Your problem with getting Opera to recognize you, may be for a couple of reasons.
1. Go to Tools -> Preferences -> Voice -> Advanced and adjust the "Confidence Level" setting. 2. Ensure that your microphone level is set sensibly, and that you're using a microphone that's not substandard. I have two different mics here, one built into the laptop, which works OK, and a mic on a "Trust multifunction headset", which only works on the days where hell has frozen.
As already said, you won't have to pay for Opera 8. Not only that, the License has become less restrictive, so that one license is valid for any number of installations. Which means you can install Opera on any number of computers in your home. See an announcement from an Opera employee
Voice output is disabled by default. If you want the voice features of Opera, you have to enable it by going to Tools - Preferences - Voice and enable it. When you do so, Opera will download the 2.5MB that enables voice
To further alleviate your "fear", Opera does not speak until instructed to by the user. The XHTML+Voice thing is mostly used to facilitate accurate voice input, so that when you want to type 'slashdot' in a form field, you won't get '/.'
What also needs to be mentioned is that the Licence has changed for paid customers. Quoting:
In fact, we've just given all Opera 7 customers a free upgrade, and added to this, we've changed our license terms so that there is only one license for all desktop platforms, which means that you can install Opera on any number of computers in your own home, regardless of the (desktop) operating system used. Yes, that's right. You can install the registered version of Opera as many times as you like with just a single license.
in addition to being available as perhaps the only real browser for Nokia 3650/7650, Nokia N-Gage and Siemens SX1, and Opera also has partnerships with several companies
I'm not convinced that they'd have more market share even if they had carried on using the old 4.x codebase really, at least this way Mozilla/Firebird has legions of geek fans who are spreading the word, as opposed to dumping all over it like they used to.
You've got it the wrong way around. Geeks scare people. Geek evangelism scares people away from Mozilla. Besides, the geek style of evangelism is to blame for 95% of the Slashdot crowd never getting laid.
1. Err. For most people, Opera is free. Most of the users I've talked about Opera aren't bothered by the ad banner, since the ads are unobtrusive (Opera has a policy that forbids that kind of ads).
The Open Source-Zealotist concept of "free", as in both lunch, dinner and beer is something most people don't give a rat's ass about.
Plus, the download is 3MB, not six. The comparable Mozilla is 14MB. If you want Java in addition, the download sizes are 12MB for Opera, and 26 for Mozilla.
2. Err again. Opera actually has one of the very few mail clients that just works. None of Mozilla's fiddling with creating folders and filters: Opera does all that for you, automatically.
And: Opera, unlike any Mozilla, or derivative, I've ever tried, runs nicely on older machines, and don't require 256MB+ RAM and a 1.4Ghz+ CPU. And even on fast machines, Opera is a speed demon compared to Mozilla. The upcoming 7.20 also has a vastly improved Javascript engine, that in many cases is even faster than MSIE.
Unfortunately, the author has somewhat misunderstood Opera's role in the browser wars.
The next generation browser wars will not be fought on the desktop - it will be fought on mobile devices, and on embedded devices, a market where Opera doesn't have any competition from either Mozilla, IE or Konqueror/Safari.
Opera have partnerships with Sony Ericsson, which brings their phone to devices like SonyEricsson P800. Furthermore. Opera is also available, and by far the superior alternative for other mobile devices such as Nokia 3650/7650, effectively bringing a sixth-generation browser with full CSS/DOM-support to handhelds.
Unlike the Mozilla project, Konqueror or Apple, Opera has created partnerships and made deals with a lot of companies, as outlined here.
As a desktop browser, Mozilla will remain what it is today: An outsider. The browser is too large, or bloated, if you will, with features noone hardly ever uses (And, yes, that goes for Mozilla Firebird as well) - for many desktop users it's just too complicated, and too slow.
Konqueror will remain a competitive alternative for which platforms it exists - it won't be any better or worse than other alternatives.
As for Safari, it may well become the dominant alternative for Mac users, but being what they are, a minority, Safari will remain a minority browser.
Opera is available for all major desktop platforms, and will compete on equal ground with the other browsers.
As for the behemoth of web-browsing, Internet Explorer; it's days are numbered. Following the statistics for a site like AWStats is interesting reading: The percentage of MSIE users has been decreasing from month to month. Granted, AWStats is a specialty site, mostly interesting to web developers, so it's statistics may be somewhat skewed. Keep in mind though: Web developers are what has made the browser market what it is today, it's web developers that chose to develop for MSIE.
