Thanks: your post tells us all pretty clearly what kind of whiny and unprofessional people are advocating KDE. Thanks for doing such a good job advocating for Gnome.
All technical issues aside, I think a switch to KDE would pretty much kill Linux on the desktop, because all commercial Linux desktop applications would then depend on commercial software from Troll Tech.
Apple markets their products to real users, not ultra-geeks. Ultra geeks have already figured out how to boot into Linux. If you haven't, then you probably shouldn't be running Linux. Apple isn't looking to add support costs to some schmuck that doesn't under Linux.
Apple markets to the same people Linux companies market to: desktop users, home users, business users, students, scientists.
What advantage to Mac users have by running Linux on their Mac? And is that advantage a real world, mom & dad advantage?
Same advantage they get from running Windows: access to lots more software that doesn't run, or doesn't run well, natively on OS X.
With Boot Camp, Apple is able to truly work as a replacement for your PC.
Maybe for your PC, but no for my PC. The people that make Mac hardware a replacement for my PC are the Linux distribution developers who spend the time on making Linux work on Mac hardware, often with little support from Apple.
I doubt we're going to see Linux support form Apple any time soon--they are currently in the denial phase; all big companies seem to go through it when Linux threatens their business. IBM was one of the first companies to get out of it, and it's taken them a few years, but they now have reasonable support for Linux. Sun has gotten out of the denial phase, but they're still hoping they can pull a fast one on Linux. Microsoft is barely out of denial and is making the first signs of accepting Linux as a commercial reality. Apple is still at that stage where they think they can fight Linux with what they think is a "better" product.
programmers using Mono on Linux exist but are few and far between
And the same is true for.NET; but Linux and Windows both have established the foundation on which people can build managed applications, Macintosh does not. Java is the closest Apple comes to a future platform for managed software development, but Java itself is in trouble.
There also is only a minor fraction of applications talking directly to X or the kernel itself.
And what are you trying to imply here? That the functionality of those components doesn't matter? That it's all in the libraries? Well, you're wrong. Both the Linux kernel and X.org are more advanced, more efficient, and more flexible than their OS X equivalents, and that is user-visible.
As far as I'm concerned people use C++, KDE or Gnome and tons of calls to standard libs
Yes, it's unfortunate that KDE in particular is based on a cross-platform toolkit controlled by a company that attempts to cover Windows, OS X, and Linux with a single toolkit. As a result, KDE has least common denominator functionality and ends up far more bloated than it needs to be. To some degree, that's also true for Gnome, although it's being addressed there.
(read not M$ infested bull).
If you're suggesting that Mono is "M$ infested bull", let me point out that both Linux and OS X are "AT&T infested bull", and that a lot of the Cocoa APIs were ripped off from Xerox. Furthermore, Mono applications usually don't use the MS APIs--they're based on Gnome.
I can't think of a single open source project that was not completely self-serving. You know the old "scratch that itch" saying?
The difference is that when other people scratch their itch, they solve the problems of other people as well; Apple's open source releases don't help anybody other than Apple, and after two decades of this shit from NeXT/Apple, we have to conclude that they're doing it on purpose.
Take Nokia for example. They took Webkit and developed a browser for their mobile device.
Let's be clear here: Apple was forced to release "Webkit" because of the KHTML license, but in typical Apple style, they did so in a form that was useless for the original open source project and they changed the name to suggest (falsely) that it was their contribution.
Tell me something, do you expect people to take you seriously with a name like penguin-collective? Do you think it instils the perception that you are capable of being anything other than a linux fanboy. Collective to me implies a lack of individual free will. Can you think for yourself?
I see: when arguments fail you, you make fun of people's names. I frankly don't care what my login name "instills" in you; your words speak for themselves.
You don't see the irony at all in what you are saying? On the one hand you ignore history of open source darwin, quicktime streaming server and other open source initiatives started by Apple
You must be kidding, right? Apple has built OS X on a huge amount of open source software. And I frankly can't think of a single open source initiative started by Apple that wasn't completely self-serving. I'm quite certain that there is no Apple software on my Linux system. Even the Bonjour implementation that came with my desktop contains no Apple code.
