Re: Apple's poor positioning for the age *after* x86

On 2005-09-24 01:55:17 -0400, ZnU <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

In article <2005092318012316807%danieljohnson@vzavenuenet>,
 Daniel Johnson <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Google's ranking system is a way to solve this problem, and a pretty good one in my view. You might argue that Google is solving the wrong problem in trying to index the entire web, but if you come up with a different problem and solve it, are you still competing with Google?

The larger problem is still 'Help people find useful stuff on the Internet', so yes. 

<scratches head>

Useful?

In any case, you are proposing searching things other than the web- product catalogs, mailing lists, etc. So that seems outside the domain of the "larger problem"

[snip]
The API wouldn't just allow Google to do full-text indexing of the contents of databases, it would also allow Google to make more sense of data on the web; we discussed mining web pages to produce structured data previously; that's a tricky problem. On the other hand, much of the information on the web already *is* structured, but software can't see that from looking at HTML pages. That structure *could* be exposed through this API.

What structure are you thinking of?

What's a product page. What's a product price. What's a spec lsit. What's a blog post. What's a blog post archive, and what's an entry within that archive. What's a message board, and what's a message....

I'd be hard pressed to answer any of those questions without more context, and I don't see the connection to "structure" to be exposed via an API.

The list goes on practically forever. Right now, Google has a poor under standing of semantic units smaller than a 'page'.

Hmmm. There is that. Some things are smaller than a page and some things cross page boundaries. Is this the sort of thing you mean?

[snip]
Ah, now *this* is not something that vendors who publish catalogs would desire. They would not use the APIs if such were the result, I think.

If they didn't use the API, their results wouldn't pop up when people performed explicit product searches. 

They do now, using Google.

Sacrificing that to have your products come up when people explicitly *aren't* looking for a place to buy would not be very clever.

I don't see that there is any sacrifice. It's not like these targeted searches exist today.

[snip]
If they are web-based, and public, Google can see them, I should think. What's not to like about indexing them like web pages?

For one thing, you'll often end up with totally irrelevant results because your result set will include some pages that have unrelated posts which, combined, happen to contain all of your keywords.

This does not seem to happen much; general messages boards group messages into pages by topic.

[snip]
This problem is not because of the dark aura of Bill Gates. Warning dialogs always have this problem; it's a well known UI pitfall.

I do not see that Mac OS X uses alerts any the less than Windows, though I admit that Mac OS X button labeling tends to be better. Windows makes Yes/No so easy, everyone does it.

OS X does actually seem to have fewer alerts of the 'You don't really need to know this, but I'm telling you anyway" type. 

This is not my impression.

More importantly, it has better alert design. Not just the better button labeling, but standard alert layout is to have large, bold text at the top of the alert which summarizes what the alert is asking in one short sentence, with a longer explanation below. Windows alerts don't tend to prioritize information this way (though it's hard to make absolute statements, since they're pretty inconsistent).

I do not think there is much to this, except for the button labeling. The problem is that people don't read the text anyway.

[snip]
Uninstallers are, of course, another example of fragile design. They basically assume the system is in exactly the state it was in right after the install, which is not always the case, and they're often fairly ignorant of dependency issues.

This has not been true since about Windows 3.

If this is true, why do uninstallers for major, first-tier applications still prompt me (in XP) to ask if I want to uninstall 'ALSKDJ.DLL' (or whatever)?

I haven't seen that happen in *years*. Your "major, first-tier" application is using an installer from the mid nineties, when there were routinely old 16-bit apps and installers to deal with.

May I ask what "major, first tier" application is still using an installer so old?

[snip]
Spelunking the file-system for your apps has never been adequate, and nobody really thinks it is anymore. That is why Apple opened up the Apple menu in System 7, and why NeXT (and Mac OS X) have a dock.

This is clearly not what's going on here. The Apple menu and the Dock are there for convenience They're locations where the user explicitly places frequently used apps. This makes them similar to the top level of the left side of the Start menu in XP, where the user can place frequently used apps. 

Yes. They do not cover the whole function of the Start Menu.

