Even if you only look at double-strand breaks that don't get repaired, oxygen still causes thousands of breaks (compared to 3 or 4 by radiation at the levels we were speaking of). Apoptosis and the immune system can often take care of cells that are too damaged.
I'm sorry, but that just isn't a sound argument. You can measure double strand breaks in lots of systems, but you don't know whether those numbers apply to cells that matter, like stem cells, reproductive cells, and others. An organism can invest a lot of effort to protect a few important cells against chemical damage, but there is nothing it can do against radiation damage.
But beyond the theoretical stuff, we have hard evidence in the case of Japanese atomic bomb survivors that a far more aggresive model than LNT is warrented.
"Warranted" in what way? Why should we accept any significant extra risk for nuclear energy?
What is wild and dangerous is to rely on fossil fuels to get the major portion of our energy. And the only alternative energy source that could possibly generate a significant portion the power that society currently uses is nuclear.
There is a much easier solution: use less energy. There is absolutely no need to use the amount of energy we do even if we make no changes to our US lifestyle--countries with a higher standard of living use much less energy per capita.
And the best free market way of reducing energy consumption is to make it more expensive.
And reducing energy requirements to the scale that they could provide would probably result in mass famine in many parts of the world as food production tanks.
That, too, is a ridiculous bugaboo and excuse. Places in the world where hunger is rampant do not rely on massive amounts of energy to produce food, and the lot of those people would get worse if they started relying on the costly and inefficient methods of food production we use (they are efficient only if you don't account for externalities).
Hunger stopped being a technological problem a few centuries ago, if it ever was a technological problem at all. Hunger is fundamentally a social problem--a problem of family planning, security, education, politics, and economics. More energy, better crops, or other technology are at best short term fixes, and in the long term make the problem of hunger much worse.
The biggest danger is not their sudden release and toxic effects of that, but lies in a totally different factor.
When CO2 suddenly bubbles up from a lake near a population center (as it has in some cases), it can lead to a sudden and massive disaster. But I agree that that's probably not much of a danger if it's pumped into an off-shore oil-field.
I hope anybody who listens to music while skiing or snowboarding and gets involved in an accident will be held liable for damages and criminally responsible. Paying attention and hearing others are very important for safe skiing (deaf people have to be extra careful). And it's unfortunate that a clothing manufacturer would support this.
But it's important to look at the standards as they are. Every mammalian cell suffers about 70 million spontaneous DNA-damaging events per year. (The LNT model was developed before this was known, of course.) Most of that is caused by oxygen free radicals
Chemical damage is different from radiation-induced damage. The cell can anticipate when chemical damage is most likely to occur and have more repair enzymes at hand. An active cell, for example, is more likely to suffer chemical damage, but it also has more resources to repair it. And the cell may take special precautions to avoid chemical damage during particular stages of the cell cycle. Radiation damage, on the other hand, is completely unpredictable from the point of view of the cell. So, basically, the comparison with chemically induced DNA damage is bogus.
I do agree that there is probably no point in reducing man-made exposure to levels significantly below those occurring naturally--that is pretty much the only solid data we can base a decision on. But as you point out yourself, that's where it is roughly right now. Beyond that, LNT seems like a reasonably conservative model for extrapolation--anything more aggressive at this point would be wild and dangerous speculation.
The LNT model wasn't actually such a bad theoretical prediction before we found out that cells could repair genetic damage to some degree.
LNT stands for "linear no threshold" (a threshold below which no ill effect occurs). The presence of repair mechanisms does not cause a threshold to appear magically: if radiation can kill at high doses with a repair mechanism, then it can kill at very low doses with a repair mechanism because repair mechanisms are not perfect.
Now, in the presence of repair mechanisms, the curve might be non-linear: at very low doses, it might be easier for the body to repair occasional damage. In fact, there are very good reasons to believe that this is the case, and that kind of behavior was certainly plausible in the 1940's.
But that doesn't invalidate the LNT model--the LNT model isn't intended as a best estimate of actual damage, it's an attempt at a conservative choice of an upper bound. Merely knowing about the existence of repair mechanisms doesn't affect that choice--if we wanted to make the upper bound more aggressive, we'd have to know a lot more about the behavior of those repair mechanisms than we do.
