Why? What makes Talon News not a real news service while al-Jazeera is a real news service? You can't just draw a line and say that everybody you disagree with isn't a real news service. That's Nazi propaganda shit.
The press has standards and rules they hold themselves to
That's actually a commonly held myth. The only rule the press subscribes to is "don't piss off so many people that our ratings drop."
Do you really want 'Talon News' held up to the standards CBS or even Fox News is held to? Because it would fail horribly.
You say that, but I don't believe you. I've read Talon's stories. There are no apparent falsehoods in them. They're news, just like the stories that go out over the AP wire are news. It's just that you don't happen to like their opinions about things, so you declare that they're not real news! over and over again. More Nazi propaganda shit.
And you can claim al-Jazeera isn't a news service when they get a press pass.
You do know that al-Jazeera has been in the briefing room since 2002, right?
you may want to read why that information was discovered
It was discovered because the President's political opponents went dumpster-diving. That's not something about which I'd brag.
It wasn't 'let's go look up dirt on this guy',
That's a lie.
you've fallen into a translation trap
More Nazi propaganda shit. You're more interested in muddling the meanings of universally understood words than you are in actually having a conversation. You're more interested in weaving little webs of lies than you are in communicating.
Thank God the Americans were smart enough not to elect any of your kind last November.
What's "breaking copyright?" If you're talking about making copies of works for which you don't own the rights, then yes, it's stealing. As far as I know, "breaking copyright" is not a legal term with any meaning in any jurisdiction I've ever heard of. Unauthorized copying, on the other hand, is a crime covered by Title 18 of the United States Code, in the same section that describes crimes like trafficking in stolen goods, counterfeiting and cattle rustling.
stealing involves taking something tangible away from someone
If you search every last line of every last paragraph of every last section of the United States Code, you will find a grand total of zero references to "taking something tangible away from someone." You don't get to make up the laws yourself, you know.
not every action that is illegal is wrong on its own merits
Please go right now to your nearest community college and take a freshman-level political science class. Please attend all the lectures where the professor talks about the cultural value of the rule of law.
educate them about fact and teach them to reason
No, that's not the purpose of the public education system. Children can learn facts right out of encyclopedias, and it's simply impossible to teach people "to reason," as can be seen on this Web site every day. No, the reason we have a public education system in this country, and more importantly why we have the one we have, is to teach our children values and cultural norms, to socialize them and integrate them into society.
The point is to give people the tools to make sound conclusions
No, that's something people have to learn on their own. That's not a function of the public school system. After you're done taking that freshman-level political science class, please register for a freshman-level theory of education class. This will all be covered on the very first day of lectures.
Perhaps your vision of the way school should work would have fit in well in a place like the USSR
Nice ad hominem attack, Mr. Anonymous Coward. Next time try having a clue.
Agreed. And because Linux programs don't work together except for those that are designed to be "suites," Linux is a very bad operating system indeed.
According to this definition KDE and GNOME are not suites either.
KDE and Gnome are two Linux-based operating systems, right?
the bigger problem with you is the attitude
This is the fallacy of the ad hominem.
Even while you insist that nothing on linux can be used, things like web serving can still be done with it
Oh, we're talking about servers, then? Fine, fine. Mac OS X Server is superior in every way to Linux Server. Linux Server requires you to learn an entire language of esoteric typewritten commands, while Mac OS X Server can be remotely administered from any Mac using simple tools. The number of transactions per second you can get through a server certainly matters to some people, but it's far more dependent on hardware than it is on software, and small differences in the number of transactions per second are far outweighed by the total cost of administering the server system. Mac OS X Server wins hands down.
The OS X X11 is useless because your desktop is full of programs that do not support it. Not so with GNU/Linux.
Confused. You're saying that X11 is useless because most of what's on the Mac is superior to it. I agree with this part. But then you say that it's not useless on Linux because every program is equally bad. I don't follow that part.
Try getting a random USB WLAN card
Don't have to. We've got AirPort and AirPort Extreme. You don't need to buy shoddy third-party products.
chances are it won't work with your lovely OS X
No, Mac OS X supports everything.
OS X doesn't have drag and drop software installation.
You've now become so desperate that you're just plain lying. Do you know how you install (say) Microsoft Office on the Mac? By dragging an icon from one window to another. End of installation.
They tried to have at first, but gave up
Please stop lying.
It just wasn't feasible
Please stop lying.
Clicking on a checkbox and pressing install, watching the program download off the network and install. That is easier than the nonworking drag and drop method.
Please stop being an idiot.
apple still includes software under it in OS X
So you have finally given up on the "Mac OS X is based on Linux" thing? That's good to see. I'm glad I could increase your knowledge.
