Last time I looked, here in the UK they were about the same price - £569, although it'll be more for the camera (maybe £900+) if you're going to be wanting a decent lens. You're also assuming that said DSLR fanatic already has a computer, which you can also argue is a requirement.
If you're going to pony up between £500 and £1000 for a camera, then it's worth factoring in the price of software, especially as you don't need to buy film.
I mean that's like getting a film SLR and moaning about the cost of darkroom kit... it's the same with any hobby; horse riding isn't just the price of a horse, fishing isn't just the price of a rod and digital photography isn't just the price of a digital camera, you have to account for all the necessary extras as they say...
...what about that honking great ugly box at the bottom of it that's way bigger than 3mm deep and obviously has to sit under the TV?
Granted, it's cool that Sony have developed an OLED TV, but sorry I don't see the point of having a wafer thin screen when the base unit looks like a brick. If you could remotely stick the box somewhere else and wallmount the TV that'd be nice, but from what I can tell, you can't.
The HTC Touch - nice interface, small form factor. Okay, so it's not made by Mr Jobs and Co, but it's a damn nice piece of kit. Works with corporate email (read Exchange), has a decent camera, no network lock-in, and it's cheaper.
Yes, the Apple fanboys will say it's Microsoft-based, but the fact is; it's a damn fine piece of kit - oh yeah, and you can write proper software apps for it using.NET, not some poxy Javascript web-based thing...
So does this mean you're taking some of those words away?
There are probably a few situations where the 'unimportant' bits of an image are still as relevant as the rest. Sports photos for instance - especially those played on grass - would not give you a true picture (literally) of what's going on in the scene.
This'd be good for reference photos - like the animals at the start of the YouTube video, but applications where precision and distance are required wouldn't benefit. Nice bit of work though and I reckon with some smart scaling embedded too (rather than its 'folding effect'), it'd cater for most image retargetting requirements.
And I must admit that the seven book series holds together well as a whole (Lucas take note!). She's obviously taken a few leaves out of Tolkien's epics to round this one off in the way that you feel satisfied, and don't feel the need for more.
Grief, it's hard to talk about a book without giving anything away, suffice to say that if you haven't read the series, of have been put off by the 'kids books' aspect, or surrounding hype, it's a damn good series of books (something you don't really see much today), that deserves to be read. Not since LotR and the Chronicles or Narnia has there been such an epic read.
As an aside, I would also warn people to avoid the Wikipedia article on the book, as it does go into great detail about the plot.
Could be some older programs are incompatible with the newer UAC security model. I've seen something similar in Windows XP whereby certain applications that required Power User or Administrator rights to uninstall had the button missing. Quicktime was a good example.
Best answer I can give; try logging in as Administrator (proper system administrator on Vista) and seeing if the uninstall buttons are there. Remember, if a program was written pre-UAC, chances are that it might misbehave and need full admin privs to remove. The other option is just to disable UAC for the duration of the uninstall, then re-enable it. I'm assuming you've researched and tried these simple fixes already though. Right?
'There's no question the biggest weakness is related to porting games from other platforms
Um... no. The UMDs biggest weakness is that honking great window that lets sand/dust/jam/toast/your gran in to destroy the game you bought with your hard-earned cash.
That said, a UMD disc is just a minidisc (sans cover) using DVD technology rather than CD technology. It won't be long until BluMD is here folks!
...are here and ironically they are in new colours. Granted, I don't see Slashdot banging on about them, but the new XPS 13" one looks great - HDMI output, LCD backlit screen, SSD hard drive options in a package less than 1" deep. I'd say that those technological advances Dell are shipping now are way more way more interesting than Apples brushed aluminum case rumour...
And the other thing people've gotta realise is that Intel are driving most of Apple's platform development now - as I've mentioned before, there's less ways for Apple to differentiate themselves from the PC masses now, apart from cases, OSes, and non-PC products like MP3 players and phones...
Get the 1 year return to base support when you buy the PC.
About 2 weeks after you receive the system, you'll get a phone call and an offer to upgrade to the full 3 year on-site support for around £30 ($60). That worked out at about a third of the price than if I'd bought it.
