or shine any other light sauce into the back on a darker day.
Do NOT follow this advice. I totally ruined my laptop thanks to this clown. Before you reply saying I did it wrong using a Burgandy or some other heavy gravy I did not. A Hollandaise was all that I applied and I even used margarine in place of butter.
Maybe it's because low-income folk typically don't hold jobs that require a smartphone where said jobs have IT departments that say you can have a BlackBerry or a BlackBerry?
I do agree with a previous poster that a lot of it is probably the American habit of living beyond their means as well.
And the Honda Civic experience will outsell the Dodge Ram experience so what's your point? They are two completely different audiences that have different gaming styles and preferences. I could care less about who's leading who. Any increase in gaming popularity benefits all gamers.
The new party chat seems great but at 8 people it seems limited. How does it interact when you play games with more than 8 people. Does it work concurrently with whatever chat implementation the game provides or is it an either/or prospect - game chat or group chat but not both?
HDD install will be welcome and Netflix streaming will be welcome if/when they improve the awful selection available for instant viewing.
The avatar friends list thing does not seem practical. Hopefully there will be sorting by online status as an option to the alphabetic order thing.
BTW, if you are 30+ or so and prefer not playing with timmies and griefers but with folks your age with lives, jobs and families check out GeezerGamers. For me, it totally changed XBL from painful to fun.
Get a Mac and install Connect360. Works flawlessly.:)
For the fanboys - I'm not seriously recommending he buy a Mac. Just a tongue-in-cheek comment based on the irony that my Mac works better with my 360 than his XP box.
While I am against Microsoft's vision of DRM-laden fonts (the internet is open and free dammit) I welcome the future of font embedding. It would be a huge boon towards a semantic, searchable and accessible web. Designers would have no reason to insert images (or Flash) in place of text order to get the desired typographic effect.
Before you say "HTML is semantic, there is no place for presentation it the spec!" read the actual proposal, it's for the CSS spec, not HTML - right where presentation belongs. Quite frankly, it's silly that this isn't already in place given the rate that we continue to move away from print.
As an owner of a few Apple laptops in my day I can say that the initial smooth surface of the trackpads wear off over time and whatever material is underneath, while functional, isn't as smooth making usage of the trackpad for long sessions uncomfortable. Your fingertips feel slightly "raw" after a while.
This is the second time they've offered a free XBLA game that I already purchased. So what is my recompense for not having a service available that I paid for? Why should I be passed over because I already bought the game?
Result, I get nothing while others get a bone tossed to them because, ironically, I gave them money where others did not.
I think the old "Microsoft owns Apple" chestnut is about a decade out of date now. They've since sold the stock. Plus, $150 million (the amount of stock they bought) in a what - 5 billion dollar company (if not more now) is hardly ownership.
I am a long-time Apple user. I have never owned a Windows machine in my life so to say that I prefer Apple technology would be an understatement.
Given that, I truly believe a Steve Jobs led Apple monopoly would be much worse and much more abusive than the current Microsoft one. I just think that Steve has a dictator streak a mile wide that would only get worse the more it succeeded.
Perhaps though, given the Microsoft monopoly it's one of two ways to survive. Open source being the first - free, open and Microsoft can't crush it, buy it or intimidate it. The second being the other extreme, closed, vertically integrated and an ecosystem not dependent upon Microsoft technology or goodwill and not being (as) susceptible to threats or buyouts.
Anything else is folly. The industry is littered with the corpses of companies that tried to compete with Microsoft on their playing field using their technology. OEM bundling with operating systems, price undercutting for Office (those of you in college probably got it for $5, right?) are 2 quick examples. How about "Plays for Sure" music players? How well have those been doing? How much love and support have they received since Microsoft introduced the Zune (which is not a Plays for Sure device)?
I would argue that the only way to survive in a Microsoft-controlled ecosystem is to either give it all away for free or keep it all to yourself and keep Microsoft's fingers out of your stuff.
