Posted by timothy on 2005-05-02 20:13
from the dept.
Interesting... this post is from The Department. Or is that the '' (null) department? The HTML source does have two spaces between "the" and "department", so perhaps that's the case...
IIRC (which I might, not, I've been on linux for quite a while now), IE and the windows update "program" are both just shells around the same components doing rendering, networking, etc. Perhaps windows update is even just an IE window missing various toolbars and menus, I'm not exactly sure.
The problem lies in that not all users know anything beyond point and click. For these users, getting to a site that says "You will need the flash plug in to view this site correctly" is a deal breaker.
Installing Flash is point-and-click. Yes, I just tried it. I'm even on Linux, and it's still point and click.
Even more so when all they see is just some inocous little image that doesnt explain to them why it isn't working. (Ala the little jigsaw piece)
It's a little puzzle piece that says "Click here to download plugin". After that, everything's automated. You just have to click next a few times and agree to a (Macromedia) license. You don't even have to restart the browser.
If you have any suggestions on how it could be improved, please report them to bugzilla.mozilla.org, or even just post here in reply to me or email me, and I'll do it for you (assuming I agree they'd improve it).
I wholeheartedly agree that firefox needs to have two rollouts. One with and without extensions.
This introduces huge licensing problems. If mozilla.org were to bundle Flash, for example, they would first have to get Macromedia's approval, and even then it would cause other problems, e.g. including it in Debian, which would most likely reject it because of the non-free license.
It also puts a lot more stress on the developers and release-candidate testers, as they have to do double the work.
I currently sit on a standards committee for the school district I work in and we shot down firefox, even though many of the admins use it on thier machines themselves
That's very unfortunate:-(
No Active X support (many of our online applications use active X)
You should fix your applications. You'll need to eventually, anyway, Firefox is just a good incentive to.
Most people consider the lack of ActiveX a good thing, as it strengthens security considerably.
Not as user friendly as other browsers (ease of use and clarity issues).
Most people would take the opposite position here: Firefox has a much better user interface than other browsers and especially Internet Explorer. If you have any specific issues, again, either report them to bugzilla.mozilla.org or send them to me and I'll pass them along to there.
Lack of a real centralized support center (The forums are a rich resource..if you have time to run searches or wait for someone to answer your post, which in a real world environment, is not conducive)
Though most people I've talked to think the support you can get in those forums is better and faster than what you get from most corporate support centers, I can understand why you might need this in a school or company. I believe there are one or perhaps even several third-party companies starting up to provide equivelant support, but I can't be certain off the top of my head. If this is a strong issue, you may want to look into it.
Potential for abuse by students of all age ranges (The tabbed browsing is an exceptional idea! however, most teachers are too sued to window browsing and wouldn't even notice the extra three or four tabs that are in the background hiding god knows what kind of sites from her view.)
This I know is a real issue, because I've used it myself in school;-) I'd point out, though, that there are plenty of other ways that students can hide what they're doing, and I've watched friends play games for hours without the teacher knowing it, even in Internet Explorer.
Everytime we tried to see if there were possible solutions, we were either met with hostility on the forums for daring to suggest that firefox was lacking in any area or we got silence.
That's unfortunate. I'm sorry the people that found you weren't as helpful.
I don't think so. I've tried that with an account I want (I watched it for several months to see if it logged on, so either it never did or the person had privacy on, unlikely).
They say they reserve the right to remove unused accounts, but I don't think they ever do.
Or try a from source distro like Gentoo. I've only used it for a few weeks (and I'm really liking it!) but it seems like most new (versions of) programs get included really quickly.
Admittedly, it'll probably be a little longer for something like Gnome than other programs, but still pretty fast.
Or more likely a bug in the router. A browser would have a hard time taking down an entire office's internet connection, and the chances of two different browsers doing it is virtually nil.
Replying to myself now that I've read the article... (w00t, first and second posts, and they're both ontopic!)
Slowest: No artificial slowdowns allowed! Scrounge up the most decrepit, pathetic, but awesome-in-its-heyday gear you can find. 300 baud modems are a good starting point, but never underestimate the possibilities of paper tape streaming between the punch and the reader. Scoring in this category is purely at the judges' discretion, and coolness points will be awarded for anything involving Morse code, acoustic couplers, or tin cans. Input and output need not be computerized. (A daisywheel printout of the transmission is fine.)
This one seems really easy: Feed the data to the pigeons, and wait for... um... digestion.
No one's diverging from the standard. No browsers currently support WF2, and I highly doubt any will before it is completed and submitted and accepted by a standards organization.
Web Forms 2 exists to lessen the dependence on javascript for things like client-side validation, not increase it.
It's mostly technical. Most of the people involved agree that the current forms situation is awful, but the w3c's solution (xforms) is too far away in the future, and something needs to be done now.
You can read the charter, and of course other people may have slightly different opinions or reasonings than me.
Well, if you had a quantum computer and your program was currently optimized for a "normal" computer, you could probably improve the efficiency by re-optimizing for the quantum one.
Believe it or not, a coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor - right into the air, too, not into some carefully guarded storage site.
Also, my (albiet very limited) understanding of history is that Carter banned reprocessing for military reasons (now invalid).
Well, the AFL-CIO says that a family of 4 needs about $33000 for a year. By the other statistics I've found online, about $6000 or $6500 of this would go to food. Divide by four and get $1500. So that $20000 could feed the kid...
Caviar? (Or it could be split up between a bunch of kids.)
