Yes, I suggested exactly this, thanks. Having a paperweight for a secondary monitor is only a problem if you have to do work for the majority of time under those conditions: linux as your main desktop means > 50% of your PC time.
If there were so many dual screen devs out there using linux like this, a reliable workaround would be available. When enough devs get vexed by the dual monitor issue, eventual refinement of their individual patches will fix what is a problem with auto-detect and auto-config. Enough years have passed that we would not even be posting in this thread if the dev niche existed:)
Just remember those ipv6 fixes years ago when linux faced had cripling dns slowness. IPv6 is a lot newer than multi-mon, but devs were corrected the flaw early.
Remember that people normally associate with people in similar circles for work, and the other devs will have similar setups as your own. It doesn't mean that your setup is standard for devs, and that's why we don't yet have a fix.
Am I the only one that uses two monitors under Linux, or do I just happen to have the two monitors that don't work?
The burning desire of day-to-day dual monitor usage is stronger for us 16:9 laptop owners. The KDE and GNOME environments use randr and other tools that fail to set up combined desktops without major mucking of config files. Especially with the case where you have different resolutions (to extend your small 16:9 laptop desktop by adding a large 4:3 monitor's desktop.)
People who have a second monitor normally run graphic apps on Windows or games that keep them occupied, so caring about improving platforms is not on the forefront. The people who matter are the devs. Most devs are privileged in having powerful desktops. Many probably have stable videocards and comfy LCD screens that don't allow time to be worried about the problems of everyone else. Kinda like how winmodem support died --largely because most linux users already had broadband.
Good dependency-free (albeit platform-specific) alternatives are.vbs (visual basic script) and.js. Both allow access to more modern dialog boxes etc. [...] I believe there is an automatic file association by default (at least for.vbs files).
There is a default association. The ubiquity, power to automate tasks and download or chain other code, is all there, even if we don't care to use it any more than we cared for DOS. This level of automation available by default is exactly what made e-mail attachment code in the form of small plaintext files so powerful.
If I get a pace maker and someone is able to root it - how will I know?
Decreasing pulse means you're already a botnet zombie DOS'ing a host. Compare to "missing" time commonly attributed to alien abduction in the USA. Real cause? rooted "metal plate" implants. Solution: Tinfoil! Lot's of tinfoil.
Re:Even though Fedora is my desktop of choice
on
Fedora 13 Is Out
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· Score: 1
I tried the beta at the weekend and NetworkManager resolutely refused to enable my wireless LAN; I had to go to the command line and 'ifup wlan0' to get it to work. I guess that's better than the Ubuntu NetworkManager repeatedly asking for my 64-character WPA2 password even though it's already been configured.
I saw the same happen in Centos while the Ubuntu partition has been working perfectly. I can't blame my OS if you're seeing it too. The issue is either NetworkManager, or the Gnome keychain manager. Either way, we're stuck with them and their lesser known alternatives.
The browser's option fails to give context and mention HTML5, but thanks. My version says, more or less, "Default storage to save databases" and defaults to 100MB.
I'm not endorsing Google's collection, but aren't people who openly broadcast their data be at least *a little* at fault here?
No. I would be "a little at fault" if I use apps to willingly disclose my static IP and MAC on a forum. By default we expect the broadcast signal to cease to exist beyond reasonable ranges. The problem at hand is that at least 1 in 2/. geeks doesn't even know about AP Geomapping sites like wigle. Suddenly my witty AP name is accessible to anyone who knows where I live. Lack of knowledge means potential for misuse, even if a name isn't particulary helpful to most people today. The stakes always change when your joke is visible at a global scale, as shown by public outcry over Facebook's recent default privacy blunders.
Remember how Windows 2000 users we not at fault for buying a system lacking a firewall out of the box. Microsoft itself was at fault, but only technically because they stood idle while Blaster and other worms took advantage of open ports in our baby internet days. John Q. Public cannot be "at fault" for the openness of access points. De-facto policies are at a sweet spot without hiding the AP name; not all people who use or buy a wireless router can grok the why or how "hidden wireless" works. They just want to pay for their new "phone/internet bundle service thing" and plug and play their equipment. The past 5 years have already brought us WAP encryption-on-first-run wizards.
