I agree with what you are saying. I think the Itanium will be very damaging to the evolution of software: it will be much harder to create new compilers for that architecture. C/C++, Java, and.NET will become even more dominant as fewer and fewer smaller compiler efforts can compete.
The Alpha was one of the best 64bit processors out there, years before the Itanium. It should have been highly successful. It failed for two reasons: one was that Alpha-based systems were priced out of the market, and the other was that it is hard (though not impossible) to compete against Intel.
A better strategy for Alpha might have been to do whatever was necessary to price it not much higher than a corresponding Pentium-based system at the time and get lots of market share and software support quickly. But this would have required deep pockets over several years, and pretty much only Intel can afford to do that.
Now, of course, we are getting a worse mouse trap: Itanium is just a horrendous architecture. It should never have seen the light of day. But Intel will manage to push it on us, whether we want it or not, because pretty much all the alternatives are effectively gone. Only AMD's 64bit chip holds out some promise because you can switch to it without changing over your entire hardware and software infrastructure.
"Usability" to a usability engineer == "whatever tasks people are able to do with this software should be intuitive, easy, and non-confusing".
Yup, you're quite right: that's the usability engineer's definition. And that kind of definition demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of engineering principles or psychology. You don't need to look any further than that kind of definition to understand why so much software sucks so badly.
The Unix tradition of "thou shalt be able to shoot thyself in the foot if thou so desire (or if thou maketh a mistake)" is deeply rooted in the developer definition of "usability".
Yup, and that kind of definition of usability matches the needs of its user community very well. UNIX developers make no pretenses that their software is easy to learn or use for arbitrary people, they just know it works for them. If it didn't, they wouldn't be using it: after all, there are plenty of other choices. That's something "usability engineers" should perhaps spend more time reflecting on.
Your analysis implies a lack of understanding of what usability is. You seem to say that "graphical" somehow equates with usability, but that is not the case.
No, I merely describe what applications designed by highly-paid real-world usability engineers at companies like Microsoft actually look like. Obviously, I don't think that those applications are designed for usability. In different words, usability engineers apparently don't have a clue even for the narrowly defined community that they are designing for.
In any case, your response suggests a basic lack of understanding of concepts like "humor" and "sarcasm".
Patents on specific breeds, strains, or varieties don't strike me as a big problem--as long as the law permits anybody to create another one with similar properties without infringing on the patent. That is, the patent should be on the specific organism and its offspring, not on concepts or general properties.
The problem is when people can patent whole classes of organisms. Patenting any mouse prone to cancer would be a problem; in some cases, patents like that have gone through already.
Equally problematic is the patenting of genes, in particular without specific applications in mind. There are two levels of problems there. First, it means patenting a simple observation--something that required no creativity on the part of the discoverer. Second, many of the applications of genetic sequences that are covered by such patents are obvious: if you identify a mutation that causes some disease, creating a test for that is usually routine using existing techniques.
Judging by the specs, the Walmart machines are actually Mini ITX machines. Walmart's price is very good: ordinarily, you pay close to $200 for just the motherboard, power supply, and enclosure; Walmart throws in the memory, keyboard, CD-ROM, mouse, disk, and speakers. Their margins must be very thin.
And, for better or for worse, despite the carping of usability engineers and the whining of Microsoft zealots, if they run Gnome/KDE, Mozilla, and OpenOffice on it, end users will have a software experience not too different from Windows with Microsoft Office.
To change the configuration of Program X simply use your favourite text editor and add the line "-option [-adst] [--h] refnumber columnnum -g --system" Full details are available by reading the source code.
Yes, and for its intended audience, that is highly usable: it's concise, it's easy to automate, it can be typed quickly, it works through ssh, and you can talk people through it over the phone.
The "usability" alternative is something like this:
Go to Start - System Tools - Fix My Problem. The program will start up. Up in the top left corner will be a plum-colored kumquat-like icon. Shift-click on it. Pick the bigger one of the two dialog boxes that pop up. In the third column, under the picture of a smirking Nielssen, will be something that looks like an entry box but actually is a drop-down list. Click there and type the first letter of the host that you wish to select, then use the arrow keys to scroll down to the actual host. Hit the enter key and dismiss the other dialog box. Now, there are only 17 more steps to fixing your problem. Go to the illustrations on pages 763-795 and follow them.
