If you read the copyright information on the radiolovers.com website, you'll find that they believe (and they have good reason to believe) that all the recordings on the site are in the public domain. If they find information to show that some of them might still be under copyright, they will pull the show.
There's a possibility that they are violating copyright laws, but if you read their case, it looks pretty strong to me.
Re:"Most readers have probably heard about Firefox
on
Firefox Secrets
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Perhaps not coincidentally, those are the only two text document formats that get passed around between corporations.
I think you're seeing a conspiracy where none exists. If, for instance, AppleWorks suddenly overnight became the most popular word processor ever, and people were passing AppleWorks bills to the local senator over email... well, you'd have the same problem, because AppleWorks (and most, if not all, word processors) keep the same meta-data as Word and PDF does.
I agree with you completely. DVDs are quite reasonable... I don't know where the hell the OP was going to buy a single movie for $40. I've never seen one for more than $25, and the vast majority are $20. In some cases, you can get a DVD movie now for less money than the soundtrack to the same movie.
In fact, my only gripe about DVDs is that I think they should throw the movie's soundtrack in as a bonus. I'd much rather have the soundtrack to The Aviator than a commentary track I'll never listen to. But that's a minor gripe. Compared to VHS and Laserdisk, DVDs are a huge bargain.
Hah. The EU would be *begging* Microsoft to come back after a month. ALL their governments use Microsoft products, most of their citizens do. IF Microsoft "took their ball and went home," you can bet that it wouldn't be a year before the EU decided to cancel the fines and let them back in.
Lots of people go out and see trainwrecks. I didn't go to Doom, but I had a buddy who did and ended up disappointed: Sure it was bad, but it wasn't MST3K bad.
Stallman is saying that your company should *never* use proprietary software.
The Interviewer asks, "what if there is no open source alternative to the software my business needs?"
Stallman replies, "then you don't need to do that."
The Interviewer presses on and asks, "What if I really *do* need to do that?"
Stallman says, "You can donate money to GNU programmers to get it done."
Then the poster, here on Slashdot, points out that despite many people donating a lot of money and time into XEMacs, the product has been disappointing. What guarantee is there that GNU programmers can get the work done? Especially when they've had at least one high-profile project, HURD, completely fail.
See how none of this has anything to do with what you replied?
Once when I was a young whippersnapper (well, ok, 2001 or so), I interviewed for a IT position at a local school district. Now my dad is an HR director, and one of the pieces of advice he gave me was that you should always ask a question when the interviewers ask if you have any questions. School districts (at least in this area) do group interviews, so you're not talking 1-on-1, you're talking to 5-7 employees, all from different departments. (I think a couple teachers, one of the custodial staff, a couple administrators, I can't remember anymore.)
Anyway. I asked about the dress code and, I'm not making this up, they *laughed* at me. Then I left my interview where my aunt (who worked nearby) was waiting to ask me how it went, and I told her about them laughing at my question, and then *she* laughed at me.
In short, no, don't ask about the dress code. Not unless you want to be laughed at by total strangers.
The Mac version whooped butt. 640x400 pixels, 256 colors. Required an Apple II to play in color, alas. (There was a black/white version also for us poor Mac SE owners.)
Why is this "informative" and not "off-topic?" We're talking about video game access for disabled persons, not which keyboard layout works better in Halo. Criminy.
I can see it now. The human race slowly becoming extinct because everyone would rather hump a perfect digital partner in VR than interact with a real person.
You can type a lot of crap without having to resort to a keymap application. Heck, like I said, I can't even figure out how to type commonly-used accents in Windows.
1) I hate OS X. I don't entirely hate OS X, but I think OS X is a much lower quality product than MacOS 9. (Yes, I'm one of those freaks who could keep OS 9 running for weeks on end without crashing.)
2) MacOS dates back to 1984. In 1984, compatibility with other products wasn't a concern.
