecture.
That may be fine for the developer, but is sucks for the user. They now have two methods they have to deal with for keeping software up to date and uninstalling software and they still have to run some arbitrary binary rather than just install a package, which is no worse on low security systems, but a lot worse on systems that implement ACLs. You honestly don't think making a package manager that actually handles all the functions developers want is a better idea than having them all have to roll their own solution or ignore Linux?
Easy enough. The commercial vendors just need to provide repositories of their own. Have the installer or install script add their repository to the end of/etc/apt/sources.list... Click'n'run. Can be done with a web site, doesn't need any changes to the package manager.
Yeah, and theoretically everyone can just migrate away from Windows and move to Linux. Why should a commercial developer start using the official package manager if they have to do extra work to register their software for every package manager in use? Why should they use the repository if they already have to implement their own registration service to insure a given item of software is up to date? What is the advantage for them?
If you want developers to take advantage of features you have to design those features to easily accommodate those developers.
You'll never be able to get rid of the mess of different installers. Even on the Mac, where Apple provides a standard installer and documents the standard installation process, vendors still insist on building their own crappy installers that don't quite work right. Same on Linux. Commercial software vendors seem to think that a non-standard installer gives them a commercial edge.
OS X does not have a proper package management system, only a minimalist one that adds very little value. Commercial software developers are right, it does give them an edge to roll their own installer/registration/update scheme because there is no one standard for packages/package management and because none of the package managers in use offer all the functions they need. Why design to target a dozen package managers and still have to develop your own registration/verification setup to prevent people from ripping you off, when you could just use a custom installer that takes care of all of it and you don't have to worry what package manager the end user has?
The whole point of my argument is if you design a package manager that does accommodate all the needs of a commercial developer, including developing a standard that all package managers can adhere to, then maybe commercial developers will be motivated to use it, since it will be easier for them. The end result of course, will be more ease of use and functionality for end users, which should be the goal of package managers.
One of the things I think a lot of developers of all platforms don't seem to understand is arguing "if only they would do this" without considering ways to motivate users to do that. Offering a feature that does not get used does not help anyone. You have to make the feature easy enough and beneficial enough to the people who are the decision makers. Technically, developers could all manage the particular functionality we're discussing without changes to exisiting package managers. Realistically, that is a pain in the butt for them and does not benefit them, so they don't, and it is end users who suffer for it.
The biggest problem with *NIX applications is that they have a horrible habit of scattering their files all over your filesystem. This basically forces you to invent a package manager just to handle a task that ought to be easy. Keeping applications up to date might need a specialised[sic] tool; installing and uninstalling really shouldn't.
OS X is not always an exception to this rule. I don't know that it is practical to install all applications via drag and drop, given the need for kernel modules and the like. I certainly agree with your point in that it should be an option whenever possible and I think that whether software is installed from a CD, repository, or from some internet channel mechanisms should be in place to manage it and keep it up to date. What I'd really like to see is the OpenStep specification expanded to include official locations for repository information for updates to the software, so a package manager will always know how to do this.
This is a relevant point because you were using it as an example of what Photoshop could, but doesn't, do in OSX that it couldn't do in Windows.
I was listing features Adobe does not take advantage of. I listed CoreGraphics as well, which I'm sure Photoshop uses at some point. My point was that they don't do anything useful with these features above and beyond parity with Windows, despite there being the opportunity.
I take issue with the irrelevant conclusion that, because Adobe bought Macromedia, everyone who ever bought Dreamweaver is an Adobe customer, then used this "fact" to help refute someone else's point.
Feel free to take issue with that, but it is not something I ever wrote. What I wrote was about Adobe's software offering called "Dreamweaver." Just because that part of what is now Adobe used to be called "Macromedia" does not make my statement any less accurate or your observations any more relevant.
You do a good job of describing the advantages of a good package manager. I agree for many situations the Linux way is easier. The problem I have is the state of existing package managers for non-ideal situations:
I want to download a closed source application that must be registered to use. The developer won't put it in an official repository so I'm left downloading it from a Website just like Windows and running a random binary that is the installer, just like Windows, and checking for updates manually, just like Windows, except this is different for my normal workflow so the end result is I have to keep track of two ways of doing things, which is worse than Windows for novices. Package managers need to accommodate downloads from the Web and registration/payment/licensing as an integral part of package management.
I have an application that is no longer distributed by the manufacturer anywhere and I want to transfer it to a friend. Further, I need to send it via IM since that is the medium we're communicating in. On OS X I drag the.app package to the IM and it works. On Linux if I'm an expert user and my distro saved installers, I can dig up the installer and transfer it, but if I'm a novice I probably will not be able to figure out how to do this.
I'm upgrading to a new laptop from my old laptop and I want to transfer all my old software over, rather than trying to find all my licensing keys and insert them into a freshly downloaded copy assuming that works with the registration scheme for the commercial software and assuming they are available for download somewhere instead of on a CD-ROM in a box in my attic. The complication, is my new laptop has a different chip architecture and it is 64 bit Intel instead of 32 bit PPC. With OS X, both binaries are included in the package and it runs seamlessly, while on Linux it does not.
