Or perhaps you're missing the reviewer's point. While I've occasionally sparred (mildly) with Eugenia, she's right on target here; unfortunately, she's not expressing herself too clearly (English being her second language sometimes does show through). Whether the "advanced search" is useful for fixing broken dependencies is honestly irrelevant. The point is that desktop users shouldn't need to know about things like library dependencies.
It's a generally well-accepted principle of human-computer interaction that if you allow this kind of "under the hood" access because occasionally you have to--in other words, because of the scenario that you're describing--the program isn't well-designed. If it often breaks, as you say, that means this isn't an "advanced" mode, it's a "we can't get our dependency handling right" mode.
I think the earlier comment someone had about using apt as a back-end is right on target. From a UI standpoint, even (gasp) typing "apt-get install emacs" stomps over any GUI package manager with poor dependency handling, no matter how elegant and refined the GUI might be.
...the number of open source projects that have "gone away" because of licensing that allows companies to use the code in proprietary closed systems can be counted on no fingers. Earth to Codepunk. Earth to Codepunk. Please return to base to pick up your clue. BSD's been around for how long without "dying?" Ever use X11? TeX? Perl? Vi? All things with licenses that allow commercial versions. (And in my book it's a good thing the licenses for all those original programs that drive the Internet, from the BSD IP stack to Bind, allowed commercial versions, or the Internet today would be very much like the Internet of 1990 and you and I would be using NetWare at work.)
The sad thing is that I agree that the GPL is a more "developer-friendly" license, a position I have a great deal of difficulty getting anti-GPL zealots to understand. (You'd think the idea of "I should have the right to prevent others from profiting from the work I did without giving me recompense" would not be difficult to get across to capitalists, but it is.) This kind of nonsense thinking from pro-GPL zealots surely doesn't help.
Some of that probably comes from Gobe's BeOS heritage, actually; in BeOS, every application is, to some degree, scriptable. It's just part of the API.
As I recall, Gobe wanted to expose a more complex scripting API in version 3, but that seemed to get pushed back due to the port to Windows and a scramble to get some of the more vital basic features done (like the ability to have sections in documents) and the neat PDF creation ability.
It's possible that FreeRadical, or even open source contributors, could go back and finish that. Also, unlike a lot of the other "lite" office suites, Productive's components really are components: if I understand the design correctly, it's theoretically possible for people to write new modules using the existing component API to add new functionality.
I agree with your complaint in general. I think Productive may actually prove to be a better "base" to attack these problems from than the other open source suites allow, though.
1,2,3,4,5,6 is a bad bet because if it does come up, there will be many winners, and the jackpot will be divided evenly among the winners.
That sounds like pretty good reasoning--except you're assuming the vast majority of lottery players won't think like Bingo Foo's wife. Let's face it, most people who know about statistics aren't playing the lottery to start with.:)
I know you're responding to someone else's claim about SAP-DB being on par with Oracle, but the meaningful question is whether SAP-DB deserves more recognition as a free software database solution, isn't it? What do you do if you need to work on your primary database machine and you're running PostgreSQL? You take the machine down in a maintenance window, and if necessary, put up a secondary machine that is "manual standby."
SAP-DB is pretty much the back end of SAP's commercial systems like SAP R/3. I'm sure there are things that Oracle does that SAP-DB doesn't (just like there are systems that actually do things Oracle doesn't, even though your Oracle sales rep won't admit it), but it's difficult to argue that the system doesn't have credibility in the enterprise.
It also supports Microsoft's cluster server on Windows, with failover; they're working on a cross-platform solution for hot standby, according to the website. It does have a batch mode replication manager, too, at least.
The referred-to patent is owned by "Compression Labs," which is referred to as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Forgent. Evidently they are (or perhaps were) a San Jose-based company which did indeed do video compression technology; through Google I found a press release from them in 1991 announcing video phone products with AT&T and again in 1993 from AT&T's Paradyne unit. Back then their technology was called "CDV" (compressed digital video) and was, interestingly, described as "based on the MPEG standard." A web page at Cisco referrs to a Compression Labs standard as "proprietary" and distinct from JPEG.
It's worth noting that in their last reported quarter, Forgent made $15M from a "licensing program based on its still-image compression technology." This is coming to light now, I suspect, because two companies have already caved in and paid for use of the technology, the announced one being Sony, and this gives Forgent legitimacy to bully others with this stick.
