Absurd: In a free market, no abusive monopoly would stay that way -- competitors, smelling profits, would start supplying effective alternatives. Heck, even with a less than free market, alternatives sprung up to Windows: the community-produced and collectively owned GNU/* and BSD-* alternatives.
In a free market - a *real* free market with no government regulation - an [abusive] monopoly is the only logical end result.
I also use them side by side, everyday and demand -real world- performance out of both and I can reassure you that you mustn't be doing much more than dragging and dropping files around on your desktop to not realise the difference.
Funny, that's the same thing I'd say to anyone trying to suggest Finder was better.
Finder works well enough if you're just throwing a few things around on the Desktop or your home directory. Get into complex directory structures and network resources (ESPECIALLY network resources), however, and it falls apart.
My particular favourite is when explorer takes 30 seconds to re-read a network directory that I use in excess of 100 times a day. (each time rereading the h&w of the images in the folder, despite having turned this off about 10 times already).
Even assuming your experience was normal - which it isn't - this pales into insignificant compared to the way Finder just randomly locks up completely accessing network shares. Heaven help you if some network share temporarily disappears, because you'll almost certainly have to kill it - possibly even log out and back in again or reboot - just so you can start using Finder again.
It gets incredibly frustrating. Naturally when it crashes it loses all of the few settings that actually stick when you choose them.(How many times have I selected no preview, just for it to forget this setting.)
Your PC is broken. You should get it fixed. I can't even remember the last time Explorer crashed.
This is just the tip of the ice burg. I won't even start on recycle bin or what happens when the explorer window is scrolled down to a section of files and you dare want to add or remove one.
Sounds like more examples of how you don't know what you're doing.
From this statement, I can only conclude that your standards are very low, indeed.
10 years of running NT without a single virus or other malware infection, uptimes regularly measured in months and an unexplained crash count that fits on one hand.
My standards are pretty high. That's the main reason I haven't been able to put up with OS X for extended lengths of time yet.
1. Explorer deals with network resources far better. Start -> Run -> \\server[\share\directory\file]. Quick and easy. Nothing else I've ever used has even come close. Not to mention when a network resource disappears from Explorer it just tries for a short while and then times out, after which you can get on with your business. Whereas Finder just sits there forever spinning the beachball and basically locks you out of the whole thing.
2. Finder has no "cut", only copy & paste.
3. Explorer's split pane directory tree + file listing view is far better for navigating and manipulating deep/complex directory structures than any of the three Finder modes.
4. The Dock. Too much has been written about how much the Dock sucks and why, which I'm not going to repeat unless specifically asked.
5. Keyboard navigation - particularly doing things like selecting files via the keyboard - is far more usable an intuitive in Explorer.
With that said, I did managed to recall one thing Finder does better:
Pop-up folders (whe you drag some and hover over folders to open them and drill down into a directory structure) work better in Finder.
Valid point, but not against Explorer, Explorer often totally locks up for minutes at a time for stupid shit like not being able to find some network share or something. It just doesn't have a beachball, but the problem is really the locking up, not the beach ball itself. (To it's no-credit, Finder doesn't do much better with network shares.)
Finder is substantially *worse* with disappearing network shares, and really just accessing network resources in general.
Explorer, at least, times out fairly quickly and lets you get on with it. Finder just sits there spinning the beachball until either the share comes back online, or you kill it.
The better question is: having blown about ten billion dollars in direct costs (and maybe as much as fifty billion in opportunity costs) [...]
Those are awfully big numbers. Where do they come from ?
[...] and having had to try to save face by hastily throwing together XP SP4 and pretending that it's actually Longhorn, despite having dropped all the features that were supposed to make it worth a six-year wait, [...]
If you think it's just a Service Pack to Windows, you're not paying attention (or just spewing the standard FUD). The low-level changes *alone* make Vista worthy of a major version jump.
[...] does it make any sense for MS to do it all again, or should they buy a working OS from a vendor who can actually ship updates on a schedule?
Surely you're not talking about Apple, the company who took several attempts (and failures) to get an OS more advanced than Windows 3.1 out the door, 6 years after Windows 95, 8 years after Windows NT and 9 years after OS/2 - and even then had to buy another OS and (by your standards, it appears) take 5 years to slap a "service pack" on top of it.
Longwind was MS's answer to the Copland project, only it's been far, far worse.
It would be much more realistic to say Copland was Apple's answer to Windows NT.
