Even with the 1GB RAM the performance is still sluggish, kind of reminds me of using a Knoppix Live CD.
If the sluggish performance you see is mostly during operations that read or write a lot of data to the hard drive, the problem is almost certainly the slow notebook hard drive. Hard drive speed in notebooks has been a problem for years, it's the one thing that really holds them back from totally replacing desktops for a lot of disk-intensive uses. And in order to make a whole computer that small, you have to use a notebook hard drive.
If you're interested in making it perform more like a desktop machine, try replacing the 4200rpm (5400rpm?) notebook drive inside with a 7200rpm notebook drive. I've never seen one before now, but apparently Hitachi just started making 40GB and 60GB 7200rpm drives. You've already replaced the RAM yourself, so this shouldn't be too difficult. I think you'll be shocked by the difference in performance. Oh, and check out the warranty on the 60GB model: 3 years! All the reviewers say it runs about as cool as the drives they are replacing, so heat shouldn't be a problem. The 8MB buffer should help too.
I wouldn't be too surprised if Apple started using these very same drives in updated versions of the Mac mini. It would certainly stem a lot of the "my Mac mini is slow" comments. Then again, an improved Mac mini might start competing a little too well with the Power Mac line.
While you're at Newegg you might want to pick up a Macally Firewire/USB enclosure for your 80GB drive so you can use it as external storage/backup. The notebook-size enclosures can usually be powered by the Firewire bus, so no extra power adapters or wires. One tiny computer with desktop-level power, one tiny external storage drive connected with a single cable.
Was there something special about win2k that prevented you from writing down your product key on a piece of paper and storing it with other pieces of important papers?
I have a slight problem with that kind of attitude. Yes, he should have written the number down. But I have a fundamental problem with the fact that he needs to do so. Where does it end?
Someday, if this continues, you too will reach your limit. Every piece of equipment and software you own will require a product activation key, without which it will stop working whenever some glitch happens. You'll have 7,632 "important" papers that you must keep track of in order to keep your life from being disrupted. You will have spent many hours making sure that you always record and have access to the registration codes for every product you own. You'll suddenly say to yourself, "This is BS, why am I letting a bunch of products control me like this?" And then you'll understand why many of us prefer using Linux or BSD, or even Mac OS X.
Not because it's free (it often isn't) but because it's Free. Many of us spend just as much or more on Free software than we did on proprietary software. The benefit is we don't have to be slaves to the software anymore. This isn't a birth certificate we're talking about here. It shouldn't be necessary to classify it as "important". We shouldn't have to waste our time keeping track of a bunch of arbitrary software keys or begging some company which may or may not remain in business for permission to use or reactivate a product we legally purchased.
I used K-Meleon for a while a couple years back, when there wasn't really anything else available for Windows. Mozilla was still way too bloated and buggy back then. But then Mozilla got better, and then Firefox came out. And both Mozilla and Firefox are cross-platform. More and more these days I am finding myself completely disinterested in anything that ties me to any specific platform, be it Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
Everyone pitches a hissy fit when applications are only available for Windows, but nobody seems to care if an application is only developed for Linux, or Mac OS X. I like the Mac and find it's a very efficient tool for getting things done, and most of the applications are fairly open, so I am a little less disturbed by using a Mac-only application, but mark my words, as soon as there are suitable open source cross-platform equivalents available for anything, I go for that instead. I am keeping a close eye on NeoOffice/J for instance. Once it and OpenOffice get a little better, the world will have that much less need for Microsoft Office, and that much less need for Microsoft Windows as a requirement. And a side benefit: that much less need for a standardized monoculture to endanger your company's computing infrastructure.
Since Firefox/Mozilla got good enough, things like K-Meleon simply don't matter to me anymore. It's a real drag having to use a different application on every platform, and I especially don't like to be tied to Windows. I can configure everything I need in Firefox, and use the fantastic extensions like Tabbbrowsing Preferences and Adblock. Unless K-Meleon can do that on any platform of my choice, I fail to see why I should care about it anymore. A little extra speed is not nearly as important as portability and freedom.
We as a market need to continuously try to force ALL types of applications away from any platform lock-in, so that the operating systems can start competing based on which is the best, not which one has the right applications. We get more than enough of that lock-in crap from camera manufacturers and everyone else.
Cross-platform development is the way of the future, the way to consumer freedom and choice, and I don't see why everyone here on/. isn't trying to promote it at every opportunity. Open source is only one side of the struggle. Platform freedom is the other. Who cares if there are a million great applications, if none of them run on your platform of choice.
There's no denying that being fit is good for your health and mental well being. But you're talking about using totally artificial means to make yourself appear attractive just so you can take advantage of the fact that good looking people get more perks from others. That's the very definition of shallow.
Also, that way lies madness, as more and more people take advantage of better technology to look more and more perfect. It soon reaches a stage where it becomes pointless. Everyone will look the same, and along the way society has had an even easier time than usual disregarding the ugliness hiding inside many of the attractive people. Social evolution will take two steps back. Unattractive people will prosper through technology, passing on their unattractive genes to their descendants, who will then have to take advantage of technology to mimic attractiveness.
If everyone adopted your attitude, life would become a beauty pageant contest with no spiritual meaning. Everyone judged by what's on the surface. People already have problems with being unable to find a purpose in life. Just think how much more difficult it will be to find a purpose in a world as shallow as the one you're advocating. Who would want to live in such a world? Not even you, if you really understood what you were suggesting.
I just don't think you should be going around teaching young people that they should modify their appearance just to get some small advantage in the job market. It's the wrong priority. Sooner or later, the appearance no longer matters, and then they'll be stuck with jack squat for real skills and personality with which to continue their lives. That's not a recipe for success.
Along with the appearance thing you were advocating being a total kissass suckup to anyone with power. Altogether you were promoting an extremely ugly attitude toward life. Ugly on the inside. If you don't think that's important, I pity you.
I am getting so tired of this junk science. The world has been coming to an end for my entire 40+ years on this planet. Nothing has happened yet. Ain't going to happen either.
We're all so sorry that the end of the world hasn't come to pass during the Hollywood-allotted 2.2 hours. Grab another bucket of popcorn, it will be along sometime in the next 30-130 years. But by that time you'll probably be dead, so who cares, right?
So sorry that the little 40 year blip you call a life hasn't made any significant impact on the 4 BILLION year climatological history of planet Earth. You haven't died today, so that means all that rigamarole about this "death" thing is junk science too. You haven't directly observed it yet, so it must not actually exist. It's junk science! Hooray, you've saved us all from death and global warming!
I never cease to be amazed at the depths of human stupidity.
If you were actually being facetious to try and get a funny mod, we all apologize for misinterpreting you.
We are arrogant, mankind is, to think that because of a half-century of climate fluctuations, that we are all going to die tomorrow. Please, the climate has been changing in HUGE ways for much longer than the life-span of a human being.
Seems like you are the arrogant one, thinking you understand the theory and data behind global warming well enough to dismiss it all as bunk. Are you a climatologist? Have you studied the actual data? If you want to disprove something, you'll need some data to prove scientifically that such-and-such won't happen. You are also being idiotic, to infer that anyone ever said we're all going to die tomorrow. Nobody ever said that, so it's just a bullshit strawman statement. Furthermore, your ignorance of the significance of past climate change is appalling. Yes, the climate has changed in the past. Guess what happened in parallel with massive climate changes in the past? Mass extinctions.
The simple fact is, we're looking at a climate record going back 10,000 years where the only real temperature increase is a spike that's been happening in the last 100 years, at an ever-increasing rate. During the 9,900 years before that, it's almost flat in comparison. We've got glaciers that have been sitting around since the last ice age breaking up and moving faster than ever before. The evidence says something is changing. Our best hypothesis is that the cause is increased emission of certain gases that absorb heat, such as CO2 and methane. We call them greenhouse gases because of their scientifically observed heat-absorbing characteristics. We have directly observed evidence that the technology of the human race produces vastly larger quatities of such "greenhouse" gases every year than all the volcano eruptions in the world. There are six billion of us, and we are having a measurable effect on our world. Surprise. References: onetwo.