That's the fallacy of the trend. Children play with toys, therefore when those children grow up there's going to be a massive explosion in the sale of toys, right? Wrong, because when children grow up they stop playing with toys.
The closest thing I've ever seen to this on a UNIX-style system was how the University of Notre Dame ran their Solaris workstation clusters on AFS back in the mid-1990s.
Actually, that's basically how Mac OS X Server works. User preferences are stored in tiered layers through a facility called NSUserDefaults. Some preferences can be set at the group layer, some at the user layer (by an administrator) and some by the user himself.
Now, many third-party applications (especially legacy 20th-century stuff) haven't gotten around to implementing NSUserDefaults yet. There's not really any excuse for that; it's only been around since 10.0. But if life were perfect it wouldn't be interesting.
And right here, in just two comments, we have a microcosm of why Linux has not been commercially successful.
First, there's just too much junk out there for a software vendor to even hope to support a majority of configurations. That goes for both hardware and software. When any tool can disable the wizfiddle driver in his gloopgloop by rejobulating his paramiffins, the cost of providing customer support skyrockets.
Second, every time anybody tries to come anywhere close to developing a product that runs on Linux, leeches appear out of nowhere demanding that the company cough up all their valuable IP.
Linux is just plain bad; that's not really in dispute. The best that can be said for it is that "it's getting better," which may or may not be true. But it does have the virtue of being cheap, and as anybody who's ever eaten at a fast food place or shopped at a retail chain can testify, cheap trumps bad any day of the week and twice on Sundays. So why hasn't Linux taken the world by storm? For these two reasons, illustrated so deftly by these two commenters.
Want to fix Linux? Start by getting rid of the "you can change everything" aspect of it. Ship standardized configurations that everybody can count on. Then drop that encumbering software license. Until those two problems are solved, Linux is gonna continue to be a footnote.
If the default appearence doesn't meet your tastes you can always change it
Why? If I don't like the way the house looks I can always spend years of my life or tens of thousands of dollars landscaping and refinishing it, too...or I can just go find a house that doesn't look like it was designed by an autistic seven-year-old with astigmatism.
That's funny, because MPEG-4 is a video standard and Ogg Vorbis is an audio standard.
LOL. MPEG-4 includes three parts, you dumbass. There's the container format, the video codec and the audio codec. Those quarter billion songs Apple's sold through iTunes? All in MPEG-4 format. (The audio part of the MPEG-4 spec is also known as Advanced Audio Coding, or AAC.)
Normal Joes do not play computer games. They use computers to do things like work and communicate with friends and family. When the time comes to have fun, normal Joes turn off their computers and play tennis or go camping or walk the dog.
If you want to attract people who play computer games to use your operating system, that's great. But do not assume that these people are normal Joes. Do not assume that they make up anything other than the tiniest niche market.
Add a third party mail client to OS X and you lose that precious iChat integration I'm afraid.
The interfaces are open and documented. If a third party fails to add support for open interfaces, whose fault is it?
iLife is a suite too. Office v.X is another.
Office is. iLife is not. The difference between a "suite" and just a bunch of programs sold under the same part number is that the programs that make up a "suite" only interoperate with each other through non-published interfaces.
Yes, even Aqua's not perfect in every respect for everyone
I'm growing tired of your vagueness. "Not perfect in every respect for everyone?" What kind of nonsense is that? If you have complaints, name them.
GNOME and KDE are just a start
But that's absurd. They are not "just a start," because what they attempt to do has already been "started" decades ago. What possible excuse could they have for being years behind the state of the art?
I would appreciate the features even if the UI was just a workable one
Features don't count if there's no way to get at them. It doesn't matter what a program does. If the interface is bad, the program is worse than useless.
AmaroK has a nice OSD that displays the title of a song on the screen when it starts playing a new one.
I saw that screen shot. It looks horrible. The bezel has square corners and is opaque. The contents are not laid out properly. The text is not set properly. Worse than useless.
Well, I believe you can find an app that requires very similar effort on Linux if all you want is to throw a couple of movies on a dvd.
Do you know what iDVD does? Do you know what its purpose is?
I had to do some research to learn that you can burn DVDs with iDVD.
That may be the stupidest sentence I've read all day.
I've seen iDVD but it wasn't instantly obvious that it is more than just a DVD player
No, never mind. That's the stupidest sentence I've read all day. You have obviously never seen iDVD and are probably just going by the name of the program.
You can't make everything doable by clicking on a lickable icon.
You've lost control completely and have spun off into meaningless generalities. We're not talking in generalities. We're talking in specifics. Linux is bad because it fails to make tasks that should be easy,easy. Tasks like listening to music, scheduling your time, chatting with people you know, organizing your photos and putting your home movies on DVD. Linux makes these things hard, and there is no excuse for that at all.
As I've said, the solutions exist. I won't argue about the UIs.
