Two things stop me being able to recommend Firefox as the top preference,both trivial, but these are things that work in Chrome, and not Fx: 1. input type=date. Chrome has a native widget, Firefox simply doesn't do anything other than treat it as text - result, we have to embed lots of JS for this alone. Fx has had a huge debate on bugzilla about how to make the datepicker look best, and they got stuck with the debate for ages, and never implemented - I don't really care which widget set it uses, but it just needs to work. 2. the progressive web app on Chrome (Android) will run full-screen. But Firefox won't full-screen it.
Also it would be rather nice if the now 17-year-old bug with several hundred comments on "please don't let a fat-fingered ctrl-Q (when we meant ctrl-W) quit the entire browser without confirmation" could be fixed. Lastly, given that Google is clearly not Mozilla's friend, perhaps Firefox could start auto-blocking mis-features such as google-analytics tracking?
As a developer, I have to agree. Though I really don't want Google to dominate[*], and for there to be a good alternative to Chrome (and I keep using Firefox myself on principle), it's very hard to avoid recommending against using Firefox when they just don't try to keep pace with simple features. Two examples:
* Firefox still doesn't support "input type=date". There's a long thread, arguing about which UI widget would make the best native experience, but for a developer, all I care about is that there should be *some* widget, however imperfect it might be.
* Firefox on Android doesn't support "mobile-web-app-capable". That's essential for us, because it allows mobile sites to be launched full-screen from a desktop icon, without showing the URL-bar and back/forward controls. For our warehousing application (running on an android hand-held terminal with barcode-scanner), this is critical to prevent user-confusion.
On the other hand, at least Firefox isn't the terribly obsolete mobile-safari (still no WebRTC!), which will only get fixed if the a developers' lawsuit succeeds in forcing Apple to open up.
[*] Google have far too much power, and abuse of Chrome could be much more dangerous to the open internet than IE could have been back at the time.
One more huge advantage of ending paywalls is linkability. If I want to share an article with a friend, or link something on my webpage, or cite it as the paper of record, then it can't be behind a paywall. This way, publishers can get paid fairly, without taking themselves out of the internet community. And we could be talking micropayments here - 1 cent an article or something.
Even better, let's have a protocol to do this automatically, perhaps built into Firefox or into Adblock.
At the moment, about 90% of web bandwidth is advertising. So it imposes a heavy cost of bandwidth/time/annoyance on the reader, yet it gives back a fraction of a cent to the author of the content. I'd much rather pay directly for the content I want, and not get the garbage. It would also improve content quality because nobody would worry about their articles being unpopular with advertisers. And it would be a great way for Firefox to lead over Chrome.
What we actually need is: US law: US companies may not comply with russian backdoor requests; nor may they withdraw service from russian citizens. In other words, for a company headquartered in the US, it must be illegal for the US arm to fail to protect russian citizens from russian law. And then the 3 symmetric permutations.
I completely agree. I had a problem where our new company couldn't send email to Gmail users without always being flagged as spam. We were doing absolutely everything right - and there is no way to get hold of Google. I did finally, 6 months later find a way to reach a person at Google (via a back channel as a customer of a different company), and they confirmed to me: Google act as judge, jury, and executioner, in a secret trial; you can't see the evidence, you don't even know if you've been condemned, and there is no appeal. And they are fine with that. For what it's worth, the problem was that the previous owners of our IP had got it into a secret blacklist (internal to Google), although we were clean on all of the hundreds of public blacklists I searched. Google are a menace to the public infrastructure. Even AOL behave better!
Even better - let's put the down-arrow offset slightly down (so that it is easier to feel for it), and let's not have PG-up and PG-down in the arrow-key block!
It's so easy to include the smoothing capacitor - but so many LED lights strobe at 50/60 Hz. This produces a really unpleasant effect, especially if people move about (or simply move their eyes). LEDs are far worse than tungsten here, because the LED is usually on for only a very small fraction of the duty-cycle, has no thermal inertia, and many of them only operate on one half-cycle not both. When LED lamps are dimmed, it's truly horrid. (I also hate the poor colour rendering, and the tendency to get harsh ("cool-white") or dirty-grey ("warm white") llight rather than a full spectrum.
