Smartass answer: typing, lots and lots of typing (it's funny because Java is so verbose. It ain't XSL, but dang.)
Non smartass answer: typing, lots and lots of typing. The thing that I had to do with Java was do projects that forced me to learn Java libraries and idioms. If you build a web app that uses a database, and does some disk IO, you'll learn a lot about how Java is used.
Also, I recommend Eclipse if you're looking for an IDE. And get familiar with the Java libraries available from Apache.
I was one of the ones, many years ago, that was frustrated that PDFs didn't do more. Now I only want to use PDFs to deliver documents that have content that can't be altered, and print out like I well expect them too. I repent of my former desire that PDFs do stuff.
Unless of course, ooh cool, Adobe came up with a killer app by combining PDF and Flash in to one thing. Have they already done this? Have I missed the boat?
So, as I understand it, this article (and the referenced report) refer to code, not the total number of infections/attacks. It would be useful to know (1) how many computers are affected by PDF attacks, and (2) how many PDFs out there are compromised.
Microsoft wins by traction, the art of the foist, always tied to the PC (Windows) or tied to a bundle tied to the PC (MS Office). The XBox is the one exception I can think of where people went out and bought their product because it was really good (vid. Zune). The success of Windows-based PDAs and smart phones is an extension of people's use of Office/Outlook and thus an extension of Windows' PC base. Right now, Windows is infrastructure. It's everywhere: in business, in almost everyone's home. It's like asphalt: poured out, steam-rolled, and solidified into semi-permanence, and as in Baltimore, where I live, given to potholes, constant ad hoc repairs, and uneven, poorly done patches.
Internet victories seem to always arise from companies that do one small thing well, an unencumbered product that's new or better than the other guy in a very crucial way. Unless you stay better (Google) or manage to build a suite of stuff that people get accustomed to or dependent upon (Yahoo!) you will fall by the way (Hotbot, Altavista, all the other poor schmoes I'm forgetting).
In the online space, Microsoft has been unable to foist stuff on people, try as they might, and they're too un-nimble to build a toehold technology/site that people fall in love with and then build on that. Everything they do starts out encumbered. In that same space Yahoo survives because early on they built their initial success at ordering the web (before searches did it better) into a mail and portal product people came to rely on. It looks like now Yahoo is merely in a position of holding on to mail and portal clients as long as they can before Google chips them away.
I use Yahoo for: (1) the Yahoo mail plus service with disposable email addresses; this I live by, but use it only for online accounts and stuff I don't want coming to my Gmail account; (2) weather; they rely on Weather.com, and present a three-day forecast that I like better than Google's weather. I don't think people are discovering or switching their homepages to Yahoo.
Gluing Yahoo onto Microsoft doesn't seem to to add anything to either company. How is MS going to build business based on Yahoo's slipping market share? How is a desktop monopoly going to help Yahoo gain share when that desktop monopoly has never succeeded at that? Microsoft typically crowds and clutters web pages with ads and MS branding. Yahoo already has busy-ness and clutter down pat. Both Yahoo and Microsoft could be good if they were to think creatively about how to be good: focus on online services that are better than what Google's strategies will allow (NOT search), or, in MS's case, hone instead inflate their OS (vid. Vista) and Office applications. But Microsoft has demonstrated again and again that they are constitutionally incapable of doing these things with their own or anyone else's technologies.
I like the foresightedness of it
on
Predicting Malware
·
· Score: 2, Funny
another bad hurricane season is predicted... the scammers are gearing up for this
These guys aren't just assholes; they take the long view of things: "So, you can see from this chart, in Q2 and Q3, we've got our shit-heel plan well mapped out. And our top asshole thinkers are hard at work in R&D, developing asshole plans for Q4 and the Christmas season."
They really should change it to something like Microsoft Omnibus Pile of Crap 2007.
The fact that MS can get away with cramming new features into a bloated and frustrating-to-use application suite amply demonstrates what happens in a competition vacuum.