Any program with a bad interface is, by definition, not a solution. It is a problem.
As for Linux not stacking up, in some areas it does. Performance. Network transparency of X. Hardware support. Software installation and maintenance.
How can you compare on performance? Linux is not faster for key tasks because key tasks are not possible on Linux. Or, as you insist so stridently, they are possible but they are so hard they require the user to study a tutorial. Who cares how fast the computer runs? People care whether they can do what they want to do. Linux loses.
Network transparency? Utter nonsense. Never the right solution for the problem. But if you absolutely have to do that, use the bundled X11 software that comes with Mac OS X. You'll hate it, because using it will remind you of how pitifully obsolete that technology is, but it's better than just getting rid of everything modern and going back to the computer equivalent of the stone age.
Hardware support? What hardware do you need to support? This is a Mac we're talking about here. It supports everything.
Software installation? What's better than dragging an icon into a folder? There is no
ICQ is one of the oldest instant messaging services. Dating back to 1998.
If it's been around that long and I've never heard of it, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that it hasn't exactly taken off like wildfire.
Ogg Vorbis is "a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source."
Hmm. Looks like it's inferior to MPEG-4, and not widely supported.
When have you used GNU/Linux with any graphical UI?
Last fall. But not for long. I fled as soon as I could.
Integrating software totally into operatings systems own GUI messes things up I think.
No idea what that's supposed to mean.
Why can't programs have their own menu's?
Because all the menus go in the same place, and change depending on your working context. This is not a new idea. It dates back to 1983.
And how usable it is that you don't close the program by closing all it's windows, but by going trough active programs and killing the application?
You're done with this document and you want to start working on another. How much sense does it make for the program to assume you're through working completely when you close the document? Closing a document and quitting the program are two different things.
But still they would read some tutorial and learn from that how to do it.
You should never need a tutorial to figure out how to use a computer program to do a simple task.
Firefox, Evolution and OpenOffice are more feature rich and easier to use than their counter parts on MAC OS X.
I had to use google to figure out what all these things are. Firefox appears to be an absurdly complicated Web browser. Safari is obviously superior. Evolution is a bad replacement for what's already a bad program: Outlook for Windows. As I've already explained, the idea that programs should come bundled as suites is 20th-century thinking. E-mail and calendar should not be in the same program. Apple breaks them out into iCal and Mail. And Open Office just appears to be a really bad copy of Microsoft Office, a program that runs spectacularly well on the Mac.
Into how many different kind of mail and groupware can your Mail.app connect?
Because it supports all the same interfaces as every other Mail program, the answer is "all of them." I assume you're talking about Exchange here. Mail works perfectly with Exchange.
In 21st century it's not practical to have isolated programs that can talk to other programs on the same computer.
No, you have that exactly backwards. It is practical to have programs that can talk to other programs. I think you're a little confused.
But not with the corporate mainframe that has GroupWare and user management.
If you're hoping a Mac can interoperate with a closed system, the answer is obviously no.
Can you just drag and drop those into your system?
You don't have to. If you boot a Mac on a network with a properly configured Active Directory server, the Mac will automatically join the domain and all services will automatically be available. Though as I understand it, it's practically impossible to property configure an Active Directory server, which is why Active Directory is going the way of the dinosaur in favor of Open Directory.
I think comments that include nothing other than a hyperlink ought to be disallowed. Aren't Internet message boards for sharing our own opinions, not just for parroting the other voices in our echo chambers?
(And in case you're wondering, no, I didn't click on it. So if it's actually a link to the comment's author's own work, somebody help me extract my foot from my mouth.)
the GNOME suite of applications do interoperate to a point
That sounds more like an excuse than a feature. Why only to a point? Why is the interoperability incomplete, and why is it only available to other programs in the "suite?" It's obviously possible to do interoperability the right way. Why doesn't Linux have good interoperability?
for other operating systems there *are no different desktops and accompanying software suites*
I don't understand. Why would you want to use a different user interface if the one you have already works? I can understand if you have two interfaces that are both bad in certain ways; you might want to switch from one to the other in order to work around the bad aspects of each. But again, that sounds more like an excuse than a feature. "Linux has more workarounds" isn't a selling point, in my opinion.
And you're kind of missing my point about "accompanying software suites." Talking about software in terms of suites -- applications that are specifically written to work together --is 20th-century thinking. It's a bad solution. Why should you only get interoperability when you use Program A1 and Program A2? Why aren't the interfaces in Program A1 implemented in program A2 and B2 and C2 and G2 and Y2?
There are millions of Jabber users, more than there are ICQ users today.
What's ICQ?
What do you find so hard to look at?
