Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X. - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/g9WdNt6yVgR <comment><USER2> I prefer Lion to Snow Leopard.

I find myself appreciating the more controversial changes, like reversed scrolling and hidden scrollers. I followed Gruber's advice and suppressed the impulse to switch the defaults back to Snowpard behaviors and find that I'm less happy when I have to use Snowpard now.

Meanwhile:

* Mail.app under Lion is the best mail UX they've ever shipped. It's not a small improvement over Snowpard; it has a more reasonable layout now that makes Smart Folders make more sense, and search seems to have been completely rebuilt and actually works now.

* I find myself liking Mission Control enough not to mind not having vertical virtual desktop arrangements.

* Preview can sign documents now!

* The Filevault fix is huge for me (Filevault is now a bona fide block level FDE), since it means I don't have to use PGP WDE, which was a debacle.

My sense of it is, there is zero opportunity for someone to compete with Apple and Microsoft on conventional desktop operating systems, and the problems O'Reilly has with OS X are not generally going to be shared by people like my dad, who are (a) the only people Apple _really_ cares about because (b) they're where all the money is.

<comment><USER3> > Mail.app under Lion is the best mail UX they've ever shipped.

Totally agreed; I have been using Gmail web interface for years reluctant to switch to a desktop client, but switched immediately after installing Lion and checking out the Mail app.

<comment><USER4> Same here. The Show Related Messages feature is even an improvement over Gmail's conversations. Now I want that on my iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those criticizing- He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong. Not all posts are meant to be essays...

Briefly though, (as another user who switched from Mac OS X), I can certainly give examples of what he says:

Not all of these are specific to OS X, its the overall hardware and software that is getting frustrating.

More user-hostile

\- If you replace your SuperDrive with another drive, you CAN NOT boot any operating system (other than Apple's) off usb drives or even external DVD drives plugged into usb slots. So with two hard drives, you can not install Windows or Linux. [1]

\- Batteries are not considered user-swappable anymore. [2]

More buggy

\- Battery life degradation when moving from SL to Lion. Apple forums are full of examples. [3] (78 page thread, no confirmation or fix from Apple).

\- We all know how annoying the switch to Mission Control was, right?

[1] <http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1125135>

[2] <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1756>

[3] [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235?start=0&tst...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235?start=0&tstart=0)

[Edit: formatting]

<comment><USER6> Worst parts of Lion over OS X:

1) Removed "Save As". You now have to duplicate and then save the file.

2) Smaller resize/minimize/"maximize" buttons.

3) The green maximize button still doesn't maximize.

4) Switched default behavior with mouse scrolling.

5) Generally slower and more resource intensive, noticeable on older (2009) Macbook Pros.

6) Terrible, lengthy switch over from the previous version of FileVault, if you had that enabled.

7) Crashed a lot of programs initially, especially Chrome. Now not as much, but very crashy a few months ago.

<comment><USER7> Seriously, wtf is up with removing "Save As"? I had to copy the text from a file I was working on and paste it into a new file because the "Save a new version" option wasn't doing anything.

One you missed: really horrible auto-correct feature Apple added. It will replace a word when you're in the middle of typing it. Completely broken and totally transparent. At first, I thought that WriteRoom was just buggy.

Oh, and the "Home" folder isn't exposed under the Favorites section of Finder by default anymore. You have to go to "Go > Home". Took me a little while to figure that one out.

<comment><USER8> Save as doesn't make sense if the app auto-saves.

<comment><USER9> "Save as" is usually used when you want to save it as a different file somewhere else, and most people have cmd-shift-s ingrained in their mind.

This no longer exists and there's no excuse. Autosaving doesn't even do the same job.

<comment><USER8> I don't think you understand. This is about paradigm shifts.

Here is how it used to work: You open this old document because you want to create a new one and use the old one as a template. You either _Save as_ right away or (much more likely) you edit for a bit and do a _Save as_ at some later point.

If you do this with auto save you are fucked. (Well, not really. There is now Versions, so starting with Lion this is finally a recoverable mistake.) Editing your document for a bit before doing a _Save as_ with auto save is the same as mistakenly saving your document – overwriting your old document – instead of doing a _Save as_. That mistake is catastrophic – I know it, I used to make it often enough myself – and users would make it all the time had Apple left _Save as_ in.

Now when you open an old document you will be asked – as soon as you start editing – whether you want to edit the document or duplicate it, thus avoiding that catastrophic mistake. You can also duplicate documents at any time.

The transition period will be painful, that's for sure, but the end result is pure bliss. It's worth it.

A lot of changes with Lion are just like this. Sometimes some pain while transitioning is the price for awesomeness.

<comment><USER10> And what if my workflow involves making multiple files based off the same document? Say I making png buttons in Photoshop. I change the test to "Order" pick save as, type "order.png", change the text to "Cancel" pick save as, type "cancel.png", change the text to "Help" pick save as, type "help.png".

It sounds like that work flow just got massively tedious.

<comment><USER8> Duplicate → Save, Duplicate → Save.

One step turned two. Worse? Yes. Tedious? No. It's worth it given the other conceptual changes and the fact that this is very much an edge case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I currently use OS X for all my work and for personal/home use. But I have to agree with the sentiment. I have had nothing but praise for Apple and OS X up until Lion release. But this year has been a major turning point. End of XServe, end of Apple java, talk of end of Mac Pro and the whole post PC world thing, turning OS X into fisher price phone OS. Honestly, at this point I have to re-think my future and make a platform switch. I have invested well over $30,000 into Apple so far, but going forward I will most likely end up with Linux for software development and Windows for Photoshop and video editing (personal use).

I'm really just waiting to see what post-Lion OS X looks like, and if they keep moving towards iOS/iPhone, then I really don't want anything to do with Apple. I don't need a computer/OS from a phone company.

<comment><USER12> Have you seen the new Windows? Microsoft is steamrolling down the "new world" path faster than Apple.

<comment><USER13> Same with Ubuntu unfortunately.

Seems like one of the smaller Linux variants will have to save us. At the moment, I'm quite taken with Fedora/Gnome 3. Although Ubuntu+Gnome 3 and the upcoming Linux Mint with Gnome 3 are solid options...

Yes. I like Gnome 3. Gnome 3.

<comment><USER14> Just installed Linux Mint - I love it! A real improvement over the bloated Ubuntu 11.10 release and Unity. It's fast to startup and shutdown, responsive and has a lovely UI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,000. I've been running Ubuntu (and recently Linux Mint) full time for both work and personal use for a year and a half.

In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot.

When I click the Maximize button on OSX, it doesn't actually maximize the window 99% of the time, it just picks a seemingly random size. I saw an app a while ago that would let you control how your OSX apps are resized when you maximize them, but if I have to buy an app just to make my OS do what it should do anyway, there's something wrong.

I need 10 different apps on a Mac just to do what I can do out of the box in Ubuntu. Nautilus can access Windows network shares, SSH/SFTP/FTP access, and can mount NTFS, HFS, and pretty much any other filesystem type there is.

On a new linux machine I can apt-get most anything, but if I do need to compile something I just apt-get build-essentials and I'm ready to go, on OSX you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source.

I just want to see hidden files in Finder, why is that so hard? Why do I have to google it and use a 3+ key combination to enable showing hidden files? I'm all for keyboard shortcuts, I'm a keyboard man, but until I learn and memorize them, you should put them in the menu where I can find them with a little hunting.

And that reminds me, why can't I type a path in Finder? I prefer an address bar, where I can type a path to a directory I want to view, but noooo, I have to click around, and if it's a really deep folder I'm trying to get to I'm screwed.

I like Home and End keys. Where are they?

In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down the left or right arrows for a while.

Maybe for some people this locked down, dumbed down environment works for them. Maybe some people love learning the myriad of keyboard shortcuts needed to get stuff done on a Mac, but I prefer Ubuntu, I can get stuff done a lot faster and without wanting to kill myself.

<comment><USER16> _Suum cuique_ but some of your concerns really aren't:

> In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I > can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near > a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize > sweetspot.

They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it.

> When I click the Maximize button on OSX, it doesn't actually maximize the > window 99% of the time, it just picks a seemingly random size.

There's now a full-screen mode that takes care of that.

> Nautilus can access Windows network shares, SSH/SFTP/FTP access, and can > mount NTFS, HFS, and pretty much any other filesystem type there is.

One of these might be for you: [http://mac.appstorm.net/roundups/utilities- roundups/5-altern...](http://mac.appstorm.net/roundups/utilities- roundups/5-alternatives-to-the-os-x-finder/)

> On a new linux machine I can apt-get most anything, but if I do need to > compile something I just apt-get build-essentials and I'm ready to go, on > OSX you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source.

Darwin ports? Fink?

> I just want to see hidden files in Finder, why is that so hard?

      defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE ?

Or just use the terminal ?

> And that reminds me, why can't I type a path in Finder?

CMD-Shift-G

> I like Home and End keys. Where are they?

Erh, fn-ArrowLeft/ArrowRight ?!

> In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I > could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going > forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down > the left or right arrows for a while.

The keyboard tab in Terminal's preferences? Or switch from Emacs-like to Vim- like navigation in the terminal?

> Maybe for some people this locked down, dumbed down environment works for > them.

As I said, to each his own and there are valid concerns/tradeoffs about OS X. But in this particular case, the only thing "dumbed down" here is your rant.

