erm, wait. tabbed browsing was brought to masses (avoiding "invented" here) by opera.
for me, it's mostly relatively low memory usage, built-in features that you have to hunt firefox plugins down for (mouse gestures and whatnot) and some features ff is missing (although there might be some obscure plugin for them, like tab previews, tab closure undos etc).
major feature is ability to set pages from history to be always loaded from cache, which allows to recover forum/slashdot/tracker/bugzilla messages if some problem occurs - although a major gripe of mine is inability to do this with https sites. that sucks. on the other hand, ff sucks even more badly at this.
then there's (built-in) ability to disable all images by default (enabling cached only ones !) and switch this on tab basis easily - awesome feature when using dog slow gprs.
oh, and opera was the first mainstream browser that introduced "persistent" browsing by saving state of your open tabs and restoring that upon next startup. a feature opera users got used to several years before firefox got this as a basic feature - no idea about msie.
in general, opera has indeed pioneered most of the features in modern browsers. being a passionate opensource user, opera is still the last bastion of proprietary software in my toolbox, despite of some major annoyances with it - which basically means all other browsers are even more annoying.
Dialog boxes (JavaScript alerts, HTTP authentication, etc.) are now non-modal and are displayed as a page overlay.
woohoo. does that also include download dialogs ? excellent if it does, lame if it doesn't.
also, i'll use the chance to point out things i'm annoyed about opera (being opera user since version 3, 4 or so, exclusively).
1. inability to disable refresh for history httpd pages. my current major annoyance. i've set history mode to 3, i've explored every other history option - nothing helps. can somebody from opera software who reads this help me, finally ?
cut&paste sort of works everywhere. except where it doesn't. for example, there's still no cross platform cut and paste support in sdl (http://www.libsdl.org/), which is a major pain in some cases.
from what i've read on concorde, it was economically viable a lot, but had serious pr problems. while that might be alternate history, the prospect of shorter flights seems very attractive to me. of course, there's always this idea (from a ted talk, maybe) to put models on the plane to walk back-forth all the time so passengers would ask for longer flights.
i extracted thunderbird 3 recently and discovered that 4 of the plugins i use don't have compatible versions with the 3. i use some 5 or so plugins, so that's quite significant to me.
this is a huge problem with plugin architecture - while it provides lots of functionality and extreme flexibility, it also is limiting when some great plugin is abandoned, or, as in this case, plugins don't keep the pace with main releases - which essentially was the reason i chose opera instead of firefox - plugins i was extremely interested in were not compatible with new stable versions of the browser for months or more.
$150 is about 1/4 of the official average wage here - or maybe 1/3, given the current economical situation. cheapest plugs start at equivalent of $1, or maybe less. try walking around and showing off your earplugs, good luck.
It's not tedious at all to configure your new kernel when you have your old config file.
exactly. when you have. for the same machine. when you don't have any, or when you are compiling for a new machine, it _is_ tedious task - i know, i'm a slackware user who recompiles kernels.
and even with make oldconfig (which helps a lot) sometimes amount of new config entries is huge, especially if you skip a couple of kernel releases.
i don't know how usable localmodconfig is, but i really appreciate kernel devs who try not to alienate, and even attract, other people.
i'm sorry to say, but that's not a good attitude. and i'm being polite here.
developers need testers. some arrogant assholes might claim they don't, but then they're known as ones. now, to attract testers you not only are polite to them, you also do not discourage them by breaking or ignoring things that hamper them (but might not concern casual users), you actually should build tools and other support functionality for testing. essentially, having less testers will impact quality of the software for everybody else, so casual users also should desire for the project to have more testers.
i propose to tag this darwinaward or maybe also darwinawardcandidates. i would tag myself, but stupid slashdot tags still don't work in opera (usually i get replies telling that it doesn't work in any browser):)
if that popup autocompletes command names and maybe also searches other things... yeah, why not:) i don't claim full knowledge of all desktop environments (although i have briefly used fcwm in the past), so bringing up even older examples of this functionality is great.
