I've been running NVIDIA's drivers on my desktop machine for a year now... only crashed I've experienced were when I experimented with the 2.5 kernel, or development versions of KDE (which in turn just crash or sometimes hang X, which can be fixed by sshing in from anothre box). My updtime is generally 2-3 months (I don't have a UPS).
Still, it's important that the source is available. The paranoid people that try step 3, or actually look at the source, are the reason I trust Open Source software. If it was a closed source app, and someone patched the binary with a somewhat stealthy trojan, we might not have known for months.
Using Open Source Software is about trust for me; I have no problem if someone uses closed source apps on a non-crucial desktop machine. I'm very dubious using any closed source apps on any server I deploy, however.
Re:I turned down a well paying job at Walgreens
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
·
· Score: 2
When I stop enjoying my work/lifestyle combination, I'll change that. It's really that simple. Right now, I dress how I want, work the hours I want (which means as few or as many as it takes to get the job done on time; I can choose to not show up for two or three days, get the week's tasks done on the final two or three days, and no one cares!)
I'm also getting to a point in my life where I'm thinking that I shouldn't tie myself down with a serious relationship or marriage because it's not right for me. I'm far happier doing what I want with my money, which prioritizes hardware upgrades before presentable curtains or high-fashion clothing or any silly shit like that. I rather like being single.
Re:I turned down a well paying job at Walgreens
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Some of us actually enjoy our job. Working long hours coding to fix one peoblem is occasionally intellectually rewarding. I don't take jobs that I won't enjoy. I'm not married, not exclusively dating, and my social life conssts almost entirely of friday/saturday activities.
One of my previous employers was a start-up, which is a whole different ball game. We were under-staffed because we were under-funded which lead to the occasional crunch time to meet a deadline. I didn't mind as my co-workers were very cool, the CEO payed for our dinner if we stayed extra hours, and often payed for a car service home, rather than have us take the subway/PATH/bus to get home, which saved me like 40 minutes on my commute.
Absolutely not! TomsHardware.com had an article about PSU's the other day... There was one unit that was basically a modded Enermax with an ultra-quiet fan... it couldn't handle the power it was rated for. It died at its rated power output.
Buy an Antec TruePower power supply. It has a thermal senser and slows down the fan when it can. My friend got one and it's pretty damn silent.
I went to private school as a child. At the time, private grade school costed about $600 a year, and high school costed $1000 a year. Let's say today private schooling will cost $1500 a year. My parents, combined, bring in $26K a year. They typically pay about 1/4-1/3 of that in combined local and state taxes. Let's say it's 1/4 which is $6500. That means they can afford to send 4 and 1/3 children a year to private school on just what uncle sam was taking out of thier meager salary. Yes, I am over-simplifying... in a libertarian society, they would also have to pay for more tolls on the roads, and a few more services. They already pay for health insurance, flood insurance, etc. There would also be no sales tax, so the cash would spread a little bit farther.
Home schooling is also an option. As would be charity-subsidized schooling, such as religious schools (a local catholic grade school only charges $400/year due to the donations of the local parishioners, and the fact that the teachers are nuns).
The point is, you aren't forced to pay exhorbitant taxes to fund crappy schools that give your children an inferior education. You have choice! If you want to send your kids to a discount school that just gets the job done, go for it! If you want to send your kids to a better school that will actually challenge them, even better. The fact is, the majority of children in this country go to really lousy schools, because their parents can't afford to live in an area with better schools.
That's more or less what happens now. Do the police spend the same time and effort investigating a dead, unidentified hooker than they would a rich person with political connections? Nope.
Some police, even entire police districts, are corrupt and can be bought.
Keep in mind, in a libertarian society, a district attourney would still exist, and also have limited funds to hire law enforcement to investigate crimes. Where would this money come from? Excise taxes. (See my other posts). They could even be hired on a basis of success... i.e., they only get paid if they catch a suspect that is found guilty in a court of law.
Yes, there will be corruption. I don't think it will be any worse than it is now. Ever lived in an area controlled by the mob? I have relatives who do. They own the local politicians in such areas. No different than paying off a law enforcement company.
