Speaking of mediocre, I made some pretty documents with a little bit of text and a few graphics in KWord in KDE on a Debian system (up-to-date) and I was happy. Things looked nice, all antialiased, Kword was simple and clear to use and now I had to print them. But our system doesn't have a printer, so I printed them out to a pdf.... nope, error. Printed them to a postscript.. no errors except the graphics were missing chunks out of them. Went to the print preview, same glitches. So, I figured I'd open them in OpenOffice which prints to ps just nicely. OpenOffice doesn't support Kword docs.. not too suprising... I try to save as an rtf, the graphics aren't included.. as html.. no graphics... Okay, the docs are simple enough, I'll ermake them in OpenOffice. I'll just copy and paste the text and reimport the graphics. I can't copy and paste between the apps... what??? try with the menus, nope....
So, maybe Kword just sucks and no one told me and they included it anyway, and I know this isn't a problem with linux as an OS, but I have seen things like this again and again with linux as a desktop systems. Things are half implemented yet used anyways. Now maybe there is an issue with Klipper and it isn't set up correctly or something that one of you could fix, but the point is that I shouldn't need to fix a clipboard system.
Redhat 8 came with some neat games though. But that's why you use Windows, not Linux.
Apple should include a workspace manager in the Dock though. I wonder if they're working on that for Panther.
However randomly programs open in the wrong workspace (at first I thought they weren't opening at all.) Hmm. Just like Apple's been "dying" for years, Linux has been "exploding on to the marketplace and taking over Windows/Apple/whatever" for years. Still waiting...
" Um. WinAMP is probably the most popular mp3 player ever. (iTunes is popular with Mac people, but 100% of Mac people is nothing compared to even 10% of Windows people"
its only because its the only sensible choice, there isnt anything better, WMP has a laughable HUGE gui which is quite frankly insane, mediamatch jukebox is unstable and generally silly, sonique is dead, kjofol is dead, so bascailly the only thing worth using is winamp2 because winamp3 is a bloated pile of garbage although personally winamp(2) is dire when you sit it next to itunes i mean the damn thing hasnt even got a library all you have is a single playlist window so you cant manage music at all really, winamp3 ntroduced a library thing but its messy and badly designed and doesnt evne come close to getting sat next to itunes. Mac users dont know how well off they are with itunes sometimes
This whole debate reminds be about the Illuminati in Deus Ex. They believed that the best idea would always triumph, and waited in complete belief and acceptance that the day where they would triumph would come quickly.
Of course, their idealism was not pragmatic, and they were sidelined by other groups who were more realistic about the world.
Much of the time blowing stuff up (like linux with windows) wins more users than making something which is truely better (Mac OS X). Such is the way of the world.
Apparently, I'm not alone in this assessment, because VMS has a significant share of the uptime-critical market (and a good chunk of the high-performance computing market, because its clustering technology has been substantially better than anyone else's for over a decade now), and UNIX and UNIX-like OS' dominate markets where reliability and efficiency are desirable, but not critical.
Here you think they're doing well because they're hanging onto their most valuable customers: a classic mistake.
No, you missed my point: VMS is better suited to the uptime-critical market and the high-performance computing market. That is true regardless of the factors you cite, and regardless of whether VMS is "doing well." Compaq almost killed it, in fact, until their customers threatened to riot - that's not generally a sign that the platform is "doing well," especially by your marketing-driven definition. But it is a sign that it's very well suited to the tasks it's used for, and that's the only factor that should be considered when making technological purchases. The fact that the core audience has shrunk to the people who can't adopt an inferior solution regardless of the amount of hype behind it is unfortunate, certainly, but in that case the problem lies with the people who blindly adopt inappropriate solutions because ComputerWorld ran a headline story about it last month.
All the marketing-speak you're trying to counter with is, to me, cowardly and irrelevant. If a product is better for a given thing, it should be used. The fact that mediocre technologies succeed on hype means nothing to me, except that hype should be countered, and the people spreading it exposed, at every opportunity.
This still has nothing to do with the MIT vs. NJ argument. You're talking about marketing, and evangelism (which I have a few unflattering theories about myself).
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Linux is a disruptive technology (I recommend the book of the same name, which doesn't directly address Linux) that steals the customers you least want first. However, in time it grows and steals so many of your customers that those that remain start to switch from the "better" product simply because of the costs of staying in a niche (assuming that the "better" product isn't simply overtaken in quality as the market focus shifts).