I really want to grab the music from a closed source game I bought, but how do I get it out of the game binary? On Linux often the best bet is to record my outgoing audio stream. With a.app bundle It is in the resources sub-folder and "cp" easily makes a copy in my music directory.
I have an office application, but I only have one license for it and I want it to be installed on a thumb drive and portable between my desktop and laptop and I want it to have the right preferences on each machine, since one has multiple monitors and one font set, while the other has only one monitor. With OS X style packages I can just drag it onto the thumb drive and it works without any hassle, because the packages are designed to be portable, with Linux I probably have to get a special version of the software that is designed with portable drives in mind (like portable firefox).
I'm implementing a security system that uses MACLs to restrict applications from access to anything they don't need, where can the develop store an ACL to describe what the binary should be doing within the application? Where is a standard location the application can write its own files to that does not interfere with any other application and is nicely contained? With a folder is the application model (like OS X) the ACL can go in the folder and it can write within the folder and my ACLs can be simple. With binaries dropped in/usr I have to make a special folder for each application or specify some other standard location which will break if it is moved and which will not be as tidy or as elegant.
Okay I don't want you to get me wrong here. I really, really appreciate the advantages of package managers. For expert users especially they are way, way better in many ways. It is hard to overstate the advantages of a centralized update system. The problem I have is I don't think current package managers do enough to accommodate the needs of commercial, closed source developers and so they bypass them, resulting in less security and convenience for me. Further, I think the packages themselves are lacking in portab
Every OS written in a C-based language supports stdin, stdout, and stderr along with using input/output redirects and piping. That includes MS-DOS and MS Windows.
You can be as pedantic as you like, that does not make Photoshop output anything useful to the command line via stdout.
The latest version of Dreamweaver is Macromedia Dreamweaver 8. Until Adobe releases a new version, I won't consider it an Adobe product and I doubt anyone else will either.
They are one company now called "Adobe" This entire conversation was predicated upon MS's response to their merger. If they had decided to keep the name "Macromedia" for the new company and I referred to Dreamweaver as a product of the new company formed by the merger would you take issue with that? I don't see the point of your distinction in terms of this conversation.
I want my package manager to know where these RPMs came from and be able to keep them up to date for starters, you know like all the other software. I want it to be so simple for developers to have their applications bundled this way that all commercial software is bundled this way. Further, I want the package manager to accommodate discovering this application, downloading it, registering it with the vendor, and paying any licensing fees. I basically want to go to a Web page an click on the download link under "Linux" and have my package manager open up with a listing for that item of software that provides everything I need to manage the commercial package rather than having to mess with a different installer for each commercial program.
Why is this marked as a troll? He makes a valid point. Linux package managers do a terrible job of accommodating commercial software the vendor does not want added to someone else's repository.
This is not a black and white issue and I wish people would stop trying to defend their favorite, beloved OS for one second and actually think about this. Package managers are bloody useful. They handle dependency issues, installation and un-installation of apps, updating apps, discovery, and download of apps. In future they could be used in addition to provide licensing and registration of applications, ACLs for applications running in secure environments, build instructions for source, and certification of applications from trusted third parties (whitelists, blacklists, and even greylists). It is doubtful anyone will manage to gain all these benefits without a package manager.
Package managers are not perfect. First, they don't provide a lot of the things I listed above that they could. Second, they are not as easy to use and the packages in them are not as useful and flexible as something like.app bundles on OS X. There are real benefits to drag and drop installation and un-installation, as well as inclusion of FAT binaries and the ability to send a functional application via IM, or run them from a thumb drive with no special tricks or customization.
If OS zealots would just look at it objectively, it is clear that a combination of an application manager and portable application bundles is the ideal. Why can't someone incorporate both and give us the best of both worlds?
Funny how you never hear Windows or Mac users wishing for package managers and app repositories...
Windows has a package manager, just not one that pulls from a repository. As a Windows and Mac user, I hereby wish both had functional package managers that integrated with repositories. The benefits are numerous. Note, that is not to say I want the platform to migrate to the same lousy package formats as Linux tends to use. I want to keep clan and portable and contained OS X style.app bundles, I just want a nice package manager to handle some discovery, downloads, updates, clean uninstalls, and situations where the app needs to install a kernel module or something.
Actually there was demand for having a repository system on Mac, which is why fink exists.
Well, Fink is pretty much a compatibility tool for installing Linux ports, but there are real package managers for OS X that handle both CLI, X11, and Aqua applications.
Hey, slow down there champ! I never said it was MS's fault. It is clearly Adobe's fault for prioritizing keeping the different versions for different platforms in synch above taking advantage of all the features of the more functional OS.
Adobe doesn't use OpenGL at all from what I can tell so I don't know what you're complaining about here.
Actually, they use OpenGL a lot.
Core graphics is something of a black box. I can understand Adobe not wanting to turn over image processing to someone else's closed code, especially in products which are primarily about image processing.