Furthermore, we have learned other things since the 1940s. For example, we have learned that a single change in a DNA base pair can cause cancer or other diseases.
I am all for safety standards on nuclear power. But I want them to be based on the latest scientific data, not on out-dated 1940's guesswork.
Rest assured, it is. In fact, the latest scientific data suggests that nuclear power is overall not such a good idea--neither from a safety point of view or from an economic point of view. It's just that some people are so enamored with the technology (or have so much money invested in it) that they simply don't want to face facts.
Occasional live webcasts from space are nice. But I think it's confusing to call it a "webcam". I expect webcams to be on the web most of the time and to be hooked up more or less directly to the web. Webcams need to be on and there even if nothing is happening. A live broadcast going into a streaming server occasionally doesn't strike me as something to be called a webcam.
some people use these for work, you know
on
AMD Delays Hammer
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why should we hope it gets released now instead of later? Do you have anything riding on it?
Hard as that may be to believe, some people use their computers for real work. And some of those people run into that dreaded 4G limit--4G is not a lot of memory anymore these days. And many of these people would love to have the choice of a Hammer over Itanium.
here is where I would draw the line
on
"Squishy" DRM?
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· Score: 2
To me, the key question about a DRM system is: does it let me or you or anybody else publish and distribute non-DRM'ed content without restrictions or costs? If it does, it's OK by me--I may think that many artists should be grateful for anybody that listens to their stuff--but that's their decision to make. If it interferes with the distribution of free content, I consider it an infringement on basic rights of free speech and a threat to our society--we don't want Disney and Microsoft to hold the keys to distributing video, audio, images, and text.
So, tracking is fine by me. I think it's technologically futile, but if they succeed and don't track things that don't belong to them, more power to them.
Component document models like OpenDoc was supposed to provide. Smalltalk-80 didn't have this, nor does Squeak
I would argue that component models are a solution to a problem created by dividing up the world into separate applications in the first place. Smalltalk doesn't have them because they don't make sense in that kind of environment.
Further, they don't even really have tools like word processors, image editors, and other areas that normally fall in the "application" domain. I've seen simple web browsers and simple editors, but nothing on the order of functionality provided by most word processors.
Yes, but the question is whether the partitioning of the world into "big word processor" and "big web browser" is the right one. We never really had much of a chance to find out. In part, that kind of structure wasn't even imposed by poor technical decisions, it was simply imposed by the way we packaged and sold software.
C++ is a great system-level programming language. It does a lot of things really well, though object-orientation isn't really one of them. Objective-C is a reasonable compromise for moving people from a C/Unix world to an OO world. Java is, well... an overarchitected and overmarkted approach to the same thing Smalltalk was attempting...
Yes, we are in agreement there.
The problem is that the best system based on the principles established by PARC, etc. hasn't been built yet. Perhaps it could have if certain companies had displayed more guts and leadership
Right. That's basically my point. Smalltalk-80 (or Squeak today) clearly does not represent anything most people would want to use for anything. But in the early 80's, Smalltalk-80 represented a genuninely different starting point for the evolution of GUIs and personal computing than MacOS, and I think a better starting point. (And I think at the time, it actually could have been competitive, since what it was competing against wasn't all that good technically either.) Smalltalk-80 could have evolved into something much better than we have today. We never got to find out where that path would have led.
As for Apple, my point is: yes, MacOSX is prettier and a little nicer to use simply because Apple does a reasonable job at making upscale computers. But if Apple had shipped Copland/Gershwin, that wouldn't be any different. Apple pays a bit more attention to quality than other vendors, but fundamentally, their products are no different from the prevailing paradigm in my opinion.
So, I don't lose any sleep over Copland/Gershwin--but some other possible paths that the industry didn't explore really strike me as missed opportunities.
There is nothing important that Smalltalk has, that Objective-C lacks.
There is plenty that is crucial and that is missing from Objective-C: garbage collection, runtime safety, and well-defined reflection, for starters.
In fact, Objective-C is superior to small talk for its given market: compiled applications that can be shipped in shrink wrapped form.
The very concept of "application", as used on Mac OS X and Windows, implies a very sterile and limited idea of computation or computer usage. Applications are separate entities that require a lot of handholding and effort to talk to each other.
