Which will be the easier transition: Photoshop 7 to Photoshop CS3, or GIMP to Photoshop CS3?
Presupposing they'll want to switch to photoshop.
It's a high school class, not a college class. If they go do multimedia at college they'll learn photoshop anyway. Better teach them something they can use at home.
My suggestions: - Paint.net (best free photo editing program) - Inkscape (best free vector graphics program) - NVu (it's buggy, but it's not bad for a web editor)
The reason Comcast is doing this is because the shared node topology of Cable can't handle all of the connection requests. Similar to a bunch of Windows 95 boxes running NETBUI on a large non-switched network, bittorrent causes a a ton of contention. The result are packet storms which end up taking everyone out.
There are less dickish ways of doing this.
Basically they need to deliver what they promise when you subscribe. If they promise 100+GB a month, at high speeds, then that's what they need to deliver. If their network isn't designed to deliver that, then promise something you CAN deliver.
The ISP's in my country all make clear promises that are met. A basic internet subscription will get you in between 10 and 20 GB of monthly data volume. If you exceed that, your connection is throttled at the modem level to speeds only fast enough for basic mail and web browsing. If you want more, you pay more.
Privacy: trusting the employees of a web application is no different from trusting the employees of a desktop application. What you need is to purchase from companies with clear privacy management policies, not pretend like somehow you can avoid the issue entirely by doing anything less than not having internet access at all.
Power: irrelevant. PC's have been fast enough for desktop apps since the early 90's. Word 2 was as useful a word processor for average people as word 2007. A web application can be as fast as it needs to be.
Security: same deal was with privacy, only that the risk of exploits is lower when it's the vendor that's updating your system for you. Most people don't correctly keep up with updates in their applications (even if they do in the OS), and most desktop applications have abysmal security precautions (worse than web apps).
Yeah that's my big issue. The only working (or at least theoretically working) open source calendar servers are not calendar servers, they're "groupware" servers. My email server works fine, thanks. So does my LDAP server.
That's the crux of the issue: you need the integrated solution. Your identity in the central address directory has to match your identity in your mail client which has to match your identity in the calendar. Your mail server has to have the same concept of identity as your calendar server has. This means they must both link into your ldap server.
Using my outlook at work I can: - Propose a meeting to someone from the ldap directory (active directory is essentially ldap). - Book a room reservation right from inside the meeting request window (custom outlook extension that we developed) - Have the other person able to confirm or counter-propose that meeting request while both of you are off-line. - Have the other person able to inspect and possibly even modify the room reservation's information right from inside outlook. - Have the resulting meeting show up in public calendars for consultation by anyone in the company.
I admit I don't know much about the open-source offerings out there, but I do know this: you can't build a usable system of that sort without pulling together the components into a single groupware suite.
Back in the early 90s usenet was "safe" because everyone knew that it got expired after a week or two. We all used our real names and email addresses too. Then someone found some old backup tapes 10 years later and handed them over to Google....
This is an interesting side-effect of the recording nature of internet conversations. It's not that people somehow have become more rotten because of the internet, it's just that a rotten remark used to be carried only by the wind, and now it's carried by hard drives around the world. I expect that in a decade or two new social rules will evolve to deal with this, where it will be considered inappropriate to take certain classes of forum comments into account when weighing a person's character.
I get the sense that many Europeans don't really grok the scale out here, or more specifically the population density (or lack thereof). The US is something like 2.5x the size of the entire EU, while the EU has like 1.5x the population of the US.
The population density argument is false. In the major metropolitan areas you have very comparable population densities.
Like another poster points out, suburbia as a concept is based on cheap personal transportation. In Europe personal transportation has never been as cheap as in the US, and therefore there is less suburbia. This cost is especially notable when measured relative to the cost of public transportation (and the quality of that transportation). Public transportation in the US, from what I've seen of it, is expensive and sub-par. Another factor that plays a role in my opinion is lack of inner city investment. If you allow the inner city to impoverish, then this becomes a self-sustaining effect as anyone who can afford it flees the inner city. By contrast, I'm in the planning stages of buying an inner city home, even though I work on the outskirts of the city, and it would be cheaper to buy a home near my place of work.
