Indeed, every time you skip a commercial you endorse eugenics, human experimentation, work camps, and anti-semitism. Oh and that whole second world war thing.
What is wrong with paying for a show without commercials? Everyone knows where to go find new movie trailers. But damn, you were at least informative and had an honest respectable opinion before you concluded that people who don't like commercials are extremist and comparable to the perpatrators of a real human tragedy.
What is that supposed to mean exactly? Every time you ignore/skip/pay for commercial free content someone takes a "shower"?
Just a couple extra minutes of thought and you could have had a better persuasive argument and your credibility.
What planet are you from? The U.S. military operates at the behest of our elected officials... We call them politicians.
I can't help but get the impression that when you use the word politician you mean it in a slanderous manner to describe someone who doesn't share your opinion.
The user telling the system to format a drive is a lot different than a 3rd party application. It isn't like you have to get the same dialog for every task.
Indeed, and I would take it one step further. I'd append to each UAC a description of why it's bad practice. Something like....
Application X is trying to do X. This is behavior typical of malware or virus activity, but can be a product of poor developmet practices.
It isn't going to win any friends, but will certainly bring their ego's into play. Of course if MS really had some balls they'd just make developers live within their install directory. Nothing gets in or out without a open/save dialog, provided by the system of course.
But I also think it's awesome that MS basically absorbed the audio stack. But only because I hate Creative even more than MS. It took 15 years, but incompetent and destructive finally caught up with them.
I suppose, like the US, Microsoft will do the right thing. Once all of the other options have been exhausted.
Come on, it's a tragic story of how the aristocratic management raises dryer rates while lowering the temperature to get more money out of their customers. Eventually you'll discover the purpose isn't just to make more dough, but to fund their super secret Laundro-Bot that will subjugate the entire human race before summoning METEOR to rain bloody vengance upon their competitors! Mostly because the owner was jilted by a girl that worked across town at another Wash & Dry. You will eventually prevail over the mad manager, but it will be too late to stop Laundro-Bot.
All of this because long ago the owner was jilted by a girl that worked across town at another Wash & Dry. A woman who turns out to be... YOUR MOM!
There will be a side quest involving a giant chicken and a homeless man with his own rocket.
traditional heroic Square character, and the other more of an anti-hero for the American market Read as... disaffected youth with spiky hair, and the other a disaffected youth with long hair
I enjoy these games as much as anyone else, but as their name implies their character development is about as flat as my display.
Maybe you anti iTunes guys should try it on a Mac for a month, and your opinions might change.
I've been using Mac's for 20 years now. I love my Mac, but it harbors some mind bending lameness beneath it's shiny bits. Video performance in iTunes blows regardless of platform. I never said anything about any PC software. In fact I am bewildered that video playback in QuickTime is so good, while the same in iTunes is so poor.
Oh and success has little relationship to good.
Afterall, the Mac version has been nearly flawless in every iteration for years now.
So you won't mind going back to 7.0 or say the early 5.0 version... you are either spouting bullshit, or you have no memory.
You left out the part where pressing the eject button isn't enough, you have to hold it. Nor the fact that most of these shortcuts are so numerous and obscure that you may as well just print them out and tape them to your display rather than try to memorize them.
And don't get me started with iTunes, a media player that doesn't even let you adjust the brightness when watching a movie. Oh you get a ten band equalizer with 20 some odd presets, a "preamp" and volume leveling. But if your movie is too dark you've got to dig it up elsewhere and play it in QuickTime. Thirty bucks please if you want that in full screen. Add to that incompetently slow navigation and fast forward and rewind so bad they shouldn't have bothered. All of which are gloriously quick in QT.
I could go on and on, and most surely will another time. But for now I'm going to rein it in and let the apologists come in with their bog standard "shut up idiot" routine.
That's because it did. Everything since is at best a veneer. Useless animation, cute tricks, and advertising delivery platforms. I don't think there is a single site I visit that has a feature that actually benefits me that isn't trivial in Netscape 3.0.
The part that caught my eye was "patent pending', which my cynical self read as locking up OSS software into a for profit container. Not that they shouldn't get credit for doing something unique, but I'd wager what they're doing wouldn't be at all possible if OOo wasn't OSS software.
