This is the third or forth time I've seem mention of this on this thread. I think you all overestimate the number of people switching to Apple. How many users have they actually taken from Windows?
Absolutely. The people talking about a mass migration to Macs are mostly already Mac people seeing things from a Mac person's perspective (ie, biased toward Macs). I for one am moving AWAY from Apple to Linux. I've used Macs for a long time, and despite what the fanboys here proclaim, Macs are NOT perfect. Far from it. After recently discovering Ubuntu (and snagging the nym!), I can honestly say that after much testing, I *STRONGLY PREFER* Gnome and Ubuntu to OS X.
p.s. Mac migration estimates are skewed by the previous mass migration away from Macs during the really bad years, and even more when "the great hope", OS X Beta, came out and really sucked and was so un-Mac-like that a lot of Maccies moved to Windows instantly. Many of them are moving back now that OS X is finally getting decent and is comparable to XP. But I only know one Windows user who switched out of hundreds of friends -- and only because he *only* uses his computer for web surfing (with the world's greatest browser, Firefox, natch), so he might as well use an OS that has no viruses. I've tried to convert hundreds of people to Mac over the years, but only one actually ever did it.
How can it be the company's responsibility to police employee use in order to prevent kiddie porn, piracy, death threats, etc. on company computers if your hands are tied behind your back? Companies have been often charged for crimes their employees have committed...
At a place I used to work, half the people were salesmen, who, because they went out on the road all the time, had laptops. They would change their Windows XP passwords and not tell management. They would change MANY passwords (to supplier e-commerce sites, etc.) and not tell management. They would use Hotmail to avoid corporate email (which was logged). Our IT guy would go onto their computer when they were out at lunch to run Ad-Aware and the antivirus (salesmen don't give a damn) and would find MOUNTAINS of porn, half-finished resumes, and a copy of our entire corporate network on the guy's hard drive! That's not acceptable, and the guy was warned, but all he did was a) change his password, b) set his screensaver to password protected and had a hotkey to launch it whenever he got up from his desk.
The pendulum has swung too far against the OWNERS of the property in favour of the USERS of said property.
This just makes corporate espionage, like stealing customer lists and selling them to the competition undetected all the easier.
Dude, you're killin' me here. It's bad enough Slashdot's April Fools Day wastes my time once a year; please don't regurgitate the agony for your own personal amusement.
Sour grapes? Maybe. Linux is immensely more popular than all of the open source BSD versions.
De Raadt says that's partly because Linux gets support from big hardware makers like Hewlett-Packard and IBM, which he says have turned Linux hackers into an unpaid workforce.
The problem with BSD is not the technology, it's the license. The BSD license offers no protection for companies who want to work with them. The BSD license basically says "anything you give to us may be taken by your competitors, put under a closed-source proprietary license, extended to make it incompatible with your original version (a la MS Kerberos), and used against you." The GPL, on the other hand, encourages a culture of equality. What IBM donates under the GPL stays under the GPL, thus Microsoft can't close it up and use it against IBM. They have to keep it open, and release their improvements when they release their new code. GPL'ed code has got to stay as open as when the original author wrote it, and thus isn't a tool of unfair leverage for the mega-corporations of the world. The GPL at least offers companies who want to encourage openness some assurance that they are levelling the playing field; the BSD license offers them nothing in return for their work except the certainty that their generosity will fuel proprietary software which may compete with their own offerings.
I love OpenBSD, but I've never understood their addiction to their "weak" license. I've thought about it, and it's business suicide. They have no chance of ever getting a foothold in the market based on their featureset because anything they do can just be co-opted by Microsoft, Apple, and whoever else wants to take their code, close-source it, and sell it with a pretty front-end. To contribute through the GPL, however, is to make a capitalistic deal with the world: "I have created this product, and on these terms. If you want to deal fairly with me on these terms, and reciprocate, then good. We have a deal." The creator stipulates the terms that the code is to be used: open, free, fair, and transparent. The BSD guys stipulate pretty much nothing, save an ego stroke attribution line.
