Zenburn is indeed a wonderful color scheme and my preferred color scheme in Vim and gVim.
I really haven't found any major problems with it, unlike many other color schemes for coding. The other options for me are "evening" (the Vim color scheme) and the classic blue background look that I can't' even remember where I first saw but there's one like it in Vim as well.
Obviously just adding more cores does little to speed up individual sequential processes, but it does help with multitasking, which is what I really think is the "killer app" for multi-core processors.
Back in the late 90's (it doesn't feel like "back in.." yet but I'm willing to admit that it was about a decade ago) I decided to build a computer with an Abit BP6 motherboard, two Celeron processors and lots of RAM instead of a single higher end processor because I wanted to be able to multitask properly, my gamer friends mocked me for choosing Celeron processors but for the price of a single processor system I got a system that was capable of running several "normal" apps and one with heavy cpu usage without slowing down the system, and the extra RAM also helped (I saw lots of people back then go for 128 MB of RAM and a faster CPU instead of "wasting" their money on RAM, and then they cursed their computer for being slow when it started swapping). There was also the upside of having Windows 2000 run as fast on my computer as Windows 98 did on my friends' computers...
But that's not the server, that's the developer specifying what sizes images have, my idea was to bypass that for things like bitmap images and have the server figure out those sizes and the browser requesting said size before actually loading the images, since practically sane no developer bothers specifying image sizes in their (X)HTML.
But having it automated would be nice for page rendering on slow connections (or from slow servers), first the browser fetches the HTML, then it fetches the "headers" for all images, flash objects and such, then renders the page layout and begins fetching the actual images...
Of course, in practice a lot of this would be done in parallell, but it would still be nice, especially since a lot of times browsers will wait until binary objects are completely loaded before continuing to render the rest of the page.
IMO the most important things for browsers in the near future is the following:
XHTML and CSS compatibility - To save us all a lot of trouble.
Memory footprint - It needs to be smaller.
Stability - When I've got fifteen tabs open I don't want something in one of those tabs to crash the browser.
Some form of page rendering where browsers are able to render page layout and text without waiting for larger images and such, perhaps by figuring out how to just fetch the dimensions of images from the server somehow.
Properly sandboxed plugins - I want to be able to let flash run but limit the resources available to it, same for javscript and java applets..
If all this could be done then I'd be pretty happy with the state of web browsers and would stop complaining...
The last mile is expensive. It is almost sure that even with DSL from 2 different providers if one fails so does the other.
In my experience from working for ADSL ISPs in Sweden only very rarely is an actual outage caused by the "last mile", with newly installed DSL it is not unusual for people living fram from the DSLAM to have problems with unstable sync but this is generally easily adjusted.
So with two different phone lines connected to two different DSLAMS belonging to two different ISPs using two different backbones you'd actually have pretty good redundancy as far as failures from the ISPs side.
Women are masters of communication and their hints are not subtle. You have to know the language to know how to read the book. For men, anything less than "hey baby, let's fuck" seems to be a subtle form of communication. The reason women confuse you is that their communication is indirect and is often relayed with body language and tone. Men rely on words and literal interpretations, but that doesn't mean you can't learn to read women. Lots of men learn to; it's the reason they're successful with them.
So if all of us guys stopped being direct and instead started communicating our intentions using the difference between a "I'm just happy" smile and a "I'm interested but not quite ready to fuck you" smile, blinking in just the right way from across the room or flicking our hair lightly then all you women would immediately understand these "not subtle" hints?
If you're unhappy with women waiting for men, then don't pursue them. Convince other men to join your ranks and boycott having to approach women, make them come to you. We'll see how that works out for ya.:}
The problem being, as you understand yourself, that this would never work unless it was possible to get a vast majority of men to take part in this "boycott".
Also, women deal with rejection just as much as men do, but it's a different form of rejection. A man may get rejected in the bar, but a woman gets rejected when she's 35 and a skinny 22 yo girl walks through the door. The man will make a beeline toward the younger woman. At least with rejection men experience, you can always find another woman. With rejection women experience, it's physical and there's not much you can do about it. You can't make yourself younger and prettier. That is FAR more hurtful than getting dissed in a night club.
