One freedom of open-source is the transparency to see how ideas are implemented, but it seems to me that the spirit of open-source lies in acknowledging, sharing, and improving what's already out there, for the benefit of us all. If that's true, then cooperative networking seems to be within the spirit of the open-source attitude.
Manifestos, like laws, can't be all-encompassing. Our morals and values have to fill the gaps and make the manifestos real. Individually, we must decide what we value: people, or money.
And when did the US have cheetahs and lions and elephants? And how did they get here? And I don't believe the United States ever had wild horses: I think they were all brought here.
If you look hard and listen, I think you'll find that you have a lot in common with the people around you, whether they're old, in Iran, or in Kansas. We're all basically the same. You have beauty in you -- the ability to love and understand. I understand that you see a lot of frustrating, saddening and enraging things out there -- we all do. The person in Iran does, and so does the person in Kansas, just in different clothes. But dealing with them in a peaceful and deeply understanding manner - rather than blaming and denouncing them - will probably leave everyone (including yourself) better off. We don't need a space elevator for that.
It does seem to be a similar phenomenon in different clothes. Frustration, desire, violence. The only things that separate the two are.. the same phenomena:-) At least it seems like that. Your post reminded me of this passage from a book I just started reading online:
Go to a party. Listen to the laughter, that brittle-tongued voice that says fun on the surface and fear underneath. Feel the tension, feel the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. They are faking it. Go to a ball game. Watch the fan in the stand. Watch the irrational fit of anger. Watch the uncontrolled frustration bubbling forth from people that masquerades under the guise of enthusiasm, or team spirit. Booing, cat-calls and unbridled egotism in the name of team loyalty. Drunkenness, fights in the stands. These are the people trying desperately to release tension from within. These are not people who are at peace with themselves. Watch the news on TV. Listen to the lyrics in popular songs. You find the same theme repeated over and over in variations. Jealousy, suffering, discontent and stress.
I think there is a mental barrier that trumps any supposed cost barrier. I think people still think of Mac and Windows computers as living in two different worlds. You even have to purchase them in different locations! I wonder how much Apple would benefit from a well-exposed Mac in a Best Buy store? It's easy to dismiss something (especially citing a $100 or $200 price difference) if you can't even use both things at once. I think if you asked most people what they think of Apple products, they'd say "they're really pretty." That might sound funny, but what might they say about Windows computers in general? I think there is a general liking of Apple stuff, but people still have no direct experience with Apple products (except maybe the iPod). So all that, along with the cost, I think makes Apple look, not unapproachable, but maybe ivory-tower-ish.
If OS X runs on x86, even if it's not widely available, porting games to OS X could become so easy and cheap that there's no reason not to release OS X versions. Don't PC games have some - or a lot of - straight ASM code, for optimizations? That wouldn't have to be changed at all, as far as I can tell. We might need a library to emulate/translate DirectX, though. And if WINE is released for OS X, then any Windows program could be theoretically be run in OS X!
From what I can tell, Netflix is able to ship and receive quickly not necessarily because of local warehouses, but because they have distributed nodes, at least superficially in the form of P.O. Boxes, which makes it possible to deliver movies in a single day at what I can only assume is a low price.
Amazon may or may not have the ability to get things to you in a day at a reasonable cost. That's not to say that they can't develop this ability. However, it seems like they'd have to develop a close relationship with USPS, and perhaps that will irk their current shipping partner(s)? Then again, maybe Amazon is powerful enough to compel their current shipping partner(s) to ship things in a day for a lower-than-normal rate. But this seems like it couldn't be as cheap (or even as feasible) as using P.O. Box nodes with the USPS, since the USPS is already built to deliver to every house on a daily basis.