Router makers will have a big problem with user feedback if their wizards hide AP names on the very same day of purchase. Brand new customers are savvy enough to use WPA keys. They aren't savvy to "find" and troubleshoot a "hidden by default" AP from their iPod, phone, PSP or laptop. Most buyers will return units that they can't connect to, ignoring how it would be "more secure." Blame the industry, because you can't solve social problems without more technology these days.
Having various tabs open, I've seen thumbnail image sites where requesting a special image opens up a single large popup window for the entire site. All my tabs for the site send image updates to just the one popup, without opening other unecessary ones until I close it. Since most sites lack this discriminate control over how they open and control one a separate window, I'd say "yes." They probably do it by window title or something.
Submarine features are scary... HTML5 enables sites to save data to a mandatory browser-side DB (see "todo" lists, for example.) Though this has even more potential than cookies for misuse, Safari and Firefox currently auto-allow the feature and give you no control over it.
On second thought [...] Let's make these creeps lifelong indentured servant to whomever they have harmed. I wouldn't mind having the guy who stole my credit card and purchased $4000 at Walmart serve as my maid for a summer.
I surely would enjoy having fat geeks around my house calling me "Master!"... just because they're wearing this.
PS: Please call me if you find slender female scammers! There's all these animes I've been watching...
I hear settlers of catan is a "gateway" game leading newbies to more complex RPG games, and allows for a combination of cards, competitive strategy and if you like, roleplaying. I haven't played it yet, but there are podcasts out there that mention it, like "Fear the Boot." The point is that it's like playing a light RPG but at a family/friends level without the stigmas of multi-day campaigns and basement dueling.
1. Update sites 2. Sharing sites 3. Digg / Reddit clones 4. Forced Registration sites 5. Social Media sites 6. Facebook clones 7. Flash sites 8. Web 2.0 sites
1,2,3, 5, 6 and 8 are almost the same, and sadly, all here to stay. Business processes ($$$) that weren't moving the web 20 years ago will guarantee it. Pandora's box, people.
I really expected a historical article about sites that are no longer, um, "socially vital" and have silently and mysteriously disappeared from the public eye.
Here's better candidates: "Shrine" sites with old midi's and gifs (we have blogs now). Ring sites linking each other so you don't need to search to find related interests. Sites with downloads of quirky icon sets and mouse pointers.
Sites that *should* also die because they're less usefull than those the TFA discusses: Perpetual domain parkers and typo squatters. Fake sites fishing for webcrawlers to point to thousands of other links, having no content themselves and adding noise to my searches. And I say to myself... "Good luck with THAT."
My 3 year old Vista "SP0" laptop was unstable and would mysteriously fail SP1 attempts via Windows update.
After biting the bullet, the factory restore alone took about 1.5 hours. Installing pre-downloaded, SP1 and SP2 plus reboots took another 2 hours. After a couple days of rest, exploration, and de-crapifying, I installed IE8 and remaining windows updates. That probably took another hour or two.
True that a bad OS yields to sales of a different OS from this same MS maker. However, I haven't seen 7 being miles away from Vista. Most techheads just weren't forced like me to use it exclusively. Techs always know they can boot to linux, buy a cheap iMac and all, but most can be filed under "future" income. Pirating aside, techs eventually bundle PC's with whatever NEW Windows exists without a stigma for being broken.
Takes microsoft years to realize what everyone else knew in minutes
It always does when it comes to admitting public failure. Hell, the cause of May 6th's 1,000 point stock blip on the Dow Jones is still "uncertain" 3 weeks later --the stakes of millionaries playing with and against millionaires are too high to admit failure in some key, currently unfixable piece of the puzzle.
Companies normally apologize when they have a new product or fix available. Otherwise, you end up like Toyota's 2010 recall, where the apology comes too early, and fear / uncertainty / doubt about a solution destroy much credibility. Credibility translates to money.
The point isn't whether you can post some obscure link --knowledge by obscurity is not knowledge. Clicking around, turning off 3 "auto-update" features on a per-user basis and branching to a Safari to download extensions is supposed to be more manageable... The company needs to provide the features centrally and without per-user-per about:config changes.
There hasn't been documentation on the XPI download tricks, and the version hack refuses to work for most extensions. Forced workarounds aren't justifiable even if "they take 10 seconds." The barrier to entry requires very specific searches against taboos from FF's point of view.
