it makes perfect sense to inconvenience your enemy if you can, and don't even suffer any damage in doing so....If you have the option to create further damage to your enemy, you just go ahead and do it. The fact that I am not in a position to do so does not mean that you should avoid it too in the name of... empathy? Or what?
Except that Cuba is not an "enemy" except to Cuban refugees in Florida. They're just a small state that has a government we dislike, but presents no real threat to us now that the Soviet Union is gone. And we certainly do suffer economically from the embargo -- if we didn't, there'd be no need to make a law against trading with them.
It isn't about empathy, it's about having Cubans see us as a prosperous ally they want to get closer to rather than as an adversary they need to set up barriers against. If we had easy tourism and trading with Cuba, it would take about 10 years for it to be one of the most pro-American places on Earth no matter what the government says about us. Money and prosperity have a strange way of bringing people closer.
I wonder why Cuba and Syria never seem to make some marvelous new technological advances that the US can envy from afar?
Cuba is one of the world leaders in biotech research.
Re:This is another triumph of politics...
on
No OLPCs for Cuba, Ever
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What's the reward for goodwill towards murderous enemies again?
That the people under their control see we're more successful and prosperous than they are, and begin to wonder why that is and envy our way of life despite whatever propaganda their leadership broadcasts. It worked in the Soviet Union, all of Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Bombing the world with Hollywood, Levi's, Coca-Cola and Britney Spears has been far more effective at changing enemies into allies than any military operation we've engaged in since WWII. The only real question is why so many Americans and politicians profess the superiority of Democracy and Capitalism, yet don't actually trust them to outperform Totalitarian Communism over the long term.
I guess the rest of the world hasn't had Cuban missile bases a few km off their coast and those missiles pointed at them. It tends to lead to grudges being held, you see.
Most of the world has real borders with their enemies, with tanks and missiles and bombers able to cross at any time, and has learned to deal with it. We live in a little bubble protected by two vast oceans and think that anyone saying "boo" from a thousand miles away is a mortal threat.
Our embargo against Cuba is just a pointless grudge that serves one domestic political group and does a disservice to the people of both nations overall.
Re:products did not end with a whimper
on
All Things iPhone
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· Score: 1
That's great -- so 15 years later, on hardware that is orders of magnitude more powerful, someone has been able to match one of the advanced features. I've also seen plenty of modern PDA apps that allow language parsing. All that does is demonstrate the point -- hardware specs do not equate in any direct fashion to actual usable power exposed to the end user.
Just because we had 400Mhz chips and oodles of RAM/ROM available didn't make the devices inherently more usable. 16MB Palm OS devices running at 33Mhz had more usable power than 64MB/400mhz Windows Mobile devices years ago, because the Palm OS and apps were measured in kilobytes and WinCE took 90% of the horsepower just to display the splash screen. Now you can buy Palm systems with gigabytes of storage and yet it's a complete waste because the system itself is so unable to use it in any effective manner.
Hardware specs do not equal power.
Re:products did not end with a whimper
on
All Things iPhone
·
· Score: 1
It's what? More powerful? The thing came out with a 20MHz ARM processor. My four year old PDA has a 200+MHz ARM processor. It came with a 4MB ROM, same PDA I have came with 64MB ROM. It came with 640KB RAM, this one came with 64MB RAM.
Remind me again, "more powerful"?
There is a big difference between tech specs and actual power/utility. Sure, it's low-end hardware, but that low-end hardware does handwriting recognition and some natural language parsing -- software features that no PDA since has done anywhere near as well.
it's not his duty to interpret the law, only to enforce it. If the law on the books says it's illegal to audio-record police officers, then he is obligated to enforce that law.
No he isn't. Police are not under an "obligation" to do the maximum possible any time they see the slightest infraction of any law, with no independent thought whatsoever. They're free to ignore minor infractions, give warnings, etc. Just as the DA is free to drop the case -- he isn't "obligated" to prosecute every offense that crosses his desk.
