It sucks for them because fastmail is genuinely good at what they do. I too switched to Protonmail over this, though i realize not much has materially changed. But the chilling effect is real due to the amount of secrecy surrounding the new laws.
As two big alternative providers, it seems they'd be well positioned to take the lead on fast and encrypted email. Form an industry alliance, make a new protocol to integrate encryption and help obsolete IMAP, and offer e2e encryption between their customer bases as the incentive for other providers to join in.
Google isn't going to do it any time soon, but Apple might also be interested with their push for privacy. Having first class modern encryption support in Mail.app on macos and ios would be fantastic.
No. Hardware evolved at an insane pace, with every new generation exponentially faster and more capable. Software was exciting too. You could download some warez and open up a whole new realm of possibility. Data could be stored and converted into various common file formats and exchanged using open protocols.
Now if it's not mobile crapware it's infested with trackers and trojans, and software compatibility is so poor that the most common way of sharing something is to turn it into a noisy JPEG. Everything still superficially speaks the same protocol, but it's just used to wrap ad-hoc formats and ill-defined APIs that can change without notice. If you can even get at the raw data at all.
Instead of tricorders we got shitty selfie-tablets that can't last a day without a recharge. Instead of empowerment and distributed networking, we got nanny admins and centralization. Instead of a rich medium for computation, we got a kitchen sink of broken ideas, so convoluted it requires a monopolisti company to farm the collective attention of the world in order to pay for its upkeep.
Cyberpunk dystopia is here, and it wants you to like and subscribe.
What is wrong with all male boards? And why do the people pushing for this law seem to think correlation is causation, and forcing women in will result in better leadership?
You hang around airports long enough, you see all sorts of things. Some people just don't seem to have the urge or self awareness to optimize in such a setting. They'll stand in line with ample time to get their papers ready, clearly watching the entire process go down repeatedly, but instead wait until they're at the counter to start digging through their purse.
Did they all collectively forget the "beware predators, don't share personal information online" perma-scare that we had before "toxic" became the new buzzword?
The internet was never safe, the only thing that changed is a bunch of people joined up who expected it to be. We wouldn't even be in this position had users not been convinced blurring their real and online identity was awesome right around when FB and Twitter showed up.
Yeah, except the word didn't refer to being triggered, it referred to people wanting to be a "special snowflake" with all the various identities they adopted for themselves through the magic of intersectionality. The far left using it in the other direction is an amazing example of how they cannot imagine what reasonable criticism of their own position is all about.
Regardless, 99% of the people whose information was harvested did not consent in both cases, because it was their friends who logged in. Whether or not that initial permission grant was fully above the board or used a quiz app doesn't really matter. Your friends and acquaintances don't have legal power over your own personal information.
That's a nice sentiment but it runs in the face of actual US actions. The US does start wars. They used 9/11 as a pretense to invade two countries. They sabotaged and deposed democratically elected governments. This last point especially makes the pearl clutching over supposed foreign interference in the last American election impossibly naive, and is a form of American myth making that both political wings refuse to deviate from.
The reference to Pearl Harbor in particular is very illustrative. It was exactly the kind of military target that you're advocating. The US response, in extremis, was to nuke two cities full of civilians. This is an action that I hear Americans still justify today, even though it had more to do with intimidating the Soviets, as Japan was already willing to make peace, as their cities had already been reduced to rubble by conventional bombing.
You are not the good guys, you're just some guys, and some very un-self-aware ones at that. You're not heroic policemen, you're high tech thugs who violate everyone else's sovereignty and can get away with it because your intelligentsia white washes it with pitch perfect consistency.
There's no such thing as "punching down". There's just satire, which is what they published, and actual violence, which is what their attackers did when they murdered them in cold blood.
Stop using newspeak to confuse two entirely different things. It's ideologically motivated manipulation to justify why some people do not deserve sympathy or empathy.
It's because the part of Drupal that's vulnerable is the part that satisfies Greenspun's rule: sufficiently complex software will contain an adhoc, bug ridden version of common lisp (i.e. render arrays, i.e. deferred evaluation). And lisp is about realizing that code is data.