If you want help, you can look under the "Help" menu entry. Our help browser, designed by usability experts, will explain to you where the power button is on your computer, and where the left mouse button is. It won't tell you anything about what the program actually does, and you'll never learn anything that's useful for anything other than fixing this one problem, but, hey we know that you are just a moron anyway--otherwise, why would you have bought our software in the first place? If you want more information, you can call us for $5/minute, 30 minute minimum (not enforced, but that's how long we'll talk to you), in addition to a free 30 minute minimum muzak listening experience to get you in the mood.
For end-users who don't know what they are doing, I suppose clicking around provides at least some entertainment, even if it's a waste of time. For expert users--people who have to use this stuff every day--however, even a cryptic command line beats the UI any day.
When it comes to open source software, developers are users. Open source software is a good example of user-centered design because the connection between users and developers is so tight. They may not be the users that usability experts usually think about, but that's a problem with usability experts, not users.
In part, open source software is a reaction to the fact that commercial designs like Windows and Macintosh have completely ignored the usability concerns of expert users. Expert users need tools that are different from casual users.
If you look around other areas, many tools for experts would not pass muster with usability experts: knives are dangerous and hard to use, motorcycles are complicated and tricky to control, violins permit users to make enormous numbers of mistakes that only a little bit of technology could prevent, cameras like the Hasselblad or Leica allow enormous amounts of user error. Thank goodness "usability experts" haven't been allowed to mess with those designs, because they are excellent designs.
Usability experts do not get involved in OSS projects
Usability experts can start whatever projects they want to. But they shouldn't be surprised if many projects simply have no interest in their advice--that isn't because people don't understand what usability engineers do, it's because they do.
And you can see many of the pathetic attempts by usability experts at making computers more intuitive at the interface hall of shame (most of the IBM stuff on that site came from what is generally considered a reputable user interface research group at IBM). From supporting family and friends, I can also tell you that neither Windows nor Apple usability have succeeded in making user interfaces that are intuitive even to their intended target audiences. Perhaps before complaining about the usability of open source software (which is much easier to support remotely), usability experts should first figure out how to do things right even for companies willing to actually invest millions of dollars.
However, projects like KDE and Gnome, whose aim is to produce an improved Windows or Mac-like desktop may well welcome the involvement of usability engineers. Any usability engineer who wants to volunteer is free to. Personally, I think that for non-programmers, paying a company like Microsoft or Apple to buy an OS is a better choice--if the market were only a bit more competitive.
Well, whether propane tanks are "safe" is debatable: if their valves get damaged, if they get dropped, if there is a fire, they can certainly cause lots of problems. Any kind of flammable gas, liquid, or solid is a potential hazard to some degree.
The idea that life started in the oceans is pretty old, and both the surface and depths were considered. Almost immediately after the discovery of hydrothermal vents, the idea started kicking around that they might be where life started, mostly because they are very rich in chemicals and early life forms could potentially have gotten by with pretty simple collections of enzymes. Any theory on the origins of life are still basically completely unsupported.
The primary problem with CFCs is that they destroy the ozone layer, not their contribution to global warming. The two problems are rather different from one another. The destruction of the ozone layer is already a serious problem in some parts of the world, while global warming has not become such a big problem--yet.
Or maybe it just wasn't hard. This is an industry that believed that sketching naked women and skulls into ice cubes would get people to buy more whisky. These people will buy anything, even if it is the completely premature application of brain imaging techniques to marketing.
My bias is that I'm familiar with Windows, and with NT4-6 and W2K everything seems to work for me, and nothing seems that hard to maintain, etc.
Let me give you an analogy. You can go out and buy a point-and-shoot camera and take nice pictures with it almost as soon as you take it out of the box. If you have some artistic sense, you will even figure out how to take some very nice pictures with it. If you are a professional real-estate agent, you may even take pictures as part of your job. Does that make you a professional photographer? No.
