The fall of the Roman empire was attributed partly to the fact that the wealthy and affluent would drink wines out of lead vessels while the poor drank from animal sacks. The wealthy and powerful ended up poisoning their minds and allowed the barbarians to overun them. We may be doing the exact same thing with technology.
As self-appointed history nazi, I have to take issue with this characterization.
First of all, remember that there wasn't exactly an incredible increase in the technology of drinking vessels near the end of the roman empire. That is to say, people had been drinking out of basically the same types of cups for CENTURIES; why wouldn't they have gotten stupider sooner? Furthermore, I seem to recall that most of the systems used to transport water used lead, too, so it's not like the poor weren't getting their requisite doses, too.
Second, the whole idea of outside barbarians attacking the Roman Empire is a gross simplification and a misunderstanding of the numerous factors involved. Most salient is the fact that pretty much all of those barbarian attacks didn't start in barbarian lands; they were the results of "barbarians" who had been in the Roman Army, and correspondingly granted land for themselves and their descendants, becoming irrate over unfair taxation and denial of wages owed, and taking up arms against what had become THEIR empire. Simply put, the barbarians didn't overrun Rome; they were just what was left when it fell apart.
Yes, yes; offtopic, I know, but I have a bit of a pet peeve about inaccuracies, especially regarding the Middle Ages, the "history" of which most people have learned is basically less history and more a morality play created by Reniassance thinkers to suit their own agendas. Hell, even the NAME reveals the bias (there's the Classical period, and the Reniassance, and then all that stuff in the Middle that doesn't matter and didn't contain anything of value, according to the period thinkers who've shaped our views).
I think a more pertinent question is why Richard Nixon is *NOT* funny ^_^ Seriously, the man's appearence, cadance, and general, overall "image" is friggin' hilarious.
On a more serious note, yes, a non-insignifcant percentage of the humor is low-brow and celebrity driven. But it's still *FUNNY* much more often than it has any right to be.
Lucy Liu-bot: "I'll never forget you, Fry! *MEMORY FILES DELETED*"
They may well fall more like the Romans than the Nazis - by transmorgrifying into another powerful entity that dominates the whole of what it surveys, such as the way the Roman Imperium became the Roman Papacy that held sway over all of Medieval Europe.
Excuse me for a moment while I indulge in a bit of history geek-ery (it's sort of like being a grammer nazi, only with the history of the world ^_^;;).
The rise of the Catholic church is not, as many/.ers and other folks believe, some kind of monolithic result of careful Roman planning. In the early days of the Christian church, even after the conversion of Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as a legitimate state religion (and the subsequent transformations this entailed for it due to the integration with the existing culture of worship), there came to be basically a group of Archbishops who were considered important (basically, the Archbishops from the various major cities held by Rome; Antioch, Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, etc). As the Roman empire began to "dissolve" (a very simplistic analysis of the forces at work, but in the interest of time, we'll leave off that discussion as that is "good enough."), these various cities began to become more and more isolated, as did the individual churches which offered services to members. As a result, their various canons (both in terms of what was included in the bible and their collections of canon law) began to diverge; this rate of dissolution was much faster in the west, however, due to the fact that there was only ONE major western Christian capitol (Rome) and due to the fact that the western Roman empire fragmented well before the Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantines, as we call them; they just called themselves "Romaioi," which is the greek word for Roman).
When Charlemagne conquered france, most of Germany, and much of Italy (including Rome), one of the important and often overlooked things that he did was to standardize the canon law by taking one version of it and mandating that all churches use that version. The standard canon law he chose was the canon of Rome, which, unsurprisingly, had a lot to say about how cool Rome was, and why the Archbishop of Rome (commonly addressed as simply "Father," from which the word Pope is derived [the early Italian word for Father, that is]). As a result, all of the territories controlled by Charlemange had this version of canon law that talked about how the Pope was the inheritor of Peter, etc.