The 'All Programs' section of the Start menu (or whatever it's called), in contrast, lists all apps on the system, and apps appear there without the user explicitly specifying this. Mac OS (any version) and NeXTStep have no equivalent of this. Windows *needs* this because C:\Program Files is an unholy mess which needs to be hidden from users, whereas /Applications is, you know, not.

It is a defect in Mac OS X that you have to search the filesystem for apps. I appreciate that Apple makes it easier to do this that Microsoft does- but only in that they don't actively obstruct you the way Windows does.

It's still spelunking the file system.

The "All Programs" list is a feature, and one that the Macintosh suffers without.

[snip]
It is more the idea that nothing *should* be changed except through a GUI- such as a wizard or an installer.

Microsoft encourages this strongly, and some elements of the system only work if it is true. But they are important things like the COM or the service control manager, so it is Very Bad if this turns out to be untrue.

It's fragile and hackish. Microsoft took a system that didn't understand any of this stuff and hacked it all in at high levels, rather than building it in lower down. It shows. 

This is a very strange thing for a Macintosh advocate to say.

Apple's approach puts the logic for this into the Finder, which builds a database of apps as it browses the filesystem. That's a very high level place to put it.

Microsoft puts paths into the registry, building it on lower-level constructs like the filesystem and the registry.

If anything, you should be complaining that MS's approach is not high level enough, since it strictly speaking tracks files, not applications.

However, as I have pointed out adding more abstraction has dangers that Apple has already encountered. It's not obviously better.

[snip]
It's analogous to designing a journaling file system that only updates the journal when files are updated in *some* ways and not others. I think we can agree that would be bad design, yes?

That what journalling filesystems do. Only updates to file metadata are protected; file content is not.

You're being pedantic again. In this analogy, say, copying files in the file manager would update the journal, while saving files from an app wouldn't.

That's more or less the way it works. When you save a file, the journal may records a change in file *size*, but not the file content.

And yes, I am being pedantic. Did you expect less of me? :D

That's basically what Microsoft has done here. They've created a system that requires certain metadata to be in sync with the actual contents of the file system, and failed to provide a mechanism to make sure that always happens.

They have provided mechanisms to make sure it happens: installers and uninstallers. The system works fairly well unless you set out to sabotage it.

[snip]
The whole way Windows handles hardware seems to suffer from some of the same design flaws. We've discussed this before.

I don't seem to recall that.

Basically, the drift is, Windows seems to maintain a sort of semi-static hardware profile, and when hardware changes certain mechanisms are supposed to engage to modify this profile. 

Yes, that's right.

Windows also seems to have a three-tiered system for drivers. There are drivers that are on the disk, but not 'installed', there are drivers that are 'installed' but not loaded (that is, they're part of the hardware profile, but the devices they work with aren't present), and then there are drivers that are actively being used. 

That's right too.

OS X takes a very different approach to all of this. For starters, there are only two states for drivers; sitting on the disk unused, and actively being used. Any time OS X detects a device, it checks on disk to see if it has a driver, and if it does that driver is loaded immediately. Moreover, OS X has no static device profile at all; every time the system boots, everything from the motherboard chipset to the external USB devices is dynamically detected. (And OS X still manages to boot much faster than XP....)

I have not observed that OS X boots much faster than XP; looks about the same since Tiger came out.

However, Microsoft's approach is needed because they propose to support a wider variety of hardware. Some hardware can't be dynamically detected reliably: you just have to set it up and the system has to remember it. ISA is like that: the Plug & Play technology for ISA was never reliable enough to use on every boot. Once you had the configuration it had to "stick". Parallel-port printers are another case of this.

The three-tier system of drivers is meant to save disk space. MS ships a *lot* of drivers and it used to be that they left most of them on the CD, and didn't copy them to disk. This meant going to the CD to install new hardware, but it meant you didn't have to have all the drivers on disk all the time. This is less important now that disk is so cheap, and it is not uncommon to put the "install media" on your hard drive today. But originally the third tier was just the OS CD-ROM (or floppies!)

You might argue that since it is unnecessary, MS should drop support for these things. There's little to gain by dropping the third tier now, though, and going to a purely dynamic configuration is certainly to be a compatibility nightmare.

[snip]

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