Worms need not be benign in order to propagate and destroy. The Witty worm probably infected within 45 minutes every vulnerable machine which was exposed on the internet and powered up at the time -- and then wrecked them.
A hybrid worm/mass-mailer-virus could have the best of both worlds -- lying "dormant" for a while on filesystems, in email systems ready to infect any systems that wake up late in the day -- even after it's destroyed the bulk of the vulnerable Windows systems on the net. If it were further hybridized with worms that can be delivered as adware/spyware it would crawl down browsers, bypassing both your firewall and your antivirus program, and then spew itself out via email and network probes to infect the soft candy center that exists at the heard of most networks. We've seen worms that do each of several very clever things. A worm that does all of them won't be stopped in time on today's networks.
If Witty had exploited LSASS instead of a second-tier firewall product, people in Hawaii would have woke up that morning to a Windows-free world. Kinda like the computer version of 28 Days Later where we *NIX users would be wandering around a nearly-empty internet wondering, "where did everybody go?" (Well, OK, most of us would be wondering, "Why is my network connection so fast today?")
It could happen with the next buffer-overflow exploit in anything on Windows that listens on any of the ports that we all know and loathe. A Witty/LSASS worm would have destroyed a significant percentage of the Windows systems in the world within two hours. I am left with questions.
Would managers of IT shops continue to act as though Windows insecurity isn't a problem?
Would Microsoft be able to get the CERT advisory revised a couple days later to strike the recommendation that customers consider using a more secure system?
If the world keeps licking the Microsoft Windows Tootsie Pop, eventually we're gonna know how many licks it takes.
We can do this without zealotry, blind advocacy...
It is exactly zealotry and blind advocacy which helped Microsoft achieve market dominance despite significant technological and other serious shortcomings in their products. Don't give up one of your chief weapons so easily!
Wikipedia is an interesting experiment, perhaps worthy of financial support, but it's by no means clear that the technology-supported-consensus-opinion facilitated by the wiki will yield information that is consistently unbiased fair and true. You describe this process as "democratic", which perhaps it is to some degree, but only those with access to the internet get to "vote". Since we know that participation in the internet remains skewed with respect to economic class, race, education level, and gender, some degree of bias and elitism is inherent in the wiki process -- at least until such time as internet access is truly universal.
So, "unbiased" seems at risk from the outset. It's not clear how to evaluate "fair" as applies to the non-editorial presentation of unbiased information. When it comes to information about history or current events, substantiated facts might be generally preferred over "fairness". Perhaps most history and other information would be perceived as unfair by someone, regardless of whether a majority voted it to be unbiased and factually true. Minority oppression is one of the greatest risks of a democratic process.
With respect to the ability of a democratic process to determine truth, consider the now classic case study of
Al Gore's alleged claim to have invented the internet.
Widely accepted and unquestioned by most people as a fact, Mr. Gore in truth made no such claim, even though variously measured majorities would almost certainly claim it to be true. Also consider that pollsters periodically test people's basic and strictly objective knowledge on some subject or another and find it sadly wanting.
The democratic process as a model for truth building seems a foundation of sand, at least so long as ignorance remains rampant.
No, the inclusion of JBoss does not imply an end to WebObjects. Apple is using WebObjects for major initiatives like iTunes Music Store, as well as.Mac / iTools the online Apple Stores and various internal projects.
You post seems like a troll. (Sloppy Mods Boost Troll to "5, Insightful", Readers Annoyed.) Perhaps you were only careless, and you didn't mean to imply that WebObjects on the whole should be abandoned in favor of a J2EE application server. In fact, WebObjects is a marvelously productive development system and set of frameworks for building web applications and services. The application server part is cool, and it will be cooler when it's integrated with JBoss, but it's not the reason people use WebObjects.
WebObjects is a secret weapon for Apple, and for anybody that uses it.
None of these freedoms are hampered in any way by the MIT or BSD licenses, both of which protect the community freedom to use the original source, and yet do not attach virally to derivative works and do not place restrictions of any kind on derivative works.
