It's also organizational, and technological. Part of the reason why programmers avoid really dealing with Windows's security mechanism is because it's so goddamn complex. I've done Windows programming for years, and to this day I completely ignore the lpfnSecurityBlahBlahBlah parameter that seems to be at the beginning of every single Win32 call, because it's just so damn intrusive. If you're dedicated to coming up with a comprehensive security policy, Windows gives you the tools to do it, but for most uses, it's just overkill.
Apple is different from MS in a somewhat larger way though, they don't have the same resources and so they probably generate a lot less code. They also have to please Steve and rather than adding feature after feature which has kind of been the MS way, they've taken a much more simple route. Less code is less bugs. More features probably does mean more bugs but I'm not sure I've seen that really established as a general truth anywhere.
This is a big issue. Apple has a few hundred programmers total. Microsoft has thousands of programmers just working on Windows and its core technologies (like DirectX). Smaller teams with more limited scopes just plain result in better code.
There is a good ACM article talking about this here.
Actually, this is probably not the case. The Mac is a minority platform, and the lowest-common denominator stays away from it because Windows is the path of least resistance. Thus, Mac users tend to be intermediate in skill between average Windows users and *NIX users. They know enough about computers to actually decide they want a Mac versus a Windows box. However, the OS is simple enough that they don't need to know the command line or anything like that.
Right now, I'm using a milky-white Macbook, which I carry around in a cute vertical STM bag. I don't have an ePenis to speak of.
Even still, dual-core is a huge boon. Neither Windows nor OS X have schedulers good enough such that single-threaded machines remain nicely interactive under load. Doing stuff like encoding a video or a CD (which college students do a lot of), in the background really makes the system lag.
In the last several years, computer ownership has become mandatory in many schools. As such, many have started offering computer ownership tuition credits, which in most cases would cover a $899 purchase.
Are those P4's dual-core? Because if they're not, we're talking about two completely different classes of machine. Dual-Core Dells run $700+ on Dell's website. Also, the integrated form-factor is definitely a plus. As a recently-graduated undergrad, let me tell you that desk and floor space are at an absolute premium in any modern dorm.
In most schools, owning your own computer is required. A lot of schools these days give a "computer ownership" tuition credit on your first semester. I went to Georgia Tech for undergrad, and IIRC, we got $1500 for a new computer.
Where are you going to get a 1.67 GHz dual-core machine with a 17" LCD for $300? Even on sale, you don't find dual-core Dells for much less than $700-$800.
That printer isn't supported on non-Windows platforms. Checking for hardware support before buying is just the side-effect of using a minority platform. I buy only supported hardware for both my Linux machines and my Macs, and haven't had to compile a driver in years.
Entertainingly enough, the driver for the M2300W isn't provided by the manufacturer for OS X either. You have to use the third-party CUPS driver, the same one you had to compile for Linux.
MCL and OpenMCL are great compilers (the latter of which is only recently available on Linux/amd64), and both have better Cocoa integration than the alternatives have GTK+ integration. Moreover, OS X has excellent GUI Emacs implementations (Aqua Emacs and Emacs.app), while there is no Emacs for GNOME that looks and feels like a native app (including native shortcut keys and anti-aliasing support).
Have you used a recent Ubuntu? Your comments are quite outmoded.
1) Ubuntu's GNOME desktop is extremely cohesive in both look and behavior. OS X probably still has an edge in integration, but because of Apple's constant theme-changing, GNOME probably has an edge in visual consistency. Of course, both suffer when running non-native apps, but I can't say Matlab on OS X looks any less hideous than Matlab in GNOME.
2) You're not supposed to install packages. You're supposed to use the repository. Just like OS X's installation method is different from Windows's, Ubuntu's is different from both.
3) Ubuntu comes with binary packages of pretty much everything. I haven't had to compile anything in Ubuntu that I haven't also had to compile in OS X (namely, research projects like LLVM or my own code).
