Hey that would be great. But realistically, if it doesn't run a mainstream OS, it's not going to sell. And the mainstream OS makers are unlikely to (expensively) port to a new architechture without a ready customer base. Chicken-and-egg, Catch-22, call it what you will.
About two thirds of the blame for the crazy heat/power situation can be laid squarely at Intel's feet, and most of that blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the stupid, sacrifice-anything-to-get-another-megahertz, power-gobbling Pentium IV.
But things may be changing - the P6's heir, the 'Dothan' Pentium M - offers blistering performance for a small fraction of the power consumption of the Pentium IV.
If someone says there's a hole in a theory, I take that to mean that the theory makes a prediction which is demonstrably incorrect, i.e., the theory is problematic to the point where it may require serious revision or risk being disproved.
I don't take it to mean that the theory doesn't explain absolutely everything in the universe. No one seriously claims that the theory of naturual selection is a grand unified "Theory of Everything." It was never meant to be.
In any case, Godel's incompleteness theorem only says that any logical system must have some axioms. Which the physical sciences do. So unless you're challenging those axioms, I don't see how they could possibly count as "holes" in natural selection.
Perhaps I should have asked "What, specifically, are the 'holes' in the theory of natural selection?" I'm not asking about metaphysics or the limits of human knowledge; I'm asking about solid evidence that the fundemental idea of natural selection is wrong, i.e., someone saw a chicken give birth to a hamster, or the fossil record shows that humans are actually the oldest mammals, etc.
I think the money is better spent on adding RAM to the main computer because the OS does a lot of caching too.
I believe that while the system's cache excels at saving disk reads (in fact it's faster and more effective than the disk controller's cache ever could be) the disk controller's cache can offer significant acceleration for disk writes. The system's cache can only postpone writes, not accelerate them. With a controller cache, data may be dumped to the disk controller at the full bus speed, rather than being limited by the speed of the spinning metal.
I think you'll find that when comparing drives with identical specs apart from the controller cache (Western Digital, for example, has offered "Standard" 2MB cache and "Special Edition" 8MB cache versions of otherwise identical units for some years), the drive with the larger cache does indeed get better benchmark scores.
And 8MB or even 16MB of RAM for the disk controller is very cheap these days. Skimping on that cache wouldn't save enough money to make a significant upgrade to the system RAM.
...the issues like RPC and IIS viruses are ones that a Windows user has no direct defense against...
Well, the RPC thing, as embodied in Sasser, Blaster, et. al., at least, is completely blocked by even a freebie desktop firewall program, a NAT device like a home networking router, and presumeably by WinXP's sucky built-in firewall. Not the sort of things that Joe Clueless is likely to actually use on his own, but things that he could use, in principle.
It's true, that link wasn't exactly a scholarly dissertation on the matter, but arguments like "assertion is not proof" and "that's just propoganda" could be applied equally well to just about any news story on the topic - what level of evidence would you require to qualify as a "debunking", realistically speaking? Not that I'm going to be able to provide it.
I wasn't able to Google up anything about the more convincing study I read about. It seems a wind farm site was monitored for bird activity before and after the installation of the turbines. After the installation, bird traffic in the area dropped precipitously - the birds flying through the area changed their routes to avoid the turbines. The overwhelming majority of the bird traffic that remained in the area navigated the farm just fine. There were some bird kills, but they amounted to a tiny fraction of a percent of the birds that had been in the area before the wind farm. The farm was by no means a bird blender, and was probably very far from the most serious threat the birds faced in their day-to-day bird lives. I did read it on-line, so it's out there somewhere.
Here's a story that points out that pretty much any "sticks-up-in-the-air" type structure - like a high-rise building or a radio tower - kills birds. The fact is that there are a lot of birds, and therefore there are always a lot of birds dying in one way or another, including smacking into the windows of even single-story structures or colliding with cars. Yet no one's arguing against windows and cars, at least not on those grounds.
Other recent research supports the idea that birds can see wind turbines perfectly well and mostly tend to keep their distance. There are a few kills, but the turbines aren't the bird-blenders they've been made out to be.
There's no reason that a hybrid design can't be faster than the non-hybrid version. The Honda Accord hybrid, for example, uses about the same engine as the standard V6 Accord, plus an electric motor. It's actually slightly quicker than the standard V6, and gets better mileage to boot.
And on the other hand, part of the nightmare of driving - or even walking, for that matter - in NYC is all the crazy rocket-propelled taxi cabs. A super-efficient and slow-ish cab design could make the city slightly quieter, cleaner, cheaper, and more pleasant.