Now you're just changing the subject, won't play that game, sorry.
You're apparently unaware of the "older guy" perception. Haven't you noticed many women prefer men who are a few years older? 5 to 15 years? They're more likely to be respectful, sincere, patient, and know what they're doing. They're also likely to have a stable career, goals, and a desire for marriage. And, many women perceive older men to be more sexually potent and attentive. Men get more sensual as they get older, making them more sexually enticing.
You're changing the subject again.
The worst thing for a woman is an immature man who's wasting time and only messing around with you for casual sex.
Ok, slightly more on-topic and I'll refute that by pointing out that I've known many women through my life who have been interested in casual sex.
What you're describing is a jerk and "alpha male" does not mean jerk. One big reason alpha males get the girl is that they try. Rather than thinking I can't because I'm not worthy; I'm too ugly; she won't like me, an alpha male thinks I am worthy and I have things to offer; I will win her. A man who tries will be 1,000 times more successful with women than a man who doesn't.
I wasn't whining about now being able to get laid, I was simply pointing out that way too many women seem to think that just because a guy acts like he thinks he's the leader that means he is the leader, in reality a lot of times when this happens it's just that his friends (who are of higher informal social rank than he is) simply tolerate his behaviour as long as he doesn't try to pull that kind of behaviour with the girls they're interested in/are dating. I definitely approach members of the opposite sex, I'm well aware that many women seem to almost prefer flicking their hair and blinking all night and going home telling themselves "maybe he didn't notice me" than taking the much more "real" risk of approaching a man and showing interest...
A guy can be fabulous, but if he never hits on the girl how the hell is she supposed to know he's interested?
Maybe by hitting on the interesting-looking guy herself and actually risk rejection like us guys do all the time? Ya know, instead of twirling her hair, blinking a little and sending other "signals" that all have plausible deniability...
And yeah I know, women don't want to do that and it may even sound downright absurd to you as there seems to be this myth among a lot of women that men actually like constantly facing rejection and taking the first (real) step, but if you try hitting on a few guys you'll probably find that we love it when we for once don't have to do all the work...
A desperate man gives the appearance of a man with nothing to offer
Of course it's not that simple, it could simply be that he hasn't gotten laid in a long time ("a long time" being a relative term, to me it would be a month or two, to someone else it may be a year or even longer) and thus really really wants to get laid. And why is it that women are rarely called "desperate" just because they really want to get laid? For all the talk about women being called sluts (which mostly is women calling each other sluts, at least here in Sweden, they even did research on this) at least they don't get completely dismissed from being acceptable sex partners simply because they actually want to have sex...
Also, it's assumed the reason he's desperate is due to rejection by other women, who probably recognized independently that he had nothing to offer.
Of course, considering the odd reasons various women have for rejecting men this shows absolutely nothing, I had this conclusively verified a couple of years ago when I went out partying with a few female friends and one of them told me early in the evening that she was desperate to find some guy to fuck (and no, this wasn't a hint, she wasn't the least bit interested in me and this has little relevance for the anecdote at hand).
Anyway, she ended up sleeping alone and the next day we got to talking about what went wrong, I pointed out that she had lots of guys hitting on her and she had a reason for why none of them were interesting, keep in mind that this is an otherwise sensible young woman who doesn't live in some ditzy Paris Hilton-inspired fashion-centered fantasy world, a couple of guys were a bit too open about wanting a one night stand so they were creepy, a few guys were short/fat/otherwise not visually pleasing and thus creepy for liking her and finally there were the rest of them that were dismissed for having the wrong style clothes or shoes.
She wanted a no strings attached one night stand and went home alone talking about how there were no guys who were interested in her, while dismissing a guy who she thought was nice but had the wrong color shoes, clearly that guy being rejected by her doesn't really say anything about his lack of good qualities, and she's hardly the only woman I've met who's dismissed guys for completely irrelevant reasons.
