The reminder to focus on the tasks the user is trying to accomplish rather than the long feature list
This is so important, but often completely missed. I have two things to say about it. First concering getting the information a programmer needs to design an appropriate interface. I have written some apps whose interface was perfectly good for the workflow that I had in my mind. Unfortunately, it turned out that I had misunderstood the user's workflow, and am now in the process of refactoring the entire application to match a more appropriate interface.
This extends to more than just interfaces, and getting a good understanding of the workflow can be hard. Often the user thinks they have to tell the programmer exactly what they want - practically specifing the interface. This inevitably leads to failure because what the user thinks they want and what they really want are not the same thing. They are not user interface designers, they are just making guesses based on what they have seen other programs do. There is usually a better solution to the problem than the one they thought of, since you have knowledge that they don't. Other times a list of features gets handed to the developer, with little information about how the features will be used. Again, huge possibility for failure because the implicit idea of how the program is going to work in your mind and in the customer's mind may be different. Now you are the one guessing at a solution, lacking knowledge that only the user has.
The big point is to get a good understanding of the problem, and then you can work together to come up with a solution. The best way I've ever seen of doing this is to tell the user to pretend that you are a new employee or intern and have them walk you through all the processes that your software will influence. Like a new employee would, talk to the old employees to get a better understanding of your (pretend) new job. Spend time watching them and look for areas of inefficiency that they don't realize because they have been doing it that way for so many years. Then you are in a position to start designing, and bouncing those designs off the users.
The second point. When designing an interface alot of programmers jump strait to the buttons, menus, dialog boxes, etc and such. But these things are the low-level implementation - not the goal itself. UI design should be more appropriately called User Interaction design, and has to do with understanding the workflow of the user, and then choosing the method to implement it.
Don't actually have anything to say about the book or review - it just got my mind going on this track, and I couldn't prevent my fingers from typing after that:)
Yeah, I don't see how something like this would bring in tourists. "Travel hundreds of miles to use the same internet you can at home." Wireless acces might make things more convient for the tourists once they got here, but I doubt anyone would choose to come because of it.
Business conventions, however, make a lot of sense. This could also be a good idea for cities working on revitalizing parts of the town. It would both increase the value of the land to businesses, as well as making it a more plesent place for people to hang out. I for one would much rather work on a laptop at a park than in my danky apartment.
wearing a schoolgirl costume with mechanical power-up accessories
I hope that this is a female posting. You just gave me had horrible mental image of Richard Stallman in a mini-skirt, and a evil-looking mini-display over one eye.
How is this junk science? A reputable institution performed a double-blind test of new equipment, and found it to have statistically meaningful effects. They acknowledged that the old cell towers were not harmfull to people, and even used them as a control (or baseline) to compare these new towers against. They acknowleged that they have no proof of perminant damage, and recomend that indepenant research be done to verify and extend their own. This sounds like a text-book example of good science to me.
These tests were not about handsets, and they made no claims that handsets were dangerous. The only effect that this study might have is in determining the placement of towers, so people don't have to spend large amounts of time in their immediate proximity. For example, in rural area many cell towers have been placed in church steeples because they are high points, and it is less expensive and less ugly than building a tower. Now, it would be nice to know if these new base stations will have an unplesent effect on people before they are installed.
It is really the media, not the institutions, that are to blame for the unjustified hysteria, which resulted in needing to do more work than necissary to quell peoples concerns. But I for one am glad that studies have been done to show that cell phones are safe, and am glad for new studies when new equipment comes out. Emperical data is always good, and assuming that there is no possibility that different RF techniques can have different effects than the ones we are familiar with is almost as bad unbased claims that new technology will cause cancer. (Althogh not as bad as saying that old, tested technology does)
Someone needs to take off the negativity goggles. Trillian has been very good about releasing patches for non-paying customers, and they say in the very same sentence, that they are planing on releasing the patch for 0.74 (the free version) as soon as they finish testing it. What were you expecting, that they implement the patch in 0.74 first, and then leave their customers hanging while they port the patch to 2.0? Of course they give preference to people that support them and not the leeches.
