You're right. If we go by body mass, one European (~70 kg) makes about 1/4th of an American. But hey, by that same metric, the USA have about the same population as China!
What, because they use whitelisting extensions in Fx? I wouldn't like the web without Flashblock - Adobe Flash is a resource hog and there are still people who use it for ads containing sound. While I can live with banners I certainly can't live with banners that yell at me. Having to click once to see the Flash animations I do want isn't much of a hassle and has the additional advantage of keeping players set to automatically start playing from doing so.
Flashblock has (apart from its main use) its advantages in page loading times. Some cross-site Javascript includes take ages to load and manually maintaining bogus entries in/etc/hosts to get rid of them is a hassle. While I don't use Flashblock I was close to using it before I redirected Google Analytics to 127.0.0.1. GA could single-handedly add ten seconds to a page's load time.
It's not about being anti-technology, it's about using technology to fix issues other technologies create. Nothing is free of issues.
Actually, one could in theory have it both ways: Additional code that is implemented in XUL/JS could be delivered as an extension that is installed by default. Additional code that runs below that level could possibly be delivered as a default-installed plugin.
Of course this makes the program slightly larger (it needs to ship the default address bar and the awesome bar extension) and development becomes more complex but it would solve the problem in a way that satisfies everyone.
The problem is that "socialism" covers everything from anarchism over social democracy and national socialism to marxist socialism. Not everyone who's pro-government involvement wants to erect a soviet republic.
"Socialist" is as much a weasel word as "liberal" - it gets tossed around by a wide variety of people to refer to a wide variety of things they don't approve of.
So was I but with what the GGP said and the general horror stories Americans tell about their mobile phone networks/carriers I find the possibility of American phones not even being dual-band not too fat out. After all, the phones are sold by one carrier to work for that one carrier and the carriers already spend money to lock down the firmware - so it seems natural that they spend money to have single-band radios installed so they don't work with competitors' networks.
Yes, I do expect American telcos to be always as consumer-hostile as possible.
Actually, in Germany it's fairly common for mobile phones to be at least dual-band if not tri-band. My current phone is one my dad got via his T-Mobile contract, including obnoxious branding and all. It's also not SIM-locked (I know no non-Apple phone that is), which I use to my advanage, having switched from T-Mobile to E-Plus's low-cost brand.
The kicker? T-Mobile uses the D2 band and E-Plus uses the E band. My phone doesn't care; it's tri-band, IIRC.
In fact, it seems a huge advantage that users can choose their own interface.
Which would be more possible with <video>. I have yet to see a Flash/WMP/QuickTime plugin that allows you to mess with the UI in any way. Flash allows the site to code their own video player UI but that's it.
D) Even if you get rid of plugins for video, you'll still have plugins for other file types.
Such as? Except for Flash and video (via Flash) <embed> and <object> aren't used for much.
That's a nice checklist of worthless features that nobody will ever actually use.
Newsflash: Firefox has a nonzero market share. The Flash z-order bug has plagued Fx for quite some time as Firefox uses its rendering engine to display the browser GUI - including context menus. Until the problem was finally fixed, Flash videos displayed in front of any context menus (or even regular menus) you opened if they happened to overlap.
Plus, even as a non-professional web designer: Shut up if you don't know what you're talking about. Control over the z-order of elements can be important and CSS opacity is only not used widely* yet because the browsers are dragging their heels getting there. Yes, the internet worked in 1998. Still doesn't mean that CSS1 and HTML4 are the alpha and omega of content presentation.
* Excepting, of course, any website that uses a framework like script.aculo.us, which allows its use for some transition effects.
OTOH, you'll need to excange a fuse. I don't know about you but over here (Germany) the distribution board usually only carrys a few large fuses and a lot of breakers. If you do "blow out a fuse" you walk to the board and reset the breaker. I strongly doubt that they're going to build that into a plug and I'd find it quite annoying to try and recover from a recoverable electrical fault (whatever kind of fault that could be) only to find that I'm out of fuses. Plus, I still need to walk to where I keep the fuses as I certainly don't have an assortment of fuses on me at all times.
Now I know that what I said is most likely horribly inaccurate from an electrical engineering point of view but we are arguing end-user convenience here and an event that blows out the fuse but allows immediate recovery is most likely going to be a short - and those are caught by the breakers just fine.
Elaborate. Europlugs aren't small enough to be a choking hazard and are fairly resilient. You could stomp on one while it's plugged in but that would probably just break off the pins, which are isolated. Schuko plugs use unisolated pins but I wish you good luck trying to break one by stomping on it while it's plugged in.
