By 'accessibilty', I'm referring to the Windows application guidelines which state that if I set my system up so that all of the menus are in 16pt Hot Pink Times New Roman and my screen is 50dpi, all applications should automatically pick up and use that information. (Unfortuantely for Moz, not all desktops are as 'policy-free' as X11.)
I'm sure this sort of thing is possible with XUL, but who has done it? (Hint: Netscape should have before they shipped.)
(BTW, I actually like the skins, but RTF/. -- people are pissy about the speed and the buggyness. Meanwhile, after developer-years have been burned by Mozilla on the XUL skins, the KMelon guy hacked his basic-functionality native skin in a weekend of work.)
My memory is fine. I don't overclock. I run with the latest version of NS 4.7.
But, yet, yesterday I managed to create a HTML page which caused Netscape to instantly crash with a memory access violation. Was my page bad? Yes, but that sort of behavior is inexcusible.
And then, last week, I ran into the links-stop-working problem which has existed in Netscape 4 for how many years? Don't tell me you've never seen it.
If you don't see these things, you're the one smoking stuff, or maybe just an old stick-in-the-mud who likes Netscape because you've always liked Netscape.
Windows is 32-bit, this I know
Because Bill Gates told me so
If I had any intellectual curosity
I'd have read "Undocumented Windows 95"
But that stuff is not for me!
OS/2 2.x could definately access more than 16MB of RAM, as long as you were running 32-bit software. It was als the first '32-bit' version of OS/2, not Warp3, which was really more like OS/2 2.5
(I think the legacy OS/2 1.x 16-bit stuff was/is limited to a 16MB address space.)
Netscape needed to get out there with a mostly usable browser, yes. But they didn't need to ship the horrid, bug-ridden mail and news piece. It wasn't ready, and it' embarassing.
Nobody is arguing with non-native widgets for HTML pages (IE doesn't even use native widgets on Windows for that.)
The problem is the chrome surrounding the page. Face it -- it's slow, memory hogging, and still not completely bug-free. It also does not support native OS behaviors and accessibility requirements.
I'd hate to dump more work on Mozilla.org, but they really should be seriously looking into adopting things like Galeon and KMelon for the three major platforms (Windows/Linux/Mac) and leave the XUL stuff in for the people who give a crap about themes or are running mozilla on OS/2 or OpenVMS or whatever.
Know your history! Netscape wasted at least a year trying to hack the Communicator 4 codebase into something that was Fast/Stable/Standards-Compliant for the planned Communicator 5 release.
The codebase was just too hacked up already -- They determined making NS4 into a working browser wasn't possible, so they started from scratch on Mozilla/Netscape 6. That means Netscape 4.7 is a dead end, and you'll just have to deal with it.
After Netscape 4.0, 4.01, 4.02, 4.03, 4.04, 4.05, 4.5, 4.51, 4.51, 4.52, 4.53, 4.54, 4.55, 4.56, 4.6, 4.61, 4.62, 4.63, 4.64, 4.7, 4.71, 4.72, 4.73, 4.74, 4.75, and 4.76 (none of which were particularly stable), what on god's green earth would make you think that a Netscape 4.80 would be a stable program? Did you just start surfing the web yesterday, or did you just somehow miss the last 4 years of the horrid quality of Netscape browsers? What is left to patch?
The only thing slow about Netscape6/Mozilla that I've noticed is startup time. Page rendering is nice and snappy on everything from a PII-233 laptop to a PIII-700 at work.
At least it's better than Netscape 4.7, which is dog slow on a P133, and just as dog slow on that PIII-700. It's the software that no CPU can conquer (probably ridden with delay loops to prevent race conditions in it's crappy code.)
In order to get (partial) DOM support into Internet Explorer, Microsoft had to rewrite the rendering engine.
In order to get DOM support into Mozilla, Netscape had to rewrite the rendering engine from scratch. (The first attempt at kludging the proprietary Layers-DOM onto NN4 resulted in a crashy memory sieve.)
So, I always wonder about these alternative browsers like Opera and Konquerer that claim to be "working on" DOM support. It seems to me that it's a little more difficult than just taking a passible HTML3.2 renderer and hacking a DOM parser on the side. Instead, you have to have an entirely different model which to parse information against, and you still have to get the display parts right.
