The apps monopoly will quickly find its monopoly power fading away unless they make their products better and more compatible.
Better than and more compatible with what? The popularity of Office did at least as much good for Windows market share as the other way around. Office will only be endangered when someone comes up with a good alternative, and so far I don't see one. People are reluctant to change document formats.
Besides, I think it's far from clear that there is superior technology out there just waiting to take down MS's apps. With the exception of some of their mediocre server products, (IIS comes to mind) most of their apps are relatively popular and relatively well made. Many of them are sold separately from Windoze and there isn't any clear "monopoly advantage" to them.
So the apps company will probably continue to do what MS has done all along: produce products their customers want. I fail to see how splitting them up will make them do that any faster or better.
Just to echo the previous posters, Carbon apps will be 100% native and fully buzzword compliant. Carbon apps do *not* share memory or other resources with classic, nor should you see any substantial performance penalties. The whole point of carbon is to allow apps to take full advantage of the modern OS without major performance penalties.
Actually, the zoom box was added with system 6 (or might have been 5) and the windowshade box came with 8.0.
If you look at really old documentation for the Mac OS API, the bit that flags whether there is a zoom box on a window is marked as an "extra" flag. Early versions of the Mac OS didn't have a zoom box--just a close box.
The biggest problem *I* see with the new layout is that the three buttons are close together, and the "single window" button is retarded. I wish they'd just drop that one, because it wastes prime real estate and is worthless to anyone who's used a computer for more than a few months.
I wish they'd move the yellow and green buttons over the the right where they belong and make the green one "zoom" as it is in the current OS. This allows "maximize" do the "right thing" depending on the application. There are a lot of apps for which "zoom" is useful while "maximize" isn't.
For that matter, I'd prefer they just use the original symbols. They were just fine the way they were.
Which is the big reason that Unix apps are so inconsistent. A KDE app won't work in GNOME, a GNOME app won't work in KDE, and neither will work on straight X. If you're just running straight X without KDE or GNOME, you have to write a lot of common GUI elements yourself. Hence, there are several different ways of implementing any given function, and so it takes a long time to figure out how any particular app's interface works.
system wide, consistent cut and paste
The only cut and paste is the hacked-up select and middle click, which isn't real cut and paste, and even then it isn't implemented right in a substantial number of apps.
A decent graphical file browser?
I've used both the GNOME and KDE file browsers, and neither of them come close the the Mac OS finder.
Consistent keyboard shortcuts for common commands?
For KDE apps, maybe. But if I want to run other apps, I'm out of luck, and even in KDE, there are not as many standard shortcuts and they aren't implemented as consistently as on a Mac.
I've learned each on my own, and Unix-at-a-terminal is absolutely no harder to learn to use than Windoze or Mac.
I'm not even going to try to argue with you on this one. I'll just suggest that you hand a completely new computer user a Mac OS 9 CD and a Red Hat CD with some documentation, and see which one he figures out how to use first. I'll bet you money Red Hat drives him to tears, while he might actually get work done on the Mac in a matter of hours. For you (as a seasoned computer user who understands the innards of your OS) it's not hard to pick up Unix. For new computer users, even concepts like file, directory, disk, memory, etc are alien. Expecting him to also memorize 2 dozen command-line commands is absurd.
"learning how to use a Mac again when you sit at a new one" is anything like "using a Mac for the first time", where it is absolutely not.
Sure, it's going to take some time to use any computer interface, because computers are complex. But I've watched a new computer user (my grandfather) work with a Mac, and I can easily imagine trying to teach him Unix. I doubt he'd even have the attention span to learn enough to do anything useful. For average Joe's, there's just no comparison.
There is nothing tying any specific action to clipboard operations but convention.
That's my *whole point*-- Unix developers *could* write decent clipboard support into their apps, except that the "convention" is the middle-button-paste. This might not be an OS-level issue from a technical standpoint, but from the user perspective, it certainly is. 95% of Mac apps provide real (clipboard-based) cut and paste. 90% of Unix applications only support text-based middle-button paste. This is a *defect* in Unix applications, and a weakness of the platform. It does users no good that KDE or GNOME provide the capability if 2/3 of apps don't use it.
How do you explain StarOffice, for ONE example out of many, when there are no apps to work on spreadsheets according to you? GIMP when there are no apps for graphics?
I haven't used either of these much, so perhaps I'm wrong about the spreadsheets. But let's take the GIMP. Can I drag and drop an image from Netscape into the GIMP? Can I copy an image in Netscape and paste it into GIMP? No? That's my point: some individual applications have implemented some good interface features, but there's no system-wide consistency in the way apps implement interface features.
Besides, the graphics people I've talked to tell me the GIMP is still a sad joke compared with Photoshop and other graphics programs available on the Mac.
Heck, if all I ever needed was a few Windows applications, and the interface was good enough for me, I could run those too, either with Wine or VMWare, or with some Windows-esque window manager.
A window manager is not an interface. A lousy interface with a pretty face is still a lousy interface. An interface is measured by its consistency, it's simplicity, its elegance, and its power, not by where the buttons are and what color the title bar is. Window managers are amusing, but no matter how good they are, they can't overcome the inadequacies of bad applications and lousy OS-level GUI API's.
Linux *started* with at least the functionality of a late-80's user interface as soon as X compiled on it.
Hmm... system wide, consistent cut and paste? A decent graphical file browser? Consistent keyboard shortcuts for common commands? multiple monitor support?
Granted, those aren't all specifically interface issues, but they are closely related. Linux *still* doesn't have a lot of the features that Mac users take for granted. Even KDE and gnome don't give you either the interface consistency or the attention to detail of the Mac cerca 1990. For all their technical bells and whistles, KDE and Gnome are still ugly, clumsy, and poorly designed.
My interface is so good, I use the command line all the time.
Good for you. And I bet you spent months learning it. And I'll also bet that when you get a new program, you have to read pages of documentation to figure out how to use it. And I'll further bet that you are in the top 5% on the geekiness scale in the general population.
The fact is that most people don't have the time or the interest to learn the Unix CLI. Doing so is no small undertaking-- it takes days to become even basically functional, and months to master all its nuances. I can sit down in front of a Mac app I've never seen before, and start using effectively almost immediately. I can do that because Apple has worked hard to ensure that developers follow certain conventions in interface design, so that new apps work the same as my old ones. CLI's expect you to memorize an entirely new set of flags and options with every command.
As for cutting and pasting, I'll take real cut-and-paste with a real clipboard any day. The standard X cut and paste is a nasty hack that should have died 10 years ago. I shouldn't have to worry about accidentally highlighting text before I've had time to paste copied text to its destination. And if Unix had a standard keyboard shortcut for "paste" you wouldn't lose more than a quarter-second in pasting.
And if I want to cut and paste something other than text, I'm just out of luck.
Of course, I'd rather get work done. I hate to break it to you, but that's what that "User Interface" is for: to get stuff done.
Correct. Which is why most X GUI's suck so much-- you can't get any work done until you've had someone walk you through using the thing for several hours, and it takes week before you're able to do even moderately complex tasks.
And forget it if you're planning on working with images, souds, video, spreadsheets, or even formatted text-- those are just too frivolous for our manly command line interface and our handy dandy middle-button paste.
My mouse is usually gonna be in the window of the app I'm currently talking to, so having the menus in that window is good.
Not true. Because it's on the edge of the screen, I can hit the Mac menubar with a single flick of my wrist, no matter where the cursor is now. In fact, it generally takes *longer* to hit menu items in Windows than in Mac OS, even if the cursor is much closer to the Windows menu. Hitting a Mac OS menu is near-instantaneous once you get used to not having to slow down as you get near the menu.
