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The internet isn't really a place to gain an informed opinion over things.

Yes, you are correct. Opinions should all be tossed out. Pure info is what the Internet is all about. Pick a language and a FOSS project, develop away, it's a great learning process that I've found much more "educational" than formal education.

Teach yourself C++: C++ Annotations, C++ Language Tutorial... ... or Perl: Perl programming documentation, or JavaScript,
or Java.

Just search the web, you'll find everything that any professor will ever be able to teach you online. Need guidance, clarification, or to ask a question? There are free online forums for that too... Yes, the Internet on average, much like the FM band, has more signal than noise, but similarly you can easily tune your into the signal you need.

Consider this: My Java "professor" gave an assignment where we read in rows of data from standard input, and output the table sorted by a certain column's value. He offered extra credit for proper alignment and justification of the table's cells... "WTF? Really?", I thought.

I used the Collections framework along with Swing to provide a GUI w/ sortable & justified JTable columns instead of doing character counting and sending extra spaces with the text to the standard output. He gave me a C. Another student used the Formatter to provide printf style formatting... also got a C, WTF! Go beyond the prof's teachings & expectations to meet a requirement, get a poor grade... That's dumb and counter productive.

In the real world, you try not to re-invent the wheel, this college course was not teaching practical programming; It was so far beneath what I learned already online, on Java's own website, I dropped the course (waste of time). Sure I can write a merge sort, or programatically align console text output, but that was not what the assignment said: "Provide a tabular output sorted by the 'Name' column." We learned merge sort 2 weeks prior, but the "professor" would not move on.

Not having a "degree" myself, I frequently answer questions that "Degree" holding graduates ask in online forums... Why? Because they didn't learn what they needed to know in their courses.

You would be hard pressed to find a programmer that doesn't have some form of documentation open in another window, screen, or context menu while coding. IMO, besides learning about algorithms and complexity, the language specs & online tutorials are all you really need. I find paper books pale in comparison to down-loadable, copy&paste-able free, online resources. Also note: As a programmer you will be expected to keep up to date with the ever changing languages you learn. All of these changes are easily accessible online too.

There's a lot of noise and very little quality signal to use and without having a degree to start with it's pretty much futile in terms of knowing what is and is not reliable information.

I call bullshit. See esp. the Java link above, your arguments are ill-informed, and reek of FUD. Search google for "java tutorial", or "$any_lang tutorial" and you get some pretty damn reliable, pure "signal" information about what you searched for.

Are you really arguing that Language specs & Tutorials from IBM, Microsoft, etc, and docs from a language's main website (such as http://perldoc.perl.org/

or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/54200/

So basically we can opt not to be tracked by the companies who actually decide to follow an optional opt-out list? Doesn't that mean I'm only opting out of the companies I'm least bothered about? Worse, make being a (relative) good-guy even less profitable?

Without legislative backing it's at best toothless and at worst counter-productive.

Even legislative backing may be prone to unintended consequences as companies leave for less regulated shores. However I'd expect there would be more of a positive influence as the field is levelled at least among the US companies, and US websites can be made liable for their advertiser.

On the whole though I think it's best left to a technology driven response to consumer demand. Like say, Ad Block, NoScript, Ghostery, Better Privacy... Admittedly it is a bit of a nuisance that there isn't one that combines the best of these, but at least they're largely opt-in (if using available lists).

More to the point perhaps, if every interweb newbie out there is blocking tracking (where I gather most of the ad-money is derived) then who's going to fund all the websites I'm freeloading on?

So basically we can opt not to be tracked by the companies who actually decide to follow an optional opt-out list? Doesn't that mean I'm only opting out of the companies I'm least bothered about? Worse, make being a (relative) good-guy even less profitable?

Without legislative backing it's at best toothless and at worst counter-productive.

Even legislative backing may be prone to unintended consequences as companies leave for less regulated shores. However I'd expect there would be more of a positive influence as the field is levelled at least among the US companies, and US websites can be made liable for their advertiser.