Yeah, one of my favorite things to point out is that if each person in the US just once flipped off their lightbulb for 30 seconds as they left the room for a moment, we'd collectively save enough money to feed a child for a year. Obviously there's a bit of rounding here, since energy prices are different in different places, people have different wattage bulbs, etc., but a little simple math shows you it's in the right ballpark.
So just think, each time you flip the lightswitch when you go to get a drink, you're doing your part to save a kid's life.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but that's a Windows program.
So I guess I'll have to go Linux -> Wine (is not an emulator!) -> iDeaS * -> Linux. Hmm... This brings up interesting possibilities...
* Is that an acronym of iaDSe, for "is a DS emulator"?
So where can I get a Nintendo DS emulator so I can try this out?
Interesting... this post is from The Department. Or is that the '' (null) department? The HTML source does have two spaces between "the" and "department", so perhaps that's the case...
I like the idea. Just as long as they don't try to patent it, because I already came up with it on my own.
IIRC (which I might, not, I've been on linux for quite a while now), IE and the windows update "program" are both just shells around the same components doing rendering, networking, etc. Perhaps windows update is even just an IE window missing various toolbars and menus, I'm not exactly sure.
This hasn't been true since before 1.0. Now there's a bar at the top of the screen, similar to the one for popups. Much less intrusive.
Installing Flash is point-and-click. Yes, I just tried it. I'm even on Linux, and it's still point and click.
It's a little puzzle piece that says "Click here to download plugin". After that, everything's automated. You just have to click next a few times and agree to a (Macromedia) license. You don't even have to restart the browser.
If you have any suggestions on how it could be improved, please report them to bugzilla.mozilla.org, or even just post here in reply to me or email me, and I'll do it for you (assuming I agree they'd improve it).
This introduces huge licensing problems. If mozilla.org were to bundle Flash, for example, they would first have to get Macromedia's approval, and even then it would cause other problems, e.g. including it in Debian, which would most likely reject it because of the non-free license.
It also puts a lot more stress on the developers and release-candidate testers, as they have to do double the work.
That's very unfortunate :-(
You should fix your applications. You'll need to eventually, anyway, Firefox is just a good incentive to.
Most people consider the lack of ActiveX a good thing, as it strengthens security considerably.
Most people would take the opposite position here: Firefox has a much better user interface than other browsers and especially Internet Explorer. If you have any specific issues, again, either report them to bugzilla.mozilla.org or send them to me and I'll pass them along to there.
Though most people I've talked to think the support you can get in those forums is better and faster than what you get from most corporate support centers, I can understand why you might need this in a school or company. I believe there are one or perhaps even several third-party companies starting up to provide equivelant support, but I can't be certain off the top of my head. If this is a strong issue, you may want to look into it.
This I know is a real issue, because I've used it myself in school ;-) I'd point out, though, that there are plenty of other ways that students can hide what they're doing, and I've watched friends play games for hours without the teacher knowing it, even in Internet Explorer.
That's unfortunate. I'm sorry the people that found you weren't as helpful.
So in other words, half as much as smokers. And we have a lot more fun with what we buy. Is this even newsworthy?
(IIRC) Camino has native widgets. Firefox uses custom ones.
I don't think so. I've tried that with an account I want (I watched it for several months to see if it logged on, so either it never did or the person had privacy on, unlikely).
They say they reserve the right to remove unused accounts, but I don't think they ever do.
In that case, all my messages are rot-26 encoded. Take that, AOL!
Or try a from source distro like Gentoo. I've only used it for a few weeks (and I'm really liking it!) but it seems like most new (versions of) programs get included really quickly.
Admittedly, it'll probably be a little longer for something like Gnome than other programs, but still pretty fast.
If you're going to link to the jargon file, link to actual jargon file, not some page full of ads.
Or more likely a bug in the router. A browser would have a hard time taking down an entire office's internet connection, and the chances of two different browsers doing it is virtually nil.
No. Unlike Verisign, the .cn registrars are responsible and don't allow domain look-alikes.
(AFAIK) It's an abbreviation of developer.mozilla.org.
Replying to myself now that I've read the article... (w00t, first and second posts, and they're both ontopic!)
This one seems really easy: Feed the data to the pigeons, and wait for... um... digestion.
Can you say "Carrier Pigeons"?
No one's diverging from the standard. No browsers currently support WF2, and I highly doubt any will before it is completed and submitted and accepted by a standards organization.
Web Forms 2 exists to lessen the dependence on javascript for things like client-side validation, not increase it.
That's the XUL namespace. It's just like the xhtml namespace, but funnier.
It's mostly technical. Most of the people involved agree that the current forms situation is awful, but the w3c's solution (xforms) is too far away in the future, and something needs to be done now.
You can read the charter, and of course other people may have slightly different opinions or reasonings than me.
Well, if you had a quantum computer and your program was currently optimized for a "normal" computer, you could probably improve the efficiency by re-optimizing for the quantum one.
From the wired article I originally mentioned (mod this post informative, not me),
Also, my (albiet very limited) understanding of history is that Carter banned reprocessing for military reasons (now invalid).
Well, the AFL-CIO says that a family of 4 needs about $33000 for a year. By the other statistics I've found online, about $6000 or $6500 of this would go to food. Divide by four and get $1500. So that $20000 could feed the kid...
Caviar? (Or it could be split up between a bunch of kids.)
Yeah, one of my favorite things to point out is that if each person in the US just once flipped off their lightbulb for 30 seconds as they left the room for a moment, we'd collectively save enough money to feed a child for a year. Obviously there's a bit of rounding here, since energy prices are different in different places, people have different wattage bulbs, etc., but a little simple math shows you it's in the right ballpark.
So just think, each time you flip the lightswitch when you go to get a drink, you're doing your part to save a kid's life.