Plus you save screen space by not having multiple menus.
Mac menus also have subtle details that make it work better: Go to a menu that has a submenu, and go down to the title of one of the submenus. Notice that if you move your pointer down and diagonally toward the submenu, that submenu stays open. (Assuming you don't go too fast) If you move your mouse in any other direction, that submenu pops closed. There are a lot of things like that: subtle details that Mac users take for granted to that the rest of the computing world hasn't bothered to implement right.
Also, closing the last window of an app doesn't kill the app. That really gets me, and I blame the shared menu for it.
This is a personal preference, but there are a couple of advantages to this. One, the application-centric (rather than window-centric) model prevents multiple copies of the same app from running. Second, command-Q kills off the whole app, whicl alt-F4 only kills one window. Thirdly, there are times when you want to close the current window and relaunch it. This is much easier if the menu bar stays in place. Fourth, it cuts down on the clutter in the application menu (task bar) I have five items in my application menu at the moment. I'd have 10-15 if every window were listed.
With that said, there are downsides-- it's an issue of personal taste. But it's hardly a basis on which to choose an OS.
I wish people would stop using this word out of context. FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and doubt." As in "if you buy a non-Microsoft product, you never know what bad things will happen." FUD is designed to get people to buy the dominant product due to the fear that the alternative has unseen downsides, the uncertainty about the products quality, and the doubt that the product will work as advertised.
My statement says nothing about Microsoft's products or those of its competitors. It might be pro-Microsoft propoganda, but it isn't FUD. Please use the word in its appropriate context.
Cisco (CSCO) is America's most valuable company and can be considered more successful and monopolistic than MSFT in every sense of the word.
I think a large part of the reason Cisco hasn't been targeted is that it's not as high-profile as Microsoft. People see the Microsoft logo every time they start up their computers, and software developers' lives revolve around changes MS makes to its API's. Cisco may be just as ubiquitous, but neither users nor developers deal as directly with their products. A cisco router sits in the background minding its own business. And so no one is pushing the DOJ to go after them.
I don't particularly want to get into another long discussion of the merits of antitrust law. Even most defenders of antitrust will concede that once a company gets a large enough market share, the rules change and the company isn't allowed to engage in various "unfair" activities. Whether you agree with these restrictions or not, they *do* reduce the payoff for starting the next Microsoft.
Yet it is not being harassed by the DOJ because "crush the competition by any means necessary" is not their guiding principle of operation.
This is and should be the guiding principle of any company. That's what competition is all about: you try to take as much market share as possible from your competitors, and you use any non-violent means at your disposal to do it. It's oxymoronic to expect companies to compete but not compete "too hard." All companies try to crush their competitors. If they didn't, their competitors would likely crush them. That's the way the free market works.
Re:I just mentioned this yesterday to a friend.
on
Irrational Exuberance
·
· Score: 2
Actually, there is a reason. The stock values of many of these firms is based heavily on the expectations of future earnings. The lesson of the Microsoft case is that if a company is too successful, it will be punished. Therefore, the breakup of Microsoft sets a precedent that hurts the prospects for other high-growth stocks.
More government regulation is a bad thing for the industry, and the antitrust case is government regulation. The market is reflecting this.
However, if you take the land area of Texas (6e11 meters^2) and spit it up 6 billion ways, the per-person land area is about 100 square meters. For a family of four, that allows for a land area 20 meters on a side. That's the size of a small suburban lot, and is much less than the density of a large city. If you housed people in apartment buildings with 100 people in them, (say a 5-story building with 5 4-person families on each floor) you'd get to put each building on a lot 100 meters on a side, which is larger than most apartment buildings have. Granted, that's not an ideal amount of land, but it wouldn't be that bad. The population density here in Minneapolis is higher than that, and I'm surviving.
So I think my point stands, although I admittedly was pulling numbers out of my ass in the previous post. The problem is not physical space, it's resources, and the primary component in the production of resources is human labor. Doubling the number of people on the planet would certainly cause a problem if done all at once, but if it's done gradually, it seems to me it would be a good thing.
There is a finite amount of resources on this planet.
There is a finite amount of natural resources, but that limit is extremely high. Note that the price of most commodities in real terms is going down. That means that those resources are becoming less scarce, meaning that they are being discovered faster than they are being used.
Most wealth is due to the value needed to make them, not to the value of raw natural resources. A chunk of iron or copper isn't worth much until it is extracted from the ground and purified. And even then it's not worth much until it's used to make something useful.
Also, most people would like to preserve some wilderness. Whether it be for recreation, aesthetic reasons, ethical reasons, or all of the above... It is hard to preserve natural areas on an overcrowded planet.
This is not true. I believe I've read that if you give every person an acre, you could fit the world's population into Texas. The reason that wilderness is being destroyed is that land is not being used efficiently. Notice that the amount of forest in the US has actually increased, and the amount of farmland in production has dropped, in spite of population and production growth in recent years.
The key to wilderness prvention is to make sure resources are used efficiently. That means that we need to find ways to get modern farming techniques to the farmers in Central America who are forced to use slash-and-burn agriculture to survive now. It means that we need a more efficient food distribution system, so that our surpluses can be distributed more effectively to the people who need them, alleviating the pressures to use marginal farmland with low yields.
In addition, you say "more goods and services" are a good thing, however if this were true rich people would be the happiest people, and I don't find this to be true.
Maybe not at the extremes, but you can bet that you and I have more pleasant lives than the average peasant in India. You can question whether Bill Gates is happier than someone who makes $100k/yr, but I think the person who makes $100k/yr is giong to be happier than someone who makes 10k/yr. Certainly it would be ridiculous to argue that fewer goods and services would be good. If you believe that, go ahead and join a monastary. I personally like goods and services.
Re:Overpopulation is good, based on your "logic"?
on
Thus Spake Stallman
·
· Score: 1
Go explain that 'fact' to the former inhabitants of Easter Island. Please CC: every specie of plant and animal we've extincted.
I have no idea what this has to do with the topic at hand.
At any rate, I'm not interested in getting into a flame war with you. Let me know when you're interested in having a serious discussion, then maybe we can both learn something. Until then, I'm not going to waste my time on you.
Re:Overpopulation is good, based on your "logic"?
on
Thus Spake Stallman
·
· Score: 1
It's amazing how industrial nations, for all of their advancement, continue to create unbelievable amounts of waste and destruction.
In fact, the precise opposite is true. Land use, pollution rates, extinctions, and other environmental harms have been declining for about 50 years in the US. This is because the advance of technology has allowed us to use more efficient production methods that save resources, farmland, and produce less pollution. It is the third world that is destroying rain forests, causing pollution, and otherwise harming the environment.
What is needed in those countries is economic growth. Only by making now-poor countries wealthy will we have the resources to protect the environment, preserve forests, clean up the air, etc.
This is why attempts to impose draconian environmental rules on the third world are so wrongheaded. They aren't going to stop the pollution, but they may very well strangle those economies in the cradle, preventing them from ever becoming industrialized. And then without the benefits of wealth, they will never be able to reduce the hard to the environment as the West has done.
Well sure, if you have a trillion people, then yes you might have problems. But most demographers predict that population is going to lever off at around 10 billion, which is nowhere near the number of people the planet can theoretically hold.
So, allow me to rephrase: any reasonable increase in population is beneficial. By reasonable, let's just say I mean up to 20 billion people. At that point, I suspect it would still be beneficial, but it's possible that we'd start to run out of natural resources.
