to be more specific -- "daily" updates are lousy in blog-style. Newspapers and daily update sites like sjgames.com are definitely "inbox" things because they get populated overnight and are in my mailbox-like folder in Thunderbird just fine.
feeds that are blogs are meant to be read in blog style, even if i'm reading them through my own (livejournal-driven) aggregated UI rather than going to each site individually (becausing remembering to visit all my bookmarks sucks -- let my aggregator visit my bookmarks for me). lj's filters/groups allow me to sort them into reasonable categories.
sites that change a whole bunch of pages weekly (ibm developer-works) are best for the live-bookmarks feature of firefox. (otherwise, i rarely use it; i think its the worst UI for RSS, and am pissed that firefox hasn't approved the feature to give the little orange icon a clipboard interface when the page designer doesn't put the feed link into the main page -- i have to do view-source and lookup the feed in the meta tags and that sucks).
the tricky bit is how to deal with feeds from wiki updates and the like, where little things keep coming up. they can flood both a blog-style and an inbox-style reader (and would certainly drive live-bookmarks bonkers). this is a style of feed that needs a rethink in terms of design and rendering -- more abilities to filter than the standard wiki provides.
that's close to what i want, though my user interface ideas are a little different. my current hassles are 1) i really lack the time, 2) i'm actually concerned with preserving extensions, particularly the multiple ways of dating a feed item and getting things mixed properly by true date rather than just by when it was read, and 3) Ajax is still in the process of mucking with my brain over what can and can't be done, considering the last major php project i worked on was 3 years ago.
though really its the time thing more than anything else. i'm heavily doing Java driven Ajax JSPs (and taglibs so the other developers can use my stuff without having to learn a thousand lines of javascript) and am really drained by the end of the day...
some sites i prefer processing the RSS through Thunderbird (Newsgator can do the same for Outlook users). other sites are more "blog" like to me and I prefer to read it in a blog style. I let LiveJournal syndicate and group them together so I get all my politics blogs in a single place & style, then all my web design feeds in one place, then my science ones, plus I can get my friends' blogs for those that aren't LJ users to be part of my "friends" list as if they all were in once place.
I've been sketching out ideas and prototypes on a "feedmixer" project, a php system that would do what LJ does in mixing feed entries into a single place, only more like JavaBlogs, it would mix multiple feeds into a single RSS feed, then CSS, XSL, and Ajax can be used to read it in blog style OR you can get them into a single place in Thunderbird.
RSS 2.0 has one simple rule for extensions: put it in its own damn namespace; any RSS 2.0 tag remains in the default namespace and no new attributes or tags can be used that are in the default namespace unless specified by the standard. OPML (also written by Winer) is the same way.
As such, this spec does not break RSS 2.0 or require any RSS 2.0 feed reader to change if it simply wants to ignore the extension (the way most RSS readers just ignore extensions). Winer wrote the spec that way specifically so extensions are just that, extensions, not ways to break the file.
My only gripe is that it looks as though it has introduced yet another date format to parse. Dates are different for RSS 0.91/2.0 and 1.0 and it's really obnoxious to deal with.
Google will win when google holds 1) the speed (see latency discussions above; taking their multiple redundant data centers and moving them closer to the customer solves that problem) and 2) the vast majority of the information itself.
In fact, I can see this working because the media companies themselves (the labels, the networks, the studios), the very ones who can't afford to have all those redundant servers and data and managing their own damn network, will be the ones to finance it all by buying local cache space. rather than serve up "Welcome Back, Kotter" from media1.abc_and_nick_at_nite_joint_server.com and killing that server, they'll serve it up from "abc_nick_at_nite_joint.googlemedia.com" and the DNS system will return the nearest google.com to the user -- boom, no latency and no 1 million hits all on the same server killing it in seconds from a public announcement of "first season of Friends is available now!".
A site served up by google in this way would survive a slashdotting without any second thoughts.
Google cache, google mail, google groups, google maps, google yellow pages, google-licensed 3rd party services serving up all the above google stuff, all financed by google advertising and all of the media paying for hosting on google's redundant servers rather than killing their own network servers...
with all of that information in google's hands, able to return the fastest searches around, the other search tools, *especially* microsoft's late entry into this market, simply won't matter.
google doesn't care about the search business as such anymore; they've already won it big enough to make the search market itself a commodity as much as microsoft made the OS a commodity, much as they kept insistent they weren't going to...
i proposed the "analog escape" (which by going through an analog phase, bypasses ANY DMCA restrictions, though adds a lossy layer to it) a couple of years ago and got thoroughly chewed out for it.
