When you jailbreak an iPhone or iPod Touch, most (if not all) tools install an SSH server to let them do their stuff. This SSH server stays on by default. If not turned off, it runs the battery down in a few hours, instead of a few days.
One thing TFA neglects to mention is that there is a suspend process notification that apps get when they lose focus. They have 20 seconds to save their state and quit, which is plenty of time. There's really no need for most apps to run in the background - things like games, productivity apps, etc only respond to user input. When it's not in the foreground, there is no user input, and no need for the process to continue to run.
Network connected apps are the only things that are hurt by this, and this is where Apple uses background helper processes. What Apple should do is add a network-connected notification to the API. Say the user connects to the network in another app. The iPhone should wake up other apps that have registered themselves for this notification, allow them to download a reasonable amount of data, notify the user of new IMs or tweets or whatever, and shut them back down.
It'll keep taking you to that damn ad every single time you connect your iPod to iTunes. It's really annoying, really stupid, and just bad customer service. I already bought your $400 device, please stop badgering me for the latest $20 upgrade. I don't want it.
Funnily enough, though, when I installed the 2.0 OS on it (from the Developer SDK), it gave me all those apps. Will they also come along with the public 2.0 release? Of course, that will cost $20 too.
Ahh... a slight correction: Till now no known malware exists for OS X because none was developed. How is that different? If there is no malware, then it's malware free, no? And could easily gain a reputation as such?
It's not that OS X is completely bereft of security holes. However, there is less OS X malware than it's market share would indicate, which suggests that it is at least a little harder to create malware for OS X. If Mac users are usually richer, then that would make a more tempting target for malware, since the personal information that could be gleaned would be more valuable.
Also, Apple's XCode development suite is free. The developer program gets you things like OS seeds, tech support, hardware discounts, and extra resources. One does also not need to buy a Mac to run OS X, but can merely run OSx86 on a PC.
That exploit is exclusive to Safari for Windows, which the laptop running OS X would not be using. The OS X/Safari combination is what's being tested, not Safari for Windows, which, I imagine, almost no one uses (except when they've accidently installed it thanks to Apple's "surprise" update).
I'm not saying "OMG anything which implies that Macs are insecure is FUD", I'm saying that the results of twenty people trying to crack things in day's work is not a very good indicator of overall security. Especially when any previously known exploits are not allowed.
Only vulnerabilities which were not previously released were allowed. There are un-patched vulnerabilities (8 of them) for IE7. There are no known un-patched vulnerabilities for Safari 3. This means that discovering a new vulnerability for Safari (which has 8 total advisories for the two most recent versions) is bigger news than discovering one for IE (which has 148 for the two most recent versions). Obviously, if more exploits are discovered, then it will be less of a big deal.
One should not draw the conclusion that Macs are less secure than PCs from the results of twenty people going at them in a room for a day.
I don't think that the OS X laptop was necessarily cracked because there are more (or easier to exploit) vulnerabilities for OS X than for Vista or Ubuntu. It's more impressive to crack an OS X machine than a Vista machine, because OS X has a reputation for being virus and malware free, so the security researcher receives more acclaim.
Connect the iPod to your wife's home computer, and then open up iTunes. Click on the iPod in the Devices menu on the left side. In the summary of the device, there should be an option on the bottom labeled "manually manage music on this device" - enable it.
This does two things. First, instead of automatically syncing all the songs in iTunes to the device, you have to drag the songs (or playlists) over to the device. Second, it should let you play (but not copy) the music on the iPod on other computers. Your wife should now be able to connect the iPod to her computer at work, launch iTunes, click the "Music" category under the iPod's name in the devices menu (she may have to click the disclosure arrow), and see all the music on the iPod. Then just click on a song, and it'll start playing. Additionally, this allows you to copy music from another computer to the iPod, without erasing the existing music - but you still won't be able to copy the music back to your computer..
This sort of frees up the device, but she'll still have to connect the iPod any time she wants to listen to music on it, which is a pain. I can see why Apple doesn't want to enable copying functionality, since they have enough trouble negotiating with the Music labels already. However, they've really locked the iTouch down, more so than previous iPods - because you can't access it as a USB drive, third party utilities that could previously pull music from iPods quite painlessly no longer work. I really like my iPod Touch, but only because I've jailbroken it - I'd like it a lot less if it were still as locked down as it originally was.
