Re:What is nice about Opera (4\beta for Linux)?
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
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· Score: 1
I suppose you're one of those free price purists (I have not truck with that)
Well, I suppose you could call it that. It's how I want to live my own life; I don't expect anyone else to live their lives according to my rules though:-)
I just find it odd that you even hecked out Opera if you were such a person.
I wanted to know how it compared to the free offerings. I think it's a mistake to hide from things that don't agree with your world view; maybe I wouldn't buy non-free software, but I should at least know how the free stuff measures up against it. An opinion makes more sense if it is an informed opinion.
if $129K is to pay for 800 licences, then the 6000 liceipnces which Virginia Beach owns cost $1 million. Multiply this by at least 1000 for the entire US, and you have easily enough money to write apps which do a better job of meeting the specific needs of municipal
institutions while maintaining user compatibility with MS Office. Unfortunately, that will never happen because municipal institutions will avoid co-ordinating with each other if it kills them.
[there are low numbers of BSD users so] BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim.
It doesn't work like that, even supposing your figures are correct. The thing BSD needs to "survive" (i.e. continue being updated) is not a sufficiently big user community; it's a sufficiently big developer community, measured by able-programmer-hours. Since Theo and a few others are highly competent and heavily dedicated, the BSDs have as active a developer community as they need.
things falling from the sky get more comments on here then a update to one of the most secure Operating Systems ever invented.
Just because people don't comment, it doesn't mean they're overlooking the article. Imagine "15,000,000 people are starving in North Korea" versus "10 things you hate about HTML". The latter is easier to chat about, though far less important. Falling satellites are more conversation-worthy than an ultra-secure OS.
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
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Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
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· Score: 1
This leads to the ridiculous situation that an old computer runs
slower and slower as new software is loaded on it, until you finally
have to buy a new one just to run at all.
I don't agree that this *always* happens, especially with free software. For example, Konqueror is the first graphical web browser since Netscape 3 which runs tolerably on my 486/66 with 24 MB ram. Ok, it *is* slower than Netscape 3, but it is also much better at rendering, it can do PNG, and Unicode etc..
What is nice about Opera (4\beta for Linux)?
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
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· Score: 3
This is not a troll, I'd genuinely like to know people's experiences. I have been comparing it to Galeon v0.8 and Konqueror 1.9.8 on Debian GNU/Linux on a 200 Mhz pentium with 32 MB ram.
speed. Opera seems to be slower than Galeon or Konqueror. On simple pages, or w3c-conformant pages, they're all tolerably fast. On complex pages, Opera seems to fall behind. After about half an hour of browsing, Opera starts churning the hard disk (presumably the swap partition, since this is with disk cache turned off). Neither Galeon 0.8 nor Konqueror suffer from this (although Galeon 0.7.6 did).
stability. When given lots of complex pages in succession, Opera seems slightly less likely to crash than Galeon 0.8, and slightly more likely to crash than Konqueror 1.9.8. This is based on the pages I have tried, YMMV.
w3c conformancy. Can't comment much on this; I've heard all three are pretty good. Certainly, all three are probably better than most of the web pages out there.
Internationalization. Opera is *terrible*. I have international fonts installed, but Opera doesn't appear to be able to render non-roman text! (Or maybe I just haven't worked out how to configure it). It replaces the Japanese, Greek and Korean on my page with blank spaces. The least I would expect is a question-mark! Galeon and Konqueror are both fine at this. (BTW Lynx (2.8.3) is really cool at this - give it a try! - it transliterates the Japanese and the Greek and certain Polish letters into letters which it can display).
If other people's experiences are anything like mine, I don't see how Opera 4 for Linux sells. (Ok, I wouldn't buy it anyway because it's non-free, I just wanted to know how it compared to Galeon and Konqueror; but I couldn't see any technical merit in it either).
Is there something which Opera is good at which I haven't noticed from the pages I read?
at least we have this document that was written 200+ years ago by people who were evidently a lot smarter and more honest than today's industry shills.
Yeah, there's a lot of good things in the US constitution about copyright. Unfortunately, the way copyright works in the US today is very far removed from that. US copyright law today is just as full of "rights" for publishers as is the Bern Convention.
