If the Browser-Fairy were to suddenly change the target of the desktop icon on every computer all over the world from iexplorer.exe to firefox.exe, the market share for IE would go to something like 10% or less.
Sounds like we need an IE worm that does just that...
If you own your home, check your home owner's policy. Many do cover computer problems. In fact my agent actually asked me how much my computer equipment was worth to make sure any losses would be covered. Some of them will even pay you for data loss due to viruses.
Re:Scalability and Maintainability go hand in hand
on
On PHP and Scaling
·
· Score: 1
Any language can become unmaintainable if you don't follow good practice. (Including Perl) and while learning I wrote lots of bad Perl code as well.
The problem is that PHP encourages bad practices (IE embedding code into HTML) and doesn't support some very basic things that are in other languages that make maintaiability easier such as namespaces or common naming convention for at least core functions!
Re:Scalability and Maintainability go hand in hand
on
On PHP and Scaling
·
· Score: 1
Actually, coding PHP is part of my job. I do both it and Perl.
I've used PHP for two years now and in several large projects. I tried Smarty, didn't like but I am glad its included by default since it is better than embedding into HTML, especially when working with designers that don't know and won't learn the tinyiest scrap of code. For templating I use PHP-HTML Template, which is compatable with HTML::Template in Perl (which is convient since we use both).
Unfortunatly PEAR doesn't come close to CPAN, the only thing I use from it are the DB modules. Many modules I've tried didn't work, documentation is almost nil and there are tons of things missing. Such as an HTML Parser.
My point is, its quite the opposite. The more I work with PHP the more I find it lacking. I think even adding some of the needed things to make the language better are too little too late. Even if it all gets in you have an army of "programmers" that aren't going to stop embedding code into HTML, aren't going to stop requesting functions be added to the core that have no business being there.
Scalability and Maintainability go hand in hand
on
On PHP and Scaling
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
PHP's problem is that it quickly becomes unmaintainable in larger projects. That's why it doesn't scale, not because the platform isn't fast enough or Apache can/can't scale.
PHP will continue to have this problem until someone comes and tells the developers about a nifty invention called 'namespaces'
Some other things that could help: Standard templating for easier separation of design/content from code, a better module architecture that doesn't require me to recompile just to get some new functionality, some nice standard modules that go with that new architecture.
Of course if someone did all of that you'd have Perl and since we already have Perl, I'll stick with it.
So what if its underused? If it keeps the user from getting crapware on their computer or having their finances destoryed, it sure is better to have unused features!
Its people like you that are part of the problem. "IE is good enough". Even if you don't like Mozilla its that attitude that keeps MS from making IE better.
Adblock didn't work because they change the way extensions were done.
You can hardly blame anyone though, Firefox is clearly stated to be a technology preview. When it is considered stable is when the API will quit being a moving target and extensions will just work.
e.g. perl's syntax is a pointless departure that adds no value.
Huh? Perl uses ; to end statements and the same if-then-else structure as C and its dervatives. And if you're talking about embedded regexes, well I'm glad you aren't in charge of "The Standard for Language Design" since I happen to like them and Perl in general. If you would take the time to learn Perl you'd find that it can be written much like English which typically makes it easier to understand.
It doesn't allow free reign to set the records up exactly how you want (trivially for example, it forces you to adopt a mandatory naming convention for MX records - though the convention is pretty sensible)
No it doesn't. On the mx line where it says 'a' or 'b' on your mx record you can put anything you want. Instead of getting a.mx.domain.com you'll get mail.domain.com or whatever else you put there. Not hard at all.
As for the syntax I think its just a matter of getting used to it. BIND has a lot of other config lines and things that I think for the most part are unnessicary and confusing.
I use djbdns as well. Very simple, very easy to use. I actually run about 100 domains off of it.
I can't say that I really like the separate cache/dns server but I've gotten used to it. I just wish my cache would immediatly pick up changes in my DNS. And I wish it was better documented.
