If you think XML a poor choice, then could you suggest an alternative?
Depends on the problem you're trying to solve.
A hell of a lot of the stuff I'm seeing in XML these days would be better off as token-separated self-describing tables (tables where the column names are the first row), or a modestly extended token-separated format like CSV.
For binary data something derived from Electronic Arts semi-self-describing interchange file format is good, examples in current use are MIDI File Format and Portable Network Graphics...
For arbitrary self-describing data there's always ASN.1.
For tagged arbitrary chunks of data descendants of RFC-822 are common.
For shallow-nested keyword-value data there's Microsoft's INI files.
And, of course, Lisp S-Expressions do absolutely everything XML does, more compactly, and are easier to parse.
Incidentally, that suggestion should not imply that everyone reinvent their own formats (again).
But XML doesn't solve that problem. I've found that the amount of code it takes to extract data from an arbitrary XML file even with an XML parser at hand is not significantly less than the amount of code it takes to parse and extract data from any other self-describing format.
Ie, selection is chaotic/not predictable enough and dangerous to the survival of the human species.
It's a dangerous universe.
Selection and feedback are epiphenoma that occur always, in all circumstances, no matter what you do. You can change the mechanisms (change what features are being selected, add new sources of feedback), to some extent, but you can't opt out of feedback loops and selection mechanisms any more than you can opt out of thermodynamics or probability. The conclusion I'm talking about isn't just a fallacy, it's simply meaningless.
It is natural selection (and market forces) that produce unsustainable situations which eventually lead to ecological/economic disaster.
Selection is a feedback mechanism. A feedback mechanism may lead to a collapse, or not, depending on the circumstances. Claiming that a feedback mechanism should be either accepted or fought against because under some circumstances it can lead to a collapse, when it is not clear to me how one would endeavor to do such a thing in the first place, is foolish.
Wearing your polo shirt's collar popped up does not (if it gets the wearer more tail) mean the wearer's offspring will have popped collars
What does the wearer have to do with it? It's the polo shirt "species" that's being selected here, not the preppie.
When there is a problem the researchers can actually identify (a selection pressure, one could call it) this works great. When there isn't, it is a waste of time.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Even if you don't know the cause of a phenomenon documenting it provides more information for later researchers who may be able to identify it.
I think you're arguing against a different point than the one I made.
I did not say that the study was not valuable. I was referring to the quoted conclusion:
"People have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term," said Deborah S. Rogers, a research fellow at Stanford.
The fact that market forces worked for Polynesians, and the fact that market forces and evolution behave similarly, is not a new revelation. The current situation that Deborah Rogers is decrying is the result of the same forces of selection that she was measuring.
In 99% of instances, cultural schemas do not need to be 'fit' in a darwinian sense to spread through diffusion or other processes - they can be spread due to power imbalance or just because whatever new widgets one makes once they follow the ways of whatever look cool.
That's all "fit" in the Darwinian sense means: the idea that Darwinian "fitness" means anything but "this is what propogates". A peacock's tail is all about looking cool. Looking cool happened to be evolutionarily selected for in peacocks.
Turn it around, you can just as easily study biology in economic terms and talk about the effect of market forces on genes. They're the same forces.
It's amazing how smart people can be so daft. Of course the same forces apply in many fields. In biology it's called "natural selection", in economics it's called "the market", in engineering it's the trend towards a design monoculture (whether it's the internal combustion engine or Windows). Hell, even Rush Limbaugh knows about economic Darwinism.
The study itself is an interesting confirmation that market forces would lead to the same results over a long enough time period even when the available communication channels are biologically slow. But the conclusion that this is some kind of new revelation indicates to me that the communication channels between Stanford and the real world may also be biologically slow.
The thing is, you're stating accurate facts but they're not actually relevant to the point you were originally making.
OK, going back to my previous calculation, the hundred families with nominal 6 megabit internet connections downloading a movie a night from iTunes for rental instead of subscribing to Comcast's High Tier offering are costing Comcast in real money only the actual peak bandwidth they get from their neighborhood... the monthly traffic from 3000 movie downloads is a pittance.
So what's the peak bandwidth from a neighborhood? I know when they switched us to a UBR10k from a UBR7k we got a lot closer to our nominal throughput a lot more often, and I don't think they were using more than a couple of nodes... at less than 50 megabits (ideal) per channel per node... so they have (as expected) an awful lot of overcommitment. If they're actually paying as much as... what did I say, $300? $500? for our neighborhood's share of THEIR upstream I'll be greatly surprised.