The individual pays, either with insurance or cash on hand. Most fire departments are volunteer and do fund-raising. Police forces should be privatized. EMT's usually work for a private company, and hospitals are often privately owned.
Disasters, hospital care, etc. should be covered by insurance. Hospitals and law enforcement should be corporately run, and should compete with each other. People can choose services and vote with thier dollars. If you don't have the cash, sorry... seek charity. It is not the responsibility of the state to be a person's nanny. People managed to get by years before these services and safety nets existed. People tamed wild fronteers (sp?) and such.
I came from a very poor family that had no money for health insurance. My parents worked for just above minimum wage, never got any federal/state help, and still managed to send my brother and I to private school. I paid my way through college. Given, I went to a state school, so some of my tuition was subsidised by the federal and state governments, but if that was not available, I would have found a way anyway. In fact, if I had been of libertarian persuasion at the tender age of 18, I would have attended a private school due to principal.
Three words: Usage based fees. Want to drive? Pay tolls. Want to use a library? Pay a membership fee. Want no service from the government for the rest of your life? Don't pay for them.
I should not have said free of all taxes. The US constitution, prior to the income tax ammendment, allowed the government to collect excise taxes and tarrifs. In a libertarian society, the state government would be so small that it could run on minimal excise taxes. There would be a need for a dozen or so clerical workers and maintenance staff, and a stipend for legislators -- and that's it! The system of courts could be fees based (and paid by the loser of a case).
Notice I said stipend for legislators -- not a salary. I don't think state legislators should make legislation a full time job! They shouldn't be adding more laws constantly! They shouldn't be giving out state funds to the poor masses. They should hold down a job, just like the rest of us, and devote 1 or 2 nights a week to legislation. That's all it should take! (Note I'm not talking about congress and the senate... although it should eventually become this trivial, we'd want senators in office full time voting against the creation of new cruft-laws that are unconstitutional and unfair to the state.)
We won't be trampling... we will be campaigning for political freedom. If we are successful, the populous will agree with us. If we aren't, we will leave.
And how will giving people more freedom be trampling. If we enact our goal, how will it affect everyone? They will still be free to pursue happiness in any form they deem necessary, so long as it does not pose physical harm or fraud unto others, and violate far more strict federal statues.
8X AGP won't buy them anything here. What that mostly affects is AGP sideband addressing, which allows the graphics card to grab textures directly from RAM without going to the CPU. Seeing as all of the textures in UT2K3 and all of the 3DMark stuff can fit in the 128MB of RAM on the graphics card, this is mostly irrelevant.
These guys are obviously just doing it for shits and giggles. The setup they have, without overclocking, should be far more than enough to play any current game at higher than acceptable framerates with all the options turned on, including FSAA.
Is there any reason? Nope. Looks like fun though. If I had the cash to waste on stuff like that, I probably would.
The limiting factor in the performance of modern GPU's seems to be memory bandwidth. They were able to overclock the GPU itself a good bit, but not much on the video RAM.
We really need to see more memory bandwidth saving technology on GPU's. ATI pushed ahead a lot of cool things (early Z, occlusion culling, Z-compression, fast Z-clear), but it's not far enough. The Kyro/Dreamcast use tile-based deferred rendering rather than immediate mode, and the GameCube's GPU (designed by ArtX, which is now a owned by ATI) uses a 2 MB on-chip Z-buffer cache which alleviates the need to go to video memory every time they want to do a Z-test (which is typically at least once per pixel). Given, the Cube doesn't ever have to deal with a frame buffer bigger than 720x480, so a fixed size Z-cache is much more useful there.
On another note, I'd really like to see support for geometry amplification schemes (n-patch tesselation, displacement mapping, etc.) that work properly with stencil-buffer volume shadows.
Memory bandwidth is one of the few aspects of computer design that touches just about every application, with the exception of those that are small enough-- or sufficiently well optimized-- to fit into cache.