We benefit from the fact that Apple is using open source software, because it increases the usage of UNIX-like APIs, but Apple has hardly given anything useful back to the open source community. That's OK--they don't have to as long as they comply with the licenses. But please don't make them out as some kind of "nice company"--they are not. Apple is largely like Microsoft, only that they have better taste and better designers.
ont the other hand you advocate Mono. Mono is a reimplimentation of a MSFT standard.
Yes, and Linux is a reimplementation of an AT&T standard, a nasty monopolist with lots of lawyers if there ever was one. And it hasn't hurt Linux.
What happens when MSFT decides to radically alter.NET? What happens if MSFT decides to abandon.NET?
Then Windows developers will be in a lot of trouble, and Mono developers won't even notice.
Mono desktop applications are, after all, not written using.NET, they are written in C# using Gtk# APIs.
Ummm...why? Because you think that they're "technologically inferior"?
Yes. Unmanaged languages for application development are (finally) on their way out. Unfortunately, Apple's entire platform is based on a huge amount of unmanaged code, with no good migration path to something else.
What Microsoft and Gnome are doing, rewriting the desktop in managed languages, is painful, but it will pay off in years to come.
Yeah, that's the same kind of attitude that came from Macintosh zealots like you a few years ago, when you were seriously arguing that multitasking was bad, Intel sucked, and MacOS was the crowning achievement of desktop computing. What is Apple running now? UNIX on Intel. Now, you're clinging desperately to the few remaining proprietary scraps on Apple.
Nobody uses Mono yet for serious applications with a wide distribution much like.NET
Quite to the contrary: applications like Banshee, F-Spot, and Muine are already an important part of many shipping Linux desktops.
I think you are forgetting a few technologies such as: Bonjour (fairly new), Core Data (new as of Tiger), Core Video/Core Image (new as of Tiger), Core Audio and of course Quartz Extreme/Quartz 2D (latter new as of Tiger).
You're seriously out of the loop if you think any of those technologies are new, don't exist in shipping Windows or Linux systems, or that Apple invented any of the underlying technologies.
What gets me is the portrayal of muslims in the west, as people completely devoid of any sense of humour. It really could not be further from the truth.
You make it sound as if the West were out to portray muslim societies in a distorted way. But it's the way Arab societies present themselves: rules about drab clothes, clerics running the government, and severe penalties for minor transgressions, punctuated by the occasional raving lunatic terrorist on TV.
This is not the way the West traditionally viewed Muslim culture: until the 20th century, the cultures of the Near East were viewed as sensual and mysterious.
Sorry, but the bad image of Muslims is of their own making.
In order to be a reasonable business choice, GMail for domains must support IMAP and (even more importantly) e-mail retention policies. E-mail retention policies both should allow the administrator to set how long E-mail must be retained and after what time E-mail is to be deleted. Furthermore, Google must guarantee that the E-mail is deleted for good.
Okay, so Linux and Windows are based on much older solutions. What's your point?
Oh, stop using weasel words like "based on" (besides, you're wrong). It's not what it's "based on", it's what the platforms actually offer to real-world programmers today:
Linux: Linux kernel, X.org, and Mono. Windows: NT kernel, Avalon, and.NET. OS X: Darwin kernel, Quartz, and Objective-C/Java.
In each category, OS X is technologically behind. It's not a huge problem yet, but Apple really has to do something if they don't want to fall behind again, as they did with their previous OS.
You're forgetting the one choice that no one can deny you, the one choice that is always yours to make: you can refuse to purchase the wares they are offering!
As I was saying, that's the choice you have under a monopoly; it's not the same choice that you are supposed to have in a free market.
That was the same choice people had, say, under the AT&T monopoly. There is a special branch of economics that deals with just that choice.