If we bring plug shape into this, I'd maintain that the English plug is more dangerous - you could step on the pins. Yeah, still not entirely exciting but we're arguing plug dangerousness as a factor of size and shape here.
Given taht the motor doesn't produce any forward acceleration anymore, most people would probably try to restart it after they rolled to a halt due to exactly that.
Java draws its own widgets and get them all fundamentally wrong, as it does on pretty much every OS it runs on.
Although on OS X it's miles ahead of X11, which isn't even capable of separating menus from windows - so yes, in a way X11 doesn't even get menus right. Speaking of which, what exactly is your issue with Notepad++'s menus? I haven't found anything unusual but then again I run Windows XP without visual styles so it might be a styling issue I can't see.
Maybe you have the strangest game collection in the world, but from my experience it's closer to 90%.
Or he plays stuff like System Shock 2 (extremely difficult to properly play under XP; virtually impossible to play under Vista/7) and X-Com: Apocalypse and refuses to put a DOSBox around the latter. In fact, thinking back to SS2, just about every Dark Engine game should be problematic; that engine really didn't age well.
Vista and XP deal with many games properly; the ones they don't play nice with are often the ones that are already tricky to get working under XP.
If they wanted the easy way out, they would have used wxWidgets, which at least feels native (by using the native toolkits) across Windows and Mac, and GTK on other Unixes.It looks native but it doesn't feel native. Example:
A dialog that tells the user "Warning: Applying these changes will reset the device." and asks them whether they want to continue or not. The detail in question are the buttons presented to the user.
Windows dialogs use [OK] [Cancel].
GTK dialogs use [Cancel][OK].
OS X dialogs use [Apply][Don't apply](the button labels are supposed to be self-explanatory and dialog-dependent).
Whatever you do, it's going to violate the HIG (or established best practices) on at least some platforms. You can get a decent approximation but it's always going to be slightly off - although with wxW it won't be as far off (on non-X11 platforms) as with Qt and nowhere near GTK's distance to proper integration.
Actually, Apple's notebook offerings are usually in the same price range as other high-class notebooks. Their desktop systems are fairly expensive but the notebooks aren't. (That's how I got into OS X: I looked for a decent notebook guaranteed to run some *nix without trouble and had the choice between a G4 iBook and a ThinkPad, with the ThinkPad being more expensive for similar performance.)
Nowadays, when I buy a notebook I buy an MBP. Not because it's exclusive or because I want to impress with how much money I have (a 13" MBP just doesn't say "I'm rich") but because in my opinion Apple has the most competent desktop OS and because the standard MacBooks don't have a FireWire 800 port.
Of course some people buy a MacBook Air because it's expensive and flashy. There's always a few oddballs with too much money on their hands.
Actually I am a Mac user and briefly pondered installing it on my beige box for fun. Then I noticed that my hardware wasn't likely to be compatible and dropped the thought. If I want an OS X desktop I'll wait until I have the spare money to get me a Mac mini.
Installing OS X shouldn't involve work or thinking.
I would replace "drive this car" with "don't operate a car while intoxicated, very tired, under the influence of certain medicines or otherwise unable to do so safely". Cars have been around long enough for this to be common sense but still lots of people decide that they can drive really well after half a bottle of whiskey.
People (except those trained in the field) dislike even reasonable precautions, especially when those precautions mean work or inconvenience.
That doesn't guard against all methods of making links not show up in the address bar. Lots of legitimate websites insist that they need JavaScript to open links in new windows - bam, the the statusbar becomes useless. Or you hide the link behind a restyled button. Or behind any random element that you styled to look like a link and hooked up to an onclick handler.
Maybe that's why synergy failes the last time around: Everyone tried to leverage it but no one produced any, leading to a shortage and thus the burst of the tech bubble as synergy-starved businesses couldn't shift paradigms anymore.
It's just like the Semantic Web: There was enough web but nobody cared about producing enough semantics and so the whole mix was off. As a result, few can tell the difference between the Semantic Web and Web Classic, let alone Web 2.0.
For instance, your hand written mail is most likely read by a machine that uses optical character recognition to decide where it goes with a pretty good success rate and confidence factor to fail over to humans.
In fact, the Deutsche Post (Germany's biggest mail company) uses a neural network to process hand-written zip codes. It works rather well, as far as I know. Classic AI, too.
Plus, spam filters. Yes, they merely use a glorified Bayes classifier but, well... learning classifiers are a part of AI. Low-level AI, for sure, but AI.
