If you could show me an advanced meditation master levitating, or something similarly amazing, then we really would have some 'proof of the pudding'
I'm sorry, but that sort of thing is just too rare, if it does occur.
This does not require any kind of trancendental view of how the universe works.
Which universe are you talking about...? The physical "stuff" of matter and energy, or the universe of your conscious experience... which in addition to what your senses report to you, also includes the mental sphere of thoughts and concepts. If you want to talk about "the Universe", you cannot leave out the internal aspects of mind. A transcendental experience doesn't necessarily have to be just about saving on air fares. When J.C. said "Turn the other cheek", it wasn't because he thought it was a good idea. Rather, his own immediate experience was that He was Everywhere, and as such to strike another was to strike himself.
The Buddha also reported about what life is like when lived, experienced, beyond the concepts of time and space. Just as my everyday experience is that I am an individual separated from the world, the Buddha nature is separateless, timeless, and therefore Eternal.
And they left behind instructions on how to attain such experience, just as a scientist gives you instructions on how to operate a microscope in order to experience, and therefore confirm for yourself the reality of germs.
Really, just because there's terminology and people working on something doesn't mean that there's anything to it
Quite, and the "proof of the pudding", as they say, is in the eating. When an advanced meditation master is hooked up to a machine that monitors his brain activity, and that monitor shows that he is deeply asleep and fully awake at the same time, then you have scientific evidence that there is something to it.
The christian bible is no different from books of greek mythology... In our age of science, we can nip religions/cults that make magical claims... 'psychics', 'magicians', and other mystics have been shown to be the frauds that they are. Deal with the facts, and toss aside your outmoded belief systems, deities, and other such cruft.
You are exactly half right, and half wrong.
Before we had the benefit of the scientific method, we believed all sorts of rubbish about hanging dead chickens outside people's doors. Whole cultures just swallowed these beliefs without checking that any of it was real. The scientific method hadn't been born, and all of that magical-mythical babble was just Pre-Rational. Today we are at the Rational level, or at least nearly:-) , where we look for objective ways of measuring and verifying our theories. Thus we put men on the moon, proving the objective reality of our knowledge.
But the story, or rather, the World doesn't stop there. Because just as the Rational perspective went way beyond the Pre-Rational, there is also a Trans-Rational level that goes beyond the Rational. This Trans-Rational domain is also a level of knowledge, and it cannot be grasped by Rationality.
So before you dismiss the scriptures for their mythical content, you should be aware of their esoteric content, which you will not understand using Rationality. In other words, you have to know how to read it, and for that you need Trans-Rational (not Pre-Rational !) awakening.
It's what Ken Wilber has called the "Pre-Trans" error... and we see it typically in bookshops with so-called "Mind-Body" sections, which lump together crystals and tarot cards with Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama!
If you study visual Arts like painting, graphic design, etc. you'd appreciate that whether a little red box is on the left, the right, touching the edge of the frame or not... there is a difference, and artists have been using and developing these subtleties for aeons. I used to live in Zambia, where we did have television. The 'advert break' consisted of someone putting cards with some writing on them, one after the other in front of the camera...yes, you could see the guy's hand..! That is like where we are at today with the web. You call graphics 'cruft' as if visuals have no content. Well, do you say that everything you see through your eyeballs is cruft?? Vision is one pretty major sence, so don't dismiss it's power so frivolously.
Left hand keypad, right hand mouse, would work beautifully.
As an example, I worked as a CAD operator in an architecture firm. They used to do draughting on GDS, which splits the screen into a graphics window to show your drawing, and a command line to issue drawing instructions. It ran on Primos.They then 'updated' to MicroGDS (on Windows), and was tool/icon palette based. People thought, "it'll be easier for everyone to learn".
Well, after a while, people started asking the company that wrote MicroGDS, "er... any chance you could add a command line to it?" To which they replied, no way, because it's heavily dependent on the message passing stuff in Windows.
It is plain slow and dumb to have the mouse pointing at the graphical object that I want to edit, then have to move the mouse AWAY from it to a icon, click the icon and then move it back to what I want to apply the operation to.
Being able to type while pointing works nice, especially when there are 20 odd different types of curve to choose from (twenty curvy icons) and most of the time you need to type co-ordinates anyway. When I'm drawing, one of the bains of my drawing life is where to put all those flaiming tool palettes! :-)
Actually, yes, I'd forgotten that modern engineering projects, be they cars, bridges or whatever, are extraordinarily complex, and just as vulnerable to small 'glitches' that kill people and/or cause huge material damage.