I expect to see 90 percent of lighting changed over to LED lighting by 2015... I don't. In commercial and public settings, maybe. Not in homes, though. People are too used to the way incandescent bulbs look. A room feels very different when lit by a white LED instead of the yellowish tone of incandescents - and not in a good way.
An FLV is basically a container for video which Flash (or, as in your case, another media player) can parse. Playing FLVs is completely different from having the Flash Player, which is where the limited resources of smartphones makes things impractical.
Looking at the Ars Technica review, it seems that the N800 uses Flash 7, two versions removed from the current Flash 9 viewer. It seems you haven't been to many sites that use Actionscript 3, or the later features of Actionscript 2 introduced in Flash 8. I'd say using a five-year old version of the Flash player doesn't really qualify as "full Flash support."
However, it is a damn sight better than Flash Lite, and it's impressive that even Flash 7 is running on a 400 MHz ARM chip. However, there are large tradeoffs in performance and usability - the Ars Technica review says that they got 1-2 fps on YouTube videos. Also, as you say, it significantly cuts down on battery life, dropping it to less than a third of its original figure.
Apple would never ship the iPhone with a Flash player like that, because the average consumer is not a nerd. If the iPhone shipped with a slow Flash player, I'd think "Wow, even getting Flash on this is impressive!" However, Joe Blow thinks "this sucks. Why is it so slow? Flash works on my desktop. Why won't it work on my iPhone?" Nerds will deal with performance and usability drawbacks if they allow new functionality, average people won't. This may not be a particularly good reason for you, but I think it makes sense.
...ie, your $600 toy has the CPU power of a TI-85. Enjoy playing text-mode Tetris on it, though... The iPhone is one of (if not the most) powerful smart phones on the market in terms of processing power. Or do you know of a smart phone that does support full Flash (not Flash Lite)? Extra points if the battery life is longer than ten minutes.
Okay, that one doesn't even make sense. Unless it in some way requires use of the cellular-telephony-specific hardware in an iPhone, it will work "with the web", on a PC (or Mac, as the case dictates). He's referring to Flash Lite, which is typically used to provide a UI layer for mobile devices. It doesn't even support the most recent version of Actionscript (which has been out for almost two years). The mere idea of navigating any modern Flash website with Flash Lite makes me cringe - which is what he meant by "not capable of being used with the web."
Once again, Master Steve turns the screws, and the fans will cry out, "Thank you sir, may I have another?" I do a fair amount of Flash development, and even I don't like the idea of Flash on my iPod Touch. If not having Flash on a mobile device is wrong, baby, I don't wanna be right.
There's several problems I see in three-dimensional control schemes. The first is that there's no way to click. In the control scheme you suggest, there's no way to differentiate "I'm moving my cursor over here" and "I'm clicking and dragging this thing over here." Defining an imaginary plane to be the screen surface, and a click event to be moving past this surface wouldn't work. You have no feedback telling you how close you are.
Another big problem is that they're not very precise - mice and touchpads both allow you to park the cursor in a single pixel until you want to move somewhere else, which is useful for things like clicking buttons. If you're using the three-dimensional control scheme, from several feet away, it's going to be hard to keep your cursor from straying out of the bounds of the button you're clicking while you click - I have trouble clicking radio buttons with my Wacom Tablet for this very reason. The imprecision is worse in a three dimensional control scheme, when you'll be working several feet away from the screen.
Perhaps the largest problem with these control schemes is that they're ill-suited to our two dimensional interfaces. The mouse and the touchpad supply only the two dimensions we need, and do so very efficiently. In a three dimensional system, it measures an entire dimension that it throws away. For this reason, I think we won't see three dimensional control schemes in the market until we have the three dimensional interfaces that demand them - either on large 2D displays (so the imprecision is less significant), or on fully three-dimensional displays. 3D control for a 2D GUI just doesn't make sense.
The Coding Horror article you linked too is pre-Leopard (and actually shows screen shots of Safari 3 on Windows), and the forum post is, well, a six-sentence forum post. Every Macbook, iMac, and Macbook Pro I've installed with Leopard (6+), the font rendering looks exactly the same as on Tiger. I've yet to see, in person or online, any evidence that Leopard has changed/broken font rendering.