Therefore, the copyleft exists for some other purposes. Others have suggested those might include restricting freedoms associated with derivative works, for reasons having more to do with politics than with free, as in beer or speech, software.
Hmm... Although my recollection may be distorted and dimmed by the passage of time, as I see it, Hatch has none of the properties of female genitalia, which in any case happen to be praiseworthy, rather than pejorative, on the whole.
Hatch is a puritan (religious nut-case?) with unabashed authoritarian tendencies leaning strongly toward fascist, which ought to be damnable enough. Hatch is also almost certainly eloquent enough to insult you directly, without missing, and instead offending your mom, your sister, and any female lovers you may have had.
One other weird bit of Hatch Trivia: Hatch makes music, lots and lots of it.
This review was stimulating, and filled me briefly with hope, then I crashed after pondering a bit. I'd like to think that we could look back on this someday as a turning point of some sort, perhaps the foundation of a new engineering discipline of documentation. Of course, lots of people thought (and probably still do) that SGML was the foundation and now we're building walls. And maybe it was, but SGML (and the derivatives HTML, XML, and future arbitrary useful DTD to come) suffer from some problems - external and cultural mostly. The technologies are somewhat complex, and there is a general lack of understanding about how to apply the technology to advantage.
The core concept of arbitrary display and formatting of structured text, which appears to underly this new work, remains alien to most of the people making business decisions and authoring documents. When you combine a vacuum style lack of good tools to author documentation in the target technology with a flood of readily available "old paradigm" authoring tools for making stuff look pretty (word processors and desktop publishing stuff) you get the explosion in documents that was seen in the 90's. You also get the tremendous resource drain as these docs are updated and reformatted for subsequent generations of word processor formats that continue to mix content and presentation. We also see a direct parallel problem with the amazing fanatical market success of programming environments where logic and presentation are mixed (MS.asp, PHP, etc.) over object oriented tools. Far, far more dynamic web sites are built "the old fashioned way" despite the availability of decent, even "better" authoring tools that exist in the object oriented world.
Unfortunately most organizations that produce and use documentation do so as an aside at best, or an afterthought at worst. Organizations typically don't value documentation highly enough to create job descriptions for skilled technical writers. Corporations with IT staffs of hundreds of people - managers, systems administrators, help desk workers, developers -- often don't have a single Technical Writer.
Take the help desk as a primary example. Just about every big company produces volumes of documentation for use by the help desk workers. Sadly, much of that documentation is created after the fact, by desperately struggling front line help desk workers themselves, who randomly try to assemble facts and myth about problem resolution. The folk creating the systems are generally not given sufficient time to develop and maintain documentation, often barely enough resources to develop the system in the first place, before moving to the next task. It's rare for companies even to realize the blatant "in your face" opportunities to save money by investing in better documentation.
If we can't get developers to understand this basic concept, how can we get front line help-desk workers who are writing documentation for themselves out of desperation and under the clock of "you still gotta answer twenty calls an hour and resolve 19 of the problems before hanging up"? Even better, how do we get a bureaucratic organization to invest in skilled technical writers?
It seems to me that to get to this point we will need to create authoring tools that are so powerful and easy to use that the authors of documentation don't need to think about the separation of content and formatting -- it "just happens" in the background. Anybody who writes such a tool gets to spend the rest of their life retired on a beach, earning twenty percent and drinking rum from hollowed out pineapple shells with little paper umbrellas in them.
There are lots of people intentionally avoiding all information about Star Wars.
There are even more people desperately trying to forget everything they know about Episode I & Episode II, and still more offering to chip in so Lucas can afford a script writer for Episode III.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constituti on.billofrights.html
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Rather than mandatory school prayer (doh! there they go again!) and flag worship in school, kids should recite the first amendment, every morning, before class, and every lunch time, before eating. Elected officials, too. All of 'em, at every level. And political appointees, too.
the nice thing about economic law is that, regardless of interpretation by economists, manipulation by local power regimes, and so forth, zero cost is still zero cost is still zero cost is still zero cost.
"Free" doesn't have the same, finite meaning to an economist that it does to an accountant, or a student seeking beer.
