Squeak uses a user interface and toolkit designed in the 90's that has little to do with the original Smalltalk UI or toolkit.
OK, they added optional scrollbars and titles but they still have the context menu on the middle button, and the right button (which everyone else in the world uses for contextual menus) pop up a bunch of floating icons around the window. This has clearly taken root in Croquet, except that the floating icons are always there.
But you can't use Squeak "just like your Mac or PC (or X11 or NeWS or just about anything else)" without changing the context menu onto the right button.
And whatever "issues" you may have with the Squeak or Croquet interfaces, both of them are far better than the in-game UI disasters that commercial games usually have.
I'll take your word for that, I quit playing video games on a regular basis... oh, probably about the time my kids started school. But based on my previous experience that's an awful low bar to beat.
They already have NASA Colab and the rest of their islands in SL.
Croquet? It's got a user interface from 1976. Sure Smalltalk was one of the first window based user interfaces (not "the first", if nothing else Xerox had Interlisp-D and their office automation software as well as Smalltalk) and Squeak and Croquet still use the same oddball design.
I can envision in the future, the "history of computer games" will have this "dark age" which "not much is known about" in the era of ~2007-20xx because the game makers back then wouldn't let people take physical copies of their games.
Remove the "of computer games" part and you've got one of the major subplots in Charlie Stross's recent novel "Glasshouse".
no one is going through your perl-scripts, c++ classes, 10000 digital holiday pictures, diaries of what you had for breakfast, or IRC logfiles
I'm sure that the people in the 11th century would have said the same thing about their accounts and letters, and yet historians and archeologists depend on them to tell us what life was like 1000 years ago.
Why do scientists write philosophy books and hoist them up as scientific fact (Dawkins)?
They're responding to philosophers and theologians writing philosophy books and hoisting them up as scientific fact.
I'm not a philosopher or a theologian, so you'll have to help me here.
Can you pull up some actual quotes where Dawkins is making statements that aren't supported by the evidence? Refuting false statements doesn't qualify. Claiming that this or that religious or philosophical position isn't necessary to explain the evidence doesn't qualify, unless there's evidence that actually requires one take a particular religious or philosophical position. Oh, and "we don't know X" doesn't imply "you need theological entity A to explain X".
Why do 90% of the posts on this topic that come from those who are scientifically minded include some mocking reference to Flying Spaghetti Monsters, relating it as science rather than philosophy?
Because it's a humorous way of pointing out that "we don't know X" doesn't imply "you need theological entity A to explain X". Belief in the FSM is as "scientific" as any other religious position: that is, it's not scientific at all.
The fact that the FSM, theological entity A, or Murphy's Law is "not scientific" is not a judgmental statement, mind you. It's simply pointing out that religion is not part of science, it's not testable by scientific methods. You might as well say that they're "not tasty" or "not blue".
I didn't say that "everything that isn't open source is reinventing the wheel". I said "the opposite of open source is reinventing the wheel". The opposite of open source is not everything past some magic openness line, not the complement, it's the antithesis, the far end of the journey, not every port along the way.
As for what they want... that's simple. If they want real physics they need to pay real money.
Microsoft actively makes it worse, with fundamentally insecure designs like ActiveX, and the most unnecessarily complex systems on the planet.
When I started having to reinstall user's computers because a bug in Internet Explorer made the Control Panel break so badly I couldn't even bring it up to back it out in safe mode I decided they'd created a whole new kind of complex system event horizon.
there's hundreds if not thousands of "open source" and/or "free software" developers that basically have fallen for that same scenario
My open source software is software I needed to write, anyway, and in exchange for open sourcing it I've received free improvements from other open source developers, and they got to avoid having to do some basic grunt work.
The opposite of "open source" isn't "software for money", it's "reinventing the wheel".
And reinventing the wheel is stupid.
It's triangular!
