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Well, one may ask. Myself, I've had a blinding revelation these past two days: There is, in fact, no difficulty with computers at all, for anyone. There is no such thing as a computer illiterate person. There is nothing to stop ALL of us from becoming our own Linux Torvalds. There is only the TriezGamer's, pomo monster's, and EZLeeAmused's out there.

They work for Microsoft. Or they volunteer to do it's dirty work because Microsoft is part of their stock portfolio, anyway. Microsoft would never have made a penny, if they could not convince people that, against the evidence of their own senses, they are too stupid to figure out a computer. As Neal Stephenson has noted in Command Line essay, at the time that Microsoft first started, charging money for computer software was a strange concept. Every computer came with some rudimentary programming language. Programming, back in the late 80's, was something that just any old body could do at all.

So you launch a campaign where you essentially hire a group of human parrots to scream "You'reTooStupid!You'reTooStupid!You'reTooStupid!" all the time. People lose confidence. You close up source code and send lawyers to harrass every competitor out of business. You drive people to enslave themselves to you, by convincing them that they can't live without you.

This explains where just about every MS user in here craps such red hot pokers every time we say "Let's give Linux to somebody." That's one more user who won't get their crack. That's why I have a volley of trolls dogging me every time I try to teach somebody something, and the trolls are all screaming "He's wrong! Visual Basic is better than C! .NET is the perfect language! All the others give you herpes!" That scares them almost as much: somebody learning something about computers, and proving that they're not so stupid, after all?

I regret that I only have one life to devote to defeating such intentional ignorance.

In The Beginning Was The Command Line"

KFG

God that is suck a great book! For anyone wondering where the idea stems from check out this site . http://www.cryptonomicon.com/

I think it was Eric Raymond who said that all the time that went into snazzy interfaces and GUI support in other programs was spent on editing text in emacs.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

The AskSlashdot question leads me to believe that the users are doing a lot of data entry. I have experienced similar feedback when migrating users from one system to a newer system with 'bling'.

The thing one has to look at is not the time to do one thing but one task. It is a big difference. A thing is copy this field to that field, a task is something like register this customer for our great new service.

Lets say you have some data entry drone that is reading from a piece of paper ( this happens very often ) and typing the data into the system. On the older style of systems ( green screen ) the users hands are always on the keyboard. On the newer windowed system your hands are alternating between on keyboard and on mouse. The more 'context' switching that goes on to complete one task. That is where all of the wasted time goes.

There are also little things that you learn when you watch people using their old systems. (A very good idea if you ever get the chance. Cute girls in the accounting dept...) Once you learn the buisness practices behind them you can make some very efficient input forms, that dont require a mouse to use.

In his book "In the beginning was the command line", Neal Stephenson wrote that some newspaper articles would be indecipherable to someone who had lived in a cave for the past 50 years, because it talks about "software", "operating systems", and "windows vs. apples".

Now I am trying to figure out what someone who has lived in a cave since the Eisenhower era would make of this headline, "Honeymonkeys Discover Undisclosed Vulnerability".

"Honey... monkey? Vulnerability? Undisclosed? uuuuh?" *HEAD EXPLODES*

(Full text of In the Beginning... is on Stephenson's site)

As Neal Stephenson pointed-out in In the Beginning was the Command-Line, because M$ refuses to release their applications for other OSes, every time their OS division loses a sale, their application division loses a sale. He said it much better of course, and you can read the whole essay online at http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

Am I the only person here who can read? Yoo-hoo! The links I posted two posts back up this thread? I suppose I cleverly impersonated all those different people and made up all the stuff that's there, too? Oh, yeah, I must have hacked Ian Murdock's blog and put the words in his mouth - plus all the comments from all those different posters. And I suppose I faked the news article about Debian security problems and then impersonated frequent poster Zonk to be sure the story got maximum coverage. My, I must have been busy!

"And I would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for those nosy kids..."

None of his experiences with Debian sound remotely similar to mine, and I've been using it for around 5 years

Ah, yes, thank you, at least there's something that makes sense. You know, I've been hearing many such comments...but *only* from old-time Debian users of the Potato/Woody era. In fact, no less a respected figure than Neil Stephenson, in his essay:
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
has nothing but praise for Debian...but check the copyright date, circa 1999!

No, I have caught a whiff of an idea that whatever the hell (I do mean hell, demons, brimstone, and all!) happened to Debian, it was once much mightier than it is, now. But, as another /.er put it, "Oh how the mighty have fallen." And I indicated that I'd read something in the pages that my previous post links to, that sounded like (a) Debian is experiencing some deep political turmoil, i.e. head-to-head fights among developers, and (b) Mr. Murdock's post titled "Can't we all just get along?", seems a pretty clear indication that the Debian volunteers evidentally don't consider cooperation to be a chief utility of volunteering in the first place?

