Unfortunately, that whitelist is unneccessarily restrictive and, as far as I know, not available for public viewing, which essentially makes Slashdot's encoding US-ASCII with undocumented additions.
TabGroups Manager. It's not the only extension of its kind, though: There's also Tree Style Tabs that gives you hierarchical, if space-intensive, tabs and Tab Kit, which apparently offers both functionalities in one package - however, I haven't tested the it and can't say how well it works.
In case you're a beta user: Tree Style Tabs says it's 4.0b1-compatible; TabGroups Manager doesn't but works apart from a cosmetic issue (the tab group bar appears below the tab bar instead of above it).
This is why I love that Opera comes build-in with all the features you need and a lot more.
Except that it doesn't. I heavily rely on Firefox extensions to, for example, manage my tabs. It's entirely possible for me to work on three projects, each with ten to thirty tabs associated with them, while simultaneously using the same browser for personal stuff, which incurs further tabs. Having fifty or more tabs open at the same time is not unusual for me. Does Opera have an easy way of organizing a huge amount of tabs without having to use additional windows (which break the way I partition my screen)? Firefox has an extension for that. I can even suspend tab groups and open them again later if I know I won't need them for a while.
Likewise, is Dragonfly as powerful as Firebug? Can Opera give me the sent and received HTTP headers in realtime? User styles and plugins not distributed with the browser don't count; you're positing that Opera already comes with anything I need. Plus, what about ARM?
Don't get me wrong. Opera probably does come with anything a casual desktop/notebook user needs. Some people have requirements that don't mesh well with what the Opera devs thnk the average user wants, however, and in that case Opera becomes rather unattractive. Given that this is Slashdot, the assumption that the people here are average users may not be sound.
But are they advertising the right thing? I mean, when I like a song and I want to buy the album it's either iTunes or nothing* nowadays. I'll only buy a physical album if I can conclusively prove that the record company has no ties to an RIAA member and otherwise I only find iTunes acceptable because I think the artist still gets a much larger cut than traditionally and the fact that the record company makes less money leaves a less bitter taste in my mouth.
Seriously, if these lawsuits have taught me anything it's not to give any RIAA member any money unless it's really neccessary. There are enough artists who release their sings under a liberal license, who self-distribute or who make all their money through merchandising. In fact, if I purchase a song from an RIAA member I feel that I open up myself for possible litigation if I merely format-shift. Not now, no, but these people are desperate for attention and will go to any length to get it.
The RIAA makes for some great advertising but perhaps they should start advertising for their members and not for Creative Commons.
* Note that "iTunes or nothing" applies to songs I want to buy, not songs I want to have.
yblockquote>Nice going, Skype assholes. Society suffers just because you can't accept that your programmers suck.
Nah, Skype's progrmmers ar alright. I mean, they managed to build an actual working cross-platform VoIP product that's easy to use. Usually you only get ones that work (SIP) or that are easy to use (TeamSpeak) but not both.
yquote>Write your own tests and assignments.
Change them every year.
Change them if you have multiple testing sessions.
Don't use tests in the first place. Seriously. My university's CS course is test-free; for regular courses the students get assignments (usually done in groups) and a fifteen-minute oral examination at the end of the semester with just you, the lecturer and usually one or two tutors being in the room (tutors must be present except for courses that don't have any). Good luck sneaking in notes. Oh, and you can skip the assignments and just do a harder thirty-minute oral exam, which of course isn't any easier to cheat on.
I don't really see the use of written tests. Okay, they reduce the lecturer's workload but our lecturers are doing fine - and yes, they're also researching. Oral exams are much harder to cheat on unless the lecturer is corrupt - but if you assume that a significant number of your lecturers are corrupt you have a much worse problem than students getting artificially good grades...