The eye candy is okay and all but the things I'm looking forward to are at the core. The new Leopard scheduler is reason enough alone to upgrade. With a multithreaded networking stack the days of disconnecting a network share without ejecting it will no longer mean 5 minutes of the beachball of death.
Plus those with multicore CPU's should run, not walk, to Leopard. From the Apple website:
"NSOperation, a breakthrough new API that optimizes applications for the world of multicore processing. Independent chunks of computation (operations) are added to NSOperationQueue, which dynamically determines how many operations to run in parallel based on the current architectures. So there's no need to hand-code the complexities of threading and locking. You simply describe the operations in a program along with their dependencies. Cocoa takes care of the rest."
Leopard features improved scheduling, memory management, and processor affinity algorithms to make better use of multiple cores. Several subsystems (TCP networking, AutoFS automounter, and NFS server) have been rewritten to be fully multithreaded. Also, POSIX thread allocation has been optimized to support the new NSOperation APIs.
Leopard gets the best possible bandwidth from both broadband and narrowband networks by optimizing buffer sizes according to the local resources and connection type. Starting with a larger window helps TCP with ongoing dynamic optimization. This is especially valuable when connecting to high-bandwidth/high-latency networks like Verizon's FiOS, which previously required specialized tools such as Broadband Tuner.
The new IOStream class in IOKit provides a high-level API for managing DMAs and other high-bandwidth data transfers, without the need to optimize caching strategies for different hardware architectures. It also forms the basis of the new IOVideo family, designed to support professional-level video cards. These new APIs make it easier for developers to take full advantage of both cutting-edge and previous-generation hardware.
This means real speed benefits are coming down the road for Leopard apps running on Intel Macs or any dual cpu or dual core PPC Macs. Plus anyone, regardless of hardware, will benefit from the dynamic TCP optimization and the new IOKit API's. The real question is whether the loads of eye candy will "cancel out" the low-level improvements from a user-experience perspective.
Would I ever use Netscape over Firefox or Camino? Probably not. Does it seem like some queer throwback to days gone by? Yes. Does it, on some level, seem kind of pathetic in the same way when A Flock of Seagulls shows up at some local bar/theater for a concert? Yes.
But I quickly realize that, as a web developer I can only stand behind them and cheer them on as a great alternative to IE. There's nothing wrong with another standards-compliant, Gecko-based browser on the market.
I just realized the irony that there is a Gecko broswer called Flock.
I know OS X is compiled using GCC but I wonder if Apple would see performance gains by using it? If they did, would it somehow introduce problems? Basically, I'm wondering if there would be a downside to using the Intel optimized compilers as opposed to all-purpose GCC compiler.
As an aside, Linux is obviously compiled using GCC but I wonder if Microsoft compiles Windows using the Intel compilers?
Can we then arrest someone at Microsoft who was responsible for making it so easy to create bots? In my opinion, Windows (and thus Microsoft) is an equal partner in the generation of spam we get today.
I'm kidding about the arrest part but it sure would be nice if Microsoft was called into the spotlight and at least publicly embarrassed for it's key role in spam production. Enough so that even my mom and dad (who think Windows is great) understand the malfeasance done by Windows' pathetic security record.
I'm on my second reinstall of Ubuntu on a machine at work. The first happened because a program froze the system hard. Upon reboot the x-server was borked for some reason. After some unsuccessful fiddling and attempting to reconfigure the thing I had to reinstall. The second time, against my better judgement, I had dapper upgrade to edgy after release. It froze the system hard during install making the system unbootable. Apparently I wasn't the only one with this problem. Second reinstall.
Didn't they have some x-server update in dapper that borked a bunch of folks systems as well?
I'm getting my son a new computer for Christmas. I was really struggling between a Mac mini and a generic Ubuntu box. Ubuntu made up my mind for me last week.
