I've used Opera for 7 years on a daily basis, so I've come to develop immunity from websites that say they don't work with Opera:
If it doesn't work with my browser, then it's not for me. I just close the page and go somewhere else.
Really, most of the time it's the webdesigner's fault or lack of knowledge. This also says something about the content of the site.
Properly designed sites work with Opera. Ok, there's google calender, which complains that not all features are available with Opera, but all the other sites out there are not google calendar.
>I believe that I have a flaw in the basic way I think about numbers.
This is where the real problem lies, in your belief. You can't expect to learn math when you *know* you cannot learn it.
You are who you think (truly believe) you are.
You can't change who you are, unless you think differently about yourself. When you do, you change.
And of course, you aren't who you think (believe) you aren't, so you can't become who you want to become, unless you stop thinking that you are flawed/wrong, wired differently or have a different concentration of neurotransmitters inside your brain.
People have a flaw in their basic physiology - they don't have wings, yet everyone can fly for a few hundred bucks. Some people even walked on the moon!
So its not who you *are* that matters, its who you think you can (or cannot) become (do).
Math isn't a wild beast that cannot be tamed. Math is just a collection of abstract conventions and proofs, invented by men for men.
People tend to think that math exists in the universe and it's important and it governs the laws of nature, but in reality it's just the way people have come to relate to the world in abstract terms.
Nature doesn't have laws, people do, and we use the laws of numbers to approximate the reality that surrounds us.
Which makes math exceptionally interesting. Fellow Mathematicians will agree that math delivers great amounts of intellectual pleasure, some of which are profound and revelatory.
So go ahead, dive into the numbers with curiosity and wonder and you will discover an entirely new realm of thought in math. Don't be afraid of math and it will open itself up to you. It takes the first 'click' to understand its beauty.
Just stop thinking that you are flawed !
pupils who use interactive programs cannot remember stories they have just read because they are distracted by cartoons and sound effects
Which is what most sites look like today. Instead of cartoons, we have banners. For instance, pr0n sites. Those animated banners are really distracting, can hardly remember the stories the next day:).
The abundance of information on the Internet is changing us into becoming information discarders, not information seekers.
In the future we will be bombarded by much more information, which will attack our brains through all possible channels (audio, video, interactivity, real time communication).
We must adapt to this abundance, by learning how to filter out unnecessary information and get only what we need (which is a separate topic in itself).
Teaching pupils how to focus on the required parts of information may be more important than actually implanting knowledge into their brains.
So I guess it is no wonder that interactive learning programs fail to achieve results; they should be used to teach kids how to ignore unnecessary distractions and focus on the important facts.
Documentation is important, but it shouldn't be the only reason for hiring or firing programmers.
Many smart programmers tend to be ego-centric and/or megalomaniacal with a set of strange beliefs.
For instance, some exceptionally smart hackers think that good programmers should read the code, not the comments.
Although they don't write good comments, these are the guys you want to have working for you.
But then of course, it depends on the project.
Not all tasks require genius hackers with a personality disorder.
Laziness and selfishness are not determined just by how many comments programmers write, but by the quality of their job.
Just my opinion.
If you put it that way, everything is dying. I bet a buck that C# or Java will be dead as a rock in 20 years, just like C++ and most of the other programming languages we know today.
What we are noticing today is that programming languages alone just don't cut it anymore.
The software is so advanced, that standard language constructs and libraries are way too raw to be applied to something useful for the average application programmer.
Knowing frameworks, APIs and libraries is becoming a lot more important than using all the language paradigms and hidden tricks.
I think C++'s user base is splitting:
On one hand there are the library and API developers, for whom the standard and the language are wholy.
On the other hand, there are the application programmers, who care about the practical side of the language; they use it because it has advantages over other languages and has lots of libraries written for it.
My belief is that C++ is more alive today than ever. It is more powerful than ever. And it will be for a long time (in technology terms, indeed).
Of course, in 10 years time it won't be recognizable.
But it's wrong to say that C++ is dying.
The first thing you need to do before starting to code is learn how to find a suitable IDE without the help of millions.
