As said in the other replies, checking the receipts has no guarantee of finding anything new, even if new software is on the computer. And if they were able to get into the computer and change the password, I'm guessing they know to simply delete any receipts they left behind, as well.
Assuming you roughly know when it happened, what will be muchmore helpful is doing a find by date modified/created. In the Finder, do a good old Find with command-f, but change the search criteria to just Date Created, then do a search and look for anything suspicious. Then do another search, this time searching for Date Modified.
Of course if the hacker really knew his stuff he would edit the date modified/created dates after putting it on your computer, so that's not failsafe either, but it's better than checking receipts.
I've been doing martial arts for years and still find these games a challenge and I sure work up a sweat.
A challenge is right! Not too long ago a friend and I fed the boxing arcade machines way too many quarters because we just couldn't get past the first two guys. Most people would give up if a game was too hard for them that early in, but I go to the boxing gym 4 times a week and am involved in the amateur circuit, and my friend was a Los Angeles County champion in Karate (and is currently serving in Iraq as an Army Ranger), so we were completely embarrased by 10 year old kids kicking ass in the game while we were struggling.
At one point it finally dawned on us that fighting like fighters was our problem - whereas in a real fight to avoid getting punched in the face you might duck your head and raise your fists, for the boxing arcade you move your fists away from the screen, to either side or below. In the real world, that's the equivilant of moving your hands as far away from blocking position as you can get them. So the game was reading our real world fighting technique as just standing in front of the punches.
I won't deny that they're a good time, but if you kick ass in the video game don't expect to be able to kick ass in an actual fight... kind of like how a good DDR player shouldn't expect to steal the floor at prom, I suppose.
Then I would suggest using a file transfer protocol
The people I'm talking about have gotten viruses through AIM. That's a whole new level of computing ineptitude, and there's no way they're going to grasp even logging into and using FTP. Email attachments have been around for a long time, they're accepted, they're standard... but if they can't be delivered then why have them at all?
I'm a fan of servers flagging spam and delivering it with the flag in the subject, but I can't stand virus blocks.
Even grandmothers have heard enough about viruses on the news lately to know that they shouldn't accept unknown attachments, and I honestly can't think of anyone I know within the past 3 years or so who has gotten a virus that way. These same people have gotten viruses through AIM, so these aren't even the technical elite - it's just that general precautions when it comes to email have made their way into the realm of common sense.
Meanwhile, I get emails with valid attachments all the time, be it from beta testers or friends or whoever, that are in.sit and.zip format. Unfortunately, all I receive is a message that says "The file ____.zip was flagged as a virus and could not be delivered. No backup was saved."
File compression and transfer are basic needs. Killing that is just a few steps short of unplugging your computer from the wall and heading back to the pre-internet days of use. Quite frankly, I'm sick of Solitaire.
Shouldn't you be spending more time fucking your sister instead of reading this post? I mean, come on, the bitch will be 15 before you know it. Then what fun will it be?
Jesus, this gets rated insightful? I mean... well, I just don't know what to say. I had always assumed there were enough smart people to make moderations more or less fair, but this post has the intelligence, and insightfulness, of a 6th grade kid making fun of a 3rd grader.
Nope, not Myth III, but I remember hearing about that one:). It's a little depressing that a story like this reminds people of their own projects, but it's good to hear that things worked out for the best for you guys.
I'm friends with a handful of people who worked on a particular game that fit into pretty much all of the evil categories of game development, It was the third installment of a trilogy which had just been bought by another company, so they were running it into the ground and hoping for money just because of the name. My friends spent a year of their life spending every waking moment (and a lot of sleeping ones) in the office, had the release date moved up 2 months in what was originally a 12 month plan (which is already pretty fast), and then the whole staff got fired a week before the publisher put it on the shelves. In other words, no bonuses based on sales, no dev staff to make (sorely need) patches or updates, and none of the big bonus milestones that would have been reached with the originally planned 2 months more of dev time.
Basically they threw away a year and a lot of pay, all for the benefit of having an unfinished and therefore not very impressive game on their resume. I wish I could say this was some sort of freakish breakdown in the game development industry, but from my experience and what I've seen this is par for the course.