For instance,
Hmmm, couldn't find "KeyCaps" or whatever...
That's because it's a FAR too useful utility to be in OS X. If you have Classic installed, it probably still has its copy of KeyCaps (which works just fine in OS X, BTW.)
Are you one of those guys who wants it where most kbds have the caps key?
No; Command is next to the space bar on a Apple keyboard. On a Windows keyboard, that's where Alt is. So instead of hitting Command-C to copy, I often typo Alt-C.
One other random gripe....I'm missing a "backspace" key! They ain't the same thing. (And I'm encountering more problems with keymapping, ssh'ing to servers where emacs says delete means what it does on PC, even though it's where the backspace should be on Mac....)
This is because of #2, above. The original Mac labelled "Backspace" as "Delete." (Arguably, that's a fine label-- it does delete the character.) For compatibility, they later added a "Delete Forward" key, labelled, helpfully, "Delete." So now the Macintosh keyboard has two Delete keys, one backwards and one forward, both labeled the same thing... it's a stupid situation, I agree, and if Apple weren't so pig-headed, they'd rename "Delete (backwards)" to "Backspace."
Counterpoint: I close my last window. Guess I'm done! What the hell is it doing still sitting around taking system resources? You mean I gotta look up at the menu bar, make sure I'm still in the correct app, and THEN hit cmd-Q?
See rule 2 above. When MacOS was new, it only ran one application at a time, and so you'd have to quit your current application to work with another one. But I still say it's not a bad thing to separate the concept of "Application" and "Document."
BTW, OS X is designed assuming that you never quit your applications. Seriously. Just close all its windows and ignore it until you need it next. That's how I worked in OS 9, also... once the app is open, just keep it open. It doesn't hurt anything, and it's not consuming resources.
Another Counterpoint: it seems like guess work if clicking on a Dock app will open up a new window or not...if you've forgotten if, say, Finder has any windows open, you don't know if clicking will open up a new window or just have focus to the old ones.
See point 1, above. The Dock sucks ass. Finder sucks ass.
All right, I don't have a strong argument, just my annoyance with option-arrow instead of ctrl-arrow, that old "is the trash the right way to eject a disk", that "will this open up a new window" or not thing, and the whole way my laptop has no 2nd button despite great support for it in the OS. And that cmd-` is a simple cycle instead of the Most-Recent pattern of cmd-tab.
Bah, the trash thing. The *RIGHT* way to eject a disk in Macintosh Classic is to select Special and choose "Put Away." As in, "put your disk away back in the box." The trash can thing is just some shortcut that somebody at Apple added, forever tarnishing their GUI's reputation, alas.
But hey, at least Macs are smart enough to keep track of disks in use and not allow users to corrupt them by ejecting them in the middle of a write operation. Or at least they were until USB disks came along, but anyway.
And yeah, I hate that my iBook has no second button also.
I like a lot of things about Macintosh, and I still think they're the best UI in town, but you must understand that, IMO, they've gone downhill in the last 5 years. OS 9 had *zero* focus-stealing bugs. In OS X, I've found a dozen. OS 9 Finder *never* crashed. The OS X Finder crashes daily. The Application Switcher in OS X never crashed; the Dock in OS X crashes constantly. Apple's sent their QA department on a long break, and it's high time they brought them back.
Well, there's the "Character Map" application that's been around for a bit. Kind of clunky. And I guess there's the old "character code typing". So Mac might have the edge here....except I have no idea how to the Option key to type anything except opt-arrow! What do you use it for?
Open up KeyCaps (or whatever they call it in OS X) and experiment. To type an accented E, you type Option-E E. An accented I, Option-E I, etc. Hold down Option and you'll see how the punctuation keys all change to alternate punctuations. On MacOS, you can type curly quotes using Option-[ and Option-Shift-[, you don't need Word to fill them in for you.