After you manage to overcome this incredibly complex problem (by performing a google search),you can try to install the IDE by yourself. If you can do that, you can start hoping that the code you'll write will actually do something useful for humanity.
I mean, come on... Soon we'll see questions like "I want to program in machine code, which is the best MS-DOS?".
Do your research, try them out, decide for yourself, then write a review for others to see.
or is this discovery here to prove how primitive we still are?
Instead of thinking 'Wow, science has really evolved', look at the article from the 2900 perspective:
Two classmates:
- Hey, those apes in 2005 were celebrating the first quantum byte!
- Hehe, lol, gimme the ketchup! Yeah... We now have like...thousands of those... hehe.
Have you noticed the recent ad campaigns of the oil companies?
I've seen ads by Shell, BP, Chevron, Esso - all on the same topic - "We care about the environment and we are looking into better solutions".
Indeed, oil companies SHOULD and CAN invest in research for new, clean sources of energy, but in the short term, what these ads do is boost the company image and increase sales of... oil products that they sell.
I've worked in an oil company and know that clean fuel is cool, but nothing fills the bank accounts like a cool 100.000 metric tons oil tanker.
I know it's true, gaming is addictive.
I've been addicted to substances and then gaming.
And I have to admit that gaming had a much more destructive effect on my social life than substance addiction/abuse.
You see, when you smoke pot every day, you can still sort of perform your social activities (like have a radio show and do C++ programming), but when you play Counter Strike for 18 hours a day you just can't physically do anything else.
CS also puts you in a paranoid-aggressive state of mind and it becomes your everyday mood.
It was also quite hard to quit playing, because the better you get at your game, the more you want to prove yourself online. Like a sport, but a very addictive one.
For me, it was easier to quit smoking than quit playing CS.
I've been CS-clean for months now, but I still get the adrenaline rush when I think about it.
High speed connections are not that much of a blessing as one may imagine.
Here in Romania, I have a fiber connection, 100Mbps throughout Romania and about 10Mbps with the outside world.
The first problem that hits you is storage.
You can download a movie in 2 minutes (on DC), at this rate you can max out your hard disk pretty quickly. I'm constantly out of space, although I have 400Gb of storage. And I'm sure that adding more space won't help, in one week it will be full too.
The second problem is CPU usage. When you have multiple uploads/downloads at Megabytes per second, your CPU starts to feel it.
Apart from that, it's not that bad to always have more bandwidth than you can eat:).
I'm a bad programmer and I'm proud of it.
I rarely document my code and when I do, I document the most obvious parts of it:
if (x <= 0)//is x positive or negative?
This helps, because it adds frustration to people looking through the code.
The goal of a bad programmer, like me, is to make sure the project fails, so that other people don't see how bad I am.
Bugs are good. They take time to fix. Time is money. The more bugs you code, the more you get paid.
It's also good to present missing features as bugs:
- Sure it's finished, but there's a small bug in the startup routine. I'll fix it on monday.
A bad programmer has to read a lot of tech books and articles to bullshit your employer with the complex tech language.
Confusion creates opportunities for missing the deadline. By 6 months or so.
Oh... I thought you meant "Hello World"... I have to rewrite the whole thing!
A bad programmer is always busy and always has a list of unfinished tasks before him.
Can't do that, I'm still working on the network code.. You know, we had a bug there.
A bad programmer always knows that the project sucks and nobody will give a ratt's ass if it's out or not.
Bad programmers always dream of working in a nuclear facility or shuttle control lab or something. The more damage you can create the better you feel aftewards.
The absolutely worst bad programmer knows he's brilliant, he just doesn't give a shit.
Bad programmers eventually open their software companies and end up creating Windows or something.
When all the western world installed Windows 3.0 on their shiny new 386's, most soviet programmers had to stick with EC-1840, a stolen version of the 8086.
If you wanted your program to run at all on that 4.7Mhz machine, you had to write it in assembly.
Programmers at state-owned, bankrupt companies would organize contests among themselves: who writes the most destructive virus in 3 hours, wins a bottle of vodka.
No wonder they are good hackers...
Who would refuse a bottle of good vodka if all you have to do is code a couple hundred lines in assembly:).
