Windows or OSX?

[Gatticus]

Well, if you are a gamer the Mac is a non-contender IMO.

 

[geardoc]

Quote:

Originally Posted by blessingx /img/forum/go_quote.gif Yes, Apple is evil. If you want feedback (album information, history, cover art, etc. from iTunes store) Apple actually goes out to fetch it from a DB. They haven't worked out a system for it to magically appear yet. If you don't want those items, turn off the mini-store and iTunes doesn't fetch. ...

I dearly want to be proven wrong of my suspicions about Apple, but like any company whose goal is to make money, opportunities arise and they take them.
The question you want to ask is, can you get the fetch feature without transmitting
your personal listening habits and information to Apple? For Amarok in Linux,
I suspect there is no such transmission, just retreival from freedb or whatever
database you select.

Yes, transmitting such information without full disclosure is evil. Orwellian at its insidious worst because you don't know about it. At least the disclosure agreement
version that ZDnet looked at:

eg. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/securit...9232649,00.htm

"To provide those recommendations, the software sends information about the selected song, such as artist, title and genre, back to Apple. But the software also transmits a string of data that is linked to a computer user's unique iTunes account ID, computer experts have found."

....

"As of Thursday morning, the licence agreements distributed with iTunes did not disclose the exchange of any data tied to song information or users' personal accounts. Information included with the software said the new 6.0.2 version "includes stability and performance improvements" but does not mention the addition of the MiniStore."

 

[blessingx]

You should be very suspicious of Apple and any company, but the same should be true of claims made against them. Hell be suspicious of everyones posts too in my book. Apple certainly isn't an altruistic entity, but even those promoting open source have their own agendas (see the Ogg Vorbis commentary versus AAC in the portables forum - Ogg is an "advanced feature", AAC is somehow an Apple proprietary format

- even though it's an open standard not controlled by Apple or any other single company). The link you provided is old news, well discussed and corresponds directly to my response. For more info you can see this article.

Quote:

"I feel that Apple, in clearly telling users what the iTunes MiniStore does, has met its obligations for informing users," said Kirk McElhearn, an author of several Apple technical books, who helped identify the issue last week. "The fact that they clearly state, in this 'warning', that they do not keep any information about the contents of users' iTunes music libraries is sufficient for me." Apple said it made the changes to assuage any potential consumer concerns. "We've listened to our users and made access to the MiniStore an opt-in feature," Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said.

I think this is most interesting that Apple was criticized for using purchasing patterns to provide purchasing recommendations. Don't want that info, turn off the "store". I can't see how this is different that going to Amazon.com and being shocked that your usage info is being used. That's about it from this story.

 

[geardoc]

"...using purchasing patterns to provide purchasing recommendations." is the holy grail of marketing. It seems like a nice trade, right. Let statistical software analyze your patterns and then give you just what you want. You should welcome it. ... Or should you?

Greedy corporation agendas should not be a surprise, but I'd be very interested to know more about open source developer agendas.

 

[blessingx]

You're looking at it differently than I meant it, but I appreciate the paranoia. Likely many here is would be very nervous of a Minority Report life. I certainly would be. What I'm saying is if you specifically request data that requires the use of other data that's not an invasion of privacy if that secondary data is obviously required for the first. This case (and if it's only this case I think that speaks volumes) shows the user explicitly requesting information based on purchases, then somehow some are nervous that that is pulled. Effectively Apple appeased (days after) their critics by now stating the obvious. If you go to the Levys site and it has a button that says "re-order last pair purchased" would you be surprised your previously purchased info was used to determine size? Is it an invasion of privacy if even your track information is used to crawl Gracenote to get its title? Now there are plenty of examples where privacy can be broken. Your social, weight or computer name isn't required to tag a track, but if you follow this case you see how incredible benign this all is. If you want a recommendation for future purchases, and if you have an iTunes account, Apple, heaven forbid, uses your previously purchased tracks to help determine that recommendation. If you don't, you turn it off. If that is delving too deeply into your personal life, I'm not sure how you use Google, Amazon, Netflix or have a Head-Fi account. I'm a defender of privacy, but I'm not for exaggerated claims or hats made from tinfoil. It does a disservice to privacy issues and the horse in this specifically case died over a year ago.

