Slashdot Mirror

Slashdot loves angle brackets. Just eats 'em up with ice cream. Yum yum yum.

Since the default posting mode is "HTML Formatted", Slashdot reserves angle brackets for itself. For markup. It's being generous to call it "HTML", since it's a ridiculous subset, but there it is.

If you want the angle brackets precious for yourself, you'll have to use the HTML character entities* for them: &lt; for < and &gt; for >. That's how you save the preciouses from the tricksy Slashdotses.

*Not all of the HTML entities listed on this site work here. In fact, I think I'd characterize it as a ridiculous subset again. Which ones work here and which ones don't is left as an exercise for the reader.

For all the whining I hear about "Viral" and "Anti Business" licenses the various *BSD projects sure do have a meager adoption (Buisness, home, free or otherwise) compared to their GPL counterparts (Linux).

Actually, OSX (Darwin BSD) is nearly twice as popular as Linux (9.0% vs. 4.9%).

No, I mean tags that are no longer deprecated.

Also, the <del>delete tag</del> doesn't work either on Slashdot.

You mean, more deprecated tags?

And? It does, which is why there is no damned point in Linux on the desktop. Firefox, gimp, Libre office, all the software other than server shit that nobody gives a fuck about but server nerds is already on windows.

Tell you what sparky, you name me ONE good reason, just one mind you, why ZFS would be useful on a consumer desktop. just one. you won't be able to answer that because there isn't one, its whole function is SERVER fault tolerance and to allowing the pooling of drives, both things that might be nice for your LAMP stack but completely fucking pointless on the desktop.

But if you want to pretend that everyone needs a LAMP stack, that is your business, but considering the FOSSies have had 20 damned years+ now and are still craptastic as far as the numbers go and in fact have started declining, which is even more telling as W3 schools is a nerd heavy site and even THEY aren't seen any growth, well you can't blame the OEMs and everyone else from simply not giving a crap.

What is country level weighting, and why do you do it?
The Net Market Share data is weighted by country. We compare our traffic to the CIA Internet Traffic by Country table, and weight our data accordingly. For example, if our global data shows that Brazil represents 2% of our traffic, and the CIA table shows Brazil to represent 4% of global Internet traffic, we will count each unique visitor from Brazil twice. This is done to balance out our global data. All regions have differing markets, and if our traffic were concentrated in one or more regions, our global data would be inappropriately affected by those regions. Country level weighting removes any bias by region.

So I'm to trust numbers that I know have a flawed methodology?
Why not these then
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Oh, but weight, stat counter started removing chrome over counts.

Further to a significant number of user requests, we are now adjusting our browser stats to remove the effect of prerendering in Google Chrome. From 1 May 2012, prerendered pages (which are not actually viewed) are not included in our stats.

All of the discussion going on about teaching programming in schools is a great new/old trend. Like many posters here, I learned basic programming skills years ago in middle / high school. But then that all changed somewhere along the line.

School technology courses began to focus on turning students into secretaries - students learn Microsoft Office. If you're lucky, they'll teach design skills (PhotoShop, etc.) The other trend these days is about using Web 2.0 to enable collaboration, which is not bad in and of itself, but misses the mark. That's where programming comes (back) in.

There are a lot of great free resources out there. I have taught programming using Scratch to third graders, Microsoft SmallBasic to fifth graders, and JavaScript to ninth graders. There is also GameMaker, which has a free lite version that allows for drag-n-drop game programming. Microsoft also has Kodu, which let's kids make 3D games with a drag-n-drop interface.

A few months ago I gave a TEDxTokyo presentation on the subject (excuse the shameless plug), which you may find interesting, possibly even entertaining...

I tell everyone to use a far better decrapifier. Those who have listened always thank me profusely every time the subject comes up.

The probability that a geek will post a oh-so-cleverly disguised link to a Linux distribution as the all-purpose solution to any problem with Windows approaches 100% on any online forum ---

but the trend line for Linux adoption remains as flat as the Kansas prairies.

Top 5 Operating Systems From Apr 2011 to Apr 2012
OS Platform Stats 2003-2012

The good folks who post to Ars Technica have grown rather weary of the business --- and quite sharp with those who continue to waste their time.

Unfortunately for your aggressively stated theory, the net has a memory. see here. In November 2004, Seamonkey was already clearly taking market share from IE. And 16% of the market at that time can in no way be construed as "pretty much a failure".

MS could have paid millions to politicians to force the .mil to buy MS licenses for every Iraqi owned PC in Iraq, that would probably have a pretty good profit.

