Man, I wish I could mod this "+1 Raised-Reiker-Eyebrow." Because it's so crazy, and techno-babble-free, that "It just might work, Number One. En-gage!"
Back when the airline industry's faced a similar rite of passage (at the dawn of online-transaction awareness in early 2000) we WON and distributors lost economically. Commissions used to encourage individual travel agents to sell tickets, and people had to physically show up at a local agency to get accurate quotes and close an airplane ticket sale.
But that reseller industry was crushed and the mom-and-pop travel agencies all over the US either closed down, or became cellphone stores, or some tax-prep / cybercafes / pc-repair and limited-benefit airline resaler. This happened because airlines made consumers realize that ordering via their newly awakening internet PCs that involved no commissions and third parties resulted in noticeable discounts to them as travellers. The cultural result is that you now hear the then-unprecedented freedom for people from third world countries to be printing their own boarding passes and checking reservation status online.
It's eye-opening that although airlines price-gouge so much, they have nowhere near the power to milk us in the way we're mistreated by the telco-ISP monster that the USA allowed to mature this past twenty years. I once had to put a cramming block because some random guy told his ISP to charge his Vonage-like IP phone system to our number every month, with nothing more than a WHAM charge happening to us every month. The phone company reverses charges but doesn't care to initiate any fraud investigation, and giving us just an fake AOL e-mail address is useless.
Your PC makes the BEST presentation layer for admiring the satellite data, and it's free. Weather reports are free too, but are too quick, have weathermen covering the data, and can't be rotated to explorer at your leisure --you can even zoom into your local streets and look up to review cloud appearance from the ground.
Fire up Google Earth and look at the radar / cloud pictures (probably close to real-time). Just tick the Weather "layer" and you can select which sublayers to enable, and even take JPEGs.
You probably know already, but the Windows search has options to disable the index. That kills some problems because metadata is no longer sought. Then you click around and set it to only search by filenames rather than inside the files, and it's done.
I still miss the old no-nonsense search that came as its own separate program back in the Windows 95 days. I swear Windows 7 still hides some results that you can find manually.
The only solution I've found to multi-gig "backups" is actually MOVING the files first, and then copying them back if I really did mean to back them up. That also *partly* takes care of not messing up the modification dates except for resetting to "now" folders and maybe creation dates. In a file move, I just have to keep selecting the remaining source files until only the "File is in use" and "CRC error" ones are left.
xcopy is not a default program, and command lines don't work well for deeply nested folders, let alone network shares. Robocopy isn't free, last I checked.
Gnome tends to give me fewer problems when moving files. That said, LET NO SLASHDOTTER continue to try backing up whole volumes over Wifi, even on a quiet 5Ghz N channel 5 feet away. It didn't work back in 2005, and it still doesn't work today on Windows, Macs or Ubuntu. Out of the obligatory 100,000+ filecounts per partition these days, even a select couple of hundred weigh into a gig or two just ALWAYS stops copying a minimum of 3 times. You end up grabbing the wires; wireless drops way below halfway through the handshake'd 300MBps N speeds but even at fractions of the 100MBps on Cat5, the increase increases to simply perfect. I just don't know why Operating Systems that thrive on wireless don't just quietly renegotiate SMB connections on wireless or when someone trips on a cable. Delivery and automated failure correction is much better over the internet.
Hmmm. I should give that Windows Teracopy thing a try next time to see if it gets around unavoidable wireless signal reconnects.
I just can't remember what it looks like. I have a vague sense that its a solid green bar (lighter in colour) with something bouncing back & forth, but I might be mixing it up with something else.
You're right. A search on "windows barber pole" led me to the "Marquee" control in Windows forms at MSDN. It looks like blank progress bar where a 20-40% width marker made up of tiny green progress bars slide back and forth like a train. Think about the red scanner sensor effect in front of Kitt, the AI car in Knight Rider. I first saw it used in Netscape 6 for Windows, IIRC.
DISCLAIMER: I do not have smartphones, my experience with slow smartphones (work blackberry included) and flash video problems hints that it would be nowhere that high on smartphone if both home computers got replaced by them. We have 700MB/30MB per day for a DSL line supporting 3Mbit/s (5 months worth of data.)
There's cumbersome form factor ergonomics and buffering slowness impatience to factor in, one just does not spend that much time downloading, editing a slashdot post (let alone the smartphone-unfriendly "dare to click on the random linux ISO every quarter") There are also those days of streaming for a couple hours, and the random weekend when I watch 10 hours of whatever anime, so once or twice each month I hit the 1.5 to 2.5GB marks on my daily graphs; I would try it out on the smartphone a few times if I knew them not to be capped.
That is a fleeting option nowadays, because providers do not want you to forego your home connections. Phones are meant to be on the road, and now that everyone's hooked, the ISP's are squeezing the noose to signal that we're not getting our way without putting more coins in the gold pot.
Slightly OT: The US can't reach and mess with European slashdotters, so they have much less qualms before stating what neighborhood they live in for all the world to see (forever). Japan's first quake/reactor story had a handful of responders indicating location earlier this year as well as slashdot-JAPAN comments partially translated in very informative efforts of a couple brave souls who said exactly where they got hit.
