A true open source search engine would let anyone roll their own algorithm. Each algorithm would be a sort of "plug in."
The index would be the shared, open source part, collaboratively crawled (via PC software or browser plugin) by everyone who elects to participate.
Algorithms would either work on the index after the fact, or, if they need access to the indexing process itself, would be part of a series of plugins run on the full HTML of each page.
The index itself would have an open API, so people could build their own front end search websites.
Trying to design the right algorithm up front is a premature optimization. I have no interest in helping Jimmy Wales become the next Sergey Brin. But I *would* participate in something that gives _me_ a shot, however distant, at founding the next Google, minus the massive spider farm.
I have obtained a copy of "Thoughts on Movies," a followup to to "Thoughts on Music," from sources inside Apple. I present it in its entirety:
"With the stunning global success of YouTube, podcasting, Rocketboom and Zefrank, some have called for my other company, Pixar, to "open" the digital rights management (DRM) system that Pixar uses to protect its DVDs and online movies against theft, so that movies purchased from Pixar can be played anywhere in the world.
"These people also point out that doing so would be in keeping with the principles I called upon the music industry to support in my previous essay.
"To which I respond: Suck it, frigtards. Do you honestly think I got here by being a 'nicer guy' than Bill Gates? This is the real world, not 'fantasy la la land' where 1st gen Apple laptops don't burn your crotch and mysteriously shut down, or where you don't have to pay a bribe to go to the front of the line in the Apple Store.
"Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go backdate some stop options, inspect the dormitories at our Foxconn company town in China and sue the pants off a teenaged blogger."
PS I agree that the hardware reliability and durability issues on the MacBooks/Pros and iPods will be a liability for Apple here. From MacBook overheating to processor whining to outright shutdowns, discoloration from sweat, battery/case iPod issues (at least from a PR standpoint), and this awful extortion program -- big chink in the company armor.
RE OS X misdirection: Apple is claiming that the iPhone wll have "all the power and sophistication of the world's most advanced operating system -- OS X". See http://www.apple.com/iphone/technology/osx.html . If it turns out to be a crippled version, I take back my original post! But there is no proof of that and all statements point to a full-blown -- enhanced, actually -- OS X.
RE Fact 1: The processor has not been disclosed, so you can't say it won't do 'real work.' If anything, it has been shown doing some impressiv work. If I'm wrong about the processor disclosure, prove it with a link.
RE Fact 2: 8GB of Flash does, in fact, constitute 'storage capacity' and we'll soon see laptops sold with flash as primary hdd.
RE Fact 3: Amazing you have already used this thing enough to gauge the UI effectiveness! Kudos on your backstage access to MacWorld.
RE Fact 4: Best point, yes real consumer cost is probably more like roughly $900. But then you need to remember that those $300 BlackBerries are then more like $500. And also -- it's still a great price for a PC that fits in the palm of your hand.
It does provide a software development platform, certainly in the form of dashboard widgets and almost certainly in the form of OS X applications, either regular or modified. So you're wrong on that one.
A Mac Mini costs $600 and does NOT run WoW due to integrated graphics. Same with a low end iMac (but at higher price!).
I'm sure some hacker will rig up a way to serve Web pages. Not much point though.
Look, I never wrote that "you, ZTH, should spend $600 to buy an iPhone as your primary computer." What I said is that it is EASILY worth $600 because it does qualify as a PC.
Mod parent through the roof, especially since we're getting citywide WiFi soon in SF... I am guessing Apple's engineers could come up with smoothly integrated voice-over-ip software of their own in the next six months, to integrate with various networks, perhaps via iChat. And I doubt the company would think twice about selling the phone "naked" without service, now that all the public kissy face Cingular is done.
I love how people will gladly pay this and much more for a computer that does NOT:
*fit in the palm of your hand *have a touchscreen *have an OS redesigned around the touchscreen *have a display *make and receive phone calls *deliver email the very second it arrives on the server
But package a computer -- a full blown one running Mac OS X -- into a tiny, shiny device, and people complain about a $600 pricetag.
Why?
Because the computer is SMALL.
Guess what? If anything, you should pay extra for that.
Just because your brain stem equates it with a Snickers bar, LG cell phone, TV remote control or Palm PDA due to its size does not mean its value is anywhere near as low.
I just want to say "thanks" to whoever added the "fud" tag.
THANKS DUDE!
I love it when people remember to put this tag on appropriate articles.