I think one problem is that women are a lot worse at sending hints to men than they think they are, and another is that a lot of women, for all the talk of empowerment and taking charge actually enjoy sitting back and having guys do all the work since it gives them an advantage in that they're the ones who are making the decisions, it also makes rejection easier to handle...
If you go up to someone and talk to that person and get rejected then the defeat is obvious, but if you just sit back, blink a little, smile and maybe twirl your hair between your fingers then you can always tell yourself that "Maybe he just didn't notice...".
And then there's this weird perception some women have that just because a man isn't screaming like Tarzan and starting fights with people for stepping on his shadow then this must translate into him being bad in bed, sexual prowess doesn't decrease just because a man has a brain and manners enough not to act like a loud idiot.
Final point, a lot of the guys women see as "leaders" and "alpha males" aren't. A hint to the female slashdot readers, next time some guy looks like a "leader" to you by "taking control" and all that bullshit, don't stare at him and drool, observe his friends, do they actually follow his lead? or do they shake their heads and look like they're considering ditching him and going somewhere else?
Yes, already at that size it would be difficult to protect yourself from, but as I pointed out in my previous post, reliability would also be important and if you're building your nuke in some warehouse in an unstable country chances are you'll a bit of a problem building a nuke that will go off reliably instead of being just a "fizzle" (although that could be pretty bad as well), and if you want a predictable yield then it's definitely something that takes a lot of resources.
Well, I don't want to sound like a fearmonger but compact isn't much of a problem as long as your definition of compact is "smaller than a freight container". Reliability might be a bit harder for your average garage nuke to have though...
The knowledge on how to build a nuke is by no means much of a secret. Yes, the design for more recent fusion-based and otherwise advanced nuclear weapons is surrounded by a lot of hush-hush but a simple fission-based nuke could probably be designed and built by students from any university engineering department, the theory behind it is available in most libraries, as is the basic design of some of the earlier nuclear weapons.
What is hard to get a hold of is the fissible material needed to manufacture a working bomb.
I disagree, I tried changing some stuff in the rTorrent source code and noticed that sometimes the only comments/documentation to be found was the GPL notice at the beginning of each file, I never did manage to make the changes I wanted (but I got kind of half-way there at least).
This depends on what country you're in, here in Sweden most people speak english well enough that until recently few games were translated to swedish, to this day many of the big titles (guitar hero, gta series, WoW and lots of others IIRC) are not available in swedish versions, yet we have to wait until the release of the versions of games translated to german and french before they're released, in english, here.
People seem to have quite varied experiences with Leopard, for me it has been much better than Tiger in the sense that with Tiger my iMac 24" managed to completely crash a couple of times under heavy load when using some not always stable apps but with Leopard the closest I've come to anything like that has been Finder crashing a couple of times.
In fact, the only real problem I've had with Leopard was with the incompatibility with Tiger FileVault images, I only had one user account (which was using FileVault) and after installing Leopard and then rebooting it was unable to mount the disk image which forced me to do some trickery in the console to convert it to a sparse disk image so I could rescue my files before doing an Archive and install installation.
I actually have a.info domain that I use for my personal website (mainly because the registration cost for the domain was almost nothing just as they started up the.info TLD), I also know of a few other useful.info sites like growl.info.
In my experience, this only applies to the first boot of a Leopard system. After mounting and unmounting a Tiger File Vault disk image, you will find that it is only mountable in Tiger. I wasted many hours fixing this problem after upgrading.
Ah yes, I remembering spending quite some time figuring out how to convert my filevault image from Tiger to a sparse disk image so I could rescue everything from my home dir (without restoring from backups that were a few weeks old), I ended up having to do this through the console as the only account I had on that machine was my own unusable account (unusable as Leopard was unable to mount the Tiger filevault image for my home dir).