We trust many people in sequence to enforce laws precisely BECAUSE it is impossible for any law to be written that takes into account every possible set of circumstances. That's part of why so many places elect District Attorneys and (less commonly) Police Chiefs. they, in conjunction with Mayors and whatever local legislative body, decide which laws to most vigorously enforce and which ones to let slide either due to them no longer making much sense or simply being too minor to worry about.
For example, in Houston there's a big annoyance that the PD has been writing thousands of tickets for having license plate frames because *technically* the law says they're illegal no matter how little they obstruct the plate design. The Texas legislature even changed the law recently because it was so patently absurd, but it hasn't taken effect yet and it seems HPD was trying to cash in on as many last-minute tickets as possible. Once the local paper pointed out that the Mayor's official vehicle driven by a police officer had such a frame, it was removed and the police have been instructed by the Mayor not to write any more tickets. Human beings were shamed into changing enforcement policies because the public recognized it was stupid, even though it WAS still illegal.
LDAP is a corporate directory server protocol, not a synchronisation protocol.
Are there companies out there that let individual users synch their personal phone books to the corporate directory? I thought this who conversation was about the iPhone in corporations -- it can access corporate directories and also synch personal data using documented, open-sourced, XML-based, standards. I can't imagine how much more transparent the data could be.
Or possibly people are avoiding upgrading because when they test Vista, they discover that the interface is the most convoluted and annoying one ever developed. Windows Vista -- now with 500% more confirmation dialogs and notification tooltips! Because we don't care about real security, we just want to make sure when something breaks we can blame the user for clicking on the confirmation.
We have several people who've bought new laptops in the past few months, and every one of them is infuriated at how annoying the interface is. I certainly couldn't train a computer novice to use it yet, because it makes no real sense where anything is or under what conditions entire sections of the interface are hidden and revealed.
Companies who've locked themselves in to a proprietary email system can't change when a new proprietary product is available.
Yeah, those darn proprietary open standards that are supported by most calendaring and email systems! I hate having to pay my IMAP tax every time I check mail, and I hope nobody finds out I'm using a pirated LDAP specification! The CalDAV group keeps sending me an invoice for $0 every six months, it's going to bankrupt me!
Good to know it's a feature of GSM, not sure if we just lacked carrier support or handset support (or carriers disablling it on handsets they sold for some reason) but it has never been a commonly available feature in the states.
Again, merging calls is completely different fromconference calling. Of course our systems have conference calling, I just had not seen any US carriers that supported merging existing calls (though the other replies say that blackberries and GSM support it, so it may just have been a limitation of handsets).
Good to know, I've owned many phones/smartphones from $30-600 across verizon, Sprint, and GSM providers (though obviously not a blackberry since we didn't target apps for them) and hadn't seen "merge" before, only conference calling. I don't know what any of this has to do with subsidy locking, since nobody brought it up.
I'm failing to see how merging calls is anything different than 3-way calling on cell networks
3-way calling is not "merging" anything, it's having an existing call and calling a third party. So yes, the network does have to add support for merging two existing calls into a single 3-way call. It's kind of amazing no cellular systems have supported this before now, it doesn't make any difference financially since they still get to bill for 2 calls simultaneously.
But on what machine would the web server run when the user leaves coverage?
No, that's what i meant, that they could all be written as local apps that just run in a browser instead of using the UI tools of the OS. Even if you had to roll your own flat-file text cookie "database" it would be very possible (and not much less elegant than plenty of commercial solutions I've seen:P )
You're right, of course, there's still too much that's unknown -- that's kind of been my point in all these iPhone discussions. I think people are getting too hung up on limitations that might not even exist. Just because they used AJAX as the buzzword to describe the JS/HTML capabilities of the embedded browser doesn't necessarily imply that everything will be tethered to a remote server.
