Most votes are wasted. What good does it do to vote for a winner? Your vote is not wasted only if it influnces the outcome. This is a rare event. However, if 500 people had voted for Gore instead of Nader in Flordia, then the world would be different now.
Different, but IMHO not any better. I voted for Nader hoping that it would help Gore to lose (I'm not in Florida tho), even though I think Republican politicians are complete scum. The thing is, I think Democratic politicians are complete scum too, but scum that ought to know better. I think the only way to bring the Dems back in line with their platform is to vote for independents and hope the Dems lose in the process-- if it happens repeatedly year after year eventually they'll get the message that what they're doing ain't working very well.
I knew full well in 2000 that Bush was an accident looking for a place to happen, and voted for Nader realizing that. Bush exceeded my wildest expectations in that regard. It was clear to me that until it got a LOT worse, it wasn't going to get any better so there's no point in mitigating the damage by voting for a Democrat and postponing the agony. What surprised me though, is that the voting populace actually didn't see Bush as the colossal screwup he obviously (to me, at least) was, and he was voted in again-- but I figured that is a good thing as the Dems just won't learn.
This year, I actually hope McCain will get in and continue to show the Dems that they are banging their head against a wall and better shape up if they ever want to see the oval office again. I think McCain would likely be nearly as bad as Bush, but as I said, I don't see it getting better until it gets a lot worse and Obama would just prolong the agony in making the Dems think what they're doing is OK.
So I'll vote independent-- ANY independent, as I refuse to vote for the scum of the earth, whether red or blue, and whether or not they have a chance of winning or not. While Barr may not have a chance of winning, Obama does have a chance of losing, and that is what I'm shooting for-- I just refuse to vote for McCain to try to accomplish it.
1. Cache known legal content to improve download performance.
2. Significantly reduce performance of content with "unknown" legal status.
3. Result: legal content gets preferential treatment so legal downloading performs better.
4. Non-"neutral" treatment completely justified by the war against contraband.
5. Hit content providers for kickbacks, those that don't pay get their content treated as "unknown" legal status.
6. PROFIT!
Seems to me they could just claim that they were taken by the "artist" they bought the images from, and OBTW, that they just found out the address the guy said he lived at is a vacant lot. They were victims of plagiarism too, weren't they?
But this goes well beyond the obvious examples of politics and religion. Scientists are the worst examples of group-think. They are taught something and repeat it and hold it to be fact even when confronted with good alternative explanations.
You obviously don't know too many scientists, this sounds like you've been accepting ID propaganda without skepticism. Scientific careers are made by finding problems with other scientists ideas, that is how you make your name in science. The idea that scientists march in lock-step and ignore new alternative explanations is completely laughable. Individual scientists may do that, but scientists as a group do not. Sour-grapes from the ID proponents because their claims are scientifically unconvincing do not make a worthy "alternative explanation". The design-as-alternative-to-evolution debate came and went over 100 years ago and nothing new has been added since then, get over it. Similarly, the debate over the germ theory of disease ended a long time ago too, but no one in their right mind would expect modern scientists to countenance crackpots who would argue it is invalid based on demonologic apologetics.
open source is "much more potentially disruptive" to Microsoft's business strategy than Google.
Well if that's the case, then it's time to look for a business strategy with a FUTURE, moron. The business strategies that depended on slave labor or cheap gasoline are rather past their prime, too...
We're talking about Bill Gates here-- remember that the quality of the OS is probably not his measuring stick-- Windows 95 was probably when they signed a bunch of lock-in deals with PC manufacturers. Also it was likely the last OS they shipped before they finally got dragged kicking and screaming into creating a QA department (according to G. Pascal Zachary's "Showstopper!" anyway)-- with all those extra employees and shipping delays!
The only thing is, we are manufacturing more insurgents by our presence in Iraq than we are killing. Many "hearts and minds," that before Iraq were sympathetic to the US justification in Afghanistan, have instead been driven to the other side by our unjustified and incompetent moves in Iraq...
