I just collect used vegetable oil from local restaraunts and process it with lye and methanol. I get all the soap I want, then give away that oily stuff left over before it catches on fire...
How is this "revolutionary?" All you are doing is generating a bunch of test vectors and feeding them to a machine instead of comparing them yourself. You could let programs "create" the test vectors if, as it says, there is another program of similar function to generate the vectors, but what if there isn't one?
All you are doing is replacing human eyes with a computer at the first "filter" process. Instead of having to compare a bunch of values and look for the errors, let the machine point them out to you - grep anyone?
I see nothing reolutionary about this. You still have the DUT making "assertions" - duuuuh can you say "print?"
You people keep calling for "fair balance" in terms of eco laws and worker safety, but you fail to realize where all that stuff comes from. When someone has to choose between buying drinking water that won't kill their child or drinking from the community well... where are they going to get the water if there's no money for a water filtering plant? You think they're just going to gather and create a treastment plant through wishes and poverty?
I can buy a high quality, mostly hand made shirt from a Singapore "tailor" (ie a garment shop that doesn't have the means to compete with the big boys and get those mega contracts) for about the same price I'd pay retail at my local store for an off the rack quality shirt. But the shirt I order is made to my measurements, has the stitching I want, the collar I want - it's a completely custom made good, and I can afford it on a very modest salary.
I don't even know anyone here who makes shirts. There are people who do crafts, but a single shirt would easily cost $100 that way. I can order two or three from Singapore for that.
I'm not a CEO. I'm not even in management in my call center job, but I could afford this on what I make at the call center alone - not that that's all the income I have. Then there's all the ebayers selling cutout merchandise from their local shops that, again, bought that stuff in bulk from Singapore, China, Pakistan...
Economically I am at the bottom of the middle class. And yet I can wear $400 designer label clothes if I want; I can wear custom tailored silk shirts, and I can sell my own goods online to others who also have mode disposable income because they, too, can get cheap clothes, cheap furnishings for their home, and (most of all the problem in the US) cheap food.
If Ravi can lift himself up out of the gutter, more power to him - I'll thank him for the custom made shirts and even give him a tip were I ever to meet him in person. And, in the process, he can contribute to his local government in the form of taxes for municipal projects so he, too, can oneday realize the golden handcuffs of having a well organized local infrastructure and all the costs that go with it.
Actually, the coco DID run a 6809, not a 6509. But don't think there weren't 6509s, too. The 6501 was the original as in the CAT single board computers and early apples, but when the 6502 was on the big screen in all those commodores Rockwell (and others) licensed the tech and had whole families of chips oriented toward embedded systems. They were the 6503, 6504, 6505, 6506, etc. and had fewer pins (24-28 pins). Then there was the 6510, which was a 6502 core with a multiplexed parallel port where part of the address bus would be on the 6502, etc.
So... what would you expect the 6509 to be used for? It didn't have the math instructions of the 6809, but it (and the 6510) did have certain useful features when it came to making "personal computers" of the day.
Why be so very afraid? Surely this isn't a surpirse to him - I was talking about this same sort of concept nearly a decade ago when hanging around on WIRED's forums. If I thought of it then surely others had, I cannot believe this sort of technology could come as a surprise to anyone who had even read, say, David Siegel's introductions to the web way back in 1995.
It should also be very obvious to anyone who knows this stuff just how giant a security risk all that sort of technology would present. I'm sure g-man thinks they've got it all sewn up now with these hardware controls, but cracks in the structure are inevitable and one can only imagine a world where just clicking to visit a website, rather than downloading a trojan installer that may or may not complete, instead downloads a robust trojan installer that will complete. And people are already getting pretty damn sick of tithing to both Microsoft and Symantec. Keep selling that crapware until they can't swallow any more!
Meanwhile, the linux desktop is coming together more and more and Microsoft's uber-desktop is pushed back again to.. when?