Ont thing about AI that confuses laypersons is that it's a term describing many things from the lowliest classifier to SKYNET. Much like laypersons tend to associate chemistry with mixing colored liquids until something happens, they associate artificial intelligence with either artificial human-like brains or the behavior of bots in ego shooters (which, amusingly, often doesn't contain any AI at all).
Slashdot Mirror
Please be civil. I know the GP tossed an epithet aroubd but calling him a Motorola phone? That's just rude.
You're right. If we go by body mass, one European (~70 kg) makes about 1/4th of an American. But hey, by that same metric, the USA have about the same population as China!
What, because they use whitelisting extensions in Fx? I wouldn't like the web without Flashblock - Adobe Flash is a resource hog and there are still people who use it for ads containing sound. While I can live with banners I certainly can't live with banners that yell at me. Having to click once to see the Flash animations I do want isn't much of a hassle and has the additional advantage of keeping players set to automatically start playing from doing so.
/etc/hosts to get rid of them is a hassle. While I don't use Flashblock I was close to using it before I redirected Google Analytics to 127.0.0.1. GA could single-handedly add ten seconds to a page's load time.
Flashblock has (apart from its main use) its advantages in page loading times. Some cross-site Javascript includes take ages to load and manually maintaining bogus entries in
It's not about being anti-technology, it's about using technology to fix issues other technologies create. Nothing is free of issues.
Actually, one could in theory have it both ways: Additional code that is implemented in XUL/JS could be delivered as an extension that is installed by default. Additional code that runs below that level could possibly be delivered as a default-installed plugin.
Of course this makes the program slightly larger (it needs to ship the default address bar and the awesome bar extension) and development becomes more complex but it would solve the problem in a way that satisfies everyone.
The problem is that "socialism" covers everything from anarchism over social democracy and national socialism to marxist socialism. Not everyone who's pro-government involvement wants to erect a soviet republic.
"Socialist" is as much a weasel word as "liberal" - it gets tossed around by a wide variety of people to refer to a wide variety of things they don't approve of.
So was I but with what the GGP said and the general horror stories Americans tell about their mobile phone networks/carriers I find the possibility of American phones not even being dual-band not too fat out. After all, the phones are sold by one carrier to work for that one carrier and the carriers already spend money to lock down the firmware - so it seems natural that they spend money to have single-band radios installed so they don't work with competitors' networks.
Yes, I do expect American telcos to be always as consumer-hostile as possible.
Actually, in Germany it's fairly common for mobile phones to be at least dual-band if not tri-band. My current phone is one my dad got via his T-Mobile contract, including obnoxious branding and all. It's also not SIM-locked (I know no non-Apple phone that is), which I use to my advanage, having switched from T-Mobile to E-Plus's low-cost brand.
The kicker? T-Mobile uses the D2 band and E-Plus uses the E band. My phone doesn't care; it's tri-band, IIRC.
Which would be more possible with <video>. I have yet to see a Flash/WMP/QuickTime plugin that allows you to mess with the UI in any way. Flash allows the site to code their own video player UI but that's it.
Such as? Except for Flash and video (via Flash) <embed> and <object> aren't used for much.
Newsflash: Firefox has a nonzero market share. The Flash z-order bug has plagued Fx for quite some time as Firefox uses its rendering engine to display the browser GUI - including context menus. Until the problem was finally fixed, Flash videos displayed in front of any context menus (or even regular menus) you opened if they happened to overlap.
Plus, even as a non-professional web designer: Shut up if you don't know what you're talking about. Control over the z-order of elements can be important and CSS opacity is only not used widely* yet because the browsers are dragging their heels getting there. Yes, the internet worked in 1998. Still doesn't mean that CSS1 and HTML4 are the alpha and omega of content presentation.
* Excepting, of course, any website that uses a framework like script.aculo.us, which allows its use for some transition effects.
No rumble. No motion sensor. No nunchuk addon. No lightgun mount.
...No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Well, the German word for "cross" ("Kreuz") already starts with a K. Yes, we love KDE that much.
The parent is right. It should, of course, be the 23nd.
Actually it was just a less cool version of the Razorjack.
OTOH, you'll need to excange a fuse. I don't know about you but over here (Germany) the distribution board usually only carrys a few large fuses and a lot of breakers. If you do "blow out a fuse" you walk to the board and reset the breaker. I strongly doubt that they're going to build that into a plug and I'd find it quite annoying to try and recover from a recoverable electrical fault (whatever kind of fault that could be) only to find that I'm out of fuses. Plus, I still need to walk to where I keep the fuses as I certainly don't have an assortment of fuses on me at all times.
