Businesses are "Evil" when they lower the quality of their product or service without lowering the price, or raise the price beyond what is generally accepted as reasonable, or devalue their product in some manner that it becomes less desirable, while still maintaining a high price.
I'm a consumer and I don't consider that to be evil. I'd consider it them doing business and not giving me what I want. If they kill tens of thousands of workers in India because of lax safety procedures, I can see applying the term "evil." That, however, is my subjective view. It also demonstrates why discussing this in terms of good and evil is pretty pointless.
Alternately, businesses are considered "Evil" when they are engaged in anti-competitive practices as defined by law.
I don't think that makes them "evil" either. It just makes them criminals who are detracting from society. The guy on welfare down the road who smokes pot all day is both a criminal and a detriment to society. I don't consider him to be evil.
The words Good and Evil are simply used as synonyms for ethical and unethical or legal and illegal.
But they shouldn't be because they are different concepts and trying to equate them results in miscommunication. It also trains people to assume they are the same thing so they assume anything illegal is also unethical and is also evil. By this logic, black people should still be slaves, since the law stated it was illegal for them to be freed and thus unethical and evil for that to happen so no one should have supported it.
Ethics are objective. They don't make judgments about what is "right" or "evil." They distinguish who is responsible for the consequences of some action. Good, evil, right, and wrong all are subjective opinions about whether that action was acceptable and legal and illegal describe the laws we have designed to imperfectly promote the common good.
In our real-world case, Adding advertisements to games devalues the game as it damages two very important game features: Immersion and Escapism.
Nope. In the real world adding ads might devalue those aspects of the game or they might increase that value by adding variety and realism. It depends upon the application and the person experiencing it. Further, not all games rely upon or consider immersion and escapism to be beneficial. Some games relate to the real world and promote learning about it (think trivia). Here's a question for you. Is it either unethical or evil for me to create a work of art without value, like spitting on cardboard, and offering it for sale for 10 million dollars?
There are also privacy concerns to deal with. It has been shown that some in-game ad companies do individual data tracking on game players. This is considered a privacy violation, which is considered highly unethical by many.
So? It can be shown that some kitchen cutlery is used in murders. Does that make steelworkers ethically responsible for murder?
Thusly, when Ads are placed into a game, particularly one where they did not exist before, the value of the game is reduced.
...or enhanced, depending upon the game and the way they are integrated.
If then the cost of the game is not correspondingly reduced, the action of including ads appears to steal value.
Okay, supposing it does, do explain how Google or another company providing a conduit between any advertisers and any game makers is responsible for the publisher's pricing?
Google, by involving itself in value-theft...
Value-theft?!? Do you by any chance work for the RIAA? They're selling a product for a price. If you don't like the combination of price and product don't buy it. They don't have a monopoly on games. If you do buy it and don't like the ads, that is no more "value-theft" than if they make all the walls in some level have an unpleasant orange color you don't like. It isn't "theft" at all.
Interesting. What makes you say that? I haven't seen any behavior out of Apple that indicates that it would be willing to sell DRM-free music or movies of any kind.
Apple is not in the content business for profit. They are in it out of necessity as a way to motivate sales of iPods. They'd give all the music away if they could without losing money. DRM provides lock-in to iPods for users who already purchased ITMS music (small number compared to iPod sales) and who don't want to backup to CD and re-rip for one reason or another. That benefits Apple a little. Now look at the drawbacks. They come under criticism for non-compatability and it brings to light anti-trust issues now that their share of portable players is so large.
Apple doesn't particularly need to lock-in those few users. They do need to counter MS's attempt to monopolize music DRM with a format they own and which is anti-competatively bundled with Windows. They also need buy in from the music publishers, and that means compromise. They have fought hard to keep prices low and DRM as unobtrusive and un-restricting as possible. If the courts mandated only open formats and/or open formats with open DRM Apple would happily comply because it would partially de-fang MS while losing them little. If the record companies agreed to DRM'less files, I think Apple would jump at that too. It fits with their strategy for music and everything they've done to date.
Try this one: "Just because hitmen offer a service that other users want, doesn't make them evil. The person putting the contract out is evil." doesn't sound so right now, does it?
Again, lets bring this conversation into something we can actually discuss and make it "ethical" and "unethical" rather than "good" or "evil." A hitman is taking an action that is unethical, or at least bears ethical responsibility. The person hiring them is directing that unethical activity and specifically knows that by paying them the end result will be an attempt at this unethical act. As a result, both bear responsibility for that action. As to whether or not killing someone is "evil" is a subjective value.
Now lets consider this in terms of what Google is doing. Is providing ads from those who wish to advertise to those who wish to present advertisements in any way unethical? They presumably know those ads will be in video games, but are putting ads in video games inherently unethical? Can ads make video games better if used appropriately? If a video game publisher provided games for free, but included ads to pay for development would that be inherently unethical? What if it was an open source project that wanted to host a MMORPG that was free to all but needed revenue to pay for servers and bandwidth?
I contend that placing ads in video games is not inherently unethical. Further, while it can be unethical, such as placing ads in a game against the artists wishes using a distribution cartel and unethical copyright laws, there is no reason for Google to assume that will be the case and take responsibility for the actions of others.
They do this, they become an enabler, and a little 'less good' in my book.
When they index porn and enable people to find it they become a lot "less good" in many people's estimation. When they take a lot of actions they are considered "evil" by someone. The term is subjective. The pertinent question is, are they ethically responsible and holding true to their own subjective views of good and evil?
If you find the publishers that will use this service evil, why would you not consider the company enabling them to do so evil as well?
The term "evil" is a moral judgement. Moral judgments are, by definition, subjective. Why even bother discussing this?
A more productive discussion is the ethics of what Google and publishers are doing here. Is it ethical to put ads in a game you publish? In my opinion that depends upon the wishes of the creators of the work being published. If an artist or group of artists wants to stick an ad on that work, what is unethical about that? In some cases the ad actually makes the art better and is a part of it. In other cases it is just an attempt to cash in. In either case, I don't see anything unethical.
Now the artists and the publishers are not always the same people. If a publisher wishes to change artwork by including advertisements and the artists do not, well I can see an argument for that being unethical, especially given the distribution cartels and unethical copyright laws.
So what about the people who enable that behavior via an advertising channel? Well, since their advertising channel can be used in both the former and latter cases and since they are taking no unethical action themselves, I'd say they're in the clear. Ethically a gun manufacturer has no ethical liability unless they know or think they know the tool they sell will be used unethically and even then the connection is tenuous. Refusing the service to some people is passing judgement on their supposed future actions, both by claiming to be responsible for preventing those actions and judging what they do. This bears significant ethical responsibility, more-so that impartially providing a service.
Would you change your mind if the enabling company was called Microsoft instead of Google?
This is why discussing ethics is more useful. Being objective, it does not matter who is taking the action. The ethics do not change.
Google is seeking to profit from an advertising tactic that most people find extremely distasteful, if not downright evil.
Yeah and some people think providing free access to the Qua-ran is distasteful if not downright evil. Some people think making it easy for people to find pornographic pictures is distasteful if not downright evil. Who cares? Since there is no objective definition of "evil" Google is free to go by their own moral beliefs if their slogan is anything other than marketing. I don't care who provides advertising channels and I hope someone does. That does not mean I'll buy a game that has ads that I don't think add to the game, or which is not offered at a price I am willing to pay in compensation for that.
That may be theoretically possible but it almost never happens.
We've switched hardware vendors twice and added two more to our list in the last few years. It certainly happens.
It is a scenario used by IT in order to block companies from switching to Apple.
Anyone looking at a switch to Apple will see some very real added expenses compared to switching to another PC vendor, not because Macs cost more, but because most of the existing software will not run on them and because different tools are optimal.
Nobody is suggesting that companies which wholesale to OS X but this excuse IT departments have is bullshit when you consider that it is being used to maintain a monopoly of MSFT OSes.
It's not just MS OS's, but switching from Linux also has some of the same costs, although not as many since more software is shared between them.
If you were to ask a business user if they cared who the hardware vendor was, they would probably say no. What they really would like is stability and security with minimum down time.
Usually this is true, although some people like ultra-small portables that Apple does not offer a model of. They do often care about what OS they run. But that is not really important here. What users want is not always the best option for a company. I'm just saying when the OS and hardware vendor are tied and the OS is not 100% compatible with others, added expenses are incurred with changes, thus restricting future choices.
I think it is time for IT to stop serving its own interests at the expense of business needs.
This certainly happens, especially when IT wants more head count or only has expertise on one platform and is afraid of being out-competed by people with better skill sets.
Ultimately, a choice of vendors is an IT consideration and it does not really ad to the costs in the grand scheme of things to standardize on Apple hardware if it means that support staff can be reduced as well.
Where I work, support is not a major expense. Apple is one of our approved vendors and for laptops we get choose between Lenovo Thinkpads and Apple Macbooks. I'm typing this on my work-provided Macbook. The software costs for repurchasing certain software for this platform has been more expensive for us, as I'm sure the cost of moving away would likewise be an added expense. The cost is fairly small compared to some of the gains in productivity I personally have, but it certainly is a factor to consider if you're examing the business case.
The fact that OS X only work on one vendor's hardware (Apple) is a poor excuse. My employer uses IBM fore workstations and servers almost exclusively and Toshiba for laptops.
This isn't really the same thing though. Most businesses standardize on given hardware or hardware vendors, but they can easily change that vendor in the future without any problems, based upon who provides the best bid in future. Even if they stick with the same vendor they benefit from lower prices because that vendor is competing directly with others.
With Apple as the only vendor, potentially moving to another vendor is more expensive because of the resulting software incompatibility. Moving from Toshiba laptops running a given OS and set of applications to Lenovo laptops running the same OS and applications is very doable if the vendor tries to gouge you or will not provide the service you want. Moving from Apple laptops running one OS and set of applications to Lenovo laptops running a different OS and different set of applications is a much bigger migration with higher transition and training costs.