On the whole though I think it's best left to a technology driven response to consumer demand. Like say, Ad Block, NoScript, Ghostery, Better Privacy... Admittedly it is a bit of a nuisance that there isn't one that combines the best of these, but at least they're largely opt-in (if using available lists).

More to the point perhaps, if every interweb newbie out there is blocking tracking (where I gather most of the ad-money is derived) then who's going to fund all the websites I'm freeloading on?

So basically we can opt not to be tracked by the companies who actually decide to follow an optional opt-out list? Doesn't that mean I'm only opting out of the companies I'm least bothered about? Worse, make being a (relative) good-guy even less profitable?

Without legislative backing it's at best toothless and at worst counter-productive.

Even legislative backing may be prone to unintended consequences as companies leave for less regulated shores. However I'd expect there would be more of a positive influence as the field is levelled at least among the US companies, and US websites can be made liable for their advertiser.

On the whole though I think it's best left to a technology driven response to consumer demand. Like say, Ad Block, NoScript, Ghostery, Better Privacy... Admittedly it is a bit of a nuisance that there isn't one that combines the best of these, but at least they're largely opt-in (if using available lists).

More to the point perhaps, if every interweb newbie out there is blocking tracking (where I gather most of the ad-money is derived) then who's going to fund all the websites I'm freeloading on?

So basically we can opt not to be tracked by the companies who actually decide to follow an optional opt-out list? Doesn't that mean I'm only opting out of the companies I'm least bothered about? Worse, make being a (relative) good-guy even less profitable?

Without legislative backing it's at best toothless and at worst counter-productive.

Even legislative backing may be prone to unintended consequences as companies leave for less regulated shores. However I'd expect there would be more of a positive influence as the field is levelled at least among the US companies, and US websites can be made liable for their advertiser.

On the whole though I think it's best left to a technology driven response to consumer demand. Like say, Ad Block, NoScript, Ghostery, Better Privacy... Admittedly it is a bit of a nuisance that there isn't one that combines the best of these, but at least they're largely opt-in (if using available lists).

More to the point perhaps, if every interweb newbie out there is blocking tracking (where I gather most of the ad-money is derived) then who's going to fund all the websites I'm freeloading on?

Thought I posted this earlier, but I guess I muffed it.

Facebook Blocker 1.2 is a good addon for Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/212323/

They also make a version for Chrome and Safari.
http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/

Facebook Blocker 1.2 Firefox Add-on works for me.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/212323/

I only recently discovered facebook's instant personalization "feature". I went to rottentomatoes and it showed movies that my facebook friends liked. This seems very inappropriate to me because how did rottentomatoes know who I am in facebook, without logging in or doing any kind of verification. Apparently rottentomatoes uses thirdparty cookies to fetch your facebook info and display it. This seems to mean that potentially any website can check who you are in facebook (if you are currently logged in). I was able to turn off this feature by disabling thirdparty cookies in Firefox.

More than anything this seems like a big privacy leak and is the fault of the browsers. This should be off by default in firefox and other browsers. If I go to rottentomatoes.com, I would expect that by Firefox would only send cookies back to rottentomatoes and should not even allow read access to other cookies while I'm on that page. The same goes for flash plugins and other scripts, etc. that read cookies, they should only have read access to the cookies for the current page.

...apparently the pre-Abine version of TACO has been forked as Beef TACO, so I'm giving it a second chance on this machine...hopefully it doesn't ever get updated with the Abine crapola.

I call them my four horsemen of the adpocalypse:

Adblock Plus
NoScript
RequestPolicy
RefControl

Other than my Facebook-specific Firefox profile, it's as if Facebook doesn't exist.

I call them my four horsemen of the adpocalypse:

Adblock Plus
NoScript
RequestPolicy
RefControl

Other than my Facebook-specific Firefox profile, it's as if Facebook doesn't exist.

I call them my four horsemen of the adpocalypse:

Adblock Plus
NoScript
RequestPolicy
RefControl

Other than my Facebook-specific Firefox profile, it's as if Facebook doesn't exist.

