I'd start by hooking another hard drive into that machine and doing a clean install to the new drive. That way you can access the old installation and start the repair process. But that's just me.
Or you could just use Knoppix, or... even the Windows XP installation CD?
The main issue that I see is that people are familiar with the architecture of Linux. The same situation with Linux is not difficult to repair.
Well, keep in mind that i wasn't specifically talking about fixing huge flaws in the operating system. I'm not a technician, i don't know that much about drivers and hardware failures and kernel errors and things like that. I just see all this griping on Slashdot all the time about completely trivial things that could be 'fixed' (and some of it isn't even in need of being 'fixed' -- there isn't anything wrong with it, the people bitching just don't like it). Rebooting to fix problems is just one of many many things that i see people talking about all the time.
But what you said doesn't make sense to me. If Linux people think that rebooting is the only (or best) solution to problems with Windows, it is about being ignorant of Windows. If they're doing it just because they're too lazy to figure out how Windows works, OK, feel free to bitch about how Windows doesn't have good error logs or how Windows won't let you do ___ and Linux will or how Windows is sooooooo much more trouble than Linux is, but don't bitch about it not being able to do something at all just because you're too lazy to figure it out (however stupid and illogical it might be).
If i were getting a blue screen on start-up, i don't think rebooting would fix it, 'cause... it would just take me back to start-up, you know?:/
In any case, i didn't mean to suggest that Windows is flawless or that it will work the same for everyone else as it will for me. But the constant bitching people do about it could, in a lot of cases, be fixed by just learning something about it. e.g., there is absolutely no excuse for whining about XP's (admittedly horrendous) default skin. Three clicks and the fucking thing is gone, Jesus Christ.
It works so well the other way, though. You Linux people often have no idea what you're doing on Windows, i suppose mostly because you refuse to learn it rather than you're too stupid to. You see it ALL THE TIME on here, people bitching about how ugly Windows is, how much useless crap it comes with, how you can't change ___ (which just means you don't know where to look), how it crashes non-stop, how it's so slow, et cetera.
None of it is true if you have any idea at all what you're doing, but more often than not some moron whining about how Windows crashes all the time (i have never once had Windows XP crash, and i've been using it continuously since the beta versions) will get his post modded up insightful. -___-
(This doesn't necessarily reflect on you, per se, but your 'only know Windows' comment leads me to believe that you might be one of these people after all, because i know i certainly don't fix problems by just rebooting.)
The origins of the term in the vulgar sense are disputed, although Webster's Third International Dictionary traces the root to the Old Norse puss, cognate with "purse" and also cites the Low Germanic puse meaning "vulva" and the Scandinavian puss with the same meaning.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, puss was used as a "call-name" for cats in both German and English, but pussy was used in English more as a synonym for "cat". In addition to cats, the word was also used for rabbits and hares as well as a humorous name for tigers. In the 19th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning was extended "in childish speech, applied to anything soft and furry", as in pussy willow. In thieves' slang, it meant "fur coat".
Prior to this in the 16th century it was used to refer to women in general and it continues to be applied to old women.
The double entendre has been used for over a hundred years by performers, including the late 19th-century vaudeville act, the Barrison Sisters, who performed the notorious routine "Do You Want To See My Pussy?" (see entry for more), the Funkadelic song "Pussy", as well as a character (Pussy Galore) and a title (Octopussy) in the James Bond series.
You know, you can only add adjectives between 'Anonymous' and 'Coward' so many times before it stops being clever. I'm not even half-way down the page and i've seen that you've already done it three or four times.
Unlike open-source people, who are so incredibly intelligent that they can program their own Web browsers to compete with multi-billion-dollar corporations, there are some IE users are so ridiculously stupid that they know how to disable ActiveX and install-on-demand and stay away from porn sites.
You really don't realize how far to the right the media has swung in the U.S. until you look at centrist broadcasting from the rest of the world (with the exception of fundamentalist middle eastern nations)
Considering that most of the world is considerably more left-wing than America is (on the whole), that would seem pretty obvious to me.
