The purpose of primaries is choosing a candidate who can win the general. Given that fundraising ability is a huge factor in the general, I don't think it's unreasonable to select for this in the primary.
ATI, *possibly*, though I doubt it. Their Linux drivers are known to be slow, their top-of-the-line cards often being outperformed by nVidia's midrange. There is no possible way Intel graphics will outperform nVidia's. nVidia's Linux drivers are at worst within a few percentage points of the Windows versions in terms of performance, and on windows, even the most neutered, slowest GeForce 6200 TurboCache 16MB cards have double the performance of Intel's integrated graphics. For an actual midrange or high end card, I'd expect that ratio to be more along the lines of 50 or so. (This is not a knock on Intel, by the way; integrated graphics isn't expected to have high performance. For the same reason, expecting it to outperform discrete cards is foolish.)
I've never tried Safari, so I can't say. From what I can tell, they're about equal in standards compliance and speed, while Opera has many more features, and Safari is more Mac-like.
On the surface, this sounds a bit like transforming single threaded into multithreaded code, which as I gather, is pretty much impossible to do in a generic and widely useful fashion.
What it may be instead, is the ability to dynamically reallocate execution logic into different configurations of 'cores' at will; so the CPU could appear either as a single core with 6 execution units, or as a dual core with 3 units in each, to take advantage of either instruction- or thread-level parallelism, whichever is in greater abundance at the moment. This way it's not creating extra paralellism out of thin air, which wasn't there before (which, I believe, would either be ridiculously hard or impossible to do), but rather makes maximum use of whatever paralellism is there to be found*.
I'm not sure how theoretically possible this is, but it does seem more likely than the other proposition. .
Grandparent was confusing things; it's AIGLX which relies on an extension the ATi drivers don't have (texture-from-pixmap), not XGL. XGL just requires a working OpenGL implementation, iirc. (AIGLX and XGL are basically two very different ways of acheiving the same awesome.)
And the fact is, you should know better anyway, you cannot expect Linux support from the latest and greatest hardware for such a minority of users when a good percentage of the market is still Windows based, thus being where the games are and ultimately, the money.
I can accept that, to a point, but not to the point of 5 months. The Radeon X1000 series was released 5 months ago, and there have been exactly zero Linux drivers for it since then, neither 2D, 3D, proprietary nor open. By comparison, nVidia usually gets drivers out in a matter of days, or a week or two at most. (And not to even mention that their drivers match the performance of their Windows counterparts (as they share the same codebase), whereas with ATi's Linux drivers, their highest end cards routinely get outrun by nVidia's midrange offerings...)
Krita 1.5 will have, among other things, object layers, group layers, adjustment layers, RGB8, RGB16, CMYK8, CMYK16, L*a*b*16, RGB float 16 and 32 (OpenEXR), LMS32, grayscale, and even a Watercolors colorspace.
That's a whole lot of GIMP's deficiencies right off the bat.
However, it also (a) is slow (most effort so far has gone into architecture and features, not optimizing), and (b) has an even smaller plugin community than the GIMP's, due to it being pretty new. (On the other hand, nearly everything in Krita is a plugin, including colorspaces, tools, paintops, and obviously filters, so once it picks up it could be pretty nice.)
In addition to the above, Opera 9 preview 1 almost passes except for a single yellow block which is rendered red. I'd guess even that is fixed in the internal builds by now (and I also have a suspicion there'll be a new preview soon, but that's just me;).
I've beaten it at least 4 times so far, right now I'm going back and seeing how far I can get without any of the special caps. You can get a surprising amount of stars you would supposedly need them for, without them.
I have to link somewhere, and from what I can tell, NewEgg is by far the most popular in those parts. Their site is pretty easy to use, too, which is a plus.
Not that I've ever ordered from them myself, living on a different continent as I do.
AMD will be migrating to DDR2 and a new socket in a few months, which means if you want to upgrade after that, you'll have to switch CPU, motherboard, and memory, again (not the video card, though -- PCI-E will hopefully be around for a while yet). And then in late summer / early fall, Intel is coming out with their new architecture, which I expect to solidly beat AMD's Athlon 64s in many respects.
