Yes, and if this is a codex then I positively guarantee it dates to A.D. something, *not* something B.C. Books from that era were scrolls, or individual pages.
And I thought the oldest still-extant text at this point was either the Leningrad Codex (if you're talking about a complete text) or else some of the Dead Sea Scrolls (if bits and pieces will do).
Try a geographic breakdown. Here's a hint: it correlates *strongly* with population density. A very disproportionately high percentage of the crime occurs in the urban areas. Something like 90% of the crime, and 99% of violent crime, in the big urban areas that house about 40% of the population.
I have been wishing for years that someone would do Commander Keen in 3D, with all of the vertically-oriented cartooney pogo-stick-and-floating-platform glory of the original, but in a vertigo-inducing new 3D version, complete with giant slugs and bright green yargs and so forth. If Apogee is coming back, now there's real hope that it could actually happen!
> (assuming you would like to travel in France, and who wouldn't).
I wouldn't. Western Europe in general is *high* on the list of places I have no interest in going.
I *would* be interested in learning German or French, but only from a linguistics perspective, because of their relationship with English. If I was going to actually travel overseas, I'd want to go somewhere much more culturally different from here -- preferably either third-world or Eastern, if not both.
> Does Word have a greater Gross National Productivity Cost than Excel? It seems like they are > about the same, except Excel might be worse since it is more likely to cause collateral damage > (bad business decisions because the numbers were crunched wrong).
You're forgetting that about five times as many people *use* (err, attempt to use) Word, as compared to Excel.
> But there is software that has an even higher GNPC than either of these two: PowerPoint.
Agreed. PowerPoint may be the most gratuitously *superfluous* software ever developed. I think it wastes more time than Solitaire and MineSweeper combined.
Yes, but the real breakthrough in computing, which I'm sure will be coming any day now, is the computed COME FROM statement, wherein the COME FROM statement gives a *formula* (which can include arithmetic, variables, function calls,...) for calculating the line number to COME FROM. When combined with the ability to COME FROM a single line to multiple other lines, as found in Threaded INTERCAL, this becomes very powerful. Especially when you can toggle it with ABSTAIN and REINSTATE, either globally (PLEASE DO ABSTAIN FROM COMING FROM) or on a per-line basis.
Okay, yeah, but that's regular INTERCAL, and 99 bottles of beer is a non-threaded application, so we're really not even talking about the same thing. (Have you seen Threaded INTERCAL? It's totally over the top.)
Actually, ActiveX controls that are installed at system deployment time by a network administrator are not really the problem. Microsoft could probably continue to allow those. The security problem was always the fact that ActiveX controls could be _installed_ as part of the normal browsing process. IE5 and 6 pretty much completely abdicated any pretense of security by doing this.
You want a relatively low contrast (but not so low it's hard to distinguish), with the darker color in the background and the lighter one in the foreground. I like to keep the background to #294D4A, and the main foreground color to #FFE6BC. Make sure your refresh rate is at least 80Hz, and make sure there are no fluorescent lights in the room to create flicker.
Oh, and set your font size large enough, and the font face to a suitable setting, so that you can comfortably see the difference between any two characters easily at a glance, then increase the font size by two more points. If your monitor's smaller than 18-inch viewable, replace it. Avoid widescreen, because for code the amount of vertical space is more critical; you need enough lines that you can fit a whole function on the screen at once, preferably two.
I'd just place it (open) in a well-ventilated area for a few hours and let it go at that.
Influenza doesn't *do* anything unless it's in a host. By itself, on its own, without a host, it's completely innocuous. You've already had this strain of it, so it won't infect you. What exactly are you worried about?
Are you comfortable troubleshooting computers, (re)installing operating systems and applications, setting up networks, unsticking printers, helping to train users for simple tasks, and maybe a bit of webmastering?
A lot of places are looking for people like that -- somebody to be the go-to person for everything computer related. The job title varies, anything from "Network Administrator" to "Technology Coordinator".
