1 : Red Herring. People who receive this treatment are generally whining or complaining. That's a way to shrug them off, because developers have no time to waste with such people. People who want to help post on bugzilla, explain to the author, tell him about the problem, without feeling compelled to say that the product "sucks".
I'm afraid you did more to verify the accuracy of his article than anything. The above attitude seems to be quite rampant on OSS projects. Even doing all you mention you generally still get shrugged off because you're not willing or able to find/fix/code yourself. I've encountered it myself and I just simply refuse to use those products. I'm not going to name names but they're not just small, relatively unknown projects.
The prevailing attitude on/. and pretty much all OSS projects really does tend to the "we don't want to hear your whining" instead of the "we appreciate your input but could you provide us some more detailed info on the problem?" Very few people are going to bother doing more when they start getting childishly accused of "whining and complaining" when they're trying to report a bug they've found.
So what happens? The project stagnates, bugs stay unfixed (and unlogged) because the project team views everything as a complaint or someone whining. And finally users go elsewhere, even if it means closed source products they have to pay for.
2 : Never in the explanation did he explain why Open Source doesn't allow you to go under the hood. YOU CAN. That's a fact. If you don't, that's no fault of Open Source (or Free Software)
Well I guess you didn't really RTFA very much as his point was that yes you CAN go under the hood but unless the source is small or the problem quite trivial even most experienced developers aren't going to be able to fix it themselves without investing a LOT of time to familiarize themselves with the code. I know personally that I don't have time for that for most things, I doubt you really do either if you're honest about it.
3 : classic misunderstandig. We're talking about freedom here, not gratis. Stupid really, as all he says is then offtopic.
There are both kinds of free software, that he talks about free as in gratis instead of freedom doesn't make his point offtopic. I understood his point, so did a lot of others. The OSS movement is devaluing programmers. This isn't to say OSS is bad, but the fact remains, programmers pretty much cannot make a living on their own anymore, they have to work for big corporations and are paid to really do other work. (Mostly, there are exceptions.)
4 : I've never heard this one. Clearly, nobody sane would state that. Perhaps he forgot the word "often" in the sentence.
Really, you've never heard the OSS is better than closed-source argument? You've been reading/. for what, 10 minutes then? This attitude is quite prevalent, if you don't think so just check out any thread that talks about Internet Explorer. The vast majority of the posts will be of the "why would anyone use IE, Firefox is the best thing since sliced bread and cheese wiz!!" variety. Try to interject that you don't find Firefox to be all the great a piece of software and you get modded down, whether you defend your arguments or not. The same thing happens in discussions where vulnerabilities in Windows are reported. This attitude is incredibly prevalent amount the/. crowd at least and he's got a very good point. I personally use several closed-source products because I can't find OSS alternatives that are half as good. You may not find this to be true for you, but every user's needs are different.
5 : Nobody said scratching personal itch was a good reason, that's just a fact. So where is the myth ?
Again you missed the point. This has definitely been promoted as a reason why OSS projects are created. But it's not a good re
This was several years ago. I think eBay refunds listing fees now, if you relist the item...
What they do is if you relist it and it sells you get your listing fee back. If it fails to sell they keep it. Also you only get one shot at the refund. If you relist it a third time and it sells then you still pay the listing fee.
Sorry if I sound ignorant or anything. It would be because I never use eBay myself. How come he can't just call the police on this guy. He payed money for a item he didn't recieve. That is fraud in my book. Atleast he can take the guy to small claims court or something. Can some more experienced eBayer tell me what is tying this guy's hands??
It's hard and expensive to sue them is the main thing. You can call the police but they have to do a full investigation and it can take months to years. It's not so much that his hands are tied (once the smouldering heap of slag that was his server is replaced you can check his website to see he has a case number with the IFCC about this) but that the system is so slow this guy can cheat others out of their money for months (or longer) until he's finally arrested. Even then he'll probably be out on bail for months before trial and can likewise continue. So putting up a page like this is a good way to try and inform others ahead of time so they won't be conned.
Nothing is as bad as Yahoo auctions. I caught a fraudulent seller red handed, notified Yahoo as there was 6 other bidders on the same item... and Yahoo wouldn't / didn't seem to do a thing about it.
This doesn't surprise me. Yahoo also refuses to remove spammers who join a Yahoo E-mail group (even with overwhelming proof, the moderator's access was down for a week and they spammed mercilessly from one single account the whole time. Worst part is the group had quite a few underage readers and most of the spam was explicit porn spam.). Back when they had free personals they wouldn't remove ads that were obviously bogus (we're talking ads that say go to hotgirl.com/barbie to learn more about me in them).
I don't know why Yahoo behaves the way it does but I long ago gave up on them as a lost cause, no matter what the offense they will almost never act on it.
I sold a Cray supercomputer on eBay. Ebay quickly took the $100 in commision, but the bidder was slow to pay. I went thru eBays 6 step process of reporting the non-paying bidder, and the bidder said he would pay. So eBay still charged me $100 in comission.
Even when the process works you still lose money as a seller. I had a non paying bidder that apparently signed up one night and bid on about 100 auctions (including mine) and won nearly all of them. Then they didn't pay for any of them. By the time I got to the filing the report they had already gotten their account deleted and I instantly got back the auction commission. However they don't refund the listing fee even in the case of a non paying bidder! I was fortunate that it had been a relist for me and I was out nothing, but looking at what all the bid on some sellers lost a fair amount because their auctions started out high.
