I see, at the current state of things, a few deficiencies that make Apple not too suitable for enterprise:
Centralized auth
Sure, it can connect to LDAP, AD, and all. But why does it insist in creating home directories in non-standard (according to the Mac's filesystem hierarchy) places? Namely,/home and not/Users. And there's no caching of usernames, so if the network goes down or the servers don't work, no-one can log in in a Mac. Worse again, they tend to freeze if the domain server goes down.
Third party software
I wonder if the Mac Business Unit of Adobe and Macromedia is made by monkeys (I work in a communication agency, so we have a lot of Macs, and almost everyone is for a graphic guy). Programs that do not run unless you're admin, or even worse, refuse to work if you are not the user that installed them
Platform stability
In the last years, Apple has first switched to Mac OS X, then to Intel chips. In comparison, what used to run on a Windows machine in 1999 still runs quite well on a Windows XP box, and I think it will too on Vista. Many of the businesses here run administrative programs that had been purchased in the mid 90es and nobody wants to replace. It's more or less the same story for why FORTRAN is so widely used in airline booking applications. No enterprise wants to have a hundred-thousand bucks application they bought have to be replaced because Mac OS has changed
The "one laptop per child" mentality is great at giving people the information that they need in order to succeed, but it will not make them succeed. It will ensure that everyone starts the race at the same point, but it will not make everyone a winner.
That's the difference between FOSS and communism. The purpose is not to prosecute "egualitarism", which boils down to levelling everyone's life at a given standard (hence stripping off freedom). That's what communism did.
Social justice, which is something that the Western World has pursued since, I'd say, 1779, is about not bringing up obstacles to keep some people from expressing their potentials and reaching fame and fortune if they deserve it. It's the same concept of a free, toll-less market: if I bring up obstacles that have the sole purpose to give me (or the products from my country) an "unfair" advantage over other products, I'm doing something immoral, because I'm artificially raising foreign products prices in order to make them less appetible to my consumers. This is something that here in Europe we are debating since a long time.
It's not like you cannot make money with Free Software. Red Hat is the example of a company that, while committing fully to the principles of FOSS, is still able to produce a profit.
The whole concept of "economy of sharing" is: if I have something that doesn't cost me nothing to produce, it is immoral to sold it out. The bakery example served quite well.
Software is, literally speaking, ideas. Nothing more, like math. And it is moral to make people pay for something that does not physically exist nor requires you cost to be imagined? Wouldn't it be more moral to make people pay to solve problems (eg, use your mind to generate ideas that help them?)
It is really a complex matter (we're not talking just about software, but virtually all the knowledge). The whole point of free software is "give people the tools, if they are good they will lift themselves up". And yes, such an approach would help the developing countries more than shitloads of money that ends up being ate by some corrupt dictator
I don't think Microsoft is full of idiots like you seem to imply in this last post.
Sometimes, their goals diverge a bit from the goals of some of their users, but in the end I'm sure they made their calculations and decided this is the better way for them.
And I think it is, from a Microsoft point of view. You cannot really blame them for doing what they think it's best for them and not what is best for you and people in your same position (a very small percentage of their userbase).
Maybe Microsoft will pull out a PC-only version of a program that addresses the needs you specified: remembers that Microsoft is pulling out a big offensive against Adobe aswell, so we might soon see a rival of Framemaker pop out at a quarter the price, half the functions and double the bugs.
Anyway the true point in all this is that Microsoft wants to kill Mac OS X, being by far its most threatening competitor. And it has all the cards to win this game.
Microsoft saw that newer machines were largely going to waste with CPU usage below even 1% so they decided that they could utilize more of it and make the user experience more enjoyable.
