Few people want tablets. They've comprehensively failed to take the world by storm. Apple did well to avoid jumping on that bandwagon, spotting that it was on fire and heading over a cliff.
I reckon that when you can't even get the name of the language you're criticising correct, then there's little hope the actual critique will be well thought out. Perhaps if you did a little reading on Objective-C you might learn something.
Something to consider though - you have to learn some programming language to develop on any system. It's less of a leap to go from C to Objective-C than to C++, C# or.Net.
It's not an elephant in the room - apart from the article, it's been discussed endlessly on forums like Slashdot. Apple's been there, done that, nearly lost the business. It'd require a better business case than "a bunch of guys on Slashdot will probably buy an untied OS X and maybe piracy wouldn't be too bad" to have Apple literally bet their entire $120B company.
That's the best thing I've read about IT in years, and reflects what I've been saying for a long time. I.T. are a *service* function, and if they don't support the *business* functions, they deserve to be replaced with better I.T. people. I.T. is like H.R. and accounting - they generate no revenue on their own, but support the people who do. Their entire raison d'etre is to make things as smooth as possible for business users.
Punctuation affects the spoken words, so in effect it is spoken. It certainly changes the meaning of the sentence, as does stressing any word in a sentence when speaking:
Check your grammar retard. (why aren't you checking?) Check your grammar retard. (don't look at mine) Check your grammar retard. (your spelling is okay, but your grammar...) Check your grammar retard. (god, you're such a bozo)
The punctuation provides some of that stress, and the last sentence above equates to placing the comma between 'gammar' and 'retard.'
Crap. What has my life become, that I write posts like this? (sigh)
It's "maths" here in Australia, and I believe in New Zealand as well.
Besides, it's not one thing so "maths" makes more sense. Is anyone arguing that arithmetic and differential calculus and algebra are all the same branch of the philosophy of mathematics? They're distinct, but related, pieces, so the plural form makes sense.
I'd never heard of them before, but now I have. I now know that they're overly sensitive to criticism and resort to litigation as a way of resolving complaints.
I'll be certain to avoid them in future and recommend against such a dangerous company if ever I get the chance.
I guess I still think the place for religion is to provide direction for some people and help them work out how to live their lives, but the problem is that I don't think any religion really gets this right. There's always some objectionable part - repression of women, persecution of other faiths, keeping slaves, wholesale genocide, that sort of thing.
There's no religion on Earth that wholly fits our modern world's values (certainly not the more liberal Western values), so people have to take the nicer parts and leave the horrible stuff, picking and choosing which parts of a religion they believe and follow. That's largely what I see in practice, even in fundamentalists. People can't live every part of their religion, so they pick the bits they like and go from there. Even the Pope doesn't advocate hitting women or slavery, but it's right there in the Bible if you choose to read it in a certain way.
It's just so much easier being an atheist! I make my own directions, do things because *I* think they're right and don't justify any actions in light of ancient texts written by old men with no conception of the current world.
First: The poster never said "Faith is a belief beyond proof" - that's your assertion. And, you're wrong, it's a belief of something in the absence of proof, or despite evidence of the contrary. There is an important distinction there. Having faith is something "greater" has no meaning in the absence of some roadmap of how that "something greater" will guide your life. All of the ideological constructs informing his/her Faith in (any) "God" is driven by the man-made religious dogma he/she ascribes to. The "Faith" that "helps shape and guide" the OP life is based on those religious constructs - he/she is making choices and shaping their life based on the dogma. So, the OP's "Faith" is essentially a man-made construct.
I've highlighted a fatal flaw in religion. Faith becomes insanity when it disagrees with reality. Religious people must learn to drop a belief that can be disproven.
An example of this is the famous "four corners of the earth" line in the Bible. Many took this to mean a flat Earth, and even when proven beyond a shadow of a doubt it was still hard to overcome the incorrect faith. Galileo had some problems as well.
