HD's already have multiple heads - one for each platter. However, they can't all be used in parallel to get some sort of on-disk striping system because the heads need to individually fine-tune to the specific track they need to operate reliably.
Since there's only one head assembly they're mounted on, tuning one head means the other heads get out of whack and become useless while the other's operating.
This requirement for precision means a multi-headed HD like that would need multiple head assemblies. Open up your favourite HD and see if you can work out where to put it:)
In short -- it's not worth it. You introduce more compexity (== cost == less demand) and things to go wrong, when you could just buy another drive and stripe and probably still come out cheaper and more reliable than a single two headed drive.
It'll probably be faster, too, since you've then got two interfaces to squeeze data down.
Although increased density perhaps makes drives a little more prone to failure, I think a big factor is how people treat their drives and where they buy them from - something that's becoming increasingly varied.
If you buy cheapo "OEM" drives from some box stacker, chances are it'll be poorly packed, and/or handled badly before it reaches you. Manufacturers can't do much if the box shifters keep throwing boxes of drives about. Just because they're rated up to 300G+ doesn't mean you don't want to handle them like eggs.
Heat's another factor; modern drives run damn hot - you really want a fair bit of airflow around them, either from your normal case intake fans and convection, or dedicated active cooling. Just because it runs fine doesn't mean you're not cutting it's lifetime in half, or worse.
The warranty situation I think is more down to the price war that's occuring with low end drives rather than any real change in quality. You can still get higher end drives with full warranties, and in some cases purchase extended warranties for another $20 or so. The 97% of users who don't experience a drive failure are probably happy to keep their $20, while 90% of the remaining 3% will likely get a replacement from their retailer anyway. The rest of us can spend the extra on a quality drive:)
my superiors were concerned that if many connections were made to the central server simultaneously, there would be a noticable drop in performance.
Distributed.net have a proxy server you can run to avoid having squillions of connections being made to some external server. It makes it easy to produce stats for your participating clients too:)
<div class="entry">
<h1>Foo Bla Blerg</h1>
<p>Wimble <em>blergle</em> bloo.</p> </div>
Now, which do you think has more semantic meaning and will degrade better?:)
With CSS, both can easily be made to render identically, but the second non-DIV-and-SPAN-soup version degrades much better. Unfortunately a worrying number of people seem to think the former method is what CSS is all about -- the default Movable Type templates are a good example of this brain damaged view of HTML:)
The current site I'm designing for gets about 35,000 visitors a day, and it's going to be XHTML 1.1 (served as application/xhtml+xml to accepting clients, no less) with a full CSS layout (with the XHTML being semantically rich so it's not required; no DIV/SPAN soup), and hopefully level AAA on the Web Content Accessability Guidelines 1.0.
I do the same for tiny sites too; the latest being a site for a diving club.
I have noticed a trend towards larger sites redesigning for XHTML and CSS recently; what was the trend for personal sites seems now to be migrating up the hierachy to larger sites such as Wired and AllTheWeb. I don't expect this trend to reverse.
No. The password is only required if you want to use the web interface regularly enough that getting a cookie through email is impractical.
I extremely rarely, if ever, use or even bother looking at the web interfaces for any of my mailing lists. I don't want nor need passwords for them. My one exception is the password for my own Ecartis setup, and it doesn't pointlessly remind me of it every month.
You wouldn't want to have to wait for a confirmation e-mail to modify your settings on the webpage or to access private list archives.
Yes, I would. If I'm unsubscribing, it's a once only thing and I do not need a password; a couple of emails is perfectly sufficient. If I'm going on vacation, that's once or twice a year (well, decade in my case, but nm) and it's also perfectly sufficient.