Which OSes do you imagine has actual dominance on "every Iraqi owned PC in Iraq"? Which OS do you imagine has the dominant position on any PC, period? Here's a hint: it's not Linux and it's not Mac OS.

(Basically, you're saying corruption would have helped MS rather than merely costing MS money for nothing.)

you STILL have to change the color value all over the place

You're doing it wrong. There are 146 color names already provided to you. These should provide sufficient color selection for any site. In addition, each color has a very easy to remember, concise name, such as LightGoldenRodYellow.

It is best to use these standard names instead of trying to decide on your own variable names. Committees of highly intelligent architects have already decided on the best names for you. For example, see the distinction between Lime and Lime Green. My personal favorite: Brown, which is a carefully chosen contenders Sienna or SaddleBrown to be the champion of the Browns.

To make things easy, the substrings "grey" and "gray" are interchangeable in any color name.

Please stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

you STILL have to change the color value all over the place

You're doing it wrong. There are 146 color names already provided to you. These should provide sufficient color selection for any site. In addition, each color has a very easy to remember, concise name, such as LightGoldenRodYellow.

It is best to use these standard names instead of trying to decide on your own variable names. Committees of highly intelligent architects have already decided on the best names for you. For example, see the distinction between Lime and Lime Green. My personal favorite: Brown, which is a carefully chosen contenders Sienna or SaddleBrown to be the champion of the Browns.

To make things easy, the substrings "grey" and "gray" are interchangeable in any color name.

Please stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

you STILL have to change the color value all over the place

You're doing it wrong. There are 146 color names already provided to you. These should provide sufficient color selection for any site. In addition, each color has a very easy to remember, concise name, such as LightGoldenRodYellow.

It is best to use these standard names instead of trying to decide on your own variable names. Committees of highly intelligent architects have already decided on the best names for you. For example, see the distinction between Lime and Lime Green. My personal favorite: Brown, which is a carefully chosen contenders Sienna or SaddleBrown to be the champion of the Browns.

To make things easy, the substrings "grey" and "gray" are interchangeable in any color name.

Please stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

you STILL have to change the color value all over the place

You're doing it wrong. There are 146 color names already provided to you. These should provide sufficient color selection for any site. In addition, each color has a very easy to remember, concise name, such as LightGoldenRodYellow.

It is best to use these standard names instead of trying to decide on your own variable names. Committees of highly intelligent architects have already decided on the best names for you. For example, see the distinction between Lime and Lime Green. My personal favorite: Brown, which is a carefully chosen contenders Sienna or SaddleBrown to be the champion of the Browns.

To make things easy, the substrings "grey" and "gray" are interchangeable in any color name.

Please stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

you STILL have to change the color value all over the place

You're doing it wrong. There are 146 color names already provided to you. These should provide sufficient color selection for any site. In addition, each color has a very easy to remember, concise name, such as LightGoldenRodYellow.

It is best to use these standard names instead of trying to decide on your own variable names. Committees of highly intelligent architects have already decided on the best names for you. For example, see the distinction between Lime and Lime Green. My personal favorite: Brown, which is a carefully chosen contenders Sienna or SaddleBrown to be the champion of the Browns.

To make things easy, the substrings "grey" and "gray" are interchangeable in any color name.

Please stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

you STILL have to change the color value all over the place

You're doing it wrong. There are 146 color names already provided to you. These should provide sufficient color selection for any site. In addition, each color has a very easy to remember, concise name, such as LightGoldenRodYellow.

It is best to use these standard names instead of trying to decide on your own variable names. Committees of highly intelligent architects have already decided on the best names for you. For example, see the distinction between Lime and Lime Green. My personal favorite: Brown, which is a carefully chosen contenders Sienna or SaddleBrown to be the champion of the Browns.

To make things easy, the substrings "grey" and "gray" are interchangeable in any color name.

Please stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

It's all about the monitor. Are you running at least 1080P? HDTV has done a horrid thing and effectively keeping displays at or close to HD res there are very view monitors that will do more than 1920*1080 some pack some more vertical pixels in at 1920*1200 with a 16x10 ratio. Anyways it's rather easy for a few year old card to run maxed out if you only running an average display 1366x768 was the most predominant per http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_resolution_higher.asp and that's really not a lot of pixels.

There are also plenty of stats to support that too: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_firefox.asp and if you look at them, you will notice that a sizable number of people (over 10%) of Firefox users are running 3.6. Makes me wonder what would happen if they gave people the opportunity for people to use the 3.6 UI in later versions of Firefox.