I've got no problem with religions holding the 'meaning' of life, and advising us how we should conduct ourselves. Indeed, for many people these things are central to their lives and give them great comfort. But when religion tries to assert that reality is at fault, then clearly the religion has got it wrong and must change (and who was meant to have created the reality that disagrees with the religion anyway?).
The Babel Fish is such an unlikely creature that it has been used as the final proof that God does not exist. Th argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "Ah!" says Man, "but the Babel Fish proves you exist, so therefore you don't!" "Oh dear!" says God, "I hadn't thought of that." And promptly disappears in a puff of logic. "Well, that was easy," says Man, goes on to prove that black equals white and gets killed at the next zebra crossing. Douglas Adams, we still miss you.
Applying logic to faith is a bit tricky. My take on it is that faith in gravity (for example) is unnecessary, as it happens anyway. I don't need to believe in a chair to sit down, or a table to hold my dinner plate. These things exist in and of themselves, and my belief isn't going to change that.
Faith is for those things that cannot be shown to exist - we have to trust some inner instinct that informs us they exist even though we can find no evidence. Once we trust our religious instinct, we can have faith that gods and demons and pixies at the bottom of the garden all exist happily, merrily doing good, evil or sorting out the worms and snails (respectively).
Some of us are atheists, and choose not to believe in something that no shred of evidence can be found for. That's an entirely logical viewpoint and consistent with scientific thought, although many people like to believe in gods and demons (not so much the pixies) because they take comfort in the words written thousands of years ago largely by nomadic desert tribesmen.
As an atheist, I still have one piece of faith that is unshakeable, in which I am devout. I believe in Humanity, in the Human Race. I reckon there's nothing we can't achieve and that while we have local setbacks, the race as a whole is moving onwards and upwards to a greatness that we can't even dream of today.
Anyway, it's probably fair to say that I've digressed somewhat, but that's the nature of first-thing-in-the-morning posting for me.
That is a great quote, and well placed. As an atheist, I believe in living the good life for my own reasons, not because I'm told to (and threatened if I don't). I feel good about the way I deal with people, and build mutual respect. I love being alive, married and happy.
You're misrepresenting the previous poster. My reading is that a better game would have convoy ambushes possibly wipe out players inside vehicles, with all the game consequences that has (wait for respawn, fail the mission, etc). Providing completely unrealistic behaviour in a recruiting tool is less than ethical, but you would allow some things for the sake of the game. Respawning is okay, but a pretense of invulnerability at certain times is not.
Who says "Join the US Army! Our convoys are invulnerable and if an ambush happens, you can just sit tight in perfect safety until the bad guys run out of ammo" ?
The point about the US Army using this as a recruitment tool is that it should reflect reality as much as possible while still being a game. Failing to do that is one of those 'truth in advertising' things.
The real human failures centre around the processes in place, not the servers. After all, any server could fail at any time. It's how you recover that makes the difference to customers.
What happened to disaster recovery? Was there a plan? Where was the backup server? Why wasn't the patch applied to a test server, confirmed and then applied to the production server?
These things are basic IT policies in well-run businesses. Why couldn't Microsoft get them right?
WGA is not easy, and reflecting on how this could be handled better, I can't think of a good 'default' policy for WGA. Maybe trust people for a short period, maybe have several WGA authentication servers or a chain of authentication, but there's no right answer. On disaster recovery however, there are plenty of right answers to my questions above, and it seems Microsoft failed all of them this time. I feel pretty confident that they won't fail the next time though!
My central point was that all operating system have got worse over the past ten years
I'll agree with you on Windows, but Linux and Apple's OSs have come ahead in leaps and bounds in the last ten years. Do you recall Apple's Mac OS 8? (shudder)
It's an interesting point though. The OS was once a tool for launching applications and file management. And that's it. Now we've got gigs of printer drivers, dictionaries for forty languages we'll never read or write, sophisticated multimedia frameworks available to the whole OS, speech recognition when all we use are keyboards and mice and so many features besides.
