Or, you'll stick with buggy-ass 10.6/Mountain Lion if your machine is one of those left unsupported by Apple in its most recent "fuck you" to its customers, or, you simply still require that your PPC apps work.
Not sure whether you mean 10.6 or Mountain Lion (which is 10.8; the marketing names are stupid and confusing, so the mistake is understandable). Presumably you mean 10.6 (which is Snow Leopard) because you mention PPC—then again, you mention "buggy", a descriptor which I've seen used less for 10.6 than for any other version, and it has a rather large user base for its age because it has been so stable—but I'll address both.
If you mean Mountain Lion, nearly all of the supported systems are also supported by Yosemite (10.10). If you mean 10.6 (Snow Leopard), this is a system that was released over five years ago. In either case, Yosemite supports machines released over seven years ago. Apple announced the PowerPC-Intel transition over nine years ago, and completed it over eight years ago.
In the past, Apple has been overly aggressive in deprecating aging hardware; at times it did genuinely feel like a "fuck you". If anything, they've become more conservative in this regard than any time I can remember (and I remember well back into the PowerPC days before Steve Jobs returned). It hardly feels like a "fuck you" that with a 2007 iMac or MacBook Pro, I could have run 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 (that is, literally every major release of OS X on Intel), or that the price to upgrade rapidly decreased to zero.
That "most recent" comment is telling. When exactly was it?
In theory it is, but in practice "Love is beautiful, like birds that sing." is more likely to show up in a dictionary attack than a random string of gibberish.
Since the suggested alternative was to use the first letter from each word in the phrase, it's only more likely if the people maintaining the dictionary are idiots. Anyone actually targeting pass phrases with a dictionary would maintain a dictionary of the abbreviated versions as well, because they're likely to be aware of dumb debates like this.
Well, it's shorter anyway. And only technically: it is shorter according to a unit of measurement that has almost no meaning to most people.
If I adopted your approach, until I develop muscle memory for entering the password—and promptly forget its origin and any mnemonic value it might have had—I would be trying to remember which permutation I used. Was it
There are better routes than "Correct Horse Battery Staple" There is a better route than "Correct Horse Battery Staple" There are better ways than "Correct Horse Battery Staple" There is a better way than "Correct Horse Battery Staple" This is a better approach than "Correct Horse Battery Staple" This is a better approach than "Correct Horse Battery Staple" What the fuck was my "Correct Horse Battery Staple" password anyway? Fuck, now I'm locked out and I'll never remember the fucking password. Fuck it, reset password back to password12.
The reason Correct Horse Battery Staple works is because, in terms of memory and recall, it's much much shorter. It's only four things.
If you think a client-side script is going to protect you from an unreasonably large HTTP request body, I really hope you aren't developing websites that I use.
Only after a radical redistribution of wealth. The vast majority of people do not actually have the means to enjoy what free time they do have without first exchanging the rest of their time for wages. Simply automating people out of their jobs doesn't resolve that, it exacerbates it.
That's fine. You should use the tool you prefer! My preference is different. But this is one area that choice is good. The biggest challenge is interoperability, but even that has a pretty good story these days.
along with its lack of decent multimon (did they fix that yet?)
For certain values of fixed. It's heaps better than it used to be— each display is its own universe, fully configurable as a single-display was before —but it comes with one caveat: you can't span a window across two displays.
window scaling shortcuts
If you mean keyboard shortcuts for Fullscreen and Zoom, the former has always had a shortcut and the latter can be trivially assigned system-wide. If you mean something more involved (like Windows Snap, various window management techniques of that sort), there are tools available but they come from third parties with various levels of cost and quality.
I actually dont like the dock at all
There's not really a lot to like, it's pretty much a minimalist task list. That said, there are tools for enhancing it as well. I've chosen one (HyperDock) that gives it similar behavior to e.g. the Windows 7 Taskbar, with window thumbnails and simple management.
--
To be clear, I discussed a couple places where I've spent money to fill gaps that OS X can't fill on its own. I realize this is part of everyone's cost-benefit analysis when choosing a platform. I am not advocating choosing a deficient OS and throwing money at fixing it. I'm actually not advocating anything, other than choosing the platform that most fits what you want to do, particularly in a professional setting.