It's possible to conclude that 1) intellectual property is legitimate, and at the same time 2) it is not possible to restrict its distribution any more than it is possible to be half pregnant. The reality could be that the only way to legitimately keep intellectual property secure against unrestricted distribution is to not distribute it at all.
It sounds like you are shopping for a workable compromise. But just because there is a market for something, that doesn't mean that something necessarily exists-- there's a market for perpetual motion too. I suspect similarly there is ample opportunity for fraud to be perpetrated on intellectual property owners by those who purport to have a solution to their income problem...
Distributing digital media to even one person is insufficiently different than transmitting it unencrypted over radio waves. You can harp about "quality of reproduction" or some such, but essentially it's in the "ether" and readily available for free to anyone with the appropriate receiver. And in fact, distribution of digital media over the internet is less expensive than radio, as with radio you ultimately have to pay for the power of transmission, and on the internet the receivers are paying more than they are with radio (radios are cheap compared to the cost of your ISP).
You missed the point-- AV DOESN'T WORK, whether it's free or not, so who cares if it's free?
I agree with Stewart, AV is just a useless performance stealer.
Instead, get Process Guard and Peer Guardian, use web-based email, Don't use IE-- use Firefox with NoScript (or equivalent), run SpyBot and AdAware periodically, and be sensible about what you download and install.
But don't waste your time with database-oriented AV scanners, they just chew up CPU time and will never find the bleeding-edge viruses, which are the ones you should be worried about.
I'm inclined to hope that tactic works. Does it seem to anyone else like $CO's execs may be on the hook for committing fraud by selling things they didn't own? In the real world, most times you sell stuff that doesn't belong to you (like counterfeit or pirated software), you go to PRISON for your efforts. So why shouldn't Darl and his pals wind up behind bars for extorting money out of companies for licenses they didn't own the rights to sell?
Methinks that is why they are trying to play it "straight" and act like they were just clueless noobs that screwed up. If they were to just say, "the hell with this, I'm gonna retire," like you'd think they would want to, they would probably leave themselves open to criminal charges, SEC investigations, and other uncomfortable adventures, sooner than would happen otherwise. If they don't take the time to make like they were just idiots, they end up looking like criminals.
The problem with nesting is you can't as easily go directly from one app "tab" to another app "tab" as you can when all the "tabs" are available at the same level. I have my task bar on the left side (widescreen monitor) and fairly wide, so the "tabs" are all stacked vertically and I can get all I need before it starts packing them in too tight to find-- so I usually don't need to nest to organize them. I don't like having a huge amount of crap left running like some people I know. Also, I don't use a PC based email client, so my email page is a browser page, and I want that clearly separated out on the taskbar so I can get to email easily just as I could if Outlook was my email client...
I hear that, I really wish I could force Firefox to NEVER create tabs, PERIOD. I've wondered if I can recompile it myself with an #undef TABBING_FEATURE or something so that it simply doesn't have the capability in the binary. Tabs are completely superfluous in Windows, as there are ALREADY tabs for pages on the Windows taskbar, and that's right where I want them. I turn it off the best I can, but once in awhile something still figures out how to create one.
The Pidgin fork from Gaim removed a bunch of features I was dependent on, so I'm still using Gaim. Works fine, ain't broke as far as I can see, and the developers are obviously clueless. It doesn't surprise me at all that it's now come to a head, the only surprise is that it took so long...
Monster cables have become the poster boy for corporate greed in my book. Blue Jeans Cable also appears to be seriously overpriced, but that actually makes such a dustup even more entertaining, actually, since I really don't care who wins or loses...
Not being one yourself. When you put the world's most powerful military and the world's most powerful corporations together and add one of the world's most important resources in an area occupied by people easy to label as evil, you end up with a very nasty situation in which it's hard to unambiguously define anyone as the "good guy"
But hey, that means the situation is self-correcting! I guess the free market really works!:-)
Yes, open source is a pretty good hedge against planned obsolescence too. Old gear that the manufacturers don't support anymore on new software platforms doesn't have to be thrown away anymore. But businesses have gotten used to the idea that if they make stuff cheaply enough and don't support last years stuff, things will stop working more often and they'll sell more product. Open source is an alternative for the consumer to such hijinks.