Even ignoring the massive time difference (Copland was starting back around *1994*) between the two projects that make any comparison ridiculous on its face, Copland was going to be a completely new MacOS, whereas Vista is a further development of Windows NT.
They've only got one viable alternative to a rerun of the disaster of the last six years, and that's to swallow their pride (which they never had in the first place), and cough up about five billion dollars to license OS X.
Why on earth would they do that ? Even being generous to OS X, the best you could say is it would be a step sideways in technology and a massive step backwards in legacy support.
For the first time in their history, they'll be able to offer a reliable, securable OS.
Windows NT is already reliable and securable. At least as much so as OS X, anyway.
No OS used by 90+% of the population will ever be "secure", as long as it can run arbitrary applications.
First if you run OSX & XP side by side, OSX highlights windows short comings, like people b i t c h about finder, but they've never really had to use explorer in a pressured environment.
I use both quite regularly, and I can't think of a single thing Finder does better than Explorer (and very few it even manages to do as well as Explorer). I can however, think of several things Explorer does *significantly* better than Finder.
But that wasn't the question - whether or not those companies would choose to pursue legal action doesn't define the legality of the software.
I can't see that anyone has raised even a faint suggestion of how this "Boot Camp" could possible be illegal...
That's what the original poster was asking about.
It seemed to me the original poster was asking whether the DMCA could be used to render "this" (referring to dual-booting with "Boot Camp") illegal. I'm not quite sure I can even begin to understand where that question could come from...
Because now at least some of the people who would have illegally run OS X on their Windows PCs, will instead consider buying a Mac so they cn run Windows on it.
Or they might just buy a Mac to run Windows on because they think it's better hardware for their needs. The MacBook Pro is a very sexy laptop.
I was addressing what could possibly make unofficial drivers illegal, which was the point of the parent's question.
Somehow I think if ATI, Nvidia, etc were going to use the DMCA to attack platforms with "unofficial" drivers, they'd have done it long ago with Linux.
Not to mention the rather flaky assumption that the drivers included in this package are in any way "unofficial" - I mean, how "unofficial" can drivers *provided by the hardware vendor* be ?
No more apologising for a Mac's inability to play games. W00t.
Most Macs ship - and have shipped for years - with relatively weak, non-upgradable video cards. I doubt being able to run Windows is going to change that.
And you seem to be arguing that only religious fanatics reject compromise as a "Win-Win" scenario.
Er, no, not in the slightest. Indeed, looking back over the thread to the post I replied to I can't even begin to imagine how you managed to get to that conclusion. I was replying to another poster who brought up the question of "religious fanatics".
As long as one side of the argument is for maintenance of the status quo any compromise is a losing situation for that side.
This does not make the end result a negative.
I welcome your input. I think you are wrong, in fact I think any standard definition of "status quo" requires you to be wrong.
Abolishment of slavery, women's suffrage, free speech, public education. The list goes on. Are you seriously going to argue these changes to the "status quo" have produced a net negative result ?
Let's all be totally clear on this: Clarke has an absolute belief in free speech, including communist literature. Not only does he believe that government shouldn't be able to regulate any kind of speech, including communist literature, but he is actively helping people to distribute communist literature, and so are you if you run a Freenet node, whether you know it or not.
Compromise is highly overrated, in essence the status quo always loses in a compromise, so, if you are ok with the way things are then the compromise is always a loser position.
You seem to be arguing compromise is inherently bad because "the status quo always loses in a compromise". You shouldn't have to think particularly hard to come up with a few examples of why this position is silly (not to mention untenable).
They would be "intuitive" and "discoverable" if every program used them and thus users expected them, and thus they learned they could right-click on anything to see the menu and see what is on it.
Even then, they would be less so than "traditional" menus because there's no indication that they even exist.
Right-click context menus have the same problem, which is why Apple doesn't use them much (and even today most users don't know they exist, as a general UI element).
For something to be "discoverable", some cues as to its existence must be obvious. UI elements whose basic existence can only been determined when a certain mouse button is clicked (or held, even more so) do not meet this criteria. The situation is even worse if the position of the mouse cursor is also a variable.
For something to be "intuitive", the user needs to be able to divine its existence and/or behaviour based on knowledge they already have of how the system works. It's very difficult to make things like context menus "intuitive", as their contents (and even presence) are so inherently tied to where the user is clicking.
It would be very difficult to create the type of UI element you are describing and meet the criteria for intuitiveness and discoverability (eg: how will it behave in co-operation with context menus).
