The user interface was awesome and remains to this day on the SonyEricsson phones I've been buying ever since.
Just goes to show that some people can put up with anything. My current phone is a Sony Ericsson, and it has, bar none, the worst UI of any device I've ever had the displeasure of being subjected to. I was led to believe that it was one of the better phones when I bought it, so I shudder to think of what the rest of the market has to tolerate. If Sony Ericssons are an example of the better phone UIs, then Jobs is just the man to give the industry a beating with his clue stick.
Last time I checked there was no descent wysiwyg editor for LaTeX (Lyx is probably the best out their, but honestly, I couldn't recommend it to anyone).
I think you're missing the point. You don't replace Word with Lyx, you replace ODF with TeX. Then you would use Word to write TeX files.
It's not a bad idea on the surface; at the very least you would get a typographically powerful document format, instead of the nasty, ass-sucking typographic atrocities that the major office word processors currently produce.
I suspect it would be a nightmare to implement. TeX formats want you to define your document elements logically, ie. this line is a foo, this paragraph is a bar; the styles and rules for foos and bars are defined elsewhere. Although this is similar to HTML+CSS and is appropriate for anything being used systematically by designers, it really is not how people use wysiwyg, and is the opposite to how they've learned to use Word. With Word, very few people follow a methodical approach of predefining styles and using them consistently; instead they just randomly set fonts, sizes, colors, and line spacing until it looks right. Accidentally turned that list element into a giant heading? No problem. Just resize it back to 10pt, fix the line spacing, and turn off the bold. Now it looks just like the rest of the list elements. Nevermind that logically it's still a heading, which will screw up anything that is expecting the document's structure to be meaningful.
A second problem is that TeX and especially LaTeX depend heavily on style files to provide most of the document formatting definitions they use. The portability of a LaTeX document depends on having the prerequisite style files, and since different vendors and versions will have different style files in their distros, and will be tweaking and refining those like crazy to keep ahead of each other, it would lead to the LaTeX equivalent of DLL hell, and perhaps even to attemnpts to lock each other out by putting restrictive copyrights/licensing on the style files. You might get around that with a modified file format that incorporates the style files into the original document, but then you've just lost the proposed advantage of a lean and simple format.
It would be possible to come up with a powerful and easy to use wysiwyg interface for LaTeX (I think Pages could make a good example, since it emphasizes logical document structures) but the real problem we face is that the whole world has learned to create documents in the wrong way with Word, and there's no going back to a rational system.
I switched to Apple so that I could run Mac, Windows, and Linux software on the same computer. It's really the killer feature of the Mac platform, so I'd expect that any computer company with sense would be trying to get on board.
I've never read a single word of documentation on iTunes, and yet I know how to do all kinds of weird stuff like tie it into multimedia presentations in Keynote or iPhoto, listen to the BBC, watch Lost season 3 episodes, browse my music collection with the handy remote control, or wirelessly stream my music from the office to the stereo in the living room. Note: I don't actually do all those things, but I know how to do them, without ever having looked it up.
I've also never read a single word of documentation on Amarok, but I have no idea whether it can do any of those things. The only thing I know how to do is Play All in random shuffle mode. It has a helpful message up telling me that I need to build a collection if I want to make use of the context browser, but I honestly don't know what the hell it's talking about, nor am I that "into" my music player that I care.
In a word, "usability". If a music player is harder to use than a CD player, it's not a great player, no matter how big its feature set is.
I use both; in fact I run my Amarok off my iTunes library backup. Furthermore, I'm running an older OSX and a sparkling new Linux. Furtherfuthermore, the Linux is running on a smoking AMD64 system, while the OSX is limping along on an old PPC. And to top it all off, it took zero configuration to get Linux sound and music going, thanks to SuSE, so I have absolutely no gripes against Linux. And I don't use the iTMS, download album cover art, nor do I own an iPod, so I have no bias to the Mac.
Which means I can definitively say you're delusional.
If you sit in front of your computer 8-10 hours a day like I do, your computer is, like it or not, your closest physical acquaintance, and you better have some kind of positive emotional engagement with it, or you will become permanently bitter and cranky.
Why do you think people install custom wallpapers, fiddle with their colors, invent entirely custom GUI themes, change their system sounds, and get their computer to play their favorite music while they work? It's because they spend their entire day interacting with a fucking retarded and shoddily designed piece of technology, and if there wasn't any kind of personal emotional bond with it, they would put a brick through it after about a week. After a bit of personalization, it's more like your annoying, dorky, little brother. Still stupid, and you wanna smack it regularly, but hey, it's family.
