Hm, that's strange... Although I can't think of a specific page at the moment, I know that I've seen it block popups that it allowed through before. Could be a bug, next time I encounter it I'll file a report.
Opera is proprietary software, which I'll never use since I value my freedom.
That's your choice, but I don't understand how somebody making proprietary software infringes on your freedom.
Even the "free" (as in beer) version comes with a huge frickin' banner ad built into it, which is a true sign of scumware.
The banner is only "huge" if you're running at 640x480... And it's not scumware, either; the browser reports no information about your computer to Opera. You can also customize what types of banners are shown; in fact, I have a friend who paid for Opera and actually keeps the banner on because he frequently sees banners for products he's interested in.
It also isn't the fastest browser anymore, and has never been the most capable.
I can't say about Safari, since I can't use it, but Opera 7 is still the fastest browser I've used, and 6 is only marginally slower. "Capable" is a relative term, but I've yet to see another browser that has features such as integrated mouse gestures (gotta have a plugin for Mozilla), a quick-preference menu (pressing F12 brings up a list of the most handy preferences), and an easy way to fake the browser ID string (possible in Mozilla only if you're willing to manually edit config files).
It also has better user-defined CSS support than other browsers I've seen. It even comes with a number of pre-defined CSS layouts that do interesting things such as emulate text-only browsers, outline structural elements on a page, remove tables, hide only non-linking images, and so forth. Also, in the event that it crashes, it can re-open all the tabs you had open previously (I believe one of the Mozilla offshoots can do this, but I haven't seen any other browser).
Yep, they moved it. It's now under Privacy & Security/Popup Windows.
The way it works has been changed slightly, too; now you can choose to either allow or suppress popups, and provide a list of exceptions. Whenever it suppresses a popup, it displays a little icon in the bottom right that you can click to allow it. I find this to be a little annoying, because I've really found that the only popups I ever got with the "unrequested" option were ones I wanted anyway, and now I have to allow them all...
Dear gods, movie tickets are $$11.50 where you live? I can't see why anybody'd go to the movies for that price. It's closer to $5 here, maybe it's because I live in the figurative boondocks -- and for $5, being able to see it on the big screen is definitely worth it.
Very unlikely that they'll sue. Opera isn't actually defacing msn.com; you can still go there from any other computer with any other browser and it will look fine. This is more like, say, buying a poster of an actor you hate and scribbling a marker all over it.
Actually, I normally use my bandwidth for trading fansubbed anime episodes, and while I'd guess I'm *usually* below 30 GB/month, I could easily go above if I tried.
Fansubs are, admittedly, technically illegal, but the authorities generally ignore it because the Japanese companies wouldn't be making any money off of Americans anyway. In addition, the American companies use fansubs as a testing base to guess how well a commercial license would do. Just this evening, I put up about 1.6 gigs of stuff for a friend to grab off of me.
Granted, I'm on a university network, and it doesn't really cost the university much because it's mostly internal traffic.
Close, except that it's more accurate to say that in Japanese, individual mora are unaccented. Mora are the syllable-like subdivisions that words are separated into; doujinshi has five, do-u-ji-n-shi. (note that a "u" following a mora that ends in an "o" just lengthens the sound of the "o", you don't actually pronounce the "u")
Ah... Could you describe to me what you mean? I'm interested, as I have a Intellimouse Optical, but have never encountered a scroll wheel problem with it in Opera. It's always worked fine for me.
If the person comes to you asking for what else to use, you might recommend QuarkXPress. Not free, but hey, it's not Adobe, either.
(disclaimer: I haven't used QuarkXPress myself, but a friend of mine who does this sort of stuff for a living tells me they're fairly comparable packages)
Actually, I take part of that back. The company that developed Calypso, MCS Dallas, no longer supports it, but out of curiousity I did a bit of searching around, and it looks like Rose City Software does now. Their page looks a little... unprofessional, however.
For my web-surfing machine, I run W2K. I will *not*, *ever*, upgrade to XP simply because it doesn't do anything "new".