Why is the situation evil and stupid if an entity comes right out and demands you to do some amount of work for them for no benefit for those doing the actual work
Well, among other things, NASA already has a pretty substantial presence in Second Life, so doing a NASA MMO is reinventing the wheel.
How's that an improvement over the square wheel?
Let's see. On the one hand we get to avoid reinventing the wheel. On the other hand we get to reinvent NASA's wheel. Seems pretty clear to me.
Facts? Try this fact: this is not an external standard that Microsoft is supposed to bring their software into line with, this standard was presented by Microsoft as accurately describing what their software actually did. That's the whole reason it was "fast tracked", because it was supposed to be a description of a conforming implementation.
If it's not, then it shouldn't have been "fast tracked", it should have gone through the same process as current HTML standards... you know, the ones Acid3 are testing...
That is, the issue is not whether Office conforms to the standard, but that Microsoft lied about its status.
Year after year, more and more security hardware and software is purchased, more and more security professionals are hired, and more security is done; yet things are not getting better.
And:
Even with all its security issues, what many do not realize is that no software company has spent more on security in the past decade than Microsoft.
Open Source is great at solving the problems that the developers need solved. It's rarely as good at solving the problems that non-developers need solved but developers don't, because developers are rarely interested in donating their time to solving these problems. Not only is there no incentive to solve them, but they are often not even aware that these problems exist, and solving them often involves a far less pleasant kind of work.
Documentation and user interface design is a common casualty of this phenomenon.
There are, however, a number of big exceptions to this. Some are the result of developers who really are fascinated by the problems of writing software for mere humans, some are the result of end-users who are also software developers, but most are the result of companies and organizations paying people to do the work, one way or the other.
And not all of these started out as proprietary packages that were open sourced for one reason or another: some are internal projects in organizations that need the product but aren't interested in being in the software business (though that's no guarantee of quality: most internal projects are no better than they have to be), some are open source projects that have a sugar daddy, some are dual-licensed products piggybacking on both the open source movement and the commercial software market, but the key ingredient for all of them is that the developers are paid to do the hard boring work of polishing the product.
I think that this money is usually more important than the goals of the original developers. There have been many open source projects intended to produce a competitor for commercial programs that never got anywhere, because it's to hard to sustain the kind of effort it takes to turn a project into a product on a volunteer basis.
What's in a name? That we call our code By any other name would smell as sweet. So Open Source would,
were it not Open Source call'd, Retain the same perfection which it's owed Without that title...
But for all the thinking and proving there's one question science can never answer, and that is "why"? The universe exists. Why? Life exists. Why? Life changes and evolves. Why?
Why are you asking a science teacher to explain a philosophical or religious question? Would you ask your history teacher how to derive the pythagorean theorem? Would you ask your philosophy teacher how C++ templates work? Would you ask your english teacher to explain continental drift and subduction zones? Would you ask your math teacher about Donne's use of metaphor?
The origin of life isn't what "Origin of the Species" is about. It's not part of the theory that you're attacking. It doesn't matter whether the theory of evolution can explain it or not, because it's not about the the origin of life, the universe, and everything, it's about speciation. That's all.
Go ask your debate teacher about the term "straw man".
The theory of the origin of species through natural selection does not actually address the question of the origin of life, it merely documents a mechanism that has been demonstrated sufficient to explain the phenomenon of speciation. That's all it attempts to do, and that's all it needs to do.
You are creating a straw man, called "Darwinism", that doesn't bear any but a superficial relationship to the reality. Attacking straw men is a blast, it's great fun, but it belongs in the pages of "Mad Magazine", not in the courts and public debate.
Windows NT completely replaced the infrastructure of Windows, and gave Microsoft a golden opportunity to draw a line under years of hacks based on a bad design. They even came up with a mechanism, subsystems, to make the business of replacing the Windows API with a better one while retaining full compatibility with the existing API... much as Apple did a few years later.