Economists sometimes consider "external" costs. These are costs to the economy of an activity which may not result in a ledger entry (say, a direct cash outlay) under current accounting conventions, yet which may be valid costs to "the economy" as a whole. They may be costs actually borne by some third party not directly engaged in the given transaction, as in the case of pollution cleanup costs borne by the tax payer, or less easily measurable such as cancers caused by the pollution. Another commonly sited example would be sales of timber by the Federal government to a lumber company, which then cuts down an acre of forest. The public receive some amount of cash which may not reflect the total value of the acre of forest to the public, since the current accounting practices don't consider that forests are finite and that it may take hundreds of years to grow that acre back, or even if it can be grown back at all (some can't). Economists think about all the other things that can be done with a forest, and the value of those things, and the cost of putting the forest back on that acre.
If we borrow the Economist's perspective on "not really free" we can consider the open source world with respect to Linux, and the opportunity cost of all the time and energy flowing into Linux. Might Linux be a largely redundant "free UNIX-like operating system"? Would the open source movement be further ahead if all that energy had been put into BSD? Hard to estimate. Forward progress and innovation happen in both forks of the happy UNIX family, with advances shared to a significant degree. Clearly, however, there is also significant redundant effort. Maybe OS technology would advance faster with all that effort focused on a single open source operating system project.
On the other hand, there may be some upper limit on coordination of people (for example) that would prevent such increases in the pace of technological advance. Maybe the ideas just don't happen any faster. Even so, that energy could have been applied to some other open source effort, say a common object layer, or a next generation, high performance display architecture to replace X11, and then common user level applications built on top of that stuff, or maybe ease of use could be improved. These things have real value, and the extent to which they happen slower, or do not happen at all would be a real cost -- an opportunity cost -- to an economist. (Assuming of course that any economist thought about the contribution of open source to the GDP, which perhaps by now some do.)
Yet another way to spin "free" is that businesses and governments don't consider Linux to be "free" just because they can download an image of the installable OS. In fact, the licensing cost of the OS is not always even a significant line item on the cost sheet. This kind of "not really free" considers all the costs that go into a business activity. From this angle, consider the impact of platform choice on other costs like support, maintenance, development, migration to new platform, and downtime.
"Getting back to Sun, Solaris is not a revenue piece for them either. There was alot of complaining in the Slashdot crowd and Sun's commitment to Solaris on Intel has waned, but really, would you like to be running Solaris instead of Linux or Debian? Thought not..."
Solaris for Intel should be considered an advertising expense by Sun, and possibly the most important such expense. It doesn't really matter if nobody else runs it at all for anything, as long as there are UNIX administrators who want to be able to learn and experiment and run Solaris at home to sharpen their skills. Sun needs these people, because they are the people who become IT managers and buy Sun instead of IBM or HP.
The day Solaris for Intel goes away is the day the community of Solaris-aware UNIX administrators begins to atrophy. If you see this coming, you'll want to sell your SUNW in lots over a period of months, rather than all at once the the day before this happens, so as not to arouse suspicion.
Several folk suggest a decision based on her prior experience with computers. Consider some other factors which may be more important:
will you be expected provide remote technical support?
will she blame you for problems?
will she be dependent on the system for business, for school, for communication with you, her family?
You will have fewer problems which require remote administration (including the "phone walk-through" type) if you get Mac OS X. If you are going to get the blame anyway, you probably want to minimize the number of technical support incidents. If you do wind up on the receiving end of a tech support call, it will be easier to guide her through a shorter sequence of steps on a system which is delightfully less opaque than Windows. You will also have more reliable, simpler, and more secure options for performing remote administration of the laptop, in the unlikely event that it's needed.
There seems to be a gender difference of note. In general, women seem to be unconcerned with the Windows vs. Mac debate. In contrast to their Monty Python-quoting, code-writing, slashdot-trolling boyfriends, most computer-using women are aware of the debate, but seem not to care. Women seem sincerely more interested in how easy it is to do what they want, which is typically: surf the web, check email, send and receive pictures in email, edit pictures, and listen to mp3 audio. They often want an email address book.