That's my innovation, and I've got it patented. It's mine. Don't even try it. Also, all extensions to coding-with-your-pants-unbuttoned technology are mine, in both the zipper and button-fly arenas. [Note: Patent excludes all pants unbuttoned-related unwholesome practices, as they are verboten under current thought and sodomy laws.]
For people who have a lot of meetings and phone calls, there's a real need to have addresses and phone numbers in one place and be able to access this info from a lot of different applications -- email, calendar, billing applications and so forth. Appending a calendar to an email program, or cramming the two things together, is one (not really so very good) way to accomplish part of this integration.
Better Mozilla, or someone (Google? They seem smart.) addressed the problem from a new, and smarter, angle. Small business people I've talked to would pay serious money to have an accessible, extensible group, web accessible contact management application.
I'm guessing that a lot of people who don't need an ultraportable for travel, still need a fully functional machine that's reasonably easy to tote and use just about any place. I find I need a laptop that is in many ways a desktop replacement, that is, has all the hardware (CD burner, ethernet wireless, full keyboard), but doesn't weigh a ton.
Since I got wireless, I neglect my desktop and code (and surf and read and look up crap on imdb while I watch TV) on my couch. I find, though, that my 10-pound Dell Instpiron 5150 is too big. And what's with the damn fan on the bottom of the computer? That means I can't set the thing down on the sofa or the ottoman w/o worrying about it overheating.
For a lot of stuff, my work computer, a 15" Powerbook, is perfect -- great size, back-vented so I can set it on the sofa cushion, light enough both it and my bulldog can be on my lap at the same time, X11 -- but it's a pain in the neck to use for coding on Emacs. I need Control and Option keys on both sides of the space bar, dammit!
I was prompted, just two days ago, to fill out a survey from Yahoo! about their services. Part of it asked about whether I used Yahoo search as my primary search engine, and if not why.
I explained that I used Google b/c I trust Google, and I don't trust Yahoo. But now that they may bribe me to use their service, I may change my mind. Nothing inspires trust like a kickback.
OK, so the people who wrote the operating system that requires all the firewalling and patching and anti-virus protection are making an anti-virus software? But, since most pieces of MS software that have access to system-level resources -- like their media player -- introduce new security holes, wouldn't you expect that this software would be just as dangerous? And, oh, I don't know, probably more so?
Really, if the guy who built your house did a crappy job, would you go to him to build a deck or a new wing on your house? Wouldn't he apply the same crappy work ethic to the new work that he did to the first?
This seems to me to be the very instance when you would want a third party doing the work, writing the software.
The fact that people don't like challenges to their way of thinking is an artifact of the way we evaluate truth -- we compare new statements to what we already know, and see how well they explain what we've seen.
My comparison takes off from this point made in the article:
The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.
I think that, in the cases of politics and religion for most people in the U.S., we're not talking about opinions that develop through the application of reason to experience and evidence, but rather intellectual practices that reinforce opinion and opinions that reinforce those intellectual practices and so on. Typically, a well-developed religious or political point of view is the result of carefully selecting and digesting supporting evidence and opinions from like-minded people, books, magazines, broadcast media, etc.
What I had in mind was the phenomology of the response to contradictory information. For partisans, religionists of certain kinds (very often those who tend to be strongly scripture oriented), and many staunch non-believers, the effect of contradictory evidence is to generate a high level of discomfort, which is the exact opposite of the sort of comfort that is generated by practice of reinforcing beliefs.
Note that this has to do with partisans. There are many people for whom these issues are less important, but for political and religious partisans contradiction is more than "an artifact of the way we evaluate truth." Challenges to my political or religious beliefs (and I am fairly partisan) are considerably more upsetting than even a challenge to my opinion about a very close friend, which would quite upsetting. Politics and belief constitute a different grade of truth because for many people they are constitutive of our idea of ourselves.
I think the response described in the article is essentially the same sort of response that people have to information or assertions that contradict their religious belief or lack thereof.
