No. There is no chance that we'll release any software for Linux. There are several reasons why. Let me explain them in no particular order.
First, Linux is our closest competitor. It's not a very good competitor, for reasons that should be obvious, but it's our closest. We have no desire to advance that. That's purely a business decision. (I'm not a business guy. I don't have an opinion about this. But it's how things are.)
Second, Linux is utterly impossible to support. An operating system where every nine-year-old can run his own kernel is not an operating system that we have any interest in working with. The whole overriding philosophy behind Apple is that working with your computer should be a good experience. It shouldn't be frustrating or unpleasant. You should never have a point where you don't like your computer. If we shipped our internal Linux ports, they would fail to work properly on two out of three computers out there. We'd be generating bad experiences for our customers. That's not how we do business.
Third, the reason we ported iTunes to Windows was to sell iPods and music. Linux users don't buy iPods or music. This isn't just anecdotal; the market research is overwhelmingly convincing. So there's no motivation to port.
Fourth, the Mac mini is $500, and its targeted specifically toward people who already own one computer cobbled together from parts. It's designed to be a drop-in replacement for an old-fashioned home computer with detached display, the kind all Linux users have. They should buy Mac minis instead. And, in fact, they are. We can't keep 'em on the shelves of our stores. Post-sales polling says that something like one in three Mac mini buyers self-describe as being primarily users of Linux.
Fifth and finally, in every single environment where Linux and Mac are viable alternatives, we're taking down business hand over fist. This is most obvious in post production. Discreet and Avid used to own post. Then Discreet started shipping their products in a Linux version last year. Suddenly customers were faced with a choice of a Linux product or an Apple product. Lots of them, on the strength of the marketing buzz, chose Linux. They're all going back. Bunim-Murray bought fifty seats of Smoke on Linux two years ago. Every one of them has been replaced with Final Cut Pro on G5s now. Our solutions work better.
Bottom line: Linux has the raw potential to compete with us. Windows doesn't, nor vice versa. Windows is so insular that a Mac can't really do the job of a Windows computer. Likewise, it's so insular that a Windows computer can't integrate into an open network like a Mac can. We're changing that a little at a time, but it's really how things are right now.
Linux, on the other hand, has the raw, untapped potential to compete with us. They're ten years behind us; we started working on Mac OS X technologies in the mid-1990s back when there was still a NeXT. Linux basically hasn't changed since. Evolution, yes, but no revolutionary changes. No Quartz, no Open Directory, no Cocoa, hell, not even anything that can compare with the Finder. So we're not worried, not by a long shot, but we recognize that if somebody were to take Linux and dump that stupid license mess and really invest time, money and energy in making it a modern operating system, it could potentially compete with us. So we're not interested in calling attention to it.
It's "Mac," short for "Macintosh" and not an acronym of anything. And I can't help but notice that the fact that you don't use them didn't stop you from telling me all about how Spotlight is supposedly useless. What strikes you as immediately and obviously wrong about this?
Computers are nothing more than stupid automatons doing exactly as they are told no matter what the user intended.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Let's just go ahead and cut to the chase scene here, okay? You believe, with all the conviction of a precocious seventeen year old, that you understand everything, and that you know exactly how things oughta be. You speak in sweeping generalizations from a point of ignorance that you don't merely admit to but actively brag about. "I have no idea what you're talking about and in fact can't even spell the three-letter name of the product your company sells, but sit back and let me tell you exactly how things are."
When I come to you with specific information about a shipping product, you close your eyes tightly and stick your fingers in your ears and insist, all facts to the contrary, that it can't possibly work.
You have contributed nothing, and served only to make yourself look like a fool.
This is not going well for you.
I have some advice: Take a huge step back from that promontory of perfect certainty onto which you've heaved your considerable girth. Do something to diminish your ignorance before spouting off to the whole wide world from The Gospel According to Whatever Your Name Is.
You keep saying "organized." Stop it. This is wrong. You should be saying "described" instead.
Objects are described in four ways. They're inherently described, they're implicitly described, they're automatically described and they're explicitly described.
By looking at a file and seeing that it's in the JPEG format, we know that it's a JPEG file. That's something we know inherently. When we make a note of that in the index entry for that file, that's inherent description.
