I can liken this to Visual Basic. There are so many crappy visual basic applications out there designed by 14 year olds with no understanding of HCI and it's just got to a point where people go "vb? erk!" and avoid it completely.
Which is a shame really because you should be judging the quality of the application - and not what it was written in. Seriously, if it does x and it does it quickly and well with a nice user interface - does it really matter that it was written in Algol 68?
As a by no-means perfect example, check out this site which is, I think, a reasonably nice looking application written in Visual Basic (it acts as a GUI to the free SMS gateways out there). I don't claim to have it perfect, but the feedback I've had from people indicate that they don't think it's the usual run-of-the-mill-vb-application.
Disclaimer: I wrote it and the preference section is a little nasty, but I'm working on it. Also, I know that VB is only really for doing RAD but I don't have the time or inclination to learn Visual C++.
I'm not an Apple guy and even I notice many people like you who enjoy spreading this FUD around. I mean, come on. Hack about it's power or low system specs or anything else, but don't spread FUD like this.
Woah, chill fella. This isn't FUD. FUD is deliberately posting untruths about something, this guy is just wrong. Don't make it out to be something so sinister.
Secondly, I don't give a toss what the Product Manager, senior designer or even Steve Jobs says at Apple. I'd like to see that statement on cold hard paper which can be waved in the face of any jobsworth who trys to play silly buggers and claim your warrenty is void when you return your faulty equipment for fixing.
Now that is not to say it doesn't exist, but in business, the word of someone doesn't mean jack unless it's written down and formally communicated. If this guy leaves tomorrow, you'll have no recourse if you don't have a hard-copy.
Whinging "but xx said that it didn't matter" isn't going to help in the slightest if you don't have it on paper and they no longer represent the company.
What plug-in changes the tabs in the way you describe in your first paragraph? That sounds handy to me...
You have to install miniT and then change your prefs.js file to get it to work. Which, to me, seems to be amazing overkill when a checkbox in the core application could have negated the need for it.
You're missing the whole point of Firefox! Simplicity man! No bloat. Nothing installed that doesn't have to be installed. Everytime I install Firefox somewhere, I also install the Adblock and flashblock extensions - yet I'd never want Adblock integrated into the base product - many people don't use it, and if you don't use it, it just adds options to the interface, potentially confusing less technical people (who are exactly the people that should benefit the most from converting to a simple and secure browser).
I fully appreciate the simplicity of Firefox and the lack of bloat but I still find it stupid that I have to download an extension to get my ctrl-clicked tab to open directly to the right of the currently active one.
Thats not an good extension, thats extremely trivial bit of functionality that really should be in the main build. I don't advocate bumping the application size with something like adblock and other beefy extensions, but there is a certain level of triviality where it's silly to get people to install an extensions just to get something that really should have been an option in the first place.
Constantly? I keep hearing how Slashdot displays incorrectly in Firefox, but would you mind specifying how exactly it displays it wrong? Is something unalligned, or is it using incorrect font sizes or something?
I get it very rarely but it is there. The contents in the middle of the page (as in, the article text and comments) are rendered too far to the left and overlap the textual links on the far left.
You can fix it by going ctrl + and then ctrl -.
This is partly due to a Firefox bug of which the fix never made it into 1.0 (but will be in 1.1) and crappy non-w3c compliant HTML that Slashdot uses.
Re:More control over EXE Files? Search Pluggins? E
on
Firefox In Print
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You need to do this if you want to be able to Remove the Kiddie Gloves [osdir.com] and let Firefox allow you to run EXE files you've downloaded out of the browser cache--with a warning of course--so that they are deleted automatically, rather than saving them to a specific folder where you'd have to delete them later.
At the risk of asking a dumb question, why is forcing a user to save an executable from the web and then open it in a two step process possibly safer than allowing them to select open from within the browser?
At the end of the day, you're not preventing them from opening it, nor are you really making it any safer - you're just annoying the people that really do want to open the file directly.
Whilst i'm a big fan of FireFox, it would be nice if they integrate some of the popular plugins directly into the application.
Not all of them - just the extremely useful ones. For example I find it bizzare that I have to install a plugin just so that when I ctrl-click a link it opens in a new tab directly to the right of my current one (and not to the far right of all the open tabs). This makes jumping between the current page and a child of that page annoying because you end up tabbing all over the place.
Plus, if you're getting people coming from IE, it would be helpful to have a few more buttons on the display by default (power users can easily remove them, non-power users can't easily add them). For example I always set new tab, back, forward, stop, reload, home, bookmarks, history, downloads and print with the address bar, go button and google search on the line below. Works for me, ex-IE users don't complain much either.