"I believe that Sony might be able to clobber Apple, but that Apple's cachet and hipness might well carry the day for them."
And this gets moderated insightful? All he did was say "maybe x will happen, but maybe y will happen instead." I wish I could do that at work and be considered insightful, I could do with a raise.
So you only get due process if you're suspected of a LITTLE crime? Once you add a few zeroes after the dollar sign, the rules change?
That's funny, after watching the way white collar criminals were dealt with (enron, etc), I was under the impression you were only given due process if you had a few extra zeroes after the dollar sign. And by due process I of course mean a red carpet...
Isn't that sort of reaction kinda par for the "Mac user tries anything else" course?
You're a troll, but I'll bite. The author of the article is not just some Mac user, he's Joe Gillespie, an established pro in graphic design and typography. By "established", I mean for the past 20 years or so he's been doing this kind of thing. Link 1, link 2. Nothing a little trip to google won't clear up if you're looking for credentials.
It's great that FreeType exists, but it's still missing the point. You shouldn't need to scour the web looking for plugins to make your program do the (simple) things you want it to do. If we were talking about something only a small set of advanced users would ever need, I wouldn't see a problem... but text rendering? Everybody needs that!
it's more than 10, but those are all put almost instantly on every fresh OS X install I touch.
Re:Closed source - who cares
on
Mac Contest Roundup
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There is an alternative, sort of. It's called XTender, and its public beta was incredibly unimpressive. The day after XTender went public an update was made to ShapeShifter, and everyone again realized how good it was.
Also, ShapeShifter has cost money since its inception. No underhanded tactics there... although it did have the big themers involved in its creation to do the things that they wanted to do. The same guy develops the theme changing and theme creating software, and he is very approachable in regards to feature requests and bug reports. ShapeShifter is technically under the Unsanity umbrella, but Jason Harris makes both. ThemePark (to create themes) also allows exporting to many other non-guikit formats, including the format native to ShapeShifter's competitor (XTheme), and the format supported by Open Source alternatives such as ThemeChanger.
All ShapeShifter guikits can be extracted into images and a Extras.rsrc file using Guikitty. They can't be directly used by another application, so in a sense it is closed and proprietary, but the above mentioned XTender was able to automatically load ShapeShifter guikits if you had Guikitty installed.
Another big point is that a lot of themes use ShapeShifter because it has features that go above and beyond what is capable with any other theme changer, even in terms of things as simple as changing text colors.
Competition is always good, don't get me wrong. But there isn't a whole lot to complain about with ShapeShifter, and any competition it has had has been crushed despite the higher price tag because of ease of use, features, and theme-changing safety (it doesn't modify any system files, or even attempt to overlay those owned by root).
And finally, theres nothing preventing the winning theme from being released in the DLTA (aka Open Source friendly) format as well, the only restriction would be if the theme requires features that are only available in ShapeShifter.
Alright, I think that about makes the case...
that's quite the fish!
on
Fish with Limbs
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
an aquatic, salamander-like creature that would have pushed its arms downward to move through shallow rivers, and used them to prop itself up while waiting for prey or to get air.
I'm a closet nerd, Slashdot like things are a big part of my personality. What I actually do is a mixed bag, but I do a lot of architectural design and client handling. Where the headphones come into play is while wandering around a site in the planning stages... I like to be alone, so I can get away with listening to music while I do it, but appearing professional is a must. I focus a lot on more natural building sites as well, and there's nothing more out of place than a guy in the woods with white headphones.
Disclaimer... appearances are not the be-all and end-all of what I do. But when someone is paying you to design something, looking good yourself is a big confidence booster for the client. I guess that might sound vain, but I'm not... just a part of the job.
It's not the quality of headphones themselves that makes me feel weird, it's the way the white grabs people's attention. Lots of cheap headphones try to look like good ones, so having actually good headphones isn't anywhere near as distinctive.