First, not all of Adobe's products have much of anything to do with image processing. Second, there is no reason not to use the capabilities of CoreGraphics and now CoreAnimation, even if that is just to hand graphics off to it and get them back once they are processed.
I hate to break this to you, but the cmd.exe in Windows is actually a very competent shell.
Hahahahahahaha! Whew. That's good. Even MS disagrees with you. Read the MS docs on monad and notice all the shortcoming of their existing shell it is supposed to address. Notice that 90% of them are already solved with bash.
Adobe ignores THAT, too. So again this has nothing to do with Windows or OSX and everything to do with Adobe's stupidity.
Ignoring the CLI for Windows apps is business as usual because Windows users do not use the CLI as a primary interface. Ignoring the CLI on OS X, for professional applications is not business as usual and is an uncommon design decision because the CLI is a heavily used interface on OS X.
Framemaker and Photoshop are also the only Adobe applications which have ever been common on Unix...
Actually, Illustrator was heavily used on many different flavors of UNIX and I'm sure some of their other software supported other OS's back in the day that I just never used. What this has to do with the technical capabilities of the users is another question.
Migrating from LaTeX was probably a big mistake.
Spoken like someone who has never built a workflow for a group of writers and publishers. LaTeX is great for a few very limited cases where you're using automation. In general use, however, it is simply too out of date. Colors and graphics are implemented as hacks. The learning curve is steep and the workflow for most jobs is torture. InDesign uses the exact same layout engine, but actually has a graphical interface for working with graphics (what a concept!)
No, it's an argument against bothering with Linux support. Most of their users wouldn't know what to do with Linux.
Yeah, graphics people wouldn't know what to do with Linux, like those technically inept guys over at Pixar. Several of Adobe's apps ported to Linux would spur adoption of Linux as people migrated their work flows away from Windows... not as many as OS X, but enough to possibly scare MS.
Over the last few years, I have seen much more Linux and Unix devotees switch to Macs than Ubuntu.
I've certainly seen the same thing. I know about 100 people who have switched to OS X in the last few years and I know 1 person who went back to Linux. Most of these people are Linux developers, writing software for Linux servers, using OS X desktops. For myself, I rely upon OS X more and more on the desktop and I migrated my Linux desktop from a separate box running Fedora to a Kubuntu install in a VM on top of OS X. The list of desktop apps I still use it for has shrunk to pretty much gimp, inkscape, and xpdf.
Would you care to explain what functionality useful to any Adobe application is present on OSX and not present on Windows XP?
Sure. Adobe apps generally ignore system services and do not use that mechanism to share functionality between Adobe apps, instead implementing their own, limited variant that clones the behavior on Windows. As a result, Adobe apps waste the resources needed to duplicate functionality implemented by Adobe apps and other apps as well. They ignore even the default Apple included services like the dictionary/thesaurus service.
Adobe ignores most of the core graphics APIs that make it trivial for me to do something like add a watermark to every page of a PDF in a small shareware app, but which is still very hard to do to an existing PDF with any of Adobe's tools. It also limits the OS's ability to automatically take more advantage of multiple processors for OpenGL operations that are CPU intensive.
Adobe apps tend to ignore the capable command line in OS X as much as possible, including stdout, limiting the use of Adobe apps in scripted workflows and automation, instead relying entirely upon input from the GUI, except where Adobe did not consider it at all and the system automatically lets you do things. I can pipe data to Photoshop, for example, but Adobe had nothing to do with that.
Adobe is not going to start putting commercial apps on Linux any time soon. It is a support nightmare for a company like Adobe that has to support complete idiots.
Adobe has had Linux and even Solaris versions of some of their applications in the past, but cancelled them to focus on Windows. They've cancelled even Mac versions of some of their software. I don't think this has anything to do with support costs.
...I say that practically no artist types know thing fucking one about a computer.
There is one glaring problem with this statement. You're assuming Adobe's users are graphics people. Half the user base of Framemaker migrated from LaTeX. Dreamweaver is the favored Web development application of some pretty hard core nerds. Your generalizations are uninformed.
...But most artists need to pay someone like me to do even simple things like hardware upgrades...
So you think this is argument against Adobe supporting OS X more? From where I'm sitting OS X is easier to use than windows and has more technically un-inclined graphics people. Adobe expanding support for the Mac and other platforms like Linux as well for certain apps, is a great way to put pressure on MS by facilitating the weakening of their core monopoly.
Apps you mean; namely InDesign and Illustrator CS2 both do it to me on a somewhat regular basis.
Weird, I almost always have a 100 meg InDesign file open (sometimes up to 5 copies of it) and I've never had it crash in such a way as I could not restart it. I do know about 3 cross-platform ways to reproducibly crash InDesign that Adobe has ignored my bugs on for several years now. I use Illustrator a lot less, but I've never had it crash on me at all. I wonder what is so different about our use cases.
If you did display them on the desktop...
