Where in history was advances in health care enough to greatly improve the living standards of a population?
I can recall a good number of cases where the reverse was true, that increasing standards of living made better healthcare possible and affordable, but at least I don't know of a single case where the other way around ever worked.
Not potential people or some statistics on a population map, but alive, breathing, suffering people.
And his gift will ensure that many of them can continue to be alive, breathe and suffer.
Lots of us don't mind the first part. We just call Gates shortsighted for ignoring the suffering part. And these people suffer from a lot of things that vaccination won't fix, but a bit of money could. Gates is so focussed on diseases, he ignores that health may be important, but its importance is dramatically reduced if you overcome the illness only to starve, or be shot to death, or gang raped in the next racial extermination campaign.
Saving lifes - but for what? I hate to be so negative on something that people consider as holy as the virgin Mary, but fact is that of the estimated 8.7 mio. saved, about 8 mio. will then have a life, but no future. Or more correctly: A future of starvation, oppression, war and misery.
More importantly, a life where high birthrates and high child mortality are the norm, and where they will create another 20 or so million to experience the same misery.
Wouldn't it be much smarter to put this money into improving the future of those people, even at the price of less saved lifes? It's not exactly the case that underpopulation would be a rampant problem on this planet, you know? We have too few ressources too badly distributed among too many people way more often than we have too many people and don't know where to spread the wealth.
In short: How about giving people a life instead of just bodily existence?
What you call "background tasks" works just fine on the iPhone (push notification for apps, and it receives SMS and phone calls just fine while you're running some other things), so I have no reason to believe it won't work that way on the iPad.
Other crap "running in the background" is usually because on a computer, starting a program takes so much longer than switching to it when it's already running. At least that's my reason for keeping mail and a browser open at practically all times.
Exactly right. They buy them for the little silver Apple logo that gives them a feeling of elitism that they can push down the throats of the unwashed masses.
I can't speak for others except those who I've spoken to. Most of the people I know are techies. Most of them have switched to Macs over the past four or so years. Most of them not because of the logo but because they now spend less time fighting the machine to work at all and more time actually working on the stuff they care about.
WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM???
I'm not the one yelling here. Any issues of your that I accidentally touched upon? Sorry for that. If you let someone calmer read my post you'll notice I was calmly pointing out that this MSI gadget will have its market segment, but comparing it with the iPad is just dumb because they don't appeal to the same kind of customers. Just like a Porsche and a Rolls Royce don't fight over customers because few buyers of the one would be convinced to instead buy the other due to some minor change or update.
There've been so many "iPod killers" (and then "iPhone killers") over the years, I've lost count. All of them try to outdo the Apple offering in tech specs. Guess what? Specs matter little. People don't buy iPods because they are the best technology. People don't buy Macs because they're the fastest, best machines around.
That is techie thinking and the world doesn't revolve around it. That's the kind of people who are still sad that VHS won the format war and not Betamax. That wonder why Linux doesn't dominate the desktop.
The revolutionary thing about the iPad isn't in the technology. It's in the way that Apple understands to put technology to the uses that people actually want. Real people, the one you meet in the street, not the one that builds their own iPad from spare parts. People that don't have the time to debug their kernel or X server just because they can. Yeah, I can debug a network just fine, from the socket code to the firewall settings, to the packet dump to the switch. But I prefer if I can plug it in and it just works.
MSI thinks "wouldn't it be neat if the feature list would contain this and that and here's one more and add a kitchen sink while you're at it" Android and Linux hackers think "wouldn't it be neat if I could hack it and make it do whatever I want, given enough time and boredom?"
Well, none of that will kill an iPod or iPhone or iPad and not even an iMac, because the typical Apple customer thinks none of that, he thinks very simply "wouldn't it be neat if the thing simply worked?"
So MSI will add competition, but to a different market segment.
We support her because even if - especially if - she is a scumbag, her losing the case to these insane damages would set a precedent that the RIAA would then use to hammer down less easy targets.