You know, for general web browsing I don't find the extensions that useful. I used to be a heavy extension user, but after a while I figured out I didn't really use all those extensions often enough to be worth it.
For web app development however, I agree that firefox is the absolute king of browsers because of the extensions. These are the dev extensions I can't do without: - Firebug (duh) - Remove cookies for site - HTML Validator
There are a lot of extensions for IE as well, but they're much harder to find out about. I've recently been toying with DebugBar + Companion.JS on IE, and they're pretty useful. No comparison to firebug, that's for sure, but sufficient for me to not be constantly aggravated at the general uselessness of IE.
Fortunately not all Americans are as such, and those few will remain competitive, by working their asses off, just as it should be, not by being born with the national silver spoon in their mouths.
So, the way "it should be" according to you is that everyone has to work their asses off just to be able to make an honest living? Enjoy that life, I know I won't. There's nothing wrong with wanting time to enjoy life, time to learn to play an instrument, to play soccer with your kids, and time to watch a good movie with a friend and not have to worry about a project's deadline.
In the west we've had the luxury of choice when it comes to how we spend our time. The challenge is to bring this choice to everyone all over the world, not to give up this choice. There is nothing wrong with wanting the choice to spend time away from work.
Its not a linux port. They simply packaged Cedega with EVE. I wish people would stop praising them for that...its not a native client.
The question is: does it matter? If it runs just fine (as well as on windows), and it integrates with the OS (launch menus, hardware recognition,...), does it matter that it's not a "native" version?
If Microsoft had a shred of intellect in it's massive evil encrusted soul it would realize embracing ECMA4 and an open web is nothing but good for everyone, including MS.
How exactly is an open web good for MS? I see no business case here whereby MS wins. The only business case that makes sense is to try to extend the microsoft/office cash cow's life until they manage to gain footholds in new markets.
Ofcourse, I do agree it is good for just about everyone else, which is why it is inevitable. We're not talking about "if", we're talking about "when".
Too bad though, because Leopard looks impressive, but I have a nice monitor, several extra disks etc. and I'm not downgrading my hardware.
All currently sold macs accept external screens, and can use that screen as a primary monitor. Also, all macs accept external disks, because all macs have at least a USB port, and most (all?) have a firewire port. My mini has an external second drive as well, and it's faster than the internal drive (hooked up via firewire), so performance is not an argument either.
If you're willing to spend in excess of $2000 on a machine just to play games a bit smoother, then you're simply not who apple is targeting. If you are willing to spend that kind of money, either money is not an object, or an extraordinary amount of your time is spent gaming, in which case you won't mind the time and effort to build a custom gaming rig, which will always be cheaper.
Vista uses a different technique of RAM Virtualization and using features of the AGP/PCI/e BUS so that it can do 'post effects' with the composer, and maintain a tear free interface without the performance and RAM penalty that OS X suffers from with the Quartz composer.
That sounds really interesting and really good news, so I googled around a bit, and I hear a different story from google.
"GDI is no longer hardware-accelerated, but instead rendered to system memory using the CPU. That rendering is later composed on a 3D surface in order to be shown on the desktop. The graphics hardware video driver is no longer involved in GDI rendering, which means that mixing GDI and accelerated 3D rendering in the same window is likely to produce corruption like stale or blanked 3D rendering, trails, etc." (from the opengl.org website)
So, GDI apps are no longer accelerated, they use more memory because they're double-buffered to system ram, and they can no longer be combined with in-window hardware accelerated OpenGL. Now, I'm sure WPF is really nice and doesn't have these problems, but let's face it, the majority of windows apps are GDI based and will remain so for years to come.
There's more to keeping your company successful than just profits.
Nonsense. There are tons of companies that care only about profits and keep doing exceedingly well. Walmart, microsoft, most banks, most oil companies, most drug companies. Corporations have figured out that if you behave like an ass but are cheaper, people will still buy from you.