I mean this in all seriousness and not as a flame. If you're so far gone that you cannot grasp the concept of personal responsiblity, you need some serious help.
I mean this in all seriousness: if you don't grasp the difference between a choice in a monopoly market and the choice in a free market even after someone just explicitly pointed this out, you should probably just give up writing anything altogether.
And if you don't understand why it bothers people when a small group of companies has monopolized and is controlling culture and mass communication, and the only choice they have is to participate in a commercialized mass culture or limit themselves to those few niches of our society where culture can eek out an existence without corporate interference, then you're just an uncultured boor.
Yes: for all their bluster, the Mac software architecture is outdated; Objective C on Mach is a 20 year old solution.
Nevertheless, for my mother, a Mac still is the best solution. It's not even because of the much-touted "usability" of Macs (which I think is largely a myth--my mother barely notices the difference between Gnome and Aqua), it's simply that it's easy to buy a Mac and easy to get support.
Long term, I would like to see Apple move more in the FOSS direction; they are already (sort of) supporting Mono and maybe they'll finally come around to integrating better X11 support into their system. Or, maybe, they'll actually start shipping hardware with a virtualization kernel so that you can quickly switch between Linux, OS X, and Windows on the same hardware. I think if they don't do something, they'll be in trouble.
Yes, Apple zealots vastly exaggerate the build quality, performance, and innovation of Apple products. Nevertheless, Apple generally ends up near the top in customer satisfaction and reliability ratings. Combine that with good styling, good marketing, and decent engineering, and it's no surprise that they are doing well. They don't have to make flawless machines in order to appeal to people and in order to be worth the premium, they just need to be noticeable better than most of the competition in several, and they are that.
Why is the assumption that innovation will be followed by excessive litigation?
The problem is that the innovations that are being patented haven't happened for the most part yet. That is, people rush out and patent ideas for applications of nanotechnology without actually having done the hard work of actually developing them, and that discourages people from making the massive investments of actually making them work.
No, you merely have the illusion of choice: Pepsi vs. Coke, Apple vs. Microsoft, Verizon vs. Sprint vs. T-Mobile, etc. In each case, big players collude to reduce real choice and keep real competitors out of the market. Often, that kind of collusion doesn't even require explicit communication: every one of the big players already knows what's in the best interest of the established players and acts accordingly.
No matter what the media moguls do, the one thing they cannot do is force us to buy their products. We have the power of choice, they do not.
First of all, they can force you to buy their products, through advertising; you theoretically have free will, so in that case, you aren't "forced", but over the population, advertising works and sells stuff that people wouldn't want to buy if they thought about it rationally.
Secondly, there are two kinds of consumer choice. There is consumer choice in a free, competitive market. And then there is consumer choice in a monopoly market, where your only choice is not to consume. The kind of choice you're talking about for DVDs is the latter, and that's not a good choice at all.
Enlightened companies should notice that OpenBSD needs some funding right now & that it would be cheaper to fund them than to have to adopt the support and development of the OpenBSD products they use.
Or, more likely, enlightened companies have done the math and decided they don't care.
Regardless of what motivations RMS has, there is no evidence whatsoever that restricting su to wheel helps security; it may actually hurt it. But that's the problem with computer security: most people don't know anything, they just make things up. Like you.
Nobody is locked into using it, the specs are open, anyone can code a replacement. It's just not easy to produce something of the same quality and security as OpenSSH.
And there is also no need to because of its liberal license. The only problem is that Theo is now complaining, after OpenSSH has become ubiquitous under the current license.
If OpenSSH didn't exist, the ssh 1.3 source would probably have been picked up by GNU and we'd have free GnuSSH, without Theo's whining. Or, maybe, people would be running telnet-over-SSL.
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Vendors like Sun will continue to choose Gnome over KDE, for the simple reason that KDE costs money for non-GPL development.
Thanks: your post tells us all pretty clearly what kind of whiny and unprofessional people are advocating KDE. Thanks for doing such a good job advocating for Gnome.
