David Fenton,
This was: "Re: [Finale] OT: Even Randy Stokes has viruses" but I've now changed the subject because the discussion has nothing to do with Randy Stokes. I will be changing the subject for other replies as well. And sorry I was not able to reply earlier.
On Monday, May 24, 2004, at 11:47 US/Pacific, David W. Fenton wrote:
All seem cosmetic, at the shell level.
Me:
You'll have to do some explaining about "shell level". . .
This is not something you mentioned in your examples, so it's not something I could have commented on.
It's something _you_ mentioned: "All seem cosmetic, at the shell level.". So stop trying to obfuscate with sophomoric tactics.
. . . MacOS X runs critical portions at BSD "shell level". Which, for some utilities, is the direct interface to what you might call 'kernel'. Hardly cosmetic.
Whoop-ti-doo.
A command prompt.
Who cares?
The only major OS without one was MacOS.
So, finally, OS X finally catches up with EVERY OTHER OPERATING SYSTEM ON THE PLANET.
As I mentioned in the reply to Dennis B-K on the same topic, I wasn't talking about "command prompts" at all. So it's a matter of you not being familiar with the concept I was referring to. "shell level" does not imply a prompt.
Furthermore, you seem to have a memory problem. We've discussed the matter of Classic MacOS and shells with prompts previously on this list. In case you've forgotten, the "Text Editor" plugin for Finale running on traditional MacOS, available since 1998, implements a unix shell (Tcl) with a prompt. It's not a matter of traditional MacOS not being able to use terminal or console type applications with a flavor of unix commands. It's simply that Apple, realizing that the majority of its user base has no interest in geek commands, consciously decided on a preference for GUI implementations and in it's native scripting language, AppleScript, maps commands to an English-like syntax in a fully object-oriented language.
This does not constitute copying from OS X. Indeed, it's precisely the opposite -- OS X finally incorporates for Mac users features that other OS's have considered essential.
In the above paragraph, and subsequent ones I've snipped to save you embarrassment, you rant on about something I wasn't referring to.
[...]
These are the kinds of things that Microsoft always screws up, because they tend to copy only the look and not the underlying information architecture.
MS screws it up because they don't have a flexible enough system architecture. . .
No, they screw up the UI issues because they don't really understand that you can't copy surface-level appearance and get the same benefits as that same appearance delivers in the Mac OS. The Mac UI was designed as a whole and incorporates principles that are very basic, but are applied very consistently throughout the user interface. This leads to an ease of use and transparency to the user that cannot be faked by simply pasting pretty pictures on top of a hodge-podge of OS components, as is the case in Windows.
You seem to be verifying my statement. In order for a system to be flexible it must have a substantial level of component integration. I see that you're trying to make some kind of distinction between graphical appearance, behaviors, and the OS architecture for the purposes of determining theft. Stealing interface concepts and "look and feel", no matter what kluges hold things together, is theft. It's a given that the two architectures can never be the same _technically_ because of fundamental things like byte order. In fact I never said that MS stole the Mac architecture. I said: "Instead, it appears to be an awkward kluge of ideas stolen from other operating systems. It doesn't seem to have a design concept of its own."
That particular problem is a failure to recognize that they *have* a problem.
Yes, I agree.
Philip Aker http://www.aker.ca
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