The problem is you can't get a.net.au either - you have to be some weird entity called an ACTUAL NETWORK to get a.net.au - it's really just as hard as getting a.com.au.
And as for.org.au, even though you didn't mention them, they are an absolute pain in the arse. I had to register ampsportaust.org.au for a client a while back and it took weeks for it to be approved.
The problem is the lack of a domain for a private person...Comanies, networks, organisations, schools, military, government all get domains, but theres no.mine.au, if you know what I mean.
One by one the unlimited dialups are going under. Eisa has stopped it. Optus have stopped it. Telstra have stopped it. Most of the smaller ISPs have stopped it, because it is simply unsustainable! The net is VERY expensive in Australia, and ISPs who offer unlimited plans simply go broke - The small ISP I work for gets loads of people who come in wanting access, and walk straight out the door as soon as they discover its got a download limit...good, we don't want them, because they cost us about $90 a month when they're paying us $25...they all go to the one of the decreasing number of ISPs who DO do unlimited traffic. These ISPs then either go broke, or introduce limits because they can't handle the traffic from all the leachers.
I don't understand why people seem to EXPECT unlimited traffic - after all, I don't expect to be able to use my mobile phone as much as I want and only pay the monthly connection fee...I expect to pay for what I use, and so it should be with internet access.
A while ago people were all concerned that the "valuable usenet archive" hosted by deja had dissapeared. Now people are concerned about their usenet posts being owned by the company who brought the deja archive back...you can't have it both ways. If you want an archive of usenet, let google do what you want with the posts. After all, it's not exclusive rights.
On the contrary, I can't see how you can make money "selling support". What is this "support" thing really, anyway? At my workplace, we've never paid for support, for any product, apart from the case of products where online technical support is included in the initial cost. Unless it's in the form of training, or something like that. Microsoft have shown us how crappy technical support can be - pay by the minute to listen to a guy read from the same help file that YOU are currently staring at. Support is only worth paying for if it's really HELPFUL - ie.
Q: I've got a problem
A: Do this, this, this and this.
Q: Great, that worked!
A: Cool, pay me.
This rarely happens. Not in windows. Not in Linux. More often than not, you get better answers from free, public forums. On top of that, what stops third-parties selling support? I understand the focus is corporate support, not support for home users, but still, it is rarely worth it.
The simple fact is, people are going to have to start paying for Linux. It's not fair, but if it doesn't happen sooner or later, a lot of great stuff like Mandrake (my distro of choice, it rocks too damn hard) might go under. There are lots of ways to do this - create cheaper "light" versions. Make it free for "non-commerical use". Making money off "support" is destined to go the same was as making money off banner ads did.
Adams was a hero of mine, and not just because because he wrote HHG2G...his non-fiction book "Last Chance to See", where he travelled the globe searching for some of the worlds rarest and most threatened species, inspired me to study Environmental Science and hopefully begin a carreer focused on conservation and enviornmental protection.
I think you ought to know,I'm feeling very depressed. Thanks, Douglas.
I've been a big fan of Opera for a while, but in the last few weeks I've been having problems, both in Win32 and linux. Opera 5.1 for Windows seems to be actually quite slow rendering some pages...It will download the data and sit there for about 20 seconds (on my PIII-667mhz) before the page finally displays. It's really annoying. AND I've just installed Mandrake-Linux 8.0 and Opera seems to seg-fault immediately on it...I haven't managed to get it running yet. And Opera has a very nasty caching system. It doesn't seem to support Shift-Reload properly, so sometimes you view a page, but it's impossible to refresh it and get the latest update. But apart from that Opera is great. I'm still waiting for someone to release the perfect browser though (like I'm waiting for someone to release the perfect OS).
Pretty Windows do not a gui make. Although I love Linux as a server, and I do use it on the desktop about 25% of the time, it's got some major problems.
Ever tried dragging and dropping text and images between programs? Works in windows and macos, but linux seems to lack it totally.
Talking of which, cut/copy/paste is fundamentally flawed. You've still got to work out how to use a 3rd mouse button when most people only have 2-button mice. And it's VERY inconsistent between programs.