But without a language that has that built into its core, you're more likely to shoot yourself in the foot.
By the way, if you don't think code and data will necessarily mix, your software never does anything surprising.
That is true, in theory, but the people in the left echo chamber aren't actually liberal by objective standards. They are authoritarian, censorious, close-minded and hypoallergenic to puritanical levels. Their ideology is mainly an excuse to shut off empathy towards entire demographics they feel are undeserving of it.
These are the hallmarks of social conservatives, they just have a liberal veneer. So yes, they are detrimental to the development of new technology.
User experience is about designing with the user as priority #1. This means matching the user's mental model of a device (rather than the technical internals), making the UI task oriented (rather than feature oriented), and dealing in targeted information rather than raw facts (anticipate and summarize).
It honestly sounds like you've never read about usability and are just dismissing it bitterly as something for 'Apple losers'. It's an actual science, with actual reproducible results, and it absolutely makes a difference.
I honestly don't get why geeks have such a problem with this. When cars went mainstream, we didn't all suddenly become race car drivers and engine mechanics. We just started driving cars that didn't require you to be either of those things. The exact same thing has happened to computers, and it's here to stay.
It's not a false premise, I'm merely supporting the idea that consistent user experience is more valuable than checking off features on a list. I don't believe that a 1% use case necessarily warrants inclusion. You could say the same about floppy drives. Or for the few people who had to buy new mice when their laptop didn't have a PS/2 port anymore.
I'm coming at this from two sides... for one, I genuinely find Flash on Android to be unusable. Some of the usability issues can be fixed, but some are inherent in the media model. For another, I've worked with Flash for ages, both design and dev, and it's just painful. Even the newer Flex runtime has never been able to shake the shackles of the underlying tech. It's crappy, unreliable and full of legacy bloat.
So, I'm not holding my breath for Flash as the new premier mobile development solution. Partially because there are already better solutions out there (e.g. Phonegap), but also because the key to good mobile is to develop with full awareness of your environment, and that will always be platform-specific. I'm thinking about Android's modular Activity/Task architecture... about iOS multitasking... about being aware of screen orientation, of connectivity, of media playback, of phone calls.
You can't plonk monolithic SWF movies in the middle of that and pretend it's the same. As for AIR, it's essentially WebKit with all the cool bits ripped out, and replaced with crummy Adobe crap... I'll pass.
Having used Flash on Android (it sucks), I'd say Flash on iOS isn't about control, it's about evolving user experience.
You're right that Flash is easy to pick up and the tools are mature, but that's because Flash was only ever designed for one thing: desktop multimedia presentations, composited wholesale by the CPU, operated with keyboard and mouse, driven by a time-line. This makes it easy to make something quick, but it also results in monolithic components that are a pain to deal with for everyone else.
Even if you disregard battery-life, there are a bunch of user experience problems that need to be addressed to get Flash working on mobile. The biggest one is that touch requires smart/heuristic input to deal with fat fingers, to disambiguate gestures and to deal with limited screen real-estate.
In making the iPhone, Apple delivered (arguably) the first usable mobile browser, and they did so by changing many of the rules of how webpages are used... you use contextual touches, you zoom in/out, you use form selectors in isolation, the chrome auto-hides, videos are played fullscreen, etc. And surprisingly, they were able to do this without requiring existing webpages to change, by leveraging HTML/CSS' transparent, descriptive nature. Then, they just added a bunch of simple APIs to JavaScript to expose the various mobile/geo features. Suddenly, iOS was the most attractive web platform around.
To do the same to Flash would've been a huge endeavor and wouldn't change the fact that most Flash content simply doesn't work well on mobile. Plus, Apple would've had to work with Adobe on this... i.e. the company that has refused to make a decent Flash player for OS X for years. Good riddance, we'll manage with JavaScript and Canvas just the same.
Going through a US airport, being subjected to the "shower stall" puff test, swabs, electronic fingerprint scanners and hand held metal detectors, the exact same thought occurred to me.