All technical issues aside, I think a switch to KDE would pretty much kill Linux on the desktop, because all commercial Linux desktop applications would then depend on commercial software from Troll Tech.
Monopolies are not illegal, but the government has the power and the right to regulate them regardless of whether they are being abused.
If Apple is a hardware company, it would make sense for them to support Linux.
Unfortunately, Apple is not a hardware company; they are a brand, and an important part of that brand is OS X.
Apple markets their products to real users, not ultra-geeks. Ultra geeks have already figured out how to boot into Linux. If you haven't, then you probably shouldn't be running Linux. Apple isn't looking to add support costs to some schmuck that doesn't under Linux.
Apple markets to the same people Linux companies market to: desktop users, home users, business users, students, scientists.
What advantage to Mac users have by running Linux on their Mac? And is that advantage a real world, mom & dad advantage?
Same advantage they get from running Windows: access to lots more software that doesn't run, or doesn't run well, natively on OS X.
With Boot Camp, Apple is able to truly work as a replacement for your PC.
Maybe for your PC, but no for my PC. The people that make Mac hardware a replacement for my PC are the Linux distribution developers who spend the time on making Linux work on Mac hardware, often with little support from Apple.
I'd much rather have them release a hypervisor, so that people can run multiple operating systems simultaneously and switch quickly between them.
I doubt we're going to see Linux support form Apple any time soon--they are currently in the denial phase; all big companies seem to go through it when Linux threatens their business. IBM was one of the first companies to get out of it, and it's taken them a few years, but they now have reasonable support for Linux. Sun has gotten out of the denial phase, but they're still hoping they can pull a fast one on Linux. Microsoft is barely out of denial and is making the first signs of accepting Linux as a commercial reality. Apple is still at that stage where they think they can fight Linux with what they think is a "better" product.
programmers using Mono on Linux exist but are few and far between
.NET; but Linux and Windows both have established the foundation on which people can build managed applications, Macintosh does not. Java is the closest Apple comes to a future platform for managed software development, but Java itself is in trouble.
And the same is true for
There also is only a minor fraction of applications talking directly to X or the kernel itself.
And what are you trying to imply here? That the functionality of those components doesn't matter? That it's all in the libraries? Well, you're wrong. Both the Linux kernel and X.org are more advanced, more efficient, and more flexible than their OS X equivalents, and that is user-visible.
As far as I'm concerned people use C++, KDE or Gnome and tons of calls to standard libs
Yes, it's unfortunate that KDE in particular is based on a cross-platform toolkit controlled by a company that attempts to cover Windows, OS X, and Linux with a single toolkit. As a result, KDE has least common denominator functionality and ends up far more bloated than it needs to be. To some degree, that's also true for Gnome, although it's being addressed there.
(read not M$ infested bull).
If you're suggesting that Mono is "M$ infested bull", let me point out that both Linux and OS X are "AT&T infested bull", and that a lot of the Cocoa APIs were ripped off from Xerox. Furthermore, Mono applications usually don't use the MS APIs--they're based on Gnome.
I can't think of a single open source project that was not completely self-serving. You know the old "scratch that itch" saying?
The difference is that when other people scratch their itch, they solve the problems of other people as well; Apple's open source releases don't help anybody other than Apple, and after two decades of this shit from NeXT/Apple, we have to conclude that they're doing it on purpose.
Take Nokia for example. They took Webkit and developed a browser for their mobile device.
Let's be clear here: Apple was forced to release "Webkit" because of the KHTML license, but in typical Apple style, they did so in a form that was useless for the original open source project and they changed the name to suggest (falsely) that it was their contribution.
Tell me something, do you expect people to take you seriously with a name like penguin-collective? Do you think it instils the perception that you are capable of being anything other than a linux fanboy. Collective to me implies a lack of individual free will. Can you think for yourself?
I see: when arguments fail you, you make fun of people's names. I frankly don't care what my login name "instills" in you; your words speak for themselves.
