are my computer's CPU cycles and my system's stability my "property"?
Various legal traditions define property as (paraphrasing) any tangible or intangible thing that can be a source or element of income or wealth.
Your car is property because you could sell it and turn it into income. If somebody takes your car from you illegally, then you have been deprived of the potential income you could have gotten from selling your car. You've been deprived of property.
But what if your neighbor borrows your car when you're not using it? Assume, for sake of argument, that your neighbor only borrows your car when you wouldn't be using it, returns it whenever you ask for it, doesn't use any gas or other tangible good, and doesn't induce wear and tear on the car. You can still turn around and sell it at any time, with zero interference.
In that case, you wouldn't be deprived of any property. The fact that your neighbor is borrowing your car has absolutely no impact on you.
That's a stupid analogy on its face, but it's a pretty good one for considering the case of a software vendor "stealing" clock cycles from your computer. No matter what's going on under the hood, you're not being directly deprived of any property. Your computer isn't magically worth less because it's running somebody else's code.
So no, CPU cycles aren't property.
There might be an argument to be made, though, that you are being deprived of your rightful use of your computer. I'd have to think about that one, though....
However, in their terms of service, they say the access is a "privelage" not a "right". That could probably be argued as long as *you* are paying for the services of the university - why should it not be a right?
What you're describing really isn't a case of access being a "right"-- which would make the subsequent denial of that access a 6th amendment issue-- but of breach of contract.
If the University agrees to provide you with internet connectivity in your room in return for your tuition or housing fees-- either as a separate itemized fee or as part of a package of services-- then you have a contract with the University. If the University violates their terms of this contract, then you have a legitimate grievance against them.
But the key there is that the University, in turning off your service, has to be in violation of the terms of the contract. In order for this to be true, two things must also be true:
1. The University's provision of access to you is an explicit term of your housing contract, like electricity.
2. The University's contract with you does not have a discretionary clause.
The University, however, is probably smart. They probably do have a discretionary clause. I haven't read any of the documents linked to in the original post-- 'cause I'm lazy-- but it's probably in there somewhere. "We provide this service to you at our discretion, and may disconnect or discontinue this service, temporarily or permanently, at any time... " and so on.
So basically, no, internet access in your dorm is not a right, and it's probably not something that you can fight on contractual terms.
If protection from incriminating statements only applies during testimony under oath, then what is stopping the police from beating a confession out of you during the discovery phase of the trial, and then using that confession in court?
Miranda v. Arizona, 1966. Miranda married the concepts of protection from self incrimination (5th amendment) and the right to counsel (6th amendment).
But Miranda also has a scope. The Miranda doctrine only applies if the subject is in custody and under interrogation.
The objective test for "custody" is whether, under those circumstances, a reasonable person would believe, based on an officer's actions or statements, that he or she is not free to leave.
Being under "interrogation" requires that the subject be asked questions that imply involvement with a crime. "What did you see?" isn't an interrogative question. "Where were you on the night of January 21st?" is.
So to protect you from being compelled to answer a question under oath that incriminates you, you have the protection of the 5th amendment. To protect you from being treated similarly in a custodial or arrest situation, outside the context of a legal proceeding, you have Miranda.
It seems to me that the discovery process should be limited to physical evidence - anything that I must be forced to say feels like self-incrimination.
That's just the thing. The fact that a password exists only in your head doesn't suddenly make revealing it a statement. It's not testimony. It's evidence. There's a really important distinction between the two.
The thing is this: if I (the State or Feds or whatever) subpoena your laptop as part of a civil investigation, then you are legally obligated to turn it over. If you fail to do so, you are in contempt of court for failure to turn over the laptop. This is true even if the laptop, or the files contained therein, is ultimately incriminating to you.
If you turned over just the laptop's keyboard, you would not be in compliance with the subpoena. You'd be in contempt.
If you turned over the laptop, but not the hard drive, you'd be in contempt.
If you turned over the laptop, and the hard drive, but not the password to acces it, you'd be in contempt.
