Crash if you open too many tabs. I routinely opened bookmark folders of 50+ tabs with firefox 2. With beta5 this operation crashes systematically. That's quite strange -- I routinely had beta5 open with >100 tabs, and no crashes or instability. On the contrary, the nicest thing about firefox3 is seeing the memory consumption stay low, even with >100 tabs open.
Chances are, Flash. Adobe's support for Linux has been pathetic at best, with newer versions eating up tons of CPU just viewing a banner ad. You still view banner ads????
What was wrong with Beta 5? Well, one big issue I had with all the betas, including b5, was that most javascript-intense pages were glacially slow (e.g. the newer version of Gmail).
This has been fixed in RC1, I'm pleased to note -- and page rendering in general feels much faster.
My Casio EX-Z750 does live RGB histogram, and very useful it is too. Fantastic camera:) Yeah, it's funny about Casios -- I seem to recall that they used Canon lenses, and had an astonishing array of features in their UIs. I just looked up the review on dpreview, and I see you're right -- you do get a merged histo of sorts. Not quite as nice as CHDK's implementation (e.g. http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Image:Zebra_diagonal.gif) but still better than any other P&S I've seen.
which is mostly useless on a camera with a sensor that small.
You don't understand what RAW is for, do you? Actually, he/she does. I use CHDK, and I can tell you that there's very little extra info in those 10-bit raw files (that's all you get from the Canon P&S line). Remember that a lot of that extra room already goes in whitebalance correction.
You *can* get a bit more non-colour information out of the highlights if you really push it, but really... I've just gone back to shooting jpegs, mostly. 10-bit RAW files aren't pretty.
That said, it's still nice to have the capability, but in the real world it's just not that useful most of the time. What *is* really nice about CHDK are the live histogram capabilities -- the live merged RGB histo is outstanding in getting the exposure right (and I don't know of any other P&S camera that provides this capability).
Hardhack, by definition, is a hardware hack. That would mean, for instance, adding an MCU to the board to gain extra functionality. This is a firmware change and thus is a software hack. What lotus flower are you people eating? Actually, it's not a firmware hack, either. Basically it works as follows:
When you upgrade firmware in a Canon camera, there is scope to run an application before the firmware upgrade. What CHDK does is trigger the upgrade process, but doesn't upgrade the firmware -- it just uses the firmware upgrade routine to run the CHDK code on top of the firmware. The camera still works, and the CHDK code has access to all the camera variables, allowing you to do pretty much anything you want. But the underlying firmware remains unchanged (and thus your warranty isn't void).
It's all rather neat, and the CHDK code is easy to hack around with (I've done so in the past).
The problem is that I can't use my old xorg.conf. xrandr has deprecated most of its functionality. But there's no way to remove xrandr or downgrade to the previous version of X. Hmmm... I'm using an old system that was once Ubuntu Dapper. But I've upgraded most of the software by hand, including xorg, so I'm now running xorg 7.3. And I'm still using my old xorg.conf, and it still works fine. For that matter, xorg 7.3 (the latest stable release) was in Ubuntu 7.10... so I'm not sure why you're seeing incompatibilities now. Are Ubuntu using a git release of xorg in 8.04?? (Surely they couldn't be that irresponsible!)
That said, I'm not leaving Ubuntu. I am downgrading to 7.10 again (again!), and I'll be rather more careful about upgrading in the future. Personally, I treat upgrading with the same respect as I would "sudo rm -rf/" -- only do it if you've got your entire system backed up (and you know the backups work!) Bad experiences in the past have led me to compile everything by hand; currently, the only major pieces of software on my system that are hanging around from Dapper are glibc (which is just too dangerous to play with!) and gcc (which I haven't had any need to upgrade yet)...
Hmmm... sorry, but the code I write (which has nothing to do with Pidgin, incidentally) is written for me. I'm, fundamentally, the person who uses it. Since I like giving back to the OSS community, the code is GPL'd and I try to add in requested features when I have the time, or at the very least reply to all the requests and bug reports that I get. However, not laying down my life to help users does not make me a jerk.
Honestly, you can't expect OSS developers to add in features that they don't like, just because the community wants them to. We don't code because we're after popularity or fame, we do it to scratch an itch. And let me tell you -- once users start abusing you for not fixing some bug or not paying their feature request enough attention, that itch strangely goes away...
