Interesting. I'll make a point of checking that out next time I buy a disk drive. In my case, the MacBook in question is a hand-me-down, so I'm not in a position to bitch about Apple's shonky practices.
Seriously. This programmer (I use the term loosely) has problems with expression? If this is the case, he needs to go back to school and try learning assembly or fortran programming. Any program worth writing can be coded in fortran, and if it can't be coded in assembler, then it can't be done at all.
If he really wants to go into creative writing, we might remind him that the 26 letters of the alphabet were good enough for Shakespeare.
Years ago, I knew an anthropologist who had spent months in the jungles of Cambodia, and hadn't had much in the way of access to washing facilities. When I picked him up from the airport here in Perth (W. Australia), I had to wait a while.
Turned out that he had been given a grilling by the Customs goons, and they had strip-searched him. However, one of them took just a sniff of his shoes, looked at his colleague and said "if that's what these things smell like, there's no way I'm looking up this guy's ass".
Exactly. It's not exactly hard to download VLC from its home site. I now use VLC exclusively on my MacBook for playing video media - much easier for those of us living in Australia, with DVDs obtained from the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
Apple, of course, offers you a limited number of times you can change the region of your DVD device, but VLC just ignores the region setting altogether. As far as I'm concerned, I've paid for legitimate media, the artists involved get their royalties, so Apple has no business standing in the way of my using said media.
It's a pretty sad indictment of our system that the best that we can hope for is a government that is incapable of governing. I often fantasise that the world is ready for anarchy, but of course the corporations and Big Money would never stand for that, and would quickly start making their own "justice".
I can't supply an answer about the Geneva conventions, but Australia does indeed have a long and well-documented history of incarcerating people in mental institutions with no judicial oversight. The situation might be better in the US (certain novels notwithstanding), but Australia's record is pretty grisly.
...for an Australian government of any stripe to take a bad idea from another country and repeat it here, as if it'll somehow work out all right this time. Nobody ever learns from anyone else's mistakes - which is probably why history keeps repeating itself.
Back when Firefox was alpha and called Phoenix, my preferred browser was its ancestor, the original Mozilla. If you did your own builds and left out Communicator and all the other stuff that made it huge and unwieldy, it kicked Phoenix' butt in every way.
Eventually, of course, by the time support for Mozilla fell away, the (by then) bulkier Firefox was well and truly established.
I am not exaggerating even slightly, but then I use Flashblock fairly ruthlessly. Most Flash shows are just advertisements. And pages I hit that are entirely built on Flash usually get passed by unless I have a compelling reason to see their content.
I also make a point of closing the browser from time to time, just as a matter of common-sense. Leaving it running for days or weeks with bazillions of tabs open is just asking for trouble, yet I see lots of people do exactly that all the time. Giving the machine a chance to do garbage-collection at a moment convenient to you is likely to forestall the inconvenience of a crash.
However, you could be right about the 64/32-bit crossover. My Linux boxes are still running in 32-bit mode, since I don't have any pressing reason to change that. And the versions for my MacBook are still built in 32-bit mode for now.
Maybe the problem is that we don't have a good terms to differentiate between appropriate reuse of one's own writing, and unnaceptable reuse.
It always used to make me chuckle to find textbook references cited as "personal observation" in journal articles written by one of my university's professors. Most scientists can't get away with that. But if you are as much of a bigwig in your field as he was, I guess it's not as arrogant as it might seem.
Here in Australia, I still get hard copy of both white-pages and yellow-pages delivered, despite the fact that I haven't had a Telstra phone for over 15 years, and always use the online directory. There doesn't seem to be any way to make them stop. In fact, I had such a delivery just yesterday: yet another large pile of paper that went straight into the recycle bin.
Well, if they do have a patent on this, at least they've had the decency to not use it. At least, I've never had a paperback novel with any advertising other than maybe on the inside cover or a few pages at the end. There, the advertising is at least out of the way of the body text.
True - but for the moment, at least, one can occasionally find texts for which copyright has been snatched by US publishing pirates by looking at Gutenberg sites under different jurisdictions. A case in point is Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: copyright to Rosenblum in the US until at least 2044, but public domain in Australia (and probably Canada).
...so that a crashing tab does not bring down the others...
I have seen this posted so many times, but nobody ever explains how they managed to crash their browser in the first place. I've been running Firefox since, well, since it was Phoenix, on Linux and more recently OS X, and I can count the number of crashes I have had on one hand. And in fact, I don't recall FF crashing at all in at least the last 3 years.
Or is this a feature exclusive to the Windows version that the rest of us don't get to enjoy?;-)
Seriously. "The setting to make the desktop usable as a desktop again."
I refer to when KDE4 was first released. It came with a default setting that let you do all sorts of arcane things with your desktop, but not use it as a place to drop files and whatnot. I later discovered there was a switch I could change to revert to more intuitive (for me, that is) behaviour.
