The best calendaring program I've used in recent times was probably written decades ago: dtcm. It came with Solaris (the dt), and had some quirks, but it was pretty easy to use, printed really nice calendars, and had a killer feature for repeating appointments. When you modified a appointment that repeated, it would ask you if you wanted to modify all of them, just the single one, or from that point forward. The "forward" option is what seems to be missing from other calendar tools (probably because they copy Outlook which doesn't have it). It's very nice for when a standing meeting changes time or location. You don't affect your history, just the future.
Maybe some have implemented it since I last looked around (it's been a few years), but I've always been disappointed in the past.
The other nice thing about a real app as opposed to a web based tool like Google calendar is that reminders pop up on whatever desktop I'm on. That way, I don't have to have the web page with the calendar up all the time to see reminders.
If you haven't, you should read the Red/Green/Blue Mars series of books bi Kim Stanley Robinson. I don't know if the economy described in the later books would work, but it is interesting to think about.
I don't think the last one is necessary -- it has zero hits in my Adblock right now. The others have quite a few hits.
This does mean you won't see any "like" buttons, but if you don't use them, you won't miss anything.
Does anyone have any similar rules for blocking Google +1 tracking? I suppose a similar "block google.com except when on google.com" might work, but I don't know if that blocks everything, or breaks anything.
I dont know what you mean by yellow journalism, but the reality is that his news corporations sway public opinions through lies, manipulation, and fear. [emphasis added]
Apparently you don't know what yellow journalism is, because you practically defined it in the second part of your sentence (they also did what they did to sell more papers). And yellow journalism was a phrase coined more than a hundred years ago (or at least the papers and times it refers to were at the beginning part of the 20th century, the phrase may have come later).
I don't see why you think journalism is worse today than it was before. It has always been this bad. If anything, it's better now, because it's easier for the average person to find out how bad it is.
Not that I really trust the MSM any more than your average politician, but at least I know not to trust them now:)
You make a good point. And as I reflect on it, maybe a more crucial question is "am I trying to solve a social problem with a technical solution?" Using my argument, someone could justify cracking a system, since that daemon that gave back a root shell when asked in the right way is acting as the server owner's agent. But we find that argument unacceptable. So, is a web site doing the equivalent by running unwanted JavaScript on our systems? I can't think that it makes any difference that the web browser downloaded and ran the code. After all, someone once tried to get into one of my systems by convincing a web app to download and run some code (fortunately, it didn't work).
I don't quite know where that leaves us. It could be argued that this is cracking (or "hacking" to scare the populous) users computers, but where is the line? Third party JS? Is Google Analytics OK, or bad? What about JS that just provides some useful (for the user) functionality that is hosted elsewhere? What about CDNs that just look like third parties (though I really don't understand why they have to be different domains instead of just subdomains)?
Even if this sort of tracking was clearly illegal, the "Powers That Be" would rarely go after companies that do this sort of thing. And even if they did (or there was a class action suit by the affected people), the advertising companies can multiply as often as script kiddies. The fight against spam has been going on for a long time, even with criminal prosecutions, yet spam still persists.
I think what is most important is user education. Most people will not realize that this is even happening. Once they do, they will probably want to stop it, either by technical (adblock, noscript), social (just boycott the offending pages), or legal ways. Once enough people demand it, laws probably wouldn't be necessary -- public shame of any brand doing this would be enough to stop it. But until there is a critical mass of people to demand social/legal change, all we're really left with is making better user agents that can avoid the problem.
Then why do you run a web browser that does that? The web browser is your agent. That's why they call it a "user agent". As your agent, it does (or should do) what you tell it to, and acts on your behalf. Your agent is simply doing what you told it to do, namely download JavaScript and run it. If you don't want it to do that, as the OP said, you can get an agent that gives you control, namely Firefox+noscript.
Maybe that's a little harsh, but I don't want to think about a future where my user agent isn't under my control, where I can't decide to to change fonts or run things like adblock or noscript that make the website different than the web designer intended.