It's not about "police" so much as there are particular personalities that do not make good officers. Unfortunately law enforcement is particularly attractive to these kinds of people and at least in America there are few if any processes to keep these kinds of situations in check.
You have to give us (Americans) credit though. We don't even bother with spurious or weak evidence, our officers just make shit up wholesale and abuse/intimidate 4 year old girls into saying whatever their sick psyche's want to hear...
The Wenatchee sex ring in Wenatchee, Washington in 1994 and 1995 where police and state social workers undertook what was then called the nation's most extensive child sex-abuse investigation. Forty-three adults were arrested on 29,726 charges of child sex abuse involving 60 children. Parents, Sunday school teachers and a pastor were charged and many were convicted of abusing their own children or the children of others in the community. Courts ultimately determined the charges were entirely untrue. Police coerced children into giving false statements, and false testimony in court. Dr. Phillip Esplin, a forensic psychologist for the National Institutes of Health's Child Witness Project commented that "Wenatchee may be the worst example ever of mental health services being abused by a state... to control and manage children who have been frightened and coerced into falsely accusing their parents and neighbors of the most heinous of crimes." ----------
I would toil endlessly with utilities and settings for days on end. Now I just disable font smoothing on the PC(technical reasons, I'd leave it on if I could) and pick my favorite wallpaper. On my Mac's I shrink and disable scaling on the dock. I really really hate the dock, if someone knows of an application that basically makes the dock a menu and utterly eliminates it I'd like to know. Display extensions/invisible files on all platforms. Total time about a minute. Add another minute for all the miscellaneous things I may have forgotten. Two minutes.
Ubuntu... I'm the guy who liked brown. Sorry.
(For the purposes of this post, I don't consider installing applications I actually use to be tweaking.)
The time I was spending tweaking was never even being close to made up in productivity. Tinting scroll bars might be nice to look at, but making wavy windows in Ubuntu is nothing more than a distraction. What I need is a quick stable platform. Even if I were inclined to tweak again, stability and performance are way more important to me and most of these sorts of things compromise that.
What I have found that has made my life so much easier... Figuring out what the developer decided what was the "right" way to do things and just do them that way. Relenting and just doing things the MS/Apple/Ubuntu way ultimately made me more productive. I still think there are some pretty questionable practices going on (Apple I'm looking at you) but for the most part installing a new file manager/gadget/accessory/widget or whatever doesn't actually save me as much time as it takes to install it.
You know what's funny... I love my Mac and Linux PC's you could even think of them as an extension of my old tweaking ways. But I keep coming back to my XP box for the bulk of my work. Why? This isn't the thread or crowd for that but I'll leave you with my favorite Guy Kawasaki quote.
I'd love to discuss advocacy with you, but I've got a check to cash.
Never-mind that the comparison is really inappropriate since the model compared already comes with a drive. If you want an honest comparison you must compare it to the core model which, surprisingly, is only 179 dollars less than the "elite" and lacks other features. Of course the content of a legitimate thoughtful comparison doesn't generate the page views that a fallacious one does.
This kind of story (I'll not call it journalism) is offensive at it's core. Mostly because it's purpose isn't to convey a message or information but rather to get people to read and click ad's. Just like the story about the movie site the other day automating the invite process... Important security issue at hand, but the writer didn't care about that because it doesn't generate the page views that a fallacious story about spam does.
It's early in the process and they don't yet know what to think about it. But that's not going to stop 1up from passing that along in the most inflammatory way possible.
And people wonder why so many businesses hide behind their PR department.
Just like the pancake house down the street says all you can eat, but they put the breaks on at 13ths.
Someone somewhere has just started work on an app. to "backup" your data to yahoo mail. By backup I mean a bittorrent app that never writes the bits to your own drive.
I kid, the service is so slow they'd never get into the double digits before closing.
The point of the article is that users are being scammed into providing their login information. This is not the case.
Sure there is a different security issue regarding providing login information to 3rd parties... a quite serious problem I agree, but that's not the point of the article. That they missed the much more credible and important argument on security policy speaks volumes. Cynical perhaps, but security articles don't bring in nearly as many readers as "OMG SPAMMER!@!!!one!1"
I'll point out again that their content is designed to match their Google Adsense ad's. This is not someone who is terribly concerned with what they are writing about as much as getting (or confusing) people into clicking some ad's.
