Re:Perl isn't unreadable - some Perl programs are
on
Exegesis 4 Out
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· Score: 2
I suppose Perl gives you enough rope to hang yourself with, whereas Python's rope is full of saftey features that make it very difficult to hang yourself, but it just ends up like childproof lighters and aspirin bottles - rather annoying and only marginally safer.
I think that's essentially Larry's point about Perl and programming in general. Forcing programmers to do things the right way seems like a really good idea, but suffers from two problems. One is that many, if not most, problems with programming aren't solvable that way. Nothing can force a programmer to use intelligent variable names, use a proper level of abstraction, write good comments, or do any of the semantic level parts of good programming. That means that the enforced good style can't solve a lot of the bad programming out there.
The other, and deeper, problem is that forcing programmers to do things the right way assumes that the language designer knows better than the programmer does. This is true far more often than most programmers would probably like to admit, but sometimes the programmer really does know what he's doing. In that case, giving him enough rope to hang himself also gives him enough freedom to come up with better and more elegant solutions.
Re:Perl 6 will be a painful, but necessary move ah
on
Exegesis 4 Out
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· Score: 2, Insightful
perl6 is a total reset, and most people who claim to be perl experts are going to have to go back and relearn an almost entirely new language.
People keep saying this, but it just isn't true. There will be a few obvious things that change (like using @foo[0] instead of $foo[0]) and a number of less obvious ones, but a lot of the language will be carried over unchanged. It's just that the discussions by Larry and Damian are focusing on the parts that are undergoing the biggest changes.
The only reason these types of games get associated is because the public image of the players has consistently been that of the outsider/geeky/skinny runt.
Don't underestimate the religious aspect of the anti-RPG folks. The whole "D&D causes suicide" thing was part of a larger attempt to discredit the game. When you look at the motivations behind the people involved, it's clear that they were mostly religious. After all D&D involves worship of Gods other than Christ, witchcraft, and the like. That's the real motivation, and the well publicized suicides of a couple of RPG players were just a convenient event to seize on for people who already disliked the games.
This is less expensive than you realize, and could probably be done today. I have a $20 alarm clock that sets itself to WWV, and I'm sure that the auto-set feature is only a small part of the total cost. I see no reason why it couldn't be included in just about any appliance.
The real news here (which you would have gotten by reading the whole article) is that the events Gateway is describing happened after DOJ and Microsoft proposed their settlement. IOW, the licensing practices under discussion appear to be allowed by the proposed settlement. That's big news because it shows that the settlement doesn't do squat to restrict Microsoft's anti-competitive practices. That may or may not be news to you, but it's very, very important that the judge finds out about it before deciding whether to accept the DOJ/Microsoft settlement!
Something along the lines of MLB's anti-trust exemption.
As a serious baseball fan, I feel compelled to correct the mistake in this statement. Baseball's antitrust exemption was created by judicial, not legislative, fiat. In Federal Baseball, MLB's lawyers argued that baseball was not interstate commerce, per se, because all of the commercial activity took place locally. Their argument used a precident that travelling vaudville actors were not engaged in interstate commerce even if their tours traveled across state lines. Simply carrying the tools of their trade across state lines to perform essentially local exhibitions was not viewed as being sufficient to constitute interstate commerce. Since it wasn't interestate commerce, the federal government didn't have the power to regulate it, including applying antitrust law. The Supreme Court accepted the argument and ruled in favor of MLB.
The truly odd thing about the ruling is what happened later in the process. When the ruling was later challenged, the Supreme Court upheld it on the principle of not changing old rulings even though they agreed that the old ruling made no sense. In essence they said that the ruling was stupid, they were going to let it stand anyway, but Congress was free to write new legislation to include baseball in federal antitrust law. The exemption was partially removed recently, but it's hardly Congress's fault for writing the law badly.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I've seen a lot of projects that could use a good graphic designer. There's always a need for good icons, for instance; ISTR that GNOME at least has asked for people who can help in that area. It may also be a case where you have to take on a project without asking and present some of your work before people will take you seriously. Part of the problem is that there are always more people who are interested in helping than there are people who actually can and do help. Presenting something tangible might serve as proof that you're in the latter category, rather than the former.
The DOJ is basically giving up because they're tired of trying to fight Microsoft. What sort of precedent does this set for the Standard Oils of the new millenium?
