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Though I like to think it was due in part to the image I uploaded once I found there was no way to get rid of it. :-)

I did learn that you could go to "Editor's Picks" and scroll and the last one (hard to see, natch) which was "white" but then the text was still shadow-y which I think looked kinda cool on the logo but it made the small text almost impossible to read. (Not that I read the small text on the page, but it's annoying to have unreadable text visible.)

Maybe their next innovation will be background images on the search results pages. How cool would that be?!?!?

Take another look at your numbers. You don't want to buy a $674 Mac Mini* because of the hard drive, and you wish there was a similar machine for $1100? A) You can buy a lot of replacement hard drives for $426, or B) you can buy MiniStacks for them. Google for tests--they're faster than the internal drives. (Or C: buy 2 spare Minis for every 3 you deploy.)

By the way, the new Minis use SATA drives and performance is pretty good. Also: I bought a PPC Mac Mini the month it was introduced and it's been running 24/7/365 ever since, as my workstation and webserver. So I wouldn't stay up nights worrying about drive longevity. A laptop hard drive in a well-ventilated case in a climate-controlled office will probably last longer than the same drive in a laptop.

As for user serviceability, they're a bit tricky to get into, but not impossible. Google for disassembly guides and buy a putty knife.

* $674 = $599 + $75 for RAM. I personally think Core Due is just about as good as Core 2 Duo, but if you disagree... wait a few months. The Minis are due for an upgrade.

I started watching the XGL videos. The first one was transparency. Funny: MS has had this capability since W2K--you just need Vitrite to activate it. Since I've never, ever, ever seen a really useful use of transparency* I'm glad they left this off by default.

* OS X's early use of semi-transparent title bars sucked when you had a bunch of windows in the same general area. Note that this is gone now. (On the other hand, they also got rid of tabs, and that totally sucks, so they're not exactly batting a thousand.) I've seen lots of people with semi-transparent terminal windows, but they're more in the "looks cool and doesn't hurt productivity much" camp, rather than being truly useful. Ditto for the transparent unused pallets in MS Office on OS X--I can't stand them, but they don't actually seem to hurt most people.

Or, you can follow these directions to make your old iBook black, pink, or any color you want. I did this and made mine clear.

Like I said elsewhere last year,

A few days after SGI was delisted, I stumbled across an old (1994) article about SGI while I was poking around in one of my favorite places, the Wired archive.
 
(I'm a huge computer history junkie--if nothing else is happening, I can amuse myself for hours digging up old computer stuff on the web. And if you're ever in the San Francisco Bay Area, I highly recommend visiting the Computer History museum.)

Anyway, the article has this quote from SGI founder Jim Clark:

Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.

"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."

Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."

Funny how things can change in 12 years. :-)

Last time this topic came up, I put out the idea of making a one-line script to make your own top ten list, and some other slashdotters chimed in to perfect it.

cat .bash_history | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -10

Results from my home box:
98 cd
96 ls
57 pico
40 curl
17 sudo
15 locate
14 cat
13 mkdir
12 ps
11 du

The only reason 'ssh' isn't on there is because I have short scripts for each server I ssh to (like '~/bin/sshweb') that save time in general and, as a bonus, they color-code the Terminal window. So 'sshweb' connects me to my production web server and makes the window red so I know to be extra-careful.

Remeber in the old days the saying was "No one ever got fired for buying IBM"? Now it's the same with MS. We all know business reality is ugly and non-idea but the sooner you accept that business reality is reality, as far as businesses are concerned, the better off you'll be. Imagine these two conversations:

Boss: "Why can't Joe read the document I sent him?"
You: "Because he has a different version of Word than you have."
Boss: "Oh. Stupid Microsoft. Can you fix it?"

or

Boss: "Why can't Joe read the document I sent him?"
You: "Because Joe has MS Office and you have an alternative office suite which is free as in free and 99% compatible but not quite perfect because M$ changes formats all the time but it's more stable and less bloated and launches faster but uses an open document format by default so you need to export as .DOC or .RTF or export to .PDF or HTML or Joe can download it (112 MB) for free or..."
Boss: "This aggrivation is not worth $400. Shut up about vendor lock-in and all your free-as-in-speech hippy friends. Run out to Staples and get me MS Office" if you're lucky or "Shut up. You're fired" if you're not.

Yes, Mac OS X can make PDFs from any application that can print. Yes, you can make PDFs for free in Windows with a Samba server and ps2pdf. Yes, OOo has built-in one-click PDF support. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter that all OOo docs are just gzipped XML and your data can never, ever be lost or unreadable. Doesn't matter that IBM likes it. Your boss, and his secretary, want to launch a word cruncher, type, click the floppy disc icon, and email the result to someone. They don't want to hear about exporting. They don't want to save two copies. If it's not interchangable by default, it has no chance to take over the world. Office won't be unseated anytime soon.