Some Christians, for example, might have a visceral reaction to the presentation of logical or scientific errors in the Bible; but at the same time, a non-believer would have a similar response to a believer's unshakable claim to a real spiritual presence in his or her life. In both cases the believer and non-believer are faced with information that threatens their ideas of the constitution of reality. But they're more than ideas. These beliefs are part of the fabric of each person's world -- they are the frame for experiencing and understanding space and time. Threats to faith (in God's existence or his absence) threaten one's sense of well-being.
Political beliefs, which may or may not be an extension of religious ones, are also a part of one's ideas about the structure of the world. For some, religious belief might tell them how they relate to God and the cosmos and the individuals they know in their lives. Political beliefs, though, tell them how institutions relate to one another and to individuals. Most likely, these political beliefs are an extension of religious ones, but they don't have to be. Threats to political beliefs like threats to political ones mess with people's core concepts of how the world is put together.
But this makes sense. A visceral reaction to contradictory information is a natural and even helpful response most of the time. You can't go around constantly re-evaluating what you believe and then changing your course of action -- that will make you completely ineffectual or crazy.
Part of the problem is that the concepts used in computers are presented to users in a confusing fashion. Using the items that bear the concepts does little to teach users what they are. The set of concepts needed to drive a car -- steering wheel, brake, accelerator, road, and so forth -- don't need a lot of explanation. What they are and how to use them become immediately clear once you get behind the wheel and try to keep your car from running into crap.
Windows is one of the worst offenders in this case. It gives users any number of possible behaviors and representations of objects that represent an underlying complexity that go far beyond what the majority of users need to do. The simplest task can be accomplished in any number of ways, and performing any one of those behaviors teaches a user virtually nothing about the system and how the pieces relate to one another.
How do you copy a Word document from one place to another? Open Word, open the document, select Save as, and then save the file to the new location.
A book about Windows concepts would, I think, walk users through common tasks in such a way that they had to learn core concepts -- no clever alternatives, no detailed explanations.
I'm not a fan of Christian Rock (I don't like rock) either, but flaming other people for their taste in music is lame.
You're right, of course. It's no fun to have one's musical taste dismissed. People enjoy what they enjoy, and music is very personal. I know that what I like means a lot to me, and I don't take well to having it dismissed out of hand. I have to admit I don't know much Christian rock music, and there could be very good Christian rock music I haven't heard. Early Van Morrison is quite Christian and quite good; and though I don't think it's dated very well early U2 has a strong Christian message without aping some other musical style.
At the same time, while it is a tad mean to dis Christian rock, especially Christian rock as a whole, it is legitimate to render criticism of the products of popular culture. Some works can reasonably be said to be aesthetically better than others. Though Christian rock was my straw man, much of the Christian rock I've heard is ersatz. It repackages ideas present in mainstream culture, bowdlerizes and represents them in a format palatable to the most vanilla of sensibilities. There may be Christian rock groups that are quite good. Christian works are often quite original and anything but bland: Bach, the Louvin Brothers, the frightening songs of Blind Willie Johnson, the novels of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, Kierkegaard.
While "derivative" may mean "derived from"; it can also mean "unoriginal", which is clearly what I intended. Yes, Linux is derivative in the first sense but not the second. And it is in the second sense that the Christian bands I mentioned and that Microsoft's software are derivative. All of them are quite popular (though their fan bases aren't necessarily the same); and they are poorer versions of what they emulate -- and in both these cases, Christian rock and Microsoft software, emulation is the point. I may apologize for the nasty spirit of the post, but I stand by the core point of the comparison.
Microsoft is to computing what Christian rock is to real rock and roll.
Christian rock is like some youth minister's idea of what rock and roll is: you don't even have Link Wray or the Rolling Stones, no it's derivative boy band music and hair metal. And Urge is like some out of touch dorky software mogul's idea of hip -- aesthetically perfectly paired with Stryper, Petra and Creed.
``Have you heard about this totally praiseworthy and righteous new music service, Urge? Rock on! Praise the Lord, man!''