<comment><USER17> I think some of the points are valid; there may be solutions but they are so obscure that people obviously never discover them. I've had a MBP for nearly a year now and never knew that Fn+Left/Right substituted for Home/End (thanks for the tip, btw). I can't see myself guessing Cmd+Shift+G to type paths into Finder either... They're valid solutions but normally Linux is (not unjustifiably) castigated for requiring obscure wizardry to do things, I don't see why OSX should get away with it either.

<comment><USER18> One handy thing is that because OS X uses Command for most of its window- management and application hot-keys, control + key is almost always unmasked by the application. Why is this important? Control-A and Control-E work in almost any text input! They work in Adium, they work in Chrome for the location bar and this textarea, and I'm sure many others.

I was pleasantly surprised because the Windows/Linux systems tend to mask Control-A for select-all.

<comment><USER19> All native text inputs support Emacs keybindings. The only rub is that you need to use Ctrl + Option to Meta.

<comment><USER18> To me I think of it as Bash bindings, because that is where I learned them. For text editing I've been using vim bindings, but I never found the vim mode to work quite like I want it to on the terminal. I should look into that more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Having had a "I really am starting to dislike Mac OS X, but Windows 8 looks pretty good!" revelation, I started to use Windows 7. I came back after about a week and told Mac OS X I'd never leave it again. I reinstalled Windows 7 about 2 or 3 times, lots of weird, inexplicable errors, one of which required a Microsoft FixIt program to run as there were some "corrupt registry keys". Gosh, it was not good.

That said, I agree that Mac OS X is not getting better. It needs to change. Everything since about 10.3 to today has been fairly incremental, and OS X is showing its age (ever wonder why Apple never changed to OS XI? It's because they're all the same...).

It's also showing that it doesn't have any real push at Cupertino to get better. No-one is driving OS X. Hardware is being driven by Johny Ive, software was arguably being pushed by Jobs, but it's clear that he was only interested in iOS for years. I'd note that iOS is going the same way as Mac OS X: stagnating in the face of competition that is doing more interesting things (amazingly, that competition is Microsoft!).

I feel like Apple is a company that rests on its laurels until the market practically forces it to change. The change that's coming for Mac OS X is that it will go away altogether. I think Steve hated it, and was waiting for the time when they could sell you iOS only. The only reason they keep Mac OS X around is for developers, and Apple aren't exactly known for making them happy.

Microsoft's dual-paradigm Windows 8 shows it's not that crazy. I think Mac OS X has an expiry date of about 5 years from now.

<comment><USER21> What on earth did you do to make Windows start having "weird, inexplicable errors"? And, why do I never have these problems?

<comment><USER20> I was trying to install Star Wars: The Old Republic, and the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable flat-out refused to install die to "Error 1365" (if I remember my error codes right). Required a Microsoft FixIt to fix the registry keys.

And I have no idea how it happened.

<comment><USER21> That is quite curious... though can you really blame the operating system for a program running on it? (Presumably SW:tOR)

<comment><USER22> People like to blame everything on Windows, including "I dropped my laptop down the stairs and now it doesn't work right" type stuff. I think if Microsoft had replaced the blue screen with a message that instead said "Your $PC-MAKER computer is a piece of crap, buy a $OTHER-PC instead." nobody would actually complain about Windows.

[a general comment, not directly related to lewisham's problem.]

<comment><USER23> In some regards, they did. The crash reports from Windows XP indicated that around 20% of all OS crashes originated in the display driver (1). Vista introduced a new display driver model. One of its features is that the OS will now survive a driver crash. The screen just goes blank for a few seconds.

1) <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480220.aspx>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There may be a good point hiding there, but I don't think he made it particularly well. He argues that OS X is getting worse.

His specific complaint was that he couldn't find the Library folder to delete his mail. Two things to keep in mind: first off, people who set up Mail extremely rarely will want to delete their email. So on the list of use cases to optimize for, that one lives near the bottom of the ladder. Secondly, the Library folder is, for all intents and purposes, something that should have been hidden to begin with. The kind of stuff that goes into a Library folder goes into hidden directories on other OSes anyway (think Application Settings on Windows, or .config, .gnome2, .kde on Linux). The fact that Apple only just now got around to hiding a folder that did nothing but clutter up the home directory for most users is significantly more surprising than the fact that it's hidden.

There was another complaint, which was that upon putting the relevant files in the Trash, attempting to empty it yielded file in use errors. That is indeed a problem, but he complains that he can't skip all of them, and that this is an old issue. So how this is related to OS X getting worse is unclear. It's definitely extremely annoying, but then I also don't think people find themselves deleting thousands of files of which several are in use very often. That said, one wonders what was using those files (unless he'd forgotten to quit Mail, but I doubt that).

Basically, "the latest frustration", his leading example of something that is "worse in Lion than in Snow Leopard", seems to not be a very good example at all. What's missing are the "so many [other] things". I want to hear them, because I haven't found too many, and I think it would be interesting to see what others genuinely think is worse. Some disagree with the changes in Spaces, for example, which is understandable. What else?

<comment><USER25> Overally I don't consider 10.7 being worse than 10.6, I'm ignoring Mission Control stuffs as I was ignoring Exposé. But there is one thing I find it maddening above all is the settings and behavior of Terminal.app, I understand _nothing_, this is insane. The behavior of Terminal.app is insane, it's even harder to explain since I fail to understand its logic.

<comment><USER26> Check out iTerm2 if Terminal.app isn't doing it for you anymore. <http://www.iterm2.com/>

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the tip will definitively try it out.

Edit: Wow I just put my shell command /bin/zsh and the default behavior seems to fit my needs without reading all the options. It closes all the tabs when I quit, it doesn't keep a kind of useless history displayed when I start a new session, the theme thing works right away. Thanks, I will be using it from now on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm somewhat of a new mac user, so I can't speak historically, but I will say that lion was quite a downgrade. It broke things that were previously working fine (my network drivers and my dev tools), removed useful features (rosetta), and really didn't add anything new that I care about. I never use the app store; I dislike mission control; really the only thing I actually like is the better window resizing.

<comment><USER2> What network drivers did Lion break? Are you plugging custom network hardware into your Mac? Why?

We're a pretty dev-tools-intensive shop here and while the transition to XCode4 has been hiccupy, I don't think Lion has broken anything for us.

<comment><USER28> A lot of people (including me) are suffering from dropped wifi connections. There's a thread on the Apple support forums that has 1264 replies and 157731 views: [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191630?start=0&tst...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191630?start=0&tstart=0)

Apple has been trying to fix it ever since Lion came out. After 2 updates it's still not working for me.

<comment><USER29> I fixed my WiFi not reconnecting by zapping my PRAM.

Cmd-Opt-P-R on boot and hold down until you get a couple of loud bongs.

Yeah! I know! First time doing that has ever fixed a damn thing for me, but not reconnecting to my WiFi was starting to become an annoyance.

This was on a new main logic board on my 2007 MBP running a fresh install of Lion 10.7.2 copied out of the Install app and burned to an 8GB USB key.

<comment><USER30> Switched to a Broadcom chip and still can't resolve all the silicon-level bugs. <http://wiki.debian.org/MacBook>

Broadcom may make Tim Cook happier, but Atheros is more the "Steve" of wifi chips. However, the 2007 MBP uses Atheros - yours is actually a different issue.

<comment><USER29> I actually made myself a Broadcom airport card, for less than $20 and it's faultless. Atheros cards have always worked great for me too.

The only time I've ever had WiFi problems is under really really old versions of Ubuntu on a ThinkPad.

I suspect a lot of problems are caused by interference, or really densely populated areas. Even out here in the boonies of North Houston, there are 8 - 10 WiFi networks visible, neighbors etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Re: "maximize" button that is being complained about in this thread. It's not a maximize button, it's a zoom button, and while I don't like its behavior, it's always been this way in OS X. From the current HIG:

 _Your application determines the initial size and position of a window, which is called the standard state. If the user changes a window's size or location by at least 7 points, the new size and location is the called the user state. The user can toggle between the standard state and the user state by clicking the zoom button in the title bar. Follow the guidelines in this section so that users can have the zoom experience they expect.

Choose a standard state that is best suited for the tasks your app enables. A document window, for example, should show as much as possible of the document's content. Don't assume that the standard state should be as large as the current display permits; instead, determine a size that makes it convenient for users to use your app. If appropriate, you can allow users to take some app windows full screen if they want more space.

Adjust the standard state when appropriate. The user can't change the standard state that defines a window's initial position and size, but your app can do so, based on other settings. For example, a word processor might define a standard that accommodates the display of a document whose width is specified in the Page Setup dialog.

Respond appropriately when the user zooms. When the user zooms a window that is in the user state, your app should make sure that size defined by the standard state is appropriate in the current context. Specifically, move the window as little as possible to make it the standard size, while at the same time keeping the entire window on the screen. The zoom button should not cause the window to fill the entire screen unless that was the last state the user set.

If the user zooms a window in a multidisplay system, the standard state should be on the display that contains the largest portion of the window, not necessarily on the display that contains the menu bar. This means that if the user moves a window between displays, the window's position in the standard state could be on different displays at different times. The standard state for any window must always be fully contained on a single display.