Most demographers are currently predicting that the population will level out by the end of the next century, so chances are we will never have a population even that large.
Re:Overpopulation is good, based on your "logic"?
on
Thus Spake Stallman
·
· Score: 1
God I'm sick of ignorant people taking condescending attitudes about subjects they don't understand. OK...
Take an island. Put 1,000 people on it. Give them all enough infinite wealth. Give them zero food.
Wealth is not money. Wealth is physical resources: iron, tractors, buildings, etc. A society that had all these things would be able to produce food more efficiently.
Besides, we don't live on an island. And our food supply is not fixed. The primary barrier to feeding the poor is poor distribution systems and a lack of technology for third-world farmers.
There is no global food shortage. There are local food shortages created by incompetent governments. Nations that have free markets in food production and the wealth to use modern farming methods have seen production skyrocket and land use dwindle.
Reducing the number of people on the Earth won't make the remaining people any richer. In fact, it will likely make them poorer, since there are fewer opportunities for division of labor, and fewer resources to go to fixed costs like research and infrastructure.
Resources are not fixed. This is an economic fact. More people means more labor available for the creation of more wealth. Population growth makes us all richer.
Gee, I sure and glad you took the time to share your opinion. I'd hate to go through life not knowing that I'm sheltered and ignorant.
Seriously, I've made out a case that population growth is a good thing. You responded with insults. And I'm the one that's sheltered?
I'd be willing to bet that I've done more reading on this subject than the average/.er. I certainly have read and thought enough about it to make a coherent case. I suggest you make sure you know what you're talking about before you go insulting other people.
If you think that population growth is bad, then please make your argument. Otherwise, why should I take you seriously?
You're assuming a fixed number of trucks, but where do trucks come from? They are made by people. So if there are no trucks for someone to drive, then chances are truck maunfacturing companies need to ramp up their production. So that extra worker could be hired by them.
The point is that almost all resources are created by human beings' labor. A hunk of iron 50 feet under the ground isn't worth a whole lot. It takes human effort (and capital, which is built with previous human effort) to extract that iron and turn it into something useful. So there will *always* be something somewhere for a new worker to work productivly.
Not only that, but specialization and the division of labor mean that two people working together can be more than twice as efficient than one person working by himself. If you're really good at catching fish, and I'm really good at gathering berries, then together we can have more of both fish and berries than either of us would alone. THis effect scales. Adding a millionth person to an economy can increase the per-person productivity of the economy as much as adding a hundredth or a thousandth person.
The cost of the physical raw material that go into a product is a very small part of the overall cost. Even when you purchase "raw copper," that copper has already had a lot of labor put into extracting it from the ground and purifying it. And there is no limit in sight to the amount of resources available. The Earth is a giant ball of natural resources, and there is probably enough resources in there to support ten times the current population. What is needed is the human labor needed to find and extract those resources.
The land they live upon, apparently, simply can't support the number of people that they have.
This isn't true. The problem is that farmers in those countries are using outdated farming methods that have lower yields. In the US, land use for farming has actually declined in spite of population growth. If all countries used the modern farming methods of the US, the environment would be cleaner and there would be plenty of food for everyone with less land wasted.
Now obviously most countries can't afford that, but that's not due to overpopulation. The third world is poor for political reasons, and would continue to be poor even if they had fewer people. What's needed in those countries is not population control but free markets, which would drive farmers to adopt modern farming methods.
Re:Overpopulation is good, based on your "logic"?
on
Thus Spake Stallman
·
· Score: 1
Well, sure, the word "overpopulation" by definition means "having too many people, so by definition that can't be good. But my point is that there is no overpopulation problem. Those countries that have problems with starvation and over-crowding are due to poverty, not an excess of people.
If you were to shoot half the people in China (not that I'm for that) then you'd have hald a billion people, and the country would be just as poor. Sure, in the short run you could take the property of the half that died, but you would have lost half the productive capacity of your economy.
Resources aren't just lying around for people to use. 90% of the value of any good or service is in the value of the labor that went into it. So reducing the number of people is going to also reduce the pool of labor, and so is going to give you a very small net gain.
In addition, there are benefits to having more people around-- more division of labor, more potential customers if you run a business, etc. These far outweigh any benefit you might have by having more physical resources per person. Human labor is the most valuable commodity around.
As for an overpopulated country with a good standard of living, look at Hong Kong. Or New York, or Japan. All have extremely high population densities, and are also very prosperous. Sure they don't probably count as "overpopulated," since they have the resources to take care of their people, but they are countries with high population densities.
And for the record, I think it's ridiculous that my original comment got knocked down to -1. It's clearly on-topic, since it's commenting on something in the article, and perhaps it doesn't deserve a "2," but it's certainly no more overrated than most 1-rated comments. It's not my fault that most/.ers disagree with me.
The Malthusians have been predicting this for 200 years, and it hasn't happened, in spite of unprecedented population growth in the last century. Sure, if there were a trillion people on the planet, then it might not be possible to feed them all, but we're nowhere near that point yet. There is still lots of open space, and most of the agriculture in the world is still done in an extremely primitive manner. Modernizing agriculture in the third world is going to be much more effective than trying to control population growth, and more people means more resources with which to modernize.
Poverty is a political problem. People are made poor by bad policies, not by any intrinsic limit on the number of people who can live in a region.
Fine, you can quibble about the words, but the fact that a new user doesn't immediately know that "i" inserts and "x" deletes has nothing whatsoever to do with computers being "logical" rather than "emotional." The fact that most Unix products have an internal logic does not mean that that logic will allow users to figure out how to use that product.
And actually, the number has to come first: "2x" and "2dd".
I'm sorry, but you seem to have no respect for anyone whose life doesn't revolve around computers.
There is nothing "logical" about most *nix GUI's. What confuses people is not relentless logic, but incredible arcaneness, the assumption that the user has a great deal of computer knowledge, and no clue whatsoever about where to start in getting a job done.
If a user wants to make a text file (and most users aren't even clear what a "text file" is) there is nothing "logical" about typing "vi newfile.txt." And there is *certainly* nothing logical about the controls in vi.
A computer is a tool. For geeks, it's an extremely important tool, and one that we therefore become intimately familiar with. For us, the primary job of a GUI is to get the hell out of the way so we can get our work done. We memorize key shortcuts, write scripts to automate common tasks, and do most of our work from the command line. Therefore, any attempt by GUI writers to add features is likely to just get in the way, since we already have things just as we like them.
Most users have neither the time or the interest to become this familiar with their computers. This does not make them stupid, lazy, or irrational. It simply means that learning the inner workings of a computer is not a priority. For these users (and 90% fall in this category) the interface needs to be simple, consistent, and provide the user with a limited set of high-level choices that are clearly marked and make it clear what options the user has. A good interface for these users also hides and automates as much as possible the nitty-gritty details of computer operations.
In other words, a mechanic might be perfectly happy reaching into the engine and manipulating it directly, but the rest of us like our steering wheels, dash boards, turn signals, etc. The fact that I can't distinguish a spark plug from an air filter does not make me stupid or irrational. I shouldn't have to know how to rebuild the engine before I drive to the store in my car.
So for geeks the interface doesn't matter that much. We work with our machines long enough that we'll figure out practically any interface. So for us, the priorities are power, flexibility, and minimal intrusiveness.
There *are* however, several facets of good UI design that should be observed in all good GUI's reading these comments I see that most open source types seem to be oblivious to the importance of good UI design. Some of the most important, just from my personal observations:
The possible actions should be available at all times. This is the biggest factor in reducing the learning curve for a new interface, and it's the primary purpose of menus.