And that's a big part of why Linux and Mac users can be such smug assholes. Because their OSes are either WAYYYY more customizable, or just plain smokin' hot right out of the box. As a result, they are happier people, and all the unhappy computer people really hate to hear about it.
And I'm speaking as a happily married guy who gets far more sex than he deserves, so you can multiply everything I said by 10 for people whose *only* close physical relationship is with their computer.
Actually, they (both armourers and buyers) thought about it quite a bit. The armourer's proof was a mark on a suit of armour (typically the breastplate, but also often the helmet) that certified it for the most dangerous weapons of the day. It was no pretty stamp, either, but a full-on bullet impact, fired from short range. Every suit of a certain quality was individually proofed in this way to show that it could take a bullet before anyone was asked to pay for it. Fancy suits with lots of metalwork and engraving would work these proof marks into fancy rosettes and other designs, so they can be tricky to spot on many museum suits. Most armour images on the web are SCA-type replicas, and they do not take their armour as seriously, so you won't see many proof marks there. This guy, however, clearly does take his armour seriously - I've seen the video of him getting creamed by a pick-up truck. Holy crap. I have no doubt he's fired many guns at his prototypes.
As guns became more powerful, the breastplates became heavier to withstand the armourer's proof without bursting; in time they had to make the back plate lighter in order to keep the breastplate heavy enough to take a musket ball. Eventually, however, they gave up trying to keep the breastplate fully-gun-proof. Then they lightened up the breastplate to the point where it would not stop a short-range shot; however, it would still protect against the spent bullets that were flying around a battlefield, and which were the cause of many casualties.
I agree, but... I am not a marketroid. What the 'troids understand and I do not, is that normal people need to "get" what it is before they will pay for it. The iPod was clearly a music player, a well-established class of device, so an abstracted brand name works. The iPhone, on the other hand, may very well be an entirely new class of device, in which case "iFoo" is a terrible branding decision.
"What hell is an iFoo?"
"Well, it's a kind of super-phone."
"But it looks like a video player."
"That's because it *is* a video player."
"...huh?"
So I think the strategy is this: call the sucker an iPhone, so that everyone on the entire planet "gets it" instantly. Apple is all about simplicity, so this makes sense. The weird gadget with no buttons is a PHONE! It's like a Treo, but 100 times cooler. And, hey.... wait a minute... it's also... it's a friggin' COMPUTER! It's a pocket Mac that makes phone calls! Whoa, dude!
Then, after everyone has had time to wrap their heads around it, declare that you could not resolve trademark disputes with Cisco, and stop calling it the iPhone. *NOW* you can rebrand it as something entirely new, because you've created the category awareness - you've got everyone knowing that it is not simply a phone, but a phone replacement. You pay off Cisco for their unwitting contribution to this guerilla marketing campaign, and you've just instantly (well, almost) established an entirely new class of consumer electronics that everyone wants before it's even available for sale, which is very, very, very difficult to do.
Does you argument hold up when it's well known that there are things we can't know?
My coffee hasn't kicked in either, but I believe your statement is more accurately expressed as "...there are truths we can't prove", not "things we can't know". The difference being we can know them to a lesser degree of certainty. Scientific knowledge is not derived from proving hypotheses in logic systems (that would be Math), so Godel doesn't really apply. Scientific knowledge certainly exists, but almost all of it is unprovable in a logical sense. However, it is empirically established to a degree that to deny it would be irrational.
The building client who wanted to add an extra floor when the building was already half constructed can moan that the builders are not "giving them what they want" but I suspect they'll get little sympathy. At some point reality hs to kick in.
Yes, but the key difference is that the final expression of a building is a physical object, whereas software is not. As long as the building is also virtual (ie. you're drawing the blueprints), buildings can go through all the same shit as software. I'm sure if there are any architects here, they could tell us all manner of horror stories of changing requirements and clients who want to add floors or do things even more outrageous. And if the architect is charging a flat fee based on the initial requirements, at some point they'll put their foot down and say no. If they are charging by the hour, maybe not. It's not a whole lot different, really. The error is in thinking that the analogy to construction is coding. In fact, the best analogy to construction is deployment (or manufacturing of CDs, etc.).