Don't allow a zoomed window to overlap the Dock. You always want to make sure that users have full use of both your windows and the Dock. For more information about the Dock, see "The Dock."_

[http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserEx...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/Windows/Windows.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000961-BACEDHFG)

<comment><USER32> Hold shift while clicking the zoom button to maximize the window. Edit: in Chrome only.

<comment><USER33> Or install a utility like RightZoom.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the tip! I didn't know about RightZoom.

Here are some little known Mac utilities I like:

* MutableCode's _Breakaway_ let's you configure separate audio volumes (including silence) for with and without headphones.

* Stereopsis' _Flux_ adjusts your display's color temperature to match the type of lighting in your room (e.g. daylight, halogen, fluorescent) to avoid the blindly blue glare in a dark room.

<comment><USER35> F.lux is actually available for all platforms! I've been using it on Windows for a while, one of my favorite small utilities.

<comment><USER36> Well, not iOS yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Don't really see why this is big news. First I don't agree that the progressive versions of OS X are getting worse, but this is entirely subjective (for you they might be getting worse, I can't say). Second, based on the fact that this is largely a subjective opinion, given your workflow is not my workflow, does it really matter what Tim thinks about OS X? This is nothing but a rant. A very sparse rant at that.

</comment><comment><USER31> FWIW, if he wants to back up his mail before deleting it, the supported way to do it would be to select the mailbox in Mail.app itself and select Export Mailbox…

By hiding the Library folder, Apple isn't trying to be hostile: most users never need to access anything in this folder. Users who are advanced enough to be grubbing around inside the Library should also be advanced enough to know that you can easily get to it via command-shift-g "~/Library". Obviously it also shows up in the Terminal. Apple's merely hidden it from view inside the Finder.

<comment><USER38> Funny that this is the same argument people use to hate Unity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm using OS X right now but I really hate all OSs at this point.

OS X is a usability nightmare for me, slowing me down even after many years of using it and trying to adapt to its ways. Lion is buggy on top of that (never ending wifi troubles).

Linux has huge driver issues and the package managers make me think like a data center sysadmin rather than the sole user of a dev workstation that I am.

And Windows is horrible as a development platform unless you stay slavishly within Microsoft's overpriced ecosystem.

But ranting about this is probably pointless. There will not be a new OS any time soon. It's just too difficult even for the largest corporations to start from scratch.

<comment><USER39> Got to agree ... every OS these days seems to annoy me in huge ways. I was surprised after I moved to a Mac that it had huge usability issues and even a lot of basic bugs. For some reason I always just accepted that Apple nailed usability but OSX (Snow Leopard) was annoying as hell. I miss so much the standard ability to navigate menus with hotkeys in Windows. I'm forced to use the mouse for a huge number of things that I never had to in Windows.

But then in Windows there are an almost equally number of annoying things, the primary being the lack of a Unix-like environment by default. I end up going with Cygwin but that has all its own issues.

Then Linux is just a neverending pita with driver issues, crappy versions of things like Skype, no possibility of MS Office, etc.

In the end I don't particularly care what OS I use because I know each and every one is just going to require me to customise the crap out of it before I'm happy (I will say for Windows and Linux that I nearly always end up getting there, so far with OSX I'm not and I'm not optimistic about the future with the direction Apple is moving).

<comment><USER28> Two things have made the Mac a little more comfortable for me recently. One is an OS extension/plugin called Witch. It allows you to switch between all open windows in MRU order the same way Alt+Tab does on Linux and Windows.

The other one is to enable "All Controls" on the keyboard shortcut preferences panel. That allows you to use the tab key to move between active buttons in confirmation dialogs like "do you want to save changes?".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Tim has issues with one application, but blames the entire operating system. Is this fair? Further, the trash bin problem of not having an "Ignore All" button has always been around. That does not mean the operating system is becoming _worse_ , just that an age old frustration (albeit a very obscure one) is still around.

I have some issues with Lion, but they are grounded primarily in my complete satisfaction with Snow Leopard and lack of desire to change (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

When Tim says "there were many things worse in Snow Leopard than in Leopard," I cannot recall a single one. In fact, the Snow Leopard release was undoubtedly a very well received one.

<comment><USER41> Reading his rant, I just couldn't understand why he wouldn't simply fire up the terminal and issue a quick 'sudo rm -rf /path/to/mail/*' command. Deleting huge numbers of recently used files with the trash has always been hit-or- miss. This is Tim O'Reilly we're talking about here; he should know better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> These threads follow a common pattern. Someone makes a list of things they dislike about an OS. That's not interesting, so they'll include a bit of a rant. Other people will agree, and add their own annoyances.

Then a bunch of people will pop up and explain how to achieve most of the things that are complained about; or explain that they're not problems but features. (The green pseudo-maximise being my most frustrating example.)

What people seem to miss is that discoverability is lousy in OSs. HN isn't read by stupid people who are un-used to tech. So why are what should be simple features either hard to find, or not present? Why do HN readers struggle with simple aspects of modern OSs? Apple (rightly, IMO) gets a lot of praise for usability. MS spent a lot of money on usability testing. Both of them have some awful awful things going on.

My example of a hard to find feature: In windows XP when you copy many files from one directory into another directory you'll get a dialog saying "The folder already contains" etc, with 4 options, [YES][YES TO ALL][NO][CANCEL]. There was a secret option of [NO TO ALL] if you held shift and clicked no.

</comment><comment><USER43> Makes sense. They should totally start over because he can't figure out the way to delete mail. Or how to use Terminal to fix if after he messed it up.

Link bait.

</comment><comment><USER44> I use Windows as my primary UI, but also use ubuntu and OSX daily in virtual machines. I switch between visual studio, eclipse, and XCode constantly.

I still prefer the windows UI to the others. Ubuntu, especially Unity feels always like a step behind the windows UI. In the latest release the taskbar won't stick, they took away the start menu, and menus are stuck at the top of the screen like osx.

I like in windows how I can drag the window to the side or the screen and it expands to fill just the half. Of if I drag the border to the top it will auto-expand the window vertically.

In OSX the max/minimize buttons are too small. And the task bar seems more visually appealing than practical (in windows it fills the whole bottom.) Also the download/install software process, it feels weird. Download a file, have it come up in some jump list, then mount it to the desktop where's there's usually 2 icons one saying to drag the other somewhere. Package management seems more straight forward in windows vs osx/linux. I do like XCode 4 though, I think how it works with tabs is much better.

<comment> X-Istence Package management in Windows ... surely you must be joking.

Having an all encompassing .app folder is simpler, and makes it easier for the user to delete stuff they no longer need/want without it spewing files all over the hard drive. DMG is just a disk image, just like Zip it allows you to contain multiple files and compress them. Not only that, but it keeps everything in tact such as symlinks, permissions and fun stuff so that when the user drags the .app to their Applications folder they have a self- contained functioning application.

<comment><USER44> Not all apps are self-contained. There are plugins, drivers, extensions to the OS etc... That's why having an install script/uninstall script that the OS can reference from one place is useful. Lots of install scripts also have repair functions, as well as options to modify the installation. Which is why having a my software control panel is useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'll continue to use the only operating system where I can both develop with unix tools and watch Netflix.

<comment><USER46> Arr, ye know there be other, better, faster, cheaper ways to be obtainin' yer movies an' TV shows, right, me hearty?

<comment><USER47> You left out legal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> An odd rant. I will say that lion has been the buggiest version of macos x ever, but I suspect it's because they futzed with the file save APIs which touch everything. If it's still this flaky at the dot 4 release I might start whining.

<comment><USER29> I've managed to get used to most of the new stuff in Lion, but the screwing with the File save stuff is just mind-bendingly awful, and has broken things as simple as trying to re-save a text-file or image from a read-only folder to a read/write folder.

Example: Choose a locked file and try saving a copy anywhere. Can you do it?

I've resorted to using the Finder to copy things into accessible places to work on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I haven't upgraded to Lion, and likely never will, because they removed the single best feature of OS X, "all-windows" Expose with no stacking into app bundles.

Default Expose was terrible in Snow Leopard too (strict grid layout vs. the old natural spatial layout) but at least then there was a hack to get the old version back: [http://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose- on-...](http://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose-on-snow- leopard-for-mac)

<comment><USER50> I completely agree. I can't believe that Lion does not have an "all-windows" Expose. It's annoying trying to find a hidden window by minimizing everything.

If someone knows how to toggle between an applications windows, please let me know.

<comment><USER51> CMD+` will cycle through applications' windows, but it won't restore minimized windows.

<comment><USER50> Thanks, Nagyman. You have no idea how useful that shortcut is to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Yeah, macs have some annoying properties that don't do exactly what you want. But, all that 'gloss' that O'Reilly refers to is the reason he purchased the Mac. Furthermore, OS X is still leaps and bounds better than other OS's for most users. The conveniences that most people would fail to notice is part of the beauty of the OS.

</comment><comment><USER53> I think the issue with Lion and also with Ubuntu 11.1 is that the GUIs are experimenting with various tablet concepts which significantly alter some of the behavior. It's pretty confusing at first but I adapted to Lion after about 4 or 5 days. I still don't quite understand Unity but expect to soon.

I think most anyone who is willing to accept that the world is undergoing a transition into a world where tablets coexist with laptops, etc., will embrace this time as a period of experimentation, rapid change, and creativity.

