The quote I remember most from Triumph of the Nerds was when they asked Steve Jobs what he doesn't like about Microsoft and he paused for a moment and then said "they have no taste". A while ago, Linus Torvalds was asked what he doesn't like about Microsoft and he also answered "they have no taste". I guess they really don't have any taste.
Here is an example of something that could make life easier for everyone.. an X-Windows based AI script writer. It just sits in the corner of your screen making scripts to do everything you are repetitvly doing (like clicking on mp3s to DL them); then when you find yourself doing something repetitive, you just click over to the script writer and modify it's half writen script to meat you specific criteria.
You are describing the Macintosh Script Editor, except for the fact that it's not always on. You turn it on or off when you want to record a script for a particular repetitive task. When you're done recording, you can edit, modify and save the script as an application. I use it all the time.
The Mac even has a script menu that sits in the upper right all the time (if you choose to use it) so you can access OS-level scripts and application-level scripts that you've recorded or written within applications. Mac users trade scripts with each other. "Hey, here's a script that keeps two folders synchronized, no matter where they are."... "Here's a script that sorts files into separate folders depending on file type."... "Here's a script that launches your mail client at a certain time and checks mail and then quits."
I thought it was funny that you described AppleScript in your first message, where you said the Mac was too limited and for stupid people, and what they really need is easy programming, but it got beyond funny when you described the Script Editor, too.
The beauty of the Mac is that the complexity is not in your face, so it's easy to learn. Unfortunately, people who want to sneer at the Mac use one for a minute or two and think they've seen the whole thing. All of the things you'd do with a GUI/CLI can also be done with a Mac, just within the one interface, which happens to be a GUI. Our command line are flexible scripts that can be treated as applications or attached to other objects to make the objects smarter.
The real break through in user interface is not some push button GUI.. it is a Programming Langauge which has a really good learning curve.. and that has access to all the information the user wants to menipulate. Light weight programming needs to be something a user can not help but do in there every day life... one day programming should be though of like driving a car is today.
Mmmmm... yummy AppleScript. Easy to learn, natural language syntax, object-oriented, controls the whole computer and many of the apps. Built into every sweet, sweet Apple pie. Tasty.
When someone's telling you why the Mac sux and they say "co-operative multitasking" you know that the almost worthless debate has become completely worthless. It's equivalent to saying you use NT instead of Linux because NT has a microkernel and Linux doesn't. It's way too much of an over simplification.
> It's funny that you bring that up. As far as I > know, Apple controls firewire
IEEE 1394 is an international standard. It is not controlled by any one company.
> So while firewire might soon leap past > USB 2.0 in terms of speed
USB is 12Mbs and Firewire is 400Mbs right now, so I think USB will have to "leap past" Firewire before we wonder whether Firewire will soon "leap past" the published specs for a proposed future version of USB.
> what devices are there that will > require it [IEEE 1394]?
IEEE 1394 devices will outnumber USB 2.0 devices both in variety and shipping numbers for at least two years, even if everything goes exactly to Intel's plans. And even then, USB is very computer-centric at a time when people are talking about home networks. Why exclude the set-top box or DVD player from the network? 1394 has an almost 10 million device head start right now, and it's just getting to that point where economies of scale are really kicking in.
Apple sold 250,000 iMac DV's (w/ 1394) just last week...
> So god damn fragging what? You got a problem > with competition?
Intel is the biggest of the companies that signed on to support Firewire when Apple released it as an ISO standard. Standards are important when the technology's sole purpose is INTEROPERABILITY. Now that there are millions of Firewire devices and lots of investment by lots of people, they are trying to jump ship to something that is an Intel standard, not an ISO standard, and is not even technically equivalent, let alone better.
Also, competition would only be possible if USB 2.0 actually existed.
>> There's lots of blather in the USB2 announcement >> about supporting video cameras etc. but IIRC USB >> doesn't support the isochronous transfers which >> are usually considered necessary to serve those >> markets. Did I miss something? > This was in USB1. I can't imagine > they got rid of it!
