I agree about the URL bar, but a plugin kinda fixes that. However there's nothing wrong with FF4 UI - except the status bar, but again I got that back with a plugin. Thank god for plugin devs.
Do all Windows PCs ship with a CD? What about retrieving the user's data?
Always partition your system so Windows is on C: drive and your data and files are on the other partition, or another drive. Then you can reformat C: and reinstall Windows without losing data.
This involves moving your user profile off C: as well. There are instructions on the web of how to do that. Then when you reinstall Windows, you reconnect the user profile to where it's stored, and off you go.
The only way a machine can be trusted after ANY infection is an OS reinstall.
Not if you make occasional disk images with Acronis et al. This is why you partition the drive with the OS install on C: and your file and data somewhere else - so you can image C: and restore it in an emergency and keep on working.
Maybe someday we'll decide to live up to the meaning of the Constitution and be a free people.
Whose meaning?:)
But define "free people". Isn't that as problematic an idea as the death penalty? Complete "freedom" (I've yet to hear a reasonably practical definition of the term) doesn't account for our species' flaws: the sociopathic, megalomaniac and narcissistic to scratch the surface. Freedom to someone of a different mindset will mean something different.
I don't think anyone wants a "free market", where companies are allowed to do whatever they want, governed only by concepts of profit and market share. We've seen where that leads. The promise of power will always attract the greedy and corrupt; it's only human. And what does freedom mean in a society of various levels of power, influence and property?
Freedom is a two-edged sword, a slippery concept. The only idea of freedom that makes sense to me is more a *process* than a state of things. The only freedoms I consider fundamental are to be able to pursue opportunity, speak out and strive for change.
As you say, times change, we change. The concept of a single perfect state of freedom doesn't seem to be the way we work. We humans will always (hopefully) find something we want to change. Although we'll often disagree on what it is and how to change it.
IIRC at least two of them involved guys walking explosives, or components of explosives, through the checkpoint.
Erk. That's not good. How were they found out?
Violation of the fourth amendment.
Not really. In "unreasonable searches and seizures", the key word is "unreasonable". Congress decided it was reasonable, so how is it a violation?
Neither is being pulled over by a cop and asked to show a driver's licence, or when customs goes through your luggage. They're deemed reasonable. Customs doesn't stop all illegal imports, and cops don't always catch crims, but that doesn't mean the practices are useless or unreasonable.
Does the death penalty deter all murderers? Deterrents will never deter *everyone*. To expect so would be unreasonable.:)
Sounds like you're coming from the enterprise area, and definitely IE is the safer choice there, in terms of what's going to be standard on everyone's desks. Other browsers won't win that one, except Chrome may find inroads now that it's becoming Group Policy friendly, or so I've heard.
Firefox is losing a much more important battle I think. I'm a freelance developer; I use Firefox because it's dev-friendly, security/privacy friendly, loads of addons, so I've always recommended it to friends and family. That's FF's front line I think - dissemination from the geeks. Just having Firefox on your system says "I know a thing or two about computers" (that office computer scene from Brazil comes to mind for some reason).:)
However I'm almost moving over to Chrome to develop on, as it's faster and has addons which rival FF in the most important areas. FF has traded on technical worth, even if it's a memory hog and a bit slow. Firebug slows FF down a lot. But Chrome has fairly useful dev tools built in. It's about as dev-friendly as FF, and *that* is FF's biggest problem I think.
The old paradigm of trying to win market share from IE is irrelevant now, compared to the danger of losing geek share to Chrome. Lose that and all is lost, as we start recommending Chrome to friends instead of Firefox. As you say, this version issue (not to mention quirky UI changes) makes us seem stupid for recommending it. We're not supposed to look stupid.:) And people who want to be geek-chic will move to what the real geeks are using.
We're sentimental and faithful - to a point. But as soon as Firefox is seen as less geek-worthy than Chrome, less suitable to develop on, less suitable to recommend to friends - I think that's when FF, sadly, is lost. At least for a while - it has enough strengths to fight back. IE is a manageable pain for devs, but the real challenge is Chrome.
If it was an effective deterrent there would not have been bombing attempts since 9/11
Well, we're talking about TSA and airport screening. Do these bombing attempts have anything to do with that? If not, what's your point?