Yes it does. Among the features I use regularly include fast user switching, which lets multiple users be logged into a computer at once locally (I know, Linux already does this), and a remote desktop connection that supports more than 8-bit colors (of course, this only works with servers that also support this, which at the moment is limited to other WinXP boxes, but the upcoming.NET Server should).
I also find the ability to lock the taskbar's position and selectively hide icons in the system tray very useful. I usually have around a dozen programs at a time running in the background that insist on having icons down there, but there are only three or four at any given time that I want to actually see; the rest just take up space. XP also has better hardware support, meaning that if I take a random piece of hardware and plug it in, it's more likely to automatically detect and install it so I don't have to go hunting drivers down. There are more I don't use, but I can't recall the details at the moment, so I won't elaborate.
Your decision to keep using Win2k is fine with me, but let's at least not lie to ourselves.
For email, I use Calypso
Actually, I used to also use Calypso, and I think it's still a great client. Why don't I anymore? for one, I discovered that there's no way to export all of your current mail into another format, and it stores everything in its own proprietary format. You may feel differently, but a lot of the e-mail I receive is important correspondance that I don't want to lose; Calypso's way of handling things meant that ever switching to another client would be fairly painful, and while I didn't want to, it's possible that someday I would have to for unforeseen reasons.
On top of that, the company that made Calypso pretends that it doesn't exist anymore. If you encounter any problems, you won't get any technical support from them, and if your hardware is damaged and you somehow lose the program, you won't be able to find it for download anymore. Not to mention that you won't be able to read any of your old mail because of how Calypso stores it.
With that said, I now mostly use Mozilla; it was a bit awkward getting used to the different interface at first, and there are a few things I miss, but I've discovered other features I like that Calypso didn't have. And being a free, open source project, it's not likely to vanish any time soon.
Out of curiousity, how is this any worse than English-speaking people who wear t-shirts covered in Japanese or Chinese characters without a clue what they mean?
I've also seen things such as decals on cars, on merchandise in stores, and so forth. Might want to consider how funny the stuff on engrish.com looks next time you buy something with kanji on it.
Now, I like Macs just fine, but a lot of your points are completely unfounded.
1) No viruses.
Same with Linux. And if you use a bit of common sense, you'll likely never get a virus on a Windows box, either.
2) I can clone my entire HD with a freeware utility (in other words, backing up is easy as pie)
Same with Linux. Probably the same with Windows, too, but I'm not aware of a free utility off the top of my head.
4) I can install or remove RAM in less than 5 seconds on any powermac.
I can do that on any computer. Well, unless you encounter an older motherboard that has stupidly hard to open RAM clips, but most newer ones are a snap.
5) OSX.2 boots very very quick on dual processor machines... its about 15-20 seconds.
Windows XP and Linux both boot in about a minute on my Athlon 950; I would imagine that they'd be similar to OSX.2 on any dual-CPU machine, especially if said CPUs were over a gigahertz.
6) Apple gives you, out of box, almost all the software you need to get productive, which in turn means very few installs from cd.
Same with most Linux distributions.
8) Almost every printer is supported in X.2, same with cd burners, again, no drivers or installs necessary.
Same with Windows XP; many Linux distros are close.
9) Its cool watching my linux friends not use the GUI.
You can use the CLI yourself, too, if you want. On both Linux and Windows, in fact.
About the only thing wrong with macs right now is the mouse, which imho would benefit from a few more buttons and a scroll wheel.
Are you sure you're a Mac head? Even the casual Mac users I've met will immediately tell you that claim's false. Any USB mouse should work perfectly, even a Microsoft IntelliMouse or somesuch.
Metal Warriors was indeed pretty great, but my main complaint with the 2 player mode was how limited it was... You could only pick from a small variety of mechs and then play on a randomly selected level. I wish they would've provided a larger assortment of mechs and levels, or, even better, let you play cooperatively. Oh well.
Are there any other games remotely similar to Metal Warriors?
It's one thing to run a viewer on an image like a.jpg. It's a totally different sort of thing to run the attachment.