In short, it's a good idea and a productivity booster for experienced, knowledgable users, but it's bad for novices. Much like context menus, in fact.
Porn is degrading to women, and it does destroys relationships
No, it gives people in doomed relationships a scapegoat.
Porn usage will not destroy a stable, open, trusting relationship, because neither party will surprised, hurt, degraded or in any way offended by the other looking at pornography.
If you don't like pornography, then that's not a problem - just don't look at it. If you *do* like pornography, but lie about it, then that *is* a problem. The pornography is not the problem, how you react to it is.
This all presumes that there's universal agreement (across cultures and legal regimes) and a completely clear definition/dividing line for what is and is not porn.
No, it most definitely does not. There are only two scenarios where a site ends up in.xxx:
1. Voluntarily. In which case the owner of the content decides whether or not it's porn.
2. Legally enforced. In which case the decision is made in the locality where the site is hosted and possibly where its domain is registed, where the decision whether or not it belongs in.xxx is made according to whatever local laws exist definiting pornography.
A universal definition of "pornography" is one of the *least* important parts of the.xxx discussion.
I can see where you're coming from, but if that's the case, why didn't the Bible-thumpers support it?
Because it legitimises pornography.
You have to remember, the objective of these people is not to "screen out" pornography, it's to eliminate it completely. Like most religious fanatics, they're not prepared to compromise.
A device that performs a particular function in a substantially more efficient way doesn't deserve a patent?
Your strawman aside, that would depend entirely upon the "new" design.
Let's say some guy develops that mythical 100 MPG gasoline engine. Shouldn't he be able to patent it?
Are you suggesting such an improvement is going to be so trivial that it can be copied practically instantly ?
If some invention is so innovative, so unheard of, so wow-I-would-never-have-though-of-that new that it really would deserve a patent in a well-managed patent system, then it's not going to be something that can be effectively duplicated in a short space of time. If it *can* be duplicated in a short space of time, then it can't really be doing anything particularly different, and thus wouldn't be deserving of a patent in a well-managed system *anyway*.
Of course there are other, less well-known tricks to getting around with alt-tab switching, but that means using the keyboard as well as the mouse.
Something that is almost universally faster...
As I use the mouse in the left hand, that means a clumsy grip. Or the same issue of seconds lost.
...Unless of course you're a lefty. Bugger.
Personally, in your position, I'd train myself to use the mouse right-handed. Basically all keyboard+mouse acceleration shortcuts are designed under the assumption the user is right handed. IMHO the payoff is more than worth the month or two of clumsiness.
Then again, I'm basically ambidextrous, so I might be understating the difficulty.
I think you also misunderstood the meaning of "the window is the program".
No, the problem is you are trying to describe the Windows interface based around the terminology and expectations of the application-centric MacOS interface.
The Windows UI is designed around being "document centric". That is, the user isn't supposed to even think about what an application is, they're just supposed to operate on "documents" (or in the case where that isn't a logical entity, "windows"). That's the place where all these things like OLE, COM, browser integration and the like have come from - the objective of making the use of "applications" completely transparent to the user. Apple had similar plans back in the mid 90s with OpenDoc, but nothing ever really came of it.
In Windows, you're not supposed to think "I'll open Word to edit that file", you're supposed to think "I want to edit that file" and then operate on the *file*. You're not supposed to use the application to get to the file. That's why that little "New" submenu fills up with things like "Word Document", "Winrar archive" and the like. That's how you're *supposed* to be creating new "documents", not by starting up an application, typing away, then saving as a new file.
(This is a further development (and in several ways an inferior one) of the theory behind OS/2's Workplace Shell - it should be immediately recognisable to any ex-OS/2ers. It was also a dramatic change from the application-centric Windows 3.1 - although since you could use Windows 95 basically in the same way as Windows 3.1, very few people ever noticed - or took advantage of - this paradigm shift.)
In this model, having an application "open" without a corresponding "document" is simply nonsensical - without the "document" there is no need for the application to be started (or even a point to having it running).
A bit of history: the reason MacOS works the way it does - application-centric - is because it was originally designed to run on machines with only floppy drives, where starting an application was a *very* expensive exercise (and might even entail swapping disks). So, leaving applications running even when no documents were open, was a reasonable design choice. Windows, OTOH, has only really been around on machines with hard disks, where starting an application is cheap, but where memory is relatively scarce. Thus, leaving the application running was a waste of RAM, and closing/reopening it the better choice from an efficiency perspective.