I've been a developer since the days that 8" floppies were the network. Currently I'm working on performance improvements for a data warehouse product. Our in-house network is running at 100M, but our customers usually use the product on 1G in order to get acceptable ETL performance. The two test servers were next to each other in the same room. I put in an IT request to set up a 1G connection between the two machines. The response I got was "our network is 100M, can't do it." After repeatedly explaining them how it could be relatively easily done without upgrading the whole building to 1G, and getting the same response, out of frustration I finally went to my boss and said, "here's an $80 switch we could buy that could get it done." We ordered the switch and are now happily operating a collection of machines in that room on 1G to each other. Our IT department is clueless about developer needs-- they assume all employees are only using CRM and office apps. Seems to me the solution ought to be a separate isolated network for the developers that they can hack on to their heart's content, but I suspect few IT departments have the savvy to figure that one out (ours certainly doesn't).
I suspect that most of the developers here have found it necessary to work around our IT department in one way or another. All of us have admin rights on our desktops which is an absolute must for us-- I'm doing things like shutting down and starting up services all the time, installing and uninstalling software, creating users, tweaking settings. I'd be down waiting for IT actions constantly if I had to do all that through them, and I'd bet much of the time they wouldn't understand what I was asking for and couldn't figure out how to get it done anyway.
With IM, I can carry on several phone-style (near-immediate interactive) conversations simultaneously. Can't do that as effectively with either email or voice. I can also tell who's available (and how long they've been unavailable) so if they aren't around to give me an answer (and haven't been for hours) I know to try someone else. Most of the workers I interact with are in different offices or are telecommuters, so IM is cheaper than telephone as well. Just because you don't see a benefit in IM doesn't mean it's not there.
It wasn't my Mac and has been about a year so the specifics have faded somewhat-- but my friend with a brand new Mac that I helped set up, wanted to get the files on the flash drive onto his hard drive so that he could play them with iTunes. The first time we tried it from within iTunes, it turned out iTunes acted like it copied the files but had instead only indexed them, so once the flash drive was removed things were confused. While dragging may appear to copy files, that doesn't necessarily mean that's what actually happened to them.
The OS itself isn't so bad, I mean it's essentially Unix, after all. But the OS is not what most people use their computer for, it is the applications that determine how you use a Mac. The Mac people I know don't go anywhere near the underlying OS, they barely understand the finder. If all I ever wanted to do is to drag files from here to there I doubt there'd be an issue. At some point you have to interface with applications-- many of which are supplied with the Mac or otherwise obtained from Apple, and these things are what defines the Mac experience, as they are used as models by third party developers. And Apple has as much history as Microsoft of imposing their applications on you. Apple has a long history of keeping things TOO simple-- the one-button mouse a classic example. Tools are not designed to be modular or Swiss army knifes, but instead very specific tools for tasks done a particular way in order to "keep it simple". But keeping it THAT simple means you often have to conform to the Mac way-- ironic, when often Mac users seem to see themselves as non-conformists...
There's plenty of frustration to go around though. With the PC's "My Documents", there's a tacit assumption that you want to group like files together-- when I prefer to group files by projects in many cases, which may contain a mix of filetypes. Consequently, I've always found the "My Documents" paradigm a less-than-useless mal-assumption. And file selectors often have related assumptions and don't handle alternatives very well either, loading a file from one project and saving it to another, or loading it from a common repository and then saving it into a project often requires browsing back and forth for every file because the selector has the wrong kind of memory for such things-- a more flexible scheme would NOT try to second-guess what you want to do, but allow you to set the various target directories in the selectors. In Unix, I can set an environment variable to remember locations of note, but there is often no equivalent in the typical GUI interfaces, even though its no less important than in Unix. And file selectors could stand to remember where you are scrolled within a directory, as if you are working on directories with hundreds or thousands of files, having to scroll through them to find the one you're interested in, and then re-find it or the "next" one in a subsequent selection is an interface that still needs some work IMHO...