And yes, central installation, control and deployment of FF is often brought forward as a dragging weight against FF's progress in the enterprise. You can't just post a one-liner and dismiss an entire comment based on apathy to parts of it. In the end, it's not me speaking. Firefox is already sinking and won't be matter at all in three years.
Ever try to find an old release of FF on the FF website ? If open source means anything, doesn't it mean you can get the previous releases, anytime you want ? Failure to give add on developers a stable platform, and failure to give users a way to isolate bad addons
I've always hated companies that hide old versions, especially if they force you to upgrade by shutting down access (also looking at you, Windows Live Messenger.) I find it very oppressive that Firefox is set to upgrade itself by default. There are pretty bad side effects, like suddenly finding that most of your extensions are disabled until the each and every one of the devs pushes an update. Furthermore, their addon website prohibits you from downloading the extension files (.xpi) for later usage. I have many partitions and users per OS, and it's a pain to redownload each extension per user profile. There's no centered extension management tool (no wonder businesses don't "do" Firefox.) Worse is that if you're not using FF to get your extensions, or your browser version is not numerically "adequate," you can't acquire the extension at all.
People here state that devs must thoroughly check each extension for every upgrade before I am entitled to use it, but this is total bologna since 0.0.1 increases won't destroy backward compatibility, and I'm supposed to be responsible for my own experimental actions in the real world. It feels like a Apple's walled garden to me.
Forgot to say that your normal doctor feels that all your questions are just extra work. An alt doctor whom you're paying to see has a clean slate, and feels the obligation to find why you think you have the problem.
The alt doctor's being fresh to an educated slashdotter's case and blind to records misleading a primary doctor is what spells success.
Plus I'm sure very few people are willing to sound stupid. Few will comment on how they had a dangerous brush googleitis and their doctor saved them from doing something stupid.
For most people, they are better off googling their own symptom first, get a general understanding of what could be the cause of it, so that you can better talk to your family doctor on what test to do and which specialist to see.
We geeks do not trust users to program our VCR (ugh, too old an example, but specific) or clean our spyware successfully. People suck at applying knowledge and following detailed, long-winded instructions. Halfway through a page, normal people will do self-selected bias and shut out anything implying that the illness is not their own.
The simple fact that slashdotters are good with machines and programming means we can also give and follow instructions well; understanding risks of googling and fairly weighing evidence to really prove that doctors suck. However, we are not doctors. The problem really is that for every benefited slashdotter there is a few fools doing it wrong. My mother gets dangerous emails about "if you have x symptoms, you probably...," "drink such and suck to cure cancer" and malevolent powerpoint slides with fake, non-traceable statements. She wanted me to save her if she ever got a seizure... her email said that bloodletting with needles can stop a seizure. I had to work hard to find her proof that it was a hoax and an attempt to land someone with an extra problem to what they were already having.
Of course, the sensible thing is google for "hoax" and "fake," weigh evidence, to leave the second opinion to a different doctor who doesn't see you everyday. Just like with coding, a second pair of expert eyes can solve more than we normally can't see past with just one.
IPv6, Hard drives, multiple cpu cores... just too many Hz and bits. [...] Drive makers: Take a pause, catch your breath and work on access times, reliability, and pushing reforming drive technologies like GPT.
Parent is insightful, and hasn't been modded up. Our industry thrives in forced obsolecense of older capable tech... while skipping real features that should be priorities.
If these companies weren't American, craving "bigger is better (at the same $$$ margin)" we would see reliable drives and improved access times. Companies put the foot down and we lose anyway: the last time I heard of a race to reduce RGB dot pitch size (increasing monitor resolutions without an end in sight) was when the USA introduced HDTV and widescreen LCD's... This resolution listshows favor to HD and widescreen, though it didn't exist at all around 1998. It's just that profit margins on 4:3 became smaller.
HD fixed resolutions to an immovable size and forced resolutions to relatively poor movie-ready sizes, ignoring graphic work, increasingly cheap large monitors at the home and gaming or 3D editing at huge resolutions. Imagine the profit margins when you no more R&D to invest in. 1080p just doesn't compete with, er.. "1200p" monitors of yesteryear, but the industry took the latter away from my local stores.
Basically, with the original LBA limit set at 2.1TB, it seemed pointless for anyone else to prepare for any capacity beyond this, so we now have a situation where many hard drive controllers, BIOSes, drivers and operating systems are all set with caps of 2.1TB, and this is going to take an industry-wide overhaul to overturn.