It would be great to be able to look to international law as a means of stregthening the great national constitutions of the world. Unfortunately, though, it mostly ends up strengthening police states
Well, I don't think that's true - in fact, I think American (and British, French,...) military support of police states is often in contravention of quite sensible international laws.
and special interests.
Well, that's certainly true - but I would say it's usually true of national laws as well.
How do people get numbers on the installed base of Linux? Are they linux users just becuase the have a dual partition with Windows [...] I know lots of people who have installed Linux. That doesn't mean they are using it. It is more of a curosity.
Quite true, you would have to decide what a "Linux user" is, and how to do some clever statistical sampling. But on the other hand you say this:
[There are] 40 million Mac's still in use today.
Where does that figure come from at all? The number of Macs that have been sold recently? How do you know that 40 million Macs are "in use"?
the BSD license [...] is more free and allows for cooperation with industry. The GPL might have its advantages, but is not really the optimum for world of free and commercial/closed software.
I'm not so sure. The GPL is a good choice for a business who wants its app to become the standard (so being Free and Open-Source is good), but doesn't want other businesses to be able to make derivative apps and not share the enhancements (so being copylefted is neccessary).
Austrailian packets tracerouted through San Jose to get to New Zealand. Packets from London were going througn Boston to get to France (!!!) [...] So to answer your question, if California crumbles into the Pacific, I think that much of the rest of the world goes into the shitter with us.
Remember that these routes are just the most preferable routes at any one given time. It doesn't mean that they are the *only* routes. If San Jose died, ymight find Australian packets going via Singapore, Hong Kong, South Africa, then Norway to get to New Zealand. Just because the best route is geographically a long way, it doesn't mean it's the only route.
And by "match" what does she mean? *Exact* same color? [...] Mrs. M. should shut up.
I think it is a bit excessive to criticise a human guinea pig who is merely recounting the experiences she's had during her lifetime. If you want to say "The researcher who works with Mrs M should shut up" then that's different.
This "region coding" phenomenon does more than just supposedly prevent piracy...it also prevents small-time, legal distribution of DVDs (say promotional materials that we've developed here but want to show in presentations over there) between regions.
I hadn't realised that it was hard to avoid region coding when you are the person creating the DVD. Does some software not give you the option of making a "regionless" DVD?
Can the different types of BSD's be compared to the different distros of Linux?
Sort of - it's not a bad starting picture, anyway. The main practical difference is that different Linux distributions are usually binary compatible, but not the different BSD versions. For example, "Wordperfect for Red Hat Linux" will (probably) run on Debian, SuSE, Turbo etc.. However, Netscape for FreeBSD won't run on OpenBSD. I don't know that much about BSD though, so if someone wants to post a different viewpoint I'd be interested to read what they had to say.
I would imagine there is no compelling reason for most people to replace a stable Linux kernel with an unstable HURD kernel, if the Linux kernel already does what they want.
Maybe one day, after the Hurd is more integrated into an end user ready product it will gain some more popularity, but I doubt any more than some of the lesser known BSD's.
Well, in principle, a fully-finished Debian GNU/HURD distribution would have everything that Debian GNU/Linux does. The user would then have a choice of kernel to go at the bottom of their Debian system, and choosing HURD shouldn't stop them using any[*] software they could have used with Linux.
Can anyone give any reasons to switch the the HURD kernel other than those stated on the link?
Well, it's probably bad to run not-yet-released software if your aim is to get things done (as opposed to just hacking). When HURD is stable, there will be good reasons to write certain types of software on it, because its structure is fundamentally more flexible than UNIX (so you could have more fine-grained permissions, more user-space drivers etc).
Darwin is based on the same technology as the Hurd
Both Darwin and Hurd run on top of the Mach microkernel. But they're not the same thing. Darwin is UNIX implemented on a Microkernel (plus whatever extra Appley bits). HURD really isn't UNIX at all. It is a general system for running interacting "servers", plus some particular servers. The UNIX compatibility is given by some of those servers, but it's quite possible to write programs for HURD which would be difficult or impossible to port to UNIX (e.g. it is almost trivial to run "sub-HURDs": just start copies of all the servers and make them talk to each other).
