Well it all depends how much online you are. If you are online just a few hours a day (or a week), dial-up is for you. I live in Europe and I think my country has the most expensive DSL offering compared to my neighbour countries: a bit less than 100Euro per month, flat-rate, all-ports open. The speed is just 256kbps downsteam and 64kbps upstream.
Before that I had ISDN which is 64kbps both ways. However, we when we had dial-up (okay, ISDN..dialup is not much difference in price), it was about 100Euro subscription per year and that's only the start: about 0.016Euro per minute in the evening (local phonecall). If you are about online 4 hours a day and that every day of the month (counting 30 days a month), it adds up to 115.2 Euro for the connection alone. Add 1/12 * 100Euro for the subscription it makes about 124 Euro per month only on internet fees. Now I pay less, have a faster connection, online 24/24 7/7 and I can run my own mailserver and webserver.
There is just a certain point where broadband is cheaper.
It was a no-brainer to decide for DSL... Considering the fact that neighbour countries have cheaper offers (I have the cheapest one possible in my country), you only have a reason to stay with dial-up if you just check your email in the evening. (Note: broadband-on-cable does not exist here, it does in the neighbour countries)
I won't go into discussing about the quality of Iomega. You can always read my other posts.
About the floppies however I can agree that the turned to crap in the last few years. On a box of 10, usually 3 are defective when using the first time. I still have some 10 year old IBM diskettes from back in the PS/2 days which work fine. Actualy they are my bootdisks I use to rescue PC's. Mostly now I use bootable CD-Roms (selfmade, with tools RAMDisk, etc...etc..) but I always have RAWRITE and some diskette images on that CD-Rom just in order to be *sure* I can boot whatever happens. You never know when you get that old P90 that granny wants to use to play bridge and email her grandkids. Not kidding you, those old machines are in use...and not only by Geeks and Nerds like me who use them as gateways and firewalls.
Oh, and finally: CD-R's are indeed getting crap too. Just recenty a (luckily buffer-underflowerd) CD-R got under my mousemat which is just slightly stick underneath (by design, not due to Mountain Dew spillage). Ehm...when I removed it the mousemat was full of silver confetti and the CD-R was a nice transparent disk. So much for quality. I remember the day when CD-R's were 8$ a piece, and those still work! Guess I'm just getting old...
I just say: the floppy is dead! long live the floppy!
That's not entirely true. It was indeed a secondary harddisk for an ageing laptop I had when I went to University. (Using a PCMCIA SCSI card that has only support on Windows 95 and Linux through recompling pcmcia-cs) This means it did 500km on the train with me each weekend. There is one little difference though: I treat my hardware with respect. I bought the case Iomega made for it, and I always handled the disks and the drive very gently. I always went sure that the surface on which it stood was hard and flat. The price of a Jaz was too high for a student to handle it like a piece of crap. I think the Jaz drives were not entirely conceived as portable devices, but more as stationary ones, only moving the disks. I had disks drop from my desk, mostly withing the cases they came with and they never developed any problems. As I said, you probably had to be lucky. I am glad I was. For your information, the Zip I mentioned in my post was the internal SCSI model. It lasted 4 years but was only used once in a month or so. So moving around doesn't really explain the breakage of either. Look, I woudn't buy Iomega now...I have seen their hardware degrade over the years (Back in the day, I used Bernouilli Drives...but noone remembers them). But as far as I know there is no such thing as a portable removable non-propritary drive. CD-RW just doesn't cut it for me. (Cheapo drive that came with OEM computer kills every CD-RW I put in it, CD-R works fine. My Mac handles CD-RWs fine...even the ones killed by my PC)
And I still have my floppies too. They are lifesavers. I do have some bootable CD-Roms I made myself, but strangely enough Adaptec CD-Creator (also came with the crappy OEM drive) makes boot-CD's by asking a boot-floppy! Urks... So I still need floppies to be able to create a bootable image in order to make bootable CD's. Kinda breaks the idea of removing the floppy drive from a PC.
Anyone knows how to create bootable CD's on the Mac (OS X). Never saw the option anywhere.
My Zip drive was also the original SCSI. I wanted to replace it with another 100 or 250 SCSI model and was not really happy to hear only USB models were made. Now I have a pile of useless zipdisks lying around. My Jaz was one of the first SCSI models. I guess you just have to be lucky. One last remark: many people think of it as a normal harddisk. Which it appears to be, but it does error correction and this error correction only works when formatted with the Iomega tools. This means you better not format it in ext2, NTFS or FAT32. That's asking for trouble.
