Apple's reaction will be interesting. If they jump on these developers, they will be sending a strong message about exactly what they are selling with the iPod. If - and I think this is more likely - they ignore or even help the project, the iPod will become immensely popular.
Ogg support (or even just a shell prompt!) would be reason enough for me to buy the iPod today.
Hope this message gets through to Apple.
So, what's next: will some intelligent company build a DVD player that can be extended with IDE drives internally and run Linux so that we can load it with mplayer and freenet and build that "your grandmother can fileshare" set-top DVD/VR I'm dreaming about?
The bitterness of coffee is what makes it attractive: many cultures have similarly bitter things to drink and chew, and the pleasure comes from the long-lasting sweet taste you get a few minutes afterwards.
If you're ever chewed kola nuts, you will know what I mean. Intensely bitter when you bite off a piece, but over minutes, you get a sweet reaction that is much smoother than a "real" sweet substance.
It seems to be part of the addictive process: think of bitter chocolate and those tiny espressos.
No one mentioned spite. But rapid audience feedback makes a much better performance. Drumming in the streets is not about "the only way" - there are also things like concerts and dance classes, which are cool - it's about seeing what works with people right on the moment. Drum badly, they walk away. Capture the moment, they get something special.
Last summer one afternoon we had a conga player, two djembes, a dun-dun, and a troupe of twenty scandinavian girl guides doing a weird dance. You just don't get the same creativity by throwing money at artists. Hollywood is the extreme example.
Before conventional notions of "selling content" go back to where they belong, namely the rubbish bin. It's always been a rotten system, paying for art, corrupting both the artist and the viewer. The best entertainment and art are communal, created for those around you and rewarded by status and reputation.
This is the way music and entertainment (story telling?) work in villages and it's only the urban lifestyle that's made it impossible.
It should be completely obvious that the large-scale entertainment industries are already dead, but they just don't know it. Copyright extensions... piracy laws... anti-copying technology... it's all just pissing into the river.
One example: did anyone seriously enjoy LOTRTT as much as they enjoyed the parodies of it? You see what I mean. The day when more people get their kicks from community-created content (CCCtm) like web logs,/., chatrooms, and autoporn, than they do from commercial media, is the day that the discussion becomes moot.
I'm speaking from experience: I used to be a street drummer, and I can say that the kick from getting fifty random people to stop from their shopping on a sunny saturday afternoon and move their booty to insanely loud drumming beats any other form of fun except possibly (possibly) sex.
There seem to be only two ways to break the need to write code line by line. Either it evolves (and it is possible that evolved software will work exactly as this article suggests, living off fuzzy patterns rather than black/white choices). Or it is built, by humans, using deliberate construction techniques. You can't really mix these any more than you can grow a house or build a tree. We already use evolution, chaos theory, and natural selection to construct objects (animals, plants), so doing this for software is nothing radical.
But how about the other route? The answer lies in abstracting useful models, no just in repacking code into objects. The entire Internet is built around one kind of abstract model - protocols - but there are many others to play with. Take a set of problems, abstract into models that work at a human level, and make software that implements the models, if necesary by generating your million line programs. It is no big deal - I routinely go this way, turning 50-line XML models into what must be at least 10m-line assembler programs.
Abstract complexity, generate code, and the only limits are those in your head.
When you can reach any point on earth through satellite connections, and most of the inhabited world through terrestrial wireless communications.
Are we going to see Nepal Telco guys in orange hats dig a ditch all the way up to the summit?
Oops, better go and read the article...
Not just inaccurate, but capitalized as well?
What happened to basic research? OK, here is the peer review process in action: flame the poster of this misleading and alarmist article. What I would like to see on/. is super mod points that we can use to take down articles that don't meet even the basic requirements of accuracy.
I'm possibly not entirely objective here, since my team makes a web server that is current, fairly popular, and most definitely not vulnerable.
I first imagined virtual keyboards around 1994. I tried building something from game gloves that could be had at the time but it was a joke.
