Interesting. If this program was implemented when I was growing up, I probably wouldn't be a college dropout. I also probably wouldn't be fluent in Japanese with reading and writing capabilities as well as be a web developers with side knowledge of programing in gtk using C as well as an assortment of other languages.
At the point I am at now, I feel like the only thing that College has done for me is get me in a huge amount of dept. This program may have set me right.
While not great and not officially in the spec yet, looks like Theora is doing it's job as the sub-standard least denominator codec. It's been appearing in random preview Opera, Firefox and Chrome builds. But given that H.264 is the spec and is as prevalent as it is, I can't see why they wouldn't include it either in Chrome. I mean, that is what their current movies are encoded in for the HQ format. Hopefully Theora will eventually replace mpeg though...
Has firefox fixed the bug where nobody can install extensions that are enabled by default without user intervention?
How slashdot loves to give karma to karma whores. I would have at least expected the parent to post a link to an actual bug so that the slashdot community could collaboratively vote for it so it could get noticed. That would actually accomplish something. This is why I am disappointed in Slashdot.
I personally don't have a problem with this installation method. It make addon development easier and it makes administration of many computers easier. While I trust linux distros doing this type of installation, Microsoft is a bit questionable.
Not on a Mac it doesn't. While Fx 3.0 is far better than previous versions on a Mac, it's still pretty poor. And you can't use Fx 3.0 on older Macs at all.
The last version of Safari for Mac OS X 10.3 was 1.3.2 (January 11, 2006). The last release of the Firefox 2 series for Mac OS X 10.3 was 2.0.20 (20 Dec 2008). That is a helluva lot of dedication and you just stepped all over it.
There was a proposal for the drop of Mac OS X 10.3 support a long time ago for Firefox 3. I recommend you read it. I'll be giving a few quotes below to stress the important parts.
For Gecko 1.8 there were significantly more Panther testers in the community than there are now. That trend will continue over the next 6 months and almost certainly accelerate when Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is released. By the time we release Gecko 1.9, I suspect that our community Panther testing resources will be so small as to be nearly insignificant.
I think you can guess how small a minority of a minority is. At that time, Omnigroup was was estimating "2% of their users were on Panther at the end of 2006." I wonder what that percent is now in 2009? Instead of supporting 10 people on Mac OS X 10.3, I would rather have the Mozilla folks focusing on making the experience better for versions that actually have users. The development team only has so many resources to use.
I still do not why slashdoters think Theora has no worth as a baseline free video codec with less legal shackles? H264 is already in the standard. I doubt it's going to disappear. It would be nice if some free (as in beer) software could ship with a working video encoder that isn't illegal in some countries. Just toss the baby out with the bathwater guys...
Besides that there's also something that stinks about forcing a standard on the web too - open or not. I think I'd rather have market forces decide a standard over a small clique of people who have their own interests and agendas which may not necessarily be the best for the web overall.
I may be wrong, but I believe this encompasses all the major rendering engines on the web today. There are about 390 other members on the page too. I do not understand how this is a smaller clique of people than just having the developers of Webkit, Gecko, Trident and Presto doing their own things.
Not sure it has anything to do with behavioral modification.
Not 100% sure, but what I think the parent poster was assuming is that the spot that a finger makes contact with the keyboard is an infinitely small point.
I *enjoy* my games being complex, having a learning curve, and not simply something where I flail my arms wildly and stuff happens.
While a lot of people say this, I wonder what percent say it because they don't want to throw away the time invested into something complicated and start over again. When you get to the age that a lot of these hardcore people are at, if the jump button is somewhere else than usual, it's flat out wrong to them.
Through the years I have traditionally enjoyed the different Nintendo controllers for both their strengths and weaknesses. Developers using them creatively is part of the art-form and had helped keep things interesting. I also enjoyed playing Mario Kart upside-down to up the challenge.:-p Still haven't upgraded from my GameCube yet though.
Just be careful about not having her grow up into a person with no self confidence because she was never allowed to do anything by herself. When little, I have gotten on the wrong bus a few times when going home and it was a learning experience. I don't know of kids who purposefully get off at the wrong stop. The just freeze and never get off. (Queue adult to help them.)
Then this is a problem with Firefox, not IE, that it let's plugins be installed through the filesystem without user intervention. At the least it should warn upon next start that "Blah has been installed, do you want to enable it?"