So not only buyer beware, seller beware when Ebay's concerned!
If you're talking about Firefox, then I'm really not sure exactly what about the UI you don't like (you never really specified). If you are talking about non-firefox mozilla then I agree. But then take a look at Firefox. It's going to replace the Mozilla suite relatively soon (I think), and may be the UI update you're looking for.
I'm talking about Firefox actually, last time I tried Mozilla I tried it, that was about 2 weeks ago.
Everyone else: Take a look at a Maxthon screenshot or three. I see a few shots that are extremely cluttered an horrible, some are good though. Nothing really head-over-heels better than firefox. At best I'd say they may be about the same.
OK those are really hideous, I can see why you think it's cluttered badly. One person has what looks like about 30-40 plugins on the plugin bar, another had their file/edit/etc. menus squished down with the search bar next to it. I'd post a screenshot of mine (which has the various toolbars laid out sanely) but I don't have anywhere to put it, certainly not anywhere that can withstand/.
Seriously though, I'm curious as to what parts of the UI you don't like. This is open source, if you don't like something, suggest changes! The reason I would consider your post troll or flamebait is that you never justify your argument with parts of the UI you don't like.
I've already answered in a few other posts about things I don't like so I really don't feel like doing it again here but I do want to point out that what the AC said is quite true. Unless you're actively involved in the project no one listens. Generally whenever this comes up most Mozilla users don't even want to hear what's said, justification or not. I haven't officially tired saying anything to the Mozilla project but frankly from experiences in the past I fully expect to waste my time trying so I don't. Yes I realize that's a bit of a fatalistic attitude but it's come from experience. Sorry. (While I know it's changed hands since, part of this goes to all the years of being ignored when reporting bugs for Netscape. Kind of a once burned why try again thing.)
I guess I should summarize a bit on things that really turn me off to the Mozilla/Firefox UI. Text sizes on tabs was one, this was also a bit of an issue on other menus/toolbars but it wasn't as pronounced as on the tabs. With about 15-20 tabs up I couldn't see more than a single letter of text. Right now I have 18 tabs up and the default font/text size used in Maxthon lets me see from 5 - 9 characters. 5 on tabs with an icon from the site, 9 on those that don't. Tab management in Firefox at least was useless without Tab Browser extensions, and even with them it was quite broken. Sure it'd remember my groups but it wouldn't remember their order (something criticaly important for me). At best it would keep the first 3 tabs in order, the rest loaded at random. (For instance I had multiple windows to stories on/. up, it didn't even load them together, that'd have made at least some sense.) Also it wasn't always the first 3, it was sometimes just 1, sometimes 2. Closing the browser and reopening would result in a different order nearly every time. Also there are quite a few options I expected to be there that weren't. Installing the extra options extension helped but I think the existence of that extension already shows there's a lot of missing stuff. Also in the download I got at least the ad blocking settings were empty, not a single regular expression or URLs of known ad sites included. That was a huge turnoff.
BTW I do know now you can fix the text size on the tabs with the user css file, but that was one that was incredibly non-obvious. If Firefox would have looked at and used my default system fonts and sizes it would have been better than the default ones it used (although still not quite the right size.)
One thing I see different is that some of those shots have
Really? At least for the latest versions of Mozilla, I can't stand going back to the IE UI - I find it really clunky. What kinds of things do you like about IE, or don't like about the Mozilla/Firefox UI?
Last time I tried Mozilla it was Firefox and roughly two weeks ago to give you an idea.
Major things I hated -- the default text size on tabs was way too huge, no way to change this from options (even with the extra options extension). Someone since told me of a way to use the css sheet to adjust it. That fixed that problem but really it was way beyond unobvious how to fix it. Also tab management is just crap without an extension. Even with the Tab Browser extensions installed it left a lot to be desired. I took the time to open all my tabs I normally use, saved them as a default group tried restarting to make sure it worked. It did partly. It would only remember the 1st 1-3 tabs order and the rest it loaded in random order. It also randomly decided if it'd remember 1, 2 or 3 of those first three tabs. I never did get it to bring the tabs up in saved order. I also found the options to be halfway, there was a LOT that should have been there that wasn't. The extra options extension helped this a lot, but many of those things should be there by default. It's hard to really put it all into words though, it just "felt" very wrong.
Most businesses, libraries, etc. aren't using some non-default UI with IE anyway - except for all those extra toolbars, etc. If you think you can design a superior UI, why nto do it? The Mozilla/Firefox source is there for you to do it with, ain't nothing stoping you.
This is true, but frankly the default IE UI is also better for your average user. I used IE plain until I found Maxthon/MyIE2.
I didn't say I thought I could design a better one, only that the current one needs help. I'm not a UI designer or I would be more than happy to. Those working on the project should be open criticism though and work on it. I'm sure there's a few UI designers out there who contribute to open source. Frankly my main point is it's not the be-all-end-all browser that supporters make it out to be. That attitude is dangerous, if you think it's perfect, why fix it?
The default UI for the regular Mozilla browser suite has was frozen long ago, so it still looks like Netcape 4. Have you given Firefox a shot at least? Themes for both Mozilla suite and Firefox?
Sure, your argument was valid 3 years ago, but not today.
Yep, last attempt was two weeks ago with Firefox, the UI still sucked as much as the last time I tried it. (Which was Firefox then too I believe.) I didn't bother with the regular Mozilla because I knew it was like Netscape 4 and that's the version that pushed me from Netscape to IE finally.