Oh yes, and some of the hidden options in "about:config" really should have their own menu option. It would also be nice if they turned on browser.xul.error_pages.enabled by default and cleaned up the error pages to look a little more professional. I'd offer to supply templates, if I knew who to approach and whether anyone would be remotely interested.
Apart from that, not really sure what else they could do for 1.1 (apart from some bug fixes, of course).
He has observed that there is a growing trend by graphics hardware vendors to provide less and less information to free and open source operating system developers.
This is because the graphics card market depends on vast amounts of R&D and producing a product that is technically superior to everything else out there. Essentially being continually ahead of the game as your competitiors try to catch up.
As much as OSS advocates would not like to hear it, opening up the graphics card specifications to all and sundry would be the equivilant of pooring your R&D down the pan. Selling support for graphics cards doesn't keep you in business - making a product that kicks the ass of your competitors (and them having difficulty working out how to beat it) does.
Okay let's say Bill is worth 50 billion dollars on paper. 750 million is something like 1.5% of his total worth?
Given that there are plenty of weathly people who give nothing to charity, anything Bill gives is better than that - whatever the percentage.
Is this a huge amount for him? It would be like if I had a hundred bucks and I gave the homeless guy on the street a $1.50
Unless you live in your parents basement and own nothing, I very much doubt you are worth only $100.
Your post makes it sound like you don't think that his 750 million is particulary generious. Given that he didn't have to make the donation and could have easily kept the money for himself (benefiting no-one but him), I would say you're wrong.
Such measures prevent thrifty foreign consumers and gray marketers -- traders who sell goods through channels that haven't been authorized by the manufacturer -- from taking advantage of the decline of the dollar against the world's major currencies to buy lower-price products in the U.S. In terms of euros, pounds or other strong currencies, U.S. retail goods are much cheaper today than they were two years ago.
The decline in the dollar may have something to do with it, but the US has for over 30 years had a far better deal on most products than here in the UK.
It is very well known that the "real" exchange rate on a lot of products is about 1 dollar to 1 pound. So when you all moan about paying 10 dollars for something, we're actually paying 10 pounds for it (which equates to around 18 dollars).
Apple have done it with the music on iTunes store, Sony on all their hardware, Microsoft on software, cars, cigarettes even coca-cola... the list goes on.
Software isn't free unless you have specific rights over the source code to basically do what you want with the code.
Definitions of words can and do change over time, but in the current world a "free" product still means "doesn't cost money" for the vast majority of the population (and by those, I mean people who don't read slashdot, don't know how to code and don't have any desire to learn how to do so either).
Maybe in the future when people describe a product as being "free" it will be more synonymous with the freedom to modify and release the code, but at present anyone who criticises a product for being free when they don't have a GPL-like licence is un-necessary splitting hairs and likely to do more harm than good.
The video card industry is looking really good right now, but so far there hasn't been all that much competition to IPod, so that just seems like an entrenchment of a single popular product (and experience suggests this leads to stagnation more than innovation).
Very true. For example, had there been good competition to the iPod then I would have expected to see better battery life, in-line remote with LCD display and gapless playback come far quicker than it has currently.
People moved from video to DVD for one or more of the following reasons:
Better picture quality
Better sound quality
Additional extra's
No need to rewind the tape
Ability to skip to certain sections of the film
Smaller physical size of the DVD medium
There are 6 keys things there that satisfy the "what is in it for me?" factor.
Having a new format with better DRM fails this test completely. The only way it will ever get adopted is if people are forced to change - and there will be public uproar.
In short, if they're going to want to introduce it, then they have to come up with some other features that really will make people want to "upgrade". If not, then it is pretty much dead in the water from the beginning.
Much of the mounting quest for power stems, some hardware manufacturers say, from battery performance that has generally not kept up with the rapidly expanding capabilities of today's consumer electronics.
Or alternativily you could argue that todays consumer electronics haven't designed their products well enough to take into account the clearly known limitations of current battery technology (it's not like the mainstream market has changed very much recently). Sure they've made efforts, but the direction has been (until recently) on bigger, better, faster and more powerful rather than lower heat output and reduced power consumption.
Or you could blame product managers and consumers. One for actually considering that a product with a 3 hour battery life is marketable and the other for actually proving them right.
It's simple to code interfaces in Windows, because everyone just uses the same widgets to make their interfaces. The result is a homogenous, bland experience, where everything looks exactly the same.
Personally I'd rather a bland homogenous interface than something completely different for every single application. In case you hadn't noticed products that have attempted to make their UI "more interesting" have often come up with something worse.
