In an ideal world, we'd all be voting Libertarian. You know, limited government, lower taxes, and personal freedoms. Unfortunately everybody is so afraid of "wasting" a vote than they only vote Democrat or Republican. To me, though, both partied are ruined past the point of no return. Something has to change.
I'm pretty sure that most people would support a political ideology that supports small government, free markets, and civil liberties. However, there are many more reasons why there isn't a lot of Libertarian voters:
Lack of awareness and knowledge of the party. If you ask any person on the street about the Libertarian Party, most people wouldn't know who they are. And the few who have heard of them and aren't libertarians themselves have some misconceptions about the party or libertarianism itself.
Radical libertarian (nearly anarchocapitalist) platform. The Libertarian Party's platform needs to be progressive (incrementalist), not radical. Re-read the platform. I agree with much of the platform, but some areas (such as lack of support for anti-discrimination laws, eventual removal of all taxation, privatization of the Interstate Highway System, complete elimination of all social programs, complete elimination of education funding, etc.) is much too radical for many people to support (and I mostly only mentioned criticism from the left; I am an ex-Democrat after all (most libertarians that I know of are ex-Republicans; I am a bit different). Some conservative criticisms of libertarianism come from the drug policy, immigration policy, and abortion policy). Libertarians need to adopt an incrementalist policy with interim measures. For example, before we cut off all funding for education, let's bring school choice within the public school system first. Then, after a decade or two of that, we'll implement school vouchers. Next, after another 20 years, we'll privatize all of the schools (but still giving out vouchers). Finally, during a 20-year period, we'll gradually eliminate funding, from the rich to the poor. As the decades roll on, the government has less and less control over education until, one day, the government has no control anymore. You don't get to the last step radically; you get there in increments. (Note: this isn't an endorsement of complete removal of education funding; I support it on a local and state level. This is just an example of turning a radical libertarian goal into a incrementalist goal).
General lack of well-known candidates. If only Arnold were a libertarian....
If the Libertarian Party and libertarianism are to defeat the Republicrats and most leftist and neo- and social conservative political activity, they must follow those steps above, especially #2. I look forward to a political party that knows what classical liberalism and libertarianism really is.
...but this comic is lame. Look at this page and the previous one. Somebody gets an A just because they didn't use a bootleg version of the textbook? Give me a break.
There is also another page in the copyright comic that seems to confuse one issue (collaborate research and somebody trying to take all of the credit) with copyright law. The comic ended in a cliffhanger after a few pages, but I don't think this comic book is effective at all (not to mention lame), and the comic confuses issues, too.
When I think of engineering mistakes, the CypressFreeway comes to mind. A double-decker freeway built on soil that isn't solid in an earthquake-prone area is a disaster waiting to happen.
The former double-decker section of 880 has since been replaced with a new, single decker structure a bit to the west of the original alignment. The cost of that new, short freeway section was $1.13 billion dollars, more expensive than the costs of LA's Century Freeway (105), IIRC.
If you ever require the user to edit a config file by hand -- or drop to the command line, for that matter -- you have failed.
By these standards, then I guess Windows has been nothing but a failure that would never reach the masses, since sometimes in order to fix something, you need to drop into either the registry or text files. Have to change a registry value? Oops; Windows is a complete failure.
You might want to look at the logic of your post again. Just because a product isn't perfect doesn't mean that it is a failure. Windows 95 crashed all of the time for me when I used it (but I managed to deal with that, allieviate much of the problems, and be productive); does that make Winodws 95 a complete failure?
I'd learn Unix first. Download yourself an emulator (I'm not telling you to switch to Unix) and a Linux or FreeBSD distribution (or open up Terminal.app if you have a OS X Mac), get yourself a Unix book or online Unix tutorial, and start learning some basic Unix commands. Once you are bored with ls, grep, and friends, learn how to set up X11 and basic system administration skills. Having a grasp of Unix will help you out in a lot more areas than one would imagine at first.
Much of computer technology (scripting languages, web development, etc.) seems to revolve around the ideas of Unix, even if you're doing all of this stuff on a Windows box. Learning Unix is very beneficial, even if you end up hating it and stick to Windows as your desktop OS. Learning Perl will also be much easier coming from a Unix perspective rather than coming from a Windows perspective.