Start robbing banks, then you wouldn't need to copy CDs and movies, you could just buy them.
First thing you'd do when entering the bank would be to shout "are any of you copyright lawyers?", then proceed to shoot any of them in the legs. They'd soon start to realise that having the police deal with bank robberies is a far better idea than having them go and arrest college kids for downloading Metallica...
Does Apple really need a partner in Europe? Sure, it'd be nice to have one, but the iPhone would happily sit at the high-end of the smartphone range with the N95 in pricing if supplied SIM-free. Ok, so you wouldn't get provider stuff such as visual voicemail, but you'd get 99% of the functionality. However, I don't think it would look too appealing - you can get a lot more phone for your money at N95 prices...
And I know I'll get shot down for this, but I'm still not getting the whole iPhone vibe thing at all. It's a phone with a touchscreen. It doesn't have 3G, it has a pretty average camera and overall, it's a pretty bog-standard smartphone. Symbian and Windows Mobile devices have been out for ages, are well established with thousands of software titles, work well with corporate systems and are generally more feature-complete. In that sense, a lot of European carriers are probably wondering what the hell all the fuss is about.
Granted the iPhone has the whole iPod/iTunes thing going for it which I kinda like, but I'd wait until that touchscreen finds its way into a standalone iPod. While I'd like the iPhone to succeed, feature for feature, version 1 has already been surpassed here by the likes of the Nokia N95 and the Sony Ericsson W960i.:o(
Except you'll find that the W960i mentioned does come with a touchscreen...
Knowing how good SE phones have become over the last few years, and the decent music playback abilities of the Walkman branded ones, there's every chance that this will become a iPhone killer in some markets, mostly here in Europe: not tied to one provider, full 3G capability, a decent camera (not tacked on as an afterthought), Symbian OS with thousands of apps available, and the Opera browser onboard. I know some people have mentioned that the battery life isn't mentioned, but my K800i will happily work for more than a week without a recharge.
Not really much to complain about there really to be honest.
Less shiny? Well, that'll be less fingerprints then...
There are a number of problems here that Sony just haven't thought about:
1. Why use a real church? 2. Why use a real church in a city with a high gun crime problem? 3.Why use a real church in a city with a high gun crime problem, in a FPS? 4. Why use a real church in a city with a high gun crime problem, in a FPS, without asking permission?
Obviously they just aren't thinking straight. I'm quite amazed that a big company like Sony just didn't think things through. What did they expect to happen? The church to welcome virtual gunmen through their doors with open arms after they've spentsomanyyearsdealingwithrealgun-relateddeaths?
Get real Sony, we all know exactly how it would've played out if a game went on a spree round your offices...
It's probably your brain you want to watch out for...it doesn't transmit when it's on your belt (only for 5 seconds every 10 minutes). It's full on when you're holding it up to your ear.
Well, the Panorama reporter should take care with his organs as he was clearly talking out of his arse.
Jokes aside, Panorama used to be really bloody good. In fact the UK used to have loads of decent science progs; Tomorrows World, QED, Horizons, Dispatches... etc. Now we have... none. Well, we have Panorama - which has turned from decent investigative journalism into a heap of shit made by people who have no understanding of what they're talking about, and don't know how to carry out decent science. That reporter should be sacked from Panorama, he's feckin' awful.
What hacked me off most is the way he played up the word radiation - yup, it is radiation, it's non-ionising radiation and isn't radioactive as most people might think by the phrase. Plus, he's comparing apples and oranges. In the UK, wireless and mobile kit works on different frequency bands, and as such the Specific Absorption Rates (SAR) of different materials would be different at certain frequencies. He should go off and investigate microwaves, DAB radios, GPS, BlueTooth, radio, maybe even light and a whole bunch of other stuff as well if he wants to go on a frequency binge.
What's sad is that there are people out there that will take this moron's words as gospel truth, just like the whole MMR jab fiasco... thinking about it, it's probably the same people. We've already had someone at work give back her laptop and refuse to work at home because it has wi-fi, regardless of the fact you can turn the damn thing off.