Whatever early lead Gmail may have had in creating a next-generation email program, both Microsoft and Yahoo have more than caught up
I've been playing with Yahoo! Mail Beta for a couple of weeks now, and as far as the interface goes, I'm not terribly impressed. It is essentially a desktop GUI email client fit into a browser window, and it does that well enough (though a little slow on my Linux and Mac boxes -- and they do warn you things may not be great on those OS's). Nevertheless, it feels to me like yesterday's ideas stuck in a new package.
The great thing about Gmail is its interface innovation. Where Yahoo! Mail has always felt cluttered (and Mail Beta does too), Gmail really gets out of my way so I can just read and send email.
I haven't used Hotmail, but from what I've seen, looking over other people's shoulders, they don't really compete with Gmail either.
Must people persist in coming up with Linux magic bullets? You could have the best email client in the world available for Linux and Linux alone and it won't make any difference ("Sure, Dan, I know it's pain in the ass for everyone else at work to communicate with me, but have I shown you how cool this interface is?"), but that's beside the point.
I love Linux, and I despise Windows. I think Windows is to the operating system, what a crap ass plastic dashboard in a GM car is to auto interiors -- ugly, feels crappy, is only nominally usable, and, o yes, will fall apart.
This side of a papal bull, a fatwa, or some way to equate Windows with gay marriage, mass conversion to Linux isn't gonna happen.
Linux may make substantial ground in a circumstance where Windows use is untenable or in certain end-user niches. The $100 Linux laptop is an example of the first. A light-weight Linux, with light, robust word processing and spreadsheet, etc that will run on cheap hardware that Windows would take a week to boot on would be good. But it would have to be w/o any geeky configuration shit (no regular expressions, no config files, no need to know anything at all about the/etc directory). And, horrors!, you'd likely have to do it like Apple: write the distro for specific hardware and sell both together in order to keep size down and maintain quality. You could, for example, bundle a specific cheap wireless card with a laptop, and provide a driver for that card alone. This approach really takes advantage of Linux's reputed best features: cost, efficiency, flexibilty.
Alternatively, a Unix/Linux end user software that is best-in-class of its type could work as well. It's got to be as good at what it does as Apache is, but easy enough for any motivated professional to use and configure. People will pay for such a thing. When I can afford it for myself, I will buy Photoshop and stick it on my Powerbook (also not yet bought). Say what you will about the Gimp, I do not have the time to learn how to get from it what I can get quickly and easily from Photoshop. It's perfectly reasonable that people should pay for such software.
The idea that Linux is going to replace Windows, in the way that's often envisioned here is a non-starter. The let's-make-Linux-whatever-Windows-is approach is garunteed to leave behind a dinosaurs' graveyard of open source software. I think that any serious in-roads into the Windows desktop will have to be accomplished by centralized, focused -- very focused -- projects. Such a project would be focused at an OS market excluded by Windows or by delivering a very specific application or set of apps that work only on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
It has rabies?
Non smartass answer: typing, lots and lots of typing. The thing that I had to do with Java was do projects that forced me to learn Java libraries and idioms. If you build a web app that uses a database, and does some disk IO, you'll learn a lot about how Java is used.
Also, I recommend Eclipse if you're looking for an IDE. And get familiar with the Java libraries available from Apache.
I was one of the ones, many years ago, that was frustrated that PDFs didn't do more. Now I only want to use PDFs to deliver documents that have content that can't be altered, and print out like I well expect them too. I repent of my former desire that PDFs do stuff.
Unless of course, ooh cool, Adobe came up with a killer app by combining PDF and Flash in to one thing. Have they already done this? Have I missed the boat?
So, as I understand it, this article (and the referenced report) refer to code, not the total number of infections/attacks. It would be useful to know (1) how many computers are affected by PDF attacks, and (2) how many PDFs out there are compromised.