I think that you're reading the causes of this wrong. The DOJ is basically giving up because there's been a change in administration. The Clinton administration, while not exactly tough on monopolies, apparently felt that the case was worth pursuing. The Bush administration, OTOH, seems to view antitrust law as being an obstacle to business and would probably drop the case completely if it wouldn't cause too much political fallout. It was widely argued before the 2000 election that Bush would almost certainly water down the Microsoft case if he won. Now he has won and the case has been greatly watered down. If this is a big surprise to you, you need to pay more attention.
Re:You are not anal enough either. (IAAL)
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Equally imnpossible is a definitive response to the question "what is the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it?"
I think that this is a distinction that is much easier to make than the previous one you mentioned. All you have to do is to go to the computers where the people are actually writing the code and see what form of the program they are modifying. If they're working on the code in a format different from what is distributed, it's an easy case that the form that's being distributed isn't the preferred form for making modifications. That's especially true if you can find:
Expert witnesses who will testify that the code as shipped is essentially impossible to work on. From the description in this case it would be fairly easy to find these.
A company whistleblower who's willing to testify that the company deliberately obfuscated the code to make it more difficult to work on. Again, it sounds as though one should be available in this case.
You're correct that this is not an open and shut thing, but it's not an intractable one, either. Most people have fairly sensitive BS detectors, and they're going to be able to tell that code that's been deliberately messed with to make modification more difficult is not in the preferred format for making modifications. All you have to do is show that a deliberate attempt has been made to obfuscate with the code and you're set.
What MS includes, or does not includes in its OS should not be determined by a bunch of lawyers. Only their predatory BUSINESS practices should be curtailed by any anti-trust action.
I'll be happy to agree with that- as long as the decisions about what to include in Windows are made only by Engineers. But as soon as business people start making decisions about what's part of Windows and what isn't then the contents of Windows is part of their predatory business practices. Since business people most certainly have been involved in deciding what is and isn't part of Windows, decisions about that content are clearly a valid part of the anti-trust action.
Of course there were benefits, too. I distinctly remember one test (for Ch125) where I was so burned out at the end of finals week that I forgot to turn it in. I noticed just after the end of the work day on Friday and wound up fretting all weekend about what would happen. When turned it in first thing on Monday, the prof (Vince McCoy) had no problems with it at all. If I said I had done it on time and just spaced out turning it in, that was what had happened. He actually seemed mildly offended that I expected him to question my honesty.
They argued that they shouldn't have to, and won't, castrate their product and remove components and have it so you can plug in this part to do this and that part to do that: it's a nightmare, and probably very unstable, and definitely inconsistent. Not what they want Windows to be.
So what if Microsoft doesn't want Windows to work that way? The whole point of the antitrust case is that Microsoft was doing things with the design of Windows that were illegal because the design illegitimately continued their monopoly. Losing the case means that Microsoft no longer has sole discression about what Windows can and should be; it must meet legal scrutiny to ensure that it doesn't continue to illegally maintain Microsoft's monopoly. That inherently means that some things that Microsoft would love to do- even some that may have valid engineering and/or marketing reasons behind them- may be disallowed because they are anticompetitive.
Bottom line - MS is not always the evil empire. Sometimes they're the ones getting fucked.
This would be a much more convincing argument if Microsoft hadn't already been found guilty of illegal behavior. That's really the point here; MS did something illegal and they are supposed to be punished for it. If it's really impossible for MS to separate IE from the rest of the OS tough shit. They never should have tied it into the OS that tightly in the first place. They signed a consent decree that said that they wouldn't. If having broken that agreement puts them in a tight spot it's their own damn fault.
Remember that XP was developed and released after Microsoft had already lost the anti-trust lawsuit. If they were so arrogant that they kept digging themselves deeper and deeper into the very behavior that lost the suit after they had already lost it, they deserve all of the pain that complying with a reasonable settlement will cause. It's not as though they shouldn't have seen this coming.
But the students at CalTech are (honestly undeniably) of a higher caliber than at most schools. They're there because they have a track record of over-achieving, and the overwhelming majority want to learn.
But you have to look at the flip side of that, too. As you say, the vast majority of incoming Caltech (please note capitalization) students have gotten used to being smarter than just about anyone they've ever met and getting top grades without much effort. The idea that they may have to work their asses off just to keep up academically is a huge culture shock. You might reasonably expect that to make them more, rather than less, likely to cheat when the going gets tough. I'm under the impression that is the case at other schools with similarly difficult course work and no honor system.
