As I've tried multiple times to get off my Opera addiction and couldn't, hopefully I can provide some insight on this:)
I'm comparing the version of Opera I currently use, eg. 8.0 beta1. It smacks a vanilla Firefox around so badly it's not even worth contrasting, so I'll be comparing to the fully-decked-out-with-extensions version of Firefox. In no particular order:
- Lighter and faster. Opera is ~3MB, complete with mail client, IRC, and all the rest; vanilla Firefox is 4-5MB (used to be much more, so they're making progress). Opera is also faster: it runs acceptably on my mom's 200MHz Cyrix, while Firefox feels slower even on my AXP 2400+ -- and that's with Firefox compiled specifically for my processor (Gentoo, and all), and Opera plain i386 (can't exactly compile it myself;). And while Opera isn't a speed demon in loading the app itself (but not too slow either), it's still a hell of a lot faster than the 20-30 seconds a Firefox fully decked out with extensions sometimes takes.
- Full MDI (windows within windows), not just tabs -- this means popups can be opened in the same window.
-...which leads to: nothing is *ever* opened outside of the base window except when you specifically request it with 'new window'. Firefox, despite the myriad extensions for it, is still very bad at this.
- Minimize tabs, meaning it won't be activated (after you close the previous tab, etc.) until you unminimize it.
- Incredibly snappy navigation. If it has a page in cache, it displays it *immediately* -- press back, and wham, it's already there, no waiting to load or anything.
- Nicer mouse gestures. I can rightclick on a link and drag downwards to open it in a new tab; ctrl+shift+drag an image to open it in a background tab, and so on. Being able to hold the right mouse button and scroll the wheel to switch between tabs is also very convenient.
- The integrated mail client is nice and simple (very GMail-ish), and convenient because I have Opera open nearly all the time anyways. (I'll be the first to admit, however, that the IRC client is pointless and a waste of time and effort.)
- The integrated notes are likewise pretty nice; right click -> copy to note is a very quick and easy way to store the various funnies you find. It also stores the URL you saved them from though I haven't yet had a use for this.
- Lots of powerful things you can do with the sidepanel. For example, open the 'links' panel, select the ones you want, select 'open in background page'. This is very convenient for pages with a ton a links you all want to download. Or open the windows panel and move pages between toplevel windows, mass-reload/close them, and so on. You can even add webpages to the sidebar as panels, and use Opera's small screen rendering (normally for cellphones) to render them.
- Bookmark nicknames, including folders -- say you have a bookmark to slashdot; you could nickname it '/.' and just type that. That's not much in itself, but you can also give nicknames to folders, so I just type 'technews' and it opens all of my 20-some tech sites at once (after which I just drag my mouse down-right for each once it's sufficiently loaded to determine that nothing's new, and middleclick on things I want to read to open them in the background, etc.).
- Keeps a list of closed pages, providing undo functionality, meaning you can press ctrl+z to reopen the page you last closed (at the same position/etc), and again for the one before it, and so on.
- Widgets in webpages are styled according to Opera's skin.
- Fastforward -- find the 'next' link on the page, follow it. Doubly effective with mouse gestures, as if there isn't a page forwards in the history, it automatically fastforwards instead. And if there's a login form for which you've stored the password, it'll log you in.
- If it crashes, it pops up a dialog asking whether you want to continue from where you left off next time you start it.
And I probably forgot half of them because it's
...that this comes before the first '2005 is the year of Linux on the desktop!!111' prediction. They've been predicting it every single year, and the year when it is declared to be true (whether or not it is), they are beaten to the punch;).
I've been thinking about why there's a lack of high-quality open source games. The easy answer would be the huge artistic & etc. effort required, but I'm not entirely sure that's true: just look at the huge number of free (unsure whether Free) mods for Windows games. So the problem actually seems to lie with the engine. We need a high quality (as in, up there with the latest commercial ones) open source game engine first; having it be cross platform wouldn't hurt, either.
Unfortunately, though, games are dissimilar to most other apps in that, for most other apps, you only need one: Windows has MS Office, Linux has OpenOffice.org, for example. For games, however, you need lots of them: Linux has Unreal and Doom, but Windows also has Far Cry, Half Life, and all the rest. So just having good open source games won't be enough unless all the Windows ones suddenly turn open source as well, which is unlikely.
So in the end it's back to the chicken-and-egg situation of the most popular OS getting the most games, and the OS with the most games getting more popular -- Linux will have to gain a larger installed base in other, non-gaming circles first, for game creators to have an incentive to port to it. (Which is already happening, to a degree. It just needs to continue.)