There's just a lot of "the sky is falling!" conversations taking place about the iPhone when nobody has one or knows what they can do. The developer info we've seen at this point is so minimal as to be useless as anything but PR, obviously Apple will be releasing a lot more in the coming weeks and then we can all panic.
Congratulations on your stellar employment history. I'm fascinated how your experience with PPC systems and x86 systems led you to believe it was the same hardware, since I've supported hundreds of each and can't begin to compare how much easier it is to support a box where things just slide together because they're engineered properly rather than requiring screws out the wazoo.
Having a motherboard manufactured by the same company doesn't mean it's the same motherboard, that the specs are the same, that the components are the same (although of course most of them are).
If Apple and Dell were selling the same systems, you'd see a similar repair and warranty rate, and a similar failure rate. Yet every survey ever conducted shows that's not the case.
You brought up the long term and I responded to it.
Yes, I said that looking only at long-term financial effects in absence of everything else is completely ridiculous. You're the one who went off on short-term financial effects while ignoring the fact that I was clearly talking about short-term non-financial effects. I don't care if someone is focused on this quarter or not, that's up to them and their company investors. It makes no difference to anyone else. But if they're achieving financial goals by shortchanging security or maintenance, then that's a problem for people OUTSIDE the company -- it has nothing to do with finances, it's a public safety issue. Looking only at the long-term financial aspects of such a decision ignores the fact that in the short term, you can do a hell of a lot of damage to people who have no means of market feedback until its entirely too late.
Perhaps you didn't understand what I said, even though I specifically stated it, so I will state it again: I care a lot about aircraft maintenance. I also said lawsuits can help to disincentivize any short term shortsightedness, then gave an example.
I understood perfectly what you said, it just had nothing whatsoever to do with the topic. That you personally care about maintenance doesn't mean a damn thing. We're not talking about you, we're talking about letting the "market" take care of businesses who don't invest in things like security or maintenance.
If YOU love maintenance, that's great, I'll be happy to fly YOUR airline, but that doesn't do me any good if someone else's airline crashes into my house and kills my family because they wanted to save $20 on parts or bomb sniffers in order to offer lower ticket prices. I wasn't their customer, so the market doesn't do me any damn good, plus I'm dead anyways. Being able to sue them is a fantastic long-term remedy for my grandkids who might live long enough to see the court case settled, but I'm still dead and the CEO of the airline is still filthy rich, it's just the airline itself that will go bankrupt.
Yes, the market works in the long term. But the long term is much longer than acceptable for many problems to be sorted out.
Yes, I care more about the long term more than the short term unlike too many in business
What does that have to do with anything? I'm not talking about profitability in the short term, I'm talking about people dying in the short term.
Actually I wanted to be a pilot since I was a kid, so I care a lot about aircraft maintenance. Flying is in my family. My dad was a mechanic on planes, he retired from the US Airforce where he worked on B52s, and an uncle built his own plane and has his pilot's license. Like him I'd like to build my own plane and fly it.
That's fantastic, but what does that have to do with the short-term economic incentives to shortchange on security and maintenance? If a guy can make a hundred million in one quarter and then go bankrupt before the lawsuits hit, sure the market has "worked" in the sense that he's no longer in business, but he's still made a ton of money and the victims are still dead.
Yahoo's in an impossible position. If they leave China, they've abandoned people.
Really? I think Yahoo could use this newfangled Internet to set up a Chinese-language site outside of the Chinese government's jurisdiction. If the Chinese government chooses to cripple their own economy by cutting off it's workforce from modern tools, that's a choice they should have to make. We certainly don't need to be volunteering to come in and help them.
wouldn't it be purely and simply out of business in China?
Well, yes and no. It seems easy to say they'd be gone, but of course they wouldn't really. Yahoo.com is not going anywhere, and Yahoo is perfectly capable of setting up a Chinese version of their site outside of China's borders.