There's a lot of whining about OS X and I just don't get it-- it is far and away the best OS I've ever worked with as a user, or developed for as a developer. Far better than Classic Mac OS, better than windows, better than Unix.
The notion that one operating system is universally better than another is just unfounded and silly. OS X is good for many users and many common applications. But Linux is good for many other users and many other common applications. What is an asset of OS X in one application, like its window system, may be a liability in another. What may be heaven for one kind of developer may be a tedious mess for another, depending on the kind of software they are working on.
Even the somewhat kludgy tradeoffs embodied in MacOS, Carbon, Cocoa, and Objective-C (or X11, KDE, and Gnome, for that matter) have their place in the world. Like, with the original MacOS software, awful as it was technically, Apple could actually deliver an attractive machine at a reasonable price, and that's nothing to sneeze at. But please don't tell me that these systems represent the epitome of GUI echnology--that, I know, they aren't.
The "moon" was called "moon" (or something equivalent) long before we even knew that other planets had other things orbiting them. So, if earth and the moon form a double planet, it seems to me "moon" should then be generalized to refer only to the smaller of a pair of double planets. We should find some other term for those in-between things orbiting other planets.
Many of their authors are dead, they contain outdated grammar or spelling errors, their facts are out of date, or they are about subjects few people still care about. Readers are crashing all over the world.
In different words, browsers will just have to deal with it. New information becomes old information, and new media become old media. Unless there is a really good reason, tools for accessing the old information better be able to cope with it. Sorry, guys, but "bad HTML" is here to stay. Maybe the badness can be isolated by making it a separate program that gets invoked by browsers when needed and translates bad, old HTML to shiny, new HTML.
Let's go back a little further. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, people implemented a vast array of techniques for component programming, object oriented programming, and user interfaces in languages and environments like Smalltalk and Lisp.
What Apple, NeXT, Sun, and Microsoft have done ever since has been to copy little aspects of those systems imperfectly. Systems like OpenDoc Objective-C were an attempt to bring some of the things that happen naturally and easily with Smalltalk and Lisp into a world dominated by C, C++, and multiple address spaces.
What you should really be crying about is that none of the Apple or Microsoft technologies ever actually took advantage of the object oriented programming technologies or development environments developed before the rise of the PC and instead condemned us to nearly two decades of awful IDEs, batch compilations, object marshalling, and pointer errors, as well as plenty of unnecessary work. We could have had something with the convenience of VisualBasic 2000 or HyperCard and the power and appearance of NeXTStep in the early 1980's if people had only listened back then. Now, these ideas are slowly being rediscovered and being hailed as great technical breakthroughs.
Apple did do a good job at making the Macintosh UI visually attractive and easy to use for casual users, both in pre-OSX and OSX. That's what they are good at, but it almost doesn't matter much what technology they are using--a set of kludgy toolboxes or a half-hearted Smalltalk clone based on C. So, don't cry over Copland/Gershwin, cry over the stuff that really could have happened but didn't.
Like "OS 9" and "X", "ical" already has a well-established meaning: ical is the name of a venerable UNIX calendaring program, still in pretty wide use. It would be nice if Apple were a bit more sensitive to other people's software products, be they commercial or free.
Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions
on
Inside Ximian
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· Score: 2
Looks like all the UIs you have ever used are consumer UIs, and all the cars you have ever driven are consumer cars.
How can UIs differ? Try something like Morphic or CLIM or Mathematica or a host of others. There are no documents, no "OK" buttons, not even distinct applications. A command line or Emacs are also excellent examples of UIs that are completely different from the Windows/MacOS paradigm.
I don't care what the "task confirmation button" says, I care that such a bogus and annoying object exists on my screen in the first place.
Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions
on
Inside Ximian
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· Score: 2
It has been done already. Many professional users feel much better served with traditional X11 in a style that doesn't emulate Windows or MacOS at all. There are user interfaces like those used with Oberon or the Xerox Cedar/Mesa. There are the Symbolics and Ti Explorer environments. There are Smalltalk-80, Self, and Morphic. And an entirely new GUI paradigm has, in fact, appeared over the last decade: HTML and browsers.
So, there are plenty of alternative environments, environments that professionals use and prefer. Like a truck or a racecar, most people wouldn't know what to do with many of them, but that's entirely OK. An artifact doesn't need to be usable by the masses to be valuable.
