I agree with you, but I don't like it when people use words with multiple meanings in ways that are deliberately designed to blur those meanings and confuse things. The meaning of "subjective" to mean "It can never be false because its an opinion" and the meaning of subjective to mean "We don't know if it's true or false" are totally different things, and yet they are close enough to each other that people can use them interchangably to muddy the discussion and champion the cause of intellectual dulling-down of our culture. It is simply not true that all beliefs are equally valid in all cases, and if everyone acted as if that was the case, then there would be no science today.
I'm pretty sure the flat earth crowd or the Newton crowd would have been as strident as you are in insisting their world view was fact
If you think that, then you're wrong. What got them to stop was the very notion I'm championing - that objective reality exists and therefore it is possible to be wrong if testing your theory against the objective, real, existing, present, external-to-yourself universe shows it to be wrong. If the world was subjective, then the flat-earthers would still be "correct from a certain point of view" even today.
To be shown to be wrong, you must first accept that the issue under discussion is inherently objective. If you don't do that, then you can cling to any belief you feel like and evidence will never sway you away from it.
The "Everything is 100% subjective" crowd is NOT more humble than the objectivist crowd - just the opposite really - because they are setting up a situation in which they never have to admit to being mistaken.
It's not solipsism to admit and embrace one's limitations. It is, of course, part of the human condition to challenge those limitations and expand our abilities...but one first must know what those limitations are.
But admitting that an issue is unkonwn is different from claiming it is subjective. Something can be similtaneously objective and unknown. (To a certain degree, everything is at least slightly unknown.) But here's the difference between that mindset and the mindset expressed by some that I really despise: If a topic is objective but unknown, that means you could be wrong. If a topic is subjective, that means you cannot ever be wrong nor can you ever be right, no matter what you say, since it's all just opinions. Taking everything as subjective is a backhanded way to try to absolve one's self of all responsibility to pursue the truth.
If by that you mean some Ann Rayndroid, then no I am not ab objectivist. If by that you mean I believe objective reality actually exists, then yes I am.
And the belief that objective reality exists is incompatable with the belief that every single topic is subjective. Whenever someone argues that everything is subjectve, that person is arguing in favor (perhaps unknowingly) of the philosophical dead-end called solopsism. It's a position that, if universally held, would spell the dead-end of all progress of humanity.
What you (and Locke) are missing is that there is a difference between something that is objective yet unknown versus something that is in fact actually subjective. If it really is subjective, that means there is no correct answer and no incorrect answer - it is all a matter of opinion. If something is objective yet unknown then there are such things as WRONG answers, but you don't know which ones they are. In the interest of politeness, things that are objective yet unknown are often spoken of using the same turns of phrase as are used for things that are subjective - since you have to admit that you don't know for sure that you are right. But admitting "I could be wrong" does not imply the topic is subjective. Just the opposite, in fact. A subjective topic is one where it is impossible to actually be wrong, as in "I believe I enjoy classical music".
That's why people like me get annoyed with people who try to treat the whole world as subjective. If there is no objective reality to observe, then you have to throw away the notion of testing theories against observations, and therefore ditch any real learning altogether. I don't know about you, but I kind of like having some technology around, and that wouldn't be possible if people had been acting as if the world was totally subjective all the time.
Your assumption that I was referring to the hollywood stories that they present as fiction is a false assumption. Perhaps your "ability of discernment is weak".
What I don't understand is why people point a link to a Wikipedia page as evidence of it being inaccurate when posting to a very public forum like slashdot. It is easy for someone to go and change the article in the time between that person's post and when I get around to seeing it, and then the original complaint ends up looking silly because it is referring to a version that isn't the one I am seeing and I don't necessarily realize that. It would make more sense to cache the page somewhere and then link to THAT.
The type of person who might learn his history from a Hollywood movie is probably the same type that would accept information presented on Wikipedia as truth, acontextually.
Having a reputation for lying does not exonerate someone from wrongdoing the next time that person lies. That hollywood has a reputation for lying about history doesn't mean they aren't doing something wrong when they lie about history.
The three revert rule doesn't sound like it would solve anything. If two people toggle things back and forth in a revert war, that just ends up meaning that whomever got involved in it second will be the final one who's version sticks for the rest of the day after both of them have used up their three reverts for the period.