* Support for cd -N ; where N is a number from the stack of folders recently accessed, also cd - cd + to move up and down stack
I'm not sure I'd want the shell to always remember all my directories -- I probably go into a lot of directories over the life of a shell. Maybe with a limit, like the last 10 directories.
But you can already do this to some extent with the existing directory stack using pushd and popd. I usually alias pd to pushd so it's as convenient as cd. Then you just pd into a directory.
As to the history, try using ctrl+r sometime. It's a great way to search through your bash history by typing part of the command you're looking for. Of course, you can also run history to get the full history output.
Re:Google maps / mouse scroll wheel annoyance
on
Google's New Design
·
· Score: 1
There are two dimensional scroll "wheels" -- often the trackpads on laptops can scroll horizontally along the bottom as well as vertically along the side. Some real mice can also do two dimensional scrolling by tilting the wheel.
Of course, I'd prefer that Google maps not do anything with the scroll wheel, at least in the embedded version, since it's very annoying to be scrolling down a page, come to an embedded map and have the page scrolling stop and Google maps zoom in or out. Maybe ctrl+wheel could be zoom, like it is in the Gnome HIG.
( The bug concerns renaming a folder from "Foo" to "foo" on a filesystem that does not differentiate between uppercase and lowercase, resulting in a "Foo already exists!" error, rather than the case change. )
To be fair, you can hardly expect Thunderbird to fix a bug in the underlying filesystem, can you?
In all seriousness, I'm not even sure how one would fix this bug. I can imagine that the code looks something like:
How does one determine that newName is the same as oldName in the context of the filesystem? The only thing one could possibly do is to just issue the rename(), but that could overwrite a different file that does exist. Perhaps maybe checking to see if the inode of newName is the same as the inode of oldName. But of course, this is primarily a problem on Windows, so I have no idea if inodes are even valid there.
Stop calling me nobody! I use remote X all the time, almost always through ssh. Just because most people don't know it's possible doesn't mean that no one uses it!
I know it's popular to take away features in OSS tools, but please stop. So many nice features have been lost in desktop Linux over tha past decade, mostly due to half done "re-writes" that no one seems to finish. Per-workspace wallpapers (Gnome 2.0), screen saver preferences, session management (having the same terminals pop up when you log in), even GDM isn't very configurable anymore. You used to be able to set lots of things, now it's almost nothing. Just Google for the procedure to change the background image for GDM. It's embarrassing. And most other things cannot be configured at all.
Compiz is one of the few bright spots. Without it, I definitely would have left Gnome a while ago. I see other posts talking about getting compiz working in XFCE. I ought to give that a shot.
Somewhat OT, but what happened to the ability to log into/. with my open ID? My account still has the OpenID associated with it, but the login area for/. doesn't seem to let me use an open ID anymore. Or is there a lesser known login area that lets one use open ID?
I wasn't blaming Microsoft, I was blaming Netflix, and the various copyright holders that control them. Your own Roku example illustrates that there's no technical limitation to streaming on Linux (Roku, IIRC, runs Linux). I already have a nice HTPC running Linux. As you point out, I could by another piece of hardware to enable me to spend more money to subscribe to Netflix, but frankly, it's just not worth it to me. If someone expects me to be their customer, they should treat me like a customer, not like a pariah.
Unfortunately, as a Linux user, I am not allowed to stream Netflix because of their (or the studios) rampant paranoia. So I am not a Netflix customer. I guess having less customers is better than someone maybe copying the stream.
It is always good to look at the context of any Bible quote:
15 "If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. 16 But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that 'every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.' 17 If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector."
Here, the church is being used as a social body to try to encourage a sinner to stop sinning. It has very little to do with the relationship between God and man and more to do with the relationships between people.
If you're concerned about vertical space, then you should install Tree Style Tab. Tabs on the side is incredibly useful, especially on widescreen monitors.
For some reason, that extension is in some sort of extension backwater -- it can only be installed by going to the addons site and scrolling way down to the bottom. It cannot be installed through FF's addons dialog/page.