I remember there were a few threads on Apple's forums dealing with this problem, unfortunately most of the tips given there were given by idiots who gave "helpful" tips that either worked or wiped your filevault image, so I decided to just do it my own way.
In Vista it's even more interesting, the swedish version will pop up some sort of "internet connection wizard" the first time you open your web browser on a fresh Vista install. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that it seems to default to settings for a PPPoE connection, and since practically no swedish ISPs use PPPoE this creates a support nightmare with users botching their network settings and then calling tech support to get it fixed (or they call in and want their username and password and won't accept that they're getting the question about this not because their connection requires it but because their operating system is stupid. Really, this happens all the time).
Actually, the earlier versions of IE were pretty horrible (like most browsers back then), they even sucked worse than Netscape. It wasn't really until IE4 that IE could seriously be said to suck less than Netscape (IE3 sucked about as much as Netscape and I couldn't really tell which one was worse).
Don't forget trying to figure out how to create a PPP connection, in the swedish version it was called a "Fjärranslutning" ("Remote connection").
Or the fact that it took me a while to figure out that the desktop directory was just a regular directory, everyone I spoke to who was an "expert" at Windows would just tell me that it was some kind of magical "special" directory ("folder") that you could not access directly through the explorer. From these "explanations" I got the impression that it was somehow stored in a single compressed file (using some outlandish file format) that could not be directly accessed and that the compression was the reason that a machine that had many files stored on the desktop would tend to run slow.
I can't say I've had this problem with my Mighty Mouse (that's actually hooked up to my Linux PC as I use a wacom tablet with my main mac), but then I take care not to make a disgusting mess of my computers.
This may be true for some other people though, like those of my friends who swear cellphones are made to only last a few months while chucking them around and dipping them in drinks (yes, a friend of mine did this and seemed almost surprised when it stopped working), or who complain that keyboards always get so gunked up with sticky crap that the keys get stuck (hint: stop eating greasy food while typing).
I think one thing that has made the iPhone popular is that it has a sane UI, my Nokia smartphone is capable of browsing the web, handling email via IMAP and a ton of other things (I've even got an SSH client installed) but I almost never use any other features than phonecalls and text messages because the UI for everything else is horrible to work with (not to mention slow) and it's been that way on all smartphones I've used.
Jokes! i hope you baught an apple(tm) extended(tm) waranty(tm) otherwise, if its anything liek an ipod, your gadget has a 90 day waranty. What happens after that? You are told to buy the new model! 5 years indeed..
One year warranty, 90 days of free phone support. Also, in certain countries the law states that the warranty period is longer unless the manufacturer can prove the fault was caused by the user. And there are tons of Wintel/PC manufacturers who have similar warranty lengths.
With adult, real computers, every part has its own waranty. Also, you dont have to buy your service packs and DONT have to have any bloody itunes, quicktime or safari near your ANYTHING. (apple updater FTW)
Well, if you buy a pre-built PC then all parts are covered by the same warranty, same as an Apple, Sun, SGI or IBM machine. And if you build your own then that's one of the annoyances, having to figure out who to contact and where to send stuff ("What? They only have offices in Germany and Taiwan? And their service center is in Latvia?").
Also, "service packs" as you and Microsoft call it are free with Mac OS X (there have been two major updates since the release of Leopard) but the major releases have to be bought (just like you have to pay to upgrade from IRIX 6.2 to 6.5 or from WinNT 5.0 to WinNT 5.1).
As for the software, iTunes is actually pretty good and usable on OS X and so is Safari. Quicktime (as in, the application) isn't really that fancy and I prefer VLC but on a freshly installed system it does its job.
Btw, have you tried using an expensive old g3 mac (your five year old example). Good luck finding software thats not purposely broken so that it wont run on your revision of the OS. Thats the most hilarious part. Even if the software would work fine, there are locks on most programs to tell you what os revision you can run them on. You know the odd program that complains when you run it on 2k, but doesnt on XP? thats par the course for mac - why didnt you buy the upgraded service pack you prole??!?