How exactly is Microsoft "ten years behind the curve"?
I would have said 5 years, but on further reflection:
GUI - consistently 6 years behind
File and volume handling - 20 years behind at least (CP/M was cool in the 80s, but is no longer a model OS.)
Networking & Internet - 3-4 years behind (compared to comparable PCs. More like 10 years if we include minicomputers.)
Security - 10-15 years behind is probably a safe bet.
So I don't think the GP was exaggerating that much.
Come on now, there are some very smart folks at Microsoft, so why can't they come up with ideas and products on their own?
Microsoft is a profoundly conservative (as in dislikes change) company, much like the old IBM, to whom they are often compared these days. Fortunately for them, this makes them attractive to business, which for the most part is also conservative. It also makes them tolerable to non-computer people, who really don't want to have to relearn anything technical if they don't have to. However, it tends to make them numerous enemies in the tech community, which actually *likes* new and refreshing ideas and better ways of doing things. Microsoft squelches progress not so much because they are evil, but because that attitude actually appeals to the anti-technology, anti-innovation, anti-computer user base. Which, unfortunately for nerds, is a very large user base.
You need better instructions to replicate the problem.
I've found that this works for me:
Install Linux.
Launch Firefox.
Surf web.
Seriously, this problem is so widely reported, confirmed, and verified, it must be the most-widely-known-bug-in-the-universe by now. Those who deny its existence are like Windows geeks who claim "I've used Windows on an open Internet connection for 5 years and never had a virus". They're like VAX sysadmins who claim "I've used VMS since 1988 and only had to reboot once after the earth split open and swallowed up my city". They're like action heroes who claim "I've had a quarter-million bullets shot at me, and never been hit." They're like students who claim, "I've attended no lectures and read no books, but I get straight A's." They're like like drug addicts who claim "I've smoked crack daily for 10 years, and never had more than 3 bugs crawling under my skin." They're like rock stars who claim "I've had unprotected sex with over 500 groupies, and never felt a need for antibiotics."
To all of these people: Fine, good for you. YOU"RE NOT NORMAL! STOP INTERRUPTING THE NORMAL PEOPLE!
And what useful skills do Mexicans have? They certainly aren't knowledge workers.
I don't know much about Mexico, but I do know that my company's biggest software contract is in the process of being outsourced to Mexico, and I also know that the Dell computers that were just delivered to our office yesterday had a big fat "Made in Mexico" label on them.
This is an amusing comment for me, because I run on a slower PPC Mac, and I avoid Firefox because it is so much slower than Safari. Just goes to show, I suppose, that impressions of "slowness" have many different causes.
The revewer examined the book from the point of view of a software developer, when the book is plainly intended for a non-technical lay public.
And how many members of the non-technical lay public are going to buy a book that is about sucky software? Approximately 0 (within a margin of error of 1000). Nobody cares *why* software sucks, except software developers*. And nobody else needs to be convinced that software sucks - it's just not that controversial of a statement.
The only members of the public who might be tempted to even pick up such a book are those for whom the title is provocative and interesting - which is strongly correlated with those people who LOVE software and think it's all totally awesome, and therefore might be challenged and engaged by the contents. (See previous paragraph for an estimate of the size of this group, excluding software geeks). If you are not in this group, the subject falls into the same general category as "Why zits suck", "Why taxes suck", and "Why mean people suck" in terms of general interest.
* In this context, software developers includes anyone in the software business, not just programmers.
Take the case of a company that has been in business for 7 years or so, and has successfully bootstrapped themselves into a modest little venture using their own open source technology. They have offices, employees (even salesmen!), a small management team, a decent little client base, and no debt. But they are very much a small business.
Now, with their hard-fought, real-world experience, understanding of their sector, and practical experience with using open source to make real money, they think they see a new opportunity in the marketplace, which their technology is well-positioned for. But going after this market will require a big investment, at least doubling the company size, and will probably require a whole new management team.
The question is: how is this problem like or unlike a start-up? Do VCs tackle this situation differently than they would a pure start-up? Should the company approach VCs differently than a start-up would? Or is this out of VC territory altogether?
On my 1Ghz/768MB iBook, it's frustratingly slow to use more than one app at a time (and even the one can get chunky).
