PDF isn't bitmap or vector, it's text and font. It can contain bitmaps and vectors as well, but it's basically a text format, and with the right tools or a little work it's even editable.
So Disk Utility doesn't call "fsck_hfs" to do the heavy lifting any more, the fact that it looks like it's getting its output from that is purely concidence, and the fact that "/System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/Contents/Info. plist" contains "FSRepairExecutable" set to "fsck_hfs" and "FSRepairArguments" set to "-y" doesn't mean it's doing the same thing as I do when I boot to single user mode and run the same command?
Glad you cleared that up.
You're uninformed. Go read the developer documentations.
Spotlight's performance depends on HFS+ ability to locate recently changed files (specifically, btree searches for filesystem metadata). On any other file system it has to depend on an exhaustive search of the file system, which means it's restricted to the same periodic scan of the file system that every other search engine (such as Harvest) uses, and so the big advantage you get from Spotlight as compared to other tools vanishes.
If I'm wrong, if I can change some random file off in the filesystem and depend on Spotlight indexing that change just as quickly whether it's on HFS+ or UFS, then I'd love to know about it. Can you give me a URL?
Feature: "a prominent part or characteristic ", "a special attraction", " something offered to the public or advertised as particularly attractive"
The last is probably the closest, but it's really incomplete. Companies frequently advertise things as "new features" that aren't any such thing.
I consider the security center as just another part of Microsoft's attempt to fix their core security problems without actually fixing the thing that's actually causing the problem. It's not a new feature, it's a bug fix.
The pop-up blocker might be considered a new feature if Microsoft had come out with it before everyone else had already done it. They wouldn't need to be first with it, even, but coming last after everyone's screaming for it? Nobody's going to see that as a "new feature". That's like being the last to install standard air-bags and then talking up your safety record because you have air-bags. Nobody's going to take that seriously.
In fact this at least makes toolbars consistent between metal and aqua windows, so that's a plus
It makes the title bar inconsistent between Aqua windows with toolbars and Aqua windows without toolbars.
And it doesn't make the toolbar really consistent with Metal, because Metal windows don't have "a toolbar that extends the title bar" - that is, there's nothing in the metal look that binds the title bar specifically to the toolbar. Rather, they have "a title bar that extends to the entire textured surface of the window".
Microsoft already has a PDF-like document format and a reader called "Microsoft Reader". It's targeted for PDAs, competing head to head with the mobile version of Acrobat Reader. It's based on an XML document format.
It's the least pleasant eBook reader I have ever used, bar none.
This bodes. This is just so chock full of boding it scares me.
Greg, man, what's your point? Do you really expect that Microsoft's Metro will suck any less? Microsoft's already got HTML rendering built into the OS, if Metro was going to be anything like HTML they'd just use that. Metro is going to be functionally equivalent to PDF, which means it's going to suck at least as much as PDF if not more.
What's the relationship between a scanned image format and a structured document format? I mean, PDF is already a couple of levels lower than I'm really happy with, but at least it doesn't turn text into unsearchable unextractable bitmaps.
I thought the definition of new was "having existed or having been made but a short time"
You must be reading a different language. In English when someone talks about "new feature" they usually mean something that is both "new" and a "feature". Now I know that there's no hard and fast rules in English, and it's full of special cases, but I'm drawing a blank on this one... I haven't run into it before.
You really believe the guy is telling the truth about never having heard of iTunes, he just came up withthe name independantly after the huge press splash? Seriously?
Some of the other things they've done are pretty unpleasant, but this one is like people bashing Microsoft for "stealing" BSD code.
it looks like NSToolbar has a gradient down from the top of the window in all cases, which looks nice - perhaps that's what you mean.
Yeh, that's what I mean. That's really disturbing, because it's taking the Metal idea of merging the window content with the controls and having a fundamental difference in the appearance of different apps that has nothing to do with the application itself... it's taking that and bringing it into Aqua apps.