Yeah, UNIX did the same thing before. Question: Is this desirable? Inevitable is a cop-out. Is it desirable? Is there any reason to work for it?
Also, all this stuff about "disruptive technologies" ignores the fact that market adoption very seldom has anything to do with any technical matters whatsoever. MS got where they are by piggybacking on a monopoly.
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I would also argue against the idea that C++ evolved C closer to a "perfect" solution. Objective-C did that, New Jersey-style, and look where it went. C++ exemplifies neither the MIT approach nor the New Jersey approach; it exemplifies design by committee and nothing else. It certainly isn't easy to write a compiler for!
C++ is not "perfect", it's "worse". But then if it isn't "better" than Obj-C then why is Obj-C such a niche technology today, even with NeXT's, then Apple's championing (without which it would have died a lonely death)?
You just made my point, which is that the MIT vs. NJ argument is irrelevant to your point. Objective-C implements what's necessary elegantly, and it's shipped with GNU's compiler suite for years and years now. Nobody owns it. C++ tries to do everything - it reminds me of PL/I, the great shining example of the MIT philosophy - and it's so complicated that no fully standard-compliant version exists, so it's hampered its own attempts at becoming viral. By the standards of the essay you linked to, Objective-C is "worse." It doesn't even try to be comprehensive or complete. And it lost.
If you declare the winner to be the "worse" one, you're begging the question.
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The design-by-commitee stuff is by-the-by, it was designed to ride upon the virus of C just like Unix was. The crux however is not technological in this case but psychological as C programmers wanted to keep on writing C while claiming to be doing OOP because they used a C++ compiler. No one wanted to really embrace OO, but no-one wanted to admit that either. (I am aware that plain C compiles as Obj-C btw)
In other words, you're aware that you don't have a point. C++ is not the only way, nor the best way, nor even the "worse" way, to extend C into an OOP-but-not-really language. It's just the one that got traction, for reasons that might have something to do with psychology, and might have something to do with MS hyping the hell out of it.
All the marketing-speak you're trying to counter with is, to me, cowardly and irrelevant. If a product is better for a given thing, it should be used. The fact that mediocre technologies succeed on hype means nothing to me, except that hype should be countered, and the people spreading it exposed, at every opportunity.
...
This still has nothing to do with the MIT vs. NJ argument. You're talking about marketing, and evangelism (which I have a few unflattering theories about myself). Also, all this stuff about "disruptive technologies" ignores the fact that market adoption very seldom has anything to do with any technical matters whatsoever. MS got where they are by piggybacking on a monopoly.
I'm not talking about hype, evangelism, or marketing (at least not in the sense that you mean) and you're still missing two important points.
Firstly, most of these things cannot be compared in terms of better and worse unless you decide on a goal. Once you set the goal you'll find that some people will disagree with it and will choose your worse as their better. The lack of one "winner" that suits everyone is a key realization. Especially as disruptive technologies often allow you to achieve a different goal from the incumbent technology, so that something that is overall worse can be significantly better in some, usually low-end, niches.
You can write them off as media-led-sheep but for many people/situations Linuxis the right answer. It just so happens that to begin with it was the right answer for people looking for the cheap and cheerful option. People wanting to run a unix like machine on the cheap, using PC hardware they had lying around. For hobbiests and the like.
Then time passed. And this is the second thing your missing, the fourth dimension. Something that was worse can become better both for intrinsic reasons if large amount of money and intelligence is expended to improve the product, or for extrinsic reasons if there are suddenly thousands of techies with relevant experience filling the job market.
I take it you think the last reason is 'cheating' in some way and we should all used elegantly over-engineered products for everything. It's not gonna happen though. Linux is going to happen, and it is going to happen *because of*, not despite, the very things that you dislike about it.
As for your last sentence. MS got where they are by piggybacking on a disruptive technology (PC's) that the incumbent (minicomputers) didn't see coming. Or rather they did and then dismissed it in almost exactly the same terms you are dismissing Linux with. It's a toy, not tested, not proven, not powerful enough, low-end, can it do this?, can it do that?, whoops! where did our market go?
Webcore is opensource but it is being put in a commercial product, OmniWeb.
Quote:
You said:
As long as there is an agreement not to use the Apple code for commercial gain I don't see how it would hurt Apple, it could only help them and the open source community.
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I said:
If you can't use it for commercial gain it's not open source; it's part of the definition. #6 to be precise.
If you can't ... it's not opensource.
If you can ... it is.
Half of OS X (which I remember paying for more than once) is opensource remember.