That's Business Goes To Court 101 - you hit an easy target first to establish the precedent you need to go after the real targets.
Microsoft just throws Windows on the device complete with all the crappy desktop metaphors and UI widgets that are completely irrelevant to the new form factor -- witness Windows Mobile and all the Windows tablets. Apple at least rethinks usability.
Apple at least thinks about usability. When's the last time that MS did that? I can tell you: Just prior to the launch of Win95, after even the final user testing showed that this "start button" concept is stupid, dumb, user-unfriendly and counterintuitive. They finally put the "Start" label on it (it was just the windos logo before that, yes a straight copy from the Apple logo on the Apple menu bar, except that that's always been on the menu bar where users expect menu things to be) and then added the "click here to start" animation when you first launch the OS, because even the label wasn't enough.
That's how MS thinks about "usability". Explains a lot about the trainwreck that every new windos edition adds to, doesn't it?
Inferior humans, sure. However, the ones who actually bother to think things through and learn what's going on so that they can make an informed choice make better choices. If that wasn't the case, why do so many people search online to find the best tv / computer / car to buy?
Self-delusion at work.
Studies have shown that with a small number of facts to consider, rational choice trumps "gut feeling". However, more than a fairly small number of facts (a dozen will do) and your rationality is confused. You'd need to make a spreadsheet to come up with the "correct" answer. And don't forget that almost no company intends to give you useful or correct data on its products, but present it in the best way possible.
No, the "superior humans" mostly think that they are superior, and that's the main part of their thinking. There's a whole graveyards of such thinking that did not stand up to serious investigation.
Move. I've never heard this before, and it strikes me as the dumbest thing ever, unless it was created as an artificial meme by the phone companies (because the margin on text messages is almost 100%).
...travel to Japan. They solved this problem ten years ago.
A few years ago, I was in Tokio for a week. During that entire time, I heard a grand total of two cell phones ringing - they both belonged to foreigners. Every japanese carries a cell phone and uses it constantly. And still you don't hear them ringing and you almost never hear anyone talking.
The secret is simple, everyone has it on vibrate (it works, don't listen to the antisocial assholes who invent reasons why it wouldn't, real-life experience shows that's all bullshit) and secondly, everyone knows that the microphone is sensitive and doesn't need to be shouted at. Actually speaking into the microphone allows you to almost whisper and still be heard clearly at the other side. In fact, due to less distortion at the high end, probably more clearly than shouting.
There's no need for a new etiquette, just for a reminder to the old one: Don't be a nuissance to people around you. Everyone who needs a checklist to accomplish that has troubles running deeper than a checklist would solve.
I wouldn't invest in Apple long-term if you paid me to; the day Steve Jobs or Ive retire, get hit by a bus, or just drop dead- Apple stock will crumble because everyone is under the perception (correctly) that they are the driving force.
Two years ago, I would've signed that statement. Today, I'm not so sure anymore. I think (and Steve's speech at Stanford confirms it in my mind) that since that cancer thing, Steve has thought quite a bit about his own mortality and also about what Apple will be without him. And if he didn't, I sure hope the board and shareholders pushed him to.
Look, half of the people in here know from personal experience that windos crashes more on identical hardware than the other system on their dual-booting machine, whether it's OS X on a Mac or Linux on a PC.
And no, it's not the drivers, please spare us standard windos apology #26.
With Windows at least, you can turn that off. You claim to be a neuroscientist but you can't take 5 seconds to find out how to turn off UAC?
I don't think he was talking about just UAC. Windos keeps bugging you with all kinds of bullshit. "Look ma, new device found", "Look ma, new updates available", "Look ma, I've peed in my pants". It will even reboot on you without warning when you're in a fullscreen app where you can't see the "I'll reboot in 5 minutes unless you click here" popup.