When you have access to the filesystem, and I assume Windows Update runs with full privileges, you can do whatever the hell you want. If MS really wanted to, they could be replacing libraries in the Firefox folder. In many ways this is similar to the argument that if a hacker has physical access to the machine, you're toast.
Having said that, a number of Linux distros have taken to including certain addons optionally or by default with a Firefox install. I don't really want to see this feature taken away and there is a very real purpose...to make mass management of Firefox installations easier.
The poster above me was talking about toolkits. So I started off my first paragraph talking about toolkits and transitioned to desktop environments since for programs, there are generally a lot of other libs involved (kdelibs, libgnome, etc). Gnome is having changes under the hood for 3.0. Glade and libgnome functionality are generally moving into gtk. But still, glade and libgnome are not gtk. Are you going to tell me they are?
Appreciate it, but I was simplifying myself by clumping them together to speak in a broader context. You see, you can get picky that I wrote "speak" in my last sentence. I am actually writing.:-p If I am not mistaken, the general development practices between the respective DEs and their toolkits mirror each other no matter which is in the lead.
I think most of these routers from the ISP include a CD (so they can brand your browser etc.) But I may be wrong. With a region as large as the EU though, I don't think it would be that hard to get ISPs doing this consistently much like what was done when Windows 3.11 didn't have a built in browser either.
Except GTK is so poor that you have Gnome devs calling for a major restructuring, and Mark Shuttleworth of Cannonical/Ubuntu fame calling for Gnome to be built on top of KDE. Ubuntu hitched their wagon to Gnome very early on, and ships broken KDE packages to this day, but I have to wonder if Shuttleworth regrets that decision today.
So this is how the QT people get to feel better about themselves after a horrible major restructuring that made Linus Torvalds of the Linux kernal fame team begrudgingly switch to Gnome even though he hates its approach to UI design. Seriously, your post was asinine. GTK has grown extremely long in the tooth because of the extreme dedication of the group to incrementalism, but that is not a sign of poor design.
KDE 3.0 and Gnome 2.0 were released in 2002.
KDE 4.0 was released in 2008 and Gnome 3.0 will be released in 2010
So Gnome's 2.0 structure was so bad that it is going to last longer than KDE3's? I also doubt it's going to have the rockey ride that was 4.0/4.1 for KDE users either. After so many years, most software needs reworking. The reason for the outward protests at Gnome is that the developers are absolutely against the KDE4 kind of developement unless it is 100% necessary. If people didn't protest, this kind of reworking would never happen have happened. The original plan for the gnome folks was to have the 2.xx series continue indefinitely.
He was insinuating to let the distributions make sure the required dependencies are there. Not program for every single combination. Hey, it works for Mozilla Firefox and Adobe Flash, doesn't it?
My wishes: While I don't mind gtk, I am really hoping gnome3 brings some good changes to it. One of the big things I wish for is more free functionally for base widgets. Things like spell checking for more elements, auto-connecting default actions for cut-copy-paste menues, user toolbar editing, etc. It's pure busy work.
My what the hells Why do some programs only have a quit menu and some only have a close (epiphany)? Why does the quit quick-key not work if the focus is in a text-view? While I can do ctrl-q to quit firefox, I have to close all the documents in gedit to get ctrl-q to work. What is wrong with having both close and quit for most apps?
My what is going to happen? I know they are working on a app driven interface over a window driven one (ala Mac OS X). You can tell just by looking at some of the preferences hidden in gconf, recent changes in gimp, and many others. What does this mean to the gtk developers and the future of their applications?
MPlayer is shit if you are using the GUI. Just...don't AGHRRR.
VLC is much more than a video player, which may be part of it's downfall. Notice the name implying network connections, almost like it may have originally been meant for some other purpose. Like streaming video as a server...
As for the Quicktime thing...I personally find the interface for VLC nicer on Macs than on Windows. Actually, Quicktime is nicer on Macs too. A bit funny though, QuickTime has some limited hardware acceleration on newer machines which you were talking about being important to you...
If you can call what they give you windows. If there was a standard vanilla MS Windows installer disk I might agree with you. But no, there is only the restore disk that wipes out your whole machine. If you want a vanilla install, you're still going to have to hash out that 200 or so dollars. Is that really money saved?
Those games were terrible compared to today's standards. Extremely dull. However, people seem to rate games according to how good they were for their time, rather than how good they are now. That's why the "best games of all time" lists should really be renamed "best games of their time".
