He does not believe the earth is flat. What he believes is that a bunch of stupid people either DO think the earth is flat, or would just be willing to pay to see him die. He is just trying to swindle some cash.
It is perfect for your kind of situation - long term, reliable, efficient storage of lots of data that seldom changes. Think of it as offline RAID backup, it works like RAID, but it computes parity during your backup operations "offline"..
The beauty of it, imo, is that is is not file system dependent. It works with NTFS, EXT2, HFS, whatever. It works on Linux, Windows, Macs, whatever. You don't need special controllers, and your hard drivers do not have to be matched to each other. You can even include drives on different buses (some on USB, some on SATA, whatever).
It doesn't mess with your data at all - your files are stored normally and can be accessed normally, there is no difference between using it and not using it under normal operation - there is no performance impact at all (it only does anything during backup operations - and even then it is very lightweight if your data doesn't change drastically day to day). You just schedule it to run on a regular basis and it does it thing. It detects and recovers from bit rot in much the same way as ZFS (although you need double parity or more to really ensure full protection from multiple drive failures). You can be as paranoid as you want, it just takes more storage to be more paranoid:)
It isn't good for frequently changing data, and it isn't so great for huge amounts of small files either. It takes a long time to generate parity setup if you have lots of data. You have to be comfortable with command line usage and you have to have some way to schedule jobs. Those issues aside, for things like media libraries and archival storage, it is easily the least painful, most effective solution I have ever used. And its free to boot (and opensource).
...and 100% of that 34% don't have a clue what 4G is. Apple is the beneficiary of a lucky coincidence of major version numbering, that is all.
The fact that 4=4 of course triggers an automatic assumption - but anyone who would actually know what 4G actually is would quickly (and easily) determine that assumption was wrong.
I say just let the rest think they have 4G if it makes them feel better. They wouldn't know the difference anyway...
What a completely asinine thing to say. Even if it was only one or two, its certainly better than none. It amazes me how people can manage to find something to criticize even in the most altruistic actions of others...
Hardly any. I remember skimming through a study of component power consumption and IIRC memory topped out at something like 5% total draw. So memory with half the power draw will buy you about 10 minutes. Whoopdeefuckingdoo.
That is with the display turned on... Most portable devices spend a considerable amount of time with the display turned off to conserve power. To put this into perspective, on an HTC Desire android device with an AMOLED display the screen uses about 50%-60% of total power, memory is probably like you said around 5% (I have never seen hard numbers for the power draw only for memory, but 5% is probably close). If it is 5% with the display on, it would be around 15% or so when it is off, which is quite a bit more significant. Also, memory always uses power - even when it is not storing anything useful... Hence the more memory the device has the more power the RAM draws. Just saying, cutting RAM power use in half can be quite significant. It might be 10 minutes if you are using the device constantly, but it could well be an hour or more of extra standby time depending on how heavily you use the device.
Shame on you for posting a theory that perfectly explains the perceived anomaly - you have dashed the hopes of millions. Please turn in your geek card NOW!
Nice Troll. No, I do NOT value my personal property over the environment - but I also do not see it as and either or thing... Unlike you, I value my social environment at least as much if not more than the physical one - they BOTH need to be healthy and functional for people to be happy.
Look, if you value the environment more than you value your neighbors right to live in a neighborhood that makes them feel comfortable, then MOVE. Your neighbors are the people who created those ordinances in the first place, did you consider the possibility that many of them LIKE them and don't see things the way you do?
I am all for seeing a group of people petitioning their city council to have these kinds of things repelled if it makes sense to the community at large - meaning go out and convince your neighbors to see things your way if you can. Ordinances are easy to change if you have the votes. But if you find your neighbors are all opposed to your world view, then maybe you should move instead of just defiantly breaking the ordinance. Just breaking the rules demonstrates nothing but contempt for the very people you are choosing to live next door to...
ps. And all this talk about "its no own else's business what I do with my own yard"... If you REALLY believe that you are the definition of anti-social (and a selfish asshole too). A neighborhood is not just a geographical location - it is more than the sum of its parts, and believe it or not a lot people CARE about their neighborhoods and how they look. I admit it may mostly about property values, but that isn't the extent of it - your front yard says a lot about you as a person, and the combination of all the lawns in a neighborhood say a lot about its residents.