I have often been hard at work in the office some afternoon, or at home on a sunny Saturday morning, thinking to myself, "I'd really like to read some Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. And where better to do so than on Slashdot? If only there were a convient way to browse this FUD all on one easy screen. After all, there is not enough FUD on the Slashdot front page, you really have to look for it."
But thanks to the "fud" tag in the super-useful Slashdot InfoTagging SystemTM, I don't have to struggle any more to find this FUD!
What I like even better than the FUD tag is when someone tags an article notfud or "!fud". Because sometimes I want to read stuff that's just not FUD. (Thankfully, I've never seen an article with both the FUD and notfud tags at once.)
The only thing I like better than the notfud tag are the "yes" and "no" tags. Very useful, for when I need to come up with questions the answer to which is very clearly "yes" or "no."
The 22-year-old founder of Facebook wants to sell for $1.5 billion, and the twit just might get away with it. You ready to kill yourself yet? Here, use our knife and be sure to cut vertically.
I think anyone with any modicum of programming skill has been repeatedly slapping their forehead over the last year at the money being made from some very basic PHP scripts and what SEEMED like really silly ideas.
Seriously -- if someone came to you a few years ago and was like, "Umm, ya, we're looking to take, like, Geocities, and mash it up with Blogger, and AOL Instant Messenger, except uglier than any of those things, and maybe graft on some awkward MP3.com type capabilities, and leverage the awesome power of ColdFusion, and we've registered an awesome domain name -- MYSPACE, get it, like My Space, like My Web Space...", I mean -- really. Would you have been able to STOP laughing?
Or if someone was like, "ya, I envision this site where everyone at every college can just upload all their personal info, pictures, basically just like Blogger, except only other people at their college can see it, and they can like join clubs and stuff, and groups, like any group they want, and post pictures of themselves doing bong hits, put the whole thing on a PHP/MySQL ball..."
I'd be like, "ya, I don't see college kids posting pictures of themselves doing illegal things, first of all, dumbass. Secondly, why join an online group when you can join a REAL group, in real life, with live members of the opposite sex present? And thirdly, why should they use YOUR facebook when their college prolly has one of its own? Even if they did, why wouldn't they use Yahoo Groups and Blogger and AIM just like everyone else?"
Shows how much I know.
Ya, I could have built this stuff. I'm not even a CS major or programmer, but I know enough scripting (perl/ruby) and server admin I could have pulled it together. But I didn't! It never would have occured to me to make something so bloody simple and so minimally better than what is already out there.
Just goes to show, it's all about the users, and if you're not a user, if you're not in their shoes, it's really hard to anticipate what will be exciting to them.
I hope the rest of you trolls out there are paying attention to this Arrogant Mac Guy. He really knows his stuff.
Read the parent post. No, really. It's totally worth it. Take a minute. I'll wait.
Done? Good. See how you sort of want to laugh out loud, but how you also just threw up a little bit in your mouth? See how you can't tell if he's serious, or trying to be funny; whether he's mocking arrogant Mac users or IS an arrogant Mac user?
Didn't you sort of feel like going to the Apple store and physically murdering one of those smug little Genius Bartenders? And then buying an iBook for $8000? THAT'S a good troll.
This guy, he is elevating the Slashdot troll from common verbal diarrhea to subliminal political treatise. He's breeding a little revolution.
I've been watching him. This thing has evolved. He's been honing it, polishing, like a fine little gem. He has posted something similar about 437 times, and no two are exactly the same. It is the snowflake of trolls.
It's not even a troll. It's a fauxtroll. A trollody. A trollsterpiece.
Arrogant Mac Guy. Awesome. Keep it up. Or cut it out. I love to hate you and hate to love you.
Listen, I don't know how to phrase this, so I'm just going to come out and say it: I'm from the future.
I know that sounds crazy, but you have to believe me. When I went to sleep last night, it was 2006 -- nearly seven years from now!
We had long since buried what you people, in this section of spacetime, circa December 1999, call "the new economy." We renamed that "the dot-com bubble." Over six long years, we learned to deeply regret having funded mediocre, copycat websites with humdrum ideas, cute names and wayyyy too much money to burn.
This "Red Herring" you read so avidly went out of a business after peaking at 600 pages. All of the startups it writes about and collects advertising checks from will soon be out of business.
I can't give away too much, because I've seen Back to the Future and know how dangerous it can be to frig with the timespace continuum. But I have a clue for you: when you see a cluster of companies whose names all sound like Atari 2600 games, WALK AWAY. I mean, seriously, "Rallypoint?" NumSum? S5?