</comment><comment><USER54> I find it hard to take these sorts of rants seriously. It's a user who wants to do things their own way, but not bother learning how exactly that is done. I call this mixed-level behaviour - e.g. users who won't use the built-in functionality, but not understand or correctly use the alternative more technical methods.

Take the mail example, Mail.app already lets him export his mail box, delete his mail etc. He never needed to rifle through ~/Library to get at it. However if he's tech savvy enough to want to do it the manual way, then he should know how to fire up the terminal to access ~/Library, or more simply by holding the option key and choosing "Library" from the go menu. I don't this is breaking osx.

While I can't vouch for why he has a magnitude of locked files, given the mail example I have a fair idea of how he's gotten in that situation. While os x does give him the option to gloss past certain locked files. He's likely seeing the error because he's removed files which are "spoken for" (i.e in use), these are often located in ~/Library and it's kind of the point of why ~/Library is hidden. Again, if he wants to be tech-savvy, he should just rm the files, or rm the contents of the trash folder. (Or if it was mail.app responsible, just originally remove the mail from inside Mail.app)

OSX certainly has some way to go in addressing this kind of mixed level behaviour, but it's not going to stop you from shooting yourself in the foot.

About the other features: while I don't appreciate the iOS-ificiation of mac os, it's trivial to turn these learning-curve reducing features off, and on laptops I find they make more sense than they do when using a mouse + keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER55> I think Tim is on crack. Snow Leopard was _specifically_ about refactoring and bug fixes—huge under the hood improvements. It's true that Lion has some annoying bugs, but so did previous versions, I wouldn't say it's buggier on the whole (I certainly see far fewer kernel panics than I used to see circa 10.3/10.4). Lion is ambitious, so there are definitely some annoying UI changes, but there are a lot of meaty changes that offer huge improvements.

Some of my favorites are: mission control is much better than exposé + spaces which I could never really put to great use. Fullscreen mode is very cool (although it sucks with multi-monitors, hopefully they'll fix that). Finally the ability to resize windows from every corner. Autosave. Remembering open windows. New gestures are great once you internalize them. What Apple is doing with sandboxing is really a revolution in PC security even if the costs are high to user and developer freedom.

I'm pretty concerned about the App Store model and the future implications, but so far Apple is still doing amazing UX work. I imagine at some point I will have to go Linux if Apple keeps tightening their grip, but that day is not yet here.

<comment><USER56> I just got a new Air, and began using Lion, I have to say I've been very, very pleased. Especially on this machine it seems like it was naturally made for this type of computer. I use Alfred, but confession, I sometimes find myself using Launchpad... Though this seems to be true of most new OS X features they've introduced over the years, I plan not to use them, decide to give them a try, and end up really liking it.

The only thing I can't do is the natural scrolling, because I switch between too many computers at work.

I share the App Store concern, but I think they're going to find the right solution, developers have always been a key part of their plans, they get things wrong of course, but they tend to make it right, just not always as fast as people want - understandable gripe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Apple has become a zombie!

Why?

1\. They have lost their Zen design philosophy - it has come to the point of ridiculousness with the new features in Lion; features for the sake of features. Since Steve is gone, there is probably no way back.

2\. They have lost their perceived moral superiority - system closedness, App Store censorship, sueing people left and right, don't seem to care one bit about chinese labour conditions; they are worse than Microsoft or IBM ever were.

3\. They have lost their coolness - the cool kids dig free, independent software; they are not the "Think different." company anymore, they attract people who desperately seek to belong to the masses. They attract sheeple who buy an iPad to tell their friends that they, too, have an iPad.

Summary: The Apple of today is a heartless consumer electronics giant, just like and worse than any other out there. It still sucks the last drops of blood out of the spirit it used to have in the past.

</comment><comment><USER58> What a waste of time it is to complain about the way someone else configured your system. You're the one who chose to use a window manager that doesn't offer custom keybindings. If you can't live with it, then either write your own window manager or switch to a OS that doesn't impose its dogma on you.

OSX is a non-contender in my book because of its complete disregard for the standard Unix directory structure, its use of registry files, its ancient BSD utilities last updated in the '90s, and its lack of a package manager that actually integrates with the rest of the system. Of course the window manager sucks too, but that's only if you judge according to functionality. To be a Mac aficionado, you've got to judge only according to how slick the UI looks. Right?

</comment><comment><USER59> Two programs that make my life on OSX way better:

Zooom/2, which lets me move and resize windows with my positioned anywhere on the window, activated with customizable key combinations. <http://coderage- software.com/zooom/index_green/index.html>

SizeUp, which lets me position and resize the activate window with customizable keyboard shortcuts. One common use case is to make one window take up the left half of the screen, and another the right half, if I'm working on something that needs information from both. <http://irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/>

</comment><comment><USER60> As a developer, my decade long honeymoon with OSX may be waning. On the other hand there is still nothing that comes close to OSX for my nontechnical friends. And no... they cannot use Ubuntu. (I have scientifically-worthless empirical evidence)

</comment><comment><USER61> What about a paid GNU/Linux distro that runs perfectly on recent Apple hardware? No drivers bullshit, just works?

<comment><USER62> Unless you pick your PC carefully with the purpose of breaking Linux, it mostly works out of the box. That said, installing Linux on a Mac seems offensive, like replacing the dashboard of a Maybach with the one of a race car. Macs are a beautifully designed combination of hardware and software that may work for you. Or not.

I like Lion better than Snow Leopard, but neither works for me for work. Casual browsing and presentations are fine, but, for serious web application development, I want Linux.

<comment><USER63> Like a teenager before a date Mac seems to be entirely about looks, oh everything works well both OS and hardware but sometimes it seems looks come before function.

No separate delete or backspace keys, no multiple desktops, breathtakingly expensive hardware and software, awkward layout of files in the GUI, closing apps frustrating X doesn't close the app it minimizes it but you also have a minimize button (??), am I copying/pasting/cutting?, old text documents open behind new text documents are opened (a bug maybe or my fault).

Apple OS X Lion is nice to look at and fairly easy to use if not entirely intuitive but it;s not as perfect as some people make it out to be.

<comment><USER64> "breathtakingly expensive hardware and software"

Where can you get something _considerably_ cheaper than the Macbook Airs that sport:

\- 128GB SSD (13")

\- 1440x900 (13") display

\- 4GB of RAM

\- Core i5

\- operating system included

\- thin, light, and have quality construction

For £1099 including taxes?

<comment><USER46> [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230171) is such a thing, and at $1099 USD, it's nearly half of your quoted price. Unfortunately, it has a widescreen which has more pixels than you asked for, but somehow I don't think that's a bad thing.

It comes with Windows, but if you want a _real operating system_ , you can install any Linux you like on there. Or a BSD. Go for it.

Also, I was going to just answer "mu" to your question, and be done with it. Macbooks don't have quality construction; that's why their hinges keep falling apart after a year or two of actual use. It's been a problem since the Powerbook days.

So, uh, yeah. Apple products are too fuckin' expensive.

(Oh, and there were a handful of VAIOs that also fit this criteria, but let's be honest, VAIOs are not real computers.)

<comment><USER65> > Macbooks don't have quality construction; that's why their hinges keep > falling apart after a year or two of actual use. It's been a problem since > the Powerbook days.

Uh, what? I've had two MacBooks that have seen continuous use since 2006 and 2008, respectively, and this never happened to me. In fact, the aluminum MacBook (not even unibody) is in pretty fantastic shape, which is quite unlike every single non-Apple product I have ever owned and used for such a long period of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I first admired OSX because of its simplicity and the way it kind of just knew what I wanted to do and started me on the journey that way. Lion was a step backward. defaults were no longer what I would find convenient. Constantly asking me if I want to open windows upon logon even though I always uncheck the box so it should know by now. The reverse scrolling which makes it a pain to use any other system after getting used to reverse direction. I'm starting to like Linux Mint more and more.

</comment><comment><USER67> There has already been a vastly simpler system that predates OS X: Linux or BSD combined with X11 and an arbitrary window manager. Just stay away from anything that calls itself a "desktop environment" and you should be fine.

Personal recommendation: <http://www.archlinux.org> & <http://awesome.naquadah.org/> \-- a nice compromise between easy configurability and the "suckless" simplicity mentality.

</comment><comment><USER68> I have to be honest, I really just don't agree. I use Mac OS X Snow Leopard (I'd upgrade to Lion, but it's not a priority right now). I can see why things like the windows not maximizing, etc. would be annoying. Here's a perspective, though:

1\. That issue of windows not resizing is generally a complaint made by native Windows users who are already _used_ to that property. I'm not saying this makes it an invalid complaint, just putting it in context.

2\. Compared with Linux, Mac OS X has more support (this doesn't mean it's superior). Compared with Windows, Mac OS X (at least in my experience) is more sensitive to power users and coders, and people who know what they're doing more. Now, I've used different distributions of Linux, and ideally, I love Linux most. But it just doesn't have as much support as Mac OS X because proprietary backing breeds rapid progress (in the sense of universal or near universal support at least). Sometimes you have to fork your own solution when you're confronted with a problem in Linux. This also happens in OS X, but often times, there's more trouble shooting advice or solutions freely available and accessible. Just a perspective.

</comment><comment><USER69> When Apple release System 7 in 1991 people everywhere started complaining about the new changes and how it was worse than System 6. For instance it required a hard drive and couldn't boot off a floppy.

Meanwhile the end users adopted it imediately and never looked back. Most of the complaints in the article are about features that we as developers love but that end users could care less about.

