SuSE is a commercial distro and they need to be sensitive to the needs of commercial developers. KDE isn't a choice for them, due to the high licensing costs of Qt for commercial customers.
Advertisers have managed to get radio and TV ratings when there was no back channel. It's not hard to figure out how to use equivalent techniques for podcasts.
Trying to measure podcasts by placing restrictions on them and creating back channels is a recipe for annoying customers, and it mainly shows how unimaginative the companies involved are. Don Katz (CEO of Audible) may rail against "old media", but he sure thinks like them, with his emphasis on DRM and control.
As a former fan of SuSE, I do not think I'll bother buying their products if they go with GNOME as their default desktop, rather than KDE.
Well, and as a former fan of RedHat and Ubuntu, I think I may be installing SuSE as my primary system. SuSE has been a great distro, except for shipping with KDE as its default desktop.
You can see what happens with a two desktop strategy by looking at SuSE right now: Gnome under SuSE sucks.
I think for Novell to continue spending time on supporting two desktops is a mistake; they should focus on doing a great job with one desktop, and they really don't have much of a choice other than to use Gnome.
So far, nobody has even come remotely close to demonstrating any interesting computation being performed on a quantum computer, so at the very least, there is a huge engineering problem.
Worse yet, though, it's not even clear quantum computers can scale up at all; what happens in the kinds of large and complex quantum systems you would construct for computation is not at all understood, but it is almost certain that the laws of quantum mechanics as we know them break down.
Yeah, I replied because "it's taken out for defensive purposes, but we'll never enforce it" is a transparent lie. Companies that want something for defensive purposes don't have to maintain patent protection.
The only realistic way for a company to guarantee that they won't enforce a patent is to dedicate the patent to the public domain (or let it lapse, which amounts to the same thing).
Even if Amazon had been the first online retailer to do this, it wouldn't matter: it's an obvious translation of brick-and-mortar concepts to the online space.
Your description is accurate, except that you are confusing the positions of Apple and open source with each other.
The OOo developers would love to create a Cocoa port of OOo, but they don't have the resources. They have stated so numerous times and publicly. In fact, the same is true for a lot of other applications: people just don't have the time to port them to Cocoa, and even if they did, why would they want to? For most applications in the real world, it doesn't matter whether they look pretty or whether the are "consistent" with the desktop. Apple's position that everybody should port to Cocoa is purist philosophical bullshit. They think that they can force the world to standardize on their proprietary window system if they are just stubborn enough about it.
What they should do is support what a significant part of their target audience wants: X11 has been an enterprise window system since long before open source or Linux were even issues. X11 has been available on every major workstation and almost every major piece of scientific and engineering software supports it, and a lot supports nothing else.
It is Apple's refusal to support X11 better that is the irrational position. The rational, objective choice would be to give customers what they want, which is the ability to run X11 applications out of the box, fully integrated with the desktop, better X11 performance, and without any kind of confusing installation or configuration step. Technically, that is no problem. It's a business, marketing, and philosophical decision by Apple to keep X11 support on OS X second rate.
Cracking drive encryption can take billions of years, or even longer than the foreseeable lifetime of the universe. So, why don't they just give the police the right to retain people as long as they feel like it? If "time to decrypt HD" becomes the standard, they might as well.
And I find NOTHING bashing or otherwise putting down linux
I said they are marketing against Linux.
AND that apple has a corporate policy of not bashing competitor products
I suppose the Ellen Feiss ads and all the other ads where Apple portrays Windows as unreliable, hard to use, and uncool are declarations of love, right? Gimme a break.
Well, maybe that is because X11 is ugly, slow, complex, and obsolete?
Well, I'll give you this much: the X11 that ships with OS X sure is a lousy implementation.
Beyond that, since you wouldn't believe anything I say anyway, I suggest you do some benchmarks yourself and share them. You'll find that a good X11 implementation runs rings around Quartz.
The open office people have never been too apple-friendly. I doubt they won't be changing their outlook with version 2.
It's not a question of "outlook" or being Apple-friendly, it's a question of resources.
Apple, on the other hand, has been downright hostile towards the OOo folks, telling them in no uncertain terms that Apple does not wish to make it easier to run X11 on OS X and does not wish other people to make it easier. Apple wants everybody to port to their proprietary GUI and they are going to do whatever it takes to "motivate" people to do that.