If Yahoo and Google both simply made Chinese sites they'd be putting the burden on Chinese officials to censor them, rather than volunteering to do it themselves. The net effect might be exactly the same as it is today -- after all, flickr is still being blocked by the Chinese even though Yahoo is being a good Chinese citizen and informing on subversives.
BUT, the net effect might be that the Chinese realize they can't prosper in the new economy if everyone else in the world has the ability to access systems like Google and Yahoo and they don't.
Right now Google and Yahoo are making it easy for the Chinese government to not have to change at all -- they can eat their cake and have it, too. They get all the benefits of modern technology while letting the pesky Americans do the hard work of censoring themselves.
Not really. Take a brick of Jell-O. Push one end. You'll move it, but it will distort in shape, compress, wobble, send waves, etc.
The only difference between Jell-O and every other solid substance is that your eyes and brain just aren't precise enough to see at a small scale that they are all behaving the same way, just to different degrees.
I did understand you weren't really talking about interface -- I just know that many people complain about iTunes performance on Windows and it is a much snappier and happier program on the Mac. And while you do point out some of the design limitations, I submit that most of them are actually very logical choices made for legitimate reasons even though I disagree with some of them -- that's pretty much been my experience in general on the Mac since I switched, it certainly is not a perfect system, but even the things that I dislike make sense once I think about why they behave the way they do. Few things are accidental or just cobbled together.
The real beauty, though, is that everything on the system is scriptable and communicates with any other programs that care to. I'm with you -- the metadata in my music collection is more important than the music itself. So I whipped up a couple Applescripts in an afternoon (mind you I had no experience whatsoever with Applescript before I began, but they read like plain English instructions and are only a half dozen lines each) that backed up the particular metadata I was concerned about and was able to restore it arbitrarily, rather than being dependent on the itunes library XML file or worrying about moving my music to a different system in the future and losing something.
In general, OS X really is an ecosystem -- the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's pretty impossible to display in any way by merely porting specific applications, because you're missing all the other pieces. iTunes on Windows has all the same features as the OS X version, and yet it can do so very much less that I hate using it. Visit dougscripts.com and you see that iTunes on the Mac is more like Firefox or Foobar2000 -- it's all about the extensions rather than the program itself.
Expose and Dashboard, for example, basically wouldn't work without the underlying window frame buffering philosophy on OS X. You can fake it by just throwing tons of horsepower in a Windows graphics card, but 90% of people who try to use a Windows workalike of Expose are going to be sorely disappointed and say "wow, this Apple stuff sucks", because frankly it would. Trying to fake Spotlight would require scanning the disk periodically (and being out of date periodically) the way Google desktop search and Windows search do. On the Mac, it's automagic.
might convince people to try an OS with better, smoother versions of those features built in.
Well, they have better, smoother versions of iTunes and Safari on OS X, but you said your experience with them on Windows has pushed you away. I'm not sure there's a whole lot they could do on Windows that would really show how well stuff designed for OS X works on OS X.
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Except that Cuba is not an "enemy" except to Cuban refugees in Florida. They're just a small state that has a government we dislike, but presents no real threat to us now that the Soviet Union is gone. And we certainly do suffer economically from the embargo -- if we didn't, there'd be no need to make a law against trading with them.
It isn't about empathy, it's about having Cubans see us as a prosperous ally they want to get closer to rather than as an adversary they need to set up barriers against. If we had easy tourism and trading with Cuba, it would take about 10 years for it to be one of the most pro-American places on Earth no matter what the government says about us. Money and prosperity have a strange way of bringing people closer.
Cuba is one of the world leaders in biotech research.
That the people under their control see we're more successful and prosperous than they are, and begin to wonder why that is and envy our way of life despite whatever propaganda their leadership broadcasts. It worked in the Soviet Union, all of Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Bombing the world with Hollywood, Levi's, Coca-Cola and Britney Spears has been far more effective at changing enemies into allies than any military operation we've engaged in since WWII. The only real question is why so many Americans and politicians profess the superiority of Democracy and Capitalism, yet don't actually trust them to outperform Totalitarian Communism over the long term.
