So true. Which also means that it is not going to make any real impact on user experience to remove Java parts EXCEPT when using the wizards. Most users spend very, very little time in wizards.
The original poster's statement that "Open Office performs clunky because of the Java based wizards" is way overblown.
>"The vulnerability affects Flash on all of the relevant platforms, including Android, as well as Reader on Windows and Mac"
What horrible wording. One could read that to mean Linux is not a "relevant platform" in general, or that the vulnerability can't use the exploit to do anything to a Linux system or several other things.
From the article:
"A critical vulnerability has been identified in Flash Player 10.1.85.3 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris; Adobe Flash Player 10.1.95.2 and earlier versions for Android; and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, and Adobe Acrobat 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows and Macintosh."
>If you want a candidate who agrees 100% with you - run for office. If you don't like the democratic or republican candidate - support a third party candidate that does agree with your views.
Except in the American system of voting, it is almost impossible for a "third party" candidate to win. Why? Because we are only allowed to cast a single vote (and to a lesser extent because of things like the electoral college). People are too scared to vote for a third party when it might mean essentially "giving" a vote to one of the two-party candidates that you don't want to win. It is a classic problem, with many solutions (like instant runoff voting). Unfortunately, nobody seems to want to fix the system.
I am sure it could, but it would probably not be terribly effective. Scripts are much more customized to individual site pages. The bulk of blocking ads is easier due to sharing of ad sites and ad-related keywords.
Eventually things will go paperless. It is unavoidable. I accept that. I even can accept being forced to pay for an E-Book with a class tuition (as long as it costs a LOT less than paper books, since I would not be able to resell it).
What I CANNOT accept is being forced to pay for a text that I cannot read on the platform of my choice. I do not and will not accept limitations on what devices, operating systems, etc, I must use/purchase/maintain to read such texts. I will not accept DRM and proprietary software or formats.
Give me an open-standards, DRM-Free based text that I can read on any device (Linux, MS-Windows, MacOS, Kindle, Sony reader, Android, iPad, etc), and can install on more than one device at a time, then it might work. Afterall, why place restrictions on "books" that you HAVE to pay for? They will have no value to anyone else as pirated material.
Although interesting, that is not quite what I had in mind. Affinity tries to place the process on the same CPU (and/or core) all the time. I don't mind the process ending up on different cores, I just don't want it using more than one core at the same time. A single, horrible website could end up allowing one Firefox process to grab way more cores than I might want, at the cost of other processes on the system. Note that nicing the process is still not the same.
>I wish someone would get on this and make firefox work with multiple cores better.
And right after adding multithreading support (which is generally a good thing), PLEASE MAKE SURE to give the user the option to TURN IT OFF (or at least compile without it). In a thin-client environment, Firefox/Web 2.0 is already destroying the application servers. The only thing that limits it from completely ruining them is that the servers are multicore. Once Firefox can take over multiple cores, the game is over:( Yes, I know this is a niche environment I speak of, but more user/admin control is always a good thing.
I am glad I am not the only one that *HATES* Slashdot's cutesy Ajax stuff. Every time they make a change, I have to go search all over the place to find a way to TURN IT BACK OFF so I can use the logical, easy, fast, simple, efficient comment system of the past. UG!
>You *could* get the NoScript extension. It lets you disable what sites can/can't use scripting.
And from my original posting:
"(And no, NoScript doesn't cut it- too complicated for most users, not automatic, too easy to break Javascript that is actually needed, etc)."
NoScript doesn't really manage stuff, it is just a series of allow/deny logic. It requires a lot of user interaction, knowledge, and time. Most people have none of the three and would just end up "breaking" most sites. It is not the solution that I had in mind.
>Isn't competition so much nicer than having a monopoly one one browser that hasn't been updated in years?
Oh yes. It is wonderful to have multiplatform, competition, and standards based. Throw in some open source and community driven stuff too and it is really nice!
That is a really crappy attitude. You are completely ignoring:
1) Older machines 2) Phones 3) Portable devices/pads 4) Thin clients 5) People who don't want to see such crap or who are severely distracted/annoyed by it.
And it doesn't matter HOW fast your machine is- good design is good design. Making assumptions about what device the user is using and not caring, or just not caring at all, is bad design.
Flashblock only stops Flash, not Javascript animation. First it was animated GIF, then Flash, and now it is Javascript animation. Animated GIF and Flash are both easy to control. But Javascript animation is a whole different story. And although Adblock helps, a lot of the stuff is not ads.
Web site designers don't seem to give a damn how much horsepower their site need or use. It is apparent when you try to browse the web using an older machine, or a smartphone. And on a portable device, all that extra "crud" eats up the battery fast.
I am sure this will set off a whole series of arguments over benchmarks, tuning, fairness, etc. But from this article I will just take this: I don't care which one is fastest to the few dozen milliseconds, they are probably all in the same "class" now. Everybody wins. (I can sorta understand not including IE, but wonder why they didn't include Opera?)