Traditionally, logic is studied as a branch of philosophy. Since the mid-nineteenth century logic has been commonly studied in mathematics, and, even more recently, in computer science. As a formal science, logic investigates and classifies the structure of statements and arguments, both through the study of formal systems of inference and through the study of arguments in natural language. The scope of logic can therefore be very large, ranging from core topics such as the study of fallacies and paradoxes, to specialist analyses of reasoning such as probably correct reasoning and arguments involving causality.
Philosophy is a lot more logical than most people would assume at first glance.
Personally, I think every type you mention, including Libertarian, falls under the Anarcho-Capitalist banner
Anarchocapitalism is free-market anarchism; there is no government at all. All of the other types of political philosophies that I've mentioned (except for the Austrian school, which is mostly anarchocapitalistic) wants small government, not anarchy. Now, how small they want the government depends on the person and the ideology.
A libertarian isn't one who follows whatever the Libertarian Party says (for future reference, a capital L refers to the party, while a lowercase l refers to the ideology. For example, a democrat is somebody who belives in democracy, while a Democrat is somebody who follows the Democratic Party). There are libertarians in the Republican Party and in the Democratic Party (their platforms differ slightly from the Libertarian Party's platform, but are still in line with libertarianism). There are independent libertarians as well.
The Libertarian Party isn't the only definition of libertarianism. You have multiple types of people who fall under the libertarian banner:
Classical liberals (they call themselves libertarians because the word liberal has come to mean social democracy in the US).
Minarchists
Goldwater conservatives (libertarians who choose to fall under the conservative banner)
Anarchocapitalists (and I don't think an anarchocapitalist would support net neutrality)
Objectivists (although Ayn Rand despised the libertarian movement
Austrian economists (Mises, Rothbard, etc.)
Chicago economists (Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, etc.)
Neolibertarians (libertarians with neoconservative foreign policy)
And the list goes on....
Libertarians believe in free markets and liberty, but how they plan on implementing both (as well as how far they'll go) is different. You have libertarians (like myself) who support anti-trust laws, whereas you have other libertarians who don't support any government regulation of business at all. You have libertarians who are pro-choice, while you have libertarians who are pro-life (and both derive their arguments from the same libertarian axioms). It is said that if you get 10 libertarians in the room, you can get up to 11 different ideas.
I'm from California, and I went to a charter school from ninth grade until high school graduation. (I now attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo). Charter schools in California are publicly funded and answer to their parent school district. However, they don't have a lot of the bureaucracy that the regular public schools have, and they can accept anybody living in the county that the charter school is located in (unlike regular public schools, which have strict boundary lines).
The charter school system was a godsend to my family and me. I live in a neighborhood with very bad schools. My parents always drove me miles out to better schools. We used to do intra- and inter-district transfers, but after elementary school, it is much harder to do. Charter schools enable families in bad neighborhoods a tuition-free alternative, and many charter schools are high quality.
If they do it poorly, charter schools will eat them alive.
There is just one problem with your theory. Charter schools are public schools (just without much of the bureaucracy). The parent school district of the charter schools can cut them loose if they don't meet their "standards." In other words, if charter schools become too numerous, the leaders over the regular schools would fight tooth and nail for them to stop gaining too much power.
I Personally wish that people would stop consuming, and giving creed to closed OSes
Why? Some people need proprietary OSes and software in order to do their jobs. Some people need it because the best tools are available only in Windows or OS X. Some people use proprietary software simply because they like it better than the FOSS alternatives (provided that they know about the alternatives).
I'm a user of proprietary software every day (although I'm also a FreeBSD user). People aren't going to switch to FOSS software for everything until it does everything that the best closed source software does (plus more)., and very easily too.
Of course, with Microsoft involved, you know that 80% of these comments are saying it'll be a crappy product without even having tried it.
I'm not in that 80 percent, even though I don't know where you got those numbers from. I did try out MS Office 2007 Beta today. I was completely unimpressed. Simple things from items that used to be in the Standard and Formatting toolbar (such as Open and Chart in Excel) required two clicks instead of one. Some tab choices (such as in Excel, Chart was under Insert instead of Data or Formula; how intiutive is that? In Excel 97-2003, it is on the default toolbar) were completely unintiutive to me. Zero customization of toolbars and menus are allowed; if you don't like it, tough. Almost everything that can take me one click (or two clicks at the most) in Office 2000 required extra clicks in Office 2007. My text seemed double-spaced anything I pressed with ENTER by default (I had to click on a different style to get it to ). When I uninstalled Office 2007 and reinstalled Office 2000, I felt a sigh of relief. Office 2000 allows me to adapt the application to my needs (customizing toolbars, for example). Office 2007 wants to force me to do tasks the way that the "grand UI gods" want me to do it, whether it is suitable for me or not.