Instaling software. Windows: run setup.exe, click YES where appropriate, and then open the start menu - same in BeOS, and I guess it's pretty similar on a Mac. But in linux, even with the use of RPMs etc, it's still a pain in the ass. I download an RPM, switch to root, install it...it tells me i'm missing dependencies, so I download them, install them. Then i install the original package...WELL DONE package installed...now where the hell is it? Rarely do RPMs add themselves to the gnome/kde menu, set up file associations, set up context menus etc...all that vital stuff is left for the user to work out.
The X-server sucks, face it. If I had my way I'd format all the harddrives over at XFree86 so they have to start the piece of crap from scratch and THIS TIME DO IT PROPERLY!
Dreadful error response...even things like Dr.Konqui in Mandrake don't do a thing. In my Mandrake 7.2 installation, there are some programs I try and run in the menu that just don't WORK! I click on their icon...harddrive whirs for a seccond...and nothing happens. I don't get any error, i don't get a box saying "Sorry, application such-and-such is missing library such-and-such." If I want to know that, I'd have to run it from the console. Now what's a user with no unix background meant to think when stuff like that happens? Quite simply they'll think this linux thing is crap.
Someone needs to totally start from scratch...throw away all the paradigms, get rid of X, stop doing the the current distribution method where you get to choose from about 500 packages, invent a binary-install system for new software. Basically do to the Linux kernel what Apple have done with BSD...then we'll have a REAL hot OS.
if all music were distributed this way, services like Napster wouldn't exist.
I don't see how you worked THIS out - why wouldn't napster exist? I wouldn't buy a copyprotected system if it's not going to let me do what i want with my music, i'd keep on using napster and use an alternative storage technology.
you're writing from a typically screwed ultra-conservative point of view. You believe there are people born good, and people born evil. you believe that good people will always be good, and that evil people do evil for the fun of doing evil. That's very much a comic-book way of thinking, don't you think? Shouldn't you have gotten over that when yous topped watching Batman?
What about the good guy who owns a gun and who dribbles the kind of crap you do? Maybe he went out and had a few drinks with his friends one night, and maybe had a few too many coz it was his workmate's birthday. Then he came home and his wife started nagging him. In a moment of distraction he grabs a gun and shoots her. Was he an "outlaw"? No. He wasn't the problem, the GUN was.
Ahh so your country is so great and free and democratic, that people have to own guns in case it _stops_ being democratic? Thats a bit ironic isn't it? Well wake up, that happened a long time ago and I don't see violent revolution in the US yet.
The American attitude towards guns constantly shocks the international community, who have learnt that not only is democracy possibly without guns, but that its a much nicer democracy! Another great irony in the US is that you're all so damn proud of the "justice and freedom" in your country, but you flush it all down the trap by justifying the means to take the law into your own hands.
I live in Australia. Automatic and semi-automatic weapons are illegal, and all other guns require licences. I know a total of four people who own guns. Two of them are farmers who use them to kill foxes, one is a guy across the road who's got an old air rifle and the last is a neo-nazi. And hey, guess what - our government isn't repressing us! We have a lot less crime than the US, we have a lot less violent crime than the US, and we don't have seemingly weekly reports of school / workplace mass murders. And we're proud of that! The general consensus over here is that Americans should stop defending the 2nd amendment - and instead change the constitution and revoke the fucker.
You goit, of course America isn't the best place to live for freedom, democracy etc. and it hasn't been for a long time, if ever. Most of western Europe is better. New Zealand and Australia are better. Hell, I'd feel safer and more "free" in Japan. Simple fact is, you Americans have no justification for all this "isn't it so great we live in this great free democracy and we're all free and happy and prosperous and we can shoot our guns whenever we want" when you have more people in jail per capita than anywhere else, where you execute more people per capita than China, where you have virtually no public health system or welfare safety net, where spending on the millitary and the drug war are through the roof, where you demand over-zealous trade protection from the WTO just to SURVIVE. The rest of us are laughing at you, you realise that? We giggle everytime you mention justice, thinking of all the wrongly sentanced people your president-elect has joyously put to death. We laugh at your concept of "Freedom" when the man who would have been your vice-president had things turned out differently makes comments along the lines of "People in this country have freedom OF religion, but not freedom FROM religion." and where others push to have flag-burning made a capital offence, and teen drug users locked up on barges on the Pontomac river (can't remember who said this but I can find out). I see little difference between US and Iran, except its a Christian Fundamentalist State rather than a Muslim Fundamentalist State.
