It was Windows NT or 95 that decided randomly to move the close box to the right side (3.1 had only the window menu for closing, and you had to double-click it or drop it down and click "close"). The only reason I can imagine why they did that was a juvenile attempt to differentiate vs. classic Mac OS. See also:
- Icons lined up by default on the left of the desktop instead of right. - White mouse arrow (stupid!) instead of black - global "bar" (taskbar vs mac menu bar) at the bottom of the screen by default instead of the top
All these changes were so obviously made to be "the opposite of whatever Apple does" in order to give Windows a veneer of different-ness so that the inexperienced user (or judge) would say "Wow, this is definitely NOT a knock-off of Mac OS! In fact, it's the opposite!
Therefore, since the original justification for moving it to the right was nonexistent, none is needed to move it back where it belongs.
light the first match, so to speak, to get the fire going.
Oh, please, please tell me this means the next step involves burning all spammers alive? Pretty please can we can we? I would support that plan because SPAMMERS ARE WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.
With a name like "clarkkent09" i'm surprised you didn't at least pick a DC superhero to use for that joke, but it was hilarious nonetheless. Too bad I don't have mod points.
Something must be wrong with your computer. I've been using time machine since leopard came out (I never did backups properly until that so this was a big win for me) and other than occasionally spotting the little time machine menubar item doing its little animation, I've NEVER noticed anything. Also, I get "spinning wheels" only on occasion, always when a program is working on an intensive operation and not responding (usually Textmate doing a project-wide search). This doesn't affect any other programs at the time.
One other problem besides net neutrality is we're letting cable companies buy TV networks now. NBC is about to be owned by Comcast, and it's not the first and won't be the last. And regulators see nothing anticompetitive about this. It's sickening.
Tivo needs to cut out the middleman, and offer an iptv device. No cable cards, no contracts with satellite providers, just plug it in to your network.
Of course, with cablecos owning major chunks of cable networks and now broadcast networks (NBC), they would never allow an IPTV startup to carry any halfway-complete set of channels... And with no net neutrality, our monopoly cable and phone companies that both want to sell you their TV services can throttle back "Tivo IP" to about 10Kbps... Crap.
(only record new, but the satellite picks up locals and shows them on 3 feeds [HD, local channel number, and 8000 channel number] so the DVR records the new episode on all three feeds because it's my highest ranked show).
You're doing it wrong on the Dish box. I think you made a Dish Pass when what you want is a plain vanilla recording. Dish pass searches on every channel--it may be good for catching the next time your favorite movie comes on, or if you gotta have every "Cops" that's aired in syndication, but a normal recording is always the tool for recording first-run shows because a normal recording only does the channel you put it on. Since you know new episodes of Big Bang Theory will always be on CBS, you just find it in the guide on your HD CBS channel, press "Record," hit "new episodes," and you're done. You'll get only new episodes that air on that specific channel.
Also cool is the timeslot feature. That is another choice in the standard recording creator, where it records that show *if and only if* it is on in that same timeslot. If it's preempted nothing is recorded. If they air episodes at 5, 6, and 10, you'll only get the timeslot you intended.
Also the Dish thing does group by show name, it's one of the options to the right of the list. Let me know if you can't find it and i'll go see what it's called. It also lets you sort either by most recently recorded or alpha.
The biggest annoyance I have with Dish DVR is that they don't strip off "The" from the beginning of shows when alphabetizing. So i have a huge "The" section down near the end of the alpha list. Aside from that it's awesome. and now the web scheduling is out of beta so i can log in and edit scheduled recording, delete shows etc. from anywhere.
FYI, you can get those blackberry trackballs for about $3-4 on Amazon. One search there ought to yield you about 50 different places selling them. The "replacement" requires a small spoon or anything to pry off the little ring and the ball mechanism lifts right out. It takes about 30 seconds. You should do it, your thumb will thank you. I picked up about 8 of them to keep 'em on hand for various coworkers, it saved on the shipping.