They often need to set up the user session as soon as you start browsing so that they can show dynamic indications of your shopping cart status and whatnot...
You have a misunderstanding about this word, "need." Some sites may be designed to require cookies, but that's not the same as a "need." That's just a poor design, and it's allowing the software guys to make a business decision (an uneccesary and poor one) to boot. Consider that not all web-browsing devices even have storage space for cookies.
Most online stores and services, and notably the most successful ones, work hard on interoperability. They work with old browsers, they work even if you don't have Flash, they work with screen readers, and they at least allow you to browse even if they can't store cookies. Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, Google, et al. Try telling Jeff Bezos that he's running his little store all wrong - he "needs" to start forcing cookies down his customer's throats.
...don't expect merchants to accomodate.
I don't expect most of them will. So? Really, it doesn't matter why I don't like cookies - it's my computer, and that's that. If merchant A has a stupid e-commerce setup, there's generally a merchant B who does not. It's not like I've ever had to do without some widget because of a cookie issue.
Are you in the web-design/e-commerce game? If so, you should take this as feedback, rather than get all bristly. The simple fact is that some people absolutely hate being required to accept cookies from a site they've never used before. A web designer who truly cares about his craft would focus on giving the users what they want, rather than grumbling about how what the users want is dumb.
Well, sure, the shopping cart will need them. I don't have a problem with that; if I actually decide to do business with an online merchant, I add their site to my whitelist.
But consider, say, Staples, for example. With cookies disabled, one cannot even see if Staples even carries the item one might be interested in buying. That's just silly.
As for turning them off, well, it's certainly a personal preference. I do what I can to keep my online activities private.
Mozilla, for one (perhaps Firefox also) makes it easy to allow cookies on a whitelist-only basis, which I consider pretty easy, and which renders any worries about tracking cookies completely moot.
Surfing the net this way, though, it's surprising how many on-line stores won't even let you search and browse their wares without cookies enabled.
$500 wooden knobs, sadly, are far from the oddest/lamest/most incredible snake oil available in the audiophile world.
There was the much-imitated "Tice Clock," a cheap digital alarm clock that sold for hundreds, which supposedly would improve the sound of any audio gear in the same room. There are isolation mats and isolation feet, to protect your precious amplifier from vibrations. There are spray-on, wipe-on, and stick-on treatments and weights for CDs that supposedly make them sound smoother. There are tiny little stilts to hold your speaker cables up off the floor to prevent - uh, actually, I don't know what those are supposed to do.
And of course the sky is the limit if you want to spend money on fancy wires. From speaker wire (the popular Monster Cable turns out to be only the first circle of rip-off Hell) to audio interconnects (even the cheapest are waaaay beyond the modest needs of audio frequencies) to US$1000 replacement power cables. (Which are may be the stupidest thing ever - the electricity has been delivered to your house through ~20 miles of low-grade industrial wire and transformers, but all your audio problems will disappear if you treat the juice to a smooth ride for that last 5 feet? Insane.)
The biometrics biz doesn't want you to know, but biometrics suck.
Even if one were to develop a much better biometric system, there are serious drawbacks. Any biometric key is really just a password that cannot be changed, even if the password has been compromised, or even if the whole system has been cracked wide open.
Suppose someone invents a "foolproof" retinal scanner system, which is deployed at every point-of-sale terminal in the US. All credit card transactions are verified with the retinal scanner. A year later, someone figures out a way to imprint retinal holograms on contact lenses, or finds some other circumvention. Now if someone gets his hands on your retinal data, your financial life is completely hosed, forever, or at least until you convince the powers-that-be to trade in $50 billion worth of retinal scanners for updated models. You can't call the credit card company and ask for a new retina.
As ever, security is really more about attitude than about devices. An awful lot of dollars worth of credit card fraud, for example, would be stopped cold if store clerks bothered to just check the signatures on credit card slips.
My own Windows box was infected, cleaned up, and re-infected with Sasser (or Sobig or Sober or Blaster or something - I don't remember which it was) - all in the space of 2 to 3 minutes on a stinking dialup.
That was a couple of years ago, when Windows worms (as opposed to Trojans, viruses, etc.) were a pretty new phenomenon, and when I thought I wouldn't need a firewall for my dinky little dial-up connection. Live and learn.
This of course begs the question as to whether MS's extensions will in fact be useful.