As for mass revolt against the JPEG format, the GIF controversy came to light in 1994. Eight years later and it's still the most widely-used graphics format that provides consistently-supported (if mediocre) implementations for transparency and simple animation. The majority of web browsers in the wild still don't support PNG correctly (and virtually nothing supports MNG).
While Gene Kan's death is certainly tragic, he had nothing to do with OpenBeOS that I know of. He was never even listed on their website, he most certainly wasn't a founder, and I never heard of him once in connection with BeOS during the time I was involved with it (from Preview Release 2 in their pre-Intel days up through Be, Inc.'s demise). I can't remotely find anything that suggests otherwise.
To my recollection--and checking a few "computer history" websites seems to back me up--Osborne wasn't killed by rumor sites, Osborne was killed by itself.
The new machine you're referring to was the Osborne Vixen. It could read PC-DOS disks but wasn't PC-DOS compatible; it was another CP/M machine, touted as being better than a PC (and perhaps given 8086 and even some 80286 competition, it was). The Vixen was preannounced by Osborne itself, nearly a year before they were ready to go into production (perhaps because the machine was actually being designed by a consultant rather than in-house). People stopped buying the Osborne 1 waiting for the Vixen, yes, and that did contribute a lot to Osborne's collapse, yes... but that contribution was Osborne's own fault.
I hear the "users don't read manuals" line frequently. It's an oft-repeated user interface design maxim, whose only fault seems to be that it's wrong.
I used to use a word processor called Nota Bene, that's still being made (yes, it's possible to compete with Microsoft Word). I bought it in the DOS days. NB 4.5 came with a "quick start" booklet, a 900-page reference manual (!), and supplemental manuals for the bibliography manager and Orbis (basically a database query system that uses NB and text files as its databases). And a reference card, of course.
Starting with NB 5, it became a Windows program, and the manual became a Windows help file. Take a wild guess what the main complaint about the new system was. Yep--no printed manuals.
Nota Bene is an unusual program, but you hear this a lot if you actually listen to users of any program that has any level of complexity. A good UI means that a user can get going on basic tasks immediately, but it won't lead people to the more advanced features that require a certain level of education to use. How many Microsoft Word users know about its ability to place anchored text frames, or its inline equation commands (TeX-like, rather than using the graphic equation editor)? How many Microsoft Excel users know what a Pivot Table is? Or to put it another way, most of the non-programming computer books published these days are there to be the manuals the programs should have to start with. (One popular series is even called "The Missing Manual.")
When you write "make it so that an advanced user can get to the functions she wants without going throgh some idiotic 'wizard,'" I certainly agree. But the advanced user has to have some kind of reference work available to become an advanced user. A good UI keeps out of the user's way--but that's not a replacement for user knowledge.
I was set to take issue with you, but starting out with "the noted anti-Semite Robert Fisk" lost a lot of points for DEP in my book. (People should read the interview with Fisk in the LA Weekly, and decide for themselves if he's anti-Semitic or not.) Criticizing European developers for being more supportive of socialism than American developers also shows a lack of connection to the rest of the world that's, well, sadly typical. The "socialism = communism = end of democracy" meme over here has been so successful that most Americans can't conceive of the mere possibility that a fully democratic country might support some kinds of socialism. (Suggest to them that the multiparty parliamentary systems most of those "socialist" countries use are, in fact, arguably more democratic than our "winner takes all" nonparliamentary system, and you might as well be speaking Martian.)
While in general your advice makes sense, it's been my observation that in my area (Tampa Bay, Florida), as soon as a new home subdivision in a growth area is completely built out, the new home values skyrocket. A friend of mine bought a home for $90K in '98, during the final phase of construction in that subdivision. Less than a year later there weren't any new homes there to buy. Then he ended up getting a job later on the other side of the metro region--a different county, with a 60+ minute commute one way!--and put the home back on the market in 2001. He sold it for $110K.
I'm philosophically against most new tract housing for a variety of reasons, but in high-growth metro areas, you're probably not going to lose money buying into one unless the subdivision development goes sour for some reason, or unless the region's economy just tanks overall before the subdivision has developed into anything useful. I suspect the ugliest tracts--the ones cleared of all trees, filled with shoddily-built literally identical homes down to the mailboxes--are going to be losing propositions no matter what, though.
...it's just not a very useful one. The WEDWay PeopleMover in Disney World--now renamed the "Tomorrowland Transit Authority"--isn't called a mag-lev, but as it uses linear induction motors and no wheels, it's a low-speed relative. (And it bears no relation to the PeopleMover that used to be at Disneyland.)
