I would assume that the've already researched those cases. Government agencies switch operating systems after someone decides it's politically convenient for him. Other people get to figure out if it's even feasible after the decision has been made. Companies usually don't quite operate like that; I'd imagine that they looked at their infrastructure and software needs first.
Besides, this is a company that, according to TFA, has already been using Ubuntu for a while. Most likely they already know what it does and does not offer and how to integrate it with their business. They're not going into this entirely unprepared.
I corrected myself in an answer to one of your siblings; it was not a cause of believing Sony but of getting things in the wrong chronological order in my head (I put the game copy launcher at the beginning when it belonged at the end).
So here's the fixed rundown: Sony first disabled Other OS on the slim PS3 because it was deemed too expensive (what with the Other OS clientele usually not buying games and all), the hackers tried to get it back, Sony panicked and removed it everywhere and then the hackers dismantled the entire firmware, which in turn enabled someone to write a launcher for copied games.
Of course what I also forget to mention is that the regular gamers' position (non-Sony firmwares enable cheating) is also mainly due to Sony's inept handling of the situation as without that people would probably still not have started messing with Game OS.
Linux is great on the desktop, but when you sleep/resume cycle it 10 times, strange things start to happen. Also when moving around and connecting weird USB thingies.
Then again, the same applies to Windows, depending on the machine in question. Sleep/resume is something that seems to trigger a lot of nondeterministic behavior in most OSes, although OS X gets it mostly correct (still not always, though).
Except, of course, they're already running on OOo and an in-house application suite written in Java. Their app support isn't going to get any worse at least for their core apps.
You're right, I did get some things in the wrong chronological order in my head. Sony shut off Other OS because it lost them money (hardware sales to people who didn't intend to buy games while the console was a loss leader), then the hackers got angry and hacked the whole system until they got far enough that they're losing Sony money in entirely new ways (copied games).
One could argue that it started with Sony's marketing as they never pointed out that Other OS would be useless for what most people assumed it would be good for (full access to the PS3's hardware; IIRC, Other OS had some rather arbitrary restrictions). So the hackers poked around and Sony panicked (and even you agree that Sony handled the case badly).
I'd say the main fault lies with Sony for selling the PS3 with a feature they didn't intend to actually support; everything else flowed from that. You can't sell a device based on one feature which you then implement differently from what you advertised and which you deem too expensive to actually support. In the end I'd put it down as a marketing fault on Sony's side; Other OS should never have been advertised in the first place. The rest is people (Sony, the hackers, the gamers, various countries) getting pissed off at one another because everyone has different ideas about what their respective rights are.
The hackers want Other OS because it's something they paid for and that the console was advertised with. That's rational.
The regular gamers are happy with Other OS being taken away because not only it it something they don't need, it's actually detrimental to them (as it forces them to deal with cheating to a greater extent). It's rational to be in favor of something exclusively detrimental to one to be removed.
Sony shut Other OS off because it makes it easier to run unlicensed copies of games and to run homebrew that wasn't sold through PSN. Since game sales are essentially what makes the platform profitable it's rational for Sony to try to protect their bottom line.
The legislators point out that the PS3 EULA contains unenforcable provisions and hence Sony didn't have the right to turn off Other OS in their country.
All sides have good arguments. There's no sense to let people run arbitrary code on a device which you use precisely because people can't run arbitrary code on it (while a game is running); I can understand the regular gamers in that regard. On the other hand it's not okay to sell something with a certain feature set and then remove features you decide you don't want on the market after all so the postion of the hackers and the legislators makes sense as well. Ultimately I'd side with the hackers (Sony just handled the whole thing very badly) but I wouldn't call any side in this argument irrational. They just happen to have different perspectives.
Except that WebM doesn't have anything to do with Flash and, in fact, can't be played back using Flash. And it's already supported by Firefox 4, even though Fx's implementation seems rough around the edges at the moment. And every file format you have an encoder's source code for (like, say, h.264) can be turned into a proprietary version with little effort.
Not just one soldier, two entire trenches. They had a Christmas celebration together, including a mess, a football match and, if I remember correctly, even a Christmas tree. Additionally, trench crews tended to develop a tit-for-tat approach like "we fire two shots for every one they fire" (which, of course, means no shots if the enemy doesn't shoot at all).