Being a teen-ager who's spent 17 years in Iowa, i think i'm qualified to speak on this~~~
Really, the worst part about this is that Riverside is just too north. I'm worried that the show is going to portray Iowans as red-necked bumpkins, and unfortunately the town of Riverside is not down south enough for us to blame any red-neckedness on the Missourian contamination that has infested southern Iowa.
I'll never get over it. If the recount had been completed, Bush would have lost the recount in Florida, giving those electoral votes to Gore, and thereby making Gore the President.
That's a different subject. The problem (assuming that Bush would have lost the electoral votes if the recount had been completed) wasn't with the way the Electoral College works, it was with voter disenfranchisement. I'm not addressing the people who are talking about the disenfranchisement, i'm just addressing the people who are constantly whining about how the president lost the popular vote but still got elected, as if that's some new loop hole that that sly devil Bush just recently exploited. The loop hole has been there all along. It seems like people just bitch needlessly about it because they hate Bush.
Because of winner takes all - a 51% vote of the state secures all the states electoral votes. The only reason candidates come to Boston or New York is for fundraising, like I said, because there's money in the urban centers. If the election outcome (51% or greater to one of the candidates) in a populous state like New York is a foregone conclusion, then that candidate is guaranteed all the states electoral votes. Yes, New York gets 10 times as many electoral votes as Wyoming, but ALL of New York's electoral votes are allocated to the winner of the New York majority. So it's not that New York gets less attention than it should on a per capita basis, it's that it gets no attention other than as a source for funds.
I still don't understand what you mean. If the outcome is a 'foregone conclusion', why should the candidate have to campaign there? The point of campaigning is to make it so that the outcome is in your favour... so... if it already is in your favour (or if there's absolutely no chance of it being in your favour)... why campaign there? Or am i still not getting it?.-.
I think there are 1 or 2 states that have somehow done away with the winner-takes-all system for assigning their electoral college votes. If every state did away with this, it would certainly reduce the odd disparities - Wyoming would still have 3 times as much say per capita as New York because of the way delegate numbers are counted, but so many resources wouldn't be wasted on states that are irrelevant other than their 'swing' status.
Maine and Nebraska are the states that do it proportionally. But... i don't think they've ever actually had to use the proportion thing, because it always ends up being in favour of one specific person anyway. (I might be wrong about that, though, i'm not really positive.)
that issue aside, the assumption that people in rural areas are more deserving of per capita attention because of the larger land area of their state relative to its population is ridiculous.
It's not the fact that there's larger land area, it's the fact that that larger land area encompasses different kinds of people. On one hand you have this one specific area with tons of people who mostly think the same way, and then on the other hand you have this huge expanse with less people but lots of different ways of thinking. That's why they're swing states, and that's why it's important that the president have their support. A candidate should get the backing of lots of different people with lots of different opinions and lots of different backgrounds and lots of different needs -- not the backing of a whole bunch of people smashed into the same area who all think and work and live exactly the same.:x
But yeah, i agree, ideally it would be proportional.
Well... i'm not sure i follow your reasoning. Your entire arguement seems to ignore the fact that i said near the beginning of my post that the states vote, not the individual citizens. The idea is to get the greatest spread of states to support the candidate rather than just having him get the support of, for example, the West Coast, and then leaving everybody else out.:/
In any case, i don't understand what you're saying in the first place. The president can't be elected at all without hitting the population centres, as far as i know. Wikipedia says, for example:
The fear is, without the college, one could campaign and win in only the 10 largest cities in the country, disenfranchising (for one example) the sparsely populated mountain region of the United States. This is illustrated by the fact that the combined total population of the 10 largest cities in the nation is (from the 1995 Statistical Abstract of the United States) almost 21.9 million. The entire population of the mountain region of the United States (op cit.) is 15.2 million. This effect is magnified when the analysis is broadened to the 10 largest metropolitan areas, not just the size of the largest cities proper. This would allow a candidate to focus resources, time, and political capital in winning the greatest numbers of voters in the cities. It is felt that this pressure would apply to all parties, and lead to voters in the sparsely populated West being completely ignored.
