Well Windows XP and 2003 are both pretty greedy with hardware, if you want to do anything with them besides watch screensavers. I can't count the number of clients I have that torture themselves daily with 4 year old Dells because they don't want to spend money upgrading. Last year's machine may be okay, 2 year old hardware can be fine, but don't kid yourself that a P3-733 with a slow, old 20G hard drive will cut the mustard. Once it gets infected with spyware, which is inevitable, it'll be so useless you might as well use it to prop open a door.
"At the time of this writing, Mac OS X has seen four major releases: 10.0 ("Cheetah", March 24, 2001), 10.1 ("Puma", September 29, 2001), 10.2 ("Jaguar", August 13, 2002), and 10.3 ("Panther", October 24, 2003)." They left out this part though (old page I guess). "On April 29, 2005, Apple released Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger" to the general public."
So the short answer to your question is 2001. I guess generally they're yearly releases after all, Slashdot's 'here's what's coming for OSX 10.x' stories tend to skew my memory.:)
Take a look at your argument from Microsoft's perspective. Every new Dell sold (nearly) comes complete with the Microsoft Tax. How many people get a new machine and think hey, I'll just re-use my old XP license on this new machine and save money? Nobody does, and the option isn't even presented to them.
The more machines Dell sells, the more money both Dell and Microsoft make. Same goes for any other OEM that's selling computers. Microsoft will NEVER improve the OS to the point where it makes old machines run faster. That's Apple's game because Apple doesn't have the same OEM pressure that Microsoft does. It's beneficial for them to sell their customers service packs bi-yearly that make their older hardware run better. Besides, selling an OS upgrade cd twice a year is a fat, delicious profit cow. The margins are much higher than hardware margins and the reduced sticker shock and 'oh boy new features' are enough to convince everyone they need it.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the idea of a space elevator leading to an outer-space dumping yard. Just package waste into suitable canisters, send them up, strap some rockets to them and fire towards the nearest star or gaseous planet. If they headed to, say, Jupiter, the atmosphere would instantly crush them into tiny pebbles as they headed towards the core.
The biggest drawback to all this is that it depletes a finite source of material over time. We only have so much of everything, and if we fire it out towards gas planets or just towards nothingness, well, it's gone for good. Recycling all waste materials is the best plan, but you won't catch me drinking Singapore toilet water anytime soon.
It could be an uber doom chemical if, you know, you have gills that extract oxygen from the water so you can breathe. Replace said oxygen with liquid carbon dioxide and voila, instant undersea holocaust.
Just rock it old school. Place a motion detector with a light, just like people put on their homes near the driveway, facing your office door. Keep your office dark (you do anyway right?) and when people walk in, boom, you're hit with a 100W floodlamp. No amount of sneaky walking defeats that.
Failing that you can rig the motion sensor to a pair of wires, wire it to a steel-framed chair you sit in, and have it shock you when they walk in. Even better, wire the door handle on your office with it, then you'll hear them yell every time they open the door.
I'm with you. I worked for Comcast before (when it was owned by AT&T Broadband) and there's nothing I hated more than going to an older part of town with an aerial drop. Nearly every time it'd be the old, crappy RG5 and it'd have to be re-dropped with RG6. Process went like this.
1. Disconnect old cable at pedestal, drop cable spool (or if driving a truck with a spool, park it at the ped). Since it's aerial the ped was about 15-20ft up on the pole.
2. Grab huge, heavy 30 foot ladder and all tools.
3. Flip out ladder hooks, heave ladder into place, elevate until the hooks grab the high-tension line. Lock in place and secure. (Sometimes you just can't secure it, that's fun).
4. Climb up ladder, wonder what would happen if you got off balance for even a second.
5. Loop one arm around high-tension wire and undo old cable, cap new cable and plug it in.
6. Secure aerial loop to high-tension wire to secure new cable drop, tag and loop cable.
7. Climb down ladder, haul it to point B, usually the house, adjust ladder height and connect other end of the new cable to the residence block.
