You don't seem to know what you are talking about. There's nothing wrong with Opera's rendering compared to other browsers. Sure it has bugs, but so does Firefox. But the reason sites don't work in Opera is that they specifically detect Opera and send it broken code. Why would they do that? No idea, but the fact is that they do.
OK, you're trying to argue with me about my subjective observations AND you're telling me that web designers go out of their way to send Opera bad data.
I'm pretty sure they can control your condition with medication and therapy.
Nope, I torture web browsers, no matter which I'm using. But I am confident that the behaviors I observe are an opera-only (at least to version 7) phenomenon. Especially when I sit and use lots of different PCs on a daily basis and either observe or do not observe certain behaviors.
That is why I'm willing to say that Firefox is generally stable and Opera is generally not.
Yeah, and he also missed Ff's "Take up all available memory and then crash so you can be reminded how cool OSS is, because this problem is being looked at right now by many eyes" feature which I've seen in all versions up to current. Excellent way to prove something.
Is that really an issue for people? I mean, I've got 5 Firefox Windows open, over 300 open tabs (mostly multiple pictures of, uh, people, in each tab, rather than text), and I see that Firefox is using a hair over 240MB RAM. Most of these tabs have been open for over a week.
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I realize not every has gigabytes of RAM, but someone with less RAM than I have probably wouldn't expect to do that much, either.
I haven't seen Firefox crash in several months, and this sort of load is very typical of my browsing habits across the 20 or so PCs I have daily contact with. Perhaps the crashiness is related to some fault in the hardware in your machine?
In the singular case of CTRL-J, I recall it not doing exactly what I wanted it to. It's been a year since the last time I tried Opera, so I cannot be more specific than that.
In my experience - up to Opera version 7 - I'd compare Opera's stability with Netscape version 4. This was especially laughable when Mozilla two-year-old pre-release versions could run for days or weeks at at a time. Earlier versions - version 3 in particular - weren't even that good. The only reason I even thought to try version 7 is that the single Opera user I know swore up and down that it had been complete re-written and was much more stable. I did not find that to be the case, and experienced at least daily crashes (on the other hand, this Firefox instance has been running for the last two weeks on this PC).
I've already addressed my issues with Opera's rendering in another post. To recap, Opera's two options are like Papa Bear's porridge (epileptic on methamphetamine) and Mama Bear's porridge (glacial) to me, little Goldilocks. Firefox and IE both seem to be "Just Right" as far as page rendering goes, not that I'm trying to say anything positive about IE.
Another poster, above, suggested that I should've tried 7.5. Maybe some day I'll take some time to pirate version 8 (no digs about opera's cost from me, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to pay for it or look at ads) and give it a spin.
WRT to user interfaces, I believe that in-consistency is counter productive. I can browse effectively with IE and FF and Konq, because they all use basically the same keyboard shortcuts. Sitting in front of Opera I found key combinations sometimes did very different things. Why? Just to be different? Opera wasn't developed in a vacuum of the days before web browsers. There was not and is not a good reason for those differences. WRT mouse gestures - there were a couple of times I managed to fire them unintentionally. I turned them off, and was less annoyed. Maybe they work better when one uses a mouse, rather than a trackball. Maybe I'm really clumsy. I don't know. Again, the gestures seem to me to be breaking away from what I consider standard interface behavior, and they ran counter to my expectations.
I tried Opera's ad blocking last time I used it, and honestly I thought it was considerably better than nothing. But if I'm manually editing a list of sites to block, it's probably more productive to edit my hosts file. NONE of the Opera-based blockers have the wonderful right-click and >poof simplicity of Adblock.
Can I also mention the default Opera bookmarks for a second? What's up with bookmarking Ebay's main page, or wizards.com? Was Operasoft worried I wouldn't be able to find Ebay or get information on Magic: The Gathering without those links? If I had actually paid $40 for a copy of Opera, I would've been pissed about those default links.