Also - is the deterrent worth the loss of civil liberties
Of course that's a question worth asking, but we don't question all the restrictions on our "civil liberties" which do protect us. Driving within the lines and under the speed limit, for instance. Or against hate speech in public. In countries outside the US, people aren't allows to carry guns whenever they want or drive without seatbelts. We accept being limited in many, many ways. What exactly is your specific argument against airport screenings?
The comments here make me laugh. Mainly because for once, when it comes to Firefox vs IE, the comments are sensible and fairly balanced. In the past, Firefox fans lamented, nay screamed into the wind, "why are people still using IE? why? why??"
But now that Firefox starting to annoy the fans, the fans are all like, "why doesn't Firefox have all the good stuff that IE has, even IE6, like Group Policy and non-breaking updates for security? There are good reasons people use IE, you know."
Suddenly, out of the blue, everyone realises why people use IE. Hilarious.
More security on the planes themselves (such as reinforced doors) is better, in my opinion.
Reinforced with moral fibre perhaps. So that when the terrorist threatens to either take over the plane or blow everyone up in it, the pilot will be suitable equipped to not open the door. Just saying you can't tell what people will do in those situations unless they're quite happy to die right now instead of later.
What I don't understand is why we don't have the technology to simply scan people for explosive compounds or the component parts thereof. And only pat people down in places where they have detected metals.
I mean I can hold someone hostage with a pencil to their throat, or my Vulcan neck pinch or a sharp fingernail in an eye socket. Not that I would, or am skilled in Vulcan neck pinches. But it seems these guess-work pat-downs, guided by whether someone could fit something or other in their oversized underpants is a bit strange.
What I really really don't understand is, when there are 3 or 4 terrorists on a plane, surrounded by 100 or more able-bodied people, why the terrorists aren't quickly torn limb from limb. Or at least jumped on and held down. The only thing stopping people from reacting is *the fear that they will be the only one*.
In my opinion, what we need is for the fat, complacent, lazy American public to be trained to cooperate well in a crisis. So that everyone knows what to do, based on what they're capable of. A few key signals that everyone is taught to respond to. A few key techniques. Jump on your nearest terrorist would be one. So some people get hurt - big deal, that's better than everyone dead. And who knows, it may help us stop fighting each other. Just a thought.
...do the police have for avoiding being recorded?
There should be legislation to record police actions *when attending a job*. Sports stars are recorded when "working", actors, judges and lawyers, and police are recorded for COPS etc. So why not as a matter of course? In fact it seems counter-intuitive that they aren't. Not while they're patrolling, just when they attend a job.
Even if it's just audio from a lapel mic, I'm sure it would ease people's minds and help prevent misconduct. People would know that what they say is being recorded, the officer is recorded, all words spoken will be on record. And its technologically pretty easy.
You realise what this means... we can no longer scoff at all those bits of sci-fi movies where they unrealistically refocus and enhance images... bugger.
On the bright side, Blade Runner is now 100% scoff-free!
I would challenge people to find out where I live or work. I think anonymity is still alive for those who care.
It depends who you want to be anonymous to. To the general public, sure it's easy. Use a pseudonym, don't provide everything asked for on a signup form like a robot.
Anonymous to the authorities? Doubt it, not if they need to know for some reason. And that's how it should be - after they prove the need, assuming the democratic checks are in place.
Indeed. For my users, I'm tempted to say "Sorry, I can't support Firefox because Firefox doesn't support Firefox", and switch them all over to Opera.
It's ironic that this what open source devs point at to say they're better than closed source shops like Microsoft - a) support for existing products, b) listening to users.
I would not be surprised if their new release cycle causes their marketshare to start shrinking in a significant fashion.
Totally agree. Partly from broken addons when the major update is done. The addon version-reliance makes it difficult. Mozilla should inform addon devs in advance and ensure all the most used ones are updated BEFORE sending out the Firefox update. It just makes sense.
Secondly, IT managers do NOT want to upgrade everyone's systems all the time. If Firefox updates are going to fritz their users, management is going to say "turn off updates" or "move (back) to IE". Or Chrome.
Even I turn off FF updates, mainly because I don't trust vX.0 of anything, but also because the UI is morphing all the time. When *productivity* is key, a stable UI is as important as avoiding major version hiccups.
And I don't know any other software, besides web browsers that, by default, push major version updates onto people. It seems web browser development is discarding all the traditional approaches that have worked so well for a long time.
I've finally gotten 4 configured the way I like; and prior to that, I completely skipped over v3.
Heh, nice to hear of someone else who was still using the beloved (and still much missed) FF2. I had them both installed, and used FF3 only when necessary.