Okay, it'll take until 2010 to finish the station then NASA will use it only for five years before pulling out. With all due respect NASA, are you fucking nuts?
It makes perfect sense. NASA is a vessel used by congress to shuttle federal money back into the states in the form of design and assembly projects. The ISS is only interesting in the sense that it is still being designed/built. Once it is done, there won't be any money to give to the states, so it will have outlived its useful purpose.
This is why they're already making plans to return to the moon. It's a nice useless project that they can spend decades designing and assembling, which nobody will object to on the grounds that it is good for "prestige".
The way it is set up,that is an AT&T for life phone, not a AT&T for 2 years phone.
It's the deliberateness that's striking. The european situation is most enlightening. Apple is going to launch only in those countries that allow bundling the subscription with the phone. In my country, belgium, they're not legally allowed to bundle with the cell service, so they're simply not launching at all.
Conclusion: apple is deliberately handicapping a product in ways that makes it very user-unfriendly in order to make higher short-term profits (revenue-sharing deal). The early 90's apple has returned, and if history repeats itself (they way it's going, it will), this will lead to apple falling of its pedestal (again) as the it industry's sun child.
Luckily their desktops are still (mostly) unaffected, but if they start doing this B.S. there too, I'm switching back to windows.
Today, FF has morphed in to something which can't be used, with plugins, for more than a couple days max without needing to be reset.
You say that, and you compare it to IE. The only environment where I know people keep a firefox process open for days is on the mac, which doesn't run IE anymore (and btw, safari 2 leaks like a sieve too in my experience). Yes, I have to relaunch ff on my mac every few days. But on windows every time I close my last window, the browser shuts down and all memory is reclaimed. So, on platforms that are not mac, and for "normal" use patterns (i.e. don't leave a browser window with sites open for days), this is a non-issue.
XUL is inherently single-threaded and JavaScript based. Try out any XUL application out there and you'll see how you get the same poor performance, speed and resource usage as with Firefox (try Miro Player and Joost)....
Actually I'm pretty sure they're in denial as to the cause of their problems. Announcing they're working on fixing "memory leaks" just supports their ability to continue their delusion.
They're not in denial. They're working on tamarin, a replacement/upgrade of their javascript engine based on the same engine that's in flash 9 / actionscript 3.
Tamarin will run javascript 2, which will to do javascript what the move from actionscript 2 to 3 did for flash/flex. In short: it will make non-toy applications easily done, instead of just marginally feasible. They plan to migrate the firefox UI and extensions to javascript 2, which should negate the performance issues. Only problem: it won't be ready for FF3.
However, if a member of a law enforcement branch of the government says "this is legal" and it's plausible, I might answer differently.
Now imagina you have a staff of hundreds of lawyers at your disposal. Would you say "hey, let's not ask the lawyers if this is legal, and let's just blindly assume it is"?
AT&T has every tool to know the exact legality of their actions. "We didn't know" is not a valid defense.
As for leaning towards good programming practices, my suggestion is to start by taking PHP off your server, learn Python (or Perl if you're feeling feisty) and write something that at least has a chance of being reasonably structured. Keeping in mind I'm a huge fan of Python.
You can do any OO design in PHP5 just as easily as in Python. PHP is less constrained. It allows people to use bad designs because this allows hobbyists who haven't learned correct design practices to build things. However, even though PHP allows you to build bad designs, it doesn't require you. It allows you to do everything by the book.
The best programming practice for web applications architecture is to serve your target market. If the target market want glitz that requires flash, and doesn't care who that cuts out, that's what you deliver. The goal of the architecture is not to instill your own sense of right and wrong onto the user, it is to enable the user to do what they want to do with high performance.
While a free replacement drive might lessen the blow somewhat--as geeky as it might sound--losing a hard drive with gigabytes of content you really care about is a gut-wrenching experience. Everything from my high school days (homework, projects, work, programming, games, music... everything) was gone in one fail swoop.