Usually the places that want to hire this kind of general-purpose computer geek are smaller outfits, places in the 5-50 employee range, that don't have an entire IT department. The boss or their assistant often gets stuck *trying* to do the computer stuff, isn't qualified, doesn't like it, and would *love* to shove it off on an "expert". (Non-IT people use the word "expert" extremely loosely when they're talking about computer geeks.)
For example, I can tell you with confidence that a lot of public libraries are eager to hire such a person. On the system-administrators-only mailing list related to the library-automation software we use here, anyone who can put together a SELECT statement in SQL to pull six fields out of the database for a report is held in awe, I kid you not. Many libraries despair of ever being able to hire someone like that.
You'll probably end up doing a bit of small-scale programming, in practically *any* IT job, certainly in any systems or network administration job. A simple CGI script here, an overnight backup script there, whatever. You know, glue code. It kind of goes with the territory. If you want to work with computers, doing anything other than data entry, you'll probably need to do a little programming (or at least scripting, if there's a difference) from time to time. Writing three lines of code once can save you from repeating a simple but tedious task every day/week/month for *years*, so it would be kind of foolish to never want to do any programming at all.
But there are a lot of sysadmin/network-admin jobs with not much programming, nothing very difficult, large, or complicated, and certainly nothing you would call application development. You might never EVER have to touch a traditional compiled app-development language (C, C++, etc.).
I've been working in this line of work since 2000, and so far I found myself writing *one* short function in C, one time, some eight or ten lines of code, to adapt a piece of existing open-source software just slightly to meet our needs. One time. I do write glue code in Perl somewhat more often, and web stuff, including a bit of Javascript here and there... but honestly it's such a small part of my job, I literally do more programming at home, for my own personal use. Furthermore, I could get by with doing even less programming at work, if I didn't like doing it.
> Sadly,we might as well enjoy it,as they won't be getting anything else as Public Domain is dead. They will > simply keep extending the copyrights when it looks like something worth having is close to expiration.
This is music we're talking about. The stuff that's really worth having was composed more than two and a half centuries ago. There are a lot of _performances_ and _recordings_ under copyright, but the music itself has always been in the public domain. There are a *small* handful of exceptions, good music written in the modern era after copyright law came into existence, but we're talking about eight or ten composers here, none of them very prolific, and none of them in the top twenty. Excluding their work is just not that big a loss, compared to what else is available.
Copyright law is a much bigger problem for other things, such as books -- *especially* non-fiction books, where there are only a handful of subjects timeless enough for a hundred-year-old book to be very worthwhile (except for humor value -- hundred-year-old medical books are amusing, sure, but you wouldn't want to try to learn about medicine from them). Software is another trouble area, albeit mostly because of proprietary data formats.
My youngest sister used to text message while driving. Then she had an accident, while texting. So now she doesn't do that anymore. Fortunately nobody was seriously hurt, but her car was totalled.
Yeah, but Bill Gates would never ask that question. He's so deep in Microsoft think, he actually thinks NTFS is *better* than a Unix-style inode-based filesystem. (That's the main reason you have to reboot when you install software on Windows: because NTFS doesn't have Unix-style inodes.)
I could get past that one, but there are so many other things in the memo that don't fit with Gates as author. The whole style of the piece doesn't sound like Gates at all. I *can* see Gates writing a scathing memo in 2003 about various Windows issues that should have been solved in XP and weren't. I *can't* see him writing this specific memo, however. From the wording right down to the specific things he chooses to complain about, it's not him.
So leave the phone on the outside but put the torrent client (or whatever) behind the traffic-control box. A Linux router should be sufficiently high-availability for BitTorrent purposes, I would think, and if it fails, the VOIP keeps going.
The real trouble I forsee is trying to shape or prioritize the bandwidth of a bottleneck last-mile link when you only control one end of the link. You can delay or drop low-priority outgoing packets, but by the time you see the downstream packets it's too late to do anything about them -- they've already had whatever effect on the network they're going to have. Somebody clicks on a torrent with a lot of seeders (say, a Debian release that came out several days ago), and suddenly you've got a veritable deluge of downstream packets coming in, even though very few upstream packets are going out. It wouldn't hurt anything to delay the BitTorrent packets -- they're not really sensitive to latency -- but it also won't do any good once they've already passed the bottleneck.
