Apple routinely patches much more serious bugs at the OS level so I don't understand what all the fuss is about. The fact remains that the security situation in Windows was so ludicrous that an unpatched Windows machine would be compromised within minutes of being connected to the internet. It forced Microsoft to drop everything and perform a security sweep of all their existing software, causing the highly visible delays in products such as Vista and Visual Studio 2005. And the security procedures in place now at Microsoft ensures that future software development will continue to proceed at a snail's pace.
It's simply about market share and nothing else. At the end of the month Windows' security problems will still exist while Mac users will continue to not have to worry about spyware and viruses, all of which really negates the stated intent of the Month of Apple Bugs exercise.
Still works for me. You can run this script from a local html file to check:
<html>
<head>
<script>
function google(a) {
document.write("<ol>");
for (i = 0; i < a.Body.Contacts.length; i++) {
document.write("<li>" + a.Body.Contacts[i].Email + "</li>");
}
document.write("</ol>");
}
</script>
<script src="http://docs.google.com/data/contacts?out=js&s how=ALL&psort=Affinity&callback=google&max=99999"> </script></head>
<body>
Hello
</body>
</html>
Buy an old P-III tower for 50 bucks, set it up with Fedora Core 6, Apache, and a dynamic DNS service. Add a cron job to reboot the server every Sunday, and maybe enable LogWatch to email you daily status updates. Finally, place the tower on the bare concrete in your basement.
With this set up you can check on your house from anywhere at any time. If the server stops responding, your house has been destroyed.
First they come up with the hypothetical Mac "virus" that can hypothetically execute code if you manually download it and run it. And now it's the hypothetical BlackBerry malware that will hypothetically execute code if you manually download it and run it.
What an absolutely pathetic attempt at marketing from the once grand antivirus company.
Of the 14 million people who bought iPods this quarter (150,000 per day), the vast majority of them couldn't care to purchase the FM radio option, don't care about file formats (as long as it plays their existing MP3s), and don't use their iPod as a generic mass storage device.
Although I rarely use it, I agree that the mass storage feature is nice to have when you need it; I can't image how an MP3 player could ship without it.
Some techies seem to waste a lot of time fretting over issues such as file formats, DRM, and technical specs. Meanwhile, everyone else is too busy enjoying their music to give a rats ass.
If Microsoft wants to sell copyrighted music they have to do what the copyright holders want. That's where the crippled hardware and DRM comes from. And unlike Apple, Microsoft cannot negotiate from a position of strength; they will do what they're told, or they won't have a music store. Microsoft even went so far as to give Universal $1 from every Zune sold. Pathetic!
I hate how virtually every tech company bends over backwards for the entertainment industry. No one company, except for Apple, has stood up to entertainment industry in any substantial way, and as a result they and their customers suffer.
Firefox's original name was "Phoenix", as the browser was meant to rise from the ruins of the old Netscape/Mozilla application suite. The Phoenix BIOS guys complained that people would confuse Phoenix the browser with Phoenix the BIOS, so they changed the name to Firebird, which is still quite a bit like a phoenix. Then the Firebird database guys complained for the same reason. Thus the name Firefox was born, a trademark now vigorously defended by the Mozilla organization.
It didn't work, though. My first thought when I read this article was that it's some Mozilla project. The Firebird guys would have been better off renaming their project, since few people had heard of it anyway. And my new computer doesn't even have a BIOS.
It's a shame you understand neither iTunes nor music in general.
The people who are interested in cultivating a music collection will burn their purchased tracks to CD, just as if they had bought them from a record store. Not only is it easy to do this in iTunes, it actually nags you to do it.
But most people don't, because most people aren't interested in cultivating a long lasting music collection. For most people, the music they buy now will be useless to them in a few years whether they buy it from iTunes or on CD or any other format. CDs scratch, tapes wear out, stuff gets lost, and peoples' tastes fade; most of their music will end up in a box in garage sale.
Microsoft said that its Windows Media Player will recognize Zune content which might make it possible to put the content on a Plays For Sure device
Yeah, but the outrageous part of the story is that existing MSN tracks with not play on the Zune. That Zune tracks won't play (easily) on legacy devices is kind of a given.
Sure, you can drive down to the record store and buy a CD.