As far as other Opera "features", I think the best thing to say is that with Firefox, I don't have to take anything I don't want. I don't like Gestures, so I don't install them. Some other person does, that's his problem. It's really a wonderful way of doing things.
He also missed the Opera's "Crash every half-hour so you can be reminded of the nifty crash-recovery feature" feature, something I've seen in every version of Opera that I've tried (up to version 7).
Nothing like having Opera crap out while you have 60 open tabs on a 9.6k modem connection. Not that that's ever happened to me four times in a one hour period.
He also doesn't mention the HIGHLY obnoxious "best guess" rendering - Opera STARTS to render a page as soon as it has any data at all, then re-renders as more data comes in. Net result? You can play tag with the page elements as they move around your screen. In my experience, Firefox starts to render pages a tick or two after Opera, but tends to finish rendering a tick or two before Opera.
Opera also uses a widely different set of keyboard shortcuts, while most of IE's and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox's overlap. Opera fans can then point out their goofy "mouse gestures" but after trying them, I didn't see the big deal and went back to my keyboard.
Opera doesn't have Adblock, Linky or Magpie. Right there, it's out of the running for my personal needs. The last version I tried (admittedly, version 7) wouldn't even import my Firefox bookmarks, which are in exactly the same format as Netscape's. A lot of the "features" Opera does have are things I don't consider particularly interesting or useful - whole page zooming, for example, or the "true MDI" nature of the program - if I wanted to manage bunches of little Windows, I'd go back to using IE.
You can say that the author of the article didn't cover your browser in the most friendly way, but in my opinion he left out some significant negatives as well. Maybe you should be thanking him for that.
There is some truth to the complexity argument. A lot of my customers will buy "Norton Internet Security" or the equivalent from McAffee without understanding what they do. Once those programs are installed, they find the regular security warnings, queries to set firewall behavior and general frustration that they STILL have problems with viruses, spyware and trojans are all far too much to deal with.
I uninstall the "all in one" security packages whenever I see them.
Er... on a Windows Machine, by default, everything that shows up in Task manager should either be human readable or easily determined to be part of your install.
You might not know what svchost.exe or lsass.exe are, but it should be easy enough to find out.
If you've got genuine random "line noise"-named processes, you've probably let a trojan or two install some random badness on your PC.
There's a program called Process Explorer (google for it, I am lazy) that can show you, in far more detail, what Windows is doing, but figuring out what each and everything is really just requires about 5 minutes with google.
I'm actually really pissed that they wasted a whole major update on PVP. One of the most basic points of appeal for CoH was the LACK of PVP, and the lack of the little twerps who go with it.
I know PVP is entirely consentual, but last night, about 20 minutes after I logged on, I ran into my first "Sorry, I respecced this toon for PVP and now he sucks for everything else." message from a teammate.
Not cool. People who want PVP can go dry-hump each other in WoW or Planetside or something. It's obvious to me that it's been poorly bolted on to CoH and the entire player base is going to suffer for it.
Porn is normally self-organizing. You have to work pretty hard to find random collections with no central theme.
Several years ago, while I was learning Delphi, I wrote a simple program that basically lets me browse directories of pictures and videos and tag each directory with metadata (girl-girl, softcore, transexual midget porno etc) that gets saved in a text file with those pictures. With that metadata in place I've rearranged my collection several times. Whenever I'm particularly bored I can take some time to tag some more of my porn.
I live in Northwest Indiana, about 25 miles from Chicago. Netflix has a one to two day turnaround to and from their distribution center in Chicago (I put something in the mail and usually get new movies two days later). Blockbuster also has a center in Chicago. Turnaround from Blockbuster is usually five business days. I also have a subscription to Wantedlist (porno-netflix), which has a distribution center in California. Turnaround from wantedlist is usually 5 - 7 business days. I've actually had Wantedlist turnaround - all the way to and from California - beat Blockbuster a few times.
Blockbuster has fewer movies I'm interested in, takes about twice as long to get me a title in general has little to recommend it. The only reason I have both services is netflix queue is so stuffed with the obscure titles I want (on the 8 at a time plan) that I started Blockbuster to grab the occasional commercial title I want.