I'm thinking ubuntu needs to put the eye-candy on the back burner and focus on testing and stability first. What good is attracting a bunch of folks with eye candy only to turn them away soured on the apparent stability/quality of linux?
I'm curious but could I ask why Macs are suddenly attractive because they have and Intel CPU? I'm genuinely curious. Is it a sort of "comfort zone" thing because you have used them in PC's past? Is it a performance thing? Is it the ability to have the safety net of Windows in case the OS X experiment doesn't work out?
I have a hard time understanding why suddenly the Mac is viable because of its CPU. The userland experience of running OS X didn't change a hoot from the switch, the software library didn't suddenly expand, performance of the PPC and the x86 always leapfrogged each other when a major new version of a chip was introduced.
I'm not baiting you, just genuinely curious. For me, the point of using a Mac had nothing to do with the chip inside.
I apologize for my assumptions. In my experience I've experienced more willfully ignorant IT folk than not. I even had one guy tell me that Macs couldn't network. He was one of our IT guys. At my current job, we just switched to Active Directory. I showed him how to set up a Mac to be an Active Directory client. He couldn't figure it out on his end and ended up configuring them as if they were Windows 98 clients and telling me afterwards that Macs suck.
This is the IT that I and I believe most people experience.
I honestly could care less what people like and use. I just can't stand willful ignorance, especially when it hurts end users. I just had our Macs set up to print using TCP/IP this year. I came in and was told I needed to use AppleTalk to print. In 2006.
Anyway, I again apologize for jumping to conclusions.
Incompetent SA's like you are the reason for monoculture. You are either lazy, excessively stupid or threatened by anything outside of your sphere of expertise. We have a mixed network of Macs and PC's here and the Macs are totally unsupported because the part time IT guy is an anachronistic "Anything not Windows sucks" guy. Yet our Macs keep going and going while he's walking around daily fixing broken Windows boxes.
I also generally observe that the Mac folk know *much* more about their machine, how they work, and how to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. The majority of Windows folk here know nothing about their machines, throw up their hands and stop working if something goes wrong and wait for IT guy to come around.
Who's more productive? Which platform is costing the company less?
I find that people that try to use a single tool for everything don't really understand much of anything - they just know how to use that tool.
"Could you pass me a rubber mallet? I need to pound this piece in here without damaging the finish."
"Uhh, all I have is my sledgehammer. Rubber mallets suck."
"But a sledgehammer will destroy the finish. It's not the right tool."
"It's sledgehammer or nothing. If you don't like it, find something else to do. I use a sledgehammer for everything."
"But your sledgehammer isn't even in good shape. I mean, look at it - the hammer is being held onto the handle with a couple of bent nails and the handle is broken in two and simply held together with duct tape."
[Runs around in circles shouting]"Sledgehammer! Sledgehammer! Sledgehammer! Enemies of sledgehammer must be eliminated!"
So, if the css support is good with this product, then what rendering engine does the preview use? Certainly not the IE engine if the claim for good css support is to be beleived. If it's not the IE engine, then why aren't they using it for IE?
My guess is the preview is IE-based and therefore a worthless tool if you're designing clean CSS.
So what's not accurate about the new ads? Is the magnetically connected power cable a big hoax? Are spyware and viruses not a significant problem on a Windows computer? Does Windows offer a anything comparable to the iLife suite of programs with each install? Is getting the average Dell (including not just assembling the hardware but deleting the 200 trialware programs installed) up and running out of the box indeed easier than the iMac?
I'll grant you the freezing, then rebooting Windows days are behind them but really, what is Apple lying about in these ads?
To be fair, the Nutshell series is more of a reference rather than an instructional book. The page counts belie that fact - 218 for the O'Rielly book and 864 for the Pragmatic Bookshelf title.
It's interesting that O'Reilly doesn't publish an instructional book for Ruby.
...I think it's very difficult, if not impossible, to have an analysis of exactly where we are as a number with supporting or complying with CSS - given that there isn't an official test suite that exhaustively tests whether you comply with the standard or not.
