Cobalt shells are overrated. You'd still need hundreds (if not thousands) of the things to put enough radioactive material into the atmosphere to wipe out most (not all) life on the planet.
IANAL, but... the question is, could Officer Friendly have found the crack lab during the course of his search for the jewelry?
Typically, items may be seized as evidence if they are "in plain sight." Warrants follow a similar rule: if, during the search of the items in the warrant you discover something, it can be entered into evidence on its own charges.
That means if your warrant only allows you to search the garage, you can't go into the basement and "discover" the crack lab.*
In which case, if the warrant to search a computer includes the entire computer, then the cache is up for grabs. If it only specifies your email, the rest of the file system is technically off limits. This is why law enforcement usually just gets blanket permission to search the whole computer.
* Most states allow for the entry of evidence gathered during the course of securing a criminal or saving an individual from harm. Thus, if Officer Friendly goes to search the garage and someone runs into the basement, he can pursue them. If he spots the crack lab during the course of apprehending the suspect, in plain sight, it can be used against them.
Exactly. Not only are outsiders able to look at the software from a clean slate, without the influence of their co-workers or company policies; they're also (relatively) free from retribution.
If they were an inside team doing the "blue hat" work, they'd be about as popular as Internal Affairs officers are to their fellow cops. There would be a lot of pressure to "just overlook that" from their friends, or folks who they feel loyalty to within the company.
I've found them to be very unreliable, however. The files tend to become lost or corrupt easily, and the file system structure itself can get damaged during transport, making it difficult to page through the files to find the information you want.
Besides, you can get your data out of the other kind of notebook with the proper tool. You can then cut & paste, or import into a three-ring system with another tool.
As a former tech-support rep for Dell, I can at least understand what's going on there.
First off, Dell doesn't do the work themselves. They outsource their tech-support to another company (whom I worked for). They've got call centers across the US and in other countries. The trouble is, if one call center is being overwhelmed, you call will get bumped to another. When that happens, you might get put into the wrong queue (home users ending up on the business lines), which means you'll have to hang up and call again. Each queue is only allowed to handle their particular service area. So, if you have an Inspiron laptop at home, you can't get any help from the desktop techs or the business laptop techs. And they can't transfer calls to another queue.
Further, the call centers close up shop at midnight local time. All remaining calls in queue then get bumped west. After midnight in California, that means you're getting a foreign call center until 8 am Eastern.
The serial numbers, however, are a good thing. When you call in, you're asked to read off the Service Tag for your machine, which allows the tech to not only pull up technical specs on your individual Dell, but to see your prior call history. That way, they know that the last time you called in you were having X problem, and the tech recommended Y solution, or that they sent out a replacement hard drive, etc.
In all, it wasn't a bad job (aside from rude or hysterical callers). Just tedious, and you had little chance to interact with your co-workers, or even your supervisors. Hell, I never did find out what my supervisor's name was, because I never met her in person.
Numbers is likely to leverage CoreData for most of it's data processing. So, given the right tweaks, it would probably fulfill the purpose of "FileMaker Lite" itself.
It's not just that it "looks different." It works completely different from other Mac apps.
Menus are per-window instead of universal. Common shortcuts don't work, or do something different. Copy & Paste is spotty, if it works at all. Windows don't obey the same rules as other Mac apps, such as when they take focus. Dialog boxes could come in any number of shapes and sizes, instead of the Mac "slide out" sheet.
It's a major turn-off because folks are used to Mac apps behaving in a consistent manner. Other OSes don't enforce this as strictly, so users tend to expect each app there to have it's ideosynchracies... but on the Mac, folks expect an app to behave itself.
Bad Car Analogy Time: Using OpenOffice via X11 on the Mac is like getting into your car and finding out that, not only is your stereo embedded in the glove compartment instead of the dash, the dial knob doesn't exist and you have to punch in stations by hand, there's no auto-seek function, and the display may show you the time or station or nothing at all depending on which preset you're using.
... which is exactly the same as Second Life. All you're really paying for is the service they offer, which is the ability to alter the virtual world they've created. That's why I can't see where the "lawsuit" angle comes from.
On the flip side, isn't paying for webspace on a server the same thing? You're paying for virtual property on a host, so that others can access that host and enjoy your creation.
