I love Opera. I use it on my dektop, my laptop and my phone. I love the way it all integrates together. I love the look and feel. I love the way it has so many useful features built in as standard (things like clone tab and view tabs side by side). I love the speed dial page that doesn't try to outguess you (looking at you Chrome). I love the option to enable server side compression very useful if you are on a slow network connection or subject to a download cap.
I love all of these things but Opera is the buggiest browser I have ever used. Version 10 was particularly bad in this respect with a number of serious bugs making it through beta and into live (incompatibility with many web forms for example). At this stage in 10's life most of the bugs have been addressed but I am worried it will start all over again with 11.
About 15 years ago my rural dwelling brother law was a leading light in a somewhat successful local campaign against the "radiation masts" that were sprouting up around the country side. As a city dweller who lived even then in a veritable sea of electromagnetic waves I was pretty sceptical of their protests and today , 15 years later, I am amused at his constant complaints that he cannot get a decent phone or internet signal.
I am old enough to remember the tabloid headlines that predicted pocket calculators would make us all dumb because no one would know how to do long division by hand any more. Well here we are forty years later and sure enough most people can't do long division by hand but it doesn't matter because they have access to a tool that do enormously complicated calculations in the blink of an eye.
I think that all tools, whether they are pocket calculators or internet search tools make us smarter by greatly expanding the things we can do. Google has become an extension of my brain and today thanks to the miracle of mobile internet I am almost never without instant access to an enormous library of information. Because Google remembers everything I don't have to. That doesn't make me dumber that makes me smarter because I can still find the answers whenever they are needed and I can use my brain cells for genuinely new ideas.
I went to college in the early 1980's and we could only dream about new fangled 1980's technology like the 8088 and 6809 while we cut our teeth on 1970's era 6800 and 8080 processors.
Will existing PCs with an AM3 socket be upgradeable to bulldozer, anyone know? I see a few people asking on forums and stuff but I couldn't find any authoritative answers.
Sounds like a good law to me but I assume that a complementary suite of protection is required to indemnify the employer against any activities undertaken by an employee under the protection of privacy. For example if an employee sends you a hate mail using a company email account then then you cannot sue the company.
Sturgeon astutely pointed out that 90% of everything is crap. In this era of information overload it has become impossible to sensibly sort out the good 10% from the crap 90% so the only rational solution is to narrow your focus to the first few non-crap pieces of information you happen to stumble upon. We nerdy types often berate non techies for the non-optimal way they use technology and yet for the vast majority of people life is just too short to figure out the "best" way to protect your files against antivirus or the quickest way to rename a group of files. It is entirely rational that most people latch on to the first method they stumble across which sort of works and stick with it.
Apologies in advance for jumping on this bandwagon but I too am not happy with Thunderbird 3. My two favourite shortcut keys (G for grouping and \ for compressing groups no longer work). I guess I am not a huge fan of the tabbed mail concept either. I always seem to be left with mails hanging open in tabs.
Mind you in a fit of disgruntlement I had a go at using gmail as a mail client and I am happy to report that even with its current troubles Thunderbird is way better. If you get more than a handful of emails per day the usability of gmail stinks and gmail is probably the best of the web email clients.
Yes this is awesome but before you youngsters get too uppity about it I remember a time when all arcade games were basically like this. You actually controlled a little toy car or a little submarine or whatever. Mind you in those pre-microprocessor days the games were laughably crude compared to Jehmlich's masterpiece but us old timers gotta grab every chance we get to adopt a condescending air of "seen it all before"ness
I think its more serious than that Chowderbags. Most budget desktop can play modern games with a simple graphics card upgrade. Perhaps not with all the bells and whistles turned on but they will play them . This was the entry route to PC gaming for most people. When that same would be gamer discovers that there is no way to upgrade their laptop graphics then that is the end of the story.
I spent this morning browsing high street computer shops helping a relative to buy a new machine. I came away convinced that the "home desktop" will soon be a thing of the past. The shelf space dedicated to home desktops has shrunk to almost nothing while the shelf space dedicated to laptops, netbooks etc has grown and grown. Most significantly the price of a general purpose laptop is now lower than the price of a general purpose desktop. This isn't going to affect casual PC gaming like Farmville and pop cap games but it is certainly going to shrink the market for serious graphically intensive PC games.