Netscape 6 AND Mozilla have fundamental problems above and beyond just resource consumption, although those are also important issues. I like a webbrowser that works fast, where there's no LAG between clicking a button and the button function starting. Mozilla/NS6 are just SLOW. They're slow on the P450 I use at work. They're painfully slow on my Linux P166 machine. And I haven't been able to check them out on my home PIII-667 Windows 2000 machine because it's only on a dialup modem and i'm not thrashing 20-30 megs over the phoneline when other Win2000 users I've spoken to tell me NS6 crashes during install!
But like I said the problems go deeper than this:
* No "Upload" option in the file menu anymore. You can browse FTP sites in the browser but you can no-longer upload.
* No right-click menu's on forms / the URL bar - this just happens to be very handy for copying / pasting data and URLs.
* Depite the alleged XML usefulness of the browser, it doesn't do much for the common man. I was hoping to be able to give NS6 the URL for a RSS file, and have the news channel displayed in that oh-so-fancy side bar. No such luck. Point NS6 at a RSS file and it says "hey what?"
* Some people posting on this article claim SSL works great. I've heard reports from other people saying that SSL works not at ALL in Linux.
* Did I mention it is slow as fuck?
* Poor plug-in integration.
* Tons of advertisements / plugs / commercial junk. Even in the FILE menu!
* Poor handling of DHTML / Javascript.
Sorry, but Netscape 6 is dreadful. It has LESS features that it's predecessor, it's bigger, bulkier and slower, the install process is a nightmare on any platform, and it is way over-commercialised. It certainly doesn't match up to IE, or, for that matter, Opera. Opera is the way people. It's in beta stage for Linux, or so I hear. It's small, fast, compliant, USEABLE! I'm much happier paying for Opera with money, than paying for Netscape 6 with my sanity.
Ah thats better then... It seems a lot of scare stories about MS end up in it being made clear it's "Only an Option". I remember tripping out about the Single Click interface...
Just to prove how buggered the australian internet set up is, obverve the following traceroute:
1 210.8.36.1 (210.8.36.1) 3.526 ms 2.226 ms 2.342 ms
2 serial1-3.cor2.ade.connect.com.au (203.63.119.242) 2.072 ms 1.978 ms 1.93
4 ms
3 fastethernet6-0-0.bdr1.ade.connect.com.au (203.63.113.78) 2.651 ms 2.500 m
s 3.696 ms
4 atm0-1-0-3.bdr1.mel.connect.com.au (203.63.112.69) 45.819 ms 14.796 ms 14.772 ms
5 Fddi1-0-1.lon6.Melbourne.telstra.net (139.130.49.81) 15.850 ms 17.774 ms
15.492 ms
6 GigabitEthernet3-0.lon-core3.Melbourne.telstra.net (139.130.239.246) 15.692
ms 15.791 ms 15.710 ms
7 Pos2-1.way-core3.Adelaide.telstra.net (203.50.6.86) 30.905 ms 23.569 ms 2
4.304 ms
8 GigabitEthernet1-0.way-core4.Adelaide.telstra.net (203.50.117.18) 23.750 ms
23.782 ms 26.170 ms
9 Pos2-1.wel-core4.Perth.telstra.net (203.50.6.94) 51.895 ms 51.621 ms 51.3
56 ms
10 GigabitEthernet5-0.wel-core3.Perth.telstra.net (203.50.113.29) 55.052 ms 5
1.962 ms 52.283 ms
11 GigabitEthernet4-0.wel-gw1.Perth.telstra.net (203.50.113.18) 52.718 ms 59.
031 ms 52.144 ms
12 205.174.75.69 (205.174.75.69) 465.296 ms 464.902 ms 467.420 ms
13 166.49.228.9 (166.49.228.9) 457.883 ms 459.724 ms 457.532 ms
14 POS2-3.GW6.SFO4.ALTER.NET (157.130.197.77) 471.249 ms 470.961 ms 470.115
ms
15 504.ATM2-0.XR1.SFO4.ALTER.NET (152.63.53.26) 477.613 ms 476.981 ms 477.93
7 ms
16 191.at-2-1-0.TR1.SAC1.ALTER.NET (152.63.51.6) 474.051 ms 483.121 ms 472.0
90 ms
17 127.at-6-1-0.TR1.DCA6.ALTER.NET (152.63.2.177) 528.358 ms 528.051 ms 527.