As a developer I love getting in to my Library folder and changing stuff around. I love backing my computer up manually and not using Time Machine. I love having complete control of my windows and applications.

But most users don't care. Most users never touch their Library folder and don't need to. Thats why its hidden. Most users don't need to back up their mail because its all on Gmail. Most users love the app store where they don't have to search all over the internet for a simple app.

Mac OS is an end user centric operating system and it always has been. Developers and hackers will have to make some tweaks to the basic OS to make it work the way they want. Honestly looking up a few keyboard shortcuts, enabling hidden folders and installing homebrew isn't that hard.

<comment><USER70> System 7 was definitely slower on the most common hardware of the day (1MB toaster macs). My college had entire labs of machines stuck on 6.0.8 for a long time afterwards.

<comment><USER71> Actually, I don't think System 7 could even run on 1MB Macs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I think Tim O'Reilly's argument is pretty silly actually. Here's my response: <http://bit.ly/v6Adhu> (re-printed below). \---

I understand what Tim is saying, but I disagree that it's time to start over.

With Mac OS X, Apple definitely seems to have begun heavily focusing on feature development over refining existing UX. But the claim that successive releases of OS X become more user-hostile and encourages more lock-in is a bit of a stretch.

Apple has never developed for the power user, and they never should -- this is part of what makes their products so great; their unrelenting focus on the common case. In fact, complaining about a hidden library file for Mail.app misses this point entirely. It's actually a wonderful feature, since the common user is more likely to mess up their own mail library than to have a need to move it between disks.

+Tim O'Reilly's second point is valid, though, the UX for emptying the trash can definitely be improved. But again, is the common case deleting 400,000 files? Is the "delete whatever you can checkbox" too odd for a normal user to understand? Let's take the mom example; if your mom emptied the trash after deleting a file, would she want to know if it couldn't be emptied, or would she be OK with it being emptied without her recently deleted file actually being removed?

People can yell for a OS do-over all they want. The fact remains though: Apple focuses on UX more than any other company I know. If that UX doesn't cater to your particular needs and you'd rather have power-user flexibility and features, even if it means less polish and more annoyances when dealing with common tasks, use Linux or Windows. Or, better yet, just learn to use the Terminal and you can have the best of both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER73> For an old (but still largely relevant) laundry list of things on Mac that drive Linux fans nuts (and generally, back to Linux), there's a 2006 ORA DevCenter article by Chromatic, "Switching Back". Both the column and comments are still highly germane.

[http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/linux/2006/06/01/switching- back...](http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/linux/2006/06/01/switching- back.html?page=all)

</comment><comment><USER74> Apple should at least give people the option to put an older operating system on a newer system. Similar to how PC vendors offer XP or W7. I tried to install my Leopard family pack on a computer that shipped with snow leopard - no dice. With the way things are, I'll never buy a new Mac, as I refuse to "upgrade" to Lion.

<comment><USER69> Apple has never done this and probably never will. Not having to support older OS releases helps dedicate developer time to the new software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Just to add, holding down the Option key while pressing it alters it behavior to be a maximize button in most apps. Some apps (like Chrome) use the Shift key to get this behavior instead.

I would like things to be more consistent. In fact, if I were in charge, I would want this button to be a maximize button by _default_ , while using the Option (i.e. Alt) key should _alter_ the behavior to the second _option_ which is to resize to the best fit for window content.

But this may need debate since now we have fullscreen mode for apps in Lion.

</comment><comment><USER76> Deleting files and the GUI complaining that it's still in use has always been a frustrating thing. Why hasn't anyone at least taken the next step of showing what the user can do to delete the files? I've always resorted to opening Terminal and using some sudo's and some -f's.

In regards to his question about future OSes, anyone think about a browser/cloud based OS like ChromeOS or JoliCloud being able to save him? These are the future of OSes so it would seem natural to look to them to create that simpleness he's complaining about.

</comment><comment><USER77> Is it really called the maximise button? I was expecting the same as Windows the first week, but I learnt it wasn't (meant to be) called maximise, I stopped using it. A fill-screen button would be nice, but you just do it once manually and it remembers.

Tim says the Library folder is hidden (power users would quickly change this, and several other things), and that the trashing system (or any copying/moving) is not as good as Windows. I do like W7's copy dialog, but it's very wordy, nothing in OSX would be that wordy.

</comment><comment><USER78> i realise that people who are unhappy with osx are encouraged to move to ubuntu, while those who are happy with ubuntu seem to be moving to mint. but i just wanted to add that opensuse is still as solid as it ever was, and a new release (12) is due out in 3 more days. it supports kde and gnome (you choose on install via a single checkbox) and i have never understood why it's not more popular in the states - it seems (to me) to hit the sweet spot of minimal maintenance and maximum flexibility.

</comment><comment><USER79> This isn't news, its just a random rant. I agree that as OS X adds complex features we lose flexibility in other areas. Many of these are are not frequently visited but its still annoying and unacceptable. Fortunately, if Tim knows where to find these files and really wants to delete them, an "rm -rf" from the offending directory would do the trick - I'd like to think that 99% of the people reading this forum know this. Ditching mail.app for GMail? Seriously??

</comment><comment><USER80> For me, the only problem I've encountered since installing Lion has been that Tweetdeck is no longer usable. I experience some strange window-focus issue where while that app is running, doing something entirely unrelated like typing a URL in Chrome's address bar will cause a random application to jump to the foreground. I've tried re-installing AIR, Tweetdeck ... though not Lion. I have no idea how to solve this. It worked fine prior to the Lion install.

</comment><comment><USER81> I'll repost a comment I left:

Your first problem is that you started deleting stuff from a folder that Apple now deems wise to hide. With all due respect, why on earth would you start from the ~/Library folder? Why not delete these from the Mail client?

You can even "backup" from inside Mail.app. (Right click a folder > Export) Also, if you really want the Library folder, you can just go to Finder > Go > (Hold option) Library

There are real criticisms to be aired, this is not one of them.

</comment><comment><USER82> "each successive release ... buggier"

Snow Leopard was more solid than Leopard. Lion followed Snow Leopard and does admittedly have more bugs. A "streak" of one isn't a streak at all.

</comment><comment><USER83> I started using OSX every day last year, after 12 years of Linux mixed with 5% Windows. Verdict: it's nice, but I'm not blown away and I miss Linux for some things.

<comment><USER34> What do you miss from Linux that is not available on OSX? MacPorts fills in the gaps for missing GNU tools.

<comment><USER83> MacPorts, brew and fink add up to a more complex, less reliable system than a typical Linux vendors' repository. Currently my brew is broken and I can't upgrade anything until I figure out why some obscure Gnome lib isn't compiling... I have not had any sort of issue like that with Linux in the past 8 years when it comes to upgrading routiney used software.

OSX's command line utils are BSD style... so going between OSX and Linux shells, I often end up with messages such as 'ls: -l: No such file or directory' because I expected to be able to put flags anywhere in the arguments.

Even between the vaunted Mac editors such as TextMate and Coda, I haven't found a text editor I like as much as Kate.

There are various other issues I've struggled with, mainly relating to installing and upgrading open source software. Projects simply expect that you will be using Linux, and using this proprietary BSD offshoot is simply inconvenient due to it's usual *nix differences.

Also, my own preferences and habits come into play. I like KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker... being able to press ctrl-alt-Fkey and get a fullscreen terminal... Gimp integrating with the window manager properly (to the extent it does at all, sure)... knowing where my Flash LSOs are saved... and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> To me, Lion really cemented the fact that the end goal of Mac OS is to make an invisible OS that requires zero tinkering just like iOS. Everyone should be able to use it and no one should have to access the file system.

This transitional period poses a huge problem for Apple and looks to be the cause of most complaints I've seen. What are they going to do about the power users who were their early adopters? Is an 'admin' or 'power user' mode appropriate?

</comment><comment><USER85> I don't really know why people are so upset. I was a hardcore windows user and I've been a Mac user now for 11 months and I love it! I don't think I will ever go back to windows and to say that Mac is going off track and turning into windows because of something this small is just crazy.. Short of something like the iPad, OS X more than Windows is A step in the right direction of how personal computing should be, it "just works"..

</comment><comment><USER86> I think I'm going to go back to Snow Leopard tomorrow. I've been running Lion for many months now, and I still can't stand it. The only reason I'm sticking with OS X (rather than using Linux exclusively) is that I've purchased tons of pricey software over the years (e.g. Logic Studio and Adobe CS4). I hope 10.8 ditches most of the retarded "features" Lion introduced, and reverts back to the wicked HCI that Snow Leopard has.

</comment><comment> saint-loup I'm quite happy with Mac OS X, but there's one thing that really annoys me: keyboard shortcuts. There's (almost) always one for what I want to do, but it's often to complicated for the frequency of the task.

For instance, checking emails in mail.app is shift+command+N. Or changing the presentation mode in iTunes or Preview is alt+command+[3-6]. Because of my Azerty keyboard, it's actually shift+alt+command+[3-6].

Isn't one modifier key enough?

<comment><USER87> Actually OS X is pretty consistent with keyboard shortcuts compared to other OSes. It's even one of my favorite things about it.

That said, the checking mails example is a bad one, and moreover it used to be the usual cmd-shift-R and they only introduced the odd new one in Lion.