See? A password is not testimony. It's part of the laptop, from a legal point of view. So you can't be protected from turning it over by the fifth amendment.
Then just make your encryption key an incremenating statement. Then tell the friendly officer to talk to your lawyer, because by giving them the key you would be directly incremenating yourself.
You don't get it. Protection from increminating statements only applies during testimony. It doesn't protect you from having to comply to a subpoena.
An encryption key is a piece of material evidence, insofar as it relates to the unlocking of other pieces of material evidence. Providing it is not testimony, and it's not covered by the fifth amendment.
I deliberately didn't go into bad thing vs good thing in my original post - I was just pointing out that factually, IBM is either a monopolist in mainframes or rather close to it. It certainly has a monopoly in IBM mainframes:-).
Well, that's okay then. I just assumed from your post that you were one of the many hordes of raging Slashdot communists.;-)
Since the key can only be obtained via testimony, short of breaking the encryption, the 5th should cover it under the 'bear no witness' clause.
Turning over an encryption key would not qualify as testimony, for several reasons. The most important one is the fact that, under those circumstances, you wouldn't be placed under oath.
The fifth amendment's primary purpose is to give an individual an "out" when faced with the choice of confession versus perjury. When you're placed under oath and asked questions by the court, you can opt not to answer those questions on the grounds that you'll either be incriminating yourself, or lying under oath.
Turning over your encryption key, on the other hand, doesn't involve being placed under oath. A summons will show up at your door, carried by your friendly neighborhood police officer, and you can either cough it up or go to jail. At the least, you'll be in contempt of court. At worst, you can be charged with obstruction of justice.
They may not sell IBM mainframes, but they do sell mainframes.
Actually, the NEC SX series-- also sold in the States by Cray, incidentally-- is a supercomputer, not a mainframe.
Some informal definitions: a mainframe is a medium-to-large computer system optimized for reliability, and often used primarily for batch processing. Most mainframes (although not all) run databases or similar transaction processing systems. Mainframes are traditionally programmed in Cobol, although Java is becoming popular.
A supercomputer is a medium-to-large computer system optimized for performance. While supercomputers are also used primarily for batch processing, they run a different kind of job. Supercomputers run numerical analysis, computational fluid dynamics, weather simulation, or any of a whole host of other applications, then spit out results, often in the form of a three-or-more-dimensional dataset. Mainframes are traditionally programmed in Fortran.
The NEC SX-6 is a vector supercomputer, not a mainframe.
The fact that IBM can make it cheaper for the customer by crippling the machine, and still make a profit, shows how high the original prices are relative to the manufacturing cost of the machine.
It seems to me that there's something here that you don't understand.
Manufacturing costs have amazingly little to do with consumer costs. Consumer costs are set by market forces-- in other words, companies charge whatever the market will bear.
This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. It allows the market to determine the value of a thing above and beyond the sum of the values of the raw materials that went into making that thing.
But it's a fact that differential pricing usually indicates market power and less-intense price competition.
How do you figure that? IBM (and others) introduced pay-as-you-go hardware in an effort to keep the entry prices of their systems down while giving their customers then-unheard-of flexibility in upgrading. It's really pretty cool: you place a phone call, and suddenly you have more processors. No muss, no fuss.
Seems to me that this was motivated primarily by wanting to offer customers new, better upgrade paths. Not any kind of power play or monopoly position.
What if the material was encrypted and the passphrase was known by the CIO of the corporation?
That's no different than saying the evidence in question is in a closet and only the CIO has the key.
The court can legally compel you to hand over the key. If you don't do it, you go to jail for contempt, and they'll break the door down anyway.
In the case of encryption, it's possible that officers of the court may be unable to break down the door. Fine. But then you're still in jail, which is what you were presumably trying to avoid with encryption in the first place.
The pod race that you all drool over is nothing more than "Days of Thunder" with different pictures...
Actually, it's the chariot race from Ben Hur. Seriously. It's almost a shot-for-shot homage, as Lucas and McCallum both said several times in various interviews.