When we purchased our Dell mini-tower a year and a half ago it took me 3 days to get it running perfectly and I fix PC's for a living!! (Oh God, get me out of the PC world! If I couldfind a way out, I'd do it in a second)
Get out of it? GET OUT OF IT?? If PC's didn't exist, my clients would never/seldem call me with problems, I'd never have to do house calls, I'd be out of business, and I'd be hungry and cold. Thank your lucky stars every day that 95% use Windows - it's life support for IT consultants..
Windows XP has made me more dough than ANY operating system, including 98, 2000, X, and 9. Long live the sheepish majority!
Check xxxxxxxxxx's uptime if you don't believe me. (But whatever you do, don't actually visit the site. I can't stress this enough!) (Er, yeah... -mod)
LOL, there is something not quite anatomically correct about that picture. Possibly a good Photoshop job? I hope so.
I can't believe I'm the first person to see this, and how could anyone click that link and not comment? BTW, I also suggest that you DO NOT check out Urinalpoop[/url]. (Agreed -mod)
I'm not talking about hype, evangelism, or marketing (at least not in the sense that you mean) and you're still missing two important points.
Actually, they form the bulk of your argument. Certainly, no part of it is rooted in any aspect of technology.
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Firstly, most of these things cannot be compared in terms of better and worse unless you decide on a goal. Once you set the goal you'll find that some people will disagree with it and will choose your worse as their better. The lack of one "winner" that suits everyone is a key realization. Especially as disruptive technologies often allow you to achieve a different goal from the incumbent technology, so that something that is overall worse can be significantly better in some, usually low-end, niches.
So, what is your worse and your better? It's not MIT and NJ, for starters. At this point I'm not sure what it is, except perhaps for "accidental" and "engineered," respectively; or maybe "hyped" and "engineered".
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You can write them off as media-led-sheep but for many people/situations Linuxis the right answer. It just so happens that to begin with it was the right answer for people looking for the cheap and cheerful option. People wanting to run a unix like machine on the cheap, using PC hardware they had lying around. For hobbiests and the like.
Dead wrong, because there already was a robust, battletested, free UNIX available that did exactly that. It was better than Linux at the outset (obviously), it ran on more hardware, and in fact it's still better in most respects.
In fact, if it had any problem, it was that it was mature and stable. It was something you could just install, and it would just run. It wasn't the sort of incomplete, temperamental problem that tinkerers are attracted to.
The most articulate endorsement of Linux I've read was an article by Ellen Ullman, where she described the experience of moving from Windows to Linux as moving from an OS that blocked her every effort to understand what was going on underneath to an OS that required her to understand her PC in bare-metal detail (keep in mind, this was 1996 or so, so Linux was even more of a work in progress then than it is now).
Now, of course, if you have a problem OS, you ask lots of questions and turn to other people for support. Communities build, and people bond over trying to figure out why this PCI bus won't work with that card when this other one does fine - well, except for that bit about voltage. People think about it. They talk about it. They get excited about it, because it's a problem, and the time they've spent on it is an investment in it. The people invested in it defend it religiously, because they can't defend it rationally, because it's broken. And they like it because it's broken, and because they like it they want it to succeed. The squeaky wheel gets greased, and before you know it, systems that are designed and tested to simply work are marginalized to single-digit marketshares and a few niches, and the majority of the world is resigned to running lemons and trying valiantly to make lemonade.
None of this is new, or particularly interesting, or in any way conducive to improving the quality of life or work or anything, really. It's a dystopia created by human instinct gone haywire, at best, and at worst it's actively stoked by companies like IBM and Microsoft who make a killing on support.
As a Mac user, i think this is all backwards. I don't think it has anything to do with disruptive technologies (although those are interesting, at least when the phrase is used descriptively; it's too often hijacked by hypemongers). I don't think it has anything to do with design methodologies. It's a scourge that should be opposed by anyone interested in the idea that technology should be used to enrich the human experience.
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Then time passed. And this is the second thing your missing, the fourth dimension. Something that was worse can become better both for intrinsic reasons if large amount of money and intelligence is expended to improve the product, or for extrinsic reasons if there are suddenly thousands of techies with relevant experience filling the job market.
You use "the fourth dimension" almost magically, because there is no reason behind it. "The Mythical Man-Month" destroys your first point; if your architecture sucks, it sucks, and the best you can hope for is a highly polished turd. If there are thousands of techies with relevant experience on the market, and I'm running a system that doesn't need any of them, why should I care? It's a given that finding VMS techs is harder than finding Linux techs. But we have one, and we hardly ever need him, so who cares about Linux? Not us.