Frighteningly enough...
on
IMSAI Series Two
·
· Score: 3, Informative
...I think Z-System, a CP/M-compatible operating system for Z80's that was made in the '80s, could indeed handle as much RAM as you'd managed to make the system address. I ran it on a TRS-80 Model 4 that had a processor upgrade card on it that used a HD64180, a relative of the Z180, and 384K of RAM. Hey, you laugh, but for a while I ran a BBS on it--since I could load the entire OS, BBS software and database indexes for 800+ messages into RAM, it ran faster than a lot of the PC BBS's of the day.
The "new IMSAI" looks like a machine I'd have loved about a decade ago, back when some ex-CP/M hackers had designed a Z180-based Z-System machine on a Baby-AT motherboard that used the XT bus. As I recall the official name was the "PC-Z" but they referred to it informally as the "Grudge." (Which of course led to someone suggest they should make a portable version and call it the "Pet Peeve.")
No, as fond as I am of reminiscing, I don't think I'll buy a new IMSAI, in case anyone asks. If I ever miss the old days, I break out a TRS-80 emulator, play a few rounds of an arcade game in its glorious 128x48 resolution, and remember that even if people pushed hardware to the limit those days in a way that they don't now, that doesn't mean it'd be much fun to go back.
[Flash] takes control away from the user and places it in the hands of a "designer" who may not have any experience in building user interfaces.
So does HTML. More abstractly, so does any user interface kit. The user isn't in charge of the way an application--or a web page--presents information to him; the designer is. It may indeed be better to put "designer" in quotes, but that doesn't change who has the power.
Flash has lent itself to a lot of abuse, and Flash MX no doubt does, too. The difference is that Flash MX adds components for consistent user interface widgets if designers choose to use them, and it offers a lot more ability to pull data back from the server--in other words, to behave more like a real client application, as opposed to the broken model for HTML "applications" we currently have.
Sure, if you give people multimedia design tools, a lot of people will design horrendous multimedia--for a while. Desktop publishing software enabled more people to quickly make absolutely horrendous typeset documents than ever before. Would you argue that it'd have been better if we'd stayed with lead type?
As far as I can tell, AbiWord still only has binaries available for MacOS X that require X11, and my attempts to compile it with Cocoa support (following the README file directions) have been abject failures.
I'm interested in AbiWord, but I really want a Cocoa or Carbon binary, guys.
I'd argue that there's a (common) fallacy here. From the standpoint of a program user, the GPL is more restrictive in the sense that it restricts them from using code in their own closed products. From the standpoint of a program author, however, that might be a perfectly desirable restriction.
Suppose, as you said, one or more corporations contributed funding to a public research project that developed free software. With the GPL, their software and any derived works must remain free. With BSD-style licensing, anyone could take this code and use it in proprietary products. The fallacy is that this is always a good thing. The GPL (or a similar license) makes better business sense for a corporation that doesn't want to risk funding a competitor.
While others have made this observation, I'll second (or third or fourth) it--when you use a web browser that's fully Cocoa, it's a lot snappier. I've given up using IE except when I have to; I primarily use OmniWeb, but I have to say that Chimera's rendering speed is pretty stunning.
I don't doubt that OS X's speed can be improved, particularly particularly in the "subjective performance" category. Very few people seem to have learned what was (IMHO) the real lesson from Amiga: if you make your UI quick and responsive, your entire OS will seem quick and responsive. BeOS figured that out. OS X, well, hasn't. It's great that they're pushing stability, but in my experience OS X has been the least stable Unix I've used (and I say that as a committed OS X fan). I'd like to at least have gained speed from that tradeoff, but that isn't there yet.
Here's hoping OS X 10.2 has that missing hardware acceleration.
Incidentally: when it hits 11.0, what are they going to do? Call it OS Y?
I think that few of the people on avant garde of HCI research take Jacob [sic] Neilsen [sic] very seriously.
So, instead of the Nielsen Norman Group, we should be listening to Business Week? Only one of the lists you linked to was about HCI research--an automatic indexer of published journal articles, many of which--even in the Interface Design subsection--are only loosely connected to research toward making more usable interfaces, which, yes, is what Nielsen (rightly) harps on.
