A piece ‘a Me

via eWeek

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, calls on Linux developers to make the presentation layer of desktop Linux applications even more attractive to users than Apple’s Mac OS.

Yup. In short, this is what they need to do. Screw GNOME, KDE and the rest, we need something that looks stunning (even on relatively modest hardware), works stunning and is stunningly easy to develop beautiful and functional apps on. Like… well… OS X.

BUT… and this is a big but (no, not a big butt, that’d be crass and schoolboy-ish), it’s not going to happen on ‘Linux’ like Shuttleworth says. Why? Because the open source community that controls ‘Linux’ and all things attached to it has aptly demonstrated over the past few years that, try as they might, they are still incapable of producing something as tidy, elegant and good looking as Apple’s Aqua/Quartz model. Yeah we can have flashy rotating 3D crap everywhere, and window transforms that actually bring on nausea. Yes we can had a good development model. But like everything the product is ugly, over-complicated and ultimately unsatisfactory, no matter who does it.

The answer? One Linux distributor/author has to do an Apple, take a good basis from open source and build a world-beating layer above it that makes it the desktop everyone wants. Too many cooks. Shut out the extra cooks and make your own broth and it’ll turn out just like you want it.

Yeah tons of folk will deride me and call me a fan boy. I don’t care. It’s not Apple I like, I used them as an example because Shuttleworth did, and because they are a good example. The key is in the method. Because it works. Harness, control and regulate, while using open source as inspiration, testing stuff and developing new ideas, filtering and channelling that into the non-OSS final product. Works for Apple, Sun, Red Hat et al.

Linux won’t succeed without regulation. Linux isn’t a socialist community, its Anarchy. Anarchy isn’t a system, it’s an anti-system.

Finally, it’s arrived. It’s available from the Apple Store now in the UK and US (and presumably elsewhere too).

There’s another huge bonus too. They’ve sliced a BIG lump off the price too.
The UK item has dropped from GBP 220 (which the original Gen 2 card was on release day) to GBP 170, a 50 GBP drop.

That takes a whole 100 GBP off the price of a new graphics card for my Mac Pro compared to the old X1950XT, plus I don’t get ATi grief in Windows when I’m playing games.

I discovered this evening that, as part of their Windows Live! Services, Microsoft provide a Blogging tool called ‘Writer’. Now it would have been easy for them to only make it work with Live! Spaces and nothing else, but what I actually found was something much cooler. It supports Wordpress, and as such I am writing this post from the app in question. Minds are slowly opening up at Microsoft I think. Slowly but surely they are learning that there is a big world out there that is outside and has some super cool stuff going on. While a nice blogging tool is only a tiny thing to most people, it’s just another sign. More of this please Microsoft, and less threats of legal wrangling with Open Source authors.

UPDATE: slightly disappointingly, the Tags system in writer doesn’t interact correctly with the tag cloud database in Wordpress. Not a biggy but still a bit of a bummer.

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.

via ARSTechnica

This is some sort of insane Joke, right? Selling to the general public a computer with a copy of OS X with a pre-violated User License? That’s not good guys…

I especially like the part about ‘non-safe’ Software updates. Really nice. The average user is REALLY gonna understand that one
Hmmm… we’ve seen this attempt to create non-Apple Macs before from people selling Apple hardware in their own cases:

http://web.archive.org/web/20031120002821/http://2khappyware.com/

Anyone remember that?

They got their asses sued so damn hard they almost spontaneously caught fire in the process.

I don’t expect this Psystar bunch to last long before Apple Legal catches up.

Hark! Is that the sound of the world’s largest proverbial ton of bricks I hear hurtling towards them?

UPDATE: Yes, it appears it’s now called the ‘Open Computer‘ instead… Interesting.

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.

via Daring Fireball

I have to extend congratulations to John Gruber again, for another damningly accurate critique of a typical tech-fluff article. Leander Kahney wrote an article about how Apple is evil and secretive and horrid and a proper meanie.

The original article was lame. Gruber’s critique is sublime.