Global Warming is alarmism, coming from political agendas of people who want attention. Remember how we all laughed at those people who purchased electric generators and resurrected old bomb shelters for the Y2K scare?
But you're absolutely right. Just because some political agendas get mixed in with the real science, as always, then it all must be bullshit of the highest order. All scientists are liars and heretics, after all. Global warming is alarmism because there are no UFOs. The climate is changing in ways that haven't been seen in 10,000 years, but ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along, nothing to see here, folks. No problem. No big deal. We now return you to your regularly scheduled bread and circuses.
BTW looks are also very important. Study after study shows that good looking people do better then ugly people.
My advice to high schoolers, work out, get and keep a great body. Get plastic surgery if you need it. Learn to sidle up to the rich and powerful. Hang out where rich people hang out, learn their lingo, learn their likes and dislikes, learn their habit. Finally think of something that would be irresistable to them and start selling it.
No thanks, buddy. I'd rather be ugly on the outside than ugly on the inside. You're not doing anyone any favors by promoting that kind of soul-devouring attitude. It's all well and good to be cynical about the state of the world, but that doesn't preclude at least trying to make the world a better place by promoting positive attitudes.
Carrying the analogy further, IE becomes a "phishing net" and Windows becomes a "phishing boat". The intarweb may be viewed as the "ocean" and your average AOLer a dumb "phish". Smarter geeks could be viewed as smarter"dolphins".
Funny. The more things change...
Let us all hearken back to the days when traveling carnivals were popular. You were either a mark (phish) or a carnie (phisher). Those running the show get trained to pick out the marks and reel them in. Everyone pick up your copy of Heinlein's classic Stranger in a Strange Land, wherein Michael joins a carnival for a time and learns just how dumb most of the human race really is...
But we really shouldn't talk. We're all marks in the right situation. Take the dolphin out of its regular environment and it can be just as vulnerable as the dumb AOL phish. Humans are the craftiest beings in the known universe. They are always looking for a way to screw you, and there are only so many precautions one can take.
Our strongest weapon against scammers is cooperation. And redundant webs of trust. Our two strongest weapons against scammers are co-- oh, nevermind.
Carrying the analogy further, IE becomes a "phishing net" and Windows becomes a "phishing boat". The intarweb may be viewed as the "ocean" and your average AOLer a dumb "phish". Smarter geeks could be viewed as smarter"dolphins".
More like "whales", if we are speaking of cetaceans.
Bwahahahaha! I made a joke about geeks being fat! Ohhhh, I'm a fat geek too. Now I've made myself sad...
Bah! If anyone wants me, I'll be in the Angry Dome!
And I have a 350MHz slot-loading iMac with 768MB of RAM on which Mac OS X (10.3+) is also fairly snappy. Hard to believe, I know. It was even fairly snappy with just 320MB of RAM, but the extra helps.
Warning: update the firmware on early iMacs before you even stick an OS X install CD in it, or you will fry something inside and your iMac will die! But with the right firmware, it works great. You can probably get old iMacs cheap, too. It rocks for a general word processing/internet/iTunes device. Some of the later ones even had Firewire ports.
Here's a link to the Apple support page for the G3 iMacs. Notice about fourth down on the list there is an alert about installing firmware 4.1.9 before installing OS X. Don't even boot from any OS X boot CD before you get that firmware updated. I'm serious.
I'm not understanding how the thing you're describing is any different from the bracket exposure feature that is on most digital cameras, even most consumer models. My two-year-old Olympus C-750 lets me bracket up to 5 exposures with up to a full stop exposure difference between shots. Isn't that exactly what you're describing? Cameras already do this quite easily.
Then if you shoot RAW you can use a splitting technique to pull two separately compensated JPEG exposures from each RAW image, thus probably getting even more range at either end. But as far as I can tell we don't need to hack the camera to accomplish this. It's a standard bracketing technique.
What would be really impressive is if the camera itself could merge the several exposures, thus giving you vastly increased dynamic range in-camera without you messing with it in post-processing. This won't happen of course because the camera hardware isn't even close to powerful enough to approach the problem, and like metering every combined exposure requires different tweaks to make it look like the actual scene. Perhaps in 10 years.
So far, nobody including you has come up with any worthwhile example of why anyone should really care about hacking their camera. It just isn't useful. The hardware in the camera is already being used to its full potential. It'd be like hacking your toaster so that you could send the toasting commands manually over a serial cable. It would be extremely difficult to improve on the natural toasting ability of the built-in controls.
Interesting factoid about the 1-billion:1 ratio of the human eye though. Very interesting.
Even if the cost were the same, a mini-ITX in a small case is still no real competitor to the Mac mini. For one thing I'll bet you it will be more expensive to build your own mini-PC that won't be twice as loud (at least) as the Mac mini. Not to mention that Cubid case is butt-ugly compared the Mac mini. And you have to assemble it yourself, and gather all the right parts, etc. Anyone who would even dream of doing such a thing isn't in the target market for the Mac mini.
For another thing, Mac OS X isn't just another operating system. It's Mac OS X. It's perfectly designed for normal non-geek humans. It's beautiful. It's functional. As a component of the computer, Mac OS X has far more value to normal people than any other operating system. It just works better. It lets you get things done. That's why so many people are even happy to buy the more expensive Macs. It ends up being a better value. No more worrying about the 50 new Windows viruses and worms that come out every week.
Until Linux gets the level of slickness of Mac OS X, there will be no Intel-based competitor to the Mac, at least not as far as the general public is concerned. As always it must be emphasized that we are not the general public. Nevertheless I am one of those who have decided that I've wasted quite enough time building and upgrading my own PCs over the years, and trying to do things in Linux that are much easier in Windows and even easier on a Mac. So I will probably be buying one of these too. I just don't have that much time on my hands anymore.
That's the whole point of PCI slots... You can't forsee what's going to happen in the future, making an open PCI slot necessary.
It's one of those things you don't really appreciate until it's gone.
If these mini macs just had even just 2 PCI slots, I'd be willing to buy one.
A. What, exactly, do you think you would ever need to put in a PCI slot in the Mac mini? It has everything normal people (non-hardcore-gamers) need, or will need for the next several years. That includes Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 ports.
B. How do you know the PCI slot isn't going to fall out of favor in the next couple of years, thus making your extra PCI slots worthless? Last time I checked, most video cards require AGP, and isn't there already a newer, better type of PCI slot?
If you look at the actual cost of most upgrades over the life of the unit, it usually works out to being more expensive than just buying a new computer, unless you have all the requisite knowledge to pick out the right parts and install them yourself. And if you can do that, you aren't really part of the target market.
Seriously, if you think you need some PCI slots or extra drives, get a PowerMac, but unless you're a gamer or other power user you simply don't need anything more than what's in that little box. The target audience for this thing doesn't need all that shit. They are tired of it, they don't want to do upgrades, they hate the huge, noisy boxes with fans that typically start growling after about 18 months. They just want a little box that's quiet and works. Apple is going to sell millions of these things to the target market.
What's funny is he's dead wrong about the other one too, about assigning a single function key to any "continuously available feature". I always think back to the digitizer tablet we used with the DOS version of AutoCAD in my high school drafting class. On the tablet was a small rectangle for moving the picker around on the screen, and outside that rectangle was a vast assortment of items you could "pick" with the little mousy-thing. You could change the items and commands that were available by putting a different template under the pad's plastic cover. The best part: Everything on that pad was ALWAYS IN THE EXACT SAME SPOT.
Then AutoCAD moved to Microsoft Windows and did away with the digitizer tablets, instead using a mouse to manipulate toolbars covering half the screen. MOVABLE toolbars, of course. The horror. That digitizer tablet was one of the best, fastest interfaces I've ever used. You could get to know it like the back of your hand and almost work without looking at it after a while, like touch typing. Plus the little mousy-thing wasn't like a regular mouse, it had several buttons, one of which was a specific cancel button. Used that one a lot. Each of the other 4 buttons always did the same thing, and were always in the same place. AutoCAD on Windows couldn't hold a candle to AutoCAD in DOS with a digitizer tablet.
Seems like this guy hasn't used a Mac either. If he did he would have noticed the function keys on the keyboard that specifically control the volume (up, down, mute), and eject the CD tray, etc. Those kind of keys have always been very handy, and always will be.