Heh! They ARE the industry. Good ideas normally float to the top. Bad ideas have to be forced down customer throats by greedy marketers, making things industry standards.
So, if nothing has been standardized yet, then here's what I see: Just like 56K being the absolute max in dial-up speeds, a competitor develops a "good enough" incompatible standard to push down people's throats, like DSL. They begin profitting, and others follow suit, even if slowly. Contrast to ISDN being the losing choice to DSL --speedwise it was competitive in the early DSL days, but home pricing and 2-line inconvenience killed it.
why did they bother with 3TB? Should the next step be 4TB? We are counting in binary are we not?
They are the same sector that came up with the idea that 1 MB == 1,000,000 bytes. to steal ~5% per MB. So the answer is "no.":) The metric system's 10-ness was convenient to them in this case.
Drives sell a lot, and this saved them some big bucks; you can consider it a perpetual "tax." By how round the number is, they're also trying to one-up inevitable offers of 2.5TB from competitors. I'm sure they count in cash-iary.
Aack! the IRONY!!:) Try to sell a 5 year old PC for the same price you can sell a mac, and you'll get laughs. At least they lose value more slowly. The bad part is the only people needing old macs are students who can't afford much... to be exact, the sub $400PC/netbook market introduced a few years ago (and need to have dual core for decent Youtube playback) is killing second hand PC markets.
I still have an OS 8.6 266Mhz G3 Desktop under my desk. I agree that without internet you can't sell anything nowadays, and even then, CSS, tag parsing glitches and buttons that just won't feel clicks make the experience go down the tubes on Netscape/IE 4 and iCab... even on the few modern alternative browsers you can install long after Apple kills support. Same happens with my dinosaur Windows laptop running IE3. Ugh.
a corporation dares to choose a widely-used product with a large install base, which fits their use requirements, as opposed to a relatively new, only moderate install base with different features available (no Firefox/Opera with H.264, no Safari/iPhone with Theora, no Internet Explorer period), which does not fit their use requirements on even one browse
And that's the ticket! Even if IE market penetration is supposedly down to 53%, a good 100% of the rest offers no agreeable solution, and companies ignore HTML5 since its standard is not even complete yet. I hate to admit it, but until an HTML5-ready IE9 or 10 brings Windows penetration from currenly 0% to a 50%+, corps won't bat an eye. Adobe is here now and it's familiar --that's why CEO's keep putting it in their expenses budget.
Budgetting support for transitions is a bigger problem than/.ers think. Example? Youtube's HTML5 is badly broken on most videos, new and old; and if you recall, Youtube has Google's geniuses and cash, and still can't produce a 100% flash-free streaming experience. I haven't even mentioned "implementing DRM" --our HTML5 pre-standard itself can be amended and DRM added to it, if the industry asks. Now, assuming our 47% alt browser market [about 15% or more non-HTML5 compliant from the chart data] uses Youtube. Very few even take the secretive HTML5 testdrive. Those that do rarely mention how quickly the endless "spinning buffering" bug caused them to switch back to 100% flash. I have tried from dff platforms and browsers with little success, and see others have failure even on the "featured" HTML5 content, with no error messages or extra guidance from Youtube.
At least Scribd seems to have a real working HTML5 implementation, because video is not a problem in transcoding books. When youtube fixes their problem, they'll do just like scribd: instead of hiding HTML5 in a geeky URL, they'll put a link to "see this file using html5" on every page.
Actually, I think Google is much smarter than the average company. Most companies tend to invest in something then struggle to find how to make money on it. Google does exactly the opposite, it's taking a profitable business model and tries to expand the scope. The more you use online services, and in particular Google services or Google-owned sites like YouTube, the more Google learns about you. That's what Google really sells, being able to target a market and hit it.
Google image search and google earth are public environments where they kinda got the ball rolling. Even though they're expanding markets, they're not just adding a patentable and closed gimmick layer; they're doing things that most other players end up incorporating. Brightly colored unzoomable maps of 15 years ago are long gone. I have pretty much discarded a potential IT partner partly because their: "how to get here" map is an old gif from 1999 and the fact that they are jerks.
Slashdot Mirror
...and Mac 7 gave us the integrated Multifinder.