An illustrative example where the interests of a metropolitan area directly conflict with those of a state or region exists between the city of Los Angeles (metropolitan population well over 15 million) and the state of Colorado (population 4.3 million) over the issue of river water use.
A direct election would focus candidates' resources on large cities such as Los Angeles. The debate would naturally center on local issues that directly affected Los Angeles citizens. Los Angeles derives a great deal of its water from the Colorado River, originating in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The amount of water reserved for California has an impact on Colorado significantly and directly, and its use results in much contention. Supporters of the college feel that competing interests such as these are best served by compelling candidates to campaign in smaller states and address their issues. If a direct election was instituted, Colorado's voters would receive less attention, as a candidate would have to campaign over the entire state (the 8th largest in area) for considerably fewer potential votes than the geographically far smaller Los Angeles metropolitan area.
So.... I'm not sure what you mean when you suggest that the candidates ignore the population centres. The states with population centres get more electoral votes anyway, so why would they ignore them? Am i not understanding what you mean?:/
By the way, i don't mean to give the impression that i'm a fan of the current Electoral College. The system itself is useful, but i believe it needs to be heavily reformed -- there are tons of problems with it. However, i think the biggest possible problem, currently, is the population-distribution thing, and right now the Electoral College does a fairly good job of solving that problem. (It ignores the problems associated with plurality voting within states and the focus placed on the two main parties and fall-back options, but those aren't really immediate concerns, i'm guessing, since most Americans don't seem to care about any of that at all. -_-)
What exactly does 'lost the popular vote' have to do with anything? The popular vote does not matter. IT NEVER HAS. The citizens of the United States do not vote for the President -- the states do. That is how it works now, and that is how it has always worked.
The elections of 2000 were not the first time a candidate has lost the popular vote yet won the presidency. It happened in 1824. It happened in 1876. It happened in 1888. It will happen again eventually.
I dislike Bush as much as anybody, but Jesus Christ, people need to get over that subject. The Electoral College is in place for a very specific and important reason. If America worked by direct democracy, the candidates would only have to win the huge urban areas like New York and Los Angeles in order to win the presidency. The Electoral College, at least partly, ensures that candidates have to win other places, too, like the Mid-west (e.g., Iowa, where i live and Kerry/Edwards and Bush/Cheney have passed through multiple times in the past few months).
If you want to argue that the Electoral College could be improved (for example, make it proportional instead of winner-takes-all), i might agree with you. (In fact, i do support making it proportional in all states.) Or if you wanted to argue that maybe somehow voters were disenfranchised in Florida and that caused Gore to lose Florida's electoral vote, i might agree with you. (Although i think that's kind of getting worn out too.) But pouting because Bush didn't win the popular vote is just retarded.:/
Well, i'm not an expert or anything, but i imagine it's because there is only so much bandwidth in the line. Since most people want 'high-speed' Internet service because of the increased downloading speed, rather than the increased uploading speed, more priority goes to the former.
Like, for example, with DSL, i know the bandwidth used to be divided up into sections. Like it would be t|uuuuuu|ddddddddddddd. 't' being the voice line, 'u' being the upload, and 'd' being the download. If you increase the upload, you decrease the download.
I'm not sure that it works like that anymore, though. With DSL i know that they no longer divide it up into fixed sections like that, but i don't know about cable (or how the new DSL technology works).:/
+ Firetruck's extensions theoretically allow it to offer more features than Opera does. In practice, though, most of them don't. In fact, you need several extensions just to catch up to Opera in terms of features. This might change in the future, though, as more people move to Firetruck.
That isn't a disadvantage of Opera. But you know what i mean.:x
Mm. Yay, i have a new Slashdot account. My old one was so lame. Anyway, i'll paste something that i said on another forum about Opera. These are advantages and disadvantages of Opera as compared to both Firetruck and IE:
ADVANTAGES:
+ Support for a ton of operating systems and hardware, including cellular phones, QNX, OS/2, &c. More portable than Firetruck, i'd think, although it's unlikely that many people are ever going to need a Web browser for QNX.:,)
+ Supports plug-ins just like Gecko/IE do. (Most Netscape plug-ins work in Opera, i think.)