So far, this explanation holds water. Because, remember in my original attempt to gloss over the topic (that'll teach me to try to be nice!) I referred to it as "fantastic disorganization, just a shambles". Come to think of it, if a group that was teamed together on a distro had a big war over how to make it and couldn't put their differences aside long enough to at least do a decent enough job to save some face, it would look - not just almost - but EXACTLY like what Sarge 3.1 looked like!

Documents that pointed me to docs in other folders that didn't exist! Screens in the install program that contradicted each other! Three copies of a file under three different names here, ghost copies of files which were actually softlinks pointing to softlinks pointing to empty space there! Packages that installed all the supporting features without installing the base program itself! "Placeholder man pages" - oh, my ASS, placeholders, funny how I'm lying about something that turns out to not exist - yet, mysteriously, you actually have a name for it! What could be simpler to write than a man page? What, ten minutes, and run it through nroff? Three years wasn't enough time to do that? Show me ANY other operating system - Linux or not - that releases with blank doc pages ??? They must be damn rare, because I never saw any before or since. And you can shove "100% percent unpaid volunteers" up your wazoo! 90% of Linux is volun-fucking-teers, including the humble little amatuer programs I post myself in my blog, which even if they're PURE SHIT, have documentation in the form of comments in the source code!!! Anybody who has a man page to write that isn't done yet, I hope they weren't in places like Slashdot bitching about how hard they have to work and accusing everybody who says their work isn't done of lying!

Finally, there's that word "server" again. "It makes the world's best 14-CD server!!!" Ey, whatever floats your boat. Surprise, I've actually worked around a server or two in my time, my own self! And to me, a server was something that came on two floppy disks which you installed with about four commands on a plai

I have recently made the jump from Win98 to Mandriva 10.1 and it was a surprisingly pain free experience. I have installed other distros in the past and after a while ended up paving over it with Windows for one reason or another (generally one of the reasons above). This time I don't see any reason why I would go back. My system is far more stable, robust and dare I say easy to maintain that it was as a Windows based system. Granted that my geek quotient is somewhat high, but if you take into account that my wife, my 8 year old and 4 year old are using it as well you cannot say it is incredibly difficult.

I am preaching to the choir on Slashdot and my point is not that Mandriva or any other distro is superior for its ease of use. My point is that traditionally all these were excellent reasons why the average computer user would not use Linux. I think that these are now no longer necessarily valid reasons. In my most recent experience:

• Install fast and easy, I went from windows to XWindows in an hour or less, and my computer is a Duron 700 with 128MB of RAM.
• Directory structure is not familiar but the majority of what I use was already set up for me in XWindows so I could use it out of the box and dig in deeper later.
• Free support is only a Google away.
• I have been able to find and install RPMs and archives of what I need. When it is not on the CD I have been mostly successful finding it and installing it. What I have not been successful compiling/installing would not be considered common sofware and I would not expect to get it running under Windows either.

maybe some not-so-uninformed-writting-piece would be helpful?

In the beginning was the command line (Neal Stephenson)
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

I love that article/essay. Link: In the Beginning was the Command Line. It's a plain CRLF text file in a ZIP archive.

Haven't you ever heard of the Finn who got blown up? http://www.cryptonomicon.com/main.html

The customer, the one with no computer knowlegde, faced a monopoly, he had no choice. And he would probably have followed the same path if he was presented alternatives. (Unix never focused on jo six-pack; Mac did well but was more expensive). Until now, MS was the only choice for Mr. Customer.

I would chalk up another thing: Most people 25-40 barely know what an operating system is, let alone know it is replaceable. Most people 14-25 aren't that far ahead. Since I've been using computers since I was 8, this comes as a shock to me, and I think it's something often overlooked by geeks.

For example, even a rather computer-literate librarian I know thinks, "You buy a PC, it runs Windows; you buy a Mac, it runs MacOS; you buy a Sun server, it runs SunOS." When I started talking about FreeBSD and Linux, she looked at me as if I was talking about turning her Vespa into a dishwasher. They don't get that PCs are designed to be open, and all you have to do is write GRUB to the MBR, and it WILL boot up. This is one of the biggest challenges facing the open-source movement. Look at the sticker on my girlfriend's Dell: "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP," which in many respects is a fallacy, but customers often interpret it as "Designed ONLY for Microsoft."