This AC would be first on the bandwagon. I've been turning off UX "improvements" since 1.x.

network.prefetch-next false
browser.tabs.closebuttons 3
browser.tabs.tabMinWidth 0
mousewheel.withcontrolkey.numlines -1
browser.tabs.selectOwnerOnClose false
browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent false
browser.microsummary.enabled false
browser.microsummary.updateGenerators false
browser.urlbar.trimURLs false (Not needed for 3.6, but I know someday I'll have to upgrade and I want this other misfeature predisabled.)
extensions.checkCompatibility false
extensions.checkUpdateSecurity false

browser.sessionstore.interval 900000 (one write of sessionstore.js to the SSD every 15 minutes of active browsing, not every TEN FUCKING SECONDS). Session restore is pretty clever in the rare event of a crash, but I don't believe it's worth the long-term performance hit (write cycles, write amplification, and/or unnecessary TRIM operations) that are associated with that many unnecessary write operations to an SSD.

Now to figure out how to get 3.6 to use more than 32M of RAM cache. I read somewhere that if you set the disk cache to zero (but on!), you can set RAM cache to up to 128M, and it'll be forced to preferentially cache content to RAM instead of disk.

I'm grateful to the Fx devs that most of this stuff is configurable.

If they'd swallowed their pride and made "browser.showStatusBar" a configurable in 4.x, I'd have migrated to 4.x. "Install another add-on" (especially at a time when add-ons were/are brittle during the upgrade process), was not, and is not, an acceptable solution. The continuing popularity of 3.6 is the result.

Yes it would be great if the Mozilla team would copy one of the useful features of Chrome: multi-process browsing. I'm sick and tired of the monolithic Firefox process consuming vast gobs of memory and excessive CPU that means my laptop's fan is constantly kicking (and probably shortening it's life through overheating), and giving me no way to manage it other than constantly closing the browser. I've seen it behaving poorly on several computers, so I doubt it's anything to do with an individual installation.

I've heard all the bullshit excuses about why it's hard to break out in to a multi-process application. These excuses seem to be a regurgitation of the ones used by the Netscape Communicator/Seamonkey Suite people back in their day - I guess the Mozilla devs just aren't very good.

After recently reading that the Electrolysis project was on hold, I started using Chrome. It had a few annoyances that I've got used to, but all my plugins/extensions work that would apparently fail in multi-process Mozilla. Most importantly, when a tab/page uses too much memory or CPU, I can easily see which it is and close it, although Chrome hasn't been a bad system hog in the same way as Firefox.

Ignorant devs, poor performance, moronic release cycle that seems to add nothing for users - no wonder Chrome is eating Firefox's lunch, and is now the most popular browser

I visited this rogue site that posts hostile code exploits and learned how to circumvent user privacy....

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/met_form_submit.asp

Even worse, this malware generating site makes exploit code even easier...

http://api.jquery.com/submit/

And yes, I used the most evil and corrupt search engine ever invented (past and future) to locate these hacker havens

Well if Mint is actually spending money to try to offer a better product then i humbly apologize, its not CntOS which is just stripping out the copyrighted material in a product they USED to pay for and handing it out to their customers. That doesn't change the fact that for all the community's big talk of "Support us and we'll support you!" that CentOS is now on 2/3rds of the servers out there, just proving that communism is a giant failwhale and that greed wins out in the end. Because there is NO company that gives more back than RH, yet the very same community they give to then rip them as much as they possibly can. and look at Canonical? how many millions did Shuttleworth sink into trying to give a Linux that worked for the masses? in the end they'll have to close their doors and join the ranks of Xandros, linspire, gOS, novell, in the "We were never able to make a penny" group.

In the end I think it comes down to a complete failure of ideology, in that its been proven time and time again communism doesn't work and that's what RMS wants with the GPL, a communist utopia. the ONLY reason that Linux works in servers is because MSFT has a truly byzantine licensing schema and truly insane prices for server OSes which makes it easy for a company like Red hat to sell their product because when you have a thousand servers its cheaper to pay for Red hat support than it is to pay for MSFT licenses. But this is also why it will NEVER work on the desktop, because the desktop suffers from what I call the "busted shitters" problem which is also a problem the communists had, going so far as to have to order soldiers on 'potato duty" to get the lousy jobs done.