No, not really. For you it's easy to tell the difference; a JPG is obviously a safe image file, while files with.exe or.sh are potentially dangerous (depending on your OS). But from a program's point of view, the only difference is that you open a.jpg with, say, the GIMP, while you open a.sh with BASH.
If somebody sends you a file with the extention.xe3 (random example), and KDE says there's a program associated with that, how is KMail supposed to know whether it's safe to open it or not?
All KMail can tell is that an attachment is an attachment; it's not safe to open anything automatically, not even something that (you think) is an image.
Applications that work best in a specific resolution or color depth. Particular examples are any games; Most 3D games, such as Unreal Tournament or Quake 3, give you the option of changing the resolution or color depth; the obvious advantage to this is that if you have a low-end video card, setting the resolution and color depth low will increase the framerate. If you have a high end video card, you obviously will want a higher resolution for greater detail. I keep my desktop at 1280x960, but prefer to run games in 1024x768 with Quincunx antialiasing (I have a GeForce 3).
Another important application is web design. A well-designed web site should look good at any resolution; however, since one can't intuitively know how a page will look at every resolution, when designing a page it is convenient to change your resolution on the fly and take a look at it.
And then, of course, you have applications that *require* a specific resolution. This isn't as much of a problem with UNIX, but in the Windows world you will likely encounter programs designed for older setups that will fail to run if you don't have a specific bit depth or resolution. Even some more recent applications have this restriction; for example, the Windows SNES emulator zSNES requires that you run it with 16-bit color depth (at least, it did the last time I checked). Starcraft requires that it run at 640x480.
So, just because you don't have any reason for this, don't say it's useless. I've been wanting this feature for ages.
Actually, the point I was trying to make is that saying something like "Obscurity isn't a strong form of security," is a massive generalization.
Encryption is essentially just an incredibly high-level form of obscurity; correct me if I'm wrong, but, as far as I know, there is as of yet no known encryption that's truly unbreakable. Sure, it might take a million supercomputers a million years to break it, but it's still nothing more than skillfully obscuring data.
True, true. I guess we should also stop worrying about things like SSL and PGP. Hell, for that matter, why would we want to use SSH in favor of telnet, a much simpler protocol?
Uh-huh. My Japanese class just recently watched a short clip of videos from Japan. The have cell phones there with built-in cameras that you can use to see the other person you're talking to (assuming their phone supports it) or even take pictures and e-mail them.
Not only that, it's common for high schoolers to have these kinds of phones in Japan; at least where I live in America, it's strange for high schoolers to have cell phones at all. And we're poised to overtake Japan? Suuure.
Re:If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em.
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't know that I would say the Dreamcast didn't "win." No, it didn't earn Sega huge chunks of money, and it didn't smack around the PS2, but I don't know that the PS2 was really its main target; it came out inbetween the game between the PSX/N64/Saturn generation systems and the GC/PS2/Xbox generation.
It also doesn't have the largest library of games, but it does have a number of truly great ones; in fact, games for it are still trickling out in Japan. Thousands of people still play Phantasy Star Online on a daily basis, plus DCs have no type of copy protection that prevents them from running burned CDs (at least, all but the last model of the DC), they're very popular in the indie developer scene. I can play MP3s, VCDs, and DivX files on mine, as well as play SNES and PSX games through emulators; or, if you want, you can put Linux on it and have a low-end server.
So I don't suppose I would say the DC "won" in the sense of winning the console war, but it didn't lose at all.;-)
On the contrary, that's because you don't need a mod chip for a Gamecube. Whether the system thinks it's Japanese or English is controlled by a single jumper; all you have to do is remove the jumper and solder a switch in its place, and flip the switch every time you want to change inbetween Japanese or English. The only thing that'd be easier is if you didn't need to mod the thing at all.
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I've got my third test in an Automata class next Tuesday. This thread is getting scary.
Hm, that's strange... Although I can't think of a specific page at the moment, I know that I've seen it block popups that it allowed through before. Could be a bug, next time I encounter it I'll file a report.
http://www.apple.com/safari
Where's the non-Mac version?