Or you can discover music on-line, buy only the tracks you want, from the comfort of your own home, for half the price, and you burn your own CD. It's your choice. Both ways you end up with the same thing, a CD of music. Both ways are legal. The record companies certainly want you to drive down to the record store...
But it's harder to defend buying music on-line when Microsoft does something so thoroughly inept as this. It puts the focus on the DRM, which they shouldn't, it absolutely screws their soon-to-be-former partners (business as usual for MS), and in the end it demonstrates how much Apple has got Microsoft to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. One thing is clear, before the Zune can "kill" the iPod it will have to kill all the other players first.
I wouldn't touch a Zune with a 10 foot clown pole.
Top 10 Gaming Eras, In no particular order: 1. The NES Era - That was a great era. 2. The "Vision" Era (Colecovision, Intellivison) - Ooh, that was a good era, too. 3. The PS2 Era - Fantastic era! 4. The Atari 2600 Era - A fundamental era. 5. The 16-bit Era (SNES, Genesis) - Who could forget that era! 6. The 32-bit Era (PS1, N64) - At least twice as good as the 16-bit era.
And let's not forget those awkward transition eras: 6. The Turbografx 16 Era - Not really 16-bit, but still incrementally better than the NES. 7. The Saturn Era - Too soon for 32-bit? 8. The Vectrex Era - Too late for monochrome vector graphics? 9. The 360 Era - Only time will tell.
And finally... 10. The future Era - Where all of today's problems become nostalgic fodder for tomorrow's old people.
The fundamental purpose of Copyright law is to allow a creator to control how their works are disseminated. Obviously, Apple wants you to buy their hardware if you want to run their software, and they're perfectly within their rights to do so.
Say Chevy offers Radiohead $1 Million to use one of their recordings in a stupid truck ad, and Radiohead refuses. By your logic, Chevy should then have the right to use the recording anyway, because since Radiohead refused to sell them the song they're not losing any money.
You may think it's right, but hundreds of years of copyright law would disagree.
Granted, there are a ton of people out there that don't realize that they rely on iTunes to decrypt their music for them, I don't know how people can spend so much money without physically receiving anything. They aren't even getting a guarantee that they can play that file for the rest of their lives! They would have to burn it to a CD to ensure that.
Sorry, but that's an asinine comment.
If the CD format is dead, you're going to have to figure out some way to get a physical master copy to me or I'm going to be upset mighty fast.
Here's how: Click, click, burn.
You've got it completely wrong. People know damn well that their music only plays in iTunes, and they know damn well that they can burn their music to CD for backup purposes. Most people don't care.
Since when have the record companies guaranteed that the music you purchased will play forever? They haven't. But the ultimate reality is that music purchased from iTunes can be backed up permanently far easier than has ever been possible with other music formats. That's important to people like you and me who buy music to collect music, people who cherish their music collections. But you and I are not most people. Most people don't care.
Good advice today would be to burn all of your purchased music to hard copy, primarily because hard drives can crash, but also because there may be unforeseen DRM hiccups years down the road. Most people don't listen to that advice, even though iTunes nags you to do just that. Most people don't care
Good advice in the 70s would be to handle your albums with extreme care, touch only the edges, and clean regularly with a special brush and solution. If you don't, your album will get wrecked. Most people didn't follow that advice. Most people don't care.
We may be music collectors, but for most people, their music collection today will end up in a box in a garage sale 10 years from now. So what's your problem with DRM again?
Funny, DRM is what made me *stop* buying CDs. It's because the studios started putting DRM nonsense on their CDs, which could interfere with my ability to use my music, that no longer buy CDs, except from independant bands not on major labels. Conversely, Apple's DRM may be annoying but it offers me a clear path to how I can get my music out of its current format so that I will be able to convert it to other formats if necessary for future use (burn it to a CD, rip the CD), so I am comfortable that despite the presence of DRM on the music I buy from the iTunes store, it has a forward migration path and I will continue to be able to use my music in an appropriate and lawful manner.
First of all, it's not really Apple's DRM, it's the copyright holders' DRM; they won't allow their works to be distributed on-line without it.
Second, the DRM used in iTunes is not really that annoying at all. Yes, if you look at it in the context of traditional software and the internet, DRM is really annoying and stupid. But if you look at it in the context of the record industry, it's way, way, way better than anything we've had to deal with in the past, including CDs that scratch, tapes that can't be copied without sound loss, and LPs that are hilariously easy to ruin.