I'm typing this from a Macbook, btw. I use both OS X and Ubuntu all the time, and while I still prefer OS X for some reasons (better Lisp compilers, better composited desktop), the two are definitely in the same league.
Please tell me why anybody would want an Apple DVD player, I mean, honestly, how much sexier do you need to make a DVD player?
Every DVD player I've used to date still has a shitty interface. If Apple came up with a DVD player with an interface as good as the iPod's, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Throw in some computer capabilities, like automatic detection and playback from streaming sources courtesty of Rendezvous, I'd even buy my friends some.
which I think has been their greatest failure to date.
If by failure, you mean something that has made them a buttload of money. So they can't be number one, so what? The mac market is growing in size every day, and is more vital today than it has been in a long time. It's made a lot of users happy, and supports a decent sized third party software industry. It's not a monopoly with 99% of the market, sure, but that doesn't make it a failure.
Now they gone and made a Macintel, a Mac that most people want desperately so they can run Windows on it.
That's true, but it doesn't mean what you think it means. Do people want Intel Macs because they prefer Windows? Of course not. If they did, they'd just by any of a number of machines that run Windows. The reason they want Intel Macs is because they prefer OS X. Now that Windows can be virtualized on Macs, people who want to use OS X as their primary platform can now do so without compromising their ability to use Windows-only applications. Many of these people would not be able to use a Mac otherwise, no matter how dissatisfied they were with Windows. And of course they were dissatisfied with Windows, because if they were happy with it, they wouldn't give Intel Macs a second thought!
The iPod is basically subsidizing their Mac line up.
Macs still make up 50% of Apple's revenues, and they still have very healthy profit-margins on those machines. The iPod doesn't subsidize Mac development any more than Mas subsidize iPod development. What it does do is insulate Apple's bottom line from the vagracies of the computer market, and allow them to persue a more aggressive strategy with the Mac. You're on to something about the Mac Mini, but you misinterpret what it represents. It doesn't represent a "don't care" attempt, but rather a high-risk attempt at expanding the Mac market in key areas. Before the iPod gave Apple a safety net, they couldn't have taken the risk of making a low margin machine. The Intel switch, too, represents Apple's continued focus on the Mac. Apple's doing it because it allows them to make more competitive Macs. The success of the iPod doesn't make the success of the Mac any less important, what it does is give Apple the flexibility to really push the Mac platform without worrying so much about the risk.
Mac's are still about OS X. It's the thing that distinguishes Apple from the rest of the PC vendors, just as, say, Alienware's enthusiast options distinguish it from other PC vendors. The Mac still makes up half of Apples' revenue, and while its marketshare isn't growing, its still increasing strongly numerically, with Apple shipping more than a million Macs per quarter these days. This isn't huge compared to the PC market as a whole, but is reasonable compared to other individual PC makers, since Apple is the sixth-largest vendor of personal computers. Apple giving up that market, just because it can't hope to dominate it is silly. Should every other company that's not in the top 3 give up as well?
As for why the Mac still exists --- it exists because there are still millions of people dissatisfied with the alternatives. I'm a recent convert (from Linux), but since October, I've bought three Macs. A Macbook and PowerMac for myself, and an iMac for my mom. Why? Because they're damn nice machines, easy to use, reliable, stable, low-maintainence, and trouble-free. I'm the de-facto technical support for a lot of people, and if I could, I'd convert them all to Macs. They are the closest a computer can come to being an appliance. Hell, my toaster is higher maintainence --- I have to clean the crumb tray on that every one in awhile...