I think their screwing around of Randall Schwartz cost them a lot of support in the Open Source community.
Hear, hear - they lost $200 of business from me for their unjustified criminal prosecution, which is more than the $0 it must have been worth to them. Ah well, if you do work in Oregon for the company which has bought Oregon, they will have far more power than justified.
Some uses of Napster are legal. Besides, using Napster to obtain unauthorised copies of music is not theft. The law does not consider copyright infringement to be theft. Theft is worse than copyright infringement - if I steal your CD, you don't have a CD any more, but if I copy your CD, nobody loses their CD.
Napster [...] has merely solidifed the opposition of a lot of artists to making their music available online.
It's done more than that. Not all musicians want the publishing companies to have a stranglehold.
You can argue that having stuff available on Napster is likely to encourage people to go out and buy the CD, but this is a fallacious argument
Fortunately, we don't have to wildly speculate; it's possible to do scientific, statistical studies. Until there is evidence backing up the claim that Napster is, on the balance of probability, decreasing anyone's sales, they should be presumed innocent by default.
theft is still theft
Right - and copyright infringement is not theft. Please do not mislead people into thinking that it is.
Typical bias. Hate to tell you this but monarchy != corrupt regime.
The original poster made the claim that "Tongans who want a democratic system tend to find themselves in jail". Now, I can't comment on the validity of this claim, but nowhere did the original poster claim that Monarchy => corrupt. The poster was making the more specific statement that Tonga is undemocratic, corrupt, and imprisons dissenters.
I'm pretty sure I still have to work with vague 'mod' tools configuration files. Same for the mouse.
Fair criticism. However, I installed Win 98 on a computer which had a separate graphics driver CD. It took 4 hours of guessing to get the driver to load. (The CD contained hundreds of drivers, and the one I needed was not the one stated in the documentation). At least with Xfree86, the documentation contained the correct answer.
The start menu is filled with crap I've never heard of.
If you use Debian, then the menu (of whatever window manager you choose) contains exactly the programs you chose to have installed.
In Windows, I click on "Windows Update..." and get system patches for bugs, security holes, etc.
Again speaking as a Debian user, my system automatically installs security fixes by itself (it dials up once a day to check for them).
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I wanted to know how it compared to the free offerings. I think it's a mistake to hide from things that don't agree with your world view; maybe I wouldn't buy non-free software, but I should at least know how the free stuff measures up against it. An opinion makes more sense if it is an informed opinion.
if $129K is to pay for 800 licences, then the 6000 liceipnces which Virginia Beach owns cost $1 million. Multiply this by at least 1000 for the entire US, and you have easily enough money to write apps which do a better job of meeting the specific needs of municipal
institutions while maintaining user compatibility with MS Office. Unfortunately, that will never happen because municipal institutions will avoid co-ordinating with each other if it kills them.
It doesn't work like that, even supposing your figures are correct. The thing BSD needs to "survive" (i.e. continue being updated) is not a sufficiently big user community; it's a sufficiently big developer community, measured by able-programmer-hours. Since Theo and a few others are highly competent and heavily dedicated, the BSDs have as active a developer community as they need.
Just because people don't comment, it doesn't mean they're overlooking the article. Imagine "15,000,000 people are starving in North Korea" versus "10 things you hate about HTML". The latter is easier to chat about, though far less important. Falling satellites are more conversation-worthy than an ultra-secure OS.
This is not a troll, I'd genuinely like to know people's experiences. I have been comparing it to Galeon v0.8 and Konqueror 1.9.8 on Debian GNU/Linux on a 200 Mhz pentium with 32 MB ram.
If other people's experiences are anything like mine, I don't see how Opera 4 for Linux sells. (Ok, I wouldn't buy it anyway because it's non-free, I just wanted to know how it compared to Galeon and Konqueror; but I couldn't see any technical merit in it either).
Is there something which Opera is good at which I haven't noticed from the pages I read?
Yeah, there's a lot of good things in the US constitution about copyright. Unfortunately, the way copyright works in the US today is very far removed from that. US copyright law today is just as full of "rights" for publishers as is the Bern Convention.
