Exactly, the EU zone has only been beneficial to business
Yes, an open market is the best possible condition for creating jobs. That's what anyone with a basic competence in economy says, so there must be some truth in it.
and the Soviet Bloc countries (business moving there for cheap labor and eventually even further east was the whole objective for the forming of the EU). Before the EU and even now, similar business-friendly arrangements have been made amongst European and even Asian countries without any EU government involvement.
So the EU is evil, but also the EU doesn't matter, because rich people will move their businesses to China anyway?
The EU and later on the Euro destroyed the sovereignty of individual nations (now only nations by name only for traditions' sake),
People elect both their local governments and the European parliament. Their local governments nominate the European government and it also has to be approved by the European parliament. And that government has very limited powers to begin with. The EU didn't destroy our sovereignty any more than the administrator of a condominium destroys the flat owners' ownership.
Of course, if member states send into the EU institutions their worst politicians who failed at home, it's a problem. But hardly a fault of the EU.
the Brits were at least smart enough to maintain some of their distance when the Euro came along.
The Brits have, among other things, a religious leader as unelected, unreplaceable Head of State and Lord Spirituals sitting alongside elected members of the Parliament. To each his own.
The EU socialized the losses of its members on a continental scale (Greece etc) while the affluent Western Europe had their middle class evaporate to pay for it and many of those countries (Netherlands, Belgium and France) will soon follow the UK.
The EU budget accounts for 1% of the total taxes paid by European citizens, how can one see its wealth evaporate because of a fluctuation of up to 1% in his expenses? It's globalization what hit the middle class; it has allowed us to pay less for iPhones without automatically giving us back a way to pay for food and housing. But I can hardly see how being a smaller country in the global maket can help fight that.
The UK never was in the club really. The joined half-heartedly late in the process, and ever since they never stopped whining about how badly they wanted to leave (as if anybody had forced them to apply for admittance in the first place). Clarity about their true feelings towards the EU was long overdue and finally it has been made. No form of government can exist without the trust of its own people.
Pretty please! Im Italian and I've spent the last 20 years getting lectured and laughed at because Berlusconi. Now you're on the brink of electing a person so special and unique that Berlusconi is Mother Teresa in comparison. I'll be lighting a candle if you do. Sincerely yours.
If you had ever read a book on European history, you'd know that Europe ("the West" is a post-WW2 concept) has been at war for thousands of years with itself, often because different portions of the same people couldn't agree on which variety of Christianity was the right one.
And people are no longer making babies because of the shitty socio-economic system that deprives them of the time, resources and willingness to procreate. Fortunately, there's immigrants who are providing fresh manpower to wipe the European's arses when they get old and discover that their iPad retina pros have no app for that.
The last time European nation-states (another relatively recent notion) started raising barbed wire around their borders and brainwashing their citizens about how better and unique and ancient and God-chosen their own culture was, the final results were some 70 million people dead (of their own), thousands of years of history in rubbles, and a country solely made of immigrants to become by far the biggest cultural, political and military power, in the world and possibly in history.
It takes some control away from administrators/developers/users and concentrates it into the distribution maintainer. Most people appreciate this, because they like to work less, some people don't, because they like to fix things themselves when they break, to use their system in a manner that the distribution maintainer hasn't planned, or to know the details of how the system works.
In practice, you can't avoid it if you want to use the most common userspaces for Linux. The average user won't care about its presence per se.
The set of characters present on many European keyboards was defined by the ancient localized ASCII encodings, ISO 646. Yes, there were non-US versions of ASCII, that contained funny characters in the lower 7 bit range. This allowed for a very limited amount of regional characters (around 10), and as a result many useful characters were omitted, such as uppercase variants and precise diacritics. This is not only a problem for the French, and it isn't due to the AZERTY/QWERTY difference.