I think that in many cases the soldiers in the trenches viewed their direct opponents as much more human than the generals who sat somewhere far away and ordered them to let themselves get shot for no good reason. Which would be a nice concept for a shooter (you shoot many good men for no reason other than that those are your orders and they have similar-sounding ones), although I'd imagine many gamers might not like a game that forces them to justify their actions away or face the fact that they are responsible for a whole lot of suffering.
That may be because you have only one surface to put everything one. A 3D way of organizing your documents doesn't make sense when gravity will pull them down onto the same plane.
I have no idea whether 3D organization will make sense once we have 3D displays but I think that at it might. More likely, though, the additional space will be used for transient effects where it's not a problem that certain documents will obscure others.
Of course with the way the content industry works that would mean that you have to obtain limited redistribution rights for that version of the document. Just imagine: Having to pay for every single link to any page containing material owned by anyone litigious enough or getting sued for copyright infringement.
True. The way they randomly die shortly after being introduced as a major character makes it even more impossible to relate to them. SG1 may be more inconsequential about death but death does feel much cheaper on SGU. In fact, SGU is a good example of how not to use death.
Yes and no. DRM isn't driving people to piracy on its own but it can tip the scales. If someone isn't entirely sure about whether to get a game or not and they learn that the game comes with always-online DRM that has known compatibility problems with random software they might decide against buying the game. Like most bad PR it doesn't make or break a product on its own but it does have a certain impact I'm entirely unqualified to accurately characterize.
It's also a respect thing. The more the publisher does for the user, the more the user will respect the publisher. For instance, pre-Activision Blizzard didn't believe in anything more draconian than a CD check, removed CD checks with later patches and allowed you to do LAN multiplayer with just one copy of the game present (with everyone else using "spawn" installations). In addition they gave (and still give) you the ability to register your CD keys with them, allowing you to download the game from them again. That was worth a lot of brownie points.
Activision Blizzard isn't quite as nice anymore (DRM, no LAN play without a lobby server, no spawns). I'm not saying that this will drive their potential buyers to piracy en masse but it will lower the threshold.
In the end it's all about PR and DRM is guaranteed bad PR. The big questions are just how bad it is for a given game and how much this bad PR influences buyer behavior.
Of course that could also be interpreted to mean that they are maximally impacted by piracy (the games they sell are already widely distributed and have been for quite some time). Yet they are profitable.
Same difference. Either way they'll be wonky and non-standard. They won't fit with whatever visual theme the user has selected, and, heck, the buttons probably won't even be in the right places. Who would want that?
Companies who really want their app to look unlike anything else the user has installed. Right off the bat I know that Razer does this with their mouse settings panel for Windows. Some virus scanners too (Avast being an example). Steam too.
Its window decorations look normal to me here. They even change their appearance when I change my window manager's settings, just like every other window. (I'm using sawfish. I have no idea why the Gnome folks switched the default to metacity, but it probably has something to do with their apparent desire to make Gnome noticeably worse and worse with every passing version.)
I use XFCE with XFWM and Chromium does provide its own window decorations there. And yes, the buttons are in the wrong place and look wrong. Maybe Sawfish is more restrictive about its decorations.
Okay, the root window, sure, but that's different. It's not borderless because some hair-brained application decided to replace its usual decorations with funky special ones. It's borderless because it's the root window. Something similar could be said for panels and docks (I have gnome-panel running, for example, and the panels don't have window decorations), but again those are not application windows; they're part of the desktop environment. It wouldn't make sense for them to be decorated like an application window.
Good catch. Panels definitely don't need window decorations.
And yet, the user's ability to customize anything is strangely absent. So, yeah, *you* look to Windows if you want. I'll be over here doing my level best to forget about it.
Unfortunately, as other platforms become more popular, we might see some of the silliness spill over. One instance would be Steam for Mac, which looks just like Steam for Windows, which looks nothing like a Windows or Mac application. If there was a Steam for Linux you could be certain that it would be doing its best to ignore your desktop's look-and-feel.
No. They didn't do tabs on top because the location bar logically belongs inside the tab. That's a sophistry somebody thought up to defend it when people complained. The reason they did tabs on top is because Chrome has tabs on top and somebody thought copying unimportant superficial features of Chrome was a good idea just because Chrome had picked up a whole bunch of new users all of a sudden, and Firefox usage has plateaued.