C'mon, admit it...it's a small bit of "compatability" and a big hunk of "whoops, context menus make a lot of sense and we probably should have included a button for it on the mouse"
Except your argument makes no sense considering the Control key has been on Mac FAR longer than they've supported contextual menus.;) The Control key is original 1984 equipment; contextual menus didn't come along until System 8. But the Control key wasn't used for anything except backwards compatibility with terminals in that entire span of time.
*Ctrl- is by far the most commonly used one and maps very well to "Cmd" on Mac.
Except it's in the wrong place, which drives me nuts.:) But yeah.
*Alt- : there's the legacy of Alt-F4. A little weird, but at least it avoids the cmd-Q vs cmd-W mixups of Mac! And then it can be used to open up a dropdown menu...(I hate the new default of "hide accelerator underlines until I hit alt" though) That's it, very rarely is it a "do this now" kind of key.
What is the "Command-Q" vs. "Command-W" mixup? As a Mac user, that's my normal way of working and the Windows way is screwy. (Case in point: Say I want to close one Word document on Windows and start another. I hit control-W to close my document, and the whole program closes! So now to start a new document, I have to wait for the *whole program* to start back up again! As a Mac user, that strikes me as dumb.)
Command-W = "stop working with this document." Command-Q = "stop working with this application." Documents != Applications. Perfectly sensible, IMO.
*Windows- : As far as I can tell, these are all very consitent, "OS"-wide things. By itself it's the start menu (and a very effecient way of starting a new app), Win-M is minimize all windows, Win-L is lock the whole thing...never any app-specific stuff.
I guess you have a point. But you're still talking about using three keys to serve the function Macintosh only needs one for.
So I think your argument about the inconsistency of Windows' accelerator is a bit week. Sure there are some oddball exceptions, but OSX isn't free of those either.
Hah! You can't just throw that out there without giving an example!
The only "oddball" behavior I can think of in OS X is that it doubles the Control key to provide some Unix-y shortcuts. But I never use those.
Got a cite for that statistic? And as a moderate "poweruser", I'd heartily disagree.
Yeah: Experience supporting 250 Windows computers for five years.
You're a poweruser. 90% of people aren't. That's exactly what that statistic is saying. (Yes I pulled the number out of my ass, but I feel it's pretty close.)
I explain this to my mean coworker when he gets paged 10 times during his week with the pager, and I get paged once. It's all karma. He's rude to the users, he gets woken up at 4:00 AM on saturday.
Well, he's probably telling the truth (the majority of Windows boot failures are caused by registry corruption), but what are the odds of getting a Windows boot failure?
I work at a hospital with 250 machines. All of these are either cheap Dell Precisions and Dimensions, or white-boxes we built ourselves from ASUS motherboards and AMD CPUs. I've worked here 3 years, and I've seen one computer fail to boot Windows XP in that amount of time. System Restore fixed it, so it probably was a registry corruption, but my point is that that's nothing to the number of problems that happen due to:
1) Hardware failure. Power supplies seem particularly prone to these; I replace probably two a week on average.
2) Printers. Printers are the BANE of existence. Especially since we have to use IBM printers because our AS/400 speaks only IPDS... IBM printers suck ass. (We have probably 25 IBM InfoPrinters that need service kits every 6 months, rebooted every week, unjammed once a month or so... and 5 HP 4000 series printers that are so reliable I've forgotten where they are because I never have to go look at them.)
3) Crappy-ass software. This is what most people would call User Error, but I firmly believe that users would not error so much if the software we used wasn't all crappy. Just today, I had to go re-install a patient information system because the installer didn't install for all users. You can't blame User Error on that one.
I have to disagree. The Macintosh way is *much* simplier.
Command: Performs a command. Option: Shows you additional options. (Either alternate menu items, or characters that don't show up on your keyboard, like a Spanish upside-down question mark. I still have no clue how to type international characters in Windows, and I've been using it for half a decade.) Control: Compatibility. Shift: Same as every other Shift key everywhere else.
