While nothing "just works", I have worked with Windows and Linux as my full time desktop OS for years, and in comparison you just spend a lot less time fighting the software on OSX.
I just did an upgrade from 10.4 to 10.6, it took 37 minutes. Everything from my printer settings, user accounts, password/key/certificate chains to known WiFi networks just kept working. I've attempted Linux or Windows upgrades in the past, but it was never so smooth, and usually I ended up doing a full install anyway. And Apple officially only supports upgrading from 10.5 to 10.6, so they didn't put any specific effort into making this transition smooth, even though they have admitted it works.
What I've understood, is that middlemanagment is basically in charge and more worried about defending its own turf than the overall company. There were some interesting articles about it on/. a month or so back, with former MS employees commenting on what the biggest problems within MS were. Basically there are two big blocks in MS, for Windows and Office, and everything else and new has an uphill battle within the company, even before it gets out into the public at large.
There is nothing familiar about the iPhone interface, but it's a raging success.
Why, because it has a good usability design. Especially, it get's rid of the desktop metaphore and uses the appliance metaphore instead, where the device is only one thing at a time, but tries to have the entire user interface be that appliance. When you think about it, it's a very strong and natural interface, and solves a lot of problems people have in current day-to-day use of not just computers, but all kinds of devices.
Most people get lost in devices like VCRs, stereos, TVs and computers because without training it's hard to figure out that a button does different things depending on what other buttons you have pushed before it. The iPhone UI tries to solve this problem by replacing the buttons.
The reason Apple fights jailbreaking is simple: They have realized that their most important asset is their brand, and they will do anything to protect it.
Why does this relate to jailbreaking? Well, remember when all those jailbroken iPhones got rickrolled a few months ago? If you read the media coverage, in most cases the detail got lost that it only concerned jailbroken phones with a badly configured sshd on them. It made Apple look bad because iPhones could be rickrolled. That's the kind of news Apple is fighting, and until you can make certain that those kinds of things do not happen on jailbroken iPhones, Apple will keep fighting it out of fear of bad publicity.
I'm not terribly familiar with the US mobile carrier market, but I could see two reasons for Apple to want to have the iPhone be GSM based: - Everyone uses GSM, well, at least 80% of the world, making it easier to sell the device. (even through grey channels to countries they are not offically available yet) - I think GSM is perceived as more modern, making it something Apple wants to align itself with.
Either way, obviously iPhones would be way better if Apple didn't restrict development and distribution of 3rd party apps.
I think there's two reasons why this isn't happening: - I don't think the network providers like the idea, as it might lead to trojans spamming their network. - Apple certainly likes to have control, as they have realized that the most important thing they own is their brand, and they are protecting their image at any cost.*
*) Take for example the Rickrolling that happened on jailbroken phones a few months ago. If you read most media reporting on it, the detail that it could only happen to jailbroken phones got lost. It's the kind of news that Apple is desperately trying to avoid and the reason why they keep a lid on the store and fight jailbreaking.
What they have done is write a very thorough 32 page document explaining why internet filtering should not happen. It centers around a couple of arguments: - It's very expensive - It introduces single points of failure and bottlenecks, doing the opposite of what an ISP should be doing - It can't work without also blocking a lot of legal content, no matter what method you choose - Blocking legal content and censorship is against the idea of free speech, but more specifically the Dutch constitution and the European treaty on human rights.
It's really well written, I wish there would be an English version. It's well worth the read.
They have sent this to all Dutch political parties and the committee for copyright legislation. I was very happy to see them get involved in this discussion. We're having national elections next june, and it looks like at least some political parties are picking this up and making it a point in the elections.
Sorry, I don't understand what Nvidia has to do with Linux not having a proper API for this. If Linux has a proper API, you could fault Nvidia for not supporting it in their driver (or Intel, AMD/Ati,...). But as I understand the problem, it's Linux that doesn't have the API. I have no clue why you're ranting at Nvidia for Linux not having an API. Unless I missed something and Linus has renamed himself.
Do Americans really live in this permanent state of fear?
I just hope I can live my entire life in a country that is safe enough that I will never even have to think about owning a weapon as self defence mechanism.
My country (The Netherlands) isn't entirely safe, but according to the statistics bureau (www.cbs.nl) about 60 people a year die from firearms. Compare this with the state of New York, which has about 750 and has a similar number of inhabitants and population density. With numbers more than ten times higher than in my country, it ranks #46 on the list of USA states: http://www.statemaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-death-rate-per-100-000
With those numbers I'd argue that having a gun might make you feel more safe, but actually has the opposite effect if everyone has one.