The funny thing is, I have been a PC gamer for over twenty years and there has never been a better time to be a PC gamer. Thanks largely to digital distribution the quantity and quality of games available for the PC at at extremely low prices is just awesome.
Are you seriously willing to risk a stay in a Chinese prison just because you can't do without your internet fix for a few days? If you lived in China then trying to bypass the firewall might be conceived as a heroic gesture against oppression but for a tourist to risk it is just foolishness.
Insisting people say please is a silly rule but that doctor's condescending attitude towards "technicians" sums up much of what is wrong with modern medicine. The sooner the "technicians" come up with decent expert systems so we can finally get rid of the self opinionated medical practitioner elite the better.
I doubt it myself but it is generating quite a bit of interweb buzz around the new phone.
I think it is an appropriate time to misquote Oscar Wilde: "To lose one phone, Mr. Jobs, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness."
In an ideal world my kids would never eat junk food and always eat their fresh green vegetables. They would never sulk or cry or act selfishly. They wouldn't fight with their siblings and they would never watch TV or play video games when the Sun is shining outside. They would head off to bed at 8pm sharp without a word of dissent. In an ideal world they would obey me instantly in all things and always respect my judgement as their father.
Unfortunately in this real world that we live in being a parent is a bit like being a politician. You have to pick your battles. Sometimes you have to compromise and sometimes you have to hold the line. Most of the time you are never quite sure where the line even is.
Actually, do you know what? That is not so unfortunate at all. When I look at my beautiful kids with all their individual foibles and eccentricities I realise just how lucky I am. They have turned out to be really great kids and terrific unique individuals. I love them more than life itself. I would not raise them any other way.
As a parent who has been forced to purchase a ridiculous quantity of happy meals I am delighted by this ban but not because I am afraid of my kids getting obese. Our house is full of these stupid things: plastic aliens that play one bar of a tune when you twist their ears, toy cars that glow when you push them backwards, tiny dolls that spin when you touch them with a magnetic wand. All of them are really cleverly designed and very well made but without exception they have zero play value. This is way too systematic to be sheer chance. I am convinced that MacDonalds specification for these things contains a design requirement that the kid must get bored with the toy after 10 minutes or when they have finished their happy meal whichever comes sooner.
Forget about the politics for a moment. What these guys are doing is an awesome tale of human perseverance in the face of adversity. As a fellow gamer I salute them
Some years back I bought a mid range graphics card called an ATI 9500 in anticipation of the soon to be released blockbuster called Half Life 2. A post on the internet alerted me to the fact that the 9500 actually used the same chip as the much more powerful ATI 9700 but with half of the channels disabled. Happily a simple software mod allowed me to unlock the missing four channels. I was delighted and enjoyed top drawer 9700 performance at a bargain 9500 price. Sadly the game Half life 2 was subject to delay after delay so I played other games while I waited, none of which really needed the extra graphics performance. It was more than a year later when Half Life 2 was finally released. I waited with renewed eager anticipation for the release date confident that my home brew 9700 would at last get a work out. Let us gloss over the fact that it took several further hours for me to download most of the game from Steam despite having an original disk. Eventually the game was installed and I eagerly started playing only to be surprised at the strange checker-board graphical effects. Google confirmed that these effects were not a creation of Valve but were in fact a sign of faulty cores on my pseudo 9700. Removing the softmod downgraded me to a vanilla 9500 and allowed me to play the game as it was intended.
Moral of the story: Sometimes manufacturers disable cores for a reason.
For those of us on limited Data plans Opera Mini's server side compression is great, not to mention the increased speed. Mind you on my Non-Apple smart phone I have recently started using Bolt browser - it has similar server side compression but gives a more "desktop like" web page appearance.
The Government warned today issued a warning against using the internet because of security issues.
The office for Information Security reported the discovery of a major flaw that allows bad people to use the internet too. Citing incidents of users who have already been spammed, scammed, hacked, phished, botted, keylogged and otherwise abused the office has issued a strong recommendation to stop using the web altogether until this vulnerability is patched.
It is as yet unclear whether these exploits will be patched in the pending release of Web 2.1
Slashdot Mirror
I love Opera. I use it on my dektop, my laptop and my phone. I love the way it all integrates together. I love the look and feel. I love the way it has so many useful features built in as standard (things like clone tab and view tabs side by side). I love the speed dial page that doesn't try to outguess you (looking at you Chrome). I love the option to enable server side compression very useful if you are on a slow network connection or subject to a download cap.