NN/g may not be "avant garde," but they're taken seriously by businesses, which makes your counterpoint of Business Week's lists faintly ironic. You don't need to be an interface researcher to make observations about the state of applied usability research, you need to be someone who studies usability in applications for living.
Most HCI research does take into account successful "real world" interfaces. The first part of Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface talks about, among other things, a very non-intuitive-looking old shortwave radio that's very easy to use, and why so many people prefer knobs in car radios to the array of buttons most modern implementations seem to have.
You're making the assumption that HCI research is about dumbing things down for the user. I don't think that's true at all--to put it inelegantly, it's about making the interface get out of the way, to be as transparent as possible to the task. Raskin takes an awful lot of heat from people infuriated by his dismissive attitude toward skinnable interfaces, but if you actually look at his research, he's advocating interface designs which are very powerful--i.e., entering commands in a text editing field by typing them in the text stream and pressing a [command] key, or navigating entire document collections with incremental searches. This is not the UI equivalent of "electronic children's books," and that's an unfair dismissal of HCI research as a whole.
Most HCI researchers are dismissive of current GUIs because they're not making any attempt to change the paradigm. "If it works, don't fix it" sounds nice, but if we followed that too slavishly, we'd be steering our cars by reins--computers have changed sufficiently since the early '80s (in volume of information, at the very least!) that it's worth considering the thought that productivity could be improved if we were trying to do more than make our interfaces translucent and shadowed.
The cloud in the silver lining there is that a lot of phone companies aren't making money now on long-distance. There's going to be a serious shakeup soon due to pure economics (really, it's already starting, but not at the consumer level yet), and I suspect that at the end of that shakeup, long-distance plans are going to be quite changed.
In most wholesale pricing--what carriers charge other carriers, for example--the distance of a trunk does matter. And as everything on the network is moving toward data, data pricing is going to start making more sense--tiers based on packet usage, similar to cell phone plans that have tiers based on minute usage. I wouldn't be surprised if, a decade from now, the common price plans take true network utilization into account--and are at least priced so that the median usage allows for profit on cross-country trunks, or perhaps even take distance itself into account. Just like they did back in the Ma Bell days, actually.
Slashdot Mirror
Or perhaps you're missing the reviewer's point. While I've occasionally sparred (mildly) with Eugenia, she's right on target here; unfortunately, she's not expressing herself too clearly (English being her second language sometimes does show through). Whether the "advanced search" is useful for fixing broken dependencies is honestly irrelevant. The point is that desktop users shouldn't need to know about things like library dependencies.
It's a generally well-accepted principle of human-computer interaction that if you allow this kind of "under the hood" access because occasionally you have to--in other words, because of the scenario that you're describing--the program isn't well-designed. If it often breaks, as you say, that means this isn't an "advanced" mode, it's a "we can't get our dependency handling right" mode.
I think the earlier comment someone had about using apt as a back-end is right on target. From a UI standpoint, even (gasp) typing "apt-get install emacs" stomps over any GUI package manager with poor dependency handling, no matter how elegant and refined the GUI might be.
...the number of open source projects that have "gone away" because of licensing that allows companies to use the code in proprietary closed systems can be counted on no fingers. Earth to Codepunk. Earth to Codepunk. Please return to base to pick up your clue. BSD's been around for how long without "dying?" Ever use X11? TeX? Perl? Vi? All things with licenses that allow commercial versions. (And in my book it's a good thing the licenses for all those original programs that drive the Internet, from the BSD IP stack to Bind, allowed commercial versions, or the Internet today would be very much like the Internet of 1990 and you and I would be using NetWare at work.)
The sad thing is that I agree that the GPL is a more "developer-friendly" license, a position I have a great deal of difficulty getting anti-GPL zealots to understand. (You'd think the idea of "I should have the right to prevent others from profiting from the work I did without giving me recompense" would not be difficult to get across to capitalists, but it is.) This kind of nonsense thinking from pro-GPL zealots surely doesn't help.
...is humorless libertarians. And Slashdot seems to be full of 'em.
Would you prefer "taking market share from competitors" rather than "stealing?" Or is there an even softer phrase you'd like?
And some people still think "political correctness" is an exclusively liberal thing....
In Wired's defense, most of us "in the know" understood that no matter what, Y2K was only going to last a year.
Some of that probably comes from Gobe's BeOS heritage, actually; in BeOS, every application is, to some degree, scriptable. It's just part of the API.