The limit is fairly complicated. IIRC, anything below 20 EUR (~25 USD at the time of posting) is tax-free; beyond that it depends on how many different kinds of things things you order, how each of these things is taxed and some other factors. I had a 700 USD group order from ThinkGeek arrive without any additional taxes and for a similar one I had to pay more than 100 EUR in taxes and tariffs because we ordered too many different kinds of things.
I run the beta, using all my old extensions (Mozilla helpfully provides an extension that lets you ignore the compatibility field). In response to your post, I tried to test all of them. So far I noticed a few extensions not working properly:
Download Helper doesn't seem to detect any videos. DownThemAll is incapable of actually downloading anything. Firebug is rendered completely inoperable. The menu is there but empty and the statusbar icon doesn't do anything. FireFTP is even more inoperable than Firebug, not even showing any menu entries. Fission doesn't work anymore but has been rendered obsolete anyway. TabGroups Manager hasn't yet adapted to the new layout code so the tab group bar is always the lowermost toolbar above the content pane. Other than that it works just fine.
So, what does work?
Add Bookmark Here^2 works as expected. Console^2 works as expected. Download Statusbar (officially compatible) works as expected. Element Properties works as expected. Flashblock works as expected. Ghostery seems to work as expected. Leet Key works as expected (at least the text transformers do). Live HTTP Headers works as expected. NukeAnything and Remove It Permanently seem to work as expected. RefControl seems to work as expected. Slashdotter works as expected. (This reminds me, perhaps with Fx 4 the new comment system will work again...) Tab Mix Plus works as expected. User Agent Switcher works as expected. Web Developer seems to work as expected, although I don't use the toolbar, which has benn reported to be broken. The context menu is intact and functioning, though.
Overall, the tally is not bad for a new major version. I think that most of the broken extensions will be fixed by the time (or shortly after) 4.0 proper comes out.
They did it right in the Mac version -first of all they didn't try to do the "tabs as title bar" thing (some of us actually use the information up there) and by default the tabs are below the location bar. Also, they didn't hide the menu bar since that doesn't make any sense on OS X.
In fact, the sole gripe I have is that they made "tabs on top" a boolean option instead of just making the various bars (tabs, toolbar, bookmarks, whatever any extension adds) reorderable at will. The new layout code conflicts with TabGroups Manager (which otherwise works just fine), which leads to the tab group bar being the lowermost bar now instead of being above the tab bar. I'll expect the extension developer to fix this, though.
Oh, and there's a bug with the toolbar customization -I can reorder and add/remove any element of the toolbar except for the bookmarks button, which can't be directly manipulated.
Apart form that, though, I'm fairly happy. Most of my 3.5 extensions still work perfectly (after I installed the Add-on Compatibility Reporter extension and enabled them) with Firebug being the biggest exception as it's completely inoperable. Still nothing we can't expect to see fixed before 4.0 goes gold.
Overall, the 4.0 beta is an improvement. Everything feels a bit smoother, the interface gained some polish (I especially like the circular per-tab progress indicators) and I finally get not only out-of-process Flash but also WebM support. Seeing (some) videos on YouTube without any stutter at all is really nice - and I don't even have 100% CPU load while doing so.
Not just environmentalists oppose GM food. I don't like it either, not because of health concerns but simply because I really don't like Monsanto et al. I wouldn't protest against it but given the choice between two otherwise similar foods I'd pick the non-GM one.
The Mac is a PC because the Mac is IBM-compatible. The term you were looking for is home computer. I've only ever seen the term personal computer used to describe IBM-compatible home computers.
Similarly, having moved from Paint Shop Pro to the GIMP, I'm perfectly fine in either of them but I find that the Photoshop GUI is byzantine, confusing and incredibly hard to navigate. This is not because I'm in a parallel universe where it's perpetually Opposite Day, it's simply because the tools I've learned to use happen to have different UIs.
Re:A-ha! A computer terminal! Mwhahahaha!
on
Behind Cyberwar FUD
·
· Score: 1
That's why the NSA has developed edsh, a new shell to use on *nix computers. The following is an actual transcript from an occasion when an NSA agent has accidentally left an edsh session open and an attacker tried to abuse it.