Unix GUI's are just awful on this score. If a new user sits down at an average Unix terminal, he's not going to have a clue where to begin. I know I didn't. You *have* to have someone sitting at your side to explain shell commands to you, and even then there are dozens of little tricks that I have learned only by watching other users. Compare this with the Mac OS, in which--although there are still lots of tricks-- all the important functions are either done by direct manipulations or are listed in menus.
Once a user becomes familiar with the interface, this is less important, but even then there are going to be features that the user hasn't used yet.
The second requirement is consistency. The Mac OS imposes a fairly strict set of conventions for widget behavior, menu placement and layout, etc. There are standard shortcuts in almost every app for cut, copy, paste, quite, etc. Unix apps have nothing that vaguely resembles this level of consistency.
If you think that the computer is simply a device to be "really fast at mathematics and transferring data around," I don't think you understand what the information revolution is all about. The whole point of the last 20 years of UI development is that the user can get work done with the computer without understanding its inner workings. A good UI hides unnecessary details and provides simple, high-level abstractions to accomplish the user's objectives. Often these interfaces are poorly done, which is probably why many power users have turned to the raw simplicity of the command line. But the fact that most GUI's today get in the way does not mean that all GUI's are useless.
Well, OK, if you are running a niche application that involves highly parallel data, then yes, a chip with a good vector unit is going to blow away one with a mediocre or non-existent vector unit. On the other hand, if you were to run an application that didn't make good use of Altivec, then the G4 is going to be about the same speed as an similarly clocked pentium.
This is why benchmarking is so contentious: you can dream up a benchmark to prove pretty much anything. But the fact is that most every-day applications are not going to make as much use of altivec as RC5 or seti@home. So these 3-6 times as fast ratings are simply not credible for everyday use.
Don't get me wrong: the G4 is a kick-ass chip, and if Apple had more competition, they would almost certainly be a better price/performance deal than x86 offerings. In fact, when I finish being a starving college students, I plan to buy a G4 (or whatever comes after it) I couldn't stand running Windoze or Linux as my only desktop OS choices. But it does the Mac community's credibility no good to treat Steve Job's inflated benchmarks as revealed truth. Yes, the G4 probably beats the competition in photoshop tests. But for those of us who don't do graphics for a living, that's not a reasonable benchmark. Like every company, Apple exaggerates their product's benefits.
Now that IBM is making G4's, though, I'm looking forward to seeing quad GHz G4's running OS X hit the market in early 2001. *drool*
The PowerPC architecture will always lag behind overall, it's just that its very close at this point in time.
The current high-end G4 is 500 MHz. That compares with the 1 GHz chips Intel and AMD are claiming. I'm skeptical about whether those chips are going to ship in volume any time soon, though. Apple claims that the G4 is over twice as fast as a similarly clocked pentium. This is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but I think it probably is true that a G4/500 is equivalent to a P-III/750 or so.
So in terms of raw speed, the high-end x86 are probably ahead. But the G4 has a *lot* of room to grow. If the folks at Moto weren't so incompetent, we'd have 7-800 MHz G4's by now, which would blow everything x86 out of the water. And IBM is just now ramping up G4 production, so expect to see some serious increases in clock rates in the coming months.
So it's ridiculous to say that PPC's will "always lag behind." In fact, the exact opposite is true. They are currently in something of a slump, and with a little luck they will catch up and surpass x86. The PPC is simply a newer, cleaner architecture with more room to grow, and so they shouldn't have any trouble keeping up with the kludge that is x86.
As much as you or I might dislike these products and choose not to use them ourselves, there are people who choose to consume them and believe they benefit from them. I don't believe it's right to take that choice away from them. And besides, even if we wanted to do so, we couldn't, as the drug war has clearly demonstrated.
Or pre-teen prostitutes?
This isn't really a "product. Pre-teen prostitution should be illegal for the protection of the preteen. It has nothing to do with corporations.
And I don't think it's true that pre-teen prostitutes are bad for their customers. *If* the prostitute is an adult, then I don't think that should be a crime. And if the prostitute is a child, then it should be illegal, but not to protect the customer.
As far as politicians go, if a politician does what is necessary to get re-elected, are not the voters getting what they 'paid' for?
I'm not. I never voted for any of the bozos in Washington right now. If the laws only applied to those that voted for the winning candidate, then I'd agree, but they apply to everyone. It is the lack of choice on the part of the taxpayer that makes the difference.
But I have seen where an entire community was kicked off its land with no compensation, their homes burnt to the ground, because of a corporation.
Whether it was done "because of a corporation" or not, the point remains that the actual kicking off was done by the local government. (or at least it chose to look the other way when it could have stopped it) Does that absolve the corporation? Absolutely not. But the root of the problem is still the government. The governments in other countries are weak and are therefore used to do nasty things to their citizens.
So while the corporation isn't blameless, this can only happen if the government lets it happen. And usually the government does all the dirty work for the corporation. So the solution is still that we need a free market-- one in which no one is allowed to use the power of the state against others.
More to the point, the major issue in this thread is how the US government should treat corporations. Whatever foreign governments should do, I think it's clear that we'd be better off with a smaller federal government here in the states. There is no danger of Microsoft raiding our homes and forcing us to install Windoze on our computers with the government powerless to stop it. There is a large danger of Microsoft using the power of the government to bludgeon its competitors with unnecessary regulations.
They are perfectly capable of building factories to sell shoes to wealthy Westerners, but they never get the chance because Nike comes in and does it for them. And Nike shareholders don't live in the worker's country spending the profits in the worker's community.
I don't think you understand the economics of the situation. A factory is expensive. Yes, with enough effort, the locals *could* build a shoe factory, but it would take much longer than if Nike came in and did it, and it would take scarce capital from more pressing needs. Wage growth is directly driven by capital acquisition. It took us 150 years to go from an agricultural economy to a modern industrial one. Without Western help, it will likely take nearly as long for third-world nations to catch up.
Western capital provides a shortcut, by allowing its workers to benefit from the high productivity (and therefore high wages) of Western capital. But wages only rise once there is enough jobs that employters have to compete for workers. And that will only happen when a large number of companies establish "sweatshops" in the third world.
So I absolutely agree that corporations shouldn't be using third world governments to fleece other countries, but that doesn't mean that corporations can only do harm. What we need is global capitalism-- a system in which no one is allowed to coerce anyone else, but also in which capital and goods are allowed to flow freely around the world. The people who demonize corporations and restrict trade are hurting the poor in the third world by taking jobs from them.
If I throw a battery in the trash, yeah, I probably should have disposed of it 'properly', but the environmental consequences aren't nearly the same as if AT&T decides to throw its batteries in the trash.
But there is no fundamental difference here except that it's not cost-effective to go after you. In theory, though, you throwing a battery in the trash should be prosecuted every bit as much as AT&T throwing a million batteries in the trash. I don't see how there is any difference in kind here, only a difference of scale.
Corporations need to be held to exactly the same rules as individuals, and those rules need to be enforced. Please give me an example of something an individual should be allowed to do that a corporation should not.
Simple, you secure the rights to buy all of the land you'll need before you build anything. And if someone won't sell, you plan a new route. You make sure that you have the rights to the entire route before you start building anything, so that you don't have to worry about someone holding out at the last minute.
Besides, what right does the government have to kick people out of their homes just because they want to build a road there? I don't think this is an argument in favor of government. It's a *good* thing that corporations can't do this. Government shouldn't do this either.
