100 replies to this topic

[g.johnson]

The argument that the product with the greatest market share is the best is either circular or manifestly untrue.

It's the product with the greatest market share among rich (i.e. knowledgeable) people that's the best, right? Or am I having a flashback.

The rich, knowledgeable person was at River Park last night, so it's clearly the best restaurant in NYC.

[g.johnson]

I think that's Lippy's point.

Yes.

I was agreeing and expanding on the point.

[g.johnson]

I don't think anyone has argued that the most popular "anything" is necessarily or presumptively the best.

Obviously, only a fool would argue that.

Windows - a billion users with a b. A billion people think it's the best thing.

Who's better? How many users do they have? Oh, the marketplace is just a mirage, right?

[g.johnson]

The argument that the product with the greatest market share is the best is either circular or manifestly untrue.

Apple market share is currently about 10%. Twenty five years after the Mac was introduced they're still a niche player. Lets put it this way - if you belonged to a political party and after 25 years it polled 10% in a general election would you view it as a positive thing?

A completely different thing. A political party in a democracy courts popularity of necessity. Manufacturers can cater to a niche market and still be successful. Bentley, Per Se, Asprey.

[g.johnson]

Its a question of price premium and flexibility. You pay more for a Mac, and for a certain segment, its worth the extra money. For a bigger segment it isn't. Its silly to say one is absolutely better than the other.

Agreed.

I use Win7 at work, we have Macs at home, and I use an Android phone (I'm sure there are thousands like me). Each has its place and they are all sufficiently intuitive that I don't even have to brush up on my Unix commands.

I needed to rename about 100 files in a group of directories the other day. Unix command line: 5 minutes. Anything else: I'd still be at it.

[Lex]

Nobody has bigger balls than Steve Jobs. He took a walk through Xerox's PARC facility and fell in love with their graphical interface. A few years later the Mac debuted. A few years after that Microsoft introduced Windows. Jobs was outraged and called it a ripoff.

His argument was basically that he had stolen it first.

[Lex]

Actually, Apple's most important function is to invent cool stuff for Microsoft and others to incorporate into Windows, smartphones, etc.

Apple would never do anything like that.

[Anthony Bonner]

the point is that Unix as its available for Windows is rather user unfriendly. Using a Mac OS X as an argument for the superiority of UNIX on a Wintel machine is silly. OS X is built around the Macs walled garden anyway, so its pretty far removed from what you are asking any wintel machine to do (with any OS) in terms of forward compatability.

The point is the free, user-developed Linux systems work perfectly well in Intel machines. It's true that the interface is not quite as slick, but that is more an indication of the interests of the developers than any deficiency in the underlying operating system -- as Max OS X shows.

To further Chambo's point - if OS X were as common as Windows they would have to deal with many of the same issues MSFT has to deal with. Windows has to do lowest common denominator stuff, Apple doesn't.

But Ubuntu and Red Hat do have to deal with those issues and deal with them fine.

It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They’ll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
With UNIX, if you’re looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it’s not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for — it’s literally a five-foot shelf of documentation — if you look long enough it’s there. That’s the difference — the beauty of UNIX is it’s simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it’s all there.

Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984

Remind me what happened to DEC.

You continue to miss my point. Yes - if you are an experienced computer lover there is no question some Unix distro knocks the socks off of windows. I've never debated that. The issue is the learning curve - even things like Ubuntu - that every pseudo-comic book guy IT geek tells you that you should be running. And god forbid you have to fiddle with the OS once you have it running if you aren't an active participant in an IT forum. For 99.9% of the world that won't work.

[SLBunge]

I needed to rename about 100 files in a group of directories the other day. Unix command line: 5 minutes. Anything else: I'd still be at it.

Perhaps it was faster for you to use a command line because you know the Unix commands. I wouldn't think it would take much longer (if at all) to do this in Win7 or OSX. And I wouldn't try to convince my company to buy OSX machines to because it is built on Unix and the command line is available.