Worse is worse is worse (note, this is using your apparent definitions, not the MIT/NJ definitions, which are only relevant to the MIT perspective). If you put lipstick on a pig, you still have a pig. If the market is flooded with porcine cosmetologists who can put lipstick on a pig like nobody's business, you still have a pig.
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I take it you think the last reason is 'cheating' in some way and we should all used elegantly over-engineered products for everything. It's not gonna happen though. Linux is going to happen, and it is going to happen *because of*, not despite, the very things that you dislike about it.
Passive tense cop-out. Linux is not going to happen. It's a big pile of text files. People will make it happen, or not. People will decide what to use, and where, and why, and they are responsible for their decisions. By your logic, we should all be using Windows. By your logic, if Linux manages to beat out Windows somehow without being any better, we should all somehow be happy with that.
Bull.
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As for your last sentence. MS got where they are by piggybacking on a disruptive technology (PC's) that the incumbent (minicomputers) didn't see coming.
And that everyone bought, because they had the name of a monopoly on them. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM." The personal computer as disruptive technology had long since happened.
The next time my server needs more up-time I'll worry about whether or not it has enough 'interface'. Those flashy scrollbars will drive it not to crash.
pyr3 most people don't have servers, they have PCs. The Linux community and journalists continue to rave about Linux on the desktop. It's hype. However, why wouldn't you want a good interface for a server? I have never run a full-time server (excluding Carracho) but would personally prefer MacOS X Server and Remote Desktop over some command line that I would have to spend months learning. MacOS X has the stability and power of Linux but with a better interface. For piping, obscure CLI commands, sudo-ing things, you can still pop open Terminal.
stupiderlikeafox I was reading too fast. I'm just worried about M$ stealing Apple code. But now that I think about it, it would be worth the trade off. They already steal their ideas anyway, now we'd actually have proof. IIRC they got caught stealing code line-by-line in some French court a while ago. Probably got rewarded for it, just like they do here...Sigh..I guess we Americans and French really aren't that different?
What ever happened to the EU persuing M$? They found them guilty then....are the going to donate Windows to "inner city" schools over there or what?
If there are thousands of techies with relevant experience on the market, and I'm running a system that doesn't need any of them, why should I care? It's a given that finding VMS techs is harder than finding Linux techs. But we have one, and we hardly ever need him, so who cares about Linux? Not us.
As a Mac user you are constantly *forced* to care about Windows. Can you use your Mac on the network at your office? Can your gran read the files you create? Why do the files you email to colleagues have a tiny extra file with the same name? Why does this web site look funny? etc. etc.
I think that the Mac has qualities that make it better (in an engineering/thing of beauty sense), so do you, but you need to accept that this is a minority position as most people don't think it's worth it. And it being a minority position affects how much better it can be. Why do you think Mac fans are so paranoid about marketshare?
This isn't marketing, this is reality.
By your logic, we should all be using Windows.
Good, because we are. (Well, I'm not, but damn near everyone else is.)
By your logic, if Linux manages to beat out Windows somehow without being any better...
To summarize my last few posts: the engineer's definition of better is not the only one. (And the changes caused by other people adopting the technology can even cause changes that will alter the engineer's opinion).
The opinion of engineers should therefore not be sought when discussing whether a technology will *succeed* in an open market, because they generally can't put aside their technical opinions enough to have a clear view of what people want from a technology.
With the release the the Xserve and the XRaid, Apple have made a huge effort to get into the server market.
We are replacing some SUN V100's with Xserve's as we can get more everything for the $. The XRaid is unbelievably cheap disk space. You can't get a cheaper systems providing 2.5TB with RAID.
The OS is reliable enough.
Anyone who wants to put in a fairly cheap linux server should consider one.
Nowadays NT Server is a solid platform. Not as good as UNIX but I'm biased.
Windows biggest letdown is its price and the amount of trouble a friggin virus can cause.
The good thing about the linux desktop is that it is free.
Seems to me that Amorph and stupider...likeafox are arguing shouldas, couldas and wouldas in a circle. Stupider accepts the Windows/Linux "worse" solution as superior because it is more popular. Amorph accepts the Apple/Unix solution as superior because of its merits. Anything I missed?
