Perhaps the Treo's work this way as well but I don't see how that can be without some other form of server side software designed to work with the devices and the Service provider.
The Treo can access mail servers directly--no need for any server-side software installation. And you don't need "push", the Treo supports polling. Mobile Internet rates have come down to the point where that works pretty much as well as "push" for power users.
The Treo also gives you an excellent web browser and lots of other capabilities that the Blackberry just can't match (I tried both before settling on the Treo).
I worry when people say things like "mathematics solved problem X", because people often think of pure mathematicians and mathematics departments.
Deconvolution was pioneered by mathematicians like Wiener nearly a century ago, but academic fields have shifted and split since then. These days, this kind of work would more likely be carried out in an applied math, electrical engineering, statistics, or computer science department than a pure mathematics department (some mathematics departments cover applied math, while others don't).
Both pure and applied mathematics are important fields of study, but both the approaches and the day-to-day work are very different. If you are a student, think about this and choose carefully.
And maybe they'd be sacrificing babies at midnight, too. All hail open source! Saviors of the universe!
So, according to you, domination of a market segment by Microsoft is equivalent to Microsoft sacrificing babies. Well, I wouldn't go quite that far, but you said it.
Hey, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004
You lost me here. What are you trying to say?
It will be a few more years before open source will really eat into Microsoft's core business (rather than just limiting growth and expansion), but believe me, it will happen.
The truly curious thing is what happened next: instead of being spurred into action by this new competition and addressing these concerns on the Linux side,
You're wrong if you think that there is any "new" competition there. Linux has several Monad-like shells for years. All the major features that Longhorn promises for 2006 (WinFS, Avalon, etc.) have been in Linux for several years. Windows still isn't competing on features or technologies with Linux, it is still years behind.
it really grieves me to see people behaving like this, rather than aiming to improve Linux to the state where it once again has many advantages over Windows.
Even if Linux weren't years ahead of Windows technologically, it wouldn't matter: the fact that it provides an open source, free, and standards-compliant platform is enough reason to use it.
If there is one thing that Apple pushed, it was the folder-and-document metaphor and GUI. Now that Apple finally comes around to discovering how inconvenient it is, and replaces it with other standard retrieval techniques, they are being hailed as "innovators".
Apple has done some pretty nifty things, for instance launcd
Do you seriously believe that it takes Apple or Microsoft to come up with these ideas? There are dozens of init and shell replacements like that.
They simplified by daring to question established wisdom
Apple is no "wiser" in this regard than a sophomore in computer science. The difference is that Apple can simply ship the stuff and all their developers and system managers have to live with it. In the case of launchd, it would be nice to see something like that catch on. However, time will have to tell whether launchd in particular breaks more things than it fixes, and whether Apple did a good job. From a business perspective, I think this was a stupid thing for Apple to do.
If you read the announcement, you'll see that Microsoft isn't smart enough to rip off the UNIX shell. Instead, they are doing their own thing, something that will have lots of features but won't work very well. As usual.
Monad is the usual bloated, overly complicated "me too" product Microsoft comes up with. In fact, Monad isn't really even a shell, it's more like Tcl/Tk or perlsh. Linux has nothing to fear from this sort of thing; there are good reasons why everybody still uses the sh family of shells after 30 years despite lots of attempts at "improving" on it.
If Microsoft wanted to come up with a decent shell, they should carefully look at bash and rc, and figure out a minimal set of changes to make it compatible with their non-standard parameter and pathname syntax, and leave it at that. Or they should make careful, incremental changes to the current command interpreter.
Don't you realize how stupid it is to blather on about "Startup Items" and "Frameworks" and "Bundles" and "Fink" and then claim that the Macintosh is intuitive? Why the hell would any normal user care to understand any of that systems stuff? Windows and Linux both have solutions to installing and uninstalling software that automate things and don't bother users with all that technical nonsense.
Macintosh will get Windows and Linux-like package management (if Apple doesn't go out of business first). But, like Intel processors, multitasking, UNIX, and lots of other stuff, Mac die-hards like you will defend the inferior Macintosh design choices until Apple finally gets around to implementing it, and then you'll claim that it didn't really exist until Apple implemented it.