There's a number of reasons, despite some small lack of features, that OS X works better for me. I'd be happy to share, but I don't want this to turn into a pissing contest like every inter-platform discussion tends to be. If you're genuinely curious, I'll oblige.
Or you use it for work and the cost for a tool you feel comfortable with (not an extra grand, but yes a premium) outweighs the cost of fighting with your tools.
They are much more concerned with politics, religion and ideology, and the use of violence or threats to those ends. Hold on, that might actually be the definition of terrorism, you all might want to check.
It's also strikingly similar to politics, religion and ideology. Incidentally, it's even similar to sports fandom. People become dangerously irrational in a line for a pocket computer. There are varying degrees of course, but "terrorism" isn't some unique or horrifying phenomenon. It's just reality failing to go away and stop inconveniencing us.
"Terrorism" is basically a modernized form of revolutionary movements. It's more careless, it's less organized, and it's put in a defensive position against an increasingly stable (and rigid) world order. It's reactionary because the more astute movements sold out a long time ago.
Basically it's a joke. And we keep electing and accepting "leaders" who don't have a sense of humor; or a sense of leadership.
The single best way to fight real terrorism is to get real honest about real grievances real fast.
As someone who probably has a point, you really should learn to communicate it much better. You're just throwing all of your potentially good ideas into the garbage.
Helpful hints:
What is the problem? What does it mean to participate?
Anyone who has real, time-sensitive responsibilities will make sure that lost time is covered before traveling. Anyone else worrying about the that time in transit is just bored, uncomfortable and selfish. (Full disclosure: I am extremely sensitive to time lost in transit, and I become a bored, uncomfortable, selfish piece of shit about it. But that doesn't mean I'm not self-aware.)
Don't be a prick. My point began with "there's a ton wrong with Uber", I am not a fanboy. Instead of responding with this internethipster you don't KNOW what a service IS? bullshit, just clarify the point (if it was even yours in the first place; if it wasn't, you're broadening the discussion and doing it in a really dickish way). It would make a discussion, with understanding and possibly even learning, much more achievable.
Yes, ultimately the fundamental problem with Uber is that they try to appear like a taxi service to end-users while not entirely following all of the rules of a taxi service. It's the source of basically everything else wrong with the company. But that does not mean that the taxi-like portion is not a service, nor that those prices are not obviously what a (would-be) customer thinks of when presented with the claim "Uber charges more money for the same service". The reality is that they are a taxi service, whatever they like to claim, and that is why I presented the comparison to other taxi services. It turns out that dispatch is a primary function of a taxi service.
Uber drivers get less money than normal taxi drivers, that's why you pay less.
Every former cab driver I've met who drives Uber (and they are many) says the opposite. Again, this might be unique to Seattle, following from an artificial limit on taxi licenses that may also be unique to Seattle, I don't know. I honestly have not taken the time to know, because a competition between luxury transportation providers is hardly the most important issue to me in terms of justice.
Wait, what? There's a ton wrong with Uber, but this does not seem to be on the list. In my experience, Uber X charges approximately 50% or less what a conventional cab would charge (and about 75% what a flat-rate cab would charge). Even so, Uber greatly increases the driver pool (at least here in Seattle, not sure how limited cab licenses are in other markets) and pays their drivers more (at least so says every driver I've met who formerly drove a conventional or flat-rate cab).
There's other stuff wrong with your post, but that just stood out as crazypants.
The two aren't equivalent. An overweight person in most circumstances has some recourse in terms of diet and physical activity, where a tall person has no recourse except dismemberment. (And none of this was said in any kind of judgment, I am both overweight and tall.)
That said, there is already precedent for charging extra to the tall: charging extra for more leg room. They already do it.
Literally none of the features discussed in your post are desirable for users.
Nonsense. Most so-called responsive techniques were driven by user demand:
1. for the "real web" on mobile devices 2. for actually usable web pages on mobile devices 3. for high resolution displays with sharper text and more detailed images 4. for respectful and reliable behavior in varying network conditions
These sorts of demands have been so strong that they upset the entire mobile industry, destroying huge incumbent companies.