You don't see the irony at all in what you are saying? On the one hand you ignore history of open source darwin, quicktime streaming server and other open source initiatives started by Apple
.NET? What happens if MSFT decides to abandon .NET?
.NET, they are written in C# using Gtk# APIs.
You must be kidding, right? Apple has built OS X on a huge amount of open source software. And I frankly can't think of a single open source initiative started by Apple that wasn't completely self-serving. I'm quite certain that there is no Apple software on my Linux system. Even the Bonjour implementation that came with my desktop contains no Apple code.
We benefit from the fact that Apple is using open source software, because it increases the usage of UNIX-like APIs, but Apple has hardly given anything useful back to the open source community. That's OK--they don't have to as long as they comply with the licenses. But please don't make them out as some kind of "nice company"--they are not. Apple is largely like Microsoft, only that they have better taste and better designers.
ont the other hand you advocate Mono. Mono is a reimplimentation of a MSFT standard.
Yes, and Linux is a reimplementation of an AT&T standard, a nasty monopolist with lots of lawyers if there ever was one. And it hasn't hurt Linux.
What happens when MSFT decides to radically alter
Then Windows developers will be in a lot of trouble, and Mono developers won't even notice.
Mono desktop applications are, after all, not written using
Ummm...why? Because you think that they're "technologically inferior"?
Yes. Unmanaged languages for application development are (finally) on their way out. Unfortunately, Apple's entire platform is based on a huge amount of unmanaged code, with no good migration path to something else.
What Microsoft and Gnome are doing, rewriting the desktop in managed languages, is painful, but it will pay off in years to come.
Yeah, that's the same kind of attitude that came from Macintosh zealots like you a few years ago, when you were seriously arguing that multitasking was bad, Intel sucked, and MacOS was the crowning achievement of desktop computing. What is Apple running now? UNIX on Intel. Now, you're clinging desperately to the few remaining proprietary scraps on Apple.
Nobody uses Mono yet for serious applications with a wide distribution much like .NET
Quite to the contrary: applications like Banshee, F-Spot, and Muine are already an important part of many shipping Linux desktops.
I think you are forgetting a few technologies such as: Bonjour (fairly new), Core Data (new as of Tiger), Core Video/Core Image (new as of Tiger), Core Audio and of course Quartz Extreme/Quartz 2D (latter new as of Tiger).
You're seriously out of the loop if you think any of those technologies are new, don't exist in shipping Windows or Linux systems, or that Apple invented any of the underlying technologies.
What gets me is the portrayal of muslims in the west, as people completely devoid of any sense of humour. It really could not be further from the truth.
You make it sound as if the West were out to portray muslim societies in a distorted way. But it's the way Arab societies present themselves: rules about drab clothes, clerics running the government, and severe penalties for minor transgressions, punctuated by the occasional raving lunatic terrorist on TV.
This is not the way the West traditionally viewed Muslim culture: until the 20th century, the cultures of the Near East were viewed as sensual and mysterious.
Sorry, but the bad image of Muslims is of their own making.
In order to be a reasonable business choice, GMail for domains must support IMAP and (even more importantly) e-mail retention policies. E-mail retention policies both should allow the administrator to set how long E-mail must be retained and after what time E-mail is to be deleted. Furthermore, Google must guarantee that the E-mail is deleted for good.
Okay, so Linux and Windows are based on much older solutions. What's your point?
.NET.
Oh, stop using weasel words like "based on" (besides, you're wrong). It's not what it's "based on", it's what the platforms actually offer to real-world programmers today:
Linux: Linux kernel, X.org, and Mono.
Windows: NT kernel, Avalon, and
OS X: Darwin kernel, Quartz, and Objective-C/Java.
In each category, OS X is technologically behind. It's not a huge problem yet, but Apple really has to do something if they don't want to fall behind again, as they did with their previous OS.
You're forgetting the one choice that no one can deny you, the one choice that is always yours to make: you can refuse to purchase the wares they are offering!