Perhaps there is scope for the Law making assessments about what a reasonably preventable bug is... like Gerry Pournelle of Byte once said, re. a bug in Word, "A WP should never, ever ever crash because of something you typed into it." (he'd just got his file mangled, and tracked the bug to a section of his text).
Likewise, it's reasonable to expect a database to not lose data, or gradually corrupt data such that even back-ups are useless.
used by independent software companies to design their software applications to run on Windows.
This excludes individuals (they're not companies) who write code (writing is not design) to make windows apps run on Linux (Linux is not Windows). So goodbye Wine.:(
I think the law is more about what people's general opinions are about what is reasonable...(weighted a bit here and there by money, politics, how many babies died etc.)
And people know how to make reasonably safe child's toys, and hairdryers that don't fry you, but nobody but nobody can reasonably claim their software is 100% bug free. If they did, we'd all laugh.
We don't even know how to objectively count, definitevely, how many bugs something has... so what exactly are you going to legislate?
We don't sue gravity when we fall off our chair. I wish Certainty(TM) software existed... but until one of you clever ducks invent it...
Yes, he was really quite clear. Their own OS is dead. Their customers are moving to Linux. We want our customers to think Linux has problems, so they'll ask us to help. And meanwhile we'll invent proprietary tools. Tools that aren't OS's or web servers or... gee, we'll have to think of something...
If you "Reverse the Polarity" of his statements on the basis that he is lying, because any Business related statement is necessairily a lie , then what he's plain as day saying is:
Customers demand that Monterey have the ability to run Linux applications.
Our customers are dropping us for Linux, so let's pretend we're Linux and hope nobody notices the difference.
However, we are not ready to flip to the view that sees Linux as the be-all, end-all of operating system software.
We know Linux is the Alpha and the Omega, but if we pretend we don't know that we know then we don't have to find new jobs.
Products are more than the sum of their technologies - they involve a network of relationships with resellers, ISVs, and customers.
Our product is dead. We have no product. But we still have some customers.. for now... so let's call them our 'product'.
We are very concerned about fragmentation.
Remember that you Linux-panting customers... I'ts gonna be a minefield for you...
First, it's a marketplace for us to sell our Linux Professional Services
...so let us be the ones to guide you through that minefield.
HALLS OF JUSTICE PAINTED GREEN MONEY TAKING POWER WOLVES BESET YOU DOOR HEAR THEM STALKING SOON YOU'LL PLEASE THEIR APPETITE THEY DEVOUR HAMMER OF JUSTICE CRUSHES YOU OVERPOWER THE ULTIMATE IN VANITY EXPLOITING THEIR SUPREMACY I CAN'T BELIEVE THE THINGS YOU SAY I CAN'T BELIEVE I CAN'T BELIEVE THE THINGS YOU PAY NOTHING CAN SAVE YOU JUSTICE IS LOST JUSTICE IS RAPED
(c) Metallica 1988 (oh yeah, better add this or they'll come after me)
So, if you postulate a God (who would be the most powerful being in the Universe, rather by definition) and then say he's wrong, who is he wrong compared to? Surely such a being would be right by definition, particularly if they were omniscient.
You are in impossible territory. The inherent limitation of Language, which is Symbol Making, prevents any valid statements (using language) about the Absolute, God, etc.
A 'thing' can only Be, by implying what it is not. Up exists in relation to Down. Left - Right. Right - Wrong. Light - Dark etc. But as God is Absolute, God escapes all definitions, because any definition would imply that there is also something which God is not... which is impossible, because God is everything, like.
What makes you think it was Microsoft that made the PC 'easy'?
There is plenty of evidence that DOS based apps are no harder or slower to use than GUI based apps... and likewise having a GUI doesn't magically make people understand what's going on.
In the UK we had the excellent BBC "The Computer Programme", like, fifteen years ago, that taught the layman about CPUs, RAM, "floppies" etc.. I do not believe you when you claim current computer ubiquity is because of one company.
Also, who exactly is blaming microsoft for everything... ? Perhaps a lot of people just don't like MS because of their products... like I don't like the hardware store that sells me a used lawn mower that they stuck back in a box and pretended it was new. I just don't like that. And I get peeved if there arn't any other stores where I can choose to go instead. And which consumers are going to be harmed, and in what ways....? Your generalising to the point of uselessness. And no, I don't agree with all/. 'opinions', and I certainly don't see any value in your opinion. There is no meat to your argument. Just empty claims.