I call them my four horsemen of the adpocalypse:

Adblock Plus
NoScript
RequestPolicy
RefControl

Other than my Facebook-specific Firefox profile, it's as if Facebook doesn't exist.

Seriously folks, Google's search results are a product of Google and are subject to their whim. They may provide mostly fair results, but does anyone seriously think that any search engine has perfectly fair results?

I don't see why they are obligated at all to treat all websites equally.
Infact, I can't think of a single search engine that does treat all sites equal due to "adwords" and other such paid for advertising. Oh, I know, they're "labeled" as ads; Pffft, my grandma doesn't know that; She can't be convinced that the sponsored links aren't the top (and therefore "best") results. Strangely enough, she actually gets what she was searching for.

Screw "fair" results. Pure algorithmic results can and have been abused by link-farms. Google and other search engines manually de-rank link farms. I have personally reported such link-bait and watched them disappear from results the next day. BLAM, there goes your "pure algorithmic results".

Even if Google is being fair in this instance, its best to search multiple engines.

If only there was some service that allowed me to search multiple engines at once.

You would think that someone would create a Firefox plugin that does this...

Seriously, this is a non issue.

Why would it be difficult to recover? There is already FEBE which can automate backups of just about any part of Firefox INCLUDING extensions, so the logical route would be to simply roll a version of FEBE into Firefox and have a backup of either all data or just extensions and have them signed by the same key pair.

Personally I think it would be better to have FEBE backup everything at shutdown, along with backup of extensions upon user alteration. Then you could have a simple GUI so if the user goes "whoops" and deletes a bookmark he/she didn't mean to or some other accident they could have an easy "previous versions" style restore. This would not only protect from extension jacking but could be used to keep the home page from being altered without user permission, protect their Firefox Persona, etc. You could even have FEBE set to backup a second copy to a USB key if they wanted to be able to carry their settings between workstations. Sounds like a win/win to me.

Doesn't FIPS mode do this? How is FF even remotely secure if it allows this in FIPS mode?

Here's an addon that claims to do just that. It's at version 0.2 and hasn't been updated in a year, but maybe worth a try (or worth helping the developer):

PluginChecker
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/46214/

Zoodles for kids ages 3-8
KidZui for kids up to 12

Zoodles for kids ages 3-8
KidZui for kids up to 12

As you have noted, it does take a commitment to learn any system. For personal projects where you answer to no one else, you should use whatever you think will be useful to know in the future. The factors involved are: what will be used for future projects at work, how important is cross platform programming, and what looks good on a resume.

For cross platform work, Qt is the way to go. Or Java I suppose, but I have found myself moving away from that language. Not for any ideological reason, I've just had a few frustrations with it over time. But you can't argue that it can be handy for the resume.

Alternatively, if you are interested in web programming, then it is amazing what you can do using HTML (especially HTML5 with its new canvas tag). If you are after a full screen application, then you can try the kiosk modes in Internet Explorer or Firefox. IE doesn't support HTML5 yet, so you would either need to limit yourself down to HTML4 can provide (which still isn't bad) or use Firefox.

If you want to learn a language that has a compiler installed by default on the majority of computers in the world, then C# is the way to go. While Visual Studio makes it easy to generate the user interface elements, it is also handy to know how to use the language in straight vanilla code so you can use the command line compiler that comes with the .NET runtime. I have knocked out a few quick hacks on other people's systems just with Notepad and C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\csc.exe.

I found that they had gone back to Explorer (Firefox "didn't look the same")

Get them this.

Seriously though, if they couldn't even handle a switch from IE to Firefox, you think they're not going to raise holy hell if you swap out the entire OS?

Doesn't matter. So far as she's concerned, they're going to get told. We'll try to make the transition as easy as possible, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. It's her computer, and those are her kids, and they'll do as they're told. Her husband couldn't care less so long as he can get his email and go to a few Web sites he needs. The kids are the big problem. I also told her we could just get them their own computer, and when they break it ... tough. Maybe then they'll start to learn a little respect. They've wasted enough of their mother's time, not to mention mine.

I found that they had gone back to Explorer (Firefox "didn't look the same")

Get them this.