Well now here is an interesting question: Is it possible for those of us who don't accept your personal source of moral value to be seen as moral to begin with? Am I a virtuous pagan for censoring myself in order to conform to your standard of behavior, or am I worse for betraying *my* personal beliefs about your mythology and its associated sensibilities? And why should I care about the particulars of your moral judgement?
Bringing the issue of morals into this discussion simply serves to illustrate that everyone's morals are different, and that your "absolute authority" is my good laugh on a Friday morning.
I buy Sony's ES-series 400 disc DVD Jukeboxes because no other company makes a comparable product. I hate Sony with an untold passion but there are singular cases where there is no other choice.
There's probably a playstation owner out there somewhere with much the same opinion.
Western Digital Raptors aren't faster because they are serial ATA. Having a SATA interface does not make a drive faster. Period. Maybe in five or six years when densities get high enough to surpass 100MB/sec for burst transfers, but not at the moment.
Furthermore, all evidence I have observed suggests that the Raptor (at least the 360GD model) may very well have the highest failure rate of any hard disk currently in production. A dead drive has has a very, very high access time and a very, very low data transfer rate.
Loss of a single large drive is loss of a single large amount of data. Loss of a single smaller drive with a subset of data results in a subset still being available on other drives. In a non-redundant array, loss of a single drive results in loss of more than one drive's worth of data, but that's not the situation I'm talking about.
Meh. If you want "high" capacity, you have to invest in the infrastructure to support it. SATA isn't about speed (it's not - the drives are about 0% faster than IDE), but about being able to support increased densities of drives in an enclosure due to simplifed cabling. Buying a 3ware or Highpoint card and a 5-in-3 enclosure just gets you to a place where capacities most desktop users would call staggering are utterly normal.
The other aspect of your wish for higher capacity drives is that your expectation of capacity will increase over time as well. If you have drawers full of IDE drives now, you're going to want them in the future, whether the drives inside are 1TB or 5TB. That's just the mindset of folks who buy multiples of large hard disks.
Five years ago people were ripping their whole CD collection to some compressed format and storing them on a PC. Now people are storing the uncompressed audio, and some people are moving their whole DVD collection onto PCs. In another 5 years people will be moving their collection of HD discs to their PCs. The need for multiple drive storage systems is not going to disappear just because you hit some arbitrary capacity.
While I'm at it, I might as well point out that data distributed across several spindles is inherently safer than data on a single spindle. This is why I stick with midrange drives rather than the largest models I could buy (250GB instead of 400+GB). Backing up a huge single drive is a pain in the ass if you don't have a BIGGER single drive someplace else (er... or a tape, I guess. A lot of tape).
I use several of these to increase my per-server densities of pr0n to acceptable levels. I've found that Samsung 1614N drives don't require active cooling in those enclosures, if noise is an issue, but I use Hitachi 7k250s because I'd rather have the capacity. Seagate drives seem to get too warm even with active cooling.
Use locate on a linux box or turn on the MS file indexing service for basic organization, or build yourself a little LAMP application (or VB, if you swing that way) if you really need to search against metadata. Export each volume with nfs to a single location, share out with Samba. On NT, you can use dfs to get to basically the same place.
That doesn't fix anything for the other folders under Documents and Settings\%username%.
Specifically, it doesn't help for things like bookmarks, the email spools used by most local mail programs, the crap on their desktop... plus you have to do it for every user on the machine.
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For a lot of people who DO have DVD-A and/or SACD recordings, the primary appeal is surround sound, not higher resolutions or sample rates.
You don't seem to know what you are talking about. There's nothing wrong with Opera's rendering compared to other browsers. Sure it has bugs, but so does Firefox. But the reason sites don't work in Opera is that they specifically detect Opera and send it broken code. Why would they do that? No idea, but the fact is that they do.
OK, you're trying to argue with me about my subjective observations AND you're telling me that web designers go out of their way to send Opera bad data.