If you still want more vertical space, move the bookmark bar to be to the left of the menu bar. You can do that just by customizing the toolbars in FF.
At work I have a Windows box that, I kid you not, can only run about 25000 processes between reboots. It doesn't seem to be able to reuse process IDs, and once it gets to about PID 100000 or so (Windows PIDs are always multiples of 4), it just can't reliably spawn new processes. Including the process to shutdown and reboot the computer (equivalent of `shutdown'). Windows seems to generate PIDs somewhat randomly, so sometimes creating a process is able to find a good PID and it works, but other times it can't find a PID so it fails.
Now, a normal person running Word and Excel probably wouldn't notice this. But I wanted to use this computer to build software using make. Well, make creates a lot of processes, especially with lots of subdirectories and sub-makes. Suffice it to say, it doesn't even make it through 'make clean' before running out of PIDs.
I never did figure out what caused this issue. Probably, a bad combination of kernel level drivers. One post online thought a similar problem might be related to the video card driver, but I'm inclined to think that the anti virus (Norton) is at least partly responsible. I was able to duplicated this on other similar machines, but not every machine.
So, anyway, maybe your software spawns a lot of processes and is running out of PIDs after a day or so.
The Wikipedia page lists some studies, but I find this one most revealing:
A 2008 study examined billing data in Indiana before and after it adopted DST in 2006, and concluded that DST increased overall residential electricity consumption by 1% to 4%, due mostly to extra afternoon cooling and extra morning heating; the main increases came in the fall. The overall annual cost of DST to Indiana households was estimated to be $9 million, with an additional $1.7-5.5 million for social costs due to increased pollution.
There may be benefits to DST, but DST does not save energy, one of the original arguments for DST.
Keep in mind, the main purpose of DST is to get people up earlier in the morning so that they don't waste that daylight. People are used to getting to work/school by some set time, say 8 AM. If you told them that in the summer, they had to get to work/school by 7 AM, even though they could leave an hour earlier, most people would balk. But if you tell them that 7 AM is really 8 AM, they don't seem to have any problem, and they'll happily go along with it.
Now, maybe it's easier to just redefine the hours of the day this way than having different schedules for winter and summer months. Lots of people are easily confused by time, and changing your clocks is a one time event, then everything else is "normal." I do find it humorous that people like to keep this convenient fiction, though. If we never had DST and someone proposed it, I think most people would find it ridiculous. But since most people have done it all their life, it's just what we do in the spring and fall (and they think that places that don't do it are somehow backwards and wrong). Just a matter of perspective, I guess.
I personally tend to use vim when quickly editing (usually small) text files and emacs for coding, especially at work. I tend to use emacs for coding because my workplace already has some nice macros and other setup in emacs that would be annoying to reproduce in vim. This includes coding standards (like indenting behavior) and SCM (in this case, ClearCase) integration.
I also prefer emacs because I find it's easier to manage lots of buffers in one session. I usually have hundreds of source files open at a time, and I just find it easier to use C-x C-b (bound to electric-buffer-list, which is much nicer than plain buffer-list) in emacs to switch buffers than:b. vim also seems to demand that I save a buffer before switching to another. There may be an option for that, but I don't remember ever finding one.
For the most part, vim and emacs can do the same things. Often, it's just a matter of preference and what others around you use (for site specific configuration and such).
I'm using Firefox 3.5.1 on Linux (maintained by IT which is why it's an old version) and the new slashdot interface is using 100% of a core, not doing anything. I'm hoping it's just one of the/. tabs I opened, but I've closed a few, including the main page, and it's still taking the same CPU.
Maybe it's time to browse/. with noscript again...
I just tried a search on this and surprisingly (to me at least) the column I selected as better was actually Bing. Then I decided to double check, and I pasted the exact same query into Google, and I got different results. But their weird thing is that the first three results that Google gave me weren't in this comparison thing and were also completely irrelevant to what I was searching for, so the Blind Search for Google was better than Google itself! Though in Google's defense, they actually were good hits to what I had put in the search terms, just not what I was looking for.