In 1995 I suffered with UNIX applications that have different locations of load/save, different shortcut keys for cut, copy and paste, different results when you clicked on a button (does it open a window or pull a dropdown or toggle a tickbox) and so on. Learning shortcut keys was next to impossible unless you remembered that each on only worked with some applications and on others didn't something completely different.
The last thing I want to do is return to a world like that (which is what you are advocating). When I'm using an unfamiliar application, I like the fact that I know rougly what is in the "File" and "Edit" menus and I know that Ctrl-Z will undo my mistake - rather than actually do something completely different because some smartass deleveloper tried to be different.
Those people who proclaim you need a single unified user interface do so for a very good reason.
Would it not be trivially easy to write a small P2P application that trades torrent files a la Gnutella but with 35k.torrent's only?
It probably wouldn't require all the fancy stuff that modern P2P applications need because of the size of the torrent files. Additionally, because of their limited size, bandwidth wouldn't be quite an issue.
I notice with interest that absolutely nowhere does it mention the words "Internet Explorer".
Was that deliberate? I ask because too many people equate Internet Explorer with "The Internet" and don't consider that it is actually their web browser.
(On a side note: Is anyone else finding that Firefox crashes if you try and open a group of tabs for the first time it starts up? I'm submitting 2 to 4 trackbacks a day and it's getting annoying now)
The Neuros is looking like an awesome competitor in the audio player market.
It is? With a market-share of less than 1.5% can someone please tell me how on earth they can remotely be a "competitor"?
Hell, HP became number 2 overnight simply by playing nice with Apple. Which just goes to show the sad state of affairs with the quality of competition that Apple is up against.
Although I am in no way an expert regarding Apple's strategy, I'd love it if they create a 60 gig version of the non-photo iPod.
This would cater to the people who have large music collections and have no interest in storage of photos or a need for a colour screen. Like me.
Given that the iPod Photo has significantly longer battery life with a colour screen, one with a b&w screen could probably increase the 12 hour duration as high as 15.
I'm still not convinced that video is the way to go at the moment, mainly because it's such a niche area. Digital photography only really took off for the average Joe a couple of years ago with the reduction in price of digital cameras to an affordable (and in many cases, dirt cheap) price.
At the moment, I'm looking at the photo iPod simply because I want 60 gig. It's somewhat disappointing to think I'm paying out extra money for the photo functionality that I'll never use.
His device was defective. There is no background hiss with this device, but unfortunately, most people will not see my comment and believe the aforementioned review. It's truly idiotic how the internet can be at times..
Ignoring the fact that Sony get what they deserve for shipping a duff device, it is worth pointing out that a lot of the issues he noted would be still around on a "non-defective" device.
Admitidally the wall of sound issue looks to be a device one, however he was using good quality earphones and I didn't see the followups in time.
Finally, I ignored the software issues he had with the Japanese version in my synopsis but it is fairly clear than the DRM wrapping time, the lack of browse by artist and the inability to remember the last browsing postion are "features" on all other shippings of the device.
Most notably, [the low pricing] has put immense pressure on Electronic Arts' market-leading sports range, with the giant publisher forced to drop prices on several of its key EA Sports titles in order to compete more effectively in the run up to Christmas.
... and there was me thinking that the EA Sports titles had to be made cheaper because the 2004 version was basically a cheap rehash of the 2003 version and the paying customers knew this and refused to buy something at the premium price point.
Given that here in the UK, we are ripped off royally when it comes to anything to do with technology - you'll probably find that this will go on sale in the USA for about 2000 USD.
I kid you not. A 40gig iPod in the USA costs you 399 USD which should work out at 266 GBP. However we have to pay 299 GBP - which represents an increase of 12%.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is a shame really because you should be judging the quality of the application - and not what it was written in. Seriously, if it does x and it does it quickly and well with a nice user interface - does it really matter that it was written in Algol 68?
As a by no-means perfect example, check out this site which is, I think, a reasonably nice looking application written in Visual Basic (it acts as a GUI to the free SMS gateways out there). I don't claim to have it perfect, but the feedback I've had from people indicate that they don't think it's the usual run-of-the-mill-vb-application.
Disclaimer: I wrote it and the preference section is a little nasty, but I'm working on it. Also, I know that VB is only really for doing RAD but I don't have the time or inclination to learn Visual C++.
My point too :) Although I maintain that something so trivial should be in the main build anyway and not have to be an extension.
Woah, chill fella. This isn't FUD. FUD is deliberately posting untruths about something, this guy is just wrong. Don't make it out to be something so sinister.
