The Core Duo cannot do the same things the Athlon 64 X2 can. Largely because (gasp) it cannot run 64bit code.
What the hell is the point of this comparison?
You're correct, of course. However, many of us don't need to run 64-bit code. You can completely ignore this, because any 32-bit CPU doesn't fit your needs, but please try to understand that other people need different things.
There is none of the fancy virtualization going on?
Correct, there is none of the fancy virtualization going on. However, once Windows and Linux work well natively on Mac hardware, it will be much easier to get virtualization working on the same hardware.
What's happening now is for geeks, not for masses.
By "can't be burned to DVD-R," I meant that there is no way to use a DVD-R disc to watch an iTMS video on an ordinary DVD player. Apple graciously allows that for music files and CD-Rs.
It seems you are correct. I had assumed iDVD and iMovie would be able to open DRM'd videos, just like they can open DRM'd audio, but they won't do it.
The Multipass version of the Daily Show gives me 16 episodes (four weeks at four episodes per week) for $10, or $0.625 per episode. They're only $2 if you buy them individually. I haven't looked at other shows like Lost, so I'm not sure how the prices compare.
you get a poor-quality video file
It's not HD or anything, but it's certainly better quality than I get from over-the-air TV. Played on a 19" CRT, I really don't notice the quality being an issue. If I had a projector, I'd probably notice, and for a full movie I'd want better quality. Don't assume the quality will be unacceptable until you've seen it. I find it perfectly adequate, but if you've seen it and think it looks bad, then you have a legitimate reason not to buy it.
that can be played only on a limited number of computers with QuickTime/iTunes
Yes, you can't play it on Linux (unless you can hack something together with WINE). Windows and Mac only. As for the limited number, I haven't run into the limit yet.
and only on an iPod (no other portable players).
If you have some other portable video player, then obviously you'd only want content that it can play. Most of us don't have one.
I own a Mac and an iPod, but torrents completely trounce any paid content on quality and flexibility.
And price. But iTMS wins for convenience and legality.
At least the iTunes Music Store lets you burn your AACs to CD; by contrast, purchased video files can't be burned to DVD-R.
Huh? What do you mean? Of course you can burn them to DVD-R...
The reason is simple. Linux is shaping up to be better and better at being user friendly and desktop quality. Apple will have to compete with that.
You mean, just like they currently have to compete with Windows? Yeah, and Apple will continue to do that too. You know how? By selling their own computers running their own software, just like they always have.
Geez, everybody thinks that just because Apple is switching to Intel processors, suddenly their whole business model is going to change. Not bloody likely.
That's because your computer wasn't really playing the music - your CD-ROM drive was playing the music, all by itself, and there's a little grey wire that runs from the CD-ROM drive directly into your sound card, completely bypassing the CPU.
Some CD-ROM drives have two buttons on the front, instead of just a single eject button. If it has two buttons, the left button is a play/next track button and the right button is stop/eject. They'll usually have a headphone jack on the front as well (which only works for CD audio, not anything else from the computer). Take a CD-ROM drive that has two buttons, an AT (not ATX) power supply, and a pair of speakers plugged into the headphone jack. Pop in an audio CD and hit the left button. Voila, you've got a CD player, without a computer.
Note that iTunes, modern versions of Windows Media Player, etc. read the audio data off the CD and process it through the software; they don't tell the CD player to play the CD directly. This also means you can play CDs in iTunes/WMP if that little grey wire is missing.
When you plug headphones into a Mac, the audio is rerouted away from the speakers in software, not hardware. This allows things like USB speakers to work, so when you plug headphones in, it mutes the USB speakers. So, in theory, this software should be able to override that and always use the built-in speakers even if headphones are plugged in. (I doubt the current feature has this feature, and it probably wouldn't be easy to implement, but it should be possible.)
There's an even bigger problem with this: namely, that as soon as business *complies* with these things, it'll be perfectly legal for them to spam you.
Let's cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we? If we can get to the point where all spam follows these rules, it will be a lot easier to do something about it. In the mean time, these rules make it easier to prosecute violators, which is very helpful right now.