If only the apple mighty mouse had been designed smartly enough to have that little trackball be an easy replacement instead of being impossible to replace...:D
Seriously, that was one of the best speeches I've heard in a while. and it came in the form of a/. comment. nice job. if you ever run for public office in the USA look me up on your fans list and i'll campaign for you.
How does this proposed alliance claim to be able to get the same benefits?
They probably just expect to just do a shitty BREW app market (such as the Verizon Get It Now/VCAST store) and think that users won't laugh in their faces and go back to using native apps written by people who know what they're doing.
I welcome this initiative, but only because it will be a giant waste of money and effort for the cellcos, and anything that hurts them makes me smile spitefully.
I have no problem reading on my 1600x1200 dvi monitor. I also maintain a no-paper desk. Any documents delivered to me as paper are scanned and recycled. Any that I don't need are immediately recycled. Before I started this practice my desk was always a mess. Now it's always great.
I feel that spending my money on an upgrade is just not worth it. When the time comes that the majority of Mac OS X apps would no longer work on v10.4, I'll just reformat my MacBook and replace its OS with FreeBSD.
Time is money. Don't you place any value on your own time? Surely it takes a few hours to do a full backup, install a new OS, find replacements for apps you had on your old OS, fix any driver issues that come up...Really, after all that time, you think you'll come out ahead? When you could just buy Snow for like $40, pop it in, do an upgrade (1 hour max and it's primarily unattended time), and suddenly all your apps work and get upgrades again, and your hardware is still fully supported? I get your "if it ain't broke" argument but you're basically saying "It ain't broke, except for the fact that less and less software works for it these days." Well what else is the OS there for but to run software, right?
I'm not trying to be a fanboy about it, I would caution you of the same thing if you were thinking of blowing away a BSD environment you'd used for 4 years to put on OS X. Perhaps at least give it a shot. Why not download an ISO of Snow, spend the few minutes doing an upgrade, and if you like it you won't have reservations buying it. If you hate it then go ahead and wipe it out and go for FreeBSD and you're not out any money or any serious time.
The OSX updates are service packs, with windows I get that for free..
Yawn. Keep telling yourself that. So since 10.6 10.5 10.4 10.3 10.2 10.1 were all service packs I guess in your opinion OS X hasn't had any real releases since 10.0 in 1999 or 2000 right? Don't be a moron. Say that you prefer Windows, I don't care, some people like it and it has its pros and cons. OS X has its pros and cons too. But don't be intentionally dense. Or otherwise tell me how 10.4 was less of an upgrade over its predecessor, 10.3, than Windows XP was vs. 2000. (Hint: Windows 2000's internal name is NT 5.0. XP? 5.1.) Same goes for 10.5 vs. 10.4.
Clearly version numbers don't mean anything. Adding hella new features is not a service pack. The only features MS ever added in a service pack was Windows Genuine Advantage, and a lot of training wheels for MSIE 6.0. Compare this to Spotlight, Expose, Time Machine, etc. The only reason Apple didn't call 10.2 "OS 11" and on from there, is because they spent a lot of time and money branding it "OS X" ("Ten") and "OS XI" would look weird and not roll off the tongue.
Not bloody likely, since Leopard came out in October 2007.
Well, if you must have the latest possible Firefox while keeping the oldest possible hardware, you could just run Linux on your 6-year-old iBook. Nobody's putting a gun to your head to make you use a certain OS. But I can't imagine it's much fun to browse the web with it. I would assume flash slaughters it. But then again you're using Firefox so maybe if you tricked it out with all kinds of ad and flash blocking it would be useful-ish. As long as you stayed away from too many DOM-manipulating fancy webapps.