In the months since I got my mom her Mac, and showed her around a little bit, she hasn't asked me a single question. It hasn't failed, crashed, or done anything even remotely weird in all that time. She even figured out how to start a video conference call with me on my Macbook through iChat. We've owned webcams for years without ever really using them, because they were too much trouble. Installing software, configuring the firewalls for the traffic, etc, were all things that my parents didn't have the skill to do, and that I didn't have the time to do. Her previous Windows XP box was a pain to maintain, even though it did nothing but internet and e-mail duties. It was never completely stable, and it was always plagued by wireless problems. I swear, I've spent days of my life dicking with Windows's wireless networking. Some Windows "features" (like not adequately respecting preferred networks) resulted in subtle abnormalities that were absolutely soul-sucking to fix. I've gone through three wifi routers in the last two months, trying to figure out why my brother's machine can't keep a stable connection. None of the Macs had any problem with any of the routers, and my Macbook, with its battery-optimized wifi card and internal antenna still gets half the WoW ping at the exact same range. Today, we bought a new wifi adapter (the fourth one for that computer). If it works, it'll be the first completely reliable wi-fi link that machine has had in the four years since it was moved to that location in our house.
Now, don't get me wrong. Windows can be made to work. I ran Windows 95 back in the day, and it was pretty damn stable. But I eventually realized it only ran that way because I spent a lot of time keeping it clean. I got of Windows a long time ago (NT4 was the last version I used on my primary machine), to Linux and then now the Mac. Each of the machines which used these OSs were a pleasure to use, and I could abuse them heavily without them ever doing anything weird or unexpected. That, in summary, is why the Mac is still around. As long as Windows still needs to be baby-sat, and I've had enough experience with inexperienced users to know that this is still the case, the Mac will have a market. As long as Windows is hard to learn, cluttered, and unasthetic, the Mac will have a market. Given how Vista is shaping up, it seems Apple will be making money off the Mac for quite awhile to come.
You used the "working stiff giving $100" as an example, as compared to a rich guy giving $37bn. That implied to me that you were comparing individuals, not groups. In any case, people heap adoration upon individuals, not groups, which explains why single large contributors get recognized more than a whole group of small contributers.
That's a very Catholic way to look at things. The benefit of charity is not how much it hurts you, but how much it helps the other guy. $37bn helps a lot more than $100, even if it is less of an inconvenience for the person donating that money.
Try to learn to read. I didn't say that the semiconductor industry is the result of current research into quantum physics. I said its the result of quantum physics research done earlier in this century. The research done by the LHC could very well lead to major industries 50 to 70 years from now. Yes, that's a distant payoff, but its also potentially an enormous one. That's the whole point of fundemental physics research --- a better understanding of the nature of the universe is exploitable, after much refinement, to the advancement of technology.
As for what quantum physics research underlies the semiconductor industry: the very subject of solid-state physics is based Schrodinger's wave formulation of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanical effects are also important in the hard drive industry (modern drives use a QM effect called GMR to read the bits on the disk), the chemical engineering industry (even high-school chemistry today is based on a quantum-mechanical formulation), and even in biology (many of the basic processes studied in molecular biology and biophysics are the results of underlying quantum-mechanical effects). LHC won't be studying the things that led to those innovations, but its just the next in a long line of projects, some of which did study the basic physics that allowed these fields to develop. Given the payoff earlier investment into QM research has had, its kind of silly to argue that current investment into QM research is not valuable.
About $8bn. A pittance, really. Scientific American estimated that 1/3 of the US GDP (that's three or four trillion dollars) is from inventions made possible by quantum physics resesarch. The semiconductor industry today would not be possible without the fundemental solid-state physics research done in the middle of this century. Investing in physics research seems to have been a pretty good bet so far.
However, the sword-swinging example is used very often in justifying the Wiimote. If that's not practical (because it's too tiring), the whole idea of using the Wiimote to mimmick real-life movements comes into question, at least for a certain class of games.
Pointing is substantially more applicable, since it can be done by only moving the wrist, but if the pointing is the most important thing, how is it better than a mouse?
I think the fact that Miyamoto addressed this issue means they've probably gone a long way in preventing it.
That's spinning the issue. The fact is that "you can swing the remote to swing your sword in the game" is one of the most commonly used justifications of the Wiimote, and Miyamoto himself decided it wasn't going to fly in one of Nintendo's flagship franchises.