Such a developer would have abhorred such a crazy idea for a feature though?:P I can't see much point in this one. It would make a nice novelty but I doubt I'd use it myself. Eh... I use Pidgin all the time, and I find the resizing text area very user-friendly. Seems like a great feature to me (why do you need to have vast amounts of whitespace underneath your text??) I agree that it's silly not to have an option to turn it off. But sometimes people forget that opensource developers are fundamentally serving *their own* interests rather than those of their users.
I have a moderately successful open-source project that gets a lot of suggestions for UI changes/improvements. Some of these I like, some of these I don't like. But the main factor in determining whether or not they're going to get added is whether I've got the time to faff about with the code. Strangely enough, I don't spend my days sitting at a computer thinking, "Gee, if only I had something fun to code". I've got a full time (and then some) job, and fun OSS projects cannot be an over-riding priority.
Reading that Pidgin ticket, you can see the same types of users coming up again and again. So many people are so rude, thinking that just because they use some software they've got a right to determine the direction of its development, and be aggressive in the way that they do this. Is it any wonder that the Pidgin developers got a bit pissed off, and suddenly don't feel like helping?
Anyway, towards the end of that ticket it looks like someone developed a plugin that will restore the old behaviour for those who want it. Problem solved. So why is this an issue any more?
In any real-world relationship, even one with a good amount of sex, most of the time will be spent doing other things. ... such as watching jokes go flying over your head, perhaps?
I thought the GP gave a fairly compelling and coherent argument. Perhaps you could start by reading the link and all the wikipedia pages relating to the terms they used? I did read the link, and I stand by what I said before: the answer doesn't need to be that complex.
Maths is based upon abstract concepts, that are free of language or universal laws. What we are doing, therefore, is discovering universal truths, not inventing them. Recursion theories just aren't necessary.
... Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity theory... [blah, blah]... Due to subitization [wikipedia.org] it has never been possible to copyright the integers 1..4. The copyright on 5 probably expired 50,000 years ago... [wtf??]... [blah] I have no idea what you're on about, but I don't think the answer needs to be that complex.
Mind you, I also suspect that your post was random noise, and that you're actually a bot.
The general public will not know what "geometric" means*.
This Captcha suffers from the same old problem. As Captchas get harder more humans will fail them.
*or annotate... or centre If a member of the general public doesn't understand what "click the centre of one of these images" means, then the robots have indeed won...
No, you're right -- it's stopped working in Beta 5. (It was working correctly in Beta 4). Nevertheless, you still get less hits with it. I'm not sure how that works...
Anyway, I agree the awesomebar is considerably less-than-awesome, but why don't you file a bug report?
Those are all good reasons to have and use a card, as long as you pay the balance every month. Somebody who claimed to know posted here once that people who pay their balances off every month are refered to by the credit industry as "deadbeats". Well, if you think about it, those of us who pay the card off each month are getting something for nothing. I have a credit card that has no annual fee, so it costs me nothing if I pay it off each month. But -- since I don't have to pay it off for 55 days -- each time I buy something, that money sits around in my account for another 55 days after the purchase earning interest. The net result is that my credit card earns me a small amount of money each year, plus it gives me an extra guarantee on anything that I buy.
Does the upconverting really make any difference? I've never seen the output of an upconverting player, but I don't understand how upconverting in the player can look much better than upconverting in the TV. It really depends on how well the TV upconverts; the players supposedly have better algorithms, and if you look carefully you can see a difference. That said, that's not really something that any average consumer will notice.
(Mind you, here in Australia (and possibly in europe as well) many upconverting players are actually degrading the picture, thanks to the PAL DVD interlaced flag debacle. PAL is 25fps, so movies aren't subjected to the 3:2 NTSC rubbish and are mostly encoded with full progressive content. Unfortunately, for some incomprehensible reason, almost all PAL progressive discs are labelled as interlaced material. The end result is that the DVD players see the interlaced flag and -- because they're upscaling -- forcibly deinterlace the material (thus reducing the vertical resolution by half) and then upscale the resulting frame. Almost all players available here in Australia do this; the only exceptions being some Panasonic and Oppo players which have a 2:2 cadence detection system which may detect the progressive material, and all Denon players (which let you manually override the interlaced detection system)...)