Should I decide I'm going to be using authenticated sessions with a MLM enough to warrant getting a password, fine; Ecartis lets me do that. There's a reason I don't bother in all cases but that of my own Ecartis managed lists, though; MLM's are not high maintainence for most users and passwords are therefore an unnecessary irritant.
hardcoded-pixel-width tables instead of sites that gracefully adapt to any window width
Yes, these are often quite lame. I don't mind some of them, but I'd have to have a really excellent reason to do it myself. Like being paid to do it that way:)
microscopic fonts for main body text
Annoyingly rampant; and they're often set using px, meaning IE users can't resize them. I personally hate anything smaller than 12px for body text. Sites which set it in the body { } CSS rule and use offsets from that in other rulesets are slightly less lame, since I can at least override it easily.
pop-up ads
All forms of popups annoy me, including interactive ones launched from links. I can open my own new windows and do not like being forced to do so. Ever.
notices telling me to "Get a Better Browser" or change my resolution, etc., to whatever their clueless developer prefers
I especially hate ones on CSS-designed sites where they generally appear in blocks set to display: none; as if they need to appologise for not making a site look wonderful in an ancient browser.
Of course, if their site doesn't serialize properly and lacks the semantic markup to make it readable without CSS, they have a lot to appologise for:)
main site content or navigation that's nonfunctional without some feature not present or disableable in some browsers
Yeah, I just *love* it when pure flash sites just display an empty white page when I load them. It gives me a nice warning that it probably doesn't have much worth looking at.
any use of A HREF="#" as a link
Yes, showing a huge lack of understanding on the developer's part. javascript: links are just as bad; the HTML event model is there for a reason!
any use of ".htm" as the extension for HTML documents instead of the more proper ".html"
Personally I'd prefer a lot fewer extensions everywhere. Especially on CGI/PHP/JSP/CFM generated sites -- I don't care what scripting language your site uses, nor do I want your links to all break when you decide to change CMS or reorganise your scripts. URL's are an abstract resource namespace, not a command line to your filesystem.
sites that muck around with the link colors so as to make visited and unvisited links the same color
Other means of identifying them can work quite well, but I do dislike sites which remove the underline from normal links though. Without colour that's about the only way you can identify links.
The problem is they can be used to track you across websites, remember?
Then deny cookies from third parties. Even IE can do that.
You can even use IE's P3P support to check their privacy policy and allow them to set cookies if you agree to it.
Cookies are fine. Cookies are the only sensible method of tracking state across the web, be that simple user logins to web applications. The alternative is just as easily leaked URL-encoded session information, and you can't reject that automatically.
They also turn off CSS to make sure it degrades well, read the source to make sure it's not just a soup of DIVs or TABLEs and has some decent semantic content, make sure it doesn't use javascript: links, see if any links are not seperated by only whitespace, see if visual media is also provided in a text form, and check to see if they serve application/xhtml+xml to accepting clients.
What? Why is everyone looking at me funny?
Oh, right, I forgot the "then steal anything that looks good" step. Sorry:)
Can you turn off it's silly password authentication stuff and make it use email like every other MLM in existance?
That monthly subscription "reminder" is the second most braindead feature of any MLM I've seen - the first being some Win32 one which stripped Message-Id. If every list I was on sent them, once a month I'd get a flood of 51 "reminders" all containing a plaintext password.
One thing I hate is having to "log in with the plaintext password I store and mail you every month without fail to some random mailing list name to do anything because this MLM is too braindead to understand listname-requests, or even listname-(command)".
Whatever you use, make sure it has a clean email interface, and configure it to include rfc2369/rfc2919 List-(Subscribe|Unsubscribe|Post|Help|Owner|Id) headers so I can filter and automate control of it.
Ecartis is a great example of a MLM with support for both email and web-based manglement. Email is the standard double-opt-(in|out) stuff, with various other methods of authentication to make sending batched/automated commands easy for admins. Web emails you a "cookie" (effectively a temporary password), and lets you set up a (secure) password once logged in; if you forget your password, you just don't include it on login and get another cookie.
No monthly spam with one of your passwords going out for all to see to some random location in your filters (mine end up in lists/(test|news|announcements)), and an extensive but by no means required web interface, without the need for a monthly insecure irritating to filter spam.
is there any other legitimate reason for Joe User to have so much disk space?
For a start, generally you want to have plenty of free space around to limit fragmentation. Cut about 30% from usable capacity there: 75GB usable -> 52GB you'd want to use.