Try a wonderful product I recently found: lightdims.com - this lets you subtly reduce the LED to where it should be. They work excellently, except where the LED is "domed".
It is frustrating to me that we now have "shortscreens" everywhere - instead of full-height screens (e.g. 20" at 1600x1200), we now have 16:9 (and no doubt 16:7 in due course). For real work, whether programming, CAD, or just reading webpages and documents, there is no substitute for screen-height. Yet a combination of the DVD-tail wagging the productivity dog, and a dishonest marketing campaign (17" widescreens have less area than 17" regular screens) means that we can't get decent screens anywhere. For desktops this is just about tolerable with the advent of very very large 16:10 screens, but for laptops, it is a nightmare.
There are a couple of legitimate uses for sites to interfere, with select/copy in certain very restricted cases. 1. Using the no-select attribute on buttons (or text styled as buttons). Otherwise, it's very easy to accidentally select the button text when you mean to click it - and that's just a UI mistake. 2. When an image is meant not to be re-shared (e.g, a personal photo on a social or dating network), intercepting right-click with a message asking the viewer not to take a copy.
It seems to me that knowing about a vulnerability, not telling the vendor, and telling someone else is tantamount to blackmail. Why can't Microsoft etc go after these people in the courts?
A friend's kid aged about 3 used to love playing the game TuxRacer (controlled by arrow keys, which Dad had to work because he wasn't dextrous enough). So I got a plush Tux toy penguin, and fastened him on top of a small plastic box, in which I placed the guts of a wireless keyboard, and 4x tilt switches connected to the arrow keys. Now simply moving the penguin controls the game:-)
At least Plasma doesn't just silently crash for you - on my Ubuntu 15.04 system, it just dies and dumps me back at the login screen (and there doesn't seem to be any way to debug it, nothing in.xsession errors, and no answers on the bug report). I find it totally bewildering that KDE4 -> KDE5 should do this, after they have just about recovered reputationally and stability-wise from the KDE 3 -> 4 mess (and 4 still hasn't completely reached parity with 3 in some ways). The bump to KDE5 should have been like Linux kernel 3.x to Linux 4.x - a total non-event for the users, i.e.only the Qt library changed, and basically nothing else did.
Anyway, you can at least install the KDE 3.5 fork (trinitydesktop.org has packages) on Ubuntu 15.04, and I'm pleased to say it works pretty well. In fact, it is also significantly prettier (from the perspective of those of us who value clarity over smoothness, and are quite partial to icons that are distinct from one another, and to having nice sharp lines and contrasts to distinguish bits of the GUI from each other). The other option is to look at Mate (apt-get install mate-desktop), which is basically Gnome 2.x, continued (though they are doing the sensible thing and using the Gnome 3 project's libraries)
One good thing about Linux is that the Window Manager is distinct from the rest of the applications. So, you can mix and match window-manager, taskbar, start-button, panel, file-manager, applications. XFCE4 isn't a bad place to start (and parcellite is an alternative to klipper).
What really got Lenovo into hot water was not just Superfish, but that Superfish got compromised. So, what we really need is for the NSA's stolen key to be leaked. If that key leaks, it will finally cause the massive that will force the politicians to re-evaluate what the miscreants in GCHQ/NSA are "lawfully" doing.
What I mean is that, any country which has no democracy has no workers' rights. Therefore, Chinese workers will never effectively demand decent working conditions. This makes them more competitive than the EU/US, and our workers (who rightly expect decent treatment) will be out-competed by cheap labour from contries that abuse their workers. The result is unemployment in the West, and "slave"-labour in the East.
If China blocks US VPNs (our exports), why isn't the US considering blocking Chinese goods in return? If nothing else, it is our own long-term best interests to force China to become more free, as it is the only thing that will prevent them winning a race-to-the-bottom competition on wages.