Other than that, I agree with you. The copy-protected CDs are utterly useless to me, and it was the last straw as far as I'm concerned. But that turned out to be a very good thing, because:
Music has never been cheaper than it is today.
It's never been easier to discover new music, and you can purchase music it from your home.
Independent artists have more reach and exposure than ever before.
You can buy only the songs you like, not the album filler.
It's never been easier to ensure the longevity of your music collection, through backups etc.
And the record companies hate every one of those points. I'm not going to say that it's all thanks to DRM, but DRM has convinced the copyright holders to loosen their grips somewhat, so it's really a good thing. As the EMI Exec suggests, they would much rather go back to just selling mass marketed CDs. Actually, they'd much much rather go back to the days of fragile vinyl records, and recording equipment that was so rare and expensive that only the record companies could afford to even record music.
You buy music, legally, on-line. You burn that music, legally and easily, to CD. You make as many copies of that CD as you want for your own personal use, legally.
The only legal option before that was to go to a store a buy a physical CD, which scratches easily and will degrade in the long term.
The option before that was to purchase a cassette, which has poor sound quality, degrades in the short term, and cannot be copied without serious sound loss.
Before that, it was vinyl records that degrade in quality very quickly if you don't go to extreme measures (by today's standards) to protect them, and cannot be copied.
When you also include the fact that people can now discover and purchase music from their own home, and that they no longer have to purchase the whole album to get just the few good songs, how can you not conclude that the situation for the music consumer today is greater now than it's ever been, because of on-line music. And the only way copyright holders allow their works to be distributed on-line is with DRM. So, really, it's DRM that enables this new golden age.
I wish everything was sold on plain MP3, I think they would sell a lot more music that way, but I also don't think that will happen for a very long time.
So, if I buy a track off of iTunes, how exactly are my fair-use rights restricted any differently than in the past?
No, unfortunately the final release uses the old "notchy" scrolling. When the "Smooth Scrolling" option is enabled it simply provides a smooth transition between each notch, but I've always found that to be slow and laggy, even on the latest MacBook.
True pixel-resolution scrolling, on the other hand, allows you to scroll as little as one pixel at a time if you scroll slow enough. The end result is that it gives you much finer control over scrolling if you use trackpad scrolling, and the implementation was very good and very fast; I couldn't tell the difference between it and native OS X applications. It goes a long way towards making Firefox feel at home on OS X. And once you're used to it it's hard to go back, which is why I was quite disappointed when it was removed in RC1.
The problem was that one scrolling pixel in the browser translated to one line of text in the bookmark manager, causing it to scroll way too fast. If you're curious, see bug numbers 319078 and 347626 on bugzilla.
Firefox 1.5 users will be happy to know that Firefox 2.0 includes numerous performance and usability improvements over v1.5 specifically for the OS X platform, bringing the Mac version closer to the Windows version in terms of quality. You'll want to upgrade immediately. If you thought that Firefox 1.5 sucked, give 2.0 a try. Big improvements on the Mac.
If you're a fan of the smooth, pixel-resolution scrolling that comes with two-finger touchpad and Mighty Mouse scrolling, and you lament the lack of this smooth scrolling in Firefox, well lament no more! Smooth pixel-resolution scrolling was introduced in Firefox 2.0 Beta 2, and it rules. Unfortunately, this feature was removed because it made the bookmark manager scroll too quickly. If you're like me and do a lot of scrolling (and don't care about how the bookmark manager scrolls) you'll want to stick with Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 on OS X, like I do.
So it's really not about platform security but about platform popularity. If Mac had the same market share as Windows we'd see a Mac worm in this case now.
Well, not really. OS X doesn't have any sort of Autorun functionality like Windows, so it's far, far easier to write a simple worm like this one on Windows and have it be effective. You could write one for OS X, but it would never get executed automatically; hardly a worm.
Also, that fact that it's a python script doesn't say anything about its portability. It's obviously using Win32 bindings to read and write to mapped network shares.
We've reported on 149 portable players since 2004, all duds.
So, is there any non-emotional reason why I should bother to listen to these guys?