The article in question was about rape AND sexual tortue. Therefore as long as Abu Gharib had some type of sexual torture, even if its not rape, it was still a legitimate link for the page.
If I add a really stupid bit of extra code to my linux kernel that solves my problem but causes bugs for 90% of other users out there, my change doesn't end up back in the main code that everyone else downloads unless it gets approval first. If I edit a Wikipedia article in a way that makes it true only 10% of the time, and false for 90% of cases, that change ends up in the public repository immediately.
The big problem here is that the infections were designed to hit people using the service period and was not limited to people using the service for just illegal activities only. That's why I made the correction to the analogy. They're going after everyone who frequents the same store, regardless of whether they were part of the illegal activity going on there or not.
I've seen a Mac OSX machine with stretchable sides all around the windows of all the apps on the screen. Perhaps it's a preference setting somewhere.
I think having the menus visible for all apps inside the apps themselves is handy. The problems with Mac's app-menu in the top desktop menu system for me were: 1 - When learning the interface it took me a long time to figure out which menus were part of the program and which were part of the OS - leading to some confusion when a menu option I thought was universal went away when focusing on a different program window. 2 - You can't visually see the menu options of a program that isn't the active one. 3 - Using a menu option of a different program is a two-click process in different parts of the screen - first you bring up the other program's window, then you move to the top of the screen to use the menu for that program. If the menu option for the background window was visible, it's not a two-click process (unless you have click-to-focus, and even then its still two clicks right next to each other - one to focus the window, one to use its menu.)
We're both after the same thing - a consistent, pleasant interface. The difference is that I'm someone who sees "This application has the same interface regardless of the OS" as most important, while you seem to be someone who thinks that "this OS has the same interface regardless of the application" is most important. If I use OpenOffice, I want it to feel like OpenOffice, regardless of if I'm running it on Windows, Mac, or Unix. If I use Gimp, I want it to feel like Gimp, regarldess of if I'm running it on Windows, Mac, or Unix. If I use Mozilla, I want it to feel like Mozilla, regardless of whether it is on Windows, Mac, or Unix.
Or, another way to look at it is, I want the consistency such that I could use pretty much the same user manual for the app whether I was running the app on Windows, Mac, or Unix.
I prefer the interface to be optimized to the task, rather than to where I happen to be when I'm performing that task.
The copying between MACos and Windows was not one-way. Notice how now the Mac look has corrected some of it's misfeatures by doing what Windows did too - like making it so you can have the application menu inside the application's window instead of merging it in with the main desktop menu, and making it so you can stretch windows from all four corners now, and not just from the lower-right corner (that was a huge misfeature).
The analogy isn't quite the same. This is more like putting random razor blades up that will cut anyone who visits the same store that sold your stolen radio.
and the processing power of the early Macs was quite limited, so they focused on hacking together an operating system based solely around the GUI.
That doesn't make sense. A GUI takes lots more computer resources to achive the same task as a CLI. (i.e. making your program recognize 10 different command-line options is very simple, tiny code in comparasin to the libraries and gui toolkits needed to make those same 10 options appear in a dialog window.)
But other than that minor point, I agree with your post.
One of the things I had to drill into Windows advocates heads is that the practice of making the GUI be a seperate entity from the underlying OS is actually a very good design decision. The reason they have a hard time understanding this is that in thier insular world, the example they have to go on is Windows 3.1 and earlier, in which Windows was a seperate thing from the DOS it ran on. They looked at how bad that was in comparasin to Windows NT and Windows XP, and assume that the problem was the layered approach. They don't understand that the suckiness of Windows 3.1 wasn't a failure of Windows. It was a failure of the DOS it was based on. DOS was a really horrible instance of a command-line system. They got an upgrade to the underlying OS at the same time the underlying CLI was being rendered obsolete, and falsely assumed the two somehow were connected.
A really good GUI needs independant processes, OS-level message passing, OS-level memory protection, OS-level networking, and so on. Unix had these all along. Windows didn't get them until it threw DOS away and started over.