I grant that it doesn't work all the time. But let's at least stop giving "it's my faith" a free pass against criticism, and be done with the faith-schools. Politicians love to think that moderate religion is on their side; it isn't. So they work in the (imho) vain struggle to keep people from moving from position (b) to (c) rather than trying to get them to move from (b) to (a). In epidemiological terms, there are several risk factors for becoming a terrorist... including social exclusion, poverty, grievances against western policy, and religious faith. Why can't we treat faith itself (rather than "perversion of faith") as the risk factor?
True in the US, but in Europe, we are already past tipping point: the majority of people now see organised religion as a force for harm.
In the US, the approach might be to apply sanctions to Saudi Arabia etc untill they fix their human rights record - this approach worked on South Africa wrt apartheid.
Wouldn't it make much more sense to devote some effort and expense to promoting the values of the enlightenment? In particular, devoting some educational effort towards eradication of irrational beliefs. Why not actually treat Islam (and Scientology, and Christianity) as the mental equivalent of a public heath hazard, where those who believe need to be helped to overcome it?
I think we make a serious mistake in our public discourse, by considering that:
violent minority = extremists = misinterpretation of scripture vs. peaceful majority = mainstream = correct interpretation of scripture.
whereas it would be more intellectually honest to consider:
violent minority = literalists = correct interpretation of scripture vs. peaceful majority = reformists = those who wilfully mis-interpret their scripture.
In other words, while almost all humans (of all faith and of none) are decent, good, tolerant peaceful people, they are decent to the extent that they discard their holy books, not to the extent that they follow them. The holy books themselves are beyond redemption, and should be considered to be "on the side of the devil".
Consider the spectrum of belief: (a)Secular humanist ---- (b) "Moderate" religion ----- (c) Extremist religion. Position (b) involves belief in gods, prophets, and veneration of "perfect" scriptures. Position (c) is a very small step beyond, namely to actually read those scriptures, already considered perfect, and interpret them the literally, as they are written. So, if we want to prevent Islamic terrorism, the most effective argument is not detailed discussion of which Koranic verse overrides which other one (an argument which the moderates can never win), but instead, to argue for the wholesale abandonment of holy books.
Education, science, secular values, and human rights are the most potent weapon we have against faith, and yet politicians refuse to deploy them! If we took the money from the security services, and put it into schools, I think it would be far more effective.
I've been using fanless machines for ages. Basically, you use heatpipes to the case. QuietPC.com are extremely helpful - I have a system with a Streacom FC9 case which is big enough for a high-end CPU, but still dead silent. Of course, if you want the ultimate in graphics cards, you may still have to put up with a fan. Also, signals travel along cables at about 2/3 speed of light - so your mere cable length shouldn't be a problem. HTH
Great that they are making these (though it would be nice to get them in HighDPI too). I'll certainly be getting a few. (Currrently using 3x 1600x1200 20.1" screens, which is an excellent productivity setup, though the backlights are all beginning to fade). While we're talking wishlits, give us a monitor that can go to 1200 lumens+ for outdoor use - I'd love to work outside in the summer time, though I need a monitor that can be viewed with sunglasses on, in partial/direct sunlight.
What do we do to defeat SSL proxying, where there is an "official" MITM? For example, a Bob uses a web browser on his work computer, which trusts an SSL proxy appliance, because Eve (sysadmin) installed that cert into all browsers on the office machines. Alice (as the server-operator) wants to protect Bob (who doesn't know any better) from this. Key fingerprinting would allow Bob to discover this, but how can Alice verify this?
Is there anything that can handle the gruesome CT600 forms that the UK Tax authority require us to fill in every year? These have lots of embedded scripting and can only be read with Acrobat Reader. However, this year, Adobe have stopped releasing Acrobat for Linux.
(An added bonus, the internal logic of the CT600 is buggy: for example if a particular tax option does not apply, it is fussy about the distinction of 0 vs empty, and this leads to subsequent validation errors (naturally with confusing messages). It also has about 20 pages of irrelevant data required, in order to reach a single number, which we have already calculated.)
Slashdot Mirror
How is it legal to sell an exploit?