So, Theo, if anyone's an "unpaid workforce", it's the BSD guys. The GPL guys get code back when theirs is used. You get nothing. The GPL guys are expanding the size of the pool of GPLed software out there in proportion to the amount of proprietary software. For every piece of BSD licensed software, 10 corporations probably take their code and use it to strengthen the proprietary software world. So if I have my choice between the excellent technology of OpenBSD or the pretty good technology and the code freedom security that comes with GPL-licensed Linux, I'll contribute to Linux. At least I know my code won't strengthen my competitors -- unless they seek to become more open as well and accept the terms of the GPL.
Here's my take on how the licenses play out in "real life":
BSD Versus Proprietary It's high noon on Bootable Hill. Tumbleweeds are floatin' by and the sun beats down. In the middle of the street, Chuck Berkeley faces off with his arch-enemy, Billy Proprietary (I know, I know. The names suck. So sue me). They stare off for a moment, then Chuck remembers his ideology. Chuck lowers his guns in true Gandhi style. BANG! Billy takes the opportunity Chuck offered, and shoots Chuck in the head. Yay. The bad guys win again. Our hero didn't think it was "ethical" to protect himself against the bad guy and is now dead. Evil reigns supreme and Cthulhu consumes the earth.
GPL Versus Proprietary It's high noon on Bootable Hill. Tumbleweeds are floatin' by and the sun beats down. In the middle of the street, our hero, Richard M. Tuxman, Esquire faces off with his arch-enemy, Billy Proprietary. They stare off for a moment, then Tuxman remembers his ideology. Tuxman calls out: "Billy, I'll lower my guns if you lower your guns in return. It's your choice." Proprietary
Employees working the show floor of the Apple's developers conference last week could be overheard discussing the prospect of open-sourcing the company's WebObjects environment
Employees also discussed who they'd rather get naked with, Christina Aquilera or Jessica Simpson.
Talk is cheap, especially off-the-record gossip. When I see the code I'll believe it.
It's hard enough to build a huge complex project like this if the software is open source and you have documentation. Apple is still *largely* closed (only the kernel and a few little bits are open), and you're not going to get any help from Apple on this.
It is possible to make a Linux emulator run under OS X, but very difficult to make OS X run under emulation on Linux or another system. As with all closed-source apps, it's pretty much a one way street (no reciprocity).
This is a good reason companies don't open source their stuff unless they have to to stay alive (Solaris?). Right now, most every good Linux app is available on OS X and / or Windows, but very very few OS X or Windows apps are available on Linux, because it's up to the discretion and financial restraints of the corporation to port them, while with open-sourced software, all it takes is an itch to port it and a weekend or two. Open-sourced software will grow and be used to its full capacity, while closed source software is largely limited by the whims of the company.
Tell me you didn't read this, and then the posted article. You did post both, Taco, cause you are the editor of both....
I hate to tell you this, but Taco died a few years ago. Shortly after he was married, he experienced what the ancients called "sex". This strange phenomenon caused his geekish brain to explode in confusion as reality as he knew it consumed itself.
What you call "Taco" is now actually a bot written in Visual Basic by Cowboy Neal, which explains the posting irregularities. If Neal would have used Perl or Python, none of this would have happened.
Cowboy Neal is aware of this problem and promises it will be fixed in Taco2.0.
I don't see how this is being moderated Troll. If Microsoft were to hire Linus Torvalds and then make him sign an NDA and a 5-year non-compete contract, wouldn't people here get the idea that maybe, just maybe, MS wanted to cripple Linux development?
People are so afraid of "conspiracy theories" that they sometimes miss the simple reality that is right in front of them. Remember, this is MICROSOFT. Just because our culture is becoming overly respectful of authority figures, politicians, and multinationals doesn't change their essential nature or the way they play the game. It's insane to refuse to consider the fact that they thought of this as a chess move which could give them street cred while simultaneously slowing the competition. I KNOW they thought of it. Because I did, and I'm not even in competition with Gentoo.
