I'm curious as to how an App Store indicates the coming armageddon of a "locked down Mac". It will not be the only place to get Mac software (said right in the keynote). The majority of Mac buyers are the Mom, Pop and arty university student base, who really don't know of the existence of most Mac software. As a developer, a storefront for my software built right into the desktop of every new Mac sold is hardly going to be a bad thing - I get millions of eyeballs and potential one click customers for a 30% cut. If I don't like those terms, I can use the traditional distribution methods.
Now, if you're going into hypotheticals, they *might* in the future remove the traditional distribution, thus breaking all software that all their customers have ever bought for earlier versions of the Mac, and alienating every big developer out there that currently publish on the platform (Microsoft, Valve, AutoCAD, etc). But then, *gasp*, MS have an app store in Windows Phone 7 - they might do the same for Windows 8! And Google, they've pulled items from the Android store in the past - they might suddenly require that all developers submit to DNA testing! We can sit and come up with nonsensical predictions, that have limited grounding in reality and no grounding in basic business sense, forever. If Apple eventually "lock down the Mac", well, then I'll switch to Linux. Until then, hyperbole about what "might" happen, despite there being no evidence of it, is just stupid.
Oh yes, they believe that people will swallow them. I'm making a kind of personal anthropological study of the changes to the US right (which, to most of the Western world, is becoming the "far right", or possibly "So far right, it's in danger of wrap around"). These people truly seem believe that *any* kind of government is an evil threat to liberty (how these people can draw a salary as a government employee is an excellent example of living with cognitive dissonance - *my* government job is OK, *my* farm subsidy is an exception to the rule of free markets). There seems to be a growing group who would prefer that the sum total role of government would be to issue all newborns with a bible and a gun, then vanish for all eternity.
I caricature, of course. Not all republicans are this far gone. Unfortunately, It's getting hard to find any vocal examples who are not.
Well, what you suggest is possible. My feeling that it's unlikely to happen are based on inertia of expectations. People have preconceived ideas of how a desktop computer should work, and these differ from mobile phones. Overcoming this sense of "It's not working right", especially with peoples libraries of existing software, will be almost impossible.
This doesn't mean that a new class of machine between an iPad and a Mac couldn't be created - an entry on your spectrum, if you like - where app approval is required. When you create a new class of device, you get to set the expectations. The closer you get to a extant "slot" in peoples minds though, the more the inertial drag of pre-existing conceptions will narrow the choices you can impose on people before they rebel. Incidentally, I suspect this is why everyone, including myself, still sees the iPhone as phenomenally free - it's a mobile phone, so I don't judge it against my Macs or other desktops - I judge it against my other phones. Perhaps, in time, peoples expectations will be changed so that the iOS app approval process seems terribly restrictive. This will be an interesting one to watch, from a sociological perspective.
The article discusses how developers expect iOS and OS X to merge from an API perspective - cross pollination between the developments (mostly from iOS to OS X) will lead to a unified development environment. This is *not* the same as the DRM/App Store, which is just the distribution method chosen for the iPhone and iPad. There's nothing technical about this - it's a business choice to make this the sole channel, one that doesn't seem to make sense for desktop computing, and one that I doubt they'd pursue.
Whilst I expect an App Store on the Mac, I would be shocked if it were the only distribution method available. In truth, I suspect we'll see a situation similar to downloading apps via Safari now - the first run, you get a warning about possible unsafe code, you tell it you're fine with that, and then everything carries on as normal. The Mac still represents a vast chunk of their revenue - only marginally less than iPhone in terms of income, and probably more in terms of profit. They're not going to kill a fully functioning golden goose, though I do expect some experimentation with it.
This experimentation is long overdue. For most people, something much simpler than a full desktop would be ideal - my iPad passes my parental approval filter far more than their desktop computer, the complexity of which causes more trouble than benefit. Now, the iPad is *not* a suitable desktop replacement - using my parents as an example again, there's no really useful document processing, no ability to hook up their TomTom, no easy printing. However, I can certainly see some hybrid iMac/iPad (or Android setup, I don't care who makes it) being a *much* better proposition for them than buying another desktop of the current ilk - be it Windows, Mac or Linux.