I don't see a lot of point to storing anything on my desktop or in moving windows out of the way so I can see it. The dock provides instant, persistent access to my most common items. Spotlight provides fast access to everything else. From what I've seen, mostly Windows people who have not developed faster work flows use the desktop for actually accessing things and care to look on it for icons.
According to the design department over here, Adobe products aren't even made for the PC.
I wish that were true. Sadly, Adobe has several products for which they have dropped the Mac version completely (like Framemaker, where prior to this decision is accounted for 60% of their market). In my experience a lot of Adobe products are held back because they take care to keep them as close on Windows and the Mac as possible, meaning they ignore most of the really cool features of OS X that MS has not yet copied on Windows.
With Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, MS decided it was time to take action. They have already started leveraging their monopoly to cut into Adobe's markets and will be doing so with increasing regularity. Adobe now has to choose whether to try to "negotiate" with MS, which insures short term profits but will kill them in the long term unless something changes, or if they are going to play hardball and throw their weight behind OS X and Linux in order to gain a better bargaining position.
It's not because it slows down. It's because some Adobe app craps all over itself to some extent that is only repaired by a reboot. No idea whose fault that is, but it doesn't happen to me on Windows (same apps.)
What app in particular? I use Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Bridge, and Acrobat very regularly on both platforms, as well as the occasional use of Dreamweaver and regular use of Framemaker on Windows. While I have had them crap out to the point that Windows needed a reboot, I don't think any have ever done so on OS X. InDesign, in particular, has about 2 days of use on Windows before Windows needs rebooting and about 5 days on OS X, but just restarting InDesign solves my problems (any more time than either and it will crash on its own).
OSX is also the only OS that refuses to remember where I put my hard disk icon:(
Umm, I'm not sure what you mean by that. All my partitions show up in the same places all the time in OS X. I don't display them on the desktop and have not dragged them to the dock, but aside from those locations I'm not sure what kind of a problem you could be having.
Uhm, pair programming doesn't mean that both programmers need to actively modify the same file at the same time.
Of course not, but it helps. Most of the pair programmers I know actually share a machine and one keyboard.
But for actual work (not technology demonstrations), and programming in particular, I believe you will have more success by just agreeing beforehand who does what, and/or manually merging the few conflicts you have.
Have you actually tried it? Having one person add a comment in the same file as another person is adding a line of code saves an immense amount of time. Once programmers get used to SubEthaEdit, you should see them fight to keep it. The whole point of pair programming (in my experience) is that two heads are better than one, but two keyboards are also better than one in that you can add information up to twice as quickly.
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Really, because way back when I was having problems with automatically pulling data in WordPerfect from Matlab, Using SunOS. I e-mailed support and they helped me script around the bugs in their interface. Should I have dropped out at that point to satisfy your weird view of the world?
Apple is selling a device to the extreme high end of the market, just like Ferrari. If they max out there production for the first two years they will probably manage to make enough for about 0.1% of the cell phone market. That may not be as small a share as the Ferrari, but based upon initial demand it seems like they will be selling them as fast as they can make them on the high end. After a year, the price will come down and they will aim for one step down from the super high end. It makes sense to me.
Well, the idea is basically that you keep the document in Google docs and make it readable or readable and writable to someone else, which is, in a way, better than ODF. Right now the export options from the word processor are ODF, HTML, RTF, Word, and PDF. Google Docs is interoperable with other programs which is probably enough to weaken MS's format lock-in.
In most cases, yes. I don't see that Google is any less trustworthy than any of the third party companies IT is outsourced to now. No one really wants to steal your undergraduate term papers, and in many cases they are already both published and submitted to third parties for archival in anti-plagiarism services. When you look to k-12 education this becomes even less of an issue, in my opinion.
That's not the fault of the package manager. The developer could choose to distribute it in a repository and add some sort of license or registration on the "config" step, and have the program refuse to run until it's completed.
If a developer already has to implement their own update mechanism to insure this for new versions and the initial registration and host their own "repository" for the software, why shouldn't they just roll their own service entirely? I mean if they have to choose between rolling their own service or, rolling their own slightly less functional service and trying to write a script for each of the many existing package managers, why should they do the latter?
Technically they could to the former, but it does not make a lot of sense for them. In order to simplify package management for user I think the package managers need to be made easy to use for all the needs of commercial developers in order to actually getting them using it and improve the platform. This means defining and using standards for package management and including everything needed by developers in that standard.
However, I suppose you could add this to package managers. They already have support for a generic concept of a license, and I believe Ubuntu will ask you the first time it finds a strange license, and then not ask you again if you say yes.
I think it is vital that a standard for packages and package management include an official registration channel for licensing as well as a standard location within the package for such a license in order to get developers on board.
So IM isn't the obstacle here, really, it's pulling a package out of your running system. The only package manager I know of that will do this is Gentoo's Portage, but it could serve as a model for others.
The basic idea is not only the ability to extract a portable package from an installed application, but to do so in a very user friendly way. If I drag my application icon into my IM window or e-mail or to a CD, it should "just work." You could do this with great complexity by having the OS recognize those export methods, create the bundle, and recognize incoming bundles on the other end and automatically install them, but I think that is a whole lot harder than simply adopting OpenStep style packages within your package manager in the first place.
