Remember that geeks already typically use Firefox. This whole thread was started about how it's going to be in a national magazine targeted towards non-geeks.
Oh. I thought he was talkin about making a website. It never occured to me that he was talking about theming:D In which case, you change Windows theme, since Firefox uses the Windows theme for these things. And, there are Firefox themes out there that change the scroll/form styles like Noia Extreme.
Everyone here seems to point out tabbed browsing as being the IE killer. I don't see the usefulness in it at all. Perhaps he did.
Again, I assumed I was dealing with a fellow nerd. It would be really hard for me to say I tried Firefox because I heard lots of hype about tabs. I tried it cause I wanted to try it! Its like gmail, saying you signed up for the search feature is sort of odd, the real motivation is more general. Don't get me wrong though, I love tabs. (Plug into school terminal, load all fark links in tabs, walk away and read at leisure during class:D)
Firefox can't render custom scrollbars or formfields
Oh no custom scrollbars! The world is ending!:P To customize form fields, add "-moz-appearance: none !important;" to the field's style, and then add style accordingly.
Having to ditch extensions entirely everytime there's an upgrade
Not anymore. Having upgraded from 0.9.3 to 0.10, it automatically updated extensions. Some didn't have equivalents right away, but soon did later. This won't be a problem anymore, as they aren't going to change the architecture anytime soon.
Having to restart the browser everytime you install an extension
And IE is any different?
Adblock doesn't block ads nearly as well as IE with Admuncher installed (it even blocks text ads!)
Um. Troll alert. Admuncher is a system level ad filter. It is browser/program agnostic.
The TalkBack agent appears way too often for my tastes.
What are you really trying to say?:P
The only reason I switched in the first place was tabbed browsing.
I doubt it. You didn't switch to simply try it out, like 99.9% who use/used firefox?
But you can get SlimBrowser or Avant Browser now and they'll add tabbed functionality to IE.
And, as everyone conveniently forgets to mention about these IE knockoffs, they come with their own security vulnerabilities along with all of IE's.
Heh, I was brainstorming on something somewhat similar, although a little more *nix-dependant.
Say you have some boxes, doesn't matter if they're running linux, BSD, or whatever, as long as they're running the same version of WINE.
Well, get all the programs people use running in one test setup (IE6,Office 2000,Minesweeper, etc.). Hey, it is possible, just time-consuming. Save the ~/.wine "image" to the server (read-only:).
Mount the server drive to some arbitrary directory, and link it in to wine as s: or something so people can save their files. Then whip up a generic shell scipt that kills the wineserver, and then automatically replaces the user's.wine directory with a fresh one from the server. Then, link to the script from the desktop, call it "panic button" or whatever. And then a clicky for each program you put on.
On the downside, WINE is the long pole in the tent here, being fickle and hard to get set up. On the upside, if you put the right progams, like IE6 and Outlook Express, the clueless noobs will be drawn like flies to the glowing blue [light, e]. They'll absolutely obliterate the wine setup on a daily basis (because there aren't many Windows programs to spread their destructive noobidity across) and yet the underlying setup will remain rock solid (aka untouched), cause the regular programs will "look funny".
The more I think about that setup, the more I like it:D
Consider other areas of engineering (the so-called real engineering) and you will see that in these fields the engineers rarely get to lay brick, so to speak.
What???
The best engineers are those who have worked in the field before deciding to move up.
The horrible engineers are those who have no exposure (completely abstracted from reality that is).
It is that little things that count. Say, if you are a good EE, you design your equipment so that the test points all have the same voltage - saving time and effort. Something you wouldn't think about if you hadn't sat behind a bench yourself and having to constantly move from equipment to specs to figure out if you have the right voltage out of 20 different test points and as many voltages.
Sure engineering can be done that way, but the relative common sense considerations just aren't gonna be there.
Another example - a engineer that I know of pulled of "the impossible". There was some ultra-high precision (patent-pending) gear that needed to be designed, and several scientists independantly evaluated the undertaking, and all said it was mathematically impossible. So, this guy threw the math out, and flew by the seat of his pants (as much as you can in engineering) and came up with a fully functioning design. No book can teach you intuitive design practice. That comes, along with other things, some real "gruntwork" under your belt.
When MS finally says 'Screw it, go Linux if you are not happy with our prices', the customers will shift from Linux talk to Linux action.