I definitely think that challenging them to stay honest is the only way of keeping people as smart, competitive, and overworked as Caltech students from cheating. I know that there were times when I was tempted to cheat, knew I could get away with it, and only resisted because of that challenge. I've talked to other alumni who feel the same way. I can't speak for those others, but I definitely feel that having learned to stay honest through that kind of temptation has made me a better person. It's an accomplishment I can remain proud of as long as I live.
There is another alternative: having a working honor system. One of the underlying flaws of systems like this that try to impose ever stricter rules against cheating is that students view them as a challenge. The tougher you make the anti-cheating system, the cleverer students will be in trying to break it. The only real solution is to turn the sytem on its head. Instead of challenging the students to ever cleverer methods of cheating, challenge them to higher standards of honesty.
My alma mater had a very simple honor system, and it worked very well. Anonymous surveys showed that the level of cheating was substantially lower than at schools that tried the other way. This was despite the fact that almost all of the exams were take home. When the professor told students that there was a 3 hour time limit and it was closed book, people listened and obeyed even though there was nobody looking over their shoulder. It was great because we got the freedom to take our tests where and when we wanted to. Of course you could be expelled for cheating (that wasn't a guarantee, but it was a possibility) but very few people were.
Personally, I'd rather have a translation that's as accurate as possible, rather than one that matches the mouth movements as closely as possible. I think that Gaiman did a pretty good job with Mononoke, but there were definitely some places where I felt that the subtitled version got some nuances better than the dub did. The best example I can think of was when Ashitaka's arm tried to draw his sword on Eboshi:
Eboshi: Does your right arm wish to kill me?
Ashitaka (dub): If it would lift the curse, I'd let it tear you apart.
Ashitaka (sub): If it would lift the curse, the left would too.
That's not a huge difference in meaning, but it's important enough that I'd prefer to have the second over the first. Of course I generally prefer to watch movies subtitled rather than dubbed because the original voices are almost always better, but the more literal translations are an important point too.
Well, I'm actually registered to vote in California, so I can let him know how I feel about spamming me in a way that might have some impact. I have a feeling that some other people around here might feel the same way; if your primary name recognition is as that spamming bastard it's not likely to win many votes. (Though this raises the spectre of forging spam from an opponent in an attempt to smear him.) Of course I wasn't planning on voting for him anyway, but it's one more reason not to like him.
Right now Google makes most of their money by selling their search services to other web sites. The main search site is really mostly advertizing for their search services. You're supposed to use it and say, "Hey, if it works that well for the whole web, it will work well for my site too." I also get the impression that a lot of their expenses are related to the cost of constantly spidering and re-spidering the whole net, which they have to do anyway for their paid services. That means that the visible search is probably cheaper in real terms than you realize.
My personal favorite example of good web design is Baseballreference.com. The layout is very clean so that the information is easy to digest and the pages are reasonably sized. It has a good search engine so that the information that people want the most doesn't require a lot of clicks to find. Just about everything that can be is made of pre-processed static pages rather than dynamic ones, which (together with the lightweight layout) makes it very fast. Most importantly, it really makes use of html. The information is densely hyperlinked so every page makes it easy to get to related information with one click. It's an incredibly useful site that's become a standard internet reference, and a lot of that is because it's well designed to make it easy to use.
That's still no solution. What if I want the program to be run by users who don't have root access? The point is that, as root, I should be able to say that program 1 has the right to set its own priority, program 2 has the right to bind to ports below 1024, and program 3 has the right to read and write/etc/shadow, but that none of those programs has all three of those rights. There are some workarounds currently available, but there is not a simple system to give fine grained control over privileges.
IOW, it's insecure by design and only a heroic effort to secure each and every little bit perfect can make the system work. Each program that must have increased privileges constitutes a single point of failure for the security of the whole system. That is not a sound foundation for a secure system. Any design which fails completely unless each individual part functions perfectly is fundamentally flawed.
Auditing code so it is perfect and without bugs does work for security, it just has to take place in the libraries rather than the applications.