If the webhost goes under, files bankruptcy, shuts down tomorrow... do you have any legal basis for a lawsuit? Just because they're not hosting you anymore?
Re:I felt a disturbance in the force...
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
Are you kidding? The MPAA execs are on the Death Star!
Re:Recommend your alternatives here
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Except, on first glance, it looks like the only way to get 6.0 is through a "Player Bundle" rather than just a codec. There doesn't appear to be any way of getting just a codec without their own player too.
When exactly did journalism become merely aggregating press releases?
In this case, it was a press release that corrects an earlier (apparently incorrect) news article that had been making the rounds. I'd say that this is one of those cases where the press release takes care of the reporting all by itself.
Right. However, his homebrewed conditioner itself doesn't.
Think of it this way: which is more environmentally friendly? A freon-based freezer & freon-based air conditioner; or a freon-based freezer & water-cooled air conditioner?
The ideal would be to not use freon (or other chemicals) in the whole process. But, this is better than the common alternative.
Also, consider that no matter what, he needs electricity to power these units. And most electricity in the US comes from coal or nuclear power, neither of which is especially "clean."
His solution just has fewer drawbacks than the typical one when it comes to disposing of the waste materials.
I'd say it's more environmentally friendly than a freon-based system, or other gas-based coolers. True, it still requires electricity for cooling the water and running the fan, but there's no real "waste" material from the whole device.
Guess I'll play the "Apple apologist" for this thread.;)
- The dock. What a hideous piece of crap this is. My trash can is on the dock. So are my running applications. So are my non-running applications. But not all of my non-running applications. To get to those, I have to go into the applications folder, which has a nice alias on the desktop that Apple didn't create. Those useful programs that you only use once in a blue moon? Go dig for them... go dig.
Er. Okay. How is this different from any other OS? And you don't have to dig. Drag the Applications folder to your Dock. Right-click (or control-click, or just hold the mouse button down) on that folder, and you'll get a menu that pops up, listing its contents. Bam.
Also, any open Finder window should have the Applications folder listed on the left-hand side. Click on it, and scroll through the window.
- Driver support. I have a cheapo webcam that came with an Earthlink subscription years ago. I plug it into linux and it works. I plug it into my Mac and it does nothing. No drivers available.
So, cheapo webcam doesn't have drivers. There are Linux drivers. Maybe... I dunno... see if the code is available, and ask someone to port the drivers to OS X? I doubt the Linux drivers came with the cam in the first place. Someone else had to write them, right?
- Quicktime. It plays 8 seconds of video and stops. Every time. MPlayer for OSX handles the same files fine.
Let me guess: DivX files, right? Yeah. No one has written decent Quicktime codecs for DivX/XviD/3viX yet. This is Apple's fault?
- Sleep. It does it whether or not I want it to. Downloading a big file, it'll go to sleep. How the hell does one stop that? Other than that, sleep works great. Or not.
Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Energy Saver. Configure to your heart's desire.
- Virtual Desktops. Man, I never thought I'd miss them so much. And even the very good replacement I found, Desktop Manger, has flaws. If I leave the adium buddy list open on one desktop, go to another desktop, and mouse over the where the buddy list is on the non-visible desktop, I see tool tips. Among other bugs, that's the most annoying.
I can see how those could be useful, yes. In fact, there are a few different virtual desktop managers available for OS X. A quick Google search does wonders, but this appears to be the one most recently updated.
- Java apps. Either swallow the menubar for the active window or don't. Don't do it in some cases and not in others. Get your act together. I know I can code to specifically do that, but I shouldn't have to. Write once, run anywhere and all that.
Would be nice. However, from what I can tell, it's a problem with Swing. Could be wrong on that, but it seems that some Swing apps do it right, some don't, and that's where the discrepancy comes from.
Overall, most of your complaints could have been solved simply by asking a Mac forum (most of us are quite friendly;) ), or some Google searches. The rest are just waiting on developers to actually develop solutions for stuff that's already third-party.
Easiest way: they'll adopt Intel's new BIOS replacement, EFI. No current motherboards run it, which means that if IntelMacOS can only boot with an EFI motherboard, pirating will be useless.
Of course, eventually EFI will move into the marketplace, and Apple will need another solution. Since I'm sure the EFI data can be read out of an Apple board, someone would hack any code they had put on there, so there may be more to it than that.