With external hard drive prices these days, you have zero excuses for not having a backup.
I keep everything that must be kept in a separate folder, and I drag that to my external backup drive every once in a while. I lost my primary drive just a few weeks ago, and was back up and running with all my data in a matter of hours.
For extra bonus points, buy two external drives and keep one of them off-site (in your car or something).
All this seems like a suspicious false deduction to me. I don't think IE on Mac got abandoned for them being "evil", but because Safari 1) came to existance and 2) started getting regularly updated by Apple, to put up a fight they just didn't bother to win. An example where Apple hasn't done this is with Microsoft Office. And lo and behold, Microsoft still produces Office for Mac. Office for Mac actually often go so far as to be superior to the Windows version.
1) Apple started on safari because microsoft stopped developing mac ie, not the other way around. Admittedly, microsoft didn't officially kill Mac IE until safari was out there, but it was effectively dead years before that point. 2) Mac IE was not a profitable product, Mac Office is a highly profitable product. Microsoft may do a lot of things, but killing highly profitable products is not one of them. 3) Apple sells a direct competitor to mac office called iwork. You've got pages (word), numbers (excel) and keynote (powerpoint). 4) The old mac office was cripple-ware. Entourage is not outlook, and as a result companies that base themselves on exchange/outlook often could not consider macs. 5) The new mac office is worse cripple-ware. They have dropped support for VBA scripting. This means that enterprises will have to standardize on win office for all their office automation needs, or dual-develop them in VBA and applescript (quite unlikely). As long as apple is not a viable competitor in the corporate space, MS's is not threatened in any way.
I understand that you may actually have good intentions now, but history shows that in every such case the good intentions became the road to Hell. I don't want your good intentions trumping my choices, my life. I want you to leave me out of them.
People generally agree on this: government should have the intention of improving self-perceived well-being for as many people as possible as much as possible. Where this dichotomy between socialist and liberalist is created is on how government best approaches this issue.
You basically have two models: A. Government tries to maximize personal freedom so people can choose a way of life that makes them happy, even if this means that bad choices or fate might cause people to become unhappy B. Government should put in place mechanisms to ensure that people's bad choices or luck doesn't force them into a life of unhappiness, even if that reduces the freedom of individuals to make personal choices
Now, the funny thing is that neither model really has it right. Obviously many people become unhappy if they are not free to do what they want to do. However, it's quite obvious that if people are left to their own devices, quite a few will end up being unhappy, either because they're taken advantage of (and lack the personal ingenuity to prevent it) or simply because they have bad luck.
The great thing about democracy (in theory) is that the acts of government would be balanced between the two viewpoints, leading to a compromise solution that's perfect for no one but acceptable for everyone. In practice, the U.S. "winner takes all" model of election prevents this optimal solution, and actually (in the media at least) falls apart into an apparent choice between type A and type B. As a consequence, people spend all their time arguing why type A or type B is "the way", because they perceive government as skewed towards the other type, while losing sight of the basic reality that what's wrong is not which type the government falls into, but how it is possible that the government ignores half the population when really it should be an aggregate of all.
I used to be a nokia fan boy, though I stopped with the N80 which cost me around $750 US when first released
I've you're paying that much money for a smartphone, get a windows mobile phone. Windows mobile 6 is reasonably stable, the performance on the newer phones is pretty good, and it doesn't actually look that bad (glass interface, vista-style). The big selling point is that 3rd party development is extremely easy and powerful, and the phones generally aren't locked down, so you can freely install whatever you want.
The new "touch" series of windows smartphones even have iphone-like "swiping" navigation. Still no multi-touch, but that's only a matter of time.
Everyone who has songs for ringtone, please proceed to the second starship!
The most irritating ringtones tend to be the built-in ones imho. My MP3 ringtone is an instrumental (piano) track from the life aquatic soundtrack. It's very relaxing and non-irritating, unlike any of the ringtones my cell phone came with.
Slashdot Mirror
Which will be the easier transition: Photoshop 7 to Photoshop CS3, or GIMP to Photoshop CS3?