Note that this didn't really matter that much, since the Pope, like every Bishop and Priest at the time, derived all of his authority from the Feudal Authority; that is, for the most part, "Bishop" was just another feudal title, whose responsibilities also included watching over the church. This didn't start to change until the 1000s, when the controversy over lay investiture began, and the Pope had about 100-150 years of actual, considerable power, due to the fact that the majority of feudal lords decided that what he said *WAS* important, even when it didn't serve their own interest. After the events culminating in the Slap of Anange (sipcw--spelling is probably completly wrong), the pope went back to being just another feudal lord with a lot of really good PR; that is, his endorsement was *valued*, but it wasn't depended on.
Anyway, that's my pedantic rant on the rise of the authority of Rome in the Catholic church. In conclusion, blame the French ^_^
I've never even met this alien civilization and I already want to convert to Jedi.:-)
. . . which is particularly funny, because there are more registered voters in britain who list their religion as "Jedi" than there are who list themselves as "Jewish." ^_^
Here's the idea: presuming, for a moment, nano-machines that are able to self replicate, etc. and are semi autonomous, how are they siginificantly distinguishable from cells? That is to say, once you've designed a single autnomous machine capable of reproducing itself and recovering energy & raw materials from its environment, it becomes fundamentally indistiguishable from a single-celled life form, except that it is artificial.
This naturally leads to considering the idea of multi-"cellular" machines, which, taken to its logical extreme, could mean people made up of colonies of nano-machines adapted to a specific purpose (such as the processing of toxins, maintenance of form, etc; basically, organs & systems).
I can't think of a single practical application for this that couldn't be more easily filled by conventional people, but it's still probably the coolest application of the technology that I could think of.
Not likely; we're not talking, after all, about a programable microprocessor, but rather a biological set of molecules (like a conventional virus, if I RTFA correctly). It would be more like ROM, so it wouldn't be as vulnerable to gaining a "virus" in the computing sense.
OTOH, if we can reprogram a retrovirus in this way, presumably someone else could reprogram it another way, but the chances of them "hacking" these buggers already in your system is slim. After all, if they can manage that, it would probably be cheaper and more reliable just to infect you with something terrible to begin with, rather than recoding these things. Put another way, why wouldn't they just recode ALL your cells to be evil?
From that perspective, I welcome our new internally dwelling microscopic friends, as they'll be our best defense against our internally dwelling microscopic enemies, be they man made or naturally occuring.
Also of interest to note is that since Moore's Law is actually about transistors, there is quite an obvious upper-bound to be found, due to the fundamental granularity of matter, in that since there is (supposedly; i don't know how much farther down than quarks sub-sub atomic theory has gotten) a lower bound on the size of a particle. That is, since transistors have to be made of SOMETHING, and there is a lower bound on the size of *things*, there quite logically must be a limit to the number of transistors that could possibly fit within a given chip size.
Of course, that doesn't take into account the idea that a single particle could somehow be made to account for multiple transistors, but transistors made of a single sub-atomic particle capable of performing as several transistors? That's just taking things to their logical extreme ^_~
A microwave operates by a magnetron device, which is a circular chamber with a high voltage between the inner cathode and the outer walls. Electrons are emitted from the cathode and are accelerated toward the walls. However, a magnetic field causes them to spiral and create a rotating radial electric field which sweeps through a number of resonant cavities, which then resonate at microwave frequency. Hence a magnetron is a particle accelerator.
Brain: The accident also involved a packet of non-dairy creamer.
I think you, like many people, are misreading the service being provided by this company. They aren't offering to have you pay into their banks so that if SCO comes a knockin' you can just roll over and pay them with money from OSRM. Rather, what they are providing is material aid to your company so that you can take SCO to court and fight the charges. Therefore, it is only likely to be providing this aid to a few companies at a time, and can likely get injunctions to slow down any other cases in which they are involved. So, it's relatively unlikely that they'll be asked to pay all the claims at the same time.