OK, you're talking about the throughput of the link.
I'm talking about the total traffic per month, regardless of the peak rate. For people selling content online and competing with Comcast for my entertainment dollar, I think that's a more reasonable number.
Let me explain why I think that:
If 100 people in a neighborhood download a video from iTunes every night for a month, the total contribution to Comcast's traffic for the month is 3000 gigabytes. If enough people are doing it that they're competing with each other and they can't individually get 6 megabits per second or whatever their nominal rating is, that's irrelevant... that just means that some of them may end up finding they need to pick up their evening movie earlier in the day.
So Comcast doesn't have to pay for 6 megabits per second times 100 families, they only have to pay for whatever they need to pay for so that most of the time most of their customers get most of the 6 megabits they expect.
So those 100 families, paying something like 6000 dollars a month between them, are *between them* costing Comcast something like 250 bucks a month for their upstream bandwidth... even if they all make the greatest possible use of iTunes movie rentals, and that's assuming Comcast is getting no better a deal for their upstream than a small customer like me.
So I don't see where the numbers make this something Comcast is (a) suffering from, and (b) throttling or charging more money for this traffic. So I can see there are businesses where that would happen, but not ones where Comcast is in a position to *justifiably* game competitors using their network.
Order a T1 which is 1.5 megs dedicated (at least to the backbone of your provider) and youre looking at 500.00 a month.
That's 500 a month for 1.5 megabits a second for 2592000 seconds, or 486 gigabytes a month. for $500.00, for an actual cost under a dollar a giga*byte*. And that's for a T1, close to the highest cost-per-bit dedicated service out there (it *is* handily beaten by a nailed-up ISDN BRI at business rates, but that was kind of a last-resort even last century)... I doubt Comcast is paying one tenth of that.
If your business model requires you to use another companies LIMITED resources for free or you go out of business, your business model is busted.
I have some sympathy for this position, however I do not find the pricing information you include in your article persuasive:
If the FCC says that Comcast cannot manage their network, expect internet access to switch to a per bit pricing model. Everyone using p2p to seed those ever popular linux iso's might have a change of heart when they end up paying what it costs comcast, which is close to 30 bucks a meg.
I rent a couple of colo servers, which do not tend to benefit near as much from overcommitment as the last mile, and if my colo company was paying 30 bucks a megabyte, let alone a megabit (if that's what you're claiming) I would be out of business. If you said 30 bucks a *gig* I'd still be suspicious, given the rates I'm paying for bandwidth. Can you elaborate on this point?
Isn't that the whole point of IMAP; not relying on keeping everything local?
That's one point to IMAP, yes.
However "these three computers have a consistent view of the mailbox" is not the same as "these three computers do not retain all copies of all messages from the mailbox".
Why would Mail.app save my mail locally that's already on IMAP servers?
For disconnected use. For reliability and redundancy. For archival purposes.
* I want to use Mail.app to exhaustively search your email on your laptop without having to be online. I have searched for some mechanism to force it to stop expiring the local cache, so that I can depend on this.
* When a previous employer lost my mailbox my IMAP cache was the only copy of many messages that, in retrospect, turned out to be quite important. Unfortunately it was incomplete and much correspondence has been lost.
* As a result of these events I have put *all* my mail into local folders and gone back through backups and created a smashing archive of almost all my mail back to the mid '90s and some back to the '80s.It has been a veritable voyage of discovery:). It has been MOST useful having this archive available in Mail.app, but it's inconvenient having to manually ensure that it is in sync: I wish I could maintain this archive using Mail.app and IMAP from my laptop to my home server, but instead I have to keep it in local folders.:(
Basically, I would like to simplify my relationship with my email, and Mail.app forces me (and, it seems, you) to use multiple tools for the same job.
And, I hasten to repeat, I realize this is horribly off topic because I have not read the original article to see what Rush's real problem is: I don't want to have ANY incentive to want to help the man, even to try and solve a puzzle.
Time Machine didn't back up his mail (and can't backup web-mail that isn't on his computer)
If that means he's trying to back up mail he's reading through a web interface, than that's consistent with his straightforward lack of connection with reality I heard on his show after the damn radio station I was accustomed to listening to on the drive home replaced NPR with Rush.