The projection keyboards are interesting but not sufficient since they depend on a flat surface. My vision of portable computing depends on a belt-mounted pack, bluetooth headphone for music and voice and (vitally) sound feedback from the virtual keyboard, heads-up vision, and keyboard gloves. The whole thing will be more compact than a small laptop, last for days with a recharge, and - yes - require expert touch typing, but that is a small price for being able to tap out your email and latest novel on your knees.
I expect the first serious mass-market virtual keyboard will be seen in Europe and be used for SMS.:-)
Actually, no troll. This is the real thing, only I was off - no 200 Mhz but 120 Mhz.
Date sent: Wed, 02 Oct 2002 10:03:09 -0500
From: Dave Cole...
Subject: Slashdotted Xitami server
To: support@imatix.com
I run Xitami on a little p-120 win 95 server at my house. last night
it got posted on slashdot It has since the slashdotting been
subjected to an incredible load 96,000+ hits and 1,451,000,000+ MB
outbound in 12 hours and is still going strong! this speaks volumes
about the stability of the xitami server. You have a great product.
The address of my Xitami server.
http://fileserver.coleskingdom.com/
The slashdot article that lead to the traffic jump
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/10/01/0220213.shtm l?tid=167
>Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
>Garth Brooks covers this in his famous book "The Mythical Man Month" where he proves in a controled lab environment that Java under X86 runs on the order of Olog(n) slower than it does on a RISC chip like an UltraSparc.
WTF? Fred Brooks wrote this book, and I don't seem to remember RISC or UltraSparc chips, not to mention Java, in 1974. Garth Brooks is (AFAIK) a country music singer. Try again.
Which is very funny: this is an article explaining how a web site survived the/. effect, thus trying to catch the/. readers back for a second round, and getting lots of advertising hits at the same time. If only that server could keep up.
Now, a while back on/. I saw a report about a 200Mhz (?) PC running Windows 95 and with about 30 hard disks, that also seemed to do very well under the/. effect.
Sorry to be a little sarcastic, but the notion of programming languages as OSes is old and familiar to everyone who used (especially micro-) computers in the 80's. Basic, Forth, Smalltalk, Lisp, mainframe assembler,... even Unix was conceived as a set of language as much as an OS.
The remarkable thing is how people have accepted OSes that do not work like programming languages: MS-DOS and its Windows brood being the most common examples, though many other firms have produced non-programmable (and non-abstractable) OSes in the past: IBM OS/400 being one wonderful example that still gets the Pavlovian juices flowing. Brrrrr.
The question is not about "mathematical identity". If that's all that matters, I can say that people will eventually become sweet corn. We are, after all, mathematically identical at many levels: consider the structure of living cells or organic molecules.
The question is how we build and use tools to hide and digest complexity. We program by creating models. Models encapsulate complexity. Can the OS do the same? If so, it's a programming language. Does it impose a single static designer model? If so, it's a crippled OS.
So what you want (if the article is correct) is a language that will write apps for you. My company makes such a thing - an open source tool called GSL. There is an old version available online and a newer version here.
Email me if you need help. And you will.
Also, a PDF on code generation that may enlighten.
Product placement is the obvious way to go, yes. Saleware shows and music will redefine the rules. Not just "Yes, you can copy this freely", but "we'll pay you to host our song/show" on your server.
If you think this is not possible, consider the TV shows that simply show funny or bizarre adverts from other countries. Product placement can be very well done and entertaining in itself, and the only limit to turning a Pepsi spot into a full feature movie is the director's imagination.
Is this the future of digital media art?
I should have provided the link when discussing Richard Stallman's comments. He argues that even libraries should be clearly GPL'd rather than covered by the looser Library GPL, and it was this argument that convinced us to switch our OSS libraries to GPL. The argument is clear: by using the full power of the GPL, OSS software developers are given an advantage. For the purposes of dual licensing, it is also clear: we can benefit two specific groups of users - OSS developers AND paying customers - while not giving presents to non-paying commercial users who are, quite possibly, competitors.