Microsoft wins by traction, the art of the foist, always tied to the PC (Windows) or tied to a bundle tied to the PC (MS Office). The XBox is the one exception I can think of where people went out and bought their product because it was really good (vid. Zune). The success of Windows-based PDAs and smart phones is an extension of people's use of Office/Outlook and thus an extension of Windows' PC base. Right now, Windows is infrastructure. It's everywhere: in business, in almost everyone's home. It's like asphalt: poured out, steam-rolled, and solidified into semi-permanence, and as in Baltimore, where I live, given to potholes, constant ad hoc repairs, and uneven, poorly done patches.
Internet victories seem to always arise from companies that do one small thing well, an unencumbered product that's new or better than the other guy in a very crucial way. Unless you stay better (Google) or manage to build a suite of stuff that people get accustomed to or dependent upon (Yahoo!) you will fall by the way (Hotbot, Altavista, all the other poor schmoes I'm forgetting).
In the online space, Microsoft has been unable to foist stuff on people, try as they might, and they're too un-nimble to build a toehold technology/site that people fall in love with and then build on that. Everything they do starts out encumbered. In that same space Yahoo survives because early on they built their initial success at ordering the web (before searches did it better) into a mail and portal product people came to rely on. It looks like now Yahoo is merely in a position of holding on to mail and portal clients as long as they can before Google chips them away.
I use Yahoo for: (1) the Yahoo mail plus service with disposable email addresses; this I live by, but use it only for online accounts and stuff I don't want coming to my Gmail account; (2) weather; they rely on Weather.com, and present a three-day forecast that I like better than Google's weather. I don't think people are discovering or switching their homepages to Yahoo.
Gluing Yahoo onto Microsoft doesn't seem to to add anything to either company. How is MS going to build business based on Yahoo's slipping market share? How is a desktop monopoly going to help Yahoo gain share when that desktop monopoly has never succeeded at that? Microsoft typically crowds and clutters web pages with ads and MS branding. Yahoo already has busy-ness and clutter down pat. Both Yahoo and Microsoft could be good if they were to think creatively about how to be good: focus on online services that are better than what Google's strategies will allow (NOT search), or, in MS's case, hone instead inflate their OS (vid. Vista) and Office applications. But Microsoft has demonstrated again and again that they are constitutionally incapable of doing these things with their own or anyone else's technologies.
What about pornographers versus ninjas?
The fact that MS can get away with cramming new features into a bloated and frustrating-to-use application suite amply demonstrates what happens in a competition vacuum.
Salesman: OK. Now this TV doesn't have the no-channel-changing feature built in.
Me: Hmm.....
S: But if you want it, we have this set-top box that'll limit your TV's functionality for you.
Me: Interesting... How much is it?
S: $600 by itself, but $575 with the purchase of a TV. And we'll throw in a kick to the crotch for free.
Me: Awesome! I'll take it! Can it get kicked in the nuts now?
That's my innovation, and I've got it patented. It's mine. Don't even try it. Also, all extensions to coding-with-your-pants-unbuttoned technology are mine, in both the zipper and button-fly arenas. [Note: Patent excludes all pants unbuttoned-related unwholesome practices, as they are verboten under current thought and sodomy laws.]
For people who have a lot of meetings and phone calls, there's a real need to have addresses and phone numbers in one place and be able to access this info from a lot of different applications -- email, calendar, billing applications and so forth. Appending a calendar to an email program, or cramming the two things together, is one (not really so very good) way to accomplish part of this integration.
Better Mozilla, or someone (Google? They seem smart.) addressed the problem from a new, and smarter, angle. Small business people I've talked to would pay serious money to have an accessible, extensible group, web accessible contact management application.
I'm guessing that a lot of people who don't need an ultraportable for travel, still need a fully functional machine that's reasonably easy to tote and use just about any place. I find I need a laptop that is in many ways a desktop replacement, that is, has all the hardware (CD burner, ethernet wireless, full keyboard), but doesn't weigh a ton.
Since I got wireless, I neglect my desktop and code (and surf and read and look up crap on imdb while I watch TV) on my couch. I find, though, that my 10-pound Dell Instpiron 5150 is too big. And what's with the damn fan on the bottom of the computer? That means I can't set the thing down on the sofa or the ottoman w/o worrying about it overheating.