I love all of these things but Opera is the buggiest browser I have ever used. Version 10 was particularly bad in this respect with a number of serious bugs making it through beta and into live (incompatibility with many web forms for example). At this stage in 10's life most of the bugs have been addressed but I am worried it will start all over again with 11.
For those who didn't get the reference above to Jozin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4aqM_wu6Ns
About 15 years ago my rural dwelling brother law was a leading light in a somewhat successful local campaign against the "radiation masts" that were sprouting up around the country side. As a city dweller who lived even then in a veritable sea of electromagnetic waves I was pretty sceptical of their protests and today , 15 years later, I am amused at his constant complaints that he cannot get a decent phone or internet signal.
I am old enough to remember the tabloid headlines that predicted pocket calculators would make us all dumb because no one would know how to do long division by hand any more. Well here we are forty years later and sure enough most people can't do long division by hand but it doesn't matter because they have access to a tool that do enormously complicated calculations in the blink of an eye.
I think that all tools, whether they are pocket calculators or internet search tools make us smarter by greatly expanding the things we can do. Google has become an extension of my brain and today thanks to the miracle of mobile internet I am almost never without instant access to an enormous library of information. Because Google remembers everything I don't have to. That doesn't make me dumber that makes me smarter because I can still find the answers whenever they are needed and I can use my brain cells for genuinely new ideas.
I went to college in the early 1980's and we could only dream about new fangled 1980's technology like the 8088 and 6809 while we cut our teeth on 1970's era 6800 and 8080 processors.
Will existing PCs with an AM3 socket be upgradeable to bulldozer, anyone know? I see a few people asking on forums and stuff but I couldn't find any authoritative answers.
Sounds like a good law to me but I assume that a complementary suite of protection is required to indemnify the employer against any activities undertaken by an employee under the protection of privacy. For example if an employee sends you a hate mail using a company email account then then you cannot sue the company.
Sturgeon astutely pointed out that 90% of everything is crap. In this era of information overload it has become impossible to sensibly sort out the good 10% from the crap 90% so the only rational solution is to narrow your focus to the first few non-crap pieces of information you happen to stumble upon. We nerdy types often berate non techies for the non-optimal way they use technology and yet for the vast majority of people life is just too short to figure out the "best" way to protect your files against antivirus or the quickest way to rename a group of files. It is entirely rational that most people latch on to the first method they stumble across which sort of works and stick with it.
Apologies in advance for jumping on this bandwagon but I too am not happy with Thunderbird 3. My two favourite shortcut keys (G for grouping and \ for compressing groups no longer work). I guess I am not a huge fan of the tabbed mail concept either. I always seem to be left with mails hanging open in tabs.
Mind you in a fit of disgruntlement I had a go at using gmail as a mail client and I am happy to report that even with its current troubles Thunderbird is way better. If you get more than a handful of emails per day the usability of gmail stinks and gmail is probably the best of the web email clients.
Yes this is awesome but before you youngsters get too uppity about it I remember a time when all arcade games were basically like this. You actually controlled a little toy car or a little submarine or whatever. Mind you in those pre-microprocessor days the games were laughably crude compared to Jehmlich's masterpiece but us old timers gotta grab every chance we get to adopt a condescending air of "seen it all before"ness
I think its more serious than that Chowderbags. Most budget desktop can play modern games with a simple graphics card upgrade. Perhaps not with all the bells and whistles turned on but they will play them . This was the entry route to PC gaming for most people. When that same would be gamer discovers that there is no way to upgrade their laptop graphics then that is the end of the story.
I spent this morning browsing high street computer shops helping a relative to buy a new machine. I came away convinced that the "home desktop" will soon be a thing of the past. The shelf space dedicated to home desktops has shrunk to almost nothing while the shelf space dedicated to laptops, netbooks etc has grown and grown. Most significantly the price of a general purpose laptop is now lower than the price of a general purpose desktop. This isn't going to affect casual PC gaming like Farmville and pop cap games but it is certainly going to shrink the market for serious graphically intensive PC games.
The funny thing is, I have been a PC gamer for over twenty years and there has never been a better time to be a PC gamer. Thanks largely to digital distribution the quantity and quality of games available for the PC at at extremely low prices is just awesome.