Inherent descriptions are very useful. Using nothing but inherent descriptions, you can create a smart folder that shows you all the JPEG images on your computer that have a resolution of 300 dpi and that you've opened in the last week. That's inherent metadata.
Implicit metadata is derived from inherent metadata. It usually involves taking the specific and extrapolating to the general. If a JPEG image has a resolution of 300 dpi, we can describe it as high-resolution. If it's got a resolution of 72 dpi, we can describe it as low resolution. This lets us distinguish between images and thumbnails of images, all without human intervention.
Automatic metadata is inserted by machine. Your camera annotates every photo you take with a ton of automatic metadata. Exposure, focal length, flash, white balance, et cetera.
Using automatic metadata, we can create still more implicit descriptions. We can use the exposure and white balance data to discriminate between photos taken indoors and outdoors, for example.
Finally there's explicit metadata. When you drag that photo into your "Christmas as Marsha's" album in iPhoto, you're creating explicit metadata.
Spotlight works with absolutely no explicit metadata. It's massively useful with no explicit metadata at all. Adding explicit metadata makes it work better, but it works incredibly well with no explicit metadata at all.
Your position is that it doesn't work at all without explicit metadata. This is demonstrably false. So please stop spreading that rumor around.
Sigh. I don't mean to get frustrated, I really don't. But how many times do I have to explain it? Spotlight includes both a content store and a metadata store. It is not similar to any content-only indexing system that has ever existed. It is not similar to any metadata-only indexing system that has ever exists. It includes elements of both, but it is very different and very new.
One more person who clearly hasn't even read the goddamn brochure much less any of the internal docs says "Oh, Spotlight is just like this completely unrelated thing from 1937" and I'm gonna blow my top.
Actually, he doesn't. Doctorow explains how it's not perfect, but he completely ignores the fact that despite all the imperfections flesh is heir to, metadata indexing does work.
His document is a poorly formatted list of gripes, nothing more.
No, iTunes will keep its own database for the obvious reason: It's cross-platform. We have to ship an iTunes for Windows, which means we have to have an internal database anyway.
iTunes 5 will get the benefits of the souped-up V100 database, though, so searching will be even faster. (This won't affect you unless you have hundreds of thousands of songs in your library.)
First of all, OS X and Mac OS had a superb search FOR ages which works VERY good. Windows search compare to that is a JOKE. Spotlight is just more branded and search more metadata and gives it in more user friendly form.
Basically everything you said here is wrong.
Ever since Panther, we've had a thing called Search Kit. (The technology behind Search Kit goes farther back than that.) Search Kit would index the contents of readable files, meaning plain text, and allow you to search them.
It was slow, it wasn't extensible, and it wasn't modular.
Spotlight is completely different. Spotlight has a content-search component, but it also has a metadata-search component, and both are linked to data through modular pieces of code called importers. Each importer is associated with one or more file types. When a file of a given type changes on disk (is written to, moved or created), the Spotlight import task (mdimport) calls the relevant importer(s) to re-index the file. These importers are very simple and run very fast. Even on old hardware, the overhead of Spotlight indexing isn't noticeable, in large part because it runs at a very low priority.
So Spotlight is really something new. It's ubiquitous and it's modular and it's fast.
Microsoft's search technology looks strikingly similar on paper. Problem is it only exists on paper.
Actually, you ARE the target user for Spotlight. Because you're wasting a huge amount of time and effort putting all your little folders inside other little folders with the obsessive concentration of an autistic kid sorting paper clips.
Spotlight was designed specifically to set people like you free from the onerous burden of having to spend all that time doing housekeeping that the expensive computer in front of you is more than capable of doing all by itself.
Seriously, man. Come on. Using grep is technologically equivalent to searching a book for a particular word by turning to the first page and scanning each line until you find what you're looking for.
Modern technologies, on the other hand, are the equivalent of using the index. Totally different in both theory and execution.
This is entirely appropriate. Closed formats should remain closed, because that's what their authors want. And if that means that those formats won't be supported by important tools, then those formats will not be widely adopted.
Nikon needs to get off their high horse and start writing files in DNG format anyway.
Was the point that searching isn't always the best method of finding data completely lost on you?