Strange, I'm typing this on virtually the same computer, which is at this very moment running Safari (7 tabs), Firefox (2 tabs), Mail, iCal, TextEdit, X11, Gimp, Preview, iPhoto, Terminal, Grab, Stickies, Bittorrent, and Software Update. NeoOffice, AbiWord, Pages, Emacs, and iTunes are also regularly running, but not at this moment. Its uptime is 29 days, and the machine is always happy and snappy, give or take a couple of seconds of swap when I pull up an app that's been idle for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you drive your car at 7000 RPM constantly? If not, then you aren't using anything close to 150 HP.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:PirateGraph.jpg
Just goes to show that some people can put up with anything. My current phone is a Sony Ericsson, and it has, bar none, the worst UI of any device I've ever had the displeasure of being subjected to. I was led to believe that it was one of the better phones when I bought it, so I shudder to think of what the rest of the market has to tolerate. If Sony Ericssons are an example of the better phone UIs, then Jobs is just the man to give the industry a beating with his clue stick.
I think you're missing the point. You don't replace Word with Lyx, you replace ODF with TeX. Then you would use Word to write TeX files.
It's not a bad idea on the surface; at the very least you would get a typographically powerful document format, instead of the nasty, ass-sucking typographic atrocities that the major office word processors currently produce.
I suspect it would be a nightmare to implement. TeX formats want you to define your document elements logically, ie. this line is a foo, this paragraph is a bar; the styles and rules for foos and bars are defined elsewhere. Although this is similar to HTML+CSS and is appropriate for anything being used systematically by designers, it really is not how people use wysiwyg, and is the opposite to how they've learned to use Word. With Word, very few people follow a methodical approach of predefining styles and using them consistently; instead they just randomly set fonts, sizes, colors, and line spacing until it looks right. Accidentally turned that list element into a giant heading? No problem. Just resize it back to 10pt, fix the line spacing, and turn off the bold. Now it looks just like the rest of the list elements. Nevermind that logically it's still a heading, which will screw up anything that is expecting the document's structure to be meaningful.
A second problem is that TeX and especially LaTeX depend heavily on style files to provide most of the document formatting definitions they use. The portability of a LaTeX document depends on having the prerequisite style files, and since different vendors and versions will have different style files in their distros, and will be tweaking and refining those like crazy to keep ahead of each other, it would lead to the LaTeX equivalent of DLL hell, and perhaps even to attemnpts to lock each other out by putting restrictive copyrights/licensing on the style files. You might get around that with a modified file format that incorporates the style files into the original document, but then you've just lost the proposed advantage of a lean and simple format.
It would be possible to come up with a powerful and easy to use wysiwyg interface for LaTeX (I think Pages could make a good example, since it emphasizes logical document structures) but the real problem we face is that the whole world has learned to create documents in the wrong way with Word, and there's no going back to a rational system.
I switched to Apple so that I could run Mac, Windows, and Linux software on the same computer. It's really the killer feature of the Mac platform, so I'd expect that any computer company with sense would be trying to get on board.
I've never read a single word of documentation on iTunes, and yet I know how to do all kinds of weird stuff like tie it into multimedia presentations in Keynote or iPhoto, listen to the BBC, watch Lost season 3 episodes, browse my music collection with the handy remote control, or wirelessly stream my music from the office to the stereo in the living room. Note: I don't actually do all those things, but I know how to do them, without ever having looked it up.
I've also never read a single word of documentation on Amarok, but I have no idea whether it can do any of those things. The only thing I know how to do is Play All in random shuffle mode. It has a helpful message up telling me that I need to build a collection if I want to make use of the context browser, but I honestly don't know what the hell it's talking about, nor am I that "into" my music player that I care.
In a word, "usability". If a music player is harder to use than a CD player, it's not a great player, no matter how big its feature set is.
I use both; in fact I run my Amarok off my iTunes library backup. Furthermore, I'm running an older OSX and a sparkling new Linux. Furtherfuthermore, the Linux is running on a smoking AMD64 system, while the OSX is limping along on an old PPC. And to top it all off, it took zero configuration to get Linux sound and music going, thanks to SuSE, so I have absolutely no gripes against Linux. And I don't use the iTMS, download album cover art, nor do I own an iPod, so I have no bias to the Mac.
Which means I can definitively say you're delusional.
You would be referring to the tiny niche that doesn't build custom boxes?
If you sit in front of your computer 8-10 hours a day like I do, your computer is, like it or not, your closest physical acquaintance, and you better have some kind of positive emotional engagement with it, or you will become permanently bitter and cranky.