Some of my first games were on an Atari. None of those games endeared to me. I have a number of NES and SNES games that I will never forget. Explain.
I think people with that kind of opinion are generally pigeon holing games in that they have to be a specific thing.
Meh. I sucked out on my reply and didn't explain myself enough. Here I try again.
The beauty of XHTML Strict is that it forced you to write correct code. (If you don't want to, there was always transitional.) I am 99% sure that the w3c documents for all HTML specs only cover how to render correct code, not incorrect code or quirks. This means if you F-up your webpage in plain old HTML, it is not reasonable to expect it to render consistently between browsers, even if they are standards complaint. Now that is a travesty. Worse yet, your page is more likely to break in future browsers. Thus, XHTML strict is in theory more interpolatable than other versions of HTML because it has to be correct to display period.
That is why I don't think XHTML was a waste of time.
Sigh. I really hope that HTML5 is somewhat similar to xhtml. I really do believe it went in the right direction in general. Even with xhtml strict pages not displaying at all if they had some unclosed tags. It all in general was working toward having authors writing better, more interpolatable pages.
Is xhtml dead? Will the applicable changes in html5 make it back to xhtml? I get the feeling that MS never implemented xhtml strict because they didn't want to drop the ability to extend it.
I think I see what you are saying. If Firefox kept it's Linux and Mac versions exactly one version behind, it would be a much better browser.;-) Maybe we will eventually see Google skip a version of chrome because they are so far behind like Adobe did with Flash. (now waiting for the tomatos)
Google didn't put the whole browser together like Mozilla, they used a bunch of parts form various places and then inserted their own JS engine. The JS Engine was likely in developement in Google labs long before the name Chrome was even thought of. Google labs is just where random projects exist like that. And no, they don't even have to do any work on the renderer themselves which is viewed by many as the hardest part.
Right now, Google's sole target is getting some Windows browser share. Supporting alternative operating systems would be nice too, but that is not their goal, it is icing. Don't give them more credit than they deserve.
Having said that, Chrome is getting this much flack because people want to use it. Not because they hate it.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. If this program was implemented when I was growing up, I probably wouldn't be a college dropout. I also probably wouldn't be fluent in Japanese with reading and writing capabilities as well as be a web developers with side knowledge of programing in gtk using C as well as an assortment of other languages.
At the point I am at now, I feel like the only thing that College has done for me is get me in a huge amount of dept. This program may have set me right.
While not great and not officially in the spec yet, looks like Theora is doing it's job as the sub-standard least denominator codec. It's been appearing in random preview Opera, Firefox and Chrome builds. But given that H.264 is the spec and is as prevalent as it is, I can't see why they wouldn't include it either in Chrome. I mean, that is what their current movies are encoded in for the HQ format. Hopefully Theora will eventually replace mpeg though...
Has firefox fixed the bug where nobody can install extensions that are enabled by default without user intervention?
How slashdot loves to give karma to karma whores. I would have at least expected the parent to post a link to an actual bug so that the slashdot community could collaboratively vote for it so it could get noticed. That would actually accomplish something. This is why I am disappointed in Slashdot.
I personally don't have a problem with this installation method. It make addon development easier and it makes administration of many computers easier. While I trust linux distros doing this type of installation, Microsoft is a bit questionable.
Not on a Mac it doesn't. While Fx 3.0 is far better than previous versions on a Mac, it's still pretty poor. And you can't use Fx 3.0 on older Macs at all.
The last version of Safari for Mac OS X 10.3 was 1.3.2 (January 11, 2006). The last release of the Firefox 2 series for Mac OS X 10.3 was 2.0.20 (20 Dec 2008). That is a helluva lot of dedication and you just stepped all over it.
There was a proposal for the drop of Mac OS X 10.3 support a long time ago for Firefox 3. I recommend you read it. I'll be giving a few quotes below to stress the important parts.
For Gecko 1.8 there were significantly more Panther testers in the community than there are now. That trend will continue over the next 6 months and almost certainly accelerate when Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is released. By the time we release Gecko 1.9, I suspect that our community Panther testing resources will be so small as to be nearly insignificant.
I think you can guess how small a minority of a minority is. At that time, Omnigroup was was estimating "2% of their users were on Panther at the end of 2006." I wonder what that percent is now in 2009? Instead of supporting 10 people on Mac OS X 10.3, I would rather have the Mozilla folks focusing on making the experience better for versions that actually have users. The development team only has so many resources to use.
