These discussions still continue to amaze me. Of course, THIS is a technology oriented site, and most people here CARE about their operating system and everything their computer does in greatest detail.
Still, whenever the subject is brought up, there is a certain ignorance about the fact, the demographic group described above is a tiny fraction, and that most people just want to use their computer, generally just for the most basic stuff. So they naturally do not care about system architecture, and they do not even understand the advantages other OS could offer them, and why should they have to?! Most users are content with Windows, and I think that is alright...
How is this misogynistic? It's a tongue-in-cheek reference to an old cliché, and it's funny. It would be misogynistic if its point was that all girls are awful; what it is saying is that it's like that stereotypical girlfriend situation where she's cleaned up but is still a quote-unquote crazy bitch. Calling a girl a crazy bitch is misogynistic in the same way that a girl calling a guy a dick is misandric. We can use gender-specific analogies without it becoming hateful towards that gender.
If you think of it with the wide-scope idea that winning economically means having more money than anybody else. Fact is there're a lot of developers who've made a shitload of money off Mac-only software, and they apparently have much more fun designing their apps for a gorgeous piece of architecture. That's a trade-off I'd make without thinking.
But that's right. Delicious Monster, the Omni Group, Panic Inc., all are fools. Tell yourself that.
Those Mac-only shops chose to leave money on the table. I, personally, will not. Refusing to have a Windows box, even for testing, is like wanting to do business in Latin America and not having in-house Spanish expertise: sure, you can make a boatload of money in Brazil and have a healthy career, but it's nowhere near your full potential.
Multiplatform support makes a difference between a software "shop" and a software firm.
I don't agree with you... They didn't leave money on the table, they decided to focus on one thing to do it well instead of targeting everyone...
Doing cross-platform application comes at a cost (and not only in term of development time), even if it works well, the apps always feel a bit off compared to the rest of the apps on the platform (especially on mac) and that has an impact on usability, sales and so on....
Now for webapps, it's a different matter... but I'd still argue that if you are sure that a very small proportion of your userbase uses Internet Explorer 6, it might not make economic sense to support them because the cost of paying someone to do so is higher than the revenue generated by those users.
That's one of the worst similes I've ever heard. I wish people who didn't understand the English language would stop trying to be impressive with it. Stick to clarity until you're sharp enough to have a style.
If you define potential by "how many people have I sold something to", then you're a sad, sad person. I could never judge a life by something that arbitrary and unnecessary. In this case especially, where developing for Windows means you're giving up a part of your soul. I'll assume you've never ever ever used a Mac application before, because you're acting like there's no difference between a Mac app and a Windows app, but I assure you that the difference is staggering.
The benefits of taking a stab at the huge win32 market far outweigh the cost of hiring an specialist team to target the platform. You named a few "boutique" Mac shops ignoring the staggering number of successful companies that have products for both platforms.
So, mahmud, what's the lesson we just learned here? That you can be successful regardless of if you're boutique or enormous! Good! You agree with me!
> far outweigh the cost of hiring an specialist team to target the platform.
What the fuck are you talking about? We were discussing application development! You said that if you don't develop for Windows you're at an economic disadvantage! Where, in God's holy name, did you get "hiring a specialist team" out of that? Are you on something?
How is that deconstruction? You just copy-pasted the article and flipped the genders.
Instead of "deconstruction", "equality"? You'd be wrong, you'd still be irrelevant, but at least you'd be wrong. As you term it now you're not even wrong.
1. The mere fact of using Linux is not a proof of intelligence since the hard things in Linux are harder because they are more tedious, less user friendly or both (e.g: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story).
2. Being able to afford a Macintosh is not what I would call rich and the implication that having money is a virtue in itself is disgusting.
The joke (ha ha only serious) is the common views that Linux is intimidating & Macs are pricier. You should be disgusted - the phrasing is pointedly manipulative.
That's the point of most humor: you exploit a stereotype to get a laugh.
As a rule of thumb, the difference between classy humor and not-classy humor is that with the former, you put the joke on yourself (not on others) and/or you point out that the stereotype has holes in it the size of an NSA machineroom.
The joke isn't that Linux is complicated or Macs are cheap. The joke is that she (Microsoft) makes you THINK (keeps you "by convincing you") that Linux is complicated (e.g., rumors about hardware incompatibilities) and Macs are expensive (e.g., those "I'm a PC" ads).
When you think about it that way, it makes the analogy so much worse (or better, I suppose).
Do you notice a difference between clicking on tabs and check-boxes and editing text files? What is easier to remember - the sequence of clicks or format and syntax of configuration file? =)
I think it's actually designed for those who do not understand or do not care what an operating system is.
There are people who are totally fine with being completely clueless about how their computers work. Microsoft targets them actively. This is not evil per se - it's just market strategy.