THAT was when they were building a new house from the ground up, and that's when they decided to build the same house pn the new foundations, leaky roof and swinging open front door and all.
Vista is not a new foundation, it's the same basic foundation as NT3, NT4, and NT5 (Windows 2000 and XP). The majority of changes in Vista are just there to stop the end user from running cable from their neighbor's CATV box to their own TV set (or at least figuring out you did it and scrambling the signal). It's not the Emperor's New Clothes, it's the Telescreen from 1984, with the indows logo instead of Big Brother.
And it's got the same basic Win32 house built on that foundation.
And the roof still leaks, it just tells you "Your roof is leaking... do you want to stay sitting under the drips or move to another chair?".
Windows 7 is rumored to be a new house, with a big old storage shed in the back yard with all the bits of the old house packed away in it so you can unpack the leaky roof only when you need it.
Not on are the contents of the zones (with the exception of local computer) controlled by the user, but the level of trust assigned to each zone are user controlled too (as in, I can pop into Internet Options and disable ActiveX for any zone, or Javascript for any zone, and so on).
This is true but irrelevant:
1. The worst problem with these zones is the "local computer" one, and that one is continually updated and changed as they discover more places that files on the local computer were actually placed there under the control of untrusted sites... by, for an early example, having the site pass URIs that point at cached copies of downloaded executables.
2. I spent 20 years as a system and network administrator and was able to successfully shepherd our division through some of the worst years of the virus plague that started in the late '90s... and I would be hesitant to try and come up with a set of security zone rules that was secure enough for my prefernces and that didn't cause the end user unacceptable levels of inconvenience... and that's just for the local zone! Expecting the end user to understand the consequences of changing these rules is expecting Uncle Elmer to be a "rocket scientist".
Firefox does the same thing!
Firefox doesn't even have a mechanism to let sites request dynamically loaded plugins run in the "local zone". The only thing that Firefox does that is even vaguely similar is the XPI installation mechanism...which is like a grotesque and unnecessary parody of security zones, and I have posted articles arguing against it in the past. Luckily it is an exceptional situation, and it makes it clear that it is an exceptional situation. It is still the wrong approach.
the only browser on the Windows platform that actually does run in a Sandbox
Running an inherently insecure browser in an inherently leaky sandbox is not an acceptable alternative to making the browser inherently secure in the first place. All it means is that when IE gets compromised, the attacker then has to come up with a second exploit or satisfy himself with running a botnet node for the duration of the current session, or stealing your bank account details by invisibly directing you to a phishing site instead of running a keylogger. Everything that Paypal (remember Paypal? That's who this song is about) is concerned about is still just as exposed as if that sandbox wasn't there.
Why do browsers even have a "run malicious code" function?
In "The Emperor's New Groove" there is a running gag where someone pulls the wrong lever and falls through a trap door into an alligator pit, then returns dripping water and kicking away alligators and asking "Why do we even *have* that lever?"
Why does Firefox have a mechanism to install extensions to Firefox from within a Firefox window?
Why does Internet Explorer have a mechanism to run native code downloaded from a website?
Why does Safari have an 'Open "Safe" Files after Download' option?
Why doesn't Microsoft provide a way for browsers to launch and pass parameters to helper functions that doesn't require them to guess how the helper function's quoting mechanism works?
Why do we even HAVE these levers? These are all obviously bad designs.
Every other plugin you install in a browser can be installed by downloading it and running it as an application. Why does Firefox have to implement a mechanism to allow a web page to request that an XPI installer run?
ActiveX and other mechanisms based on using "security zones" to allow the HTML control to guess whether it's being asked to run a plugin that Windows Update needs instead of one that's going to install spyware are inherently insecure. Why doesn't Windows Update, for example, run as an application and provide its extensions to the specific instance of the HTML window that needs them, instead?
Apple has finally turned 'Open "Safe" files' off by default. This tiny increase in security is probably the best news I've heard in web security in a year... which is kind of sad. The underlying problems with helper function bindings are still there in OS X and Windows, alas.