But then, there's always something just around the corner, so I'm not sure whether waiting is such a good idea, either.
Here's where the 'sweet spots' in terms of performance/price are, in my opinion; choose depending on your budget. (Of course, if your goal is to waste money, there's plenty of components available at or near $1000 prices, as well, but they don't provide much more than a 20% or so performance increase over the $200-300 options.)
Processor: Athlon 64 3200+ ($160)
A 2GHz Athlon 64 with 512K cache. As is widely known, these beat the pants off of Pentium 4s.
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ ($320)
Two 2GHz Athlon 64s with 512K cache (dual core).
Motherboard: Abit KN8 SLI ($110)
SLI doesn't carry much of a price premium any more these days, so it can't hurt to have the extra upgrade capability. Other brands like DFI, Asus, MSI, EPoX, are fine as well.
Memory:
2x 512MB Crucial PC-3200 ($95)
2x 1GB Crucial PC-3200 ($170)
Two is so you can run them in dual channel mode. Other good brands include Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin, OCZ.
Video card: GeForce 6600GT 128MB ($125)
8 pixel pipelines at 500MHz = 4 Gigasomethings
GeForce 6800GS 256MB ($190)
12 pipelines at 425MHz = 5.1 Gigasomethings. This also has double the memory and memory bandwidth of a 6600GT, so it'll handle higher resolutions and antialiasing levels much better.
GeForce 7800GT 256MB ($270)
20 pipelines at 400MHz = 8 Gigasomethings. This is almost exactly double a 6600GT in many respects (double the pixel pushing power, memory, and memory bandwidth).
If you want to find things out for yourself, I recommend browsing around at The Tech Report and AnandTech; I've found these two to consistently have the highest quality reviews and comparisons out there. Their system guides don't completely suck, either. (Neither do Ars Technica's, but they don't do hardware reviews).
No, they don't. He says how to get the menus drawn with Qt, which I already know (seen this thread before;), but regarding native skins which I'm asking about here, all he says is "I don't know".
Thanks for noting, though.
I have read somewhere that of Opera's income from the desktop market, roughly a third was from the ad supported versions, a third was from people buying, and a third from partnering deals with search engines and so, for searches generated from Opera's searchbar. I have further read that Opera's plan with making the browser completely free of charge and ads was to increase marketshare to the point where the increase in revenue from search engines would be sufficient to offset the loss of the other two. How successful has this strategy been?
Opera offers so-called "native" skins for Windows and Mac OS X, where certain controls of the UI are drawn not by Opera's theming engine, but by that of the operating system. (I can't say for OS X, but in Windows XP this adapts to which Windows theme you use, even non-Microsoft sanctioned ones with a modified uxtheme.dll, so I am quite certain it is actually native, and not just Opera drawing them to merely look the same as the default). I don't know how this is done, but knowing that Opera makes use of Qt, and that Qt coincidentally also allows drawing of controls by the OS's theming engine on Windows and OS X, I could hazard a guess that it's done by making use of Qt's capabilities.
Under Linux, however, attempting to use these native themes results in the controls being drawn in a quite ugly faux Windows 9x (or is it Platinum?) style, with no regard to the Qt style you have chosen. If Opera uses Qt to draw native widgets under Windows and OS X, why couldn't it do the same under Linux? In this case the widgets would look native to KDE, which also uses Qt, but not to GNOME and GTK -- but in my estimation, this would still be a whole lot better than what support is there currently (which is to say, about none).
One of Opera's many strengths is it's excellent rendering engine, Presto, which is light, fast, and standards compliant. To this point, is has held an edge over the competition -- over just about everything in terms of speed, over IE in standards compliance, and over Gecko in a clean and agile codebase (admittedly I haven't seen either, but judging from results and what I've heard).