How do you know that the evolution of technology doesn't require more diversity than MS can provide at this juncture?
If you don't justify what you say, then I don't need to have a justification for opposing you.
We tend to think of a computer as a set of tools... but the tools are just part of a process. See a surgeon at work, in an operating theatre. He is totally focussed on the process.. his/her procedures, while the assistants hand him the tools as needed, and monitor the patient's condition, only alerting the surgeon to life threatening signs as needed.
I'm afraid that today's computer interfaces (GUI & CLI) are more akin to the surgeon taking a look at the patient and then filling out a departmental resources request for a scaplel...
For an excellent rendition of the problems, see Thomas K. Landauer "The Trouble with Computers" ISBN 0-262-12186-7.
"Computers are often used to do things that are irrelevant or detrimental to true productivity, such as purely share-shifting marketing or excess report generation. And when computer applications are intended to increase worker or process efficiency, they often don't help.... managers have been so interested in short term market share that they have not devoted needed resources to making computers do better things. But also it has proved so much harder to make computers do serious work that they have been diverted to easier but more frivolous employment.... Foremost [there is] a reliance on traditional design and engineering methods that are not sufficient for the development of tools fgor intellectual work."
The author advocates a deep analysis of 'user centred design".
After two years of intensive Freudian psychotheraputic analysis conducted on a group of Linux users, and a separate group of Windows users, the research team has just published their findings. "We see that the Windows Experience(TM) has helped users to achieve a significant and deep re-integration of their unconscious libido drive, allowing them to channel their creative energies 'like a laser beam'.. they are productive, happy and well integrated. The Linux group, however, was found to have had excacerbated symptoms of pre-phallic neuroses, oral compulsive behaviour and post modern dissasociation of oedipal complex shadow regression."
The researchers' solid evidence has been verified by many intependent groups..." we are lucky to have had ample funding for this work so that we can catch this danger to society in time.." remarked one of the researchers, who is now undergoing intensive therapy after exposure to Linux during the project. "It's really screwed up my life!"
Presumably each site is free to decide the data format of it's cookies... looking through my own cookies I see some contain plain text while others are non human readable... making passing false info to the enemy tricky...
BTW, can sites read all cookies... or are they somehow limited by the browser to the ones they themselves set?
I can't tell you about the iBook (have LinuxPPC on an 8500)... Yes, Open Firmware booting works ok, but sharing files is a little awkward. On the LinuxPPC side, it can mount r/w HFS partitions (but not HFS+), and on the MacOS side, you can use LinuxDisks by Michel Pollet to r/w ext2 partitions, but use this carefully!
Abso-friggen-lutely! Computers are complex! The Windows image of making PCs easy is a complete con.
The problem is that we are trying to hide the complexity ("you the user are too stupid to learn so we won't ever give you the chance to"), where instead we should be making the parts more clear.
The GUI could be made to be a MAP, designed from the point of viewof a traveller arriving in a big, foreign city.
The first thing a traveller does is buy a map. We should make the GUI like a map... you can see the major features at a glance, and find where to go. And it should be a fully detailed map -- maps can be very big and complex, and still make sence!
GUI has been a misleading term which has steered our thinking in one direction, ie. that little coloured buttons means 'graphical'. Think instead of MUI or "Mapping UI", which, like all maps, uses graphics to give you a good general picture with clear and easily identifyable detail.
Maps are drawn at different scales, showing continents, countries, cities, streets, and individual buildings... do we not find similar hierarchies in computing? For example, one difficulty with CLI is that boot scripts, device driver source code files, theme files and the Gimp are all just files on the disk. There is no sence of depth.. not idea that you, as a beginner, will not be interested in init scripts, and no idea what they are when you do want to know.
our entire concept of human-computer interfaces are flawed. We need something that will retain all the flexibility that geeks love, while making it natural to work with for those that aren't as technically proficient
Stated more universally, the problem is that each user will have a different 'point of view', or mental context, for each of his/her aims. Traditionally we have tried to address this with the notion of 'applications'. But the app as a context is too limiting (causing the feature set to bloat as it tries to cater for every conceivable context). What we need are many radically different environments designed to match the user's context.
For example, consider the same media rich wep page in different contexts:
'Watch-TV' context: the streaming video takes up most of the screen, foreign language subtitle text is enlarged and overlaid, and info about the cast is in a small inobtrusive box at the side.