Don't most USB devices talk to the computer at a slower speed than it talks to them? That upstream/downstream stuff? The big issue for video stuff is that with Firewire, camera can talk to VCR equally, with USB, everything talks to the computer.
> USB1 technically supported 127 devices, but I > think you would have been crazy to actually > try to use more than 3 at once. Don't know > about firewire.
Firewire can do 64 right now, but the key is that they daisy chain, so you just need one cable per device. 64 USB devices would require a huge number of hubs, and the USB bus is too slow for this.
Re:USB doesn't inherantly require more CPU power
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I think the main point is that USB devices require a PC (which often has Intel inside) and Firewire devices don't. Firewire is working right now anywhere there's digital video involved, and this only involves a PC when it's logical to involve one (say, for editing). Intel would like to see USB 2.0 in there so that a PC is always involved.
Firewire will be at 800Mbs by the time USB is at 400 (if it gets there), but the big advantage of Firewire is its decentralization.
Re:Apple in this group?? what about keeping both
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> Wasn't apple supposed to be one of the great > inspirations and lead member of this group? > Why are they absent now?
No, they were just the first to fully implement it, because they didn't have to wait for Microsoft to halfway support it, and they were able to realize many more benefits from it because they replaced two, older, slower ports.
> This is silly splitting off support to too many > different standards
Firewire and USB are very different. USB is for (slow) keyboards, pointing devices and printers while Firewire is for (high-speed) digital camcorders and hard drives and such. You don't want your digital camcorder sharing a bus with your keyboard. They have different needs. Also, Firewire devices have to have brains so that you can control a Firewire camcorder from a Firewire computer without having to tell the computer what kind of camcorder you're using. A keyboard or mouse may not benefit from that because they're pretty cheap and generic, but hard drives and tape drives that don't need special drivers and can backup each other without using a computer's CPU are very cool.
Also, Firewire is an ISO standard and USB is not. Makes it a safer bet for the future.
For most OS', you go 1) make sure you have appropriate hardware, 2) install OS. With NT, you can skip step one and get away with it more often than with BeOS, Linux or OS/2, but you're still an idiot to do so. Blind, crossed-fingers hardware support is the only place I can see where NT installation is easier.
I gave BeOS a try. It's an incredibly easy install. It takes 1 minute to start it and then you go for coffee and come back 10-15 minutes later and it's done. The best thing Be could do for themselves would be to make a movie of their install process and post it on the Web. At the very least it would make people wonder why the Microsoft ones have to talk down to you so much.
Also, the new Startup Manager on the newest Apple machines seems like it would be a huge hit with Linux users. Basically, if you boot a PowerMac G4, an iBook or a new iMac with the Option key held down, you get a graphical screen with icons for all of the drives the machine can find. You choose a drive and boot from it. A very elegant way to run more than one OS on a single machine. No more booting to Mac OS to boot Linux, as in the old (pre-Jobs... hmm) days.
If you can't find a Firewire device you like at Firepower then you've got a problem. That's just one company. Dealers are selling these things for about 15-20% less than the list prices on this site, too (like all computer gear). Firewire is well into the useful stage.
such as photo, video and others. All of which relies on many many expansion slots.
Yeah, photo and video people just HATE Firewire, right? There hasn't been a Mac produced with more than three empty PCI slots for a year now, and they can barely make enough of them to meet the demand. AND, if you really need more slots, there's an expansion chassis from a third-party that gives you six or eight more.
Sure it is. Patent office is making a lot of money.
All Amazon are doing is ID'ing the user and then performing a transaction. Even if everyone else does it in two clicks and Amazon in one, all that makes them is more efficient. They haven't invented anything. Also, don't you think that turning "three-click transactions" into "one-click transactions" could be considered obvious? Like a hundred years from now a guy would go "shit! why didn't we ever think of making Web shopping more efficient?"
Outpost.com has been doing this for a long time, too, I believe. I always skip it, but its certainly there.