I think the trend for a long time has been to integrate more features into the OS to make them available to all apps, rather than have devs write their own. This is great for devs who don't need to write their own multimedia engine to add a few images and sounds to their app, or who don't want to write a database system to have their app manipulate information. It's great for users as well, provided the extra features take up little to no active system resources when not in use.
The problems come when features sit in the background waiting to be called upon, or (worse) when they poll the system to check whether they're required. It's a fine line though. I like inserting a new CD, having iTunes launch, get the track names, import the disc and eject it without my interaction. That only happens because the iTunes daemon sits there, waiting for a 'disc inserted' event. I'm less excited by the CUPS daemon sitting there waiting for a 'print document' event, because I *always* manually kick off a print job. In one case I'm happy to lose a few cycles and MB of memory, in the other I'm not. Other users will have different priorities from me, so the OS developers have this enormous temptation to just stuff everything in there and hope the computer is powerful enough to run it.
What? You've not heard of PDOOMA? It's sweeping the Internet, the TV and the newspapers of the world! It's the latest in business analysis and information.
PDOOMA = Pulled Directly Out Of My Arse.
Just like the 1/100 memory miss rate. Nice work. You may have a career in punditry waiting for you somewhere.
Just that the argument that a GUI is necessary is incorrect.
Good point. You may notice that I never argued a GUI was necessary. It's incredibly useful for people who don't care to learn all the Unix commands though, which is about 99.9% of the potential user base.
And by "trying Linux out" you mean "complaining that it isn't exactly like Windows. Linux is NOT Windows and anyone who is honestly "trying Linux out" will try to learn the differences.
No. I don't mean that at all, and you're stretching a lot to get your sentence from mine (by stretching I mean 'completely inventing'). I mean that there's a bit of hype around at the moment for Linux, and this will translate into people testing a Live CD or installing Linux in a seperate partition. People want to see how good Linux is. To respond to your point - if you force them to use an archaic command line, then you're not selling Linux very well. Don't you *want* people to try Linux?
What happens when the "click here to fix all the problems" GUI does not launch?
What happens when the user screws up the command line? And who said anything about a 'click here to fix all the problems' GUI? You're stretching again, aren't you? What about a more reasonable GUI that guides users through common problems, and leaves the really tricky ones to the command line.
With Ubuntu, you don't have to. You type "apt-get install --reinstall foo" and it works again.
Excellent. Now, where's the easy help system to guide users to this command? You went on to talk about a 3x5 card, but that's pure rubbish and you probably know this. Exactly which 'foo' are you talking about that will resolve *any* GUI issues? I'd guess there are many 'foo's but that severely weakens your point.
If you're keen on seeing more people try and use Linux, you need to accept the GUI tools are a Good Thing. You may want users to learn the Linux way, but instead of throwing them in the deep end and laughing while most drown, how about helping them through the early stages so that they can learn Linux at a pace that suits them? Giving people better tools can only help, and the command line, while powerful, is an archaic remnant of an earlier computing age. People expect graphic interfaces now (and some aesthetics), and developers such as Apple have become adept at providing them. Your imagination may fail to come up with intuitive ways to accomplish command line functions in a GUI, but why should that hold back devs with better imaginations producing interfaces that are stable, attractive, functional and powerful?
Reality Master 101 has an excellent point - where *is* the innovation these days? Look through any top 40 chart from the sixties or seventies and you'll see all sorts of different music, from folk and hippie music through pop to hard rock and early metal. There was a huge amount of experimentation then, much of it pretty bad but enough that was just incredible. These days we still get some experimentation, but music seems to have largely settled into a few genres inside which all songs have very similar qualities.
The Beatles are probably the best example of innovation in music history. Listen through the three decades they touched and you'll hear an incredible range of styles (and a sitar). They did just about everything, reinventing their music every few years. Then there's The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, The Mommas and The Poppas, The Eagles, Little River Band, Kate Bush, ABBA, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead... the list just goes on and on.
I may sound like a cranky old man looking back at my generation's music as the best one, but nearly all of this was before my time. I've looked at the contrast between 'music before my 20s' and 'music since my 20s' and today it just looks so... bland in comparison.