Their control of the App Store and anti-jailbreaking measures are because of one reason: Apple wants to avoid bad publicity. When there was this rash of rickrolled iPhones a few months back, most media reported it, but very few mentioned that it only affected jail broken phones. Apple wants to avoid getting into the news like that, because their brand is the most important asset they have.
Which is probably the exact reason why Apple is both controlling the App Store and making it hard to jailbreak iPhones. Their image is everything, their primary mission is to avoid bad PR.
Some of the quotes from the NYT article: "The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980."
Or from the tax foundation article on Gross Income: All Taxpayers (141,070,971) $8,798,500,000,000 Top 1% (1,410,710) $2,008,259,000,000 Bottom 50% (70,535,485) $1,078,287
Or the top 1% of incomes earned about 25% of all income in the USA in 2007. Also they earned about a 100 times more per person than the bottom 50%.
To me it shows the American Dream is only for the lucky few.
Then do your part. I've just sent an e-mail to my representative in the EU parliament congratulating on proposing this bill and voting for it. Make sure that if they d things like this they get a positive response from the people that matter most to politicians: voters.
Some problems can be verified, but a lot can not. Similarly you can write verifiable software, but most real-world software does not fall into that small category.
I've read a book a while back, although I forgot the title. It concerns itself with software that controls an elevator. The professor who wrote the book originally proved that a piece of software he wrote during his master thesis, is the optimal solution for controlling one elevator. Then he went on in his PhD to work on a system with 2 elevator cars. He thought he had cracked it by the time he got his PhD, but in the 30 years since, students have continuously been finding errors in his theory of the 2 car elevator problem. He now thinks that a solution to the 2 car problem can not be completely proven to be correct with current methods, even though the single car problem is well understood and was done 30+ years ago in his master thesis.
Unfortunately I had borrowed the book and I do no longer remember the title. It was an interesting read, if a bit dated because I think it was from the nineties.
And then the problem of elevator car control is probably considered a simple problem by most.
What amazes me so much about today's automated fly-by-wire airplanes, is that it seems most accidents happen because of a pilot failing to notice something or other about an autopilot in operation. At least that seems to be the most common thing in those documentaries you see on TV.
I think if anything, aircarft designers need to have a good hard look at the UI design of autopilots.
One thing that I think should change in the training of pilots, is that they should turn off any autopilots at the first sign of trouble. If one of them utters the words "What's it doing?", then they should turn it off and concentrate on flying, but it often ends up to be a game "guess what the autopilot is doing", and we end up hearing about the cases that the pilots never figure it out.
Pah, from this side of the Atlantic Ocean, it looked like Reagan/Bush 1 were big spenders, Clinton then fixed the budget, and then Bush 2 spent money in a way that paled even the Reagan years. http://bethemedia.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/deficits.jpg
I suppose for most of them, they would not survive without this support.
Given that apparently a large part of the USA populace is in favour of cutting Medicare spending, does this mean that they would like to see these 35 million or so people die?
That would be about 1 in 7 Americans, probably a lot of them children and elderly, who are not able to provide for themselves trough a paying job?
Or am I not understanding this Medicare program, and is it mainly spent on cosmetic surgery or something?
Compare UK: $1764 per capita USA: $4631 per capita
Providing free/cheap health care to your entire population is in the end much cheaper than only providing it to those who can pay, because it leads to a much healthier population, which results in lower hospital bills.
Compare UK: $1764 per capita USA: $4631 per capita
Providing free/cheap health care to your entire population is in the end much cheaper than only providing it to those who can pay, because it leads to a much healthier population, which results in lower hospital bills.
Though this might be a contributing factor, the medical education is organised in a similar way in most western countries. Still in the USA health care costs about double of what it costs in countries like the UK, Germany or Sweden.
Compare UK: $1764 per capita USA: $4631 per capita
This huge difference is mainly due to other factors, not the way medical specialists are organised as that is very similar in both countries. It's mainly due to something that the western-european countries have figured out a while ago:
Providing free/cheap health care to your entire population is in the end much cheaper than only providing it to those who can pay, because it leads to a much healthier population, which results in lower hospital bills.
I can even name a commandline application: The scripting language Glish.
And I often have had problems where I had to change things in make or config files and then recompile.
If you think that an advanced linux program, using sound, (3d) graphics and such, will have a binary that will just run on any distro you take, is a dream.
And then I'm not talking architectures, like i386 vs x86_64 vs PowerPC and such. (something OSX does solve btw).