656 ms
18 187.at-6-0-0.XR1.TCO1.ALTER.NET (152.63.34.17) 518.023 ms 544.072 ms 541.
069 ms
19 193.ATM7-0.GW7.TCO1.ALTER.NET (152.63.34.109) 581.842 ms 527.414 ms 527.3
07 ms
20 ctn-45904.customer.ALTER.NET (157.130.32.22) 522.004 ms 522.983 ms 521.42
1 ms
21 63.101.250.19 (63.101.250.19) 512.020 ms 512.199 ms 520.075 ms
22 www.wcicable.net (208.240.93.67) 519.041 ms 517.108 ms 517.176 ms
Observe: I'm in adelaide. My packet bounces from adelaide, to melbourne, back to adelaide, over to PERTH! over the OLD LINK FROM PERTH, bounces around the US for a bit, then hits your host. New link isn't touched. Now i'm no network infrastructure expert, but it seems to be that Australia lacks sensible routing within the country; the major backbones don't seem to be connected!
Erm...netscape has supported CSS since version 4... IE has supported CSS since version 4.... Opera supports CSS now. They all support CSS. They have for some time. Where have you been hiding the last 3 years?
The thing is, technically, the "sucks" suffix can be confused for a legitimate domain registration. Look at www.primussucks.com - the OFFICAL website for the band Primus. What if guinness ran a campaign, about..i dunno...how their beer sucks. say if it was cool to suck or something. I dunno. But you get my point. I'm not saying they're right to do what they did, after all, a man's domain is his own business (pun or something else).
Excel2000 and Word2000 (imho the only really good applications Microsoft ever published)
Ok Ok, I'll give Excel credit...it still beats the spreadsheet in StarOffice, but WORD??? No Microsoft product manages to increase my stress level more than Word! Even BSODs in Win98 don't compare! Word is fucking evil! I constantly switch it to the Australian dictionary. After typing a paragraph it switches back to the US dictionary. So I switch it back. So it changes back again. Then there's the painful graphic positioning process...and the little effort where by if you drag a graphic past the bottom of the screen the scroll at first moves at a snails pace, then suddenly jumps all over the document. Then there's that FUCKED UP LITTLE PAPER CLIP that there appears to be no option to disable...you have to uninstall the software using the CD.
Ok I admit it. My job is coding ASP based on VBScript. I love BASIC. You know why? I've never done a Computer Science degree! I taught myself and got a job out of it...the fact is BASIC does the job. I've based dozens of websites on it, and they WORK, it's that simple. You can whinge all you want about how it's unstructured, how it teaches poor programming technique, or whatever, but the fact is, at the end of the day, you can nead it into something that works very quickly, and, whats more, I can give the code to less computer literate users and they can actually work out how to modify the code to their own needs without needing to really have any programming knowledge...which they surely can't do with code like this:
$_ = $links2;
while (/[0-9]{0,3}./) {
s/[0-9]{0,3}.//;
}
(Flames about my shoddy Perl programming will be gracefully ignored; yeah I know I'm crap, like I said, I teach myself)
Ok I admit it requires a more powerful language to create powerful programs...but you don't always NEED powerful programs. You just need something that does the job, and porting a language like BASIC will hopefully do what it did for M$ - reel in a pile of "amature" programmers, greatly increasing the Linux software base, and hence increasing it's viability as a desktop OS.
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Never heard it pronounced "jigga" in my life. If it was pronounced "jigga" it would be spelt with a J, like "Lets get jiggy with it" etc.
Yeah I've heard of this mysterious entity called a .id.au, but I swear I've never seen one in real life! Tell me if you see one in action :)
The problem is you can't get a .net.au either - you have to be some weird entity called an ACTUAL NETWORK to get a .net.au - it's really just as hard as getting a .com.au.