Now I know that what I said is most likely horribly inaccurate from an electrical engineering point of view but we are arguing end-user convenience here and an event that blows out the fuse but allows immediate recovery is most likely going to be a short - and those are caught by the breakers just fine.
Elaborate. Europlugs aren't small enough to be a choking hazard and are fairly resilient. You could stomp on one while it's plugged in but that would probably just break off the pins, which are isolated. Schuko plugs use unisolated pins but I wish you good luck trying to break one by stomping on it while it's plugged in.
If we bring plug shape into this, I'd maintain that the English plug is more dangerous - you could step on the pins. Yeah, still not entirely exciting but we're arguing plug dangerousness as a factor of size and shape here.
Given taht the motor doesn't produce any forward acceleration anymore, most people would probably try to restart it after they rolled to a halt due to exactly that.
Actually, they call Woz. After all those years he's still running the Dial-A-Choke hotline.
Although on OS X it's miles ahead of X11, which isn't even capable of separating menus from windows - so yes, in a way X11 doesn't even get menus right. Speaking of which, what exactly is your issue with Notepad++'s menus? I haven't found anything unusual but then again I run Windows XP without visual styles so it might be a styling issue I can't see.
Or he plays stuff like System Shock 2 (extremely difficult to properly play under XP; virtually impossible to play under Vista/7) and X-Com: Apocalypse and refuses to put a DOSBox around the latter. In fact, thinking back to SS2, just about every Dark Engine game should be problematic; that engine really didn't age well.
Vista and XP deal with many games properly; the ones they don't play nice with are often the ones that are already tricky to get working under XP.
Actually, Apple's notebook offerings are usually in the same price range as other high-class notebooks. Their desktop systems are fairly expensive but the notebooks aren't. (That's how I got into OS X: I looked for a decent notebook guaranteed to run some *nix without trouble and had the choice between a G4 iBook and a ThinkPad, with the ThinkPad being more expensive for similar performance.)
Nowadays, when I buy a notebook I buy an MBP. Not because it's exclusive or because I want to impress with how much money I have (a 13" MBP just doesn't say "I'm rich") but because in my opinion Apple has the most competent desktop OS and because the standard MacBooks don't have a FireWire 800 port.
Of course some people buy a MacBook Air because it's expensive and flashy. There's always a few oddballs with too much money on their hands.
Actually I am a Mac user and briefly pondered installing it on my beige box for fun. Then I noticed that my hardware wasn't likely to be compatible and dropped the thought. If I want an OS X desktop I'll wait until I have the spare money to get me a Mac mini.
Installing OS X shouldn't involve work or thinking.
I would replace "drive this car" with "don't operate a car while intoxicated, very tired, under the influence of certain medicines or otherwise unable to do so safely". Cars have been around long enough for this to be common sense but still lots of people decide that they can drive really well after half a bottle of whiskey.
People (except those trained in the field) dislike even reasonable precautions, especially when those precautions mean work or inconvenience.
That doesn't guard against all methods of making links not show up in the address bar. Lots of legitimate websites insist that they need JavaScript to open links in new windows - bam, the the statusbar becomes useless. Or you hide the link behind a restyled button. Or behind any random element that you styled to look like a link and hooked up to an onclick handler.
Reliance on the statusbar doesn't really suffice.
Maybe that's why synergy failes the last time around: Everyone tried to leverage it but no one produced any, leading to a shortage and thus the burst of the tech bubble as synergy-starved businesses couldn't shift paradigms anymore.
It's just like the Semantic Web: There was enough web but nobody cared about producing enough semantics and so the whole mix was off. As a result, few can tell the difference between the Semantic Web and Web Classic, let alone Web 2.0.
In fact, the Deutsche Post (Germany's biggest mail company) uses a neural network to process hand-written zip codes. It works rather well, as far as I know. Classic AI, too.
Plus, spam filters. Yes, they merely use a glorified Bayes classifier but, well... learning classifiers are a part of AI. Low-level AI, for sure, but AI.
Ont thing about AI that confuses laypersons is that it's a term describing many things from the lowliest classifier to SKYNET. Much like laypersons tend to associate chemistry with mixing colored liquids until something happens, they associate artificial intelligence with either artificial human-like brains or the behavior of bots in ego shooters (which, amusingly, often doesn't contain any AI at all).
IIRC, QoS needs to be installed separately, though. At least on pre-Vista versions.