~ # ls
?
~ # cd/
?
~ # login
?
~ # jsmith
?
~ # help
?
~ # ^D
?
~ # ^C
?
~ # ?
?
~ # I AM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
?
~ #
You see, edsh has completely thwarted the attack. It is for this reason, that it will soon be declared the standard shell.
Of course the same applies to Flash if you're not on Windows. When asked about this, Adobe usually answers with "Flash isn't designed to be a video delivery platform".
Seriously, as a Mac user I can't see how <video> can in any way be worse than Flash apart from the codec issue. Unless all browser vendors manage to implement the codec(s) in a way that uses an absurd amount of CPU time but is unable to play video stutter-free even if it doesn't stress the CPU much. Given that Flash fails at video delivery, even straight download links can give Flash a run for its money.
I'd happily use Flash if Flash actually worked properly. Given that it doesn't and that it comes from a company known for mediocre software who are in no rush to fix it I just want it to be relegated to those niches the HTML5 multimedia delivery tags can't reach - like webcam support. I just hope you don't want to use that webcam on Linux or OS X...
Interestingly, 3.6.6 was also pushed to OS X users. I don't even know whether the crash protection applies to Mac users as we don't yet use the new-style plugin handling. In case it doesn't apply we get an update that does absolutely nothing beyond increasing an entirely decorative integer by 2.
That's exactly why.xxx is a bad idea. New sites don't have anything to lose but existing ones rely on customers knowing their domain name. The domain name is part of their brand and abandoning the existing name in favor of a.xxx one would be the equivalent of hiding from their customers.
My recommendation: 5 years for patents, 2 years for copyrights.
No. Not across the board. There are still some cases where distribution takes time. For example, books aren't much faster than they were half a century ago. Sure, we have eBooks, but those are hardly indicative of the market as a whole.
Here's my take:
15 years for design patents. Industrial design can stick around for a long time.
10 years for copyright on print documents and movies. (The latter get ten years simply because they're quite expensive to make.)
5 years for copyright on songs and performances and for technical patents (ie. patents describing some kind of hardware, not something done with generic hardware or things entirely unrelated to hardware).
2 years for all other copyrights and patents.
Patents can be renewed with the renewal fee being equal to the licensing fee for a new patent. All patents are automaticaly released to the general public 30 years after the filing date.
If you compare the two platforms, one has an open.source kernel and a closed-source userland and the other has a closed-source everything. Unfortunately, application management is not a kernel module in Android so the fact that Android's kernel is open doesn't help you a single bit.
Plus one can argue the iOS is much less invasive than Android as Apple doesn't seem to have the capability to do anything to apps already installed on your iPhone. There are plenty of people who still happily run apps that Apple has long kicked out of the App Store for violating the TOS. iOS is less easy to install random apps to but on the other hand gives the vendor and mobile provider less power over your phone - so in essence, Android gives everyone more power and iOS less. Which you prefer depends on how much you expect third parties' willingness to exploit you (in the business sense) for money and whether you consider safety a more important feature than the ability to install arbitrary software.
Ok, so Google can install new apps to give new features?
Of course they can also install new versions of apps to remove features. Let's say the mobile provider who sold you your phone decides to make something a premium feature. They can just push an appropriate update via Google and suddenly one of your apps has some restriction built in and a link to their homepage that explains how you can get the functionality back for just ten Dollars a month.
And no, Google wouldn't take a stand for the user. They would take a stand for the company that makes them all the licensing money and can switch to another mobile OS for future devices if they don't like Google's service.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, that whitelist is unneccessarily restrictive and, as far as I know, not available for public viewing, which essentially makes Slashdot's encoding US-ASCII with undocumented additions.