G&W started the whole Nintendo D-pad era, which then migrated to the NES and every console they've made since. Personally, I much prefer the Nintendo style D-pad to any of the others out there, and specifically don't like the 360's version as it seems to be on a slight angle based on how you hold the controller. As far as analog sticks go, the 360 has the best out there - much better than the sloppy ones on the PS1/2/3 controller IMHO.
However in my mind, I reckon that WASD and a mouse is the best controller for most games I play. Granted, it's not a console controller, but it's the dogs for FPS. No console control system comes near it and I often find myself longign for a keyboard and mouse for my Wii/360...
True, but when you're trying to do subtle gradients and stuff, it's really bloody obvious that there's dithering going on, even when it's calibrated.
In this respect, I always make sure I have a full 16M colour-capable monitor attached via DVI to my Inspiron 9400 if I'm doing any graphics work.
It's quite strange actually, because I've always been aware that laptop panels were 6-bit and this was the reason why people virtually never ever did graphics work on laptops. Why on earth Apple users should kick up a fuss now is rather amusing. I guess there'll be two outcomes; a) Apple will trumpet a 8-bit screen as the next big thing on a future MacBook release, or b) they'll change their advertising and hoep it'll go away. Having said that, with the hordes of designers that use Macs, I don't think that b's going to happen...
I would've stuck the Core 2 architecture at #1 as it's made such a huge impact this year across all platforms; desktop, laptop and servers.. There are some notable omissions; the MacBook for one. Why is the overpriced MacBook Pro on there when the oh-so-cheap MacBook isn't? OneNote 2007 deserves a mention. I'd also like to think the Momento 70 digital picture frame should be on there - it's wireless and actually works properly with a PC.
Stuff that shouldn't be on there? iTunes (yawn) - yes, it's iTunes and in 2007 it's done nothing different from what it did in 2006. As I'm in the UK I'd also wager Apple TV too. The concept's nice, but until Apple start selling video over here, it's not particularly inspiring sat under my TV. Ditto for Adobe CS3 - until they start selling it an a realistic price in the UK, it's not getting my vote at all. We're paying something like $700 for a Photoshop CS2 > CS3 upgrade for Pete's sake!!
Oh yeah, and why are we doing top 100s in May again?
...and at that point, Mr Hauser probably thought "oh crap, we should be writing games for the PC"
Seriously though, they've got hard drives, and you can stick a game on multiple DVDs if necessary. It also hasn't been unknown for a game to be released on one specific media either - Farcry only came on DVD. Add to that the fact that 99% of game developers out there could happily develop on an x86 box rather than cryptic head-bending Cell or less common PowerPC code, and I think he'd be onto a winner.
Oh, the installed userbase is big too - more than that of all the nextgen consoles put together... heh!
So the bottom line: if you want to write decent games that sell well, write it for a current PC, then port across to current consoles. Sorted.
I'm pretty much cool with having the ribbons set as they are. There a a number of reasons:
Firstly, I seemed to spend ages pulling the whole lot apart and making it just the way I wanted it. Then I'd change it. Then I'd change it again. By the time I'd got it right, I'd made it so different from the standard menus that if I used another PC, I couldn't remember where the heck I'd put anything.
Secondly, this also goes for supporting users. How many times have you told people exactly where to find something in an OS, only to find they've moved it/deleted it/ lost it? Happens all the time with Office. People regularly seem to lose whole toolbars, or end up with a little grey stub.
Thirdly, it's contextual. In older versions, none of the command were contextual at all. The rest of the OS is - right click, drag, etc. but toolbars weren't. Those years of sorting out the new ribbon seem to have pretty much got the whole lot in just the right place. For instance, I absolutely hate PowerPoint, but in 2007 putting a new presentation together was a breeze. It looked pretty good too.
Just my twopenneth. I know a lot of people out there hate the idea of being told where their icons and menus are going, but to be honest, I just don't have a problem with it at all. It's all there, it all makes sense and it's progress as far as I'm concerned.
