Thanks for the correction; I've updated the story.
And how do you like Simon's Rock?:) (Beautiful place. I'll be up at a nearby YMCA camp several weeks from now.)
timothy
The opening line of the summary, "Four short months after Opera 10.5", suffers from the same issue (as in, it was actually 10.50, not 10.5). Might as well point that out as well.
My father-in-law hates Firefox. After spending three hours installing all the add-ons he thought looked good, it ran like molasses and crashed all the time.
You did ask:-)
Well, addons would indeed be the logical thing to ask about when people are apparently having so much trouble with Firefox. I only use Adblock Plus (but I've had probably up to 6 addons installed at once before, all privacy and ad related) and have (almost) always been solidly stable.
I say "almost" because this discussion has reminded me of a time when an addon was causing the Firefox process to hang on exit. It was happening to my friend too. After we uninstalled the addon, the problem disappeared. And even though that was annoying, it still wasn't a crash.
So if you're having issues with Firefox, start uninstalling all your useless, fluffy, garbage addons and see what happens.
I've been using Firefox for a really long time, and the only instabilities I've ever witnessed were caused by Flash. Aside from that, I honestly have no remembrance in my head of Firefox crashing. And since plugins are ran in a separate process now, even Flash won't bring it down anymore, although Flash is seeming a lot more stable nowadays as well.
I'm not sure how people are using Firefox that would cause it to crash so much.
Treating unsubstantiated beliefs as sacred and taboo will always be a bad thing because you can't challenge a good or bad interpretation with logic and clearly any and all belief systems set up by man for various agendas will have downsides - some more than others.
Not to mention, any time that a death penalty is suggested for anything less than homicide, there's something terribly wrong with the picture.
Anytime the death penalty is suggested at all, there's something terribly wrong with the picture. Nobody can logically explain why it's okay to kill someone when it isn't okay to kill someone.
Also a sure fire 100% guaranteed way to get modded into oblivion I'm sure, but whatever. I just have to ask though: Who the fuck is pirating a Uwe Boll movie? You deserve to get sued morons.
Actually, you're going to (or should) get modded down because this is flamebait. "If you don't want to get sued for doing X, don't do X" is an extremely shallow, closed-minded and unintelligent oversimplification that assumes people should be able to be sued for doing X in the first place.
News like this tends to rile people up about "the government." Let's take a step back and realize that these problems don't exist because of government, but because of undemocratic governments. Do you think people in FTC were just sitting around and said, "hey, let's introduce a new tax and give it to newspapers!" Obviously not. Giant "news" corporations are lobbying for it. It's more their government than yours. That's why it's being considered.
Absurd taxes (and other bailouts and laws in general) like these would never come up if a real democratic mechanism were in place.
I already block Flash automatically, as it drags down performance and rarely adds any content.
There are a few cases in which useful content has been designed in Flash, but most of the time it is useless eye candy - and more often than not, just pure advertising. A great way to block most advertising that you do not want is to block Flash. Why would you not want to do that?
Or just use Adblock Plus and not worry about whether advertisements are Flash or not. And then you'll have blocked more than most advertising.
Web-pages should be about spreading information, not creating flashy designs.
Cars should be about getting from point A to point B, not being fun to drive or flashy designs.
See how it doesn't work so well to make such a limitation?
Well, I guess you sort of defeated your own argument, since I still don't see the downside of this so-called "limitation". I'll take a solid, well-running, non-flashy vehicle over a flashy, gadget-filled fadmobile that may only just allegedly look pretty.
It does take some getting used to, but I love it. It's like steaming up and down the coast in an ironclad while the enemy tries to shoot little cannonballs at you from wooden ships.
But my point is to say, at least for myself, what enemies exactly? (Unless you call Javascript itself the enemy, then by all means...)
That barricaded feeling is what became annoying to me after awhile, especially when having to set a bunch of permissions on multiple sites, and some features not working until you approve the right subdomains and blah blah blah. It's annoying after the 500th time, especially across multiple computers.
most people or most nerds? I don't think most people even get ABP, even if they run Firefox, let alone actually know what Javascript is or that its something that can be disabled. Turn off JS these days, and practically nothing works. better would be a plug-in which just prevents Smokescreen from being loaded in particular.
Disabling javascript at the user's will? Forget ABP, that's where noscript comes in! And who doesn't use noscript?