Windows on the other hand makes no distinction for its modifiers. Some of the commands use Control, like Control-C for Copy. Some use Alt, like Alt-F4 for Close. Some use Windows, like Windows-L for Lock Workstation. There's no consistency. It gives me the impression that nobody ever sat down and said, "whoa, this is confusing, let's stop and figure this out."
BTW, 90% or more of users only use one mouse button. Now, given, Apple didn't know that when they decided to use just one button on their original 1984 Macintosh, but we know it now... and knowing that, the decision doesn't look that bad.
The theory is that you used your computer with your left hand on the keyboard doing Command shortcuts and your right hand on the mouse pointing at icons or menus. Now that didn't work out for a few reasons... if you're casually using a computer, you're usually just putting one hand on the mouse and eating chips or something with the other. But that's how it was designed, and if you use the system as designed, you can be pretty damned effective.
You are right that Apple doesn't design for keyboards in general. This has long been a failing of theirs. (They had a terrible "mouse keys" control panel in Classic MacOS, and now they have a feature called "full keyboard access", but both of them are much worse than what Windows offers.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the copyright information on the radiolovers.com website, you'll find that they believe (and they have good reason to believe) that all the recordings on the site are in the public domain. If they find information to show that some of them might still be under copyright, they will pull the show.
There's a possibility that they are violating copyright laws, but if you read their case, it looks pretty strong to me.
And a nickel would get you a three course dinner!
Perhaps not coincidentally, those are the only two text document formats that get passed around between corporations.
I think you're seeing a conspiracy where none exists. If, for instance, AppleWorks suddenly overnight became the most popular word processor ever, and people were passing AppleWorks bills to the local senator over email... well, you'd have the same problem, because AppleWorks (and most, if not all, word processors) keep the same meta-data as Word and PDF does.
I agree with you completely. DVDs are quite reasonable... I don't know where the hell the OP was going to buy a single movie for $40. I've never seen one for more than $25, and the vast majority are $20. In some cases, you can get a DVD movie now for less money than the soundtrack to the same movie.
In fact, my only gripe about DVDs is that I think they should throw the movie's soundtrack in as a bonus. I'd much rather have the soundtrack to The Aviator than a commentary track I'll never listen to. But that's a minor gripe. Compared to VHS and Laserdisk, DVDs are a huge bargain.
http://www.radiolovers.com/
They did it best in the 40s and 50s when podcasting was called "radio shows."
Hah. The EU would be *begging* Microsoft to come back after a month. ALL their governments use Microsoft products, most of their citizens do. IF Microsoft "took their ball and went home," you can bet that it wouldn't be a year before the EU decided to cancel the fines and let them back in.
I think it was funnier when Bender had Leela's emotions.
Leela: You don't understand. He would never hurt people. Let us help you capture him.
Dwayne: Impossible. If the legend is true, our only hope is to offer him a snack-rifice.
Raoul: Yes. An unspoiled virgin.
Leela: [raising her hand] I volunteer.
Vyolet: Nice try, Leela, but we've all seen Zapp Brannigan's webpage.
[Bender laughs and Leela looks sad. Bender's emotion chip beeps and he groans.]
Bender: Oh, I made myself feel bad.
nt
Lots of people go out and see trainwrecks. I didn't go to Doom, but I had a buddy who did and ended up disappointed: Sure it was bad, but it wasn't MST3K bad.
Yes, but you're UTTERLY MISSING THE POINT.
Let's review:
Stallman is saying that your company should *never* use proprietary software.
The Interviewer asks, "what if there is no open source alternative to the software my business needs?"
Stallman replies, "then you don't need to do that."
The Interviewer presses on and asks, "What if I really *do* need to do that?"
Stallman says, "You can donate money to GNU programmers to get it done."