If you look at the lousy screen shots it is painfully obvious they are being up front and quite clear what they intend to do and how to skip the invitation process.
I'm not saying I'm a fan of their scheme, but it's not like they're scamming anyone. You even get to select who you want to invite.
I guess some people feel they have to produce content, even if they have to dress a non-story up in inflammatory language and ignore the facts of the situation. Gotta drive those Adsense impressions.
That was pretty good, dangerously close to sincere but pretty good.
As a battered consumer of OS 9 I can certainly sympathize, even 10.4 still has a lot of that "user in the passenger seat" abusive spouse mentality.
But it's less of a parody than an anti-ad in the same style the key difference being that he's mocking apple rather than the advertisements. Splitting hairs? Probably. Thanks though I'd long forgotten that one.
Considering you got an "Insightful" moderation when you have no e-mail address and your message is the product of an association fallacy... I'd say this fellow is at the least more credible than our moderators tonight. I know you're just being a bit silly behind that incredulity, but someone agreed with you.
It used to be that you had to be black or female to warrant that kind of discrimination.
Precisely. For that matter, considering the target audence the concept of a Log file as notification is not only ineffective but probably offensive to most. Of the people I know who might use this product, every single one of them would have ended up in a shop and paying a lot of money to have a tech figure it out. Or more than likely paying them to re-install Windows and hope it didn't happen again.
I think that perhaps you have a differing set of criteria for "window management inconsistency", "finder cock-ups", "bugs", and what the "mass market and corporations need" than a lot of other people.
I certainly know that one thing I treasure about the OS X experience is how much more consistent the window management is over, say, XP....over, say, the junk that shows up in XP.
Safari requires two clicks to activate a control, unless you click on a text edit area (but not the URL) or the Bookmark bar. Mail will let me open a link without having focus, but Safari will not. TextEdit requires two clicks to move the carrot but one to abuse the toolbar, the ruler which is in the toolbar area, and even overflows a bit with the tab elements requires focus to interact. This inconsistency is pervasive throughout Apple's applications. XP... controls are active regardless of focus.
As for allowing programmers to make rational, conistent, and powerful user interfaces across the board. That's just spurious nonsense, either platform will let you do whatever you want. Whether or not it becomes a noose has nothing to do with the platform.
At this time I'd like to reintroduce Perversion Tracker.... it gets my cock down quite frankly.
Cock-up has nothing to do with your phallus, nor is this an appropriate time or place to discuss your penis. Frankly, you are disgusting.
And let's just pretend that you didn't mention bugs. Or polish. Just how is it that you never hear Mac users bitching about their buggy OS and how nothing seems to work seamlessly?
Well, except me... And everyone who has ever posted at Macfixit Et al. Let's not talk about it? That's just ignorant, because that's the point...
The iTunes update today for instance. Apparently Apple didn't think anyone would change to/from full screen because it doesn't update the cover in the other view. Performance on a Mini is horrendous, more like "cover slide show". Forget about animation if you're viewing full screen and skipping a song. I can play WoW well enough on a mini to get some trading done but Apple can't shift and skew a rectangle? They must have been in a hurry, and God knows what else they rushed. Speaking of which, considering how much they have riding on iTunes they sure manage to botch a lot of releases. At least this one didn't destroy my library.
I'm skipping the emotional rhetoric, disinformation, and logical fallacies...
At least Apple is producing major releases every 18 months (not five+ years) with six-month point updates that not only fix the broken bits but actually make older machines run faster. If there is one major company out there that is at least trying to get it right, don't choose Microsoft as your answer. And don't think that M$ somehow updates their operating systems for free either.
If you look at the condition Apple released that software in the best adjective to describe it would be "unconscionable". They said it would work on said platform, but the actual product was unusable. There is a not insignificant number of people who feel that 10.0 and 10.1 should never have been released in the first place.
Oh and MS actually does this, service packs and interim patches are regularly released to fix bugs, improve performance, and add features. Which you can read all about in excruciating detail on their website. Which segues nicely...
Refusing to talk about failure? Which company are we talking about? Personally, I think you've got the whole thing ass-backwards.