Finally, Microsoft's POSIX subsystem actually includes "exec", the UNIX system call that is available on other platforms to avoid the quoting problems that the corresponding Windows call has. Unfortunately you can't use that call from Win32 programs, and they haven't implemented the equivalent in the past 15 or so years that it's been there. Why not?
How hard is it to run a caching DNS server on your firewall? Do none of the replacement firewall-router distros include a copy of BIND? I don't think I've ever used the ISP's name service at my house.
I can see "Uncle Elmer" users doing that, but surely anyone who's fetching debian ISOs has their own BIND cache.
If they can't get the price down to the level of a consumer product, then yes, it's doomed.
Tape has become too expensive for the consumer market, though. I don't know if this was the cause of or a result of the increasing concentration of the tape industry during the '90s, but the result is that the only credible backup media for the consumer is hard disks. If their media is $180 for 300 GB it's cheaper to buy a disk drive than a cartridge.
And that goes for tape, too. I struggled with home tape backup for years, and finally just pulled in my last set of archives, burned them to DVDs and kept a copy in external hard drives on the shelf. Tape drives just became too unreliable, and too unrepairable with the resources of a home user, and too expensive to replace when they inevitably broke.
If they (or anyone) could ship even 100GB media at a consumer price, THAT would be a breakthrough.
Slashdot Mirror
Squeak uses a user interface and toolkit designed in the 90's that has little to do with the original Smalltalk UI or toolkit.
OK, they added optional scrollbars and titles but they still have the context menu on the middle button, and the right button (which everyone else in the world uses for contextual menus) pop up a bunch of floating icons around the window. This has clearly taken root in Croquet, except that the floating icons are always there.
But you can't use Squeak "just like your Mac or PC (or X11 or NeWS or just about anything else)" without changing the context menu onto the right button.
And whatever "issues" you may have with the Squeak or Croquet interfaces, both of them are far better than the in-game UI disasters that commercial games usually have.
I'll take your word for that, I quit playing video games on a regular basis... oh, probably about the time my kids started school. But based on my previous experience that's an awful low bar to beat.
Maybe all those Gentoo users will start getting down and dirty with Java now they can recompile it every boot.
They already have NASA Colab and the rest of their islands in SL.
Croquet? It's got a user interface from 1976. Sure Smalltalk was one of the first window based user interfaces (not "the first", if nothing else Xerox had Interlisp-D and their office automation software as well as Smalltalk) and Squeak and Croquet still use the same oddball design.
I think Digital demonstrated what happens when you try to keep up on process using your own fabs.
I don't think Apple even owns the companies that make their actual hardware over in China. It's all contracted.
I think "disabled activation" means "you can't activate your copy of XP any more" not "you don't need to activate it any more".
So, when do you think Microsoft will turn off XP? 2010? 2015?
I can envision in the future, the "history of computer games" will have this "dark age" which "not much is known about" in the era of ~2007-20xx because the game makers back then wouldn't let people take physical copies of their games.
Remove the "of computer games" part and you've got one of the major subplots in Charlie Stross's recent novel "Glasshouse".
Also relevant comment in another recent slashdot thread.
no one is going through your perl-scripts, c++ classes, 10000 digital holiday pictures, diaries of what you had for breakfast, or IRC logfiles
I'm sure that the people in the 11th century would have said the same thing about their accounts and letters, and yet historians and archeologists depend on them to tell us what life was like 1000 years ago.
Chimps will take whatever they think they can get away with, and never actively teach and often try to hide things from each other.
Like the RIAA, you mean?
Why do scientists write philosophy books and hoist them up as scientific fact (Dawkins)?
They're responding to philosophers and theologians writing philosophy books and hoisting them up as scientific fact.
I'm not a philosopher or a theologian, so you'll have to help me here.