Now if we could just be this effective on a few of the slightly more important issues like civil rights, pre-emptive wars, and so forth. Along those lines, it just occured to me how short it took to get the courts to look at this case. A judge in Oklahoma blocked the list citing that the FTC overstepped its authority. A judge in Denver found the same thing and further stated Free Speech concerns, because the government was determine exactly where to draw the line of speech is allowed into your house, if you sign up for the list. All of this before the list was enacted and simply because the Direct Marketing Association brought the issue to court.
Now how long has it been since the Patriot Act was passed? I was under the impression that we had to wait around until someone was tried under the new laws before it's constitionality could be challenged. But the telemarketers didn't wait till they were sued for calling someone on the DNC list before challenging it's validity. What's the difference? Can someone like the ACLU or just file a case in court questioning the Patriot Act? I'm assuming not, or else someone would have done so already. But was is the legal differentiation here?
If they've got probable cause, they can do just about anything. If you've murdered someone, I want the government to be able to find out how long it takes for you to shit if it will help them any.
He shouldn't have done anything with that virus. Period. Nobody should have. And if all his personal information will help them confirm that he did it and/or find leads to others that did, I say more power to them. They've got cause to believe he did it, they've got cause to be on his case. This isn't a story.
This person expressed a valid point of view. Just because you disagree with a post does not mean you should moderate it down. In fact there were a couple good people who took the time to write insightfull responces explaining why they disagreed with the post. You moderators could have moderated those up, benifiting all of us with a better understand of the issues, but instead you abused your powers to censor an opinion you didn't like.
As a matter of policy I agree. But concider how many posts get modded up that are doing nothing but completely trashing the book reviewer. They are almost completely noise as well. It is nice to see some positive noise for a change.
But even informative posts tend to be negative. The nature of dicussion forums is that signal is information that isn't in the article, so it is just natural that most signal is the opposing view. This results in quite a negative atmosphere. So it's good to have a reminder like this from time to time, lest we fall into the dark side :)
That was my initial reaction, but it caused me to wonder why these exemptions for jounalists exist in the first place. I assume that the main reason is that it could discourage free speech in the press. Could someone with more knowledge (or imagination) than me give some examples/ situations of how this this would stiffle free speech?
The other side of the story is the bad effect that it has on the court. Like where he mentioned how a bunch of the "evidence" was siting newspaper articles! Because we all know that if it's in the newspaper it must be true. What evidence can journalists collect that the FBI can't? The FBI should have no need for this, and should not be presenting second hand information in court, unless they absolutely must.
Oh, you're sneaky, pretending to be giving a complement, but I see that insult hidden in there. "thanks--"! Why don't you just go all the way and say "thanks=0". Some people, have to throw in their insulting remarks, even when they are pretending to be nice;)
The big deal is that kernal developers wrote this code and they have the (copy)right to determine how it is being used. Linksys has broken the terms of the copyright licence. Just because the kernal developers have a more permissive license than proprietary software does not give people the right to do whatever they want with the sofware. Just because the copyright is not held by a large corporation, does not mean that they can get away with breaking the licence. Just because the license demands source code instead of money in exchange for the right to modify the software, does not make it any less valid. A licence is a licence and what Linksys is doing is illegal - no different than if someone were to ship with copies of Windows in their hardware without paying for licences.
The main point is that we need to inforce the GPL and out of principle and fairness. It wouldn't be good to crack down on licence violations in cases where we have something to gain and then willingly turn a blind eye to others. We don't want to be seen playing a bait and charge game like what happened with GIF and MP3. We need to be diligent and fair in this manner, find out what source is not being released, and who is holding it back (be it Linksys themselves, or one of their partners), and see to it that they obey the terms of our licence. If we don't, then people will get the impression that we don't care if they violate our license.
