Condescending Attitude Toward Mac Users

Alright, I’m getting really tired of the general condescending attitude toward Mac users. This post was brought on by Ben’s thing here, (”We won’t dwell on the Mac users; they’re pretty much hopeless and demented anyway.”), but I’ve seen the attitude elsewhere also.

(a) OS X is UNIX
(b) Better UNIX then Windows.
(c) OS X *is* easier to get started with *and* maintain then Linux, even Ubuntu. More expensive, certainly, but much easier by an order of magnitude.

I would recommend OS X over Linux (even Ubuntu) for the average Joe who can afford it. More mainstream software is compatible, things “just work”, and it’s less hassle in general.

Don’t believe me? ‘Ight. Let’s play a word game.

• MP3/DVD compatibility
• 3D acceleration
• Games
• Microsoft Office
• Photo manipulation
• Power management

You can, of course, do all of these things on Linux. However, it is much easier to do them on a Mac. It’s stupid to expect your average Joe to search through a bunch of documentation to get 3D games working. Heck, even Ben hasn’t gotten 3D acceleration working on his laptop. MP3 and DVDs can’t be played by default on Ubuntu and require installation of an illegal (in the US) codec pack. That sort of thing is unheard of on a mainstream desktop PC. I understand this stuff is getting ironed out as we speak, but as of right now, they aren’t.

Photo manipulation with The GIMP still lags behind Photoshop. *cough* CMYK *cough*

Power management is another area Linux lags behind on. My Ubuntu laptop can hibernate, but it stopped waking up after a kernel update several months ago. I’m not alone in this either. Yeah.

As for OpenOffice.org, have you compared it to Microsoft Office 2007? The interface is vastly inferior. Even Office 2003 for Mac scores better in my book. Office 2008 for Mac should pretty sweet, if they do even a fraction of what was accomplished in the Windows version. No, really. I haven’t drunk any Kool-ade, I’m speaking as someone who has studied HIG. Office is bloated and the DOCX format is pretty lame, but it still pwns all competition. OpenOffice.org can’t even display two pages of the same document side by side. Sad, but true.

Also, there isn’t anything that comes even close to OneNote available for Linux. BasKet 1.0 is a step in the right direction, but as a OneNote user, I cringed and put it down after a few attempts to get work done. Tomboy, while a good substitute for the OneNote mini-pad thing, can’t compare to the full program. Ok, yeah, I know, no OneNote for Mac either, but y’know. At least they have notebook view in Word, we don’t even have that.

Really, I love Linux and it’s my primary operating system, but there are many good reasons to use OS X instead.

Steve Jobs pwns the music industry

Earlier today, Steve Jobs released an open letter to the music industry. In it, he argued that digital rights management is both fundamentally flawed and unnecessary. Wow. Jobs has power, and he’s using it for good. If record companies pay heed, this would seriously be one of the best things to ever happen to music enthusiasts using computers, on any operating system.

It’s a rather interesting move. Perhaps Apple is seizing in on how Microsoft has been getting beat up lately for including extensive DRM support in Windows Vista.

Robin Hood

Context: I had just been asked to “obtain” a copy of Office 2007 for a friend.

James: James has a “don’t pirate stuff” policy
Josh: y?
Josh: microsoft is evil
James: …
Josh: its like robin hood
James: Yeah, like Robin Hood.
Josh: steal from the evil rich and give to the evil less rich
James: He would have used Linux, btw.
Josh: maybe
James: You know it to be true.

Neat little things

I’m coming off my Christmas break, but oddly I haven’t felt like blogging at all. I shall provide random bullet points and call it “a post”.

• Use the scrollwheel on the Gnome taskbar to flip through all your windows quickly.
• Glipper solves all the annoyances I’ve had with copy and paste on Linux.
• Gens works on Linux and plays all my old Sonic games quite nicely. It even has a nice GUI.
• “apt-get install gweled” for a nice Diamond Mine clone
• Zelda Classic brings The Legend of Zelda 1 to PC, no emulator required. It features a quest editor and a Linux version.
• MoM is an interesting half-free MMORPG, apparently programmed by just one guy.
• Ted Dekker’s Circle trillogy rocks, as do P. G. Wodehouse’s many short stories.
• OICCC is upon us once more. It has inspired me to brush up on my C skills and write a program that prints its own source code. It seems like it would be possible to create a recursive program that changes it’s source, recompiles, executes the new program and exits. This prospect excites me, though I can’t think of any practical reason for doing it.
• I thought this was pretty funny.

Titanion

Kenta Cho. ABA Games. Best crazy Japanese shoot-em-up games ever.

First new release since like March: Titanion

w00t!!!!

It’s basically old timey Galaga done up right. You remember that annoying enemy that would grab your space ship and use it against you? This time, you have that ability. It’s very fun to just suck up an entire line of incoming
ships, then blast down the next wave with them.

Update: Yay, there’s a way to run it on Linux! Either follow the instructions for compiling here, or grab the package I’ve compiled here.