As one of the purveyors of worthless "Viruses/Cybercrime cost the economy TRILLIONS!!!" sky is falling nonsense, here's an interesting conflict of interests for McAfee. From a users perspective, the damage caused here will somewhat similar to the costs of cleaning up after a virus has damaged machines. Will they reimburse customers the many, many millions they claim viruses could cost companies when they sell them McAfee solutions? Or will IT support costs suddenly come down to these sensible "reasonable expenses" when they have to foot the bill?
Gaining an advantage over your competitors is *not* grounds for anti-trust. Once again, I see "A monopoly on high quality" or "A monopoly on something I want" being thrown around as grounds for government intervention. Fortunately, the law isn't that idiotic - just random Internet commenters.
Apple has nowhere near a monopoly on chip design, mobile devices or computing. There are plenty of competitors to ARM in the low power chip market. The shareholders of these two companies are well within their rights to agree a takeover. Buying something so your competitors can't use it is a perfectly legitimate business action - if it wasn't, huge swathes of company takeover in existence would be "blocked on antitrust grounds".
Direct quote from Mike Chambers: "Because this is Flash, it is rather trivial to port games created with Flash that target the iPhone to target other operating systems, such as Android."
Which pretty much sums up the entire reason for 3.3.1. Did they seriously expect that, going in with this offering, they'd get no pushback from Apple? It's been abundantly clear from day one that the iPhone store is a closed platform, subject to the business ideals of Apple (i.e. make Apple more money). Any sane iPhone developer knew this going in, and really doesn't care (or they'd never have started).
I suspect the correct way to view the iPhone store is not "A horribly closed environment compared to e.g. Windows/the Web", but "A largely open market compared to the PS3/Wii etc". Closed platforms have existed for eons without the world ending, and they'll continue to exist in the future. The real novelty with the iPhone is it sits in the middle - neither open nor closed. People are freaking out trying to shoehorn it into one camp or the other, when it's just not possible.
Obligatory side picking: Apple. Just because I will be so very, very glad when I never have to see a Flash ridden site again. Also, because I'm enjoying the irony of the de-facto "Let's take an open environment like the web, and close it up" getting all angry over openness.
Not only because of what it does, but because of the competition it's created in an industry that hadn't really moved in a decade. Free markets do work, sometimes!
Too elaborate on my glib commenting, I suspect the largest reason the Wii has succeeded in the space is simply
1 - Cost. It's cheap
2 - Games that are easy to understand. Your Mom knows how to bowl. My computer illterate friends understand Mario Party. They're not the games you see elsewhere
The "casual" choice on the other two platforms are currently vapourware, but will certainly fail the (1) element of the above. The (2) element remains to be seen. I suspect that, this console cycle, the Wii has that mindshare sown up tight.
We may consider, however, that the people allowing the photograph to be taken may not have been *entirely* honest when setting up the contents and cryptographic "method" being demonstrated.
If there was any real "trust" component, I'd buy this argument. SSL certificate authorities are supposed to be sources of trust - we trust them to have authenticated that the FooCorp who bought a certificate really is FooCorp Ltd (and not F0oCorpe). However, the only inducement most vendors need to issue a certificate these days is money.
I've successfully bought SSL certificates for companies that I had little or no verifiable connection with, from authorities that are trusted by all major browsers. Now, I obtained these with full permission of the companies in question, as a contractor, but as far as the authority was concerned, I was Joe Bloggs. They've even realised that now, and introduced the new EV Certificates - now with Extra Validation! Until of course, these get paid off as well, and we need EEV Certificates and so forth.
Using SSL for trust based on the word of companies like Verisign is pointless - you have to do manual authentication. The only use I see for them these days is transport encryption.
Being a UKian, I now get BBC shows via the BBC iPlayer (www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer) for free, but only via streaming (I'm Mac based). I could almost certainly get the same content for free via Bittorrent at higher resolutions, as a file I can easily add to my iPhone/360 etc. I still use the iPlayer; convience is a huge win, as is consistent quality. I don't have time or inclination to trawl torrent trackers to find content - past experiments in doing so have nearly always yielded situations whereby I'd be better off flipping burgers at McDonalds, then using the money to buy the content - I'd be in pocket from the transaction timewise, and have the show legally.
