> Seriously, why would you choose Opera over Firefox?
Why wouldn't you? Firefox is an EXTREMELY resource hungry application that can seriously slow down a machine that doesn't have a ton of ram. Currently on my machine, Firefox is using over 150mb of main memory. In this respect Firefox is very badly written indeed. If I close it, and open the exact same group of tabs, it only uses 40mb of RAM (which is still double that of Opera). It is NOT a very well written application at all.
In addition, you probably need many extensions to be installed to actually get the features you want (as "out of the box" is has many important features missing). For me, I also find that the newest Firefox (1.5) crashes quite a lot on both my machine - especially when doing anything which involves video streams. Opera doesn't have this problem.
People seem to think that just because something is open source, that it's somehow inherently better than commercial software (which often they haven't even tried). Firefox is certainly not a good example of well written open source application. The only reason it's so popular is that it's better than IE (in certain respects anyway).
Thunderbird is just as bad in this respect - often using up over 100MB of RAM, which is absolutely ridicious for an e-mail client! Even outlook express barely exceeds 40mb of RAM when connected to exactly the same IMAP e-mail accounts.
On my machine currently, I have about 30 processes running. The top two if I order by resource usage are Thunderbird and Firefox - all the rest is commercial software.
I think you're missing his point. I'd hardly call 10 years or so "well into" the third millennium. A millennium is 1000 years. "Well into" would be 100 or 200 years out of that (ie 10 or 20%). Not 10 years.
> At least I've got a nice selection with just a basic Linux install.
I think that's called "bloatware". Why install loads of programs people will never use? Just put on one basic editor that anyone can use - and then if users want a different one, let them install it themselves.
You can tell things are bad when an operating system needs more than one CD to install. Hopefully Windows will never get like this and come with loads of different programs you don't actually want and take 2 hours to install.
Wow! - mouse wheel support. The developers really MUST have been busy in last 7 years since mouse wheels were invented. I think Windows 98 had mousewheel support *natively*. I think I'll stick to my Windows editor if that's where Linux editors have got to so far...
I normally never bother replying to Anonymous Cowards as they will probably never see my reply, but for the benefit of others;
That's a perfect example of an "appalling hack" that I was talking about. If bookmarking even vaguely worked properly, you shouldn't need ANY sourcecode.
That source code shows an extremely trivial example and yet still requires lots of code to make it work. Hardly a usable solution in a large website.
Bollocks. They mix perfectly if the security is well thought out and implemented.
Otherwise everyone would be pirating all the satellite channels. I don't know about other countries, but in the UK, the security of satellite broadcasts hasn't be compromised in years - despite the massive finantial incentive for someone to do so.
> Why should wireless routers be designed for users who doesn't even know what an IP address is?
The same way that cars are designed for people who don't know what an ECU or distributor is. The same way that cell phones are designed for people who don't understand the GSM/CDMA protocols. The same way that your central heating can be used by people that don't know what a thermocouple or heatexchanger is.
If you want to access the Internet without a wire, why the fsck should it matter that you don't know what an IP address is? It shouldn't matter if the device is properly designed!
There is no reason whatsoever that you couldn't buy a wireless LAN kit that is totally secure by default and is just as easy to set up as an insecure one. How hard would it be to simply have a button on the router that allows new devices to connect (temporarily shares WEP key), or even if the driver installer just asks you the WEP number printed on the orange sticker on the bottom of the router (the default WEP key)? For some bizarre reason, most manufactures have decided to make securing an access point a very difficult task for a non-technical user. I've had to go and warn all my neighbours and fix their APs for them (even though one of them is an IT teacher at the local secondary school!).
> Problems with printing, bookmarking, etc. are all problems > that both Macromedia and the Flash community have worked on for some time to rectify.
I work with Flash quite a lot and I've seen no solutions that let you bookmark flash files properly without lots of workarounds (or "appauling hacks" as we call them in our software house). I would be greatful if you could show me an example of how you can bookmark a 100% flash site without using lots of time consuming hacks.
If it really WAS easy to deal with issues such as bookmarking and printing, then why does nobody seem have done it at all? Please post a link to any major site where bookmarking and printing work properly.
I'm not so incredibly rude as to "call bullshit" as you say but I also doubt your statements as you have not included even one example as proof.
