Seems like comparing our schools to asian schools would have such a large number of factors that it'd be impossible to isolate single factors to find simple causal relationships. And one of the biggest factors-- culture-- is one that you can't really control very predictably without creating an oppressive regime filled with propaganda.
So I may read that book, but I'd still like to express some doubts that it will give the solution for the US education system. As far as I've ever seen, the education system in the US serves the lowest common denominator. Anyone who doesn't quite fit the mold, even if it's by way of excellence, is punished and pushed out, or else ignored.
And that's in places where the school system is supposed to be good. In places where it's bad, it's run down, understaffed, and under funded.
So though I'm not the sort of person to think that you can solve a problem by throwing money at it, I do think that a lack of qualified teachers is one of the big problems with our system. Both in terms of having too few teachers, and that the teachers we have aren't qualified enough. Spending more money won't necessarily fix the problem, but any solution will cost significant amounts of money.
The other big problem with education is the parents, but it's not clear what can be done about that.
I'm not saying that many people actually evaluate studies. I'm saying they literally just need to hear the magic words "studies prove". It may be that there are people rubbing garlic on their feet to get rid of headaches (hadn't heard that), but I assure you a lot more would if there were a rumor that "studies had proven" that garlic on the feet was a good headache cure. Get someone to say on TV that "studies have proven" it, and everyone will do it.
Anyway, I said *some* people won't believe obvious things until you say that "studies have proven it". You respond by providing an example where other people have believed something that's not at all obvious without having evaluated any studies. So your example obviously doesn't serve to rebut but claim.
But yeah, some things are counter-intuitive, and so you can't always trust "obvious"="true". I don't agree, though, that "obvious" is completely subjective, nor the implication that obvious things should be ignored until proven. Obvious things should, under most circumstances and for most purposes, be assumed to be true until otherwise proven.
I would explain further or try to give examples, but I think the truth of my claims are rather obvious.
I think it is more important to make sure the whole population is well educated and informed than distilling every year's Nobel prize winners while leaving the masses in ignorance.
Part of the problem here is that you can't "make sure" the whole population is well educated. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. You can't make people thoughtful, you can't make people be curious, and you can't make people be interested. And therefore you can't make someone well educated.
The success of our current president is a reminder of *that*. He's had every opportunity laid out in front of him, went to the best schools, and still his education apparently didn't take. His success has largely been based on simple name recognition.
So go ahead and spent all day finding horses that won't drink and leading them to water, just leading them to water and watching them not drink. Meanwhile ignore all the horses that would happily drink, leaving them to die of thirst if they can't find water on their own, letting them die when you could have easily saved them.
Personally, I think it's better to put your effort into saving those who can be saved. I'd rather live in a society where 85% of the people have an education that's at least decent and 15% have a sub-par education than in one where 100% have the same sub-par education.
Yeah, I think lots of people have been saying this for years. It's completely obvious, but unfortunately some people won't listen to even the most obvious things until you can say, "a study proved it." And of course, you never hear about any studies that prove obvious but politically-incorrect ideas.
Anyway, yes, of course, kids don't simply raise themselves. Smart kids, dumb kids, it doesn't matter, they need people to pay attention to them, teach them, tell them what to do, be given examples of what to be, etc. Attention is a limited resource, and the more attention to pay to some kids, the less you pay to others. So if you pay all your attention to the problem kids and the dumb kids, the well-behaved kids and the smart kids suffer.
And no, really, the smart kids don't take care of themselves. All kids need attention.
No, really, it is largely about finance. You need a greater teacher/student ratio than most schools have.
See, because even if you want to separate kids out based on their gifts, you need someone to evaluate which kids are gifted at what. You can give them tests, but that will only tell you which kids do better on tests.
What it doesn't tell you is which kids are smart but unmotivated or bored, and therefore not bothering to try. It doesn't tell you which kids might have skills and assets that don't show up well on tests. It doesn't tell you which kids are just nervous and don't do well on tests. It doesn't tell you which kids are smart but have learning disabilities-- yes, 'learning disabled' has become code for stupid, but there are real learning disabilities.
