how about an 8 year old microwave - I know I wouldn't.
Why not? Most appliances don't age as quickly as computers do. My microwave oven is 5 or 6 years old. If I were to buy a new microwave today, at best I would get a different set of controls. It wouldn't be particularly more effective or more efficient. It wouldn't enable me to do anything the old one couldn't do. The only reason I could possibly have to get a new microwave would be if this one stopped working.
By contrast, an eight-year-old computer will not be able to handle modern games, may not be able to handle modern office applications, and will run graphics applications much more slowly than a modern computer. And eight-year-old operating system will not be able to handle many modern applications, and newer versions of the same operating system may very well include more usable or more capable applications. It would be the equivalent of a 25-year-old microwave -- the kind that takes 3 times as long as a modern one and causes all the lights to dim when you turn it on. You can still use it if it isn't broken, but a new one will be faster and save you money on your electric bill.
(One last note on running old Linux or Mac OSes -- Windows has gone to a great deal of effort to preserve backward compatibility. Apple has, on several occasions, chosen to strike off in an entirely new direction: the switch from thr 68K processor to the PowerPC, the switch from Classic to OSX, the switch from PowerPC to Intel. You literally can't run software made for a modern Mac on an 8-year-old Mac. And Linux tends to rely heavily on shared libraries, so to run a modern app on an old distro, you often have to upgrade system libraries even to compile the app from source.)
It'll take a while. For one thing, while most Windows users are on Windows XP, not all of them have been dragged into the world of XP SP2, which is required for IE7. For another, there's still a sizeable chunk of businesses that are standardized on Win2k, and there are still people using Win98. Heck, there are probably still people using Win95 or WinMe *shudder*.
Plus, unless Microsoft labels IE7 as a "critical update" -- which they probably shouldn't, from a keep-your-mitts-off-my-computer perspective -- a lot of people won't install it without being convinced that they should.
IE 7 doesn't implement all of CSS 1, a standard that's pushing 10 years old.
It does, however, implement a hell of a lot more of CSS than IE6, and has fixed quite a few CSS bugs. It's a lot more than "IE 6 with a tab bar."
(While we're at it, does *any* browser implement all of CSS1? The main reference I know of only deals with CSS2 and CSS3.)
While I'm disappointed that IE7 doesn't catch up with Opera, Firefox and Safari, I also have to admit that IE7 represents a huge improvement over the previous version.
Firefox 2 beta 1 should be out Real Soon Now(TM). I seem to recall that they're aiming for September for 2.0 final, but I wouldn't expect it that early. It should be out by the end of the year, though.
For all practical purposes, the war was over in 2001. For the next 3 years, IE6 was the undisputed ruler of the web. And look what it got us:
For 4 years, Internet Explorer went without a significant upgrade to its capabilities. It couldn't even finish support for the specs that had been defined years earlier, never mind adding new stuff.
With 97% of web surfers using IE6 on Windows, the target was obvious for malware writers: viruses, spyware, and worms burst onto the scene and have gotten so bad that even Microsoft says the best way to get rid of them is to wipe your system and reinstall it from scratch.
I'd much rather deal with slight differences in standards support (like trying to manage the differences between Firefox, Opera, and Safari today) than deal with huge chunks of missing features and major bugs the way we have to when developing something for IE6 and F/O/S.
Having more than one browser out there with viable market share puts pressure on the leaders to keep improving their products. Having more than one major target will make it harder for malware writers to hit the entire web at once, and will slow down the spread of malware.
So yes, we're better off with the competition than without it.
And just why is IE finally improving matters? Because Firefox has shown itself to be a threat.
The way I see it, a bunch of viably competing browsers will keep IE on its toes. If Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari -- in other words, the Gecko, Trident, Presto and KHTML rendering engines -- each have significant marketshare, then they put pressure on each other to offer complete coverage of the specs and to innovate further. As long as they don't sacrifice stability like IE and Nestcape seemed to during the first round of browser wars, having them all fall over each other trying to add more capabilities. And with any luck, having 3 or 4 major players instead of just two would encourage WHATWG-style innovation over unilateral <blink> or <marquee>-style garbage.
So that's the goal: keep Firefox growing, keep Opera growing, and let them all keep each other honest.