Computers are presented like a calculator, a typewriter, a gaming station, an Internet access point.

Absolutely. (If you weren't a geek) you wouldn't think of an "operating system" with respect to your calculator, would you? How many computer users do you think know how an IC works? They're still operating from the abacus metaphor. And http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html has some good stuff in it regrading this kind of false metaphor.

...it was the case until recently that the people who wrote manuals and created customer support websites for commercial OSes seemed to have been barred, by their employers' legal or PR departments, from admitting, even obliquely, that the software might contain bugs or that the interface might be suffering from the blinking twelve problem. They couldn't address users' actual difficulties. The manuals and websites were therefore useless, and caused even technically self-assured users to wonder whether they were going subtly insane.

See http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html.

Seriously, do you think a perponderence of people even use the features that Photoshop has over Gimp? My department, for instance, bought two licenses for CS so that we could crop and size some photos, and do some very basic web graphics.

The boss turned down my suggestion, I think, because of the usual suspicion and fear that surrounds GNU software: "What? It can't be free. There must be some catch. It might even be illegal." The only downside that Gimp has is the annoyance of, "Oooh I don't like it the interface is all different" from my coworkers. But like they say, nobody ever got fired for buying (insert your favorite 800-lb gorilla corporation here).

I believe the term they use in Silicon Valley (and Cryptonomicon) is "Fuck You Money". The Economist's current estimate is about $10 million.

I love that article! You can get the full text here.

The more worms et. al. get into a computer, the more a basic user needs to be familiar with tinkering with stuff behind the smiling computer icon. cf. the section "MORLOCKS AND ELOI AT THE KEYBOARD" of "In the Beginning Was The Command Line."

... during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

-- Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line

...Oh sorry, you must be a linux fanboy, which means that if you can't type
fchsfejfs -p xy -o trw
at some stupid CLI, your shit will remain stuck in your anus...

"My biggest annoyance with the current version is that it keeps reinstalling features, which requires me to reinsert the master disc over and over. I'm not sure if this is a trick to check with Microsoft's database to make sure I'm a registered user or if the program is just stupid."

...was the Command Line has got to be one of the best informative essays I have read. Nominally he's talking about operating systems, but he manages to throw in Batmobiles, Disney World, quake-proofing San Fran, and the venerable Hole Hawg drill. Quite entertaining even if you've already got the knowledge.

See? Now I'm reading it again instead of sleeping.

• Librarians to the Rescue
• Copyright Crusaders Hit Schools
• Internet Publishing Can Pay Off
• It's Just the 'internet' Now? (story from here)
• Open-ILS.org | Library software by librarians for librarians

The shortest Neil Stephenson book ever (and non fiction) In the Beginning Was the Command Line says, "Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they would crush Microsoft in a year or two." Maybe they read the book.

You can also download it here or read it here.

Untill I can have a full conversation with a computer (a la the Turing effect, not the limited versions that Alice et. al. can accomplish) I'll be happy with source code, thank you very much. It's just another layer blocking me from the code anyway (read In the Beginning... lately?).

A good geek should know about the ones that came before, and learn from their mistakes and triumphs. Some books on geek history:

In The Beginning Was The Command Line by Neal Stephenson is a good overview of the culture of Linux, Macintosh, Be, and Microsoft in essay form. I've given it to non-computer geeks to teach them about Linux, and why it's different from windows. He talks about how modern society tries to impose a false image over everything to make things easier to deal with(like Disney) and compares that to the GUI vs. CLI differences. I don't agree with everything he says, but Stephenson is definitely a great writer, and he has the book available free at the link I put in.

Hackers by Steven Levy covers important epochs of the hacker culture, from its beginning at MIT to game developers in the 80s. It even has a chapter on Stallman starting GNU! A must-read for any geek.

In the Beginning was the Command Line is a short book / long essay by Neal Stephenson, available for download here.
It deals with many things, mainly with the power of detail over abstraction.

Fuck off you anti-social "rebel".

No, no, no... it's "Stay away from my house, you freak!"

We should all know by now that Windows is a station wagon, Apple produces Euro-style sedans, Linux is a tank, and Be made neato Batmobiles.

The full text of Stephenson's essay is available here:

In The Beginning Was The Command Line

I remember seeing it online a long while ago, but I've only recently seen it in print. Googling "in the beginning was the command line" will turn up a bunch of mirrors if the site isn't reachable.

If anyone needs further illustration on this point, I suggest referring to Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. Folow the narrative threads dealing with The Vault, its reasons for existing, and what others do to stop its creation.