Women will almost all tell you that the iBook or the PowerBook is "cute" -- and they mean basically the same thing when they say it about you: they know it when they see it. Perhaps it translates something like: "I don't want something that weighs twice what it should and looks like a prop from an SF fan movie set with a bunch of extra mystery buttons all over that are trying and failing to impress".
One other bit relevant only to the PC world... if you put a woman in front of a trackpad and an IBM-nipple they universally prefer the trackpad. For reasons that I suspect are Freudian, about half of men prefer the nipple thing. I myself don't grok that, since it's very easy to demonstrate that even the people who *prefer* the nipple thing can control the pointer more efficiently with a trackpad. And it's really not much of a substitute for an actual nipple.
They all still use, and are universally thrilled with their PowerBooks -- and none have traded in for a different geek. (The sample size is small, so YMMV).
Finally, if she's at all interested in the iLife stuff, especially movie making, you'll want to get her any PowerBook, rather than the iBook, since the AltiVec in the G4 will be notably faster for that stuff than the G3.
4. Put some amount of energy into improving the Carbon based MSIE, and keep it tracking the features of the Windows MSIE.
Microsoft probably doesn't even notice the "browser wars" on Mac OS X. Given the relative size of the market, it's more like a bar fight than a riot even, much less a war.
Apple, on the other hand, was almost certainly suffering on the sales front. Several different browser projects on the platform failed to produce a single competative browser, as compared to those available on Windows. They really needed to get a competive browser onto the sales floor and into the forum discussions.
With desperation providing acute incentive, somebody at Apple came up with a brilliant idea on how to fix that problem in a really interesting way -- based on an open source library that could be used for other browsers, and other non-browser software packages, too.
It seems to be working, with discussion comments like "Sarfari is blindingly fast" rather than, "Mac OS X is infuriatingly slow".
I'm not a fan of the Carbon Finder either, but the reasons behind it are not entirely incomprehensible. Apple needed to demonstrate a major, important, if-it-doesn't-work-it's-show-stopping application in Carbon, so they could keep multiple teams focused on the Carbon framework. Most of the other major apps were destined to be Cocoa apps, so the Finder seems a natural choice. The Carbon Finder was also derived to some degree from a Classic Mac OS code base -- making it an even better demonstration for Microsoft, Adobe and the gang.
If it had been put to a vote, I would have voted twice for a Cocoa Finder, hired some thugs to close the polls early in the Carbon-voting districtists in Florida, made quiet promises to a few media conglomerates to make sure the questions didn't run too deep, maybe bought me a judge or two, and helped some ballot boxes get lost...
Slashdot Mirror
Worms need not be benign in order to propagate and destroy. The Witty worm probably infected within 45 minutes every vulnerable machine which was exposed on the internet and powered up at the time -- and then wrecked them.
The Spread of the Witty Worm
Witty Worm Analysis -- LURHQ
A hybrid worm/mass-mailer-virus could have the best of both worlds -- lying "dormant" for a while on filesystems, in email systems ready to infect any systems that wake up late in the day -- even after it's destroyed the bulk of the vulnerable Windows systems on the net. If it were further hybridized with worms that can be delivered as adware/spyware it would crawl down browsers, bypassing both your firewall and your antivirus program, and then spew itself out via email and network probes to infect the soft candy center that exists at the heard of most networks. We've seen worms that do each of several very clever things. A worm that does all of them won't be stopped in time on today's networks.
If Witty had exploited LSASS instead of a second-tier firewall product, people in Hawaii would have woke up that morning to a Windows-free world. Kinda like the computer version of 28 Days Later where we *NIX users would be wandering around a nearly-empty internet wondering, "where did everybody go?" (Well, OK, most of us would be wondering, "Why is my network connection so fast today?")
It could happen with the next buffer-overflow exploit in anything on Windows that listens on any of the ports that we all know and loathe. A Witty/LSASS worm would have destroyed a significant percentage of the Windows systems in the world within two hours. I am left with questions.
Would managers of IT shops continue to act as though Windows insecurity isn't a problem?
Would Microsoft be able to get the CERT advisory revised a couple days later to strike the recommendation that customers consider using a more secure system?