If that means he's using an IMAP interface to gmail and Mail.app's damn "I'm not actually going to save your mail, I'm just going to cache what you've recently read" behavior is tripping him up, then I gotta say I have some sympathy with him.
Not enough sympathy to read the actual article and risk getting interesting in his problem: I'm smart enough to recognize when my hyperfocus is likely to lead me into behavior I may later regret.
People are living longer and 50 years of copyright protection no longer give lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties, he said.
I mean, seriously. Before 1997 and Active Desktop the whole idea of mail software that would deliberately accept and execute code from any random yahoo, deliberately, was bad SF. It was something that people made jokes about. Programs wandering around in computer networks and being given the right to execute an any system they came across, that was a Saturday morning cartoon for kids before.NET. But at least that kind of problem was limited to Windows... nobody ran native unsandboxed code from web pages until recently.
So it's no wonder they want to send TRON and Bob out after Sark and Megabyte. They really believe in special effects.
The EeePC sacrifices too much to thinness as well. Not to mention price.
It's possible that if it had been out a couple of years ago I'd have bought one, but probably not. Compared to the EeePC 8G, I'd rather spend a bit more and get a fatter computer if that's what it took to get a sub-notebook that had the features I need (and had in the Libretto):
* Hard drive, user replaceable (and preferably as easily swapped as in the Libretto). * Larger battery, hot-swappable, 5 hours battery life. * Expansion slot. This was PCMCIA in the Libretto, CF or ExpressCard would be more likely now.
And given that this is TEN YEARS later... a higher resolution screen. It looks like there might even be room for a 9" screen in the form factor of the EeePC.
I might be satisfied with the 8G *if* it had a couple of CF or even SD slots (if one could take an SDIO card), and a larger swappable battery. I wouldn't accept a PDA that didn't have an expansion slot of some kind, let alone a notebook, and I *do* need something that can run long enough to last a half-day meeting.
Military can NOT be used against the civilian population except under "special" circumstances.
So they need to put up some FBI spysats, then?
Oh, wait:
And by special, i mean, war on drugs special
If you've bought in to the idea that the War On Civil Liberties is a legitimate excuse, then what's stopping you from accepting the War On Civil Liberties II?
My old Libretto was a better size than any of these "thin" laptops. Even my Macbook Pro is really thinner than it should be, and has critically compromised cooling and keyboard quality to shave a quarter of an inch that I don't need saved off the thickness, and yet where it matters to me... the space it takes up on the desk (or lap, or airline tray-table)... all these devices are every bit as big as my Thinkpad T23 was.
Extreme thinness in laptops is a gimmick, and I wouldn't touch a laptop that's as compromised as these are for half the price.
The hidden features are just shortcuts on top of it for power users.
No, they're not.
The ONLY way to delete tracks from your library without actually switching to the Library (and losing the view of the tracks you want to delete) is option-delete. There is no menu option to do it, either on the menu bar or in a contextual menu.
a novice would implement obscure controls and give you no other way to replicate their function.
That's precisely what Apple does.
maybe there are good ways of making these things more obvious.
Or...since you already have contextual menus, you could just choose not to use the other features they include.
If I didn't care about the user interface I could also choose to use a much cheaper and more powerful computer running an operating system other than Mac OS X.
I had spent my entire life up to this conversation without it even occurring to me to hold down the option key while pressing the delete key with a song selected in an iTunes playlist
That is, of course, my point. That these features are not obvious. They are obscure, needlessly so. It's something that I would expect to run across in some novice's My First Application, not an Apple product.
That doesn't solve the same problem, it's equivalent to opening the destination window first... it doesn't help when you're updating a large number of folders infrequently.
yeah, good luck raging against that machine.
When did I say I expected them to fix it?
Of the more than a dozen different ways to accomplish that task, you personally prefer the...
Learn to read. I've described at least three alternate mechanisms for the operation they do not provide, only one of which is the mechanism you're referring to (and which, by the way, has nothing to do with floppy drives... it was eliminated as a result of an implementation decision porting Finder to Rhapsody), and none of which are equivalent to the alternatives you keep coming up with.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think XML a poor choice, then could you suggest an alternative?
Depends on the problem you're trying to solve.
A hell of a lot of the stuff I'm seeing in XML these days would be better off as token-separated self-describing tables (tables where the column names are the first row), or a modestly extended token-separated format like CSV.