I do know that there is a java Office Suite applicaion available, I just don't remember it by name.
You're either thinking of ThinkFree Office (non-free, $49), or the ongoing Aqua/Java port of OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J. NeoOffice/J may be our only hope for seeing a truly native Aqua port of OOo, since the main OOo team have abandoned the idea of making their own Aqua port. Just recently they've managed to make it support the native Mac menus and widgets, and it supports the native Mac fonts and printing, so it can almost pass as a real Mac application. They are continuing to work on it. OOo is large and slow, but it's free and getting better.
I tried ThinkFree Office a couple of times and wasn't impressed. Too Windows-oriented to function well in a Mac environment, and because it's some kind of cross-platform Java application the interface is almost as weird as using an X11 application. Blech.
As someone else said, the ability to change the status bar text can be used as part of a phishing scam, i.e. it's a security risk. Every link on a page can appear to be genuine. It's always been one of my pet peeves that I couldn't hover over a link and actually see where it went in the status bar, or trust what was written there if it seemed to show a link. On every Mozilla and Firefox install I've done since I discovered that I can turn that off, I have done so. Having it off by default just saves me the trouble now.
Being able to change the status bar text was just another unnecessary frivolity on the level of proprietary HTML extensions like marquee. So, I definitely agree with the Firefox developers that it should be disabled by default.
It is true that Firefox has bugs. We are all ready to admit that, I hope. I'm sure there are even some nasty ones in the Bugzilla database. But for the most part it is best to assume that the Firefox developers have implemented something in a particular way in order to either comply with the real standards more closely or to help protect the user (or both). It is best to assume that the way Firefox does something is the correct way, if you see a different behavior from IE. Making this assumption until further evidence presents itself can help keep a person from being lambasted publicly on Slashdot.;-)
You're a fool if you think the users are actually paying any attention to that ActiveX prompt besides automatically clicking "Yes". So what's the point? If they're really ignorant, you'll have to find a better way of keeping them from entering the wrong website. I have some users who are forced to run IE to connect to some website run by the state government. I've told them in no uncertain terms that they should only use IE to go to that specific website, and for the general Internet it's Firefox or Mozilla. The firewall software is set to ask for confirmation whenever IE tries to access the net, as an additional way to try and keep them from using IE on other websites. Probably doesn't work all the time, but I tried.
On the other hand, sometimes you can actually explain the problem with disabling a protection feature, and if you do it properly they will understand and accept that the annoying thing is protecting them. I did that when someone said the firewall software was annoying because of the little dialogs that pop up. I explained that the firewall was helping keep their computers safe, and they accepted the mildly annoying dialogs from then on. User education. Eventually you can almost always get it through to them if you try. If you can't, and the management won't back you up, then it's not your problem. CYA and move on.
The main thing to remember is, not everyone is a computer expert. Those dialogs really are annoying! We accept them because we know why they are there. The users get much more annoyed with them because they usually haven't got a clue why they are being interrupted just so they can answer a question they don't understand. That kind of thing is really, really annoying. Look at it from their perspective, and then help them see it from your perspective. Don't just call them idiots. That solves nothing.
As others have said Firefox loads slower than IE initially because portions of the IE code are always running in memory, and are loaded in the background when Windows boots. If IE were a standalone application like Firefox, it would be about the same speed or slower. Use the turbo option that others have described to keep parts of Firefox in memory and get a similar effect. Mozilla has that option available from preferences for years, I'm not sure why they left it out of Firefox.
What I do instead of closing Firefox is to leave it open, and have any documents open in a new tab in the browser that's already running. This can be configured under the Advanced preferences. In that same section there is an option to warn before closing any browser with more than one tab open, which is what you're looking for. That option has been there since at least 1.0pre that I know about, and on a fresh install it should have been selected by default. Just go in there and check that box.
There is an extension that can make tabbed browsing even more wonderful than it already is. Just go to Tools -> Extensions and click on the blue link to get more extensions, and install the Tabbbrowser Preferences extension. What it can do is keep all related tabs together in colored groups, and let you move tabs around manually, make the tab bar scroll when there are too many tabs to display, and some other stuff like making links that would normally open in a new window open in a new tab instead. Also, it will save and restore a group of tabs, and restore the tabs you were using when Firefox crashed. I'm not sure if Firefox can do that by default. Oh, and you can undo closing any number of tabs. I'm sure you've also many times closed a tab when you didn't mean to. With the Tabbbrowser Preferences extension, you can bring that tab back. It's very cool.
The other extension that I really recommend is Adblock. Install that, and then get a pre-defined filterset for it like Filterset.G, so you don't have to train it. Just save the file there with the latest date as part of the filename. Import the filterset by going into the Adblock preferences and clicking on Options -> Import Filters.
Ok, let me get this straight in my head. You're saying that because Microsoft et al were forced by the market to create some sort of workable (but still mostly proprietary) "standards" so that the market would buy their products, that makes them the good guys? If someone does something that approximates doing the right thing because they are forced to do so, that doesn't automatically make them deserving of any support or respect. Especially since, in almost every technology you look at, the "interoperability" that Microsoft came up with was only interoperable with other Microsoft products (to further their own advancement), and/or actively broke or destroyed the usefulness of other REAL standards developed by the community at large. That should not be acceptable behavior.
The so-called standards developed by Microsoft were always about winning more market share. You are a fool if you think Microsoft has ever cared about you as a customer having better interoperability with any non-Microsoft technology. Never has such a thing come to pass unless they literally had no choice. It has ALWAYS been about trying to keep you from using anything not owned by them. It's not even about money, it's about winning at any cost while crushing the competition by any means.
No, sir, your view of computing history has some rather large holes in it. Microsoft has done FAR more harm than good with regards to advancing the computing industry as a whole. The purpose of all their proprietary technologies like ActiveX was to attempt to take absolute control over the entire Internet, such that any person connecting to the general web would require an operating system and web browser created by Microsoft. The secondary purpose is always to thwart the development or continued use of open standards. Let us never forget either of these things.
Additionally, by refusing to support the real web standards like CSS 1/2, they have now held back the advancement of web development technology by years. A website that can be developed with web standards in 2 weeks to be compatible with all other web browsers will then take an additional 10 weeks to be modified to work around every broken standard and quirk and unsupported standard in Internet Explorer. Every company that has to pay even a single web developer should be mad as hell at Microsoft for all the money they have to pay out for extra development time. Go ahead, try coding to the standards and see how well your website works with IE compared to every other browser.
You say nearly anything will talk to nearly anything else at this point? That's funny, I don't see Microsoft Windows understanding AppleTalk networks, or ANY non-Windows filesystem, even though such things have been around for a minimum of 15 years. (Servers running Services for Mac don't count. The common Windows PC can't talk to a Mac or read any disk with a Mac filesystem, even though it's worked in the other direction for at least a decade.) I don't see any application that can claim reliable compatibility with any Microsoft Office file format.
Yeah, TCP/IP works, big whoop. That part was a basic necessity for the computing world at large to move forward back in 1990. It's also not a Microsoft-developed standard, it was developed by a consortium of companies back in the 80s when they decided they had no choice but to figure out some way to work together at a basic level. There were just too many low-level networking technologies in competition. Again, the market forced the creation of a standard way of doing things, but only at a low level.
At every layer on top of that, Microsoft continues to be basically incompatible in myriad ways with everyone else on the planet. Applications, file formats, filesystems, network protocols, etc. If they come from Microsoft, they are all based on the "screw you if you aren't using Microsoft" philosophy, unless they had no choice but to build in some compatibility. You are so wrong about the current compatibility level and where it came from, it's not even
Forever are we re-learning the lessons of events like the Vietnam war. Individual riflemen can still wreak havoc even among the most technologically advanced troops in the world. Until every soldier in the Army is equipped with an armored mecha-suit that can stop a 30-30 round, most firearms can still do plenty of damage. That argument is crap. Even if it were true that firearms would be less effective than they used to be, it doesn't excuse just giving up on the whole concept of keeping the balance of power in favor of the populace.