I mean, will it use shared libraries _and_ be able to deal with foreign characters
Yes, depending on your distro. They have shared builds for many Linux distros including versions of Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Xandros (for some reason the download page always defaults to Xandros on my Fedora box), SuSE, Ubuntu, and more, plus the static builds in.deb,.rpm, and.tar.gz form.
And at least on Fedora Core, it has no problems (that I've noticed) with international characters.
I've been following Opera since around 1998 or 1999, when 3.6 was current. At the time it was mainly a Windows browser, though they'd ported to a couple of OSes (including BeOS at one point). They introduced a Linux port with version 5, and it was terrible. I purchased a license anyway, to encourage them to keep working on it, and by version 8 it worked as well on Linux as it did on Windows.
I think they added the Mac port with version 6. When Apple announced Safari, they seriously considered backing out of the Macintosh market entirely (or at least bluffed that they were considering it). I tried out version 7 on the Mac, and it was awful, roughly on par with that first Linux release. I haven't really used Opera on the Mac since, but the last time I tried it (8.5), it was much better than the previous one.
It seems to take them several versions to really get up to speed on a new platform. From what I can see, Opera 9 may be finally approaching trip-platform parity. Maybe in Opera 10 they'll be able to work on serious platform integration on the Mac?
Opera 9 has added a lot of the cutting-edge features that Google relies on. Rich text editing is finally here, and there've been a lot of improvements in AJAX-related functionality.
So all the tools should be in place for Google to make Opera a first-tier supported browser.
Firefox at least is working on it. The Gecko trunk is getting close, and there's a "reflow" branch that passes (but hasn't been merged in yet).
These fixes will miss Firefox 2.0, which will use roughly the same rendering engine as Firefox 1.5 does, but should be in in time for Firefox 3.0.
As for IE -- last we heard from Microsoft on the subject, they had no plans to target Acid2. Maybe IE8 if we're lucky, but if they maintain their current schedule, that could be in 2010.
2. Firefox 'memory leaks' are just a myth. Firefox keeps the last few pages stored in RAM for the instant back/forward functionality.
If Firefox memory leaks are just a myth, then what are all those memory-leak bugs that were fixed in 1.5.0.1, 1.5.0.2, and 1.5.0.4?
Firefox does have memory leaks, but not to the extent that detractors often claim. Mozilla is working on these, and has even released a tool to help track down more leaks. It also has features, like the back/forward cache you mentioned, that consume lots of memory, which probably overshadow the actual leaks by several orders of magnitude.
The problem comes when people oversimplify, as in "I hope they fix the memory leak (singular)" or "Firefox doesn't have memory leaks, it has features." Either way, it obscures the actual problems.
Head on down to your local plant nursery and consider what share of the plants there are native to your area. The percentage will be pitifully small unless you're in Hawaii or something.
Well, that depends on what you consider to be "native." Hawaiian ecology is essentially the result of several thousand years of successive waves of invasions. Every once in a while, a few new seeds blow in on the trade winds, or a stray flock of migrating birds gets lost, or something wanders in on driftwood. If it's a good fit for the island, it carves out a niche in the ecosystem, which then rebalances itself.
The same thing happened when successive waves of humans showed up, bringing in their own plants and animals from other parts of Polynesia, some intentionally (pigs, for instance), others unintentionally (like rats). Sure, things have picked up in the last 200-odd years, with people bringing in the mongoose to controll the rats (big mistake!), and with even more plants and animals hitching rides on boats and airplanes (several islands on Hawaii have a major frog/toad problem of their own, and there's a problem with a weed taking over pastures that causes an allergic reaction in cattle).
So I suppose if by "native" you mean "pre-European," then yes, Hawaii has mostly native plant life.
As far as I can tell, AOL has never been entirely sure what to do with the Netscape brand name.
They seem to have bought the company mainly to use the browser as a bargaining chip against Microsoft ("We'll switch to Mozilla if you don't give us a good deal!"). Since they secured the new deal for the IE engine and jettisoned the browser development staff they've abandoned Netscape-the-browser at least twice, both times changing their minds. There was the surprise release of (IIRC) Netscape 7.2, which as near as I can tell involved merging the latest Mozilla Suite with their local tree, and then there was the outsourced chimera of Netscape 8.