For binary data something derived from Electronic Arts semi-self-describing interchange file format is good, examples in current use are MIDI File Format and Portable Network Graphics...
For arbitrary self-describing data there's always ASN.1.
For tagged arbitrary chunks of data descendants of RFC-822 are common.
For shallow-nested keyword-value data there's Microsoft's INI files.
And, of course, Lisp S-Expressions do absolutely everything XML does, more compactly, and are easier to parse.
Incidentally, that suggestion should not imply that everyone reinvent their own formats (again).
But XML doesn't solve that problem. I've found that the amount of code it takes to extract data from an arbitrary XML file even with an XML parser at hand is not significantly less than the amount of code it takes to parse and extract data from any other self-describing format.
Ie, selection is chaotic/not predictable enough and dangerous to the survival of the human species.
It's a dangerous universe.
Selection and feedback are epiphenoma that occur always, in all circumstances, no matter what you do. You can change the mechanisms (change what features are being selected, add new sources of feedback), to some extent, but you can't opt out of feedback loops and selection mechanisms any more than you can opt out of thermodynamics or probability. The conclusion I'm talking about isn't just a fallacy, it's simply meaningless.
It is natural selection (and market forces) that produce unsustainable situations which eventually lead to ecological/economic disaster.
Selection is a feedback mechanism. A feedback mechanism may lead to a collapse, or not, depending on the circumstances. Claiming that a feedback mechanism should be either accepted or fought against because under some circumstances it can lead to a collapse, when it is not clear to me how one would endeavor to do such a thing in the first place, is foolish.
What counts as fit for a cultural schema?
One that succeeds.
Wearing your polo shirt's collar popped up does not (if it gets the wearer more tail) mean the wearer's offspring will have popped collars
What does the wearer have to do with it? It's the polo shirt "species" that's being selected here, not the preppie.
When there is a problem the researchers can actually identify (a selection pressure, one could call it) this works great. When there isn't, it is a waste of time.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Even if you don't know the cause of a phenomenon documenting it provides more information for later researchers who may be able to identify it.
I think you're arguing against a different point than the one I made.
I did not say that the study was not valuable. I was referring to the quoted conclusion:
"People have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term," said Deborah S. Rogers, a research fellow at Stanford.
The fact that market forces worked for Polynesians, and the fact that market forces and evolution behave similarly, is not a new revelation. The current situation that Deborah Rogers is decrying is the result of the same forces of selection that she was measuring.
In 99% of instances, cultural schemas do not need to be 'fit' in a darwinian sense to spread through diffusion or other processes - they can be spread due to power imbalance or just because whatever new widgets one makes once they follow the ways of whatever look cool.
That's all "fit" in the Darwinian sense means: the idea that Darwinian "fitness" means anything but "this is what propogates". A peacock's tail is all about looking cool. Looking cool happened to be evolutionarily selected for in peacocks.
Turn it around, you can just as easily study biology in economic terms and talk about the effect of market forces on genes. They're the same forces.
It's amazing how smart people can be so daft. Of course the same forces apply in many fields. In biology it's called "natural selection", in economics it's called "the market", in engineering it's the trend towards a design monoculture (whether it's the internal combustion engine or Windows). Hell, even Rush Limbaugh knows about economic Darwinism.
The study itself is an interesting confirmation that market forces would lead to the same results over a long enough time period even when the available communication channels are biologically slow. But the conclusion that this is some kind of new revelation indicates to me that the communication channels between Stanford and the real world may also be biologically slow.
The thing is, you're stating accurate facts but they're not actually relevant to the point you were originally making.
... what did I say, $300? $500? for our neighborhood's share of THEIR upstream I'll be greatly surprised.
OK, going back to my previous calculation, the hundred families with nominal 6 megabit internet connections downloading a movie a night from iTunes for rental instead of subscribing to Comcast's High Tier offering are costing Comcast in real money only the actual peak bandwidth they get from their neighborhood... the monthly traffic from 3000 movie downloads is a pittance.
So what's the peak bandwidth from a neighborhood? I know when they switched us to a UBR10k from a UBR7k we got a lot closer to our nominal throughput a lot more often, and I don't think they were using more than a couple of nodes... at less than 50 megabits (ideal) per channel per node... so they have (as expected) an awful lot of overcommitment. If they're actually paying as much as
OK, you're talking about the throughput of the link.
I'm talking about the total traffic per month, regardless of the peak rate. For people selling content online and competing with Comcast for my entertainment dollar, I think that's a more reasonable number.