Now, let's install a few games:
UT2k3 is 2.4GB, more if you have some custom maps. Except UT2k3 also wants the CD; you don't want to constantly swap in originals, so you rip the play CD and mount in daemon tools. That's over 3GB for one game.
NOLF 2 is ~1.6GB, plus easily 50MB+ of savegames, so let's say 1.7GB, plus daemontooled CD, that's 2.4GB.
Ditto for Battlefield 1942, which also needs the CD: 0.9GB + 0.7GB.
That's 3 games, eating a grand total of 7.1GB, or nearly 15% of our available disk space Addons can easily push this higher pretty easily, and savegames soon pile up to sizes that make Word.doc's look lean. I have a lot more than 3 games installed.
Email: I recieve a tonne of it, and I keep all of it, too. This year I chalked up 1.3GB.
Windows: 1.8GB here. Oh, and another 1GB of swap.
Backups: I mirror my ~/ and various other dirs to my Windows machine, that's another 1-2GB of junk, easily.
Logs: I log a lot. IRC, SSH sessions, email, firewall hits, all sorts. If I want to keep a few years worth, I want to be able to, because, damnit, it might be useful! One day I *will* make a nice graph using rrdtool of [whatever I logged].
Music: I'll admit I don't own much, and the RIAA probably would be rather irriated at my collection, but what I do own, I rip; the CD's barely get taken out once, purely because my computer is my sound system, and OGG's are the most useful format for me. 50-100MB per CD, multiplied by however many CD's I might own. 100 CD's isn't uncommon; 5-10GB, assuming I use OGG and not FLAC or another lossless codec. 20GB+ if I go lossless.
Movies: Ditto for MP3's; although legitimate use is probably closer to "If I want to make my own edit of I want the space to do it in". 10-15GB, easy. Plus maybe I want to keep those 6GB VOB's on my HD so I don't have to hunt for the DVD's and risk damaging/exploding them:)
8 DVD's * 6GB = 48GB. Oops. A friend of mine owns over 150 DVD's, I'm sure he'd love a couple of TB to store them in rather than hunt around his shelf for them.
TV: Let's not forget TiVo and friends. Hands up who wants multi-TB HD's for their PVR?
Alternate OS's: When I want to try out RH 8 or FreeBSD-CURRENT, I want the disk space to try it out. 5GB (at least) for the spare partitions.
Cache: 3 browsers, each with 200MB+ cache dirs. 600MB of tiny files that probably bloat to 800MB easily. I might like to give squid half a gig or more.
Source code repositories: I have 1.2GB of tarballs and source direcories, most aren't even full CVS repositories.
Versioning: I dream of a time when my filesystem is one big version controled repository. I want to keep every modification I make to my HD, at least in certain directories. Multiply current requirements by about 100.
That's about 55GB there, and I've not even got onto applications or central storage for all my digital data, or filesystem version control, and my requirements are only going to get bigger while I'm allowed to purchase permanent licenses for data.
Conclusion: Relatively average users could quite happily make use of multiple TB's of quiet, reliable, backupable, rollbackable and relatively portable storage.
Now, which of these count for laptops might be questionable, but then, how many people have a laptop as their primary machine because their £2000 machine cost them their entire tech budget? How many laptops come with DVD's? Wouldn't you like to have all your data at your fingertips wherever you are?
If not, well, you're not geeky enough for SlashDot. Get out;)
In Opera I just hit F12 p to disable plugins. Not great if you actually use other plugins, but it's easy enough to enable when you need it; otherwise just remove or redirect the swf MIME type entries in whatever browser you're using.
Someone posted some CSS which should work in Gecko based clients and Opera (and probably others); just add it to your user stylesheet (Prefs -> Page Style -> My Style Sheet in Opera, userContent.css in your profile dir in Mozilla).
You can use user CSS to kill a lot of other web based spam too - e.g. my anti-banner.css nukes, you guessed it, banners. Opera still loads the banners with this, so it's a good choice if you want to support sites but don't want to see the spam:)
8 is "Can zoom any text, even that with fixed pixel sizes".
