Mmmmm, I love a single counter-example in response to a *general* statement.. Plus the implication that generalisations are inherently bad..
The thing about generalisations is, they apply.. in GENERAL! Like, sometimes, they don't apply!
Err, no. Mathematically, this is exactly how you disprove a generalisation. If you want the kind of generalisation which isn't really general, then you should stick in a `usually' or `often' or something.
P.S. It is obligatory at this point to add that all generalisations are bad.
The tabbed interface was first introduced by IBM's OS/2 Warp v3, where tabs were located along the side of a window.
Unfortunately, in my second post I undid my own smug superiority about not having said anything about the history of tabbed browsing, by (implicitly) saying something about the history of tabbed browsing. I hereby renounce any claims made by me as to who developed what kind of tab browsing when.
How do you do the same task in Windows Explorer without using the keyboard?
An excellent point, but Microsoft, despite its many flaws, is not the one insisting on a single-button mouse to force developers to conform to a mindset which it espouses but does not practice.
As to the Anonymous Coward's suggestion, putting aside the inconvenience of changing my auto-arrange settings just to highlight some files, what if the files I want to select form more than a line, but not a complete rectangle? Anyway, this kind of quibbling is beside the point -- all I mean the current configuration makes it inconvenient to do something that could be easy with more buttons. (Creating a new folder would have been a better example. Can that be done without using a modifier key? Again, if the answer is yes, I'm happy to receive my comeuppance in return for finding out how.)
1)Firefox is based on Mozilla, which was originally/is still (AFAIK) a Netscape project.
2)Tabbed browsing is not a new development, nor was it first implemented by Firefox. That innovation (again, AFAIK) belongs to Opera, and has been around for some time.
(1) I deliberated over the wording on this one. I know Mozilla spun off from Netscape, but I had the impression that they were now separate (but peacefully coexisting) entities. Anyway, if Firefox is to be thought of as a Netscape browser -- a notion with which I am uncomfortable, frankly -- then I can change my phrasing to `Netscape was not destroyed, there's now Firefox', and continue from there.
(2) I said neither that tabbed browsing was new, nor that it originated with Firefox, only that (it seemed to me that) IE's sudden interest in this radically new wowza wowza feature probably had more to do with Firefox's popularising it than with Opera's implementing it first.
Netscape is the only widely known competitor? Firefox is very widely known, and it's reasonable to believe that some of the new developments (cough, tab browsing, cough) were made implemented because of Microsoft's fear of Firefox -- precisely not because they think they're alone.
Surely, when Apple's own Finder requires various right- and middle-click applications for ease of use (really, tell me how to select multiple files which are not adjacent in the window without using the keyboard, and I'll be very very happy), it is reasonable to say that even Apple doesn't believe in an interface with a single mouse button.
But people lie and copy and cheat and forge and so to do this requires a *trusted platform* - a system you and I can both agree has been verified for honesty by a disinterested third party to our exchange.
Where are we going to find a mutually trusted third party? I'm serious. So far manufacturers have decided whom they will trust, and who is most convenient for them. Where is the mutual trust in this situation?
The sales weasel kept going on and on about security, repeating himself with how it has security "at the level of individual pixels".
Not that the general ignorance needs any more specific fun poked at it, but it seems that the concept of something being secure `at the level of individual pixels' (a document has pixels?) is about the same as that of a substance which is cool `at the level of individual atoms'.
Re:Do the release notes contradict themselves?
on
Firefox 1.05 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Surely that's a contradiction. If you install into a new directory then you aren't going to get your old extentions.
Your extensions and themes are in your profile directory, not your install directory.
Or the art of using paper and ink to record information.
Re:The annoyances of Mozilla products (Windows)
on
Firefox 1.05 Released
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· Score: 1
2. Why do they still insist on supporting many profiles per user? If I would like multiple profiles, then I would also create multiple users on my Windows.
You must be joking. How about instead I ask:
Why does Windows insist on supporting multiple users? All I need is extra profiles in Firefox.
Nobody stops you from using one profile if you like. I'm very happy on my system, which has one user (plus an administrative account) and multiple profiles (for myself and my wife, who likes a different setup). I could also use new profiles to test extensions that I'm afraid might conflict with existing ones, to allow me to choose between a high-security browsing session (NoScript, GreaseMonkey, Flashblock &c.) and a convenient one (where I don't have to do lots of right-clicking to make sure a Flash- or Java-heavy site works as it's supposed to), and so son.
Why intentionally disable this functionality for me? As to the paths, as has already been mentioned, they're so that the path to your profile can't be easily guessed; and, if you don't like these paths, then you can put them wherever you want.
I've experienced price changes within the span of five minutes, or less. I'll be surfing around to sites, comparing prices, and I'll return to a site I've just visited, and they'll increase the price on me [I've never seen a price decrease].