The only way to run it will be through the X11 server, and in that case, it isn't very clean or elegant looking.
As CodeTek has shown, one can do a much better job integrating X11 into the OS X desktop. The fact that X11 is hard to use and inelegant on OS X is Apple's responsibility. Maybe they'll figure out sooner or later that they are hurting themselves with this attitude, but so far, there is no indication of that. So far, Apple still seems to seriously believe that a pure Cocoa desktop is the future.
iWork is a great suit of applications, but its functionality is at the level of Apple Works; it is not an office suite that can compete with OpenOffice or MS Office in the professional or corporate market.
Apple may not shy away from showing Linux users the benefits of OS X, but that's not marketing.
"Showing Linux users the benefits of OS X" is, of course, marketing. And, of course, it is "marketing against Linux".
The switch story is just a mild example. When they aren't on paper, Apple sales and technical people become much more aggressive, making all sorts of assertions about X11 being outdated and Linux not being usable. And if you ask them to improve, say, X11 integration on OS X, they basically tell you to port to Cocoa.
I don't care whether you believe me or not, I'm just telling you: I wish they'd stop marketing against Linux. It's not that they really hurt Linux with that sort of behavior, it's that they hurt themselves, and I, for one, would prefer to see Apple stay in the market for desktop machines. If they continue on their current course, they'll end up being a consumer electronics maker.
But, whatever, you have a real narrow view of UNIX and I reckon that all that's going to happen if we continue this discussion is you're gonna nail that view down like a stake and not budge from the spot.
I don't see you budging. But more importantly, I don't see you actually making an argument. Your only argument was your supposedly superior experience, which turned out to be not so superior, since you haven't been using UNIX longer than me and apparently never even worked where UNIX was created.
In contrast, I do provide arguments: Darwin does not contain any significant amount of UNIX source code, even simple traditional UNIX tools like "cp" don't work correctly on it, and the kernel architecture is completely different. And while the UNIX philosophy has been to remove features from the kernel and the UNIX group would many times remove features backwards compatibility be damned, I have not seen Apple do any such thing.
Since OS X isn't derived from, fully compatible with, architected, or developed like UNIX, in what way is it supposed to "be" UNIX? Seems to me Darwin is like many other non-UNIX systems with a UNIX-compatible API, and there are plenty of those, including Windows NT. Come on, at least make the effort to construct a minimal argument.
YOU seem to be saying that OS X is outdated junk and everyone should just switch to Linux and use.Net.
I didn't say that OS X is "junk". It's a well-engineered operating system based on mature technologies. Given that currently most Linux and Windows applications are based on C/C++, Apple is still doing OK relative to what's out there in the market.
But you made the claim that "OS X seems to have the most forward looking technologies in the OS" and that "X11 is creaky", and both of those claims simply don't hold up to scrutiny. In terms of underlying technologies, Apple is not ahead of Windows or Linux. And what is a concern is that while both Linux and Microsoft already have reasonable technology for future application development in place (Mono and.NET); Objective C and Cocoa are reasonably nice, but they are not cutting edge, and Apple has not even announced a roadmap.
I didn't tell you what to switch to. Personally, I very much prefer OS X to Windows, but I don't think it's the OS nirvana people like you make it out to be. But however much you like OS X, its attractive qualities are not due to better technologies, they are due to better engineering.
The problem with statements like yours is that it misdirect Linux developers. In particular, X11 is excellent technology for a window system. It is efficient compared to Quartz, more modular, and has more and better functionality. Areas where Linux technologies need improvement are Gtk+ and C/C++, but those improvements have been delivered (Python, Mono, etc.) and Linux application developers are starting to use them. Linux is technologically on the right track.
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SuSE is a commercial distro and they need to be sensitive to the needs of commercial developers. KDE isn't a choice for them, due to the high licensing costs of Qt for commercial customers.
Advertisers have managed to get radio and TV ratings when there was no back channel. It's not hard to figure out how to use equivalent techniques for podcasts.
Trying to measure podcasts by placing restrictions on them and creating back channels is a recipe for annoying customers, and it mainly shows how unimaginative the companies involved are. Don Katz (CEO of Audible) may rail against "old media", but he sure thinks like them, with his emphasis on DRM and control.
Note that in Palo Alto, you can get free wireless access courtesy of a community wireless mesh network, pafree.net (you can guess what their URL is).