Edit: sorry, misread your comment. But mine is still valid. Because of the many keyboard shortcuts for the OS UI, it's only natural that you need more modifier keys in the apps sometimes.

<comment><USER23> Funny, one of my complaints about OSX compared to Windows is the (IMO) lackluster implementation of keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps I just don't see it, if so please enlighten me, but OSX's key bindings feel random and inconsistent to me. To elaborate:

On Windows the Windows-key is the modifier key for global operating system functions, things like lock screen (win-l), explorer (win-e) and projector mode (win-p). Save for legacy bindings like CTRL-ESC, no global functions tie to the other modifier keys. The CTRL and ALT modifiers are therefore free to bind to functions of the currently active application. Some of these follow standard conventions, like ALT-F4, CTRL-S. Aside from these, any application is free to implement a keyboard scheme (and e.g. exploit symmetry) without clashing with the operating system.

Contrast this to OSX where there appears to be no designated key for global functions. A "naked" F11 triggers Expose, Ctrl-F2 puts focus in the menu bar, Cmd-space pops up Spotlight, leaving just Opt as unbound. Like in Windows, there are some conventions like CTRL-comma. There is no global key to open a Finder window, although Spotlight alleviates much of the pain.

With no standard key for global functions, the potential for key clashes is always there. Software that targets just OSX can avoid these, but cross- platform applications that originated elsewhere are quite often prohibited from using the same set of key bindings in every platform.

Finally, OSX lacks a key binding for the context menu (i.e. the equivalent of SHIFT-F10 or the dedicated key on Windows systems) and mnemonic keys (the underlined characters in menu items; OSX wants you to type the caption of the desired menu item). The lack of mnemonic keys invalidates all my muscle memory in Eclipse, I really miss them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> For any 'non-geek' friends (or just non-geek hacker news readers like me) try JoliOS from www.jolicloud.com - it's Ubunto with a friendly HTML5 skin.

Easy install of apps, auto update of the OS, really easy to use, sync across loads of computers, runs on any laptop or pc that can run XP, and is FAST.

I have it on a netbook and also as a dual boot on y pc, and I now rarely boot to Windows.

</comment><comment><USER89> At first I thought the same. But I'm slowly coming around. I'd still prefer Snow Leopard with Lion's full-screen and mission control, but I trust Lion will improve with age.

That said, I have my most productive dev environment now on Lion. The speed with which I can move between apps write code, compile, test, etc, is actually starting to push my laptop.

</comment><comment><USER90> If you want something fixed, changed, or added, simply file a bug radar.

Apple does certain things for a reason. If you disagree with Apple's reasoning behind something specific and want to change it, then change it yourself. Most commenters complaining about OS X can count the number of grievances they have with their fingers.

<comment><USER91> How would one change things? I wasn't aware that OSX was open source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> People throw the word hate around a bit lightly these days. These things seem like minor annoyances.

</comment><comment><USER93> Someone should send him a copy of bash for beginners so he can learn how to use the open command and rm -rf effectively.

When you use rm it does not put things in the trash, but removes them directly. The open command can open anything, even "hidden" things.

</comment><comment><USER94> Pretty much everything I've read about Lion (and, ok, Windows 8) suggests theuy is taking a hard right towards non-techies.

Meh. Give me Linux. In a few years, I'll be 100% Linux I figure.

</comment><comment><USER95> I just wish you could speed up the animation for switching between workspaces. Being used to Gnome some of the whizzier OS X animations just seem like a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER96> People who are feverishly pro Android and Mac OS X users are in a weird situation. They are so anti iPhone that they are starting to turn on Mac OS X.

<comment><USER97> Alternately, lots of people hurried to "*nix with a nice GUI" and are now realising that it was just a stepping stone along the way to what Apple really wanted to produce: "Apps with no OS you need to care about, or can get to".

Perhaps in 3 years Tim O'Reilly's post and commentary will be seen as early cracks in a dissapointed technical community leaving OS X in larger and larger numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Rants about OS X, but only bitches about the email client like a clueless 90's Windows-user. Is there any reason to take this seriously?

</comment><comment><USER99> My iPad and iPhone won't open the page. It makes them crashed. Only from PC it can be read. Anyone with the same problem?

</comment><comment><USER100> I primarily use whatever O/S my customers, users and site members predominantly use. Not a bad rule of thumb.

</comment><comment><USER101> His complaint does seem minor as does mine for Windows, can you scroll non- active windows yet?

<comment><USER102> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> tl;dr enormous thread fight about shortcuts, most useless one I've seen here.

</comment><comment><USER104> If you don't like MacOS zooming and maximizing behavior, i recommend divvy [0] it has a heavy price tag but fixes those issues completely.

[0] <http://mizage.com/#macdivvy>

<comment><USER42> $14 USD for something which is standard in most Linux desktop environments? (And is probably standard in Windows, but I can't remember.)

This is exactly what people complain about. Yes, this stuff can be done, but you need to set a bunch of options via the command line (no problem, but annoying if you have lots of stuff you want tweaked); then set a bunch of program options; then install a bunch of apps (some of which need to be paid for).

It is baffling to me why I need to install 3rd party software just to stop my MacBookPro making the startup sound every time I turn it on. (The alternative is to remember to mute the sound every time I turn it off.)

<comment><USER105> Why do you turn your Mac on and off all the time? Sleep works fine. Just close the lid and stuff it in your bag, then open it up again. Yes I know it never worked on Windows. It works on a Mac.* The only reason I reboot is for an OS update or for the occasional installer that's too stupid to just launch the services it just threw into the "start this at launch" system.

* well eeeevery now and then shit gets in the way and breaks it, upgrading in place to Lion introduced some heisenbugs with regards to using my Air closed with an external monitor, but they vanished after a reinstall. And this was the first time I'd had sleep problems in the entire decade I've been using Macs.

<comment><USER42> Sleep has trouble with USB drives; sleep will just disconnect them uncleanly. Data loss and corrupt discs is not a feature of something that I would call "works fine".

There are other problems with sleep, but that's the most obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> I remember when a ticket to the movies was 5 cents.

</comment><comment><USER107> To all of y'all complainging about zoom button behavior, I agree it is pretty terrible, but! --there's an app for that. It's called "RightZoom". Works well.

</comment><comment><USER108> I think is THE golden opportunity for Linux on the desktop. But the best candidate - Ubuntu - also made terrible mistakes - Unity -.

</comment><comment><USER109> Well, I am really starting to hate Tim O' Reilly, too.

I remember a time when O'Reilly books were the golden standard for things like Perl, Python et al. Nowadays it seems like they are producing crap, half- written books by the ton.

Oreillynet was also, one time, one of the best places to go for nice, informative articles and tutorials. Nowadays it's just an assortment of lame blog entries and book promotions.

And don't let me get started on "Safari books online", a sub par reading experience if I ever saw one.

<comment><USER110> I feel this way about The Pragmatic Bookshelf...

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> I've used Windows most of my life, use Linux for work, but I LOVE my MacBook Air.

<comment><USER23> By virtue of its operating system?</comment></comment>


PHP 5.5.0 Alpha1 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.php.net/archive/2012.php#id2012-11-15-1 <comment><USER2> Ugh, now suhosin is TWO versions behind.

Everyone please donate so he doesn't give up!

<http://hardened-php.net/donate.45.html>

(also: suhosin github page <https://github.com/stefanesser/suhosin/issues> )

<comment><USER3> An igorant question: Do you know why the Suhosin patch was never included in PHP core?

<comment><USER2> "political" security disagreements between suhosin developer and the php core people.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/568609/why-isnt- suhosin-p...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/568609/why-isnt-suhosin-part- of-the-php-core)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks to everyone working on PHP for all of their hard work. Looking forward to using that new password hashing API in future production systems in particular, once 5.5 goes final.

<comment><USER5> You can use it right now: <https://packagist.org/packages/ircmaxell/password- compat>

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "We also dropped support for Windows XP and 2003."

Well, that sucks. And everybody was laughing/bitching/both at MS for dropping support for them with VS 2012.

<comment><USER7> Windows is really a second class citizen in the PHP world, I imagine that there are very few live deployments of PHP on Windows servers.

<comment><USER3> I've never experienced this. I've spent years of my life developing on PHP on Windows (and mostly, but not only, deploying on Linux). I've never got the impression that Windows is 2nd class like it is for Python.

It comes with well working Apache and IIS bindings by default; the Windows package contains a large number of compiled extensions; a fair set of Windows- specific extensions are enabled by default (including support for COM and .NET interfacing, for instance); command-line PHP (for e.g. Composer or Symfony) works just fine; most if not all posix-ish builtin functions have good Windows implementations.

Also, the built-in HTTP server that was added in PHP 5.4 works just fine on Windows. Really, I have no idea what you're talking about.

That said, I've never looked into whether PHP is as performant or secure on Windows.

<comment><USER7> I suppose it depends on which subset of functions you are using.

I developed a PHP app on Windows which did mailsending, push notifications (APE) and UTF8 encoding. All of these things behaved differently between operating systems.

<comment><USER3> Mail sending? Hmm, curious. Sure, there's STMP-settings in php.ini vs sendmail, but that can't be a show stopper, right? Also, PEAR::Mail did the rest for me, back in the days. I'm sure there's even better options these days.

