I routinely deal with more than 20 open tabs, and upwards of 60-80 open tabs at times. It isn't a problem, from a performance perspective.
What is an issue is managing all those open tabs, and being able to find the one I want. I use a number of extensions which help with this, but it can still get burdensome at times. Still, I don't think it's a huge problem, and it doesn't really bother me.
Right, Netscape didn't have the resources to continue to compete with Microsoft. Microsoft had a huge pile of money to throw into IE that was being generated from their other business. Netscape didn't have that, and couldn't continue pouring money into development at the rate MS could into IE. As a result, eventually IE became better, and once it did, Netscape lost the war.
Netscape didn't just lose to Microsoft because of bundling. They did eventually lose because of technical inferiority. But they could not sustain the development race because Microsoft undercut them on cost and gave away their browser for free, bundled and deeply integrated into Windows.
Even so, many people continued to use Netscape because it was better, until it wasn't anymore. That didn't happen until IE4 came out. As soon as it wasn't, Microsoft basically had 90%+ of the market due to the Windows monopoly.
I didn't say IE would lose ALL marketshare. But it's likely that they will continue to lose marketshare.
Firefox has advantages in that it is available on many more platforms, and I expect that those platforms will over time continue to erode the Windows platform's hold on the market. It's also more flexible, which matters for a lot of people, so I expect it will continue to pick up marketshare, largely at the expense of IE. Likely the same can be said for Chrome, and as it matures in terms of features and customizability.
As for Microsoft, I'll be happy if IE8 is succeeded by an IE9 and IE10 and Microsoft continues putting effort into improving their browser. More good competition is always a good thing.
There's a lot of other factors in play to help determine browser marketshare. Among them:
1) Bundling with OS 2) Feature completeness 3) Product maturity 4) Cost
I think when you look at these, it helps explain why browsers are popular or not.
Opera: Fast, Lots of features, lots of maturity, but not bundled with OS, for a long time was not free, and thus not widely adopted.
Chrome: Fast, few features, not mature, not bundled with OS, Free. Yet still managed to grab 1% of marketshare almost instantly because of Google's ability to communicate the value of its innovations, its intentions with the project, and Google's overall good reputation with consumers.
Firefox: Fast-ish, lots of features, bloating as it matures, not bundled with Windows, but comes bundled with many Linux distros, free. Built up marketshare to where it is today through long, gradual, incremental struggle, FOSS activism, discontent with Microsoft IE, and word of mouth.
IE: Bundled with OS. Managed to obtain marketshare due to anti-competitive behaviors that put Netscape out of business, proceeded then to basically cease development and ignore its many faults until Mozilla and other projects finally caught up. Was really a lot more vulnerable to competition than anyone would have ever thought, because Microsoft over-reliance on OS integration, bundling, and pricing out the non-free competition. Once a good, Free alternative was available, IE started losing marketshare steadily, and will continue to do so.
Safari: Bundled with OS. Market penetration on Apple platform is basically 100%, although many Mac users may prefer to use Firefox or another Mozilla product such as Seamonkey or Camino. But Apple's platform represents a small minority of overall web browser market. Availability on Windows hasn't made much of a difference, as it doesn't offer anything compelling that puts it ahead of Firefox or Opera, and is mainly useful for web developers and iPhone developers to test with.
It's also worth noting that speed of rendering is not all that high on my list. Speed of resolving DNS, speed of resolving URLs, downloading resources makes more of a difference to me than speed of rendering. But the main features I value in a browser are that it is capable of working with web sites I want to use (and embracing open standards to get there is important to this end), and that it has all the features I want, and is exensible so that I can add features that I come up with.
Next most important would be security, although if I really thought of it I'd probably put that ahead or on equal footing with features and interoperability.
Speed and lightweight footprint are about dead last, although if they're not fast and lightweight enough, I'll complain about it, I probably wouldn't switch from Firefox unless they released something that was an unmitigated disaster on these two criteria.