Surprised no one else caught your factual error. In Safari: Edit -> Spelling -> Check Spelling as You Type. I've been using this for ages. And yes, using a systemwide dictionary rocks.

See this screenshot: http://apple.newbox.org/pics/spelling.png

Too late to get modded up, but what the hell. No, Vista will not be the spark that ignites Linux. Win98 was pretty unstable. Did Linux take over then? No. Win ME sucked ass. Did Linux take over then? No. Win2k was pretty nice but wasn't shipped on much consumer hardware. Did Linux take over then? No. WinXP is annoying as fuck, what with balloons popping up everywhere (Take a tour! This is the start menu! Wireless is here! Wireless is gone! Hey, wireless is back! No, wait, gone again!) and all the activation BS, not to mention spyware, viruses, self-spreading bad stuff, etc. Did Linux take over? No. Vista? Well, technically I can't see into the future, but I'm a pretty good guesser.

"Whether it's the lack of a new file system or the Monad scripting shell, the absence of innovation in this operating system is giving it a black eye." One second--you think customers care one fucking bit about innovation in an OS? What planet is this guy on that he thinks people care about a fucking FILESYSTEM or SHELL?!?!?* I'm gonna say this once really loud for the cheap seats: WINDOWS IS POPULAR BECAUSE IT'S THE OS ON THE CHEAPEST COMPUTERS OUT THERE!!!!!!!111oneoneone. The 5% of customers that do care about innovation already have a home: they're at the Apple store.

* note: Windows does ship with a shell. But no one needs it. (Because Windows also ships with a GUI, natch.) Before writing another article like this, do this simple test: walk up to 50 people and ask them about the shell in Windows.
- 46 will go "huh?"
- 2 will say "cmd.exe but I have no use for it." (You just stumbled across two people who work in IT or a computer store.)
- 1 will say "cmd.exe and I use it once in a while because I've been using PCs for 20 years and I still do things there 'cause I'm used to it."
- And exactly one will say "cmd.exe but I don't use it 'cause it's teh sux0rz! When I get a new comp the first thing I do is use IE to download Firefox and then I use Firefox to download Cygwin!" (Read that page, it's really funny. I love that story.)

Monad is very cool but even if MS would have shipped it in Vista, did you really think you were going to spend next thanksgiving teaching your mom how to use it? "Look, mom, here--I just pipe this through that, and what makes Monad even cooler than bash is that it isn't just text coming out, these are actual objects, so I can take these results and..." Uh-huh. Right.

Because SVG is XML, which is text, it can be generated by anything that can create text--Perl, PHP, ASP, whatever. Here is a sample (with source) done in PHP. Fun, fun, fun. I haven't coded vector graphics in ages. Anyone else remember things like Apple's HPLOT and Basic's LINE? I do. I think this will work:

10 SCREEN 2
20 A=INT(RND(1)*200)
30 B=INT(RND(1)*200)
40 LINE (0,0)-(A,B)
50 GOTO 20

• can be done remotely over even the slowest network link.
• can be put into a script...
• ...which can be scheduled with CRON
• produces textual output, which can be
  • instantly sent to a printer (hack-proof!--hard to delete logs when they're already printed*)
  • emailed
  • shown on a web page

I agree 100%. And Scott Hacker said it best: "...people in the print industry pay good money for paper opaque enough not to let other pages show through, while OS X spends valuable CPU cycles to enable the opposite effect. Transparency can sometimes make things look cluttered and hard to read."

Reading other posts, it seems that maybe MS is doing something good. I'll reserve judgment until I see for myself. (Yeah, I know, I must be new here. :-) )

For pictures: Gallery. Super-easy to use, pretty easy to set up, OSS, and requires a couple OSS (I think) libs (ImageMagick or NetBPM.) Makes nice galleries, good looking thumbnails, and any user (if you allow it) can add comments to pictures.

For content, including calendar: GeekLog. Pretty easy to use (the user model throws me a bit but I haven't spent much time with it since I'm the only user), works a lot like Slashdot (stories, comments, etc.), looks a lot like Slashdot (sections, polls, etc., but gorgeous; I fell in love with the 'clean' theme) and has integration with Gallery. (Or maybe Gallery offers integration with GeekLog. I forget. One or the other, I know it's there, I just haven't used it.) And GeekLog was originally designed to be the weblog for a security site, so it's pretty good in that regard. My GeekLog-backed site is here with the aforementioned 'clean' theme. (Note also that GeekLog ships with only one theme, so even Clean--which used to be a stock theme--has to be downloaded separately.) Look around for tips--many sites (mine included) start off with "how I made this site" as the first story.

Or, if you don't mind having your eggs in someone else's free-as-in-beer basket, Yahoo's services, as others have mentioned, are pretty sweet and easy-to-use, not to mention the availability and bandwidth. (Though they still put ads in the groups, AFAIK.)

And Wired got that joke from Apple itself (themselves?) at last summer's WWDC.

You can also use Samba to create a "virtual" network printer that will make PDFs.