No way, this will be huge. Think about how many people have talked about putting their car or fridge on the Web... Jini and the like and the idea that if it has a digital pulse, we'll network it someday. Then think about the fact that there are already hundreds of millions of set-top-box/TV combos out there. Which non-computer devices do you think will really be the first ones to go en masse onto the Web?
Besides, this isn't about getting people a way to cheaply look at their cousin's Web page, it's about marketing and that's IT. That's what pays for it, because it will be dirt cheap to the consumer, if not free. A lot of people don't "explore" the Web. They'll get on there and buy from the stores that Intel/Nokia/partners push at them and get their stock quotes, plan their retirement, do their banking the same way. They won't be able to live without it after a while. How will I do my banking or order my groceries without it? A huge market, too. For every American on the Web right now there's one that isn't. Those people really want this, because they're scared and confused by all the www.foo.com billboards and they hate it when people ask for their email address and they don't have one. They're ready to online shop. I mean, online shopping is pretty good, but doesn't it sound a whole lot better when you don't have a clue what it is? All those ads Intel shows where the Web looks like the Metaverse or something (if you have a PIII, I guess) can't be hurting, either.
They look like you could pick them up with one hand, but they could easily be two or three times that size. Also, an example of a colorful case that's not pretending to be an iMac.
Short reminder: almost all of the European Union countries are led by socialists.
So is the United States, we just don't call it that here. There are European countries that are less socialist than the US, especially the US in the grip of the Drug War and the War on Terrorism and the War on Hackers and whatever else the government can dream up to keep all the cops and soldiers busy and in need of bigger budgets and more toys. I understand this because I've lived long stretches in a few different countries. I can't legally keep my paycheck in the US, either. I have to make an annual report to the government detailing every penny I receive from another person, and every penny I give to another person so that the government can determine that I gave enough for the "common good". The US is a kleptocracy like any other government in the world.
When we used to have Kings or Emperors, the King received tribute which he redistributed according to his whim by building roads, schools, prisons and armies. Once Kings went out of fashion, we got socialism (dictatorship of the proletariat) and taxes are put into a common pool to be redistributed according to the whim of the majority (or their representatives) by buiding roads, schools, prisons and armies. It's really not that much of a change for the average citizen.
Libertarianism is a step beyond that... individuals own themselves and the fruits of their labor and distribute (not re-distribute) their time, labor or money according to their own whims. What emerges out of this complexity is the true "will of the people". No voting, committee, book of dogma, righteous bullshit or political power structure required. In a libertarian model, if people really desire an alternative OS, that desire will be expressed not by talking about the need for one, or even voting about the need for one, but by people actually building one (show me the code).
So far, OSS and Linux have been developped in a very socialist way (not communist), in the most noble sense of the word.
Do you have as much say about what goes into the Linux kernel as Linus Torvalds does? Are you required for the common good to contribute to Linux development or is it voluntary? (Do you submit kernel patches like taxes?) Are there other open source operating systems or only one common one? How many Linux users actually contribute code to the next release? How much of that code makes it in? Shouldn't all submitted code make it into a socialist OS? It's owned by everybody, right?
When Alan Cox criticized "The Committee for the Administration of the Structural Planning of the Linux Kernel" he was saying that the socialists in the OSS movement are getting just as much done as socialists get done anywhere else: nothing. Talk, plan, decree, vote, budget and punish heritics and loners while other people just actually get some work done.
Socialism is ownership of everything, but in practice that just works out to ownership of nothing. (This kind of thing is what makes doublethink possible.)
I mean, what's better: having one six-billionth share of stock in Mankind Incorporated, a lumbering behemoth of an organization that brooks no dissent and permits no alternatives, or having full ownership of yourself, with the power to choose which other individuals you interact with throughout your life? Is the world one big serial CPU requiring a single, common input and output path, or is it massively parallel? Massively parallel is libertarianism.
When cars were first invented, it was widely accepted that the human body would be crushed if it were accellerated to 60mph.
People talk now about how fast you can make an airliner go, and others talk about just shooting up into orbit and waiting for the earth to move Tokyo to where London was beneath you. One way in one hour.