You really need to do coordinated shaping on both ends of the link, but I'm not aware of any consumer-level ISPs who provide that sort of thing to ordinary home users.
IE is bundled on most new computers by most OEMs (all of the major OEMs except Apple, plus greater than 90% of the smaller OEMs as well), so the overwhelming majority people who never install anything on their own (either because they just don't care, don't want to bother, are afraid they don't know how, whatever) will be using whatever version of IE came pre-installed. And they'll be using it as long as they own the computer.
Automatic updates could help somewhat, but IE7, besides not even being available for older systems (notably, Win98), requires at least one update that requires user cooperation to install ("verification" or somesuch, I forget the exact name of it). Some OEM installs, especially ones from before the inclusion of SP2, don't turn on the auto updates by default. Add to that how long it takes to download some of the larger updates (especially the service packs) via dialup, and the fact that a lot of people don't leave their computers turned on for that long at a time, and you've got a recipe for not everyone being updated, no matter how long you wait. Not to mention that doing a reinstall, which Windows systems typically require every three to five years, puts you back where you were.
Unless something significant happens to change all that, I wouldn't expect IE to _ever_ get 90% of their userbase on the latest version. Frankly, two-thirds in under two years is doing pretty good, under the circumstances, a fact I'd attribute at least partly to how badly behind the times IE6 had become, to the point where it's borderline unusable on the modern web.
> Maybe you think this is okay because some oceans have committed terrorist acts like hurricanes > and tsunamis, but it would be bigoted of us to condemn all oceans for the actions of a few.
Would it be alright if they only do surveillance on the oceans that *are* known to have been responsible for hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, and icebergs that sink ships?
Most of the systems don't have DVD drives. A number of them don't have CD burners, only CD-ROM.
We get 3-5 new computers a year, and sometimes instead of replacing old ones some of them have to go to whole new stations. You know that "three-year lifespan" large corporations use? Forget about that. We just got rid of our last Windows 98 systems this year. We still have at least two of the same printers we had when I was hired in 2000.
I know, the time I spend on the maintenance costs us more than the computers are worth. But it's "different money". (Accountants don't think like computer geeks. I can't really explain it any better than that.)
> 1) It searches your bookmarks. If I wanted to go to a bookmark, > I'd have clicked on one. That's what they're for.
There probably should be a bookmarks search feature. (Didn't Navigator 4 used to have that?) A lot of us would never use it, but there are people out there who have *hundreds* of bookmarks. My mom, for instance, bookmarks things she only needs for a couple of days (e.g., specific auction listings on ebay) and then never bothers to clean out the old ones, ever. So finding anything in her bookmarks is... a pain.
Oh, wait, I see, there _is_ a bookmarks search, but you have to actually open up the bookmarks manager ("Organize Bookmarks") to see it. It probably should be a top-level entry under the Bookmarks menu.
However, I can't think of any reason to put the bookmarks search feature into the location bar. What kind of person would even look for it there?
> 2) It searches the middle of words.
I can think of reasons why that might be desirable, occasionally, although it's important that it favors matches at the start of a word first.
> 3) It breaks muscle memory. The results seem to occur in random order.
Location bar autocomplete has always been like that.
> 4) The font is too large, and only 12 entries are listed. > This makes it nearly useless. The old default was 25 entries.
The font size ideally should be a preference, but if you think the default is too large, you're clearly underestimating the number of people out there whose eyesight has gone down the tubes since they turned fifty. The location bar is very near the top of the screen, and while that's probably the only sane place for it to be, that makes normal-sized text up there totally illegible for people with bifocals. I swear I am not making this up: my mother routinely types URLs into Google rather than the location bar because the Google search box is an extra couple of inches lower on the screen, and as a result she can see it better. So then she gets the Google error message that says, basically, oops, you typed an address there instead of search terms, you probably didn't really want to search for that, maybe you just wanted to go there, and she clicks on the link in that error message to go to the site. It's an extra step, but she insists it's easier.