Professional photographers learn how to use manually operated cameras, they learn how to use view cameras, they learn how to develop film, etc. They learn all that even if they are going to shoot all their photos later with basically the same kind of auto exposure and autofocus that you use with your point-and-shoot. It's part of the craft and it teaches them fundamental principles.
Now, after they have learned all that, are they skilled professionals? Not at all. It takes maybe a year to learn all that icky manual stuff. But it takes many more years to become a skilled craftsman and artist. People start out with the icky manual stuff because it's the quickest and simplest way of learning the hard stuff, and it's really only a small part of the overall time commitment it takes to become a professional.
At the end of that process, a photographer who knows how to get "the shot" reliably, every time, with whatever equipment is at hand and whatever the situation is. And many professional photographers will stick with the manual stuff when things get tricky because it's ultimately faster and more reliable.
UNIX is like a brand of manual camera (although it's not the only one). For the first year or two, it seems incredibly cumbersome, but it teaches you important principles. But even if you know all the UNIX commands (or whatever other "manual" operating system you are learning on), you are still not a skilled system administrator. That takes many more years. And once someone has become a skilled system administrator, they can figure out how to administer any system quickly. You can put an experienced UNIX system administrator down in front of an NT system with a reference manual, and they'll probably figure out what to do quicker than someone with a Microsoft certification. System administration is not about knowledge about a specific OS, it's about a set of skills and a deep understanding of what's going on under the covers.
Using the simple, automated GUI interface may well satisfy your needs, but if that is all you ever use, you aren't a professional system administrator. When the going gets tough and you are called on to administer a system you've never seen before or create some kind of setup you've never seen before, you'll probably be out of your depth, while a professional knows what to look for and does it without a second thought. Being able to deal with those unexpected eventualities is the difference between a professional and a user.
What's the military budget been over the same span? Let's say 18 years at a minimum of $200 billion/year, that's at least $3.6 trillion.
I think the space station is a useless waste of money. But we have probably wasted many times that on weapons systems we don't need, that don't work, and that even the military doesn't want.
Credit cards are different from cash. With a credit card company, if the credit card company disappears unexpectedly, I'm happy--I may not need to pay off my balance. With a digital cash company, if the digital cash company disappears, I'm unhappy--my cash is probably worthless.
Even paper cash was a mess until it was backed by the full faith and credit of the government, for analogous reasons.
Part of the lower cost comes from the factor of scale. If you're looking to do some consulting, well Microsoft has a massive and undeniable lead in the number of users- so you start up a business to take advantage of this and offer services for Microsoft software.
Whether there are or are not more trained Windows monkeys out there really doesn't matter for an individual company. What matters is the cost at which you can hire expertise. A Linux admin is probably no more expensive than a Windows admin, and he is likely going to be more efficient and effective.
Everywhere you go you can find all sorts of Microsoft camp product support. Once you learn one Microsoft product you are well on your way to knowing another.
That's just plain nonsense. Except for non-standard lingo and the existence of lots of dialog boxes, Windows system software is no more consistent than Linux system software.
They *really and truly* don't care what software they use as long as it works, and as long as it is cost-effective to use it. Most business need to use computers, but what computers they use are irrelevant to them. They just need to, well, take care of business.
Linux does "just work", and it works very well and cost-effectively. It would work less well if it became more like Windows. What Windows gives you is the illusion of usability and easy administration. Windows gives you a shallow initial learning curve and then gobbles up time and money with inefficient and cumbersome management procedures.
Pretty much all professional tools in any field are hard to use at first, and there are good reasons for that. If people want to waste their money on expensive, hard-to-maintain Windows systems, that's their problem. Linux users can't do more than spread the word that it's worth investing the time to get over the inital hurdles.
Finally someone realises that the initial cost does not reflect the TCO. Wonder why Mac OS X was left out of the quotation.