I've had automatic updates for the browser turned off for the past year or so. FF4 won't be upgrading to FF5 until I see it's worth upgrading to.. plugins work, no huge bugs or dumb design issues that mess up my productivity.
Productivity is the deal here for a lot of people. Major upgrades, if they come too often, are not appealing in that respect.
In other words, the brain doesn't appear to firmly distinguish between physical pain and intense emotional pain.
Isn't this a flawed assumption? Maybe what they're looking at in the brain, when physical pain occurs, is the *emotional* reaction to the physical pain (ie. distress). So when purely emotional pain is felt, the same areas light up.
I mean do they know for sure that the brain signals they're seeing for physical pain are just that - signals for physical pain? You'd have to then ask, why would the brain wave a flag to say "my arm hurts" it there wasn't a reason for it - and that reason being to provoke a strong reaction to attend to the cause of the hurt. That is, an emotional reaction.
So it seems to me the two are kind of linked anyway. You feel distress when in pain. Surprise. So why shouldn't there be similar or related signals going on when feeling purely emotional distress?
Schools in North America at least--if not everywhere in the West--seem to think that their disciplinary powers extend to any actions committed by students anywhere during their years of attendance.
They are just preparing students for the workforce.
I'd like to see a sensible comparison between the amount of piracy going on now online vs the piracy of the past (eg. copying vinyl to tape, lending out records, making mix tapes). I'd really like to know whether things are much different to how they were in real terms.
The industry feels like it's losing control. The overreaction to that is locking down control way past the extent they ever had it. The sad thing these days is that government, which should make sensible, "human" policy, is in the pocket of commercial interests. Such is democracy today.
Slashdot Mirror
unwelcome changes in the UI with Firefox 4
I agree about the URL bar, but a plugin kinda fixes that. However there's nothing wrong with FF4 UI - except the status bar, but again I got that back with a plugin. Thank god for plugin devs.
This is my FF4 UI. What's so wrong about that?
http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/4374/ffui.gif
Do all Windows PCs ship with a CD? What about retrieving the user's data?
Always partition your system so Windows is on C: drive and your data and files are on the other partition, or another drive. Then you can reformat C: and reinstall Windows without losing data.
This involves moving your user profile off C: as well. There are instructions on the web of how to do that. Then when you reinstall Windows, you reconnect the user profile to where it's stored, and off you go.
The only way a machine can be trusted after ANY infection is an OS reinstall.
Not if you make occasional disk images with Acronis et al. This is why you partition the drive with the OS install on C: and your file and data somewhere else - so you can image C: and restore it in an emergency and keep on working.
Maybe someday we'll decide to live up to the meaning of the Constitution and be a free people.
Whose meaning? :)
But define "free people". Isn't that as problematic an idea as the death penalty? Complete "freedom" (I've yet to hear a reasonably practical definition of the term) doesn't account for our species' flaws: the sociopathic, megalomaniac and narcissistic to scratch the surface. Freedom to someone of a different mindset will mean something different.
I don't think anyone wants a "free market", where companies are allowed to do whatever they want, governed only by concepts of profit and market share. We've seen where that leads. The promise of power will always attract the greedy and corrupt; it's only human. And what does freedom mean in a society of various levels of power, influence and property?
Freedom is a two-edged sword, a slippery concept. The only idea of freedom that makes sense to me is more a *process* than a state of things. The only freedoms I consider fundamental are to be able to pursue opportunity, speak out and strive for change.
As you say, times change, we change. The concept of a single perfect state of freedom doesn't seem to be the way we work. We humans will always (hopefully) find something we want to change. Although we'll often disagree on what it is and how to change it.
Life is change management. :)
IIRC at least two of them involved guys walking explosives, or components of explosives, through the checkpoint.
Erk. That's not good. How were they found out?
Violation of the fourth amendment.
Not really. In "unreasonable searches and seizures", the key word is "unreasonable". Congress decided it was reasonable, so how is it a violation?
Neither is being pulled over by a cop and asked to show a driver's licence, or when customs goes through your luggage. They're deemed reasonable. Customs doesn't stop all illegal imports, and cops don't always catch crims, but that doesn't mean the practices are useless or unreasonable.
Does the death penalty deter all murderers? Deterrents will never deter *everyone*. To expect so would be unreasonable. :)
Sounds like you're coming from the enterprise area, and definitely IE is the safer choice there, in terms of what's going to be standard on everyone's desks. Other browsers won't win that one, except Chrome may find inroads now that it's becoming Group Policy friendly, or so I've heard.