In which ways do you find that the Edge UI is better than Firefox's? In Edge, you can't drag-and-drop files, so you need to resort to Windows 3.1-era browse dialog boxes if you need to choose a file. You can't download files properly either: downloads will stop when you close the browser window, there's absolutely no way of knowing how fast you are downloading, and when the downloads finish, they silently open BEHIND the browser window. The UI has the same nature as that of the Lynx browser, that is text lines, but it has much fewer features and it's perhaps even less intuitive: the text-only links that make up the UI are actually hidden behind cryptic hieroglyphs and when you need a feature, assuming it's one of the few features that Edge actually supports, you have to hunt for it by clicking those pictograms to find out that they reveal hidden surfaces, sliding tabs and other incoherent, undiscoverable UI elements. I really can't understand what's to like in that browser, nor how a browser so limited and buggy could ever be released as part of a paid product. Even searching for text can cause Edge to crash on my machine. And even when it doesn't crash, the text search thingy remains stuck open even if you change tab or close the current one. It's as if the developers hadn't tested even the basic use cases of a browser (searching for text, downloading a file) before releasing it as a supposedly finished application.
I've had mixed success with that: most hardware will indeed work, but you may run into problems. For instance, for some reason older webcam drivers will work on Windows 10 in desktop applications, but won't work with Modern applications (you get a black picture or a “camera is busy” error). Display drivers are also problematic: I had a kind of netbook with an AMD APU, bought just two years ago, for which AMD have stated that they won't release a proper driver for Windows 10, and that I'm not supposed to use the one for Windows 8.1. In other cases I have solved the problem as you say by forcing a specific driver in place of the one that Windows had selected automatically, but it has happened to me that some time later Windows Update replaced the driver that I had installed with a newer version of the one that doesn't work. I can live fixing that each time it happens but I wouldn't recommend my aunt to have a machine in this situation.
Come to think of it, my biggest source of trouble with the Windows 10 update have been AMD drivers: I can report a laptop which can't adjust the brightness level, another one that pauses for 60s on startup and resume, and another one which isn't able to play videos without stuttering.
One reason to stay behind could be owning a device that has drivers for Windows 8.1 but no driver, or a crappy one, for Windows 10. While Microsoft have an interest in the users of those devices upgrading to Windows 10, device manufacturers and laptop vendors have no interest in spending resources to support people who have already bought their products. As a result, a surprising amount of recent hardware doesn't work or is buggy under Windows 10.
If we’re talking about Linux proper, then Linux's binary compatibility goes as far as letting you run executables in the a.out format even with the very latest Linux kernel. As long as you provide the ancient libraries required to run them. Why, on Linux, through Wine, you can run 16-bit Windows applications, which won’t even run on 64-bit Windows.
The fact that distributions no longer ship old libraries, or that the community of developers has a certain tendency to introduce new “frameworks” and deprecate existing ones, shouldn’t be confused with an alleged technical inability of the Linux kernel or its traditional GNU userspace to maintain backwards compatibility.
I think that they aren’t offering it yet from the main download page because they want to prevent non-tech savvy people from downloading it and finding out that flash doesn’t work. To me, that’s actually a plus.
I've been on the internet since the time of 28.8 modems and I don't remember ads being more obnoxious than today. Once upon a time they were just banners of animated gifs of two different sizes, with a couple of frames of animation. Things started getting awful when advertisers began taking advantage of javascript to manipulate the browser window, favorites and so on. Which got fixed after browsers began blocking pop-ups (and IIRC that move was induced by the appearance of third-party plugins, too). Nowadays, with HTML5, advertisers are free to do whatever they want - and they exercise that freedom to the maximum extent. Pages are artificially restricted to one third of the visible screen, with the two remaining thirds reserved for huge ads that often contain - let's say so - eye-catching content that cannot be hidden. Self-playing videos will pop up from every corner of the page, either automatically or when you make the mistake of hovering the mouse pointer over them, perhaps while the pointer was on its way to click a link that you effectively were interested in. Such videos become full-screen, have extremely bandwidth-intensive content and play abrupt, annoying audio tracks that are always recorded at an extremely high volume, and the button to close them, when it's not missing or not working, is extremely hard to find and use. And I haven't talked about the extreme espionage put in place by ad networks: not only they will make a dossier about you even if you don't log into any site you visit, but now they will even associate that dossier with your real identity when you buy stuff in the real world.
I have nothing but admiration and respect for the United States of America. I think that you are a great country, built by great people, who have a lot to teach to the rest to the world. But I also think that you should stop believing the FUD that the world will end if you don't let mega-corporations rape your rights in every possible way. Compromises can be made, too, once in a while.
It's not that Firefox disables flash behind your back: it displays a security warning in place of flash boxes, having a button to enable the plugin again. Also, it will only do it for versions of flash which are known to be vulnerable. This is quite a good thing IMHO: remaining within the nanny terminology, it's not a matter of how much grown up you are, if you have a vulnerable plugin, and you visit a compromised site, your machine will be owned.