Most of the world has real borders with their enemies, with tanks and missiles and bombers able to cross at any time, and has learned to deal with it. We live in a little bubble protected by two vast oceans and think that anyone saying "boo" from a thousand miles away is a mortal threat.
Our embargo against Cuba is just a pointless grudge that serves one domestic political group and does a disservice to the people of both nations overall.
That's great -- so 15 years later, on hardware that is orders of magnitude more powerful, someone has been able to match one of the advanced features. I've also seen plenty of modern PDA apps that allow language parsing. All that does is demonstrate the point -- hardware specs do not equate in any direct fashion to actual usable power exposed to the end user.
Just because we had 400Mhz chips and oodles of RAM/ROM available didn't make the devices inherently more usable. 16MB Palm OS devices running at 33Mhz had more usable power than 64MB/400mhz Windows Mobile devices years ago, because the Palm OS and apps were measured in kilobytes and WinCE took 90% of the horsepower just to display the splash screen. Now you can buy Palm systems with gigabytes of storage and yet it's a complete waste because the system itself is so unable to use it in any effective manner.
Hardware specs do not equal power.
There is a big difference between tech specs and actual power/utility. Sure, it's low-end hardware, but that low-end hardware does handwriting recognition and some natural language parsing -- software features that no PDA since has done anywhere near as well.
No he isn't. Police are not under an "obligation" to do the maximum possible any time they see the slightest infraction of any law, with no independent thought whatsoever. They're free to ignore minor infractions, give warnings, etc. Just as the DA is free to drop the case -- he isn't "obligated" to prosecute every offense that crosses his desk.
We trust many people in sequence to enforce laws precisely BECAUSE it is impossible for any law to be written that takes into account every possible set of circumstances. That's part of why so many places elect District Attorneys and (less commonly) Police Chiefs. they, in conjunction with Mayors and whatever local legislative body, decide which laws to most vigorously enforce and which ones to let slide either due to them no longer making much sense or simply being too minor to worry about.
For example, in Houston there's a big annoyance that the PD has been writing thousands of tickets for having license plate frames because *technically* the law says they're illegal no matter how little they obstruct the plate design. The Texas legislature even changed the law recently because it was so patently absurd, but it hasn't taken effect yet and it seems HPD was trying to cash in on as many last-minute tickets as possible. Once the local paper pointed out that the Mayor's official vehicle driven by a police officer had such a frame, it was removed and the police have been instructed by the Mayor not to write any more tickets. Human beings were shamed into changing enforcement policies because the public recognized it was stupid, even though it WAS still illegal.
Are there companies out there that let individual users synch their personal phone books to the corporate directory? I thought this who conversation was about the iPhone in corporations -- it can access corporate directories and also synch personal data using documented, open-sourced, XML-based, standards. I can't imagine how much more transparent the data could be.
Or possibly people are avoiding upgrading because when they test Vista, they discover that the interface is the most convoluted and annoying one ever developed. Windows Vista -- now with 500% more confirmation dialogs and notification tooltips! Because we don't care about real security, we just want to make sure when something breaks we can blame the user for clicking on the confirmation.
We have several people who've bought new laptops in the past few months, and every one of them is infuriated at how annoying the interface is. I certainly couldn't train a computer novice to use it yet, because it makes no real sense where anything is or under what conditions entire sections of the interface are hidden and revealed.
Yeah, those darn proprietary open standards that are supported by most calendaring and email systems! I hate having to pay my IMAP tax every time I check mail, and I hope nobody finds out I'm using a pirated LDAP specification! The CalDAV group keeps sending me an invoice for $0 every six months, it's going to bankrupt me!