And now we arrive at the thrust of my argument, and the thing you utterly failed to address in any fashion. Your baseless cheerleading obviously fulfills some kind of need but brings nothing to the table. All large pieces of software have problems no matter how much you want
4: Of a sort, yes; there is a hierarchical list view and a column-based browser. I find both very clumsy myself and tend to stick with the old-style Mac icon view. Fair warning, the Finder is widely -- and correctly -- considered a piece of junk needing a total rewrite. It's not well (or at all?) multithreaded and tends to balk on things Konqueror wouldn't even bat an eyelash at.
I think it's worth mentioning as well that Apple tends not to fix things between major releases. The Finder as you pointed out has a host of bugs that needs fixing, a few of which would improve it significantly. By improve I mean function "as intended", even if "as intended" sucks.
As someone who has used a mac daily for 20 years and liked it, I'd also like to see Apple gain significant ground. But it isn't going to happen until some changes are made. At a fundamental level Apple culture is in opposition to what the mass market and corporations need. Frankly OS X is not as polished as XP in many important area's. Certainly OS X has groovy features, but a surprising amount of really basic stuff is problematic. Today alone I bumped up against window management inconsistency, finder cock-ups, and plain old reproducible bugs. I'm not talking matters of taste, I'm specifically talking about fuck-ups. Windows certainly has it's share of bugs, but here is a key difference...
Microsoft documents problems, workarounds and limitations in their "knowledge base". It's not perfect, it doesn't get everything right but it's a sight better than posting manuals on the support web site and calling the job done. Refusing to talk about failure does not make you a success any more than wearing a merkin cures syphilis. Apple would have you believe that they are the panacea while ignoring buggy/broken features between major releases. As if to say "Our software is perfect until we charge you for a perfecter version".
Slashdot Mirror
Dare I say it? Anti-commercial Nazis?
Indeed, every time you skip a commercial you endorse eugenics, human experimentation, work camps, and anti-semitism. Oh and that whole second world war thing.
What is wrong with paying for a show without commercials? Everyone knows where to go find new movie trailers. But damn, you were at least informative and had an honest respectable opinion before you concluded that people who don't like commercials are extremist and comparable to the perpatrators of a real human tragedy.
What is that supposed to mean exactly? Every time you ignore/skip/pay for commercial free content someone takes a "shower"?
Just a couple extra minutes of thought and you could have had a better persuasive argument and your credibility.
What planet are you from? The U.S. military operates at the behest of our elected officials... We call them politicians.
I can't help but get the impression that when you use the word politician you mean it in a slanderous manner to describe someone who doesn't share your opinion.
Everyone has an agenda, get over it.
The user telling the system to format a drive is a lot different than a 3rd party application. It isn't like you have to get the same dialog for every task.
Indeed, and I would take it one step further. I'd append to each UAC a description of why it's bad practice. Something like....
Application X is trying to do X. This is behavior typical of malware or virus activity, but can be a product of poor developmet practices.
It isn't going to win any friends, but will certainly bring their ego's into play. Of course if MS really had some balls they'd just make developers live within their install directory. Nothing gets in or out without a open/save dialog, provided by the system of course.
But I also think it's awesome that MS basically absorbed the audio stack. But only because I hate Creative even more than MS. It took 15 years, but incompetent and destructive finally caught up with them.
I suppose, like the US, Microsoft will do the right thing. Once all of the other options have been exhausted.
Come on, it's a tragic story of how the aristocratic management raises dryer rates while lowering the temperature to get more money out of their customers. Eventually you'll discover the purpose isn't just to make more dough, but to fund their super secret Laundro-Bot that will subjugate the entire human race before summoning METEOR to rain bloody vengance upon their competitors! Mostly because the owner was jilted by a girl that worked across town at another Wash & Dry. You will eventually prevail over the mad manager, but it will be too late to stop Laundro-Bot.
All of this because long ago the owner was jilted by a girl that worked across town at another Wash & Dry. A woman who turns out to be... YOUR MOM!
There will be a side quest involving a giant chicken and a homeless man with his own rocket.
traditional heroic Square character, and the other more of an anti-hero for the American market
Read as...
disaffected youth with spiky hair, and the other a disaffected youth with long hair
I enjoy these games as much as anyone else, but as their name implies their character development is about as flat as my display.
Maybe you anti iTunes guys should try it on a Mac for a month, and your opinions might change.