It would be nice if Mozilla completed their project of a javascript-based interpreter for flash. It would be the same thing that they’ve done for PDF. The overlap between flash and javascript + HTML5 is complete so it should be viable, and as a bonus SWFs would run under the same security sandbox as javascript.
While I prefer to stick to documented facts rather than anyone's anecdotal evidence, including mine, when I make absolute statements about correctness, since we're entering this realm, I'll tell you that I do have a late-2011 HP laptop, DV7-something, with no antivirus running and no extra software installed besides the ones that I actually need. Formatted after the purchase in order to get rid of the extra manufacturer-installed stuff. The last time I've posted a measured sample of its performance here on Slashdot, I was greeted with 6 responses telling me how slow it was. And to be honest it's not a machine that I personally find excessively slow to use.
Why, I'm citing specific, documented misdesigns of Windows components that cause the machine to progressively slow down until it becomes unusable, which is what this article is about. I'm picking specific ones because the post I was responding to spoke of "superstition without numbers". I'm also citing two specific ones that wouldn't be fixed by an SSD, which is another point that was being made by the same post. No amount of care would have prevented you from incurring into those bugs, unless you don't use Windows Update, which of course is not feasible today. Such slowdowns are not "apparent to me", they are measured and recognised by Microsoft, as the links that I've put in my comment show. I also was careful to choose two slowdowns that aren't related to machines with insufficient system resources: the first one would manage to freeze a Core i7 running Windows XP, the second one would hinder machines with double the amount of memory recommended by Microsoft themselves for Windows 7.
Finally, about the fact that you have to be careful about the stuff that you install, which is orthogonal to the problem that Windows systems slow down themselves even if you don't touch them: the problem is that people need to install stuff to make their computers work. Want to read PDFs (most people will)? You get one knick-knack with the relevant auto-update. Want to watch YouTube (most people will)? There goes another one. Want to be able to download stuff from the internet? If you're not an expert, and most people aren't, you're going to need an anti virus, and there goes another invasive software you'll need to install. The point is that my bathroom can be cleaned without burning down my house, whereas there's no such option to clean up Windows, which is another major design failure - in addition to the fact that the system slows down by itself.
The point is that you cannot just stick to the desktop in Windows 8. Even if you hack the OS with third party tools in order to make some fake Start menu return from the afterlife, you just can't change the fact that some functionality remains into the Metro side (both OS functions and third-party applications, because Microsoft strongly pushed third-party developers to use Metro). And some of the broken UI design still bites even on the desktop side (invisible magic areas, undocumented destructive gestures that get activated by mistake if you happen to use a touchpad, the “charms”...).
Oh come on, every Windows installation slows down with usage, to the point of requiring to be formatted. Even without anti-virus software and third party add-ons (not that it would be a justification, because one buys a computer with the intention of using it somehow, not to look at the desktop background). Buying an SSD is not an acceptable solution, because SSDs currently cost 6 times as much as spinning rust drives.
It is not a matter of HD activity, either, and it's not superstition. Just two examples: in the case of Windows XP, which is post-Windows 98, we had the catastrophic Windows Update failure to scale that caused all Windows XP machines to become unusable for hours just some months ago. Back then it was a matter of CPU usage, not disk. In the case of Windows 7, which is post-Windows 98 too, you might have noticed that on machines with 2 GB of memory or less (which is twice the minimum required amount) another Windows Update bug caused the Windows Update service to eat all the available RAM and thrash the machine, again, into the land of unusability. In this case, it was a matter of RAM usage, not disk.
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Exactly, the EU zone has only been beneficial to business
Yes, an open market is the best possible condition for creating jobs. That's what anyone with a basic competence in economy says, so there must be some truth in it.
and the Soviet Bloc countries (business moving there for cheap labor and eventually even further east was the whole objective for the forming of the EU). Before the EU and even now, similar business-friendly arrangements have been made amongst European and even Asian countries without any EU government involvement.
So the EU is evil, but also the EU doesn't matter, because rich people will move their businesses to China anyway?
The EU and later on the Euro destroyed the sovereignty of individual nations (now only nations by name only for traditions' sake),
People elect both their local governments and the European parliament. Their local governments nominate the European government and it also has to be approved by the European parliament. And that government has very limited powers to begin with. The EU didn't destroy our sovereignty any more than the administrator of a condominium destroys the flat owners' ownership.