...in terms of stating that we really do fully support the CSS 2.1 spec, it's hard to tell because there is a bias to any analysis. We're certainly somewhere between those two... I don't think we're at 90%, I think we're above 50% though - and again, it really depends on how you end up weighing things. The problem is, if I gave any number I'd really want to support how I came up with that number - and I don't have a great way to do that today.
What really gets me as a web developer is his "Standards? Define standards? We're just groping in the dark like everybody else." attitude. Safari, Opera and Firefox seem to be figuring it out okay. As a web developer, I can design a web page and have those three browsers look pretty much the same with only minor differences. Then I spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to hack it in IE.
I mean, what's so difficult about figuring out how compliant you are? Get a list of the CSS 2.1 spec and make a checklist out of it. "Child selectors, check. Pseudo selectors, check. Box model, check." Do the math - (IE7 CSS implementation/CSS spec)*100 = Percent compliant. Is it perfect? Probably not but it's a start for pete's sake.
Actually, I've given up wasting time on IE (including IE 7) and just run Dean Edward's IE7 script. It's just becoming less and less worth supporting IE down to the pixel. As web developers, we're tired and we've had enough. Don't expect us to jump for joy simply because you've begun making IE a little bit better toward standards. Nothing short of 90% compliance will be worthwhile. And if you get there, don't expect a big sloppy kiss from the web developer community either because it's been long overdue.
On the other hand, I welcome Microsoft's slide toward irrelevance and the inevitable renaissance of a non-microsoft controlled web. So...I guess keep up the good work Chris!
From what I understand, staying with the current industrial design was an intentional decision. They wanted to impart the feeling that the new Intel Macs are just like the old PPC Macs. They look the same and function the same - only faster. If they introduced a new architecture as well as new industrial design that may have felt to "jarring" for some that are wary of (or feel betrayed by) the Intel change.
I'm not saying I'm in this "change is scary and bad" camp but there are a lot of folk living there.
Slashdot Mirror
or shine any other light sauce into the back on a darker day.
Do NOT follow this advice. I totally ruined my laptop thanks to this clown. Before you reply saying I did it wrong using a Burgandy or some other heavy gravy I did not. A Hollandaise was all that I applied and I even used margarine in place of butter.
Maybe it's because low-income folk typically don't hold jobs that require a smartphone where said jobs have IT departments that say you can have a BlackBerry or a BlackBerry?
I do agree with a previous poster that a lot of it is probably the American habit of living beyond their means as well.
And the Honda Civic experience will outsell the Dodge Ram experience so what's your point? They are two completely different audiences that have different gaming styles and preferences. I could care less about who's leading who. Any increase in gaming popularity benefits all gamers.
The new party chat seems great but at 8 people it seems limited. How does it interact when you play games with more than 8 people. Does it work concurrently with whatever chat implementation the game provides or is it an either/or prospect - game chat or group chat but not both?
HDD install will be welcome and Netflix streaming will be welcome if/when they improve the awful selection available for instant viewing.
The avatar friends list thing does not seem practical. Hopefully there will be sorting by online status as an option to the alphabetic order thing.
BTW, if you are 30+ or so and prefer not playing with timmies and griefers but with folks your age with lives, jobs and families check out GeezerGamers. For me, it totally changed XBL from painful to fun.
Get a Mac and install Connect360. Works flawlessly. :)
For the fanboys - I'm not seriously recommending he buy a Mac. Just a tongue-in-cheek comment based on the irony that my Mac works better with my 360 than his XP box.
Just curious to see, you know, if it's ready for Vista yet.
While I am against Microsoft's vision of DRM-laden fonts (the internet is open and free dammit) I welcome the future of font embedding. It would be a huge boon towards a semantic, searchable and accessible web. Designers would have no reason to insert images (or Flash) in place of text order to get the desired typographic effect.
