And that's without having seen Vista. But if you scan the list of features they had announced for "Longhorn" and then removed before calling it "Vista", well about everything that would be an actual technological advancement is on that discarded-features list. So whatever is left except some eye candy - the one area where MS has been at least 10 years behind Apple for all of its existence? Trying to beat Apple in looks of the OS is the one thing that a company like MS, driven by marketing freaks and a few remaining techies will never, ever accomplish.
No, "Longhorn" (as originally announced) might have become a state-of-the-art OS. "Vista" isn't.
Actually, what I personally care more about than some socialist dream is that I live in a harbour city. If the ocean were to rise a few metres, large parts of my city would get flooded.
And no, corporations don't want to kill people. They want to make a profit. The problem is that there is nothing in the concept of a corporation to stop it from killing people if doing so means making a profit. And that's the problem. Corporations aren't evil, they are without morals at all.
IMHO, the "scientific consensus" that global warming is *even happening at all* is completely manufactured. I just flat out don't believe it. Is that belief as in religious belief or belief as in substantiated opinion? You know, the beauty about science is that all the documents are out there. You can read the studies. You can check if there is a consensus and what it is and why.
This is one of the problems of society we face. Our forefathers faced slavery, absolutism, war and others, we are facing litigation and the question of which status corporations should have.
A corporation is in many ways worse than an insane king. For one, you can't wait for it to die of old age. Two, it the king at least could only be in one place at the same time. He had limited resources. Once he started distributing responsibilities, you could hope to change the bureaucracy instead.
However, we face the same problem those French Revolution peasants did: First, we have to realize that we are the people, that corporations live and die by our decree. That if we are united, there's nothing they can do except maybe cause some casualties. We've got to realize that before they've taken all the power away from us. As long as elections are bought and manipulated and full of fraud and bullshit, but at least it's still we who vote and the manipulations can't bend a clear majority. And we've got to realize that "we" means all the lazy, stupid, couch-potato, daily-soap-watching, beer-drinking idiots, too.
Good point. Yes, COBOL in business environments, FORTRAN in production, LISP in - afaik - research and (at that time) "weird" applications.
I didn't learn FORTRAN, it was "out" when I studied. But I still learned COBOL. Please, let it die a quick and horrible death. Mostly quick would be very welcome.
One, these figures result from the simple fact that COBOL was pretty much the only high-level language around at those pre-historic times many of the major applications were written. And banks are very, very conservative environments where something that works will not be thrown away for something that might have bugs, even if it's 10x as fast, easy to maintain or whatever. It has to work and that's priority #1, #2 and #3.
Two, the reason COBOL is so widespread in financial institutions has nothing to do with business sense and everything with business mind. It is "readable" to a business dude with zero computing experience. Something like "ADD PROFITMARGIN TO PRICE" just makes these people feel more at easy than "$price+=$p_margin".
I can't wrap my mind around it that this is even worthy of discussion.
Let's see, what's an encyclopedia all about? Objective fact and information, neutral and impartial.
What's advertisement all about? Presentation of a single, strongly partial and subjective view that has a strict business purpose and is "designed" in accordance to business needs. Facts are to be used if positive, hidden if negative.
There's one other trend where I think 2006 has really excelled - though 2005 wasn't much better:
Selling half-finished games.
On the PC, this is currently the major problem. I've played so many games in '06 that were clearly not released "when done", but much earlier. Massive gameplay problems, huuuge AI errors, crippling graphics problems. Ever since the Internet and widespread broadband adoption have made patching easy, it seems companies ship when it's half done and hope they can work the major bugs out between gold master and first week of sales.
And I don't mean small bugs. I mean game-stopping problems. Check the forums for any of the large games. Crashbug here, unplayable due to bug X there - and that's months after the initial release in many cases.
The problem is that this compatability is only within the MS monopoly. Try to Cut&Paste some Excel data into any non-MS document. Even plain text doesn't always behave as expected once you cross the boundary between MS turf and 3rd party "wilderness".