 

[geardoc]

I suppose we can applaud Apple for how quickly they clarified their intentions on using personal information in iTunes. Curious if M$ would have been as forthcoming.

You made my point on how ubiquitous our patterns are already being used to save us time. You don't need a desire for tin hats to realize that this collective set of information is marketed and sold en-mass to whoever wants it. Each piece is insignificant, but the sum of all your electronic presence defines you very well. Now imagine it being used in a way that does not benefit you - maybe a job interview or something like that.

Back to the original posters question about which OS for audio, we have three choices, two with greedy corporate interests, and a third based on open source. Which one has your interests in mind? Predict your listening patterns and serve up licensed, DRM'd music, or let you do it all yourself?

I still haven't figured out what the agenda is behind open source developers.

 

[lowmagnet]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fwojciec /img/forum/go_quote.gif I've never used a Mac, so I can't help you there (the overall philosophy of Mac OS is something that never appealed to me).

Please tell us what you think the overall philosophy of the Mac OS is? I'd like to know because to me it's rather similar to some of the newer Linux distros.

 

[geardoc]

Good question. Mac is kind of like linux but "holding your hand" and anticipating what you want to do, but also keeping you from wandering into traffic and into XXX rated shops.

I guess OSX 's gui/desktop runs on top of a linux like system (FreeBSD).

 

[fwojciec]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lowmagnet /img/forum/go_quote.gif Please tell us what you think the overall philosophy of the Mac OS is? I'd like to know because to me it's rather similar to some of the newer Linux distros.

It's rather simple. Mac OS, in principle, restricts your choices with regard to how you can use use your system rather than trying to give you the full control over your hardware - whether they do it for profit, to create a particular type of consumer and a particular target group for their products, or whether they do it in order to make the system easy/fun to use and stable doesn't really concern me, what concerns me is the actual fact of restricting my choices and influencing the way I use my computer. It's like, for example, a difference between iTunes and Foobar - I definitely prefer Foobar because it gives me much more control over how I play and organize my music collection. There are many people who are perfectly happy with iTunes and prefer it over Foobar.

To me there is no comparison between the customization potential of Mac OS and Linux, regardless of the distribution.

 

[blessingx]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fwojciec /img/forum/go_quote.gif To me there is no comparison between the customization potential of Mac OS and Linux, regardless of the distribution.

If you consider any GUI to be a restriction/guide for common uses (OS X is certainly more "guiding" here) and the terminal/scripting is to expand that, how do you feel OS X stacks up to common "unix" distros with the latter? There are certainly differences with default directory installs, etc., but when you think of OS X do you think of opening the terminal? Do you also think of running Evolution, OpenOffice, etc. in X11?

Apple certainly restricts your hardware choices, but I thought pre-Intel switch it was actually less restrictive than Windows and Linux as you had an at least Windows equivalent and a true terminal window into the OS. Post-Intel switch, it's even less restrictive (though obviously I'm not only talking Apple OS here).

 

[error401]

Quote:

Originally Posted by blessingx /img/forum/go_quote.gif Apple certainly restricts your hardware choices, but I thought pre-Intel switch it was actually less restrictive than Windows and Linux as you had an at least Windows equivalent and a true terminal window into the OS. Post-Intel switch, it's even less restrictive (though obviously I'm not only talking Apple OS here).

Apple's overall philosophy is that of restricting choice to (supposedly) make their products easier to use. This was (and still is) the reason for the restrictions on the hardware you can use, allowing them total control over the whole system - even today they don't have to deal with 3rd party motherboards, for example. There are myriad other cases of this as well, and I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing, but it's definitely restrictive. They go further, though, and use their software design in the same way. For each of their products there is a pretty specific workflow that works well, and anyone that doesn't want to conform to it is pretty much without any viable options.

Even compared to Windows, their OS's UI is very inflexible, there are but a handful of configuration options that don't really affect how you use the software at all - or even how it looks - though Windows isn't much better. When you get to userspace apps you see the same thing, with programs like iTunes that basically force you to work under their set of assumptions about the best way to perform that task. For some people, these perceptions are correct (and don't think Apple hasn't done loads of usability research), but for many others the way Apple's software works is sub optimal. It seems, from my experience with macs, that third-party software tends to follow the same sort of philosophy. Now I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's not the best for everyone, and for many people (myself included), the lack of flexibility is frustrating and difficult to work with. I want my computer to work how I want it to, not how Apple thinks it should.