Basically, yeah. Because you see, searching is the best way to find things. It's the best way we have. We don't know of a better way. If you think of one, great, I hope you become fabulously rich. But right now, searching is the acme of human accomplishment when it comes to finding things.
See, the computer is there to keep track of relationships for you. That's its job. It's not just a storage device. It's a device that's capable of storing and retrieving things. If you want information related to scuba diving, you shouldn't have to go looking with lots of clicky-clicky-clicky. You should be able to just ask for it. That's why we have computers instead of, say, shoeboxes full of paper.
Is 30+ years of computer science a design flaw?
It is when that 30+ years of work leads to something that's since been supplanted. It took us thousands of years to come up with Aristotle's theory of nested crystal spheres, but it was still wrong.
My entire point was that different != better when it comes to user interfaces.
And my point is that better is better. You're talking in meaningless and nonsensical abstractions. I'm talking about an actual computer program.
Replacing file-trees with search and removing the ability to keep file-trees
Who said anything about removing anything? Of course, if somebody did do that, it would not be worse. Have you looked at a database lately? Databases preserve relationships between entities in a way that's totally opaque to the user. You get to the data by going through a semantic interface. This is superior for managing large volumes of data. In fact, it's superior for managing small volumes of data, too. It's just that the activation energy used to be so high that it wasn't worth creating a relational database to store, say, your e-mail, chat transcripts, contact information and calendar entries. Spotlight reduces this activation energy to zero, meaning you can create that relational database with no investment at all. Just plug in the data as you normally would, and Spotlight handles building the relationship models for you.
Example: Just a few hours ago, I got an iChat from a person whose name I recognized, but I drew a complete blank on who he was. I spotlighted his name and instantly found an e-mail that he'd sent me two years ago. As soon as I saw it I knew exactly who he was; I just needed to be reminded. At the same time, I saw that he was on the attendees list for a interdepartmental meeting that's scheduled for April 28. It was in my calendar, you see.
See what I mean? The computer goes from being a big shoebox full of paper to a machine that actually knows things and that can answer questions. This is good. This is important.
Again: You're talking in meaningless abstractions. I'm telling you about an actual, working, shipping product. Not maybe-someday, but today, tonight, right now. (Well, right now for us. Ten days from now for everybody else.)
first time I sat down at an OS-X workstation I couldn't even find the web-browser let alone documents.
Hm. I'm having a hard time coming up with an explanation for this that doesn't involve massive, almost comical stupidity on your part. Maybe I should refrain from jumping to conclusions... but you're not making it easy on me.
I found in particular your question from two comments ago to be freaking hilarious in light of what you said about not having much use for Mac OS X. You asked, "Why can't I just grab the contents of my 'programs' directory and move it to a new machine?" If you'd spent ten minutes using a Mac instead of complaining that the Dock is, to use your word, "ugly," you'd know that that's precisely how things work on the Mac. Applications are self-contained little packages that can be run from anywhere and simply dragged from one computer to another.
It is a HUGE design flaw. We've been over this and over this internally. But like so many things, it's a compromise. On the one hand, everybody recognizes that the UNIX command line is a massively stupid thing to keep around. On the other, lots of our users want it, and WE want POSIX compliance. So we strike a compromise. We keep it, but we ensure that nobody will ever have to use it for anything, ever.
Here's the important thing, though. We go back and forth on this with every release. We're aware of the problem, and we're constantly looking for solutions to it. Compare and contrast with the mouth-breathing idiots who continue to insist that it's just FINE that the command-line interface is the equivalent of hammering in a nail with the butt of a loaded pistol.
Can one undo a "move to trash, empty trash" in OSX?
One can't undo an "empty trash." But in order to do an "empty trash," you have to first put the file in the trash, then when asked you have to confirm that you really mean to empty the trash. You can't undo a nuclear missile launch, but you can require that two people be there to turn the keys. Same basic idea.
Why not do both? Didn't you read the interview? The system has fundamental design flaws, okay? One of those design flaws is that it's not at all robust or forgiving. Delete the wrong file, the computer stops working. I mean it just stops working. That's obviously a massive design flaw.