The statement is simply wrong, rather than incomplete. The absolute motion (i.e., the motion of earth relative to all other mass in the universe) of earth through space is at least several hundred km/sec, far too high for this analogy. Obviously, the reporter meant "around the sun" and just got it wrong.
Well that's just it. With app bundles, you can store shared libraries and daemons inside the bundle.
You keep trying to solve problems by pretending they aren't there. You can't avoid sharing and dependencies by stuffing copies of everything into every app. Linux has dependencies and sharing not because it likes to make things complicated but because they are absolutely necessary.
I suppose that's why Mac OS X's usage growth is increasing and Linux's growth is decreasing? Now we see that you're just a troll, because you don't and probably can't back up your claims.
My claim is easy to back up: look at historical Apple market share. At some point, it was as high as 16%, now it's down to 2-3%; more than 80% of Apple users have abandoned the platform. And the platform was never popular with power users to begin with.
But what about you backing up your claims about growth rates?
What operating system provides protections against this kind of thing?
There is nothing wrong with changing system settings and all that (indeed, it is unavoidable), as long as they get restored properly on uninstall. Windows and Linux do that, Macintosh does not.
No package manager can possibly protect your system against unspecified "other things".
Package managers don't "protect" you, they provide a well-defined mechanism by which users can install and uninstall applications cleanly. Windows and Linux have such mechanisms (Linux's even handles dependencies), Macintosh does not.
What is your suggested method of removing application bundles which are no longer in use?
You go to the package manager, get a complete list of what is and isn't installed, and make your selection of what you want installed. The rest should be automatic.
These are called frameworks, and will be in bundles in ~/Library/Frameworks or/Library/Frameworks [...] These are called startupitems, and will be in bundles in ~/Library/StartupItems or/Library/StartupItems
No, they are not called "frameworks" or "startup items" in the real world. And if hunting around for leftover shared libraries, daemons, and other stuff makes you happy, you deserve your Macintosh. Just don't try telling the rest of us that that sort of crap is what we all should be reduced to.
Macintosh is no competition for Linux, not even on the desktop.
'FOSS' has just barely begun making a small dent in some Microsoft markets. Or would you care to list some?
Oh, you are so wrong. Without open source, Microsoft would already own the server, phone, and embedded spaces, but they are losing ground. And with open source's push for the desktop, Microsoft is in major trouble there as well.
And all of these modest advances are happening only because big companies (IBM, Novell, Sun, Apple) are experimenting with open source.
And what's your point? Microsoft has been playing dirty tricks with the industry for a dozen years. Now people are getting together and fighting back in a way that Microsoft cannot buy or cheat their way out of.
So where is this 'competition' that Microsoft has to fear?
While I don't like anybody getting sued over silly patents, this is good. Microsoft is a major proponent of software patents, and if they find out how bad it is for their business, maybe they will lobby to abolish them.
Of course, $9m isn't going to hurt them, but we can keep our fingers crossed that someone will be awarded $9b. In all that Microsoft software, there must be lots of patent infringement.
There are a lot of programs that let you write down all your passwords in a single place and still encrypt them with a master password. Mozilla has something built in. If you want something more portable, get a Palm or PocketPC. There are also desktop solutions and solutions that work from memory sticks.
the European politicians asked European computer industry representatives for whether this was a good solution. And since most of them have just as much stake in closed, proprietary solutions as Microsoft, they all nodded in agreement.
Microsoft loves this because they know they can kill any commercial competitor they like through either FUD or just buying them; they just haven't figured out how to kill competition from FOSS.
FOSS advocates need to be vocal and clear that this is not an acceptable solution and that it will hurt competition and that it will hurt the economy.
This issue is rampant on windows as well as Linux.
Every Debian package gives you the choice of removing it completely, or removing only the package files and leaving the configuration files. Furthermore, unlike Windows or Macintosh, you can remove whatever you like from a running system. This stuff just works on Linux without a second thought.
Windows clearly doesn't do this as well as Debian, but it still does a better job than OS X. On OS X, people just pretend the problem goes away if they deny it exists.