You see in servers a company has a problem, problem costs company money, so they pay to fix the problem. in desktops because anybody can copy what you've done there simply isn't any money to be made fixing problems as Canonical is finding out and when you rely on volunteers the busted shitters simply don't get done. its simply human nature, everyone wants to be the artist, nobody wants to be the guy that cleans and fixes the busted shitter. Now there are some seriously busted shitters in Linux on the desktop that anybody but a zealot would be willing to admit is true, just a few off the top of my head are the lousy driver model that practically guarantees multiple broken drivers each release cycle, lousy QA and regression testing, incomplete docs that are either practically worthless lists of CLI use flags or worse a "to be done' placeholder, lack of consistency of UI, these are all SERIOUS problems, yet they never get fixed, why? Because they are ALL busted shitters. They will require months or even years of long, boring, dull, thankless, truly shitty work to be done. Now again its simply human nature that if i'm donating my time I'm gonna want to do something i enjoy, and we humans are creative creatures which is why you'll see new release after new release of software with frankly show stopping bugs. Making something new is exciting, fixing bugs is not.

In the end without a complete rewrite of the GPL (which RMS will die before allowing) so that a company can actually charge money for doing these thankless jobs they just don't get done and THAT is why Linux is frankly going nowhere on desktops. even the best estimate in favor of Linux I could find has Linux at 4.9% and that is skewed by being strictly the most geeker heavy sites on the web. think about that for a moment, 20 years, countless man hours, and Linux is BARELY beating Vista which was the most reviled and hated MSFT OS since WinME. If that isn't proof the current model simply doesn't work i don't know what does. With each release both Windows and OSX gets better and if anything I'd argue that Linux is backsliding. Linux USED to laugh about how Windows had to install clean, while ignoring the fact that Windows has such a long tail when it comes to support that most will outgrow their hardware before they need to upgrade, but they

I had a bash at learning to program a while ago, and one thing that got in my way was figuring out where to start and feeling like I had to learn multuple standards and "languages" at the same time. I made the mistake of asking a bunch of people on a forum which language was best to start with, and I got a dozen replies with a dozen different answers. I then made the mistake of getting a book which claimed to be for beginners but clearly meant "someone familiar with programming but who doesn't know this language". After getting bombarded with concepts and programming language I wasn't familiar with I gave up on that language, went to W3Schools and learnt HTML and built a small web page. W3S is simple, it's a "for total newbies" style guide and it doesn't bother even mentioning other optional stuff like CSS until you actually have a grasp on basic HTML.

One thing a lot of places (and people) seem to miss with learning is Keep It Simple Stupid: newbie programmers haven't a clue about all of the different languages available these days, or the different concepts surrounding their strengths and weaknessess, or the standards or versions.... So to take your example, from the perspective of a total newbie:

Basically the hump is getting hello world up on the screen and then creating the very first bit of your 'thing'

OK, I've got my machine displaying "Hello World", and I feel quite pleased with ymself. Now, onto the next step...

I wanted to look up the prices of my old DVDs I wanted to sell. Pain in the arse on Amazon... oh, hold on they have an API. Quite fun playing with APIs on sites that you're familiar with, with something friendly like PHP.

Wait, what? What's an API? And what the hell is PHP? Do I have to learn some whole new language called PHP to interact with my "Hello world" program? Why do I need these API and PHP things?!

Oh, then how about using a CSV to load and dump results to?

OK, you've totally lost me now.

Shit, I seem to be getting results back from the wrong bits of amazon, lets add some array sorting.

I have no idea what an array is, let alone how to sort it.

Etc. etc.

I know nobody can reasonably expect to pick everything up in a week, but the thing is, there are so many different languages, concepts, modules and standards these days that experienced programmers seem to forget that newbies often haven't heard of these things, let alone understand what they are or why they're needed. Learning a new language is time consuming enough for many people without having to learn how to write and interact with MySQL on the side at the same time: it needs to be kept on a single track until we know how to handle that properly, then it'll be easy enough to plug other stuff in. We don't have the years of experience interacting with all of these different things simultaneously that you guys have.

XP/32 is still the most used OS on the planet

Nope.

And until [insert browser of choice here] further obfuscates the navigation bar into oblivion you can sneak a peek at where the link goes before you click it. I, for one, do not blindly dive into water, drive my car or click links without knowing what comes next.
 
PS: fuck tinyURL and it's ilk. Just bury the long URL under [HERE}.

I counter your study with another study. This is still a heavily studied topic, and results seem to vary depending on where, who and when the studies happen. The benefits seem to be negligible when compared to a properly designed yellow phase, though.

offtopic: Here's a link to a page on w3schools, briefly discussing anchors.

In case you care, this page will show you how to linkify a word: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_href.asp Enjoy!

(And still there is no notes about how to 'properly' link a word with an URL in slashdots help below writing comments)

This is 2011, almost 2012. You are on a website for nerds. You (somehow) don't know the rudiments of html.

And that's slashdot's problem?!

What the hell, it's the weekend and I feel unreasonably generous. Here ya go, wanker!

That's useful, thanks.