The solution to that massive design flaw, according to some, is to add a whole layer to prevent the user from doing certain operations. This makes perfect sense on a multiuser system, particularly a timesharing multiuser system, but it makes no sense at all on a single-user system. It results in users being told that they don't have sufficient privileges to install software and things like that. It's not a good solution.
The problem arises when people use this added layer of multiuser security as an excuse for not fixing the fundamental design flaws. "We don't need to make the system survivable," goes the theory, "because we'll just tell people to accept a high degree of inconvenience in the name of 'security.'"
The problem is that so many people choose to sit on their hands denying that the flaw even exists rather than putting their big ol' brains toward solving it.
I mean, if we can't even expect to teach people what a "directory tree" is and means, how do we expect them to learn to organize information?
Expecting people to change the way they work to accommodate design flaws in the tool you've built for them is the wrong idea entirely. There's a better way.
Doing the same from a graphical file manager will destroy your system too.
It certainly will not. Because when you drag files to the trash, you can put them back where they came from. Dragging a file to the trash destroys nothing. Dragging a file to the trash, emptying the trash and clicking "okay" destroys it.
The argument was that we need a user-hostile privileges system because it prevents people from entering easily mis-typed commands that do drastic things. That's dumb. What we need to fix is the interface. Throwing a whole layer of crap on top to try to work around that fundamental flaw is not a good solution.
Ever used OS X?
Heh. And here I thought my reputation had preceded me.
Slashdot Mirror
No. There is no chance that we'll release any software for Linux. There are several reasons why. Let me explain them in no particular order.
First, Linux is our closest competitor. It's not a very good competitor, for reasons that should be obvious, but it's our closest. We have no desire to advance that. That's purely a business decision. (I'm not a business guy. I don't have an opinion about this. But it's how things are.)
Second, Linux is utterly impossible to support. An operating system where every nine-year-old can run his own kernel is not an operating system that we have any interest in working with. The whole overriding philosophy behind Apple is that working with your computer should be a good experience. It shouldn't be frustrating or unpleasant. You should never have a point where you don't like your computer. If we shipped our internal Linux ports, they would fail to work properly on two out of three computers out there. We'd be generating bad experiences for our customers. That's not how we do business.
Third, the reason we ported iTunes to Windows was to sell iPods and music. Linux users don't buy iPods or music. This isn't just anecdotal; the market research is overwhelmingly convincing. So there's no motivation to port.
Fourth, the Mac mini is $500, and its targeted specifically toward people who already own one computer cobbled together from parts. It's designed to be a drop-in replacement for an old-fashioned home computer with detached display, the kind all Linux users have. They should buy Mac minis instead. And, in fact, they are. We can't keep 'em on the shelves of our stores. Post-sales polling says that something like one in three Mac mini buyers self-describe as being primarily users of Linux.
Fifth and finally, in every single environment where Linux and Mac are viable alternatives, we're taking down business hand over fist. This is most obvious in post production. Discreet and Avid used to own post. Then Discreet started shipping their products in a Linux version last year. Suddenly customers were faced with a choice of a Linux product or an Apple product. Lots of them, on the strength of the marketing buzz, chose Linux. They're all going back. Bunim-Murray bought fifty seats of Smoke on Linux two years ago. Every one of them has been replaced with Final Cut Pro on G5s now. Our solutions work better.
Bottom line: Linux has the raw potential to compete with us. Windows doesn't, nor vice versa. Windows is so insular that a Mac can't really do the job of a Windows computer. Likewise, it's so insular that a Windows computer can't integrate into an open network like a Mac can. We're changing that a little at a time, but it's really how things are right now.
Linux, on the other hand, has the raw, untapped potential to compete with us. They're ten years behind us; we started working on Mac OS X technologies in the mid-1990s back when there was still a NeXT. Linux basically hasn't changed since. Evolution, yes, but no revolutionary changes. No Quartz, no Open Directory, no Cocoa, hell, not even anything that can compare with the Finder. So we're not worried, not by a long shot, but we recognize that if somebody were to take Linux and dump that stupid license mess and really invest time, money and energy in making it a modern operating system, it could potentially compete with us. So we're not interested in calling attention to it.
So no. No Linux ports.