For anyone to really know all that about students, someone needs to know the students. You can't really get to know the students well enough when you have 45 minutes a day per class with a class of 40 kids. You'd improve our education system immensely if teachers were given a couple hours a day with a class of 15 kids, maybe with opportunities for private tutoring.
Of course, you can't accomplish that without hiring loads of new teachers, and you can't hire loads of new teachers without spending a lot more money. Plus, in order to attract good teachers, you might have to pay them better. I think I'd probably like being a teacher, but not if it means I'll get paid 1/4 of what I get paid now.
Yeah, I don't know either. Like I said, it's at least *partially* a user problem. Maybe people will just get more accustomed to this convention and they'll pay more attention. I think another option that might make sense is to slam all unread messages in a conversation together with minimal separation between them.
But I don't pretend to be a UI expert capable of coming up with a clever solution. I'm just a user who noticed that it seems to be a problem.
I don't think that's the case. What I'm saying is it's partially a user problem, that users don't always scroll down when there are multiple unread e-mails in a thread. However, it's also a layout problem with Gmail, in that it apparently doesn't do enough to make sure people notice that there are multiple unread messages.
I mean, I notice and it seems clear enough to me, but I'm saying *apparently* it's not enough for lots of users, because I've had this problem on multiple occasions with multiple different people.
What I was saying was that my work-around was to change the subject line so that Gmail would think it was a new conversation. If they used the message ID header, I'd have to be careful to make an actual new thread.
Is there anything cool to see there other than tabs? Frankly I'm not sure I see the value of tabs in a mail client, so I'm not too impressed. They could do a lot of work, though, to make the UI sleeker and fit in better with OSX. Firefox has made some progress in that regard, and I believe Thunderbird people are working on it too, but I'm not sure anything major has happened yet with the UI for the v.3 alpha.
There's no conversation-style view of messages. This would be a killer feature as even GMail seems to do it wrong (threading by subject text instead of message Id)
I'm not a huge fan of Gmail's conversational view of e-mail. Sometimes I'll respond to the same message twice before they've had a chance to reply to my first e-mail. (So, for example, someone sends me an e-mail, I reply, and before they've read that reply, I get more information and reply again.) Gmail will arrange those e-mails into a thread, and put the newest e-mail at the top. I've often had problems where Gmail users will ignore the older e-mail (even though it hasn't been read yet) because they don't bother to scroll down far enough. When it's a separate e-mail, people are more likely to catch it. As a work-around, I'll sometimes change the subject line when I reply to gmail user-- which is possibly stupid and annoying.
I could see a conversational view work, but I'd like to see a better implementation.
By the peculiarities of special relativity, the high relative velocity between the observers means that both will always be able to claim to have carried out their measurement first, thereby ruling out the naysayers' arguments.
What naysayers? Naysayers of what? And what are their arguments?
Because, frankly, the stated aims of environmentalists - improving the forests, saving the fuzzy animals, and so on, Where have you found these "stated aims"?
Well let's be fair-- "saving the fuzzy animals" is a lot of what you hear about. You hear people talking about how beautiful some forrest is, how cutting it down is robbing our children of the opportunity to see them, and how the whole process is harming some particular kind of titmouse that only exists in a very small area.
And what the GP is pointing out is that a lot of people hear all that and don't care. And then those people get yelled at for being selfish, because we should all be prepared to make sacrifices in order to preserve the pristine beauty of bla bla bla. So environmentalists end up being viewed as self-righteous nutcases who have no sense of priority, and are content to let people suffer in order to preserve a single bird species-- because every living creature is special and beautiful, or some nonsense of that sort.
And what the GP is rightly pointing out is that the greater issue is whether humans will be able to preserve our own species. We need food and breathable air and drinkable water, and sufficient environmental damage can threaten that. That's what environmentalists should be worried about, and that's what most environmentalists are worried about. But unfortunately many of the most vocal environmentalists (at least those you tend to see on the MSM) still get caught up on the plight of cute fuzzies, e.g. polar bears having trouble finding ice to hang out on.
