It's not like you could provide both MP3 and Vorbis like machinae supremacy is doing to reach *both* normal people and Vorbis geeks. Machinae has gained quite some publicity under geeks for their Vorbissupport - they were one of the first after all.
If you can show me one digital music player that plays Vorbis files but won't play MP3s then you might have a point. But you can't do that, can you? Even then, as the other person who's already replied to your post pointed out, why stop at the tiny fraction of one percent of the market that wants Vorbis but won't accept the same music in MP3 format? Why not go after every other "xxx but not MP3 at any cost" market?
Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of money to be made converting, storing and serving files in every possible audio file format under the sun. To hell with the law of diminishing returns, streamlining your business to be as efficient as possible, or anything else resembling a sensible business model...
why can't these music stores use a more superior format. they can then give more bang for your bitrate. they still stick with the old mp3.
there are portable vorbis players out there, we need more online stores now.
Yeah, because when you want to reach the widest possible audience with your new e-tailing venture, you should always endeavour to avoid selling popular products or using popular technologies in favour of more obsure goods or less supported formats.
Oh, wait, that business model's been patented. Do you remember boo.com?
Also, I'd love to see a return of historical stories, ones that reference Earth's history. These used to be fairly common for the first and second Doctors, (eg, The Reign Of Terror) but the latter Doctors almost always didn't have any such adventures (although the fifth Doctor did inadvertantly start the Great Fire of London in 1666 at the conclusion of The Visitation).
To be honest, losing the Daleks (for now) is a blow but as villains they were pretty one-dimensional. I'm far more concerned about the casting of Billie Piper as the Doctor's assistant. I thought we'd all learnt from the Bonnie Langford mistake.
What the hell is a "revmeter"? Are you a fucking moron? I think so. Look up: tachometer.
No, I'm not, but one of us might be. Why don't you google "rev meter" (in speech marks, so that you only find exact phrases) and then google "tachometer". Then compare the number of matches.
Revmeter, rev-meter or rev meter are all perfectly acceptable. And although tachometer might be more formal, revmeter is plainer and clearer for those people unfamiliar with that word. Besides, this is Slashdot, where people think that "spelt" as in "this is how a word is spelt" is spelt incorrectly and will proceed to argue the point without even bothering to reference a dictionary to check to see if they're talking out of their asses.
Now go grow a spine (so that you can kick the AC habit) and a brain (so that you can learn when to keep your mouth shut and perhaps even some manners), you pathetic little man.
This patent might be specifically about the taskbar but you can apply that same common sense anywhere. The idea that grouping similar items together is something that is worthy of a patent - as if someone invented the concept of putting similar items together - is laughable.
Imagine tomorrow that there's a whole new consumer product being sold by supermarkets: we'll call them widgets. Do you think that Wal-Mart or whoever should be able to patent having all the widgets in the same aisle next to one another? Or putting all of Company A's widgets together and all of Company B's widgets together?
Putting widgets together is basically what this patent is about. Anyone who claims that someone owns the right to "inventing" that process is really pushing the definition of what's patentable and what's not way past the point where the average man in the street (and the average judge) would laugh in their faces for even suggesting it.
You can patent putting similar tools together? Like cut, copy and paste in any application? Or backwards and forwards in a web browser? How about +, -, * and / in a calculator?
What next? Ford applying for and getting a patent on the side-by-side arrangement of foot pedals in a car? Or the standard gear-stick arrangement? How about patenting putting the speedometer and revmeter next to each other? Or the fuel, water and temperature gauges within a certain distance of one another.
The USPTO is crazy. I swear they'd let you patent the colour of the sky if you paid your processing fee.
The grandparent post refered to NASA rockets, not rockets in general. Those, indeed were developed by Von Braun and other former German World War Two rocket scientists.
Step 2 is to take these selfish bastards to court. They were clearly breaching the terms and conditions of their accounts, so proving a case against them won't take more than five minutes.
Once a few of these spammers have lost everything including the shirt on their backs then you'll see a serious drop in the number of people who think that spamming is a quick and easy path to riches.
Or I won't tell your wife you've been living in an apartment in Florida with an unmarried woman...
Get it right. She's married too. And it's a house not an apartment.
Can't say I agree with you there...
on
Retro Gaming Gets Hot
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Clones and variations aren't anything new.