> So to sum up, before talking about how capable a platform is of dealing with a problem, > it might help to know anything about the platform. Flash is, at present, far more mature > when it comes to addressing many of these issues.
Explain how then... I presume you don't know or you would have given at least one example.
The example code I've seen always entails HORRIBLE hacks such as reloading the page to modify the URL or specifically trying to detect a crawler using the user agent string and then behaving differently. Some articles on Macromedia's site even involve installing 3rd party products and URL rewriters whcih I would hardly call a mature solution - just more hacks.
The only solution would be for flash to be natively bookmarkable in the same way that HTML is with no extra work by the developer required. It would have to have some kind of internal notion of "pages" or "points in time" in the case of a movie/presentation which somehow makes it back to the URL without a reload.
Yes, of course google can index PDFs, Flash, Images etc, but in the context of navigation it's pretty useless. Google does NOT know how to click buttons in flash files. Therefore if your navigation is done entirely in Flash, Google will not crawl your site. The reason I know this is because I do a lot of work in Search Engine Optimisation. Clients come to us and say "why I can't I find my products by using google". Usually it's because a flash-happy designer has made all the fancy navigation drop down menus in Flash and google hasn't been able to follow links from within the flash to the other flash content or even static pages.
It's one thing to be able to rip text out of a raw SWF file, but its another thing entirely to for Google to actually understand what the point of the flash file is, understand any embedded heirarchy and follow links within the file. I expect Google will never do this unless Macromedia specifically make it easier for them to do so.
Nearly all of the problems cited in the article are present to a FAR WORSE extent with fewer workarounds if you write your website so it makes heavy use of Macromedia Flash. That includes problems with bookmarking, back button not working, no printing etc. Yet Flash is used on millions of major websites. As other posters mention, the problem is not with the technology but misuse of the technology.
Some flash developers get what I call "flash happy" and write the entire website in flash. This is lunacy. For a start, (and this is possibly a problem with AJAX heavy sites too) your site cannot be indexed by any search engines if it's navigation is entirely flash based. No search engine in the world is going to evaluate your flash files or run your AJAX scripts in order to attempt to crawl the site. If AJAX is used sparingly where necessary, then I'm pretty sure it won't cause any major problems. It's not like Flash seems to have suffered...
The entire point of DIY projectors is that they are CHEAP. As soon as you say 16:9 you instantly make it EXPENSIVE. Any 16:9 panel will cost more than a 4:3 for the forseeable future.
Because 16:9 panels are expensive, the projector will become bad value compared to a commercial one, so you might as well just buy the commercial one which is far smaller, guaranteed and generally much better quality than the DIY ones.
You can obviously still project 16:9 pictures via a 4:3 display - it's just that there might be a slight glow above and below the picture (which you could easily mask out if it really bothered you). You might not get the full resolution of the panel, but this is about cheapness and the fun of building - not quality. If you want 16:9 and quality, buy a commercial projector off eBay.
> The power supply for the XBox 360 is almost as large as the XBox 360 itself.
Why post saying "the power supply for the XBox 360 is almost as large as the XBox 360 itself" and at the same time linking to pictures which clearly show it to be not even one quarter the size of the XBox 360? (if that)
So when the XBox360 says not to use it on a bed or sofa, which I expect accounts for where 99% of people would use it...
Sorry, but why would even one single percent of people put their XBox power supply on a bed or sofa? I bet pretty much nobody has ever done this. Most people put their XBox near the the TV so you can plug it into the TV.
You're forgetting that most people (nearly all people?) listen to this stuff on an iPod or in the car or on a cheap all-in-one stereo, where the sound quality is sufficiently poor that it's not possible to tell the difference between an MP3 and an original. If people really cared at all about slightly degraded quality music then nobody would ever listen to the radio - which is way worse quality than any 128k MP3 file ever will be.
The sort of people that have spent $2000 on their hifi and can tell if someone has replaced their $100 interconnect with a $50 interconnect when they're in the next room will probably not buy their music in MP3 format.
> It allows you to make direct connections from any computer to any other computer connected to > the Internet.
No it doesn't. Firewalls prevent that - and IPv6 does not remove the need for firewalls. IPv6 does not provide a way to miraculously tunnel through firewalls.
> It's just that Skype wouldn't need to use the kinds of ugly kludges they do now to get > around NATed users.