I've been using Mac's for 20 years now. I love my Mac, but it harbors some mind bending lameness beneath it's shiny bits. Video performance in iTunes blows regardless of platform. I never said anything about any PC software. In fact I am bewildered that video playback in QuickTime is so good, while the same in iTunes is so poor.
Oh and success has little relationship to good.
Afterall, the Mac version has been nearly flawless in every iteration for years now.
So you won't mind going back to 7.0 or say the early 5.0 version... you are either spouting bullshit, or you have no memory.
You left out the part where pressing the eject button isn't enough, you have to hold it. Nor the fact that most of these shortcuts are so numerous and obscure that you may as well just print them out and tape them to your display rather than try to memorize them.
And don't get me started with iTunes, a media player that doesn't even let you adjust the brightness when watching a movie. Oh you get a ten band equalizer with 20 some odd presets, a "preamp" and volume leveling. But if your movie is too dark you've got to dig it up elsewhere and play it in QuickTime. Thirty bucks please if you want that in full screen. Add to that incompetently slow navigation and fast forward and rewind so bad they shouldn't have bothered. All of which are gloriously quick in QT.
I could go on and on, and most surely will another time. But for now I'm going to rein it in and let the apologists come in with their bog standard "shut up idiot" routine.
An option to keep Safari and FF bookmarks synced and therefore backed up to .mac.
Some days I think the Web peaked at HTML 3.2.
That's because it did. Everything since is at best a veneer. Useless animation, cute tricks, and advertising delivery platforms. I don't think there is a single site I visit that has a feature that actually benefits me that isn't trivial in Netscape 3.0.
The part that caught my eye was "patent pending', which my cynical self read as locking up OSS software into a for profit container. Not that they shouldn't get credit for doing something unique, but I'd wager what they're doing wouldn't be at all possible if OOo wasn't OSS software.
It's not about "police" so much as there are particular personalities that do not make good officers. Unfortunately law enforcement is particularly attractive to these kinds of people and at least in America there are few if any processes to keep these kinds of situations in check.
e _hysteria
... to control and manage children who have been frightened and coerced into falsely accusing their parents and neighbors of the most heinous of crimes."
You have to give us (Americans) credit though. We don't even bother with spurious or weak evidence, our officers just make shit up wholesale and abuse/intimidate 4 year old girls into saying whatever their sick psyche's want to hear...
----------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_care_sexual_abus
The Wenatchee sex ring in Wenatchee, Washington in 1994 and 1995 where police and state social workers undertook what was then called the nation's most extensive child sex-abuse investigation. Forty-three adults were arrested on 29,726 charges of child sex abuse involving 60 children. Parents, Sunday school teachers and a pastor were charged and many were convicted of abusing their own children or the children of others in the community. Courts ultimately determined the charges were entirely untrue. Police coerced children into giving false statements, and false testimony in court. Dr. Phillip Esplin, a forensic psychologist for the National Institutes of Health's Child Witness Project commented that "Wenatchee may be the worst example ever of mental health services being abused by a state
----------
Wasn't the PSP already aimed at at teen users?
Naw... 20 somethings wanting to relive playing PS1 games they played 10 years ago.
I would toil endlessly with utilities and settings for days on end. Now I just disable font smoothing on the PC(technical reasons, I'd leave it on if I could) and pick my favorite wallpaper. On my Mac's I shrink and disable scaling on the dock. I really really hate the dock, if someone knows of an application that basically makes the dock a menu and utterly eliminates it I'd like to know. Display extensions/invisible files on all platforms. Total time about a minute. Add another minute for all the miscellaneous things I may have forgotten. Two minutes.
Ubuntu... I'm the guy who liked brown. Sorry.
(For the purposes of this post, I don't consider installing applications I actually use to be tweaking.)
The time I was spending tweaking was never even being close to made up in productivity. Tinting scroll bars might be nice to look at, but making wavy windows in Ubuntu is nothing more than a distraction. What I need is a quick stable platform. Even if I were inclined to tweak again, stability and performance are way more important to me and most of these sorts of things compromise that.
What I have found that has made my life so much easier... Figuring out what the developer decided what was the "right" way to do things and just do them that way. Relenting and just doing things the MS/Apple/Ubuntu way ultimately made me more productive. I still think there are some pretty questionable practices going on (Apple I'm looking at you) but for the most part installing a new file manager/gadget/accessory/widget or whatever doesn't actually save me as much time as it takes to install it.