I have plenty of respect for older computers (I was sad when my little 12" PowerBook G4 finally died last year) but honestly I'd much rather Mozilla spends their resources making new features and improving performance for the 90% than catering to the 10% who are too cheap (no offense--i'm just sayin') to buy new hardware (or even OS) more than once per decade. This is the fourth laptop I've had since yours was new, and I'm far, far, far from rich. I find that keeping up to date with hardware improves my experience and helps me get things done faster. YMMV.
Lol. if you read the story you would know that Apple is not involved in this at all. There were old APIs, Mozilla used them, then Apple made shiny new way better APIs 3 years ago, Mozilla decided to use those too, and now they don't want to bother anymore with maintaining the old code that uses the old (still supported) APIs.
If you think that Microsoft never introduces new APIs that make things better for developers, I doubt you have ever developed for Microsoft. They totally introduce cool new APIs. If you're going to have a living product this is a problem everyone faces on every platform. Sure, abandonware will stop working after fewer years on a constantly-upgraded Mac than it will on a constantly-upgraded Windows box. But any *non-dead* product has to choose from one of these options:
A. Never use new APIs. Your app will start to look clunky after a while and might not perform well. An example would be using GDI instead of DirectX for a game because you don't want to break Win 3.1 support.
B. Use new APIs when they make your job easier, but still do all the work of using the old APIs forever. Not only are you now actually making your job harder than if you did choice (A), but now your app becomes a bloated and tangled mess and has branching logic everywhere to handle every version of the OS.
C. Use new APIs when they make your job easier. Keep doing the work of using the old APIs for a little while, then prune out that stuff after a couple years when adoption of the new OS picks up. Use the time you save to actually improve your app.
So are you blaming Apple for not inventing those new APIs sooner? Because I guess that would be nice if they could have just written every API we have now, into 10.0 and shipped that 10 years ago. Or are you blaming Apple for daring to work on making better APIs? Again, they didn't even pull support out for those APIs. Nobody's stopping Mozilla from continuing to code to them. Mozilla is just smart enough to see when something better has been invented and use it!
If you're not making any new cool APIs, I don't see the point in bothering to work on an operating system at all. Besides doing security patches and designing new skins (see Windows Vista).
If these users aren't upgrading their OS, they probably aren't the sort of people who are particularly bothered about having a specific browser.
It's not like Firefox is a spectacularly great browser on OS X anyway.
THIS. Seriously, this, combined with the fact that this upcoming 10.4-dropping version of firefox won't make it out until 2011 and security updates wouldn't stop for the 10.4 version until mid 2011 make this a retarded story that I am seriously ashamed to even be reading. (Yes, i know i'm a moron for posting on it after having coming to this realization.)
Heh. Yeah, but even with Win7, basically nobody uses 64-bit windows because it breaks so much crap. So fortunately you can continue to run EDIT.COM and other hilarious old chestnuts that Windows still helpfully includes. And you can have comically-specced systems that ship with 4GB of RAM but can only address 3GB.
Thanks, this is interesting. Okay, I'm willing to say that it would be cool for some research to go into bringing some principles from your rollcage and harness proposal into an updated passenger car design that would still be acceptable to drivers.
I suppose you love superficial wounds?
Of course i do, in fact I'm a 16 year old girl and i cut myself every day. it makes me all hardcore and sexy.;) (just kidding, none of that is true)
All things considering, I'm sure he would choose the airbag again vs having broken facial bones without one.
So, you're admitting that having airbags is way better than not having them? Cool, cause that was my freaking point too! As for your nitpick, yes, I meant "harmless" as an aggregate term. Think in gaming terms: Big head-on collision + no airbag: You take 86 damage. Big head-on collision + airbag: You take 6 damage.