My conclusion is that larger default font sizes in the location bar and similar places (menus...) would be a big usability win for people with poor eyesight.
I don't really understand *why* the top of the screen is harder to see than the middle. (My vision is fine, except that I'm hypersensitive to bright lights.)
> 5) It doesn't seem to take into account website home pages. Compared > to FF2, this algorithm puts a whole heap of crappy leaf pages before > the root of a site. The reason for this is probably that the leaf > pages usually have more interesting titles.
Which behavior is more desirable probably depends on the type of site you typically frequent. For sites like slashdot, the home page is the one you would normally want, but that isn't necessarily the case for all sites. There are some fairly popular sites with COMPLETELY useless home pages, where the user might take three or four clicks to get from there to where they want to be. (Two of the big three free webmail providers spring immediately to mind here.)
Of course, either way you can bookmark any site that you visit regularly. (A significant minority doesn't know how to do bookmarks, but there's a limit on how much the UI should be warped to accommodate people who go out of their way to avoid learning new skills. At some point you have to let them go out of their way a little, e.g., let them type the whole thing every time if that's what they insist on doing. They're not hurting anyone but themselves.)
> 6) The rational
ITYM rationale. The two words are pronounced rather differently, and are different parts of speech, with different meanings (and, indee
I'm trying to do a reinstall on a workstation that was having problems, and when I went to install the browser extensions... the addons site is down. I bet this is why: everybody's upgrading to 3.0 and has to upgrade all their extensions and themes to match.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and if this is a codex then I positively guarantee it dates to A.D. something, *not* something B.C. Books from that era were scrolls, or individual pages.
And I thought the oldest still-extant text at this point was either the Leningrad Codex (if you're talking about a complete text) or else some of the Dead Sea Scrolls (if bits and pieces will do).
Is that going to be right after we finally achieve a paperless society, or right after? And when do I get my flying car?
Try a geographic breakdown. Here's a hint: it correlates *strongly* with population density. A very disproportionately high percentage of the crime occurs in the urban areas. Something like 90% of the crime, and 99% of violent crime, in the big urban areas that house about 40% of the population.
I have been wishing for years that someone would do Commander Keen in 3D, with all of the vertically-oriented cartooney pogo-stick-and-floating-platform glory of the original, but in a vertigo-inducing new 3D version, complete with giant slugs and bright green yargs and so forth. If Apogee is coming back, now there's real hope that it could actually happen!
Give them your PAUSE ID, and let them look your work up on the CPAN. HTH.HAND.
> (assuming you would like to travel in France, and who wouldn't).
I wouldn't. Western Europe in general is *high* on the list of places I have no interest in going.
I *would* be interested in learning German or French, but only from a linguistics perspective, because of their relationship with English. If I was going to actually travel overseas, I'd want to go somewhere much more culturally different from here -- preferably either third-world or Eastern, if not both.
> Does Word have a greater Gross National Productivity Cost than Excel? It seems like they are
> about the same, except Excel might be worse since it is more likely to cause collateral damage
> (bad business decisions because the numbers were crunched wrong).
You're forgetting that about five times as many people *use* (err, attempt to use) Word, as compared to Excel.
> But there is software that has an even higher GNPC than either of these two: PowerPoint.
Agreed. PowerPoint may be the most gratuitously *superfluous* software ever developed. I think it wastes more time than Solitaire and MineSweeper combined.
Yes, but the real breakthrough in computing, which I'm sure will be coming any day now, is the computed COME FROM statement, wherein the COME FROM statement gives a *formula* (which can include arithmetic, variables, function calls, ...) for calculating the line number to COME FROM. When combined with the ability to COME FROM a single line to multiple other lines, as found in Threaded INTERCAL, this becomes very powerful. Especially when you can toggle it with ABSTAIN and REINSTATE, either globally (PLEASE DO ABSTAIN FROM COMING FROM) or on a per-line basis.
