+10,000 Insightful

Seriously, that was one of the best speeches I've heard in a while. and it came in the form of a /. comment. nice job. if you ever run for public office in the USA look me up on your fans list and i'll campaign for you.

They probably just expect to just do a shitty BREW app market (such as the Verizon Get It Now/VCAST store) and think that users won't laugh in their faces and go back to using native apps written by people who know what they're doing.

I welcome this initiative, but only because it will be a giant waste of money and effort for the cellcos, and anything that hurts them makes me smile spitefully.

I have no problem reading on my 1600x1200 dvi monitor. I also maintain a no-paper desk. Any documents delivered to me as paper are scanned and recycled. Any that I don't need are immediately recycled. Before I started this practice my desk was always a mess. Now it's always great.

Paper sucks...

Time is money. Don't you place any value on your own time? Surely it takes a few hours to do a full backup, install a new OS, find replacements for apps you had on your old OS, fix any driver issues that come up...Really, after all that time, you think you'll come out ahead? When you could just buy Snow for like $40, pop it in, do an upgrade (1 hour max and it's primarily unattended time), and suddenly all your apps work and get upgrades again, and your hardware is still fully supported? I get your "if it ain't broke" argument but you're basically saying "It ain't broke, except for the fact that less and less software works for it these days." Well what else is the OS there for but to run software, right?

I'm not trying to be a fanboy about it, I would caution you of the same thing if you were thinking of blowing away a BSD environment you'd used for 4 years to put on OS X. Perhaps at least give it a shot. Why not download an ISO of Snow, spend the few minutes doing an upgrade, and if you like it you won't have reservations buying it. If you hate it then go ahead and wipe it out and go for FreeBSD and you're not out any money or any serious time.

Yawn. Keep telling yourself that. So since 10.6 10.5 10.4 10.3 10.2 10.1 were all service packs I guess in your opinion OS X hasn't had any real releases since 10.0 in 1999 or 2000 right? Don't be a moron. Say that you prefer Windows, I don't care, some people like it and it has its pros and cons. OS X has its pros and cons too. But don't be intentionally dense. Or otherwise tell me how 10.4 was less of an upgrade over its predecessor, 10.3, than Windows XP was vs. 2000. (Hint: Windows 2000's internal name is NT 5.0. XP? 5.1.) Same goes for 10.5 vs. 10.4.

Clearly version numbers don't mean anything. Adding hella new features is not a service pack. The only features MS ever added in a service pack was Windows Genuine Advantage, and a lot of training wheels for MSIE 6.0. Compare this to Spotlight, Expose, Time Machine, etc. The only reason Apple didn't call 10.2 "OS 11" and on from there, is because they spent a lot of time and money branding it "OS X" ("Ten") and "OS XI" would look weird and not roll off the tongue.

Not bloody likely, since Leopard came out in October 2007.

Well, if you must have the latest possible Firefox while keeping the oldest possible hardware, you could just run Linux on your 6-year-old iBook. Nobody's putting a gun to your head to make you use a certain OS. But I can't imagine it's much fun to browse the web with it. I would assume flash slaughters it. But then again you're using Firefox so maybe if you tricked it out with all kinds of ad and flash blocking it would be useful-ish. As long as you stayed away from too many DOM-manipulating fancy webapps.

I have plenty of respect for older computers (I was sad when my little 12" PowerBook G4 finally died last year) but honestly I'd much rather Mozilla spends their resources making new features and improving performance for the 90% than catering to the 10% who are too cheap (no offense--i'm just sayin') to buy new hardware (or even OS) more than once per decade. This is the fourth laptop I've had since yours was new, and I'm far, far, far from rich. I find that keeping up to date with hardware improves my experience and helps me get things done faster. YMMV.

Yeah i'm pretty confused. Remittances aren't illegal. And according to the linked wiki article India is the world's #1 recipient of remittances!

Lol. if you read the story you would know that Apple is not involved in this at all. There were old APIs, Mozilla used them, then Apple made shiny new way better APIs 3 years ago, Mozilla decided to use those too, and now they don't want to bother anymore with maintaining the old code that uses the old (still supported) APIs.

If you think that Microsoft never introduces new APIs that make things better for developers, I doubt you have ever developed for Microsoft. They totally introduce cool new APIs. If you're going to have a living product this is a problem everyone faces on every platform. Sure, abandonware will stop working after fewer years on a constantly-upgraded Mac than it will on a constantly-upgraded Windows box. But any *non-dead* product has to choose from one of these options:

A. Never use new APIs. Your app will start to look clunky after a while and might not perform well. An example would be using GDI instead of DirectX for a game because you don't want to break Win 3.1 support.