That's assuming you have enough CPU power to process everything coming in. If you have 100 GB/s of bandwidth, and a single P4 or Athlon, most of that bandwidth will be unused.
I'd love to try OSX... but the hardware is too damn expensive. I'm a college student, using a K6-III/400. I'm planning on spending $600 on parts for a new Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67ghz) based system this fall that will kick the pants off all but the highest end Macs in performance.
And don't give me that "G4 is 10 times faster per clock than any supercomputer on the planet" crap. The G4 is a damn fine processor, but an 800mhz G4 (which comes on most new Macs) is about equivalent to a 1.1 ghz Athlon, or a 1.4 GHZ P4. Plus, Macs in the sub $1800 price range come with a GeForce2 MX or GeForece4 MX... I'll be getting a GeForce4 Ti4200. I'll price two similarly configured systems... let's first assume that the iMac's 15" LCD is worth $500:
iMac (from apple's web site):
1GB SDRAM - 2 DIMMs
Keyboard/Mac OS X - U.S. English
40GB Ultra ATA drive
DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX w/32MB DDR graphics Total: $1,749.00 (not including tax, shipping)
PC:
ASUS A7N266-VM (nForce 220D) $ 80
AMD Athlon-XP 1800+ (retail box) $ 90
2x Crucial 512MB PC2100 $140
nVidia GeForce2MX 32MB $ 50
Western Digital WD400BB 40GB $ 70
Toshiba SD-R1202 CD-RW/DVD-ROM $ 80
Enermax ATX case+300W power $ 60
Name-brand 15" LCD monitor $500
(Sound and ethernet integrated) $ 00
Keyboard and mouse $ 30 Total (before tax, shipping): $1100
So that's $649 difference. I'd personally not get myself the LCD, and spend $150 on a decent 17" CRT. The Athlon system also has a faster processor, and faster RAM.
Yeah, I know you are paying for the finished product, but Dell has some sub-$1000 systems I could live with (after a RAM upgrade). And yeah, no firewire -- big deal.
Please don't think this is an anti-apple flame! It's not. I'm just hoping Apple lowers their prices so more could use their good products.
If companies didn't advertise products that were already out, they would lose mind share and brand recognition. If you weren't bombarded by advertisemenst of the Whopper, yet McDonald's was bombarding you with ads for the new Ultra-Delux double-meat sandwich, and any new sandwich of the month, You'd eventually forget about Burger King. Even being the steady old standby that everyone loves isn't enough in these media-saturated times.
"Let's see (wondering through Best Buy)... 16x CD burner = $89,... 40x CD burner = $250,... DVD burner = $400..."
Ummm... Best Buy has lousy prices, dude. You can get a Teac 40X for $90 online, or a Lite-on 40X for around $60. I just ordered a Teac 40X the other day from NewEgg for $86, and am expecting it in the mail real soon now.
If the traceroute ends at the ISP router, the ISP is thus legally responsible to either stop the user themselves, or face charges.
This is still far better than letting the RIAA actively attack unsecured home PC's. I'm glad someone has the balls to do this. Unfortunately for me, Verizon is the only broadband provider in the area. I highly doubt they will take this stand. I'm hoping SpeakEasy and other friendly providers will follow the bandwagon.
Nope... not wishful thinking. This is the way everything eventually will be heading. Much more speciallized apps, using a common set of very large, advanced widgets. Imagine a rich-text widget that had all of the features of Microsoft Word's. It would then be trivial to build word processors for specific purposes, such as specifically for legal annotating. The tricky part is figuring out exactly what each person/profession needs.
Qt already has such a widget. Although it's not as featureful as MS Word, it's pretty darn nice, and can use Win32 drawing functions to look, act, and feel like another Windows app. Never tinkered with the Mac version... Don't have the cash to spend on a Mac. I'd love to play around with OSX, however.
Yes, but what if one door know looks more or less like it is supposed to be turned as normal, but in reality needs to be pushed in, an action which reveals a small toggle switch. Assume that this doorknob was also free-spinning, that turning it does nothing. How many people would sit there for many minutes trying to turn the door knob each way? Why do they do this? Are they stupid? No... if the door knob looks like all the other standard doorknobs they are used to turning, they are predicting its functionality based on a previously established pattern. This is how we function.