Are we looking at the same thing? The interface is incredibly ugly. Fonts are mis-sized and improperly kerned. Interface elements are placed with no consistency and with insufficient use of buffer space. If you were to put your mouse point in any part of the window and click, some control would intercept the click because the interface is too dense. And the main controls --you know, "play" and "stop" --are completely obscured by insignificant controls. It's like sitting down in the cockpit of a jet fighter...except all you're trying to do is listen to some music. Complexity isn't automatically bad, but unnecessary complexity is.
I like having the album covers (automatically fetched from amazon)
That's technically a violation of Amazon's terms of service. That's why iTunes doesn't do it. I'm not sure I'd feel very good about using a piece of software that's distributed by people who don't seem to care about being good citizens.
the automatically displayed lists of favourite songs
Yes, in iTunes we call them "smart playlists." One of the defaults is a list of the most highly rated songs in the library. But you're not limited to the default smart playlists, of course.
AmaroK has this and more cool stuff.
You're playing up features, but forgetting that throwing all those features together behind a sham of a user interface is a giant mistake.
And lacks Ogg Vorbis as I said.
ICQ, too, evidently. Whatever the hell that is.
Flamebait is an opinion that's needlessly harsh and unaccounted for.
Sounds an awful lot like "anything with which I disagree," to me. I'm not a fan of dismissiveness. This "flamebait" term of yours seems like an excuse to dismiss somebody's opinion because it conflicts with your own.
They have UI Guidelines and have conducted usability studies.
While that may be true, there is no evidence of it.
Try picking up a recent issue of LJ for a tutorial or do a bit of research online.
A tutorial? Research? You're not seeing it, are you? With iDVD, you drag movies to the template and click "burn." No tutorials or research required. There's no excuse for making it harder than that.
I doubt you can name many tasks that would be impossible on a free software operating system today
That's not really the point, is it? The point is that something that's possible but difficult might as well be impossible for all practical purposes. Because long befo
Considering that Farsi and Bengali scripts are bundled with Mac OS X, and that Mac OS X is (to the best of my knowledge) the only environment that allows you to mix seven-bit, eight-bit and sixteen-bit encoded text in a single document without any additional support in the application, I'm gonna go ahead and say that you're mistaken here.
If you mean copying like making a backup copy for yourself, then you're wrong. If you mean copying like stealing, then you're right.
no sharing
Absolutely right. You are not allowed to give away or to take copies of media from other people. That's just a "duh" moment, you know?
no moving
I don't understand this one. You mean picking up a disc and moving it from here to there?
no ripping
You covered this one already with "no copying."
no burning
Again: You covered this with "no copying."
Boil it down and what do we have? You are absolutely allowed to copy media you buy for your own personal use. You are not allowed to either give copies to somebody else or to take copies from somebody else. Those are the limits that the industry wants enforced. Why? Because there are too many people like you who think there's no difference between making a copy of a CD to carry in the car and making a copy of a CD to give to a friend.
Granted, it seems like the long-term solution to the problem is education: We need to teach kids that stealing is wrong even when it's easy. We need to teach kids that "punching somebody in the dark" is not a victimless crime. We need to teach kids that it's about more than illegal versus legal, but rather wrong versus right.
But every time we try, some dumbass from the ACLU or the EFF comes crawling out of the woodwork to complain about "indoctrination." Tell me, just what do we have a public education system for, if not to indoctrinate our kids in our norms, values and culture?
As long as you're okay with the fact that giving away copies of media to your friends and to strangers on the Internet is not "using the product the way I want," then fine. That is, after all, the law of the land right now. Breaking access control for the purpose of making fair use is fine. Breaking access control for any other reason-- including "just 'cause I can" --is not.
it would make sense that a 64-bit machine would have 64-bit opcodes
I don't know about "it would make sense" or whatever, but this is not a true statement. Why would you ever need 64-bit-long instructions? Are you seriously going to have an instruction set with more than two billion instructions in it?
I probably just need to educate myself on 64-bit computing.
Slashdot Mirror
Linspire is in my opinion a closed-world project that we must fight
Ask me again why Linux has remained stagnant for the past four years.
they aren't a real news service
Why? What makes Talon News not a real news service while al-Jazeera is a real news service? You can't just draw a line and say that everybody you disagree with isn't a real news service. That's Nazi propaganda shit.
The press has standards and rules they hold themselves to
That's actually a commonly held myth. The only rule the press subscribes to is "don't piss off so many people that our ratings drop."
Do you really want 'Talon News' held up to the standards CBS or even Fox News is held to? Because it would fail horribly.
You say that, but I don't believe you. I've read Talon's stories. There are no apparent falsehoods in them. They're news, just like the stories that go out over the AP wire are news. It's just that you don't happen to like their opinions about things, so you declare that they're not real news! over and over again. More Nazi propaganda shit.
And you can claim al-Jazeera isn't a news service when they get a press pass.