As a former fan of SuSE, I do not think I'll bother buying their products if they go with GNOME as their default desktop, rather than KDE.
Well, and as a former fan of RedHat and Ubuntu, I think I may be installing SuSE as my primary system. SuSE has been a great distro, except for shipping with KDE as its default desktop.
You can see what happens with a two desktop strategy by looking at SuSE right now: Gnome under SuSE sucks.
I think for Novell to continue spending time on supporting two desktops is a mistake; they should focus on doing a great job with one desktop, and they really don't have much of a choice other than to use Gnome.
Quantum computers are snake oil for now.
So far, nobody has even come remotely close to demonstrating any interesting computation being performed on a quantum computer, so at the very least, there is a huge engineering problem.
Worse yet, though, it's not even clear quantum computers can scale up at all; what happens in the kinds of large and complex quantum systems you would construct for computation is not at all understood, but it is almost certain that the laws of quantum mechanics as we know them break down.
Yeah, I replied because "it's taken out for defensive purposes, but we'll never enforce it" is a transparent lie. Companies that want something for defensive purposes don't have to maintain patent protection.
The only realistic way for a company to guarantee that they won't enforce a patent is to dedicate the patent to the public domain (or let it lapse, which amounts to the same thing).
Finally, a computer with an intuitive interface.
Help screw Amazon: use Book Burro. It lets you use Amazon's web pages, then finds the cheapest price for you among many different retailers.
Even if Amazon had been the first online retailer to do this, it wouldn't matter: it's an obvious translation of brick-and-mortar concepts to the online space.
and it's extremely difficult, in many cases impossible, to achieve any patent protection for the concept.
Well, apparently Amazon isn't having any problems doing it.
I think it would be cool if they announced that this patent would never EVER be enforced.
Simple: dedicate the patent to the public domain.
They only took out the patent to protect themselves from some troll-company pulling an SCO
No, Amazon is a troll company pulling an SCO; they are just much better at it, and they are screwing every consumer in the US.
In that case, it would be sufficient to publish the patent application but not go through with the patenting.
In any case, Amazon has been trying to enforce some of their bad patents, so we know they're evil.
Your description is accurate, except that you are confusing the positions of Apple and open source with each other.
The OOo developers would love to create a Cocoa port of OOo, but they don't have the resources. They have stated so numerous times and publicly. In fact, the same is true for a lot of other applications: people just don't have the time to port them to Cocoa, and even if they did, why would they want to? For most applications in the real world, it doesn't matter whether they look pretty or whether the are "consistent" with the desktop. Apple's position that everybody should port to Cocoa is purist philosophical bullshit. They think that they can force the world to standardize on their proprietary window system if they are just stubborn enough about it.
What they should do is support what a significant part of their target audience wants: X11 has been an enterprise window system since long before open source or Linux were even issues. X11 has been available on every major workstation and almost every major piece of scientific and engineering software supports it, and a lot supports nothing else.
It is Apple's refusal to support X11 better that is the irrational position. The rational, objective choice would be to give customers what they want, which is the ability to run X11 applications out of the box, fully integrated with the desktop, better X11 performance, and without any kind of confusing installation or configuration step. Technically, that is no problem. It's a business, marketing, and philosophical decision by Apple to keep X11 support on OS X second rate.
Cracking drive encryption can take billions of years, or even longer than the foreseeable lifetime of the universe. So, why don't they just give the police the right to retain people as long as they feel like it? If "time to decrypt HD" becomes the standard, they might as well.
They have such an installer. It's called "Debian". Or "RedHat". Improves your PC in lots of other ways, too.
Hey, Microsoft's releases alphas (aka "x.0 versions") and declares everything before then obsolete.
And I find NOTHING bashing or otherwise putting down linux
I said they are marketing against Linux.
AND that apple has a corporate policy of not bashing competitor products
I suppose the Ellen Feiss ads and all the other ads where Apple portrays Windows as unreliable, hard to use, and uncool are declarations of love, right? Gimme a break.
Well, maybe that is because X11 is ugly, slow, complex, and obsolete?
Well, I'll give you this much: the X11 that ships with OS X sure is a lousy implementation.
Beyond that, since you wouldn't believe anything I say anyway, I suggest you do some benchmarks yourself and share them. You'll find that a good X11 implementation runs rings around Quartz.