You better be careful. The people who think that W3C has no relationship with MS/IE and that it only does things to hurt IE will get mad. :-p
I still do not why slashdoters think Theora has no worth as a baseline free video codec with less legal shackles? H264 is already in the standard. I doubt it's going to disappear. It would be nice if some free (as in beer) software could ship with a working video encoder that isn't illegal in some countries. Just toss the baby out with the bathwater guys...
Besides that there's also something that stinks about forcing a standard on the web too - open or not. I think I'd rather have market forces decide a standard over a small clique of people who have their own interests and agendas which may not necessarily be the best for the web overall.
According to the w3c site, the members include:
I may be wrong, but I believe this encompasses all the major rendering engines on the web today. There are about 390 other members on the page too. I do not understand how this is a smaller clique of people than just having the developers of Webkit, Gecko, Trident and Presto doing their own things.
Not sure it has anything to do with behavioral modification.
Not 100% sure, but what I think the parent poster was assuming is that the spot that a finger makes contact with the keyboard is an infinitely small point.
I *enjoy* my games being complex, having a learning curve, and not simply something where I flail my arms wildly and stuff happens.
While a lot of people say this, I wonder what percent say it because they don't want to throw away the time invested into something complicated and start over again. When you get to the age that a lot of these hardcore people are at, if the jump button is somewhere else than usual, it's flat out wrong to them.
Through the years I have traditionally enjoyed the different Nintendo controllers for both their strengths and weaknesses. Developers using them creatively is part of the art-form and had helped keep things interesting. I also enjoyed playing Mario Kart upside-down to up the challenge. :-p Still haven't upgraded from my GameCube yet though.
Just be careful about not having her grow up into a person with no self confidence because she was never allowed to do anything by herself. When little, I have gotten on the wrong bus a few times when going home and it was a learning experience. I don't know of kids who purposefully get off at the wrong stop. The just freeze and never get off. (Queue adult to help them.)
Then this is a problem with Firefox, not IE, that it let's plugins be installed through the filesystem without user intervention. At the least it should warn upon next start that "Blah has been installed, do you want to enable it?"
When you have access to the filesystem, and I assume Windows Update runs with full privileges, you can do whatever the hell you want. If MS really wanted to, they could be replacing libraries in the Firefox folder. In many ways this is similar to the argument that if a hacker has physical access to the machine, you're toast.
Having said that, a number of Linux distros have taken to including certain addons optionally or by default with a Firefox install. I don't really want to see this feature taken away and there is a very real purpose...to make mass management of Firefox installations easier.
The poster above me was talking about toolkits. So I started off my first paragraph talking about toolkits and transitioned to desktop environments since for programs, there are generally a lot of other libs involved (kdelibs, libgnome, etc). Gnome is having changes under the hood for 3.0. Glade and libgnome functionality are generally moving into gtk. But still, glade and libgnome are not gtk. Are you going to tell me they are?
You could read the release notes. Or you could try reading slashdot. ;-) Or probably almost any technical magazine for that matter.
Appreciate it, but I was simplifying myself by clumping them together to speak in a broader context. You see, you can get picky that I wrote "speak" in my last sentence. I am actually writing. :-p If I am not mistaken, the general development practices between the respective DEs and their toolkits mirror each other no matter which is in the lead.
I think most of these routers from the ISP include a CD (so they can brand your browser etc.) But I may be wrong. With a region as large as the EU though, I don't think it would be that hard to get ISPs doing this consistently much like what was done when Windows 3.11 didn't have a built in browser either.
Except GTK is so poor that you have Gnome devs calling for a major restructuring, and Mark Shuttleworth of Cannonical/Ubuntu fame calling for Gnome to be built on top of KDE. Ubuntu hitched their wagon to Gnome very early on, and ships broken KDE packages to this day, but I have to wonder if Shuttleworth regrets that decision today.
So this is how the QT people get to feel better about themselves after a horrible major restructuring that made Linus Torvalds of the Linux kernal fame team begrudgingly switch to Gnome even though he hates its approach to UI design. Seriously, your post was asinine. GTK has grown extremely long in the tooth because of the extreme dedication of the group to incrementalism, but that is not a sign of poor design.