TabGroups Manager. It's not the only extension of its kind, though: There's also Tree Style Tabs that gives you hierarchical, if space-intensive, tabs and Tab Kit, which apparently offers both functionalities in one package - however, I haven't tested the it and can't say how well it works.
In case you're a beta user: Tree Style Tabs says it's 4.0b1-compatible; TabGroups Manager doesn't but works apart from a cosmetic issue (the tab group bar appears below the tab bar instead of above it).
This is why I love that Opera comes build-in with all the features you need and a lot more.
Except that it doesn't. I heavily rely on Firefox extensions to, for example, manage my tabs. It's entirely possible for me to work on three projects, each with ten to thirty tabs associated with them, while simultaneously using the same browser for personal stuff, which incurs further tabs. Having fifty or more tabs open at the same time is not unusual for me. Does Opera have an easy way of organizing a huge amount of tabs without having to use additional windows (which break the way I partition my screen)? Firefox has an extension for that. I can even suspend tab groups and open them again later if I know I won't need them for a while.
Likewise, is Dragonfly as powerful as Firebug? Can Opera give me the sent and received HTTP headers in realtime? User styles and plugins not distributed with the browser don't count; you're positing that Opera already comes with anything I need. Plus, what about ARM?
Don't get me wrong. Opera probably does come with anything a casual desktop/notebook user needs. Some people have requirements that don't mesh well with what the Opera devs thnk the average user wants, however, and in that case Opera becomes rather unattractive. Given that this is Slashdot, the assumption that the people here are average users may not be sound.
But are they advertising the right thing? I mean, when I like a song and I want to buy the album it's either iTunes or nothing* nowadays. I'll only buy a physical album if I can conclusively prove that the record company has no ties to an RIAA member and otherwise I only find iTunes acceptable because I think the artist still gets a much larger cut than traditionally and the fact that the record company makes less money leaves a less bitter taste in my mouth.
Seriously, if these lawsuits have taught me anything it's not to give any RIAA member any money unless it's really neccessary. There are enough artists who release their sings under a liberal license, who self-distribute or who make all their money through merchandising. In fact, if I purchase a song from an RIAA member I feel that I open up myself for possible litigation if I merely format-shift. Not now, no, but these people are desperate for attention and will go to any length to get it.
The RIAA makes for some great advertising but perhaps they should start advertising for their members and not for Creative Commons.
* Note that "iTunes or nothing" applies to songs I want to buy, not songs I want to have.
Nah, Skype's progrmmers ar alright. I mean, they managed to build an actual working cross-platform VoIP product that's easy to use. Usually you only get ones that work (SIP) or that are easy to use (TeamSpeak) but not both.
Skype just really doesn't like mobile computing.
Unfortunately, that does nothing to help the fact that NASA is also running out of Vespene gas.
Change them every year.
Change them if you have multiple testing sessions.
Don't use tests in the first place. Seriously. My university's CS course is test-free; for regular courses the students get assignments (usually done in groups) and a fifteen-minute oral examination at the end of the semester with just you, the lecturer and usually one or two tutors being in the room (tutors must be present except for courses that don't have any). Good luck sneaking in notes. Oh, and you can skip the assignments and just do a harder thirty-minute oral exam, which of course isn't any easier to cheat on.
I don't really see the use of written tests. Okay, they reduce the lecturer's workload but our lecturers are doing fine - and yes, they're also researching. Oral exams are much harder to cheat on unless the lecturer is corrupt - but if you assume that a significant number of your lecturers are corrupt you have a much worse problem than students getting artificially good grades...
The limit is fairly complicated. IIRC, anything below 20 EUR (~25 USD at the time of posting) is tax-free; beyond that it depends on how many different kinds of things things you order, how each of these things is taxed and some other factors. I had a 700 USD group order from ThinkGeek arrive without any additional taxes and for a similar one I had to pay more than 100 EUR in taxes and tariffs because we ordered too many different kinds of things.