I'm not opposed to learning new things. I'm currently learning LaTeX, which is a very good typesetting language and packages that produces high-quality documents. I constantly learn new programming languages and other subjects. Learning is my passion. However, when you are learning a tool, you want to work with tools that are best for you. MS Office 2007, frankly, doesn't cut it for me. It feels like a downgrade from MS Office 2000 (and some would say that MS Office 97 is the high water mark for Office, but I use 2000 instead of 97 because of better compatability with dealing with 2002 and 2003 documents).
Now, in defense of Office 2007, I would say that they have done a spectacular job with font anti-aliasing; I felt that I was using an OS X machine (compared to Office 2000). Office 2007 did open my older Office documents quite well. However, it isn't worth the purchase to me, and I'll still hang on to my Office 2000 disk. Just like many WordPerfect 5.1 users still haven't "upgraded" to MS Word, I won't "upgrade" to MS Office 2007; if I must buy MS Office, I'd get the latest Mac version (provided that they don't Vistafy that version).
Imagine trying to sell a new version of Windows/Office that looks exactly the same as the previous version of Windows/Office. They have to do something to make them look different.
Yeah, I agree, but I wish they made themseleves look different in a better way. Look at how Apple made the switch from OS 9 (an already excellent interface, IMO) and NeXTSTEP (I would like to try out NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP for Intel just to see if the praise for this interface is true) to OS X (an even more excellent interface with a combination of OS 9 ideas, NeXTSTEP ideas, and new ideas such as Aqua). In comparison, compare Windows 2000 (the high water mark of Windows, IMO), to Windows XP's Luna (I hate it; I use Classic on all XP machines I see), to Vista (which, although nicer looking than Luna, has too many gratitious menu changes and other annoyances for me to like).
I'd buy a new version of Windows only if the architecture behind it substantially improves. If MS used WinFS or some other innovative file system, learned a few things from Apple and worked on improving Windows Classic even further instead of adding gratitious changes, added real security, came with a good command line (MS is working on one, I believe), and worked fantastically well on a 950MHz Duron with 384MB RAM, I'd be the first in line to buy that version of Windows. The sad thing is that Vista was supposed to be all of things (and more), but most of the interesting, architectural stuff was gutted out.
Because for every power user, there are 100s of regular users.
Problem is, most of those regular users are already accustomed to the Windows 95-esque and Office 97-esque interface, not this newfangled Vista stuff. For example, my parents are regular users and they still use Windows 95 and Office 97. Yet they have no trouble using Word, Excel, and those applications. Same with my siblings who, while very computer literate, they don't plan on coding and all of that other fun stuff. They can use classic Windows with very little difficulty. The classic Windows interface just works. Throw most regular users this Vista stuff with no menus, reorganized icons, and other stuff, and they will have to do a lot of retraining (just like how Windows 3.1 users had to switch to Windows 95, except I believe the XP-Vista switch of interfaces is worse compared to the 3.1-95 switch). It is a completely different OS; you might as well hand them a Mac (which has familiar menus, toolbars, a dock, and other features) or even KDE/GNOME (which is even more Windows-like; and no, this isn't a slam).
Don't think that regular users are cavemen and cavewomen who barely know how to use a computer. Regular users have a lot more computing experience than most of us CSers, UI people, and other computer professionals think. That's the problem with UI people; they want to design UIs for complete noobs, yet most people aren't complete noobs (but not exactly power users, either). I say, keep the old Office interface that we've been using since 1995. It works, and it works quite well. Any gratitious changes (like Office 2007 and Vista) would just make users think twice about getting a PC and think more about getting a Mac or switching to *nix (hey, you already have to learn a new interface with Vista; some people might as well switch OSes).
Right from the start, you'll notice the most significant change to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and many screens in Outlook 2007. Gone are the familiar toolbars and menus; they've been replaced by "ribbons" that house a variety of buttons, icons and graphics (see Figure 1). The ribbons have a dual purpose: to highlight features that users are likely to use most often or want most (but have trouble finding), and to promote features at the point they're most useful.