Probably true. I guess I just expected it to save the image since it was an image. For some reason I thought that windows explorer did save the image. I don't use windows often so I'm probably incorrect:)
X can copy content and it has multiple clipboards, the problem is that everyone has done the implementation the wrong way. (See the links folks have posted above)
Gnome seems to be able to copy an paste files just fine, and I'm sure KDE can too. I use Blackbox and I can drag images off the web from Firefox to GIMP and they open (oddly enough if I drag from Firefox to Nautilis they save only the URL, probably a bug in Nautilus)
We do have antitrust law, this is correct. And while Microsoft does have a monopoly (which in itself is not illegal) but you have a choice still to use an alternative such as Linux or Mac. Or you have the choice to do without.
Cellphones, as so many people have mentioned, 5 providers in my area, all with different pricing structures and different plans, how is that not equal footing? I chose the one that gave me the best price for the best coverage.
Its government regulation and the idea that because someone else has the latest greatest toy we all have to get it too, that has made a mess out of the market. The market most certainly can't work when the government gives billions to prob up failing airlines, or sets up monopolies on power or other utilities, or when the FTC makes regulations that blatently benefit large companies, (Clear Channel, Comcast ring any bells?)
I agree that the agencies you mention were set up with good intentions but now they are mere puppets of the large companies you despise. I'm sorry but I'm not going to put my faith that more regulation will suddenly fix everything. The answer is to educate people how to be smart with their money and credit and to actually care when companies are screwing them over and STOP PAYING THEM! When you want to keep a company honest stop giving them your money, its that simple, and no matter how large the company when enough people finally do that, the company will not be so large anymore.
Excellent for the Great White Males who are shareholders/CEOs; bad for the rest of us. America looks more like a caste system every day.
[flame-proof suit] [Warning: soap-box style rant] What a racist comment, the real reason that so many minorities have problems in this country is because they're always looking for someone else to blame, how convinent that the evil white overlords come along and make everyone else give them their money. How evil they are to come up with stuff people want and develop a pricing model that most people can afford. And there are plenty of minorities in positions of power, and what about Japanese companies? I bet some of those people would take offense to being called white. I personally take offense as a white person who came from a poor family and worked my butt off to have the money to go to college and get to where I am. I didn't whine and complain that I didn't get scholarships because of my skin color, I just did what I had to, no one gave me free handouts, why should anyone else get them?
As for more government regulation, Oh yeah that's a great idea, since when did regulation become a replacement for common sense? I can't think of a single thing that you can rent that you can't also buy. The thing that comes closest are cell phones but trust me, go down to Radio Shack and I guarentee they will cell you your very own cell phone at full price, no contracts, no 'renting'. Cars, houses, TVs, its all the same, sure you can rent and some people do that but if you want to own then pay more money up front (and probably less in the long run). MS will probably do something similar, you won't pay $200 up front anymore, you'll just pay so much per month until you no longer want to use it. If you don't like that model then I'm betting they will still have an option for buying it. If they don't offer a buy option then don't sign up for a contract to rent it. Contact them, tell them why they won't get your money, encourage your friends to not buy it either and to use alternatives, enough people do that (and their will be) MS will back-peddle faster than they did to get away from Bob.
Companies have a right to offer what ever pricing model people will go for, no one is forcing you to give them your money, if you don't like the terms then find another service.
Thunderbird at least (probably in Mozilla as well) has an option to turn off remotely loaded images. So you can keep the HTML formating if you so desire without worrying about being tracked in this fashion.
Sure there aren't droves of people using it yet but that's because a lot of people haven't even left Redhat 7.3 yet.
Fedora is an easy to use (especially after adding apt) stable distro. It has some backing from Redhat so my employer likes it. I don't do distro politics, I use what works for me.