I think it went like this: Chrome devs: We now have our tabs on top! It's the wave of the future! Other browser devs: Why? Chrome devs: Er... It's because everything else is per-tab anyway? Other browser devs: Ooooooh. That sounds like something that makes sense. Wait, what about toolbars? Chrome devs: What's a "toolbars"?
Have you tried turning off the stupid "bookmark tabset replaces the content of the current tab" feature in recent versions? Haha. Dataloss? What are you talking about? The contents of your tabs are not data, they're, umm, well, this is the way it's designed to work now, mkay?
Truth to be told, I just use Tab Groups Manager and have completely outgrown the need for bookmarks. (I just put all tabs related to a concept in a group and hibernate the group.) I think Tab Mix Plus fixes the issue, though. Just like Status-4-Evar fixes the missing status bar and Element Properties fixes the missing "Properties" context menu icon. Admittedly, it's annoying that you have to install extensions to retain useful functionality while pointless things like Personas get baked into the browser, but then again you can do it. If they turn off the normal tab position I'll either install an extension that puts them back on top or one like Tree Style Tabs that provides its own freely-positionable tabs.
There are window managers that allow the application to replace its own window decorations?
Seriously? WHY? I cannot imagine anyone EVER wanting that.
You don't replace them, you just create a borderless window and then draw your own widgets in there. Chrome does this; at least I know it does on Windows and Linux. IMO borderless windows should be restricted to full-screen windows; at least I can't think of a scenario where it's beneficial to forego the WM's decoration handling.
Look to Windows for a platform where rampant ignorance of UI consistency is the norm: Lots of apps are borderless with self-provided (and self-themed) interface elements. To someone who values consistency that can make a Windows installation with lots of those apps rather ugly and in some cases the application's iconography can be confusing. But hey, what's a bit of ergonomy if we can shove more of our corporate design down the user's throat?
I mean, why on earth would I want all the browser and browser-extension chrome (toolbars and so on) moved down inside the page content area?
The idea behind that is that the URL bar affects only the current tab, thus it logically belongs inside the tab. That's already the case as far as the browser is concerned; URL bar content has been tab-bound since tabbed browsing took off.
Of course that doesn't change the fact that tabs-on-top isn't everyone's cup of tea. It's especially unfitting if you set up your browser so that pages opened through the URL bar open in a new tab, in which case the URL bar as a navigation tool deinitely isn't bound to the current tab. Thankfully, the Mozilla devs made tab-on-taop easy to turn off.
I generally turn it off because not having the tabs on top makes the window smaller by a pixel or two on platforms where Fx isn't allowed to replace the window decorations.
Of course Chrome isn't any better, what with wasting about twenty vertical pixels on empty space. It does get better when you use a butchered ChromeOS as a browser, though, as with OS they actually realized that heroically saving space by hiding the menu bar doesn't work when you immediately turn around and waste the saved space.
I think that Chrome should add an optional Fennec-like interface. Having no always-present GUI elements is maximally efficient and Fennec puts everything just one scroll away.
Up until now there were a few "major" releases like 3.0, 3.5, 3.6 and 4.0. It was well known in advance that these would be "major" and that they would break compatibility with some old extensions because the GUI/API/XPCOM would change. Extension authors tested their extensions with the next major version's betas once they were out and everything was fine since apart form these releases there was usually no breakage.
Now we have a new major version every couple weeks, nobody knows whether Firefox 7 will break compatibility with Firefox 6 and extension authors will have to do a lot more testing to see if te next major version is supported. I expect a lot of false negatives here as authors don't have the time to check for every new major version or stop developing altogether, leaving theri extension compatible with "up until 6.0".
I'll just assume that a) Firefox uses a rolling, version-less release scheme and b) all extensions and APIs will be compatible forever. I'll enforce the latter assumption by running the compatibility tester extension and enabling everything regardless of what the extension says.
YYYY-MM-DD is fairly human-readable. It adheres to how numbers usually work: Biggest component goes left. Yes, it's worse when written YY-MM-DD and even worse when written YY/MM/DD but that's just people being lazy. Having a four-digit year component should tell you everything you need to know about the order of the components.
