You're totally missing the point-- when you go to a restaurant, you have no way of knowing whether or not things contain trans-fats. You could ask, and they could lie. There aren't nutritional labels on the menus, and therefore you aren't able to make informed decisions about such things. If enough people in NYC don't want to eat trans-fats, they can pass a ban that says restaurants can't use them, and then if they lie and get caught, they face fines by the health department.
I've heard a bunch of people complain about the NYC trans-fat ban, and I really don't get why people are upset. It isn't an attempt to make "unhealthy eating" illegal, or even make it illegal to eat trans-fats. It's just a ban on selling trans-fats in restaurants. You have to remember that, when you're talking about trans-fats, you usually aren't talking about naturally-occuring stuff in real food. It's kind of a gross grey goop that is artificially made, horribly bad for you, and used because it's cheaper. People going to restaurants don't get nutritional labels to let them know what they're eating.
The health departments will also fine restaurants for selling food with rat-droppings in it. It's not because they want to take away your freedom. They aren't making it illegal to eat rat droppings if you want to, but rat droppings aren't food, and could be a source of health problems if people are eating lots of rat-dropping-laden foods. If you really really want to eat rat-droppings, you're allowed to. Restaurants just aren't really allowed to sell it as food.
And in case you're wondering, I live in NYC and welcome the change. It's not that I'm a health nut, but in fact particularly because I like eating greasy foods that I'm in favor of the ban. For example, I really like fried chicken. It needs to be a certain level of unhealthy in order to make fried chicken taste that good. Do I really want restaurants to add to that unhealthiness as a cost-saving measure?
Yes I agree. Actually, if you want to know what I think the truly useful application for speech-recognition is, it's the people who are bundling it together with a translation program and a text-to-speech program and trying to make a universal translator. It seems to me that it would be possible, useful, and realistic that I could speak to someone over the telephone in real time without a common language.
Yes, he's been crazy about speech recognition, and it makes a certain sort of sense. However, the idea that speech recognition alone will replace the keyboard interface shows a lack of imagination. Part of the reason we've stuck with keyboards for as long as we have is they're efficient. They're cheap, can operate easily in noisy areas, and allow for purposeful manipulation of text. If you're a good typist, keyboards can be faster and easier, too. And can you imagine trying to play Half-Life with a speech interface? Keyboards aren't going anywhere.
So what does that leave for speech? Maybe you can say, "launch microsoft word" and then, once it's launched, you start typing. Or you could say, "next song" and iTunes would switch to the next song instead of having to click on a button. Wowwie! And what happens when you're sitting at your computer, and you say something to your friend about "the next song in my playlist..." How does it know you don't want to go to the next song?
The problem is that having computers respond naturally to speech requires an awful lot of AI that we won't have anytime soon. Even if we do have that amount of AI in a PC someday, it's still not clear that a keyboard won't be preferable for many interactions. Of course, maybe once we have that level of AI, we won't be trying to type anything up anymore anyway. I'll say, "Computer, please write a letter to my mom." and the computer will just do it. "Computer, write me a slashdot post on this topic."
There are only two groups of people I'm aware of who think that it's a good idea speech recognition for the purpose of doing away with keyboards, and have really good text-to-speech to you so you won't have to read. Those two groups are "children" and "Bill Gates". The best major applications for these technologies are accessibility for the disabled and portable devices. That's pretty much it for the foreseeable future.
Also, it's just not a bad from their standpoint to get a whole lot of free beta testers. The only down side to Google's beta testing is that they're tipping their hand to any competition, but that downside is incurred by Google, and they seem fine with it. All in all, I'm not sure it's worth complaining.
Well it may always be a problem with open source that the "community" won't have a single coherent vision. We can all agree with things like "stability" and "improved performance", but to drive the desktop forward, you need some sort of a coherent idea about how people will want to interact with their computers. This, some might argue, has been what has made Apple successful.
