> you have an incomprehensibly low opinion of most end-users.
If you were to perhaps spend some *time* around end users -- people who don't have a computer geek in their immediate family -- you might comprehend better. A lot of computer geeks could really stand to pay a bit more attention to end users and their needs. UI designers are getting better at this, but you still catch people like Gerv Markham making inane comments like "Really? Do people type out entire URLs because copy and paste is beyond them?" in usenet threads about UI design. I don't think 30% of the population around here knows how to copy and paste, and a lot of people who theoretically know how (like my mom -- because I keep showing it to her) usually don't, because it would take longer to stop and remember how than to just retype the thing. (This latter category only applies to people old enough to have learned to type on something other than a computer, so the phenomenon will probably disappear altogether when that generation dies out; but, there will still be people who copy and paste and people who don't. I think we'll always have that.)
And it isn't about having a low opinion of people as such. It's about understanding the implications of the fact that most people's priorities don't place a high value on learning about computers. (Some people's priorities *do* place a higher value on that, of course. I call those people "power users", "technical users", or "developers", depending what level they're at.)
All I want out of a new Linux PC is fully-working, fully-standard hardware. So that if I try to install my distro of choice, and something doesn't work out of the box, it's the distro's fault, and if I can't get it to work, it's either my fault or the distro's fault. For instance, at home my main workstation runs FreeBSD. I can't get the scrollmouse to work as such. (It works as a mouse, and depressing the scroll button gives me middle click as usual, but the actual scrolling feature does not work.) I suspect that it is possible to get it to work, but I don't understand the BSD way of dealing with mouse hardware well enough to set it up right. The fact that it doesn't get detected and work OOTB is because FreeBSD lags behind the Linux world in terms of automagical hardware detection. Currently I'm willing to live with this minor. If I weren't, I'd either hit the fora and find out how to make it work, or I'd use another OS. The thing is, the mouse is a perfectly normal standard scroll mouse. The manufacturer is not at fault here, and I know it. There's nothing wrong, or proprietary, about the mouse.
That's all I want. Really. (Well, one other thing: by preference I want hardware that uses technologies that have been around the block a couple of times, so that software people have had a chance to debug their support for it. PCI and IDE, for instance. Let the gamers field-test the new bleeding edge stuff, I just want something reliable.)
It doesn't matter whether the distro they pre-install is the one I plan to use. It's not like installing operating systems is very hard these days.
There's nothing new about this. People have been saying for thousands of years that the universe was created ex nihilo. Hawking is just a little late jumping on the bandwagon;-)
> Yes, for example, could we get tabs out of the core?
I think what you want is a completely different web browser. Tabs are such a fundamental feature of the interface, IMO, that if you don't want them, you don't really want Firefox. (I won't presume to tell you which one you do want, but there are a number of options.)
The password manager can be easily turned off (and I do that when I deploy it on public stations at the library where I work).
But turning things like tabbed browsing and password management into extensions is, IMO, heading in the wrong direction. You'd end up with practically *nothing* in core. Bookmarks? Some people don't use them. HTTPS? Some people don't use it. Download manager? A *lot* of people don't use it. The find-in-page feature is another one a lot of people don't use (or even know about), so that could be an extension too. Home button? I've seen people argue for its removal, so maybe it should be an extension. Indeed, some people use all keyboard shortcuts, and hide the toolbars altogether, so maybe the toolbars should be an extension... In short, that way lies madness.
Installation is bad enough now, what with all the extensions I already have to install to get a usable browser. If I had to install extensions for each and every little basic feature, it would take hours to hunt down everything I need. (Hmm... RenderXML, RenderHTML4, ParseCSS, ShowGIF, ShowJPEG, ShowPNG,... do I need ShowSVG too? Then I want the UnderlineHyperlinks extension and FormPOST and Scrollbars and StatusBar and MenuBar...) At some point the browser makers have to draw a line and say, "This is useful enough to a large enough percentage of the userbase that we're going to include it." You can argue about _how_ useful it needs to be and _what_ percentage of the userbase needs to find it useful, and by setting different values you'll end up with either a pretty slim browser or else a pretty full-featured one, but making *everything* an extension is not practical.
I mean, if you really want practically no features at all, just go use Lynx and leave Firefox alone. Even Lynx has some features that not everyone uses.
But that's not what you want. It's not what (hardly) anyone wants. We want something with enough features that we can actually, you know, *use* it. And not everyone wants exactly the same features, so yeah, that means in addition to the ones you want there are going to be some you don't care about. There are always going to be some features that not everyone uses. That's the nature of software.
If I'd had to limit myself to ten extensions, I never would have switched to Firefox (from the Mozilla suite) in the first place. I had to install a solid dozen extensions just to get back the features that *should* have been included out of the box, but weren't -- features that Mozilla 1.x had, and in one case a feature that even Navigotor 3 and 4 had. Firefox was so stripped down, I would never had been able to switch to it if not for these extensions. Then if I wanted to actually add any cool new functionality (e.g., Greasemonkey), that's extra.
The new edit-friendly about:config has helped a bit with this: several of the extensions that I used to rely on were for adding things into the preferences dialog that *needed* to be configurable (e.g., whether to loop GIF animations forever and ever or stop them after one play-through), and these days I just use about:config for that stuff. But still, I don't know if I could get my list of must-have extensions down to ten. I definitely can't live without DOM Inspector and Web Developer. I suppose if you're not a web developer you might not need them, but for me they're essential. The stylesheet switcher and user-agent switcher are also quite critically important. I guess I could live without ColorZilla in a pinch, though it's quite handy, but without Copy Plain Text I'd be pulling my hair out in notime flat, and I could do without FlashBlock only if the Flash plugin were not installed at all. The Gmail Notifier is convenient, but I could survive without it at a pinch, but History Menu ought to just be standard, and HashColouredTabs is really important too. Greasemonkey is another one that ought to be built-in these days: there are several user scripts I don't want to surf the web without. Image Zoom and Page Zoom ought to be built in functionality, and I definitely am not willing to do without Nuke Anything Enhanced. (I particularly like the "remove selection" feature. That's really a must-have for sure.) I guess I could live without Platypus, but it sure is nice to have. SubmitToTab ought to be standard. So should RefreshBlocker. Oops, I think I'm well over ten.