Depending on the number of poles, it could have turned into a wash-rinse-repeat-dammit-I'm-tired type of deal. You never, ever forget those sketchy days when it's 45 degrees out, windy, sprinkling or drizzling, you're up on that ladder freezing your ass off and wondering why you don't just quit and go get some hot coffee. One day a fine lady made some fresh, spicy beef chili and it was the last job I had. She told my friend and I to help ourselves. Best. Chili. Ever.
Yeah, for the cable guys and anyone else involved in the process, buried cable = gift from god.
My personal favorite are Chinese ghosts. They wear elaborate clothing, have long, sharp fingernails, and hop towards you instead of just floating or magically appearing. They're probably the least scary to westerners.
Telecom lines *should* be free. This was part of the telecommunications act nearly a decade ago. Big providers like SBC get government and municipality-granted monopolies in exchange for 'playing nice' with others.
The original reasoning behind the friendly monopoly was to prevent divergent standards in telecom from emerging and to prevent mass destruction of public property. Think about it this way...one company, one city, many streets and alleyways. Any time SBC lays new fiber, runs new lines, erects new poles, etc. the city is well aware of it. The proper forms are filled out and streets are closed/traffic redirected/people are notified.
Now imagine there are 4 telcos in your city. Each one will be on their own upgrade and repair schedule. Each one will fight for customers. Each one will be loathe to exchange with other companies' traffic. Each one will tear up streets during upgrade cycles. See the problem here? Telecom is considered important enough for city governments not to fuck with it, just like the power company. A phone, a water pipe, and power to every address is not too much to ask for.
If our government worked better, i.e. wasn't so slow and wasteful, I'd wish that we'd have government controlled telecom. We could have a national telecom policy that'd bring us fine things like fiber to the home like Japan, Korea, *insert better connected country here* does. SBC is an impediment to progress, while they're in the position to push it forward, they have to make sure to squeeze every last penny out of what they've already invested. So of course, the CEO will boldly say 'you must pay to use our lines'. The shareholders would expect nothing less. Common corporate bs here.
What would happen if they were unable to exact a charge on companies sharing their lines? To the shareholders, they're giving something away for free. To them, they're losing money on legacy hardware (i.e. the paths they provide have already been bought and paid for many times over). They fought like hell in court to prevent the telecom act, and it's easy to see why. The cable companies have the upper hand here, because the playing field is somewhat more level for them. They're not as strictly regulated and don't have to share their infrastructure with others. They still compete with each other and tear up public property occasionally but they're not as 'necessary' as SBC is. Yet. SBC has said time and again that if they had the right protection they would invest the billions required to put fiber to the curb. Verizon, in some areas, has already beaten them to the punch.
Basically to sum it all up, SBC is becoming a model for corporate greed and sloth. Just like Microsoft or any other company that gets too big, they never want to play nice and share with others for fear of losing a few bucks in the exchange.
This is just impractical. Where would you put a logo on a crotchless panty, on the back? You wouldn't see it anyway, they're off before you get to that side.
No, I think your standard g-string with just enough room for Invader Zim would be perfect. Plus you get the dumbass pun for free. Invader...get it...blarg.
Well, Apple has given you guys plenty of eye candy with OSX and it's a big selling point, but all that jazz comes with a high CPU cost. The old-school, 2d renderer was very fast and light in comparison. You can't have both really..it's like having KDE 3.4 vs Fluxbox. You can still run KDE apps in Fluxbox though but some of that processing overhead comes with it.
Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
He clearly mentions his bias halfway through the article, but he makes a few good points. Distros like Mandrake, Redhat, Centos, etc. WILL NOT package pine or pico in their 'free' distros due to the licensing restrictions already stated. Yes, he does go a little over the top, but he tells the truth.
Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The thing wrong with pico is it isn't free, hence why distros like Centos and Whitebox include its free clone, nano. http://www.asty.org/articles/20010702pine.html has a decent article detailing pine's default text editor, pico's licensing scheme and why it's bad, and goes on to explain why nano is a suitable replacement.