I'm pretty sure they can control your condition with medication and therapy.
Nope, I torture web browsers, no matter which I'm using.
But I am confident that the behaviors I observe are an opera-only (at least to version 7) phenomenon. Especially when I sit and use lots of different PCs on a daily basis and either observe or do not observe certain behaviors.
That is why I'm willing to say that Firefox is generally stable and Opera is generally not.
Yeah, and he also missed Ff's "Take up all available memory and then crash so you can be reminded how cool OSS is, because this problem is being looked at right now by many eyes" feature which I've seen in all versions up to current. Excellent way to prove something.
Is that really an issue for people? I mean, I've got 5 Firefox Windows open, over 300 open tabs (mostly multiple pictures of, uh, people, in each tab, rather than text), and I see that Firefox is using a hair over 240MB RAM. Most of these tabs have been open for over a week.
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I realize not every has gigabytes of RAM, but someone with less RAM than I have probably wouldn't expect to do that much, either.
I haven't seen Firefox crash in several months, and this sort of load is very typical of my browsing habits across the 20 or so PCs I have daily contact with. Perhaps the crashiness is related to some fault in the hardware in your machine?
In the singular case of CTRL-J, I recall it not doing exactly what I wanted it to. It's been a year since the last time I tried Opera, so I cannot be more specific than that.
In my experience - up to Opera version 7 - I'd compare Opera's stability with Netscape version 4. This was especially laughable when Mozilla two-year-old pre-release versions could run for days or weeks at at a time. Earlier versions - version 3 in particular - weren't even that good. The only reason I even thought to try version 7 is that the single Opera user I know swore up and down that it had been complete re-written and was much more stable. I did not find that to be the case, and experienced at least daily crashes (on the other hand, this Firefox instance has been running for the last two weeks on this PC).
I've already addressed my issues with Opera's rendering in another post. To recap, Opera's two options are like Papa Bear's porridge (epileptic on methamphetamine) and Mama Bear's porridge (glacial) to me, little Goldilocks. Firefox and IE both seem to be "Just Right" as far as page rendering goes, not that I'm trying to say anything positive about IE.
Another poster, above, suggested that I should've tried 7.5. Maybe some day I'll take some time to pirate version 8 (no digs about opera's cost from me, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to pay for it or look at ads) and give it a spin.
WRT to user interfaces, I believe that in-consistency is counter productive. I can browse effectively with IE and FF and Konq, because they all use basically the same keyboard shortcuts. Sitting in front of Opera I found key combinations sometimes did very different things. Why? Just to be different? Opera wasn't developed in a vacuum of the days before web browsers. There was not and is not a good reason for those differences.
WRT mouse gestures - there were a couple of times I managed to fire them unintentionally. I turned them off, and was less annoyed. Maybe they work better when one uses a mouse, rather than a trackball. Maybe I'm really clumsy. I don't know. Again, the gestures seem to me to be breaking away from what I consider standard interface behavior, and they ran counter to my expectations.
I tried Opera's ad blocking last time I used it, and honestly I thought it was considerably better than nothing. But if I'm manually editing a list of sites to block, it's probably more productive to edit my hosts file. NONE of the Opera-based blockers have the wonderful right-click and >poof simplicity of Adblock.
Can I also mention the default Opera bookmarks for a second? What's up with bookmarking Ebay's main page, or wizards.com? Was Operasoft worried I wouldn't be able to find Ebay or get information on Magic: The Gathering without those links? If I had actually paid $40 for a copy of Opera, I would've been pissed about those default links.
As far as other Opera "features", I think the best thing to say is that with Firefox, I don't have to take anything I don't want. I don't like Gestures, so I don't install them. Some other person does, that's his problem. It's really a wonderful way of doing things.
I've tried both ways, and the other way just seemed slower compared to how other browsers do it (IE, Konq, Moz, whatever).
I can describe the default rendering method as playing "Catch the Submit Button". Drove me nuts.