Oops. I should have spelt Mach right :)
Thanks!
Yes, I suggested exactly this, thanks. Having a paperweight for a secondary monitor is only a problem if you have to do work for the majority of time under those conditions: linux as your main desktop means > 50% of your PC time.
If there were so many dual screen devs out there using linux like this, a reliable workaround would be available. When enough devs get vexed by the dual monitor issue, eventual refinement of their individual patches will fix what is a problem with auto-detect and auto-config. Enough years have passed that we would not even be posting in this thread if the dev niche existed :)
Just remember those ipv6 fixes years ago when linux faced had cripling dns slowness. IPv6 is a lot newer than multi-mon, but devs were corrected the flaw early.
Remember that people normally associate with people in similar circles for work, and the other devs will have similar setups as your own. It doesn't mean that your setup is standard for devs, and that's why we don't yet have a fix.
Mac 5 melts aluminum steadily
Mac 6 melts steel
And don't forget that keeping this friction heat down also requires a good deal of power.
Am I the only one that uses two monitors under Linux, or do I just happen to have the two monitors that don't work?
The burning desire of day-to-day dual monitor usage is stronger for us 16:9 laptop owners. The KDE and GNOME environments use randr and other tools that fail to set up combined desktops without major mucking of config files. Especially with the case where you have different resolutions (to extend your small 16:9 laptop desktop by adding a large 4:3 monitor's desktop.)
People who have a second monitor normally run graphic apps on Windows or games that keep them occupied, so caring about improving platforms is not on the forefront. The people who matter are the devs. Most devs are privileged in having powerful desktops. Many probably have stable videocards and comfy LCD screens that don't allow time to be worried about the problems of everyone else. Kinda like how winmodem support died --largely because most linux users already had broadband.
Good dependency-free (albeit platform-specific) alternatives are .vbs (visual basic script) and .js. Both allow access to more modern dialog boxes etc. [...] I believe there is an automatic file association by default (at least for .vbs files).
There is a default association. The ubiquity, power to automate tasks and download or chain other code, is all there, even if we don't care to use it any more than we cared for DOS. This level of automation available by default is exactly what made e-mail attachment code in the form of small plaintext files so powerful.
If I get a pace maker and someone is able to root it - how will I know?
Decreasing pulse means you're already a botnet zombie DOS'ing a host.
Compare to "missing" time commonly attributed to alien abduction in the USA. Real cause? rooted "metal plate" implants.
Solution: Tinfoil! Lot's of tinfoil.
I tried the beta at the weekend and NetworkManager resolutely refused to enable my wireless LAN; I had to go to the command line and 'ifup wlan0' to get it to work. I guess that's better than the Ubuntu NetworkManager repeatedly asking for my 64-character WPA2 password even though it's already been configured.
I saw the same happen in Centos while the Ubuntu partition has been working perfectly. I can't blame my OS if you're seeing it too. The issue is either NetworkManager, or the Gnome keychain manager. Either way, we're stuck with them and their lesser known alternatives.
The browser's option fails to give context and mention HTML5, but thanks. My version says, more or less, "Default storage to save databases" and defaults to 100MB.
I'm not endorsing Google's collection, but aren't people who openly broadcast their data be at least *a little* at fault here?
No. I would be "a little at fault" if I use apps to willingly disclose my static IP and MAC on a forum. By default we expect the broadcast signal to cease to exist beyond reasonable ranges. The problem at hand is that at least 1 in 2 /. geeks doesn't even know about AP Geomapping sites like wigle. Suddenly my witty AP name is accessible to anyone who knows where I live. Lack of knowledge means potential for misuse, even if a name isn't particulary helpful to most people today. The stakes always change when your joke is visible at a global scale, as shown by public outcry over Facebook's recent default privacy blunders.
Remember how Windows 2000 users we not at fault for buying a system lacking a firewall out of the box. Microsoft itself was at fault, but only technically because they stood idle while Blaster and other worms took advantage of open ports in our baby internet days. John Q. Public cannot be "at fault" for the openness of access points. De-facto policies are at a sweet spot without hiding the AP name; not all people who use or buy a wireless router can grok the why or how "hidden wireless" works. They just want to pay for their new "phone/internet bundle service thing" and plug and play their equipment. The past 5 years have already brought us WAP encryption-on-first-run wizards.
