The app is only as valuable as the data. This is the key to web services - tying services to data on a server.
No, that's the key to internet services. The two are not synonymous. Mr. Carmack's product, Quake, understands the internet quite well. Playing Quake deathmatches with people hundreds or thousands of miles away uses internet connectivity.
Web connectivity, on the other hand, implies a web-based application such as a java applet or HTML forms. Web applets are good for small, frequently changing or only briefly-used apps. Not for word processors, at least not at current bandwidths.
To give a desktop application web connectivity you don't really even need to change the application itself much, at least with file systems like Linux and (yes) Windows. What you need to upgrade is the file system, to allow remotely stored data to look like local files, with read and write via the standard mechanisms. (Windows' namespacing allows this, and Linux's/proc directory is an example of non-standard filing for Linux.) Then all you need to do to the app is add some ability to find your data remotely without memorizing some long filepath, and you have all the functionality you want out of a web app.
Both models have their pluses and minuses. I wouldn't want to have to download and install a problem to do many of the things web applets do. On the other hand, I'm not looking to play Quake in a Mozilla window.
I am *completely* against mis-use of the trademark laws, and a lawyer who so blatantly misrepresents them should be disbarred. Trademark law is available on-line, so even non-lawyers like us can discover relevant sections at this site.
Check out Sect 1125, in particular the very end:
(4) The following shall not be actionable under this section: (A) Fair use of a famous mark by another person in comparative commercial advertising or promotion to identify the competing goods or services of the owner of the famous mark. (B) Noncommercial use of a mark. (C) All forms of news reporting and news commentary.
This qualifies under both (B) and (C) as *non*-actionable.
I think the first step a government should take is to require that government documents be saved and transmitted in a fully-documented data format. Open source the data formats before worrying about the code.
Closed data formats put control over the government data in the hands of a private company, which is never a good thing.
Seriously, though, it talks about some kind of zooming control being part of the mouse, and the code is probably for that. There's [probably also a control panel.cpl file, but looking at my NT files, none of them is over 250k.
Once when I was going overboard in coding, back in DOS/Win3.1 days, I started writing a scrolling manager that would have allowed things like a little animated climbing monkey to serve as the scroll bar. Fortunately for the world, I never did get that far; that's only a short step from talking paperclips...
Not at all. Microsoft's mouse is seriously pretty cool, and I haven't seen anything quite like it. It tracks without a grid pad, unlike the Sun mice. There is nothing truly new under the sun, but as a product, Microsoft's mouse is innovative and worthy of praise.
Now their operating systems, on the other hand... Actually, I can't complain too much about NT, but 98's rate of crashing seems to be increasing on me. Argh!
A company spending millions of dollars on research has every right to protect its intellectual property by any means neccessary.
No they don't. You can't go around shooting people for violating copyright, you can't drop poison gas in a Hong Kong market to take out sellers of pirated CDs, etc. You can only do what the law allows. And you can only protect what the law allows you to protect.
The alternative to patent is trade secret information hidden from EVERYONE.
You mean everyone you don't have a contractual agreement with. Part of that contractual agreement would be serious damages if the secret is leaked. *This* is the way for companies to protect secret -- but not innovative, which is a requirement for patents -- discoveries.
Also, the new Intel chips run much cooler than an Athlon, which eases cooling issues. It might make more of a difference for those wanting to run multiprocessor machines.
True, but we're discussing bitmap editors here, not the whole box of tools (e.g., vector, 3d, video editing, page layout, batch conversion, etc.). Chisels only, in other words.
I don't know about you, but I own more than one chisel...
And actually the same holds for Photoshop, provided people still buy it, the company will still develop it. People stop buying it, Adobe go out of business. How is this different from GIMP?
Photoshop is looking for customers to continue, while the GIMP needs developers. The two sets overlap slightly, but not much. And the GIMP's required number of developers is much, much smaller.
Also, just having customers may not be enough -- look what happened to OS/2, for example.
Considering [Photogenics] was started a long time ago and he still continues to work on it means that the man LOVES his work.
And if he gets hit by a bus tomorrow? (john Carmack talks about putting his life on the line when driving his F-50, one tire flaw at the wrong time and we might never have had Quake.) Of course, I hope Mr. Nolan lives a long and healthy life. But the only way the GIMP could die is if people lose interest in improving it.
