It's out on Disney DVD now. Note, though, that if you rent it, watch it subtitled, not dubbed. Both versions are on the DVD but the English-language soundtrack was put together by someone who can't stand silence, so he (she?) filled it with gratitious music and dialog. The synth-heavy original score sounds a bit dated now but it's worth it just to miss out on that cretin's handiwork.
Laputa is probably my favourite of his movies, but it's also the first of his that I saw, so your mileage may vary. It does feature lots of steampunk-ish flying machines, which is way freakin' cool.
Oh, but you said movies--plural. So the correct answer to that is "all of them". His worst films are still better than 99% of the anime out there and certainly worth the cost of the rental.
I looked into getting a Sidekick a couple of years back and
decided it wasn't what I wanted because it was too locked down.
Although you can get a development kit for it, there's no way to
actually install your software on a non-developer Sidekick aside from
Danger's "Premium Download Manager". So while you can write a program
for the Sidekick, it lives or dies on the whim of Danger and T-Mobile.
I couldn't find anything about whether it's possible to distribute
free (or Free) software this way, but the FAQ seems to imply that the
answer is no.
Related to this, if your carrier decides to stop supporting a
particular application, it's automatically erased from your phone then
and there.
It used to be that you could only backup to Danger's servers--not
a PC--so that if you decided to stop using a Hiptop, you lost
everything. I think this is no longer the case, but I have to
wonder what other, similar tricks lurk in the future. I know of at
least one cell provider that disabled their phones' ability to offload
pictures through USB so that customers would have to pay them to save
their pictures. I imagine the Hiptop makes more of these sorts of
shenanigans easy to do.
In other words, it's not a computer, even though it looks like
one. It's an information appliance with the added caveat that all of
your purchased software has a built-in self-destruct. You can't do
cool things with it the way you can with a Palm or Blackberry.
Of course, if all you want is a portable SSH client, it's probably
quite good. Just make sure your contract will let you ditch the thing
should your carrier ever drop the SSH client.
(Disclaimer: I've never owned a Hiptop and my research is somewhat
old and a bit sketchy. Things may have changed since then.)
Does it not seem somewhat strange that we are more than happy to rally against measures by certain governments to restrict our internet liberties, yet there is no problem with us blocking whole nations access to western sites because of rogue elements in their borders?
The two are completely different. You blocking people's access to someone else's web server would be censoring them. If they themselves are refusing to let you see their web site, that's just them refusing to talk (or listen) to you.
Freedom of speech is about letting you say what you want. There's nothing there that obligates people to listen to you.
In practice, the Creative Commons license seems to mainly appeal to people who want to spread their own creative works in some kind of "viral" way. [...] All Creative Commons is, as far as I can see, is a lawyer who was nice enough to draft up some stock boilerplate for you, free of charge. That was nice of him.
There's one other thing. In most people's minds, the word "copyright" seems to be defined as "you have to pay for it" while stuff you don't need to play for is "public domain". The CC licenses illustrate in an eye-catching way that there's actually a whole continuum between those extremes.
But once again, what's wrong with that? I find the whole fracas kind of perplexing. Yes, some CC advocates are kind of nuts, but so what? The CC licenses are a useful tool for some artists. What's wrong with that?
(As an aside, regarding Orlowski's comment that there was already an informal system in place: yes, there is a certain amount of leeway wrt. illicit samples, but that didn't stop Beatallica from getting C&D'd by Sony or the Gray Album from getting suppressed or the Verve losing Bittersweet Symphony. If you use a copyrighted work without permission, you are at the mercy of the copyright holder and the fact that they often don't sue provides no guarantees.)
...Windows' biggest vulnerability is that executability is
determined by filename.
I'd argue that it's a bit more complicated than that. The problem
is that Windows (and its associated culture) doesn't distinguish
between accessing a data file and running a program. You view a
picture by double-clicking its icon and you execute a (possibly
malicious) program by double-clicking on its icon. Both of
these actions are called "Opening the file".
It's fairly straightforward to tell a naive user (or his software)
never to run a program unless it comes from a trusted source.
However, when the operating system deliberately makes it difficult to
tell which is which and when people routinely send legitimate data
packaged in executables (e.g. self-displaying pictures), that advice
stops being quite so useful.
AIUI, the standard Outlook Express virus works by being an
executable of some sort that OE doesn't recognize as one. Then, when
OE passes it on to Windows to take care of, Windows just runs it.