An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built- in interpreter(s).
Now, this is certainly lawyer speak and probably covers more than they'd like - I very doubt they'd care if you used some of your own library code to script custom UI elements in, say, LISP. But it is certainly their intent to stop people from just republishing all the iPhone APIs under a new wrapper, then selling an "Interpreter App" that downloads and runs "jPhone Apps" (aka "data" for your special iPhone app), thereby bypassing all their controls. It certainly seems to rule out a JRE in the sense that we've used to, and from Apples point of view, this is correct (no judgements from me on whether this is a good thing or not).
Except (as you've now pointed out), he wasn't in the LOTR (shows how much attention the moderators pay, eh?). The flashbacks were done by Ian Holm as well, wrinkles removed by taping back his skin (and possibly a little CG).
Either way, I suspect he'll be rather too old to carry off "Young" Bilbo.
And for those wondering what PCI refers to
on
PCI Compliance
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's "Payment Card Industry" (maybe in the USA this is a common term, but I've never heard it in the UK, to my knowledge). From the summary, I thought it was some kind of PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus level security (i.e. encrypted electrical transport), for DRM!
Disclaimer: I use Mac laptops, Linux servers, and Windows desktops (in the main). I am *not* a Microsoft shill.
Right, karma to burn. How the hell is this "Informative"? "+5 Groupthink", or "+5 Telling me what I want to hear", sure. But there is no information here at all - Vista does have some "good features", regardless of what some people think. Answering your points specifically
1) Eye Candy: If you don't like it, turn it off. 2) Missing or shitting drivers: I have not noticed, nor do I know anyone who has noticed, Vista not supporting hardware that XP supported. Shitty drivers, well, this is a more reasonable concern, but it applies in my experience only to graphics, and then only to people for whom a 5-10% drop in performance (until nVidia get their ass in gear) is a "shitty problem". It's *vastly* better than Linux in this regard. 3) UAC: You're doing it wrong. I have not seen a UAC prompt that wasn't because I launched an app that required admin priviledges for weeks. Sure, when you're setting up the system, you get them a lot - much like in Linux, where you prefix half the first weeks commands with "sudo". After that, if you're seeing it more than once or twice a week, you need to seriously look at what kinds of software you're running that constantly need "root" access.
As to a sample of "good points"
1) New graphics and sound stack is vastly superior - I can set sound volume on a per application basis, automatically, using an simple interface built right in. No more stupid Flash in Firefox blaring away at 80db when I'm listening to music via iTunes. 2) Integrated search - Works as well as Spotlight for me, and I thought Spotlight was the best thing since sliced bread. 3) UAC - Yes, in my eyes, this is a good thing (and the biggest step forward in Vista). Windows no longer uses an "Admin for everything" model, something most people have been crying out for it do have for years.
Does it add anything *huge* over OS X, or even XP? No. Since when has a new OS release added anything world changing? They have been, since OS X 10.0, Linux 2 and Windows 2000, incremental. Is the DRM stuff a bad route? Yes. Does Vista use too many resources? Well, the idle footprint over my OS X machine isn't significantly greater - I would say it *does* use a too much, but frankly, as my machine is fairly modern, I don't notice. In many operations, it's faster than XP.
Should we all move to desktop Ubuntu? I don't know - I use Linux on servers, but it's still not ready for desktops, in my eyes. A technically semi-literate friend installed it on his Laptop, as someone had preached too him, and it *mostly* worked - except sound, which was a huge pain in the ass, and even I (with years of Linux experience) couldn't make work. Mostly is not good enough (he bought an OS X laptop to replace it, and is very happy). When Linux sorts out these issues, and gets a decent suite of end user software (no, Openoffice is not good enough to be an Office replacement), I might consider putting friends and familiy onto it.
Is Vista the devil? No. It's no worse than XP, and has several significant features that make it better, much like XP over 2000.