I see everyone complaining about Iomega here, but I used Iomega products *before* they became big and get the Zip out. Anyone remember the Bernouilli Drives? Hey, we had a drive for over 10 years and when we gave it away it was still working as on the first day.
Strange...I have a 1Gig Jaz which I now use as a backup drive. I used it for about 3 years as a secondary harddisk. All my 8 Jaz disks work fine and have no errors. It has been reliable for over 5 years without any problems. I wish I could say that about my Zip drive which was much less used and died a year ago. I still think the Jaz was an excellent drive and since it was SCSI, you did not need any drivers to use it on any operating system that supported SCSI. Heck, I used it under DOS 6.22 and it worked fine (with the appropriate drivers from my SCSI card manufacturer) I know Iomega is not popular around here, but my experience tells me the Jaz was a good product.
This strikes me as odd. Why are these domains exception (The only one that is logical to me is x.org), and why aren't the other letters of the alphabet used? Surfing around on registrars didn't seem to allow me to register j.org, not that I would: I'm quite happy with what I have.
Hey, I always wanted to have J.ORG which is my first name. Too bad you cannot get one letter domains, as far as I know. It's okay, I have jawtheshark.net, jawtheshark.org and jawtheshark.com and also a ${MYLASTNAME}.lu domain. The last one is expensive, but the other three only cost me 12 Euro per year at Gandi Not that there is anything interesting to see on my sites...Just vanity:-)
If you must use Windows on an infrequent base, use Windows NT4 for the low-end boxes, no USB alas.... Your box should handle that and NT4 is a okay OS (and isn't really that bloated - SP6a works fine on P-I class machines with a decent amount of RAM). Windows 2000 works well on low-Mhz machines too, you know: I have a Pentium Pro 200 with 256Meg RAM running it just fine. It's all about the memory, so add some (it's cheap) and get rid of ME. I wouldn't even dare to run XP on my biggest machine which is a P-III 800Mhz with 786Meg RAM. It feels even sluggish on the Athlon 1.6GHz PC a friend of mine showed me (granted, only had 256Meg RAM..still wonder how such a CPU can be sold with so few RAM) Before I get flamed to death for promoting Microsoft OSes, note that most computers I talk about are for family use and I would get lynched if suddenly my siblings cannot play their favourite games anymore. Only 4 out of 7 computers here run Windows 2000, so I think that's not a bad ratio. (Plus, I'm working on changing to Debian on the P-III)
Besides, what weird NIC makes problems with 98SE? Did you try to download the latest drivers from the manufacturer. Always works for me. Or give it a try at driverguide (Username: drivers, Password: all) As you see, it's just a matter of choosing the right OS for the right hardware. Hey, a few months ago I installed Windows 95 OSR2 on a old P90 with 24Meg RAM...that's okay for the old lady that just want to email her grandkids and play a bridge game.
I only know one person that runs Windows ME, and she complains all the time about her computer. I already told her I would reinstall her machine with something decent, but she doesn't want to hear about it. Her loss.
Hmmm... it probably depends on the person talking. I actually purchased a iBook because of Mac OS X. Before OS X, I did consider Macs a toys. First of all, I was proven wrong by a hardcore Photoshop user on Mac OS 9. Second, after getting sick and tired (after two weeks) of Mac OS 9 that was preinstalled on my iBook, I installed Mac OS X. At that point I felt at home having *BSD and Linux experience.
What I should mention however is that I needed a new laptop... My old laptop's network card dongle broke and there aren't many 16-bit PCMCIA NIC's in the commerce nowadays (of course that thing ran Linux...you don't run Windows on a P120 with 32Meg RAM, but Linux + WindowMaker and a few selected tools works perfectly)
I did my first rendering on a 80286 at 10Mhz. Of course it was all simple scenes (which I found damn impressing on my 320x200@8bit graphics card). I just wrote the scenes, rendered at very very small resolution and when it "looked" good, I ran it overnight. The raytracer I used was a shareware program called "Vivid". Haven't done any rendering in ages, I'm just not artistical.:-(
Yup,...that is one of my main reasons of drinking coffee...lots of it. Another is because I have been reading slashdot until 4 'o clock in the morning knowning very well that I have to get up at 7:30. *sigh*
Yup...one of my favourites: Flash 4 is required to view Subaru.com Mozilla 1.0 on Mac OS X. I could probably download the plugin, but I don't want to...