I must say that I've seen a spate of strange crashes and stuff with the last few point updates to QuickTime on both Macs and PCs. The last update solved a few of them, but in my current line of work (which is IT sysadmin for a media company with 200+ machines) QuickTime functioning properly is vital to business.
First port of call would be QuickTime itself. As there are 'known issues' with iTunes and Vista, and we know that QuickTime and iTunes integrate pretty closely, I'd uninstall the iTunes/Quicktime install and try installing just the standalone player. There could be iTunes hooks into QuickTime that might be breaking something. It also makes sure you've got the most recent QuickTime install.
This has fixed a few of the problems I've seen over the past few months.
Secondly, I'd try a variety of different.mov files. There's a chance it could be an issue with your machine and specific encoding method that certain types of.mov files use. Thirdly, I'd try some other media files in it, like mp4 video or H.264. These can also be played back in other players and success or failure would point you in the direction of whether it's QuickTime or something deeper - such as a graphics driver - at fault.
Thirdly, I'd think back and ask yourself if you've seen any other odd graphic behaviour on your PC recently. That might indicate a driver issue. Make usre in cases like this that you're using the manufacturer approved drivers.
Fourthly, I'd look at downloading Microsoft's Application Compatibility Tools and seeing whether there's anything on your machine that doesn't run under Vista. Specifically look out for items with a graphical angle such as screen managers etc.
Yup, this new material scratches diamond, but from the article:
The material is nearly as hard as cubic boron nitride and boron suboxide, two of the hardest materials known, and like them can scratch diamond. It should also be able to cut steel without reacting chemically with the iron.
Ideally the headline should be mentioning that it's a material created in a furnace without using expensive high pressure methods. That's what makes this annoucement special.
It makes sense for Apple to put a bit more effort into the iPhone because it's a new market - they'll make quite a bit of money off it and sell new product to new customers.
However, Leopard is pretty much a point upgrade to an existing product; there's no threat to its market leverage apart from its successor, and most copies of it will be supplied with a new Mac - put simply, they an afford to let it slip as it's not as big a cash cow and isn't cracking open a new market for them. In fact for Apple, an OS update must be getting a bit dull by now - there's not a huge amount of stuff missing or wrong with it that they could add to teh mix.
iPhone on the other hand has to be right - it's one phone in a sea of hundreds, so that little bit of spit and polish to get things just right could pay off big time.
Slashdot Mirror
Figures like this are expendable - just wait until you get the sales figures for Wii vs. 360 after Mario Galaxies is released...
Last time I looked, here in the UK they were about the same price - £569, although it'll be more for the camera (maybe £900+) if you're going to be wanting a decent lens. You're also assuming that said DSLR fanatic already has a computer, which you can also argue is a requirement.
If you're going to pony up between £500 and £1000 for a camera, then it's worth factoring in the price of software, especially as you don't need to buy film.
I mean that's like getting a film SLR and moaning about the cost of darkroom kit... it's the same with any hobby; horse riding isn't just the price of a horse, fishing isn't just the price of a rod and digital photography isn't just the price of a digital camera, you have to account for all the necessary extras as they say...
...what about that honking great ugly box at the bottom of it that's way bigger than 3mm deep and obviously has to sit under the TV?
Granted, it's cool that Sony have developed an OLED TV, but sorry I don't see the point of having a wafer thin screen when the base unit looks like a brick. If you could remotely stick the box somewhere else and wallmount the TV that'd be nice, but from what I can tell, you can't.
...it's just a really large toy!
The HTC Touch - nice interface, small form factor. Okay, so it's not made by Mr Jobs and Co, but it's a damn nice piece of kit. Works with corporate email (read Exchange), has a decent camera, no network lock-in, and it's cheaper.
.NET, not some poxy Javascript web-based thing...
Yes, the Apple fanboys will say it's Microsoft-based, but the fact is; it's a damn fine piece of kit - oh yeah, and you can write proper software apps for it using
So does this mean you're taking some of those words away?
There are probably a few situations where the 'unimportant' bits of an image are still as relevant as the rest. Sports photos for instance - especially those played on grass - would not give you a true picture (literally) of what's going on in the scene.
