Ah, the old "or they'll lose their licence" line. OK, well that works in theory, but not always in practice.
Especially late at night, more than a few taxi cab drivers are reluctant to go to far flung places from where they are very unlikely to pick up another fare that will want to take them back to a more customer-rich environment. It sucks, but that's the reality of the situation.
The world of software development is a fast-paced one. Try the current version, like I suggested, and then try and tell me that it's not a better package than Firefox. Until you do that you're just comparing a shiny, fresh, ripe apple with your memory of a less than ripe apple that you ate a few years ago.
In fact, arguably the nearest of the properties on a UK Monopoly board to Wimbledon is Old Kent Road*, which, ironically, is the first and hence cheapest property on the board.
If I were to make an educated guess, I'd say that either Euston Road, Picadilly or Trafalgar Square would win this competition, as they are major traffic arteries that cabs are always visible on.
(*Both Wimbledon and the Old Kend Road are south of the River Thames. There maybe a property that is a little closer to Wimbledon, but anyone who's ever lived in London would know that trying to get a taxi cab to take you "south of the river" can sometimes be harder than drawing blood from a stone.)
It's not the word "adware" that's being called into question here, it's the use of the word "stuffed".
The implication of your poorly chosen word is that Opera is somehow bogged down by ads, whereas the opposite is true: the ads that do appear in the ad-supported free version of the browser are small, in both form-factor and download size, and unobtrusive.
Your reply of "adware is adware" is equally laughable. Linux has bugs in it but would you dismiss it with a nonchalant and pithy comment such as "bugged software is bugged software"? I don't think so.
As other people have pointed out, Firefox development is well funded: AOL have poored millions of money into it and at least one individual has donated a six figure sum too. Firefox developers are paid for their efforts, is it so wrong that the Opera developers should want to earn a living too?
I don't know anyone personally who drives a Rolls Royce or a Ferrari, that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
Contrary to what you might think, there are plenty of people who'll pay for something even when a free alternative that isn't that much inferior is available: bottled water vs tap water, for example.
To most Opera users, Opera vs a free browser falls under that description: to them, what they are getting for their money makes Opera well worth the cost of the license, even though Firefox, etc are available at no cost.
Also, you forget that there is an Google Ads-supported free version of Opera, so it's not like you actually have to pay to use Opera if you don't want to.
Just because there are more popular free browsers that doesn't mean that Opera has "lost", any more than it means Rolls Royce or Ferrari has "lost".
Finally, it's a fair guess that, like many of the people who've been quick to dismiss Opera, you've never tried Opera at all. Well, install Opera 8 and try it for a few weeks. Enjoy the way you can instantly go back and forwards between pages, the excellent Notes feature, mouse gestures, sessions and lots of other features that are either lacking or poorly executed in Firefox (yes, even after you've added lots of plugins). Enjoy the fact that all this just works, and just works from a single install out-of-the-box, and that you don't have to worry about this plugin not working well with that plugin.
Try Opera seriously, and put even 10 percent of the effort you've put into configuring your Firefox install into it (even if that's 10 percent of nothing) and I'll guarantee you that you won't be talking about how Opera "might" be a really nice browser but praising it for being a superb one.
Consider it a Pepsi challenge, just one with Opera and Firefox instead of Pepsi and Coke. You won't be disappointed.
You're British, right? Would you joke about the Omagh bombing with someone from that town, Hillsborough with a die-hard Liverpool fan, the Paddington rail crash with someone who was on that train, or someone from Dumblane about the horror that occured there?
I'm guessing you wouldn't. And I'm guessing you wouldn't dream of doing it with anyone while the events were hitting the headlines. Joking about potential life and death events as they are occuring, as the poster to whom I originally replied had done, is tasteless.
I agree, given proper time for reflection, joking about tragedy can be a good thing - part of the healing process, even - but there are always certain subjects that are taboo unless you know your audience intimately and/or they are prepared for it. Try joking about the Holocaust with someone who's Jewish, for example, and see what kind of reaction you get.
Laughter is good medicine but laughing whilst people could be dying is callous to say the least.
Well, the Asian tsunami that killed more than half a million people wasn't even six months ago. To use your example, how tasteless would it have been to make light of planes hitting buildings six months after September 11th, 2001?
I don't think that the person who's comment I replied to is American (as in USA) but rather Brazilian, given the.br TLD of his website. Nevertheless, that doesn't negate the fact that joking about this topic is in poor taste, given recent events.
Yeah, it always good to joke about events that can and do kill hundreds of thousands. It's even better if you can do it as soon as the story is published because some kindred spirit with mod points might even spend one on your comment, thereby giving you your 15 minutes of fame.