I used NoScript for awhile, but it became annoying and I couldn't really identify any real benefits for myself to use it. ABP is enough for me in terms of making the web bearable. Whatever security benefits I allegedly get from running NoScript become meaningless when confronted with the fact that I don't browse around bizarre and obscure websites in the first place.
But C++ isn't a higher level language, they're not gaining anything but hidden complexity.
The low level knowledge you have to possess to use the high level features correctly make them practically useless and you often end up spending more time coaxing the language to do the right thing than you would have spent writing the code yourself.
I can assure you that whatever it is that's holding the project back it has absolutely nothing to do with a lack of language features.
Everything that should be done in C++ can be done easier and simpler in C by reasonably competent programmers, the rest of C++ is pure madness and it will slowly seep into the project regardless of coding standards.
I wish I had mod points.
From TFA:
"Hey guys, we're going to use C++! Actually, we probably shouldn't use too much because people will either have a hard time understanding it or will often misuse it, because afterall, it's C++. And C++ is a gigantic language so let's bikeshed over what we should allow and shouldn't allow."
You know you picked a crappy language for developing your project in when you're worried about people... you know... developing your project in the language.
IMHO, piracy is in fact a danger to the well-being of the film and video game medium.
Since statements such as yours are nothing but speculation, opinions, and beliefs, they have no real bearing on reality. It has never been shown that piracy affects movie/music sales. In fact, if anything, every real study that tends to pop up shows that piracy has zero to near zero effect.
It's just as reasonable to believe that piracy significantly increases sales of media, because piracy is basically free marketing. And it's also easy to conclude that movie companies are either not affected or positively affected by piracy because year after year they break sales records with new movie releases at the theater.
The producers of the game Crysis vowed to never again release a PC-exclusive game again, due to the sub-par sales which were attributed to piracy.
They attributed it to piracy. This is actually hilarious, honestly. You have to have giant egos to believe your game is just inherently so good that the only reason it isn't a #1 top seller is because of those damned pirates.
Here's the real reason why the game didn't sell well: it sucks. That isn't much of a shocker. Most games suck. But it isn't good marketing to say that about your own game, so pick the popular, typical propaganda line and blame it on "piracy."
Lack of DRM makes it easy to get the movie onto TPB in the first place.
The point is flying over your head.
1. Disc with DRM -> will end up on TPB.
2. Disc without DRM -> will end up on TPB.
So what's the point in ruining discs with DRM in the first place when by this time (and for a long time now) it has been a proven failure as a technique to curb piracy. It's so bad of a solution that the only people who complain about DRM are people who do buy the discs. Anyone with a brain should be pirating everything nowadays.
As a GNOME user, I don't like this at all, and I have no idea why anyone would want to use KDE. I can't stand a desktop environment where I'm able to choose how to configure it, or worse, where others can configure their desktops differently from mine. That's why I like GNOME: it removes all these confusing options, and just gives me the minimum. Desktops need to be as simple as possible, so that users like me aren't confused, and extra options goes against this. KDE is just too complicated, and I can't understand it.
It isn't about being "confused" or somehow not smart enough to use KDE. It's about lacking the time/patience to make a bunch of crappy, poorly thought-out software bearable by spending an inordinate amount of time in baroque Options dialogues for every new program they open.
You might want to try Arch Linux then. I got fed up with the half annual ritual myself, and moved to Arch. it's *not* very easy to setup, but if you follow the step by step instructions you should have a running stable system fast. And from then on : "rolling updates, baby!"
I feel Arch is extremely easy to set up. But I can always understand if it's a little daunting to people who are coming from a strictly desktop/GUI environment. Once you're beyond that though, I'd imagine Arch is much less of a pain than other minimal distros.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the correction; I've updated the story.
And how do you like Simon's Rock? :) (Beautiful place. I'll be up at a nearby YMCA camp several weeks from now.)
timothy
The opening line of the summary, "Four short months after Opera 10.5", suffers from the same issue (as in, it was actually 10.50, not 10.5). Might as well point that out as well.
My father-in-law hates Firefox. After spending three hours installing all the add-ons he thought looked good, it ran like molasses and crashed all the time. You did ask :-)
Well, addons would indeed be the logical thing to ask about when people are apparently having so much trouble with Firefox. I only use Adblock Plus (but I've had probably up to 6 addons installed at once before, all privacy and ad related) and have (almost) always been solidly stable.
I say "almost" because this discussion has reminded me of a time when an addon was causing the Firefox process to hang on exit. It was happening to my friend too. After we uninstalled the addon, the problem disappeared. And even though that was annoying, it still wasn't a crash.