I can't conceive how anyone can possibly consider this a good thing.
the security center, the updated browser with the popup blocker, the no execute feature, the IE Add-on Manager, the revamped firewall, and Windows Update 5
Like I said, SP2 doesn't include any new features.
Look. People don't buy software to run it, they buy software to do something with it. That's why Microsoft is where they are... people want to do something with their computer, they want to run software that does things they want to do, and they buy Windows to run that software. Changes in an OS that don't give you a way to do something you couldn't do before aren't going to be perceived as new features, they're going to be seen as bug fixes. People are willing to buy bug fixes from a third party, but they're not expecting to buy bug fixes from the company that sold them the bugs. If the bugs are big and important enough, they may buy the fixes anyway, but they're not going to be happy about it and you can't get them to do that very often. If it's a really big bug, and you really can't be blamed for it, and you really worked hard to fix it, then maybe you can slide it in without people getting ticked off. But Microsoft's not in that situation.
What I am trying to point out here is that the difference in responsiveness between the 2 stays even when you eliminate the GUI completely.
I find this hard to believe. Did you test this on the same hardware? What version of UNIX were you using? Because I have been using UNIX for a quarter of a century and I can not recall ever finding myself in a situation where a character based interactive application that wasn't blocked on other I/O was effected by any number of background CPU-intensive apps. Ever. Even when the load average is up in the double digits, when there are dozens of programs competing for the run queue, interactive applications autmatically and invisibly get priority.
I'm sure OS/2 does just as well, there. But I can't see how any change in the scheduler could make it do better than 'it's always got a higher priority'. If you were seeing a difference in behaviour then something else must have been different between the applications or their environment.
A GUI that employs a single, synchronous message queue for events between the GUI and applications is really not a good way to achieve responsiveness at all
Actually, a single event queue feeding a single event loop is a very common technique used in real-time control systems, because as long as you can control the latency for each operation you have complete control of the latency for the system as a whole. Having a single queue that imposes virtually no latency of its own is still going to give you a more responsive user interface than multiple queues that deliberately impose latency to increase throughput.
Microsoft does sell Plus Packs for XP - two of them. One regular plus pack, and one "digital media" plus pack.
Interesting. They're certainly marketing them effectively... so effectively I've never seen or heard of them.
I'm sure they will want some $$$ for anti-virus and spyware protection. Even though it seems like a conflict of interest for them to charge money for that.
Conflict of Interest is, well, that's understating the situation. Especially since it would be SO easy for them to fix most of the avenues those things use to get into the system in the first place.
A little, just a little. Spotlight is a very nice piece of technology, and it's doing something that I've really wanted for a very long time. There's nothing else in Tiger that's really exciting, and some of it seems kind of dumb, like the way Dashboard widgets are relegated to a translucent ghetto however fast and cool looking, but Spotlight is nice. It does what I've been doing with Harvest on my FreeBSD box, plus it keeps the cache up to date in real time instead of waiting until my nightly pass over $HOME.
Though... I suspect you implemented the OS side of it in the wrong place. I'm pretty familiar with the BSD code (say hi to Jordan for me) and I've looked at what you have in Darwin and it sure looks like you could have done everything you need to notify the userland side of Spotlight, your daemon, from the vnode layer. There's a handful of VOPs that need to be reported back to userland, and you can track changes in the vnode and file modification dates so you wouldn't need to actually put any code in the critical path of write. In fact I suspect that you might even be able to get the same stuff working on FreeBSD without any kernel changes by using kevents, but I'm not sure there's quite enough hooks and that stuff doesn't seem to have made it over to Darwin anyway... alas.
Do that, and it would work over ANY file system... not just HFS+.
Which would be nice.