+ Comes with customisable pop-up blocking -- you can set it to: (a) open all pop-ups; (b) open all pop-ups in background; (c) block unwanted pop-ups; (d) block all pop-ups.
+ Allows (easily) customisable mouse gestures. You can set a mouse gesture to do just about ANYTHING, from enabling/disabling tool bars to disabling GIF animation to closing windows to filling in passwords.
+ Allows easily customisable keyboard shortcuts for just about anything. No editing JAR files or anything -- you just go into the preferences and set your keys and actions to whatever you want.
+ Probably the most customisable interface of any browser. You can use themes if you want, but (more importantly, for me) you can also set it to use Windows's native interface. Mozilla and Firetruck do not use Windows's native interface. (I can not STAND that.) There are probably more than a hundred built-in buttons you can add if you want, and you're able to create your own custom buttons that can do just about anything, from disabling cookies to executing a program to controlling Winamp. You can move the built-in tool bars just about anywhere you want.
+ You can set options for what sites can do to your browser. If you want to allow a site to make your buttons purple, you can do that, but you can also disable it if you want. Same with scroll bars. You can enable and disable specific JavaScript actions (for example, you can disallow sites from moving the browser window with JS). This is all available from the preferences panel.
+ There are tons of CSS options. You can make it so that sites conform to what you want them to look like, if you want. You can emulate viewing a site in a text browser. You can view a site without images. You can view a site with outlines around structural elements. You can view a site in high-contrast mode. You can view a site without CSS at all (awesome for testing the degradability of your Web sites). You can override the CSS of any site with your own CSS. (These features are best for disabled people and developers.)
+ Every menu and tool bar is very easily edited. Admittedly, some of the more advanced stuff has to be done by editing text files, but it's more convenient to edit these text files than it is to edit Firetruck's JAR files.
+ If you want, Opera comes with both a built-in e-mail client and a built-in IRC client, both of which are very nice, as far as built-in-to-browser stuff goes. Opera supports RSS out of the box. It also has a very nice download manager. It also supports taking notes and a sort of address book. Of course, you can disable or hide most of these things if you don't want them. (Which is what i did.)
+ Supports 'in-line find' just like Firetruck does.
+ I don't know if Firetruck does this, but Opera supports giving 'nicknames' to sites. For example, you can add a book mark for Google and put 'goo' for the nickname, and you can just type 'goo' in the address bar and it'll go to it. This is useful if you have a site that you visit often, but not often enough to add to your personal bar.
+ Opera supports the Wand feature, which saves your log-in information for the sites you choose, and lets you re-enter this information automatically just by pressing a button (or using a mouse gesture). For example, i can go to Hotmail, click the Wand button in my tool bar, and i get logged in, without typing anything. This
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I'd start by hooking another hard drive into that machine and doing a clean install to the new drive. That way you can access the old installation and start the repair process. But that's just me.
Or you could just use Knoppix, or... even the Windows XP installation CD?
The main issue that I see is that people are familiar with the architecture of Linux. The same situation with Linux is not difficult to repair.
Well, keep in mind that i wasn't specifically talking about fixing huge flaws in the operating system. I'm not a technician, i don't know that much about drivers and hardware failures and kernel errors and things like that. I just see all this griping on Slashdot all the time about completely trivial things that could be 'fixed' (and some of it isn't even in need of being 'fixed' -- there isn't anything wrong with it, the people bitching just don't like it). Rebooting to fix problems is just one of many many things that i see people talking about all the time.
But what you said doesn't make sense to me. If Linux people think that rebooting is the only (or best) solution to problems with Windows, it is about being ignorant of Windows. If they're doing it just because they're too lazy to figure out how Windows works, OK, feel free to bitch about how Windows doesn't have good error logs or how Windows won't let you do ___ and Linux will or how Windows is sooooooo much more trouble than Linux is, but don't bitch about it not being able to do something at all just because you're too lazy to figure it out (however stupid and illogical it might be).