Now, if availability of this code helps someone, then great - that's why the GPL is written the way it is. And at the very least there are people that would enjoy having the code. But even if no one ever used the source, we would be setting a very bad precident not to press this issue.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
Now I'm not excited about the prospect of online taxes, but how is it unfair? If anything, the current situation is unfair to brick-and-mortor stores that do have to charge taxes on their products.
hmm, thats true. In fact exploring moral and societal issue has always been a big part of SciFi in general. I think where it got annoying was where it changed from being less about morality and more about political correctness.
Which is why Jonathan Archer is the best captain ever!;)
No, it isn't a mind control device. People like us with no interest whatsoever in the product will still not buy it. But we are at one extreme. At the other is people that actually respond to spam. And there are people in the middle. This method get results by influencing the people in the middle, who concidered responding but didn't.
Numerically, say 0.1% of spam gets a responce. Even if you increase the responce 22 fold, as the study did, then 97.8% of the people still are not responding to your spam.
Taguchi did not develop this method for advertizing. He developed for engineering, and it was never used for advertizing till extremely recently. It is a general method for determining a handfull of tests which can be used to find the empericall tradeoffs between a whole slew of various factors. Taguchi used it to improve the quality of japanese cars while keeping costs down.
Giving him full credit for the quality of japanese cars, as Cringly did, was definately an overstatement though.
Re:With the current cost of SPAM
on
Building Better Spam
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This improvement isn't about targeting specific gullible who are more likely to respond. It is about an easy, rigorous way to fine tune what the spam says to better play on one's gullibility. And the analysis is quite cheap, so it is well worth the effort.
Or in your analogy, they are still hitting as many people with their better carpet bomb, but sustain more fatalities.
Dell words of wisdom
To determine what businesses his company wants to be in, Dell looks for large markets where there are inefficiencies or high mark-ups. He looks for standards, because markets don't usually become high-volume until standards exist. Dell said standards benefit users, while proprietary hardware benefits only the company selling it.
Which is interesting in light of the anouncement of the music service, since the music industry is a glarring example of high mark ups.
\begin{vent} I just came to check and see if anyone had posted any comments in responce to mine, and discovered that someone had modded me down as overrated. The purpose of moderation is to save reader's time, modding somthing down as overrated is basically saying that you think that reading this post is a waste of the reader's time.
So this moderation annoys me because no one has posted any real criticism about my idea, so I don't know why the moderator thought my opinion was not worth reading. Furthermore, I did not have a high score to begin with (how can something be overrated when it wasn't highly rated to begin with?), and now even fewer people will read this I won't get any feedback on my idea, which is the entire reason I post to begin with.
grr, well at least I am motivated to meta-moderate more often now. \end{vent}
Now to the the people that were kind enough to talk to me:)
I definitly agree with everything you say about CD quality. (I was thinking of commenting on that in the original post, but decided I use to many parenthetical statments already:) CD's aren't perfect, but they are the best quality, most portable audio format available to consumers.
Flac would be nice. Both methods are almost the same to me - download flac, burn a back up CD, and encode a mp3 for my portable, or buy a CD rip and then encode an mp3. About the same amount of work - less if you use flac in all your music devices. But CD's are prettier, and that gets me all the time:)
In terms of crippled CD's I've never actually run acrossed one. To me they have just been a potential concern on the horizon, which I hoped wouldn't become widespread. But yes, a proprietary formated (crippled) CD is just as bad as a proprietory file format, if not worse.
Okay, that makes sense. From your examples it looks like Apple gains some additional sanity over the library issue by having central control over all the system libraries. So providing your own copy of a shared library is rarely necisarry but always an option. Nice.
The Unix style of VFS entries pointing to different media isn't as practical on a desktop system as it was on bigass mainframes.... I think the one thing keeping Linux from having real mainstream appeal is the Unix underpinnings it clings to.