Firefox is losing a much more important battle I think. I'm a freelance developer; I use Firefox because it's dev-friendly, security/privacy friendly, loads of addons, so I've always recommended it to friends and family. That's FF's front line I think - dissemination from the geeks. Just having Firefox on your system says "I know a thing or two about computers" (that office computer scene from Brazil comes to mind for some reason). :)
However I'm almost moving over to Chrome to develop on, as it's faster and has addons which rival FF in the most important areas. FF has traded on technical worth, even if it's a memory hog and a bit slow. Firebug slows FF down a lot. But Chrome has fairly useful dev tools built in. It's about as dev-friendly as FF, and *that* is FF's biggest problem I think.
The old paradigm of trying to win market share from IE is irrelevant now, compared to the danger of losing geek share to Chrome. Lose that and all is lost, as we start recommending Chrome to friends instead of Firefox. As you say, this version issue (not to mention quirky UI changes) makes us seem stupid for recommending it. We're not supposed to look stupid. :) And people who want to be geek-chic will move to what the real geeks are using.
We're sentimental and faithful - to a point. But as soon as Firefox is seen as less geek-worthy than Chrome, less suitable to develop on, less suitable to recommend to friends - I think that's when FF, sadly, is lost. At least for a while - it has enough strengths to fight back. IE is a manageable pain for devs, but the real challenge is Chrome.
If it was an effective deterrent there would not have been bombing attempts since 9/11
Well, we're talking about TSA and airport screening. Do these bombing attempts have anything to do with that? If not, what's your point?
Also - is the deterrent worth the loss of civil liberties
Of course that's a question worth asking, but we don't question all the restrictions on our "civil liberties" which do protect us. Driving within the lines and under the speed limit, for instance. Or against hate speech in public. In countries outside the US, people aren't allows to carry guns whenever they want or drive without seatbelts. We accept being limited in many, many ways. What exactly is your specific argument against airport screenings?
The comments here make me laugh. Mainly because for once, when it comes to Firefox vs IE, the comments are sensible and fairly balanced. In the past, Firefox fans lamented, nay screamed into the wind, "why are people still using IE? why? why??"
But now that Firefox starting to annoy the fans, the fans are all like, "why doesn't Firefox have all the good stuff that IE has, even IE6, like Group Policy and non-breaking updates for security? There are good reasons people use IE, you know."
Suddenly, out of the blue, everyone realises why people use IE. Hilarious.
More security on the planes themselves (such as reinforced doors) is better, in my opinion.
Reinforced with moral fibre perhaps. So that when the terrorist threatens to either take over the plane or blow everyone up in it, the pilot will be suitable equipped to not open the door. Just saying you can't tell what people will do in those situations unless they're quite happy to die right now instead of later.
What I don't understand is why we don't have the technology to simply scan people for explosive compounds or the component parts thereof. And only pat people down in places where they have detected metals.
I mean I can hold someone hostage with a pencil to their throat, or my Vulcan neck pinch or a sharp fingernail in an eye socket. Not that I would, or am skilled in Vulcan neck pinches. But it seems these guess-work pat-downs, guided by whether someone could fit something or other in their oversized underpants is a bit strange.
What I really really don't understand is, when there are 3 or 4 terrorists on a plane, surrounded by 100 or more able-bodied people, why the terrorists aren't quickly torn limb from limb. Or at least jumped on and held down. The only thing stopping people from reacting is *the fear that they will be the only one*.
In my opinion, what we need is for the fat, complacent, lazy American public to be trained to cooperate well in a crisis. So that everyone knows what to do, based on what they're capable of. A few key signals that everyone is taught to respond to. A few key techniques. Jump on your nearest terrorist would be one. So some people get hurt - big deal, that's better than everyone dead. And who knows, it may help us stop fighting each other. Just a thought.
Terrorists aren't complete morons.
This is true. Which is why TSA has never caught one.
This is true. Which is why TSA can be said to be working well as a deterrent. Just saying.
...do the police have for avoiding being recorded?
There should be legislation to record police actions *when attending a job*. Sports stars are recorded when "working", actors, judges and lawyers, and police are recorded for COPS etc. So why not as a matter of course? In fact it seems counter-intuitive that they aren't. Not while they're patrolling, just when they attend a job.