So in other words, you walk in and say "I want a computer" and you let the salesman tell you what you should buy, instead of you making an informed decision and actually finding out what would work best for you and at the best price.
If you knew anything about the psychology of choice, you'd know that confronted with more options, humans tend to make worse choices, not better ones. Google or read a couple of books, the "Simplify your Life" thing brought that knowledge mainstream a couple years ago.
Mac OSX GETS OUT OF MY WAY, WINDOWS KEEPS PROMPTING ME USELESSLY. OSX thus gives me more time for creative effort instead of technical troubleshooting.
Someone (forgot who) once said that OS X is like a well-trained butler - always there when you need it, invisible at all other times. Windos, on the other hand, is like an over-eager boyscout, always pulling on your shirt wanting to show you what it's done just now.
My first MacBook Pro was not bought for OS X. I thought I'd try that out, but mostly install Linux on it, because the hardware specs were exactly what I was looking for and every other notebook I'd owned had failed me in that category one way or the other.
The funny thing is that as far as objectivity goes, you will find Apple a lot more often mentioned under the "good example" category in the textbooks than you would be happy to admit.
In fact, the Apple User Interface Guidelines are quite often cited in the literature.
So can anyone give an example of what he's talking about?
Quicksilver beats Kapatult (it's Linux copycat) in every aspect. TextMate eats every other text editor I've ever used for lunch. And I've used a lot of text editors, because 90% of them suck. OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle are among the only tools in their respective segments that make the task actually easier than doing it manually on paper would. Scrivener makes you twice as productive in writing (the actual book-writing task, not letters and stuff) as MS word allows. And finally Unity 3D is a games engine (now also available for windos) that has no equivalent, and beats Unreal or anything from id in regards of usability hands down and tied behind its back.
There are a lot more examples. If you want to insist on the Apple stuff, take iWork, not iLife. Pages rips Word a new one, maybe not in the feature list but in the usability. And Numbers is what spreadsheets would have evolved to 10 years ago if they hadn't stagnated due to the Excel lock-in. Again, maybe Excel has 100 additional features that a whooping 20 people world-wide use, but in presentation, useability and the features that actually matter, like being able to have two tables next to each other, Numbers shows us that Excel is 20 year old crap.
The short of it is: Universal is one of those companies that appears to have absolutely no trouble asking for similar figures when it is them who filed the suit. And I'm talking both damages and attorney fees. Quid pro quo. You ruin people upload 240 seconds of your song, then be ready to be ruined yourself when you falsely accuse people over 30 seconds of it.
You can't have it both ways. Either these are the crown jewels and everything about them is so precious that your ridiculous fees and damages are alright, or this is mass-produced cheap crap with a net worth around a couple cents. Which one is it?
I applaud that Apple has the discipline to limit outbound communications until the launch.
I'd like to add one thing to that:
One thing that I absolutely adore about a Stevenote is that when Apple finally announces the new product everyone has been waiting for officially, the usual (not always, but usual) line is "available today".
In a world where vaporware has become so common that you view almost every product announcement with a grain of salt, that is very refreshing.
Yes, it is. And still there's a difference between a GUI that was well-designed by people who know something about HCI and... well, to be polite, one that wasn't.
Good food, cheap food, junk food - of course that's all a personal choice. Except that some of the choices make more sense than others.
I'm far more productive in a mouse-less grid layout personally
I'm sure you are. I'm also sure you don't do any graphics, music, 3D, design or any other work that is not text-based.
Not trying to put you down. I'm much in favour of keyboard shortcuts (and applaud OS X for more consistency in that area than either windos or Linux offers) and not using the mouse when you're working with text, no matter if you're writing a thesis or a program. But a lot of what people do with computers does not translate well to keyboard controls.
Tell them to try it. I'm talking from personal experience. Linux fanatic for ~10 years, then I bought a Mac, with the "if this OS X doesn't work out for me, I can always install Linux on it" thought in the back of my mind.