IE can't do this. Try it:
<html> <body> <p style="font-size: 8px;">Go on, just try to resize this in IE. Ah hahaha.</p> </body> </html>
Highly annoying, especially since weenies who like tiny font sizes usually specify them in pixels.
17. IE does this
"The cookie manager lets you view the cookies that have been set, their values and their expiry times."
It does? It has nice P3P support, don't recall anything like that though.
46. Is this a joke ?
"Can be installed quickly and without much fuss. It can generally be run off a network or CD as well."
Well, given how IE can't be installed (well, upgraded) without replacing core system files, where as Mozilla can just be extracted from a zip..
Now, I'll pick a few.
"Popup blocking": Provided in a number of replacement IE UI's such as MyIE.
"Can select from multiple stylesheets provided by page": But you can't save it; even going to another page on the same site with the same stylesheets looses the alternate stylesheet selection.
"View the syntax coloured source of a page, without having to view it in Notepad.": *shrug*, mine loads vim, which is rather better than Mozilla's View Source.
"You can select any search engine you wish, not just one that has been chosen for you.": You can change a lot of this using regedit; including stuff like "g foo" googling for foo.
"Can fill-in complete forms automatically": Um, IE has AutoComplete.
"Properly handles MIME types": Yup, IE's mimetype handling is a complete joke.
"Displays ABBR/ACRONYM titles in tooltips": IE supports ACRONYM. No ABBR though, *grumble*.
"You can make text blink. This list isn't subjective.": This is good. I've even used it once, and it saved me using an animgif. I used it to make a fake blinking cursor:)
"CSS position:fixed": IE breaks this completely, not even falling back to the previous value it was set to. Those responsible are going to hell.
"CSS2 selectors": Again, something IE developers are going to hell for, even if it gives us a way to hide CSS from it which it would otherwise break...
"Can use the finger protocol. This has been disabled in newer versions of Mozilla.": Aww. And I want dict:// support!
"Supports irc protocol": Barely, and if you use it you'll wish it didn't.
"Preferences are all stored in a single file (prefs.js) which one can easily edit to add custom settings which have no UI.": Uhm, right. Good luck working out which prefs.js is actually loaded for your profile. Ditto for the unsettable userContent.css - even IE lets you specify a path to a user stylesheet; hardcoded paths to one *suck*.
To me the interesting battle is to get enough users to use standards compliant browsers and not use old browsers such as Netscape 4 and IE 4 that web developers can finally just write according to web standards and know their websites can work for more than 99% of users.
99.2% of hits from browsers sufficient to totally move to CSS. The other 0.8% will probably get a site that works better, to be honest; many sites are already using CSS and more advanced JavaScript which makes NS4 and friends uncomfortable to use.
1.4GHz Athlon, 512MB SDR, 128MB Ti4200 with 500MHz memory clock.
I get about 20FPS in 640*480, with interesting parts happily going into jerk-o-vision (~10FPS). It takes an age to load, eats memory, and isn't very stable.
But why invent something *totally* different just because there are some slight language conflicts?
Yes, of course. Every language should use SGML or XML, because readability and redundancy are irrelevent in all cases, especially for simple languages with little data to encode.
Is there any particular reason you're not also asking why JavaScript isn't "HTML based"?
A total 180 does not make sense just because there are minor issues IMO
These "minor issues" with complexity, uglyness, redundancy, parsing rules, etc, are all the exact opposite of CSS's main requirements; to be simple and human readable and writable. I'm very glad the CSS WG does not share your opinion.
Your HTML example is probably more larger than it needs to be. I think you are possibly exaggerating. You could go 'color="red"' instead of Attribute tags, for example.
You're not going to save a significant amount of space by doing that. You could promote the attributes to tags, but then you're making forward compatible parsing difficult. You could make that selector tag into a simple bit of ASCII like CSS used, but then you have to start adding your own custom parsing routines, and it gets even more complex.
If you want any more detail, I suggest you contact the CSS Working Group, or ask on www-style, or something. I'm getting tired of justifying decisions made by other people half a decade ago to someone who's opinion I really should care less about.