Seriously though, if they couldn't even handle a switch from IE to Firefox, you think they're not going to raise holy hell if you swap out the entire OS?

I don't know and who validates the response from the Perspectives notaries (the agents in the networks which store this information) ?

And what about my privacy ? Do they store the information about the sites I visit (they probably say they don't).

Maybe Certificate Patrol is a good start:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6415/

It works like SSH, everytime you connect it will tell you if something changed since you last connected. It also will tell you what changed.

A self signed certificate would be fine for most of what HTTPS Everywhere does.

But then how would your users know that your self-signed cert is authentic before installing it into their browsers for the first time? MITM in the wild is a reality.

The only thing the "trusted authorites" confirm is that the person who has the cert paid for it.

Some trust.

Wow! I had no idea! You should pay for a certificate for CN=www.bankofamerica.com, then MITM patrons at a nearby public WiFi hotspot, get rich, and move to Argentina.

But they don't authenticate the remote site. They just check that the remote site has a certificate signed by one of those super trustworthy people like Verisign or the government of China.

CAs can made mistakes. Good thing none of the people designing cryptosystems rely on infallibility -- that's why the PKI includes a thing called "revocation lists".

Also, turns out that in order to get your root trusted by vendors, you have to provide assurances. Policies from organizations such as Mozilla, Microsoft, and Apple are readily available. Feel free to make your own root, get it accepted everywhere, and take over Internet commerce.

In conclusion: put up or shut up. In-browser SSL offers strong assurances. If you believe otherwise, then by all means, exploit it.

Speaking of addons:

Does Firefox have a "Debug And QA UI" addon like SeaMonkey has? I've found this extension to be extremely useful and would love to use it with fox. If you don't know what I'm talking about read more here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/addon/212342/

Rendering has no impact on scores, but...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=601332#c13

Was basically intended to ensure prettier loading. But in rapid updates like this and their use of innerHTML (STUPID) it had this side effect.

No big deal, you can't say Opera is free of rendering issues, esp the alpha. :-p

The truth is your ISP already has this power, so if the government wants it, will they demand only they have access to it and bar ISPs from unauthorised deep packet inspection and randomly audit their computers to ensure they can not do it without authorisation.

Think about it want foreign agents to gain access to secret data both government and private, them get them working as network engineers at ISPs, deep packet inspection can already reveal far more secrets than the government or wealthy people realise.

Addons like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/229918/ could become far more popular.

Can I run Fennec on my desktop? Pretty please?

Yes you can

Web sites are very poor when it comes to things like typography. Then again, so are Apple's iBooks, and even Amazon's Kindle, etc., as well, but they will improve with time.

The time is now:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/11/firefox-4-font-feature-support/
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/11/good-web-typography-is-easy-with-type-a-file/
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/11/lettering-js-makes-complex-typography-easy/

It's "JaegerMonkey" or "JägerMonkey" if your keyboard has umlaut available. But certainly not "JagerMonkey" - q.v. https://wiki.mozilla.org/JaegerMonkey

Among other changes to Firefox 4 in Beta 7 were [] support for the OpenType font format.

Bullshit. From the release notes:

Improved web typography using OpenType with support for ligatures, kerning and font variants

Firefox has had OpenType support for ages, encapsulated in WOFF or not. What they added now is support for some styling attributes. Quite nice but strange CSS syntax:-moz-font-feature-settings: "dlig=1,ss01=1"; why the quotes?

I refer to the editors when I say kids, as they are just as incompetent and should be treated as such.

They are reporting this over a day late after many people submitted it, while the story they chose linked to a shitty comptuerworld article. Not only that, they can't even manage there site properly with news.slashdot.org being broken for about an hour. Pathetic. Getting around it by replacing the URL with http://slashdotisincompetent.slashdot.org/story/10/11/12/037241/Firefox-4-Regains-Speed-Mojo-With-No-2-Placing works fine though

As far as the browser is concerned, it's fucking awesome. I was initially very annoyed at the lack of status bar, but I am getting used to it. Indeed, all the functionality is at the top of the browser which means I don't have to scan to the bottom of the screen anymore. The thing missing are download progress. The main bug is the lack of easy download progress without having to have DM open, although this is being worked on.This won't stop people complaining because they are unable to adapt and realize the changes are better however.