Back in 2004, after extensive research, I finally moved my large MP3 collection off of my linux server and on to my first MP3 player, an iPod, and it was a slam dunk. For me and my music collection it's all about iTunes, and back in 2004 the only alternative was WMP 9, which I'm sure we can all agree is complete junk, so the choice then was obvious. And since then Apple has continually updated and improved both the desktop and client software, while adding new features such as podcasts. As I said, for 2004 it was an absolute slam dunk.
Since then there have been lots of attempts to entice me to upgrade my old iPod; features like Photos, Video, FM Tuners, etc., from either Apple, 3rd parties, and other MP3 manufacturers, all of which have meant nothing to me. I've been quite determined to keep the old iPod until its hard drive dies. With all of the new competition on the market, including Microsoft's Zune, it's ironic that the only new product I've seen that has made me even consider upgrading is iTunes 7, with its gapless playback and additional playlist fields (Skip Count, Last Skipped, etc.) which aren't available on the old 3G iPod.
The other MP3 manufacturers have added lots of technical features to complete against the iPod, but in my opinion Apple still does the best job of addressing the needs of the real music fan.
Back in the eighties and early nineties Microsoft wasn't much of a software company. They had a (well deserved) reputation for simplistic, unsophisticated, poor quality software, and they certainly never would have survived without the truck loads of free money coming in from their MS-DOS royalties.
Their transformation into a real software company in the early nineties is well documented, and while the quality of their software greatly improved they were still burdened with a reputation for unsophisticated, poor quality software (some of it deserved, some not). As a result, I think Microsoft engineers tend to over-compensate for this reputation by dramatically over-designing and over-engineering most of their modern software. But what else can you do if you must still support Win9x running on an MS-DOS/FAT file system?
It's no surprise to me that their software would overshoot the hardware requirements. Simple, elegant solutions are just not in cards for Microsoft engineers.
People in the Apple camp have to admit that Steve Jobs set Apple up for this kind of criticism when he playfully trashed Microsoft for copying OS X and then immediately proceeded to unveil new features in OS X Leopard that aren't necessarily all that new (although many are new takes on older concepts that have yet to be taken to the mainstream for any number of reasons)
On the other hand, the Microsoft fans have to admit that Microsoft too has set themselves up for criticism by being so far behind on Vista that a lot of its most compelling features have been around on OS X (and other platforms) for two years or longer.
There isn't anything more to say than that; there isn't much point in defending either of them. Apple takes a swipe at Microsoft (rightfully so) and the Microsofties feel compelled to defend poor old Microsoft; they take a swipe at Apple (rightfully so) and the MacHeads feel compelled to defend poor underdog Apple. Boring.
... except with snakes! Yeah, throw some mother-fucking space-snakes on the Enterprise, plus, say, a cameo from Yoda and maybe Jack Black as an out-of-shape Han Solo.
An A-list Star Trek comedy would be the greatest thing ever.
My two year old iBook is as white as the day I bought it. Any marks can be easily cleaned.
The problem with the original MacBooks is a specific manufacturing defect. It's not dirt and it can't be cleaned. That's why they're replacing it on warranty.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple routinely patches much more serious bugs at the OS level so I don't understand what all the fuss is about. The fact remains that the security situation in Windows was so ludicrous that an unpatched Windows machine would be compromised within minutes of being connected to the internet. It forced Microsoft to drop everything and perform a security sweep of all their existing software, causing the highly visible delays in products such as Vista and Visual Studio 2005. And the security procedures in place now at Microsoft ensures that future software development will continue to proceed at a snail's pace.
It's simply about market share and nothing else. At the end of the month Windows' security problems will still exist while Mac users will continue to not have to worry about spyware and viruses, all of which really negates the stated intent of the Month of Apple Bugs exercise.
Still works for me. You can run this script from a local html file to check:
s how=ALL&psort=Affinity&callback=google&max=99999"> </script></head>
<html>
<head>
<script>
function google(a) {
document.write("<ol>");
for (i = 0; i < a.Body.Contacts.length; i++) {
document.write("<li>" + a.Body.Contacts[i].Email + "</li>");
}
document.write("</ol>");
}
</script>
<script src="http://docs.google.com/data/contacts?out=js&
<body>
Hello
</body>
</html>
Buy an old P-III tower for 50 bucks, set it up with Fedora Core 6, Apache, and a dynamic DNS service. Add a cron job to reboot the server every Sunday, and maybe enable LogWatch to email you daily status updates. Finally, place the tower on the bare concrete in your basement.