What do you mean by "finally"? People have realized this for a long time. The argument for Linux has rarely been that it's cheaper because you get the software for free--Linux is cheaper because it's more reliable and easier to maintain for people experienced with it.
Oh, probably because macs won every other TCO report I've seen;)
In some environments, Macs have lower TCO, in other environments, they don't. For example, for home users, I really do recommed Macs. But trying to integrate Macs into our UNIX environment has been a major headache: Macs lack many of the management and software update features that Linux and even Windows have, and there are many non-standard and quirky things going on under the covers.
There is no DRM in Linux running on any existing PC motherboard. When/if hardware enforced DRM comes, we can deal with it then--an old non-DRM PC will be no more or less of an oddity at that point than an old non-DRM PPC.
I didn't say that the EPIA-M was as fast as the G3. It beats the PPC board on other dimensions that you might care about (price, power consumption, size, compatibility, I/O ports). I mention it because, clearly, if you pay $500 for a 400MHz G3, speed can't be your primary criterion anyway. If you are going for speed, get a low-cost P3 or AMD, still for less than the PPC system.
In any case, I actually doubt that "G3 kicks the bejeezus out of the EPIA". I have both an iMac and an 800MHz EPIA, and I actually run compute-intensive stuff on them.. A 400MHz G3 is probably no faster than a 400MHz P3, and a 933MHz C3 probably is somewhere around a 300MHz P3 since the 800MHz C3 comes in at around the same speed or faster as a 250MHz P3 in the benchmarks I tried.
As for gcc maturity, the C3 is Pentium compatible. Linux just runs on it. If it's not as well optimized, that only means that there is more room for improvement over the above comparison; PPC optimization for gcc looks like a done deal--it won't get much better. What I do know from personal experience is that "porting" to the EPIA or any desktop PC is much easier than to the iMac/PPC: again, code just runs, while on PPC, you face byte order issues and x86 assembly doesn't work (e.g., for MPEG codecs).
For the same amount of money, you get PC hardware that is considerably faster. And Linux on x86 runs a lot more software than Linux on PPC.
In fact, probably even the new EPIA-M board is a better deal for many applications; the EPIA-M costs $160 with processor, uses a 933MHz C3 (Pentium compatible), is tiny, and uses comparatively little power. And if you buy one of those, you don't even give money to the other monopoly.
Digital cash, like real cash, needs to be administered and backed by the government. And it needs some kind of easily manageable interface (like a smart card with a keypad--punch in a number, get a certificate for the amount). With that, it would be a wild success.
Of course, the last thing the US government would want is to increase the use of untraceable monetary instruments, so hell will freeze over before that happens.
I wonder if this commitment to Gnome from Sun could also be considered some sort of admission that Swing, despite years of research and development, is not (yet?) that adeguate to make a desktop environment.
<micro-flame>
Sun has never given it a serious try: the X11 implementation for Java 2D, AWT, and Swing is absolutely awful. Sun keeps pointing the finger at X11, but it comes down to that they just don't have a clue what they are doing when it comes to X11. I think their engineers must still be mourning the (deserved) demise of NeWS and SunView. The latest idiocy is that instead of aggressively deploying the X11 RENDER extension, which would give them the Java2D imaging model, Sun has made noises about building a DRI-based renderer for Java on X11. Sorry, did I mention that Sun's sorry treatment of X11 really annoys me?
</micro-flame>
Basically, anybody who tries to build a Windows/Mac/X11 cross-platform toolkit will do a poor job on X11. The capabilities of the X11 server just differ too much from the APIs on other platforms. Unfortunately, all major X11 toolkits these days (including Gtk+) fail to take full advantage of X11. However, some toolkits are better than others, and Gtk+ is a compromise one can live with.
The way to build a really good Java toolkit for X11 would be to start with a pure Java X11 binding (like Escher) and build a dedicated toolkit on top of that.
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Those other RISC architectures haven't been doing that well either.
They are aimed at the high end, not the low-end.
All that matters to most people is price/performance ratios. When the Pentium got better floating point performance per dollar, it took over.