It is rather interesting to see these fundamental differences between the two UIs are basically because of the platforms they were originally designed for 20+ years ago. Kind of like the urban myth about how the size of the space shuttle boosters is depdendant on the width of a horse's arse.
The other solution is the one I mentioned earlier, the "window in a window" solution.
You are describing MDI, which uses the same principles as things like tabbed browsers. It makes sense for some uses but not others (most notably, it's very bad for moving information between child windows - ie: drag & drop to documents). It's a holdover from the Windows 3.x days and really shouldn't be being used since the release of Windows 95, at least not in the general case (things like tabbed browsers are an exception IMHO).
(Yes, I know some developers still do. Yes, I know Microsoft still do sometimes. The point is that they *shouldn't*, and they're breaking the Windows UI guidelines by doing so.)
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In a free market - a *real* free market with no government regulation - an [abusive] monopoly is the only logical end result.
For all practical purposes, it is impossible to have a monopoly and *not* be "abusive" or "stifle competition".
Funny, that's the same thing I'd say to anyone trying to suggest Finder was better.
Finder works well enough if you're just throwing a few things around on the Desktop or your home directory. Get into complex directory structures and network resources (ESPECIALLY network resources), however, and it falls apart.
My particular favourite is when explorer takes 30 seconds to re-read a network directory that I use in excess of 100 times a day. (each time rereading the h&w of the images in the folder, despite having turned this off about 10 times already).
Even assuming your experience was normal - which it isn't - this pales into insignificant compared to the way Finder just randomly locks up completely accessing network shares. Heaven help you if some network share temporarily disappears, because you'll almost certainly have to kill it - possibly even log out and back in again or reboot - just so you can start using Finder again.
It gets incredibly frustrating. Naturally when it crashes it loses all of the few settings that actually stick when you choose them.(How many times have I selected no preview, just for it to forget this setting.)
Your PC is broken. You should get it fixed. I can't even remember the last time Explorer crashed.
This is just the tip of the ice burg. I won't even start on recycle bin or what happens when the explorer window is scrolled down to a section of files and you dare want to add or remove one.
Sounds like more examples of how you don't know what you're doing.
10 years of running NT without a single virus or other malware infection, uptimes regularly measured in months and an unexplained crash count that fits on one hand.
My standards are pretty high. That's the main reason I haven't been able to put up with OS X for extended lengths of time yet.
My top 5:
1. Explorer deals with network resources far better. Start -> Run -> \\server[\share\directory\file]. Quick and easy. Nothing else I've ever used has even come close. Not to mention when a network resource disappears from Explorer it just tries for a short while and then times out, after which you can get on with your business. Whereas Finder just sits there forever spinning the beachball and basically locks you out of the whole thing.
2. Finder has no "cut", only copy & paste.
3. Explorer's split pane directory tree + file listing view is far better for navigating and manipulating deep/complex directory structures than any of the three Finder modes.
4. The Dock. Too much has been written about how much the Dock sucks and why, which I'm not going to repeat unless specifically asked.
5. Keyboard navigation - particularly doing things like selecting files via the keyboard - is far more usable an intuitive in Explorer.
With that said, I did managed to recall one thing Finder does better:
Pop-up folders (whe you drag some and hover over folders to open them and drill down into a directory structure) work better in Finder.
Finder is substantially *worse* with disappearing network shares, and really just accessing network resources in general.
Explorer, at least, times out fairly quickly and lets you get on with it. Finder just sits there spinning the beachball until either the share comes back online, or you kill it.
Those are awfully big numbers. Where do they come from ?
[...] and having had to try to save face by hastily throwing together XP SP4 and pretending that it's actually Longhorn, despite having dropped all the features that were supposed to make it worth a six-year wait, [...]
If you think it's just a Service Pack to Windows, you're not paying attention (or just spewing the standard FUD). The low-level changes *alone* make Vista worthy of a major version jump.
[...] does it make any sense for MS to do it all again, or should they buy a working OS from a vendor who can actually ship updates on a schedule?
Surely you're not talking about Apple, the company who took several attempts (and failures) to get an OS more advanced than Windows 3.1 out the door, 6 years after Windows 95, 8 years after Windows NT and 9 years after OS/2 - and even then had to buy another OS and (by your standards, it appears) take 5 years to slap a "service pack" on top of it.
Longwind was MS's answer to the Copland project, only it's been far, far worse.
It would be much more realistic to say Copland was Apple's answer to Windows NT.