But it doesn't really work. It's better than nothing, but if there's one thing that years of security bugs should have taught us, it's that there are always new classes of undiscovered bugs out there. You can eliminate every known bug, but that doesn't guarantee that there are no clever exploits that you haven't figured out but that somebody else has (or will) find out how to use. What you really need is a level of security that's orthogonal to code level security. That can be something like capabilities, mandatory access controls, or even just finer grained control over what the code is allowed to do than Unix's all or nothing model.
Right now, if I want my computer's CD burning software to be able to set itself at high priority to avoid buffer underruns, I have to run it SUID root. That's insane; it means that a single programming error in what reasonably should be a user accessable program could give somebody complete access to the system. That isn't security, it's a nightmare. We need a system where I can assign that program only the right to reset its own priority, and not complete run of the system. Yes, it's better if the code is audited and potential bugs are eliminated, but a system in which a single bug can completely compromise the whole system is badly designed.
Or you can go to your local suncoast and pick up shows like Neon Genesis Evangelion...
I hate to say it, but Evangelion is not a great example to use when discussing the great frame rate used in anime. While the action sequences are truly outstanding, it sure looks as though they paid for it by making the rest of the show as cheaply as they could get away with. They certainly do a lot of stills and pans; just think of Asuka and Rei sitting in an elevator not talking or moving for 60 seconds.
we have all kinds of great animation in the US, with shows like Family Guy and Futurama.
But that doesn't really constitute "all kinds great animation". Essentially all American animation is either comedy or aimed only at kids. There's no American equivalent of shows like Cowboy Bebop, much less movies like Perfect Blue or Ghost in the Shell. The technical quality is completely different, too. Futurama is the only show I've seen that comes anywhere close to the best TV anime in production values, and that's still not particularly close. Top notch anime has animation, acting, music, and plot that's so much better than run of the mill American animation that it's not even funny. Good American cinematic animation can approach the technical quality of anime, but I have yet to see any that is nearly as well written.
Running Linux on a mainframe doesn't change the fact that you must still maintain an expensive, proprietary system...
As opposed to running on a Sun system, which lets you run on a... oh wait a minute. Those alternatives from Sun are mostly expensive proprietary systems, too, aren't they?
You still get the man years of free testing, free software, interoperability, and speed.
You also get a system that lets you migrate from your existing Linux systems to the IBM system without having to learn the quirks of a different Unix variant. If you use a supported distribution, you don't even have to learn a new distro. And if/when you decide that IBM isn't where you want to be, you can switch to many other hardware platforms with nothing more than a recompile. Sounds like you still get the key freedoms that Free Software is supposed to provide.
Re:Gnome or KDE?
on
GNOME 2.0 Beta
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Reducing the barrier to entry is a big potential advantage, and I think that you're wrong to underestimate it. Every user interface difference between what people are using now and what you want them to switch to is one possible reason for them not to switch. Integrate over every difference, and you wind up with a big barrier to changing. Of course every beneficial difference is one reason for people to make the switch, so you shouldn't be afraid of making improvements. But there are a lot of cosmetic things that probably should be kept the same just because people expect them to be that way.
The net result is that the "start button" is going to be in the lower left corner, new icons are going to be placed starting in the upper left, etc. There's no fundamental reason that those things have to be in those places, but people are used to them being there from using Windows, so they will automatically look for them there. If that makes it easier for a Windows user to switch desktops, it's more than enough justification for making that the default behavior. And yes, I do realize that the menu bar in Windows can be moved around; the fact that it's still on the bottom with the start menu at the far left on essentially every Windows desktop is simply proof of how conservative most users are.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's essentially Larry's point about Perl and programming in general. Forcing programmers to do things the right way seems like a really good idea, but suffers from two problems. One is that many, if not most, problems with programming aren't solvable that way. Nothing can force a programmer to use intelligent variable names, use a proper level of abstraction, write good comments, or do any of the semantic level parts of good programming. That means that the enforced good style can't solve a lot of the bad programming out there.
The other, and deeper, problem is that forcing programmers to do things the right way assumes that the language designer knows better than the programmer does. This is true far more often than most programmers would probably like to admit, but sometimes the programmer really does know what he's doing. In that case, giving him enough rope to hang himself also gives him enough freedom to come up with better and more elegant solutions.
People keep saying this, but it just isn't true. There will be a few obvious things that change (like using @foo[0] instead of $foo[0]) and a number of less obvious ones, but a lot of the language will be carried over unchanged. It's just that the discussions by Larry and Damian are focusing on the parts that are undergoing the biggest changes.
