Whoops. Didn't notice that minWidth was not documented on that page. Well, it's a wiki, so I guess someone could add documentation for it if they felt industrious.
But you can search for it in about:config itself and just edit it without having consulted the documentation for that particular entry; I don't suppose you need a Wiki to tell you what minWidth does and what the number attached to it means.;)
I generally get my extensions from the author websites instead of from Mozilla Add-ons because Mozilla Add-ons usually doesn't list the dev builds and because of the approval process, it also tends to lag behind official author sites.
This is one of the reasons why I'm loving FF2.:) The overflow handling is useful. The new minWidth is annoying (but the change is understandable; FF has been more successful than other OSS browsers because it targets Joe Average), but that can be easily changed in about:config. Go in there, drop the minWidth down to 50 or so and also kill the close buttons while you're at it (use middle-click to close), and you'll have the best of both worlds: lots of tabs and overflow control.
I've been using the release candidates for nearly a month now, starting with the first candidate of RC1 (yes, they do release release candidates of release candidates;)). There were some things that took a bit of getting used to, but within an hour, I was loving it.
1/ It seems faster. It also has a MUCH better memory footprint. 2/ Session-saving and undo close tabs is now built-in. This is great, because I used to get this from an extension, and that extension was a horrible memory leaker (this might contribute to #1). 3/ New tab management. I often have lots of tabs open, and it's nice to be able to scroll the tab bar now or to get a drop-down of all the open tabs. The close button on each tab is annoying (that's what middle-click is for) and the wider minimum tab width is wasteful, but both of those settings can be changed in about:config. 4/ Speaking of about:config, there is a new hidden setting that lets you disable compatibility checking for extensions. Oftentimes, an extension marked for 1.5 will work just fine for 2.0, but the author hadn't updated the extension's manifest to say that, so FF2 would refuse that extension. Not anymore.:) No more need for NTT or for manually bumping up the maxVersion of such extensions. 5/ Button to restart Firefox after installing an add-on. And the new session saving kicks in to restore all your tabs and even what you have filled into forms after the restart. Makes installing stuff much less painful. 6/ Spell check! No more copying-and-pasting into word to check for typos. 7/ Better RSS management 8/ Better password auto-fill 9/ I personally love the look of the new theme. The old tabs looked rather ugly on Windows Classic. Now combined with ClassicFox, Firefox looks stunning on Windows Classic. But that's a matter of personal taste.
Personally, I didn't care much for the other features like anti-phishing (I have it disabled 'cuz I think I can protect myself, but it's good for Joe Sixpack), live titles, or the search suggest (which I also have disabled). Anyway, at the risk of sounding like some sappy endorsement, I really love Firefox 2. Once I got used to it and tweaked the settings, I can't believe how I ever managed to get along with 1.5.
Erm... yes, you can generate nuke-like explosions without nukes. This has been established in the other comments. But what makes a nuke effective is that it's small and light. You can load it on a plane or hitch it to a missile. If you want a nuke-like explosion without the nuke, you're going to need hundreds of tonnes of explosives. There's simply no other way. And hundreds of tonnes of stuff is very hard to deliver. You can't drop it from a plane or anything.
The restriction is not for network connections in general, but for Windows networking on the local network. Like when you want to access files on \\upstairsComputer\C$ for streaming... this same restriction exists in XP Home, and applies only to concurrent connections to the built-in Windows networking (so no, this won't affect LAN games or stuff like that). This basically prevents the computer from acting as a high-volume Windows networking server and will not affect most people.
P2P file sharing is not the same as the sort of file sharing that this refers to.
When you buy a car or a toaster, that car or toaster becomes your property and you can do whatever the heck you want with it.
"Buying" software is not the same thing. You can't "buy" software. You can only buy a *license to use* software. And that is different.
This is the difference between buying a home and doing whatever you want to the interior versus renting an apartment and having the landlord tell you that you can't repaint the walls and rip out the carpet.
My network, connected to the Internet via a vanilla DSL service from Verizon, logs tons of break-in attempts on various ports. Most of them are from Chinese IP addresses. And unless the Chinese government has waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much time on its hands (they are barely able to keep domestic order right now, so I doubt that they'd give a damn about some home computer), I think it's safe to say that the attacks against my system are blind, automated attacks by regular hackers trying to steal passwords, financial/identity info, or to pull me into a botnet for things like spam.