However, it now has some significant competition from KHTML/WebCore, which enjoys both corporate backing from Apple (and to a lesser degree Nokia), and the support of the open source community. It too has a clean and flexible codebase (this was the reason Apple chose it for Safari instead of Gecko, in the first place), it has a degree of standards compliance comparable to Opera's, and with Safari 2, it's also the only browser to seriously challenge Opera in terms of speed. There has also been movement (by Nokia) to adapt it to the mobile market, which is, if memory serves, Opera's main source of income currently.
What do you think of KHTML/WebCore? Do you see it as a threat to Opera's position in the desktop and/or mobile markets? If so, how do you plan to stay ahead of it?
> Much more importantly, Opera doesn't support Gmail properly.
GMail doesn't support Opera properly. Set it identify as Mozilla and voila - it works again. sigh:(
Re:Windows lookalike?
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't see how or why you equate 'not showing a big intrusive dialog every time the user inserts a "medium"' with 'having to sudo (u)mount everything by hand'. I much prefer to just have an icon put on the desktop, which I can access at my leisure. (This, incidentally, also happens, and I turn the big intrusive dialog off.)
Tastes vary, indeed. I absolutely loved Snow Crash -- and while I didn't dislike Cryptonomicon, I only really enjoyed the parts around that very same - unfortunately short - digression into Greek mythology.
to quote myself (more out of laziness than narcissism;):
(i'm not certain whether Firefox has, does not have, or has an extension for each of these features... but long story short, last two times I tried migrating, I couldn't.)
- handles MDI better. the close buttons are right/on/ the tab, where they're logical, and not just one close button at the end of the bar. when the tab bar gets really full, only the active tab has a close button on it, so you can still switch to other tabs without having to aim for the 1px (or less) of space between where the close buttons would otherwise be. it's like they actually put some thought into the whole thing. (by contrast, in Firefox (or was it some other browser? iirc, it was firefox), when you have too many tabs, they just go off past the edge of the screen and that's that.) you can click on an active tab again to minimize it. drag-and-drop rearranging of tabs (FF 1.5a has this now).
- reopening closed windows. if you close something and want it back (I disable the history because I'm paranoid), press Ctrl+Alt+Z (or select it from the menu under the little trash can icon on the right), and it reopens. at the same position you were at, too.
- when you go back/forwards, it's/instant/. combined with mouse gestures, flick left, back, flick right, forward again. instantly.
- it's just plain fast at everything else, too.
- mouse gestures are awesome. instead of having to move my mouse over to the toolbar (I no longer/have/ a toolbar), click a button, and back, I just flick the mouse left and right a bit. also, you can switch windows by holding the right mouse button and scrolling the wheel, which is incredibly convenient.
- the mail client is very nice -- it's like GMail, except not in a web interface -- uses the same concept of labels (though it calls them views), instead of hierarchial folders. small and simple, and I've heard it's powerful as well, though I haven't had to make use of it.
- the sidebar. you can do many crazy power-user stuff very easily: there's panels for links (in the current page), you can select a whole lot (or all) of them, and then right click and, say, open them all in background tabs. there's a windows panel where you can rearrange Opera's tabs among toplevel windows, mass-reload, or whatever. and there's also a notes panel -- nothing fancy, just type in a note and it stays there, remembering what page you were at when you typed it. the thing I like about it is it's so/simple/ -- just open the panel and start typing, no mucking around. then there's also the highly convenient "copy to note" in the context menu whenever you select some text.
- keeps everything,/everything/, in a single window, unless you explicitly tell it to open a new one. this was one of the most irritating aspects of firefox, there were even several extensions purporting to accomplish this, but none of them really did.
- when it crashes (not often, and it only tends to happen when I have (not exaggerating) 100+ tabs open), you can start again where you left off. (you can also set it to do this even if it didn't crash, but I don't.)
- bookmark 'nicknames' -- for example, I can (but don't, this is only an example) give slashdot the nickname 'sd', and then type sd in the address bar to open slashdot. you can do this for folders of bookmarks also -- I used to have one with the 10 or so tech sites I liked, so I just typed 'technews' and it opened them all.