But if you had to move 10,000 people (instructions) from one location to another (process them), wouldn't two five-seater cars at 60mph be pretty much as good as one five-seater car at 120mph?
A lot of people who really defend Be point out that SMP is very much the coming thing, and BeOS itself is completely SMP-capable. You write your app for BeOS and add more processors and the OS takes care of it quite efficiently. If BeOS gets its killer app (real-time video processing or some such) around the time that people are looking at SMP to get an edge, they will look pretty good.
Camcorders are going digital. VCR's are going digital. TV's are going digital. These are very much consumer devices and they're going to create/store/move a lot of bits around. The consumer is going to want to control/store/edit lots of bits in the future. Word processing is already starting to give way to home video editing. The iMac DV is marketed as a digital camcorder accessory.
Saying "who needs more power for their word processor?" is the same as "who needs more than 640k?". It assumes too much. You can still get a "wait" cursor just applying Photoshop filters, and the average consumer is already editing photographs on their computers.
During the past year I bought a brand-new blue G3 and an exactly ten-year old SE/30. The SE/30 was $5 at a yard sale. It's really something to compare the ten-year stretch. I had that same thought of "what would sit next to the blue G3 10 years from now?"
I think the industry is very conscious of the wall. Chips are being done in copper, and there's a lot of talk of silicon-on-insulator... new special-purpose designs like Altivec, basically building a DSP onto the CPU. There was talk of putting the whole chipset on the CPU so they can communicate faster. A few years ago, they were just making bigger, faster, more transistors. I guess what I'm saying is that we get faster at the same pace, but it's taking more and different methods to do it.
If you were AOL and you wanted to have "AOL Everywhere", which would you choose:
1) An AOL client built on IE that runs only on Windows. (IE on Mac and Unix are separate products with very little in common and would require separate AOL development efforts.)
2) An AOL client built once to standards that runs within Navigator 5 (like any other Web page) but still looks like AOL since a Web page can swap out the whole "skin" of Navigator 5. Note that this would run unaltered on Windows, Macintosh and Unix desktops. It would run anywhere you could get enough Linux going to run the whole (5MB) Navigator or the 1.5MB Gecko rendering engine. Set-top boxes, embedded devices, phones, pay terminals in airports, malls and cafes... computers of every shape and size.
The choice is the same for every AOL-wannabe as well.
Add to this that the Web development community is anxious for a standards-based browser because development in the absence of standards takes way more time and money. Web developers know this now, but the money men will realize it soon enough as more of their business moves to Web-only. "What do you mean IE only supports 89% of XML?"
The browser war has hardly started. IE won the desktop-computing battle because it came with the OS. They extended their desktop OS dominance to desktop browser dominance. The Web is about a lot more than just desktop computing, though. Most people aren't on the Internet yet, even in America. Most people do not have the extra time, money or technical expertise to run a Windows PC just to look at the Web.
Well, it has to be SIGNIFICANTLY better in order to beat out the incumbent. So, a Dvorak keyboard would have to be at least twice as good and probably even better than that for me to go to the trouble of retraining to use one.
Try using your mouse with your opposite hand for a while to see how that kind of retraining feels.
Also, it's very hard to switch back and forth, so you'd have to carry a Dvorak keyboard around (or a few of them in USB, ADB and PS/2 versions if you use different platforms) in order to work at different locations.
From what I've read, the fastest Dvorak typists are only small percentage points faster than the fastest QWERTY typists. It's just not worth the hassle. The QWERTY keyboard will be replaced with voice recognition.
A bigger issue to me in the meantime is making QWERTY keyboards (even split ones) more ergonomic. The arrangement of the rarely used special characters keys, and separating the number pad to make space for the mouse. Most of the split keyboards you can get today are so wide that you can get a sore mouse elbow from reaching so far for the mouse, just to make room for home, end, page down to occupy their traditional spaces.
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No, the iBook has been shipping for some time, but only in blue. The yellow parts were delayed by the Taiwan quake.
