Your comments about Outlook and how it's used in businesses are completely naive in my opinion, but that's not even the point.
My main point is that Outlook's entire design is outdated. FOSS, as well as commercial vendors, are replacing Outlook not by cloning it, but by replacing its functionality one piece at a time with web-based and standards-based applications (possibly with light-weight plug-ins for Outlook/Thunderbird for people who really want the functionality inside their mail client). Companies are following the trend because it gives them better software and lowers their cost.
Outlook/Exchange is increasingly being reduced to a mail client/server, and it's pretty poor and expensive for that. The time for Outlook/Exchange and Notes-based groupware is over.
This is probably not going to be a big deal for Apple: Windows NT on PPC is non-existent, and people who want to run Linux alongside OS X on Macintosh hardware already have good solutions.
The main utility of virtualization is for server farms and mainframes. IBM will probably be shipping some server solutions based on the 970, and the rest of the market will go to Intel and AMD-based solutions. Neither Apple nor OS X are big players in that market.
Yes. Standard DHTML can do it. So can XUL, Java, and Flash.
Extensibility with third-party apps you install? Nope. Scripting? Nope. Loading without the need to be tied to the network 24/7? Forget it. [...] I'll be dead in the cold, cold ground before I believe a web browser can outdo a native application.
Outlook also didn't improve on the applications it replaced, and yet lots of corporations adopted it over alternatives that users preferred. In the kind of environments that can force Outlook on their users, it makes no difference what you want.
In any case, a good strategy is to use native apps for a few common features (calendaring, mail, etc.) and to use web-based applications for everything else. For rarely used functionality, native apps are both too complex and too costly to develop.
I still (respectfully) disagree. The manufacturers you've mentioned do make slightly more stylish boxen, but they make boxes for the techno-fetishist.
That's pretty much what Apple does, isn't it?
And, frankly, I find that several of those manufacturers make boxes that look considerably nicer than Apple's machines. Once you get into expensive boxes, it all becomes a matter of taste, and I don't see Apple's designs as any more timeless than any of the others.
I find it confusing when people start popping up in other shows. I mean, when the holographic doctor from Voyager appears as a government lawyer in SG-1, one kind of expects him to have his emitter fail every minute.
For movie actors or minor characters, that's not so much of a problem, but for regular cast members, it's weird.
Then you have missed why people use it completely. One program for all communications.
Maybe your organization uses Outlook that way, but most organizations don't. In fact, lots of organizations couldn't if they wanted to because they simply don't have the means by which they can force everybody to use a single software product.
In any case, we already have one program for all communications: it's called a web browser, along with its server, a web server, an open protocol called HTTP/WebDAV, and a set of easy-to-use application development languages, foremost PHP. That's what most groupware applications get written in these days. Outlook and its plugins are an anachronism.
There is no single app that can replace everything that we use outlook for.
And there shouldn't be. All those features should be handled by different applications, tied together through open protocols and formats.
What Microsoft is doing with Outlook and what Lotus did with Notes before them is to rush to market with a big, monolithic product. That has allowed them to avoid issues of standardization of protocols and formats and capture a large part of the market in the short term, but it won't stand in the long term. Over the next 10-20 years, monolithic groupware like Outlook will disappear and it will be replaced by a dozen separate servers and applications. And your business can't afford not to go along with that because Outlook's built-in functionality will be substandard compared to those.
Most slashdotters just dont get that Outlook, (not Outlook Express as most here think) goes way beyond a simple mail client. Show me how to include all the synching, scheduling and work flow features available, or easily built onto of Outlook/Exchange and you might have something.
Outlook's functionality is pathetic compared to what Lotus Notes groupware used to offer. But did Lotus Notes win in the market? No, it didn't, because winning in the market is not about having the most features.
As a side rant I love firefox but thunderbird is a fairly average effort at best. I almost fell off my chair laughing at a post the other day about someone saying how cool and innovative the new sorting and grouping was, features that were available in Outlook 97 (and probably other mail clients at that period).