.org.au, even though you didn't mention them, they are an absolute pain in the arse. I had to register ampsportaust.org.au for a client a while back and it took weeks for it to be approved.
.mine.au, if you know what I mean.
And as for
The problem is the lack of a domain for a private person...Comanies, networks, organisations, schools, military, government all get domains, but theres no
One by one the unlimited dialups are going under. Eisa has stopped it. Optus have stopped it. Telstra have stopped it. Most of the smaller ISPs have stopped it, because it is simply unsustainable! The net is VERY expensive in Australia, and ISPs who offer unlimited plans simply go broke - The small ISP I work for gets loads of people who come in wanting access, and walk straight out the door as soon as they discover its got a download limit...good, we don't want them, because they cost us about $90 a month when they're paying us $25...they all go to the one of the decreasing number of ISPs who DO do unlimited traffic. These ISPs then either go broke, or introduce limits because they can't handle the traffic from all the leachers.
I don't understand why people seem to EXPECT unlimited traffic - after all, I don't expect to be able to use my mobile phone as much as I want and only pay the monthly connection fee...I expect to pay for what I use, and so it should be with internet access.
A while ago people were all concerned that the "valuable usenet archive" hosted by deja had dissapeared. Now people are concerned about their usenet posts being owned by the company who brought the deja archive back...you can't have it both ways. If you want an archive of usenet, let google do what you want with the posts. After all, it's not exclusive rights.
Bah, you've probably been drinkin XXXX or VB or some crap. Get some real aussie beer into you. You can eat Coopers Stout with a fork.
On the contrary, I can't see how you can make money "selling support". What is this "support" thing really, anyway? At my workplace, we've never paid for support, for any product, apart from the case of products where online technical support is included in the initial cost. Unless it's in the form of training, or something like that. Microsoft have shown us how crappy technical support can be - pay by the minute to listen to a guy read from the same help file that YOU are currently staring at. Support is only worth paying for if it's really HELPFUL - ie.
Q: I've got a problem
A: Do this, this, this and this.
Q: Great, that worked!
A: Cool, pay me.
This rarely happens. Not in windows. Not in Linux. More often than not, you get better answers from free, public forums. On top of that, what stops third-parties selling support? I understand the focus is corporate support, not support for home users, but still, it is rarely worth it.
The simple fact is, people are going to have to start paying for Linux. It's not fair, but if it doesn't happen sooner or later, a lot of great stuff like Mandrake (my distro of choice, it rocks too damn hard) might go under. There are lots of ways to do this - create cheaper "light" versions. Make it free for "non-commerical use". Making money off "support" is destined to go the same was as making money off banner ads did.
Adams was a hero of mine, and not just because because he wrote HHG2G...his non-fiction book "Last Chance to See", where he travelled the globe searching for some of the worlds rarest and most threatened species, inspired me to study Environmental Science and hopefully begin a carreer focused on conservation and enviornmental protection.
I think you ought to know,I'm feeling very depressed. Thanks, Douglas.
I've been a big fan of Opera for a while, but in the last few weeks I've been having problems, both in Win32 and linux. Opera 5.1 for Windows seems to be actually quite slow rendering some pages...It will download the data and sit there for about 20 seconds (on my PIII-667mhz) before the page finally displays. It's really annoying. AND I've just installed Mandrake-Linux 8.0 and Opera seems to seg-fault immediately on it...I haven't managed to get it running yet. And Opera has a very nasty caching system. It doesn't seem to support Shift-Reload properly, so sometimes you view a page, but it's impossible to refresh it and get the latest update. But apart from that Opera is great. I'm still waiting for someone to release the perfect browser though (like I'm waiting for someone to release the perfect OS).
I love the smell of redneck in the morning. It smells like...stupidity.
Ever tried dragging and dropping text and images between programs? Works in windows and macos, but linux seems to lack it totally.
Talking of which, cut/copy/paste is fundamentally flawed. You've still got to work out how to use a 3rd mouse button when most people only have 2-button mice. And it's VERY inconsistent between programs.