Now what if you show the user a doorknob that doesn't look anything like what they have seen before, yet has to be turned to open? What if it is square, and recessed into the door, with no obvious way of grasping it? Same problem. The look of the doorknob will confuse the user.
But once they learn it, you say, there will be no problems, right? That's because it's a simple case. I'm using Mozilla right now, I see 9 tabs, 4 circles with arrows and other things in them, a printer icon, a big 'M', a text box, some labels that say "Home", "Bookmarks", etc., and some menus at the top, 4 little icons on the lower-left, a label that says "Document: Done", two more icons on the lower right, a scrollbar, a little "x" button by the tabs. All in all, there are 45 things I can click to do things that are not part of the page I'm navigating, which has dozens of links, buttons, checkboxes, images, and an animated ad at the top.
This is what we call information overload. Why do I not freak out? Because I know more or less what everything does, and I ignore what my brain sees as noise. When things are unfamiliar, this is harder to do. When I don't know what things are, I can't tell whether they are signal or noise. This slows me down. This disturbs me because I am in an unfamiliar environment. Being the tinkerer that I am, I tend to muddle through unfamiliar interfaces with curiosity and disreguard for consequences. Most people will not do this.
I'm not saying what everybody uses is good... I thought BeOS had one of the nicest, simples, most straight-forward UI's one can get. Properly configured KDE IMHO is better than Windows or MacOS. But whatever platform one is using should be consistent to be friendly to users. It would be nice if on Win32 Mozilla used Win32 widgets, on MacOS Mozilla used Cocoa widgets, under KDE Qt widgets, under GNOME GTK+ widgets, etc. I'm not implying this is easy either; it's a much more difficult task than using a portable toolkit. The end user, however, really doesn't care.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been running NVIDIA's drivers on my desktop machine for a year now... only crashed I've experienced were when I experimented with the 2.5 kernel, or development versions of KDE (which in turn just crash or sometimes hang X, which can be fixed by sshing in from anothre box). My updtime is generally 2-3 months (I don't have a UPS).
Still, it's important that the source is available. The paranoid people that try step 3, or actually look at the source, are the reason I trust Open Source software. If it was a closed source app, and someone patched the binary with a somewhat stealthy trojan, we might not have known for months.
Using Open Source Software is about trust for me; I have no problem if someone uses closed source apps on a non-crucial desktop machine. I'm very dubious using any closed source apps on any server I deploy, however.
When I stop enjoying my work/lifestyle combination, I'll change that. It's really that simple. Right now, I dress how I want, work the hours I want (which means as few or as many as it takes to get the job done on time; I can choose to not show up for two or three days, get the week's tasks done on the final two or three days, and no one cares!)
I'm also getting to a point in my life where I'm thinking that I shouldn't tie myself down with a serious relationship or marriage because it's not right for me. I'm far happier doing what I want with my money, which prioritizes hardware upgrades before presentable curtains or high-fashion clothing or any silly shit like that. I rather like being single.
Some of us actually enjoy our job. Working long hours coding to fix one peoblem is occasionally intellectually rewarding. I don't take jobs that I won't enjoy. I'm not married, not exclusively dating, and my social life conssts almost entirely of friday/saturday activities.
One of my previous employers was a start-up, which is a whole different ball game. We were under-staffed because we were under-funded which lead to the occasional crunch time to meet a deadline. I didn't mind as my co-workers were very cool, the CEO payed for our dinner if we stayed extra hours, and often payed for a car service home, rather than have us take the subway/PATH/bus to get home, which saved me like 40 minutes on my commute.
Actually, in every job I've worked in, the only really well dressed techs are the MCSE's and VB programmers.
I wear what's comfortable, but also have proper hygene. Also, it's much more space/cost efficient to only have one wardrobe instead of two.
Absolutely not! TomsHardware.com had an article about PSU's the other day... There was one unit that was basically a modded Enermax with an ultra-quiet fan... it couldn't handle the power it was rated for. It died at its rated power output.