If you want to talk statistics, then you need to contrast the figure of 1.5% for open source with the 30% in IT professionally who are women. That means that all the social and cultural factors that keep women away from computers apply to those 30%. That also means the other 28.5% are choosing not to do FOSS for very different reasons.
The real issue is that a lot of men on the internet act like they're in a boys club and pretend that everyone shares their interests. Seeing sexual imagery in a conference presentation isn't just crass and alienates women, it also alienates all the men in the audience who don't care for it. It's going to make people feel excluded, perhaps because they are a woman, because they are gay, because they're married, etc. Instead of promoting diversity, you're just narrowly aligning the community with its most dominant demographic.
This is a problem for FOSS because the 'boys club of the internet' has very strong limits on its growth. Beyond a certain level, you simply cannot grow a community's focus and presence without reaching out to a more diverse audience. And this requires raising the level of discourse several notches above the lowest common denominator on the internet. It requires a serious effort, and people need to speak up and respect each other's opinions to do so. It's also something that's easily derailed by a few bad apples, because every instance of sexism needs to be countered with a much larger effort in order for the community to retain its outwardly friendly appearance and reputation.
That's why it is incredibly important for the community to police itself and to aggressively do damage control whenever people do get upset. Arguing about whether something is sexist is exactly the wrong thing to do, because it's too late: people's feelings are already hurt. Denying this means you're sending a minority in the community a signal that they are not important and that their opinions do not matter.
This is great advice. I find when I have "programmer's block", it is mostly because I am imagining too many (future) problems and not enough solutions. My solution then is to ignore a lot of those future problems, and focus on small discrete chunks in 'to do' list form. It doesn't matter if you're only looking ahead a couple days on your list. It gives you the perspective and focus necessary to get shit done right now.
Then later, when you do encounter those Big Problems, you will have the experience from building your initial prototype code to help you decide better how to proceed. If it's a really big project, a lot of the initial work will end up having to be rewritten anyway. Don't try to fight it, and don't get too attached to your code. Just start working, and git'er done.
Here's why I use and love Safari 4 on OS X. And yes, I am a huge geek who hacks code for a living.
It's bloody fast, in every way. From loading speed, to rendering speed, to JavaScript execution to Canvas rendering. Firefox does not compare, and Chrome still isn't available for Mac.
Full-text indexing of your history + thumbnails are a life saver for finding that one blog post or article that you read 3 days ago but can't remember the URL to or find on Google (because the site's SEO sucks). Coverflowing through a set of thumbnails lets you identify specific pages really quickly if you've seen them before. It really is waaay more than just a cool effect.
Safari has the best web standards support and includes a bunch of awesome proposed features on top of that. Web fonts, box/text shadows (+ rounded corners), css transforms, border image, etc. It's awesome fun to develop on.
It is the most polished browser on OS X, by far. The scrolling is butter-smooth and feels analog (multitouch trackpad++), the form widgets feel like real Aqua, the textareas are resizable, the font rendering is the most consistent.
For me, Safari provides the best web experience. For you, Firefox 3 is the sweet spot. Why can't you just accept that people have differing priorities and requirements, instead of smugly deriding others for using a "miserable little browser"? If you want to hate on a browser, hate on IE. At least there's demonstrable evidence of how IE has damaged the web. Us Safari users are doing just fine.
Iexplore.exe has its own unique pseudo-shortcut on your desktop (no shortcut arrow!) that can be set from the Desktop control panel. Its options actually live under 'Internet Options' in the system-wide control panelâ"including all the various Network Security Zone management. And before XP SP2, you could type a URL into a Windows Explorer window and have it magically morph into a pseudo-Internet Explorer window and back.
This is Microsoft actively merging its browser into its OS.
Safari.app on the other hand is a regular application, it has its own regular preferences window and regular file associations. All the Safari UI is contained in the app bundle, and the browser adds quite a lot on top of the WebKit rendering engine (smart download handling, inline find, PDF viewing, RSS, dashboard widgets, form autofill, history, search, etc.).