Now moving to or from OS X in general is cheaper than moving to and from Windows, since Apple does a pretty good job of adhering to standards and maintaining portable formats and protocols. If I had to choose between migrating from Linux to OS X or vice versus, or migrating from Windows to Linux, I'd much rather do the former and the costs would be lower. It is still, however, significantly more difficult than migrating hardware while maintaining the same OS and applications.
Menus at the top of the screen instead of arbitrary positions, ala Fitt's Law; dialogue boxes that have actions for buttons instead of (OK/Cancel) which condition people via repetitive unneeded action; or default on button mouse, with multiple buttons as optional. There are hundreds of examples, actually. Just pick up a book on user interface design and development and you can see many, many well supported methods MS ignores.
Drag and drop works fine on Windows, it's just that most applications choose to give you a wizard to force-feed you the EULA, or offer you to set some preferences. Running software off an external drive works fine too, it depends on the software.
With Windows you have the choice of a.exe file with all resources embedded, or using an installer. Often, the.exe file and the installer install items in the registry that are not removed if you drag the application to the trash. As for external drives, usually you need to run an installer to install it on an external drive, which often will not work when plugged into a new computer because not all of it is on the removable drive unless the application is specifically designed for that like portable Firefox, but it does not work in most instances. Further, most Windows application are not FAT binaries and plugging the same drive into two different computers with different architectures does not work. On OS X I can drag an application into my chat client and it usually works for the person on the other end. On Windows, if this worked it would be a rare exception.
Nor do Commodore 64 users.
True, this is a win for commodore64 too. What is your point?
All works fine for me on Windows.
You've obviously never tried these same tasks on both platforms. In the first case, imagine you get a new laptop and would like to install the OS on it and migrate all your files, applications, user accounts settings, security certs, etc to the new machine. With a mac you plug in a Firewire cable and click the install from old machine option. It sucks all of the above over and even if the two machines are running very different processors all the software still works and is registered on the new machine with no work. Further, new software included with the new machine is installed alongside the software you already had and if you happened to have a partition on your drive it is replicated as well. One click and I go for coffee.
Doing the same task on Windows usually takes me a week of changing settings and reinstalling programs, and remaking user accounts, and looking up old passwords and certs that were not copied. Even if I buy a utility designed to do this for Windows, it still takes significant effort as programs are not generally portable. This is a huge win for the mac platform and I now instantly migrate my Windows install by keeping it in a VM and letting OS X handle the migration for me.
As for zeroconf, if I go to a conference I instantly see all the Mac and some Linux users available for local chatting, printers, shared music streaming, shared drive space, and collaborative documents available for shared editing. Because it is an open standard anyone can implement it and many OS's and hardware vendors now do so. Windows ignores this and Vista implements a proprietary discovery protocol, meaning that it intentionally cannot interoperate in mixed environments and of the above functions, only about half of them are available for auto-discovery on Windows that I've seen. Hence, "ubiquitous" zeroconf.
This assumes I want to run OS X in the first place.
No it doesn't. Re-read what I wrote. It compares OS X's ability to run Windows and Linux software, with Window's ability to run OS X and Linux software. The assumption is whatever platform you're using, if you're a power use you may need or want to use or test software from other platforms. No one platform has all the best applications available. The best
People who want to play GAMES. Like me. I will gladly wait 45 seconds to restart in order to run Half-Life 2
Actually both Parallels and VMware are working on graphics card support, which should make running Half-life without rebooting ala bootcamp a whole lot faster and mostly a matter of having enough RAM.
The general comments seem to be that we hate Microsoft because it's a closed system.
Umm, I don't see that as the character of the comments. Are you sure this isn't a strawman? I dislike MS because their criminal behavior has set the industry back a decade and personally inconvenienced me. As for it being "closed" Windows is not closed so much as intentionally designed to not interoperate with others and to make things hard for MS's customers when they want to do anything that doesn't result in MS getting more of their money.
On the otherhand we love Apple because everything works so well together.
Nah, screw that. I like Apple's products because they give me the functions I need, instead of assuming I will buy from them anyway and aiming at features that benefit them.
They can develop for a very narrow selection of hardware and have minimized the support costs.
This comment is actually wrong. Apple works very hard and spends money to get support from third parties. MS is a monopoly, so third parties all do whatever it takes to make sure they work with MS, even if that means paying MS to help them. MS doesn't spend money on this, they make money.
There is a very narrow range of hardware choices...
This is entirely true. Apple only makes a small selection of hardware and have coupled their hardware and software. This is a classic way to survive in a monopolized market. You build a separate vertical chain incorporating what would be a competitor to the monopoly. If not for MS's unethical practices in maintaining their monopoly, however, Apple would be driven to decouple the OS and hardware by the free market. So this disadvantage to Apple products is the result of MS's criminal behavior. That doesn't make it any less annoying, but it does lead a lot of us to dislike MS more, rather than Apple.
Also the choice of software for the mac is relatively limited...there is usually just one option (or maybe two) in each major category. For example, there is one home finance program, one tax program...
Umm, one in each major category? Not really, no. Taxes: turbotax, quicken, checkmark, and taxcut are all available.
...and if you are looking for special interest programs, in many cases there are none available for the mac.
This is true, there are a lot of niche applications where Windows has the only available software, or at least better software. There are enough of these so that a lot of people will eventually run into this.
What categories of programs are Mac only?
Well, there are certainly some areas. Publishing, biochemistry, linguistics, physics research, some computer security, pair programming, etc. For other areas software is available on both Mac and PC (like video editing) but the mac software is a whole lot better and really dominates the field.
Mac does have a unique high-end movie editor (but apple had to write it as no commercial company saw a big enough market in a mac only (yes, Adobe is returning to cross-platform for their version).
Don't you think it more than a little contradictory to write that the market for Mac video editing software was "not big enough" and then mention that Adobe is trying to get into that market? The truth is, Apple released a much better product than what was currently available and blew Adobe and to some degree Avid out of the water. They captured the lion's share of the video editing market with a better, cheaper product and people are still abandoning Adobe and Windows to move to that solution, which is why Adobe is releasing a mac version to try to win some of the switchers back with cross-platform availability. Adobe cancelled their competitor for a time claiming they could not compete and hoping to pressure Apple, not because there was not a profitable market.
Obviously a person should look at their own needs before picking a platform or, like me, run OS X on my laptop and Windows and Linux in VMs on top of it for specific applications.
I'm not saying Vista is better, but I point out that I don't agree with some of your OS X points
That's fine. The problem is, the consensus among UI experts is pretty clear to date on a lot of points that Vista has not changed from previous versions of Windows. Neither UI is perfect, but among people who have studied the subject it is like comparing the default security of OS X and WinXP SP1. People will say, "well they both have problems" or "OS X has problems with case sensitivity" but that doesn't address the overall picture. Being as I'm posting via a pseudonym I can't really rely upon my credentials to convince you, but do a little research into the subject, it is a good skill to have some understanding of anyway. Vista's human/computer interaction is still abysmal, while OS X is among the best of what is currently on the market.
It can be annoying at times, but this is why I like Linux, I can maximize windows, set other windows to 'always ontop' etc.
That's not really relevant to the point. We're discussing the pluses and minuses of Vista and OS X on the desktop. Adding Linux would make for a very difficult comparison and need a lot more discussion. I mentioned the UI paradigm simply to provide background for why the UI element you objected to was appropriate on both systems given other UI choices.
But I can't. Zoom has it's merit, but I still prefer maximize over it.
They are both appropriate for different applications and uses. OS X actually allows the application develop to choose which is appropriate, although I dislike the choices made for some default applications, although that partially is because I use them differently than the common case.
Seeing how easy it is to miss drag, I disagree, clicking 'next' a few times isn't as messy.
Umm, do you perhaps have a palsy? Conceptually it is much, much easier. It is faster. It is more learnable. For power users there is the "delete" key. I think you are 100% wrong on this.
Most applications work fine if you move them. Windows will even change the shortcuts accordingly
This is not my experience at all. A lot of applications, break if you move them in Vista or XP. A lot of them won't even run if you install them on a portable drive.
Too many times have I miss dragged or something and added the stupid thing to the dock (I'm not a novice with a mouse).
If the mouse is so hard for you to use, why do you use it? I can't say that I've ever failed to drag an icon to the trash. Maybe you should examine your sensitivity settings.
To be honest, I think your point about running programs off portable media is a bit of a meaningless.
I don't care. You're responding to a comment saying that whether or not a feature is useful to you or many people does not matter as this is a list of features where one system is ahead or behind. Most people won't care about most items. Your opinion of a feature is irrelevant unless you think something else does it better, which you have not presented.
.net can do this, it's produced binaries are architecture independent
Okay, when the majority of application on Windows are.net applications we can revisit this point. But right now, in the real world, this is a win for OS X because most applications work this way now, while on Windows they don't because it is not the standard.
As having written my own win32 console applications, I didn't actually have problems piping data from them.
Way to completely miss the point. I'm talking about existing applications. Most people are not developers. I can pipe data to and from photoshop on OS X. I cannot do that on Windows using Cygwin. On OS X the CLI shell is part of the system. On Windows you can tack on a third party Linux emulation environment that will work with itself and might work with apps you specially design to do so. OS X gets the point.
Open office will,unfortunately, take over in the mainstream just about the time Linux does. The main reason being corporations are wary of adopting software with no promise of support.
OpenOffice is in use in the industry right now. As for support, you can get it from IBM or Redhat or Sun or Suse or Novell or whomever. Word is where you have trouble getting real support because if you don't have enough seats MS will let you rot.
And people just aren't going to use one prog at work, one at home, etc. Just causes a hassle.
This is one of the strongest arguments for OpenOffice, not against it. Think of it this way. You administer a middle school or business where people work on things at home sometimes. With OpenOffice users can install the same version at home that they use in your network eliminating all the version incompatibilities. They can install as many copies as they want, because there is no per seat fee. MS has been trying to mitigate this with licenses that let a user install an extra copy of a corporate edition at home, but trying to manage the licensing for that sounds like a huge mess. If I was running a big network of word processing terminals, I'd be very, very tempted by OpenOffice for just this reason.