Mainly, he claims to want to create a "comprehensive theory of process expression". Fair enough, but as soon as you want to extract usable, reliable results from your "comprehensive theory", you've really just created a branch of mathematics. Maths is not just numbers and calculus, but any systematic treatment of relations in a symbolic fashion - unless he plans a lot of fairly useless hand waving, "Oh, my process is expressed as *insert long winded ambiguous English description", he will be working within the remit of mathematics. Heck, one of my areas of study is the development of processes (studied through the use of process calculi) - a highly mathematical tool.
He also ignores the vast array of work on non-deterministic algorithms, stating that "Any program utilising random input to carry out its process, such...is not an algorithm". Sure, it's not a deterministic algorithm, but even if you artificially restrict your definition of algorithm to just be deterministic, it's a useful tool in analysing such problems.
Finally, statements such as "Computer science does not need a theory of computation" are just so bizarre as to be funny. I suggest he forgets all he knows about formal computational theory, and I'll contract "Theseus Research" to write me a program to determine the halting problem for an arbitrary program. I wonder what his bid will be, given that he doesn't need a theory of computation (that would tell him you can't do it, at least with our models of computation - and probably with any).
Now, all of this is not to say you can't make progress in computer science without the mathematics that's currently been developed - however, you will either spend a lot of time achieving unreliable results, be reinventing the wheel, or just be creating a new branch of mathematics.
It depends entirely on the environment in which one works. At my university, it is very, very rare to see a Windows machine or laptop being used by academic staff. Offices are probably 80% Mac, 15% Linux, 5% Windows. I am certainly surprised every time I see a Windows machine there!
Just to clear it up, in the film version they fixed the "bug" with the lack of the wight sword by changing Galadriel's gifts to Merry & Pippin to be elven daggers (you can see this in the extended cut of TFOTR). The concept was that the magical elven steel could harm the Witch King.
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I'm curious as to how an App Store indicates the coming armageddon of a "locked down Mac". It will not be the only place to get Mac software (said right in the keynote). The majority of Mac buyers are the Mom, Pop and arty university student base, who really don't know of the existence of most Mac software. As a developer, a storefront for my software built right into the desktop of every new Mac sold is hardly going to be a bad thing - I get millions of eyeballs and potential one click customers for a 30% cut. If I don't like those terms, I can use the traditional distribution methods.
Now, if you're going into hypotheticals, they *might* in the future remove the traditional distribution, thus breaking all software that all their customers have ever bought for earlier versions of the Mac, and alienating every big developer out there that currently publish on the platform (Microsoft, Valve, AutoCAD, etc). But then, *gasp*, MS have an app store in Windows Phone 7 - they might do the same for Windows 8! And Google, they've pulled items from the Android store in the past - they might suddenly require that all developers submit to DNA testing! We can sit and come up with nonsensical predictions, that have limited grounding in reality and no grounding in basic business sense, forever. If Apple eventually "lock down the Mac", well, then I'll switch to Linux. Until then, hyperbole about what "might" happen, despite there being no evidence of it, is just stupid.
Oh yes, they believe that people will swallow them. I'm making a kind of personal anthropological study of the changes to the US right (which, to most of the Western world, is becoming the "far right", or possibly "So far right, it's in danger of wrap around"). These people truly seem believe that *any* kind of government is an evil threat to liberty (how these people can draw a salary as a government employee is an excellent example of living with cognitive dissonance - *my* government job is OK, *my* farm subsidy is an exception to the rule of free markets). There seems to be a growing group who would prefer that the sum total role of government would be to issue all newborns with a bible and a gun, then vanish for all eternity.
I caricature, of course. Not all republicans are this far gone. Unfortunately, It's getting hard to find any vocal examples who are not.
Well, what you suggest is possible. My feeling that it's unlikely to happen are based on inertia of expectations. People have preconceived ideas of how a desktop computer should work, and these differ from mobile phones. Overcoming this sense of "It's not working right", especially with peoples libraries of existing software, will be almost impossible.