I admit I do not live in an area where water is scarce. If I did, I would probably think that this ordinance wasn't a very good idea and would try to convince my neighbors to agree with me. And if I could convince enough of them then I would likely go to the city council and try to get the ordinance changed. And if I couldn't convince them and it was REALLY important to me, I would probably seriously consider moving. I would NOT, however, feel compelled to simply break the ordinance to prove how green I was - that is selfish and arrogant, which was the point I was trying to make.
This will probably be interpreted as a flame, but it isn't meant to be one. The _reason_ these kinds of city ordinances exist is because people wanted them - and they wanted them because they help protect property values.
No matter how noble or righteous you might think ripping up your lawn and replacing it with wood chips is, it is still violating the ordinance.
If I lived next door I frankly wouldn't give a crap how Eco-friendly the sea of wood chips next door was - if it looked like crap and it was next to my house I would be pissed off. I'm all for creative ways to help the environment and save money - but not if it means violating ordinances that exist for very good reason.
Doing things like this is frankly makes you look like a child acting out... "The environment is more important than these stupid rules and there are just too many people that don't care about the environment so I will defy them in a effort to get the rules changed. So there!"
Yes, in the grand scheme of things the environment is more important. So what does that have to do exactly with this particular ordinance? Nothing, zip. The point is if you actually wanted to change the ordinance the way to go about it is to convince your neighbors its a good idea and go to the city council. Its done ALL THE TIME all over the country. Good luck with that in this particular case - people LIKE grass.
Not everywhere of course, but in many regions the common name for Escolar is White Tuna... The fact that Albacore is ALSO referred to as White Tuna does not make this fraudulent naming.
In fact in most Sushi restaurants I have frequented, Escolar is MUCH more expensive and is intentionally distinguished from other Tuna varieties. I usually see it labeled as "White Tuna (Escolar)". This is definitely not meant to fool the customer into thinking it is Tuna, it is because that is what they themselves have learned to identify it as. Anyone who enjoys Albacore would _immediately_ know the difference as Escolar is VERY different...
Sorry, but that is a stupid argument. For unencrypted traffic (the vast majority of all traffic) - we essentially trust dns NOW.
So your point is that this is a bad idea because someone might forge the DNS entry... They can already do that - this makes it no easier to accomplish.
Its encryption, not endpoint validation...
Anyone using counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be imprisoned for life
This kind of law (there are others like it) is just f*cking stupid. There is no logical reason for their existence. You can replace "counterfeit products" with ANYTHING and it wouldn't change a damn thing. Recklessly causing or attempting to cause death is what is/should be illegal - attaching it with a specific thing using a law like this is just a way to criminalize something by associating its existence/usage with illegal behavior.
I could use this same logic to criminalize Twinkies. Seriously. Hostess makes twinkies. Twinkies make people fat. Being fat kills people. You might be able to bring a civil suite for against Hostess for something like this, but a criminal prosecution would be preposterous. But if you created a law like the above replacing "counterfeit products" with "twinkies" all of a sudden you have grounds for a life imprisonment case. Its still rather shaky grounds and the case would probably fail miserably, but that isn't the point. Its the fact that it gives the prosecutor enough ammo to trump up the case in the first place. This kind of shit has to stop.
for smaller databases, but limiting the tablespace to a single file per database/schema doesn't sound very flexible, and won't allow DBAs to maximize their disk throughput.
Jim Starky, the designer of falcon (and Interbase and Netfrastructure) would say that that is the point (if you ever heard him speak you would get the joke). Falcon is designed from the ground up to be as independent as possible from disk performance. The basic fundamental design philosophy is "do everything that matters in memory, disk is only a backfill". Once the data gets "hot" disk performance pretty much doesn't matter anymore. Writes to disk are performed in the background and NEVER block, so their performance isn't that important. It also has a clever 2 level indexing scheme that makes ALL indexes behave like clustered indexes, so that helps with disk I/O too, but like I said the intent is not to have to worry too much about disk performance.
I am guessing that this is more of a MyISAM replacement than an InnoDB replacement, so it's not really a shot across Oracle's bow (as some comments make it sound like).
Although feature wise it is much more like innoDB, you are right that it will probably end up being more of a MyISAM replacement. It offers alot of things that innoDB offers, but it aims to be fast, simple to administer, easy to understand, not need ANY tuning, and will be 100% open source - things MyISAM users would probably appreciate more.