However I agree with your post, I have to correct you on this issue:
average cpu utilization will be as low as it currently is with vista. Effects are calculated when actually someone does something (like moving windows, pulling down menus and whatever else), not if the computer is idle.
so effects are drawn when the cpu gets busy, hence not alleviating at all the "burst effect" we currently see on cpu usage
the burst effect isn't bad at all (see cpu freq scaling)
all the effects calculation are made using the 3d power of the GPU through direct3d
effects were added because users like it. I've been using XGL and AIGLX for several months, and now everytime i fall back onto a non-accelerated desktop I feel bad (btw, you don't know how addictive the rotating desktop and/or wobbly windows can become)
Well, apart the fact it doesn't run on Linux, or Mac OSX?
Exchange is a good piece of software, and is a key part of the overall integrated server system that Microsoft offers. I've been using Exchange 2003 (and administering it) for about an year at my job, and my major complaint is about something that has been added in the most recent iteration: the seemingly impossibility to retrieve a single mail from a backup.
We used to made daily backups, and one day my boss came up and was like "uh, I think a week ago I accidentally deleted a very important mail, can you retrieve it for me into the backups?" and I was like "for sure!".
But apparently, the idiot they hired to replace you (I know it was possible to retrieve a single mail from a backup atleast until Exchange 7 or maybe even 2000) thought that this was a very dangerous operation to allow, and I was presented two choices:
Restore all the mailboxes to day X (uh yeah, everybody's gonna love it)
I mentioned a second choice? Oh my bad, I miscounted
You probably detected some serious hate surface between the waves of sarcasm, and I hope you can understand why. I mean, that's the only real complaint I have against Exchange, and is probably not too representative, but I somewhat got the idea that the application is now in its descending curb.
Overall anyway, Exchange offers great features: and from a users' point of view, is a good application. As developer, I might bitch about the lack of support for standards, but yeah, that's a long issue.
And the OSS community wants to "clone" it in term of functionality because it works, not because we think it sucks. Elseway, we wouldn't bother. Now, it's just a pity that due to IP fears you cannot particicpate to the developement of any open-source alternative...
Intresting POV. But what would be the point of doing such a thing? It wouldn't just block the IT industry. It would block the whole justice machine way faster. I'm not all that familiar with how it works in the US, but I'm quite sure there would be too much suits going on for judges and all to handle, and they would fall in prescription before the judge can come to a decision. Here in Italy, our former prime minister have several times exploited this bug in order to avoid being judged. So people would just going on doing their business in The Illegal Way (tm), and politicians would be forced to "forgive" all the IP infringment until they get to reform it.
Here, Microsoft is acting like the Godfather, threatening people and hoping they would stop or pay them, but knowing they cannot really enforce their threats, because the consequences would be highly unpredictable
I don't have any idea of what your business is, but my personal experience points right in the opposite direction.
I work for a design, communication and advertising agency, and we've used Windows for our storage systems before the society was reorganized (putting me in charge of IT).
With windows, we had load of problems:
software RAID support sucked: we don't have the money to buy SCSI server that satisfy our storage requirements (2TB, RAID 5) and our experience with SATA hardware RAID has been unpleasant. But if you let the os do, you get a bandwidth on file transfers that is simply too low (note that people work directly on server, due to ceratin security/privacy policies we have to follow)
Exchange has been a pain in the ass all way long. Works perfectly unless someone asks you to retrieve some mail he accidentally deleted out of the backups. A single mail? Are you sure you don't want to rollback your server configuration to the time of the install?
Mac cannot be integrated too well
Updates being a general pain in the ass: Windows 2003 Server tried several times to install updates for MSDE SQL Server 2000, despite the fact that was not installed on the system, and making the update process fail at every iteration.
Since we do webdeveloping aswell, we didn't had much time to lose after the servers administration: once you get them up and running, they shouldn't need to be checked every day for hours.
Windows sadly, was a whiny bitch and constantly asked for some attention.
Since I switched to Fedora Core for all the servers, none of the above problems have surfaced, except an hardware failure on our router (an old WWI Pentium box, that apparently died from exhaustion).
So my conclusion is that half of my problems with windows arise from the fact I do not know how it works in detail, and that I find it harder to find solutions for Windows issues rather than Linux issues onto the net.
