The only pilfering they've done from Microsoft was fast user switching in 10.3 [...] The actual Spotlight implementation in 10.4 will owe much more to BeOS than to anything Microsoft has done.
Who cares about pilfering from Microsoft or Be? Neither Microsoft nor Be invented metadata or database file systems, or search. This stuff is based long-standing research in academia and lots of other commercial research labs.
(At least Microsoft is spending some money on research these days, Apple spends no money on research at all as far as I can tell.)
Apple has used metadata extensively in their operating system to a degree that nothing on Windows has ever come close to:
The world didn't begin with either Apple or Microsoft. Neither Apple nor Microsoft invented this technology. Apple is just a bit louder about pretending they did.
YOU might manage to get everything you need out of the software included in your distro, but do you really expect the big distros to anticipate every single need of every single user?
The way it works out in practice on Debian is that, for most people, once it's mature enough to be included in the distro, it's part of the distro. Until then, you probably want to install it from source anyway, which is an option you always have.
Should a good distro include a version of GAMESS just because I want to do a theoretical chemistry calculation?
Yes. More accurately, someone should become a binary package maintainer for each distribution. As part of that, that person has to assume responsibility for not breaking anything in the distro. Creating an "Autopackage" and pretending that that solves the integration problems "automatically" just isn't going to do the trick; you might as well only distribute the sources.
The system of attempting to package everything the user of the distro might ever want is not scalable.
Looks like it is to me: Debian has pretty much everything I want. If it's not been packaged yet, it's probably not in good enough shape yet to use either.
Distro developers end up duplicating effort on a massive scale. 20 distros == the same software packaged 20 times
The idea that this is duplicated effort presumes that the main work and value of creating packages for distributions is in putting things into containers, but that's wrong. The main work and value of distributions like Debian is in the extensive testing that goes into making sure that all the packages work together.
Debian does two more things: during the process of Debian packaging, people review the licenses associated with software. When I install software in core Debian, I can be sure that it doesn't come with weird or restrictive licenses attached. And Debian also provides a central point of contact for issues like security and Trojans.
Packages created with Autopackage don't provide any of that--anybody can throw any kind of shit into an autopackage and put it on their web site. There is no guarantee that stuff has been tested, there is no independent review, there is no point of contact to resolve conflicts.
Packaging for distributions has a huge value and Autopackage isn't providing it. Systems like Autopackage take us back to the chaotic software maintenance practices on Windows and OS X, and I don't want to be there.
That kind of "universal interface" has been the goal of researchers for many years, long before Apple ever got into this space. The patent doesn't demonstrate innovation, it demonstrates that Apple is doing just like what Microsoft is doing: filing more and more bogus patents.
The loser isn't Microsoft (since Apple and Microsoft are in bed with one another), the loser is open source: these kinds of bogus patents threaten the availability of core desktop functionality on other platforms.
Great going, Apple: keep working towards a duopoly, with Microsoft as Dr. Evil and Apple as Mini Me.
Spotlight technology first appeared in the other iApps like iTunes (smart playlists) and iPhoto (smart albums).
But Apple didn't invent that technology, they copied it from other applications on other platforms. They just happened to implement it in their iApps and gave it a catchy name. Why is it OK with people like you when Apple goes pilfering other people's ideas, but it's not OK when Microsoft does it?
Bill Gates was correctly observing that Apple was copying Microsoft's strategy; the underlying technology predates both Apple and Microsoft by many years, so neither copied from the other.
Still, it is perhaps good that Microsoft is getting a taste of their own medicine: after all, copying other companies' strategies and beating them to market with features is what Microsoft has been doing for so long.
(Sarcasm)But hey, if you cant beat them... cheat them.(/sarcasm)
Who do you think is being "cheated"? Desktop search applications have been around long before either Microsoft or Apple decided to bundle them with the OS.
In fact, I think it's bad that both companies seem to try to outdo each other in bundling ever more functionality with the OS. Apple is even worse in that regard than Microsoft.
I didn't find any of the games that were available in the store compelling. Add to that a high price, long load times, and a proprietary disk format, and it just doesn't add up.
Even if technically there is a loophole it is basically a government endorsement of a product.