Instaling software. Windows: run setup.exe, click YES where appropriate, and then open the start menu - same in BeOS, and I guess it's pretty similar on a Mac. But in linux, even with the use of RPMs etc, it's still a pain in the ass. I download an RPM, switch to root, install it...it tells me i'm missing dependencies, so I download them, install them. Then i install the original package...WELL DONE package installed...now where the hell is it? Rarely do RPMs add themselves to the gnome/kde menu, set up file associations, set up context menus etc...all that vital stuff is left for the user to work out.
The X-server sucks, face it. If I had my way I'd format all the harddrives over at XFree86 so they have to start the piece of crap from scratch and THIS TIME DO IT PROPERLY!
Dreadful error response...even things like Dr.Konqui in Mandrake don't do a thing. In my Mandrake 7.2 installation, there are some programs I try and run in the menu that just don't WORK! I click on their icon...harddrive whirs for a seccond...and nothing happens. I don't get any error, i don't get a box saying "Sorry, application such-and-such is missing library such-and-such." If I want to know that, I'd have to run it from the console. Now what's a user with no unix background meant to think when stuff like that happens? Quite simply they'll think this linux thing is crap.
Someone needs to totally start from scratch...throw away all the paradigms, get rid of X, stop doing the the current distribution method where you get to choose from about 500 packages, invent a binary-install system for new software. Basically do to the Linux kernel what Apple have done with BSD...then we'll have a REAL hot OS.
if all music were distributed this way, services like Napster wouldn't exist.
I don't see how you worked THIS out - why wouldn't napster exist? I wouldn't buy a copyprotected system if it's not going to let me do what i want with my music, i'd keep on using napster and use an alternative storage technology.
you're writing from a typically screwed ultra-conservative point of view. You believe there are people born good, and people born evil. you believe that good people will always be good, and that evil people do evil for the fun of doing evil. That's very much a comic-book way of thinking, don't you think? Shouldn't you have gotten over that when yous topped watching Batman?
What about the good guy who owns a gun and who dribbles the kind of crap you do? Maybe he went out and had a few drinks with his friends one night, and maybe had a few too many coz it was his workmate's birthday. Then he came home and his wife started nagging him. In a moment of distraction he grabs a gun and shoots her. Was he an "outlaw"? No. He wasn't the problem, the GUN was.
Yeah but you've got all those lovely snow-capped mountains, and you understand what _real_ football is.
Ahh so your country is so great and free and democratic, that people have to own guns in case it _stops_ being democratic? Thats a bit ironic isn't it? Well wake up, that happened a long time ago and I don't see violent revolution in the US yet.
The American attitude towards guns constantly shocks the international community, who have learnt that not only is democracy possibly without guns, but that its a much nicer democracy! Another great irony in the US is that you're all so damn proud of the "justice and freedom" in your country, but you flush it all down the trap by justifying the means to take the law into your own hands.
I live in Australia. Automatic and semi-automatic weapons are illegal, and all other guns require licences. I know a total of four people who own guns. Two of them are farmers who use them to kill foxes, one is a guy across the road who's got an old air rifle and the last is a neo-nazi. And hey, guess what - our government isn't repressing us! We have a lot less crime than the US, we have a lot less violent crime than the US, and we don't have seemingly weekly reports of school / workplace mass murders. And we're proud of that! The general consensus over here is that Americans should stop defending the 2nd amendment - and instead change the constitution and revoke the fucker.
You goit, of course America isn't the best place to live for freedom, democracy etc. and it hasn't been for a long time, if ever. Most of western Europe is better. New Zealand and Australia are better. Hell, I'd feel safer and more "free" in Japan. Simple fact is, you Americans have no justification for all this "isn't it so great we live in this great free democracy and we're all free and happy and prosperous and we can shoot our guns whenever we want" when you have more people in jail per capita than anywhere else, where you execute more people per capita than China, where you have virtually no public health system or welfare safety net, where spending on the millitary and the drug war are through the roof, where you demand over-zealous trade protection from the WTO just to SURVIVE. The rest of us are laughing at you, you realise that? We giggle everytime you mention justice, thinking of all the wrongly sentanced people your president-elect has joyously put to death. We laugh at your concept of "Freedom" when the man who would have been your vice-president had things turned out differently makes comments along the lines of "People in this country have freedom OF religion, but not freedom FROM religion." and where others push to have flag-burning made a capital offence, and teen drug users locked up on barges on the Pontomac river (can't remember who said this but I can find out). I see little difference between US and Iran, except its a Christian Fundamentalist State rather than a Muslim Fundamentalist State.