About stock: is Amazon currently able to turn all of its in-stock DVDs into rental DVDs? Assuming they have the legal privilege to do this: do they have the stock? These are questions I cannot answer because I don't have the knowledge, but I assume Amazon has to deal with them. And if their rental service is as popular as their selling service, they'll have to double their stock of DVDs, and they'll have to optimize this stock for location, because people who rent X-movie may not live in the same location as people who buy X-movie -- and X-movie has to be near the renter, or it won't get there quickly. And if the rental service is popular, does Amazon stand to lose money? I remember reading an article that said that even if all of AOL's customers switched to AOL Broadband, they'd still lose money, because dial-up access has a larger dividend for them. Will this be an issue for Amazon? If people in general start to rent rather than buy (similar to the dial-up=>broadband trend), perhaps it won't be, because that's simply where the market is going.
Amazon does have another option, as far as I can tell: they could open up local CD-pressing centers which turn (rewritable/re-pressable?) DVDs into movies which they then send to you. This way, their stock is virtual, and will always respond to demand perfectly. And distribution is instantaneous: a disc image of a movie is sent across the net and pressed onto DVDs. There's no waiting for a movie to ship from across the country. And when a movie is no longer in demand, the disc is overwritten (or recycled). This could even be on-demand: imagine renting a movie on Amazon.com and having that trigger a DVD-write in some building 20 miles away, which, upon completion, triggers a shipment to your house that, 99% of the time, gets it to you the next day. Rent 1 movie, 2 movies, 10 movies, and you'll get them all in a day, with very little cost to Amazon, and little more movie piracy risk than Netflix is currently taking.
Or, Amazon could be gearing up to do download rentals:-) But that isn't very appealing to me at the moment.
I'm young and I don't necessarily like all the violence in games. Does that make me "old"?
Rather than this being about young versus old, isn't this about two groups of people who don't really want to listen to each other? I reject the distinction between young and old; they may as well have simply said "cool versus uncool." If the debate continues to be framed by the "cool" in this way, the bickering isn't clearing.
Love is something that must be reciprocated in order to have any meaning.
[..]
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
If Jesus taught anyone anything, isn't it that you should love everyone regardless of what it means for you?
If you love with the expectation of return, I don't believe you're really loving at all. You have love in you, but it's being overtaken by ego and desire.
While I agree that polarization of issues is bad, I don't think it's love or hate that should be castigated; it's the insistence that one is "good" and the other is "bad." If we have love/kindness for each other, these distinctions become nonextant, because the emphasis is on helping each other, which is outside any focus on whether someone is good or bad.
To paraphrase Rama-Kandra from The Matrix: Revolutions: Microsoft is a word. What matters is what's implied. You can see them as a faceless company, or you can see them as people; as your neighbors.
I think it's the most over rated piece of software ever built
When we polarize issues such that one side is "ultimately good" and the other is "ultimately bad," we put ourselves at risk for embarrassment and then further entrenchment and violence.
I do this not to break the spirit of someone who has become smitten with his new toy or his new friends; I do this for enlightenment, so that we may all see how even the best among us are human and make mistakes. Behold what your new love has done. Betwixt the speed and the compatibility, betwixt the games and primary colors, behold your lover. Behold the puppy dog and the smiley on the screen at the same time. Behold: Microsoft Bob.
Yesterday I was having problems setting up my wifi card in Ubuntu (which surprised me by detecting my card and providing a GUI interface to configure it), and a friend of mine said "see, this is why I don't like Linux: you have to do all this shit just to get a network card running."
After a while I rebooted into Windows to try and get wi-fi going in there. Windows did not have a driver compatible with my wi-fi card, so I was dead in the water. My friend had to download a driver on his computer and transfer it via USB key. At this point, I tried to install the driver. Windows read the.inf file, but presented me with an empty list -- no drivers. At one point I brought up the Add Network Connection dialog, and my friend got impatient and told me it wouldn't work, and when I asked him why, he said that this was the wrong place to add a network connection 8-|
I think that Windows is not necessarily "new user friendly." I think "user friendly" is at least overstated, or is used as a defense by people who are just used to Windows and are unwilling to be open to other operating systems. The same may be true of any OS proponent, of course. It doesn't really help anyone to fight each other. For me, I prefer OS X's black-and-white, "this is what works and everything else can fuck off" approach. It makes everything simple (and stable, I believe), and probably allows Apple to maintain incredible focus.