I define "harmful" as causing you to take more damage than you would have without it. For example, a spike mounted on the wheel causes you more damage than no spike, and is harmful. Therefore, since you are in fact 80 health units better off with it than without it, I don't see how you can blame the airbag (by labeling it "harmful") for the 6 damage. Instead I'd blame the accident for it. Now, if airbags replaced a perfect device that would allow you to take NO damage from the same accident, then you could call them harmful.
which can happen if you manage to accidentally short one of the yellow wires under your dashboard
I like how you're mocking me for being unqualified to comment, but you seem to be advocating making compromises to protect unqualified people playing with wires under the dash. Maybe they shouldn't monkey with those wires unless they know what they're doing?
People get their nose broken by their airbag all the time.
Oh, no! In the process of having your life saved, you've sustained a superficial injury!
And if you were wearing a safety harness and driving a vehicle with a roll cage and a properly designed steering column
You go ahead and market these 6-point harnesses (with free airbag deactivation!) and you tell me who's willing to wear them. Clue: Some people don't even wear seatbelts. Sorry, but your harness solution is great for racecars where everyone has to follow the rules, but a convenient seatbelt + airbag combo has saved more lives a hundred times over than your idealist solution would, because nobody would bother to properly strap in before driving down the street for groceries. Before you mock me (again) for being unqualified, apparently most of the auto engineers who do this stuff for a living agree with me, otherwise our cars would be equipped as you advocate.
And my main point was that I'm qualified to comment on the effects of airbags on passengers because I have been in an accident and had an airbag deploy on me. Have you? Were you permanently harmed?
Now that we've finished the name-calling and stuff, can you answer an honest technical question? Some posters here have said that the airbag gives your head a little farther to travel while it decelerates so it doesn't have to decelerate all at once. I understand that to be the point of airbags. Without getting into how much you hate airbags (and superficial wounds), can you explain to me how your harness system is better? I would think that a harness would stop your body all at once (and I think it was you who mentioned a helmet with a head strap, so it would stop your head all at once too). That's a lot of G-force. I'm not sure that would be so good for your head.
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It was Windows NT or 95 that decided randomly to move the close box to the right side (3.1 had only the window menu for closing, and you had to double-click it or drop it down and click "close"). The only reason I can imagine why they did that was a juvenile attempt to differentiate vs. classic Mac OS. See also:
- Icons lined up by default on the left of the desktop instead of right.
- White mouse arrow (stupid!) instead of black
- global "bar" (taskbar vs mac menu bar) at the bottom of the screen by default instead of the top
All these changes were so obviously made to be "the opposite of whatever Apple does" in order to give Windows a veneer of different-ness so that the inexperienced user (or judge) would say "Wow, this is definitely NOT a knock-off of Mac OS! In fact, it's the opposite!
Therefore, since the original justification for moving it to the right was nonexistent, none is needed to move it back where it belongs.
light the first match, so to speak, to get the fire going.
Oh, please, please tell me this means the next step involves burning all spammers alive? Pretty please can we can we? I would support that plan because SPAMMERS ARE WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.
Haha. Thanks for setting me straight. I didn't know that.
Um, since always. it's an island. er, one and a half islands. In other news, Hawaii is not a part of North America. :P
With a name like "clarkkent09" i'm surprised you didn't at least pick a DC superhero to use for that joke, but it was hilarious nonetheless. Too bad I don't have mod points.
Something must be wrong with your computer. I've been using time machine since leopard came out (I never did backups properly until that so this was a big win for me) and other than occasionally spotting the little time machine menubar item doing its little animation, I've NEVER noticed anything.
Also, I get "spinning wheels" only on occasion, always when a program is working on an intensive operation and not responding (usually Textmate doing a project-wide search). This doesn't affect any other programs at the time.
One other problem besides net neutrality is we're letting cable companies buy TV networks now. NBC is about to be owned by Comcast, and it's not the first and won't be the last. And regulators see nothing anticompetitive about this. It's sickening.
Tivo needs to cut out the middleman, and offer an iptv device. No cable cards, no contracts with satellite providers, just plug it in to your network.