Luckily, we have different distributions that can each move forward in their own slightly different directions. Unfortunately, if anyone wants to go in a terribly different direction, they'll have to try to exert disproportionate influence on the community or perhaps fork some software. Either of these moves would be likely to alienate the community, making it difficult to drum up support. Therefore, there's a little bit of a "design by committee" quality to many things. This isn't all bad, since it means that the features and methods are generally sensible, but it might make the whole endeavor less nimble than it would be with top-down management.
Up until now there has been no need for a big leap.
Can you really have a "big leap" with the Linux development model? With Windows, Microsoft can develop an OS for 5 years and keep lots of things under wraps. When it finally hit's people's desktop, if people like the improvements, there's a big "whoa" factor. There are a whole lot of changes.
But if Windows was open-sourced with no secrets, and had a 6 month release schedule, I suspect it would all feel like a whole lot of little incremental upgrades and bug fixes. There wouldn't be much anticipation or many surprises. The upgrades feel more mundane. Like you said, though, there have been substantial improvements to desktop Linux distros since 2002, but when all those improvements are trickling out every 6 months over a 5 year period, they just don't feel that big.
Yes, you could do that, but that's not what Debian is right now. It's not a core that has been heavily worked on. It's a huge repository of packages that are close to the vanilla version of those pieces of software, but tested to work together with the other packages. Changing what Debian is so drastically would possibly solve some problems, but would be just as likely to introduce others. For example, if you have this core with third parties working on extensions, what reason do you have to believe that the third-party extensions will work together?
Really, this alternate approach is fine, but there are other distros that do it. Changing Debian to that model would remove many of the advantages of using Debian.
Your argument would be similar to someone claiming "The fact that you paid the dry cleaner to clean your clothing grants the government the right to take your clothing and run tests to see if it had any blood stains on the clothing."
IANAL, but as far as I know, the police would be allowed to ask your dry-cleaner for any clothes in the dry-cleaner's possession. The dry-cleaner could refuse, and then the police would need to get a warrant, or the dry-cleaner could hand the clothes over without the police providing a warrant. Getting your clothes dry-cleaned doesn't give the police the right to search your house for clothing, but from what I understand, you can't leave your belongings just anywhere and have them protected from searches simply on the basis that they belong to you.
For example, if I left a personal letter opened, on top of my desk at work, my employer could permit police to look on top of my desk. I'm pretty sure about that, but not sure if my employer would be allowed to grant police permission to search my desk drawers. I would guess probably so, considering my employer owns the desk, but it might depend on the details. So while I believe my employer can give police access to my office, I don't believe my landlord can give access to my apartment.
So it seems to me that the government should definitely need a warrant to force an ISP to disclose the contents of e-mails, but it isn't clear whether your ISP can turn them over voluntarily. AFAIK, it does depend on a legalistic determination as to whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Cut the distro down to what will fit on one CD (two max). That will reduce a lot of Debian's headaches. Less for them to maintain and less to test between releases. Everything else can be put into contributed non-official repositories
I think that what's really great about Debian is that it has such wide support for everything. If there's a distro capable of being anything to anyone, and still doing everything pretty well, it's probably Debian. There are plenty of other projects that do just what you're talking about. They take Debian, reduce the number of packages to what makes sense for a particular purpose, and that allows more work to be done on fewer packages in less time, creating a distro that's more specialized. Why would you want Debian to do that, too?
The USA is about regulated capitalism anyway. Unbridled "pure" capitalism would lead to huge monopolies, stifled/complete lack of competition, and extreme corruption. Which would ironically be contrary to the spirit of capitalism.
And yet we still have huge monopolies, stifled competition, and extreme corruption in our "regulated" capitalism.
Oh, was that the problem with the new ones? I thought it was that they had hired a different alien to play Yoda-- you know, like Darrin in Bewitched? But you're saying that the first Yoda was a tiny man in a "rubber" suit? Wow, those suits are really terrific, because I could never tell.
Well.... live and learn, I guess. Next thing you know, you'll be telling me that Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't really a robot from the future. What kind of material are these "rubber" suits made out of, anyway?
P.S.- I'm sure Lucas will be very please to hear that the problem with the new Star Wars movies wasn't his piss poor writing, bad direction, or retarded casting choices. The big problem was that you could tell that not all the aliens were made of rubber.