It's just as valid now as it was three years ago, the UI stinks for a large number of users. Those advocating Mozilla don't want to hear any complaints about it, posting even what I did risks getting modded as a troll. It's a valid complaint, nearly everyone with an open mind who's tried to get a non-techy friend to change has encountered this. Until the Mozilla project(s?) take a look at it and work on it it's going to remain a problem.
BTW the themes don't change the basic UI, at least not the several I tried. They just made it look different.
Probably one of my top 3 favorite extensions. Gives you a lot of control over tabs, saves your last sessions, allows you to reorder tabs, group tabs with the tab they were linked from, and a lot more.
In my tests of it TabBrowser extensions won't restore the tabs in the original order. It would remember the order of the first 1-3 tabs (at random, sometimes only one, sometimes 2, sometimes 3) but the rest weren't even in alphabetical order. That made it fairly useless since I use a lot of tabs (around 20) and they're in a particular order on purpose.
Success stories? Hey, just grab anyone who switched to Mozilla and you'll have a success story: No more pop-ups, tabbed browsing, hardly anyone targeting your browser for attack. Ah, the sweet smell of success!
I've tried to switch multiple times and I still cannot stand Mozilla's UI at all. I don't use plain-vanilla IE either (I use the browser wrapper Maxthon (used to be called MyIE2)) but what I do use makes Mozilla's UI look pathetic.
Frankly the Mozilla project needs to take a serious look at the UI and improve it. If a member of the/. crowd (who remembers using Netscape when it was called Mozilla the first time before IE came around) can't stand the UI, how can we expect your average joe to? How can we honestly expect business, libraries or anyone else to switch?
Make Mozailla's UI at least as good as IE and the browser wrappers out there for it (I really recommend Maxthon) and THEN you'll have tons of success stories. Until then Mozilla's going to be the province of the highly technical users who don't mind the UI.
And no this isn't meant to be a troll or flamebait. Too many people are happy to expouse "switch to Mozilla it's great and more secure" without considering that a lot of people think Mozilla's a step down. We really need folks to work on the UI and improve it. I'd like to see it improved myself so I can finally stand to switch.
18 is the age where you can vote and you can be put in jail, surely the most important things as far as your fundamental rights go.
Except exceptions are often made for heinous crimes and someone under 18's tried as an adult. That just confuses it more, did committing the crime make them an adult magically, or did they commit it because they're still not an adult and didn't understand the full extent of their actions?
Frankly I'm not sure anyone can really determine when a child's a child and when they're an adult except on a case-by-case basis.
I'm surprised no one has commented on this gem in the letter:
Four of the top ten downloaded applications on the Internet are P2P programs operated by companies who purposefully set them up to be used for illegal conduct.
That's stating it in a manner that doesn't leave room to consider it an opinion, Bainwol is flat out saying that those four companies are intentionally incouraging others to break the law, something that is already illegal. I suppose he'll squirm out of it because he didn't name which four, but frankly I'd love to see all ten sue him and the RIAA for libel and demand an immediate, very public retraction.
They don't have to lull us into anything. What some consumer protection group needs to do is present to Congress what fair-use really is.
The sad truth though is that they will be lulling the vast majority of folks (those who really don't understand all this copyright stuff even on a basic level) into believing their rights are preserved. Most people relate to wanting to make backup copies and that's the biggest issue for the MPAA to overcome to remove mass resistance to their efforts. Once the public at large has stopped complaining those of us who understand the issue better and can see through the smoke screen can be dismissed as a radical fringe group.
It's not what the fucking corporations decide it is. They have to play under the GOVERNMENT's rules not the other way around. You just have to love the brass balls that the MPAA has saying "oh, we are going to allow you to make backups."
Sadly recent history has shown us that what the government's rules say will be pretty much precisely what the corporations say, at least when we're talking about the MPAA and RIAA. Look at the INDUCE act that Senator Orrin Hatch introduced (with broad bi-partisan support). I'm still trying to figure out how any sane individual could have given the speech he did without busting out laughing and admitting they were just making their corporate masters happy. It was NUTS. Even most idiots could tell they're really grasping hard to make the connection between P2P and corruption of children. Hell I think I could have come up with a more plausible connection to support something like that, they're not even trying to pretend much anymore. Just slap in a few "it's for the children lines" then put in whatever restrictions you want passed into law, give it to your senator-for-hire and laugh all the way to the bank.
That is how government is working nowadays, and it needs to be fixed.
Let's stop pussy-footing around with these people and tell them to fuck off.
Well frankly we've tried that, it's not working. Look at the downloads of Mp3s, even with all the lawsuits, propogandinizing, putting convicted kids in commercials, etc. it's not stopping. It's not even slowed down much. If that's not a big "Fuck You" to the recording industry I don't know what is. Hell people are even starting to do what we've always said you need to do -- vote with your wallet. RIAA member company's sales have been declining, file trading's up and they still aren't getting the message that people are tired of both their content and outrageous prices. They're simply NOT going to listen to us -- period.
What we really need to do is tell our congressmen to tell all these corporation lobbyists to fuck off. That'd do a huge world of good, but it'll likewise never happen. Pretty much every politician ends up taking money from corporations and special interest groups, even those they opposed when running for office. (I read an article recently telling how the Governator has started doing this, no surprise it's a normal political move by nearly all.)