Okay, yeah, but that's regular INTERCAL, and 99 bottles of beer is a non-threaded application, so we're really not even talking about the same thing. (Have you seen Threaded INTERCAL? It's totally over the top.)
Actually, ActiveX controls that are installed at system deployment time by a network administrator are not really the problem. Microsoft could probably continue to allow those. The security problem was always the fact that ActiveX controls could be _installed_ as part of the normal browsing process. IE5 and 6 pretty much completely abdicated any pretense of security by doing this.
Actually, I've seen the specs for Malbolge, and I still think Threaded INTERCAL is more ingenious and extreme.
You want a relatively low contrast (but not so low it's hard to distinguish), with the darker color in the background and the lighter one in the foreground. I like to keep the background to #294D4A, and the main foreground color to #FFE6BC. Make sure your refresh rate is at least 80Hz, and make sure there are no fluorescent lights in the room to create flicker.
Oh, and set your font size large enough, and the font face to a suitable setting, so that you can comfortably see the difference between any two characters easily at a glance, then increase the font size by two more points. If your monitor's smaller than 18-inch viewable, replace it. Avoid widescreen, because for code the amount of vertical space is more critical; you need enough lines that you can fit a whole function on the screen at once, preferably two.
I'd just place it (open) in a well-ventilated area for a few hours and let it go at that.
Influenza doesn't *do* anything unless it's in a host. By itself, on its own, without a host, it's completely innocuous. You've already had this strain of it, so it won't infect you. What exactly are you worried about?
Are you comfortable troubleshooting computers, (re)installing operating systems and applications, setting up networks, unsticking printers, helping to train users for simple tasks, and maybe a bit of webmastering?
A lot of places are looking for people like that -- somebody to be the go-to person for everything computer related. The job title varies, anything from "Network Administrator" to "Technology Coordinator".
Usually the places that want to hire this kind of general-purpose computer geek are smaller outfits, places in the 5-50 employee range, that don't have an entire IT department. The boss or their assistant often gets stuck *trying* to do the computer stuff, isn't qualified, doesn't like it, and would *love* to shove it off on an "expert". (Non-IT people use the word "expert" extremely loosely when they're talking about computer geeks.)
For example, I can tell you with confidence that a lot of public libraries are eager to hire such a person. On the system-administrators-only mailing list related to the library-automation software we use here, anyone who can put together a SELECT statement in SQL to pull six fields out of the database for a report is held in awe, I kid you not. Many libraries despair of ever being able to hire someone like that.
You'll probably end up doing a bit of small-scale programming, in practically *any* IT job, certainly in any systems or network administration job. A simple CGI script here, an overnight backup script there, whatever. You know, glue code. It kind of goes with the territory. If you want to work with computers, doing anything other than data entry, you'll probably need to do a little programming (or at least scripting, if there's a difference) from time to time. Writing three lines of code once can save you from repeating a simple but tedious task every day/week/month for *years*, so it would be kind of foolish to never want to do any programming at all.
But there are a lot of sysadmin/network-admin jobs with not much programming, nothing very difficult, large, or complicated, and certainly nothing you would call application development. You might never EVER have to touch a traditional compiled app-development language (C, C++, etc.).
I've been working in this line of work since 2000, and so far I found myself writing *one* short function in C, one time, some eight or ten lines of code, to adapt a piece of existing open-source software just slightly to meet our needs. One time. I do write glue code in Perl somewhat more often, and web stuff, including a bit of Javascript here and there... but honestly it's such a small part of my job, I literally do more programming at home, for my own personal use. Furthermore, I could get by with doing even less programming at work, if I didn't like doing it.
Sorry, this site only collects music.
> Sadly,we might as well enjoy it,as they won't be getting anything else as Public Domain is dead. They will
> simply keep extending the copyrights when it looks like something worth having is close to expiration.