Probably the best way to solve this problem is to provide a way to
deliberately mark a file as being of suspect origin (via some file
attribute, for example) and make all of the main Windows apps honour
it.
Use Emacs or XEmacs in outline mode. If you want fancier output, use consistent markup (either homebrew or something like markdown) and write a script to convert it to your preferred fancy format (e.g. LaTeX or HTML).
If you're writing down math lectures, learn LaTeX and use it to jot down equations.
Easy!
(Well, to say, anyway--I've never tried it. But you can't go wrong with a text file and a scripting language.)
Perl is executable line noise, Python is executable pseudocode.
It's this sort of jingoism that makes me hate using Python. The language itself is adequate (albeit with some flaws) but every time I consider using it, I can't help but think that I'm in some way aligning myself with people who say stuff like this so I use some other language instead.
And their argument invariably boils down to one thing: Python uses less non-alphanumeric characters than Perl.
woot.
Could someone who isn't afraid of dollar signs perhaps chime in here with actual examples of how Python is better than Perl? Perhaps something having to do with the languages' semantics?
I'd post my own personal beefs with Python here but I've done that once already so I'll just post the link .
Personally, I think that Perl is a better language for programming in the large than Python.
See, we techies are used to basically saying it like it is. We
deal with things requiring accuracy so our communications try to be as
accurate as possible. So, for example, if I were investigating
switching our zillion-dollar web app to Linux and I say, "Linux looks
pretty good but I don't quite trust it yet," you know that what I mean
is that we should keep looking into it but be cautious and not bet the
company until we know that it works.
A business type, though, would think, This is the best the
Linux advocate can say about it? It must suck!
In my experience, business types are so used to spinning all of
their communication that whenever they hear any opinion, they
subconciously subtract a bias value from it to try to get something
accurate.
I figure that Balmer says what he does because if he ever said
anything remotely positive about Linux, that would be interpreted as
saying that Linux was better than Windows for everything, all the time
and that MS was basically doomed and had just admitted it.
Personally, I figure it's worth the effort to stick to the subset of HTML/CSS that's supported by both the standards and IE. Then, somewhere near the bottom of your web page, you can say,
This website supports standards-compliant web browsers and Internet Explorer version 6 or later.
It's not really practical to lock out the IE users from your website. They're still the majority of web users out there and unless you're running a Mozilla developer's forum (and even then!) it's probably not a good idea to exclude them.
Besides, having occasionally been in a position where I had no option but to use IE, let me tell you that the little lecture about how IE is evil and will SUCK your EYES right OUT OF YOUR HEAD gets old really fast.
But if you stick to standards, you don't discourage people from switching to a less-broken browser. You also gain access to the 10-or-so percent of web users who don't use IE and that makes some sense from a business perspective.
What John Tierney (and Steven E. Landsburg, who he cites) have
missed is that script kiddies, while obnoxious and moderately costly
to society, also provide a valuable benefit. By creating an
environment where leaving a security hole open has tangible
consequences, they provide a real impetus for making sure those holes
get fixed, and soon. This makes it a lot harder for a real
terrorist to do actual damage.
If you really did impose the death penalty for these small-time
vandals, it would certainly get rid of most of them, but it would also
let people get lazy and stop updating their operating system and
anti-virus software. And that would be much, much worse because the
first smart and motivated malicious hacker to come along would have
the run of most of the Internet. We would be replacing a swarm of
minor pests with a few evildoers who are willing to risk death to
achieve their goals.
Script kiddies are like the common cold. They're annoying and they
cost you some productivity but they also exercise your immune system
so it will be able to stop the real threats.
I have invested the possibility of self publishing. The problem is that these companies are not set up for high page counts (1,616) and an A4'ish page size (ok, and self-publishers are currently offering a less than stunning deal; the ROI is small).
And, several pages articles later, we hear about Fundable. I'd think that be an ideal way to make sure you have 5000 orders before springing for a print run.
Connie Willis wrote the Doomsday book, a story about a time traveler stuck in Europe during the plague. [...] Her books aren't so much fun as interesting.
I never did manage to finish The Doomsday Book but I really enjoyed both To Say Nothing of the Dog and Bellwether and I would consider both of them to be great fun.
Willis tends to alternate between funny and dark. Doomsday was of the latter while the other two were more of the former. If you're curious, check them out or try one of her short-story collections. Impossible Things is a pretty good sampling of her work.