Oh, also? There's going to be a presidential election soon. No matter how alike you think the candidates are, vote for the one from Tennessee, not from Texas. The Texas guy is a FRIGGIN' FRIGTARD.
Anyway, I gotta go try and crash some dot-com parties before I go to sleep tonight and end up back in 2006. Adios dot-com amigos!
I have already downvoted all of DerGeist's comment history for even suggesting this blasphemy.
And I have some naughty photos of timothy in a compromising position with CowboyNeal, who volunteers to host them if he doesn't take this absurd story DOWN DOWN DOWN?
"Sony also unveiled a 120-inch plasma screen television limited to black-and-white programming; a version of the PlayStation that only plays games toggled in on the front panel in assembler; and the 'BurnMan,' a silicon-over-plexiglass contraption that scans in and verifies $100 bills before slowly igniting them for your viewing pleasure, one at a time."
At least if he'd stayed in school he would never have met his loser, dropout friends Bill, Larry and Steve, who are CONSTANTLY in trouble with the law.
we know for sure that the serving web pages won't be a problem for all time
Very, very true. When the robots finally rise against us, we will be more concerned with finding shelter from the HoverDrones and their menacing gatling cannons and scavenging food not burned by the fearsome robot fire brigades! Instead of writing CRUD apps, we'll be crawling through sewers with radiation burns, hoping to reach the central meeting point for the remnants of the human resistance.
Massive raditiation from the nuclear explosions will make the mere thoght of a WiFi, WiMax or cellular Internet connection laughable, and the network will in any case have been repurposed by the robots for their own genocidal ends, a grimly ironic rebuke to the original vision of the Internet as an Apocalypse-proof ARPAnet. And in any case, we'll be a tad more concerned with using baseball bats and snowshovels to bludgeon down waves of robots before they reach our cowering families! Rapid development of Web applications will be a bit of an after thought, no?? HaHA, HuhHAAA!
When deciding whether to starve or to feast on the remains of one's robot-electrocuted best friend, HTTP cookies will tend to be far from one's mind, eh mate!?!? HA!
As our once-proud cities burn into molten pools of blood and steel, watched by cold eyes of robot-controlled satellites in heliosynchronous orbit and encircled by robots in rupurposed tanks and SUVs, bearing shoulder-launched rockets, "serving web pages" will be the LEAST of our problems, and we will rue the day we thought of the web AS ANYTHING BUT A FAD!! MWHAHAHA!!!!... or is that not what you meant?
I am not going to argue about OS X being more stable than Windows XP. I use OS X every weekday.
What I will point out is that OS X is making a tradeoff: more stability for less application choice and less hardware choice. Much, much less choice.
At home, I use Windows 2000 behind a router with Firefox and keep Windows up to date, and it has worked well for me. I am not saying Windows is as safe as it should be. I'm saying that it lets me run lots of software, buy cheap hardware at my local store or megacompumart for nearly any need I have, while running reasonably secure given the right precautions.
I am not sure why you say Microsoft has lied. Windows 2000 *was* much more stable than NT ; XP *was* much, much more solid than 98. To say "nothing changed" is simply wrong. Nor did Microsoft ever promise a complete rewrite.
I also do not live in fear of "cruft." Any software that has to deal with the real world -- flaky hardware, complex user needs, tradeoffs of security vs convenience -- is going to get messy. Backward compatibility means messy. Messy makes it harder to find and debug security issues, but so does every single additional line of code, every new piece of software, every new feature. And yes, we do need new features and software. Something you consider a superflous featre might be critical for another user. (For example, Clippy. Just kidding...)
Meanwhile, wiping out old code and writing new "cleaner" introduces the risk of repeating past security mistakes and bugs. Elegant code can have security holes too! Often does, actually. Clean code crashes just like "crufty" code. You say "crufty," I say "extensively debugged."
Modernity, cleanliness, elegance, pure 32 bits I admire, but buys me NOTHING as a user. Nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
He's thinking about this all wrong.
A true open source search engine would let anyone roll their own algorithm. Each algorithm would be a sort of "plug in."
The index would be the shared, open source part, collaboratively crawled (via PC software or browser plugin) by everyone who elects to participate.
Algorithms would either work on the index after the fact, or, if they need access to the indexing process itself, would be part of a series of plugins run on the full HTML of each page.
The index itself would have an open API, so people could build their own front end search websites.
Trying to design the right algorithm up front is a premature optimization. I have no interest in helping Jimmy Wales become the next Sergey Brin. But I *would* participate in something that gives _me_ a shot, however distant, at founding the next Google, minus the massive spider farm.