Nowhere on Windows is there as clear a separation between Internet Explorer and MSHTML as there is with Safari.app and WebKit.framework. Internet Explorer consists of many parts spread all over your system, both files as well as UI controls. For proof: go download the stand-alone versions of IE6 and IE7, and see how many DLLs they have to replace to work.
Or right click and drag to create a shortcut, alias.
OS X uses modifier keys a lot more than windows: Drag = move, option+drag = copy, option+cmd+drag = shortcut.
Even better, holding down a modifier key will consistently show the changes it enables in the UI. E.g., do a click-hold on a dock icon, then press 'option' to see the 'Quit' option turn to 'Force quit'. OS X is great at keeping the advanced options away from hapless users, and still within easy reach of power users.
Yes, Drupal maintains high code standards, which are frequently a reason not to commit patches. All these practices, as well as detailed guidelines in terms of security, API usage, theming, localization,... are published on the web site. Dries himself frequently runs benchmarks on Drupal and identifies areas where a patch can be improved. The community also polices itself when it comes to contributed modules, and tries to avoid overlap between them.
Besides Dries, there are 4 other people with core commit access (including me). Two of those were added about a year ago, matching our increased growth. They are respected community members who have demonstrated fair and balanced judgement and excellent technical skills. We all maintain the same standards, and give each patch a fair review. For the Drupal 5.0 release, almost 500 people submitted patches. Several of those affected key parts of Drupal's core. Many of those have been and are still being developed as contributed modules that are slowly seeping into core. For example, Drupal 5 includes user-definable content types, which was incorporated from CCK.module.
When a patch is rejected, there is always a good reason given. Most people however forget that Drupal is used and deployed in a variety of scenarios, and that what goes for them doesn't necessary apply to others. This is why we try to make sure that as many parts of Drupal can be altered, extended or removed by modules, so that nobody needs to create a fork (which causes update/maintenance hassles).
Today, CivicSpace is a distribution of Drupal: their core is unforked, and their modules are developed and stored in the main Drupal repository. They contribute patches to the main project as well as work on their own stuff.
and many more sites. Even if you don't know Drupal, you've probably visited a Drupal site before. Drupal is known for its modular architecture, clean code and developer friendlyness.
Slashdot Mirror
It sucks for them because fastmail is genuinely good at what they do. I too switched to Protonmail over this, though i realize not much has materially changed. But the chilling effect is real due to the amount of secrecy surrounding the new laws.
As two big alternative providers, it seems they'd be well positioned to take the lead on fast and encrypted email. Form an industry alliance, make a new protocol to integrate encryption and help obsolete IMAP, and offer e2e encryption between their customer bases as the incentive for other providers to join in.
Google isn't going to do it any time soon, but Apple might also be interested with their push for privacy. Having first class modern encryption support in Mail.app on macos and ios would be fantastic.
No. Hardware evolved at an insane pace, with every new generation exponentially faster and more capable. Software was exciting too. You could download some warez and open up a whole new realm of possibility. Data could be stored and converted into various common file formats and exchanged using open protocols.
Now if it's not mobile crapware it's infested with trackers and trojans, and software compatibility is so poor that the most common way of sharing something is to turn it into a noisy JPEG. Everything still superficially speaks the same protocol, but it's just used to wrap ad-hoc formats and ill-defined APIs that can change without notice. If you can even get at the raw data at all.
Instead of tricorders we got shitty selfie-tablets that can't last a day without a recharge. Instead of empowerment and distributed networking, we got nanny admins and centralization. Instead of a rich medium for computation, we got a kitchen sink of broken ideas, so convoluted it requires a monopolisti company to farm the collective attention of the world in order to pay for its upkeep.
Cyberpunk dystopia is here, and it wants you to like and subscribe.
What is wrong with all male boards? And why do the people pushing for this law seem to think correlation is causation, and forcing women in will result in better leadership?
>betrayed our country
Why do American progressives now sound like Bush-era conservatives?
Just imagine how fabulous the soldiers will be, covered in sequins.