As far as specific features...
Device-pixel ratios are how users get sharper text—and now images—when their hardware allows it. The alternative is that either users see smaller and smaller content/UI, or they are stuck with low-resolution displays. Neither of those are desirable outcomes for users (and sales show pretty well that users prefer high-resolution).
Mime-type alternation allows:
- all users (rather than some) to view content—this is self-evidently desirable by users; - some users to reduce bandwidth—this is self-evidently desirable by any user who is bandwidth-constrained (either in terms of speed of data cap).
Element queries allow UI elements to be reusable components, so that they always behave the same way under the same circumstances. This is fairly obviously desirable by everyone, as the alternative is to have things work in myriad ways depending on unrelated circumstances.
User-based settings for preferring faster downloads/reduced data consumption is obviously desirable. I can't for the life of me imagine how you could say it's not.
If you're hosting different versions, provider links to the versions and let the user choose.
Nothing is preventing a responsive site from doing just that, but still being smart about which (and how many) bits to send down the wire to a particular user.
Don't serve up different content to different browsers unless you absolutely have to (and when you absolutely have to, odds are your UI is terrible).
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what responsive design is about. This is not about serving different content (at all) nor distinguishing between browsers (at all). It's about providing optimal rendering of the same content for different viewing/network conditions. Fundamentally, what is optimal for 2560x1440@1x is not optimal for 2560x1440@3x. What is optimal for LTE is not optimal for EDGE.
What's appropriate for my display, exactly? You have to base it on the VIEWPORT, but that's VARIABLE because the USER can change that shit. Any viewport change and you risk having to download the newly "appropriate" version.
+
The whole premise of why we'd want to do this is retarded as well. Phones are getting resolutions of 2560x1440 now.
There's more to it than that, and yet more coming in the future. Yes, media queries tend to be primarily viewport queries. Viewport data is more complex than just pixel dimensions though, because a browser pixel is not a device pixel. This is why device-pixel-ratios are also supported. A 2560x1440 phone likely responds to a media query as ~854x480@3x (the math isn't right, I wonder what the real device pixel viewport size is).
Picture/source also supports mime-type alternation, just like video/audio sources do. This allows content to be delivered in preferred media types (e.g. webm, webp) where possible with fallbacks to less-preferred types (e.g. h264, png/jpg/gif), potentially reducing bandwidth and cost.
The same group that led the picture element is now leading element queries, which will allow size-based queries to be derived from the size displayed on screen, rather than the size of the viewport itself (as in, placing a responsive image in a sidebar will have different download characteristics from placing it in a full-width column).
And browser vendors can develop selection algorithms based on user preference (e.g. prefer faster downloads) and network conditions (e.g. high latency cell, bandwidth limits, etc) rather than viewport conditions alone.
Literally none of the features discussed here are possible with the feature set that existed before picture. Some (some!) can be approximated with JavaScript, generally badly and often with very undesirable consequences.
Turning novel programming problems into an implementation that is non-clever, simple and clear is absolutely a creative pursuit. The "cleverness" that is (and/or should be) lambasted in programming is that which hides complexity. It's an expression of lax creativity. Creative programming can be a combination of a keen application of solved problems and actually clever solutions for unsolved problems. That cleverness is expressed by arriving at solutions that are simple and clear.
This is work that is a long way off from being expendable. It will come eventually, but until then a large subset of programming problems require deeply creative work.
Any programmer who feels that their work does not fit what I said above is almost certainly working on solved problems.
Windows compatibility, then ARM. While the majority of Mac usage certainly isn't on Windows, the fact that it could be quite likely drove a large part of the surge in sales after the Intel switch.
There's a problem with efforts to make programming more accessible to non-programmers at the technology level: it turns out that you still have to become a programmer to use the technology effectively. This very notion is how programming languages were developed in the first place—what if we could specify what a program should do, rather than writing the code that does it, and then have the computer generate the code? That is a programming language.