There's a Javascript method to retrieve the timezone of the user's PC: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_gettimezoneoffset.asp

I've never tried it, but it might be easy to add the HTML5 geolocation thing as a default: http://html5demos.com/geo .

I'm not sure if there's an easy way to get the timezone for a lat+long though. Some ideas here. I've heard of geonames.org (related to my job), but never used it.

1. Download a VM like Virtalbox.
2. Download Puppy Linux .iso
3. Install Puppy Linux in Virtalbox. 4 gig dynamic drive with 128 megs of RAM will suffice.
4. Inside puppy download and install the pet package Hiawatha
5. Setup FTP inside your home directory (I think it's called setup file sharing)
6. Set your network in Puppy to a static IP and set Virtualbox to use a bridged adapter for the puppy install.
7. Use Notepad++, Filezilla in windows to FTP into your virtual box to update files.

That's close to a LAMP server. I don't think technically using Puppy/Hiawatha would be LAMP. But I believe Hiawatha serves the same function as Apache and I think would suit your purpose. if you're just interested in the PHP part you can also just install XAMPP.

The thing I like about the Virtualbox (or any VM) is you can wipe it out easily. You can move it to different computers. It's easy to play around with FTP and SSH settings.
There are tons of ways to do this without getting a host if you're just looking to learn. If you really want a host most have LAMP options. For many it is even the default. For tutorials I think W3 Schools is good starting point and has examples.

*All suggestions are debatable. When making these suggestions I considered using low resources and ease of use. Given more resources to give to the Virtual box you have tons and tons of choices.

Thanks. I hadn't tried that because the first couple times I posted after getting positive karma, the paragraphs were formed automatically. So I was confused, but now I use these http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_paragraphs.asp

I chose the top result in Google: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp.

However, looking at the Wikipedia page, this seems to have a much lower estimation than all the other website's stats. Seems reasonable considering that the users of w3schools are website developers who would be much more likely to have eschewed IE.

However, the exact figure does not change my point too much. Browsers that use Google search engine as a default have nearly double the usage of Internet Explorer (although if Firefox changed to Bing then the situation would reverse).

ahem.

I find in odd that you reason as though Mexico doesn't think it owns any of El Estados Unidos since the Mexican-American War. Durring Hurrican Katrina, if I remember correctly, several ARMED APC's outwardly showing their firepower invaded parts of Texas and towards Louisianna when Hurrican Katrina swamped much of the area. Their intent wasn't neutral and they setup stations in various places without permition from the Sheriff, yet they were mostly ignored for the short time as though they were tempting their antagonism against the civil unrest to demonstrate how far they would be tolerated.

Similarly, I find it digusting that Police and Sheriff Deputies don't tolerate The People to open-carry side-arms yet the same Police and Sheriff having no ties to the Constitution demand that The People tolerate their carry and so-called "courthouse justified" use of the same against various individuals they pre-judged them as being CRIMINAL or FELONIOUS. When The People pop, they're taking down the drug companies and the law enforcement and the judiciary and the army, but it seems today The People is more of a abandoned child or endangered animal because everyone is too busy hurting eachother in various unconstitional professions and activities.

Are you unfamiliar with the "Mérida Initiative"("Plan Mexico" to skeptics)? For reasons, um, wholly unrelated to that incident where the border between Mexico and the US shifted abruptly some time back, Mexico takes considerable offense at the idea of US troops on its soil. We've settled for rolling out just about all the various instruments of policy-by-proxy we have available there and elsewhere in Latin America(Plan Columbia, Central American Regional Security Initiative, Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, likely the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in some capacity)

Yes, the Mexican Army did send armed convoys to deliver aid to victims of hurricane Katrina. Doing a little research before you comment will not only allow you to impart accurate information, but allow you to give the URL of supporting information to strengthen your position, like this link to a Wikipedia article explaining the situation.

Also, it is fairly difficult to treat information with any amount of respect when the deliverer of that information (that would be you, Mr. Anonymous Coward) has serious issues with spelling, grammar, and (worst of all) capitalization.

Capitalizing random words, or worse yet, capitalizing entire words, presumably for emphasis, is simply ignorant. There are tags such as italics (<i>) and bold (<b>) that should be used for that, instead. Don't forget your closing tags.

Spell-check is a good thing to use, and most modern browsers actually have it built-in for text input fields (I know Firefox does, at least, and Microsoft products tend to have it available by pressing F7). That red squiggle under the word means it is not in the spell-checker's dictionary, so you may want to double-check the spelling before hitting "submit". This Taylor Mali video, entitled "The the Impotence of Proofreading"drives home the point that a spellchecker should not be your only guide, a point made even clearer when you read the text-only version, and realize just how badly mangled that poor student's paper is.