This has a precise reason, but I bet you can see it clearly aswell: and from now on, refrain from generically bashing technologies you never tried to use, without giving specific details of what the matter is.
My name is ###### and I've been a Gentoo faithful user for more than a year.
The first Gentoo I installed was 2004. and I didn't read any documentation prior installing. I just printed the manual out and went for it. It was long, but in the end it was a total success. I installed it on all the servers at work (2 machines) and on my two home computers.
My love for gentoo started to fade when the updates started taking too long (I know, there are binary packages, but I mainly got gentoo to compile things myself). Secondarily, my boss (which is not linux-wise) asked me to install X on one of the servers. I did, and was totally unhappy with it, mainly because my boss quickly gave up with trying to administer the server from GUI, and I'm a CLI guy.
So I happily decided to remove X. Ugh. Emerge is great at installing packages, but surely sucks at removing them. The software to query packages for dependencies was still beta at that time, and quite uncomfy to use.
I started dreaming of aptitude at night.
All in all, I still have gentoo on one server at work (the one that does routing/firewall) because gentoo can be light like no others. But for the other three servers I now use Fedora, and I have started using Ubuntu for the desktop.
As last note, I want to clarify that my experience with Gentoo has been great. Most of all it made me (forced me) learn a lot of things about the insides of what I use daily that I did not knew before. It's a GREAT educational tool, and I recommend its use, even if for a bit, to anyone that wants to learn Linux.
For the production side, I noted it required me more attention / administartion time than others distro on a typical setup, while it just performs great on small, task-oriented systems (because you can cut off all the bullshit).
So true. Happened recently here in Italy aswell: a site has been detected by European authorities as a safe place where nuke waste might be stored.
That was enough to bring entire villages on war, blocking trains and and roads and protesting against that. And the funny thing is, they were not greens at all.
They didn't give a shit about the environment, they were just worried their houses might lose price.
So it's not green nor communists that blocks nuclear, it's just the common people (not like me, but just because I pay a rent:P) that doesn't want certain things to be built near their homes. They're ok with building it elsewhere in the country.
On final note, they're gonna make the site there the European way: they'll say "we are rethinking the whole program" and then one day voila! The site is there, built and fully functional, and you have to swallow it
Enhanced alt+tab with window preview is available for free (and win XP) on the Microsoft powertoys homepage. Definitely a great feature, and another reason that will prevent me from upgrading to Vista:D.
Erm... is your comment related to the topic at all? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, so it doesn't has to be.
Anyway, most of the criticism around Vista boils down to one point: it is indeed (and looks) like a cool os, and his interface is as good as OS X one (except for the ring on the active textbox, which I hope they will add soon, since it really really helps the user).
But, is it worth 300$? Why I should upgrade from my Windows XP to Windows Vista? That's the real point.
There are limits yes. Most notably, editing the menu (or any kind of preferences) needs you to edit a config file, and right-clicking the taskbar doesn't work for closing windows.
But I deployed a severe addiction to the root menu (right-clicking the windows desktop is a trauma now) and it has some feature that windows misses completely, like a decent virtual desktop management, and some cool plugins (being able to customize the window decorations rocks, and also being able to roll up a window).
As mini-review, I have to say that it serves my purposes well, so I'll give it a 8 (btw, I use xoblite http://xoblite.net/)
You can get X run on it? WOW. Anyway, consider that blackbox is just a window manager, when GNOME, like KDE and others, starts a ton of background processes that take care of many things (wallets/keychains, sound daemons, etc etc) that goes beyond the "let's show some windows".
Said that, since I don't need those things, I'm a happy user of blackbox and derivates, which I can also use on windows (and surprisingly, everyone that saw me using it wanted me to install it on their windoze box)
Maybe to the geek. Honestly, on Konqueror Gmail doesn't work well (you have to set the useragent to Firefox for it to work, and even when you do that doesn't work too well) and Flash support is a pain.