I'm all for the free market, but when corporations behave like governments and as de facto monopolies then they either need to be regulated or dissolved into smaller yet competing bodies.
So in other words, you're in favor of a free market. The chief problems with the government running things is that it's an overly-powerful body that can exert undue influence, and they aren't subject to the normal market forces that would keep things running well. Monopolies have the same problems.
You can be in favor of the free market, with no qualifications, and then there's a separate question: What do we do with the markets that are run by monopolies, and therefore aren't free? Thinking the government should regulate those monopolies does not make you a communist. Particularly not when, as in the case of cable/telephone companies, the monopoly is enforced by the government.
Yeah, I'm not sure what this WWDC is going to be about. There's going to be the iPhone 2 (and firmware upgrade), which will be huge. There are rumors of another device, halfway between an iPhone and a laptop. There are rumors of an OS upgrade. There are rumors of their Pro laptop line getting a redesign. Some other things to boot. If all that happens, it seems like a little too much for one event.
So that's why I think it may actually be true that Snow Leopard, if real, won't have many new features. They might just say, "Hey, we're coming up with an update, all Cocoa, faster, bla bla bla." and leave it at that. Incidentally, I predict that there may be a "all-Cocoa" move coming, but not in the form of dropping support for 3rd party Carbon apps. It may be instead that the "all-Cocoa" rumors are about Apple turning all of it's apps over to Cocoa and warning other developers, "We're making the move, and you should too. Only a couple more years before we stop supporting Carbon".
Anwyay, it may also be that (assuming "Snow Leopard" is for real) there won't be any new major OS features (FileVault, Time Machine, etc), but there will be new application features. If the iPhone is getting better Exchange support, I would expect that Mail, iCal, and Address Book will also be getting improved Exchange support. Also it may be that their server-side analogues (mail, calendar, and directory services) will be getting more features to be on-par with Exchange. I'd love to see OSX Server support push-email, better webmail, and get everything a little bit better integrated so that they can compete with Exchange.
There are also a lot of loose ends that Apple could try to tie up without offering something that stands out as a "new feature". For example, if they finally offered ZFS support, most users wouldn't see it as a "feature"-- they just wouldn't know it was there. But if Apple made enough changes/upgrades of that sort, they'd have to increment the version number so people would know that things might not be compatible. But for most users, it they wouldn't be "features" exactly, but more like "under the hood improvements".
I actually think there are lots of ways this could go. I can imagine Jobs saying, "look, we want to clean things up and offer some new technologies, but since these things won't be 'features' to most users, we're going to make a semi-new version. It'll be called almost the same thing ('Snow Leopard' instead of 'Leopard'), and it'll be a free upgrade to anyone using Leopard, but we'll call it a full new version." Or something along those lines-- I'm not claiming this is what will happen, but only that it wouldn't completely shock me.
Well the bigger problem there is not just that they'd fail-- but that Microsoft would pull MS Office from Mac in retaliation. iWork is good, but doesn't offer the same level of transparent interoperability within a Windows/Office dominated world.
And yes, I know MS Office for Mac isn't completely transparent, but it opens/saves Office formats more faithfully than iWork or OpenOffice.
On a side note, if their product line needs "fixing", I don't think it's in the OS department. It's in the fact that they don't offer a mid-grade monitorless tower computer. Everything else can stand to be improved (everything can always be improved), but the absence of a mid-grade tower hurts them in some major markets.
It's possible-- and interesting-- but if I were running Apple, I'd be more interested in getting Windows applications running on OSX than getting OSX applications running on Windows. With WINE hitting 1.0, the prospect isn't unthinkable. (CrossOver Office for OSX works pretty well, when it works).