Can't some of the authors sue them for having a "blackmail-based business model"?
Two things stop me being able to recommend Firefox as the top preference,both trivial, but these are things that work in Chrome, and not Fx:
1. input type=date. Chrome has a native widget, Firefox simply doesn't do anything other than treat it as text - result, we have to embed lots of JS for this alone. Fx has had a huge debate on bugzilla about how to make the datepicker look best, and they got stuck with the debate for ages, and never implemented - I don't really care which widget set it uses, but it just needs to work.
2. the progressive web app on Chrome (Android) will run full-screen. But Firefox won't full-screen it.
Also it would be rather nice if the now 17-year-old bug with several hundred comments on "please don't let a fat-fingered ctrl-Q (when we meant ctrl-W) quit the entire browser without confirmation" could be fixed. Lastly, given that Google is clearly not Mozilla's friend, perhaps Firefox could start auto-blocking mis-features such as google-analytics tracking?
I really want Fx to do well though.
As a developer, I have to agree. Though I really don't want Google to dominate[*], and for there to be a good alternative to Chrome (and I keep using Firefox myself on principle), it's very hard to avoid recommending against using Firefox when they just don't try to keep pace with simple features. Two examples:
* Firefox still doesn't support "input type=date". There's a long thread, arguing about which UI widget would make the best native experience, but for a developer, all I care about is that there should be *some* widget, however imperfect it might be.
* Firefox on Android doesn't support "mobile-web-app-capable". That's essential for us, because it allows mobile sites to be launched full-screen from a desktop icon, without showing the URL-bar and back/forward controls. For our warehousing application (running on an android hand-held terminal with barcode-scanner), this is critical to prevent user-confusion.
On the other hand, at least Firefox isn't the terribly obsolete mobile-safari (still no WebRTC!), which will only get fixed if the a developers' lawsuit succeeds in forcing Apple to open up.
[*] Google have far too much power, and abuse of Chrome could be much more dangerous to the open internet than IE could have been back at the time.
One more huge advantage of ending paywalls is linkability.
If I want to share an article with a friend, or link something on my webpage, or cite it as the paper of record, then it can't be behind a paywall.
This way, publishers can get paid fairly, without taking themselves out of the internet community.
And we could be talking micropayments here - 1 cent an article or something.
Even better, let's have a protocol to do this automatically, perhaps built into Firefox or into Adblock.
At the moment, about 90% of web bandwidth is advertising. So it imposes a heavy cost of bandwidth/time/annoyance on the reader, yet it gives back a fraction of a cent to the author of the content. I'd much rather pay directly for the content I want, and not get the garbage. It would also improve content quality because nobody would worry about their articles being unpopular with advertisers. And it would be a great way for Firefox to lead over Chrome.
What we actually need is:
US law: US companies may not comply with russian backdoor requests; nor may they withdraw service from russian citizens. In other words, for a company headquartered in the US, it must be illegal for the US arm to fail to protect russian citizens from russian law. And then the 3 symmetric permutations.
I completely agree. I had a problem where our new company couldn't send email to Gmail users without always being flagged as spam. We were doing absolutely everything right - and there is no way to get hold of Google. I did finally, 6 months later find a way to reach a person at Google (via a back channel as a customer of a different company), and they confirmed to me: Google act as judge, jury, and executioner, in a secret trial; you can't see the evidence, you don't even know if you've been condemned, and there is no appeal. And they are fine with that.
For what it's worth, the problem was that the previous owners of our IP had got it into a secret blacklist (internal to Google), although we were clean on all of the hundreds of public blacklists I searched. Google are a menace to the public infrastructure. Even AOL behave better!
Even better - let's put the down-arrow offset slightly down (so that it is easier to feel for it), and let's not have PG-up and PG-down in the arrow-key block!
It's so easy to include the smoothing capacitor - but so many LED lights strobe at 50/60 Hz. This produces a really unpleasant effect, especially if people move about (or simply move their eyes). LEDs are far worse than tungsten here, because the LED is usually on for only a very small fraction of the duty-cycle, has no thermal inertia, and many of them only operate on one half-cycle not both. When LED lamps are dimmed, it's truly horrid. (I also hate the poor colour rendering, and the tendency to get harsh ("cool-white") or dirty-grey ("warm white") llight rather than a full spectrum.