If the world keeps licking the Microsoft Windows Tootsie Pop, eventually we're gonna know how many licks it takes.
Don't forget Borland SideKick , for DOS.
It is exactly zealotry and blind advocacy which helped Microsoft achieve market dominance despite significant technological and other serious shortcomings in their products. Don't give up one of your chief weapons so easily!
...how it was that a human laptop could talk to the alien mother ship in ID4. Independence Day continuity
Wikipedia is an interesting experiment, perhaps worthy of financial support, but it's by no means clear that the technology-supported-consensus-opinion facilitated by the wiki will yield information that is consistently unbiased fair and true. You describe this process as "democratic", which perhaps it is to some degree, but only those with access to the internet get to "vote". Since we know that participation in the internet remains skewed with respect to economic class, race, education level, and gender, some degree of bias and elitism is inherent in the wiki process -- at least until such time as internet access is truly universal.
So, "unbiased" seems at risk from the outset. It's not clear how to evaluate "fair" as applies to the non-editorial presentation of unbiased information. When it comes to information about history or current events, substantiated facts might be generally preferred over "fairness". Perhaps most history and other information would be perceived as unfair by someone, regardless of whether a majority voted it to be unbiased and factually true. Minority oppression is one of the greatest risks of a democratic process.
With respect to the ability of a democratic process to determine truth, consider the now classic case study of Al Gore's alleged claim to have invented the internet. Widely accepted and unquestioned by most people as a fact, Mr. Gore in truth made no such claim, even though variously measured majorities would almost certainly claim it to be true. Also consider that pollsters periodically test people's basic and strictly objective knowledge on some subject or another and find it sadly wanting.
The democratic process as a model for truth building seems a foundation of sand, at least so long as ignorance remains rampant.
If you work in a place where "security is EVERYTHING", then you should know that trust is *not* the bottom line.
Don't trust vendors.
Don't trust open source.
Trust no one.
Audit.
No, the inclusion of JBoss does not imply an end to WebObjects. Apple is using WebObjects for major initiatives like iTunes Music Store, as well as .Mac / iTools the online Apple Stores and various internal projects.
You post seems like a troll. (Sloppy Mods Boost Troll to "5, Insightful", Readers Annoyed.) Perhaps you were only careless, and you didn't mean to imply that WebObjects on the whole should be abandoned in favor of a J2EE application server. In fact, WebObjects is a marvelously productive development system and set of frameworks for building web applications and services. The application server part is cool, and it will be cooler when it's integrated with JBoss, but it's not the reason people use WebObjects.
WebObjects is a secret weapon for Apple, and for anybody that uses it.
None of these freedoms are hampered in any way by the MIT or BSD licenses, both of which protect the community freedom to use the original source, and yet do not attach virally to derivative works and do not place restrictions of any kind on derivative works.
Therefore, the copyleft exists for some other purposes. Others have suggested those might include restricting freedoms associated with derivative works, for reasons having more to do with politics than with free, as in beer or speech, software.
Hmm... Although my recollection may be distorted and dimmed by the passage of time, as I see it, Hatch has none of the properties of female genitalia, which in any case happen to be praiseworthy, rather than pejorative, on the whole.
Hatch is a puritan (religious nut-case?) with unabashed authoritarian tendencies leaning strongly toward fascist, which ought to be damnable enough. Hatch is also almost certainly eloquent enough to insult you directly, without missing, and instead offending your mom, your sister, and any female lovers you may have had.
One other weird bit of Hatch Trivia: Hatch makes music, lots and lots of it.
This review was stimulating, and filled me briefly with hope, then I crashed after pondering a bit. I'd like to think that we could look back on this someday as a turning point of some sort, perhaps the foundation of a new engineering discipline of documentation. Of course, lots of people thought (and probably still do) that SGML was the foundation and now we're building walls. And maybe it was, but SGML (and the derivatives HTML, XML, and future arbitrary useful DTD to come) suffer from some problems - external and cultural mostly. The technologies are somewhat complex, and there is a general lack of understanding about how to apply the technology to advantage.