Frankly I don't know what the answer is, but I'm increasingly concerned it will end in utter chaos no matter what. Congress ignores the people and listens to the corporations. The corporations ignore the people and screw over their employees (and in the case of the RIAA it's even worse what they do to their artists) and the people. While the public's still fairly apathetic there are signs that people at large are getting fed up. Where will it end when noone who can change things is listening to those people?
Can it be that the MPAA has learnt a lesson from the RIAA's heavy handed tactics or has Microsoft convinced them that Janus will work, despite their recent record of bug free coding, and we're going to have a repeat of the DeCSS fiasco?
I suspect the whole thing's a ploy by the MPAA and it's member companies to make it look like they're preserving fair-use rights while tightening their technical and legal stranglehold on copyright is all. After all if they can point to something like this when we cry foul about the loss of fair-use rights then they can largely fend off that line of attack. (At least in Congress.)
I think the police department in your town should require citizens to have RFID implants, and their movements/location should be recorded at all times. If anyone is ever murdered/raped/abducted, or if a robbery is ever reported, someone can check the recording and use the unique ID to tell almost instintaniously who the criminal is. There wouldn't even be a need to have a live watch over the feeds.
Better seal the borders and build a wall around the town, otherwise anyone from outside of town could murder/rape/kidnap at will and the newly RFID-Tracking reliant police would be utterly stymied.
And yes I know you weren't being serious, just wanted to add to pointing out the absurdity of this concept.
This argument is such a fallacy. Why don't we encase our children in 'Nerf'? After all, then they would just bounce off of cars when they run out in the street.
If it saved one child, it's worth it right?
It would certainly change the age old saying of "oh go play in traffic".:)
"Oh look darling, little Johnny was just knocked through the goal, we're ahead of the Smiths now!"
Children. They aren't considered to be full humans, until on their 18th birthday they make an overnight magical transformation into a full adult. Prisoners have more rights than them.
You have a good point but it's more muddled than that for the poor kids:
They gain the right to consensually have sex between 14 and 18 (in the US at least, it varies more in the world at large).
To add to the confusion while they can have sex consensually they probably can't marry without their parent's permission until 18.
They can start driving at 16 (in most US states), but can't vote till 18.
Also they can legally smoke at 18 but they can't drink until 21!
So exactly when do they really become an official adult?
Um, if the school paper is produced with school resources, and the school lockers are paid for by school funds, then the school has every right to search for them.
Except if it's a public school it's funded by government funding which all comes from taxes. In other words the kid's parents paid for those resources and they, and their kids, have some right to say how they are used. The school doesn't own them the community does. For private schools it's a bit different, but most of those have tuition costs so the parents are still paying for most, if not all, of the school's resources.
Searching lockers isn't so bad, it's been around longer than people might think. (I graduated in 1989 and we had a locker check by our homeroom teacher once every 6 weeks all through Junior High and High school. It was mainly done to make sure we kept them fairly neat (e.g. no life-threatening avalanches on opening them) but I'm sure it kept down people bringing forbidden things to school somewhat. Restricting what students can write about their schools is hypocrisy at its best. Kids are there to learn, and learning involves thinking. Not every two people are going to think alike. All restricting kids from writing about their schools does is teach kids what hypocrisy is. They're certainly smart enough to notice the difference between what is "taught" and what is allowed. Allowing students to publish a school paper without much interference is a good thing. Some supervision would be needed (to prevent students from crossing from opinion to libel) but school officials should be able to handle criticism. Even if they do successfully keep the kids from speaking their minds they're going to hear from the parents of those kids who they can't shut up with draconinian rules.
Joe-user shouldn't have to install a lot of extensions. What functionality that the "joe-users" use is missing from Firefox?
Well from what I could tell tabbed browsings crippled without the Tab Browser extension for one. Some were things that not everyone would need, but then again I was adding extensions for features I had in MyIE2/Maxthon. (Granted there were a couple that are plugins/extensions in both, but only about 2-3 total fell into that category.)
I'll give the font size thing a try but the tab groups not opening in the same order they were saved in was the real killer, I have them ordered for a reason.
I find Opera suits my needs far better, and I think it's a little unfair (and unwise) that most of this hype centers around moving people to Firefox rather than away from IE.
I got a chance to take a look at Opera today and it is more suited I agree. The one thing I found lacking, which I didn't realize how much I liked until I didn't have it, was the ad blocker built into Maxthon. If I can find an ad blocker to work with Opera I might switch.
But you're quite right about the hype, if you try to force people to use a browser they don't like they're going to go use IE behind your back. You can't just promote Firefox, promote all the alternatives to people and you'll have a better chance of them migrating then.
Obviously anyone who hasn't made all their Windows 'friends' switch to FireFox needs to do so now.
I'm sure I'll be hated for saying this but I can't stand FireFox from a UI standpoint. I've tried it several times, last time was just a week or so ago. I spent well over an hour getting it installed with all the extensions I needed (the first try it died on installing multiple extensions at once, I had to do an uninstall/reboot/reinstall and start over and install them one by one). Then I find that I can't tell what tab's what since the text it used for them was too big (and I never found a way to change it, even in the extra options extension). I was willing to work around that but when I discovered that the Tab Browser extension wouldn't keep my tabs ordered I just gave up. Perhaps Opera may be better suited for me, but right now for me personally FireFox's UI is a looooooooong way off from the IE browser wrapper I use (Maxthon, formerly MyIE2).