Even if it's just audio from a lapel mic, I'm sure it would ease people's minds and help prevent misconduct. People would know that what they say is being recorded, the officer is recorded, all words spoken will be on record. And its technologically pretty easy.
You realise what this means... we can no longer scoff at all those bits of sci-fi movies where they unrealistically refocus and enhance images... bugger.
On the bright side, Blade Runner is now 100% scoff-free!
I would challenge people to find out where I live or work. I think anonymity is still alive for those who care.
It depends who you want to be anonymous to. To the general public, sure it's easy. Use a pseudonym, don't provide everything asked for on a signup form like a robot.
Anonymous to the authorities? Doubt it, not if they need to know for some reason. And that's how it should be - after they prove the need, assuming the democratic checks are in place.
Indeed. For my users, I'm tempted to say "Sorry, I can't support Firefox because Firefox doesn't support Firefox", and switch them all over to Opera.
It's ironic that this what open source devs point at to say they're better than closed source shops like Microsoft - a) support for existing products, b) listening to users.
I would not be surprised if their new release cycle causes their marketshare to start shrinking in a significant fashion.
Totally agree. Partly from broken addons when the major update is done. The addon version-reliance makes it difficult. Mozilla should inform addon devs in advance and ensure all the most used ones are updated BEFORE sending out the Firefox update. It just makes sense.
Secondly, IT managers do NOT want to upgrade everyone's systems all the time. If Firefox updates are going to fritz their users, management is going to say "turn off updates" or "move (back) to IE". Or Chrome.
Even I turn off FF updates, mainly because I don't trust vX.0 of anything, but also because the UI is morphing all the time. When *productivity* is key, a stable UI is as important as avoiding major version hiccups.
And I don't know any other software, besides web browsers that, by default, push major version updates onto people. It seems web browser development is discarding all the traditional approaches that have worked so well for a long time.
I've finally gotten 4 configured the way I like; and prior to that, I completely skipped over v3.
Heh, nice to hear of someone else who was still using the beloved (and still much missed) FF2. I had them both installed, and used FF3 only when necessary.
I've had automatic updates for the browser turned off for the past year or so. FF4 won't be upgrading to FF5 until I see it's worth upgrading to.. plugins work, no huge bugs or dumb design issues that mess up my productivity.
Productivity is the deal here for a lot of people. Major upgrades, if they come too often, are not appealing in that respect.
I am from HK and those are not two news sources that I trust.
I've been reading /. for long enough to know to read a few comments before bothering with TFA at all. Usually the comments are more enlightening.
iRaq and iRan are both in violation as well
No, iRan may yet settle. They're still in talks with A Flock of Seagulls.
It's still dismaying that women's bits get +5 and men's bits get -1.
In other words, the brain doesn't appear to firmly distinguish between physical pain and intense emotional pain.
Isn't this a flawed assumption? Maybe what they're looking at in the brain, when physical pain occurs, is the *emotional* reaction to the physical pain (ie. distress). So when purely emotional pain is felt, the same areas light up.
I mean do they know for sure that the brain signals they're seeing for physical pain are just that - signals for physical pain? You'd have to then ask, why would the brain wave a flag to say "my arm hurts" it there wasn't a reason for it - and that reason being to provoke a strong reaction to attend to the cause of the hurt. That is, an emotional reaction.
So it seems to me the two are kind of linked anyway. You feel distress when in pain. Surprise. So why shouldn't there be similar or related signals going on when feeling purely emotional distress?
Everyone knows that satire means you're dangerous.
Evidenced by the fact there's no +Satirical, therefore you've been tagged Informative by default.
Schools in North America at least--if not everywhere in the West--seem to think that their disciplinary powers extend to any actions committed by students anywhere during their years of attendance.
They are just preparing students for the workforce.
.. I added "Raymond Herisse" (the name of the man who died) to my searches. It turns out he's been IDed as the suspect..
For a second there I thought Apple had patented being dead.
it's the expression of those genes
Can we finally all agree now that there's a limit to freedom of expression?
Aii, that's a scary story.
I'd like to see a sensible comparison between the amount of piracy going on now online vs the piracy of the past (eg. copying vinyl to tape, lending out records, making mix tapes). I'd really like to know whether things are much different to how they were in real terms.
The industry feels like it's losing control. The overreaction to that is locking down control way past the extent they ever had it. The sad thing these days is that government, which should make sensible, "human" policy, is in the pocket of commercial interests. Such is democracy today.