[...] software that uses an XML dialect will still work after the dialect is extended.
This is also incorrect. XML is not magically backward compatible. The correct thing to say is that XML sometimes makes it possible to design an XML-based data format that is backward compatible. For example, there are nine different, incompatible versions of RSS.
Microsoft might actually be doing the world a favour by introducing their own funky version, since that's likely to be the version that everyone actually uses. It (or a subset thereof) may end up being the thing everyone can actually use without worrying about incompatibilies.
Ah, who am I kidding? It'll be a horrible mess on par with HTML of the mid-nineties.
Ebay is the Big Name in online sales. They're the site everybody goes to when they want to buy or sell something online. They dwarf everyone else. So obviously, they've gotten a bit arrogant, 'cause where else are people going to go, huh?
It'll be interesting to see if they catch on early enough to save the company.
The sad part is that what they were doing--letting readers have an immediate voice--is a good thing. It's a step in the direction that journalism should go. Only, in screwing up their implementation of it, they've likely discredited the whole concept to the entire mainstream media.
Whoever commissions the poll gets to write the questions, and whoever writes the questions gets to choose the outcome. The poll was commissioned by a security industry lobby group and the result turns out to be in favour of exactly the sorts of things they're pushing for. Colour me surprised.
I think the best news in that article is that the poll showed people didn't want more government interference. That shows me that there's real opposition to the whole idea and not even leading questions can get past it.
Feh! Who has time to read postings. Uninformed spouting
is what Slashdot is all about!
Also, I managed to get a look at the site documentation and
there's some talk about persistent storage using server-side CGI and
encryption. That's not implemented yet (according to the docs), but
it appears to be pretty straightforward. That lets you store your
work on a remote server and lets the remote server interact with your
data.
That's useful for writing and editing text, and doing JS/UIX
development (which you'll need to do if you want to do anything
else useful).
With a bit of server-side help, you could also read and send email
or maintain a small website. It's all a matter of getting the server
to do a few things on filesystem load and save.
So it's not useful yet but it can be made to do useful
things without too much extra work.
Something like this would be a great way to have access to a decent computing environment from a restricted Internet connection. Things like kiosks and Internet cafes tend to only give you a web browser. An OS written in JavaScript would work there and give you the chance to do something useful.
Well, at least until someone comes up with a way to boot Linux through an IE exploit.
(Disclaimer: I haven't been able to read the article or try it so I don't know if it can actually do anything interesting.)
You mean the world doesn't want to hear about the latest dress
you got, or your personal problems with your boyfriend/girlfriend?
What a shocker.
This is why one of the great things about blogs is that you don't
have to read them.
I don't mean to pick on you specifically here, but I really don't
get why people complain about blogs. Sure, the majority of them are
self-indulgent, pointless and relevant to no more than six people
worldwide. So what?
I could see the complainers' point if it was on some common
resource--a public web forum, USENET newsgroup or public mailing
list--but it's not. Each blogger uses a single, specific website that
they're paying for (one way or another). It's really, really easy to
just pretend it doesn't exist.
The thing about blogs is that the vast majority exist for the the
sole benefit of the blogger. They're not writing for you--they're
writing for themselves, and that's not a bad thing. It means people
are learning to express themselves and that they're creating content
rather than just passively absorbing it. It's a healthy trend (IMHO).
(By the way, I don't blog. I made a vow long ago not to blog
until I'd written my own software and I haven't gotten around to that
yet.)
Use snail-mail. A lot of people, political types especially,
consider it more meaningful if you go to the trouble of writing an
actual letter on paper. Also, use a word-processor, good paper and a
good printer. And proof-read it.
Send copies to the PM and the heads of the other major parties.
Right now, there's a minority government. The other parties
are capable of doing something about this.
In your letter, make it clear that this isn't about
getting movies or music for free. Explain that you're more than
willing to pay a fair price to the artists and content companies but
that you want to be able to use the stuff you've bought in the way
that you want to.
Apropos this, you also need to explain how this will be bad for
Canadians in general. DRM is bad for technological innovation and for
independant content providers since it gives the big players the tools
to lock out the little guys. This is especially bad for Canada, a
bilingual and multicultural society, since virtually all of the
non-English-language content creators are small players.
Know your stuff. Cite references if you can.
Be careful when talking about "freedom of speech". Some people
consider that "freedom of porn", and they disapprove of porn. You're
much better off saying "freedom of the press", "accountable
government" or "free and democratic society". Nobody can really argue
with that in public.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on this, so take my advice with a
grain of salt, or tell me why I'm wrong.