Why? Well, I'd really like to run with UFS instead of HFS+ under me. I switched back to the Mac a couple of years ago and I did try an install with UFS a couple of times, though, and some programs objected... so I went back to HFS+. Since then I've had several occasions where HFS got so corrupted that fsck_hfs couldn't fix it. That bothered me, it's something I'd expect from Microsoft, not Apple. I've never had UFS corrupted so badly that fsck couldn't fix the file system structure itself, and aparently having HFS+ break itself so badly you need to take heroic measures to put it back together again is a long-standing problem from the classic Mac OS days.
Spotlight would make it a damn sight harder to get back to UFS should HFS+ tick me off enough, which gives me another reason for wanting to stay clear: I can EASILY see getting totally hooked on Spotlight. And much as I like Mac OS X, stuff like this makes me worry about getting that hooked.
On the other, a different-looking toolbar control.
Yep. Well, the user interface is a good chunk of why I'm in the Mac world at all. It's a lot nicer than what I've got on my NeXTstation and in GNUstep on FreeBSD. A nice user interface and having actual third-party commercial software available on top of the rock-solid OS I was already using is what convinced me to buy an old Mac and a copy of Jaguar and give it a shot.
And, I mean, a few messages up there you were making a big deal about the angle of the shadow in an icon. You're laughing now, but you really do know that the details of the user interface are important... and when someone has an immediate and perhaps irrational negative reaction to a change in the user interface, well, you know... there may be a problem there.
Just maybe, it's not entirely irrational.
You did a good job with Panther. The changes to Aqua itself between Jaguar and Panther are almost all improvements. I don't care for all the Metal but except for a few legacy Carbon apps (unfortunately including Finder, but that's a rant for another day) I can get rid of that by tweaking the NIB file.
As you know, look and feel is important, and I can't see how the new NSToolbar can possibly be an improvement. It changes a part of the window visuals that should stay in the background: the Aqua window decorations, especially in Panther, are very nicely done, they're understated and elegant, they do their job without distracting attention from the application. You could say they're supporting characters on the user interface stage. The use of uniform visuals for these common elements has been one of the attractive things about the Mac. But now you've got these windows aggressively asserting "Hey! I've got a TOOLBAR! Isn't that COOL!"
It's not going to be hard for Microsoft to do it this time.
How do you figure? This time Microsoft isn't competing against an overpriced product and overpriced fonts, and there's no groundswell of anger against PDF.
If anything, the document format that people are hating right now is Microsoft's own Word format.
Apple's approach is not going to work for Windows users.
I'm not suggesting Apple's approach, I'm suggesting something that Microsoft MIGHT be able to pull off toget the same results.
Apple dosn't sell "Plus Packs" and bundles and do all that Big Top Walmart Blue Light Special Offer hokum that I'm suggesting. Microsoft used to, and they can do it again... if they can come up with compelling add-ons for Windows.
Nobody's being asked to pay $129 for (SP2), even though it took about the same amount of work to produce as Tiger.
That's because SP2 doesn't include new features, it's all bugfixes. They're saving up features (or at least promising them) to go into in Longhorn, the next big Painful Upgrade. If instead they release them bit by bit as paid-for enhancements (REAL enhancements) to Windows they CAN sell them, and then Longhorn would just become a bundle of existing Plus Packs and maybe a preview of the next Plus Pack.
Once you've got it all, the only way to go is down.
Fire laterally hard enough and you'll make orbital velocity. You can only hover on one engine through brute force for so long, at some point you have to hit the steering jets, and add another vector to your trajectory.
Microsoft's got to quit emulating Microsoft and start emulating IBM.
I'm starting to think that they're at the same point Apple was at in the 90s: every attempt to build a modern successor to OS 9 from scratch crashed and burned horribly.
That's an interesting point and I have to say that I agree to a certain extent that that's what they seem to be trying to do. What I don't understand is why.
Apple HAD to make a break from classic Mac OS, because it was really pretty awful. NT isn't awful. It's not great, but it's in nowhere like the trouble OS 8 and OS 9 were in.