For the record, I'm from Germany where we use DD.MM.YY. For me, dot-separaton implies that ordering, dash-separation implies ISO 8601 ordering and slash-separation implies the weird American ordering.
Well, things like "I need a 13x13x13 meter stone cube" make for decent starting points. You then use that to build your actual structure. On a server I played on we had something that looked like a pretty decent replica of a Cylon basestar. It turned out to be the foundation for someone's house.
I would've taken him for granted but then again I'm from Gemany and the German mainstream comic market has been dominated by Disney since just about forever. Tony Stork? Victor von who? Who the hell are those guys? Never seen them around Duckburg.
Of course it helps that Gyro has a nifty name in Germany. Translated back you get "Daniel Jetboost", which does convey a nice feeling of him giving us progress at a breakneck pace even if "breakneck" often describes the final result rather well.
Microsoft are pretty good at HID (even though I find their mice too bulky and stick to Razer) but damn, did their MN-700 router suck. Trust Microsoft to get input devices right but don't assume that their other hardware offerings are automatically of the same quality.
It doesn't have to be ludicrously expensive. When I look at my university we have 200 EUR/semester for administrative stuff (including a 40 EUR train/bus/tram ticket that gets you halfway across North Germany for free for the entire semester) plus 500 EUR/semester for state-mandated tuition (that's been suspended for years due to the local tuition law being unconstitutional). Let's add books - the mandatory of which in my CS course amounted to about 200 EUR spread out over nine semesters. That's fairly affordable.
Of course you still have living costs etc. but then again you can always request a BAFöG* grant, which manifests as a monthly payment calculated based on the projected income of you and your parents. The nice thing is that you only have to pay back half of it (less if you graduate fast and with good grades), you never have to pay back more than 10.000 EUR and you have a grace period after graduating.
It's pretty hard to really get yourself in financial trouble through studying in Germany. Of course you can attend a ludicrously expensive university if you want but we have plenty of reputable universities normal people can afford. American universities being financial black holes for the students is not an issue with academia in general.
* BAFöG = Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz = Federal Law for the Promotion of Education
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I would assume that the've already researched those cases. Government agencies switch operating systems after someone decides it's politically convenient for him. Other people get to figure out if it's even feasible after the decision has been made. Companies usually don't quite operate like that; I'd imagine that they looked at their infrastructure and software needs first.
Besides, this is a company that, according to TFA, has already been using Ubuntu for a while. Most likely they already know what it does and does not offer and how to integrate it with their business. They're not going into this entirely unprepared.
I corrected myself in an answer to one of your siblings; it was not a cause of believing Sony but of getting things in the wrong chronological order in my head (I put the game copy launcher at the beginning when it belonged at the end).
So here's the fixed rundown: Sony first disabled Other OS on the slim PS3 because it was deemed too expensive (what with the Other OS clientele usually not buying games and all), the hackers tried to get it back, Sony panicked and removed it everywhere and then the hackers dismantled the entire firmware, which in turn enabled someone to write a launcher for copied games.
Of course what I also forget to mention is that the regular gamers' position (non-Sony firmwares enable cheating) is also mainly due to Sony's inept handling of the situation as without that people would probably still not have started messing with Game OS.
Linux is great on the desktop, but when you sleep/resume cycle it 10 times, strange things start to happen. Also when moving around and connecting weird USB thingies.
Then again, the same applies to Windows, depending on the machine in question. Sleep/resume is something that seems to trigger a lot of nondeterministic behavior in most OSes, although OS X gets it mostly correct (still not always, though).
Except, of course, they're already running on OOo and an in-house application suite written in Java. Their app support isn't going to get any worse at least for their core apps.
You're right, I did get some things in the wrong chronological order in my head. Sony shut off Other OS because it lost them money (hardware sales to people who didn't intend to buy games while the console was a loss leader), then the hackers got angry and hacked the whole system until they got far enough that they're losing Sony money in entirely new ways (copied games).
One could argue that it started with Sony's marketing as they never pointed out that Other OS would be useless for what most people assumed it would be good for (full access to the PS3's hardware; IIRC, Other OS had some rather arbitrary restrictions). So the hackers poked around and Sony panicked (and even you agree that Sony handled the case badly).