To put it into perspective, I used to connect to BBSes on a 2400 baud modem back in the day, and could read text almost as fast as I could download it over a telnet session. That's about my limit for "too slow". If a graphical and script-heavy page feels slower than plain txt @2400 bps, that's a problem. For the most part, rendering takes a small fraction of a second and isn't a huge inconvenience. In fact, I almost find Chrome's speed of scrolling to be jarring.
A lot of great PC games were even more successful than they otherwise might have been because they opened themselves up to the mod community. It's sad and wrong that a fan-produced work that was to be released for free is seen as a threat to the commercial interests of the original IP creator. It's especially bad that Square/Enix decided to wait until the game was nearly completed before the C&D.
I'm afraid that ROM hacking of older systems is going to see this sort of C&D treatment with more frequency. It's the downside of the Virtual Console and the rise in popularity of retro gaming -- when Nintendo put the Virtual Console into the Wii, they basically eliminated the "Abandonware" argument that emulator fans had clung to.
Is there any way they might possibly work a deal out with Square/Enix to have their game put out as an official title, distributed through Virtual Console/Live Arcade?
Apple has basically said no to customization throughout their existence, so Apple users aren't used to customization, they like it one consistent way and will stick with it till the day they die.
That might be more true about Finder in the OS X era, but back in the day there was a whole lot of customization going on with System 7. I ran a ton of extensions that customized the Finder UI, and gave it a lot of useful functionality that was lacking from the stock Finder. Things like Windowshade (minimize window to just a title bar) and improved scrollbar controls, pop-up folders and better menus, etc.
Apple took many of these ideas and integrated them into later versions. It was nice that you didn't have to pay $10 here and $15 there for all the different shareware extensions that made the OS easier to use, but it didn't feel right to me that Apple was basically stealing all those innovations from the 3rd party and hobby developers who came up with the ideas and wrote them.
I have no idea whether Apple ever properly credited those people or compensated them for their stuff, but I hope they did.
if I was going to do something I should do it quickly. I knew journalists wouldn't be looking at it until the morning,' The quote had no referenced sources and was therefore taken down by moderators of Wikipedia within minutes. However, Fitzgerald put it back up a few more times until it was finally left up on the site for more than 24 hours. While he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone's death as a social experiment,
This is like someone expressing surprise and having ethical qualms about a biology experiment involving stabbing someone repeatedly until they finally die. While it does show that wikipedia is vulnerable, how is this any different from showing that a human body is vulnerable to stabbing, and if you try to stab someone enough times, eventually you will kill them?
What does this prove, exactly? That truth is malleable and that people with bad intent can use this fact to further their own ends? Did we not know this before?
I know! Why does everyone have a problem with 'parental controls'.
Children have a fundamental human right to free speech and free expression and to be exposed to free ideas every bit as much as adults. It's MORE important for children to have access to ideas so that they cannot be brainwashed by propaganda that sees itself as so flimsy that the only way it can prevail in the wild is by suppressing facts and arguments that would destroy it, long enough for the brainwashing to take hold.
Beyond that, if parents can filter children's content, then national censors can filter citizen's content, very easily, using the same tools.
The only moral content filter is one that a person self-selects. Doing so for anyone else without their approval and consent is evil.
Just because a game is old, doesn't mean it's a classic. A classic is a game which stands as a pinnacle representative of its type, an archetypal game that defined or created a genre, or a game so supremely crafted and so well-loved, that its appeal transcends its era.
My router (Linksys w/ DD-WRT), NAS (D-Link DNS-323), HDTV (Sony Bravia), and MythTV box all run a Linux kernel.
My laptop dual-boots XP and Ubuntu.
It's really getting there. I still primarily use XP on my laptop, but for the most part I could just as well use Ubuntu. Pidgin, Firefox, OpenOffice, and VLC all run just fine on it.