Really, you could tell it was CG? Sheesh, you must have some keen eyes and a brilliant intellect, because I thought they had created a real mutant squid-man and taught him to act.
Even if I accept your premise that Windows is more configurable than OSX, it's equally arguable that Windows is offering more options than people need, and therefore creating an overly-complicated and confusing UI.
However, I don't think it's true that Windows gives you more options on anything like a scale of 10:1. Comparing Windows's "Control Panel" and OSX's "System Preferences", it seems like they have a fairly comparable number of useful options, and I can't think of an option that exists in Windows that should exist in OSX but doesn't. When you additionally figure in the open source components and Unix compatibility of OSX, and all of the options they've opened to developers, I think OSX is arguably more open to tweaking than Windows.
Now you say Onyx has settings like that, and other replies have mentioned other software to fix the gripes on the list, requiring the user to install several programs to enable power user functionality is a poor design choice. Apple seems devoted to figuring out the way their products and software should be used, then limiting users' ability to use it any other way.
You miss the point. If you want to tweak one of the settings that most people don't want to tweak, you either need to know how to teak that setting or you need to have an application that can tweak it for you. There's no limitation there. You can leave it as-is, you can change it yourself, or you can rely on 3rd party developers to tweak it for you.
In what form would they have these "advanced settings" though? Just a big huge list with thousands of settings that you could select true/false? Most of the settings aren't very useful to normal users, so I would think the most sensible thing would be to document them so developers could find them in case they need them. Beyond that, you can get freeware programs like Onyx which gives you a fairly large list of extra "advanced" settings that they believe people would want access to.
I mean, really, what OS isn't guilty of this? In Linux, think of all the files in/etc. Think of the Windows registry. If you don't know what you're doing in either case, you could spend quite a lot of time looking through obscure settings without knowing what they all do. No OS is providing a nice little menu for altering every possible setting. But if the defaults are reasonable, the most important settings are accessible, and the more rare and advanced settings are documented and open to 3rd party developers to work with, are there really grounds to complain?
But if Sony screws you over, at least you can sue them
I could also pay a lawyer $50,000 to plant a sign on my forehead, "Sony, please pay your lawyers lots of money to ruin my life!"
... but implying that the risk of legitimately purchased 'DRM' content has become more risky than piracy is a bit ridiculous.
With DRM, there is certainly a bigger risk that I'll lose access to the content I've legitimately purchased. If I download an MP3 and that pirating group decides to disappear off of the face of the earth, it makes no difference to me. If I buy a DRM protected song from iTunes and Apple's servers suddenly disappeared, I won't be able to authorize new computers to play that track.
Really, though, isn't this a sensible way to do things? There are well chosen default settings and GUI controls for obvious and simple settings. If you want to change something more complicated or strange, that dumb users might find confusing, they give a sensible command-line option, exposing the setting to both power-users and developers who might have need of it.
As with most things in life, I use things because I want them to do what I want, not because I want to do what they want me to. Like my OS. Even if it's all fucked up, I want it to work how I expect.... The problem isn't that the users don't "get" OSX.
Possibly if you "got" OSX, you'd know what to expect?
I want to resize the window, but the UI has to step in to do it for me, as I can't be trusted?
No, you can resize things manually if you like. I don't see how this is so different from other operating systems. Would you complain that Windows doesn't trust you because when you request it automatically tile your Windows, it doesn't tile them the way you would if you did it manually?
In Windows, you can resize the window manually, or you can tell it to automatically maximize the window to take up the whole screen, tile windows, or cascade them. Apple seems to think it's more useful to have a button that says, "automatically make the window use screen space efficiently".
I know what you mean, but I've come to think that it's not entirely fair. Apple does borrow/copy things from other operating systems, but there's also a different design philosophy going on, which leads to different choices.
Once upon a time, I felt the way you do. I used Windows exclusively. Every time I used Linux or MacOS, I thought, "Why do they have to do things their own little way? Why can't they just do it the normal way?!" Of course, by "normal way" I was imagining the way Microsoft did things. As I used more and different systems, I came to realize that each UI had some sort of reason for being the way it was, and each fostered a slightly different way of looking at and interacting with computers.