The only problem with any of this is that Microsoft and Apple spend millions marketing their consumer GUIs to PHBs and claiming that they are professional environments, that UI researchers support that silliness, and that many programmers swallow that nonsense. As a result, rather than having a flourishing marketplace of ideas and advanced GUI environments, efforts (both commercial and academic) are all directed at creating yet more GUIs for the masses.
It's as if every culinary school in the world were only teaching MacDonald's-style cooking and developing new recipies for french fries. That would obviously be a bad idea for food, and it has to stop for GUIs as well in the long term.
Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions
on
Inside Ximian
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· Score: 2
When somebody comes up with something more intuitive, 3-dimensional, or whatever, all the OSes will flock to it.
That's like saying every musician should use a CD player instead of an instrument because it is so much more "intuitive". Being intuitive is not the only measure of quality of a UI, and for a professional user, it is largely irrelevant.
Windows satisfies the needs of most people because most people have very modest needs, that's all.
Re:As a matter of fact, we do all drive the same c
on
Inside Ximian
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· Score: 3, Interesting
From a user-interface standpoint, we all pretty much drive the same car
That's a predictable but wrong answer, and it shows the same blinders that people have when it comes to Windows. Professional cars (trucks, racecars, tanks, etc.) are very different from consumer cars. There is likewise no reason why software for professionals should look anything like consumer software. Asserting that it should is the same idiotic advertising machinery that sells cheap plastic thingies as "professional tools" to consumers who are eager to buy "the real thing".
And even among consumer cars there is enormous variation: other than the steering wheel and two pedals, all the other user interface elements can be found almost anywhere within reach, in almost any arrangement.
Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions
on
Inside Ximian
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· Score: 2
You assume that there is a single standard of usability that applies to all people and all applications. That's completely bogus. Microsoft's UI may work well for some people, and it doesn't work well for many others. Do we all drive the same car? Do we all wear the same clothes? Do we all listen to the same music? Why should we all use the same kind of UI?
Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?
on
Inside Ximian
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· Score: 2
One big hitch though seems to be in rendering quality outline fonts. Everyone would love to have the precision of PostScript for determining exactly where text is located, how far it extends, etc, but there seems to be big players that are nervous about releasing outlines of their fonts and have punted about precise layout of fonts inside SVG,
Why do you need "the big players" to do anything? If you got scalable fonts on your system, whether free or proprietary, you already got plenty of outlines.
Mozilla is a bit cumbersome as a programming platform or common library. But I suppose it still beats the alternatives--large C or C++ toolkits that people use to create even larger and more inflexible desktops and applications.
You'll see palladium enabled image formats, movies, interactive flash apps, all that will refuse to load without palladium enabled
You mean I won't have to worry about manually disabling Flash anymore, it just won't play? Great! Where can I sign up?
Shortly thereafter, expect MS "enhancements" to IE that can allow web sites to disable the view source, copy, paste, and print functions on web pages. You'll have to have palladium enabled to view those sites.
Those sites, effectively, already exist. They are fairly infrequent because the purpose of putting stuff up on the web is to be seen.
Let commercial companies control their commercial content. If it doesn't play under Mac or Linux, who cares? You can stick it in a DVD player.
What I care about is that I can publish my own audio, text, photos, and video on the web and that others can do so as well, without paying anybody. There are ways in which "Fritz" can mess that up (like requiring positive authentication for any media to play in any hardware), but Palladium doesn't go that far yet.
Or your old computer breaks, and power supplies, hard drives, etc. with the appropriate hardware interface are no longer available due to either obsolescence or CBDTPA.
Oh, wires have become obsolete? Last I checked, I could still buy plenty of embedded chips, RAM, FPGAs and other stuff. Some bright little companies will put together Linux boxes out of those, whether Microsfot likes it or not.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but that just isn't a sound argument. You can measure double strand breaks in lots of systems, but you don't know whether those numbers apply to cells that matter, like stem cells, reproductive cells, and others. An organism can invest a lot of effort to protect a few important cells against chemical damage, but there is nothing it can do against radiation damage.
But beyond the theoretical stuff, we have hard evidence in the case of Japanese atomic bomb survivors that a far more aggresive model than LNT is warrented.