I'd been saying all along that UNIX can be a very good base for a GUI. If people don't like X11 (I do), it can be replaced with something else and you don't have to throw away the underlying OS because unlike with DOS and MacOS, it was never badly broken in the first place. Unix was extensible and capable of evolving due to the fact that it was designed in a rigidly layered approach where companies were expected to see the source code and port it to their own archetectures. The offerings from Apple and MS weren't like that, and so eventually their parent companies had to completely ditch them and start over. MS had to do it earlier because DOS was more sucky than MacOS and hit the end of its useful extensibility sooner. But eventually both ended up having to do it. I like that Apple chose a Unix to switch to, because it demonstrates the point beutifally that the GUI and the underlying OS can be properly layered and yet still not confuse the end-user by exposing the underlying OS unless he wants to see it.
I myself don't much care for the Apple user interface, but I am still very glad they did what they did, and wish them and their users the best of luck with it. That's one of the things that makes Unix better than Windows - With Unix, it's "the more the merrier" - the more alternate uses there are of it, the faster it evolves - so having a competing Unix doesn't devalue it for the rest - it makes them all stronger. With Windows, there's not enough shared public code that everyone can benefit from other people's work off of. I'm sure that in years to come some people are going to look at some of the things MacOSX did with BSD and say, "wow - I think that's a cool idea, and we should implement something similar in other unixes."
I noticed over the last few years more and more unix freeware projects having compile options for OSX, and even though I don't have any desire to use OSX, I still see that as a very healthy good thing for Unix in general.
It's not that UNIX is inherently command-line at its core, it just that all the system-level userland tools were implemented for the command line, which is not to say that they couldn't all be re-implemented with graphical interfaces,
I disagree very strongly.
On the rest, I can't speak too much about Applescript as I have only heard of it from others - never seen it myself.
While I agree that having no command-line forced developers to work on better GUIs, I don't believe for a moment your notion that this was an intentional temporary plan on Apple's part and that they were planning on bringing the command-line in later on, as you keep insinuating. They brought the command-line in simply because MacOS was really bad at doing OS-type things (automation, pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, etc) and they needed something better, and that something ended up being BSD (mostly because there was already some experience with it via NeXT and because it has a licensing scheme that is compatable with what Apple wanted to do.) BSD happens to come with a lot of command-line support so they got that as an extra thing on the side.
The water gets flung out thereby changing the moment of intertia at the equator which would slow the earth back down, no?
It would slow the earth down, yes - but not below the speed it started at. The eventual equilibrium reached after the fluctuations stopped would be somewhere between what it was before the earthquake and what it would be after the earthquake if the oceans were solid masses that didn't get flung out.
Those developers that got frightened away from the Mac due to the extra work involved in making intuitive interfaces for their apps
No. They got frightened away due to the lack of powerful interfaces in OTHER existing apps. When the CLI way to solve a problem is "use this 5-line script that makes use of these three common programs" and the GUI way is "Fire up these three common programs and then make these manual mouse motions 300 times" then people who wouldn't be able to handle the 5-line script method anyway won't be annoyed by the gui way, but people who do know the 5-line script method do get annoyed by the gui.
Programming languages are not gui. Not yet at any rate. The only way to legitimately make the command-line go away entirely is to have programming be a graphical rather than a linear task. It isn't. Maybe that might change some day if the industry comes up with a lot of useful graphical programming languages (i.e. draw a diagram which is itself the source code). But until it does, CLI's are going to be more powerful than GUIs because of the fact that, in essence, they ARE programming languages - rather abstract, slow ones granted, but they are not as far removed from being programming as, say, a series of mouse gestures are.
You keep looking at this as programmers being too lazy to make GUIs of their own unless forced, when what the problem was was that programmers like to see something more than just runtime-interactive interfaces for the programs written by OTHERS that they have to use. Otherwise automating tasks involves reinventing the wheel over and over and over.
When the system has CLI at its core, then something like "crontab" is easy to implement. With a GUI it's harder to take any arbitrary program and write (and edit) a config setting that says "do this action that I could have done from the interactive interface, but instead do it non-interactively every hour. If any errors are output, plese send them to me in e-mail." That sort of thing ends up being a special case in an all-gui system.
When the system has CLI at its core, then something like "find all files of type foo and do the following thing to them" is easy to implement.