We had Pacman, Ms. Pacman, Pacland, Pacmania, Pacman Jr and a few more flavours of Pacman that I can't remember off the top of my head. Similarly, we had Tetris, Wetris, 3-D Tetris, etc.
Even popular arcade machines of yesteryear were sequeled: Galaga/Galaxians, Operation Wolf/Operation Thunderbolt, Nemesis/Salamander/Vulcan Venture, R-Type/R-Type 2, Gauntlet/Gauntlet 2, Outrun/Outrun 2, etc.
The reason why we got more of the same is because people wanted more of the same. If it aint broke don't fix it is one of the oldest rules of arcade/PC/console gaming.
Does that include this one? If not, then that's irrelevant. Even if it is the case, their network, their rules. You can, of course, pick another university: nobody's forcing you to study there.
2. Dialup is a viable alternative: you might dismiss it because it isn't fast, but if you're that paranoid about the terms and conditions attached to being on the college network then don't expect them to have an independent broadband connection (and whatever else you might like) just for you.
Why do people expect everything to fall into their laps like it's some kind of divine right?
1. There is a free ad-supported version. And, because of the way the ads are served, you're browsing speed isn't constantly compromised.
2. There's a pay, ad-free version. This is what I and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of others have on their computers. Opera is the best browser out there, and there are a lot of people out there who believe that it's worth paying for quality (cf BMW, Mercedes, Rolex, Zippo, etc).
In less than three months since their announcement of Gmail (April 1st) they have redefined what a free email service should provide, in terms of storage and attachment size if nothing else.
If Gmail hadn't appeared to shake up the status quo then Yahoo, Hotmail, etc would still be providing storage in the 2MB region rather than two or three orders of magnitude more.
Let's say that you have incompatibility problems with some of your common office applications and the Microsoft solution to this situation is to upgrade your applications.
Now, would you be happy that to get a secure computing platform you have to spend hundreds of dollars/whatever per seat upgrading to the latest version of your commonly used apps? To get a properly working version of Windows XP should you be forced to abandon those applications that work for you?
Microsoft has used incompatibility problems to its own advantage time and time again. Indeed, breaking the compatibility of competitors' applications was one of the company's standard operating procedure for many years. WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, DR-DOS, etc all were victims at one time or another. There was even a little saying that went round Microsoft during the time that one major version of DOS was being developed: "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run".
When you look at this new story in that context it's hard not to be suspicious of Microsoft's motives and difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt.
So all those Muslim women who are forced to cover their heads (those that do it not through choice but because that's what their societies have deemed is required of them), simply because of some mistranslation somewhere along the line should be grateful that standards that weren't intended to be set by the Koran have been set by those that choose to interpret its words in a different manner?
You know, all this is only one part of the debate. We could just as well be arguing for hours about the right of young Jewish schoolboys to wear kippas when they go to their French state schools. But, in many ways, the point isn't enforcement of religious values, the point is the exact opposite: the non-enforcement of religious values.
What France is doing is simple, it's saying (not openly, perhaps) that religion is a potential source for division, and that by removing potential sources of division from its classrooms, the next generation of French citizens will hopefully grow up being more tolerant and accepting of other faiths. By putting Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and everyone else in the same classrooms in nothing but the same school uniforms (You are aware that most schoolkids in Europe have to wear a school uniform, right? I hope so, because it is a overall relevant part of the debate.) France is teaching its schoolkids that, underneath it all, there are more things that we have in common than we don't have in common: that, basically, we're all the same.
It's pretty hard to hate people that you grew up beside, that you played with on the sports field and that you laughed with in the playground. It's hard to learn to hate someone that you already consider a friend. That is the real social benefit that France, which like most places in Europe is happy to concede that it's now a multicultural society, hopes to gain from this change.
You only have to look at Northern Ireland (where most Catholics and Protestants spend their entire lives being taught then socialising only with those of their own denomination) and Israel and the occupied territories to see that if you let people perform segregation in the minds of you children then bringing those children together decades later to live peacefully is a much harder task than if those children had the benefit of knowing their "enemy" from a young age.
In many ways, France has made a bold move. Whether it was the right one or the wrong one really can't be judged until we see what sort of citizens these schoolkids turn out to be in twenty years' time and what sort of society they build for themselves. It's not about disrespecting someone's religion, it's about getting to a place where someone's religion isn't a tool for social division.