I hope that you're as keen to repeat your hilarous gag when death and destruction on the scale of last year's Asian tsunami hits closer to where you live.
Sorry, but I hardly think that this is the sort of thing that you make light of, especially as we've all had a recent reminder of just how deadly offshore (and even onshore) earthquakes can be.
Sorry, but you're being a bit of a idiot here. I said "As far as email is concerned, labels are an Opera innovation...", so don't pull the "labels are an Opera innovation..." bit out of context and try to use it against me to suggest that I was saying that labels generally were Opera's gift to the world.
What I said, which was pretty clear to everyone apart from you it seems, was that labelling in emails was something that Opera had way before Gmail did. Only you seem incapable of grasping what that means. Sorry, but from where I'm standing you're either being very obtuse or trolling.
Sigh. Go read the Opera website. Opera is heavily opposed to software patents and in favour of competing on merit rather than through the courts.
If they weren't - if instead they were patent-happy and litigous in nature - then Firefox would have been stripped of several of its features, as a great many of them were borrowed from Opera.
And, I didn't say Opera invented labelling, only that they introduced labelling rather than foldering to email way before Gmail did. Had they wanted to, Opera could have easily patented labelling in emails, especially with the way that the USPTO gives out patents to everyone who so much as looks in its direction.
I have my music ordered in nested folders, structured by artist, album then track - eg, I:\MP3s\Coldplay\A Rush Of Blood To The Head\The Scientist.mp3 - which is a far better way of organising my music than relying on any one application.
With my system, if I want to get an album, or even all the albums by one artist, then I can do so easily. If I want to find any track, well, it takes seconds, and I don't have to wait for any application to load or perform any searches to do it.
Relying on iTunes to sort your music is a bad idea. For one thing, not everyone who loves iTunes will use it 100 percent of the time because it's not compatible with all MP3 players - just as iPod users are locked into iTunes, I'm locked into using Real's equivalent to get music onto my Palm Tungsten E. And for another, I found that iTunes wasn't really good at handling compilations, although that might just have been my personal experience.
I'm an avid and early Gmail user but I think it's only fair to point out that Gmail borrowed the folderless labelling system that it uses from Opera's M2 mail client.
As far as email is concerned, labels are an Opera innovation (unless, of course, someone can provide an earlier example), not a Gmail one.
Uh, when you run your own business you'll find there are these things called "bills", which have to be paid if you want to stay in business and not go bust. To help pay the bills you need to have "paying customers": ie, people who buy your products and/or services and pay more for them than it costs you to provide them.
If your paying customers take up more of your products and/or services than it costs you to provide them then they become a liability, especially if what they consume isn't a limitless quantity, such as table space in a coffee shop, or parking spaces in a car park.
In the case of coffee shops clearly it's dangerous to be in a situation where you coffee shop is full of people who take up the table space that two or more people would normally take and sit there for hours at a time and buy nothing more than one or two cups of latte when your business model needs your coffee shop to be full of people who come in with friends, have something to drink and maybe to eat and then move onto somewhere else after 20 minutes or so.
Now, you may call people who just want to be able to sell enough cups of coffee and muffins to stay afloat "evil capitalists" but I call them realistic and pragmatic. I'd rather they were realistic and pragmatic and still in business than foolish and idealistic and out of business, because that would only leave the rest of us with nowhere but the Starbucks of the world to frequent.
AReally, I think you overestimate the affluence and disposable incomes of most working class Americans on minimum wage. That someone can be busting a gut doing a full-time job and barely have more to show for it than a couple of hundred dollars worth of stuff really isn't anything to be sticking your chest out with patriotic pride.
It's a shortcoming of capitalism that those do most of the donkey work get the fewest rewards, and not a positive feature, as you seem to suggest.
Have you read Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy of sequels?
If you got Zahn and a decent screenwriter to write the movie adaptations, and gave their work to a decent director, such as Irvin Kershner who did a good job at the helm of The Empire Strikes Back, then you'd have movie dynamite.
The Thrawn trilogy books have it all. Dynamite story, dynamite action, dynamite drama, dynamite twists - the lot. If anything, perhaps there's too much good material there for it to be trimmed down to three two-hour movies, so maybe they'd be better suited to a TV mini-series but to suggest that there isn't any film or TV potential left in the Star Wars is criminal.
Heck, even a bounty hunters film that used material from KW Jeter's Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy would be cool if handled with the appropriate care.
Somewhere along the line you miss out a salient point. If Joe Average breaks the law in the US three times then his ass is in jail for good. If Average Inc does it, there's no similar repercussion.