I'd say the main fault lies with Sony for selling the PS3 with a feature they didn't intend to actually support; everything else flowed from that. You can't sell a device based on one feature which you then implement differently from what you advertised and which you deem too expensive to actually support. In the end I'd put it down as a marketing fault on Sony's side; Other OS should never have been advertised in the first place. The rest is people (Sony, the hackers, the gamers, various countries) getting pissed off at one another because everyone has different ideas about what their respective rights are.
Well, all sides are acting rationally:
The hackers want Other OS because it's something they paid for and that the console was advertised with. That's rational.
The regular gamers are happy with Other OS being taken away because not only it it something they don't need, it's actually detrimental to them (as it forces them to deal with cheating to a greater extent). It's rational to be in favor of something exclusively detrimental to one to be removed.
Sony shut Other OS off because it makes it easier to run unlicensed copies of games and to run homebrew that wasn't sold through PSN. Since game sales are essentially what makes the platform profitable it's rational for Sony to try to protect their bottom line.
The legislators point out that the PS3 EULA contains unenforcable provisions and hence Sony didn't have the right to turn off Other OS in their country.
All sides have good arguments. There's no sense to let people run arbitrary code on a device which you use precisely because people can't run arbitrary code on it (while a game is running); I can understand the regular gamers in that regard. On the other hand it's not okay to sell something with a certain feature set and then remove features you decide you don't want on the market after all so the postion of the hackers and the legislators makes sense as well. Ultimately I'd side with the hackers (Sony just handled the whole thing very badly) but I wouldn't call any side in this argument irrational. They just happen to have different perspectives.
Except that WebM doesn't have anything to do with Flash and, in fact, can't be played back using Flash. And it's already supported by Firefox 4, even though Fx's implementation seems rough around the edges at the moment. And every file format you have an encoder's source code for (like, say, h.264) can be turned into a proprietary version with little effort.
But yes, apart from that you nailed it.
Not just one soldier, two entire trenches. They had a Christmas celebration together, including a mess, a football match and, if I remember correctly, even a Christmas tree. Additionally, trench crews tended to develop a tit-for-tat approach like "we fire two shots for every one they fire" (which, of course, means no shots if the enemy doesn't shoot at all).
I think that in many cases the soldiers in the trenches viewed their direct opponents as much more human than the generals who sat somewhere far away and ordered them to let themselves get shot for no good reason. Which would be a nice concept for a shooter (you shoot many good men for no reason other than that those are your orders and they have similar-sounding ones), although I'd imagine many gamers might not like a game that forces them to justify their actions away or face the fact that they are responsible for a whole lot of suffering.
That may be because you have only one surface to put everything one. A 3D way of organizing your documents doesn't make sense when gravity will pull them down onto the same plane.
I have no idea whether 3D organization will make sense once we have 3D displays but I think that at it might. More likely, though, the additional space will be used for transient effects where it's not a problem that certain documents will obscure others.
Of course with the way the content industry works that would mean that you have to obtain limited redistribution rights for that version of the document. Just imagine: Having to pay for every single link to any page containing material owned by anyone litigious enough or getting sued for copyright infringement.
Yeah, that's a brilliant idea.
True. The way they randomly die shortly after being introduced as a major character makes it even more impossible to relate to them. SG1 may be more inconsequential about death but death does feel much cheaper on SGU. In fact, SGU is a good example of how not to use death.
Yes and no. DRM isn't driving people to piracy on its own but it can tip the scales. If someone isn't entirely sure about whether to get a game or not and they learn that the game comes with always-online DRM that has known compatibility problems with random software they might decide against buying the game. Like most bad PR it doesn't make or break a product on its own but it does have a certain impact I'm entirely unqualified to accurately characterize.
It's also a respect thing. The more the publisher does for the user, the more the user will respect the publisher. For instance, pre-Activision Blizzard didn't believe in anything more draconian than a CD check, removed CD checks with later patches and allowed you to do LAN multiplayer with just one copy of the game present (with everyone else using "spawn" installations). In addition they gave (and still give) you the ability to register your CD keys with them, allowing you to download the game from them again. That was worth a lot of brownie points.
Activision Blizzard isn't quite as nice anymore (DRM, no LAN play without a lobby server, no spawns). I'm not saying that this will drive their potential buyers to piracy en masse but it will lower the threshold.
In the end it's all about PR and DRM is guaranteed bad PR. The big questions are just how bad it is for a given game and how much this bad PR influences buyer behavior.