Your comment is just as ridiculous as theirs because those features weren't new with Outlook 97 or other mail clients of that period either, they go back at least another decade. You demonstrate again a fundamental truth about users and features: users are ignorant, and having the most/newest features doesn't matter. What matters is that you package and sell the right features well.
Then just need to persuade organisations to deploy this shiny new unproven technology into their core infrastructure.
Microsoft killed its competitors by moving in from the bottom. It didn't matter whether IT staff wanted the whole enterprise to run on a mainframe or Lotus Notes, individuals and workgroups chose Windows.
I think for a FOSS meeting scheduler, something web-based is preferable to what Outlook does.
In particular, in order to set up a meeting with a group, the web application sends a link to a web page to each person in the group. People then indicate on that web page what their availability is and the systems schedules the meeting and confirms it by E-mail.
I think the checking of one's own calendar and the entering of the meeting into one's calendar is not something that should be automated: it is good to expend a few seconds of conscious effort on those because there are a lot of factors that go into scheduling other than merely whether there is a free time slot.
Furthermore, even if an automated mechanism were desirable, Outlook assumes that the whole world will just be assimilated into its particular mechanisms. That may be OK for Three-of-Twenty-Gates, but it is unacceptable for FOSS.
I've got 1 and 2 covered (Courier IMAP and Mozilla calendar with WebDAV backend). There is still no uniform contact database backend... and don't start talking LDAP.
You don't need to cobble together a complex servers olution out of IMAP, WebDAV, and LDAP: even though it wasn't designed for it, IMAP is capable of supporting mail store, calendaring, and contacts, and IMAP is already widely available.
You could cobble together an IMAP server and some other OSS pieces and approximate the Outlook/Exchange experience, but since they are not all seamlessly integrated, you would have an administrative nightmare if you ever migrated to another server, found a security hole in one of the pieces, or had to change any piece in any way.
Actually, on the server side, you wouldn't need more than an IMAP server: IMAP has pretty much everything you need to support a seamless, high-quality groupware experience. In particular, you can use IMAP for storing mail, calendaring information, configuration information, and files, all with searchable metadata. Furthermore, clients can already be connected to multiple IMAP servers and accounts simultaneously, supporting complex collaborative scenarios.
it would take a long time, because Outlook is remarkably mature,
Outlook seems to polarize people: some love it and some hate it. Personally, I think Outlook is a p.o.s. and cloning it is a bad idea; I think the only reason Outlook as any significant following at all is because organizations force users to use it and users just have never seen any real groupware.
FOSS developers should do better than Outlook, and that isn't hard.
* Statistically speaking, Rossi is still considered the winner unless Gregoire pulls out with a 300 vote lead. This is pure math, folks, nothing more, nothing less.
Statistically, mathematically, and legally, the winner is the person who has the most votes after the recount. Period.
As for me, it's obvious. The democrats have successfully stolen the election, and I have proof.
Winning on recount isn't "stealing the election". The real question we should ask is why Republican leads seem to fall apart so frequently when one actually checks the ballots. Think about that for a moment.
I have argued, and still believe, that formal methods, specifically Z notation and formal reasoning, were in absolute terms useful to me in solving a particular open source development problem. I agree that any stronger claim is unjustified by our publication.
OK, if you put it that way, I think we can agree on that.
It is hard to imagine physicists, for example, arguing that calculus of variations needs behavioral studies to discover whether it is a more efficient method of solving problems in physics than numerical methods. Physicists use what works, and tend to figure out what works through experience rather than behavioral experiment.
Yes, and that's how software development used to work, too. But over the last two decades, people have increasingly quantified the software development process because the experience/crafts-based approach lacked reproducibility and predictability. That wasn't idle social scientists looking for work, it was companies repeatedly facing multi-million dollar software disasters and wondering what they can do to avoid that.