Yes they would - for the reason stated above. I do not know of even one single ISP that uses NAT for broadband users. The main problem is firewalls - not NAT.
Why does it mean that we "won't need providers such as Skype anymore because we'll be able to do it all ourselves"?
I don't see how IPv6 lets you do ANY of these things. You'll still be firewalled, you'll still need servers and software vendors like Skype. In fact the only thing about IPv6 that would seem to me to help P2P is that slighly more people might end up not being NATed but that won't affect anything much.
Does this person actually know what they're talking about or are they from marketing?
Actually, the dialog doesn't pop up. It's there the entire time and always has the cancel button. So the chances of that happening are pretty much zero unless you alt-tab to it and press enter - which is hard to do accidentally. The text in the download window changes to tell you it's moving the file, but it's the same dialog and it doesn't pop up or focus itself. Just tried it in IE 6 to make sure.
Our license plates don't have letters that stand out... they're completely flat. You start with a sheet of clear plastic, put the letters on from behind (backwards) then cover the whole lot in sticky yellow (back) or white (front) plastic and shove it through some rollers to make sure the plastic never comes unstuck. We keep the same license plates for the life of the vehicle (unlike in some countries where the plate itself seems to change every year or so).
No, it is the most acid2 test compliant browser. Acid2 is not a standards compliance test and by it's own admission, "passing the test does not guarantee compliance with any standards".
Same here on two machines. It seems that the automatic update feature doesn't work. After it claimed it had updated, I still seemed to be on Beta 2. I had to download the full installer and install again to actually get it to update properly to RC1.
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> It will need a permantent phone/internet connection.
From the Blu-ray FAQ:
"Will Blu-ray require an Internet connection?
No, you will not need an Internet connection for playback of Blu-ray movies."
> Seriously, why would you choose Opera over Firefox?
Why wouldn't you? Firefox is an EXTREMELY resource hungry application that can seriously slow down a machine that doesn't have a ton of ram. Currently on my machine, Firefox is using over 150mb of main memory. In this respect Firefox is very badly written indeed. If I close it, and open the exact same group of tabs, it only uses 40mb of RAM (which is still double that of Opera). It is NOT a very well written application at all.
In addition, you probably need many extensions to be installed to actually get the features you want (as "out of the box" is has many important features missing). For me, I also find that the newest Firefox (1.5) crashes quite a lot on both my machine - especially when doing anything which involves video streams. Opera doesn't have this problem.
People seem to think that just because something is open source, that it's somehow inherently better than commercial software (which often they haven't even tried). Firefox is certainly not a good example of well written open source application. The only reason it's so popular is that it's better than IE (in
certain respects anyway).
Thunderbird is just as bad in this respect - often using up over 100MB of RAM, which is absolutely ridicious for an e-mail client! Even outlook express barely exceeds 40mb of RAM when connected to exactly the same IMAP e-mail accounts.
On my machine currently, I have about 30 processes running. The top two if I order by resource usage are Thunderbird and Firefox - all the rest is commercial software.
I think you're missing his point. I'd hardly call 10 years or so "well into" the third millennium. A millennium is 1000 years. "Well into" would be 100 or 200 years out of that (ie 10 or 20%). Not 10 years.
> You need to get permission every time you play a disc,
No you just made that up. Permission from who? Will the players have a cell phone built in and call up?
> your discs are permanently mated to your player.
Err, no! Obviously not. Otherwise when you upgrade your player, your entire collection would be written off.
> if your player breaks, you lose your whole DVD collection
*Obviously* not or they would never sell a single player. Please stop saying whatever stupid little thing pops into your head.
Someone please mod the parent's propaganda post below zero before it confuses anymore gullable people.
> At least I've got a nice selection with just a basic Linux install.
I think that's called "bloatware". Why install loads of programs people will never use? Just put on one basic editor that anyone can use - and then if users want a different one, let them install it themselves.
You can tell things are bad when an operating system needs more than one CD to install. Hopefully Windows will never get like this and come with loads of different programs you don't actually want and take 2 hours to install.
Wow! - mouse wheel support. The developers really MUST have been busy in last 7 years since mouse wheels were invented. I think Windows 98 had mousewheel support *natively*. I think I'll stick to my Windows editor if that's where Linux editors have got to so far...