If you see the Safari screenshot in the Coding Horror page you linked to as "horribly blurry" (personally, I like the way it looks), then you just prefer the way Windows renders text over OS X. Windows will adjust the text so that strong lines sync up with pixels and sub-pixels, while OS X will just render the text without shifting it around. This gives Windows' text a sharper-but-thinner look which some people prefer, and some don't. The drawback to this approach is that the shape of the text is often distorted, and the width and height of the text does not scale linearly (here's a good side-by-side comparison of Windows' text scaling to OS X's). On the Mac, where a lot of graphics-layout gets done, it's preferable to have consistently scaled text, even if some will think it's blurry, while Windows has made the opposite decision.
If you still maintain that Leopard has broken font rendering, then perhaps you could post some screenshots of it.
From the amount of times that Will Wright has demoed large portions of this game at various game conferences and other gatherings (just search for "spore" on Google Video, or check out the links on the Spore wikipedia article), I don't see how this can qualify as vaporware. DNF has only one (likely pre-rendered) trailer to show for all that development time, Spore has hours of demo videos.
From all the videos I've seen, it seems like the bulk of the game is finished, and the only tasks that remain are gameplay-tweaking, bug squashing, and cross-platform issues.
That George Ou article is worthless. He's just another flame-baiter like Dvorak, whose only purpose is to draw hits. I have yet to meet a Mac whose font rendering actually looks like Ou's "examples" - the rendering on my Macbook Pro looks tons better, and subpixel is turned on by default.
Graphic and type designers make up a significant amount of the Apple user base, and if OS X's font rendering actually looked as bad as he claims, those users would be making a stink about it.
People probably won't care enough about your site to get Firefox, if they're the typical IE user. Your goal should be to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to see your site, no matter what browser. Your "IE Compatible Mode Tag" would be unacceptable for any website that has to target a large amount of IE users (e.g. any commercial website). It might be fine for your personal website, where it doesn't matter too much if you lose some IE users, but when sales depend on traffic, you can't afford to turn anyone away.
Yes, Firefox is a much better browser than IE. We know that. Unfortunately, IE will not be eradicated for the near future, and for non-technically-inclined Windows users, it will remain the browser of choice. It seems like it will be much easier to develop websites that work in IE 8 (unless it too is "quirky"), and Microsoft is doing this without breaking old sites, at the cost of one meta tag, however inane and redundant that tag may be. It's a much better solution than "Oh, everyone would hate to see all their hard work hacking their sites for IE 6 and 7 to go to waste, let's keep IE 8 quirky." I don't see another solution that transitions to standards-compliance whilst not breaking old sites. Do you?
The average IE-using visitor to your site will not understand why your site fails to render properly in their browser. They're just using the default browser that came with their computer - they have no understanding of standards or standards-compliance. They'll assume that the fault lies with your site, and go on their merry way.
Yes, it's inane and ridiculous to have to add another tag clarifying standards compliance. But it's the best way to continue to support as many sites as possible. It's their fault thousands of websites had to have IE specific hacks, but at least they're changing that now. It could be worse. When dealing with M$, any improvements are a feat in of themselves.
Two of the inventions most beneficial to the human race in the past hundred years - antibiotics (penicillin) and the X-Ray - have been more or less accidently discovered. Fleming wasn't trying to cure diseases, Hittorf, Pulyui, Tesla and Sanford weren't trying to invent a means for investigating the interior of the human body remotely. Just because something doesn't aim to improve every day life doesn't mean it won't/
It's definitely not an either/or choice. You should check out the works of Shigeru Ban. He's known for creating both functional and beautiful buildings out of almost entirely recyclable materials.
One of his most famous works is Paper Church, a church whose main structural supports are recycled paper tubes. It was intended to be an temporary emergency center, but it stayed up for ten years before taken down, and it's planned to be re-assembled in Taiwan. A favorite of mine is the Paper House, an extremely minimal house whose entire load-bearing structure is made of paper - and it passes Japan's rigorous housing standards for earthquake safe buildings! Plus, it looks fantastic.