This is music we're talking about. The stuff that's really worth having was composed more than two and a half centuries ago. There are a lot of _performances_ and _recordings_ under copyright, but the music itself has always been in the public domain. There are a *small* handful of exceptions, good music written in the modern era after copyright law came into existence, but we're talking about eight or ten composers here, none of them very prolific, and none of them in the top twenty. Excluding their work is just not that big a loss, compared to what else is available.
Copyright law is a much bigger problem for other things, such as books -- *especially* non-fiction books, where there are only a handful of subjects timeless enough for a hundred-year-old book to be very worthwhile (except for humor value -- hundred-year-old medical books are amusing, sure, but you wouldn't want to try to learn about medicine from them). Software is another trouble area, albeit mostly because of proprietary data formats.
My youngest sister used to text message while driving. Then she had an accident, while texting. So now she doesn't do that anymore. Fortunately nobody was seriously hurt, but her car was totalled.
Yeah, but Bill Gates would never ask that question. He's so deep in Microsoft think, he actually thinks NTFS is *better* than a Unix-style inode-based filesystem. (That's the main reason you have to reboot when you install software on Windows: because NTFS doesn't have Unix-style inodes.)
I could get past that one, but there are so many other things in the memo that don't fit with Gates as author. The whole style of the piece doesn't sound like Gates at all. I *can* see Gates writing a scathing memo in 2003 about various Windows issues that should have been solved in XP and weren't. I *can't* see him writing this specific memo, however. From the wording right down to the specific things he chooses to complain about, it's not him.
So leave the phone on the outside but put the torrent client (or whatever) behind the traffic-control box. A Linux router should be sufficiently high-availability for BitTorrent purposes, I would think, and if it fails, the VOIP keeps going.
The real trouble I forsee is trying to shape or prioritize the bandwidth of a bottleneck last-mile link when you only control one end of the link. You can delay or drop low-priority outgoing packets, but by the time you see the downstream packets it's too late to do anything about them -- they've already had whatever effect on the network they're going to have. Somebody clicks on a torrent with a lot of seeders (say, a Debian release that came out several days ago), and suddenly you've got a veritable deluge of downstream packets coming in, even though very few upstream packets are going out. It wouldn't hurt anything to delay the BitTorrent packets -- they're not really sensitive to latency -- but it also won't do any good once they've already passed the bottleneck.
You really need to do coordinated shaping on both ends of the link, but I'm not aware of any consumer-level ISPs who provide that sort of thing to ordinary home users.
Exactly. It's not a fair comparison.
IE is bundled on most new computers by most OEMs (all of the major OEMs except Apple, plus greater than 90% of the smaller OEMs as well), so the overwhelming majority people who never install anything on their own (either because they just don't care, don't want to bother, are afraid they don't know how, whatever) will be using whatever version of IE came pre-installed. And they'll be using it as long as they own the computer.
Automatic updates could help somewhat, but IE7, besides not even being available for older systems (notably, Win98), requires at least one update that requires user cooperation to install ("verification" or somesuch, I forget the exact name of it). Some OEM installs, especially ones from before the inclusion of SP2, don't turn on the auto updates by default. Add to that how long it takes to download some of the larger updates (especially the service packs) via dialup, and the fact that a lot of people don't leave their computers turned on for that long at a time, and you've got a recipe for not everyone being updated, no matter how long you wait. Not to mention that doing a reinstall, which Windows systems typically require every three to five years, puts you back where you were.
Unless something significant happens to change all that, I wouldn't expect IE to _ever_ get 90% of their userbase on the latest version. Frankly, two-thirds in under two years is doing pretty good, under the circumstances, a fact I'd attribute at least partly to how badly behind the times IE6 had become, to the point where it's borderline unusable on the modern web.
> Maybe you think this is okay because some oceans have committed terrorist acts like hurricanes
> and tsunamis, but it would be bigoted of us to condemn all oceans for the actions of a few.