Of course that could also be interpreted to mean that they are maximally impacted by piracy (the games they sell are already widely distributed and have been for quite some time). Yet they are profitable.
Same difference. Either way they'll be wonky and non-standard. They won't fit with whatever visual theme the user has selected, and, heck, the buttons probably won't even be in the right places. Who would want that?
Companies who really want their app to look unlike anything else the user has installed. Right off the bat I know that Razer does this with their mouse settings panel for Windows. Some virus scanners too (Avast being an example). Steam too.
Its window decorations look normal to me here. They even change their appearance when I change my window manager's settings, just like every other window. (I'm using sawfish. I have no idea why the Gnome folks switched the default to metacity, but it probably has something to do with their apparent desire to make Gnome noticeably worse and worse with every passing version.)
I use XFCE with XFWM and Chromium does provide its own window decorations there. And yes, the buttons are in the wrong place and look wrong. Maybe Sawfish is more restrictive about its decorations.
Okay, the root window, sure, but that's different. It's not borderless because some hair-brained application decided to replace its usual decorations with funky special ones. It's borderless because it's the root window. Something similar could be said for panels and docks (I have gnome-panel running, for example, and the panels don't have window decorations), but again those are not application windows; they're part of the desktop environment. It wouldn't make sense for them to be decorated like an application window.
Good catch. Panels definitely don't need window decorations.
And yet, the user's ability to customize anything is strangely absent. So, yeah, *you* look to Windows if you want. I'll be over here doing my level best to forget about it.
Unfortunately, as other platforms become more popular, we might see some of the silliness spill over. One instance would be Steam for Mac, which looks just like Steam for Windows, which looks nothing like a Windows or Mac application. If there was a Steam for Linux you could be certain that it would be doing its best to ignore your desktop's look-and-feel.
No. They didn't do tabs on top because the location bar logically belongs inside the tab. That's a sophistry somebody thought up to defend it when people complained. The reason they did tabs on top is because Chrome has tabs on top and somebody thought copying unimportant superficial features of Chrome was a good idea just because Chrome had picked up a whole bunch of new users all of a sudden, and Firefox usage has plateaued.
I think it went like this:
Chrome devs: We now have our tabs on top! It's the wave of the future!
Other browser devs: Why?
Chrome devs: Er... It's because everything else is per-tab anyway?
Other browser devs: Ooooooh. That sounds like something that makes sense. Wait, what about toolbars?
Chrome devs: What's a "toolbars"?
Have you tried turning off the stupid "bookmark tabset replaces the content of the current tab" feature in recent versions? Haha. Dataloss? What are you talking about? The contents of your tabs are not data, they're, umm, well, this is the way it's designed to work now, mkay?
Truth to be told, I just use Tab Groups Manager and have completely outgrown the need for bookmarks. (I just put all tabs related to a concept in a group and hibernate the group.) I think Tab Mix Plus fixes the issue, though. Just like Status-4-Evar fixes the missing status bar and Element Properties fixes the missing "Properties" context menu icon. Admittedly, it's annoying that you have to install extensions to retain useful functionality while pointless things like Personas get baked into the browser, but then again you can do it. If they turn off the normal tab position I'll either install an extension that puts them back on top or one like Tree Style Tabs that provides its own freely-positionable tabs.
There are window managers that allow the application to replace its own window decorations? Seriously? WHY? I cannot imagine anyone EVER wanting that.
You don't replace them, you just create a borderless window and then draw your own widgets in there. Chrome does this; at least I know it does on Windows and Linux. IMO borderless windows should be restricted to full-screen windows; at least I can't think of a scenario where it's beneficial to forego the WM's decoration handling.
Look to Windows for a platform where rampant ignorance of UI consistency is the norm: Lots of apps are borderless with self-provided (and self-themed) interface elements. To someone who values consistency that can make a Windows installation with lots of those apps rather ugly and in some cases the application's iconography can be confusing. But hey, what's a bit of ergonomy if we can shove more of our corporate design down the user's throat?
I mean, why on earth would I want all the browser and browser-extension chrome (toolbars and so on) moved down inside the page content area?
The idea behind that is that the URL bar affects only the current tab, thus it logically belongs inside the tab. That's already the case as far as the browser is concerned; URL bar content has been tab-bound since tabbed browsing took off.