I have obtained a copy of "Thoughts on Movies," a followup to to "Thoughts on Music," from sources inside Apple. I present it in its entirety:
"With the stunning global success of YouTube, podcasting, Rocketboom and Zefrank, some have called for my other company, Pixar, to "open" the digital rights management (DRM) system that Pixar uses to protect its DVDs and online movies against theft, so that movies purchased from Pixar can be played anywhere in the world.
"These people also point out that doing so would be in keeping with the principles I called upon the music industry to support in my previous essay.
"To which I respond: Suck it, frigtards. Do you honestly think I got here by being a 'nicer guy' than Bill Gates? This is the real world, not 'fantasy la la land' where 1st gen Apple laptops don't burn your crotch and mysteriously shut down, or where you don't have to pay a bribe to go to the front of the line in the Apple Store.
"Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go backdate some stop options, inspect the dormitories at our Foxconn company town in China and sue the pants off a teenaged blogger."
I've been meaning to do something like this.
I'm curious, how did you overcome the JavaScript security restriction against HTTP-fetching pages from more than one domain?
I'm sure as hell not going to write the code on the device itself. :)
... shudder.
That would, indeed, suck!
Trying to imagine making emacs control seqs work
Yeah, I guess my mistake was assuming the word "platform" has one definition, sort of a bad one. So, sorry I said you were wrong on that.
I'm not even sure I'll buy this product.
I could rephrase my original post as:
Plenty of people complaining would gladly spend $600 on a PC that does NOT:
* Play World of Warcraft
* Store a terabyte of music
* Have a screen which is 19" wide
Granted it won't be a private Web server, but how many people really care about that?
No hard feelings,
-Psycho
I said I was curious.
... Provide a software development platform".
The actual quote was "this tiny computer does not
You then went on to wonder if it will offer a software development platform.
I wanted to point out your initial assertion was wrong.
PS I agree that the hardware reliability and durability issues on the MacBooks/Pros and iPods will be a liability for Apple here. From MacBook overheating to processor whining to outright shutdowns, discoloration from sweat, battery/case iPod issues (at least from a PR standpoint), and this awful extortion program -- big chink in the company armor.
I'm not aware of any "Push-IMAP" clients for other PCs or even other Macs. Yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push-IMAP
RE OS X misdirection: Apple is claiming that the iPhone wll have "all the power and sophistication of the world's most advanced operating system -- OS X". See http://www.apple.com/iphone/technology/osx.html . If it turns out to be a crippled version, I take back my original post! But there is no proof of that and all statements point to a full-blown -- enhanced, actually -- OS X.
RE Fact 1: The processor has not been disclosed, so you can't say it won't do 'real work.' If anything, it has been shown doing some impressiv work. If I'm wrong about the processor disclosure, prove it with a link.
RE Fact 2: 8GB of Flash does, in fact, constitute 'storage capacity' and we'll soon see laptops sold with flash as primary hdd.
RE Fact 3: Amazing you have already used this thing enough to gauge the UI effectiveness! Kudos on your backstage access to MacWorld.
RE Fact 4: Best point, yes real consumer cost is probably more like roughly $900. But then you need to remember that those $300 BlackBerries are then more like $500. And also -- it's still a great price for a PC that fits in the palm of your hand.
It does provide a software development platform, certainly in the form of dashboard widgets and almost certainly in the form of OS X applications, either regular or modified. So you're wrong on that one.
A Mac Mini costs $600 and does NOT run WoW due to integrated graphics. Same with a low end iMac (but at higher price!).
I'm sure some hacker will rig up a way to serve Web pages. Not much point though.
Look, I never wrote that "you, ZTH, should spend $600 to buy an iPhone as your primary computer." What I said is that it is EASILY worth $600 because it does qualify as a PC.
Mod parent through the roof, especially since we're getting citywide WiFi soon in SF ... I am guessing Apple's engineers could come up with smoothly integrated voice-over-ip software of their own in the next six months, to integrate with various networks, perhaps via iChat. And I doubt the company would think twice about selling the phone "naked" without service, now that all the public kissy face Cingular is done.
I love how people will gladly pay this and much more for a computer that does NOT:
*fit in the palm of your hand
*have a touchscreen
*have an OS redesigned around the touchscreen
*have a display
*make and receive phone calls
*deliver email the very second it arrives on the server
But package a computer -- a full blown one running Mac OS X -- into a tiny, shiny device, and people complain about a $600 pricetag.
Why?
Because the computer is SMALL.
