Problem is that Slackware is so low-level that to do anything with it requires the knowledge and confidence to fiddle around with the system. With distros like Ubuntu, people who would think nothing of recompiling their kernel under Slack are uncomfortable doing something that might put the package management database into an inconsistent state.

This one just came up for me: Formatting a USB thumbdrive. Required dropping to a shell to run fdisk and mkfs.vfat.

(Which I could do, since I was a Slackware user from about '96 until this year, but I was expecting the procedure would be along the lines of 'Right click, select "Format"', not "Determine the device name, fdisk it, and run mkfs" like on Slackware)

True enough. But Uncle Max might, because he thinks he's good with computers but actually isn't.

And you do realize that you just responded to my complaint about Linux not being user friendly by telling me to download some *extra software* that has a name which--while it makes perfect sense to us geeks (G for Gnome, Part for Partition, Ed for Editor)--would confuse the hell out of a normal person, to do something that's a fairly basic part of using a computer?

That does not help your argument.

I did find gparted as a solution when searching, but for me, doing it from the CLI was easier. So I did. I'm talking about the people for whom CLIs are scary. Something like gparted is gonna be just as scary.

So have it only work on unmounted volumes, or have it only work on removable media. There's a much bigger chance of fuckup when you have to figure out it's /dev/sdi from the dmesg or df output and then type that in than when you're pointing right at the little icon that looks like a removable USB stick.

Hell, I'm a professional programmer, so presumably I could do it myself.

Go ahead and do a google search for "format usb ubuntu". You'll find some pages returned that are people posting in the appropriate forum that this would be a good feature to have. From February. I.e., it's been suggested to the developers, and apparently, like me, nobody else is motivated enough to fix it.

And really, this is the crux of my argument. Yeah, making it so anyone can fix something is, in theory, how open source improves. But in practice, most people don't care enough to work on the little things that are the key differentiator between mediocre-to-bad user experience and great user experience.

More like Linux for the geek who'd rather spend time USING his computer than fiddling around with it. Of course, saying this, I've just spent about four solid days fiddling with my Ubuntu system so things like control-U work properly like I was used to with Slackware (it means delete-line, dammit, not underline).

And yes, that's who Apple targets as well.

No it's not. A lot of it is getting there, but there are still to this day things where Linux just falls down on usability. And I say this as someone who's been using Linux (and, until this year, *Slackware* Linux) as his primary OS since the mid-90s, so it's not just that I'm dumb and can't figure things out.

Quick example: The other day, I needed do format a USB drive because there was something messed up with its filesystem and it thought it has less memory than it actually does. I'm running Ubuntu now, so I assumed that there was a nice easy Gnome way to do it.

Yeah, there's not.

I right clicked on the drive, and I thoroughly searched the Nautilus menus and there wasn't a "Format" option. Eventually I gave up and googled it...and learned that the only way to do it is apparently to drop to a shell and run fdisk and mkfs.vfat by hand.

Even if you dispute my central premise that Aunt Tilly can't handle shell commands, you've got to at least grant me that forcing Aunt Tilly to handle shell commands where a one-character typo (e.g., /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdi) could completely wipe out her hard drive is not particularly user friendly.

It's a little thing, but Linux is riddled with these little examples where the user is tooling along happily with Gnome wrapping them in a nice warm blanket of user friendliness and then they suddenly get kicked in the balls by the underlying Linux way of doing things when they have to set up slightly weird hardware or configure a program that doesn't have a nice graphical editor for its config file.

It's small stuff, yeah, but good user interface design is all about sweating the small stuff. Apple gets that. Microsoft doesn't, really, but they're close enough for most people. The open source community, for the most part, doesn't. Certainly some do, but for every coder out there who does there are ten going "So? What's so hard about fdisk and mkfs? People should learn to use the shell anyway, it's way more powerful." And they're the more prolific coders.