Well... I don't use MAC's
It's "Mac," short for "Macintosh" and not an acronym of anything. And I can't help but notice that the fact that you don't use them didn't stop you from telling me all about how Spotlight is supposedly useless. What strikes you as immediately and obviously wrong about this?
Computers are nothing more than stupid automatons doing exactly as they are told no matter what the user intended.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Let's just go ahead and cut to the chase scene here, okay? You believe, with all the conviction of a precocious seventeen year old, that you understand everything, and that you know exactly how things oughta be. You speak in sweeping generalizations from a point of ignorance that you don't merely admit to but actively brag about. "I have no idea what you're talking about and in fact can't even spell the three-letter name of the product your company sells, but sit back and let me tell you exactly how things are."
When I come to you with specific information about a shipping product, you close your eyes tightly and stick your fingers in your ears and insist, all facts to the contrary, that it can't possibly work.
You have contributed nothing, and served only to make yourself look like a fool.
This is not going well for you.
I have some advice: Take a huge step back from that promontory of perfect certainty onto which you've heaved your considerable girth. Do something to diminish your ignorance before spouting off to the whole wide world from The Gospel According to Whatever Your Name Is.
Just a suggestion. Take it or leave it.
You keep saying "organized." Stop it. This is wrong. You should be saying "described" instead.
Objects are described in four ways. They're inherently described, they're implicitly described, they're automatically described and they're explicitly described.
By looking at a file and seeing that it's in the JPEG format, we know that it's a JPEG file. That's something we know inherently. When we make a note of that in the index entry for that file, that's inherent description.
Inherent descriptions are very useful. Using nothing but inherent descriptions, you can create a smart folder that shows you all the JPEG images on your computer that have a resolution of 300 dpi and that you've opened in the last week. That's inherent metadata.
Implicit metadata is derived from inherent metadata. It usually involves taking the specific and extrapolating to the general. If a JPEG image has a resolution of 300 dpi, we can describe it as high-resolution. If it's got a resolution of 72 dpi, we can describe it as low resolution. This lets us distinguish between images and thumbnails of images, all without human intervention.
Automatic metadata is inserted by machine. Your camera annotates every photo you take with a ton of automatic metadata. Exposure, focal length, flash, white balance, et cetera.
Using automatic metadata, we can create still more implicit descriptions. We can use the exposure and white balance data to discriminate between photos taken indoors and outdoors, for example.
Finally there's explicit metadata. When you drag that photo into your "Christmas as Marsha's" album in iPhoto, you're creating explicit metadata.
Spotlight works with absolutely no explicit metadata. It's massively useful with no explicit metadata at all. Adding explicit metadata makes it work better, but it works incredibly well with no explicit metadata at all.
Your position is that it doesn't work at all without explicit metadata. This is demonstrably false. So please stop spreading that rumor around.
Sigh. I don't mean to get frustrated, I really don't. But how many times do I have to explain it? Spotlight includes both a content store and a metadata store. It is not similar to any content-only indexing system that has ever existed. It is not similar to any metadata-only indexing system that has ever exists. It includes elements of both, but it is very different and very new.
One more person who clearly hasn't even read the goddamn brochure much less any of the internal docs says "Oh, Spotlight is just like this completely unrelated thing from 1937" and I'm gonna blow my top.
Actually, he doesn't. Doctorow explains how it's not perfect, but he completely ignores the fact that despite all the imperfections flesh is heir to, metadata indexing does work.
His document is a poorly formatted list of gripes, nothing more.
Sure, because God forbid you want to pull a song from your music library to use as a background track behind a presentation you're working on.
Try to be a little less small-minded, okay?
No, iTunes will keep its own database for the obvious reason: It's cross-platform. We have to ship an iTunes for Windows, which means we have to have an internal database anyway.
iTunes 5 will get the benefits of the souped-up V100 database, though, so searching will be even faster. (This won't affect you unless you have hundreds of thousands of songs in your library.)
First of all, OS X and Mac OS had a superb search FOR ages which works VERY good. Windows search compare to that is a JOKE. Spotlight is just more branded and search more metadata and gives it in more user friendly form.
Basically everything you said here is wrong.
Ever since Panther, we've had a thing called Search Kit. (The technology behind Search Kit goes farther back than that.) Search Kit would index the contents of readable files, meaning plain text, and allow you to search them.