Yes I definately agree with this. That's one thing that grates me when using the linux destops. I am quite happy with the unix way of doing things, and I am equally content with the mac way. But with these destops you have a mac face thrown on a *nix body with no give and take between the two paradigms. The two paradigms do not harmonize well in the sense that nothing you learn about the mac half will help you in the unix half, and you ineviable have to use both halves, at some point.
At one point, (before GNOME or OS X) I though that Linux as we know it would be restricted to the server and the future of free software on the desktop would not be a "linux os" distro, but another operating system (or operating environment if you prefer) that just happened to use linux as it's kernal, and happend to borrow some useful daemons, but was nothing like unix at all. (Acorn RiscOS is more along the lines I was thinking). From everything I've seen, Mac OS X put itself about halfway between that and unix. It changed the overall organization of the system to match that of the desktop, but kept most of the nuances of unix, just hidden.
On a side note, while the unix traditions and mechanics are not suitable to the desktop, I haven't given up on the unix philosophy. The main problem with the unix implementations is that the interface that unix provided to it's tools was purely "in one side out the other". So it was good for filtering things (like configuration file and logs), but useless at iteractive tasks. The Humane Interface stuff that Jeff Raskin talks about is pretty much the same thing as the unix philosophy. Applications are modal, and thus cause errors and limit the usefullness of tools. Therefore get rid of applications and just have documents and tools to operate on documents. I am really interested to see if his approach really can create something more powerful and pleasent than the applications we have today.
Anway, I am counting weeks till I can get a new mac, try out OS X, and contibute to his project:)
Slashdot Mirror
The reminder to focus on the tasks the user is trying to accomplish rather than the long feature list
:)
This is so important, but often completely missed. I have two things to say about it. First concering getting the information a programmer needs to design an appropriate interface. I have written some apps whose interface was perfectly good for the workflow that I had in my mind. Unfortunately, it turned out that I had misunderstood the user's workflow, and am now in the process of refactoring the entire application to match a more appropriate interface.
This extends to more than just interfaces, and getting a good understanding of the workflow can be hard. Often the user thinks they have to tell the programmer exactly what they want - practically specifing the interface. This inevitably leads to failure because what the user thinks they want and what they really want are not the same thing. They are not user interface designers, they are just making guesses based on what they have seen other programs do. There is usually a better solution to the problem than the one they thought of, since you have knowledge that they don't. Other times a list of features gets handed to the developer, with little information about how the features will be used. Again, huge possibility for failure because the implicit idea of how the program is going to work in your mind and in the customer's mind may be different. Now you are the one guessing at a solution, lacking knowledge that only the user has.
The big point is to get a good understanding of the problem, and then you can work together to come up with a solution. The best way I've ever seen of doing this is to tell the user to pretend that you are a new employee or intern and have them walk you through all the processes that your software will influence. Like a new employee would, talk to the old employees to get a better understanding of your (pretend) new job. Spend time watching them and look for areas of inefficiency that they don't realize because they have been doing it that way for so many years. Then you are in a position to start designing, and bouncing those designs off the users.
The second point. When designing an interface alot of programmers jump strait to the buttons, menus, dialog boxes, etc and such. But these things are the low-level implementation - not the goal itself. UI design should be more appropriately called User Interaction design, and has to do with understanding the workflow of the user, and then choosing the method to implement it.
Don't actually have anything to say about the book or review - it just got my mind going on this track, and I couldn't prevent my fingers from typing after that
Yeah, I don't see how something like this would bring in tourists. "Travel hundreds of miles to use the same internet you can at home." Wireless acces might make things more convient for the tourists once they got here, but I doubt anyone would choose to come because of it.
Business conventions, however, make a lot of sense. This could also be a good idea for cities working on revitalizing parts of the town. It would both increase the value of the land to businesses, as well as making it a more plesent place for people to hang out. I for one would much rather work on a laptop at a park than in my danky apartment.
wearing a schoolgirl costume with mechanical power-up accessories
I hope that this is a female posting. You just gave me had horrible mental image of Richard Stallman in a mini-skirt, and a evil-looking mini-display over one eye.