So, in the case of the Commerce Department, are these hackers "Chinese" in the sense that they represent the Chinese regime (and are thus hacking for national interests)? Or "Chinese" in the sense that they just happen to originate from that part of the world (and are thus hacking for petty selfish criminal interests)? - Given the prevalence of hackers hacking for selfish crimes (vs. for national interests), I would think lean towards the latter. - If the Chinese government really wanted to hack the US government, they could've picked a more useful department. Like Defense or State. But Commerce?!?! - Attacks originating from Chinese IP addresses are extremely common, mostly because of software piracy. Because over 90% of the Windows installations there are illegal, it is common practice for software updates to be disabled (you can thank WGA for that), and thus, a HUGE number of computers in China are zombies out on a mission to zombify (is that a word?) other computers.
I often like to compare Gmail to a web-based mouse-enabled version of Pine (especially if you turn on the keyboard shortcuts!). Yahoo! Mail is obviously an attempt to emulate Netscape Mail, Outlook Express, etc.
It's two different paradigms and they're really not strictly comparable. For people who are more tech-savvy who are used to dealing with Pine on a Unix terminal or for those who are highly utilitarian, Gmail is great. For those who have been brought up on years of Outlook Express and are used to drag and drop, Yahoo! is great. More than anything, what someone thinks about the new Yahoo! mail really depends on that person's preferences and set of experiences.
On that note, here is my personal opinion: I love Pine and I love Gmail.:P Yahoo! Mail is very slow (esp. on my 800 MHz Celeron laptop). Ultimately, I think that the fundamental problem with Yahoo! mail is that it uses AJAX to replicate a desktop paradigm on the web. Google, on the other hand, recognizes that the web is a fundamentally different medium and thus uses AJAX to create a web app with an interface paradigm that is appropriate for the web. The web is not the desktop, and I think that it needs a different approach that does not involve blindly porting over a desktop interface. But that's just my personal opinion...
From what I've been reading about Pre-N, "slightly less backwards compatible" is an understatement. There are simply too many problems with it right now, and the last thing I want is for all my neighbors to start nuking the spectrum with these Pre-N radio jammers.
Have you actually read the reviews of the Pre-N crap that's out there? (Google them up; there are quite a number) Poor range, not as fast as they want, and they are not "good neighbors" as they totally clobber (jam) existing b/g networks. The problem with Linksys and everyone else pushing out these Pre-N products is that there are serious flaws with them that they're ignoring, and they're totally flaunting the IEEE in their desire to grab market share.
Yes, the idiots who are selling Pre-N today will probably have an edge, to the detriment of everyone else.
Did anyone read the other "How I work" interviews
on
How Bill Gates Works
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· Score: 1
On the site, click to open the gallery, and you'll get a list of other people they interviewed, included Marissa Mayer of Google. That one was particularly interesting because she talks about how she likes to use Pine for work e-mail and Gmail for personal e-mail.
Ever since the 1986 theft, Caltech became a bit more vigilant. The cannon was literally locked to the ground. How did they break that lock without drawing attention? And how did they move that cannon around without drawing attention? And finally, when HMC did it, they posed as a cleaning crew that needed to move the cannon for maintenance... if the MIT people used a moving company excuse to deflect any attention that they did draw, I'm surprised that Caltech fell for what amounted to a similar trick.
Anyway, HMC should be ashamed of itself, letting MIT do this.:P
Re:Did Google create a cult we are not aware of?
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
Yep, it did.:) I recently switched my domain e-mail to Gmail (it's now auto-forwarded to Gmail; am not using Gmail for domains yet) instead of using a "real" e-mail system... why?
It gives me flexibility. Here are the three reasons: 1) It gives me secure SMTP and POP, so I can use e-mail in the traditional way. 2) Downloading using POP does *not* remove the e-mail from the web-based inbox (unless you want it to). This way, it's almost a bit like IMAP where I can have a copy of all my e-mails in my e-mail client, but if I'm on the go, I can also access all my e-mails via the web. 3) Google lets you set different From: addresses, which lets me use my GMail account to send e-mail on behalf of a number of different addresses. 4) And the AJAX is kinda nice, too. Other webmail interfaces are clunkier than Pine (which I am also fond of), but Gmail's is the first *usable* web interface I have seen.