Well, that is, in economics-speak, today the demand curve is shifting left - the equilibrium price is falling. Tomorrow, if MS says screw it, that means MS loses all of its elastic demand (people who don't need MS, but buy from them anyway).
And why is this happening? Because when the firm that is purchasing your goods switches from a monopoly market to an oligopoly, you can't keep charging the monopoly price unless you collude with the new competitors. This isn't happening.
All software companies go this way. At some point, they have sold the product to everyone who needs it, and any growth in revenue HAS to come from price increases. They have already tried to accelerate the upgrade cycle, with little success. Many users never upgraded from Office 97 or Windows 98!
Well, the pace of operating systems is slowing down too. 6 years after Windows 98, some programs are ending support for it, but the majority still do. I can't say the same for Windows 95, 6 years after it came out. Heck I remember upgrading to 98 very soon after it came out, because of compatability issues.
Well, I certainly benefited. I've had a Yahoo! Mail account for as long as I can remember. And for a lot of that time, I was constantly hitting the limit cause of spam. Probably lost a few legitimate emails in the process. Now, where it would have hit the limit before, it now says 1% used:D.
And, you know, there is a pretty strong lock-in effect. Switching my email to some other provider would be an effort of biblical proportions (well, relatively speaking - I'm super lazy), and even after notifying contacts, and switching out all the newsletter/blog/porn subscriptions, I'd still have to check it cause somebody will forget.
In any case, only one person is going to get that terabyte, so I wouldn't consider that a market influence. But since those 10GB accounts are out there for free, and the MSN 2GB, I wouldn't be suprised if my gmail harddrive gets some extra space soon:D
I dunno, it must not be that restrictive. The latest E-Machines have Netscape 6.2 pre-installed. Yeah, Netscape 6.2 sucks, but hey, its something else at least:D
I browse at -1 cause there are a few offtopic gems that you run across, but lots of cruft. You could browse at 4 and be done reading the comments in 5 mins:P
If the engineers take advantage of the openness of Linux and make some tweaks to the part that is officially Linux, the company must to distribute their changes too.
Actually thats not true. You don't have to distribute code if you aren't distributing the kernel. (or program, or whatever). Does the person who has patches his sources, for example when testing for the linux kernel for the developers, have to publish his/usr/src/linux directory on the web? Hell no.
No, actually, it depends on what "women" is to you. Every man has their own locus of charactaristics that draws their attention, including nerd/non-nerd. I am of the opinion that women don't know how to use computers properly, but since I can be honest with myself, I know thats because thats how I like it:D Like a lot of men, I'm a "egotistical" fanatical provider, which among other things, leads to an almost singular locus.
Unfortunately, there are less and less suitable "women" as society becomes more and more "progressive", so much so today that the process of natural selection is working against guys like us. This is somewhat irritating, since natural selection has pretty much taken a back seat since the advent of modern medicine, and there is no "shallow end of the gene pool" any longer. Consult the biology textbooks you saved from college (haha) and look up "percieved suitability". Anyone can get plasic surgury and look like reproductive gold;)
Nowadays, all these "women" that come from broken families are just looking for a shrimp (like their dads) that they can easily convince to divorce if things get tough. More of the rest are buying the feminist "self-centered masculinism". Thats all it boils down to.
Thats up to Yahoo! actually, not Mozilla Foundation. Displaying an error vs letting the site display. I'm sure Firefox could handle whatever they have perfectly fine.
If someone is such a Windows zealot that he ignores any advantages of Linux in favor of constantly scrambling to fix the latest Microsoft problem then he is costing the company more money than if he had been more platform agnostic.
Actually now that you mentioned it, it can be seen that most people are Windows zealots. Since most folks refuse to consider everything else, giving reasons I hear a lot like "linux is fer weenies" and "macs are for treehuggers" and all that mindless garbage, that pretty much makes them zealots.
Yeah, if there wasn't for football teams, we wouldn't have slacker degrees like Management (aka "the M-train"). I'm waiting for the day when the next generation of greater height and smaller brain capacity players necessitates the creation of the Shoelace Repair degree, or some such nonsense.
Sort of. The window decorations are drab. GNOME has always been drab in general. Its a pain to get it looking near-sexy. KDE comes sexy out of the box, and that is why I use it. Too bad Mozilla is GTK, otherwise everything would be perfect.