This doesn't mean that a new class of machine between an iPad and a Mac couldn't be created - an entry on your spectrum, if you like - where app approval is required. When you create a new class of device, you get to set the expectations. The closer you get to a extant "slot" in peoples minds though, the more the inertial drag of pre-existing conceptions will narrow the choices you can impose on people before they rebel. Incidentally, I suspect this is why everyone, including myself, still sees the iPhone as phenomenally free - it's a mobile phone, so I don't judge it against my Macs or other desktops - I judge it against my other phones. Perhaps, in time, peoples expectations will be changed so that the iOS app approval process seems terribly restrictive. This will be an interesting one to watch, from a sociological perspective.
The article discusses how developers expect iOS and OS X to merge from an API perspective - cross pollination between the developments (mostly from iOS to OS X) will lead to a unified development environment. This is *not* the same as the DRM/App Store, which is just the distribution method chosen for the iPhone and iPad. There's nothing technical about this - it's a business choice to make this the sole channel, one that doesn't seem to make sense for desktop computing, and one that I doubt they'd pursue.
Whilst I expect an App Store on the Mac, I would be shocked if it were the only distribution method available. In truth, I suspect we'll see a situation similar to downloading apps via Safari now - the first run, you get a warning about possible unsafe code, you tell it you're fine with that, and then everything carries on as normal. The Mac still represents a vast chunk of their revenue - only marginally less than iPhone in terms of income, and probably more in terms of profit. They're not going to kill a fully functioning golden goose, though I do expect some experimentation with it.
This experimentation is long overdue. For most people, something much simpler than a full desktop would be ideal - my iPad passes my parental approval filter far more than their desktop computer, the complexity of which causes more trouble than benefit. Now, the iPad is *not* a suitable desktop replacement - using my parents as an example again, there's no really useful document processing, no ability to hook up their TomTom, no easy printing. However, I can certainly see some hybrid iMac/iPad (or Android setup, I don't care who makes it) being a *much* better proposition for them than buying another desktop of the current ilk - be it Windows, Mac or Linux.
As one of the purveyors of worthless "Viruses/Cybercrime cost the economy TRILLIONS!!!" sky is falling nonsense, here's an interesting conflict of interests for McAfee. From a users perspective, the damage caused here will somewhat similar to the costs of cleaning up after a virus has damaged machines. Will they reimburse customers the many, many millions they claim viruses could cost companies when they sell them McAfee solutions? Or will IT support costs suddenly come down to these sensible "reasonable expenses" when they have to foot the bill?
Gaining an advantage over your competitors is *not* grounds for anti-trust. Once again, I see "A monopoly on high quality" or "A monopoly on something I want" being thrown around as grounds for government intervention. Fortunately, the law isn't that idiotic - just random Internet commenters.
Apple has nowhere near a monopoly on chip design, mobile devices or computing. There are plenty of competitors to ARM in the low power chip market. The shareholders of these two companies are well within their rights to agree a takeover. Buying something so your competitors can't use it is a perfectly legitimate business action - if it wasn't, huge swathes of company takeover in existence would be "blocked on antitrust grounds".
Direct quote from Mike Chambers: "Because this is Flash, it is rather trivial to port games created with Flash that target the iPhone to target other operating systems, such as Android."
Which pretty much sums up the entire reason for 3.3.1. Did they seriously expect that, going in with this offering, they'd get no pushback from Apple? It's been abundantly clear from day one that the iPhone store is a closed platform, subject to the business ideals of Apple (i.e. make Apple more money). Any sane iPhone developer knew this going in, and really doesn't care (or they'd never have started).
I suspect the correct way to view the iPhone store is not "A horribly closed environment compared to e.g. Windows/the Web", but "A largely open market compared to the PS3/Wii etc". Closed platforms have existed for eons without the world ending, and they'll continue to exist in the future. The real novelty with the iPhone is it sits in the middle - neither open nor closed. People are freaking out trying to shoehorn it into one camp or the other, when it's just not possible.
Obligatory side picking: Apple. Just because I will be so very, very glad when I never have to see a Flash ridden site again. Also, because I'm enjoying the irony of the de-facto "Let's take an open environment like the web, and close it up" getting all angry over openness.
Not only because of what it does, but because of the competition it's created in an industry that hadn't really moved in a decade. Free markets do work, sometimes!