These are things that the all-gui Mac was never very good at, and programmers noticed. By going all-GUI, Apple guaranteed the scorn of all users with needs more sophisticated than "Hey computer, do one interactive thing at a time, when I tell you to do it, and if I'm not around I'll shut off the computer."
With OSX, though, it seems this deficiency has been rectified. (Now if they would just sell a laptop with more than one mouse button. As someone who's interest in Mac would be mostly to run Unix programs and occasionally run Mac programs, I really want a three (or at least two) button mouse for use with Unix X11 apps. In a laptop, if I have to plug in an external mouse to get that it sort of depreciates the portable usability of a laptop.)
The only thing I am 100% certain of is that I exist. The next most certain thing is that the universe exists independantly of me (the alternative is solipsism), and thus objective reality is the true nature of the universe. (i.e. I am 99.9999999999% sure of this) Further down, I get to "I am certain gravity functions" (i.e. 99.99999% sure). After that, further down the scale of certainty I get to things like "I am sitting in a chair right now" (something like 99.99% certainty) After that, further down the scale of certainty I get to things like "George Washington exists" and "Autism exists". (i.e. I am 99% certain of this)
I'm just trying to give you the scale of things here so you don't get the false impression that I'm saying much by giving Washington's existence a less than 100% certainty level. It's on about the same level as assuming you exist as a person and are not a 'bot posting to Slashdot - I don't have proof with 100% certainty - but the alternative explanation is waaay more complex and seems unlikely.
So, I ask again, won't the increase in the earth's rotational speed "fling" the water away from the earth's center?
You created a chicken-and-egg probem. The effect you mention is caused by the very effect you claim it would cancel out. If the water being flung out succeeded in keeping the earth from getting faster, that would mean the water wouldn't really be flung out after all and so the earth could still spin faster after all.
Thus the water-flings-out effect CANNOT stop the earth-goes-faster effect. At most it can dampen it and make it happen to a lesser degree.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you, but I don't like it when people use words with multiple meanings in ways that are deliberately designed to blur those meanings and confuse things. The meaning of "subjective" to mean "It can never be false because its an opinion" and the meaning of subjective to mean "We don't know if it's true or false" are totally different things, and yet they are close enough to each other that people can use them interchangably to muddy the discussion and champion the cause of intellectual dulling-down of our culture. It is simply not true that all beliefs are equally valid in all cases, and if everyone acted as if that was the case, then there would be no science today.
I'm pretty sure the flat earth crowd or the Newton crowd would have been as strident as you are in insisting their world view was fact
If you think that, then you're wrong. What got them to stop was the very notion I'm championing - that objective reality exists and therefore it is possible to be wrong if testing your theory against the objective, real, existing, present, external-to-yourself universe shows it to be wrong. If the world was subjective, then the flat-earthers would still be "correct from a certain point of view" even today.
To be shown to be wrong, you must first accept that the issue under discussion is inherently objective. If you don't do that, then you can cling to any belief you feel like and evidence will never sway you away from it.
The "Everything is 100% subjective" crowd is NOT more humble than the objectivist crowd - just the opposite really - because they are setting up a situation in which they never have to admit to being mistaken.
It's not solipsism to admit and embrace one's limitations. It is, of course, part of the human condition to challenge those limitations and expand our abilities...but one first must know what those limitations are.
But admitting that an issue is unkonwn is different from claiming it is subjective. Something can be similtaneously objective and unknown. (To a certain degree, everything is at least slightly unknown.) But here's the difference between that mindset and the mindset expressed by some that I really despise: If a topic is objective but unknown, that means you could be wrong. If a topic is subjective, that means you cannot ever be wrong nor can you ever be right, no matter what you say, since it's all just opinions. Taking everything as subjective is a backhanded way to try to absolve one's self of all responsibility to pursue the truth.
If by that you mean some Ann Rayndroid, then no I am not ab objectivist. If by that you mean I believe objective reality actually exists, then yes I am.
And the belief that objective reality exists is incompatable with the belief that every single topic is subjective. Whenever someone argues that everything is subjectve, that person is arguing in favor (perhaps unknowingly) of the philosophical dead-end called solopsism. It's a position that, if universally held, would spell the dead-end of all progress of humanity.