Architecture need not be entirely functional or entirely artistic. If you have the engineering skill and creativity, you can create buildings that are both. Gehry is primarily a sculptor, not an architect or engineer.
Have you heard of Perian? It's a quicktime plugin that provides support for Divx, Xvid, Avi, FLV, MKV - pretty much everything but Real and WMV. I've barely had to use VLC since I installed it.
Actually, you only get license for 5 installs in the same household if you buy the $200 Family Pack edition of the OS. Also, Apple states in their license that you may only install the software on "Apple-labeled computers." If I may quote from the Mac OS X License:
A. Single Use. This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time. You agree not to install, use
or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so. This License does not allow the Apple Software to exist on more than one computer at a time, and you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be used by multiple computers at the same time. So, even though you made a nice gesture by buying the software for your hackintosh, it's really no more legal to install it than if you had just pirated the thing.
Well, 'under the hood' of OS X, it's really just Unix. As long as you have a decent knowledge of how Unix/BSD works, and a familiarity with a CLI, you can figure most everything else out.
For example, dig around in the packages of System applications, like the Dock (right-click, then select "Show All Applications"). All the graphical elements that the new Leopard dock uses are in there. I've changed those so I have a black dock (without the annoying curvy highlight), and white application indicators - much easier to see.
Also, a lot of the preference lists (plists) for applications are kept in your/Users/Your User Name/Library/Application Support/Name Of Application/ folders, and digging around in those with Plist editor can be fruitful (always make backups first, though).
Mainly, get as familiar as possible on Unix/BSD, and you will become more knowledgeable of OS X's underpinnings. Some good sites are Mac OS X Hints and O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center.
This is one thing that many of my PC-using friends complain about with respect to OS X: it's too hard to tweak/hack. Apple tends to make it very hard for a person without at least cursory knowledge of the internals of OS X and Unix, as well as familiarity with a CLI, to modify the OS. While I'm sure most of my friends would be able to figure out OS X's guts pretty quickly, the fact that they don't see the options for deeper tweaking right in, say, System Preferences, leads them to conclude that it's not possible.
Personally, I think that this is a good thing - it creates sort of a minimum competency barrier for tooling around with the OS. If you're knowledgeable enough to know how to change things, you're probably knowledgeable enough to know how to fix it if something goes wrong. Meanwhile, the average user never has to see any of these things if they don't want to, and are much less likely to accidently screw something up by mucking about in preference panes.
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When you jailbreak an iPhone or iPod Touch, most (if not all) tools install an SSH server to let them do their stuff. This SSH server stays on by default. If not turned off, it runs the battery down in a few hours, instead of a few days.
One thing TFA neglects to mention is that there is a suspend process notification that apps get when they lose focus. They have 20 seconds to save their state and quit, which is plenty of time. There's really no need for most apps to run in the background - things like games, productivity apps, etc only respond to user input. When it's not in the foreground, there is no user input, and no need for the process to continue to run.
Network connected apps are the only things that are hurt by this, and this is where Apple uses background helper processes. What Apple should do is add a network-connected notification to the API. Say the user connects to the network in another app. The iPhone should wake up other apps that have registered themselves for this notification, allow them to download a reasonable amount of data, notify the user of new IMs or tweets or whatever, and shut them back down.
It'll keep taking you to that damn ad every single time you connect your iPod to iTunes. It's really annoying, really stupid, and just bad customer service. I already bought your $400 device, please stop badgering me for the latest $20 upgrade. I don't want it.
Funnily enough, though, when I installed the 2.0 OS on it (from the Developer SDK), it gave me all those apps. Will they also come along with the public 2.0 release? Of course, that will cost $20 too.
It's not that OS X is completely bereft of security holes. However, there is less OS X malware than it's market share would indicate, which suggests that it is at least a little harder to create malware for OS X. If Mac users are usually richer, then that would make a more tempting target for malware, since the personal information that could be gleaned would be more valuable.
Also, Apple's XCode development suite is free. The developer program gets you things like OS seeds, tech support, hardware discounts, and extra resources. One does also not need to buy a Mac to run OS X, but can merely run OSx86 on a PC.
That exploit is exclusive to Safari for Windows, which the laptop running OS X would not be using. The OS X/Safari combination is what's being tested, not Safari for Windows, which, I imagine, almost no one uses (except when they've accidently installed it thanks to Apple's "surprise" update).