You do know that al-Jazeera has been in the briefing room since 2002, right?
you may want to read why that information was discovered
It was discovered because the President's political opponents went dumpster-diving. That's not something about which I'd brag.
It wasn't 'let's go look up dirt on this guy',
That's a lie.
you've fallen into a translation trap
More Nazi propaganda shit. You're more interested in muddling the meanings of universally understood words than you are in actually having a conversation. You're more interested in weaving little webs of lies than you are in communicating.
Thank God the Americans were smart enough not to elect any of your kind last November.
Breaking copyright isn't stealing.
What's "breaking copyright?" If you're talking about making copies of works for which you don't own the rights, then yes, it's stealing. As far as I know, "breaking copyright" is not a legal term with any meaning in any jurisdiction I've ever heard of. Unauthorized copying, on the other hand, is a crime covered by Title 18 of the United States Code, in the same section that describes crimes like trafficking in stolen goods, counterfeiting and cattle rustling.
stealing involves taking something tangible away from someone
If you search every last line of every last paragraph of every last section of the United States Code, you will find a grand total of zero references to "taking something tangible away from someone." You don't get to make up the laws yourself, you know.
not every action that is illegal is wrong on its own merits
Please go right now to your nearest community college and take a freshman-level political science class. Please attend all the lectures where the professor talks about the cultural value of the rule of law.
educate them about fact and teach them to reason
No, that's not the purpose of the public education system. Children can learn facts right out of encyclopedias, and it's simply impossible to teach people "to reason," as can be seen on this Web site every day. No, the reason we have a public education system in this country, and more importantly why we have the one we have, is to teach our children values and cultural norms, to socialize them and integrate them into society.
The point is to give people the tools to make sound conclusions
No, that's something people have to learn on their own. That's not a function of the public school system. After you're done taking that freshman-level political science class, please register for a freshman-level theory of education class. This will all be covered on the very first day of lectures.
Perhaps your vision of the way school should work would have fit in well in a place like the USSR
Nice ad hominem attack, Mr. Anonymous Coward. Next time try having a clue.
The end result is lack of integration.
Agreed. And because Linux programs don't work together except for those that are designed to be "suites," Linux is a very bad operating system indeed.
According to this definition KDE and GNOME are not suites either.
KDE and Gnome are two Linux-based operating systems, right?
the bigger problem with you is the attitude
This is the fallacy of the ad hominem.
Even while you insist that nothing on linux can be used, things like web serving can still be done with it
Oh, we're talking about servers, then? Fine, fine. Mac OS X Server is superior in every way to Linux Server. Linux Server requires you to learn an entire language of esoteric typewritten commands, while Mac OS X Server can be remotely administered from any Mac using simple tools. The number of transactions per second you can get through a server certainly matters to some people, but it's far more dependent on hardware than it is on software, and small differences in the number of transactions per second are far outweighed by the total cost of administering the server system. Mac OS X Server wins hands down.
The OS X X11 is useless because your desktop is full of programs that do not support it. Not so with GNU/Linux.
Confused. You're saying that X11 is useless because most of what's on the Mac is superior to it. I agree with this part. But then you say that it's not useless on Linux because every program is equally bad. I don't follow that part.
Try getting a random USB WLAN card
Don't have to. We've got AirPort and AirPort Extreme. You don't need to buy shoddy third-party products.
chances are it won't work with your lovely OS X
No, Mac OS X supports everything.
OS X doesn't have drag and drop software installation.
You've now become so desperate that you're just plain lying. Do you know how you install (say) Microsoft Office on the Mac? By dragging an icon from one window to another. End of installation.
They tried to have at first, but gave up
Please stop lying.
It just wasn't feasible
Please stop lying.
Clicking on a checkbox and pressing install, watching the program download off the network and install. That is easier than the nonworking drag and drop method.
Please stop being an idiot.
apple still includes software under it in OS X
So you have finally given up on the "Mac OS X is based on Linux" thing? That's good to see. I'm glad I could increase your knowledge.
But you still have a very long way to go.
That's the fallacy of the trend. Children play with toys, therefore when those children grow up there's going to be a massive explosion in the sale of toys, right? Wrong, because when children grow up they stop playing with toys.
I do not know a single Chinese person. Therefore Chinese people must not exist. Or, at the very least, there must not be very many of them.
The closest thing I've ever seen to this on a UNIX-style system was how the University of Notre Dame ran their Solaris workstation clusters on AFS back in the mid-1990s.
Actually, that's basically how Mac OS X Server works. User preferences are stored in tiered layers through a facility called NSUserDefaults. Some preferences can be set at the group layer, some at the user layer (by an administrator) and some by the user himself.