Even ignoring the massive time difference (Copland was starting back around *1994*) between the two projects that make any comparison ridiculous on its face, Copland was going to be a completely new MacOS, whereas Vista is a further development of Windows NT.
They've only got one viable alternative to a rerun of the disaster of the last six years, and that's to swallow their pride (which they never had in the first place), and cough up about five billion dollars to license OS X.
Why on earth would they do that ? Even being generous to OS X, the best you could say is it would be a step sideways in technology and a massive step backwards in legacy support.
For the first time in their history, they'll be able to offer a reliable, securable OS.
Windows NT is already reliable and securable. At least as much so as OS X, anyway.
No OS used by 90+% of the population will ever be "secure", as long as it can run arbitrary applications.
I use both quite regularly, and I can't think of a single thing Finder does better than Explorer (and very few it even manages to do as well as Explorer). I can however, think of several things Explorer does *significantly* better than Finder.
I can't see that anyone has raised even a faint suggestion of how this "Boot Camp" could possible be illegal...
That's what the original poster was asking about.
It seemed to me the original poster was asking whether the DMCA could be used to render "this" (referring to dual-booting with "Boot Camp") illegal. I'm not quite sure I can even begin to understand where that question could come from...
Because now at least some of the people who would have illegally run OS X on their Windows PCs, will instead consider buying a Mac so they cn run Windows on it.
Or they might just buy a Mac to run Windows on because they think it's better hardware for their needs. The MacBook Pro is a very sexy laptop.
Somehow I think if ATI, Nvidia, etc were going to use the DMCA to attack platforms with "unofficial" drivers, they'd have done it long ago with Linux.
Not to mention the rather flaky assumption that the drivers included in this package are in any way "unofficial" - I mean, how "unofficial" can drivers *provided by the hardware vendor* be ?
Most Macs ship - and have shipped for years - with relatively weak, non-upgradable video cards. I doubt being able to run Windows is going to change that.
Uh, did you miss the part where _Apple_ are the ones distributing this software ?
(/First post.)
Er, no, not in the slightest. Indeed, looking back over the thread to the post I replied to I can't even begin to imagine how you managed to get to that conclusion. I was replying to another poster who brought up the question of "religious fanatics".
As long as one side of the argument is for maintenance of the status quo any compromise is a losing situation for that side.
This does not make the end result a negative.
I welcome your input. I think you are wrong, in fact I think any standard definition of "status quo" requires you to be wrong.
Abolishment of slavery, women's suffrage, free speech, public education. The list goes on. Are you seriously going to argue these changes to the "status quo" have produced a net negative result ?
There's no "arguably" about it. Both alcohol and tobacco are demonstrably more dangerous than marijuana.
Let's all be totally clear on this: Clarke has an absolute belief in free speech, including communist literature. Not only does he believe that government shouldn't be able to regulate any kind of speech, including communist literature, but he is actively helping people to distribute communist literature, and so are you if you run a Freenet node, whether you know it or not.
I never suggested you were...
Compromise is highly overrated, in essence the status quo always loses in a compromise, so, if you are ok with the way things are then the compromise is always a loser position.
You seem to be arguing compromise is inherently bad because "the status quo always loses in a compromise". You shouldn't have to think particularly hard to come up with a few examples of why this position is silly (not to mention untenable).
Even then, they would be less so than "traditional" menus because there's no indication that they even exist.
Right-click context menus have the same problem, which is why Apple doesn't use them much (and even today most users don't know they exist, as a general UI element).
For something to be "discoverable", some cues as to its existence must be obvious. UI elements whose basic existence can only been determined when a certain mouse button is clicked (or held, even more so) do not meet this criteria. The situation is even worse if the position of the mouse cursor is also a variable.
For something to be "intuitive", the user needs to be able to divine its existence and/or behaviour based on knowledge they already have of how the system works. It's very difficult to make things like context menus "intuitive", as their contents (and even presence) are so inherently tied to where the user is clicking.
It would be very difficult to create the type of UI element you are describing and meet the criteria for intuitiveness and discoverability (eg: how will it behave in co-operation with context menus).
In short, it's a good idea and a productivity booster for experienced, knowledgable users, but it's bad for novices. Much like context menus, in fact.
No, it's to make it easier to find porn and then block access to it.
No, it gives people in doomed relationships a scapegoat.
Porn usage will not destroy a stable, open, trusting relationship, because neither party will surprised, hurt, degraded or in any way offended by the other looking at pornography.