Modern programming is increasingly abstracted away from the metal, and compilers are a wonder unto themselves, but ultimately in order to effectively write a program you still need to do two very specialized things:
1. Design the damn thing well enough to at least get it working (and hopefully well enough to maintain and extend it). 2. Either know or discover—usually both—how to work around the warts of the chosen technology (because they all have warts).
Even if programming could be made so abstract that it's essentially a series of opaque building blocks, you'll always need to do #1, and only by vast inefficiencies and ignorance be able to avoid #2.
- - -
Side note:
Speaking of HyperCard, in many ways its spiritual descendant is Flash. Flash hosts a monstrosity of a language, with concepts from Java bolted onto JavaScript. I'm not saying it couldn't have been done another way, but it's little surprise that something designed to be simple for content producers could become so enormously complex.
How's Netflix going to figure out why I rated that a 1 without asking me?
This isn't really hard, in the abstract. They just have to have much better metadata about the content, and then an ever-deeper analysis of relative ratings can follow from that. Inference of context will never be perfect, but then again neither will a questionnaire (even if people voluntarily devote their time to answering it) which could recursively be subject to the same criticism that it lacks context. Unless Netflix (or any similar service) deeply understands its content, its recommendations will always be lacking.
The reason online retailers can do relatively better is that a given product often has quite a lot of metadata that can be reasoned about, and it's often relatively easy to model in context of a given product's domain. The kind of qualities people discuss about content is generally much more vague and superficial in comparison.
For instance, Netflix is often confused into believing I have any interest in genre. It might be better at predicting my taste if there were a deeper wealth of data on the kinds of qualities I care about in the content I do like, but it's generally pretty self-evident that they don't. They use coincidence of ratings across users to approximate this, but it's all very hand-wavy and often leads to confusing (if unsurprising) results. Nothing is a substitute for a deeper (currently, at least, human) analysis of the content.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, you'll stick with buggy-ass 10.6/Mountain Lion if your machine is one of those left unsupported by Apple in its most recent "fuck you" to its customers, or, you simply still require that your PPC apps work.
Not sure whether you mean 10.6 or Mountain Lion (which is 10.8; the marketing names are stupid and confusing, so the mistake is understandable). Presumably you mean 10.6 (which is Snow Leopard) because you mention PPC—then again, you mention "buggy", a descriptor which I've seen used less for 10.6 than for any other version, and it has a rather large user base for its age because it has been so stable—but I'll address both.
If you mean Mountain Lion, nearly all of the supported systems are also supported by Yosemite (10.10). If you mean 10.6 (Snow Leopard), this is a system that was released over five years ago. In either case, Yosemite supports machines released over seven years ago. Apple announced the PowerPC-Intel transition over nine years ago, and completed it over eight years ago.
In the past, Apple has been overly aggressive in deprecating aging hardware; at times it did genuinely feel like a "fuck you". If anything, they've become more conservative in this regard than any time I can remember (and I remember well back into the PowerPC days before Steve Jobs returned). It hardly feels like a "fuck you" that with a 2007 iMac or MacBook Pro, I could have run 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 (that is, literally every major release of OS X on Intel), or that the price to upgrade rapidly decreased to zero.
That "most recent" comment is telling. When exactly was it?
In theory it is, but in practice "Love is beautiful, like birds that sing." is more likely to show up in a dictionary attack than a random string of gibberish.
Since the suggested alternative was to use the first letter from each word in the phrase, it's only more likely if the people maintaining the dictionary are idiots. Anyone actually targeting pass phrases with a dictionary would maintain a dictionary of the abbreviated versions as well, because they're likely to be aware of dumb debates like this.
it's much shorter, and it's easier to memorize
Well, it's shorter anyway. And only technically: it is shorter according to a unit of measurement that has almost no meaning to most people.
If I adopted your approach, until I develop muscle memory for entering the password—and promptly forget its origin and any mnemonic value it might have had—I would be trying to remember which permutation I used. Was it
There are better routes than "Correct Horse Battery Staple"
There is a better route than "Correct Horse Battery Staple"
There are better ways than "Correct Horse Battery Staple"
There is a better way than "Correct Horse Battery Staple"
This is a better approach than "Correct Horse Battery Staple"
This is a better approach than "Correct Horse Battery Staple"
What the fuck was my "Correct Horse Battery Staple" password anyway?