Yes, you can change it back, but it doesn't ask you if you want IE8 or if you want it as the default browser, it makes the decisions for you.
This is not entirely true. When you install IE8, it asks you whether you'd like to do an Easy install or if you'd rather do a custom install. The Easy install does indeed set IE8 as the system's default browser, without asking. However, if you do the custom install, it does ask, and it honors what you tell the installer to do.
Even if your default browser setting does get hijacked, the very next time you launch Firefox, it'll let you know it's not set as your default browser, and it's one click to change it back. Not a big deal at all, other than if you're running unattended installs on critical systems which require Firefox to be the default browser for some reason.
I've played Atari games natively on a color TV set, as well as emulated on a SVGA CRT. I like it both ways. You get a super-clear picture on the computer monitor, but it's nostalgic to play it with the video artifacts that came from the RF input and NTSC. If you value a true historical re-enactment, you kindof need to be able to do this. It's something that you can configure to your preference, so having it as an option doesn't hurt anybody. Even MegaMan 9 had a special mode that allowed you to emulate the graphical limitations of the NES if you wanted a more "retro" experience. I play it without the flicker, but it's cool to be able to turn it on if I want to. It's like listening to an old scratchy phonograph record that somehow feels more alive than a freshly re-mastered CD. Not that it sounds better, but the pops and hiss are familiar and you miss it when it's gone.
OTOH it also means the entire world can offer improvements and that means you're effectively getting a development department not even giants like IBM and Microsoft can afford for free.
Not really. That's the theory, but in reality what it means is that nothing prevents such a development department from forming spontaneously. In reality, many open source projects languish because no one is interested in developing for them, and there's no management in place to guide the developers to plan a roadmap for the project. High-profile, successful open source projects like Linux, Mozilla, and Pidgin didn't happen by accident.
You have to have people who understand the project, its purpose and goals, and have technical expertise in coding, and who are interested in contributing to the project and see a need to do it, or who are paid to do so.
If you're a company and you want to foster this sort of environment, one of the best things you can do is set aside some budget to pay coders for contributions that make it into the trunk of the project, or, you know, hire a few full-time developers to work on your project.
Simply putting the code out there and wishing isn't going to get you very far. Although, at least that way, when you go out of business, anyone who used to depend on your company for support can come along and pick up the project code and do something with it. Which is better than nothing, I guess. Far better to fertilize your project by putting incentives out there for programmers and users to take interest, than to simply open the codebase up and wait for magic to happen.
Right, I do get that. MS has shown that it doesn't care about that, though. Perhaps they should, and perhaps they should have thought of that before they released IE6 in such a terrible state of insecurity.
But the bottom line is, if the only way for them to close gaping security holes is to upgrade IE in a way that breaks compatibility with web applications that depend on using insecure technologies, that's what they have to do.
Does it suck? Sure, for those who depend on those web applications. But what would make more sense? That MS can never close critical security holes in Windows until every web application ever developed that depends on IE6 has been fixed? Stuff that Microsoft didn't author, but merely provided a (insecure, standards-breaking) platform for?
If IE6 was a critical part of the operating system, shouldn't it get critical updates for the life of the operating system?
That's what IE8 is.
If you re-word your sentence to read, "If IE [dropping version number] was a critical part of the operating system, shouldn't it get critical updates for the life of the operating system?" then your problem with MS "failing" to support IE6 "for the life of WinXP" disappears.
Slashdot Mirror
That guy from Accounting, yeah... he prefers to go by "Richard" now. No, I didn't ask him why.
I routinely deal with more than 20 open tabs, and upwards of 60-80 open tabs at times. It isn't a problem, from a performance perspective.
What is an issue is managing all those open tabs, and being able to find the one I want. I use a number of extensions which help with this, but it can still get burdensome at times. Still, I don't think it's a huge problem, and it doesn't really bother me.
A woman's laptop should use one of those IBM Thinkpad TrackPoint things for the pointer device.
