1GB, which was gobs for the P3 era, and is overkill for what it does (it runs Win98 and does mostly online stuff and image editing). But RAM was cheap that week and it needed low-profile sticks, which were hard to find. So I maxed it out when I had the chance.
And frankly, if rendering web pages needs a bleeding edge machine, something is seriously wrong with what we're doing to the web.
Google maps whyness: The non-JS view is MUCH faster, and if you want a *printable* map image, is much better. Yeah, you have to move it around the old fashioned way, but the image is much clearer and there's less clutter around it. AND it's faster. (And I hate their new "improved" zoom method in the full version.. makes it much harder to zero in on a feature.) So when I know I'll need to print the output, or if I'm in a hurry and just want the damned street map -- I use the old primitive no-JS view.
Yeah, I keep meaning to look into noscript... realtor.com is so fucked up now that it takes 30 seconds just for the bad script to stall out. Unusable as it is now.:(
It's in how the browser handles not-loading images.
Netscape leaves everything exactly the same, except there is a "hole" where the image would be -- with the ALT text visible. You can right-click and have your way with the image (load a single image, save it, etc.), and if it's an imagelink or imagemap, it still works. You don't have to wait for images to download, yet still have all their other uses, with no effect on the layout or functionality.
But when image loading is disabled in Moz/FF, it "disappears" the image, along with the blank placeholder space, the alt text, and any assocuiated imagelinks/imagemaps, and there is nothing left to rightclick OR leftclick. That's not useful, sometimes it's nonfunctional, and it's very irritating.
And we had not one but TWO record lows here in the SoCal desert over the past week. There's still "global warming" all over the local mountains. And this winter we had significant snow down on the flats for the first time in over 20 years.
Local short-term blips, you say? Well, that's the point. The GW theorists are looking at blips, when the climate megacycles are tens of thousands of years long. I'm far more afraid of GW proponents "doing something about it" and fucking things up beyond repair, than I am of GW itself, even if it proves true (which is still debateable).
It also bothers me that even if we COULD "lock" the climate in its present state, what would we be doing, really? What if the next natural swing was an ice age, which is therefore that much deeper and colder than it would have been if we hadn't fucked with the climate in the first place?
Doesn't strike me as a wise idea, no indeed. Better to invest in bilge pumps.
What I want to hear is how human-caused global warming is affecting other planets in the solar system, which I understand are ALSO undergoing their own global warming cycles.
Unless they're inhabited by newly-industrial-age aliens and we've failed to notice??
Heh, I remembered that there used to be an add-on that killed CSS and such, but it hadn't occured to me to look under "view, styles" in the current version! (when I must use a newer browser, I use Seamonkey; I detest Firefox!) Thanks for the heads-up. This will henceforth see lots of use.:)
[goes off, tries it] Well, it does work here on Slashdot, and unlike the rest of Moz/SM/FF, it actually RESPECTS my system colours -- tho it still takes about 10x as long to render the exact same page as in NS3!! And it totally falls over on Google maps (almost locked up). So I guess it's not completely stripping styles, but perhaps re-rendering 'em after the fact. Unfortunately, the entire FF/Moz family is afflicted with that sort of poor programming Zen, as Michael Abrash would say.:(
I think that's what the low-bandwidth option is supposed to do, but in a "normal modern browser" display, it still takes for freakin' ever to load and render -- so clearly something else is needed, at least for people who may not have the option of an old browser that strips CSS.
Tho come to think of it, wasn't there an add-on for the Moz family that did nothing but strip CSS? whatever happened to that?
Nope, I really do still use NS3 as my primary browser, for any site that degrades gracefully and isn't afflicted with JS menus. (I also have image loading turned off, an old habit from the mid-1990s and very slow dialup, but even on broadband I've discovered that I really prefer NOT to be bothered with images most of the time. NS3 handles this well; Mozilla does not.)
NS3 renders CSS sites pretty much as plain text. This makes many sites FAR easier to read, as all the "busy" shit goes away (and probably because it's easier for the developer than tables, CSS sites *do* tend to have a LOT more "busy" clutter than other sites). When CSS is done right, so it degrades gracefully, there IS no "layout", but the text, menus, and links remain in catalog order, so it's just as usable, sometimes moreso.
So the fact is -- if you're doing your CSS right, I'll see a perfectly functional plaintext page, and everything will work exactly as I expect it to. No need to worry about browser quirks.:) And I already know it's going to look like plain text, so I'm not offended by it being "ugly":)
When CSS is fucked up, the content can wind up scrambled, but that seems to come from trying to combine tables with CSS (or from combining CSS with JS to restrict browser behaviour, or for menus). When a site uses just one or the other, everything is copasetic.