Let me explain why I think that:
If 100 people in a neighborhood download a video from iTunes every night for a month, the total contribution to Comcast's traffic for the month is 3000 gigabytes. If enough people are doing it that they're competing with each other and they can't individually get 6 megabits per second or whatever their nominal rating is, that's irrelevant... that just means that some of them may end up finding they need to pick up their evening movie earlier in the day.
So Comcast doesn't have to pay for 6 megabits per second times 100 families, they only have to pay for whatever they need to pay for so that most of the time most of their customers get most of the 6 megabits they expect.
So those 100 families, paying something like 6000 dollars a month between them, are *between them* costing Comcast something like 250 bucks a month for their upstream bandwidth... even if they all make the greatest possible use of iTunes movie rentals, and that's assuming Comcast is getting no better a deal for their upstream than a small customer like me.
So I don't see where the numbers make this something Comcast is (a) suffering from, and (b) throttling or charging more money for this traffic. So I can see there are businesses where that would happen, but not ones where Comcast is in a position to *justifiably* game competitors using their network.
Order a T1 which is 1.5 megs dedicated (at least to the backbone of your provider) and youre looking at 500.00 a month.
That's 500 a month for 1.5 megabits a second for 2592000 seconds, or 486 gigabytes a month. for $500.00, for an actual cost under a dollar a giga*byte*. And that's for a T1, close to the highest cost-per-bit dedicated service out there (it *is* handily beaten by a nailed-up ISDN BRI at business rates, but that was kind of a last-resort even last century)... I doubt Comcast is paying one tenth of that.
If your business model requires you to use another companies LIMITED resources for free or you go out of business, your business model is busted.
I have some sympathy for this position, however I do not find the pricing information you include in your article persuasive:
If the FCC says that Comcast cannot manage their network, expect internet access to switch to a per bit pricing model. Everyone using p2p to seed those ever popular linux iso's might have a change of heart when they end up paying what it costs comcast, which is close to 30 bucks a meg.
I rent a couple of colo servers, which do not tend to benefit near as much from overcommitment as the last mile, and if my colo company was paying 30 bucks a megabyte, let alone a megabit (if that's what you're claiming) I would be out of business. If you said 30 bucks a *gig* I'd still be suspicious, given the rates I'm paying for bandwidth. Can you elaborate on this point?
Isn't that the whole point of IMAP; not relying on keeping everything local?
:). It has been MOST useful having this archive available in Mail.app, but it's inconvenient having to manually ensure that it is in sync: I wish I could maintain this archive using Mail.app and IMAP from my laptop to my home server, but instead I have to keep it in local folders. :(
That's one point to IMAP, yes.
However "these three computers have a consistent view of the mailbox" is not the same as "these three computers do not retain all copies of all messages from the mailbox".
Why would Mail.app save my mail locally that's already on IMAP servers?
For disconnected use. For reliability and redundancy. For archival purposes.
* I want to use Mail.app to exhaustively search your email on your laptop without having to be online. I have searched for some mechanism to force it to stop expiring the local cache, so that I can depend on this.
* When a previous employer lost my mailbox my IMAP cache was the only copy of many messages that, in retrospect, turned out to be quite important. Unfortunately it was incomplete and much correspondence has been lost.
* As a result of these events I have put *all* my mail into local folders and gone back through backups and created a smashing archive of almost all my mail back to the mid '90s and some back to the '80s.It has been a veritable voyage of discovery
Basically, I would like to simplify my relationship with my email, and Mail.app forces me (and, it seems, you) to use multiple tools for the same job.
And, I hasten to repeat, I realize this is horribly off topic because I have not read the original article to see what Rush's real problem is: I don't want to have ANY incentive to want to help the man, even to try and solve a puzzle.
Time Machine didn't back up his mail (and can't backup web-mail that isn't on his computer)
If that means he's trying to back up mail he's reading through a web interface, than that's consistent with his straightforward lack of connection with reality I heard on his show after the damn radio station I was accustomed to listening to on the drive home replaced NPR with Rush.
If that means he's using an IMAP interface to gmail and Mail.app's damn "I'm not actually going to save your mail, I'm just going to cache what you've recently read" behavior is tripping him up, then I gotta say I have some sympathy with him.
Not enough sympathy to read the actual article and risk getting interesting in his problem: I'm smart enough to recognize when my hyperfocus is likely to lead me into behavior I may later regret.