Lots of people want to go back to the DOS version of WordPerfect because it was faster if you knew all the keystroke combinations for formatting. I don't.

[Sneakeater]

I do.

[g.johnson]

You continue to miss my point. Yes - if you are an experienced computer lover there is no question some Unix distro knocks the socks off of windows. I've never debated that. The issue is the learning curve - even things like Ubuntu - that every pseudo-comic book guy IT geek tells you that you should be running. And god forbid you have to fiddle with the OS once you have it running if you aren't an active participant in an IT forum. For 99.9% of the world that won't work.

I was addressing Chambolle's argument that it is really difficult to write an operating system that will work with multiple platforms, device, networks, etc. Well, of course, it is. But Thompson, Ritchie and a few others who may very well be geniuses managed it within a few months at Bell labs in 1969. That operating system works fine today, and is simpler, easier to program, more stable and more versatile than Windows. The things you're worrying about are not inherent to the operating system but the interface to it. Microsoft have done a better job of writing an interface to an inferior OS. The amateurs that developed Linux have written a worse interface to a better OS. Apple have written a better interface to a better OS.

[g.johnson]

Perhaps it was faster for you to use a command line because you know the Unix commands. I wouldn't think it would take much longer (if at all) to do this in Win7 or OSX.

Ooh, I think it would. I had a series of 60 directories called SE0001, SE0002, etc. Each had 10 files called MR0001, MR0002, etc. I needed to copy all the files to the same directory but with different names. That would take hours using a GUI interface. With unix it's ls SE0001 > stript.txt and use vi to create a renaming script. It really did only take a few minutes. But, as you say, I knew what to do.

[FoodDabbler]

I needed to rename about 100 files in a group of directories the other day. Unix command line: 5 minutes. Anything else: I'd still be at it.

Perhaps it was faster for you to use a command line because you know the Unix commands. I wouldn't think it would take much longer (if at all) to do this in Win7 or OSX.

As a practical question in a theoretical discussion, how would one do this in Windows,
except file by file? Say your camera has dumped a hundred files on your computer named
1101.JPG ... 1200.JPG, and you want to rename them NewYorkVisit1.jpg ... NewYorkVisit100.jpg?

You may be right that a task like this can be automated without using a command line, but how?
I use OSX as my main environment and like g.j am lazy enough to simply open a terminal window
and type in some Unix when I do things such as this.

Imagine another situation: You have ten thousand web pages across hundreds of directories and you
want to place a new element in each: a table, say, or a logo. With the Unix command line you can
write the necessary script in minutes and get the job done in seconds. Just saying.

Eta: G.Johnson has beaten me to the punch again. He must be using unix.

[Anthony Bonner]

You continue to miss my point. Yes - if you are an experienced computer lover there is no question some Unix distro knocks the socks off of windows. I've never debated that. The issue is the learning curve - even things like Ubuntu - that every pseudo-comic book guy IT geek tells you that you should be running. And god forbid you have to fiddle with the OS once you have it running if you aren't an active participant in an IT forum. For 99.9% of the world that won't work.

I was addressing Chambolle's argument that it is really difficult to write an operating system that will work with multiple platforms, device, networks, etc. Well, of course, it is. But Thompson, Ritchie and a few others who may very well be geniuses managed it within a few months at Bell labs in 1969. That operating system works fine today, and is simpler, easier to program, more stable and more versatile than Windows. The things you're worrying about are not inherent to the operating system but the interface to it. Microsoft have done a better job of writing an interface to an inferior OS. The amateurs that developed Linux have written a worse interface to a better OS. Apple have written a better interface to a better OS.

you can't divorce the OS from the interface.

[Stone]

Lots of people want to go back to the DOS version of WordPerfect because it was faster if you knew all the keystroke combinations for formatting. I don't.

MS Word's victory over WordPerfect is one of the great tragedies of the computing era. Word must be one of the worst products ever.