Then the poster, here on Slashdot, points out that despite many people donating a lot of money and time into XEMacs, the product has been disappointing. What guarantee is there that GNU programmers can get the work done? Especially when they've had at least one high-profile project, HURD, completely fail.
See how none of this has anything to do with what you replied?
Uh, what video card are Linux users supposed to be using? Matrox?
Once when I was a young whippersnapper (well, ok, 2001 or so), I interviewed for a IT position at a local school district. Now my dad is an HR director, and one of the pieces of advice he gave me was that you should always ask a question when the interviewers ask if you have any questions. School districts (at least in this area) do group interviews, so you're not talking 1-on-1, you're talking to 5-7 employees, all from different departments. (I think a couple teachers, one of the custodial staff, a couple administrators, I can't remember anymore.)
Anyway. I asked about the dress code and, I'm not making this up, they *laughed* at me. Then I left my interview where my aunt (who worked nearby) was waiting to ask me how it went, and I told her about them laughing at my question, and then *she* laughed at me.
In short, no, don't ask about the dress code. Not unless you want to be laughed at by total strangers.
The Mac version whooped butt. 640x400 pixels, 256 colors. Required an Apple II to play in color, alas. (There was a black/white version also for us poor Mac SE owners.)
Whiplash has to be one of the most underrated games ever.
However, artifically lengthening the game by making you go through all the stages twice *did* suck.
Have you tried Spyro? If you liked Whiplash, you'll probably like Spyro as well.
Why is this "informative" and not "off-topic?" We're talking about video game access for disabled persons, not which keyboard layout works better in Halo. Criminy.
I would touch that robot with a 10 foot pole. ...
Well, it was funny in my head.
I can see it now. The human race slowly becoming extinct because everyone would rather hump a perfect digital partner in VR than interact with a real person.
You saw that Futurama episode with Lucy Liu also?
FYI, here are some screenshots of KeyCaps in action:
n ormal.pngo ption.pngo ption_shift.png
Normal: http://www.schend.net/images/screenshots/keycaps_
With Option down: http://www.schend.net/images/screenshots/keycaps_
With Option and Shift down: http://www.schend.net/images/screenshots/keycaps_
You can type a lot of crap without having to resort to a keymap application. Heck, like I said, I can't even figure out how to type commonly-used accents in Windows.
Before we continue, a couple of ground rules:
1) I hate OS X. I don't entirely hate OS X, but I think OS X is a much lower quality product than MacOS 9. (Yes, I'm one of those freaks who could keep OS 9 running for weeks on end without crashing.)
2) MacOS dates back to 1984. In 1984, compatibility with other products wasn't a concern.
For instance,
Hmmm, couldn't find "KeyCaps" or whatever...
That's because it's a FAR too useful utility to be in OS X. If you have Classic installed, it probably still has its copy of KeyCaps (which works just fine in OS X, BTW.)
Are you one of those guys who wants it where most kbds have the caps key?
No; Command is next to the space bar on a Apple keyboard. On a Windows keyboard, that's where Alt is. So instead of hitting Command-C to copy, I often typo Alt-C.
One other random gripe....I'm missing a "backspace" key! They ain't the same thing. (And I'm encountering more problems with keymapping, ssh'ing to servers where emacs says delete means what it does on PC, even though it's where the backspace should be on Mac....)
This is because of #2, above. The original Mac labelled "Backspace" as "Delete." (Arguably, that's a fine label-- it does delete the character.) For compatibility, they later added a "Delete Forward" key, labelled, helpfully, "Delete." So now the Macintosh keyboard has two Delete keys, one backwards and one forward, both labeled the same thing... it's a stupid situation, I agree, and if Apple weren't so pig-headed, they'd rename "Delete (backwards)" to "Backspace."
Counterpoint: I close my last window. Guess I'm done! What the hell is it doing still sitting around taking system resources? You mean I gotta look up at the menu bar, make sure I'm still in the correct app, and THEN hit cmd-Q?