Anyone who has used Linux since '95 or so will have a list of "features" implemented in ANY of the desktop environments that seemed idiotic at the time. Sometimes they really were, and we had to find ways around them; otherwise we just learned to live with them and move on.
I think I might have been mistaken when I wrote "~1997". It might have been a year or two later, but I remember occasionally being frustrated with my preferred Gnome suite, and finding that the KDE equivalents tended to run more smoothly. Apart from that, it comes down to how comfortable one feels with the interface, and there lies a pointless flamewar with which I can't be bothered.
Is the energy of mozilla better on improving browsers or office suites ?
Better stick to what it's good at. No point in reinventing the wheel.
But I draw the reader's attention to an entirely unsubstantiated quote from the submission, apropos Firefox:..."and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features."
What might those be? I would be the first to agree that Firefox is not always the quickest at rendering webpages, but that is easily cured by a few microseconds of patience. But as far as features are concerned, Firefox has no equal. You pick what features (extensions) are important to you, install them, and that's that.
I don't even understand what you're trying to do with this rather poor troll, apart from spewing regurgitated nonsense.
Nothing regurgitated about it. First-hand experience only. Fact is, at that time, KDE was a little more mature, and its apps were a bit more developed and didn't break as often. That doesn't mean I liked KDE (quite the opposite), but I try to be fair. Did you bother to read the rest of my post?
Why not just stick with what has made Ubuntu the most popular distribution of Linux.
Gnome != Ubuntu != Linux. I, for one, would be discontent if Gnome developers decided to focus their efforts towards Ubuntu to the exclusion of users of other distros.
Each group of developers can (have done, and will) come up with ideas which may not work so well for the user. The crappier ideas will fall by the wayside, as they should, while the less-crappy ones survive to be improved upon.
As a matter of interest, what do you consider to be so wrong with gnome-terminal? It behaves exactly like any other xterm (or TTY for that matter), with the addition of a few bells and whistles, which is all it was ever meant to do. Maybe I spent too long with punch-cards early in my career, but I fail to see what else you might want.
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Interesting. I'll make a point of checking that out next time I buy a disk drive. In my case, the MacBook in question is a hand-me-down, so I'm not in a position to bitch about Apple's shonky practices.
It would probably be quieter and less messy, though.
Seriously. This programmer (I use the term loosely) has problems with expression? If this is the case, he needs to go back to school and try learning assembly or fortran programming. Any program worth writing can be coded in fortran, and if it can't be coded in assembler, then it can't be done at all.
If he really wants to go into creative writing, we might remind him that the 26 letters of the alphabet were good enough for Shakespeare.
And, of course, what Orwell forgot to say is that once you have lost everything, you have nothing left to lose by fighting against such repression.
Years ago, I knew an anthropologist who had spent months in the jungles of Cambodia, and hadn't had much in the way of access to washing facilities. When I picked him up from the airport here in Perth (W. Australia), I had to wait a while.
Turned out that he had been given a grilling by the Customs goons, and they had strip-searched him. However, one of them took just a sniff of his shoes, looked at his colleague and said "if that's what these things smell like, there's no way I'm looking up this guy's ass".
Exactly. It's not exactly hard to download VLC from its home site. I now use VLC exclusively on my MacBook for playing video media - much easier for those of us living in Australia, with DVDs obtained from the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
Apple, of course, offers you a limited number of times you can change the region of your DVD device, but VLC just ignores the region setting altogether. As far as I'm concerned, I've paid for legitimate media, the artists involved get their royalties, so Apple has no business standing in the way of my using said media.
Excrement! Well posted, Mr. AC. I would mod you up, but I've already posted here...
It's a pretty sad indictment of our system that the best that we can hope for is a government that is incapable of governing. I often fantasise that the world is ready for anarchy, but of course the corporations and Big Money would never stand for that, and would quickly start making their own "justice".
I can't supply an answer about the Geneva conventions, but Australia does indeed have a long and well-documented history of incarcerating people in mental institutions with no judicial oversight. The situation might be better in the US (certain novels notwithstanding), but Australia's record is pretty grisly.
...for an Australian government of any stripe to take a bad idea from another country and repeat it here, as if it'll somehow work out all right this time. Nobody ever learns from anyone else's mistakes - which is probably why history keeps repeating itself.
Back when Firefox was alpha and called Phoenix, my preferred browser was its ancestor, the original Mozilla. If you did your own builds and left out Communicator and all the other stuff that made it huge and unwieldy, it kicked Phoenix' butt in every way.
Eventually, of course, by the time support for Mozilla fell away, the (by then) bulkier Firefox was well and truly established.