Well, there are a lot of n00bs on this board with little if any knowledge of either linux or BSD expressing opinions, acting as if those opinions are informed and/or cogent. At least Amorph is semi-informed in terms of linux vs BSD, and makes an effort to qualify some of his statements, which is more than can be said for Aquatic, Inkhead and many other n00bs in other threads on AI.
You might have overlooked that.
The reality is that linux is very stable and very secure, as well as free. Which is why our favorite search engine (google.com) is a bunch of cobbled together commodity PCs running linux. It has 24/7/365 uptime, and serves millions of hits a day (producing results in milliseconds) from a very large database. That's not hype.
As one who actually *gasp!* uses OpenBSD and linux (and OSX) on his TiBook, I can say they are roughly equivalent in terms of speed (excluding OSX of course), security, and stability. And I'm comparing the latest releases of both, btw, not harkening back to '99 when some guy I know's brother tried to install a then-immature flavour of redhat 6 on his pentium 2 233.
Take that for what it's worth.
ps if you want to install software that's two years old for some reason, try debian-stable. They may still use the 2.2 kernel for all I know. I personaly prefer to run the latest and greatest, as a lot can happen in Open Source software in six months, let alone two years (and I have a radeon 9000 gfx card, and don't want to wait two years for accelerated video).
Comments
So, maybe Kword just sucks and no one told me and they included it anyway, and I know this isn't a problem with linux as an OS, but I have seen things like this again and again with linux as a desktop systems. Things are half implemented yet used anyways. Now maybe there is an issue with Klipper and it isn't set up correctly or something that one of you could fix, but the point is that I shouldn't need to fix a clipboard system.
Apple should include a workspace manager in the Dock though. I wonder if they're working on that for Panther.
However randomly programs open in the wrong workspace (at first I thought they weren't opening at all.) Hmm. Just like Apple's been "dying" for years, Linux has been "exploding on to the marketplace and taking over Windows/Apple/whatever" for years. Still waiting...
its only because its the only sensible choice, there isnt anything better, WMP has a laughable HUGE gui which is quite frankly insane, mediamatch jukebox is unstable and generally silly, sonique is dead, kjofol is dead, so bascailly the only thing worth using is winamp2 because winamp3 is a bloated pile of garbage although personally winamp(2) is dire when you sit it next to itunes i mean the damn thing hasnt even got a library all you have is a single playlist window so you cant manage music at all really, winamp3 ntroduced a library thing but its messy and badly designed and doesnt evne come close to getting sat next to itunes. Mac users dont know how well off they are with itunes sometimes
Of course, their idealism was not pragmatic, and they were sidelined by other groups who were more realistic about the world.
Much of the time blowing stuff up (like linux with windows) wins more users than making something which is truely better (Mac OS X). Such is the way of the world.
I'll continue to be a Mac user myself.
Barto
Originally posted by stupider...likeafox
Originally posted by Amorph
Apparently, I'm not alone in this assessment, because VMS has a significant share of the uptime-critical market (and a good chunk of the high-performance computing market, because its clustering technology has been substantially better than anyone else's for over a decade now), and UNIX and UNIX-like OS' dominate markets where reliability and efficiency are desirable, but not critical.
Here you think they're doing well because they're hanging onto their most valuable customers: a classic mistake.
No, you missed my point: VMS is better suited to the uptime-critical market and the high-performance computing market. That is true regardless of the factors you cite, and regardless of whether VMS is "doing well." Compaq almost killed it, in fact, until their customers threatened to riot - that's not generally a sign that the platform is "doing well," especially by your marketing-driven definition. But it is a sign that it's very well suited to the tasks it's used for, and that's the only factor that should be considered when making technological purchases. The fact that the core audience has shrunk to the people who can't adopt an inferior solution regardless of the amount of hype behind it is unfortunate, certainly, but in that case the problem lies with the people who blindly adopt inappropriate solutions because ComputerWorld ran a headline story about it last month.
All the marketing-speak you're trying to counter with is, to me, cowardly and irrelevant. If a product is better for a given thing, it should be used. The fact that mediocre technologies succeed on hype means nothing to me, except that hype should be countered, and the people spreading it exposed, at every opportunity.
This still has nothing to do with the MIT vs. NJ argument. You're talking about marketing, and evangelism (which I have a few unflattering theories about myself).
Linux is a disruptive technology (I recommend the book of the same name, which doesn't directly address Linux) that steals the customers you least want first. However, in time it grows and steals so many of your customers that those that remain start to switch from the "better" product simply because of the costs of staying in a niche (assuming that the "better" product isn't simply overtaken in quality as the market focus shifts).
