Alternate.org

From MS-owned Slate: Linux’s new popularity may hurt Apple more than Microsoft.


Apple still has software applications not available on Linuxsuch as Quark for publishing, or Photoshop for graphicsbut if Salkever’s analyst buddies step forth and pronounce Linux the No. 2 platform, software companies will re-evaluate their commitments.

Right. Macromedia is going to write Flash MX for KDE/Qt. Adobe’s going to write a GNOME version of Photoshop Elements. Every developer devoted to Apple’s platform is going to automagically change development platforms, processors, coding languages and sales channels, just because Linux may be announced as the #2 desktop OS by some lame assfuck who doesn’t know shit about shit, or more importantly, shit about Apple or Linux.

The one thing he neglects to mention (actually there are many things… which distribution of Linux? Which GUI? tcsh or bash? Sawfish or WindowMaker? How many grandmothers out there run Linux as opposed to Macs?) is that software developers can make money by writing software for Apple’s platform. Perhaps not as much as they would (theoretically) for Windows, but don’t forget that the amount of competitors a developer faces within the Windows world is exponentially larger to that of the Macintosh.

Write apps for Linux and decide to charge for them? Desktop apps, no less? Good fucking luck. Did we not just watch VA/Linux and all the other Linux guys go under or combine or get purchased because it’s very difficult to sell software that’s written for a free platform?

So what do you think? If BusinessWreck (er.. Week) decides to announce Linux as the #2 desktop install, are you going to switch?




UPDATE: John Gruber responds, as well. Now of course, his response is very carefully thought-out, and doesn’t contain gratuitous use of the word ‘fuck.’ But the point is basically the same.

Despite all the other ridiculously cool announcements today, what I’m excited most about is Safari’s implementation of the legend tag. Tabs are still unreachable by (my) AppleScript, but hey.




Oh, and I guess maybe the Power Mac G5 is pretty cool, too. If you’re into that sort of thing.

What I’ve been thinking all along, and what I’d hoped more Americans would be:



As an article by Thomas Powers in the Globe notes, Bush, in his State of the Union Address, contended that Iraq possessed the following: 30,000 warheads, 500 tons of chemical weapons, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin. In a dramatic appearance before the United Nations that helped convince many of the justification for war with Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Iraq maintained a factory for making poisons and explosives in Khurmal, chemical munitions bunkers at Taji, rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents ‘’hidden in large groves of palm trees,’’ and a ‘’suspicious caravan of trucks’’ at the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine Institute, a center for testing biological and chemical weapons. As Powers reminds us, ‘’None of this has been found.’’

…

Hillary Clinton took $8 million from a book publisher and possibly didn’t tell the whole truth about the Lewinsky scandal. George W. Bush took the armed forces of the United States of America, put lives at risk, and shook the world order to wage war against Iraq. Maybe he told the whole truth about why we were going to war and maybe he didn’t


I honestly can’t understand why more of us aren’t outraged at what this country is doing; to ourselves as well as the rest of the world. I’ve never cared much about politics or government; I’m an American. We’re basically taught not to. What’s really difficult for me to trying to explan to my 5-year old that no, Iraq people are not bad. American people are not all good. He’s looking for a Star Wars-esqu Good Guys/Bad Guys type explanation and I just don’t have it for him. How do I tell him that we’re the bad guys?

Come on, Grant. You know you can’t even mention MS and widely-accepted standards in the same sentence, let alone actually have it happen.

I know it’s not hard to get a dramatic photo on an NYC subway, but damn. Via Coudal.

Okay, so what the fuck happened to Jewel? I guess her new ‘direction’ is unsurprising to a lot of you, but me, I thought she was pretty swell. For a while anyway, basically during the run of her first album. For those of you keeping score, she is officially the embodiment of selling out.

From Lockergnome Bytes:



Apple’s decision to close a loophole in it’s Rendezvous feature last week may ultimately doom the service. With the decision to restrict Rendezvous they will more than likely have to close any loophole that hackers may find. The feature had obviously helped sell records. For everyones information apparently hackers have found a way to trick the software to share again, so we will see if Apple makes further changes or do away with it all together



Pay close attention to the line: “The feature had obviously helped sell records.” How the fuck could Rendezvous music streaming – something that takes place over an internal network, machines on the same subnet – sell music, when the sharing-over-IP function was what Apple cut out of iTunes 4.0.1, PLUS the fact that even then, you couldn’t share purchased AAC files, but your regular-old, no-DRM-encoded MP3 files?



If anyone should get it, it’s these guys. I’m just trying to battle the waves of incoherent innacuracy these days.