Secondly, I don't give a toss what the Product Manager, senior designer or even Steve Jobs says at Apple. I'd like to see that statement on cold hard paper which can be waved in the face of any jobsworth who trys to play silly buggers and claim your warrenty is void when you return your faulty equipment for fixing.
Now that is not to say it doesn't exist, but in business, the word of someone doesn't mean jack unless it's written down and formally communicated. If this guy leaves tomorrow, you'll have no recourse if you don't have a hard-copy.
Whinging "but xx said that it didn't matter" isn't going to help in the slightest if you don't have it on paper and they no longer represent the company.
You have to install miniT and then change your prefs.js file to get it to work. Which, to me, seems to be amazing overkill when a checkbox in the core application could have negated the need for it.
Sorry, forgot to include link before ;)
I fully appreciate the simplicity of Firefox and the lack of bloat but I still find it stupid that I have to download an extension to get my ctrl-clicked tab to open directly to the right of the currently active one.
Thats not an good extension, thats extremely trivial bit of functionality that really should be in the main build. I don't advocate bumping the application size with something like adblock and other beefy extensions, but there is a certain level of triviality where it's silly to get people to install an extensions just to get something that really should have been an option in the first place.
I get it very rarely but it is there. The contents in the middle of the page (as in, the article text and comments) are rendered too far to the left and overlap the textual links on the far left.
You can fix it by going ctrl + and then ctrl -.
This is partly due to a Firefox bug of which the fix never made it into 1.0 (but will be in 1.1) and crappy non-w3c compliant HTML that Slashdot uses.
At the risk of asking a dumb question, why is forcing a user to save an executable from the web and then open it in a two step process possibly safer than allowing them to select open from within the browser?
At the end of the day, you're not preventing them from opening it, nor are you really making it any safer - you're just annoying the people that really do want to open the file directly.
Someone please enlighten me :)
Not all of them - just the extremely useful ones. For example I find it bizzare that I have to install a plugin just so that when I ctrl-click a link it opens in a new tab directly to the right of my current one (and not to the far right of all the open tabs). This makes jumping between the current page and a child of that page annoying because you end up tabbing all over the place.
Plus, if you're getting people coming from IE, it would be helpful to have a few more buttons on the display by default (power users can easily remove them, non-power users can't easily add them). For example I always set new tab, back, forward, stop, reload, home, bookmarks, history, downloads and print with the address bar, go button and google search on the line below. Works for me, ex-IE users don't complain much either.
Oh yes, and some of the hidden options in "about:config" really should have their own menu option. It would also be nice if they turned on browser.xul.error_pages.enabled by default and cleaned up the error pages to look a little more professional. I'd offer to supply templates, if I knew who to approach and whether anyone would be remotely interested.
Apart from that, not really sure what else they could do for 1.1 (apart from some bug fixes, of course).
This is because the graphics card market depends on vast amounts of R&D and producing a product that is technically superior to everything else out there. Essentially being continually ahead of the game as your competitiors try to catch up.
As much as OSS advocates would not like to hear it, opening up the graphics card specifications to all and sundry would be the equivilant of pooring your R&D down the pan. Selling support for graphics cards doesn't keep you in business - making a product that kicks the ass of your competitors (and them having difficulty working out how to beat it) does.
Given that there are plenty of weathly people who give nothing to charity, anything Bill gives is better than that - whatever the percentage.
Is this a huge amount for him? It would be like if I had a hundred bucks and I gave the homeless guy on the street a $1.50
Unless you live in your parents basement and own nothing, I very much doubt you are worth only $100.
Your post makes it sound like you don't think that his 750 million is particulary generious. Given that he didn't have to make the donation and could have easily kept the money for himself (benefiting no-one but him), I would say you're wrong.
The decline in the dollar may have something to do with it, but the US has for over 30 years had a far better deal on most products than here in the UK.
It is very well known that the "real" exchange rate on a lot of products is about 1 dollar to 1 pound. So when you all moan about paying 10 dollars for something, we're actually paying 10 pounds for it (which equates to around 18 dollars).
Apple have done it with the music on iTunes store, Sony on all their hardware, Microsoft on software, cars, cigarettes even coca-cola ... the list goes on.
Welcome to Rip-Off Britain!
Given that HP could jump to number 2 almost overnight by simply releasing a branded version of the iPod, Creative have a tough battle on their hands.
Definitions of words can and do change over time, but in the current world a "free" product still means "doesn't cost money" for the vast majority of the population (and by those, I mean people who don't read slashdot, don't know how to code and don't have any desire to learn how to do so either).