The dual-license model is thus a very powerful tool for delivering OSS software to specific target users. I'd highly recommended this approach to all OSS developers who work ex-catherdra.
Dual-licensing works extremely well in one specific case of open-source software, namely that where there is no confusion about copyright ownership. If a project gets numerous submissions from external contributors, they either have to sign-over ownership, or the project has to fork. Neither are really satisfactory.
But for projects working ex-Cathedra, where external developers provide feedback and perhaps patches but no significant functional extensions, the dual licensing model can work very well indeed.
My company has made open source tools since 1995 or so, and we've now switched from a BSD-style license to a GPL / or commercial license model. Our motivation was (a) guided by Stallman's comments about BSD licenses helping commercial companies at the expense of open-source projects, which we agreed with, and (b) the desire of some customers for some kind of commercial framework.
Since 1995, we've found that there are very few people able and willing to contribute to our software, even though there are thousands happy to use it. Possibly because our tool are somewhat complex internally. So, the dual-license model fits our process perfectly.
Yes, it's 2003 and time to jump on this thing called OPEN SOURCE!
Seriously, it's very, very later to do this. This is "Open Source as a Waste Disposal Mechanism".
Few companies dare to use Free/Open Source Software as a development tool, but those that do, and do it well, find it is a very satisfying way of getting software into more hands and making it better. MySQL, Berkeley DB, and there are many other examples.
For small-to-medium sized software houses there seems little alternative. GPL the damn stuff, and make an alternative license for commercial use. You will get the best of both markets: FOSS developers willing to stress test your work, and commercial developers paying for support.
There should be a catagory label for this kind of after-the-fact FOSS release: "Deadware", or maybe "FOSS-pit Software".
TO: BAGGINSFRODO@THESHIRE.ME
FROM: SAURON@DARKLORD.ME
KIND SIR, PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF.
I AM SAURON JUNIOR, RELATIVE OF THE LATE DECEASED SAURON, LORD. YOU WILL BE AWARE OF THE RECENT TRAGIC EVENTS OVERTAKING OUR MIDDLE EARTH, WHICH I
CAN ASSURE YOU MY FAMILY HAS NO CONNECTION WITH.
HOWEVER, MY LATE DECEASED RELATIVE LEFT A LARGE AMOUNT OF GOLD AND JEWELRY HIDDEN IN A DRAGON'S LAIR. THE ESTIMATED VALUE OF THIS TREASURE IS
250,000,000 OLD SMEAGOLS. I AM SEEKING WELL WISHERS WHO WILL HELP ME TO RECOVER THIS RIGHTFUL LEGACY,
IN RETURN FOR A MODEST 10% OF ALL
GOLD RECOVERED. PLEASE DO NOT INFORM THE WIZARD OR HIS MINIONS OF THIS TREASURE OR THE CONSEQUENCES WILL BE TRULY DREADFUL FOR YOURS TRULY.
ALL I ASK OF YOU IS THAT I CAN USE YOUR GOLD RING TO PASS INVISIBLY PAST THE DRAGON STILL GUARDING THE GOLD. ONCE I HAVE RECOVERED THE RIGHTFUL GOLD AND JEWELRY I WILL DELIVER YOU 10% OF THE AFORESAID TREASURE AND OF COURSE RETURN YOU THE RING.
I RECEIVED YOUR ADDRESS FROM AN ELF. PLEASE CONSIDER MY REQUEST MOST SINCERELY.
'cuse me, are you the Fellowship of the Ring?
Bugger off! Fellowship of the Ring? Bleeding fags! Of course we're not the Fellowship of the bleeding Ring, we're the People's Followers of The Ring. Bloody Fellowship of the Ring, prancing around on their bloody horses.
Still, they're not as bad as the Judean People's Ring Front!
Yeah, sodding Judean People's Ring Front!