Computers are cheap. And I can tell you from experience it's not that hard to convince someone to try linux after you've helped the reload their computer for the second or third time. It's up to the product to keep them there once they've made that transition - if we can't beat the crap MS has been shoveling with another two full years of development time, it won't be because Bill and Steve are to blame.
I mean, the artist was standing on a street corner just singing this song for the price of a coin in the hat. It was something about "the GPL blues" so I thought surely he wouldn't care if we had p-diddy provide his own diddi-ized version on our next mega-pop talentless rap release...
Copyright means all rights reserved. Publishers don't even publish "public comments" from usenet in their for-profit publications because they don't want the hassle of securing permission from all the copyright holders. The fact I release a limited portion of my rights to this work doesn't mean I release all of them - that's how copyright works. That's how GPL works.
That's why it's called the GNU General Public License, and not the public domain.
That's the point. Why the fuck do I care if my music jukebox comes with a store? I rip my cds, I download others, and I don't care. I buy music from truly independant (at least in the US) artists.
And no, there's virtually no chance of me being prosecuted for my music gathering habits - MP3s are not illegal, and I wouldn't let a p2p app within 100 feet of my PC - I don't have the bandwidth to spare even if I were stupid enough to want to run that crap.
My archive is about 55GB and still growing by the week. I don't want an "archive manager" for my music - that's what file managers are for.
Lossless format support and seamless track transitions - wow! If they'd just get rid of the DRM, just think: you could have almost all the same great features on your Mac I've been enjoying on my PC for more than two years now!
Because this is, at least for now, unenforceable. The only possible way to enforce such a restriction as you mention would be to eavesdrop on all internet communications originating from the US and to prosecute U.S serfers who utilize this "illegal" service.
And, since that would require all sorts of invasive precendents, it would surely take multiple SCOTUS cases to settle the issue - an issue, as you know, the SCOTUS has a long record of siding with "users" and not corporate holders. Just as they sided with home users having a right to record Disney's movies on their Sony VCRs in their homes, it's doubtful the record industry could ever win a case against a user for "importing" their own legally purchased CDs via these electronic means.
And BTW, whether you like the Berne convention or not, we're stuck with it until our own politicians get smart - you can't defend the law in one breath and then in the next say "well, I don't like that part of the law so I'm not going to argue it - as a student of law you should fucking well know better than to even try such nonsense. And, so long as Russia ia a signatory on that treaty that none of us "like," we're bound to accept their protections just as they're bound to accept ours. And in Russia (Ukraine, Poland, etc) there are far fewer protections for corporate entities when it comes to copyight (another discussion we have had before - should I cite some Polish or Ukraine law?)
And record companies may not like this fact, but they seem to have no problem living with it: Sony, Universal, BMG... these all have presence in Russia just as elsewhere. Madonna may not like her music being sold so cheap, but she has little say over it - a little something is better than whole lotta nothing, which is what she'd get is she refused to allow Maverick records to have any official presence in the country.
In short: I been using this service for a long time. I told you about it over at Arstech and no one there seemed to find it worthy of front page comment, and I've mentioned it here multiple times and yet it's remained a pretty well kept secret until now.
So, Slashdot may have finally accomplished what Berne could not - deprive me of a steady supply of cheap, quality encoded music at a fair price (cheaper even than "free" usenet, BTW). I'm sure there's a lesson in there about capitalism and the power of a free press, but right now I'm too pissed to think much about it...
I've posted about them several times. I also like to point out that I regularly buy Russian music CDs from an importer in NY, and each of those CDs costs me all of 6 bucks. So for those trolls saying "these aren't legal" then I offer you this: how is an importer able to get away with selling these physical goods in the US?
The big RIAA labels all have a presence over there. My fave artist, Linda, has had a record contract with (I believe) BMG for quite some time. She regularly appears on Russian MTV and there was even an English language version of "Vorona" ("Crow") made for (always impending) US release. And remember TATU?