Also, fields like physics and mathematics are changing and people are looking hard at how to improve the processes with which work is accomplished in those fields now. That's, in part, because people are noticing that the literature in those fields is rife with errors, in part because the models are getting far more complex than they used to be, and in part because the consquences of errors are becoming more and more costly.
I also regret that space constraints precluded much of the reporting that you would have liked to have seen. Much of it was presented at the talk, but that is indeed insufficient.
I don't think that's the problem. You could have written a paper trying to demonstrate the utility of "formal methods" using Z. In that case, you could have left out most of the details about XCB, giving you more than enough room to talk about experimental design and controls. But you didn't. Instead, you did, as you say, present a case study of applying Z to a particular problem. That may serve as a useful tutorial on Z or XCB, it may convince people that XCB is correct, but it tells the reader nothing about whether using "formal methods" actually leads to improvements in software development.
You may have noticed the part where we described the paper as a "case study". I don't claim that we proved anything too generalizable with this work, although there are many such case studies in the literature that reach similar conclusions.
But (effectively) saying "this is anecdotal evidence" in the introduction to a paper doesn't remove the criticism. "Case studies" of the kind you presented are useful for people to understand how something works, but not as evidence that something works better than something else. Yet, you have been trying to use it as the latter.
but subjectively I solved a problem using Z that I and two other smart people working together hadn't solved without it even given a lot of effort. I'll mark this one in the success column.
But the "formal methods" community claims that their methods lead to objective improvements in software development (cheaper, more robust, etc.). Either the "formal methods" community needs to support those claims or it needs to drop them.
What is particularly bad about the use of the term "formal methods" is that the term suggests that it comprises all well-founded methods for reasoning about software and software reliability, but that is clearly not the case.
I think that this is somewhat orthogonal from the "behavioral science" approach you seem to be advocating
I'm not advocating a behavioral science approach. I'm saying that if you choose to make behavioral science claims, then you have to support those claims adequately using the scientific methodologies generally accepted in support of claims. And the claim that the use of formal methods by software developers may lead to higher quality software and/or lower development costs is a behavioral science claim, no matter how much mathematical notation it involves.
The overloaded home page didn't indicate that the source was available, and the announcement talked about it being free-as-in-beer. The logical conclusion is that it's not open source. If it is, all the better; the authors should fix their home page, however.
Yes, and if you had used UML, code reviews, pair programming, a different programming language, or merely meditated over a copy of the source code for the same amount of time, it might have "worked" even better. We'll never know because you didn't do a controlled experiment. You didn't even quantify the effort it took you or validate the actual implementation, so we don't even have any data about what you did.
Supporting an approach to software development with anecdotal reports like yours is junk science; we might as well use astrology for picking the best software development methods. Until computer science starts taking the scientific method a little more seriously, it will remain stuck in the dark ages.
There are lots of free-as-in-beer paint programs for Windows. As long as it's closed source, it doesn't matter what it's written in to anybody other than its original developers.
Once they make it available open source under an open license, then it becomes interesting. Until then, it's just a curiosity. The most notable feature is probably that Microsoft has enough influence to push both its proprietary development model and its platform into universities.
I might be mistaken, but basically what you're saying is that computer programmers should discard computer science methods as irrelevant? Including things like graphs and sorting algorithms, for example (which are studied using formal methods by computer scientists)?
Yes, you are mistaken. I'm all for the formal analysis of things like graphs and sorting algorithms, but that kind of analysis has little to do with "formal methods" as used by these people. "Formal methods", as used by these people, refers to one narrow and specific approach to software development (and one that hasn't had much success in practice).
Roberto Di Cosmo of University of Paris 7 claims that theoretical computer science is particularly strong in France and that its formal methods can be used to manage complex dependencies to create an "integrated, coherent whole."
In different words, people in France are jumping onto the open source bandwagon in order to squeeze out another few years of funding for the same old stuff they have already been doing for 30 years.
If you want to read more about formal methods, look here and here. You can judge for yourself how much relevance you think this is going to have for FOSS. I think its chances are close to nil.