Of course, with cablecos owning major chunks of cable networks and now broadcast networks (NBC), they would never allow an IPTV startup to carry any halfway-complete set of channels... And with no net neutrality, our monopoly cable and phone companies that both want to sell you their TV services can throttle back "Tivo IP" to about 10Kbps... Crap.
(only record new, but the satellite picks up locals and shows them on 3 feeds [HD, local channel number, and 8000 channel number] so the DVR records the new episode on all three feeds because it's my highest ranked show).
You're doing it wrong on the Dish box. I think you made a Dish Pass when what you want is a plain vanilla recording. Dish pass searches on every channel--it may be good for catching the next time your favorite movie comes on, or if you gotta have every "Cops" that's aired in syndication, but a normal recording is always the tool for recording first-run shows because a normal recording only does the channel you put it on. Since you know new episodes of Big Bang Theory will always be on CBS, you just find it in the guide on your HD CBS channel, press "Record," hit "new episodes," and you're done. You'll get only new episodes that air on that specific channel.
Also cool is the timeslot feature. That is another choice in the standard recording creator, where it records that show *if and only if* it is on in that same timeslot. If it's preempted nothing is recorded. If they air episodes at 5, 6, and 10, you'll only get the timeslot you intended.
Also the Dish thing does group by show name, it's one of the options to the right of the list. Let me know if you can't find it and i'll go see what it's called. It also lets you sort either by most recently recorded or alpha.
The biggest annoyance I have with Dish DVR is that they don't strip off "The" from the beginning of shows when alphabetizing. So i have a huge "The" section down near the end of the alpha list. Aside from that it's awesome. and now the web scheduling is out of beta so i can log in and edit scheduled recording, delete shows etc. from anywhere.
FYI, you can get those blackberry trackballs for about $3-4 on Amazon. One search there ought to yield you about 50 different places selling them. The "replacement" requires a small spoon or anything to pry off the little ring and the ball mechanism lifts right out. It takes about 30 seconds. You should do it, your thumb will thank you. I picked up about 8 of them to keep 'em on hand for various coworkers, it saved on the shipping.
If only the apple mighty mouse had been designed smartly enough to have that little trackball be an easy replacement instead of being impossible to replace... :D
+10,000 Insightful
Seriously, that was one of the best speeches I've heard in a while. and it came in the form of a /. comment. nice job. if you ever run for public office in the USA look me up on your fans list and i'll campaign for you.
How does this proposed alliance claim to be able to get the same benefits?
They probably just expect to just do a shitty BREW app market (such as the Verizon Get It Now/VCAST store) and think that users won't laugh in their faces and go back to using native apps written by people who know what they're doing.
I welcome this initiative, but only because it will be a giant waste of money and effort for the cellcos, and anything that hurts them makes me smile spitefully.
I have no problem reading on my 1600x1200 dvi monitor. I also maintain a no-paper desk. Any documents delivered to me as paper are scanned and recycled. Any that I don't need are immediately recycled. Before I started this practice my desk was always a mess. Now it's always great.
Paper sucks...
I feel that spending my money on an upgrade is just not worth it. When the time comes that the majority of Mac OS X apps would no longer work on v10.4, I'll just reformat my MacBook and replace its OS with FreeBSD.
Time is money. Don't you place any value on your own time? Surely it takes a few hours to do a full backup, install a new OS, find replacements for apps you had on your old OS, fix any driver issues that come up...Really, after all that time, you think you'll come out ahead? When you could just buy Snow for like $40, pop it in, do an upgrade (1 hour max and it's primarily unattended time), and suddenly all your apps work and get upgrades again, and your hardware is still fully supported? I get your "if it ain't broke" argument but you're basically saying "It ain't broke, except for the fact that less and less software works for it these days." Well what else is the OS there for but to run software, right?