I've watched Bowling for Columbine last Sunday. Two days later, I see this in the news.
I think the movie kind of explains why this is happening in the US.
Now there's another question - are games an inspiration for real-life shooters or are games INSPIRED by reality?
No game or movie will ever depict the horror of a real war, yet war is considered a good thing if fought for the right cause.
But why do violent games are so successful? Well, one of the reasons may be that we are, in fact, a violent species who take confort in destruction and causing pain?
I've seen my girlfriend torture her Sim so badly (by isolating him and depriving him of water, food, sleep and toilet) that SIMS looked like a nazi-training game.
And there are other questions these people may ask themselves -- what game did those guys in 1914-1917 and 1939-1945 (and many other) play?
Do we really need to blame abstract technologies for what we do?
What game will you blame when a glitch or crazy general launches the thermonuclear warhead over an unsuspecting city?
I came across a tool that might be useful.
It doesn't open a different browser, however, it lets you configure most IE security, privacy and content settings on a per-site basis.
If you don't trust a site, you can enforce high privacy, security settings (including IP hiding) while clicking on the link.
One other nice feature is that it lets you configure proxy servers for different domains/sites.
Pardon me... But why in the world do you need to search for incremental variables in the first place?
A source file can contain a dozen for's and while's; isn't it easier to search for the function name and then look inside that function?
Anyway, since we're on the topic, wouldn't it be nicer to name your inc variables xxx ? It doesn't naturally occur in the english language (unless you write really perverse comments) and it's fun!
Imagine the pleasure you get from reading a code snipped like:
for (xxx = 0; xxx < 0xfffffff; xxx++){DrawFrame(xxx);}
why, oh why, does Visual C++ still not have a form editor like Visual Basic or Visual C#?
If you use straight Windows API, you don't think about Forms and events.
Instead, you have windows, dialogs, window messages, you know, the usual WndProc stuff.
Borland C++ Builder extends the C++ language and implements it's own run-time library, VCL, which is how you get to override OnButtonClick().
The price you pay for handy stuff like OnOpen() and Form.width = 100 is usually speed and memory usage, because you would use a custom runtime library or architecture.
So I think it's only logical that the old dialog editor is there (for WinAPI/MFC developers) and I don't think they can extend it further.
C++.NET probably works with forms, but it's probably wiser to use C# or VB for that.
I don't really trust a C++ extension with a VB soul.
As a Visual C++ developer, I'm disappointed that Service Pack2 changed the symbol format for the system DLLs and Visual C++ 6 debugger can't understand them.
This makes the Visual C++ 6 environment worthless when it comes to power debugging low-level problems (like multithreaded deadlocks), the only solution is to upgrade to Visual C++.NET 2003.
On the other hand, a system without the service pack doesn't survive more than 10 minutes when connected to the internet.
So SP2 is a *required* update, which *forces* me (as a developer) to purchase VS.NET 2k3.
Smart move by microsoft, but frustrating for me.
I'm sure they could have included both debug formats for compatibility, but they didn't...
I've been using Opera for more than 3 years now and still think it's the best browser out there.
There are a lot of small features that keep me hooked up on it, which I couldn't find in Firefox.
It has it's problems, too, but I can cope with that.
If some sites don't work with Opera, well, I don't visit the sites! I think it's the webmaster's responsibility to make his site work properly with all browsers, if it doesn't, it means the web site was designed by sloppy web developers or their mind and soul is sold to m$.
Unless your site is gmail (which is more a client-side application than a web site), technically, it IS possible to make it work with opera, so when a web site tells me that I should use IE 6, I tell it to go to hell, where it belongs (that's my new definition of hell, btw - being forced to use IE).
I think the only problem with Opera being widely accepted is that it's not free. If the guys at opera gave it away for free (just the browser, without M2, chat and other advanced features for the Pro version), we could see real competition on this market and Opera would quickly start to climb up.
Dear Nintendo,
It has come to our attention that one of our users has used the name of your company on his page. Since your company is often associated with videogames for children, it damages our site's reputation by suggesting that we are a childish adult site and don't have enough hardcore material to satisfy every visitor's darkest fetish fantasies.