Slashdot Mirror
Or mutt, which doesn't have such a large history of security holes, and which has had basic features like threading for years
Probably around the same time they support XHTML 2, since it kinda depends on it for any type of form.
:)
Maybe when IE/NS/Opera hit version 8, given browsers still need to catch up with CSS 2 (or rather, 2.1) and XHTML 1.*.
BTW, there need to be two interoperable implementations of the spec before it's accepted as a recommendation -- I wonder what they are
HD's already have multiple heads - one for each platter. However, they can't all be used in parallel to get some sort of on-disk striping system because the heads need to individually fine-tune to the specific track they need to operate reliably.
:)
Since there's only one head assembly they're mounted on, tuning one head means the other heads get out of whack and become useless while the other's operating.
This requirement for precision means a multi-headed HD like that would need multiple head assemblies. Open up your favourite HD and see if you can work out where to put it
In short -- it's not worth it. You introduce more compexity (== cost == less demand) and things to go wrong, when you could just buy another drive and stripe and probably still come out cheaper and more reliable than a single two headed drive.
It'll probably be faster, too, since you've then got two interfaces to squeeze data down.
Although increased density perhaps makes drives a little more prone to failure, I think a big factor is how people treat their drives and where they buy them from - something that's becoming increasingly varied.
:)
If you buy cheapo "OEM" drives from some box stacker, chances are it'll be poorly packed, and/or handled badly before it reaches you. Manufacturers can't do much if the box shifters keep throwing boxes of drives about. Just because they're rated up to 300G+ doesn't mean you don't want to handle them like eggs.
Heat's another factor; modern drives run damn hot - you really want a fair bit of airflow around them, either from your normal case intake fans and convection, or dedicated active cooling. Just because it runs fine doesn't mean you're not cutting it's lifetime in half, or worse.
The warranty situation I think is more down to the price war that's occuring with low end drives rather than any real change in quality. You can still get higher end drives with full warranties, and in some cases purchase extended warranties for another $20 or so. The 97% of users who don't experience a drive failure are probably happy to keep their $20, while 90% of the remaining 3% will likely get a replacement from their retailer anyway. The rest of us can spend the extra on a quality drive
Distributed.net have a proxy server you can run to avoid having squillions of connections being made to some external server. It makes it easy to produce stats for your participating clients too
Yes, used sensibly to denote sections, since HTML provides no better way to mark them up yet.
There's nothing wrong with using DIV and SPAN, it's just when that's all you have that things get questionable.
Compare:To:Now, which do you think has more semantic meaning and will degrade better?
With CSS, both can easily be made to render identically, but the second non-DIV-and-SPAN-soup version degrades much better. Unfortunately a worrying number of people seem to think the former method is what CSS is all about -- the default Movable Type templates are a good example of this brain damaged view of HTML
Yes, I do, all the time.
The current site I'm designing for gets about 35,000 visitors a day, and it's going to be XHTML 1.1 (served as application/xhtml+xml to accepting clients, no less) with a full CSS layout (with the XHTML being semantically rich so it's not required; no DIV/SPAN soup), and hopefully level AAA on the Web Content Accessability Guidelines 1.0.
I do the same for tiny sites too; the latest being a site for a diving club.
I have noticed a trend towards larger sites redesigning for XHTML and CSS recently; what was the trend for personal sites seems now to be migrating up the hierachy to larger sites such as Wired and AllTheWeb. I don't expect this trend to reverse.
Great, except XHTML is supposed to be served as application/xhtml+xml, which IE6 SP1 still wants to download rather than display.
I guess text/xml is one step closer, though.. assuming it works properly.
I know. Opera goes one step further - zoom scales *everything*, including images, tables, CSS measurements, etc.
Mozilla has a nice option to set a lower limit for font sizes too; Appearance -> Fonts -> Minimum Font Size.
I extremely rarely, if ever, use or even bother looking at the web interfaces for any of my mailing lists. I don't want nor need passwords for them. My one exception is the password for my own Ecartis setup, and it doesn't pointlessly remind me of it every month.