I'm not saying "OMG anything which implies that Macs are insecure is FUD", I'm saying that the results of twenty people trying to crack things in day's work is not a very good indicator of overall security. Especially when any previously known exploits are not allowed.
Only vulnerabilities which were not previously released were allowed. There are un-patched vulnerabilities (8 of them) for IE7. There are no known un-patched vulnerabilities for Safari 3. This means that discovering a new vulnerability for Safari (which has 8 total advisories for the two most recent versions) is bigger news than discovering one for IE (which has 148 for the two most recent versions). Obviously, if more exploits are discovered, then it will be less of a big deal.
One should not draw the conclusion that Macs are less secure than PCs from the results of twenty people going at them in a room for a day.
I don't think that the OS X laptop was necessarily cracked because there are more (or easier to exploit) vulnerabilities for OS X than for Vista or Ubuntu. It's more impressive to crack an OS X machine than a Vista machine, because OS X has a reputation for being virus and malware free, so the security researcher receives more acclaim.
Connect the iPod to your wife's home computer, and then open up iTunes. Click on the iPod in the Devices menu on the left side. In the summary of the device, there should be an option on the bottom labeled "manually manage music on this device" - enable it.
This does two things. First, instead of automatically syncing all the songs in iTunes to the device, you have to drag the songs (or playlists) over to the device. Second, it should let you play (but not copy) the music on the iPod on other computers. Your wife should now be able to connect the iPod to her computer at work, launch iTunes, click the "Music" category under the iPod's name in the devices menu (she may have to click the disclosure arrow), and see all the music on the iPod. Then just click on a song, and it'll start playing. Additionally, this allows you to copy music from another computer to the iPod, without erasing the existing music - but you still won't be able to copy the music back to your computer..
This sort of frees up the device, but she'll still have to connect the iPod any time she wants to listen to music on it, which is a pain. I can see why Apple doesn't want to enable copying functionality, since they have enough trouble negotiating with the Music labels already. However, they've really locked the iTouch down, more so than previous iPods - because you can't access it as a USB drive, third party utilities that could previously pull music from iPods quite painlessly no longer work. I really like my iPod Touch, but only because I've jailbroken it - I'd like it a lot less if it were still as locked down as it originally was.
"Bigfoot's territory is being threatened, if he exists, although if he doesn't, it's not."
Playing FLVs != browsing Flash websites.
An FLV is basically a container for video which Flash (or, as in your case, another media player) can parse. Playing FLVs is completely different from having the Flash Player, which is where the limited resources of smartphones makes things impractical.
Looking at the Ars Technica review, it seems that the N800 uses Flash 7, two versions removed from the current Flash 9 viewer. It seems you haven't been to many sites that use Actionscript 3, or the later features of Actionscript 2 introduced in Flash 8. I'd say using a five-year old version of the Flash player doesn't really qualify as "full Flash support."
However, it is a damn sight better than Flash Lite, and it's impressive that even Flash 7 is running on a 400 MHz ARM chip. However, there are large tradeoffs in performance and usability - the Ars Technica review says that they got 1-2 fps on YouTube videos. Also, as you say, it significantly cuts down on battery life, dropping it to less than a third of its original figure.
Apple would never ship the iPhone with a Flash player like that, because the average consumer is not a nerd. If the iPhone shipped with a slow Flash player, I'd think "Wow, even getting Flash on this is impressive!" However, Joe Blow thinks "this sucks. Why is it so slow? Flash works on my desktop. Why won't it work on my iPhone?" Nerds will deal with performance and usability drawbacks if they allow new functionality, average people won't. This may not be a particularly good reason for you, but I think it makes sense.