Guess what, I now have 3 Macs in my home and 0 Linux computers. My servers still run Linux, but for a desktop, Gnome, KDE and everything else has about 20 years in user interface design before it comes close. Gimmicks and visuals isn't what it's about, that's just the icing on the cake and icing without cake just doesn't cut it.
How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful?
Really? The first thing you should always question is your assumptions. Does Apple have a "philosophy of information sharing" and if so, what is it?
The company is secretive about upcoming, not-yet-available products. Which is not information that customers require in their day-to-day work anyways. As a user or as a developer, it is information about the current, existing products that you need most. And as both I've always found that to be readily available whenever I needed it.
So how does a philosophy of "not talking (much) about unreleased ideas" merge with the mindset of a designer, artist, programmer or any other kind of creative person? Quite well. A lot of creative people don't talk (much) about their work-in-progress, either, until it's finished. Programmers are about the only kind who feel that putting a half-finished thing out for the public is the thing to do.
Maybe the First Sale Doctrine works differently in the UK.
And maybe the same people who cry about "government intervention" whenever corporations are asked to pay their fair share to society could allow consenting adults to conduct whatever business they want? In this case, it is very clear and obvious from the start just what exactly the deal is. Contrary to, say, movies or games with DRM where you only find out later that your buyer won't be able to use it.
While I find that list as funny (and often true) as the next guy, you failed in applying it.
Mailing lists and cooperation of everyone has long been solved in the micro-payment solutions. Central authorities are not needed, just a reasonably small set of payment handlers. And it's got nothing to do with blacklists, rather with dynamic whitelisting.
A little technical voodoo solves the rest.
Still, I agree with your result that it won't work, mostly because people have become way too used to the way e-mail works for any change that does not give them an immediate, tangible benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
In case of doubt, ask for evidence.
Where in history was advances in health care enough to greatly improve the living standards of a population?
I can recall a good number of cases where the reverse was true, that increasing standards of living made better healthcare possible and affordable, but at least I don't know of a single case where the other way around ever worked.
Not potential people or some statistics on a population map, but alive, breathing, suffering people.
And his gift will ensure that many of them can continue to be alive, breathe and suffer.
Lots of us don't mind the first part. We just call Gates shortsighted for ignoring the suffering part. And these people suffer from a lot of things that vaccination won't fix, but a bit of money could. Gates is so focussed on diseases, he ignores that health may be important, but its importance is dramatically reduced if you overcome the illness only to starve, or be shot to death, or gang raped in the next racial extermination campaign.
Saving lifes - but for what? I hate to be so negative on something that people consider as holy as the virgin Mary, but fact is that of the estimated 8.7 mio. saved, about 8 mio. will then have a life, but no future. Or more correctly: A future of starvation, oppression, war and misery.
More importantly, a life where high birthrates and high child mortality are the norm, and where they will create another 20 or so million to experience the same misery.
Wouldn't it be much smarter to put this money into improving the future of those people, even at the price of less saved lifes? It's not exactly the case that underpopulation would be a rampant problem on this planet, you know? We have too few ressources too badly distributed among too many people way more often than we have too many people and don't know where to spread the wealth.
In short: How about giving people a life instead of just bodily existence?
What you call "background tasks" works just fine on the iPhone (push notification for apps, and it receives SMS and phone calls just fine while you're running some other things), so I have no reason to believe it won't work that way on the iPad.
Other crap "running in the background" is usually because on a computer, starting a program takes so much longer than switching to it when it's already running. At least that's my reason for keeping mail and a browser open at practically all times.
Exactly right. They buy them for the little silver Apple logo that gives them a feeling of elitism that they can push down the throats of the unwashed masses.
I can't speak for others except those who I've spoken to. Most of the people I know are techies. Most of them have switched to Macs over the past four or so years. Most of them not because of the logo but because they now spend less time fighting the machine to work at all and more time actually working on the stuff they care about.
WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM???