Now that Javascript is so much faster, perhaps the browsers can focus on giving some type of automated/intelligent control over when it is used and how so older machines won't come to a CRAWL because of all the cutesy animation and junk spread over most big sites now. (And no, NoScript doesn't cut it- too complicated for most users, not automatic, too easy to break Javascript that is actually needed, etc). Suppress time-delayed actions, disable tight loops, throw artificial delays in loops under user control, visually tag elements to manually "play" on-demand only or stop after X seconds. I know, keep dreaming.
Well, I finally had my first 3D TV experience in a Costco. It was a Panasonic TV and they had the glasses mounted on a movable pole. So I looked for about 10 minutes. Yes, the 3D depth part is fine, but it flickered and stuttered horribly. I found it immediately extremely annoying. And instead of getting "used to it" over time, it just got worse. And when I was "done", my eyes hurt too.
Please note that I *like* 3D, and when I watched Avatar in a 3D Imax theater, I observed no such flicker/stuttering at all.... it was great.
So if all the 3D TV's act like that Panasonic, I know that I have ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in obtaining a "3D TV". And if my next TV just happens to have the 3D feature (and still looks like that Panasonic) then I would just never use it in 3D mode.
After a suitable warning to the customer/administrator, yes. Absolutely. But it should be made very easy for the customer/administrator to reactivate their service, too.
Oh! Thanks. That clears it right up. It is still a shame to have YAS (Yet Another Standard) when it is so close to 1080p (which very probably happened first).
Why did they choose such an apparently non-standard resolution for the high quality version? Wouldn't 1920x (1080p) have made more sense (especially since the next size down is WAY lower than 1920- it is 1280x (720p))? I suppose it doesn't matter for many systems, but mplayer barfs on it:
"Source image dimensions are too high: 2048x872 (maximum is 2046x2046)" "FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver."
And vlc complains that it can't hardware accelerate video of that size (because they made it 2 pixels too wide!) Regardless, it plays surprising fine.
Our meters have a single set of digits showing whole number of kwatt hours. There is no bar chart, no line, nothing else except a tiny blinking triangle (which when I looked at it now is blinking about once per second). No indication as to what the triangle means. It is pretty crappy.
Slashdot Mirror
>CentOS is a server platform. Don't put it on your desktop, that's not what it's for.
And what if your "desktop" is a thin client running from a CentOS/RHEL application server? Mine is...
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
...because nobody has one or wants to have one :)
"so far, IE 9 has the best overall [html5] results"
Great! (No really, it is)
Now wake me up when IE can run on any platform other than just MS-Windows...
So true. Which also means that it is not going to make any real impact on user experience to remove Java parts EXCEPT when using the wizards. Most users spend very, very little time in wizards.
The original poster's statement that "Open Office performs clunky because of the Java based wizards" is way overblown.
>Many cultures use commas instaed of periods for the decimal mark. Specifically, see here.
I know, but it still drives me crazy. It looks like a list of different things instead of a single number.
Good question. Mine reports 10,2,161,22 installed (can't they figure out how to use decimal points?)
>"Microsoft, by the way, released a new IE9 platform preview (PP6) at PDC 20910 today."
Kewl? Does it run on any other platform besides MS-Windows yet?
>"The vulnerability affects Flash on all of the relevant platforms, including Android, as well as Reader on Windows and Mac"
What horrible wording. One could read that to mean Linux is not a "relevant platform" in general, or that the vulnerability can't use the exploit to do anything to a Linux system or several other things.
From the article:
"A critical vulnerability has been identified in Flash Player 10.1.85.3 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris; Adobe Flash Player 10.1.95.2 and earlier versions for Android; and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, and Adobe Acrobat 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows and Macintosh."
>If you want a candidate who agrees 100% with you - run for office. If you don't like the democratic or republican candidate - support a third party candidate that does agree with your views.
Except in the American system of voting, it is almost impossible for a "third party" candidate to win. Why? Because we are only allowed to cast a single vote (and to a lesser extent because of things like the electoral college). People are too scared to vote for a third party when it might mean essentially "giving" a vote to one of the two-party candidates that you don't want to win. It is a classic problem, with many solutions (like instant runoff voting). Unfortunately, nobody seems to want to fix the system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqblOq8BmgM&feature=channel_page
I am sure it could, but it would probably not be terribly effective. Scripts are much more customized to individual site pages. The bulk of blocking ads is easier due to sharing of ad sites and ad-related keywords.
Eventually things will go paperless. It is unavoidable. I accept that. I even can accept being forced to pay for an E-Book with a class tuition (as long as it costs a LOT less than paper books, since I would not be able to resell it).
What I CANNOT accept is being forced to pay for a text that I cannot read on the platform of my choice. I do not and will not accept limitations on what devices, operating systems, etc, I must use/purchase/maintain to read such texts. I will not accept DRM and proprietary software or formats.
Give me an open-standards, DRM-Free based text that I can read on any device (Linux, MS-Windows, MacOS, Kindle, Sony reader, Android, iPad, etc), and can install on more than one device at a time, then it might work. Afterall, why place restrictions on "books" that you HAVE to pay for? They will have no value to anyone else as pirated material.