The Calendar in my Visor is accessable from anywhere.
Not to me, it isn't. If you're in a situation that requires you to share your personal calendar with others (a staff or team, or your family), or in which you need access to other people's calendars, carrying your data around in your pocket just isn't sufficient.
The grandparent's point was simply that internet applications have already stealthed their way into the mainstream: Hotmail, Yahoo Calendar, AOL Instant Messenger. The idea behind these sorts of apps doesn't have to be talked about exclusively in the future tense.
Ink is a real physical liquid and paper is porous. What do you think happens with ink on paper? It bleeds out a little, randomly, you will never get two "pixels" the same. Thus the "jagged staircase" effect is slightly reduced.
1. Laser-type printers don't actually use ink. They use a powdered toner that can be affixed to the paper in very precise ways. Toner affixed by a laser doesn't bleed.
2. Quality control is a huge part of the commercial printing process. Colors and tones are expected to be visually indistinguishable from press to press, and from run to run, and from sheet to sheet. While it's true to say that no to spots are ever absolutely identical, they're much, much closer than you think. Look at two samples through a loupe sometime.
[I]f GCC consistently turns out code that's faster than Visual Studio, we could extrapolate that Linux is significantly faster than Windows.
Maybe you could, if GCC could be thus characterized. But there's no evidence in this article that points to that conclusion. Rather, this article says that GCC did a better job of compiling the SPEC benchmarks. As everybody knows-- or should know-- benchmarks are to real applications as fish are to bicycles.
Of course it doesn't. It means that GCC is somewhat better at compiling the SPECint_base benchmark than Visual Studio is.
I won't pretend to be educated about the inner workings of SPECint, but one would suppose that, because it's purported to be a hardware benchmark rather than an OS benchmark, it is completely independent of the standard C library, or any other OS-level service. One would expect the compiled benchmark to just run pure code inside the CPU, without any system calls or any of that stuff.
So the same benchmark compiled with the same compiler but run under two different OSs should return exactly the same result, within a certain statistical margin.
Somebody with more time on their hands could either test this hypothesis, or confirm that it's already been done by somebody else.
Some printers do vary the dot size to achieve a sort of anti-aliasing.
That's fundamentally different from antialiasing. That technique can best be described as "smoothing."
I tried using ASCII art to show the effect of smoothing, as distinct from antialiasing, but I got frustrated and gave up. Suffice it to say that antialiasing uses oversampling and averaging, while smoothing simply attempts to fill in the corners that look too jagged to the eye.
Fairly crappy explanation, but I'm too sleepy to write a better one.
This seems to me to be a technology of limited use. Even at high color depths almost all text is rendered as black-on-white, which makes color pretty much worthless.
It makes title bars look pretty. It makes big pictures on web pages look pretty. But for 99% of the text you see, it doesn't do much.
Those high-res printers you speak of, still use anti-aliasing.......
No, they don't. A dot on paper is either there, or it isn't. You don't print with multiple shades of grey and black ink to give the illusion of higher resolution. Around the 200 DPI mark, printed text takes on the appearance of smooth letterforms, not patterns of dots. Of course, you can tell the difference between 200 and 2400 DPI easily, but the point is that 200 DPI is where you stop seeing the pixels before you see the letters.
You may be thinking of halftones, which are patterns of dots of various sizes that can achieve the illusion of tone when viewed from a reasonable distance. This isn't anti-aliasing at all.
And by the way, an ellipsis has three dots, like this:...
Antialiasing is a neat tool, used in moderation. I just dream of 200dpi screens where it's pointless.
At work I have two monitors on my desk, both 21" Sonys. The one on the left runs at 1280x1024. The one on the right runs at 2048x1556 (I think). When I read PDFs, I open Acrobat full-screen on the right display, with AA turned on. Sitting about two feet away from the screen, as I usually do, the PDF is then almost indistinguishable from the printed page.
Medium-high resolution (> 120 dots per inch) with decent AA is a powerful combination.