You hang around airports long enough, you see all sorts of things. Some people just don't seem to have the urge or self awareness to optimize in such a setting. They'll stand in line with ample time to get their papers ready, clearly watching the entire process go down repeatedly, but instead wait until they're at the counter to start digging through their purse.
Did they all collectively forget the "beware predators, don't share personal information online" perma-scare that we had before "toxic" became the new buzzword?
The internet was never safe, the only thing that changed is a bunch of people joined up who expected it to be. We wouldn't even be in this position had users not been convinced blurring their real and online identity was awesome right around when FB and Twitter showed up.
Yeah, except the word didn't refer to being triggered, it referred to people wanting to be a "special snowflake" with all the various identities they adopted for themselves through the magic of intersectionality. The far left using it in the other direction is an amazing example of how they cannot imagine what reasonable criticism of their own position is all about.
The Obama campaign violated Facebook's own policy and FB looked the other way. So both parties likely violated laws then too.
https://ijr.com/2018/03/107708...
Regardless, 99% of the people whose information was harvested did not consent in both cases, because it was their friends who logged in. Whether or not that initial permission grant was fully above the board or used a quiz app doesn't really matter. Your friends and acquaintances don't have legal power over your own personal information.
That's a nice sentiment but it runs in the face of actual US actions. The US does start wars. They used 9/11 as a pretense to invade two countries. They sabotaged and deposed democratically elected governments. This last point especially makes the pearl clutching over supposed foreign interference in the last American election impossibly naive, and is a form of American myth making that both political wings refuse to deviate from.
The reference to Pearl Harbor in particular is very illustrative. It was exactly the kind of military target that you're advocating. The US response, in extremis, was to nuke two cities full of civilians. This is an action that I hear Americans still justify today, even though it had more to do with intimidating the Soviets, as Japan was already willing to make peace, as their cities had already been reduced to rubble by conventional bombing.
You are not the good guys, you're just some guys, and some very un-self-aware ones at that. You're not heroic policemen, you're high tech thugs who violate everyone else's sovereignty and can get away with it because your intelligentsia white washes it with pitch perfect consistency.
There's no such thing as "punching down". There's just satire, which is what they published, and actual violence, which is what their attackers did when they murdered them in cold blood.
Stop using newspeak to confuse two entirely different things. It's ideologically motivated manipulation to justify why some people do not deserve sympathy or empathy.
It's because the part of Drupal that's vulnerable is the part that satisfies Greenspun's rule: sufficiently complex software will contain an adhoc, bug ridden version of common lisp (i.e. render arrays, i.e. deferred evaluation). And lisp is about realizing that code is data.
But without a language that has that built into its core, you're more likely to shoot yourself in the foot.
By the way, if you don't think code and data will necessarily mix, your software never does anything surprising.
That is true, in theory, but the people in the left echo chamber aren't actually liberal by objective standards. They are authoritarian, censorious, close-minded and hypoallergenic to puritanical levels. Their ideology is mainly an excuse to shut off empathy towards entire demographics they feel are undeserving of it.
These are the hallmarks of social conservatives, they just have a liberal veneer. So yes, they are detrimental to the development of new technology.
User experience is about designing with the user as priority #1. This means matching the user's mental model of a device (rather than the technical internals), making the UI task oriented (rather than feature oriented), and dealing in targeted information rather than raw facts (anticipate and summarize).
It honestly sounds like you've never read about usability and are just dismissing it bitterly as something for 'Apple losers'. It's an actual science, with actual reproducible results, and it absolutely makes a difference.
I honestly don't get why geeks have such a problem with this. When cars went mainstream, we didn't all suddenly become race car drivers and engine mechanics. We just started driving cars that didn't require you to be either of those things. The exact same thing has happened to computers, and it's here to stay.
It's not a false premise, I'm merely supporting the idea that consistent user experience is more valuable than checking off features on a list. I don't believe that a 1% use case necessarily warrants inclusion. You could say the same about floppy drives. Or for the few people who had to buy new mice when their laptop didn't have a PS/2 port anymore.