I'm not sure how you can really compare this to Linux, which is really coming from all philosophies at once, rather than Apple's tunnel-vision. Gnome, for example, follows a similar path as Apple, with a small set of important options and not much, if any configurability presented to the user. Personally I think they do it better, and still allow for things like UI themes and various window manager models, for example, while still keeping things simple and defaults sane. Going further, KDE is several orders of magnitude more configurable, and a lot less homogenous. Then for the real hardcore, you can fully tweak your environment to suit your needs with for example a heavily customized fvwm2, or an alternative window environment like ratpoison.

The command line interface is really a small part of it. Yes, Apple's is quite good and the availability of a fully-POSIX library, good terminal program and included *nix system commands is a huge boon for administration and scripting compared to Windows, but it shouldn't be considered anything special. It's nice, and allows for some cool features, but really you can do this on any OS with varying degrees of effort. The next Windows server OS for example will have a pretty nifty command line/scripting interface that's really rather revolutionary (I can't believe I'm saying this about an MS product...).

Long story short, it's about philosophy, and whether that philosophy fits your needs or not. If not, then Apple is not for you.

 

[fwojciec]

Quote:

Originally Posted by blessingx /img/forum/go_quote.gif If you consider any GUI to be a restriction/guide for common uses (OS X is certainly more "guiding" here) and the terminal/scripting is to expand that, how do you feel OS X stacks up to common "unix" distros with the latter? There are certainly differences with default directory installs, etc., but when you think of OS X do you think of opening the terminal? Do you also think of running Evolution, OpenOffice, etc. in X11? Apple certainly restricts your hardware choices, but I thought pre-Intel switch it was actually less restrictive than Windows and Linux as you had an at least Windows equivalent and a true terminal window into the OS. Post-Intel switch, it's even less restrictive (though obviously I'm not only talking Apple OS here).

There is, of course, a degree of customization that's possible on Mac OS, and, in a certain sense, a degree of customization is also possible on Windows (not necessarily through the terminal, but by means of the huge number of applications and hacks that are available for Windows) - only Linux, however, is expressly designed to be as versatile as possible and fully customizable (because it is open-source) and this is precisely what is attractive to me. By customizing Mac OS or Windows you are, in a way, going against the grain, with Linux it is perfectly normal and, in fact, inevitable and expected. It's actually difficult, if not impossible, to get a well working Linux system without tinkering and configuring things manually - some people consider that a disadvantage of Linux, it's lack of maturity, personally I rather enjoy doing it and I hope Linux doesn't mature too much.

To put all of this in a more general context... I see a particular tendency in how the various operating systems have developed over the years, and commercial systems (Mac OS and Windows) have, over time, become increasingly restrictive in terms of how much control the end-user has over the way he/she can use the system. This is achieved, to give but a few examples, by means of the design of the OS (a certain "thickening" of the GUI, if you will, and the relative hiding of the command line, directory structure, configuration files etc.), by means of license terms, and now, with Microsoft and Vista, by using dominant market position to influence hardware manufacturers to hard-wire certain design solutions (Apple, of course, doesn't need to do that since they make their own hardware in the first place.) I assume that the trend will continue into the future, so I choose Linux since it can't help but develop in the opposite way. This is, sort of, what I meant when I spoke (in an earlier post) in terms of the "philosophy" of different operating systems.

Mind you, I don't mean all this as some fundamental criticism of Mac OS or even Vista by a Linux fanboy - this is a way of things and, as a matter of fact, I consider Mac OS to be a very well designed operating system - Linux simply matches my preferences better, that's all.