How is this junk science? A reputable institution performed a double-blind test of new equipment, and found it to have statistically meaningful effects. They acknowledged that the old cell towers were not harmfull to people, and even used them as a control (or baseline) to compare these new towers against. They acknowleged that they have no proof of perminant damage, and recomend that indepenant research be done to verify and extend their own. This sounds like a text-book example of good science to me.
These tests were not about handsets, and they made no claims that handsets were dangerous. The only effect that this study might have is in determining the placement of towers, so people don't have to spend large amounts of time in their immediate proximity. For example, in rural area many cell towers have been placed in church steeples because they are high points, and it is less expensive and less ugly than building a tower. Now, it would be nice to know if these new base stations will have an unplesent effect on people before they are installed.
It is really the media, not the institutions, that are to blame for the unjustified hysteria, which resulted in needing to do more work than necissary to quell peoples concerns. But I for one am glad that studies have been done to show that cell phones are safe, and am glad for new studies when new equipment comes out. Emperical data is always good, and assuming that there is no possibility that different RF techniques can have different effects than the ones we are familiar with is almost as bad unbased claims that new technology will cause cancer. (Althogh not as bad as saying that old, tested technology does)
Someone needs to take off the negativity goggles. Trillian has been very good about releasing patches for non-paying customers, and they say in the very same sentence, that they are planing on releasing the patch for 0.74 (the free version) as soon as they finish testing it. What were you expecting, that they implement the patch in 0.74 first, and then leave their customers hanging while they port the patch to 2.0? Of course they give preference to people that support them and not the leeches.
Now if we could just be this effective on a few of the slightly more important issues like civil rights, pre-emptive wars, and so forth.
Along those lines, it just occured to me how short it took to get the courts to look at this case. A judge in Oklahoma blocked the list citing that the FTC overstepped its authority. A judge in Denver found the same thing and further stated Free Speech concerns, because the government was determine exactly where to draw the line of speech is allowed into your house, if you sign up for the list. All of this before the list was enacted and simply because the Direct Marketing Association brought the issue to court.
Now how long has it been since the Patriot Act was passed? I was under the impression that we had to wait around until someone was tried under the new laws before it's constitionality could be challenged. But the telemarketers didn't wait till they were sued for calling someone on the DNC list before challenging it's validity. What's the difference? Can someone like the ACLU or just file a case in court questioning the Patriot Act? I'm assuming not, or else someone would have done so already. But was is the legal differentiation here?
Concerning my parent post quoted here:
If they've got probable cause, they can do just about anything. If you've murdered someone, I want the government to be able to find out how long it takes for you to shit if it will help them any.
He shouldn't have done anything with that virus. Period. Nobody should have. And if all his personal information will help them confirm that he did it and/or find leads to others that did, I say more power to them. They've got cause to believe he did it, they've got cause to be on his case. This isn't a story.
This person expressed a valid point of view. Just because you disagree with a post does not mean you should moderate it down. In fact there were a couple good people who took the time to write insightfull responces explaining why they disagreed with the post. You moderators could have moderated those up, benifiting all of us with a better understand of the issues, but instead you abused your powers to censor an opinion you didn't like.
I completely agree, just couldn't pass up a bad C joke. Perhaps this would have been better:
:)
I see your thanks--, and raise you a thanks++
err, I made myself groan on that one, perhaps enough bad humor for the day
As a matter of policy I agree. But concider how many posts get modded up that are doing nothing but completely trashing the book reviewer. They are almost completely noise as well. It is nice to see some positive noise for a change.
:)
But even informative posts tend to be negative. The nature of dicussion forums is that signal is information that isn't in the article, so it is just natural that most signal is the opposing view. This results in quite a negative atmosphere. So it's good to have a reminder like this from time to time, lest we fall into the dark side
That was my initial reaction, but it caused me to wonder why these exemptions for jounalists exist in the first place. I assume that the main reason is that it could discourage free speech in the press. Could someone with more knowledge (or imagination) than me give some examples/ situations of how this this would stiffle free speech?