Look, competition IS good, and freedom of choice IS good when it comes to things like applications. But there's so much diluted effort and inconsistency at the base level of Linux distributions, that it's not even funny. I don't you've quite got it. The culture that has built linux is all about tinkering, adapting, changing, customising. It's created by people who love coding so much, they're willing to give it away for free.
So, yes, you will get diluted effort, wasted effort and large scale inconsistencies. But who cares? Linux is about freedom and having fun. It's the bazaar, remember? Not the cathedral.
BTW I have at least 20 tabs open now, no problem on a 4 year old dual G5 tower or a 4 year old p.c. notebook. just make sure you have at least a gig of ram... Pah, that's nothing -- I've got 55 tabs open now, and I haven't even gotten started yet.
My browser collects tabs like my sink collects dishes. (Now if only there was a "Wash all dishes" menu option...)
At the end, what pisses me off the most about this whole deal is not being able to revert to the old behavior. That kind of forced nurturing is what I'd expect from Microsoft, not Mozilla. about:config is your friend -- just set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true and you're back with the old site-matching-only algorithm. It's true that about:config isn't the most friendly way for a newbie to do things, but then the newbies are the ones that will love the new urlbar in the first place...
Personally, I'd been using an extension for FF2 called "my_urlbar.a" or something like that, which did exactly the same thing as the awesomebar does now. The sad thing is, that extension did it *without slowing down my typing*. If only they'd improve the speed of the awesomebar's response, I'd be much happier -- it's a great idea, but I'd happily sacrifice site rankings and whatever other bells and whistles there are in order to make the thing *fast*. After all, it doesn't matter how many usability boxes your interface tweaks if acceptable speed isn't one of them...
(ps -- speaking of abominations that are ugly and slow, am I the only other person here who finds the new theme of the/. discussion system horribly, horribly wrong?? I'm hoping it's just a very late April fool's joke, 'cause it makes OMGPonies look positively tasteful in comparison...)
I wonder how the algorithm works after the machine has had a few beers. Actually, I think you'll find that it's a bottle of wine over the keyboard that really causes problems...
yes, but, I was talking about the general PC market. not the Eee in particular. for general computer usage, Linux doesn't cut it for Average Joe's 16 year old daughter Oh, I agree with you there. I just don't think that people want Windows on everything anymore. And that sort of environment is one in which devices like the Eee can help linux gain a serious desktop foothold.
Mind you, from my experiences trying to help friends with their Vista systems, things seem just as unlikely to work in the Windows world as in the linux world. I'm yet to see a desktop OS that "just works" or comes anywhere close, be it Windows, linux or MacOS.
This is going to cost me some karma but... this just proves what every reader here refuses to believe: people just WON'T use Linux. It doesn't matter if it's free, if it has "everything you need" (no games or yahoo/windows live messenger -- gaim/pidgin don't count because it's NOT THE SAME god damn it), or the supposed deal-breaker: preinstallation. Slashdotters here seem to think that if you preinstall Linux, people WILL use it, and I very well know that it doesn't happen. People here in my country buy PCs with Linux (most retailers don't sell Windows except in high end brand-name machines. value machines come with a completely useless "FreeDOS preinstalled") and the same day they call the techie neighbor to install a pirated copy of windows. Sorry, but that's the way it is. And it leads us to another point: of those "1 in 5 $399 laptops", probably 9 out of 10 will have a pirated windows installed more sooner than later. See, I believed the same thing before the Eee came along. No windows, couldn't run windows (without some tinkering), nobody cared. It's a different market, where people don't need Windows for the things they want to do on the Eee.
I thought the Eee would be a flop too. But it hasn't been, and I think that represents a major shift in people's thinking. But then, if you think about it, people are becoming a lot more used to dealing with different OSes -- their phone probably runs Symbian, their mate's laptop might run MacOS, and they just keep hearing about this linux thing. And the other interesting thing is that something that's non-Windows is inherently cooler.
The world isn't Windows-only anymore, and nobody minds one bit.
My friend runs an online store and 90% of his sales are laptops. It's not a small business since he's selling hundreds of lappies every month, so his facts are interesting. According to him, the Windows-equipped $499 laptops outsell the Linux-equipped $399 laptops 5 to 1.