With this set up you can check on your house from anywhere at any time. If the server stops responding, your house has been destroyed.
First they come up with the hypothetical Mac "virus" that can hypothetically execute code if you manually download it and run it. And now it's the hypothetical BlackBerry malware that will hypothetically execute code if you manually download it and run it.
What an absolutely pathetic attempt at marketing from the once grand antivirus company.
Of the 14 million people who bought iPods this quarter (150,000 per day), the vast majority of them couldn't care to purchase the FM radio option, don't care about file formats (as long as it plays their existing MP3s), and don't use their iPod as a generic mass storage device.
Although I rarely use it, I agree that the mass storage feature is nice to have when you need it; I can't image how an MP3 player could ship without it.
Some techies seem to waste a lot of time fretting over issues such as file formats, DRM, and technical specs. Meanwhile, everyone else is too busy enjoying their music to give a rats ass.
If Microsoft wants to sell copyrighted music they have to do what the copyright holders want. That's where the crippled hardware and DRM comes from. And unlike Apple, Microsoft cannot negotiate from a position of strength; they will do what they're told, or they won't have a music store. Microsoft even went so far as to give Universal $1 from every Zune sold. Pathetic!
I hate how virtually every tech company bends over backwards for the entertainment industry. No one company, except for Apple, has stood up to entertainment industry in any substantial way, and as a result they and their customers suffer.
Firefox's original name was "Phoenix", as the browser was meant to rise from the ruins of the old Netscape/Mozilla application suite. The Phoenix BIOS guys complained that people would confuse Phoenix the browser with Phoenix the BIOS, so they changed the name to Firebird, which is still quite a bit like a phoenix. Then the Firebird database guys complained for the same reason. Thus the name Firefox was born, a trademark now vigorously defended by the Mozilla organization.
It didn't work, though. My first thought when I read this article was that it's some Mozilla project. The Firebird guys would have been better off renaming their project, since few people had heard of it anyway. And my new computer doesn't even have a BIOS.
It's a shame you understand neither iTunes nor music in general.
The people who are interested in cultivating a music collection will burn their purchased tracks to CD, just as if they had bought them from a record store. Not only is it easy to do this in iTunes, it actually nags you to do it.
But most people don't, because most people aren't interested in cultivating a long lasting music collection. For most people, the music they buy now will be useless to them in a few years whether they buy it from iTunes or on CD or any other format. CDs scratch, tapes wear out, stuff gets lost, and peoples' tastes fade; most of their music will end up in a box in garage sale.
You buy only the tracks you want, from your own home, and burn your own CD.
Or, for twice the price, you go down to the record store a buy a CD.
Yes, one of those choices is stupid. The other choice, the record companies hate.
Yeah, but the outrageous part of the story is that existing MSN tracks with not play on the Zune. That Zune tracks won't play (easily) on legacy devices is kind of a given.
Sure, you can drive down to the record store and buy a CD.
Or you can discover music on-line, buy only the tracks you want, from the comfort of your own home, for half the price, and you burn your own CD. It's your choice. Both ways you end up with the same thing, a CD of music. Both ways are legal. The record companies certainly want you to drive down to the record store...
But it's harder to defend buying music on-line when Microsoft does something so thoroughly inept as this. It puts the focus on the DRM, which they shouldn't, it absolutely screws their soon-to-be-former partners (business as usual for MS), and in the end it demonstrates how much Apple has got Microsoft to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. One thing is clear, before the Zune can "kill" the iPod it will have to kill all the other players first.
I wouldn't touch a Zune with a 10 foot clown pole.
Top 10 Gaming Eras, In no particular order:
1. The NES Era - That was a great era.
2. The "Vision" Era (Colecovision, Intellivison) - Ooh, that was a good era, too.
3. The PS2 Era - Fantastic era!
4. The Atari 2600 Era - A fundamental era.
5. The 16-bit Era (SNES, Genesis) - Who could forget that era!
6. The 32-bit Era (PS1, N64) - At least twice as good as the 16-bit era.
And let's not forget those awkward transition eras:
6. The Turbografx 16 Era - Not really 16-bit, but still incrementally better than the NES.
7. The Saturn Era - Too soon for 32-bit?
8. The Vectrex Era - Too late for monochrome vector graphics?
9. The 360 Era - Only time will tell.
And finally...