If companies were held to the same standards as individuals - and if their board members were actually personally responsible for making sure that they met those standards - then we'd have a much better, much more honest and ethical system of capitalism.
If by law they have to read and vote on each law at least once very 20 years, then the bad laws will be thrown out so they don't have to read them.
(Bold emphasis added by me.)
Ah, but first you'd have to get the US Congress to pass legislation that made it compulsory for Congressmen to read the all laws that they are voting on, and that's never going to happen. Just as turkeys don't vote for Christmas, Congressmen won't vote to give themselves a more demanding workload.
Most Congressmen will openly admit to not reading the bills that they are passing, which means that bills like the USA PATRIOT Act get passed even though they have sections in them that many Congressmen later confess to finding abhorrent.
(The whole system of attaching riders that have nothing to do with the original bills doesn't help either. At best it's dubious, and at worse it's immoral.)
I've no doubt that a few Congressmen are hard-working and conscientious, but the majority of them seem to have no interest in doing anything other than not rocking the boat whilst they put maximum effort into making sure that they maximise their campaign funds and get re-elected.
OK, all human life then. But the politicians who'll decide upon whether to do this or not are hardly going to be looking to cockroaches for their votes, are they?
No, but at the same time I think the best way the West can stop China (or anyone else) from putting nuclear arsenals or other weapons in space is to develop a better long-term, mutually-beneficial partnership with them in space rather than just putting up whatever we like there and just keeping our fingers crossed that nobody else does the same.
If you want to make sure that the other guy doesn't have a gun pointing at your head it's smarter to make sure that he's horrified by the very thought of putting a gun to your head rather than making sure that you've got a gun pointing at his head first.
No, I'm not saying that if the US hadn't come up with the bomb that someone else wouldn't have, only that the US having the bomb lead directly to the USSR's zeal to develop it too, which lead to China doing the same, etc, etc.
There might well be an idiot in this discussion but if you can't join the dots between one country doing something then one of its rivals playing catch-up then, well, I'm not the one who should be having the idiot tag hung around his neck.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, the old "or they'll lose their licence" line. OK, well that works in theory, but not always in practice.
Especially late at night, more than a few taxi cab drivers are reluctant to go to far flung places from where they are very unlikely to pick up another fare that will want to take them back to a more customer-rich environment. It sucks, but that's the reality of the situation.
I have tried Opera, though not recently...
The world of software development is a fast-paced one. Try the current version, like I suggested, and then try and tell me that it's not a better package than Firefox. Until you do that you're just comparing a shiny, fresh, ripe apple with your memory of a less than ripe apple that you ate a few years ago.
In fact, arguably the nearest of the properties on a UK Monopoly board to Wimbledon is Old Kent Road*, which, ironically, is the first and hence cheapest property on the board.
If I were to make an educated guess, I'd say that either Euston Road, Picadilly or Trafalgar Square would win this competition, as they are major traffic arteries that cabs are always visible on.
(*Both Wimbledon and the Old Kend Road are south of the River Thames. There maybe a property that is a little closer to Wimbledon, but anyone who's ever lived in London would know that trying to get a taxi cab to take you "south of the river" can sometimes be harder than drawing blood from a stone.)
It's not the word "adware" that's being called into question here, it's the use of the word "stuffed".
The implication of your poorly chosen word is that Opera is somehow bogged down by ads, whereas the opposite is true: the ads that do appear in the ad-supported free version of the browser are small, in both form-factor and download size, and unobtrusive.
Your reply of "adware is adware" is equally laughable. Linux has bugs in it but would you dismiss it with a nonchalant and pithy comment such as "bugged software is bugged software"? I don't think so.
As other people have pointed out, Firefox development is well funded: AOL have poored millions of money into it and at least one individual has donated a six figure sum too. Firefox developers are paid for their efforts, is it so wrong that the Opera developers should want to earn a living too?
I don't know anyone personally who drives a Rolls Royce or a Ferrari, that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
Contrary to what you might think, there are plenty of people who'll pay for something even when a free alternative that isn't that much inferior is available: bottled water vs tap water, for example.
To most Opera users, Opera vs a free browser falls under that description: to them, what they are getting for their money makes Opera well worth the cost of the license, even though Firefox, etc are available at no cost.
Also, you forget that there is an Google Ads-supported free version of Opera, so it's not like you actually have to pay to use Opera if you don't want to.
Just because there are more popular free browsers that doesn't mean that Opera has "lost", any more than it means Rolls Royce or Ferrari has "lost".