This goes to the heart of why Photogenics isn't competition for the GIMP, although the reverse may be true. The GIMP doesn't need a huge pool of uses to keep going. The only thing the GIMP is competing for is developer mindshare, and Photogenics isn't likely to affect this.
But my almost 6 years of Photoshop experience is something I can't throw out unless there's a very compelling reason to do so.
You know, I don't know of any carpenters who only use a chisel and no other tools. So why just use one computer tool? If Photogenics does something that Photoshop doesn't do, use it, and then use Photoshop for what it does well.
You do run in to the problem, of course, that unlike carpentry tools which all leave the wood as wood, computer tools output their own special "wood" -- different file formats. But I think.PSD is a known format, and of course GIFs, JPGs, etc. can all be imported to Photoshop from other programs.
The licenses for [ASIC] tools are very very expensive (I'm talking > $100k in some cases).
In many situations where this is the case, the open source alternative would be for the software users to hire programmers to build the tool. The problem with this is despite the fact that this would probably cheaper for all involved (you just pay for the program development, not the marketing, etc. you normally fund), it's not that easy to get companies in competition to work together on a tool they all need.
The biggest problem with OSS is that there are always people willing to fix your software for you or upgrade it for free. That's a hell of a big assumption.
So fix it yourself, or hire someone to do so. Software vendors generally do end up charging you when they provide a bug fix, since it tends to come in the next upgrade. Moreover, you can get those bug fixes done in a hurry if you need a fix in a hurry, rather than waiting for the next bug fix release.
No, the biggest blindspot of OSSers isn't this. It's missing the fact that for many purposes, effective open source isn't a practical alternative due to its non-existence. 8 years ago, what open source OS would you have used? Linux? Linux was still Linus's pet project then. Even today, with the growth of Linux, there's plenty of Linux users who still use Windows a lot. Why? Because of the apps, ones which have a better interface or simply don't exist under Linux. If I want a really good flight simulator, FlightGear just doesn't compute with MS Flight Simulator 2000 yet. There's no open source project comparable to Age of Empires/Kings, Starcraft, Quake, Quicken, Diablo, etc. Maybe this will change, maybe the flood of work being done on open source code and its inherent advantages (open source code almost never gets orphaned or neglected) will be enough to fill in the large gaps. But I wouldn't expect to see Bill Gates redeeming food stamps any time soon...
I think the key obstacle in the way of convergence is the television's poor resolution. Slashdot on a TV is unusable. Replace TVs with reasonable quality displays with 720 progressive or higher vertical resolution, and it's an acceptable monitor for most home users. Once video games can do HDTV out and HDTVs start becoming reasonably priced, that's when the line between the console and the computer becomes very fuzzy.
From the X-Box, it sounds like Microsoft is trying to make sure that if this happens, they're in position. It's surprising, given the expected timeline and the current pace of graphics chip turnover, specifics like the nVidia GeForce256 would be mentioned. I suspect, however, that's just linking the project to the hottest current 3-D chip, and the specific chip won't be chosen until the machine is closer to release.
... because it's got polynomial equation solving built into its instruction set!!
In grad school, I worked on the Pixel-Planes graphics supercomputer at UNC. Among its unique features were large arrays (256 to a chip) of 1-bit processors, with special hardware for solving second-degree polynomial equations. The polygon edges, texture maps, etc. were all turned into plane equations, and the resulting values solved per-pixel with one such processor per pixel. Pretty darned nifty eight years ago...
They don't want American Matrix DVDs available in England before it's finished the first theatrical run there, or they've sold the pay-per-view rights, or whatever.
Note that a large part of the reason for different release dates is the cost of producing the films, and thus the reels of films shown in the US head overseas as theaters stop showing them. The upcoming digital methods of distribution and display may eliminate this expense and thus make simultaneous distribution possible, and region code less necessary.
I suppose one concern might be widescale pirating that occurs in some regions of the world, and thus the attempt to stop pirated DVDs flowing out of those regions. I doubt this would have much success, though, the sellers would just make US/Europe-encoded DVDs anyway.
This couldn't be like OSS software projects. Some kind of staff has to have a final, near dictatorial say on what goes in and what doesn't.
You mean like Linus?
Frankly, I might be interested in writing articles even for free. Heck, I was thinking that one thing I wished I'd done was set up an Internet Encyclopedia. The web is a wonderful source of info, but it is scattershot and hard to search. Moreover, there's no easy way to determine age appropriateness; the entry for a six year old should be less in-depth and less technical than that for an adult. if it takes advertizing to hire moderators and organizers, and the writers are ill-paid or unpaid, I can work with that.