Games don't store them in the game binary. Just because it's in a .app does not magically mean people will store resources separately, instead of in the binary -- and just because it's a package and a normal binary doesn't mean people will be stupid enough not to put music into some folder, like everyone else.
We're not just talking about music, but also images and movies and the like. Simply having a standardized location within the package greatly simplifies finding these items, means development tools are more likely to make use of that location, and means third party tools designed to extract these and convert them to more common formats know here to look. This is not a huge win, but it is more elegant and results in better and more predictable behavior from developers in my experience.
However, assuming most of this was commercial software, the right thing for a package manager to do would be to give you an easy way to grab all your license keys and a list of software, and let it re-download everything.
Why? Why re-download everything when you already have it? What if it was never available for download in the first place and you got it from a network share at work or a CD-ROM you bought at Walmart? What if you have a slow internet connection, or don't have any internet at the time of the upgrade? What if you paid for software, but the copy of the serial number was lost in a fire or when you moved? Is it really a good idea to work from a clean slate every time?
And I know not all soft
Umm, how does this help mitgate any of the points I made?
The rest of your comment is nonsense. There are plenty of schools that have made the move to libre software already. And they haven't collapsed in upon themselves as you are alluding.I never said they would collapse, I simply pointed out some of the many reasons why Google Docs is more suited to the academic setting than OpenOffice. Calling someone an idiot because they did not move to OpenOffice instead is what is nonsense.
As for the mac users, isn't there a port of OpenOffice to that already?Sure there is. It is just immensely slow. It is actually faster for me to run the Linux native version in Kubuntu, in a VM running on top of OS X, than it is for me to run the last version of NeoOffice I tested. The developers are making progress and I applaud their effort, but in the end Google docs opens instantly and is responsive, while NeoOffice takes a minute or more to load and can't even keep up with my typing much of the time on a machine significantly faster than what the average user will have.
Anyways, bullshit whining. There are libre software choices, you just have to pull your head out of your arse and look around.You're the one who has to realize that being free and open is a feature, and not a particularly important one to many people. You just assume it is the best choice for someone because it is open, but that is completely a false assumption. Sometime a closed source tool is a better choice for me and for most people in general.
There are two types of people......those who assert false dichotomies in an attempt to oversimplify the world so they don't have to think, and those who objectively view every choice without blinders on. You'll find my name on IETF drafts, and I've contributed to many open source projects. That does not mean it is always the best solution to a given problem.
So you're telling me that five years after a user graduates their skills using MS Office products will be more valuable and translate better to whatever the most popular office tool of the day is than using Google Docs? How do you know that by the time they graduate Google Docs won't be the standard? When I was in school the word processor of choice was WordPerfect, does that hinder my ability to use MS Word somehow? For the most part a word processor is a word processor. A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. If your university is training you to use any specific tool, instead of teaching you general concepts and skills that you can apply across many different tools, then you should probably drop out now and find a better school.
The reason some universities use MS Office products is because MS gives them huge discounts and it minimizes the support costs as it is what most users have on their home machines. There has been a noticable move towards OpenOffice in recent years because it further reduces costs and the users can have the exact same (up to date) version on their home machine further reducing support issues. This is hampered by the difficulty of migrating formats and making changes in general, and by OpenOffice's lackluster Mac support, which is more important in university settings.
Google docs is offering a way to not only almost the functionality MS Office supplies, but also to handle the support for almost all of it as well as server administration costs and duplicating the benefit of having the same product at home and in school while also eliminating the transport problem. If your university is not evaluating at Google Docs as a potential solution, then you are the on likely to be left behind as technology moves on. MS is doing their best to try to move MS Office to an internet service model as well, so you'd better get used to it.
Dear Clueless,
How much does it cost for direct telephone support for all those OpenOffice users? How much does it cost to run e-mail servers for them? How much does it cost for disk space and maintaining redundant backups of the disk? How much does it cost to administer the calendar, e-mail, IM, file, and backup servers? How many students are willing to wipe their macs in order to install Linux and get a reasonable version of OpenOffice? Who will be providing support for the installation of OpenOffice on all those home machines as well as providing a mechanism for transporting the user's files between the two systems and keeping them synched?
Get a fucking clue.Aside from learning some basic courtesy, make you should learn to think through what all is being provided by Google here and how hard it would actually be to replicate all that functionality in a university setting. There are a lot of cases where OpenOffice is a much, much better solution than Google Docs. At our business, for example, we would not let our documents and communication all run, unencrypted to a third party. We would not relinquish so much control of the functions handled by our servers. For the education sector, however, Google seems to be offering a lot of real advantages over OpenOffice at this time.
I'm not the original poster but the idea of a fully open source system I can freely and legally copy without a license appeals to me very much. It just doesn't appeal to me enough that I'm willing to give up the last 5 years worth of progress and ease of use on my desktop. I consider software being free and open source to be a feature, which I weigh against all the other features. Right now, it is the other features where Linux is falling behind (IMHO).