Min-Kyu Choi's Folding UK style plug. All the goodness of the UK plug, none of the bulky crap. http://www.minkyu.co.uk/Site/Product/Entries/2009/4/20_Folding_Plug_System.html
Too elaborate on my glib commenting, I suspect the largest reason the Wii has succeeded in the space is simply
1 - Cost. It's cheap
2 - Games that are easy to understand. Your Mom knows how to bowl. My computer illterate friends understand Mario Party. They're not the games you see elsewhere
The "casual" choice on the other two platforms are currently vapourware, but will certainly fail the (1) element of the above. The (2) element remains to be seen. I suspect that, this console cycle, the Wii has that mindshare sown up tight.
If you design a game for a machine with 360 specs, it doesn't run very well on the Wii without redesign.
In other news, Mattes tried running Wii Sports on the 360, but it provided a "Watered down" experience.
We may consider, however, that the people allowing the photograph to be taken may not have been *entirely* honest when setting up the contents and cryptographic "method" being demonstrated.
If there's any truth to it, then I'm fairly sure this only applies to MacPros (see http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=2319).
If there was any real "trust" component, I'd buy this argument. SSL certificate authorities are supposed to be sources of trust - we trust them to have authenticated that the FooCorp who bought a certificate really is FooCorp Ltd (and not F0oCorpe). However, the only inducement most vendors need to issue a certificate these days is money.
I've successfully bought SSL certificates for companies that I had little or no verifiable connection with, from authorities that are trusted by all major browsers. Now, I obtained these with full permission of the companies in question, as a contractor, but as far as the authority was concerned, I was Joe Bloggs. They've even realised that now, and introduced the new EV Certificates - now with Extra Validation! Until of course, these get paid off as well, and we need EEV Certificates and so forth.
Using SSL for trust based on the word of companies like Verisign is pointless - you have to do manual authentication. The only use I see for them these days is transport encryption.
The main character in "Hammer of God" was originally a moon athlete, and the book mentions the eventual establishment of a Lunar Olympics.
Being a UKian, I now get BBC shows via the BBC iPlayer (www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer) for free, but only via streaming (I'm Mac based). I could almost certainly get the same content for free via Bittorrent at higher resolutions, as a file I can easily add to my iPhone/360 etc. I still use the iPlayer; convience is a huge win, as is consistent quality. I don't have time or inclination to trawl torrent trackers to find content - past experiments in doing so have nearly always yielded situations whereby I'd be better off flipping burgers at McDonalds, then using the money to buy the content - I'd be in pocket from the transaction timewise, and have the show legally.
Presumably, this also affects those who want to move from "NO" to "YES", and as such, hurts those who want to push it through just as much as helps?
Now, this is certainly lawyer speak and probably covers more than they'd like - I very doubt they'd care if you used some of your own library code to script custom UI elements in, say, LISP. But it is certainly their intent to stop people from just republishing all the iPhone APIs under a new wrapper, then selling an "Interpreter App" that downloads and runs "jPhone Apps" (aka "data" for your special iPhone app), thereby bypassing all their controls. It certainly seems to rule out a JRE in the sense that we've used to, and from Apples point of view, this is correct (no judgements from me on whether this is a good thing or not).
If you want big screens and fast clocks, I'd conjecture you're not the market segment the Air is aimed at. Have you considered a Macbook Pro?
Except (as you've now pointed out), he wasn't in the LOTR (shows how much attention the moderators pay, eh?). The flashbacks were done by Ian Holm as well, wrinkles removed by taping back his skin (and possibly a little CG).
Either way, I suspect he'll be rather too old to carry off "Young" Bilbo.
It's "Payment Card Industry" (maybe in the USA this is a common term, but I've never heard it in the UK, to my knowledge). From the summary, I thought it was some kind of PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus level security (i.e. encrypted electrical transport), for DRM!
Disclaimer: I use Mac laptops, Linux servers, and Windows desktops (in the main). I am *not* a Microsoft shill.
Right, karma to burn. How the hell is this "Informative"? "+5 Groupthink", or "+5 Telling me what I want to hear", sure. But there is no information here at all - Vista does have some "good features", regardless of what some people think. Answering your points specifically
1) Eye Candy: If you don't like it, turn it off.