And the People's Front of the Ring!
Yeah, bleeding People's Front of the Ring!
And the People's Followers of the Ring!
Yeah, sodding... hey, wait a minute, we're the People's Followers of the Ring!
Oh, sorry...
What exactly are domain registrars selling if not property? If the Supreme Court decides that domain names are not property, it'd be fun to start a class action against... hmmm... Verisign to recover the millions spent on domain names which are apparently not actually "property" at all.
Linux for the Desktop? I suggest that the desktop as a metaphor for how we use computers is hugely overrated, and has largely been the result of Windows' marketing rather than real users' needs.
The desktop originally meant running fairly simple applications in separate windows. It was then extended to managing multiple documents at once. Then the documents became complex and 'active'. Then the Internet got involved and every document became a resource, and the desktop became a browser.
At least, this is how Microsoft saw their world, and how they presented it to their users. Of course Linux will never be ready for this desktop - it's a moving target and one that most Linux developers do not sincerely believe in, for the good reason that it is fundamentally flawed.
So, what's the flaw?
I think it's related to the way people organize their work. People do two kinds of paperwork: clerical work, and creative work. For clerical work, your UI should consist mainly of a personal inbox and shared filing cabinets. For creative work, your UI should consist of a clutter of tasks, going from the 'hot' important ones to the old, dry ones. No filing, no organization, just a circle of gradually aging tasks.
The Windows computer desktop is like the clean desk policy of some companies: it does not match the way our heads work. I believe this is the main reason why computers are still so painful for most people to use.
Linux addresses half of the real problem of building information systems: namely, the problem of getting information from place to place safely and reliably. It largely ignores the desktop (except for playing with cosmetics). Windows does the opposite.
So, my suggestion is to continue to ignore the Windows desktop metaphor and to build a new one instead. Make it so close to what people like using that it becomes a unique selling point.
I'll present ideas for the two user interfaces I've described. Firstly, the clerical interface. It should look a lot like email, basically channeling all work through a single 'todo' list. Clerical work is about following through documents, workflow, approval, etc. Imagine that you can do such actions directly from your UI, from your messaging client. You can file documents in a shared group filing system, or a personal filing system. You can chuck documents away for later handling.
Now for the creative work UI. Much simpler. Create tasks and give them a priority. Throw them onto your desktop, in concentric heaps. The tasks closest to you are the most important. When you work on something, it remains 'hot', and when you leave a task alone, it regresses to the bottom of the heap. The back of your desk is just a huge mess of old documents and tasks that you can search through, and occasionally clean-up.
Both these interfaces match closely the way people work. For instance, it's been shown that prematurely filing 'work in progress' actually makes it harder for people to find it back again. Our brains - when we're doing creative work - seem to organize tasks in such concentric rings of hot, medium, and cold work, and the computer should present our work in the same way.
Conclusions: First, simply adding complexity to an already fat and useless desktop metaphor is not the way to go. Secondly, competing with Windows on this basis is both impossible and misguided. Thirdly, look at the way people really work, and design a new desktop metaphor for this. I've shown two possibilities. There are certainly more, depending on the type of work people do: art, music, writing, teaching, playing, negotiation, management,... each of these roles may deserve a carefully-designed UI metaphor. Lastly, creating the UIs that I've described should be a modest effort, and I'll probably do it myself one of these days.
You're referring to Saudi Arabia, I suppose. It's worth noting that the Taliban and Al Quaida were trained and armed (up to soon before Sept. 11) by the US government itself. The same government that keeps the Al Saud family in power because it guarantees the flow of oil.
No-one said it was possible to reform a political system overnight, especially when corruption is so completely part of global politics. Saying that a popular reaction to Sept.11th shows that fast-cycle democracy is no good is meaningless, since it is clear that the entire current terrorism cycle was entirely caused by cronyist oil politics in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's reaction will be interesting. If they jump on these developers, they will be sending a strong message about exactly what they are selling with the iPod. If - and I think this is more likely - they ignore or even help the project, the iPod will become immensely popular.