'Program-VCR' context: now the streaming video is small, with large captions stating the name of the series and the episode number. There's a large list of future episodes and screening times, that can be drag-and-dropped to the VRC icon.
'E-mail a TV-listings magazine with comments about the show' context: shows page for typing e-mail, with list of magazines that have featured reviews of the series before. And instead of streaming video, there is a scene-by-scene breakdown of the episode with accompanying script.
And I stress that this should be possible from the same 'web page' or location... just by switching to different modes.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but that sort of thing is just too rare, if it does occur.
This does not require any kind of trancendental view of how the universe works.
Which universe are you talking about...? The physical "stuff" of matter and energy, or the universe of your conscious experience... which in addition to what your senses report to you, also includes the mental sphere of thoughts and concepts. If you want to talk about "the Universe", you cannot leave out the internal aspects of mind. A transcendental experience doesn't necessarily have to be just about saving on air fares. When J.C. said "Turn the other cheek", it wasn't because he thought it was a good idea. Rather, his own immediate experience was that He was Everywhere, and as such to strike another was to strike himself.
The Buddha also reported about what life is like when lived, experienced, beyond the concepts of time and space. Just as my everyday experience is that I am an individual separated from the world, the Buddha nature is separateless, timeless, and therefore Eternal.
And they left behind instructions on how to attain such experience, just as a scientist gives you instructions on how to operate a microscope in order to experience, and therefore confirm for yourself the reality of germs.
Quite, and the "proof of the pudding", as they say, is in the eating. When an advanced meditation master is hooked up to a machine that monitors his brain activity, and that monitor shows that he is deeply asleep and fully awake at the same time, then you have scientific evidence that there is something to it.
You are exactly half right, and half wrong.
Before we had the benefit of the scientific method, we believed all sorts of rubbish about hanging dead chickens outside people's doors. Whole cultures just swallowed these beliefs without checking that any of it was real. The scientific method hadn't been born, and all of that magical-mythical babble was just Pre-Rational. Today we are at the Rational level, or at least nearly :-) , where we look for objective ways of measuring and verifying our theories. Thus we put men on the moon, proving the objective reality of our knowledge.
But the story, or rather, the World doesn't stop there. Because just as the Rational perspective went way beyond the Pre-Rational, there is also a Trans-Rational level that goes beyond the Rational. This Trans-Rational domain is also a level of knowledge, and it cannot be grasped by Rationality.
So before you dismiss the scriptures for their mythical content, you should be aware of their esoteric content, which you will not understand using Rationality. In other words, you have to know how to read it, and for that you need Trans-Rational (not Pre-Rational !) awakening.
It's what Ken Wilber has called the "Pre-Trans" error... and we see it typically in bookshops with so-called "Mind-Body" sections, which lump together crystals and tarot cards with Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama!
Regarding the "facts", I suggest you check out The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion. The author mekes it very readable, and he's the world's foremost scholar on the subject.
Heh. What happens when they have a row...? Does he get insulted in front of the whole community ??
Goodevening, and here is the news. Today I caught my husband leering at the neighbour's teenage daughter...
"a licence to print money"
If you study visual Arts like painting, graphic design, etc. you'd appreciate that whether a little red box is on the left, the right, touching the edge of the frame or not... there is a difference, and artists have been using and developing these subtleties for aeons. I used to live in Zambia, where we did have television. The 'advert break' consisted of someone putting cards with some writing on them, one after the other in front of the camera...yes, you could see the guy's hand..! That is like where we are at today with the web. You call graphics 'cruft' as if visuals have no content. Well, do you say that everything you see through your eyeballs is cruft?? Vision is one pretty major sence, so don't dismiss it's power so frivolously.
As an example, I worked as a CAD operator in an architecture firm. They used to do draughting on GDS, which splits the screen into a graphics window to show your drawing, and a command line to issue drawing instructions. It ran on Primos.They then 'updated' to MicroGDS (on Windows), and was tool/icon palette based. People thought, "it'll be easier for everyone to learn".
Well, after a while, people started asking the company that wrote MicroGDS, "er... any chance you could add a command line to it?" To which they replied, no way, because it's heavily dependent on the message passing stuff in Windows.
It is plain slow and dumb to have the mouse pointing at the graphical object that I want to edit, then have to move the mouse AWAY from it to a icon, click the icon and then move it back to what I want to apply the operation to.
Being able to type while pointing works nice, especially when there are 20 odd different types of curve to choose from (twenty curvy icons) and most of the time you need to type co-ordinates anyway. When I'm drawing, one of the bains of my drawing life is where to put all those flaiming tool palettes! :-)
That's what I was afraid of.