Simply denying it doesn't help anyone.
The only people in denial are the OS X users and developers, who confuse simplistic solutions with simple solutions.
Yeah, and I like the idea of OS X, as long as I don't have to use it myself. That's why they make different operating systems. If only the Macadvocates would remember that.
This is a load of shit, the add/remove programs absolutely does not remove all traces for many applications on windows
It may well not do that, sometimes deliberately (there is no reason to remove registry entries), and sometimes because uninstallers have bugs. But at least the mechanism is there, which means that software authors know what to write to and users know where to look. OS X has nothing of the sort.
On OSX or linux even I can trash the equivalent to windows messenger [...] and expect it to expect it to stay gone without resorting to registry hacking or the like.
On Linux, that's absolutely false. If you remove a component, you may very well get it back later if it's a dependency for something else.
The fact that OS X doesn't do that is a deficiency in OS X.
What would be good of Apple to do is to make a disk clean up wizard (perhaps Symantec or whoever is in the cleaning up business.
Yes, and wouldn't it be nice if the tooth fairy actually existed, but it doesn't. Windows has uninstallers because there is no automatic way of doing the cleanup reliably. And Linux has both uninstallers and dependencies because dependencies can't be inferred automatically either. Linux gets it right, Windows gets it partially right, and OS X just gets it completely wrong.
It's unclear that defeating optical illusions is a good thing. Many optical illusions are just part of the normal functioning of the visual system. In some cases, optical illusions directly aid in the perception of the real world, in other cases, they may not have a function, but are an indication that other processes are working as they should. A completely "literal" (metric, whatever) interpretation is generally not useful, even if you could achieve it.
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Perhaps the Treo's work this way as well but I don't see how that can be without some other form of server side software designed to work with the devices and the Service provider.
The Treo can access mail servers directly--no need for any server-side software installation. And you don't need "push", the Treo supports polling. Mobile Internet rates have come down to the point where that works pretty much as well as "push" for power users.
The Treo also gives you an excellent web browser and lots of other capabilities that the Blackberry just can't match (I tried both before settling on the Treo).
Are you suggesting that removing files is beyond the technical expertise of most users?
Yes, I am. The fact that you don't get it speaks for itself.
take it as a personal insult that Mac OS X doesn't work the way you think it should.
No, I just pointed out that OS X is no threat to Linux (see the original story) and justified my statement.
EOM
I worry when people say things like "mathematics solved problem X", because people often think of pure mathematicians and mathematics departments.
Deconvolution was pioneered by mathematicians like Wiener nearly a century ago, but academic fields have shifted and split since then. These days, this kind of work would more likely be carried out in an applied math, electrical engineering, statistics, or computer science department than a pure mathematics department (some mathematics departments cover applied math, while others don't).
Both pure and applied mathematics are important fields of study, but both the approaches and the day-to-day work are very different. If you are a student, think about this and choose carefully.
And maybe they'd be sacrificing babies at midnight, too. All hail open source! Saviors of the universe!
So, according to you, domination of a market segment by Microsoft is equivalent to Microsoft sacrificing babies. Well, I wouldn't go quite that far, but you said it.
Hey, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004
You lost me here. What are you trying to say?
It will be a few more years before open source will really eat into Microsoft's core business (rather than just limiting growth and expansion), but believe me, it will happen.
The truly curious thing is what happened next: instead of being spurred into action by this new competition and addressing these concerns on the Linux side,
You're wrong if you think that there is any "new" competition there. Linux has several Monad-like shells for years. All the major features that Longhorn promises for 2006 (WinFS, Avalon, etc.) have been in Linux for several years. Windows still isn't competing on features or technologies with Linux, it is still years behind.
it really grieves me to see people behaving like this, rather than aiming to improve Linux to the state where it once again has many advantages over Windows.
Even if Linux weren't years ahead of Windows technologically, it wouldn't matter: the fact that it provides an open source, free, and standards-compliant platform is enough reason to use it.