Installing a lot of extensions is a hazard inherent to using Firefox, as far as I'm concerned. If I couldn't have my extensions, I'd be switching to another browser, *fast*.
I do block popups (whether they are ads or not, and whether they result from a user action or not -- basically anything that the website wants to open in a separate window for any reason is blocked, period), and I limit GIF animations to one playthrough (no repeats), and I use FlashBlock (if I even have Flash installed, which I frequently don't, because even setting aside advertisements, most of what it's used for is far more annoying than the "get the plugin" placeholder you see if it's not installed). And Javascript is not allowed to dork around in non-page-content areas, such as the statusbar. (I used to surf with Javascript disabled entirely, until I discovered capability policies.) Oh, and I haven't surfed the web with page colors enabled since the late nineties, except when I'm testing my own sites. (Everything shows in my system colors. Always.) And I frequently turn off page fonts, too (so that everything uses the fonts I have chosen). And my web browser isn't generally set up to play sounds, either.
For me, the web is about information. Basically it's hypertext, with graphics, and file downloads. Stuff that gets in the way or distracts me is superfluous dross, and I treat it as such. Whether it's an advertisement or not.
So I don't block advertisements *as such*, but I do block some of the more annoying technologies that some advertisers like to use to distract me from reading the web pages I'm trying to read. (Advertisers aren't the only people who abuse these technologies. When I first started limiting looping GIF animations to one play-through, it wasn't because of adverts so much as those annoying email-me and page-under-construction animations. Yeah, you remember them. Blinky flashy banner adverts came along a few months later, but by then I'd already taken the hex editor to navigator.exe and changed the magic string so that the loop-forever flag wouldn't be recognized. These days of course we have an about:config entry for this.)
> They are shipped in a 'Clamshell/Blister Pack'. I dare anyone without specialized tools to access it.
There are at least three known ways to break into those things without the proper tools. You can use a soldering iron to cut away sections of the blister packing, or you can toss the thing in the freezer overnight and then smack it with a hammer, or you can run the thing through a transporter, and the blister packaging will be filtered out in the pattern buffers like any other threat to life (e.g., common viruses, unauthorized phasers and disruptors, etc).
> I don't understand how one can just casually expect their OS to not work.
Spend some more time around end users, and you will begin to understand it.
Tech geeks expect to be able to *fix* things when they go wrong, so that they *do* work. End users have no such expectation. They live in constant fear that if they click the wrong thing, their whole computer experience will become totally messed up. The reason they live in fear of this is because most of them have had it happen at one point or another. (Response when it does happen varies. Some people know a geek they can maybe get to take a look at it, so they try to get by for a few days or weeks until they can do this. Some don't, so they either try to live with the problem indefinitely, or they get desparate and try to fix it themselves, sometimes creating much worse problems in the process. Others try taking the computer into a store that sells computers, in hopes that the nice people there can fix it. A few computer stores actually *do* offer this service, but then again sometimes the user ends up buying a new computer, either on the spot when the store guys recommend that solution, or eventually when they can't find a place that'll fix the old one.)
A good example of this is the taskbar in Windows 95 and 98. Windows XP has it locked in place by default, but on Windows 95 and 98, it's not: you can just grab it and drag it to a different edge of the screen, or grab the edge and resize it so that it has a different amount of task list space. For power users, this is a useful thing. For end users, it is unexpected, disorienting, and even frightening. The problem is that while power users who inadvertently drag the thing to a different location will be able to figure out what they did, end users typically cannot. I've seen this happen to them on a number of occasions, and usually they fervently believe that all they did was some innocuous operation they've done a thousand times before (e.g., "All I did was click on Start"), only this time on a whim the system decided to redesign the UI on them. (I suspect that's why it's locked by default on XP. Power users can still unlock it and then move it, of course. On a side note, the difference between clicking and dragging is somewhat hazy to a lot of users, and many also don't understand that a specific portion of the mouse pointer is the part that actually matters, position-wise, so if at least half (any half) of the little arrow is over something for at least half the time the button is down, they think they're clicking on it. I'm not sure what UI designers could do about this, short of going to a one-pixel mouse pointer, and that's a cure worse than the disease by far.)
Granted, if the sleep mode in the OS just plain doesn't work right with certain hardware, that may be something the user can't really fix, so it's a slightly different thing from having things go wrong and repairing them. Nonetheless, if you've screwed up computers so that they don't work and been unable to fix them a few times, it's easy to imagine that you'd get used to expecting computers to just not work right sometimes.
> Ok, so back in 1810 when you graduated from college, maybe $75 was a lot of money. Today, > $75 buys you either: rent for a week, two books, one night out, or food for almost a week.
Several of my college books were over $75 individually. Very few of them were less than half that (new; of course the ones I was able to get used were typically rather less). Books were expensive. (This was back in the dark ages, before Wikitextbooks, when people still used NCSA Mosaic and, even, Gopher. Yes, I'm really that old. I've also used VMS.)
> You get $75 by either saving it up, or simply by working one extra nightshift at your part-time student job.