WTF? But I like my menu bars and toolbars, thank you very much. Menu bars has been a part of Windows since 1985 (and the Mac since 1983 thanks to the Lisa). I think most users would have a hard time understanding "ribbons"; I don't like it when programs try to be "smart" and hide features away from me. There must be an option to use the old menus and toolbars in Office 2007; if not, then I'm not buying it.
I find that Vista and Office 2007 seems to change menus around and get rid of long-standing GUI features for no apparent usability reason. What's wrong with the old Windows interface? To me, the Windows 2000 interface was the perfect user interface; I still use Classic on my Windows XP partition, and even my KDE desktop on FreeBSD is reminiscent of Windows 2000. I used Vista for a while; I'm not too impressed. Microsoft can take my copy of Office 2000 (I'd still happily be using Office 97 if somebody didn't give me his upgrade disks) and Windows XP when it pries it from my cold, dead fingers. When XP and Office 2000 become obsolete, I would have long switched to FreeBSD and OS X with OpenOffice by then (I'm already a FreeBSD user, too; I just need to buy a Mac to make the switch complete).
Why must they change the interface when the old one worked so well?
It depends on your definition of operating system. You don't need a 800MHz machine with 512MB RAM to run even an advanced OS kernel, but you do if the OS is loaded with heavy graphics, multimedia features, background security programs, and other stuff.
As for me, I'm sticking with XP and FreeBSD. I don't think my fastest machine, a 950MHz Duron with 384MB RAM, a 60GB harddrive, and a Voodoo 3 graphics card with 16MB video RAM cuts the mustard for Vista. Windows XP and FreeBSD (with KDE 3.4) runs very well on this machine; I don't feel a noticeable speed bump when I use faster machines (although I felt a huge speed bump compared to my 266MHz Pentium II laptop with 64MB RAM, running FreeBSD with WindowMaker).
It sure irritates me to see BSD groups actually helping proprietary vendors compete against open source. Thanks buddy. Stallman got at least one thing right.
But you don't understand the point of BSD. BSD wants its software used. It doesn't matter to BSD users/developers if somebody uses their code and doesn't keep it open. BSD doesn't mind if Microsoft wants to use the code (and they do, just grep for "University of California" in ftp.exe in Windows). BSD is simply about creating good software and watching its work being used in some shape or form everywhere.
It looks like OS X is taking a few tips from the 80s. Most Unix developers are accustomed to having access to the source code for the system; this dates back to the mid-1970s when universities bought Unix licenses from AT&T including source code to study. This practice ended in the 1980s when source code licenses from AT&T started to cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, we get BSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and even the original Unix sources (from Caldera). Having access to the source code of the kernel is useful for understanding how the system works, creating device drivers, and optimizing the performance (research experiments, for example). Removing the kernel source code is a loss. As a FreeBSD user, closed-source Unix just doesn't make sense to me, and this removes one incentive of the Mac (although I'm still planning on getting one).
Then again, NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were completely closed source (but that was due to AT&T licensing; BSD wasn't fully unencumbered until about 1994), so I guess most NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP users who switched to the Mac have no concept of having access to source code.
Meanwhile, the baby's mother (a hot Brazillian model) is not told about the cameras. The baby's father (the rich MIT geek) is clueless why his buddies picked HIS house to do the experiment.
There is one problem with that joke. Since when did hot models marry (or even date) us geeks, rich or not? Disprove my conjecture, please.
Agreed. I am currently a 1st year CS major. I was planning on buying a MacBook Pro, but after this announcement, I'm getting the MacBook. $1049 (price with student discount) for a nice, fast Apple laptop with nearly the same specs as the entry MacBook Pro (only smaller screen and Intel integrated graphics) is literally a dream come true for me.
Education means nothing if you do nothing with it. Linus has applied his education very well and progress well beyond anything Tanenbaum has accomplished, with or without a doctorate...
If it weren't for Tanenbaum, there would be no Minix for Linus Torvalds to try to improve on.
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I'm pretty sure that most people would support a political ideology that supports small government, free markets, and civil liberties. However, there are many more reasons why there isn't a lot of Libertarian voters:
If the Libertarian Party and libertarianism are to defeat the Republicrats and most leftist and neo- and social conservative political activity, they must follow those steps above, especially #2. I look forward to a political party that knows what classical liberalism and libertarianism really is.