One thing I've been wondering about the Mac though-- the PC has an annoying habit of "stealing focus" when you have multiple things running, and are typing into a text box somewhere. Various things will move themselves to the front and interrupt your work with stupid stuff like "would you like to update now?" or other annoyances. Even many web browsers will do it to themselves-- I start typing in a URL as soon as my browser appears, and while it's loading my home page I get halfway through typing and the page finishes loading and it then steals the cursor and puts it into an entry box on the page that loaded so the second half of the URL I type in ends up in a different box. I want to see a GUI where I can completely "mask" all such interrupts while I'm typing, with an adjustable timeout perhaps that locks focus to where I'm typing until I pause for some period of time. The only acceptable interrupt would be an imminent crash that will cause data loss or loss of the text I'm entering-- any other thing, NO MATTER WHAT that CAN be delayed SHOULD be until I finish typing. How is the Mac at this sort of thing? Better? Worse? The same? If it was better that would certainly be one feature well worth bragging about...
As much as I hate Microsoft, when forced to use a Mac I curse a lot more at it. Primarily, because I have my own idea of what my workflow should be, and at least on a PC I can jerk the apps around enough to make it do things the way I want them done. I don't put *anything* in "My Documents."
Macs are good for people who have no idea how they should do things on a computer. If you do have an idea of how you want things done, you will have to re-learn it the Mac way. Something as simple as moving files from a USB drive into the iTunes "jukebox" (or whatever it's called) turned out to be an involved process as it just wasn't prepared to do things the way I thought about them and I had to 1) realize it was making assumptions that were not at all intuitive (to me at least) and 2) figure out just what those assumptions were.
I've grown up with the computer industry and make my living working with them. I won't let ANY computer system dictate my workflow-- computers are supposed to adapt to MY workflow, not the other way around. At least on a PC there's some hope of doing that, it's nearly impossible on a Mac. I suppose that's great if you have NO IDEA what you are doing, but I find it far more annoying than the worst thing I've ever see a Windows PC do...
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Most votes are wasted. What good does it do to vote for a winner? Your vote is not wasted only if it influnces the outcome. This is a rare event. However, if 500 people had voted for Gore instead of Nader in Flordia, then the world would be different now.
Different, but IMHO not any better. I voted for Nader hoping that it would help Gore to lose (I'm not in Florida tho), even though I think Republican politicians are complete scum. The thing is, I think Democratic politicians are complete scum too, but scum that ought to know better. I think the only way to bring the Dems back in line with their platform is to vote for independents and hope the Dems lose in the process-- if it happens repeatedly year after year eventually they'll get the message that what they're doing ain't working very well.
I knew full well in 2000 that Bush was an accident looking for a place to happen, and voted for Nader realizing that. Bush exceeded my wildest expectations in that regard. It was clear to me that until it got a LOT worse, it wasn't going to get any better so there's no point in mitigating the damage by voting for a Democrat and postponing the agony. What surprised me though, is that the voting populace actually didn't see Bush as the colossal screwup he obviously (to me, at least) was, and he was voted in again-- but I figured that is a good thing as the Dems just won't learn.
This year, I actually hope McCain will get in and continue to show the Dems that they are banging their head against a wall and better shape up if they ever want to see the oval office again. I think McCain would likely be nearly as bad as Bush, but as I said, I don't see it getting better until it gets a lot worse and Obama would just prolong the agony in making the Dems think what they're doing is OK.
So I'll vote independent-- ANY independent, as I refuse to vote for the scum of the earth, whether red or blue, and whether or not they have a chance of winning or not. While Barr may not have a chance of winning, Obama does have a chance of losing, and that is what I'm shooting for-- I just refuse to vote for McCain to try to accomplish it.
1. Cache known legal content to improve download performance.
2. Significantly reduce performance of content with "unknown" legal status.
3. Result: legal content gets preferential treatment so legal downloading performs better.
4. Non-"neutral" treatment completely justified by the war against contraband.
5. Hit content providers for kickbacks, those that don't pay get their content treated as "unknown" legal status.
6. PROFIT!
Seems to me they could just claim that they were taken by the "artist" they bought the images from, and OBTW, that they just found out the address the guy said he lived at is a vacant lot. They were victims of plagiarism too, weren't they?