This isn't meant as a troll, it's meant to prompt some serious thought. I'm a SysAdmin and I even had promblems in the install process (with extensions granted, but that's more than enough to kill off your average joe-user). If we really expect people to give up IE and all the asundry wrappers for it the UI in FireFox must be as good as, or better than what they have now. Otherwise they're not going to switch.
I'll give Opera a whirl when I have time but I'm still using Maxthon, most things in IE disabled or set to prompt to protect me. I also use BHO Demon to watch for attempted BHO hijackings. Frankly it's annoying but it's still far more useable than FireFox was for me.
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I'm afraid you did more to verify the accuracy of his article than anything. The above attitude seems to be quite rampant on OSS projects. Even doing all you mention you generally still get shrugged off because you're not willing or able to find/fix/code yourself. I've encountered it myself and I just simply refuse to use those products. I'm not going to name names but they're not just small, relatively unknown projects.
The prevailing attitude on /. and pretty much all OSS projects really does tend to the "we don't want to hear your whining" instead of the "we appreciate your input but could you provide us some more detailed info on the problem?" Very few people are going to bother doing more when they start getting childishly accused of "whining and complaining" when they're trying to report a bug they've found.
So what happens? The project stagnates, bugs stay unfixed (and unlogged) because the project team views everything as a complaint or someone whining. And finally users go elsewhere, even if it means closed source products they have to pay for.
Well I guess you didn't really RTFA very much as his point was that yes you CAN go under the hood but unless the source is small or the problem quite trivial even most experienced developers aren't going to be able to fix it themselves without investing a LOT of time to familiarize themselves with the code. I know personally that I don't have time for that for most things, I doubt you really do either if you're honest about it.
There are both kinds of free software, that he talks about free as in gratis instead of freedom doesn't make his point offtopic. I understood his point, so did a lot of others. The OSS movement is devaluing programmers. This isn't to say OSS is bad, but the fact remains, programmers pretty much cannot make a living on their own anymore, they have to work for big corporations and are paid to really do other work. (Mostly, there are exceptions.)
Really, you've never heard the OSS is better than closed-source argument? You've been reading /. for what, 10 minutes then? This attitude is quite prevalent, if you don't think so just check out any thread that talks about Internet Explorer. The vast majority of the posts will be of the "why would anyone use IE, Firefox is the best thing since sliced bread and cheese wiz!!" variety. Try to interject that you don't find Firefox to be all the great a piece of software and you get modded down, whether you defend your arguments or not. The same thing happens in discussions where vulnerabilities in Windows are reported. This attitude is incredibly prevalent amount the /. crowd at least and he's got a very good point. I personally use several closed-source products because I can't find OSS alternatives that are half as good. You may not find this to be true for you, but every user's needs are different.
Again you missed the point. This has definitely been promoted as a reason why OSS projects are created. But it's not a good re
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This was several years ago. I think eBay refunds listing fees now, if you relist the item...
What they do is if you relist it and it sells you get your listing fee back. If it fails to sell they keep it. Also you only get one shot at the refund. If you relist it a third time and it sells then you still pay the listing fee.-
Sorry if I sound ignorant or anything. It would be because I never use eBay myself. How come he can't just call the police on this guy. He payed money for a item he didn't recieve. That is fraud in my book. Atleast he can take the guy to small claims court or something. Can some more experienced eBayer tell me what is tying this guy's hands??
It's hard and expensive to sue them is the main thing. You can call the police but they have to do a full investigation and it can take months to years. It's not so much that his hands are tied (once the smouldering heap of slag that was his server is replaced you can check his website to see he has a case number with the IFCC about this) but that the system is so slow this guy can cheat others out of their money for months (or longer) until he's finally arrested. Even then he'll probably be out on bail for months before trial and can likewise continue. So putting up a page like this is a good way to try and inform others ahead of time so they won't be conned.-
Nothing is as bad as Yahoo auctions. I caught a fraudulent seller red handed, notified Yahoo as there was 6 other bidders on the same item... and Yahoo wouldn't / didn't seem to do a thing about it.
This doesn't surprise me. Yahoo also refuses to remove spammers who join a Yahoo E-mail group (even with overwhelming proof, the moderator's access was down for a week and they spammed mercilessly from one single account the whole time. Worst part is the group had quite a few underage readers and most of the spam was explicit porn spam.). Back when they had free personals they wouldn't remove ads that were obviously bogus (we're talking ads that say go to hotgirl.com/barbie to learn more about me in them).I don't know why Yahoo behaves the way it does but I long ago gave up on them as a lost cause, no matter what the offense they will almost never act on it.
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I sold a Cray supercomputer on eBay. Ebay quickly took the $100 in commision, but the bidder was slow to pay. I went thru eBays 6 step process of reporting the non-paying bidder, and the bidder said he would pay. So eBay still charged me $100 in comission.
Even when the process works you still lose money as a seller. I had a non paying bidder that apparently signed up one night and bid on about 100 auctions (including mine) and won nearly all of them. Then they didn't pay for any of them. By the time I got to the filing the report they had already gotten their account deleted and I instantly got back the auction commission. However they don't refund the listing fee even in the case of a non paying bidder! I was fortunate that it had been a relist for me and I was out nothing, but looking at what all the bid on some sellers lost a fair amount because their auctions started out high.So not only buyer beware, seller beware when Ebay's concerned!
... set all those 20 tabs as your home page group, then they will open back up exactly the same on restarting mozilla.
That's precisely what I did and they didn't open back up in the same order. I was actually quite surprised as it didn't make much sense.I'm talking about Firefox actually, last time I tried Mozilla I tried it, that was about 2 weeks ago.