I agree with what you are saying. I think the Itanium will be very damaging to the evolution of software: it will be much harder to create new compilers for that architecture. C/C++, Java, and .NET will become even more dominant as fewer and fewer smaller compiler efforts can compete.
A better strategy for Alpha might have been to do whatever was necessary to price it not much higher than a corresponding Pentium-based system at the time and get lots of market share and software support quickly. But this would have required deep pockets over several years, and pretty much only Intel can afford to do that.
Now, of course, we are getting a worse mouse trap: Itanium is just a horrendous architecture. It should never have seen the light of day. But Intel will manage to push it on us, whether we want it or not, because pretty much all the alternatives are effectively gone. Only AMD's 64bit chip holds out some promise because you can switch to it without changing over your entire hardware and software infrastructure.
Yup, you're quite right: that's the usability engineer's definition. And that kind of definition demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of engineering principles or psychology. You don't need to look any further than that kind of definition to understand why so much software sucks so badly.
The Unix tradition of "thou shalt be able to shoot thyself in the foot if thou so desire (or if thou maketh a mistake)" is deeply rooted in the developer definition of "usability".
Yup, and that kind of definition of usability matches the needs of its user community very well. UNIX developers make no pretenses that their software is easy to learn or use for arbitrary people, they just know it works for them. If it didn't, they wouldn't be using it: after all, there are plenty of other choices. That's something "usability engineers" should perhaps spend more time reflecting on.
No, I merely describe what applications designed by highly-paid real-world usability engineers at companies like Microsoft actually look like. Obviously, I don't think that those applications are designed for usability. In different words, usability engineers apparently don't have a clue even for the narrowly defined community that they are designing for.
In any case, your response suggests a basic lack of understanding of concepts like "humor" and "sarcasm".
The problem is when people can patent whole classes of organisms. Patenting any mouse prone to cancer would be a problem; in some cases, patents like that have gone through already.
Equally problematic is the patenting of genes, in particular without specific applications in mind. There are two levels of problems there. First, it means patenting a simple observation--something that required no creativity on the part of the discoverer. Second, many of the applications of genetic sequences that are covered by such patents are obvious: if you identify a mutation that causes some disease, creating a test for that is usually routine using existing techniques.
And, for better or for worse, despite the carping of usability engineers and the whining of Microsoft zealots, if they run Gnome/KDE, Mozilla, and OpenOffice on it, end users will have a software experience not too different from Windows with Microsoft Office.
Yes, and for its intended audience, that is highly usable: it's concise, it's easy to automate, it can be typed quickly, it works through ssh, and you can talk people through it over the phone.
The "usability" alternative is something like this:
For end-users who don't know what they are doing, I suppose clicking around provides at least some entertainment, even if it's a waste of time. For expert users--people who have to use this stuff every day--however, even a cryptic command line beats the UI any day.
When it comes to open source software, developers are users. Open source software is a good example of user-centered design because the connection between users and developers is so tight. They may not be the users that usability experts usually think about, but that's a problem with usability experts, not users.
In part, open source software is a reaction to the fact that commercial designs like Windows and Macintosh have completely ignored the usability concerns of expert users. Expert users need tools that are different from casual users.
If you look around other areas, many tools for experts would not pass muster with usability experts: knives are dangerous and hard to use, motorcycles are complicated and tricky to control, violins permit users to make enormous numbers of mistakes that only a little bit of technology could prevent, cameras like the Hasselblad or Leica allow enormous amounts of user error. Thank goodness "usability experts" haven't been allowed to mess with those designs, because they are excellent designs.
Usability experts do not get involved in OSS projects
Usability experts can start whatever projects they want to. But they shouldn't be surprised if many projects simply have no interest in their advice--that isn't because people don't understand what usability engineers do, it's because they do.
And you can see many of the pathetic attempts by usability experts at making computers more intuitive at the interface hall of shame (most of the IBM stuff on that site came from what is generally considered a reputable user interface research group at IBM). From supporting family and friends, I can also tell you that neither Windows nor Apple usability have succeeded in making user interfaces that are intuitive even to their intended target audiences. Perhaps before complaining about the usability of open source software (which is much easier to support remotely), usability experts should first figure out how to do things right even for companies willing to actually invest millions of dollars.