You the AC to whom I'm replying to might be the only person apart from me who actually will see and read this post that I've spent the last half an hour composing. So, please, do me a favour and re-read it. I think you'll find that it contains more truths than the people who would use organised religion to deliberately drive wedges between us would like to concede.
Well, it all depends how you define a violent crime, doesn't it? Britain has probably the loosest definitions of what constitutes a violent crime that you're ever likely to find. For example, spitting at someone, or even pushing them, is classed as a violent crime. Elsewhere, including the US I bet, such actions are classed differently.
Also, have a good look at the murder rates in the US and then the murder rates in the UK. The figures are like chalk and cheese, even when you take into account the difference in populations (US ~300 million, UK ~60 million). Similarly with other directly comparable violent crimes, such as rape.
Public perceptions of crime? Well, it's a proven fact that every scientific study on the matter has shown that the UK public's perception of their chances of you being a victim of crime far outstrip the actual likelyhood that they will be so. So what if Americans feel safer? Just what matters here: what people think or the actual reality?
So, paint it any way you want. Britain is a far less dangerous place to live than the US. And we do have a right of self-defence, contrary to what you choose to believe.
Right, because the US media reports the most typical cases rather than the most extreme ones that it finds, doesn't it? Perhaps you'd like a list of extreme cases that highlight how ridiculous the relevant US laws can be? Because I do have examples if you're interested...
What's reasonable force is dependent on the circumstances. If you're legitimately in fear of your life then you can do just about anything to defend yourself, including using deadly force. But there's a difference between beating someone to within an inch of their life when they've come at you with deadly force themselves and doing the same when they presented no real threat.
In the very extreme cases (such as the ones that the US media chooses to hype for your digestion) the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (equivalent to Federal Attorneys) will have agreed that there is a possibility that the intended victim may have overstepped the mark. The way that possibility is then examined is in a court of law, in a jury trial. The same thing happens every day in the US too, whether your papers decide to print it or not.
Oh, and believe it or not, most juries have a predisposition to side with the intended victims of crime, not with those that try to assail them. So few of the cases that your papers like to sensationalise end with the intended victim being found guilty of any serious crime but then I guess you don't get to hear that side of things because reporting that justice has been served, with the benefit of a jury trial providing critical peer review, doesn't sell as many papers as sensationalising the next story on the "lets sell more papers today" merry-go-round.
The farmer that you refer to, Tony Martin, shot and killed a robber in the back as he was running away from him. Furthermore, even at trial he showed no remorse for having taken a life.
Now, you might call that self-defence but a jury of twelve of his peers, who unlike you had all the evidence presented to them, didn't.
Keep trying to portray Britain as a criminal's paradise. I suppose that's one way to deal with the fact that you live in the most violent country in the western world.
Novell got complacent, made some dumb moves (eg, buying WordPerfect) and hit some real competition when Microsoft started muscling in on their traditional turf. Whilst the competition was coming right at it, Novell just looked on, doe-eyed.
A littany of bad management decisions is why they are where they are today. Maybe Novell can regain some of its lost market share but you'll have to wait a very long time if you want to see it regain market dominance.
It's your life. If you feel comfortable about being in a situation where your chances of losing your life increase dramatically, and if you think that you're being adequately compensated for the risks that you're taking, then go ahead and take the assignment.
But if possibly becoming a target, or even being the unfortunate victim of a friendly fire incident, makes your stomach churn then don't do it.
These are warzones that you're talking about. Don't step into one because someone else says that they'd do it, step into one because you know that you're comfortable doing it. You only have one life, so don't lead it according to how someone else would lead their's.
Bottom line: is the job worth potentially dying for? Only you can answer that for yourself.
Hang on in there for Opera support...
on
Gmail in the News
·
· Score: 1
Safari support only got added a couple of weeks ago and it's likely that Opera support is just around the corner.
Remember, the service is still in beta and far from being close to a full roll-out (there isn't even a "save as draft" option at the moment) so the current Opera incompatibility shouldn't be taken as an indication that Gmail will always be unusable to Opera users.
Slashdot Mirror
Vittu huora is what I have to say to that...
