Rudimentary ad blocking through urlfilter.ini appeared in Opera 6.02, released on May 15th, 2002. So, Opera has effectively had a form of ad-blocking capabilities for over seven years.
It's not as flexible as what you get through specialized Firefox extensions, but it's there, there are pre-made filters available for download, and like I said, it's been a part of the browser for seven years.
But despite it all, dogs know dogs. Upon seeing another, they'll wag their tails or bark for a rotweiller the same as they would for a terrier. They'll all roam about in their little packs, somehow instinctively knowing they they naturally should.
My dog, who was a pure-bred mutt, adored poodles. He'd whimper and howl at female poodles like they were the only ones in the whole world. Also, he was pretty much peaceful, but never missed the opportunity to fight with a certain black mutt and a certain golden labrador from the 'hood and nobody else.
Dogs might (usually) greet each other the same way, but they do have preferences.
I think my core issue is this: I'm bored of computers.
I've been using them since early 80s (ZX Spectrum FTW!) and they don't hold much of an interest to me anymore. Hex editing? Done that. Assembly programming? Done that. Writing my own simple 3D engine? Done that, too. Configuring something obscure for weeks and tinkering with configuration files? Done that. In my youth I even had huge-ass ISA cards with a couple dozen relays on each and I used to build things that I'd control with my computer. I've done it all.
For me, the computer stopped being a toy some time ago. When I'm at work, it's a tool that I use to earn money; at home, it's an appliance that plays music (TV is reserved for videos) and lets me browse some sites when I'm bored, or play a game five hours a month. Had I been born a decade later, I'd be a Linux user, I'm absolutely sure of it... But I've just had too much exposure to computers already.
I used to be a power user, but I'm not even an average user anymore, though. I have no idea what drives those... And the kids these days just seem to be interested in playing games.
Whatever it is, Windows users usually seem to find their way back to Windows because it just does what they need. Emulating the look and feel of Windows isn't going to change the fact that their needs aren't satisfied by Linux.
In my case - I just don't feel like it. Back when I was a kid and when DOS ruled the lands, I fiddled around for weeks with Slackware and its dozens of floppies, and that was the time when Linux really didn't have much to offer and nobody had internet access. Configuring X for my Cirrus Logic 5426 VESA card was a pain, but I was a hacker and it was fun (I think I still have my old Linux home dir somewhere on my HDD). When I was in DOS, I used to spend a lot of time tinkering around with assembler and running programs through debuggers; a hex editor was my favourite toy.
When Windows 95 came out, I still booted to DOS most of the time. It was around 1996 or 1997 when I finally switched to Windows and told DOS to FO. Now I'm on XP SP2 and I can't even be bothered to upgrade to SP3.
Linux would suit my needs perfectly. I don't do anything special on my PC - I rarely play games, and let's face it, most of the time we spend online is in the browser or inside an IM app.
I can't be bothered. Windows works, it's stable, it's secure because I have a long background with computers. The only time I had a virus infection was in the above-mentioned 90s when I wrote my own virus and it accidentally spread to ".." (which happened to be the root of C partition) instead of "." (whoops).
Any OS would do what I need, and that's exactly the point - I have no incentive to switch to anything and waste time on it. "I'm too old for that shit."
But before I looked it up I had completely forgotten that Mars is at best still another 53 million km and then imagining the billions of lightyears Herschel will be able to "see"... I have to buy another ticket for "Star Trek" to lose this image of an invisibly tiny blue spec in a black void in my head...
We would see massive power brownouts if electricity was being billed as an unlimited service too. The fact the internet service is still this way is silly. Meter it and move on.
I don't see the problem with metering.
When I got my DSL connection several years ago, I was soft-capped at 2 GB per month. Go over that, and pay an extra fee for every 0.5 GB (something like $3, I can't remember). It was tough sometimes, but I never went over 2 GB.
They have since expanded the limit to 5 GB and recently 10 GB, so I've relaxed my surfing habits a little, but I still can't cross 5 GB. Most of the time I'm at around 3.5 GB per month... And I can't for the life of me figure out what I'd need to do to spend the entire 10 GB.
Re:You're playing an incomplete game!