Overall, Gmail gives me the sort of access-anywhere flexibility that I used to get from Pine. Except while most public terminals do not have SSH (this is criminal; a SSH client should be included in every Windows PC), pretty much every public terminal that has access to the Internet has a web browser. It's the unfortunate byproduct of people equating HTTP(S)/WWW == Internet, but oh well, it's how the cookie crumbles.
It was a great program, and it prompted me to re-visit the old Slashdot article on this and to look a number of things up. Things that Nova missed:
* It mentioned the Gray team being a dark horse, but in reality, they took only about half an hour longer than Stanley. If anything, it was probably even more of a newcomer than Stanley. CMU has been in the robot driving business for a long time (they had neural-net based self-driving vehicles since the early 90's), so for this unknown team to finish so close to the others was interesting.
* The whole passing thing was a bit overhyped. According to what I read, if there is a passing situation, the chase vehicles will find a wide open area and pause the vehicle that was being passed. So H1ghlander should have been still while it happened. At least one of the robots that failed the race did so when it had problems restarting from a pause.
People are forced to use Microsoft because when's the last time you tried to use Mac or Linux and managed to get all the software that you need for work/gaming/etc. to work? To the extent that Windows is a platform allows Microsoft to leverage its monopoly and thus give it market power.
If Google were to kick everyone's butt and dominate and then start charging people for page rankings, then they will quickly go the way of Overture (or any search engine that existed before Google, since this was common practice pre-Google). Remember, Google entered search late, with virtually no capital and no marketing, and because the other search engines were pulling crap like selling rankings, Google quickly won.
So this is fundamentally different from Microsoft--because people are not tied to a search engine like they are tied (by way of software) to an OS. And as a result, if Google were to have a monopoly, that monopoly would not translate to market power (or if it did, it would be short-lived).
Governments do NOT regulate monopolies. They regulate abuses of market power (whether they are derived from monopolies or not).
2/ The nature of their monopolies is different. People are forced to use M$ due to lack of software for other platforms. People can easily use another search engine by just typing different letters in the address bar. Government intervention is justified *only* if the market is unable to correct itself. This is the case with natural monopolies (e.g., utilities, gov't-created monopolies, Microsoft, etc.) and with predatory monopolies (e.g., Standard Oil; though such monopolies no longer exist in today's economy unless they also happen to be a natural monopoly). So if Google were to become a monopoly, it would be a fundamentally different monopoly from Microsoft's from an economic point of view.
Utilities are natural monopolies. Telecoms are natural monopolies. Windows represents a natural monopoly.
Google is not a natural monopoly. First, it is not a monopoly at all. Yahoo! and MSN will be pretty miffed at the notion that Google controls the market--sure they are the top dog, but they don't control it. Second, unlike the cases mentioned above, there is relatively free entry in the search engine market. Just ask Google. They entered search very late in the game, at a time when AltaVista dominated, and spent no money on marketing for the first several years. Despite that, they went from zilch to king. You can't say this about utilities because of the sort of infrastructure costs involved and because of the inefficiency of multiple water/gas/etc. companies serving the same area. And until there is a Windows clone (like AMD is an Intel clone) that can run Windows software, Windows is also a natural monopoly. If Google become evil incarnate, I can assure you that the market will correct the problem by handing someone else the crown faster than the government can say "Congressional committee". Just ask how the folks at Overture are doing these days...
Governments do NOT have *any* mandate to regulate monopolies on a whim. Their mandate extends to natural monopolies and to cases of abuse, such as anti-competitive behavior. Until that can be shown, there is no basis whatsoever.
Also, geeks tend to lean towards libertarianism; please do not mistake libertarian for Republican.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops. Didn't notice that minWidth was not documented on that page. Well, it's a wiki, so I guess someone could add documentation for it if they felt industrious.
;)
But you can search for it in about:config itself and just edit it without having consulted the documentation for that particular entry; I don't suppose you need a Wiki to tell you what minWidth does and what the number attached to it means.