I'm not trying to be a fanboy about it, I would caution you of the same thing if you were thinking of blowing away a BSD environment you'd used for 4 years to put on OS X. Perhaps at least give it a shot. Why not download an ISO of Snow, spend the few minutes doing an upgrade, and if you like it you won't have reservations buying it. If you hate it then go ahead and wipe it out and go for FreeBSD and you're not out any money or any serious time.
The OSX updates are service packs, with windows I get that for free. .
Yawn. Keep telling yourself that. So since 10.6 10.5 10.4 10.3 10.2 10.1 were all service packs I guess in your opinion OS X hasn't had any real releases since 10.0 in 1999 or 2000 right? Don't be a moron. Say that you prefer Windows, I don't care, some people like it and it has its pros and cons. OS X has its pros and cons too. But don't be intentionally dense. Or otherwise tell me how 10.4 was less of an upgrade over its predecessor, 10.3, than Windows XP was vs. 2000. (Hint: Windows 2000's internal name is NT 5.0. XP? 5.1.) Same goes for 10.5 vs. 10.4.
Clearly version numbers don't mean anything. Adding hella new features is not a service pack. The only features MS ever added in a service pack was Windows Genuine Advantage, and a lot of training wheels for MSIE 6.0. Compare this to Spotlight, Expose, Time Machine, etc. The only reason Apple didn't call 10.2 "OS 11" and on from there, is because they spent a lot of time and money branding it "OS X" ("Ten") and "OS XI" would look weird and not roll off the tongue.
who bought nice new Macbooks running 10.4 in 2008
Not bloody likely, since Leopard came out in October 2007.
Well, if you must have the latest possible Firefox while keeping the oldest possible hardware, you could just run Linux on your 6-year-old iBook. Nobody's putting a gun to your head to make you use a certain OS. But I can't imagine it's much fun to browse the web with it. I would assume flash slaughters it. But then again you're using Firefox so maybe if you tricked it out with all kinds of ad and flash blocking it would be useful-ish. As long as you stayed away from too many DOM-manipulating fancy webapps.
I have plenty of respect for older computers (I was sad when my little 12" PowerBook G4 finally died last year) but honestly I'd much rather Mozilla spends their resources making new features and improving performance for the 90% than catering to the 10% who are too cheap (no offense--i'm just sayin') to buy new hardware (or even OS) more than once per decade. This is the fourth laptop I've had since yours was new, and I'm far, far, far from rich. I find that keeping up to date with hardware improves my experience and helps me get things done faster. YMMV.
Yeah i'm pretty confused. Remittances aren't illegal. And according to the linked wiki article India is the world's #1 recipient of remittances!
Lol. if you read the story you would know that Apple is not involved in this at all. There were old APIs, Mozilla used them, then Apple made shiny new way better APIs 3 years ago, Mozilla decided to use those too, and now they don't want to bother anymore with maintaining the old code that uses the old (still supported) APIs.
If you think that Microsoft never introduces new APIs that make things better for developers, I doubt you have ever developed for Microsoft. They totally introduce cool new APIs. If you're going to have a living product this is a problem everyone faces on every platform. Sure, abandonware will stop working after fewer years on a constantly-upgraded Mac than it will on a constantly-upgraded Windows box. But any *non-dead* product has to choose from one of these options:
A. Never use new APIs. Your app will start to look clunky after a while and might not perform well. An example would be using GDI instead of DirectX for a game because you don't want to break Win 3.1 support.
B. Use new APIs when they make your job easier, but still do all the work of using the old APIs forever. Not only are you now actually making your job harder than if you did choice (A), but now your app becomes a bloated and tangled mess and has branching logic everywhere to handle every version of the OS.
C. Use new APIs when they make your job easier. Keep doing the work of using the old APIs for a little while, then prune out that stuff after a couple years when adoption of the new OS picks up. Use the time you save to actually improve your app.