What you (and Locke) are missing is that there is a difference between something that is objective yet unknown versus something that is in fact actually subjective. If it really is subjective, that means there is no correct answer and no incorrect answer - it is all a matter of opinion. If something is objective yet unknown then there are such things as WRONG answers, but you don't know which ones they are. In the interest of politeness, things that are objective yet unknown are often spoken of using the same turns of phrase as are used for things that are subjective - since you have to admit that you don't know for sure that you are right. But admitting "I could be wrong" does not imply the topic is subjective. Just the opposite, in fact. A subjective topic is one where it is impossible to actually be wrong, as in "I believe I enjoy classical music".
That's why people like me get annoyed with people who try to treat the whole world as subjective. If there is no objective reality to observe, then you have to throw away the notion of testing theories against observations, and therefore ditch any real learning altogether. I don't know about you, but I kind of like having some technology around, and that wouldn't be possible if people had been acting as if the world was totally subjective all the time.
Your assumption that I was referring to the hollywood stories that they present as fiction is a false assumption. Perhaps your "ability of discernment is weak".
What I don't understand is why people point a link to a Wikipedia page as evidence of it being inaccurate when posting to a very public forum like slashdot. It is easy for someone to go and change the article in the time between that person's post and when I get around to seeing it, and then the original complaint ends up looking silly because it is referring to a version that isn't the one I am seeing and I don't necessarily realize that. It would make more sense to cache the page somewhere and then link to THAT.
The type of person who might learn his history from a Hollywood movie is probably the same type that would accept information presented on Wikipedia as truth, acontextually.
Having a reputation for lying does not exonerate someone from wrongdoing the next time that person lies. That hollywood has a reputation for lying about history doesn't mean they aren't doing something wrong when they lie about history.
The three revert rule doesn't sound like it would solve anything. If two people toggle things back and forth in a revert war, that just ends up meaning that whomever got involved in it second will be the final one who's version sticks for the rest of the day after both of them have used up their three reverts for the period.
The article in question was about rape AND sexual tortue. Therefore as long as Abu Gharib had some type of sexual torture, even if its not rape, it was still a legitimate link for the page.
If I add a really stupid bit of extra code to my linux kernel that solves my problem but causes bugs for 90% of other users out there, my change doesn't end up back in the main code that everyone else downloads unless it gets approval first. If I edit a Wikipedia article in a way that makes it true only 10% of the time, and false for 90% of cases, that change ends up in the public repository immediately.
So, no, this is nothing like open source.
Knowledge is unfortunately subjective
If something is subjective, that means it cannot be knowlege. It is merely opinion.
The big problem here is that the infections were designed to hit people using the service period and was not limited to people using the service for just illegal activities only. That's why I made the correction to the analogy. They're going after everyone who frequents the same store, regardless of whether they were part of the illegal activity going on there or not.
I've seen a Mac OSX machine with stretchable sides all around the windows of all the apps on the screen. Perhaps it's a preference setting somewhere.
I think having the menus visible for all apps inside the apps themselves is handy. The problems with Mac's app-menu in the top desktop menu system for me were: 1 - When learning the interface it took me a long time to figure out which menus were part of the program and which were part of the OS - leading to some confusion when a menu option I thought was universal went away when focusing on a different program window. 2 - You can't visually see the menu options of a program that isn't the active one. 3 - Using a menu option of a different program is a two-click process in different parts of the screen - first you bring up the other program's window, then you move to the top of the screen to use the menu for that program. If the menu option for the background window was visible, it's not a two-click process (unless you have click-to-focus, and even then its still two clicks right next to each other - one to focus the window, one to use its menu.)
We're both after the same thing - a consistent, pleasant interface. The difference is that I'm someone who sees "This application has the same interface regardless of the OS" as most important, while you seem to be someone who thinks that "this OS has the same interface regardless of the application" is most important. If I use OpenOffice, I want it to feel like OpenOffice, regardless of if I'm running it on Windows, Mac, or Unix. If I use Gimp, I want it to feel like Gimp, regarldess of if I'm running it on Windows, Mac, or Unix. If I use Mozilla, I want it to feel like Mozilla, regardless of whether it is on Windows, Mac, or Unix.