If you don't like pornography, then that's not a problem - just don't look at it. If you *do* like pornography, but lie about it, then that *is* a problem. The pornography is not the problem, how you react to it is.
No, it most definitely does not. There are only two scenarios where a site ends up in .xxx:
1. Voluntarily. In which case the owner of the content decides whether or not it's porn.
2. Legally enforced. In which case the decision is made in the locality where the site is hosted and possibly where its domain is registed, where the decision whether or not it belongs in .xxx is made according to whatever local laws exist definiting pornography.
A universal definition of "pornography" is one of the *least* important parts of the .xxx discussion.
Because it legitimises pornography.
You have to remember, the objective of these people is not to "screen out" pornography, it's to eliminate it completely. Like most religious fanatics, they're not prepared to compromise.
Your strawman aside, that would depend entirely upon the "new" design.
Let's say some guy develops that mythical 100 MPG gasoline engine. Shouldn't he be able to patent it?
Are you suggesting such an improvement is going to be so trivial that it can be copied practically instantly ?
If some invention is so innovative, so unheard of, so wow-I-would-never-have-though-of-that new that it really would deserve a patent in a well-managed patent system, then it's not going to be something that can be effectively duplicated in a short space of time. If it *can* be duplicated in a short space of time, then it can't really be doing anything particularly different, and thus wouldn't be deserving of a patent in a well-managed system *anyway*.
Something that is almost universally faster...
As I use the mouse in the left hand, that means a clumsy grip. Or the same issue of seconds lost.
...Unless of course you're a lefty. Bugger.
Personally, in your position, I'd train myself to use the mouse right-handed. Basically all keyboard+mouse acceleration shortcuts are designed under the assumption the user is right handed. IMHO the payoff is more than worth the month or two of clumsiness.
Then again, I'm basically ambidextrous, so I might be understating the difficulty.
I think you also misunderstood the meaning of "the window is the program".
No, the problem is you are trying to describe the Windows interface based around the terminology and expectations of the application-centric MacOS interface.
The Windows UI is designed around being "document centric". That is, the user isn't supposed to even think about what an application is, they're just supposed to operate on "documents" (or in the case where that isn't a logical entity, "windows"). That's the place where all these things like OLE, COM, browser integration and the like have come from - the objective of making the use of "applications" completely transparent to the user. Apple had similar plans back in the mid 90s with OpenDoc, but nothing ever really came of it.
In Windows, you're not supposed to think "I'll open Word to edit that file", you're supposed to think "I want to edit that file" and then operate on the *file*. You're not supposed to use the application to get to the file. That's why that little "New" submenu fills up with things like "Word Document", "Winrar archive" and the like. That's how you're *supposed* to be creating new "documents", not by starting up an application, typing away, then saving as a new file.
(This is a further development (and in several ways an inferior one) of the theory behind OS/2's Workplace Shell - it should be immediately recognisable to any ex-OS/2ers. It was also a dramatic change from the application-centric Windows 3.1 - although since you could use Windows 95 basically in the same way as Windows 3.1, very few people ever noticed - or took advantage of - this paradigm shift.)
In this model, having an application "open" without a corresponding "document" is simply nonsensical - without the "document" there is no need for the application to be started (or even a point to having it running).
A bit of history: the reason MacOS works the way it does - application-centric - is because it was originally designed to run on machines with only floppy drives, where starting an application was a *very* expensive exercise (and might even entail swapping disks). So, leaving applications running even when no documents were open, was a reasonable design choice. Windows, OTOH, has only really been around on machines with hard disks, where starting an application is cheap, but where memory is relatively scarce. Thus, leaving the application running was a waste of RAM, and closing/reopening it the better choice from an efficiency perspective.
It is rather interesting to see these fundamental differences between the two UIs are basically because of the platforms they were originally designed for 20+ years ago. Kind of like the urban myth about how the size of the space shuttle boosters is depdendant on the width of a horse's arse.
The other solution is the one I mentioned earlier, the "window in a window" solution.
You are describing MDI, which uses the same principles as things like tabbed browsers. It makes sense for some uses but not others (most notably, it's very bad for moving information between child windows - ie: drag & drop to documents). It's a holdover from the Windows 3.x days and really shouldn't be being used since the release of Windows 95, at least not in the general case (things like tabbed browsers are an exception IMHO).
(Yes, I know some developers still do. Yes, I know Microsoft still do sometimes. The point is that they *shouldn't*, and they're breaking the Windows UI guidelines by doing so.)