I'm not the one yelling here. Any issues of your that I accidentally touched upon? Sorry for that. If you let someone calmer read my post you'll notice I was calmly pointing out that this MSI gadget will have its market segment, but comparing it with the iPad is just dumb because they don't appeal to the same kind of customers. Just like a Porsche and a Rolls Royce don't fight over customers because few buyers of the one would be convinced to instead buy the other due to some minor change or update.
Wait, so multitasking is a "complex alternative"? Please.
Yes, it is. Most people don't multitask. They want to do one thing at a time.
The "shortcomings" of the iPad? Yeah, right.
There've been so many "iPod killers" (and then "iPhone killers") over the years, I've lost count. All of them try to outdo the Apple offering in tech specs. Guess what? Specs matter little. People don't buy iPods because they are the best technology. People don't buy Macs because they're the fastest, best machines around.
That is techie thinking and the world doesn't revolve around it. That's the kind of people who are still sad that VHS won the format war and not Betamax. That wonder why Linux doesn't dominate the desktop.
The revolutionary thing about the iPad isn't in the technology. It's in the way that Apple understands to put technology to the uses that people actually want. Real people, the one you meet in the street, not the one that builds their own iPad from spare parts. People that don't have the time to debug their kernel or X server just because they can. Yeah, I can debug a network just fine, from the socket code to the firewall settings, to the packet dump to the switch. But I prefer if I can plug it in and it just works.
MSI thinks "wouldn't it be neat if the feature list would contain this and that and here's one more and add a kitchen sink while you're at it"
Android and Linux hackers think "wouldn't it be neat if I could hack it and make it do whatever I want, given enough time and boredom?"
Well, none of that will kill an iPod or iPhone or iPad and not even an iMac, because the typical Apple customer thinks none of that, he thinks very simply "wouldn't it be neat if the thing simply worked?"
So MSI will add competition, but to a different market segment.
We support her because even if - especially if - she is a scumbag, her losing the case to these insane damages would set a precedent that the RIAA would then use to hammer down less easy targets.
That's Business Goes To Court 101 - you hit an easy target first to establish the precedent you need to go after the real targets.
Microsoft just throws Windows on the device complete with all the crappy desktop metaphors and UI widgets that are completely irrelevant to the new form factor -- witness Windows Mobile and all the Windows tablets. Apple at least rethinks usability.
Apple at least thinks about usability. When's the last time that MS did that? I can tell you: Just prior to the launch of Win95, after even the final user testing showed that this "start button" concept is stupid, dumb, user-unfriendly and counterintuitive. They finally put the "Start" label on it (it was just the windos logo before that, yes a straight copy from the Apple logo on the Apple menu bar, except that that's always been on the menu bar where users expect menu things to be) and then added the "click here to start" animation when you first launch the OS, because even the label wasn't enough.
That's how MS thinks about "usability". Explains a lot about the trainwreck that every new windos edition adds to, doesn't it?
Inferior humans, sure. However, the ones who actually bother to think things through and learn what's going on so that they can make an informed choice make better choices. If that wasn't the case, why do so many people search online to find the best tv / computer / car to buy?
Self-delusion at work.
Studies have shown that with a small number of facts to consider, rational choice trumps "gut feeling". However, more than a fairly small number of facts (a dozen will do) and your rationality is confused. You'd need to make a spreadsheet to come up with the "correct" answer. And don't forget that almost no company intends to give you useful or correct data on its products, but present it in the best way possible.
No, the "superior humans" mostly think that they are superior, and that's the main part of their thinking. There's a whole graveyards of such thinking that did not stand up to serious investigation.
Now its common to text before call
Move. I've never heard this before, and it strikes me as the dumbest thing ever, unless it was created as an artificial meme by the phone companies (because the margin on text messages is almost 100%).
...travel to Japan. They solved this problem ten years ago.