Hell, you'd be lucky to find 5 text editors in Windows that behaved consistently and used the same keyboard shortcuts and modifier keys.
Have you noticed that all Cocoa apps that use the text editing widget have the same key bindings? And what's more, they're Emacs bindings! C-a for beginning of line, C-e for end, and so on.
Actually, that was a NeXT thing. NeXT had fat binaries for 68K and x86 right around the time of NeXTSTEP 3.0.
Really? Okay, I stand corrected. But no matter who actually deserves the credit for it, it was still a good idea that made the 68K-PPC transition easier than it might have otherwise been.
That is a result of all the chatter that comes with Appletalk. A lot of networks have become less "saturated" when Appletalk goes of the wire.
What's a network for? I want my network connections to be at full capacity all the time. Otherwise I'm not getting my money's worth.
I've had IT types complain to me about the "chatty" nature of AppleTalk before. I've never heard a good answer to the question: exactly why is a "chatty" network a bad thing? If it impacts performance in a significant way, then you have other problems.
Have you ever tried to edit source code in Windows (NT, 2000)? God forbid you ever try to select something on a long line! I spend a lot of time trying to get applications to allow me to select just what I want instead of what it wants.
A classic example of the Microsoft way of doing things. Who sat in a staff meeting and said, "You know what's hard? Selecting text. We should try to make selecting text easier.
"See, if the user drags the cursor over part of a word, he obviously meant to select the whole word, so we should select the whole word for him. And if he selects a word at the end of a sentence, he obviously wanted the terminal punctuation and space too, so we should select those for him."
"Hey, boss, I've got some thoughts on how we can simplify that collection of six interrelated modal dialog boxes for managing network settings."
"Not now, Johnson. We're making real progress on the text-selection problem! Guys, I smell bonuses!"
Slashdot Mirror
are my computer's CPU cycles and my system's stability my "property"?
Various legal traditions define property as (paraphrasing) any tangible or intangible thing that can be a source or element of income or wealth.
Your car is property because you could sell it and turn it into income. If somebody takes your car from you illegally, then you have been deprived of the potential income you could have gotten from selling your car. You've been deprived of property.
But what if your neighbor borrows your car when you're not using it? Assume, for sake of argument, that your neighbor only borrows your car when you wouldn't be using it, returns it whenever you ask for it, doesn't use any gas or other tangible good, and doesn't induce wear and tear on the car. You can still turn around and sell it at any time, with zero interference.
In that case, you wouldn't be deprived of any property. The fact that your neighbor is borrowing your car has absolutely no impact on you.
That's a stupid analogy on its face, but it's a pretty good one for considering the case of a software vendor "stealing" clock cycles from your computer. No matter what's going on under the hood, you're not being directly deprived of any property. Your computer isn't magically worth less because it's running somebody else's code.
So no, CPU cycles aren't property.
There might be an argument to be made, though, that you are being deprived of your rightful use of your computer. I'd have to think about that one, though....
However, in their terms of service, they say the access is a "privelage" not a "right". That could probably be argued as long as *you* are paying for the services of the university - why should it not be a right?
What you're describing really isn't a case of access being a "right"-- which would make the subsequent denial of that access a 6th amendment issue-- but of breach of contract.
If the University agrees to provide you with internet connectivity in your room in return for your tuition or housing fees-- either as a separate itemized fee or as part of a package of services-- then you have a contract with the University. If the University violates their terms of this contract, then you have a legitimate grievance against them.
But the key there is that the University, in turning off your service, has to be in violation of the terms of the contract. In order for this to be true, two things must also be true:
1. The University's provision of access to you is an explicit term of your housing contract, like electricity.
2. The University's contract with you does not have a discretionary clause.
The University, however, is probably smart. They probably do have a discretionary clause. I haven't read any of the documents linked to in the original post-- 'cause I'm lazy-- but it's probably in there somewhere. "We provide this service to you at our discretion, and may disconnect or discontinue this service, temporarily or permanently, at any time... " and so on.
So basically, no, internet access in your dorm is not a right, and it's probably not something that you can fight on contractual terms.