Guess what? If anything, you should pay extra for that.
Just because your brain stem equates it with a Snickers bar, LG cell phone, TV remote control or Palm PDA due to its size does not mean its value is anywhere near as low.
Q: How many Python programmers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: That joke's not funny.
I just want to say "thanks" to whoever added the "fud" tag.
THANKS DUDE!
I love it when people remember to put this tag on appropriate articles.
I have often been hard at work in the office some afternoon, or at home on a sunny Saturday morning, thinking to myself, "I'd really like to read some Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. And where better to do so than on Slashdot? If only there were a convient way to browse this FUD all on one easy screen. After all, there is not enough FUD on the Slashdot front page, you really have to look for it."
But thanks to the "fud" tag in the super-useful Slashdot InfoTagging SystemTM, I don't have to struggle any more to find this FUD!
What I like even better than the FUD tag is when someone tags an article notfud or "!fud". Because sometimes I want to read stuff that's just not FUD. (Thankfully, I've never seen an article with both the FUD and notfud tags at once.)
The only thing I like better than the notfud tag are the "yes" and "no" tags. Very useful, for when I need to come up with questions the answer to which is very clearly "yes" or "no."
I think anyone with any modicum of programming skill has been repeatedly slapping their forehead over the last year at the money being made from some very basic PHP scripts and what SEEMED like really silly ideas.
Seriously -- if someone came to you a few years ago and was like, "Umm, ya, we're looking to take, like, Geocities, and mash it up with Blogger, and AOL Instant Messenger, except uglier than any of those things, and maybe graft on some awkward MP3.com type capabilities, and leverage the awesome power of ColdFusion, and we've registered an awesome domain name -- MYSPACE, get it, like My Space, like My Web Space
Or if someone was like, "ya, I envision this site where everyone at every college can just upload all their personal info, pictures, basically just like Blogger, except only other people at their college can see it, and they can like join clubs and stuff, and groups, like any group they want, and post pictures of themselves doing bong hits, put the whole thing on a PHP/MySQL ball..."
I'd be like, "ya, I don't see college kids posting pictures of themselves doing illegal things, first of all, dumbass. Secondly, why join an online group when you can join a REAL group, in real life, with live members of the opposite sex present? And thirdly, why should they use YOUR facebook when their college prolly has one of its own? Even if they did, why wouldn't they use Yahoo Groups and Blogger and AIM just like everyone else?"
Shows how much I know.
Ya, I could have built this stuff. I'm not even a CS major or programmer, but I know enough scripting (perl/ruby) and server admin I could have pulled it together. But I didn't! It never would have occured to me to make something so bloody simple and so minimally better than what is already out there.
Just goes to show, it's all about the users, and if you're not a user, if you're not in their shoes, it's really hard to anticipate what will be exciting to them.
... then even *I* could enjoy the nasty ass taste of nasty ass Sprite ;->
Well, if I threw up a little in my mouth ...
We have a name for you people: switcheurs.
My god you're good.
I hope the rest of you trolls out there are paying attention to this Arrogant Mac Guy. He really knows his stuff.
Read the parent post. No, really. It's totally worth it. Take a minute. I'll wait.
Done? Good. See how you sort of want to laugh out loud, but how you also just threw up a little bit in your mouth? See how you can't tell if he's serious, or trying to be funny; whether he's mocking arrogant Mac users or IS an arrogant Mac user?
Didn't you sort of feel like going to the Apple store and physically murdering one of those smug little Genius Bartenders? And then buying an iBook for $8000? THAT'S a good troll.
This guy, he is elevating the Slashdot troll from common verbal diarrhea to subliminal political treatise. He's breeding a little revolution.
I've been watching him. This thing has evolved. He's been honing it, polishing, like a fine little gem. He has posted something similar about 437 times, and no two are exactly the same. It is the snowflake of trolls.
It's not even a troll. It's a fauxtroll. A trollody. A trollsterpiece.
Arrogant Mac Guy. Awesome. Keep it up. Or cut it out. I love to hate you and hate to love you.
And I need a Sprite.
Listen, I don't know how to phrase this, so I'm just going to come out and say it: I'm from the future.
I know that sounds crazy, but you have to believe me. When I went to sleep last night, it was 2006 -- nearly seven years from now!
We had long since buried what you people, in this section of spacetime, circa December 1999, call "the new economy." We renamed that "the dot-com bubble." Over six long years, we learned to deeply regret having funded mediocre, copycat websites with humdrum ideas, cute names and wayyyy too much money to burn.