Mac users ARE all the things he said. Not all, of course, there are a few who are still rational (myself); but overall, Mac users do view their platform as something holy, perfect and unstoppable. Try to get a mac user to admit that there is a better alternative out there. It will never happen -- except as a response to this post, in order to "prove" that they're fair, after which they will go back to flaming superior products en masse.
And saying that mentioning that Mac users are intolerant is itself intolerant is bad logic. Are the FBI intolerant for shutting down murderous KKK mobs?
Re:Worshipping Steve Jobs
on
Drafting GPL3
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the clarification.
Re:Does anyone else find it mildly strange....
on
Drafting GPL3
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· Score: 1
I don't think they're demanding deification, just respect -- which RMS rarely gets, if we're being absolutely honest here. I don't see it, anyway.
In other news, nobody seems to have noticed that we absolutely WORSHIP Steve Jobs, throwing ourselves at his feet and basking in the glory of Dashboard and newfound Pentium Power.
Dude, it's not "changed" in Windows, unless you're going back before Windows 95 (which I wasn't able to verify, because nobody runs Win3.1 or before anymore, although it still works in DOS, so it's probably valid).
I checked the different PCs at work, and from Win95 onward, they've always merged the directories, not replaced them. It's also that way on Gnome. Haven't tried KDE for a while, but it's probably the same.
OS X "Thinks Different" than the other OSes on this one. And it is definitely more unreasonable when you want to merge a directory with 5 MP3s in it and OS X wipes out your entire 50Gig MP3 archive. If I want to replace it, I'll use the delete key.
On Windows, it adds the files from one directory to the other, making one huge directory of MP3s or whatever. On the Mac, it deletes the first batch of files and leaves only the second.
Yes, it is true. I am NOT trolling. If you don't believe me, go down to your local Best Buy and try it for yourself. Then you'll have the pleasure of asking "metamatic" what his trollish lying malfunction is.
On the Mac OS X desktop, make a directory, name it "foo", then put another directory with the exact same name somewhere else on the drive. Drag it to your desktop. Make sure you put some files in the first directory so when they get copied over you can prove they're just plain gone.
I am a long-time Mac user switching from Mac OS X to Linux. I still boot into OS X every once in a while, mostly because I haven't figured out how to retrieve my settings and data out of some OS X apps I used to use.
This came after years of nagging little frustrations with Apple's hardware and software (like the fact that because iMovie and iDVD have no MPEG support, only MOV, in order to work with movie files from my digital camera I had to buy QuickTime Pro -- and then keep rebuying it as they break compatibility yearly with older versions). Or how when you have a directory on one drive, say "MP3s", and you want to copy it over to your main drive, if there's another MP3s directory there, it won't ADD the new MP3s to the pile, it will DELETE all the main directories' MP3s and replace them with the new ones! I've lost PILES of stuff doing this before I learned that file management SUCKS under OS X. Sadly, Windows Explorer kicks the Finder's ass.
I get OS X app crashes as frequently as my family does on their Dells, maybe more frequently even. And I'm running the 1.5 Ghz PowerBook with 1 Gig of RAM, the 128Meg video card, and a faster HardDrive option, so I shouldn't be maxing out my hardware. In fact, my PowerBook is *not as fast* as my brother's Dell which is at least a year older. But I blame this at least partly because of all the "eye candy" in OS X, as Ubuntu on the same hardware absolutely screams.
Apple continually shows themselves to be cut from the same cloth as Microsoft, and it is only the spin from Apple Corporate (and our own desire to deny the truth about Apple and keep them on a pedestal) that keeps us from judging them fairly for their actions like we do other corporations. When MS screws over a vendor, we Slashdotters froth at the mouth and attack rabidly. When Apple blatantly rips off third party vendors, bankrupting them in the process, we turn a blind eye. One word: Konfabulator. Despite the nonsensical arguments and support of the Mac Faithful, Apple DID steal their product. Amazingly, NOBODY CARES. We always give Apple a free ride. It is quite dishonest to do so, and letting Apple get away with stuff like this only encourages them to do it again. There is no balance of power between the customers and the company -- the company has near total control. What Steve says, we believe. We never question. Do we? I don't see any examples of us Mac Faithful taking Apple to task for any of their slimy business moves.