Microsoft really could do what Apple's doing and introduce new bundled features on a year-to-year basis, or even sell them as $50 Plus Packs, and maintain a steady income without either losing market share or alienating customers. They don't need to be pulling the "All New Windows" every few years like they did in the '90s... they reached a reasonably stable peak in terms of what they're really capable of doing right with Windows 2000.
They've got a mature product they can build on, sell new accessories for it, bundle it as "Windows 2004, you get Windows 2000, the XP Plus Pack, the GUI Glitz Plus Pack, and a special this-release-only sidebar, a combined value of almost $300, for $150. For only $75 more you get the Professional Pack, normally $125, in Windows 2004 Professional".
That's how a mature company sells mature products, and it's what microsoft really needs to do. Because, Microsoft is a mature company, they've got the brass ring and there's no way they can significantly boost Windows sales over what they'd be without building a "successor OS". They don't need to act like a startup now, it's just getting in the way of doing the best job and making the most money.
the third major window style on the system (Aqua, Metal, and now Plastic)
No, that's Aqua.
It doesn't look like Aqua to me. It looks like a slice of a Metal window with the brushed aluminum airbrushed out glued onto an Aqua one, and the stuff below the metal-style window looks like Aqua, but I can't believe the top section was laid out in a standard NIB file.
Slashdot Mirror
PDF isn't bitmap or vector, it's text and font. It can contain bitmaps and vectors as well, but it's basically a text format, and with the right tools or a little work it's even editable.
That utility was deprecated two OS releases ago.
. plist"
So Disk Utility doesn't call "fsck_hfs" to do the heavy lifting any more, the fact that it looks like it's getting its output from that is purely concidence, and the fact that "/System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/Contents/Info
contains "FSRepairExecutable" set to "fsck_hfs" and "FSRepairArguments" set to "-y" doesn't mean it's doing the same thing as I do when I boot to single user mode and run the same command?
Glad you cleared that up.
You're uninformed. Go read the developer documentations.
Spotlight's performance depends on HFS+ ability to locate recently changed files (specifically, btree searches for filesystem metadata). On any other file system it has to depend on an exhaustive search of the file system, which means it's restricted to the same periodic scan of the file system that every other search engine (such as Harvest) uses, and so the big advantage you get from Spotlight as compared to other tools vanishes.
If I'm wrong, if I can change some random file off in the filesystem and depend on Spotlight indexing that change just as quickly whether it's on HFS+ or UFS, then I'd love to know about it. Can you give me a URL?
Feature: "a prominent part or characteristic ", "a special attraction", " something offered to the public or advertised as particularly attractive"
The last is probably the closest, but it's really incomplete. Companies frequently advertise things as "new features" that aren't any such thing.
I consider the security center as just another part of Microsoft's attempt to fix their core security problems without actually fixing the thing that's actually causing the problem. It's not a new feature, it's a bug fix.
The pop-up blocker might be considered a new feature if Microsoft had come out with it before everyone else had already done it. They wouldn't need to be first with it, even, but coming last after everyone's screaming for it? Nobody's going to see that as a "new feature". That's like being the last to install standard air-bags and then talking up your safety record because you have air-bags. Nobody's going to take that seriously.
In fact this at least makes toolbars consistent between metal and aqua windows, so that's a plus
It makes the title bar inconsistent between Aqua windows with toolbars and Aqua windows without toolbars.
And it doesn't make the toolbar really consistent with Metal, because Metal windows don't have "a toolbar that extends the title bar" - that is, there's nothing in the metal look that binds the title bar specifically to the toolbar. Rather, they have "a title bar that extends to the entire textured surface of the window".
Microsoft already has a PDF-like document format and a reader called "Microsoft Reader". It's targeted for PDAs, competing head to head with the mobile version of Acrobat Reader. It's based on an XML document format.
It's the least pleasant eBook reader I have ever used, bar none.
This bodes. This is just so chock full of boding it scares me.