I can't imagine anyone bankrolling a group like Queen any more. Their breakout hit Bohemian Rhapsody doesn't fit any convenient genre and looks awful on paper. It'd be a huge risk to pay for that to be recorded. What about Pink Floyd? There's nothing like them today, nothing even close. The Wall may be the best rock opera yet, but it's impossible to see it happening today.
Today we have an industry that is risk averse, and as a result the music they produce is stagnating. Outside the mainstream things are pretty exciting, but I can barely stand anything mainstream lately. It has to change.
What's wrong with providing a simple GUI for accomplishing the same thing? Not everyone cares to learn the Unix command set, or the ins and outs of package management, so why force them to work that way? Aren't they making enough of a commitment by trying Linux out?
Surely providing an option for people more used to GUIs can only help Linux adoption. Maybe more advanced features would only be accessible to the command line, giving some incentive for those who care to delve.
You need to remember - you are not an average user. Your expectations are different, as is your level of knowledge. You cannot apply your experiences to everyone and expect them to jump through the hoops you're happy to jump through in order to get something simple done. Making it simple and visual is a good thing for the rest of the population.
I disagree. Many Mac users I've known just get their work done and the Mac is the tool that helps them. Many Linux users I've known have tried to convert me, have talked about their superior OS and have been pretty damned smug about themselves. I see the same attitude on Slashdot a lot as well. Maybe you need to look at your glass house before you start casting stones.
Place overtly willful limits on hardware compatibility and things get substantially easier.
You're so right. After all, Apple's use of non-standard interfaces like PCI, USB, FireWire, AGP and others means that Apple can easily account for anything you've plugged into your Mac. There's only a couple of possible options for PCI slots, surely?
Apple use almost completely standard components across the board. They limit the possibilities in the initial purchase, but the towers can have pretty much anything in them and somehow still have very few hardware problems after OS upgrades. Note that I said 'few' and not 'none' - read sites like xlr8yourmac.com for many examples (still 'few' compared to volume) of upgrades causing hardware failures.
I also have had issues with hardware failing after upgrading from MacOS 8 to MacOS 9, but nothing in OS X.
Einstein was misquoted. He originally said "God does not play dice with the Universe. He plays poker, but I think He's got a tell. When He bluffs, you get earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanos and hurricanes around the Earth. Still, He's a mean player but I always thrash Him at contract bridge. He's not so good at making deals with his partner."
Bear with me on this thought process, but here's my take on why there's no 'central point' in the Universe.
Think of an ordinary rubber balloon before it's been inflated. It's a little piece of rubber. Consider that to be the Universe before the big bang. It's a 2D representation of space in this thought experiment because we're not allowing an 'up' or 'down' from the balloon's surface.
Now inflate the balloon. The original balloon is still there, but now it's much larger. The 2D representation of space has been stretched out. The starting point (the uninflated balloon) is still there, and it's everywhere the inflated balloon is. There's no seperate starting point that someone on the balloon's surface can point to - it's the entire surface! There's no special frame of reference, and our balloon behaves nicely under relativity.
It may help to put little stars on the balloon using a marker pen. If you can cram a few trillion on, it'll look pretty cool. Especially if you go for interesting structures and tiny swirly patterns.
The tricky thing is that the balloon surface isn't 3D but 2D like Flatland. Repeating this thought experiment in full 3D with technicolour is more accurate, but very hard because the expansion happens as well in extra dimensions that we can't think in. It'd be like a solid balloon, but probably more of a lumpy sphere, which expands from an infinitely compressed point like a space-filling foam does.
Slashdot Mirror
Few people want tablets. They've comprehensively failed to take the world by storm. Apple did well to avoid jumping on that bandwagon, spotting that it was on fire and heading over a cliff.
I reckon that when you can't even get the name of the language you're criticising correct, then there's little hope the actual critique will be well thought out. Perhaps if you did a little reading on Objective-C you might learn something.
.Net.