It was slow, it wasn't extensible, and it wasn't modular.
Spotlight is completely different. Spotlight has a content-search component, but it also has a metadata-search component, and both are linked to data through modular pieces of code called importers. Each importer is associated with one or more file types. When a file of a given type changes on disk (is written to, moved or created), the Spotlight import task (mdimport) calls the relevant importer(s) to re-index the file. These importers are very simple and run very fast. Even on old hardware, the overhead of Spotlight indexing isn't noticeable, in large part because it runs at a very low priority.
So Spotlight is really something new. It's ubiquitous and it's modular and it's fast.
Microsoft's search technology looks strikingly similar on paper. Problem is it only exists on paper.
Actually, you ARE the target user for Spotlight. Because you're wasting a huge amount of time and effort putting all your little folders inside other little folders with the obsessive concentration of an autistic kid sorting paper clips.
Spotlight was designed specifically to set people like you free from the onerous burden of having to spend all that time doing housekeeping that the expensive computer in front of you is more than capable of doing all by itself.
Seriously, man. Come on. Using grep is technologically equivalent to searching a book for a particular word by turning to the first page and scanning each line until you find what you're looking for.
Modern technologies, on the other hand, are the equivalent of using the index. Totally different in both theory and execution.
The "slippery slope" thing is a myth, a logical fallacy.
This is entirely appropriate. Closed formats should remain closed, because that's what their authors want. And if that means that those formats won't be supported by important tools, then those formats will not be widely adopted.
Nikon needs to get off their high horse and start writing files in DNG format anyway.
Star Wars has ALWAYS been about cutting-edge special effects, and NEVER about good acting.
Guess you never saw "The Empire Strikes Back." That love story was the only part of the five movies so far that could be called "good."
I am sure the picky people would have no problem adding an "export PICKY_BITCH_USER=1" to their shell init script
You're really not clear on this whole "Mac" thing, are you?
Necessary but not sufficient for what? For popular adoption? Clearly not. For overwhelming commercial success? Clearly not.
Just what, exactly, are you suggesting that your own personal pet political philosophy is necessary for?
Was the point that searching isn't always the best method of finding data completely lost on you?
... but you're not making it easy on me.
Basically, yeah. Because you see, searching is the best way to find things. It's the best way we have. We don't know of a better way. If you think of one, great, I hope you become fabulously rich. But right now, searching is the acme of human accomplishment when it comes to finding things.
See, the computer is there to keep track of relationships for you. That's its job. It's not just a storage device. It's a device that's capable of storing and retrieving things. If you want information related to scuba diving, you shouldn't have to go looking with lots of clicky-clicky-clicky. You should be able to just ask for it. That's why we have computers instead of, say, shoeboxes full of paper.
Is 30+ years of computer science a design flaw?
It is when that 30+ years of work leads to something that's since been supplanted. It took us thousands of years to come up with Aristotle's theory of nested crystal spheres, but it was still wrong.
My entire point was that different != better when it comes to user interfaces.
And my point is that better is better. You're talking in meaningless and nonsensical abstractions. I'm talking about an actual computer program.
Replacing file-trees with search and removing the ability to keep file-trees
Who said anything about removing anything? Of course, if somebody did do that, it would not be worse. Have you looked at a database lately? Databases preserve relationships between entities in a way that's totally opaque to the user. You get to the data by going through a semantic interface. This is superior for managing large volumes of data. In fact, it's superior for managing small volumes of data, too. It's just that the activation energy used to be so high that it wasn't worth creating a relational database to store, say, your e-mail, chat transcripts, contact information and calendar entries. Spotlight reduces this activation energy to zero, meaning you can create that relational database with no investment at all. Just plug in the data as you normally would, and Spotlight handles building the relationship models for you.
Example: Just a few hours ago, I got an iChat from a person whose name I recognized, but I drew a complete blank on who he was. I spotlighted his name and instantly found an e-mail that he'd sent me two years ago. As soon as I saw it I knew exactly who he was; I just needed to be reminded. At the same time, I saw that he was on the attendees list for a interdepartmental meeting that's scheduled for April 28. It was in my calendar, you see.