A few years ago, I was in Tokio for a week. During that entire time, I heard a grand total of two cell phones ringing - they both belonged to foreigners. Every japanese carries a cell phone and uses it constantly. And still you don't hear them ringing and you almost never hear anyone talking.
The secret is simple, everyone has it on vibrate (it works, don't listen to the antisocial assholes who invent reasons why it wouldn't, real-life experience shows that's all bullshit) and secondly, everyone knows that the microphone is sensitive and doesn't need to be shouted at. Actually speaking into the microphone allows you to almost whisper and still be heard clearly at the other side. In fact, due to less distortion at the high end, probably more clearly than shouting.
There's no need for a new etiquette, just for a reminder to the old one: Don't be a nuissance to people around you. Everyone who needs a checklist to accomplish that has troubles running deeper than a checklist would solve.
I wouldn't invest in Apple long-term if you paid me to; the day Steve Jobs or Ive retire, get hit by a bus, or just drop dead- Apple stock will crumble because everyone is under the perception (correctly) that they are the driving force.
Two years ago, I would've signed that statement. Today, I'm not so sure anymore. I think (and Steve's speech at Stanford confirms it in my mind) that since that cancer thing, Steve has thought quite a bit about his own mortality and also about what Apple will be without him. And if he didn't, I sure hope the board and shareholders pushed him to.
As long as you're not using some cheapo hardware,
Oh yes, standard windos apology #25.
Look, half of the people in here know from personal experience that windos crashes more on identical hardware than the other system on their dual-booting machine, whether it's OS X on a Mac or Linux on a PC.
And no, it's not the drivers, please spare us standard windos apology #26.
With Windows at least, you can turn that off. You claim to be a neuroscientist but you can't take 5 seconds to find out how to turn off UAC?
I don't think he was talking about just UAC. Windos keeps bugging you with all kinds of bullshit. "Look ma, new device found", "Look ma, new updates available", "Look ma, I've peed in my pants". It will even reboot on you without warning when you're in a fullscreen app where you can't see the "I'll reboot in 5 minutes unless you click here" popup.
So in other words, you walk in and say "I want a computer" and you let the salesman tell you what you should buy, instead of you making an informed decision and actually finding out what would work best for you and at the best price.
If you knew anything about the psychology of choice, you'd know that confronted with more options, humans tend to make worse choices, not better ones. Google or read a couple of books, the "Simplify your Life" thing brought that knowledge mainstream a couple years ago.
Mac OSX GETS OUT OF MY WAY, WINDOWS KEEPS PROMPTING ME USELESSLY. OSX thus gives me more time for creative effort instead of technical troubleshooting.
Someone (forgot who) once said that OS X is like a well-trained butler - always there when you need it, invisible at all other times. Windos, on the other hand, is like an over-eager boyscout, always pulling on your shirt wanting to show you what it's done just now.
*signed*
My first MacBook Pro was not bought for OS X. I thought I'd try that out, but mostly install Linux on it, because the hardware specs were exactly what I was looking for and every other notebook I'd owned had failed me in that category one way or the other.
The funny thing is that as far as objectivity goes, you will find Apple a lot more often mentioned under the "good example" category in the textbooks than you would be happy to admit.
In fact, the Apple User Interface Guidelines are quite often cited in the literature.
Please do your homework.
So can anyone give an example of what he's talking about?
Quicksilver beats Kapatult (it's Linux copycat) in every aspect.
TextMate eats every other text editor I've ever used for lunch. And I've used a lot of text editors, because 90% of them suck.
OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle are among the only tools in their respective segments that make the task actually easier than doing it manually on paper would.
Scrivener makes you twice as productive in writing (the actual book-writing task, not letters and stuff) as MS word allows.
And finally Unity 3D is a games engine (now also available for windos) that has no equivalent, and beats Unreal or anything from id in regards of usability hands down and tied behind its back.