I agree with the nice booklets that GSM providers give...The one I got (I was one of the first customers when the network was launched) was clear and sound. However that was for me. People aren't only scared of things like 200 page manuals, but also of the words like "Roaming"...if you do not read the definitions you stay in the dark anway. (Just like all those people storing their numbers in non-international format in their GSM phonebooks...irresponsible). The provider gave me back then a 40 page manual, full with pictures of Alice and Bob doing roaming in Paris and Brussels.... Yet, many people I encounter have no idea what roaming is and how it works because they didn't even bother to read those measly 40 pages.
The problem is not that those small manuals are not comprehensible, it is that the users don't read them...
This is not only in the computer-level so.... I own an Audi (that's a car for the non-Europeans around here), and it comes with a 250 page manual, which I read. Well, Audi's are popular cars, but about twice a week I can instruct someone about "new" features of their cars because I read the damn manual and they didn't. That is the sad part! And really, 250 pages for a car is nothing...
A condom does come with directions....Well at least on the package...just like any other medical item. I know what you mean, I understand the fact that some things have become completely endorsed by our society. Technology is not one of those things and this includes VCR's and TiVo's. Reading the measly 20 pages that come with the appliances of today shoudn't be a huge pain. Not for a geek, not for my grandma.
Reminds me of the joke when a woman calls the helpdesk and tells the screen of her laptop stays black...the helpdesk goes through all the procedures and finally tells her to push the power button. Her reaction: what? Do I have to turn this thing on, I just paid 2000$ for this thing and I need to turn it on manually. (Not the exact story, but you get the picture). This is what people expect today: that technology reads their minds. One of my GUI professors at University always said: the perfect interface for anything is a single button that you push labeled "Do what I think"....wait, that's even overkill, you shoudn't be pushing it since it knows what you think!
That's a misconception...the simple things ought to be in the fist 20 pages...Enough for the layman...Anything more complex should be later on in the manual so that the layman can give up. This was the case in the example I gave of the 200 page manual. Really, I do want to know what my cellphone is able to do. And if you don't know about base stations, roaming and preferred networks: how are you going to cope when you get abroad?
That is probably why I am not a consumer...the average age of my computers currently in use is about 3,6 years... I tend to keep my gadgets a long time: cellphone 2 years now (5 years the model before) and PDA is 2 years old (not considering a replacement for my Psion!), those before even much older (3-4 years not sure. Psion Siena and Atari Portfolio).
I'm sorry I have to say this but often reading the manual helps. Unfortunately the quality of the manuals has gone down in the years because the "interface is so userfriendly". I recall my first cellphone: a full 200page manual. I read it, I understood it and now I practically know how GSM works;-) Okay, this is not for everyone....I recon, but consider this. Two years ago, my 5 year old cellphone was due for replacement (unable to get new batteries), and I bought a new one...with a manual of barely 20 pages. I felt as if nothing was explained.
Honestly, if I don't figure it out by meddeling with the interface I just love to get the full-featured manual and read it and follow instructions. For me it has worked with numerous VCR's and other appliances. Unfortunately, *reading* is something even 80 year old grandfathers don't do anymore because technology is supposed to be intuitive.:-( Call me oldschool...I'm sorry...
Strange...many people say it is slashdotted. I got everything just right now (0:40 CET, and not many comments).
Anyways...I think looks are important and that is indeed why I bought a Mac too. I have a cool case mod on one of my PC's (well a simple one, my concept...dad did it...he's better with his hands) but that one is out of nessecity: very big fan on the side of a overheated machine...looks cool too.
My first reaction was: why mod a mouse with a Lego figure? Well...I woudn't do it...but it looks very cool. 10 points for originality:-)
So fold your stuff up in as database (Postgress, MySQL) and provide it to the world with a PHP website and stop complaining. Specialized problems need specialized solutions. It's that easy. You are a exception in comparision with Joe User.
Ehm? Did you ever heard of symbolic links? So you want to be able to access the MP3 folder in your Shared folder. Make a symbolic link. Oh, sorry, I forgot: windows cannot do that. I'm sorry. My Mac, OpenBSD and Linux systems don't have too much problems with it.