RSS was intended to collect news. Now MS is planning to make it show updates to ordered lists - something it was never intended to do in the first place. Is that really such a great idea? Is it likely to lead to a widely-compatible, stable and well-designed system?
Wouldn't it be simpler to keep the frequently-updated list on a plain old web site, and put linked update notices in the RSS feed? What problem are we trying to solve here?
They can be done under Mozilla/Firefox with a bit of Javascript, I beleive.
And personally, I think style issues like these are better handled by scripts or other non-browser-specific systems. Styles change, and it would be just as well to avoid changing the browser for every little whim of fashion.
Wow, thanks for pointing out that Adorama has a print service. It looks like a bargain. 8x10s are 1/4 the price of my local camera shop and 1/2 the price of my local discount/drug stores. The web interface shows you how the pictures will be auto-cropped, and lets the customer override. And it understands.tif files! Outstanding. I placed an order just now. Even including the shipping, two 8x10s and two 5x7s are under US$10, less than a pair of 5x7s alone at my local camera shop.
Now I am a tiny bit torn, because I do think it's important to support local businesses and the personal, expert service they can provide. But the guys at the local camera shop aren't expert enough to justify that kind of price hike.
Of all the wacky things that are serious crimes in Singapore, what's so wacky about this one? At least it's arguably a life-and-limb issue, unlike the chewing gum thing.
I mean, I hear that in the US, you actually have to take classes and then a test and pay a fee for a license to drive a truck. And that to get the license, you actually have to promise to follow the rules of the road! Whoa, hey, if that's not techo-fascism, what is?
Windows Update is sometimes inexplicably slow about installing the patches that it downloads, but in my experience, the download itself has generally zipped right along. I snagged 8MB of patches in under a minute this morning. (And no, I'm not really thrilled that my simple e-mailing and web-reading desktop needs 8MB of patches every couple of months.)
I'd guess that on the scale that Microsoft buys it, bandwidth is dirt cheap and getting cheaper. In that case, what compelling business case is there to resort to a peer-to-peer strategy to distribute patches? They can probably afford to budget, say, 5GB of transfer for patch downloads for every OS license sold. How much would that be, US$0.50? Less? Why bother with all the security headaches of a peer-to-peer system when a client-server system offers better protection, control, and is so cheap?
I had figured that Valve's Steam platform would use some sort of peer-to-peer boost, especially when they hired Mr. Cohen, but I guess Valve decided the same way on the security-headaches vs. bandwith-is-cheap issue.
Theoretcially this is true, but I wonder if it's really practical enough for a malware author to consider. A malicious MP3 file, for example, would find itself getting decoded by one of about a zillion decoder/media player programs out there. Any particular buffer overflow attack would probably only be successful on a minority desktop PCs.
In the case of video files, things would be easier for an attacker, since a DivX file (for example) is virtually always going to be played back with the one official DivX decoder, even if it's not always running under the same media player.
Of course, if the world at large could be persuaded to eschew the closed-source codecs, (yay XviD!) exploits like these might be more quickly contained.
But it gets more complex if you want to share the show with friends / family / etc. With VHS, you simply lend out the tape, which is already prepared, with a high degree of confidence that the lendee owns and understands how to operate the playback equipment. I know people who are perfectly comfortable using a VCR, but who get flummoxed by DVD players.
Many people refer to the old Microsoft CLI so familiar from the DOS days as DOS. Of course, that's not really accurate.
DOS was the interrupt-handler-based not-quite-really-an-operating-system that ran PCs from the 1980s through the early 90s, and which was radically extended to form Windows 1/2/3/95/98 etc. The CLI was, technically, a DOS application, not DOS itself.
The CLI included with NT-based systems (NT3.5/NT4/2k/XP) looks and acts very much like the CLI from the DOS days, but it's a 32-bit protected-mode Windows application. It has no ability to run DOS applications at all. When you start a DOS application from an NT-based command line, a different process (NTVDM - NT Virtual DOS Machine) is fired up to emulate DOS. Which doesn't always work very well, since DOS applications frequently manipulated hardware in the most direct possible way, and that's verboten in NT-based Windows.
In the better variety of Microsoft OSes, DOS died over a decade ago.
for home users, it'll take a LOT longer to explain "directories" than just a file/folder comparison and a file cabinet. Easy simple stuff you take for granted will often confuse the begeezis out of regular people.
That's absolutely true.
