I agree completely, and I think it is intentional on Apple's part. Even the original Mac had at least one window that didn't really fit the "everything is either a document or a container of documents" model, namely the control panel, and that's part of the reason the control panel was confusing for people.
So now Apple has decided to have two window styles; pinstripe for docs and brushed metal for apps. As for Safari, if you think of the web as a delivery system for multimedia content, it makes sense for Safari to look like a player rather than a document viewer.
You are in the majority. MDI has fallen out of favor on Windows and was never popular outside the Windows world. Even Microsoft doesn't use it anymore -- Word 2000 is SDI.
What you put around that kernel to make a functional system - i.e., the rest of the operating system - is GNU.
That's what RMS seems to believe, but it isn't true.
The Linux kernel plus the GNU toolset do not an operating system make. You also need filesystems, device drivers, bootup code, and lots of other bits and pieces that the GNU project didn't need yet. The Linux community wrote and contributed those things because they wanted to run Linux, not because the GNU project was lacking them.
RMS's whole point is that GNU had been working for many years to create a free (as in speech) OS, had it all together except for the kernel (IMHO because they got too ambitious with the HURD), along came Linus and provided that kernel.
Linus released the kernel under GPL.
If RMS or the FSF thought that Linus' kernel was the last missing piece, the piece that was preventing GNU from being a complete operating system, then they could have added it to the GNU project and released it as a complete operating system. And they could have called it GNU or GNU/Linux or whatever they wanted to call it.
But they didn't. And they didn't think of the name GNU/Linux until after Linux distributions like Slackware and Red Hat had an installed base of people who thought the OS they were running was called Linux.
All DVDs encode the material at a resolution of 720x480. A flag in an MPEG header indicates whether the bitmap represents a 4:3 image or a 16:9 image; either way the pixels aren't square.
On a DVD box, "Enhanced for 16x9 televisions" means the bitmap represents a 16:9 image. When played on a 4:3 TV, vertical scaling is performed in the DVD player, producing a letterboxed image.
For whatever reason, some DVD creators letterbox the film first, then encode the letterboxed image. So some of the 720x480 bitmap is wasted on the image of the black bars, resulting in lower picture quality.
So if the Tron DVD is "enhanced for 16x9" then Disney did it right.
You should definitely start with Sun's code conventions. Java is young enough that there hasn't been time for lots of divergent coding styles to take hold, and Java comes with a large run-time library which is all written in a single style.
For example, if you want to associate some code with a Swing button click, you have to implement the interface "ActionListener" by writing a method called "actionPerformed." You are just going to confuse things if you try to enforce a different set of conventions for your own code, like "mActionPerformed" or "IActionListener".
In my own projects, I also insist that every class and method start with a javadoc comment containing at least one descriptive sentence, and it is not allowed to be a cut-and-paste comment from some other class or method.
The original Mac offered the desktop as a place to store files, allowing new users to be productive without having to learn about filesystems and storage media. But it doesn't scale; once you have too many files, the desktop gets cluttered and you can't find anything.
The Mac answer is to make users transition to using folders on the hard drive. This is a difficult transition for some people, and since they're working within a visual metaphor, they focus on the existance of the hard drive icon as the source of difficulty. This is the context of the original article, and the reason it suggests eliminating the hard drive icon.
What I find interesting is that Unix traditionally avoided the problem a different way. When using X11 and one of the older window managers (like mwm, olwm, or twm) there is no Mac style desktop. Sure, there's a background area behind the windows, but you can't store a file there. Any icon that that is on the desktop represents either a running application or a minimized window (depending on your point of view.) The same was true of Nextstep.
With no Mac style desktop, users are forced to understand the notion of saving a file into a folder right from the start. To make this easier, applications offer the user's home directory as the default place to save files.
Personally, I think the typical Linux user already understands files and directories. I think they've already transitioned away from storing everything on the desktop, or never did so in the first place. Apple's target audience for the original Mac was computer-phobic first-time computer buyers (remember the ad slogan, "the computer for the rest of us.") Seventeen years later, I don't think that market exists any more, or if it does it isn't worth pandering to.
This does not mean sacrificing usability. Eliminating or downplaying a rarely used feature actually improves usability. The bottom line is this: to the extent that Gnome and KDE encourage users to store files directly on the desktop, they also have to figure out how to transition them to using directories when the screen gets too cluttered. The simpler alternative is to eliminate or downplay the ability to store things on the desktop.
Consider English literature and ASCII. If you look at a reproduction of Beowulf in the original Old English, you find lots of characters that aren't present in ASCII. That doesn't mean ASCII is worthless, and it doesn't mean anyone had to accept restricted access to literature. It just means there was room for improvement because ASCII wasn't suitable for all purposes.
The Unicode designers got bogged down trying to create an encoding suitable for every possible purpose. If the goals had been more modest, say to allow Chinese language URLs, there would have been faster ways to go about it.
Actually, on a typical PC, the perceptual difference between 0x00 and 0x33 is the same as that between 0xCC and 0xFF. In the absence of any gamma correction, the transfer function from frame buffer value to CRT brightness is close to the inverse of the transfer function from CRT brightness to perceived brightness. Which means the pixel values should be perceptually coded.