Presupposing they'll want to switch to photoshop.
It's a high school class, not a college class. If they go do multimedia at college they'll learn photoshop anyway. Better teach them something they can use at home.
My suggestions:
- Paint.net (best free photo editing program)
- Inkscape (best free vector graphics program)
- NVu (it's buggy, but it's not bad for a web editor)
The reason Comcast is doing this is because the shared node topology of Cable can't handle all of the connection requests. Similar to a bunch of Windows 95 boxes running NETBUI on a large non-switched network, bittorrent causes a a ton of contention. The result are packet storms which end up taking everyone out.
There are less dickish ways of doing this.
Basically they need to deliver what they promise when you subscribe. If they promise 100+GB a month, at high speeds, then that's what they need to deliver. If their network isn't designed to deliver that, then promise something you CAN deliver.
The ISP's in my country all make clear promises that are met. A basic internet subscription will get you in between 10 and 20 GB of monthly data volume. If you exceed that, your connection is throttled at the modem level to speeds only fast enough for basic mail and web browsing. If you want more, you pay more.
Privacy: trusting the employees of a web application is no different from trusting the employees of a desktop application. What you need is to purchase from companies with clear privacy management policies, not pretend like somehow you can avoid the issue entirely by doing anything less than not having internet access at all.
Power: irrelevant. PC's have been fast enough for desktop apps since the early 90's. Word 2 was as useful a word processor for average people as word 2007. A web application can be as fast as it needs to be.
Security: same deal was with privacy, only that the risk of exploits is lower when it's the vendor that's updating your system for you. Most people don't correctly keep up with updates in their applications (even if they do in the OS), and most desktop applications have abysmal security precautions (worse than web apps).
Yeah that's my big issue. The only working (or at least theoretically working) open source calendar servers are not calendar servers, they're "groupware" servers. My email server works fine, thanks. So does my LDAP server.
That's the crux of the issue: you need the integrated solution. Your identity in the central address directory has to match your identity in your mail client which has to match your identity in the calendar. Your mail server has to have the same concept of identity as your calendar server has. This means they must both link into your ldap server.
Using my outlook at work I can:
- Propose a meeting to someone from the ldap directory (active directory is essentially ldap).
- Book a room reservation right from inside the meeting request window (custom outlook extension that we developed)
- Have the other person able to confirm or counter-propose that meeting request while both of you are off-line.
- Have the other person able to inspect and possibly even modify the room reservation's information right from inside outlook.
- Have the resulting meeting show up in public calendars for consultation by anyone in the company.
I admit I don't know much about the open-source offerings out there, but I do know this: you can't build a usable system of that sort without pulling together the components into a single groupware suite.
Back in the early 90s usenet was "safe" because everyone knew that it got expired after a week or two. We all used our real names and email addresses too. Then someone found some old backup tapes 10 years later and handed them over to Google. ...
This is an interesting side-effect of the recording nature of internet conversations. It's not that people somehow have become more rotten because of the internet, it's just that a rotten remark used to be carried only by the wind, and now it's carried by hard drives around the world. I expect that in a decade or two new social rules will evolve to deal with this, where it will be considered inappropriate to take certain classes of forum comments into account when weighing a person's character.
I get the sense that many Europeans don't really grok the scale out here, or more specifically the population density (or lack thereof). The US is something like 2.5x the size of the entire EU, while the EU has like 1.5x the population of the US.
The population density argument is false. In the major metropolitan areas you have very comparable population densities.
Like another poster points out, suburbia as a concept is based on cheap personal transportation. In Europe personal transportation has never been as cheap as in the US, and therefore there is less suburbia. This cost is especially notable when measured relative to the cost of public transportation (and the quality of that transportation). Public transportation in the US, from what I've seen of it, is expensive and sub-par. Another factor that plays a role in my opinion is lack of inner city investment. If you allow the inner city to impoverish, then this becomes a self-sustaining effect as anyone who can afford it flees the inner city. By contrast, I'm in the planning stages of buying an inner city home, even though I work on the outskirts of the city, and it would be cheaper to buy a home near my place of work.