I'm coming at this from two sides... for one, I genuinely find Flash on Android to be unusable. Some of the usability issues can be fixed, but some are inherent in the media model. For another, I've worked with Flash for ages, both design and dev, and it's just painful. Even the newer Flex runtime has never been able to shake the shackles of the underlying tech. It's crappy, unreliable and full of legacy bloat.
So, I'm not holding my breath for Flash as the new premier mobile development solution. Partially because there are already better solutions out there (e.g. Phonegap), but also because the key to good mobile is to develop with full awareness of your environment, and that will always be platform-specific. I'm thinking about Android's modular Activity/Task architecture... about iOS multitasking... about being aware of screen orientation, of connectivity, of media playback, of phone calls.
You can't plonk monolithic SWF movies in the middle of that and pretend it's the same. As for AIR, it's essentially WebKit with all the cool bits ripped out, and replaced with crummy Adobe crap... I'll pass.
Having used Flash on Android (it sucks), I'd say Flash on iOS isn't about control, it's about evolving user experience.
You're right that Flash is easy to pick up and the tools are mature, but that's because Flash was only ever designed for one thing: desktop multimedia presentations, composited wholesale by the CPU, operated with keyboard and mouse, driven by a time-line. This makes it easy to make something quick, but it also results in monolithic components that are a pain to deal with for everyone else.
Even if you disregard battery-life, there are a bunch of user experience problems that need to be addressed to get Flash working on mobile. The biggest one is that touch requires smart/heuristic input to deal with fat fingers, to disambiguate gestures and to deal with limited screen real-estate.
In making the iPhone, Apple delivered (arguably) the first usable mobile browser, and they did so by changing many of the rules of how webpages are used... you use contextual touches, you zoom in/out, you use form selectors in isolation, the chrome auto-hides, videos are played fullscreen, etc. And surprisingly, they were able to do this without requiring existing webpages to change, by leveraging HTML/CSS' transparent, descriptive nature. Then, they just added a bunch of simple APIs to JavaScript to expose the various mobile/geo features. Suddenly, iOS was the most attractive web platform around.
To do the same to Flash would've been a huge endeavor and wouldn't change the fact that most Flash content simply doesn't work well on mobile. Plus, Apple would've had to work with Adobe on this... i.e. the company that has refused to make a decent Flash player for OS X for years. Good riddance, we'll manage with JavaScript and Canvas just the same.
Going through a US airport, being subjected to the "shower stall" puff test, swabs, electronic fingerprint scanners and hand held metal detectors, the exact same thought occurred to me.
If you want to talk statistics, then you need to contrast the figure of 1.5% for open source with the 30% in IT professionally who are women. That means that all the social and cultural factors that keep women away from computers apply to those 30%. That also means the other 28.5% are choosing not to do FOSS for very different reasons.
The real issue is that a lot of men on the internet act like they're in a boys club and pretend that everyone shares their interests. Seeing sexual imagery in a conference presentation isn't just crass and alienates women, it also alienates all the men in the audience who don't care for it. It's going to make people feel excluded, perhaps because they are a woman, because they are gay, because they're married, etc. Instead of promoting diversity, you're just narrowly aligning the community with its most dominant demographic.
This is a problem for FOSS because the 'boys club of the internet' has very strong limits on its growth. Beyond a certain level, you simply cannot grow a community's focus and presence without reaching out to a more diverse audience. And this requires raising the level of discourse several notches above the lowest common denominator on the internet. It requires a serious effort, and people need to speak up and respect each other's opinions to do so. It's also something that's easily derailed by a few bad apples, because every instance of sexism needs to be countered with a much larger effort in order for the community to retain its outwardly friendly appearance and reputation.
That's why it is incredibly important for the community to police itself and to aggressively do damage control whenever people do get upset. Arguing about whether something is sexist is exactly the wrong thing to do, because it's too late: people's feelings are already hurt. Denying this means you're sending a minority in the community a signal that they are not important and that their opinions do not matter.