In fact, JPEG relies on perceptual coding, so that the perceived effect of the lossy algorithm is minimized.
The exceptions to the rule are SGI machines (which were designed with ray-tracing in mind, so they assume physical coding in the frame buffer and use gamma correction to convert to perceptual coding) and Macs (which have a gamma correction intended to mimic the dot gain of the original Laser Writer.)
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So now Apple has decided to have two window styles; pinstripe for docs and brushed metal for apps. As for Safari, if you think of the web as a delivery system for multimedia content, it makes sense for Safari to look like a player rather than a document viewer.
You are in the majority. MDI has fallen out of favor on Windows and was never popular outside the Windows world. Even Microsoft doesn't use it anymore -- Word 2000 is SDI.
That's what RMS seems to believe, but it isn't true.
The Linux kernel plus the GNU toolset do not an operating system make. You also need filesystems, device drivers, bootup code, and lots of other bits and pieces that the GNU project didn't need yet. The Linux community wrote and contributed those things because they wanted to run Linux, not because the GNU project was lacking them.
Linus released the kernel under GPL. If RMS or the FSF thought that Linus' kernel was the last missing piece, the piece that was preventing GNU from being a complete operating system, then they could have added it to the GNU project and released it as a complete operating system. And they could have called it GNU or GNU/Linux or whatever they wanted to call it.
But they didn't. And they didn't think of the name GNU/Linux until after Linux distributions like Slackware and Red Hat had an installed base of people who thought the OS they were running was called Linux.
OK, you're wrong.
All DVDs encode the material at a resolution of 720x480. A flag in an MPEG header indicates whether the bitmap represents a 4:3 image or a 16:9 image; either way the pixels aren't square.
On a DVD box, "Enhanced for 16x9 televisions" means the bitmap represents a 16:9 image. When played on a 4:3 TV, vertical scaling is performed in the DVD player, producing a letterboxed image.
For whatever reason, some DVD creators letterbox the film first, then encode the letterboxed image. So some of the 720x480 bitmap is wasted on the image of the black bars, resulting in lower picture quality.
So if the Tron DVD is "enhanced for 16x9" then Disney did it right.
For example, if you want to associate some code with a Swing button click, you have to implement the interface "ActionListener" by writing a method called "actionPerformed." You are just going to confuse things if you try to enforce a different set of conventions for your own code, like "mActionPerformed" or "IActionListener".
In my own projects, I also insist that every class and method start with a javadoc comment containing at least one descriptive sentence, and it is not allowed to be a cut-and-paste comment from some other class or method.
The Mac answer is to make users transition to using folders on the hard drive. This is a difficult transition for some people, and since they're working within a visual metaphor, they focus on the existance of the hard drive icon as the source of difficulty. This is the context of the original article, and the reason it suggests eliminating the hard drive icon.
What I find interesting is that Unix traditionally avoided the problem a different way. When using X11 and one of the older window managers (like mwm, olwm, or twm) there is no Mac style desktop. Sure, there's a background area behind the windows, but you can't store a file there. Any icon that that is on the desktop represents either a running application or a minimized window (depending on your point of view.) The same was true of Nextstep.
With no Mac style desktop, users are forced to understand the notion of saving a file into a folder right from the start. To make this easier, applications offer the user's home directory as the default place to save files.
Personally, I think the typical Linux user already understands files and directories. I think they've already transitioned away from storing everything on the desktop, or never did so in the first place. Apple's target audience for the original Mac was computer-phobic first-time computer buyers (remember the ad slogan, "the computer for the rest of us.") Seventeen years later, I don't think that market exists any more, or if it does it isn't worth pandering to.
This does not mean sacrificing usability. Eliminating or downplaying a rarely used feature actually improves usability. The bottom line is this: to the extent that Gnome and KDE encourage users to store files directly on the desktop, they also have to figure out how to transition them to using directories when the screen gets too cluttered. The simpler alternative is to eliminate or downplay the ability to store things on the desktop.
Consider English literature and ASCII. If you look at a reproduction of Beowulf in the original Old English, you find lots of characters that aren't present in ASCII. That doesn't mean ASCII is worthless, and it doesn't mean anyone had to accept restricted access to literature. It just means there was room for improvement because ASCII wasn't suitable for all purposes.
The Unicode designers got bogged down trying to create an encoding suitable for every possible purpose. If the goals had been more modest, say to allow Chinese language URLs, there would have been faster ways to go about it.
The ABC wasn't programmable. In my book, if it ain't programmable, it ain't a computer.
In fact, JPEG relies on perceptual coding, so that the perceived effect of the lossy algorithm is minimized.
The exceptions to the rule are SGI machines (which were designed with ray-tracing in mind, so they assume physical coding in the frame buffer and use gamma correction to convert to perceptual coding) and Macs (which have a gamma correction intended to mimic the dot gain of the original Laser Writer.)
For more than you ever wanted to know about gamma, see Charles Poynton's Gamma FAQ and the sRGB proposal.