It's not like you could provide both MP3 and Vorbis like machinae supremacy is doing to reach *both* normal people and Vorbis geeks. Machinae has gained quite some publicity under geeks for their Vorbissupport - they were one of the first after all.
If you can show me one digital music player that plays Vorbis files but won't play MP3s then you might have a point. But you can't do that, can you? Even then, as the other person who's already replied to your post pointed out, why stop at the tiny fraction of one percent of the market that wants Vorbis but won't accept the same music in MP3 format? Why not go after every other "xxx but not MP3 at any cost" market?
Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of money to be made converting, storing and serving files in every possible audio file format under the sun. To hell with the law of diminishing returns, streamlining your business to be as efficient as possible, or anything else resembling a sensible business model...
why can't these music stores use a more superior format. they can then give more bang for your bitrate. they still stick with the old mp3.
there are portable vorbis players out there, we need more online stores now.
Yeah, because when you want to reach the widest possible audience with your new e-tailing venture, you should always endeavour to avoid selling popular products or using popular technologies in favour of more obsure goods or less supported formats.
Oh, wait, that business model's been patented. Do you remember boo.com?
If we can't have Daleks, then my wishlist of featured bad guys includes:
1. Cybermen
2. The Master
3. Sontarans
4. Autons
5. Ice Warriors
Also, I'd love to see a return of historical stories, ones that reference Earth's history. These used to be fairly common for the first and second Doctors, (eg, The Reign Of Terror) but the latter Doctors almost always didn't have any such adventures (although the fifth Doctor did inadvertantly start the Great Fire of London in 1666 at the conclusion of The Visitation).
To be honest, losing the Daleks (for now) is a blow but as villains they were pretty one-dimensional. I'm far more concerned about the casting of Billie Piper as the Doctor's assistant. I thought we'd all learnt from the Bonnie Langford mistake.
What the hell is a "revmeter"? Are you a fucking moron? I think so. Look up: tachometer.
No, I'm not, but one of us might be. Why don't you google "rev meter" (in speech marks, so that you only find exact phrases) and then google "tachometer". Then compare the number of matches.
Revmeter, rev-meter or rev meter are all perfectly acceptable. And although tachometer might be more formal, revmeter is plainer and clearer for those people unfamiliar with that word. Besides, this is Slashdot, where people think that "spelt" as in "this is how a word is spelt" is spelt incorrectly and will proceed to argue the point without even bothering to reference a dictionary to check to see if they're talking out of their asses.
Now go grow a spine (so that you can kick the AC habit) and a brain (so that you can learn when to keep your mouth shut and perhaps even some manners), you pathetic little man.
This patent might be specifically about the taskbar but you can apply that same common sense anywhere. The idea that grouping similar items together is something that is worthy of a patent - as if someone invented the concept of putting similar items together - is laughable.
Imagine tomorrow that there's a whole new consumer product being sold by supermarkets: we'll call them widgets. Do you think that Wal-Mart or whoever should be able to patent having all the widgets in the same aisle next to one another? Or putting all of Company A's widgets together and all of Company B's widgets together?
Putting widgets together is basically what this patent is about. Anyone who claims that someone owns the right to "inventing" that process is really pushing the definition of what's patentable and what's not way past the point where the average man in the street (and the average judge) would laugh in their faces for even suggesting it.
You can patent putting similar tools together? Like cut, copy and paste in any application? Or backwards and forwards in a web browser? How about +, -, * and / in a calculator?
What next? Ford applying for and getting a patent on the side-by-side arrangement of foot pedals in a car? Or the standard gear-stick arrangement? How about patenting putting the speedometer and revmeter next to each other? Or the fuel, water and temperature gauges within a certain distance of one another.
The USPTO is crazy. I swear they'd let you patent the colour of the sky if you paid your processing fee.
The grandparent post refered to NASA rockets, not rockets in general. Those, indeed were developed by Von Braun and other former German World War Two rocket scientists.
Step 2 is to take these selfish bastards to court. They were clearly breaching the terms and conditions of their accounts, so proving a case against them won't take more than five minutes.
Once a few of these spammers have lost everything including the shirt on their backs then you'll see a serious drop in the number of people who think that spamming is a quick and easy path to riches.
This from someone who sports a 5-digit Slashdot ID? Puh-leaze.