"Hearing damage" is sort of ambiguous I guess. You can lose your hearing in very small increments, only noticable over months or years of exposure. I doubt the phone would be able to output enough of a blast to take out your eardrums.
If you are trying to install software not on the SuSE CD's, you will be scrounging in rpmfind.net. However, if a dependency is not installed but on the CD's, SuSE will automatically fetch it. I have 9.1 Pro, and getting mplayer working was a bit of a challenge (not included for some godawful reason).
Well, you know, meat is cross platform. Any mammal can eat it. But first you need a mouth. Or in other words a platform to begin with! Hence you still need an OS, even if it doesn't matter what OS you pick.
The problem with that approach is that Election Day will turn into Election Month or Election Quarter. There are craptons of candidates that never make it to the ballot. The current method of weeding out candidates is the "petition to get on the ballot" method. We'd have to work through every party, serious or not, till all the "Gallager for President" types fall by the wayside.
Funny you mention that. I was thinking about how the elections could be improved, and that was exactly what I thought of - a runoff for the two top people to compete in a second election.
Many people I talk to would like to vote for Nader, or Libertarian, but the constraints of the system make that a silly thing to do.
Since the current system favors the two existing parties, I doubt anything will change anytime soon.
Over 85 db continuous can cause hearing loss over time:D I have some paperwork I collected here for OSHA compliance...here is a general idea for noise:
Weakest sound audible by ear: 0db
Normal conversation: 60db
Ringing Telephone: 80db
Belt Sander: 90db
Chain Saw: 110db
Jet taking off: 140db
Rocket Launch: 180db
Loudest possible tone the ear can process without drum imploding instantaneously: 194 db
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, the story went public at 3:06 AM, and I submitted a story at 3:44AM....REJECTED :D
I don't blame them, because there really isn't a relavant section to assign it...science fiction seemed like the best match...
Remember that geeks already typically use Firefox. This whole thread was started about how it's going to be in a national magazine targeted towards non-geeks.
:D In which case, you change Windows theme, since Firefox uses the Windows theme for these things. And, there are Firefox themes out there that change the scroll/form styles like Noia Extreme.
:D)
Oh. I thought he was talkin about making a website. It never occured to me that he was talking about theming
Everyone here seems to point out tabbed browsing as being the IE killer. I don't see the usefulness in it at all. Perhaps he did.
Again, I assumed I was dealing with a fellow nerd. It would be really hard for me to say I tried Firefox because I heard lots of hype about tabs. I tried it cause I wanted to try it! Its like gmail, saying you signed up for the search feature is sort of odd, the real motivation is more general. Don't get me wrong though, I love tabs. (Plug into school terminal, load all fark links in tabs, walk away and read at leisure during class
Firefox can't render custom scrollbars or formfields
:P To customize form fields, add "-moz-appearance: none !important;" to the field's style, and then add style accordingly.
:P
Oh no custom scrollbars! The world is ending!
Having to ditch extensions entirely everytime there's an upgrade
Not anymore. Having upgraded from 0.9.3 to 0.10, it automatically updated extensions. Some didn't have equivalents right away, but soon did later. This won't be a problem anymore, as they aren't going to change the architecture anytime soon.
Having to restart the browser everytime you install an extension
And IE is any different?
Adblock doesn't block ads nearly as well as IE with Admuncher installed (it even blocks text ads!)
Um. Troll alert. Admuncher is a system level ad filter. It is browser/program agnostic.
The TalkBack agent appears way too often for my tastes.
What are you really trying to say?
The only reason I switched in the first place was tabbed browsing.
I doubt it. You didn't switch to simply try it out, like 99.9% who use/used firefox?
But you can get SlimBrowser or Avant Browser now and they'll add tabbed functionality to IE.
And, as everyone conveniently forgets to mention about these IE knockoffs, they come with their own security vulnerabilities along with all of IE's.
And I'm sure IE7 will add tabs.
Three cheers for vaporware!
Heh, I was brainstorming on something somewhat similar, although a little more *nix-dependant.
:).
.wine directory with a fresh one from the server. Then, link to the script from the desktop, call it "panic button" or whatever. And then a clicky for each program you put on.
:D
Say you have some boxes, doesn't matter if they're running linux, BSD, or whatever, as long as they're running the same version of WINE.