See rule 2 above. When MacOS was new, it only ran one application at a time, and so you'd have to quit your current application to work with another one. But I still say it's not a bad thing to separate the concept of "Application" and "Document."
BTW, OS X is designed assuming that you never quit your applications. Seriously. Just close all its windows and ignore it until you need it next. That's how I worked in OS 9, also... once the app is open, just keep it open. It doesn't hurt anything, and it's not consuming resources.
Another Counterpoint: it seems like guess work if clicking on a Dock app will open up a new window or not...if you've forgotten if, say, Finder has any windows open, you don't know if clicking will open up a new window or just have focus to the old ones.
See point 1, above. The Dock sucks ass. Finder sucks ass.
All right, I don't have a strong argument, just my annoyance with option-arrow instead of ctrl-arrow, that old "is the trash the right way to eject a disk", that "will this open up a new window" or not thing, and the whole way my laptop has no 2nd button despite great support for it in the OS. And that cmd-` is a simple cycle instead of the Most-Recent pattern of cmd-tab.
Bah, the trash thing. The *RIGHT* way to eject a disk in Macintosh Classic is to select Special and choose "Put Away." As in, "put your disk away back in the box." The trash can thing is just some shortcut that somebody at Apple added, forever tarnishing their GUI's reputation, alas.
But hey, at least Macs are smart enough to keep track of disks in use and not allow users to corrupt them by ejecting them in the middle of a write operation. Or at least they were until USB disks came along, but anyway.
And yeah, I hate that my iBook has no second button also.
I like a lot of things about Macintosh, and I still think they're the best UI in town, but you must understand that, IMO, they've gone downhill in the last 5 years. OS 9 had *zero* focus-stealing bugs. In OS X, I've found a dozen. OS 9 Finder *never* crashed. The OS X Finder crashes daily. The Application Switcher in OS X never crashed; the Dock in OS X crashes constantly. Apple's sent their QA department on a long break, and it's high time they brought them back.
Well, there's the "Character Map" application that's been around for a bit. Kind of clunky. And I guess there's the old "character code typing". So Mac might have the edge here....except I have no idea how to the Option key to type anything except opt-arrow! What do you use it for?
;) The Control key is original 1984 equipment; contextual menus didn't come along until System 8. But the Control key wasn't used for anything except backwards compatibility with terminals in that entire span of time.
:) But yeah.
Open up KeyCaps (or whatever they call it in OS X) and experiment. To type an accented E, you type Option-E E. An accented I, Option-E I, etc. Hold down Option and you'll see how the punctuation keys all change to alternate punctuations. On MacOS, you can type curly quotes using Option-[ and Option-Shift-[, you don't need Word to fill them in for you.
C'mon, admit it...it's a small bit of "compatability" and a big hunk of "whoops, context menus make a lot of sense and we probably should have included a button for it on the mouse"
Except your argument makes no sense considering the Control key has been on Mac FAR longer than they've supported contextual menus.
*Ctrl- is by far the most commonly used one and maps very well to "Cmd" on Mac.
Except it's in the wrong place, which drives me nuts.
*Alt- : there's the legacy of Alt-F4. A little weird, but at least it avoids the cmd-Q vs cmd-W mixups of Mac! And then it can be used to open up a dropdown menu...(I hate the new default of "hide accelerator underlines until I hit alt" though) That's it, very rarely is it a "do this now" kind of key.
What is the "Command-Q" vs. "Command-W" mixup? As a Mac user, that's my normal way of working and the Windows way is screwy. (Case in point: Say I want to close one Word document on Windows and start another. I hit control-W to close my document, and the whole program closes! So now to start a new document, I have to wait for the *whole program* to start back up again! As a Mac user, that strikes me as dumb.)
Command-W = "stop working with this document." Command-Q = "stop working with this application." Documents != Applications. Perfectly sensible, IMO.