As for needing a large majority to get something done, that's not actually the way things work. You only need 10% of any particular group to decide to do something, and it's over, the rest will follow-the-leader like the usual sheep they are. Simple social dynamics. Events always come to a head faster than you think they would. People appear apathetic most of the time, but that's mostly because nobody really steps over the line in an obvious way. The camel always has a ton of straw on his back before the last straw is placed.
If we saw the kind of corruption in this country that happens in other countries (like South and Central America for instance), where it's just obvious and blatant, people would quite literally be up in arms, and things would change. (In those countries things can't change because the population is disarmed and always has been.) Things haven't reached that point here yet. Most of the population is quite happy. That doesn't mean the situation can't change. That doesn't mean the people in power can't decide to get stupid all of a sudden. Like passing stupid laws like this smart gun thing. It's just one more step on the road to stupid. I'd rather not go any farther down that road, if you don't mind.
Now, you can sit back and watch everything go to shit, or you can fight the degeneration of freedoms and try to keep the country in working condition. If anyone had actual evidence of fraud during the last election it would be out in the open by now and we would all be talking about it on a daily basis. Something tells me the Democrats wouldn't just sit on something that could get them back into power. If you have some sort of evidence, why aren't you pointing us to it so we can do something about it?
Yeah, we all like toys that can kill people. That's why we all love to own kitchen knives and motor vehicles, right? We should ban those too. After all, motor vehicles alone kill many more people each year than firearms ever do. And that's including firearms homocides, which is the vast majority of firearms deaths. These smart guns will do zilch against that number. You could probably count on one hand the number of deaths that *might* be avoided each year with these smart guns. You could save 100 times as many lives with better driver education, better vehicle safety testing, better DUI enforcement, etc. But nobody cares about that when we have the gun as a convenient scapegoat.
Now: that said, if we had a society where firearms weren't necessary for home protection or policing (I rarely ever see the latter in action where I live, so I require the former), then this would be great.
There will never be any such society on any planet containing more than one homo sapiens, or as Heinlein liked to refer to us, the two-legged wolf species. Humans are, by nature, not angels. Sometimes we have to defend ourselves from other members of our species. It is wishful thinking to imagine that this will change anytime within the next 50,000 years.
On sport firearms, this would be great, because you don't need the reliability you would in a protection scenario.
I must disagree with this also. Sometimes the only firearm you have is a sport firearm. Oddly enough, the same Murphy's law that determines things will break at the most inopportune moment, determines also that you will be attacked at the most inopportune moment, e.g. when you don't have a fully-functional non-sport firearm. Therefore you would want any weapon to be usable at any time.
Also, who says you don't need reliability in a sport firearm? You certainly don't want your target rifle to stop working in the middle of your timed match because the battery shorted out or something stupid like that. You don't want your hunting rifle to fail to fire at the crucial moment because your hand got too sweaty.
No, sorry, this is a bad idea no matter what angle you look at it. It's also a violation of the purpose of the 2nd Amendment, as far as I am concerned. That is more than enough for me to oppose any forced use of it. Idiots may exercise their freedom of choice to choose to use it, and it may have its mandated uses in places like prisons where the likelihood of the weapon being taken away from the owner are high, but this should not be forced by law on the general population. It's just wrong, on many levels.
If you're dealing with someone who has the foresight to use an EMP pulse, and has the equipment necessary to do it, you have bigger things to worry about.
Not necessarily. If this law goes through, within a few years any person can be certain that most of the guns in any "law abiding" neighborhood will be these "smart" guns. A single individual or a group of people with ill intent can turn an entire neighborhood of armed individuals into disarmed individuals with a medium-sized homemade EMP. That's just not cool. It doesn't matter that it's unlikely. Earthquakes are unlikely too, but we still build earthquake resistant buildings because the consequences of having your building fall down during an earthquake are really bad. It's also unlikely that a whole plane-load of people would allow a couple of people armed with nothing but knives to take over their plane and deliberately fly it into a building, killing thousands. Yet it happened, what, four times in one day? No shit, huh?
Then there's the little thing that everyone always forgets about the 2nd Amendment. It's not about your right to protect yourself. That is an inalienable right that cannot be taken away by any government. What the 2nd Amendment (and the entire Constitution) is really about is the guaranteed ability of the general population to defend itself agains a corrupt government, by law or by force. By the People, for the People, and all the jazz.
Something tells me that the military and the police aren't going to be carrying around these so-called "smart" guns anytime soon, while the general population is forced to buy only smart guns and exchange older guns for smart guns. Something also tells me that the military is the one group who has easy access to EMP weapons. Follow the bouncing ball. It leads to a very dark place.
It doesn't matter that it's unlikely to happen. The point is that it could happen very easily, and the consequences of such an event are very, very bad for the citizens of this country. If you think it could never happen, you must be living on a different planet with a different world history and a completely different race of sentient beings controlling things. This is a great country, but we all know it is not run by angels. No government ever has been. Everyone who is in power always wants more power.
Mark my words. This type of law is evil to the core, and shows a complete lack of understanding of the meaning of the 2nd Amendment of these United States.
Yeah, how did humanity ever survive the dark ages of the early 1900's when we didn't have some fucking nanny-state telling us not to use something we shouldn't eat in components we won't eat, or eat off of?
When was the last time you were served a meal on an old motherboard, or had IC's for an appetizer? Maybe you've used an old heatsink as a lollipop?
Man, I'm not particularly "green", but I do feel the need to point out that you seem to be missing an important concept, which is the little fact that life is a cycle and we live in a closed ecosystem (it's called Earth). That means once you create a substance, it doesn't go away unless you destroy it or recycle it into a different substance. Do you have someplace else to take your family when every source of fresh water on this planet is contaminated beyond the ability of nature to decontaminate it? Well, do you? I don't see any other planets being terraformed just yet.
Everything we build eventually finds its way into a landfill where the chemicals in it are leeched out into ground water. It doesn't matter that this takes a long time if you have a billion tons of toxic stuff to leech chemicals from. Many of those chemicals have no known safe concentration, meaning they are toxic at even the smallest concentrations. Or they are cumulative toxins meaning they build up in living tissue and never go away. Nature doesn't do a good job filtering out stuff like that.
How did humanity ever survive the dark ages before certain substances were banned? Last time I checked, a whole lot of humanity didn't survive a lot of things, including exposure to lead paint, asbestos, dioxins, even mediocre stuff like coal dust. There is a reason that things like CFCs and dioxins and asbestos get banned.
The "fucking nanny state" you refer to isn't protecting you from licking your circuit boards (feel free). It's protecting the rest of us and our children (your children too, amazingly enough) from having to drink contaminated ground water coming from landfills full of your old, broken lead-filled circuit boards and dioxin-based herbicides. Unless you have a safe way to deal with a toxic substance throughout its entire lifetime, you should not be using it. Period. Unless it degrades into something safe (or we invent a cheap way to throw toxic waste into the sun) it will eventually come back and bite us in the ass if it remains part of the Earth's ecosystem. And by us I mean the human race. I may not be proud of every member of the human race but I do support its continued survival. I think we have a lot of potential. Including the potential to kill ourselves off via numerous methods if we're not careful.
Maybe you were just trying to be facetious and the moderator didn't catch it, but if you weren't I have to say I'm glad there are plenty of greenie "idiots" out there to oppose your kind of idiocy and short-sightedness. We have to look ahead and find a sustainable balance between technology and the only ecosystem we have available to keep us alive. That usually means erring on the side of not irreversibly contaminating our life support system. Sometimes, that means giving up the most efficient way of doing something for a cleaner way. The horror. The Horror!
What are you referring to? I really haven't had problems with Sandisk.
I have seen a great many reports on sites like DPReview forums about older Sandisk cards (pre-Ultra II/Extreme) having extremely poor transfer speeds, not living up to spec, poor reliability, etc. Since the Ultra II/Extreme lines came out they seem to have cleaned up their act and now they are considered the top of the line cards by many people. Their new Extreme III line has just recently doubled the transfer speeds of most types of memory cards to sustained 20MB/20MB read/write, and won some sort of award. Prior to the Ultra II/Extreme cards they had a lot of problems.
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Even with the 1GB RAM the performance is still sluggish, kind of reminds me of using a Knoppix Live CD.