1. Use a dark blanket to cover your equipment. Cheap an effective.
2. I would recomment sleeping in another room too, in case you leave your computers running 24.7 this also helps get rid of the noise.
2.1 If you have only one room, you can hang a dark blanket from the ceiling and separate your bed from the work place.
3. Use a complicated combination of mirrors to reflect the led lights to the window - this will create an interesting, isoteric view from the outside. Could help attract chicks too.
4. Use a large hammer to damage yor equipment or yourself. Blame your psychotic behaviour on the LEDs when the psychiatrist asks.
5. Move to another country, start a family, have children and forget about this problem forever.
I personally think this IS the future.
Research in brain-microchip interface is currently at a very incipient stage, but when it reaches the level when you can transmit audio or video directly to/from the brain (and lots of other sensory information, like smell, temperature, touch or sexual pleasure) through wireless networks, we'll all be hooked on this stuff.
And it's just evolution.
As you may have noticed, the tendency of the human race is to interact more and more on various sensory levels (see: internet, mobile communication, movies, music, computer games) and as an extrapolation of this tendency I sense the desire (and need) to create a unique, collective intelligence, which would be much more efficient in achieving whatever it is we want to achieve.
Imagine being able to see through the eyes of a friend located 10,000 miles away in real time. Hear and feel whatever he is feeling or hears.
Or take the easiest case: voice (speech) transmission to/from brain and consider the implications.
Humans are currently very inefficient due to many limitations of our body. Transmitting information through speech/text is very inefficient, but when you exclude the brain-muscles-mouth/tongue -> ear->brain chain, we will be able to communicate at a considerably faster rate. In time, this ability will improve and we will be communicating at gigabits/second instead of a couple of kbits/second max as we do now through speech. You can imagine the implications this thing will have on all our other activities.
All in all, I'm very excited about this technology and only wish more time and resources are invested in it, because I think this is the next step in our evolution.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used Opera for 7 years on a daily basis, so I've come to develop immunity from websites that say they don't work with Opera: If it doesn't work with my browser, then it's not for me. I just close the page and go somewhere else. Really, most of the time it's the webdesigner's fault or lack of knowledge. This also says something about the content of the site. Properly designed sites work with Opera. Ok, there's google calender, which complains that not all features are available with Opera, but all the other sites out there are not google calendar.
>I believe that I have a flaw in the basic way I think about numbers. This is where the real problem lies, in your belief. You can't expect to learn math when you *know* you cannot learn it. You are who you think (truly believe) you are. You can't change who you are, unless you think differently about yourself. When you do, you change. And of course, you aren't who you think (believe) you aren't, so you can't become who you want to become, unless you stop thinking that you are flawed/wrong, wired differently or have a different concentration of neurotransmitters inside your brain. People have a flaw in their basic physiology - they don't have wings, yet everyone can fly for a few hundred bucks. Some people even walked on the moon! So its not who you *are* that matters, its who you think you can (or cannot) become (do). Math isn't a wild beast that cannot be tamed. Math is just a collection of abstract conventions and proofs, invented by men for men. People tend to think that math exists in the universe and it's important and it governs the laws of nature, but in reality it's just the way people have come to relate to the world in abstract terms. Nature doesn't have laws, people do, and we use the laws of numbers to approximate the reality that surrounds us. Which makes math exceptionally interesting. Fellow Mathematicians will agree that math delivers great amounts of intellectual pleasure, some of which are profound and revelatory. So go ahead, dive into the numbers with curiosity and wonder and you will discover an entirely new realm of thought in math. Don't be afraid of math and it will open itself up to you. It takes the first 'click' to understand its beauty. Just stop thinking that you are flawed !
pupils who use interactive programs cannot remember stories they have just read because they are distracted by cartoons and sound effects
:).
Which is what most sites look like today. Instead of cartoons, we have banners. For instance, pr0n sites. Those animated banners are really distracting, can hardly remember the stories the next day
The abundance of information on the Internet is changing us into becoming information discarders, not information seekers. In the future we will be bombarded by much more information, which will attack our brains through all possible channels (audio, video, interactivity, real time communication). We must adapt to this abundance, by learning how to filter out unnecessary information and get only what we need (which is a separate topic in itself).