Don't underestimate the religious aspect of the anti-RPG folks. The whole "D&D causes suicide" thing was part of a larger attempt to discredit the game. When you look at the motivations behind the people involved, it's clear that they were mostly religious. After all D&D involves worship of Gods other than Christ, witchcraft, and the like. That's the real motivation, and the well publicized suicides of a couple of RPG players were just a convenient event to seize on for people who already disliked the games.
This is less expensive than you realize, and could probably be done today. I have a $20 alarm clock that sets itself to WWV, and I'm sure that the auto-set feature is only a small part of the total cost. I see no reason why it couldn't be included in just about any appliance.
The real news here (which you would have gotten by reading the whole article) is that the events Gateway is describing happened after DOJ and Microsoft proposed their settlement. IOW, the licensing practices under discussion appear to be allowed by the proposed settlement. That's big news because it shows that the settlement doesn't do squat to restrict Microsoft's anti-competitive practices. That may or may not be news to you, but it's very, very important that the judge finds out about it before deciding whether to accept the DOJ/Microsoft settlement!
As a serious baseball fan, I feel compelled to correct the mistake in this statement. Baseball's antitrust exemption was created by judicial, not legislative, fiat. In Federal Baseball, MLB's lawyers argued that baseball was not interstate commerce, per se, because all of the commercial activity took place locally. Their argument used a precident that travelling vaudville actors were not engaged in interstate commerce even if their tours traveled across state lines. Simply carrying the tools of their trade across state lines to perform essentially local exhibitions was not viewed as being sufficient to constitute interstate commerce. Since it wasn't interestate commerce, the federal government didn't have the power to regulate it, including applying antitrust law. The Supreme Court accepted the argument and ruled in favor of MLB.
The truly odd thing about the ruling is what happened later in the process. When the ruling was later challenged, the Supreme Court upheld it on the principle of not changing old rulings even though they agreed that the old ruling made no sense. In essence they said that the ruling was stupid, they were going to let it stand anyway, but Congress was free to write new legislation to include baseball in federal antitrust law. The exemption was partially removed recently, but it's hardly Congress's fault for writing the law badly.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I've seen a lot of projects that could use a good graphic designer. There's always a need for good icons, for instance; ISTR that GNOME at least has asked for people who can help in that area. It may also be a case where you have to take on a project without asking and present some of your work before people will take you seriously. Part of the problem is that there are always more people who are interested in helping than there are people who actually can and do help. Presenting something tangible might serve as proof that you're in the latter category, rather than the former.
I think that you're reading the causes of this wrong. The DOJ is basically giving up because there's been a change in administration. The Clinton administration, while not exactly tough on monopolies, apparently felt that the case was worth pursuing. The Bush administration, OTOH, seems to view antitrust law as being an obstacle to business and would probably drop the case completely if it wouldn't cause too much political fallout. It was widely argued before the 2000 election that Bush would almost certainly water down the Microsoft case if he won. Now he has won and the case has been greatly watered down. If this is a big surprise to you, you need to pay more attention.
I think that this is a distinction that is much easier to make than the previous one you mentioned. All you have to do is to go to the computers where the people are actually writing the code and see what form of the program they are modifying. If they're working on the code in a format different from what is distributed, it's an easy case that the form that's being distributed isn't the preferred form for making modifications. That's especially true if you can find:
You're correct that this is not an open and shut thing, but it's not an intractable one, either. Most people have fairly sensitive BS detectors, and they're going to be able to tell that code that's been deliberately messed with to make modification more difficult is not in the preferred format for making modifications. All you have to do is show that a deliberate attempt has been made to obfuscate with the code and you're set.
I'll be happy to agree with that- as long as the decisions about what to include in Windows are made only by Engineers. But as soon as business people start making decisions about what's part of Windows and what isn't then the contents of Windows is part of their predatory business practices. Since business people most certainly have been involved in deciding what is and isn't part of Windows, decisions about that content are clearly a valid part of the anti-trust action.
Of course there were benefits, too. I distinctly remember one test (for Ch125) where I was so burned out at the end of finals week that I forgot to turn it in. I noticed just after the end of the work day on Friday and wound up fretting all weekend about what would happen. When turned it in first thing on Monday, the prof (Vince McCoy) had no problems with it at all. If I said I had done it on time and just spaced out turning it in, that was what had happened. He actually seemed mildly offended that I expected him to question my honesty.