It's also people like these (Aaron J. Seigo specifically, in this case) who make KDE such an amazing desktop environment. While I do not agree with it entirely, I wouldn't dismiss his argument out of hand, either. And he never said people don't have a right to port things to Windows if they want to; why do people *always* mix this in whenever someone voices an opinion? He was debating whether it's a meaningful thing to do, not whether it's legal.
And personally, I wouldn't throw insults about 'giving the FOSS community a bad name' until I've done something to give it a good one - such as writing amazing software, for one. (If you have, then my apologies, and rant on with impunity.)
Re:Konqueror: the file and internet browser
on
KDE 3.3.2 Released
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· Score: 1
While it's not exactly the same (commander-style as opposed to explorer/finder-style), give Krusader a try.
He's talking about Linux. ATi's linux drivers are completely inexcusable horrible fucking pieces of brainrotted shit. If you manage to get them working at all, you'll still get all sorts of stability and corruption, and a 9600 Pro will get beaten by a GeForce2 MX. Yes, they are that bad.
Yes, I'm aware of this. Which is why I suggested the best method would probably be to just make a lot of backups;).
The other issue I see is that it may not be possible (in fact it's probably not) to securely store the password on the 'key', without requiring yet another password (which would be pointless), in which case having the key inserted while the user is logged in is not such a good idea. If that's true, scrap the part about removing it to log out, and just insert to log in, remove immediately afterwards, and logout via the standard GUI way.
I think I'll quote a post I made at dot.kde.org just a few hours ago, as it seems relevant:
In my opinion, the default level of security should be (the goal of) immunity to remote attacks. Whatever sacrifices necessary to achieve that should be made, and if additional security can be obtained at no cost, then there's not reason not to have it, but additional sacrifices shouldn't be made beyond that point. If someone gains physical access to the machine, well... if someone gains physical access to their TV, they can just walk off with it, and you don't see people chaining TVs to their walls to avoid the scenario. So really, it's a nonissue for 99%+ of the userbase -- and the rest can take further measures themselves (encrypting the entire drive, whatnot).
So what I'd like to see is that users have to enter a password when logging in, and never again after that, unless they specifically choose to. Autogenerating highly secure passwords seems like a good idea -- perhaps Konqueror could try and detect registration forms, and fill in the password field(s) in advance? Or either way, the method to do so should be in plain sight and require minimal effort.
Another idea, in order to get rid of the login password hassle entirely and increase security in the process: autogenerate a hugely secure password, and then let the user put it on a USB thumb/pen/whatever drive, flash card, floppy disk, heck, CD, or whatever media they have, and then use it in the same way as a car key. Press the power switch to turn on the computer, and when they insert the 'key', automatically login the user who's key it is. And when they remove the 'key', automatically log them out. That would be rather nice, don't you think? (There should also be a way to recover if the key is lost -- probably just forcing or forcefully suggesting the user to make backups, but that's getting into details.)
(And again, if someone manages to steal it, well, credit cards and car keys can be stolen as well. There's no need to be paranoid to such a degree.)
While I'll have to agree with you that Opera doesn't stand much of a chance on the desktop against the twin juggernauts of Microsoft and Open Source, it is kind of sad, really. Almost every large advancement in browsers recently, to wit the ones incorporated by Firefox, were invented by them. Tabbed browsing (well, Opera actually has a true MDI with windows in it, not just tabs), mouse gestures, and others (can't think of them because I've started taking them for granted:/). The whole browsing experience is also much better thought out -- for example, there's the 'fast forward' button, which by default looks for a 'next' link in the page and follows it. In itself, that's nothing spectacular; but the mouse gesture for 'forward' falls back on it if there's no pages forward in the history, and if there's a login form in the page that you've stored the login/password for, pressing fast forward (or using the forward mouse gesture) will log in. And it's filled with these sort of things that just make the whole thing that much more polished.
M2 isn't a bad piece of kit, either. I don't know whether it inspired GMail, but the similarities are striking, either way. Like GMail, it replaces the old folder-based hierarchy with a flat, heavily indexed database that you can search/sort based on user-assigned attributes ('labels' in GMail, 'views' in Opera), or preset ones like whether the message was read, whether it is spam, etc. As well as their content, of course. It also has a limited form of GMail's 'conversations'.