B. Use new APIs when they make your job easier, but still do all the work of using the old APIs forever. Not only are you now actually making your job harder than if you did choice (A), but now your app becomes a bloated and tangled mess and has branching logic everywhere to handle every version of the OS.

C. Use new APIs when they make your job easier. Keep doing the work of using the old APIs for a little while, then prune out that stuff after a couple years when adoption of the new OS picks up. Use the time you save to actually improve your app.

So are you blaming Apple for not inventing those new APIs sooner? Because I guess that would be nice if they could have just written every API we have now, into 10.0 and shipped that 10 years ago. Or are you blaming Apple for daring to work on making better APIs? Again, they didn't even pull support out for those APIs. Nobody's stopping Mozilla from continuing to code to them. Mozilla is just smart enough to see when something better has been invented and use it!

If you're not making any new cool APIs, I don't see the point in bothering to work on an operating system at all. Besides doing security patches and designing new skins (see Windows Vista).

THIS. Seriously, this, combined with the fact that this upcoming 10.4-dropping version of firefox won't make it out until 2011 and security updates wouldn't stop for the 10.4 version until mid 2011 make this a retarded story that I am seriously ashamed to even be reading. (Yes, i know i'm a moron for posting on it after having coming to this realization.)

Heh. Yeah, but even with Win7, basically nobody uses 64-bit windows because it breaks so much crap. So fortunately you can continue to run EDIT.COM and other hilarious old chestnuts that Windows still helpfully includes. And you can have comically-specced systems that ship with 4GB of RAM but can only address 3GB.

Well that's just disgusting.

No, seriously. How do you sleep at night?

I "could" also have a beach house in malibu. Too bad I don't. What a dumb statement. Netbooks kinda fail for a lot of tasks.

Thanks, this is interesting. Okay, I'm willing to say that it would be cool for some research to go into bringing some principles from your rollcage and harness proposal into an updated passenger car design that would still be acceptable to drivers.

I suppose you love superficial wounds?

Of course i do, in fact I'm a 16 year old girl and i cut myself every day. it makes me all hardcore and sexy. ;) (just kidding, none of that is true)

ended up with minor bruising.

All things considering, I'm sure he would choose the airbag again vs having broken facial bones without one.

So, you're admitting that having airbags is way better than not having them? Cool, cause that was my freaking point too! As for your nitpick, yes, I meant "harmless" as an aggregate term. Think in gaming terms:
Big head-on collision + no airbag: You take 86 damage.
Big head-on collision + airbag: You take 6 damage.

I define "harmful" as causing you to take more damage than you would have without it. For example, a spike mounted on the wheel causes you more damage than no spike, and is harmful. Therefore, since you are in fact 80 health units better off with it than without it, I don't see how you can blame the airbag (by labeling it "harmful") for the 6 damage. Instead I'd blame the accident for it. Now, if airbags replaced a perfect device that would allow you to take NO damage from the same accident, then you could call them harmful.

Thank you asswipe,

Um, okay.

which can happen if you manage to accidentally short one of the yellow wires under your dashboard

I like how you're mocking me for being unqualified to comment, but you seem to be advocating making compromises to protect unqualified people playing with wires under the dash. Maybe they shouldn't monkey with those wires unless they know what they're doing?

People get their nose broken by their airbag all the time.

Oh, no! In the process of having your life saved, you've sustained a superficial injury!

And if you were wearing a safety harness and driving a vehicle with a roll cage and a properly designed steering column

You go ahead and market these 6-point harnesses (with free airbag deactivation!) and you tell me who's willing to wear them. Clue: Some people don't even wear seatbelts. Sorry, but your harness solution is great for racecars where everyone has to follow the rules, but a convenient seatbelt + airbag combo has saved more lives a hundred times over than your idealist solution would, because nobody would bother to properly strap in before driving down the street for groceries. Before you mock me (again) for being unqualified, apparently most of the auto engineers who do this stuff for a living agree with me, otherwise our cars would be equipped as you advocate.

And my main point was that I'm qualified to comment on the effects of airbags on passengers because I have been in an accident and had an airbag deploy on me. Have you? Were you permanently harmed?

Now that we've finished the name-calling and stuff, can you answer an honest technical question? Some posters here have said that the airbag gives your head a little farther to travel while it decelerates so it doesn't have to decelerate all at once. I understand that to be the point of airbags. Without getting into how much you hate airbags (and superficial wounds), can you explain to me how your harness system is better? I would think that a harness would stop your body all at once (and I think it was you who mentioned a helmet with a head strap, so it would stop your head all at once too). That's a lot of G-force. I'm not sure that would be so good for your head.