Amazon (which has already got plenty of mention) seems to be particularly bad in this. (For a while, due to some glitch, I would get constant messages of the form `The price of [Product A] has increased from $10.85 to $10.85.') I signed in today after a month's non-usage and had about twelve price increase/decrease notices appear. What I found strange was this:
I had signed in to delete some items from my to-buy-later list which I had recently received as gifts. When I first accessed my cart, I got `The price of Pirates of the Caribbean has increased from $13.99 to $14.99.' When I deleted the first item, I got `... has decreased from $14.99 to $13.99.' When I deleted the second item, literally not more than thirty seconds later, I got `... has increased from $13.99 to $14.99.'
Losing your password to a phisher is a complete impossibility if you use a tool to auto-generate your passwords based on the domain name and a master password. PasswordMaker is my favorite for Firefox; there are others too. To me this approach is far preferable to keeping a password-protected vault of passwords, because you don't have to carry the vault around with you.
I have contemplated using PasswordMaker for a while, because I can no longer remember so many strong passwords, and I do end up using the same password on many sites. (Shh, don't tell any crackers.) However, I'm troubled by this and all external master-password type ideas -- extensions aren't necessarily open-source (is PasswordMaker?), and if the extension, say, doesn't work with a future release of Firefox and the author is no longer updating it, then I'm locked out of all the sites for which I use it because I cannot reproduce the password myself.
Maybe it's a specious worry, or maybe PasswordMaker is just an easy front-end to some procedure I could carry out (laboriously) myself without it, but I'd sure feel more comfortable if I knew that there were some way that I could be sure I will always have access to those passwords. A little cross-browser compatibility (what if I am using Safari, Opera... from a different computer? -- suddenly I can't log in!) wouldn't hurt either.
Can you not yell about the evils of the government just as loudly from a jail cell as from a soap box?
That's a very good point, and I agree, but I think there is an important distinction to be made between someone who is impeding your ability to be heard so as to silence you (a government censoring opposing opinions) and someone who is impeding your ability to be heard indirectly (a spammer who has no wish to drown out your post in particular). They cause the same, or much the same (because with a spammer at least your message can be seen, even if it is lost in a crapflood or marooned in a forum to which no attention is paid), end result, but I think it is the former sort of person who is the more threatening to society.
Your ability to speak your mind freely is not impeded by a flood of spam and crap posts. Your ability to find the information you want, and the ability of other users to find the (presumably valuable) information you have provided, is indeed impeded -- but, while self-expression is a fundamental right, the `right to be heard' is not. If the price of a Chinese citizen's right to criticise his government was that I could no longer criticise mine (which, as an American, I increasingly am not allowed to do anyway), then that would be an illegitimate trade-off; but surely if the price of that same right is that I have to sort through a few (or very many) more messages to get to the ones I want, then it is selfish in the extreme to claim that the price is too high for me to pay. It is not that a Chinese citizen is `more equal' than I, only that a huge benefit accrues for a relatively small price.
If the batteries do, despite the `very small' risk, catch fire, a ThermaPAK is not going to be a lot of help to you. What you'll have is a flaming sleeve over your laptop.
Until CSS was cracked, that's about how it was. Remember? Linux people not having DVD player software 'cos they didn't have a CSS key? Until CSS was cracked.Any DRM, any encryption, any technological terrors the ??AA can construct WILL be cracked. Not might, but WILL be cracked. It's totally foolish to think otherwise.
I have the same implicit faith as, I think, anyone here that eventually any software-based protection can be cracked; but the point as I understand it of a `trusted computing' environment is that the hardware prevents you even from having access to the software to crack it. I'm sure that some intrepid folks out there will still get around that, but physical manipulations cannot be downloaded and implemented by the common user as software manipulations can, so the protection can defeat all but a few.
So, if this comes to pass, huge numbers of people will buy the DVD, take it home, enter their fingerprint ONCE, and rip it to a non-protected copy. Then, they'll just use the much-more convenient copy.
Shh! Now that you've given Rajit Gadh the idea, he will insist that we buy specially-equipped DVD drives which won't copy data from a disc with a special RFID tag!
Seriously, I wondered about this, but maybe his vision of our future is that we will no longer be able to play DVDs on computers at all, or only in some kind of `trusted computing' environment which will `protect' us from copying them to disk.
Slashdot Mirror
P.S. It is obligatory at this point to add that all generalisations are bad.
An excellent point, but Microsoft, despite its many flaws, is not the one insisting on a single-button mouse to force developers to conform to a mindset which it espouses but does not practice.
As to the Anonymous Coward's suggestion, putting aside the inconvenience of changing my auto-arrange settings just to highlight some files, what if the files I want to select form more than a line, but not a complete rectangle? Anyway, this kind of quibbling is beside the point -- all I mean the current configuration makes it inconvenient to do something that could be easy with more buttons. (Creating a new folder would have been a better example. Can that be done without using a modifier key? Again, if the answer is yes, I'm happy to receive my comeuppance in return for finding out how.)