This'd be good for reference photos - like the animals at the start of the YouTube video, but applications where precision and distance are required wouldn't benefit. Nice bit of work though and I reckon with some smart scaling embedded too (rather than its 'folding effect'), it'd cater for most image retargetting requirements.
And I must admit that the seven book series holds together well as a whole (Lucas take note!). She's obviously taken a few leaves out of Tolkien's epics to round this one off in the way that you feel satisfied, and don't feel the need for more.
Grief, it's hard to talk about a book without giving anything away, suffice to say that if you haven't read the series, of have been put off by the 'kids books' aspect, or surrounding hype, it's a damn good series of books (something you don't really see much today), that deserves to be read. Not since LotR and the Chronicles or Narnia has there been such an epic read.
As an aside, I would also warn people to avoid the Wikipedia article on the book, as it does go into great detail about the plot.
Could be some older programs are incompatible with the newer UAC security model. I've seen something similar in Windows XP whereby certain applications that required Power User or Administrator rights to uninstall had the button missing. Quicktime was a good example.
Best answer I can give; try logging in as Administrator (proper system administrator on Vista) and seeing if the uninstall buttons are there. Remember, if a program was written pre-UAC, chances are that it might misbehave and need full admin privs to remove. The other option is just to disable UAC for the duration of the uninstall, then re-enable it. I'm assuming you've researched and tried these simple fixes already though. Right?
That said, a UMD disc is just a minidisc (sans cover) using DVD technology rather than CD technology. It won't be long until BluMD is here folks!
...are here and ironically they are in new colours. Granted, I don't see Slashdot banging on about them, but the new XPS 13" one looks great - HDMI output, LCD backlit screen, SSD hard drive options in a package less than 1" deep. I'd say that those technological advances Dell are shipping now are way more way more interesting than Apples brushed aluminum case rumour...
And the other thing people've gotta realise is that Intel are driving most of Apple's platform development now - as I've mentioned before, there's less ways for Apple to differentiate themselves from the PC masses now, apart from cases, OSes, and non-PC products like MP3 players and phones...
Get the 1 year return to base support when you buy the PC.
About 2 weeks after you receive the system, you'll get a phone call and an offer to upgrade to the full 3 year on-site support for around £30 ($60). That worked out at about a third of the price than if I'd bought it.
Start robbing banks, then you wouldn't need to copy CDs and movies, you could just buy them.
First thing you'd do when entering the bank would be to shout "are any of you copyright lawyers?", then proceed to shoot any of them in the legs. They'd soon start to realise that having the police deal with bank robberies is a far better idea than having them go and arrest college kids for downloading Metallica...
What a bunch of unethical twats...
Does Apple really need a partner in Europe? Sure, it'd be nice to have one, but the iPhone would happily sit at the high-end of the smartphone range with the N95 in pricing if supplied SIM-free. Ok, so you wouldn't get provider stuff such as visual voicemail, but you'd get 99% of the functionality. However, I don't think it would look too appealing - you can get a lot more phone for your money at N95 prices...
:o(
And I know I'll get shot down for this, but I'm still not getting the whole iPhone vibe thing at all. It's a phone with a touchscreen. It doesn't have 3G, it has a pretty average camera and overall, it's a pretty bog-standard smartphone. Symbian and Windows Mobile devices have been out for ages, are well established with thousands of software titles, work well with corporate systems and are generally more feature-complete. In that sense, a lot of European carriers are probably wondering what the hell all the fuss is about.
Granted the iPhone has the whole iPod/iTunes thing going for it which I kinda like, but I'd wait until that touchscreen finds its way into a standalone iPod. While I'd like the iPhone to succeed, feature for feature, version 1 has already been surpassed here by the likes of the Nokia N95 and the Sony Ericsson W960i.
Except you'll find that the W960i mentioned does come with a touchscreen...