Sure, if you have the source, and can tweak things, you can get anything running. If the binary you have is static linked, you might also be in luck. But you're saying "any open source desktop linux application". Goodluck getting something to run that's been dynamically linked against Qt 2.1 for example, like an old Kylix application. Or something funny like Netscape navigator 3.
What will happen, is that either applications will use the lowest common denominator, like the G1 and will not use any features beyond what that supports, or they will write applications for a specific popular model, and if you have something else you're out of luck.
I don't even know if an application for Android 1.0 will run on Android 1.5 or 2.0?
I don't think the power of open source is even going to make a real difference. We'll see some things for a few dominant models, but if you have a less popular model, you'll either have to modify each app you want to run yourself, or you're out of luck.
There are many applications that have some less-than-fully-dressed women (and men!) in them, what to think of apps like "Funny Pics" or "LOLcats"? Soon we'll only have Burqua clad women in the AppStore?
Sure, make a separate Adult/18+ category or something, I'm fine with that.
I'm not saying this because I don't want to protect children or offend any women. I just think that there is no way to consistently apply any criteria beyond "not showing genitals", without banning a lot more apps than they currently have. And then the inequality of not banning SI or PB added on top of that.
And given that there is a browser on the system, Google-Images is only two clicks away.
It's like banning all apps that have references to gambling, smoking or driving irresponsible. This is just beyond silly.
And I'm saying that as someone who often defends Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
While nothing "just works", I have worked with Windows and Linux as my full time desktop OS for years, and in comparison you just spend a lot less time fighting the software on OSX.
I just did an upgrade from 10.4 to 10.6, it took 37 minutes. Everything from my printer settings, user accounts, password/key/certificate chains to known WiFi networks just kept working. I've attempted Linux or Windows upgrades in the past, but it was never so smooth, and usually I ended up doing a full install anyway. And Apple officially only supports upgrading from 10.5 to 10.6, so they didn't put any specific effort into making this transition smooth, even though they have admitted it works.
What I've understood, is that middlemanagment is basically in charge and more worried about defending its own turf than the overall company. There were some interesting articles about it on /. a month or so back, with former MS employees commenting on what the biggest problems within MS were.
Basically there are two big blocks in MS, for Windows and Office, and everything else and new has an uphill battle within the company, even before it gets out into the public at large.
Very well said.
There is nothing familiar about the iPhone interface, but it's a raging success.
Why, because it has a good usability design. Especially, it get's rid of the desktop metaphore and uses the appliance metaphore instead, where the device is only one thing at a time, but tries to have the entire user interface be that appliance. When you think about it, it's a very strong and natural interface, and solves a lot of problems people have in current day-to-day use of not just computers, but all kinds of devices.
Most people get lost in devices like VCRs, stereos, TVs and computers because without training it's hard to figure out that a button does different things depending on what other buttons you have pushed before it. The iPhone UI tries to solve this problem by replacing the buttons.
The reason Apple fights jailbreaking is simple: They have realized that their most important asset is their brand, and they will do anything to protect it.
Why does this relate to jailbreaking? Well, remember when all those jailbroken iPhones got rickrolled a few months ago? If you read the media coverage, in most cases the detail got lost that it only concerned jailbroken phones with a badly configured sshd on them. It made Apple look bad because iPhones could be rickrolled. That's the kind of news Apple is fighting, and until you can make certain that those kinds of things do not happen on jailbroken iPhones, Apple will keep fighting it out of fear of bad publicity.
I'm not terribly familiar with the US mobile carrier market, but I could see two reasons for Apple to want to have the iPhone be GSM based:
- Everyone uses GSM, well, at least 80% of the world, making it easier to sell the device. (even through grey channels to countries they are not offically available yet)
- I think GSM is perceived as more modern, making it something Apple wants to align itself with.
Either way, obviously iPhones would be way better if Apple didn't restrict development and distribution of 3rd party apps.
I think there's two reasons why this isn't happening:
- I don't think the network providers like the idea, as it might lead to trojans spamming their network.
- Apple certainly likes to have control, as they have realized that the most important thing they own is their brand, and they are protecting their image at any cost.*
*) Take for example the Rickrolling that happened on jailbroken phones a few months ago. If you read most media reporting on it, the detail that it could only happen to jailbroken phones got lost. It's the kind of news that Apple is desperately trying to avoid and the reason why they keep a lid on the store and fight jailbreaking.