Historical precedent is also against you. The early railroad industry was built almost entirely with private money. The later Westward expansion was done on land provided by the government, but the more successful railroads in the east made it without much government help. I see no reason why roads couldn't be run the same way.
Slashdot Mirror
The apps monopoly will quickly find its monopoly power fading away unless they make their products better and more compatible.
Better than and more compatible with what? The popularity of Office did at least as much good for Windows market share as the other way around. Office will only be endangered when someone comes up with a good alternative, and so far I don't see one. People are reluctant to change document formats.
Besides, I think it's far from clear that there is superior technology out there just waiting to take down MS's apps. With the exception of some of their mediocre server products, (IIS comes to mind) most of their apps are relatively popular and relatively well made. Many of them are sold separately from Windoze and there isn't any clear "monopoly advantage" to them.
So the apps company will probably continue to do what MS has done all along: produce products their customers want. I fail to see how splitting them up will make them do that any faster or better.
Just to echo the previous posters, Carbon apps will be 100% native and fully buzzword compliant. Carbon apps do *not* share memory or other resources with classic, nor should you see any substantial performance penalties. The whole point of carbon is to allow apps to take full advantage of the modern OS without major performance penalties.
Actually, the zoom box was added with system 6 (or might have been 5) and the windowshade box came with 8.0.
If you look at really old documentation for the Mac OS API, the bit that flags whether there is a zoom box on a window is marked as an "extra" flag. Early versions of the Mac OS didn't have a zoom box--just a close box.
The biggest problem *I* see with the new layout is that the three buttons are close together, and the "single window" button is retarded. I wish they'd just drop that one, because it wastes prime real estate and is worthless to anyone who's used a computer for more than a few months.
I wish they'd move the yellow and green buttons over the the right where they belong and make the green one "zoom" as it is in the current OS. This allows "maximize" do the "right thing" depending on the application. There are a lot of apps for which "zoom" is useful while "maximize" isn't.
For that matter, I'd prefer they just use the original symbols. They were just fine the way they were.
In Unix, there are no OS-level GUI APIs, period.
Which is the big reason that Unix apps are so inconsistent. A KDE app won't work in GNOME, a GNOME app won't work in KDE, and neither will work on straight X. If you're just running straight X without KDE or GNOME, you have to write a lot of common GUI elements yourself. Hence, there are several different ways of implementing any given function, and so it takes a long time to figure out how any particular app's interface works.
system wide, consistent cut and paste
The only cut and paste is the hacked-up select and middle click, which isn't real cut and paste, and even then it isn't implemented right in a substantial number of apps.
A decent graphical file browser?
I've used both the GNOME and KDE file browsers, and neither of them come close the the Mac OS finder.
Consistent keyboard shortcuts for common commands?
For KDE apps, maybe. But if I want to run other apps, I'm out of luck, and even in KDE, there are not as many standard shortcuts and they aren't implemented as consistently as on a Mac.
I've learned each on my own, and Unix-at-a-terminal is absolutely no harder to learn to use than Windoze or Mac.
I'm not even going to try to argue with you on this one. I'll just suggest that you hand a completely new computer user a Mac OS 9 CD and a Red Hat CD with some documentation, and see which one he figures out how to use first. I'll bet you money Red Hat drives him to tears, while he might actually get work done on the Mac in a matter of hours. For you (as a seasoned computer user who understands the innards of your OS) it's not hard to pick up Unix. For new computer users, even concepts like file, directory, disk, memory, etc are alien. Expecting him to also memorize 2 dozen command-line commands is absurd.
"learning how to use a Mac again when you sit at a new one" is anything like "using a Mac for the first time", where it is absolutely not.
Sure, it's going to take some time to use any computer interface, because computers are complex. But I've watched a new computer user (my grandfather) work with a Mac, and I can easily imagine trying to teach him Unix. I doubt he'd even have the attention span to learn enough to do anything useful. For average Joe's, there's just no comparison.
There is nothing tying any specific action to clipboard operations but convention.
That's my *whole point*-- Unix developers *could* write decent clipboard support into their apps, except that the "convention" is the middle-button-paste. This might not be an OS-level issue from a technical standpoint, but from the user perspective, it certainly is. 95% of Mac apps provide real (clipboard-based) cut and paste. 90% of Unix applications only support text-based middle-button paste. This is a *defect* in Unix applications, and a weakness of the platform. It does users no good that KDE or GNOME provide the capability if 2/3 of apps don't use it.
How do you explain StarOffice, for ONE example out of many, when there are no apps to work on spreadsheets according to you? GIMP when there are no apps for graphics?
I haven't used either of these much, so perhaps I'm wrong about the spreadsheets. But let's take the GIMP. Can I drag and drop an image from Netscape into the GIMP? Can I copy an image in Netscape and paste it into GIMP? No? That's my point: some individual applications have implemented some good interface features, but there's no system-wide consistency in the way apps implement interface features.
Besides, the graphics people I've talked to tell me the GIMP is still a sad joke compared with Photoshop and other graphics programs available on the Mac.
Heck, if all I ever needed was a few Windows applications, and the interface was good enough for me, I could run those too, either with Wine or VMWare, or with some Windows-esque window manager.
A window manager is not an interface. A lousy interface with a pretty face is still a lousy interface. An interface is measured by its consistency, it's simplicity, its elegance, and its power, not by where the buttons are and what color the title bar is. Window managers are amusing, but no matter how good they are, they can't overcome the inadequacies of bad applications and lousy OS-level GUI API's.
Linux *started* with at least the functionality of a late-80's user interface as soon as X compiled on it.
Hmm... system wide, consistent cut and paste? A decent graphical file browser? Consistent keyboard shortcuts for common commands? multiple monitor support?
Granted, those aren't all specifically interface issues, but they are closely related. Linux *still* doesn't have a lot of the features that Mac users take for granted. Even KDE and gnome don't give you either the interface consistency or the attention to detail of the Mac cerca 1990. For all their technical bells and whistles, KDE and Gnome are still ugly, clumsy, and poorly designed.
My interface is so good, I use the command line all the time.
Good for you. And I bet you spent months learning it. And I'll also bet that when you get a new program, you have to read pages of documentation to figure out how to use it. And I'll further bet that you are in the top 5% on the geekiness scale in the general population.
The fact is that most people don't have the time or the interest to learn the Unix CLI. Doing so is no small undertaking-- it takes days to become even basically functional, and months to master all its nuances. I can sit down in front of a Mac app I've never seen before, and start using effectively almost immediately. I can do that because Apple has worked hard to ensure that developers follow certain conventions in interface design, so that new apps work the same as my old ones. CLI's expect you to memorize an entirely new set of flags and options with every command.
As for cutting and pasting, I'll take real cut-and-paste with a real clipboard any day. The standard X cut and paste is a nasty hack that should have died 10 years ago. I shouldn't have to worry about accidentally highlighting text before I've had time to paste copied text to its destination. And if Unix had a standard keyboard shortcut for "paste" you wouldn't lose more than a quarter-second in pasting.
And if I want to cut and paste something other than text, I'm just out of luck.
Of course, I'd rather get work done. I hate to break it to you, but that's what that "User Interface" is for: to get stuff done.
Correct. Which is why most X GUI's suck so much-- you can't get any work done until you've had someone walk you through using the thing for several hours, and it takes week before you're able to do even moderately complex tasks.
And forget it if you're planning on working with images, souds, video, spreadsheets, or even formatted text-- those are just too frivolous for our manly command line interface and our handy dandy middle-button paste.
My mouse is usually gonna be in the window of the app I'm currently talking to, so having the menus in that window is good.