Netscape 6 AND Mozilla have fundamental problems above and beyond just resource consumption, although those are also important issues. I like a webbrowser that works fast, where there's no LAG between clicking a button and the button function starting. Mozilla/NS6 are just SLOW. They're slow on the P450 I use at work. They're painfully slow on my Linux P166 machine. And I haven't been able to check them out on my home PIII-667 Windows 2000 machine because it's only on a dialup modem and i'm not thrashing 20-30 megs over the phoneline when other Win2000 users I've spoken to tell me NS6 crashes during install!
But like I said the problems go deeper than this:
* No "Upload" option in the file menu anymore. You can browse FTP sites in the browser but you can no-longer upload.
* No right-click menu's on forms / the URL bar - this just happens to be very handy for copying / pasting data and URLs.
* Depite the alleged XML usefulness of the browser, it doesn't do much for the common man. I was hoping to be able to give NS6 the URL for a RSS file, and have the news channel displayed in that oh-so-fancy side bar. No such luck. Point NS6 at a RSS file and it says "hey what?"
* Some people posting on this article claim SSL works great. I've heard reports from other people saying that SSL works not at ALL in Linux.
* Did I mention it is slow as fuck?
* Poor plug-in integration.
* Tons of advertisements / plugs / commercial junk. Even in the FILE menu!
* Poor handling of DHTML / Javascript.
Sorry, but Netscape 6 is dreadful. It has LESS features that it's predecessor, it's bigger, bulkier and slower, the install process is a nightmare on any platform, and it is way over-commercialised. It certainly doesn't match up to IE, or, for that matter, Opera. Opera is the way people. It's in beta stage for Linux, or so I hear. It's small, fast, compliant, USEABLE! I'm much happier paying for Opera with money, than paying for Netscape 6 with my sanity.
Oh gee buster you caught me! Whatever shall I do?!
Ah thats better then... It seems a lot of scare stories about MS end up in it being made clear it's "Only an Option". I remember tripping out about the Single Click interface...
This is just crazy - MS seem to be doing everything POSSIBLE to piss off consumers! I can see a big crash ahead....
Just to prove how buggered the australian internet set up is, obverve the following traceroute:
.772 mst (139.130.239.246) 15.692
ms 15.791 ms 15.710 ms
1 210.8.36.1 (210.8.36.1) 3.526 ms 2.226 ms 2.342 ms
2 serial1-3.cor2.ade.connect.com.au (203.63.119.242) 2.072 ms 1.978 ms 1.93 4 ms
3 fastethernet6-0-0.bdr1.ade.connect.com.au (203.63.113.78) 2.651 ms 2.500 m s 3.696 ms
4 atm0-1-0-3.bdr1.mel.connect.com.au (203.63.112.69) 45.819 ms 14.796 ms 14
5 Fddi1-0-1.lon6.Melbourne.telstra.net (139.130.49.81) 15.850 ms 17.774 ms 15.492 ms
6 GigabitEthernet3-0.lon-core3.Melbourne.telstra.ne
7 Pos2-1.way-core3.Adelaide.telstra.net (203.50.6.86) 30.905 ms 23.569 ms 2 4.304 ms
8 GigabitEthernet1-0.way-core4.Adelaide.telstra.net (203.50.117.18) 23.750 ms 23.782 ms 26.170 ms
9 Pos2-1.wel-core4.Perth.telstra.net (203.50.6.94) 51.895 ms 51.621 ms 51.3 56 ms
10 GigabitEthernet5-0.wel-core3.Perth.telstra.net (203.50.113.29) 55.052 ms 5 1.962 ms 52.283 ms
11 GigabitEthernet4-0.wel-gw1.Perth.telstra.net (203.50.113.18) 52.718 ms 59. 031 ms 52.144 ms
12 205.174.75.69 (205.174.75.69) 465.296 ms 464.902 ms 467.420 ms
13 166.49.228.9 (166.49.228.9) 457.883 ms 459.724 ms 457.532 ms
14 POS2-3.GW6.SFO4.ALTER.NET (157.130.197.77) 471.249 ms 470.961 ms 470.115 ms
15 504.ATM2-0.XR1.SFO4.ALTER.NET (152.63.53.26) 477.613 ms 476.981 ms 477.93 7 ms