Opera is proprietary software, which I'll never use since I value my freedom.
That's your choice, but I don't understand how somebody making proprietary software infringes on your freedom.
Even the "free" (as in beer) version comes with a huge frickin' banner ad built into it, which is a true sign of scumware.
The banner is only "huge" if you're running at 640x480... And it's not scumware, either; the browser reports no information about your computer to Opera. You can also customize what types of banners are shown; in fact, I have a friend who paid for Opera and actually keeps the banner on because he frequently sees banners for products he's interested in.
It also isn't the fastest browser anymore, and has never been the most capable.
I can't say about Safari, since I can't use it, but Opera 7 is still the fastest browser I've used, and 6 is only marginally slower. "Capable" is a relative term, but I've yet to see another browser that has features such as integrated mouse gestures (gotta have a plugin for Mozilla), a quick-preference menu (pressing F12 brings up a list of the most handy preferences), and an easy way to fake the browser ID string (possible in Mozilla only if you're willing to manually edit config files).
It also has better user-defined CSS support than other browsers I've seen. It even comes with a number of pre-defined CSS layouts that do interesting things such as emulate text-only browsers, outline structural elements on a page, remove tables, hide only non-linking images, and so forth. Also, in the event that it crashes, it can re-open all the tabs you had open previously (I believe one of the Mozilla offshoots can do this, but I haven't seen any other browser).
Yep, they moved it. It's now under Privacy & Security/Popup Windows.
The way it works has been changed slightly, too; now you can choose to either allow or suppress popups, and provide a list of exceptions. Whenever it suppresses a popup, it displays a little icon in the bottom right that you can click to allow it. I find this to be a little annoying, because I've really found that the only popups I ever got with the "unrequested" option were ones I wanted anyway, and now I have to allow them all...
Dear gods, movie tickets are $$11.50 where you live? I can't see why anybody'd go to the movies for that price. It's closer to $5 here, maybe it's because I live in the figurative boondocks -- and for $5, being able to see it on the big screen is definitely worth it.
Ultima Online, Ultima Online expansions, and a sequel to... Ultima Online!
Actually, they cancelled the sequel to work on the original more. It upset me and quite a few other fans, as the sequel was looking to be very good...
Very unlikely that they'll sue. Opera isn't actually defacing msn.com; you can still go there from any other computer with any other browser and it will look fine. This is more like, say, buying a poster of an actor you hate and scribbling a marker all over it.
Actually, I normally use my bandwidth for trading fansubbed anime episodes, and while I'd guess I'm *usually* below 30 GB/month, I could easily go above if I tried.
Fansubs are, admittedly, technically illegal, but the authorities generally ignore it because the Japanese companies wouldn't be making any money off of Americans anyway. In addition, the American companies use fansubs as a testing base to guess how well a commercial license would do. Just this evening, I put up about 1.6 gigs of stuff for a friend to grab off of me.
Granted, I'm on a university network, and it doesn't really cost the university much because it's mostly internal traffic.
Close, except that it's more accurate to say that in Japanese, individual mora are unaccented. Mora are the syllable-like subdivisions that words are separated into; doujinshi has five, do-u-ji-n-shi. (note that a "u" following a mora that ends in an "o" just lengthens the sound of the "o", you don't actually pronounce the "u")
I'll tell you about my etching techniques if you tell me about how you refined the minerals you mined to make your circuit boards. ;-)
Ah... Could you describe to me what you mean? I'm interested, as I have a Intellimouse Optical, but have never encountered a scroll wheel problem with it in Opera. It's always worked fine for me.
If the person comes to you asking for what else to use, you might recommend QuarkXPress. Not free, but hey, it's not Adobe, either.
(disclaimer: I haven't used QuarkXPress myself, but a friend of mine who does this sort of stuff for a living tells me they're fairly comparable packages)
Actually, I take part of that back. The company that developed Calypso, MCS Dallas, no longer supports it, but out of curiousity I did a bit of searching around, and it looks like Rose City Software does now. Their page looks a little... unprofessional, however.