The other side of the story is the bad effect that it has on the court. Like where he mentioned how a bunch of the "evidence" was siting newspaper articles! Because we all know that if it's in the newspaper it must be true. What evidence can journalists collect that the FBI can't? The FBI should have no need for this, and should not be presenting second hand information in court, unless they absolutely must.
Oh, you're sneaky, pretending to be giving a complement, but I see that insult hidden in there. "thanks--"! Why don't you just go all the way and say "thanks=0". Some people, have to throw in their insulting remarks, even when they are pretending to be nice ;)
The big deal is that kernal developers wrote this code and they have the (copy)right to determine how it is being used. Linksys has broken the terms of the copyright licence. Just because the kernal developers have a more permissive license than proprietary software does not give people the right to do whatever they want with the sofware. Just because the copyright is not held by a large corporation, does not mean that they can get away with breaking the licence. Just because the license demands source code instead of money in exchange for the right to modify the software, does not make it any less valid. A licence is a licence and what Linksys is doing is illegal - no different than if someone were to ship with copies of Windows in their hardware without paying for licences.
The main point is that we need to inforce the GPL and out of principle and fairness. It wouldn't be good to crack down on licence violations in cases where we have something to gain and then willingly turn a blind eye to others. We don't want to be seen playing a bait and charge game like what happened with GIF and MP3. We need to be diligent and fair in this manner, find out what source is not being released, and who is holding it back (be it Linksys themselves, or one of their partners), and see to it that they obey the terms of our licence. If we don't, then people will get the impression that we don't care if they violate our license.
Now, if availability of this code helps someone, then great - that's why the GPL is written the way it is. And at the very least there are people that would enjoy having the code. But even if no one ever used the source, we would be setting a very bad precident not to press this issue.
Yeah you are right, but he made another mistake that canceled out the first one:
.6m x 2 = 0.12m .12m
Thus: the wavelength is
0.6m x 2 = 1.2m or
0.06m x 2 =
So, had he done all his math right he would have gotten 3x10^8. As it is, his lab report will come back quite bloodied by the red marker.
We live our lives enslaved to the meaningless details of this world. The solution?
:)
AD23:
Go, sell all your possessions and give the the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.
AD2003:
Bash the fuck out of your computer. Now doesn't that feel better.
My, how we have advanced
Now I'm not excited about the prospect of online taxes, but how is it unfair? If anything, the current situation is unfair to brick-and-mortor stores that do have to charge taxes on their products.
hmm, thats true. In fact exploring moral and societal issue has always been a big part of SciFi in general. I think where it got annoying was where it changed from being less about morality and more about political correctness.
;)
Which is why Jonathan Archer is the best captain ever!
Thats right, IBM has not a single OS of their very own :)
No, it isn't a mind control device. People like us with no interest whatsoever in the product will still not buy it. But we are at one extreme. At the other is people that actually respond to spam. And there are people in the middle. This method get results by influencing the people in the middle, who concidered responding but didn't.
Numerically, say 0.1% of spam gets a responce. Even if you increase the responce 22 fold, as the study did, then 97.8% of the people still are not responding to your spam.
Taguchi did not develop this method for advertizing. He developed for engineering, and it was never used for advertizing till extremely recently. It is a general method for determining a handfull of tests which can be used to find the empericall tradeoffs between a whole slew of various factors. Taguchi used it to improve the quality of japanese cars while keeping costs down.
Giving him full credit for the quality of japanese cars, as Cringly did, was definately an overstatement though.
This improvement isn't about targeting specific gullible who are more likely to respond. It is about an easy, rigorous way to fine tune what the spam says to better play on one's gullibility. And the analysis is quite cheap, so it is well worth the effort.