People are living longer and 50 years of copyright protection no longer give lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties, he said.
My heart fairly bleeds for them.
Really.
In other words, pi are square, but that's still better than 10 Starbucks per square mile.
And I thought the Onion article about the Starbucks in the restroom of another Starbucks was a joke.
I mean, seriously. Before 1997 and Active Desktop the whole idea of mail software that would deliberately accept and execute code from any random yahoo, deliberately, was bad SF. It was something that people made jokes about. Programs wandering around in computer networks and being given the right to execute an any system they came across, that was a Saturday morning cartoon for kids before .NET. But at least that kind of problem was limited to Windows... nobody ran native unsandboxed code from web pages until recently.
So it's no wonder they want to send TRON and Bob out after Sark and Megabyte. They really believe in special effects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Valentine's_Day_Massacre
The EeePC sacrifices too much to thinness as well. Not to mention price.
It's possible that if it had been out a couple of years ago I'd have bought one, but probably not. Compared to the EeePC 8G, I'd rather spend a bit more and get a fatter computer if that's what it took to get a sub-notebook that had the features I need (and had in the Libretto):
* Hard drive, user replaceable (and preferably as easily swapped as in the Libretto).
* Larger battery, hot-swappable, 5 hours battery life.
* Expansion slot. This was PCMCIA in the Libretto, CF or ExpressCard would be more likely now.
And given that this is TEN YEARS later... a higher resolution screen. It looks like there might even be room for a 9" screen in the form factor of the EeePC.
I might be satisfied with the 8G *if* it had a couple of CF or even SD slots (if one could take an SDIO card), and a larger swappable battery. I wouldn't accept a PDA that didn't have an expansion slot of some kind, let alone a notebook, and I *do* need something that can run long enough to last a half-day meeting.
Military can NOT be used against the civilian population except under "special" circumstances.
So they need to put up some FBI spysats, then?
Oh, wait:
And by special, i mean, war on drugs special
If you've bought in to the idea that the War On Civil Liberties is a legitimate excuse, then what's stopping you from accepting the War On Civil Liberties II?
An interesting measure of success for usability would be the ability to remove any terminal emulators from the default install, with no issues.
Mac OS X doesn't even try a damnfool thing like that.
Hell, even Windows doesn't try a damnfool thing like that.
Hydrogen on Earth isn't an energy source, it's a distribution mechanism.
My old Libretto was a better size than any of these "thin" laptops. Even my Macbook Pro is really thinner than it should be, and has critically compromised cooling and keyboard quality to shave a quarter of an inch that I don't need saved off the thickness, and yet where it matters to me... the space it takes up on the desk (or lap, or airline tray-table)... all these devices are every bit as big as my Thinkpad T23 was.
Extreme thinness in laptops is a gimmick, and I wouldn't touch a laptop that's as compromised as these are for half the price.
The hidden features are just shortcuts on top of it for power users.
No, they're not.
The ONLY way to delete tracks from your library without actually switching to the Library (and losing the view of the tracks you want to delete) is option-delete. There is no menu option to do it, either on the menu bar or in a contextual menu.
a novice would implement obscure controls and give you no other way to replicate their function.
That's precisely what Apple does.
maybe there are good ways of making these things more obvious.
I've listed two or three possibilities so far.
Or...since you already have contextual menus, you could just choose not to use the other features they include.
If I didn't care about the user interface I could also choose to use a much cheaper and more powerful computer running an operating system other than Mac OS X.
I had spent my entire life up to this conversation without it even occurring to me to hold down the option key while pressing the delete key with a song selected in an iTunes playlist
That is, of course, my point. That these features are not obvious. They are obscure, needlessly so. It's something that I would expect to run across in some novice's My First Application, not an Apple product.
place alias of folder on desktop.
That doesn't solve the same problem, it's equivalent to opening the destination window first... it doesn't help when you're updating a large number of folders infrequently.
yeah, good luck raging against that machine.
When did I say I expected them to fix it?
Of the more than a dozen different ways to accomplish that task, you personally prefer the...
Learn to read. I've described at least three alternate mechanisms for the operation they do not provide, only one of which is the mechanism you're referring to (and which, by the way, has nothing to do with floppy drives... it was eliminated as a result of an implementation decision porting Finder to Rhapsody), and none of which are equivalent to the alternatives you keep coming up with.