Greg, man, what's your point? Do you really expect that Microsoft's Metro will suck any less? Microsoft's already got HTML rendering built into the OS, if Metro was going to be anything like HTML they'd just use that. Metro is going to be functionally equivalent to PDF, which means it's going to suck at least as much as PDF if not more.
What's the relationship between a scanned image format and a structured document format? I mean, PDF is already a couple of levels lower than I'm really happy with, but at least it doesn't turn text into unsearchable unextractable bitmaps.
I thought the definition of new was "having existed or having been made but a short time"
You must be reading a different language. In English when someone talks about "new feature" they usually mean something that is both "new" and a "feature". Now I know that there's no hard and fast rules in English, and it's full of special cases, but I'm drawing a blank on this one... I haven't run into it before.
You really believe the guy is telling the truth about never having heard of iTunes, he just came up withthe name independantly after the huge press splash? Seriously?
Some of the other things they've done are pretty unpleasant, but this one is like people bashing Microsoft for "stealing" BSD code.
Why did it take a couple of ACs to answer this, instead of the guy who's actually working at Apple?
And you can always edit NIBs to turn it off in applications that do.
Oh, thank god.
it looks like NSToolbar has a gradient down from the top of the window in all cases, which looks nice - perhaps that's what you mean.
Yeh, that's what I mean. That's really disturbing, because it's taking the Metal idea of merging the window content with the controls and having a fundamental difference in the appearance of different apps that has nothing to do with the application itself... it's taking that and bringing it into Aqua apps.
I can't conceive how anyone can possibly consider this a good thing.
the security center, the updated browser with the popup blocker, the no execute feature, the IE Add-on Manager, the revamped firewall, and Windows Update 5
Like I said, SP2 doesn't include any new features.
Look. People don't buy software to run it, they buy software to do something with it. That's why Microsoft is where they are... people want to do something with their computer, they want to run software that does things they want to do, and they buy Windows to run that software. Changes in an OS that don't give you a way to do something you couldn't do before aren't going to be perceived as new features, they're going to be seen as bug fixes. People are willing to buy bug fixes from a third party, but they're not expecting to buy bug fixes from the company that sold them the bugs. If the bugs are big and important enough, they may buy the fixes anyway, but they're not going to be happy about it and you can't get them to do that very often. If it's a really big bug, and you really can't be blamed for it, and you really worked hard to fix it, then maybe you can slide it in without people getting ticked off. But Microsoft's not in that situation.
They will just implement it and automatically everyone who gets a new computer after Longhorn is released will get what Microsoft ships.
Really? Everyone who gets a new computer? Well well, that's really interesting. Everyone, eh? How about that.
What I am trying to point out here is that the difference in responsiveness between the 2 stays even when you eliminate the GUI completely.
I find this hard to believe. Did you test this on the same hardware? What version of UNIX were you using? Because I have been using UNIX for a quarter of a century and I can not recall ever finding myself in a situation where a character based interactive application that wasn't blocked on other I/O was effected by any number of background CPU-intensive apps. Ever. Even when the load average is up in the double digits, when there are dozens of programs competing for the run queue, interactive applications autmatically and invisibly get priority.
I'm sure OS/2 does just as well, there. But I can't see how any change in the scheduler could make it do better than 'it's always got a higher priority'. If you were seeing a difference in behaviour then something else must have been different between the applications or their environment.
A GUI that employs a single, synchronous message queue for events between the GUI and applications is really not a good way to achieve responsiveness at all
Actually, a single event queue feeding a single event loop is a very common technique used in real-time control systems, because as long as you can control the latency for each operation you have complete control of the latency for the system as a whole. Having a single queue that imposes virtually no latency of its own is still going to give you a more responsive user interface than multiple queues that deliberately impose latency to increase throughput.
Microsoft does sell Plus Packs for XP - two of them. One regular plus pack, and one "digital media" plus pack.
Interesting. They're certainly marketing them effectively... so effectively I've never seen or heard of them.