Despite ALL that, I've NEVER seen so many stating their location --remember that a few months down the road you're the same guys who might just jokingly post the DeCSS key or "You sank my battleship" re-twit. I guess this is how social engineering wins --feelings of helpfulness and disaster collaboration lower our defenses. For those who don't get it, American slashdotters are very secretive about giving up their location on a permanent storage medium because there are so many stalkers and LAWYERS with fingers in the right triggers.
It doesn't matter that a street address wasn't given; to someone dedicated to enough of a payoff, we all fall little by little; just like how everyone here agrees that "physical access makes that 1,000,000bit encryption key useless." Someone with an axe to grind can now google those/. nicks and add "earthquake" to find your town. Based on town, and your posting time, it narrows down which ISPs they need to subpoena for an IP address, without even knocking on Slashdot's doors.
What I find completely wrong is that all these features are being added and almost NONE are being balanced by a nice control GUI. They just throw the storage into a random place, like the below commenter's persistence tab being under Advanced \ Networks in FF (3.6.10 here worked as well as his 6.x build, BTW)
Browsers do not have a standard set of things to block; blink tags were the first warning that very few users even in open-source browsers would probably benefit from a very fine-grained advanced section. I don't know what we're going to do when we get our wishes granted and Flash goes extinct; I can turn flash off, but see no efforts to selectively disable canvas, or even CSS attributes. Being forced to turn off stylesheets just to turn of a particular feature drives home the point that "full blast AND OFF" is a lazy programmer-thought solution to everything this day.
I'm just waiting for the day there's an HTML5 checklist where I can turn stuff off that I don't like. Opera has a very detailed but obscure page akin to FF's about page, with explanations and all. The downside is that you can't know whether features there are browser-specific or HTML5 specific, but I really liked long descriptive lines as opposed to FF's cryptic Registry-like entries. Any setting that is hidden until you create a new key is just asking for obscurity. I just hope FF can copy from Opera's book and provide some sort of in-line string for every option available by default instead of having me google the option and investigave what is relevant for MY particular release.
I'll put on my user hat for a sec, so it will sound harsh, but Joe User doesn't care:
How would you solve these use cases with just <a>'s? a) A web site can verify that the user agent has presented the entirety of one video before offering the link to another video.
Joe User: Not our problem. 10 years ago websites gave me all videos at and I could play and replay at my leisure. What's different now? [yeah, I know, bandwidth abuse, but still Joe User sees no benefit from the business implementation side of things and just clicking on the next link 100 times is still easier than paying a single dollar. Isn't that how Joe User leeches specific porn online?]
b) The advantage to the user is that the user can watch a message from a sponsor instead of providing payment details and paying for each view.
Joe User: I heard that the internet is supposed to be a place for sharing. Why do I need to "pay" anyone for goods I can find elsewhere for free? I can do just that to find ALL my music and videos for free, so I don't care about this one greedy "sponsor"
Disabling flash for everyone on your machine is easy. Arguing with someone who uses the same PC AND/OR re-enabling it for some emergency when time is important, is hard.
And you'd be surprised how many places require it. Streetview requires it, Yahoo mail has some hidden attachment functionality, and Youtube's HTML5 video fails, and sucks when it actually FINDS any video that is available in that format... iPhones load all flash-lacking youtube videos OK, but full-size PC implementations are utterly unusable when parsing the same data, for some reason.
So we're not quite there yet. The day HTML5 comes of age as a real Microsoft standard, you can fully expect your flash-less trip will not protect you that well, and you won't be finding HTML4-only browsers on that day. Apparently HTML5 features will not be GUI-configurable, other than the html5cookie^W "persistent" storage amounts.
This is a "feature," not a "bug." Sales or no sales, they still have the same bills to pay. The artificial demand caused by this past weeked's blowout sale would have been absent without a sale:
Because selling those X million units at a $100-$200 loss generates more gross cash than selling zero of those same units at a $200+ gain:-)
They should be able to sell these things pretty cheap. If you can get Chinese knock-off tablets for under $100, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get a nice tablet at the $200-$300 price point.
Sadly, yes, there is an important reason going against all 1990's logic: profit margins.
Companies no longer see the same first-time buyer volumes that propelled the PC markets in the late nineties because now nearly all developed country households have one multimedia, internet-ready PC at home. When volumes (demand) goes down, supply needs to increase to make the same cash. But this has the effect of creating more of a product that is already not selling very well, and then, lowering prices to attract sales.
Nobody is thanking the price drops of the $1200 PC's of the nineties to today's $400 levels, yet that's availability and cheaper tech. Profit margins have trimmed so low that nobody is giving those internet bundle discounts so common 10 years ago, where someone sold you a PC for a small fraction of the full price so that they could sign you up for a... "dial-up data plan" multi-year contract of that era. All of that was possible because the economy was BOOMING. You can offer a lot and still make a lot of cash by sheer volumes of adoption alone. That explains why pad, android and other expensive tech is so profitable... since the tech is new enough that compared to netbooks and laptops, it is still very competitive in terms of first-adopter profits.