If there is one thing that Apple pushed, it was the folder-and-document metaphor and GUI. Now that Apple finally comes around to discovering how inconvenient it is, and replaces it with other standard retrieval techniques, they are being hailed as "innovators".
Apple has done some pretty nifty things, for instance launcd
Do you seriously believe that it takes Apple or Microsoft to come up with these ideas? There are dozens of init and shell replacements like that.
They simplified by daring to question established wisdom
Apple is no "wiser" in this regard than a sophomore in computer science. The difference is that Apple can simply ship the stuff and all their developers and system managers have to live with it. In the case of launchd, it would be nice to see something like that catch on. However, time will have to tell whether launchd in particular breaks more things than it fixes, and whether Apple did a good job. From a business perspective, I think this was a stupid thing for Apple to do.
If you read the announcement, you'll see that Microsoft isn't smart enough to rip off the UNIX shell. Instead, they are doing their own thing, something that will have lots of features but won't work very well. As usual.
Monad is the usual bloated, overly complicated "me too" product Microsoft comes up with. In fact, Monad isn't really even a shell, it's more like Tcl/Tk or perlsh. Linux has nothing to fear from this sort of thing; there are good reasons why everybody still uses the sh family of shells after 30 years despite lots of attempts at "improving" on it.
If Microsoft wanted to come up with a decent shell, they should carefully look at bash and rc, and figure out a minimal set of changes to make it compatible with their non-standard parameter and pathname syntax, and leave it at that. Or they should make careful, incremental changes to the current command interpreter.
Don't you realize how stupid it is to blather on about "Startup Items" and "Frameworks" and "Bundles" and "Fink" and then claim that the Macintosh is intuitive? Why the hell would any normal user care to understand any of that systems stuff? Windows and Linux both have solutions to installing and uninstalling software that automate things and don't bother users with all that technical nonsense.
Macintosh will get Windows and Linux-like package management (if Apple doesn't go out of business first). But, like Intel processors, multitasking, UNIX, and lots of other stuff, Mac die-hards like you will defend the inferior Macintosh design choices until Apple finally gets around to implementing it, and then you'll claim that it didn't really exist until Apple implemented it.
Isn't that a human rights violation?
What's your point?
The statement is simply wrong, rather than incomplete. The absolute motion (i.e., the motion of earth relative to all other mass in the universe) of earth through space is at least several hundred km/sec, far too high for this analogy. Obviously, the reporter meant "around the sun" and just got it wrong.
What it's for is to put small amounts of matter at tremendous temperatures and pressures. There are a lot of reasons to want to do this.
Yeah, kids love to do that sort of thing, and the scientists at Sandia are still kids at heart, just with much bigger budgets.
using the Z-machine's Marx Generators
Are those Groucho Marx Generators or Karl Marx Generators? It makes a difference, you know.
Well that's just it. With app bundles, you can store shared libraries and daemons inside the bundle.
You keep trying to solve problems by pretending they aren't there. You can't avoid sharing and dependencies by stuffing copies of everything into every app. Linux has dependencies and sharing not because it likes to make things complicated but because they are absolutely necessary.
I suppose that's why Mac OS X's usage growth is increasing and Linux's growth is decreasing? Now we see that you're just a troll, because you don't and probably can't back up your claims.
My claim is easy to back up: look at historical Apple market share. At some point, it was as high as 16%, now it's down to 2-3%; more than 80% of Apple users have abandoned the platform. And the platform was never popular with power users to begin with.
But what about you backing up your claims about growth rates?
What operating system provides protections against this kind of thing?
/Library/Frameworks [...] These are called startupitems, and will be in bundles in ~/Library/StartupItems or /Library/StartupItems
There is nothing wrong with changing system settings and all that (indeed, it is unavoidable), as long as they get restored properly on uninstall. Windows and Linux do that, Macintosh does not.
No package manager can possibly protect your system against unspecified "other things".
Package managers don't "protect" you, they provide a well-defined mechanism by which users can install and uninstall applications cleanly. Windows and Linux have such mechanisms (Linux's even handles dependencies), Macintosh does not.
What is your suggested method of removing application bundles which are no longer in use?
You go to the package manager, get a complete list of what is and isn't installed, and make your selection of what you want installed. The rest should be automatic.