For my web-surfing machine, I run W2K. I will *not*, *ever*, upgrade to XP simply because it doesn't do anything "new".
.NET Server should).
Yes it does. Among the features I use regularly include fast user switching, which lets multiple users be logged into a computer at once locally (I know, Linux already does this), and a remote desktop connection that supports more than 8-bit colors (of course, this only works with servers that also support this, which at the moment is limited to other WinXP boxes, but the upcoming
I also find the ability to lock the taskbar's position and selectively hide icons in the system tray very useful. I usually have around a dozen programs at a time running in the background that insist on having icons down there, but there are only three or four at any given time that I want to actually see; the rest just take up space. XP also has better hardware support, meaning that if I take a random piece of hardware and plug it in, it's more likely to automatically detect and install it so I don't have to go hunting drivers down. There are more I don't use, but I can't recall the details at the moment, so I won't elaborate.
Your decision to keep using Win2k is fine with me, but let's at least not lie to ourselves.
For email, I use Calypso
Actually, I used to also use Calypso, and I think it's still a great client. Why don't I anymore? for one, I discovered that there's no way to export all of your current mail into another format, and it stores everything in its own proprietary format. You may feel differently, but a lot of the e-mail I receive is important correspondance that I don't want to lose; Calypso's way of handling things meant that ever switching to another client would be fairly painful, and while I didn't want to, it's possible that someday I would have to for unforeseen reasons.
On top of that, the company that made Calypso pretends that it doesn't exist anymore. If you encounter any problems, you won't get any technical support from them, and if your hardware is damaged and you somehow lose the program, you won't be able to find it for download anymore. Not to mention that you won't be able to read any of your old mail because of how Calypso stores it.
With that said, I now mostly use Mozilla; it was a bit awkward getting used to the different interface at first, and there are a few things I miss, but I've discovered other features I like that Calypso didn't have. And being a free, open source project, it's not likely to vanish any time soon.
Out of curiousity, how is this any worse than English-speaking people who wear t-shirts covered in Japanese or Chinese characters without a clue what they mean?
I've also seen things such as decals on cars, on merchandise in stores, and so forth. Might want to consider how funny the stuff on engrish.com looks next time you buy something with kanji on it.
Ah, but how much would that be if it were gzipped? I would imagine that as the LoC is probably mostly text, you could compress the hell out of it.
Now, I like Macs just fine, but a lot of your points are completely unfounded.
1) No viruses.
Same with Linux. And if you use a bit of common sense, you'll likely never get a virus on a Windows box, either.
2) I can clone my entire HD with a freeware utility (in other words, backing up is easy as pie)
Same with Linux. Probably the same with Windows, too, but I'm not aware of a free utility off the top of my head.
4) I can install or remove RAM in less than 5 seconds on any powermac.
I can do that on any computer. Well, unless you encounter an older motherboard that has stupidly hard to open RAM clips, but most newer ones are a snap.
5) OSX.2 boots very very quick on dual processor machines... its about 15-20 seconds.
Windows XP and Linux both boot in about a minute on my Athlon 950; I would imagine that they'd be similar to OSX.2 on any dual-CPU machine, especially if said CPUs were over a gigahertz.
6) Apple gives you, out of box, almost all the software you need to get productive, which in turn means very few installs from cd.
Same with most Linux distributions.
8) Almost every printer is supported in X.2, same with cd burners, again, no drivers or installs necessary.
Same with Windows XP; many Linux distros are close.
9) Its cool watching my linux friends not use the GUI.
You can use the CLI yourself, too, if you want. On both Linux and Windows, in fact.
About the only thing wrong with macs right now is the mouse, which imho would benefit from a few more buttons and a scroll wheel.
Are you sure you're a Mac head? Even the casual Mac users I've met will immediately tell you that claim's false. Any USB mouse should work perfectly, even a Microsoft IntelliMouse or somesuch.
Metal Warriors was indeed pretty great, but my main complaint with the 2 player mode was how limited it was... You could only pick from a small variety of mechs and then play on a randomly selected level. I wish they would've provided a larger assortment of mechs and levels, or, even better, let you play cooperatively. Oh well.