With the new normals in this economic world, the problem is that new "personal" computers appear every 4 years or so that everyone blindly starts accepting. That means ever-high prices for the newest gadget. Remember the mp3 players, then *video* iPods... then the iPhones (and android revolution in general,) the netbooks, the tablets... what will come in the next 3 years? If you follow this logic trend, you'll see the world has already had a full decade of "consumption" devices, and their launch prices have never been under $100USD. That's not a coincidence, and having moved from stored music, to video, to non-stored broadband internet means even more profit if you can sell a binding contract for monthly broadband access as a prerequisite to using your device. Eventually the devices will be cheap and maybe we'll reach a plateau, but perhaps the internet costs will keep rising as "4G" and fiber come of age and people demand to replace their disposables with future versions that integrate newer speeds.
Also, first-time users never know whether the software is hosted at avira.com or smallStartupHosting.com/avira. I did a search and only google returned the correct first result. Yahoo and Bing have ads from two other companies, where Yahoo even has a big fat green download botton for the supposedly Yahoo-sanctioned copy.
I'm a tech, and that hasn't helped much for semi-obscure software like avg and some of the majorgeeks utilities. Apparently free utilities (not libre) are often abandonware that isn't hosted anywhere in particular, so you spend lots of time weeding out forum links and second-guessing which of the top links is the real site. Joe User does not second-guess. He clicks on the very first link there is, often in those nested click-trap sites or SMS-charge traps. At least google used to be pretty clean. Lately there's a lot of SEO sites that are bringing doubt to my software download strategies.
The appstore people may be onto something, but it will just be a blink of an eye before Apple and MS Windows 8 stores begin to do some app-wrapping of their own (never mind that each of their OSs are already DRM'ed enough) Keeping the store up-to-date will surely require a validated, up-to-date Windows update system. Take that, pirates!:(
Very informative thread. I'm looking for my first Android and didn't know that microSD ports are useless unless the Apps and stock bundles are designed with them in mind*
It doesn't help that the Desire only has 500MB RAM (really, I'm surprised the rom is the same size). The funny thing is that even the Gingerbread update is almost 200MB. The file sizes of the Android updates on the HTC page have been ballooning, and it's curious that Android as owned by google has only been out since late 2008, and doubled in size. The HTC android updates page shows an alarming, trend, though not new:
Portable/embedded software continues to grow bloated at a pace that portable consumer hardware doesn't care to fix --compare to dd-wrt failing to fit in your tiny router's RAM.
* It resembles Windows devs who took a decade to learn coding guidelines that would finally stop trying to put config files in (now) read-only folders, have a modern "File open" call and use the "My Documents" folders... even longer for Apache to even ship with an installer fully supporting space-containing foldernames, so that it could finally be installed under "Program Files" --that feature wasn't there in 2005 and you got stuck with C:\Apache and would change that "at your own risk"
That one was easy to master, but there's tons of others I'll get into below that were a pain. Re-training my muscle memory is hard, and makes me look stupid in front of the people that pay you to work on their temporary employment projects:)
It took me a cumulative month of mainly working with mac laptops on different contracts to regain all my windows CTRL-ARROW commands for editing / carot navigation, and the CTRL-SHIFT-ARROW ones for copy-paste duties; much involuntary Workspace switching ensued! The solution was the Fn key, but its location and need is overlooked by full-sized desktop owners. The Option key also had to be used.
My 1998 mac is not working anymore, so I had to do all the keyboard training on the job while nobody was looking at me fumble.
You can probably look around for key binders and bind the backquote key to a slash. Or the coder in you might instead re-awaken the ol' F3 shortcut that used to serve that purpose before all applications forgot about that row of Keys. Who ever expects any "help" out of the F1 key any more on unless their application is from a huge corporation? That's why some keyboards just merge the number row with Fn-based combos to get at those Function keys. Hideous.
A hate that Crome's search box goes away when you change pages.
That's why we don't trust big companies developing GUIs; they do things backwards: 1) The search box goes away. 2) The big download panel at the bottom of your screen stays forever until you close it. This default cannot be changed.
I agree, but today's dynamic pages make it a pain to enforce the old concept that data you have put in a "logical" page is searchable at all times. Twitter / Facebook users must keep scrolling down for the browser to re-load that two-day-old old telephone number that someone posted. Their GUIs don't allow you to filter results. That is because "walls" are of dynamic structure loaded on demand to save bandwidth and time. E-mail interfaces a little better, but nobody mainstream can filter data or sort by date or sender. Unless they've learned at work or taken some long classes on spreadsheets to get that ONE gold nugget out of it.
Still, it is painful seeing people have the equivalent of a phonebook in front of them and try to go page by page when they can just do a Find and look up a person's name. No browser teaches you this, and all the few fancy magnifying glass icons in their GUIs have been perverted as "search the web" rather than find HERE.
On slashdot, the problem is different: you know a discussion URL where someone said "memerific!" but must load all 400 comments by moving sliders / clicking "get 50 more comments" before that CTRL-F search finds the one word that you know you read the day before. That is because of javascript doesn't allow browser searches to unhide comments that the page hides by default. As the world keeps turning with stupid smartphone GUIs that have little copy and paste and forbid all "shortcuts", and desktops begin the MS2007-ification and tablet-ization of all GUIs, we'll be in deep trouble with mountains of old data and no way to sort it out using Windows. And by then users will be too comfortable to start wanting to learn Linux.
I remember in the 90s [...] many people use[d] to take courses on "how to use computers" and shortcut keys were considered a big part of that.