However, projects like KDE and Gnome, whose aim is to produce an improved Windows or Mac-like desktop may well welcome the involvement of usability engineers. Any usability engineer who wants to volunteer is free to. Personally, I think that for non-programmers, paying a company like Microsoft or Apple to buy an OS is a better choice--if the market were only a bit more competitive.
Well, whether propane tanks are "safe" is debatable: if their valves get damaged, if they get dropped, if there is a fire, they can certainly cause lots of problems. Any kind of flammable gas, liquid, or solid is a potential hazard to some degree.
The idea that life started in the oceans is pretty old, and both the surface and depths were considered. Almost immediately after the discovery of hydrothermal vents, the idea started kicking around that they might be where life started, mostly because they are very rich in chemicals and early life forms could potentially have gotten by with pretty simple collections of enzymes. Any theory on the origins of life are still basically completely unsupported.
The primary problem with CFCs is that they destroy the ozone layer, not their contribution to global warming. The two problems are rather different from one another. The destruction of the ozone layer is already a serious problem in some parts of the world, while global warming has not become such a big problem--yet.
Unfortunately, most consumer digital cameras cannot be controlled by computer.
Or maybe it just wasn't hard. This is an industry that believed that sketching naked women and skulls into ice cubes would get people to buy more whisky. These people will buy anything, even if it is the completely premature application of brain imaging techniques to marketing.
Let me give you an analogy. You can go out and buy a point-and-shoot camera and take nice pictures with it almost as soon as you take it out of the box. If you have some artistic sense, you will even figure out how to take some very nice pictures with it. If you are a professional real-estate agent, you may even take pictures as part of your job. Does that make you a professional photographer? No.
Professional photographers learn how to use manually operated cameras, they learn how to use view cameras, they learn how to develop film, etc. They learn all that even if they are going to shoot all their photos later with basically the same kind of auto exposure and autofocus that you use with your point-and-shoot. It's part of the craft and it teaches them fundamental principles.
Now, after they have learned all that, are they skilled professionals? Not at all. It takes maybe a year to learn all that icky manual stuff. But it takes many more years to become a skilled craftsman and artist. People start out with the icky manual stuff because it's the quickest and simplest way of learning the hard stuff, and it's really only a small part of the overall time commitment it takes to become a professional.
At the end of that process, a photographer who knows how to get "the shot" reliably, every time, with whatever equipment is at hand and whatever the situation is. And many professional photographers will stick with the manual stuff when things get tricky because it's ultimately faster and more reliable.
UNIX is like a brand of manual camera (although it's not the only one). For the first year or two, it seems incredibly cumbersome, but it teaches you important principles. But even if you know all the UNIX commands (or whatever other "manual" operating system you are learning on), you are still not a skilled system administrator. That takes many more years. And once someone has become a skilled system administrator, they can figure out how to administer any system quickly. You can put an experienced UNIX system administrator down in front of an NT system with a reference manual, and they'll probably figure out what to do quicker than someone with a Microsoft certification. System administration is not about knowledge about a specific OS, it's about a set of skills and a deep understanding of what's going on under the covers.
Using the simple, automated GUI interface may well satisfy your needs, but if that is all you ever use, you aren't a professional system administrator. When the going gets tough and you are called on to administer a system you've never seen before or create some kind of setup you've never seen before, you'll probably be out of your depth, while a professional knows what to look for and does it without a second thought. Being able to deal with those unexpected eventualities is the difference between a professional and a user.
Sure; but I was giving a lower bound that was likely to be valid for the last 18 years.
I think the space station is a useless waste of money. But we have probably wasted many times that on weapons systems we don't need, that don't work, and that even the military doesn't want.
Even paper cash was a mess until it was backed by the full faith and credit of the government, for analogous reasons.
Whether there are or are not more trained Windows monkeys out there really doesn't matter for an individual company. What matters is the cost at which you can hire expertise. A Linux admin is probably no more expensive than a Windows admin, and he is likely going to be more efficient and effective.