- user stylesheets. I discovered my eyes didn't appreciate staring into a fricking lightbulb all day, so I went and got a white-on-black colorscheme for KDE, and set Opera to use the high contrast (w/b) user stylesheet. so my webpages are now all white on black -- and for the most part, they don't look bad, either. (for the ones
Well, since you asked... here's a list. (i'm not certain whether Firefox has, does not have, or has an extension for each of these features... but long story short, last two times I tried migrating, I couldn't.)
- handles MDI better. the close buttons are right/on/ the tab, where they're logical, and not just one close button at the end of the bar. when the tab bar gets really full, only the active tab has a close button on it, so you can still switch to other tabs without having to aim for the 1px (or less) of space between where the close buttons would otherwise be. it's like they actually put some thought into the whole thing. (by contrast, in Firefox (or was it some other browser? iirc, it was firefox), when you have too many tabs, they just go off past the edge of the screen and that's that.) you can click on an active tab again to minimize it. drag-and-drop rearranging of tabs (FF 1.5a has this now).
- reopening closed windows. if you close something and want it back (I disable the history because I'm paranoid), press Ctrl+Alt+Z (or select it from the menu under the little trash can icon on the right), and it reopens. at the same position you were at, too.
- when you go back/forwards, it's/instant/. combined with mouse gestures, flick left, back, flick right, forward again. instantly.
- it's just plain fast at everything else, too.
- mouse gestures are awesome. instead of having to move my mouse over to the toolbar (I no longer/have/ a toolbar), click a button, and back, I just flick the mouse left and right a bit. also, you can switch windows by holding the right mouse button and scrolling the wheel, which is incredibly convenient.
- the mail client is very nice -- it's like GMail, except not in a web interface -- uses the same concept of labels (though it calls them views), instead of hierarchial folders. small and simple, and I've heard it's powerful as well, though I haven't had to make use of it.
- the sidebar. you can do many crazy power-user stuff very easily: there's panels for links (in the current page), you can select a whole lot (or all) of them, and then right click and, say, open them all in background tabs. there's a windows panel where you can rearrange Opera's tabs among toplevel windows, mass-reload, or whatever. and there's also a notes panel -- nothing fancy, just type in a note and it stays there, remembering what page you were at when you typed it. the thing I like about it is it's so/simple/ -- just open the panel and start typing, no mucking around. then there's also the highly convenient "copy to note" in the context menu whenever you select some text.
- keeps everything,/everything/, in a single window, unless you explicitly tell it to open a new one. this was one of the most irritating aspects of firefox, there were even several extensions purporting to accomplish this, but none of them really did.
- when it crashes (not often, and it only tends to happen when I have (not exaggerating) 100+ tabs open), you can start again where you left off. (you can also set it to do this even if it didn't crash, but I don't.)
- bookmark 'nicknames' -- for example, I can (but don't, this is only an example) give slashdot the nickname 'sd', and then type sd in the address bar to open slashdot. you can do this for folders of bookmarks also -- I used to have one with the 10 or so tech sites I liked, so I just typed 'technews' and it opened them all.
- user stylesheets. I discovered my eyes didn't appreciate staring into a fricking lightbulb all day, so I went and got a white-on-black colorscheme for KDE, and set Opera to use the high contrast (w/b) user stylesheet. so my webpages are now all white on black -- and for the most part, they don't look bad, either. (for the ones that do, I can just go the toolbar and select view -> style -> author mode ).
- effective workflow. what I usually do is when I see an interesting link, I
Assume you meant 'DARK SUCKING LIGHTBULB MONSTERS'? That's how they work, you know. Suck in the dark. You can verify this by looking at one that's gone bad, it has a darkish tinge to it. That's because it's full.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose of primaries is choosing a candidate who can win the general. Given that fundraising ability is a huge factor in the general, I don't think it's unreasonable to select for this in the primary.
Oh, right. That's easily possible, yes.