Not true. Because it's on the edge of the screen, I can hit the Mac menubar with a single flick of my wrist, no matter where the cursor is now. In fact, it generally takes *longer* to hit menu items in Windows than in Mac OS, even if the cursor is much closer to the Windows menu. Hitting a Mac OS menu is near-instantaneous once you get used to not having to slow down as you get near the menu.
Plus you save screen space by not having multiple menus.
Mac menus also have subtle details that make it work better: Go to a menu that has a submenu, and go down to the title of one of the submenus. Notice that if you move your pointer down and diagonally toward the submenu, that submenu stays open. (Assuming you don't go too fast) If you move your mouse in any other direction, that submenu pops closed. There are a lot of things like that: subtle details that Mac users take for granted to that the rest of the computing world hasn't bothered to implement right.
Also, closing the last window of an app doesn't kill the app. That really gets me, and I blame the shared menu for it.
This is a personal preference, but there are a couple of advantages to this. One, the application-centric (rather than window-centric) model prevents multiple copies of the same app from running. Second, command-Q kills off the whole app, whicl alt-F4 only kills one window. Thirdly, there are times when you want to close the current window and relaunch it. This is much easier if the menu bar stays in place. Fourth, it cuts down on the clutter in the application menu (task bar) I have five items in my application menu at the moment. I'd have 10-15 if every window were listed.
With that said, there are downsides-- it's an issue of personal taste. But it's hardly a basis on which to choose an OS.
FUD
I wish people would stop using this word out of context. FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and doubt." As in "if you buy a non-Microsoft product, you never know what bad things will happen." FUD is designed to get people to buy the dominant product due to the fear that the alternative has unseen downsides, the uncertainty about the products quality, and the doubt that the product will work as advertised.
My statement says nothing about Microsoft's products or those of its competitors. It might be pro-Microsoft propoganda, but it isn't FUD. Please use the word in its appropriate context.
Cisco (CSCO) is America's most valuable company and can be considered more successful and monopolistic than MSFT in every sense of the word.
I think a large part of the reason Cisco hasn't been targeted is that it's not as high-profile as Microsoft. People see the Microsoft logo every time they start up their computers, and software developers' lives revolve around changes MS makes to its API's. Cisco may be just as ubiquitous, but neither users nor developers deal as directly with their products. A cisco router sits in the background minding its own business. And so no one is pushing the DOJ to go after them.
I don't particularly want to get into another long discussion of the merits of antitrust law. Even most defenders of antitrust will concede that once a company gets a large enough market share, the rules change and the company isn't allowed to engage in various "unfair" activities. Whether you agree with these restrictions or not, they *do* reduce the payoff for starting the next Microsoft.
Yet it is not being harassed by the DOJ because "crush the competition by any means necessary" is not their guiding principle of operation.
This is and should be the guiding principle of any company. That's what competition is all about: you try to take as much market share as possible from your competitors, and you use any non-violent means at your disposal to do it. It's oxymoronic to expect companies to compete but not compete "too hard." All companies try to crush their competitors. If they didn't, their competitors would likely crush them. That's the way the free market works.
Actually, there is a reason. The stock values of many of these firms is based heavily on the expectations of future earnings. The lesson of the Microsoft case is that if a company is too successful, it will be punished. Therefore, the breakup of Microsoft sets a precedent that hurts the prospects for other high-growth stocks.
More government regulation is a bad thing for the industry, and the antitrust case is government regulation. The market is reflecting this.
OK, so I'm way off about the land area claim.
However, if you take the land area of Texas (6e11 meters^2) and spit it up 6 billion ways, the per-person land area is about 100 square meters. For a family of four, that allows for a land area 20 meters on a side. That's the size of a small suburban lot, and is much less than the density of a large city. If you housed people in apartment buildings with 100 people in them, (say a 5-story building with 5 4-person families on each floor) you'd get to put each building on a lot 100 meters on a side, which is larger than most apartment buildings have. Granted, that's not an ideal amount of land, but it wouldn't be that bad. The population density here in Minneapolis is higher than that, and I'm surviving.
So I think my point stands, although I admittedly was pulling numbers out of my ass in the previous post. The problem is not physical space, it's resources, and the primary component in the production of resources is human labor. Doubling the number of people on the planet would certainly cause a problem if done all at once, but if it's done gradually, it seems to me it would be a good thing.
There is a finite amount of resources on this planet.
There is a finite amount of natural resources, but that limit is extremely high. Note that the price of most commodities in real terms is going down. That means that those resources are becoming less scarce, meaning that they are being discovered faster than they are being used.
Most wealth is due to the value needed to make them, not to the value of raw natural resources. A chunk of iron or copper isn't worth much until it is extracted from the ground and purified. And even then it's not worth much until it's used to make something useful.
Also, most people would like to preserve some wilderness. Whether it be for recreation, aesthetic reasons, ethical reasons, or all of the above... It is hard to preserve natural areas on an overcrowded planet.
This is not true. I believe I've read that if you give every person an acre, you could fit the world's population into Texas. The reason that wilderness is being destroyed is that land is not being used efficiently. Notice that the amount of forest in the US has actually increased, and the amount of farmland in production has dropped, in spite of population and production growth in recent years.
The key to wilderness prvention is to make sure resources are used efficiently. That means that we need to find ways to get modern farming techniques to the farmers in Central America who are forced to use slash-and-burn agriculture to survive now. It means that we need a more efficient food distribution system, so that our surpluses can be distributed more effectively to the people who need them, alleviating the pressures to use marginal farmland with low yields.
In addition, you say "more goods and services" are a good thing, however if this were true rich people would be the happiest people, and I don't find this to be true.
Maybe not at the extremes, but you can bet that you and I have more pleasant lives than the average peasant in India. You can question whether Bill Gates is happier than someone who makes $100k/yr, but I think the person who makes $100k/yr is giong to be happier than someone who makes 10k/yr. Certainly it would be ridiculous to argue that fewer goods and services would be good. If you believe that, go ahead and join a monastary. I personally like goods and services.
Go explain that 'fact' to the former inhabitants of Easter Island. Please CC: every specie of plant and animal we've extincted.
I have no idea what this has to do with the topic at hand.
At any rate, I'm not interested in getting into a flame war with you. Let me know when you're interested in having a serious discussion, then maybe we can both learn something. Until then, I'm not going to waste my time on you.
It's amazing how industrial nations, for all of their advancement, continue to create unbelievable amounts of waste and destruction.
In fact, the precise opposite is true. Land use, pollution rates, extinctions, and other environmental harms have been declining for about 50 years in the US. This is because the advance of technology has allowed us to use more efficient production methods that save resources, farmland, and produce less pollution. It is the third world that is destroying rain forests, causing pollution, and otherwise harming the environment.
What is needed in those countries is economic growth. Only by making now-poor countries wealthy will we have the resources to protect the environment, preserve forests, clean up the air, etc.
This is why attempts to impose draconian environmental rules on the third world are so wrongheaded. They aren't going to stop the pollution, but they may very well strangle those economies in the cradle, preventing them from ever becoming industrialized. And then without the benefits of wealth, they will never be able to reduce the hard to the environment as the West has done.
Well sure, if you have a trillion people, then yes you might have problems. But most demographers predict that population is going to lever off at around 10 billion, which is nowhere near the number of people the planet can theoretically hold.
So, allow me to rephrase: any reasonable increase in population is beneficial. By reasonable, let's just say I mean up to 20 billion people. At that point, I suspect it would still be beneficial, but it's possible that we'd start to run out of natural resources.