Because asshat HR departments require Word format to the rational exclusion of all other formats.
What kind of places do you send your resume to? We always ask for PDFs and when I was last looking at permanent jobs so did most of the places I looked at. The only really good reason I know of to send a Word doc is if it is a security post working someplace full of incompetent people, then you can put a web bug in it and call them when they look at your resume and say, "so I noticed you're looking at my resume...":)
Your example about the spell checker is however a good example. OS's can be improved. Although I suspect that geeks don't spell check. But maybe they do, I don't know. I have never seen geeks getting excited about spell checking (I am not excited about it either, although it is clearly something useful)
Well I know some geeks that certainly spell check, especially books they're working on, but in general I suspect it is the fact that someone finally implemented a system that allows the user to plug in arbitrary functionality by itself or as part of an application, and share that functionality across applications that gets geeks excited.
I don't see comments how a Mac makes it easier for a programmer. Do people use Macs for programming?
My primary employer is a shop that makes specialty servers with some really cool custom security software on them. They're really expensive, but very useful. They run Linux and OpenBSD for the most part. The vast majority of the programmers and security experts I work with use macs for their desktops. They have pretty much everything Linux does as a programming environment. They ship with gcc, and all the tools you'd expect. They also have a lot of the commercial software Linux is lacking and some software, like omnigraffle and subethaedit that is very useful for programmers and not available on any other platform.
Is there a decent database available? Webserver?
You can install a database like MySQL or the like, but that is really more for servers. OS X ships with an integral database called "CoreData" that servers for lightweight personal uses. OS X ships with the Apache Web server, but again, it is more useful for development or minor serving tasks. OS X is optimized as a desktop, not a server.
I mean something that really makes it better than Windows and Linux?
OS X is good at lots of tasks and great for some types of programming and not so great for others, depending upon your target platform(s), languages, and tools. It ships with CVS (SVN is in the next release) toolsets for Ruby on Rails, Python, C, C++, Objective C, etc. Basically it has almost all the advantages of Linux, but additionally has more available software and some extras. It is ideal for pair programming as I find the tools much better than on other platforms.
When that is the case nobody ever mentions it.
Lots of people talk about the advantages of OS X. If you went to Blackhat or Defcon this year you'd notice half the machines there were running it. It's just that a lot of the really vocal people on non-technical sites, don't do any programming so they talk about the advantages for them.
The choice of an OS has been made an emotional thing.
It is for some people, like you and the mac evangelists. For others of us it is simply finding the best tool despite what other people say about it. Of course for some of us it is also not so much a choice, since we use all of them.
It is important to realize that an OS is just an OS. Just like many people don't care about which brand of car they drive...
And other people do care. There are conventions and groups for people who own an electric car, or a mini-cooper and I know a BMW owner who will drone on for hours, given the chance. For some people the relative merits of cars are important, either for their work or because it is their hobby. This is Slashdot. Almost everyone here uses computers for their job and many of us develop them. It is only natural that it will be a huge subject of interest. If you're not interested in OS's I suggest you change your filter settings or don't click on articles that are discussions about them, like this one obviously is.
Personally I like the concept of Linux most.
Linux is a great OS for some things and a so-so OS for others. Being fully open source and GPL is a feature, that results in long term benefits. When I'm looking for a solution to a specific problem I treat it as such, one more feature to go into my evaluation. Linux advocates are every bit as vocal about their OS and treating it as a religion as other OS advocates.
There is no reason to get excited (or even religious) about an OS. You don't get excited about the floor in your house. It just needs to be there.
Ahh, but if the market for floors had been monopolized and everyone had concrete floors, and then a house manufacturer started to sell houses with hardwood floors, a lot of people would be excited and want to talk about it. The pace of OS advancement has been glacial for many years and even some relatively basic features, like providing ways for those applications running on the OS to share features, have not really materialized. Then Apple was rejuvenated and has brought a lot to the table. One of the topics for discussion earlier was spellchecking in browsers and e-mail clients. It is pretty basic that if one program has a way to easily spellcheck words, it should be able to share that functionality with other applications via the OS. To date the majority of people share that functionality via an interface called "copy and paste." They copy text into Word, spellcheck it, and copy it back into whatever program they are using. This is rather cumbersome, so application developers instead implemented spell checking independently for every program or group of programs.
In OS X 10.0 Apple introduced system services. Suddenly one spelling checker can share that functionality with any other application that uses the default text APIs and they can share a dictionary. Better yet, they produced a whole framework so that programs can share arbitrary functions, like grammar checking, language translation, automatically formatting bibliographies, encrypting text, checksums, changing the style of line endings or quotes, etc. The idea is pretty basic, but most people never even considered why they couldn't use Word's spell checker in their AIM client. So when people started doing that, suddenly they got excited. Real improvement after years of basically nothing. Some of those people ran off at the mouth and claimed it meant OS X was superior in every way and anyone not using it is an idiot. Others thought, cool, I hope MS copies that soon.
I don't blame computer geeks who get excited by progress. It just shows they care about what they do.
Listen, I know quite a bit about UI design and testing. If you pick up a good book on the subject you'll notice something, a lot of the "common mistakes" are still in Vista and a lot of the "good designs" are in OS X. The Windows UI operates almost on the assumption that you'll want to see one application, per screen at a time. As a result, a maximize button that expands to fit the screen is useful, even if only because of the prior poor design choice. On OS X that assumption does not hold true, so expanding to fit the content makes sense. You chose a very poor point to argue.
I find that really annoying on OS X, I'd rather just double click on a package
If you think double clicking and navigating through a wizard is easier than dragging to a folder, well you're wrong in the general case. If you think not being able to move the application once installed is more flexible, or convenient you must work at MS. If you think opening up add/remove software and clicking through the uninstaller is easier than dragging to the trash, you must work at MS and may be drunk.
A feature I don't see many people using at the moment.
Some people do, most don't. The point of my post was to list the features where each OS is ahead of the other. Just because you don't use it or even because 99% of people don't use it does not matter.
.NET is better for this, sorry.
Hardware platforms. I can put an application on my thumb drive and plug it into two machines one a 32 bit PPC machine running OS X and the other a 64 bit Intel running a different version of OS X and it will work on both. If I upgrade from one machine to the other, the app still works without reinstalling. That is an advantage that Vista does not have that I've ever found.
haven't been very impressed with the ANSI color support of term.app, even Windows gets this right. As for shells on Windows, while a 'reasonable' one may not pre-installed. I do find Cygwin more comfy than having say OS X + Darwin tools.
I've used cygwin for years and it is very, very limited and does not integrate with anything. You can't pipe data from a Windows app or even to a a Windows app from one running in cygwin without a lot of pain. As for your arguments about terminal.app, I like it but it is irrelevant to this point. I was talking about the shell environment, not the terminal used to access it.
Upgrading a Mac is so easy... You buy a new one?
You have to prejudiced as hell not to see OS X's firewire upgrade mechanism as anything other than a huge win over Windows.
And the ones that don't work lock up the computer (like my bluetooth dongle:P)
I've actually never had any hardware lock up any of my macs except for some bad RAM one time. I have had peripherals bluescreen Windows. In any case, that is a completely separate and arguable point, your anecdote and mine notwithstanding.
I disagree, I think package management via domain management is really nicely done, I haven't seen any better from OS X out of the box.
Umm, Apple basically has no package management out of the box, which is why this was listed as a win for Vista. As for that package management being "nicely done" I take it you've never run a Linux desktop of any variety?
On a more general note, I figured people would decide to quibble and argue about these features, but it is sad that you did not have anything useful to add to the conversation. You're so blatantly pro-MS that it is sickening. Even on really useful features where MS has not even come up with anything, you feel the need to try to defend them. Sad.
That said, the arguments about which OS is better seem specious.
I disagree and I'm actually rather sad at the response to this type of article. Arguing the relative merits of Apple and Microsoft in ways that don't actually address their end products, is what is pointless. Discussing the actual relative merits of the two OS's feature by feature, task by task has value. The problem is so few people have used both OS's that almost no one here knows what the missing features and abilities of both OS's are. Almost all the reviews you see online are from either a Mac user, who tries out Vista for a few hours, or a Windows guy, who tries OS X for a few hours. They almost never actually address the actual differences and there certainly are a number of them.
Since everyone's needs and preferences and workflows are different you can't say one is better or worse, but you certainly can give potential users the information they need to see what functions are present and missing on each system and which tasks each performs better at, in general. I was busy working when this article was posted, but near the bottom of the comments you can find one from me that lists the features/advantages I could think of off the top of my head. If you've used both Vista and OS X, why not take a look and add your own two cents. This discussion could actually be a useful and informative one, rather than a pissing contest.
But I would never use a Mac. It is soooo snobbish. There is no way I want to be part of that snobbish Mac-defenders group. I wished they would shut up and consider Mac for what it is: an overpriced BSD clone, that is just used to brag about.
I thought your post was rather amusing in a number of ways. First, you explain that people are emotionally invested in their OS choices and will defend them regardless of the real relative merits. This is entirely true. In addition, most people don't really understand and use multiple OS's so they are arguing from ignorance. There are, however, a few people who do use two or three or more OS's regularly. Since they have the same investment in several OS's perhaps their decisions and arguments can be a little more useful? I run Linux (server and desktop), OpenBSD (server), OS X (desktop), and Windows (server) every day. They all have plusses and minuses.
So here's what I find so amusing, you claim you won't use a mac because you don't like others who do. This is pretty emotive decision making. You're admittedly choosing an OS based upon something other than the relative merits of your options. Further, you express dismay that you would somehow be forced to be a "snobbish mac-defender." Contrary to your perception, most mac users are not particularly vocal about their OS choice. There is a phenomenon, however, where new mac users will get their first mac and be astounded about how easy some things are and how some of their biggest gripes are solved and how some things they never even thought of are now making their life easier. These people tend to want to share this with others, since the only reason they did not switch long ago was because they did know about all of these things. Sadly, most of this vocal group are usually also the least experienced and informed users, so they tend to present some very superficial and sometimes emotive rather than logical arguments.