This discussion about washing one's hands after going to the bathroom has already been settled. Generally, most men wash after, some men wash before, and some men don't wash at all. Then you have people who don't always wash at home but are freaks of washing when using a public restroom.
Personally I wash before and after at a public bathroom..which doesn't prevent me from pushing on the dookie door handle on the way out, but if it's a pushy-door instead of a knobbed, turn-the-handle-door, I'll use the heel of my hand or my foot to open the door.
When I'm at home, I don't always wash after doing a number one, but a number two demands it. And for those who will say 'man I'm never eating at your house', A. you're right and B. I always wash up before handling food regardless.
Don't forget the forced upgrades that Microsoft hands everyone every 3 to 5 years. Try running XP on a machine 'designed for Win98' or even a Milennium-spec machine. Every software developer expects people to be on the upgrade treadmill, and even Linux is getting to be like this (if you're running the latest and greatest kernel, X.org, multimedia apps, desktop, etc.).
Let's just face it. Developers are no longer limited to a low spec platform, so code isn't tight and 'on the metal' like it used to be. Want to be impressed, check out the demo scene or pretty much anything coded on the Commie 64 in the last few years. THOSE guys know how to code for efficiency.
Thanks for the nitpicks and the clarifications. I wasn't sure about the pci express lanes but I knew that on my board and most SLI boards, the way it works is correct, default chipsets (i.e. consumer chipsets) are only x16 on a single SLI slot or x8 on both simultaneously.
Word. My dual 6600 does a fine job with Battlefield 2, but I've noticed ram goes a long way towards helping that game. When I had 1 gig it was chunky, but after that second gig went in, it became buttery smooth.
Just wait for Quake 4 next week, then we'll see yet another graphics card killer from your pals at iD.
I'll go ahead and provide the definitive post on the subject since I own a wonderful SLI single board card myself (the 3d1-xl from gigabyte). It's a dual 6600 sli card.
The standard single PCI express video bus uses a 16x path. However, when you throw another card in, that path gets cut in half, so each card gets an 8x path. This is due to pipeline limitations on the motherboard itself and is part of the PCI-X spec.
Having a single card which is an SLI card doesn't change the PCI-X spec. Rather than 2 cards splitting up the 16x bus, you have a single card with dual chips, and each chip is using half of that 16x bus. It is true SLI and yes, it requires an SLI-capable motherboard with twin slots and the little SLI chip on the board has to be flipped to NORMAL mode. This allocates all 16x to the first slot where you install the card, and the card splits that to the separate 8x paths for each chip. Otherwise it simply won't work or won't boot.
Windows even sees 2 separate cards in this case and the Nvidia driver installs drivers for each (you have to hit OK twice on the whql cert part).
This is without a doubt the best card I've ever owned, 8x and 16x SLI antialiasing is a thing to behold, it'll beat a single 6800 Ultra in all tests for half the cost, my case isn't overstuffed and I didn't spend an arm and a leg on it. I highly recommend the single card solutions, but be aware that you WILL need an SLI board for it.
Actually, I fault Bryce for breaking GUI guidelines on Mac. It was intuitive once you got to know it, but the familiarity of the environment was just absent. Since then, other apps like Poser, etc. have all gone their own route in taking GUI look and feel into their own hands.
At the end of the day, if everyone follows the guidelines, and the guidelines are good, end users are better equipped to cope with software in general. Consistency is the key for alot of businesses. Take restaurants for example. I've eaten improper Thai food at many restaurants, but they stay open, which means they have customers. I bet if any of those restaurants ever changed their recipes to be proper, real Thai-style food, they'd get alot of complaints. Why? They were always doing it wrong, HOWEVER, their customers expected wrong. When something is improved to be more fitting with another style, everyone panics. "This is not what I'm used to, give me the old one back" is generally the public's initial reaction. Over time, people can learn to deal with something that's different than what they expect, but the comfort zone sure is a sweet spot.
The name is actually funny because it's got 2 dudes running it. Of course, as the old saying goes, it takes two to tango.
I don't think the *nix desktop itself needs to look 'integrated' or 'standardized', it's the apps. KDE and Gnome stuff generally looks the same in each environment, but take them out of that environment and occasionally either set of apps looks out of place.