In related news, I want to add that the biggest and oldest ISP of The Netherlands (XS4ALL) has also taken a stand against internet filtering. Unfortunately the site and documents are only available in Dutch:
http://www.xs4all.nl/overxs4all/maatschappelijk/dossiers/downloaden.php
What they have done is write a very thorough 32 page document explaining why internet filtering should not happen. It centers around a couple of arguments:
- It's very expensive
- It introduces single points of failure and bottlenecks, doing the opposite of what an ISP should be doing
- It can't work without also blocking a lot of legal content, no matter what method you choose
- Blocking legal content and censorship is against the idea of free speech, but more specifically the Dutch constitution and the European treaty on human rights.
It's really well written, I wish there would be an English version. It's well worth the read.
They have sent this to all Dutch political parties and the committee for copyright legislation. I was very happy to see them get involved in this discussion. We're having national elections next june, and it looks like at least some political parties are picking this up and making it a point in the elections.
Sorry, I don't understand what Nvidia has to do with Linux not having a proper API for this. If Linux has a proper API, you could fault Nvidia for not supporting it in their driver (or Intel, AMD/Ati,...). But as I understand the problem, it's Linux that doesn't have the API. I have no clue why you're ranting at Nvidia for Linux not having an API. Unless I missed something and Linus has renamed himself.
I don't understand your post.
Do Americans really live in this permanent state of fear?
I just hope I can live my entire life in a country that is safe enough that I will never even have to think about owning a weapon as self defence mechanism.
In general I'd argue that the USA's weapon's laws make is less safe than similar more restrictive countries.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir_percap-crime-murders-firearms-per-capita
Murders with firearms:
United States: 0.0279271 per 1,000 people
Canada: 0.00502972 per 1,000 people
United Kingdom: 0.00102579 per 1,000 people
Unfortunately this one doesn't show the more civilized countries:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_gun_vio_hom_fir_hom_rat_per_100_pop-rate-per-100-000-pop
My country (The Netherlands) isn't entirely safe, but according to the statistics bureau (www.cbs.nl) about 60 people a year die from firearms. Compare this with the state of New York, which has about 750 and has a similar number of inhabitants and population density. With numbers more than ten times higher than in my country, it ranks #46 on the list of USA states:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-death-rate-per-100-000
With those numbers I'd argue that having a gun might make you feel more safe, but actually has the opposite effect if everyone has one.
Their control of the App Store and anti-jailbreaking measures are because of one reason: Apple wants to avoid bad publicity.
When there was this rash of rickrolled iPhones a few months back, most media reported it, but very few mentioned that it only affected jail broken phones. Apple wants to avoid getting into the news like that, because their brand is the most important asset they have.
Which is probably the exact reason why Apple is both controlling the App Store and making it hard to jailbreak iPhones. Their image is everything, their primary mission is to avoid bad PR.
$1,078,287 should of course be $1,078,287,000,000
I missed that one even with Preview...
I agree with the point you're trying to make, although I like numbers, so here there are some:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/29tax.html
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html
Some of the quotes from the NYT article:
"The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980."
Or from the tax foundation article on Gross Income:
All Taxpayers (141,070,971) $8,798,500,000,000
Top 1% (1,410,710) $2,008,259,000,000
Bottom 50% (70,535,485) $1,078,287
Or the top 1% of incomes earned about 25% of all income in the USA in 2007. Also they earned about a 100 times more per person than the bottom 50%.
To me it shows the American Dream is only for the lucky few.
Then do your part. I've just sent an e-mail to my representative in the EU parliament congratulating on proposing this bill and voting for it. Make sure that if they d things like this they get a positive response from the people that matter most to politicians: voters.
It also depends on the problem.
Some problems can be verified, but a lot can not. Similarly you can write verifiable software, but most real-world software does not fall into that small category.
I've read a book a while back, although I forgot the title. It concerns itself with software that controls an elevator. The professor who wrote the book originally proved that a piece of software he wrote during his master thesis, is the optimal solution for controlling one elevator.
Then he went on in his PhD to work on a system with 2 elevator cars. He thought he had cracked it by the time he got his PhD, but in the 30 years since, students have continuously been finding errors in his theory of the 2 car elevator problem. He now thinks that a solution to the 2 car problem can not be completely proven to be correct with current methods, even though the single car problem is well understood and was done 30+ years ago in his master thesis.
Unfortunately I had borrowed the book and I do no longer remember the title. It was an interesting read, if a bit dated because I think it was from the nineties.
And then the problem of elevator car control is probably considered a simple problem by most.
What amazes me so much about today's automated fly-by-wire airplanes, is that it seems most accidents happen because of a pilot failing to notice something or other about an autopilot in operation. At least that seems to be the most common thing in those documentaries you see on TV.