On a solid system, you cut cut&paste or drag&drop anything from anywhere to anywhere and it would at least make us much out of it as possible. The Mac has most of that working, I can mark text in Firefox, drag it to the desktop and a new text file with its contents will be created. I can drag&drop stuff from any application to any other and in the vast majority of cases it'll work, no matter if it's an Apple app or not.
Not so on windos. The whole undocumented API mess pays for MS, but only for MS.
simple, uniform, and consistent key and mouse commands. There's just too many command option control shift double corner click combos in OS X. You think? I'm not sure anymore. I started out thinking the same, but the more I think about it, the less I agree with my original feeling.
Command + something is always some, well command. "Do X". Alt + something is always an alternative, like "shutdown, but without asking me".
It would be, if it had two real buttons. I agree on that. The reply was to a specific feature, however, the scroll-wheel vs. trackball question. There are a couple of things about the Mighty Mouse that I would wish were improved as well.
Typical Mac fanboy fanatacism. Try not to break a sweat next time you post. My post was rational. Yours, fanatical. Fanboy? Yes, by experience. I use a Mac and nothing but brute force will get me to windos. As for rational, it was also full of false information. Your reply, on the other hand, is ad hominem, which on my scale rates far below fanboyish.
If its so wonderful, why do more Mac users use third party wheel mice instead of it? Everyone has different preferences. I don't find the Mighty Mouse perfect, either. However, we were comparing one specific feature here - trackball vs. scroll wheel. You claim one is a "cheap copy" of the other, when it in fact is at the very least an improvement.
Let's see, there's no 1cm border on the outside of my work window. It seems to me that its OSX that's wasteful here. You have no idea what you're talking about, do you? OSX doesn't just leave a "pretty border" around stuff for no reason. The green window icon puts a window into optimal size. For many windows, that means less than full screen simply because there is not enough content in the window to justify using up the entire screen. Why would I want to maximize to 1600x1200 a window that has a 300x200 content?
"Drag" in general is a system that is fading from interface design, Says who? Any sources for that bold claim?
The Dock is yet another example of "Dear God, please don't let us get caught following Windows' lead". This is the point where I get a bit irritated. Other replies have given you a clean history of the Dock and should be more than enough evidence that its design is older, more refined and mature than the windos taskbar which is, in fact, a bad copy of the same source that the Dock is a better copy of. Now if you insist on not being educated by fact, I can't change that, but I don't see a need to argue over facts that are so well known even the most ardent windos fans readily agree on them.
How many flavors of Linux favor the taskbar approach over the dock approach? Because that's a pretty good indication. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And here I was thinking everyone on/. agreed that after Betamax vs. VHS it's a well-known fact that preponderance is not an indication of quality.
* Scrolling in 2d can be annoying on some websites.
* I haven't found a need to scroll horizontal yet. You don't have to scroll in 2D, you know? You can, but you don't have to. I've yet to scroll horizontal by accident. And if you've never had to do that, you aren't doing much work on a GUI. Image manipulation, CAD, 3D animation and so on for a long list of applications where your view needs to move in 2D all the time.
I disagree, I find this really primitive in OS X. On KDE, I can maximize windows, making full use of space desktop space. I'm able to set important small windows to always remain ontop (or like in 'Spaces', another virtual desktop). True that, there's a few nice features I miss on OSX. Though all of them are lacking on windos as well and that was the topic. Which also covers most of your other answers. Then again, KDE did copy a few nice ideas from OSX - Katapult is a nice copy of Quicksilver, though it's lacking all the advanced features.
As for customizability - a few years ago I thought that was king. I don't think that any longer. Being able to sit down on any other Mac and being able to start working right away without having to figure out for half an hour where everything has been customized to has a value all in itself. What I need to customize, I find I can.
But, there are always different preferences. You have yours and that's fine.
When I started reading that I honestly thought you were going to refer to the number of people who try Linux out of curiosity
Oops. No. I was refering to "if your website only works on windos, then every Linux user who visits it will visit it only once, counting for 1 Linux visit. Windos users will return, counting for x (x>1, depending on how interesting your site is) visits, thus even if Linux had 50% market share, your logs would show 10% if the average windos user of yours clocks 9 visits.