Ogg support (or even just a shell prompt!) would be reason enough for me to buy the iPod today.
Hope this message gets through to Apple.
So, what's next: will some intelligent company build a DVD player that can be extended with IDE drives internally and run Linux so that we can load it with mplayer and freenet and build that "your grandmother can fileshare" set-top DVD/VR I'm dreaming about?
The bitterness of coffee is what makes it attractive: many cultures have similarly bitter things to drink and chew, and the pleasure comes from the long-lasting sweet taste you get a few minutes afterwards.
If you're ever chewed kola nuts, you will know what I mean. Intensely bitter when you bite off a piece, but over minutes, you get a sweet reaction that is much smoother than a "real" sweet substance.
It seems to be part of the addictive process: think of bitter chocolate and those tiny espressos.
No one mentioned spite. But rapid audience feedback makes a much better performance. Drumming in the streets is not about "the only way" - there are also things like concerts and dance classes, which are cool - it's about seeing what works with people right on the moment. Drum badly, they walk away. Capture the moment, they get something special.
Last summer one afternoon we had a conga player, two djembes, a dun-dun, and a troupe of twenty scandinavian girl guides doing a weird dance. You just don't get the same creativity by throwing money at artists. Hollywood is the extreme example.
Before conventional notions of "selling content" go back to where they belong, namely the rubbish bin. It's always been a rotten system, paying for art, corrupting both the artist and the viewer. The best entertainment and art are communal, created for those around you and rewarded by status and reputation. /., chatrooms, and autoporn, than they do from commercial media, is the day that the discussion becomes moot.
This is the way music and entertainment (story telling?) work in villages and it's only the urban lifestyle that's made it impossible.
It should be completely obvious that the large-scale entertainment industries are already dead, but they just don't know it. Copyright extensions... piracy laws... anti-copying technology... it's all just pissing into the river.
One example: did anyone seriously enjoy LOTRTT as much as they enjoyed the parodies of it? You see what I mean. The day when more people get their kicks from community-created content (CCCtm) like web logs,
I'm speaking from experience: I used to be a street drummer, and I can say that the kick from getting fifty random people to stop from their shopping on a sunny saturday afternoon and move their booty to insanely loud drumming beats any other form of fun except possibly (possibly) sex.
There seem to be only two ways to break the need to write code line by line. Either it evolves (and it is possible that evolved software will work exactly as this article suggests, living off fuzzy patterns rather than black/white choices). Or it is built, by humans, using deliberate construction techniques. You can't really mix these any more than you can grow a house or build a tree. We already use evolution, chaos theory, and natural selection to construct objects (animals, plants), so doing this for software is nothing radical.
But how about the other route? The answer lies in abstracting useful models, no just in repacking code into objects. The entire Internet is built around one kind of abstract model - protocols - but there are many others to play with. Take a set of problems, abstract into models that work at a human level, and make software that implements the models, if necesary by generating your million line programs. It is no big deal - I routinely go this way, turning 50-line XML models into what must be at least 10m-line assembler programs.
Abstract complexity, generate code, and the only limits are those in your head.
Like Kazaa. Oh.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these worms... and VOILA! Internet, 2003/02/25.
When you can reach any point on earth through satellite connections, and most of the inhabited world through terrestrial wireless communications.
Are we going to see Nepal Telco guys in orange hats dig a ditch all the way up to the summit?
Oops, better go and read the article...
Not just inaccurate, but capitalized as well? What happened to basic research? OK, here is the peer review process in action: flame the poster of this misleading and alarmist article. What I would like to see on /. is super mod points that we can use to take down articles that don't meet even the basic requirements of accuracy.
I'm possibly not entirely objective here, since my team makes a web server that is current, fairly popular, and most definitely not vulnerable.