So, if these labels are so insistent that there is no money to be made in a country where lax copyright controls exist, why (and how) have they retained a presence in a country where nearly two thirds of all content sold in stores is "pirated?"
From Tatu's own website, these figures:
February 2002 - Universal Music Russia releases an enlarged edition of the album "200 in the opposite direction" with a new design and with a new track "Clowns". The song "Clowns" appears regularly on the "Russian Radio", "Dynamite FM", "Hit-FM" and "Europe +".
March 2002 - re-release of the album "200kph in the wrong lane" beats all the records during the first week of sales: 60,000 of legal copies sold!
Now the number of sold copies of the TATU albums is about 1,100,000!
60,000 "lega" copies out of more than a Million are sold, and Universal seems to have no problem with betting on this horse... meanwhile, here in the US, laws keep getting passed...
Russia is not the problem here. The US is the problem. and I hope sites like this continue to prosper, and it demolishes the US entertainment industry. After all, "constructive destruction" is what capitalism is all about. How ironic these "capitalists" seem only able to realize this lesson at the hands of a formerly soviet socialist state.
And the only time I ever got a virus was when I stupidly ran an install with my computer connected to the network. Simple fix: unplug cable and reinstall again.
First thing I install is winrar just because I have it and it works. Then Imad's PGP 6.58ckt7 and zone alarm.
The rest doesn't need install. I just drag shortcuts to mozilla, proxomitron, winamp and the rest to my desktop and click.
If you don't use IE or outlook and run proxomitron behind mozilla, there's not many ways bad stuff can find you behind a decent firewall.
The FCC doesn't "prohibit" manufacturers releasing documentation about how their cards work - the companies simply use this as an excuse to hide their "proprietary" information. I can buy a Sam's photofact of any of thousands of radio transmitters without having a license, if the FCC cared I'm sure that hole would have been plugged long ago. There's nothing special about "digital" devices except to the manufacturers of those devices.
And yes, they WOULD sell more devices if they would not be so hung up on proprietary information. I was chomping at the bit for months to buy one of those cool new motherboards with the 3dfx chipset until I learned that the drivers basically suck ass and are only available in binary form. If that's the only choice I have I'll stick with my less powerful but well supported SIS chipset motherboard that actually has BETTER drivers in linux (and supports more modes) than the manufacturer's "supported" windows drivers.
example1,
example 2, and
example 3 of why this is a supremely antiquated notion.
But then, what should one expect in a forum where someone touting the real world possibilities for self employment in today's job market is modded "troll?"
New format available: all albums are now available for download as highest-quality Apple Macintosh AAC files, compressed into a Mac-native Stuffit archive. All the meta-information (song name,
artist, year, album) is stored in the AAC file so that you can just drop the files into iTunes and they're perfectly recognized. And unlike AAC files bought from the iTunes shop, these AAC files are as unemcumbered by DRM (digital rights management).
If anyone here hasn't yet checked out magnatune, you should. There are some great acts and you can get exactly what most of us have been screaming for: un-DRM files of the highest possible quality and YOU set the price.
Something must have been lost in the translation, because none of those apps do what I described. One appears to be little more useful than a collection of rss feeds, and two more are basically fancy front ends for duplicating functionality supplied by the built-in windows search function.
Care to try again?
and innovation doesn't just mean "never been done before." Innovation means doing something better, different, in a way that often makes people say "gee, that's so simple, why didn't I think of that?"
Most users expect their computers to fuck up. they think it's normal to have to reboot every few hours, to have information become "lost," to have windows shut itself down for no understandable reason at all.
Security and reliability mean nothing to end users. End users just want to do what they want and the rest of the shit to get out of the way. They want free crap. they want music free. They want to email their friends and to play games. that they have become used to windows SNAFUs just proves it even more: reliability means nothing to most PC users - to most, it's an utterly foreign concept, much like that "security" thing.
"Do you know someone else has control of your computer via that backdoor virus?"
