81–90 of 331 posts
If that is your idea of a better operating system, try again.
Why doesn't the author just pay the non-subsidized price and get a clean Signature machine from Microsoft? http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/en_US/pd/product... I suspect that while he doesn't like the crapware, he doesn't mind the $75 subsidy. You really can't have it both ways.
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This is hilarious. You call others fanboys and then compare the horrific inconvenience of disk images (which I don't understand either but it's what, double-click and then drag, right) to Windows install wizards, uninstall, etc. Get real.
Get real? Why the hostility? Eli's comment is aimed at how unintuitive OS X's system is, not how inconvenient it is compared to Windows.
OSX by default (at least for DMG's) opens a window with the extracted content and most include "setup" instructions ("drag FOO into the Applications folder"), so it's not hard to miss.
I enjoyed this rant. The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold too. That is because "you" are too cheap to pay what "we" think should be paid for them. It is like a hotel which sells you room for $100 a night if you agree to let them leave a web cam on 24/7 and sell any useful 'snippets' it catches while you are there. The bulk of the market doesn't buy "computers" they…
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One of the major reasons genetic diversity is important is that it makes it harder for a population to be wiped out by infection. The windows monoculture is inevitably a victim of itself.
It doesn't seem wiped out yet.
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> The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold to To be honest, I didn't jump from Windows to Linux because of this. I jumped because Windows ME was just that bad. However, this makes me increasingly happy I jumped with each new version of both Windows and MacOS. > Time to start a 'developers' company that works very much on the same model that Sun Microsystems started on,…
>Too bad that of The Two Steves, Jobs gets the accolades and Wozniak gets ignored. Oh please, not this again. But OK, I'll bite: Wozniak was given plenty of recognition for his work at Apple. But he quit in 87, which was 25 years ago. What has he done since? Not that much, really. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, has brought tremendous contributions to a number of industries. In the light of this, it makes complete sen…
The last Apple computer Woz had a direct hand in designing was either the Apple II or the II+ (I can't quite figure out which), over three decades ago. Woz was a genius when it came to minimal and effective designs and it's certain that he played a key role in getting Apple off the ground, but he has had no real impact on the company or anything the company does for nearly as long as I've been alive.
Woz helped build Apple into a successful company, but the scale isn't even remotely the same. The Apple that Jobs subsequently built decades later now sells more hardware in a month (or so) than Woz's Apple sold during his entire tenure.
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System76 is attempting to do this. I liked the Gazelle Professional. Considering they're not an ODM, the Gazelle was pretty decent for its specs and screen when it was released. There was no bloat aside from vanilla Ubuntu, except a driver to improve the screen brightness buttons. Still though, you can always throw Ubuntu on a Thinkpad. A small company like System76 can't match the form factor and battery life of pro…
I'll second System76, I've bought laptops from them for a couple years now and never had a bad experience. They only throw in hardware that ubuntu supports and there's absolutely no bloatware. There are still things I have to put up with like Ubuntu's recent decision to use Unity, but gnome3 is a single command away.
If they were doing a 'Sun' type model, they would spec the hardware, get the Ubuntu distro and integrate it with some key features. Create an ABI and a DDI [1] that third party vendors could rely on to work for the next few years and when it changed to evolve in a compatible way, and then sell that to end users.
The point of having a managed ABI/DDI is that someone like an AutoCAD would be assured that if they ported AutoCAD to the system it would always work on all systems and if it didn't then System76 would figure out why and fix it. System76 would have to sign up to create a stable set of interfaces that provided all of the required features so that you wouldn't need "autoconf" or "configure" you could just add "#ifdef SYSTEM76" in your code where needed and know it would just work. Now System76 can build that out of existing pieces, they can say for example that "OpenGL will be available, link library is -lgl and include path is " and those kinds of "restrictions" enable someone to maintain a version of their product for a 'small user base' (which rounded to the nearest million users is 0) Those same restrictions are anathema to many in the community ("Why force me to use Unity? I love Gnome/KDE/XFCE...") but they require a federating API if someone wants to code to them and support that code.
The counter argument is "community support has created stuff that runs on everything without restrictions, look at MySQL, or VIM" and that is a good argument, but for 'boring' things it works poorly, and 'boring' usually means tools of interest to a user who isn't interested in quarrying the rock so they smelt the iron to make into a lathe kind of users.
The third argument is that its all going into the cloud and people running computers that they compile on and stuff will be like people who spin fiber into yarn so they can knit their own sweaters, a niche and a small one at that. I can see the merits of that argument as well but hope it doesn't win the day.
[1] ABI - Application Binary Interface, DDI - Device Driver interface
I enjoyed this rant. The bottom line is that this 'experience' isn't about you, its about who you can be sold too. That is because "you" are too cheap to pay what "we" think should be paid for them. It is like a hotel which sells you room for $100 a night if you agree to let them leave a web cam on 24/7 and sell any useful 'snippets' it catches while you are there. The bulk of the market doesn't buy "computers" they…
I think there is a company that does what you suggest. I will probably get down voted for saying it, but Apple. They put in the time to make a pretty darned good user experience for first impressions. There's no junk, no spyware, nothing to remove. Occasionally you might get a software bundle, like Office, or Quicken, but literally just drop it in the trash and you are done with it. Rarely would you have to find an u…