And since the trend seems to go toward massive use of client side scripting (either flash or Javascript) lacking in those areas is quite a big problem.
Also, Firefox works well on Windows, while Konqueror doesn't. This is a great matter, since Linux is quite unusable as desktop, and will become less attraent to desktop users if the current developement trend is maintained.
Now, if you mentioned Safari, I would have agreed...
I so agree. At work I have one of those 17" LCDs running at 1280x1024. Why half of that space has to be wasted with toolbars, tabs, menus, bars and all the happy family, forcing me to scroll like a madman (and yeah, scrolling is definitely an operation I'm hating more and more, because it fucks up my "reference points" on the text) when I could happily see two thirds of the whole document at 100% zoom on my screen?
Plus, I notice everyone at my work uses shortcuts a lot. That's because, after ten months you're using a program (or just like after 4 months) you realize you're WAT more productive this way then waving a pointer around on your screen. And I'm not talking about geeks, I'm talking about normal people that never heard of firefox.
But no, UI designs now goes in the opposite direction.... so we have something that is intuitive and usable by everyone that just got out of the jungle and never saw a computer before, but just feels obtrusive and slow to the guy that has to use it everyday
My $0.02 advice is to make it simple, clean, consistent. Just slam in a very reduced menu, a simple thin toolbar with few commands, and let users be able to add the advanced commands/menus they want, IF they need it.
It's funny how the masses always complain about windows being instable and crashing. I have news for you, windows does not (not XP, anyway). All the crashes I've seen in the past years were cause of crappy drivers (mainly nVidia and Ati). That's because Microsoft developers are stupid and can't develop a decent driver API? (because we all know that the average IQ in microsoft is something around 15, and that the legend of the 1000 typing monkeys... ok, but I ain't bein funny)
I'm perfectly aware of the reasons mentioned in the previous posts. But the decision isn't trivial. There is a compromise/tradeoff to make, and it ain't so simple. Is it worth to attract the masses? I doubt. the real deal for the masses is Apple... masses, in the IT world, don't need to be "free to do things". Because that translates in "free to damage things". So the real deal is a vendor that offers you everything from its own factory, all shipped up in a cool package, with just 4 models to choose from (ok, maybe even 20, doesn't make much difference). You run your thing, you don't need to know nothing, and IT'S FUCKING BETTER YOU DON'T. Everything works, as long as your needs conforms to the standard needs. I'm sure that 99% of the people would be damned happy with this. And to them I say, go Apple.
For me, this is just a cool version of the Soviet Republic. But I'm a mad anarchist, so just leave me alone with my crappy Linux, that needs days to be configured with mainstream hardware, but that does not "limit" me in any way
(Many would say mine is just a bunch of politic arg... idiocies. True. Because Linux and Open Source is a political matter. Being opensource does not give a project any mere technical advantage over a closed source one. It has its upsides in how the software interacts with the community of users/developers, and hence is a social/politic matter)
NEXTstep _was_ very developer friendly. Eleven years ago.
Also,.net goes far beyond asp.net. And honestly WebObjects isn't in the same area (actually, I think no one is in the same area of the.net platform, atm) so it doesn't make much sense to compare them.
Also, Apple seems lacking the "total integration" that Microsoft offers. For example, can I replace the Win2003+Exchange+ActiveDirectory setting that i have at my job with something that offers the same functionalitites, the same integration, and it's targeted for the mac platform?
I've never really investigated into this (cause, uhm... Microsoft made us an offer "we couldn't refuse") but I would like to know if it's possible to do.
Well, Apple, on its side, does all by its own. Windows run practically on a million different configurations (just think at how many vendors for each component exists, and how many components there are, and how many model for each single vendor), while the possible configuration for macs does not exceed the hundreds.
If we had the MSPC (no, it's not a drug name) Windows would be as easy to run on as mac is.
Second, but not less important, is that MAc is highly user friendly, but is not much developer friendly, at least not as much as Windows is. Try to do the same things you do in.NET in ObjectiveC, then tell me;). That might explain the lack of apps, too.