As to your beautiful layouts -- they may be lovely as an art form, but if I just want to read stuff I don't CARE what it looks like, so long as it's readable for aging eyes. I have stuff set to black text on grey background because that's restful to my eyes. Glare white with black text is painful after a while, even with my monitor dialed way down. So your *gracefully-degrading* CSS is appreciated, because it DOES render as my desired black-on-grey.
Elinks? Another descendant of Lynx? this one? http://elinks.or.cz/ Thanks, I'll have to try it, next time I have a non-Windows system up (I don't see a build for Windows, and I gather it's not available as a binary??) The screenshots remind me of some of the old DOS-based graphical browsers, which were a good start but never really got to where they were useful to me. This looks more mature.
Absolutely. The cute bells and whistles are sometimes fun, and occasionally useful, but they are NOT why I come here. I come here for the news and the conversation. It's rather like a coffeehouse or neighbourhood bar -- you go there to relax. You don't want to be forced to dress up in a power suit just to have a beer with your friends.
My internet machine is a P3 (albeit with gobs of RAM). It struggles with the full display, even in "low bandwidth" mode (on broadband). It takes 20-30 seconds for any page (even "small" ones) to download and render in Mozilla.
Aside from the fact that the whole bloody look is hard on my aging eyes (with no way to get it to be "restfully readable"), this is one reason I still use antique Netscape 3 here -- it doesn't do CSS or JS, so all I see is plain text, rendered almost instantly.
If the site's "improvements" ever get to where I can't use NS3 to read and post, I'll have to give up Slashdot -- it simply won't be worth the time or the eyestrain if I have to read it in "normal" mode.
Yep, there is that. And it doesn't really matter who the nanny is, be it gov't or corporate or religious, or as some SF novels have it, advanced aliens. In days of yore, even the lowliest serfs were expected to have SOME ability to fend for themselves, even if they were obligated to a master.
The foundation point is that it selected toward permanent children and against self-sufficient maturity. You may enjoy my other rant about that, also in this thread.:)
Not the gene pool as a whole for the species, no. That takes a lot more than local pressure. But the gene pool for the most "civilized" areas has changed just within my 5.4 decade lifetime, and not for the better.
"Nine stone weaklings with knobboly knees" and social misfits (generally some form of juvenile schizophrenia, ie. failure to mature past childhood -- most readily recognised by being either "leftwing liberal wackos" (and more rarely, extreme religious nuts, left or right) and/or with a belief in some form of "magic science" (eg. homeopathy) DESPITE being intelligent and well-educated) used to be rare everywhere, as at least the males tended to be socially unsuccessful and didn't reproduce effectively; now, in some parts of the very civilized world they are a significant minority and growing rapidly. I'd say the social effects have already reached critical mass in the U.S., and is well past critical mass in some other countries that are taking the plunge into new-era socialism.
One of the side effects of this "unnatural selection" is the growth of the socialist nanny state (which in turn encouraged the growth of the permanent-juvenile population sector), because permanent juveniles believe in "Mommy save me!" and "Mommy make it better" -- which is fundamentally what laws like the DMCA do: put responsibility for "making a living" into the hands of the state, rather than of the individual (here "represented" by the **AA cartel, which acts like a whiney ill-mannered child that wants ALL the marbles, or it'll take its own marbles and go home).
An AC says, "It's not the stupid fucks that mess things up long-term."
Well, that's probably technically correct, since many of the aforementioned stupid fucks are actually very intelligent people, but unable to see beyond their own narrow view, which they then impose on everyone, whether it's a good fit or not.
Yep... we could argue the date, but that's the ballpark and the basis. I would further tie it to the Industrial Revolution, and the broad changes it made in social dynamics, which let these unnaturally-selective new thoughts become widespread, rather than being eyed askanse as nutcases.
Well, yes, that's what I was talking about -- when you turn natural selection on its ear, eventually all those losers you kept alive (inverse natural selection and unnatural population growth) come back to bite your species, and then normal natural selection does its job again... possibly catastrophically.
I noticed a later post coughed up Google's own stats, which didn't look very good for the "DMCA takedowns are always legit" crowd, being something like half bogus.
We used to kill off the stupid fucks, or let them do themselves in with their own stupidity. But once we became civilized we started coddling stupid fucks, so they thrived against all natural odds and eventually overran us, and consequently the world is now being run by stupid fucks.
My understanding is that the NK military is so large (numerically) because joining the army is the ONLY way to be sure you'll get at least one meal per day.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes a person feel downright retro, don't it? :)
I've never caught it using more than 450mb, so I guess the rest is there mostly for looks :)
1GB, which was gobs for the P3 era, and is overkill for what it does (it runs Win98 and does mostly online stuff and image editing). But RAM was cheap that week and it needed low-profile sticks, which were hard to find. So I maxed it out when I had the chance.