I don't think the average Eee buyer is going to care much for specifications as much as they care for the whole concept, which is why I think you are wrong. Yeah, but the Eee is a bit different. People aren't buying them as replacement laptops, they're buying them as a second notebook to travel with. As such, they don't need all the bells and whistles -- provided it does what they need (surf the web, handle email and edit documents/spreadsheets/presentations) that's all they'll ever need.
Let's think about how the sales conversation with Joe Average might go:
----
Salesman: "So, you can get the Eee with Windows installed and 8Gb storage, or with linux and 12Gb storage. Same price."
Joe: "Uh, yeah, linux. I've heard of that. Any difference between that and windows?"
Salesman: "Not really. Most things you want to do on the Eee, you can do with linux. It won't run all your windows software, but it depends what you want to do with the Eee. For the basic tasks, linux will be fine."
Joe: "And I can always install Windows on the linux one if I don't like linux, can't I?"
Salesman: "Well, sure, they're the same computer, just one has more storage space for the same price."
Joe: "Well, in that case, I'll get the linux one, thanks!"
----
The thing is, nobody expected the Eees to do so well. They were toys, they'd never catch on... but they sold so fast most stores couldn't get enough of them. It's one of the more amazing computing stories of recent years -- average guys going crazy buying what was only ever going to be a geek's play thing. And they bought them without windows, and nobody cared! That's the thing that's hurt MS more than anything -- Asus was selling these things without even the option of having Windows, and nobody even blinked. Joe Average didn't care.
Slashdot Mirror
This has been fixed in RC1, I'm pleased to note -- and page rendering in general feels much faster.
Nice little camera
You don't understand what RAW is for, do you? Actually, he/she does. I use CHDK, and I can tell you that there's very little extra info in those 10-bit raw files (that's all you get from the Canon P&S line). Remember that a lot of that extra room already goes in whitebalance correction.
You *can* get a bit more non-colour information out of the highlights if you really push it, but really
That said, it's still nice to have the capability, but in the real world it's just not that useful most of the time. What *is* really nice about CHDK are the live histogram capabilities -- the live merged RGB histo is outstanding in getting the exposure right (and I don't know of any other P&S camera that provides this capability).
When you upgrade firmware in a Canon camera, there is scope to run an application before the firmware upgrade. What CHDK does is trigger the upgrade process, but doesn't upgrade the firmware -- it just uses the firmware upgrade routine to run the CHDK code on top of the firmware. The camera still works, and the CHDK code has access to all the camera variables, allowing you to do pretty much anything you want. But the underlying firmware remains unchanged (and thus your warranty isn't void).
It's all rather neat, and the CHDK code is easy to hack around with (I've done so in the past).
Hmmm ... sorry, but the code I write (which has nothing to do with Pidgin, incidentally) is written for me. I'm, fundamentally, the person who uses it. Since I like giving back to the OSS community, the code is GPL'd and I try to add in requested features when I have the time, or at the very least reply to all the requests and bug reports that I get. However, not laying down my life to help users does not make me a jerk.
...
Honestly, you can't expect OSS developers to add in features that they don't like, just because the community wants them to. We don't code because we're after popularity or fame, we do it to scratch an itch. And let me tell you -- once users start abusing you for not fixing some bug or not paying their feature request enough attention, that itch strangely goes away
I have a moderately successful open-source project that gets a lot of suggestions for UI changes/improvements. Some of these I like, some of these I don't like. But the main factor in determining whether or not they're going to get added is whether I've got the time to faff about with the code. Strangely enough, I don't spend my days sitting at a computer thinking, "Gee, if only I had something fun to code". I've got a full time (and then some) job, and fun OSS projects cannot be an over-riding priority.
Reading that Pidgin ticket, you can see the same types of users coming up again and again. So many people are so rude, thinking that just because they use some software they've got a right to determine the direction of its development, and be aggressive in the way that they do this. Is it any wonder that the Pidgin developers got a bit pissed off, and suddenly don't feel like helping?
Anyway, towards the end of that ticket it looks like someone developed a plugin that will restore the old behaviour for those who want it. Problem solved. So why is this an issue any more?
Maths is based upon abstract concepts, that are free of language or universal laws. What we are doing, therefore, is discovering universal truths, not inventing them. Recursion theories just aren't necessary.