Yes, I would. If I'm unsubscribing, it's a once only thing and I do not need a password; a couple of emails is perfectly sufficient. If I'm going on vacation, that's once or twice a year (well, decade in my case, but nm) and it's also perfectly sufficient.
Should I decide I'm going to be using authenticated sessions with a MLM enough to warrant getting a password, fine; Ecartis lets me do that. There's a reason I don't bother in all cases but that of my own Ecartis managed lists, though; MLM's are not high maintainence for most users and passwords are therefore an unnecessary irritant.
Yes, but can you remove the need for a password entirely?
Yes, these are often quite lame. I don't mind some of them, but I'd have to have a really excellent reason to do it myself. Like being paid to do it that way
Annoyingly rampant; and they're often set using px, meaning IE users can't resize them. I personally hate anything smaller than 12px for body text. Sites which set it in the body { } CSS rule and use offsets from that in other rulesets are slightly less lame, since I can at least override it easily.
All forms of popups annoy me, including interactive ones launched from links. I can open my own new windows and do not like being forced to do so. Ever.
I especially hate ones on CSS-designed sites where they generally appear in blocks set to display: none; as if they need to appologise for not making a site look wonderful in an ancient browser.
Of course, if their site doesn't serialize properly and lacks the semantic markup to make it readable without CSS, they have a lot to appologise for
Yeah, I just *love* it when pure flash sites just display an empty white page when I load them. It gives me a nice warning that it probably doesn't have much worth looking at.
Yes, showing a huge lack of understanding on the developer's part. javascript: links are just as bad; the HTML event model is there for a reason!
Personally I'd prefer a lot fewer extensions everywhere. Especially on CGI/PHP/JSP/CFM generated sites -- I don't care what scripting language your site uses, nor do I want your links to all break when you decide to change CMS or reorganise your scripts. URL's are an abstract resource namespace, not a command line to your filesystem.
Other means of identifying them can work quite well, but I do dislike sites which remove the underline from normal links though. Without colour that's about the only way you can identify links.
Then deny cookies from third parties. Even IE can do that.
You can even use IE's P3P support to check their privacy policy and allow them to set cookies if you agree to it.
Cookies are fine. Cookies are the only sensible method of tracking state across the web, be that simple user logins to web applications. The alternative is just as easily leaked URL-encoded session information, and you can't reject that automatically.
Not quite.
:)
They also turn off CSS to make sure it degrades well, read the source to make sure it's not just a soup of DIVs or TABLEs and has some decent semantic content, make sure it doesn't use javascript: links, see if any links are not seperated by only whitespace, see if visual media is also provided in a text form, and check to see if they serve application/xhtml+xml to accepting clients.
What? Why is everyone looking at me funny?
Oh, right, I forgot the "then steal anything that looks good" step. Sorry
Can you turn off it's silly password authentication stuff and make it use email like every other MLM in existance?
That monthly subscription "reminder" is the second most braindead feature of any MLM I've seen - the first being some Win32 one which stripped Message-Id. If every list I was on sent them, once a month I'd get a flood of 51 "reminders" all containing a plaintext password.
One thing I hate is having to "log in with the plaintext password I store and mail you every month without fail to some random mailing list name to do anything because this MLM is too braindead to understand listname-requests, or even listname-(command)".
Whatever you use, make sure it has a clean email interface, and configure it to include rfc2369/rfc2919 List-(Subscribe|Unsubscribe|Post|Help|Owner|Id) headers so I can filter and automate control of it.
Ecartis is a great example of a MLM with support for both email and web-based manglement. Email is the standard double-opt-(in|out) stuff, with various other methods of authentication to make sending batched/automated commands easy for admins. Web emails you a "cookie" (effectively a temporary password), and lets you set up a (secure) password once logged in; if you forget your password, you just don't include it on login and get another cookie.
No monthly spam with one of your passwords going out for all to see to some random location in your filters (mine end up in lists/(test|news|announcements)), and an extensive but by no means required web interface, without the need for a monthly insecure irritating to filter spam.