The current situation is analogous to Apple and Microsoft to a degree -- Apple invents all the great ideas, and Microsoft steals them, makes a ton of money, and marginalizes Apple. The difference here is that Mozilla isn't making money and isn't an evil empire (quite the opposite), but it makes precious little difference from Opera's perspective.
KDE is rather configurable. Want the menubar in the app under the titlebar, like Windows? Fine. Want it at the top of the screen all the time, like MacOS? You can do that, too. You can configure what sort of clicks in which areas of the window do what with regards to window management (eg doubleclick the titlebar to shade, or to maximize, etc.). That's just two examples, but pretty much all of KDE is like this. It's the epitome of 'highly configurable, with sane defaults'.
You might want to give the Badnarik interview that was on here a while back a read. He has a very interesting solution to this -- make shareholders liable for the actions of the corporation they own. It makes perfect sense -- if I pay someone to kill you, I should be liable, if I pay a corporation to do the same, I should be liable. Currently, I wouldn't be. This would almost overnight move the emphasis away from the shortsighted profit-at-all-costs mentality, because suddenly it wouldn't be worth it for the shareholders.
History shows that that is not the case: people are not necessarily greedy, and they are capable of selfless cooperation. While some greed may exist in any society, if greedy and selfish behavior becomes the norm in a society, it is probably because the society has chosen to make that the preferred behavior.
Either you're confused, or I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say. Libertarianism doesn't specify that all people shall be greedy capitalist pigs; it merely accounts for the possibility that they might. And as I already said, the current mindset of greed and shortsightedness has nothing (or at any rate, very little) to do with Libertarianism, as we don't currently have a Libertarian government and/or society.
I agree that the welfare thing is one of the weak spots of the Libertarian platform, and I don't necessarily agree with it; nor disagree. People might start taking care of the poor by themselves; they might not. It's also possible that the economy will do so well that pretty much anyone who wants a job will be able to get one. But you're certainly correct that Libertarianism doesn't fundamentally account for it.
I've also been toying with the alternate idea of making life and the resources necessary to maintain it a fundamental right; basically, determine a minimum amount necessary to pay for food, shelter, and other basic necessities, and give that much to everyone, whether rich or poor, collect taxes to pay for it, and that's welfare taken care of. Not much room for bureaucracy to syphon money away, either. But again, I don't feel myself sufficiently informed in this area, so I'm just staying agnostic for now.
Well, as I see it, the fundamental philosophy of Libertarianism isn't "greed is the ultimate good" as you say. Rather, it recognizes that people are fundamentally greedy, and attempts to design a functioning society with that in mind. That's what I like about Libertarianism -- in stark contrast to other 'idealist' philosophies like, for example, communism, it designs for the worst rather than the best case scenario; rather than assume that human nature will conveniently step aside, it specifically exploits it. It's as if it were designed to actually work in practice.
Now, so far I've just been trying to clear up a misconception; I'm not saying a Libertarian government/society would necessarily avoid the pitfalls mentioned in TFA. We don't have a Libertarian government, nor has there been one recently; there's no way to know. However, it's certainly possible that one of the reasons for the current situation is that people are fundamentally greedy, and we currently have a system that doesn't account for it.
Slashdot Mirror
As I've tried multiple times to get off my Opera addiction and couldn't, hopefully I can provide some insight on this :)
;). And while Opera isn't a speed demon in loading the app itself (but not too slow either), it's still a hell of a lot faster than the 20-30 seconds a Firefox fully decked out with extensions sometimes takes. ...which leads to: nothing is *ever* opened outside of the base window except when you specifically request it with 'new window'. Firefox, despite the myriad extensions for it, is still very bad at this.
I'm comparing the version of Opera I currently use, eg. 8.0 beta1. It smacks a vanilla Firefox around so badly it's not even worth contrasting, so I'll be comparing to the fully-decked-out-with-extensions version of Firefox. In no particular order:
- Lighter and faster. Opera is ~3MB, complete with mail client, IRC, and all the rest; vanilla Firefox is 4-5MB (used to be much more, so they're making progress). Opera is also faster: it runs acceptably on my mom's 200MHz Cyrix, while Firefox feels slower even on my AXP 2400+ -- and that's with Firefox compiled specifically for my processor (Gentoo, and all), and Opera plain i386 (can't exactly compile it myself
- Full MDI (windows within windows), not just tabs -- this means popups can be opened in the same window.
-
- Minimize tabs, meaning it won't be activated (after you close the previous tab, etc.) until you unminimize it.