It's a messy business, and one that probably requires more than just a patch from Hans and Frans of the University of Kronenberg. If anyone has gotten DOM support without a major overhaul, it would be interesting to hear about it.
Ever notice how anyone who advocates Opera/Konquerer/iCab/Other 1% marketshare browser always is touting their "standards-compliance"?
Guess what? It's bullshit and just FUD for the advocacy well. Not that it matters because almost none of the pages on the great WWW are standards-compliant either.
Yep, low-end printers are definately a Razor-n-Blades situation.
But, for HP, it's a little more complex. When you see those Best Buy ads for "Buy a Compaq Presario 666-Q and get a FREE HP PRINTER", part of the reason why is that HP wants to remain absolutely associated with computer printing in people's minds. That means giving out free or near-free printers to newbie users just so the association of Printer==HP sticks in their brain, and they come back for a HP LaserJet when their little inkjet craps out on them.
Of course, any printer for free (or less than $100 really) is going to have to be a software-driven, cheaply contructed piece of crap. Problem is, people want to use those printers with Linux, and it's a little harder to tell them to buy Real Hardware (like a Lexmark with Postscript) when you are talking about $399 than it is with the WinModem situation.
"Me Too" as a Lexmark customer, because of their PostScript-emulation, despite the fact that I think HP printers are top notch products.
The number #1 thing they could do to help Unix printing is to add PostScript or PS-emulation across the board. This runs counter to their policy of charging a premium for their "M"(acintosh)-Series of printers, but hopefully you will be able to push them in the right direction.
The Start Menu didn't come from OS/2. The taskbar didn't come from OS/2. The only thing you could argue that came from OS/2 was tabbed dialogs, and the Microsoft implementation was just plain better than OS/2 (for v3 and before).
Lots of things look similar between Windows and OS/2, but that makes sense because they were both originally developed to have an similar interface to each other by Microsoft..
Anti-aliasing isn't the only reason that Windows fonts look better than X fonts.
First of all, Win fonts are only antialiased at > 16pts or so, which is almost none of text on my screen. Second, Font Smoothing wasn't even enabled on this default Win2000 install. Third, the standard system font on older versions of Windows (98, NT4) is "MS Sans", which is a non-scalable bitmapped font anyway.
No, Windows fonts look better because they spent more time and effort designing them. Particularly, they heavily use TTF's hinting features to improve screen readability, especially for the web fonts that you can download with IE or from their Truetype page.
So, yeah, anti-aliasing can look pretty slick (especially in the XTerms in the screens), but the first step is still having a good font to render in the first place, which ever Linux install I've seen does not have.
The political rational of going down and kicking some inbred cracker ass was "To Save the Union!" (which is a more exciting way of saying 'There goes nullification! Now give us your vimin, bubba!')
Most people up North didn't even know that Slavery had been abolished until a couple years after the war. Not that they cared that much until the 1940s when Blacks finally figured out they could get out of that shithole.
Well, Bush can stick with his intellectual position until the cows come home, but this is politics, right?
I'm guessing you're a Republican. I generally vote Democrat. Still, I think the smart move for Bush would have been to challenge Gore for a statewide hand recount on the day after the election. Which Gore would have accepted, and Bush most likely would have won.
So, by now Bush would be the undisputed president-elect. But instead, his cronies put the screws down on the recounts, and now he's going to have to live with 4 year-long nasty political rainstorm that he might not have actually been elected. And you thought the country was nasty to Clinton for winning with 43% of the vote...
All your little dittohead arguments won't change that. Short term victory, but expect another Clinton in the white house from 04 to 12.
Well, we'll have one biased count produced under the rules spun by the secretary of state, and and other biased count produced under the rules spun by the New York Times.
Objectively - you are going to have a rough time running the country if the belief spreads that you didn't really win. So it was a dumb *political* move for Bush to rush the counting period and go for the gold.
Bush f-ed up 'big time' by not working with Gore for a full recount, and instead having his minions stall the whole thing.
Well, it did worked in that he might become President. But eventually (FOIA or whatever), all of the ballots will be recounted, and the results will be made public. If that recount shows Gore to be the winner (0.7 probability), Bush will be remembered as the biggest phony joke to ever wear a dumb retard grin in the oval office.