Why not? The government can endorse a product if they like. Of course, the government can also revoke a corporate charter, break up a company, or simply take over a company or monopoly as well. Companies exist and operate at our (the people's) discretion.
The relevant point of using XML is that it's a standard for serializing and deserializing structured data in a way that doesn't depend on the type of data.
XML is a markup language, not a language for serializing data structures. The two are not the same: most of XML is completely unnecessary for serializing data structures, so something much simpler would do, while at the same time, XML lacks primitives for common data structures found in real programming languages. That makes XML a really poor choice for serializing data structures.
XML has been misused for the purpose of serializing data structures, but that's fitting a square peg into a round hole.
XML is designed for document interchange. It's an idiosyncracy of MS Word that it is currently using data structure serialization ("marshalling") for its storage format. Actually, it's not even an idiosyncracy, it is plainly idiotic. But that's not the worst problem with MS Word anyway.
It's kind of ironic that on their web site, right below the "open sores" story is a story about how great Jobs and Apple are. A large part of OS X is based on open source software. And a lot of the technologies that OS X is based on (window shadows, gcc, transparency, the PDF imaging model, Objective-C, OpenStep, etc.) were not invented or developed at Apple, and most of them weren't even invented or developed at NeXT.
Whether one thinks of Apple as a great innovator in some areas or not, the fact is that without open source, OS X would not exist.
and a consequence of those "unavoidable ambiguities" is that a person may make a statement that, while semantically "not false," can be quite misleading.
His statement was not misleading, it expressed what it was intended to express.
al gore made no attempt to clarify his meaning, which at the least marks his willingness to accept people's misunderstanding of the statement (to his benefit).
There was nothing to clarify. The people who deliberately misconstrued his statement would never be satisfied anyway.
In any case, it doesn't matter: the chimp has won twice, and like Republican presidents before him, he is bankrupting the country as we speak and as the voters wanted, so what do you care?
I think people did a great job with that: it brings a sense of style and pizazz to the X11 platform that it has been lacking in the past. That's important for raising interest in a platform, marketing it, attracting users, and all that.
However, although many people confuse the two, the thing to keep in mind that style and pizazz don't mean improved usability. Improving usability is the harder problem, and improving usability while looking stylish is even harder. Many of today's very stylish user interfaces have worse usability than some of their predecessors.
A second problem with UIs is that they are still far too hard to develop; even with the best toolkits, it's still a lot of work. And the more visual constraints and visual functionality you put into the UI, the more application programmers are burdened with things unrelated to producing a high quality UI.
Things that happen at the window manager level (floppy windows, etc.) are generally fairly harmless in terms of usability or software development. Other things, like sophisticated theme engines, make it a lot harder to deliver a usable UI, because the details of how buttons look do matter. As a simple example, coloring OK and Cancel buttons green and red respectively might well improve usability (some toolkits used to do this), but it would kill the style of many themes.
Your logic is flawed because you are resolving the reference "the Internet" incorrectly. Gore was referring to the Internet at the time he was making his statement, the commercially successful, widely used one, the one everyone was excited about. And he is correct when he claims that he was an important part in creating that.
Natural languages have unavoidable ambiguities; you should learn to resolve them correctly.
Gassee's response makes no sense. It indicates that he really just didn't know what the question meant and was just making something up. Not surprising, given where he ended up: with another failed startup.
The PSP hardware is gorgeous, but it looks like it has a lot of the usual Sony proprietary bullshit associated with it. Too bad. If Sony had created an open platform with standard components (CF, mini DVD,...), they could have created a true mass market product that people would be using for everying.
The DS looked somewhat unexciting in terms of hardware, but it is more affordable and may be better in terms of gaming. If people manage to get Linux up and running on the DS, it would be absolutely phatastic, however: a $150 Linux machine with WiFi and an excellent battery life.
A valid point, but you'll have to wait for the case law to catch up to this technological change. As it stands, though, Apple doesn't have to support your ability to resell a song.
Sure. Keep in mind also, though, that judges take into account what societal attitudes are; so, it probably makes sense for people to express their opinion not only verbally, but also through their actions.
Ultimately, though, I think this DRM/DMCA/Bono mess will require legislative action, and that definitely won't happen until there is widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.
Every time this gets cracked, it hurts online legal music.