You know, for general web browsing I don't find the extensions that useful. I used to be a heavy extension user, but after a while I figured out I didn't really use all those extensions often enough to be worth it.
For web app development however, I agree that firefox is the absolute king of browsers because of the extensions. These are the dev extensions I can't do without:
- Firebug (duh)
- Remove cookies for site
- HTML Validator
There are a lot of extensions for IE as well, but they're much harder to find out about. I've recently been toying with DebugBar + Companion.JS on IE, and they're pretty useful. No comparison to firebug, that's for sure, but sufficient for me to not be constantly aggravated at the general uselessness of IE.
Fortunately not all Americans are as such, and those few will remain
competitive, by working their asses off, just as it should be, not by
being born with the national silver spoon in their mouths.
So, the way "it should be" according to you is that everyone has to work their asses off just to be able to make an honest living? Enjoy that life, I know I won't. There's nothing wrong with wanting time to enjoy life, time to learn to play an instrument, to play soccer with your kids, and time to watch a good movie with a friend and not have to worry about a project's deadline.
In the west we've had the luxury of choice when it comes to how we spend our time. The challenge is to bring this choice to everyone all over the world, not to give up this choice. There is nothing wrong with wanting the choice to spend time away from work.
Its not a linux port. They simply packaged Cedega with EVE. I wish people would stop praising them for that...its not a native client.
...), does it matter that it's not a "native" version?
The question is: does it matter? If it runs just fine (as well as on windows), and it integrates with the OS (launch menus, hardware recognition,
If Microsoft had a shred of intellect in it's massive evil encrusted soul it would realize embracing ECMA4 and an open web is nothing but good for everyone, including MS.
How exactly is an open web good for MS? I see no business case here whereby MS wins. The only business case that makes sense is to try to extend the microsoft/office cash cow's life until they manage to gain footholds in new markets.
Ofcourse, I do agree it is good for just about everyone else, which is why it is inevitable. We're not talking about "if", we're talking about "when".
Too bad though, because Leopard looks impressive, but I have a nice monitor, several extra disks etc. and I'm not downgrading my hardware.
All currently sold macs accept external screens, and can use that screen as a primary monitor. Also, all macs accept external disks, because all macs have at least a USB port, and most (all?) have a firewire port. My mini has an external second drive as well, and it's faster than the internal drive (hooked up via firewire), so performance is not an argument either.
Now, what was that about downgrading?
If you're willing to spend in excess of $2000 on a machine just to play games a bit smoother, then you're simply not who apple is targeting. If you are willing to spend that kind of money, either money is not an object, or an extraordinary amount of your time is spent gaming, in which case you won't mind the time and effort to build a custom gaming rig, which will always be cheaper.
Vista uses a different technique of RAM Virtualization and using features of the AGP/PCI/e BUS so that it can do 'post effects' with the composer, and maintain a tear free interface without the performance and RAM penalty that OS X suffers from with the Quartz composer.
That sounds really interesting and really good news, so I googled around a bit, and I hear a different story from google.
"GDI is no longer hardware-accelerated, but instead rendered to system memory using the CPU. That rendering is later composed on a 3D surface in order to be shown on the desktop. The graphics hardware video driver is no longer involved in GDI rendering, which means that mixing GDI and accelerated 3D rendering in the same window is likely to produce corruption like stale or blanked 3D rendering, trails, etc." (from the opengl.org website)
So, GDI apps are no longer accelerated, they use more memory because they're double-buffered to system ram, and they can no longer be combined with in-window hardware accelerated OpenGL. Now, I'm sure WPF is really nice and doesn't have these problems, but let's face it, the majority of windows apps are GDI based and will remain so for years to come.
There's more to keeping your company successful than just profits.
Nonsense. There are tons of companies that care only about profits and keep doing exceedingly well. Walmart, microsoft, most banks, most oil companies, most drug companies. Corporations have figured out that if you behave like an ass but are cheaper, people will still buy from you.