The newest G3 macs you'll find are six years old, and that was at the end of the product cycle. The first G3 macs were introduced in 1997 and the G3 Powermacs were phased out in favor of the G4 CPU in 1999. So with a six year-old iMac that was pretty much the lowest of the low end when it was new there will indeed be problems.
Also, I have not found this to be very common, some software that relies heavily on things that change between different versions of the OS will often have different executables available for different OS versions and in some cases the version for the older OS version may not be supported any more as it is not possible to add new features without maintaning separate codebases.
Slashdot Mirror
Zenburn is indeed a wonderful color scheme and my preferred color scheme in Vim and gVim.
I really haven't found any major problems with it, unlike many other color schemes for coding. The other options for me are "evening" (the Vim color scheme) and the classic blue background look that I can't' even remember where I first saw but there's one like it in Vim as well.
/Mikael
Obviously just adding more cores does little to speed up individual sequential processes, but it does help with multitasking, which is what I really think is the "killer app" for multi-core processors.
Back in the late 90's (it doesn't feel like "back in.." yet but I'm willing to admit that it was about a decade ago) I decided to build a computer with an Abit BP6 motherboard, two Celeron processors and lots of RAM instead of a single higher end processor because I wanted to be able to multitask properly, my gamer friends mocked me for choosing Celeron processors but for the price of a single processor system I got a system that was capable of running several "normal" apps and one with heavy cpu usage without slowing down the system, and the extra RAM also helped (I saw lots of people back then go for 128 MB of RAM and a faster CPU instead of "wasting" their money on RAM, and then they cursed their computer for being slow when it started swapping). There was also the upside of having Windows 2000 run as fast on my computer as Windows 98 did on my friends' computers...
/Mikael
But that's not the server, that's the developer specifying what sizes images have, my idea was to bypass that for things like bitmap images and have the server figure out those sizes and the browser requesting said size before actually loading the images, since practically sane no developer bothers specifying image sizes in their (X)HTML.
/Mikael
But having it automated would be nice for page rendering on slow connections (or from slow servers), first the browser fetches the HTML, then it fetches the "headers" for all images, flash objects and such, then renders the page layout and begins fetching the actual images...
Of course, in practice a lot of this would be done in parallell, but it would still be nice, especially since a lot of times browsers will wait until binary objects are completely loaded before continuing to render the rest of the page.
/Mikael
IMO the most important things for browsers in the near future is the following:
If all this could be done then I'd be pretty happy with the state of web browsers and would stop complaining...
/Mikael
In my experience from working for ADSL ISPs in Sweden only very rarely is an actual outage caused by the "last mile", with newly installed DSL it is not unusual for people living fram from the DSLAM to have problems with unstable sync but this is generally easily adjusted.
So with two different phone lines connected to two different DSLAMS belonging to two different ISPs using two different backbones you'd actually have pretty good redundancy as far as failures from the ISPs side.
/Mikael
Why wouldn't it be possible to use IPv6 with a cellphone? as long as the operating system and network both support it...
/Mikael
So if all of us guys stopped being direct and instead started communicating our intentions using the difference between a "I'm just happy" smile and a "I'm interested but not quite ready to fuck you" smile, blinking in just the right way from across the room or flicking our hair lightly then all you women would immediately understand these "not subtle" hints?
If you're unhappy with women waiting for men, then don't pursue them. Convince other men to join your ranks and boycott having to approach women, make them come to you. We'll see how that works out for ya.The problem being, as you understand yourself, that this would never work unless it was possible to get a vast majority of men to take part in this "boycott".
Also, women deal with rejection just as much as men do, but it's a different form of rejection. A man may get rejected in the bar, but a woman gets rejected when she's 35 and a skinny 22 yo girl walks through the door. The man will make a beeline toward the younger woman. At least with rejection men experience, you can always find another woman. With rejection women experience, it's physical and there's not much you can do about it. You can't make yourself younger and prettier. That is FAR more hurtful than getting dissed in a night club.Now you're just changing the subject, won't play that game, sorry.