They aren't interested in Netscape the browser, but they have this brand name that they don't want to waste, and they keep trying to come up with something to do with it. They tried it as a classic portal, they tried it as a low-cost dialup service, they tried it as a webmail service, they tried it as a toolbar, now they're chasing another trend, trying to jam the square peg into yet another shaped hole.
It makes about as much sense as it would make for, say, Coca-Cola to buy Dr. Pepper, then retire the soft drink flavor and start marketing Dr. Pepper spice racks.
(Oh, and Britney Spears -- does the youth audience still care about her, or is she already passe?)
Hurricanes are a piece of cake to deal with. I'd rather deal with them then earthquakes or tornados.
Here's the funny thing: I, and most people I know who have grown up in California, would much rather deal with earthquakes than hurricanes or tornadoes. We can't imagine why someone would want to stay in a hurricane-prone area. And I'd be willing to be that people in, say, Kansas, would much rather deal with tornadoes than hurricanes or earthquakes.
I think it just comes down to the disaster you grew up with. You know what to expect, you know how to prepare for a typical hurricane/quake/flood/tornado, you know what to do during the disaster, and you know how pick things up afterward. Every once in a while something hits on the level of Katrina or the 1906 San Francisco quake, but for the most part, the locals in any region are comfortable with their area's disasters -- and often freaked out totally by the disasters that hit other areas.
To add to the detailed explanation by merlin_jim, here's Wikipedia's entry on Lagrange points, which includes a couple of diagrams showing where L1-L5 are located in an orbital system.
Slashdot Mirror
instead of ringing it goes, "Yeah, um, about those TPS reports..."?
You did get the memo, right?
how about an 8 year old microwave - I know I wouldn't.
Why not? Most appliances don't age as quickly as computers do. My microwave oven is 5 or 6 years old. If I were to buy a new microwave today, at best I would get a different set of controls. It wouldn't be particularly more effective or more efficient. It wouldn't enable me to do anything the old one couldn't do. The only reason I could possibly have to get a new microwave would be if this one stopped working.
By contrast, an eight-year-old computer will not be able to handle modern games, may not be able to handle modern office applications, and will run graphics applications much more slowly than a modern computer. And eight-year-old operating system will not be able to handle many modern applications, and newer versions of the same operating system may very well include more usable or more capable applications. It would be the equivalent of a 25-year-old microwave -- the kind that takes 3 times as long as a modern one and causes all the lights to dim when you turn it on. You can still use it if it isn't broken, but a new one will be faster and save you money on your electric bill.
(One last note on running old Linux or Mac OSes -- Windows has gone to a great deal of effort to preserve backward compatibility. Apple has, on several occasions, chosen to strike off in an entirely new direction: the switch from thr 68K processor to the PowerPC, the switch from Classic to OSX, the switch from PowerPC to Intel. You literally can't run software made for a modern Mac on an 8-year-old Mac. And Linux tends to rely heavily on shared libraries, so to run a modern app on an old distro, you often have to upgrade system libraries even to compile the app from source.)
And how many Windows users do you think are willing to mess with command-line FTP?
It'll take a while. For one thing, while most Windows users are on Windows XP, not all of them have been dragged into the world of XP SP2, which is required for IE7. For another, there's still a sizeable chunk of businesses that are standardized on Win2k, and there are still people using Win98. Heck, there are probably still people using Win95 or WinMe *shudder*.
Plus, unless Microsoft labels IE7 as a "critical update" -- which they probably shouldn't, from a keep-your-mitts-off-my-computer perspective -- a lot of people won't install it without being convinced that they should.
IE 7 doesn't implement all of CSS 1, a standard that's pushing 10 years old.
It does, however, implement a hell of a lot more of CSS than IE6, and has fixed quite a few CSS bugs. It's a lot more than "IE 6 with a tab bar."
(While we're at it, does *any* browser implement all of CSS1? The main reference I know of only deals with CSS2 and CSS3.)
While I'm disappointed that IE7 doesn't catch up with Opera, Firefox and Safari, I also have to admit that IE7 represents a huge improvement over the previous version.