Teaching pupils how to focus on the required parts of information may be more important than actually implanting knowledge into their brains.
So I guess it is no wonder that interactive learning programs fail to achieve results; they should be used to teach kids how to ignore unnecessary distractions and focus on the important facts.
Documentation is important, but it shouldn't be the only reason for hiring or firing programmers.
Many smart programmers tend to be ego-centric and/or megalomaniacal with a set of strange beliefs. For instance, some exceptionally smart hackers think that good programmers should read the code, not the comments.
Although they don't write good comments, these are the guys you want to have working for you.
But then of course, it depends on the project.
Not all tasks require genius hackers with a personality disorder.
Laziness and selfishness are not determined just by how many comments programmers write, but by the quality of their job.
Just my opinion.
If you put it that way, everything is dying. I bet a buck that C# or Java will be dead as a rock in 20 years, just like C++ and most of the other programming languages we know today.
What we are noticing today is that programming languages alone just don't cut it anymore. The software is so advanced, that standard language constructs and libraries are way too raw to be applied to something useful for the average application programmer. Knowing frameworks, APIs and libraries is becoming a lot more important than using all the language paradigms and hidden tricks.
I think C++'s user base is splitting: On one hand there are the library and API developers, for whom the standard and the language are wholy. On the other hand, there are the application programmers, who care about the practical side of the language; they use it because it has advantages over other languages and has lots of libraries written for it.
My belief is that C++ is more alive today than ever. It is more powerful than ever. And it will be for a long time (in technology terms, indeed). Of course, in 10 years time it won't be recognizable. But it's wrong to say that C++ is dying.
The first thing you need to do before starting to code is learn how to find a suitable IDE without the help of millions.
After you manage to overcome this incredibly complex problem (by performing a google search),you can try to install the IDE by yourself. If you can do that, you can start hoping that the code you'll write will actually do something useful for humanity.
I mean, come on... Soon we'll see questions like "I want to program in machine code, which is the best MS-DOS?".
Do your research, try them out, decide for yourself, then write a review for others to see.
Cool! I want ten of those genes. How much did you say they cost? Do you sell them in the mall ?
or is this discovery here to prove how primitive we still are?
Instead of thinking 'Wow, science has really evolved', look at the article from the 2900 perspective:
Two classmates:
- Hey, those apes in 2005 were celebrating the first quantum byte!
- Hehe, lol, gimme the ketchup! Yeah... We now have like...thousands of those... hehe.
Have you noticed the recent ad campaigns of the oil companies? ... oil products that they sell.
I've seen ads by Shell, BP, Chevron, Esso - all on the same topic - "We care about the environment and we are looking into better solutions".
Indeed, oil companies SHOULD and CAN invest in research for new, clean sources of energy, but in the short term, what these ads do is boost the company image and increase sales of
I've worked in an oil company and know that clean fuel is cool, but nothing fills the bank accounts like a cool 100.000 metric tons oil tanker.
I know it's true, gaming is addictive. I've been addicted to substances and then gaming. And I have to admit that gaming had a much more destructive effect on my social life than substance addiction/abuse. You see, when you smoke pot every day, you can still sort of perform your social activities (like have a radio show and do C++ programming), but when you play Counter Strike for 18 hours a day you just can't physically do anything else. CS also puts you in a paranoid-aggressive state of mind and it becomes your everyday mood. It was also quite hard to quit playing, because the better you get at your game, the more you want to prove yourself online. Like a sport, but a very addictive one. For me, it was easier to quit smoking than quit playing CS. I've been CS-clean for months now, but I still get the adrenaline rush when I think about it.
were created by attaching a gene for fluorescence found in jellyfish to a gene expressed only in a male mosquito's sexual organs.
Wow, those must be some damn sexy male mosquitos.
I mean, a glowing dick... Looks cool and is very practical if you're in a dark room.
High speed connections are not that much of a blessing as one may imagine. Here in Romania, I have a fiber connection, 100Mbps throughout Romania and about 10Mbps with the outside world. :).