There are so many examples of why "Life As An Apple User" is not perfect that I can't even begin to describe them here. I don't hate Apple. Apple's not bad, but they're like another Microsoft. Their stuff is okay. I hate the insanity of the posters on here who take it as a religion or their life's mission to lie to people in order to promote Apple. It makes no sense, and a LOT of the propaganda I see on here is flat out LIES. but nobody calls the liars on it either, I suppose because the lies are all in favor of Apple. Suffice it to say that you should take ANYTHING you read on Slashdot about the legendary greatness of Apple with a grain of salt. There is a deep-rooted bias with many of the posters here (which is why if this story wasn't a day or two old I'd be modded down to -1 almost immediately, free speech and quality of this post be damned). The reality doesn't match up to the advertising hype. OS X is a very good system, but it has it's faults. But that's NOT the impression I get from reading this site. It has enough faults, in fact, that after years of Mac Zealotry myself, I've finally switched off the system, and I'm much happier here.
I don't know what most people are doing with their computer that they can't figure out how to use Gnome or KDE, and that they need the imaginary handholding of OS X to enable them to do their work, but I've been using Ubuntu as my main desktop for a while now, and I'm having LESS headaches or brick walls to run into than I did on either OS X or Windows.
Unpopular opinion here, but it's the truth. Sosumi.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the third or forth time I've seem mention of this on this thread. I think you all overestimate the number of people switching to Apple. How many users have they actually taken from Windows?
Absolutely. The people talking about a mass migration to Macs are mostly already Mac people seeing things from a Mac person's perspective (ie, biased toward Macs). I for one am moving AWAY from Apple to Linux. I've used Macs for a long time, and despite what the fanboys here proclaim, Macs are NOT perfect. Far from it. After recently discovering Ubuntu (and snagging the nym!), I can honestly say that after much testing, I *STRONGLY PREFER* Gnome and Ubuntu to OS X.
p.s. Mac migration estimates are skewed by the previous mass migration away from Macs during the really bad years, and even more when "the great hope", OS X Beta, came out and really sucked and was so un-Mac-like that a lot of Maccies moved to Windows instantly. Many of them are moving back now that OS X is finally getting decent and is comparable to XP. But I only know one Windows user who switched out of hundreds of friends -- and only because he *only* uses his computer for web surfing (with the world's greatest browser, Firefox, natch), so he might as well use an OS that has no viruses. I've tried to convert hundreds of people to Mac over the years, but only one actually ever did it.
If you don't think a Terminator movie can make you cry, try paying full price for T3.
How can it be the company's responsibility to police employee use in order to prevent kiddie porn, piracy, death threats, etc. on company computers if your hands are tied behind your back? Companies have been often charged for crimes their employees have committed...
At a place I used to work, half the people were salesmen, who, because they went out on the road all the time, had laptops. They would change their Windows XP passwords and not tell management. They would change MANY passwords (to supplier e-commerce sites, etc.) and not tell management. They would use Hotmail to avoid corporate email (which was logged). Our IT guy would go onto their computer when they were out at lunch to run Ad-Aware and the antivirus (salesmen don't give a damn) and would find MOUNTAINS of porn, half-finished resumes, and a copy of our entire corporate network on the guy's hard drive! That's not acceptable, and the guy was warned, but all he did was a) change his password, b) set his screensaver to password protected and had a hotkey to launch it whenever he got up from his desk.
The pendulum has swung too far against the OWNERS of the property in favour of the USERS of said property.
This just makes corporate espionage, like stealing customer lists and selling them to the competition undetected all the easier.
SEVEN MONTHS? Where were you, Iraq?