Creationism is based on an idea that has no scientific basis, i.e. it's based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. However, the rest of Creationism is an attempt to build a scientific model, based on actual observable data, that explains what has happened since the time of Creation, filling in the details that the Bible omits. Whether the Creator was God or millions of fairies is of course a non-scientific issue (which is why ID avoids it), but the underlying premise of Creationism also includes things like the age of the earth (based on genealogies listed in the Bible), a single original super-continent ("let the water... be gathered to one place", see Genesis 1:9), volcanic activity at the time of Noah's Flood ("the fountains of the great deep", see Genesis 7:11) and of course the Flood itself, and other details that are taken from Scripture. Simply saying "we were created by a supernatural power" does not imply these other things, and since that claim itself cannot be tested (none of us was there to observe what happened), ID falls completely outside the realm of science. Creationism has a religious basis but has actual science built on top of it.
Is that any clearer?
Yes, most ID proponents are really Creationists trying to remove the religious part of Creationism and get it accepted as a non-religious idea. The problem is, they've removed the science part as well. What's left behind is a philosophy that actually discourages scientific exploration, which I believe runs contrary to God's intention for us.
Since when is Intelligent Design/Creationism a "theory"? It doesn't even deserve the reputation as theory. Theories are rational, testable and predictive. ID/Creationism is fantasy. Evolution can offer predictions about the natural world. What can ID/Creationism "predict"?
First off, I was surprised to discover that Creationism and Intelligent Design are so different.
Creationism starts with the idea that God created the universe and everything in it about 6,000 years ago, and there was a worldwide Flood around 4,000 years ago, as described in the Bible. Starting with that premise, it seeks to explain the mechanics of how the events since the time of Creation have occurred (i.e. how the Flood occurred, what other catastrophic geological events happened at the same time, what happened to the climate since then, etc.), since the Bible is very sparse on details. Creationism predicts that you'll find evidence of a pre-Flood tropical climate in all parts of the world, that you'll find evidence of a massive flood all over the world (including lots of fossils), that you will not find trees more than 4,000 years old, and you should find evidence that humans lived at the same time as extinct animals such as dinosaurs. Some of these predictions have proved true, some have not. The validity of radiometric dating is a pretty major sticking point, since anything accurately dated at over 6,000 years old breaks the Creation model, so either the model is wrong or the dating method is flawed; obviously Creationists believe the latter.
Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is the philosophy that life is too complicated to have evolved by chance, and therefore must have been created by a supernatural Designer (whose identity and origin is beyond the scope of ID). Essentially, ID says there cannot be a natural explanation for the existence of certain things (though exactly which things these are doesn't seem to be clearly defined), and so looking for a natural explanation is a pointless waste of time. It should be pretty obvious that this is not a scientific idea, and it's not coherent enough to be called a religion either; philosophy is the only category I've heard it put in that really seems to fit. Although I agree with the basic premise of ID (that life cannot have evolved by chance), I disagree with its conclusion (that trying to find natural explanations for things is a waste of time), largely because throughout history, natural explanations have been found for all kinds of things that had previously thought to have no natural explanation.
I'm a Creationist, and I think ID is crap. ID has nothing to do with science, it's a philosophy that says life is too complicated to have happened by chance and therefore there must have been supernatural intervention (God, FSM, etc.). I don't really have a problem with someone believing that, but it's not science, and should not be taught in a scientific context in schools.
And yet I do believe that God created the universe and everything in it less than 10,000 years ago. Furthermore, I believe that the search for evidence supporting this hypothesis is scientific, and this is a topic that is appropriate for public education. Learning how to interpret scientific evidence within different presupposed frameworks (i.e. the old-earth/uniformitarian/evolution view vs. the young-earth/catastrophism/Creation view), seeing how the same facts can be made to fit in both models even if you believe one of the models is wrong, is a good exercise, because it can help you recognize bias.
Again, "Intelligent Design" as it is currently being promoted is a load of nonsense.
No, you cant. Religion is the belief in in the supernatural. Science only only concerns itself with demonstratable conjecture to describe a natural phenomenon.
As another poster pointed out, since science is not concerned with the supernatural, there is no conflict here.