I think the more important point is that we shouldn't make the assumption that SCO will be the only SCO. Unless somehow magically all of its cases end in "There cannot possibly under any circumstances be any code in Linux that wasn't meant to be there," which is TERRIBLY unlikely not only because of the innate absurdity of the court ruling on the potential "ownership" of every line of code, including those not material to the case, but also because none of the cases actually deal with the IP except for the Novell and Red Hat ones, one of which says SCO doesn't really own the code to begin with. Simply put, no matter what happens, there is still a vulnerability with open source with so many contributors that someone will view it as an easy target for stock-pumping litigation.
In light of this, it's much more obvious why a company might be willing to shell out $100,000 a year to reduce their risk of having to shell out $Millions to pay for legal defense or $millions in settlement fees.
The idea is a bit like malpractice insurance, in and of the fact that it's designed to indemnify its customers against frivolous lawsuits, but I think you've misidentified the intended customers.
The service is primarily designed to protect companies who are thinking about switching to Linux, but don't have the wherewithall to defend themselves against frivilous lawsuits arising from companies like SCO (and rest assured, even when they inevitably fail, chances are someone else will try to pull the same stunt sometime down the line). From what I could tell, it's as much a matter of providing legal defense as monetary re-imbursment for defending yourself against baseless allegations. Essentially, it's a service through which you are able to defend yourself, and fund that defense, against baseless accusations for scams like this. In large part, it seems to have been designed to help reduce the costs of going into litigation with these companies rather than rolling over and paying them their blood money (which is usually MUCH cheaper than actually paying for the lawyers and defense).
Here's the point, which I think a lot of people are missing: You're not defending yourself from some kind of mystical hole in Linux copyright, you're defending yourself against companies whose business model revolves around FUD about Linux copyright, and making yourself better able to take those claims to court, rather than settling, which just adds more fuel to the fire.
I think it's also worth pointing out that if your mail service provider filters for spam, guess what? Why, they ALREADY have a machine scanning the text of every message you send/receive and comparing it against a database.
Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough, but I don't really see how this is all that much different. They're comparing the data against lists of products that my e-mails suggest I might ACTUALLY be interested in, rather than random spam/useless banners. I, for one, would rather see a small text add for Tor fantasy novels rather than a giant, obnoxious, load-slowing banner for some moronic scam like the ones you get from Yahoo!.
Because by dragging it out in court, if they can get the injunction allowing them to continue their current practices until a final verdict is reached, they still win.
Allow me to elaborate: in cases such as this, it's usually (and anyone in Europe, please correct me if I'm wrong) fairly easy to get an injunction from the appeals court allowing the penalties to be put aside until the appeals court issues its ruling. So, during the 3-4 years in which the case is under consideration in the higher courts, Microsoft is free to continue its current practices. Thus, more people get used to (and come to expect) the WMP software. Therefore, even if the eventual verdict is wholly against them, they still have users who are most familiar with their software, and are thus more likely to use it even when presented with alternatives. As a result, they win, in spite of having lost in court.
This is basically the same thing that happened in the US antitrust case. By the time the settlement was actually reached, most users were more familiar with IE, and were more inclined to use it than any of the alternative browsers.
Actually, interesting to note is that this article is out of the Deseret News, which is both Utah based and heavily LDS, and yet the article tone was, to my reading, not actually "SCO Propaganda." For instance, while it does feature the aforementioned details, it also points out that Darl is disliked primarily for being "dishonest," and in overall content, features far more Anti info, and all of its "pro" info is directly and specifically attributed to Darl; obviously much more work was done to get the opinions of people on the other side (i count 6 definitely negative people and one "i don't think suing IBM is a good idea"). Hell, it even ends with the story of how ex-CEO Ransom Love ditched all his stock and considers the whole affair "tragic." Kinda hard to call this "propaganda."
Or, more accurately, "I, for one, welcome our new monkey-controlled robot overlords."
Remember, the first rule of comedy: Monkeys are funny. The second rule of comedy? Anything that is funny can be made more so by the addition of monkeys.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled/., already in progress.