The quote I remember most from Triumph of the Nerds was when they asked Steve Jobs what he doesn't like about Microsoft and he paused for a moment and then said "they have no taste". A while ago, Linus Torvalds was asked what he doesn't like about Microsoft and he also answered "they have no taste". I guess they really don't have any taste.
Here is an example of something that could make life easier for everyone.. an X-Windows based AI script writer. It just sits in the corner of your screen making scripts to do everything you are repetitvly doing (like clicking on mp3s to DL them); then when you find yourself doing something repetitive, you just click over to the script writer and modify it's half writen script to meat you specific criteria.
You are describing the Macintosh Script Editor, except for the fact that it's not always on. You turn it on or off when you want to record a script for a particular repetitive task. When you're done recording, you can edit, modify and save the script as an application. I use it all the time.
The Mac even has a script menu that sits in the upper right all the time (if you choose to use it) so you can access OS-level scripts and application-level scripts that you've recorded or written within applications. Mac users trade scripts with each other. "Hey, here's a script that keeps two folders synchronized, no matter where they are." ... "Here's a script that sorts files into separate folders depending on file type." ... "Here's a script that launches your mail client at a certain time and checks mail and then quits."
I thought it was funny that you described AppleScript in your first message, where you said the Mac was too limited and for stupid people, and what they really need is easy programming, but it got beyond funny when you described the Script Editor, too.
The beauty of the Mac is that the complexity is not in your face, so it's easy to learn. Unfortunately, people who want to sneer at the Mac use one for a minute or two and think they've seen the whole thing. All of the things you'd do with a GUI/CLI can also be done with a Mac, just within the one interface, which happens to be a GUI. Our command line are flexible scripts that can be treated as applications or attached to other objects to make the objects smarter.
The real break through in user interface is not some push button GUI.. it is a Programming Langauge which has a really good learning curve.. and that has access to all the information the user wants to menipulate. Light weight programming needs to be something a user can not help but do in there every day life ... one day programming should be though of like driving a car is today.
Mmmmm ... yummy AppleScript. Easy to learn, natural language syntax, object-oriented, controls the whole computer and many of the apps. Built into every sweet, sweet Apple pie. Tasty.
When someone's telling you why the Mac sux and they say "co-operative multitasking" you know that the almost worthless debate has become completely worthless. It's equivalent to saying you use NT instead of Linux because NT has a microkernel and Linux doesn't. It's way too much of an over simplification.
If NT 4 + SP 5 was just called NT 4.5 (too easy I guess) you wouldn't say it was a 1996 version.
> It's funny that you bring that up. As far as I
...
> know, Apple controls firewire
IEEE 1394 is an international standard. It is not controlled by any one company.
> So while firewire might soon leap past
> USB 2.0 in terms of speed
USB is 12Mbs and Firewire is 400Mbs right now, so I think USB will have to "leap past" Firewire before we wonder whether Firewire will soon "leap past" the published specs for a proposed future version of USB.
> what devices are there that will
> require it [IEEE 1394]?
IEEE 1394 devices will outnumber USB 2.0 devices both in variety and shipping numbers for at least two years, even if everything goes exactly to Intel's plans. And even then, USB is very computer-centric at a time when people are talking about home networks. Why exclude the set-top box or DVD player from the network? 1394 has an almost 10 million device head start right now, and it's just getting to that point where economies of scale are really kicking in.
Apple sold 250,000 iMac DV's (w/ 1394) just last week
> So god damn fragging what? You got a problem
> with competition?
Intel is the biggest of the companies that signed on to support Firewire when Apple released it as an ISO standard. Standards are important when the technology's sole purpose is INTEROPERABILITY. Now that there are millions of Firewire devices and lots of investment by lots of people, they are trying to jump ship to something that is an Intel standard, not an ISO standard, and is not even technically equivalent, let alone better.
Also, competition would only be possible if USB 2.0 actually existed.
>> There's lots of blather in the USB2 announcement
>> about supporting video cameras etc. but IIRC USB >> doesn't support the isochronous transfers which
>> are usually considered necessary to serve those
>> markets. Did I miss something?