That doesn't mean the Wiimote is going to fail, but it should certainly temper some of the unbounded enthusiasm for the device.
A DDR round is short, a few minutes at most. A dungeon in Zelda can take hours.
I don't disagree with you that the Wiimote will at least achieve the success of DDR. For short rounds of activity, it seems quite usable indeed. My point is, rather, that its limitations may prevent it from being very useful in more traditional games. Zelda is the Nintendo franchise that appeals to the most hardcore gamers in Nintendo's audience, and if it can't utilize the Wiimote fully, then that doesn't bode well.
I should also point out that with regards to gaming consoles, the conventional wisdom of "hardcore = minority" is turned on its head. The people you're deriding as "nerds" are actually the bulk of the gamer market. You know, those people Nintendo has to sell consoles to. You could argue that Nintendo might convert a lot of non-gamers into casual gamers, and you might be right, but as of yet, casual gaming is still a fledgling market.
The fact that guys in Iraq do it every day doesn't change the fact that our bodies weren't meant to. They go through a lot of training in order to hold an M16 in front of them all day --- your average gamer doesn't.
Has anybody read this month's EGM? There's in interview in there with Miyamoto, in which he is asked how the Wiimote will be used in Twilight Princess. He said it'll be used for things like aiming the bow, but will not use it for actually controlling Link's sword. He noted that they tried to do that, but it was too tiring for players.
In my mind, that's a pretty big confirmation of the problems many people expected the Wiimote to have. Gyroscopic controllers aren't new, and they've failed in the past for exactly the same reason --- they're too tiring to use. If the Wiimote is actually too tiring for long term use, its possible that it'll be used much sparingly in conjunction with a more traditional control style. Or, perhaps it'll be used mainly for the games intended at the "30 minute non-gamer" gamer market that Nintendo is trying to create.
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It's also organizational, and technological. Part of the reason why programmers avoid really dealing with Windows's security mechanism is because it's so goddamn complex. I've done Windows programming for years, and to this day I completely ignore the lpfnSecurityBlahBlahBlah parameter that seems to be at the beginning of every single Win32 call, because it's just so damn intrusive. If you're dedicated to coming up with a comprehensive security policy, Windows gives you the tools to do it, but for most uses, it's just overkill.
Apple is different from MS in a somewhat larger way though, they don't have the same resources and so they probably generate a lot less code. They also have to please Steve and rather than adding feature after feature which has kind of been the MS way, they've taken a much more simple route. Less code is less bugs. More features probably does mean more bugs but I'm not sure I've seen that really established as a general truth anywhere.
This is a big issue. Apple has a few hundred programmers total. Microsoft has thousands of programmers just working on Windows and its core technologies (like DirectX). Smaller teams with more limited scopes just plain result in better code.
There is a good ACM article talking about this here.
Actually, this is probably not the case. The Mac is a minority platform, and the lowest-common denominator stays away from it because Windows is the path of least resistance. Thus, Mac users tend to be intermediate in skill between average Windows users and *NIX users. They know enough about computers to actually decide they want a Mac versus a Windows box. However, the OS is simple enough that they don't need to know the command line or anything like that.
Right now, I'm using a milky-white Macbook, which I carry around in a cute vertical STM bag. I don't have an ePenis to speak of.
Even still, dual-core is a huge boon. Neither Windows nor OS X have schedulers good enough such that single-threaded machines remain nicely interactive under load. Doing stuff like encoding a video or a CD (which college students do a lot of), in the background really makes the system lag.
Are you? The $300 came from the post of the person to whom I was replying.
This is no longer true. On modern processors, both take exactly one cycle, and the MOV sequence is shorter when working with the 32-bit registers.
In the last several years, computer ownership has become mandatory in many schools. As such, many have started offering computer ownership tuition credits, which in most cases would cover a $899 purchase.