Most real-world users aren't capable of it because they've been trained by people like you to ignore it and just click yes. [...] That is indeed a layer. It isn't the only layer you should rely on. I'd argue the more layers you have the better.
See, and so does Microsoft, and that's why their security will continue to suck.
This isn't Microsoft's problem. It's a problem due to people like you who don't think that signed binaries are important.
I think insuring the integrity of binaries is very important. I just think that Microsoft's particular implementation is done poorly.
It is probably that same line of thinking which results in the flagship OSS product not giving me the ability to verify that I'm using an official build and not a custom 1-off that will send all of my CC information to an email account in South America.
Typical Microsoft: spread FUD about the competitor. Sorry, but you are wrong: you can verify the integrity of your Firefox download even on Windows, and on Linux it's done automatically for you.
The fact remains that millions of Windows machines will send your CC information to an email account in South America, while you'd be hard pressed to find one Linux or Macintosh machine that does that.
This thing is just a black box with a handle and a color LCD display. Compare that to the current and previous iMacs.
I think iMac has been a pretty mixed bag. I think the gumdrop iMac was done pretty nicely. The pile-of-rice iMac was a little too extreme looking for many people. And I find the current iMac ugly--with its huge bezel, it just looks like a low-end LCD screen, even though it actually manages to squeeze a computer in there.
As for this thing, I think the handle does it in. Without the handle, it would be quite elegant, along the lines of the acrylic-trashcan-toaster G4, which I think is still Apple's nicest design in recent years.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comments about Outlook and how it's used in businesses are completely naive in my opinion, but that's not even the point.
My main point is that Outlook's entire design is outdated. FOSS, as well as commercial vendors, are replacing Outlook not by cloning it, but by replacing its functionality one piece at a time with web-based and standards-based applications (possibly with light-weight plug-ins for Outlook/Thunderbird for people who really want the functionality inside their mail client). Companies are following the trend because it gives them better software and lowers their cost.
Outlook/Exchange is increasingly being reduced to a mail client/server, and it's pretty poor and expensive for that. The time for Outlook/Exchange and Notes-based groupware is over.
This is probably not going to be a big deal for Apple: Windows NT on PPC is non-existent, and people who want to run Linux alongside OS X on Macintosh hardware already have good solutions.
The main utility of virtualization is for server farms and mainframes. IBM will probably be shipping some server solutions based on the 970, and the rest of the market will go to Intel and AMD-based solutions. Neither Apple nor OS X are big players in that market.
Can a browser-based* app do drag and drop? Nope.
Yes. Standard DHTML can do it. So can XUL, Java, and Flash.
Extensibility with third-party apps you install? Nope. Scripting? Nope. Loading without the need to be tied to the network 24/7? Forget it. [...] I'll be dead in the cold, cold ground before I believe a web browser can outdo a native application.
Outlook also didn't improve on the applications it replaced, and yet lots of corporations adopted it over alternatives that users preferred. In the kind of environments that can force Outlook on their users, it makes no difference what you want.
In any case, a good strategy is to use native apps for a few common features (calendaring, mail, etc.) and to use web-based applications for everything else. For rarely used functionality, native apps are both too complex and too costly to develop.
except that Outlook keeps gaining ground,
I don't think so. Relative to web-based applications, Outlook is dying.
FYI, I would like nothing more than a well written alternative to Outlook that gives me the same, solid user experience.
You won't be getting that because that's not where the market is going.
Does anybody have recommendations for an external Linux-compatible TV tuner with MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 encoding and a High Speed USB2 interface?
I still (respectfully) disagree. The manufacturers you've mentioned do make slightly more stylish boxen, but they make boxes for the techno-fetishist.
That's pretty much what Apple does, isn't it?
And, frankly, I find that several of those manufacturers make boxes that look considerably nicer than Apple's machines. Once you get into expensive boxes, it all becomes a matter of taste, and I don't see Apple's designs as any more timeless than any of the others.