Way back when I was the one of the few people to have an iPod, I was always very self concious when I pulled it out of my pocket. It's distinctive, but I don't want that kind of attention... I just want to listen to my music without feeling like some elitist rich snob. The problem was that even after I put my iPod back in my pocket, those damn white headphones were still trailing down over my customary black jacket... a little like the iPod advertisements these days. I couldn't stand it, and ended up buying new headphones. The new ones are great, incredible technical accomplishments that cost quite a bit more money, but without that distinctive white cord I feel like so much less of an elitist rich snob, and now the only people that give me a second look while wearing them are audiophiles.
Nowadays the whole rich elitist snob thing doesn't apply, because every college kid has an iPod of his very own. I have some friends with iPods that never felt the way I did before, but now that the dangling white cords are everywhere they've bought new headphones because they feel like they're trend followers. I know all of this must sound terribly vain, but in my profession appearances are very important (yes, even while listening to music).
My story doesn't seem to have much of a point, I know. I guess what it comes down to is that if I were to pick my least favorite facet of the iPod, the white headphone cord would definitely be it. I don't like being a walking billboard for anything, no matter hor subtle the advertisement.
It's totally understandable that China's gov't will be overthrown if people are given free access to information
Why do you say this? Have you been to China, asked anyone there what they think? Of course China is oppressive, and of course its views don't fall in line with those of the US. But that doesn't necessarily mean people would instantly overthrow it given the chance.
As an architect, I've been keeping a very close eye on growth in China. Quite simply, China is where it's at. The growth rate there is just insane, and with the Olympics coming up there is now intense international pressure on very accellerated modernization. Remember the dot com boom? China is like that right now, except their economy is based on tangible things.
I'm not saying that giving up freedom is worth some prosperity, but I am saying that if China were to all of a sudden take down its Great Firewall there is no guarantee that its people would want to risk destroying one of the largest economic expansions in history just because they can read the whiny ramblings of a 13 year old girl on Blogspot.
Wait... does this mean one of your friends (or you) actually put your real name, address, and phone number in your info? I treat loyalty cards like I treat throwaway email accounts - absolutely no accurate infortmation. I don't have any reason for this (no conspiracy theories, etc), other than that I don't like having my personal info scattered everywhere.
Okay, can somebody please explain why an iChat update requires a reboot?
A lot of iChat is within the.app, but there's an entire framework for it (including code and graphics) within the system files. Ppresumably it gives it a bit of a speed boost, but iChat is also tied with a lot of Apple's other apps (while reading an email in Mail, for example, you can see if the person who sent it to you is online without actually looking at iChat).
Whatever. It's still not as good (or pretty!) as the nightly builds of Adium.
I can drag and arrange the tabs however I want. Opera has an inline find in page facility, mouse gestures, and a handy feature for paging through galleries where the images follow a simple incremental progression or have a 'next' or similar recognizable link in the page.
Mouse gestures for all cocoa apps (including Safari) can be done for free with Cocoa Gestures. I love it. Arranging tabs, along with tons of other features, can be done with Safari Extender or Saft, $10 each (buy both of them and that's still half the price of Opera). Inline finding in a page... try Cmd-F.
As for paging through galleries, that does sound nice and I can't think of a Safari equivilant. However it also sounds like I wouldn't have a need to use it most of the time and forget to use it the rest of the time.
When I say that I don't want things to open in a new window in Opera, I mean it, and it works. I have that option checked in Safari, but it still opens new windows all the time.
I completely agree, I'm the same way. Saft (link above) has excellent window management prefs, including forcing all windows into tabs in one window, or getting rid of the menu bar and going full screen, etc etc.
Oh, and provided that Opera maintains its key configurability, it'll definitely have a leg up there on Safari. (My outlook on that is mostly due to me wanting Opera-like keybindings in Safari. When I type 'Cmd-N', I want a new TAB, not a new window.
You can bind keys using ReKey (donationware) or the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse. I actually have Cmd-N set to create new tab and Cmd-Shift-N for new window (which is normaly for new bookmark folder, so I bound that to Cmd-Ctrl-N because I never use the keyboard for making new bookmarks).
There are of course advantages to things being built into Opera rather than requiring 3rd party plugins like for Safari. They all fit in so well though that after I finish installing them (5 minutes of time lost... damn) they might as well be stock features. The plugin route is also cheaper than just buying Opera.