so windows 7 FINALLY implemented alt+f2 launcher from kde and gnome, but the huge improvement was that they made it appear instead of the start menu ?:) i've been using launcher for years now, and i completely agree that it is very convenient. but somehow i see this as windows following what was available on linux long time ago, except that they have brought commandline in front of the user as opposed to gui. very simple commandline, but still we get people complaining that "if you have to enter text into some box, it's not usable" - and they are talking about linux distros, of course,
agreed, yast tends to nuke many user changes. on the other hand, many of those files have notices at the top warning against editing them and pointing to source files that are used when regenerating those files;)
as for package management, pushing for zen tools on opensuse was a HUGE mistake. at that point the top faq was "wtf ?", and answer was "remove all traces of zmd". which i tried to do whenever i installed suse, but if i forgot, it sometimes messed things up irrepairably.
in latest releases zypper has gotten much better, it has improved performance and i have actually started using it instead of smart package manager. what i still feel is missing in zypper - decent, supported and properly working interactive mode.
exactly. some time ago they evaluated whether they should keep this approach. it seems they decided on keeping, which is great.
when gui breaks, or when using cli only (servers), console yast is awesome to have even if you are a slackware user (like me), who is used to configuring everything with config files.
if anybody from suse reads this, keep console/gui uniformity of yast, that is definitely a selling point (as opposed to gui-only redhat tools...)
i'm also using opensuse for people whom i'm setting up linux - having fairly good kde integration is a big reason for that. a pretty big problem is lack of what ubuntu calls 'lts', releases with longer support and repo availability. this has made me curious about rolling release distro like arch...
not sure about that. seeing the ted video got me very interested. it would be quite cool to point this thing at a bus schedule to get delays projected on it, or see that there's bad weather at the end of my flight so i can plan for possible delays. or display prices or availability of a specific product in other neraby shops. or give me on-product "clickable" list of all additives so that i can figure out which ones i don't want to consume (even better - just allow me to preconfigure list of substances to avoid and automatically tell me whether i should buy the product). or recognise laptop in question and tell me default bios password (if they have such thing nowadays). or tell me how well a printer is supported in linux when the shop person is clueless.
would all this be trivial ? definitely not. but i do hope that enthusiastic people like from openmko and 6thsense can come up with something awesome.
i don't know. i have been "educated", but i'd prefer being able to rely on advertising to at least not outright lie or redefine words. and for that they should have been hit hard with misleading advertising fines.
couldn't some group of americans sue the shit out of dumbass companies who use misleading marketing - calling something with a cap "unlimited" should result in their whole marketing department fired and any manager who approved it receiving hefty financial fine.
but there is a lockin, just a different one. now, if both are so bad, maybe companies should offer less subsidised hardware... that might make people actually research their options and require some quality hardware.
Other than that, I can't really understand the hate for Flash(players), besides maybe OS incompatibilities.
I'm on WinXP myself, so I would not know anything about that
eheh. were you aiming for the funny mod ?:) of course, if you are not affected by the problems, you would not understand them.
i could come up with many analogies, referencing historical atrocities, but i'll leave that to badanalogyguy. no, wait, i'll try one, and it's even car related !
"i don't understand why all the hype about toyotas accelerating on their own, well, maybe for some increase in crash possibility.
not that i own or have owned a toyota ever. i haven't even ever been near public roads they drive on !"
so why not have discount hardware and subscription _agreement_ for some defined period of time ? the only reasin against this that i can imagine is some law preventing such agreement clauses that disallow customer to cancel subscription but keep the device.
i don't own tivo and don't plan to get one (not had a tv at home since it broke 3 months ago), but applying such hardware limitations would surely make me less interested in one if i even was a target demographic.
Slashdot Mirror
no. but you probably knew that and were partially trolling.
would be mighty cool if it became foss one day, though.
erm, wait. tabbed browsing was brought to masses (avoiding "invented" here) by opera.
for me, it's mostly relatively low memory usage, built-in features that you have to hunt firefox plugins down for (mouse gestures and whatnot) and some features ff is missing (although there might be some obscure plugin for them, like tab previews, tab closure undos etc).
major feature is ability to set pages from history to be always loaded from cache, which allows to recover forum/slashdot/tracker/bugzilla messages if some problem occurs - although a major gripe of mine is inability to do this with https sites. that sucks. on the other hand, ff sucks even more badly at this.
then there's (built-in) ability to disable all images by default (enabling cached only ones !) and switch this on tab basis easily - awesome feature when using dog slow gprs.
oh, and opera was the first mainstream browser that introduced "persistent" browsing by saving state of your open tabs and restoring that upon next startup. a feature opera users got used to several years before firefox got this as a basic feature - no idea about msie.
in general, opera has indeed pioneered most of the features in modern browsers. being a passionate opensource user, opera is still the last bastion of proprietary software in my toolbox, despite of some major annoyances with it - which basically means all other browsers are even more annoying.