What *nix needs is a gui guideline set similar to the Platinum spec that Apple used before. You could sit down at nearly any MacOS 7.x or 8.x or 9.x app and feel right at home, even if you've never seen it before. You knew where options were (edit-preferences), where your window management stuff was, where help was, etc. Everything looked consistent regardless of the company that coded it.
If this spec gets hammered out (and yes it may involve *gasp* focus groups) it'll be a miracle if everyone follows it when coding a frontend to x, y and z, but it'll go a long way towards unifying 'the desktop'. Gnome and KDE both probably have guidelines for 'native' apps, but that's not good enough. EVERYTHING that you see on the screen needs to be consistent regardless of the widget set it was made for.
Maybe it really is time for some monolithic distro to come along and unify all these pieces.
Building your own is great, but when you're freelancing as a consultant, and you have clients, you don't want to worry about what you build, and that's where Dell and others come in. Plus it's easy to sell people on Dell machines, at home or at offices, since alot of them already use them at work. Every time you say 'I can build one FOR you..' they get this strange look and their eyes usually glaze over. For some reason, they accept the fact that you can fix pc's but not build them.
Personally I've never liked MDMA though I've tried it twice. I've logged literally hundreds of hours with LSD though, and know that path very well. You DO have a rebound problem with serotonin no matter what. Any psychedelic usually does the same thing chemically; blocks serotonin receptors to prevent re-uptake leading to elevated levels and, since your brain knows it has too much, it stops producing it for a short time. There is always a crash after any type of serotonin-related high. How hard you crash and how long that lasts depends on many factors but it happens regardless.
Oh and I don't doubt the legitimacy of chemically induced 'soul searching'. The issue is, sometimes what you find there isn't pleasant. Most of the time it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Well Windows XP and 2003 are both pretty greedy with hardware, if you want to do anything with them besides watch screensavers. I can't count the number of clients I have that torture themselves daily with 4 year old Dells because they don't want to spend money upgrading. Last year's machine may be okay, 2 year old hardware can be fine, but don't kid yourself that a P3-733 with a slow, old 20G hard drive will cut the mustard. Once it gets infected with spyware, which is inevitable, it'll be so useless you might as well use it to prop open a door.
Here's the timeline, taken straight from http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/history.html.
:)
"At the time of this writing, Mac OS X has seen four major releases: 10.0 ("Cheetah", March 24, 2001), 10.1 ("Puma", September 29, 2001), 10.2 ("Jaguar", August 13, 2002), and 10.3 ("Panther", October 24, 2003)." They left out this part though (old page I guess). "On April 29, 2005, Apple released Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger" to the general public."
So the short answer to your question is 2001. I guess generally they're yearly releases after all, Slashdot's 'here's what's coming for OSX 10.x' stories tend to skew my memory.
Take a look at your argument from Microsoft's perspective. Every new Dell sold (nearly) comes complete with the Microsoft Tax. How many people get a new machine and think hey, I'll just re-use my old XP license on this new machine and save money? Nobody does, and the option isn't even presented to them.
The more machines Dell sells, the more money both Dell and Microsoft make. Same goes for any other OEM that's selling computers. Microsoft will NEVER improve the OS to the point where it makes old machines run faster. That's Apple's game because Apple doesn't have the same OEM pressure that Microsoft does. It's beneficial for them to sell their customers service packs bi-yearly that make their older hardware run better. Besides, selling an OS upgrade cd twice a year is a fat, delicious profit cow. The margins are much higher than hardware margins and the reduced sticker shock and 'oh boy new features' are enough to convince everyone they need it.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the idea of a space elevator leading to an outer-space dumping yard. Just package waste into suitable canisters, send them up, strap some rockets to them and fire towards the nearest star or gaseous planet. If they headed to, say, Jupiter, the atmosphere would instantly crush them into tiny pebbles as they headed towards the core.