Why do you think people install custom wallpapers, fiddle with their colors, invent entirely custom GUI themes, change their system sounds, and get their computer to play their favorite music while they work? It's because they spend their entire day interacting with a fucking retarded and shoddily designed piece of technology, and if there wasn't any kind of personal emotional bond with it, they would put a brick through it after about a week. After a bit of personalization, it's more like your annoying, dorky, little brother. Still stupid, and you wanna smack it regularly, but hey, it's family.
And that's a big part of why Linux and Mac users can be such smug assholes. Because their OSes are either WAYYYY more customizable, or just plain smokin' hot right out of the box. As a result, they are happier people, and all the unhappy computer people really hate to hear about it.
And I'm speaking as a happily married guy who gets far more sex than he deserves, so you can multiply everything I said by 10 for people whose *only* close physical relationship is with their computer.
Actually, they (both armourers and buyers) thought about it quite a bit. The armourer's proof was a mark on a suit of armour (typically the breastplate, but also often the helmet) that certified it for the most dangerous weapons of the day. It was no pretty stamp, either, but a full-on bullet impact, fired from short range. Every suit of a certain quality was individually proofed in this way to show that it could take a bullet before anyone was asked to pay for it. Fancy suits with lots of metalwork and engraving would work these proof marks into fancy rosettes and other designs, so they can be tricky to spot on many museum suits. Most armour images on the web are SCA-type replicas, and they do not take their armour as seriously, so you won't see many proof marks there. This guy, however, clearly does take his armour seriously - I've seen the video of him getting creamed by a pick-up truck. Holy crap. I have no doubt he's fired many guns at his prototypes.
As guns became more powerful, the breastplates became heavier to withstand the armourer's proof without bursting; in time they had to make the back plate lighter in order to keep the breastplate heavy enough to take a musket ball. Eventually, however, they gave up trying to keep the breastplate fully-gun-proof. Then they lightened up the breastplate to the point where it would not stop a short-range shot; however, it would still protect against the spent bullets that were flying around a battlefield, and which were the cause of many casualties.
I agree, but... I am not a marketroid. What the 'troids understand and I do not, is that normal people need to "get" what it is before they will pay for it. The iPod was clearly a music player, a well-established class of device, so an abstracted brand name works. The iPhone, on the other hand, may very well be an entirely new class of device, in which case "iFoo" is a terrible branding decision.
"What hell is an iFoo?"
"Well, it's a kind of super-phone."
"But it looks like a video player."
"That's because it *is* a video player."
"...huh?"
So I think the strategy is this: call the sucker an iPhone, so that everyone on the entire planet "gets it" instantly. Apple is all about simplicity, so this makes sense. The weird gadget with no buttons is a PHONE! It's like a Treo, but 100 times cooler. And, hey.... wait a minute... it's also... it's a friggin' COMPUTER! It's a pocket Mac that makes phone calls! Whoa, dude!
Then, after everyone has had time to wrap their heads around it, declare that you could not resolve trademark disputes with Cisco, and stop calling it the iPhone. *NOW* you can rebrand it as something entirely new, because you've created the category awareness - you've got everyone knowing that it is not simply a phone, but a phone replacement. You pay off Cisco for their unwitting contribution to this guerilla marketing campaign, and you've just instantly (well, almost) established an entirely new class of consumer electronics that everyone wants before it's even available for sale, which is very, very, very difficult to do.
My coffee hasn't kicked in either, but I believe your statement is more accurately expressed as "...there are truths we can't prove", not "things we can't know". The difference being we can know them to a lesser degree of certainty. Scientific knowledge is not derived from proving hypotheses in logic systems (that would be Math), so Godel doesn't really apply. Scientific knowledge certainly exists, but almost all of it is unprovable in a logical sense. However, it is empirically established to a degree that to deny it would be irrational.
Yes, but the key difference is that the final expression of a building is a physical object, whereas software is not. As long as the building is also virtual (ie. you're drawing the blueprints), buildings can go through all the same shit as software. I'm sure if there are any architects here, they could tell us all manner of horror stories of changing requirements and clients who want to add floors or do things even more outrageous. And if the architect is charging a flat fee based on the initial requirements, at some point they'll put their foot down and say no. If they are charging by the hour, maybe not. It's not a whole lot different, really. The error is in thinking that the analogy to construction is coding. In fact, the best analogy to construction is deployment (or manufacturing of CDs, etc.).