The core concept of arbitrary display and formatting of structured text, which appears to underly this new work, remains alien to most of the people making business decisions and authoring documents. When you combine a vacuum style lack of good tools to author documentation in the target technology with a flood of readily available "old paradigm" authoring tools for making stuff look pretty (word processors and desktop publishing stuff) you get the explosion in documents that was seen in the 90's. You also get the tremendous resource drain as these docs are updated and reformatted for subsequent generations of word processor formats that continue to mix content and presentation. We also see a direct parallel problem with the amazing fanatical market success of programming environments where logic and presentation are mixed (MS.asp, PHP, etc.) over object oriented tools. Far, far more dynamic web sites are built "the old fashioned way" despite the availability of decent, even "better" authoring tools that exist in the object oriented world.
Unfortunately most organizations that produce and use documentation do so as an aside at best, or an afterthought at worst. Organizations typically don't value documentation highly enough to create job descriptions for skilled technical writers. Corporations with IT staffs of hundreds of people - managers, systems administrators, help desk workers, developers -- often don't have a single Technical Writer.
Take the help desk as a primary example. Just about every big company produces volumes of documentation for use by the help desk workers. Sadly, much of that documentation is created after the fact, by desperately struggling front line help desk workers themselves, who randomly try to assemble facts and myth about problem resolution. The folk creating the systems are generally not given sufficient time to develop and maintain documentation, often barely enough resources to develop the system in the first place, before moving to the next task. It's rare for companies even to realize the blatant "in your face" opportunities to save money by investing in better documentation.
If we can't get developers to understand this basic concept, how can we get front line help-desk workers who are writing documentation for themselves out of desperation and under the clock of "you still gotta answer twenty calls an hour and resolve 19 of the problems before hanging up"? Even better, how do we get a bureaucratic organization to invest in skilled technical writers?
It seems to me that to get to this point we will need to create authoring tools that are so powerful and easy to use that the authors of documentation don't need to think about the separation of content and formatting -- it "just happens" in the background. Anybody who writes such a tool gets to spend the rest of their life retired on a beach, earning twenty percent and drinking rum from hollowed out pineapple shells with little paper umbrellas in them.
Economists sometimes consider "external" costs. These are costs to the economy of an activity which may not result in a ledger entry (say, a direct cash outlay) under current accounting conventions, yet which may be valid costs to "the economy" as a whole. They may be costs actually borne by some third party not directly engaged in the given transaction, as in the case of pollution cleanup costs borne by the tax payer, or less easily measurable such as cancers caused by the pollution. Another commonly sited example would be sales of timber by the Federal government to a lumber company, which then cuts down an acre of forest. The public receive some amount of cash which may not reflect the total value of the acre of forest to the public, since the current accounting practices don't consider that forests are finite and that it may take hundreds of years to grow that acre back, or even if it can be grown back at all (some can't). Economists think about all the other things that can be done with a forest, and the value of those things, and the cost of putting the forest back on that acre.
If we borrow the Economist's perspective on "not really free" we can consider the open source world with respect to Linux, and the opportunity cost of all the time and energy flowing into Linux. Might Linux be a largely redundant "free UNIX-like operating system"? Would the open source movement be further ahead if all that energy had been put into BSD? Hard to estimate. Forward progress and innovation happen in both forks of the happy UNIX family, with advances shared to a significant degree. Clearly, however, there is also significant redundant effort. Maybe OS technology would advance faster with all that effort focused on a single open source operating system project.
On the other hand, there may be some upper limit on coordination of people (for example) that would prevent such increases in the pace of technological advance. Maybe the ideas just don't happen any faster. Even so, that energy could have been applied to some other open source effort, say a common object layer, or a next generation, high performance display architecture to replace X11, and then common user level applications built on top of that stuff, or maybe ease of use could be improved. These things have real value, and the extent to which they happen slower, or do not happen at all would be a real cost -- an opportunity cost -- to an economist. (Assuming of course that any economist thought about the contribution of open source to the GDP, which perhaps by now some do.)