The open office people have never been too apple-friendly. I doubt they won't be changing their outlook with version 2.
It's not a question of "outlook" or being Apple-friendly, it's a question of resources.
Apple, on the other hand, has been downright hostile towards the OOo folks, telling them in no uncertain terms that Apple does not wish to make it easier to run X11 on OS X and does not wish other people to make it easier. Apple wants everybody to port to their proprietary GUI and they are going to do whatever it takes to "motivate" people to do that.
The only way to run it will be through the X11 server, and in that case, it isn't very clean or elegant looking.
As CodeTek has shown, one can do a much better job integrating X11 into the OS X desktop. The fact that X11 is hard to use and inelegant on OS X is Apple's responsibility. Maybe they'll figure out sooner or later that they are hurting themselves with this attitude, but so far, there is no indication of that. So far, Apple still seems to seriously believe that a pure Cocoa desktop is the future.
iWork is a great suit of applications, but its functionality is at the level of Apple Works; it is not an office suite that can compete with OpenOffice or MS Office in the professional or corporate market.
Apple may not shy away from showing Linux users the benefits of OS X, but that's not marketing.
"Showing Linux users the benefits of OS X" is, of course, marketing. And, of course, it is "marketing against Linux".
The switch story is just a mild example. When they aren't on paper, Apple sales and technical people become much more aggressive, making all sorts of assertions about X11 being outdated and Linux not being usable. And if you ask them to improve, say, X11 integration on OS X, they basically tell you to port to Cocoa.
I don't care whether you believe me or not, I'm just telling you: I wish they'd stop marketing against Linux. It's not that they really hurt Linux with that sort of behavior, it's that they hurt themselves, and I, for one, would prefer to see Apple stay in the market for desktop machines. If they continue on their current course, they'll end up being a consumer electronics maker.
Basically you can get the tug-ship up to speed alongside the asteroid and then cut the engines,
No, you can't; the spacecraft would either fall or orbit the asteroid.
But they are basically doing what you are saying, except that they are using the thrusters to avoid falling or orbiting.
But, whatever, you have a real narrow view of UNIX and I reckon that all that's going to happen if we continue this discussion is you're gonna nail that view down like a stake and not budge from the spot.
I don't see you budging. But more importantly, I don't see you actually making an argument. Your only argument was your supposedly superior experience, which turned out to be not so superior, since you haven't been using UNIX longer than me and apparently never even worked where UNIX was created.
In contrast, I do provide arguments: Darwin does not contain any significant amount of UNIX source code, even simple traditional UNIX tools like "cp" don't work correctly on it, and the kernel architecture is completely different. And while the UNIX philosophy has been to remove features from the kernel and the UNIX group would many times remove features backwards compatibility be damned, I have not seen Apple do any such thing.
Since OS X isn't derived from, fully compatible with, architected, or developed like UNIX, in what way is it supposed to "be" UNIX? Seems to me Darwin is like many other non-UNIX systems with a UNIX-compatible API, and there are plenty of those, including Windows NT. Come on, at least make the effort to construct a minimal argument.
YOU seem to be saying that OS X is outdated junk and everyone should just switch to Linux and use .Net.
.NET); Objective C and Cocoa are reasonably nice, but they are not cutting edge, and Apple has not even announced a roadmap.
I didn't say that OS X is "junk". It's a well-engineered operating system based on mature technologies. Given that currently most Linux and Windows applications are based on C/C++, Apple is still doing OK relative to what's out there in the market.
But you made the claim that "OS X seems to have the most forward looking technologies in the OS" and that "X11 is creaky", and both of those claims simply don't hold up to scrutiny. In terms of underlying technologies, Apple is not ahead of Windows or Linux. And what is a concern is that while both Linux and Microsoft already have reasonable technology for future application development in place (Mono and
I didn't tell you what to switch to. Personally, I very much prefer OS X to Windows, but I don't think it's the OS nirvana people like you make it out to be. But however much you like OS X, its attractive qualities are not due to better technologies, they are due to better engineering.
The problem with statements like yours is that it misdirect Linux developers. In particular, X11 is excellent technology for a window system. It is efficient compared to Quartz, more modular, and has more and better functionality. Areas where Linux technologies need improvement are Gtk+ and C/C++, but those improvements have been delivered (Python, Mono, etc.) and Linux application developers are starting to use them. Linux is technologically on the right track.