Fuck, now I'm locked out and I'll never remember the fucking password.
Fuck it, reset password back to password12.
The reason Correct Horse Battery Staple works is because, in terms of memory and recall, it's much much shorter. It's only four things.
If you think a client-side script is going to protect you from an unreasonably large HTTP request body, I really hope you aren't developing websites that I use.
Only after a radical redistribution of wealth. The vast majority of people do not actually have the means to enjoy what free time they do have without first exchanging the rest of their time for wages. Simply automating people out of their jobs doesn't resolve that, it exacerbates it.
That's fine. You should use the tool you prefer! My preference is different. But this is one area that choice is good. The biggest challenge is interoperability, but even that has a pretty good story these days.
along with its lack of decent multimon (did they fix that yet?)
For certain values of fixed. It's heaps better than it used to be— each display is its own universe, fully configurable as a single-display was before —but it comes with one caveat: you can't span a window across two displays.
window scaling shortcuts
If you mean keyboard shortcuts for Fullscreen and Zoom, the former has always had a shortcut and the latter can be trivially assigned system-wide. If you mean something more involved (like Windows Snap, various window management techniques of that sort), there are tools available but they come from third parties with various levels of cost and quality.
I actually dont like the dock at all
There's not really a lot to like, it's pretty much a minimalist task list. That said, there are tools for enhancing it as well. I've chosen one (HyperDock) that gives it similar behavior to e.g. the Windows 7 Taskbar, with window thumbnails and simple management.
--
To be clear, I discussed a couple places where I've spent money to fill gaps that OS X can't fill on its own. I realize this is part of everyone's cost-benefit analysis when choosing a platform. I am not advocating choosing a deficient OS and throwing money at fixing it. I'm actually not advocating anything, other than choosing the platform that most fits what you want to do, particularly in a professional setting.
There's a number of reasons, despite some small lack of features, that OS X works better for me. I'd be happy to share, but I don't want this to turn into a pissing contest like every inter-platform discussion tends to be. If you're genuinely curious, I'll oblige.
Or you use it for work and the cost for a tool you feel comfortable with (not an extra grand, but yes a premium) outweighs the cost of fighting with your tools.
Portable to what?
They are much more concerned with politics, religion and ideology, and the use of violence or threats to those ends. Hold on, that might actually be the definition of terrorism, you all might want to check.
It's also strikingly similar to politics, religion and ideology. Incidentally, it's even similar to sports fandom. People become dangerously irrational in a line for a pocket computer. There are varying degrees of course, but "terrorism" isn't some unique or horrifying phenomenon. It's just reality failing to go away and stop inconveniencing us.
"Terrorism" is basically a modernized form of revolutionary movements. It's more careless, it's less organized, and it's put in a defensive position against an increasingly stable (and rigid) world order. It's reactionary because the more astute movements sold out a long time ago.
Basically it's a joke. And we keep electing and accepting "leaders" who don't have a sense of humor; or a sense of leadership.
The single best way to fight real terrorism is to get real honest about real grievances real fast.
As someone who probably has a point, you really should learn to communicate it much better. You're just throwing all of your potentially good ideas into the garbage.
Helpful hints:
What is the problem?
What does it mean to participate?
Anyone who has real, time-sensitive responsibilities will make sure that lost time is covered before traveling. Anyone else worrying about the that time in transit is just bored, uncomfortable and selfish. (Full disclosure: I am extremely sensitive to time lost in transit, and I become a bored, uncomfortable, selfish piece of shit about it. But that doesn't mean I'm not self-aware.)
Well, you fell to their propaganda.
Don't be a prick. My point began with "there's a ton wrong with Uber", I am not a fanboy. Instead of responding with this internethipster you don't KNOW what a service IS? bullshit, just clarify the point (if it was even yours in the first place; if it wasn't, you're broadening the discussion and doing it in a really dickish way). It would make a discussion, with understanding and possibly even learning, much more achievable.