Right, Netscape didn't have the resources to continue to compete with Microsoft. Microsoft had a huge pile of money to throw into IE that was being generated from their other business. Netscape didn't have that, and couldn't continue pouring money into development at the rate MS could into IE. As a result, eventually IE became better, and once it did, Netscape lost the war.
Netscape didn't just lose to Microsoft because of bundling. They did eventually lose because of technical inferiority. But they could not sustain the development race because Microsoft undercut them on cost and gave away their browser for free, bundled and deeply integrated into Windows.
Even so, many people continued to use Netscape because it was better, until it wasn't anymore. That didn't happen until IE4 came out. As soon as it wasn't, Microsoft basically had 90%+ of the market due to the Windows monopoly.
I didn't say IE would lose ALL marketshare. But it's likely that they will continue to lose marketshare.
Firefox has advantages in that it is available on many more platforms, and I expect that those platforms will over time continue to erode the Windows platform's hold on the market. It's also more flexible, which matters for a lot of people, so I expect it will continue to pick up marketshare, largely at the expense of IE. Likely the same can be said for Chrome, and as it matures in terms of features and customizability.
As for Microsoft, I'll be happy if IE8 is succeeded by an IE9 and IE10 and Microsoft continues putting effort into improving their browser. More good competition is always a good thing.
There's a lot of other factors in play to help determine browser marketshare. Among them:
1) Bundling with OS
2) Feature completeness
3) Product maturity
4) Cost
I think when you look at these, it helps explain why browsers are popular or not.
Opera: Fast, Lots of features, lots of maturity, but not bundled with OS, for a long time was not free, and thus not widely adopted.
Chrome: Fast, few features, not mature, not bundled with OS, Free. Yet still managed to grab 1% of marketshare almost instantly because of Google's ability to communicate the value of its innovations, its intentions with the project, and Google's overall good reputation with consumers.
Firefox: Fast-ish, lots of features, bloating as it matures, not bundled with Windows, but comes bundled with many Linux distros, free. Built up marketshare to where it is today through long, gradual, incremental struggle, FOSS activism, discontent with Microsoft IE, and word of mouth.
IE: Bundled with OS. Managed to obtain marketshare due to anti-competitive behaviors that put Netscape out of business, proceeded then to basically cease development and ignore its many faults until Mozilla and other projects finally caught up. Was really a lot more vulnerable to competition than anyone would have ever thought, because Microsoft over-reliance on OS integration, bundling, and pricing out the non-free competition. Once a good, Free alternative was available, IE started losing marketshare steadily, and will continue to do so.
Safari: Bundled with OS. Market penetration on Apple platform is basically 100%, although many Mac users may prefer to use Firefox or another Mozilla product such as Seamonkey or Camino. But Apple's platform represents a small minority of overall web browser market. Availability on Windows hasn't made much of a difference, as it doesn't offer anything compelling that puts it ahead of Firefox or Opera, and is mainly useful for web developers and iPhone developers to test with.
It's also worth noting that speed of rendering is not all that high on my list. Speed of resolving DNS, speed of resolving URLs, downloading resources makes more of a difference to me than speed of rendering. But the main features I value in a browser are that it is capable of working with web sites I want to use (and embracing open standards to get there is important to this end), and that it has all the features I want, and is exensible so that I can add features that I come up with.
Next most important would be security, although if I really thought of it I'd probably put that ahead or on equal footing with features and interoperability.
Speed and lightweight footprint are about dead last, although if they're not fast and lightweight enough, I'll complain about it, I probably wouldn't switch from Firefox unless they released something that was an unmitigated disaster on these two criteria.
To put it into perspective, I used to connect to BBSes on a 2400 baud modem back in the day, and could read text almost as fast as I could download it over a telnet session. That's about my limit for "too slow". If a graphical and script-heavy page feels slower than plain txt @2400 bps, that's a problem. For the most part, rendering takes a small fraction of a second and isn't a huge inconvenience. In fact, I almost find Chrome's speed of scrolling to be jarring.