Starship Troopers definitely popped into my mind. A bunch of gorillas.
Apes, goddammit. At least get it right. They were called apes.
If protection from incriminating statements only applies during testimony under oath, then what is stopping the police from beating a confession out of you during the discovery phase of the trial, and then using that confession in court?
Miranda v. Arizona, 1966. Miranda married the concepts of protection from self incrimination (5th amendment) and the right to counsel (6th amendment).
But Miranda also has a scope. The Miranda doctrine only applies if the subject is in custody and under interrogation.
The objective test for "custody" is whether, under those circumstances, a reasonable person would believe, based on an officer's actions or statements, that he or she is not free to leave.
Being under "interrogation" requires that the subject be asked questions that imply involvement with a crime. "What did you see?" isn't an interrogative question. "Where were you on the night of January 21st?" is.
So to protect you from being compelled to answer a question under oath that incriminates you, you have the protection of the 5th amendment. To protect you from being treated similarly in a custodial or arrest situation, outside the context of a legal proceeding, you have Miranda.
It seems to me that the discovery process should be limited to physical evidence - anything that I must be forced to say feels like self-incrimination.
That's just the thing. The fact that a password exists only in your head doesn't suddenly make revealing it a statement. It's not testimony. It's evidence. There's a really important distinction between the two.
The thing is this: if I (the State or Feds or whatever) subpoena your laptop as part of a civil investigation, then you are legally obligated to turn it over. If you fail to do so, you are in contempt of court for failure to turn over the laptop. This is true even if the laptop, or the files contained therein, is ultimately incriminating to you.
If you turned over just the laptop's keyboard, you would not be in compliance with the subpoena. You'd be in contempt.
If you turned over the laptop, but not the hard drive, you'd be in contempt.
If you turned over the laptop, and the hard drive, but not the password to acces it, you'd be in contempt.
See? A password is not testimony. It's part of the laptop, from a legal point of view. So you can't be protected from turning it over by the fifth amendment.
Then just make your encryption key an incremenating statement. Then tell the friendly officer to talk to your lawyer, because by giving them the key you would be directly incremenating yourself.
You don't get it. Protection from increminating statements only applies during testimony. It doesn't protect you from having to comply to a subpoena.
An encryption key is a piece of material evidence, insofar as it relates to the unlocking of other pieces of material evidence. Providing it is not testimony, and it's not covered by the fifth amendment.
I deliberately didn't go into bad thing vs good thing in my original post - I was just pointing out that factually, IBM is either a monopolist in mainframes or rather close to it. It certainly has a monopoly in IBM mainframes :-).
;-)
Well, that's okay then. I just assumed from your post that you were one of the many hordes of raging Slashdot communists.
Since the key can only be obtained via testimony, short of breaking the encryption, the 5th should cover it under the 'bear no witness' clause.
Turning over an encryption key would not qualify as testimony, for several reasons. The most important one is the fact that, under those circumstances, you wouldn't be placed under oath.
The fifth amendment's primary purpose is to give an individual an "out" when faced with the choice of confession versus perjury. When you're placed under oath and asked questions by the court, you can opt not to answer those questions on the grounds that you'll either be incriminating yourself, or lying under oath.
Turning over your encryption key, on the other hand, doesn't involve being placed under oath. A summons will show up at your door, carried by your friendly neighborhood police officer, and you can either cough it up or go to jail. At the least, you'll be in contempt of court. At worst, you can be charged with obstruction of justice.
They may not sell IBM mainframes, but they do sell mainframes.
Actually, the NEC SX series-- also sold in the States by Cray, incidentally-- is a supercomputer, not a mainframe.
Some informal definitions: a mainframe is a medium-to-large computer system optimized for reliability, and often used primarily for batch processing. Most mainframes (although not all) run databases or similar transaction processing systems. Mainframes are traditionally programmed in Cobol, although Java is becoming popular.