Finally, the author failed to mention the perhaps most important of the browsing competitors of the future: The Aggregator, enabling users to subscribe to XML feeds, instead of visiting a site by traditional means. The aggregator market is a highly diverse market, with products like NNTP//RSS, Amphetadesk, Radio, RssBandit, FeedReader, FeedDemon and a whole bunch of both commercial and homegrown readers. Many of these either utilise some common browser rendering engine, convert content to plaintext, or have a minimal HTML rendering engine.
... I'm going to suggest a commercial product; Opera. Opera has a volume licensing program that may bring licenses down to $1 or below per license. Read more about the Opera Higher Education Program.
M2, the Opera mail client, makes a lot of sense, both from a users perspective, and from the sysadmin perspective, since the user threshold is fairly low: The notion of Access Points means that users mostly will not have to micro-manage their mail - they won't have to learn how to set up filters, since the mail client filters intellegently enough for 99% of users, and support staff won't have to spend hours on end to teach people how to use their mail client.
From a system administrators point of view, Opera also makes a lot of sense, since Opera and M2 is available on multiple platforms, and all mail and settings can be shared between Linux/Windows installations (and other platforms as well, as they become available).
Please, mirror the file instead of using this as sole source. I have no opportunity to set up BitTorrent here, and I have maximum transfer per month constraints. I will pull the file after 1GB is transfered.
var a = 1;
var b = 1;
var c = a+b;
document.write(c);
will still output "2". If, however either a or b are input from, for instance forms, they are strings. When you use the '+' operator and one of the values is a string, all values in your expression are treated as a string.
var a = '1';
var b = 1;
var c = parseInt(a)+b;
document.write(c);
Choosing one browser over another is a matter of personal needs, and some need-to-have features.
I regularily use both, Opera for it's speed, nice keyboard navigation, tabs implementation,standards compliance and wonderful mail client. I use Mozilla for testing purposes, and for the pages that will not work in Opera because some web-"master" have decided that Opera isn't a V4+-browser, no matter which version of Opera I'm using
And only when both these have failed, and I need to access something, will I use MSIE.
There is of course an initial cost of switching to a different platform, but the initial offer of $2,4 million should cover most/all of that cost.
Switching to a different platform could however save them some money in the long run. MA Dept. of Revenue consider Linux as a more cost effective solution, so your grandfathers college could end up actually saving money in addition to the grant becoming an extra income.
This is one thing I would GLADLY pay for if it came out on Linux (and think it was a small price to pay, too)
Opera 7 is available for Linux. It is currently only a preview version, but please help Opera out by testing it, and help out by leaving useful feedback in the opera.linux newsgroup.
People are even willing to switch. After redesigning redesigning a couple of personal sites, making use of CSS MSIE cannot handle, people have actually been willing to switch
For the first of the two sites, the non-MSIE audience is now at 75% and visits have increased about 50% since the redesign. For the second site, the MSIE share is down from 60% to 38%, with a +50% increase in number of monthly visits.
Yes, these are small sites, but still, people are willing to switch. I have actually seen a lot of people switching from MSIE to Opera 7, and also a signifcant number of people have switched to either Mozilla or Phoenix.
People want tabbed browsing. They want mouse gestures. They want security. They despise pop-ups. And they want something smaller, faster, better. And for the first time in years, they actually are willing to do anything about it.
This is because the Mozilla quirks mode seems to mimic Netscape 4.x rather than IE4/5. This is not because Mozilla is a better quirks renderer than Opera.
As I've said in another reply and on my personal site, Microsoft seems to be specifically targetting Opera for a non-accessible version.
I don't for one second believe that MS is doing this for any other purpose than making Opera look bad. Why? Because in the mobile / Small-screen-market, Opera is definetly their biggest threat. The mobile market is the only browser market that still has a great potential for growth. Microsofts want to own that market. Currently, they don't. Microsoft won't own that market with Opera around. But they know they can't beat Opera in that market without first killing off Opera on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
Your problem with getting Opera to recognize you, may be for a couple of reasons.
1. Go to Tools -> Preferences -> Voice -> Advanced and adjust the "Confidence Level" setting.
2. Ensure that your microphone level is set sensibly, and that you're using a microphone that's not substandard. I have two different mics here, one built into the laptop, which works OK, and a mic on a "Trust multifunction headset", which only works on the days where hell has frozen.
As per now, the voice support in Opera is only available on Windows.