- Incredibly snappy navigation. If it has a page in cache, it displays it *immediately* -- press back, and wham, it's already there, no waiting to load or anything.
- Nicer mouse gestures. I can rightclick on a link and drag downwards to open it in a new tab; ctrl+shift+drag an image to open it in a background tab, and so on. Being able to hold the right mouse button and scroll the wheel to switch between tabs is also very convenient.
- The integrated mail client is nice and simple (very GMail-ish), and convenient because I have Opera open nearly all the time anyways. (I'll be the first to admit, however, that the IRC client is pointless and a waste of time and effort.)
- The integrated notes are likewise pretty nice; right click -> copy to note is a very quick and easy way to store the various funnies you find. It also stores the URL you saved them from though I haven't yet had a use for this.
- Lots of powerful things you can do with the sidepanel. For example, open the 'links' panel, select the ones you want, select 'open in background page'. This is very convenient for pages with a ton a links you all want to download. Or open the windows panel and move pages between toplevel windows, mass-reload/close them, and so on. You can even add webpages to the sidebar as panels, and use Opera's small screen rendering (normally for cellphones) to render them.
- Bookmark nicknames, including folders -- say you have a bookmark to slashdot; you could nickname it '/.' and just type that. That's not much in itself, but you can also give nicknames to folders, so I just type 'technews' and it opens all of my 20-some tech sites at once (after which I just drag my mouse down-right for each once it's sufficiently loaded to determine that nothing's new, and middleclick on things I want to read to open them in the background, etc.).
- Keeps a list of closed pages, providing undo functionality, meaning you can press ctrl+z to reopen the page you last closed (at the same position/etc), and again for the one before it, and so on.
- Widgets in webpages are styled according to Opera's skin.
- Fastforward -- find the 'next' link on the page, follow it. Doubly effective with mouse gestures, as if there isn't a page forwards in the history, it automatically fastforwards instead. And if there's a login form for which you've stored the password, it'll log you in.
- If it crashes, it pops up a dialog asking whether you want to continue from where you left off next time you start it.
And I probably forgot half of them because it's
...that this comes before the first '2005 is the year of Linux on the desktop!!111' prediction. They've been predicting it every single year, and the year when it is declared to be true (whether or not it is), they are beaten to the punch ;).
I've been thinking about why there's a lack of high-quality open source games. The easy answer would be the huge artistic & etc. effort required, but I'm not entirely sure that's true: just look at the huge number of free (unsure whether Free) mods for Windows games. So the problem actually seems to lie with the engine. We need a high quality (as in, up there with the latest commercial ones) open source game engine first; having it be cross platform wouldn't hurt, either.
Unfortunately, though, games are dissimilar to most other apps in that, for most other apps, you only need one: Windows has MS Office, Linux has OpenOffice.org, for example. For games, however, you need lots of them: Linux has Unreal and Doom, but Windows also has Far Cry, Half Life, and all the rest. So just having good open source games won't be enough unless all the Windows ones suddenly turn open source as well, which is unlikely.
So in the end it's back to the chicken-and-egg situation of the most popular OS getting the most games, and the OS with the most games getting more popular -- Linux will have to gain a larger installed base in other, non-gaming circles first, for game creators to have an incentive to port to it. (Which is already happening, to a degree. It just needs to continue.)
The ed2k links work, though.
Poland thanked. Thanks for the tip.
PIMP Isn't Microsoft Paint either
Sold it and bought an nVidia card.
It's also people like these (Aaron J. Seigo specifically, in this case) who make KDE such an amazing desktop environment. While I do not agree with it entirely, I wouldn't dismiss his argument out of hand, either. And he never said people don't have a right to port things to Windows if they want to; why do people *always* mix this in whenever someone voices an opinion? He was debating whether it's a meaningful thing to do, not whether it's legal.
And personally, I wouldn't throw insults about 'giving the FOSS community a bad name' until I've done something to give it a good one - such as writing amazing software, for one. (If you have, then my apologies, and rant on with impunity.)
While it's not exactly the same (commander-style as opposed to explorer/finder-style), give Krusader a try.
He's talking about Linux. ATi's linux drivers are completely inexcusable horrible fucking pieces of brainrotted shit. If you manage to get them working at all, you'll still get all sorts of stability and corruption, and a 9600 Pro will get beaten by a GeForce2 MX. Yes, they are that bad.
See also.
Yes, I'm aware of this. Which is why I suggested the best method would probably be to just make a lot of backups ;).