ATI, *possibly*, though I doubt it. Their Linux drivers are known to be slow, their top-of-the-line cards often being outperformed by nVidia's midrange. There is no possible way Intel graphics will outperform nVidia's. nVidia's Linux drivers are at worst within a few percentage points of the Windows versions in terms of performance, and on windows, even the most neutered, slowest GeForce 6200 TurboCache 16MB cards have double the performance of Intel's integrated graphics. For an actual midrange or high end card, I'd expect that ratio to be more along the lines of 50 or so.
(This is not a knock on Intel, by the way; integrated graphics isn't expected to have high performance. For the same reason, expecting it to outperform discrete cards is foolish.)
I've never tried Safari, so I can't say. From what I can tell, they're about equal in standards compliance and speed, while Opera has many more features, and Safari is more Mac-like.
It isn't noticed as often, but Opera is like Nintendo and Apple too: they come up with all the cool new stuff which everyone else then copies.
:-).
It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when two of my favorite companies join forces like this
On the surface, this sounds a bit like transforming single threaded into multithreaded code, which as I gather, is pretty much impossible to do in a generic and widely useful fashion.
What it may be instead, is the ability to dynamically reallocate execution logic into different configurations of 'cores' at will; so the CPU could appear either as a single core with 6 execution units, or as a dual core with 3 units in each, to take advantage of either instruction- or thread-level parallelism, whichever is in greater abundance at the moment. This way it's not creating extra paralellism out of thin air, which wasn't there before (which, I believe, would either be ridiculously hard or impossible to do), but rather makes maximum use of whatever paralellism is there to be found*.
I'm not sure how theoretically possible this is, but it does seem more likely than the other proposition.
.
I can accept that, to a point, but not to the point of 5 months. The Radeon X1000 series was released 5 months ago, and there have been exactly zero Linux drivers for it since then, neither 2D, 3D, proprietary nor open. By comparison, nVidia usually gets drivers out in a matter of days, or a week or two at most. (And not to even mention that their drivers match the performance of their Windows counterparts (as they share the same codebase), whereas with ATi's Linux drivers, their highest end cards routinely get outrun by nVidia's midrange offerings...)
escape velocity
super mario 64
super smash bros.
Krita 1.5 will have, among other things, object layers, group layers, adjustment layers, RGB8, RGB16, CMYK8, CMYK16, L*a*b*16, RGB float 16 and 32 (OpenEXR), LMS32, grayscale, and even a Watercolors colorspace. That's a whole lot of GIMP's deficiencies right off the bat. However, it also (a) is slow (most effort so far has gone into architecture and features, not optimizing), and (b) has an even smaller plugin community than the GIMP's, due to it being pretty new. (On the other hand, nearly everything in Krita is a plugin, including colorspaces, tools, paintops, and obviously filters, so once it picks up it could be pretty nice.)
In addition to the above, Opera 9 preview 1 almost passes except for a single yellow block which is rendered red. I'd guess even that is fixed in the internal builds by now (and I also have a suspicion there'll be a new preview soon, but that's just me ;).
I've beaten it at least 4 times so far, right now I'm going back and seeing how far I can get without any of the special caps. You can get a surprising amount of stars you would supposedly need them for, without them.
I have to link somewhere, and from what I can tell, NewEgg is by far the most popular in those parts. Their site is pretty easy to use, too, which is a plus.
Not that I've ever ordered from them myself, living on a different continent as I do.
AMD will be migrating to DDR2 and a new socket in a few months, which means if you want to upgrade after that, you'll have to switch CPU, motherboard, and memory, again (not the video card, though -- PCI-E will hopefully be around for a while yet). And then in late summer / early fall, Intel is coming out with their new architecture, which I expect to solidly beat AMD's Athlon 64s in many respects.
But then, there's always something just around the corner, so I'm not sure whether waiting is such a good idea, either.
Here's where the 'sweet spots' in terms of performance/price are, in my opinion; choose depending on your budget. (Of course, if your goal is to waste money, there's plenty of components available at or near $1000 prices, as well, but they don't provide much more than a 20% or so performance increase over the $200-300 options.)
Processor:
Athlon 64 3200+ ($160)
A 2GHz Athlon 64 with 512K cache. As is widely known, these beat the pants off of Pentium 4s.