Knowing how good SE phones have become over the last few years, and the decent music playback abilities of the Walkman branded ones, there's every chance that this will become a iPhone killer in some markets, mostly here in Europe: not tied to one provider, full 3G capability, a decent camera (not tacked on as an afterthought), Symbian OS with thousands of apps available, and the Opera browser onboard. I know some people have mentioned that the battery life isn't mentioned, but my K800i will happily work for more than a week without a recharge.
Not really much to complain about there really to be honest.
Less shiny? Well, that'll be less fingerprints then...
There are a number of problems here that Sony just haven't thought about:
.Why use a real church in a city with a high gun crime problem, in a FPS?
1. Why use a real church?
2. Why use a real church in a city with a high gun crime problem?
3
4. Why use a real church in a city with a high gun crime problem, in a FPS, without asking permission?
Obviously they just aren't thinking straight. I'm quite amazed that a big company like Sony just didn't think things through. What did they expect to happen? The church to welcome virtual gunmen through their doors with open arms after they've spent so many years dealing with real gun-related deaths?
Get real Sony, we all know exactly how it would've played out if a game went on a spree round your offices...
Jokes aside, Panorama used to be really bloody good. In fact the UK used to have loads of decent science progs; Tomorrows World, QED, Horizons, Dispatches... etc. Now we have... none. Well, we have Panorama - which has turned from decent investigative journalism into a heap of shit made by people who have no understanding of what they're talking about, and don't know how to carry out decent science. That reporter should be sacked from Panorama, he's feckin' awful.
What hacked me off most is the way he played up the word radiation - yup, it is radiation, it's non-ionising radiation and isn't radioactive as most people might think by the phrase. Plus, he's comparing apples and oranges. In the UK, wireless and mobile kit works on different frequency bands, and as such the Specific Absorption Rates (SAR) of different materials would be different at certain frequencies. He should go off and investigate microwaves, DAB radios, GPS, BlueTooth, radio, maybe even light and a whole bunch of other stuff as well if he wants to go on a frequency binge.
What's sad is that there are people out there that will take this moron's words as gospel truth, just like the whole MMR jab fiasco... thinking about it, it's probably the same people. We've already had someone at work give back her laptop and refuse to work at home because it has wi-fi, regardless of the fact you can turn the damn thing off.
G&W started the whole Nintendo D-pad era, which then migrated to the NES and every console they've made since. Personally, I much prefer the Nintendo style D-pad to any of the others out there, and specifically don't like the 360's version as it seems to be on a slight angle based on how you hold the controller. As far as analog sticks go, the 360 has the best out there - much better than the sloppy ones on the PS1/2/3 controller IMHO.
However in my mind, I reckon that WASD and a mouse is the best controller for most games I play. Granted, it's not a console controller, but it's the dogs for FPS. No console control system comes near it and I often find myself longign for a keyboard and mouse for my Wii/360...
True, but when you're trying to do subtle gradients and stuff, it's really bloody obvious that there's dithering going on, even when it's calibrated.
In this respect, I always make sure I have a full 16M colour-capable monitor attached via DVI to my Inspiron 9400 if I'm doing any graphics work.
It's quite strange actually, because I've always been aware that laptop panels were 6-bit and this was the reason why people virtually never ever did graphics work on laptops. Why on earth Apple users should kick up a fuss now is rather amusing. I guess there'll be two outcomes; a) Apple will trumpet a 8-bit screen as the next big thing on a future MacBook release, or b) they'll change their advertising and hoep it'll go away. Having said that, with the hordes of designers that use Macs, I don't think that b's going to happen...
I would've stuck the Core 2 architecture at #1 as it's made such a huge impact this year across all platforms; desktop, laptop and servers.. There are some notable omissions; the MacBook for one. Why is the overpriced MacBook Pro on there when the oh-so-cheap MacBook isn't? OneNote 2007 deserves a mention. I'd also like to think the Momento 70 digital picture frame should be on there - it's wireless and actually works properly with a PC.