Buy an Antec TruePower power supply. It has a thermal senser and slows down the fan when it can. My friend got one and it's pretty damn silent.
I went to private school as a child. At the time, private grade school costed about $600 a year, and high school costed $1000 a year. Let's say today private schooling will cost $1500 a year. My parents, combined, bring in $26K a year. They typically pay about 1/4-1/3 of that in combined local and state taxes. Let's say it's 1/4 which is $6500. That means they can afford to send 4 and 1/3 children a year to private school on just what uncle sam was taking out of thier meager salary. Yes, I am over-simplifying... in a libertarian society, they would also have to pay for more tolls on the roads, and a few more services. They already pay for health insurance, flood insurance, etc. There would also be no sales tax, so the cash would spread a little bit farther.
Home schooling is also an option. As would be charity-subsidized schooling, such as religious schools (a local catholic grade school only charges $400/year due to the donations of the local parishioners, and the fact that the teachers are nuns).
The point is, you aren't forced to pay exhorbitant taxes to fund crappy schools that give your children an inferior education. You have choice! If you want to send your kids to a discount school that just gets the job done, go for it! If you want to send your kids to a better school that will actually challenge them, even better. The fact is, the majority of children in this country go to really lousy schools, because their parents can't afford to live in an area with better schools.
That's more or less what happens now. Do the police spend the same time and effort investigating a dead, unidentified hooker than they would a rich person with political connections? Nope.
Some police, even entire police districts, are corrupt and can be bought.
Keep in mind, in a libertarian society, a district attourney would still exist, and also have limited funds to hire law enforcement to investigate crimes. Where would this money come from? Excise taxes. (See my other posts). They could even be hired on a basis of success... i.e., they only get paid if they catch a suspect that is found guilty in a court of law.
Yes, there will be corruption. I don't think it will be any worse than it is now. Ever lived in an area controlled by the mob? I have relatives who do. They own the local politicians in such areas. No different than paying off a law enforcement company.
The individual pays, either with insurance or cash on hand. Most fire departments are volunteer and do fund-raising. Police forces should be privatized. EMT's usually work for a private company, and hospitals are often privately owned.
Disasters, hospital care, etc. should be covered by insurance. Hospitals and law enforcement should be corporately run, and should compete with each other. People can choose services and vote with thier dollars. If you don't have the cash, sorry... seek charity. It is not the responsibility of the state to be a person's nanny. People managed to get by years before these services and safety nets existed. People tamed wild fronteers (sp?) and such.
I came from a very poor family that had no money for health insurance. My parents worked for just above minimum wage, never got any federal/state help, and still managed to send my brother and I to private school. I paid my way through college. Given, I went to a state school, so some of my tuition was subsidised by the federal and state governments, but if that was not available, I would have found a way anyway. In fact, if I had been of libertarian persuasion at the tender age of 18, I would have attended a private school due to principal.
Three words: Usage based fees. Want to drive? Pay tolls. Want to use a library? Pay a membership fee. Want no service from the government for the rest of your life? Don't pay for them.
I should not have said free of all taxes. The US constitution, prior to the income tax ammendment, allowed the government to collect excise taxes and tarrifs. In a libertarian society, the state government would be so small that it could run on minimal excise taxes. There would be a need for a dozen or so clerical workers and maintenance staff, and a stipend for legislators -- and that's it! The system of courts could be fees based (and paid by the loser of a case).
Notice I said stipend for legislators -- not a salary. I don't think state legislators should make legislation a full time job! They shouldn't be adding more laws constantly! They shouldn't be giving out state funds to the poor masses. They should hold down a job, just like the rest of us, and devote 1 or 2 nights a week to legislation. That's all it should take! (Note I'm not talking about congress and the senate... although it should eventually become this trivial, we'd want senators in office full time voting against the creation of new cruft-laws that are unconstitutional and unfair to the state.)
We won't be trampling... we will be campaigning for political freedom. If we are successful, the populous will agree with us. If we aren't, we will leave.