GNOME is technically inferior. But, as far as my experience goes, GNOME is much more intuitive than KDE.
If I remember correctly, there has been a lot of work (mainly conducted by Sun) into usability for the GNOME desktop. This was a lot of time ago, before the version 2 came out. At the time, I laughed at them, since I thought than paying people to use things instead of paying developers was a bad move.
But I have to admit that, despite the large amount of implementation/architectural problems of GNOME, I feel better using it than using KDE. And since at my job we're doing some little "experimenting" on the feasibility of a linux desktop solution (meaning, if we should seriously think of switching some of our employees to linux) I realized that the newbie feels way more comfortable with GNOME than with KDE.
KDE is much more a geek-oriented DE than GNOME, being more focused on tech things than actual "feel".
Slashdot Mirror
I see, at the current state of things, a few deficiencies that make Apple not too suitable for enterprise:
Centralized auth Sure, it can connect to LDAP, AD, and all. But why does it insist in creating home directories in non-standard (according to the Mac's filesystem hierarchy) places? Namely,That's the difference between FOSS and communism. The purpose is not to prosecute "egualitarism", which boils down to levelling everyone's life at a given standard (hence stripping off freedom). That's what communism did.
Social justice, which is something that the Western World has pursued since, I'd say, 1779, is about not bringing up obstacles to keep some people from expressing their potentials and reaching fame and fortune if they deserve it. It's the same concept of a free, toll-less market: if I bring up obstacles that have the sole purpose to give me (or the products from my country) an "unfair" advantage over other products, I'm doing something immoral, because I'm artificially raising foreign products prices in order to make them less appetible to my consumers. This is something that here in Europe we are debating since a long time.
It's not like you cannot make money with Free Software. Red Hat is the example of a company that, while committing fully to the principles of FOSS, is still able to produce a profit.
The whole concept of "economy of sharing" is: if I have something that doesn't cost me nothing to produce, it is immoral to sold it out. The bakery example served quite well.
Software is, literally speaking, ideas. Nothing more, like math. And it is moral to make people pay for something that does not physically exist nor requires you cost to be imagined? Wouldn't it be more moral to make people pay to solve problems (eg, use your mind to generate ideas that help them?)
It is really a complex matter (we're not talking just about software, but virtually all the knowledge). The whole point of free software is "give people the tools, if they are good they will lift themselves up". And yes, such an approach would help the developing countries more than shitloads of money that ends up being ate by some corrupt dictator
I don't think Microsoft is full of idiots like you seem to imply in this last post.
Sometimes, their goals diverge a bit from the goals of some of their users, but in the end I'm sure they made their calculations and decided this is the better way for them.
And I think it is, from a Microsoft point of view. You cannot really blame them for doing what they think it's best for them and not what is best for you and people in your same position (a very small percentage of their userbase).
Maybe Microsoft will pull out a PC-only version of a program that addresses the needs you specified: remembers that Microsoft is pulling out a big offensive against Adobe aswell, so we might soon see a rival of Framemaker pop out at a quarter the price, half the functions and double the bugs.
Anyway the true point in all this is that Microsoft wants to kill Mac OS X, being by far its most threatening competitor. And it has all the cards to win this game.
However I agree with your post, I have to correct you on this issue:
And wants register globals to be active, and that's enough for me to foresee it needs a little refreshing of the code.
Well, apart the fact it doesn't run on Linux, or Mac OSX?
Exchange is a good piece of software, and is a key part of the overall integrated server system that Microsoft offers. I've been using Exchange 2003 (and administering it) for about an year at my job, and my major complaint is about something that has been added in the most recent iteration: the seemingly impossibility to retrieve a single mail from a backup.
We used to made daily backups, and one day my boss came up and was like "uh, I think a week ago I accidentally deleted a very important mail, can you retrieve it for me into the backups?" and I was like "for sure!".