You're apparently unaware of the "older guy" perception. Haven't you noticed many women prefer men who are a few years older? 5 to 15 years? They're more likely to be respectful, sincere, patient, and know what they're doing. They're also likely to have a stable career, goals, and a desire for marriage. And, many women perceive older men to be more sexually potent and attentive. Men get more sensual as they get older, making them more sexually enticing.You're changing the subject again.
The worst thing for a woman is an immature man who's wasting time and only messing around with you for casual sex.Ok, slightly more on-topic and I'll refute that by pointing out that I've known many women through my life who have been interested in casual sex.
What you're describing is a jerk and "alpha male" does not mean jerk. One big reason alpha males get the girl is that they try. Rather than thinking I can't because I'm not worthy; I'm too ugly; she won't like me, an alpha male thinks I am worthy and I have things to offer; I will win her. A man who tries will be 1,000 times more successful with women than a man who doesn't.I wasn't whining about now being able to get laid, I was simply pointing out that way too many women seem to think that just because a guy acts like he thinks he's the leader that means he is the leader, in reality a lot of times when this happens it's just that his friends (who are of higher informal social rank than he is) simply tolerate his behaviour as long as he doesn't try to pull that kind of behaviour with the girls they're interested in/are dating. I definitely approach members of the opposite sex, I'm well aware that many women seem to almost prefer flicking their hair and blinking all night and going home telling themselves "maybe he didn't notice me" than taking the much more "real" risk of approaching a man and showing interest...
/Mikael
Maybe by hitting on the interesting-looking guy herself and actually risk rejection like us guys do all the time? Ya know, instead of twirling her hair, blinking a little and sending other "signals" that all have plausible deniability...
And yeah I know, women don't want to do that and it may even sound downright absurd to you as there seems to be this myth among a lot of women that men actually like constantly facing rejection and taking the first (real) step, but if you try hitting on a few guys you'll probably find that we love it when we for once don't have to do all the work...
/Mikael
Of course it's not that simple, it could simply be that he hasn't gotten laid in a long time ("a long time" being a relative term, to me it would be a month or two, to someone else it may be a year or even longer) and thus really really wants to get laid. And why is it that women are rarely called "desperate" just because they really want to get laid? For all the talk about women being called sluts (which mostly is women calling each other sluts, at least here in Sweden, they even did research on this) at least they don't get completely dismissed from being acceptable sex partners simply because they actually want to have sex...
Also, it's assumed the reason he's desperate is due to rejection by other women, who probably recognized independently that he had nothing to offer.Of course, considering the odd reasons various women have for rejecting men this shows absolutely nothing, I had this conclusively verified a couple of years ago when I went out partying with a few female friends and one of them told me early in the evening that she was desperate to find some guy to fuck (and no, this wasn't a hint, she wasn't the least bit interested in me and this has little relevance for the anecdote at hand).
Anyway, she ended up sleeping alone and the next day we got to talking about what went wrong, I pointed out that she had lots of guys hitting on her and she had a reason for why none of them were interesting, keep in mind that this is an otherwise sensible young woman who doesn't live in some ditzy Paris Hilton-inspired fashion-centered fantasy world, a couple of guys were a bit too open about wanting a one night stand so they were creepy, a few guys were short/fat/otherwise not visually pleasing and thus creepy for liking her and finally there were the rest of them that were dismissed for having the wrong style clothes or shoes.
She wanted a no strings attached one night stand and went home alone talking about how there were no guys who were interested in her, while dismissing a guy who she thought was nice but had the wrong color shoes, clearly that guy being rejected by her doesn't really say anything about his lack of good qualities, and she's hardly the only woman I've met who's dismissed guys for completely irrelevant reasons.
I think one problem is that women are a lot worse at sending hints to men than they think they are, and another is that a lot of women, for all the talk of empowerment and taking charge actually enjoy sitting back and having guys do all the work since it gives them an advantage in that they're the ones who are making the decisions, it also makes rejection easier to handle...