> This was in USB1. I can't imagine
> they got rid of it!
Don't most USB devices talk to the computer at a slower speed than it talks to them? That upstream/downstream stuff? The big issue for video stuff is that with Firewire, camera can talk to VCR equally, with USB, everything talks to the computer.
> USB1 technically supported 127 devices, but I
> think you would have been crazy to actually
> try to use more than 3 at once. Don't know
> about firewire.
Firewire can do 64 right now, but the key is that they daisy chain, so you just need one cable per device. 64 USB devices would require a huge number of hubs, and the USB bus is too slow for this.
I think the main point is that USB devices require a PC (which often has Intel inside) and Firewire devices don't. Firewire is working right now anywhere there's digital video involved, and this only involves a PC when it's logical to involve one (say, for editing). Intel would like to see USB 2.0 in there so that a PC is always involved.
Firewire will be at 800Mbs by the time USB is at 400 (if it gets there), but the big advantage of Firewire is its decentralization.
> Wasn't apple supposed to be one of the great
> inspirations and lead member of this group?
> Why are they absent now?
No, they were just the first to fully implement it, because they didn't have to wait for Microsoft to halfway support it, and they were able to realize many more benefits from it because they replaced two, older, slower ports.
> This is silly splitting off support to too many
> different standards
Firewire and USB are very different. USB is for (slow) keyboards, pointing devices and printers while Firewire is for (high-speed) digital camcorders and hard drives and such. You don't want your digital camcorder sharing a bus with your keyboard. They have different needs. Also, Firewire devices have to have brains so that you can control a Firewire camcorder from a Firewire computer without having to tell the computer what kind of camcorder you're using. A keyboard or mouse may not benefit from that because they're pretty cheap and generic, but hard drives and tape drives that don't need special drivers and can backup each other without using a computer's CPU are very cool.
Also, Firewire is an ISO standard and USB is not. Makes it a safer bet for the future.
For most OS', you go 1) make sure you have appropriate hardware, 2) install OS. With NT, you can skip step one and get away with it more often than with BeOS, Linux or OS/2, but you're still an idiot to do so. Blind, crossed-fingers hardware support is the only place I can see where NT installation is easier.
I gave BeOS a try. It's an incredibly easy install. It takes 1 minute to start it and then you go for coffee and come back 10-15 minutes later and it's done. The best thing Be could do for themselves would be to make a movie of their install process and post it on the Web. At the very least it would make people wonder why the Microsoft ones have to talk down to you so much.
Also, the new Startup Manager on the newest Apple machines seems like it would be a huge hit with Linux users. Basically, if you boot a PowerMac G4, an iBook or a new iMac with the Option key held down, you get a graphical screen with icons for all of the drives the machine can find. You choose a drive and boot from it. A very elegant way to run more than one OS on a single machine. No more booting to Mac OS to boot Linux, as in the old (pre-Jobs ... hmm) days.
As soon as.... I only been waiting forever
If you can't find a Firewire device you like at Firepower then you've got a problem. That's just one company. Dealers are selling these things for about 15-20% less than the list prices on this site, too (like all computer gear). Firewire is well into the useful stage.
such as photo, video and others. All of which relies on many many expansion slots.
Yeah, photo and video people just HATE Firewire, right? There hasn't been a Mac produced with more than three empty PCI slots for a year now, and they can barely make enough of them to meet the demand. AND, if you really need more slots, there's an expansion chassis from a third-party that gives you six or eight more.
> A patent is not granted that easily.
Sure it is. Patent office is making a lot of money.
All Amazon are doing is ID'ing the user and then performing a transaction. Even if everyone else does it in two clicks and Amazon in one, all that makes them is more efficient. They haven't invented anything. Also, don't you think that turning "three-click transactions" into "one-click transactions" could be considered obvious? Like a hundred years from now a guy would go "shit! why didn't we ever think of making Web shopping more efficient?"
Outpost.com has been doing this for a long time, too, I believe. I always skip it, but its certainly there.
> I mean it's mostly reading and thinking.