And how will giving people more freedom be trampling. If we enact our goal, how will it affect everyone? They will still be free to pursue happiness in any form they deem necessary, so long as it does not pose physical harm or fraud unto others, and violate far more strict federal statues.
That, and they will be free of all local taxes.
8X AGP won't buy them anything here. What that mostly affects is AGP sideband addressing, which allows the graphics card to grab textures directly from RAM without going to the CPU. Seeing as all of the textures in UT2K3 and all of the 3DMark stuff can fit in the 128MB of RAM on the graphics card, this is mostly irrelevant.
These guys are obviously just doing it for shits and giggles. The setup they have, without overclocking, should be far more than enough to play any current game at higher than acceptable framerates with all the options turned on, including FSAA.
Is there any reason? Nope. Looks like fun though. If I had the cash to waste on stuff like that, I probably would.
The limiting factor in the performance of modern GPU's seems to be memory bandwidth. They were able to overclock the GPU itself a good bit, but not much on the video RAM.
We really need to see more memory bandwidth saving technology on GPU's. ATI pushed ahead a lot of cool things (early Z, occlusion culling, Z-compression, fast Z-clear), but it's not far enough. The Kyro/Dreamcast use tile-based deferred rendering rather than immediate mode, and the GameCube's GPU (designed by ArtX, which is now a owned by ATI) uses a 2 MB on-chip Z-buffer cache which alleviates the need to go to video memory every time they want to do a Z-test (which is typically at least once per pixel). Given, the Cube doesn't ever have to deal with a frame buffer bigger than 720x480, so a fixed size Z-cache is much more useful there.
On another note, I'd really like to see support for geometry amplification schemes (n-patch tesselation, displacement mapping, etc.) that work properly with stencil-buffer volume shadows.
- Memory bandwidth is one of the few aspects of computer design that touches just about every application, with the exception of those that are small enough-- or sufficiently well optimized-- to fit into cache.
That's assuming you have enough CPU power to process everything coming in. If you have 100 GB/s of bandwidth, and a single P4 or Athlon, most of that bandwidth will be unused.I use Linux, so the only software I would add cost for is games. And style doesn't mean much to a starving CS student who needs to compile his code.
I'd love to try OSX... but the hardware is too damn expensive. I'm a college student, using a K6-III/400. I'm planning on spending $600 on parts for a new Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67ghz) based system this fall that will kick the pants off all but the highest end Macs in performance.
And don't give me that "G4 is 10 times faster per clock than any supercomputer on the planet" crap. The G4 is a damn fine processor, but an 800mhz G4 (which comes on most new Macs) is about equivalent to a 1.1 ghz Athlon, or a 1.4 GHZ P4. Plus, Macs in the sub $1800 price range come with a GeForce2 MX or GeForece4 MX... I'll be getting a GeForce4 Ti4200. I'll price two similarly configured systems... let's first assume that the iMac's 15" LCD is worth $500:
iMac (from apple's web site):
1GB SDRAM - 2 DIMMs
Keyboard/Mac OS X - U.S. English
40GB Ultra ATA drive
DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX w/32MB DDR graphics
Total: $1,749.00 (not including tax, shipping)
PC:
ASUS A7N266-VM (nForce 220D) $ 80
AMD Athlon-XP 1800+ (retail box) $ 90
2x Crucial 512MB PC2100 $140
nVidia GeForce2MX 32MB $ 50
Western Digital WD400BB 40GB $ 70
Toshiba SD-R1202 CD-RW/DVD-ROM $ 80
Enermax ATX case+300W power $ 60
Name-brand 15" LCD monitor $500
(Sound and ethernet integrated) $ 00
Keyboard and mouse $ 30
Total (before tax, shipping): $1100
So that's $649 difference. I'd personally not get myself the LCD, and spend $150 on a decent 17" CRT. The Athlon system also has a faster processor, and faster RAM.
Yeah, I know you are paying for the finished product, but Dell has some sub-$1000 systems I could live with (after a RAM upgrade). And yeah, no firewire -- big deal.