OK those are really hideous, I can see why you think it's cluttered badly. One person has what looks like about 30-40 plugins on the plugin bar, another had their file/edit/etc. menus squished down with the search bar next to it. I'd post a screenshot of mine (which has the various toolbars laid out sanely) but I don't have anywhere to put it, certainly not anywhere that can withstand /.
I've already answered in a few other posts about things I don't like so I really don't feel like doing it again here but I do want to point out that what the AC said is quite true. Unless you're actively involved in the project no one listens. Generally whenever this comes up most Mozilla users don't even want to hear what's said, justification or not. I haven't officially tired saying anything to the Mozilla project but frankly from experiences in the past I fully expect to waste my time trying so I don't. Yes I realize that's a bit of a fatalistic attitude but it's come from experience. Sorry. (While I know it's changed hands since, part of this goes to all the years of being ignored when reporting bugs for Netscape. Kind of a once burned why try again thing.)
I guess I should summarize a bit on things that really turn me off to the Mozilla/Firefox UI. Text sizes on tabs was one, this was also a bit of an issue on other menus/toolbars but it wasn't as pronounced as on the tabs. With about 15-20 tabs up I couldn't see more than a single letter of text. Right now I have 18 tabs up and the default font/text size used in Maxthon lets me see from 5 - 9 characters. 5 on tabs with an icon from the site, 9 on those that don't. Tab management in Firefox at least was useless without Tab Browser extensions, and even with them it was quite broken. Sure it'd remember my groups but it wouldn't remember their order (something criticaly important for me). At best it would keep the first 3 tabs in order, the rest loaded at random. (For instance I had multiple windows to stories on /. up, it didn't even load them together, that'd have made at least some sense.) Also it wasn't always the first 3, it was sometimes just 1, sometimes 2. Closing the browser and reopening would result in a different order nearly every time. Also there are quite a few options I expected to be there that weren't. Installing the extra options extension helped but I think the existence of that extension already shows there's a lot of missing stuff. Also in the download I got at least the ad blocking settings were empty, not a single regular expression or URLs of known ad sites included. That was a huge turnoff.
BTW I do know now you can fix the text size on the tabs with the user css file, but that was one that was incredibly non-obvious. If Firefox would have looked at and used my default system fonts and sizes it would have been better than the default ones it used (although still not quite the right size.)
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Really? At least for the latest versions of Mozilla, I can't stand going back to the IE UI - I find it really clunky. What kinds of things do you like about IE, or don't like about the Mozilla/Firefox UI?
Last time I tried Mozilla it was Firefox and roughly two weeks ago to give you an idea.Major things I hated -- the default text size on tabs was way too huge, no way to change this from options (even with the extra options extension). Someone since told me of a way to use the css sheet to adjust it. That fixed that problem but really it was way beyond unobvious how to fix it. Also tab management is just crap without an extension. Even with the Tab Browser extensions installed it left a lot to be desired. I took the time to open all my tabs I normally use, saved them as a default group tried restarting to make sure it worked. It did partly. It would only remember the 1st 1-3 tabs order and the rest it loaded in random order. It also randomly decided if it'd remember 1, 2 or 3 of those first three tabs. I never did get it to bring the tabs up in saved order. I also found the options to be halfway, there was a LOT that should have been there that wasn't. The extra options extension helped this a lot, but many of those things should be there by default. It's hard to really put it all into words though, it just "felt" very wrong.
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Most businesses, libraries, etc. aren't using some non-default UI with IE anyway - except for all those extra toolbars, etc. If you think you can design a superior UI, why nto do it? The Mozilla/Firefox source is there for you to do it with, ain't nothing stoping you.
This is true, but frankly the default IE UI is also better for your average user. I used IE plain until I found Maxthon/MyIE2.I didn't say I thought I could design a better one, only that the current one needs help. I'm not a UI designer or I would be more than happy to. Those working on the project should be open criticism though and work on it. I'm sure there's a few UI designers out there who contribute to open source. Frankly my main point is it's not the be-all-end-all browser that supporters make it out to be. That attitude is dangerous, if you think it's perfect, why fix it?
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The default UI for the regular Mozilla browser suite has was frozen long ago, so it still looks like Netcape 4. Have you given Firefox a shot at least? Themes for both Mozilla suite and Firefox?
Yep, last attempt was two weeks ago with Firefox, the UI still sucked as much as the last time I tried it. (Which was Firefox then too I believe.) I didn't bother with the regular Mozilla because I knew it was like Netscape 4 and that's the version that pushed me from Netscape to IE finally.Sure, your argument was valid 3 years ago, but not today.
It's just as valid now as it was three years ago, the UI stinks for a large number of users. Those advocating Mozilla don't want to hear any complaints about it, posting even what I did risks getting modded as a troll. It's a valid complaint, nearly everyone with an open mind who's tried to get a non-techy friend to change has encountered this. Until the Mozilla project(s?) take a look at it and work on it it's going to remain a problem.
BTW the themes don't change the basic UI, at least not the several I tried. They just made it look different.
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Probably one of my top 3 favorite extensions. Gives you a lot of control over tabs, saves your last sessions, allows you to reorder tabs, group tabs with the tab they were linked from, and a lot more.