I read once that Windows had to have hacks applied to it by Microsoft developers to allow applications that took advantage of DOS bugs to still run. That kind of burden can't make it easy for MS to develop new OSes, especially if (and I'm not saying it necessarily does) it has a neurotic obsession with maintaining market share. Dudes: just start fresh. If people need legacy code, they can stay in XP. Provide dual-boot or a Compatibility Mode if you want, like in OS X.
Here is a company that single handedly created the market for Personal Computers, brought computing to ordinary folks like you and me, made it affordable
Dictatorships are always remarkably efficient and cheap! If anyone disagrees with you: off with his head!
Wait, Macs are cheap. Right? They are cheap. I mean, if you take the bare minimum of what could technically be called a "laptop," you might be able to get a brand new one for less than $999, but I bet it wouldn't be as awesome as an iBook, and I bet it wouldn't come with grade-A, no-questions-asked, no-problem-we'll-send-it-overnight-via-Airborne customer service.
And if you want to talk about disrespecting developers, look no further than the Win32 API, my friend. That is a fucking spider nest. I'm sure Microsoft is trying to improve upon it (unless.NET really isn't going to make it into Windows), but for now it is just abhorrent. OS X's Cocoa, on the other hand, is a delight to program under. And perhaps most importantly, OS X is just a beautiful platform to develop for. Windows isn't, really; they don't even provide a good GUI library; it's all manual nuts-and-bolts stuff (unless you use MFC, which even Microsoft has officially recommended against).
I would bet that the disrepsect you're referring to is Dashboard. I'm sure you notice how close it is to Konfabulator. I acknowledge that, but I know nothing about the behind-the-scenes stuff. It's not something that I worry about because Apple has done so much to gain my respect.
I believe you're exactly who companies who do copy protection do not care about; I'm sure they're more than happy to let you do what you want. Copy protection is solely to try and prevent theft; not to try and prevent you from getting the most out of what you buy/watch/etc. Theft comes with a dirty conscience and, I would imagine, might be the most vociferously defended since that's actually the activity that's under attack. I honestly don't care much about copy protection, and I won't until it gets in the way of me doing something I morally approve of. Then I'll crack it.
I'd bet $50 that this "DRM" is just to make sure you're using Apple-branded hardware.
I get the feeling Apple will be treated with scorn by many people if they don't release a general-purpose, "anything goes" hardware-adapting version of OS X. Why is it incumbent upon Apple to do this? If Apple is so good at making user-level software, maybe we should just trust them to make their own decisions and not frame their activity from whatever socioeconomic platform we might claim to believe in. Granted, Steve Jobs' announcement that Apple would move to Intel was presented in a confusing manner.
Perhaps the reform need not occur in the government, but rather in the holders of the patents. Some laws are not perfect, and rely on the good character of citizens to hold to the spirit of the law; the word of the law, as can be seen in things like EULAs, can be an awkward and unfriendly tool. I wonder if it's a bad idea to rely on the government to provide boundaries on behavior, and then anything you can do within those laws is "freedom."
Freedom to act is one thing; what you do with that freedom is what really matters.
Of course, to have a public review of a patent application the applicant would need protection against someone stealing the idea before the patent was issued.
According to the Wikipedia,
"In accordance with the original definition of the term "patent", one school of thought holds that patent legislation facilitates and encourages disclosure of innovation into the public domain for the common good, by granting the inventor exclusive rights to exploit their invention for a limited period."