Something to consider though - you have to learn some programming language to develop on any system. It's less of a leap to go from C to Objective-C than to C++, C# or
It's not an elephant in the room - apart from the article, it's been discussed endlessly on forums like Slashdot. Apple's been there, done that, nearly lost the business. It'd require a better business case than "a bunch of guys on Slashdot will probably buy an untied OS X and maybe piracy wouldn't be too bad" to have Apple literally bet their entire $120B company.
That's the best thing I've read about IT in years, and reflects what I've been saying for a long time. I.T. are a *service* function, and if they don't support the *business* functions, they deserve to be replaced with better I.T. people. I.T. is like H.R. and accounting - they generate no revenue on their own, but support the people who do. Their entire raison d'etre is to make things as smooth as possible for business users.
Punctuation affects the spoken words, so in effect it is spoken. It certainly changes the meaning of the sentence, as does stressing any word in a sentence when speaking:
Check your grammar retard. (why aren't you checking?)
Check your grammar retard. (don't look at mine)
Check your grammar retard. (your spelling is okay, but your grammar...)
Check your grammar retard. (god, you're such a bozo)
The punctuation provides some of that stress, and the last sentence above equates to placing the comma between 'gammar' and 'retard.'
Crap. What has my life become, that I write posts like this? (sigh)
It's "maths" here in Australia, and I believe in New Zealand as well.
Besides, it's not one thing so "maths" makes more sense. Is anyone arguing that arithmetic and differential calculus and algebra are all the same branch of the philosophy of mathematics? They're distinct, but related, pieces, so the plural form makes sense.
We're a bit off topic here though...
I'd never heard of them before, but now I have. I now know that they're overly sensitive to criticism and resort to litigation as a way of resolving complaints.
I'll be certain to avoid them in future and recommend against such a dangerous company if ever I get the chance.
Thanks 2clix, you've revealed your true colours.
(I'm an Australian, living in Melbourne)
That's the first post I've read in a long time that actually did have me laughing out loud.
Thanks for that.
That's a very good point.
I guess I still think the place for religion is to provide direction for some people and help them work out how to live their lives, but the problem is that I don't think any religion really gets this right. There's always some objectionable part - repression of women, persecution of other faiths, keeping slaves, wholesale genocide, that sort of thing.
There's no religion on Earth that wholly fits our modern world's values (certainly not the more liberal Western values), so people have to take the nicer parts and leave the horrible stuff, picking and choosing which parts of a religion they believe and follow. That's largely what I see in practice, even in fundamentalists. People can't live every part of their religion, so they pick the bits they like and go from there. Even the Pope doesn't advocate hitting women or slavery, but it's right there in the Bible if you choose to read it in a certain way.
It's just so much easier being an atheist! I make my own directions, do things because *I* think they're right and don't justify any actions in light of ancient texts written by old men with no conception of the current world.
First: The poster never said "Faith is a belief beyond proof" - that's your assertion. And, you're wrong, it's a belief of something in the absence of proof, or despite evidence of the contrary. There is an important distinction there. Having faith is something "greater" has no meaning in the absence of some roadmap of how that "something greater" will guide your life. All of the ideological constructs informing his/her Faith in (any) "God" is driven by the man-made religious dogma he/she ascribes to. The "Faith" that "helps shape and guide" the OP life is based on those religious constructs - he/she is making choices and shaping their life based on the dogma. So, the OP's "Faith" is essentially a man-made construct.
I've highlighted a fatal flaw in religion. Faith becomes insanity when it disagrees with reality. Religious people must learn to drop a belief that can be disproven.
An example of this is the famous "four corners of the earth" line in the Bible. Many took this to mean a flat Earth, and even when proven beyond a shadow of a doubt it was still hard to overcome the incorrect faith. Galileo had some problems as well.
I've got no problem with religions holding the 'meaning' of life, and advising us how we should conduct ourselves. Indeed, for many people these things are central to their lives and give them great comfort. But when religion tries to assert that reality is at fault, then clearly the religion has got it wrong and must change (and who was meant to have created the reality that disagrees with the religion anyway?).