Yes, ultimately the fundamental problem with Uber is that they try to appear like a taxi service to end-users while not entirely following all of the rules of a taxi service. It's the source of basically everything else wrong with the company. But that does not mean that the taxi-like portion is not a service, nor that those prices are not obviously what a (would-be) customer thinks of when presented with the claim "Uber charges more money for the same service". The reality is that they are a taxi service, whatever they like to claim, and that is why I presented the comparison to other taxi services. It turns out that dispatch is a primary function of a taxi service.
Uber drivers get less money than normal taxi drivers, that's why you pay less.
Every former cab driver I've met who drives Uber (and they are many) says the opposite. Again, this might be unique to Seattle, following from an artificial limit on taxi licenses that may also be unique to Seattle, I don't know. I honestly have not taken the time to know, because a competition between luxury transportation providers is hardly the most important issue to me in terms of justice.
Uber, charges more money for the same service
Wait, what? There's a ton wrong with Uber, but this does not seem to be on the list. In my experience, Uber X charges approximately 50% or less what a conventional cab would charge (and about 75% what a flat-rate cab would charge). Even so, Uber greatly increases the driver pool (at least here in Seattle, not sure how limited cab licenses are in other markets) and pays their drivers more (at least so says every driver I've met who formerly drove a conventional or flat-rate cab).
There's other stuff wrong with your post, but that just stood out as crazypants.
Sure I could just be the world's biggest dick. But what does that get me?
A lucrative career in adult entertainment.
I'm pretty concerned that I got through half the comments before I read one that mentions a train.
The two aren't equivalent. An overweight person in most circumstances has some recourse in terms of diet and physical activity, where a tall person has no recourse except dismemberment. (And none of this was said in any kind of judgment, I am both overweight and tall.)
That said, there is already precedent for charging extra to the tall: charging extra for more leg room. They already do it.
Literally none of the features discussed in your post are desirable for users.
Nonsense. Most so-called responsive techniques were driven by user demand:
1. for the "real web" on mobile devices
2. for actually usable web pages on mobile devices
3. for high resolution displays with sharper text and more detailed images
4. for respectful and reliable behavior in varying network conditions
These sorts of demands have been so strong that they upset the entire mobile industry, destroying huge incumbent companies.
As far as specific features...
Device-pixel ratios are how users get sharper text—and now images—when their hardware allows it. The alternative is that either users see smaller and smaller content/UI, or they are stuck with low-resolution displays. Neither of those are desirable outcomes for users (and sales show pretty well that users prefer high-resolution).
Mime-type alternation allows:
- all users (rather than some) to view content—this is self-evidently desirable by users;
- some users to reduce bandwidth—this is self-evidently desirable by any user who is bandwidth-constrained (either in terms of speed of data cap).
Element queries allow UI elements to be reusable components, so that they always behave the same way under the same circumstances. This is fairly obviously desirable by everyone, as the alternative is to have things work in myriad ways depending on unrelated circumstances.
User-based settings for preferring faster downloads/reduced data consumption is obviously desirable. I can't for the life of me imagine how you could say it's not.
If you're hosting different versions, provider links to the versions and let the user choose.
Nothing is preventing a responsive site from doing just that, but still being smart about which (and how many) bits to send down the wire to a particular user.
Don't serve up different content to different browsers unless you absolutely have to (and when you absolutely have to, odds are your UI is terrible).
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what responsive design is about. This is not about serving different content (at all) nor distinguishing between browsers (at all). It's about providing optimal rendering of the same content for different viewing/network conditions. Fundamentally, what is optimal for 2560x1440@1x is not optimal for 2560x1440@3x. What is optimal for LTE is not optimal for EDGE.
What's appropriate for my display, exactly?
You have to base it on the VIEWPORT, but that's VARIABLE because the USER can change that shit.
Any viewport change and you risk having to download the newly "appropriate" version.
+
The whole premise of why we'd want to do this is retarded as well. Phones are getting resolutions of 2560x1440 now.