Unfortunatly if the designer doesn't understand HTML then its a moot point, the designers I work with use Dreamweaver MX and they still use tables. Makes me want to kill them but they think that divs are hard and they will never get out of their little world where they control the layout completely.
Did I sleep through IE becoming complient?
on
Core CSS (2nd ed.)
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Oh yeah it isn't.
Seriously there are so many bugs and missing stuff from IE's implementation even of CSS 1 I fail to see how anyone can claim that its even remotely complient.
Here's just a few things off the top of my head:
No support for min-width, max-width. Wrongly treats the width property as min-width.
Can't clip background images to anything other than the body
Tons of just plain bugs related to padding, and boxes, incorrectly clips fonts, even full words in some cases
No support for:hover, etc on elements other than a making it impossible to do dynamic effects without Javascript
No support for overwritting classes (ie.class >.someOtherClass { })
The list goes on! And don't even get me started on the implementation of the DOM in IE, not to mention the security problems and other 'features' that also come along with it.
Why oh why can't it just go away!? If you don't believe me, google for this stuff, its all out there complete with hacks to get around some of it (though most of htem use non-standard MS extensions)
I find Photoshop confusing. Yes I've used it and I work on graphic design sometimes (small company have to do a little of everything). I've been around it for years. I like GIMP better. So as boring of an argument as that might be its simply true, especially when not every person can just 'naturally' picks up stuff.
Gimp's interface is designed around a 'sloppy' focus model instead of a click to focus model, Of course PS has tons of windows too they just get contained in a big one. Do you need to go to the taskbar to use PS? If not why do you need to go to the task bar to use Gimp?
And space, enter, tab and escape work just like you say they should on Gimp and just like they do in any GTK application (ie just like windows).
Oh what am I doing, its way too late to feed the trolls.
In Gimp 2.0 you don't have to anymore, they put all the menus at the top of every editing window for you. (the right-click works too of course)
Actually even in the 1.2 series there is a little box with an arrow in the top left that opens the menu as well but that was admittidly more awkward than the right click:)
Personally I like the right-click it makes sense to me. And I have trouble finding features in PhotoShop!
Slashdot Mirror
If the Browser-Fairy were to suddenly change the target of the desktop icon on every computer all over the world from iexplorer.exe to firefox.exe, the market share for IE would go to something like 10% or less.
...
... mostly)
Sounds like we need an IE worm that does just that
(j/k
If you own your home, check your home owner's policy. Many do cover computer problems. In fact my agent actually asked me how much my computer equipment was worth to make sure any losses would be covered. Some of them will even pay you for data loss due to viruses.
Any language can become unmaintainable if you don't follow good practice. (Including Perl) and while learning I wrote lots of bad Perl code as well.
The problem is that PHP encourages bad practices (IE embedding code into HTML) and doesn't support some very basic things that are in other languages that make maintaiability easier such as namespaces or common naming convention for at least core functions!
Actually, coding PHP is part of my job. I do both it and Perl.
I've used PHP for two years now and in several large projects. I tried Smarty, didn't like but I am glad its included by default since it is better than embedding into HTML, especially when working with designers that don't know and won't learn the tinyiest scrap of code. For templating I use PHP-HTML Template, which is compatable with HTML::Template in Perl (which is convient since we use both).
Unfortunatly PEAR doesn't come close to CPAN, the only thing I use from it are the DB modules. Many modules I've tried didn't work, documentation is almost nil and there are tons of things missing. Such as an HTML Parser.
My point is, its quite the opposite. The more I work with PHP the more I find it lacking. I think even adding some of the needed things to make the language better are too little too late. Even if it all gets in you have an army of "programmers" that aren't going to stop embedding code into HTML, aren't going to stop requesting functions be added to the core that have no business being there.
PHP's problem is that it quickly becomes unmaintainable in larger projects. That's why it doesn't scale, not because the platform isn't fast enough or Apache can/can't scale.