The calendar, todo and notes support CalDAV/iCalendar, open standards. The address book supports LDAP, an open standard.
Good to know it's a feature of GSM, not sure if we just lacked carrier support or handset support (or carriers disablling it on handsets they sold for some reason) but it has never been a commonly available feature in the states.
Again, merging calls is completely different fromconference calling. Of course our systems have conference calling, I just had not seen any US carriers that supported merging existing calls (though the other replies say that blackberries and GSM support it, so it may just have been a limitation of handsets).
Good to know, I've owned many phones/smartphones from $30-600 across verizon, Sprint, and GSM providers (though obviously not a blackberry since we didn't target apps for them) and hadn't seen "merge" before, only conference calling. I don't know what any of this has to do with subsidy locking, since nobody brought it up.
I'm failing to see how merging calls is anything different than 3-way calling on cell networks
3-way calling is not "merging" anything, it's having an existing call and calling a third party. So yes, the network does have to add support for merging two existing calls into a single 3-way call. It's kind of amazing no cellular systems have supported this before now, it doesn't make any difference financially since they still get to bill for 2 calls simultaneously.
No, that's what i meant, that they could all be written as local apps that just run in a browser instead of using the UI tools of the OS. Even if you had to roll your own flat-file text cookie "database" it would be very possible (and not much less elegant than plenty of commercial solutions I've seen
You're right, of course, there's still too much that's unknown -- that's kind of been my point in all these iPhone discussions. I think people are getting too hung up on limitations that might not even exist. Just because they used AJAX as the buzzword to describe the JS/HTML capabilities of the embedded browser doesn't necessarily imply that everything will be tethered to a remote server.
There's just a lot of "the sky is falling!" conversations taking place about the iPhone when nobody has one or knows what they can do. The developer info we've seen at this point is so minimal as to be useless as anything but PR, obviously Apple will be releasing a lot more in the coming weeks and then we can all panic.
Congratulations on your stellar employment history. I'm fascinated how your experience with PPC systems and x86 systems led you to believe it was the same hardware, since I've supported hundreds of each and can't begin to compare how much easier it is to support a box where things just slide together because they're engineered properly rather than requiring screws out the wazoo.
Having a motherboard manufactured by the same company doesn't mean it's the same motherboard, that the specs are the same, that the components are the same (although of course most of them are).
If Apple and Dell were selling the same systems, you'd see a similar repair and warranty rate, and a similar failure rate. Yet every survey ever conducted shows that's not the case.
Yes, I said that looking only at long-term financial effects in absence of everything else is completely ridiculous. You're the one who went off on short-term financial effects while ignoring the fact that I was clearly talking about short-term non-financial effects. I don't care if someone is focused on this quarter or not, that's up to them and their company investors. It makes no difference to anyone else. But if they're achieving financial goals by shortchanging security or maintenance, then that's a problem for people OUTSIDE the company -- it has nothing to do with finances, it's a public safety issue. Looking only at the long-term financial aspects of such a decision ignores the fact that in the short term, you can do a hell of a lot of damage to people who have no means of market feedback until its entirely too late.
I understood perfectly what you said, it just had nothing whatsoever to do with the topic. That you personally care about maintenance doesn't mean a damn thing. We're not talking about you, we're talking about letting the "market" take care of businesses who don't invest in things like security or maintenance.
If YOU love maintenance, that's great, I'll be happy to fly YOUR airline, but that doesn't do me any good if someone else's airline crashes into my house and kills my family because they wanted to save $20 on parts or bomb sniffers in order to offer lower ticket prices. I wasn't their customer, so the market doesn't do me any damn good, plus I'm dead anyways. Being able to sue them is a fantastic long-term remedy for my grandkids who might live long enough to see the court case settled, but I'm still dead and the CEO of the airline is still filthy rich, it's just the airline itself that will go bankrupt.
Yes, the market works in the long term. But the long term is much longer than acceptable for many problems to be sorted out.