Anything you has saved up was taken into account by the financial aid department when they calculated how much of your tuition you could afford to pay. So it's gone. Student jobs don't have extra shifts. During the semester you get *at most* the number of hours the financial aid department says you can have, which was also taken into their calculations, so every dime has to go for tuition; otherwise, when the end of the semester gets close (about two weeks before finals), the business office will tell your professors not to let you into class because your bill isn't fully paid. I knew a guy who had this happen, because he foolishly spent some of his student job earnings on other things (probably food, but I don't recall exactly). Fortunately for him his parents were able to wire him some money and he was back in classes the next day, but it's nothing to play around with.
> Any student can afford $75.
You either went to a state college (where the costs are unnaturally low), ivy league (where all the students have unnaturally affluent parents who can actually afford to pay for their kids' college), or a community college (where the students don't have to pay room and board, just tuition). At any normal college, many of the students cannot afford $75 for anything that's not required for a class.
> Of course every student also has better things (beer) to do with their money
Beer? I think I know which of the above options apply to you. You went to a state college.
I don't care *how* much below retail price it is, I would never have been able to scrape together $75 for software when I was in college. The people in the financial aid department have this down to a science: they figure out *exactly* how much money you and your parents can possibly scrape together if you run the full gamut of funding sources, and they offer you *precisely* the amount of financial aid that makes it just *almost* possible for you to attend, so tantalizingly close to enough that you go ahead and sign up for classes.
Then you find out how much your books are, try to buy them used, and discover the publisher changed editions on half of them, so you scrape the bottom of the barrel getting the last of your books, and you've got about $10 left to get you through the semester. Your meals are covered by the room and board fees, so you figure if you don't buy anything else the $10 will just about stretch to cover doing your laundry in the coinfed machines in the dorm lounge. You'll have to let your car sit in the dorm parking lot all year for lack of gas, but you can walk around campus. I guess you'll make it.
Then a group of guys approaches you about buying a $7 dorm shirt, and you start calculating how many times you can get mom and dad to come pick you up, so you can get home for a visit and do laundry for free, without buying any gas. Then you start figuring out exactly how many times you can wear each article of clothing, and how many you have, and exactly how many weeks that means you can go without doing laundry. Can you make it from fall break to Christmas? That would save you almost two dollars in quarters...
There's no way that kind of budget will stretch to cover $75 for office software, no matter *how* much they say it's theoretically worth at retail. Okay, yeah, so 75 Australian dollars is less than $75, but still, it's not enough less to fit into a college student budget.
> > ***Maybe you don't recall IRQ conflicts or undocumented jumpers.*** > Was there some other kind of jumper?
Yeah, there were drive jumpers, which were documented on stickers affixed to the hard drives in such a position that in order to read them, you had to take the drive totally out of the drive bay.
Oh, wait, we still have that, at least for IDE drives.
Actually, it comes from eta oin shrdlu
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
You see, the etc hierarchy on Unix was the successor the etb hierarchy on Unics, which was named for the ETA configuration mechanism on Multics, which was named for ETA OIN SHRDLU. So, now you know.
You may be making things more complicated than they have to be by insisting on the absolute newest technology. Sometimes an older technology fits the situation better. For instance, if you just run some land lines down there, you can install regular old cordless phones. With the base-stations and the phones both in the sheltered area together, reception should be largely unaffected by the super-thick walls, and Bob is your uncle.
It's been years, so I doubt if the specific ones I have would still be on the market. I have a small one (a ten-in-one I think) that I got when I was in about third grade, and a somewhat larger one that I got when I was in about sixth or seventh grade I think. I haven't played with them in a good while either, but I'll tell you want I remember, in general: they're a lot of fun.
You do have to be diligent to go ahead and do all the projects in the book, even if some of them don't sound exciting and interesting. The reason is because each one is included for a reason, to demonstrate some principle. They start with simple concepts and work up, so if you skip, you'll miss and potentially not understand stuff. (I assume some kits have more built-in redundancy in this regard than others, though, and maybe with the larger kits you can afford to skip more than would have been the case with my relatively small kits.)
On the other hand, once you've built the stuff in the book, you can improvise a bit. I was able on a couple of occasions to combine two different projects from mine and make something the book didn't really tell you how to make as such, though I no longer remember all of the details. (This was in about 1989, so as you can imagine I may have forgotten some of the finer points ad interim.) It does stick in my head that the kit didn't have a microphone as such but the earphone could be used as an input, and the piezo buzzer as an output (albeit, not a very high-quality one). One supposes if I'd had several of each component, rather than one each of most of them, I'd have been able to do more advanced things like telephone-like two-way communication systems.
One of these kits may not fulfill all your dreams of being an electrical engineer, but IMO it *is* well worth having. Recommended. Get one.
> Kelvin himself was rather absolute in some of his pronouncements, like his > assertion that radio would never be more than a curiosity, and that > heavier-than-air flight was impossible.
Waitasec... are you telling me that the man didn't believe in the existence of birds?
> AND I use the Run As feature to launch browser windows as yet another different > nonadmin account. On the Linux host itself, I run firefox as a different user > from my main user account.
These are very useful precautions from a security perspective. I wish operating systems included features to make it more convenient to do things this way.
> I'd be more worried about Windows graphic driver exploits - graphics drivers seem > a bit shoddy- plus they are all about performance, not security. And currently > it's basically - Nvidia, ATI and Intel.
You've been getting your information about graphics cards from gamers, obviously. Gamers like to think of themselves as knowing a lot about computer hardware, but mostly they just know a lot about reading benchmark graphs and playing games.