But this goes well beyond the obvious examples of politics and religion. Scientists are the worst examples of group-think. They are taught something and repeat it and hold it to be fact even when confronted with good alternative explanations.
You obviously don't know too many scientists, this sounds like you've been accepting ID propaganda without skepticism. Scientific careers are made by finding problems with other scientists ideas, that is how you make your name in science. The idea that scientists march in lock-step and ignore new alternative explanations is completely laughable. Individual scientists may do that, but scientists as a group do not. Sour-grapes from the ID proponents because their claims are scientifically unconvincing do not make a worthy "alternative explanation". The design-as-alternative-to-evolution debate came and went over 100 years ago and nothing new has been added since then, get over it. Similarly, the debate over the germ theory of disease ended a long time ago too, but no one in their right mind would expect modern scientists to countenance crackpots who would argue it is invalid based on demonologic apologetics.
open source is "much more potentially disruptive" to Microsoft's business strategy than Google.
Well if that's the case, then it's time to look for a business strategy with a FUTURE, moron. The business strategies that depended on slave labor or cheap gasoline are rather past their prime, too...
That implies that you should be programming in APL.
I AM programming in APL, you insensitive clod!
We're talking about Bill Gates here-- remember that the quality of the OS is probably not his measuring stick-- Windows 95 was probably when they signed a bunch of lock-in deals with PC manufacturers. Also it was likely the last OS they shipped before they finally got dragged kicking and screaming into creating a QA department (according to G. Pascal Zachary's "Showstopper!" anyway)-- with all those extra employees and shipping delays!
The only thing is, we are manufacturing more insurgents by our presence in Iraq than we are killing. Many "hearts and minds," that before Iraq were sympathetic to the US justification in Afghanistan, have instead been driven to the other side by our unjustified and incompetent moves in Iraq...
It's possible to conclude that 1) intellectual property is legitimate, and at the same time 2) it is not possible to restrict its distribution any more than it is possible to be half pregnant. The reality could be that the only way to legitimately keep intellectual property secure against unrestricted distribution is to not distribute it at all.
It sounds like you are shopping for a workable compromise. But just because there is a market for something, that doesn't mean that something necessarily exists-- there's a market for perpetual motion too. I suspect similarly there is ample opportunity for fraud to be perpetrated on intellectual property owners by those who purport to have a solution to their income problem...
Distributing digital media to even one person is insufficiently different than transmitting it unencrypted over radio waves. You can harp about "quality of reproduction" or some such, but essentially it's in the "ether" and readily available for free to anyone with the appropriate receiver. And in fact, distribution of digital media over the internet is less expensive than radio, as with radio you ultimately have to pay for the power of transmission, and on the internet the receivers are paying more than they are with radio (radios are cheap compared to the cost of your ISP).
You missed the point-- AV DOESN'T WORK, whether it's free or not, so who cares if it's free? I agree with Stewart, AV is just a useless performance stealer. Instead, get Process Guard and Peer Guardian, use web-based email, Don't use IE-- use Firefox with NoScript (or equivalent), run SpyBot and AdAware periodically, and be sensible about what you download and install. But don't waste your time with database-oriented AV scanners, they just chew up CPU time and will never find the bleeding-edge viruses, which are the ones you should be worried about.
exactly what is there in XP SP3 that I might actually *want*?
There was a near-complete rewrite of it when it was named Pidgin. While not exactly a fork, Pidgin isn't exactly Gaim either...
I'm inclined to hope that tactic works. Does it seem to anyone else like $CO's execs may be on the hook for committing fraud by selling things they didn't own? In the real world, most times you sell stuff that doesn't belong to you (like counterfeit or pirated software), you go to PRISON for your efforts. So why shouldn't Darl and his pals wind up behind bars for extorting money out of companies for licenses they didn't own the rights to sell?
Methinks that is why they are trying to play it "straight" and act like they were just clueless noobs that screwed up. If they were to just say, "the hell with this, I'm gonna retire," like you'd think they would want to, they would probably leave themselves open to criminal charges, SEC investigations, and other uncomfortable adventures, sooner than would happen otherwise. If they don't take the time to make like they were just idiots, they end up looking like criminals.