These are called frameworks, and will be in bundles in ~/Library/Frameworks or
No, they are not called "frameworks" or "startup items" in the real world. And if hunting around for leftover shared libraries, daemons, and other stuff makes you happy, you deserve your Macintosh. Just don't try telling the rest of us that that sort of crap is what we all should be reduced to.
Macintosh is no competition for Linux, not even on the desktop.
'FOSS' has just barely begun making a small dent in some Microsoft markets. Or would you care to list some?
Oh, you are so wrong. Without open source, Microsoft would already own the server, phone, and embedded spaces, but they are losing ground. And with open source's push for the desktop, Microsoft is in major trouble there as well.
And all of these modest advances are happening only because big companies (IBM, Novell, Sun, Apple) are experimenting with open source.
And what's your point? Microsoft has been playing dirty tricks with the industry for a dozen years. Now people are getting together and fighting back in a way that Microsoft cannot buy or cheat their way out of.
So where is this 'competition' that Microsoft has to fear?
Laugh while you can, monkey boy.
While I don't like anybody getting sued over silly patents, this is good. Microsoft is a major proponent of software patents, and if they find out how bad it is for their business, maybe they will lobby to abolish them.
Of course, $9m isn't going to hurt them, but we can keep our fingers crossed that someone will be awarded $9b. In all that Microsoft software, there must be lots of patent infringement.
There are a lot of programs that let you write down all your passwords in a single place and still encrypt them with a master password. Mozilla has something built in. If you want something more portable, get a Palm or PocketPC. There are also desktop solutions and solutions that work from memory sticks.
the European politicians asked European computer industry representatives for whether this was a good solution. And since most of them have just as much stake in closed, proprietary solutions as Microsoft, they all nodded in agreement.
Microsoft loves this because they know they can kill any commercial competitor they like through either FUD or just buying them; they just haven't figured out how to kill competition from FOSS.
FOSS advocates need to be vocal and clear that this is not an acceptable solution and that it will hurt competition and that it will hurt the economy.
This issue is rampant on windows as well as Linux.
Every Debian package gives you the choice of removing it completely, or removing only the package files and leaving the configuration files. Furthermore, unlike Windows or Macintosh, you can remove whatever you like from a running system. This stuff just works on Linux without a second thought.
Windows clearly doesn't do this as well as Debian, but it still does a better job than OS X. On OS X, people just pretend the problem goes away if they deny it exists.
Simply denying it doesn't help anyone.
The only people in denial are the OS X users and developers, who confuse simplistic solutions with simple solutions.
Yeah, and I like the idea of OS X, as long as I don't have to use it myself. That's why they make different operating systems. If only the Macadvocates would remember that.
This is a load of shit, the add/remove programs absolutely does not remove all traces for many applications on windows
.
It may well not do that, sometimes deliberately (there is no reason to remove registry entries), and sometimes because uninstallers have bugs. But at least the mechanism is there, which means that software authors know what to write to and users know where to look. OS X has nothing of the sort.
On OSX or linux even I can trash the equivalent to windows messenger [...] and expect it to expect it to stay gone without resorting to registry hacking or the like.
On Linux, that's absolutely false. If you remove a component, you may very well get it back later if it's a dependency for something else.
The fact that OS X doesn't do that is a deficiency in OS X.
What would be good of Apple to do is to make a disk clean up wizard (perhaps Symantec or whoever is in the cleaning up business
Yes, and wouldn't it be nice if the tooth fairy actually existed, but it doesn't. Windows has uninstallers because there is no automatic way of doing the cleanup reliably. And Linux has both uninstallers and dependencies because dependencies can't be inferred automatically either. Linux gets it right, Windows gets it partially right, and OS X just gets it completely wrong.
It's unclear that defeating optical illusions is a good thing. Many optical illusions are just part of the normal functioning of the visual system. In some cases, optical illusions directly aid in the perception of the real world, in other cases, they may not have a function, but are an indication that other processes are working as they should. A completely "literal" (metric, whatever) interpretation is generally not useful, even if you could achieve it.