Well, I don't think that's true - in fact, I think American (and British, French,
Well, that's certainly true - but I would say it's usually true of national laws as well.
Where does that figure come from at all? The number of Macs that have been sold recently? How do you know that 40 million Macs are "in use"?
I'm not so sure. The GPL is a good choice for a business who wants its app to become the standard (so being Free and Open-Source is good), but doesn't want other businesses to be able to make derivative apps and not share the enhancements (so being copylefted is neccessary).
Remember that these routes are just the most preferable routes at any one given time. It doesn't mean that they are the *only* routes. If San Jose died, ymight find Australian packets going via Singapore, Hong Kong, South Africa, then Norway to get to New Zealand. Just because the best route is geographically a long way, it doesn't mean it's the only route.
I think it is a bit excessive to criticise a human guinea pig who is merely recounting the experiences she's had during her lifetime. If you want to say "The researcher who works with Mrs M should shut up" then that's different.
I hadn't realised that it was hard to avoid region coding when you are the person creating the DVD. Does some software not give you the option of making a "regionless" DVD?
Cool, I've learned something today then. Is it "emulated" support, or do FreeBSD binaries run as fast as native binaries?
Sort of - it's not a bad starting picture, anyway. The main practical difference is that different Linux distributions are usually binary compatible, but not the different BSD versions. For example, "Wordperfect for Red Hat Linux" will (probably) run on Debian, SuSE, Turbo etc.. However, Netscape for FreeBSD won't run on OpenBSD. I don't know that much about BSD though, so if someone wants to post a different viewpoint I'd be interested to read what they had to say.
I would imagine there is no compelling reason for most people to replace a stable Linux kernel with an unstable HURD kernel, if the Linux kernel already does what they want.
Well, in principle, a fully-finished Debian GNU/HURD distribution would have everything that Debian GNU/Linux does. The user would then have a choice of kernel to go at the bottom of their Debian system, and choosing HURD shouldn't stop them using any[*] software they could have used with Linux.
[*]At least, any Open-source software.
Well, it's probably bad to run not-yet-released software if your aim is to get things done (as opposed to just hacking). When HURD is stable, there will be good reasons to write certain types of software on it, because its structure is fundamentally more flexible than UNIX (so you could have more fine-grained permissions, more user-space drivers etc).
Both Darwin and Hurd run on top of the Mach microkernel. But they're not the same thing. Darwin is UNIX implemented on a Microkernel (plus whatever extra Appley bits). HURD really isn't UNIX at all. It is a general system for running interacting "servers", plus some particular servers. The UNIX compatibility is given by some of those servers, but it's quite possible to write programs for HURD which would be difficult or impossible to port to UNIX (e.g. it is almost trivial to run "sub-HURDs": just start copies of all the servers and make them talk to each other).
Hear, hear - they lost $200 of business from me for their unjustified criminal prosecution, which is more than the $0 it must have been worth to them. Ah well, if you do work in Oregon for the company which has bought Oregon, they will have far more power than justified.
Some uses of Napster are legal. Besides, using Napster to obtain unauthorised copies of music is not theft. The law does not consider copyright infringement to be theft. Theft is worse than copyright infringement - if I steal your CD, you don't have a CD any more, but if I copy your CD, nobody loses their CD.
It's done more than that. Not all musicians want the publishing companies to have a stranglehold.
Fortunately, we don't have to wildly speculate; it's possible to do scientific, statistical studies. Until there is evidence backing up the claim that Napster is, on the balance of probability, decreasing anyone's sales, they should be presumed innocent by default.
Right - and copyright infringement is not theft. Please do not mislead people into thinking that it is.
But I'm not white, and I agree with everything he said, so your argument falls down.
The original poster made the claim that "Tongans who want a democratic system tend to find themselves in jail". Now, I can't comment on the validity of this claim, but nowhere did the original poster claim that Monarchy => corrupt. The poster was making the more specific statement that Tonga is undemocratic, corrupt, and imprisons dissenters.
If you use Debian, then the menu (of whatever window manager you choose) contains exactly the programs you chose to have installed.
Again speaking as a Debian user, my system automatically installs security fixes by itself (it dials up once a day to check for them).