...but this comic is lame. Look at this page and the previous one. Somebody gets an A just because they didn't use a bootleg version of the textbook? Give me a break.
There is also another page in the copyright comic that seems to confuse one issue (collaborate research and somebody trying to take all of the credit) with copyright law. The comic ended in a cliffhanger after a few pages, but I don't think this comic book is effective at all (not to mention lame), and the comic confuses issues, too.
When I think of engineering mistakes, the Cypress Freeway comes to mind. A double-decker freeway built on soil that isn't solid in an earthquake-prone area is a disaster waiting to happen.
The former double-decker section of 880 has since been replaced with a new, single decker structure a bit to the west of the original alignment. The cost of that new, short freeway section was $1.13 billion dollars, more expensive than the costs of LA's Century Freeway (105), IIRC.
By these standards, then I guess Windows has been nothing but a failure that would never reach the masses, since sometimes in order to fix something, you need to drop into either the registry or text files. Have to change a registry value? Oops; Windows is a complete failure.
You might want to look at the logic of your post again. Just because a product isn't perfect doesn't mean that it is a failure. Windows 95 crashed all of the time for me when I used it (but I managed to deal with that, allieviate much of the problems, and be productive); does that make Winodws 95 a complete failure?
I'd learn Unix first. Download yourself an emulator (I'm not telling you to switch to Unix) and a Linux or FreeBSD distribution (or open up Terminal.app if you have a OS X Mac), get yourself a Unix book or online Unix tutorial, and start learning some basic Unix commands. Once you are bored with ls, grep, and friends, learn how to set up X11 and basic system administration skills. Having a grasp of Unix will help you out in a lot more areas than one would imagine at first.
Much of computer technology (scripting languages, web development, etc.) seems to revolve around the ideas of Unix, even if you're doing all of this stuff on a Windows box. Learning Unix is very beneficial, even if you end up hating it and stick to Windows as your desktop OS. Learning Perl will also be much easier coming from a Unix perspective rather than coming from a Windows perspective.
From Wikipedia:
Philosophy is a lot more logical than most people would assume at first glance.
Anarchocapitalism is free-market anarchism; there is no government at all. All of the other types of political philosophies that I've mentioned (except for the Austrian school, which is mostly anarchocapitalistic) wants small government, not anarchy. Now, how small they want the government depends on the person and the ideology.
A libertarian isn't one who follows whatever the Libertarian Party says (for future reference, a capital L refers to the party, while a lowercase l refers to the ideology. For example, a democrat is somebody who belives in democracy, while a Democrat is somebody who follows the Democratic Party). There are libertarians in the Republican Party and in the Democratic Party (their platforms differ slightly from the Libertarian Party's platform, but are still in line with libertarianism). There are independent libertarians as well.
The Libertarian Party isn't the only definition of libertarianism. You have multiple types of people who fall under the libertarian banner:
Libertarians believe in free markets and liberty, but how they plan on implementing both (as well as how far they'll go) is different. You have libertarians (like myself) who support anti-trust laws, whereas you have other libertarians who don't support any government regulation of business at all. You have libertarians who are pro-choice, while you have libertarians who are pro-life (and both derive their arguments from the same libertarian axioms). It is said that if you get 10 libertarians in the room, you can get up to 11 different ideas.
I'm from California, and I went to a charter school from ninth grade until high school graduation. (I now attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo). Charter schools in California are publicly funded and answer to their parent school district. However, they don't have a lot of the bureaucracy that the regular public schools have, and they can accept anybody living in the county that the charter school is located in (unlike regular public schools, which have strict boundary lines).
The charter school system was a godsend to my family and me. I live in a neighborhood with very bad schools. My parents always drove me miles out to better schools. We used to do intra- and inter-district transfers, but after elementary school, it is much harder to do. Charter schools enable families in bad neighborhoods a tuition-free alternative, and many charter schools are high quality.
There is just one problem with your theory. Charter schools are public schools (just without much of the bureaucracy). The parent school district of the charter schools can cut them loose if they don't meet their "standards." In other words, if charter schools become too numerous, the leaders over the regular schools would fight tooth and nail for them to stop gaining too much power.
Our school system needs to change.