The biggest drawback to all this is that it depletes a finite source of material over time. We only have so much of everything, and if we fire it out towards gas planets or just towards nothingness, well, it's gone for good. Recycling all waste materials is the best plan, but you won't catch me drinking Singapore toilet water anytime soon.
It could be an uber doom chemical if, you know, you have gills that extract oxygen from the water so you can breathe. Replace said oxygen with liquid carbon dioxide and voila, instant undersea holocaust.
Worst. Science. Idea. Ever.
Just rock it old school. Place a motion detector with a light, just like people put on their homes near the driveway, facing your office door. Keep your office dark (you do anyway right?) and when people walk in, boom, you're hit with a 100W floodlamp. No amount of sneaky walking defeats that.
Failing that you can rig the motion sensor to a pair of wires, wire it to a steel-framed chair you sit in, and have it shock you when they walk in. Even better, wire the door handle on your office with it, then you'll hear them yell every time they open the door.
Yay for Microsoft, yay for IIS, some poor tech gets another Ruined Weekend TM.
I'm with you. I worked for Comcast before (when it was owned by AT&T Broadband) and there's nothing I hated more than going to an older part of town with an aerial drop. Nearly every time it'd be the old, crappy RG5 and it'd have to be re-dropped with RG6. Process went like this.
1. Disconnect old cable at pedestal, drop cable spool (or if driving a truck with a spool, park it at the ped). Since it's aerial the ped was about 15-20ft up on the pole.
2. Grab huge, heavy 30 foot ladder and all tools.
3. Flip out ladder hooks, heave ladder into place, elevate until the hooks grab the high-tension line. Lock in place and secure. (Sometimes you just can't secure it, that's fun).
4. Climb up ladder, wonder what would happen if you got off balance for even a second.
5. Loop one arm around high-tension wire and undo old cable, cap new cable and plug it in.
6. Secure aerial loop to high-tension wire to secure new cable drop, tag and loop cable.
7. Climb down ladder, haul it to point B, usually the house, adjust ladder height and connect other end of the new cable to the residence block.
Depending on the number of poles, it could have turned into a wash-rinse-repeat-dammit-I'm-tired type of deal. You never, ever forget those sketchy days when it's 45 degrees out, windy, sprinkling or drizzling, you're up on that ladder freezing your ass off and wondering why you don't just quit and go get some hot coffee. One day a fine lady made some fresh, spicy beef chili and it was the last job I had. She told my friend and I to help ourselves. Best. Chili. Ever.
Yeah, for the cable guys and anyone else involved in the process, buried cable = gift from god.
My personal favorite are Chinese ghosts. They wear elaborate clothing, have long, sharp fingernails, and hop towards you instead of just floating or magically appearing. They're probably the least scary to westerners.
Telecom lines *should* be free. This was part of the telecommunications act nearly a decade ago. Big providers like SBC get government and municipality-granted monopolies in exchange for 'playing nice' with others.
The original reasoning behind the friendly monopoly was to prevent divergent standards in telecom from emerging and to prevent mass destruction of public property. Think about it this way...one company, one city, many streets and alleyways. Any time SBC lays new fiber, runs new lines, erects new poles, etc. the city is well aware of it. The proper forms are filled out and streets are closed/traffic redirected/people are notified.
Now imagine there are 4 telcos in your city. Each one will be on their own upgrade and repair schedule. Each one will fight for customers. Each one will be loathe to exchange with other companies' traffic. Each one will tear up streets during upgrade cycles. See the problem here? Telecom is considered important enough for city governments not to fuck with it, just like the power company. A phone, a water pipe, and power to every address is not too much to ask for.
If our government worked better, i.e. wasn't so slow and wasteful, I'd wish that we'd have government controlled telecom. We could have a national telecom policy that'd bring us fine things like fiber to the home like Japan, Korea, *insert better connected country here* does. SBC is an impediment to progress, while they're in the position to push it forward, they have to make sure to squeeze every last penny out of what they've already invested. So of course, the CEO will boldly say 'you must pay to use our lines'. The shareholders would expect nothing less. Common corporate bs here.