You say you wish mac users would shut up, but the vast majority of them have shut up, you just don't hear from them. As for OS X being an "overprices BSD clone" well if that is truly your opinion you've either never used OS X on the desktop or never used the BSDs on the desktop.
Finder is pretty poor compared to something like Konqueror...
I dunno, they both have their plusses and minuses.
The ease with which you can change or add hotkey combinations for certain functions is also an issue with me.
Weird. System Preferences, Keyboard and Mouse, Keyboard Shortcuts.
I've not really gotten into more power-user type stuff yet, I've had Mac laptops for a while, but used them mainly for "day to day" browsing, IM, Term Serv. Now I have a Mac as my desktop machine at home, and it's definitely throwing some curves coming from SuSE + KDE, but I'm trying to hold off on dual-booting and give it a fair shot.
The only person I know who switched to OS X for their desktop and switched back, was an old school UNIX guy who simply did not want to learn to do anything differently from Linux and just wanted to make OS X behave exactly like Linux (which of course it could never do as well). The fact that he does a lot of Linux desktop development as a hobby was probably also a factor. In my experience, almost everyone who is willing to learn to do things differently soon can find some real advantages on OS X, I know I have.
For the record, I still use Kubuntu within a VM regularly for a number of workstation tasks it does better.
The fact is, people probably like OSX because there is less opportunity for the user to get confused
I disagree. There is plenty of rope to hang yourself. Both expert users and others can find plenty of options on OS X to confuse themselves. The difference is you never need to change those options, while on Linux you still do, upon occasion.
...it's just a little more workable than Windows on a lot of levels.
Yeah, as with anything else it has its advantages and disadvantages. Many of the advantages, have become so useful, however, whenever I use my Linux or Windows systems I feel like I just stepped back into the 90's. What do you mean I can't translate my IM messages to and from german with a key press?...and so on.
Sane UI choices - OS X does not ignore the last two decades worth of human/computer interaction research.
System services - global (nearly) spellchecking, dictionary/thesaurus, and plug-in functionality like grammar checking, language translation, only reference lookups, bibliography formatting, etc.
OpenStep application bundles - drag and drop installation and uninstallation of most applications, e-mail or IM working programs without having to save installers, run software off an ipod or thumb drive without having to install (including remembering per-machine preferences), easy binaries for multiple platforms, finding resources in packages is much easier and requires no tools.
Security - for a variety of reasons that don't matter to most end users, OS X users have never had to worry about malware or worms and probably will not have to in the foreseeable future.
Usable shell environment - bash, tcsh, whatever; the CLI on OS X is very usable and powerful and a first class citizen. We'll see if this comparison changes when Monad is released.
Automater - scripting usable by secretaries. This is the easiest tool for some tasks and the only automation/scripting I've seen that some novices can quickly learn and use.
Included applications - both CLI tools, GUI utilities, and GUI applications, OS X has more and nicer ones when you include iTunes, iPhoto, Preview, etc., etc.
Upgrading hardware - upgrading a mac to a mac is as easy as plugging in a firewire cable clicking a button. This saves a lot of time and effort, amazingly better
Ubiquitous zeroconf - automatically and instantly finds printers, local chat, streaming music, file shares, and collaborative documents
PDF support - create PDFs from everywhere and viewing is fast, fast, fast compared to Vista.
Emulation/ports/virtualization/compatability - it is easier to run Linux and Windows software on OS X and there are more options to do so on OS X, than there are to run Linux and OS X apps on Windows (yeah I know about cygwin and Apple's licensing and the relative number of apps)
Easier support of third party devices, plug them in and they just work much more often.
Windows Vista Wins:
Application availability - more developers target Windows and eventually a lot of people want to run some niche software that does not work without Windows
Not tied to one hardware vendor - If you run Windows you have more hardware choices and likely get a machine that meets your needs more cheaply as a result
Package manager - Windows has a pretty lame software install/uninstall manager, but it is still better than nothing
Antivirus/phishing features - OS X doesn't have a lot of need, but this is still not a bad precaution
Remote desktop features - have clients for more platforms than OS X's comparable feature.
Wider support for third party devices, everyone makes a Windows driver, not everyone makes an OS X driver
Those are the things I can think of off the top of my head. Does anyone have anything to add. Please don't bother unless you've used both OS's recently.
This is one reason I much prefer Camino to Firefox on OS X, as well.
Firefox 3 alpha 1 on OS X is pretty stable for me and includes cocoa widget support so the spell checking service and all the other services work just fine in it. You might want to check it out as it is more up-to-date than Camino which tends to lag Firefox quite a bit. It's not for everyone, but you do have a choice between trailing edge or bleeding edge if that is the feature you need.
What boggles my mind is the degree to which people have come to rely on their browsers and are convinced that every feature normally associated with a different program should be built into their browser of choice. Don't mean to sound overly critical, but for me, a browser is (ignoring the few extra bits) something that renders web pages. I don't want it to do anything more.
Different people have different needs and wants both in their browser and in other programs. Many, many people want spell checking for their Web mail, for example. I agree that this should not be added to browsers though. Spellchecking and the like are more appropriate to add/enable/disabable at the OS level. I mean if you already have this running in your word processor, why not share that functionality for your Web browser, e-mail client, chat client, text editor, terminals, calendar, etc., etc. This also provides the advantage of sharing one dictionary so you need only train it once.
Then, again, I'm still scratching my head wondering why it is people need two spell czech they're work. Your reading, writing and typing skills will never improve (and may get worse), and for the lazy, it's a poor substitute for proof reading.
Spell checking is not a substitute for proof reading, but it is beneficial in many cases. When I'm casually writing I often do not notice misspellings and having many of them highlighted for me makes my writings much more readable. Better yet, spellcheckers train people to spell some words correctly. How many times have you seen the word "rediculous" here on Slashdot? Don't you think that after five of six times of noticing it is highlighted in red and then fixing it those people would learn how to spell it?
As a side note, OS X already provides a global spelling checker as I describe that you can enable or disable globally, preventing a lot of code duplication and saving a lot resources for those who do use it.
What I would rather have is a facility that can spell check any text in any application.
This is already built into OS X, along with a dictionary/thesaurus option. Better yet, OS X includes a services framework that allows the addition/customization of arbitrary functions like this, called services. I regularly use one for grammar checking (included with leopard), language translations, bibliography reference formatting, collated online dictionary lookups, removing windows line endings, statistical info, and a slew of other functions I'm not thinking of right now. It is, in my opinion, one of the most under appreciated features of OS X. KDE, by the way, has implemented something called "Kparts" that lets developers of KDE apps embed spellchecking making it more common and universal, but since developers have to explicitly include the feature, it is much less useful.
MacOS X DOES provide an inline spell checker, though I believe it only works for Cocoa apps, not Carbon, and I think they leave it up to developers whether to implement it or not...
This is not quite correct. The OS X spellchecking service, like all the other services, works automatically in Cocoa apps without any work on the part of the developer (as I understand) and functions inline. Developers can integrate it in additional ways as well and it can be included in Carbon applications, but the developers have to do it specifically. For example, Firefox3 alpha 1 includes the native OS X spellchecking with the same dictionary as all the other applicatons, despite not being a cocoa application.
There's also a spell checker on the Services menu, though its more for checking the spelling of individual words.
This is the same spell checker and uses the same dictionary. It is just a different interface for getting to that function.
Most of us would probably consider the Communist Manifesto to be a reasonable source of information
Communist manifesto is a politically motivated document. It does not define communism, but defines the goals of a particular group that call themselves communists. It is like saying that democracy is defined by the charter and bylaws of the american democratic party. Is a belief in the christian god prerequisite to democracy? Is a formation of committees with at least 1/3 women prerequisite to democracy?
I'm sure you've probably read it before, but it seems to me that communism explicitly requires the violent overthrow of the bourgeois as it's method of implementation. I don't see how this could be compatible with democracy.
You are, quite simply, confusing a political party's platform for an economic concept. If I tell you the firebird I bought is green, would you assume I meant it was aligned with the ideals of the American green party, or would you assume I meant the paint was a mix of blue and yellow pigments? If I told you I was a member of the green party would you assume I'm in favor of increasing the number of things painted green? I'm all in favor of democracy. That does not mean I support the actions and political goals of the democratic party. I understand that communism is a necessary part of a stable economy. That does not mean I support the actions or policies of the american communist party. The government of the Indian state we were originally discussing is a democracy, and most of the officials in that state belong to the communist party. That does not mean that the state is a communist one, nor that the members of that party even advocate increased communism any more than the democrats in the US advocate increased democracy. To the best of my knowledge, neither is true.
I just want to make sure that people don't confuse socialism, communism, and the communist party platform, all of which are different things that people often confuse for one another.
Microsoft spent lots of time and money taking over the market from WP, and they have no incentive making it easy for someone to take over the market from Word.
The point of having an open standard is the fact that anyone can do this. Once again, MS has promised to create something that is just like and almost as good as, what customers want, but which really is nothing of the sort. The advantages of open standards are that they allow any vendor to provide a solution, and in fact, multiple vendors to provide different solutions for different uses of the format. OpenXML, is may have "open" in the name, but if it is castrated and obfuscated to prevent that, then it is simply trying to mislead people into thinking they are getting the benefits of open standards when they are not. Purchasers don't want open standards or open source, they want the advantages those bring, and MS is great at confusing the issue and giving people as few of those advantages in as limited of a way as possible, while claiming the opposite.