But apparently, the idiot they hired to replace you (I know it was possible to retrieve a single mail from a backup atleast until Exchange 7 or maybe even 2000) thought that this was a very dangerous operation to allow, and I was presented two choices:
You probably detected some serious hate surface between the waves of sarcasm, and I hope you can understand why. I mean, that's the only real complaint I have against Exchange, and is probably not too representative, but I somewhat got the idea that the application is now in its descending curb.
Overall anyway, Exchange offers great features: and from a users' point of view, is a good application. As developer, I might bitch about the lack of support for standards, but yeah, that's a long issue.
And the OSS community wants to "clone" it in term of functionality because it works, not because we think it sucks. Elseway, we wouldn't bother. Now, it's just a pity that due to IP fears you cannot particicpate to the developement of any open-source alternative...
Intresting POV. But what would be the point of doing such a thing? It wouldn't just block the IT industry. It would block the whole justice machine way faster. I'm not all that familiar with how it works in the US, but I'm quite sure there would be too much suits going on for judges and all to handle, and they would fall in prescription before the judge can come to a decision. Here in Italy, our former prime minister have several times exploited this bug in order to avoid being judged. So people would just going on doing their business in The Illegal Way (tm), and politicians would be forced to "forgive" all the IP infringment until they get to reform it.
Here, Microsoft is acting like the Godfather, threatening people and hoping they would stop or pay them, but knowing they cannot really enforce their threats, because the consequences would be highly unpredictable
I don't have any idea of what your business is, but my personal experience points right in the opposite direction.
I work for a design, communication and advertising agency, and we've used Windows for our storage systems before the society was reorganized (putting me in charge of IT).
With windows, we had load of problems:
Since we do webdeveloping aswell, we didn't had much time to lose after the servers administration: once you get them up and running, they shouldn't need to be checked every day for hours.
Windows sadly, was a whiny bitch and constantly asked for some attention.
Since I switched to Fedora Core for all the servers, none of the above problems have surfaced, except an hardware failure on our router (an old WWI Pentium box, that apparently died from exhaustion).
So my conclusion is that half of my problems with windows arise from the fact I do not know how it works in detail, and that I find it harder to find solutions for Windows issues rather than Linux issues onto the net.
This has a precise reason, but I bet you can see it clearly aswell: and from now on, refrain from generically bashing technologies you never tried to use, without giving specific details of what the matter is.
Window Snyder... who formerly worked in Microsoft (http://news.com.com/Mozilla+looks+to+Microsoft+fo r+security/2008-7355_3-6117896.html?tag=nl) security team. By reading those short bio I couldn't help but laugh at the coincidences. And strenghtened my resolution of not have kids with another programmer.
PS.: I feel a disturbance in the force... like a million fanboys crying
My name is ###### and I've been a Gentoo faithful user for more than a year.
The first Gentoo I installed was 2004. and I didn't read any documentation prior installing. I just printed the manual out and went for it. It was long, but in the end it was a total success. I installed it on all the servers at work (2 machines) and on my two home computers.
My love for gentoo started to fade when the updates started taking too long (I know, there are binary packages, but I mainly got gentoo to compile things myself). Secondarily, my boss (which is not linux-wise) asked me to install X on one of the servers. I did, and was totally unhappy with it, mainly because my boss quickly gave up with trying to administer the server from GUI, and I'm a CLI guy.
So I happily decided to remove X. Ugh. Emerge is great at installing packages, but surely sucks at removing them. The software to query packages for dependencies was still beta at that time, and quite uncomfy to use. I started dreaming of aptitude at night.
All in all, I still have gentoo on one server at work (the one that does routing/firewall) because gentoo can be light like no others. But for the other three servers I now use Fedora, and I have started using Ubuntu for the desktop.
As last note, I want to clarify that my experience with Gentoo has been great. Most of all it made me (forced me) learn a lot of things about the insides of what I use daily that I did not knew before. It's a GREAT educational tool, and I recommend its use, even if for a bit, to anyone that wants to learn Linux.