Keep in mind that the new tab handling and session saving makes some of TMP's FF1.5 features irrelevant for FF2.0.
http://tmp.garyr.net/ and look at the dev builds?
I generally get my extensions from the author websites instead of from Mozilla Add-ons because Mozilla Add-ons usually doesn't list the dev builds and because of the approval process, it also tends to lag behind official author sites.
IIRC, this is targetted for FF3.
This is one of the reasons why I'm loving FF2. :) The overflow handling is useful. The new minWidth is annoying (but the change is understandable; FF has been more successful than other OSS browsers because it targets Joe Average), but that can be easily changed in about:config. Go in there, drop the minWidth down to 50 or so and also kill the close buttons while you're at it (use middle-click to close), and you'll have the best of both worlds: lots of tabs and overflow control.
Yes!
c onfig_Entries
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:
Specifically, look at:
browser.tabs.closeButtons
browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
I've been using the release candidates for nearly a month now, starting with the first candidate of RC1 (yes, they do release release candidates of release candidates ;)). There were some things that took a bit of getting used to, but within an hour, I was loving it.
:) No more need for NTT or for manually bumping up the maxVersion of such extensions.
1/ It seems faster. It also has a MUCH better memory footprint.
2/ Session-saving and undo close tabs is now built-in. This is great, because I used to get this from an extension, and that extension was a horrible memory leaker (this might contribute to #1).
3/ New tab management. I often have lots of tabs open, and it's nice to be able to scroll the tab bar now or to get a drop-down of all the open tabs. The close button on each tab is annoying (that's what middle-click is for) and the wider minimum tab width is wasteful, but both of those settings can be changed in about:config.
4/ Speaking of about:config, there is a new hidden setting that lets you disable compatibility checking for extensions. Oftentimes, an extension marked for 1.5 will work just fine for 2.0, but the author hadn't updated the extension's manifest to say that, so FF2 would refuse that extension. Not anymore.
5/ Button to restart Firefox after installing an add-on. And the new session saving kicks in to restore all your tabs and even what you have filled into forms after the restart. Makes installing stuff much less painful.
6/ Spell check! No more copying-and-pasting into word to check for typos.
7/ Better RSS management
8/ Better password auto-fill
9/ I personally love the look of the new theme. The old tabs looked rather ugly on Windows Classic. Now combined with ClassicFox, Firefox looks stunning on Windows Classic. But that's a matter of personal taste.
Personally, I didn't care much for the other features like anti-phishing (I have it disabled 'cuz I think I can protect myself, but it's good for Joe Sixpack), live titles, or the search suggest (which I also have disabled). Anyway, at the risk of sounding like some sappy endorsement, I really love Firefox 2. Once I got used to it and tweaked the settings, I can't believe how I ever managed to get along with 1.5.
Have you tried FF2 RC1/RC2/RC3? And looked at the first item of the first page of the options dialog?
Erm... yes, you can generate nuke-like explosions without nukes. This has been established in the other comments. But what makes a nuke effective is that it's small and light. You can load it on a plane or hitch it to a missile. If you want a nuke-like explosion without the nuke, you're going to need hundreds of tonnes of explosives. There's simply no other way. And hundreds of tonnes of stuff is very hard to deliver. You can't drop it from a plane or anything.
The restriction is not for network connections in general, but for Windows networking on the local network. Like when you want to access files on \\upstairsComputer\C$ for streaming ... this same restriction exists in XP Home, and applies only to concurrent connections to the built-in Windows networking (so no, this won't affect LAN games or stuff like that). This basically prevents the computer from acting as a high-volume Windows networking server and will not affect most people.
P2P file sharing is not the same as the sort of file sharing that this refers to.
When you buy a car or a toaster, that car or toaster becomes your property and you can do whatever the heck you want with it.
"Buying" software is not the same thing. You can't "buy" software. You can only buy a *license to use* software. And that is different.
This is the difference between buying a home and doing whatever you want to the interior versus renting an apartment and having the landlord tell you that you can't repaint the walls and rip out the carpet.
If it was, it would not have generated so much attention.
The upside, though, is that the Go button is much smaller and compact than before...