Interestingly enough, someone hacked the GIMP interface to behave more like Photoshop. GIMPshop has versions for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Worth a shot, anyway.
Wink or not, I wonder if you ever came close to any of Marx' writings.
I have, yes. My wink was because I was only referring to his call for the revolution to overthrow governments that did not serve the people. In other words, it was a throwaway joke not directly related to the prior comments.
Humor. Go figure.;)
Where did you get that idea? Do you think the Sowiet Union was run well, or effectively?
The Soviet Union was not a dictatorship. Well, not after Stalin died, anyway...
Do you know that Hitlers Germany was broke when he started the war and only lasted through robbing the conquered countries and using their workforce?
Well, duh. You just managed to ignore a whole swath of history there. Hitler came to power, in part, because the country had been driven to poverty by the Treaty of Versailles. He turned the country around, built up a formidable military, "got the trains running on time," and gave his nation purpose. Then, he started fighting nations he couldn't afford to, decimated his military with stupid decisions and robbed from his own people to keep up a fight that couldn't be won.
Hitler was a terrible person, and the Holocaust cannot be forgiven. He was, however, an efficient dictator that rebuilt a nation from rubble. Not that such a thing makes up for the atrocities committed by his design, at all.
What I was really trying to get across, which some folks seemed to miss, was the concept of the benevolent dictator. A dictator who really cares about his people is capable of providing the most stable, efficient government possible. And, in my mind, that's what young Anakin was expecting in Ep 2. "Someone wise," to make people do the right thing. Instead, it turns out that his choice was a power hungry dictator... but he was so wedded to the idea of an efficient, one-man government that he let it influence his beliefs that the Jedi and Republic were completely useless for governing the people. Thus, a violent overthrow to establish an efficient government was necessary in his mind.
And here I thought I explained all that in one paragraph the first time.:)
Seriously though, the most effective form of government is a dictatorship. Any government based on freedom is bound to be (at least somewhat) inept and inefficient. That's why the Republic looks slow, inept and complicated; while the Empire looks efficient, directed and simple.
Luckily, it didn't last long. But, other laws did. It took us a very long time to stop censoring entire classes of people, and things were still a lot more constrained than today.
It's not an excuse for the abuses of today, but it's false to think things were really better a long time ago. Censorship has existed since the first words were spoken.
I still don't see any practical difference. A label is just a static list of a previous search result based on certain metadata. The label itself is metadata on the individual emails/files, and the Label in your Gmail window had to be created originally from a search of the Gmail database.
When you update a file's metadata in the MacOS, it gets updated in the Spotlight database as well. The only difference is that Smart Folders search the Spotlight database every time, instead of keeping a static list. It's generally fast enough as to make no difference, and it avoids the problem of the static list becoming damaged and no longer reflecting the contents of the database.
Further, there is one way of getting your Label functionality in a MacOS X Smart Folder. Amusingly enough, it's called a Label in the MacOS as well.;) They're an old holdover from the MacOS 7 days. It's basically a kind of metadata which can be applied to individual files, and yet the label itself can be renamed (or change colors) right from the Finder preferences. Which would affect all the files marked by that label as well.
Still, your SQL/Smart Folder is basically no different from a regular Smart Folder. The only difference is that there's a specific bit of metadata for your "Bills" information, rather than a generic Comments metadata field which could contain anything. Essentially, what you want is a list of user-customizable metadata fields, so you could have one "Bills" field for all your files, regardless of their filetype or contents. The MacOS Labels could do that, though it's limited to 10 of them.
How does my Smart Folder know that only credit card bills go in it? i.e. What's to prevent it from also picking up an email I send to my spouse, or something not related at all, but just happens to match the search criteria?
You specify criteria that makes sure your Smart Folder only picks out the proper files. Same as with your Gmail labels: make your label too general, and you'll get the same poor results.
Well, one idea is that we could label them with "Credit Card Bills" so that the search will always get the right files.;-)
You're mixing terms again. Can we settle on one use of the word "label" here? Again, if you rename the Gmail label, it has no effect on what's listed. If you change the metadata on a specific email, or in the label's criteria, that does change what's listed.
The idea behind labels is that you always get exactly what you put in a folder. Saved searches (e.g. Smart Folders) are quite nice as well, but both have a place.