Most people who construct the "Choose religion or science" frame do so (as I do) because I believe that once someone accepts that a supernatural world exists, they abandon their ability to pursue science.
History has shown that your belief is a load of crap.
If your willing to accept the supernatural -- what purpose does reason and logic have in the pursuit of science (that which is natural)?
The Bible teaches that God is consistent. Our universe is governed by both spiritual and physical laws, and we are encouraged to try to gain an understanding of both, because by better understanding Creation, we can better understand our Creator.
Destroying religion as necessary to civilization as plumbing and not cohabitating with one's livestock.
Civilization has been around for thousands of years. A couple hundred years ago people used outhouses. Like another poster, I'm amused that you would try to push your beliefs on the rest of the world, while accusing religious people of doing the same.
Religion is (to put it mildly) a bother and a bore, and Im tired of a world populated by masses who believe their supernatural deity is The Most Great.
Perhaps you should ignore it?
Religion keeps us from taking ownership of Humanity's OUR OWN PROBLEMS.
I'm not sure what you mean. The Bible makes it very clear that humanity has problems, and helps us to understand why we have these problems, while giving good advice on how to deal with them.
Keeps us from realizing that WE ALONE are responsible for the state of our community.
The Bible agrees with you on this. We alone are responsible for our own sins.
Religion is a manner of absolving oneself of responsiblity ("I give myself to you oh lord").
On the contrary! Becoming a Christian doesn't mean absolving yourself of responsibility, it means taking on additional responsibility! The additional responsibility to honor God, follow His teachings, and keep His commandments. Giving yourself to God doesn't mean you're no longer responsible for your own actions, it means you're no longer responsible for planning your life. It means not worrying about what's coming next, because you can trust God to make sure you won't be placed in a situation you can't handle with His help., It means not getting angry at people who cut you off in traffic, because God is in control of your commute, not you. It means not worrying about whether or not I get the job I just applied for, because if God wants me to be there, He'll make sure I get the job, and knowing that if I don't get the job, it's because He has a different plan for me that's even better than that would have been. It means having a relationship with a perfect, loving, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God who wants what's best for me and who knows far better than I ever could exactly what that means.
Somehow people "know" not to pray for that kind of thing, despite their professed belief in the power of prayer.
I believe in the power of prayer - I just don't believe that prayer's power has anything to do with healing sick people. Rather, the power of prayer is that it allows us to communicate with the Almighty, who is a sentient Being with His own master plan for each of His children.
In other words, prayer doesn't cause miracles to happen; God causes miracles to happen, but often disguises them. For example, a year or so ago the pastor at my church got some kind of rash from something - he thinks it was either poison oak or an allergic reaction to some pesticide or something. Doesn't sound like a great miracle, does it? Certainly doesn't sound like much fun. Except that when he went to see a doctor to get the rash taken care of, the doctor noticed something else, and he was diagnosed with a form of cancer. Because it was caught so early, it was treatable, and he is now fully recovered. Is this solid proof of God's intervention? Absolutely not, but in the lack of any evidence to the contrary, I choose to believe that God was involved.
There is a widespread belief that God will punish you if you don't properly worship Him (or Her). But we have many conflicting claims on just how this worship is to be performed, and most of those claims include punishment if you pick the wrong style of worship.
For the record, the Christian Bible doesn't say you'll be punished if you fail to properly worship God; it says you'll be punished if you commit a sin (which every one of us has, because we were born with a sinful nature) unless you believe in Jesus Christ and accept Him as Lord. It's important to note that the punishment - which really just amounts to eternal separation from God - is not for a failure to worship correctly or a failure to believe in God or a failure to accept Christ's salvation, it's a punishment for sins that all of us have already committed. This was not God's original design; Lucifer a.k.a. Satan messed it up, and God has mercifully offered us an alternative.
Worship comes freely out of love and awe. If you don't love God, you aren't expected to worship Him, and if you do love God, there are no specific rules for how to worship Him for the same reason that there are no specific rules for what kind of flowers to buy your wife and when you're supposed to give them to her.
Most likely, all the systems they tested seemed to work fine. Once they've got thousands of them being used by theousands of different people, minor defects become noticeable on some machines but not others.