Dialog boxes (JavaScript alerts, HTTP authentication, etc.) are now non-modal and are displayed as a page overlay.
woohoo. does that also include download dialogs ? excellent if it does, lame if it doesn't.
also, i'll use the chance to point out things i'm annoyed about opera (being opera user since version 3, 4 or so, exclusively).
1. inability to disable refresh for history httpd pages. my current major annoyance. i've set history mode to 3, i've explored every other history option - nothing helps. can somebody from opera software who reads this help me, finally ?
2. new one - i can't find out how to customise opera to be more useful :)
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=302392
3. a pretty old one - "reload every" functionality got silently regressed, and nobody really responded on why usability was so seriously fucked up on this one.
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=225510
other than these i'm a quite happy opera user for many years and i'm excited about performance improvements for sure.
cut&paste sort of works everywhere. except where it doesn't.
for example, there's still no cross platform cut and paste support in sdl (http://www.libsdl.org/), which is a major pain in some cases.
but, but... they are calling themselves restaurants, at least here !
it's a bit surprising that such a junkfood is so massively popular :)
from what i've read on concorde, it was economically viable a lot, but had serious pr problems. while that might be alternate history, the prospect of shorter flights seems very attractive to me.
of course, there's always this idea (from a ted talk, maybe) to put models on the plane to walk back-forth all the time so passengers would ask for longer flights.
i extracted thunderbird 3 recently and discovered that 4 of the plugins i use don't have compatible versions with the 3. i use some 5 or so plugins, so that's quite significant to me.
this is a huge problem with plugin architecture - while it provides lots of functionality and extreme flexibility, it also is limiting when some great plugin is abandoned, or, as in this case, plugins don't keep the pace with main releases - which essentially was the reason i chose opera instead of firefox - plugins i was extremely interested in were not compatible with new stable versions of the browser for months or more.
$150 is about 1/4 of the official average wage here - or maybe 1/3, given the current economical situation. cheapest plugs start at equivalent of $1, or maybe less.
try walking around and showing off your earplugs, good luck.
i'm sorry, WHAT ?
did you respond to incorrect post, or did you misread some parts of it ?
It's not tedious at all to configure your new kernel when you have your old config file.
exactly. when you have. for the same machine.
when you don't have any, or when you are compiling for a new machine, it _is_ tedious task - i know, i'm a slackware user who recompiles kernels.
and even with make oldconfig (which helps a lot) sometimes amount of new config entries is huge, especially if you skip a couple of kernel releases.
i don't know how usable localmodconfig is, but i really appreciate kernel devs who try not to alienate, and even attract, other people.
that looks more like some copy-paste troll.
"use the terminal to navigate to a word document and use sudo to open it" ? rrrrrrrrrrrrright.
i'm sorry to say, but that's not a good attitude. and i'm being polite here.
developers need testers. some arrogant assholes might claim they don't, but then they're known as ones. now, to attract testers you not only are polite to them, you also do not discourage them by breaking or ignoring things that hamper them (but might not concern casual users), you actually should build tools and other support functionality for testing.
essentially, having less testers will impact quality of the software for everybody else, so casual users also should desire for the project to have more testers.
i'm glad that at least some kernel hackers recognise this, and 2.6.32 actually has support for new configuration method, which looks at already loaded modules and some other stuff to create trimmed down kernel config - http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges#head-11f54cdac41ad6150ef817fd68597554d9d05a5f
i propose to tag this darwinaward or maybe also darwinawardcandidates. :)
i would tag myself, but stupid slashdot tags still don't work in opera (usually i get replies telling that it doesn't work in any browser)
and in latvian mythology as well - it's called peerkonjkrusts (transliterated, damn slashdot) or thundercross, as one of the main gods was thunder.