Why? Some people need proprietary OSes and software in order to do their jobs. Some people need it because the best tools are available only in Windows or OS X. Some people use proprietary software simply because they like it better than the FOSS alternatives (provided that they know about the alternatives).
I'm a user of proprietary software every day (although I'm also a FreeBSD user). People aren't going to switch to FOSS software for everything until it does everything that the best closed source software does (plus more)., and very easily too.
I'm not in that 80 percent, even though I don't know where you got those numbers from. I did try out MS Office 2007 Beta today. I was completely unimpressed. Simple things from items that used to be in the Standard and Formatting toolbar (such as Open and Chart in Excel) required two clicks instead of one. Some tab choices (such as in Excel, Chart was under Insert instead of Data or Formula; how intiutive is that? In Excel 97-2003, it is on the default toolbar) were completely unintiutive to me. Zero customization of toolbars and menus are allowed; if you don't like it, tough. Almost everything that can take me one click (or two clicks at the most) in Office 2000 required extra clicks in Office 2007. My text seemed double-spaced anything I pressed with ENTER by default (I had to click on a different style to get it to ). When I uninstalled Office 2007 and reinstalled Office 2000, I felt a sigh of relief. Office 2000 allows me to adapt the application to my needs (customizing toolbars, for example). Office 2007 wants to force me to do tasks the way that the "grand UI gods" want me to do it, whether it is suitable for me or not.
I'm not opposed to learning new things. I'm currently learning LaTeX, which is a very good typesetting language and packages that produces high-quality documents. I constantly learn new programming languages and other subjects. Learning is my passion. However, when you are learning a tool, you want to work with tools that are best for you. MS Office 2007, frankly, doesn't cut it for me. It feels like a downgrade from MS Office 2000 (and some would say that MS Office 97 is the high water mark for Office, but I use 2000 instead of 97 because of better compatability with dealing with 2002 and 2003 documents).
Now, in defense of Office 2007, I would say that they have done a spectacular job with font anti-aliasing; I felt that I was using an OS X machine (compared to Office 2000). Office 2007 did open my older Office documents quite well. However, it isn't worth the purchase to me, and I'll still hang on to my Office 2000 disk. Just like many WordPerfect 5.1 users still haven't "upgraded" to MS Word, I won't "upgrade" to MS Office 2007; if I must buy MS Office, I'd get the latest Mac version (provided that they don't Vistafy that version).
Yeah, I agree, but I wish they made themseleves look different in a better way. Look at how Apple made the switch from OS 9 (an already excellent interface, IMO) and NeXTSTEP (I would like to try out NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP for Intel just to see if the praise for this interface is true) to OS X (an even more excellent interface with a combination of OS 9 ideas, NeXTSTEP ideas, and new ideas such as Aqua). In comparison, compare Windows 2000 (the high water mark of Windows, IMO), to Windows XP's Luna (I hate it; I use Classic on all XP machines I see), to Vista (which, although nicer looking than Luna, has too many gratitious menu changes and other annoyances for me to like).
I'd buy a new version of Windows only if the architecture behind it substantially improves. If MS used WinFS or some other innovative file system, learned a few things from Apple and worked on improving Windows Classic even further instead of adding gratitious changes, added real security, came with a good command line (MS is working on one, I believe), and worked fantastically well on a 950MHz Duron with 384MB RAM, I'd be the first in line to buy that version of Windows. The sad thing is that Vista was supposed to be all of things (and more), but most of the interesting, architectural stuff was gutted out.
Problem is, most of those regular users are already accustomed to the Windows 95-esque and Office 97-esque interface, not this newfangled Vista stuff. For example, my parents are regular users and they still use Windows 95 and Office 97. Yet they have no trouble using Word, Excel, and those applications. Same with my siblings who, while very computer literate, they don't plan on coding and all of that other fun stuff. They can use classic Windows with very little difficulty. The classic Windows interface just works. Throw most regular users this Vista stuff with no menus, reorganized icons, and other stuff, and they will have to do a lot of retraining (just like how Windows 3.1 users had to switch to Windows 95, except I believe the XP-Vista switch of interfaces is worse compared to the 3.1-95 switch). It is a completely different OS; you might as well hand them a Mac (which has familiar menus, toolbars, a dock, and other features) or even KDE/GNOME (which is even more Windows-like; and no, this isn't a slam).