Are you seriously willing to risk a stay in a Chinese prison just because you can't do without your internet fix for a few days? If you lived in China then trying to bypass the firewall might be conceived as a heroic gesture against oppression but for a tourist to risk it is just foolishness.
I am not familiar with US taxation and benefit systems but I wonder is there a way to fiddle this by pretending to be gay just to get a pay rise?
Insisting people say please is a silly rule but that doctor's condescending attitude towards "technicians" sums up much of what is wrong with modern medicine. The sooner the "technicians" come up with decent expert systems so we can finally get rid of the self opinionated medical practitioner elite the better.
I doubt it myself but it is generating quite a bit of interweb buzz around the new phone.
I think it is an appropriate time to misquote Oscar Wilde:
"To lose one phone, Mr. Jobs, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness."
In an ideal world my kids would never eat junk food and always eat their fresh green vegetables. They would never sulk or cry or act selfishly. They wouldn't fight with their siblings and they would never watch TV or play video games when the Sun is shining outside. They would head off to bed at 8pm sharp without a word of dissent. In an ideal world they would obey me instantly in all things and always respect my judgement as their father.
Unfortunately in this real world that we live in being a parent is a bit like being a politician. You have to pick your battles. Sometimes you have to compromise and sometimes you have to hold the line. Most of the time you are never quite sure where the line even is.
Actually, do you know what? That is not so unfortunate at all. When I look at my beautiful kids with all their individual foibles and eccentricities I realise just how lucky I am. They have turned out to be really great kids and terrific unique individuals. I love them more than life itself. I would not raise them any other way.
As a parent who has been forced to purchase a ridiculous quantity of happy meals I am delighted by this ban but not because I am afraid of my kids getting obese. Our house is full of these stupid things: plastic aliens that play one bar of a tune when you twist their ears, toy cars that glow when you push them backwards, tiny dolls that spin when you touch them with a magnetic wand. All of them are really cleverly designed and very well made but without exception they have zero play value. This is way too systematic to be sheer chance. I am convinced that MacDonalds specification for these things contains a design requirement that the kid must get bored with the toy after 10 minutes or when they have finished their happy meal whichever comes sooner.
Forget about the politics for a moment. What these guys are doing is an awesome tale of human perseverance in the face of adversity. As a fellow gamer I salute them
Some years back I bought a mid range graphics card called an ATI 9500 in anticipation of the soon to be released blockbuster called Half Life 2. A post on the internet alerted me to the fact that the 9500 actually used the same chip as the much more powerful ATI 9700 but with half of the channels disabled. Happily a simple software mod allowed me to unlock the missing four channels. I was delighted and enjoyed top drawer 9700 performance at a bargain 9500 price. Sadly the game Half life 2 was subject to delay after delay so I played other games while I waited, none of which really needed the extra graphics performance. It was more than a year later when Half Life 2 was finally released. I waited with renewed eager anticipation for the release date confident that my home brew 9700 would at last get a work out. Let us gloss over the fact that it took several further hours for me to download most of the game from Steam despite having an original disk. Eventually the game was installed and I eagerly started playing only to be surprised at the strange checker-board graphical effects. Google confirmed that these effects were not a creation of Valve but were in fact a sign of faulty cores on my pseudo 9700. Removing the softmod downgraded me to a vanilla 9500 and allowed me to play the game as it was intended.
Moral of the story: Sometimes manufacturers disable cores for a reason.
For those of us on limited Data plans Opera Mini's server side compression is great, not to mention the increased speed. Mind you on my Non-Apple smart phone I have recently started using Bolt browser - it has similar server side compression but gives a more "desktop like" web page appearance.
The link is slashdotted so I can't tell but I managed to find this video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j54pO9ATmeQ :)
How well did I.W. nail the feeling of the place in that iconic level?
you could probably fit a hands free phone into the car for the same price?
isn't a bit of mathematics handy for working out complicated expressions to put into your computed gotos?
The Government warned today issued a warning against using the internet because of security issues.
The office for Information Security reported the discovery of a major flaw that allows bad people to use the internet too. Citing incidents of users who have already been spammed, scammed, hacked, phished, botted, keylogged and otherwise abused the office has issued a strong recommendation to stop using the web altogether until this vulnerability is patched.
It is as yet unclear whether these exploits will be patched in the pending release of Web 2.1