Excellent point. Back then, especially before the internet, we only had a small subset of the kinds of things that we must do now. The biggest curses to learning have come from intractability. I mean, GUI advances and the internet have caused all computers to be different and have different programs.
Back in days of DOS @ home of the eighties and early nineties, courses focused on teaching you history of computing, disk hardware down to learning numbers of cylinders, sectors and tracks, the need to know about disk space management. You also took Lotus for spreadsheets, COBOL, BASIC or other programming courses even if you didn't have reasons to market yourself as a programmer; and I'm talking anyone from teenagers to adults... Back then, all you had was a command line and a knowledge that there was some regime you must endure prior to being able to navigate your brand new system, and shortcuts were welcome because there was no mouse metric to compete against their usefulness. Prior to the web explosion of the late nineties, career switchers (the kind that brings no knowledge to the table and zero interest into advancement except for quick IT cash) had no true motivations to jump into web-development and other parts of IT because the barriers to entry for usage, let alone tech support and infrastructure, were high, and learning by google-ability was not an option.
Now that the "artificial" difficulties has been largely removed in desktops AND phones, it's impossible to expect people to want to deal with real obstacles... I had several people start private tutoring lessons with me or others, just to drop off after 3 or 4 because today's computers world allows you to get lots of positive stimulous while being largely incompetent. That boils down to adults rejecting their need to study with you while enforcing the "let's just ask the computer guy when this requires knowledge." But they still won't be convinced that they need a lesson for why 0.123GB is bigger than 12.345MB. Who wants to learn units just to "emergency" send e-mail videos and photos? The annoying part is that it's always an emergency. Nowadays I just suggest that people sign up into a real class, but they don't want a real learning regime with attendance, testing and actual homework where, you know, they might actually learn something.
Wow. I enjoyed your link. I never accepted tablets that imitating Star Trek technology had to look so awfully different. Just look at all the handles and purposeless bumps on the frame, plus all the wasted space and buttons.
But then I look at the Windows logo on the top tablets. It's evidence that those were kludges meant to run a full-featured Windows OS, assigning a stylus to do nearly all input (and the more alien handles and margin buttons as another kludge to fix the limitations of the stylus-only push). The hidden, rotating keyboards also made them bulky, heavy and probably justified the $2000 pricetags that came with them prior to the advent of modern iPhone/Google-based smartphones with touchscreens
I remember the days of supporting students with Win95, 98, ME, 2000 --all "different," yet all "alike". You have rightly outlined a perfect excuse for forcing friends to software we only know less intimately, but that guarantee to update less so that we can keep up with feature placement and support.
Safari for Windows FINALLY implemented fullscreen support in 5.1 a month ago. In imitation of American credit rating bureaus so popular these days, Vlueboy has evaluated this improvement and is raising Safari's usability rating to "widescreen A+"
I'm writing this from 3.6 on Windows; though I have to admit minefield is on the other computer at version 8, which won't be out till early 2012.
in chrome for blocking flash and stuff like that there's a built in feature. go to about:flags and enable click2play. then enable it in the plugin settings. it works exactly like flashblock!
Thank you very much. Knowing this flags page exists and enables GPU rendering and other nifty stuff is a nice weekend gift. Carry on, kind sir!
Tsk tsk tsk! The internet isn't as "safe" as all of you gossipers, want us to believe. That thing there in the GP is a username, '0123456' and he just gave out two company names 'id' and 'valve'. If you know the USA or have read any lawsuit nightmares here, then you know that giving out his any more triangulating info gets too specific.
Anyone who worked with him on that section of code will notice today, or on a google search a month from now, and is bound to be drawing eyeballs to quote us here for other forums (while post deletion at the HERE source is not an option.) In our crowds or theirs there are bound to be whistle-blowers, old enemies who still work for the GP's company at the time, and the lawyers from all three companies. All three with very large sticks that point at non-expiring NDA's he signed for the privilege to play ball while making a living.
If you personally want "anonymity," then invite us to a 4chan thread created by "you". And be prepared for information that sounds more "substantiated" as you ask, but might be 100% lies from someone youll find isn't even the GP in the first place. That is the point... we really won't know even if GP chooses to reply to you pretending all the info given in his follow-up is "true."
The last few days, with wikipedia and some other stories, slashdot has started to show voyeurs wanting a good story for nostalgia's sake. But we're not a peeping site. There's an unwritten law in professional circles (even beyond medicine's implicit and legal nondisclosure norms) that says that juicy stories should anonymized enough. After all, we ask the same of Facebook and other free services, so we need to be just as considerate.
LOL. Another one in a slippery rope of drawbacks to version inflation death: Even the studies that are supposed to praise you cannot honestly keep.
FF6 was officially released *today*, making the results look ancient because we still expect a major number to last a full year or two for FF. Sadly, I couldn't find much web feedback of this "brand new" version in my native language (a nice way to avoid all the shills and paid reviewers so deeply ingrained in the English-US blogosphere). Zero feedback means I'd look at FF5, but I've never installed it, so it's iffy. The catch 22 is that 4 didn't make stellar grades in this study, so 6 can't be all that much better, with just 6 months of cooking time, can it?
And that, my friends, is the whole thought process that finally drove Mozilla to the madness that was "we're now planning to go all version agnostic YEA!"