Now, many third-party applications (especially legacy 20th-century stuff) haven't gotten around to implementing NSUserDefaults yet. There's not really any excuse for that; it's only been around since 10.0. But if life were perfect it wouldn't be interesting.
And right here, in just two comments, we have a microcosm of why Linux has not been commercially successful.
First, there's just too much junk out there for a software vendor to even hope to support a majority of configurations. That goes for both hardware and software. When any tool can disable the wizfiddle driver in his gloopgloop by rejobulating his paramiffins, the cost of providing customer support skyrockets.
Second, every time anybody tries to come anywhere close to developing a product that runs on Linux, leeches appear out of nowhere demanding that the company cough up all their valuable IP.
Linux is just plain bad; that's not really in dispute. The best that can be said for it is that "it's getting better," which may or may not be true. But it does have the virtue of being cheap, and as anybody who's ever eaten at a fast food place or shopped at a retail chain can testify, cheap trumps bad any day of the week and twice on Sundays. So why hasn't Linux taken the world by storm? For these two reasons, illustrated so deftly by these two commenters.
Want to fix Linux? Start by getting rid of the "you can change everything" aspect of it. Ship standardized configurations that everybody can count on. Then drop that encumbering software license. Until those two problems are solved, Linux is gonna continue to be a footnote.
Is not a "linux-like" OS, it a Linux distribution
...or I can just go find a house that doesn't look like it was designed by an autistic seven-year-old with astigmatism.
What's the difference?
If the default appearence doesn't meet your tastes you can always change it
Why? If I don't like the way the house looks I can always spend years of my life or tens of thousands of dollars landscaping and refinishing it, too
we all know OSX is very pretty, highly functional, reasonably solid, easy-to-use, nicely supported, etc. It's great! We know!
Said the guy who signs his comments "Mac Shit." Is this one of those "troll" things I've read so much about?
That's funny, because MPEG-4 is a video standard and Ogg Vorbis is an audio standard.
LOL. MPEG-4 includes three parts, you dumbass. There's the container format, the video codec and the audio codec. Those quarter billion songs Apple's sold through iTunes? All in MPEG-4 format. (The audio part of the MPEG-4 spec is also known as Advanced Audio Coding, or AAC.)
Linspire 5 seems awesome
Linspire is some Linux-like operating system, right? I googled around and found what appear to be screen shots.
They're profoundly ugly.
What about this seems awesome to you? What wonderful thing am I missing by only looking at the screen shots?
GURPS (I had to google it) seems to be a poor substitute for the long-lost art of telling stories around a campfire.
Normal Joes do not play computer games. They use computers to do things like work and communicate with friends and family. When the time comes to have fun, normal Joes turn off their computers and play tennis or go camping or walk the dog.
If you want to attract people who play computer games to use your operating system, that's great. But do not assume that these people are normal Joes. Do not assume that they make up anything other than the tiniest niche market.
It comes with great personal productivity software: Thunderbird, Evo, OpenOffice, and in many cases, Totem / MPlayer.
Your understand of the word "great" is flawed. Please consult the nearest dictionary before using this word again.
you can play a lot more games on Linux
I happily concede that Linux is the operating system of choice for children with poor social lives. This isn't something I'd brag about, however.
Personally, when I buy an iPod, and upgrade my computer, I can't imagine being told I should delete all my songs to use it.
What fever dream prompted this foul emission?
Add a third party mail client to OS X and you lose that precious iChat integration I'm afraid.
The interfaces are open and documented. If a third party fails to add support for open interfaces, whose fault is it?
iLife is a suite too. Office v.X is another.
Office is. iLife is not. The difference between a "suite" and just a bunch of programs sold under the same part number is that the programs that make up a "suite" only interoperate with each other through non-published interfaces.
Yes, even Aqua's not perfect in every respect for everyone
I'm growing tired of your vagueness. "Not perfect in every respect for everyone?" What kind of nonsense is that? If you have complaints, name them.
GNOME and KDE are just a start
But that's absurd. They are not "just a start," because what they attempt to do has already been "started" decades ago. What possible excuse could they have for being years behind the state of the art?
I would appreciate the features even if the UI was just a workable one
Features don't count if there's no way to get at them. It doesn't matter what a program does. If the interface is bad, the program is worse than useless.
AmaroK has a nice OSD that displays the title of a song on the screen when it starts playing a new one.
I saw that screen shot. It looks horrible. The bezel has square corners and is opaque. The contents are not laid out properly. The text is not set properly. Worse than useless.
Well, I believe you can find an app that requires very similar effort on Linux if all you want is to throw a couple of movies on a dvd.
Do you know what iDVD does? Do you know what its purpose is?
I had to do some research to learn that you can burn DVDs with iDVD.
That may be the stupidest sentence I've read all day.