On a side note, I have personally found it very interesting to watch the way people on Mac forums approach problems versus Windows or Linux users. Often there is an implicit assumption that any problem encountered is an OS bug (sometimes even if nobody else can be found who is experiencing the same problem) and you see demands that it be fixed in the next release. Possibly this is because a high proportion of the problems experienced by Mac users are indeed OS bugs.
Possibly, I guess, but probably not. An awful lot of the code that makes up OSX is the same code in FreeBSD/NetBSD and Linux. Where it differs-- well, I've never heard anyone claim that the Mach kernel is particularly buggy. All you have left is Aqua and the APIs, which are the parts that everyone seems to want to be open sourced and/or sold for their platform of choice.
So from all that (and personal experience with a Windows/Linux/OSX) I wouldn't be inclined to think the problem is that OSX has more OS bugs than other platforms. But I guess we could take your hypothesis another way-- that programs written for OSX are more bug-free than other platforms. That doesn't seem too terribly unlikely, but my personal guess would be that it's actually a combination of a few things:
Back in the pre-OSX days, MacOS was extremely fickle. For example, some applications wouldn't run will if you enabled virtual memory, while other applications wouldn't run without virtual memory enabled; also, users had to delete their preference files on a regular basis in order to keep programs running properly. Mac users from that time period are prone to expect that there are lots of strange techniques necessary to keep their systems running, and so they go off looking for OS tweaks for any problem they encounter.
Many OSX users are prone to complain about any problem, even minor problems. For example, I've seen people go to great lengths to buff a scratch out of the bottom of their Macbook cases, months after purchase. A tiny little scratch. So you get a bunch of those people together, many of whom don't know very much about computers, and they'll complain to the manufacturer about any little problem they encounter.
Apple users might be using a lot of Apple applications, too. They might be using Final Cut, iWork, iLife, iChat, Safari, Mail, etc. Plus the hardware is Apple's. So if I have Apple hardware, and Apple OS, and I'm using Apple applications, then there's a pretty good chance that I'm going to complain to Apple when I have problems.
No really, the answer to all your questions are "yes". You seem to understand the situation so I'm not sure why you're asking.
Q:Is there a reason why they don't release it for regular PC's?
A:Yes, there are a couple reasons, at least. You give two of them later on.
Q:Is it because they'd like people to buy Mac hardware along with the OS?
A:Yes. Apple makes most of its money selling hardware. That's the business they're in. OSX and iLife are largely built to be enticements to buy their hardware, just as the iTMS was created to encourage people to buy iPods.
Q:But maybe there would be more Mac OS's sold if they also made a version for regular PC's?
A:Yes, there would most surely be more sales of OSX. The question is, would the increased profits from OSX be enough to make up for the lost hardware sales? The answer is "probably not".
Q:Or maybe they do it because there are less possible compatibility problems if they only make it for their own Mac hardware, because PC's are too customizable?
A:Yes, that's another problem with supporting generic PCs-- you're going to have to support every little piece of crappy hardware anyone wants to buy. Worse yet, you're going to have to deal with the fact that a lot of that hardware comes with poorly-written drivers that will crash your system. The fact is that a *lot* of instability that people see on Windows is driver-related. By being both the OS developer and the systems integrator, Apple gets a level of stability that would otherwise be much more difficult to reach.
Either get Leopard solid, stable, and most importantly, *fast* before you move onto the next OS (unless Snow Leopard addresses a lot of these issues).
Actually, according to all rumors about "Snow Leopard", those are exactly the issues that it's supposed to address. That's the entire rumor about Snow Leopard, that it's going to be a quick release that won't add much in the way of features, but it will be cleaning out legacy code, squashing bugs, and making the whole thing run fast. Some people have also noted that the last time Apple did this (10.1) the upgrade was free.
If it's decrypted on the fly, on access, then why wouldn't they be decrypted during the backup process?
Or if copies are always encrypted, then wouldn't you notice there was a problem the first time you tried to share a file, copy it to a server, e-mail it as an attachment, etc?
Seems like it would be hard to pull off. But go ahead and try. Like I said, I haven't been infected by a single virus in 15 years.