PHP will continue to have this problem until someone comes and tells the developers about a nifty invention called 'namespaces'
Some other things that could help: Standard templating for easier separation of design/content from code, a better module architecture that doesn't require me to recompile just to get some new functionality, some nice standard modules that go with that new architecture.
Of course if someone did all of that you'd have Perl and since we already have Perl, I'll stick with it.
So what if its underused? If it keeps the user from getting crapware on their computer or having their finances destoryed, it sure is better to have unused features!
Its people like you that are part of the problem. "IE is good enough". Even if you don't like Mozilla its that attitude that keeps MS from making IE better.
What exactly is wrong with the new theme? From what I've seen the new theme is much cleaner. IMHO of course.
Adblock didn't work because they change the way extensions were done.
You can hardly blame anyone though, Firefox is clearly stated to be a technology preview. When it is considered stable is when the API will quit being a moving target and extensions will just work.
e.g. perl's syntax is a pointless departure that adds no value.
Huh? Perl uses ; to end statements and the same if-then-else structure as C and its dervatives. And if you're talking about embedded regexes, well I'm glad you aren't in charge of "The Standard for Language Design" since I happen to like them and Perl in general. If you would take the time to learn Perl you'd find that it can be written much like English which typically makes it easier to understand.
Anyone know where I can find one?
It doesn't allow free reign to set the records up exactly how you want (trivially for example, it forces you to adopt a mandatory naming convention for MX records - though the convention is pretty sensible)
No it doesn't. On the mx line where it says 'a' or 'b' on your mx record you can put anything you want. Instead of getting a.mx.domain.com you'll get mail.domain.com or whatever else you put there. Not hard at all.
As for the syntax I think its just a matter of getting used to it. BIND has a lot of other config lines and things that I think for the most part are unnessicary and confusing.
I agree on your other two points.
I use djbdns as well. Very simple, very easy to use. I actually run about 100 domains off of it.
I can't say that I really like the separate cache/dns server but I've gotten used to it. I just wish my cache would immediatly pick up changes in my DNS. And I wish it was better documented.
Probably true. I guess I just expected it to save the image since it was an image. For some reason I thought that windows explorer did save the image. I don't use windows often so I'm probably incorrect :)
X can copy content and it has multiple clipboards, the problem is that everyone has done the implementation the wrong way. (See the links folks have posted above)
Gnome seems to be able to copy an paste files just fine, and I'm sure KDE can too. I use Blackbox and I can drag images off the web from Firefox to GIMP and they open (oddly enough if I drag from Firefox to Nautilis they save only the URL, probably a bug in Nautilus)
We do have antitrust law, this is correct. And while Microsoft does have a monopoly (which in itself is not illegal) but you have a choice still to use an alternative such as Linux or Mac. Or you have the choice to do without.
Cellphones, as so many people have mentioned, 5 providers in my area, all with different pricing structures and different plans, how is that not equal footing? I chose the one that gave me the best price for the best coverage.
Its government regulation and the idea that because someone else has the latest greatest toy we all have to get it too, that has made a mess out of the market. The market most certainly can't work when the government gives billions to prob up failing airlines, or sets up monopolies on power or other utilities, or when the FTC makes regulations that blatently benefit large companies, (Clear Channel, Comcast ring any bells?)
I agree that the agencies you mention were set up with good intentions but now they are mere puppets of the large companies you despise. I'm sorry but I'm not going to put my faith that more regulation will suddenly fix everything. The answer is to educate people how to be smart with their money and credit and to actually care when companies are screwing them over and STOP PAYING THEM! When you want to keep a company honest stop giving them your money, its that simple, and no matter how large the company when enough people finally do that, the company will not be so large anymore.
Excellent for the Great White Males who are shareholders/CEOs; bad for the rest of us. America looks more like a caste system every day.