You are right. Some of us are not catholic.
As an introverted, self-hating geek, I resent the implication that I'm Catholic.
No such list would be complete without Peter Hamilton's Nightsdawn, even if it does make Lord of the Rings look like a novella.
<Votes to have all those awful Jules Verne books nuked in favour of The Reality Dysfunction and Greg Bear's Queen of Angels>
For a start, generally you want to have plenty of free space around to limit fragmentation. Cut about 30% from usable capacity there: 75GB usable -> 52GB you'd want to use.
Now, let's install a few games:
UT2k3 is 2.4GB, more if you have some custom maps. Except UT2k3 also wants the CD; you don't want to constantly swap in originals, so you rip the play CD and mount in daemon tools. That's over 3GB for one game.
NOLF 2 is ~1.6GB, plus easily 50MB+ of savegames, so let's say 1.7GB, plus daemontooled CD, that's 2.4GB.
Ditto for Battlefield 1942, which also needs the CD: 0.9GB + 0.7GB.
That's 3 games, eating a grand total of 7.1GB, or nearly 15% of our available disk space Addons can easily push this higher pretty easily, and savegames soon pile up to sizes that make Word
Email: I recieve a tonne of it, and I keep all of it, too. This year I chalked up 1.3GB.
Windows: 1.8GB here. Oh, and another 1GB of swap.
Backups: I mirror my ~/ and various other dirs to my Windows machine, that's another 1-2GB of junk, easily.
Logs: I log a lot. IRC, SSH sessions, email, firewall hits, all sorts. If I want to keep a few years worth, I want to be able to, because, damnit, it might be useful! One day I *will* make a nice graph using rrdtool of [whatever I logged].
Music: I'll admit I don't own much, and the RIAA probably would be rather irriated at my collection, but what I do own, I rip; the CD's barely get taken out once, purely because my computer is my sound system, and OGG's are the most useful format for me. 50-100MB per CD, multiplied by however many CD's I might own. 100 CD's isn't uncommon; 5-10GB, assuming I use OGG and not FLAC or another lossless codec. 20GB+ if I go lossless.
Movies: Ditto for MP3's; although legitimate use is probably closer to "If I want to make my own edit of I want the space to do it in". 10-15GB, easy. Plus maybe I want to keep those 6GB VOB's on my HD so I don't have to hunt for the DVD's and risk damaging/exploding them
8 DVD's * 6GB = 48GB. Oops. A friend of mine owns over 150 DVD's, I'm sure he'd love a couple of TB to store them in rather than hunt around his shelf for them.
TV: Let's not forget TiVo and friends. Hands up who wants multi-TB HD's for their PVR?
Alternate OS's: When I want to try out RH 8 or FreeBSD-CURRENT, I want the disk space to try it out. 5GB (at least) for the spare partitions.
Cache: 3 browsers, each with 200MB+ cache dirs. 600MB of tiny files that probably bloat to 800MB easily. I might like to give squid half a gig or more.
Source code repositories: I have 1.2GB of tarballs and source direcories, most aren't even full CVS repositories.
Versioning: I dream of a time when my filesystem is one big version controled repository. I want to keep every modification I make to my HD, at least in certain directories. Multiply current requirements by about 100.
That's about 55GB there, and I've not even got onto applications or central storage for all my digital data, or filesystem version control, and my requirements are only going to get bigger while I'm allowed to purchase permanent licenses for data.
Conclusion: Relatively average users could quite happily make use of multiple TB's of quiet, reliable, backupable, rollbackable and relatively portable storage.
Now, which of these count for laptops might be questionable, but then, how many people have a laptop as their primary machine because their £2000 machine cost them their entire tech budget? How many laptops come with DVD's? Wouldn't you like to have all your data at your fingertips wherever you are?
If not, well, you're not geeky enough for SlashDot. Get out
In Opera I just hit F12 p to disable plugins. Not great if you actually use other plugins, but it's easy enough to enable when you need it; otherwise just remove or redirect the swf MIME type entries in whatever browser you're using.