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ ($320)
Two 2GHz Athlon 64s with 512K cache (dual core).
Motherboard:
Abit KN8 SLI ($110)
SLI doesn't carry much of a price premium any more these days, so it can't hurt to have the extra upgrade capability. Other brands like DFI, Asus, MSI, EPoX, are fine as well.
Memory:
2x 512MB Crucial PC-3200 ($95)
2x 1GB Crucial PC-3200 ($170)
Two is so you can run them in dual channel mode. Other good brands include Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin, OCZ.
Video card:
GeForce 6600GT 128MB ($125)
8 pixel pipelines at 500MHz = 4 Gigasomethings
GeForce 6800GS 256MB ($190)
12 pipelines at 425MHz = 5.1 Gigasomethings. This also has double the memory and memory bandwidth of a 6600GT, so it'll handle higher resolutions and antialiasing levels much better.
GeForce 7800GT 256MB ($270)
20 pipelines at 400MHz = 8 Gigasomethings. This is almost exactly double a 6600GT in many respects (double the pixel pushing power, memory, and memory bandwidth).
If you want to find things out for yourself, I recommend browsing around at The Tech Report and AnandTech; I've found these two to consistently have the highest quality reviews and comparisons out there. Their system guides don't completely suck, either. (Neither do Ars Technica's, but they don't do hardware reviews).
No, they don't. He says how to get the menus drawn with Qt, which I already know (seen this thread before ;), but regarding native skins which I'm asking about here, all he says is "I don't know".
Thanks for noting, though.
I have read somewhere that of Opera's income from the desktop market, roughly a third was from the ad supported versions, a third was from people buying, and a third from partnering deals with search engines and so, for searches generated from Opera's searchbar. I have further read that Opera's plan with making the browser completely free of charge and ads was to increase marketshare to the point where the increase in revenue from search engines would be sufficient to offset the loss of the other two. How successful has this strategy been?
Opera offers so-called "native" skins for Windows and Mac OS X, where certain controls of the UI are drawn not by Opera's theming engine, but by that of the operating system. (I can't say for OS X, but in Windows XP this adapts to which Windows theme you use, even non-Microsoft sanctioned ones with a modified uxtheme.dll, so I am quite certain it is actually native, and not just Opera drawing them to merely look the same as the default). I don't know how this is done, but knowing that Opera makes use of Qt, and that Qt coincidentally also allows drawing of controls by the OS's theming engine on Windows and OS X, I could hazard a guess that it's done by making use of Qt's capabilities.
Under Linux, however, attempting to use these native themes results in the controls being drawn in a quite ugly faux Windows 9x (or is it Platinum?) style, with no regard to the Qt style you have chosen. If Opera uses Qt to draw native widgets under Windows and OS X, why couldn't it do the same under Linux? In this case the widgets would look native to KDE, which also uses Qt, but not to GNOME and GTK -- but in my estimation, this would still be a whole lot better than what support is there currently (which is to say, about none).
One of Opera's many strengths is it's excellent rendering engine, Presto, which is light, fast, and standards compliant. To this point, is has held an edge over the competition -- over just about everything in terms of speed, over IE in standards compliance, and over Gecko in a clean and agile codebase (admittedly I haven't seen either, but judging from results and what I've heard).
However, it now has some significant competition from KHTML/WebCore, which enjoys both corporate backing from Apple (and to a lesser degree Nokia), and the support of the open source community. It too has a clean and flexible codebase (this was the reason Apple chose it for Safari instead of Gecko, in the first place), it has a degree of standards compliance comparable to Opera's, and with Safari 2, it's also the only browser to seriously challenge Opera in terms of speed. There has also been movement (by Nokia) to adapt it to the mobile market, which is, if memory serves, Opera's main source of income currently.
What do you think of KHTML/WebCore? Do you see it as a threat to Opera's position in the desktop and/or mobile markets? If so, how do you plan to stay ahead of it?