I'm sure they will want some $$$ for anti-virus and spyware protection. Even though it seems like a conflict of interest for them to charge money for that.
Conflict of Interest is, well, that's understating the situation. Especially since it would be SO easy for them to fix most of the avenues those things use to get into the system in the first place.
Are you fucking kidding me?
A little, just a little. Spotlight is a very nice piece of technology, and it's doing something that I've really wanted for a very long time. There's nothing else in Tiger that's really exciting, and some of it seems kind of dumb, like the way Dashboard widgets are relegated to a translucent ghetto however fast and cool looking, but Spotlight is nice. It does what I've been doing with Harvest on my FreeBSD box, plus it keeps the cache up to date in real time instead of waiting until my nightly pass over $HOME.
Though... I suspect you implemented the OS side of it in the wrong place. I'm pretty familiar with the BSD code (say hi to Jordan for me) and I've looked at what you have in Darwin and it sure looks like you could have done everything you need to notify the userland side of Spotlight, your daemon, from the vnode layer. There's a handful of VOPs that need to be reported back to userland, and you can track changes in the vnode and file modification dates so you wouldn't need to actually put any code in the critical path of write. In fact I suspect that you might even be able to get the same stuff working on FreeBSD without any kernel changes by using kevents, but I'm not sure there's quite enough hooks and that stuff doesn't seem to have made it over to Darwin anyway... alas.
Do that, and it would work over ANY file system... not just HFS+.
Which would be nice.
Why? Well, I'd really like to run with UFS instead of HFS+ under me. I switched back to the Mac a couple of years ago and I did try an install with UFS a couple of times, though, and some programs objected... so I went back to HFS+. Since then I've had several occasions where HFS got so corrupted that fsck_hfs couldn't fix it. That bothered me, it's something I'd expect from Microsoft, not Apple. I've never had UFS corrupted so badly that fsck couldn't fix the file system structure itself, and aparently having HFS+ break itself so badly you need to take heroic measures to put it back together again is a long-standing problem from the classic Mac OS days.
Spotlight would make it a damn sight harder to get back to UFS should HFS+ tick me off enough, which gives me another reason for wanting to stay clear: I can EASILY see getting totally hooked on Spotlight. And much as I like Mac OS X, stuff like this makes me worry about getting that hooked.
On the other, a different-looking toolbar control.
Yep. Well, the user interface is a good chunk of why I'm in the Mac world at all. It's a lot nicer than what I've got on my NeXTstation and in GNUstep on FreeBSD. A nice user interface and having actual third-party commercial software available on top of the rock-solid OS I was already using is what convinced me to buy an old Mac and a copy of Jaguar and give it a shot.
And, I mean, a few messages up there you were making a big deal about the angle of the shadow in an icon. You're laughing now, but you really do know that the details of the user interface are important... and when someone has an immediate and perhaps irrational negative reaction to a change in the user interface, well, you know... there may be a problem there.
Just maybe, it's not entirely irrational.
You did a good job with Panther. The changes to Aqua itself between Jaguar and Panther are almost all improvements. I don't care for all the Metal but except for a few legacy Carbon apps (unfortunately including Finder, but that's a rant for another day) I can get rid of that by tweaking the NIB file.
As you know, look and feel is important, and I can't see how the new NSToolbar can possibly be an improvement. It changes a part of the window visuals that should stay in the background: the Aqua window decorations, especially in Panther, are very nicely done, they're understated and elegant, they do their job without distracting attention from the application. You could say they're supporting characters on the user interface stage. The use of uniform visuals for these common elements has been one of the attractive things about the Mac. But now you've got these windows aggressively asserting "Hey! I've got a TOOLBAR! Isn't that COOL!"
Why? Can you explain that?
PDF doesn't do any of that. Adobe Reader does that, but you don't need to use Adobe Reader to read PDF. Apple figured that out, why can't Microsoft?
You are SO ready for a Macintosh.
It's not going to be hard for Microsoft to do it this time.