10. The future Era - Where all of today's problems become nostalgic fodder for tomorrow's old people.
The fundamental purpose of Copyright law is to allow a creator to control how their works are disseminated. Obviously, Apple wants you to buy their hardware if you want to run their software, and they're perfectly within their rights to do so.
Say Chevy offers Radiohead $1 Million to use one of their recordings in a stupid truck ad, and Radiohead refuses. By your logic, Chevy should then have the right to use the recording anyway, because since Radiohead refused to sell them the song they're not losing any money.
You may think it's right, but hundreds of years of copyright law would disagree.
Sorry, but that's an asinine comment.
Here's how: Click, click, burn.You've got it completely wrong. People know damn well that their music only plays in iTunes, and they know damn well that they can burn their music to CD for backup purposes. Most people don't care.
Since when have the record companies guaranteed that the music you purchased will play forever? They haven't. But the ultimate reality is that music purchased from iTunes can be backed up permanently far easier than has ever been possible with other music formats. That's important to people like you and me who buy music to collect music, people who cherish their music collections. But you and I are not most people. Most people don't care.
Good advice today would be to burn all of your purchased music to hard copy, primarily because hard drives can crash, but also because there may be unforeseen DRM hiccups years down the road. Most people don't listen to that advice, even though iTunes nags you to do just that. Most people don't care
Good advice in the 70s would be to handle your albums with extreme care, touch only the edges, and clean regularly with a special brush and solution. If you don't, your album will get wrecked. Most people didn't follow that advice. Most people don't care.
We may be music collectors, but for most people, their music collection today will end up in a box in a garage sale 10 years from now. So what's your problem with DRM again?
First of all, it's not really Apple's DRM, it's the copyright holders' DRM; they won't allow their works to be distributed on-line without it.
Second, the DRM used in iTunes is not really that annoying at all. Yes, if you look at it in the context of traditional software and the internet, DRM is really annoying and stupid. But if you look at it in the context of the record industry, it's way, way, way better than anything we've had to deal with in the past, including CDs that scratch, tapes that can't be copied without sound loss, and LPs that are hilariously easy to ruin.
Other than that, I agree with you. The copy-protected CDs are utterly useless to me, and it was the last straw as far as I'm concerned. But that turned out to be a very good thing, because:
And the record companies hate every one of those points. I'm not going to say that it's all thanks to DRM, but DRM has convinced the copyright holders to loosen their grips somewhat, so it's really a good thing. As the EMI Exec suggests, they would much rather go back to just selling mass marketed CDs. Actually, they'd much much rather go back to the days of fragile vinyl records, and recording equipment that was so rare and expensive that only the record companies could afford to even record music.
On-line music with DRM does not bypass fair use.
You buy music, legally, on-line. You burn that music, legally and easily, to CD. You make as many copies of that CD as you want for your own personal use, legally.
The only legal option before that was to go to a store a buy a physical CD, which scratches easily and will degrade in the long term.
The option before that was to purchase a cassette, which has poor sound quality, degrades in the short term, and cannot be copied without serious sound loss.
Before that, it was vinyl records that degrade in quality very quickly if you don't go to extreme measures (by today's standards) to protect them, and cannot be copied.
When you also include the fact that people can now discover and purchase music from their own home, and that they no longer have to purchase the whole album to get just the few good songs, how can you not conclude that the situation for the music consumer today is greater now than it's ever been, because of on-line music. And the only way copyright holders allow their works to be distributed on-line is with DRM. So, really, it's DRM that enables this new golden age.
I wish everything was sold on plain MP3, I think they would sell a lot more music that way, but I also don't think that will happen for a very long time.
So, if I buy a track off of iTunes, how exactly are my fair-use rights restricted any differently than in the past?
No, unfortunately the final release uses the old "notchy" scrolling. When the "Smooth Scrolling" option is enabled it simply provides a smooth transition between each notch, but I've always found that to be slow and laggy, even on the latest MacBook.