The problem with nesting is you can't as easily go directly from one app "tab" to another app "tab" as you can when all the "tabs" are available at the same level. I have my task bar on the left side (widescreen monitor) and fairly wide, so the "tabs" are all stacked vertically and I can get all I need before it starts packing them in too tight to find-- so I usually don't need to nest to organize them. I don't like having a huge amount of crap left running like some people I know. Also, I don't use a PC based email client, so my email page is a browser page, and I want that clearly separated out on the taskbar so I can get to email easily just as I could if Outlook was my email client...
I hear that, I really wish I could force Firefox to NEVER create tabs, PERIOD. I've wondered if I can recompile it myself with an #undef TABBING_FEATURE or something so that it simply doesn't have the capability in the binary. Tabs are completely superfluous in Windows, as there are ALREADY tabs for pages on the Windows taskbar, and that's right where I want them. I turn it off the best I can, but once in awhile something still figures out how to create one.
The Pidgin fork from Gaim removed a bunch of features I was dependent on, so I'm still using Gaim. Works fine, ain't broke as far as I can see, and the developers are obviously clueless. It doesn't surprise me at all that it's now come to a head, the only surprise is that it took so long...
Monster cables have become the poster boy for corporate greed in my book. Blue Jeans Cable also appears to be seriously overpriced, but that actually makes such a dustup even more entertaining, actually, since I really don't care who wins or loses...
Not being one yourself. When you put the world's most powerful military and the world's most powerful corporations together and add one of the world's most important resources in an area occupied by people easy to label as evil, you end up with a very nasty situation in which it's hard to unambiguously define anyone as the "good guy"
But hey, that means the situation is self-correcting! I guess the free market really works! :-)
Yes, open source is a pretty good hedge against planned obsolescence too. Old gear that the manufacturers don't support anymore on new software platforms doesn't have to be thrown away anymore. But businesses have gotten used to the idea that if they make stuff cheaply enough and don't support last years stuff, things will stop working more often and they'll sell more product. Open source is an alternative for the consumer to such hijinks.
I've been a developer since the days that 8" floppies were the network. Currently I'm working on performance improvements for a data warehouse product. Our in-house network is running at 100M, but our customers usually use the product on 1G in order to get acceptable ETL performance. The two test servers were next to each other in the same room. I put in an IT request to set up a 1G connection between the two machines. The response I got was "our network is 100M, can't do it." After repeatedly explaining them how it could be relatively easily done without upgrading the whole building to 1G, and getting the same response, out of frustration I finally went to my boss and said, "here's an $80 switch we could buy that could get it done." We ordered the switch and are now happily operating a collection of machines in that room on 1G to each other. Our IT department is clueless about developer needs-- they assume all employees are only using CRM and office apps. Seems to me the solution ought to be a separate isolated network for the developers that they can hack on to their heart's content, but I suspect few IT departments have the savvy to figure that one out (ours certainly doesn't).
I suspect that most of the developers here have found it necessary to work around our IT department in one way or another. All of us have admin rights on our desktops which is an absolute must for us-- I'm doing things like shutting down and starting up services all the time, installing and uninstalling software, creating users, tweaking settings. I'd be down waiting for IT actions constantly if I had to do all that through them, and I'd bet much of the time they wouldn't understand what I was asking for and couldn't figure out how to get it done anyway.
With IM, I can carry on several phone-style (near-immediate interactive) conversations simultaneously. Can't do that as effectively with either email or voice. I can also tell who's available (and how long they've been unavailable) so if they aren't around to give me an answer (and haven't been for hours) I know to try someone else. Most of the workers I interact with are in different offices or are telecommuters, so IM is cheaper than telephone as well. Just because you don't see a benefit in IM doesn't mean it's not there.
Nice little ISP business you got here. It'd be a real SHAME if something were to happen to it...