As I was saying, that's the choice you have under a monopoly; it's not the same choice that you are supposed to have in a free market.
That was the same choice people had, say, under the AT&T monopoly. There is a special branch of economics that deals with just that choice.
I mean this in all seriousness and not as a flame. If you're so far gone that you cannot grasp the concept of personal responsiblity, you need some serious help.
I mean this in all seriousness: if you don't grasp the difference between a choice in a monopoly market and the choice in a free market even after someone just explicitly pointed this out, you should probably just give up writing anything altogether.
And if you don't understand why it bothers people when a small group of companies has monopolized and is controlling culture and mass communication, and the only choice they have is to participate in a commercialized mass culture or limit themselves to those few niches of our society where culture can eek out an existence without corporate interference, then you're just an uncultured boor.
Yes: for all their bluster, the Mac software architecture is outdated; Objective C on Mach is a 20 year old solution.
Nevertheless, for my mother, a Mac still is the best solution. It's not even because of the much-touted "usability" of Macs (which I think is largely a myth--my mother barely notices the difference between Gnome and Aqua), it's simply that it's easy to buy a Mac and easy to get support.
Long term, I would like to see Apple move more in the FOSS direction; they are already (sort of) supporting Mono and maybe they'll finally come around to integrating better X11 support into their system. Or, maybe, they'll actually start shipping hardware with a virtualization kernel so that you can quickly switch between Linux, OS X, and Windows on the same hardware. I think if they don't do something, they'll be in trouble.
Yes, Apple zealots vastly exaggerate the build quality, performance, and innovation of Apple products. Nevertheless, Apple generally ends up near the top in customer satisfaction and reliability ratings. Combine that with good styling, good marketing, and decent engineering, and it's no surprise that they are doing well. They don't have to make flawless machines in order to appeal to people and in order to be worth the premium, they just need to be noticeable better than most of the competition in several, and they are that.
(Here is a recent PC World ranking.)
Why is the assumption that innovation will be followed by excessive litigation?
The problem is that the innovations that are being patented haven't happened for the most part yet. That is, people rush out and patent ideas for applications of nanotechnology without actually having done the hard work of actually developing them, and that discourages people from making the massive investments of actually making them work.
We have the power of choice, they do not.
No, you merely have the illusion of choice: Pepsi vs. Coke, Apple vs. Microsoft, Verizon vs. Sprint vs. T-Mobile, etc. In each case, big players collude to reduce real choice and keep real competitors out of the market. Often, that kind of collusion doesn't even require explicit communication: every one of the big players already knows what's in the best interest of the established players and acts accordingly.
No matter what the media moguls do, the one thing they cannot do is force us to buy their products. We have the power of choice, they do not.
First of all, they can force you to buy their products, through advertising; you theoretically have free will, so in that case, you aren't "forced", but over the population, advertising works and sells stuff that people wouldn't want to buy if they thought about it rationally.
Secondly, there are two kinds of consumer choice. There is consumer choice in a free, competitive market. And then there is consumer choice in a monopoly market, where your only choice is not to consume. The kind of choice you're talking about for DVDs is the latter, and that's not a good choice at all.
Enlightened companies should notice that OpenBSD needs some funding right now & that it would be cheaper to fund them than to have to adopt the support and development of the OpenBSD products they use.
Or, more likely, enlightened companies have done the math and decided they don't care.
Regardless of what motivations RMS has, there is no evidence whatsoever that restricting su to wheel helps security; it may actually hurt it. But that's the problem with computer security: most people don't know anything, they just make things up. Like you.
Nobody is locked into using it, the specs are open, anyone can code a replacement. It's just not easy to produce something of the same quality and security as OpenSSH.
And there is also no need to because of its liberal license. The only problem is that Theo is now complaining, after OpenSSH has become ubiquitous under the current license.
If OpenSSH didn't exist, the ssh 1.3 source would probably have been picked up by GNU and we'd have free GnuSSH, without Theo's whining. Or, maybe, people would be running telnet-over-SSL.