No, it only hurts schemes that rely on DRM. It doesn't hurt on-line music sales that don't rely on DRM.
After all, we can't just NOT BUY THE SONGS if we don't like the DRM, right?
The existence of DRM still threatens me because as long as people erroneously believe that they can make DRM work, they will be trying to put all sorts of bogus technological protections in my hardware.
So, I don't buy DRM'ed music, but I still consider it very important, and applaud, that people break the hokey DRM schemes that companies try to build business models around.
his has nothing to do with "Congress" saving a business model. The copyright owners own the content, period, and get to decide how it's used, by whom, and under what conditions, whether you like it or not.
It has everything to do with Congress. Copyright is a right Congress defines. It defines it not as a basic property right, but it defines it for the purpose of encouraging the creation of good content.
And, traditionally, it has always been a limited right. For example, content is supposed to fall into the public domain after some time. You are supposed to be able to resell it. Those are restrictions that have always existed for content.
Now, with the technological possibility of DRM, content "owners" have attempted an end-run around the conditions under which Congress originally granted copyright in the first place.
If you don't believe in copyright, licenses, or "trade secrets", then kiss work on open source or other original work by yourself, things the GNU General Public License, and your own privacy goodbye. Oh, I forgot, those things only apply to the things you want it to, not corporate interests
I am a strong supporter of copyrights. But granting copyrights on content that is also subject to DRM is a mistake. Companies should choose whether they want to rely on copyrights or whether they want to attempt technological solutions. They should not be permitted to have both.
And, yes, abolishing copyrights altogether would be better than the current situation. But the best solution would be to return to the original idea behind copyright law: limited term protection (maybe 20 years) for content, but only if the content is actually published (i.e., not subject to DRM or other technological restrictions).
But they, and the content owners - you know, those people who actually have LEGAL RIGHTS to the content - don't intend to do that
And why should it matter what the content "owners" want? We, the people, created those "LEGAL RIGHTS", not because we want to make stockholders happy, but because we thought it would increase the availability and quality of music and other media.
If the deal isn't working out for us, or if the music and movie industry are even abusing those laws, we can abolish copyright again, or limit it again.
I'm willing to abide by traditional copyright laws. I'm not willing to abide by DRM--I think giving copyright protection to DRM'ed content violates the constitution.
Of course, rather than civil disobedience (which is what lots of people seem to be choosing), my solution is simply to send companies like Apple and Microsoft to hell, as well as return any content that comes to me in a DRM'ed format.
This doctrine prevents a copyright holder or vendor (such as Apple) from filing a claim against you for re-selling an item, but it doesn't say that the original seller (Apple, in this case) has to make it easy or possible for you to do so.
It doesn't say that because the issue didn't originally arise: content was sold on physical media, and of course, you could resell those. That's why the doctrine of first sale was created.
In other words, your "rights" are not being violated by DRM.
Many people would say that DRM is violating the social contract under which copyright exists in the first place: it prevents content from becoming public domain, and it prevents people from reselling it. Both of those are rights that we, the people, clearly reserved for ourselves when we created copyright.
I think the solution is pretty simple: if companies want to use DRM, let them try, but then they can't simultaneously claim copyright protection. In fact, the courts could simply not consider content available under DRM "published", so copyright really shouldn't apply.
Is making code run faster "innovation"? Sometimes it is, like when you come up with a new algorithm. Often, it isn't, like when you remove dead code, cache results, unroll loops; that's just standard engineering practice.
Usability is no different: occasionally, someone will come up with a specific, innovative method for improving usability, but usually, it's just applications of well-known textbook principles.
In the same way, I argue that Apple continuous refinements are also changing the way people work, not in leaps and bounds, but by making it easier to manage multiple windows, keep multiple programs open, search an increasing amount of data, access an increasing amount of data, and manage an increasing amount of data.
But neither the idea of doing those things, nor the way in which Apple does them, is new. Apple is just taking a large collection of ideas and prototypes invented by other people and integrating them into their system. That is not innovation. In fact, if many of those ideas weren't so old, it would be intellectual property infringement.