> My photography site [...] isn't blocked! That either means
It means nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I've seen the numbers that the filtering companies all publish, boasting of how many sites they have categorized. The numbers look impressive only if you have absolutely no concept whatsoever of the size of the world or of the scope of the internet. 50 million URLs in 30 languages is a typical number, and bear in mind this is everything they've categorized, not just porn and such but also games, chat, education, ecommerce, and so forth. The *largest* number I've seen is Websense's 200 million URLs in 50 languages, still a *tiny* fraction of the internet. I don't have a recent figure for the number of websites on the internet, but I'm sure the number of registered domain names, let alone URLs, is so far beyond 200 million that there's no comparison. (Indeed, it's not particularly difficult to find a single word in the English language for which Google returns over a billion results, without resorting to trivial words like "the" and "of".) Furthermore, the filtering companies never say anything about the *currentness* of their lists, so I suppose a significant percentage of those 200 million URLs are 404 now anyway, or maybe don't even resolve.
Some of the filtering companies try to compensate for their inability to hire enough staff to build lists that large either by blocking entire IP ranges or by on-the-fly AI checking of URLs the first time they are encountered, to see if they should be blocked. Of course, these strategies lead to false positives, which is what the article is mostly about.
Frankly the only sane approach is to *supervise* the children while they are using the internet. You know, have an adult *watch* them. I suppose that's too difficult.
Or I suppose you could use whitelists. That's very limiting, and takes overblocking to the extreme, but it does actually *work*.
If they are seriously DETERMINED to get the overwhelming majority of people to adopt compact fluorescents as a replacement for incandescents, they could place an excise tax on the incandescents and raise it a bit each year or so until they cost half again as much per bulb as the CF ones, or maybe even double. That would be all you need to do to get most ordinary consumers to go with CF. Problem solved.
Outlawing incandescents altogether is using an axe to swat a fly. There are a number of different kinds of special situations in which gas-discharge lighting is for one reason or another really not an acceptable option, and for those situations incandescent is really the only reasonable way to go, and would be even if the bulbs cost twice as much as the CF ones. These situations are rare enough that they don't add up to enough energy waste to worry about at a national level, so you lose nothing significant by allowing the use of incandescent bulbs to go on in such cases.
Put the collected excise tax moneys into a fund designated for, umm, I don't know, subsidizing research into improved energy efficiency or something.
This sort of thing is exactly what excise taxes are *for*. It's why you tax gas: because you want fuel efficiency to be worth more to car buyers (and thus to car makers). (It was working in the eighties, but in the nineties people (and reviewers like Consumer Reports) started looking so much at safety ratings that fuel efficiency became almost a non-issue; if you want it to be a major concern again, raise the excise tax until gas prices quadruple or so, and it will be.) While you're at it you (theoretically) put the money into road repairs, but that's not the real point.
I'm glad I don't live in Australia. I don't mind if the price of incandescents goes up to make CFs more attractive, but I don't want them to be altogether unavailable. There are certain situations where I specifically want them, not because they're cheap, but because for certain things they're much better.
> Holding my cell phone at arm's length, it only sees me from the top of my head > to just above the bottom of my ribcage.
That might vary from one cellphone model to another.
> if you're holding the cell phone at arm's length, how are you going to sign > with two hands? If you need to set it down on a tripod or something
Upthread someone spoke of having another person hold it, but I would think you could just set it on a table or desk or bench or something, depending on where you are.
> is it really any more convenient than carrying around a TTY keyboard?
That would be my reservation. Cheap, flimsy, lightweight keyboards are inconvenient to use compared to my Avant Stellar, but they're certainly usable, and no more inconvenient to carry around than a thin textbook. Add an over-one-shoulder nylon bag, and it would be lighter and more convenient to carry than a lot of women's purses. Assuming there are cellphones that you can plug a keyboard like that into for text messaging purposes, I would think that really would be the way to go.
For added bonus points, if you carry a small PDA too, you could use the same keyboard in conjunction with that, and besides normal PDA functions you could use it for communicating with people who are physically present at your location and don't know sign language (as 90%+ of the population does not), by handing the keyboard back and forth for each half of the conversation, which would be less convenient than speech or signing but still significantly more convenient than pencil and paper, which is usually the choice you'd be left with otherwise. (Okay, so there's also sharades...)
IE is certainly not the worst piece of software ever written. It's not even the worst piece of software Microsoft has ever written (Outlook Express for instance has it totally outclassed in terms of overall badness), much less the worst overall (which dubious honor almost certainly belongs to one of those "resume writer" programs you could buy on floppy diskette at college bookstores during the late nineties).
It might reasonably be considered the worst current major web browser, though.
> I've got one site where Firefox accounts for 20% of visitors, second to IE at 70%, > and another where Firefox is #1 at 44% and IE is #2 at 40%.
Furthermore, neither of these is a particularly extreme example. It's not hard to find examples of sites where IE usage is over 95%. (Usually these are sites that have historically depended heavily on ActiveX for important parts of their functionality, but not always.) On the other end of the scale, the stats for catalog.galionlibrary.org are more than 75% Firefox. (This isn't entirely fair either, because every computer in the library, including six dedicated ones that can *only* access that catalog, have Firefox.) Sites directly related to browser issues can be even more skewed. Windows Update probably gets 99% IE or higher; whereas, things like Mozillazine and spreadfirefox.com and addons.mozilla.org would be expected to have abnormally high Firefox usage figures, due to the nature of what the site is.
Your IE/FF figures of 70/20 and 40/44 are actually plausible for (relatively) normal sites that will work properly in all the major browsers and don't actively promote or relate to any one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
> you have an incomprehensibly low opinion of most end-users.