Okay, it'll take until 2010 to finish the station then NASA will use it only for five years before pulling out. With all due respect NASA, are you fucking nuts?
It makes perfect sense. NASA is a vessel used by congress to shuttle federal money back into the states in the form of design and assembly projects. The ISS is only interesting in the sense that it is still being designed/built. Once it is done, there won't be any money to give to the states, so it will have outlived its useful purpose.
This is why they're already making plans to return to the moon. It's a nice useless project that they can spend decades designing and assembling, which nobody will object to on the grounds that it is good for "prestige".
The way it is set up,that is an AT&T for life phone, not a AT&T for 2 years phone.
It's the deliberateness that's striking. The european situation is most enlightening. Apple is going to launch only in those countries that allow bundling the subscription with the phone. In my country, belgium, they're not legally allowed to bundle with the cell service, so they're simply not launching at all.
Conclusion: apple is deliberately handicapping a product in ways that makes it very user-unfriendly in order to make higher short-term profits (revenue-sharing deal). The early 90's apple has returned, and if history repeats itself (they way it's going, it will), this will lead to apple falling of its pedestal (again) as the it industry's sun child.
Luckily their desktops are still (mostly) unaffected, but if they start doing this B.S. there too, I'm switching back to windows.
Today, FF has morphed in to something which can't be used, with plugins, for more than a couple days max without needing to be reset.
You say that, and you compare it to IE. The only environment where I know people keep a firefox process open for days is on the mac, which doesn't run IE anymore (and btw, safari 2 leaks like a sieve too in my experience). Yes, I have to relaunch ff on my mac every few days. But on windows every time I close my last window, the browser shuts down and all memory is reclaimed. So, on platforms that are not mac, and for "normal" use patterns (i.e. don't leave a browser window with sites open for days), this is a non-issue.
Thiis page may be informative about the issue of memory in firefox: http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/memusage.html
XUL is inherently single-threaded and JavaScript based. Try out any XUL application out there and you'll see how you get the same poor performance, speed and resource usage as with Firefox (try Miro Player and Joost). ...
Actually I'm pretty sure they're in denial as to the cause of their problems. Announcing they're working on fixing "memory leaks" just supports their ability to continue their delusion.
They're not in denial. They're working on tamarin, a replacement/upgrade of their javascript engine based on the same engine that's in flash 9 / actionscript 3.
Tamarin will run javascript 2, which will to do javascript what the move from actionscript 2 to 3 did for flash/flex. In short: it will make non-toy applications easily done, instead of just marginally feasible. They plan to migrate the firefox UI and extensions to javascript 2, which should negate the performance issues. Only problem: it won't be ready for FF3.
However, if a member of a law enforcement branch of the government says "this is legal" and it's plausible, I might answer differently.
Now imagina you have a staff of hundreds of lawyers at your disposal. Would you say "hey, let's not ask the lawyers if this is legal, and let's just blindly assume it is"?
AT&T has every tool to know the exact legality of their actions. "We didn't know" is not a valid defense.
As for leaning towards good programming practices, my suggestion is to start by taking PHP off your server, learn Python (or Perl if you're feeling feisty) and write something that at least has a chance of being reasonably structured. Keeping in mind I'm a huge fan of Python.
You can do any OO design in PHP5 just as easily as in Python. PHP is less constrained. It allows people to use bad designs because this allows hobbyists who haven't learned correct design practices to build things. However, even though PHP allows you to build bad designs, it doesn't require you. It allows you to do everything by the book.
The best programming practice for web applications architecture is to serve your target market. If the target market want glitz that requires flash, and doesn't care who that cuts out, that's what you deliver. The goal of the architecture is not to instill your own sense of right and wrong onto the user, it is to enable the user to do what they want to do with high performance.
While a free replacement drive might lessen the blow somewhat--as geeky as it might sound--losing a hard drive with gigabytes of content you really care about is a gut-wrenching experience. Everything from my high school days (homework, projects, work, programming, games, music... everything) was gone in one fail swoop.
