The thing isn’t broken, the design is

[tanngrisnir]

I thought this report was interesting: half of all “malfunctioning” products are in full working order, it’s just that the poor bloody customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices. Even worse for them, companies frequently dismiss them as ‘nuisance calls.’ It was a nice touch that the study being reported involved giving managers products

Comments

[wibbble]

I think that aviation and the military, at least, are relatively immune from this sort of nonsense: if it's not easily understandable at a glance, neither the aviation industry nor the military are going to touch it.

I can just picture someone on a field trial of some new planning/communication device deciding to just drop it in a pool of mud and go back to using a map and a radio rather than figure out the icons.

[tanngrisnir]

You would hope so; however, I do recall reports that some US aircraft carriers were going to be running on a version of Windows.

[wibbble]

Well, it depends on what it's being used for. I imagine there's a lot of paperwork involved in running an aircraft carrier - it would be mean to make them use Linux and OpenOffice.

As for other systems, AFAIK there's no real-time version of Windows, so you couldn't use it for more essential systems.

[tanngrisnir]

I’d rather use OpenOffice than Word any day. And Linux is a far superior operating system than Windows. (To pick just one little thing: you tell Linux to shut down, and it shuts down; you cannot always say the same for Windows.)

What was being talked about for the carriers was explicitly not office use, it was to run the ship.

Scary thought.

[wibbble]

Well, we've no Windows machines here. :o) OpenOffice is a bit horrible, though - it's like all the badness of Word without any of the more recent improvements.

I tend to use Nisus Writer myself, anyway.

I suppose the military could at least insist on getting the source code to do a proper security audit, which is something, at least.

[tanngrisnir]

The early versions of OpenOffice weren’t brilliant, but recent ones are much improved. It also has one particular feature that sets it apart from MS software: it doesn’t set out all the time to do what it thinks you should have meant instead of what you actually want. On the Windows hard drive, I have a copy of OpenOffice installed to use rather than the copy of Word which came with the OS.

MacOS is nicely designed, but give me the configurability of Linux any day. ;o)

[wibbble]

Eh, Mac OS X is basically really pretty BSD clone. You get all the options and configurability for Linux, and all the decent commercial software of Mac OS.

I've got X11 installed on my iBook, and can install packages using 'apt-get install' - there's also a port of portage (as used on Gentoo). Oh, and the BSD ports system, too.

Mac OS X really is the best of both worlds. :o)

[tanngrisnir]

I haven’t used OS X. Does it also give you the BASH console? Does it really have all the configurability of Linux?

[wibbble]

It used to ship with tcsh as default, but now BASH is. There's also ksh and other options.

There's a few native terminal applications, plus, of course, you can always run xterm inside X11.

If you wanted to, you could even abandon 'Aqua' (the Mac OS X native GUI), boot to a command-line prompt, and start up X11 with KDE or GNOME, and you'd basically just have a slightly weird BSD box.

You do have some limits - Mac OS X people don't run around recompiling their kernels (although you could: the source is available), and most of the Aqua software is closed-source, or at least not trivially available as source code. On the other hand, there's a lot of Mac OS X software based on open source projects - the most popular non-Apple third-party IM client is based on libgaim, for example.

And finally, Mac OS X has a level of prettiness that Linux is only now just starting to come close to with the XGI stuff.

[tanngrisnir]

Sounds like MacOS might be as good an improvement as some people claim. Not sure why I would prefer to run MacOS based on a Unix flavour rather than Linux, but it does sound a huge improvement.

You don’t have to go running around recompiling the kernel if you use Linux either. :o)

(I have never done it, and don’t intend to, either.)

As for prettiness, Linux has been pretty (well, some of the graphical desktops anyway - Gnome is a dog) for a while, not only now, though nowhere near as long as MacOS, I grant you. :o)

[wibbble]

Actually, it is pretty new: Xgl - http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/

A lot of the stuff there Mac OS X is capable of, but doesn't do, because it's pointless.

This only got demoed this year, so it is new stuff.

As for why you'd pick Mac OS X: the hardware's solid, the driver support is decent, and you can use Photoshop (or whatever), and Apple's own software (at the consumer end: iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, and the high-end pro software like Final Cut Pro) is really quite excellent.

A lot of Linux-geeks/hackers have switched to using Mac OS X on a PowerBook. I suspect even more will move over now that there's an Intel CPU inside the 'MacBook'.

[tanngrisnir]

No, some of these extra prettifications are new; that doesn’t mean it was quite pretty before that. :o)

Hardware’s pretty irrelevant, since Linux isn’t tethered to a particular combination of hardware. (Frankly, I would prefer to run Motorola-based hardware in an ideal world, but I can live with Intel-type hardware.) You have a good point with regard to particular types of application. I think for video and music editing, and maybe certain specialised types of publishing, I would go for a Mac every time. For just about anything else, I don’t think it gives a particular advantage.

Typo

[tanngrisnir]

...that doesn’t mean it wasn’t quite pretty...

[wibbble]

The Intel CPU attracting more people is mostly psychological. There's no real difference in how to machine /works/, they've just replaced an IBM chip with an Intel one. In the long term it'll make for some interesting stuff (dual-booting with Windows, things like WINE), but in the short term it just means that lots of stuff won't work quickly on a new Mac.

For every day use, I'd say Mac OS X has an edge over Windows, and definitely over Linux. It's interesting to read what the Penny Arcade guys have been saying - these are long-time Windows users who either out-right hated the Mac, or were just completely apathetic towards it. Within a few weeks of getting an Intel Mac they're raving about how much /better/ the user experience is.

It's something that us Mac people have known for years, of course. ;o)

[tanngrisnir]

Of course the user experience is better - MacOS was designed by people who knew what they were doing.

Your relative position of the three OSes is a bit skewy, though. MacOS has a definite edge over Windows (whether you are talking X or earlier), but Linux has a definite edge over Windows too - I think you haven’t used a Linux machine in a while. :)

It is now possible for a user to sit down with a PC, stick a distro in the drive and install it, then run it and use it quite easily (it’s never completely easy, since every OS, MacOS included has its quirks you need to learn), all without opening a manual or doing anything remotely obscure or difficult. (Try doing that with Windows!) You might not be doing everything you could do, but that doesn’t really matter.

[wibbble]

It's been a while since I tried Linux on a workstation, but I do use Linux regularly on my server. :o