Excuse me while I say the artists aren't getting a dime out of that. That Russian company has no intention of paying the artists, as their only means for reaching the artists would require going through the labels.
When it comes to something like G3, given that its not just the 3 guitarists, but also their respective bands, how will they find them all?
That site may be legal under some obscure Russian law that ignores American copyrights, but it is not ethical.
The fact that there is King Crimson's material, particularly that owned by King Crimson and distributed through Discipline Global Mobile, makes that obvious. Robert Fripp has not, under any terms whatsoever, given any company the rights to distribute his music (or Crimson music) online in any form.
Ah, but that's because the software and its installation onto your PC constitutes a Digital Rights Protection Scheme. As such, it is already covered by the DMCA. Any attempt to bypass the "security" that the CD is protected with by somehow avoiding having the software installed on your PC was a violation of the DMCA and you weren't legally allowed to do it in the first place.
Thus, their software's EULA didn't have to cover that aspect.
I dup (rip and burn) every cd I get, as I've gotten too damned tired of scratches making my cd's unusable. Especially in my car; I simply won't put an original cd in my (or any) car anymore.
In addition, I only bring duplicated CDs with me on long trips involving airplanes. My cd case was stolen one time (yes, partially my fault for not paying attention; i left it behind @ security and someone else took it). I only lost 3 cds out of it because all of the others were copies where my masters were at home. And from now on, I won't bring any original CDs with me unless I bought them on the trip.
Had I known that the G3 cds were hit with that garbage, I wouldn't have bought them, as I already have the tools necessary to rip the soundtrack of the matching DVD.
I realize this comment is now making/. violate the DMCA, so if they feel like deleting it for legal reasons, fine.
The CDs "protected" by this scheme are very easy to copy and have no "skip-gap" style protections that break normal cd-copy mechanisms and theoretically work "fine" on normal cd players (experience has shown otherwise).
cdrdao can read the cds just fine (I used it on the G3 Live in Tokyo release that just came out last week), and quickly identifies the data/file-system tracks from the main. rip with cdrdao, edit the toc file to remove the data tracks, and burn away. the resultant cdrom can load anywhere and is easily ripped into mp3s for your *legal* right to listen to music you purchase your way.
in fact, the most rediculous thing about their "protection" of the G3 cds is that for the 2-cd set, the second cd isn't even "protected" with that filesystem. protecting the 2nd disk relies directly on the root-kit hack that detects and analysis when sony cds are inserted, that SONY expects you would have installed by sticking the cd-1 in first.
It is in the patent clerk examiner's best interests to simply pass every patent application received.
If the patent office approves a request, they're "off the hook". It then becomes in the hands of the courts and the free market to actually determine the validity or legitimacy of the patent and the technology involved. When the patent goes to court, the patent office itself does not have to show up or be involved in any way at all. They're done, take the money and move on. Reviews like the Eolas "browser plug-in" one are extremely rare, and often simply keep the status quo.
If the patent office *rejects* a patent, they can be required to get involved. The clerk involved may be ordered to go to court or otherwise write up a document defending their decision that the technology was affected by prior art, triviality, or obviousness.
For a measly $35K a year, its not worth their time or trouble. Pass it and its no longer their problem, its somebody else's...
The process of approval itself encourages lazyness and haphazard investigation. As such, their modern definition of "prior art" is merely "has a patent application already been filed in the United States of America on this?". That's it. triviality and non-obviousness are beyond them because 1) they wouldn't know, and 2) they'd have to defend their decisions, wasting their time from doing their *real* job which is to process (and approve) patent applications, not act as surrogate lawyers far underpaid for that role.
lose everything just because the batteries run out? -- BINGO
i think that's actually the more people's real problem. after your third or fourth "total loss of everything" simply because you didn't or couldn't back up prior to a losing all power, you kinda get sick of it and go "why can't this thing just remember everything without power except stupid stuff, the same way an iwhatever does?"
there's no reason to be so limited to 32 meg. a real architecture would have 32meg for active programs and a gig "permanent" flash-storage, even without external cards getting involved. then have a kernel that knows how to do idle-time monitoring and sync the active memory to the flash when the system isn't actively being used, and finally have the flash memory be USB drive to automatically transfer files without having to go through a "sync" and you're set.
the "sync" should only worry about things actually being shared with the your system, like b-cards, calendar, etc.
everything else should just be transfered like files; plugging in to the main computer should start an auto-backup process, rather than a "sync".
or at least, that's my desires for PDA version 3.
that's probably the key thing to remember -- we're coming up to the third generation of pda's (newton was 1, prove there was a use and a need; palm and ipaq were the collective version 2, over-do the feature set, under-do the architecture and usability). recent palms are version 3, but we're waiting for the great 3.11 -- 3.1 to get it robust and right and 3.11 to get the groupware and social software right.