Or I won't tell your wife you've been living in an apartment in Florida with an unmarried woman...
Get it right. She's married too. And it's a house not an apartment.
Clones and variations aren't anything new.
We had Pacman, Ms. Pacman, Pacland, Pacmania, Pacman Jr and a few more flavours of Pacman that I can't remember off the top of my head. Similarly, we had Tetris, Wetris, 3-D Tetris, etc.
Even popular arcade machines of yesteryear were sequeled: Galaga/Galaxians, Operation Wolf/Operation Thunderbolt, Nemesis/Salamander/Vulcan Venture, R-Type/R-Type 2, Gauntlet/Gauntlet 2, Outrun/Outrun 2, etc.
The reason why we got more of the same is because people wanted more of the same. If it aint broke don't fix it is one of the oldest rules of arcade/PC/console gaming.
Does that include this one? If not, then that's irrelevant. Even if it is the case, their network, their rules. You can, of course, pick another university: nobody's forcing you to study there.
1. Nobody is forcing them to live on campus.
2. Dialup is a viable alternative: you might dismiss it because it isn't fast, but if you're that paranoid about the terms and conditions attached to being on the college network then don't expect them to have an independent broadband connection (and whatever else you might like) just for you.
Why do people expect everything to fall into their laps like it's some kind of divine right?
1. There is a free ad-supported version. And, because of the way the ads are served, you're browsing speed isn't constantly compromised.
2. There's a pay, ad-free version. This is what I and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of others have on their computers. Opera is the best browser out there, and there are a lot of people out there who believe that it's worth paying for quality (cf BMW, Mercedes, Rolex, Zippo, etc).
In less than three months since their announcement of Gmail (April 1st) they have redefined what a free email service should provide, in terms of storage and attachment size if nothing else.
If Gmail hadn't appeared to shake up the status quo then Yahoo, Hotmail, etc would still be providing storage in the 2MB region rather than two or three orders of magnitude more.
Turkeys don't vote for Christmas.
Let's say that you have incompatibility problems with some of your common office applications and the Microsoft solution to this situation is to upgrade your applications.
Now, would you be happy that to get a secure computing platform you have to spend hundreds of dollars/whatever per seat upgrading to the latest version of your commonly used apps? To get a properly working version of Windows XP should you be forced to abandon those applications that work for you?
Microsoft has used incompatibility problems to its own advantage time and time again. Indeed, breaking the compatibility of competitors' applications was one of the company's standard operating procedure for many years. WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, DR-DOS, etc all were victims at one time or another. There was even a little saying that went round Microsoft during the time that one major version of DOS was being developed: "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run".
When you look at this new story in that context it's hard not to be suspicious of Microsoft's motives and difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt.
So all those Muslim women who are forced to cover their heads (those that do it not through choice but because that's what their societies have deemed is required of them), simply because of some mistranslation somewhere along the line should be grateful that standards that weren't intended to be set by the Koran have been set by those that choose to interpret its words in a different manner?
You know, all this is only one part of the debate. We could just as well be arguing for hours about the right of young Jewish schoolboys to wear kippas when they go to their French state schools. But, in many ways, the point isn't enforcement of religious values, the point is the exact opposite: the non-enforcement of religious values.
What France is doing is simple, it's saying (not openly, perhaps) that religion is a potential source for division, and that by removing potential sources of division from its classrooms, the next generation of French citizens will hopefully grow up being more tolerant and accepting of other faiths. By putting Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and everyone else in the same classrooms in nothing but the same school uniforms (You are aware that most schoolkids in Europe have to wear a school uniform, right? I hope so, because it is a overall relevant part of the debate.) France is teaching its schoolkids that, underneath it all, there are more things that we have in common than we don't have in common: that, basically, we're all the same.
It's pretty hard to hate people that you grew up beside, that you played with on the sports field and that you laughed with in the playground. It's hard to learn to hate someone that you already consider a friend. That is the real social benefit that France, which like most places in Europe is happy to concede that it's now a multicultural society, hopes to gain from this change.
You only have to look at Northern Ireland (where most Catholics and Protestants spend their entire lives being taught then socialising only with those of their own denomination) and Israel and the occupied territories to see that if you let people perform segregation in the minds of you children then bringing those children together decades later to live peacefully is a much harder task than if those children had the benefit of knowing their "enemy" from a young age.