Finally, it's a fair guess that, like many of the people who've been quick to dismiss Opera, you've never tried Opera at all. Well, install Opera 8 and try it for a few weeks. Enjoy the way you can instantly go back and forwards between pages, the excellent Notes feature, mouse gestures, sessions and lots of other features that are either lacking or poorly executed in Firefox (yes, even after you've added lots of plugins). Enjoy the fact that all this just works, and just works from a single install out-of-the-box, and that you don't have to worry about this plugin not working well with that plugin.
Try Opera seriously, and put even 10 percent of the effort you've put into configuring your Firefox install into it (even if that's 10 percent of nothing) and I'll guarantee you that you won't be talking about how Opera "might" be a really nice browser but praising it for being a superb one.
Consider it a Pepsi challenge, just one with Opera and Firefox instead of Pepsi and Coke. You won't be disappointed.
or using the free version that is stuffed with adware.
Ah, nothing like FUD. A few non-graphical Google Ads that are barely noticable hardly counts as "stuffed with adware".
I can't tell you how gusperred I'll be when that's true.
You're British, right? Would you joke about the Omagh bombing with someone from that town, Hillsborough with a die-hard Liverpool fan, the Paddington rail crash with someone who was on that train, or someone from Dumblane about the horror that occured there?
I'm guessing you wouldn't. And I'm guessing you wouldn't dream of doing it with anyone while the events were hitting the headlines. Joking about potential life and death events as they are occuring, as the poster to whom I originally replied had done, is tasteless.
I agree, given proper time for reflection, joking about tragedy can be a good thing - part of the healing process, even - but there are always certain subjects that are taboo unless you know your audience intimately and/or they are prepared for it. Try joking about the Holocaust with someone who's Jewish, for example, and see what kind of reaction you get.
Laughter is good medicine but laughing whilst people could be dying is callous to say the least.
My point was that whether or not it is tasteless isn't even up for discussion.
Well, the Asian tsunami that killed more than half a million people wasn't even six months ago. To use your example, how tasteless would it have been to make light of planes hitting buildings six months after September 11th, 2001?
I don't think that the person who's comment I replied to is American (as in USA) but rather Brazilian, given the .br TLD of his website. Nevertheless, that doesn't negate the fact that joking about this topic is in poor taste, given recent events.
Yeah, it always good to joke about events that can and do kill hundreds of thousands. It's even better if you can do it as soon as the story is published because some kindred spirit with mod points might even spend one on your comment, thereby giving you your 15 minutes of fame.
I hope that you're as keen to repeat your hilarous gag when death and destruction on the scale of last year's Asian tsunami hits closer to where you live.
Sorry, but I hardly think that this is the sort of thing that you make light of, especially as we've all had a recent reminder of just how deadly offshore (and even onshore) earthquakes can be.
Sorry, but you're being a bit of a idiot here. I said "As far as email is concerned, labels are an Opera innovation...", so don't pull the "labels are an Opera innovation..." bit out of context and try to use it against me to suggest that I was saying that labels generally were Opera's gift to the world.
What I said, which was pretty clear to everyone apart from you it seems, was that labelling in emails was something that Opera had way before Gmail did. Only you seem incapable of grasping what that means. Sorry, but from where I'm standing you're either being very obtuse or trolling.
Sigh. Go read the Opera website. Opera is heavily opposed to software patents and in favour of competing on merit rather than through the courts.
If they weren't - if instead they were patent-happy and litigous in nature - then Firefox would have been stripped of several of its features, as a great many of them were borrowed from Opera.
And, I didn't say Opera invented labelling, only that they introduced labelling rather than foldering to email way before Gmail did. Had they wanted to, Opera could have easily patented labelling in emails, especially with the way that the USPTO gives out patents to everyone who so much as looks in its direction.
All clear now?
That's complete rubbish.
I have my music ordered in nested folders, structured by artist, album then track - eg, I:\MP3s\Coldplay\A Rush Of Blood To The Head\The Scientist.mp3 - which is a far better way of organising my music than relying on any one application.
With my system, if I want to get an album, or even all the albums by one artist, then I can do so easily. If I want to find any track, well, it takes seconds, and I don't have to wait for any application to load or perform any searches to do it.
Relying on iTunes to sort your music is a bad idea. For one thing, not everyone who loves iTunes will use it 100 percent of the time because it's not compatible with all MP3 players - just as iPod users are locked into iTunes, I'm locked into using Real's equivalent to get music onto my Palm Tungsten E. And for another, I found that iTunes wasn't really good at handling compilations, although that might just have been my personal experience.