Apple's innovation is to make the indexing happen during file writes, and not overnight schedules like Windows
That is not an innovation, it is something that goes back to the 1960's. It's also already available with Linux, and Linux is far from the first system to implement it. I am sorry that both Windows and MacOS are so outdated and primitive that such ancient technology seems like "innovation" to its users.
You also harp on Dashboard. Yes, Apple should have given more credit to the Konfabulator people. However Apple also has had widgets since 1984 [daringfireball.net] with the release of the original Mac. Of course they weren't called widgets and they didn't use Expose, and they were called Desktop Accessories, but Apple did invent them.
(1) "Dashboard" is the name of the zero-query Gnome desktop search engine (together with the regular desktop search application called "Beagle"). (2) Desktop accessories were a hack to get around the fact that the original design of MacOS was badly broken. They are not an example of innovation, they are a testament to Apple's poor engineering skills (which is what eventually killed off the original MacOS line). (3) Apple didn't even "invent" that: similar hacks existed in similarly broken operating systems. MS-DOS had them, as did many other such systems. (4) The same category of software (as AppleDashboard, not the original stupid accessories) is already shipping for both Linux and Windows.
So, the software was a kludge to begin with, it wasn't a kludge that Apple originally came up with (either in its original or in its modern form), and it already ships on other systems. What exactly do you think is innovative about Apple shipping something like that in Tiger?
You also pan Automator: Full blown IDEs and programming environments have been around for years, just like before iTunes databases have been around for years, but like how Apple put a database into iTunes changed the way people are using gigabytes of music, Automator can change the way people program their computers. For most people programming is hard, and Automator is supposed to make it simpler.
Again, you just seem blithely unaware of decades of computer science research, as well as scores of commercial products. Simplifying automation and end user programming has been a long-standing research problem in human computer interaction. Automator looks like it barely scratches the surface of the technology that has existed for a long time already.
I use Microsoft Windows at work and my Mac at home, and you don't know how frustrating it is that
I know very well how frustrating it is. It is even more frustrating that Apple and Microsoft together have been holding the industry back by shipping the kind of outdated junk they have been shipping.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean by "catch up"? Functionally, Gnome is up-to-date. Building it may be tricky, but that's not a concern to most Gnome users.
The only pilfering they've done from Microsoft was fast user switching in 10.3 [...] The actual Spotlight implementation in 10.4 will owe much more to BeOS than to anything Microsoft has done.
Who cares about pilfering from Microsoft or Be? Neither Microsoft nor Be invented metadata or database file systems, or search. This stuff is based long-standing research in academia and lots of other commercial research labs.
(At least Microsoft is spending some money on research these days, Apple spends no money on research at all as far as I can tell.)
Apple has used metadata extensively in their operating system to a degree that nothing on Windows has ever come close to:
The world didn't begin with either Apple or Microsoft. Neither Apple nor Microsoft invented this technology. Apple is just a bit louder about pretending they did.
YOU might manage to get everything you need out of the software included in your distro, but do you really expect the big distros to anticipate every single need of every single user?
The way it works out in practice on Debian is that, for most people, once it's mature enough to be included in the distro, it's part of the distro. Until then, you probably want to install it from source anyway, which is an option you always have.
Should a good distro include a version of GAMESS just because I want to do a theoretical chemistry calculation?
Yes. More accurately, someone should become a binary package maintainer for each distribution. As part of that, that person has to assume responsibility for not breaking anything in the distro. Creating an "Autopackage" and pretending that that solves the integration problems "automatically" just isn't going to do the trick; you might as well only distribute the sources.
The system of attempting to package everything the user of the distro might ever want is not scalable.
Looks like it is to me: Debian has pretty much everything I want. If it's not been packaged yet, it's probably not in good enough shape yet to use either.
Distro developers end up duplicating effort on a massive scale. 20 distros == the same software packaged 20 times
The idea that this is duplicated effort presumes that the main work and value of creating packages for distributions is in putting things into containers, but that's wrong. The main work and value of distributions like Debian is in the extensive testing that goes into making sure that all the packages work together.
Debian does two more things: during the process of Debian packaging, people review the licenses associated with software. When I install software in core Debian, I can be sure that it doesn't come with weird or restrictive licenses attached. And Debian also provides a central point of contact for issues like security and Trojans.