You thought people disrespected Clinton? Well, wait and see when it's found that Bush stole the election.
Note that it's System Out, not Standard Out, so unlike whatever C varient you are talking about, there is no assumption that you have a universal teletype emulator dangling off the emulated serial port that your program is talking to.
So, now you want the String class to know the details about whatever system-dependant output device that you may or may not (some Mac VMs for example) have, instead of the much easier proposition of the virutal output device knowing about strings.
Nah - given java's assumptions, your idea is br0ken. Let the goatse guy file it away for future reference
Yeah, but the lack of mainstream SMP support by Intel (which started with the i815) is a screw-job for people who run NT/Linux/NetWare/whatever on x86 servers.
A year or two ago, Compaq and friends were selling buttloads of high-profit SMP-capable systems on BX as 'workgroup servers' or whatever. ('Workgroup' serving being NT's dominant market.) Now, these boxes, in the $3K to $6K range, are being pushed uniprocessor-only, and have less scalability than the machines they replaced, and might well be slower than a 2-way BX machine.
So, yeah, this doesn't affect the $10K+ big Xeon boxes, but it does make an opening in the lower-range for AMD and the 760MP chipset.
Well, the idea of day trading is just stupid on the face of it. The fact that you can be on the Internet all day and surf Yahoo Finance doesn't mean that you have the same level of information as the guys on the trading floor, or the supercomputer in the mutual fund basement. And having some kind of superior (or inside) information is the only way to make money in short term stock trades.
It seems that your experience is pretty common among the dot-com fall outs I've known. It's amazing that people can have a shit job working for a shit company and when that company goes under, they literally have to fight off the recruiters. In the Bay Area, we're trying to hiring someone who has had dot-com marketing/business analyst experience (don't ask...), and it's virtually impossible to find anyone. Perhaps that's because these people never had business plans to begin with, but still.
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By 'accessibilty', I'm referring to the Windows application guidelines which state that if I set my system up so that all of the menus are in 16pt Hot Pink Times New Roman and my screen is 50dpi, all applications should automatically pick up and use that information. (Unfortuantely for Moz, not all desktops are as 'policy-free' as X11.)
I'm sure this sort of thing is possible with XUL, but who has done it? (Hint: Netscape should have before they shipped.)
(BTW, I actually like the skins, but RTF/. -- people are pissy about the speed and the buggyness. Meanwhile, after developer-years have been burned by Mozilla on the XUL skins, the KMelon guy hacked his basic-functionality native skin in a weekend of work.)
My memory is fine. I don't overclock. I run with the latest version of NS 4.7.
But, yet, yesterday I managed to create a HTML page which caused Netscape to instantly crash with a memory access violation. Was my page bad? Yes, but that sort of behavior is inexcusible.
And then, last week, I ran into the links-stop-working problem which has existed in Netscape 4 for how many years? Don't tell me you've never seen it.
If you don't see these things, you're the one smoking stuff, or maybe just an old stick-in-the-mud who likes Netscape because you've always liked Netscape.
Windows is 32-bit, this I know
Because Bill Gates told me so
If I had any intellectual curosity
I'd have read "Undocumented Windows 95"
But that stuff is not for me!
OS/2 2.x could definately access more than 16MB of RAM, as long as you were running 32-bit software. It was als the first '32-bit' version of OS/2, not Warp3, which was really more like OS/2 2.5
(I think the legacy OS/2 1.x 16-bit stuff was/is limited to a 16MB address space.)
Netscape needed to get out there with a mostly usable browser, yes. But they didn't need to ship the horrid, bug-ridden mail and news piece. It wasn't ready, and it' embarassing.
Nobody is arguing with non-native widgets for HTML pages (IE doesn't even use native widgets on Windows for that.)
The problem is the chrome surrounding the page. Face it -- it's slow, memory hogging, and still not completely bug-free. It also does not support native OS behaviors and accessibility requirements.
I'd hate to dump more work on Mozilla.org, but they really should be seriously looking into adopting things like Galeon and KMelon for the three major platforms (Windows/Linux/Mac) and leave the XUL stuff in for the people who give a crap about themes or are running mozilla on OS/2 or OpenVMS or whatever.