Second, I really just don't like the idea of tiny machines within my body, it's just a personal hangup, though, nothing more
My dad has a pacemaker. My wife has a cochlear implant. If cars and internal combustion engines weren't so universal, I might be a bit more nervous about strapping myself in within a foot or so of thousands of little explosions per minute. And think of my children! What an evil parent I must be to position them within feet of gallons of highly explosive gasoline!
Seriously, new technology often seems scary, and we have to be cautious with at first. But over time, as the risk-takers try it and it gets made safer, it becomes so universal we don't even think about it.
Seriously though, Codewarrior for the MacOS rocks.
The one thing I most dislike about CodeWarrior for Macs is that the.mcp files are binary, which doesn't work well in a multi-programmer environment. (You can't make independent changes and merge them together, like you can with a makefile or MSDev's.dsp/.dsw files, nor can you parse what changes were made.) Is it too much to hope that the Linux version does not suffer from this?
Using MSDev under NT is a mix of wonderful and awful.
Wonderful: Edit and continue: quick recompile while the program is running, and keep running it. It doesn't always let you do this, and it has once (only once) given me an incorrect interim result, but most of the time it's terrific.
Information displays: at first these seemed a little annoying, but now I find it so convenient to know the parameter types for a function just by mousing over the name, tab-completion of variable/function names, and so on.
Navigation: easy to use the mouse, the keyboard, or a combination to get around. Maybe Unix/GNU tools is as easy to navigate if you're good at it, I never was.
The Awful:
Drive letters: Drive letters are an abomination, and they make it hard to do things like use a removable hard drive for the project on multiple machines.
MDI (Multiple Document Interface): while it seems handy for arranging things, you end up using small parts of even a big monitor. Something like CodeWarrior (at least on the Mac), with multiple sub-windows that can all be hidden at once, is a much better use of screen real estate. MSDev tries to act like this, with the ability to drag some of the sub-windows off the main one, but they are always in front of the edit window.
Compiling: if you interrupt its first-pass compile, you will have to restart from the beginning. You saw an error? Gotta wait until the first pass is done before fixing it.
Priority: As far as I can tell, there's no way to "nice" the compile. Furthermore, it seems to use honkin' great amounts of memory, so even if the compilation is set to lower priority through the task manager, things are still godawful slow. (And this with 128 megs.)
System hooks: I've tried several virtual Window managers, and MSDev's debugger will screw all of them up, presumably by hooking into the system in ways no normal app can. This doesn't happen to me with KDE.
Search: while kind of nice, the inability to do a multiple search or the equivalent of -v really limits it as a useful tool. The "whole word only" option is nice though, for finding instances of a variable.
I'm rather astounded, really, at just how bad all dev tools are. You would think that programmers would have spent more effort improving the tools they use. But I know of only one (proprietary) file differencing tool that will show word differences when two lines only differ by a small amount. And I know of none that will allow you to ignore certain differences, such as when a class name gets changed, or differences that are in comments/commented out. I know of no tools that allow you to replace every instance of a variable name with a new name (sed won't work with duplicate names in different scopes, etc.). Syntax color highlighting generally doesn't showed #if'ed out code in a different color. No tool allows you to replace all const references to a member variable with a const accessor. No compiler is smart enough to skip recompiling files that aren't affected by a particular header file change (for example, adding a new function prototype -- it's only an issue if the name is overloaded). No compiler allows you to "break" during compiling to see what #defines are defined at the point of a problem, or to see what header files are included (and from where). There's just so many things an IDE (including emacs/vi+gcc+xterms) could do to make the life of a programmer easier and more productive, but they don't. Maybe someday...
1. Command shell that doesn't involve a lot of learning.
This is unnecessary, just provide a pretty file manager like the Finder or Explorer and that will make Joe Blow much happier. Joe Blows that are willing to use a command line/scripting language can deal with the funny names or alias them.
Automount of CDs would be nice; automount that automagically runs a startup program from the CD would be even better (with the option to disable this, of course).
Slashdot Mirror
The app is only as valuable as the data. This is the key to web services - tying services to data on a server.
/proc directory is an example of non-standard filing for Linux.) Then all you need to do to the app is add some ability to find your data remotely without memorizing some long filepath, and you have all the functionality you want out of a web app.
