replies to michael dawson, joanna, doug, jon johanning, dwayne monroe, jim ayler:
Michael Dawson wrote:
> Amen. We will not shop our way to a better world.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
> On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
>
> ravi wrote:
>
>>thanks for the detailed note, btw! now if only we could get all the
>>left-leaning LBO members to adopt open source:
>
> Life's too short.
>
shop? open source is free. perhaps i should've made that more explicit in my message promoting mozilla: you do not have to shop or pay for it.
joanna bujes wrote:
>
>> I don't mind the command line. The only problem is that it leads grown
>> men to wipe out their directories. You think you're in directory X when
>> you're in directory Y -- You say thrash them all! The OS says, are you
>> sure?, you say, sure I'm sure. And that's that.
>
true, true. as the old saying goes, unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. but for the 99% of the time that you actually do want to delete a directory it takes a fraction of the time.
Jon Johanning wrote:
>
> Since starting to use OS X, I've delved a bit into Unix, mostly out of
> curiosity to see what I can do with it. But the trouble is, you can't
> just delve a bit into it;
>
i disagree almost entirely with the above. the beauty if unix is the simplicity of its constructing blocks. without doubt a GUI interface is often much easier to use and [for simple tasks] learn. however, a beginner's unix guide, the online manpages and a few minutes a day should be more than enough to get familiar with unix. questions? there are a million of us who can answer them for you!
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> I got a CP/M computer in 1981. It was fun to have a real computer,
> but when the Mac came along I lost all interest in command lines. I
> love good industrial design. I don't think it's just eye candy - it
> makes work more pleasant and life more beautiful. There's so much
> ugly crap around these days that it's really wonderful to work on
> beautiful machines. It's a political economy issue as well as an
> aesthetic issue - modern American ugliness is in large part produced
> by cost minimization/profit maximization. Yeah, this titanium
> Powerbook I'm typing on cost more than a Dell would, but I'd have to
> live with its boxy ugliness.
>
>
well, that's subjective, isnt it? honestly, i find the mac (powerbook, the bulbous desktop thing -- iMac?, the limited function iPod) aesthetically and functionally displeasing. as someone else pointed out, the no-frills design of some modern PCs is at least neutral. not to insult mac afficionados, but sometimes i wonder when they may realize that the emperor has no clothes ;-).
Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>
> FreeBSD, the OS that Chuck G. and Ravi have been talking about and
> the heart of the thread I guess, is, in my opinion, not a tool I'd
> recommend to my friends who simply want to conduct general biz such
> ...
>
i would second that. i would go further and suggest that even linux is not ready for end users. mozilla (the product i recommended) is not only ready for non-technical users, it is arguably the best browser available right now.
Jon Johanning wrote:
>
> But my point is that I already have a Mac, which is supposedly based
> on BSD, so why would I have to switch to Linux? It would be a waste
> of money. Why isn't this open source stuff ready to run right out out
> of the box, or right after downloading, on the Mac?
>
as you correctly pointed out, you will soon see various open source ports to macos X, which is a fairly recent OS.
> Thanks for this insight (and the URLs). As I was beginning to suspect,
> what we have is basically a political set-to rather analogous to the
> moderate/radical Left one in the macro political world. The open source
> people are damned if they are going to support the corporate giant
> Apple, just as the Nader and points-to-the-left-of-Nader people hate
> the DP with a passion.
i made a joke about the apple/safari/khtml fork as the nader of the computing world, but seriously: i think your reading dwayne's message is somewhat off. the open source world is not radically opposed to the mac. many welcome the fact that apple decided to move to an open platform. there is a lot of ongoing collaboration between osX developers and others in the open source community.
the real divide in the open source world (that is relevant to your passage above) is that between the philosophical GNU free software foundation movement's originator, richard stallman (http://www.stallman.org/), and the more pragmatic open source proponents such as eric raymond (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/rms-bio.html). this is mostly a philosophical issue however and does not, IMHO, impede the technical progress of open source/free software. (if you do visit the ESR's writings page, check out the various unix/linux horror stories).
open source works because of community effort, at all levels. whether it be hacking the kernel, writing browsers, testing code, writing documentation, helping new users, etc. imho, that's the only way it can work. why would anyone want to be part of a community? i don't know the general answer (at least one that will fit into a few lines) to that question.
jimi ayler wrote:
> sorry i'm late to the party -- and, really,
> listserv-ing on the weekends doesn't sound like my
> idea of a party -- but, if i'm not mistaken, isn't the
> mach kernel in os x based on freebsd? wasn't that the
> reason why linus torvalds called os x, and its
> components, "crap"?
linus thinks freebsd is crap?! do you have a source to this? i find it very suspect. i doubt he would say that even of mach, despite his ongoing war with andrew tannenbaum.
--ravi