Perhaps there is scope for the Law making assessments about what a reasonably preventable bug is... like Gerry Pournelle of Byte once said, re. a bug in Word, "A WP should never, ever ever crash because of something you typed into it." (he'd just got his file mangled, and tracked the bug to a section of his text).
Likewise, it's reasonable to expect a database to not lose data, or gradually corrupt data such that even back-ups are useless.
Yes, they should have to fix these things.
This excludes individuals (they're not companies) who write code (writing is not design) to make windows apps run on Linux (Linux is not Windows). So goodbye Wine. :(
Am I being silly... or what?
I think the law is more about what people's general opinions are about what is reasonable...(weighted a bit here and there by money, politics, how many babies died etc.)
And people know how to make reasonably safe child's toys, and hairdryers that don't fry you, but nobody but nobody can reasonably claim their software is 100% bug free. If they did, we'd all laugh.
We don't even know how to objectively count, definitevely, how many bugs something has... so what exactly are you going to legislate?
We don't sue gravity when we fall off our chair. I wish Certainty(TM) software existed... but until one of you clever ducks invent it...
Yes, he was really quite clear. Their own OS is dead. Their customers are moving to Linux. We want our customers to think Linux has problems, so they'll ask us to help. And meanwhile we'll invent proprietary tools. Tools that aren't OS's or web servers or... gee, we'll have to think of something...
Customers demand that Monterey have the ability to run Linux applications.
Our customers are dropping us for Linux, so let's pretend we're Linux and hope nobody notices the difference.
However, we are not ready to flip to the view that sees Linux as the be-all, end-all of operating system software.
We know Linux is the Alpha and the Omega, but if we pretend we don't know that we know then we don't have to find new jobs.
Products are more than the sum of their technologies - they involve a network of relationships with resellers, ISVs, and customers.
Our product is dead. We have no product. But we still have some customers.. for now... so let's call them our 'product'.
We are very concerned about fragmentation.
Remember that you Linux-panting customers... I'ts gonna be a minefield for you...
First, it's a marketplace for us to sell our Linux Professional Services
Cant say they didn't warn us....
HALLS OF JUSTICE PAINTED GREEN
MONEY TAKING
POWER WOLVES BESET YOU DOOR
HEAR THEM STALKING
SOON YOU'LL PLEASE THEIR APPETITE
THEY DEVOUR
HAMMER OF JUSTICE CRUSHES YOU
OVERPOWER
THE ULTIMATE IN VANITY
EXPLOITING THEIR SUPREMACY
I CAN'T BELIEVE THE THINGS YOU SAY
I CAN'T BELIEVE
I CAN'T BELIEVE THE THINGS YOU PAY
NOTHING CAN SAVE YOU
JUSTICE IS LOST
JUSTICE IS RAPED
(c) Metallica 1988 (oh yeah, better add this or they'll come after me)
You are in impossible territory. The inherent limitation of Language, which is Symbol Making, prevents any valid statements (using language) about the Absolute, God, etc.
A 'thing' can only Be, by implying what it is not. Up exists in relation to Down. Left - Right. Right - Wrong. Light - Dark etc. But as God is Absolute, God escapes all definitions, because any definition would imply that there is also something which God is not... which is impossible, because God is everything, like.
This is why we have Zen Koans.
There is plenty of evidence that DOS based apps are no harder or slower to use than GUI based apps... and likewise having a GUI doesn't magically make people understand what's going on.
In the UK we had the excellent BBC "The Computer Programme", like, fifteen years ago, that taught the layman about CPUs, RAM, "floppies" etc.. I do not believe you when you claim current computer ubiquity is because of one company.
Also, who exactly is blaming microsoft for everything... ? Perhaps a lot of people just don't like MS because of their products... like I don't like the hardware store that sells me a used lawn mower that they stuck back in a box and pretended it was new. I just don't like that. And I get peeved if there arn't any other stores where I can choose to go instead. And which consumers are going to be harmed, and in what ways....? Your generalising to the point of uselessness. And no, I don't agree with all /. 'opinions', and I certainly don't see any value in your opinion. There is no meat to your argument. Just empty claims.
How do you know that the evolution of technology doesn't require more diversity than MS can provide at this juncture?
If you don't justify what you say, then I don't need to have a justification for opposing you.
We tend to think of a computer as a set of tools... but the tools are just part of a process.