In my tests of it TabBrowser extensions won't restore the tabs in the original order. It would remember the order of the first 1-3 tabs (at random, sometimes only one, sometimes 2, sometimes 3) but the rest weren't even in alphabetical order. That made it fairly useless since I use a lot of tabs (around 20) and they're in a particular order on purpose.-
Success stories? Hey, just grab anyone who switched to Mozilla and you'll have a success story: No more pop-ups, tabbed browsing, hardly anyone targeting your browser for attack. Ah, the sweet smell of success!
I've tried to switch multiple times and I still cannot stand Mozilla's UI at all. I don't use plain-vanilla IE either (I use the browser wrapper Maxthon (used to be called MyIE2)) but what I do use makes Mozilla's UI look pathetic.Frankly the Mozilla project needs to take a serious look at the UI and improve it. If a member of the /. crowd (who remembers using Netscape when it was called Mozilla the first time before IE came around) can't stand the UI, how can we expect your average joe to? How can we honestly expect business, libraries or anyone else to switch?
Make Mozailla's UI at least as good as IE and the browser wrappers out there for it (I really recommend Maxthon) and THEN you'll have tons of success stories. Until then Mozilla's going to be the province of the highly technical users who don't mind the UI.
And no this isn't meant to be a troll or flamebait. Too many people are happy to expouse "switch to Mozilla it's great and more secure" without considering that a lot of people think Mozilla's a step down. We really need folks to work on the UI and improve it. I'd like to see it improved myself so I can finally stand to switch.
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We've been hunting a guy around the world for 12 years because he played a chess match in a country we didn't like at the time?
So that's why the FBI didn't notice what Al Queda was up to, too busy hunting for an insane chess genius!-
That someone can become a soldier at 16. So, you are old enough to kill and/or die for your country but not old enough to vote?
Or have sex in some states. A very strange juxtaposition to be sure. I'd think having sex is far less harmful than getting killed myself.-
18 is the age where you can vote and you can be put in jail, surely the most important things as far as your fundamental rights go.
Except exceptions are often made for heinous crimes and someone under 18's tried as an adult. That just confuses it more, did committing the crime make them an adult magically, or did they commit it because they're still not an adult and didn't understand the full extent of their actions?Frankly I'm not sure anyone can really determine when a child's a child and when they're an adult except on a case-by-case basis.
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Four of the top ten downloaded applications on the Internet are P2P programs operated by companies who purposefully set them up to be used for illegal conduct.
That's stating it in a manner that doesn't leave room to consider it an opinion, Bainwol is flat out saying that those four companies are intentionally incouraging others to break the law, something that is already illegal. I suppose he'll squirm out of it because he didn't name which four, but frankly I'd love to see all ten sue him and the RIAA for libel and demand an immediate, very public retraction.-
They don't have to lull us into anything. What some consumer protection group needs to do is present to Congress what fair-use really is.
The sad truth though is that they will be lulling the vast majority of folks (those who really don't understand all this copyright stuff even on a basic level) into believing their rights are preserved. Most people relate to wanting to make backup copies and that's the biggest issue for the MPAA to overcome to remove mass resistance to their efforts. Once the public at large has stopped complaining those of us who understand the issue better and can see through the smoke screen can be dismissed as a radical fringe group.-
It's not what the fucking corporations decide it is. They have to play under the GOVERNMENT's rules not the other way around. You just have to love the brass balls that the MPAA has saying "oh, we are going to allow you to make backups."
Sadly recent history has shown us that what the government's rules say will be pretty much precisely what the corporations say, at least when we're talking about the MPAA and RIAA. Look at the INDUCE act that Senator Orrin Hatch introduced (with broad bi-partisan support). I'm still trying to figure out how any sane individual could have given the speech he did without busting out laughing and admitting they were just making their corporate masters happy. It was NUTS. Even most idiots could tell they're really grasping hard to make the connection between P2P and corruption of children. Hell I think I could have come up with a more plausible connection to support something like that, they're not even trying to pretend much anymore. Just slap in a few "it's for the children lines" then put in whatever restrictions you want passed into law, give it to your senator-for-hire and laugh all the way to the bank.That is how government is working nowadays, and it needs to be fixed.
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Let's stop pussy-footing around with these people and tell them to fuck off.
Well frankly we've tried that, it's not working. Look at the downloads of Mp3s, even with all the lawsuits, propogandinizing, putting convicted kids in commercials, etc. it's not stopping. It's not even slowed down much. If that's not a big "Fuck You" to the recording industry I don't know what is. Hell people are even starting to do what we've always said you need to do -- vote with your wallet. RIAA member company's sales have been declining, file trading's up and they still aren't getting the message that people are tired of both their content and outrageous prices. They're simply NOT going to listen to us -- period.What we really need to do is tell our congressmen to tell all these corporation lobbyists to fuck off. That'd do a huge world of good, but it'll likewise never happen. Pretty much every politician ends up taking money from corporations and special interest groups, even those they opposed when running for office. (I read an article recently telling how the Governator has started doing this, no surprise it's a normal political move by nearly all.)
Frankly I don't know what the answer is, but I'm increasingly concerned it will end in utter chaos no matter what. Congress ignores the people and listens to the corporations. The corporations ignore the people and screw over their employees (and in the case of the RIAA it's even worse what they do to their artists) and the people. While the public's still fairly apathetic there are signs that people at large are getting fed up. Where will it end when noone who can change things is listening to those people?
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Can it be that the MPAA has learnt a lesson from the RIAA's heavy handed tactics or has Microsoft convinced them that Janus will work, despite their recent record of bug free coding, and we're going to have a repeat of the DeCSS fiasco?