How do you figure? This time Microsoft isn't competing against an overpriced product and overpriced fonts, and there's no groundswell of anger against PDF.
If anything, the document format that people are hating right now is Microsoft's own Word format.
Apple's approach is not going to work for Windows users.
I'm not suggesting Apple's approach, I'm suggesting something that Microsoft MIGHT be able to pull off toget the same results.
Apple dosn't sell "Plus Packs" and bundles and do all that Big Top Walmart Blue Light Special Offer hokum that I'm suggesting. Microsoft used to, and they can do it again... if they can come up with compelling add-ons for Windows.
Nobody's being asked to pay $129 for (SP2), even though it took about the same amount of work to produce as Tiger.
That's because SP2 doesn't include new features, it's all bugfixes. They're saving up features (or at least promising them) to go into in Longhorn, the next big Painful Upgrade. If instead they release them bit by bit as paid-for enhancements (REAL enhancements) to Windows they CAN sell them, and then Longhorn would just become a bundle of existing Plus Packs and maybe a preview of the next Plus Pack.
Once you've got it all, the only way to go is down.
Fire laterally hard enough and you'll make orbital velocity. You can only hover on one engine through brute force for so long, at some point you have to hit the steering jets, and add another vector to your trajectory.
Microsoft's got to quit emulating Microsoft and start emulating IBM.
That's what NSToolbar looks like now.
*choke*
Oh god.
Oh all the gods and their pet demons.
Then... damn. I don't know if Spotlight is really enough to make it worthwhile upgrading to Tiger now. I guess that'll save me some money.
What were you guys thinking? No, really?
what Carbon applications can you point to that OS X wouldn't be better off without. The Finder?
Hell yes! Finder should have been let fade away instead of being used to turn the nice NeXT file manager into an ugly hybrid.
iTunes would be better in Cocoa: it would use the standard user interface and I could turn off that damn Metal look.
BBedit? Yeh, I tried it, I hated it. It's just oldschool enough to be nasty without being oldschool enough to be nice.
Games? We have a PS2, XBox, Gamecube, and Gameboy. All of them are better game boxes than a Mac, and I still don't play games.
Photoshop? The old photoshop under Classic is faster than Carbon Photoshop.
I'm starting to think that they're at the same point Apple was at in the 90s: every attempt to build a modern successor to OS 9 from scratch crashed and burned horribly.
That's an interesting point and I have to say that I agree to a certain extent that that's what they seem to be trying to do. What I don't understand is why.
Apple HAD to make a break from classic Mac OS, because it was really pretty awful. NT isn't awful. It's not great, but it's in nowhere like the trouble OS 8 and OS 9 were in.
Microsoft really could do what Apple's doing and introduce new bundled features on a year-to-year basis, or even sell them as $50 Plus Packs, and maintain a steady income without either losing market share or alienating customers. They don't need to be pulling the "All New Windows" every few years like they did in the '90s... they reached a reasonably stable peak in terms of what they're really capable of doing right with Windows 2000.
They've got a mature product they can build on, sell new accessories for it, bundle it as "Windows 2004, you get Windows 2000, the XP Plus Pack, the GUI Glitz Plus Pack, and a special this-release-only sidebar, a combined value of almost $300, for $150. For only $75 more you get the Professional Pack, normally $125, in Windows 2004 Professional".
That's how a mature company sells mature products, and it's what microsoft really needs to do. Because, Microsoft is a mature company, they've got the brass ring and there's no way they can significantly boost Windows sales over what they'd be without building a "successor OS". They don't need to act like a startup now, it's just getting in the way of doing the best job and making the most money.
the third major window style on the system (Aqua, Metal, and now Plastic)
No, that's Aqua.
It doesn't look like Aqua to me. It looks like a slice of a Metal window with the brushed aluminum airbrushed out glued onto an Aqua one, and the stuff below the metal-style window looks like Aqua, but I can't believe the top section was laid out in a standard NIB file.