So what if Microsoft doesn't want Windows to work that way? The whole point of the antitrust case is that Microsoft was doing things with the design of Windows that were illegal because the design illegitimately continued their monopoly. Losing the case means that Microsoft no longer has sole discression about what Windows can and should be; it must meet legal scrutiny to ensure that it doesn't continue to illegally maintain Microsoft's monopoly. That inherently means that some things that Microsoft would love to do- even some that may have valid engineering and/or marketing reasons behind them- may be disallowed because they are anticompetitive.
This would be a much more convincing argument if Microsoft hadn't already been found guilty of illegal behavior. That's really the point here; MS did something illegal and they are supposed to be punished for it. If it's really impossible for MS to separate IE from the rest of the OS tough shit. They never should have tied it into the OS that tightly in the first place. They signed a consent decree that said that they wouldn't. If having broken that agreement puts them in a tight spot it's their own damn fault.
Remember that XP was developed and released after Microsoft had already lost the anti-trust lawsuit. If they were so arrogant that they kept digging themselves deeper and deeper into the very behavior that lost the suit after they had already lost it, they deserve all of the pain that complying with a reasonable settlement will cause. It's not as though they shouldn't have seen this coming.
But you have to look at the flip side of that, too. As you say, the vast majority of incoming Caltech (please note capitalization) students have gotten used to being smarter than just about anyone they've ever met and getting top grades without much effort. The idea that they may have to work their asses off just to keep up academically is a huge culture shock. You might reasonably expect that to make them more, rather than less, likely to cheat when the going gets tough. I'm under the impression that is the case at other schools with similarly difficult course work and no honor system.
I definitely think that challenging them to stay honest is the only way of keeping people as smart, competitive, and overworked as Caltech students from cheating. I know that there were times when I was tempted to cheat, knew I could get away with it, and only resisted because of that challenge. I've talked to other alumni who feel the same way. I can't speak for those others, but I definitely feel that having learned to stay honest through that kind of temptation has made me a better person. It's an accomplishment I can remain proud of as long as I live.
There is another alternative: having a working honor system. One of the underlying flaws of systems like this that try to impose ever stricter rules against cheating is that students view them as a challenge. The tougher you make the anti-cheating system, the cleverer students will be in trying to break it. The only real solution is to turn the sytem on its head. Instead of challenging the students to ever cleverer methods of cheating, challenge them to higher standards of honesty.
My alma mater had a very simple honor system, and it worked very well. Anonymous surveys showed that the level of cheating was substantially lower than at schools that tried the other way. This was despite the fact that almost all of the exams were take home. When the professor told students that there was a 3 hour time limit and it was closed book, people listened and obeyed even though there was nobody looking over their shoulder. It was great because we got the freedom to take our tests where and when we wanted to. Of course you could be expelled for cheating (that wasn't a guarantee, but it was a possibility) but very few people were.
Personally, I'd rather have a translation that's as accurate as possible, rather than one that matches the mouth movements as closely as possible. I think that Gaiman did a pretty good job with Mononoke, but there were definitely some places where I felt that the subtitled version got some nuances better than the dub did. The best example I can think of was when Ashitaka's arm tried to draw his sword on Eboshi:
That's not a huge difference in meaning, but it's important enough that I'd prefer to have the second over the first. Of course I generally prefer to watch movies subtitled rather than dubbed because the original voices are almost always better, but the more literal translations are an important point too.
Well, I'm actually registered to vote in California, so I can let him know how I feel about spamming me in a way that might have some impact. I have a feeling that some other people around here might feel the same way; if your primary name recognition is as that spamming bastard it's not likely to win many votes. (Though this raises the spectre of forging spam from an opponent in an attempt to smear him.) Of course I wasn't planning on voting for him anyway, but it's one more reason not to like him.
Right now Google makes most of their money by selling their search services to other web sites. The main search site is really mostly advertizing for their search services. You're supposed to use it and say, "Hey, if it works that well for the whole web, it will work well for my site too." I also get the impression that a lot of their expenses are related to the cost of constantly spidering and re-spidering the whole net, which they have to do anyway for their paid services. That means that the visible search is probably cheaper in real terms than you realize.