But... but... they do the exact same thing! x.x
I'm really not seeing what distinction you're making here. If you aren't specific enough, you don't get good results. If you are, you do. That applies to any kind of search, whether it's a Gmail label, a Smart Folder or an iTunes Smart Playlist.
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Cobalt shells are overrated. You'd still need hundreds (if not thousands) of the things to put enough radioactive material into the atmosphere to wipe out most (not all) life on the planet.
Wow. That's more bad science and anti-science rhetoric in one post than I've seen in a long time. Congratulations.
Pretty much. Since, in quantum theory, once a state has been observed its properties are fixed, once an event occurs its place in history is "fixed."
Of course, this muxes up quantum mechanics with macro-scale physics, which doesn't work so well... but it's still a neat proposal.
Typically, items may be seized as evidence if they are "in plain sight." Warrants follow a similar rule: if, during the search of the items in the warrant you discover something, it can be entered into evidence on its own charges.
That means if your warrant only allows you to search the garage, you can't go into the basement and "discover" the crack lab.*
In which case, if the warrant to search a computer includes the entire computer, then the cache is up for grabs. If it only specifies your email, the rest of the file system is technically off limits. This is why law enforcement usually just gets blanket permission to search the whole computer.
* Most states allow for the entry of evidence gathered during the course of securing a criminal or saving an individual from harm. Thus, if Officer Friendly goes to search the garage and someone runs into the basement, he can pursue them. If he spots the crack lab during the course of apprehending the suspect, in plain sight, it can be used against them.
Exactly. Not only are outsiders able to look at the software from a clean slate, without the influence of their co-workers or company policies; they're also (relatively) free from retribution.
If they were an inside team doing the "blue hat" work, they'd be about as popular as Internal Affairs officers are to their fellow cops. There would be a lot of pressure to "just overlook that" from their friends, or folks who they feel loyalty to within the company.
Besides, you can get your data out of the other kind of notebook with the proper tool. You can then cut & paste, or import into a three-ring system with another tool.
(How far can we stretch this joke? :) )
Yeah. You could always tell when you got a trouble PC / customer when you pull up the records, and the previous entries scroll off the screen.
;)
That's when you know, "This is going to be a baaaad call..."
As a former tech-support rep for Dell, I can at least understand what's going on there.
First off, Dell doesn't do the work themselves. They outsource their tech-support to another company (whom I worked for). They've got call centers across the US and in other countries. The trouble is, if one call center is being overwhelmed, you call will get bumped to another. When that happens, you might get put into the wrong queue (home users ending up on the business lines), which means you'll have to hang up and call again. Each queue is only allowed to handle their particular service area. So, if you have an Inspiron laptop at home, you can't get any help from the desktop techs or the business laptop techs. And they can't transfer calls to another queue.
Further, the call centers close up shop at midnight local time. All remaining calls in queue then get bumped west. After midnight in California, that means you're getting a foreign call center until 8 am Eastern.
The serial numbers, however, are a good thing. When you call in, you're asked to read off the Service Tag for your machine, which allows the tech to not only pull up technical specs on your individual Dell, but to see your prior call history. That way, they know that the last time you called in you were having X problem, and the tech recommended Y solution, or that they sent out a replacement hard drive, etc.
In all, it wasn't a bad job (aside from rude or hysterical callers). Just tedious, and you had little chance to interact with your co-workers, or even your supervisors. Hell, I never did find out what my supervisor's name was, because I never met her in person.
Numbers is likely to leverage CoreData for most of it's data processing. So, given the right tweaks, it would probably fulfill the purpose of "FileMaker Lite" itself.
It's not just that it "looks different." It works completely different from other Mac apps.
Menus are per-window instead of universal. Common shortcuts don't work, or do something different. Copy & Paste is spotty, if it works at all. Windows don't obey the same rules as other Mac apps, such as when they take focus. Dialog boxes could come in any number of shapes and sizes, instead of the Mac "slide out" sheet.
It's a major turn-off because folks are used to Mac apps behaving in a consistent manner. Other OSes don't enforce this as strictly, so users tend to expect each app there to have it's ideosynchracies... but on the Mac, folks expect an app to behave itself.
Bad Car Analogy Time: Using OpenOffice via X11 on the Mac is like getting into your car and finding out that, not only is your stereo embedded in the glove compartment instead of the dash, the dial knob doesn't exist and you have to punch in stations by hand, there's no auto-seek function, and the display may show you the time or station or nothing at all depending on which preset you're using.