It is the same strategy as their "shared source" initiative. Ask a manager what open source is and they'll tell you that you can see the code. Ask them the advantages it brings and they get a little fuzzy. Open source means anyone can work on something and you can take bids from multiple developers. It stops lock in and it means you can get free improvements from other contributors. Shared source, means you can see the code if you sign a license that prevents you from getting any of those benefits. It is almost useless except as a way to mislead decision makers that have been advised what to do, but don't understand the mechanism or the difference between MS's version of things and what everyone else is talking about when they say "open source" or "open standard."
But I still think you don't understand my deeper point that roundtripping with.DOC means the new format needs to be able to handle all the quirks of.DOC. The face of the matter is that.DOC files have a "render like WP 5.x" attribute, so if you want to be able to roundtrip, that must exist in the XML format. You could add a bunch of finer grained attributes that describe how WP 5.x renders and add them to the standard but as soon as you needed to convert back to DOC you'd need to recongnize them and turn them into a.DOC style "Render as WP 5.x" attribute. But doing that is hard, especially if the user might remove some of the attributes when they edit the file.
Yes, I understand and I think it should be handled by the conversion process. If a person modifies a document and re-saves it they can't expect it not to change. Whether those finer grained attributes are implemented in Word using modern positioning attributes or with the "act like WP" version should not matter or be visible to the end user. You don't have to interpret the low level attributes back into a high level attribute as you claim, provided you account for all the functionality of the low level attributes in Word.
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Businesses are "Evil" when they lower the quality of their product or service without lowering the price, or raise the price beyond what is generally accepted as reasonable, or devalue their product in some manner that it becomes less desirable, while still maintaining a high price.
I'm a consumer and I don't consider that to be evil. I'd consider it them doing business and not giving me what I want. If they kill tens of thousands of workers in India because of lax safety procedures, I can see applying the term "evil." That, however, is my subjective view. It also demonstrates why discussing this in terms of good and evil is pretty pointless.
Alternately, businesses are considered "Evil" when they are engaged in anti-competitive practices as defined by law.
I don't think that makes them "evil" either. It just makes them criminals who are detracting from society. The guy on welfare down the road who smokes pot all day is both a criminal and a detriment to society. I don't consider him to be evil.
The words Good and Evil are simply used as synonyms for ethical and unethical or legal and illegal.
But they shouldn't be because they are different concepts and trying to equate them results in miscommunication. It also trains people to assume they are the same thing so they assume anything illegal is also unethical and is also evil. By this logic, black people should still be slaves, since the law stated it was illegal for them to be freed and thus unethical and evil for that to happen so no one should have supported it.
Ethics are objective. They don't make judgments about what is "right" or "evil." They distinguish who is responsible for the consequences of some action. Good, evil, right, and wrong all are subjective opinions about whether that action was acceptable and legal and illegal describe the laws we have designed to imperfectly promote the common good.
In our real-world case, Adding advertisements to games devalues the game as it damages two very important game features: Immersion and Escapism.
Nope. In the real world adding ads might devalue those aspects of the game or they might increase that value by adding variety and realism. It depends upon the application and the person experiencing it. Further, not all games rely upon or consider immersion and escapism to be beneficial. Some games relate to the real world and promote learning about it (think trivia). Here's a question for you. Is it either unethical or evil for me to create a work of art without value, like spitting on cardboard, and offering it for sale for 10 million dollars?
There are also privacy concerns to deal with. It has been shown that some in-game ad companies do individual data tracking on game players. This is considered a privacy violation, which is considered highly unethical by many.
So? It can be shown that some kitchen cutlery is used in murders. Does that make steelworkers ethically responsible for murder?
Thusly, when Ads are placed into a game, particularly one where they did not exist before, the value of the game is reduced.
...or enhanced, depending upon the game and the way they are integrated.
If then the cost of the game is not correspondingly reduced, the action of including ads appears to steal value.
Okay, supposing it does, do explain how Google or another company providing a conduit between any advertisers and any game makers is responsible for the publisher's pricing?
Google, by involving itself in value-theft...
Value-theft?!? Do you by any chance work for the RIAA? They're selling a product for a price. If you don't like the combination of price and product don't buy it. They don't have a monopoly on games. If you do buy it and don't like the ads, that is no more "value-theft" than if they make all the walls in some level have an unpleasant orange color you don't like. It isn't "theft" at all.
Those who consciously enable Evil
Interesting. What makes you say that? I haven't seen any behavior out of Apple that indicates that it would be willing to sell DRM-free music or movies of any kind.
Apple is not in the content business for profit. They are in it out of necessity as a way to motivate sales of iPods. They'd give all the music away if they could without losing money. DRM provides lock-in to iPods for users who already purchased ITMS music (small number compared to iPod sales) and who don't want to backup to CD and re-rip for one reason or another. That benefits Apple a little. Now look at the drawbacks. They come under criticism for non-compatability and it brings to light anti-trust issues now that their share of portable players is so large.
Apple doesn't particularly need to lock-in those few users. They do need to counter MS's attempt to monopolize music DRM with a format they own and which is anti-competatively bundled with Windows. They also need buy in from the music publishers, and that means compromise. They have fought hard to keep prices low and DRM as unobtrusive and un-restricting as possible. If the courts mandated only open formats and/or open formats with open DRM Apple would happily comply because it would partially de-fang MS while losing them little. If the record companies agreed to DRM'less files, I think Apple would jump at that too. It fits with their strategy for music and everything they've done to date.
Try this one: "Just because hitmen offer a service that other users want, doesn't make them evil. The person putting the contract out is evil." doesn't sound so right now, does it?
Again, lets bring this conversation into something we can actually discuss and make it "ethical" and "unethical" rather than "good" or "evil." A hitman is taking an action that is unethical, or at least bears ethical responsibility. The person hiring them is directing that unethical activity and specifically knows that by paying them the end result will be an attempt at this unethical act. As a result, both bear responsibility for that action. As to whether or not killing someone is "evil" is a subjective value.
Now lets consider this in terms of what Google is doing. Is providing ads from those who wish to advertise to those who wish to present advertisements in any way unethical? They presumably know those ads will be in video games, but are putting ads in video games inherently unethical? Can ads make video games better if used appropriately? If a video game publisher provided games for free, but included ads to pay for development would that be inherently unethical? What if it was an open source project that wanted to host a MMORPG that was free to all but needed revenue to pay for servers and bandwidth?
I contend that placing ads in video games is not inherently unethical. Further, while it can be unethical, such as placing ads in a game against the artists wishes using a distribution cartel and unethical copyright laws, there is no reason for Google to assume that will be the case and take responsibility for the actions of others.
They do this, they become an enabler, and a little 'less good' in my book.
When they index porn and enable people to find it they become a lot "less good" in many people's estimation. When they take a lot of actions they are considered "evil" by someone. The term is subjective. The pertinent question is, are they ethically responsible and holding true to their own subjective views of good and evil?
If you find the publishers that will use this service evil, why would you not consider the company enabling them to do so evil as well?
The term "evil" is a moral judgement. Moral judgments are, by definition, subjective. Why even bother discussing this?
A more productive discussion is the ethics of what Google and publishers are doing here. Is it ethical to put ads in a game you publish? In my opinion that depends upon the wishes of the creators of the work being published. If an artist or group of artists wants to stick an ad on that work, what is unethical about that? In some cases the ad actually makes the art better and is a part of it. In other cases it is just an attempt to cash in. In either case, I don't see anything unethical.
Now the artists and the publishers are not always the same people. If a publisher wishes to change artwork by including advertisements and the artists do not, well I can see an argument for that being unethical, especially given the distribution cartels and unethical copyright laws.
So what about the people who enable that behavior via an advertising channel? Well, since their advertising channel can be used in both the former and latter cases and since they are taking no unethical action themselves, I'd say they're in the clear. Ethically a gun manufacturer has no ethical liability unless they know or think they know the tool they sell will be used unethically and even then the connection is tenuous. Refusing the service to some people is passing judgement on their supposed future actions, both by claiming to be responsible for preventing those actions and judging what they do. This bears significant ethical responsibility, more-so that impartially providing a service.
Would you change your mind if the enabling company was called Microsoft instead of Google?
This is why discussing ethics is more useful. Being objective, it does not matter who is taking the action. The ethics do not change.
Google is seeking to profit from an advertising tactic that most people find extremely distasteful, if not downright evil.
Yeah and some people think providing free access to the Qua-ran is distasteful if not downright evil. Some people think making it easy for people to find pornographic pictures is distasteful if not downright evil. Who cares? Since there is no objective definition of "evil" Google is free to go by their own moral beliefs if their slogan is anything other than marketing. I don't care who provides advertising channels and I hope someone does. That does not mean I'll buy a game that has ads that I don't think add to the game, or which is not offered at a price I am willing to pay in compensation for that.
That may be theoretically possible but it almost never happens.
We've switched hardware vendors twice and added two more to our list in the last few years. It certainly happens.
It is a scenario used by IT in order to block companies from switching to Apple.
Anyone looking at a switch to Apple will see some very real added expenses compared to switching to another PC vendor, not because Macs cost more, but because most of the existing software will not run on them and because different tools are optimal.
Nobody is suggesting that companies which wholesale to OS X but this excuse IT departments have is bullshit when you consider that it is being used to maintain a monopoly of MSFT OSes.
It's not just MS OS's, but switching from Linux also has some of the same costs, although not as many since more software is shared between them.
If you were to ask a business user if they cared who the hardware vendor was, they would probably say no. What they really would like is stability and security with minimum down time.
Usually this is true, although some people like ultra-small portables that Apple does not offer a model of. They do often care about what OS they run. But that is not really important here. What users want is not always the best option for a company. I'm just saying when the OS and hardware vendor are tied and the OS is not 100% compatible with others, added expenses are incurred with changes, thus restricting future choices.
I think it is time for IT to stop serving its own interests at the expense of business needs.
This certainly happens, especially when IT wants more head count or only has expertise on one platform and is afraid of being out-competed by people with better skill sets.
Ultimately, a choice of vendors is an IT consideration and it does not really ad to the costs in the grand scheme of things to standardize on Apple hardware if it means that support staff can be reduced as well.