True pixel-resolution scrolling, on the other hand, allows you to scroll as little as one pixel at a time if you scroll slow enough. The end result is that it gives you much finer control over scrolling if you use trackpad scrolling, and the implementation was very good and very fast; I couldn't tell the difference between it and native OS X applications. It goes a long way towards making Firefox feel at home on OS X. And once you're used to it it's hard to go back, which is why I was quite disappointed when it was removed in RC1.
The problem was that one scrolling pixel in the browser translated to one line of text in the bookmark manager, causing it to scroll way too fast. If you're curious, see bug numbers 319078 and 347626 on bugzilla.
No, I'm talking about the pixel-resolution trackpad scrolling. Firefox's old "Smooth Scrolling" option has never worked well on OS X.
Well, not really. OS X doesn't have any sort of Autorun functionality like Windows, so it's far, far easier to write a simple worm like this one on Windows and have it be effective. You could write one for OS X, but it would never get executed automatically; hardly a worm.
Also, that fact that it's a python script doesn't say anything about its portability. It's obviously using Win32 bindings to read and write to mapped network shares.
So, is there any non-emotional reason why I should bother to listen to these guys?
Back in 2004, after extensive research, I finally moved my large MP3 collection off of my linux server and on to my first MP3 player, an iPod, and it was a slam dunk. For me and my music collection it's all about iTunes, and back in 2004 the only alternative was WMP 9, which I'm sure we can all agree is complete junk, so the choice then was obvious. And since then Apple has continually updated and improved both the desktop and client software, while adding new features such as podcasts. As I said, for 2004 it was an absolute slam dunk.
Since then there have been lots of attempts to entice me to upgrade my old iPod; features like Photos, Video, FM Tuners, etc., from either Apple, 3rd parties, and other MP3 manufacturers, all of which have meant nothing to me. I've been quite determined to keep the old iPod until its hard drive dies. With all of the new competition on the market, including Microsoft's Zune, it's ironic that the only new product I've seen that has made me even consider upgrading is iTunes 7, with its gapless playback and additional playlist fields (Skip Count, Last Skipped, etc.) which aren't available on the old 3G iPod.
The other MP3 manufacturers have added lots of technical features to complete against the iPod, but in my opinion Apple still does the best job of addressing the needs of the real music fan.
I have a theory.
Back in the eighties and early nineties Microsoft wasn't much of a software company. They had a (well deserved) reputation for simplistic, unsophisticated, poor quality software, and they certainly never would have survived without the truck loads of free money coming in from their MS-DOS royalties.
Their transformation into a real software company in the early nineties is well documented, and while the quality of their software greatly improved they were still burdened with a reputation for unsophisticated, poor quality software (some of it deserved, some not). As a result, I think Microsoft engineers tend to over-compensate for this reputation by dramatically over-designing and over-engineering most of their modern software. But what else can you do if you must still support Win9x running on an MS-DOS/FAT file system?
It's no surprise to me that their software would overshoot the hardware requirements. Simple, elegant solutions are just not in cards for Microsoft engineers.
People in the Apple camp have to admit that Steve Jobs set Apple up for this kind of criticism when he playfully trashed Microsoft for copying OS X and then immediately proceeded to unveil new features in OS X Leopard that aren't necessarily all that new (although many are new takes on older concepts that have yet to be taken to the mainstream for any number of reasons)
On the other hand, the Microsoft fans have to admit that Microsoft too has set themselves up for criticism by being so far behind on Vista that a lot of its most compelling features have been around on OS X (and other platforms) for two years or longer.
There isn't anything more to say than that; there isn't much point in defending either of them. Apple takes a swipe at Microsoft (rightfully so) and the Microsofties feel compelled to defend poor old Microsoft; they take a swipe at Apple (rightfully so) and the MacHeads feel compelled to defend poor underdog Apple. Boring.
... except with snakes! Yeah, throw some mother-fucking space-snakes on the Enterprise, plus, say, a cameo from Yoda and maybe Jack Black as an out-of-shape Han Solo.
An A-list Star Trek comedy would be the greatest thing ever.
My two year old iBook is as white as the day I bought it. Any marks can be easily cleaned.
The problem with the original MacBooks is a specific manufacturing defect. It's not dirt and it can't be cleaned. That's why they're replacing it on warranty.