You know what's funny... I love my Mac and Linux PC's you could even think of them as an extension of my old tweaking ways. But I keep coming back to my XP box for the bulk of my work. Why? This isn't the thread or crowd for that but I'll leave you with my favorite Guy Kawasaki quote.
I'd love to discuss advocacy with you, but I've got a check to cash.
Never-mind that the comparison is really inappropriate since the model compared already comes with a drive. If you want an honest comparison you must compare it to the core model which, surprisingly, is only 179 dollars less than the "elite" and lacks other features. Of course the content of a legitimate thoughtful comparison doesn't generate the page views that a fallacious one does.
This kind of story (I'll not call it journalism) is offensive at it's core. Mostly because it's purpose isn't to convey a message or information but rather to get people to read and click ad's. Just like the story about the movie site the other day automating the invite process... Important security issue at hand, but the writer didn't care about that because it doesn't generate the page views that a fallacious story about spam does.
It's early in the process and they don't yet know what to think about it. But that's not going to stop 1up from passing that along in the most inflammatory way possible.
And people wonder why so many businesses hide behind their PR department.
Just like the pancake house down the street says all you can eat, but they put the breaks on at 13ths.
Someone somewhere has just started work on an app. to "backup" your data to yahoo mail. By backup I mean a bittorrent app that never writes the bits to your own drive.
I kid, the service is so slow they'd never get into the double digits before closing.
The point of the article is that users are being scammed into providing their login information. This is not the case.
Sure there is a different security issue regarding providing login information to 3rd parties... a quite serious problem I agree, but that's not the point of the article. That they missed the much more credible and important argument on security policy speaks volumes. Cynical perhaps, but security articles don't bring in nearly as many readers as "OMG SPAMMER!@!!!one!1"
I'll point out again that their content is designed to match their Google Adsense ad's. This is not someone who is terribly concerned with what they are writing about as much as getting (or confusing) people into clicking some ad's.
If you look at the lousy screen shots it is painfully obvious they are being up front and quite clear what they intend to do and how to skip the invitation process.
I'm not saying I'm a fan of their scheme, but it's not like they're scamming anyone. You even get to select who you want to invite.
I guess some people feel they have to produce content, even if they have to dress a non-story up in inflammatory language and ignore the facts of the situation. Gotta drive those Adsense impressions.
That was pretty good, dangerously close to sincere but pretty good.
As a battered consumer of OS 9 I can certainly sympathize, even 10.4 still has a lot of that "user in the passenger seat" abusive spouse mentality.
But it's less of a parody than an anti-ad in the same style the key difference being that he's mocking apple rather than the advertisements. Splitting hairs? Probably. Thanks though I'd long forgotten that one.
What makes a good parody is biting humor matched with commentary that is generally more truthful than the original. These ad's have neither of that.
9 882600929
The clay monkey switch ad? Hilarious, and the implication that platform advocacy is for monkeys is spot on.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=378593493
Gus's I used to be a gamer ad? Very nice, and very true.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq3G_vqKmhI
Everything else I've seen has been pretty much rubbish. At best mildly funny but usually uncomfortably sincere.
There's something funny to be mined from the "Linux is a Chick" well, but it's pretty misogynistic and unflattering.
Considering you got an "Insightful" moderation when you have no e-mail address and your message is the product of an association fallacy... I'd say this fellow is at the least more credible than our moderators tonight. I know you're just being a bit silly behind that incredulity, but someone agreed with you.
It used to be that you had to be black or female to warrant that kind of discrimination.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Precisely. For that matter, considering the target audence the concept of a Log file as notification is not only ineffective but probably offensive to most. Of the people I know who might use this product, every single one of them would have ended up in a shop and paying a lot of money to have a tech figure it out. Or more than likely paying them to re-install Windows and hope it didn't happen again.
I think that perhaps you have a differing set of criteria for "window management inconsistency", "finder cock-ups", "bugs", and what the "mass market and corporations need" than a lot of other people.
... it gets my cock down quite frankly.
I certainly know that one thing I treasure about the OS X experience is how much more consistent the window management is over, say, XP....over, say, the junk that shows up in XP.