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
Classic Greek authors tell us that in the ancient Greece, dolphins and whales were already found stranded on the shore. This was a windfall for the locals, who were not eating meat very often. They saw it as a divine gift and thanked Poseidon for it. So considering that the Greek galleys didn't use sonar, we need to stop barking at the wrong tree and find the cause of this phenomenon.
Unless, of course, there was a sonar-equipped sub from Atlantis somewhere nearby... Or submerged alien vessels.
Are you kidding? I visit that site every day. While they're great, they don't really have as large of a hardware selection as most review sites. Also, they're still (as you've demonstrated) somewhat geared toward the gamer/overclocker/max performance crowd.
I don't think you have ever visited that site.
It's geared so much towards silent/quiet computing that they have their own anechoic chamber and a special system for testing fan airflow. They even test hard drives for vibration (subjectively, but still).
"Most review sites" give absolutely no indication of hardware noise, and if they do, it's almost entirely worthless.
What I've always wanted to see is more scripted realism in games. For example, the Medal of Honor games worked much in the same way as a Disney theme ride with certain prescripted actions occuring when you passed by. Run across the field to the house, then the soldiers there will go through a scripted sequence of planning the next move, then they do so. You walk past the far side, a German tank triggers and comes crashing through at you.
I seriously hate that.
It leads to truly stupid scenarios, such as being able to kill over a thousand bad guys and they *still* keep coming at you because you should have moved over to that wall over there. The only way to play such games is to play Rambo and just run forward, hoping for scripted events to occur. In most events, you don't even have to shoot at your enemies, just move forward and survive. You are NOT making any kind of a difference by shooting and killing enemies. You don't matter. At all.
I've fallen into that trap too many times. Bang, bang, ra-ta-tat-tat, whiz, bang, 50 dead Germans, but whoops - I'm out of ammo and the scripted event never happened because I loved my cover and position on the field.
In the first case blame the administrators (for not knowing how to properly protect a Windows server), in the second case blame Microsoft (for running servers on a desktop that should not be there in the first place). I would expect the second case as that I recall we have seen before, a virus exploiting a bug in a server function that can not even be stopped on a desktop.
Description of the Server service:
Supports file, print, and named-pipe sharing over the network for this computer. If this service is stopped, these functions will be unavailable. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start.
Dependant services: Computer Browser ("Maintains an updated list of computers on the network and supplies this list to computers designated as browsers. If this service is stopped, this list will not be updated or maintained.")
How many machines could not get their NIC to work out of the box? How much did this skew the data because the owners never bothered to sneakernet the drivers? If these hypothetical NICs didn't work, how much else on the systems didn't work and was not recorded in the data?
Not many. Networking is a priority inside Windows (unlike sound, for example), and people who installed the beta were surely smart and eager enough to get drivers for those cases where the built-in ones failed, if they failed at all.
That said, networkless installs wouldn't even count towards the data presented in the article. So yeah, theoretically there might have been 20 million installs, not 10, and the extra ones didn't have a network connection, but that's in the realm of improbable.
Considering how one of the major complaints about Beasta was the lack of drivers, this *is* astonishing when it comes to Windows. It doesn't take anything away from driver support in Linux.
To date, we have fixes in the pipeline for nearly 2,000 bugs in Windows code (not in third party drivers or applications) that caused crashes or hangs.
Yet the trolling headline screams "ZOMG, M$ doesn't listen to users!!!"...
But wait, there's more!
To date, we have recorded over 10,000,000 device installations and over 75% of these were able to use drivers provided in box (that is no download necessary). The remaining devices were almost all served by downloading drivers from Windows Update and by direct links to the manufacturer's web site. We've recorded the usage of over 2.8M unique plug-and-play device identifiers.
2.8 million pieces of different hardware, and over 7.5 million installations had all drivers included, "almost all" could be downoaded easily. No matter what you think of Microsoft, that information is pretty much astonishing.
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts BUILTIN\Users:R
BUILTIN\Power Users:R
BUILTIN\Administrators:F
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:F
Stop running as an administrator, please. 99% of trojan/malware problems will simply go away. The remaining 1% will only happen if there was a serious exploit in Windows that hasn't been patched already (or if you're behind with updates), and there isn't many of those, really.