Of course, if member states send into the EU institutions their worst politicians who failed at home, it's a problem. But hardly a fault of the EU.
the Brits were at least smart enough to maintain some of their distance when the Euro came along.
The Brits have, among other things, a religious leader as unelected, unreplaceable Head of State and Lord Spirituals sitting alongside elected members of the Parliament. To each his own.
The EU socialized the losses of its members on a continental scale (Greece etc) while the affluent Western Europe had their middle class evaporate to pay for it and many of those countries (Netherlands, Belgium and France) will soon follow the UK.
The EU budget accounts for 1% of the total taxes paid by European citizens, how can one see its wealth evaporate because of a fluctuation of up to 1% in his expenses? It's globalization what hit the middle class; it has allowed us to pay less for iPhones without automatically giving us back a way to pay for food and housing. But I can hardly see how being a smaller country in the global maket can help fight that.
Plus, this whole "the North paying for the South" subtly racist propaganda is toxic. Britain was the poorest among the big nations when it joined the EEC. Currently, it is France, Italy and Spain who pay for the British rebate and not the other way around.
The UK never was in the club really. The joined half-heartedly late in the process, and ever since they never stopped whining about how badly they wanted to leave (as if anybody had forced them to apply for admittance in the first place). Clarity about their true feelings towards the EU was long overdue and finally it has been made. No form of government can exist without the trust of its own people.
Pretty please! Im Italian and I've spent the last 20 years getting lectured and laughed at because Berlusconi. Now you're on the brink of electing a person so special and unique that Berlusconi is Mother Teresa in comparison. I'll be lighting a candle if you do. Sincerely yours.
And people are no longer making babies because of the shitty socio-economic system that deprives them of the time, resources and willingness to procreate. Fortunately, there's immigrants who are providing fresh manpower to wipe the European's arses when they get old and discover that their iPad retina pros have no app for that.
The last time European nation-states (another relatively recent notion) started raising barbed wire around their borders and brainwashing their citizens about how better and unique and ancient and God-chosen their own culture was, the final results were some 70 million people dead (of their own), thousands of years of history in rubbles, and a country solely made of immigrants to become by far the biggest cultural, political and military power, in the world and possibly in history.
In practice, you can't avoid it if you want to use the most common userspaces for Linux. The average user won't care about its presence per se.
Boy, Windows is so advanced that it fucks itself in the background, while you use it - no need to uninstall solitaire.
That said, I don't know if hip linux distributions have replaced coreutils with something else.
How do you write your user interfaces in Python? And in Java? Does Python3 run your Python2 code?
The set of characters present on many European keyboards was defined by the ancient localized ASCII encodings, ISO 646. Yes, there were non-US versions of ASCII, that contained funny characters in the lower 7 bit range. This allowed for a very limited amount of regional characters (around 10), and as a result many useful characters were omitted, such as uppercase variants and precise diacritics. This is not only a problem for the French, and it isn't due to the AZERTY/QWERTY difference.
Oh, mafia has no code of honour either; it's just bullshit that fiction writers made up in order to make the Godfather movies more interesting.
In which ways do you find that the Edge UI is better than Firefox's? In Edge, you can't drag-and-drop files, so you need to resort to Windows 3.1-era browse dialog boxes if you need to choose a file. You can't download files properly either: downloads will stop when you close the browser window, there's absolutely no way of knowing how fast you are downloading, and when the downloads finish, they silently open BEHIND the browser window. The UI has the same nature as that of the Lynx browser, that is text lines, but it has much fewer features and it's perhaps even less intuitive: the text-only links that make up the UI are actually hidden behind cryptic hieroglyphs and when you need a feature, assuming it's one of the few features that Edge actually supports, you have to hunt for it by clicking those pictograms to find out that they reveal hidden surfaces, sliding tabs and other incoherent, undiscoverable UI elements. I really can't understand what's to like in that browser, nor how a browser so limited and buggy could ever be released as part of a paid product. Even searching for text can cause Edge to crash on my machine. And even when it doesn't crash, the text search thingy remains stuck open even if you change tab or close the current one. It's as if the developers hadn't tested even the basic use cases of a browser (searching for text, downloading a file) before releasing it as a supposedly finished application.