The first problem that hits you is storage.
You can download a movie in 2 minutes (on DC), at this rate you can max out your hard disk pretty quickly. I'm constantly out of space, although I have 400Gb of storage. And I'm sure that adding more space won't help, in one week it will be full too.
The second problem is CPU usage. When you have multiple uploads/downloads at Megabytes per second, your CPU starts to feel it.
Apart from that, it's not that bad to always have more bandwidth than you can eat
This helps, because it adds frustration to people looking through the code. The goal of a bad programmer, like me, is to make sure the project fails, so that other people don't see how bad I am. Bugs are good. They take time to fix. Time is money. The more bugs you code, the more you get paid. It's also good to present missing features as bugs:
- Sure it's finished, but there's a small bug in the startup routine. I'll fix it on monday.
A bad programmer has to read a lot of tech books and articles to bullshit your employer with the complex tech language. Confusion creates opportunities for missing the deadline. By 6 months or so.
Oh... I thought you meant "Hello World"... I have to rewrite the whole thing!
A bad programmer is always busy and always has a list of unfinished tasks before him.
Can't do that, I'm still working on the network code.. You know, we had a bug there.
A bad programmer always knows that the project sucks and nobody will give a ratt's ass if it's out or not.
Bad programmers always dream of working in a nuclear facility or shuttle control lab or something. The more damage you can create the better you feel aftewards.
The absolutely worst bad programmer knows he's brilliant, he just doesn't give a shit.
Bad programmers eventually open their software companies and end up creating Windows or something.
You must supply the SCSI drivers on a *floppy* during windows XP setup.
When all the western world installed Windows 3.0 on their shiny new 386's, most soviet programmers had to stick with EC-1840, a stolen version of the 8086. :).
If you wanted your program to run at all on that 4.7Mhz machine, you had to write it in assembly.
Programmers at state-owned, bankrupt companies would organize contests among themselves: who writes the most destructive virus in 3 hours, wins a bottle of vodka.
No wonder they are good hackers...
Who would refuse a bottle of good vodka if all you have to do is code a couple hundred lines in assembly
I've watched Bowling for Columbine last Sunday. Two days later, I see this in the news. I think the movie kind of explains why this is happening in the US.
Now there's another question - are games an inspiration for real-life shooters or are games INSPIRED by reality?
No game or movie will ever depict the horror of a real war, yet war is considered a good thing if fought for the right cause.
But why do violent games are so successful? Well, one of the reasons may be that we are, in fact, a violent species who take confort in destruction and causing pain?
I've seen my girlfriend torture her Sim so badly (by isolating him and depriving him of water, food, sleep and toilet) that SIMS looked like a nazi-training game.
And there are other questions these people may ask themselves -- what game did those guys in 1914-1917 and 1939-1945 (and many other) play?
Do we really need to blame abstract technologies for what we do? What game will you blame when a glitch or crazy general launches the thermonuclear warhead over an unsuspecting city?
I Forgot: You can check it out at www.viewshield.com
I came across a tool that might be useful. It doesn't open a different browser, however, it lets you configure most IE security, privacy and content settings on a per-site basis. If you don't trust a site, you can enforce high privacy, security settings (including IP hiding) while clicking on the link. One other nice feature is that it lets you configure proxy servers for different domains/sites.
Pardon me... But why in the world do you need to search for incremental variables in the first place?
A source file can contain a dozen for's and while's; isn't it easier to search for the function name and then look inside that function?
Anyway, since we're on the topic, wouldn't it be nicer to name your inc variables xxx ? It doesn't naturally occur in the english language (unless you write really perverse comments) and it's fun!
Imagine the pleasure you get from reading a code snipped like:
for (xxx = 0; xxx < 0xfffffff; xxx++){DrawFrame(xxx);}
why, oh why, does Visual C++ still not have a form editor like Visual Basic or Visual C#?
.NET probably works with forms, but it's probably wiser to use C# or VB for that.
I don't really trust a C++ extension with a VB soul.