For the production side, I noted it required me more attention / administartion time than others distro on a typical setup, while it just performs great on small, task-oriented systems (because you can cut off all the bullshit).
So true. Happened recently here in Italy aswell: a site has been detected by European authorities as a safe place where nuke waste might be stored.
That was enough to bring entire villages on war, blocking trains and and roads and protesting against that. And the funny thing is, they were not greens at all.
They didn't give a shit about the environment, they were just worried their houses might lose price.
So it's not green nor communists that blocks nuclear, it's just the common people (not like me, but just because I pay a rent :P) that doesn't want certain things to be built near their homes. They're ok with building it elsewhere in the country.
On final note, they're gonna make the site there the European way: they'll say "we are rethinking the whole program" and then one day voila! The site is there, built and fully functional, and you have to swallow it
Enhanced alt+tab with window preview is available for free (and win XP) on the Microsoft powertoys homepage. Definitely a great feature, and another reason that will prevent me from upgrading to Vista :D.
Erm... is your comment related to the topic at all? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, so it doesn't has to be.
Anyway, most of the criticism around Vista boils down to one point: it is indeed (and looks) like a cool os, and his interface is as good as OS X one (except for the ring on the active textbox, which I hope they will add soon, since it really really helps the user). But, is it worth 300$? Why I should upgrade from my Windows XP to Windows Vista? That's the real point.
Hope you have a good answer
There are limits yes. Most notably, editing the menu (or any kind of preferences) needs you to edit a config file, and right-clicking the taskbar doesn't work for closing windows.
But I deployed a severe addiction to the root menu (right-clicking the windows desktop is a trauma now) and it has some feature that windows misses completely, like a decent virtual desktop management, and some cool plugins (being able to customize the window decorations rocks, and also being able to roll up a window).
As mini-review, I have to say that it serves my purposes well, so I'll give it a 8 (btw, I use xoblite http://xoblite.net/)
You can get X run on it? WOW. Anyway, consider that blackbox is just a window manager, when GNOME, like KDE and others, starts a ton of background processes that take care of many things (wallets/keychains, sound daemons, etc etc) that goes beyond the "let's show some windows".
Said that, since I don't need those things, I'm a happy user of blackbox and derivates, which I can also use on windows (and surprisingly, everyone that saw me using it wanted me to install it on their windoze box)
GNU/Hurd booting? Hell, that's a news!
(just joking guys, put the axes there.... ooookay... thanks for flying Comedian Airlines)
Maybe to the geek. Honestly, on Konqueror Gmail doesn't work well (you have to set the useragent to Firefox for it to work, and even when you do that doesn't work too well) and Flash support is a pain. And since the trend seems to go toward massive use of client side scripting (either flash or Javascript) lacking in those areas is quite a big problem.
Also, Firefox works well on Windows, while Konqueror doesn't. This is a great matter, since Linux is quite unusable as desktop, and will become less attraent to desktop users if the current developement trend is maintained.
Now, if you mentioned Safari, I would have agreed...
Yeah, and thinks of all the other laws we did not even heard of!
(side note, I'm Italian aswell)
Ally with the powerful French in this war. (Oh wait, did we say French? DOH!!!)
I so agree. At work I have one of those 17" LCDs running at 1280x1024. Why half of that space has to be wasted with toolbars, tabs, menus, bars and all the happy family, forcing me to scroll like a madman (and yeah, scrolling is definitely an operation I'm hating more and more, because it fucks up my "reference points" on the text) when I could happily see two thirds of the whole document at 100% zoom on my screen?
Plus, I notice everyone at my work uses shortcuts a lot. That's because, after ten months you're using a program (or just like after 4 months) you realize you're WAT more productive this way then waving a pointer around on your screen. And I'm not talking about geeks, I'm talking about normal people that never heard of firefox.