So, by this logic, that is why patents exist! To balance public good against the individual's ability to prosper. Perhaps it's important to note that "prosper" may have meant something different when patents were first widely available by law; "prosper" may have meant "the ability to survive and provide your family with survival, with some guarantee of future survival" rather than "become rich." In the United States at least, I understand that not until the 1950s or so was there some general assumption that a person was going to be alive and taken care of even if they became sick or made a mistake.
I don't immediately see how carrying feature-length movies around is a very compelling feature. I mean, with the iPod I can have essentially my entire music collection a click away. But while I can listen to music over and over and with little personal investment, movies require hours of your time and in general I don't think I'd re-watch movies with any short-term frequency. And with the large amount of hard drive space these movies (I assume) would take up, I can easily see half an iPod taken up by 5-6 movies. I find it unreasonable to sacrifice all that potential music for a few movies. And, the nature of an iPod is that it's dynamic: it's easy and almost encouraged (especially with the music store and podcasts) that you download new content. I don't think I have the patience to wait for a 4GB download, and then wait for that to transfer to my iPod. And I generally don't have the desire to bring movies with me all the time! And to be curtly to-the-point: How often to people watch movies, and how often do they listen to music? I consider myself a movie-lover, and I still barely find the time to watch 3-4 a month (thanks, Netflix!).
As for the music video feature: I just can't see myself staring into my iPod. But then again, I don't really watch music videos.
Assuming that these screenshots more or less represent the end product, it seems to me that Microsoft is keeping the status quo because it makes them money (or at least keeps things stable). Also, think of all of the people who use Windows and depend on their knowledge of it (from tenuous to expert). Microsoft may feel they need to preserve the familiar interface to keep these users. Maybe Microsoft won't really try to invent or innovate their UI unless their current interface is no longer gaining or keeping customers.
On the back-end, though, if the Win32 API has been deprecated or wrapped in.NET and eschewed in favor of an OO,.NET library (primarily through C#, I'd assume), then Microsoft would be attempting to innovate Windows in areas which developers abhor (well, I know at least I abhor the Win32 API). Microsoft has been taste-testing.NET with developers for a while now, and has been migrating its internal development to C#, so it may be that the.NET releases to-date have just been a way to test whether developers would like.NET -- so that making the new Windows entirely.NET wouldn't be so risky.
The consumer drives capitalism. At the coldest and most literal level, if the consumer doesn't want it, then it's tethered swimming for you! (I don't feel right!) And if it turns out the consumer is wrong, then all the better for everyone: we'll learn a lesson and something even better will come from it.
Much as there is commercial radio and public radio, you have a choice of whether to actively support what you like; or to deal with advertising. Look at the Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't need ads; it gets donations when necessary (and quite generously, from what I can tell).
Telling people what to do will never work. Watch what they do and make your best decision. Live by your own morals.
Slashdot Mirror
One freedom of open-source is the transparency to see how ideas are implemented, but it seems to me that the spirit of open-source lies in acknowledging, sharing, and improving what's already out there, for the benefit of us all. If that's true, then cooperative networking seems to be within the spirit of the open-source attitude.
Manifestos, like laws, can't be all-encompassing. Our morals and values have to fill the gaps and make the manifestos real. Individually, we must decide what we value: people, or money.
And when did the US have cheetahs and lions and elephants? And how did they get here? And I don't believe the United States ever had wild horses: I think they were all brought here.
There may be a day when this is no longer funny! ;-)
If you look hard and listen, I think you'll find that you have a lot in common with the people around you, whether they're old, in Iran, or in Kansas. We're all basically the same. You have beauty in you -- the ability to love and understand. I understand that you see a lot of frustrating, saddening and enraging things out there -- we all do. The person in Iran does, and so does the person in Kansas, just in different clothes. But dealing with them in a peaceful and deeply understanding manner - rather than blaming and denouncing them - will probably leave everyone (including yourself) better off. We don't need a space elevator for that.