===---===

This idea of their own currency sounds awfully like the plot of this book. I don't really think that is possible in this age. Even in the book it seemed a bit far fetched to me. Who knows though...I'd love for them to prove me wrong. Give me Google cash! :P McK

First, the blind in this instance have no prior experience with sight. Even if everything about seeing were to be described to them in great detail, it would be so far beyond their experience as to be incomprehensible. Those who witnessed this act would construe it as supernatural, literally meaning above or more than what is natural, because for them blindness is natural.

Yes, the blind would have no personal experience with it. However I have not met any blind people in the world today who consider sight to be supernatural. Lance Armstrong rides a bicycle on a 30 degree upward slope faster than I can ride on flat ground. It is outside of my personal experience to be able to do what he does let alone for a long as he is able to do it. I do not, however, consider it supernatural.

An attribution of something above and beyond reality requires not only lack of experience with the subject at hand, but a dogmatic belief that the subject is intrinsically unknowable. (Not as unknown to me personally, but rather unknown to anyone.) This is the God of the Gaps that I cannot accept.

You may argue that the experiment was performed by a reputable institution, but I would argue that a reputable institution wouldn't even dream of allowing such an insane person through their doors, much less let him do his little tricks.

Here is where we diverge greatly. I do not consider an institution to be reputable if it ignores information that is inconvenient. This is of course not the same as watching someone's "little tricks" and noting the use of smoke and mirrors.

In summary, fine-tuning theory states that the basic parameters of physics must be set to such specific values that it can only be accounted for by intelligent design. This is, in essence, the results of the seeing person's experiment - the probability that we (life) would be capable of existing at all (not to mention human consciousness) is so small as to be impossible - a much more distant prospect than the 1/24 chance that the colored objects are named correctly.

The chances of me winning a six-number lottery jackpot -- assuming I buy one ticket -- are 1 in 13,983,816. Everyone else has the same chance (assuming there is no cheating of course). From a realistic point of view, no one would never win the lottery. However, people do indeed win the lottery. Christians, jews, muslims, buddhists, and even atheists have all won the lottery at one time or another. Does this mean that at a given time, Jesus plucked those balls down just for you? Are you truly that arrogant? Or rather is it random chance that you won?

I am extremely lucky. I was born into a universe that was physically acceptable for formation, born on a planet upon which organic compounds are plentiful, have been birthed from a species of supreme bad-asses (to borrow a phrase from Cryptonomicon), and live in the wealthiest country on the planet. Woohoo! I won the lottery! And had I lost, we would not be having this discussion. A great improbability is not the same as an impossibility.

Now then, with regard to the Fine-Tuning Design Argument, I and others have a few issues. First and foremost is the notion that everything just seems to fit too perfectly. I take it that you don't know too many physicists or engineers do you? The general response I get from those communities is that it's a wonder that this chaotic and unordered world functions as well as it does. For further discussion and other important points, I'll have to simply say "look

I also recommend Neal Stephenson's excellent essay on the topic of GUIs, In the Beginning was the Command Line

Your analogy fails, because to many drivers, it's their mechanic, or their spouse/parent/relative/neighbor/friend who looks after the machine's internals for them. For a lot of people, simply getting in the car and driving it is what they know.

Neil Stephenson made the apt comparison of computers to cars, with Macs being the Volvo-esque, hermetically sealed O/S, Windows 95 a station wagon, and Linux a tank.

The analogy holds up, being that the average car owner takes their vehical to an expert who does the regular servicing. Sure, you and I know where the drain plug is located on the oil pan of our tanks, but do you think the graphical designer cares whether their Volvo even has one? Nope, they just want it to work, and they pay experts to solve the problems outside their domain.

I pity you and your genetic tree.

"Stay away from my house, you freak!!"

Especially your last paragraph: 'Granted CLI is nice and powerful. When I used a UNIX machine more intensively, I liked CLI. But when I stopped using UNIX intensively (dropped below 5 hrs per week of Unix use), I found that I quickly forgot all the commands and spent most of my time grepping man pages. CLI is mega keen and faster if you're doing batch file transfer, but for single file transfer, I can drag and drop faster than I can try and remember and then type the correct command, path, and file name.

The bottom line is I want to "use" my computer, not "learn" my computer. Although *nix requires you learn before using, some OSes don't have such a steep learning curve. What I like is Bill Joy's statement in a recent wired article about Linux vs. Mac -- he chooses the Mac because it "just works."'

is what Stephenson concludes too, and basicly what the whole essay is about.

In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson. It's available in text form from http://cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html.

