How Apple makes more profit on their systems...

[Alex Hewitt]

Coleman Kane wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-10-05 at 13:46 -0400, Ben Scott wrote:
>   
>> On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
>>     
>>>>> ... I got a mini displayport to composite adapter.  *bzzt*.  ....
>>>>> ... the mini just works for everything I want to do. ...
>>>>>           
>>>>  Reality Distortion Field is in effect, I see.
>>>>         
>>> Nope.  I wanted ... While I waited to get the HDTV, it didn't work with
>>> the old TV ...
>>>       
>>   The fact remains that everything "just worked" only after you
>> adjusted your definition of "just worked".  This appears to be a
>> common symptom of RDF exposure: Repeated claims of "it just works",
>> but careful attention notices that any scenario in which it does not
>> or would not "just work" is excluded by changing the terms of the
>> test.  It becomes impossible for things to not "just work" by careful
>> manipulation of the scenario.
>>
>> -- Ben
>>     
>
> I think, in general, the rule that Mac stuff "just works" with other Mac
> stuff implies the comparison to how PC stuff doesn't typically "just
> work" with other PC stuff.
>
> However, I think that all of us techies can pretty much agree that
> nothing in computing (whether PC, Mac, or Mainframe) ever really "just
> works" as much as we want it to, and that's why we're so dedicated to
> FOSS.
>
> Case in point:
>
> OS X never "just worked" with my old HP psc1315 inkjet
> Printer/Scanner/Copier, which claimed support "out of the box". I
> actually had to install ESP GhostScript, CUPS 1.3.x, HPLIP, and the
> Foomatic filter database over the top of the versions that shipped with
> Mac OS X. The ramification of this was that I had to go back and
> reinstall all of those packages when a new Mac OS X patch-release
> clobbered them via Apple Software Updater. However, using the HPLIP
> driver package, I was able to get it to "just work" under GNU/Linux
> systems as well as under FreeBSD systems. This includes the
> scanner/copier portion of the device.
>
> Later, when Leopard (10.5) was released, they "fixed" some of the
> problems by simply removing support for the built-in scanner/copier
> portions.
>
> Even in Windows, the support for the printer was pretty lackluster. I
> had to resort to serving it up via CUPS with a postscript filter, and
> use the ImageWriter driver from Windows.
>
> Of these platforms, GNU/Linux and FreeBSD are the only two that actually
> empowered the user to investigate and attempt to solve the problems. The
> other two are quite hostile to this approach, and a user could easily
> render their system unusable, incompatible with another software
> package, or have their work unwittingly undone by a future software
> update.
>
>   

I think it's the juxtaposition of FOSS with anything proprietary that 
makes greedy behavior so annoying. My preferred platform is Ubuntu 
running on my Acer laptop. For business reasons I still have Vista 
installed on the system and of course my customers are mostly Windows XP 
users. For servers I tend to install Centos (thanks Ben) and my 
customers are often using Microsoft Server 2xxx because the software 
they need will only run on that platform.

Based on my use of all these platforms, Linux is far and away the most 
stable. Windows can be more stable than people would like to admit but 
it does have problems which Microsoft will make you pay through the nose 
to fix. A segment of my business runs on Apple systems. In my experience 
the SBBOD (Spinning Beach Ball of Death) is slightly more common than 
the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) on Windows systems. I have had Windows 
and Mac updates KO the systems they were installed on. I  can't remember 
having anything go that catastrophically wrong with any of my Linux 
updates. When there has been a problem, I've been easily able to find a 
solution.  Some of the problems are actually hardware related (BIOS 
problems etc.).

So my stance is that if you  can run the software you need on Linux, you 
will be better off than  with a proprietary  platform and I never miss 
an opportunity to ask my customers to at least try the FOSS alternative.
Linux has certainly come a long way. A friend of mine ran his  business 
with Microsoft products for 20 years. He retired a year or so ago and 
got tired of the endless malware problems with Microsoft products. He 
(on his own no less) decided to try Ubuntu and now every system he owns 
is running Linux.

-Alex