I normally never bother replying to Anonymous Cowards as they will probably never see my reply, but for the benefit of others;
That's a perfect example of an "appalling hack" that I was talking about. If bookmarking even vaguely worked properly, you shouldn't need ANY sourcecode.
That source code shows an extremely trivial example and yet still requires lots of code to make it work. Hardly a usable solution in a large website.
> Except broadcasting and secure NEVER mix.
Bollocks. They mix perfectly if the security is well thought out and implemented.
Otherwise everyone would be pirating all the satellite channels. I don't know about other countries, but in the UK, the security of satellite broadcasts hasn't be compromised in years - despite the massive finantial incentive for someone to do so.
> Why should wireless routers be designed for users who doesn't even know what an IP address is?
The same way that cars are designed for people who don't know what an ECU or distributor is.
The same way that cell phones are designed for people who don't understand the GSM/CDMA protocols.
The same way that your central heating can be used by people that don't know what a thermocouple or heatexchanger is.
If you want to access the Internet without a wire, why the fsck should it matter that you don't know what an IP address is? It shouldn't matter if the device is properly designed!
There is no reason whatsoever that you couldn't buy a wireless LAN kit that is totally secure by default and is just as easy to set up as an insecure one. How hard would it be to simply have a button on the router that allows new devices to connect (temporarily shares WEP key), or even if the driver installer just asks you the WEP number printed on the orange sticker on the bottom of the router (the default WEP key)? For some bizarre reason, most manufactures have decided to make securing an access point a very difficult task for a non-technical user. I've had to go and warn all my neighbours and fix their APs for them (even though one of them is an IT teacher at the local secondary school!).
> Problems with printing, bookmarking, etc. are all problems
> that both Macromedia and the Flash community have worked on for some time to rectify.
I work with Flash quite a lot and I've seen no solutions that let you bookmark flash files properly without lots of workarounds (or "appauling hacks" as we call them in our software house). I would be greatful if you could show me an example of how you can bookmark a 100% flash site without using lots of time consuming hacks.
If it really WAS easy to deal with issues such as bookmarking and printing, then why does nobody seem have done it at all? Please post a link to any major site where bookmarking and printing work properly.
I'm not so incredibly rude as to "call bullshit" as you say but I also doubt your statements as you have not included even one example as proof.
> So to sum up, before talking about how capable a platform is of dealing with a problem,
> it might help to know anything about the platform. Flash is, at present, far more mature
> when it comes to addressing many of these issues.
Explain how then... I presume you don't know or you would have given at least one example.
The example code I've seen always entails HORRIBLE hacks such as reloading the page to modify the URL or specifically trying to detect a crawler using the user agent string and then behaving differently. Some articles on Macromedia's site even involve installing 3rd party products and URL rewriters whcih I would hardly call a mature solution - just more hacks.
The only solution would be for flash to be natively bookmarkable in the same way that HTML is with no extra work by the developer required. It would have to have some kind of internal notion of "pages" or "points in time" in the case of a movie/presentation which somehow makes it back to the URL without a reload.
Read my post again!
Yes, of course google can index PDFs, Flash, Images etc, but in the context of navigation it's pretty useless. Google does NOT know how to click buttons in flash files. Therefore if your navigation is done entirely in Flash, Google will not crawl your site. The reason I know this is because I do a lot of work in Search Engine Optimisation. Clients come to us and say "why I can't I find my products by using google". Usually it's because a flash-happy designer has made all the fancy navigation drop down menus in Flash and google hasn't been able to follow links from within the flash to the other flash content or even static pages.
It's one thing to be able to rip text out of a raw SWF file, but its another thing entirely to for Google to actually understand what the point of the flash file is, understand any embedded heirarchy and follow links within the file. I expect Google will never do this unless Macromedia specifically make it easier for them to do so.
Nearly all of the problems cited in the article are present to a FAR WORSE extent with fewer workarounds if you write your website so it makes heavy use of Macromedia Flash. That includes problems with bookmarking, back button not working, no printing etc. Yet Flash is used on millions of major websites. As other posters mention, the problem is not with the technology but misuse of the technology.
Some flash developers get what I call "flash happy" and write the entire website in flash. This is lunacy. For a start, (and this is possibly a problem with AJAX heavy sites too) your site cannot be indexed by any search engines if it's navigation is entirely flash based. No search engine in the world is going to evaluate your flash files or run your AJAX scripts in order to attempt to crawl the site. If AJAX is used sparingly where necessary, then I'm pretty sure it won't cause any major problems. It's not like Flash seems to have suffered...