So I'd say take that site with a grain of salt. The main page does say the author of the site works for Microsoft, but I suspect that the difference is more of a case of Google trying to personalize the search results that it cannot do with a general site than any malfeasance on the part of Blind Search.
Amen to Tree Style Tabs. Being able to collapse trees of tabs to make space is also very nice.
I also add to that Tab Mix Plus, which makes the text on unread tabs different (red and italic by default), so that I can easily see which tabs I've read. Works great on/. where I open a bunch of comments pages at once, and then go through them later.
I'm not looking forward to FF4 where I'll probably lose one or both of those extensions. Hopefully the extension authors will figure out how to get them to work in FF4 before my distro tries to upgrade me.
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now?
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, I still find some things nicer in Gnome. For example, I can configure Gnome to not treat my finger briefly touching the trackpad on my laptop as a mouse click. I can also quite easily configure the caps lock key to be an additional control key (like on Sun keyboards). I also like all my Compiz settings (not too much flash, but just enough to be nice and useful).
I know I can configure the X server to do the caps lock option. Maybe there's also a way to do the touchpad, too, but it's nice to have a simple GUI to do it and not mess with the xmodmap settings. Not sure if there's a way to use compiz with XFCE, though.
I just hope the Gnome anti-configuration people don't take away those options, like the way they took away my screensaver settings, my login screen settings, my session settings, etc. I probably need to give this latest XFCE a try to see if it would work for me. I've used XFCE in the past, but I've always gravitated back to Gnome (despite its shortcomings).
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now?
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
Because using mount to modify the kernel's VFS layer normally requires root privileges. Some of that has been fixed for mounting of external disks and drives (though I think it just signals through DBUS some root daemon to do a mount or umount as necessary). In addition, there's also security to consider. If I want to make an 'ssh' virtual mount, I probably don't want that exposed to everybody on the system. I don't really even want it exposed to root, though I confess I don't know if things like GnomeVFS, ThunarVFS, or the KDE equivalent (kio-slaves?) allow root access to the virtual mount.
I agree it would be nice if there was a ~/mnt or something that was used instead of virtual mounting through the DE.
Slashdot Mirror
The best calendaring program I've used in recent times was probably written decades ago: dtcm. It came with Solaris (the dt), and had some quirks, but it was pretty easy to use, printed really nice calendars, and had a killer feature for repeating appointments. When you modified a appointment that repeated, it would ask you if you wanted to modify all of them, just the single one, or from that point forward. The "forward" option is what seems to be missing from other calendar tools (probably because they copy Outlook which doesn't have it). It's very nice for when a standing meeting changes time or location. You don't affect your history, just the future.
Maybe some have implemented it since I last looked around (it's been a few years), but I've always been disappointed in the past.
The other nice thing about a real app as opposed to a web based tool like Google calendar is that reminders pop up on whatever desktop I'm on. That way, I don't have to have the web page with the calendar up all the time to see reminders.
If you haven't, you should read the Red/Green/Blue Mars series of books bi Kim Stanley Robinson. I don't know if the economy described in the later books would work, but it is interesting to think about.
Logging out is not necessarily good enough. Facebook also tracks IP addresses that aren't currently logged in. Better to add adblock rules like:
I don't think the last one is necessary -- it has zero hits in my Adblock right now. The others have quite a few hits.
This does mean you won't see any "like" buttons, but if you don't use them, you won't miss anything.
Does anyone have any similar rules for blocking Google +1 tracking? I suppose a similar "block google.com except when on google.com" might work, but I don't know if that blocks everything, or breaks anything.
I dont know what you mean by yellow journalism, but the reality is that his news corporations sway public opinions through lies, manipulation, and fear. [emphasis added]
Apparently you don't know what yellow journalism is, because you practically defined it in the second part of your sentence (they also did what they did to sell more papers). And yellow journalism was a phrase coined more than a hundred years ago (or at least the papers and times it refers to were at the beginning part of the 20th century, the phrase may have come later).