I find it confusing when people start popping up in other shows. I mean, when the holographic doctor from Voyager appears as a government lawyer in SG-1, one kind of expects him to have his emitter fail every minute.
For movie actors or minor characters, that's not so much of a problem, but for regular cast members, it's weird.
Then you have missed why people use it completely. One program for all communications.
Maybe your organization uses Outlook that way, but most organizations don't. In fact, lots of organizations couldn't if they wanted to because they simply don't have the means by which they can force everybody to use a single software product.
In any case, we already have one program for all communications: it's called a web browser, along with its server, a web server, an open protocol called HTTP/WebDAV, and a set of easy-to-use application development languages, foremost PHP. That's what most groupware applications get written in these days. Outlook and its plugins are an anachronism.
There is no single app that can replace everything that we use outlook for.
And there shouldn't be. All those features should be handled by different applications, tied together through open protocols and formats.
What Microsoft is doing with Outlook and what Lotus did with Notes before them is to rush to market with a big, monolithic product. That has allowed them to avoid issues of standardization of protocols and formats and capture a large part of the market in the short term, but it won't stand in the long term. Over the next 10-20 years, monolithic groupware like Outlook will disappear and it will be replaced by a dozen separate servers and applications. And your business can't afford not to go along with that because Outlook's built-in functionality will be substandard compared to those.
Most slashdotters just dont get that Outlook, (not Outlook Express as most here think) goes way beyond a simple mail client. Show me how to include all the synching, scheduling and work flow features available, or easily built onto of Outlook/Exchange and you might have something.
Outlook's functionality is pathetic compared to what Lotus Notes groupware used to offer. But did Lotus Notes win in the market? No, it didn't, because winning in the market is not about having the most features.
As a side rant I love firefox but thunderbird is a fairly average effort at best. I almost fell off my chair laughing at a post the other day about someone saying how cool and innovative the new sorting and grouping was, features that were available in Outlook 97 (and probably other mail clients at that period).
Your comment is just as ridiculous as theirs because those features weren't new with Outlook 97 or other mail clients of that period either, they go back at least another decade. You demonstrate again a fundamental truth about users and features: users are ignorant, and having the most/newest features doesn't matter. What matters is that you package and sell the right features well.
Then just need to persuade organisations to deploy this shiny new unproven technology into their core infrastructure.
Microsoft killed its competitors by moving in from the bottom. It didn't matter whether IT staff wanted the whole enterprise to run on a mainframe or Lotus Notes, individuals and workgroups chose Windows.
I think for a FOSS meeting scheduler, something web-based is preferable to what Outlook does.
In particular, in order to set up a meeting with a group, the web application sends a link to a web page to each person in the group. People then indicate on that web page what their availability is and the systems schedules the meeting and confirms it by E-mail.
I think the checking of one's own calendar and the entering of the meeting into one's calendar is not something that should be automated: it is good to expend a few seconds of conscious effort on those because there are a lot of factors that go into scheduling other than merely whether there is a free time slot.
Furthermore, even if an automated mechanism were desirable, Outlook assumes that the whole world will just be assimilated into its particular mechanisms. That may be OK for Three-of-Twenty-Gates, but it is unacceptable for FOSS.
I've got 1 and 2 covered (Courier IMAP and Mozilla calendar with WebDAV backend). There is still no uniform contact database backend... and don't start talking LDAP.
You don't need to cobble together a complex servers olution out of IMAP, WebDAV, and LDAP: even though it wasn't designed for it, IMAP is capable of supporting mail store, calendaring, and contacts, and IMAP is already widely available.
You could cobble together an IMAP server and some other OSS pieces and approximate the Outlook/Exchange experience, but since they are not all seamlessly integrated, you would have an administrative nightmare if you ever migrated to another server, found a security hole in one of the pieces, or had to change any piece in any way.