What does that have to do with anything? I'm not talking about profitability in the short term, I'm talking about people dying in the short term.
That's fantastic, but what does that have to do with the short-term economic incentives to shortchange on security and maintenance? If a guy can make a hundred million in one quarter and then go bankrupt before the lawsuits hit, sure the market has "worked" in the sense that he's no longer in business, but he's still made a ton of money and the victims are still dead.
Really? I think Yahoo could use this newfangled Internet to set up a Chinese-language site outside of the Chinese government's jurisdiction. If the Chinese government chooses to cripple their own economy by cutting off it's workforce from modern tools, that's a choice they should have to make. We certainly don't need to be volunteering to come in and help them.
Well, yes and no. It seems easy to say they'd be gone, but of course they wouldn't really. Yahoo.com is not going anywhere, and Yahoo is perfectly capable of setting up a Chinese version of their site outside of China's borders.
If Yahoo and Google both simply made Chinese sites they'd be putting the burden on Chinese officials to censor them, rather than volunteering to do it themselves. The net effect might be exactly the same as it is today -- after all, flickr is still being blocked by the Chinese even though Yahoo is being a good Chinese citizen and informing on subversives.
BUT, the net effect might be that the Chinese realize they can't prosper in the new economy if everyone else in the world has the ability to access systems like Google and Yahoo and they don't.
Right now Google and Yahoo are making it easy for the Chinese government to not have to change at all -- they can eat their cake and have it, too. They get all the benefits of modern technology while letting the pesky Americans do the hard work of censoring themselves.
I'm pretty sure the entire object has to be accelerated before it can leave the muzzle.
Not really. Take a brick of Jell-O. Push one end. You'll move it, but it will distort in shape, compress, wobble, send waves, etc.
The only difference between Jell-O and every other solid substance is that your eyes and brain just aren't precise enough to see at a small scale that they are all behaving the same way, just to different degrees.
I did understand you weren't really talking about interface -- I just know that many people complain about iTunes performance on Windows and it is a much snappier and happier program on the Mac. And while you do point out some of the design limitations, I submit that most of them are actually very logical choices made for legitimate reasons even though I disagree with some of them -- that's pretty much been my experience in general on the Mac since I switched, it certainly is not a perfect system, but even the things that I dislike make sense once I think about why they behave the way they do. Few things are accidental or just cobbled together.
The real beauty, though, is that everything on the system is scriptable and communicates with any other programs that care to. I'm with you -- the metadata in my music collection is more important than the music itself. So I whipped up a couple Applescripts in an afternoon (mind you I had no experience whatsoever with Applescript before I began, but they read like plain English instructions and are only a half dozen lines each) that backed up the particular metadata I was concerned about and was able to restore it arbitrarily, rather than being dependent on the itunes library XML file or worrying about moving my music to a different system in the future and losing something.
In general, OS X really is an ecosystem -- the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's pretty impossible to display in any way by merely porting specific applications, because you're missing all the other pieces. iTunes on Windows has all the same features as the OS X version, and yet it can do so very much less that I hate using it. Visit dougscripts.com and you see that iTunes on the Mac is more like Firefox or Foobar2000 -- it's all about the extensions rather than the program itself.
Expose and Dashboard, for example, basically wouldn't work without the underlying window frame buffering philosophy on OS X. You can fake it by just throwing tons of horsepower in a Windows graphics card, but 90% of people who try to use a Windows workalike of Expose are going to be sorely disappointed and say "wow, this Apple stuff sucks", because frankly it would. Trying to fake Spotlight would require scanning the disk periodically (and being out of date periodically) the way Google desktop search and Windows search do. On the Mac, it's automagic.
Well, they have better, smoother versions of iTunes and Safari on OS X, but you said your experience with them on Windows has pushed you away. I'm not sure there's a whole lot they could do on Windows that would really show how well stuff designed for OS X works on OS X.