Can you pull up some actual quotes where Dawkins is making statements that aren't supported by the evidence? Refuting false statements doesn't qualify. Claiming that this or that religious or philosophical position isn't necessary to explain the evidence doesn't qualify, unless there's evidence that actually requires one take a particular religious or philosophical position. Oh, and "we don't know X" doesn't imply "you need theological entity A to explain X".
Why do 90% of the posts on this topic that come from those who are scientifically minded include some mocking reference to Flying Spaghetti Monsters, relating it as science rather than philosophy?
Because it's a humorous way of pointing out that "we don't know X" doesn't imply "you need theological entity A to explain X". Belief in the FSM is as "scientific" as any other religious position: that is, it's not scientific at all.
The fact that the FSM, theological entity A, or Murphy's Law is "not scientific" is not a judgmental statement, mind you. It's simply pointing out that religion is not part of science, it's not testable by scientific methods. You might as well say that they're "not tasty" or "not blue".
and users make it even worse by using MSFT products!!
Go ahead, make me feel guilty, rub it in.
I didn't say that "everything that isn't open source is reinventing the wheel". I said "the opposite of open source is reinventing the wheel". The opposite of open source is not everything past some magic openness line, not the complement, it's the antithesis, the far end of the journey, not every port along the way.
As for what they want... that's simple. If they want real physics they need to pay real money.
Microsoft can't do it all?
Microsoft actively makes it worse, with fundamentally insecure designs like ActiveX, and the most unnecessarily complex systems on the planet.
When I started having to reinstall user's computers because a bug in Internet Explorer made the Control Panel break so badly I couldn't even bring it up to back it out in safe mode I decided they'd created a whole new kind of complex system event horizon.
Check out the new wheel!
there's hundreds if not thousands of "open source" and/or "free software" developers that basically have fallen for that same scenario
My open source software is software I needed to write, anyway, and in exchange for open sourcing it I've received free improvements from other open source developers, and they got to avoid having to do some basic grunt work.
The opposite of "open source" isn't "software for money", it's "reinventing the wheel".
And reinventing the wheel is stupid.
It's triangular!
Why is the situation evil and stupid if an entity comes right out and demands you to do some amount of work for them for no benefit for those doing the actual work
Well, among other things, NASA already has a pretty substantial presence in Second Life, so doing a NASA MMO is reinventing the wheel.
How's that an improvement over the square wheel?
Let's see. On the one hand we get to avoid reinventing the wheel. On the other hand we get to reinvent NASA's wheel. Seems pretty clear to me.
One fewer bump! -- Johnny Hart (1932-2008)
Facts? Try this fact: this is not an external standard that Microsoft is supposed to bring their software into line with, this standard was presented by Microsoft as accurately describing what their software actually did. That's the whole reason it was "fast tracked", because it was supposed to be a description of a conforming implementation.
If it's not, then it shouldn't have been "fast tracked", it should have gone through the same process as current HTML standards... you know, the ones Acid3 are testing...
That is, the issue is not whether Office conforms to the standard, but that Microsoft lied about its status.
Compare and contrast these two quotes:
Year after year, more and more security hardware and software is purchased, more and more security professionals are hired, and more security is done; yet things are not getting better.
And:
Even with all its security issues, what many do not realize is that no software company has spent more on security in the past decade than Microsoft.
"Do as I say, not as I do?"
Open Source is great at solving the problems that the developers need solved. It's rarely as good at solving the problems that non-developers need solved but developers don't, because developers are rarely interested in donating their time to solving these problems. Not only is there no incentive to solve them, but they are often not even aware that these problems exist, and solving them often involves a far less pleasant kind of work.
Documentation and user interface design is a common casualty of this phenomenon.
There are, however, a number of big exceptions to this. Some are the result of developers who really are fascinated by the problems of writing software for mere humans, some are the result of end-users who are also software developers, but most are the result of companies and organizations paying people to do the work, one way or the other.