The far left has "tree-huggers" who want to get rid of industry, dams, power generators, cars, etc. I don't see anyone on the right making accusations like this as to why we are falling behind.
big business CONSTANTLY makes accusations that environmental protections and other things that "cost money" and "reduce profit" are impacting america's ability to remain competitive in the world marketplace. they cite the lack of regulation in countries like China, 'Nam, central and south america, etc as reasons we're not profitable. this includes their whole attitude on more oil drilling in alaska, which is constatly stopped by the "green" people of the left. they are using the current oil-price crisis to get through legislation on the justification that if you didn't have to enforce the environmental policies in effect, we could drill and provide cheap oil to americans.
no, they don't claim we're falling behind scientifically. they claim we're falling behind economically.
and they COMPLETELY ignore the fact that america is less profitable in the global marketplace not because our "stuff" is more expensive due to regulation, its because our *PEOPLE* are more expensive due to our attitudes about class, cost-of-living, minimum-wage, health care, etc.
i have no problem with companies outsourcing because american people are expensive. i have a problem with american companies saying our environmental protections are really hurting them and using "think-tank" science to try to justify that false claim.
...to anybody who saw Clone Wars season 2 on cartoon network. She was left captured and you know they were coming to get her, but it ended there.
other scenes were leaked to anybody who either read the novelization or the comic adaptation, just like with every SW film up 'til now. (i.e., in Empire, the sequence where C-3PO removed the "beware" sticker on the door so the troops could get pummled by wampas; in SW where luke and biggs are watching the battle from the planet surface; there's more...).
IE wins because IE is already there. Its the trick they learned from Netscape when OEMs bundled Netscape (because Netscape realized it worked because M$ did exactly that with MS Office for business PCs).
So to gain the momentum to be treated as permanent, Firefox evangelists have to work on Gateway, Dell, Compaq/HP, and Toshiba (still a strong player in the laptop market) directly. Get Firefox side-by-side with IE, on the desktop, and remind Microsoft that any move to block this in their OEM contracts technically violates the terms of the DoJ settlement (even though the current DoJ is doing nothing to enforce it).
Now to make this work, Firefox needs to have automatic security updates that don't require uninstalling/reinstalling by hand. It needs to "just happen". Hopefully, the 1.5 will finalize this feature.
ogg left a bad taste in my mouth back in the beta days when the sound quality sucked. mp3s are a de facto standard (play on everything, regardless of the particular DRM i might have access to on some platform or another) so that's what i use.
i hated windows, but that's cause i was a unix (BSD-variant) junkie living off Motif + X windows 15 years ago and hating pure System V systems like the plague. years later, i was seriously annoyed with GTK and QT and really never saw the point in rewriting your graphics library from scratch every time you felt someone else wasn't listening to you. i'm over that now, given the multitude of languages one can write gtk/gnome apps in now. but i use java + swing for my gui work mostly, so what do i care.
hated windows then. still hate it now. the GUI should never have been so attached to the kernel, and the window management system never so tightly attached to the running application. the main thing X got right was separation of window management from application. XP i can deal with; i hate the "look", but it doesn't crash on me nearly as much as 98 or 2k did, and i like the fact that i don't have to reboot every time i install something new just because *something* doesn't know how to reread the registry. (of course, the registry itself is a major design flaw, but i couldn't begin to imagine a better alternative after this many years).
"pop" music has sucked for me since 1986, so that's hardly an issue. I listen to prog, classical, and celtic, all of which have some degree of timelessness to them.