"Warranted" in what way? Why should we accept any significant extra risk for nuclear energy?
What is wild and dangerous is to rely on fossil fuels to get the major portion of our energy. And the only alternative energy source that could possibly generate a significant portion the power that society currently uses is nuclear.
There is a much easier solution: use less energy. There is absolutely no need to use the amount of energy we do even if we make no changes to our US lifestyle--countries with a higher standard of living use much less energy per capita.
And the best free market way of reducing energy consumption is to make it more expensive.
And reducing energy requirements to the scale that they could provide would probably result in mass famine in many parts of the world as food production tanks.
That, too, is a ridiculous bugaboo and excuse. Places in the world where hunger is rampant do not rely on massive amounts of energy to produce food, and the lot of those people would get worse if they started relying on the costly and inefficient methods of food production we use (they are efficient only if you don't account for externalities).
Hunger stopped being a technological problem a few centuries ago, if it ever was a technological problem at all. Hunger is fundamentally a social problem--a problem of family planning, security, education, politics, and economics. More energy, better crops, or other technology are at best short term fixes, and in the long term make the problem of hunger much worse.
When CO2 suddenly bubbles up from a lake near a population center (as it has in some cases), it can lead to a sudden and massive disaster. But I agree that that's probably not much of a danger if it's pumped into an off-shore oil-field.
I hope anybody who listens to music while skiing or snowboarding and gets involved in an accident will be held liable for damages and criminally responsible. Paying attention and hearing others are very important for safe skiing (deaf people have to be extra careful). And it's unfortunate that a clothing manufacturer would support this.
Chemical damage is different from radiation-induced damage. The cell can anticipate when chemical damage is most likely to occur and have more repair enzymes at hand. An active cell, for example, is more likely to suffer chemical damage, but it also has more resources to repair it. And the cell may take special precautions to avoid chemical damage during particular stages of the cell cycle. Radiation damage, on the other hand, is completely unpredictable from the point of view of the cell. So, basically, the comparison with chemically induced DNA damage is bogus.
I do agree that there is probably no point in reducing man-made exposure to levels significantly below those occurring naturally--that is pretty much the only solid data we can base a decision on. But as you point out yourself, that's where it is roughly right now. Beyond that, LNT seems like a reasonably conservative model for extrapolation--anything more aggressive at this point would be wild and dangerous speculation.
LNT stands for "linear no threshold" (a threshold below which no ill effect occurs). The presence of repair mechanisms does not cause a threshold to appear magically: if radiation can kill at high doses with a repair mechanism, then it can kill at very low doses with a repair mechanism because repair mechanisms are not perfect.
Now, in the presence of repair mechanisms, the curve might be non-linear: at very low doses, it might be easier for the body to repair occasional damage. In fact, there are very good reasons to believe that this is the case, and that kind of behavior was certainly plausible in the 1940's.
But that doesn't invalidate the LNT model--the LNT model isn't intended as a best estimate of actual damage, it's an attempt at a conservative choice of an upper bound. Merely knowing about the existence of repair mechanisms doesn't affect that choice--if we wanted to make the upper bound more aggressive, we'd have to know a lot more about the behavior of those repair mechanisms than we do.
Furthermore, we have learned other things since the 1940s. For example, we have learned that a single change in a DNA base pair can cause cancer or other diseases.
I am all for safety standards on nuclear power. But I want them to be based on the latest scientific data, not on out-dated 1940's guesswork.
Rest assured, it is. In fact, the latest scientific data suggests that nuclear power is overall not such a good idea--neither from a safety point of view or from an economic point of view. It's just that some people are so enamored with the technology (or have so much money invested in it) that they simply don't want to face facts.
Occasional live webcasts from space are nice. But I think it's confusing to call it a "webcam". I expect webcams to be on the web most of the time and to be hooked up more or less directly to the web. Webcams need to be on and there even if nothing is happening. A live broadcast going into a streaming server occasionally doesn't strike me as something to be called a webcam.
Hard as that may be to believe, some people use their computers for real work. And some of those people run into that dreaded 4G limit--4G is not a lot of memory anymore these days. And many of these people would love to have the choice of a Hammer over Itanium.
So, tracking is fine by me. I think it's technologically futile, but if they succeed and don't track things that don't belong to them, more power to them.