Are there any other games remotely similar to Metal Warriors?
It's one thing to run a viewer on an image like a .jpg. It's a totally different sort of thing to run the attachment.
.exe or .sh are potentially dangerous (depending on your OS). But from a program's point of view, the only difference is that you open a .jpg with, say, the GIMP, while you open a .sh with BASH.
.xe3 (random example), and KDE says there's a program associated with that, how is KMail supposed to know whether it's safe to open it or not?
No, not really. For you it's easy to tell the difference; a JPG is obviously a safe image file, while files with
If somebody sends you a file with the extention
All KMail can tell is that an attachment is an attachment; it's not safe to open anything automatically, not even something that (you think) is an image.
Reasons why this is good:
Applications that work best in a specific resolution or color depth. Particular examples are any games; Most 3D games, such as Unreal Tournament or Quake 3, give you the option of changing the resolution or color depth; the obvious advantage to this is that if you have a low-end video card, setting the resolution and color depth low will increase the framerate. If you have a high end video card, you obviously will want a higher resolution for greater detail. I keep my desktop at 1280x960, but prefer to run games in 1024x768 with Quincunx antialiasing (I have a GeForce 3).
Another important application is web design. A well-designed web site should look good at any resolution; however, since one can't intuitively know how a page will look at every resolution, when designing a page it is convenient to change your resolution on the fly and take a look at it.
And then, of course, you have applications that *require* a specific resolution. This isn't as much of a problem with UNIX, but in the Windows world you will likely encounter programs designed for older setups that will fail to run if you don't have a specific bit depth or resolution. Even some more recent applications have this restriction; for example, the Windows SNES emulator zSNES requires that you run it with 16-bit color depth (at least, it did the last time I checked). Starcraft requires that it run at 640x480.
So, just because you don't have any reason for this, don't say it's useless. I've been wanting this feature for ages.
Actually, the point I was trying to make is that saying something like "Obscurity isn't a strong form of security," is a massive generalization.
Encryption is essentially just an incredibly high-level form of obscurity; correct me if I'm wrong, but, as far as I know, there is as of yet no known encryption that's truly unbreakable. Sure, it might take a million supercomputers a million years to break it, but it's still nothing more than skillfully obscuring data.
True, true. I guess we should also stop worrying about things like SSL and PGP. Hell, for that matter, why would we want to use SSH in favor of telnet, a much simpler protocol?
Uh-huh. My Japanese class just recently watched a short clip of videos from Japan. The have cell phones there with built-in cameras that you can use to see the other person you're talking to (assuming their phone supports it) or even take pictures and e-mail them.
Not only that, it's common for high schoolers to have these kinds of phones in Japan; at least where I live in America, it's strange for high schoolers to have cell phones at all. And we're poised to overtake Japan? Suuure.
I don't know that I would say the Dreamcast didn't "win." No, it didn't earn Sega huge chunks of money, and it didn't smack around the PS2, but I don't know that the PS2 was really its main target; it came out inbetween the game between the PSX/N64/Saturn generation systems and the GC/PS2/Xbox generation.
;-)
It also doesn't have the largest library of games, but it does have a number of truly great ones; in fact, games for it are still trickling out in Japan. Thousands of people still play Phantasy Star Online on a daily basis, plus DCs have no type of copy protection that prevents them from running burned CDs (at least, all but the last model of the DC), they're very popular in the indie developer scene. I can play MP3s, VCDs, and DivX files on mine, as well as play SNES and PSX games through emulators; or, if you want, you can put Linux on it and have a low-end server.
So I don't suppose I would say the DC "won" in the sense of winning the console war, but it didn't lose at all.
there are no GameCube modchips that work
On the contrary, that's because you don't need a mod chip for a Gamecube. Whether the system thinks it's Japanese or English is controlled by a single jumper; all you have to do is remove the jumper and solder a switch in its place, and flip the switch every time you want to change inbetween Japanese or English. The only thing that'd be easier is if you didn't need to mod the thing at all.