Let's assume, for the moment, that Dvorak's implied assumption--that this switch means that OS/X will become Yet Another PC OS--is true. If that's the case, it means that OS/X will be exactly where BeOS used to be.
Remember BeOS? That rather nice proprietary, Unix-ish operating system for the PC? Remember how it failed to draw away the Linux developer community?
The thing that keeps open-source projects alive is developer interest and most developers don't go for pretty menus. Or at least, they prefer source availability to them.
Also, if OS/X does become Just Another PC OS, that'd be the death of Apple right there. I think the Apple folks are smart enough to know that.
Slashdot Mirror
Which one of his movies should you rent ?
Castle in the Sky (aka Laputa).
It's out on Disney DVD now. Note, though, that if you rent it, watch it subtitled, not dubbed. Both versions are on the DVD but the English-language soundtrack was put together by someone who can't stand silence, so he (she?) filled it with gratitious music and dialog. The synth-heavy original score sounds a bit dated now but it's worth it just to miss out on that cretin's handiwork.
Laputa is probably my favourite of his movies, but it's also the first of his that I saw, so your mileage may vary. It does feature lots of steampunk-ish flying machines, which is way freakin' cool.
Oh, but you said movies--plural. So the correct answer to that is "all of them". His worst films are still better than 99% of the anime out there and certainly worth the cost of the rental.
I looked into getting a Sidekick a couple of years back and decided it wasn't what I wanted because it was too locked down.
In other words, it's not a computer, even though it looks like one. It's an information appliance with the added caveat that all of your purchased software has a built-in self-destruct. You can't do cool things with it the way you can with a Palm or Blackberry.
Of course, if all you want is a portable SSH client, it's probably quite good. Just make sure your contract will let you ditch the thing should your carrier ever drop the SSH client.
(Disclaimer: I've never owned a Hiptop and my research is somewhat old and a bit sketchy. Things may have changed since then.)
Does it not seem somewhat strange that we are more than happy to rally against measures by certain governments to restrict our internet liberties, yet there is no problem with us blocking whole nations access to western sites because of rogue elements in their borders?
The two are completely different. You blocking people's access to someone else's web server would be censoring them. If they themselves are refusing to let you see their web site, that's just them refusing to talk (or listen) to you.
Freedom of speech is about letting you say what you want. There's nothing there that obligates people to listen to you.
In practice, the Creative Commons license seems to mainly appeal to people who want to spread their own creative works in some kind of "viral" way. [...] All Creative Commons is, as far as I can see, is a lawyer who was nice enough to draft up some stock boilerplate for you, free of charge. That was nice of him.
There's one other thing. In most people's minds, the word "copyright" seems to be defined as "you have to pay for it" while stuff you don't need to play for is "public domain". The CC licenses illustrate in an eye-catching way that there's actually a whole continuum between those extremes.
But once again, what's wrong with that? I find the whole fracas kind of perplexing. Yes, some CC advocates are kind of nuts, but so what? The CC licenses are a useful tool for some artists. What's wrong with that?
(As an aside, regarding Orlowski's comment that there was already an informal system in place: yes, there is a certain amount of leeway wrt. illicit samples, but that didn't stop Beatallica from getting C&D'd by Sony or the Gray Album from getting suppressed or the Verve losing Bittersweet Symphony. If you use a copyrighted work without permission, you are at the mercy of the copyright holder and the fact that they often don't sue provides no guarantees.)
I'd argue that it's a bit more complicated than that. The problem is that Windows (and its associated culture) doesn't distinguish between accessing a data file and running a program. You view a picture by double-clicking its icon and you execute a (possibly malicious) program by double-clicking on its icon. Both of these actions are called "Opening the file".
It's fairly straightforward to tell a naive user (or his software) never to run a program unless it comes from a trusted source. However, when the operating system deliberately makes it difficult to tell which is which and when people routinely send legitimate data packaged in executables (e.g. self-displaying pictures), that advice stops being quite so useful.
AIUI, the standard Outlook Express virus works by being an executable of some sort that OE doesn't recognize as one. Then, when OE passes it on to Windows to take care of, Windows just runs it.
Probably the best way to solve this problem is to provide a way to deliberately mark a file as being of suspect origin (via some file attribute, for example) and make all of the main Windows apps honour it.