Importing stuff is complicated.
I run the beta, using all my old extensions (Mozilla helpfully provides an extension that lets you ignore the compatibility field). In response to your post, I tried to test all of them. So far I noticed a few extensions not working properly:
Download Helper doesn't seem to detect any videos.
DownThemAll is incapable of actually downloading anything.
Firebug is rendered completely inoperable. The menu is there but empty and the statusbar icon doesn't do anything.
FireFTP is even more inoperable than Firebug, not even showing any menu entries.
Fission doesn't work anymore but has been rendered obsolete anyway.
TabGroups Manager hasn't yet adapted to the new layout code so the tab group bar is always the lowermost toolbar above the content pane. Other than that it works just fine.
So, what does work?
Add Bookmark Here^2 works as expected.
Console^2 works as expected.
Download Statusbar (officially compatible) works as expected.
Element Properties works as expected.
Flashblock works as expected.
Ghostery seems to work as expected.
Leet Key works as expected (at least the text transformers do).
Live HTTP Headers works as expected.
NukeAnything and Remove It Permanently seem to work as expected.
RefControl seems to work as expected.
Slashdotter works as expected. (This reminds me, perhaps with Fx 4 the new comment system will work again...)
Tab Mix Plus works as expected.
User Agent Switcher works as expected.
Web Developer seems to work as expected, although I don't use the toolbar, which has benn reported to be broken. The context menu is intact and functioning, though.
Overall, the tally is not bad for a new major version. I think that most of the broken extensions will be fixed by the time (or shortly after) 4.0 proper comes out.
They did it right in the Mac version -first of all they didn't try to do the "tabs as title bar" thing (some of us actually use the information up there) and by default the tabs are below the location bar. Also, they didn't hide the menu bar since that doesn't make any sense on OS X.
In fact, the sole gripe I have is that they made "tabs on top" a boolean option instead of just making the various bars (tabs, toolbar, bookmarks, whatever any extension adds) reorderable at will. The new layout code conflicts with TabGroups Manager (which otherwise works just fine), which leads to the tab group bar being the lowermost bar now instead of being above the tab bar. I'll expect the extension developer to fix this, though.
Oh, and there's a bug with the toolbar customization -I can reorder and add/remove any element of the toolbar except for the bookmarks button, which can't be directly manipulated.
Apart form that, though, I'm fairly happy. Most of my 3.5 extensions still work perfectly (after I installed the Add-on Compatibility Reporter extension and enabled them) with Firebug being the biggest exception as it's completely inoperable. Still nothing we can't expect to see fixed before 4.0 goes gold.
Overall, the 4.0 beta is an improvement. Everything feels a bit smoother, the interface gained some polish (I especially like the circular per-tab progress indicators) and I finally get not only out-of-process Flash but also WebM support. Seeing (some) videos on YouTube without any stutter at all is really nice - and I don't even have 100% CPU load while doing so.
Not just environmentalists oppose GM food. I don't like it either, not because of health concerns but simply because I really don't like Monsanto et al. I wouldn't protest against it but given the choice between two otherwise similar foods I'd pick the non-GM one.
The Mac is a PC because the Mac is IBM-compatible. The term you were looking for is home computer. I've only ever seen the term personal computer used to describe IBM-compatible home computers.
Isn't that exactly how Photoshop works? At least CS3 on OS X did.
Similarly, having moved from Paint Shop Pro to the GIMP, I'm perfectly fine in either of them but I find that the Photoshop GUI is byzantine, confusing and incredibly hard to navigate. This is not because I'm in a parallel universe where it's perpetually Opposite Day, it's simply because the tools I've learned to use happen to have different UIs.
That's why the NSA has developed edsh, a new shell to use on *nix computers. The following is an actual transcript from an occasion when an NSA agent has accidentally left an edsh session open and an attacker tried to abuse it.
/
~ # ls
?
~ # cd
?
~ # login
?