Take, for example, Slashdot itself. Try viewing it in several different browsers. Everyone I know find that Opeara and IE tie for first place in making the site look good, with Mozilla/Netscape 6+ as a close second, but Konqueror as a distant third.
First flaw... you're saying it's possible for/. to look good. It's easy to use once you figure it out, no question, but the designers completely ignored aesthetics (which I'm fine with.)
Second, more important flaw... IE, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari render/. exactly the same for me, with the only difference being that I don't see ads while using Safari. Safari handles all the pages I visit well enough to certainly never think there's a flaw in the way it's doing things.
Opera, besides its excellent rendering engine, also has the tabbed interface working in its favor.
As does Safari...
Opera lets you reopen the browser after a crash or application close and have all the pages that were open at the time of the crash or close.
I've used this feature in the past and hated it. To begin with Safari crashes so rarely its essentially never, and on top of that I'm not sure I want to have everything I was looking at open automatically for the next user if I was too lazy to close all the windows before quitting. Sure, some people will say I was looking at pr0n or whatever, but there is plenty of private stuff accessable through a browser (email, for one). This is a feature that's nice for a small group, definitely not for me.
I'll take Opera and Mozilla over the others any day.
Safari isn't perfect, there's room to grow yet. But the only one of your arguments that held water is a niche feature, and you completely ignored rendering speed, actual browser speed (Mozilla can be downright sluggish... Firefox is pretty nice though), how well it conforms to Apple HIG and whether or not it uses the OS graphic libraries (I'm an OS X themer, so that's important to me and everyone else who applies system themes).
After taking the time to look through the new Opera for a good comparison to Safari so I could write this, I've become more convinced than ever that I picked the right browser as my default.
Slashdot Mirror
As said in the other replies, checking the receipts has no guarantee of finding anything new, even if new software is on the computer. And if they were able to get into the computer and change the password, I'm guessing they know to simply delete any receipts they left behind, as well.
Assuming you roughly know when it happened, what will be muchmore helpful is doing a find by date modified/created. In the Finder, do a good old Find with command-f, but change the search criteria to just Date Created, then do a search and look for anything suspicious. Then do another search, this time searching for Date Modified.
Of course if the hacker really knew his stuff he would edit the date modified/created dates after putting it on your computer, so that's not failsafe either, but it's better than checking receipts.
I've been doing martial arts for years and still find these games a challenge and I sure work up a sweat.
A challenge is right! Not too long ago a friend and I fed the boxing arcade machines way too many quarters because we just couldn't get past the first two guys. Most people would give up if a game was too hard for them that early in, but I go to the boxing gym 4 times a week and am involved in the amateur circuit, and my friend was a Los Angeles County champion in Karate (and is currently serving in Iraq as an Army Ranger), so we were completely embarrased by 10 year old kids kicking ass in the game while we were struggling.
At one point it finally dawned on us that fighting like fighters was our problem - whereas in a real fight to avoid getting punched in the face you might duck your head and raise your fists, for the boxing arcade you move your fists away from the screen, to either side or below. In the real world, that's the equivilant of moving your hands as far away from blocking position as you can get them. So the game was reading our real world fighting technique as just standing in front of the punches.
I won't deny that they're a good time, but if you kick ass in the video game don't expect to be able to kick ass in an actual fight... kind of like how a good DDR player shouldn't expect to steal the floor at prom, I suppose.
Then I would suggest using a file transfer protocol The people I'm talking about have gotten viruses through AIM. That's a whole new level of computing ineptitude, and there's no way they're going to grasp even logging into and using FTP. Email attachments have been around for a long time, they're accepted, they're standard... but if they can't be delivered then why have them at all?
I'm a fan of servers flagging spam and delivering it with the flag in the subject, but I can't stand virus blocks.
.sit and .zip format. Unfortunately, all I receive is a message that says "The file ____.zip was flagged as a virus and could not be delivered. No backup was saved."
Even grandmothers have heard enough about viruses on the news lately to know that they shouldn't accept unknown attachments, and I honestly can't think of anyone I know within the past 3 years or so who has gotten a virus that way. These same people have gotten viruses through AIM, so these aren't even the technical elite - it's just that general precautions when it comes to email have made their way into the realm of common sense.