A supercomputer is a medium-to-large computer system optimized for performance. While supercomputers are also used primarily for batch processing, they run a different kind of job. Supercomputers run numerical analysis, computational fluid dynamics, weather simulation, or any of a whole host of other applications, then spit out results, often in the form of a three-or-more-dimensional dataset. Mainframes are traditionally programmed in Fortran.
The NEC SX-6 is a vector supercomputer, not a mainframe.
The fact that IBM can make it cheaper for the customer by crippling the machine, and still make a profit, shows how high the original prices are relative to the manufacturing cost of the machine.
It seems to me that there's something here that you don't understand.
Manufacturing costs have amazingly little to do with consumer costs. Consumer costs are set by market forces-- in other words, companies charge whatever the market will bear.
This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. It allows the market to determine the value of a thing above and beyond the sum of the values of the raw materials that went into making that thing.
But it's a fact that differential pricing usually indicates market power and less-intense price competition.
How do you figure that? IBM (and others) introduced pay-as-you-go hardware in an effort to keep the entry prices of their systems down while giving their customers then-unheard-of flexibility in upgrading. It's really pretty cool: you place a phone call, and suddenly you have more processors. No muss, no fuss.
Seems to me that this was motivated primarily by wanting to offer customers new, better upgrade paths. Not any kind of power play or monopoly position.
Bah. You don't know what you're talking about.
What if the material was encrypted and the passphrase was known by the CIO of the corporation?
That's no different than saying the evidence in question is in a closet and only the CIO has the key.
The court can legally compel you to hand over the key. If you don't do it, you go to jail for contempt, and they'll break the door down anyway.
In the case of encryption, it's possible that officers of the court may be unable to break down the door. Fine. But then you're still in jail, which is what you were presumably trying to avoid with encryption in the first place.
The pod race that you all drool over is nothing more than "Days of Thunder" with different pictures...
Actually, it's the chariot race from Ben Hur. Seriously. It's almost a shot-for-shot homage, as Lucas and McCallum both said several times in various interviews.
The Calendar in my Visor is accessable from anywhere.
Not to me, it isn't. If you're in a situation that requires you to share your personal calendar with others (a staff or team, or your family), or in which you need access to other people's calendars, carrying your data around in your pocket just isn't sufficient.
The grandparent's point was simply that internet applications have already stealthed their way into the mainstream: Hotmail, Yahoo Calendar, AOL Instant Messenger. The idea behind these sorts of apps doesn't have to be talked about exclusively in the future tense.
Ink is a real physical liquid and paper is porous. What do you think happens with ink on paper? It bleeds out a little, randomly, you will never get two "pixels" the same. Thus the "jagged staircase" effect is slightly reduced.
1. Laser-type printers don't actually use ink. They use a powdered toner that can be affixed to the paper in very precise ways. Toner affixed by a laser doesn't bleed.
2. Quality control is a huge part of the commercial printing process. Colors and tones are expected to be visually indistinguishable from press to press, and from run to run, and from sheet to sheet. While it's true to say that no to spots are ever absolutely identical, they're much, much closer than you think. Look at two samples through a loupe sometime.
3. This has nothing to do with antialiasing.
[I]f GCC consistently turns out code that's faster than Visual Studio, we could extrapolate that Linux is significantly faster than Windows.
Maybe you could, if GCC could be thus characterized. But there's no evidence in this article that points to that conclusion. Rather, this article says that GCC did a better job of compiling the SPEC benchmarks. As everybody knows-- or should know-- benchmarks are to real applications as fish are to bicycles.
That means Linux is over 30% faster than Windows!
Of course it doesn't. It means that GCC is somewhat better at compiling the SPECint_base benchmark than Visual Studio is.
I won't pretend to be educated about the inner workings of SPECint, but one would suppose that, because it's purported to be a hardware benchmark rather than an OS benchmark, it is completely independent of the standard C library, or any other OS-level service. One would expect the compiled benchmark to just run pure code inside the CPU, without any system calls or any of that stuff.
So the same benchmark compiled with the same compiler but run under two different OSs should return exactly the same result, within a certain statistical margin.