When are the content producers going to stop shooting themselves in their own foot with this kind of stuff? Actually, what REALLY blows my mind is how these companies can be so fricken stupid... I mean they have literally created out of thin air an industry consisting of companies whose sole line of business is inventing ways to take their money without delivering a product that actually works. Every single one of these "copy protection" schemes has been snake oil with NO exceptions. None. Not a single one of them works effectively. The fact that the content owners keep buying them is frankly a pretty harsh indictment on their intellect. Maybe they should start trying to hire executives whose IQ exceeds their shoe size. Or just get a clue as to WHY people want what they want and figure out a business plan that lets them give it to them.
NT is a hybrid. It has Microkernel facilities that are constantly being used for something different in each version. Early versions of NT were apparently full Microkernels, but this was changed for performance.
No-no-no-no-NO! I swear this kills me... Why does this myth continue to propogate? The ONLY thing about NT that was EVER uKernelish was that it did alot of IPC (message passing) and that it implemented "personalities" (but it did so in a most decidedly non-microkernel way). Both of these traits were commonly associated with microKernels at the time, but regardless the things that ACTUALLY make a kernel a microKernel never existed in NT... EVER...
All drivers that touched an I/O port HAD to be implemented in kernelmode. That restriction goes back to the original NT 3.1 release and was NEVER otherwise.
Although filesystems are modular to a certain degree, the nuts and bolts of all filesystems have to be implemented in kernelspace.
While initially GDI device drivers (i.e. graphics and printing) were implemented in userspace, this concept was thrown out in NT4. Btw, there was nothing especially microkernelish about this; X is implemented in a similar way to the pre-NT4 GDI as far as that goes. Graphics and printing after all are not generally an esential function of an OS from a functionality perspective.
Do you actually want people to take you seriously when you post utter shit like this?
Fact: Mach performs poorly due to message passing overhead. L3, L4, hybridized kernels (NT executive, XNU), K42, etc, do not.
That is a veiled lie. Mach performed very poorly mostly because of message _validation_, not message passing (although it was pretty slow at that too). I.e. it spent alot of cycles making sure messages were correct. L3/L4 and K42 simple dont do any validation, they leave it up to the user code. In other words once you put back the validation in userland that Mach had in kernelspace, things are a bit more even. And for the love of god NT is NOT a microkernel. It never was a microkernel. And stop using the term "hybrid", all hybrid means is that the marketing dept. wanted people to think it was a microkernel...
Now I will throw a few "facts" at you. It is possible with alot of clever trickery to simulate message passing using zero-copy shared memory (this is what L3/L4/K42/QNX/etc... any microkernel wanting to do message passing quickly). And if done correctly it CAN perform in the same league as monolithic code for many things where the paradigm is a good fit. But there are ALWAYS situations where it is going to be desirable for seperate parts of an OS to directly touch the same memory in a cooperative manner, and when this is the case a microkernel just gets in your damn way...
Fact: OpenBSD (monolithic kernel) performs worse than MacOS X (microkernel) on comparable hardware! Go download lmbench and do some testing of the VFS layer.
Ok... Two things. OpenBSD is pretty much the slowest of all BSD derivitives (which is fine, those guys are more concerned with other aspects of the system and its users are as well), so using it in this comparison shows an obvious bias on your part... Secondly, and please listen very closely because this bullshit needs to stop already, !!OSX IS NOT A MICROKERNEL!! It is a monolithic kernel. Yes it is based on Mach, just like mkLinux was (which also was not a microkernel). Lets get something straight here, being based on Mach doesnt make your kernel a microkernel, it just makes it slow. If you compile away the message passing and implement your drivers in kernel space, then you DO NOT have a microkernel anymore.
So what you actually said in your post could be re-written like this:
Fact: OSX is sooooo slow that the only thing it is faster than is OpenBSD. And you cant even blame its slowness on it being a microkernel. How pathetic... Wow, that says it all in my book:)
And no, you dont have to believe me... Please read
this before bothering to reply.
The long and the short of it is this: VB ain't bad.
People will say that Visual Basic is "unstructured," and they're clueless...
I call bullshit. No one, and I mean NO ONE, who learned to program using VB and later moved on to a real language could possibly make those statements... I dont deny that the language can be used in the manner you described, but I can use a pipewrench to drive a nail... that doesnt make it a good hammer. VB.NET? Ok, they fixed most of the truly stupid shit, but prior to that (i.e. VB6 and back) it was a joke.
What version of Opera did you last use? Opera 8 does exactly what you're talking about too, as did Opera 6 and 7, if I remember correctly.
