The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft • Hacker News Board

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#211

Post by pavs » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 4:55 PM UTC

pavs wrote: post #175

wsinks wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any thoughts about Cisco? We're literally trying to be the taste and execution. I work for Cisco. Curious about candid thoughts.

ISP Owner here. I wouldn't call their hardware visually appealing. In UI, we mostly use CLI - so not sure what more can be done in that regard. A visual way to looking at live traffic info similar to iftop/htop would be nice.

I want to add the cisco-IOS is an absolute clusterfuck. There is so much room for improvement I wouldn't know where to start. Please have a loot at Mikrotik, they are doing a pretty decent job for a small company. If their devices were powerful enough to handle our edge router traffic, I would drop cisco like a brick. I am not kidding.

Someone really needs to fund Mikrotik big time.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#212

Post by worg » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 4:55 PM UTC

mwfunk wrote: post #147

stcredzero wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us are. Once, a long time ago, using the $ was "cool." And "so it goes" with all forms of online culture. (Has Kurt Vonnegut gone out of fashion yet? I used to coxswain crew boats past his summer home.) I would be quite amused if young "Microsofties" suddenly decided to co-opt "Micro$haft" but with a Richard Roundtree vibe.

Let's be clear: using the $ was NEVER cool by any stretch of the imagination, it was just a lot more common in the Internet of the '90s. The people who thought it was cool were always the same people who think it's funny to make up derogatory puns for the names of things they don't like, such as "Internet Exploder" or "Crapple". This is a category of humor that will be forever associated with bitter, angry, condescen…

So let's offend them, because denostating products/companies (as childish as it is saying M$, CrApple et al) in your opinion is the same as denostating other human beings, why not just ignore the bad jokes?

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#213

Post by jmiserez » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 5:01 PM UTC

gxs wrote: post #14

aaron-lebo wrote: post #7

> Just check out its striking video for the Surface Studio — it is so influenced by Apple’s playbook that I’m surprised there’s no Jony Ive narration. What's happened is that other companies have figured out how to emulate Steve Jobs's playbook that's now several decades old and there's nobody at Apple to write new plays. Jobs always talked about how Microsoft didn't have taste and when you look at MS products up unt…

This is exactly right. Apple's rising tide lifted all of us: it forced every other computer manufacturer take a look at the quality of what they were selling, not just feature lists and requirements. We've all benefited from this tremendously: android was quite literally unusable crap until the last few years (queue rooters and apologizers), laptop pc's were similarly crap, and you just never got the feeling that som…

IBM did care about their ThinkPad laptops, they really built solid hardware and software addons, before the brand was sold to Lenovo. One example is the full size butterfly keyboard they built, and the general robust designs.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#214

Post by klodolph » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

grzm wrote: post #162

klodolph wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically correct but very few people care about "defaults write". I can't remember the last time I used it, but I do use RegEdit often enough.

One place I've found it useful is for scripting the setup of a fresh machine, something like this: https://blog.vandenbrand.org/2016/01/04/how-to-automate-your... I agree it's likely very few people use it. It can be exactly the right tool for the job in some circumstances.

Yeah, that's a good reason to use it, and it makes sense that the tool is there. But there's a big difference between having a CLI tool for digging around when you need it, and having two separate GUI control panels with some settings in one, some in the other, and other settings in both.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#215

Post by JBlue42 » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 7:10 PM UTC

aaron-lebo wrote: post #7

> Just check out its striking video for the Surface Studio — it is so influenced by Apple’s playbook that I’m surprised there’s no Jony Ive narration. What's happened is that other companies have figured out how to emulate Steve Jobs's playbook that's now several decades old and there's nobody at Apple to write new plays. Jobs always talked about how Microsoft didn't have taste and when you look at MS products up unt…

>they weren't just selling computers, they were selling a lifestyle, they were selling cool.

I work for a 100+ person company. Outside of the admin staff, everyone has souped-up PCs doing a huge load of 3D work. The only people with Apple devices (iMacs and MBPs)? The four 2D graphics designers and the executives. Why? The graphic designers would be in uproar and the execs believe clients expect them to present a certain 'aesthetic'. The MBPs are mainly used for email and powerpoint presentations.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#216

Post by twblalock » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 8:28 PM UTC

drtz wrote: post #141

serge2k wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like touchId were amazing features in their own right though. Now the best they can do is a second lens for kinda bokeh and adding a touch bar instead of physical keys on the macbook. While dumping the headphone jack and magsafe (and HDMI and SD).

> Things like touchId were amazing features in their own right though. Touch ID is cool and all, but in 2016 calling it "amazing" is a bit of a stretch. ThinkPads first got a fingerprint reader more than a decade ago: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/37017.html

So what? The technology doesn't matter -- what matters is the implementation of the technology as a user-friendly feature. Apple did it better, as they often do in these cases.

As a feature, the Thinkpad fingerprint readers kind of sucked. All you could do is log into Windows with them, if you had the Thinkpad crapware installed. They weren't very reliable, either. I had one, and I gave up on using it after a while because typing my password was faster than attempting to use the fingerprint reader several times, then giving up and typing my password anyway.