Use Emacs or XEmacs in outline mode. If you want fancier output, use consistent markup (either homebrew or something like markdown) and write a script to convert it to your preferred fancy format (e.g. LaTeX or HTML).
If you're writing down math lectures, learn LaTeX and use it to jot down equations.
Easy!
(Well, to say, anyway--I've never tried it. But you can't go wrong with a text file and a scripting language.)
Get it? Make up, entertainment? haha, funny, lol, rofl, those type of things.
Mental note: remember--when admitting to drug use in a public forum, make sure you're logged in anonymously first.
Also, remember kids: Just Say No!
Perl is executable line noise, Python is executable pseudocode.
It's this sort of jingoism that makes me hate using Python. The language itself is adequate (albeit with some flaws) but every time I consider using it, I can't help but think that I'm in some way aligning myself with people who say stuff like this so I use some other language instead.
And their argument invariably boils down to one thing: Python uses less non-alphanumeric characters than Perl.
woot.
Could someone who isn't afraid of dollar signs perhaps chime in here with actual examples of how Python is better than Perl? Perhaps something having to do with the languages' semantics?
I'd post my own personal beefs with Python here but I've done that once already so I'll just post the link .
Personally, I think that Perl is a better language for programming in the large than Python.
This looks to be a good cop/bad cop routine.
I suspect that it's really a culture clash.
See, we techies are used to basically saying it like it is. We deal with things requiring accuracy so our communications try to be as accurate as possible. So, for example, if I were investigating switching our zillion-dollar web app to Linux and I say, "Linux looks pretty good but I don't quite trust it yet," you know that what I mean is that we should keep looking into it but be cautious and not bet the company until we know that it works.
A business type, though, would think, This is the best the Linux advocate can say about it? It must suck!
In my experience, business types are so used to spinning all of their communication that whenever they hear any opinion, they subconciously subtract a bias value from it to try to get something accurate.
I figure that Balmer says what he does because if he ever said anything remotely positive about Linux, that would be interpreted as saying that Linux was better than Windows for everything, all the time and that MS was basically doomed and had just admitted it.
Personally, I figure it's worth the effort to stick to the subset of HTML/CSS that's supported by both the standards and IE. Then, somewhere near the bottom of your web page, you can say,
It's not really practical to lock out the IE users from your website. They're still the majority of web users out there and unless you're running a Mozilla developer's forum (and even then!) it's probably not a good idea to exclude them.
Besides, having occasionally been in a position where I had no option but to use IE, let me tell you that the little lecture about how IE is evil and will SUCK your EYES right OUT OF YOUR HEAD gets old really fast.
But if you stick to standards, you don't discourage people from switching to a less-broken browser. You also gain access to the 10-or-so percent of web users who don't use IE and that makes some sense from a business perspective.
Darn my inner child...
I don't delete 'em.
Me neither. I edit them. It's much more satisfying.
(Okay, not really, but I've heard of people doing it and thought it was a wonderfully eeeeevil thing to do.)
What John Tierney (and Steven E. Landsburg, who he cites) have missed is that script kiddies, while obnoxious and moderately costly to society, also provide a valuable benefit. By creating an environment where leaving a security hole open has tangible consequences, they provide a real impetus for making sure those holes get fixed, and soon. This makes it a lot harder for a real terrorist to do actual damage.
If you really did impose the death penalty for these small-time vandals, it would certainly get rid of most of them, but it would also let people get lazy and stop updating their operating system and anti-virus software. And that would be much, much worse because the first smart and motivated malicious hacker to come along would have the run of most of the Internet. We would be replacing a swarm of minor pests with a few evildoers who are willing to risk death to achieve their goals.
Script kiddies are like the common cold. They're annoying and they cost you some productivity but they also exercise your immune system so it will be able to stop the real threats.
I have invested the possibility of self publishing. The problem is that these companies are not set up for high page counts (1,616) and an A4'ish page size (ok, and self-publishers are currently offering a less than stunning deal; the ROI is small).
And, several pages articles later, we hear about Fundable. I'd think that be an ideal way to make sure you have 5000 orders before springing for a print run.
Connie Willis wrote the Doomsday book, a story about a time traveler stuck in Europe during the plague. [...] Her books aren't so much fun as interesting.
I never did manage to finish The Doomsday Book but I really enjoyed both To Say Nothing of the Dog and Bellwether and I would consider both of them to be great fun.