Are those P4's dual-core? Because if they're not, we're talking about two completely different classes of machine. Dual-Core Dells run $700+ on Dell's website. Also, the integrated form-factor is definitely a plus. As a recently-graduated undergrad, let me tell you that desk and floor space are at an absolute premium in any modern dorm.
Vista should be just fine with integrated video. OS X uses the GPU for compositing, and it runs just fine on the 950.
In most schools, owning your own computer is required. A lot of schools these days give a "computer ownership" tuition credit on your first semester. I went to Georgia Tech for undergrad, and IIRC, we got $1500 for a new computer.
Where are you going to get a 1.67 GHz dual-core machine with a 17" LCD for $300? Even on sale, you don't find dual-core Dells for much less than $700-$800.
That printer isn't supported on non-Windows platforms. Checking for hardware support before buying is just the side-effect of using a minority platform. I buy only supported hardware for both my Linux machines and my Macs, and haven't had to compile a driver in years.
Entertainingly enough, the driver for the M2300W isn't provided by the manufacturer for OS X either. You have to use the third-party CUPS driver, the same one you had to compile for Linux.
MCL and OpenMCL are great compilers (the latter of which is only recently available on Linux/amd64), and both have better Cocoa integration than the alternatives have GTK+ integration. Moreover, OS X has excellent GUI Emacs implementations (Aqua Emacs and Emacs.app), while there is no Emacs for GNOME that looks and feels like a native app (including native shortcut keys and anti-aliasing support).
Have you used a recent Ubuntu? Your comments are quite outmoded.
1) Ubuntu's GNOME desktop is extremely cohesive in both look and behavior. OS X probably still has an edge in integration, but because of Apple's constant theme-changing, GNOME probably has an edge in visual consistency. Of course, both suffer when running non-native apps, but I can't say Matlab on OS X looks any less hideous than Matlab in GNOME.
2) You're not supposed to install packages. You're supposed to use the repository. Just like OS X's installation method is different from Windows's, Ubuntu's is different from both.
3) Ubuntu comes with binary packages of pretty much everything. I haven't had to compile anything in Ubuntu that I haven't also had to compile in OS X (namely, research projects like LLVM or my own code).
I'm typing this from a Macbook, btw. I use both OS X and Ubuntu all the time, and while I still prefer OS X for some reasons (better Lisp compilers, better composited desktop), the two are definitely in the same league.
Please tell me why anybody would want an Apple DVD player, I mean, honestly, how much sexier do you need to make a DVD player?
Every DVD player I've used to date still has a shitty interface. If Apple came up with a DVD player with an interface as good as the iPod's, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Throw in some computer capabilities, like automatic detection and playback from streaming sources courtesty of Rendezvous, I'd even buy my friends some.
which I think has been their greatest failure to date.
If by failure, you mean something that has made them a buttload of money. So they can't be number one, so what? The mac market is growing in size every day, and is more vital today than it has been in a long time. It's made a lot of users happy, and supports a decent sized third party software industry. It's not a monopoly with 99% of the market, sure, but that doesn't make it a failure.
Now they gone and made a Macintel, a Mac that most people want desperately so they can run Windows on it.
That's true, but it doesn't mean what you think it means. Do people want Intel Macs because they prefer Windows? Of course not. If they did, they'd just by any of a number of machines that run Windows. The reason they want Intel Macs is because they prefer OS X. Now that Windows can be virtualized on Macs, people who want to use OS X as their primary platform can now do so without compromising their ability to use Windows-only applications. Many of these people would not be able to use a Mac otherwise, no matter how dissatisfied they were with Windows. And of course they were dissatisfied with Windows, because if they were happy with it, they wouldn't give Intel Macs a second thought!
The iPod is basically subsidizing their Mac line up.