If you were to perhaps spend some *time* around end users -- people who don't have a computer geek in their immediate family -- you might comprehend better. A lot of computer geeks could really stand to pay a bit more attention to end users and their needs. UI designers are getting better at this, but you still catch people like Gerv Markham making inane comments like "Really? Do people type out entire URLs because copy and paste is beyond them?" in usenet threads about UI design. I don't think 30% of the population around here knows how to copy and paste, and a lot of people who theoretically know how (like my mom -- because I keep showing it to her) usually don't, because it would take longer to stop and remember how than to just retype the thing. (This latter category only applies to people old enough to have learned to type on something other than a computer, so the phenomenon will probably disappear altogether when that generation dies out; but, there will still be people who copy and paste and people who don't. I think we'll always have that.)
And it isn't about having a low opinion of people as such. It's about understanding the implications of the fact that most people's priorities don't place a high value on learning about computers. (Some people's priorities *do* place a higher value on that, of course. I call those people "power users", "technical users", or "developers", depending what level they're at.)
> Nothing revolutionary in this release but definitely some nice new features, ...
Hey! None of that! This is Gnome. Features are verboten.
All I want out of a new Linux PC is fully-working, fully-standard hardware. So that if I try to install my distro of choice, and something doesn't work out of the box, it's the distro's fault, and if I can't get it to work, it's either my fault or the distro's fault. For instance, at home my main workstation runs FreeBSD. I can't get the scrollmouse to work as such. (It works as a mouse, and depressing the scroll button gives me middle click as usual, but the actual scrolling feature does not work.) I suspect that it is possible to get it to work, but I don't understand the BSD way of dealing with mouse hardware well enough to set it up right. The fact that it doesn't get detected and work OOTB is because FreeBSD lags behind the Linux world in terms of automagical hardware detection. Currently I'm willing to live with this minor. If I weren't, I'd either hit the fora and find out how to make it work, or I'd use another OS. The thing is, the mouse is a perfectly normal standard scroll mouse. The manufacturer is not at fault here, and I know it. There's nothing wrong, or proprietary, about the mouse.
That's all I want. Really. (Well, one other thing: by preference I want hardware that uses technologies that have been around the block a couple of times, so that software people have had a chance to debug their support for it. PCI and IDE, for instance. Let the gamers field-test the new bleeding edge stuff, I just want something reliable.)
It doesn't matter whether the distro they pre-install is the one I plan to use. It's not like installing operating systems is very hard these days.
There's nothing new about this. People have been saying for thousands of years that the universe was created ex nihilo. Hawking is just a little late jumping on the bandwagon ;-)
> Yes, for example, could we get tabs out of the core?
... do I need ShowSVG too? Then I want the UnderlineHyperlinks extension and FormPOST and Scrollbars and StatusBar and MenuBar...) At some point the browser makers have to draw a line and say, "This is useful enough to a large enough percentage of the userbase that we're going to include it." You can argue about _how_ useful it needs to be and _what_ percentage of the userbase needs to find it useful, and by setting different values you'll end up with either a pretty slim browser or else a pretty full-featured one, but making *everything* an extension is not practical.
I think what you want is a completely different web browser. Tabs are such a fundamental feature of the interface, IMO, that if you don't want them, you don't really want Firefox. (I won't presume to tell you which one you do want, but there are a number of options.)
The password manager can be easily turned off (and I do that when I deploy it on public stations at the library where I work).
But turning things like tabbed browsing and password management into extensions is, IMO, heading in the wrong direction. You'd end up with practically *nothing* in core. Bookmarks? Some people don't use them. HTTPS? Some people don't use it. Download manager? A *lot* of people don't use it. The find-in-page feature is another one a lot of people don't use (or even know about), so that could be an extension too. Home button? I've seen people argue for its removal, so maybe it should be an extension. Indeed, some people use all keyboard shortcuts, and hide the toolbars altogether, so maybe the toolbars should be an extension... In short, that way lies madness.
Installation is bad enough now, what with all the extensions I already have to install to get a usable browser. If I had to install extensions for each and every little basic feature, it would take hours to hunt down everything I need. (Hmm... RenderXML, RenderHTML4, ParseCSS, ShowGIF, ShowJPEG, ShowPNG,
I mean, if you really want practically no features at all, just go use Lynx and leave Firefox alone. Even Lynx has some features that not everyone uses.
But that's not what you want. It's not what (hardly) anyone wants. We want something with enough features that we can actually, you know, *use* it. And not everyone wants exactly the same features, so yeah, that means in addition to the ones you want there are going to be some you don't care about. There are always going to be some features that not everyone uses. That's the nature of software.
If I'd had to limit myself to ten extensions, I never would have switched to Firefox (from the Mozilla suite) in the first place. I had to install a solid dozen extensions just to get back the features that *should* have been included out of the box, but weren't -- features that Mozilla 1.x had, and in one case a feature that even Navigotor 3 and 4 had. Firefox was so stripped down, I would never had been able to switch to it if not for these extensions. Then if I wanted to actually add any cool new functionality (e.g., Greasemonkey), that's extra.
The new edit-friendly about:config has helped a bit with this: several of the extensions that I used to rely on were for adding things into the preferences dialog that *needed* to be configurable (e.g., whether to loop GIF animations forever and ever or stop them after one play-through), and these days I just use about:config for that stuff. But still, I don't know if I could get my list of must-have extensions down to ten. I definitely can't live without DOM Inspector and Web Developer. I suppose if you're not a web developer you might not need them, but for me they're essential. The stylesheet switcher and user-agent switcher are also quite critically important. I guess I could live without ColorZilla in a pinch, though it's quite handy, but without Copy Plain Text I'd be pulling my hair out in notime flat, and I could do without FlashBlock only if the Flash plugin were not installed at all. The Gmail Notifier is convenient, but I could survive without it at a pinch, but History Menu ought to just be standard, and HashColouredTabs is really important too. Greasemonkey is another one that ought to be built-in these days: there are several user scripts I don't want to surf the web without. Image Zoom and Page Zoom ought to be built in functionality, and I definitely am not willing to do without Nuke Anything Enhanced. (I particularly like the "remove selection" feature. That's really a must-have for sure.) I guess I could live without Platypus, but it sure is nice to have. SubmitToTab ought to be standard. So should RefreshBlocker. Oops, I think I'm well over ten.