If you use straight Windows API, you don't think about Forms and events. Instead, you have windows, dialogs, window messages, you know, the usual WndProc stuff. Borland C++ Builder extends the C++ language and implements it's own run-time library, VCL, which is how you get to override OnButtonClick().
The price you pay for handy stuff like OnOpen() and Form.width = 100 is usually speed and memory usage, because you would use a custom runtime library or architecture.
So I think it's only logical that the old dialog editor is there (for WinAPI/MFC developers) and I don't think they can extend it further.
C++
As a Visual C++ developer, I'm disappointed that Service Pack2 changed the symbol format for the system DLLs and Visual C++ 6 debugger can't understand them. .NET 2003.
On the other hand, a system without the service pack doesn't survive more than 10 minutes when connected to the internet.
This makes the Visual C++ 6 environment worthless when it comes to power debugging low-level problems (like multithreaded deadlocks), the only solution is to upgrade to Visual C++
So SP2 is a *required* update, which *forces* me (as a developer) to purchase VS.NET 2k3.
Smart move by microsoft, but frustrating for me. I'm sure they could have included both debug formats for compatibility, but they didn't...
I've been using Opera for more than 3 years now and still think it's the best browser out there.
There are a lot of small features that keep me hooked up on it, which I couldn't find in Firefox. It has it's problems, too, but I can cope with that.
If some sites don't work with Opera, well, I don't visit the sites! I think it's the webmaster's responsibility to make his site work properly with all browsers, if it doesn't, it means the web site was designed by sloppy web developers or their mind and soul is sold to m$.
Unless your site is gmail (which is more a client-side application than a web site), technically, it IS possible to make it work with opera, so when a web site tells me that I should use IE 6, I tell it to go to hell, where it belongs (that's my new definition of hell, btw - being forced to use IE).
I think the only problem with Opera being widely accepted is that it's not free. If the guys at opera gave it away for free (just the browser, without M2, chat and other advanced features for the Pro version), we could see real competition on this market and Opera would quickly start to climb up.
Dear Nintendo,
It has come to our attention that one of our users has used the name of your company on his page. Since your company is often associated with videogames for children, it damages our site's reputation by suggesting that we are a childish adult site and don't have enough hardcore material to satisfy every visitor's darkest fetish fantasies.
1. Use a dark blanket to cover your equipment. Cheap an effective.
2. I would recomment sleeping in another room too, in case you leave your computers running 24.7 this also helps get rid of the noise.
2.1 If you have only one room, you can hang a dark blanket from the ceiling and separate your bed from the work place.
3. Use a complicated combination of mirrors to reflect the led lights to the window - this will create an interesting, isoteric view from the outside. Could help attract chicks too.
4. Use a large hammer to damage yor equipment or yourself. Blame your psychotic behaviour on the LEDs when the psychiatrist asks.
5. Move to another country, start a family, have children and forget about this problem forever.
I personally think this IS the future.
Research in brain-microchip interface is currently at a very incipient stage, but when it reaches the level when you can transmit audio or video directly to/from the brain (and lots of other sensory information, like smell, temperature, touch or sexual pleasure) through wireless networks, we'll all be hooked on this stuff.
And it's just evolution.
As you may have noticed, the tendency of the human race is to interact more and more on various sensory levels (see: internet, mobile communication, movies, music, computer games) and as an extrapolation of this tendency I sense the desire (and need) to create a unique, collective intelligence, which would be much more efficient in achieving whatever it is we want to achieve.
Imagine being able to see through the eyes of a friend located 10,000 miles away in real time. Hear and feel whatever he is feeling or hears.
Or take the easiest case: voice (speech) transmission to/from brain and consider the implications.
Humans are currently very inefficient due to many limitations of our body. Transmitting information through speech/text is very inefficient, but when you exclude the brain-muscles-mouth/tongue -> ear->brain chain, we will be able to communicate at a considerably faster rate. In time, this ability will improve and we will be communicating at gigabits/second instead of a couple of kbits/second max as we do now through speech. You can imagine the implications this thing will have on all our other activities.
All in all, I'm very excited about this technology and only wish more time and resources are invested in it, because I think this is the next step in our evolution.