The grammar issues I can't give you a quick fix for; those require knowing how to properly formulate a sentence in the first place (a skill you obviously lack - no offense).

As for any factual information you may be attempting to convey, learn how to use an anchor tag to create a link - this page will show you how.

On a sep

I find in odd that you reason as though Mexico doesn't think it owns any of El Estados Unidos since the Mexican-American War. Durring Hurrican Katrina, if I remember correctly, several ARMED APC's outwardly showing their firepower invaded parts of Texas and towards Louisianna when Hurrican Katrina swamped much of the area. Their intent wasn't neutral and they setup stations in various places without permition from the Sheriff, yet they were mostly ignored for the short time as though they were tempting their antagonism against the civil unrest to demonstrate how far they would be tolerated.

Similarly, I find it digusting that Police and Sheriff Deputies don't tolerate The People to open-carry side-arms yet the same Police and Sheriff having no ties to the Constitution demand that The People tolerate their carry and so-called "courthouse justified" use of the same against various individuals they pre-judged them as being CRIMINAL or FELONIOUS. When The People pop, they're taking down the drug companies and the law enforcement and the judiciary and the army, but it seems today The People is more of a abandoned child or endangered animal because everyone is too busy hurting eachother in various unconstitional professions and activities.

Are you unfamiliar with the "Mérida Initiative"("Plan Mexico" to skeptics)? For reasons, um, wholly unrelated to that incident where the border between Mexico and the US shifted abruptly some time back, Mexico takes considerable offense at the idea of US troops on its soil. We've settled for rolling out just about all the various instruments of policy-by-proxy we have available there and elsewhere in Latin America(Plan Columbia, Central American Regional Security Initiative, Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, likely the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in some capacity)

Yes, the Mexican Army did send armed convoys to deliver aid to victims of hurricane Katrina. Doing a little research before you comment will not only allow you to impart accurate information, but allow you to give the URL of supporting information to strengthen your position, like this link to a Wikipedia article explaining the situation.

Also, it is fairly difficult to treat information with any amount of respect when the deliverer of that information (that would be you, Mr. Anonymous Coward) has serious issues with spelling, grammar, and (worst of all) capitalization.

Capitalizing random words, or worse yet, capitalizing entire words, presumably for emphasis, is simply ignorant. There are tags such as italics (<i>) and bold (<b>) that should be used for that, instead. Don't forget your closing tags.

Spell-check is a good thing to use, and most modern browsers actually have it built-in for text input fields (I know Firefox does, at least, and Microsoft products tend to have it available by pressing F7). That red squiggle under the word means it is not in the spell-checker's dictionary, so you may want to double-check the spelling before hitting "submit". This Taylor Mali video, entitled "The the Impotence of Proofreading"drives home the point that a spellchecker should not be your only guide, a point made even clearer when you read the text-only version, and realize just how badly mangled that poor student's paper is.

The grammar issues I can't give you a quick fix for; those require knowing how to properly formulate a sentence in the first place (a skill you obviously lack - no offense).

As for any factual information you may be attempting to convey, learn how to use an anchor tag to create a link - this page will show you how.

On a sep

Windows still has the market share it did before the antitrust case.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

There are many other corroborating sites.

Or, since people prefer (*smirk*) car analogies, tabs on top in a browser is like a major car manufacturer deciding to replace the steering wheel with a tiller in all of its designs.

If you prefer car analogies, you should use them better. It's like a new car company starting and making great cars, but only offering leather seats. Many people aren't used to them but most grow to like them. Then another car company switches their default to leather seats because most people prefer them, but they still offer fabric as an option. Then a small number of people complain online because the new company doesn't offer fabric like the old one does... And you really agreed with the previous post?

It's like your carpenter telling you that your cabinet will have sliding doors; no matter how many orders he gets for hinged doors, he'll ignore it. Sure, he can do that, but he'll be considered a quirky craftsman at best, and a bad one at worst, and I don't think his carpentry business will be viable in the long run.

That's moronic on several levels. First, this quirky carpenter just stole more customers last month from your "custom carpentry" guy. Oh, and the old mean spirited carpenter (IE) took some too. Second, it's not like a carpenter doing custom work for you. It's like one of the big 3 national cabinet manufacturer only offering bow knobs on their cabinets. You just love everything about their cabinets but you prefer round knobs. They are nice enough to have a forum to submit requests for cabinets online, but they decide not to offer round knobs. So people go online and whine about them "stifling dissent".