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I wish I could mod this "+1 Raised-Reiker-Eyebrow." Because it's so crazy, and techno-babble-free, that
"It just might work, Number One. En-gage!"
Back when the airline industry's faced a similar rite of passage (at the dawn of online-transaction awareness in early 2000) we WON and distributors lost economically. Commissions used to encourage individual travel agents to sell tickets, and people had to physically show up at a local agency to get accurate quotes and close an airplane ticket sale.
But that reseller industry was crushed and the mom-and-pop travel agencies all over the US either closed down, or became cellphone stores, or some tax-prep / cybercafes / pc-repair and limited-benefit airline resaler. This happened because airlines made consumers realize that ordering via their newly awakening internet PCs that involved no commissions and third parties resulted in noticeable discounts to them as travellers. The cultural result is that you now hear the then-unprecedented freedom for people from third world countries to be printing their own boarding passes and checking reservation status online.
It's eye-opening that although airlines price-gouge so much, they have nowhere near the power to milk us in the way we're mistreated by the telco-ISP monster that the USA allowed to mature this past twenty years. I once had to put a cramming block because some random guy told his ISP to charge his Vonage-like IP phone system to our number every month, with nothing more than a WHAM charge happening to us every month. The phone company reverses charges but doesn't care to initiate any fraud investigation, and giving us just an fake AOL e-mail address is useless.
Your PC makes the BEST presentation layer for admiring the satellite data, and it's free. Weather reports are free too, but are too quick, have weathermen covering the data, and can't be rotated to explorer at your leisure --you can even zoom into your local streets and look up to review cloud appearance from the ground.
Fire up Google Earth and look at the radar / cloud pictures (probably close to real-time). Just tick the Weather "layer" and you can select which sublayers to enable, and even take JPEGs.
You probably know already, but the Windows search has options to disable the index. That kills some problems because metadata is no longer sought. Then you click around and set it to only search by filenames rather than inside the files, and it's done.
I still miss the old no-nonsense search that came as its own separate program back in the Windows 95 days. I swear Windows 7 still hides some results that you can find manually.
The only solution I've found to multi-gig "backups" is actually MOVING the files first, and then copying them back if I really did mean to back them up. That also *partly* takes care of not messing up the modification dates except for resetting to "now" folders and maybe creation dates. In a file move, I just have to keep selecting the remaining source files until only the "File is in use" and "CRC error" ones are left.
xcopy is not a default program, and command lines don't work well for deeply nested folders, let alone network shares. Robocopy isn't free, last I checked.
Gnome tends to give me fewer problems when moving files. That said, LET NO SLASHDOTTER continue to try backing up whole volumes over Wifi, even on a quiet 5Ghz N channel 5 feet away. It didn't work back in 2005, and it still doesn't work today on Windows, Macs or Ubuntu. Out of the obligatory 100,000+ filecounts per partition these days, even a select couple of hundred weigh into a gig or two just ALWAYS stops copying a minimum of 3 times. You end up grabbing the wires; wireless drops way below halfway through the handshake'd 300MBps N speeds but even at fractions of the 100MBps on Cat5, the increase increases to simply perfect. I just don't know why Operating Systems that thrive on wireless don't just quietly renegotiate SMB connections on wireless or when someone trips on a cable. Delivery and automated failure correction is much better over the internet.
Hmmm. I should give that Windows Teracopy thing a try next time to see if it gets around unavoidable wireless signal reconnects.
I just can't remember what it looks like. I have a vague sense that its a solid green bar (lighter in colour) with something bouncing back & forth, but I might be mixing it up with something else.
You're right. A search on "windows barber pole" led me to the "Marquee" control in Windows forms at MSDN. It looks like blank progress bar where a 20-40% width marker made up of tiny green progress bars slide back and forth like a train. Think about the red scanner sensor effect in front of Kitt, the AI car in Knight Rider. I first saw it used in Netscape 6 for Windows, IIRC.
DISCLAIMER: I do not have smartphones, my experience with slow smartphones (work blackberry included) and flash video problems hints that it would be nowhere that high on smartphone if both home computers got replaced by them. We have 700MB/30MB per day for a DSL line supporting 3Mbit/s (5 months worth of data.)
There's cumbersome form factor ergonomics and buffering slowness impatience to factor in, one just does not spend that much time downloading, editing a slashdot post (let alone the smartphone-unfriendly "dare to click on the random linux ISO every quarter") There are also those days of streaming for a couple hours, and the random weekend when I watch 10 hours of whatever anime, so once or twice each month I hit the 1.5 to 2.5GB marks on my daily graphs; I would try it out on the smartphone a few times if I knew them not to be capped.
That is a fleeting option nowadays, because providers do not want you to forego your home connections. Phones are meant to be on the road, and now that everyone's hooked, the ISP's are squeezing the noose to signal that we're not getting our way without putting more coins in the gold pot.
Slightly OT: The US can't reach and mess with European slashdotters, so they have much less qualms before stating what neighborhood they live in for all the world to see (forever). Japan's first quake/reactor story had a handful of responders indicating location earlier this year as well as slashdot-JAPAN comments partially translated in very informative efforts of a couple brave souls who said exactly where they got hit.