Packages created with Autopackage don't provide any of that--anybody can throw any kind of shit into an autopackage and put it on their web site. There is no guarantee that stuff has been tested, there is no independent review, there is no point of contact to resolve conflicts.
Packaging for distributions has a huge value and Autopackage isn't providing it. Systems like Autopackage take us back to the chaotic software maintenance practices on Windows and OS X, and I don't want to be there.
That kind of "universal interface" has been the goal of researchers for many years, long before Apple ever got into this space. The patent doesn't demonstrate innovation, it demonstrates that Apple is doing just like what Microsoft is doing: filing more and more bogus patents.
The loser isn't Microsoft (since Apple and Microsoft are in bed with one another), the loser is open source: these kinds of bogus patents threaten the availability of core desktop functionality on other platforms.
Great going, Apple: keep working towards a duopoly, with Microsoft as Dr. Evil and Apple as Mini Me.
Spotlight technology first appeared in the other iApps like iTunes (smart playlists) and iPhoto (smart albums).
But Apple didn't invent that technology, they copied it from other applications on other platforms. They just happened to implement it in their iApps and gave it a catchy name. Why is it OK with people like you when Apple goes pilfering other people's ideas, but it's not OK when Microsoft does it?
Bill Gates was correctly observing that Apple was copying Microsoft's strategy; the underlying technology predates both Apple and Microsoft by many years, so neither copied from the other.
Still, it is perhaps good that Microsoft is getting a taste of their own medicine: after all, copying other companies' strategies and beating them to market with features is what Microsoft has been doing for so long.
(Sarcasm)But hey, if you cant beat them... cheat them.(/sarcasm)
Who do you think is being "cheated"? Desktop search applications have been around long before either Microsoft or Apple decided to bundle them with the OS.
In fact, I think it's bad that both companies seem to try to outdo each other in bundling ever more functionality with the OS. Apple is even worse in that regard than Microsoft.
I didn't find any of the games that were available in the store compelling. Add to that a high price, long load times, and a proprietary disk format, and it just doesn't add up.
Even if technically there is a loophole it is basically a government endorsement of a product.
Why not? The government can endorse a product if they like. Of course, the government can also revoke a corporate charter, break up a company, or simply take over a company or monopoly as well. Companies exist and operate at our (the people's) discretion.
The relevant point of using XML is that it's a standard for serializing and deserializing structured data in a way that doesn't depend on the type of data.
XML is a markup language, not a language for serializing data structures. The two are not the same: most of XML is completely unnecessary for serializing data structures, so something much simpler would do, while at the same time, XML lacks primitives for common data structures found in real programming languages. That makes XML a really poor choice for serializing data structures.
XML has been misused for the purpose of serializing data structures, but that's fitting a square peg into a round hole.
XML is designed for document interchange. It's an idiosyncracy of MS Word that it is currently using data structure serialization ("marshalling") for its storage format. Actually, it's not even an idiosyncracy, it is plainly idiotic. But that's not the worst problem with MS Word anyway.
It's kind of ironic that on their web site, right below the "open sores" story is a story about how great Jobs and Apple are. A large part of OS X is based on open source software. And a lot of the technologies that OS X is based on (window shadows, gcc, transparency, the PDF imaging model, Objective-C, OpenStep, etc.) were not invented or developed at Apple, and most of them weren't even invented or developed at NeXT.
Whether one thinks of Apple as a great innovator in some areas or not, the fact is that without open source, OS X would not exist.
You may not have much opportunity to practice it yourself, but, trust me, forking can be quite pleasant and good for you, actually.
and a consequence of those "unavoidable ambiguities" is that a person may make a statement that, while semantically "not false," can be quite misleading.
His statement was not misleading, it expressed what it was intended to express.
al gore made no attempt to clarify his meaning, which at the least marks his willingness to accept people's misunderstanding of the statement (to his benefit).
There was nothing to clarify. The people who deliberately misconstrued his statement would never be satisfied anyway.
In any case, it doesn't matter: the chimp has won twice, and like Republican presidents before him, he is bankrupting the country as we speak and as the voters wanted, so what do you care?
I think people did a great job with that: it brings a sense of style and pizazz to the X11 platform that it has been lacking in the past. That's important for raising interest in a platform, marketing it, attracting users, and all that.