If the best free and open source OS was a piece of garbage that was 10 times slower then any commercial OS, insecure, and lacking in modern features like a GUI, or ability to address more than 100 meg of RAM, would you use it on your desktop every day or would you go with Windows or OS X? Assuming the latter, then we agree in principal and it is just an evaluation of particular features which is different for us.
I use Linux on the desktop for certain applications and as a server for a lot of applications, but unless Linux somehow catches up for both ease of use and features, it won't be on my main desktop, except in a VM.
Currently there is not one standard for package managers and no package manager offers all the features commercial developers want, so they roll their own installers. As a result, end users have to juggle to methods of managing and updating applications, which sucks for novices. End users have to run some random binary installer and hope it is not malicious.
there has been commercial applications on *nix for a couple of decades and linux can be treated the same way.Yeah, but commercial software on other platforms has moved on in the mean time. Developers don't want to give you a binary and trust you only install it once, while ignoring widespread illegal copying. Since package managers don't handle this, or even do a good job of handling software installed from a CD-ROM, since their is no official (package manager independent) way to provide repository information for updates of that software, commercial developers almost all roll their own solution, if they target Linux at all.
You do not have to use the package manager on the distro and it may be better to ignore it so that is one less thing to be dependant[sic] on so your application will run on all the recent distros for the same architecture.That may be fine for the developer, but is sucks for the user. They now have two methods they have to deal with for keeping software up to date and uninstalling software and they still have to run some arbitrary binary rather than just install a package, which is no worse on low security systems, but a lot worse on systems that implement ACLs. You honestly don't think making a package manager that actually handles all the functions developers want is a better idea than having them all have to roll their own solution or ignore Linux?
Yeah, and theoretically everyone can just migrate away from Windows and move to Linux. Why should a commercial developer start using the official package manager if they have to do extra work to register their software for every package manager in use? Why should they use the repository if they already have to implement their own registration service to insure a given item of software is up to date? What is the advantage for them?
If you want developers to take advantage of features you have to design those features to easily accommodate those developers.
You'll never be able to get rid of the mess of different installers. Even on the Mac, where Apple provides a standard installer and documents the standard installation process, vendors still insist on building their own crappy installers that don't quite work right. Same on Linux. Commercial software vendors seem to think that a non-standard installer gives them a commercial edge.OS X does not have a proper package management system, only a minimalist one that adds very little value. Commercial software developers are right, it does give them an edge to roll their own installer/registration/update scheme because there is no one standard for packages/package management and because none of the package managers in use offer all the functions they need. Why design to target a dozen package managers and still have to develop your own registration/verification setup to prevent people from ripping you off, when you could just use a custom installer that takes care of all of it and you don't have to worry what package manager the end user has?
The whole point of my argument is if you design a package manager that does accommodate all the needs of a commercial developer, including developing a standard that all package managers can adhere to, then maybe commercial developers will be motivated to use it, since it will be easier for them. The end result of course, will be more ease of use and functionality for end users, which should be the goal of package managers.
One of the things I think a lot of developers of all platforms don't seem to understand is arguing "if only they would do this" without considering ways to motivate users to do that. Offering a feature that does not get used does not help anyone. You have to make the feature easy enough and beneficial enough to the people who are the decision makers. Technically, developers could all manage the particular functionality we're discussing without changes to exisiting package managers. Realistically, that is a pain in the butt for them and does not benefit them, so they don't, and it is end users who suffer for it.
OS X is not always an exception to this rule. I don't know that it is practical to install all applications via drag and drop, given the need for kernel modules and the like. I certainly agree with your point in that it should be an option whenever possible and I think that whether software is installed from a CD, repository, or from some internet channel mechanisms should be in place to manage it and keep it up to date. What I'd really like to see is the OpenStep specification expanded to include official locations for repository information for updates to the software, so a package manager will always know how to do this.
I was listing features Adobe does not take advantage of. I listed CoreGraphics as well, which I'm sure Photoshop uses at some point. My point was that they don't do anything useful with these features above and beyond parity with Windows, despite there being the opportunity.
I take issue with the irrelevant conclusion that, because Adobe bought Macromedia, everyone who ever bought Dreamweaver is an Adobe customer, then used this "fact" to help refute someone else's point.Feel free to take issue with that, but it is not something I ever wrote. What I wrote was about Adobe's software offering called "Dreamweaver." Just because that part of what is now Adobe used to be called "Macromedia" does not make my statement any less accurate or your observations any more relevant.
You do a good job of describing the advantages of a good package manager. I agree for many situations the Linux way is easier. The problem I have is the state of existing package managers for non-ideal situations:
Okay I don't want you to get me wrong here. I really, really appreciate the advantages of package managers. For expert users especially they are way, way better in many ways. It is hard to overstate the advantages of a centralized update system. The problem I have is I don't think current package managers do enough to accommodate the needs of commercial, closed source developers and so they bypass them, resulting in less security and convenience for me. Further, I think the packages themselves are lacking in portab
You can be as pedantic as you like, that does not make Photoshop output anything useful to the command line via stdout.