I think it's actually designed for those who do not understand or do not care what an operating system is.
You should know what a spleen does and how to tell if it's healthy - if you're a doctor.
You should know what a tappet does and how you can fix it - if you're a car mechanic.
You should know what a tort does and how you can serve one - if you're a lawyer.
The Doctor, Lawyer, mechanic can be intelligent, dedicated, passionate people. Just not about computers. Why on earth should they care about operating systems more than you care about spleens, torts or tappets? What makes you special?
"“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”"
Now, most of the specifics here are things that normal people could do (cook a meal, etc). Few of them ("plan an invasion") are something that require substantial training. But his point is that people should be well-rounded, not specialized.
The problem is, generalization isn't rewarded in any modern culture that I'm aware of. The phrase "age of the specialist" is well known; people who are fantastic experts at (neurosurgery|IP law|graphics coding|etc) and utterly incompetent outside their field of expertise always have higher status and salaries than JOATs who can turn their hand to anything and do a decent job, but don't have great mastery at any one thing.
It's even hard to argue which approach is better; who is more likely to make a significant new discovery, the scientist who knows every little detail of his entire field and can synthesize all of them, or the scientist with decent familiarity with half a dozen fields, that has bring a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem?
I suppose there's a place for both. Certainly, when you have a knee surgery done, the guy you want to go to is the one who does nothing but knees, 4-8 operations per week, and not the guy who does whatever kind of surgery comes into his OR.
The evil bit is conditioning people to expect computers to constantly break, crash, not work. Microsoft has taught people to expect that, and some people have just accepted it as fact - computers crash.
When you're the market leader, you kind of have a responsibility to represent the industry in a good light.
"Have you tried turning it off and on again"? Is a horrible horrible tech support answer (Checkout IT crowd if you haven't watched it), but it's so common. We've become accepting of computers, and software crashing, and IMHO a large part of the blame is squarely with MS.
However, the blue screen of death was so prevalent that it set windows apart from other OS'es.
Kernel panics on linux are pretty rare. And I've never seen OSX just die at the OS level.
edit: Just remembered, I have seen OSX die, on my mac mini if I try to play backed up DVDs and output dolby5.1 in frontrow sometimes it just blows up and says "Your computer requires a restart" :/ eugh. Still, works if you use other players, and something easy to avoid.
Ooh! Ooh! I managed to crash OSX! I kept my computer running for a week straight, no sleep, and had iTunes shuffle to a new song once every 10 seconds, and for each song scrobble to Last.fm and also download album art and lyrics. At some point it borked out.
I know Windows gets a bad rep for crashing—I use XP on my Macbook and I've had no crashes yet—but beyond crashing, I'm astonished at how grotesquely unstable it is. I use an app on it that takes up the full screen, where one window generates the full screen window, so Alt-F4 doesn't work, and I can't open a task manager because it just gets auto-hidden by the screen. That's incredibly bad practice, but I've seen it done by multiple Windows designers because it, unlike OS X, doesn't offer a rigid set of guidelines for its functions.
Beyond crashing and messing up, Windows is just incredibly un-smooth. Perhaps they fixed it with 7, I don't know yet, but when I use XP or Vista I'm struck by how hard it is for me to treat its window metaphor with any respect. I can't rely on windows to move when I click and drag them, they don't have any particularly good window hierarchy in place, and everything is so choppy and clunky, even with a good mouse, that I find myself resenting the system. That compared to OS X, which is the smoothest system I've ever used. Everything in it adds up brilliantly.
I still like XP—or, I do until there are more Mac emulators available—but I completely get axod's argument, and agree with it. Microsoft killed computers' reputation, and are primarily responsible for why people I know think computers are so impossible to deal with.
I go months without rebooting win2k, but I've also seen it blue screen simply by removing a USB/serial adapter with the port still in use, which is obviously a third party driver problem.
You might try setting the "Always on top" option for taskman, so that other app windows can't cover it up. I've _never_ had a problem with taskman being obscured by another window.
That's how it's set up. It still gets covered because the full-screen is being constantly redrawn. So I can click on it, because it's above the black screen, but I can't see where to click, because the black is always above it, frame by frame.
The evil bit is conditioning people to expect computers to constantly break, crash, not work. Microsoft has taught people to expect that, and some people have just accepted it as fact - computers crash
You say it like it was deliberate. Historically, where Linux has said "not a chance on this hardware but hey, you could always write your own drivers", Windows has said "OK let's give it a go, fingers crossed" and it hasn't always worked.
Still, whenever the subject is brought up, there is a certain ignorance about the fact, the demographic group described above is a tiny fraction, and that most people just want to use their computer, generally just for the most basic stuff. So they naturally do not care about system architecture, and they do not even understand the advantages other OS could offer them, and why should they have to?! Most users are content with Windows, and I think that is alright...