Really, this doesn't scare me very much. Can these people stop making money on spam, please, and let them try their hand at blackmail? Because it's fine-- a lot of people won't pay, and others will get the FBI to trace the money to the criminals behind it. They'll probably get caught, but either way they won't get me. Like any sane person, I have a firewall, don't open random attachments, and keep backups.
I'm not sure it's right to call it the "quality" of OpenOffice that people have a problem with. Sure, people dislike qualities of the software, but they don't dislike it for being "poor quality".
There are probably still people who are stuck on Word/Excel because of some particular feature. The rest of people who aren't happy with it, in my limited experience, it's because it doesn't look great and it runs slowly.
The first could be done with an interface facelift. Probably not a huge deal, if there's the will to do it. The problem of slowness, I don't know what the problem really is. If they can fix those two things, I'd say the general level of quality is more than sufficient.
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Seems like comparing our schools to asian schools would have such a large number of factors that it'd be impossible to isolate single factors to find simple causal relationships. And one of the biggest factors-- culture-- is one that you can't really control very predictably without creating an oppressive regime filled with propaganda.
So I may read that book, but I'd still like to express some doubts that it will give the solution for the US education system. As far as I've ever seen, the education system in the US serves the lowest common denominator. Anyone who doesn't quite fit the mold, even if it's by way of excellence, is punished and pushed out, or else ignored.
And that's in places where the school system is supposed to be good. In places where it's bad, it's run down, understaffed, and under funded.
So though I'm not the sort of person to think that you can solve a problem by throwing money at it, I do think that a lack of qualified teachers is one of the big problems with our system. Both in terms of having too few teachers, and that the teachers we have aren't qualified enough. Spending more money won't necessarily fix the problem, but any solution will cost significant amounts of money.
The other big problem with education is the parents, but it's not clear what can be done about that.
And the plural of "someone else's glib quote" is not "argument". Or do you prefer glib quotes to both data and anecdotes?
PS- my post didn't have any anecdotes in it
I'm not saying that many people actually evaluate studies. I'm saying they literally just need to hear the magic words "studies prove". It may be that there are people rubbing garlic on their feet to get rid of headaches (hadn't heard that), but I assure you a lot more would if there were a rumor that "studies had proven" that garlic on the feet was a good headache cure. Get someone to say on TV that "studies have proven" it, and everyone will do it.
Anyway, I said *some* people won't believe obvious things until you say that "studies have proven it". You respond by providing an example where other people have believed something that's not at all obvious without having evaluated any studies. So your example obviously doesn't serve to rebut but claim.
But yeah, some things are counter-intuitive, and so you can't always trust "obvious"="true". I don't agree, though, that "obvious" is completely subjective, nor the implication that obvious things should be ignored until proven. Obvious things should, under most circumstances and for most purposes, be assumed to be true until otherwise proven.
I would explain further or try to give examples, but I think the truth of my claims are rather obvious.
I think it is more important to make sure the whole population is well educated and informed than distilling every year's Nobel prize winners while leaving the masses in ignorance.
Part of the problem here is that you can't "make sure" the whole population is well educated. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. You can't make people thoughtful, you can't make people be curious, and you can't make people be interested. And therefore you can't make someone well educated.
The success of our current president is a reminder of *that*. He's had every opportunity laid out in front of him, went to the best schools, and still his education apparently didn't take. His success has largely been based on simple name recognition.
So go ahead and spent all day finding horses that won't drink and leading them to water, just leading them to water and watching them not drink. Meanwhile ignore all the horses that would happily drink, leaving them to die of thirst if they can't find water on their own, letting them die when you could have easily saved them.
Personally, I think it's better to put your effort into saving those who can be saved. I'd rather live in a society where 85% of the people have an education that's at least decent and 15% have a sub-par education than in one where 100% have the same sub-par education.
Yeah, I think lots of people have been saying this for years. It's completely obvious, but unfortunately some people won't listen to even the most obvious things until you can say, "a study proved it." And of course, you never hear about any studies that prove obvious but politically-incorrect ideas.