I'm also curious how UTF8 was different. After all, since PHP arrays are simply binary arrays, how can it be different?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It strikes me that several of the languages that gained popularity at the turn of the century are having a bit of an identity crisis in the face of their increasing irrelevance. This is especially evident in PHP, but I'm beginning to feel the same about Java in the face of JDK8.

With the new breed of popular languages (Ruby, Python, Scala, Clojure etc.) heavily influenced by functional programming, it seems as if the incumbents are desperate to remain relevant by adding comparable features with little consideration for their impact on the language as a whole.

For me, PHP has become (quite some time ago actually) a "kitchen sink" of a language; if another language has it, it's a fair bet that PHP will try to add it at some point in the future.

<comment><USER3> > _For me, PHP has become (quite some time ago actually) a "kitchen sink" of a > language; if another language has it, it's a fair bet that PHP will try to > add it at some point in the future._

But is that a problem? I've not seen the fancy new features that PHP added in the last years clash with one another yet.

The only con might be that PHP has become a relatively "big" language. Closures (but weirdly done), references, 2 styles of classes, object literals, namespaces, half-assed reflection with support for magic comments, constants that are slower than variables, some magic functions and methods here and there, half of which have lecacy history. That's a fair lot to take in at once.

But once you've taken it in, it simply allows you to write better PHP code, more productively, than 4 years ago. How can that be bad?

<comment><USER9> I worked for several years as a C++ developer. Let me tell you that a "kitchen sink" language is a problem. You have to choose a subset to work in, there's lots of corner cases, and moving from one shop to another will turn you quickly into a language lawyer rather than a programmer.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for this; C++ is exactly the language that I should have referenced. It's a for-bearer for what PHP is to become.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> BTW:

5.4.9 final will be tagged next week, November 19th and released on Thursday the 22nd.

Changelog:

<https://raw.github.com/php/php-src/PHP-5.4.9/NEWS>

</comment><comment><USER10> Where is the list of deprecated features? At this point PHP really doesn't need new features as much as it needs an internal cleanup of its API's and Libraries and a complete re-write of its "VM"

<comment><USER11> This is the closest thing, I guess: <https://github.com/php/php- src/blob/PHP-5.5/UPGRADING>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION!_

Interesting thing to say given that php.net itself runs a development version of PHP.

<comment><USER13> They're running a patch level update in production, not a development _preview_.

There are obviously going to be substantially fewer changes between 5.4.8 - 5.4.9 and 5.4.8 - 5.5.0

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's the link to their build server so I can see how many test the latest build has failed?

<comment><USER11> You mean this one? <http://gcov.php.net/viewer.php?version=PHP_5_5>

<comment><USER14> I've never seen one of their builds not report multiple errors!

<comment><USER14> I spoke too soon:

Build Status: OK Last Build Time: 45 hours

Compile Warnings: 1116 Code Coverage: 70.4% Test Failures: 103 Expected Test Failures: 44 Valgrind Reports: 59

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> some welcome improvements.

array/string de-referencing will help write less useless lines of code.

<comment><USER16> Array/string de-referencing was added in php-5.4.

<comment><USER11> 5.4 has function-results dereferencing. array/string is new in 5.5

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why do I have to laugh when I read the new feature list?

Why are people still using this?

One negative aspect of open source is that it prevents failed technologies from disappearing.

<comment><USER18> I guess that the reason you don't understand why php is so popular is that you never built anything, you probably just play with the latest cool language building toy projects as a hobby.

<comment><USER13> There's no need to be a douche just because the parent was. You're making yourself look like a one language pony.

<comment><USER18> PHP being popular is a fact, that doesn't mean that I use or advise using php only.

And the fact that lots of people that don't understand that syntactic sugar is not the only thing that matter in a language always bash popular languages that are not "cool" is a very common symptom that describes my previous comment very well.

And there is a third fact, that "sensitive" people like you that don't like strong opinions like mine feel the urge to disagree in a way that adds no value to the conversation and ironically call others "douche".

<comment><USER13> You extrapolated some fantasy and strawmanned the parent, that makes you a douche.

> I guess that the reason you don't understand why php is so popular is that > you never built anything.

What.

> you probably just play with the latest cool language building toy projects > as a hobby.

Is that meant to be disparaging? It reeks of someone who doesn't know a whole lot beyond the PHP ecosystem. There isn't a dichotomy of PHP and then "cool" languages.

I think PHP is useful in certain scenarios but acting like a zealot (or as you like to call it having "strong opinions") over it is fucking stupid.

<comment><USER18> > What.

So I guess you also don't understand why PHP is popular.

> It reeks of someone who doesn't know a whole lot beyond the PHP ecosystem.

You are now making some "fantasy" assumptions.

You missed the point from the beginning and now you are trying to take this into mud with all kind of assumptions and insults.

I'm stopping here.

<comment><USER13> Of course I understand why PHP is popular, I've used it for long enough. My expression of exasperation was at the jumps of logic you were making.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The hiring spreadsheet and the clash at The Markup - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/the_new_gatekeepers/the-markup-hiring-spreadsheet.php <comment><USER2> I read a description -- sorry, don't remember where -- that finally made me feel like what happened made sense. Though who knows if any outsider will ever understand what happened.

Reading between the lines, Gardner basically claimed Angwin -- who was the EIC -- didn't do the job. Angwin wanted to do journalism, but that's not the EIC job. Her job was to _hire_ people to do journalism, and to set up the (prioritization, themes, etc) in which journalism was to be done. Angwin did that poorly. [1] Her job also was to set up technical infra. It was claimed she didn't. etc.

From another article, "Angwin acknowledged to CJR that 'meetings are not my favorite thing.'" [2] . That makes me believe the firing of Angwin was justified; the EIC job is literally meetings.

This is a pattern that is repeated in startups: a technical founder often doesn't understand the job is not to be the best engineer on the team, but rather to hire managers, set priorities, coordinate with the rest of the business, etc.

[1] > _" Hiring was slow. Recruitment was slow. Even as of this month, we didn't have stories banked. We didn't have editorial processes in place to accept and develop pieces. We hadn't developed areas of coverage. We still lacked an editorial..."_ — Jeff Larson [https://link.medium.com/oPwISQSD9V](https://link.medium.com/oPwISQSD9V) [https://medium.com/@jeff_larson/about-the- markup-6adc6a77810...](https://medium.com/@jeff_larson/about-the- markup-6adc6a778100)

[2] [https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the- markup.php](https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the-markup.php)

</comment><comment><USER3> The spreadsheet seems pretty damning. I'm not a lawyer, but isn't it illegal to judge an employee on whether they are male/female or "non-white"?

<comment><USER4> Not a lawyer either, but seems to me if you're hiring writers to pursue a particular perspective, then their backgrounds matter.

<comment><USER5> Hopefully you are hiring writers to report on the objective state of the world, not pursue a particular perspective.

<comment><USER6> And who gets to decide what "the objective state of the world" is?

There is real value in reading about the same topic from differing perspectives. Not all writing is or aspires to be purely fact-based journalism, and that's okay.

It's reasonable that The Markup wants to hire group of people with diverse viewpoints on how "powerful institutions are using technology in ways that impact people and society". I would be surprised and underwhelmed if they had e.g. only software engineers or only consumer rights activists writing.

The issue is their assumption that only non-white, non-males have interesting things to say about how "powerful institutions are using technology in ways that impact people and society".

<comment><USER7> Why has it become acceptable to assume so much about someone's view of the world based on their race, gender and sexual identity? Why has our definition of "diversity" become so narrow and stereotypical?

If you want to hire people with diverse viewpoints, then look for people with diverse viewpoints. It's incredibly easy to fill a room with people who look like a Benetton poster but who all read the same books in the same colleges and all rigidly adhere to the same dogma. It's incredibly easy to use tokenism to justify your own prejudices. It's difficult to build a genuinely diverse collaboration based on profound and meaningful differences of perspective.

<comment> barry-cotter > Why has it become acceptable to assume so much about someone's view of the > world based on their race, gender and sexual identity? Why has our > definition of "diversity" become so narrow and stereotypical?

US Supreme Court jurisprudence more or less. No one actually cares about diversity as a goal. The political coalition that passed the Civil Rights Act looked around, saw they'd won and wanted more stuff for their constituents. Affirmative action was one of the ways to get more stuff. It's also illegal under a plain reading of equal rights. For reasons I'm unqualified to opine on a quota system is too blatant legally (also explicit points based systems with group X getting Y extra points) so the Supreme Court went with diversity as an acceptable workaround to get to the desired goal of getting more stuff for the desired interest groups. This all happened in the context of university admissions and the buzzword spread from the case law.

Same as free speech or state's rights people who genuinely believe in them are rare compared to those who use them as talking points when convenient and drop them when not.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, no one actually cares difficult, deeply rooted social and cultural problems that affect millions of people. It's clearly just about getting more stuff.

<comment> barry-cotter Yes, that's broadly right. The number of principled ideologues is always very low compared to those who see that an ideology has something for them and then follow it. I'm not suggesting these people are self-aware hypocrites that's just how human psychology works.