Willis tends to alternate between funny and dark. Doomsday was of the latter while the other two were more of the former. If you're curious, check them out or try one of her short-story collections. Impossible Things is a pretty good sampling of her work.
RSS is a dialect of XML.
This is incorrect. RSS is an application of XML.
[...] software that uses an XML dialect will still work after the dialect is extended.
This is also incorrect. XML is not magically backward compatible. The correct thing to say is that XML sometimes makes it possible to design an XML-based data format that is backward compatible. For example, there are nine different, incompatible versions of RSS.
Microsoft might actually be doing the world a favour by introducing their own funky version, since that's likely to be the version that everyone actually uses. It (or a subset thereof) may end up being the thing everyone can actually use without worrying about incompatibilies.
Ah, who am I kidding? It'll be a horrible mess on par with HTML of the mid-nineties.
Ebay is the Big Name in online sales. They're the site everybody goes to when they want to buy or sell something online. They dwarf everyone else. So obviously, they've gotten a bit arrogant, 'cause where else are people going to go, huh?
It'll be interesting to see if they catch on early enough to save the company.
He missed Batman's real super powers:
The new movie (which r0xx0rz, IMHO) touches on that a bit, unlike the others.
Amen, brother!
The sad part is that what they were doing--letting readers have an immediate voice--is a good thing. It's a step in the direction that journalism should go. Only, in screwing up their implementation of it, they've likely discredited the whole concept to the entire mainstream media.
Whoever commissions the poll gets to write the questions, and whoever writes the questions gets to choose the outcome. The poll was commissioned by a security industry lobby group and the result turns out to be in favour of exactly the sorts of things they're pushing for. Colour me surprised.
I think the best news in that article is that the poll showed people didn't want more government interference. That shows me that there's real opposition to the whole idea and not even leading questions can get past it.
Feh! Who has time to read postings. Uninformed spouting is what Slashdot is all about!
Also, I managed to get a look at the site documentation and there's some talk about persistent storage using server-side CGI and encryption. That's not implemented yet (according to the docs), but it appears to be pretty straightforward. That lets you store your work on a remote server and lets the remote server interact with your data.
That's useful for writing and editing text, and doing JS/UIX development (which you'll need to do if you want to do anything else useful).
With a bit of server-side help, you could also read and send email or maintain a small website. It's all a matter of getting the server to do a few things on filesystem load and save.
So it's not useful yet but it can be made to do useful things without too much extra work.
Something like this would be a great way to have access to a decent computing environment from a restricted Internet connection. Things like kiosks and Internet cafes tend to only give you a web browser. An OS written in JavaScript would work there and give you the chance to do something useful.
Well, at least until someone comes up with a way to boot Linux through an IE exploit.
(Disclaimer: I haven't been able to read the article or try it so I don't know if it can actually do anything interesting.)
You mean the world doesn't want to hear about the latest dress you got, or your personal problems with your boyfriend/girlfriend?
What a shocker.
This is why one of the great things about blogs is that you don't have to read them.
I don't mean to pick on you specifically here, but I really don't get why people complain about blogs. Sure, the majority of them are self-indulgent, pointless and relevant to no more than six people worldwide. So what?
I could see the complainers' point if it was on some common resource--a public web forum, USENET newsgroup or public mailing list--but it's not. Each blogger uses a single, specific website that they're paying for (one way or another). It's really, really easy to just pretend it doesn't exist.
The thing about blogs is that the vast majority exist for the the sole benefit of the blogger. They're not writing for you--they're writing for themselves, and that's not a bad thing. It means people are learning to express themselves and that they're creating content rather than just passively absorbing it. It's a healthy trend (IMHO).
(By the way, I don't blog. I made a vow long ago not to blog until I'd written my own software and I haven't gotten around to that yet.)
Some other suggestions:
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on this, so take my advice with a grain of salt, or tell me why I'm wrong.
Let's assume, for the moment, that Dvorak's implied assumption--that this switch means that OS/X will become Yet Another PC OS--is true. If that's the case, it means that OS/X will be exactly where BeOS used to be.
Remember BeOS? That rather nice proprietary, Unix-ish operating system for the PC? Remember how it failed to draw away the Linux developer community?
The thing that keeps open-source projects alive is developer interest and most developers don't go for pretty menus. Or at least, they prefer source availability to them.
Also, if OS/X does become Just Another PC OS, that'd be the death of Apple right there. I think the Apple folks are smart enough to know that.