My personal favorite example of good web design is Baseballreference.com. The layout is very clean so that the information is easy to digest and the pages are reasonably sized. It has a good search engine so that the information that people want the most doesn't require a lot of clicks to find. Just about everything that can be is made of pre-processed static pages rather than dynamic ones, which (together with the lightweight layout) makes it very fast. Most importantly, it really makes use of html. The information is densely hyperlinked so every page makes it easy to get to related information with one click. It's an incredibly useful site that's become a standard internet reference, and a lot of that is because it's well designed to make it easy to use.
That's still no solution. What if I want the program to be run by users who don't have root access? The point is that, as root, I should be able to say that program 1 has the right to set its own priority, program 2 has the right to bind to ports below 1024, and program 3 has the right to read and write /etc/shadow, but that none of those programs has all three of those rights. There are some workarounds currently available, but there is not a simple system to give fine grained control over privileges.
IOW, it's insecure by design and only a heroic effort to secure each and every little bit perfect can make the system work. Each program that must have increased privileges constitutes a single point of failure for the security of the whole system. That is not a sound foundation for a secure system. Any design which fails completely unless each individual part functions perfectly is fundamentally flawed.
But it doesn't really work. It's better than nothing, but if there's one thing that years of security bugs should have taught us, it's that there are always new classes of undiscovered bugs out there. You can eliminate every known bug, but that doesn't guarantee that there are no clever exploits that you haven't figured out but that somebody else has (or will) find out how to use. What you really need is a level of security that's orthogonal to code level security. That can be something like capabilities, mandatory access controls, or even just finer grained control over what the code is allowed to do than Unix's all or nothing model.
Right now, if I want my computer's CD burning software to be able to set itself at high priority to avoid buffer underruns, I have to run it SUID root. That's insane; it means that a single programming error in what reasonably should be a user accessable program could give somebody complete access to the system. That isn't security, it's a nightmare. We need a system where I can assign that program only the right to reset its own priority, and not complete run of the system. Yes, it's better if the code is audited and potential bugs are eliminated, but a system in which a single bug can completely compromise the whole system is badly designed.
I hate to say it, but Evangelion is not a great example to use when discussing the great frame rate used in anime. While the action sequences are truly outstanding, it sure looks as though they paid for it by making the rest of the show as cheaply as they could get away with. They certainly do a lot of stills and pans; just think of Asuka and Rei sitting in an elevator not talking or moving for 60 seconds.
But that doesn't really constitute "all kinds great animation". Essentially all American animation is either comedy or aimed only at kids. There's no American equivalent of shows like Cowboy Bebop, much less movies like Perfect Blue or Ghost in the Shell. The technical quality is completely different, too. Futurama is the only show I've seen that comes anywhere close to the best TV anime in production values, and that's still not particularly close. Top notch anime has animation, acting, music, and plot that's so much better than run of the mill American animation that it's not even funny. Good American cinematic animation can approach the technical quality of anime, but I have yet to see any that is nearly as well written.
As opposed to running on a Sun system, which lets you run on a ... oh wait a minute. Those alternatives from Sun are mostly expensive proprietary systems, too, aren't they?
You also get a system that lets you migrate from your existing Linux systems to the IBM system without having to learn the quirks of a different Unix variant. If you use a supported distribution, you don't even have to learn a new distro. And if/when you decide that IBM isn't where you want to be, you can switch to many other hardware platforms with nothing more than a recompile. Sounds like you still get the key freedoms that Free Software is supposed to provide.
Reducing the barrier to entry is a big potential advantage, and I think that you're wrong to underestimate it. Every user interface difference between what people are using now and what you want them to switch to is one possible reason for them not to switch. Integrate over every difference, and you wind up with a big barrier to changing. Of course every beneficial difference is one reason for people to make the switch, so you shouldn't be afraid of making improvements. But there are a lot of cosmetic things that probably should be kept the same just because people expect them to be that way.
The net result is that the "start button" is going to be in the lower left corner, new icons are going to be placed starting in the upper left, etc. There's no fundamental reason that those things have to be in those places, but people are used to them being there from using Windows, so they will automatically look for them there. If that makes it easier for a Windows user to switch desktops, it's more than enough justification for making that the default behavior. And yes, I do realize that the menu bar in Windows can be moved around; the fact that it's still on the bottom with the start menu at the far left on essentially every Windows desktop is simply proof of how conservative most users are.