[...] at least half of customers' cries of how awkward and cumbersome [...]
...
If it weren't for the lack of that simple checkbox in Chrome, that's the browser I'd be using right now, but without it, it's a dealbreaker for me, and as the comments on the linked bug report demonstrate, I'm not the only one.

No, 500 people starred the bug, out of 70 million. 500 is one out of 140,000. That's 0.0007% of users that cared enough to find the bug and click a button. 188 comments were there. Several were duplicate posts, a few were developer comments and a couple were against it so let's say 180. More people were injured by lightning in the US last year (241) than cared enough to post a comment to that bug.

One of the developer comments was that many UI design professionals would say that options aren't always a good thing (I think they have a point) and that it is explicitly not Chromium's design philosophy. That is like a painter. They specifically want a consistent user experience, one of the reasons they streamlined it, don't have a menu bar and don't let plugins add bars. I've seen family where nearly have their screen is taken up by toolbars, and they like that. Are you saying that Chrome should allow Farmville to install toolbars on people's windows if 500 grandmas want it?

Second, I think you are under-estimating the changes required. Hit SHIFT+ESC in Chrome, or hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and open your task manager. Chrome has a browser process and a separate process for each tab. The tab process owns the address bar. They did this for security and stability reasons. Putting the tabs from other processes under the address bar owned by another process is not that easy to do. I agree 100% with their philosophy on this, I've lost work in Firefox several times because Youtube crashed in another window. When that happens in Chrome I just lost that tab or other flash ones. I've had Javascript running in one tab hose the whole Firefox UI before, never happened in Chrome. If the tab processes managed tabs for other processes and it locked up for some reason, you would not be able

I'd have to disagree. Firefox has reached a level of penetration beyond it being used by power users and their friends and family. It has a momentum of it's own. The figures for Firefox usage alone tell you that.

Really? The figures for Firefox show a nearly flat, but downward trend. The numbers for chrome show a significant upward trend.

Don't like w3schools? Let's try another site. Oh, look, that one shows the same downward trend for Firefox, too.

And a third site (warning: flash required) shows the same thing, too: Firefox has a downward trend.

I like Firefox, too, but the devs actions seem to be driving users away. I'm only using FF because of the addons (but I'm getting really tired of some breaking every month or two).

I have loads of friends who use Firefox on recommendation from a friend who wasn't a power user..

My friends and co-workers are slowly moving away from Firefox to chrome. While personal anecdotes may be fun, they're not all that useful.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_firefox.asp

This is much better - clearly shows ever since the introduction of 4, adopting shitty user interface choices from chrome which we DON'T WANT OR WE'D USE CHROME that they've dropped from as high as 46% down now to 40% and dropping.

Since Firefox looks awful like Chrome now I may as well just get the addons I want for FF in Chrome - at least I know it's faster. And I detest Chrome and it's ghastly breaking of Windows standards (tabs up top is a damned sin)

The drop is clearly visible: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

"By many metrics - Windows XP still has 60% percent of the desktop market. This despite Microsoft only selling Win7 license. "

No it doesn't. At least not in the non-Chinese market where most of us live. That number skews the market where still half of them use IE 6 and is heavily pirated with older machines where 90% of copies are illegal.

In the US XP runs in less 1 out of every 4 desktops. Windows 7 is eclipsing XP and Vista with strong corporate sales. Corporate America is the only one buying new XP licenses and almost all of them are either upgrading to Windows 7 or plan to do it in the next 6-12 months if they are not already doing so now.

XP is quickly dying and being replaced regardless of its fans. At the this rate a year from now it will drop below the 10% marketshare line. Then games and other apps wont support XP anymore. XP is very old and thanks to the recession many companies refused to upgrade and instead kept running older systems which are now dying. Economists call this pent up demand. Vista was so bad too and now with Windows 7 corporate users can finally jump ship.

65% WinXP vs. 13% Win7 - admittedly that was June 2010
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-XP-vs-Windows-7-a-Microsoft-Perspective-147906.shtml

Slightly more updated stats:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

Puts them head to head with Win7 leading by 2% points.

Still, as noted in my OP (the GP of this post), web stats are skewed due to User Agents modifications in browsers of non-Windows platforms by users.

So then we turn to a number of resources from Wikipedia which still shows Win7 lagging WinXP by 4% in nearly every survey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems

which seems to be corroborated by http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=11 showing Win7 at almost 30% and WInXP at almost 50%.

What does this mean? Given time, WIn7 will overtake WinXP but even 2 years after Win7 was released that still hasn't happened - namely due to (i) the downgrade rights to WinXP that comes with certain versions of Win7, and (ii) the massive amount of installs for WinXP.