I notice that most of the comments thus far seem to be along the lines of "We don't need to improve the interface, the users need to get better because they're too dumb to use it right, and they should just learn cause then they'll realize how much better it is!"
This is a common mistake made by programmers. The problem is that not that users are actually all that stupid. The problem is that we tend to think of things in terms of how they're doing something, whereas users want to think of them in terms of what they're doing. For example, I want to set up DHCP to distribute IPs to my OSX box so I can use SMB to pull MP3s off my XP box. This is not the way a user thinks; the average user wants to hook his Compaq to his Mac so he can move around his music. He doesn't want to know what any of those acronyms stand for. He just wants to accomplish a simple task.
Bottom line: the best way to write a good interface is not to think in terms of "what is my software doing" but rather in terms of "what is my user doing." Like my human interface design professor used to say, if people can't use your software, it's not because they're stupid, it's because you designed it poorly. Users prefer usable software to powerful software, when given the choice.
Another point to consider is that, in the eyes of the Managers of potential corporate users of your system, any time employees spent learning all the details of your software is time taken away from getting actual work done. Not to mention that sloppy interfaces that haven't been properly checked often actually COST most companies money, since their employees actually often take longer than it would have otherwise. Good interface design is not a luxury, it is a mandate.
Actually, I'd think it's more apt to describe it as:
Windows: McDonalds: Crappy food, Crappy service, but everyone knows where to find it and there's probably one close to your office. Still, it's usually easy enough for users to find, so they stick with it because they aren't willing to go the extra mile for a better experience.
Mac: A nicer burger joint; good service, great food, but still a resteraunt, so you still have to put up with stuff like "no shoes, no shirt, no service," and occasional mishaps from the waitstaff and chefs that make things less pleasant than they could be. Also, it's difficult to get anything but burgers, because they're a smaller chain.
Linux: A big potluck in the park, where a whole bunch of people gathered together to provide food for everyone. Food is good, but there's no menu, so you often have to wander around looking for what you really want. And you can bring your own if you'd like; if it's better than what someone else brought, theirs gets thrown out and you get their spot at the table, or if it's something new, they'll make room.
Yeah, I know; the metaphor now officially out of control. Somebody call the JDF!
Slashdot Mirror
So that'd be a no, then ^_~
As self-appointed history nazi, I have to take issue with this characterization.
First of all, remember that there wasn't exactly an incredible increase in the technology of drinking vessels near the end of the roman empire. That is to say, people had been drinking out of basically the same types of cups for CENTURIES; why wouldn't they have gotten stupider sooner? Furthermore, I seem to recall that most of the systems used to transport water used lead, too, so it's not like the poor weren't getting their requisite doses, too.
Second, the whole idea of outside barbarians attacking the Roman Empire is a gross simplification and a misunderstanding of the numerous factors involved. Most salient is the fact that pretty much all of those barbarian attacks didn't start in barbarian lands; they were the results of "barbarians" who had been in the Roman Army, and correspondingly granted land for themselves and their descendants, becoming irrate over unfair taxation and denial of wages owed, and taking up arms against what had become THEIR empire. Simply put, the barbarians didn't overrun Rome; they were just what was left when it fell apart.
Yes, yes; offtopic, I know, but I have a bit of a pet peeve about inaccuracies, especially regarding the Middle Ages, the "history" of which most people have learned is basically less history and more a morality play created by Reniassance thinkers to suit their own agendas. Hell, even the NAME reveals the bias (there's the Classical period, and the Reniassance, and then all that stuff in the Middle that doesn't matter and didn't contain anything of value, according to the period thinkers who've shaped our views).
Remind me again why Richard Nixon is funny?
I think a more pertinent question is why Richard Nixon is *NOT* funny ^_^ Seriously, the man's appearence, cadance, and general, overall "image" is friggin' hilarious.
On a more serious note, yes, a non-insignifcant percentage of the humor is low-brow and celebrity driven. But it's still *FUNNY* much more often than it has any right to be.