Yeah, so what? I don't use it for anything much anyway - just shopping on ebay and email. I don't WANT to reload everything - just get rid of the virus and call it fixed...
That is... jobs are obsolete. If you have skills it's time to think outside the box, for sure. You didn't really WANT to spend the next thirty years in a cubicle, did you?
I took my $10/hr job at a call center for the insurance and to be with " structured friends" (ie to have co-workers and regular personal interaction). I work there a few days a week (mostly weekends), I have half decent health care, and I have plenty of time T-F to do what I want with my time. I realize this isn't an answer for someone who has a wife and kids and expects to keep them in primo jeans and caviar, but I honestly don't see how ANYONE with a decent skill set in this world today could spend their life a pauper unless they WANTED to live as a pauper (which I have done, as I said, by choice).
You've got a world of connecitons at your fingers. Find a project and become an expert, tell everyone who will listen about it. Eventually someone will pay you for your expertise, and they'll do it on your terms.
I dunno about klyx or latex or anyt of that stuff. I do know I write A LOT and I almost think in HTML because of all those years I spent learning "the web." But writing in HTML is a pain in the ass when you just want simple work done.
Here's what I did: I made a wiki engine my desktop. I can search my wiki for anything I ever wrote about, I can search for any file linked to it by keyword, and I can enter well formatted text using common wiki commands like//this is italics// and **this is bold**. It's freaking fast, it's powerful, and it could be much better integrated - basically it's a lot of the stuff MS touts about longhorn, and I've been doing it for two years now. There'ss no reason at all we couldn't make mozilla (or some browser) the default desktop interface for MOST THINGS and have a good 75% of desktop functionality driven by "web apps" - client/server apps that look nice and are easily customised by any joe user who was willing, at any time in the past, to learn how to create a web page.
Yeah, it all sounds so very 1999. But this is coming from a guy who can hardly write a compilable c app - if I can do all the stuff I did in damn jscript, you XUL and Apache skilled coders oughtta be able to do some real magic. All it takes is someone to do it instead of offering 100 reasons why it can't (or shouldn't) be done.
This is why Linux has to STOP CATCHING UP. I know there are many things in linux that aren't in windows, but there's little you can point to and say "this isn't in windows and see how great it is?" Users don't have a clue about security, security is not a feature. Windows users don't even know how to configure a fucking user account - and if they did then the problems with spyware blowing up desktops would be reduced, so linux would even lose that tiny edge.
Linux really needs a killer usability app. Something like a personal google that would allow you to recollect ANY information you've ever viewed in your browser - complex search features that don't look complex. Instead of freaking out over google's 1GB email system, port that search functionality to the linux desktop and make it possible to do all the same stuff WITHOUT having to store your email on google's farm. Instead of trying to port games and catch up on drivers for fancy graphics cards, court a hardware maker and invest some GPL lovin' into a graphics engine. Or court IBM and get them to migrate even more of that functionality to the CPU cores - I'm sure Apple would love that too.
There's so many ways linux is this close to outdistancing Windows, but none of them are complete enough to be of use to joe average. And if WINE/David/whatever would allow windows apps to be used on linux AND linux has capabilities that windows doesn't - and people can see and feel those differences themselves - then this is a good thing. So long as linux is playing catch-up, 'tho, this is nothing but one more tool for MS to point at and say "See? We set the standards! Why would you look anywhere else?"
spatial resolution vs. temporal resolution
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The rover also has the luxury of having very few moving objects to contend with, and being able to remain in a very precise location for extended periods of time. It would not be so easy for me to take 100 pictures of grandma from the exact same position with different dithers applied to the image over a period of hours - she's not likely to sit still for that, unless grandma's finally done her last moving around.
I've done experiments with my 3MP camera, taking multiple shots from the same angle and layering them in photoshop. The enhanced resolution can be downright breathtaking, but the practice is only practical for still lifes and landscapes. What are you going to do with that 1MP camera when you want a high resolution image of janie's first smile?