Anyway, yes, of course, kids don't simply raise themselves. Smart kids, dumb kids, it doesn't matter, they need people to pay attention to them, teach them, tell them what to do, be given examples of what to be, etc. Attention is a limited resource, and the more attention to pay to some kids, the less you pay to others. So if you pay all your attention to the problem kids and the dumb kids, the well-behaved kids and the smart kids suffer.
And no, really, the smart kids don't take care of themselves. All kids need attention.
No, really, it is largely about finance. You need a greater teacher/student ratio than most schools have.
See, because even if you want to separate kids out based on their gifts, you need someone to evaluate which kids are gifted at what. You can give them tests, but that will only tell you which kids do better on tests.
What it doesn't tell you is which kids are smart but unmotivated or bored, and therefore not bothering to try. It doesn't tell you which kids might have skills and assets that don't show up well on tests. It doesn't tell you which kids are just nervous and don't do well on tests. It doesn't tell you which kids are smart but have learning disabilities-- yes, 'learning disabled' has become code for stupid, but there are real learning disabilities.
For anyone to really know all that about students, someone needs to know the students. You can't really get to know the students well enough when you have 45 minutes a day per class with a class of 40 kids. You'd improve our education system immensely if teachers were given a couple hours a day with a class of 15 kids, maybe with opportunities for private tutoring.
Of course, you can't accomplish that without hiring loads of new teachers, and you can't hire loads of new teachers without spending a lot more money. Plus, in order to attract good teachers, you might have to pay them better. I think I'd probably like being a teacher, but not if it means I'll get paid 1/4 of what I get paid now.
This is "insightful" and not "funny"? This looks like sarcasm to me. Or at least it looks like it should be sarcasm.
Yeah, I don't know either. Like I said, it's at least *partially* a user problem. Maybe people will just get more accustomed to this convention and they'll pay more attention. I think another option that might make sense is to slam all unread messages in a conversation together with minimal separation between them.
But I don't pretend to be a UI expert capable of coming up with a clever solution. I'm just a user who noticed that it seems to be a problem.
I don't think that's the case. What I'm saying is it's partially a user problem, that users don't always scroll down when there are multiple unread e-mails in a thread. However, it's also a layout problem with Gmail, in that it apparently doesn't do enough to make sure people notice that there are multiple unread messages.
I mean, I notice and it seems clear enough to me, but I'm saying *apparently* it's not enough for lots of users, because I've had this problem on multiple occasions with multiple different people.
What I was saying was that my work-around was to change the subject line so that Gmail would think it was a new conversation. If they used the message ID header, I'd have to be careful to make an actual new thread.
Is there anything cool to see there other than tabs? Frankly I'm not sure I see the value of tabs in a mail client, so I'm not too impressed. They could do a lot of work, though, to make the UI sleeker and fit in better with OSX. Firefox has made some progress in that regard, and I believe Thunderbird people are working on it too, but I'm not sure anything major has happened yet with the UI for the v.3 alpha.
I'm not a huge fan of Gmail's conversational view of e-mail. Sometimes I'll respond to the same message twice before they've had a chance to reply to my first e-mail. (So, for example, someone sends me an e-mail, I reply, and before they've read that reply, I get more information and reply again.) Gmail will arrange those e-mails into a thread, and put the newest e-mail at the top. I've often had problems where Gmail users will ignore the older e-mail (even though it hasn't been read yet) because they don't bother to scroll down far enough. When it's a separate e-mail, people are more likely to catch it. As a work-around, I'll sometimes change the subject line when I reply to gmail user-- which is possibly stupid and annoying.
I could see a conversational view work, but I'd like to see a better implementation.
What naysayers? Naysayers of what? And what are their arguments?
Well let's be fair-- "saving the fuzzy animals" is a lot of what you hear about. You hear people talking about how beautiful some forrest is, how cutting it down is robbing our children of the opportunity to see them, and how the whole process is harming some particular kind of titmouse that only exists in a very small area.