With external hard drive prices these days, you have zero excuses for not having a backup.
I keep everything that must be kept in a separate folder, and I drag that to my external backup drive every once in a while. I lost my primary drive just a few weeks ago, and was back up and running with all my data in a matter of hours.
For extra bonus points, buy two external drives and keep one of them off-site (in your car or something).
All this seems like a suspicious false deduction to me. I don't think IE on Mac got abandoned for them being "evil", but because Safari 1) came to existance and 2) started getting regularly updated by Apple, to put up a fight they just didn't bother to win. An example where Apple hasn't done this is with Microsoft Office. And lo and behold, Microsoft still produces Office for Mac. Office for Mac actually often go so far as to be superior to the Windows version.
1) Apple started on safari because microsoft stopped developing mac ie, not the other way around. Admittedly, microsoft didn't officially kill Mac IE until safari was out there, but it was effectively dead years before that point.
2) Mac IE was not a profitable product, Mac Office is a highly profitable product. Microsoft may do a lot of things, but killing highly profitable products is not one of them.
3) Apple sells a direct competitor to mac office called iwork. You've got pages (word), numbers (excel) and keynote (powerpoint).
4) The old mac office was cripple-ware. Entourage is not outlook, and as a result companies that base themselves on exchange/outlook often could not consider macs.
5) The new mac office is worse cripple-ware. They have dropped support for VBA scripting. This means that enterprises will have to standardize on win office for all their office automation needs, or dual-develop them in VBA and applescript (quite unlikely). As long as apple is not a viable competitor in the corporate space, MS's is not threatened in any way.
I understand that you may actually have good intentions now, but history shows that in every such case the good intentions became the road to Hell. I don't want your good intentions trumping my choices, my life. I want you to leave me out of them.
People generally agree on this: government should have the intention of improving self-perceived well-being for as many people as possible as much as possible. Where this dichotomy between socialist and liberalist is created is on how government best approaches this issue.
You basically have two models:
A. Government tries to maximize personal freedom so people can choose a way of life that makes them happy, even if this means that bad choices or fate might cause people to become unhappy
B. Government should put in place mechanisms to ensure that people's bad choices or luck doesn't force them into a life of unhappiness, even if that reduces the freedom of individuals to make personal choices
Now, the funny thing is that neither model really has it right. Obviously many people become unhappy if they are not free to do what they want to do. However, it's quite obvious that if people are left to their own devices, quite a few will end up being unhappy, either because they're taken advantage of (and lack the personal ingenuity to prevent it) or simply because they have bad luck.
The great thing about democracy (in theory) is that the acts of government would be balanced between the two viewpoints, leading to a compromise solution that's perfect for no one but acceptable for everyone. In practice, the U.S. "winner takes all" model of election prevents this optimal solution, and actually (in the media at least) falls apart into an apparent choice between type A and type B. As a consequence, people spend all their time arguing why type A or type B is "the way", because they perceive government as skewed towards the other type, while losing sight of the basic reality that what's wrong is not which type the government falls into, but how it is possible that the government ignores half the population when really it should be an aggregate of all.
I used to be a nokia fan boy, though I stopped with the N80 which cost me around $750 US when first released
I've you're paying that much money for a smartphone, get a windows mobile phone. Windows mobile 6 is reasonably stable, the performance on the newer phones is pretty good, and it doesn't actually look that bad (glass interface, vista-style). The big selling point is that 3rd party development is extremely easy and powerful, and the phones generally aren't locked down, so you can freely install whatever you want.
The new "touch" series of windows smartphones even have iphone-like "swiping" navigation. Still no multi-touch, but that's only a matter of time.
Everyone who has songs for ringtone, please proceed to the second starship!
The most irritating ringtones tend to be the built-in ones imho. My MP3 ringtone is an instrumental (piano) track from the life aquatic soundtrack. It's very relaxing and non-irritating, unlike any of the ringtones my cell phone came with.