A bit scary, indeed, but a bit of duct tape over the camera lens is always safest. Not that that will stop anyone hearing your moans... ;-P
I am not exaggerating even slightly, but then I use Flashblock fairly ruthlessly. Most Flash shows are just advertisements. And pages I hit that are entirely built on Flash usually get passed by unless I have a compelling reason to see their content.
I also make a point of closing the browser from time to time, just as a matter of common-sense. Leaving it running for days or weeks with bazillions of tabs open is just asking for trouble, yet I see lots of people do exactly that all the time. Giving the machine a chance to do garbage-collection at a moment convenient to you is likely to forestall the inconvenience of a crash.
However, you could be right about the 64/32-bit crossover. My Linux boxes are still running in 32-bit mode, since I don't have any pressing reason to change that. And the versions for my MacBook are still built in 32-bit mode for now.
Maybe the problem is that we don't have a good terms to differentiate between appropriate reuse of one's own writing, and unnaceptable reuse.
It always used to make me chuckle to find textbook references cited as "personal observation" in journal articles written by one of my university's professors. Most scientists can't get away with that. But if you are as much of a bigwig in your field as he was, I guess it's not as arrogant as it might seem.
Interesting. I have lots of Penguins from that period, but have never seen such adverts. Are these titles from a single genre? (Examples?)
Here in Australia, I still get hard copy of both white-pages and yellow-pages delivered, despite the fact that I haven't had a Telstra phone for over 15 years, and always use the online directory. There doesn't seem to be any way to make them stop. In fact, I had such a delivery just yesterday: yet another large pile of paper that went straight into the recycle bin.
Well, if they do have a patent on this, at least they've had the decency to not use it. At least, I've never had a paperback novel with any advertising other than maybe on the inside cover or a few pages at the end. There, the advertising is at least out of the way of the body text.
True - but for the moment, at least, one can occasionally find texts for which copyright has been snatched by US publishing pirates by looking at Gutenberg sites under different jurisdictions. A case in point is Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: copyright to Rosenblum in the US until at least 2044, but public domain in Australia (and probably Canada).
...so that a crashing tab does not bring down the others...
;-)
I have seen this posted so many times, but nobody ever explains how they managed to crash their browser in the first place. I've been running Firefox since, well, since it was Phoenix, on Linux and more recently OS X, and I can count the number of crashes I have had on one hand. And in fact, I don't recall FF crashing at all in at least the last 3 years.
Or is this a feature exclusive to the Windows version that the rest of us don't get to enjoy?
Seriously. "The setting to make the desktop usable as a desktop again."
I refer to when KDE4 was first released. It came with a default setting that let you do all sorts of arcane things with your desktop, but not use it as a place to drop files and whatnot. I later discovered there was a switch I could change to revert to more intuitive (for me, that is) behaviour.
Anyone who has used Linux since '95 or so will have a list of "features" implemented in ANY of the desktop environments that seemed idiotic at the time. Sometimes they really were, and we had to find ways around them; otherwise we just learned to live with them and move on.
I think I might have been mistaken when I wrote "~1997". It might have been a year or two later, but I remember occasionally being frustrated with my preferred Gnome suite, and finding that the KDE equivalents tended to run more smoothly. Apart from that, it comes down to how comfortable one feels with the interface, and there lies a pointless flamewar with which I can't be bothered.
Is the energy of mozilla better on improving browsers or office suites ?
..."and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features."
Better stick to what it's good at. No point in reinventing the wheel.
But I draw the reader's attention to an entirely unsubstantiated quote from the submission, apropos Firefox:
What might those be? I would be the first to agree that Firefox is not always the quickest at rendering webpages, but that is easily cured by a few microseconds of patience. But as far as features are concerned, Firefox has no equal. You pick what features (extensions) are important to you, install them, and that's that.
I don't even understand what you're trying to do with this rather poor troll, apart from spewing regurgitated nonsense.
Nothing regurgitated about it. First-hand experience only. Fact is, at that time, KDE was a little more mature, and its apps were a bit more developed and didn't break as often. That doesn't mean I liked KDE (quite the opposite), but I try to be fair. Did you bother to read the rest of my post?
Why not just stick with what has made Ubuntu the most popular distribution of Linux.
Gnome != Ubuntu != Linux. I, for one, would be discontent if Gnome developers decided to focus their efforts towards Ubuntu to the exclusion of users of other distros.
Each group of developers can (have done, and will) come up with ideas which may not work so well for the user. The crappier ideas will fall by the wayside, as they should, while the less-crappy ones survive to be improved upon.
Gnome is not an operating system.
As a matter of interest, what do you consider to be so wrong with gnome-terminal? It behaves exactly like any other xterm (or TTY for that matter), with the addition of a few bells and whistles, which is all it was ever meant to do. Maybe I spent too long with punch-cards early in my career, but I fail to see what else you might want.