If the sluggish performance you see is mostly during operations that read or write a lot of data to the hard drive, the problem is almost certainly the slow notebook hard drive. Hard drive speed in notebooks has been a problem for years, it's the one thing that really holds them back from totally replacing desktops for a lot of disk-intensive uses. And in order to make a whole computer that small, you have to use a notebook hard drive.
If you're interested in making it perform more like a desktop machine, try replacing the 4200rpm (5400rpm?) notebook drive inside with a 7200rpm notebook drive. I've never seen one before now, but apparently Hitachi just started making 40GB and 60GB 7200rpm drives. You've already replaced the RAM yourself, so this shouldn't be too difficult. I think you'll be shocked by the difference in performance. Oh, and check out the warranty on the 60GB model: 3 years! All the reviewers say it runs about as cool as the drives they are replacing, so heat shouldn't be a problem. The 8MB buffer should help too.
I wouldn't be too surprised if Apple started using these very same drives in updated versions of the Mac mini. It would certainly stem a lot of the "my Mac mini is slow" comments. Then again, an improved Mac mini might start competing a little too well with the Power Mac line.
While you're at Newegg you might want to pick up a Macally Firewire/USB enclosure for your 80GB drive so you can use it as external storage/backup. The notebook-size enclosures can usually be powered by the Firewire bus, so no extra power adapters or wires. One tiny computer with desktop-level power, one tiny external storage drive connected with a single cable.
Dammit, I'm drooling on my keyboard again...
Was there something special about win2k that prevented you from writing down your product key on a piece of paper and storing it with other pieces of important papers?
I have a slight problem with that kind of attitude. Yes, he should have written the number down. But I have a fundamental problem with the fact that he needs to do so. Where does it end?
Someday, if this continues, you too will reach your limit. Every piece of equipment and software you own will require a product activation key, without which it will stop working whenever some glitch happens. You'll have 7,632 "important" papers that you must keep track of in order to keep your life from being disrupted. You will have spent many hours making sure that you always record and have access to the registration codes for every product you own. You'll suddenly say to yourself, "This is BS, why am I letting a bunch of products control me like this?" And then you'll understand why many of us prefer using Linux or BSD, or even Mac OS X.
Not because it's free (it often isn't) but because it's Free. Many of us spend just as much or more on Free software than we did on proprietary software. The benefit is we don't have to be slaves to the software anymore. This isn't a birth certificate we're talking about here. It shouldn't be necessary to classify it as "important". We shouldn't have to waste our time keeping track of a bunch of arbitrary software keys or begging some company which may or may not remain in business for permission to use or reactivate a product we legally purchased.
I used K-Meleon for a while a couple years back, when there wasn't really anything else available for Windows. Mozilla was still way too bloated and buggy back then. But then Mozilla got better, and then Firefox came out. And both Mozilla and Firefox are cross-platform. More and more these days I am finding myself completely disinterested in anything that ties me to any specific platform, be it Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
/. isn't trying to promote it at every opportunity. Open source is only one side of the struggle. Platform freedom is the other. Who cares if there are a million great applications, if none of them run on your platform of choice.
Everyone pitches a hissy fit when applications are only available for Windows, but nobody seems to care if an application is only developed for Linux, or Mac OS X. I like the Mac and find it's a very efficient tool for getting things done, and most of the applications are fairly open, so I am a little less disturbed by using a Mac-only application, but mark my words, as soon as there are suitable open source cross-platform equivalents available for anything, I go for that instead. I am keeping a close eye on NeoOffice/J for instance. Once it and OpenOffice get a little better, the world will have that much less need for Microsoft Office, and that much less need for Microsoft Windows as a requirement. And a side benefit: that much less need for a standardized monoculture to endanger your company's computing infrastructure.
Since Firefox/Mozilla got good enough, things like K-Meleon simply don't matter to me anymore. It's a real drag having to use a different application on every platform, and I especially don't like to be tied to Windows. I can configure everything I need in Firefox, and use the fantastic extensions like Tabbbrowsing Preferences and Adblock. Unless K-Meleon can do that on any platform of my choice, I fail to see why I should care about it anymore. A little extra speed is not nearly as important as portability and freedom.
We as a market need to continuously try to force ALL types of applications away from any platform lock-in, so that the operating systems can start competing based on which is the best, not which one has the right applications. We get more than enough of that lock-in crap from camera manufacturers and everyone else.
Cross-platform development is the way of the future, the way to consumer freedom and choice, and I don't see why everyone here on
There's no denying that being fit is good for your health and mental well being. But you're talking about using totally artificial means to make yourself appear attractive just so you can take advantage of the fact that good looking people get more perks from others. That's the very definition of shallow.
Also, that way lies madness, as more and more people take advantage of better technology to look more and more perfect. It soon reaches a stage where it becomes pointless. Everyone will look the same, and along the way society has had an even easier time than usual disregarding the ugliness hiding inside many of the attractive people. Social evolution will take two steps back. Unattractive people will prosper through technology, passing on their unattractive genes to their descendants, who will then have to take advantage of technology to mimic attractiveness.
If everyone adopted your attitude, life would become a beauty pageant contest with no spiritual meaning. Everyone judged by what's on the surface. People already have problems with being unable to find a purpose in life. Just think how much more difficult it will be to find a purpose in a world as shallow as the one you're advocating. Who would want to live in such a world? Not even you, if you really understood what you were suggesting.
I just don't think you should be going around teaching young people that they should modify their appearance just to get some small advantage in the job market. It's the wrong priority. Sooner or later, the appearance no longer matters, and then they'll be stuck with jack squat for real skills and personality with which to continue their lives. That's not a recipe for success.
Along with the appearance thing you were advocating being a total kissass suckup to anyone with power. Altogether you were promoting an extremely ugly attitude toward life. Ugly on the inside. If you don't think that's important, I pity you.
I am getting so tired of this junk science. The world has been coming to an end for my entire 40+ years on this planet. Nothing has happened yet. Ain't going to happen either.
We're all so sorry that the end of the world hasn't come to pass during the Hollywood-allotted 2.2 hours. Grab another bucket of popcorn, it will be along sometime in the next 30-130 years. But by that time you'll probably be dead, so who cares, right?
So sorry that the little 40 year blip you call a life hasn't made any significant impact on the 4 BILLION year climatological history of planet Earth. You haven't died today, so that means all that rigamarole about this "death" thing is junk science too. You haven't directly observed it yet, so it must not actually exist. It's junk science! Hooray, you've saved us all from death and global warming!
I never cease to be amazed at the depths of human stupidity.
If you were actually being facetious to try and get a funny mod, we all apologize for misinterpreting you.
We are arrogant, mankind is, to think that because of a half-century of climate fluctuations, that we are all going to die tomorrow. Please, the climate has been changing in HUGE ways for much longer than the life-span of a human being.
Seems like you are the arrogant one, thinking you understand the theory and data behind global warming well enough to dismiss it all as bunk. Are you a climatologist? Have you studied the actual data? If you want to disprove something, you'll need some data to prove scientifically that such-and-such won't happen. You are also being idiotic, to infer that anyone ever said we're all going to die tomorrow. Nobody ever said that, so it's just a bullshit strawman statement. Furthermore, your ignorance of the significance of past climate change is appalling. Yes, the climate has changed in the past. Guess what happened in parallel with massive climate changes in the past? Mass extinctions.
The simple fact is, we're looking at a climate record going back 10,000 years where the only real temperature increase is a spike that's been happening in the last 100 years, at an ever-increasing rate. During the 9,900 years before that, it's almost flat in comparison. We've got glaciers that have been sitting around since the last ice age breaking up and moving faster than ever before. The evidence says something is changing. Our best hypothesis is that the cause is increased emission of certain gases that absorb heat, such as CO2 and methane. We call them greenhouse gases because of their scientifically observed heat-absorbing characteristics. We have directly observed evidence that the technology of the human race produces vastly larger quatities of such "greenhouse" gases every year than all the volcano eruptions in the world. There are six billion of us, and we are having a measurable effect on our world. Surprise. References: one two.
Global Warming is alarmism, coming from political agendas of people who want attention. Remember how we all laughed at those people who purchased electric generators and resurrected old bomb shelters for the Y2K scare?