Or in your analogy, they are still hitting as many people with their better carpet bomb, but sustain more fatalities.
This caught my eye.
Dell words of wisdom
To determine what businesses his company wants to be in, Dell looks for large markets where there are inefficiencies or high mark-ups. He looks for standards, because markets don't usually become high-volume until standards exist. Dell said standards benefit users, while proprietary hardware benefits only the company selling it.
Which is interesting in light of the anouncement of the music service, since the music industry is a glarring example of high mark ups.
Yes, and actually TWM and FVWM are not actually the lightest window managers around, just the simplest.
\begin{vent}
:)
:) CD's aren't perfect, but they are the best quality, most portable audio format available to consumers.
:)
I just came to check and see if anyone had posted any comments in responce to mine, and discovered that someone had modded me down as overrated. The purpose of moderation is to save reader's time, modding somthing down as overrated is basically saying that you think that reading this post is a waste of the reader's time.
So this moderation annoys me because no one has posted any real criticism about my idea, so I don't know why the moderator thought my opinion was not worth reading. Furthermore, I did not have a high score to begin with (how can something be overrated when it wasn't highly rated to begin with?), and now even fewer people will read this I won't get any feedback on my idea, which is the entire reason I post to begin with.
grr, well at least I am motivated to meta-moderate more often now.
\end{vent}
Now to the the people that were kind enough to talk to me
I definitly agree with everything you say about CD quality. (I was thinking of commenting on that in the original post, but decided I use to many parenthetical statments already
Flac would be nice. Both methods are almost the same to me - download flac, burn a back up CD, and encode a mp3 for my portable, or buy a CD rip and then encode an mp3. About the same amount of work - less if you use flac in all your music devices. But CD's are prettier, and that gets me all the time
In terms of crippled CD's I've never actually run acrossed one. To me they have just been a potential concern on the horizon, which I hoped wouldn't become widespread. But yes, a proprietary formated (crippled) CD is just as bad as a proprietory file format, if not worse.
Okay, that makes sense. From your examples it looks like Apple gains some additional sanity over the library issue by having central control over all the system libraries. So providing your own copy of a shared library is rarely necisarry but always an option. Nice.
...
The Unix style of VFS entries pointing to different media isn't as practical on a desktop system as it was on bigass mainframes.
I think the one thing keeping Linux from having real mainstream appeal is the Unix underpinnings it clings to.
Yes I definately agree with this. That's one thing that grates me when using the linux destops. I am quite happy with the unix way of doing things, and I am equally content with the mac way. But with these destops you have a mac face thrown on a *nix body with no give and take between the two paradigms. The two paradigms do not harmonize well in the sense that nothing you learn about the mac half will help you in the unix half, and you ineviable have to use both halves, at some point.
At one point, (before GNOME or OS X) I though that Linux as we know it would be restricted to the server and the future of free software on the desktop would not be a "linux os" distro, but another operating system (or operating environment if you prefer) that just happened to use linux as it's kernal, and happend to borrow some useful daemons, but was nothing like unix at all. (Acorn RiscOS is more along the lines I was thinking). From everything I've seen, Mac OS X put itself about halfway between that and unix. It changed the overall organization of the system to match that of the desktop, but kept most of the nuances of unix, just hidden.
On a side note, while the unix traditions and mechanics are not suitable to the desktop, I haven't given up on the unix philosophy. The main problem with the unix implementations is that the interface that unix provided to it's tools was purely "in one side out the other". So it was good for filtering things (like configuration file and logs), but useless at iteractive tasks. The Humane Interface stuff that Jeff Raskin talks about is pretty much the same thing as the unix philosophy. Applications are modal, and thus cause errors and limit the usefullness of tools. Therefore get rid of applications and just have documents and tools to operate on documents. I am really interested to see if his approach really can create something more powerful and pleasent than the applications we have today.
Anway, I am counting weeks till I can get a new mac, try out OS X, and contibute to his project:)