Of course that doesn't change the fact that tabs-on-top isn't everyone's cup of tea. It's especially unfitting if you set up your browser so that pages opened through the URL bar open in a new tab, in which case the URL bar as a navigation tool deinitely isn't bound to the current tab. Thankfully, the Mozilla devs made tab-on-taop easy to turn off.
The central question about Firefox 5 will of course be: Team Proto Man or Team Colonel?
I generally turn it off because not having the tabs on top makes the window smaller by a pixel or two on platforms where Fx isn't allowed to replace the window decorations.
Of course Chrome isn't any better, what with wasting about twenty vertical pixels on empty space. It does get better when you use a butchered ChromeOS as a browser, though, as with OS they actually realized that heroically saving space by hiding the menu bar doesn't work when you immediately turn around and waste the saved space.
I think that Chrome should add an optional Fennec-like interface. Having no always-present GUI elements is maximally efficient and Fennec puts everything just one scroll away.
Up until now there were a few "major" releases like 3.0, 3.5, 3.6 and 4.0. It was well known in advance that these would be "major" and that they would break compatibility with some old extensions because the GUI/API/XPCOM would change. Extension authors tested their extensions with the next major version's betas once they were out and everything was fine since apart form these releases there was usually no breakage.
Now we have a new major version every couple weeks, nobody knows whether Firefox 7 will break compatibility with Firefox 6 and extension authors will have to do a lot more testing to see if te next major version is supported. I expect a lot of false negatives here as authors don't have the time to check for every new major version or stop developing altogether, leaving theri extension compatible with "up until 6.0".
I'll just assume that a) Firefox uses a rolling, version-less release scheme and b) all extensions and APIs will be compatible forever. I'll enforce the latter assumption by running the compatibility tester extension and enabling everything regardless of what the extension says.
We Germans did it without reordering anything. We say it like "11th September".
YYYY-MM-DD is fairly human-readable. It adheres to how numbers usually work: Biggest component goes left. Yes, it's worse when written YY-MM-DD and even worse when written YY/MM/DD but that's just people being lazy. Having a four-digit year component should tell you everything you need to know about the order of the components.
For the record, I'm from Germany where we use DD.MM.YY. For me, dot-separaton implies that ordering, dash-separation implies ISO 8601 ordering and slash-separation implies the weird American ordering.
Well, things like "I need a 13x13x13 meter stone cube" make for decent starting points. You then use that to build your actual structure. On a server I played on we had something that looked like a pretty decent replica of a Cylon basestar. It turned out to be the foundation for someone's house.
I would've taken him for granted but then again I'm from Gemany and the German mainstream comic market has been dominated by Disney since just about forever. Tony Stork? Victor von who? Who the hell are those guys? Never seen them around Duckburg.
Of course it helps that Gyro has a nifty name in Germany. Translated back you get "Daniel Jetboost", which does convey a nice feeling of him giving us progress at a breakneck pace even if "breakneck" often describes the final result rather well.
Microsoft are pretty good at HID (even though I find their mice too bulky and stick to Razer) but damn, did their MN-700 router suck. Trust Microsoft to get input devices right but don't assume that their other hardware offerings are automatically of the same quality.
It doesn't have to be ludicrously expensive. When I look at my university we have 200 EUR/semester for administrative stuff (including a 40 EUR train/bus/tram ticket that gets you halfway across North Germany for free for the entire semester) plus 500 EUR/semester for state-mandated tuition (that's been suspended for years due to the local tuition law being unconstitutional). Let's add books - the mandatory of which in my CS course amounted to about 200 EUR spread out over nine semesters. That's fairly affordable.
Of course you still have living costs etc. but then again you can always request a BAFöG* grant, which manifests as a monthly payment calculated based on the projected income of you and your parents. The nice thing is that you only have to pay back half of it (less if you graduate fast and with good grades), you never have to pay back more than 10.000 EUR and you have a grace period after graduating.
It's pretty hard to really get yourself in financial trouble through studying in Germany. Of course you can attend a ludicrously expensive university if you want but we have plenty of reputable universities normal people can afford. American universities being financial black holes for the students is not an issue with academia in general.
* BAFöG = Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz = Federal Law for the Promotion of Education