A piece ‘a Me

This is a regurgitation of something I wrote on the 68kMLA forum in response to comparisons of GNU/Linux, Windows and OS X.

Okay, in order to make a fair comparison to OS X you have to compare it to installing OSX86 on an.other PC hardware combination. Try that and see how well it runs and how nicely it behaves. It’s hell on two legs, that’s what. OS X is, in my opinion the best consumer OS available. While not perfect it is about as good as it gets. It is *not* however available outside the Mac hardware platform without significant screwing around, and following undocumented techniques that frankly make Linux installs look like a walk in the park with mother. There are, now, install DVDs where a lot of the screwing is done for you but you still have to jump through hoop X and y to get tit working, and there’s no guarantee at the end that it will anyway.

Therefore, and what this all boils down to is, when faced with *generic non-Apple hardware*, which is the easiest and least obstructive OS with the best support and most straightforward install? The answer in some people’s mind is Linux (insert favourite distro here). In my mind it’s Windows, and I don’t care what ANYONE says, I still think that. It doesn’t stop me using Linux, but that’s because I know it inside out and understand what goes wrong with it and where. To a novice or a Windows-only user it’s all alien flim-flam, and when it goes wrong they are up the creek and desperately lacking propulsion devices.

Linux is free, as in beer/speech, but with any free OS the penalty is the need for support. You either need an IT tech, or a pet nerd (one and the same in some cases). I’m sure plenty of people will quote chapter and verse about how they’ve never had a problem with x distro etc. In my experience I’ve never had a serious problem with *some* distros on *some* hardware. I’ve had gripes though, and they are the sort of things Joe Soap User can’t fix themselves.

Another issue is hardware compatibility. You throw your favourite distro at a machine not knowing if it’s going to work okay or not, simply. Most of the time it does. Sometimes, especially on older hardware (which is a more common target for experimentation with Linux), it doesn’t and you have to use something different. Because of differences between distros it then puts you slightly on the back foot as you can potentially be stuck in a system you don’t know, making life hard when stuff goes wrong (which it does).

All this is to say nothing of the fact that GNOME based distros either have a hellish and jumbled mess of config utilities which may or may not work correctly and lack the options required for some setup. I generally compare them directly with OS X or Windows, both of which lacks some in places themselves, so lacking on something that’s lacking is generally really not good.

KDE goes some way to helping I have found as it seems more homologous with config and util apps having much more consistency, however it’s still not quite all there.

Then there’s XFCE which is different again.

Then every distro uses a different setup for configs and utils to manage them. Although common threads exist, they are only that. Rough similarity is not either consistency or standardization. Most of the similarities are factors more of the basic nature of a configuration being the same and/or the text config file being the same. The upshot is it’s difficult to guide a novice user through a standard procedure to reconfigure/setup/install anything. Using ‘Linux’ isn’t enough anymore. Divergence means you now have to ask ‘what Linux?’ and ‘what version?’ to get anywhere. The latter and often even former are something, again, Joe Soap User doesn’t know and can’t find out all that easily (and to compound the issue, finding out is different between distros! ARGHHHHHH!!!).

Linux will never succeed as a desktop OS unless it is standardized, and then rigorously crafted into a product on a par with OS X and Windows quality and consistency wise. That won’t happen because it’s ‘Free’, which means you can do what you like. That’s ultimately going to leads to it’s remaining a mediocrity, in my opinion.

BBC Article

I have been listening to the debate between the BBC and British ISPs of late. Last year the BBC introduced an internet TV service called ‘iPlayer’, which serves up popular BBC TV and Radio. This has prompted a firestorm from UK ISPs, whose already groaning broadband network is now under more strain than ever from people streaming content from the BBC, and other Video services.

The recent revelation that UK ISPs are now calling for BBC funds to be provided to offset the estimated 830 million GBP (Source: Ofcom, via BBC) of spending needed to upgrade the UK broadband network has me really pissed off…

I imagine what kind of reaction consumers would get if they asked the BBC for funding to upgrade their TVs to digital. Or the BBC provides HD TV for some channels, but I don’t see anyone asking for BBC funds to upgrade everyone’s TVs to HD. UK ISPs are ripping consumers off left right and centre. If they can’t find the money to upgrade what is a chronically dated system, that pre-BBC iPlayer was *already suffering under excessive load*, then they are not fit to provide internet services. They make stack of money by selling fake unlimited contracts to people, so why haven’t they got he money to invest in upgrading the infrastructure, or is it just the case that they needed a scape goat?

My theory is that *all* media services are putting a heavy load on UK ISP networks. YouTube cannot be ignored for example, it’s become hugely popular in the last 2 years and must put a huge strain on the network, iTunes and their music store selling TV and music over the internet to UK customers can’t help either. That’s just 2 examples, given a few minutes I could think of a lot more I’m sure. The problem afoot here is not that the BBC in particular, although they are undeniably putting a lot of traffic across uK networks, are not the sole source of this problem. The internet is changing, and UK ISPs are lagging behind *yet again*. Video on demand services are more numerously available, and more people are using them than ever. The network needs upgrading and rather than get their heads down and upgrade it like they should be doing, UK ISPs are, yet again (we’ve already seen them try and blame file sharing an piracy), trying to find a scapegoat to prevent them having to get off their fat-cat arses and sort the bloody problem out properly.

Ofcom should simply turn round and tell them to sort it out IMHO. It’s not the BBC’s problem, it’s not the consumer’s problem.

While looking for something totally different (Applescript Tutorials for idiots), I stumbled over this brilliant article. It’s basically a rant about how old skool OS 7-9 Mac users are ruining OS X’s stability and security by using bad hacks to do stuff instead of programming it properly, or accepting it cannot be done securely.

What the hell am I rambling about? Well lets put it simply. OS X is written on top of UNIX. UNIX has things in place that have been crafted carefully over decades to ensure stability and security. When Apple wrote OS X they carried these right on up to the user level, making the whole OS stable and secure. Yet still these morons insist on hacking it about, like they did OS 9 and earlier, to make stuff work the easy way. This compromises the integrity of what is otherwise a great OS.

Take ‘Unsanity’ (singled out right at the beginning of said article). They are the Kings of Beige Box Idoits™ in my opinion. Their most popular product, APE, is an open framework for bad and dirty hacks for OS X, basically. The fact it exists at all is a travesty. The fact it caused Apple huge headaches and bad press during the launch of OS X 10.5 Leopard is an apt and vivid illustration of just how bad it really is.

The article goes on to describe also a paper from a dev conference specifically detailing how and why overriding application behaviour is good. I’ll give you a clue IT ISN’T GOOD!

It’s clear this breed of Beige Box Idoits™ has no clue how a real Operating System is supposed to work. They probably belong to the same camp of half-assed developers that keep complaining that Windows Vista’s User Access Control has stopped their application from working.