I dunno how well this will play WoW, but if it does it might be what you're looking for in a mobile gaming platform.
http://openpandora.org/
It's not really a netbook, but it does have a qwerty keyboard.
A lot of great PC games were even more successful than they otherwise might have been because they opened themselves up to the mod community. It's sad and wrong that a fan-produced work that was to be released for free is seen as a threat to the commercial interests of the original IP creator. It's especially bad that Square/Enix decided to wait until the game was nearly completed before the C&D.
I'm afraid that ROM hacking of older systems is going to see this sort of C&D treatment with more frequency. It's the downside of the Virtual Console and the rise in popularity of retro gaming -- when Nintendo put the Virtual Console into the Wii, they basically eliminated the "Abandonware" argument that emulator fans had clung to.
Is there any way they might possibly work a deal out with Square/Enix to have their game put out as an official title, distributed through Virtual Console/Live Arcade?
I always wondered what the "plus" was for, and now I know:)
Apple has basically said no to customization throughout their existence, so Apple users aren't used to customization, they like it one consistent way and will stick with it till the day they die.
That might be more true about Finder in the OS X era, but back in the day there was a whole lot of customization going on with System 7. I ran a ton of extensions that customized the Finder UI, and gave it a lot of useful functionality that was lacking from the stock Finder. Things like Windowshade (minimize window to just a title bar) and improved scrollbar controls, pop-up folders and better menus, etc.
Apple took many of these ideas and integrated them into later versions. It was nice that you didn't have to pay $10 here and $15 there for all the different shareware extensions that made the OS easier to use, but it didn't feel right to me that Apple was basically stealing all those innovations from the 3rd party and hobby developers who came up with the ideas and wrote them.
I have no idea whether Apple ever properly credited those people or compensated them for their stuff, but I hope they did.
Hardware like foot-pedals and audio controllers no longer work.
Did you try taking the mouse off the floor and putting it back on the counter-top and use it with your hand? I hear it works better that way.
Also that "audio controller" is not a cupholder. Refer to manual and make sure you are using it correctly.
...and I'm all out of money.
if I was going to do something I should do it quickly. I knew journalists wouldn't be looking at it until the morning,' The quote had no referenced sources and was therefore taken down by moderators of Wikipedia within minutes. However, Fitzgerald put it back up a few more times until it was finally left up on the site for more than 24 hours. While he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone's death as a social experiment,
This is like someone expressing surprise and having ethical qualms about a biology experiment involving stabbing someone repeatedly until they finally die. While it does show that wikipedia is vulnerable, how is this any different from showing that a human body is vulnerable to stabbing, and if you try to stab someone enough times, eventually you will kill them?
What does this prove, exactly? That truth is malleable and that people with bad intent can use this fact to further their own ends? Did we not know this before?
I know! Why does everyone have a problem with 'parental controls'.
Children have a fundamental human right to free speech and free expression and to be exposed to free ideas every bit as much as adults. It's MORE important for children to have access to ideas so that they cannot be brainwashed by propaganda that sees itself as so flimsy that the only way it can prevail in the wild is by suppressing facts and arguments that would destroy it, long enough for the brainwashing to take hold.
Beyond that, if parents can filter children's content, then national censors can filter citizen's content, very easily, using the same tools.
The only moral content filter is one that a person self-selects. Doing so for anyone else without their approval and consent is evil.
Just because a game is old, doesn't mean it's a classic. A classic is a game which stands as a pinnacle representative of its type, an archetypal game that defined or created a genre, or a game so supremely crafted and so well-loved, that its appeal transcends its era.
My router (Linksys w/ DD-WRT), NAS (D-Link DNS-323), HDTV (Sony Bravia), and MythTV box all run a Linux kernel.
My laptop dual-boots XP and Ubuntu.