Router makers will have a big problem with user feedback if their wizards hide AP names on the very same day of purchase. Brand new customers are savvy enough to use WPA keys. They aren't savvy to "find" and troubleshoot a "hidden by default" AP from their iPod, phone, PSP or laptop. Most buyers will return units that they can't connect to, ignoring how it would be "more secure." Blame the industry, because you can't solve social problems without more technology these days.
Having various tabs open, I've seen thumbnail image sites where requesting a special image opens up a single large popup window for the entire site. All my tabs for the site send image updates to just the one popup, without opening other unecessary ones until I close it. Since most sites lack this discriminate control over how they open and control one a separate window, I'd say "yes." They probably do it by window title or something.
Submarine features are scary... HTML5 enables sites to save data to a mandatory browser-side DB (see "todo" lists, for example.) Though this has even more potential than cookies for misuse, Safari and Firefox currently auto-allow the feature and give you no control over it.
On second thought [...] Let's make these creeps lifelong indentured servant to whomever they have harmed. I wouldn't mind having the guy who stole my credit card and purchased $4000 at Walmart serve as my maid for a summer.
I surely would enjoy having fat geeks around my house calling me "Master!"... just because they're wearing this.
PS: Please call me if you find slender female scammers! There's all these animes I've been watching...
P.S. Why is settlers of catan so popular?!
I hear settlers of catan is a "gateway" game leading newbies to more complex RPG games, and allows for a combination of cards, competitive strategy and if you like, roleplaying. I haven't played it yet, but there are podcasts out there that mention it, like "Fear the Boot." The point is that it's like playing a light RPG but at a family/friends level without the stigmas of multi-day campaigns and basement dueling.
1,2,3, 5, 6 and 8 are almost the same, and sadly, all here to stay. Business processes ($$$) that weren't moving the web 20 years ago will guarantee it. Pandora's box, people.
I really expected a historical article about sites that are no longer, um, "socially vital" and have silently and mysteriously disappeared from the public eye.
Here's better candidates: "Shrine" sites with old midi's and gifs (we have blogs now). Ring sites linking each other so you don't need to search to find related interests. Sites with downloads of quirky icon sets and mouse pointers.
Sites that *should* also die because they're less usefull than those the TFA discusses: Perpetual domain parkers and typo squatters. Fake sites fishing for webcrawlers to point to thousands of other links, having no content themselves and adding noise to my searches. And I say to myself... "Good luck with THAT."
My 3 year old Vista "SP0" laptop was unstable and would mysteriously fail SP1 attempts via Windows update.
After biting the bullet, the factory restore alone took about 1.5 hours. Installing pre-downloaded, SP1 and SP2 plus reboots took another 2 hours. After a couple days of rest, exploration, and de-crapifying, I installed IE8 and remaining windows updates. That probably took another hour or two.
True that a bad OS yields to sales of a different OS from this same MS maker. However, I haven't seen 7 being miles away from Vista. Most techheads just weren't forced like me to use it exclusively. Techs always know they can boot to linux, buy a cheap iMac and all, but most can be filed under "future" income. Pirating aside, techs eventually bundle PC's with whatever NEW Windows exists without a stigma for being broken.
Takes microsoft years to realize what everyone else knew in minutes
It always does when it comes to admitting public failure. Hell, the cause of May 6th's 1,000 point stock blip on the Dow Jones is still "uncertain" 3 weeks later --the stakes of millionaries playing with and against millionaires are too high to admit failure in some key, currently unfixable piece of the puzzle.
Companies normally apologize when they have a new product or fix available. Otherwise, you end up like Toyota's 2010 recall, where the apology comes too early, and fear / uncertainty / doubt about a solution destroy much credibility. Credibility translates to money.
I have seen Ballmer's behavior often in IT.
Please.
The point isn't whether you can post some obscure link --knowledge by obscurity is not knowledge. Clicking around, turning off 3 "auto-update" features on a per-user basis and branching to a Safari to download extensions is supposed to be more manageable... The company needs to provide the features centrally and without per-user-per about:config changes.
There hasn't been documentation on the XPI download tricks, and the version hack refuses to work for most extensions. Forced workarounds aren't justifiable even if "they take 10 seconds." The barrier to entry requires very specific searches against taboos from FF's point of view.