What bothers me about the single menu issue the most is that it is something that Apple could easily make a display preferences type option and just keep the default like it is now.
It would be a lot harder than you think. All Mac applications are written with a single system-wide menubar in mind, which changes based on context; you could try to hack multiple menubars in by caching the menubar changes and associating them with whatever the front-most document window was at the time of the change, and force any click on a menubar in a background window to bring that window to the front, but how would you handle applications that offer useful functionality from the menubar when no windows are open? How would you handle menubars that change based on criteria other than which document window is frontmost? If you've got two windows open with identical menubars, and the application changes the menubar for some reason, you can only assume the change applies to the frontmost window, but if the user tries to click on a menu in the background window that shouldn't exist anymore, the menu would disappear as soon as that window is brought to the front, and the whole thing would be a confusing and inconsistent experience for the user. Not to mention that the 95% of Mac users who like it better the way it is would stage protests.
Any serious Mac user mostly just uses the menubar for reference anyway. If you want to actually get something done, that's what keyboard shortcuts are for.
I remember the difference between Win95 at work and Mac OS 8.5 at home pretty clearly; the previous poster is right. Mac OS was very far from perfect, but it was a damn sight better than Windows, which started becoming unusable after about 6 hours of uptime. I had to reboot twice every day, once at the beginning of my shift and once during my lunch break; if I skipped the lunchtime reboot, it usually wouldn't make it through the rest of the day before I'd get a BSOD.
My experience with Win98 at another company later was the same. NT4, however, was rock solid.
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I just got a new 2.0 Core Duo iMac and it feels a lot more powerful than my old P4 2.8 GHz Sony PC.
How much RAM in each system? What kind of video card? Shared AGP or dedicated video memory?
The Core Duo cannot do the same things the Athlon 64 X2 can. Largely because (gasp) it cannot run 64bit code.
What the hell is the point of this comparison?
You're correct, of course. However, many of us don't need to run 64-bit code. You can completely ignore this, because any 32-bit CPU doesn't fit your needs, but please try to understand that other people need different things.
Wow, I've never seen "yadda yadda yadda" abbreviated before. I'm impressed!
I like your signature. hehe
There is none of the fancy virtualization going on?
Correct, there is none of the fancy virtualization going on. However, once Windows and Linux work well natively on Mac hardware, it will be much easier to get virtualization working on the same hardware.
What's happening now is for geeks, not for masses.
I live in the Portland (Oregon) area; most of our electricity here comes from hydroelectric dams.
By "can't be burned to DVD-R," I meant that there is no way to use a DVD-R disc to watch an iTMS video on an ordinary DVD player. Apple graciously allows that for music files and CD-Rs.
It seems you are correct. I had assumed iDVD and iMovie would be able to open DRM'd videos, just like they can open DRM'd audio, but they won't do it.
For $2,
The Multipass version of the Daily Show gives me 16 episodes (four weeks at four episodes per week) for $10, or $0.625 per episode. They're only $2 if you buy them individually. I haven't looked at other shows like Lost, so I'm not sure how the prices compare.
you get a poor-quality video file
It's not HD or anything, but it's certainly better quality than I get from over-the-air TV. Played on a 19" CRT, I really don't notice the quality being an issue. If I had a projector, I'd probably notice, and for a full movie I'd want better quality. Don't assume the quality will be unacceptable until you've seen it. I find it perfectly adequate, but if you've seen it and think it looks bad, then you have a legitimate reason not to buy it.
that can be played only on a limited number of computers with QuickTime/iTunes
Yes, you can't play it on Linux (unless you can hack something together with WINE). Windows and Mac only. As for the limited number, I haven't run into the limit yet.
and only on an iPod (no other portable players).
If you have some other portable video player, then obviously you'd only want content that it can play. Most of us don't have one.
I own a Mac and an iPod, but torrents completely trounce any paid content on quality and flexibility.
And price. But iTMS wins for convenience and legality.
At least the iTunes Music Store lets you burn your AACs to CD; by contrast, purchased video files can't be burned to DVD-R.