I think maybe a database filesystem - with the right interface - could be easier for these people. Yet it might also be more confusing for someone (like me) who's been using directories to organize everything for 20+ years.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey that would be great. But realistically, if it doesn't run a mainstream OS, it's not going to sell. And the mainstream OS makers are unlikely to (expensively) port to a new architechture without a ready customer base. Chicken-and-egg, Catch-22, call it what you will.
About two thirds of the blame for the crazy heat/power situation can be laid squarely at Intel's feet, and most of that blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the stupid, sacrifice-anything-to-get-another-megahertz, power-gobbling Pentium IV.
But things may be changing - the P6's heir, the 'Dothan' Pentium M - offers blistering performance for a small fraction of the power consumption of the Pentium IV.
If someone says there's a hole in a theory, I take that to mean that the theory makes a prediction which is demonstrably incorrect, i.e., the theory is problematic to the point where it may require serious revision or risk being disproved.
I don't take it to mean that the theory doesn't explain absolutely everything in the universe. No one seriously claims that the theory of naturual selection is a grand unified "Theory of Everything." It was never meant to be.
In any case, Godel's incompleteness theorem only says that any logical system must have some axioms. Which the physical sciences do. So unless you're challenging those axioms, I don't see how they could possibly count as "holes" in natural selection.
Perhaps I should have asked "What, specifically, are the 'holes' in the theory of natural selection?" I'm not asking about metaphysics or the limits of human knowledge; I'm asking about solid evidence that the fundemental idea of natural selection is wrong, i.e., someone saw a chicken give birth to a hamster, or the fossil record shows that humans are actually the oldest mammals, etc.
I am sure that given enough time, scientists can plug holes in the theory of evolution...
What holes?
I think the money is better spent on adding RAM to the main computer because the OS does a lot of caching too.
I believe that while the system's cache excels at saving disk reads (in fact it's faster and more effective than the disk controller's cache ever could be) the disk controller's cache can offer significant acceleration for disk writes. The system's cache can only postpone writes, not accelerate them. With a controller cache, data may be dumped to the disk controller at the full bus speed, rather than being limited by the speed of the spinning metal.
I think you'll find that when comparing drives with identical specs apart from the controller cache (Western Digital, for example, has offered "Standard" 2MB cache and "Special Edition" 8MB cache versions of otherwise identical units for some years), the drive with the larger cache does indeed get better benchmark scores.
And 8MB or even 16MB of RAM for the disk controller is very cheap these days. Skimping on that cache wouldn't save enough money to make a significant upgrade to the system RAM.
...the issues like RPC and IIS viruses are ones that a Windows user has no direct defense against...
Well, the RPC thing, as embodied in Sasser, Blaster, et. al., at least, is completely blocked by even a freebie desktop firewall program, a NAT device like a home networking router, and presumeably by WinXP's sucky built-in firewall. Not the sort of things that Joe Clueless is likely to actually use on his own, but things that he could use, in principle.
It's true, that link wasn't exactly a scholarly dissertation on the matter, but arguments like "assertion is not proof" and "that's just propoganda" could be applied equally well to just about any news story on the topic - what level of evidence would you require to qualify as a "debunking", realistically speaking? Not that I'm going to be able to provide it.
I wasn't able to Google up anything about the more convincing study I read about. It seems a wind farm site was monitored for bird activity before and after the installation of the turbines. After the installation, bird traffic in the area dropped precipitously - the birds flying through the area changed their routes to avoid the turbines. The overwhelming majority of the bird traffic that remained in the area navigated the farm just fine. There were some bird kills, but they amounted to a tiny fraction of a percent of the birds that had been in the area before the wind farm. The farm was by no means a bird blender, and was probably very far from the most serious threat the birds faced in their day-to-day bird lives. I did read it on-line, so it's out there somewhere.
Here's a story that points out that pretty much any "sticks-up-in-the-air" type structure - like a high-rise building or a radio tower - kills birds. The fact is that there are a lot of birds, and therefore there are always a lot of birds dying in one way or another, including smacking into the windows of even single-story structures or colliding with cars. Yet no one's arguing against windows and cars, at least not on those grounds.
...debunked here [PDF] among other places.
Other recent research supports the idea that birds can see wind turbines perfectly well and mostly tend to keep their distance. There are a few kills, but the turbines aren't the bird-blenders they've been made out to be.
There's no reason that a hybrid design can't be faster than the non-hybrid version. The Honda Accord hybrid, for example, uses about the same engine as the standard V6 Accord, plus an electric motor. It's actually slightly quicker than the standard V6, and gets better mileage to boot.