I've converted a lot of people to regular user accounts. I set a bright red desktop background on the admin account, set all the fonts to red, and tell the people *only* to use the account if they need to install software they *trust* (as in, bought from a retailer instead of pirated). Nobody ever had problems.
I must admit I don't like the sound of the 10 bit thing - I'm guessing those extra 2 bits are not used in the normal way (i.e. for extra colours), but seem to be some kind of kludge to accommodate different computers/monitors?
No, the extra bits would be used for more colour values:) Go back to my rubber band example, where a stretched 7 is represented by 5. If you had more marks on the rubber band - say, 100 instead of 5 - you could get extremely close to the original length of an unstretched 5 by choosing a value of, uhm, 42. The stretched 7, when you really need it, would naturally be 100.
Is this correct - ideally I'd just like 0-100$ for each R, G, & B to describe an image without any of the scary kludges/bandaids that seem to be appearing.
I presume you mean 0-100%? That wouldn't solve anything; it would only make things worse. With 8-bit colours, you have (2^8)^3 = 16777216 colours. If you dropped down to 0-100 for each, you'd have 100^3 = 1000000 colours, which is an order of magnitude less.
Er isn't more brightness and gamut a good thing for pictures that INTEND those qualities? There's always the brightness and saturation knobs for you to turn down if need be. A display which has a higher gamut will always be able to adjust to a lower gamut, while the reverse is not true. Same thing with brightness.
Sadly, it doesn't quite work that way.
The DTP standard is calibration to 120 or 140 cd/m2, depending on the lighting. On some monitors, that's impossible to achieve; even that value is too high for dim environments. Right now I'm using a CRT which is - subjectively speaking, as I don't have a colorimeter - around 70 cd/m2, and I find it very comfortable as the only light in my room is an incandescent 60W bulb.
With some backlights, getting a low level of brightness is extremely hard, so monitor manufacturers resort to a really nasty trick: panel blocking. It basically means software control of brightness (crushing dynamic range), and tends to lead to very, very poor black levels and contrast because the backlight is too powerful and bleeds through the panel itself. It might help if you think of this as an audio system: you have an amp dialed all the way up to eleven, so you have to use your sound card's volume control to lower the amplitude of sound waves. The hiss and static when nothing is playing will still be present, and instead of having all 16 bits of possible amplitude values, you have artificially decreased it by a couple of orders of magnitude and got a very small dynamic range (that would be the contrast for our monitor).
In a similar fashion, you cannot adjust a wide gamut monitor to standard sRGB gamut without losing dynamic range and without software emulation. Gamut is a hardware property of the backlight. For an example, see a comment I've recently left in another story; I couldn't think of anything better but it should be simple enough to understand: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1107919&cid=26650833
The wide gamut problems cannot be solved until we have at least 10-bit visual content paths. The software needs to work with 10+ bits per colour, the graphics card needs to output extra levels, and the monitor needs to know how to display them. Until all that happens (and it's not happening any time soon; think at least five years from now), the best thing you can get is an imperfect software emulation, either through the monitor's built-in DSP, or some code in the operating system. The only thing that does work is a fully colour-managed environment (Photoshop), but the amount of crap you have to go through to make your images look good to everyone is mindboggling.
Gamut and colour management are incredibly complex topics, with whole books written about them. I won't pretend I understand everything, but I know enough to understand that wide gamut had been brought upon us by marketing droids instead of engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
The PSU can supply 300W. It doesn't mean that it _uses_ 300W. In fact, that machine from TFA probably idles at around 30-40W and tops at about 100W.
8.4 seconds for 0-100 km/h is pretty impressive.
I'd probably use it more frequenty if it had some Ad blocking capabilities.
It does. Right-click on the page, "Block Content...".
By the way... http://www.opera.com/docs/history/
Integrated content blocking appeared in Opera 9.0, officially released on June 20th, 2006. Almost three years now.
And a little bit of history: http://www.schrode.net/opera/url_filtering/
Rudimentary ad blocking through urlfilter.ini appeared in Opera 6.02, released on May 15th, 2002. So, Opera has effectively had a form of ad-blocking capabilities for over seven years.