Your second example works too with symbolic links. However most people have a "way" of organizing stuff. They tend not to think in different organizational structures every time they access a computer. It's akin to people sorting they socks by colour. It's weird, but most people I know (not geeks) do have quite a good concept of what is in their "My Documents" (but not beyond...). They eiter have all files cluttered in one directory with huge filenames describing the content or they have folders classifying about anything. Most people classify...
the first OS to get the annoying filesystem out of the way.
And why would you want to do that? Is there anything cleaner than a hierarchical system for classifying your stuff? You might argue a keyword-based database or some kind of thing (parsing the internals of a document for relevant keywords). However I fear most users won't be able to find back their stuff at that point: did you ever notice how miserable people are at the usage of internet search engines? They are not even able to rephrase their queries with synonyms and/or more details.
I'd prefer to stay with the tree-structured system: it's way easier to say "Documenst -> Marketing -> Presentations -> BigAssClient -> VeryImportantProject" instead of searching for those keywords and hoping that the indexer was smart enough to "get it". Because don't expect the users to keep their keywords up to date.
Yes, "they" did... But you forget one little thing: back then "they" was not the same as nowadays. Back then Win 3.11 was bought by business for business use and here and there it found it's way to a PC at home (I had Windows 2.0 at one point at home...stayed there for about 3 hours *grin*) Most of the time "they" in the days of Win3.11 were people that had at least some knowlegde of DOS, they knew what filesystems were and how to find files on a disk (cd, dir, start the application then open the file, that kind of stuff).
Things have dramatically changed: now the normal user wants to point and click and know nothing about filesystems, heck even the line between applications (code) and files (data) is blurred for the commoner nowadays. Also applications have changed: back then it was spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3) and word processors (Word Perfect, WordStar), now it is "the internet" (a.k.a. Outlook and Internet Explorer). The customer base is just completely different: actually it is less informed than it was back in the 3.11 days.
Of course the Egyptian obelisks found all over Europe are plunder
Now, I only know one famous Egyption obelisk in Europe (not that I say there aren't any others) and that is the one in Paris on the Place de la Concorde. This particular obelisk was a present from the Egyptian government to France. Actually they gave two obelisks but the transport costs were too high to get them both to Paris, so the other still stands in Egypt.
It's hardly plunder when it's a gift from a government. (Of course, I don't know what kind of government it was...might be that it was some colony government) Or would you call the Statue of Liberty plunder? It was a gift from the French government to the US after all.
Yup, I know NAT does allocate outbound connections dynamically. That's no problem, besides, PUSH woudn't work without it, isn't it? Besides: PUSH works perfectly, only, most people cancel the download (actually upload *grin*) after 5%, probably due to the speed. I also know about "rdr" in nat.conf. I had to use it in order to set up the ftp-proxy. However neither of this is going to help me: it is just not possible to know who is going to be using the filesharing service. Could be me, my sister my brother or even me on my laptop...they all got different IP addresses (obviously). Static mapping is not an option.
Now that I think of it: the only thing that would be useful would be some kind of gnutella-proxy. Run the proxy (on the server) which itself does not do filesharing. However my clients connect to it and the proxy provides the outbound connections for people that want to get my files. Just an idea, perhaps it already exists.
You actually complain about the load time? This could well have to do with the fact that the dlls for the JVM are (partially) preloaded on your system with Windows. What matters *much* more than load-times to me (and to many users) is the execution speed. I can tell you (from my own experience because I was involved in the development of e-banking applets) that the Microsoft VM sucks performance-wise. It's as simple as that. If you run a 1.3 Sun plugin, without even recompiling for 1.3, it runs a factor 3 faster. And 20 minutes? Ahem.... You like exaggerating isn't it?
I think however that Java Applets have failed on the www. You rarely see applets bar the occasional games and the occasional IRC clients. Java has found it's niche on the server, and it's here to stay.
In some ways I don't agree wit Sun: I think Sun and Microsoft would be better off that OSes shipped without JVM. The download is not *that* big. Besides, what stops Sun from providing CD's to OEM dealers to include with the new (inevitably Windows XP) machines? Most Joe Users push in every CD they get with their new machine (I don't but then I format the disks when I buy a new one) so the Sun JVM *will* be installed.