If i were getting a blue screen on start-up, i don't think rebooting would fix it, 'cause... it would just take me back to start-up, you know? :/
In any case, i didn't mean to suggest that Windows is flawless or that it will work the same for everyone else as it will for me. But the constant bitching people do about it could, in a lot of cases, be fixed by just learning something about it. e.g., there is absolutely no excuse for whining about XP's (admittedly horrendous) default skin. Three clicks and the fucking thing is gone, Jesus Christ.
But "insightful"? Only if you only know Windows.
It works so well the other way, though. You Linux people often have no idea what you're doing on Windows, i suppose mostly because you refuse to learn it rather than you're too stupid to. You see it ALL THE TIME on here, people bitching about how ugly Windows is, how much useless crap it comes with, how you can't change ___ (which just means you don't know where to look), how it crashes non-stop, how it's so slow, et cetera.
None of it is true if you have any idea at all what you're doing, but more often than not some moron whining about how Windows crashes all the time (i have never once had Windows XP crash, and i've been using it continuously since the beta versions) will get his post modded up insightful. -___-
(This doesn't necessarily reflect on you, per se, but your 'only know Windows' comment leads me to believe that you might be one of these people after all, because i know i certainly don't fix problems by just rebooting.)
It's pretty ridiculous that people on Slashdot, of all places, don't understand the difference between megabits and megabytes.
The origins of the term in the vulgar sense are disputed, although Webster's Third International Dictionary traces the root to the Old Norse puss, cognate with "purse" and also cites the Low Germanic puse meaning "vulva" and the Scandinavian puss with the same meaning.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, puss was used as a "call-name" for cats in both German and English, but pussy was used in English more as a synonym for "cat". In addition to cats, the word was also used for rabbits and hares as well as a humorous name for tigers. In the 19th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning was extended "in childish speech, applied to anything soft and furry", as in pussy willow. In thieves' slang, it meant "fur coat".
Prior to this in the 16th century it was used to refer to women in general and it continues to be applied to old women.
The double entendre has been used for over a hundred years by performers, including the late 19th-century vaudeville act, the Barrison Sisters, who performed the notorious routine "Do You Want To See My Pussy?" (see entry for more), the Funkadelic song "Pussy", as well as a character (Pussy Galore) and a title (Octopussy) in the James Bond series.
From Wikipedia.
Must be moderation enough for the people who voted them into office?
You know, you can only add adjectives between 'Anonymous' and 'Coward' so many times before it stops being clever. I'm not even half-way down the page and i've seen that you've already done it three or four times.
Unlike open-source people, who are so incredibly intelligent that they can program their own Web browsers to compete with multi-billion-dollar corporations, there are some IE users are so ridiculously stupid that they know how to disable ActiveX and install-on-demand and stay away from porn sites.
Imagine that.
Wow. I wish there were Americans who were so well-informed about New Zealand's politics.
Or even Canada's, Jesus Christ. :/
You really don't realize how far to the right the media has swung in the U.S. until you look at centrist broadcasting from the rest of the world (with the exception of fundamentalist middle eastern nations)
Considering that most of the world is considerably more left-wing than America is (on the whole), that would seem pretty obvious to me.
Being a teen-ager who's spent 17 years in Iowa, i think i'm qualified to speak on this~~~
Really, the worst part about this is that Riverside is just too north. I'm worried that the show is going to portray Iowans as red-necked bumpkins, and unfortunately the town of Riverside is not down south enough for us to blame any red-neckedness on the Missourian contamination that has infested southern Iowa.
I'm only partly joking.
I'll never get over it. If the recount had been completed, Bush would have lost the recount in Florida, giving those electoral votes to Gore, and thereby making Gore the President.
That's a different subject. The problem (assuming that Bush would have lost the electoral votes if the recount had been completed) wasn't with the way the Electoral College works, it was with voter disenfranchisement. I'm not addressing the people who are talking about the disenfranchisement, i'm just addressing the people who are constantly whining about how the president lost the popular vote but still got elected, as if that's some new loop hole that that sly devil Bush just recently exploited. The loop hole has been there all along. It seems like people just bitch needlessly about it because they hate Bush.