And these stats are probably pretty accurate even within the US as well where most only upgrade to a newer version of Windows because that's what came on it from BestBuy/etc; even then, with Win7 if you bought one with downgrade rights you are prompted for which - Win7 or WinXP - you want to install/use during first use.

To be even fairer, IE8 from 2009 on my up-to-date Windows Seven PC has no problems rendering properly

To be honest IE8 from 2009 on my up-to-date Windows Seven PC has no problems rendering broken code.

There - fixed that for you.

Ouch. To be fair, someone on the Chrome page pointed out that

No single opensource browser can render properly this tag properties:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=915 (12 year old!)
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50688
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3241
[let's inline Chrome's bug for slashdot's benefit: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=12094 ]

To be even fairer, IE8 from 2009 on my up-to-date Windows Seven PC has no problems rendering properly where all four OSS browsers failed.

It's such a simple logical failure too... it's a bizarre case showing that IE has some silent merits... Must be sanity-wrenching to find a bug like this prior to seeing confirmation that it's not YOUR code at fault because the once-leading browser has no issues rendering it.

I wonder how many thousands of devs around the world individually break their head per year once their corporations give the green light to move to OSS browsers, but someone notices THIS exact bug and pulls back. It's little wonder doc files and PDF distributions are so overwhelmingly prefered to HTML.

I'm not the biggest fan of Outlook (or OWA), but we use it at work, and OWA is actually pretty decent in web browser support. It works in IE of course, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (and maybe other browsers that I haven't tried). According to this site, as of June 2011, that's 97% of the browser market share.

How about you go for facts instead?

Yeah, he's losing around 2% of the market, probably composed of old people, with old computers, or chronically stupid people.

"tremendous amount of potential" indeed

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp

I think what is implied is that in an average area, there are more likely 2 out of 3 people who have 'some' experience in using if not supporting Windows. If you look at the numbers, In 2009, 80 % of the homes in the US have a Computer. where looking at OS distribution, Approx 80% of Users are running some form of Windows.

Our company has specialized equipment and as a Systems Admin I work with alot of different *NIX versions. From AIX to Solaris to Ubuntu. And I am the ONLY person in our 9 man IT department who can handle *NIX. Even the operators and users of the machines and terminals dont know anything about *NIX and they use these OS's everyday. So I believe that he wasnt trying to

make it sound like Windows just magically works.

He was just emphasizing the spread of common place OS users and and software compatibility, yes he was correct,

There isn't a right way to do this, depends on the situation. So decide if you are willing to support it (or if they have a support guy that handles Linux, which is unlikely),

If not Windows is the best way to go.

It may surprise you to know that the majority of the world is not yet using 1080p monitors.

That said...nobody's forcing you to view every page fullscreen. Also, with a near-1080p monitor myself, I could care less if the screen is filled entirely from left-to-right. That actually reduces readability of most text.

Ever see a newspaper print its text all the way accross the page? No, they use many smaller columns to break-up the text. Since the website is not printed on paper, it's somewhat irrelevant if there's blank space on the sides.

Aside from all that...what the heck does this have to do with the release of 4.7?

Dish Network picked up Blockbuster. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/06/us-blockbuster-dishnetwork-idUSTRE7351VA20110406 [reuters.com] Also note the "Subsidiary of Dish Network" part here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbuster_Inc [wikipedia.org].

Make it look like this, please.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Theres no way to know the actual usage of browsers since theres no central authority that requires each and every person connected to the internet to "contribute" their data. But don't worry, lots of people are working on it now.

I'm a little confused -- are you looking for an online CMS? Or an offline tool for editing? Because that seems to be more than half of the recommendations coming up.

If you're looking for content management, your options are pretty much limited to how much power you ultimately want over your content. Drupal has a little bit of a learning curve but is easily the most flexible options in the pack; outside of that, try browsing a couple of distribution sites, or hell:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems

Of course, when it comes down to it, just simply learning to hand-code is not going to be the end of the world, I promise. Nothing has changed in the time you've described on the code-side of things except for bolted-on additions, and browsers are still pretty forgiving to older code (programmers could only wish for the kinds of backwards-compatibility HTML has had during its existence). HTML is not that difficult. CSS is not that difficult. AJAX might be a bit of a push, but JQuery is pretty solid for adding a little extra "zing" for not a lot of extra work. Look into it:

http://www.w3schools.com/

This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.

For example:

1. I'd bet that Chrome's download page has a much lower percentage of Chrome users than the general populace.
2. I'm sure M$ could show you stats with IE at 92% and the rest reading the files from FTP.
3. Corporate vs. Academic sites would probably see great variation for a single browser.

What makes any one set of browser share statistics any better than any other?