Also, it's amazing just how much better their implementation of removing the status bar is then Chromes. Amazing.

The JavaScript improvement is magnificent. This is the first time I have ever been able to restore a session of about 10 slashdot pages each with over 500 comments all fully expanded, in less than 30 seconds. I guess this is because the JIT compiler cached the coder, and didn't have to interpret it for each page. As much as it seems like cheating, I can't disagree with the end result!

Good job Mozilla, continua leading the way and demonstrating just why you continue to hold the crown.

well, it's not an infection, but if you're running firefox, try:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=461339

From the end of the article, " Specifically, Nevercookie prevents abuse to both the Adobe Flash Local Storage Object (LSO) and Microsoft's Silverlight Isolated Storage (MIS)." "

  Doesn't BetterPrivacy already eliminate LSOs and other stored data?

  I don't have Silverlight so I don't know if it eliminates that data but unless these "Evercookies" are somehow different than "Supercookies" you can eliminate this issue right now.

Try this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498/

Canada has been doing this for years with a full curriculum.
They even have a one week crash course.
Oh look, here's a map of schools around the world doing this right now

well kind of... that plugin fails in that it requires you to add in each domain you want to use ssl for. I would recommend force-tls for firefox and KB SSL enforcer for chrome (the second is not completely secure due to chrome's design, but hoping that will be fixed soon).

Yeah, it's close, but not perfect. However, the Mozilla extensions are more along the lines of what I was thinking.

Indeed. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API#Writing_Audio and https://github.com/corbanbrook/dsp.js are closer to what's needed for realtime synthesis. Hopefully it will make its way to other browsers too.

You might be interested in https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API#Writing_Audio and https://github.com/corbanbrook/dsp.js

Not sure what the latency is, but if it's too high for uses like this, please let the people involved know? They want this to actually be useful for exactly the sort of things you're talking about.

And sure, it wouldn't support sound, but who needs that when you've got the beautiful noise of your computer fans running on full blast, thanks to its excessive CPU usage!

This JavaScript NES emulator supports sound: http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/

Here are some other JavaScript audio demos:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/beyond-html5-experiments-with-interactive-audio/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/10/audio-data-api-audio-generation-demo/

And sure, it wouldn't support sound, but who needs that when you've got the beautiful noise of your computer fans running on full blast, thanks to its excessive CPU usage!

This JavaScript NES emulator supports sound: http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/

Here are some other JavaScript audio demos:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/beyond-html5-experiments-with-interactive-audio/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/10/audio-data-api-audio-generation-demo/

This is a feature we want to add, but we haven't got it yet. Until then, you can try the Bigger Text add-on, which adds simple font size controls instead.

This is a feature we want to add, but we haven't got it yet. Until then, you can try the Bigger Text add-on, which adds simple font size controls instead.

So - FFox and Flashblock for the win...

I use both on my AO751h (+ABP), and a 9 cell battery gets me ~10 hours of use, streaming video or whatever. And no damned "Punch the Monkey" ads. Don't see why the same wouldn't work on/for Macs...

I can hook up a heavy Marine Battery to any laptop and stream video using Flash longer than any light Mac Book Air can stream video.

So - FFox and Flashblock for the win...

I use both on my AO751h (+ABP), and a 9 cell battery gets me ~10 hours of use, streaming video or whatever. And no damned "Punch the Monkey" ads. Don't see why the same wouldn't work on/for Macs...

It would be interesting to try a completely bogus made up browser (and perhaps a null browser, no user-agent at all) with a plugin like user-agent switcher and see what that yields.

I also set the minimum font size.

As for the buttons, there is a solution for you under firefox, but you're not going to like it.

Custom, per-site user css rules.

With css, you can actually specify "an image tag, where the image is X" and then have it substitute your own image there.

The downside is that this is a very, very manual process, and you would have to do it for every site you need to tweak.