I'm an avid and early Gmail user but I think it's only fair to point out that Gmail borrowed the folderless labelling system that it uses from Opera's M2 mail client.
As far as email is concerned, labels are an Opera innovation (unless, of course, someone can provide an earlier example), not a Gmail one.
Uh, when you run your own business you'll find there are these things called "bills", which have to be paid if you want to stay in business and not go bust. To help pay the bills you need to have "paying customers": ie, people who buy your products and/or services and pay more for them than it costs you to provide them.
If your paying customers take up more of your products and/or services than it costs you to provide them then they become a liability, especially if what they consume isn't a limitless quantity, such as table space in a coffee shop, or parking spaces in a car park.
In the case of coffee shops clearly it's dangerous to be in a situation where you coffee shop is full of people who take up the table space that two or more people would normally take and sit there for hours at a time and buy nothing more than one or two cups of latte when your business model needs your coffee shop to be full of people who come in with friends, have something to drink and maybe to eat and then move onto somewhere else after 20 minutes or so.
Now, you may call people who just want to be able to sell enough cups of coffee and muffins to stay afloat "evil capitalists" but I call them realistic and pragmatic. I'd rather they were realistic and pragmatic and still in business than foolish and idealistic and out of business, because that would only leave the rest of us with nowhere but the Starbucks of the world to frequent.
AReally, I think you overestimate the affluence and disposable incomes of most working class Americans on minimum wage. That someone can be busting a gut doing a full-time job and barely have more to show for it than a couple of hundred dollars worth of stuff really isn't anything to be sticking your chest out with patriotic pride.
It's a shortcoming of capitalism that those do most of the donkey work get the fewest rewards, and not a positive feature, as you seem to suggest.
Have you read Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy of sequels?
If you got Zahn and a decent screenwriter to write the movie adaptations, and gave their work to a decent director, such as Irvin Kershner who did a good job at the helm of The Empire Strikes Back, then you'd have movie dynamite.
The Thrawn trilogy books have it all. Dynamite story, dynamite action, dynamite drama, dynamite twists - the lot. If anything, perhaps there's too much good material there for it to be trimmed down to three two-hour movies, so maybe they'd be better suited to a TV mini-series but to suggest that there isn't any film or TV potential left in the Star Wars is criminal.
Heck, even a bounty hunters film that used material from KW Jeter's Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy would be cool if handled with the appropriate care.
Somewhere along the line you miss out a salient point. If Joe Average breaks the law in the US three times then his ass is in jail for good. If Average Inc does it, there's no similar repercussion.
If companies were held to the same standards as individuals - and if their board members were actually personally responsible for making sure that they met those standards - then we'd have a much better, much more honest and ethical system of capitalism.
If by law they have to read and vote on each law at least once very 20 years, then the bad laws will be thrown out so they don't have to read them.
(Bold emphasis added by me.)
Ah, but first you'd have to get the US Congress to pass legislation that made it compulsory for Congressmen to read the all laws that they are voting on, and that's never going to happen. Just as turkeys don't vote for Christmas, Congressmen won't vote to give themselves a more demanding workload.
Most Congressmen will openly admit to not reading the bills that they are passing, which means that bills like the USA PATRIOT Act get passed even though they have sections in them that many Congressmen later confess to finding abhorrent.
(The whole system of attaching riders that have nothing to do with the original bills doesn't help either. At best it's dubious, and at worse it's immoral.)
I've no doubt that a few Congressmen are hard-working and conscientious, but the majority of them seem to have no interest in doing anything other than not rocking the boat whilst they put maximum effort into making sure that they maximise their campaign funds and get re-elected.
OK, all human life then. But the politicians who'll decide upon whether to do this or not are hardly going to be looking to cockroaches for their votes, are they?
That's not a "hack", that's a "workaround". Or in this case, perhaps that should be a "not workaround".
No, but at the same time I think the best way the West can stop China (or anyone else) from putting nuclear arsenals or other weapons in space is to develop a better long-term, mutually-beneficial partnership with them in space rather than just putting up whatever we like there and just keeping our fingers crossed that nobody else does the same.
If you want to make sure that the other guy doesn't have a gun pointing at your head it's smarter to make sure that he's horrified by the very thought of putting a gun to your head rather than making sure that you've got a gun pointing at his head first.
No, I'm not saying that if the US hadn't come up with the bomb that someone else wouldn't have, only that the US having the bomb lead directly to the USSR's zeal to develop it too, which lead to China doing the same, etc, etc.
There might well be an idiot in this discussion but if you can't join the dots between one country doing something then one of its rivals playing catch-up then, well, I'm not the one who should be having the idiot tag hung around his neck.