Yeah, UNIX did the same thing before. Question: Is this desirable? Inevitable is a cop-out. Is it desirable? Is there any reason to work for it?
Also, all this stuff about "disruptive technologies" ignores the fact that market adoption very seldom has anything to do with any technical matters whatsoever. MS got where they are by piggybacking on a monopoly.
I would also argue against the idea that C++ evolved C closer to a "perfect" solution. Objective-C did that, New Jersey-style, and look where it went. C++ exemplifies neither the MIT approach nor the New Jersey approach; it exemplifies design by committee and nothing else. It certainly isn't easy to write a compiler for!
C++ is not "perfect", it's "worse". But then if it isn't "better" than Obj-C then why is Obj-C such a niche technology today, even with NeXT's, then Apple's championing (without which it would have died a lonely death)?
You just made my point, which is that the MIT vs. NJ argument is irrelevant to your point. Objective-C implements what's necessary elegantly, and it's shipped with GNU's compiler suite for years and years now. Nobody owns it. C++ tries to do everything - it reminds me of PL/I, the great shining example of the MIT philosophy - and it's so complicated that no fully standard-compliant version exists, so it's hampered its own attempts at becoming viral. By the standards of the essay you linked to, Objective-C is "worse." It doesn't even try to be comprehensive or complete. And it lost.
If you declare the winner to be the "worse" one, you're begging the question.
The design-by-commitee stuff is by-the-by, it was designed to ride upon the virus of C just like Unix was. The crux however is not technological in this case but psychological as C programmers wanted to keep on writing C while claiming to be doing OOP because they used a C++ compiler. No one wanted to really embrace OO, but no-one wanted to admit that either. (I am aware that plain C compiles as Obj-C btw)
In other words, you're aware that you don't have a point.
Originally posted by Amorph
All the marketing-speak you're trying to counter with is, to me, cowardly and irrelevant. If a product is better for a given thing, it should be used. The fact that mediocre technologies succeed on hype means nothing to me, except that hype should be countered, and the people spreading it exposed, at every opportunity.
...
This still has nothing to do with the MIT vs. NJ argument. You're talking about marketing, and evangelism (which I have a few unflattering theories about myself). Also, all this stuff about "disruptive technologies" ignores the fact that market adoption very seldom has anything to do with any technical matters whatsoever. MS got where they are by piggybacking on a monopoly.
I'm not talking about hype, evangelism, or marketing (at least not in the sense that you mean) and you're still missing two important points.
Firstly, most of these things cannot be compared in terms of better and worse unless you decide on a goal. Once you set the goal you'll find that some people will disagree with it and will choose your worse as their better. The lack of one "winner" that suits everyone is a key realization. Especially as disruptive technologies often allow you to achieve a different goal from the incumbent technology, so that something that is overall worse can be significantly better in some, usually low-end, niches.
You can write them off as media-led-sheep but for many people/situations Linuxis the right answer. It just so happens that to begin with it was the right answer for people looking for the cheap and cheerful option. People wanting to run a unix like machine on the cheap, using PC hardware they had lying around. For hobbiests and the like.
Then time passed. And this is the second thing your missing, the fourth dimension. Something that was worse can become better both for intrinsic reasons if large amount of money and intelligence is expended to improve the product, or for extrinsic reasons if there are suddenly thousands of techies with relevant experience filling the job market.
I take it you think the last reason is 'cheating' in some way and we should all used elegantly over-engineered products for everything. It's not gonna happen though. Linux is going to happen, and it is going to happen *because of*, not despite, the very things that you dislike about it.
As for your last sentence. MS got where they are by piggybacking on a disruptive technology (PC's) that the incumbent (minicomputers) didn't see coming. Or rather they did and then dismissed it in almost exactly the same terms you are dismissing Linux with. It's a toy, not tested, not proven, not powerful enough, low-end, can it do this?, can it do that?, whoops! where did our market go?
History repeating...
Originally posted by Aquatic
Webcore is opensource but it is being put in a commercial product, OmniWeb.
You said:
As long as there is an agreement not to use the Apple code for commercial gain I don't see how it would hurt Apple, it could only help them and the open source community.
I said:
If you can't use it for commercial gain it's not open source; it's part of the definition. #6 to be precise.
If you can't ... it's not opensource.
If you can ... it is.
Half of OS X (which I remember paying for more than once) is opensource remember.