I don't see why you think journalism is worse today than it was before. It has always been this bad. If anything, it's better now, because it's easier for the average person to find out how bad it is.
Not that I really trust the MSM any more than your average politician, but at least I know not to trust them now :)
You make a good point. And as I reflect on it, maybe a more crucial question is "am I trying to solve a social problem with a technical solution?" Using my argument, someone could justify cracking a system, since that daemon that gave back a root shell when asked in the right way is acting as the server owner's agent. But we find that argument unacceptable. So, is a web site doing the equivalent by running unwanted JavaScript on our systems? I can't think that it makes any difference that the web browser downloaded and ran the code. After all, someone once tried to get into one of my systems by convincing a web app to download and run some code (fortunately, it didn't work).
I don't quite know where that leaves us. It could be argued that this is cracking (or "hacking" to scare the populous) users computers, but where is the line? Third party JS? Is Google Analytics OK, or bad? What about JS that just provides some useful (for the user) functionality that is hosted elsewhere? What about CDNs that just look like third parties (though I really don't understand why they have to be different domains instead of just subdomains)?
Even if this sort of tracking was clearly illegal, the "Powers That Be" would rarely go after companies that do this sort of thing. And even if they did (or there was a class action suit by the affected people), the advertising companies can multiply as often as script kiddies. The fight against spam has been going on for a long time, even with criminal prosecutions, yet spam still persists.
I think what is most important is user education. Most people will not realize that this is even happening. Once they do, they will probably want to stop it, either by technical (adblock, noscript), social (just boycott the offending pages), or legal ways. Once enough people demand it, laws probably wouldn't be necessary -- public shame of any brand doing this would be enough to stop it. But until there is a critical mass of people to demand social/legal change, all we're really left with is making better user agents that can avoid the problem.
Then why do you run a web browser that does that? The web browser is your agent. That's why they call it a "user agent". As your agent, it does (or should do) what you tell it to, and acts on your behalf. Your agent is simply doing what you told it to do, namely download JavaScript and run it. If you don't want it to do that, as the OP said, you can get an agent that gives you control, namely Firefox+noscript.
Maybe that's a little harsh, but I don't want to think about a future where my user agent isn't under my control, where I can't decide to to change fonts or run things like adblock or noscript that make the website different than the web designer intended.
* Support for cd -N ; where N is a number from the stack of folders recently accessed, also cd - cd + to move up and down stack
I'm not sure I'd want the shell to always remember all my directories -- I probably go into a lot of directories over the life of a shell. Maybe with a limit, like the last 10 directories.
But you can already do this to some extent with the existing directory stack using pushd and popd. I usually alias pd to pushd so it's as convenient as cd. Then you just pd into a directory.
As to the history, try using ctrl+r sometime. It's a great way to search through your bash history by typing part of the command you're looking for. Of course, you can also run history to get the full history output.
There are two dimensional scroll "wheels" -- often the trackpads on laptops can scroll horizontally along the bottom as well as vertically along the side. Some real mice can also do two dimensional scrolling by tilting the wheel.
Of course, I'd prefer that Google maps not do anything with the scroll wheel, at least in the embedded version, since it's very annoying to be scrolling down a page, come to an embedded map and have the page scrolling stop and Google maps zoom in or out. Maybe ctrl+wheel could be zoom, like it is in the Gnome HIG.
To be fair, you can hardly expect Thunderbird to fix a bug in the underlying filesystem, can you?
In all seriousness, I'm not even sure how one would fix this bug. I can imagine that the code looks something like:
How does one determine that newName is the same as oldName in the context of the filesystem? The only thing one could possibly do is to just issue the rename(), but that could overwrite a different file that does exist. Perhaps maybe checking to see if the inode of newName is the same as the inode of oldName. But of course, this is primarily a problem on Windows, so I have no idea if inodes are even valid there.
Stop calling me nobody! I use remote X all the time, almost always through ssh. Just because most people don't know it's possible doesn't mean that no one uses it!