If you go up to someone and talk to that person and get rejected then the defeat is obvious, but if you just sit back, blink a little, smile and maybe twirl your hair between your fingers then you can always tell yourself that "Maybe he just didn't notice...".
And then there's this weird perception some women have that just because a man isn't screaming like Tarzan and starting fights with people for stepping on his shadow then this must translate into him being bad in bed, sexual prowess doesn't decrease just because a man has a brain and manners enough not to act like a loud idiot.
Final point, a lot of the guys women see as "leaders" and "alpha males" aren't. A hint to the female slashdot readers, next time some guy looks like a "leader" to you by "taking control" and all that bullshit, don't stare at him and drool, observe his friends, do they actually follow his lead? or do they shake their heads and look like they're considering ditching him and going somewhere else?
Yes, already at that size it would be difficult to protect yourself from, but as I pointed out in my previous post, reliability would also be important and if you're building your nuke in some warehouse in an unstable country chances are you'll a bit of a problem building a nuke that will go off reliably instead of being just a "fizzle" (although that could be pretty bad as well), and if you want a predictable yield then it's definitely something that takes a lot of resources.
/Mikael
Well, I don't want to sound like a fearmonger but compact isn't much of a problem as long as your definition of compact is "smaller than a freight container". Reliability might be a bit harder for your average garage nuke to have though...
/Mikael
The knowledge on how to build a nuke is by no means much of a secret. Yes, the design for more recent fusion-based and otherwise advanced nuclear weapons is surrounded by a lot of hush-hush but a simple fission-based nuke could probably be designed and built by students from any university engineering department, the theory behind it is available in most libraries, as is the basic design of some of the earlier nuclear weapons.
What is hard to get a hold of is the fissible material needed to manufacture a working bomb.
/Mikael
I disagree, I tried changing some stuff in the rTorrent source code and noticed that sometimes the only comments/documentation to be found was the GPL notice at the beginning of each file, I never did manage to make the changes I wanted (but I got kind of half-way there at least).
/Mikael
This depends on what country you're in, here in Sweden most people speak english well enough that until recently few games were translated to swedish, to this day many of the big titles (guitar hero, gta series, WoW and lots of others IIRC) are not available in swedish versions, yet we have to wait until the release of the versions of games translated to german and french before they're released, in english, here.
/Mikael
People seem to have quite varied experiences with Leopard, for me it has been much better than Tiger in the sense that with Tiger my iMac 24" managed to completely crash a couple of times under heavy load when using some not always stable apps but with Leopard the closest I've come to anything like that has been Finder crashing a couple of times.
In fact, the only real problem I've had with Leopard was with the incompatibility with Tiger FileVault images, I only had one user account (which was using FileVault) and after installing Leopard and then rebooting it was unable to mount the disk image which forced me to do some trickery in the console to convert it to a sparse disk image so I could rescue my files before doing an Archive and install installation.
/Mikael
I actually have a .info domain that I use for my personal website (mainly because the registration cost for the domain was almost nothing just as they started up the .info TLD), I also know of a few other useful .info sites like growl.info.
/Mikael
Ah yes, I remembering spending quite some time figuring out how to convert my filevault image from Tiger to a sparse disk image so I could rescue everything from my home dir (without restoring from backups that were a few weeks old), I ended up having to do this through the console as the only account I had on that machine was my own unusable account (unusable as Leopard was unable to mount the Tiger filevault image for my home dir).
I remember there were a few threads on Apple's forums dealing with this problem, unfortunately most of the tips given there were given by idiots who gave "helpful" tips that either worked or wiped your filevault image, so I decided to just do it my own way.
/Mikael
In Vista it's even more interesting, the swedish version will pop up some sort of "internet connection wizard" the first time you open your web browser on a fresh Vista install. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that it seems to default to settings for a PPPoE connection, and since practically no swedish ISPs use PPPoE this creates a support nightmare with users botching their network settings and then calling tech support to get it fixed (or they call in and want their username and password and won't accept that they're getting the question about this not because their connection requires it but because their operating system is stupid. Really, this happens all the time).