And what the GP is pointing out is that a lot of people hear all that and don't care. And then those people get yelled at for being selfish, because we should all be prepared to make sacrifices in order to preserve the pristine beauty of bla bla bla. So environmentalists end up being viewed as self-righteous nutcases who have no sense of priority, and are content to let people suffer in order to preserve a single bird species-- because every living creature is special and beautiful, or some nonsense of that sort.
And what the GP is rightly pointing out is that the greater issue is whether humans will be able to preserve our own species. We need food and breathable air and drinkable water, and sufficient environmental damage can threaten that. That's what environmentalists should be worried about, and that's what most environmentalists are worried about. But unfortunately many of the most vocal environmentalists (at least those you tend to see on the MSM) still get caught up on the plight of cute fuzzies, e.g. polar bears having trouble finding ice to hang out on.
So in other words, you're in favor of a free market. The chief problems with the government running things is that it's an overly-powerful body that can exert undue influence, and they aren't subject to the normal market forces that would keep things running well. Monopolies have the same problems.
You can be in favor of the free market, with no qualifications, and then there's a separate question: What do we do with the markets that are run by monopolies, and therefore aren't free? Thinking the government should regulate those monopolies does not make you a communist. Particularly not when, as in the case of cable/telephone companies, the monopoly is enforced by the government.
Yeah, I'm not sure what this WWDC is going to be about. There's going to be the iPhone 2 (and firmware upgrade), which will be huge. There are rumors of another device, halfway between an iPhone and a laptop. There are rumors of an OS upgrade. There are rumors of their Pro laptop line getting a redesign. Some other things to boot. If all that happens, it seems like a little too much for one event.
So that's why I think it may actually be true that Snow Leopard, if real, won't have many new features. They might just say, "Hey, we're coming up with an update, all Cocoa, faster, bla bla bla." and leave it at that. Incidentally, I predict that there may be a "all-Cocoa" move coming, but not in the form of dropping support for 3rd party Carbon apps. It may be instead that the "all-Cocoa" rumors are about Apple turning all of it's apps over to Cocoa and warning other developers, "We're making the move, and you should too. Only a couple more years before we stop supporting Carbon".
Anwyay, it may also be that (assuming "Snow Leopard" is for real) there won't be any new major OS features (FileVault, Time Machine, etc), but there will be new application features. If the iPhone is getting better Exchange support, I would expect that Mail, iCal, and Address Book will also be getting improved Exchange support. Also it may be that their server-side analogues (mail, calendar, and directory services) will be getting more features to be on-par with Exchange. I'd love to see OSX Server support push-email, better webmail, and get everything a little bit better integrated so that they can compete with Exchange.
There are also a lot of loose ends that Apple could try to tie up without offering something that stands out as a "new feature". For example, if they finally offered ZFS support, most users wouldn't see it as a "feature"-- they just wouldn't know it was there. But if Apple made enough changes/upgrades of that sort, they'd have to increment the version number so people would know that things might not be compatible. But for most users, it they wouldn't be "features" exactly, but more like "under the hood improvements".
I actually think there are lots of ways this could go. I can imagine Jobs saying, "look, we want to clean things up and offer some new technologies, but since these things won't be 'features' to most users, we're going to make a semi-new version. It'll be called almost the same thing ('Snow Leopard' instead of 'Leopard'), and it'll be a free upgrade to anyone using Leopard, but we'll call it a full new version." Or something along those lines-- I'm not claiming this is what will happen, but only that it wouldn't completely shock me.
Well the bigger problem there is not just that they'd fail-- but that Microsoft would pull MS Office from Mac in retaliation. iWork is good, but doesn't offer the same level of transparent interoperability within a Windows/Office dominated world.
And yes, I know MS Office for Mac isn't completely transparent, but it opens/saves Office formats more faithfully than iWork or OpenOffice.