Lucy Liu-bot: "I'll never forget you, Fry! *MEMORY FILES DELETED*"
Excuse me for a moment while I indulge in a bit of history geek-ery (it's sort of like being a grammer nazi, only with the history of the world ^_^;;).
The rise of the Catholic church is not, as many /.ers and other folks believe, some kind of monolithic result of careful Roman planning. In the early days of the Christian church, even after the conversion of Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as a legitimate state religion (and the subsequent transformations this entailed for it due to the integration with the existing culture of worship), there came to be basically a group of Archbishops who were considered important (basically, the Archbishops from the various major cities held by Rome; Antioch, Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, etc). As the Roman empire began to "dissolve" (a very simplistic analysis of the forces at work, but in the interest of time, we'll leave off that discussion as that is "good enough."), these various cities began to become more and more isolated, as did the individual churches which offered services to members. As a result, their various canons (both in terms of what was included in the bible and their collections of canon law) began to diverge; this rate of dissolution was much faster in the west, however, due to the fact that there was only ONE major western Christian capitol (Rome) and due to the fact that the western Roman empire fragmented well before the Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantines, as we call them; they just called themselves "Romaioi," which is the greek word for Roman).
When Charlemagne conquered france, most of Germany, and much of Italy (including Rome), one of the important and often overlooked things that he did was to standardize the canon law by taking one version of it and mandating that all churches use that version. The standard canon law he chose was the canon of Rome, which, unsurprisingly, had a lot to say about how cool Rome was, and why the Archbishop of Rome (commonly addressed as simply "Father," from which the word Pope is derived [the early Italian word for Father, that is]). As a result, all of the territories controlled by Charlemange had this version of canon law that talked about how the Pope was the inheritor of Peter, etc.
Note that this didn't really matter that much, since the Pope, like every Bishop and Priest at the time, derived all of his authority from the Feudal Authority; that is, for the most part, "Bishop" was just another feudal title, whose responsibilities also included watching over the church. This didn't start to change until the 1000s, when the controversy over lay investiture began, and the Pope had about 100-150 years of actual, considerable power, due to the fact that the majority of feudal lords decided that what he said *WAS* important, even when it didn't serve their own interest. After the events culminating in the Slap of Anange (sipcw--spelling is probably completly wrong), the pope went back to being just another feudal lord with a lot of really good PR; that is, his endorsement was *valued*, but it wasn't depended on.
Anyway, that's my pedantic rant on the rise of the authority of Rome in the Catholic church. In conclusion, blame the French ^_^
-Z
"This is just a model."
*turns to offending Knight.*
SHHHHHHH!
On second thought, let's not go to the universe. It is a silly place.
. . . which is particularly funny, because there are more registered voters in britain who list their religion as "Jedi" than there are who list themselves as "Jewish." ^_^
Nanopeople!
Here's the idea: presuming, for a moment, nano-machines that are able to self replicate, etc. and are semi autonomous, how are they siginificantly distinguishable from cells? That is to say, once you've designed a single autnomous machine capable of reproducing itself and recovering energy & raw materials from its environment, it becomes fundamentally indistiguishable from a single-celled life form, except that it is artificial.
This naturally leads to considering the idea of multi-"cellular" machines, which, taken to its logical extreme, could mean people made up of colonies of nano-machines adapted to a specific purpose (such as the processing of toxins, maintenance of form, etc; basically, organs & systems).
I can't think of a single practical application for this that couldn't be more easily filled by conventional people, but it's still probably the coolest application of the technology that I could think of.
Utilize the letter "G" much? ^_~
Not likely; we're not talking, after all, about a programable microprocessor, but rather a biological set of molecules (like a conventional virus, if I RTFA correctly). It would be more like ROM, so it wouldn't be as vulnerable to gaining a "virus" in the computing sense.
OTOH, if we can reprogram a retrovirus in this way, presumably someone else could reprogram it another way, but the chances of them "hacking" these buggers already in your system is slim. After all, if they can manage that, it would probably be cheaper and more reliable just to infect you with something terrible to begin with, rather than recoding these things. Put another way, why wouldn't they just recode ALL your cells to be evil?