Slashdot Mirror
Before that I had ISDN which is 64kbps both ways. However, we when we had dial-up (okay, ISDN..dialup is not much difference in price), it was about 100Euro subscription per year and that's only the start: about 0.016Euro per minute in the evening (local phonecall). If you are about online 4 hours a day and that every day of the month (counting 30 days a month), it adds up to 115.2 Euro for the connection alone. Add 1/12 * 100Euro for the subscription it makes about 124 Euro per month only on internet fees. Now I pay less, have a faster connection, online 24/24 7/7 and I can run my own mailserver and webserver.
There is just a certain point where broadband is cheaper.
It was a no-brainer to decide for DSL... Considering the fact that neighbour countries have cheaper offers (I have the cheapest one possible in my country), you only have a reason to stay with dial-up if you just check your email in the evening. (Note: broadband-on-cable does not exist here, it does in the neighbour countries)
About the floppies however I can agree that the turned to crap in the last few years. On a box of 10, usually 3 are defective when using the first time.
I still have some 10 year old IBM diskettes from back in the PS/2 days which work fine. Actualy they are my bootdisks I use to rescue PC's. Mostly now I use bootable CD-Roms (selfmade, with tools RAMDisk, etc...etc..) but I always have RAWRITE and some diskette images on that CD-Rom just in order to be *sure* I can boot whatever happens. You never know when you get that old P90 that granny wants to use to play bridge and email her grandkids. Not kidding you, those old machines are in use...and not only by Geeks and Nerds like me who use them as gateways and firewalls.
Oh, and finally: CD-R's are indeed getting crap too. Just recenty a (luckily buffer-underflowerd) CD-R got under my mousemat which is just slightly stick underneath (by design, not due to Mountain Dew spillage). Ehm...when I removed it the mousemat was full of silver confetti and the CD-R was a nice transparent disk. So much for quality. I remember the day when CD-R's were 8$ a piece, and those still work! Guess I'm just getting old...
I just say: the floppy is dead! long live the floppy!
There is one little difference though: I treat my hardware with respect. I bought the case Iomega made for it, and I always handled the disks and the drive very gently. I always went sure that the surface on which it stood was hard and flat. The price of a Jaz was too high for a student to handle it like a piece of crap. I think the Jaz drives were not entirely conceived as portable devices, but more as stationary ones, only moving the disks. I had disks drop from my desk, mostly withing the cases they came with and they never developed any problems.
As I said, you probably had to be lucky. I am glad I was.
For your information, the Zip I mentioned in my post was the internal SCSI model. It lasted 4 years but was only used once in a month or so. So moving around doesn't really explain the breakage of either.
Look, I woudn't buy Iomega now...I have seen their hardware degrade over the years (Back in the day, I used Bernouilli Drives...but noone remembers them). But as far as I know there is no such thing as a portable removable non-propritary drive. CD-RW just doesn't cut it for me. (Cheapo drive that came with OEM computer kills every CD-RW I put in it, CD-R works fine. My Mac handles CD-RWs fine...even the ones killed by my PC)
And I still have my floppies too. They are lifesavers. I do have some bootable CD-Roms I made myself, but strangely enough Adaptec CD-Creator (also came with the crappy OEM drive) makes boot-CD's by asking a boot-floppy! Urks... So I still need floppies to be able to create a bootable image in order to make bootable CD's. Kinda breaks the idea of removing the floppy drive from a PC.
Anyone knows how to create bootable CD's on the Mac (OS X). Never saw the option anywhere.
My Jaz was one of the first SCSI models. I guess you just have to be lucky. One last remark: many people think of it as a normal harddisk. Which it appears to be, but it does error correction and this error correction only works when formatted with the Iomega tools. This means you better not format it in ext2, NTFS or FAT32. That's asking for trouble.
I see everyone complaining about Iomega here, but I used Iomega products *before* they became big and get the Zip out. Anyone remember the Bernouilli Drives? Hey, we had a drive for over 10 years and when we gave it away it was still working as on the first day.
Strange...I have a 1Gig Jaz which I now use as a backup drive. I used it for about 3 years as a secondary harddisk. All my 8 Jaz disks work fine and have no errors. It has been reliable for over 5 years without any problems.
I wish I could say that about my Zip drive which was much less used and died a year ago.
I still think the Jaz was an excellent drive and since it was SCSI, you did not need any drivers to use it on any operating system that supported SCSI. Heck, I used it under DOS 6.22 and it worked fine (with the appropriate drivers from my SCSI card manufacturer)
I know Iomega is not popular around here, but my experience tells me the Jaz was a good product.