2) Missing or shitting drivers: I have not noticed, nor do I know anyone who has noticed, Vista not supporting hardware that XP supported. Shitty drivers, well, this is a more reasonable concern, but it applies in my experience only to graphics, and then only to people for whom a 5-10% drop in performance (until nVidia get their ass in gear) is a "shitty problem". It's *vastly* better than Linux in this regard.
3) UAC: You're doing it wrong. I have not seen a UAC prompt that wasn't because I launched an app that required admin priviledges for weeks. Sure, when you're setting up the system, you get them a lot - much like in Linux, where you prefix half the first weeks commands with "sudo". After that, if you're seeing it more than once or twice a week, you need to seriously look at what kinds of software you're running that constantly need "root" access.
As to a sample of "good points"
1) New graphics and sound stack is vastly superior - I can set sound volume on a per application basis, automatically, using an simple interface built right in. No more stupid Flash in Firefox blaring away at 80db when I'm listening to music via iTunes.
2) Integrated search - Works as well as Spotlight for me, and I thought Spotlight was the best thing since sliced bread.
3) UAC - Yes, in my eyes, this is a good thing (and the biggest step forward in Vista). Windows no longer uses an "Admin for everything" model, something most people have been crying out for it do have for years.
Does it add anything *huge* over OS X, or even XP? No. Since when has a new OS release added anything world changing? They have been, since OS X 10.0, Linux 2 and Windows 2000, incremental. Is the DRM stuff a bad route? Yes. Does Vista use too many resources? Well, the idle footprint over my OS X machine isn't significantly greater - I would say it *does* use a too much, but frankly, as my machine is fairly modern, I don't notice. In many operations, it's faster than XP.
Should we all move to desktop Ubuntu? I don't know - I use Linux on servers, but it's still not ready for desktops, in my eyes. A technically semi-literate friend installed it on his Laptop, as someone had preached too him, and it *mostly* worked - except sound, which was a huge pain in the ass, and even I (with years of Linux experience) couldn't make work. Mostly is not good enough (he bought an OS X laptop to replace it, and is very happy). When Linux sorts out these issues, and gets a decent suite of end user software (no, Openoffice is not good enough to be an Office replacement), I might consider putting friends and familiy onto it.
Is Vista the devil? No. It's no worse than XP, and has several significant features that make it better, much like XP over 2000.
Mainly, he claims to want to create a "comprehensive theory of process expression". Fair enough, but as soon as you want to extract usable, reliable results from your "comprehensive theory", you've really just created a branch of mathematics. Maths is not just numbers and calculus, but any systematic treatment of relations in a symbolic fashion - unless he plans a lot of fairly useless hand waving, "Oh, my process is expressed as *insert long winded ambiguous English description", he will be working within the remit of mathematics. Heck, one of my areas of study is the development of processes (studied through the use of process calculi) - a highly mathematical tool.
He also ignores the vast array of work on non-deterministic algorithms, stating that "Any program utilising random input to carry out its process, such...is not an algorithm". Sure, it's not a deterministic algorithm, but even if you artificially restrict your definition of algorithm to just be deterministic, it's a useful tool in analysing such problems.
Finally, statements such as "Computer science does not need a theory of computation" are just so bizarre as to be funny. I suggest he forgets all he knows about formal computational theory, and I'll contract "Theseus Research" to write me a program to determine the halting problem for an arbitrary program. I wonder what his bid will be, given that he doesn't need a theory of computation (that would tell him you can't do it, at least with our models of computation - and probably with any).
Now, all of this is not to say you can't make progress in computer science without the mathematics that's currently been developed - however, you will either spend a lot of time achieving unreliable results, be reinventing the wheel, or just be creating a new branch of mathematics.
It depends entirely on the environment in which one works. At my university, it is very, very rare to see a Windows machine or laptop being used by academic staff. Offices are probably 80% Mac, 15% Linux, 5% Windows. I am certainly surprised every time I see a Windows machine there!
Just to clear it up, in the film version they fixed the "bug" with the lack of the wight sword by changing Galadriel's gifts to Merry & Pippin to be elven daggers (you can see this in the extended cut of TFOTR). The concept was that the magical elven steel could harm the Witch King.