From that perspective, I welcome our new internally dwelling microscopic friends, as they'll be our best defense against our internally dwelling microscopic enemies, be they man made or naturally occuring.
Also of interest to note is that since Moore's Law is actually about transistors, there is quite an obvious upper-bound to be found, due to the fundamental granularity of matter, in that since there is (supposedly; i don't know how much farther down than quarks sub-sub atomic theory has gotten) a lower bound on the size of a particle. That is, since transistors have to be made of SOMETHING, and there is a lower bound on the size of *things*, there quite logically must be a limit to the number of transistors that could possibly fit within a given chip size.
Of course, that doesn't take into account the idea that a single particle could somehow be made to account for multiple transistors, but transistors made of a single sub-atomic particle capable of performing as several transistors? That's just taking things to their logical extreme ^_~
Brain: The accident also involved a packet of non-dairy creamer.
Lawyer: *Dumbfounded Pause* No further questions.
I think you, like many people, are misreading the service being provided by this company. They aren't offering to have you pay into their banks so that if SCO comes a knockin' you can just roll over and pay them with money from OSRM. Rather, what they are providing is material aid to your company so that you can take SCO to court and fight the charges. Therefore, it is only likely to be providing this aid to a few companies at a time, and can likely get injunctions to slow down any other cases in which they are involved. So, it's relatively unlikely that they'll be asked to pay all the claims at the same time.
I think the more important point is that we shouldn't make the assumption that SCO will be the only SCO. Unless somehow magically all of its cases end in "There cannot possibly under any circumstances be any code in Linux that wasn't meant to be there," which is TERRIBLY unlikely not only because of the innate absurdity of the court ruling on the potential "ownership" of every line of code, including those not material to the case, but also because none of the cases actually deal with the IP except for the Novell and Red Hat ones, one of which says SCO doesn't really own the code to begin with. Simply put, no matter what happens, there is still a vulnerability with open source with so many contributors that someone will view it as an easy target for stock-pumping litigation.
In light of this, it's much more obvious why a company might be willing to shell out $100,000 a year to reduce their risk of having to shell out $Millions to pay for legal defense or $millions in settlement fees.
Everybody Hates Marketing.
When I noticed his title, my immediate response was "They have professors? Mankind is DOOMED."
The idea is a bit like malpractice insurance, in and of the fact that it's designed to indemnify its customers against frivolous lawsuits, but I think you've misidentified the intended customers.
The service is primarily designed to protect companies who are thinking about switching to Linux, but don't have the wherewithall to defend themselves against frivilous lawsuits arising from companies like SCO (and rest assured, even when they inevitably fail, chances are someone else will try to pull the same stunt sometime down the line). From what I could tell, it's as much a matter of providing legal defense as monetary re-imbursment for defending yourself against baseless allegations. Essentially, it's a service through which you are able to defend yourself, and fund that defense, against baseless accusations for scams like this. In large part, it seems to have been designed to help reduce the costs of going into litigation with these companies rather than rolling over and paying them their blood money (which is usually MUCH cheaper than actually paying for the lawyers and defense).
Here's the point, which I think a lot of people are missing: You're not defending yourself from some kind of mystical hole in Linux copyright, you're defending yourself against companies whose business model revolves around FUD about Linux copyright, and making yourself better able to take those claims to court, rather than settling, which just adds more fuel to the fire.
I think it's also worth pointing out that if your mail service provider filters for spam, guess what? Why, they ALREADY have a machine scanning the text of every message you send/receive and comparing it against a database.
Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough, but I don't really see how this is all that much different. They're comparing the data against lists of products that my e-mails suggest I might ACTUALLY be interested in, rather than random spam/useless banners. I, for one, would rather see a small text add for Tor fantasy novels rather than a giant, obnoxious, load-slowing banner for some moronic scam like the ones you get from Yahoo!.