Now we are really off topic

 

[fwojciec]

Quote:

Originally Posted by error401 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Apple's overall philosophy is that of restricting choice to (supposedly) make their products easier to use. This was (and still is) the reason for the restrictions on the hardware you can use, allowing them total control over the whole system - even today they don't have to deal with 3rd party motherboards, for example. There are myriad other cases of this as well, and I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing, but it's definitely restrictive. They go further, though, and use their software design in the same way. For each of their products there is a pretty specific workflow that works well, and anyone that doesn't want to conform to it is pretty much without any viable options. Even compared to Windows, their OS's UI is very inflexible, there are but a handful of configuration options that don't really affect how you use the software at all - or even how it looks - though Windows isn't much better. When you get to userspace apps you see the same thing, with programs like iTunes that basically force you to work under their set of assumptions about the best way to perform that task. For some people, these perceptions are correct (and don't think Apple hasn't done loads of usability research), but for many others the way Apple's software works is sub optimal. It seems, from my experience with macs, that third-party software tends to follow the same sort of philosophy. Now I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's not the best for everyone, and for many people (myself included), the lack of flexibility is frustrating and difficult to work with. I want my computer to work how I want it to, not how Apple thinks it should. I'm not sure how you can really compare this to Linux, which is really coming from all philosophies at once, rather than Apple's tunnel-vision. Gnome, for example, follows a similar path as Apple, with a small set of important options and not much, if any configurability presented to the user. Personally I think they do it better, and still allow for things like UI themes and various window manager models, for example, while still keeping things simple and defaults sane. Going further, KDE is several orders of magnitude more configurable, and a lot less homogenous. Then for the real hardcore, you can fully tweak your environment to suit your needs with for example a heavily customized fvwm2, or an alternative window environment like ratpoison. The command line interface is really a small part of it. Yes, Apple's is quite good and the availability of a fully-POSIX library, good terminal program and included *nix system commands is a huge boon for administration and scripting compared to Windows, but it shouldn't be considered anything special. It's nice, and allows for some cool features, but really you can do this on any OS with varying degrees of effort. The next Windows server OS for example will have a pretty nifty command line/scripting interface that's really rather revolutionary (I can't believe I'm saying this about an MS product...). Long story short, it's about philosophy, and whether that philosophy fits your needs or not. If not, then Apple is not for you.

I think we have a similar perception of how the matters stand

 

[geardoc]

Quote:

Originally Posted by fwojciec /img/forum/go_quote.gif I think we have a similar perception of how the matters stand

X3, what you guys said, and with so much good detail.

I still haven't figured out what the agenda is for open source developers.

 

[blessingx]

Quote:

Originally Posted by geardoc /img/forum/go_quote.gif I still haven't figured out what the agenda is for open source developers.

Is this repeated statement is in response to my comment? If so where were developers mentioned? That's another subject, but I suspect my thoughts there are the same as you. As for supporters here, that is hopefullly illustrated by my example and there are plenty of others of sacrificing facts in the interest of open source promotion.

Quote:

Originally Posted by fwojciec /img/forum/go_quote.gif To put all of this in a more general context... I see a particular tendency in how the various operating systems have developed over the years, and commercial systems (Mac OS and Windows) have, over time, become increasingly restrictive in terms of how much control the end-user has over the way he/she can use the system.

Although I agree with your triangulation between the three OSs, the "particular tendency" of the commercial OS X system has gone the opposite direction, no? Do you really feel OS 7, 8, 9 were more open than OS X? OS X built on Mach/FreeBSD, opened to open-standards like MP4 and H.264, agnostic to font and doc types, etc. I think OS X has become less restrictive (and it was the first Mac OS I was interested in since '85). You can argue the cause for that move towards openness, but I think it's clear. I wouldn't confuse Windows and OS X here. And since iTunes was mentioned, Applescript, as limiting as it is, has extended iTunes capabilities quite a bit on the Mac side.

Finally I wonder how many of the +3 have spent a good chuck of time with OS X (sounds like you may have error401)? Listen I again agree with the overall philosophies given. I also agree when applied back to the general public. We're not in disagreement with either of these. But I don't think this is the entire story. I also work for a company where most employees (depending on job) have a choice of their first day to choose a Windows, OS X or Linux box. It's the first company (and I've worked in the design and education worlds in the past), where I see so many Macs. And I have to say an awful lot of them have terminal windows open all day (though you're right this isn't the whole *nix story). The way I see it, when discussing restrictions (and besides the general philosophies) OS X gives better than Windows basic GUI instructions and most of *nix if I want it. That's why I and some others think it's less restrictive overall. We're obviously using "restrictive" is some cases differently though. There are certainly restrictions with using Linux as a main OS (even the often hyped Gimp ain't no Photoshop, etc.) as there are with OS X and Windows. In the end I agree - different strokes for different folks. Pick the platform that fits you best. Data exchange (at least in some areas) is easy between them.