Slashdot Mirror
I just collect used vegetable oil from local restaraunts and process it with lye and methanol. I get all the soap I want, then give away that oily stuff left over before it catches on fire...
You broke the record: that was the longest strawman post I ever saw!
All you are doing is replacing human eyes with a computer at the first "filter" process. Instead of having to compare a bunch of values and look for the errors, let the machine point them out to you - grep anyone?
I see nothing reolutionary about this. You still have the DUT making "assertions" - duuuuh can you say "print?"
I can buy a high quality, mostly hand made shirt from a Singapore "tailor" (ie a garment shop that doesn't have the means to compete with the big boys and get those mega contracts) for about the same price I'd pay retail at my local store for an off the rack quality shirt. But the shirt I order is made to my measurements, has the stitching I want, the collar I want - it's a completely custom made good, and I can afford it on a very modest salary.
I don't even know anyone here who makes shirts. There are people who do crafts, but a single shirt would easily cost $100 that way. I can order two or three from Singapore for that.
I'm not a CEO. I'm not even in management in my call center job, but I could afford this on what I make at the call center alone - not that that's all the income I have. Then there's all the ebayers selling cutout merchandise from their local shops that, again, bought that stuff in bulk from Singapore, China, Pakistan...
Economically I am at the bottom of the middle class. And yet I can wear $400 designer label clothes if I want; I can wear custom tailored silk shirts, and I can sell my own goods online to others who also have mode disposable income because they, too, can get cheap clothes, cheap furnishings for their home, and (most of all the problem in the US) cheap food.
If Ravi can lift himself up out of the gutter, more power to him - I'll thank him for the custom made shirts and even give him a tip were I ever to meet him in person. And, in the process, he can contribute to his local government in the form of taxes for municipal projects so he, too, can oneday realize the golden handcuffs of having a well organized local infrastructure and all the costs that go with it.
So... what would you expect the 6509 to be used for? It didn't have the math instructions of the 6809, but it (and the 6510) did have certain useful features when it came to making "personal computers" of the day.
It can't do anything right. It only appears to be doing something between hourly reboots.
use mono/.net. Same end result, no java needed.
It should also be very obvious to anyone who knows this stuff just how giant a security risk all that sort of technology would present. I'm sure g-man thinks they've got it all sewn up now with these hardware controls, but cracks in the structure are inevitable and one can only imagine a world where just clicking to visit a website, rather than downloading a trojan installer that may or may not complete, instead downloads a robust trojan installer that will complete. And people are already getting pretty damn sick of tithing to both Microsoft and Symantec. Keep selling that crapware until they can't swallow any more!
Meanwhile, the linux desktop is coming together more and more and Microsoft's uber-desktop is pushed back again to.. when?
Computers are cheap. And I can tell you from experience it's not that hard to convince someone to try linux after you've helped the reload their computer for the second or third time. It's up to the product to keep them there once they've made that transition - if we can't beat the crap MS has been shoveling with another two full years of development time, it won't be because Bill and Steve are to blame.
Copyright means all rights reserved. Publishers don't even publish "public comments" from usenet in their for-profit publications because they don't want the hassle of securing permission from all the copyright holders. The fact I release a limited portion of my rights to this work doesn't mean I release all of them - that's how copyright works. That's how GPL works.
That's why it's called the GNU General Public License, and not the public domain.
And no, there's virtually no chance of me being prosecuted for my music gathering habits - MP3s are not illegal, and I wouldn't let a p2p app within 100 feet of my PC - I don't have the bandwidth to spare even if I were stupid enough to want to run that crap.
My archive is about 55GB and still growing by the week. I don't want an "archive manager" for my music - that's what file managers are for.
And, since that would require all sorts of invasive precendents, it would surely take multiple SCOTUS cases to settle the issue - an issue, as you know, the SCOTUS has a long record of siding with "users" and not corporate holders. Just as they sided with home users having a right to record Disney's movies on their Sony VCRs in their homes, it's doubtful the record industry could ever win a case against a user for "importing" their own legally purchased CDs via these electronic means.