Um ... but that's not really the issue at hand -- unless you meant to say "invented", rather than "discovered".
... Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity theoryMind you, I also suspect that your post was random noise, and that you're actually a bot.
This Captcha suffers from the same old problem. As Captchas get harder more humans will fail them.
*or annotate... or centre If a member of the general public doesn't understand what "click the centre of one of these images" means, then the robots have indeed won
No, you're right -- it's stopped working in Beta 5. (It was working correctly in Beta 4). Nevertheless, you still get less hits with it. I'm not sure how that works ...
Anyway, I agree the awesomebar is considerably less-than-awesome, but why don't you file a bug report?
(Mind you, here in Australia (and possibly in europe as well) many upconverting players are actually degrading the picture, thanks to the PAL DVD interlaced flag debacle. PAL is 25fps, so movies aren't subjected to the 3:2 NTSC rubbish and are mostly encoded with full progressive content. Unfortunately, for some incomprehensible reason, almost all PAL progressive discs are labelled as interlaced material. The end result is that the DVD players see the interlaced flag and -- because they're upscaling -- forcibly deinterlace the material (thus reducing the vertical resolution by half) and then upscale the resulting frame. Almost all players available here in Australia do this; the only exceptions being some Panasonic and Oppo players which have a 2:2 cadence detection system which may detect the progressive material, and all Denon players (which let you manually override the interlaced detection system)
So, yes, you will get diluted effort, wasted effort and large scale inconsistencies. But who cares? Linux is about freedom and having fun. It's the bazaar, remember? Not the cathedral.
My browser collects tabs like my sink collects dishes. (Now if only there was a "Wash all dishes" menu option
... and if anyone *was* wondering how to get rid of those ugly grey boxes surrounding the comments, try the following in Stylish:
li[class^="comment contain"] {
border: 0 !important;
}
Personally, I'd been using an extension for FF2 called "my_urlbar.a" or something like that, which did exactly the same thing as the awesomebar does now. The sad thing is, that extension did it *without slowing down my typing*. If only they'd improve the speed of the awesomebar's response, I'd be much happier -- it's a great idea, but I'd happily sacrifice site rankings and whatever other bells and whistles there are in order to make the thing *fast*. After all, it doesn't matter how many usability boxes your interface tweaks if acceptable speed isn't one of them
(ps -- speaking of abominations that are ugly and slow, am I the only other person here who finds the new theme of the
Mind you, from my experiences trying to help friends with their Vista systems, things seem just as unlikely to work in the Windows world as in the linux world. I'm yet to see a desktop OS that "just works" or comes anywhere close, be it Windows, linux or MacOS.
I thought the Eee would be a flop too. But it hasn't been, and I think that represents a major shift in people's thinking. But then, if you think about it, people are becoming a lot more used to dealing with different OSes -- their phone probably runs Symbian, their mate's laptop might run MacOS, and they just keep hearing about this linux thing. And the other interesting thing is that something that's non-Windows is inherently cooler.
The world isn't Windows-only anymore, and nobody minds one bit.
I don't think the average Eee buyer is going to care much for specifications as much as they care for the whole concept, which is why I think you are wrong. Yeah, but the Eee is a bit different. People aren't buying them as replacement laptops, they're buying them as a second notebook to travel with. As such, they don't need all the bells and whistles -- provided it does what they need (surf the web, handle email and edit documents/spreadsheets/presentations) that's all they'll ever need.
Let's think about how the sales conversation with Joe Average might go:
----
Salesman: "So, you can get the Eee with Windows installed and 8Gb storage, or with linux and 12Gb storage. Same price."
Joe: "Uh, yeah, linux. I've heard of that. Any difference between that and windows?"
Salesman: "Not really. Most things you want to do on the Eee, you can do with linux. It won't run all your windows software, but it depends what you want to do with the Eee. For the basic tasks, linux will be fine."
Joe: "And I can always install Windows on the linux one if I don't like linux, can't I?"
Salesman: "Well, sure, they're the same computer, just one has more storage space for the same price."
Joe: "Well, in that case, I'll get the linux one, thanks!"
----
The thing is, nobody expected the Eees to do so well. They were toys, they'd never catch on