Firefox 2 beta 1 should be out Real Soon Now(TM). I seem to recall that they're aiming for September for 2.0 final, but I wouldn't expect it that early. It should be out by the end of the year, though.
For all practical purposes, the war was over in 2001. For the next 3 years, IE6 was the undisputed ruler of the web. And look what it got us:
For 4 years, Internet Explorer went without a significant upgrade to its capabilities. It couldn't even finish support for the specs that had been defined years earlier, never mind adding new stuff.
With 97% of web surfers using IE6 on Windows, the target was obvious for malware writers: viruses, spyware, and worms burst onto the scene and have gotten so bad that even Microsoft says the best way to get rid of them is to wipe your system and reinstall it from scratch.
I'd much rather deal with slight differences in standards support (like trying to manage the differences between Firefox, Opera, and Safari today) than deal with huge chunks of missing features and major bugs the way we have to when developing something for IE6 and F/O/S.
Having more than one browser out there with viable market share puts pressure on the leaders to keep improving their products. Having more than one major target will make it harder for malware writers to hit the entire web at once, and will slow down the spread of malware.
So yes, we're better off with the competition than without it.
And just why is IE finally improving matters? Because Firefox has shown itself to be a threat.
The way I see it, a bunch of viably competing browsers will keep IE on its toes. If Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari -- in other words, the Gecko, Trident, Presto and KHTML rendering engines -- each have significant marketshare, then they put pressure on each other to offer complete coverage of the specs and to innovate further. As long as they don't sacrifice stability like IE and Nestcape seemed to during the first round of browser wars, having them all fall over each other trying to add more capabilities. And with any luck, having 3 or 4 major players instead of just two would encourage WHATWG-style innovation over unilateral <blink> or <marquee>-style garbage.
So that's the goal: keep Firefox growing, keep Opera growing, and let them all keep each other honest.
I mean, will it use shared libraries _and_ be able to deal with foreign characters
.deb, .rpm, and .tar.gz form.
Yes, depending on your distro. They have shared builds for many Linux distros including versions of Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Xandros (for some reason the download page always defaults to Xandros on my Fedora box), SuSE, Ubuntu, and more, plus the static builds in
And at least on Fedora Core, it has no problems (that I've noticed) with international characters.
Ah, yes, the last page on the internet. "We hope that you have enjoyed surfing the Web..."
something about that acid2 test reminds me of drugs
You must be looking at it in IE
It's a matter of time.
I've been following Opera since around 1998 or 1999, when 3.6 was current. At the time it was mainly a Windows browser, though they'd ported to a couple of OSes (including BeOS at one point). They introduced a Linux port with version 5, and it was terrible. I purchased a license anyway, to encourage them to keep working on it, and by version 8 it worked as well on Linux as it did on Windows.
I think they added the Mac port with version 6. When Apple announced Safari, they seriously considered backing out of the Macintosh market entirely (or at least bluffed that they were considering it). I tried out version 7 on the Mac, and it was awful, roughly on par with that first Linux release. I haven't really used Opera on the Mac since, but the last time I tried it (8.5), it was much better than the previous one.
It seems to take them several versions to really get up to speed on a new platform. From what I can see, Opera 9 may be finally approaching trip-platform parity. Maybe in Opera 10 they'll be able to work on serious platform integration on the Mac?
Opera 9 has added a lot of the cutting-edge features that Google relies on. Rich text editing is finally here, and there've been a lot of improvements in AJAX-related functionality.
So all the tools should be in place for Google to make Opera a first-tier supported browser.
Firefox at least is working on it. The Gecko trunk is getting close, and there's a "reflow" branch that passes (but hasn't been merged in yet).
These fixes will miss Firefox 2.0, which will use roughly the same rendering engine as Firefox 1.5 does, but should be in in time for Firefox 3.0.
As for IE -- last we heard from Microsoft on the subject, they had no plans to target Acid2. Maybe IE8 if we're lucky, but if they maintain their current schedule, that could be in 2010.
I swear by Opera myself.
What in Opera's name are you talking about?
2. Firefox 'memory leaks' are just a myth. Firefox keeps the last few pages stored in RAM for the instant back/forward functionality.
If Firefox memory leaks are just a myth, then what are all those memory-leak bugs that were fixed in 1.5.0.1, 1.5.0.2, and 1.5.0.4?