I think there is a mental barrier that trumps any supposed cost barrier. I think people still think of Mac and Windows computers as living in two different worlds. You even have to purchase them in different locations! I wonder how much Apple would benefit from a well-exposed Mac in a Best Buy store? It's easy to dismiss something (especially citing a $100 or $200 price difference) if you can't even use both things at once. I think if you asked most people what they think of Apple products, they'd say "they're really pretty." That might sound funny, but what might they say about Windows computers in general? I think there is a general liking of Apple stuff, but people still have no direct experience with Apple products (except maybe the iPod). So all that, along with the cost, I think makes Apple look, not unapproachable, but maybe ivory-tower-ish.
If OS X runs on x86, even if it's not widely available, porting games to OS X could become so easy and cheap that there's no reason not to release OS X versions. Don't PC games have some - or a lot of - straight ASM code, for optimizations? That wouldn't have to be changed at all, as far as I can tell. We might need a library to emulate/translate DirectX, though. And if WINE is released for OS X, then any Windows program could be theoretically be run in OS X!
From what I can tell, Netflix is able to ship and receive quickly not necessarily because of local warehouses, but because they have distributed nodes, at least superficially in the form of P.O. Boxes, which makes it possible to deliver movies in a single day at what I can only assume is a low price.
:-) But that isn't very appealing to me at the moment.
Amazon may or may not have the ability to get things to you in a day at a reasonable cost. That's not to say that they can't develop this ability. However, it seems like they'd have to develop a close relationship with USPS, and perhaps that will irk their current shipping partner(s)? Then again, maybe Amazon is powerful enough to compel their current shipping partner(s) to ship things in a day for a lower-than-normal rate. But this seems like it couldn't be as cheap (or even as feasible) as using P.O. Box nodes with the USPS, since the USPS is already built to deliver to every house on a daily basis.
About stock: is Amazon currently able to turn all of its in-stock DVDs into rental DVDs? Assuming they have the legal privilege to do this: do they have the stock? These are questions I cannot answer because I don't have the knowledge, but I assume Amazon has to deal with them. And if their rental service is as popular as their selling service, they'll have to double their stock of DVDs, and they'll have to optimize this stock for location, because people who rent X-movie may not live in the same location as people who buy X-movie -- and X-movie has to be near the renter, or it won't get there quickly. And if the rental service is popular, does Amazon stand to lose money? I remember reading an article that said that even if all of AOL's customers switched to AOL Broadband, they'd still lose money, because dial-up access has a larger dividend for them. Will this be an issue for Amazon? If people in general start to rent rather than buy (similar to the dial-up=>broadband trend), perhaps it won't be, because that's simply where the market is going.
Amazon does have another option, as far as I can tell: they could open up local CD-pressing centers which turn (rewritable/re-pressable?) DVDs into movies which they then send to you. This way, their stock is virtual, and will always respond to demand perfectly. And distribution is instantaneous: a disc image of a movie is sent across the net and pressed onto DVDs. There's no waiting for a movie to ship from across the country. And when a movie is no longer in demand, the disc is overwritten (or recycled). This could even be on-demand: imagine renting a movie on Amazon.com and having that trigger a DVD-write in some building 20 miles away, which, upon completion, triggers a shipment to your house that, 99% of the time, gets it to you the next day. Rent 1 movie, 2 movies, 10 movies, and you'll get them all in a day, with very little cost to Amazon, and little more movie piracy risk than Netflix is currently taking.
Or, Amazon could be gearing up to do download rentals
I'm young and I don't necessarily like all the violence in games. Does that make me "old"?
Rather than this being about young versus old, isn't this about two groups of people who don't really want to listen to each other? I reject the distinction between young and old; they may as well have simply said "cool versus uncool." If the debate continues to be framed by the "cool" in this way, the bickering isn't clearing.
If you love with the expectation of return, I don't believe you're really loving at all. You have love in you, but it's being overtaken by ego and desire.