People in the Mid-west are not 'cow-humping country bumpkin illiterates'. The first electronic digital computer was invented in Iowa, you know. >:(
Because of winner takes all - a 51% vote of the state secures all the states electoral votes. The only reason candidates come to Boston or New York is for fundraising, like I said, because there's money in the urban centers. If the election outcome (51% or greater to one of the candidates) in a populous state like New York is a foregone conclusion, then that candidate is guaranteed all the states electoral votes. Yes, New York gets 10 times as many electoral votes as Wyoming, but ALL of New York's electoral votes are allocated to the winner of the New York majority. So it's not that New York gets less attention than it should on a per capita basis, it's that it gets no attention other than as a source for funds.
I still don't understand what you mean. If the outcome is a 'foregone conclusion', why should the candidate have to campaign there? The point of campaigning is to make it so that the outcome is in your favour... so... if it already is in your favour (or if there's absolutely no chance of it being in your favour)... why campaign there? Or am i still not getting it? .-.
I think there are 1 or 2 states that have somehow done away with the winner-takes-all system for assigning their electoral college votes. If every state did away with this, it would certainly reduce the odd disparities - Wyoming would still have 3 times as much say per capita as New York because of the way delegate numbers are counted, but so many resources wouldn't be wasted on states that are irrelevant other than their 'swing' status.
Maine and Nebraska are the states that do it proportionally. But... i don't think they've ever actually had to use the proportion thing, because it always ends up being in favour of one specific person anyway. (I might be wrong about that, though, i'm not really positive.)
that issue aside, the assumption that people in rural areas are more deserving of per capita attention because of the larger land area of their state relative to its population is ridiculous.
It's not the fact that there's larger land area, it's the fact that that larger land area encompasses different kinds of people. On one hand you have this one specific area with tons of people who mostly think the same way, and then on the other hand you have this huge expanse with less people but lots of different ways of thinking. That's why they're swing states, and that's why it's important that the president have their support. A candidate should get the backing of lots of different people with lots of different opinions and lots of different backgrounds and lots of different needs -- not the backing of a whole bunch of people smashed into the same area who all think and work and live exactly the same. :x
But yeah, i agree, ideally it would be proportional.
Well... i'm not sure i follow your reasoning. Your entire arguement seems to ignore the fact that i said near the beginning of my post that the states vote, not the individual citizens. The idea is to get the greatest spread of states to support the candidate rather than just having him get the support of, for example, the West Coast, and then leaving everybody else out. :/
In any case, i don't understand what you're saying in the first place. The president can't be elected at all without hitting the population centres, as far as i know. Wikipedia says, for example:
So.... I'm not sure what you mean when you suggest that the candidates ignore the population centres. The states with population centres get more electoral votes anyway, so why would they ignore them? Am i not understanding what you mean? :/
By the way, i don't mean to give the impression that i'm a fan of the current Electoral College. The system itself is useful, but i believe it needs to be heavily reformed -- there are tons of problems with it. However, i think the biggest possible problem, currently, is the population-distribution thing, and right now the Electoral College does a fairly good job of solving that problem. (It ignores the problems associated with plurality voting within states and the focus placed on the two main parties and fall-back options, but those aren't really immediate concerns, i'm guessing, since most Americans don't seem to care about any of that at all. -_-)
What exactly does 'lost the popular vote' have to do with anything? The popular vote does not matter. IT NEVER HAS. The citizens of the United States do not vote for the President -- the states do. That is how it works now, and that is how it has always worked.
The elections of 2000 were not the first time a candidate has lost the popular vote yet won the presidency. It happened in 1824. It happened in 1876. It happened in 1888. It will happen again eventually.
I dislike Bush as much as anybody, but Jesus Christ, people need to get over that subject. The Electoral College is in place for a very specific and important reason. If America worked by direct democracy, the candidates would only have to win the huge urban areas like New York and Los Angeles in order to win the presidency. The Electoral College, at least partly, ensures that candidates have to win other places, too, like the Mid-west (e.g., Iowa, where i live and Kerry/Edwards and Bush/Cheney have passed through multiple times in the past few months).