There are a lot more examples. If you want to insist on the Apple stuff, take iWork, not iLife. Pages rips Word a new one, maybe not in the feature list but in the usability. And Numbers is what spreadsheets would have evolved to 10 years ago if they hadn't stagnated due to the Excel lock-in. Again, maybe Excel has 100 additional features that a whooping 20 people world-wide use, but in presentation, useability and the features that actually matter, like being able to have two tables next to each other, Numbers shows us that Excel is 20 year old crap.
What a long rant.
The short of it is: Universal is one of those companies that appears to have absolutely no trouble asking for similar figures when it is them who filed the suit. And I'm talking both damages and attorney fees. Quid pro quo. You ruin people upload 240 seconds of your song, then be ready to be ruined yourself when you falsely accuse people over 30 seconds of it.
You can't have it both ways. Either these are the crown jewels and everything about them is so precious that your ridiculous fees and damages are alright, or this is mass-produced cheap crap with a net worth around a couple cents. Which one is it?
I applaud that Apple has the discipline to limit outbound communications until the launch.
I'd like to add one thing to that:
One thing that I absolutely adore about a Stevenote is that when Apple finally announces the new product everyone has been waiting for officially, the usual (not always, but usual) line is "available today".
In a world where vaporware has become so common that you view almost every product announcement with a grain of salt, that is very refreshing.
What GUI you prefer is a personal choice.
Yes, it is. And still there's a difference between a GUI that was well-designed by people who know something about HCI and... well, to be polite, one that wasn't.
Good food, cheap food, junk food - of course that's all a personal choice. Except that some of the choices make more sense than others.
I'm far more productive in a mouse-less grid layout personally
I'm sure you are.
I'm also sure you don't do any graphics, music, 3D, design or any other work that is not text-based.
Not trying to put you down. I'm much in favour of keyboard shortcuts (and applaud OS X for more consistency in that area than either windos or Linux offers) and not using the mouse when you're working with text, no matter if you're writing a thesis or a program.
But a lot of what people do with computers does not translate well to keyboard controls.
Tell them to try it. I'm talking from personal experience. Linux fanatic for ~10 years, then I bought a Mac, with the "if this OS X doesn't work out for me, I can always install Linux on it" thought in the back of my mind.
Guess what, I now have 3 Macs in my home and 0 Linux computers. My servers still run Linux, but for a desktop, Gnome, KDE and everything else has about 20 years in user interface design before it comes close. Gimmicks and visuals isn't what it's about, that's just the icing on the cake and icing without cake just doesn't cut it.
How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful?
Really? The first thing you should always question is your assumptions. Does Apple have a "philosophy of information sharing" and if so, what is it?
The company is secretive about upcoming, not-yet-available products. Which is not information that customers require in their day-to-day work anyways. As a user or as a developer, it is information about the current, existing products that you need most. And as both I've always found that to be readily available whenever I needed it.
So how does a philosophy of "not talking (much) about unreleased ideas" merge with the mindset of a designer, artist, programmer or any other kind of creative person? Quite well. A lot of creative people don't talk (much) about their work-in-progress, either, until it's finished. Programmers are about the only kind who feel that putting a half-finished thing out for the public is the thing to do.
Maybe the First Sale Doctrine works differently in the UK.
And maybe the same people who cry about "government intervention" whenever corporations are asked to pay their fair share to society could allow consenting adults to conduct whatever business they want? In this case, it is very clear and obvious from the start just what exactly the deal is. Contrary to, say, movies or games with DRM where you only find out later that your buyer won't be able to use it.
While I find that list as funny (and often true) as the next guy, you failed in applying it.
Mailing lists and cooperation of everyone has long been solved in the micro-payment solutions. Central authorities are not needed, just a reasonably small set of payment handlers. And it's got nothing to do with blacklists, rather with dynamic whitelisting.
A little technical voodoo solves the rest.
Still, I agree with your result that it won't work, mostly because people have become way too used to the way e-mail works for any change that does not give them an immediate, tangible benefit.