Despite ALL that, I've NEVER seen so many stating their location --remember that a few months down the road you're the same guys who might just jokingly post the DeCSS key or "You sank my battleship" re-twit. I guess this is how social engineering wins --feelings of helpfulness and disaster collaboration lower our defenses. For those who don't get it, American slashdotters are very secretive about giving up their location on a permanent storage medium because there are so many stalkers and LAWYERS with fingers in the right triggers.
It doesn't matter that a street address wasn't given; to someone dedicated to enough of a payoff, we all fall little by little; just like how everyone here agrees that "physical access makes that 1,000,000bit encryption key useless." Someone with an axe to grind can now google those /. nicks and add "earthquake" to find your town. Based on town, and your posting time, it narrows down which ISPs they need to subpoena for an IP address, without even knocking on Slashdot's doors.
What I find completely wrong is that all these features are being added and almost NONE are being balanced by a nice control GUI. They just throw the storage into a random place, like the below commenter's persistence tab being under Advanced \ Networks in FF (3.6.10 here worked as well as his 6.x build, BTW)
Browsers do not have a standard set of things to block; blink tags were the first warning that very few users even in open-source browsers would probably benefit from a very fine-grained advanced section. I don't know what we're going to do when we get our wishes granted and Flash goes extinct; I can turn flash off, but see no efforts to selectively disable canvas, or even CSS attributes. Being forced to turn off stylesheets just to turn of a particular feature drives home the point that "full blast AND OFF" is a lazy programmer-thought solution to everything this day.
I'm just waiting for the day there's an HTML5 checklist where I can turn stuff off that I don't like. Opera has a very detailed but obscure page akin to FF's about page, with explanations and all. The downside is that you can't know whether features there are browser-specific or HTML5 specific, but I really liked long descriptive lines as opposed to FF's cryptic Registry-like entries. Any setting that is hidden until you create a new key is just asking for obscurity. I just hope FF can copy from Opera's book and provide some sort of in-line string for every option available by default instead of having me google the option and investigave what is relevant for MY particular release.
I'll put on my user hat for a sec, so it will sound harsh, but Joe User doesn't care:
How would you solve these use cases with just <a>'s?
a) A web site can verify that the user agent has presented the entirety of one video before offering the link to another video.
Joe User: Not our problem. 10 years ago websites gave me all videos at and I could play and replay at my leisure. What's different now? [yeah, I know, bandwidth abuse, but still Joe User sees no benefit from the business implementation side of things and just clicking on the next link 100 times is still easier than paying a single dollar. Isn't that how Joe User leeches specific porn online?]
b) The advantage to the user is that the user can watch a message from a sponsor instead of providing payment details and paying for each view.
Joe User: I heard that the internet is supposed to be a place for sharing. Why do I need to "pay" anyone for goods I can find elsewhere for free? I can do just that to find ALL my music and videos for free, so I don't care about this one greedy "sponsor"
Disabling flash for everyone on your machine is easy. Arguing with someone who uses the same PC AND/OR re-enabling it for some emergency when time is important, is hard.
And you'd be surprised how many places require it. Streetview requires it, Yahoo mail has some hidden attachment functionality, and Youtube's HTML5 video fails, and sucks when it actually FINDS any video that is available in that format... iPhones load all flash-lacking youtube videos OK, but full-size PC implementations are utterly unusable when parsing the same data, for some reason.
So we're not quite there yet. The day HTML5 comes of age as a real Microsoft standard, you can fully expect your flash-less trip will not protect you that well, and you won't be finding HTML4-only browsers on that day. Apparently HTML5 features will not be GUI-configurable, other than the html5cookie^W "persistent" storage amounts.
True. Unfortunately, they're selling these at Around a $100-$200 loss on each model sold.
This is a "feature," not a "bug." Sales or no sales, they still have the same bills to pay. The artificial demand caused by this past weeked's blowout sale would have been absent without a sale:
Because selling those X million units at a $100-$200 loss generates more gross cash than selling zero of those same units at a $200+ gain :-)
They should be able to sell these things pretty cheap. If you can get Chinese knock-off tablets for under $100, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get a nice tablet at the $200-$300 price point.
Sadly, yes, there is an important reason going against all 1990's logic: profit margins.
Companies no longer see the same first-time buyer volumes that propelled the PC markets in the late nineties because now nearly all developed country households have one multimedia, internet-ready PC at home. When volumes (demand) goes down, supply needs to increase to make the same cash. But this has the effect of creating more of a product that is already not selling very well, and then, lowering prices to attract sales.
Nobody is thanking the price drops of the $1200 PC's of the nineties to today's $400 levels, yet that's availability and cheaper tech. Profit margins have trimmed so low that nobody is giving those internet bundle discounts so common 10 years ago, where someone sold you a PC for a small fraction of the full price so that they could sign you up for a ... "dial-up data plan" multi-year contract of that era. All of that was possible because the economy was BOOMING. You can offer a lot and still make a lot of cash by sheer volumes of adoption alone. That explains why pad, android and other expensive tech is so profitable... since the tech is new enough that compared to netbooks and laptops, it is still very competitive in terms of first-adopter profits.