While MS may have pioneered this approach in the tech field, most companies should not be in a position to emulate this callous disregard. After all, MS has long enjoyed monopoly power but hardly anyone can talk of most (any?) PC makers having monopoly power. It seems like such lousy service is not something these PC makers should be able to get away with providing. On the other hand, MS can barely warm over Windows 95 again, throw in a few features, recommend business buyers NOT purchase the product, and foist it on consumers as "Windows Millenium Edition" (not to be confused with the millenium edition of Windows NT known as Windows 2000). Now THAT's monopoly power.

BTW, Neal Stephenson hit this nail on the head in his essay "In the Beginning was the command line" seen here. In the essay, he predicted a future MS operating system would consist of logging on and just seeing one button to click. Voila, I give you "Luna" in XP (years later).

Correction: it's not a typewriter that's on his desk. It's a fountain pen. That's what he used to write Quicksilver.

When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind's eye: "The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter's box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from home plate." and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions.

While I wouldn't say that "most modern terrorism is due to US foreign policy", I definitely agree that much of the hostility towards the US is due to US foreign policy and culture. I will now quote Neal Stephenson's exellent thoughts on the subject:

"It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. This is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians--are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.

The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.

The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely--and that is actually a pretty good thing!"

Neal Stephenson, In The Beginning Was The Command Line. If you haven't yet, read this essay - it is long but extremely insightful and covers a lot of different (seemingly unrelated) things.

For a more in-depth discussion of this topic, see Neal Stephenson's essay In The Beginning Was The Command Line.

After you finish Snow Crash, make sure you pick up 'Cryptonomicon', it's a great read.

Stephenson's book, 'In the Beginning Was the Command Line' is a good one to give to those non-tech friends who just don't get the whole 'Linux' thing. I've bought several copies over the years, but now it's a free download as a text file from Stephenson's web site.

Take a look at Neal Stephenson's In the beginning was the command line for an interesting take on this - he argues that WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) interfaces were only ever meant to serve as a metaphor for controlling virtual objects on a computer screen as if they were physical objects (windows~=documents, etc.), but have been used as so much more that the metaphor (never that well defined in the first place) has got lost. So much so that devices like phones and video recorders have introduced interfaces which use a WIMP metaphor - an interface which is supposed to remind you of a computer windowing GUI. at that point, all metaphor is gone, and your left with very insubstantial user interfaces.

An even worse trend now is towards 'web-like' interfaces. This crops up in applications like MS Money which uses the incredibly misguided metaphor of presenting you with what seems to be a web site devoted to your finances. And because web interfaces are even less standardised than WIMP GUIs, this is an excuse for creating truly appalling interfaces. With 'web-like' interfaces cropping up on cashpoints, personal video recorders, and the like, we're well due for a user interface revolution, because frankly most systems I use these days are really just a flashy mask over a crappy hierarchical menu system (look at digital cameras, MP3 players, in-car computers, and DVD players). Personally, I want more physical dials, switches and buttons on these devices, not just a sleekly styled 'up-down-left-right-select' control.

The text for Neal Stephenson's book "In the Beginning..." can be downloaded here. Haven't read it yet, but when did that stop anyone here :-)

No, Linux is a tank.

Will Linux do to OS X what it already has done to Tru64, Irix, HP/UX, AIX and Solaris and emerge as the only viable competitor to Windows on the desktop?

Not until Linux (and Unix in general) becomes truely fanatical about a quality user interface. This includes such things as consistently protecting the user against dumb accidents (no more unrecoverable 'rm * .o' errors) a really consistent interface (no more Athena/KDE/GTK/... toolkits as the whim takes the programmer) and, generally, not just papering over the cracks but ensuring that the UI is really seamless.

But I'm not sure that this is even possible in open-source land. The natural inclination is to do things your way, rather than the way laid down by the Great Committee. This is great in the sense that it has made amateur programming fun again. "Amateur" in the sense of for fun, rather than for profit; no implications on the quality of the software are intended. But it's not so great in that the user has to come to terms with the myriad incoherent ways of doing things that make up each work of art that is an open-source program.

Linux (at the moment) is wonderful for the community of Morlocks (of which I am a member). But Apple, if it wasn't so expensive, is still the only company serious about being "the computer for everybody else".

You mentioned Snow Crash, but not Cryptonomicon (which I personally enjoyed more than Snow Crash). Oh, it's a hefty read... maybe pick up that and a Clancy novel and call it a summer.

BTW, "In the Beginning was the Command Line" can be downloaded for free (yes, legitimately) from his website.

I'm really happy driving my tank, thank you... :)

Corrected link