Where I work, support is not a major expense. Apple is one of our approved vendors and for laptops we get choose between Lenovo Thinkpads and Apple Macbooks. I'm typing this on my work-provided Macbook. The software costs for repurchasing certain software for this platform has been more expensive for us, as I'm sure the cost of moving away would likewise be an added expense. The cost is fairly small compared to some of the gains in productivity I personally have, but it certainly is a factor to consider if you're examing the business case.
The fact that OS X only work on one vendor's hardware (Apple) is a poor excuse. My employer uses IBM fore workstations and servers almost exclusively and Toshiba for laptops.
This isn't really the same thing though. Most businesses standardize on given hardware or hardware vendors, but they can easily change that vendor in the future without any problems, based upon who provides the best bid in future. Even if they stick with the same vendor they benefit from lower prices because that vendor is competing directly with others.
With Apple as the only vendor, potentially moving to another vendor is more expensive because of the resulting software incompatibility. Moving from Toshiba laptops running a given OS and set of applications to Lenovo laptops running the same OS and applications is very doable if the vendor tries to gouge you or will not provide the service you want. Moving from Apple laptops running one OS and set of applications to Lenovo laptops running a different OS and different set of applications is a much bigger migration with higher transition and training costs.
Now moving to or from OS X in general is cheaper than moving to and from Windows, since Apple does a pretty good job of adhering to standards and maintaining portable formats and protocols. If I had to choose between migrating from Linux to OS X or vice versus, or migrating from Windows to Linux, I'd much rather do the former and the costs would be lower. It is still, however, significantly more difficult than migrating hardware while maintaining the same OS and applications.
Examples?
Menus at the top of the screen instead of arbitrary positions, ala Fitt's Law; dialogue boxes that have actions for buttons instead of (OK/Cancel) which condition people via repetitive unneeded action; or default on button mouse, with multiple buttons as optional. There are hundreds of examples, actually. Just pick up a book on user interface design and development and you can see many, many well supported methods MS ignores.
Drag and drop works fine on Windows, it's just that most applications choose to give you a wizard to force-feed you the EULA, or offer you to set some preferences. Running software off an external drive works fine too, it depends on the software.
With Windows you have the choice of a .exe file with all resources embedded, or using an installer. Often, the .exe file and the installer install items in the registry that are not removed if you drag the application to the trash. As for external drives, usually you need to run an installer to install it on an external drive, which often will not work when plugged into a new computer because not all of it is on the removable drive unless the application is specifically designed for that like portable Firefox, but it does not work in most instances. Further, most Windows application are not FAT binaries and plugging the same drive into two different computers with different architectures does not work. On OS X I can drag an application into my chat client and it usually works for the person on the other end. On Windows, if this worked it would be a rare exception.
Nor do Commodore 64 users.
True, this is a win for commodore64 too. What is your point?
All works fine for me on Windows.
You've obviously never tried these same tasks on both platforms. In the first case, imagine you get a new laptop and would like to install the OS on it and migrate all your files, applications, user accounts settings, security certs, etc to the new machine. With a mac you plug in a Firewire cable and click the install from old machine option. It sucks all of the above over and even if the two machines are running very different processors all the software still works and is registered on the new machine with no work. Further, new software included with the new machine is installed alongside the software you already had and if you happened to have a partition on your drive it is replicated as well. One click and I go for coffee.
Doing the same task on Windows usually takes me a week of changing settings and reinstalling programs, and remaking user accounts, and looking up old passwords and certs that were not copied. Even if I buy a utility designed to do this for Windows, it still takes significant effort as programs are not generally portable. This is a huge win for the mac platform and I now instantly migrate my Windows install by keeping it in a VM and letting OS X handle the migration for me.
As for zeroconf, if I go to a conference I instantly see all the Mac and some Linux users available for local chatting, printers, shared music streaming, shared drive space, and collaborative documents available for shared editing. Because it is an open standard anyone can implement it and many OS's and hardware vendors now do so. Windows ignores this and Vista implements a proprietary discovery protocol, meaning that it intentionally cannot interoperate in mixed environments and of the above functions, only about half of them are available for auto-discovery on Windows that I've seen. Hence, "ubiquitous" zeroconf.
This assumes I want to run OS X in the first place.
No it doesn't. Re-read what I wrote. It compares OS X's ability to run Windows and Linux software, with Window's ability to run OS X and Linux software. The assumption is whatever platform you're using, if you're a power use you may need or want to use or test software from other platforms. No one platform has all the best applications available. The best
People who want to play GAMES. Like me. I will gladly wait 45 seconds to restart in order to run Half-Life 2
Actually both Parallels and VMware are working on graphics card support, which should make running Half-life without rebooting ala bootcamp a whole lot faster and mostly a matter of having enough RAM.
The general comments seem to be that we hate Microsoft because it's a closed system.
Umm, I don't see that as the character of the comments. Are you sure this isn't a strawman? I dislike MS because their criminal behavior has set the industry back a decade and personally inconvenienced me. As for it being "closed" Windows is not closed so much as intentionally designed to not interoperate with others and to make things hard for MS's customers when they want to do anything that doesn't result in MS getting more of their money.
On the otherhand we love Apple because everything works so well together.
Nah, screw that. I like Apple's products because they give me the functions I need, instead of assuming I will buy from them anyway and aiming at features that benefit them.
They can develop for a very narrow selection of hardware and have minimized the support costs.
This comment is actually wrong. Apple works very hard and spends money to get support from third parties. MS is a monopoly, so third parties all do whatever it takes to make sure they work with MS, even if that means paying MS to help them. MS doesn't spend money on this, they make money.
There is a very narrow range of hardware choices...
This is entirely true. Apple only makes a small selection of hardware and have coupled their hardware and software. This is a classic way to survive in a monopolized market. You build a separate vertical chain incorporating what would be a competitor to the monopoly. If not for MS's unethical practices in maintaining their monopoly, however, Apple would be driven to decouple the OS and hardware by the free market. So this disadvantage to Apple products is the result of MS's criminal behavior. That doesn't make it any less annoying, but it does lead a lot of us to dislike MS more, rather than Apple.
Also the choice of software for the mac is relatively limited...there is usually just one option (or maybe two) in each major category. For example, there is one home finance program, one tax program...
Umm, one in each major category? Not really, no. Taxes: turbotax, quicken, checkmark, and taxcut are all available.
This is true, there are a lot of niche applications where Windows has the only available software, or at least better software. There are enough of these so that a lot of people will eventually run into this.
What categories of programs are Mac only?
Well, there are certainly some areas. Publishing, biochemistry, linguistics, physics research, some computer security, pair programming, etc. For other areas software is available on both Mac and PC (like video editing) but the mac software is a whole lot better and really dominates the field.
Mac does have a unique high-end movie editor (but apple had to write it as no commercial company saw a big enough market in a mac only (yes, Adobe is returning to cross-platform for their version).
Don't you think it more than a little contradictory to write that the market for Mac video editing software was "not big enough" and then mention that Adobe is trying to get into that market? The truth is, Apple released a much better product than what was currently available and blew Adobe and to some degree Avid out of the water. They captured the lion's share of the video editing market with a better, cheaper product and people are still abandoning Adobe and Windows to move to that solution, which is why Adobe is releasing a mac version to try to win some of the switchers back with cross-platform availability. Adobe cancelled their competitor for a time claiming they could not compete and hoping to pressure Apple, not because there was not a profitable market.
Obviously a person should look at their own needs before picking a platform or, like me, run OS X on my laptop and Windows and Linux in VMs on top of it for specific applications.
I'm not saying Vista is better, but I point out that I don't agree with some of your OS X points
That's fine. The problem is, the consensus among UI experts is pretty clear to date on a lot of points that Vista has not changed from previous versions of Windows. Neither UI is perfect, but among people who have studied the subject it is like comparing the default security of OS X and WinXP SP1. People will say, "well they both have problems" or "OS X has problems with case sensitivity" but that doesn't address the overall picture. Being as I'm posting via a pseudonym I can't really rely upon my credentials to convince you, but do a little research into the subject, it is a good skill to have some understanding of anyway. Vista's human/computer interaction is still abysmal, while OS X is among the best of what is currently on the market.
It can be annoying at times, but this is why I like Linux, I can maximize windows, set other windows to 'always ontop' etc.
That's not really relevant to the point. We're discussing the pluses and minuses of Vista and OS X on the desktop. Adding Linux would make for a very difficult comparison and need a lot more discussion. I mentioned the UI paradigm simply to provide background for why the UI element you objected to was appropriate on both systems given other UI choices.
But I can't. Zoom has it's merit, but I still prefer maximize over it.
They are both appropriate for different applications and uses. OS X actually allows the application develop to choose which is appropriate, although I dislike the choices made for some default applications, although that partially is because I use them differently than the common case.
Seeing how easy it is to miss drag, I disagree, clicking 'next' a few times isn't as messy.
Umm, do you perhaps have a palsy? Conceptually it is much, much easier. It is faster. It is more learnable. For power users there is the "delete" key. I think you are 100% wrong on this.
Most applications work fine if you move them. Windows will even change the shortcuts accordingly
This is not my experience at all. A lot of applications, break if you move them in Vista or XP. A lot of them won't even run if you install them on a portable drive.
Too many times have I miss dragged or something and added the stupid thing to the dock (I'm not a novice with a mouse).
If the mouse is so hard for you to use, why do you use it? I can't say that I've ever failed to drag an icon to the trash. Maybe you should examine your sensitivity settings.
To be honest, I think your point about running programs off portable media is a bit of a meaningless.
I don't care. You're responding to a comment saying that whether or not a feature is useful to you or many people does not matter as this is a list of features where one system is ahead or behind. Most people won't care about most items. Your opinion of a feature is irrelevant unless you think something else does it better, which you have not presented.
Okay, when the majority of application on Windows are .net applications we can revisit this point. But right now, in the real world, this is a win for OS X because most applications work this way now, while on Windows they don't because it is not the standard.