Try a wonderful product I recently found: lightdims.com - this lets you subtly reduce the LED to where it should be.
They work excellently, except where the LED is "domed".
It is frustrating to me that we now have "shortscreens" everywhere - instead of full-height screens (e.g. 20" at 1600x1200), we now have 16:9 (and no doubt 16:7 in due course). For real work, whether programming, CAD, or just reading webpages and documents, there is no substitute for screen-height. Yet a combination of the DVD-tail wagging the productivity dog, and a dishonest marketing campaign (17" widescreens have less area than 17" regular screens) means that we can't get decent screens anywhere. For desktops this is just about tolerable with the advent of very very large 16:10 screens, but for laptops, it is a nightmare.
There are a couple of legitimate uses for sites to interfere, with select/copy in certain very restricted cases.
1. Using the no-select attribute on buttons (or text styled as buttons). Otherwise, it's very easy to accidentally select the button text when you mean to click it - and that's just a UI mistake.
2. When an image is meant not to be re-shared (e.g, a personal photo on a social or dating network), intercepting right-click with a message asking the viewer not to take a copy.
It seems to me that knowing about a vulnerability, not telling the vendor, and telling someone else is tantamount to blackmail.
Why can't Microsoft etc go after these people in the courts?
A friend's kid aged about 3 used to love playing the game TuxRacer (controlled by arrow keys, which Dad had to work because he wasn't dextrous enough). So I got a plush Tux toy penguin, and fastened him on top of a small plastic box, in which I placed the guts of a wireless keyboard, and 4x tilt switches connected to the arrow keys. Now simply moving the penguin controls the game :-)
At least Plasma doesn't just silently crash for you - on my Ubuntu 15.04 system, it just dies and dumps me back at the login screen (and there doesn't seem to be any way to debug it, nothing in .xsession errors, and no answers on the bug report). I find it totally bewildering that KDE4 -> KDE5 should do this, after they have just about recovered reputationally and stability-wise from the KDE 3 -> 4 mess (and 4 still hasn't completely reached parity with 3 in some ways). The bump to KDE5 should have been like Linux kernel 3.x to Linux 4.x - a total non-event for the users, i.e.only the Qt library changed, and basically nothing else did.
Anyway, you can at least install the KDE 3.5 fork (trinitydesktop.org has packages) on Ubuntu 15.04, and I'm pleased to say it works pretty well. In fact, it is also significantly prettier (from the perspective of those of us who value clarity over smoothness, and are quite partial to icons that are distinct from one another, and to having nice sharp lines and contrasts to distinguish bits of the GUI from each other). The other option is to look at Mate (apt-get install mate-desktop), which is basically Gnome 2.x, continued (though they are doing the sensible thing and using the Gnome 3 project's libraries)
One good thing about Linux is that the Window Manager is distinct from the rest of the applications. So, you can mix and match window-manager, taskbar, start-button, panel, file-manager, applications. XFCE4 isn't a bad place to start (and parcellite is an alternative to klipper).
What really got Lenovo into hot water was not just Superfish, but that Superfish got compromised. So, what we really need is for the NSA's stolen key to be leaked.
If that key leaks, it will finally cause the massive that will force the politicians to re-evaluate what the miscreants in GCHQ/NSA are "lawfully" doing.
What I mean is that, any country which has no democracy has no workers' rights. Therefore, Chinese workers will never effectively demand decent working conditions. This makes them more competitive than the EU/US, and our workers (who rightly expect decent treatment) will be out-competed by cheap labour from contries that abuse their workers. The result is unemployment in the West, and "slave"-labour in the East.
If China blocks US VPNs (our exports), why isn't the US considering blocking Chinese goods in return?
If nothing else, it is our own long-term best interests to force China to become more free, as it is the only thing that will prevent them winning a race-to-the-bottom competition on wages.