Like with the infinitely superior wheel-mouse? Or windows that maximize? Or a hierarcichal file explorer? Or a taskbar? Have you ever used OSX for more than 5 minutes? Then you, sir, are a stupid idiot.
* The Mighty Mouse is at least 3 times as useful as those "wheel-mouse" abominations. It doesn't have a wheel, it has a small trackball. That means a) higher resolution and b) ability to scroll in 2D instead of 1D. If you've ever used a mouse in serious work and not just websurfing, you'll know how infinitly valuable that is.
* OSX windows don't maximize. They optimize. There's a difference there, one you have to see to appreciate. Maximize is simple, wasteful and ugly. Optimize is simple (to use), efficient and beautiful.
* Finder isn't based on explorer, it's based on the NeXT filesystem browser as is immediatly obvious to anyone who's used both. In fact, from what I've heard the vista explorer has once again copied Finder's useful shortcut bar.
* There is no taskbar on OSX. The Dock contains information about running tasks, but it is much more, more useful, efficient and nicer to look it. If you call it "copying" that Ferrari builds cars with the same number of wheels as the original Ford, then yes. By any other definition, the Dock is not a copy of the taskbar.
Why's there no "-1 bullshit" or "-1 misinformation" mod choice?
Great, so blocking images in E-Mail will no longer get those image-spams thrown out, because now a bright-but-not-intelligent geek has given the spammer assholes a way to encode their crap in simple HTML which no spam filter will manage to get.
Congratulations. How much did they pay you?
Oh, as for the "official" purpose. I give it a life expectancy of 3 weeks before the spammers have found a way around it. If they bother at all.
I laugh at those statistics every time I see them.
Let me think... might the low number of Linux visits probably be related to the bad Linux support? You know, if it doesn't work for them, they're less likely to return for another visit? Those circular causation chains are a bitch, aren't they?
Sure, Linux is small. But it's not exactly as if nobody would use it. For example, I dare to say that there are more Linux users on the Internet than blind users. Yet a lot of effort is made, especially on government sites, to make them accessable for blind users. The argument is what, exactly? That blindness is a disability and using Linux a choice? Ah! So number of users doesn't matter is what you say? But up there you said Linux userbase is too small and that's why. But that's not true for some other user groups, so it's not the whole story.
Then again, using windos is a kind of disability itself. Something like having AIDS, you know? An immune system deficiency - if you have windos, you're a lot more likely to catch all these viruses...
I think the lack of Linux support from big organisations like the EU is mostly due to mindset. They are used to working with other big organisations, like multinational corporations, and when you say "Linux support" they ask "who can we contract?" and if your answer is "all kinds of people, these and those and lots more" they say "that's too complicated for us. Who produces Linux? Lots of companies? Too complicated. Parse error. Input buffer overflow. Bzzzt." and then you get these bogus reasons like "for legal reasons". I've long made a mental note that "for legal reasons" without any further explanation alway means "don't ask, just go away, we don't want to explain it because it's embarrassing".
Sorry, but "not intentional" doesn't cut it when something happens that was explicitly forbidden in the charter of the program.
If I sign a contract that specifically says I can only get X under condition of Y and Z, then breaking those conditions invalidates the contract. Secure Flight should be terminated and TSA be made liable for any and all damages.
Why is it that governments and corporations can fuck up constantly on a scale that makes you dizzy while any natural person doing a fuckup on a similar scale would be locked away for life?
so the best solution is to try to educate the prey They breed faster than you can educate them. Until "do not buy from spammers" becomes something every 4-year old is told together with "don't take candy from strangers", education is and will remain a total failure.
I've been doing security for 10 years now. User education is a desaster, a failure and a total waste of time. I have yet to see a single security problem being solved by user education. In the corporate environment especially giving an order and threaten everyone with being fired if they don't obey works 10x as well as explaining why doing X is bad and should be avoided.