Everywhere you go you can find all sorts of Microsoft camp product support. Once you learn one Microsoft product you are well on your way to knowing another.
That's just plain nonsense. Except for non-standard lingo and the existence of lots of dialog boxes, Windows system software is no more consistent than Linux system software.
They *really and truly* don't care what software they use as long as it works, and as long as it is cost-effective to use it. Most business need to use computers, but what computers they use are irrelevant to them. They just need to, well, take care of business.
Linux does "just work", and it works very well and cost-effectively. It would work less well if it became more like Windows. What Windows gives you is the illusion of usability and easy administration. Windows gives you a shallow initial learning curve and then gobbles up time and money with inefficient and cumbersome management procedures.
Pretty much all professional tools in any field are hard to use at first, and there are good reasons for that. If people want to waste their money on expensive, hard-to-maintain Windows systems, that's their problem. Linux users can't do more than spread the word that it's worth investing the time to get over the inital hurdles.
What do you mean by "finally"? People have realized this for a long time. The argument for Linux has rarely been that it's cheaper because you get the software for free--Linux is cheaper because it's more reliable and easier to maintain for people experienced with it.
Oh, probably because macs won every other TCO report I've seen ;)
In some environments, Macs have lower TCO, in other environments, they don't. For example, for home users, I really do recommed Macs. But trying to integrate Macs into our UNIX environment has been a major headache: Macs lack many of the management and software update features that Linux and even Windows have, and there are many non-standard and quirky things going on under the covers.
There is no DRM in Linux running on any existing PC motherboard. When/if hardware enforced DRM comes, we can deal with it then--an old non-DRM PC will be no more or less of an oddity at that point than an old non-DRM PPC.
In any case, I actually doubt that "G3 kicks the bejeezus out of the EPIA". I have both an iMac and an 800MHz EPIA, and I actually run compute-intensive stuff on them.. A 400MHz G3 is probably no faster than a 400MHz P3, and a 933MHz C3 probably is somewhere around a 300MHz P3 since the 800MHz C3 comes in at around the same speed or faster as a 250MHz P3 in the benchmarks I tried.
As for gcc maturity, the C3 is Pentium compatible. Linux just runs on it. If it's not as well optimized, that only means that there is more room for improvement over the above comparison; PPC optimization for gcc looks like a done deal--it won't get much better. What I do know from personal experience is that "porting" to the EPIA or any desktop PC is much easier than to the iMac/PPC: again, code just runs, while on PPC, you face byte order issues and x86 assembly doesn't work (e.g., for MPEG codecs).
In fact, probably even the new EPIA-M board is a better deal for many applications; the EPIA-M costs $160 with processor, uses a 933MHz C3 (Pentium compatible), is tiny, and uses comparatively little power. And if you buy one of those, you don't even give money to the other monopoly.
Of course, the last thing the US government would want is to increase the use of untraceable monetary instruments, so hell will freeze over before that happens.
<micro-flame>
Sun has never given it a serious try: the X11 implementation for Java 2D, AWT, and Swing is absolutely awful. Sun keeps pointing the finger at X11, but it comes down to that they just don't have a clue what they are doing when it comes to X11. I think their engineers must still be mourning the (deserved) demise of NeWS and SunView. The latest idiocy is that instead of aggressively deploying the X11 RENDER extension, which would give them the Java2D imaging model, Sun has made noises about building a DRI-based renderer for Java on X11. Sorry, did I mention that Sun's sorry treatment of X11 really annoys me?
</micro-flame>
Basically, anybody who tries to build a Windows/Mac/X11 cross-platform toolkit will do a poor job on X11. The capabilities of the X11 server just differ too much from the APIs on other platforms. Unfortunately, all major X11 toolkits these days (including Gtk+) fail to take full advantage of X11. However, some toolkits are better than others, and Gtk+ is a compromise one can live with.
The way to build a really good Java toolkit for X11 would be to start with a pure Java X11 binding (like Escher) and build a dedicated toolkit on top of that.