And yes, central installation, control and deployment of FF is often brought forward as a dragging weight against FF's progress in the enterprise. You can't just post a one-liner and dismiss an entire comment based on apathy to parts of it. In the end, it's not me speaking. Firefox is already sinking and won't be matter at all in three years.
Ever try to find an old release of FF on the FF website ? If open source means anything, doesn't it mean you can get the previous releases, anytime you want ?
Failure to give add on developers a stable platform, and failure to give users a way to isolate bad addons
I've always hated companies that hide old versions, especially if they force you to upgrade by shutting down access (also looking at you, Windows Live Messenger.) I find it very oppressive that Firefox is set to upgrade itself by default. There are pretty bad side effects, like suddenly finding that most of your extensions are disabled until the each and every one of the devs pushes an update. Furthermore, their addon website prohibits you from downloading the extension files (.xpi) for later usage. I have many partitions and users per OS, and it's a pain to redownload each extension per user profile. There's no centered extension management tool (no wonder businesses don't "do" Firefox.) Worse is that if you're not using FF to get your extensions, or your browser version is not numerically "adequate," you can't acquire the extension at all.
People here state that devs must thoroughly check each extension for every upgrade before I am entitled to use it, but this is total bologna since 0.0.1 increases won't destroy backward compatibility, and I'm supposed to be responsible for my own experimental actions in the real world. It feels like a Apple's walled garden to me.
Forgot to say that your normal doctor feels that all your questions are just extra work. An alt doctor whom you're paying to see has a clean slate, and feels the obligation to find why you think you have the problem.
The alt doctor's being fresh to an educated slashdotter's case and blind to records misleading a primary doctor is what spells success.
Plus I'm sure very few people are willing to sound stupid. Few will comment on how they had a dangerous brush googleitis and their doctor saved them from doing something stupid.
For most people, they are better off googling their own symptom first, get a general understanding of what could be the cause of it, so that you can better talk to your family doctor on what test to do and which specialist to see.
We geeks do not trust users to program our VCR (ugh, too old an example, but specific) or clean our spyware successfully. People suck at applying knowledge and following detailed, long-winded instructions. Halfway through a page, normal people will do self-selected bias and shut out anything implying that the illness is not their own.
The simple fact that slashdotters are good with machines and programming means we can also give and follow instructions well; understanding risks of googling and fairly weighing evidence to really prove that doctors suck. However, we are not doctors. The problem really is that for every benefited slashdotter there is a few fools doing it wrong. My mother gets dangerous emails about "if you have x symptoms, you probably...," "drink such and suck to cure cancer" and malevolent powerpoint slides with fake, non-traceable statements. She wanted me to save her if she ever got a seizure... her email said that bloodletting with needles can stop a seizure. I had to work hard to find her proof that it was a hoax and an attempt to land someone with an extra problem to what they were already having.
Of course, the sensible thing is google for "hoax" and "fake," weigh evidence, to leave the second opinion to a different doctor who doesn't see you everyday. Just like with coding, a second pair of expert eyes can solve more than we normally can't see past with just one.
IPv6, Hard drives, multiple cpu cores... just too many Hz and bits. [...]
Drive makers: Take a pause, catch your breath and work on access times, reliability, and pushing reforming drive technologies like GPT.
Parent is insightful, and hasn't been modded up. Our industry thrives in forced obsolecense of older capable tech... while skipping real features that should be priorities.
If these companies weren't American, craving "bigger is better (at the same $$$ margin)" we would see reliable drives and improved access times. Companies put the foot down and we lose anyway: the last time I heard of a race to reduce RGB dot pitch size (increasing monitor resolutions without an end in sight) was when the USA introduced HDTV and widescreen LCD's... This resolution listshows favor to HD and widescreen, though it didn't exist at all around 1998. It's just that profit margins on 4:3 became smaller.
HD fixed resolutions to an immovable size and forced resolutions to relatively poor movie-ready sizes, ignoring graphic work, increasingly cheap large monitors at the home and gaming or 3D editing at huge resolutions. Imagine the profit margins when you no more R&D to invest in. 1080p just doesn't compete with, er.. "1200p" monitors of yesteryear, but the industry took the latter away from my local stores.
From TFA:
Basically, with the original LBA limit set at 2.1TB, it seemed pointless for anyone else to prepare for any capacity beyond this, so we now have a situation where many hard drive controllers, BIOSes, drivers and operating systems are all set with caps of 2.1TB, and this is going to take an industry-wide overhaul to overturn.