The one-button mouse, for example: the way people talk about the whole thing, you'd think Apple engineers just couldn't figure out how to build the thing. Really, though, it was a decision that a mouse was not meant to be an independent control device, but just a pointer. It's a way of looking at the UI differently, that says the keyboard is for complicated things, and the mouse only serves as a simple point/select device. There's a certain simplicity and elegance to the idea. Enough people wanted a two-button mouse, so Apple finally released the Mighty Mouse, which is capable of being either a one-button or multiple-button mouse, so that the simplicity of the system isn't necessarily compromised, but users are given more options. This is the way that Apple works, and once you get used to the whole thing, it does have pleasant results. For example, you don't get weird options hidden in context menus that you might never be able to find unless you already knew it was there.
Personally, I don't really agree with this. I used to. When I used Windows dominantly, I always wanted to have my windows take up the whole screen. After using Macs for a while, I tend to use the "clutter to my advantage, letting pieces of windows hang out from behind foreground windows so I can move back and forth without constantly using Expose.
However, if the maximize button worked the way you want, i suppose it wouldn't really bother me. I just wouldn't really use it. Either way, I wish they'd just have it work consistently. Right now, what the button does depends on the application, which is needlessly confusing.
This has been my thinking for a long time. Honestly, I generally feel like it's not worth my time and attention to keep track of pennies, and not worth the feel of extra things in my pockets. Whenever I have pennies, I get rid of them as soon as I can, and have even just dropped them on the street before in the hopes that, if anyone is desperate enough for pennies that they want to pick them up, they can have it.
I might be an extreme case, but I feel like nickels are bordering on being considered "more trouble than they're worth," too. The only coins that I specifically hold on to are quarters, and that's for vending machines, laundry machines, parking meters, etc. So if pennies disappeared, I'd be happy. The only time I like having nickels is when I have two times and want to exchange them for a quarter. For the most part, if all my transactions got rounded to the nearest quarter, I'd be fine with that.
Slashdot Mirror
You're totally missing the point-- when you go to a restaurant, you have no way of knowing whether or not things contain trans-fats. You could ask, and they could lie. There aren't nutritional labels on the menus, and therefore you aren't able to make informed decisions about such things. If enough people in NYC don't want to eat trans-fats, they can pass a ban that says restaurants can't use them, and then if they lie and get caught, they face fines by the health department.
I've heard a bunch of people complain about the NYC trans-fat ban, and I really don't get why people are upset. It isn't an attempt to make "unhealthy eating" illegal, or even make it illegal to eat trans-fats. It's just a ban on selling trans-fats in restaurants. You have to remember that, when you're talking about trans-fats, you usually aren't talking about naturally-occuring stuff in real food. It's kind of a gross grey goop that is artificially made, horribly bad for you, and used because it's cheaper. People going to restaurants don't get nutritional labels to let them know what they're eating.
The health departments will also fine restaurants for selling food with rat-droppings in it. It's not because they want to take away your freedom. They aren't making it illegal to eat rat droppings if you want to, but rat droppings aren't food, and could be a source of health problems if people are eating lots of rat-dropping-laden foods. If you really really want to eat rat-droppings, you're allowed to. Restaurants just aren't really allowed to sell it as food.
And in case you're wondering, I live in NYC and welcome the change. It's not that I'm a health nut, but in fact particularly because I like eating greasy foods that I'm in favor of the ban. For example, I really like fried chicken. It needs to be a certain level of unhealthy in order to make fried chicken taste that good. Do I really want restaurants to add to that unhealthiness as a cost-saving measure?
Yes I agree. Actually, if you want to know what I think the truly useful application for speech-recognition is, it's the people who are bundling it together with a translation program and a text-to-speech program and trying to make a universal translator. It seems to me that it would be possible, useful, and realistic that I could speak to someone over the telephone in real time without a common language.