I first imagined virtual keyboards around 1994. I tried building something from game gloves that could be had at the time but it was a joke. The projection keyboards are interesting but not sufficient since they depend on a flat surface. My vision of portable computing depends on a belt-mounted pack, bluetooth headphone for music and voice and (vitally) sound feedback from the virtual keyboard, heads-up vision, and keyboard gloves. The whole thing will be more compact than a small laptop, last for days with a recharge, and - yes - require expert touch typing, but that is a small price for being able to tap out your email and latest novel on your knees. :-)
I expect the first serious mass-market virtual keyboard will be seen in Europe and be used for SMS.
Date sent: Wed, 02 Oct 2002 10:03:09 -0500 ...
m l?tid=167
From: Dave Cole
Subject: Slashdotted Xitami server
To: support@imatix.com
I run Xitami on a little p-120 win 95 server at my house. last night
it got posted on slashdot It has since the slashdotting been
subjected to an incredible load 96,000+ hits and 1,451,000,000+ MB
outbound in 12 hours and is still going strong! this speaks volumes
about the stability of the xitami server. You have a great product.
The address of my Xitami server. http://fileserver.coleskingdom.com/
The slashdot article that lead to the traffic jump http://slashdot.org/articles/02/10/01/0220213.sht
>Garth Brooks covers this in his famous book "The Mythical Man Month" where he proves in a controled lab environment that Java under X86 runs on the order of Olog(n) slower than it does on a RISC chip like an UltraSparc.
WTF? Fred Brooks wrote this book, and I don't seem to remember RISC or UltraSparc chips, not to mention Java, in 1974. Garth Brooks is (AFAIK) a country music singer. Try again.
Which is very funny: this is an article explaining how a web site survived the /. effect, thus trying to catch the /. readers back for a second round, and getting lots of advertising hits at the same time. If only that server could keep up. /. I saw a report about a 200Mhz (?) PC running Windows 95 and with about 30 hard disks, that also seemed to do very well under the /. effect.
Now, a while back on
Sorry to be a little sarcastic, but the notion of programming languages as OSes is old and familiar to everyone who used (especially micro-) computers in the 80's. Basic, Forth, Smalltalk, Lisp, mainframe assembler,... even Unix was conceived as a set of language as much as an OS.
The remarkable thing is how people have accepted OSes that do not work like programming languages: MS-DOS and its Windows brood being the most common examples, though many other firms have produced non-programmable (and non-abstractable) OSes in the past: IBM OS/400 being one wonderful example that still gets the Pavlovian juices flowing. Brrrrr.
The question is not about "mathematical identity". If that's all that matters, I can say that people will eventually become sweet corn. We are, after all, mathematically identical at many levels: consider the structure of living cells or organic molecules.
The question is how we build and use tools to hide and digest complexity. We program by creating models. Models encapsulate complexity. Can the OS do the same? If so, it's a programming language. Does it impose a single static designer model? If so, it's a crippled OS.
So what you want (if the article is correct) is a language that will write apps for you. My company makes such a thing - an open source tool called GSL. There is an old version available online and a newer version here.
Email me if you need help. And you will.
Also, a PDF on code generation that may enlighten.
Product placement is the obvious way to go, yes. Saleware shows and music will redefine the rules. Not just "Yes, you can copy this freely", but "we'll pay you to host our song/show" on your server.
If you think this is not possible, consider the TV shows that simply show funny or bizarre adverts from other countries. Product placement can be very well done and entertaining in itself, and the only limit to turning a Pepsi spot into a full feature movie is the director's imagination.
Is this the future of digital media art?
I should have provided the link when discussing Richard Stallman's comments. He argues that even libraries should be clearly GPL'd rather than covered by the looser Library GPL, and it was this argument that convinced us to switch our OSS libraries to GPL. The argument is clear: by using the full power of the GPL, OSS software developers are given an advantage. For the purposes of dual licensing, it is also clear: we can benefit two specific groups of users - OSS developers AND paying customers - while not giving presents to non-paying commercial users who are, quite possibly, competitors.