As having written my own win32 console applications, I didn't actually have problems piping data from them.
Way to completely miss the point. I'm talking about existing applications. Most people are not developers. I can pipe data to and from photoshop on OS X. I cannot do that on Windows using Cygwin. On OS X the CLI shell is part of the system. On Windows you can tack on a third party Linux emulation environment that will work with itself and might work with apps you specially design to do so. OS X gets the point.
Not to mentio
Open office will ,unfortunately, take over in the mainstream just about the time Linux does. The main reason being corporations are wary of adopting software with no promise of support.
OpenOffice is in use in the industry right now. As for support, you can get it from IBM or Redhat or Sun or Suse or Novell or whomever. Word is where you have trouble getting real support because if you don't have enough seats MS will let you rot.
And people just aren't going to use one prog at work, one at home, etc. Just causes a hassle.
This is one of the strongest arguments for OpenOffice, not against it. Think of it this way. You administer a middle school or business where people work on things at home sometimes. With OpenOffice users can install the same version at home that they use in your network eliminating all the version incompatibilities. They can install as many copies as they want, because there is no per seat fee. MS has been trying to mitigate this with licenses that let a user install an extra copy of a corporate edition at home, but trying to manage the licensing for that sounds like a huge mess. If I was running a big network of word processing terminals, I'd be very, very tempted by OpenOffice for just this reason.
Because asshat HR departments require Word format to the rational exclusion of all other formats.
What kind of places do you send your resume to? We always ask for PDFs and when I was last looking at permanent jobs so did most of the places I looked at. The only really good reason I know of to send a Word doc is if it is a security post working someplace full of incompetent people, then you can put a web bug in it and call them when they look at your resume and say, "so I noticed you're looking at my resume..." :)
Your example about the spell checker is however a good example. OS's can be improved. Although I suspect that geeks don't spell check. But maybe they do, I don't know. I have never seen geeks getting excited about spell checking (I am not excited about it either, although it is clearly something useful)
Well I know some geeks that certainly spell check, especially books they're working on, but in general I suspect it is the fact that someone finally implemented a system that allows the user to plug in arbitrary functionality by itself or as part of an application, and share that functionality across applications that gets geeks excited.
I don't see comments how a Mac makes it easier for a programmer. Do people use Macs for programming?
My primary employer is a shop that makes specialty servers with some really cool custom security software on them. They're really expensive, but very useful. They run Linux and OpenBSD for the most part. The vast majority of the programmers and security experts I work with use macs for their desktops. They have pretty much everything Linux does as a programming environment. They ship with gcc, and all the tools you'd expect. They also have a lot of the commercial software Linux is lacking and some software, like omnigraffle and subethaedit that is very useful for programmers and not available on any other platform.
Is there a decent database available? Webserver?
You can install a database like MySQL or the like, but that is really more for servers. OS X ships with an integral database called "CoreData" that servers for lightweight personal uses. OS X ships with the Apache Web server, but again, it is more useful for development or minor serving tasks. OS X is optimized as a desktop, not a server.
I mean something that really makes it better than Windows and Linux?
OS X is good at lots of tasks and great for some types of programming and not so great for others, depending upon your target platform(s), languages, and tools. It ships with CVS (SVN is in the next release) toolsets for Ruby on Rails, Python, C, C++, Objective C, etc. Basically it has almost all the advantages of Linux, but additionally has more available software and some extras. It is ideal for pair programming as I find the tools much better than on other platforms.
When that is the case nobody ever mentions it.
Lots of people talk about the advantages of OS X. If you went to Blackhat or Defcon this year you'd notice half the machines there were running it. It's just that a lot of the really vocal people on non-technical sites, don't do any programming so they talk about the advantages for them.
The choice of an OS has been made an emotional thing.
It is for some people, like you and the mac evangelists. For others of us it is simply finding the best tool despite what other people say about it. Of course for some of us it is also not so much a choice, since we use all of them.
It is important to realize that an OS is just an OS. Just like many people don't care about which brand of car they drive...
And other people do care. There are conventions and groups for people who own an electric car, or a mini-cooper and I know a BMW owner who will drone on for hours, given the chance. For some people the relative merits of cars are important, either for their work or because it is their hobby. This is Slashdot. Almost everyone here uses computers for their job and many of us develop them. It is only natural that it will be a huge subject of interest. If you're not interested in OS's I suggest you change your filter settings or don't click on articles that are discussions about them, like this one obviously is.
Personally I like the concept of Linux most.
Linux is a great OS for some things and a so-so OS for others. Being fully open source and GPL is a feature, that results in long term benefits. When I'm looking for a solution to a specific problem I treat it as such, one more feature to go into my evaluation. Linux advocates are every bit as vocal about their OS and treating it as a religion as other OS advocates.
There is no reason to get excited (or even religious) about an OS. You don't get excited about the floor in your house. It just needs to be there.
Ahh, but if the market for floors had been monopolized and everyone had concrete floors, and then a house manufacturer started to sell houses with hardwood floors, a lot of people would be excited and want to talk about it. The pace of OS advancement has been glacial for many years and even some relatively basic features, like providing ways for those applications running on the OS to share features, have not really materialized. Then Apple was rejuvenated and has brought a lot to the table. One of the topics for discussion earlier was spellchecking in browsers and e-mail clients. It is pretty basic that if one program has a way to easily spellcheck words, it should be able to share that functionality with other applications via the OS. To date the majority of people share that functionality via an interface called "copy and paste." They copy text into Word, spellcheck it, and copy it back into whatever program they are using. This is rather cumbersome, so application developers instead implemented spell checking independently for every program or group of programs.
In OS X 10.0 Apple introduced system services. Suddenly one spelling checker can share that functionality with any other application that uses the default text APIs and they can share a dictionary. Better yet, they produced a whole framework so that programs can share arbitrary functions, like grammar checking, language translation, automatically formatting bibliographies, encrypting text, checksums, changing the style of line endings or quotes, etc. The idea is pretty basic, but most people never even considered why they couldn't use Word's spell checker in their AIM client. So when people started doing that, suddenly they got excited. Real improvement after years of basically nothing. Some of those people ran off at the mouth and claimed it meant OS X was superior in every way and anyone not using it is an idiot. Others thought, cool, I hope MS copies that soon.
I don't blame computer geeks who get excited by progress. It just shows they care about what they do.
Maximize button.
Listen, I know quite a bit about UI design and testing. If you pick up a good book on the subject you'll notice something, a lot of the "common mistakes" are still in Vista and a lot of the "good designs" are in OS X. The Windows UI operates almost on the assumption that you'll want to see one application, per screen at a time. As a result, a maximize button that expands to fit the screen is useful, even if only because of the prior poor design choice. On OS X that assumption does not hold true, so expanding to fit the content makes sense. You chose a very poor point to argue.
I find that really annoying on OS X, I'd rather just double click on a package
If you think double clicking and navigating through a wizard is easier than dragging to a folder, well you're wrong in the general case. If you think not being able to move the application once installed is more flexible, or convenient you must work at MS. If you think opening up add/remove software and clicking through the uninstaller is easier than dragging to the trash, you must work at MS and may be drunk.
A feature I don't see many people using at the moment.
Some people do, most don't. The point of my post was to list the features where each OS is ahead of the other. Just because you don't use it or even because 99% of people don't use it does not matter.
Hardware platforms. I can put an application on my thumb drive and plug it into two machines one a 32 bit PPC machine running OS X and the other a 64 bit Intel running a different version of OS X and it will work on both. If I upgrade from one machine to the other, the app still works without reinstalling. That is an advantage that Vista does not have that I've ever found.
haven't been very impressed with the ANSI color support of term.app, even Windows gets this right. As for shells on Windows, while a 'reasonable' one may not pre-installed. I do find Cygwin more comfy than having say OS X + Darwin tools.
I've used cygwin for years and it is very, very limited and does not integrate with anything. You can't pipe data from a Windows app or even to a a Windows app from one running in cygwin without a lot of pain. As for your arguments about terminal.app, I like it but it is irrelevant to this point. I was talking about the shell environment, not the terminal used to access it.
Upgrading a Mac is so easy... You buy a new one?
You have to prejudiced as hell not to see OS X's firewire upgrade mechanism as anything other than a huge win over Windows.
And the ones that don't work lock up the computer (like my bluetooth dongle :P)
I've actually never had any hardware lock up any of my macs except for some bad RAM one time. I have had peripherals bluescreen Windows. In any case, that is a completely separate and arguable point, your anecdote and mine notwithstanding.
I disagree, I think package management via domain management is really nicely done, I haven't seen any better from OS X out of the box.
Umm, Apple basically has no package management out of the box, which is why this was listed as a win for Vista. As for that package management being "nicely done" I take it you've never run a Linux desktop of any variety?
On a more general note, I figured people would decide to quibble and argue about these features, but it is sad that you did not have anything useful to add to the conversation. You're so blatantly pro-MS that it is sickening. Even on really useful features where MS has not even come up with anything, you feel the need to try to defend them. Sad.
That said, the arguments about which OS is better seem specious.
I disagree and I'm actually rather sad at the response to this type of article. Arguing the relative merits of Apple and Microsoft in ways that don't actually address their end products, is what is pointless. Discussing the actual relative merits of the two OS's feature by feature, task by task has value. The problem is so few people have used both OS's that almost no one here knows what the missing features and abilities of both OS's are. Almost all the reviews you see online are from either a Mac user, who tries out Vista for a few hours, or a Windows guy, who tries OS X for a few hours. They almost never actually address the actual differences and there certainly are a number of them.
Since everyone's needs and preferences and workflows are different you can't say one is better or worse, but you certainly can give potential users the information they need to see what functions are present and missing on each system and which tasks each performs better at, in general. I was busy working when this article was posted, but near the bottom of the comments you can find one from me that lists the features/advantages I could think of off the top of my head. If you've used both Vista and OS X, why not take a look and add your own two cents. This discussion could actually be a useful and informative one, rather than a pissing contest.