Well, get all the programs people use running in one test setup (IE6,Office 2000,Minesweeper, etc.). Hey, it is possible, just time-consuming. Save the ~/.wine "image" to the server (read-only
Mount the server drive to some arbitrary directory, and link it in to wine as s: or something so people can save their files. Then whip up a generic shell scipt that kills the wineserver, and then automatically replaces the user's
On the downside, WINE is the long pole in the tent here, being fickle and hard to get set up. On the upside, if you put the right progams, like IE6 and Outlook Express, the clueless noobs will be drawn like flies to the glowing blue [light, e]. They'll absolutely obliterate the wine setup on a daily basis (because there aren't many Windows programs to spread their destructive noobidity across) and yet the underlying setup will remain rock solid (aka untouched), cause the regular programs will "look funny".
The more I think about that setup, the more I like it
Consider other areas of engineering (the so-called real engineering) and you will see that in these fields the engineers rarely get to lay brick, so to speak.
What???
The best engineers are those who have worked in the field before deciding to move up.
The horrible engineers are those who have no exposure (completely abstracted from reality that is).
It is that little things that count. Say, if you are a good EE, you design your equipment so that the test points all have the same voltage - saving time and effort. Something you wouldn't think about if you hadn't sat behind a bench yourself and having to constantly move from equipment to specs to figure out if you have the right voltage out of 20 different test points and as many voltages.
Sure engineering can be done that way, but the relative common sense considerations just aren't gonna be there.
Another example - a engineer that I know of pulled of "the impossible". There was some ultra-high precision (patent-pending) gear that needed to be designed, and several scientists independantly evaluated the undertaking, and all said it was mathematically impossible. So, this guy threw the math out, and flew by the seat of his pants (as much as you can in engineering) and came up with a fully functioning design. No book can teach you intuitive design practice. That comes, along with other things, some real "gruntwork" under your belt.
That is a pretty good point. Considering this coming right after the buzz about the Google browser, this may not be only for the tin foil hat crowd.
This is probably the result of one of them corporate brainstorms.
Boss: They're taking our aolusers, what do we do??
Dennis: Do what they're do....
Boss: I'VE GOT IT! Build our own version of what they're offering!
Dennis: Very good idea, sir!
"As of version 9.2, a personal edition is not being offered anymore."
When MS finally says 'Screw it, go Linux if you are not happy with our prices', the customers will shift from Linux talk to Linux action.
Well, that is, in economics-speak, today the demand curve is shifting left - the equilibrium price is falling. Tomorrow, if MS says screw it, that means MS loses all of its elastic demand (people who don't need MS, but buy from them anyway).
And why is this happening? Because when the firm that is purchasing your goods switches from a monopoly market to an oligopoly, you can't keep charging the monopoly price unless you collude with the new competitors. This isn't happening.
All software companies go this way. At some point, they have sold the product to everyone who needs it, and any growth in revenue HAS to come from price increases. They have already tried to accelerate the upgrade cycle, with little success. Many users never upgraded from Office 97 or Windows 98!
Well, the pace of operating systems is slowing down too. 6 years after Windows 98, some programs are ending support for it, but the majority still do. I can't say the same for Windows 95, 6 years after it came out. Heck I remember upgrading to 98 very soon after it came out, because of compatability issues.
Well, I certainly benefited. I've had a Yahoo! Mail account for as long as I can remember. And for a lot of that time, I was constantly hitting the limit cause of spam. Probably lost a few legitimate emails in the process. Now, where it would have hit the limit before, it now says 1% used :D.
:D
And, you know, there is a pretty strong lock-in effect. Switching my email to some other provider would be an effort of biblical proportions (well, relatively speaking - I'm super lazy), and even after notifying contacts, and switching out all the newsletter/blog/porn subscriptions, I'd still have to check it cause somebody will forget.
In any case, only one person is going to get that terabyte, so I wouldn't consider that a market influence. But since those 10GB accounts are out there for free, and the MSN 2GB, I wouldn't be suprised if my gmail harddrive gets some extra space soon
I dunno, it must not be that restrictive. The latest E-Machines have Netscape 6.2 pre-installed. Yeah, Netscape 6.2 sucks, but hey, its something else at least :D
Err, try browsing at a different threashold :D
:P
I browse at -1 cause there are a few offtopic gems that you run across, but lots of cruft. You could browse at 4 and be done reading the comments in 5 mins
From the writeup:
/usr/src/linux directory on the web? Hell no.