Firefox does have memory leaks, but not to the extent that detractors often claim. Mozilla is working on these, and has even released a tool to help track down more leaks. It also has features, like the back/forward cache you mentioned, that consume lots of memory, which probably overshadow the actual leaks by several orders of magnitude.
The problem comes when people oversimplify, as in "I hope they fix the memory leak (singular)" or "Firefox doesn't have memory leaks, it has features." Either way, it obscures the actual problems.
Has their CEO reached the US yet since their last release?
Yes, actually -- he's in Seattle right now.
Head on down to your local plant nursery and consider what share of the plants there are native to your area. The percentage will be pitifully small unless you're in Hawaii or something.
Well, that depends on what you consider to be "native." Hawaiian ecology is essentially the result of several thousand years of successive waves of invasions. Every once in a while, a few new seeds blow in on the trade winds, or a stray flock of migrating birds gets lost, or something wanders in on driftwood. If it's a good fit for the island, it carves out a niche in the ecosystem, which then rebalances itself.
The same thing happened when successive waves of humans showed up, bringing in their own plants and animals from other parts of Polynesia, some intentionally (pigs, for instance), others unintentionally (like rats). Sure, things have picked up in the last 200-odd years, with people bringing in the mongoose to controll the rats (big mistake!), and with even more plants and animals hitching rides on boats and airplanes (several islands on Hawaii have a major frog/toad problem of their own, and there's a problem with a weed taking over pastures that causes an allergic reaction in cattle).
So I suppose if by "native" you mean "pre-European," then yes, Hawaii has mostly native plant life.
And as everyone knows, the snakes will die out when winter sets in. Problem solved.
Sure, unless somone decides to put those snakes on a plane.
As far as I can tell, AOL has never been entirely sure what to do with the Netscape brand name.
They seem to have bought the company mainly to use the browser as a bargaining chip against Microsoft ("We'll switch to Mozilla if you don't give us a good deal!"). Since they secured the new deal for the IE engine and jettisoned the browser development staff they've abandoned Netscape-the-browser at least twice, both times changing their minds. There was the surprise release of (IIRC) Netscape 7.2, which as near as I can tell involved merging the latest Mozilla Suite with their local tree, and then there was the outsourced chimera of Netscape 8.
They aren't interested in Netscape the browser, but they have this brand name that they don't want to waste, and they keep trying to come up with something to do with it. They tried it as a classic portal, they tried it as a low-cost dialup service, they tried it as a webmail service, they tried it as a toolbar, now they're chasing another trend, trying to jam the square peg into yet another shaped hole.
It makes about as much sense as it would make for, say, Coca-Cola to buy Dr. Pepper, then retire the soft drink flavor and start marketing Dr. Pepper spice racks.
(Oh, and Britney Spears -- does the youth audience still care about her, or is she already passe?)
Hey, don't forget all the children of the 80s who are running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music.
The federal funds are mainly used to destroy property owned by the state, not by Floridians.
Was this a typo, or a subtle swipe at government mismanagement?
Hurricanes are a piece of cake to deal with. I'd rather deal with them then earthquakes or tornados.
Here's the funny thing: I, and most people I know who have grown up in California, would much rather deal with earthquakes than hurricanes or tornadoes. We can't imagine why someone would want to stay in a hurricane-prone area. And I'd be willing to be that people in, say, Kansas, would much rather deal with tornadoes than hurricanes or earthquakes.
I think it just comes down to the disaster you grew up with. You know what to expect, you know how to prepare for a typical hurricane/quake/flood/tornado, you know what to do during the disaster, and you know how pick things up afterward. Every once in a while something hits on the level of Katrina or the 1906 San Francisco quake, but for the most part, the locals in any region are comfortable with their area's disasters -- and often freaked out totally by the disasters that hit other areas.
all we need now is 1.) In Soviet Russia OMG PONIES!! wear the trojans 2.???? 3. profit ^WUranus...did I miss any
You must be new here -- you forgot the Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portman's hot grits on a first post.
To add to the detailed explanation by merlin_jim, here's Wikipedia's entry on Lagrange points, which includes a couple of diagrams showing where L1-L5 are located in an orbital system.