Or, another way to look at it is, I want the consistency such that I could use pretty much the same user manual for the app whether I was running the app on Windows, Mac, or Unix.
I prefer the interface to be optimized to the task, rather than to where I happen to be when I'm performing that task.
The only problem is that MacOS X uses a proprietary windowing system and group of widget set frameworks,
I agree.
but it's so much better than the the open source stuff available
I disagree. My dislike of the feel of the interface is the main reason I don't switch to OSX.
The copying between MACos and Windows was not one-way. Notice how now the Mac look has corrected some of it's misfeatures by doing what Windows did too - like making it so you can have the application menu inside the application's window instead of merging it in with the main desktop menu, and making it so you can stretch windows from all four corners now, and not just from the lower-right corner (that was a huge misfeature).
The analogy isn't quite the same. This is more like putting random razor blades up that will cut anyone who visits the same store that sold your stolen radio.
and the processing power of the early Macs was quite limited, so they focused on hacking together an operating system based solely around the GUI.
That doesn't make sense. A GUI takes lots more computer resources to achive the same task as a CLI. (i.e. making your program recognize 10 different command-line options is very simple, tiny code in comparasin to the libraries and gui toolkits needed to make those same 10 options appear in a dialog window.)
But other than that minor point, I agree with your post.
One of the things I had to drill into Windows advocates heads is that the practice of making the GUI be a seperate entity from the underlying OS is actually a very good design decision. The reason they have a hard time understanding this is that in thier insular world, the example they have to go on is Windows 3.1 and earlier, in which Windows was a seperate thing from the DOS it ran on. They looked at how bad that was in comparasin to Windows NT and Windows XP, and assume that the problem was the layered approach. They don't understand that the suckiness of Windows 3.1 wasn't a failure of Windows. It was a failure of the DOS it was based on. DOS was a really horrible instance of a command-line system. They got an upgrade to the underlying OS at the same time the underlying CLI was being rendered obsolete, and falsely assumed the two somehow were connected.
A really good GUI needs independant processes, OS-level message passing, OS-level memory protection, OS-level networking, and so on. Unix had these all along. Windows didn't get them until it threw DOS away and started over.
I'd been saying all along that UNIX can be a very good base for a GUI. If people don't like X11 (I do), it can be replaced with something else and you don't have to throw away the underlying OS because unlike with DOS and MacOS, it was never badly broken in the first place. Unix was extensible and capable of evolving due to the fact that it was designed in a rigidly layered approach where companies were expected to see the source code and port it to their own archetectures. The offerings from Apple and MS weren't like that, and so eventually their parent companies had to completely ditch them and start over. MS had to do it earlier because DOS was more sucky than MacOS and hit the end of its useful extensibility sooner. But eventually both ended up having to do it. I like that Apple chose a Unix to switch to, because it demonstrates the point beutifally that the GUI and the underlying OS can be properly layered and yet still not confuse the end-user by exposing the underlying OS unless he wants to see it.
I myself don't much care for the Apple user interface, but I am still very glad they did what they did, and wish them and their users the best of luck with it. That's one of the things that makes Unix better than Windows - With Unix, it's "the more the merrier" - the more alternate uses there are of it, the faster it evolves - so having a competing Unix doesn't devalue it for the rest - it makes them all stronger. With Windows, there's not enough shared public code that everyone can benefit from other people's work off of. I'm sure that in years to come some people are going to look at some of the things MacOSX did with BSD and say, "wow - I think that's a cool idea, and we should implement something similar in other unixes."
I noticed over the last few years more and more unix freeware projects having compile options for OSX, and even though I don't have any desire to use OSX, I still see that as a very healthy good thing for Unix in general.
It's not that UNIX is inherently command-line at its core, it just that all the system-level userland tools were implemented for the command line, which is not to say that they couldn't all be re-implemented with graphical interfaces,
I disagree very strongly.
On the rest, I can't speak too much about Applescript as I have only heard of it from others - never seen it myself.
While I agree that having no command-line forced developers to work on better GUIs, I don't believe for a moment your notion that this was an intentional temporary plan on Apple's part and that they were planning on bringing the command-line in later on, as you keep insinuating. They brought the command-line in simply because MacOS was really bad at doing OS-type things (automation, pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, etc) and they needed something better, and that something ended up being BSD (mostly because there was already some experience with it via NeXT and because it has a licensing scheme that is compatable with what Apple wanted to do.) BSD happens to come with a lot of command-line support so they got that as an extra thing on the side.