For years, GM, Ford, and Chrysler have been making multiple lines with basically the same car in them. E.g., the old GMC Safari van was the exact same vehicle as the Chevrolet Astro, just with different chrome slapped on the front. If you've been listening to the news lately, you may have heard that one of the plans the Big Three have to rescue themselves is to knock that shit off and simplify their car lines.

An example from my own personal experience: I was looking to replace my car and decided I wanted a hybrid. I went down to the Honda dealership to test drive the civic hybrid and the dealer started trying to sell me the non-hybrid civic since it was cheaper and he thought I'd be more likely to buy that day for a lower price. But if you took away my base "I want a hybrid", then my choice went from 'Civic vs Prius' to 'All of the small four-door cars currently on the market'.

Long story short, I bought a Prius.

Also, for a while, Apple had the Macintosh Performa, the Macintosh Centris, the Macintosh Quadra, the Macintosh Powerbook, the Macintosh LC, the Apple Workgroup Servers, the Color Classic, and probably a few others I'm forgetting, all being sold at the same time, all with a variety of different model numbers and configurations, some of which were the same machine internally but with different nameplates on the front for different markets. One of the big changes Steve Jobs made when he came back was to simplify that down to: iMac/Powermac, iBook/Powerbook (and then later iMac/Mac Pro, MacBook/MacBook Pro). Simplifying the line increased the overall Mac sales. People could just choose between the consumer and pro model, laptop or desktop. They didn't have to choose between high-end, lower-high-end, midrange, upper-low-end, low-end, in desktop, laptop, or tower configurations, or maybe the Classic line if they wanted a monitor built in, etc.

There was a great show on RadioLab about this subject the other day where it's explained a lot more eloquently than I can, so I'm going to link you to there and stop rambling.
http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2008/11/18/choice/

First off, I want to point something out: "Apple's throne" was achieved in less than two years, starting basically from zero, when competing against companies that have been in the cell phone market since the 80s. Keep that in mind when criticizing Apple's business strategies.

One SIGNIFICANT subset of the industry where open source is not the default way to develop software: Industries where the user interface matters. Think about how many times you've heard the phrase "As easy to use as Linux".

There is a lot of empirical evidence to refute this. Customers DO NOT want choice. One of the big complaints about Linux is that people have to choose between Ubuntu, Redhat, Slackware, Debian, Kubuntu, Fedora, LFS, Gentoo, etc. Or maybe FreeBSD or NetBSD. And on top of that, Gnome or KDE or something else. When faced with too many choices, the reaction amongst most humans is give up. One of the reasons Ubuntu has been so successful is that (unlike, say, Slackware) you don't have to go through and choose which programs and window manager/desktop system you want.

One of the biggest wins by far of the App Store is that there is a certain minimum quality level needed to be in it. If they opened that up, it would turn into something like SourceForge and it would be impossible to find the good stuff amongst the chaff.

But I thought you said choice was good? ;)

Honestly, I prefer Apple to have competition. Keeps 'em honest.

All of the other smartphones are already a lot more open than the iPhone, and (with the exception of Android) they've been around a lot longer. Apple's still whuppin' their asses.

Wow, you don't understand Linux people at all, do you? There is a certain sort of person who will try to install Linux on anything that stands still in front of them for too long. The only computing hardware that people won't try getting to run Linux is computing hardware that's already running Linux. And even then, they'll try to swap in a *custom* version of Linux. It's what they do. Making the iPhone more open would just have made that happen more quickly.

There's another way to look at that.

Nokia: A huge lineup of phones for sale, for any carrier, with a history of mobile phone sales going back to the 80s. They have phones targeted at every price point, every demographic, every market.

Apple: Has one cell phone model (available in two configurations), which it has been selling for a year and a half. In most countries, it's only available with one provider, and it hasn't even been *available* (legally, anyway) in most countries until the middle of this year.

And despite that, according to you, Apple's already matched 1/4th of Nokia's sales?

Pretty damned impressive, that.

That 1.5M number is way higher than the actual sales.