It's not as flexible as what you get through specialized Firefox extensions, but it's there, there are pre-made filters available for download, and like I said, it's been a part of the browser for seven years.
Sorry to hear that you had health issues :( I hope you are okay now.
"Marmoset there'll be days like this
There'll be days like this, my marmoset"
But despite it all, dogs know dogs. Upon seeing another, they'll wag their tails or bark for a rotweiller the same as they would for a terrier. They'll all roam about in their little packs, somehow instinctively knowing they they naturally should.
My dog, who was a pure-bred mutt, adored poodles. He'd whimper and howl at female poodles like they were the only ones in the whole world. Also, he was pretty much peaceful, but never missed the opportunity to fight with a certain black mutt and a certain golden labrador from the 'hood and nobody else.
Dogs might (usually) greet each other the same way, but they do have preferences.
I think my core issue is this: I'm bored of computers.
I've been using them since early 80s (ZX Spectrum FTW!) and they don't hold much of an interest to me anymore. Hex editing? Done that. Assembly programming? Done that. Writing my own simple 3D engine? Done that, too. Configuring something obscure for weeks and tinkering with configuration files? Done that. In my youth I even had huge-ass ISA cards with a couple dozen relays on each and I used to build things that I'd control with my computer. I've done it all.
For me, the computer stopped being a toy some time ago. When I'm at work, it's a tool that I use to earn money; at home, it's an appliance that plays music (TV is reserved for videos) and lets me browse some sites when I'm bored, or play a game five hours a month. Had I been born a decade later, I'd be a Linux user, I'm absolutely sure of it... But I've just had too much exposure to computers already.
I used to be a power user, but I'm not even an average user anymore, though. I have no idea what drives those... And the kids these days just seem to be interested in playing games.
Whatever it is, Windows users usually seem to find their way back to Windows because it just does what they need. Emulating the look and feel of Windows isn't going to change the fact that their needs aren't satisfied by Linux.
In my case - I just don't feel like it. Back when I was a kid and when DOS ruled the lands, I fiddled around for weeks with Slackware and its dozens of floppies, and that was the time when Linux really didn't have much to offer and nobody had internet access. Configuring X for my Cirrus Logic 5426 VESA card was a pain, but I was a hacker and it was fun (I think I still have my old Linux home dir somewhere on my HDD). When I was in DOS, I used to spend a lot of time tinkering around with assembler and running programs through debuggers; a hex editor was my favourite toy.
When Windows 95 came out, I still booted to DOS most of the time. It was around 1996 or 1997 when I finally switched to Windows and told DOS to FO. Now I'm on XP SP2 and I can't even be bothered to upgrade to SP3.
Linux would suit my needs perfectly. I don't do anything special on my PC - I rarely play games, and let's face it, most of the time we spend online is in the browser or inside an IM app.
I can't be bothered. Windows works, it's stable, it's secure because I have a long background with computers. The only time I had a virus infection was in the above-mentioned 90s when I wrote my own virus and it accidentally spread to ".." (which happened to be the root of C partition) instead of "." (whoops).
Any OS would do what I need, and that's exactly the point - I have no incentive to switch to anything and waste time on it. "I'm too old for that shit."
But before I looked it up I had completely forgotten that Mars is at best still another 53 million km and then imagining the billions of lightyears Herschel will be able to "see"... I have to buy another ticket for "Star Trek" to lose this image of an invisibly tiny blue spec in a black void in my head...
Here's something that won't help you do it: http://www.physics.uci.edu/~observat/Physical_Scales.html
First link seems like astroturfing. A better link would of been [NDSSL @ Virgina Tech], where the research is being done.
Have.
Fucking HAVE.
We would see massive power brownouts if electricity was being billed as an unlimited service too. The fact the internet service is still this way is silly. Meter it and move on.
I don't see the problem with metering.
When I got my DSL connection several years ago, I was soft-capped at 2 GB per month. Go over that, and pay an extra fee for every 0.5 GB (something like $3, I can't remember). It was tough sometimes, but I never went over 2 GB.