Because by dragging it out in court, if they can get the injunction allowing them to continue their current practices until a final verdict is reached, they still win.
Allow me to elaborate: in cases such as this, it's usually (and anyone in Europe, please correct me if I'm wrong) fairly easy to get an injunction from the appeals court allowing the penalties to be put aside until the appeals court issues its ruling. So, during the 3-4 years in which the case is under consideration in the higher courts, Microsoft is free to continue its current practices. Thus, more people get used to (and come to expect) the WMP software. Therefore, even if the eventual verdict is wholly against them, they still have users who are most familiar with their software, and are thus more likely to use it even when presented with alternatives. As a result, they win, in spite of having lost in court.
This is basically the same thing that happened in the US antitrust case. By the time the settlement was actually reached, most users were more familiar with IE, and were more inclined to use it than any of the alternative browsers.
-Z
Actually, interesting to note is that this article is out of the Deseret News, which is both Utah based and heavily LDS, and yet the article tone was, to my reading, not actually "SCO Propaganda." For instance, while it does feature the aforementioned details, it also points out that Darl is disliked primarily for being "dishonest," and in overall content, features far more Anti info, and all of its "pro" info is directly and specifically attributed to Darl; obviously much more work was done to get the opinions of people on the other side (i count 6 definitely negative people and one "i don't think suing IBM is a good idea"). Hell, it even ends with the story of how ex-CEO Ransom Love ditched all his stock and considers the whole affair "tragic." Kinda hard to call this "propaganda."
You're right. You're /.er #323026 ^_^
-Z
Or, more accurately, "I, for one, welcome our new monkey-controlled robot overlords."
Remember, the first rule of comedy: Monkeys are funny. The second rule of comedy? Anything that is funny can be made more so by the addition of monkeys.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled /., already in progress.
I notice that most of the comments thus far seem to be along the lines of "We don't need to improve the interface, the users need to get better because they're too dumb to use it right, and they should just learn cause then they'll realize how much better it is!"
This is a common mistake made by programmers. The problem is that not that users are actually all that stupid. The problem is that we tend to think of things in terms of how they're doing something, whereas users want to think of them in terms of what they're doing. For example, I want to set up DHCP to distribute IPs to my OSX box so I can use SMB to pull MP3s off my XP box. This is not the way a user thinks; the average user wants to hook his Compaq to his Mac so he can move around his music. He doesn't want to know what any of those acronyms stand for. He just wants to accomplish a simple task.
Bottom line: the best way to write a good interface is not to think in terms of "what is my software doing" but rather in terms of "what is my user doing." Like my human interface design professor used to say, if people can't use your software, it's not because they're stupid, it's because you designed it poorly. Users prefer usable software to powerful software, when given the choice.
Another point to consider is that, in the eyes of the Managers of potential corporate users of your system, any time employees spent learning all the details of your software is time taken away from getting actual work done. Not to mention that sloppy interfaces that haven't been properly checked often actually COST most companies money, since their employees actually often take longer than it would have otherwise. Good interface design is not a luxury, it is a mandate.
Actually, I'd think it's more apt to describe it as:
Windows: McDonalds: Crappy food, Crappy service, but everyone knows where to find it and there's probably one close to your office. Still, it's usually easy enough for users to find, so they stick with it because they aren't willing to go the extra mile for a better experience.
Mac: A nicer burger joint; good service, great food, but still a resteraunt, so you still have to put up with stuff like "no shoes, no shirt, no service," and occasional mishaps from the waitstaff and chefs that make things less pleasant than they could be. Also, it's difficult to get anything but burgers, because they're a smaller chain.
Linux: A big potluck in the park, where a whole bunch of people gathered together to provide food for everyone. Food is good, but there's no menu, so you often have to wander around looking for what you really want. And you can bring your own if you'd like; if it's better than what someone else brought, theirs gets thrown out and you get their spot at the table, or if it's something new, they'll make room.
Yeah, I know; the metaphor now officially out of control. Somebody call the JDF!
-Z