The dual-license model is thus a very powerful tool for delivering OSS software to specific target users. I'd highly recommended this approach to all OSS developers who work ex-catherdra.
Dual-licensing works extremely well in one specific case of open-source software, namely that where there is no confusion about copyright ownership. If a project gets numerous submissions from external contributors, they either have to sign-over ownership, or the project has to fork. Neither are really satisfactory.
But for projects working ex-Cathedra, where external developers provide feedback and perhaps patches but no significant functional extensions, the dual licensing model can work very well indeed.
My company has made open source tools since 1995 or so, and we've now switched from a BSD-style license to a GPL / or commercial license model. Our motivation was (a) guided by Stallman's comments about BSD licenses helping commercial companies at the expense of open-source projects, which we agreed with, and (b) the desire of some customers for some kind of commercial framework.
Since 1995, we've found that there are very few people able and willing to contribute to our software, even though there are thousands happy to use it. Possibly because our tool are somewhat complex internally. So, the dual-license model fits our process perfectly.
"And where the heck do you think YOU'RE going today?"
Big Brother is watching you (ouch!)
(Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Gates Clones)
Yes, it's 2003 and time to jump on this thing called OPEN SOURCE!
Seriously, it's very, very later to do this. This is "Open Source as a Waste Disposal Mechanism".
Few companies dare to use Free/Open Source Software as a development tool, but those that do, and do it well, find it is a very satisfying way of getting software into more hands and making it better. MySQL, Berkeley DB, and there are many other examples.
For small-to-medium sized software houses there seems little alternative. GPL the damn stuff, and make an alternative license for commercial use. You will get the best of both markets: FOSS developers willing to stress test your work, and commercial developers paying for support.
There should be a catagory label for this kind of after-the-fact FOSS release: "Deadware", or maybe "FOSS-pit Software".
TO: BAGGINSFRODO@THESHIRE.ME
FROM: SAURON@DARKLORD.ME
KIND SIR, PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF.
I AM SAURON JUNIOR, RELATIVE OF THE LATE DECEASED
SAURON, LORD. YOU WILL BE AWARE OF THE RECENT
TRAGIC EVENTS OVERTAKING OUR MIDDLE EARTH, WHICH I
CAN ASSURE YOU MY FAMILY HAS NO CONNECTION WITH.
HOWEVER, MY LATE DECEASED RELATIVE LEFT A LARGE
AMOUNT OF GOLD AND JEWELRY HIDDEN IN A DRAGON'S
LAIR. THE ESTIMATED VALUE OF THIS TREASURE IS
250,000,000 OLD SMEAGOLS. I AM SEEKING WELL
WISHERS WHO WILL HELP ME TO RECOVER THIS RIGHTFUL LEGACY,
IN RETURN FOR A MODEST 10% OF ALL
GOLD RECOVERED. PLEASE DO NOT INFORM THE
WIZARD OR HIS MINIONS OF THIS TREASURE OR THE
CONSEQUENCES WILL BE TRULY DREADFUL FOR YOURS TRULY.
ALL I ASK OF YOU IS THAT I CAN USE YOUR GOLD RING
TO PASS INVISIBLY PAST THE DRAGON STILL
GUARDING THE GOLD. ONCE I HAVE RECOVERED THE
RIGHTFUL GOLD AND JEWELRY I WILL DELIVER YOU
10% OF THE AFORESAID TREASURE AND OF COURSE
RETURN YOU THE RING.
I RECEIVED YOUR ADDRESS FROM AN ELF. PLEASE
CONSIDER MY REQUEST MOST SINCERELY.
'cuse me, are you the Fellowship of the Ring?
Bugger off! Fellowship of the Ring? Bleeding fags! Of course we're not the Fellowship of the bleeding Ring, we're the People's Followers of The Ring. Bloody Fellowship of the Ring, prancing around on their bloody horses.