My network, connected to the Internet via a vanilla DSL service from Verizon, logs tons of break-in attempts on various ports. Most of them are from Chinese IP addresses. And unless the Chinese government has waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much time on its hands (they are barely able to keep domestic order right now, so I doubt that they'd give a damn about some home computer), I think it's safe to say that the attacks against my system are blind, automated attacks by regular hackers trying to steal passwords, financial/identity info, or to pull me into a botnet for things like spam.
So, in the case of the Commerce Department, are these hackers "Chinese" in the sense that they represent the Chinese regime (and are thus hacking for national interests)? Or "Chinese" in the sense that they just happen to originate from that part of the world (and are thus hacking for petty selfish criminal interests)?
- Given the prevalence of hackers hacking for selfish crimes (vs. for national interests), I would think lean towards the latter.
- If the Chinese government really wanted to hack the US government, they could've picked a more useful department. Like Defense or State. But Commerce?!?!
- Attacks originating from Chinese IP addresses are extremely common, mostly because of software piracy. Because over 90% of the Windows installations there are illegal, it is common practice for software updates to be disabled (you can thank WGA for that), and thus, a HUGE number of computers in China are zombies out on a mission to zombify (is that a word?) other computers.
I often like to compare Gmail to a web-based mouse-enabled version of Pine (especially if you turn on the keyboard shortcuts!). Yahoo! Mail is obviously an attempt to emulate Netscape Mail, Outlook Express, etc.
:P Yahoo! Mail is very slow (esp. on my 800 MHz Celeron laptop). Ultimately, I think that the fundamental problem with Yahoo! mail is that it uses AJAX to replicate a desktop paradigm on the web. Google, on the other hand, recognizes that the web is a fundamentally different medium and thus uses AJAX to create a web app with an interface paradigm that is appropriate for the web. The web is not the desktop, and I think that it needs a different approach that does not involve blindly porting over a desktop interface. But that's just my personal opinion...
It's two different paradigms and they're really not strictly comparable. For people who are more tech-savvy who are used to dealing with Pine on a Unix terminal or for those who are highly utilitarian, Gmail is great. For those who have been brought up on years of Outlook Express and are used to drag and drop, Yahoo! is great. More than anything, what someone thinks about the new Yahoo! mail really depends on that person's preferences and set of experiences.
On that note, here is my personal opinion: I love Pine and I love Gmail.
There's a speed-size trade-off.
Ouch. :( http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot%2C+digg&ct ab=0&geo=all&date=all
/. much more than Digg*
*likes
From what I've been reading about Pre-N, "slightly less backwards compatible" is an understatement. There are simply too many problems with it right now, and the last thing I want is for all my neighbors to start nuking the spectrum with these Pre-N radio jammers.
Have you actually read the reviews of the Pre-N crap that's out there? (Google them up; there are quite a number) Poor range, not as fast as they want, and they are not "good neighbors" as they totally clobber (jam) existing b/g networks. The problem with Linksys and everyone else pushing out these Pre-N products is that there are serious flaws with them that they're ignoring, and they're totally flaunting the IEEE in their desire to grab market share.
Yes, the idiots who are selling Pre-N today will probably have an edge, to the detriment of everyone else.
On the site, click to open the gallery, and you'll get a list of other people they interviewed, included Marissa Mayer of Google. That one was particularly interesting because she talks about how she likes to use Pine for work e-mail and Gmail for personal e-mail.
Ever since the 1986 theft, Caltech became a bit more vigilant. The cannon was literally locked to the ground. How did they break that lock without drawing attention? And how did they move that cannon around without drawing attention? And finally, when HMC did it, they posed as a cleaning crew that needed to move the cannon for maintenance... if the MIT people used a moving company excuse to deflect any attention that they did draw, I'm surprised that Caltech fell for what amounted to a similar trick.
:P
Anyway, HMC should be ashamed of itself, letting MIT do this.
Yep, it is.
It's pathetic that MIT did it and not HMC.
Yep, it did. :) I recently switched my domain e-mail to Gmail (it's now auto-forwarded to Gmail; am not using Gmail for domains yet) instead of using a "real" e-mail system... why?
It gives me flexibility. Here are the three reasons:
1) It gives me secure SMTP and POP, so I can use e-mail in the traditional way.