The latest version of Dreamweaver is Macromedia Dreamweaver 8. Until Adobe releases a new version, I won't consider it an Adobe product and I doubt anyone else will either.They are one company now called "Adobe" This entire conversation was predicated upon MS's response to their merger. If they had decided to keep the name "Macromedia" for the new company and I referred to Dreamweaver as a product of the new company formed by the merger would you take issue with that? I don't see the point of your distinction in terms of this conversation.
I want my package manager to know where these RPMs came from and be able to keep them up to date for starters, you know like all the other software. I want it to be so simple for developers to have their applications bundled this way that all commercial software is bundled this way. Further, I want the package manager to accommodate discovering this application, downloading it, registering it with the vendor, and paying any licensing fees. I basically want to go to a Web page an click on the download link under "Linux" and have my package manager open up with a listing for that item of software that provides everything I need to manage the commercial package rather than having to mess with a different installer for each commercial program.
Why is this marked as a troll? He makes a valid point. Linux package managers do a terrible job of accommodating commercial software the vendor does not want added to someone else's repository.
This is not a black and white issue and I wish people would stop trying to defend their favorite, beloved OS for one second and actually think about this. Package managers are bloody useful. They handle dependency issues, installation and un-installation of apps, updating apps, discovery, and download of apps. In future they could be used in addition to provide licensing and registration of applications, ACLs for applications running in secure environments, build instructions for source, and certification of applications from trusted third parties (whitelists, blacklists, and even greylists). It is doubtful anyone will manage to gain all these benefits without a package manager.
Package managers are not perfect. First, they don't provide a lot of the things I listed above that they could. Second, they are not as easy to use and the packages in them are not as useful and flexible as something like .app bundles on OS X. There are real benefits to drag and drop installation and un-installation, as well as inclusion of FAT binaries and the ability to send a functional application via IM, or run them from a thumb drive with no special tricks or customization.
If OS zealots would just look at it objectively, it is clear that a combination of an application manager and portable application bundles is the ideal. Why can't someone incorporate both and give us the best of both worlds?
Windows has a package manager, just not one that pulls from a repository. As a Windows and Mac user, I hereby wish both had functional package managers that integrated with repositories. The benefits are numerous. Note, that is not to say I want the platform to migrate to the same lousy package formats as Linux tends to use. I want to keep clan and portable and contained OS X style .app bundles, I just want a nice package manager to handle some discovery, downloads, updates, clean uninstalls, and situations where the app needs to install a kernel module or something.
Actually there was demand for having a repository system on Mac, which is why fink exists.Well, Fink is pretty much a compatibility tool for installing Linux ports, but there are real package managers for OS X that handle both CLI, X11, and Aqua applications.
Hey, slow down there champ! I never said it was MS's fault. It is clearly Adobe's fault for prioritizing keeping the different versions for different platforms in synch above taking advantage of all the features of the more functional OS.
Adobe doesn't use OpenGL at all from what I can tell so I don't know what you're complaining about here.Actually, they use OpenGL a lot.
Core graphics is something of a black box. I can understand Adobe not wanting to turn over image processing to someone else's closed code, especially in products which are primarily about image processing.First, not all of Adobe's products have much of anything to do with image processing. Second, there is no reason not to use the capabilities of CoreGraphics and now CoreAnimation, even if that is just to hand graphics off to it and get them back once they are processed.
I hate to break this to you, but the cmd.exe in Windows is actually a very competent shell.Hahahahahahaha! Whew. That's good. Even MS disagrees with you. Read the MS docs on monad and notice all the shortcoming of their existing shell it is supposed to address. Notice that 90% of them are already solved with bash.
Adobe ignores THAT, too. So again this has nothing to do with Windows or OSX and everything to do with Adobe's stupidity.Ignoring the CLI for Windows apps is business as usual because Windows users do not use the CLI as a primary interface. Ignoring the CLI on OS X, for professional applications is not business as usual and is an uncommon design decision because the CLI is a heavily used interface on OS X.
Framemaker and Photoshop are also the only Adobe applications which have ever been common on Unix...Actually, Illustrator was heavily used on many different flavors of UNIX and I'm sure some of their other software supported other OS's back in the day that I just never used. What this has to do with the technical capabilities of the users is another question.
Migrating from LaTeX was probably a big mistake.Spoken like someone who has never built a workflow for a group of writers and publishers. LaTeX is great for a few very limited cases where you're using automation. In general use, however, it is simply too out of date. Colors and graphics are implemented as hacks. The learning curve is steep and the workflow for most jobs is torture. InDesign uses the exact same layout engine, but actually has a graphical interface for working with graphics (what a concept!)
No, it's an argument against bothering with Linux support. Most of their users wouldn't know what to do with Linux.Yeah, graphics people wouldn't know what to do with Linux, like those technically inept guys over at Pixar. Several of Adobe's apps ported to Linux would spur adoption of Linux as people migrated their work flows away from Windows... not as many as OS X, but enough to possibly scare MS.