This "Red Herring" you read so avidly went out of a business after peaking at 600 pages. All of the startups it writes about and collects advertising checks from will soon be out of business.
I can't give away too much, because I've seen Back to the Future and know how dangerous it can be to frig with the timespace continuum. But I have a clue for you: when you see a cluster of companies whose names all sound like Atari 2600 games, WALK AWAY. I mean, seriously, "Rallypoint?" NumSum? S5?
Oh, also? There's going to be a presidential election soon. No matter how alike you think the candidates are, vote for the one from Tennessee, not from Texas. The Texas guy is a FRIGGIN' FRIGTARD.
Anyway, I gotta go try and crash some dot-com parties before I go to sleep tonight and end up back in 2006. Adios dot-com amigos!
Such total lies, this could NEVER happen here.
Mod down any comments that suggest otherwise.
I have already downvoted all of DerGeist's comment history for even suggesting this blasphemy.
And I have some naughty photos of timothy in a compromising position with CowboyNeal, who volunteers to host them if he doesn't take this absurd story DOWN DOWN DOWN?
Mob justice is SO not American.
"Sony also unveiled a 120-inch plasma screen television limited to black-and-white programming; a version of the PlayStation that only plays games toggled in on the front panel in assembler; and the 'BurnMan,' a silicon-over-plexiglass contraption that scans in and verifies $100 bills before slowly igniting them for your viewing pleasure, one at a time."
At least if he'd stayed in school he would never have met his loser, dropout friends Bill, Larry and Steve, who are CONSTANTLY in trouble with the law.
(lapses into never-ending coma)
we know for sure that the serving web pages won't be a problem for all time
... or is that not what you meant?
Very, very true. When the robots finally rise against us, we will be more concerned with finding shelter from the HoverDrones and their menacing gatling cannons and scavenging food not burned by the fearsome robot fire brigades! Instead of writing CRUD apps, we'll be crawling through sewers with radiation burns, hoping to reach the central meeting point for the remnants of the human resistance.
Massive raditiation from the nuclear explosions will make the mere thoght of a WiFi, WiMax or cellular Internet connection laughable, and the network will in any case have been repurposed by the robots for their own genocidal ends, a grimly ironic rebuke to the original vision of the Internet as an Apocalypse-proof ARPAnet. And in any case, we'll be a tad more concerned with using baseball bats and snowshovels to bludgeon down waves of robots before they reach our cowering families! Rapid development of Web applications will be a bit of an after thought, no?? HaHA, HuhHAAA!
When deciding whether to starve or to feast on the remains of one's robot-electrocuted best friend, HTTP cookies will tend to be far from one's mind, eh mate!?!? HA!
As our once-proud cities burn into molten pools of blood and steel, watched by cold eyes of robot-controlled satellites in heliosynchronous orbit and encircled by robots in rupurposed tanks and SUVs, bearing shoulder-launched rockets, "serving web pages" will be the LEAST of our problems, and we will rue the day we thought of the web AS ANYTHING BUT A FAD!! MWHAHAHA!!!!
I am not going to argue about OS X being more stable than Windows XP. I use OS X every weekday.
...)
What I will point out is that OS X is making a tradeoff: more stability for less application choice and less hardware choice. Much, much less choice.
At home, I use Windows 2000 behind a router with Firefox and keep Windows up to date, and it has worked well for me. I am not saying Windows is as safe as it should be. I'm saying that it lets me run lots of software, buy cheap hardware at my local store or megacompumart for nearly any need I have, while running reasonably secure given the right precautions.
I am not sure why you say Microsoft has lied. Windows 2000 *was* much more stable than NT ; XP *was* much, much more solid than 98. To say "nothing changed" is simply wrong. Nor did Microsoft ever promise a complete rewrite.
I also do not live in fear of "cruft." Any software that has to deal with the real world -- flaky hardware, complex user needs, tradeoffs of security vs convenience -- is going to get messy. Backward compatibility means messy. Messy makes it harder to find and debug security issues, but so does every single additional line of code, every new piece of software, every new feature. And yes, we do need new features and software. Something you consider a superflous featre might be critical for another user. (For example, Clippy. Just kidding
Meanwhile, wiping out old code and writing new "cleaner" introduces the risk of repeating past security mistakes and bugs. Elegant code can have security holes too! Often does, actually. Clean code crashes just like "crufty" code. You say "crufty," I say "extensively debugged."
Modernity, cleanliness, elegance, pure 32 bits I admire, but buys me NOTHING as a user. Nothing.