I am one of those who actually use Opera's voice output capabilities, as I like having a web page read to me while I do other stuff.
Is IBM planning to make the voice technology available on other platforms, such as OSX or Linux, so Opera can be used with voice on those platforms?
As already said, you won't have to pay for Opera 8. Not only that, the License has become less restrictive, so that one license is valid for any number of installations. Which means you can install Opera on any number of computers in your home. See an announcement from an Opera employee
Voice output is disabled by default. If you want the voice features of Opera, you have to enable it by going to Tools - Preferences - Voice and enable it. When you do so, Opera will download the 2.5MB that enables voice
To further alleviate your "fear", Opera does not speak until instructed to by the user. The XHTML+Voice thing is mostly used to facilitate accurate voice input, so that when you want to type 'slashdot' in a form field, you won't get '/.'
What also needs to be mentioned is that the Licence has changed for paid customers. Quoting:
Whether you use AdSense or regular banner ads is up to you. Choose the regular banner ads and no URLs you visit are sent to Google.
Opera 7.50 has a learning filter built in as well. I've got a mailbox of about ~150 000 messages, and I think it's missed something like ten spams.
Whether it is any worse or better than Thunderbirds implementation is something I'll leave unanswered.
Well. Let's see.. Opera is the standard browser on:
in addition to being available as perhaps the only real browser for Nokia 3650/7650, Nokia N-Gage and Siemens SX1, and Opera also has partnerships with several companies
... a place where the "BSD is dying" guy can post and be vaguely on-topic
You've got it the wrong way around. Geeks scare people. Geek evangelism scares people away from Mozilla. Besides, the geek style of evangelism is to blame for 95% of the Slashdot crowd never getting laid.
1. Err. For most people, Opera is free. Most of the users I've talked about Opera aren't bothered by the ad banner, since the ads are unobtrusive (Opera has a policy that forbids that kind of ads).
The Open Source-Zealotist concept of "free", as in both lunch, dinner and beer is something most people don't give a rat's ass about.
Plus, the download is 3MB, not six. The comparable Mozilla is 14MB. If you want Java in addition, the download sizes are 12MB for Opera, and 26 for Mozilla.
2. Err again. Opera actually has one of the very few mail clients that just works. None of Mozilla's fiddling with creating folders and filters: Opera does all that for you, automatically.
And: Opera, unlike any Mozilla, or derivative, I've ever tried, runs nicely on older machines, and don't require 256MB+ RAM and a 1.4Ghz+ CPU. And even on fast machines, Opera is a speed demon compared to Mozilla. The upcoming 7.20 also has a vastly improved Javascript engine, that in many cases is even faster than MSIE.
Unfortunately, the author has somewhat misunderstood Opera's role in the browser wars.
The next generation browser wars will not be fought on the desktop - it will be fought on mobile devices, and on embedded devices, a market where Opera doesn't have any competition from either Mozilla, IE or Konqueror/Safari.
Opera have partnerships with Sony Ericsson, which brings their phone to devices like SonyEricsson P800. Furthermore. Opera is also available, and by far the superior alternative for other mobile devices such as Nokia 3650/7650, effectively bringing a sixth-generation browser with full CSS/DOM-support to handhelds.
Unlike the Mozilla project, Konqueror or Apple, Opera has created partnerships and made deals with a lot of companies, as outlined here.
As a desktop browser, Mozilla will remain what it is today: An outsider. The browser is too large, or bloated, if you will, with features noone hardly ever uses (And, yes, that goes for Mozilla Firebird as well) - for many desktop users it's just too complicated, and too slow.
Konqueror will remain a competitive alternative for which platforms it exists - it won't be any better or worse than other alternatives.
As for Safari, it may well become the dominant alternative for Mac users, but being what they are, a minority, Safari will remain a minority browser.
Opera is available for all major desktop platforms, and will compete on equal ground with the other browsers.
As for the behemoth of web-browsing, Internet Explorer; it's days are numbered. Following the statistics for a site like AWStats is interesting reading: The percentage of MSIE users has been decreasing from month to month. Granted, AWStats is a specialty site, mostly interesting to web developers, so it's statistics may be somewhat skewed. Keep in mind though: Web developers are what has made the browser market what it is today, it's web developers that chose to develop for MSIE.