Would it be alright if they only do surveillance on the oceans that *are* known to have been responsible for hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, and icebergs that sink ships?
Most of the systems don't have DVD drives. A number of them don't have CD burners, only CD-ROM.
We get 3-5 new computers a year, and sometimes instead of replacing old ones some of them have to go to whole new stations. You know that "three-year lifespan" large corporations use? Forget about that. We just got rid of our last Windows 98 systems this year. We still have at least two of the same printers we had when I was hired in 2000.
I know, the time I spend on the maintenance costs us more than the computers are worth. But it's "different money". (Accountants don't think like computer geeks. I can't really explain it any better than that.)
> 1) It searches your bookmarks. If I wanted to go to a bookmark,
> I'd have clicked on one. That's what they're for.
There probably should be a bookmarks search feature. (Didn't Navigator 4 used to have that?) A lot of us would never use it, but there are people out there who have *hundreds* of bookmarks. My mom, for instance, bookmarks things she only needs for a couple of days (e.g., specific auction listings on ebay) and then never bothers to clean out the old ones, ever. So finding anything in her bookmarks is... a pain.
Oh, wait, I see, there _is_ a bookmarks search, but you have to actually open up the bookmarks manager ("Organize Bookmarks") to see it. It probably should be a top-level entry under the Bookmarks menu.
However, I can't think of any reason to put the bookmarks search feature into the location bar. What kind of person would even look for it there?
> 2) It searches the middle of words.
I can think of reasons why that might be desirable, occasionally, although it's important that it favors matches at the start of a word first.
> 3) It breaks muscle memory. The results seem to occur in random order.
Location bar autocomplete has always been like that.
> 4) The font is too large, and only 12 entries are listed.
> This makes it nearly useless. The old default was 25 entries.
The font size ideally should be a preference, but if you think the default is too large, you're clearly underestimating the number of people out there whose eyesight has gone down the tubes since they turned fifty. The location bar is very near the top of the screen, and while that's probably the only sane place for it to be, that makes normal-sized text up there totally illegible for people with bifocals. I swear I am not making this up: my mother routinely types URLs into Google rather than the location bar because the Google search box is an extra couple of inches lower on the screen, and as a result she can see it better. So then she gets the Google error message that says, basically, oops, you typed an address there instead of search terms, you probably didn't really want to search for that, maybe you just wanted to go there, and she clicks on the link in that error message to go to the site. It's an extra step, but she insists it's easier.
My conclusion is that larger default font sizes in the location bar and similar places (menus...) would be a big usability win for people with poor eyesight.
I don't really understand *why* the top of the screen is harder to see than the middle. (My vision is fine, except that I'm hypersensitive to bright lights.)
> 5) It doesn't seem to take into account website home pages. Compared
> to FF2, this algorithm puts a whole heap of crappy leaf pages before
> the root of a site. The reason for this is probably that the leaf
> pages usually have more interesting titles.
Which behavior is more desirable probably depends on the type of site you typically frequent. For sites like slashdot, the home page is the one you would normally want, but that isn't necessarily the case for all sites. There are some fairly popular sites with COMPLETELY useless home pages, where the user might take three or four clicks to get from there to where they want to be. (Two of the big three free webmail providers spring immediately to mind here.)
Of course, either way you can bookmark any site that you visit regularly. (A significant minority doesn't know how to do bookmarks, but there's a limit on how much the UI should be warped to accommodate people who go out of their way to avoid learning new skills. At some point you have to let them go out of their way a little, e.g., let them type the whole thing every time if that's what they insist on doing. They're not hurting anyone but themselves.)
> 6) The rational
ITYM rationale. The two words are pronounced rather differently, and are different parts of speech, with different meanings (and, indee
I'm trying to do a reinstall on a workstation that was having problems, and when I went to install the browser extensions... the addons site is down. I bet this is why: everybody's upgrading to 3.0 and has to upgrade all their extensions and themes to match.
Well, addons.mozilla.org appears to be down already, so apparently not enough.