The entire point of DIY projectors is that they are CHEAP. As soon as you say 16:9 you instantly make it EXPENSIVE. Any 16:9 panel will cost more than a 4:3 for the forseeable future.
Because 16:9 panels are expensive, the projector will become bad value compared to a commercial one, so you might as well just buy the commercial one which is far smaller, guaranteed and generally much better quality than the DIY ones.
You can obviously still project 16:9 pictures via a 4:3 display - it's just that there might be a slight glow above and below the picture (which you could easily mask out if it really bothered you). You might not get the full resolution of the panel, but this is about cheapness and the fun of building - not quality. If you want 16:9 and quality, buy a commercial projector off eBay.
> The power supply for the XBox 360 is almost as large as the XBox 360 itself.
Why post saying "the power supply for the XBox 360 is almost as large as the XBox 360 itself" and at the same time linking to pictures which clearly show it to be not even one quarter the size of the XBox 360? (if that)
How did that get modded up even one point?
Sorry, but why would even one single percent of people put their XBox power supply on a bed or sofa? I bet pretty much nobody has ever done this. Most people put their XBox near the the TV so you can plug it into the TV.
You're forgetting that most people (nearly all people?) listen to this stuff on an iPod or in the car or on a cheap all-in-one stereo, where the sound quality is sufficiently poor that it's not possible to tell the difference between an MP3 and an original. If people really cared at all about slightly degraded quality music then nobody would ever listen to the radio - which is way worse quality than any 128k MP3 file ever will be.
The sort of people that have spent $2000 on their hifi and can tell if someone has replaced their $100 interconnect with a $50 interconnect when they're in the next room will probably not buy their music in MP3 format.
> It allows you to make direct connections from any computer to any other computer connected to
> the Internet.
No it doesn't. Firewalls prevent that - and IPv6 does not remove the need for firewalls. IPv6 does not provide a way to miraculously tunnel through firewalls.
> It's just that Skype wouldn't need to use the kinds of ugly kludges they do now to get
> around NATed users.
Yes they would - for the reason stated above. I do not know of even one single ISP that uses NAT for broadband users. The main problem is firewalls - not NAT.
Err, 32? It's going to be more like millions per person (if you want them).
Why does IPv6 make P2P any easier to implement?
Why does it remove the need for servers?
Why does it mean that we "won't need providers such as Skype anymore because we'll be able to do it all ourselves"?
I don't see how IPv6 lets you do ANY of these things. You'll still be firewalled, you'll still need servers and software vendors like Skype. In fact the only thing about IPv6 that would seem to me to help P2P is that slighly more people might end up not being NATed but that won't affect anything much.
Does this person actually know what they're talking about or are they from marketing?
Actually, the dialog doesn't pop up. It's there the entire time and always has the cancel button. So the chances of that happening are pretty much zero unless you alt-tab to it and press enter - which is hard to do accidentally. The text in the download window changes to tell you it's moving the file, but it's the same dialog and it doesn't pop up or focus itself. Just tried it in IE 6 to make sure.
Our license plates don't have letters that stand out... they're completely flat. You start with a sheet of clear plastic, put the letters on from behind (backwards) then cover the whole lot in sticky yellow (back) or white (front) plastic and shove it through some rollers to make sure the plastic never comes unstuck. We keep the same license plates for the life of the vehicle (unlike in some countries where the plate itself seems to change every year or so).
> Since when has it become acceptable to grant patents on recepies?
Err, all patents are pretty much recipies. That's what they're for!
If Coca Cola doesn't have a patent, then why doesn't anyone else make a drink that tastes exactly the same?
> The american 'IP'-quest is getting more and more rediculous by the day.
What do you know about intellectual property? You can't even spell "ridiculous" or "recipe".
Safari does NOT pass the Acid2 test.
> Now it is the most standards compliant browser
No, it is the most acid2 test compliant browser. Acid2 is not a standards compliance test and by it's own admission, "passing the test does not guarantee compliance with any standards".
Same here on two machines. It seems that the automatic update feature doesn't work. After it claimed it had updated, I still seemed to be on Beta 2. I had to download the full installer and install again to actually get it to update properly to RC1.