I think if anything, aircarft designers need to have a good hard look at the UI design of autopilots.
One thing that I think should change in the training of pilots, is that they should turn off any autopilots at the first sign of trouble. If one of them utters the words "What's it doing?", then they should turn it off and concentrate on flying, but it often ends up to be a game "guess what the autopilot is doing", and we end up hearing about the cases that the pilots never figure it out.
Pah, from this side of the Atlantic Ocean, it looked like Reagan/Bush 1 were big spenders, Clinton then fixed the budget, and then Bush 2 spent money in a way that paled even the Reagan years.
http://bethemedia.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/deficits.jpg
Or just get rid of the stupid two party winner-takes-all system. It makes it hard to have any true reform, because the choices are too limited.
I need a bit more explanation than this.
Take for example this Medicare thing. It seems about 35-40 million Americans depend on it.
http://www.kff.org/medicare/upload/7305-04-2.pdf
I suppose for most of them, they would not survive without this support.
Given that apparently a large part of the USA populace is in favour of cutting Medicare spending, does this mean that they would like to see these 35 million or so people die?
That would be about 1 in 7 Americans, probably a lot of them children and elderly, who are not able to provide for themselves trough a paying job?
Or am I not understanding this Medicare program, and is it mainly spent on cosmetic surgery or something?
I've already posted this twice in this discussion, but most people only seem to believe this when they see the numbers, so here goes again:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_hea_car_fun_tot_per_cap-care-funding-total-per-capita [nationmaster.com]
Compare
UK: $1764 per capita
USA: $4631 per capita
Providing free/cheap health care to your entire population is in the end much cheaper than only providing it to those who can pay, because it leads to a much healthier population, which results in lower hospital bills.
Exactly, as I already wrote in another post:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_hea_car_fun_tot_per_cap-care-funding-total-per-capita [nationmaster.com]
Compare
UK: $1764 per capita
USA: $4631 per capita
Providing free/cheap health care to your entire population is in the end much cheaper than only providing it to those who can pay, because it leads to a much healthier population, which results in lower hospital bills.
Though this might be a contributing factor, the medical education is organised in a similar way in most western countries. Still in the USA health care costs about double of what it costs in countries like the UK, Germany or Sweden.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_hea_car_fun_tot_per_cap-care-funding-total-per-capita
Compare
UK: $1764 per capita
USA: $4631 per capita
This huge difference is mainly due to other factors, not the way medical specialists are organised as that is very similar in both countries. It's mainly due to something that the western-european countries have figured out a while ago:
Providing free/cheap health care to your entire population is in the end much cheaper than only providing it to those who can pay, because it leads to a much healthier population, which results in lower hospital bills.
I can even name a commandline application: The scripting language Glish.
And I often have had problems where I had to change things in make or config files and then recompile.
If you think that an advanced linux program, using sound, (3d) graphics and such, will have a binary that will just run on any distro you take, is a dream.
And then I'm not talking architectures, like i386 vs x86_64 vs PowerPC and such. (something OSX does solve btw).
Sure, if you have the source, and can tweak things, you can get anything running. If the binary you have is static linked, you might also be in luck. But you're saying "any open source desktop linux application". Goodluck getting something to run that's been dynamically linked against Qt 2.1 for example, like an old Kylix application. Or something funny like Netscape navigator 3.
What will happen, is that either applications will use the lowest common denominator, like the G1 and will not use any features beyond what that supports, or they will write applications for a specific popular model, and if you have something else you're out of luck.
I don't even know if an application for Android 1.0 will run on Android 1.5 or 2.0?
I don't think the power of open source is even going to make a real difference. We'll see some things for a few dominant models, but if you have a less popular model, you'll either have to modify each app you want to run yourself, or you're out of luck.
Where to draw the line?
There are many applications that have some less-than-fully-dressed women (and men!) in them, what to think of apps like "Funny Pics" or "LOLcats"? Soon we'll only have Burqua clad women in the AppStore?
Sure, make a separate Adult/18+ category or something, I'm fine with that.
I'm not saying this because I don't want to protect children or offend any women. I just think that there is no way to consistently apply any criteria beyond "not showing genitals", without banning a lot more apps than they currently have. And then the inequality of not banning SI or PB added on top of that.
And given that there is a browser on the system, Google-Images is only two clicks away.
It's like banning all apps that have references to gambling, smoking or driving irresponsible. This is just beyond silly.
And I'm saying that as someone who often defends Apple.