They have since expanded the limit to 5 GB and recently 10 GB, so I've relaxed my surfing habits a little, but I still can't cross 5 GB. Most of the time I'm at around 3.5 GB per month... And I can't for the life of me figure out what I'd need to do to spend the entire 10 GB.
On paper, Rock
Why won't anyone play with scissors? :(
Because of Spock.
Classic Greek authors tell us that in the ancient Greece, dolphins and whales were already found stranded on the shore. This was a windfall for the locals, who were not eating meat very often. They saw it as a divine gift and thanked Poseidon for it. So considering that the Greek galleys didn't use sonar, we need to stop barking at the wrong tree and find the cause of this phenomenon.
Unless, of course, there was a sonar-equipped sub from Atlantis somewhere nearby... Or submerged alien vessels.
They don't measure performance, only power consumption and noise. Naturally, a CPU won't produce noise, but a fan will :)
Are you kidding? I visit that site every day. While they're great, they don't really have as large of a hardware selection as most review sites. Also, they're still (as you've demonstrated) somewhat geared toward the gamer/overclocker/max performance crowd.
I don't think you have ever visited that site.
It's geared so much towards silent/quiet computing that they have their own anechoic chamber and a special system for testing fan airflow. They even test hard drives for vibration (subjectively, but still).
"Most review sites" give absolutely no indication of hardware noise, and if they do, it's almost entirely worthless.
What I've always wanted to see is more scripted realism in games. For example, the Medal of Honor games worked much in the same way as a Disney theme ride with certain prescripted actions occuring when you passed by. Run across the field to the house, then the soldiers there will go through a scripted sequence of planning the next move, then they do so. You walk past the far side, a German tank triggers and comes crashing through at you.
I seriously hate that.
It leads to truly stupid scenarios, such as being able to kill over a thousand bad guys and they *still* keep coming at you because you should have moved over to that wall over there. The only way to play such games is to play Rambo and just run forward, hoping for scripted events to occur. In most events, you don't even have to shoot at your enemies, just move forward and survive. You are NOT making any kind of a difference by shooting and killing enemies. You don't matter. At all.
I've fallen into that trap too many times. Bang, bang, ra-ta-tat-tat, whiz, bang, 50 dead Germans, but whoops - I'm out of ammo and the scripted event never happened because I loved my cover and position on the field.
Out of curiosity, what software installed that service on your computer? I don't have it on my XP, nor at a Win2k3 workstation I'm using at work...
In the first case blame the administrators (for not knowing how to properly protect a Windows server), in the second case blame Microsoft (for running servers on a desktop that should not be there in the first place). I would expect the second case as that I recall we have seen before, a virus exploiting a bug in a server function that can not even be stopped on a desktop.
Description of the Server service:
Supports file, print, and named-pipe sharing over the network for this computer. If this service is stopped, these functions will be unavailable. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start.
Dependant services: Computer Browser ("Maintains an updated list of computers on the network and supplies this list to computers designated as browsers. If this service is stopped, this list will not be updated or maintained.")
I think it starts automatically.
It can probably be disabled, but who knows...
How many machines could not get their NIC to work out of the box? How much did this skew the data because the owners never bothered to sneakernet the drivers? If these hypothetical NICs didn't work, how much else on the systems didn't work and was not recorded in the data?
Not many. Networking is a priority inside Windows (unlike sound, for example), and people who installed the beta were surely smart and eager enough to get drivers for those cases where the built-in ones failed, if they failed at all.
That said, networkless installs wouldn't even count towards the data presented in the article. So yeah, theoretically there might have been 20 million installs, not 10, and the extra ones didn't have a network connection, but that's in the realm of improbable.
Considering how one of the major complaints about Beasta was the lack of drivers, this *is* astonishing when it comes to Windows. It doesn't take anything away from driver support in Linux.
FTFA:
To date, we have fixes in the pipeline for nearly 2,000 bugs in Windows code (not in third party drivers or applications) that caused crashes or hangs.
Yet the trolling headline screams "ZOMG, M$ doesn't listen to users!!!"...
But wait, there's more!
To date, we have recorded over 10,000,000 device installations and over 75% of these were able to use drivers provided in box (that is no download necessary). The remaining devices were almost all served by downloading drivers from Windows Update and by direct links to the manufacturer's web site. We've recorded the usage of over 2.8M unique plug-and-play device identifiers.