~ # jsmith
?
~ # help
?
~ # ^D
?
~ # ^C
?
~ # ?
?
~ # I AM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
?
~ #
You see, edsh has completely thwarted the attack. It is for this reason, that it will soon be declared the standard shell.
Unless they used XeTeX, which is better at OpenType then Word is. Seriously.
Is it poorly implemented in most modern browsers,
Of course the same applies to Flash if you're not on Windows. When asked about this, Adobe usually answers with "Flash isn't designed to be a video delivery platform".
Seriously, as a Mac user I can't see how <video> can in any way be worse than Flash apart from the codec issue. Unless all browser vendors manage to implement the codec(s) in a way that uses an absurd amount of CPU time but is unable to play video stutter-free even if it doesn't stress the CPU much. Given that Flash fails at video delivery, even straight download links can give Flash a run for its money.
I'd happily use Flash if Flash actually worked properly. Given that it doesn't and that it comes from a company known for mediocre software who are in no rush to fix it I just want it to be relegated to those niches the HTML5 multimedia delivery tags can't reach - like webcam support. I just hope you don't want to use that webcam on Linux or OS X...
What do you expect? This is Adobe we're talking about. Their name has been translating to "half-assed software development" for the last couple years.
Interestingly, 3.6.6 was also pushed to OS X users. I don't even know whether the crash protection applies to Mac users as we don't yet use the new-style plugin handling. In case it doesn't apply we get an update that does absolutely nothing beyond increasing an entirely decorative integer by 2.
Hey, "x.xxx" yould be a nice domain name.
Did Slashdot swallow the dots of an IPv4 address or do you use an alternative DNS root with the TLD "1113982824"?
Why should pornographers want to hide themselves?
That's exactly why .xxx is a bad idea. New sites don't have anything to lose but existing ones rely on customers knowing their domain name. The domain name is part of their brand and abandoning the existing name in favor of a .xxx one would be the equivalent of hiding from their customers.
My recommendation: 5 years for patents, 2 years for copyrights.
No. Not across the board. There are still some cases where distribution takes time. For example, books aren't much faster than they were half a century ago. Sure, we have eBooks, but those are hardly indicative of the market as a whole.
Here's my take:
15 years for design patents. Industrial design can stick around for a long time.
10 years for copyright on print documents and movies. (The latter get ten years simply because they're quite expensive to make.)
5 years for copyright on songs and performances and for technical patents (ie. patents describing some kind of hardware, not something done with generic hardware or things entirely unrelated to hardware).
2 years for all other copyrights and patents.
Patents can be renewed with the renewal fee being equal to the licensing fee for a new patent. All patents are automaticaly released to the general public 30 years after the filing date.
If you compare the two platforms, one has an open.source kernel and a closed-source userland and the other has a closed-source everything. Unfortunately, application management is not a kernel module in Android so the fact that Android's kernel is open doesn't help you a single bit.
Plus one can argue the iOS is much less invasive than Android as Apple doesn't seem to have the capability to do anything to apps already installed on your iPhone. There are plenty of people who still happily run apps that Apple has long kicked out of the App Store for violating the TOS. iOS is less easy to install random apps to but on the other hand gives the vendor and mobile provider less power over your phone - so in essence, Android gives everyone more power and iOS less. Which you prefer depends on how much you expect third parties' willingness to exploit you (in the business sense) for money and whether you consider safety a more important feature than the ability to install arbitrary software.
Ok, so Google can install new apps to give new features?
Of course they can also install new versions of apps to remove features. Let's say the mobile provider who sold you your phone decides to make something a premium feature. They can just push an appropriate update via Google and suddenly one of your apps has some restriction built in and a link to their homepage that explains how you can get the functionality back for just ten Dollars a month.
And no, Google wouldn't take a stand for the user. They would take a stand for the company that makes them all the licensing money and can switch to another mobile OS for future devices if they don't like Google's service.