...ie, your $600 toy has the CPU power of a TI-85. Enjoy playing text-mode Tetris on it, though... The iPhone is one of (if not the most) powerful smart phones on the market in terms of processing power. Or do you know of a smart phone that does support full Flash (not Flash Lite)? Extra points if the battery life is longer than ten minutes. Okay, that one doesn't even make sense. Unless it in some way requires use of the cellular-telephony-specific hardware in an iPhone, it will work "with the web", on a PC (or Mac, as the case dictates). He's referring to Flash Lite, which is typically used to provide a UI layer for mobile devices. It doesn't even support the most recent version of Actionscript (which has been out for almost two years). The mere idea of navigating any modern Flash website with Flash Lite makes me cringe - which is what he meant by "not capable of being used with the web." Once again, Master Steve turns the screws, and the fans will cry out, "Thank you sir, may I have another?" I do a fair amount of Flash development, and even I don't like the idea of Flash on my iPod Touch. If not having Flash on a mobile device is wrong, baby, I don't wanna be right.There's several problems I see in three-dimensional control schemes. The first is that there's no way to click. In the control scheme you suggest, there's no way to differentiate "I'm moving my cursor over here" and "I'm clicking and dragging this thing over here." Defining an imaginary plane to be the screen surface, and a click event to be moving past this surface wouldn't work. You have no feedback telling you how close you are.
Another big problem is that they're not very precise - mice and touchpads both allow you to park the cursor in a single pixel until you want to move somewhere else, which is useful for things like clicking buttons. If you're using the three-dimensional control scheme, from several feet away, it's going to be hard to keep your cursor from straying out of the bounds of the button you're clicking while you click - I have trouble clicking radio buttons with my Wacom Tablet for this very reason. The imprecision is worse in a three dimensional control scheme, when you'll be working several feet away from the screen.
Perhaps the largest problem with these control schemes is that they're ill-suited to our two dimensional interfaces. The mouse and the touchpad supply only the two dimensions we need, and do so very efficiently. In a three dimensional system, it measures an entire dimension that it throws away. For this reason, I think we won't see three dimensional control schemes in the market until we have the three dimensional interfaces that demand them - either on large 2D displays (so the imprecision is less significant), or on fully three-dimensional displays. 3D control for a 2D GUI just doesn't make sense.
The Coding Horror article you linked too is pre-Leopard (and actually shows screen shots of Safari 3 on Windows), and the forum post is, well, a six-sentence forum post. Every Macbook, iMac, and Macbook Pro I've installed with Leopard (6+), the font rendering looks exactly the same as on Tiger. I've yet to see, in person or online, any evidence that Leopard has changed/broken font rendering.
If you see the Safari screenshot in the Coding Horror page you linked to as "horribly blurry" (personally, I like the way it looks), then you just prefer the way Windows renders text over OS X. Windows will adjust the text so that strong lines sync up with pixels and sub-pixels, while OS X will just render the text without shifting it around. This gives Windows' text a sharper-but-thinner look which some people prefer, and some don't. The drawback to this approach is that the shape of the text is often distorted, and the width and height of the text does not scale linearly (here's a good side-by-side comparison of Windows' text scaling to OS X's). On the Mac, where a lot of graphics-layout gets done, it's preferable to have consistently scaled text, even if some will think it's blurry, while Windows has made the opposite decision.
If you still maintain that Leopard has broken font rendering, then perhaps you could post some screenshots of it.
From the amount of times that Will Wright has demoed large portions of this game at various game conferences and other gatherings (just search for "spore" on Google Video, or check out the links on the Spore wikipedia article), I don't see how this can qualify as vaporware. DNF has only one (likely pre-rendered) trailer to show for all that development time, Spore has hours of demo videos.
From all the videos I've seen, it seems like the bulk of the game is finished, and the only tasks that remain are gameplay-tweaking, bug squashing, and cross-platform issues.
That George Ou article is worthless. He's just another flame-baiter like Dvorak, whose only purpose is to draw hits. I have yet to meet a Mac whose font rendering actually looks like Ou's "examples" - the rendering on my Macbook Pro looks tons better, and subpixel is turned on by default. Graphic and type designers make up a significant amount of the Apple user base, and if OS X's font rendering actually looked as bad as he claims, those users would be making a stink about it.
People probably won't care enough about your site to get Firefox, if they're the typical IE user. Your goal should be to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to see your site, no matter what browser. Your "IE Compatible Mode Tag" would be unacceptable for any website that has to target a large amount of IE users (e.g. any commercial website). It might be fine for your personal website, where it doesn't matter too much if you lose some IE users, but when sales depend on traffic, you can't afford to turn anyone away.