In many ways, France has made a bold move. Whether it was the right one or the wrong one really can't be judged until we see what sort of citizens these schoolkids turn out to be in twenty years' time and what sort of society they build for themselves. It's not about disrespecting someone's religion, it's about getting to a place where someone's religion isn't a tool for social division.
You the AC to whom I'm replying to might be the only person apart from me who actually will see and read this post that I've spent the last half an hour composing. So, please, do me a favour and re-read it. I think you'll find that it contains more truths than the people who would use organised religion to deliberately drive wedges between us would like to concede.
Well, it all depends how you define a violent crime, doesn't it? Britain has probably the loosest definitions of what constitutes a violent crime that you're ever likely to find. For example, spitting at someone, or even pushing them, is classed as a violent crime. Elsewhere, including the US I bet, such actions are classed differently.
Also, have a good look at the murder rates in the US and then the murder rates in the UK. The figures are like chalk and cheese, even when you take into account the difference in populations (US ~300 million, UK ~60 million). Similarly with other directly comparable violent crimes, such as rape.
Public perceptions of crime? Well, it's a proven fact that every scientific study on the matter has shown that the UK public's perception of their chances of you being a victim of crime far outstrip the actual likelyhood that they will be so. So what if Americans feel safer? Just what matters here: what people think or the actual reality?
So, paint it any way you want. Britain is a far less dangerous place to live than the US. And we do have a right of self-defence, contrary to what you choose to believe.
Right, because the US media reports the most typical cases rather than the most extreme ones that it finds, doesn't it? Perhaps you'd like a list of extreme cases that highlight how ridiculous the relevant US laws can be? Because I do have examples if you're interested...
What's reasonable force is dependent on the circumstances. If you're legitimately in fear of your life then you can do just about anything to defend yourself, including using deadly force. But there's a difference between beating someone to within an inch of their life when they've come at you with deadly force themselves and doing the same when they presented no real threat.
In the very extreme cases (such as the ones that the US media chooses to hype for your digestion) the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (equivalent to Federal Attorneys) will have agreed that there is a possibility that the intended victim may have overstepped the mark. The way that possibility is then examined is in a court of law, in a jury trial. The same thing happens every day in the US too, whether your papers decide to print it or not.
Oh, and believe it or not, most juries have a predisposition to side with the intended victims of crime, not with those that try to assail them. So few of the cases that your papers like to sensationalise end with the intended victim being found guilty of any serious crime but then I guess you don't get to hear that side of things because reporting that justice has been served, with the benefit of a jury trial providing critical peer review, doesn't sell as many papers as sensationalising the next story on the "lets sell more papers today" merry-go-round.
The farmer that you refer to, Tony Martin, shot and killed a robber in the back as he was running away from him. Furthermore, even at trial he showed no remorse for having taken a life.
Now, you might call that self-defence but a jury of twelve of his peers, who unlike you had all the evidence presented to them, didn't.
Keep trying to portray Britain as a criminal's paradise. I suppose that's one way to deal with the fact that you live in the most violent country in the western world.
Novell got complacent, made some dumb moves (eg, buying WordPerfect) and hit some real competition when Microsoft started muscling in on their traditional turf. Whilst the competition was coming right at it, Novell just looked on, doe-eyed.
A littany of bad management decisions is why they are where they are today. Maybe Novell can regain some of its lost market share but you'll have to wait a very long time if you want to see it regain market dominance.
It's your life. If you feel comfortable about being in a situation where your chances of losing your life increase dramatically, and if you think that you're being adequately compensated for the risks that you're taking, then go ahead and take the assignment.
But if possibly becoming a target, or even being the unfortunate victim of a friendly fire incident, makes your stomach churn then don't do it.
These are warzones that you're talking about. Don't step into one because someone else says that they'd do it, step into one because you know that you're comfortable doing it. You only have one life, so don't lead it according to how someone else would lead their's.
Bottom line: is the job worth potentially dying for? Only you can answer that for yourself.
Safari support only got added a couple of weeks ago and it's likely that Opera support is just around the corner.
Remember, the service is still in beta and far from being close to a full roll-out (there isn't even a "save as draft" option at the moment) so the current Opera incompatibility shouldn't be taken as an indication that Gmail will always be unusable to Opera users.