I've certainly seen the same thing. I know about 100 people who have switched to OS X in the last few years and I know 1 person who went back to Linux. Most of these people are Linux developers, writing software for Linux servers, using OS X desktops. For myself, I rely upon OS X more and more on the desktop and I migrated my Linux desktop from a separate box running Fedora to a Kubuntu install in a VM on top of OS X. The list of desktop apps I still use it for has shrunk to pretty much gimp, inkscape, and xpdf.
Sure. Adobe apps generally ignore system services and do not use that mechanism to share functionality between Adobe apps, instead implementing their own, limited variant that clones the behavior on Windows. As a result, Adobe apps waste the resources needed to duplicate functionality implemented by Adobe apps and other apps as well. They ignore even the default Apple included services like the dictionary/thesaurus service.
Adobe ignores most of the core graphics APIs that make it trivial for me to do something like add a watermark to every page of a PDF in a small shareware app, but which is still very hard to do to an existing PDF with any of Adobe's tools. It also limits the OS's ability to automatically take more advantage of multiple processors for OpenGL operations that are CPU intensive.
Adobe apps tend to ignore the capable command line in OS X as much as possible, including stdout, limiting the use of Adobe apps in scripted workflows and automation, instead relying entirely upon input from the GUI, except where Adobe did not consider it at all and the system automatically lets you do things. I can pipe data to Photoshop, for example, but Adobe had nothing to do with that.
Adobe is not going to start putting commercial apps on Linux any time soon. It is a support nightmare for a company like Adobe that has to support complete idiots.Adobe has had Linux and even Solaris versions of some of their applications in the past, but cancelled them to focus on Windows. They've cancelled even Mac versions of some of their software. I don't think this has anything to do with support costs.
...I say that practically no artist types know thing fucking one about a computer.There is one glaring problem with this statement. You're assuming Adobe's users are graphics people. Half the user base of Framemaker migrated from LaTeX. Dreamweaver is the favored Web development application of some pretty hard core nerds. Your generalizations are uninformed.
...But most artists need to pay someone like me to do even simple things like hardware upgrades...So you think this is argument against Adobe supporting OS X more? From where I'm sitting OS X is easier to use than windows and has more technically un-inclined graphics people. Adobe expanding support for the Mac and other platforms like Linux as well for certain apps, is a great way to put pressure on MS by facilitating the weakening of their core monopoly.
Weird, I almost always have a 100 meg InDesign file open (sometimes up to 5 copies of it) and I've never had it crash in such a way as I could not restart it. I do know about 3 cross-platform ways to reproducibly crash InDesign that Adobe has ignored my bugs on for several years now. I use Illustrator a lot less, but I've never had it crash on me at all. I wonder what is so different about our use cases.
If you did display them on the desktop...I don't see a lot of point to storing anything on my desktop or in moving windows out of the way so I can see it. The dock provides instant, persistent access to my most common items. Spotlight provides fast access to everything else. From what I've seen, mostly Windows people who have not developed faster work flows use the desktop for actually accessing things and care to look on it for icons.
I wish that were true. Sadly, Adobe has several products for which they have dropped the Mac version completely (like Framemaker, where prior to this decision is accounted for 60% of their market). In my experience a lot of Adobe products are held back because they take care to keep them as close on Windows and the Mac as possible, meaning they ignore most of the really cool features of OS X that MS has not yet copied on Windows.
With Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, MS decided it was time to take action. They have already started leveraging their monopoly to cut into Adobe's markets and will be doing so with increasing regularity. Adobe now has to choose whether to try to "negotiate" with MS, which insures short term profits but will kill them in the long term unless something changes, or if they are going to play hardball and throw their weight behind OS X and Linux in order to gain a better bargaining position.
What app in particular? I use Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Bridge, and Acrobat very regularly on both platforms, as well as the occasional use of Dreamweaver and regular use of Framemaker on Windows. While I have had them crap out to the point that Windows needed a reboot, I don't think any have ever done so on OS X. InDesign, in particular, has about 2 days of use on Windows before Windows needs rebooting and about 5 days on OS X, but just restarting InDesign solves my problems (any more time than either and it will crash on its own).
OSX is also the only OS that refuses to remember where I put my hard disk iconUmm, I'm not sure what you mean by that. All my partitions show up in the same places all the time in OS X. I don't display them on the desktop and have not dragged them to the dock, but aside from those locations I'm not sure what kind of a problem you could be having.
Of course not, but it helps. Most of the pair programmers I know actually share a machine and one keyboard.
But for actual work (not technology demonstrations), and programming in particular, I believe you will have more success by just agreeing beforehand who does what, and/or manually merging the few conflicts you have.Have you actually tried it? Having one person add a comment in the same file as another person is adding a line of code saves an immense amount of time. Once programmers get used to SubEthaEdit, you should see them fight to keep it. The whole point of pair programming (in my experience) is that two heads are better than one, but two keyboards are also better than one in that you can add information up to twice as quickly.