As I recall, Gobe wanted to expose a more complex scripting API in version 3, but that seemed to get pushed back due to the port to Windows and a scramble to get some of the more vital basic features done (like the ability to have sections in documents) and the neat PDF creation ability.
It's possible that FreeRadical, or even open source contributors, could go back and finish that. Also, unlike a lot of the other "lite" office suites, Productive's components really are components: if I understand the design correctly, it's theoretically possible for people to write new modules using the existing component API to add new functionality.
I agree with your complaint in general. I think Productive may actually prove to be a better "base" to attack these problems from than the other open source suites allow, though.
1,2,3,4,5,6 is a bad bet because if it does come up, there will be many winners, and the jackpot will be divided evenly among the winners.
That sounds like pretty good reasoning--except you're assuming the vast majority of lottery players won't think like Bingo Foo's wife. Let's face it, most people who know about statistics aren't playing the lottery to start with. :)
I know you're responding to someone else's claim about SAP-DB being on par with Oracle, but the meaningful question is whether SAP-DB deserves more recognition as a free software database solution, isn't it? What do you do if you need to work on your primary database machine and you're running PostgreSQL? You take the machine down in a maintenance window, and if necessary, put up a secondary machine that is "manual standby."
SAP-DB is pretty much the back end of SAP's commercial systems like SAP R/3. I'm sure there are things that Oracle does that SAP-DB doesn't (just like there are systems that actually do things Oracle doesn't, even though your Oracle sales rep won't admit it), but it's difficult to argue that the system doesn't have credibility in the enterprise.
It also supports Microsoft's cluster server on Windows, with failover; they're working on a cross-platform solution for hot standby, according to the website. It does have a batch mode replication manager, too, at least.
The referred-to patent is owned by "Compression Labs," which is referred to as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Forgent. Evidently they are (or perhaps were) a San Jose-based company which did indeed do video compression technology; through Google I found a press release from them in 1991 announcing video phone products with AT&T and again in 1993 from AT&T's Paradyne unit. Back then their technology was called "CDV" (compressed digital video) and was, interestingly, described as "based on the MPEG standard." A web page at Cisco referrs to a Compression Labs standard as "proprietary" and distinct from JPEG.
It's worth noting that in their last reported quarter, Forgent made $15M from a "licensing program based on its still-image compression technology." This is coming to light now, I suspect, because two companies have already caved in and paid for use of the technology, the announced one being Sony, and this gives Forgent legitimacy to bully others with this stick.
As for mass revolt against the JPEG format, the GIF controversy came to light in 1994. Eight years later and it's still the most widely-used graphics format that provides consistently-supported (if mediocre) implementations for transparency and simple animation. The majority of web browsers in the wild still don't support PNG correctly (and virtually nothing supports MNG).
While Gene Kan's death is certainly tragic, he had nothing to do with OpenBeOS that I know of. He was never even listed on their website, he most certainly wasn't a founder, and I never heard of him once in connection with BeOS during the time I was involved with it (from Preview Release 2 in their pre-Intel days up through Be, Inc.'s demise). I can't remotely find anything that suggests otherwise.
To my recollection--and checking a few "computer history" websites seems to back me up--Osborne wasn't killed by rumor sites, Osborne was killed by itself.
The new machine you're referring to was the Osborne Vixen. It could read PC-DOS disks but wasn't PC-DOS compatible; it was another CP/M machine, touted as being better than a PC (and perhaps given 8086 and even some 80286 competition, it was). The Vixen was preannounced by Osborne itself, nearly a year before they were ready to go into production (perhaps because the machine was actually being designed by a consultant rather than in-house). People stopped buying the Osborne 1 waiting for the Vixen, yes, and that did contribute a lot to Osborne's collapse, yes... but that contribution was Osborne's own fault.
I hear the "users don't read manuals" line frequently. It's an oft-repeated user interface design maxim, whose only fault seems to be that it's wrong.
I used to use a word processor called Nota Bene, that's still being made (yes, it's possible to compete with Microsoft Word). I bought it in the DOS days. NB 4.5 came with a "quick start" booklet, a 900-page reference manual (!), and supplemental manuals for the bibliography manager and Orbis (basically a database query system that uses NB and text files as its databases). And a reference card, of course.
Starting with NB 5, it became a Windows program, and the manual became a Windows help file. Take a wild guess what the main complaint about the new system was. Yep--no printed manuals.