The default behavior of all Opera versions (at least up to 9, I havent tried 9 yet) is to go to the last _active_ tab upon the closing of a currently active tab... This "feature" has been heavily debated for quite a while now by different camps in the user community.
Since it was originally an MDI app, alot of users who were accustomed to the much more powerful window management prefer more advanced tab management behavior like this. Users coming from other browsers who have never used an MDI based browser are often left confused by it. Like I said it is still debated over quite a bit so I dont know which side will win this argument
Slashdot Mirror
...let it die.
...definitely not a WinAmp replacement.
He does not believe the earth is flat. What he believes is that a bunch of stupid people either DO think the earth is flat, or would just be willing to pay to see him die. He is just trying to swindle some cash.
Stop feeding the troll people...
Its not the only solution of its type, but it is imo the best:
http://www.snapraid.it/
It is perfect for your kind of situation - long term, reliable, efficient storage of lots of data that seldom changes. Think of it as offline RAID backup, it works like RAID, but it computes parity during your backup operations "offline"..
The beauty of it, imo, is that is is not file system dependent. It works with NTFS, EXT2, HFS, whatever. It works on Linux, Windows, Macs, whatever. You don't need special controllers, and your hard drivers do not have to be matched to each other. You can even include drives on different buses (some on USB, some on SATA, whatever).
It doesn't mess with your data at all - your files are stored normally and can be accessed normally, there is no difference between using it and not using it under normal operation - there is no performance impact at all (it only does anything during backup operations - and even then it is very lightweight if your data doesn't change drastically day to day). You just schedule it to run on a regular basis and it does it thing. It detects and recovers from bit rot in much the same way as ZFS (although you need double parity or more to really ensure full protection from multiple drive failures). You can be as paranoid as you want, it just takes more storage to be more paranoid :)
It isn't good for frequently changing data, and it isn't so great for huge amounts of small files either. It takes a long time to generate parity setup if you have lots of data. You have to be comfortable with command line usage and you have to have some way to schedule jobs. Those issues aside, for things like media libraries and archival storage, it is easily the least painful, most effective solution I have ever used. And its free to boot (and opensource).
Highly Recommended.
...and 100% of that 34% don't have a clue what 4G is. Apple is the beneficiary of a lucky coincidence of major version numbering, that is all.
The fact that 4=4 of course triggers an automatic assumption - but anyone who would actually know what 4G actually is would quickly (and easily) determine that assumption was wrong.
I say just let the rest think they have 4G if it makes them feel better. They wouldn't know the difference anyway...
Well, I'm gonna get a little high.
What a completely asinine thing to say. Even if it was only one or two, its certainly better than none. It amazes me how people can manage to find something to criticize even in the most altruistic actions of others...
That is with the display turned on... Most portable devices spend a considerable amount of time with the display turned off to conserve power. To put this into perspective, on an HTC Desire android device with an AMOLED display the screen uses about 50%-60% of total power, memory is probably like you said around 5% (I have never seen hard numbers for the power draw only for memory, but 5% is probably close). If it is 5% with the display on, it would be around 15% or so when it is off, which is quite a bit more significant. Also, memory always uses power - even when it is not storing anything useful... Hence the more memory the device has the more power the RAM draws. Just saying, cutting RAM power use in half can be quite significant. It might be 10 minutes if you are using the device constantly, but it could well be an hour or more of extra standby time depending on how heavily you use the device.
affords willing participants plausible deniability in the assault.
Seriously? There are actually enough people that willingly want to do this kind of thing that it deserves a post on slashdot?
Please, if you care about the internet at all don't be coerced into doing this kind of thing - it is the digital equivalent of pissing in the pool...
I have nothing snarky to say. That was just cool.
Hey! No fair!!!
This is slashdot you insensitive clod...
Shame on you for posting a theory that perfectly explains the perceived anomaly - you have dashed the hopes of millions. Please turn in your geek card NOW!
...screw you right back atcha Sony!
Nice Troll. No, I do NOT value my personal property over the environment - but I also do not see it as and either or thing... Unlike you, I value my social environment at least as much if not more than the physical one - they BOTH need to be healthy and functional for people to be happy.
Look, if you value the environment more than you value your neighbors right to live in a neighborhood that makes them feel comfortable, then MOVE. Your neighbors are the people who created those ordinances in the first place, did you consider the possibility that many of them LIKE them and don't see things the way you do?