While I agree that polarization of issues is bad, I don't think it's love or hate that should be castigated; it's the insistence that one is "good" and the other is "bad." If we have love/kindness for each other, these distinctions become nonextant, because the emphasis is on helping each other, which is outside any focus on whether someone is good or bad.
To paraphrase Rama-Kandra from The Matrix: Revolutions: Microsoft is a word. What matters is what's implied. You can see them as a faceless company, or you can see them as people; as your neighbors.
I do this not to break the spirit of someone who has become smitten with his new toy or his new friends; I do this for enlightenment, so that we may all see how even the best among us are human and make mistakes. Behold what your new love has done. Betwixt the speed and the compatibility, betwixt the games and primary colors, behold your lover. Behold the puppy dog and the smiley on the screen at the same time. Behold: Microsoft Bob.
Yesterday I was having problems setting up my wifi card in Ubuntu (which surprised me by detecting my card and providing a GUI interface to configure it), and a friend of mine said "see, this is why I don't like Linux: you have to do all this shit just to get a network card running."
.inf file, but presented me with an empty list -- no drivers. At one point I brought up the Add Network Connection dialog, and my friend got impatient and told me it wouldn't work, and when I asked him why, he said that this was the wrong place to add a network connection 8-|
After a while I rebooted into Windows to try and get wi-fi going in there. Windows did not have a driver compatible with my wi-fi card, so I was dead in the water. My friend had to download a driver on his computer and transfer it via USB key. At this point, I tried to install the driver. Windows read the
I think that Windows is not necessarily "new user friendly." I think "user friendly" is at least overstated, or is used as a defense by people who are just used to Windows and are unwilling to be open to other operating systems. The same may be true of any OS proponent, of course. It doesn't really help anyone to fight each other. For me, I prefer OS X's black-and-white, "this is what works and everything else can fuck off" approach. It makes everything simple (and stable, I believe), and probably allows Apple to maintain incredible focus.
I read once that Windows had to have hacks applied to it by Microsoft developers to allow applications that took advantage of DOS bugs to still run. That kind of burden can't make it easy for MS to develop new OSes, especially if (and I'm not saying it necessarily does) it has a neurotic obsession with maintaining market share. Dudes: just start fresh. If people need legacy code, they can stay in XP. Provide dual-boot or a Compatibility Mode if you want, like in OS X.
+5 Street cred
So should it be legal to do anything you want in your home? Like beating your kids?
Wait, Macs are cheap. Right? They are cheap. I mean, if you take the bare minimum of what could technically be called a "laptop," you might be able to get a brand new one for less than $999, but I bet it wouldn't be as awesome as an iBook, and I bet it wouldn't come with grade-A, no-questions-asked, no-problem-we'll-send-it-overnight-via-Airborne customer service.
.NET really isn't going to make it into Windows), but for now it is just abhorrent. OS X's Cocoa, on the other hand, is a delight to program under. And perhaps most importantly, OS X is just a beautiful platform to develop for. Windows isn't, really; they don't even provide a good GUI library; it's all manual nuts-and-bolts stuff (unless you use MFC, which even Microsoft has officially recommended against).
And if you want to talk about disrespecting developers, look no further than the Win32 API, my friend. That is a fucking spider nest. I'm sure Microsoft is trying to improve upon it (unless
I would bet that the disrepsect you're referring to is Dashboard. I'm sure you notice how close it is to Konfabulator. I acknowledge that, but I know nothing about the behind-the-scenes stuff. It's not something that I worry about because Apple has done so much to gain my respect.
I believe you're exactly who companies who do copy protection do not care about; I'm sure they're more than happy to let you do what you want. Copy protection is solely to try and prevent theft; not to try and prevent you from getting the most out of what you buy/watch/etc. Theft comes with a dirty conscience and, I would imagine, might be the most vociferously defended since that's actually the activity that's under attack. I honestly don't care much about copy protection, and I won't until it gets in the way of me doing something I morally approve of. Then I'll crack it.