I would argue that component models are a solution to a problem created by dividing up the world into separate applications in the first place. Smalltalk doesn't have them because they don't make sense in that kind of environment.
Further, they don't even really have tools like word processors, image editors, and other areas that normally fall in the "application" domain. I've seen simple web browsers and simple editors, but nothing on the order of functionality provided by most word processors.
Yes, but the question is whether the partitioning of the world into "big word processor" and "big web browser" is the right one. We never really had much of a chance to find out. In part, that kind of structure wasn't even imposed by poor technical decisions, it was simply imposed by the way we packaged and sold software.
C++ is a great system-level programming language. It does a lot of things really well, though object-orientation isn't really one of them. Objective-C is a reasonable compromise for moving people from a C/Unix world to an OO world. Java is, well... an overarchitected and overmarkted approach to the same thing Smalltalk was attempting...
Yes, we are in agreement there.
The problem is that the best system based on the principles established by PARC, etc. hasn't been built yet. Perhaps it could have if certain companies had displayed more guts and leadership
Right. That's basically my point. Smalltalk-80 (or Squeak today) clearly does not represent anything most people would want to use for anything. But in the early 80's, Smalltalk-80 represented a genuninely different starting point for the evolution of GUIs and personal computing than MacOS, and I think a better starting point. (And I think at the time, it actually could have been competitive, since what it was competing against wasn't all that good technically either.) Smalltalk-80 could have evolved into something much better than we have today. We never got to find out where that path would have led.
As for Apple, my point is: yes, MacOSX is prettier and a little nicer to use simply because Apple does a reasonable job at making upscale computers. But if Apple had shipped Copland/Gershwin, that wouldn't be any different. Apple pays a bit more attention to quality than other vendors, but fundamentally, their products are no different from the prevailing paradigm in my opinion.
So, I don't lose any sleep over Copland/Gershwin--but some other possible paths that the industry didn't explore really strike me as missed opportunities.
There is plenty that is crucial and that is missing from Objective-C: garbage collection, runtime safety, and well-defined reflection, for starters.
In fact, Objective-C is superior to small talk for its given market: compiled applications that can be shipped in shrink wrapped form.
The very concept of "application", as used on Mac OS X and Windows, implies a very sterile and limited idea of computation or computer usage. Applications are separate entities that require a lot of handholding and effort to talk to each other.
There's a lot of whining about OS X and I just don't get it-- it is far and away the best OS I've ever worked with as a user, or developed for as a developer. Far better than Classic Mac OS, better than windows, better than Unix.
The notion that one operating system is universally better than another is just unfounded and silly. OS X is good for many users and many common applications. But Linux is good for many other users and many other common applications. What is an asset of OS X in one application, like its window system, may be a liability in another. What may be heaven for one kind of developer may be a tedious mess for another, depending on the kind of software they are working on.
Even the somewhat kludgy tradeoffs embodied in MacOS, Carbon, Cocoa, and Objective-C (or X11, KDE, and Gnome, for that matter) have their place in the world. Like, with the original MacOS software, awful as it was technically, Apple could actually deliver an attractive machine at a reasonable price, and that's nothing to sneeze at. But please don't tell me that these systems represent the epitome of GUI echnology--that, I know, they aren't.
The "moon" was called "moon" (or something equivalent) long before we even knew that other planets had other things orbiting them. So, if earth and the moon form a double planet, it seems to me "moon" should then be generalized to refer only to the smaller of a pair of double planets. We should find some other term for those in-between things orbiting other planets.
In different words, browsers will just have to deal with it. New information becomes old information, and new media become old media. Unless there is a really good reason, tools for accessing the old information better be able to cope with it. Sorry, guys, but "bad HTML" is here to stay. Maybe the badness can be isolated by making it a separate program that gets invoked by browsers when needed and translates bad, old HTML to shiny, new HTML.
What Apple, NeXT, Sun, and Microsoft have done ever since has been to copy little aspects of those systems imperfectly. Systems like OpenDoc Objective-C were an attempt to bring some of the things that happen naturally and easily with Smalltalk and Lisp into a world dominated by C, C++, and multiple address spaces.