I know it's popular to take away features in OSS tools, but please stop. So many nice features have been lost in desktop Linux over tha past decade, mostly due to half done "re-writes" that no one seems to finish. Per-workspace wallpapers (Gnome 2.0), screen saver preferences, session management (having the same terminals pop up when you log in), even GDM isn't very configurable anymore. You used to be able to set lots of things, now it's almost nothing. Just Google for the procedure to change the background image for GDM. It's embarrassing. And most other things cannot be configured at all.
Compiz is one of the few bright spots. Without it, I definitely would have left Gnome a while ago. I see other posts talking about getting compiz working in XFCE. I ought to give that a shot.
Somewhat OT, but what happened to the ability to log into /. with my open ID? My account still has the OpenID associated with it, but the login area for /. doesn't seem to let me use an open ID anymore. Or is there a lesser known login area that lets one use open ID?
I wasn't blaming Microsoft, I was blaming Netflix, and the various copyright holders that control them. Your own Roku example illustrates that there's no technical limitation to streaming on Linux (Roku, IIRC, runs Linux). I already have a nice HTPC running Linux. As you point out, I could by another piece of hardware to enable me to spend more money to subscribe to Netflix, but frankly, it's just not worth it to me. If someone expects me to be their customer, they should treat me like a customer, not like a pariah.
Unfortunately, as a Linux user, I am not allowed to stream Netflix because of their (or the studios) rampant paranoia. So I am not a Netflix customer. I guess having less customers is better than someone maybe copying the stream.
It is always good to look at the context of any Bible quote:
Matthew 18:15-17
Here, the church is being used as a social body to try to encourage a sinner to stop sinning. It has very little to do with the relationship between God and man and more to do with the relationships between people.
If you're concerned about vertical space, then you should install Tree Style Tab. Tabs on the side is incredibly useful, especially on widescreen monitors.
For some reason, that extension is in some sort of extension backwater -- it can only be installed by going to the addons site and scrolling way down to the bottom. It cannot be installed through FF's addons dialog/page.
If you still want more vertical space, move the bookmark bar to be to the left of the menu bar. You can do that just by customizing the toolbars in FF.
At work I have a Windows box that, I kid you not, can only run about 25000 processes between reboots. It doesn't seem to be able to reuse process IDs, and once it gets to about PID 100000 or so (Windows PIDs are always multiples of 4), it just can't reliably spawn new processes. Including the process to shutdown and reboot the computer (equivalent of `shutdown'). Windows seems to generate PIDs somewhat randomly, so sometimes creating a process is able to find a good PID and it works, but other times it can't find a PID so it fails.
Now, a normal person running Word and Excel probably wouldn't notice this. But I wanted to use this computer to build software using make. Well, make creates a lot of processes, especially with lots of subdirectories and sub-makes. Suffice it to say, it doesn't even make it through 'make clean' before running out of PIDs.
I never did figure out what caused this issue. Probably, a bad combination of kernel level drivers. One post online thought a similar problem might be related to the video card driver, but I'm inclined to think that the anti virus (Norton) is at least partly responsible. I was able to duplicated this on other similar machines, but not every machine.
So, anyway, maybe your software spawns a lot of processes and is running out of PIDs after a day or so.
The Wikipedia page lists some studies, but I find this one most revealing:
There may be benefits to DST, but DST does not save energy, one of the original arguments for DST.
Keep in mind, the main purpose of DST is to get people up earlier in the morning so that they don't waste that daylight. People are used to getting to work/school by some set time, say 8 AM. If you told them that in the summer, they had to get to work/school by 7 AM, even though they could leave an hour earlier, most people would balk. But if you tell them that 7 AM is really 8 AM, they don't seem to have any problem, and they'll happily go along with it.
Now, maybe it's easier to just redefine the hours of the day this way than having different schedules for winter and summer months. Lots of people are easily confused by time, and changing your clocks is a one time event, then everything else is "normal." I do find it humorous that people like to keep this convenient fiction, though. If we never had DST and someone proposed it, I think most people would find it ridiculous. But since most people have done it all their life, it's just what we do in the spring and fall (and they think that places that don't do it are somehow backwards and wrong). Just a matter of perspective, I guess.