Yes, he's been crazy about speech recognition, and it makes a certain sort of sense. However, the idea that speech recognition alone will replace the keyboard interface shows a lack of imagination. Part of the reason we've stuck with keyboards for as long as we have is they're efficient. They're cheap, can operate easily in noisy areas, and allow for purposeful manipulation of text. If you're a good typist, keyboards can be faster and easier, too. And can you imagine trying to play Half-Life with a speech interface? Keyboards aren't going anywhere.
So what does that leave for speech? Maybe you can say, "launch microsoft word" and then, once it's launched, you start typing. Or you could say, "next song" and iTunes would switch to the next song instead of having to click on a button. Wowwie! And what happens when you're sitting at your computer, and you say something to your friend about "the next song in my playlist..." How does it know you don't want to go to the next song?
The problem is that having computers respond naturally to speech requires an awful lot of AI that we won't have anytime soon. Even if we do have that amount of AI in a PC someday, it's still not clear that a keyboard won't be preferable for many interactions. Of course, maybe once we have that level of AI, we won't be trying to type anything up anymore anyway. I'll say, "Computer, please write a letter to my mom." and the computer will just do it. "Computer, write me a slashdot post on this topic."
There are only two groups of people I'm aware of who think that it's a good idea speech recognition for the purpose of doing away with keyboards, and have really good text-to-speech to you so you won't have to read. Those two groups are "children" and "Bill Gates". The best major applications for these technologies are accessibility for the disabled and portable devices. That's pretty much it for the foreseeable future.
Also, it's just not a bad from their standpoint to get a whole lot of free beta testers. The only down side to Google's beta testing is that they're tipping their hand to any competition, but that downside is incurred by Google, and they seem fine with it. All in all, I'm not sure it's worth complaining.
Maybe Gloogler?
Well it may always be a problem with open source that the "community" won't have a single coherent vision. We can all agree with things like "stability" and "improved performance", but to drive the desktop forward, you need some sort of a coherent idea about how people will want to interact with their computers. This, some might argue, has been what has made Apple successful.
Luckily, we have different distributions that can each move forward in their own slightly different directions. Unfortunately, if anyone wants to go in a terribly different direction, they'll have to try to exert disproportionate influence on the community or perhaps fork some software. Either of these moves would be likely to alienate the community, making it difficult to drum up support. Therefore, there's a little bit of a "design by committee" quality to many things. This isn't all bad, since it means that the features and methods are generally sensible, but it might make the whole endeavor less nimble than it would be with top-down management.
Up until now there has been no need for a big leap.
Can you really have a "big leap" with the Linux development model? With Windows, Microsoft can develop an OS for 5 years and keep lots of things under wraps. When it finally hit's people's desktop, if people like the improvements, there's a big "whoa" factor. There are a whole lot of changes.
But if Windows was open-sourced with no secrets, and had a 6 month release schedule, I suspect it would all feel like a whole lot of little incremental upgrades and bug fixes. There wouldn't be much anticipation or many surprises. The upgrades feel more mundane. Like you said, though, there have been substantial improvements to desktop Linux distros since 2002, but when all those improvements are trickling out every 6 months over a 5 year period, they just don't feel that big.
Yes, you could do that, but that's not what Debian is right now. It's not a core that has been heavily worked on. It's a huge repository of packages that are close to the vanilla version of those pieces of software, but tested to work together with the other packages. Changing what Debian is so drastically would possibly solve some problems, but would be just as likely to introduce others. For example, if you have this core with third parties working on extensions, what reason do you have to believe that the third-party extensions will work together?
Really, this alternate approach is fine, but there are other distros that do it. Changing Debian to that model would remove many of the advantages of using Debian.
Your argument would be similar to someone claiming "The fact that you paid the dry cleaner to clean your clothing grants the government the right to take your clothing and run tests to see if it had any blood stains on the clothing."
IANAL, but as far as I know, the police would be allowed to ask your dry-cleaner for any clothes in the dry-cleaner's possession. The dry-cleaner could refuse, and then the police would need to get a warrant, or the dry-cleaner could hand the clothes over without the police providing a warrant. Getting your clothes dry-cleaned doesn't give the police the right to search your house for clothing, but from what I understand, you can't leave your belongings just anywhere and have them protected from searches simply on the basis that they belong to you.