And not all of these started out as proprietary packages that were open sourced for one reason or another: some are internal projects in organizations that need the product but aren't interested in being in the software business (though that's no guarantee of quality: most internal projects are no better than they have to be), some are open source projects that have a sugar daddy, some are dual-licensed products piggybacking on both the open source movement and the commercial software market, but the key ingredient for all of them is that the developers are paid to do the hard boring work of polishing the product.
I think that this money is usually more important than the goals of the original developers. There have been many open source projects intended to produce a competitor for commercial programs that never got anywhere, because it's to hard to sustain the kind of effort it takes to turn a project into a product on a volunteer basis.
What's in a name? That we call our code
By any other name would smell as sweet.
So Open Source would,
were it not Open Source call'd,
Retain the same perfection which it's owed
Without that title...
-- shakespear.wil@theglobe.london.england
But for all the thinking and proving there's one question science can never answer, and that is "why"? The universe exists. Why? Life exists. Why? Life changes and evolves. Why?
Why are you asking a science teacher to explain a philosophical or religious question? Would you ask your history teacher how to derive the pythagorean theorem? Would you ask your philosophy teacher how C++ templates work? Would you ask your english teacher to explain continental drift and subduction zones? Would you ask your math teacher about Donne's use of metaphor?
The origin of life isn't what "Origin of the Species" is about. It's not part of the theory that you're attacking. It doesn't matter whether the theory of evolution can explain it or not, because it's not about the the origin of life, the universe, and everything, it's about speciation. That's all.
Go ask your debate teacher about the term "straw man".
Sorry, I mean "there is no Darwinism".
The theory of the origin of species through natural selection does not actually address the question of the origin of life, it merely documents a mechanism that has been demonstrated sufficient to explain the phenomenon of speciation. That's all it attempts to do, and that's all it needs to do.
You are creating a straw man, called "Darwinism", that doesn't bear any but a superficial relationship to the reality. Attacking straw men is a blast, it's great fun, but it belongs in the pages of "Mad Magazine", not in the courts and public debate.
If you don't taste anything in your orange juice tomorrow morning, that's not iocaine, honest.
Windows NT completely replaced the infrastructure of Windows, and gave Microsoft a golden opportunity to draw a line under years of hacks based on a bad design. They even came up with a mechanism, subsystems, to make the business of replacing the Windows API with a better one while retaining full compatibility with the existing API... much as Apple did a few years later.
THAT was when they were building a new house from the ground up, and that's when they decided to build the same house pn the new foundations, leaky roof and swinging open front door and all.
Vista is not a new foundation, it's the same basic foundation as NT3, NT4, and NT5 (Windows 2000 and XP). The majority of changes in Vista are just there to stop the end user from running cable from their neighbor's CATV box to their own TV set (or at least figuring out you did it and scrambling the signal). It's not the Emperor's New Clothes, it's the Telescreen from 1984, with the indows logo instead of Big Brother.
And it's got the same basic Win32 house built on that foundation.
And the roof still leaks, it just tells you "Your roof is leaking... do you want to stay sitting under the drips or move to another chair?".
Windows 7 is rumored to be a new house, with a big old storage shed in the back yard with all the bits of the old house packed away in it so you can unpack the leaky roof only when you need it.
We'll see.
Not on are the contents of the zones (with the exception of local computer) controlled by the user, but the level of trust assigned to each zone are user controlled too (as in, I can pop into Internet Options and disable ActiveX for any zone, or Javascript for any zone, and so on).
This is true but irrelevant:
1. The worst problem with these zones is the "local computer" one, and that one is continually updated and changed as they discover more places that files on the local computer were actually placed there under the control of untrusted sites... by, for an early example, having the site pass URIs that point at cached copies of downloaded executables.