Meanwhile, I get emails with valid attachments all the time, be it from beta testers or friends or whoever, that are in
File compression and transfer are basic needs. Killing that is just a few steps short of unplugging your computer from the wall and heading back to the pre-internet days of use. Quite frankly, I'm sick of Solitaire.
Shouldn't you be spending more time fucking your sister instead of reading this post? I mean, come on, the bitch will be 15 before you know it. Then what fun will it be?
Jesus, this gets rated insightful? I mean... well, I just don't know what to say. I had always assumed there were enough smart people to make moderations more or less fair, but this post has the intelligence, and insightfulness, of a 6th grade kid making fun of a 3rd grader.
Nope, not Myth III, but I remember hearing about that one :). It's a little depressing that a story like this reminds people of their own projects, but it's good to hear that things worked out for the best for you guys.
I'm friends with a handful of people who worked on a particular game that fit into pretty much all of the evil categories of game development, It was the third installment of a trilogy which had just been bought by another company, so they were running it into the ground and hoping for money just because of the name. My friends spent a year of their life spending every waking moment (and a lot of sleeping ones) in the office, had the release date moved up 2 months in what was originally a 12 month plan (which is already pretty fast), and then the whole staff got fired a week before the publisher put it on the shelves. In other words, no bonuses based on sales, no dev staff to make (sorely need) patches or updates, and none of the big bonus milestones that would have been reached with the originally planned 2 months more of dev time.
Basically they threw away a year and a lot of pay, all for the benefit of having an unfinished and therefore not very impressive game on their resume. I wish I could say this was some sort of freakish breakdown in the game development industry, but from my experience and what I've seen this is par for the course.
"I believe that Sony might be able to clobber Apple, but that Apple's cachet and hipness might well carry the day for them."
And this gets moderated insightful? All he did was say "maybe x will happen, but maybe y will happen instead." I wish I could do that at work and be considered insightful, I could do with a raise.
So you only get due process if you're suspected of a LITTLE crime? Once you add a few zeroes after the dollar sign, the rules change?
That's funny, after watching the way white collar criminals were dealt with (enron, etc), I was under the impression you were only given due process if you had a few extra zeroes after the dollar sign.
And by due process I of course mean a red carpet...
Isn't that sort of reaction kinda par for the "Mac user tries anything else" course?
You're a troll, but I'll bite. The author of the article is not just some Mac user, he's Joe Gillespie, an established pro in graphic design and typography. By "established", I mean for the past 20 years or so he's been doing this kind of thing. Link 1, link 2. Nothing a little trip to google won't clear up if you're looking for credentials.
It's great that FreeType exists, but it's still missing the point. You shouldn't need to scour the web looking for plugins to make your program do the (simple) things you want it to do. If we were talking about something only a small set of advanced users would ever need, I wouldn't see a problem... but text rendering? Everybody needs that!
nobody asked, but that won't stop me from answering :)
For AIM: Adium
For a tweaked OS: Cocktail and TinkerTool
For a better OS: my collection of haxies for Unsanity's Application Enhancer (ClearDock, FruitMenu, Metallifizer, Mighty Mouse, ShapeShifter, SharedMenus, Silk, WindowShade X)
For privacy/security: NetBarrier, PeerVanguard (not because I trade P2P, but because I wear a tinfoil hat), Little Snitch
Helpful apps: Butler, QuickSilver, DragThing
For everything else: VLC, SBook5, Transmit, Path Finder, Apple Dev Tools
it's more than 10, but those are all put almost instantly on every fresh OS X install I touch.
There is an alternative, sort of. It's called XTender, and its public beta was incredibly unimpressive. The day after XTender went public an update was made to ShapeShifter, and everyone again realized how good it was.
Also, ShapeShifter has cost money since its inception. No underhanded tactics there... although it did have the big themers involved in its creation to do the things that they wanted to do. The same guy develops the theme changing and theme creating software, and he is very approachable in regards to feature requests and bug reports. ShapeShifter is technically under the Unsanity umbrella, but Jason Harris makes both. ThemePark (to create themes) also allows exporting to many other non-guikit formats, including the format native to ShapeShifter's competitor (XTheme), and the format supported by Open Source alternatives such as ThemeChanger.