But no, UI designs now goes in the opposite direction.... so we have something that is intuitive and usable by everyone that just got out of the jungle and never saw a computer before, but just feels obtrusive and slow to the guy that has to use it everyday
My $0.02 advice is to make it simple, clean, consistent. Just slam in a very reduced menu, a simple thin toolbar with few commands, and let users be able to add the advanced commands/menus they want, IF they need it.
It's funny how the masses always complain about windows being instable and crashing. I have news for you, windows does not (not XP, anyway). All the crashes I've seen in the past years were cause of crappy drivers (mainly nVidia and Ati). That's because Microsoft developers are stupid and can't develop a decent driver API? (because we all know that the average IQ in microsoft is something around 15, and that the legend of the 1000 typing monkeys... ok, but I ain't bein funny)
I'm perfectly aware of the reasons mentioned in the previous posts. But the decision isn't trivial. There is a compromise/tradeoff to make, and it ain't so simple. Is it worth to attract the masses? I doubt. the real deal for the masses is Apple... masses, in the IT world, don't need to be "free to do things". Because that translates in "free to damage things". So the real deal is a vendor that offers you everything from its own factory, all shipped up in a cool package, with just 4 models to choose from (ok, maybe even 20, doesn't make much difference). You run your thing, you don't need to know nothing, and IT'S FUCKING BETTER YOU DON'T. Everything works, as long as your needs conforms to the standard needs. I'm sure that 99% of the people would be damned happy with this. And to them I say, go Apple.
For me, this is just a cool version of the Soviet Republic. But I'm a mad anarchist, so just leave me alone with my crappy Linux, that needs days to be configured with mainstream hardware, but that does not "limit" me in any way
(Many would say mine is just a bunch of politic arg... idiocies. True. Because Linux and Open Source is a political matter. Being opensource does not give a project any mere technical advantage over a closed source one. It has its upsides in how the software interacts with the community of users/developers, and hence is a social/politic matter)
The one finally rewritten as microkernel, of course using the amazing message passing version of Visual Basic.
PS Half of this post is serious. Finding what part actually is is left as exercise to the reader
NEXTstep _was_ very developer friendly. Eleven years ago.
Also, .net goes far beyond asp.net. And honestly WebObjects isn't in the same area (actually, I think no one is in the same area of the .net platform, atm) so it doesn't make much sense to compare them.
Also, Apple seems lacking the "total integration" that Microsoft offers. For example, can I replace the Win2003+Exchange+ActiveDirectory setting that i have at my job with something that offers the same functionalitites, the same integration, and it's targeted for the mac platform?
I've never really investigated into this (cause, uhm... Microsoft made us an offer "we couldn't refuse") but I would like to know if it's possible to do.
PS Don't mention samba. Please do not.
Well, Apple, on its side, does all by its own. Windows run practically on a million different configurations (just think at how many vendors for each component exists, and how many components there are, and how many model for each single vendor), while the possible configuration for macs does not exceed the hundreds. If we had the MSPC (no, it's not a drug name) Windows would be as easy to run on as mac is. Second, but not less important, is that MAc is highly user friendly, but is not much developer friendly, at least not as much as Windows is. Try to do the same things you do in .NET in ObjectiveC, then tell me ;). That might explain the lack of apps, too.
GNOME is technically inferior. But, as far as my experience goes, GNOME is much more intuitive than KDE.
If I remember correctly, there has been a lot of work (mainly conducted by Sun) into usability for the GNOME desktop. This was a lot of time ago, before the version 2 came out. At the time, I laughed at them, since I thought than paying people to use things instead of paying developers was a bad move.
But I have to admit that, despite the large amount of implementation/architectural problems of GNOME, I feel better using it than using KDE. And since at my job we're doing some little "experimenting" on the feasibility of a linux desktop solution (meaning, if we should seriously think of switching some of our employees to linux) I realized that the newbie feels way more comfortable with GNOME than with KDE.
KDE is much more a geek-oriented DE than GNOME, being more focused on tech things than actual "feel".
That's my 0.02$, but I see it this way.