Dude, you're killin' me here. It's bad enough Slashdot's April Fools Day wastes my time once a year; please don't regurgitate the agony for your own personal amusement.
I used to use Opera, a long time ago on my ex-Windows box. Since I switched to Mozilla, then Firefox, I haven't looked back.
Opera is closed-source, and I won't be using any closed-source app while a half-decent open-source alternative is available. Simple as that.
Now would be a good time to remember that Microsoft and Apple are working together to fight against the open-source community on this.
(Thanks to Leoxx for the linkage.)
The problem with BSD is not the technology, it's the license. The BSD license offers no protection for companies who want to work with them. The BSD license basically says "anything you give to us may be taken by your competitors, put under a closed-source proprietary license, extended to make it incompatible with your original version (a la MS Kerberos), and used against you." The GPL, on the other hand, encourages a culture of equality. What IBM donates under the GPL stays under the GPL, thus Microsoft can't close it up and use it against IBM. They have to keep it open, and release their improvements when they release their new code. GPL'ed code has got to stay as open as when the original author wrote it, and thus isn't a tool of unfair leverage for the mega-corporations of the world. The GPL at least offers companies who want to encourage openness some assurance that they are levelling the playing field; the BSD license offers them nothing in return for their work except the certainty that their generosity will fuel proprietary software which may compete with their own offerings.
I love OpenBSD, but I've never understood their addiction to their "weak" license. I've thought about it, and it's business suicide. They have no chance of ever getting a foothold in the market based on their featureset because anything they do can just be co-opted by Microsoft, Apple, and whoever else wants to take their code, close-source it, and sell it with a pretty front-end. To contribute through the GPL, however, is to make a capitalistic deal with the world: "I have created this product, and on these terms. If you want to deal fairly with me on these terms, and reciprocate, then good. We have a deal." The creator stipulates the terms that the code is to be used: open, free, fair, and transparent. The BSD guys stipulate pretty much nothing, save an ego stroke attribution line.
So, Theo, if anyone's an "unpaid workforce", it's the BSD guys. The GPL guys get code back when theirs is used. You get nothing. The GPL guys are expanding the size of the pool of GPLed software out there in proportion to the amount of proprietary software. For every piece of BSD licensed software, 10 corporations probably take their code and use it to strengthen the proprietary software world. So if I have my choice between the excellent technology of OpenBSD or the pretty good technology and the code freedom security that comes with GPL-licensed Linux, I'll contribute to Linux. At least I know my code won't strengthen my competitors -- unless they seek to become more open as well and accept the terms of the GPL.
Here's my take on how the licenses play out in "real life":
BSD Versus Proprietary
It's high noon on Bootable Hill. Tumbleweeds are floatin' by and the sun beats down. In the middle of the street, Chuck Berkeley faces off with his arch-enemy, Billy Proprietary (I know, I know. The names suck. So sue me). They stare off for a moment, then Chuck remembers his ideology. Chuck lowers his guns in true Gandhi style. BANG! Billy takes the opportunity Chuck offered, and shoots Chuck in the head. Yay. The bad guys win again. Our hero didn't think it was "ethical" to protect himself against the bad guy and is now dead. Evil reigns supreme and Cthulhu consumes the earth.
GPL Versus Proprietary
It's high noon on Bootable Hill. Tumbleweeds are floatin' by and the sun beats down. In the middle of the street, our hero, Richard M. Tuxman, Esquire faces off with his arch-enemy, Billy Proprietary. They stare off for a moment, then Tuxman remembers his ideology. Tuxman calls out: "Billy, I'll lower my guns if you lower your guns in return. It's your choice." Proprietary
Employees working the show floor of the Apple's developers conference last week could be overheard discussing the prospect of open-sourcing the company's WebObjects environment
Employees also discussed who they'd rather get naked with, Christina Aquilera or Jessica Simpson.
Talk is cheap, especially off-the-record gossip. When I see the code I'll believe it.
What rulez?
Hint: It's in MM_MacOS.pm. Therefore, Mac rulez!
p.s. Dear Solaris, L33tsp3ak is unprofessional.