I've seen iDVD but it wasn't instantly obvious that it is more than just a DVD player
No, never mind. That's the stupidest sentence I've read all day. You have obviously never seen iDVD and are probably just going by the name of the program.
You can't make everything doable by clicking on a lickable icon.
You've lost control completely and have spun off into meaningless generalities. We're not talking in generalities. We're talking in specifics. Linux is bad because it fails to make tasks that should be easy, easy. Tasks like listening to music, scheduling your time, chatting with people you know, organizing your photos and putting your home movies on DVD. Linux makes these things hard, and there is no excuse for that at all.
As I've said, the solutions exist. I won't argue about the UIs.
Any program with a bad interface is, by definition, not a solution. It is a problem.
As for Linux not stacking up, in some areas it does. Performance. Network transparency of X. Hardware support. Software installation and maintenance.
How can you compare on performance? Linux is not faster for key tasks because key tasks are not possible on Linux. Or, as you insist so stridently, they are possible but they are so hard they require the user to study a tutorial. Who cares how fast the computer runs? People care whether they can do what they want to do. Linux loses.
Network transparency? Utter nonsense. Never the right solution for the problem. But if you absolutely have to do that, use the bundled X11 software that comes with Mac OS X. You'll hate it, because using it will remind you of how pitifully obsolete that technology is, but it's better than just getting rid of everything modern and going back to the computer equivalent of the stone age.
Hardware support? What hardware do you need to support? This is a Mac we're talking about here. It supports everything.
Software installation? What's better than dragging an icon into a folder? There is no
ICQ is one of the oldest instant messaging services. Dating back to 1998.
If it's been around that long and I've never heard of it, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that it hasn't exactly taken off like wildfire.
Ogg Vorbis is "a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source."
Hmm. Looks like it's inferior to MPEG-4, and not widely supported.
When have you used GNU/Linux with any graphical UI?
Last fall. But not for long. I fled as soon as I could.
Integrating software totally into operatings systems own GUI messes things up I think.
No idea what that's supposed to mean.
Why can't programs have their own menu's?
Because all the menus go in the same place, and change depending on your working context. This is not a new idea. It dates back to 1983.
And how usable it is that you don't close the program by closing all it's windows, but by going trough active programs and killing the application?
You're done with this document and you want to start working on another. How much sense does it make for the program to assume you're through working completely when you close the document? Closing a document and quitting the program are two different things.
But still they would read some tutorial and learn from that how to do it.
You should never need a tutorial to figure out how to use a computer program to do a simple task.
Firefox, Evolution and OpenOffice are more feature rich and easier to use than their counter parts on MAC OS X.
I had to use google to figure out what all these things are. Firefox appears to be an absurdly complicated Web browser. Safari is obviously superior. Evolution is a bad replacement for what's already a bad program: Outlook for Windows. As I've already explained, the idea that programs should come bundled as suites is 20th-century thinking. E-mail and calendar should not be in the same program. Apple breaks them out into iCal and Mail. And Open Office just appears to be a really bad copy of Microsoft Office, a program that runs spectacularly well on the Mac.
Into how many different kind of mail and groupware can your Mail.app connect?
Because it supports all the same interfaces as every other Mail program, the answer is "all of them." I assume you're talking about Exchange here. Mail works perfectly with Exchange.
In 21st century it's not practical to have isolated programs that can talk to other programs on the same computer.
No, you have that exactly backwards. It is practical to have programs that can talk to other programs. I think you're a little confused.
But not with the corporate mainframe that has GroupWare and user management.
If you're hoping a Mac can interoperate with a closed system, the answer is obviously no.
Can you just drag and drop those into your system?
You don't have to. If you boot a Mac on a network with a properly configured Active Directory server, the Mac will automatically join the domain and all services will automatically be available. Though as I understand it, it's practically impossible to property configure an Active Directory server, which is why Active Directory is going the way of the dinosaur in favor of Open Directory.
If either of those objections mattered to anybody, anywhere, you might have a point. But they don't, so never mind.
iTunes music is audibly indistinguishable from CD. If you don't think so, don't shop there.
And your blah-blah about how much silence is played between tracks is just silly.
Be ashamed.
I think comments that include nothing other than a hyperlink ought to be disallowed. Aren't Internet message boards for sharing our own opinions, not just for parroting the other voices in our echo chambers?
(And in case you're wondering, no, I didn't click on it. So if it's actually a link to the comment's author's own work, somebody help me extract my foot from my mouth.)
the GNOME suite of applications do interoperate to a point
...except all you're trying to do is listen to some music. Complexity isn't automatically bad, but unnecessary complexity is.