I grant that it doesn't work all the time. But let's at least stop giving "it's my faith" a free pass against criticism, and be done with the faith-schools. Politicians love to think that moderate religion is on their side; it isn't. So they work in the (imho) vain struggle to keep people from moving from position (b) to (c) rather than trying to get them to move from (b) to (a). In epidemiological terms, there are several risk factors for becoming a terrorist... including social exclusion, poverty, grievances against western policy, and religious faith. Why can't we treat faith itself (rather than "perversion of faith") as the risk factor?
True in the US, but in Europe, we are already past tipping point: the majority of people now see organised religion as a force for harm.
In the US, the approach might be to apply sanctions to Saudi Arabia etc untill they fix their human rights record - this approach worked on South Africa wrt apartheid.
Wouldn't it make much more sense to devote some effort and expense to promoting the values of the enlightenment? In particular, devoting some educational effort towards eradication of irrational beliefs. Why not actually treat Islam (and Scientology, and Christianity) as the mental equivalent of a public heath hazard, where those who believe need to be helped to overcome it?
I think we make a serious mistake in our public discourse, by considering that:
violent minority = extremists = misinterpretation of scripture vs. peaceful majority = mainstream = correct interpretation of scripture.
whereas it would be more intellectually honest to consider:
violent minority = literalists = correct interpretation of scripture vs. peaceful majority = reformists = those who wilfully mis-interpret their scripture.
In other words, while almost all humans (of all faith and of none) are decent, good, tolerant peaceful people, they are decent to the extent that they discard their holy books, not to the extent that they follow them. The holy books themselves are beyond redemption, and should be considered to be "on the side of the devil".
Consider the spectrum of belief: (a)Secular humanist ---- (b) "Moderate" religion ----- (c) Extremist religion.
Position (b) involves belief in gods, prophets, and veneration of "perfect" scriptures. Position (c) is a very small step beyond, namely to actually read those scriptures, already considered perfect, and interpret them the literally, as they are written. So, if we want to prevent Islamic terrorism, the most effective argument is not detailed discussion of which Koranic verse overrides which other one (an argument which the moderates can never win), but instead, to argue for the wholesale abandonment of holy books.
Education, science, secular values, and human rights are the most potent weapon we have against faith, and yet politicians refuse to deploy them! If we took the money from the security services, and put it into schools, I think it would be far more effective.
I've been using fanless machines for ages. Basically, you use heatpipes to the case. QuietPC.com are extremely helpful - I have a system with a Streacom FC9 case which is big enough for a high-end CPU, but still dead silent. Of course, if you want the ultimate in graphics cards, you may still have to put up with a fan.
Also, signals travel along cables at about 2/3 speed of light - so your mere cable length shouldn't be a problem. HTH
Great that they are making these (though it would be nice to get them in HighDPI too). I'll certainly be getting a few.
(Currrently using 3x 1600x1200 20.1" screens, which is an excellent productivity setup, though the backlights are all beginning to fade).
While we're talking wishlits, give us a monitor that can go to 1200 lumens+ for outdoor use - I'd love to work outside in the summer time, though I need a monitor that can be viewed with sunglasses on, in partial/direct sunlight.
What do we do to defeat SSL proxying, where there is an "official" MITM? For example, a Bob uses a web browser on his work computer, which trusts an SSL proxy appliance, because Eve (sysadmin) installed that cert into all browsers on the office machines. Alice (as the server-operator) wants to protect Bob (who doesn't know any better) from this. Key fingerprinting would allow Bob to discover this, but how can Alice verify this?
Is there anything that can handle the gruesome CT600 forms that the UK Tax authority require us to fill in every year? These have lots of embedded scripting and can only be read with Acrobat Reader. However, this year, Adobe have stopped releasing Acrobat for Linux.
(An added bonus, the internal logic of the CT600 is buggy: for example if a particular tax option does not apply, it is fussy about the distinction of 0 vs empty, and this leads to subsequent validation errors (naturally with confusing messages). It also has about 20 pages of irrelevant data required, in order to reach a single number, which we have already calculated.)