Originally posted by O-Mac
When we purchased our Dell mini-tower a year and a half ago it took me 3 days to get it running perfectly and I fix PC's for a living!! (Oh God, get me out of the PC world! If I couldfind a way out, I'd do it in a second)
Get out of it? GET OUT OF IT??
Windows XP has made me more dough than ANY operating system, including 98, 2000, X, and 9. Long live the sheepish majority!
Originally posted by Gizzmonic
Check xxxxxxxxxx's uptime if you don't believe me. (But whatever you do, don't actually visit the site. I can't stress this enough!) (Er, yeah... -mod)
LOL, there is something not quite anatomically correct about that picture. Possibly a good Photoshop job? I hope so.
I can't believe I'm the first person to see this, and how could anyone click that link and not comment? BTW, I also suggest that you DO NOT check out Urinalpoop[/url]. (Agreed -mod)
Originally posted by stupider...likeafox
I'm not talking about hype, evangelism, or marketing (at least not in the sense that you mean) and you're still missing two important points.
Actually, they form the bulk of your argument. Certainly, no part of it is rooted in any aspect of technology.
Firstly, most of these things cannot be compared in terms of better and worse unless you decide on a goal. Once you set the goal you'll find that some people will disagree with it and will choose your worse as their better. The lack of one "winner" that suits everyone is a key realization. Especially as disruptive technologies often allow you to achieve a different goal from the incumbent technology, so that something that is overall worse can be significantly better in some, usually low-end, niches.
So, what is your worse and your better? It's not MIT and NJ, for starters. At this point I'm not sure what it is, except perhaps for "accidental" and "engineered," respectively; or maybe "hyped" and "engineered".
You can write them off as media-led-sheep but for many people/situations Linuxis the right answer. It just so happens that to begin with it was the right answer for people looking for the cheap and cheerful option. People wanting to run a unix like machine on the cheap, using PC hardware they had lying around. For hobbiests and the like.
Dead wrong, because there already was a robust, battletested, free UNIX available that did exactly that. It was better than Linux at the outset (obviously), it ran on more hardware, and in fact it's still better in most respects.
In fact, if it had any problem, it was that it was mature and stable. It was something you could just install, and it would just run. It wasn't the sort of incomplete, temperamental problem that tinkerers are attracted to.
The most articulate endorsement of Linux I've read was an article by Ellen Ullman, where she described the experience of moving from Windows to Linux as moving from an OS that blocked her every effort to understand what was going on underneath to an OS that required her to understand her PC in bare-metal detail (keep in mind, this was 1996 or so, so Linux was even more of a work in progress then than it is now).
Now, of course, if you have a problem OS, you ask lots of questions and turn to other people for support. Communities build, and people bond over trying to figure out why this PCI bus won't work with that card when this other one does fine - well, except for that bit about voltage. People think about it. They talk about it. They get excited about it, because it's a problem, and the time they've spent on it is an investment in it. The people invested in it defend it religiously, because they can't defend it rationally, because it's broken. And they like it because it's broken, and because they like it they want it to succeed. The squeaky wheel gets greased, and before you know it, systems that are designed and tested to simply work are marginalized to single-digit marketshares and a few niches, and the majority of the world is resigned to running lemons and trying valiantly to make lemonade.
None of this is new, or particularly interesting, or in any way conducive to improving the quality of life or work or anything, really. It's a dystopia created by human instinct gone haywire, at best, and at worst it's actively stoked by companies like IBM and Microsoft who make a killing on support.
As a Mac user, i think this is all backwards. I don't think it has anything to do with disruptive technologies (although those are interesting, at least when the phrase is used descriptively; it's too often hijacked by hypemongers). I don't think it has anything to do with design methodologies. It's a scourge that should be opposed by anyone interested in the idea that technology should be used to enrich the human experience.
Then time passed. And this is the second thing your missing, the fourth dimension. Something that was worse can become better both for intrinsic reasons if large amount of money and intelligence is expended to improve the product, or for extrinsic reasons if there are suddenly thousands of techies with relevant experience filling the job market.
You use "the fourth dimension" almost magically, because there is no reason behind it. "The Mythical Man-Month" destroys your first point; if your architecture sucks, it sucks, and the best you can hope for is a highly polished turd. If there are thousands of techies with relevant experience on the market, and I'm running a system that doesn't need any of them, why should I care? It's a given that finding VMS techs is harder than finding Linux techs. But we have one, and we hardly ever need him, so who cares about Linux? Not us.