2. I spent 20 years as a system and network administrator and was able to successfully shepherd our division through some of the worst years of the virus plague that started in the late '90s... and I would be hesitant to try and come up with a set of security zone rules that was secure enough for my prefernces and that didn't cause the end user unacceptable levels of inconvenience... and that's just for the local zone! Expecting the end user to understand the consequences of changing these rules is expecting Uncle Elmer to be a "rocket scientist".
Firefox does the same thing!
Firefox doesn't even have a mechanism to let sites request dynamically loaded plugins run in the "local zone". The only thing that Firefox does that is even vaguely similar is the XPI installation mechanism...which is like a grotesque and unnecessary parody of security zones, and I have posted articles arguing against it in the past. Luckily it is an exceptional situation, and it makes it clear that it is an exceptional situation. It is still the wrong approach.
the only browser on the Windows platform that actually does run in a Sandbox
Running an inherently insecure browser in an inherently leaky sandbox is not an acceptable alternative to making the browser inherently secure in the first place. All it means is that when IE gets compromised, the attacker then has to come up with a second exploit or satisfy himself with running a botnet node for the duration of the current session, or stealing your bank account details by invisibly directing you to a phishing site instead of running a keylogger. Everything that Paypal (remember Paypal? That's who this song is about) is concerned about is still just as exposed as if that sandbox wasn't there.
Why do browsers even have a "run malicious code" function?
In "The Emperor's New Groove" there is a running gag where someone pulls the wrong lever and falls through a trap door into an alligator pit, then returns dripping water and kicking away alligators and asking "Why do we even *have* that lever?"
Why does Firefox have a mechanism to install extensions to Firefox from within a Firefox window?
Why does Internet Explorer have a mechanism to run native code downloaded from a website?
Why does Safari have an 'Open "Safe" Files after Download' option?
Why doesn't Microsoft provide a way for browsers to launch and pass parameters to helper functions that doesn't require them to guess how the helper function's quoting mechanism works?
Why do we even HAVE these levers? These are all obviously bad designs.
Every other plugin you install in a browser can be installed by downloading it and running it as an application. Why does Firefox have to implement a mechanism to allow a web page to request that an XPI installer run?
ActiveX and other mechanisms based on using "security zones" to allow the HTML control to guess whether it's being asked to run a plugin that Windows Update needs instead of one that's going to install spyware are inherently insecure. Why doesn't Windows Update, for example, run as an application and provide its extensions to the specific instance of the HTML window that needs them, instead?
Apple has finally turned 'Open "Safe" files' off by default. This tiny increase in security is probably the best news I've heard in web security in a year... which is kind of sad. The underlying problems with helper function bindings are still there in OS X and Windows, alas.
Finally, Microsoft's POSIX subsystem actually includes "exec", the UNIX system call that is available on other platforms to avoid the quoting problems that the corresponding Windows call has. Unfortunately you can't use that call from Win32 programs, and they haven't implemented the equivalent in the past 15 or so years that it's been there. Why not?
How hard is it to run a caching DNS server on your firewall? Do none of the replacement firewall-router distros include a copy of BIND? I don't think I've ever used the ISP's name service at my house.
I can see "Uncle Elmer" users doing that, but surely anyone who's fetching debian ISOs has their own BIND cache.
If they can't get the price down to the level of a consumer product, then yes, it's doomed.
Tape has become too expensive for the consumer market, though. I don't know if this was the cause of or a result of the increasing concentration of the tape industry during the '90s, but the result is that the only credible backup media for the consumer is hard disks. If their media is $180 for 300 GB it's cheaper to buy a disk drive than a cartridge.
And that goes for tape, too. I struggled with home tape backup for years, and finally just pulled in my last set of archives, burned them to DVDs and kept a copy in external hard drives on the shelf. Tape drives just became too unreliable, and too unrepairable with the resources of a home user, and too expensive to replace when they inevitably broke.
If they (or anyone) could ship even 100GB media at a consumer price, THAT would be a breakthrough.