Picking Through the Rubble that is Ubuntu 6.10

First off, I really like using Ubuntu. Here at the university, my time is in short supply, and it’s nice to have something that I don’t have to tweak at if I don’t want to. (Things that do require constant maintenance include Windows, Gentoo and Slackware.) Ubuntu just works. At least, it used to. Then I heard about the next release, a slightly less reliable testing version by the moniker of “Edgy Eft”. But it’s a major release, right? One new official release every six months and an extended support release once every two years. So, while it probably won’t be as good as the current LTS (long time support) version, it can’t be horrible, can it? Well, can it?

Ah, yes. It’s never a good sign when the upgrade program shipped on the cd is broken, is it? I was denied the task of upgrading off my shiny new CD-ROM by an ugly python error message and some text urging me to report this as a bug. I don’t recall seeing a URL displayed with the message, and I didn’t feel like googling to find the official Ubuntu bug station. So I proceeded manually.
Now, I only have 3 Gigabytes of bandwith a month, so I had to install directly off the CD-ROM. My general idea was to tell Ubuntu that the CD contained an abundance of happy new packages which are better then the old ones. Ubuntu would then process them and upgrade everything. Except, it didn’t work that way.

“Behold, ye of limited bandwidth,” proclaimed my computer. “The path of the CD is a lame one. Allow me to show you a better way.” I was then asked for permission to download 1.2 gigabytes of data. For the good of mankind, of course.

“Forget mankind!” I said. It was a long hard struggle. I’ve posted my fragmented upgrade notes here in the hope they might come in handy to someone.

I’ve got a Radeon Xpress 200M card in this Toshiba Satellite notebook, and after upgrading, I was greeted by both a broken boot screen and an X.org server crash. The boot sceeen was resolved with a quick “apt-get install ubuntu-desktop”, but X was a bit trickier to fix. You can get a quick fix by enabling the basic, no-3d-acceleration “ati” driver, but in the time it takes you to do that, you might as well go here and read up on the fix.

Even though Eft looked like an utter disaster the first time I booted it up, underneath it’s quite nice. Nothing exactly revolutionary, but updated versions of all your programs are always appreciated. They fixed a bunch of small annoyances as well, like the high pitched pips and squeaks my speakers used to make when I turned the volume up all the way.

But, yeah. It’s actually a pretty good upgrade, but only if you know what you doing and are prepared to be set up the bomb. Everyone else, just stick with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS - for great justice.

Oxygen icon preview

If you’re into KDE or theming Linux, you’ve probably heard about the Oxygen icons that will be officially released with KDE 4.

Unfortunately, the official Oxygen website dosen’t exactly have a whole lot of icons up. You can’t look at a complete gallery of the progress they’ve made, unlike with the Tango project.

You can, however, get a sneak peek of things to come at the official KDE development SVN here.

Some of the icons look pretty slick, others… not so much. Obviously, these are not the final results. Note that the current license prohibits distribution until the official release. I guess they’ve got some perfectionists running this thing. ^_^

A problem with the Thunderbird feed reader

…Is that it does not support organizing feeds in different folders. Not directly, anyway. An even larger problem is that it breaks feeds when you do so.

There is a workaround though, which is the only reason I'm posting this to a blog rather then just filing a bug report. (Blogs tend to be higher on Google searches then bug trackers, and I've found I'm often not alone in breaking things like this.)

If you make a directory and drag some feeds into it they will die. They just won't be updated. If you drag them out again, they still won't be updated. It's as if Thunderbird has lost track of them or something. If you try to re-add the atom/rss/xml address you'll get a notice that they are already in the system. It's really a mess.

Here's a work around I've discovered:

1. Make a list of all the "dead" feeds.
2. Export your feed list. It will only include the good feeds.
3. Goto where ever your Thunderbird email directory is and back up the contents of "Mail/News & Blogs". Then, delete it.
4. Open Thunderbird and import that list of feeds you exported at the beginning. It will be missing any dead feeds, but you'll have rebuilt the evil database, so it won't think you still have them.
5. In that backup you made, there will be a file named feeditems.rdf. It's human readable, so you can look though it with a text editor and and manually pick out the addresses of your missing blogs.
6. Manually put them back into Thunderbird using the "Manage subscriptions" dialog. Never touch any feed related stuff without using this.
7. Note the usability issues and politely ask Mozilla to do something about it.

Actually, there is no need for me to post a bug report. This bug has been known about for a year and a half. *cough*

SuSE Gnome Mockups

Someone involved with SuSE Linux has posted a bunch of new mock-ups based off usability research done by the Better Desktop project.

Some highlights:

Notification boxes - I've been waiting for something like this ever since I tried Opera. In addition to the examples pictured, it could also use a download monitor thing, a la every web browser but IE.

New menu - Looks a bit like the new Vista menu, though mock-ups of concepts like this have been floating around for years. More info here.

From the looks of things, I'm gonna have to try SuSE again sometime soon…

Happy Birthday, Matthew!

Recently, my brother Matthew turned 12. To celebrate this momentous occasion, I gave him my old 100MHz Acer Aspire tower. In the interest of introducing him to Linux, Mandrake 7.0 was installed during the festivities.

But low and behold, the default desktop is KDE 1.0! As I am devout user of Gnome, tensions have broken out between us. Already, our manner has been colder then usual as I dump him out of the room so I can get work done. He carelessly, maliciously, has begun to dump even more of his dirty clothes on my side of the floor.

Clearly, something must be done.