Before you say "HTML is semantic, there is no place for presentation it the spec!" read the actual proposal, it's for the CSS spec, not HTML - right where presentation belongs. Quite frankly, it's silly that this isn't already in place given the rate that we continue to move away from print.
"Oooh. I like how when you push the gas pedal down it makes the car go faster."
"Now try turning the car using this directional influencer."
"Wow. When I turn this wheel thing to the left the car goes left. I like that. I like being able to drive my car in the direction I want it to."
"This Ford Focus is actually Windows Vista."
"Really!?"
As an owner of a few Apple laptops in my day I can say that the initial smooth surface of the trackpads wear off over time and whatever material is underneath, while functional, isn't as smooth making usage of the trackpad for long sessions uncomfortable. Your fingertips feel slightly "raw" after a while.
I would imagine glass doesn't have this issue.
This is the second time they've offered a free XBLA game that I already purchased. So what is my recompense for not having a service available that I paid for? Why should I be passed over because I already bought the game?
Result, I get nothing while others get a bone tossed to them because, ironically, I gave them money where others did not.
I think the old "Microsoft owns Apple" chestnut is about a decade out of date now. They've since sold the stock. Plus, $150 million (the amount of stock they bought) in a what - 5 billion dollar company (if not more now) is hardly ownership.
I am a long-time Apple user. I have never owned a Windows machine in my life so to say that I prefer Apple technology would be an understatement.
Given that, I truly believe a Steve Jobs led Apple monopoly would be much worse and much more abusive than the current Microsoft one. I just think that Steve has a dictator streak a mile wide that would only get worse the more it succeeded.
Perhaps though, given the Microsoft monopoly it's one of two ways to survive. Open source being the first - free, open and Microsoft can't crush it, buy it or intimidate it. The second being the other extreme, closed, vertically integrated and an ecosystem not dependent upon Microsoft technology or goodwill and not being (as) susceptible to threats or buyouts.
Anything else is folly. The industry is littered with the corpses of companies that tried to compete with Microsoft on their playing field using their technology. OEM bundling with operating systems, price undercutting for Office (those of you in college probably got it for $5, right?) are 2 quick examples. How about "Plays for Sure" music players? How well have those been doing? How much love and support have they received since Microsoft introduced the Zune (which is not a Plays for Sure device)?
I would argue that the only way to survive in a Microsoft-controlled ecosystem is to either give it all away for free or keep it all to yourself and keep Microsoft's fingers out of your stuff.
The eye candy is okay and all but the things I'm looking forward to are at the core. The new Leopard scheduler is reason enough alone to upgrade. With a multithreaded networking stack the days of disconnecting a network share without ejecting it will no longer mean 5 minutes of the beachball of death.
Plus those with multicore CPU's should run, not walk, to Leopard. From the Apple website:
"NSOperation, a breakthrough new API that optimizes applications for the world of multicore processing. Independent chunks of computation (operations) are added to NSOperationQueue, which dynamically determines how many operations to run in parallel based on the current architectures. So there's no need to hand-code the complexities of threading and locking. You simply describe the operations in a program along with their dependencies. Cocoa takes care of the rest."
Leopard features improved scheduling, memory management, and processor affinity algorithms to make better use of multiple cores. Several subsystems (TCP networking, AutoFS automounter, and NFS server) have been rewritten to be fully multithreaded. Also, POSIX thread allocation has been optimized to support the new NSOperation APIs.
Leopard gets the best possible bandwidth from both broadband and narrowband networks by optimizing buffer sizes according to the local resources and connection type. Starting with a larger window helps TCP with ongoing dynamic optimization. This is especially valuable when connecting to high-bandwidth/high-latency networks like Verizon's FiOS, which previously required specialized tools such as Broadband Tuner.