> Much more importantly, Opera doesn't support Gmail properly. GMail doesn't support Opera properly. Set it identify as Mozilla and voila - it works again. sigh :(
I don't see how or why you equate 'not showing a big intrusive dialog every time the user inserts a "medium"' with 'having to sudo (u)mount everything by hand'. I much prefer to just have an icon put on the desktop, which I can access at my leisure. (This, incidentally, also happens, and I turn the big intrusive dialog off.)
Tastes vary, indeed.
I absolutely loved Snow Crash -- and while I didn't dislike Cryptonomicon, I only really enjoyed the parts around that very same - unfortunately short - digression into Greek mythology.
Well, since you asked... here's a list. (i'm not certain whether Firefox has, does not have, or has an extension for each of these features... but long story short, last two times I tried migrating, I couldn't.)
/on/ the tab, where they're logical, and not just one close button at the end of the bar. when the tab bar gets really full, only the active tab has a close button on it, so you can still switch to other tabs without having to aim for the 1px (or less) of space between where the close buttons would otherwise be. it's like they actually put some thought into the whole thing. (by contrast, in Firefox (or was it some other browser? iirc, it was firefox), when you have too many tabs, they just go off past the edge of the screen and that's that.) you can click on an active tab again to minimize it. drag-and-drop rearranging of tabs (FF 1.5a has this now).
/instant/. combined with mouse gestures, flick left, back, flick right, forward again. instantly.
/have/ a toolbar), click a button, and back, I just flick the mouse left and right a bit. also, you can switch windows by holding the right mouse button and scrolling the wheel, which is incredibly convenient.
/simple/ -- just open the panel and start typing, no mucking around. then there's also the highly convenient "copy to note" in the context menu whenever you select some text.
/everything/, in a single window, unless you explicitly tell it to open a new one. this was one of the most irritating aspects of firefox, there were even several extensions purporting to accomplish this, but none of them really did.
- handles MDI better. the close buttons are right
- reopening closed windows. if you close something and want it back (I disable the history because I'm paranoid), press Ctrl+Alt+Z (or select it from the menu under the little trash can icon on the right), and it reopens. at the same position you were at, too.
- when you go back/forwards, it's
- it's just plain fast at everything else, too.
- mouse gestures are awesome. instead of having to move my mouse over to the toolbar (I no longer
- the mail client is very nice -- it's like GMail, except not in a web interface -- uses the same concept of labels (though it calls them views), instead of hierarchial folders. small and simple, and I've heard it's powerful as well, though I haven't had to make use of it.
- the sidebar. you can do many crazy power-user stuff very easily: there's panels for links (in the current page), you can select a whole lot (or all) of them, and then right click and, say, open them all in background tabs. there's a windows panel where you can rearrange Opera's tabs among toplevel windows, mass-reload, or whatever. and there's also a notes panel -- nothing fancy, just type in a note and it stays there, remembering what page you were at when you typed it. the thing I like about it is it's so
- keeps everything,
- when it crashes (not often, and it only tends to happen when I have (not exaggerating) 100+ tabs open), you can start again where you left off. (you can also set it to do this even if it didn't crash, but I don't.)
- bookmark 'nicknames' -- for example, I can (but don't, this is only an example) give slashdot the nickname 'sd', and then type sd in the address bar to open slashdot. you can do this for folders of bookmarks also -- I used to have one with the 10 or so tech sites I liked, so I just typed 'technews' and it opened them all.
- user stylesheets. I discovered my eyes didn't appreciate staring into a fricking lightbulb all day, so I went and got a white-on-black colorscheme for KDE, and set Opera to use the high contrast (w/b) user stylesheet. so my webpages are now all white on black -- and for the most part, they don't look bad, either. (for the ones that do, I can just go the toolbar and select view -> style -> author mode ).
- effective workflow. what I usually do is when I see an interesting link, I
Ditto. I'm getting a free reg code (hey, why not), but I'm not sure I'll actually use it...
Assume you meant 'DARK SUCKING LIGHTBULB MONSTERS'? That's how they work, you know. Suck in the dark. You can verify this by looking at one that's gone bad, it has a darkish tinge to it. That's because it's full.