Actually, on the server side, you wouldn't need more than an IMAP server: IMAP has pretty much everything you need to support a seamless, high-quality groupware experience. In particular, you can use IMAP for storing mail, calendaring information, configuration information, and files, all with searchable metadata. Furthermore, clients can already be connected to multiple IMAP servers and accounts simultaneously, supporting complex collaborative scenarios.
it would take a long time, because Outlook is remarkably mature,
Outlook seems to polarize people: some love it and some hate it. Personally, I think Outlook is a p.o.s. and cloning it is a bad idea; I think the only reason Outlook as any significant following at all is because organizations force users to use it and users just have never seen any real groupware.
FOSS developers should do better than Outlook, and that isn't hard.
* Statistically speaking, Rossi is still considered the winner unless Gregoire pulls out with a 300 vote lead. This is pure math, folks, nothing more, nothing less.
Statistically, mathematically, and legally, the winner is the person who has the most votes after the recount. Period.
As for me, it's obvious. The democrats have successfully stolen the election, and I have proof.
Winning on recount isn't "stealing the election". The real question we should ask is why Republican leads seem to fall apart so frequently when one actually checks the ballots. Think about that for a moment.
I have argued, and still believe, that formal methods, specifically Z notation and formal reasoning, were in absolute terms useful to me in solving a particular open source development problem. I agree that any stronger claim is unjustified by our publication.
OK, if you put it that way, I think we can agree on that.
It is hard to imagine physicists, for example, arguing that calculus of variations needs behavioral studies to discover whether it is a more efficient method of solving problems in physics than numerical methods. Physicists use what works, and tend to figure out what works through experience rather than behavioral experiment.
Yes, and that's how software development used to work, too. But over the last two decades, people have increasingly quantified the software development process because the experience/crafts-based approach lacked reproducibility and predictability. That wasn't idle social scientists looking for work, it was companies repeatedly facing multi-million dollar software disasters and wondering what they can do to avoid that.
Also, fields like physics and mathematics are changing and people are looking hard at how to improve the processes with which work is accomplished in those fields now. That's, in part, because people are noticing that the literature in those fields is rife with errors, in part because the models are getting far more complex than they used to be, and in part because the consquences of errors are becoming more and more costly.
I also regret that space constraints precluded much of the reporting that you would have liked to have seen. Much of it was presented at the talk, but that is indeed insufficient.
I don't think that's the problem. You could have written a paper trying to demonstrate the utility of "formal methods" using Z. In that case, you could have left out most of the details about XCB, giving you more than enough room to talk about experimental design and controls. But you didn't. Instead, you did, as you say, present a case study of applying Z to a particular problem. That may serve as a useful tutorial on Z or XCB, it may convince people that XCB is correct, but it tells the reader nothing about whether using "formal methods" actually leads to improvements in software development.
You may have noticed the part where we described the paper as a "case study". I don't claim that we proved anything too generalizable with this work, although there are many such case studies in the literature that reach similar conclusions.
But (effectively) saying "this is anecdotal evidence" in the introduction to a paper doesn't remove the criticism. "Case studies" of the kind you presented are useful for people to understand how something works, but not as evidence that something works better than something else. Yet, you have been trying to use it as the latter.
but subjectively I solved a problem using Z that I and two other smart people working together hadn't solved without it even given a lot of effort. I'll mark this one in the success column.
But the "formal methods" community claims that their methods lead to objective improvements in software development (cheaper, more robust, etc.). Either the "formal methods" community needs to support those claims or it needs to drop them.
What is particularly bad about the use of the term "formal methods" is that the term suggests that it comprises all well-founded methods for reasoning about software and software reliability, but that is clearly not the case.
I think that this is somewhat orthogonal from the "behavioral science" approach you seem to be advocating
I'm not advocating a behavioral science approach. I'm saying that if you choose to make behavioral science claims, then you have to support those claims adequately using the scientific methodologies generally accepted in support of claims. And the claim that the use of formal methods by software developers may lead to higher quality software and/or lower development costs is a behavioral science claim, no matter how much mathematical notation it involves.