Employers give drug tests because employees take drugs on the job.
I'd bet $50 that this "DRM" is just to make sure you're using Apple-branded hardware.
I get the feeling Apple will be treated with scorn by many people if they don't release a general-purpose, "anything goes" hardware-adapting version of OS X. Why is it incumbent upon Apple to do this? If Apple is so good at making user-level software, maybe we should just trust them to make their own decisions and not frame their activity from whatever socioeconomic platform we might claim to believe in. Granted, Steve Jobs' announcement that Apple would move to Intel was presented in a confusing manner.
Perhaps the reform need not occur in the government, but rather in the holders of the patents. Some laws are not perfect, and rely on the good character of citizens to hold to the spirit of the law; the word of the law, as can be seen in things like EULAs, can be an awkward and unfriendly tool. I wonder if it's a bad idea to rely on the government to provide boundaries on behavior, and then anything you can do within those laws is "freedom."
Freedom to act is one thing; what you do with that freedom is what really matters.
So, by this logic, that is why patents exist! To balance public good against the individual's ability to prosper. Perhaps it's important to note that "prosper" may have meant something different when patents were first widely available by law; "prosper" may have meant "the ability to survive and provide your family with survival, with some guarantee of future survival" rather than "become rich." In the United States at least, I understand that not until the 1950s or so was there some general assumption that a person was going to be alive and taken care of even if they became sick or made a mistake.
What do you think about how the iPod skips between tracks?
I don't immediately see how carrying feature-length movies around is a very compelling feature. I mean, with the iPod I can have essentially my entire music collection a click away. But while I can listen to music over and over and with little personal investment, movies require hours of your time and in general I don't think I'd re-watch movies with any short-term frequency. And with the large amount of hard drive space these movies (I assume) would take up, I can easily see half an iPod taken up by 5-6 movies. I find it unreasonable to sacrifice all that potential music for a few movies. And, the nature of an iPod is that it's dynamic: it's easy and almost encouraged (especially with the music store and podcasts) that you download new content. I don't think I have the patience to wait for a 4GB download, and then wait for that to transfer to my iPod. And I generally don't have the desire to bring movies with me all the time! And to be curtly to-the-point: How often to people watch movies, and how often do they listen to music? I consider myself a movie-lover, and I still barely find the time to watch 3-4 a month (thanks, Netflix!).
As for the music video feature: I just can't see myself staring into my iPod. But then again, I don't really watch music videos.
Assuming that these screenshots more or less represent the end product, it seems to me that Microsoft is keeping the status quo because it makes them money (or at least keeps things stable). Also, think of all of the people who use Windows and depend on their knowledge of it (from tenuous to expert). Microsoft may feel they need to preserve the familiar interface to keep these users. Maybe Microsoft won't really try to invent or innovate their UI unless their current interface is no longer gaining or keeping customers.
.NET and eschewed in favor of an OO, .NET library (primarily through C#, I'd assume), then Microsoft would be attempting to innovate Windows in areas which developers abhor (well, I know at least I abhor the Win32 API). Microsoft has been taste-testing .NET with developers for a while now, and has been migrating its internal development to C#, so it may be that the .NET releases to-date have just been a way to test whether developers would like .NET -- so that making the new Windows entirely .NET wouldn't be so risky.
On the back-end, though, if the Win32 API has been deprecated or wrapped in
The consumer drives capitalism. At the coldest and most literal level, if the consumer doesn't want it, then it's tethered swimming for you! (I don't feel right!) And if it turns out the consumer is wrong, then all the better for everyone: we'll learn a lesson and something even better will come from it.
Much as there is commercial radio and public radio, you have a choice of whether to actively support what you like; or to deal with advertising. Look at the Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't need ads; it gets donations when necessary (and quite generously, from what I can tell).
Telling people what to do will never work. Watch what they do and make your best decision. Live by your own morals.