And on the other hand, part of the nightmare of driving - or even walking, for that matter - in NYC is all the crazy rocket-propelled taxi cabs. A super-efficient and slow-ish cab design could make the city slightly quieter, cleaner, cheaper, and more pleasant.
You have a misunderstanding about this word, "need." Some sites may be designed to require cookies, but that's not the same as a "need." That's just a poor design, and it's allowing the software guys to make a business decision (an uneccesary and poor one) to boot. Consider that not all web-browsing devices even have storage space for cookies.
Most online stores and services, and notably the most successful ones, work hard on interoperability. They work with old browsers, they work even if you don't have Flash, they work with screen readers, and they at least allow you to browse even if they can't store cookies. Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, Google, et al. Try telling Jeff Bezos that he's running his little store all wrong - he "needs" to start forcing cookies down his customer's throats.
I don't expect most of them will. So? Really, it doesn't matter why I don't like cookies - it's my computer, and that's that. If merchant A has a stupid e-commerce setup, there's generally a merchant B who does not. It's not like I've ever had to do without some widget because of a cookie issue.
Are you in the web-design/e-commerce game? If so, you should take this as feedback, rather than get all bristly. The simple fact is that some people absolutely hate being required to accept cookies from a site they've never used before. A web designer who truly cares about his craft would focus on giving the users what they want, rather than grumbling about how what the users want is dumb.
Well, sure, the shopping cart will need them. I don't have a problem with that; if I actually decide to do business with an online merchant, I add their site to my whitelist.
But consider, say, Staples, for example. With cookies disabled, one cannot even see if Staples even carries the item one might be interested in buying. That's just silly.
As for turning them off, well, it's certainly a personal preference. I do what I can to keep my online activities private.
Mozilla, for one (perhaps Firefox also) makes it easy to allow cookies on a whitelist-only basis, which I consider pretty easy, and which renders any worries about tracking cookies completely moot.
Surfing the net this way, though, it's surprising how many on-line stores won't even let you search and browse their wares without cookies enabled.
$500 wooden knobs, sadly, are far from the oddest/lamest/most incredible snake oil available in the audiophile world.
There was the much-imitated "Tice Clock," a cheap digital alarm clock that sold for hundreds, which supposedly would improve the sound of any audio gear in the same room. There are isolation mats and isolation feet, to protect your precious amplifier from vibrations. There are spray-on, wipe-on, and stick-on treatments and weights for CDs that supposedly make them sound smoother. There are tiny little stilts to hold your speaker cables up off the floor to prevent - uh, actually, I don't know what those are supposed to do.
And of course the sky is the limit if you want to spend money on fancy wires. From speaker wire (the popular Monster Cable turns out to be only the first circle of rip-off Hell) to audio interconnects (even the cheapest are waaaay beyond the modest needs of audio frequencies) to US$1000 replacement power cables. (Which are may be the stupidest thing ever - the electricity has been delivered to your house through ~20 miles of low-grade industrial wire and transformers, but all your audio problems will disappear if you treat the juice to a smooth ride for that last 5 feet? Insane.)
The biometrics biz doesn't want you to know, but biometrics suck.
Even if one were to develop a much better biometric system, there are serious drawbacks. Any biometric key is really just a password that cannot be changed, even if the password has been compromised, or even if the whole system has been cracked wide open.
Suppose someone invents a "foolproof" retinal scanner system, which is deployed at every point-of-sale terminal in the US. All credit card transactions are verified with the retinal scanner. A year later, someone figures out a way to imprint retinal holograms on contact lenses, or finds some other circumvention. Now if someone gets his hands on your retinal data, your financial life is completely hosed, forever, or at least until you convince the powers-that-be to trade in $50 billion worth of retinal scanners for updated models. You can't call the credit card company and ask for a new retina.
As ever, security is really more about attitude than about devices. An awful lot of dollars worth of credit card fraud, for example, would be stopped cold if store clerks bothered to just check the signatures on credit card slips.
My own Windows box was infected, cleaned up, and re-infected with Sasser (or Sobig or Sober or Blaster or something - I don't remember which it was) - all in the space of 2 to 3 minutes on a stinking dialup.
That was a couple of years ago, when Windows worms (as opposed to Trojans, viruses, etc.) were a pretty new phenomenon, and when I thought I wouldn't need a firewall for my dinky little dial-up connection. Live and learn.
This of course begs the question as to whether MS's extensions will in fact be useful.
RSS was intended to collect news. Now MS is planning to make it show updates to ordered lists - something it was never intended to do in the first place. Is that really such a great idea? Is it likely to lead to a widely-compatible, stable and well-designed system?