Know your history! Netscape wasted at least a year trying to hack the Communicator 4 codebase into something that was Fast/Stable/Standards-Compliant for the planned Communicator 5 release.
The codebase was just too hacked up already -- They determined making NS4 into a working browser wasn't possible, so they started from scratch on Mozilla/Netscape 6. That means Netscape 4.7 is a dead end, and you'll just have to deal with it.
After Netscape 4.0, 4.01, 4.02, 4.03, 4.04, 4.05, 4.5, 4.51, 4.51, 4.52, 4.53, 4.54, 4.55, 4.56, 4.6, 4.61, 4.62, 4.63, 4.64, 4.7, 4.71, 4.72, 4.73, 4.74, 4.75, and 4.76 (none of which were particularly stable), what on god's green earth would make you think that a Netscape 4.80 would be a stable program? Did you just start surfing the web yesterday, or did you just somehow miss the last 4 years of the horrid quality of Netscape browsers? What is left to patch?
An 8 digit plan would obsolete every phone switch in the country. Whoops. Fortunately, they all handle 10 digit numbers.
The only thing slow about Netscape6/Mozilla that I've noticed is startup time. Page rendering is nice and snappy on everything from a PII-233 laptop to a PIII-700 at work.
At least it's better than Netscape 4.7, which is dog slow on a P133, and just as dog slow on that PIII-700. It's the software that no CPU can conquer (probably ridden with delay loops to prevent race conditions in it's crappy code.)
In order to get (partial) DOM support into Internet Explorer, Microsoft had to rewrite the rendering engine.
In order to get DOM support into Mozilla, Netscape had to rewrite the rendering engine from scratch. (The first attempt at kludging the proprietary Layers-DOM onto NN4 resulted in a crashy memory sieve.)
So, I always wonder about these alternative browsers like Opera and Konquerer that claim to be "working on" DOM support. It seems to me that it's a little more difficult than just taking a passible HTML3.2 renderer and hacking a DOM parser on the side. Instead, you have to have an entirely different model which to parse information against, and you still have to get the display parts right.
It's a messy business, and one that probably requires more than just a patch from Hans and Frans of the University of Kronenberg. If anyone has gotten DOM support without a major overhaul, it would be interesting to hear about it.
Ever notice how anyone who advocates Opera/Konquerer/iCab/Other 1% marketshare browser always is touting their "standards-compliance"?
Guess what? It's bullshit and just FUD for the advocacy well. Not that it matters because almost none of the pages on the great WWW are standards-compliant either.
Yep, low-end printers are definately a Razor-n-Blades situation.
But, for HP, it's a little more complex. When you see those Best Buy ads for "Buy a Compaq Presario 666-Q and get a FREE HP PRINTER", part of the reason why is that HP wants to remain absolutely associated with computer printing in people's minds. That means giving out free or near-free printers to newbie users just so the association of Printer==HP sticks in their brain, and they come back for a HP LaserJet when their little inkjet craps out on them.
Of course, any printer for free (or less than $100 really) is going to have to be a software-driven, cheaply contructed piece of crap. Problem is, people want to use those printers with Linux, and it's a little harder to tell them to buy Real Hardware (like a Lexmark with Postscript) when you are talking about $399 than it is with the WinModem situation.
"Me Too" as a Lexmark customer, because of their PostScript-emulation, despite the fact that I think HP printers are top notch products.
The number #1 thing they could do to help Unix printing is to add PostScript or PS-emulation across the board. This runs counter to their policy of charging a premium for their "M"(acintosh)-Series of printers, but hopefully you will be able to push them in the right direction.
The Start Menu didn't come from OS/2. The taskbar didn't come from OS/2. The only thing you could argue that came from OS/2 was tabbed dialogs, and the Microsoft implementation was just plain better than OS/2 (for v3 and before).
Lots of things look similar between Windows and OS/2, but that makes sense because they were both originally developed to have an similar interface to each other by Microsoft..
It's a real good ol'fashioned pants-shitting laugh riot. Oh god, my side hurts from rolling on the floor laughing my big fat uncle-fucking ass off.