What would happen if they were unable to exact a charge on companies sharing their lines? To the shareholders, they're giving something away for free. To them, they're losing money on legacy hardware (i.e. the paths they provide have already been bought and paid for many times over). They fought like hell in court to prevent the telecom act, and it's easy to see why. The cable companies have the upper hand here, because the playing field is somewhat more level for them. They're not as strictly regulated and don't have to share their infrastructure with others. They still compete with each other and tear up public property occasionally but they're not as 'necessary' as SBC is. Yet. SBC has said time and again that if they had the right protection they would invest the billions required to put fiber to the curb. Verizon, in some areas, has already beaten them to the punch.
Basically to sum it all up, SBC is becoming a model for corporate greed and sloth. Just like Microsoft or any other company that gets too big, they never want to play nice and share with others for fear of losing a few bucks in the exchange.
This is just impractical. Where would you put a logo on a crotchless panty, on the back? You wouldn't see it anyway, they're off before you get to that side.
No, I think your standard g-string with just enough room for Invader Zim would be perfect. Plus you get the dumbass pun for free. Invader...get it...blarg.
Invisible pink unicorn? Bah. Any self-righteous kook worth their weight in marinara sauce supports the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Oh, just wait until my wish finally comes true and we get a -1 Stupid moderation. Then you'll see the real fun begin.
Well, Apple has given you guys plenty of eye candy with OSX and it's a big selling point, but all that jazz comes with a high CPU cost. The old-school, 2d renderer was very fast and light in comparison. You can't have both really..it's like having KDE 3.4 vs Fluxbox. You can still run KDE apps in Fluxbox though but some of that processing overhead comes with it.
He clearly mentions his bias halfway through the article, but he makes a few good points. Distros like Mandrake, Redhat, Centos, etc. WILL NOT package pine or pico in their 'free' distros due to the licensing restrictions already stated. Yes, he does go a little over the top, but he tells the truth.
The thing wrong with pico is it isn't free, hence why distros like Centos and Whitebox include its free clone, nano. http://www.asty.org/articles/20010702pine.html has a decent article detailing pine's default text editor, pico's licensing scheme and why it's bad, and goes on to explain why nano is a suitable replacement.
This discussion about washing one's hands after going to the bathroom has already been settled. Generally, most men wash after, some men wash before, and some men don't wash at all. Then you have people who don't always wash at home but are freaks of washing when using a public restroom.
Personally I wash before and after at a public bathroom..which doesn't prevent me from pushing on the dookie door handle on the way out, but if it's a pushy-door instead of a knobbed, turn-the-handle-door, I'll use the heel of my hand or my foot to open the door.
When I'm at home, I don't always wash after doing a number one, but a number two demands it. And for those who will say 'man I'm never eating at your house', A. you're right and B. I always wash up before handling food regardless.
Don't forget the forced upgrades that Microsoft hands everyone every 3 to 5 years. Try running XP on a machine 'designed for Win98' or even a Milennium-spec machine. Every software developer expects people to be on the upgrade treadmill, and even Linux is getting to be like this (if you're running the latest and greatest kernel, X.org, multimedia apps, desktop, etc.).
Let's just face it. Developers are no longer limited to a low spec platform, so code isn't tight and 'on the metal' like it used to be. Want to be impressed, check out the demo scene or pretty much anything coded on the Commie 64 in the last few years. THOSE guys know how to code for efficiency.
Thanks for the nitpicks and the clarifications. I wasn't sure about the pci express lanes but I knew that on my board and most SLI boards, the way it works is correct, default chipsets (i.e. consumer chipsets) are only x16 on a single SLI slot or x8 on both simultaneously.
Word. My dual 6600 does a fine job with Battlefield 2, but I've noticed ram goes a long way towards helping that game. When I had 1 gig it was chunky, but after that second gig went in, it became buttery smooth.
Just wait for Quake 4 next week, then we'll see yet another graphics card killer from your pals at iD.
I'll go ahead and provide the definitive post on the subject since I own a wonderful SLI single board card myself (the 3d1-xl from gigabyte). It's a dual 6600 sli card.