Nota Bene is an unusual program, but you hear this a lot if you actually listen to users of any program that has any level of complexity. A good UI means that a user can get going on basic tasks immediately, but it won't lead people to the more advanced features that require a certain level of education to use. How many Microsoft Word users know about its ability to place anchored text frames, or its inline equation commands (TeX-like, rather than using the graphic equation editor)? How many Microsoft Excel users know what a Pivot Table is? Or to put it another way, most of the non-programming computer books published these days are there to be the manuals the programs should have to start with. (One popular series is even called "The Missing Manual.")
When you write "make it so that an advanced user can get to the functions she wants without going throgh some idiotic 'wizard,'" I certainly agree. But the advanced user has to have some kind of reference work available to become an advanced user. A good UI keeps out of the user's way--but that's not a replacement for user knowledge.
I believe the link you're actually looking for is: http://www.linuxandmain.com/comment/ed040702.html.
I was set to take issue with you, but starting out with "the noted anti-Semite Robert Fisk" lost a lot of points for DEP in my book. (People should read the interview with Fisk in the LA Weekly, and decide for themselves if he's anti-Semitic or not.) Criticizing European developers for being more supportive of socialism than American developers also shows a lack of connection to the rest of the world that's, well, sadly typical. The "socialism = communism = end of democracy" meme over here has been so successful that most Americans can't conceive of the mere possibility that a fully democratic country might support some kinds of socialism. (Suggest to them that the multiparty parliamentary systems most of those "socialist" countries use are, in fact, arguably more democratic than our "winner takes all" nonparliamentary system, and you might as well be speaking Martian.)
Can anyone say *autosuggestion?*
Sure: "Autosuggestion."
While in general your advice makes sense, it's been my observation that in my area (Tampa Bay, Florida), as soon as a new home subdivision in a growth area is completely built out, the new home values skyrocket. A friend of mine bought a home for $90K in '98, during the final phase of construction in that subdivision. Less than a year later there weren't any new homes there to buy. Then he ended up getting a job later on the other side of the metro region--a different county, with a 60+ minute commute one way!--and put the home back on the market in 2001. He sold it for $110K.
I'm philosophically against most new tract housing for a variety of reasons, but in high-growth metro areas, you're probably not going to lose money buying into one unless the subdivision development goes sour for some reason, or unless the region's economy just tanks overall before the subdivision has developed into anything useful. I suspect the ugliest tracts--the ones cleared of all trees, filled with shoddily-built literally identical homes down to the mailboxes--are going to be losing propositions no matter what, though.
...it's just not a very useful one. The WEDWay PeopleMover in Disney World--now renamed the "Tomorrowland Transit Authority"--isn't called a mag-lev, but as it uses linear induction motors and no wheels, it's a low-speed relative. (And it bears no relation to the PeopleMover that used to be at Disneyland.)
...I think Z-System, a CP/M-compatible operating system for Z80's that was made in the '80s, could indeed handle as much RAM as you'd managed to make the system address. I ran it on a TRS-80 Model 4 that had a processor upgrade card on it that used a HD64180, a relative of the Z180, and 384K of RAM. Hey, you laugh, but for a while I ran a BBS on it--since I could load the entire OS, BBS software and database indexes for 800+ messages into RAM, it ran faster than a lot of the PC BBS's of the day.
The "new IMSAI" looks like a machine I'd have loved about a decade ago, back when some ex-CP/M hackers had designed a Z180-based Z-System machine on a Baby-AT motherboard that used the XT bus. As I recall the official name was the "PC-Z" but they referred to it informally as the "Grudge." (Which of course led to someone suggest they should make a portable version and call it the "Pet Peeve.")
No, as fond as I am of reminiscing, I don't think I'll buy a new IMSAI, in case anyone asks. If I ever miss the old days, I break out a TRS-80 emulator, play a few rounds of an arcade game in its glorious 128x48 resolution, and remember that even if people pushed hardware to the limit those days in a way that they don't now, that doesn't mean it'd be much fun to go back.
[Flash] takes control away from the user and places it in the hands of a "designer" who may not have any experience in building user interfaces.
So does HTML. More abstractly, so does any user interface kit. The user isn't in charge of the way an application--or a web page--presents information to him; the designer is. It may indeed be better to put "designer" in quotes, but that doesn't change who has the power.
Flash has lent itself to a lot of abuse, and Flash MX no doubt does, too. The difference is that Flash MX adds components for consistent user interface widgets if designers choose to use them, and it offers a lot more ability to pull data back from the server--in other words, to behave more like a real client application, as opposed to the broken model for HTML "applications" we currently have.