And frankly, if rendering web pages needs a bleeding edge machine, something is seriously wrong with what we're doing to the web.
Google maps whyness: The non-JS view is MUCH faster, and if you want a *printable* map image, is much better. Yeah, you have to move it around the old fashioned way, but the image is much clearer and there's less clutter around it. AND it's faster. (And I hate their new "improved" zoom method in the full version.. makes it much harder to zero in on a feature.) So when I know I'll need to print the output, or if I'm in a hurry and just want the damned street map -- I use the old primitive no-JS view.
Yeah, I keep meaning to look into noscript... realtor.com is so fucked up now that it takes 30 seconds just for the bad script to stall out. Unusable as it is now. :(
Thanks, I hadn't heard of that one -- sounds like something to look into. I use PrefBar but there are a few tweaks it doesn't do.
It's in how the browser handles not-loading images.
Netscape leaves everything exactly the same, except there is a "hole" where the image would be -- with the ALT text visible. You can right-click and have your way with the image (load a single image, save it, etc.), and if it's an imagelink or imagemap, it still works. You don't have to wait for images to download, yet still have all their other uses, with no effect on the layout or functionality.
But when image loading is disabled in Moz/FF, it "disappears" the image, along with the blank placeholder space, the alt text, and any assocuiated imagelinks/imagemaps, and there is nothing left to rightclick OR leftclick. That's not useful, sometimes it's nonfunctional, and it's very irritating.
And we had not one but TWO record lows here in the SoCal desert over the past week. There's still "global warming" all over the local mountains. And this winter we had significant snow down on the flats for the first time in over 20 years.
Local short-term blips, you say? Well, that's the point. The GW theorists are looking at blips, when the climate megacycles are tens of thousands of years long. I'm far more afraid of GW proponents "doing something about it" and fucking things up beyond repair, than I am of GW itself, even if it proves true (which is still debateable).
So, you're equating Al Gore with research scientists? As I recall, his degree is in journalism...
It also bothers me that even if we COULD "lock" the climate in its present state, what would we be doing, really? What if the next natural swing was an ice age, which is therefore that much deeper and colder than it would have been if we hadn't fucked with the climate in the first place?
Doesn't strike me as a wise idea, no indeed. Better to invest in bilge pumps.
What I want to hear is how human-caused global warming is affecting other planets in the solar system, which I understand are ALSO undergoing their own global warming cycles.
Unless they're inhabited by newly-industrial-age aliens and we've failed to notice??
Kinda reminds a person of the concept of "Debtors Prison", don't it??
Heh, I remembered that there used to be an add-on that killed CSS and such, but it hadn't occured to me to look under "view, styles" in the current version! (when I must use a newer browser, I use Seamonkey; I detest Firefox!) Thanks for the heads-up. This will henceforth see lots of use. :)
[goes off, tries it] Well, it does work here on Slashdot, and unlike the rest of Moz/SM/FF, it actually RESPECTS my system colours -- tho it still takes about 10x as long to render the exact same page as in NS3!! And it totally falls over on Google maps (almost locked up). So I guess it's not completely stripping styles, but perhaps re-rendering 'em after the fact. Unfortunately, the entire FF/Moz family is afflicted with that sort of poor programming Zen, as Michael Abrash would say. :(
I think that's what the low-bandwidth option is supposed to do, but in a "normal modern browser" display, it still takes for freakin' ever to load and render -- so clearly something else is needed, at least for people who may not have the option of an old browser that strips CSS.
Tho come to think of it, wasn't there an add-on for the Moz family that did nothing but strip CSS? whatever happened to that?
Nope, I really do still use NS3 as my primary browser, for any site that degrades gracefully and isn't afflicted with JS menus. (I also have image loading turned off, an old habit from the mid-1990s and very slow dialup, but even on broadband I've discovered that I really prefer NOT to be bothered with images most of the time. NS3 handles this well; Mozilla does not.)
NS3 renders CSS sites pretty much as plain text. This makes many sites FAR easier to read, as all the "busy" shit goes away (and probably because it's easier for the developer than tables, CSS sites *do* tend to have a LOT more "busy" clutter than other sites). When CSS is done right, so it degrades gracefully, there IS no "layout", but the text, menus, and links remain in catalog order, so it's just as usable, sometimes moreso.
So the fact is -- if you're doing your CSS right, I'll see a perfectly functional plaintext page, and everything will work exactly as I expect it to. No need to worry about browser quirks. :) And I already know it's going to look like plain text, so I'm not offended by it being "ugly" :)
When CSS is fucked up, the content can wind up scrambled, but that seems to come from trying to combine tables with CSS (or from combining CSS with JS to restrict browser behaviour, or for menus). When a site uses just one or the other, everything is copasetic.