For example, if I left a personal letter opened, on top of my desk at work, my employer could permit police to look on top of my desk. I'm pretty sure about that, but not sure if my employer would be allowed to grant police permission to search my desk drawers. I would guess probably so, considering my employer owns the desk, but it might depend on the details. So while I believe my employer can give police access to my office, I don't believe my landlord can give access to my apartment.
So it seems to me that the government should definitely need a warrant to force an ISP to disclose the contents of e-mails, but it isn't clear whether your ISP can turn them over voluntarily. AFAIK, it does depend on a legalistic determination as to whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Cut the distro down to what will fit on one CD (two max). That will reduce a lot of Debian's headaches. Less for them to maintain and less to test between releases. Everything else can be put into contributed non-official repositories
I think that what's really great about Debian is that it has such wide support for everything. If there's a distro capable of being anything to anyone, and still doing everything pretty well, it's probably Debian. There are plenty of other projects that do just what you're talking about. They take Debian, reduce the number of packages to what makes sense for a particular purpose, and that allows more work to be done on fewer packages in less time, creating a distro that's more specialized. Why would you want Debian to do that, too?
The USA is about regulated capitalism anyway. Unbridled "pure" capitalism would lead to huge monopolies, stifled/complete lack of competition, and extreme corruption. Which would ironically be contrary to the spirit of capitalism.
And yet we still have huge monopolies, stifled competition, and extreme corruption in our "regulated" capitalism.
Oh, was that the problem with the new ones? I thought it was that they had hired a different alien to play Yoda-- you know, like Darrin in Bewitched? But you're saying that the first Yoda was a tiny man in a "rubber" suit? Wow, those suits are really terrific, because I could never tell.
Well.... live and learn, I guess. Next thing you know, you'll be telling me that Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't really a robot from the future. What kind of material are these "rubber" suits made out of, anyway?
P.S.- I'm sure Lucas will be very please to hear that the problem with the new Star Wars movies wasn't his piss poor writing, bad direction, or retarded casting choices. The big problem was that you could tell that not all the aliens were made of rubber.
Really, you could tell it was CG? Sheesh, you must have some keen eyes and a brilliant intellect, because I thought they had created a real mutant squid-man and taught him to act.
Even if I accept your premise that Windows is more configurable than OSX, it's equally arguable that Windows is offering more options than people need, and therefore creating an overly-complicated and confusing UI.
However, I don't think it's true that Windows gives you more options on anything like a scale of 10:1. Comparing Windows's "Control Panel" and OSX's "System Preferences", it seems like they have a fairly comparable number of useful options, and I can't think of an option that exists in Windows that should exist in OSX but doesn't. When you additionally figure in the open source components and Unix compatibility of OSX, and all of the options they've opened to developers, I think OSX is arguably more open to tweaking than Windows.
Now you say Onyx has settings like that, and other replies have mentioned other software to fix the gripes on the list, requiring the user to install several programs to enable power user functionality is a poor design choice. Apple seems devoted to figuring out the way their products and software should be used, then limiting users' ability to use it any other way.
You miss the point. If you want to tweak one of the settings that most people don't want to tweak, you either need to know how to teak that setting or you need to have an application that can tweak it for you. There's no limitation there. You can leave it as-is, you can change it yourself, or you can rely on 3rd party developers to tweak it for you.
In what form would they have these "advanced settings" though? Just a big huge list with thousands of settings that you could select true/false? Most of the settings aren't very useful to normal users, so I would think the most sensible thing would be to document them so developers could find them in case they need them. Beyond that, you can get freeware programs like Onyx which gives you a fairly large list of extra "advanced" settings that they believe people would want access to.