I suspect the whole thing's a ploy by the MPAA and it's member companies to make it look like they're preserving fair-use rights while tightening their technical and legal stranglehold on copyright is all. After all if they can point to something like this when we cry foul about the loss of fair-use rights then they can largely fend off that line of attack. (At least in Congress.)-
I think the police department in your town should require citizens to have RFID implants, and their movements/location should be recorded at all times. If anyone is ever murdered/raped/abducted, or if a robbery is ever reported, someone can check the recording and use the unique ID to tell almost instintaniously who the criminal is. There wouldn't even be a need to have a live watch over the feeds.
Better seal the borders and build a wall around the town, otherwise anyone from outside of town could murder/rape/kidnap at will and the newly RFID-Tracking reliant police would be utterly stymied.And yes I know you weren't being serious, just wanted to add to pointing out the absurdity of this concept.
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This argument is such a fallacy. Why don't we encase our children in 'Nerf'? After all, then they would just bounce off of cars when they run out in the street.
It would certainly change the age old saying of "oh go play in traffic".If it saved one child, it's worth it right?
"Oh look darling, little Johnny was just knocked through the goal, we're ahead of the Smiths now!"
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Children. They aren't considered to be full humans, until on their 18th birthday they make an overnight magical transformation into a full adult. Prisoners have more rights than them.
You have a good point but it's more muddled than that for the poor kids:- They gain the right to consensually have sex between 14 and 18 (in the US at least, it varies more in the world at large).
- To add to the confusion while they can have sex consensually they probably can't marry without their parent's permission until 18.
- They can start driving at 16 (in most US states), but can't vote till 18.
- Also they can legally smoke at 18 but they can't drink until 21!
So exactly when do they really become an official adult?-
Um, if the school paper is produced with school resources, and the school lockers are paid for by school funds, then the school has every right to search for them.
Except if it's a public school it's funded by government funding which all comes from taxes. In other words the kid's parents paid for those resources and they, and their kids, have some right to say how they are used. The school doesn't own them the community does. For private schools it's a bit different, but most of those have tuition costs so the parents are still paying for most, if not all, of the school's resources.Searching lockers isn't so bad, it's been around longer than people might think. (I graduated in 1989 and we had a locker check by our homeroom teacher once every 6 weeks all through Junior High and High school. It was mainly done to make sure we kept them fairly neat (e.g. no life-threatening avalanches on opening them) but I'm sure it kept down people bringing forbidden things to school somewhat. Restricting what students can write about their schools is hypocrisy at its best. Kids are there to learn, and learning involves thinking. Not every two people are going to think alike. All restricting kids from writing about their schools does is teach kids what hypocrisy is. They're certainly smart enough to notice the difference between what is "taught" and what is allowed. Allowing students to publish a school paper without much interference is a good thing. Some supervision would be needed (to prevent students from crossing from opinion to libel) but school officials should be able to handle criticism. Even if they do successfully keep the kids from speaking their minds they're going to hear from the parents of those kids who they can't shut up with draconinian rules.
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Joe-user shouldn't have to install a lot of extensions. What functionality that the "joe-users" use is missing from Firefox?
Well from what I could tell tabbed browsings crippled without the Tab Browser extension for one. Some were things that not everyone would need, but then again I was adding extensions for features I had in MyIE2/Maxthon. (Granted there were a couple that are plugins/extensions in both, but only about 2-3 total fell into that category.)I'll give the font size thing a try but the tab groups not opening in the same order they were saved in was the real killer, I have them ordered for a reason.
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I find Opera suits my needs far better, and I think it's a little unfair (and unwise) that most of this hype centers around moving people to Firefox rather than away from IE.
I got a chance to take a look at Opera today and it is more suited I agree. The one thing I found lacking, which I didn't realize how much I liked until I didn't have it, was the ad blocker built into Maxthon. If I can find an ad blocker to work with Opera I might switch.But you're quite right about the hype, if you try to force people to use a browser they don't like they're going to go use IE behind your back. You can't just promote Firefox, promote all the alternatives to people and you'll have a better chance of them migrating then.
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Obviously anyone who hasn't made all their Windows 'friends' switch to FireFox needs to do so now.
I'm sure I'll be hated for saying this but I can't stand FireFox from a UI standpoint. I've tried it several times, last time was just a week or so ago. I spent well over an hour getting it installed with all the extensions I needed (the first try it died on installing multiple extensions at once, I had to do an uninstall/reboot/reinstall and start over and install them one by one). Then I find that I can't tell what tab's what since the text it used for them was too big (and I never found a way to change it, even in the extra options extension). I was willing to work around that but when I discovered that the Tab Browser extension wouldn't keep my tabs ordered I just gave up. Perhaps Opera may be better suited for me, but right now for me personally FireFox's UI is a looooooooong way off from the IE browser wrapper I use (Maxthon, formerly MyIE2).This isn't meant as a troll, it's meant to prompt some serious thought. I'm a SysAdmin and I even had promblems in the install process (with extensions granted, but that's more than enough to kill off your average joe-user). If we really expect people to give up IE and all the asundry wrappers for it the UI in FireFox must be as good as, or better than what they have now. Otherwise they're not going to switch.
I'll give Opera a whirl when I have time but I'm still using Maxthon, most things in IE disabled or set to prompt to protect me. I also use BHO Demon to watch for attempted BHO hijackings. Frankly it's annoying but it's still far more useable than FireFox was for me.