Wouldn't it be simpler to keep the frequently-updated list on a plain old web site, and put linked update notices in the RSS feed? What problem are we trying to solve here?
They can be done under Mozilla/Firefox with a bit of Javascript, I beleive.
And personally, I think style issues like these are better handled by scripts or other non-browser-specific systems. Styles change, and it would be just as well to avoid changing the browser for every little whim of fashion.
Wow, thanks for pointing out that Adorama has a print service. It looks like a bargain. 8x10s are 1/4 the price of my local camera shop and 1/2 the price of my local discount/drug stores. The web interface shows you how the pictures will be auto-cropped, and lets the customer override. And it understands .tif files! Outstanding. I placed an order just now. Even including the shipping, two 8x10s and two 5x7s are under US$10, less than a pair of 5x7s alone at my local camera shop.
Now I am a tiny bit torn, because I do think it's important to support local businesses and the personal, expert service they can provide. But the guys at the local camera shop aren't expert enough to justify that kind of price hike.
Of all the wacky things that are serious crimes in Singapore, what's so wacky about this one? At least it's arguably a life-and-limb issue, unlike the chewing gum thing.
I mean, I hear that in the US, you actually have to take classes and then a test and pay a fee for a license to drive a truck. And that to get the license, you actually have to promise to follow the rules of the road! Whoa, hey, if that's not techo-fascism, what is?
Windows Update is sometimes inexplicably slow about installing the patches that it downloads, but in my experience, the download itself has generally zipped right along. I snagged 8MB of patches in under a minute this morning. (And no, I'm not really thrilled that my simple e-mailing and web-reading desktop needs 8MB of patches every couple of months.)
I'd guess that on the scale that Microsoft buys it, bandwidth is dirt cheap and getting cheaper. In that case, what compelling business case is there to resort to a peer-to-peer strategy to distribute patches? They can probably afford to budget, say, 5GB of transfer for patch downloads for every OS license sold. How much would that be, US$0.50? Less? Why bother with all the security headaches of a peer-to-peer system when a client-server system offers better protection, control, and is so cheap?
I had figured that Valve's Steam platform would use some sort of peer-to-peer boost, especially when they hired Mr. Cohen, but I guess Valve decided the same way on the security-headaches vs. bandwith-is-cheap issue.
Theoretcially this is true, but I wonder if it's really practical enough for a malware author to consider. A malicious MP3 file, for example, would find itself getting decoded by one of about a zillion decoder/media player programs out there. Any particular buffer overflow attack would probably only be successful on a minority desktop PCs.
In the case of video files, things would be easier for an attacker, since a DivX file (for example) is virtually always going to be played back with the one official DivX decoder, even if it's not always running under the same media player.
Of course, if the world at large could be persuaded to eschew the closed-source codecs, (yay XviD!) exploits like these might be more quickly contained.
But it gets more complex if you want to share the show with friends / family / etc. With VHS, you simply lend out the tape, which is already prepared, with a high degree of confidence that the lendee owns and understands how to operate the playback equipment. I know people who are perfectly comfortable using a VCR, but who get flummoxed by DVD players.
Many people refer to the old Microsoft CLI so familiar from the DOS days as DOS. Of course, that's not really accurate.
DOS was the interrupt-handler-based not-quite-really-an-operating-system that ran PCs from the 1980s through the early 90s, and which was radically extended to form Windows 1/2/3/95/98 etc. The CLI was, technically, a DOS application, not DOS itself.
The CLI included with NT-based systems (NT3.5/NT4/2k/XP) looks and acts very much like the CLI from the DOS days, but it's a 32-bit protected-mode Windows application. It has no ability to run DOS applications at all. When you start a DOS application from an NT-based command line, a different process (NTVDM - NT Virtual DOS Machine) is fired up to emulate DOS. Which doesn't always work very well, since DOS applications frequently manipulated hardware in the most direct possible way, and that's verboten in NT-based Windows.
In the better variety of Microsoft OSes, DOS died over a decade ago.
for home users, it'll take a LOT longer to explain "directories" than just a file/folder comparison and a file cabinet. Easy simple stuff you take for granted will often confuse the begeezis out of regular people.
That's absolutely true.
I think maybe a database filesystem - with the right interface - could be easier for these people. Yet it might also be more confusing for someone (like me) who's been using directories to organize everything for 20+ years.
Would those be English (Old) or Metric (New) Beetles?