Installing a lot of extensions is a hazard inherent to using Firefox, as far as I'm concerned. If I couldn't have my extensions, I'd be switching to another browser, *fast*.
Yeah. I don't use adblock even.
I do block popups (whether they are ads or not, and whether they result from a user action or not -- basically anything that the website wants to open in a separate window for any reason is blocked, period), and I limit GIF animations to one playthrough (no repeats), and I use FlashBlock (if I even have Flash installed, which I frequently don't, because even setting aside advertisements, most of what it's used for is far more annoying than the "get the plugin" placeholder you see if it's not installed). And Javascript is not allowed to dork around in non-page-content areas, such as the statusbar. (I used to surf with Javascript disabled entirely, until I discovered capability policies.) Oh, and I haven't surfed the web with page colors enabled since the late nineties, except when I'm testing my own sites. (Everything shows in my system colors. Always.) And I frequently turn off page fonts, too (so that everything uses the fonts I have chosen). And my web browser isn't generally set up to play sounds, either.
For me, the web is about information. Basically it's hypertext, with graphics, and file downloads. Stuff that gets in the way or distracts me is superfluous dross, and I treat it as such. Whether it's an advertisement or not.
So I don't block advertisements *as such*, but I do block some of the more annoying technologies that some advertisers like to use to distract me from reading the web pages I'm trying to read. (Advertisers aren't the only people who abuse these technologies. When I first started limiting looping GIF animations to one play-through, it wasn't because of adverts so much as those annoying email-me and page-under-construction animations. Yeah, you remember them. Blinky flashy banner adverts came along a few months later, but by then I'd already taken the hex editor to navigator.exe and changed the magic string so that the loop-forever flag wouldn't be recognized. These days of course we have an about:config entry for this.)
> They are shipped in a 'Clamshell/Blister Pack'. I dare anyone without specialized tools to access it.
There are at least three known ways to break into those things without the proper tools. You can use a soldering iron to cut away sections of the blister packing, or you can toss the thing in the freezer overnight and then smack it with a hammer, or you can run the thing through a transporter, and the blister packaging will be filtered out in the pattern buffers like any other threat to life (e.g., common viruses, unauthorized phasers and disruptors, etc).
> I don't understand how one can just casually expect their OS to not work.
Spend some more time around end users, and you will begin to understand it.
Tech geeks expect to be able to *fix* things when they go wrong, so that they *do* work. End users have no such expectation. They live in constant fear that if they click the wrong thing, their whole computer experience will become totally messed up. The reason they live in fear of this is because most of them have had it happen at one point or another. (Response when it does happen varies. Some people know a geek they can maybe get to take a look at it, so they try to get by for a few days or weeks until they can do this. Some don't, so they either try to live with the problem indefinitely, or they get desparate and try to fix it themselves, sometimes creating much worse problems in the process. Others try taking the computer into a store that sells computers, in hopes that the nice people there can fix it. A few computer stores actually *do* offer this service, but then again sometimes the user ends up buying a new computer, either on the spot when the store guys recommend that solution, or eventually when they can't find a place that'll fix the old one.)
A good example of this is the taskbar in Windows 95 and 98. Windows XP has it locked in place by default, but on Windows 95 and 98, it's not: you can just grab it and drag it to a different edge of the screen, or grab the edge and resize it so that it has a different amount of task list space. For power users, this is a useful thing. For end users, it is unexpected, disorienting, and even frightening. The problem is that while power users who inadvertently drag the thing to a different location will be able to figure out what they did, end users typically cannot. I've seen this happen to them on a number of occasions, and usually they fervently believe that all they did was some innocuous operation they've done a thousand times before (e.g., "All I did was click on Start"), only this time on a whim the system decided to redesign the UI on them. (I suspect that's why it's locked by default on XP. Power users can still unlock it and then move it, of course. On a side note, the difference between clicking and dragging is somewhat hazy to a lot of users, and many also don't understand that a specific portion of the mouse pointer is the part that actually matters, position-wise, so if at least half (any half) of the little arrow is over something for at least half the time the button is down, they think they're clicking on it. I'm not sure what UI designers could do about this, short of going to a one-pixel mouse pointer, and that's a cure worse than the disease by far.)
Granted, if the sleep mode in the OS just plain doesn't work right with certain hardware, that may be something the user can't really fix, so it's a slightly different thing from having things go wrong and repairing them. Nonetheless, if you've screwed up computers so that they don't work and been unable to fix them a few times, it's easy to imagine that you'd get used to expecting computers to just not work right sometimes.
> Ok, so back in 1810 when you graduated from college, maybe $75 was a lot of money. Today,
> $75 buys you either: rent for a week, two books, one night out, or food for almost a week.
Several of my college books were over $75 individually. Very few of them were less than half that (new; of course the ones I was able to get used were typically rather less). Books were expensive. (This was back in the dark ages, before Wikitextbooks, when people still used NCSA Mosaic and, even, Gopher. Yes, I'm really that old. I've also used VMS.)
> You get $75 by either saving it up, or simply by working one extra nightshift at your part-time student job.