I am all for seeing a group of people petitioning their city council to have these kinds of things repelled if it makes sense to the community at large - meaning go out and convince your neighbors to see things your way if you can. Ordinances are easy to change if you have the votes. But if you find your neighbors are all opposed to your world view, then maybe you should move instead of just defiantly breaking the ordinance. Just breaking the rules demonstrates nothing but contempt for the very people you are choosing to live next door to...
ps. And all this talk about "its no own else's business what I do with my own yard"... If you REALLY believe that you are the definition of anti-social (and a selfish asshole too). A neighborhood is not just a geographical location - it is more than the sum of its parts, and believe it or not a lot people CARE about their neighborhoods and how they look. I admit it may mostly about property values, but that isn't the extent of it - your front yard says a lot about you as a person, and the combination of all the lawns in a neighborhood say a lot about its residents.
I admit I do not live in an area where water is scarce. If I did, I would probably think that this ordinance wasn't a very good idea and would try to convince my neighbors to agree with me. And if I could convince enough of them then I would likely go to the city council and try to get the ordinance changed. And if I couldn't convince them and it was REALLY important to me, I would probably seriously consider moving. I would NOT, however, feel compelled to simply break the ordinance to prove how green I was - that is selfish and arrogant, which was the point I was trying to make.
This will probably be interpreted as a flame, but it isn't meant to be one. The _reason_ these kinds of city ordinances exist is because people wanted them - and they wanted them because they help protect property values.
No matter how noble or righteous you might think ripping up your lawn and replacing it with wood chips is, it is still violating the ordinance.
If I lived next door I frankly wouldn't give a crap how Eco-friendly the sea of wood chips next door was - if it looked like crap and it was next to my house I would be pissed off. I'm all for creative ways to help the environment and save money - but not if it means violating ordinances that exist for very good reason.
Doing things like this is frankly makes you look like a child acting out... "The environment is more important than these stupid rules and there are just too many people that don't care about the environment so I will defy them in a effort to get the rules changed. So there!"
Yes, in the grand scheme of things the environment is more important. So what does that have to do exactly with this particular ordinance? Nothing, zip. The point is if you actually wanted to change the ordinance the way to go about it is to convince your neighbors its a good idea and go to the city council. Its done ALL THE TIME all over the country. Good luck with that in this particular case - people LIKE grass.
Not everywhere of course, but in many regions the common name for Escolar is White Tuna... The fact that Albacore is ALSO referred to as White Tuna does not make this fraudulent naming. In fact in most Sushi restaurants I have frequented, Escolar is MUCH more expensive and is intentionally distinguished from other Tuna varieties. I usually see it labeled as "White Tuna (Escolar)". This is definitely not meant to fool the customer into thinking it is Tuna, it is because that is what they themselves have learned to identify it as. Anyone who enjoys Albacore would _immediately_ know the difference as Escolar is VERY different...
No. Sorry, did I ruin it for you?
Sorry, but that is a stupid argument. For unencrypted traffic (the vast majority of all traffic) - we essentially trust dns NOW. So your point is that this is a bad idea because someone might forge the DNS entry... They can already do that - this makes it no easier to accomplish. Its encryption, not endpoint validation...
Anyone using counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be imprisoned for life
This kind of law (there are others like it) is just f*cking stupid. There is no logical reason for their existence. You can replace "counterfeit products" with ANYTHING and it wouldn't change a damn thing. Recklessly causing or attempting to cause death is what is/should be illegal - attaching it with a specific thing using a law like this is just a way to criminalize something by associating its existence/usage with illegal behavior.
I could use this same logic to criminalize Twinkies. Seriously. Hostess makes twinkies. Twinkies make people fat. Being fat kills people. You might be able to bring a civil suite for against Hostess for something like this, but a criminal prosecution would be preposterous. But if you created a law like the above replacing "counterfeit products" with "twinkies" all of a sudden you have grounds for a life imprisonment case. Its still rather shaky grounds and the case would probably fail miserably, but that isn't the point. Its the fact that it gives the prosecutor enough ammo to trump up the case in the first place. This kind of shit has to stop.