On a side note, if their product line needs "fixing", I don't think it's in the OS department. It's in the fact that they don't offer a mid-grade monitorless tower computer. Everything else can stand to be improved (everything can always be improved), but the absence of a mid-grade tower hurts them in some major markets.
It's possible-- and interesting-- but if I were running Apple, I'd be more interested in getting Windows applications running on OSX than getting OSX applications running on Windows. With WINE hitting 1.0, the prospect isn't unthinkable. (CrossOver Office for OSX works pretty well, when it works).
Possibly, I guess, but probably not. An awful lot of the code that makes up OSX is the same code in FreeBSD/NetBSD and Linux. Where it differs-- well, I've never heard anyone claim that the Mach kernel is particularly buggy. All you have left is Aqua and the APIs, which are the parts that everyone seems to want to be open sourced and/or sold for their platform of choice.
So from all that (and personal experience with a Windows/Linux/OSX) I wouldn't be inclined to think the problem is that OSX has more OS bugs than other platforms. But I guess we could take your hypothesis another way-- that programs written for OSX are more bug-free than other platforms. That doesn't seem too terribly unlikely, but my personal guess would be that it's actually a combination of a few things:
Yes.
No really, the answer to all your questions are "yes". You seem to understand the situation so I'm not sure why you're asking.
Q:Is there a reason why they don't release it for regular PC's?
A:Yes, there are a couple reasons, at least. You give two of them later on.
Q:Is it because they'd like people to buy Mac hardware along with the OS?
A:Yes. Apple makes most of its money selling hardware. That's the business they're in. OSX and iLife are largely built to be enticements to buy their hardware, just as the iTMS was created to encourage people to buy iPods.
Q:But maybe there would be more Mac OS's sold if they also made a version for regular PC's?
A:Yes, there would most surely be more sales of OSX. The question is, would the increased profits from OSX be enough to make up for the lost hardware sales? The answer is "probably not".
Q:Or maybe they do it because there are less possible compatibility problems if they only make it for their own Mac hardware, because PC's are too customizable?
A:Yes, that's another problem with supporting generic PCs-- you're going to have to support every little piece of crappy hardware anyone wants to buy. Worse yet, you're going to have to deal with the fact that a lot of that hardware comes with poorly-written drivers that will crash your system. The fact is that a *lot* of instability that people see on Windows is driver-related. By being both the OS developer and the systems integrator, Apple gets a level of stability that would otherwise be much more difficult to reach.
Actually, according to all rumors about "Snow Leopard", those are exactly the issues that it's supposed to address. That's the entire rumor about Snow Leopard, that it's going to be a quick release that won't add much in the way of features, but it will be cleaning out legacy code, squashing bugs, and making the whole thing run fast. Some people have also noted that the last time Apple did this (10.1) the upgrade was free.
If it's decrypted on the fly, on access, then why wouldn't they be decrypted during the backup process?
Or if copies are always encrypted, then wouldn't you notice there was a problem the first time you tried to share a file, copy it to a server, e-mail it as an attachment, etc?
Seems like it would be hard to pull off. But go ahead and try. Like I said, I haven't been infected by a single virus in 15 years.
I don't really overwrite my backups, especially without confirming that I still have a good backup somewhere.
Does it matter? I have backups.
Really, this doesn't scare me very much. Can these people stop making money on spam, please, and let them try their hand at blackmail? Because it's fine-- a lot of people won't pay, and others will get the FBI to trace the money to the criminals behind it. They'll probably get caught, but either way they won't get me. Like any sane person, I have a firewall, don't open random attachments, and keep backups.
I'm not sure it's right to call it the "quality" of OpenOffice that people have a problem with. Sure, people dislike qualities of the software, but they don't dislike it for being "poor quality".
There are probably still people who are stuck on Word/Excel because of some particular feature. The rest of people who aren't happy with it, in my limited experience, it's because it doesn't look great and it runs slowly.
The first could be done with an interface facelift. Probably not a huge deal, if there's the will to do it. The problem of slowness, I don't know what the problem really is. If they can fix those two things, I'd say the general level of quality is more than sufficient.