As to your beautiful layouts -- they may be lovely as an art form, but if I just want to read stuff I don't CARE what it looks like, so long as it's readable for aging eyes. I have stuff set to black text on grey background because that's restful to my eyes. Glare white with black text is painful after a while, even with my monitor dialed way down. So your *gracefully-degrading* CSS is appreciated, because it DOES render as my desired black-on-grey.
Elinks? Another descendant of Lynx? this one? http://elinks.or.cz/ Thanks, I'll have to try it, next time I have a non-Windows system up (I don't see a build for Windows, and I gather it's not available as a binary??) The screenshots remind me of some of the old DOS-based graphical browsers, which were a good start but never really got to where they were useful to me. This looks more mature.
Absolutely. The cute bells and whistles are sometimes fun, and occasionally useful, but they are NOT why I come here. I come here for the news and the conversation. It's rather like a coffeehouse or neighbourhood bar -- you go there to relax. You don't want to be forced to dress up in a power suit just to have a beer with your friends.
My internet machine is a P3 (albeit with gobs of RAM). It struggles with the full display, even in "low bandwidth" mode (on broadband). It takes 20-30 seconds for any page (even "small" ones) to download and render in Mozilla.
Aside from the fact that the whole bloody look is hard on my aging eyes (with no way to get it to be "restfully readable"), this is one reason I still use antique Netscape 3 here -- it doesn't do CSS or JS, so all I see is plain text, rendered almost instantly.
If the site's "improvements" ever get to where I can't use NS3 to read and post, I'll have to give up Slashdot -- it simply won't be worth the time or the eyestrain if I have to read it in "normal" mode.
Yep, there is that. And it doesn't really matter who the nanny is, be it gov't or corporate or religious, or as some SF novels have it, advanced aliens. In days of yore, even the lowliest serfs were expected to have SOME ability to fend for themselves, even if they were obligated to a master.
The foundation point is that it selected toward permanent children and against self-sufficient maturity. You may enjoy my other rant about that, also in this thread. :)
Not the gene pool as a whole for the species, no. That takes a lot more than local pressure. But the gene pool for the most "civilized" areas has changed just within my 5.4 decade lifetime, and not for the better.
"Nine stone weaklings with knobboly knees" and social misfits (generally some form of juvenile schizophrenia, ie. failure to mature past childhood -- most readily recognised by being either "leftwing liberal wackos" (and more rarely, extreme religious nuts, left or right) and/or with a belief in some form of "magic science" (eg. homeopathy) DESPITE being intelligent and well-educated) used to be rare everywhere, as at least the males tended to be socially unsuccessful and didn't reproduce effectively; now, in some parts of the very civilized world they are a significant minority and growing rapidly. I'd say the social effects have already reached critical mass in the U.S., and is well past critical mass in some other countries that are taking the plunge into new-era socialism.
One of the side effects of this "unnatural selection" is the growth of the socialist nanny state (which in turn encouraged the growth of the permanent-juvenile population sector), because permanent juveniles believe in "Mommy save me!" and "Mommy make it better" -- which is fundamentally what laws like the DMCA do: put responsibility for "making a living" into the hands of the state, rather than of the individual (here "represented" by the **AA cartel, which acts like a whiney ill-mannered child that wants ALL the marbles, or it'll take its own marbles and go home).
Ha, and you thought we were off-topic ;)
An AC says, "It's not the stupid fucks that mess things up long-term."
Well, that's probably technically correct, since many of the aforementioned stupid fucks are actually very intelligent people, but unable to see beyond their own narrow view, which they then impose on everyone, whether it's a good fit or not.
Which kinda describes the DMCA viewpoint, eh??
Yep... we could argue the date, but that's the ballpark and the basis. I would further tie it to the Industrial Revolution, and the broad changes it made in social dynamics, which let these unnaturally-selective new thoughts become widespread, rather than being eyed askanse as nutcases.
Well, yes, that's what I was talking about -- when you turn natural selection on its ear, eventually all those losers you kept alive (inverse natural selection and unnatural population growth) come back to bite your species, and then normal natural selection does its job again... possibly catastrophically.
I noticed a later post coughed up Google's own stats, which didn't look very good for the "DMCA takedowns are always legit" crowd, being something like half bogus.
I meant NK's glorious leader, but any of the above might qualify ;)
We used to kill off the stupid fucks, or let them do themselves in with their own stupidity. But once we became civilized we started coddling stupid fucks, so they thrived against all natural odds and eventually overran us, and consequently the world is now being run by stupid fucks.
Inverse natural selection at work. :/
Well then, what's needed is a database of DMCA notices, so we can see what proportion are real, stretched, or bogus, as the case may be.
My understanding is that the NK military is so large (numerically) because joining the army is the ONLY way to be sure you'll get at least one meal per day.