[flame-proof suit] [Warning: soap-box style rant] What a racist comment, the real reason that so many minorities have problems in this country is because they're always looking for someone else to blame, how convinent that the evil white overlords come along and make everyone else give them their money. How evil they are to come up with stuff people want and develop a pricing model that most people can afford. And there are plenty of minorities in positions of power, and what about Japanese companies? I bet some of those people would take offense to being called white. I personally take offense as a white person who came from a poor family and worked my butt off to have the money to go to college and get to where I am. I didn't whine and complain that I didn't get scholarships because of my skin color, I just did what I had to, no one gave me free handouts, why should anyone else get them?
As for more government regulation, Oh yeah that's a great idea, since when did regulation become a replacement for common sense? I can't think of a single thing that you can rent that you can't also buy. The thing that comes closest are cell phones but trust me, go down to Radio Shack and I guarentee they will cell you your very own cell phone at full price, no contracts, no 'renting'. Cars, houses, TVs, its all the same, sure you can rent and some people do that but if you want to own then pay more money up front (and probably less in the long run). MS will probably do something similar, you won't pay $200 up front anymore, you'll just pay so much per month until you no longer want to use it. If you don't like that model then I'm betting they will still have an option for buying it. If they don't offer a buy option then don't sign up for a contract to rent it. Contact them, tell them why they won't get your money, encourage your friends to not buy it either and to use alternatives, enough people do that (and their will be) MS will back-peddle faster than they did to get away from Bob.
Companies have a right to offer what ever pricing model people will go for, no one is forcing you to give them your money, if you don't like the terms then find another service.
[/rant]
It's far far faster, at least on my machine
Thunderbird at least (probably in Mozilla as well) has an option to turn off remotely loaded images. So you can keep the HTML formating if you so desire without worrying about being tracked in this fashion.
Fedora Legacy is issuing security patches for RH 7.2 - 9 so I don't know why they wouldn't for FC 1 when it reaches end of life.
Also FreshRPMs continues to provide security updates for these OSes as well.
Sure there aren't droves of people using it yet but that's because a lot of people haven't even left Redhat 7.3 yet.
Fedora is an easy to use (especially after adding apt) stable distro. It has some backing from Redhat so my employer likes it. I don't do distro politics, I use what works for me.
Unfortunatly if the designer doesn't understand HTML then its a moot point, the designers I work with use Dreamweaver MX and they still use tables. Makes me want to kill them but they think that divs are hard and they will never get out of their little world where they control the layout completely.
Seriously there are so many bugs and missing stuff from IE's implementation even of CSS 1 I fail to see how anyone can claim that its even remotely complient.
Here's just a few things off the top of my head:
The list goes on! And don't even get me started on the implementation of the DOM in IE, not to mention the security problems and other 'features' that also come along with it.
Why oh why can't it just go away!? If you don't believe me, google for this stuff, its all out there complete with hacks to get around some of it (though most of htem use non-standard MS extensions)
Anyone know where I can get one? Not on the apt repositories yet :(
I find Photoshop confusing. Yes I've used it and I work on graphic design sometimes (small company have to do a little of everything). I've been around it for years. I like GIMP better. So as boring of an argument as that might be its simply true, especially when not every person can just 'naturally' picks up stuff.
Gimp's interface is designed around a 'sloppy' focus model instead of a click to focus model, Of course PS has tons of windows too they just get contained in a big one. Do you need to go to the taskbar to use PS? If not why do you need to go to the task bar to use Gimp?
And space, enter, tab and escape work just like you say they should on Gimp and just like they do in any GTK application (ie just like windows).
Oh what am I doing, its way too late to feed the trolls.
In Gimp 2.0 you don't have to anymore, they put all the menus at the top of every editing window for you. (the right-click works too of course)
:)
Actually even in the 1.2 series there is a little box with an arrow in the top left that opens the menu as well but that was admittidly more awkward than the right click
Personally I like the right-click it makes sense to me. And I have trouble finding features in PhotoShop!