Experts worry that businesses will be slow to switch to the [Windows Vista] Oh yeah, the "most secure windos ever". That's like saying you've just created the least leaky sieve ever. Come on, the consumer version isn't even out yet and there are already exploits. Within a year, Vista will be full of holes just like XP is today. Doesn't anyone remember that they made the identical claims regarding security when XP replaced 98/ME ?
Shut down bots. Only option to get rid of the networks. Make people care. Pass a law that forces ISPs to shut down known bot-infected customers until they've cleaned up, on penalty of severe fines. I work for an ISP. We can do it, but won't for fear of customers becoming angry and moving elsewhere. That's why it has to be a law so there is no elsewhere to go and the rules are the same for every ISP.
I like tinkerirng with my servers. I don't like tinkering with X on a notebook while on a plane with limited battery life left and a deadline to meet. And yes, Linux is 100% free and I could in theory write my own hardware drivers (never done it, but I have the code and the skills and even a book about writing kernel modules).
Point still is: For a desktop, I will choose OSX any day. For a server, give me Linux. For special-purpose machine, I'll also prefer Linux most of the times, because I can customize it better. But I much enjoy putting the hours I used to spend on resolving dependencies manually so I can compile this latest release of something into more personal projects instead.
Also, both KDE and Gnome suck. And I mean suck as in "they are almost as bad as windos". Inconsistent in many places, way too much me-too-copying (the K menu. Right. Take the dumbest idea from windos and copy it. I still think the designer of the K menu should be shot, together with the designers of the "Start" menu).
Linux's strengths are also its weaknesses. Yes, I can choose from 20 different window managers and 2 different desktop systems. But that also means not everything works with everything else, and stuff breaks randomly left and right.
Don't get me wrong, Linux is great. But while we (yes, I include myself, I used to be lightly involved with Gnome) tried to put Linux on the desktop, Apple lapped us.
Wait, didn't the court just tell them that no, you can not introduce new evidence into a case years after discovery is over? And then tossed their case out saying they have no leg to stand on? And now they say "if only we were allowed to add this new evidence, there would be a case" ???
Are they trying to pull a Microsoft here - annoying the judge until he says something stupid and they can get him replaced? Or are they simply dumb and hard of hearing?
Try a recent Ubuntu. Things have moved on. Ubuntu is running on my machine at work. Sorry, it's not an equal to OSX. The only thing I miss about OSX is virtual desktops, but hey Leopard is coming...
And since then you've become a fanatical Mac fanboy? Yes.
Perhaps you should install anything recent such as Ubuntu 6.10 and see where Linux is at now. Running at work, where I can install the OS of choice but not buy the hardware of choice. Sorry, even though it's a great step forward, and it beats windos every day, it still doesn't compare to OSX. The main difference being that on OSX stuff just works. Installing drivers, messing with/etc/* files? "Plug and Play" is a joke and buzzphrase on windos, on OSX it's reality. I still have to find a piece of hardware that doesn't simply work when I plug it in.
Article is right on one thing: OSX was the deathblow to Linux-on-the-desktop.
I've been a fanatical Linux fanboy since about '95.
Today, I own a MacBook Pro and run OSX. My servers run Debian. But for the desktop, OSX is what Linux will never be: A Unix with a state-of-the-art GUI.
The key is that now the sender has to own the email. He can't just shoot off 20 million random messages. He now has to store all of them on his server for some period of time so that you can pick them up. Cheap for you, expensive for him. Wrong. For legitimate mail, you shift the costs to the sender. For spam or other mass-mailings, the additional cost is negligable, because the same mail is delivered to everyone who comes calling, and you don't even need to store a list of who is authorized - you just give the spam to everyone who comes asking.
It also means that he has to be honest about his RSS feed otherwise you'll never be able to pick up the email and read it. This also makes it easier to track them down. In theory, yes. In the real world, they'd just use other people's machines, like now. It would make a little difference, yes. But it wouldn't eliminate the problem. Just another round in the arms-race.