(1) I deliberated over the wording on this one. I know Mozilla spun off from Netscape, but I had the impression that they were now separate (but peacefully coexisting) entities. Anyway, if Firefox is to be thought of as a Netscape browser -- a notion with which I am uncomfortable, frankly -- then I can change my phrasing to `Netscape was not destroyed, there's now Firefox', and continue from there.
(2) I said neither that tabbed browsing was new, nor that it originated with Firefox, only that (it seemed to me that) IE's sudden interest in this radically new wowza wowza feature probably had more to do with Firefox's popularising it than with Opera's implementing it first.
Netscape is the only widely known competitor? Firefox is very widely known, and it's reasonable to believe that some of the new developments (cough, tab browsing, cough) were made implemented because of Microsoft's fear of Firefox -- precisely not because they think they're alone.
Surely, when Apple's own Finder requires various right- and middle-click applications for ease of use (really, tell me how to select multiple files which are not adjacent in the window without using the keyboard, and I'll be very very happy), it is reasonable to say that even Apple doesn't believe in an interface with a single mouse button.
Rarely? Maybe. Hardly ever? Maybe. Never? This flirts with `It's not a bug, it's a feature.'
Not that the general ignorance needs any more specific fun poked at it, but it seems that the concept of something being secure `at the level of individual pixels' (a document has pixels?) is about the same as that of a substance which is cool `at the level of individual atoms'.
Or the art of using paper and ink to record information.
Why intentionally disable this functionality for me? As to the paths, as has already been mentioned, they're so that the path to your profile can't be easily guessed; and, if you don't like these paths, then you can put them wherever you want.
Unfortunately? Unfortunately because it reflects badly on human nature? Unfortunately from the point of view of adware asshats or terrorist-funders?
1. Notice that a certain British show is successful.
2. Make an American show with the same name and a desperate and flawed attempt to capture the feel of the original.
I guess the obligatory next step is
3. PROFIT!!!
but it doesn't seem to have worked that way.
By the way, is it just me, or is the text we're supposed to read getting much harder to read? (Maybe I'm a script after all.)
For the sake of reproducing it, what was the configuration?
Amazon (which has already got plenty of mention) seems to be particularly bad in this. (For a while, due to some glitch, I would get constant messages of the form `The price of [Product A] has increased from $10.85 to $10.85.') I signed in today after a month's non-usage and had about twelve price increase/decrease notices appear. What I found strange was this:
I had signed in to delete some items from my to-buy-later list which I had recently received as gifts. When I first accessed my cart, I got `The price of Pirates of the Caribbean has increased from $13.99 to $14.99.' When I deleted the first item, I got `... has decreased from $14.99 to $13.99.' When I deleted the second item, literally not more than thirty seconds later, I got `... has increased from $13.99 to $14.99.'
Maybe it's a specious worry, or maybe PasswordMaker is just an easy front-end to some procedure I could carry out (laboriously) myself without it, but I'd sure feel more comfortable if I knew that there were some way that I could be sure I will always have access to those passwords. A little cross-browser compatibility (what if I am using Safari, Opera ... from a different computer? -- suddenly I can't log in!) wouldn't hurt either.
That's a very good point, and I agree, but I think there is an important distinction to be made between someone who is impeding your ability to be heard so as to silence you (a government censoring opposing opinions) and someone who is impeding your ability to be heard indirectly (a spammer who has no wish to drown out your post in particular). They cause the same, or much the same (because with a spammer at least your message can be seen, even if it is lost in a crapflood or marooned in a forum to which no attention is paid), end result, but I think it is the former sort of person who is the more threatening to society.
Your ability to speak your mind freely is not impeded by a flood of spam and crap posts. Your ability to find the information you want, and the ability of other users to find the (presumably valuable) information you have provided, is indeed impeded -- but, while self-expression is a fundamental right, the `right to be heard' is not. If the price of a Chinese citizen's right to criticise his government was that I could no longer criticise mine (which, as an American, I increasingly am not allowed to do anyway), then that would be an illegitimate trade-off; but surely if the price of that same right is that I have to sort through a few (or very many) more messages to get to the ones I want, then it is selfish in the extreme to claim that the price is too high for me to pay. It is not that a Chinese citizen is `more equal' than I, only that a huge benefit accrues for a relatively small price.
If the batteries do, despite the `very small' risk, catch fire, a ThermaPAK is not going to be a lot of help to you. What you'll have is a flaming sleeve over your laptop.
Seriously, I wondered about this, but maybe his vision of our future is that we will no longer be able to play DVDs on computers at all, or only in some kind of `trusted computing' environment which will `protect' us from copying them to disk.