Huh? What do you mean? Of course you can burn them to DVD-R...
The reason is simple. Linux is shaping up to be better and better at being user friendly and desktop quality. Apple will have to compete with that.
You mean, just like they currently have to compete with Windows? Yeah, and Apple will continue to do that too. You know how? By selling their own computers running their own software, just like they always have.
Geez, everybody thinks that just because Apple is switching to Intel processors, suddenly their whole business model is going to change. Not bloody likely.
On my iBook G4/800 running OSX 10.4.6, there's a menu to select the output device, but it's disabled so I can't change it.
That's because your computer wasn't really playing the music - your CD-ROM drive was playing the music, all by itself, and there's a little grey wire that runs from the CD-ROM drive directly into your sound card, completely bypassing the CPU.
Some CD-ROM drives have two buttons on the front, instead of just a single eject button. If it has two buttons, the left button is a play/next track button and the right button is stop/eject. They'll usually have a headphone jack on the front as well (which only works for CD audio, not anything else from the computer). Take a CD-ROM drive that has two buttons, an AT (not ATX) power supply, and a pair of speakers plugged into the headphone jack. Pop in an audio CD and hit the left button. Voila, you've got a CD player, without a computer.
Note that iTunes, modern versions of Windows Media Player, etc. read the audio data off the CD and process it through the software; they don't tell the CD player to play the CD directly. This also means you can play CDs in iTunes/WMP if that little grey wire is missing.
When you plug headphones into a Mac, the audio is rerouted away from the speakers in software, not hardware. This allows things like USB speakers to work, so when you plug headphones in, it mutes the USB speakers. So, in theory, this software should be able to override that and always use the built-in speakers even if headphones are plugged in. (I doubt the current feature has this feature, and it probably wouldn't be easy to implement, but it should be possible.)
I'm hoping they'll use the fine money to fund investigation and prosecution of more spammers, instead of using tax money to do it.
There's an even bigger problem with this: namely, that as soon as business *complies* with these things, it'll be perfectly legal for them to spam you.
Let's cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we? If we can get to the point where all spam follows these rules, it will be a lot easier to do something about it. In the mean time, these rules make it easier to prosecute violators, which is very helpful right now.
Here's AiG's list of articles on the topic.
Creationism is based on an idea that has no scientific basis, i.e. it's based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. However, the rest of Creationism is an attempt to build a scientific model, based on actual observable data, that explains what has happened since the time of Creation, filling in the details that the Bible omits. Whether the Creator was God or millions of fairies is of course a non-scientific issue (which is why ID avoids it), but the underlying premise of Creationism also includes things like the age of the earth (based on genealogies listed in the Bible), a single original super-continent ("let the water... be gathered to one place", see Genesis 1:9), volcanic activity at the time of Noah's Flood ("the fountains of the great deep", see Genesis 7:11) and of course the Flood itself, and other details that are taken from Scripture. Simply saying "we were created by a supernatural power" does not imply these other things, and since that claim itself cannot be tested (none of us was there to observe what happened), ID falls completely outside the realm of science. Creationism has a religious basis but has actual science built on top of it.
Is that any clearer?
Yes, most ID proponents are really Creationists trying to remove the religious part of Creationism and get it accepted as a non-religious idea. The problem is, they've removed the science part as well. What's left behind is a philosophy that actually discourages scientific exploration, which I believe runs contrary to God's intention for us.
Since when is Intelligent Design/Creationism a "theory"? It doesn't even deserve the reputation as theory. Theories are rational, testable and predictive. ID/Creationism is fantasy. Evolution can offer predictions about the natural world. What can ID/Creationism "predict"?
:-)
First off, I was surprised to discover that Creationism and Intelligent Design are so different.