Most demographers are currently predicting that the population will level out by the end of the next century, so chances are we will never have a population even that large.
God I'm sick of ignorant people taking condescending attitudes about subjects they don't understand. OK...
Take an island. Put 1,000 people on it. Give them all enough infinite wealth. Give them zero food.
Wealth is not money. Wealth is physical resources: iron, tractors, buildings, etc. A society that had all these things would be able to produce food more efficiently.
Besides, we don't live on an island. And our food supply is not fixed. The primary barrier to feeding the poor is poor distribution systems and a lack of technology for third-world farmers.
There is no global food shortage. There are local food shortages created by incompetent governments. Nations that have free markets in food production and the wealth to use modern farming methods have seen production skyrocket and land use dwindle.
Reducing the number of people on the Earth won't make the remaining people any richer. In fact, it will likely make them poorer, since there are fewer opportunities for division of labor, and fewer resources to go to fixed costs like research and infrastructure.
Resources are not fixed. This is an economic fact. More people means more labor available for the creation of more wealth. Population growth makes us all richer.
Gee, I sure and glad you took the time to share your opinion. I'd hate to go through life not knowing that I'm sheltered and ignorant.
/.er. I certainly have read and thought enough about it to make a coherent case. I suggest you make sure you know what you're talking about before you go insulting other people.
Seriously, I've made out a case that population growth is a good thing. You responded with insults. And I'm the one that's sheltered?
I'd be willing to bet that I've done more reading on this subject than the average
If you think that population growth is bad, then please make your argument. Otherwise, why should I take you seriously?
You're assuming a fixed number of trucks, but where do trucks come from? They are made by people. So if there are no trucks for someone to drive, then chances are truck maunfacturing companies need to ramp up their production. So that extra worker could be hired by them.
The point is that almost all resources are created by human beings' labor. A hunk of iron 50 feet under the ground isn't worth a whole lot. It takes human effort (and capital, which is built with previous human effort) to extract that iron and turn it into something useful. So there will *always* be something somewhere for a new worker to work productivly.
Not only that, but specialization and the division of labor mean that two people working together can be more than twice as efficient than one person working by himself. If you're really good at catching fish, and I'm really good at gathering berries, then together we can have more of both fish and berries than either of us would alone. THis effect scales. Adding a millionth person to an economy can increase the per-person productivity of the economy as much as adding a hundredth or a thousandth person.
The cost of the physical raw material that go into a product is a very small part of the overall cost. Even when you purchase "raw copper," that copper has already had a lot of labor put into extracting it from the ground and purifying it. And there is no limit in sight to the amount of resources available. The Earth is a giant ball of natural resources, and there is probably enough resources in there to support ten times the current population. What is needed is the human labor needed to find and extract those resources.
The land they live upon, apparently, simply can't support the number of people that they have.
This isn't true. The problem is that farmers in those countries are using outdated farming methods that have lower yields. In the US, land use for farming has actually declined in spite of population growth. If all countries used the modern farming methods of the US, the environment would be cleaner and there would be plenty of food for everyone with less land wasted.
Now obviously most countries can't afford that, but that's not due to overpopulation. The third world is poor for political reasons, and would continue to be poor even if they had fewer people. What's needed in those countries is not population control but free markets, which would drive farmers to adopt modern farming methods.
Well, sure, the word "overpopulation" by definition means "having too many people, so by definition that can't be good. But my point is that there is no overpopulation problem. Those countries that have problems with starvation and over-crowding are due to poverty, not an excess of people.
/.ers disagree with me.
If you were to shoot half the people in China (not that I'm for that) then you'd have hald a billion people, and the country would be just as poor. Sure, in the short run you could take the property of the half that died, but you would have lost half the productive capacity of your economy.
Resources aren't just lying around for people to use. 90% of the value of any good or service is in the value of the labor that went into it. So reducing the number of people is going to also reduce the pool of labor, and so is going to give you a very small net gain.
In addition, there are benefits to having more people around-- more division of labor, more potential customers if you run a business, etc. These far outweigh any benefit you might have by having more physical resources per person. Human labor is the most valuable commodity around.
As for an overpopulated country with a good standard of living, look at Hong Kong. Or New York, or Japan. All have extremely high population densities, and are also very prosperous. Sure they don't probably count as "overpopulated," since they have the resources to take care of their people, but they are countries with high population densities.
And for the record, I think it's ridiculous that my original comment got knocked down to -1. It's clearly on-topic, since it's commenting on something in the article, and perhaps it doesn't deserve a "2," but it's certainly no more overrated than most 1-rated comments. It's not my fault that most
The Malthusians have been predicting this for 200 years, and it hasn't happened, in spite of unprecedented population growth in the last century. Sure, if there were a trillion people on the planet, then it might not be possible to feed them all, but we're nowhere near that point yet. There is still lots of open space, and most of the agriculture in the world is still done in an extremely primitive manner. Modernizing agriculture in the third world is going to be much more effective than trying to control population growth, and more people means more resources with which to modernize.
Poverty is a political problem. People are made poor by bad policies, not by any intrinsic limit on the number of people who can live in a region.
Fine, you can quibble about the words, but the fact that a new user doesn't immediately know that "i" inserts and "x" deletes has nothing whatsoever to do with computers being "logical" rather than "emotional." The fact that most Unix products have an internal logic does not mean that that logic will allow users to figure out how to use that product.
And actually, the number has to come first: "2x" and "2dd".
I'm sorry, but you seem to have no respect for anyone whose life doesn't revolve around computers.
There is nothing "logical" about most *nix GUI's. What confuses people is not relentless logic, but incredible arcaneness, the assumption that the user has a great deal of computer knowledge, and no clue whatsoever about where to start in getting a job done.
If a user wants to make a text file (and most users aren't even clear what a "text file" is) there is nothing "logical" about typing "vi newfile.txt." And there is *certainly* nothing logical about the controls in vi.
A computer is a tool. For geeks, it's an extremely important tool, and one that we therefore become intimately familiar with. For us, the primary job of a GUI is to get the hell out of the way so we can get our work done. We memorize key shortcuts, write scripts to automate common tasks, and do most of our work from the command line. Therefore, any attempt by GUI writers to add features is likely to just get in the way, since we already have things just as we like them.
Most users have neither the time or the interest to become this familiar with their computers. This does not make them stupid, lazy, or irrational. It simply means that learning the inner workings of a computer is not a priority. For these users (and 90% fall in this category) the interface needs to be simple, consistent, and provide the user with a limited set of high-level choices that are clearly marked and make it clear what options the user has. A good interface for these users also hides and automates as much as possible the nitty-gritty details of computer operations.
In other words, a mechanic might be perfectly happy reaching into the engine and manipulating it directly, but the rest of us like our steering wheels, dash boards, turn signals, etc. The fact that I can't distinguish a spark plug from an air filter does not make me stupid or irrational. I shouldn't have to know how to rebuild the engine before I drive to the store in my car.
So for geeks the interface doesn't matter that much. We work with our machines long enough that we'll figure out practically any interface. So for us, the priorities are power, flexibility, and minimal intrusiveness.
There *are* however, several facets of good UI design that should be observed in all good GUI's reading these comments I see that most open source types seem to be oblivious to the importance of good UI design. Some of the most important, just from my personal observations:
The possible actions should be available at all times. This is the biggest factor in reducing the learning curve for a new interface, and it's the primary purpose of menus.