All four of the banks I use and both of my credit card vendors support Firefox. Is there a bank nowadays that doesn't?
He also missed the Opera's "Crash every half-hour so you can be reminded of the nifty crash-recovery feature" feature, something I've seen in every version of Opera that I've tried (up to version 7).
Nothing like having Opera crap out while you have 60 open tabs on a 9.6k modem connection. Not that that's ever happened to me four times in a one hour period.
He also doesn't mention the HIGHLY obnoxious "best guess" rendering - Opera STARTS to render a page as soon as it has any data at all, then re-renders as more data comes in. Net result? You can play tag with the page elements as they move around your screen. In my experience, Firefox starts to render pages a tick or two after Opera, but tends to finish rendering a tick or two before Opera.
Opera also uses a widely different set of keyboard shortcuts, while most of IE's and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox's overlap. Opera fans can then point out their goofy "mouse gestures" but after trying them, I didn't see the big deal and went back to my keyboard.
Opera doesn't have Adblock, Linky or Magpie. Right there, it's out of the running for my personal needs. The last version I tried (admittedly, version 7) wouldn't even import my Firefox bookmarks, which are in exactly the same format as Netscape's. A lot of the "features" Opera does have are things I don't consider particularly interesting or useful - whole page zooming, for example, or the "true MDI" nature of the program - if I wanted to manage bunches of little Windows, I'd go back to using IE.
You can say that the author of the article didn't cover your browser in the most friendly way, but in my opinion he left out some significant negatives as well. Maybe you should be thanking him for that.
Apparently mods do not understand the genuis of the Clerks Animated Series. :(
I download porn constantly. If I run anti-spyware programs on my Windows machines, I never have anything but cookies. Porn is not the problem.
Using a non-IE browser, however, is almost certainly part of the solution.
There is some truth to the complexity argument. A lot of my customers will buy "Norton Internet Security" or the equivalent from McAffee without understanding what they do. Once those programs are installed, they find the regular security warnings, queries to set firewall behavior and general frustration that they STILL have problems with viruses, spyware and trojans are all far too much to deal with.
I uninstall the "all in one" security packages whenever I see them.
Not to derail the discussion or anything, but what exactly did Bill Clinton do that was anything other than centrist?
Er... on a Windows Machine, by default, everything that shows up in Task manager should either be human readable or easily determined to be part of your install.
You might not know what svchost.exe or lsass.exe are, but it should be easy enough to find out.
If you've got genuine random "line noise"-named processes, you've probably let a trojan or two install some random badness on your PC.
There's a program called Process Explorer (google for it, I am lazy) that can show you, in far more detail, what Windows is doing, but figuring out what each and everything is really just requires about 5 minutes with google.
I'm actually really pissed that they wasted a whole major update on PVP. One of the most basic points of appeal for CoH was the LACK of PVP, and the lack of the little twerps who go with it.
I know PVP is entirely consentual, but last night, about 20 minutes after I logged on, I ran into my first "Sorry, I respecced this toon for PVP and now he sucks for everything else." message from a teammate.
Not cool.
People who want PVP can go dry-hump each other in WoW or Planetside or something. It's obvious to me that it's been poorly bolted on to CoH and the entire player base is going to suffer for it.
Porn is normally self-organizing. You have to work pretty hard to find random collections with no central theme.
Several years ago, while I was learning Delphi, I wrote a simple program that basically lets me browse directories of pictures and videos and tag each directory with metadata (girl-girl, softcore, transexual midget porno etc) that gets saved in a text file with those pictures. With that metadata in place I've rearranged my collection several times. Whenever I'm particularly bored I can take some time to tag some more of my porn.
I live in Northwest Indiana, about 25 miles from Chicago. Netflix has a one to two day turnaround to and from their distribution center in Chicago (I put something in the mail and usually get new movies two days later). Blockbuster also has a center in Chicago. Turnaround from Blockbuster is usually five business days. I also have a subscription to Wantedlist (porno-netflix), which has a distribution center in California. Turnaround from wantedlist is usually 5 - 7 business days. I've actually had Wantedlist turnaround - all the way to and from California - beat Blockbuster a few times.