Somebody with more time on their hands could either test this hypothesis, or confirm that it's already been done by somebody else.
If you set "Location" to automatic and
drag the interfaces into the desired
direction you don't have to change settings
at all.
One LAN uses DHCP, the other static IP. "Automatic" can't help there.
Some printers do vary the dot size to achieve a sort of anti-aliasing.
That's fundamentally different from antialiasing. That technique can best be described as "smoothing."
I tried using ASCII art to show the effect of smoothing, as distinct from antialiasing, but I got frustrated and gave up. Suffice it to say that antialiasing uses oversampling and averaging, while smoothing simply attempts to fill in the corners that look too jagged to the eye.
Fairly crappy explanation, but I'm too sleepy to write a better one.
This really isn't meant to be a flame.
This seems to me to be a technology of limited use. Even at high color depths almost all text is rendered as black-on-white, which makes color pretty much worthless.
It makes title bars look pretty. It makes big pictures on web pages look pretty. But for 99% of the text you see, it doesn't do much.
reducto ad absurdum
;-)
Those high-res printers you speak of, still use anti-aliasing.......
...
No, they don't. A dot on paper is either there, or it isn't. You don't print with multiple shades of grey and black ink to give the illusion of higher resolution. Around the 200 DPI mark, printed text takes on the appearance of smooth letterforms, not patterns of dots. Of course, you can tell the difference between 200 and 2400 DPI easily, but the point is that 200 DPI is where you stop seeing the pixels before you see the letters.
You may be thinking of halftones, which are patterns of dots of various sizes that can achieve the illusion of tone when viewed from a reasonable distance. This isn't anti-aliasing at all.
And by the way, an ellipsis has three dots, like this:
Antialiasing is a neat tool, used in moderation. I just dream of 200dpi screens where it's pointless.
At work I have two monitors on my desk, both 21" Sonys. The one on the left runs at 1280x1024. The one on the right runs at 2048x1556 (I think). When I read PDFs, I open Acrobat full-screen on the right display, with AA turned on. Sitting about two feet away from the screen, as I usually do, the PDF is then almost indistinguishable from the printed page.
Medium-high resolution (> 120 dots per inch) with decent AA is a powerful combination.
Hell, you'd be lucky to find 5 text editors in Windows that behaved consistently and used the same keyboard shortcuts and modifier keys.
Have you noticed that all Cocoa apps that use the text editing widget have the same key bindings? And what's more, they're Emacs bindings! C-a for beginning of line, C-e for end, and so on.
Actually, that was a NeXT thing. NeXT had fat binaries for 68K and x86 right around the time of NeXTSTEP 3.0.
Really? Okay, I stand corrected. But no matter who actually deserves the credit for it, it was still a good idea that made the 68K-PPC transition easier than it might have otherwise been.
That is a result of all the chatter that comes with Appletalk. A lot of networks have become less "saturated" when Appletalk goes of the wire.
What's a network for? I want my network connections to be at full capacity all the time. Otherwise I'm not getting my money's worth.
I've had IT types complain to me about the "chatty" nature of AppleTalk before. I've never heard a good answer to the question: exactly why is a "chatty" network a bad thing? If it impacts performance in a significant way, then you have other problems.
Have you ever tried to edit source code in Windows (NT, 2000)? God forbid you ever try to select something on a long line! I spend a lot of time trying to get applications to allow me to select just what I want instead of what it wants.
A classic example of the Microsoft way of doing things. Who sat in a staff meeting and said, "You know what's hard? Selecting text. We should try to make selecting text easier.
"See, if the user drags the cursor over part of a word, he obviously meant to select the whole word, so we should select the whole word for him. And if he selects a word at the end of a sentence, he obviously wanted the terminal punctuation and space too, so we should select those for him."
"Hey, boss, I've got some thoughts on how we can simplify that collection of six interrelated modal dialog boxes for managing network settings."
"Not now, Johnson. We're making real progress on the text-selection problem! Guys, I smell bonuses!"