And BTW, whether you like the Berne convention or not, we're stuck with it until our own politicians get smart - you can't defend the law in one breath and then in the next say "well, I don't like that part of the law so I'm not going to argue it - as a student of law you should fucking well know better than to even try such nonsense. And, so long as Russia ia a signatory on that treaty that none of us "like," we're bound to accept their protections just as they're bound to accept ours. And in Russia (Ukraine, Poland, etc) there are far fewer protections for corporate entities when it comes to copyight (another discussion we have had before - should I cite some Polish or Ukraine law?)
And record companies may not like this fact, but they seem to have no problem living with it: Sony, Universal, BMG... these all have presence in Russia just as elsewhere. Madonna may not like her music being sold so cheap, but she has little say over it - a little something is better than whole lotta nothing, which is what she'd get is she refused to allow Maverick records to have any official presence in the country.
In short: I been using this service for a long time. I told you about it over at Arstech and no one there seemed to find it worthy of front page comment, and I've mentioned it here multiple times and yet it's remained a pretty well kept secret until now.
So, Slashdot may have finally accomplished what Berne could not - deprive me of a steady supply of cheap, quality encoded music at a fair price (cheaper even than "free" usenet, BTW). I'm sure there's a lesson in there about capitalism and the power of a free press, but right now I'm too pissed to think much about it...
I've been using allofmp3.com since about 2001...
The big RIAA labels all have a presence over there. My fave artist, Linda, has had a record contract with (I believe) BMG for quite some time. She regularly appears on Russian MTV and there was even an English language version of "Vorona" ("Crow") made for (always impending) US release. And remember TATU?
So, if these labels are so insistent that there is no money to be made in a country where lax copyright controls exist, why (and how) have they retained a presence in a country where nearly two thirds of all content sold in stores is "pirated?"
From Tatu's own website, these figures:
February 2002 - Universal Music Russia releases an enlarged edition of the album "200 in the opposite direction" with a new design and with a new track "Clowns". The song "Clowns" appears regularly on the "Russian Radio", "Dynamite FM", "Hit-FM" and "Europe +".
March 2002 - re-release of the album "200kph in the wrong lane" beats all the records during the first week of sales: 60,000 of legal copies sold!
Now the number of sold copies of the TATU albums is about 1,100,000!
60,000 "lega" copies out of more than a Million are sold, and Universal seems to have no problem with betting on this horse... meanwhile, here in the US, laws keep getting passed...
Russia is not the problem here. The US is the problem. and I hope sites like this continue to prosper, and it demolishes the US entertainment industry. After all, "constructive destruction" is what capitalism is all about. How ironic these "capitalists" seem only able to realize this lesson at the hands of a formerly soviet socialist state.
First thing I install is winrar just because I have it and it works. Then Imad's PGP 6.58ckt7 and zone alarm.
The rest doesn't need install. I just drag shortcuts to mozilla, proxomitron, winamp and the rest to my desktop and click.
If you don't use IE or outlook and run proxomitron behind mozilla, there's not many ways bad stuff can find you behind a decent firewall.
And yes, they WOULD sell more devices if they would not be so hung up on proprietary information. I was chomping at the bit for months to buy one of those cool new motherboards with the 3dfx chipset until I learned that the drivers basically suck ass and are only available in binary form. If that's the only choice I have I'll stick with my less powerful but well supported SIS chipset motherboard that actually has BETTER drivers in linux (and supports more modes) than the manufacturer's "supported" windows drivers.
example1, example 2, and example 3 of why this is a supremely antiquated notion...
Yes, I replied to a troll... hype knows no boundaries.
But then, what should one expect in a forum where someone touting the real world possibilities for self employment in today's job market is modded "troll?"
Harrumph.