So Gnome's 2.0 structure was so bad that it is going to last longer than KDE3's? I also doubt it's going to have the rockey ride that was 4.0/4.1 for KDE users either. After so many years, most software needs reworking. The reason for the outward protests at Gnome is that the developers are absolutely against the KDE4 kind of developement unless it is 100% necessary. If people didn't protest, this kind of reworking would never happen have happened. The original plan for the gnome folks was to have the 2.xx series continue indefinitely.
He was insinuating to let the distributions make sure the required dependencies are there. Not program for every single combination. Hey, it works for Mozilla Firefox and Adobe Flash, doesn't it?
My wishes:
While I don't mind gtk, I am really hoping gnome3 brings some good changes to it. One of the big things I wish for is more free functionally for base widgets. Things like spell checking for more elements, auto-connecting default actions for cut-copy-paste menues, user toolbar editing, etc. It's pure busy work.
My what the hells
Why do some programs only have a quit menu and some only have a close (epiphany)? Why does the quit quick-key not work if the focus is in a text-view? While I can do ctrl-q to quit firefox, I have to close all the documents in gedit to get ctrl-q to work. What is wrong with having both close and quit for most apps?
My what is going to happen?
I know they are working on a app driven interface over a window driven one (ala Mac OS X). You can tell just by looking at some of the preferences hidden in gconf, recent changes in gimp, and many others. What does this mean to the gtk developers and the future of their applications?
MPlayer is shit if you are using the GUI. Just...don't AGHRRR.
VLC is much more than a video player, which may be part of it's downfall. Notice the name implying network connections, almost like it may have originally been meant for some other purpose. Like streaming video as a server...
As for the Quicktime thing...I personally find the interface for VLC nicer on Macs than on Windows. Actually, Quicktime is nicer on Macs too. A bit funny though, QuickTime has some limited hardware acceleration on newer machines which you were talking about being important to you...
If you can call what they give you windows. If there was a standard vanilla MS Windows installer disk I might agree with you. But no, there is only the restore disk that wipes out your whole machine. If you want a vanilla install, you're still going to have to hash out that 200 or so dollars. Is that really money saved?
Those games were terrible compared to today's standards. Extremely dull. However, people seem to rate games according to how good they were for their time, rather than how good they are now. That's why the "best games of all time" lists should really be renamed "best games of their time".
Some of my first games were on an Atari. None of those games endeared to me. I have a number of NES and SNES games that I will never forget. Explain.
I think people with that kind of opinion are generally pigeon holing games in that they have to be a specific thing.
Meh. I sucked out on my reply and didn't explain myself enough. Here I try again.
The beauty of XHTML Strict is that it forced you to write correct code. (If you don't want to, there was always transitional.) I am 99% sure that the w3c documents for all HTML specs only cover how to render correct code, not incorrect code or quirks. This means if you F-up your webpage in plain old HTML, it is not reasonable to expect it to render consistently between browsers, even if they are standards complaint. Now that is a travesty. Worse yet, your page is more likely to break in future browsers. Thus, XHTML strict is in theory more interpolatable than other versions of HTML because it has to be correct to display period.
That is why I don't think XHTML was a waste of time.
I didn't think a more interpolatable web (in theory) with better formatted code was a waste of time. But to each their own.
Sigh. I really hope that HTML5 is somewhat similar to xhtml. I really do believe it went in the right direction in general. Even with xhtml strict pages not displaying at all if they had some unclosed tags. It all in general was working toward having authors writing better, more interpolatable pages.
Is xhtml dead? Will the applicable changes in html5 make it back to xhtml? I get the feeling that MS never implemented xhtml strict because they didn't want to drop the ability to extend it.
I think I see what you are saying. If Firefox kept it's Linux and Mac versions exactly one version behind, it would be a much better browser. ;-) Maybe we will eventually see Google skip a version of chrome because they are so far behind like Adobe did with Flash. (now waiting for the tomatos)
Google didn't put the whole browser together like Mozilla, they used a bunch of parts form various places and then inserted their own JS engine. The JS Engine was likely in developement in Google labs long before the name Chrome was even thought of. Google labs is just where random projects exist like that. And no, they don't even have to do any work on the renderer themselves which is viewed by many as the hardest part.
Right now, Google's sole target is getting some Windows browser share. Supporting alternative operating systems would be nice too, but that is not their goal, it is icing. Don't give them more credit than they deserve.
Having said that, Chrome is getting this much flack because people want to use it. Not because they hate it.