Touch ID is built in to iOS. You can use it to unlock the phone, and to authenticate yourself for various Apple applications like the App Store and Apple Pay. There are also APIs for third-party applications to accept Touch ID instead of passwords, if the user wants to do that. It is fast and generally reliable. It's light years ahead of the fingerprint reader on the Thinkpads.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#217

Post by kartickv » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 5:56 AM UTC

otisfunkmeyer wrote: post #167

kartickv wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your paid Linux idea won't work, because money is not the only thing holding back the open-source community. Other reasons are: - Design isn't appreciated or valued. A successful OS effort can't be driven only by engineers. - An obsession with choice as an end to itself, and being unable to say, "This is what we think the best user experience will be. You can't change it." - Fragmentation with too many APIs, GUI tool…

If it's a paid Linux though, then you can get a team that: -Appreciates design. -Makes choices. -Supports the most powerful and popular hardware. -Yes, focused first and foremost on tinkerers and geeks, who are the main people losing out in the current environment. It's all a group that's increasing in size and will likely continue to for the foreseeable future. How's that plan sound?

"Makes choices" and "focused on tinkerers" are at tension with each other.

Because tinkerers want choice, such as with multiple window managers, sound subsystems or what have you. If you have N window managers, now you need to build and maintain all of them at a high bar, which is N times as much effort as one.

Plus the combinations: window manager X doesn't work with sound subsystem Y.

An awesome Linux would have just one supported window manager, filesystem, sound subsystem, and all the rest.

You will also need one dictator who understands eng, UX, product design, sales, marketing, and so on. The dictator listens to everyone, and people can present information and perspectives and debate as much as they want, but at the end of the day, it's the dictator's decision.

If you do all this, yes, you can succeed, in theory.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#218

Post by 58 » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 10:22 AM UTC

lqdc13 wrote: post #189

58 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, I don't want to dork around with spending days compiling kernel patches and installing soundcard drivers before I can use the computer. You are badly misrepresenting the current state of mainstream Linux distributions. I've done probably 20 Linux installs, and by and large it always just works. If there is some necessary proprietary driver, it's almost always as simple as Menu --> Administration --> Driver Mana…

I am using Linux distros on both laptops and a desktop as the only OS and you are definitely misrepresenting the current state of things. It takes a lot of work. For the laptops, the clickpads never work well. You have to mess with synaptics settings a lot and eventually you get a slightly worse config than the default on Windows and a lot worse than OSX clickpad. This is coming from someone who looked into hardware…

Most of your list is either a specialized requirement, or something that probably wouldn't be that much easier on Windows / MacOS. I meant that simple things like browsing the Internet, video chatting, and playing music (the needs of 99% of computer users) work out of the box. GP was saying that you literally can't install Linux without kernel patching and command line wizardry, which is totally false, and the only point I was refuting.

I'll add one to your list -- dealing with Linux audio. I have a stable music production setup now, but it took me a long time to iron everthing out.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#219

Post by pjlegato » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 8:24 PM UTC

58 wrote: post #174

pjlegato wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose you need a new computer for work. Your other options are Windows or a Linux desktop experience, both of which are vastly worse in other ways. (No, I don't want to dork around with spending days compiling kernel patches and installing soundcard drivers before I can use the computer.) I'd gladly buy any other laptop that was simple and just worked out of the box in the sense that a Mac does. But there aren't an…

> No, I don't want to dork around with spending days compiling kernel patches and installing soundcard drivers before I can use the computer. You are badly misrepresenting the current state of mainstream Linux distributions. I've done probably 20 Linux installs, and by and large it always just works. If there is some necessary proprietary driver, it's almost always as simple as Menu --> Administration --> Driver Mana…

Not at all an exaggeration.

I recently had to binary patch a video card driver -- using a patch I found on a forum -- just to get it to start X, after I had specifically bought the hardware (Foxconn, AMD - major brands) because they specifically advertised that they fully support Linux and X, which I had cross-verified with the Linux and X documentation.

Why? The video card was a Radeon model "1234" (I forget the real exact number), but the hardware was a newer minor revision that identified itself as a "1234-A" to the OS in its ID string. Linux (Ubuntu) then simply refused to load the "1234" driver, because "1234-A" was not in the list of approved card ID strings in the driver.

Absolutely nothing on AMD's site, nothing on Foxconn's site, nothing on Ubuntu's sites. Contact tech support? Ha.

Eventually -- after days of googling for a solution -- I found some obscure forum where others were discussing the exact same problem. Someone provided a binary patch ("just load up the video driver in a hex editor and change the following 20 bytes to these other opaque values".) It worked.

That is why I don't want a Linux desktop.

Re: The bizarre role reversal of Apple and Microsoft

#220

Post by pjlegato » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 8:27 PM UTC

linguae wrote: post #161

pjlegato wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 'd buy it! Who's going to fund the upfront development? "We're going to make a new desktop OS that takes on both Apple and Microsoft" sounds like a hard sell for the VC crowd.

And that's the hard part....OS/2, NEXTSTEP/x86, and BeOS were examples of alternative OSes that failed to successfully take on Microsoft in the 1990s. It would be difficult for a VC firm to fund a business model that has failed multiple times in the 1990s. Moreover, the desktop market as a whole is shrinking, and my understanding is VC firms are interested in growing markets. An alternative OS dedicated to power user…

It could be, but it seems like that would depend on the brand awareness / credentials of the team writing the software. Note that KDE, Gnome, etc. have been trying to do exactly that for decades, with only marginal success.

So if you got the team that wrote the Apple Aqua UI on board to write it, and have great PR, then maybe. If you get the KDE or Gnome team, no way.