- www.q.com
- www.x.com
- www.z.com
- www.x.org
This strikes me as odd. Why are these domains exception (The only one that is logical to me is x.org), and why aren't the other letters of the alphabet used? Surfing around on registrars didn't seem to allow me to register j.org, not that I would: I'm quite happy with what I have.Hey, I always wanted to have J.ORG which is my first name. Too bad you cannot get one letter domains, as far as I know. :-)
It's okay, I have jawtheshark.net, jawtheshark.org and jawtheshark.com and also a ${MYLASTNAME}.lu domain. The last one is expensive, but the other three only cost me 12 Euro per year at Gandi Not that there is anything interesting to see on my sites...Just vanity
Windows 2000 works well on low-Mhz machines too, you know: I have a Pentium Pro 200 with 256Meg RAM running it just fine. It's all about the memory, so add some (it's cheap) and get rid of ME.
I wouldn't even dare to run XP on my biggest machine which is a P-III 800Mhz with 786Meg RAM. It feels even sluggish on the Athlon 1.6GHz PC a friend of mine showed me (granted, only had 256Meg RAM..still wonder how such a CPU can be sold with so few RAM)
Before I get flamed to death for promoting Microsoft OSes, note that most computers I talk about are for family use and I would get lynched if suddenly my siblings cannot play their favourite games anymore. Only 4 out of 7 computers here run Windows 2000, so I think that's not a bad ratio. (Plus, I'm working on changing to Debian on the P-III)
Besides, what weird NIC makes problems with 98SE? Did you try to download the latest drivers from the manufacturer. Always works for me. Or give it a try at driverguide (Username: drivers, Password: all)
As you see, it's just a matter of choosing the right OS for the right hardware. Hey, a few months ago I installed Windows 95 OSR2 on a old P90 with 24Meg RAM...that's okay for the old lady that just want to email her grandkids and play a bridge game.
I only know one person that runs Windows ME, and she complains all the time about her computer. I already told her I would reinstall her machine with something decent, but she doesn't want to hear about it. Her loss.
What I should mention however is that I needed a new laptop... My old laptop's network card dongle broke and there aren't many 16-bit PCMCIA NIC's in the commerce nowadays (of course that thing ran Linux...you don't run Windows on a P120 with 32Meg RAM, but Linux + WindowMaker and a few selected tools works perfectly)
I did my first rendering on a 80286 at 10Mhz. Of course it was all simple scenes (which I found damn impressing on my 320x200@8bit graphics card). I just wrote the scenes, rendered at very very small resolution and when it "looked" good, I ran it overnight. The raytracer I used was a shareware program called "Vivid". :-(
Haven't done any rendering in ages, I'm just not artistical.
Yup,...that is one of my main reasons of drinking coffee...lots of it.
Another is because I have been reading slashdot until 4 'o clock in the morning knowning very well that I have to get up at 7:30. *sigh*
Yup...one of my favourites: Flash 4 is required to view Subaru.com
Mozilla 1.0 on Mac OS X. I could probably download the plugin, but I don't want to...
The problem is not that those small manuals are not comprehensible, it is that the users don't read them...
This is not only in the computer-level so.... I own an Audi (that's a car for the non-Europeans around here), and it comes with a 250 page manual, which I read. Well, Audi's are popular cars, but about twice a week I can instruct someone about "new" features of their cars because I read the damn manual and they didn't. That is the sad part! And really, 250 pages for a car is nothing...
I know what you mean, I understand the fact that some things have become completely endorsed by our society. Technology is not one of those things and this includes VCR's and TiVo's. Reading the measly 20 pages that come with the appliances of today shoudn't be a huge pain. Not for a geek, not for my grandma.
Reminds me of the joke when a woman calls the helpdesk and tells the screen of her laptop stays black...the helpdesk goes through all the procedures and finally tells her to push the power button. Her reaction: what? Do I have to turn this thing on, I just paid 2000$ for this thing and I need to turn it on manually. (Not the exact story, but you get the picture).
This is what people expect today: that technology reads their minds. One of my GUI professors at University always said: the perfect interface for anything is a single button that you push labeled "Do what I think"....wait, that's even overkill, you shoudn't be pushing it since it knows what you think!