Slashdot Mirror
a similar approach is built into ajaxtags already -- a minimum threshold of keystrokes before it attempts to update the dropdown items.
to be more specific -- "daily" updates are lousy in blog-style. Newspapers and daily update sites like sjgames.com are definitely "inbox" things because they get populated overnight and are in my mailbox-like folder in Thunderbird just fine.
feeds that are blogs are meant to be read in blog style, even if i'm reading them through my own (livejournal-driven) aggregated UI rather than going to each site individually (becausing remembering to visit all my bookmarks sucks -- let my aggregator visit my bookmarks for me). lj's filters/groups allow me to sort them into reasonable categories.
sites that change a whole bunch of pages weekly (ibm developer-works) are best for the live-bookmarks feature of firefox. (otherwise, i rarely use it; i think its the worst UI for RSS, and am pissed that firefox hasn't approved the feature to give the little orange icon a clipboard interface when the page designer doesn't put the feed link into the main page -- i have to do view-source and lookup the feed in the meta tags and that sucks).
the tricky bit is how to deal with feeds from wiki updates and the like, where little things keep coming up. they can flood both a blog-style and an inbox-style reader (and would certainly drive live-bookmarks bonkers). this is a style of feed that needs a rethink in terms of design and rendering -- more abilities to filter than the standard wiki provides.
actually, i just read that you've seen the date problem as well (and the same solution i had come to). :)
that's close to what i want, though my user interface ideas are a little different. my current hassles are 1) i really lack the time, 2) i'm actually concerned with preserving extensions, particularly the multiple ways of dating a feed item and getting things mixed properly by true date rather than just by when it was read, and 3) Ajax is still in the process of mucking with my brain over what can and can't be done, considering the last major php project i worked on was 3 years ago.
though really its the time thing more than anything else. i'm heavily doing Java driven Ajax JSPs (and taglibs so the other developers can use my stuff without having to learn a thousand lines of javascript) and am really drained by the end of the day...
some sites i prefer processing the RSS through Thunderbird (Newsgator can do the same for Outlook users). other sites are more "blog" like to me and I prefer to read it in a blog style. I let LiveJournal syndicate and group them together so I get all my politics blogs in a single place & style, then all my web design feeds in one place, then my science ones, plus I can get my friends' blogs for those that aren't LJ users to be part of my "friends" list as if they all were in once place.
I've been sketching out ideas and prototypes on a "feedmixer" project, a php system that would do what LJ does in mixing feed entries into a single place, only more like JavaBlogs, it would mix multiple feeds into a single RSS feed, then CSS, XSL, and Ajax can be used to read it in blog style OR you can get them into a single place in Thunderbird.
RSS 2.0 has one simple rule for extensions: put it in its own damn namespace; any RSS 2.0 tag remains in the default namespace and no new attributes or tags can be used that are in the default namespace unless specified by the standard. OPML (also written by Winer) is the same way.
As such, this spec does not break RSS 2.0 or require any RSS 2.0 feed reader to change if it simply wants to ignore the extension (the way most RSS readers just ignore extensions). Winer wrote the spec that way specifically so extensions are just that, extensions, not ways to break the file.
My only gripe is that it looks as though it has introduced yet another date format to parse. Dates are different for RSS 0.91/2.0 and 1.0 and it's really obnoxious to deal with.
Google will win when google holds 1) the speed (see latency discussions above; taking their multiple redundant data centers and moving them closer to the customer solves that problem) and 2) the vast majority of the information itself.
In fact, I can see this working because the media companies themselves (the labels, the networks, the studios), the very ones who can't afford to have all those redundant servers and data and managing their own damn network, will be the ones to finance it all by buying local cache space. rather than serve up "Welcome Back, Kotter" from media1.abc_and_nick_at_nite_joint_server.com and killing that server, they'll serve it up from "abc_nick_at_nite_joint.googlemedia.com" and the DNS system will return the nearest google.com to the user -- boom, no latency and no 1 million hits all on the same server killing it in seconds from a public announcement of "first season of Friends is available now!".
A site served up by google in this way would survive a slashdotting without any second thoughts.
Google cache, google mail, google groups, google maps, google yellow pages, google-licensed 3rd party services serving up all the above google stuff, all financed by google advertising and all of the media paying for hosting on google's redundant servers rather than killing their own network servers...
with all of that information in google's hands, able to return the fastest searches around, the other search tools, *especially* microsoft's late entry into this market, simply won't matter.
google doesn't care about the search business as such anymore; they've already won it big enough to make the search market itself a commodity as much as microsoft made the OS a commodity, much as they kept insistent they weren't going to...
actually, it wasn't /. as much as someone griping about it in a pre-"radar" blog @ o'reilly.
i proposed the "analog escape" (which by going through an analog phase, bypasses ANY DMCA restrictions, though adds a lossy layer to it) a couple of years ago and got thoroughly chewed out for it.
Excuse me while I say the artists aren't getting a dime out of that. That Russian company has no intention of paying the artists, as their only means for reaching the artists would require going through the labels.