With the new normals in this economic world, the problem is that new "personal" computers appear every 4 years or so that everyone blindly starts accepting. That means ever-high prices for the newest gadget. Remember the mp3 players, then *video* iPods... then the iPhones (and android revolution in general,) the netbooks, the tablets... what will come in the next 3 years? If you follow this logic trend, you'll see the world has already had a full decade of "consumption" devices, and their launch prices have never been under $100USD. That's not a coincidence, and having moved from stored music, to video, to non-stored broadband internet means even more profit if you can sell a binding contract for monthly broadband access as a prerequisite to using your device. Eventually the devices will be cheap and maybe we'll reach a plateau, but perhaps the internet costs will keep rising as "4G" and fiber come of age and people demand to replace their disposables with future versions that integrate newer speeds.
Also, first-time users never know whether the software is hosted at avira.com or smallStartupHosting.com/avira. I did a search and only google returned the correct first result. Yahoo and Bing have ads from two other companies, where Yahoo even has a big fat green download botton for the supposedly Yahoo-sanctioned copy.
I'm a tech, and that hasn't helped much for semi-obscure software like avg and some of the majorgeeks utilities. Apparently free utilities (not libre) are often abandonware that isn't hosted anywhere in particular, so you spend lots of time weeding out forum links and second-guessing which of the top links is the real site. Joe User does not second-guess. He clicks on the very first link there is, often in those nested click-trap sites or SMS-charge traps. At least google used to be pretty clean. Lately there's a lot of SEO sites that are bringing doubt to my software download strategies.
The appstore people may be onto something, but it will just be a blink of an eye before Apple and MS Windows 8 stores begin to do some app-wrapping of their own (never mind that each of their OSs are already DRM'ed enough) Keeping the store up-to-date will surely require a validated, up-to-date Windows update system. Take that, pirates! :(
Very informative thread. I'm looking for my first Android and didn't know that microSD ports are useless unless the Apps and stock bundles are designed with them in mind*
It doesn't help that the Desire only has 500MB RAM (really, I'm surprised the rom is the same size). The funny thing is that even the Gingerbread update is almost 200MB. The file sizes of the Android updates on the HTC page have been ballooning, and it's curious that Android as owned by google has only been out since late 2008, and doubled in size. The HTC android updates page shows an alarming, trend, though not new:
Portable/embedded software continues to grow bloated at a pace that portable consumer hardware doesn't care to fix --compare to dd-wrt failing to fit in your tiny router's RAM.
* It resembles Windows devs who took a decade to learn coding guidelines that would finally stop trying to put config files in (now) read-only folders, have a modern "File open" call and use the "My Documents" folders... even longer for Apache to even ship with an installer fully supporting space-containing foldernames, so that it could finally be installed under "Program Files" --that feature wasn't there in 2005 and you got stuck with C:\Apache and would change that "at your own risk"
That one was easy to master, but there's tons of others I'll get into below that were a pain. Re-training my muscle memory is hard, and makes me look stupid in front of the people that pay you to work on their temporary employment projects :)
It took me a cumulative month of mainly working with mac laptops on different contracts to regain all my windows CTRL-ARROW commands for editing / carot navigation, and the CTRL-SHIFT-ARROW ones for copy-paste duties; much involuntary Workspace switching ensued! The solution was the Fn key, but its location and need is overlooked by full-sized desktop owners. The Option key also had to be used.
My 1998 mac is not working anymore, so I had to do all the keyboard training on the job while nobody was looking at me fumble.
You can probably look around for key binders and bind the backquote key to a slash. Or the coder in you might instead re-awaken the ol' F3 shortcut that used to serve that purpose before all applications forgot about that row of Keys. Who ever expects any "help" out of the F1 key any more on unless their application is from a huge corporation? That's why some keyboards just merge the number row with Fn-based combos to get at those Function keys. Hideous.
A hate that Crome's search box goes away when you change pages.
That's why we don't trust big companies developing GUIs; they do things backwards:
1) The search box goes away.
2) The big download panel at the bottom of your screen stays forever until you close it. This default cannot be changed.
I agree, but today's dynamic pages make it a pain to enforce the old concept that data you have put in a "logical" page is searchable at all times. Twitter / Facebook users must keep scrolling down for the browser to re-load that two-day-old old telephone number that someone posted. Their GUIs don't allow you to filter results. That is because "walls" are of dynamic structure loaded on demand to save bandwidth and time. E-mail interfaces a little better, but nobody mainstream can filter data or sort by date or sender. Unless they've learned at work or taken some long classes on spreadsheets to get that ONE gold nugget out of it.
Still, it is painful seeing people have the equivalent of a phonebook in front of them and try to go page by page when they can just do a Find and look up a person's name. No browser teaches you this, and all the few fancy magnifying glass icons in their GUIs have been perverted as "search the web" rather than find HERE.
On slashdot, the problem is different: you know a discussion URL where someone said "memerific!" but must load all 400 comments by moving sliders / clicking "get 50 more comments" before that CTRL-F search finds the one word that you know you read the day before. That is because of javascript doesn't allow browser searches to unhide comments that the page hides by default. As the world keeps turning with stupid smartphone GUIs that have little copy and paste and forbid all "shortcuts", and desktops begin the MS2007-ification and tablet-ization of all GUIs, we'll be in deep trouble with mountains of old data and no way to sort it out using Windows. And by then users will be too comfortable to start wanting to learn Linux.
I remember in the 90s [...] many people use[d] to take courses on "how to use computers" and shortcut keys were considered a big part of that.