Don't think that regular users are cavemen and cavewomen who barely know how to use a computer. Regular users have a lot more computing experience than most of us CSers, UI people, and other computer professionals think. That's the problem with UI people; they want to design UIs for complete noobs, yet most people aren't complete noobs (but not exactly power users, either). I say, keep the old Office interface that we've been using since 1995. It works, and it works quite well. Any gratitious changes (like Office 2007 and Vista) would just make users think twice about getting a PC and think more about getting a Mac or switching to *nix (hey, you already have to learn a new interface with Vista; some people might as well switch OSes).
WTF? But I like my menu bars and toolbars, thank you very much. Menu bars has been a part of Windows since 1985 (and the Mac since 1983 thanks to the Lisa). I think most users would have a hard time understanding "ribbons"; I don't like it when programs try to be "smart" and hide features away from me. There must be an option to use the old menus and toolbars in Office 2007; if not, then I'm not buying it.
I find that Vista and Office 2007 seems to change menus around and get rid of long-standing GUI features for no apparent usability reason. What's wrong with the old Windows interface? To me, the Windows 2000 interface was the perfect user interface; I still use Classic on my Windows XP partition, and even my KDE desktop on FreeBSD is reminiscent of Windows 2000. I used Vista for a while; I'm not too impressed. Microsoft can take my copy of Office 2000 (I'd still happily be using Office 97 if somebody didn't give me his upgrade disks) and Windows XP when it pries it from my cold, dead fingers. When XP and Office 2000 become obsolete, I would have long switched to FreeBSD and OS X with OpenOffice by then (I'm already a FreeBSD user, too; I just need to buy a Mac to make the switch complete).
Why must they change the interface when the old one worked so well?
Under Chinese law, aren't most Chinese businesses somewhat partly owned by the Chinese government?
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along" acquires an odd meaning in a story about the discovery of new planets.
It depends on your definition of operating system. You don't need a 800MHz machine with 512MB RAM to run even an advanced OS kernel, but you do if the OS is loaded with heavy graphics, multimedia features, background security programs, and other stuff.
As for me, I'm sticking with XP and FreeBSD. I don't think my fastest machine, a 950MHz Duron with 384MB RAM, a 60GB harddrive, and a Voodoo 3 graphics card with 16MB video RAM cuts the mustard for Vista. Windows XP and FreeBSD (with KDE 3.4) runs very well on this machine; I don't feel a noticeable speed bump when I use faster machines (although I felt a huge speed bump compared to my 266MHz Pentium II laptop with 64MB RAM, running FreeBSD with WindowMaker).
I would say that the Constitution has been an endangered species since May 1861, and has been extinct since March 1933.
But you don't understand the point of BSD. BSD wants its software used. It doesn't matter to BSD users/developers if somebody uses their code and doesn't keep it open. BSD doesn't mind if Microsoft wants to use the code (and they do, just grep for "University of California" in ftp.exe in Windows). BSD is simply about creating good software and watching its work being used in some shape or form everywhere.
It looks like OS X is taking a few tips from the 80s. Most Unix developers are accustomed to having access to the source code for the system; this dates back to the mid-1970s when universities bought Unix licenses from AT&T including source code to study. This practice ended in the 1980s when source code licenses from AT&T started to cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, we get BSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and even the original Unix sources (from Caldera). Having access to the source code of the kernel is useful for understanding how the system works, creating device drivers, and optimizing the performance (research experiments, for example). Removing the kernel source code is a loss. As a FreeBSD user, closed-source Unix just doesn't make sense to me, and this removes one incentive of the Mac (although I'm still planning on getting one).
Then again, NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were completely closed source (but that was due to AT&T licensing; BSD wasn't fully unencumbered until about 1994), so I guess most NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP users who switched to the Mac have no concept of having access to source code.
There is one problem with that joke. Since when did hot models marry (or even date) us geeks, rich or not? Disprove my conjecture, please.
Agreed. I am currently a 1st year CS major. I was planning on buying a MacBook Pro, but after this announcement, I'm getting the MacBook. $1049 (price with student discount) for a nice, fast Apple laptop with nearly the same specs as the entry MacBook Pro (only smaller screen and Intel integrated graphics) is literally a dream come true for me.
Thank you, Apple!
If it weren't for Tanenbaum, there would be no Minix for Linus Torvalds to try to improve on.
Isn't that you, Mac OS 9?