2) Downloading using POP does *not* remove the e-mail from the web-based inbox (unless you want it to). This way, it's almost a bit like IMAP where I can have a copy of all my e-mails in my e-mail client, but if I'm on the go, I can also access all my e-mails via the web.
3) Google lets you set different From: addresses, which lets me use my GMail account to send e-mail on behalf of a number of different addresses.
4) And the AJAX is kinda nice, too. Other webmail interfaces are clunkier than Pine (which I am also fond of), but Gmail's is the first *usable* web interface I have seen.
Overall, Gmail gives me the sort of access-anywhere flexibility that I used to get from Pine. Except while most public terminals do not have SSH (this is criminal; a SSH client should be included in every Windows PC), pretty much every public terminal that has access to the Internet has a web browser. It's the unfortunate byproduct of people equating HTTP(S)/WWW == Internet, but oh well, it's how the cookie crumbles.
It was a great program, and it prompted me to re-visit the old Slashdot article on this and to look a number of things up. Things that Nova missed:
* It mentioned the Gray team being a dark horse, but in reality, they took only about half an hour longer than Stanley. If anything, it was probably even more of a newcomer than Stanley. CMU has been in the robot driving business for a long time (they had neural-net based self-driving vehicles since the early 90's), so for this unknown team to finish so close to the others was interesting.
* The whole passing thing was a bit overhyped. According to what I read, if there is a passing situation, the chase vehicles will find a wide open area and pause the vehicle that was being passed. So H1ghlander should have been still while it happened. At least one of the robots that failed the race did so when it had problems restarting from a pause.
That's a false analogy.
People are forced to use Microsoft because when's the last time you tried to use Mac or Linux and managed to get all the software that you need for work/gaming/etc. to work? To the extent that Windows is a platform allows Microsoft to leverage its monopoly and thus give it market power.
If Google were to kick everyone's butt and dominate and then start charging people for page rankings, then they will quickly go the way of Overture (or any search engine that existed before Google, since this was common practice pre-Google). Remember, Google entered search late, with virtually no capital and no marketing, and because the other search engines were pulling crap like selling rankings, Google quickly won.
So this is fundamentally different from Microsoft--because people are not tied to a search engine like they are tied (by way of software) to an OS. And as a result, if Google were to have a monopoly, that monopoly would not translate to market power (or if it did, it would be short-lived).
Governments do NOT regulate monopolies. They regulate abuses of market power (whether they are derived from monopolies or not).
1/ Google is not a monopoly (yet).
2/ The nature of their monopolies is different. People are forced to use M$ due to lack of software for other platforms. People can easily use another search engine by just typing different letters in the address bar. Government intervention is justified *only* if the market is unable to correct itself. This is the case with natural monopolies (e.g., utilities, gov't-created monopolies, Microsoft, etc.) and with predatory monopolies (e.g., Standard Oil; though such monopolies no longer exist in today's economy unless they also happen to be a natural monopoly). So if Google were to become a monopoly, it would be a fundamentally different monopoly from Microsoft's from an economic point of view.
There is one big problem to your analogies.
Utilities are natural monopolies. Telecoms are natural monopolies. Windows represents a natural monopoly.
Google is not a natural monopoly. First, it is not a monopoly at all. Yahoo! and MSN will be pretty miffed at the notion that Google controls the market--sure they are the top dog, but they don't control it. Second, unlike the cases mentioned above, there is relatively free entry in the search engine market. Just ask Google. They entered search very late in the game, at a time when AltaVista dominated, and spent no money on marketing for the first several years. Despite that, they went from zilch to king. You can't say this about utilities because of the sort of infrastructure costs involved and because of the inefficiency of multiple water/gas/etc. companies serving the same area. And until there is a Windows clone (like AMD is an Intel clone) that can run Windows software, Windows is also a natural monopoly. If Google become evil incarnate, I can assure you that the market will correct the problem by handing someone else the crown faster than the government can say "Congressional committee". Just ask how the folks at Overture are doing these days...
Governments do NOT have *any* mandate to regulate monopolies on a whim. Their mandate extends to natural monopolies and to cases of abuse, such as anti-competitive behavior. Until that can be shown, there is no basis whatsoever.
Also, geeks tend to lean towards libertarianism; please do not mistake libertarian for Republican.