However, although many people confuse the two, the thing to keep in mind that style and pizazz don't mean improved usability. Improving usability is the harder problem, and improving usability while looking stylish is even harder. Many of today's very stylish user interfaces have worse usability than some of their predecessors.
A second problem with UIs is that they are still far too hard to develop; even with the best toolkits, it's still a lot of work. And the more visual constraints and visual functionality you put into the UI, the more application programmers are burdened with things unrelated to producing a high quality UI.
Things that happen at the window manager level (floppy windows, etc.) are generally fairly harmless in terms of usability or software development. Other things, like sophisticated theme engines, make it a lot harder to deliver a usable UI, because the details of how buttons look do matter. As a simple example, coloring OK and Cancel buttons green and red respectively might well improve usability (some toolkits used to do this), but it would kill the style of many themes.
Your logic is flawed because you are resolving the reference "the Internet" incorrectly. Gore was referring to the Internet at the time he was making his statement, the commercially successful, widely used one, the one everyone was excited about. And he is correct when he claims that he was an important part in creating that.
Natural languages have unavoidable ambiguities; you should learn to resolve them correctly.
Gassee's response makes no sense. It indicates that he really just didn't know what the question meant and was just making something up. Not surprising, given where he ended up: with another failed startup.
The PSP hardware is gorgeous, but it looks like it has a lot of the usual Sony proprietary bullshit associated with it. Too bad. If Sony had created an open platform with standard components (CF, mini DVD, ...), they could have created a true mass market product that people would be using for everying.
The DS looked somewhat unexciting in terms of hardware, but it is more affordable and may be better in terms of gaming. If people manage to get Linux up and running on the DS, it would be absolutely phatastic, however: a $150 Linux machine with WiFi and an excellent battery life.
A valid point, but you'll have to wait for the case law to catch up to this technological change. As it stands, though, Apple doesn't have to support your ability to resell a song.
Sure. Keep in mind also, though, that judges take into account what societal attitudes are; so, it probably makes sense for people to express their opinion not only verbally, but also through their actions.
Ultimately, though, I think this DRM/DMCA/Bono mess will require legislative action, and that definitely won't happen until there is widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.
Every time this gets cracked, it hurts online legal music.
No, it only hurts schemes that rely on DRM. It doesn't hurt on-line music sales that don't rely on DRM.
After all, we can't just NOT BUY THE SONGS if we don't like the DRM, right?
The existence of DRM still threatens me because as long as people erroneously believe that they can make DRM work, they will be trying to put all sorts of bogus technological protections in my hardware.
So, I don't buy DRM'ed music, but I still consider it very important, and applaud, that people break the hokey DRM schemes that companies try to build business models around.
his has nothing to do with "Congress" saving a business model. The copyright owners own the content, period, and get to decide how it's used, by whom, and under what conditions, whether you like it or not.
It has everything to do with Congress. Copyright is a right Congress defines. It defines it not as a basic property right, but it defines it for the purpose of encouraging the creation of good content.
And, traditionally, it has always been a limited right. For example, content is supposed to fall into the public domain after some time. You are supposed to be able to resell it. Those are restrictions that have always existed for content.
Now, with the technological possibility of DRM, content "owners" have attempted an end-run around the conditions under which Congress originally granted copyright in the first place.
If you don't believe in copyright, licenses, or "trade secrets", then kiss work on open source or other original work by yourself, things the GNU General Public License, and your own privacy goodbye. Oh, I forgot, those things only apply to the things you want it to, not corporate interests
I am a strong supporter of copyrights. But granting copyrights on content that is also subject to DRM is a mistake. Companies should choose whether they want to rely on copyrights or whether they want to attempt technological solutions. They should not be permitted to have both.
And, yes, abolishing copyrights altogether would be better than the current situation. But the best solution would be to return to the original idea behind copyright law: limited term protection (maybe 20 years) for content, but only if the content is actually published (i.e., not subject to DRM or other technological restrictions).
But they, and the content owners - you know, those people who actually have LEGAL RIGHTS to the content - don't intend to do that
And why should it matter what the content "owners" want? We, the people, created those "LEGAL RIGHTS", not because we want to make stockholders happy, but because we thought it would increase the availability and quality of music and other media.