Anything you has saved up was taken into account by the financial aid department when they calculated how much of your tuition you could afford to pay. So it's gone. Student jobs don't have extra shifts. During the semester you get *at most* the number of hours the financial aid department says you can have, which was also taken into their calculations, so every dime has to go for tuition; otherwise, when the end of the semester gets close (about two weeks before finals), the business office will tell your professors not to let you into class because your bill isn't fully paid. I knew a guy who had this happen, because he foolishly spent some of his student job earnings on other things (probably food, but I don't recall exactly). Fortunately for him his parents were able to wire him some money and he was back in classes the next day, but it's nothing to play around with.
> Any student can afford $75.
You either went to a state college (where the costs are unnaturally low), ivy league (where all the students have unnaturally affluent parents who can actually afford to pay for their kids' college), or a community college (where the students don't have to pay room and board, just tuition). At any normal college, many of the students cannot afford $75 for anything that's not required for a class.
> Of course every student also has better things (beer) to do with their money
Beer? I think I know which of the above options apply to you. You went to a state college.
I don't care *how* much below retail price it is, I would never have been able to scrape together $75 for software when I was in college. The people in the financial aid department have this down to a science: they figure out *exactly* how much money you and your parents can possibly scrape together if you run the full gamut of funding sources, and they offer you *precisely* the amount of financial aid that makes it just *almost* possible for you to attend, so tantalizingly close to enough that you go ahead and sign up for classes.
Then you find out how much your books are, try to buy them used, and discover the publisher changed editions on half of them, so you scrape the bottom of the barrel getting the last of your books, and you've got about $10 left to get you through the semester. Your meals are covered by the room and board fees, so you figure if you don't buy anything else the $10 will just about stretch to cover doing your laundry in the coinfed machines in the dorm lounge. You'll have to let your car sit in the dorm parking lot all year for lack of gas, but you can walk around campus. I guess you'll make it.
Then a group of guys approaches you about buying a $7 dorm shirt, and you start calculating how many times you can get mom and dad to come pick you up, so you can get home for a visit and do laundry for free, without buying any gas. Then you start figuring out exactly how many times you can wear each article of clothing, and how many you have, and exactly how many weeks that means you can go without doing laundry. Can you make it from fall break to Christmas? That would save you almost two dollars in quarters...
There's no way that kind of budget will stretch to cover $75 for office software, no matter *how* much they say it's theoretically worth at retail. Okay, yeah, so 75 Australian dollars is less than $75, but still, it's not enough less to fit into a college student budget.
> > ***Maybe you don't recall IRQ conflicts or undocumented jumpers.***
> Was there some other kind of jumper?
Yeah, there were drive jumpers, which were documented on stickers affixed to the hard drives in such a position that in order to read them, you had to take the drive totally out of the drive bay.
Oh, wait, we still have that, at least for IDE drives.
You see, the etc hierarchy on Unix was the successor the etb hierarchy on Unics, which was named for the ETA configuration mechanism on Multics, which was named for ETA OIN SHRDLU. So, now you know.
You may be making things more complicated than they have to be by insisting on the absolute newest technology. Sometimes an older technology fits the situation better. For instance, if you just run some land lines down there, you can install regular old cordless phones. With the base-stations and the phones both in the sheltered area together, reception should be largely unaffected by the super-thick walls, and Bob is your uncle.
It's been years, so I doubt if the specific ones I have would still be on the market. I have a small one (a ten-in-one I think) that I got when I was in about third grade, and a somewhat larger one that I got when I was in about sixth or seventh grade I think. I haven't played with them in a good while either, but I'll tell you want I remember, in general: they're a lot of fun.
You do have to be diligent to go ahead and do all the projects in the book, even if some of them don't sound exciting and interesting. The reason is because each one is included for a reason, to demonstrate some principle. They start with simple concepts and work up, so if you skip, you'll miss and potentially not understand stuff. (I assume some kits have more built-in redundancy in this regard than others, though, and maybe with the larger kits you can afford to skip more than would have been the case with my relatively small kits.)
On the other hand, once you've built the stuff in the book, you can improvise a bit. I was able on a couple of occasions to combine two different projects from mine and make something the book didn't really tell you how to make as such, though I no longer remember all of the details. (This was in about 1989, so as you can imagine I may have forgotten some of the finer points ad interim.) It does stick in my head that the kit didn't have a microphone as such but the earphone could be used as an input, and the piezo buzzer as an output (albeit, not a very high-quality one). One supposes if I'd had several of each component, rather than one each of most of them, I'd have been able to do more advanced things like telephone-like two-way communication systems.
One of these kits may not fulfill all your dreams of being an electrical engineer, but IMO it *is* well worth having. Recommended. Get one.
> Kelvin himself was rather absolute in some of his pronouncements, like his
> assertion that radio would never be more than a curiosity, and that
> heavier-than-air flight was impossible.
Waitasec... are you telling me that the man didn't believe in the existence of birds?
> AND I use the Run As feature to launch browser windows as yet another different
> nonadmin account. On the Linux host itself, I run firefox as a different user
> from my main user account.
These are very useful precautions from a security perspective. I wish operating systems included features to make it more convenient to do things this way.
> I'd be more worried about Windows graphic driver exploits - graphics drivers seem
> a bit shoddy- plus they are all about performance, not security. And currently
> it's basically - Nvidia, ATI and Intel.
You've been getting your information about graphics cards from gamers, obviously. Gamers like to think of themselves as knowing a lot about computer hardware, but mostly they just know a lot about reading benchmark graphs and playing games.
*Good* graphics cards are made by Matrox.