Personally, I think spammers won't go away easily. They make a lot of money off pathetic fucktards who think they can get a bigger dick with a pill. The real damage is done by the people who purchase via spam making spam a viable marketing tool. 100% agree. We should shoot the spammers, and fine everyone who ever bought anything from a spammer the costs of the bullet and assassin.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I agree.
And that's without having seen Vista. But if you scan the list of features they had announced for "Longhorn" and then removed before calling it "Vista", well about everything that would be an actual technological advancement is on that discarded-features list. So whatever is left except some eye candy - the one area where MS has been at least 10 years behind Apple for all of its existence? Trying to beat Apple in looks of the OS is the one thing that a company like MS, driven by marketing freaks and a few remaining techies will never, ever accomplish.
No, "Longhorn" (as originally announced) might have become a state-of-the-art OS. "Vista" isn't.
And no, corporations don't want to kill people. They want to make a profit. The problem is that there is nothing in the concept of a corporation to stop it from killing people if doing so means making a profit. And that's the problem. Corporations aren't evil, they are without morals at all. IMHO, the "scientific consensus" that global warming is *even happening at all* is completely manufactured. I just flat out don't believe it. Is that belief as in religious belief or belief as in substantiated opinion? You know, the beauty about science is that all the documents are out there. You can read the studies. You can check if there is a consensus and what it is and why.
Did you?
This is one of the problems of society we face. Our forefathers faced slavery, absolutism, war and others, we are facing litigation and the question of which status corporations should have.
A corporation is in many ways worse than an insane king. For one, you can't wait for it to die of old age. Two, it the king at least could only be in one place at the same time. He had limited resources. Once he started distributing responsibilities, you could hope to change the bureaucracy instead.
However, we face the same problem those French Revolution peasants did: First, we have to realize that we are the people, that corporations live and die by our decree. That if we are united, there's nothing they can do except maybe cause some casualties.
We've got to realize that before they've taken all the power away from us. As long as elections are bought and manipulated and full of fraud and bullshit, but at least it's still we who vote and the manipulations can't bend a clear majority.
And we've got to realize that "we" means all the lazy, stupid, couch-potato, daily-soap-watching, beer-drinking idiots, too.
The last is why I don't have much hope.
Good point. Yes, COBOL in business environments, FORTRAN in production, LISP in - afaik - research and (at that time) "weird" applications.
I didn't learn FORTRAN, it was "out" when I studied. But I still learned COBOL. Please, let it die a quick and horrible death. Mostly quick would be very welcome.
One, these figures result from the simple fact that COBOL was pretty much the only high-level language around at those pre-historic times many of the major applications were written. And banks are very, very conservative environments where something that works will not be thrown away for something that might have bugs, even if it's 10x as fast, easy to maintain or whatever. It has to work and that's priority #1, #2 and #3.
Two, the reason COBOL is so widespread in financial institutions has nothing to do with business sense and everything with business mind. It is "readable" to a business dude with zero computing experience. Something like "ADD PROFITMARGIN TO PRICE" just makes these people feel more at easy than "$price+=$p_margin".
I can't wrap my mind around it that this is even worthy of discussion.
Let's see, what's an encyclopedia all about? Objective fact and information, neutral and impartial.
What's advertisement all about? Presentation of a single, strongly partial and subjective view that has a strict business purpose and is "designed" in accordance to business needs. Facts are to be used if positive, hidden if negative.
How can anyone even think these two could match?
There's one other trend where I think 2006 has really excelled - though 2005 wasn't much better:
Selling half-finished games.
On the PC, this is currently the major problem. I've played so many games in '06 that were clearly not released "when done", but much earlier. Massive gameplay problems, huuuge AI errors, crippling graphics problems. Ever since the Internet and widespread broadband adoption have made patching easy, it seems companies ship when it's half done and hope they can work the major bugs out between gold master and first week of sales.
And I don't mean small bugs. I mean game-stopping problems. Check the forums for any of the large games. Crashbug here, unplayable due to bug X there - and that's months after the initial release in many cases.