The water gets flung out thereby changing the moment of intertia at the equator which would slow the earth back down, no?
It would slow the earth down, yes - but not below the speed it started at. The eventual equilibrium reached after the fluctuations stopped would be somewhere between what it was before the earthquake and what it would be after the earthquake if the oceans were solid masses that didn't get flung out.
I din't say private flows. I said individual investments.
Those developers that got frightened away from the Mac due to the extra work involved in making intuitive interfaces for their apps
No. They got frightened away due to the lack of powerful interfaces in OTHER existing apps. When the CLI way to solve a problem is "use this 5-line script that makes use of these three common programs" and the GUI way is "Fire up these three common programs and then make these manual mouse motions 300 times" then people who wouldn't be able to handle the 5-line script method anyway won't be annoyed by the gui way, but people who do know the 5-line script method do get annoyed by the gui.
Programming languages are not gui. Not yet at any rate. The only way to legitimately make the command-line go away entirely is to have programming be a graphical rather than a linear task. It isn't. Maybe that might change some day if the industry comes up with a lot of useful graphical programming languages (i.e. draw a diagram which is itself the source code). But until it does, CLI's are going to be more powerful than GUIs because of the fact that, in essence, they ARE programming languages - rather abstract, slow ones granted, but they are not as far removed from being programming as, say, a series of mouse gestures are.
You keep looking at this as programmers being too lazy to make GUIs of their own unless forced, when what the problem was was that programmers like to see something more than just runtime-interactive interfaces for the programs written by OTHERS that they have to use. Otherwise automating tasks involves reinventing the wheel over and over and over.
When the system has CLI at its core, then something like "crontab" is easy to implement. With a GUI it's harder to take any arbitrary program and write (and edit) a config setting that says "do this action that I could have done from the interactive interface, but instead do it non-interactively every hour. If any errors are output, plese send them to me in e-mail." That sort of thing ends up being a special case in an all-gui system.
When the system has CLI at its core, then something like "find all files of type foo and do the following thing to them" is easy to implement.
These are things that the all-gui Mac was never very good at, and programmers noticed. By going all-GUI, Apple guaranteed the scorn of all users with needs more sophisticated than "Hey computer, do one interactive thing at a time, when I tell you to do it, and if I'm not around I'll shut off the computer."
With OSX, though, it seems this deficiency has been rectified. (Now if they would just sell a laptop with more than one mouse button. As someone who's interest in Mac would be mostly to run Unix programs and occasionally run Mac programs, I really want a three (or at least two) button mouse for use with Unix X11 apps. In a laptop, if I have to plug in an external mouse to get that it sort of depreciates the portable usability of a laptop.)
The only thing I am 100% certain of is that I exist.
The next most certain thing is that the universe exists independantly of me (the alternative is solipsism), and thus objective reality is the true nature of the universe. (i.e. I am 99.9999999999% sure of this)
Further down, I get to "I am certain gravity functions" (i.e. 99.99999% sure).
After that, further down the scale of certainty I get to things like "I am sitting in a chair right now" (something like 99.99% certainty)
After that, further down the scale of certainty I get to things like "George Washington exists" and "Autism exists". (i.e. I am 99% certain of this)
I'm just trying to give you the scale of things here so you don't get the false impression that I'm saying much by giving Washington's existence a less than 100% certainty level. It's on about the same level as assuming you exist as a person and are not a 'bot posting to Slashdot - I don't have proof with 100% certainty - but the alternative explanation is waaay more complex and seems unlikely.
So, I ask again, won't the increase in the earth's rotational speed "fling" the water away from the earth's center?
You created a chicken-and-egg probem. The effect you mention is caused by the very effect you claim it would cancel out. If the water being flung out succeeded in keeping the earth from getting faster, that would mean the water wouldn't really be flung out after all and so the earth could still spin faster after all.
Thus the water-flings-out effect CANNOT stop the earth-goes-faster effect. At most it can dampen it and make it happen to a lesser degree.