See a surgeon at work, in an operating theatre. He is totally focussed on the process.. his/her procedures, while the assistants hand him the tools as needed, and monitor the patient's condition, only alerting the surgeon to life threatening signs as needed.
I'm afraid that today's computer interfaces (GUI & CLI) are more akin to the surgeon taking a look at the patient and then filling out a departmental resources request for a scaplel...
For an excellent rendition of the problems, see Thomas K. Landauer "The Trouble with Computers" ISBN 0-262-12186-7.
... managers have been so interested in short term market share that they have not devoted needed resources to making computers do better things. ... Foremost [there is] a reliance on traditional design and engineering methods that are not sufficient for the development of tools fgor intellectual work."
"Computers are often used to do things that are irrelevant or detrimental to true productivity, such as purely share-shifting marketing or excess report generation.
And when computer applications are intended to increase worker or process efficiency, they often don't help.
But also it has proved so much harder to make computers do serious work that they have been diverted to easier but more frivolous employment.
The author advocates a deep analysis of 'user centred design".
After two years of intensive Freudian psychotheraputic analysis conducted on a group of Linux users, and a separate group of Windows users, the research team has just published their findings. "We see that the Windows Experience(TM) has helped users to achieve a significant and deep re-integration of their unconscious libido drive, allowing them to channel their creative energies 'like a laser beam'.. they are productive, happy and well integrated. The Linux group, however, was found to have had excacerbated symptoms of pre-phallic neuroses, oral compulsive behaviour and post modern dissasociation of oedipal complex shadow regression."
The researchers' solid evidence has been verified by many intependent groups..." we are lucky to have had ample funding for this work so that we can catch this danger to society in time.." remarked one of the researchers, who is now undergoing intensive therapy after exposure to Linux during the project. "It's really screwed up my life!"
Presumably each site is free to decide the data format of it's cookies... looking through my own cookies I see some contain plain text while others are non human readable... making passing false info to the enemy tricky...
BTW, can sites read all cookies... or are they somehow limited by the browser to the ones they themselves set?
I'd never thought of that. I'll try it :)
BTW, have you ever, ever ever seen iCab smile?
I can't tell you about the iBook (have LinuxPPC on an 8500)...
Yes, Open Firmware booting works ok, but sharing files is a little awkward. On the LinuxPPC side, it can mount r/w HFS partitions (but not HFS+), and on the MacOS side, you can use LinuxDisks by Michel Pollet to r/w ext2 partitions, but use this carefully!
The problem is that we are trying to hide the complexity ("you the user are too stupid to learn so we won't ever give you the chance to"), where instead we should be making the parts more clear.
The GUI could be made to be a MAP, designed from the point of viewof a traveller arriving in a big, foreign city.
The first thing a traveller does is buy a map. We should make the GUI like a map... you can see the major features at a glance, and find where to go. And it should be a fully detailed map -- maps can be very big and complex, and still make sence!
GUI has been a misleading term which has steered our thinking in one direction, ie. that little coloured buttons means 'graphical'. Think instead of MUI or "Mapping UI", which, like all maps, uses graphics to give you a good general picture with clear and easily identifyable detail.
Maps are drawn at different scales, showing continents, countries, cities, streets, and individual buildings... do we not find similar hierarchies in computing? For example, one difficulty with CLI is that boot scripts, device driver source code files, theme files and the Gimp are all just files on the disk. There is no sence of depth.. not idea that you, as a beginner, will not be interested in init scripts, and no idea what they are when you do want to know.
Stated more universally, the problem is that each user will have a different 'point of view', or mental context, for each of his/her aims. Traditionally we have tried to address this with the notion of 'applications'. But the app as a context is too limiting (causing the feature set to bloat as it tries to cater for every conceivable context). What we need are many radically different environments designed to match the user's context.
For example, consider the same media rich wep page in different contexts:
'Watch-TV' context: the streaming video takes up most of the screen, foreign language subtitle text is enlarged and overlaid, and info about the cast is in a small inobtrusive box at the side.
'Program-VCR' context: now the streaming video is small, with large captions stating the name of the series and the episode number. There's a large list of future episodes and screening times, that can be drag-and-dropped to the VRC icon.
'E-mail a TV-listings magazine with comments about the show' context: shows page for typing e-mail, with list of magazines that have featured reviews of the series before. And instead of streaming video, there is a scene-by-scene breakdown of the episode with accompanying script.
And I stress that this should be possible from the same 'web page' or location... just by switching to different modes.