The standard single PCI express video bus uses a 16x path. However, when you throw another card in, that path gets cut in half, so each card gets an 8x path. This is due to pipeline limitations on the motherboard itself and is part of the PCI-X spec.
Having a single card which is an SLI card doesn't change the PCI-X spec. Rather than 2 cards splitting up the 16x bus, you have a single card with dual chips, and each chip is using half of that 16x bus. It is true SLI and yes, it requires an SLI-capable motherboard with twin slots and the little SLI chip on the board has to be flipped to NORMAL mode. This allocates all 16x to the first slot where you install the card, and the card splits that to the separate 8x paths for each chip. Otherwise it simply won't work or won't boot.
Windows even sees 2 separate cards in this case and the Nvidia driver installs drivers for each (you have to hit OK twice on the whql cert part).
This is without a doubt the best card I've ever owned, 8x and 16x SLI antialiasing is a thing to behold, it'll beat a single 6800 Ultra in all tests for half the cost, my case isn't overstuffed and I didn't spend an arm and a leg on it. I highly recommend the single card solutions, but be aware that you WILL need an SLI board for it.
Actually, I fault Bryce for breaking GUI guidelines on Mac. It was intuitive once you got to know it, but the familiarity of the environment was just absent. Since then, other apps like Poser, etc. have all gone their own route in taking GUI look and feel into their own hands.
At the end of the day, if everyone follows the guidelines, and the guidelines are good, end users are better equipped to cope with software in general. Consistency is the key for alot of businesses. Take restaurants for example. I've eaten improper Thai food at many restaurants, but they stay open, which means they have customers. I bet if any of those restaurants ever changed their recipes to be proper, real Thai-style food, they'd get alot of complaints. Why? They were always doing it wrong, HOWEVER, their customers expected wrong. When something is improved to be more fitting with another style, everyone panics. "This is not what I'm used to, give me the old one back" is generally the public's initial reaction. Over time, people can learn to deal with something that's different than what they expect, but the comfort zone sure is a sweet spot.
The name is actually funny because it's got 2 dudes running it. Of course, as the old saying goes, it takes two to tango.
I don't think the *nix desktop itself needs to look 'integrated' or 'standardized', it's the apps. KDE and Gnome stuff generally looks the same in each environment, but take them out of that environment and occasionally either set of apps looks out of place.
What *nix needs is a gui guideline set similar to the Platinum spec that Apple used before. You could sit down at nearly any MacOS 7.x or 8.x or 9.x app and feel right at home, even if you've never seen it before. You knew where options were (edit-preferences), where your window management stuff was, where help was, etc. Everything looked consistent regardless of the company that coded it.
If this spec gets hammered out (and yes it may involve *gasp* focus groups) it'll be a miracle if everyone follows it when coding a frontend to x, y and z, but it'll go a long way towards unifying 'the desktop'. Gnome and KDE both probably have guidelines for 'native' apps, but that's not good enough. EVERYTHING that you see on the screen needs to be consistent regardless of the widget set it was made for.
Maybe it really is time for some monolithic distro to come along and unify all these pieces.
Building your own is great, but when you're freelancing as a consultant, and you have clients, you don't want to worry about what you build, and that's where Dell and others come in. Plus it's easy to sell people on Dell machines, at home or at offices, since alot of them already use them at work. Every time you say 'I can build one FOR you..' they get this strange look and their eyes usually glaze over. For some reason, they accept the fact that you can fix pc's but not build them.
Personally I've never liked MDMA though I've tried it twice. I've logged literally hundreds of hours with LSD though, and know that path very well. You DO have a rebound problem with serotonin no matter what. Any psychedelic usually does the same thing chemically; blocks serotonin receptors to prevent re-uptake leading to elevated levels and, since your brain knows it has too much, it stops producing it for a short time. There is always a crash after any type of serotonin-related high. How hard you crash and how long that lasts depends on many factors but it happens regardless.
Oh and I don't doubt the legitimacy of chemically induced 'soul searching'. The issue is, sometimes what you find there isn't pleasant. Most of the time it is.