The new IOStream class in IOKit provides a high-level API for managing DMAs and other high-bandwidth data transfers, without the need to optimize caching strategies for different hardware architectures. It also forms the basis of the new IOVideo family, designed to support professional-level video cards. These new APIs make it easier for developers to take full advantage of both cutting-edge and previous-generation hardware.
This means real speed benefits are coming down the road for Leopard apps running on Intel Macs or any dual cpu or dual core PPC Macs. Plus anyone, regardless of hardware, will benefit from the dynamic TCP optimization and the new IOKit API's. The real question is whether the loads of eye candy will "cancel out" the low-level improvements from a user-experience perspective.
Would I ever use Netscape over Firefox or Camino? Probably not. Does it seem like some queer throwback to days gone by? Yes. Does it, on some level, seem kind of pathetic in the same way when A Flock of Seagulls shows up at some local bar/theater for a concert? Yes.
But I quickly realize that, as a web developer I can only stand behind them and cheer them on as a great alternative to IE. There's nothing wrong with another standards-compliant, Gecko-based browser on the market.
I just realized the irony that there is a Gecko broswer called Flock.
I know OS X is compiled using GCC but I wonder if Apple would see performance gains by using it? If they did, would it somehow introduce problems? Basically, I'm wondering if there would be a downside to using the Intel optimized compilers as opposed to all-purpose GCC compiler.
As an aside, Linux is obviously compiled using GCC but I wonder if Microsoft compiles Windows using the Intel compilers?
Can we then arrest someone at Microsoft who was responsible for making it so easy to create bots? In my opinion, Windows (and thus Microsoft) is an equal partner in the generation of spam we get today.
I'm kidding about the arrest part but it sure would be nice if Microsoft was called into the spotlight and at least publicly embarrassed for it's key role in spam production. Enough so that even my mom and dad (who think Windows is great) understand the malfeasance done by Windows' pathetic security record.
I'm on my second reinstall of Ubuntu on a machine at work. The first happened because a program froze the system hard. Upon reboot the x-server was borked for some reason. After some unsuccessful fiddling and attempting to reconfigure the thing I had to reinstall. The second time, against my better judgement, I had dapper upgrade to edgy after release. It froze the system hard during install making the system unbootable. Apparently I wasn't the only one with this problem. Second reinstall.
Didn't they have some x-server update in dapper that borked a bunch of folks systems as well?
I'm getting my son a new computer for Christmas. I was really struggling between a Mac mini and a generic Ubuntu box. Ubuntu made up my mind for me last week.
I'm thinking ubuntu needs to put the eye-candy on the back burner and focus on testing and stability first. What good is attracting a bunch of folks with eye candy only to turn them away soured on the apparent stability/quality of linux?
I'm curious but could I ask why Macs are suddenly attractive because they have and Intel CPU? I'm genuinely curious. Is it a sort of "comfort zone" thing because you have used them in PC's past? Is it a performance thing? Is it the ability to have the safety net of Windows in case the OS X experiment doesn't work out?
I have a hard time understanding why suddenly the Mac is viable because of its CPU. The userland experience of running OS X didn't change a hoot from the switch, the software library didn't suddenly expand, performance of the PPC and the x86 always leapfrogged each other when a major new version of a chip was introduced.
I'm not baiting you, just genuinely curious. For me, the point of using a Mac had nothing to do with the chip inside.
I apologize for my assumptions. In my experience I've experienced more willfully ignorant IT folk than not. I even had one guy tell me that Macs couldn't network. He was one of our IT guys. At my current job, we just switched to Active Directory. I showed him how to set up a Mac to be an Active Directory client. He couldn't figure it out on his end and ended up configuring them as if they were Windows 98 clients and telling me afterwards that Macs suck.
This is the IT that I and I believe most people experience.
I honestly could care less what people like and use. I just can't stand willful ignorance, especially when it hurts end users. I just had our Macs set up to print using TCP/IP this year. I came in and was told I needed to use AppleTalk to print. In 2006.
Anyway, I again apologize for jumping to conclusions.