Creationism starts with the idea that God created the universe and everything in it about 6,000 years ago, and there was a worldwide Flood around 4,000 years ago, as described in the Bible. Starting with that premise, it seeks to explain the mechanics of how the events since the time of Creation have occurred (i.e. how the Flood occurred, what other catastrophic geological events happened at the same time, what happened to the climate since then, etc.), since the Bible is very sparse on details. Creationism predicts that you'll find evidence of a pre-Flood tropical climate in all parts of the world, that you'll find evidence of a massive flood all over the world (including lots of fossils), that you will not find trees more than 4,000 years old, and you should find evidence that humans lived at the same time as extinct animals such as dinosaurs. Some of these predictions have proved true, some have not. The validity of radiometric dating is a pretty major sticking point, since anything accurately dated at over 6,000 years old breaks the Creation model, so either the model is wrong or the dating method is flawed; obviously Creationists believe the latter.
Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is the philosophy that life is too complicated to have evolved by chance, and therefore must have been created by a supernatural Designer (whose identity and origin is beyond the scope of ID). Essentially, ID says there cannot be a natural explanation for the existence of certain things (though exactly which things these are doesn't seem to be clearly defined), and so looking for a natural explanation is a pointless waste of time. It should be pretty obvious that this is not a scientific idea, and it's not coherent enough to be called a religion either; philosophy is the only category I've heard it put in that really seems to fit. Although I agree with the basic premise of ID (that life cannot have evolved by chance), I disagree with its conclusion (that trying to find natural explanations for things is a waste of time), largely because throughout history, natural explanations have been found for all kinds of things that had previously thought to have no natural explanation.
Please correct me if I've misstated something.
I'm a Creationist, and I think ID is crap. ID has nothing to do with science, it's a philosophy that says life is too complicated to have happened by chance and therefore there must have been supernatural intervention (God, FSM, etc.). I don't really have a problem with someone believing that, but it's not science, and should not be taught in a scientific context in schools.
And yet I do believe that God created the universe and everything in it less than 10,000 years ago. Furthermore, I believe that the search for evidence supporting this hypothesis is scientific, and this is a topic that is appropriate for public education. Learning how to interpret scientific evidence within different presupposed frameworks (i.e. the old-earth/uniformitarian/evolution view vs. the young-earth/catastrophism/Creation view), seeing how the same facts can be made to fit in both models even if you believe one of the models is wrong, is a good exercise, because it can help you recognize bias.
Again, "Intelligent Design" as it is currently being promoted is a load of nonsense.
Notice I said love and awe; Neither alone is grounds for worship, as you so astutely pointed out.
The master-slave relationship is precisely what God wanted to avoid, in giving us free will. Love that is coerced isn't love at all.
No, you cant. Religion is the belief in in the supernatural.
Science only only concerns itself with demonstratable conjecture to describe a natural phenomenon.
As another poster pointed out, since science is not concerned with the supernatural, there is no conflict here.
Most people who construct the "Choose religion or science" frame do so (as I do) because I believe that once someone accepts that a supernatural world exists, they abandon their ability to pursue science.
History has shown that your belief is a load of crap.
If your willing to accept the supernatural -- what purpose does reason and logic have in the pursuit of science (that which is natural)?
The Bible teaches that God is consistent. Our universe is governed by both spiritual and physical laws, and we are encouraged to try to gain an understanding of both, because by better understanding Creation, we can better understand our Creator.
Destroying religion as necessary to civilization as plumbing and not cohabitating with one's livestock.
Civilization has been around for thousands of years. A couple hundred years ago people used outhouses. Like another poster, I'm amused that you would try to push your beliefs on the rest of the world, while accusing religious people of doing the same.
Religion is (to put it mildly) a bother and a bore, and Im tired of a world populated by masses who believe their supernatural deity is The Most Great.
Perhaps you should ignore it?
Religion keeps us from taking ownership of Humanity's OUR OWN PROBLEMS.
I'm not sure what you mean. The Bible makes it very clear that humanity has problems, and helps us to understand why we have these problems, while giving good advice on how to deal with them.
Keeps us from realizing that WE ALONE are responsible for the state of our community.
The Bible agrees with you on this. We alone are responsible for our own sins.
Religion is a manner of absolving oneself of responsiblity ("I give myself to you oh lord").