Yes, Firefox is a much better browser than IE. We know that. Unfortunately, IE will not be eradicated for the near future, and for non-technically-inclined Windows users, it will remain the browser of choice. It seems like it will be much easier to develop websites that work in IE 8 (unless it too is "quirky"), and Microsoft is doing this without breaking old sites, at the cost of one meta tag, however inane and redundant that tag may be. It's a much better solution than "Oh, everyone would hate to see all their hard work hacking their sites for IE 6 and 7 to go to waste, let's keep IE 8 quirky." I don't see another solution that transitions to standards-compliance whilst not breaking old sites. Do you?
The average IE-using visitor to your site will not understand why your site fails to render properly in their browser. They're just using the default browser that came with their computer - they have no understanding of standards or standards-compliance. They'll assume that the fault lies with your site, and go on their merry way.
Yes, it's inane and ridiculous to have to add another tag clarifying standards compliance. But it's the best way to continue to support as many sites as possible. It's their fault thousands of websites had to have IE specific hacks, but at least they're changing that now. It could be worse. When dealing with M$, any improvements are a feat in of themselves.
Two of the inventions most beneficial to the human race in the past hundred years - antibiotics (penicillin) and the X-Ray - have been more or less accidently discovered. Fleming wasn't trying to cure diseases, Hittorf, Pulyui, Tesla and Sanford weren't trying to invent a means for investigating the interior of the human body remotely. Just because something doesn't aim to improve every day life doesn't mean it won't/
It's definitely not an either/or choice. You should check out the works of Shigeru Ban. He's known for creating both functional and beautiful buildings out of almost entirely recyclable materials.
One of his most famous works is Paper Church, a church whose main structural supports are recycled paper tubes. It was intended to be an temporary emergency center, but it stayed up for ten years before taken down, and it's planned to be re-assembled in Taiwan. A favorite of mine is the Paper House, an extremely minimal house whose entire load-bearing structure is made of paper - and it passes Japan's rigorous housing standards for earthquake safe buildings! Plus, it looks fantastic.
Architecture need not be entirely functional or entirely artistic. If you have the engineering skill and creativity, you can create buildings that are both. Gehry is primarily a sculptor, not an architect or engineer.
Have you heard of Perian? It's a quicktime plugin that provides support for Divx, Xvid, Avi, FLV, MKV - pretty much everything but Real and WMV. I've barely had to use VLC since I installed it.
A. Single Use. This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time. You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so. This License does not allow the Apple Software to exist on more than one computer at a time, and you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be used by multiple computers at the same time. So, even though you made a nice gesture by buying the software for your hackintosh, it's really no more legal to install it than if you had just pirated the thing.
Well, 'under the hood' of OS X, it's really just Unix. As long as you have a decent knowledge of how Unix/BSD works, and a familiarity with a CLI, you can figure most everything else out.
/Users/Your User Name/Library/Application Support/Name Of Application/ folders, and digging around in those with Plist editor can be fruitful (always make backups first, though).
For example, dig around in the packages of System applications, like the Dock (right-click, then select "Show All Applications"). All the graphical elements that the new Leopard dock uses are in there. I've changed those so I have a black dock (without the annoying curvy highlight), and white application indicators - much easier to see.
Also, a lot of the preference lists (plists) for applications are kept in your
Mainly, get as familiar as possible on Unix/BSD, and you will become more knowledgeable of OS X's underpinnings. Some good sites are Mac OS X Hints and O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center.
This is one thing that many of my PC-using friends complain about with respect to OS X: it's too hard to tweak/hack. Apple tends to make it very hard for a person without at least cursory knowledge of the internals of OS X and Unix, as well as familiarity with a CLI, to modify the OS. While I'm sure most of my friends would be able to figure out OS X's guts pretty quickly, the fact that they don't see the options for deeper tweaking right in, say, System Preferences, leads them to conclude that it's not possible.
Personally, I think that this is a good thing - it creates sort of a minimum competency barrier for tooling around with the OS. If you're knowledgeable enough to know how to change things, you're probably knowledgeable enough to know how to fix it if something goes wrong. Meanwhile, the average user never has to see any of these things if they don't want to, and are much less likely to accidently screw something up by mucking about in preference panes.