:)
Someone posted some CSS which should work in Gecko based clients and Opera (and probably others); just add it to your user stylesheet (Prefs -> Page Style -> My Style Sheet in Opera, userContent.css in your profile dir in Mozilla).
You can use user CSS to kill a lot of other web based spam too - e.g. my anti-banner.css nukes, you guessed it, banners. Opera still loads the banners with this, so it's a good choice if you want to support sites but don't want to see the spam
8 is "Can zoom any text, even that with fixed pixel sizes".
IE can't do this. Try it:Highly annoying, especially since weenies who like tiny font sizes usually specify them in pixels.
"The cookie manager lets you view the cookies that have been set, their values and their expiry times."
It does? It has nice P3P support, don't recall anything like that though.
"Can be installed quickly and without much fuss. It can generally be run off a network or CD as well."
Well, given how IE can't be installed (well, upgraded) without replacing core system files, where as Mozilla can just be extracted from a zip..
Now, I'll pick a few.
"Popup blocking":
Provided in a number of replacement IE UI's such as MyIE.
"Can select from multiple stylesheets provided by page":
But you can't save it; even going to another page on the same site with the same stylesheets looses the alternate stylesheet selection.
"View the syntax coloured source of a page, without having to view it in Notepad.":
*shrug*, mine loads vim, which is rather better than Mozilla's View Source.
"You can select any search engine you wish, not just one that has been chosen for you.":
You can change a lot of this using regedit; including stuff like "g foo" googling for foo.
"Can fill-in complete forms automatically":
Um, IE has AutoComplete.
"Properly handles MIME types":
Yup, IE's mimetype handling is a complete joke.
"Displays ABBR/ACRONYM titles in tooltips":
IE supports ACRONYM. No ABBR though, *grumble*.
"You can make text blink. This list isn't subjective.":
This is good. I've even used it once, and it saved me using an animgif. I used it to make a fake blinking cursor
"CSS position:fixed":
IE breaks this completely, not even falling back to the previous value it was set to. Those responsible are going to hell.
"CSS2 selectors":
Again, something IE developers are going to hell for, even if it gives us a way to hide CSS from it which it would otherwise break...
"Can use the finger protocol. This has been disabled in newer versions of Mozilla.":
Aww. And I want dict:// support!
"Supports irc protocol":
Barely, and if you use it you'll wish it didn't.
"Preferences are all stored in a single file (prefs.js) which one can easily edit to add custom settings which have no UI.":
Uhm, right. Good luck working out which prefs.js is actually loaded for your profile. Ditto for the unsettable userContent.css - even IE lets you specify a path to a user stylesheet; hardcoded paths to one *suck*.
Maybe I'm just lucky:99.2% of hits from browsers sufficient to totally move to CSS. The other 0.8% will probably get a site that works better, to be honest; many sites are already using CSS and more advanced JavaScript which makes NS4 and friends uncomfortable to use.
1.4GHz Athlon, 512MB SDR, 128MB Ti4200 with 500MHz memory clock.
I get about 20FPS in 640*480, with interesting parts happily going into jerk-o-vision (~10FPS). It takes an age to load, eats memory, and isn't very stable.
And you propose to do this by turning everything into XML?
You're fired!
Yes, of course. Every language should use SGML or XML, because readability and redundancy are irrelevent in all cases, especially for simple languages with little data to encode.
Is there any particular reason you're not also asking why JavaScript isn't "HTML based"?
These "minor issues" with complexity, uglyness, redundancy, parsing rules, etc, are all the exact opposite of CSS's main requirements; to be simple and human readable and writable. I'm very glad the CSS WG does not share your opinion.
You're not going to save a significant amount of space by doing that. You could promote the attributes to tags, but then you're making forward compatible parsing difficult. You could make that selector tag into a simple bit of ASCII like CSS used, but then you have to start adding your own custom parsing routines, and it gets even more complex.
If you want any more detail, I suggest you contact the CSS Working Group, or ask on www-style, or something. I'm getting tired of justifying decisions made by other people half a decade ago to someone who's opinion I really should care less about.