Unix GUI's are just awful on this score. If a new user sits down at an average Unix terminal, he's not going to have a clue where to begin. I know I didn't. You *have* to have someone sitting at your side to explain shell commands to you, and even then there are dozens of little tricks that I have learned only by watching other users. Compare this with the Mac OS, in which--although there are still lots of tricks-- all the important functions are either done by direct manipulations or are listed in menus.
Once a user becomes familiar with the interface, this is less important, but even then there are going to be features that the user hasn't used yet.
The second requirement is consistency. The Mac OS imposes a fairly strict set of conventions for widget behavior, menu placement and layout, etc. There are standard shortcuts in almost every app for cut, copy, paste, quite, etc. Unix apps have nothing that vaguely resembles this level of consistency.
If you think that the computer is simply a device to be "really fast at mathematics and transferring data around," I don't think you understand what the information revolution is all about. The whole point of the last 20 years of UI development is that the user can get work done with the computer without understanding its inner workings. A good UI hides unnecessary details and provides simple, high-level abstractions to accomplish the user's objectives. Often these interfaces are poorly done, which is probably why many power users have turned to the raw simplicity of the command line. But the fact that most GUI's today get in the way does not mean that all GUI's are useless.
Well, OK, if you are running a niche application that involves highly parallel data, then yes, a chip with a good vector unit is going to blow away one with a mediocre or non-existent vector unit. On the other hand, if you were to run an application that didn't make good use of Altivec, then the G4 is going to be about the same speed as an similarly clocked pentium.
This is why benchmarking is so contentious: you can dream up a benchmark to prove pretty much anything. But the fact is that most every-day applications are not going to make as much use of altivec as RC5 or seti@home. So these 3-6 times as fast ratings are simply not credible for everyday use.
Don't get me wrong: the G4 is a kick-ass chip, and if Apple had more competition, they would almost certainly be a better price/performance deal than x86 offerings. In fact, when I finish being a starving college students, I plan to buy a G4 (or whatever comes after it) I couldn't stand running Windoze or Linux as my only desktop OS choices. But it does the Mac community's credibility no good to treat Steve Job's inflated benchmarks as revealed truth. Yes, the G4 probably beats the competition in photoshop tests. But for those of us who don't do graphics for a living, that's not a reasonable benchmark. Like every company, Apple exaggerates their product's benefits.
Now that IBM is making G4's, though, I'm looking forward to seeing quad GHz G4's running OS X hit the market in early 2001. *drool*
The PowerPC architecture will always lag behind overall, it's just that its very close at this point in time.
The current high-end G4 is 500 MHz. That compares with the 1 GHz chips Intel and AMD are claiming. I'm skeptical about whether those chips are going to ship in volume any time soon, though. Apple claims that the G4 is over twice as fast as a similarly clocked pentium. This is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but I think it probably is true that a G4/500 is equivalent to a P-III/750 or so.
So in terms of raw speed, the high-end x86 are probably ahead. But the G4 has a *lot* of room to grow. If the folks at Moto weren't so incompetent, we'd have 7-800 MHz G4's by now, which would blow everything x86 out of the water. And IBM is just now ramping up G4 production, so expect to see some serious increases in clock rates in the coming months.
So it's ridiculous to say that PPC's will "always lag behind." In fact, the exact opposite is true. They are currently in something of a slump, and with a little luck they will catch up and surpass x86. The PPC is simply a newer, cleaner architecture with more room to grow, and so they shouldn't have any trouble keeping up with the kludge that is x86.
how about cocaine? Or LSD?
As much as you or I might dislike these products and choose not to use them ourselves, there are people who choose to consume them and believe they benefit from them. I don't believe it's right to take that choice away from them. And besides, even if we wanted to do so, we couldn't, as the drug war has clearly demonstrated.
Or pre-teen prostitutes?
This isn't really a "product. Pre-teen prostitution should be illegal for the protection of the preteen. It has nothing to do with corporations.
And I don't think it's true that pre-teen prostitutes are bad for their customers. *If* the prostitute is an adult, then I don't think that should be a crime. And if the prostitute is a child, then it should be illegal, but not to protect the customer.
As far as politicians go, if a politician does what is necessary to get re-elected, are not the voters getting what they 'paid' for?
I'm not. I never voted for any of the bozos in Washington right now. If the laws only applied to those that voted for the winning candidate, then I'd agree, but they apply to everyone. It is the lack of choice on the part of the taxpayer that makes the difference.
But I have seen where an entire community was kicked off its land with no compensation, their homes burnt to the ground, because of a corporation.
Whether it was done "because of a corporation" or not, the point remains that the actual kicking off was done by the local government. (or at least it chose to look the other way when it could have stopped it) Does that absolve the corporation? Absolutely not. But the root of the problem is still the government. The governments in other countries are weak and are therefore used to do nasty things to their citizens.
So while the corporation isn't blameless, this can only happen if the government lets it happen. And usually the government does all the dirty work for the corporation. So the solution is still that we need a free market-- one in which no one is allowed to use the power of the state against others.
More to the point, the major issue in this thread is how the US government should treat corporations. Whatever foreign governments should do, I think it's clear that we'd be better off with a smaller federal government here in the states. There is no danger of Microsoft raiding our homes and forcing us to install Windoze on our computers with the government powerless to stop it. There is a large danger of Microsoft using the power of the government to bludgeon its competitors with unnecessary regulations.
They are perfectly capable of building factories to sell shoes to wealthy Westerners, but they never get the chance because Nike comes in and does it for them. And Nike shareholders don't live in the worker's country spending the profits in the worker's community.
I don't think you understand the economics of the situation. A factory is expensive. Yes, with enough effort, the locals *could* build a shoe factory, but it would take much longer than if Nike came in and did it, and it would take scarce capital from more pressing needs. Wage growth is directly driven by capital acquisition. It took us 150 years to go from an agricultural economy to a modern industrial one. Without Western help, it will likely take nearly as long for third-world nations to catch up.
Western capital provides a shortcut, by allowing its workers to benefit from the high productivity (and therefore high wages) of Western capital. But wages only rise once there is enough jobs that employters have to compete for workers. And that will only happen when a large number of companies establish "sweatshops" in the third world.
So I absolutely agree that corporations shouldn't be using third world governments to fleece other countries, but that doesn't mean that corporations can only do harm. What we need is global capitalism-- a system in which no one is allowed to coerce anyone else, but also in which capital and goods are allowed to flow freely around the world. The people who demonize corporations and restrict trade are hurting the poor in the third world by taking jobs from them.
If I throw a battery in the trash, yeah, I probably should have disposed of it 'properly', but the environmental consequences aren't nearly the same as if AT&T decides to throw its batteries in the trash.
But there is no fundamental difference here except that it's not cost-effective to go after you. In theory, though, you throwing a battery in the trash should be prosecuted every bit as much as AT&T throwing a million batteries in the trash. I don't see how there is any difference in kind here, only a difference of scale.
Corporations need to be held to exactly the same rules as individuals, and those rules need to be enforced. Please give me an example of something an individual should be allowed to do that a corporation should not.
Simple, you secure the rights to buy all of the land you'll need before you build anything. And if someone won't sell, you plan a new route. You make sure that you have the rights to the entire route before you start building anything, so that you don't have to worry about someone holding out at the last minute.
Besides, what right does the government have to kick people out of their homes just because they want to build a road there? I don't think this is an argument in favor of government. It's a *good* thing that corporations can't do this. Government shouldn't do this either.
Historical precedent is also against you. The early railroad industry was built almost entirely with private money. The later Westward expansion was done on land provided by the government, but the more successful railroads in the east made it without much government help. I see no reason why roads couldn't be run the same way.