I would have said 5 years, but on further reflection:
GUI - consistently 6 years behind
File and volume handling - 20 years behind at least (CP/M was cool in the 80s, but is no longer a model OS.)
Networking & Internet - 3-4 years behind (compared to comparable PCs. More like 10 years if we include minicomputers.)
Security - 10-15 years behind is probably a safe bet.
So I don't think the GP was exaggerating that much.
It would take balls to name anything the iSaac.
Microsoft is a profoundly conservative (as in dislikes change) company, much like the old IBM, to whom they are often compared these days. Fortunately for them, this makes them attractive to business, which for the most part is also conservative. It also makes them tolerable to non-computer people, who really don't want to have to relearn anything technical if they don't have to. However, it tends to make them numerous enemies in the tech community, which actually *likes* new and refreshing ideas and better ways of doing things. Microsoft squelches progress not so much because they are evil, but because that attitude actually appeals to the anti-technology, anti-innovation, anti-computer user base. Which, unfortunately for nerds, is a very large user base.
Seriously, this problem is so widely reported, confirmed, and verified, it must be the most-widely-known-bug-in-the-universe by now. Those who deny its existence are like Windows geeks who claim "I've used Windows on an open Internet connection for 5 years and never had a virus". They're like VAX sysadmins who claim "I've used VMS since 1988 and only had to reboot once after the earth split open and swallowed up my city". They're like action heroes who claim "I've had a quarter-million bullets shot at me, and never been hit." They're like students who claim, "I've attended no lectures and read no books, but I get straight A's." They're like like drug addicts who claim "I've smoked crack daily for 10 years, and never had more than 3 bugs crawling under my skin." They're like rock stars who claim "I've had unprotected sex with over 500 groupies, and never felt a need for antibiotics."
To all of these people: Fine, good for you. YOU"RE NOT NORMAL! STOP INTERRUPTING THE NORMAL PEOPLE!
Does this mean you stay younger longer, or older longer?
I don't know much about Mexico, but I do know that my company's biggest software contract is in the process of being outsourced to Mexico, and I also know that the Dell computers that were just delivered to our office yesterday had a big fat "Made in Mexico" label on them.
This is an amusing comment for me, because I run on a slower PPC Mac, and I avoid Firefox because it is so much slower than Safari. Just goes to show, I suppose, that impressions of "slowness" have many different causes.
And how many members of the non-technical lay public are going to buy a book that is about sucky software? Approximately 0 (within a margin of error of 1000). Nobody cares *why* software sucks, except software developers*. And nobody else needs to be convinced that software sucks - it's just not that controversial of a statement.
The only members of the public who might be tempted to even pick up such a book are those for whom the title is provocative and interesting - which is strongly correlated with those people who LOVE software and think it's all totally awesome, and therefore might be challenged and engaged by the contents. (See previous paragraph for an estimate of the size of this group, excluding software geeks). If you are not in this group, the subject falls into the same general category as "Why zits suck", "Why taxes suck", and "Why mean people suck" in terms of general interest.
* In this context, software developers includes anyone in the software business, not just programmers.
Take the case of a company that has been in business for 7 years or so, and has successfully bootstrapped themselves into a modest little venture using their own open source technology. They have offices, employees (even salesmen!), a small management team, a decent little client base, and no debt. But they are very much a small business.
Now, with their hard-fought, real-world experience, understanding of their sector, and practical experience with using open source to make real money, they think they see a new opportunity in the marketplace, which their technology is well-positioned for. But going after this market will require a big investment, at least doubling the company size, and will probably require a whole new management team.
The question is: how is this problem like or unlike a start-up? Do VCs tackle this situation differently than they would a pure start-up? Should the company approach VCs differently than a start-up would? Or is this out of VC territory altogether?
Just strap that puppy to the space elevator. That's pretty long.
Strange, I'm typing this on virtually the same computer, which is at this very moment running Safari (7 tabs), Firefox (2 tabs), Mail, iCal, TextEdit, X11, Gimp, Preview, iPhoto, Terminal, Grab, Stickies, Bittorrent, and Software Update. NeoOffice, AbiWord, Pages, Emacs, and iTunes are also regularly running, but not at this moment. Its uptime is 29 days, and the machine is always happy and snappy, give or take a couple of seconds of swap when I pull up an app that's been idle for a long time.
I think your computer is sick.