... Jini and the like and the idea that if it has a digital pulse, we'll network it someday. Then think about the fact that there are already hundreds of millions of set-top-box/TV combos out there. Which non-computer devices do you think will really be the first ones to go en masse onto the Web?
Thinking? On the Internet?
No way, this will be huge. Think about how many people have talked about putting their car or fridge on the Web
Besides, this isn't about getting people a way to cheaply look at their cousin's Web page, it's about marketing and that's IT. That's what pays for it, because it will be dirt cheap to the consumer, if not free. A lot of people don't "explore" the Web. They'll get on there and buy from the stores that Intel/Nokia/partners push at them and get their stock quotes, plan their retirement, do their banking the same way. They won't be able to live without it after a while. How will I do my banking or order my groceries without it? A huge market, too. For every American on the Web right now there's one that isn't. Those people really want this, because they're scared and confused by all the www.foo.com billboards and they hate it when people ask for their email address and they don't have one. They're ready to online shop. I mean, online shopping is pretty good, but doesn't it sound a whole lot better when you don't have a clue what it is? All those ads Intel shows where the Web looks like the Metaverse or something (if you have a PIII, I guess) can't be hurting, either.
They look like you could pick them up with one hand, but they could easily be two or three times that size. Also, an example of a colorful case that's not pretending to be an iMac.
Short reminder: almost all of the European Union countries are led by socialists.
So is the United States, we just don't call it that here. There are European countries that are less socialist than the US, especially the US in the grip of the Drug War and the War on Terrorism and the War on Hackers and whatever else the government can dream up to keep all the cops and soldiers busy and in need of bigger budgets and more toys. I understand this because I've lived long stretches in a few different countries. I can't legally keep my paycheck in the US, either. I have to make an annual report to the government detailing every penny I receive from another person, and every penny I give to another person so that the government can determine that I gave enough for the "common good". The US is a kleptocracy like any other government in the world.
When we used to have Kings or Emperors, the King received tribute which he redistributed according to his whim by building roads, schools, prisons and armies. Once Kings went out of fashion, we got socialism (dictatorship of the proletariat) and taxes are put into a common pool to be redistributed according to the whim of the majority (or their representatives) by buiding roads, schools, prisons and armies. It's really not that much of a change for the average citizen.
Libertarianism is a step beyond that ... individuals own themselves and the fruits of their labor and distribute (not re-distribute) their time, labor or money according to their own whims. What emerges out of this complexity is the true "will of the people". No voting, committee, book of dogma, righteous bullshit or political power structure required. In a libertarian model, if people really desire an alternative OS, that desire will be expressed not by talking about the need for one, or even voting about the need for one, but by people actually building one (show me the code).
So far, OSS and Linux have been developped in a very socialist way (not communist), in the most noble sense of the word.
Do you have as much say about what goes into the Linux kernel as Linus Torvalds does? Are you required for the common good to contribute to Linux development or is it voluntary? (Do you submit kernel patches like taxes?) Are there other open source operating systems or only one common one? How many Linux users actually contribute code to the next release? How much of that code makes it in? Shouldn't all submitted code make it into a socialist OS? It's owned by everybody, right?
When Alan Cox criticized "The Committee for the Administration of the Structural Planning of the Linux Kernel" he was saying that the socialists in the OSS movement are getting just as much done as socialists get done anywhere else: nothing. Talk, plan, decree, vote, budget and punish heritics and loners while other people just actually get some work done.
Socialism is ownership of everything, but in practice that just works out to ownership of nothing. (This kind of thing is what makes doublethink possible.)
I mean, what's better: having one six-billionth share of stock in Mankind Incorporated, a lumbering behemoth of an organization that brooks no dissent and permits no alternatives, or having full ownership of yourself, with the power to choose which other individuals you interact with throughout your life? Is the world one big serial CPU requiring a single, common input and output path, or is it massively parallel? Massively parallel is libertarianism.
When cars were first invented, it was widely accepted that the human body would be crushed if it were accellerated to 60mph.
...