The problem is that this compatability is only within the MS monopoly. Try to Cut&Paste some Excel data into any non-MS document. Even plain text doesn't always behave as expected once you cross the boundary between MS turf and 3rd party "wilderness".
On a solid system, you cut cut&paste or drag&drop anything from anywhere to anywhere and it would at least make us much out of it as possible. The Mac has most of that working, I can mark text in Firefox, drag it to the desktop and a new text file with its contents will be created. I can drag&drop stuff from any application to any other and in the vast majority of cases it'll work, no matter if it's an Apple app or not.
Not so on windos. The whole undocumented API mess pays for MS, but only for MS.
Command + something is always some, well command. "Do X".
Alt + something is always an alternative, like "shutdown, but without asking me".
* I haven't found a need to scroll horizontal yet. You don't have to scroll in 2D, you know? You can, but you don't have to. I've yet to scroll horizontal by accident. And if you've never had to do that, you aren't doing much work on a GUI. Image manipulation, CAD, 3D animation and so on for a long list of applications where your view needs to move in 2D all the time. I disagree, I find this really primitive in OS X. On KDE, I can maximize windows, making full use of space desktop space. I'm able to set important small windows to always remain ontop (or like in 'Spaces', another virtual desktop). True that, there's a few nice features I miss on OSX. Though all of them are lacking on windos as well and that was the topic. Which also covers most of your other answers. Then again, KDE did copy a few nice ideas from OSX - Katapult is a nice copy of Quicksilver, though it's lacking all the advanced features.
As for customizability - a few years ago I thought that was king. I don't think that any longer. Being able to sit down on any other Mac and being able to start working right away without having to figure out for half an hour where everything has been customized to has a value all in itself. What I need to customize, I find I can.
But, there are always different preferences. You have yours and that's fine.
When I started reading that I honestly thought you were going to refer to the number of people who try Linux out of curiosity
Oops. No. I was refering to "if your website only works on windos, then every Linux user who visits it will visit it only once, counting for 1 Linux visit. Windos users will return, counting for x (x>1, depending on how interesting your site is) visits, thus even if Linux had 50% market share, your logs would show 10% if the average windos user of yours clocks 9 visits.
Or windows that maximize?
Or a hierarcichal file explorer?
Or a taskbar? Have you ever used OSX for more than 5 minutes? Then you, sir, are a stupid idiot.
* The Mighty Mouse is at least 3 times as useful as those "wheel-mouse" abominations. It doesn't have a wheel, it has a small trackball. That means a) higher resolution and b) ability to scroll in 2D instead of 1D. If you've ever used a mouse in serious work and not just websurfing, you'll know how infinitly valuable that is.
* OSX windows don't maximize. They optimize. There's a difference there, one you have to see to appreciate. Maximize is simple, wasteful and ugly. Optimize is simple (to use), efficient and beautiful.
* Finder isn't based on explorer, it's based on the NeXT filesystem browser as is immediatly obvious to anyone who's used both. In fact, from what I've heard the vista explorer has once again copied Finder's useful shortcut bar.
* There is no taskbar on OSX. The Dock contains information about running tasks, but it is much more, more useful, efficient and nicer to look it. If you call it "copying" that Ferrari builds cars with the same number of wheels as the original Ford, then yes. By any other definition, the Dock is not a copy of the taskbar.
Why's there no "-1 bullshit" or "-1 misinformation" mod choice?
Great, so blocking images in E-Mail will no longer get those image-spams thrown out, because now a bright-but-not-intelligent geek has given the spammer assholes a way to encode their crap in simple HTML which no spam filter will manage to get.
Congratulations. How much did they pay you?
Oh, as for the "official" purpose. I give it a life expectancy of 3 weeks before the spammers have found a way around it. If they bother at all.
I laugh at those statistics every time I see them.
Let me think... might the low number of Linux visits probably be related to the bad Linux support? You know, if it doesn't work for them, they're less likely to return for another visit? Those circular causation chains are a bitch, aren't they?