Stuff that shouldn't be on there? iTunes (yawn) - yes, it's iTunes and in 2007 it's done nothing different from what it did in 2006. As I'm in the UK I'd also wager Apple TV too. The concept's nice, but until Apple start selling video over here, it's not particularly inspiring sat under my TV. Ditto for Adobe CS3 - until they start selling it an a realistic price in the UK, it's not getting my vote at all. We're paying something like $700 for a Photoshop CS2 > CS3 upgrade for Pete's sake!!
Oh yeah, and why are we doing top 100s in May again?
...and at that point, Mr Hauser probably thought "oh crap, we should be writing games for the PC"
Seriously though, they've got hard drives, and you can stick a game on multiple DVDs if necessary. It also hasn't been unknown for a game to be released on one specific media either - Farcry only came on DVD. Add to that the fact that 99% of game developers out there could happily develop on an x86 box rather than cryptic head-bending Cell or less common PowerPC code, and I think he'd be onto a winner.
Oh, the installed userbase is big too - more than that of all the nextgen consoles put together... heh!
So the bottom line: if you want to write decent games that sell well, write it for a current PC, then port across to current consoles. Sorted.
I'm pretty much cool with having the ribbons set as they are. There a a number of reasons:
Firstly, I seemed to spend ages pulling the whole lot apart and making it just the way I wanted it. Then I'd change it. Then I'd change it again. By the time I'd got it right, I'd made it so different from the standard menus that if I used another PC, I couldn't remember where the heck I'd put anything.
Secondly, this also goes for supporting users. How many times have you told people exactly where to find something in an OS, only to find they've moved it/deleted it/ lost it? Happens all the time with Office. People regularly seem to lose whole toolbars, or end up with a little grey stub.
Thirdly, it's contextual. In older versions, none of the command were contextual at all. The rest of the OS is - right click, drag, etc. but toolbars weren't. Those years of sorting out the new ribbon seem to have pretty much got the whole lot in just the right place. For instance, I absolutely hate PowerPoint, but in 2007 putting a new presentation together was a breeze. It looked pretty good too.
Just my twopenneth. I know a lot of people out there hate the idea of being told where their icons and menus are going, but to be honest, I just don't have a problem with it at all. It's all there, it all makes sense and it's progress as far as I'm concerned.
I must say that I've seen a spate of strange crashes and stuff with the last few point updates to QuickTime on both Macs and PCs. The last update solved a few of them, but in my current line of work (which is IT sysadmin for a media company with 200+ machines) QuickTime functioning properly is vital to business.
.mov files. There's a chance it could be an issue with your machine and specific encoding method that certain types of .mov files use. Thirdly, I'd try some other media files in it, like mp4 video or H.264. These can also be played back in other players and success or failure would point you in the direction of whether it's QuickTime or something deeper - such as a graphics driver - at fault.
First port of call would be QuickTime itself. As there are 'known issues' with iTunes and Vista, and we know that QuickTime and iTunes integrate pretty closely, I'd uninstall the iTunes/Quicktime install and try installing just the standalone player. There could be iTunes hooks into QuickTime that might be breaking something. It also makes sure you've got the most recent QuickTime install.
This has fixed a few of the problems I've seen over the past few months.
Secondly, I'd try a variety of different
Thirdly, I'd think back and ask yourself if you've seen any other odd graphic behaviour on your PC recently. That might indicate a driver issue. Make usre in cases like this that you're using the manufacturer approved drivers.
Fourthly, I'd look at downloading Microsoft's Application Compatibility Tools and seeing whether there's anything on your machine that doesn't run under Vista. Specifically look out for items with a graphical angle such as screen managers etc.
It makes sense for Apple to put a bit more effort into the iPhone because it's a new market - they'll make quite a bit of money off it and sell new product to new customers.
However, Leopard is pretty much a point upgrade to an existing product; there's no threat to its market leverage apart from its successor, and most copies of it will be supplied with a new Mac - put simply, they an afford to let it slip as it's not as big a cash cow and isn't cracking open a new market for them. In fact for Apple, an OS update must be getting a bit dull by now - there's not a huge amount of stuff missing or wrong with it that they could add to teh mix.
iPhone on the other hand has to be right - it's one phone in a sea of hundreds, so that little bit of spit and polish to get things just right could pay off big time.