Still, they're not as bad as the Judean People's Ring Front!
Yeah, sodding Judean People's Ring Front!
And the People's Front of the Ring!
Yeah, bleeding People's Front of the Ring!
And the People's Followers of the Ring!
Yeah, sodding... hey, wait a minute, we're the People's Followers of the Ring!
Oh, sorry...
What exactly are domain registrars selling if not property? If the Supreme Court decides that domain names are not property, it'd be fun to start a class action against ... hmmm... Verisign to recover the millions spent on domain names which are apparently not actually "property" at all.
Linux for the Desktop? I suggest that the desktop as a metaphor for how we use computers is hugely overrated, and has largely been the result of Windows' marketing rather than real users' needs.
The desktop originally meant running fairly simple applications in separate windows. It was then extended to managing multiple documents at once. Then the documents became complex and 'active'. Then the Internet got involved and every document became a resource, and the desktop became a browser.
At least, this is how Microsoft saw their world, and how they presented it to their users. Of course Linux will never be ready for this desktop - it's a moving target and one that most Linux developers do not sincerely believe in, for the good reason that it is fundamentally flawed.
So, what's the flaw?
I think it's related to the way people organize their work. People do two kinds of paperwork: clerical work, and creative work. For clerical work, your UI should consist mainly of a personal inbox and shared filing cabinets. For creative work, your UI should consist of a clutter of tasks, going from the 'hot' important ones to the old, dry ones. No filing, no organization, just a circle of gradually aging tasks.
The Windows computer desktop is like the clean desk policy of some companies: it does not match the way our heads work. I believe this is the main reason why computers are still so painful for most people to use.
Linux addresses half of the real problem of building information systems: namely, the problem of getting information from place to place safely and reliably. It largely ignores the desktop (except for playing with cosmetics). Windows does the opposite.
So, my suggestion is to continue to ignore the Windows desktop metaphor and to build a new one instead. Make it so close to what people like using that it becomes a unique selling point.
I'll present ideas for the two user interfaces I've described. Firstly, the clerical interface. It should look a lot like email, basically channeling all work through a single 'todo' list. Clerical work is about following through documents, workflow, approval, etc. Imagine that you can do such actions directly from your UI, from your messaging client. You can file documents in a shared group filing system, or a personal filing system. You can chuck documents away for later handling.
Now for the creative work UI. Much simpler. Create tasks and give them a priority. Throw them onto your desktop, in concentric heaps. The tasks closest to you are the most important. When you work on something, it remains 'hot', and when you leave a task alone, it regresses to the bottom of the heap. The back of your desk is just a huge mess of old documents and tasks that you can search through, and occasionally clean-up.
Both these interfaces match closely the way people work. For instance, it's been shown that prematurely filing 'work in progress' actually makes it harder for people to find it back again. Our brains - when we're doing creative work - seem to organize tasks in such concentric rings of hot, medium, and cold work, and the computer should present our work in the same way.
Conclusions: First, simply adding complexity to an already fat and useless desktop metaphor is not the way to go. Secondly, competing with Windows on this basis is both impossible and misguided. Thirdly, look at the way people really work, and design a new desktop metaphor for this. I've shown two possibilities. There are certainly more, depending on the type of work people do: art, music, writing, teaching, playing, negotiation, management,... each of these roles may deserve a carefully-designed UI metaphor. Lastly, creating the UIs that I've described should be a modest effort, and I'll probably do it myself one of these days.
You're referring to Saudi Arabia, I suppose. It's worth noting that the Taliban and Al Quaida were trained and armed (up to soon before Sept. 11) by the US government itself. The same government that keeps the Al Saud family in power because it guarantees the flow of oil.
No-one said it was possible to reform a political system overnight, especially when corruption is so completely part of global politics. Saying that a popular reaction to Sept.11th shows that fast-cycle democracy is no good is meaningless, since it is clear that the entire current terrorism cycle was entirely caused by cronyist oil politics in the first place.