Excellent point. Back then, especially before the internet, we only had a small subset of the kinds of things that we must do now. The biggest curses to learning have come from intractability. I mean, GUI advances and the internet have caused all computers to be different and have different programs.
Back in days of DOS @ home of the eighties and early nineties, courses focused on teaching you history of computing, disk hardware down to learning numbers of cylinders, sectors and tracks, the need to know about disk space management. You also took Lotus for spreadsheets, COBOL, BASIC or other programming courses even if you didn't have reasons to market yourself as a programmer; and I'm talking anyone from teenagers to adults... Back then, all you had was a command line and a knowledge that there was some regime you must endure prior to being able to navigate your brand new system, and shortcuts were welcome because there was no mouse metric to compete against their usefulness. Prior to the web explosion of the late nineties, career switchers (the kind that brings no knowledge to the table and zero interest into advancement except for quick IT cash) had no true motivations to jump into web-development and other parts of IT because the barriers to entry for usage, let alone tech support and infrastructure, were high, and learning by google-ability was not an option.
Now that the "artificial" difficulties has been largely removed in desktops AND phones, it's impossible to expect people to want to deal with real obstacles... I had several people start private tutoring lessons with me or others, just to drop off after 3 or 4 because today's computers world allows you to get lots of positive stimulous while being largely incompetent. That boils down to adults rejecting their need to study with you while enforcing the "let's just ask the computer guy when this requires knowledge." But they still won't be convinced that they need a lesson for why 0.123GB is bigger than 12.345MB. Who wants to learn units just to "emergency" send e-mail videos and photos? The annoying part is that it's always an emergency. Nowadays I just suggest that people sign up into a real class, but they don't want a real learning regime with attendance, testing and actual homework where, you know, they might actually learn something.
Wow. I enjoyed your link.
I never accepted tablets that imitating Star Trek technology had to look so awfully different. Just look at all the handles and purposeless bumps on the frame, plus all the wasted space and buttons.
But then I look at the Windows logo on the top tablets. It's evidence that those were kludges meant to run a full-featured Windows OS, assigning a stylus to do nearly all input (and the more alien handles and margin buttons as another kludge to fix the limitations of the stylus-only push). The hidden, rotating keyboards also made them bulky, heavy and probably justified the $2000 pricetags that came with them prior to the advent of modern iPhone/Google-based smartphones with touchscreens
I remember the days of supporting students with Win95, 98, ME, 2000 --all "different," yet all "alike". You have rightly outlined a perfect excuse for forcing friends to software we only know less intimately, but that guarantee to update less so that we can keep up with feature placement and support.
Safari for Windows FINALLY implemented fullscreen support in 5.1 a month ago. In imitation of American credit rating bureaus so popular these days, Vlueboy has evaluated this improvement and is raising Safari's usability rating to "widescreen A+"
I'm writing this from 3.6 on Windows; though I have to admit minefield is on the other computer at version 8, which won't be out till early 2012.
in chrome for blocking flash and stuff like that there's a built in feature. go to about:flags and enable click2play. then enable it in the plugin settings. it works exactly like flashblock!
Thank you very much. Knowing this flags page exists and enables GPU rendering and other nifty stuff is a nice weekend gift. Carry on, kind sir!
Tsk tsk tsk!
The internet isn't as "safe" as all of you gossipers, want us to believe. That thing there in the GP is a username, '0123456' and he just gave out two company names 'id' and 'valve'. If you know the USA or have read any lawsuit nightmares here, then you know that giving out his any more triangulating info gets too specific.
Anyone who worked with him on that section of code will notice today, or on a google search a month from now, and is bound to be drawing eyeballs to quote us here for other forums (while post deletion at the HERE source is not an option.) In our crowds or theirs there are bound to be whistle-blowers, old enemies who still work for the GP's company at the time, and the lawyers from all three companies. All three with very large sticks that point at non-expiring NDA's he signed for the privilege to play ball while making a living.
If you personally want "anonymity," then invite us to a 4chan thread created by "you". And be prepared for information that sounds more "substantiated" as you ask, but might be 100% lies from someone youll find isn't even the GP in the first place. That is the point... we really won't know even if GP chooses to reply to you pretending all the info given in his follow-up is "true."
The last few days, with wikipedia and some other stories, slashdot has started to show voyeurs wanting a good story for nostalgia's sake. But we're not a peeping site. There's an unwritten law in professional circles (even beyond medicine's implicit and legal nondisclosure norms) that says that juicy stories should anonymized enough. After all, we ask the same of Facebook and other free services, so we need to be just as considerate.
Good day to you.
LOL. Another one in a slippery rope of drawbacks to version inflation death: Even the studies that are supposed to praise you cannot honestly keep.
FF6 was officially released *today*, making the results look ancient because we still expect a major number to last a full year or two for FF. Sadly, I couldn't find much web feedback of this "brand new" version in my native language (a nice way to avoid all the shills and paid reviewers so deeply ingrained in the English-US blogosphere). Zero feedback means I'd look at FF5, but I've never installed it, so it's iffy. The catch 22 is that 4 didn't make stellar grades in this study, so 6 can't be all that much better, with just 6 months of cooking time, can it?
And that, my friends, is the whole thought process that finally drove Mozilla to the madness that was "we're now planning to go all version agnostic YEA!"