But you're absolutely right. Just because some political agendas get mixed in with the real science, as always, then it all must be bullshit of the highest order. All scientists are liars and heretics, after all. Global warming is alarmism because there are no UFOs. The climate is changing in ways that haven't been seen in 10,000 years, but ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along, nothing to see here, folks. No problem. No big deal. We now return you to your regularly scheduled bread and circuses.
Gah.
Popularity is extrememly important.
BTW looks are also very important. Study after study shows that good looking people do better then ugly people.
My advice to high schoolers, work out, get and keep a great body. Get plastic surgery if you need it. Learn to sidle up to the rich and powerful. Hang out where rich people hang out, learn their lingo, learn their likes and dislikes, learn their habit. Finally think of something that would be irresistable to them and start selling it.
No thanks, buddy. I'd rather be ugly on the outside than ugly on the inside. You're not doing anyone any favors by promoting that kind of soul-devouring attitude. It's all well and good to be cynical about the state of the world, but that doesn't preclude at least trying to make the world a better place by promoting positive attitudes.
Carrying the analogy further, IE becomes a "phishing net" and Windows becomes a "phishing boat". The intarweb may be viewed as the "ocean" and your average AOLer a dumb "phish". Smarter geeks could be viewed as smarter"dolphins".
Funny. The more things change...
Let us all hearken back to the days when traveling carnivals were popular. You were either a mark (phish) or a carnie (phisher). Those running the show get trained to pick out the marks and reel them in. Everyone pick up your copy of Heinlein's classic Stranger in a Strange Land, wherein Michael joins a carnival for a time and learns just how dumb most of the human race really is...
But we really shouldn't talk. We're all marks in the right situation. Take the dolphin out of its regular environment and it can be just as vulnerable as the dumb AOL phish. Humans are the craftiest beings in the known universe. They are always looking for a way to screw you, and there are only so many precautions one can take.
Our strongest weapon against scammers is cooperation. And redundant webs of trust. Our two strongest weapons against scammers are co-- oh, nevermind.
Carrying the analogy further, IE becomes a "phishing net" and Windows becomes a "phishing boat". The intarweb may be viewed as the "ocean" and your average AOLer a dumb "phish". Smarter geeks could be viewed as smarter"dolphins".
More like "whales", if we are speaking of cetaceans.
Bwahahahaha! I made a joke about geeks being fat!
Ohhhh, I'm a fat geek too. Now I've made myself sad...
Bah! If anyone wants me, I'll be in the Angry Dome!
"Report me to Homeland Security for terrorist links because i disagree with you?"
you joke... but how long until that becomes a viable way of dealing with undesirable people... the same way it is in China.
About three years from now... Negative three, that is.
And I have a 350MHz slot-loading iMac with 768MB of RAM on which Mac OS X (10.3+) is also fairly snappy. Hard to believe, I know. It was even fairly snappy with just 320MB of RAM, but the extra helps.
Warning: update the firmware on early iMacs before you even stick an OS X install CD in it, or you will fry something inside and your iMac will die! But with the right firmware, it works great. You can probably get old iMacs cheap, too. It rocks for a general word processing/internet/iTunes device. Some of the later ones even had Firewire ports.
Here's a link to the Apple support page for the G3 iMacs. Notice about fourth down on the list there is an alert about installing firmware 4.1.9 before installing OS X. Don't even boot from any OS X boot CD before you get that firmware updated. I'm serious.
I'm not understanding how the thing you're describing is any different from the bracket exposure feature that is on most digital cameras, even most consumer models. My two-year-old Olympus C-750 lets me bracket up to 5 exposures with up to a full stop exposure difference between shots. Isn't that exactly what you're describing? Cameras already do this quite easily.
Then if you shoot RAW you can use a splitting technique to pull two separately compensated JPEG exposures from each RAW image, thus probably getting even more range at either end. But as far as I can tell we don't need to hack the camera to accomplish this. It's a standard bracketing technique.
What would be really impressive is if the camera itself could merge the several exposures, thus giving you vastly increased dynamic range in-camera without you messing with it in post-processing. This won't happen of course because the camera hardware isn't even close to powerful enough to approach the problem, and like metering every combined exposure requires different tweaks to make it look like the actual scene. Perhaps in 10 years.
So far, nobody including you has come up with any worthwhile example of why anyone should really care about hacking their camera. It just isn't useful. The hardware in the camera is already being used to its full potential. It'd be like hacking your toaster so that you could send the toasting commands manually over a serial cable. It would be extremely difficult to improve on the natural toasting ability of the built-in controls.
Interesting factoid about the 1-billion:1 ratio of the human eye though. Very interesting.
Bah.
Even if the cost were the same, a mini-ITX in a small case is still no real competitor to the Mac mini. For one thing I'll bet you it will be more expensive to build your own mini-PC that won't be twice as loud (at least) as the Mac mini. Not to mention that Cubid case is butt-ugly compared the Mac mini. And you have to assemble it yourself, and gather all the right parts, etc. Anyone who would even dream of doing such a thing isn't in the target market for the Mac mini.
For another thing, Mac OS X isn't just another operating system. It's Mac OS X. It's perfectly designed for normal non-geek humans. It's beautiful. It's functional. As a component of the computer, Mac OS X has far more value to normal people than any other operating system. It just works better. It lets you get things done. That's why so many people are even happy to buy the more expensive Macs. It ends up being a better value. No more worrying about the 50 new Windows viruses and worms that come out every week.
Until Linux gets the level of slickness of Mac OS X, there will be no Intel-based competitor to the Mac, at least not as far as the general public is concerned. As always it must be emphasized that we are not the general public. Nevertheless I am one of those who have decided that I've wasted quite enough time building and upgrading my own PCs over the years, and trying to do things in Linux that are much easier in Windows and even easier on a Mac. So I will probably be buying one of these too. I just don't have that much time on my hands anymore.
That's the whole point of PCI slots... You can't forsee what's going to happen in the future, making an open PCI slot necessary.
It's one of those things you don't really appreciate until it's gone.
If these mini macs just had even just 2 PCI slots, I'd be willing to buy one.
A. What, exactly, do you think you would ever need to put in a PCI slot in the Mac mini? It has everything normal people (non-hardcore-gamers) need, or will need for the next several years. That includes Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 ports.
B. How do you know the PCI slot isn't going to fall out of favor in the next couple of years, thus making your extra PCI slots worthless? Last time I checked, most video cards require AGP, and isn't there already a newer, better type of PCI slot?
If you look at the actual cost of most upgrades over the life of the unit, it usually works out to being more expensive than just buying a new computer, unless you have all the requisite knowledge to pick out the right parts and install them yourself. And if you can do that, you aren't really part of the target market.
Seriously, if you think you need some PCI slots or extra drives, get a PowerMac, but unless you're a gamer or other power user you simply don't need anything more than what's in that little box. The target audience for this thing doesn't need all that shit. They are tired of it, they don't want to do upgrades, they hate the huge, noisy boxes with fans that typically start growling after about 18 months. They just want a little box that's quiet and works. Apple is going to sell millions of these things to the target market.
What's funny is he's dead wrong about the other one too, about assigning a single function key to any "continuously available feature". I always think back to the digitizer tablet we used with the DOS version of AutoCAD in my high school drafting class. On the tablet was a small rectangle for moving the picker around on the screen, and outside that rectangle was a vast assortment of items you could "pick" with the little mousy-thing. You could change the items and commands that were available by putting a different template under the pad's plastic cover. The best part: Everything on that pad was ALWAYS IN THE EXACT SAME SPOT.
Then AutoCAD moved to Microsoft Windows and did away with the digitizer tablets, instead using a mouse to manipulate toolbars covering half the screen. MOVABLE toolbars, of course. The horror. That digitizer tablet was one of the best, fastest interfaces I've ever used. You could get to know it like the back of your hand and almost work without looking at it after a while, like touch typing. Plus the little mousy-thing wasn't like a regular mouse, it had several buttons, one of which was a specific cancel button. Used that one a lot. Each of the other 4 buttons always did the same thing, and were always in the same place. AutoCAD on Windows couldn't hold a candle to AutoCAD in DOS with a digitizer tablet.