Come to think of it, my biggest source of trouble with the Windows 10 update have been AMD drivers: I can report a laptop which can't adjust the brightness level, another one that pauses for 60s on startup and resume, and another one which isn't able to play videos without stuttering.
One reason to stay behind could be owning a device that has drivers for Windows 8.1 but no driver, or a crappy one, for Windows 10. While Microsoft have an interest in the users of those devices upgrading to Windows 10, device manufacturers and laptop vendors have no interest in spending resources to support people who have already bought their products. As a result, a surprising amount of recent hardware doesn't work or is buggy under Windows 10.
The fact that distributions no longer ship old libraries, or that the community of developers has a certain tendency to introduce new “frameworks” and deprecate existing ones, shouldn’t be confused with an alleged technical inability of the Linux kernel or its traditional GNU userspace to maintain backwards compatibility.
Download link, Download link for the EME-free version.
I think that they aren’t offering it yet from the main download page because they want to prevent non-tech savvy people from downloading it and finding out that flash doesn’t work. To me, that’s actually a plus.
I have nothing but admiration and respect for the United States of America. I think that you are a great country, built by great people, who have a lot to teach to the rest to the world. But I also think that you should stop believing the FUD that the world will end if you don't let mega-corporations rape your rights in every possible way. Compromises can be made, too, once in a while.
It's not that Firefox disables flash behind your back: it displays a security warning in place of flash boxes, having a button to enable the plugin again. Also, it will only do it for versions of flash which are known to be vulnerable. This is quite a good thing IMHO: remaining within the nanny terminology, it's not a matter of how much grown up you are, if you have a vulnerable plugin, and you visit a compromised site, your machine will be owned.
It would be nice if Mozilla completed their project of a javascript-based interpreter for flash. It would be the same thing that they’ve done for PDF. The overlap between flash and javascript + HTML5 is complete so it should be viable, and as a bonus SWFs would run under the same security sandbox as javascript.
But flash Player for NPAPI is alive and well on Windows.
Why would any government give asylum to an individual who is hiding from a crime that is more or less universally not tolerated.
You never know, France is known for offering asylum to convicted multiple muderers.
While I prefer to stick to documented facts rather than anyone's anecdotal evidence, including mine, when I make absolute statements about correctness, since we're entering this realm, I'll tell you that I do have a late-2011 HP laptop, DV7-something, with no antivirus running and no extra software installed besides the ones that I actually need. Formatted after the purchase in order to get rid of the extra manufacturer-installed stuff. The last time I've posted a measured sample of its performance here on Slashdot, I was greeted with 6 responses telling me how slow it was. And to be honest it's not a machine that I personally find excessively slow to use.
Finally, about the fact that you have to be careful about the stuff that you install, which is orthogonal to the problem that Windows systems slow down themselves even if you don't touch them: the problem is that people need to install stuff to make their computers work. Want to read PDFs (most people will)? You get one knick-knack with the relevant auto-update. Want to watch YouTube (most people will)? There goes another one. Want to be able to download stuff from the internet? If you're not an expert, and most people aren't, you're going to need an anti virus, and there goes another invasive software you'll need to install. The point is that my bathroom can be cleaned without burning down my house, whereas there's no such option to clean up Windows, which is another major design failure - in addition to the fact that the system slows down by itself.
The point is that you cannot just stick to the desktop in Windows 8. Even if you hack the OS with third party tools in order to make some fake Start menu return from the afterlife, you just can't change the fact that some functionality remains into the Metro side (both OS functions and third-party applications, because Microsoft strongly pushed third-party developers to use Metro). And some of the broken UI design still bites even on the desktop side (invisible magic areas, undocumented destructive gestures that get activated by mistake if you happen to use a touchpad, the “charms”...).
It is not a matter of HD activity, either, and it's not superstition. Just two examples: in the case of Windows XP, which is post-Windows 98, we had the catastrophic Windows Update failure to scale that caused all Windows XP machines to become unusable for hours just some months ago. Back then it was a matter of CPU usage, not disk. In the case of Windows 7, which is post-Windows 98 too, you might have noticed that on machines with 2 GB of memory or less (which is twice the minimum required amount) another Windows Update bug caused the Windows Update service to eat all the available RAM and thrash the machine, again, into the land of unusability. In this case, it was a matter of RAM usage, not disk.