So are you blaming Apple for not inventing those new APIs sooner? Because I guess that would be nice if they could have just written every API we have now, into 10.0 and shipped that 10 years ago. Or are you blaming Apple for daring to work on making better APIs? Again, they didn't even pull support out for those APIs. Nobody's stopping Mozilla from continuing to code to them. Mozilla is just smart enough to see when something better has been invented and use it!
If you're not making any new cool APIs, I don't see the point in bothering to work on an operating system at all. Besides doing security patches and designing new skins (see Windows Vista).
If these users aren't upgrading their OS, they probably aren't the sort of people who are particularly bothered about having a specific browser.
It's not like Firefox is a spectacularly great browser on OS X anyway.
THIS. Seriously, this, combined with the fact that this upcoming 10.4-dropping version of firefox won't make it out until 2011 and security updates wouldn't stop for the 10.4 version until mid 2011 make this a retarded story that I am seriously ashamed to even be reading. (Yes, i know i'm a moron for posting on it after having coming to this realization.)
Heh. Yeah, but even with Win7, basically nobody uses 64-bit windows because it breaks so much crap. So fortunately you can continue to run EDIT.COM and other hilarious old chestnuts that Windows still helpfully includes. And you can have comically-specced systems that ship with 4GB of RAM but can only address 3GB.
IE 5.5.
not... using any of those frameworks or anything .
Well that's just disgusting.
No, seriously. How do you sleep at night?
I "could" also have a beach house in malibu. Too bad I don't. What a dumb statement. Netbooks kinda fail for a lot of tasks.
Thanks, this is interesting. Okay, I'm willing to say that it would be cool for some research to go into bringing some principles from your rollcage and harness proposal into an updated passenger car design that would still be acceptable to drivers.
Of course i do, in fact I'm a 16 year old girl and i cut myself every day. it makes me all hardcore and sexy. ;) (just kidding, none of that is true)
So, you're admitting that having airbags is way better than not having them? Cool, cause that was my freaking point too! As for your nitpick, yes, I meant "harmless" as an aggregate term. Think in gaming terms:
Big head-on collision + no airbag: You take 86 damage.
Big head-on collision + airbag: You take 6 damage.
I define "harmful" as causing you to take more damage than you would have without it. For example, a spike mounted on the wheel causes you more damage than no spike, and is harmful. Therefore, since you are in fact 80 health units better off with it than without it, I don't see how you can blame the airbag (by labeling it "harmful") for the 6 damage. Instead I'd blame the accident for it. Now, if airbags replaced a perfect device that would allow you to take NO damage from the same accident, then you could call them harmful.
Um, okay.
I like how you're mocking me for being unqualified to comment, but you seem to be advocating making compromises to protect unqualified people playing with wires under the dash. Maybe they shouldn't monkey with those wires unless they know what they're doing?
Oh, no! In the process of having your life saved, you've sustained a superficial injury!
You go ahead and market these 6-point harnesses (with free airbag deactivation!) and you tell me who's willing to wear them. Clue: Some people don't even wear seatbelts. Sorry, but your harness solution is great for racecars where everyone has to follow the rules, but a convenient seatbelt + airbag combo has saved more lives a hundred times over than your idealist solution would, because nobody would bother to properly strap in before driving down the street for groceries. Before you mock me (again) for being unqualified, apparently most of the auto engineers who do this stuff for a living agree with me, otherwise our cars would be equipped as you advocate.
And my main point was that I'm qualified to comment on the effects of airbags on passengers because I have been in an accident and had an airbag deploy on me. Have you? Were you permanently harmed?
Now that we've finished the name-calling and stuff, can you answer an honest technical question? Some posters here have said that the airbag gives your head a little farther to travel while it decelerates so it doesn't have to decelerate all at once. I understand that to be the point of airbags. Without getting into how much you hate airbags (and superficial wounds), can you explain to me how your harness system is better? I would think that a harness would stop your body all at once (and I think it was you who mentioned a helmet with a head strap, so it would stop your head all at once too). That's a lot of G-force. I'm not sure that would be so good for your head.