Any real advantage to putting Linux on it?
So it won't SUCK?
It's hard enough to build a huge complex project like this if the software is open source and you have documentation. Apple is still *largely* closed (only the kernel and a few little bits are open), and you're not going to get any help from Apple on this.
It is possible to make a Linux emulator run under OS X, but very difficult to make OS X run under emulation on Linux or another system. As with all closed-source apps, it's pretty much a one way street (no reciprocity).
This is a good reason companies don't open source their stuff unless they have to to stay alive (Solaris?). Right now, most every good Linux app is available on OS X and / or Windows, but very very few OS X or Windows apps are available on Linux, because it's up to the discretion and financial restraints of the corporation to port them, while with open-sourced software, all it takes is an itch to port it and a weekend or two. Open-sourced software will grow and be used to its full capacity, while closed source software is largely limited by the whims of the company.
Just my 2 cents.
But, does it run Linux?
Forget Linux. Does it run Java? Oh, wait...
Tell me you didn't read this, and then the posted article. You did post both, Taco, cause you are the editor of both....
I hate to tell you this, but Taco died a few years ago. Shortly after he was married, he experienced what the ancients called "sex". This strange phenomenon caused his geekish brain to explode in confusion as reality as he knew it consumed itself.
What you call "Taco" is now actually a bot written in Visual Basic by Cowboy Neal, which explains the posting irregularities. If Neal would have used Perl or Python, none of this would have happened.
Cowboy Neal is aware of this problem and promises it will be fixed in Taco2.0.
It's official, we've crossed over into the Bizarro World.
It's not Bizarro World, it's Hell.
Unfortunately, drobbins is still outnumbered, by about... oh, 57,000 to 1.
I don't see how this is being moderated Troll. If Microsoft were to hire Linus Torvalds and then make him sign an NDA and a 5-year non-compete contract, wouldn't people here get the idea that maybe, just maybe, MS wanted to cripple Linux development?
People are so afraid of "conspiracy theories" that they sometimes miss the simple reality that is right in front of them. Remember, this is MICROSOFT. Just because our culture is becoming overly respectful of authority figures, politicians, and multinationals doesn't change their essential nature or the way they play the game. It's insane to refuse to consider the fact that they thought of this as a chess move which could give them street cred while simultaneously slowing the competition. I KNOW they thought of it. Because I did, and I'm not even in competition with Gentoo.
Mac users ARE all the things he said. Not all, of course, there are a few who are still rational (myself); but overall, Mac users do view their platform as something holy, perfect and unstoppable. Try to get a mac user to admit that there is a better alternative out there. It will never happen -- except as a response to this post, in order to "prove" that they're fair, after which they will go back to flaming superior products en masse.
And saying that mentioning that Mac users are intolerant is itself intolerant is bad logic. Are the FBI intolerant for shutting down murderous KKK mobs?
Thanks for the clarification.
I don't think they're demanding deification, just respect -- which RMS rarely gets, if we're being absolutely honest here. I don't see it, anyway.
In other news, nobody seems to have noticed that we absolutely WORSHIP Steve Jobs, throwing ourselves at his feet and basking in the glory of Dashboard and newfound Pentium Power.
Good thing you're using Gentoo. All that compiling gave mankind an extra week or two of existence. If it had been Mandrake we'd be dead already.
Dude, it's not "changed" in Windows, unless you're going back before Windows 95 (which I wasn't able to verify, because nobody runs Win3.1 or before anymore, although it still works in DOS, so it's probably valid).
I checked the different PCs at work, and from Win95 onward, they've always merged the directories, not replaced them. It's also that way on Gnome. Haven't tried KDE for a while, but it's probably the same.
OS X "Thinks Different" than the other OSes on this one. And it is definitely more unreasonable when you want to merge a directory with 5 MP3s in it and OS X wipes out your entire 50Gig MP3 archive. If I want to replace it, I'll use the delete key.