See what I mean? The computer goes from being a big shoebox full of paper to a machine that actually knows things and that can answer questions. This is good. This is important.
Again: You're talking in meaningless abstractions. I'm telling you about an actual, working, shipping product. Not maybe-someday, but today, tonight, right now. (Well, right now for us. Ten days from now for everybody else.)
first time I sat down at an OS-X workstation I couldn't even find the web-browser let alone documents.
Hm. I'm having a hard time coming up with an explanation for this that doesn't involve massive, almost comical stupidity on your part. Maybe I should refrain from jumping to conclusions
I found in particular your question from two comments ago to be freaking hilarious in light of what you said about not having much use for Mac OS X. You asked, "Why can't I just grab the contents of my 'programs' directory and move it to a new machine?" If you'd spent ten minutes using a Mac instead of complaining that the Dock is, to use your word, "ugly," you'd know that that's precisely how things work on the Mac. Applications are self-contained little packages that can be run from anywhere and simply dragged from one computer to another.
That cracked me up.
This seems like a design flaw.
It is a HUGE design flaw. We've been over this and over this internally. But like so many things, it's a compromise. On the one hand, everybody recognizes that the UNIX command line is a massively stupid thing to keep around. On the other, lots of our users want it, and WE want POSIX compliance. So we strike a compromise. We keep it, but we ensure that nobody will ever have to use it for anything, ever.
Here's the important thing, though. We go back and forth on this with every release. We're aware of the problem, and we're constantly looking for solutions to it. Compare and contrast with the mouth-breathing idiots who continue to insist that it's just FINE that the command-line interface is the equivalent of hammering in a nail with the butt of a loaded pistol.
Um. No. I can honestly say that I've never mistakenly moved a file that I didn't intend to move. That sounds incredibly unlikely.
But even if I did, the solution is a quick command-Z away. Unlike that silly command-line example that everybody's still straw-manning.
Can one undo a commandline "rm" in OSX?
One would not do such a thing in Mac OS X.
Can one undo a "move to trash, empty trash" in OSX?
One can't undo an "empty trash." But in order to do an "empty trash," you have to first put the file in the trash, then when asked you have to confirm that you really mean to empty the trash. You can't undo a nuclear missile launch, but you can require that two people be there to turn the keys. Same basic idea.
Why not do both? Didn't you read the interview? The system has fundamental design flaws, okay? One of those design flaws is that it's not at all robust or forgiving. Delete the wrong file, the computer stops working. I mean it just stops working. That's obviously a massive design flaw.
The solution to that massive design flaw, according to some, is to add a whole layer to prevent the user from doing certain operations. This makes perfect sense on a multiuser system, particularly a timesharing multiuser system, but it makes no sense at all on a single-user system. It results in users being told that they don't have sufficient privileges to install software and things like that. It's not a good solution.
The problem arises when people use this added layer of multiuser security as an excuse for not fixing the fundamental design flaws. "We don't need to make the system survivable," goes the theory, "because we'll just tell people to accept a high degree of inconvenience in the name of 'security.'"
The problem is that so many people choose to sit on their hands denying that the flaw even exists rather than putting their big ol' brains toward solving it.
I stand corrected. You're right. Prior to Tiger, we imported two largely useless formats. ;-)
I mean, if we can't even expect to teach people what a "directory tree" is and means, how do we expect them to learn to organize information?
Expecting people to change the way they work to accommodate design flaws in the tool you've built for them is the wrong idea entirely. There's a better way.
Doing the same from a graphical file manager will destroy your system too.
It certainly will not. Because when you drag files to the trash, you can put them back where they came from. Dragging a file to the trash destroys nothing. Dragging a file to the trash, emptying the trash and clicking "okay" destroys it.
The argument was that we need a user-hostile privileges system because it prevents people from entering easily mis-typed commands that do drastic things. That's dumb. What we need to fix is the interface. Throwing a whole layer of crap on top to try to work around that fundamental flaw is not a good solution.
Ever used OS X?
Heh. And here I thought my reputation had preceded me.
What you should have comprehended was the awesomely bad design of a user interface that assumes you're infallible.
Of course, Unix is not like this and so we must choose
Not exactly.