So if you're having issues with Firefox, start uninstalling all your useless, fluffy, garbage addons and see what happens.
This much more detailed comment occurs much later in the discussion because it was moved down by comments that are mostly unhelpful or irrelevant: Firefox is the most unstable program in common use
I've been using Firefox for a really long time, and the only instabilities I've ever witnessed were caused by Flash. Aside from that, I honestly have no remembrance in my head of Firefox crashing. And since plugins are ran in a separate process now, even Flash won't bring it down anymore, although Flash is seeming a lot more stable nowadays as well.
I'm not sure how people are using Firefox that would cause it to crash so much.
So, it's okay for Comcast and NBC to merge then? What about Fox and Cox? Would you claim that rocks?
I would not watch that in a Box.
I would not watch it here or there.
I would not watch it anywhere.
"Facts" correctness has nothing to do with what you believe. Facts are by definition correct.
This shouldn't be modded up because it's wrong. All it takes is a simple glance at a dictionary.
"something said to be true or supposed to have happened: The facts given by the witness are highly questionable."
"Something believed to be true or real: a document laced with mistaken facts."
Treating unsubstantiated beliefs as sacred and taboo will always be a bad thing because you can't challenge a good or bad interpretation with logic and clearly any and all belief systems set up by man for various agendas will have downsides - some more than others.
Not to mention, any time that a death penalty is suggested for anything less than homicide, there's something terribly wrong with the picture.
Anytime the death penalty is suggested at all, there's something terribly wrong with the picture. Nobody can logically explain why it's okay to kill someone when it isn't okay to kill someone.
...to not get sued for pirating movies.
Don't pirate movies.
Also a sure fire 100% guaranteed way to get modded into oblivion I'm sure, but whatever. I just have to ask though: Who the fuck is pirating a Uwe Boll movie? You deserve to get sued morons.
Actually, you're going to (or should) get modded down because this is flamebait. "If you don't want to get sued for doing X, don't do X" is an extremely shallow, closed-minded and unintelligent oversimplification that assumes people should be able to be sued for doing X in the first place.
Sure, I guess that works until you can install Emacs, but I'd hardly call it a real editor....
Yeah, I agree with you man, I'd hardly call Emacs a real editor too. So what's all this talk about installing it?
No link tn the article. Smart move.
Here's a link to the article: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/06/06/2051226/Prosecuting-DDoS-Attacks
News like this tends to rile people up about "the government." Let's take a step back and realize that these problems don't exist because of government, but because of undemocratic governments. Do you think people in FTC were just sitting around and said, "hey, let's introduce a new tax and give it to newspapers!" Obviously not. Giant "news" corporations are lobbying for it. It's more their government than yours. That's why it's being considered.
Absurd taxes (and other bailouts and laws in general) like these would never come up if a real democratic mechanism were in place.
Not all advertising is bad.
Depends on who you ask. You say no, I say yes.
I already block Flash automatically, as it drags down performance and rarely adds any content.
There are a few cases in which useful content has been designed in Flash, but most of the time it is useless eye candy - and more often than not, just pure advertising. A great way to block most advertising that you do not want is to block Flash. Why would you not want to do that?
Or just use Adblock Plus and not worry about whether advertisements are Flash or not. And then you'll have blocked more than most advertising.
Web-pages should be about spreading information, not creating flashy designs.
Cars should be about getting from point A to point B, not being fun to drive or flashy designs.
See how it doesn't work so well to make such a limitation?
Well, I guess you sort of defeated your own argument, since I still don't see the downside of this so-called "limitation". I'll take a solid, well-running, non-flashy vehicle over a flashy, gadget-filled fadmobile that may only just allegedly look pretty.
Piracy leaves no future for outdated, dinosaur business models. Accept it.
Fixed that for you. And I've long accepted and praised it.
It does take some getting used to, but I love it. It's like steaming up and down the coast in an ironclad while the enemy tries to shoot little cannonballs at you from wooden ships.
But my point is to say, at least for myself, what enemies exactly? (Unless you call Javascript itself the enemy, then by all means...)
That barricaded feeling is what became annoying to me after awhile, especially when having to set a bunch of permissions on multiple sites, and some features not working until you approve the right subdomains and blah blah blah. It's annoying after the 500th time, especially across multiple computers.
most people or most nerds? I don't think most people even get ABP, even if they run Firefox, let alone actually know what Javascript is or that its something that can be disabled. Turn off JS these days, and practically nothing works. better would be a plug-in which just prevents Smokescreen from being loaded in particular.