The other issue I see is that it may not be possible (in fact it's probably not) to securely store the password on the 'key', without requiring yet another password (which would be pointless), in which case having the key inserted while the user is logged in is not such a good idea. If that's true, scrap the part about removing it to log out, and just insert to log in, remove immediately afterwards, and logout via the standard GUI way.
While I'll have to agree with you that Opera doesn't stand much of a chance on the desktop against the twin juggernauts of Microsoft and Open Source, it is kind of sad, really. Almost every large advancement in browsers recently, to wit the ones incorporated by Firefox, were invented by them. Tabbed browsing (well, Opera actually has a true MDI with windows in it, not just tabs), mouse gestures, and others (can't think of them because I've started taking them for granted :/). The whole browsing experience is also much better thought out -- for example, there's the 'fast forward' button, which by default looks for a 'next' link in the page and follows it. In itself, that's nothing spectacular; but the mouse gesture for 'forward' falls back on it if there's no pages forward in the history, and if there's a login form in the page that you've stored the login/password for, pressing fast forward (or using the forward mouse gesture) will log in. And it's filled with these sort of things that just make the whole thing that much more polished.
M2 isn't a bad piece of kit, either. I don't know whether it inspired GMail, but the similarities are striking, either way. Like GMail, it replaces the old folder-based hierarchy with a flat, heavily indexed database that you can search/sort based on user-assigned attributes ('labels' in GMail, 'views' in Opera), or preset ones like whether the message was read, whether it is spam, etc. As well as their content, of course. It also has a limited form of GMail's 'conversations'.
The current situation is analogous to Apple and Microsoft to a degree -- Apple invents all the great ideas, and Microsoft steals them, makes a ton of money, and marginalizes Apple. The difference here is that Mozilla isn't making money and isn't an evil empire (quite the opposite), but it makes precious little difference from Opera's perspective.
blu-ray taco... *drool*
So is this essentially... Escape Velocity in MMORPG form? That would kick so much ass, half the world wouldn't be able to sit down for weeks.
KDE is rather configurable. Want the menubar in the app under the titlebar, like Windows? Fine. Want it at the top of the screen all the time, like MacOS? You can do that, too. You can configure what sort of clicks in which areas of the window do what with regards to window management (eg doubleclick the titlebar to shade, or to maximize, etc.). That's just two examples, but pretty much all of KDE is like this. It's the epitome of 'highly configurable, with sane defaults'.
iTunes != iTunes Music Store
You might want to give the Badnarik interview that was on here a while back a read. He has a very interesting solution to this -- make shareholders liable for the actions of the corporation they own. It makes perfect sense -- if I pay someone to kill you, I should be liable, if I pay a corporation to do the same, I should be liable. Currently, I wouldn't be. This would almost overnight move the emphasis away from the shortsighted profit-at-all-costs mentality, because suddenly it wouldn't be worth it for the shareholders.
I agree that the welfare thing is one of the weak spots of the Libertarian platform, and I don't necessarily agree with it; nor disagree. People might start taking care of the poor by themselves; they might not. It's also possible that the economy will do so well that pretty much anyone who wants a job will be able to get one. But you're certainly correct that Libertarianism doesn't fundamentally account for it.
I've also been toying with the alternate idea of making life and the resources necessary to maintain it a fundamental right; basically, determine a minimum amount necessary to pay for food, shelter, and other basic necessities, and give that much to everyone, whether rich or poor, collect taxes to pay for it, and that's welfare taken care of. Not much room for bureaucracy to syphon money away, either. But again, I don't feel myself sufficiently informed in this area, so I'm just staying agnostic for now.
Well, as I see it, the fundamental philosophy of Libertarianism isn't "greed is the ultimate good" as you say. Rather, it recognizes that people are fundamentally greedy, and attempts to design a functioning society with that in mind. That's what I like about Libertarianism -- in stark contrast to other 'idealist' philosophies like, for example, communism, it designs for the worst rather than the best case scenario; rather than assume that human nature will conveniently step aside, it specifically exploits it. It's as if it were designed to actually work in practice.
Now, so far I've just been trying to clear up a misconception; I'm not saying a Libertarian government/society would necessarily avoid the pitfalls mentioned in TFA. We don't have a Libertarian government, nor has there been one recently; there's no way to know. However, it's certainly possible that one of the reasons for the current situation is that people are fundamentally greedy, and we currently have a system that doesn't account for it.
It was obviously the wrong mouse button, not the right one as you seem to believe.
Kiosk.
sue-ess-ee, or sue second edition :)