No, that's the key to internet services. The two are not synonymous. Mr. Carmack's product, Quake, understands the internet quite well. Playing Quake deathmatches with people hundreds or thousands of miles away uses internet connectivity.
Web connectivity, on the other hand, implies a web-based application such as a java applet or HTML forms. Web applets are good for small, frequently changing or only briefly-used apps. Not for word processors, at least not at current bandwidths.
To give a desktop application web connectivity you don't really even need to change the application itself much, at least with file systems like Linux and (yes) Windows. What you need to upgrade is the file system, to allow remotely stored data to look like local files, with read and write via the standard mechanisms. (Windows' namespacing allows this, and Linux's
Both models have their pluses and minuses. I wouldn't want to have to download and install a problem to do many of the things web applets do. On the other hand, I'm not looking to play Quake in a Mozilla window.
We had Borg and McEnroe at UNC; nowadays Sampras, Agassi, Williams, Hingis, et al could be used...
I am against IP laws, but not trademark laws.
I am *completely* against mis-use of the trademark laws, and a lawyer who so blatantly misrepresents them should be disbarred. Trademark law is available on-line, so even non-lawyers like us can discover relevant sections at this site.
Check out Sect 1125, in particular the very end:
(4) The following shall not be actionable under this section:
(A) Fair use of a famous mark by another person in comparative
commercial advertising or promotion to identify the competing
goods or services of the owner of the famous mark.
(B) Noncommercial use of a mark.
(C) All forms of news reporting and news commentary.
This qualifies under both (B) and (C) as *non*-actionable.
I think the first step a government should take is to require that government documents be saved and transmitted in a fully-documented data format. Open source the data formats before worrying about the code.
Closed data formats put control over the government data in the hands of a private company, which is never a good thing.
You're crazy.
.cpl file, but looking at my NT files, none of them is over 250k.
Seriously, though, it talks about some kind of zooming control being part of the mouse, and the code is probably for that. There's [probably also a control panel
Everything? Including, say, scrollbars?
Once when I was going overboard in coding, back in DOS/Win3.1 days, I started writing a scrolling manager that would have allowed things like a little animated climbing monkey to serve as the scroll bar. Fortunately for the world, I never did get that far; that's only a short step from talking paperclips...
WHY?
Never ask a hacker why, just smile and slowly back away.
I'm surprised no one else has said this yet... Rob?
Troll.
Not at all. Microsoft's mouse is seriously pretty cool, and I haven't seen anything quite like it. It tracks without a grid pad, unlike the Sun mice. There is nothing truly new under the sun, but as a product, Microsoft's mouse is innovative and worthy of praise.
Now their operating systems, on the other hand... Actually, I can't complain too much about NT, but 98's rate of crashing seems to be increasing on me. Argh!
A company spending millions of dollars on research has every right to protect its intellectual property by any means neccessary.
No they don't. You can't go around shooting people for violating copyright, you can't drop poison gas in a Hong Kong market to take out sellers of pirated CDs, etc. You can only do what the law allows. And you can only protect what the law allows you to protect.
The alternative to patent is trade secret information hidden from EVERYONE.
You mean everyone you don't have a contractual agreement with. Part of that contractual agreement would be serious damages if the secret is leaked. *This* is the way for companies to protect secret -- but not innovative, which is a requirement for patents -- discoveries.
The bad news for AMD in this is several-fold:
Also, the new Intel chips run much cooler than an Athlon, which eases cooling issues. It might make more of a difference for those wanting to run multiprocessor machines.
True, but we're discussing bitmap editors here, not the whole box of tools (e.g., vector, 3d, video editing, page layout, batch conversion, etc.). Chisels only, in other words.
I don't know about you, but I own more than one chisel...
And actually the same holds for Photoshop, provided people still buy it, the company will still develop it. People stop buying it, Adobe go out of business. How is this different from GIMP?
Photoshop is looking for customers to continue, while the GIMP needs developers. The two sets overlap slightly, but not much. And the GIMP's required number of developers is much, much smaller.
Also, just having customers may not be enough -- look what happened to OS/2, for example.
Considering [Photogenics] was started a long time ago and he still continues to work on it means that the man LOVES his work.
And if he gets hit by a bus tomorrow? (john Carmack talks about putting his life on the line when driving his F-50, one tire flaw at the wrong time and we might never have had Quake.) Of course, I hope Mr. Nolan lives a long and healthy life. But the only way the GIMP could die is if people lose interest in improving it.