Maybe in the future when people describe a product as being "free" it will be more synonymous with the freedom to modify and release the code, but at present anyone who criticises a product for being free when they don't have a GPL-like licence is un-necessary splitting hairs and likely to do more harm than good.
Very true. For example, had there been good competition to the iPod then I would have expected to see better battery life, in-line remote with LCD display and gapless playback come far quicker than it has currently.
(one's come, but the others haven't).
- Better picture quality
- Better sound quality
- Additional extra's
- No need to rewind the tape
- Ability to skip to certain sections of the film
- Smaller physical size of the DVD medium
There are 6 keys things there that satisfy the "what is in it for me?" factor.Having a new format with better DRM fails this test completely. The only way it will ever get adopted is if people are forced to change - and there will be public uproar.
In short, if they're going to want to introduce it, then they have to come up with some other features that really will make people want to "upgrade". If not, then it is pretty much dead in the water from the beginning.
Or alternativily you could argue that todays consumer electronics haven't designed their products well enough to take into account the clearly known limitations of current battery technology (it's not like the mainstream market has changed very much recently). Sure they've made efforts, but the direction has been (until recently) on bigger, better, faster and more powerful rather than lower heat output and reduced power consumption.
Or you could blame product managers and consumers. One for actually considering that a product with a 3 hour battery life is marketable and the other for actually proving them right.
Personally I'd rather a bland homogenous interface than something completely different for every single application. In case you hadn't noticed products that have attempted to make their UI "more interesting" have often come up with something worse.
In 1995 I suffered with UNIX applications that have different locations of load/save, different shortcut keys for cut, copy and paste, different results when you clicked on a button (does it open a window or pull a dropdown or toggle a tickbox) and so on. Learning shortcut keys was next to impossible unless you remembered that each on only worked with some applications and on others didn't something completely different.
The last thing I want to do is return to a world like that (which is what you are advocating). When I'm using an unfamiliar application, I like the fact that I know rougly what is in the "File" and "Edit" menus and I know that Ctrl-Z will undo my mistake - rather than actually do something completely different because some smartass deleveloper tried to be different.
Those people who proclaim you need a single unified user interface do so for a very good reason.
Damn, answering my own questions but it looks like eXeem will do this.
Mini "review" is here. You can gather a fair bit of information on what it will do just by looking at the screenshots.
Is anyone using this? If so, what is it like? Do you know when it will be out?
It probably wouldn't require all the fancy stuff that modern P2P applications need because of the size of the torrent files. Additionally, because of their limited size, bandwidth wouldn't be quite an issue.
Just a thought...
Was that deliberate? I ask because too many people equate Internet Explorer with "The Internet" and don't consider that it is actually their web browser.
(On a side note: Is anyone else finding that Firefox crashes if you try and open a group of tabs for the first time it starts up? I'm submitting 2 to 4 trackbacks a day and it's getting annoying now)
It is? With a market-share of less than 1.5% can someone please tell me how on earth they can remotely be a "competitor"?
Hell, HP became number 2 overnight simply by playing nice with Apple. Which just goes to show the sad state of affairs with the quality of competition that Apple is up against.
This would cater to the people who have large music collections and have no interest in storage of photos or a need for a colour screen. Like me.
Given that the iPod Photo has significantly longer battery life with a colour screen, one with a b&w screen could probably increase the 12 hour duration as high as 15.
I'm still not convinced that video is the way to go at the moment, mainly because it's such a niche area. Digital photography only really took off for the average Joe a couple of years ago with the reduction in price of digital cameras to an affordable (and in many cases, dirt cheap) price.
At the moment, I'm looking at the photo iPod simply because I want 60 gig. It's somewhat disappointing to think I'm paying out extra money for the photo functionality that I'll never use.
Ignoring the fact that Sony get what they deserve for shipping a duff device, it is worth pointing out that a lot of the issues he noted would be still around on a "non-defective" device.
Admitidally the wall of sound issue looks to be a device one, however he was using good quality earphones and I didn't see the followups in time.
Finally, I ignored the software issues he had with the Japanese version in my synopsis but it is fairly clear than the DRM wrapping time, the lack of browse by artist and the inability to remember the last browsing postion are "features" on all other shippings of the device.
Given that here in the UK, we are ripped off royally when it comes to anything to do with technology - you'll probably find that this will go on sale in the USA for about 2000 USD.
I kid you not. A 40gig iPod in the USA costs you 399 USD which should work out at 266 GBP. However we have to pay 299 GBP - which represents an increase of 12%.