Macs still make up 50% of Apple's revenues, and they still have very healthy profit-margins on those machines. The iPod doesn't subsidize Mac development any more than Mas subsidize iPod development. What it does do is insulate Apple's bottom line from the vagracies of the computer market, and allow them to persue a more aggressive strategy with the Mac. You're on to something about the Mac Mini, but you misinterpret what it represents. It doesn't represent a "don't care" attempt, but rather a high-risk attempt at expanding the Mac market in key areas. Before the iPod gave Apple a safety net, they couldn't have taken the risk of making a low margin machine. The Intel switch, too, represents Apple's continued focus on the Mac. Apple's doing it because it allows them to make more competitive Macs. The success of the iPod doesn't make the success of the Mac any less important, what it does is give Apple the flexibility to really push the Mac platform without worrying so much about the risk.
Mac's are still about OS X. It's the thing that distinguishes Apple from the rest of the PC vendors, just as, say, Alienware's enthusiast options distinguish it from other PC vendors. The Mac still makes up half of Apples' revenue, and while its marketshare isn't growing, its still increasing strongly numerically, with Apple shipping more than a million Macs per quarter these days. This isn't huge compared to the PC market as a whole, but is reasonable compared to other individual PC makers, since Apple is the sixth-largest vendor of personal computers. Apple giving up that market, just because it can't hope to dominate it is silly. Should every other company that's not in the top 3 give up as well?
As for why the Mac still exists --- it exists because there are still millions of people dissatisfied with the alternatives. I'm a recent convert (from Linux), but since October, I've bought three Macs. A Macbook and PowerMac for myself, and an iMac for my mom. Why? Because they're damn nice machines, easy to use, reliable, stable, low-maintainence, and trouble-free. I'm the de-facto technical support for a lot of people, and if I could, I'd convert them all to Macs. They are the closest a computer can come to being an appliance. Hell, my toaster is higher maintainence --- I have to clean the crumb tray on that every one in awhile...
In the months since I got my mom her Mac, and showed her around a little bit, she hasn't asked me a single question. It hasn't failed, crashed, or done anything even remotely weird in all that time. She even figured out how to start a video conference call with me on my Macbook through iChat. We've owned webcams for years without ever really using them, because they were too much trouble. Installing software, configuring the firewalls for the traffic, etc, were all things that my parents didn't have the skill to do, and that I didn't have the time to do. Her previous Windows XP box was a pain to maintain, even though it did nothing but internet and e-mail duties. It was never completely stable, and it was always plagued by wireless problems. I swear, I've spent days of my life dicking with Windows's wireless networking. Some Windows "features" (like not adequately respecting preferred networks) resulted in subtle abnormalities that were absolutely soul-sucking to fix. I've gone through three wifi routers in the last two months, trying to figure out why my brother's machine can't keep a stable connection. None of the Macs had any problem with any of the routers, and my Macbook, with its battery-optimized wifi card and internal antenna still gets half the WoW ping at the exact same range. Today, we bought a new wifi adapter (the fourth one for that computer). If it works, it'll be the first completely reliable wi-fi link that machine has had in the four years since it was moved to that location in our house.
Now, don't get me wrong. Windows can be made to work. I ran Windows 95 back in the day, and it was pretty damn stable. But I eventually realized it only ran that way because I spent a lot of time keeping it clean. I got of Windows a long time ago (NT4 was the last version I used on my primary machine), to Linux and then now the Mac. Each of the machines which used these OSs were a pleasure to use, and I could abuse them heavily without them ever doing anything weird or unexpected. That, in summary, is why the Mac is still around. As long as Windows still needs to be baby-sat, and I've had enough experience with inexperienced users to know that this is still the case, the Mac will have a market. As long as Windows is hard to learn, cluttered, and unasthetic, the Mac will have a market. Given how Vista is shaping up, it seems Apple will be making money off the Mac for quite awhile to come.
You used the "working stiff giving $100" as an example, as compared to a rich guy giving $37bn. That implied to me that you were comparing individuals, not groups. In any case, people heap adoration upon individuals, not groups, which explains why single large contributors get recognized more than a whole group of small contributers.