... which is exactly the same as Second Life. All you're really paying for is the service they offer, which is the ability to alter the virtual world they've created. That's why I can't see where the "lawsuit" angle comes from.
On the flip side, isn't paying for webspace on a server the same thing? You're paying for virtual property on a host, so that others can access that host and enjoy your creation.
If the webhost goes under, files bankruptcy, shuts down tomorrow... do you have any legal basis for a lawsuit? Just because they're not hosting you anymore?
Are you kidding? The MPAA execs are on the Death Star!
Except, on first glance, it looks like the only way to get 6.0 is through a "Player Bundle" rather than just a codec. There doesn't appear to be any way of getting just a codec without their own player too.
In this case, it was a press release that corrects an earlier (apparently incorrect) news article that had been making the rounds. I'd say that this is one of those cases where the press release takes care of the reporting all by itself.
Right. However, his homebrewed conditioner itself doesn't.
Think of it this way: which is more environmentally friendly? A freon-based freezer & freon-based air conditioner; or a freon-based freezer & water-cooled air conditioner?
The ideal would be to not use freon (or other chemicals) in the whole process. But, this is better than the common alternative.
Also, consider that no matter what, he needs electricity to power these units. And most electricity in the US comes from coal or nuclear power, neither of which is especially "clean."
His solution just has fewer drawbacks than the typical one when it comes to disposing of the waste materials.
I'd say it's more environmentally friendly than a freon-based system, or other gas-based coolers. True, it still requires electricity for cooling the water and running the fan, but there's no real "waste" material from the whole device.
- The dock. What a hideous piece of crap this is. My trash can is on the dock. So are my running applications. So are my non-running applications. But not all of my non-running applications. To get to those, I have to go into the applications folder, which has a nice alias on the desktop that Apple didn't create. Those useful programs that you only use once in a blue moon? Go dig for them... go dig.
Er. Okay. How is this different from any other OS? And you don't have to dig. Drag the Applications folder to your Dock. Right-click (or control-click, or just hold the mouse button down) on that folder, and you'll get a menu that pops up, listing its contents. Bam.
Also, any open Finder window should have the Applications folder listed on the left-hand side. Click on it, and scroll through the window.
- Driver support. I have a cheapo webcam that came with an Earthlink subscription years ago. I plug it into linux and it works. I plug it into my Mac and it does nothing. No drivers available.
So, cheapo webcam doesn't have drivers. There are Linux drivers. Maybe... I dunno... see if the code is available, and ask someone to port the drivers to OS X? I doubt the Linux drivers came with the cam in the first place. Someone else had to write them, right?
- Quicktime. It plays 8 seconds of video and stops. Every time. MPlayer for OSX handles the same files fine.
Let me guess: DivX files, right? Yeah. No one has written decent Quicktime codecs for DivX/XviD/3viX yet. This is Apple's fault?
- Sleep. It does it whether or not I want it to. Downloading a big file, it'll go to sleep. How the hell does one stop that? Other than that, sleep works great. Or not.
Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Energy Saver. Configure to your heart's desire.
- Virtual Desktops. Man, I never thought I'd miss them so much. And even the very good replacement I found, Desktop Manger, has flaws. If I leave the adium buddy list open on one desktop, go to another desktop, and mouse over the where the buddy list is on the non-visible desktop, I see tool tips. Among other bugs, that's the most annoying.
I can see how those could be useful, yes. In fact, there are a few different virtual desktop managers available for OS X. A quick Google search does wonders, but this appears to be the one most recently updated.
- Java apps. Either swallow the menubar for the active window or don't. Don't do it in some cases and not in others. Get your act together. I know I can code to specifically do that, but I shouldn't have to. Write once, run anywhere and all that.
Would be nice. However, from what I can tell, it's a problem with Swing. Could be wrong on that, but it seems that some Swing apps do it right, some don't, and that's where the discrepancy comes from.
Overall, most of your complaints could have been solved simply by asking a Mac forum (most of us are quite friendly ;) ), or some Google searches. The rest are just waiting on developers to actually develop solutions for stuff that's already third-party.
Of course, eventually EFI will move into the marketplace, and Apple will need another solution. Since I'm sure the EFI data can be read out of an Apple board, someone would hack any code they had put on there, so there may be more to it than that.