This is great advice. I find when I have "programmer's block", it is mostly because I am imagining too many (future) problems and not enough solutions. My solution then is to ignore a lot of those future problems, and focus on small discrete chunks in 'to do' list form. It doesn't matter if you're only looking ahead a couple days on your list. It gives you the perspective and focus necessary to get shit done right now.
Then later, when you do encounter those Big Problems, you will have the experience from building your initial prototype code to help you decide better how to proceed. If it's a really big project, a lot of the initial work will end up having to be rewritten anyway. Don't try to fight it, and don't get too attached to your code. Just start working, and git'er done.
Here's why I use and love Safari 4 on OS X. And yes, I am a huge geek who hacks code for a living.
For me, Safari provides the best web experience. For you, Firefox 3 is the sweet spot. Why can't you just accept that people have differing priorities and requirements, instead of smugly deriding others for using a "miserable little browser"? If you want to hate on a browser, hate on IE. At least there's demonstrable evidence of how IE has damaged the web. Us Safari users are doing just fine.
Safari.app vs iexplore.exe is quite a difference.
Iexplore.exe has its own unique pseudo-shortcut on your desktop (no shortcut arrow!) that can be set from the Desktop control panel. Its options actually live under 'Internet Options' in the system-wide control panelâ"including all the various Network Security Zone management. And before XP SP2, you could type a URL into a Windows Explorer window and have it magically morph into a pseudo-Internet Explorer window and back.
This is Microsoft actively merging its browser into its OS.
Safari.app on the other hand is a regular application, it has its own regular preferences window and regular file associations. All the Safari UI is contained in the app bundle, and the browser adds quite a lot on top of the WebKit rendering engine (smart download handling, inline find, PDF viewing, RSS, dashboard widgets, form autofill, history, search, etc.).
Nowhere on Windows is there as clear a separation between Internet Explorer and MSHTML as there is with Safari.app and WebKit.framework. Internet Explorer consists of many parts spread all over your system, both files as well as UI controls. For proof: go download the stand-alone versions of IE6 and IE7, and see how many DLLs they have to replace to work.
OS X uses modifier keys a lot more than windows: Drag = move, option+drag = copy, option+cmd+drag = shortcut.
Even better, holding down a modifier key will consistently show the changes it enables in the UI. E.g., do a click-hold on a dock icon, then press 'option' to see the 'Quit' option turn to 'Force quit'. OS X is great at keeping the advanced options away from hapless users, and still within easy reach of power users.
What bizarro world do you live in?
... are published on the web site. Dries himself frequently runs benchmarks on Drupal and identifies areas where a patch can be improved. The community also polices itself when it comes to contributed modules, and tries to avoid overlap between them.
Yes, Drupal maintains high code standards, which are frequently a reason not to commit patches. All these practices, as well as detailed guidelines in terms of security, API usage, theming, localization,
Besides Dries, there are 4 other people with core commit access (including me). Two of those were added about a year ago, matching our increased growth. They are respected community members who have demonstrated fair and balanced judgement and excellent technical skills. We all maintain the same standards, and give each patch a fair review. For the Drupal 5.0 release, almost 500 people submitted patches. Several of those affected key parts of Drupal's core. Many of those have been and are still being developed as contributed modules that are slowly seeping into core. For example, Drupal 5 includes user-definable content types, which was incorporated from CCK.module.
When a patch is rejected, there is always a good reason given. Most people however forget that Drupal is used and deployed in a variety of scenarios, and that what goes for them doesn't necessary apply to others. This is why we try to make sure that as many parts of Drupal can be altered, extended or removed by modules, so that nobody needs to create a fork (which causes update/maintenance hassles).
Today, CivicSpace is a distribution of Drupal: their core is unforked, and their modules are developed and stored in the main Drupal repository. They contribute patches to the main project as well as work on their own stuff.
To answer the question, what is Drupal...
Drupal is the open-source CMS behind:
and many more sites. Even if you don't know Drupal, you've probably visited a Drupal site before. Drupal is known for its modular architecture, clean code and developer friendlyness.