Worse is worse is worse (note, this is using your apparent definitions, not the MIT/NJ definitions, which are only relevant to the MIT perspective). If you put lipstick on a pig, you still have a pig. If the market is flooded with porcine cosmetologists who can put lipstick on a pig like nobody's business, you still have a pig.
I take it you think the last reason is 'cheating' in some way and we should all used elegantly over-engineered products for everything. It's not gonna happen though. Linux is going to happen, and it is going to happen *because of*, not despite, the very things that you dislike about it.
Passive tense cop-out. Linux is not going to happen. It's a big pile of text files. People will make it happen, or not. People will decide what to use, and where, and why, and they are responsible for their decisions. By your logic, we should all be using Windows. By your logic, if Linux manages to beat out Windows somehow without being any better, we should all somehow be happy with that.
Bull.
As for your last sentence. MS got where they are by piggybacking on a disruptive technology (PC's) that the incumbent (minicomputers) didn't see coming.
And that everyone bought, because they had the name of a monopoly on them. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM." The personal computer as disruptive technology had long since happened.
Originally posted by Aquatic
They just don't get it. It's about the interface.
The next time my server needs more up-time I'll worry about whether or not it has enough 'interface'. Those flashy scrollbars will drive it not to crash.
stupiderlikeafox I was reading too fast. I'm just worried about M$ stealing Apple code. But now that I think about it, it would be worth the trade off. They already steal their ideas anyway, now we'd actually have proof. IIRC they got caught stealing code line-by-line in some French court a while ago. Probably got rewarded for it, just like they do here...Sigh..I guess we Americans and French really aren't that different?
What ever happened to the EU persuing M$? They found them guilty then....are the going to donate Windows to "inner city" schools over there or what?
Originally posted by Amorph
As a Mac user ...
...
If there are thousands of techies with relevant experience on the market, and I'm running a system that doesn't need any of them, why should I care? It's a given that finding VMS techs is harder than finding Linux techs. But we have one, and we hardly ever need him, so who cares about Linux? Not us.
As a Mac user you are constantly *forced* to care about Windows. Can you use your Mac on the network at your office? Can your gran read the files you create? Why do the files you email to colleagues have a tiny extra file with the same name? Why does this web site look funny? etc. etc.
I think that the Mac has qualities that make it better (in an engineering/thing of beauty sense), so do you, but you need to accept that this is a minority position as most people don't think it's worth it. And it being a minority position affects how much better it can be. Why do you think Mac fans are so paranoid about marketshare?
This isn't marketing, this is reality.
By your logic, we should all be using Windows.
Good, because we are. (Well, I'm not, but damn near everyone else is.)
By your logic, if Linux manages to beat out Windows somehow without being any better...
To summarize my last few posts: the engineer's definition of better is not the only one. (And the changes caused by other people adopting the technology can even cause changes that will alter the engineer's opinion).
The opinion of engineers should therefore not be sought when discussing whether a technology will *succeed* in an open market, because they generally can't put aside their technical opinions enough to have a clear view of what people want from a technology.
We are replacing some SUN V100's with Xserve's as we can get more everything for the $. The XRaid is unbelievably cheap disk space. You can't get a cheaper systems providing 2.5TB with RAID.
The OS is reliable enough.
Anyone who wants to put in a fairly cheap linux server should consider one.
Nowadays NT Server is a solid platform. Not as good as UNIX but I'm biased.
Windows biggest letdown is its price and the amount of trouble a friggin virus can cause.
The good thing about the linux desktop is that it is free.
A cheap PC is the same price as XP Prof.
Uh, what was this thread about?
Dobby.
You might have overlooked that.
The reality is that linux is very stable and very secure, as well as free. Which is why our favorite search engine (google.com) is a bunch of cobbled together commodity PCs running linux. It has 24/7/365 uptime, and serves millions of hits a day (producing results in milliseconds) from a very large database. That's not hype.
As one who actually *gasp!* uses OpenBSD and linux (and OSX) on his TiBook, I can say they are roughly equivalent in terms of speed (excluding OSX of course), security, and stability. And I'm comparing the latest releases of both, btw, not harkening back to '99 when some guy I know's brother tried to install a then-immature flavour of redhat 6 on his pentium 2 233.
Take that for what it's worth.
ps if you want to install software that's two years old for some reason, try debian-stable. They may still use the 2.2 kernel for all I know. I personaly prefer to run the latest and greatest, as a lot can happen in Open Source software in six months, let alone two years (and I have a radeon 9000 gfx card, and don't want to wait two years for accelerated video).
Right.
And on that note...