I wonder if EFI can handle encryption...
Interestingly enough, someone hacked the GIMP interface to behave more like Photoshop. GIMPshop has versions for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Worth a shot, anyway.
I have, yes. My wink was because I was only referring to his call for the revolution to overthrow governments that did not serve the people. In other words, it was a throwaway joke not directly related to the prior comments.
Humor. Go figure. ;)
Where did you get that idea? Do you think the Sowiet Union was run well, or effectively?
The Soviet Union was not a dictatorship. Well, not after Stalin died, anyway...
Do you know that Hitlers Germany was broke when he started the war and only lasted through robbing the conquered countries and using their workforce?
Well, duh. You just managed to ignore a whole swath of history there. Hitler came to power, in part, because the country had been driven to poverty by the Treaty of Versailles. He turned the country around, built up a formidable military, "got the trains running on time," and gave his nation purpose. Then, he started fighting nations he couldn't afford to, decimated his military with stupid decisions and robbed from his own people to keep up a fight that couldn't be won.
Hitler was a terrible person, and the Holocaust cannot be forgiven. He was, however, an efficient dictator that rebuilt a nation from rubble. Not that such a thing makes up for the atrocities committed by his design, at all.
What I was really trying to get across, which some folks seemed to miss, was the concept of the benevolent dictator. A dictator who really cares about his people is capable of providing the most stable, efficient government possible. And, in my mind, that's what young Anakin was expecting in Ep 2. "Someone wise," to make people do the right thing. Instead, it turns out that his choice was a power hungry dictator... but he was so wedded to the idea of an efficient, one-man government that he let it influence his beliefs that the Jedi and Republic were completely useless for governing the people. Thus, a violent overthrow to establish an efficient government was necessary in his mind.
And here I thought I explained all that in one paragraph the first time. :)
Marx called. He'd like to have his book back. ;)
:)
Seriously though, the most effective form of government is a dictatorship. Any government based on freedom is bound to be (at least somewhat) inept and inefficient. That's why the Republic looks slow, inept and complicated; while the Empire looks efficient, directed and simple.
So, which do you prefer?
Point of reference: The Alien And Sedition Acts, signed into law by President John Adams in 1798.
Luckily, it didn't last long. But, other laws did. It took us a very long time to stop censoring entire classes of people, and things were still a lot more constrained than today.
It's not an excuse for the abuses of today, but it's false to think things were really better a long time ago. Censorship has existed since the first words were spoken.
When you update a file's metadata in the MacOS, it gets updated in the Spotlight database as well. The only difference is that Smart Folders search the Spotlight database every time, instead of keeping a static list. It's generally fast enough as to make no difference, and it avoids the problem of the static list becoming damaged and no longer reflecting the contents of the database.
Further, there is one way of getting your Label functionality in a MacOS X Smart Folder. Amusingly enough, it's called a Label in the MacOS as well. ;) They're an old holdover from the MacOS 7 days. It's basically a kind of metadata which can be applied to individual files, and yet the label itself can be renamed (or change colors) right from the Finder preferences. Which would affect all the files marked by that label as well.
Still, your SQL/Smart Folder is basically no different from a regular Smart Folder. The only difference is that there's a specific bit of metadata for your "Bills" information, rather than a generic Comments metadata field which could contain anything. Essentially, what you want is a list of user-customizable metadata fields, so you could have one "Bills" field for all your files, regardless of their filetype or contents. The MacOS Labels could do that, though it's limited to 10 of them.
You specify criteria that makes sure your Smart Folder only picks out the proper files. Same as with your Gmail labels: make your label too general, and you'll get the same poor results.
Well, one idea is that we could label them with "Credit Card Bills" so that the search will always get the right files. ;-)
You're mixing terms again. Can we settle on one use of the word "label" here? Again, if you rename the Gmail label, it has no effect on what's listed. If you change the metadata on a specific email, or in the label's criteria, that does change what's listed.
The idea behind labels is that you always get exactly what you put in a folder. Saved searches (e.g. Smart Folders) are quite nice as well, but both have a place.
But... but... they do the exact same thing! x.x
I'm really not seeing what distinction you're making here. If you aren't specific enough, you don't get good results. If you are, you do. That applies to any kind of search, whether it's a Gmail label, a Smart Folder or an iTunes Smart Playlist.