For a lot of stuff, my work computer, a 15" Powerbook, is perfect -- great size, back-vented so I can set it on the sofa cushion, light enough both it and my bulldog can be on my lap at the same time, X11 -- but it's a pain in the neck to use for coding on Emacs. I need Control and Option keys on both sides of the space bar, dammit!
O...crap....
... the backup copy of that stromboli I had last night.
I explained that I used Google b/c I trust Google, and I don't trust Yahoo. But now that they may bribe me to use their service, I may change my mind. Nothing inspires trust like a kickback.
Really, if the guy who built your house did a crappy job, would you go to him to build a deck or a new wing on your house? Wouldn't he apply the same crappy work ethic to the new work that he did to the first?
This seems to me to be the very instance when you would want a third party doing the work, writing the software.
And let me tell you, it took my team of crack researchers (lawyers), months to come up with that one.
My comparison takes off from this point made in the article:
I think that, in the cases of politics and religion for most people in the U.S., we're not talking about opinions that develop through the application of reason to experience and evidence, but rather intellectual practices that reinforce opinion and opinions that reinforce those intellectual practices and so on. Typically, a well-developed religious or political point of view is the result of carefully selecting and digesting supporting evidence and opinions from like-minded people, books, magazines, broadcast media, etc.
What I had in mind was the phenomology of the response to contradictory information. For partisans, religionists of certain kinds (very often those who tend to be strongly scripture oriented), and many staunch non-believers, the effect of contradictory evidence is to generate a high level of discomfort, which is the exact opposite of the sort of comfort that is generated by practice of reinforcing beliefs.
Note that this has to do with partisans. There are many people for whom these issues are less important, but for political and religious partisans contradiction is more than "an artifact of the way we evaluate truth." Challenges to my political or religious beliefs (and I am fairly partisan) are considerably more upsetting than even a challenge to my opinion about a very close friend, which would quite upsetting. Politics and belief constitute a different grade of truth because for many people they are constitutive of our idea of ourselves.
Some Christians, for example, might have a visceral reaction to the presentation of logical or scientific errors in the Bible; but at the same time, a non-believer would have a similar response to a believer's unshakable claim to a real spiritual presence in his or her life. In both cases the believer and non-believer are faced with information that threatens their ideas of the constitution of reality. But they're more than ideas. These beliefs are part of the fabric of each person's world -- they are the frame for experiencing and understanding space and time. Threats to faith (in God's existence or his absence) threaten one's sense of well-being.
Political beliefs, which may or may not be an extension of religious ones, are also a part of one's ideas about the structure of the world. For some, religious belief might tell them how they relate to God and the cosmos and the individuals they know in their lives. Political beliefs, though, tell them how institutions relate to one another and to individuals. Most likely, these political beliefs are an extension of religious ones, but they don't have to be. Threats to political beliefs like threats to political ones mess with people's core concepts of how the world is put together.
But this makes sense. A visceral reaction to contradictory information is a natural and even helpful response most of the time. You can't go around constantly re-evaluating what you believe and then changing your course of action -- that will make you completely ineffectual or crazy.
Geez. You people willl believe anything.
Part of the problem is that the concepts used in computers are presented to users in a confusing fashion. Using the items that bear the concepts does little to teach users what they are. The set of concepts needed to drive a car -- steering wheel, brake, accelerator, road, and so forth -- don't need a lot of explanation. What they are and how to use them become immediately clear once you get behind the wheel and try to keep your car from running into crap.
Windows is one of the worst offenders in this case. It gives users any number of possible behaviors and representations of objects that represent an underlying complexity that go far beyond what the majority of users need to do. The simplest task can be accomplished in any number of ways, and performing any one of those behaviors teaches a user virtually nothing about the system and how the pieces relate to one another.
How do you copy a Word document from one place to another? Open Word, open the document, select Save as, and then save the file to the new location.
A book about Windows concepts would, I think, walk users through common tasks in such a way that they had to learn core concepts -- no clever alternatives, no detailed explanations.