Anti-aliasing isn't the only reason that Windows fonts look better than X fonts.
First of all, Win fonts are only antialiased at > 16pts or so, which is almost none of text on my screen. Second, Font Smoothing wasn't even enabled on this default Win2000 install. Third, the standard system font on older versions of Windows (98, NT4) is "MS Sans", which is a non-scalable bitmapped font anyway.
No, Windows fonts look better because they spent more time and effort designing them. Particularly, they heavily use TTF's hinting features to improve screen readability, especially for the web fonts that you can download with IE or from their Truetype page.
So, yeah, anti-aliasing can look pretty slick (especially in the XTerms in the screens), but the first step is still having a good font to render in the first place, which ever Linux install I've seen does not have.
The political rational of going down and kicking some inbred cracker ass was "To Save the Union!" (which is a more exciting way of saying 'There goes nullification! Now give us your vimin, bubba!')
Most people up North didn't even know that Slavery had been abolished until a couple years after the war. Not that they cared that much until the 1940s when Blacks finally figured out they could get out of that shithole.
Well, Bush can stick with his intellectual position until the cows come home, but this is politics, right?
I'm guessing you're a Republican. I generally vote Democrat. Still, I think the smart move for Bush would have been to challenge Gore for a statewide hand recount on the day after the election. Which Gore would have accepted, and Bush most likely would have won.
So, by now Bush would be the undisputed president-elect. But instead, his cronies put the screws down on the recounts, and now he's going to have to live with 4 year-long nasty political rainstorm that he might not have actually been elected. And you thought the country was nasty to Clinton for winning with 43% of the vote...
All your little dittohead arguments won't change that. Short term victory, but expect another Clinton in the white house from 04 to 12.
Well, we'll have one biased count produced under the rules spun by the secretary of state, and and other biased count produced under the rules spun by the New York Times.
Objectively - you are going to have a rough time running the country if the belief spreads that you didn't really win. So it was a dumb *political* move for Bush to rush the counting period and go for the gold.
Bush f-ed up 'big time' by not working with Gore for a full recount, and instead having his minions stall the whole thing.
Well, it did worked in that he might become President. But eventually (FOIA or whatever), all of the ballots will be recounted, and the results will be made public. If that recount shows Gore to be the winner (0.7 probability), Bush will be remembered as the biggest phony joke to ever wear a dumb retard grin in the oval office.
You thought people disrespected Clinton? Well, wait and see when it's found that Bush stole the election.
Note that it's System Out, not Standard Out, so unlike whatever C varient you are talking about, there is no assumption that you have a universal teletype emulator dangling off the emulated serial port that your program is talking to.
So, now you want the String class to know the details about whatever system-dependant output device that you may or may not (some Mac VMs for example) have, instead of the much easier proposition of the virutal output device knowing about strings.
Nah - given java's assumptions, your idea is br0ken. Let the goatse guy file it away for future reference
Yeah, but the lack of mainstream SMP support by Intel (which started with the i815) is a screw-job for people who run NT/Linux/NetWare/whatever on x86 servers.
A year or two ago, Compaq and friends were selling buttloads of high-profit SMP-capable systems on BX as 'workgroup servers' or whatever. ('Workgroup' serving being NT's dominant market.) Now, these boxes, in the $3K to $6K range, are being pushed uniprocessor-only, and have less scalability than the machines they replaced, and might well be slower than a 2-way BX machine.
So, yeah, this doesn't affect the $10K+ big Xeon boxes, but it does make an opening in the lower-range for AMD and the 760MP chipset.
Well, the idea of day trading is just stupid on the face of it. The fact that you can be on the Internet all day and surf Yahoo Finance doesn't mean that you have the same level of information as the guys on the trading floor, or the supercomputer in the mutual fund basement. And having some kind of superior (or inside) information is the only way to make money in short term stock trades.
It seems that your experience is pretty common among the dot-com fall outs I've known. It's amazing that people can have a shit job working for a shit company and when that company goes under, they literally have to fight off the recruiters. In the Bay Area, we're trying to hiring someone who has had dot-com marketing/business analyst experience (don't ask...), and it's virtually impossible to find anyone. Perhaps that's because these people never had business plans to begin with, but still.