Disabling javascript at the user's will? Forget ABP, that's where noscript comes in! And who doesn't use noscript?
I used NoScript for awhile, but it became annoying and I couldn't really identify any real benefits for myself to use it. ABP is enough for me in terms of making the web bearable. Whatever security benefits I allegedly get from running NoScript become meaningless when confronted with the fact that I don't browse around bizarre and obscure websites in the first place.
But C++ isn't a higher level language, they're not gaining anything but hidden complexity. The low level knowledge you have to possess to use the high level features correctly make them practically useless and you often end up spending more time coaxing the language to do the right thing than you would have spent writing the code yourself. I can assure you that whatever it is that's holding the project back it has absolutely nothing to do with a lack of language features. Everything that should be done in C++ can be done easier and simpler in C by reasonably competent programmers, the rest of C++ is pure madness and it will slowly seep into the project regardless of coding standards.
I wish I had mod points.
From TFA:
"Hey guys, we're going to use C++! Actually, we probably shouldn't use too much because people will either have a hard time understanding it or will often misuse it, because afterall, it's C++. And C++ is a gigantic language so let's bikeshed over what we should allow and shouldn't allow."
You know you picked a crappy language for developing your project in when you're worried about people... you know... developing your project in the language.
We already have a cure for AIDS. They're called condoms.
Oh wow, for real? What do you do with a condom to cure someone with AIDS?
IMHO, piracy is in fact a danger to the well-being of the film and video game medium.
Since statements such as yours are nothing but speculation, opinions, and beliefs, they have no real bearing on reality. It has never been shown that piracy affects movie/music sales. In fact, if anything, every real study that tends to pop up shows that piracy has zero to near zero effect.
It's just as reasonable to believe that piracy significantly increases sales of media, because piracy is basically free marketing. And it's also easy to conclude that movie companies are either not affected or positively affected by piracy because year after year they break sales records with new movie releases at the theater.
The producers of the game Crysis vowed to never again release a PC-exclusive game again, due to the sub-par sales which were attributed to piracy.
They attributed it to piracy. This is actually hilarious, honestly. You have to have giant egos to believe your game is just inherently so good that the only reason it isn't a #1 top seller is because of those damned pirates.
Here's the real reason why the game didn't sell well: it sucks. That isn't much of a shocker. Most games suck. But it isn't good marketing to say that about your own game, so pick the popular, typical propaganda line and blame it on "piracy."
Lack of DRM makes it easy to get the movie onto TPB in the first place.
The point is flying over your head.
1. Disc with DRM -> will end up on TPB.
2. Disc without DRM -> will end up on TPB.
So what's the point in ruining discs with DRM in the first place when by this time (and for a long time now) it has been a proven failure as a technique to curb piracy. It's so bad of a solution that the only people who complain about DRM are people who do buy the discs. Anyone with a brain should be pirating everything nowadays.
so geeks dislike kde. my time to leave /., I guess.
Is this implying geeks should love KDE? If so, why?
As a GNOME user, I don't like this at all, and I have no idea why anyone would want to use KDE. I can't stand a desktop environment where I'm able to choose how to configure it, or worse, where others can configure their desktops differently from mine. That's why I like GNOME: it removes all these confusing options, and just gives me the minimum. Desktops need to be as simple as possible, so that users like me aren't confused, and extra options goes against this. KDE is just too complicated, and I can't understand it.
It isn't about being "confused" or somehow not smart enough to use KDE. It's about lacking the time/patience to make a bunch of crappy, poorly thought-out software bearable by spending an inordinate amount of time in baroque Options dialogues for every new program they open.
Fedora (AKA the Bleeding Edge of all Linux)
No.
In any other case 90% of Desktop Problems are sitting behind the Monitor and at the keyboard.
If users can't figure out how to use the software, it's the software that sucks.
You might want to try Arch Linux then. I got fed up with the half annual ritual myself, and moved to Arch. it's *not* very easy to setup, but if you follow the step by step instructions you should have a running stable system fast. And from then on : "rolling updates, baby!"
I feel Arch is extremely easy to set up. But I can always understand if it's a little daunting to people who are coming from a strictly desktop/GUI environment. Once you're beyond that though, I'd imagine Arch is much less of a pain than other minimal distros.