2.8 million pieces of different hardware, and over 7.5 million installations had all drivers included, "almost all" could be downoaded easily. No matter what you think of Microsoft, that information is pretty much astonishing.
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc>cacls hosts
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts BUILTIN\Users:R
BUILTIN\Power Users:R
BUILTIN\Administrators:F
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:F
Stop running as an administrator, please. 99% of trojan/malware problems will simply go away. The remaining 1% will only happen if there was a serious exploit in Windows that hasn't been patched already (or if you're behind with updates), and there isn't many of those, really.
I've converted a lot of people to regular user accounts. I set a bright red desktop background on the admin account, set all the fonts to red, and tell the people *only* to use the account if they need to install software they *trust* (as in, bought from a retailer instead of pirated). Nobody ever had problems.
I use FireFox, I love FireFox
If you really used and loved it, then you'd be aware that the browser's name is Firefox. :)
I must admit I don't like the sound of the 10 bit thing - I'm guessing those extra 2 bits are not used in the normal way (i.e. for extra colours), but seem to be some kind of kludge to accommodate different computers/monitors?
No, the extra bits would be used for more colour values :) Go back to my rubber band example, where a stretched 7 is represented by 5. If you had more marks on the rubber band - say, 100 instead of 5 - you could get extremely close to the original length of an unstretched 5 by choosing a value of, uhm, 42. The stretched 7, when you really need it, would naturally be 100.
Is this correct - ideally I'd just like 0-100$ for each R, G, & B to describe an image without any of the scary kludges/bandaids that seem to be appearing.
I presume you mean 0-100%? That wouldn't solve anything; it would only make things worse. With 8-bit colours, you have (2^8)^3 = 16777216 colours. If you dropped down to 0-100 for each, you'd have 100^3 = 1000000 colours, which is an order of magnitude less.
Er isn't more brightness and gamut a good thing for pictures that INTEND those qualities? There's always the brightness and saturation knobs for you to turn down if need be.
A display which has a higher gamut will always be able to adjust to a lower gamut, while the reverse is not true. Same thing with brightness.
Sadly, it doesn't quite work that way.
The DTP standard is calibration to 120 or 140 cd/m2, depending on the lighting. On some monitors, that's impossible to achieve; even that value is too high for dim environments. Right now I'm using a CRT which is - subjectively speaking, as I don't have a colorimeter - around 70 cd/m2, and I find it very comfortable as the only light in my room is an incandescent 60W bulb.
With some backlights, getting a low level of brightness is extremely hard, so monitor manufacturers resort to a really nasty trick: panel blocking. It basically means software control of brightness (crushing dynamic range), and tends to lead to very, very poor black levels and contrast because the backlight is too powerful and bleeds through the panel itself. It might help if you think of this as an audio system: you have an amp dialed all the way up to eleven, so you have to use your sound card's volume control to lower the amplitude of sound waves. The hiss and static when nothing is playing will still be present, and instead of having all 16 bits of possible amplitude values, you have artificially decreased it by a couple of orders of magnitude and got a very small dynamic range (that would be the contrast for our monitor).
In a similar fashion, you cannot adjust a wide gamut monitor to standard sRGB gamut without losing dynamic range and without software emulation. Gamut is a hardware property of the backlight. For an example, see a comment I've recently left in another story; I couldn't think of anything better but it should be simple enough to understand: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1107919&cid=26650833
The wide gamut problems cannot be solved until we have at least 10-bit visual content paths. The software needs to work with 10+ bits per colour, the graphics card needs to output extra levels, and the monitor needs to know how to display them. Until all that happens (and it's not happening any time soon; think at least five years from now), the best thing you can get is an imperfect software emulation, either through the monitor's built-in DSP, or some code in the operating system. The only thing that does work is a fully colour-managed environment (Photoshop), but the amount of crap you have to go through to make your images look good to everyone is mindboggling.
Gamut and colour management are incredibly complex topics, with whole books written about them. I won't pretend I understand everything, but I know enough to understand that wide gamut had been brought upon us by marketing droids instead of engineers.