Finally, the author failed to mention the perhaps most important of the browsing competitors of the future: The Aggregator, enabling users to subscribe to XML feeds, instead of visiting a site by traditional means. The aggregator market is a highly diverse market, with products like NNTP//RSS, Amphetadesk, Radio, RssBandit, FeedReader, FeedDemon and a whole bunch of both commercial and homegrown readers. Many of these either utilise some common browser rendering engine, convert content to plaintext, or have a minimal HTML rendering engine.
... I'm going to suggest a commercial product; Opera. Opera has a volume licensing program that may bring licenses down to $1 or below per license. Read more about the Opera Higher Education Program.
M2, the Opera mail client, makes a lot of sense, both from a users perspective, and from the sysadmin perspective, since the user threshold is fairly low: The notion of Access Points means that users mostly will not have to micro-manage their mail - they won't have to learn how to set up filters, since the mail client filters intellegently enough for 99% of users, and support staff won't have to spend hours on end to teach people how to use their mail client.
From a system administrators point of view, Opera also makes a lot of sense, since Opera and M2 is available on multiple platforms, and all mail and settings can be shared between Linux/Windows installations (and other platforms as well, as they become available).
The virtuelvis mirror has been pulled. As many others seem to already have mirrored this, I pulled it to escape billing for excessive bandwith usage.
When things have calmed down, I might start hosting it again.
The file is now gone. Please mod this up so my server survives.
Use Dave Winers offer to download instead, or one of the other sources: waste.zip
But, seeing as it's GPLed:
Waste-source
Please, mirror the file instead of using this as sole source. I have no opportunity to set up BitTorrent here, and I have maximum transfer per month constraints. I will pull the file after 1GB is transfered.
Check your facts, please;
var a = 1;
var b = 1;
var c = a+b;
document.write(c);
will still output "2". If, however either a or b are input from, for instance forms, they are strings. When you use the '+' operator and one of the values is a string, all values in your expression are treated as a string.
var a = '1';
var b = 1;
var c = parseInt(a)+b;
document.write(c);
will still output 2. As one should expect.
Choosing one browser over another is a matter of personal needs, and some need-to-have features.
I regularily use both, Opera for it's speed, nice keyboard navigation, tabs implementation,standards compliance and wonderful mail client. I use Mozilla for testing purposes, and for the pages that will not work in Opera because some web-"master" have decided that Opera isn't a V4+-browser, no matter which version of Opera I'm using
And only when both these have failed, and I need to access something, will I use MSIE.
The notes are available in the "Notes" panel in the sidebar, which is toggled on/off with F4.
There is of course an initial cost of switching to a different platform, but the initial offer of $2,4 million should cover most/all of that cost.
Switching to a different platform could however save them some money in the long run. MA Dept. of Revenue consider Linux as a more cost effective solution, so your grandfathers college could end up actually saving money in addition to the grant becoming an extra income.
Opera 7 is available for Linux. It is currently only a preview version, but please help Opera out by testing it, and help out by leaving useful feedback in the opera.linux newsgroup.
People are even willing to switch. After redesigning redesigning a couple of personal sites, making use of CSS MSIE cannot handle, people have actually been willing to switch
For the first of the two sites, the non-MSIE audience is now at 75% and visits have increased about 50% since the redesign. For the second site, the MSIE share is down from 60% to 38%, with a +50% increase in number of monthly visits.
Yes, these are small sites, but still, people are willing to switch. I have actually seen a lot of people switching from MSIE to Opera 7, and also a signifcant number of people have switched to either Mozilla or Phoenix.
People want tabbed browsing. They want mouse gestures. They want security. They despise pop-ups. And they want something smaller, faster, better. And for the first time in years, they actually are willing to do anything about it.
This is because the Mozilla quirks mode seems to mimic Netscape 4.x rather than IE4/5. This is not because Mozilla is a better quirks renderer than Opera.
As I've said in another reply and on my personal site, Microsoft seems to be specifically targetting Opera for a non-accessible version.
I did a little bit of research on this, and tested if any versions of Opera actually needed the stylesheet Microsoft is serving. Not even Opera 3.62 benefits from the stylesheet MSN wants to serve.
I don't for one second believe that MS is doing this for any other purpose than making Opera look bad. Why? Because in the mobile / Small-screen-market, Opera is definetly their biggest threat. The mobile market is the only browser market that still has a great potential for growth. Microsofts want to own that market. Currently, they don't. Microsoft won't own that market with Opera around. But they know they can't beat Opera in that market without first killing off Opera on the desktop.
I don't know what Americans do, but here in Norway, mp3 is commonly used as a verb.
"Hey, I just mp3ed that song"