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/10/dont_buy_the_g1.html

(Note that URL truncates the full title, which is "Don't buy the G1 Sales Figures". It's not just an article telling you not to buy the G1)

I would not bet against Apple were I you.

http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/gartner_apple_overtakes_microsoft_as_worlds_3_smartphone_os_vendor/

They're already up to ~13% and growing faster than any other company. You say they're too targeted at one market, but the market they're targeting isn't "Executives who need to have access to their email at all times" like RIM and Microsoft have targeted with their respective smartphone OSes--it's "People who want a good cell phone." That's a pretty big market.

Also, what do you mean "like all Apple products"? The iPod still has north of 70% market share.

Not really.

See, in addition to making inferior products, one of the ways that manufacturers lower their prices to meet Wal Mart's goals is to outsource. You'll notice that Wal Mart's big "Buy American" kick died along with Sam Walton--nowadays, shockingly few of the items in Wal Mart are American made, simply because suppliers can't afford to pay American labor while still meeting Wal Mart's supply price mandates.

So yeah, you buy four pairs of pants for 1/4 the cost of normal Levis and each pair lasts a quarter of the time that "real" Levis would. Works out about even for you. But to stay profitable as Wal Mart continues to force the price down, several Levi workers might lose their jobs. But hey, at least welfare will pay them enough that they can still shop at Wal Mart too.

Long term, Levi can't stay profitable at any price, sells their trademark to Wal Mart as part of a bankruptcy settlement, and Wal Mart starts slapping the Levi brand on Chinese-made burlap sacks with two holes cut in the bottom and a rough hemp rope around the waist.

(Then, eventually, they discontinue the rough hemp rope because the size of Wal Mart shoppers' waists are enough to keep the sack from falling down and it saves them a ha'penny per unit)

That is, in fact, exactly what he's saying. Wal Mart requires its suppliers to lower their prices by a certain percentage each year. At first, the suppliers tend to do this by improving efficiency but...there's only so much of that you can do. Eventually they're forced to either stop selling to Wal Mart or reduce quality.

In this specific example:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2003-07-21-walmart_x.htm

Wal-Mart has first dibs on the mass Levi's brand, Levi Strauss Signature, before it hits other retailers. The line, featured on Wal-Mart's in-store TV network since Friday, is a lower-priced take on the premium Levi's brand. Jeans tops and jackets made from lighter-weight denim and with fewer design details will sell for about 30% less than Levi's. "We've built a style and line that are relevant to customers and fashion," says Mary Kwan, vice president of Levi Strauss Signature.

Levis made with cheaper denim and fewer design touches. And it's like that with a *lot* of the "name brand" items you find at Wal Mart.

Why not? If a company spends $50,000 developing a program (A reasonable price for 1 cheap developer employed for 1 year) and then distributes it digitally, you're saying they should only sell it for like $.05/copy? They would have to sell a million copies just to break even.

Not to mention that when a program is shipped, ongoing costs don't just stop dead. There's maintenance, support, sales, advertising, and other such ongoing costs you have to deal with.

And incidentally, unless your app is featured in one of Apple's commercials, the average sales of software in the App store is about 16/day. Assume you price it at the App Store minimum of $0.99 (the only lower price point being 'Free'), which you apparently still think is an enormous markup since you're only taking into account reproduction costs. Apple takes its 30% cut, leaving you with about 70 cents. Times 16 is $11/day. Times 365 is about $4000/year. So to make up that $50,000 worth of development cost would take about 12 years, and God help you if you need to fix a bug, because you can't afford to keep your developer employed during that period or it adds another 12 years. Oh, and this assumes that people keep downloading an app at that rate when you can't afford to debug it or market it in any way.

Software prices aren't based on "artificial scarcity". They're based on scarcity of Programmers, and decent programmers are a very scarce commodity indeed.

Beyond the resolution of 35mm lenses, maybe. I believe the particular RED back with the 261MP sensor was designed to mount large-format glass.