People talk now about how fast you can make an airliner go, and others talk about just shooting up into orbit and waiting for the earth to move Tokyo to where London was beneath you. One way in one hour.
Then there are the transporters
But if you had to move 10,000 people (instructions) from one location to another (process them), wouldn't two five-seater cars at 60mph be pretty much as good as one five-seater car at 120mph?
Better gas milage, too.
What the hell am I talking about?
A lot of people who really defend Be point out that SMP is very much the coming thing, and BeOS itself is completely SMP-capable. You write your app for BeOS and add more processors and the OS takes care of it quite efficiently. If BeOS gets its killer app (real-time video processing or some such) around the time that people are looking at SMP to get an edge, they will look pretty good.
Camcorders are going digital. VCR's are going digital. TV's are going digital. These are very much consumer devices and they're going to create/store/move a lot of bits around. The consumer is going to want to control/store/edit lots of bits in the future. Word processing is already starting to give way to home video editing. The iMac DV is marketed as a digital camcorder accessory.
Saying "who needs more power for their word processor?" is the same as "who needs more than 640k?". It assumes too much. You can still get a "wait" cursor just applying Photoshop filters, and the average consumer is already editing photographs on their computers.
During the past year I bought a brand-new blue G3 and an exactly ten-year old SE/30. The SE/30 was $5 at a yard sale. It's really something to compare the ten-year stretch. I had that same thought of "what would sit next to the blue G3 10 years from now?"
... new special-purpose designs like Altivec, basically building a DSP onto the CPU. There was talk of putting the whole chipset on the CPU so they can communicate faster. A few years ago, they were just making bigger, faster, more transistors. I guess what I'm saying is that we get faster at the same pace, but it's taking more and different methods to do it.
I think the industry is very conscious of the wall. Chips are being done in copper, and there's a lot of talk of silicon-on-insulator
If you were AOL and you wanted to have "AOL Everywhere", which would you choose:
... computers of every shape and size.
1) An AOL client built on IE that runs only on Windows. (IE on Mac and Unix are separate products with very little in common and would require separate AOL development efforts.)
2) An AOL client built once to standards that runs within Navigator 5 (like any other Web page) but still looks like AOL since a Web page can swap out the whole "skin" of Navigator 5. Note that this would run unaltered on Windows, Macintosh and Unix desktops. It would run anywhere you could get enough Linux going to run the whole (5MB) Navigator or the 1.5MB Gecko rendering engine. Set-top boxes, embedded devices, phones, pay terminals in airports, malls and cafes
The choice is the same for every AOL-wannabe as well.
Add to this that the Web development community is anxious for a standards-based browser because development in the absence of standards takes way more time and money. Web developers know this now, but the money men will realize it soon enough as more of their business moves to Web-only. "What do you mean IE only supports 89% of XML?"
The browser war has hardly started. IE won the desktop-computing battle because it came with the OS. They extended their desktop OS dominance to desktop browser dominance. The Web is about a lot more than just desktop computing, though. Most people aren't on the Internet yet, even in America. Most people do not have the extra time, money or technical expertise to run a Windows PC just to look at the Web.
Well, it has to be SIGNIFICANTLY better in order to beat out the incumbent. So, a Dvorak keyboard would have to be at least twice as good and probably even better than that for me to go to the trouble of retraining to use one.
Try using your mouse with your opposite hand for a while to see how that kind of retraining feels.
Also, it's very hard to switch back and forth, so you'd have to carry a Dvorak keyboard around (or a few of them in USB, ADB and PS/2 versions if you use different platforms) in order to work at different locations.
From what I've read, the fastest Dvorak typists are only small percentage points faster than the fastest QWERTY typists. It's just not worth the hassle. The QWERTY keyboard will be replaced with voice recognition.
A bigger issue to me in the meantime is making QWERTY keyboards (even split ones) more ergonomic. The arrangement of the rarely used special characters keys, and separating the number pad to make space for the mouse. Most of the split keyboards you can get today are so wide that you can get a sore mouse elbow from reaching so far for the mouse, just to make room for home, end, page down to occupy their traditional spaces.