In under a generation people go from arguing that everyone deserves equal rights and dignity to campaigning for explicit racial privileges for their side, or from supporting the right of the federal government to seize slaves who escape and travel to a free state to yakking about state's rights to justify Jim Crow, or the one we're in the trailing end of right now, the transition from free speech being a left wing value to a right wing one. When the right had the establishment the left was all about people's right to speak and be heard. Now that they're in charge it's safe spaces and hate speech. Or look at the collapse of the anti-war movement once Obama was elected. Bush bombed Muslims for eight years, Obama bombed Muslims for eight years. Bush destroyed Iraq and had no real effect in Afghanistan as it comes pre destroyed. Obama destroyer Libya and cape quite close with Syria before his good sense overcame the presence of Hilary Clinton in his cabinet.

Politics is overwhelmingly about sides, coalitions and spoils. Insofar as it's about ideology most people have 1-3 things they really care about and the rest they're pretty happy to modify to fit in with their coalition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This spreadsheet looks basically fine to me? They're taking the information they'd normally use to make decisions ("understands the tech industry" etc) and using a tool to be more consistent across candidates.

With race/sex/class those are _after_ the computation of the candidate's total score, which makes me think they're being used for affirmative action in a pretty normal way.

<comment><USER10> This spreadsheet is what I dread serving on interview panels. It has column headers that are hard to understand but gives a score to that header. Hopefully there's a companion doc describing the criteria and the meaning between a 1-5.

Without such definitions, this is just a way to ouija board bias into results because you can sum factors and sort candidates.

I've found that people like to put more importance on numbers like this than they should and will naturally try to create cutoffs.

The class column is concerning as a hiring criteria, but also that it's just based on superficial review of info and imputing. Someone going to Wesleyan and studying abroad might be extremely poor on scholarship. Probably not, but might be. Trying to guess class by reading someone's LinkedIn and then using that guess for something like hiring is confusing to me. That doesn't seem like good decision making since the "data" aren't factual.

There's a term called scientism [0] which is when something is cosmetically like science but kind of bullshit. This smells like whatever the equivalent is for data where the data are all made up bullshit, but then a reasonable looking method is applied to it. Maybe it's "data scientism."

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's something about this spreadsheet that I don't get.

The article gives examples of categories graded on a 1-to-5 scale:

> The criteria [for the "social class" column] are: "1) very poor family > background, 2) working class, 3) middle class, 4) slightly upper middle, and > 5) super rich, super privileged."

> A key for the column marked "Famous" describes the criteria as: "1) has only > published in small media, or hasn't published very much 2) has published > regularly in ordinary-sized media 3) has published a LOT in ordinary-sized > or larger media, or has a social media presence exceeding 10K, 4) has > published a lot in very popular media AND has a social media presence bigger > than 10K 5) practically a household name."

These do not look like evenly spaced points to me. In particular, the gap between a 4 and a 5 appears to be much larger, in both cases, than the gaps between other adjacent numbers such as 2 and 3.

And that is fine; there's nothing saying your scale needs to use uniform spacing.

But if you look at the spreadsheet, it starts with a bunch of columns assessing various metrics. Then there's a column labeled "Total", the value of which is just the sum of each entry in the preceding columns.

This makes no sense. If your numbers come from a non-uniform scale, adding two numbers together is an error. With the sharp dropoff from 4 to 5, it should be _much_ easier to have a 3 in two categories than to have a 5 in one and a 1 (the minimum! You're guaranteed to be at least this good!) in another.

The "famous" and "social class" columns aren't among the ones that get summed. (Presumably because higher social class is bad rather than good.) But I tend to suspect that the scales for the summed columns were assigned similarly.

And the summed columns do show direct evidence of a very similar problem -- they are color-coded. Each cell is assigned a color ranging from deep red (bad) to white (neutral) to deep green (great). In most of these summed columns, a 3 is neutral, a 4 is light green, and so on, exactly what you'd expect. But in "Competent technology end user", a 5 is deep green, and a 4 is already light red. In "explanatory, helpful to readers", a 3 is deep red. This suggests again that the columns aren't being measured in similar scales, and that adding them makes no sense.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well this spreadsheet reaffirms a bunch of recent stereotypes about journalists now.

</comment><comment><USER13> Myers-Briggs personality test?! Isn't that like horoscope? The last time I took one in a company was administrated by a consultant paddling some psycho analysis things to HR. We all had a good laugh, like reading our palms to pigeonhole us into artificial compartments.

<comment><USER14> Hi, psychology student here. It's not very good in a psychometric sense, but its validity problems aren't really a concern when it comes to idiographic data ie: "helpful tools for getting to know the people with whom she was creating a new company".

It's not the devil we memed it into, there are better tools for categorizing and rejecting candidates based on objective-ish traits but this wasn't the purpose according to thr article.

<comment><USER15> Out of (genuine) interest, which alternative tools do you recommend?

<comment><USER14> The MMPI-2 is the big reference right now. Legally you'll probably need a licensed psychologist to administer it (depending on your state/country), but that would be true of most useful tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ANPEQ-1 "Non-white"

"Non-male"

How does this spreadsheet not represent practices prohibited by the EEOC?

[https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm](https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm)

<comment><USER4> EEOC rules don't apply to private businesses with less than 15 employees.

[https://employment.law.tulane.edu/blog/what-is-an-equal- oppo...](https://employment.law.tulane.edu/blog/what-is-an-equal-opportunity- employer)

<comment> ANPEQ-1 Ahhh okay, interesting. I guess that is interesting news for all the racist and sexist small business owners out there _barf_</comment></comment></comment>


SICP makes me feel incompetent How do I overcome this? - <AUTHOR> I have so far attempted to work through the book three times and then quit. Each time I start from the beginning, go through every line and do every problem in the exercises and then eventually stop somewhere down the lane (within less than the first 50 pages).
After a lot of mental effort I decided to make another attempt. However this time I decided to analyze why I stopped the first three times and found that I stopped every time at the exact same page. At this page was a problem which made me realize: "Here is a solution to a problem which I could probably have never ever thought of by myself". I think this somehow depressed me and made me wonder if things were going to get very tough for me to understand or its probably the fear of encountering such problems more and more as I go through the book.
Note that I thoroughly enjoyed working on the exercises until this part of the book. It was like an orgasm of the mind. But somehow when I get to this problem, I feel incompetent. It doesn't help much that I am bit mathematically handicapped.
The problem I am talking about here is the counting change problem in the first chapter. <comment><USER2> "Here is a solution to a problem which I could probably have never ever thought of by myself". Now you have a clever solution you can use as a tool in your belt of tricks. You might end up applying to a problem of your own on your own volition. That would be a feat on its own.

How much time did you allocate to working at the problem before looking at the solution? What do you want to get out of SICP? A book won't help you become a master on any subject by itself. Many people slave for tens, hundreds, thousands of hours on subjects that interest them occasionally without what you might consider "progress".

It appears that you did give up and peeked at the solution. So logically, you do not know whether you would figure it out on your own or not - you've lost that opportunity. The thing is, everyone experiences setbacks, pitfalls, speedbumps - FAILURES. This is nothing to be ashamed of and if you let it, by learning from it, you can help prevent anxiety and move on.

<comment><AUTHOR> This wasn't a problem in the exercise section. This was simply a problem solved to explain a concept. So I didn't really peek at any solution. I was supposed to see this solution as an example to understand one of the methods of problem solving using recursion. (not denying that I could have tried to figure it out on my own instead of reading further in the main text)

But I agree with your last two sentences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Here is a solution to a problem which I could probably have never ever thought of by myself_

I'm not sure why you suppose you could _never_ have thought of it, but I think it is much more likely that you would have thought of it, given a different background and history. Most likely, that history would involve an example of the same sort of problem being solved in the same sort of way.

Once you've seen solutions, they seem easy. So easy in fact, that it leads you to wonder why it took until, say, 1700 AD before someone came up with it. Much of present day knowledge has only existed for a few centuries and many 'obvious' things have been missed by millenia of great minds. The lesson from that is: we don't learn by being original or by having revelations: we learn by example and by abstraction from those examples. This is exactly such an example: you weren't supposed to have been able to think of it yourself. It's an example that shows you the way, that teaches you, that enables you to, maybe some day in the future, be original or have a revelation.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am not sure if this is the best advice but: have you tried to implement a scheme yourself? I found doing so gave me a much better understanding and appreciation of SICP. Also you might consider starting with "simply scheme", "how to design programs" or "the little schemer".

If it makes you feel better I am currently going through the same thing with "the art of prolog". It is just such a huge departure from everything I have ever done before that I am constantly running into the same barrier you spoke of "I wouldn't have ever even have asked that question". But that is why I am reading it - to flex my head. Once I fully understand it I know I'm going to miss that feeling just like the first time your muscles hurt form a hard work out or conditioning session. Once they develop - unless you injure them - it's never quite the same rewarding burn.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have you watched the videos online that cover this text (there are actually a couple of different sets with different professors, but Abelson and Sussman is probably the way to go)?

I haven't worked through the whole book, either, but I found having someone explain things made it much clearer, and I've made it more than halfway through without running into any serious roadblocks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To clarify, I understood the solution to the problem. But what bothers me more is that I couldn't have thought of it by myself.

<comment><USER6> and? I don't know about you, but I think I am reading the wrong book if the author is not better than I am at the subject at hand.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have an issue with the authors being smarter than I am. I think they are awesome. Like I said, I liked the challenge of the exercises for which the authors didn't give any solution. And when I cracked these exercises it felt really good.

And I have read many other intellectually stimulating books, but those books don't make me feel like what I am feeling right now.</comment></comment></comment>