Safari requires two clicks to activate a control, unless you click on a text edit area (but not the URL) or the Bookmark bar. Mail will let me open a link without having focus, but Safari will not. TextEdit requires two clicks to move the carrot but one to abuse the toolbar, the ruler which is in the toolbar area, and even overflows a bit with the tab elements requires focus to interact. This inconsistency is pervasive throughout Apple's applications.
XP... controls are active regardless of focus.
As for allowing programmers to make rational, conistent, and powerful user interfaces across the board. That's just spurious nonsense, either platform will let you do whatever you want. Whether or not it becomes a noose has nothing to do with the platform.
At this time I'd like to reintroduce Perversion Tracker.
Cock-up has nothing to do with your phallus, nor is this an appropriate time or place to discuss your penis. Frankly, you are disgusting.
And let's just pretend that you didn't mention bugs. Or polish. Just how is it that you never hear Mac users bitching about their buggy OS and how nothing seems to work seamlessly?
Well, except me... And everyone who has ever posted at Macfixit Et al. Let's not talk about it? That's just ignorant, because that's the point...
The iTunes update today for instance. Apparently Apple didn't think anyone would change to/from full screen because it doesn't update the cover in the other view. Performance on a Mini is horrendous, more like "cover slide show". Forget about animation if you're viewing full screen and skipping a song. I can play WoW well enough on a mini to get some trading done but Apple can't shift and skew a rectangle? They must have been in a hurry, and God knows what else they rushed. Speaking of which, considering how much they have riding on iTunes they sure manage to botch a lot of releases. At least this one didn't destroy my library.
I'm skipping the emotional rhetoric, disinformation, and logical fallacies...
At least Apple is producing major releases every 18 months (not five+ years) with six-month point updates that not only fix the broken bits but actually make older machines run faster. If there is one major company out there that is at least trying to get it right, don't choose Microsoft as your answer. And don't think that M$ somehow updates their operating systems for free either.
If you look at the condition Apple released that software in the best adjective to describe it would be "unconscionable". They said it would work on said platform, but the actual product was unusable. There is a not insignificant number of people who feel that 10.0 and 10.1 should never have been released in the first place.
Oh and MS actually does this, service packs and interim patches are regularly released to fix bugs, improve performance, and add features. Which you can read all about in excruciating detail on their website. Which segues nicely...
Refusing to talk about failure? Which company are we talking about? Personally, I think you've got the whole thing ass-backwards.
And now we arrive at the thrust of my argument, and the thing you utterly failed to address in any fashion. Your baseless cheerleading obviously fulfills some kind of need but brings nothing to the table. All large pieces of software have problems no matter how much you want
4: Of a sort, yes; there is a hierarchical list view and a column-based browser. I find both very clumsy myself and tend to stick with the old-style Mac icon view. Fair warning, the Finder is widely -- and correctly -- considered a piece of junk needing a total rewrite. It's not well (or at all?) multithreaded and tends to balk on things Konqueror wouldn't even bat an eyelash at.
I think it's worth mentioning as well that Apple tends not to fix things between major releases. The Finder as you pointed out has a host of bugs that needs fixing, a few of which would improve it significantly. By improve I mean function "as intended", even if "as intended" sucks.
I've got Karma to burn, so I'll say it...
As someone who has used a mac daily for 20 years and liked it, I'd also like to see Apple gain significant ground. But it isn't going to happen until some changes are made. At a fundamental level Apple culture is in opposition to what the mass market and corporations need. Frankly OS X is not as polished as XP in many important area's. Certainly OS X has groovy features, but a surprising amount of really basic stuff is problematic. Today alone I bumped up against window management inconsistency, finder cock-ups, and plain old reproducible bugs. I'm not talking matters of taste, I'm specifically talking about fuck-ups. Windows certainly has it's share of bugs, but here is a key difference...
Microsoft documents problems, workarounds and limitations in their "knowledge base". It's not perfect, it doesn't get everything right but it's a sight better than posting manuals on the support web site and calling the job done. Refusing to talk about failure does not make you a success any more than wearing a merkin cures syphilis. Apple would have you believe that they are the panacea while ignoring buggy/broken features between major releases. As if to say "Our software is perfect until we charge you for a perfecter version".