The Babel Fish is such an unlikely creature that it has been used as the final proof that God does not exist. Th argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"Ah!" says Man, "but the Babel Fish proves you exist, so therefore you don't!"
"Oh dear!" says God, "I hadn't thought of that." And promptly disappears in a puff of logic.
"Well, that was easy," says Man, goes on to prove that black equals white and gets killed at the next zebra crossing.
Douglas Adams, we still miss you.
Applying logic to faith is a bit tricky. My take on it is that faith in gravity (for example) is unnecessary, as it happens anyway. I don't need to believe in a chair to sit down, or a table to hold my dinner plate. These things exist in and of themselves, and my belief isn't going to change that.
Faith is for those things that cannot be shown to exist - we have to trust some inner instinct that informs us they exist even though we can find no evidence. Once we trust our religious instinct, we can have faith that gods and demons and pixies at the bottom of the garden all exist happily, merrily doing good, evil or sorting out the worms and snails (respectively).
Some of us are atheists, and choose not to believe in something that no shred of evidence can be found for. That's an entirely logical viewpoint and consistent with scientific thought, although many people like to believe in gods and demons (not so much the pixies) because they take comfort in the words written thousands of years ago largely by nomadic desert tribesmen.
As an atheist, I still have one piece of faith that is unshakeable, in which I am devout. I believe in Humanity, in the Human Race. I reckon there's nothing we can't achieve and that while we have local setbacks, the race as a whole is moving onwards and upwards to a greatness that we can't even dream of today.
Anyway, it's probably fair to say that I've digressed somewhat, but that's the nature of first-thing-in-the-morning posting for me.
That is a great quote, and well placed. As an atheist, I believe in living the good life for my own reasons, not because I'm told to (and threatened if I don't). I feel good about the way I deal with people, and build mutual respect. I love being alive, married and happy.
You're misrepresenting the previous poster. My reading is that a better game would have convoy ambushes possibly wipe out players inside vehicles, with all the game consequences that has (wait for respawn, fail the mission, etc). Providing completely unrealistic behaviour in a recruiting tool is less than ethical, but you would allow some things for the sake of the game. Respawning is okay, but a pretense of invulnerability at certain times is not.
Who says "Join the US Army! Our convoys are invulnerable and if an ambush happens, you can just sit tight in perfect safety until the bad guys run out of ammo" ?
The point about the US Army using this as a recruitment tool is that it should reflect reality as much as possible while still being a game. Failing to do that is one of those 'truth in advertising' things.
The real human failures centre around the processes in place, not the servers. After all, any server could fail at any time. It's how you recover that makes the difference to customers.
What happened to disaster recovery? Was there a plan? Where was the backup server? Why wasn't the patch applied to a test server, confirmed and then applied to the production server?
These things are basic IT policies in well-run businesses. Why couldn't Microsoft get them right?
WGA is not easy, and reflecting on how this could be handled better, I can't think of a good 'default' policy for WGA. Maybe trust people for a short period, maybe have several WGA authentication servers or a chain of authentication, but there's no right answer. On disaster recovery however, there are plenty of right answers to my questions above, and it seems Microsoft failed all of them this time. I feel pretty confident that they won't fail the next time though!
My central point was that all operating system have got worse over the past ten years
I'll agree with you on Windows, but Linux and Apple's OSs have come ahead in leaps and bounds in the last ten years. Do you recall Apple's Mac OS 8? (shudder)
It's an interesting point though. The OS was once a tool for launching applications and file management. And that's it. Now we've got gigs of printer drivers, dictionaries for forty languages we'll never read or write, sophisticated multimedia frameworks available to the whole OS, speech recognition when all we use are keyboards and mice and so many features besides.
I think the trend for a long time has been to integrate more features into the OS to make them available to all apps, rather than have devs write their own. This is great for devs who don't need to write their own multimedia engine to add a few images and sounds to their app, or who don't want to write a database system to have their app manipulate information. It's great for users as well, provided the extra features take up little to no active system resources when not in use.