It's really getting there. I still primarily use XP on my laptop, but for the most part I could just as well use Ubuntu. Pidgin, Firefox, OpenOffice, and VLC all run just fine on it.
Yes, you can change it back, but it doesn't ask you if you want IE8 or if you want it as the default browser, it makes the decisions for you.
This is not entirely true. When you install IE8, it asks you whether you'd like to do an Easy install or if you'd rather do a custom install. The Easy install does indeed set IE8 as the system's default browser, without asking. However, if you do the custom install, it does ask, and it honors what you tell the installer to do.
Even if your default browser setting does get hijacked, the very next time you launch Firefox, it'll let you know it's not set as your default browser, and it's one click to change it back. Not a big deal at all, other than if you're running unattended installs on critical systems which require Firefox to be the default browser for some reason.
I've played Atari games natively on a color TV set, as well as emulated on a SVGA CRT. I like it both ways. You get a super-clear picture on the computer monitor, but it's nostalgic to play it with the video artifacts that came from the RF input and NTSC. If you value a true historical re-enactment, you kindof need to be able to do this. It's something that you can configure to your preference, so having it as an option doesn't hurt anybody. Even MegaMan 9 had a special mode that allowed you to emulate the graphical limitations of the NES if you wanted a more "retro" experience. I play it without the flicker, but it's cool to be able to turn it on if I want to. It's like listening to an old scratchy phonograph record that somehow feels more alive than a freshly re-mastered CD. Not that it sounds better, but the pops and hiss are familiar and you miss it when it's gone.
If I install Windows 7 RC on anything, it'll be a virtual machine. If I get downgraded, I just kill the VM, and no harm done.
What I fail to understand is why anyone worth a damn would keep playing a game that openly allows buying their way to the top.
This sounds a lot like real life. The game company can just advertise the hell out of the added dimension of realism.
OTOH it also means the entire world can offer improvements and that means you're effectively getting a development department not even giants like IBM and Microsoft can afford for free.
Not really. That's the theory, but in reality what it means is that nothing prevents such a development department from forming spontaneously. In reality, many open source projects languish because no one is interested in developing for them, and there's no management in place to guide the developers to plan a roadmap for the project. High-profile, successful open source projects like Linux, Mozilla, and Pidgin didn't happen by accident.
You have to have people who understand the project, its purpose and goals, and have technical expertise in coding, and who are interested in contributing to the project and see a need to do it, or who are paid to do so.
If you're a company and you want to foster this sort of environment, one of the best things you can do is set aside some budget to pay coders for contributions that make it into the trunk of the project, or, you know, hire a few full-time developers to work on your project.
Simply putting the code out there and wishing isn't going to get you very far. Although, at least that way, when you go out of business, anyone who used to depend on your company for support can come along and pick up the project code and do something with it. Which is better than nothing, I guess. Far better to fertilize your project by putting incentives out there for programmers and users to take interest, than to simply open the codebase up and wait for magic to happen.
only I call them "chickens".
Tyrannosaurus Clux
Except in Nebraska!
Right, I do get that. MS has shown that it doesn't care about that, though. Perhaps they should, and perhaps they should have thought of that before they released IE6 in such a terrible state of insecurity.
But the bottom line is, if the only way for them to close gaping security holes is to upgrade IE in a way that breaks compatibility with web applications that depend on using insecure technologies, that's what they have to do.
Does it suck? Sure, for those who depend on those web applications. But what would make more sense? That MS can never close critical security holes in Windows until every web application ever developed that depends on IE6 has been fixed? Stuff that Microsoft didn't author, but merely provided a (insecure, standards-breaking) platform for?
If IE6 was a critical part of the operating system, shouldn't it get critical updates for the life of the operating system?
That's what IE8 is.
If you re-word your sentence to read, "If IE [dropping version number] was a critical part of the operating system, shouldn't it get critical updates for the life of the operating system?" then your problem with MS "failing" to support IE6 "for the life of WinXP" disappears.