The overloaded home page didn't indicate that the source was available, and the announcement talked about it being free-as-in-beer. The logical conclusion is that it's not open source. If it is, all the better; the authors should fix their home page, however.
Worked great for us!
Yes, and if you had used UML, code reviews, pair programming, a different programming language, or merely meditated over a copy of the source code for the same amount of time, it might have "worked" even better. We'll never know because you didn't do a controlled experiment. You didn't even quantify the effort it took you or validate the actual implementation, so we don't even have any data about what you did.
Supporting an approach to software development with anecdotal reports like yours is junk science; we might as well use astrology for picking the best software development methods. Until computer science starts taking the scientific method a little more seriously, it will remain stuck in the dark ages.
There are lots of free-as-in-beer paint programs for Windows. As long as it's closed source, it doesn't matter what it's written in to anybody other than its original developers.
Once they make it available open source under an open license, then it becomes interesting. Until then, it's just a curiosity. The most notable feature is probably that Microsoft has enough influence to push both its proprietary development model and its platform into universities.
I might be mistaken, but basically what you're saying is that computer programmers should discard computer science methods as irrelevant? Including things like graphs and sorting algorithms, for example (which are studied using formal methods by computer scientists)?
Yes, you are mistaken. I'm all for the formal analysis of things like graphs and sorting algorithms, but that kind of analysis has little to do with "formal methods" as used by these people. "Formal methods", as used by these people, refers to one narrow and specific approach to software development (and one that hasn't had much success in practice).
I just hope that they don't pour heaps of cash into something which gets bogged down by bureaucracy.
:-)
Too late. Formal methods are effectively the mathematical equivalent of the EU bureaucracy for software development.
Roberto Di Cosmo of University of Paris 7 claims that theoretical computer science is particularly strong in France and that its formal methods can be used to manage complex dependencies to create an "integrated, coherent whole."
In different words, people in France are jumping onto the open source bandwagon in order to squeeze out another few years of funding for the same old stuff they have already been doing for 30 years.
If you want to read more about formal methods, look here and here. You can judge for yourself how much relevance you think this is going to have for FOSS. I think its chances are close to nil.
Most real-world users aren't capable of it because they've been trained by people like you to ignore it and just click yes. [...] That is indeed a layer. It isn't the only layer you should rely on. I'd argue the more layers you have the better.
See, and so does Microsoft, and that's why their security will continue to suck.
This isn't Microsoft's problem. It's a problem due to people like you who don't think that signed binaries are important.
I think insuring the integrity of binaries is very important. I just think that Microsoft's particular implementation is done poorly.
It is probably that same line of thinking which results in the flagship OSS product not giving me the ability to verify that I'm using an official build and not a custom 1-off that will send all of my CC information to an email account in South America.
Typical Microsoft: spread FUD about the competitor. Sorry, but you are wrong: you can verify the integrity of your Firefox download even on Windows, and on Linux it's done automatically for you.
The fact remains that millions of Windows machines will send your CC information to an email account in South America, while you'd be hard pressed to find one Linux or Macintosh machine that does that.
Is it really that hard to design smart, elegant hardware?
No, it isn't. Sony, Hush, Hoojum, Alienware, and Shuttle all have great looking machines.
Beige boxes are great for business, but hasn't Apple already proven theres a market for aesthetics?
Yes, and the market for stylish PCs is being supplied. It's just that with PCs, you get a choice: more expensive stylish PCs and cheaper beige boxes.
This thing is just a black box with a handle and a color LCD display. Compare that to the current and previous iMacs.
I think iMac has been a pretty mixed bag. I think the gumdrop iMac was done pretty nicely. The pile-of-rice iMac was a little too extreme looking for many people. And I find the current iMac ugly--with its huge bezel, it just looks like a low-end LCD screen, even though it actually manages to squeeze a computer in there.
As for this thing, I think the handle does it in. Without the handle, it would be quite elegant, along the lines of the acrylic-trashcan-toaster G4, which I think is still Apple's nicest design in recent years.