Sure, Linux is small. But it's not exactly as if nobody would use it. For example, I dare to say that there are more Linux users on the Internet than blind users. Yet a lot of effort is made, especially on government sites, to make them accessable for blind users. The argument is what, exactly? That blindness is a disability and using Linux a choice? Ah! So number of users doesn't matter is what you say? But up there you said Linux userbase is too small and that's why. But that's not true for some other user groups, so it's not the whole story.
Then again, using windos is a kind of disability itself. Something like having AIDS, you know? An immune system deficiency - if you have windos, you're a lot more likely to catch all these viruses...
I think the lack of Linux support from big organisations like the EU is mostly due to mindset. They are used to working with other big organisations, like multinational corporations, and when you say "Linux support" they ask "who can we contract?" and if your answer is "all kinds of people, these and those and lots more" they say "that's too complicated for us. Who produces Linux? Lots of companies? Too complicated. Parse error. Input buffer overflow. Bzzzt." and then you get these bogus reasons like "for legal reasons". I've long made a mental note that "for legal reasons" without any further explanation alway means "don't ask, just go away, we don't want to explain it because it's embarrassing".
Sorry, but "not intentional" doesn't cut it when something happens that was explicitly forbidden in the charter of the program.
If I sign a contract that specifically says I can only get X under condition of Y and Z, then breaking those conditions invalidates the contract. Secure Flight should be terminated and TSA be made liable for any and all damages.
Why is it that governments and corporations can fuck up constantly on a scale that makes you dizzy while any natural person doing a fuckup on a similar scale would be locked away for life?
I've been doing security for 10 years now. User education is a desaster, a failure and a total waste of time. I have yet to see a single security problem being solved by user education. In the corporate environment especially giving an order and threaten everyone with being fired if they don't obey works 10x as well as explaining why doing X is bad and should be avoided.
Shut down bots. Only option to get rid of the networks. Make people care. Pass a law that forces ISPs to shut down known bot-infected customers until they've cleaned up, on penalty of severe fines. I work for an ISP. We can do it, but won't for fear of customers becoming angry and moving elsewhere. That's why it has to be a law so there is no elsewhere to go and the rules are the same for every ISP.
I like tinkerirng with my servers. I don't like tinkering with X on a notebook while on a plane with limited battery life left and a deadline to meet. And yes, Linux is 100% free and I could in theory write my own hardware drivers (never done it, but I have the code and the skills and even a book about writing kernel modules).
Point still is: For a desktop, I will choose OSX any day. For a server, give me Linux. For special-purpose machine, I'll also prefer Linux most of the times, because I can customize it better. But I much enjoy putting the hours I used to spend on resolving dependencies manually so I can compile this latest release of something into more personal projects instead.
Also, both KDE and Gnome suck. And I mean suck as in "they are almost as bad as windos". Inconsistent in many places, way too much me-too-copying (the K menu. Right. Take the dumbest idea from windos and copy it. I still think the designer of the K menu should be shot, together with the designers of the "Start" menu).
Linux's strengths are also its weaknesses. Yes, I can choose from 20 different window managers and 2 different desktop systems. But that also means not everything works with everything else, and stuff breaks randomly left and right.
Don't get me wrong, Linux is great. But while we (yes, I include myself, I used to be lightly involved with Gnome) tried to put Linux on the desktop, Apple lapped us.
Wait, didn't the court just tell them that no, you can not introduce new evidence into a case years after discovery is over? And then tossed their case out saying they have no leg to stand on? And now they say "if only we were allowed to add this new evidence, there would be a case" ???
Are they trying to pull a Microsoft here - annoying the judge until he says something stupid and they can get him replaced? Or are they simply dumb and hard of hearing?
Article is right on one thing: OSX was the deathblow to Linux-on-the-desktop.
I've been a fanatical Linux fanboy since about '95.
Today, I own a MacBook Pro and run OSX. My servers run Debian. But for the desktop, OSX is what Linux will never be: A Unix with a state-of-the-art GUI.