*Windows- : As far as I can tell, these are all very consitent, "OS"-wide things. By itself it's the start menu (and a very effecient way of starting a new app), Win-M is minimize all windows, Win-L is lock the whole thing...never any app-specific stuff.
I guess you have a point. But you're still talking about using three keys to serve the function Macintosh only needs one for.
So I think your argument about the inconsistency of Windows' accelerator is a bit week. Sure there are some oddball exceptions, but OSX isn't free of those either.
Hah! You can't just throw that out there without giving an example!
The only "oddball" behavior I can think of in OS X is that it doubles the Control key to provide some Unix-y shortcuts. But I never use those.
Got a cite for that statistic? And as a moderate "poweruser", I'd heartily disagree.
Yeah: Experience supporting 250 Windows computers for five years.
You're a poweruser. 90% of people aren't. That's exactly what that statistic is saying. (Yes I pulled the number out of my ass, but I feel it's pretty close.)
Possibly, I dunno anything about OS/400. I just know our OS/400 guy tells me we need IPDS printers.
I explain this to my mean coworker when he gets paged 10 times during his week with the pager, and I get paged once. It's all karma. He's rude to the users, he gets woken up at 4:00 AM on saturday.
Well, he's probably telling the truth (the majority of Windows boot failures are caused by registry corruption), but what are the odds of getting a Windows boot failure?
I work at a hospital with 250 machines. All of these are either cheap Dell Precisions and Dimensions, or white-boxes we built ourselves from ASUS motherboards and AMD CPUs. I've worked here 3 years, and I've seen one computer fail to boot Windows XP in that amount of time. System Restore fixed it, so it probably was a registry corruption, but my point is that that's nothing to the number of problems that happen due to:
1) Hardware failure. Power supplies seem particularly prone to these; I replace probably two a week on average.
2) Printers. Printers are the BANE of existence. Especially since we have to use IBM printers because our AS/400 speaks only IPDS... IBM printers suck ass. (We have probably 25 IBM InfoPrinters that need service kits every 6 months, rebooted every week, unjammed once a month or so... and 5 HP 4000 series printers that are so reliable I've forgotten where they are because I never have to go look at them.)
3) Crappy-ass software. This is what most people would call User Error, but I firmly believe that users would not error so much if the software we used wasn't all crappy. Just today, I had to go re-install a patient information system because the installer didn't install for all users. You can't blame User Error on that one.
I'm guessing he came up with this theory after using Lotus Notes for a few days? :)
I have to disagree. The Macintosh way is *much* simplier.
Command: Performs a command.
Option: Shows you additional options. (Either alternate menu items, or characters that don't show up on your keyboard, like a Spanish upside-down question mark. I still have no clue how to type international characters in Windows, and I've been using it for half a decade.)
Control: Compatibility.
Shift: Same as every other Shift key everywhere else.
Windows on the other hand makes no distinction for its modifiers. Some of the commands use Control, like Control-C for Copy. Some use Alt, like Alt-F4 for Close. Some use Windows, like Windows-L for Lock Workstation. There's no consistency. It gives me the impression that nobody ever sat down and said, "whoa, this is confusing, let's stop and figure this out."
BTW, 90% or more of users only use one mouse button. Now, given, Apple didn't know that when they decided to use just one button on their original 1984 Macintosh, but we know it now... and knowing that, the decision doesn't look that bad.
The theory is that you used your computer with your left hand on the keyboard doing Command shortcuts and your right hand on the mouse pointing at icons or menus. Now that didn't work out for a few reasons... if you're casually using a computer, you're usually just putting one hand on the mouse and eating chips or something with the other. But that's how it was designed, and if you use the system as designed, you can be pretty damned effective.
You are right that Apple doesn't design for keyboards in general. This has long been a failing of theirs. (They had a terrible "mouse keys" control panel in Classic MacOS, and now they have a feature called "full keyboard access", but both of them are much worse than what Windows offers.)