Although interesting, that is not quite what I had in mind. Affinity tries to place the process on the same CPU (and/or core) all the time. I don't mind the process ending up on different cores, I just don't want it using more than one core at the same time. A single, horrible website could end up allowing one Firefox process to grab way more cores than I might want, at the cost of other processes on the system. Note that nicing the process is still not the same.
>I wish someone would get on this and make firefox work with multiple cores better.
And right after adding multithreading support (which is generally a good thing), PLEASE MAKE SURE to give the user the option to TURN IT OFF (or at least compile without it). In a thin-client environment, Firefox/Web 2.0 is already destroying the application servers. The only thing that limits it from completely ruining them is that the servers are multicore. Once Firefox can take over multiple cores, the game is over :( Yes, I know this is a niche environment I speak of, but more user/admin control is always a good thing.
I am glad I am not the only one that *HATES* Slashdot's cutesy Ajax stuff. Every time they make a change, I have to go search all over the place to find a way to TURN IT BACK OFF so I can use the logical, easy, fast, simple, efficient comment system of the past. UG!
>You *could* get the NoScript extension. It lets you disable what sites can/can't use scripting.
And from my original posting:
"(And no, NoScript doesn't cut it- too complicated for most users, not automatic, too easy to break Javascript that is actually needed, etc)."
NoScript doesn't really manage stuff, it is just a series of allow/deny logic. It requires a lot of user interaction, knowledge, and time. Most people have none of the three and would just end up "breaking" most sites. It is not the solution that I had in mind.
>Isn't competition so much nicer than having a monopoly one one browser that hasn't been updated in years?
Oh yes. It is wonderful to have multiplatform, competition, and standards based. Throw in some open source and community driven stuff too and it is really nice!
That is a really crappy attitude. You are completely ignoring:
1) Older machines
2) Phones
3) Portable devices/pads
4) Thin clients
5) People who don't want to see such crap or who are severely distracted/annoyed by it.
And it doesn't matter HOW fast your machine is- good design is good design. Making assumptions about what device the user is using and not caring, or just not caring at all, is bad design.
Flashblock only stops Flash, not Javascript animation. First it was animated GIF, then Flash, and now it is Javascript animation. Animated GIF and Flash are both easy to control. But Javascript animation is a whole different story. And although Adblock helps, a lot of the stuff is not ads.
Web site designers don't seem to give a damn how much horsepower their site need or use. It is apparent when you try to browse the web using an older machine, or a smartphone. And on a portable device, all that extra "crud" eats up the battery fast.
I am sure this will set off a whole series of arguments over benchmarks, tuning, fairness, etc. But from this article I will just take this: I don't care which one is fastest to the few dozen milliseconds, they are probably all in the same "class" now. Everybody wins. (I can sorta understand not including IE, but wonder why they didn't include Opera?)
Now that Javascript is so much faster, perhaps the browsers can focus on giving some type of automated/intelligent control over when it is used and how so older machines won't come to a CRAWL because of all the cutesy animation and junk spread over most big sites now. (And no, NoScript doesn't cut it- too complicated for most users, not automatic, too easy to break Javascript that is actually needed, etc). Suppress time-delayed actions, disable tight loops, throw artificial delays in loops under user control, visually tag elements to manually "play" on-demand only or stop after X seconds. I know, keep dreaming.
Well, I finally had my first 3D TV experience in a Costco. It was a Panasonic TV and they had the glasses mounted on a movable pole. So I looked for about 10 minutes. Yes, the 3D depth part is fine, but it flickered and stuttered horribly. I found it immediately extremely annoying. And instead of getting "used to it" over time, it just got worse. And when I was "done", my eyes hurt too.
Please note that I *like* 3D, and when I watched Avatar in a 3D Imax theater, I observed no such flicker/stuttering at all.... it was great.
So if all the 3D TV's act like that Panasonic, I know that I have ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in obtaining a "3D TV". And if my next TV just happens to have the 3D feature (and still looks like that Panasonic) then I would just never use it in 3D mode.
>"Should ISPs Cut Off Bot-infected Users?"
After a suitable warning to the customer/administrator, yes. Absolutely. But it should be made very easy for the customer/administrator to reactivate their service, too.
Oh! Thanks. That clears it right up. It is still a shame to have YAS (Yet Another Standard) when it is so close to 1080p (which very probably happened first).
Why did they choose such an apparently non-standard resolution for the high quality version? Wouldn't 1920x (1080p) have made more sense (especially since the next size down is WAY lower than 1920- it is 1280x (720p))? I suppose it doesn't matter for many systems, but mplayer barfs on it:
"Source image dimensions are too high: 2048x872 (maximum is 2046x2046)" "FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver."
And vlc complains that it can't hardware accelerate video of that size (because they made it 2 pixels too wide!) Regardless, it plays surprising fine.
Our meters have a single set of digits showing whole number of kwatt hours. There is no bar chart, no line, nothing else except a tiny blinking triangle (which when I looked at it now is blinking about once per second). No indication as to what the triangle means. It is pretty crappy.