This goes to the heart of why Photogenics isn't competition for the GIMP, although the reverse may be true. The GIMP doesn't need a huge pool of uses to keep going. The only thing the GIMP is competing for is developer mindshare, and Photogenics isn't likely to affect this.
But my almost 6 years of Photoshop experience is something I can't throw out unless there's a very compelling reason to do so.
.PSD is a known format, and of course GIFs, JPGs, etc. can all be imported to Photoshop from other programs.
You know, I don't know of any carpenters who only use a chisel and no other tools. So why just use one computer tool? If Photogenics does something that Photoshop doesn't do, use it, and then use Photoshop for what it does well.
You do run in to the problem, of course, that unlike carpentry tools which all leave the wood as wood, computer tools output their own special "wood" -- different file formats. But I think
The licenses for [ASIC] tools are very very expensive (I'm talking > $100k in some cases).
In many situations where this is the case, the open source alternative would be for the software users to hire programmers to build the tool. The problem with this is despite the fact that this would probably cheaper for all involved (you just pay for the program development, not the marketing, etc. you normally fund), it's not that easy to get companies in competition to work together on a tool they all need.
The biggest problem with OSS is that there are always people willing to fix your software for you or upgrade it for free. That's a hell of a big assumption.
So fix it yourself, or hire someone to do so. Software vendors generally do end up charging you when they provide a bug fix, since it tends to come in the next upgrade. Moreover, you can get those bug fixes done in a hurry if you need a fix in a hurry, rather than waiting for the next bug fix release.
No, the biggest blindspot of OSSers isn't this. It's missing the fact that for many purposes, effective open source isn't a practical alternative due to its non-existence. 8 years ago, what open source OS would you have used? Linux? Linux was still Linus's pet project then. Even today, with the growth of Linux, there's plenty of Linux users who still use Windows a lot. Why? Because of the apps, ones which have a better interface or simply don't exist under Linux. If I want a really good flight simulator, FlightGear just doesn't compute with MS Flight Simulator 2000 yet. There's no open source project comparable to Age of Empires/Kings, Starcraft, Quake, Quicken, Diablo, etc. Maybe this will change, maybe the flood of work being done on open source code and its inherent advantages (open source code almost never gets orphaned or neglected) will be enough to fill in the large gaps. But I wouldn't expect to see Bill Gates redeeming food stamps any time soon...
I think the key obstacle in the way of convergence is the television's poor resolution. Slashdot on a TV is unusable. Replace TVs with reasonable quality displays with 720 progressive or higher vertical resolution, and it's an acceptable monitor for most home users. Once video games can do HDTV out and HDTVs start becoming reasonably priced, that's when the line between the console and the computer becomes very fuzzy.
From the X-Box, it sounds like Microsoft is trying to make sure that if this happens, they're in position. It's surprising, given the expected timeline and the current pace of graphics chip turnover, specifics like the nVidia GeForce256 would be mentioned. I suspect, however, that's just linking the project to the hottest current 3-D chip, and the specific chip won't be chosen until the machine is closer to release.
... because it's got polynomial equation solving built into its instruction set!!
In grad school, I worked on the Pixel-Planes graphics supercomputer at UNC. Among its unique features were large arrays (256 to a chip) of 1-bit processors, with special hardware for solving second-degree polynomial equations. The polygon edges, texture maps, etc. were all turned into plane equations, and the resulting values solved per-pixel with one such processor per pixel. Pretty darned nifty eight years ago...
They don't want American Matrix DVDs available in England before it's finished the first theatrical run there, or they've sold the pay-per-view rights, or whatever.
Note that a large part of the reason for different release dates is the cost of producing the films, and thus the reels of films shown in the US head overseas as theaters stop showing them. The upcoming digital methods of distribution and display may eliminate this expense and thus make simultaneous distribution possible, and region code less necessary.
I suppose one concern might be widescale pirating that occurs in some regions of the world, and thus the attempt to stop pirated DVDs flowing out of those regions. I doubt this would have much success, though, the sellers would just make US/Europe-encoded DVDs anyway.
This couldn't be like OSS software projects. Some kind of staff has to have a final, near dictatorial say on what goes in and what doesn't.
You mean like Linus?