http://latvianhistory.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/the-latvian-mythology/
unfortunately, it's historical misuse prevents education - for example see item 6 at http://www.skyforger.lv/en/index.php?main_page_id=21&page_type=text
it also had more complex buildup, as can be seen here : http://www.latvianstuff.com/Pagan_design_elements2.html and here : http://www.abc.lv/cms/lvdizaineri_davanas_6_14_420x340.jpg
if that popup autocompletes command names and maybe also searches other things... yeah, why not :)
i don't claim full knowledge of all desktop environments (although i have briefly used fcwm in the past), so bringing up even older examples of this functionality is great.
and that was still years after kde had usable launcher (maybe gnome as well).
nice troll, though :)
so windows 7 FINALLY implemented alt+f2 launcher from kde and gnome, but the huge improvement was that they made it appear instead of the start menu ? :)
i've been using launcher for years now, and i completely agree that it is very convenient. but somehow i see this as windows following what was available on linux long time ago, except that they have brought commandline in front of the user as opposed to gui. very simple commandline, but still we get people complaining that "if you have to enter text into some box, it's not usable" - and they are talking about linux distros, of course,
agreed, yast tends to nuke many user changes. on the other hand, many of those files have notices at the top warning against editing them and pointing to source files that are used when regenerating those files ;)
as for package management, pushing for zen tools on opensuse was a HUGE mistake. at that point the top faq was "wtf ?", and answer was "remove all traces of zmd". which i tried to do whenever i installed suse, but if i forgot, it sometimes messed things up irrepairably.
in latest releases zypper has gotten much better, it has improved performance and i have actually started using it instead of smart package manager. what i still feel is missing in zypper - decent, supported and properly working interactive mode.
exactly. some time ago they evaluated whether they should keep this approach. it seems they decided on keeping, which is great.
when gui breaks, or when using cli only (servers), console yast is awesome to have even if you are a slackware user (like me), who is used to configuring everything with config files.
if anybody from suse reads this, keep console/gui uniformity of yast, that is definitely a selling point (as opposed to gui-only redhat tools...)
i'm also using opensuse for people whom i'm setting up linux - having fairly good kde integration is a big reason for that.
a pretty big problem is lack of what ubuntu calls 'lts', releases with longer support and repo availability.
this has made me curious about rolling release distro like arch...
not sure about that. seeing the ted video got me very interested. it would be quite cool to point this thing at a bus schedule to get delays projected on it, or see that there's bad weather at the end of my flight so i can plan for possible delays.
or display prices or availability of a specific product in other neraby shops. or give me on-product "clickable" list of all additives so that i can figure out which ones i don't want to consume (even better - just allow me to preconfigure list of substances to avoid and automatically tell me whether i should buy the product).
or recognise laptop in question and tell me default bios password (if they have such thing nowadays).
or tell me how well a printer is supported in linux when the shop person is clueless.
would all this be trivial ? definitely not. but i do hope that enthusiastic people like from openmko and 6thsense can come up with something awesome.
i don't know. i have been "educated", but i'd prefer being able to rely on advertising to at least not outright lie or redefine words. and for that they should have been hit hard with misleading advertising fines.
couldn't some group of americans sue the shit out of dumbass companies who use misleading marketing - calling something with a cap "unlimited" should result in their whole marketing department fired and any manager who approved it receiving hefty financial fine.
but there is a lockin, just a different one.
now, if both are so bad, maybe companies should offer less subsidised hardware... that might make people actually research their options and require some quality hardware.
Other than that, I can't really understand the hate for Flash(players), besides maybe OS incompatibilities.
I'm on WinXP myself, so I would not know anything about that
eheh. were you aiming for the funny mod ? :)
of course, if you are not affected by the problems, you would not understand them.
i could come up with many analogies, referencing historical atrocities, but i'll leave that to badanalogyguy.
no, wait, i'll try one, and it's even car related !
"i don't understand why all the hype about toyotas accelerating on their own, well, maybe for some increase in crash possibility.
not that i own or have owned a toyota ever. i haven't even ever been near public roads they drive on !"
so why not have discount hardware and subscription _agreement_ for some defined period of time ?
the only reasin against this that i can imagine is some law preventing such agreement clauses that disallow customer to cancel subscription but keep the device.
i don't own tivo and don't plan to get one (not had a tv at home since it broke 3 months ago), but applying such hardware limitations would surely make me less interested in one if i even was a target demographic.