But I would never use a Mac. It is soooo snobbish. There is no way I want to be part of that snobbish Mac-defenders group. I wished they would shut up and consider Mac for what it is: an overpriced BSD clone, that is just used to brag about.
I thought your post was rather amusing in a number of ways. First, you explain that people are emotionally invested in their OS choices and will defend them regardless of the real relative merits. This is entirely true. In addition, most people don't really understand and use multiple OS's so they are arguing from ignorance. There are, however, a few people who do use two or three or more OS's regularly. Since they have the same investment in several OS's perhaps their decisions and arguments can be a little more useful? I run Linux (server and desktop), OpenBSD (server), OS X (desktop), and Windows (server) every day. They all have plusses and minuses.
So here's what I find so amusing, you claim you won't use a mac because you don't like others who do. This is pretty emotive decision making. You're admittedly choosing an OS based upon something other than the relative merits of your options. Further, you express dismay that you would somehow be forced to be a "snobbish mac-defender." Contrary to your perception, most mac users are not particularly vocal about their OS choice. There is a phenomenon, however, where new mac users will get their first mac and be astounded about how easy some things are and how some of their biggest gripes are solved and how some things they never even thought of are now making their life easier. These people tend to want to share this with others, since the only reason they did not switch long ago was because they did know about all of these things. Sadly, most of this vocal group are usually also the least experienced and informed users, so they tend to present some very superficial and sometimes emotive rather than logical arguments.
You say you wish mac users would shut up, but the vast majority of them have shut up, you just don't hear from them. As for OS X being an "overprices BSD clone" well if that is truly your opinion you've either never used OS X on the desktop or never used the BSDs on the desktop.
Finder is pretty poor compared to something like Konqueror...
I dunno, they both have their plusses and minuses.
The ease with which you can change or add hotkey combinations for certain functions is also an issue with me.
Weird. System Preferences, Keyboard and Mouse, Keyboard Shortcuts.
I've not really gotten into more power-user type stuff yet, I've had Mac laptops for a while, but used them mainly for "day to day" browsing, IM, Term Serv. Now I have a Mac as my desktop machine at home, and it's definitely throwing some curves coming from SuSE + KDE, but I'm trying to hold off on dual-booting and give it a fair shot.
The only person I know who switched to OS X for their desktop and switched back, was an old school UNIX guy who simply did not want to learn to do anything differently from Linux and just wanted to make OS X behave exactly like Linux (which of course it could never do as well). The fact that he does a lot of Linux desktop development as a hobby was probably also a factor. In my experience, almost everyone who is willing to learn to do things differently soon can find some real advantages on OS X, I know I have.
For the record, I still use Kubuntu within a VM regularly for a number of workstation tasks it does better.
The fact is, people probably like OSX because there is less opportunity for the user to get confused
I disagree. There is plenty of rope to hang yourself. Both expert users and others can find plenty of options on OS X to confuse themselves. The difference is you never need to change those options, while on Linux you still do, upon occasion.
Yeah, as with anything else it has its advantages and disadvantages. Many of the advantages, have become so useful, however, whenever I use my Linux or Windows systems I feel like I just stepped back into the 90's. What do you mean I can't translate my IM messages to and from german with a key press? ...and so on.
OS X Wins:
Windows Vista Wins:
Those are the things I can think of off the top of my head. Does anyone have anything to add. Please don't bother unless you've used both OS's recently.
This is one reason I much prefer Camino to Firefox on OS X, as well.
Firefox 3 alpha 1 on OS X is pretty stable for me and includes cocoa widget support so the spell checking service and all the other services work just fine in it. You might want to check it out as it is more up-to-date than Camino which tends to lag Firefox quite a bit. It's not for everyone, but you do have a choice between trailing edge or bleeding edge if that is the feature you need.
What boggles my mind is the degree to which people have come to rely on their browsers and are convinced that every feature normally associated with a different program should be built into their browser of choice. Don't mean to sound overly critical, but for me, a browser is (ignoring the few extra bits) something that renders web pages. I don't want it to do anything more.
Different people have different needs and wants both in their browser and in other programs. Many, many people want spell checking for their Web mail, for example. I agree that this should not be added to browsers though. Spellchecking and the like are more appropriate to add/enable/disabable at the OS level. I mean if you already have this running in your word processor, why not share that functionality for your Web browser, e-mail client, chat client, text editor, terminals, calendar, etc., etc. This also provides the advantage of sharing one dictionary so you need only train it once.
Then, again, I'm still scratching my head wondering why it is people need two spell czech they're work. Your reading, writing and typing skills will never improve (and may get worse), and for the lazy, it's a poor substitute for proof reading.
Spell checking is not a substitute for proof reading, but it is beneficial in many cases. When I'm casually writing I often do not notice misspellings and having many of them highlighted for me makes my writings much more readable. Better yet, spellcheckers train people to spell some words correctly. How many times have you seen the word "rediculous" here on Slashdot? Don't you think that after five of six times of noticing it is highlighted in red and then fixing it those people would learn how to spell it?
As a side note, OS X already provides a global spelling checker as I describe that you can enable or disable globally, preventing a lot of code duplication and saving a lot resources for those who do use it.
What I would rather have is a facility that can spell check any text in any application.
This is already built into OS X, along with a dictionary/thesaurus option. Better yet, OS X includes a services framework that allows the addition/customization of arbitrary functions like this, called services. I regularly use one for grammar checking (included with leopard), language translations, bibliography reference formatting, collated online dictionary lookups, removing windows line endings, statistical info, and a slew of other functions I'm not thinking of right now. It is, in my opinion, one of the most under appreciated features of OS X. KDE, by the way, has implemented something called "Kparts" that lets developers of KDE apps embed spellchecking making it more common and universal, but since developers have to explicitly include the feature, it is much less useful.
MacOS X DOES provide an inline spell checker, though I believe it only works for Cocoa apps, not Carbon, and I think they leave it up to developers whether to implement it or not...
This is not quite correct. The OS X spellchecking service, like all the other services, works automatically in Cocoa apps without any work on the part of the developer (as I understand) and functions inline. Developers can integrate it in additional ways as well and it can be included in Carbon applications, but the developers have to do it specifically. For example, Firefox3 alpha 1 includes the native OS X spellchecking with the same dictionary as all the other applicatons, despite not being a cocoa application.
There's also a spell checker on the Services menu, though its more for checking the spelling of individual words.
This is the same spell checker and uses the same dictionary. It is just a different interface for getting to that function.
Most of us would probably consider the Communist Manifesto to be a reasonable source of information
Communist manifesto is a politically motivated document. It does not define communism, but defines the goals of a particular group that call themselves communists. It is like saying that democracy is defined by the charter and bylaws of the american democratic party. Is a belief in the christian god prerequisite to democracy? Is a formation of committees with at least 1/3 women prerequisite to democracy?
I'm sure you've probably read it before, but it seems to me that communism explicitly requires the violent overthrow of the bourgeois as it's method of implementation. I don't see how this could be compatible with democracy.
You are, quite simply, confusing a political party's platform for an economic concept. If I tell you the firebird I bought is green, would you assume I meant it was aligned with the ideals of the American green party, or would you assume I meant the paint was a mix of blue and yellow pigments? If I told you I was a member of the green party would you assume I'm in favor of increasing the number of things painted green? I'm all in favor of democracy. That does not mean I support the actions and political goals of the democratic party. I understand that communism is a necessary part of a stable economy. That does not mean I support the actions or policies of the american communist party. The government of the Indian state we were originally discussing is a democracy, and most of the officials in that state belong to the communist party. That does not mean that the state is a communist one, nor that the members of that party even advocate increased communism any more than the democrats in the US advocate increased democracy. To the best of my knowledge, neither is true.
I just want to make sure that people don't confuse socialism, communism, and the communist party platform, all of which are different things that people often confuse for one another.
Microsoft spent lots of time and money taking over the market from WP, and they have no incentive making it easy for someone to take over the market from Word.
The point of having an open standard is the fact that anyone can do this. Once again, MS has promised to create something that is just like and almost as good as, what customers want, but which really is nothing of the sort. The advantages of open standards are that they allow any vendor to provide a solution, and in fact, multiple vendors to provide different solutions for different uses of the format. OpenXML, is may have "open" in the name, but if it is castrated and obfuscated to prevent that, then it is simply trying to mislead people into thinking they are getting the benefits of open standards when they are not. Purchasers don't want open standards or open source, they want the advantages those bring, and MS is great at confusing the issue and giving people as few of those advantages in as limited of a way as possible, while claiming the opposite.
It is the same strategy as their "shared source" initiative. Ask a manager what open source is and they'll tell you that you can see the code. Ask them the advantages it brings and they get a little fuzzy. Open source means anyone can work on something and you can take bids from multiple developers. It stops lock in and it means you can get free improvements from other contributors. Shared source, means you can see the code if you sign a license that prevents you from getting any of those benefits. It is almost useless except as a way to mislead decision makers that have been advised what to do, but don't understand the mechanism or the difference between MS's version of things and what everyone else is talking about when they say "open source" or "open standard."
But I still think you don't understand my deeper point that roundtripping with .DOC means the new format needs to be able to handle all the quirks of .DOC. The face of the matter is that .DOC files have a "render like WP 5.x" attribute, so if you want to be able to roundtrip, that must exist in the XML format. You could add a bunch of finer grained attributes that describe how WP 5.x renders and add them to the standard but as soon as you needed to convert back to DOC you'd need to recongnize them and turn them into a .DOC style "Render as WP 5.x" attribute. But doing that is hard, especially if the user might remove some of the attributes when they edit the file.
Yes, I understand and I think it should be handled by the conversion process. If a person modifies a document and re-saves it they can't expect it not to change. Whether those finer grained attributes are implemented in Word using modern positioning attributes or with the "act like WP" version should not matter or be visible to the end user. You don't have to interpret the low level attributes back into a high level attribute as you claim, provided you account for all the functionality of the low level attributes in Word.