The problems come when features sit in the background waiting to be called upon, or (worse) when they poll the system to check whether they're required. It's a fine line though. I like inserting a new CD, having iTunes launch, get the track names, import the disc and eject it without my interaction. That only happens because the iTunes daemon sits there, waiting for a 'disc inserted' event. I'm less excited by the CUPS daemon sitting there waiting for a 'print document' event, because I *always* manually kick off a print job. In one case I'm happy to lose a few cycles and MB of memory, in the other I'm not. Other users will have different priorities from me, so the OS developers have this enormous temptation to just stuff everything in there and hope the computer is powerful enough to run it.
Ah, numbers from the PDOOMA methodology.
What? You've not heard of PDOOMA? It's sweeping the Internet, the TV and the newspapers of the world! It's the latest in business analysis and information.
PDOOMA = Pulled Directly Out Of My Arse.
Just like the 1/100 memory miss rate. Nice work. You may have a career in punditry waiting for you somewhere.
Just that the argument that a GUI is necessary is incorrect.
Good point. You may notice that I never argued a GUI was necessary. It's incredibly useful for people who don't care to learn all the Unix commands though, which is about 99.9% of the potential user base.
And by "trying Linux out" you mean "complaining that it isn't exactly like Windows. Linux is NOT Windows and anyone who is honestly "trying Linux out" will try to learn the differences.
No. I don't mean that at all, and you're stretching a lot to get your sentence from mine (by stretching I mean 'completely inventing'). I mean that there's a bit of hype around at the moment for Linux, and this will translate into people testing a Live CD or installing Linux in a seperate partition. People want to see how good Linux is. To respond to your point - if you force them to use an archaic command line, then you're not selling Linux very well. Don't you *want* people to try Linux?
What happens when the "click here to fix all the problems" GUI does not launch?
What happens when the user screws up the command line? And who said anything about a 'click here to fix all the problems' GUI? You're stretching again, aren't you? What about a more reasonable GUI that guides users through common problems, and leaves the really tricky ones to the command line.
With Ubuntu, you don't have to. You type "apt-get install --reinstall foo" and it works again.
Excellent. Now, where's the easy help system to guide users to this command? You went on to talk about a 3x5 card, but that's pure rubbish and you probably know this. Exactly which 'foo' are you talking about that will resolve *any* GUI issues? I'd guess there are many 'foo's but that severely weakens your point.
If you're keen on seeing more people try and use Linux, you need to accept the GUI tools are a Good Thing. You may want users to learn the Linux way, but instead of throwing them in the deep end and laughing while most drown, how about helping them through the early stages so that they can learn Linux at a pace that suits them? Giving people better tools can only help, and the command line, while powerful, is an archaic remnant of an earlier computing age. People expect graphic interfaces now (and some aesthetics), and developers such as Apple have become adept at providing them. Your imagination may fail to come up with intuitive ways to accomplish command line functions in a GUI, but why should that hold back devs with better imaginations producing interfaces that are stable, attractive, functional and powerful?
Reality Master 101 has an excellent point - where *is* the innovation these days? Look through any top 40 chart from the sixties or seventies and you'll see all sorts of different music, from folk and hippie music through pop to hard rock and early metal. There was a huge amount of experimentation then, much of it pretty bad but enough that was just incredible. These days we still get some experimentation, but music seems to have largely settled into a few genres inside which all songs have very similar qualities.
The Beatles are probably the best example of innovation in music history. Listen through the three decades they touched and you'll hear an incredible range of styles (and a sitar). They did just about everything, reinventing their music every few years. Then there's The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, The Mommas and The Poppas, The Eagles, Little River Band, Kate Bush, ABBA, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead... the list just goes on and on.
I may sound like a cranky old man looking back at my generation's music as the best one, but nearly all of this was before my time. I've looked at the contrast between 'music before my 20s' and 'music since my 20s' and today it just looks so... bland in comparison.