All ShapeShifter guikits can be extracted into images and a Extras.rsrc file using Guikitty. They can't be directly used by another application, so in a sense it is closed and proprietary, but the above mentioned XTender was able to automatically load ShapeShifter guikits if you had Guikitty installed.
Another big point is that a lot of themes use ShapeShifter because it has features that go above and beyond what is capable with any other theme changer, even in terms of things as simple as changing text colors.
Competition is always good, don't get me wrong. But there isn't a whole lot to complain about with ShapeShifter, and any competition it has had has been crushed despite the higher price tag because of ease of use, features, and theme-changing safety (it doesn't modify any system files, or even attempt to overlay those owned by root).
And finally, theres nothing preventing the winning theme from being released in the DLTA (aka Open Source friendly) format as well, the only restriction would be if the theme requires features that are only available in ShapeShifter.
Alright, I think that about makes the case...
an aquatic, salamander-like creature that would have pushed its arms downward to move through shallow rivers, and used them to prop itself up while waiting for prey or to get air.
sounds like a fish to me!I'm a closet nerd, Slashdot like things are a big part of my personality. What I actually do is a mixed bag, but I do a lot of architectural design and client handling. Where the headphones come into play is while wandering around a site in the planning stages... I like to be alone, so I can get away with listening to music while I do it, but appearing professional is a must. I focus a lot on more natural building sites as well, and there's nothing more out of place than a guy in the woods with white headphones.
Disclaimer... appearances are not the be-all and end-all of what I do. But when someone is paying you to design something, looking good yourself is a big confidence booster for the client. I guess that might sound vain, but I'm not... just a part of the job.
It's not the quality of headphones themselves that makes me feel weird, it's the way the white grabs people's attention. Lots of cheap headphones try to look like good ones, so having actually good headphones isn't anywhere near as distinctive.
Way back when I was the one of the few people to have an iPod, I was always very self concious when I pulled it out of my pocket. It's distinctive, but I don't want that kind of attention... I just want to listen to my music without feeling like some elitist rich snob. The problem was that even after I put my iPod back in my pocket, those damn white headphones were still trailing down over my customary black jacket... a little like the iPod advertisements these days. I couldn't stand it, and ended up buying new headphones. The new ones are great, incredible technical accomplishments that cost quite a bit more money, but without that distinctive white cord I feel like so much less of an elitist rich snob, and now the only people that give me a second look while wearing them are audiophiles.
Nowadays the whole rich elitist snob thing doesn't apply, because every college kid has an iPod of his very own. I have some friends with iPods that never felt the way I did before, but now that the dangling white cords are everywhere they've bought new headphones because they feel like they're trend followers. I know all of this must sound terribly vain, but in my profession appearances are very important (yes, even while listening to music).
My story doesn't seem to have much of a point, I know. I guess what it comes down to is that if I were to pick my least favorite facet of the iPod, the white headphone cord would definitely be it. I don't like being a walking billboard for anything, no matter hor subtle the advertisement.
It's totally understandable that China's gov't will be overthrown if people are given free access to information
Why do you say this? Have you been to China, asked anyone there what they think? Of course China is oppressive, and of course its views don't fall in line with those of the US. But that doesn't necessarily mean people would instantly overthrow it given the chance.
As an architect, I've been keeping a very close eye on growth in China. Quite simply, China is where it's at. The growth rate there is just insane, and with the Olympics coming up there is now intense international pressure on very accellerated modernization. Remember the dot com boom? China is like that right now, except their economy is based on tangible things.
I'm not saying that giving up freedom is worth some prosperity, but I am saying that if China were to all of a sudden take down its Great Firewall there is no guarantee that its people would want to risk destroying one of the largest economic expansions in history just because they can read the whiny ramblings of a 13 year old girl on Blogspot.
I bet there are many out there who starts thinking "Damn, and I who just bought N-Gage 1..."
Nobody bought an N-Gage.
Wait... does this mean one of your friends (or you) actually put your real name, address, and phone number in your info? I treat loyalty cards like I treat throwaway email accounts - absolutely no accurate infortmation. I don't have any reason for this (no conspiracy theories, etc), other than that I don't like having my personal info scattered everywhere.