If the deal isn't working out for us, or if the music and movie industry are even abusing those laws, we can abolish copyright again, or limit it again.
I'm willing to abide by traditional copyright laws. I'm not willing to abide by DRM--I think giving copyright protection to DRM'ed content violates the constitution.
Of course, rather than civil disobedience (which is what lots of people seem to be choosing), my solution is simply to send companies like Apple and Microsoft to hell, as well as return any content that comes to me in a DRM'ed format.
This doctrine prevents a copyright holder or vendor (such as Apple) from filing a claim against you for re-selling an item, but it doesn't say that the original seller (Apple, in this case) has to make it easy or possible for you to do so.
It doesn't say that because the issue didn't originally arise: content was sold on physical media, and of course, you could resell those. That's why the doctrine of first sale was created.
In other words, your "rights" are not being violated by DRM.
Many people would say that DRM is violating the social contract under which copyright exists in the first place: it prevents content from becoming public domain, and it prevents people from reselling it. Both of those are rights that we, the people, clearly reserved for ourselves when we created copyright.
I think the solution is pretty simple: if companies want to use DRM, let them try, but then they can't simultaneously claim copyright protection. In fact, the courts could simply not consider content available under DRM "published", so copyright really shouldn't apply.
I do believe usability is innovation
Is making code run faster "innovation"? Sometimes it is, like when you come up with a new algorithm. Often, it isn't, like when you remove dead code, cache results, unroll loops; that's just standard engineering practice.
Usability is no different: occasionally, someone will come up with a specific, innovative method for improving usability, but usually, it's just applications of well-known textbook principles.
In the same way, I argue that Apple continuous refinements are also changing the way people work, not in leaps and bounds, but by making it easier to manage multiple windows, keep multiple programs open, search an increasing amount of data, access an increasing amount of data, and manage an increasing amount of data.
But neither the idea of doing those things, nor the way in which Apple does them, is new. Apple is just taking a large collection of ideas and prototypes invented by other people and integrating them into their system. That is not innovation. In fact, if many of those ideas weren't so old, it would be intellectual property infringement.
Apple's innovation is to make the indexing happen during file writes, and not overnight schedules like Windows
That is not an innovation, it is something that goes back to the 1960's. It's also already available with Linux, and Linux is far from the first system to implement it. I am sorry that both Windows and MacOS are so outdated and primitive that such ancient technology seems like "innovation" to its users.
You also harp on Dashboard. Yes, Apple should have given more credit to the Konfabulator people. However Apple also has had widgets since 1984 [daringfireball.net] with the release of the original Mac. Of course they weren't called widgets and they didn't use Expose, and they were called Desktop Accessories, but Apple did invent them.
(1) "Dashboard" is the name of the zero-query Gnome desktop search engine (together with the regular desktop search application called "Beagle"). (2) Desktop accessories were a hack to get around the fact that the original design of MacOS was badly broken. They are not an example of innovation, they are a testament to Apple's poor engineering skills (which is what eventually killed off the original MacOS line). (3) Apple didn't even "invent" that: similar hacks existed in similarly broken operating systems. MS-DOS had them, as did many other such systems. (4) The same category of software (as AppleDashboard, not the original stupid accessories) is already shipping for both Linux and Windows.
So, the software was a kludge to begin with, it wasn't a kludge that Apple originally came up with (either in its original or in its modern form), and it already ships on other systems. What exactly do you think is innovative about Apple shipping something like that in Tiger?
You also pan Automator: Full blown IDEs and programming environments have been around for years, just like before iTunes databases have been around for years, but like how Apple put a database into iTunes changed the way people are using gigabytes of music, Automator can change the way people program their computers. For most people programming is hard, and Automator is supposed to make it simpler.
Again, you just seem blithely unaware of decades of computer science research, as well as scores of commercial products. Simplifying automation and end user programming has been a long-standing research problem in human computer interaction. Automator looks like it barely scratches the surface of the technology that has existed for a long time already.
I use Microsoft Windows at work and my Mac at home, and you don't know how frustrating it is that
I know very well how frustrating it is. It is even more frustrating that Apple and Microsoft together have been holding the industry back by shipping the kind of outdated junk they have been shipping.
Yes, noth