Seems like this guy hasn't used a Mac either. If he did he would have noticed the function keys on the keyboard that specifically control the volume (up, down, mute), and eject the CD tray, etc. Those kind of keys have always been very handy, and always will be.
I do know that there is a java Office Suite applicaion available, I just don't remember it by name.
You're either thinking of ThinkFree Office (non-free, $49), or the ongoing Aqua/Java port of OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice/J. NeoOffice/J may be our only hope for seeing a truly native Aqua port of OOo, since the main OOo team have abandoned the idea of making their own Aqua port. Just recently they've managed to make it support the native Mac menus and widgets, and it supports the native Mac fonts and printing, so it can almost pass as a real Mac application. They are continuing to work on it. OOo is large and slow, but it's free and getting better.
I tried ThinkFree Office a couple of times and wasn't impressed. Too Windows-oriented to function well in a Mac environment, and because it's some kind of cross-platform Java application the interface is almost as weird as using an X11 application. Blech.
As someone else said, the ability to change the status bar text can be used as part of a phishing scam, i.e. it's a security risk. Every link on a page can appear to be genuine. It's always been one of my pet peeves that I couldn't hover over a link and actually see where it went in the status bar, or trust what was written there if it seemed to show a link. On every Mozilla and Firefox install I've done since I discovered that I can turn that off, I have done so. Having it off by default just saves me the trouble now.
;-)
Being able to change the status bar text was just another unnecessary frivolity on the level of proprietary HTML extensions like marquee. So, I definitely agree with the Firefox developers that it should be disabled by default.
It is true that Firefox has bugs. We are all ready to admit that, I hope. I'm sure there are even some nasty ones in the Bugzilla database. But for the most part it is best to assume that the Firefox developers have implemented something in a particular way in order to either comply with the real standards more closely or to help protect the user (or both). It is best to assume that the way Firefox does something is the correct way, if you see a different behavior from IE. Making this assumption until further evidence presents itself can help keep a person from being lambasted publicly on Slashdot.
You're a fool if you think the users are actually paying any attention to that ActiveX prompt besides automatically clicking "Yes". So what's the point? If they're really ignorant, you'll have to find a better way of keeping them from entering the wrong website. I have some users who are forced to run IE to connect to some website run by the state government. I've told them in no uncertain terms that they should only use IE to go to that specific website, and for the general Internet it's Firefox or Mozilla. The firewall software is set to ask for confirmation whenever IE tries to access the net, as an additional way to try and keep them from using IE on other websites. Probably doesn't work all the time, but I tried.
On the other hand, sometimes you can actually explain the problem with disabling a protection feature, and if you do it properly they will understand and accept that the annoying thing is protecting them. I did that when someone said the firewall software was annoying because of the little dialogs that pop up. I explained that the firewall was helping keep their computers safe, and they accepted the mildly annoying dialogs from then on. User education. Eventually you can almost always get it through to them if you try. If you can't, and the management won't back you up, then it's not your problem. CYA and move on.
The main thing to remember is, not everyone is a computer expert. Those dialogs really are annoying! We accept them because we know why they are there. The users get much more annoyed with them because they usually haven't got a clue why they are being interrupted just so they can answer a question they don't understand. That kind of thing is really, really annoying. Look at it from their perspective, and then help them see it from your perspective. Don't just call them idiots. That solves nothing.
As others have said Firefox loads slower than IE initially because portions of the IE code are always running in memory, and are loaded in the background when Windows boots. If IE were a standalone application like Firefox, it would be about the same speed or slower. Use the turbo option that others have described to keep parts of Firefox in memory and get a similar effect. Mozilla has that option available from preferences for years, I'm not sure why they left it out of Firefox.
What I do instead of closing Firefox is to leave it open, and have any documents open in a new tab in the browser that's already running. This can be configured under the Advanced preferences. In that same section there is an option to warn before closing any browser with more than one tab open, which is what you're looking for. That option has been there since at least 1.0pre that I know about, and on a fresh install it should have been selected by default. Just go in there and check that box.
There is an extension that can make tabbed browsing even more wonderful than it already is. Just go to Tools -> Extensions and click on the blue link to get more extensions, and install the Tabbbrowser Preferences extension. What it can do is keep all related tabs together in colored groups, and let you move tabs around manually, make the tab bar scroll when there are too many tabs to display, and some other stuff like making links that would normally open in a new window open in a new tab instead. Also, it will save and restore a group of tabs, and restore the tabs you were using when Firefox crashed. I'm not sure if Firefox can do that by default. Oh, and you can undo closing any number of tabs. I'm sure you've also many times closed a tab when you didn't mean to. With the Tabbbrowser Preferences extension, you can bring that tab back. It's very cool.
The other extension that I really recommend is Adblock. Install that, and then get a pre-defined filterset for it like Filterset.G, so you don't have to train it. Just save the file there with the latest date as part of the filename. Import the filterset by going into the Adblock preferences and clicking on Options -> Import Filters.
Enjoy Firefox.
Ok, let me get this straight in my head. You're saying that because Microsoft et al were forced by the market to create some sort of workable (but still mostly proprietary) "standards" so that the market would buy their products, that makes them the good guys? If someone does something that approximates doing the right thing because they are forced to do so, that doesn't automatically make them deserving of any support or respect. Especially since, in almost every technology you look at, the "interoperability" that Microsoft came up with was only interoperable with other Microsoft products (to further their own advancement), and/or actively broke or destroyed the usefulness of other REAL standards developed by the community at large. That should not be acceptable behavior.
The so-called standards developed by Microsoft were always about winning more market share. You are a fool if you think Microsoft has ever cared about you as a customer having better interoperability with any non-Microsoft technology. Never has such a thing come to pass unless they literally had no choice. It has ALWAYS been about trying to keep you from using anything not owned by them. It's not even about money, it's about winning at any cost while crushing the competition by any means.
No, sir, your view of computing history has some rather large holes in it. Microsoft has done FAR more harm than good with regards to advancing the computing industry as a whole. The purpose of all their proprietary technologies like ActiveX was to attempt to take absolute control over the entire Internet, such that any person connecting to the general web would require an operating system and web browser created by Microsoft. The secondary purpose is always to thwart the development or continued use of open standards. Let us never forget either of these things.
Additionally, by refusing to support the real web standards like CSS 1/2, they have now held back the advancement of web development technology by years. A website that can be developed with web standards in 2 weeks to be compatible with all other web browsers will then take an additional 10 weeks to be modified to work around every broken standard and quirk and unsupported standard in Internet Explorer. Every company that has to pay even a single web developer should be mad as hell at Microsoft for all the money they have to pay out for extra development time. Go ahead, try coding to the standards and see how well your website works with IE compared to every other browser.
You say nearly anything will talk to nearly anything else at this point? That's funny, I don't see Microsoft Windows understanding AppleTalk networks, or ANY non-Windows filesystem, even though such things have been around for a minimum of 15 years. (Servers running Services for Mac don't count. The common Windows PC can't talk to a Mac or read any disk with a Mac filesystem, even though it's worked in the other direction for at least a decade.) I don't see any application that can claim reliable compatibility with any Microsoft Office file format.
Yeah, TCP/IP works, big whoop. That part was a basic necessity for the computing world at large to move forward back in 1990. It's also not a Microsoft-developed standard, it was developed by a consortium of companies back in the 80s when they decided they had no choice but to figure out some way to work together at a basic level. There were just too many low-level networking technologies in competition. Again, the market forced the creation of a standard way of doing things, but only at a low level.
At every layer on top of that, Microsoft continues to be basically incompatible in myriad ways with everyone else on the planet. Applications, file formats, filesystems, network protocols, etc. If they come from Microsoft, they are all based on the "screw you if you aren't using Microsoft" philosophy, unless they had no choice but to build in some compatibility. You are so wrong about the current compatibility level and where it came from, it's not even
Forever are we re-learning the lessons of events like the Vietnam war. Individual riflemen can still wreak havoc even among the most technologically advanced troops in the world. Until every soldier in the Army is equipped with an armored mecha-suit that can stop a 30-30 round, most firearms can still do plenty of damage. That argument is crap. Even if it were true that firearms would be less effective than they used to be, it doesn't excuse just giving up on the whole concept of keeping the balance of power in favor of the populace.