Please don't think this is an anti-apple flame! It's not. I'm just hoping Apple lowers their prices so more could use their good products.
If companies didn't advertise products that were already out, they would lose mind share and brand recognition. If you weren't bombarded by advertisemenst of the Whopper, yet McDonald's was bombarding you with ads for the new Ultra-Delux double-meat sandwich, and any new sandwich of the month, You'd eventually forget about Burger King. Even being the steady old standby that everyone loves isn't enough in these media-saturated times.
Joe Average Computer Guy doesn't read Slashdot. I'd bet better than 80% of the Slashdot crowd is aware of NewEgg and Pricewatch.
Ummm... Best Buy has lousy prices, dude. You can get a Teac 40X for $90 online, or a Lite-on 40X for around $60. I just ordered a Teac 40X the other day from NewEgg for $86, and am expecting it in the mail real soon now.
If the traceroute ends at the ISP router, the ISP is thus legally responsible to either stop the user themselves, or face charges.
This is still far better than letting the RIAA actively attack unsecured home PC's. I'm glad someone has the balls to do this. Unfortunately for me, Verizon is the only broadband provider in the area. I highly doubt they will take this stand. I'm hoping SpeakEasy and other friendly providers will follow the bandwagon.
Nope... not wishful thinking. This is the way everything eventually will be heading. Much more speciallized apps, using a common set of very large, advanced widgets. Imagine a rich-text widget that had all of the features of Microsoft Word's. It would then be trivial to build word processors for specific purposes, such as specifically for legal annotating. The tricky part is figuring out exactly what each person/profession needs.
Qt already has such a widget. Although it's not as featureful as MS Word, it's pretty darn nice, and can use Win32 drawing functions to look, act, and feel like another Windows app. Never tinkered with the Mac version... Don't have the cash to spend on a Mac. I'd love to play around with OSX, however.
Yes, but what if one door know looks more or less like it is supposed to be turned as normal, but in reality needs to be pushed in, an action which reveals a small toggle switch. Assume that this doorknob was also free-spinning, that turning it does nothing. How many people would sit there for many minutes trying to turn the door knob each way? Why do they do this? Are they stupid? No... if the door knob looks like all the other standard doorknobs they are used to turning, they are predicting its functionality based on a previously established pattern. This is how we function.
Now what if you show the user a doorknob that doesn't look anything like what they have seen before, yet has to be turned to open? What if it is square, and recessed into the door, with no obvious way of grasping it? Same problem. The look of the doorknob will confuse the user.
But once they learn it, you say, there will be no problems, right? That's because it's a simple case. I'm using Mozilla right now, I see 9 tabs, 4 circles with arrows and other things in them, a printer icon, a big 'M', a text box, some labels that say "Home", "Bookmarks", etc., and some menus at the top, 4 little icons on the lower-left, a label that says "Document: Done", two more icons on the lower right, a scrollbar, a little "x" button by the tabs. All in all, there are 45 things I can click to do things that are not part of the page I'm navigating, which has dozens of links, buttons, checkboxes, images, and an animated ad at the top.
This is what we call information overload. Why do I not freak out? Because I know more or less what everything does, and I ignore what my brain sees as noise. When things are unfamiliar, this is harder to do. When I don't know what things are, I can't tell whether they are signal or noise. This slows me down. This disturbs me because I am in an unfamiliar environment. Being the tinkerer that I am, I tend to muddle through unfamiliar interfaces with curiosity and disreguard for consequences. Most people will not do this.
I'm not saying what everybody uses is good... I thought BeOS had one of the nicest, simples, most straight-forward UI's one can get. Properly configured KDE IMHO is better than Windows or MacOS. But whatever platform one is using should be consistent to be friendly to users. It would be nice if on Win32 Mozilla used Win32 widgets, on MacOS Mozilla used Cocoa widgets, under KDE Qt widgets, under GNOME GTK+ widgets, etc. I'm not implying this is easy either; it's a much more difficult task than using a portable toolkit. The end user, however, really doesn't care.