Incompetent SA's like you are the reason for monoculture. You are either lazy, excessively stupid or threatened by anything outside of your sphere of expertise. We have a mixed network of Macs and PC's here and the Macs are totally unsupported because the part time IT guy is an anachronistic "Anything not Windows sucks" guy. Yet our Macs keep going and going while he's walking around daily fixing broken Windows boxes.
I also generally observe that the Mac folk know *much* more about their machine, how they work, and how to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. The majority of Windows folk here know nothing about their machines, throw up their hands and stop working if something goes wrong and wait for IT guy to come around.
Who's more productive? Which platform is costing the company less?
I find that people that try to use a single tool for everything don't really understand much of anything - they just know how to use that tool.
"Could you pass me a rubber mallet? I need to pound this piece in here without damaging the finish."
"Uhh, all I have is my sledgehammer. Rubber mallets suck."
"But a sledgehammer will destroy the finish. It's not the right tool."
"It's sledgehammer or nothing. If you don't like it, find something else to do. I use a sledgehammer for everything."
"But your sledgehammer isn't even in good shape. I mean, look at it - the hammer is being held onto the handle with a couple of bent nails and the handle is broken in two and simply held together with duct tape."
[Runs around in circles shouting]"Sledgehammer! Sledgehammer! Sledgehammer! Enemies of sledgehammer must be eliminated!"
So, if the css support is good with this product, then what rendering engine does the preview use? Certainly not the IE engine if the claim for good css support is to be beleived. If it's not the IE engine, then why aren't they using it for IE?
My guess is the preview is IE-based and therefore a worthless tool if you're designing clean CSS.
So what's not accurate about the new ads? Is the magnetically connected power cable a big hoax? Are spyware and viruses not a significant problem on a Windows computer? Does Windows offer a anything comparable to the iLife suite of programs with each install? Is getting the average Dell (including not just assembling the hardware but deleting the 200 trialware programs installed) up and running out of the box indeed easier than the iMac?
I'll grant you the freezing, then rebooting Windows days are behind them but really, what is Apple lying about in these ads?
To be fair, the Nutshell series is more of a reference rather than an instructional book. The page counts belie that fact - 218 for the O'Rielly book and 864 for the Pragmatic Bookshelf title.
It's interesting that O'Reilly doesn't publish an instructional book for Ruby.
What really gets me as a web developer is his "Standards? Define standards? We're just groping in the dark like everybody else." attitude. Safari, Opera and Firefox seem to be figuring it out okay. As a web developer, I can design a web page and have those three browsers look pretty much the same with only minor differences. Then I spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to hack it in IE.
I mean, what's so difficult about figuring out how compliant you are? Get a list of the CSS 2.1 spec and make a checklist out of it. "Child selectors, check. Pseudo selectors, check. Box model, check." Do the math - (IE7 CSS implementation/CSS spec)*100 = Percent compliant. Is it perfect? Probably not but it's a start for pete's sake.
Actually, I've given up wasting time on IE (including IE 7) and just run Dean Edward's IE7 script. It's just becoming less and less worth supporting IE down to the pixel. As web developers, we're tired and we've had enough. Don't expect us to jump for joy simply because you've begun making IE a little bit better toward standards. Nothing short of 90% compliance will be worthwhile. And if you get there, don't expect a big sloppy kiss from the web developer community either because it's been long overdue.
On the other hand, I welcome Microsoft's slide toward irrelevance and the inevitable renaissance of a non-microsoft controlled web. So...I guess keep up the good work Chris!
From what I understand, staying with the current industrial design was an intentional decision. They wanted to impart the feeling that the new Intel Macs are just like the old PPC Macs. They look the same and function the same - only faster. If they introduced a new architecture as well as new industrial design that may have felt to "jarring" for some that are wary of (or feel betrayed by) the Intel change.
I'm not saying I'm in this "change is scary and bad" camp but there are a lot of folk living there.