When it comes to something like G3, given that its not just the 3 guitarists, but also their respective bands, how will they find them all?
That site may be legal under some obscure Russian law that ignores American copyrights, but it is not ethical.
The fact that there is King Crimson's material, particularly that owned by King Crimson and distributed through Discipline Global Mobile, makes that obvious. Robert Fripp has not, under any terms whatsoever, given any company the rights to distribute his music (or Crimson music) online in any form.
when did little details like THAT ever stop a u.s. company from acting like a bunch of mindless jerks? :)
Ah, but that's because the software and its installation onto your PC constitutes a Digital Rights Protection Scheme. As such, it is already covered by the DMCA. Any attempt to bypass the "security" that the CD is protected with by somehow avoiding having the software installed on your PC was a violation of the DMCA and you weren't legally allowed to do it in the first place.
Thus, their software's EULA didn't have to cover that aspect.
I dup (rip and burn) every cd I get, as I've gotten too damned tired of scratches making my cd's unusable. Especially in my car; I simply won't put an original cd in my (or any) car anymore.
In addition, I only bring duplicated CDs with me on long trips involving airplanes. My cd case was stolen one time (yes, partially my fault for not paying attention; i left it behind @ security and someone else took it). I only lost 3 cds out of it because all of the others were copies where my masters were at home. And from now on, I won't bring any original CDs with me unless I bought them on the trip.
Had I known that the G3 cds were hit with that garbage, I wouldn't have bought them, as I already have the tools necessary to rip the soundtrack of the matching DVD.
I realize this comment is now making /. violate the DMCA, so if they feel like deleting it for legal reasons, fine.
The CDs "protected" by this scheme are very easy to copy and have no "skip-gap" style protections that break normal cd-copy mechanisms and theoretically work "fine" on normal cd players (experience has shown otherwise).
cdrdao can read the cds just fine (I used it on the G3 Live in Tokyo release that just came out last week), and quickly identifies the data/file-system tracks from the main. rip with cdrdao, edit the toc file to remove the data tracks, and burn away. the resultant cdrom can load anywhere and is easily ripped into mp3s for your *legal* right to listen to music you purchase your way.
in fact, the most rediculous thing about their "protection" of the G3 cds is that for the 2-cd set, the second cd isn't even "protected" with that filesystem. protecting the 2nd disk relies directly on the root-kit hack that detects and analysis when sony cds are inserted, that SONY expects you would have installed by sticking the cd-1 in first.
It is in the patent clerk examiner's best interests to simply pass every patent application received.
If the patent office approves a request, they're "off the hook". It then becomes in the hands of the courts and the free market to actually determine the validity or legitimacy of the patent and the technology involved. When the patent goes to court, the patent office itself does not have to show up or be involved in any way at all. They're done, take the money and move on. Reviews like the Eolas "browser plug-in" one are extremely rare, and often simply keep the status quo.
If the patent office *rejects* a patent, they can be required to get involved. The clerk involved may be ordered to go to court or otherwise write up a document defending their decision that the technology was affected by prior art, triviality, or obviousness.
For a measly $35K a year, its not worth their time or trouble. Pass it and its no longer their problem, its somebody else's...
The process of approval itself encourages lazyness and haphazard investigation. As such, their modern definition of "prior art" is merely "has a patent application already been filed in the United States of America on this?". That's it. triviality and non-obviousness are beyond them because 1) they wouldn't know, and 2) they'd have to defend their decisions, wasting their time from doing their *real* job which is to process (and approve) patent applications, not act as surrogate lawyers far underpaid for that role.
lose everything just because the batteries run out? -- BINGO
i think that's actually the more people's real problem. after your third or fourth "total loss of everything" simply because you didn't or couldn't back up prior to a losing all power, you kinda get sick of it and go "why can't this thing just remember everything without power except stupid stuff, the same way an iwhatever does?"
there's no reason to be so limited to 32 meg. a real architecture would have 32meg for active programs and a gig "permanent" flash-storage, even without external cards getting involved. then have a kernel that knows how to do idle-time monitoring and sync the active memory to the flash when the system isn't actively being used, and finally have the flash memory be USB drive to automatically transfer files without having to go through a "sync" and you're set.
the "sync" should only worry about things actually being shared with the your system, like b-cards, calendar, etc.
everything else should just be transfered like files; plugging in to the main computer should start an auto-backup process, rather than a "sync".
or at least, that's my desires for PDA version 3.
that's probably the key thing to remember -- we're coming up to the third generation of pda's (newton was 1, prove there was a use and a need; palm and ipaq were the collective version 2, over-do the feature set, under-do the architecture and usability). recent palms are version 3, but we're waiting for the great 3.11 -- 3.1 to get it robust and right and 3.11 to get the groupware and social software right.
to do that, "losing everything" has to stop.
why, just because we know so little about bird origins and so much about pterosaurs, do we keep forgetting to mention them as flyers?
sheesh...
you'd think a creature with a 20 foot wingspan wouldn't be forgotten about so easily when talking about flyers.