16 191.at-2-1-0.TR1.SAC1.ALTER.NET (152.63.51.6) 474.051 ms 483.121 ms 472.0 90 ms
17 127.at-6-1-0.TR1.DCA6.ALTER.NET (152.63.2.177) 528.358 ms 528.051 ms 527. 656 ms
18 187.at-6-0-0.XR1.TCO1.ALTER.NET (152.63.34.17) 518.023 ms 544.072 ms 541. 069 ms
19 193.ATM7-0.GW7.TCO1.ALTER.NET (152.63.34.109) 581.842 ms 527.414 ms 527.3 07 ms
20 ctn-45904.customer.ALTER.NET (157.130.32.22) 522.004 ms 522.983 ms 521.42 1 ms
21 63.101.250.19 (63.101.250.19) 512.020 ms 512.199 ms 520.075 ms
22 www.wcicable.net (208.240.93.67) 519.041 ms 517.108 ms 517.176 ms
Observe: I'm in adelaide. My packet bounces from adelaide, to melbourne, back to adelaide, over to PERTH! over the OLD LINK FROM PERTH, bounces around the US for a bit, then hits your host. New link isn't touched. Now i'm no network infrastructure expert, but it seems to be that Australia lacks sensible routing within the country; the major backbones don't seem to be connected!
Erm...netscape has supported CSS since version 4... IE has supported CSS since version 4.... Opera supports CSS now. They all support CSS. They have for some time. Where have you been hiding the last 3 years?
The thing is, technically, the "sucks" suffix can be confused for a legitimate domain registration. Look at www.primussucks.com - the OFFICAL website for the band Primus. What if guinness ran a campaign, about..i dunno...how their beer sucks. say if it was cool to suck or something. I dunno. But you get my point. I'm not saying they're right to do what they did, after all, a man's domain is his own business (pun or something else).
Excel2000 and Word2000 (imho the only really good applications Microsoft ever published)
Ok Ok, I'll give Excel credit...it still beats the spreadsheet in StarOffice, but WORD??? No Microsoft product manages to increase my stress level more than Word! Even BSODs in Win98 don't compare! Word is fucking evil! I constantly switch it to the Australian dictionary. After typing a paragraph it switches back to the US dictionary. So I switch it back. So it changes back again. Then there's the painful graphic positioning process...and the little effort where by if you drag a graphic past the bottom of the screen the scroll at first moves at a snails pace, then suddenly jumps all over the document. Then there's that FUCKED UP LITTLE PAPER CLIP that there appears to be no option to disable...you have to uninstall the software using the CD.
Ok I admit it. My job is coding ASP based on VBScript. I love BASIC. You know why? I've never done a Computer Science degree! I taught myself and got a job out of it...the fact is BASIC does the job. I've based dozens of websites on it, and they WORK, it's that simple. You can whinge all you want about how it's unstructured, how it teaches poor programming technique, or whatever, but the fact is, at the end of the day, you can nead it into something that works very quickly, and, whats more, I can give the code to less computer literate users and they can actually work out how to modify the code to their own needs without needing to really have any programming knowledge...which they surely can't do with code like this:
/) { //;
$_ = $links2;
while (/[0-9]{0,3}.
s/[0-9]{0,3}.
}
(Flames about my shoddy Perl programming will be gracefully ignored; yeah I know I'm crap, like I said, I teach myself)
Ok I admit it requires a more powerful language to create powerful programs...but you don't always NEED powerful programs. You just need something that does the job, and porting a language like BASIC will hopefully do what it did for M$ - reel in a pile of "amature" programmers, greatly increasing the Linux software base, and hence increasing it's viability as a desktop OS.