Sure, if you give people multimedia design tools, a lot of people will design horrendous multimedia--for a while. Desktop publishing software enabled more people to quickly make absolutely horrendous typeset documents than ever before. Would you argue that it'd have been better if we'd stayed with lead type?
If the first three letters were HIL, any guess what the next three encrypted were, Yup, TER, spelling out "Hitler."
Now, most of us would think that spells HILTER, but we're not brilliant mathemeticians like Alan Turnig!
As far as I can tell, AbiWord still only has binaries available for MacOS X that require X11, and my attempts to compile it with Cocoa support (following the README file directions) have been abject failures. I'm interested in AbiWord, but I really want a Cocoa or Carbon binary, guys.
What color is the sky on the little world you live on?
I'd argue that there's a (common) fallacy here. From the standpoint of a program user, the GPL is more restrictive in the sense that it restricts them from using code in their own closed products. From the standpoint of a program author, however, that might be a perfectly desirable restriction.
Suppose, as you said, one or more corporations contributed funding to a public research project that developed free software. With the GPL, their software and any derived works must remain free. With BSD-style licensing, anyone could take this code and use it in proprietary products. The fallacy is that this is always a good thing. The GPL (or a similar license) makes better business sense for a corporation that doesn't want to risk funding a competitor.
While others have made this observation, I'll second (or third or fourth) it--when you use a web browser that's fully Cocoa, it's a lot snappier. I've given up using IE except when I have to; I primarily use OmniWeb, but I have to say that Chimera's rendering speed is pretty stunning.
I don't doubt that OS X's speed can be improved, particularly particularly in the "subjective performance" category. Very few people seem to have learned what was (IMHO) the real lesson from Amiga: if you make your UI quick and responsive, your entire OS will seem quick and responsive. BeOS figured that out. OS X, well, hasn't. It's great that they're pushing stability, but in my experience OS X has been the least stable Unix I've used (and I say that as a committed OS X fan). I'd like to at least have gained speed from that tradeoff, but that isn't there yet.
Here's hoping OS X 10.2 has that missing hardware acceleration.
Incidentally: when it hits 11.0, what are they going to do? Call it OS Y?
So, instead of the Nielsen Norman Group, we should be listening to Business Week? Only one of the lists you linked to was about HCI research--an automatic indexer of published journal articles, many of which--even in the Interface Design subsection--are only loosely connected to research toward making more usable interfaces, which, yes, is what Nielsen (rightly) harps on.
NN/g may not be "avant garde," but they're taken seriously by businesses, which makes your counterpoint of Business Week's lists faintly ironic. You don't need to be an interface researcher to make observations about the state of applied usability research, you need to be someone who studies usability in applications for living.
Most HCI research does take into account successful "real world" interfaces. The first part of Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface talks about, among other things, a very non-intuitive-looking old shortwave radio that's very easy to use, and why so many people prefer knobs in car radios to the array of buttons most modern implementations seem to have.
You're making the assumption that HCI research is about dumbing things down for the user. I don't think that's true at all--to put it inelegantly, it's about making the interface get out of the way, to be as transparent as possible to the task. Raskin takes an awful lot of heat from people infuriated by his dismissive attitude toward skinnable interfaces, but if you actually look at his research, he's advocating interface designs which are very powerful--i.e., entering commands in a text editing field by typing them in the text stream and pressing a [command] key, or navigating entire document collections with incremental searches. This is not the UI equivalent of "electronic children's books," and that's an unfair dismissal of HCI research as a whole.
Most HCI researchers are dismissive of current GUIs because they're not making any attempt to change the paradigm. "If it works, don't fix it" sounds nice, but if we followed that too slavishly, we'd be steering our cars by reins--computers have changed sufficiently since the early '80s (in volume of information, at the very least!) that it's worth considering the thought that productivity could be improved if we were trying to do more than make our interfaces translucent and shadowed.
In most wholesale pricing--what carriers charge other carriers, for example--the distance of a trunk does matter. And as everything on the network is moving toward data, data pricing is going to start making more sense--tiers based on packet usage, similar to cell phone plans that have tiers based on minute usage. I wouldn't be surprised if, a decade from now, the common price plans take true network utilization into account--and are at least priced so that the median usage allows for profit on cross-country trunks, or perhaps even take distance itself into account. Just like they did back in the Ma Bell days, actually.