What you should really be crying about is that none of the Apple or Microsoft technologies ever actually took advantage of the object oriented programming technologies or development environments developed before the rise of the PC and instead condemned us to nearly two decades of awful IDEs, batch compilations, object marshalling, and pointer errors, as well as plenty of unnecessary work. We could have had something with the convenience of VisualBasic 2000 or HyperCard and the power and appearance of NeXTStep in the early 1980's if people had only listened back then. Now, these ideas are slowly being rediscovered and being hailed as great technical breakthroughs.
Apple did do a good job at making the Macintosh UI visually attractive and easy to use for casual users, both in pre-OSX and OSX. That's what they are good at, but it almost doesn't matter much what technology they are using--a set of kludgy toolboxes or a half-hearted Smalltalk clone based on C. So, don't cry over Copland/Gershwin, cry over the stuff that really could have happened but didn't.
Like "OS 9" and "X", "ical" already has a well-established meaning: ical is the name of a venerable UNIX calendaring program, still in pretty wide use. It would be nice if Apple were a bit more sensitive to other people's software products, be they commercial or free.
How can UIs differ? Try something like Morphic or CLIM or Mathematica or a host of others. There are no documents, no "OK" buttons, not even distinct applications. A command line or Emacs are also excellent examples of UIs that are completely different from the Windows/MacOS paradigm.
I don't care what the "task confirmation button" says, I care that such a bogus and annoying object exists on my screen in the first place.
So, there are plenty of alternative environments, environments that professionals use and prefer. Like a truck or a racecar, most people wouldn't know what to do with many of them, but that's entirely OK. An artifact doesn't need to be usable by the masses to be valuable.
The only problem with any of this is that Microsoft and Apple spend millions marketing their consumer GUIs to PHBs and claiming that they are professional environments, that UI researchers support that silliness, and that many programmers swallow that nonsense. As a result, rather than having a flourishing marketplace of ideas and advanced GUI environments, efforts (both commercial and academic) are all directed at creating yet more GUIs for the masses.
It's as if every culinary school in the world were only teaching MacDonald's-style cooking and developing new recipies for french fries. That would obviously be a bad idea for food, and it has to stop for GUIs as well in the long term.
That's like saying every musician should use a CD player instead of an instrument because it is so much more "intuitive". Being intuitive is not the only measure of quality of a UI, and for a professional user, it is largely irrelevant.
Windows satisfies the needs of most people because most people have very modest needs, that's all.
That's a predictable but wrong answer, and it shows the same blinders that people have when it comes to Windows. Professional cars (trucks, racecars, tanks, etc.) are very different from consumer cars. There is likewise no reason why software for professionals should look anything like consumer software. Asserting that it should is the same idiotic advertising machinery that sells cheap plastic thingies as "professional tools" to consumers who are eager to buy "the real thing".
And even among consumer cars there is enormous variation: other than the steering wheel and two pedals, all the other user interface elements can be found almost anywhere within reach, in almost any arrangement.
You assume that there is a single standard of usability that applies to all people and all applications. That's completely bogus. Microsoft's UI may work well for some people, and it doesn't work well for many others. Do we all drive the same car? Do we all wear the same clothes? Do we all listen to the same music? Why should we all use the same kind of UI?
Is it available for OSX and Windows as well?
Why do you need "the big players" to do anything? If you got scalable fonts on your system, whether free or proprietary, you already got plenty of outlines.
Mozilla is a bit cumbersome as a programming platform or common library. But I suppose it still beats the alternatives--large C or C++ toolkits that people use to create even larger and more inflexible desktops and applications.
You mean I won't have to worry about manually disabling Flash anymore, it just won't play? Great! Where can I sign up?
Shortly thereafter, expect MS "enhancements" to IE that can allow web sites to disable the view source, copy, paste, and print functions on web pages. You'll have to have palladium enabled to view those sites.
Those sites, effectively, already exist. They are fairly infrequent because the purpose of putting stuff up on the web is to be seen.
What I care about is that I can publish my own audio, text, photos, and video on the web and that others can do so as well, without paying anybody. There are ways in which "Fritz" can mess that up (like requiring positive authentication for any media to play in any hardware), but Palladium doesn't go that far yet.
Oh, wires have become obsolete? Last I checked, I could still buy plenty of embedded chips, RAM, FPGAs and other stuff. Some bright little companies will put together Linux boxes out of those, whether Microsfot likes it or not.