Jim Starky, the designer of falcon (and Interbase and Netfrastructure) would say that that is the point (if you ever heard him speak you would get the joke). Falcon is designed from the ground up to be as independent as possible from disk performance. The basic fundamental design philosophy is "do everything that matters in memory, disk is only a backfill". Once the data gets "hot" disk performance pretty much doesn't matter anymore. Writes to disk are performed in the background and NEVER block, so their performance isn't that important. It also has a clever 2 level indexing scheme that makes ALL indexes behave like clustered indexes, so that helps with disk I/O too, but like I said the intent is not to have to worry too much about disk performance.
Although feature wise it is much more like innoDB, you are right that it will probably end up being more of a MyISAM replacement. It offers alot of things that innoDB offers, but it aims to be fast, simple to administer, easy to understand, not need ANY tuning, and will be 100% open source - things MyISAM users would probably appreciate more.
When are the content producers going to stop shooting themselves in their own foot with this kind of stuff? Actually, what REALLY blows my mind is how these companies can be so fricken stupid... I mean they have literally created out of thin air an industry consisting of companies whose sole line of business is inventing ways to take their money without delivering a product that actually works. Every single one of these "copy protection" schemes has been snake oil with NO exceptions. None. Not a single one of them works effectively. The fact that the content owners keep buying them is frankly a pretty harsh indictment on their intellect. Maybe they should start trying to hire executives whose IQ exceeds their shoe size. Or just get a clue as to WHY people want what they want and figure out a business plan that lets them give it to them.
No-no-no-no-NO! I swear this kills me... Why does this myth continue to propogate? The ONLY thing about NT that was EVER uKernelish was that it did alot of IPC (message passing) and that it implemented "personalities" (but it did so in a most decidedly non-microkernel way). Both of these traits were commonly associated with microKernels at the time, but regardless the things that ACTUALLY make a kernel a microKernel never existed in NT... EVER...
Thanks for that :)
Do you actually want people to take you seriously when you post utter shit like this?
That is a veiled lie. Mach performed very poorly mostly because of message _validation_, not message passing (although it was pretty slow at that too). I.e. it spent alot of cycles making sure messages were correct. L3/L4 and K42 simple dont do any validation, they leave it up to the user code. In other words once you put back the validation in userland that Mach had in kernelspace, things are a bit more even. And for the love of god NT is NOT a microkernel. It never was a microkernel. And stop using the term "hybrid", all hybrid means is that the marketing dept. wanted people to think it was a microkernel...
Now I will throw a few "facts" at you. It is possible with alot of clever trickery to simulate message passing using zero-copy shared memory (this is what L3/L4/K42/QNX/etc... any microkernel wanting to do message passing quickly). And if done correctly it CAN perform in the same league as monolithic code for many things where the paradigm is a good fit. But there are ALWAYS situations where it is going to be desirable for seperate parts of an OS to directly touch the same memory in a cooperative manner, and when this is the case a microkernel just gets in your damn way...
Ok... Two things. OpenBSD is pretty much the slowest of all BSD derivitives (which is fine, those guys are more concerned with other aspects of the system and its users are as well), so using it in this comparison shows an obvious bias on your part... Secondly, and please listen very closely because this bullshit needs to stop already, !!OSX IS NOT A MICROKERNEL!! It is a monolithic kernel. Yes it is based on Mach, just like mkLinux was (which also was not a microkernel). Lets get something straight here, being based on Mach doesnt make your kernel a microkernel, it just makes it slow. If you compile away the message passing and implement your drivers in kernel space, then you DO NOT have a microkernel anymore.
So what you actually said in your post could be re-written like this:
Fact: OSX is sooooo slow that the only thing it is faster than is OpenBSD. And you cant even blame its slowness on it being a microkernel. How pathetic... Wow, that says it all in my book :)
And no, you dont have to believe me... Please read this before bothering to reply.
I call bullshit. No one, and I mean NO ONE, who learned to program using VB and later moved on to a real language could possibly make those statements... I dont deny that the language can be used in the manner you described, but I can use a pipewrench to drive a nail... that doesnt make it a good hammer. VB.NET? Ok, they fixed most of the truly stupid shit, but prior to that (i.e. VB6 and back) it was a joke.
The default behavior of all Opera versions (at least up to 9, I havent tried 9 yet) is to go to the last _active_ tab upon the closing of a currently active tab... This "feature" has been heavily debated for quite a while now by different camps in the user community.
Since it was originally an MDI app, alot of users who were accustomed to the much more powerful window management prefer more advanced tab management behavior like this. Users coming from other browsers who have never used an MDI based browser are often left confused by it. Like I said it is still debated over quite a bit so I dont know which side will win this argument