It wasn't my Mac and has been about a year so the specifics have faded somewhat-- but my friend with a brand new Mac that I helped set up, wanted to get the files on the flash drive onto his hard drive so that he could play them with iTunes. The first time we tried it from within iTunes, it turned out iTunes acted like it copied the files but had instead only indexed them, so once the flash drive was removed things were confused. While dragging may appear to copy files, that doesn't necessarily mean that's what actually happened to them.
The OS itself isn't so bad, I mean it's essentially Unix, after all. But the OS is not what most people use their computer for, it is the applications that determine how you use a Mac. The Mac people I know don't go anywhere near the underlying OS, they barely understand the finder. If all I ever wanted to do is to drag files from here to there I doubt there'd be an issue. At some point you have to interface with applications-- many of which are supplied with the Mac or otherwise obtained from Apple, and these things are what defines the Mac experience, as they are used as models by third party developers. And Apple has as much history as Microsoft of imposing their applications on you. Apple has a long history of keeping things TOO simple-- the one-button mouse a classic example. Tools are not designed to be modular or Swiss army knifes, but instead very specific tools for tasks done a particular way in order to "keep it simple". But keeping it THAT simple means you often have to conform to the Mac way-- ironic, when often Mac users seem to see themselves as non-conformists...
There's plenty of frustration to go around though. With the PC's "My Documents", there's a tacit assumption that you want to group like files together-- when I prefer to group files by projects in many cases, which may contain a mix of filetypes. Consequently, I've always found the "My Documents" paradigm a less-than-useless mal-assumption. And file selectors often have related assumptions and don't handle alternatives very well either, loading a file from one project and saving it to another, or loading it from a common repository and then saving it into a project often requires browsing back and forth for every file because the selector has the wrong kind of memory for such things-- a more flexible scheme would NOT try to second-guess what you want to do, but allow you to set the various target directories in the selectors. In Unix, I can set an environment variable to remember locations of note, but there is often no equivalent in the typical GUI interfaces, even though its no less important than in Unix. And file selectors could stand to remember where you are scrolled within a directory, as if you are working on directories with hundreds or thousands of files, having to scroll through them to find the one you're interested in, and then re-find it or the "next" one in a subsequent selection is an interface that still needs some work IMHO...
One thing I've been wondering about the Mac though-- the PC has an annoying habit of "stealing focus" when you have multiple things running, and are typing into a text box somewhere. Various things will move themselves to the front and interrupt your work with stupid stuff like "would you like to update now?" or other annoyances. Even many web browsers will do it to themselves-- I start typing in a URL as soon as my browser appears, and while it's loading my home page I get halfway through typing and the page finishes loading and it then steals the cursor and puts it into an entry box on the page that loaded so the second half of the URL I type in ends up in a different box. I want to see a GUI where I can completely "mask" all such interrupts while I'm typing, with an adjustable timeout perhaps that locks focus to where I'm typing until I pause for some period of time. The only acceptable interrupt would be an imminent crash that will cause data loss or loss of the text I'm entering-- any other thing, NO MATTER WHAT that CAN be delayed SHOULD be until I finish typing. How is the Mac at this sort of thing? Better? Worse? The same? If it was better that would certainly be one feature well worth bragging about...
As much as I hate Microsoft, when forced to use a Mac I curse a lot more at it. Primarily, because I have my own idea of what my workflow should be, and at least on a PC I can jerk the apps around enough to make it do things the way I want them done. I don't put *anything* in "My Documents."
Macs are good for people who have no idea how they should do things on a computer. If you do have an idea of how you want things done, you will have to re-learn it the Mac way. Something as simple as moving files from a USB drive into the iTunes "jukebox" (or whatever it's called) turned out to be an involved process as it just wasn't prepared to do things the way I thought about them and I had to 1) realize it was making assumptions that were not at all intuitive (to me at least) and 2) figure out just what those assumptions were.
I've grown up with the computer industry and make my living working with them. I won't let ANY computer system dictate my workflow-- computers are supposed to adapt to MY workflow, not the other way around. At least on a PC there's some hope of doing that, it's nearly impossible on a Mac. I suppose that's great if you have NO IDEA what you are doing, but I find it far more annoying than the worst thing I've ever see a Windows PC do...