I can't imagine anyone bankrolling a group like Queen any more. Their breakout hit Bohemian Rhapsody doesn't fit any convenient genre and looks awful on paper. It'd be a huge risk to pay for that to be recorded. What about Pink Floyd? There's nothing like them today, nothing even close. The Wall may be the best rock opera yet, but it's impossible to see it happening today.
Today we have an industry that is risk averse, and as a result the music they produce is stagnating. Outside the mainstream things are pretty exciting, but I can barely stand anything mainstream lately. It has to change.
What's wrong with providing a simple GUI for accomplishing the same thing? Not everyone cares to learn the Unix command set, or the ins and outs of package management, so why force them to work that way? Aren't they making enough of a commitment by trying Linux out?
Surely providing an option for people more used to GUIs can only help Linux adoption. Maybe more advanced features would only be accessible to the command line, giving some incentive for those who care to delve.
You need to remember - you are not an average user. Your expectations are different, as is your level of knowledge. You cannot apply your experiences to everyone and expect them to jump through the hoops you're happy to jump through in order to get something simple done. Making it simple and visual is a good thing for the rest of the population.
I disagree. Many Mac users I've known just get their work done and the Mac is the tool that helps them. Many Linux users I've known have tried to convert me, have talked about their superior OS and have been pretty damned smug about themselves. I see the same attitude on Slashdot a lot as well. Maybe you need to look at your glass house before you start casting stones.
Place overtly willful limits on hardware compatibility and things get substantially easier.
You're so right. After all, Apple's use of non-standard interfaces like PCI, USB, FireWire, AGP and others means that Apple can easily account for anything you've plugged into your Mac. There's only a couple of possible options for PCI slots, surely?
Apple use almost completely standard components across the board. They limit the possibilities in the initial purchase, but the towers can have pretty much anything in them and somehow still have very few hardware problems after OS upgrades. Note that I said 'few' and not 'none' - read sites like xlr8yourmac.com for many examples (still 'few' compared to volume) of upgrades causing hardware failures.
I also have had issues with hardware failing after upgrading from MacOS 8 to MacOS 9, but nothing in OS X.
Einstein was misquoted. He originally said "God does not play dice with the Universe. He plays poker, but I think He's got a tell. When He bluffs, you get earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanos and hurricanes around the Earth. Still, He's a mean player but I always thrash Him at contract bridge. He's not so good at making deals with his partner."
Bear with me on this thought process, but here's my take on why there's no 'central point' in the Universe.
Think of an ordinary rubber balloon before it's been inflated. It's a little piece of rubber. Consider that to be the Universe before the big bang. It's a 2D representation of space in this thought experiment because we're not allowing an 'up' or 'down' from the balloon's surface.
Now inflate the balloon. The original balloon is still there, but now it's much larger. The 2D representation of space has been stretched out. The starting point (the uninflated balloon) is still there, and it's everywhere the inflated balloon is. There's no seperate starting point that someone on the balloon's surface can point to - it's the entire surface! There's no special frame of reference, and our balloon behaves nicely under relativity.
It may help to put little stars on the balloon using a marker pen. If you can cram a few trillion on, it'll look pretty cool. Especially if you go for interesting structures and tiny swirly patterns.
The tricky thing is that the balloon surface isn't 3D but 2D like Flatland. Repeating this thought experiment in full 3D with technicolour is more accurate, but very hard because the expansion happens as well in extra dimensions that we can't think in. It'd be like a solid balloon, but probably more of a lumpy sphere, which expands from an infinitely compressed point like a space-filling foam does.
And they lost the very first page, which read:
This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. The author reserves his moral rights.
If you enjoy this book, why not purchase the other books in this series by the same author?
* Bible II - The Revengening
* Bible III - Apocalypse Now!
* Bible IV - Return of The Devil
* Bible V - God Strikes Back!
and soon...
* Bible VI - Endgame at Bethlehem
For my darling Elizabeth, we'll always have Babylon.
Douglas Adams, we miss you! Another brilliant bit of commentary on the political process.
Thanks for the quote, SatanicPuppy. There's nothing like a wry grin in the middle of the day.