On the contrary! Becoming a Christian doesn't mean absolving yourself of responsibility, it means taking on additional responsibility! The additional responsibility to honor God, follow His teachings, and keep His commandments. Giving yourself to God doesn't mean you're no longer responsible for your own actions, it means you're no longer responsible for planning your life. It means not worrying about what's coming next, because you can trust God to make sure you won't be placed in a situation you can't handle with His help., It means not getting angry at people who cut you off in traffic, because God is in control of your commute, not you. It means not worrying about whether or not I get the job I just applied for, because if God wants me to be there, He'll make sure I get the job, and knowing that if I don't get the job, it's because He has a different plan for me that's even better than that would have been. It means having a relationship with a perfect, loving, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God who wants what's best for me and who knows far better than I ever could exactly what that means.
Somehow people "know" not to pray for that kind of thing, despite their professed belief in the power of prayer.
I believe in the power of prayer - I just don't believe that prayer's power has anything to do with healing sick people. Rather, the power of prayer is that it allows us to communicate with the Almighty, who is a sentient Being with His own master plan for each of His children.
In other words, prayer doesn't cause miracles to happen; God causes miracles to happen, but often disguises them. For example, a year or so ago the pastor at my church got some kind of rash from something - he thinks it was either poison oak or an allergic reaction to some pesticide or something. Doesn't sound like a great miracle, does it? Certainly doesn't sound like much fun. Except that when he went to see a doctor to get the rash taken care of, the doctor noticed something else, and he was diagnosed with a form of cancer. Because it was caught so early, it was treatable, and he is now fully recovered. Is this solid proof of God's intervention? Absolutely not, but in the lack of any evidence to the contrary, I choose to believe that God was involved.
There is a widespread belief that God will punish you if you don't properly worship Him (or Her). But we have many conflicting claims on just how this worship is to be performed, and most of those claims include punishment if you pick the wrong style of worship.
For the record, the Christian Bible doesn't say you'll be punished if you fail to properly worship God; it says you'll be punished if you commit a sin (which every one of us has, because we were born with a sinful nature) unless you believe in Jesus Christ and accept Him as Lord. It's important to note that the punishment - which really just amounts to eternal separation from God - is not for a failure to worship correctly or a failure to believe in God or a failure to accept Christ's salvation, it's a punishment for sins that all of us have already committed. This was not God's original design; Lucifer a.k.a. Satan messed it up, and God has mercifully offered us an alternative.
Worship comes freely out of love and awe. If you don't love God, you aren't expected to worship Him, and if you do love God, there are no specific rules for how to worship Him for the same reason that there are no specific rules for what kind of flowers to buy your wife and when you're supposed to give them to her.
Yes, it is that hard.
Most likely, all the systems they tested seemed to work fine. Once they've got thousands of them being used by theousands of different people, minor defects become noticeable on some machines but not others.
What bothers me about the single menu issue the most is that it is something that Apple could easily make a display preferences type option and just keep the default like it is now.
It would be a lot harder than you think. All Mac applications are written with a single system-wide menubar in mind, which changes based on context; you could try to hack multiple menubars in by caching the menubar changes and associating them with whatever the front-most document window was at the time of the change, and force any click on a menubar in a background window to bring that window to the front, but how would you handle applications that offer useful functionality from the menubar when no windows are open? How would you handle menubars that change based on criteria other than which document window is frontmost? If you've got two windows open with identical menubars, and the application changes the menubar for some reason, you can only assume the change applies to the frontmost window, but if the user tries to click on a menu in the background window that shouldn't exist anymore, the menu would disappear as soon as that window is brought to the front, and the whole thing would be a confusing and inconsistent experience for the user. Not to mention that the 95% of Mac users who like it better the way it is would stage protests.
Any serious Mac user mostly just uses the menubar for reference anyway. If you want to actually get something done, that's what keyboard shortcuts are for.
I remember the difference between Win95 at work and Mac OS 8.5 at home pretty clearly; the previous poster is right. Mac OS was very far from perfect, but it was a damn sight better than Windows, which started becoming unusable after about 6 hours of uptime. I had to reboot twice every day, once at the beginning of my shift and once during my lunch break; if I skipped the lunchtime reboot, it usually wouldn't make it through the rest of the day before I'd get a BSOD.
My experience with Win98 at another company later was the same. NT4, however, was rock solid.