Okay, can somebody please explain why an iChat update requires a reboot?
A lot of iChat is within the .app, but there's an entire framework for it (including code and graphics) within the system files. Ppresumably it gives it a bit of a speed boost, but iChat is also tied with a lot of Apple's other apps (while reading an email in Mail, for example, you can see if the person who sent it to you is online without actually looking at iChat).
Whatever. It's still not as good (or pretty!) as the nightly builds of Adium.
I can drag and arrange the tabs however I want. Opera has an inline find in page facility, mouse gestures, and a handy feature for paging through galleries where the images follow a simple incremental progression or have a 'next' or similar recognizable link in the page.
Mouse gestures for all cocoa apps (including Safari) can be done for free with Cocoa Gestures. I love it. Arranging tabs, along with tons of other features, can be done with Safari Extender or Saft, $10 each (buy both of them and that's still half the price of Opera). Inline finding in a page... try Cmd-F.
As for paging through galleries, that does sound nice and I can't think of a Safari equivilant. However it also sounds like I wouldn't have a need to use it most of the time and forget to use it the rest of the time.
When I say that I don't want things to open in a new window in Opera, I mean it, and it works. I have that option checked in Safari, but it still opens new windows all the time.
I completely agree, I'm the same way. Saft (link above) has excellent window management prefs, including forcing all windows into tabs in one window, or getting rid of the menu bar and going full screen, etc etc.
Oh, and provided that Opera maintains its key configurability, it'll definitely have a leg up there on Safari. (My outlook on that is mostly due to me wanting Opera-like keybindings in Safari. When I type 'Cmd-N', I want a new TAB, not a new window.
You can bind keys using ReKey (donationware) or the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse. I actually have Cmd-N set to create new tab and Cmd-Shift-N for new window (which is normaly for new bookmark folder, so I bound that to Cmd-Ctrl-N because I never use the keyboard for making new bookmarks).
There are of course advantages to things being built into Opera rather than requiring 3rd party plugins like for Safari. They all fit in so well though that after I finish installing them (5 minutes of time lost... damn) they might as well be stock features. The plugin route is also cheaper than just buying Opera.
How did you get safari to block to ads for slashdot? They're still there for me.
Download and install PithHelmet. It's free, it's easy, it's effective. I don't even see flash ads very often anymore.Take, for example, Slashdot itself. Try viewing it in several different browsers. Everyone I know find that Opeara and IE tie for first place in making the site look good, with Mozilla/Netscape 6+ as a close second, but Konqueror as a distant third.
First flaw... you're saying it's possible for /. to look good. It's easy to use once you figure it out, no question, but the designers completely ignored aesthetics (which I'm fine with.)
Second, more important flaw... IE, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari render /. exactly the same for me, with the only difference being that I don't see ads while using Safari. Safari handles all the pages I visit well enough to certainly never think there's a flaw in the way it's doing things.
Opera, besides its excellent rendering engine, also has the tabbed interface working in its favor.
As does Safari...
Opera lets you reopen the browser after a crash or application close and have all the pages that were open at the time of the crash or close.
I've used this feature in the past and hated it. To begin with Safari crashes so rarely its essentially never, and on top of that I'm not sure I want to have everything I was looking at open automatically for the next user if I was too lazy to close all the windows before quitting. Sure, some people will say I was looking at pr0n or whatever, but there is plenty of private stuff accessable through a browser (email, for one). This is a feature that's nice for a small group, definitely not for me.
I'll take Opera and Mozilla over the others any day.
Safari isn't perfect, there's room to grow yet. But the only one of your arguments that held water is a niche feature, and you completely ignored rendering speed, actual browser speed (Mozilla can be downright sluggish... Firefox is pretty nice though), how well it conforms to Apple HIG and whether or not it uses the OS graphic libraries (I'm an OS X themer, so that's important to me and everyone else who applies system themes).
After taking the time to look through the new Opera for a good comparison to Safari so I could write this, I've become more convinced than ever that I picked the right browser as my default.
Competition is always good... we can all see what happens to innovation when people say "what good is Netscape when IE is already on my computer?"