At the same time, while it is a tad mean to dis Christian rock, especially Christian rock as a whole, it is legitimate to render criticism of the products of popular culture. Some works can reasonably be said to be aesthetically better than others. Though Christian rock was my straw man, much of the Christian rock I've heard is ersatz. It repackages ideas present in mainstream culture, bowdlerizes and represents them in a format palatable to the most vanilla of sensibilities. There may be Christian rock groups that are quite good. Christian works are often quite original and anything but bland: Bach, the Louvin Brothers, the frightening songs of Blind Willie Johnson, the novels of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, Kierkegaard.
While "derivative" may mean "derived from"; it can also mean "unoriginal", which is clearly what I intended. Yes, Linux is derivative in the first sense but not the second. And it is in the second sense that the Christian bands I mentioned and that Microsoft's software are derivative. All of them are quite popular (though their fan bases aren't necessarily the same); and they are poorer versions of what they emulate -- and in both these cases, Christian rock and Microsoft software, emulation is the point. I may apologize for the nasty spirit of the post, but I stand by the core point of the comparison.
Christian rock is like some youth minister's idea of what rock and roll is: you don't even have Link Wray or the Rolling Stones, no it's derivative boy band music and hair metal. And Urge is like some out of touch dorky software mogul's idea of hip -- aesthetically perfectly paired with Stryper, Petra and Creed.
``Have you heard about this totally praiseworthy and righteous new music service, Urge? Rock on! Praise the Lord, man!''
I've been playing with Yahoo! Mail Beta for a couple of weeks now, and as far as the interface goes, I'm not terribly impressed. It is essentially a desktop GUI email client fit into a browser window, and it does that well enough (though a little slow on my Linux and Mac boxes -- and they do warn you things may not be great on those OS's). Nevertheless, it feels to me like yesterday's ideas stuck in a new package.
The great thing about Gmail is its interface innovation. Where Yahoo! Mail has always felt cluttered (and Mail Beta does too), Gmail really gets out of my way so I can just read and send email.
I haven't used Hotmail, but from what I've seen, looking over other people's shoulders, they don't really compete with Gmail either.
I love Linux, and I despise Windows. I think Windows is to the operating system, what a crap ass plastic dashboard in a GM car is to auto interiors -- ugly, feels crappy, is only nominally usable, and, o yes, will fall apart.
This side of a papal bull, a fatwa, or some way to equate Windows with gay marriage, mass conversion to Linux isn't gonna happen.
Linux may make substantial ground in a circumstance where Windows use is untenable or in certain end-user niches. The $100 Linux laptop is an example of the first. A light-weight Linux, with light, robust word processing and spreadsheet, etc that will run on cheap hardware that Windows would take a week to boot on would be good. But it would have to be w/o any geeky configuration shit (no regular expressions, no config files, no need to know anything at all about the /etc directory). And, horrors!, you'd likely have to do it like Apple: write the distro for specific hardware and sell both together in order to keep size down and maintain quality. You could, for example, bundle a specific cheap wireless card with a laptop, and provide a driver for that card alone. This approach really takes advantage of Linux's reputed best features: cost, efficiency, flexibilty.
Alternatively, a Unix/Linux end user software that is best-in-class of its type could work as well. It's got to be as good at what it does as Apache is, but easy enough for any motivated professional to use and configure. People will pay for such a thing. When I can afford it for myself, I will buy Photoshop and stick it on my Powerbook (also not yet bought). Say what you will about the Gimp, I do not have the time to learn how to get from it what I can get quickly and easily from Photoshop. It's perfectly reasonable that people should pay for such software.
The idea that Linux is going to replace Windows, in the way that's often envisioned here is a non-starter. The let's-make-Linux-whatever-Windows-is approach is garunteed to leave behind a dinosaurs' graveyard of open source software. I think that any serious in-roads into the Windows desktop will have to be accomplished by centralized, focused -- very focused -- projects. Such a project would be focused at an OS market excluded by Windows or by delivering a very specific application or set of apps that work only on Linux.