/Mikael
Actually, the earlier versions of IE were pretty horrible (like most browsers back then), they even sucked worse than Netscape. It wasn't really until IE4 that IE could seriously be said to suck less than Netscape (IE3 sucked about as much as Netscape and I couldn't really tell which one was worse).
/Mikael
Don't forget trying to figure out how to create a PPP connection, in the swedish version it was called a "Fjärranslutning" ("Remote connection").
Or the fact that it took me a while to figure out that the desktop directory was just a regular directory, everyone I spoke to who was an "expert" at Windows would just tell me that it was some kind of magical "special" directory ("folder") that you could not access directly through the explorer. From these "explanations" I got the impression that it was somehow stored in a single compressed file (using some outlandish file format) that could not be directly accessed and that the compression was the reason that a machine that had many files stored on the desktop would tend to run slow.
/Mikael
I can't say I've had this problem with my Mighty Mouse (that's actually hooked up to my Linux PC as I use a wacom tablet with my main mac), but then I take care not to make a disgusting mess of my computers.
This may be true for some other people though, like those of my friends who swear cellphones are made to only last a few months while chucking them around and dipping them in drinks (yes, a friend of mine did this and seemed almost surprised when it stopped working), or who complain that keyboards always get so gunked up with sticky crap that the keys get stuck (hint: stop eating greasy food while typing).
/Mikael
I think one thing that has made the iPhone popular is that it has a sane UI, my Nokia smartphone is capable of browsing the web, handling email via IMAP and a ton of other things (I've even got an SSH client installed) but I almost never use any other features than phonecalls and text messages because the UI for everything else is horrible to work with (not to mention slow) and it's been that way on all smartphones I've used.
/Mikael
One year warranty, 90 days of free phone support. Also, in certain countries the law states that the warranty period is longer unless the manufacturer can prove the fault was caused by the user. And there are tons of Wintel/PC manufacturers who have similar warranty lengths.
With adult, real computers, every part has its own waranty. Also, you dont have to buy your service packs and DONT have to have any bloody itunes, quicktime or safari near your ANYTHING. (apple updater FTW)Well, if you buy a pre-built PC then all parts are covered by the same warranty, same as an Apple, Sun, SGI or IBM machine. And if you build your own then that's one of the annoyances, having to figure out who to contact and where to send stuff ("What? They only have offices in Germany and Taiwan? And their service center is in Latvia?").
Also, "service packs" as you and Microsoft call it are free with Mac OS X (there have been two major updates since the release of Leopard) but the major releases have to be bought (just like you have to pay to upgrade from IRIX 6.2 to 6.5 or from WinNT 5.0 to WinNT 5.1).
As for the software, iTunes is actually pretty good and usable on OS X and so is Safari. Quicktime (as in, the application) isn't really that fancy and I prefer VLC but on a freshly installed system it does its job.
Btw, have you tried using an expensive old g3 mac (your five year old example). Good luck finding software thats not purposely broken so that it wont run on your revision of the OS. Thats the most hilarious part. Even if the software would work fine, there are locks on most programs to tell you what os revision you can run them on. You know the odd program that complains when you run it on 2k, but doesnt on XP? thats par the course for mac - why didnt you buy the upgraded service pack you prole??!?The newest G3 macs you'll find are six years old, and that was at the end of the product cycle. The first G3 macs were introduced in 1997 and the G3 Powermacs were phased out in favor of the G4 CPU in 1999. So with a six year-old iMac that was pretty much the lowest of the low end when it was new there will indeed be problems.
Also, I have not found this to be very common, some software that relies heavily on things that change between different versions of the OS will often have different executables available for different OS versions and in some cases the version for the older OS version may not be supported any more as it is not possible to add new features without maintaning separate codebases.
/Mikael (IHBT IHL HAND)