I mean, really, what OS isn't guilty of this? In Linux, think of all the files in /etc. Think of the Windows registry. If you don't know what you're doing in either case, you could spend quite a lot of time looking through obscure settings without knowing what they all do. No OS is providing a nice little menu for altering every possible setting. But if the defaults are reasonable, the most important settings are accessible, and the more rare and advanced settings are documented and open to 3rd party developers to work with, are there really grounds to complain?
But if Sony screws you over, at least you can sue them
I could also pay a lawyer $50,000 to plant a sign on my forehead, "Sony, please pay your lawyers lots of money to ruin my life!"
With DRM, there is certainly a bigger risk that I'll lose access to the content I've legitimately purchased. If I download an MP3 and that pirating group decides to disappear off of the face of the earth, it makes no difference to me. If I buy a DRM protected song from iTunes and Apple's servers suddenly disappeared, I won't be able to authorize new computers to play that track.
While you wait: Aqua4iTunes
Really, though, isn't this a sensible way to do things? There are well chosen default settings and GUI controls for obvious and simple settings. If you want to change something more complicated or strange, that dumb users might find confusing, they give a sensible command-line option, exposing the setting to both power-users and developers who might have need of it.
Possibly if you "got" OSX, you'd know what to expect?
No, you can resize things manually if you like. I don't see how this is so different from other operating systems. Would you complain that Windows doesn't trust you because when you request it automatically tile your Windows, it doesn't tile them the way you would if you did it manually?
In Windows, you can resize the window manually, or you can tell it to automatically maximize the window to take up the whole screen, tile windows, or cascade them. Apple seems to think it's more useful to have a button that says, "automatically make the window use screen space efficiently".
I know what you mean, but I've come to think that it's not entirely fair. Apple does borrow/copy things from other operating systems, but there's also a different design philosophy going on, which leads to different choices.
Once upon a time, I felt the way you do. I used Windows exclusively. Every time I used Linux or MacOS, I thought, "Why do they have to do things their own little way? Why can't they just do it the normal way?!" Of course, by "normal way" I was imagining the way Microsoft did things. As I used more and different systems, I came to realize that each UI had some sort of reason for being the way it was, and each fostered a slightly different way of looking at and interacting with computers.
The one-button mouse, for example: the way people talk about the whole thing, you'd think Apple engineers just couldn't figure out how to build the thing. Really, though, it was a decision that a mouse was not meant to be an independent control device, but just a pointer. It's a way of looking at the UI differently, that says the keyboard is for complicated things, and the mouse only serves as a simple point/select device. There's a certain simplicity and elegance to the idea. Enough people wanted a two-button mouse, so Apple finally released the Mighty Mouse, which is capable of being either a one-button or multiple-button mouse, so that the simplicity of the system isn't necessarily compromised, but users are given more options. This is the way that Apple works, and once you get used to the whole thing, it does have pleasant results. For example, you don't get weird options hidden in context menus that you might never be able to find unless you already knew it was there.
Personally, I don't really agree with this. I used to. When I used Windows dominantly, I always wanted to have my windows take up the whole screen. After using Macs for a while, I tend to use the "clutter to my advantage, letting pieces of windows hang out from behind foreground windows so I can move back and forth without constantly using Expose.
However, if the maximize button worked the way you want, i suppose it wouldn't really bother me. I just wouldn't really use it. Either way, I wish they'd just have it work consistently. Right now, what the button does depends on the application, which is needlessly confusing.
They've tried to introduce $1 coins a couple times, but people don't seem to like them.
This has been my thinking for a long time. Honestly, I generally feel like it's not worth my time and attention to keep track of pennies, and not worth the feel of extra things in my pockets. Whenever I have pennies, I get rid of them as soon as I can, and have even just dropped them on the street before in the hopes that, if anyone is desperate enough for pennies that they want to pick them up, they can have it.
I might be an extreme case, but I feel like nickels are bordering on being considered "more trouble than they're worth," too. The only coins that I specifically hold on to are quarters, and that's for vending machines, laundry machines, parking meters, etc. So if pennies disappeared, I'd be happy. The only time I like having nickels is when I have two times and want to exchange them for a quarter. For the most part, if all my transactions got rounded to the nearest quarter, I'd be fine with that.