There's more to it than that, and yet more coming in the future. Yes, media queries tend to be primarily viewport queries. Viewport data is more complex than just pixel dimensions though, because a browser pixel is not a device pixel. This is why device-pixel-ratios are also supported. A 2560x1440 phone likely responds to a media query as ~854x480@3x (the math isn't right, I wonder what the real device pixel viewport size is).
Picture/source also supports mime-type alternation, just like video/audio sources do. This allows content to be delivered in preferred media types (e.g. webm, webp) where possible with fallbacks to less-preferred types (e.g. h264, png/jpg/gif), potentially reducing bandwidth and cost.
The same group that led the picture element is now leading element queries, which will allow size-based queries to be derived from the size displayed on screen, rather than the size of the viewport itself (as in, placing a responsive image in a sidebar will have different download characteristics from placing it in a full-width column).
And browser vendors can develop selection algorithms based on user preference (e.g. prefer faster downloads) and network conditions (e.g. high latency cell, bandwidth limits, etc) rather than viewport conditions alone.
Literally none of the features discussed here are possible with the feature set that existed before picture. Some (some!) can be approximated with JavaScript, generally badly and often with very undesirable consequences.
Is there some benefit to paying taxes on your gains?
Living in a society that isn't crumbling?
Standardizing on anything mitigates mixtures of non-standard things. Spaces aren't magically special.
Turning novel programming problems into an implementation that is non-clever, simple and clear is absolutely a creative pursuit. The "cleverness" that is (and/or should be) lambasted in programming is that which hides complexity. It's an expression of lax creativity. Creative programming can be a combination of a keen application of solved problems and actually clever solutions for unsolved problems. That cleverness is expressed by arriving at solutions that are simple and clear.
This is work that is a long way off from being expendable. It will come eventually, but until then a large subset of programming problems require deeply creative work.
Any programmer who feels that their work does not fit what I said above is almost certainly working on solved problems.
No, how do they work?
Windows compatibility, then ARM. While the majority of Mac usage certainly isn't on Windows, the fact that it could be quite likely drove a large part of the surge in sales after the Intel switch.
There's a problem with efforts to make programming more accessible to non-programmers at the technology level: it turns out that you still have to become a programmer to use the technology effectively. This very notion is how programming languages were developed in the first place—what if we could specify what a program should do, rather than writing the code that does it, and then have the computer generate the code? That is a programming language.
Modern programming is increasingly abstracted away from the metal, and compilers are a wonder unto themselves, but ultimately in order to effectively write a program you still need to do two very specialized things:
1. Design the damn thing well enough to at least get it working (and hopefully well enough to maintain and extend it).
2. Either know or discover—usually both—how to work around the warts of the chosen technology (because they all have warts).
Even if programming could be made so abstract that it's essentially a series of opaque building blocks, you'll always need to do #1, and only by vast inefficiencies and ignorance be able to avoid #2.
- - -
Side note:
Speaking of HyperCard, in many ways its spiritual descendant is Flash. Flash hosts a monstrosity of a language, with concepts from Java bolted onto JavaScript. I'm not saying it couldn't have been done another way, but it's little surprise that something designed to be simple for content producers could become so enormously complex.
How's Netflix going to figure out why I rated that a 1 without asking me?
This isn't really hard, in the abstract. They just have to have much better metadata about the content, and then an ever-deeper analysis of relative ratings can follow from that. Inference of context will never be perfect, but then again neither will a questionnaire (even if people voluntarily devote their time to answering it) which could recursively be subject to the same criticism that it lacks context. Unless Netflix (or any similar service) deeply understands its content, its recommendations will always be lacking.
The reason online retailers can do relatively better is that a given product often has quite a lot of metadata that can be reasoned about, and it's often relatively easy to model in context of a given product's domain. The kind of qualities people discuss about content is generally much more vague and superficial in comparison.
For instance, Netflix is often confused into believing I have any interest in genre. It might be better at predicting my taste if there were a deeper wealth of data on the kinds of qualities I care about in the content I do like, but it's generally pretty self-evident that they don't. They use coincidence of ratings across users to approximate this, but it's all very hand-wavy and often leads to confusing (if unsurprising) results. Nothing is a substitute for a deeper (currently, at least, human) analysis of the content.