> My photography site [...] isn't blocked! That either means
It means nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I've seen the numbers that the filtering companies all publish, boasting of how many sites they have categorized. The numbers look impressive only if you have absolutely no concept whatsoever of the size of the world or of the scope of the internet. 50 million URLs in 30 languages is a typical number, and bear in mind this is everything they've categorized, not just porn and such but also games, chat, education, ecommerce, and so forth. The *largest* number I've seen is Websense's 200 million URLs in 50 languages, still a *tiny* fraction of the internet. I don't have a recent figure for the number of websites on the internet, but I'm sure the number of registered domain names, let alone URLs, is so far beyond 200 million that there's no comparison. (Indeed, it's not particularly difficult to find a single word in the English language for which Google returns over a billion results, without resorting to trivial words like "the" and "of".) Furthermore, the filtering companies never say anything about the *currentness* of their lists, so I suppose a significant percentage of those 200 million URLs are 404 now anyway, or maybe don't even resolve.
Some of the filtering companies try to compensate for their inability to hire enough staff to build lists that large either by blocking entire IP ranges or by on-the-fly AI checking of URLs the first time they are encountered, to see if they should be blocked. Of course, these strategies lead to false positives, which is what the article is mostly about.
Frankly the only sane approach is to *supervise* the children while they are using the internet. You know, have an adult *watch* them. I suppose that's too difficult.
Or I suppose you could use whitelists. That's very limiting, and takes overblocking to the extreme, but it does actually *work*.
If they are seriously DETERMINED to get the overwhelming majority of people to adopt compact fluorescents as a replacement for incandescents, they could place an excise tax on the incandescents and raise it a bit each year or so until they cost half again as much per bulb as the CF ones, or maybe even double. That would be all you need to do to get most ordinary consumers to go with CF. Problem solved.
Outlawing incandescents altogether is using an axe to swat a fly. There are a number of different kinds of special situations in which gas-discharge lighting is for one reason or another really not an acceptable option, and for those situations incandescent is really the only reasonable way to go, and would be even if the bulbs cost twice as much as the CF ones. These situations are rare enough that they don't add up to enough energy waste to worry about at a national level, so you lose nothing significant by allowing the use of incandescent bulbs to go on in such cases.
Put the collected excise tax moneys into a fund designated for, umm, I don't know, subsidizing research into improved energy efficiency or something.
This sort of thing is exactly what excise taxes are *for*. It's why you tax gas: because you want fuel efficiency to be worth more to car buyers (and thus to car makers). (It was working in the eighties, but in the nineties people (and reviewers like Consumer Reports) started looking so much at safety ratings that fuel efficiency became almost a non-issue; if you want it to be a major concern again, raise the excise tax until gas prices quadruple or so, and it will be.) While you're at it you (theoretically) put the money into road repairs, but that's not the real point.
I'm glad I don't live in Australia. I don't mind if the price of incandescents goes up to make CFs more attractive, but I don't want them to be altogether unavailable. There are certain situations where I specifically want them, not because they're cheap, but because for certain things they're much better.
> Holding my cell phone at arm's length, it only sees me from the top of my head
> to just above the bottom of my ribcage.
That might vary from one cellphone model to another.
> if you're holding the cell phone at arm's length, how are you going to sign
> with two hands? If you need to set it down on a tripod or something
Upthread someone spoke of having another person hold it, but I would think you could just set it on a table or desk or bench or something, depending on where you are.
> is it really any more convenient than carrying around a TTY keyboard?
That would be my reservation. Cheap, flimsy, lightweight keyboards are inconvenient to use compared to my Avant Stellar, but they're certainly usable, and no more inconvenient to carry around than a thin textbook. Add an over-one-shoulder nylon bag, and it would be lighter and more convenient to carry than a lot of women's purses. Assuming there are cellphones that you can plug a keyboard like that into for text messaging purposes, I would think that really would be the way to go.
For added bonus points, if you carry a small PDA too, you could use the same keyboard in conjunction with that, and besides normal PDA functions you could use it for communicating with people who are physically present at your location and don't know sign language (as 90%+ of the population does not), by handing the keyboard back and forth for each half of the conversation, which would be less convenient than speech or signing but still significantly more convenient than pencil and paper, which is usually the choice you'd be left with otherwise. (Okay, so there's also sharades...)
> I live in NYC
Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be insensitive.
> Well, sure, just like dishwashing detergent kills HIV.
Sure, but Clorox cures both HIV *and* cancer!
> "To pull a Homer": To succeed despite idiocy
Oh, you mean like pulling a Maxwell Smart? (Kids these days. Sheesh.)
> IE, the worst piece of software ever invented.
IE is certainly not the worst piece of software ever written. It's not even the worst piece of software Microsoft has ever written (Outlook Express for instance has it totally outclassed in terms of overall badness), much less the worst overall (which dubious honor almost certainly belongs to one of those "resume writer" programs you could buy on floppy diskette at college bookstores during the late nineties).
It might reasonably be considered the worst current major web browser, though.
> I've got one site where Firefox accounts for 20% of visitors, second to IE at 70%,
> and another where Firefox is #1 at 44% and IE is #2 at 40%.
Furthermore, neither of these is a particularly extreme example. It's not hard to find examples of sites where IE usage is over 95%. (Usually these are sites that have historically depended heavily on ActiveX for important parts of their functionality, but not always.) On the other end of the scale, the stats for catalog.galionlibrary.org are more than 75% Firefox. (This isn't entirely fair either, because every computer in the library, including six dedicated ones that can *only* access that catalog, have Firefox.) Sites directly related to browser issues can be even more skewed. Windows Update probably gets 99% IE or higher; whereas, things like Mozillazine and spreadfirefox.com and addons.mozilla.org would be expected to have abnormally high Firefox usage figures, due to the nature of what the site is.
Your IE/FF figures of 70/20 and 40/44 are actually plausible for (relatively) normal sites that will work properly in all the major browsers and don't actively promote or relate to any one of them.