The far left has "tree-huggers" who want to get rid of industry, dams, power generators, cars, etc. I don't see anyone on the right making accusations like this as to why we are falling behind.
big business CONSTANTLY makes accusations that environmental protections and other things that "cost money" and "reduce profit" are impacting america's ability to remain competitive in the world marketplace. they cite the lack of regulation in countries like China, 'Nam, central and south america, etc as reasons we're not profitable. this includes their whole attitude on more oil drilling in alaska, which is constatly stopped by the "green" people of the left. they are using the current oil-price crisis to get through legislation on the justification that if you didn't have to enforce the environmental policies in effect, we could drill and provide cheap oil to americans.
no, they don't claim we're falling behind scientifically. they claim we're falling behind economically.
and they COMPLETELY ignore the fact that america is less profitable in the global marketplace not because our "stuff" is more expensive due to regulation, its because our *PEOPLE* are more expensive due to our attitudes about class, cost-of-living, minimum-wage, health care, etc.
i have no problem with companies outsourcing because american people are expensive. i have a problem with american companies saying our environmental protections are really hurting them and using "think-tank" science to try to justify that false claim.
if the eolas patent for browser plug-ins wasn't upheld as valid, this slashdot entry wouldn't be here.
sorry -- forgot that bit...haven't seen it since the CN marathon viewing a while back.
seems a bit daft of lucas to go and put out SW3 on dvd without putting out this prequel first.
...to anybody who saw Clone Wars season 2 on cartoon network. She was left captured and you know they were coming to get her, but it ended there.
other scenes were leaked to anybody who either read the novelization or the comic adaptation, just like with every SW film up 'til now. (i.e., in Empire, the sequence where C-3PO removed the "beware" sticker on the door so the troops could get pummled by wampas; in SW where luke and biggs are watching the battle from the planet surface; there's more...).
IE wins because IE is already there. Its the trick they learned from Netscape when OEMs bundled Netscape (because Netscape realized it worked because M$ did exactly that with MS Office for business PCs).
So to gain the momentum to be treated as permanent, Firefox evangelists have to work on Gateway, Dell, Compaq/HP, and Toshiba (still a strong player in the laptop market) directly. Get Firefox side-by-side with IE, on the desktop, and remind Microsoft that any move to block this in their OEM contracts technically violates the terms of the DoJ settlement (even though the current DoJ is doing nothing to enforce it).
Now to make this work, Firefox needs to have automatic security updates that don't require uninstalling/reinstalling by hand. It needs to "just happen". Hopefully, the 1.5 will finalize this feature.
because its incredibly common and we're still alive. that's how natural selection works.
sheesh...
ogg left a bad taste in my mouth back in the beta days when the sound quality sucked. mp3s are a de facto standard (play on everything, regardless of the particular DRM i might have access to on some platform or another) so that's what i use.
i hated windows, but that's cause i was a unix (BSD-variant) junkie living off Motif + X windows 15 years ago and hating pure System V systems like the plague. years later, i was seriously annoyed with GTK and QT and really never saw the point in rewriting your graphics library from scratch every time you felt someone else wasn't listening to you. i'm over that now, given the multitude of languages one can write gtk/gnome apps in now. but i use java + swing for my gui work mostly, so what do i care.
hated windows then. still hate it now. the GUI should never have been so attached to the kernel, and the window management system never so tightly attached to the running application. the main thing X got right was separation of window management from application. XP i can deal with; i hate the "look", but it doesn't crash on me nearly as much as 98 or 2k did, and i like the fact that i don't have to reboot every time i install something new just because *something* doesn't know how to reread the registry. (of course, the registry itself is a major design flaw, but i couldn't begin to imagine a better alternative after this many years).
"pop" music has sucked for me since 1986, so that's hardly an issue. I listen to prog, classical, and celtic, all of which have some degree of timelessness to them.