Blockbuster has fewer movies I'm interested in, takes about twice as long to get me a title in general has little to recommend it. The only reason I have both services is netflix queue is so stuffed with the obscure titles I want (on the 8 at a time plan) that I started Blockbuster to grab the occasional commercial title I want.
Well now here is an interesting question: Is it possible for those of us who don't accept your personal source of moral value to be seen as moral to begin with? Am I a virtuous pagan for censoring myself in order to conform to your standard of behavior, or am I worse for betraying *my* personal beliefs about your mythology and its associated sensibilities? And why should I care about the particulars of your moral judgement?
Bringing the issue of morals into this discussion simply serves to illustrate that everyone's morals are different, and that your "absolute authority" is my good laugh on a Friday morning.
I buy Sony's ES-series 400 disc DVD Jukeboxes because no other company makes a comparable product. I hate Sony with an untold passion but there are singular cases where there is no other choice.
There's probably a playstation owner out there somewhere with much the same opinion.
Western Digital Raptors aren't faster because they are serial ATA. Having a SATA interface does not make a drive faster. Period. Maybe in five or six years when densities get high enough to surpass 100MB/sec for burst transfers, but not at the moment.
Furthermore, all evidence I have observed suggests that the Raptor (at least the 360GD model) may very well have the highest failure rate of any hard disk currently in production. A dead drive has has a very, very high access time and a very, very low data transfer rate.
Loss of a single large drive is loss of a single large amount of data. Loss of a single smaller drive with a subset of data results in a subset still being available on other drives. In a non-redundant array, loss of a single drive results in loss of more than one drive's worth of data, but that's not the situation I'm talking about.
Who knows? Personally I just buy more CD jukeboxes.
Meh. If you want "high" capacity, you have to invest in the infrastructure to support it. SATA isn't about speed (it's not - the drives are about 0% faster than IDE), but about being able to support increased densities of drives in an enclosure due to simplifed cabling. Buying a 3ware or Highpoint card and a 5-in-3 enclosure just gets you to a place where capacities most desktop users would call staggering are utterly normal.
The other aspect of your wish for higher capacity drives is that your expectation of capacity will increase over time as well. If you have drawers full of IDE drives now, you're going to want them in the future, whether the drives inside are 1TB or 5TB. That's just the mindset of folks who buy multiples of large hard disks.
Five years ago people were ripping their whole CD collection to some compressed format and storing them on a PC. Now people are storing the uncompressed audio, and some people are moving their whole DVD collection onto PCs. In another 5 years people will be moving their collection of HD discs to their PCs. The need for multiple drive storage systems is not going to disappear just because you hit some arbitrary capacity.
While I'm at it, I might as well point out that data distributed across several spindles is inherently safer than data on a single spindle. This is why I stick with midrange drives rather than the largest models I could buy (250GB instead of 400+GB). Backing up a huge single drive is a pain in the ass if you don't have a BIGGER single drive someplace else (er... or a tape, I guess. A lot of tape).
Amateur.
I use several of these to increase my per-server densities of pr0n to acceptable levels. I've found that Samsung 1614N drives don't require active cooling in those enclosures, if noise is an issue, but I use Hitachi 7k250s because I'd rather have the capacity. Seagate drives seem to get too warm even with active cooling.
Use locate on a linux box or turn on the MS file indexing service for basic organization, or build yourself a little LAMP application (or VB, if you swing that way) if you really need to search against metadata. Export each volume with nfs to a single location, share out with Samba. On NT, you can use dfs to get to basically the same place.
What's so hard about that?
Yahoo mail also allows POP3 access.
And adblock fixes Yahoo's ads nicely.
Why not just use subst for that?
That doesn't fix anything for the other folders under Documents and Settings\%username%.
Specifically, it doesn't help for things like bookmarks, the email spools used by most local mail programs, the crap on their desktop... plus you have to do it for every user on the machine.