Yet another way to spin "free" is that businesses and governments don't consider Linux to be "free" just because they can download an image of the installable OS. In fact, the licensing cost of the OS is not always even a significant line item on the cost sheet. This kind of "not really free" considers all the costs that go into a business activity. From this angle, consider the impact of platform choice on other costs like support, maintenance, development, migration to new platform, and downtime.
Free isn't always clear.
The day Solaris for Intel goes away is the day the community of Solaris-aware UNIX administrators begins to atrophy. If you see this coming, you'll want to sell your SUNW in lots over a period of months, rather than all at once the the day before this happens, so as not to arouse suspicion.
- will you be expected provide remote technical support?
- will she blame you for problems?
- will she be dependent on the system for business, for school, for communication with you, her family?
You will have fewer problems which require remote administration (including the "phone walk-through" type) if you get Mac OS X. If you are going to get the blame anyway, you probably want to minimize the number of technical support incidents. If you do wind up on the receiving end of a tech support call, it will be easier to guide her through a shorter sequence of steps on a system which is delightfully less opaque than Windows. You will also have more reliable, simpler, and more secure options for performing remote administration of the laptop, in the unlikely event that it's needed.There seems to be a gender difference of note. In general, women seem to be unconcerned with the Windows vs. Mac debate. In contrast to their Monty Python-quoting, code-writing, slashdot-trolling boyfriends, most computer-using women are aware of the debate, but seem not to care. Women seem sincerely more interested in how easy it is to do what they want, which is typically: surf the web, check email, send and receive pictures in email, edit pictures, and listen to mp3 audio. They often want an email address book.
Women will almost all tell you that the iBook or the PowerBook is "cute" -- and they mean basically the same thing when they say it about you: they know it when they see it. Perhaps it translates something like: "I don't want something that weighs twice what it should and looks like a prop from an SF fan movie set with a bunch of extra mystery buttons all over that are trying and failing to impress".
One other bit relevant only to the PC world... if you put a woman in front of a trackpad and an IBM-nipple they universally prefer the trackpad. For reasons that I suspect are Freudian, about half of men prefer the nipple thing. I myself don't grok that, since it's very easy to demonstrate that even the people who *prefer* the nipple thing can control the pointer more efficiently with a trackpad. And it's really not much of a substitute for an actual nipple.
They all still use, and are universally thrilled with their PowerBooks -- and none have traded in for a different geek. (The sample size is small, so YMMV).
Finally, if she's at all interested in the iLife stuff, especially movie making, you'll want to get her any PowerBook, rather than the iBook, since the AltiVec in the G4 will be notably faster for that stuff than the G3.
What about...
4. Put some amount of energy into improving the Carbon based MSIE, and keep it tracking the features of the Windows MSIE.
Microsoft probably doesn't even notice the "browser wars" on Mac OS X. Given the relative size of the market, it's more like a bar fight than a riot even, much less a war.
Apple, on the other hand, was almost certainly suffering on the sales front. Several different browser projects on the platform failed to produce a single competative browser, as compared to those available on Windows. They really needed to get a competive browser onto the sales floor and into the forum discussions.
With desperation providing acute incentive, somebody at Apple came up with a brilliant idea on how to fix that problem in a really interesting way -- based on an open source library that could be used for other browsers, and other non-browser software packages, too.
It seems to be working, with discussion comments like "Sarfari is blindingly fast" rather than, "Mac OS X is infuriatingly slow".
I'm not a fan of the Carbon Finder either, but the reasons behind it are not entirely incomprehensible. Apple needed to demonstrate a major, important, if-it-doesn't-work-it's-show-stopping application in Carbon, so they could keep multiple teams focused on the Carbon framework. Most of the other major apps were destined to be Cocoa apps, so the Finder seems a natural choice. The Carbon Finder was also derived to some degree from a Classic Mac OS code base -- making it an even better demonstration for Microsoft, Adobe and the gang.
If it had been put to a vote, I would have voted twice for a Cocoa Finder, hired some thugs to close the polls early in the Carbon-voting districtists in Florida, made quiet promises to a few media conglomerates to make sure the questions didn't run too deep, maybe bought me a judge or two, and helped some ballot boxes get lost...