That sounds more like an excuse than a feature. Why only to a point? Why is the interoperability incomplete, and why is it only available to other programs in the "suite?" It's obviously possible to do interoperability the right way. Why doesn't Linux have good interoperability?
for other operating systems there *are no different desktops and accompanying software suites*
I don't understand. Why would you want to use a different user interface if the one you have already works? I can understand if you have two interfaces that are both bad in certain ways; you might want to switch from one to the other in order to work around the bad aspects of each. But again, that sounds more like an excuse than a feature. "Linux has more workarounds" isn't a selling point, in my opinion.
And you're kind of missing my point about "accompanying software suites." Talking about software in terms of suites -- applications that are specifically written to work together --is 20th-century thinking. It's a bad solution. Why should you only get interoperability when you use Program A1 and Program A2? Why aren't the interfaces in Program A1 implemented in program A2 and B2 and C2 and G2 and Y2?
There are millions of Jabber users, more than there are ICQ users today.
What's ICQ?
What do you find so hard to look at?
Are we looking at the same thing? The interface is incredibly ugly. Fonts are mis-sized and improperly kerned. Interface elements are placed with no consistency and with insufficient use of buffer space. If you were to put your mouse point in any part of the window and click, some control would intercept the click because the interface is too dense. And the main controls --you know, "play" and "stop" --are completely obscured by insignificant controls. It's like sitting down in the cockpit of a jet fighter
I like having the album covers (automatically fetched from amazon)
That's technically a violation of Amazon's terms of service. That's why iTunes doesn't do it. I'm not sure I'd feel very good about using a piece of software that's distributed by people who don't seem to care about being good citizens.
the automatically displayed lists of favourite songs
Yes, in iTunes we call them "smart playlists." One of the defaults is a list of the most highly rated songs in the library. But you're not limited to the default smart playlists, of course.
AmaroK has this and more cool stuff.
You're playing up features, but forgetting that throwing all those features together behind a sham of a user interface is a giant mistake.
And lacks Ogg Vorbis as I said.
ICQ, too, evidently. Whatever the hell that is.
Flamebait is an opinion that's needlessly harsh and unaccounted for.
Sounds an awful lot like "anything with which I disagree," to me. I'm not a fan of dismissiveness. This "flamebait" term of yours seems like an excuse to dismiss somebody's opinion because it conflicts with your own.
They have UI Guidelines and have conducted usability studies.
While that may be true, there is no evidence of it.
Try picking up a recent issue of LJ for a tutorial or do a bit of research online.
A tutorial? Research? You're not seeing it, are you? With iDVD, you drag movies to the template and click "burn." No tutorials or research required. There's no excuse for making it harder than that.
I doubt you can name many tasks that would be impossible on a free software operating system today
That's not really the point, is it? The point is that something that's possible but difficult might as well be impossible for all practical purposes. Because long befo
Considering that Farsi and Bengali scripts are bundled with Mac OS X, and that Mac OS X is (to the best of my knowledge) the only environment that allows you to mix seven-bit, eight-bit and sixteen-bit encoded text in a single document without any additional support in the application, I'm gonna go ahead and say that you're mistaken here.
Just when doing so allows me to make what I consider to be an important point.
no copying
If you mean copying like making a backup copy for yourself, then you're wrong. If you mean copying like stealing, then you're right.
no sharing
Absolutely right. You are not allowed to give away or to take copies of media from other people. That's just a "duh" moment, you know?
no moving
I don't understand this one. You mean picking up a disc and moving it from here to there?
no ripping
You covered this one already with "no copying."
no burning
Again: You covered this with "no copying."
Boil it down and what do we have? You are absolutely allowed to copy media you buy for your own personal use. You are not allowed to either give copies to somebody else or to take copies from somebody else. Those are the limits that the industry wants enforced. Why? Because there are too many people like you who think there's no difference between making a copy of a CD to carry in the car and making a copy of a CD to give to a friend.
Granted, it seems like the long-term solution to the problem is education: We need to teach kids that stealing is wrong even when it's easy. We need to teach kids that "punching somebody in the dark" is not a victimless crime. We need to teach kids that it's about more than illegal versus legal, but rather wrong versus right.
But every time we try, some dumbass from the ACLU or the EFF comes crawling out of the woodwork to complain about "indoctrination." Tell me, just what do we have a public education system for, if not to indoctrinate our kids in our norms, values and culture?
As long as you're okay with the fact that giving away copies of media to your friends and to strangers on the Internet is not "using the product the way I want," then fine. That is, after all, the law of the land right now. Breaking access control for the purpose of making fair use is fine. Breaking access control for any other reason-- including "just 'cause I can" --is not.
it would make sense that a 64-bit machine would have 64-bit opcodes
I don't know about "it would make sense" or whatever, but this is not a true statement. Why would you ever need 64-bit-long instructions? Are you seriously going to have an instruction set with more than two billion instructions in it?
I probably just need to educate myself on 64-bit computing.
Word.