On Windows, it adds the files from one directory to the other, making one huge directory of MP3s or whatever. On the Mac, it deletes the first batch of files and leaves only the second.
Try it for yourself.
Yes, it is true. I am NOT trolling. If you don't believe me, go down to your local Best Buy and try it for yourself. Then you'll have the pleasure of asking "metamatic" what his trollish lying malfunction is.
On the Mac OS X desktop, make a directory, name it "foo", then put another directory with the exact same name somewhere else on the drive. Drag it to your desktop. Make sure you put some files in the first directory so when they get copied over you can prove they're just plain gone.
I am a long-time Mac user switching from Mac OS X to Linux. I still boot into OS X every once in a while, mostly because I haven't figured out how to retrieve my settings and data out of some OS X apps I used to use.
This came after years of nagging little frustrations with Apple's hardware and software (like the fact that because iMovie and iDVD have no MPEG support, only MOV, in order to work with movie files from my digital camera I had to buy QuickTime Pro -- and then keep rebuying it as they break compatibility yearly with older versions). Or how when you have a directory on one drive, say "MP3s", and you want to copy it over to your main drive, if there's another MP3s directory there, it won't ADD the new MP3s to the pile, it will DELETE all the main directories' MP3s and replace them with the new ones! I've lost PILES of stuff doing this before I learned that file management SUCKS under OS X. Sadly, Windows Explorer kicks the Finder's ass.
I get OS X app crashes as frequently as my family does on their Dells, maybe more frequently even. And I'm running the 1.5 Ghz PowerBook with 1 Gig of RAM, the 128Meg video card, and a faster HardDrive option, so I shouldn't be maxing out my hardware. In fact, my PowerBook is *not as fast* as my brother's Dell which is at least a year older. But I blame this at least partly because of all the "eye candy" in OS X, as Ubuntu on the same hardware absolutely screams.
Apple continually shows themselves to be cut from the same cloth as Microsoft, and it is only the spin from Apple Corporate (and our own desire to deny the truth about Apple and keep them on a pedestal) that keeps us from judging them fairly for their actions like we do other corporations. When MS screws over a vendor, we Slashdotters froth at the mouth and attack rabidly. When Apple blatantly rips off third party vendors, bankrupting them in the process, we turn a blind eye. One word: Konfabulator. Despite the nonsensical arguments and support of the Mac Faithful, Apple DID steal their product. Amazingly, NOBODY CARES. We always give Apple a free ride. It is quite dishonest to do so, and letting Apple get away with stuff like this only encourages them to do it again. There is no balance of power between the customers and the company -- the company has near total control. What Steve says, we believe. We never question. Do we? I don't see any examples of us Mac Faithful taking Apple to task for any of their slimy business moves.
There are so many examples of why "Life As An Apple User" is not perfect that I can't even begin to describe them here. I don't hate Apple. Apple's not bad, but they're like another Microsoft. Their stuff is okay. I hate the insanity of the posters on here who take it as a religion or their life's mission to lie to people in order to promote Apple. It makes no sense, and a LOT of the propaganda I see on here is flat out LIES. but nobody calls the liars on it either, I suppose because the lies are all in favor of Apple. Suffice it to say that you should take ANYTHING you read on Slashdot about the legendary greatness of Apple with a grain of salt. There is a deep-rooted bias with many of the posters here (which is why if this story wasn't a day or two old I'd be modded down to -1 almost immediately, free speech and quality of this post be damned). The reality doesn't match up to the advertising hype. OS X is a very good system, but it has it's faults. But that's NOT the impression I get from reading this site. It has enough faults, in fact, that after years of Mac Zealotry myself, I've finally switched off the system, and I'm much happier here.
I don't know what most people are doing with their computer that they can't figure out how to use Gnome or KDE, and that they need the imaginary handholding of OS X to enable them to do their work, but I've been using Ubuntu as my main desktop for a while now, and I'm having LESS headaches or brick walls to run into than I did on either OS X or Windows.
Unpopular opinion here, but it's the truth. Sosumi.