That's a very Catholic way to look at things. The benefit of charity is not how much it hurts you, but how much it helps the other guy. $37bn helps a lot more than $100, even if it is less of an inconvenience for the person donating that money.
Try to learn to read. I didn't say that the semiconductor industry is the result of current research into quantum physics. I said its the result of quantum physics research done earlier in this century. The research done by the LHC could very well lead to major industries 50 to 70 years from now. Yes, that's a distant payoff, but its also potentially an enormous one. That's the whole point of fundemental physics research --- a better understanding of the nature of the universe is exploitable, after much refinement, to the advancement of technology.
As for what quantum physics research underlies the semiconductor industry: the very subject of solid-state physics is based Schrodinger's wave formulation of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanical effects are also important in the hard drive industry (modern drives use a QM effect called GMR to read the bits on the disk), the chemical engineering industry (even high-school chemistry today is based on a quantum-mechanical formulation), and even in biology (many of the basic processes studied in molecular biology and biophysics are the results of underlying quantum-mechanical effects). LHC won't be studying the things that led to those innovations, but its just the next in a long line of projects, some of which did study the basic physics that allowed these fields to develop. Given the payoff earlier investment into QM research has had, its kind of silly to argue that current investment into QM research is not valuable.
About $8bn. A pittance, really. Scientific American estimated that 1/3 of the US GDP (that's three or four trillion dollars) is from inventions made possible by quantum physics resesarch. The semiconductor industry today would not be possible without the fundemental solid-state physics research done in the middle of this century. Investing in physics research seems to have been a pretty good bet so far.
However, the sword-swinging example is used very often in justifying the Wiimote. If that's not practical (because it's too tiring), the whole idea of using the Wiimote to mimmick real-life movements comes into question, at least for a certain class of games.
Pointing is substantially more applicable, since it can be done by only moving the wrist, but if the pointing is the most important thing, how is it better than a mouse?
I think the fact that Miyamoto addressed this issue means they've probably gone a long way in preventing it.
That's spinning the issue. The fact is that "you can swing the remote to swing your sword in the game" is one of the most commonly used justifications of the Wiimote, and Miyamoto himself decided it wasn't going to fly in one of Nintendo's flagship franchises.
That doesn't mean the Wiimote is going to fail, but it should certainly temper some of the unbounded enthusiasm for the device.
A DDR round is short, a few minutes at most. A dungeon in Zelda can take hours.
I don't disagree with you that the Wiimote will at least achieve the success of DDR. For short rounds of activity, it seems quite usable indeed. My point is, rather, that its limitations may prevent it from being very useful in more traditional games. Zelda is the Nintendo franchise that appeals to the most hardcore gamers in Nintendo's audience, and if it can't utilize the Wiimote fully, then that doesn't bode well.
I should also point out that with regards to gaming consoles, the conventional wisdom of "hardcore = minority" is turned on its head. The people you're deriding as "nerds" are actually the bulk of the gamer market. You know, those people Nintendo has to sell consoles to. You could argue that Nintendo might convert a lot of non-gamers into casual gamers, and you might be right, but as of yet, casual gaming is still a fledgling market.
The fact that guys in Iraq do it every day doesn't change the fact that our bodies weren't meant to. They go through a lot of training in order to hold an M16 in front of them all day --- your average gamer doesn't.
Has anybody read this month's EGM? There's in interview in there with Miyamoto, in which he is asked how the Wiimote will be used in Twilight Princess. He said it'll be used for things like aiming the bow, but will not use it for actually controlling Link's sword. He noted that they tried to do that, but it was too tiring for players.
In my mind, that's a pretty big confirmation of the problems many people expected the Wiimote to have. Gyroscopic controllers aren't new, and they've failed in the past for exactly the same reason --- they're too tiring to use. If the Wiimote is actually too tiring for long term use, its possible that it'll be used much sparingly in conjunction with a more traditional control style. Or, perhaps it'll be used mainly for the games intended at the "30 minute non-gamer" gamer market that Nintendo is trying to create.