As for needing a large majority to get something done, that's not actually the way things work. You only need 10% of any particular group to decide to do something, and it's over, the rest will follow-the-leader like the usual sheep they are. Simple social dynamics. Events always come to a head faster than you think they would. People appear apathetic most of the time, but that's mostly because nobody really steps over the line in an obvious way. The camel always has a ton of straw on his back before the last straw is placed.
If we saw the kind of corruption in this country that happens in other countries (like South and Central America for instance), where it's just obvious and blatant, people would quite literally be up in arms, and things would change. (In those countries things can't change because the population is disarmed and always has been.) Things haven't reached that point here yet. Most of the population is quite happy. That doesn't mean the situation can't change. That doesn't mean the people in power can't decide to get stupid all of a sudden. Like passing stupid laws like this smart gun thing. It's just one more step on the road to stupid. I'd rather not go any farther down that road, if you don't mind.
Now, you can sit back and watch everything go to shit, or you can fight the degeneration of freedoms and try to keep the country in working condition. If anyone had actual evidence of fraud during the last election it would be out in the open by now and we would all be talking about it on a daily basis. Something tells me the Democrats wouldn't just sit on something that could get them back into power. If you have some sort of evidence, why aren't you pointing us to it so we can do something about it?
Yeah, we all like toys that can kill people. That's why we all love to own kitchen knives and motor vehicles, right? We should ban those too. After all, motor vehicles alone kill many more people each year than firearms ever do. And that's including firearms homocides, which is the vast majority of firearms deaths. These smart guns will do zilch against that number. You could probably count on one hand the number of deaths that *might* be avoided each year with these smart guns. You could save 100 times as many lives with better driver education, better vehicle safety testing, better DUI enforcement, etc. But nobody cares about that when we have the gun as a convenient scapegoat.
Now: that said, if we had a society where firearms weren't necessary for home protection or policing (I rarely ever see the latter in action where I live, so I require the former), then this would be great.
There will never be any such society on any planet containing more than one homo sapiens, or as Heinlein liked to refer to us, the two-legged wolf species. Humans are, by nature, not angels. Sometimes we have to defend ourselves from other members of our species. It is wishful thinking to imagine that this will change anytime within the next 50,000 years.
On sport firearms, this would be great, because you don't need the reliability you would in a protection scenario.
I must disagree with this also. Sometimes the only firearm you have is a sport firearm. Oddly enough, the same Murphy's law that determines things will break at the most inopportune moment, determines also that you will be attacked at the most inopportune moment, e.g. when you don't have a fully-functional non-sport firearm. Therefore you would want any weapon to be usable at any time.
Also, who says you don't need reliability in a sport firearm? You certainly don't want your target rifle to stop working in the middle of your timed match because the battery shorted out or something stupid like that. You don't want your hunting rifle to fail to fire at the crucial moment because your hand got too sweaty.
No, sorry, this is a bad idea no matter what angle you look at it. It's also a violation of the purpose of the 2nd Amendment, as far as I am concerned. That is more than enough for me to oppose any forced use of it. Idiots may exercise their freedom of choice to choose to use it, and it may have its mandated uses in places like prisons where the likelihood of the weapon being taken away from the owner are high, but this should not be forced by law on the general population. It's just wrong, on many levels.
If you're dealing with someone who has the foresight to use an EMP pulse, and has the equipment necessary to do it, you have bigger things to worry about.
Not necessarily. If this law goes through, within a few years any person can be certain that most of the guns in any "law abiding" neighborhood will be these "smart" guns. A single individual or a group of people with ill intent can turn an entire neighborhood of armed individuals into disarmed individuals with a medium-sized homemade EMP. That's just not cool. It doesn't matter that it's unlikely. Earthquakes are unlikely too, but we still build earthquake resistant buildings because the consequences of having your building fall down during an earthquake are really bad. It's also unlikely that a whole plane-load of people would allow a couple of people armed with nothing but knives to take over their plane and deliberately fly it into a building, killing thousands. Yet it happened, what, four times in one day? No shit, huh?
Then there's the little thing that everyone always forgets about the 2nd Amendment. It's not about your right to protect yourself. That is an inalienable right that cannot be taken away by any government. What the 2nd Amendment (and the entire Constitution) is really about is the guaranteed ability of the general population to defend itself agains a corrupt government, by law or by force. By the People, for the People, and all the jazz.
Something tells me that the military and the police aren't going to be carrying around these so-called "smart" guns anytime soon, while the general population is forced to buy only smart guns and exchange older guns for smart guns. Something also tells me that the military is the one group who has easy access to EMP weapons. Follow the bouncing ball. It leads to a very dark place.
It doesn't matter that it's unlikely to happen. The point is that it could happen very easily, and the consequences of such an event are very, very bad for the citizens of this country. If you think it could never happen, you must be living on a different planet with a different world history and a completely different race of sentient beings controlling things. This is a great country, but we all know it is not run by angels. No government ever has been. Everyone who is in power always wants more power.
Mark my words. This type of law is evil to the core, and shows a complete lack of understanding of the meaning of the 2nd Amendment of these United States.
Yeah, how did humanity ever survive the dark ages of the early 1900's when we didn't have some fucking nanny-state telling us not to use something we shouldn't eat in components we won't eat, or eat off of?
When was the last time you were served a meal on an old motherboard, or had IC's for an appetizer? Maybe you've used an old heatsink as a lollipop?
Man, I'm not particularly "green", but I do feel the need to point out that you seem to be missing an important concept, which is the little fact that life is a cycle and we live in a closed ecosystem (it's called Earth). That means once you create a substance, it doesn't go away unless you destroy it or recycle it into a different substance. Do you have someplace else to take your family when every source of fresh water on this planet is contaminated beyond the ability of nature to decontaminate it? Well, do you? I don't see any other planets being terraformed just yet.
Everything we build eventually finds its way into a landfill where the chemicals in it are leeched out into ground water. It doesn't matter that this takes a long time if you have a billion tons of toxic stuff to leech chemicals from. Many of those chemicals have no known safe concentration, meaning they are toxic at even the smallest concentrations. Or they are cumulative toxins meaning they build up in living tissue and never go away. Nature doesn't do a good job filtering out stuff like that.
How did humanity ever survive the dark ages before certain substances were banned? Last time I checked, a whole lot of humanity didn't survive a lot of things, including exposure to lead paint, asbestos, dioxins, even mediocre stuff like coal dust. There is a reason that things like CFCs and dioxins and asbestos get banned.
The "fucking nanny state" you refer to isn't protecting you from licking your circuit boards (feel free). It's protecting the rest of us and our children (your children too, amazingly enough) from having to drink contaminated ground water coming from landfills full of your old, broken lead-filled circuit boards and dioxin-based herbicides. Unless you have a safe way to deal with a toxic substance throughout its entire lifetime, you should not be using it. Period. Unless it degrades into something safe (or we invent a cheap way to throw toxic waste into the sun) it will eventually come back and bite us in the ass if it remains part of the Earth's ecosystem. And by us I mean the human race. I may not be proud of every member of the human race but I do support its continued survival. I think we have a lot of potential. Including the potential to kill ourselves off via numerous methods if we're not careful.
Maybe you were just trying to be facetious and the moderator didn't catch it, but if you weren't I have to say I'm glad there are plenty of greenie "idiots" out there to oppose your kind of idiocy and short-sightedness. We have to look ahead and find a sustainable balance between technology and the only ecosystem we have available to keep us alive. That usually means erring on the side of not irreversibly contaminating our life support system. Sometimes, that means giving up the most efficient way of doing something for a cleaner way. The horror. The Horror!
What are you referring to? I really haven't had problems with Sandisk.
I have seen a great many reports on sites like DPReview forums about older Sandisk cards (pre-Ultra II/Extreme) having extremely poor transfer speeds, not living up to spec, poor reliability, etc. Since the Ultra II/Extreme lines came out they seem to have cleaned up their act and now they are considered the top of the line cards by many people. Their new Extreme III line has just recently doubled the transfer speeds of most types of memory cards to sustained 20MB/20MB read/write, and won some sort of award. Prior to the Ultra II/Extreme cards they had a lot of problems.