Frankly, I might be interested in writing articles even for free. Heck, I was thinking that one thing I wished I'd done was set up an Internet Encyclopedia. The web is a wonderful source of info, but it is scattershot and hard to search. Moreover, there's no easy way to determine age appropriateness; the entry for a six year old should be less in-depth and less technical than that for an adult. if it takes advertizing to hire moderators and organizers, and the writers are ill-paid or unpaid, I can work with that.
MS's marketing department has clearly lost its touch with reality.
You say this as if there were marketing departments that haven't...
Second, I really just don't like the idea of tiny machines within my body, it's just a personal hangup, though, nothing more
My dad has a pacemaker. My wife has a cochlear implant. If cars and internal combustion engines weren't so universal, I might be a bit more nervous about strapping myself in within a foot or so of thousands of little explosions per minute. And think of my children! What an evil parent I must be to position them within feet of gallons of highly explosive gasoline!
Seriously, new technology often seems scary, and we have to be cautious with at first. But over time, as the risk-takers try it and it gets made safer, it becomes so universal we don't even think about it.
Seriously though, Codewarrior for the MacOS rocks.
.mcp files are binary, which doesn't work well in a multi-programmer environment. (You can't make independent changes and merge them together, like you can with a makefile or MSDev's .dsp/.dsw files, nor can you parse what changes were made.) Is it too much to hope that the Linux version does not suffer from this?
The one thing I most dislike about CodeWarrior for Macs is that the
Using MSDev under NT is a mix of wonderful and awful.
Wonderful:
Edit and continue: quick recompile while the program is running, and keep running it. It doesn't always let you do this, and it has once (only once) given me an incorrect interim result, but most of the time it's terrific.
Information displays: at first these seemed a little annoying, but now I find it so convenient to know the parameter types for a function just by mousing over the name, tab-completion of variable/function names, and so on.
Navigation: easy to use the mouse, the keyboard, or a combination to get around. Maybe Unix/GNU tools is as easy to navigate if you're good at it, I never was.
The Awful:
Drive letters: Drive letters are an abomination, and they make it hard to do things like use a removable hard drive for the project on multiple machines.
MDI (Multiple Document Interface): while it seems handy for arranging things, you end up using small parts of even a big monitor. Something like CodeWarrior (at least on the Mac), with multiple sub-windows that can all be hidden at once, is a much better use of screen real estate. MSDev tries to act like this, with the ability to drag some of the sub-windows off the main one, but they are always in front of the edit window.
Compiling: if you interrupt its first-pass compile, you will have to restart from the beginning. You saw an error? Gotta wait until the first pass is done before fixing it.
Priority: As far as I can tell, there's no way to "nice" the compile. Furthermore, it seems to use honkin' great amounts of memory, so even if the compilation is set to lower priority through the task manager, things are still godawful slow. (And this with 128 megs.)
System hooks: I've tried several virtual Window managers, and MSDev's debugger will screw all of them up, presumably by hooking into the system in ways no normal app can. This doesn't happen to me with KDE.
Search: while kind of nice, the inability to do a multiple search or the equivalent of -v really limits it as a useful tool. The "whole word only" option is nice though, for finding instances of a variable.
I'm rather astounded, really, at just how bad all dev tools are. You would think that programmers would have spent more effort improving the tools they use. But I know of only one (proprietary) file differencing tool that will show word differences when two lines only differ by a small amount. And I know of none that will allow you to ignore certain differences, such as when a class name gets changed, or differences that are in comments/commented out. I know of no tools that allow you to replace every instance of a variable name with a new name (sed won't work with duplicate names in different scopes, etc.). Syntax color highlighting generally doesn't showed #if'ed out code in a different color. No tool allows you to replace all const references to a member variable with a const accessor. No compiler is smart enough to skip recompiling files that aren't affected by a particular header file change (for example, adding a new function prototype -- it's only an issue if the name is overloaded). No compiler allows you to "break" during compiling to see what #defines are defined at the point of a problem, or to see what header files are included (and from where). There's just so many things an IDE (including emacs/vi+gcc+xterms) could do to make the life of a programmer easier and more productive, but they don't. Maybe someday...
1. Command shell that doesn't involve a lot of learning.
This is unnecessary, just provide a pretty file manager like the Finder or Explorer and that will make Joe Blow much happier. Joe Blows that are willing to use a command line/scripting language can deal with the funny names or alias them.
Automount of CDs would be nice; automount that automagically runs a startup program from the CD would be even better (with the option to disable this, of course).