Heh! They ARE the industry. Good ideas normally float to the top. Bad ideas have to be forced down customer throats by greedy marketers, making things industry standards.
So, if nothing has been standardized yet, then here's what I see:
Just like 56K being the absolute max in dial-up speeds, a competitor develops a "good enough" incompatible standard to push down people's throats, like DSL. They begin profitting, and others follow suit, even if slowly. Contrast to ISDN being the losing choice to DSL --speedwise it was competitive in the early DSL days, but home pricing and 2-line inconvenience killed it.
why did they bother with 3TB? Should the next step be 4TB? We are counting in binary are we not?
They are the same sector that came up with the idea that 1 MB == 1,000,000 bytes. to steal ~5% per MB. So the answer is "no." :) The metric system's 10-ness was convenient to them in this case.
Drives sell a lot, and this saved them some big bucks; you can consider it a perpetual "tax." By how round the number is, they're also trying to one-up inevitable offers of 2.5TB from competitors. I'm sure they count in cash-iary.
Correction:
>>>I had to [sell] a perfectly good Mac G4
Aack! the IRONY!! :)
Try to sell a 5 year old PC for the same price you can sell a mac, and you'll get laughs. At least they lose value more slowly. The bad part is the only people needing old macs are students who can't afford much... to be exact, the sub $400PC/netbook market introduced a few years ago (and need to have dual core for decent Youtube playback) is killing second hand PC markets.
I still have an OS 8.6 266Mhz G3 Desktop under my desk. I agree that without internet you can't sell anything nowadays, and even then, CSS, tag parsing glitches and buttons that just won't feel clicks make the experience go down the tubes on Netscape/IE 4 and iCab... even on the few modern alternative browsers you can install long after Apple kills support. Same happens with my dinosaur Windows laptop running IE3. Ugh.
a corporation dares to choose a widely-used product with a large install base, which fits their use requirements, as opposed to a relatively new, only moderate install base with different features available (no Firefox/Opera with H.264, no Safari/iPhone with Theora, no Internet Explorer period), which does not fit their use requirements on even one browse
And that's the ticket! Even if IE market penetration is supposedly down to 53%, a good 100% of the rest offers no agreeable solution, and companies ignore HTML5 since its standard is not even complete yet. I hate to admit it, but until an HTML5-ready IE9 or 10 brings Windows penetration from currenly 0% to a 50%+, corps won't bat an eye. Adobe is here now and it's familiar --that's why CEO's keep putting it in their expenses budget.
Budgetting support for transitions is a bigger problem than /.ers think. Example? Youtube's HTML5 is badly broken on most videos, new and old; and if you recall, Youtube has Google's geniuses and cash, and still can't produce a 100% flash-free streaming experience. I haven't even mentioned "implementing DRM" --our HTML5 pre-standard itself can be amended and DRM added to it, if the industry asks. Now, assuming our 47% alt browser market [about 15% or more non-HTML5 compliant from the chart data] uses Youtube. Very few even take the secretive HTML5 testdrive. Those that do rarely mention how quickly the endless "spinning buffering" bug caused them to switch back to 100% flash. I have tried from dff platforms and browsers with little success, and see others have failure even on the "featured" HTML5 content, with no error messages or extra guidance from Youtube.
At least Scribd seems to have a real working HTML5 implementation, because video is not a problem in transcoding books. When youtube fixes their problem, they'll do just like scribd: instead of hiding HTML5 in a geeky URL, they'll put a link to "see this file using html5" on every page.
Actually, I think Google is much smarter than the average company. Most companies tend to invest in something then struggle to find how to make money on it. Google does exactly the opposite, it's taking a profitable business model and tries to expand the scope. The more you use online services, and in particular Google services or Google-owned sites like YouTube, the more Google learns about you. That's what Google really sells, being able to target a market and hit it.
Google image search and google earth are public environments where they kinda got the ball rolling. Even though they're expanding markets, they're not just adding a patentable and closed gimmick layer; they're doing things that most other players end up incorporating. Brightly colored unzoomable maps of 15 years ago are long gone. I have pretty much discarded a potential IT partner partly because their: "how to get here" map is an old gif from 1999 and the fact that they are jerks.