I personally tend to use vim when quickly editing (usually small) text files and emacs for coding, especially at work. I tend to use emacs for coding because my workplace already has some nice macros and other setup in emacs that would be annoying to reproduce in vim. This includes coding standards (like indenting behavior) and SCM (in this case, ClearCase) integration.
I also prefer emacs because I find it's easier to manage lots of buffers in one session. I usually have hundreds of source files open at a time, and I just find it easier to use C-x C-b (bound to electric-buffer-list, which is much nicer than plain buffer-list) in emacs to switch buffers than :b. vim also seems to demand that I save a buffer before switching to another. There may be an option for that, but I don't remember ever finding one.
For the most part, vim and emacs can do the same things. Often, it's just a matter of preference and what others around you use (for site specific configuration and such).
Really? That's too bad, though not unexpected. Good thing I grabbed the source code before they closed it off. Just hope I got it all.
Do you know if there is an Open Grid Engine (or similar) project starting to rise from the ashes?
I'm using Firefox 3.5.1 on Linux (maintained by IT which is why it's an old version) and the new slashdot interface is using 100% of a core, not doing anything. I'm hoping it's just one of the /. tabs I opened, but I've closed a few, including the main page, and it's still taking the same CPU.
Maybe it's time to browse /. with noscript again...
I just tried a search on this and surprisingly (to me at least) the column I selected as better was actually Bing. Then I decided to double check, and I pasted the exact same query into Google, and I got different results. But their weird thing is that the first three results that Google gave me weren't in this comparison thing and were also completely irrelevant to what I was searching for, so the Blind Search for Google was better than Google itself! Though in Google's defense, they actually were good hits to what I had put in the search terms, just not what I was looking for.
So I'd say take that site with a grain of salt. The main page does say the author of the site works for Microsoft, but I suspect that the difference is more of a case of Google trying to personalize the search results that it cannot do with a general site than any malfeasance on the part of Blind Search.
In international politics, isn't that called Dumping?
Amen to Tree Style Tabs. Being able to collapse trees of tabs to make space is also very nice.
I also add to that Tab Mix Plus, which makes the text on unread tabs different (red and italic by default), so that I can easily see which tabs I've read. Works great on /. where I open a bunch of comments pages at once, and then go through them later.
I'm not looking forward to FF4 where I'll probably lose one or both of those extensions. Hopefully the extension authors will figure out how to get them to work in FF4 before my distro tries to upgrade me.
Unfortunately, I still find some things nicer in Gnome. For example, I can configure Gnome to not treat my finger briefly touching the trackpad on my laptop as a mouse click. I can also quite easily configure the caps lock key to be an additional control key (like on Sun keyboards). I also like all my Compiz settings (not too much flash, but just enough to be nice and useful).
I know I can configure the X server to do the caps lock option. Maybe there's also a way to do the touchpad, too, but it's nice to have a simple GUI to do it and not mess with the xmodmap settings. Not sure if there's a way to use compiz with XFCE, though.
I just hope the Gnome anti-configuration people don't take away those options, like the way they took away my screensaver settings, my login screen settings, my session settings, etc. I probably need to give this latest XFCE a try to see if it would work for me. I've used XFCE in the past, but I've always gravitated back to Gnome (despite its shortcomings).
Because using mount to modify the kernel's VFS layer normally requires root privileges. Some of that has been fixed for mounting of external disks and drives (though I think it just signals through DBUS some root daemon to do a mount or umount as necessary). In addition, there's also security to consider. If I want to make an 'ssh' virtual mount, I probably don't want that exposed to everybody on the system. I don't really even want it exposed to root, though I confess I don't know if things like GnomeVFS, ThunarVFS, or the KDE equivalent (kio-slaves?) allow root access to the virtual mount.
I agree it would be nice if there was a ~/mnt or something that was used instead of virtual mounting through the DE.