If the engineers take advantage of the openness of Linux and make some tweaks to the part that is officially Linux, the company must to distribute their changes too.
Actually thats not true. You don't have to distribute code if you aren't distributing the kernel. (or program, or whatever). Does the person who has patches his sources, for example when testing for the linux kernel for the developers, have to publish his
Apparently I'm "not authorized" to view that bug. Probably most others are too. Could you post details?
See, that attitude is what keeps you single.
:D Like a lot of men, I'm a "egotistical" fanatical provider, which among other things, leads to an almost singular locus.
;)
No, actually, it depends on what "women" is to you. Every man has their own locus of charactaristics that draws their attention, including nerd/non-nerd. I am of the opinion that women don't know how to use computers properly, but since I can be honest with myself, I know thats because thats how I like it
Unfortunately, there are less and less suitable "women" as society becomes more and more "progressive", so much so today that the process of natural selection is working against guys like us. This is somewhat irritating, since natural selection has pretty much taken a back seat since the advent of modern medicine, and there is no "shallow end of the gene pool" any longer. Consult the biology textbooks you saved from college (haha) and look up "percieved suitability". Anyone can get plasic surgury and look like reproductive gold
Nowadays, all these "women" that come from broken families are just looking for a shrimp (like their dads) that they can easily convince to divorce if things get tough. More of the rest are buying the feminist "self-centered masculinism". Thats all it boils down to.
Oh well, no one said being a real man was easy.
Thats up to Yahoo! actually, not Mozilla Foundation. Displaying an error vs letting the site display. I'm sure Firefox could handle whatever they have perfectly fine.
If someone is such a Windows zealot that he ignores any advantages of Linux in favor of constantly scrambling to fix the latest Microsoft problem then he is costing the company more money than if he had been more platform agnostic.
Actually now that you mentioned it, it can be seen that most people are Windows zealots. Since most folks refuse to consider everything else, giving reasons I hear a lot like "linux is fer weenies" and "macs are for treehuggers" and all that mindless garbage, that pretty much makes them zealots.
Mostly cellphones and pocket PC's. And then the BSD's, Amigas, HP-UXes, etc.
Yeah, if there wasn't for football teams, we wouldn't have slacker degrees like Management (aka "the M-train"). I'm waiting for the day when the next generation of greater height and smaller brain capacity players necessitates the creation of the Shoelace Repair degree, or some such nonsense.
Sort of. The window decorations are drab. GNOME has always been drab in general. Its a pain to get it looking near-sexy. KDE comes sexy out of the box, and that is why I use it. Too bad Mozilla is GTK, otherwise everything would be perfect.
"Hearing damage" is sort of ambiguous I guess. You can lose your hearing in very small increments, only noticable over months or years of exposure. I doubt the phone would be able to output enough of a blast to take out your eardrums.
If you are trying to install software not on the SuSE CD's, you will be scrounging in rpmfind.net. However, if a dependency is not installed but on the CD's, SuSE will automatically fetch it. I have 9.1 Pro, and getting mplayer working was a bit of a challenge (not included for some godawful reason).
Well, you know, meat is cross platform. Any mammal can eat it. But first you need a mouth. Or in other words a platform to begin with! Hence you still need an OS, even if it doesn't matter what OS you pick.
The problem with that approach is that Election Day will turn into Election Month or Election Quarter. There are craptons of candidates that never make it to the ballot. The current method of weeding out candidates is the "petition to get on the ballot" method. We'd have to work through every party, serious or not, till all the "Gallager for President" types fall by the wayside.
Funny you mention that. I was thinking about how the elections could be improved, and that was exactly what I thought of - a runoff for the two top people to compete in a second election.
Many people I talk to would like to vote for Nader, or Libertarian, but the constraints of the system make that a silly thing to do.
Since the current system favors the two existing parties, I doubt anything will change anytime soon.
Over 85 db continuous can cause hearing loss over time :D I have some paperwork I collected here for OSHA compliance...here is a general idea for noise:
Weakest sound audible by ear: 0db
Normal conversation: 60db
Ringing Telephone: 80db
Belt Sander: 90db
Chain Saw: 110db
Jet taking off: 140db
Rocket Launch: 180db
Loudest possible tone the ear can process without drum imploding instantaneously: 194 db