New format available: all albums are now available for download as highest-quality Apple Macintosh AAC files, compressed into a Mac-native Stuffit archive. All the meta-information (song name, artist, year, album) is stored in the AAC file so that you can just drop the files into iTunes and they're perfectly recognized. And unlike AAC files bought from the iTunes shop, these AAC files are as unemcumbered by DRM (digital rights management).
If anyone here hasn't yet checked out magnatune, you should. There are some great acts and you can get exactly what most of us have been screaming for: un-DRM files of the highest possible quality and YOU set the price.
Care to try again?
and innovation doesn't just mean "never been done before." Innovation means doing something better, different, in a way that often makes people say "gee, that's so simple, why didn't I think of that?"
Security and reliability mean nothing to end users. End users just want to do what they want and the rest of the shit to get out of the way. They want free crap. they want music free. They want to email their friends and to play games. that they have become used to windows SNAFUs just proves it even more: reliability means nothing to most PC users - to most, it's an utterly foreign concept, much like that "security" thing.
"Do you know someone else has control of your computer via that backdoor virus?"
Yeah, so what? I don't use it for anything much anyway - just shopping on ebay and email. I don't WANT to reload everything - just get rid of the virus and call it fixed...
I took my $10/hr job at a call center for the insurance and to be with " structured friends" (ie to have co-workers and regular personal interaction). I work there a few days a week (mostly weekends), I have half decent health care, and I have plenty of time T-F to do what I want with my time. I realize this isn't an answer for someone who has a wife and kids and expects to keep them in primo jeans and caviar, but I honestly don't see how ANYONE with a decent skill set in this world today could spend their life a pauper unless they WANTED to live as a pauper (which I have done, as I said, by choice).
You've got a world of connecitons at your fingers. Find a project and become an expert, tell everyone who will listen about it. Eventually someone will pay you for your expertise, and they'll do it on your terms.
Here's what I did: I made a wiki engine my desktop. I can search my wiki for anything I ever wrote about, I can search for any file linked to it by keyword, and I can enter well formatted text using common wiki commands like //this is italics// and **this is bold**. It's freaking fast, it's powerful, and it could be much better integrated - basically it's a lot of the stuff MS touts about longhorn, and I've been doing it for two years now. There'ss no reason at all we couldn't make mozilla (or some browser) the default desktop interface for MOST THINGS and have a good 75% of desktop functionality driven by "web apps" - client/server apps that look nice and are easily customised by any joe user who was willing, at any time in the past, to learn how to create a web page.
Yeah, it all sounds so very 1999. But this is coming from a guy who can hardly write a compilable c app - if I can do all the stuff I did in damn jscript, you XUL and Apache skilled coders oughtta be able to do some real magic. All it takes is someone to do it instead of offering 100 reasons why it can't (or shouldn't) be done.
Linux really needs a killer usability app. Something like a personal google that would allow you to recollect ANY information you've ever viewed in your browser - complex search features that don't look complex. Instead of freaking out over google's 1GB email system, port that search functionality to the linux desktop and make it possible to do all the same stuff WITHOUT having to store your email on google's farm. Instead of trying to port games and catch up on drivers for fancy graphics cards, court a hardware maker and invest some GPL lovin' into a graphics engine. Or court IBM and get them to migrate even more of that functionality to the CPU cores - I'm sure Apple would love that too.
There's so many ways linux is this close to outdistancing Windows, but none of them are complete enough to be of use to joe average. And if WINE/David/whatever would allow windows apps to be used on linux AND linux has capabilities that windows doesn't - and people can see and feel those differences themselves - then this is a good thing. So long as linux is playing catch-up, 'tho, this is nothing but one more tool for MS to point at and say "See? We set the standards! Why would you look anywhere else?"
I've done experiments with my 3MP camera, taking multiple shots from the same angle and layering them in photoshop. The enhanced resolution can be downright breathtaking, but the practice is only practical for still lifes and landscapes. What are you going to do with that 1MP camera when you want a high resolution image of janie's first smile?