That's a misconception...the simple things ought to be in the fist 20 pages...Enough for the layman...Anything more complex should be later on in the manual so that the layman can give up. This was the case in the example I gave of the 200 page manual. Really, I do want to know what my cellphone is able to do. And if you don't know about base stations, roaming and preferred networks: how are you going to cope when you get abroad?
That is probably why I am not a consumer...the average age of my computers currently in use is about 3,6 years... I tend to keep my gadgets a long time: cellphone 2 years now (5 years the model before) and PDA is 2 years old (not considering a replacement for my Psion!), those before even much older (3-4 years not sure. Psion Siena and Atari Portfolio).
Honestly, if I don't figure it out by meddeling with the interface I just love to get the full-featured manual and read it and follow instructions. For me it has worked with numerous VCR's and other appliances. Unfortunately, *reading* is something even 80 year old grandfathers don't do anymore because technology is supposed to be intuitive. :-(
Call me oldschool...I'm sorry...
Anyways...I think looks are important and that is indeed why I bought a Mac too. I have a cool case mod on one of my PC's (well a simple one, my concept...dad did it...he's better with his hands) but that one is out of nessecity: very big fan on the side of a overheated machine...looks cool too.
My first reaction was: why mod a mouse with a Lego figure? Well...I woudn't do it...but it looks very cool. 10 points for originality :-)
So fold your stuff up in as database (Postgress, MySQL) and provide it to the world with a PHP website and stop complaining. Specialized problems need specialized solutions. It's that easy. You are a exception in comparision with Joe User.
Your second example works too with symbolic links. However most people have a "way" of organizing stuff. They tend not to think in different organizational structures every time they access a computer. It's akin to people sorting they socks by colour. It's weird, but most people I know (not geeks) do have quite a good concept of what is in their "My Documents" (but not beyond...). They eiter have all files cluttered in one directory with huge filenames describing the content or they have folders classifying about anything. Most people classify...
the first OS to get the annoying filesystem out of the way.
And why would you want to do that? Is there anything cleaner than a hierarchical system for classifying your stuff? You might argue a keyword-based database or some kind of thing (parsing the internals of a document for relevant keywords). However I fear most users won't be able to find back their stuff at that point: did you ever notice how miserable people are at the usage of internet search engines? They are not even able to rephrase their queries with synonyms and/or more details.
I'd prefer to stay with the tree-structured system: it's way easier to say "Documenst -> Marketing -> Presentations -> BigAssClient -> VeryImportantProject" instead of searching for those keywords and hoping that the indexer was smart enough to "get it". Because don't expect the users to keep their keywords up to date.
Things have dramatically changed: now the normal user wants to point and click and know nothing about filesystems, heck even the line between applications (code) and files (data) is blurred for the commoner nowadays. Also applications have changed: back then it was spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3) and word processors (Word Perfect, WordStar), now it is "the internet" (a.k.a. Outlook and Internet Explorer). The customer base is just completely different: actually it is less informed than it was back in the 3.11 days.
Now, I only know one famous Egyption obelisk in Europe (not that I say there aren't any others) and that is the one in Paris on the Place de la Concorde. This particular obelisk was a present from the Egyptian government to France. Actually they gave two obelisks but the transport costs were too high to get them both to Paris, so the other still stands in Egypt.
It's hardly plunder when it's a gift from a government. (Of course, I don't know what kind of government it was...might be that it was some colony government) Or would you call the Statue of Liberty plunder? It was a gift from the French government to the US after all.
I also know about "rdr" in nat.conf. I had to use it in order to set up the ftp-proxy. However neither of this is going to help me: it is just not possible to know who is going to be using the filesharing service. Could be me, my sister my brother or even me on my laptop...they all got different IP addresses (obviously). Static mapping is not an option.
Now that I think of it: the only thing that would be useful would be some kind of gnutella-proxy. Run the proxy (on the server) which itself does not do filesharing. However my clients connect to it and the proxy provides the outbound connections for people that want to get my files. Just an idea, perhaps it already exists.
I think however that Java Applets have failed on the www. You rarely see applets bar the occasional games and the occasional IRC clients. Java has found it's niche on the server, and it's here to stay.
In some ways I don't agree wit Sun: I think Sun and Microsoft would be better off that OSes shipped without JVM. The download is not *that* big. Besides, what stops Sun from providing CD's to OEM dealers to include with the new (inevitably Windows XP) machines? Most Joe Users push in every CD they get with their new machine (I don't but then I format the disks when I buy a new one) so the Sun JVM *will* be installed.