If you want to argue that the Electoral College could be improved (for example, make it proportional instead of winner-takes-all), i might agree with you. (In fact, i do support making it proportional in all states.) Or if you wanted to argue that maybe somehow voters were disenfranchised in Florida and that caused Gore to lose Florida's electoral vote, i might agree with you. (Although i think that's kind of getting worn out too.) But pouting because Bush didn't win the popular vote is just retarded. :/
Well, i'm not an expert or anything, but i imagine it's because there is only so much bandwidth in the line. Since most people want 'high-speed' Internet service because of the increased downloading speed, rather than the increased uploading speed, more priority goes to the former.
Like, for example, with DSL, i know the bandwidth used to be divided up into sections. Like it would be t|uuuuuu|ddddddddddddd. 't' being the voice line, 'u' being the upload, and 'd' being the download. If you increase the upload, you decrease the download.
I'm not sure that it works like that anymore, though. With DSL i know that they no longer divide it up into fixed sections like that, but i don't know about cable (or how the new DSL technology works). :/
Er, now that i think of it....
+ Firetruck's extensions theoretically allow it to offer more features than Opera does. In practice, though, most of them don't. In fact, you need several extensions just to catch up to Opera in terms of features. This might change in the future, though, as more people move to Firetruck.
That isn't a disadvantage of Opera. But you know what i mean. :x
Mm. Yay, i have a new Slashdot account. My old one was so lame. Anyway, i'll paste something that i said on another forum about Opera. These are advantages and disadvantages of Opera as compared to both Firetruck and IE:
ADVANTAGES:
+ Support for a ton of operating systems and hardware, including cellular phones, QNX, OS/2, &c. More portable than Firetruck, i'd think, although it's unlikely that many people are ever going to need a Web browser for QNX. :,)
+ Supports plug-ins just like Gecko/IE do. (Most Netscape plug-ins work in Opera, i think.)
+ Comes with customisable pop-up blocking -- you can set it to: (a) open all pop-ups; (b) open all pop-ups in background; (c) block unwanted pop-ups; (d) block all pop-ups.
+ Allows (easily) customisable mouse gestures. You can set a mouse gesture to do just about ANYTHING, from enabling/disabling tool bars to disabling GIF animation to closing windows to filling in passwords.
+ Allows easily customisable keyboard shortcuts for just about anything. No editing JAR files or anything -- you just go into the preferences and set your keys and actions to whatever you want.
+ Probably the most customisable interface of any browser. You can use themes if you want, but (more importantly, for me) you can also set it to use Windows's native interface. Mozilla and Firetruck do not use Windows's native interface. (I can not STAND that.) There are probably more than a hundred built-in buttons you can add if you want, and you're able to create your own custom buttons that can do just about anything, from disabling cookies to executing a program to controlling Winamp. You can move the built-in tool bars just about anywhere you want.
+ You can set options for what sites can do to your browser. If you want to allow a site to make your buttons purple, you can do that, but you can also disable it if you want. Same with scroll bars. You can enable and disable specific JavaScript actions (for example, you can disallow sites from moving the browser window with JS). This is all available from the preferences panel.
+ There are tons of CSS options. You can make it so that sites conform to what you want them to look like, if you want. You can emulate viewing a site in a text browser. You can view a site without images. You can view a site with outlines around structural elements. You can view a site in high-contrast mode. You can view a site without CSS at all (awesome for testing the degradability of your Web sites). You can override the CSS of any site with your own CSS. (These features are best for disabled people and developers.)
+ Every menu and tool bar is very easily edited. Admittedly, some of the more advanced stuff has to be done by editing text files, but it's more convenient to edit these text files than it is to edit Firetruck's JAR files.
+ If you want, Opera comes with both a built-in e-mail client and a built-in IRC client, both of which are very nice, as far as built-in-to-browser stuff goes. Opera supports RSS out of the box. It also has a very nice download manager. It also supports taking notes and a sort of address book. Of course, you can disable or hide most of these things if you don't want them. (Which is what i did.)
+ Supports 'in-line find' just like Firetruck does.
+ I don't know if Firetruck does this, but Opera supports giving 'nicknames' to sites. For example, you can add a book mark for Google and put 'goo' for the nickname, and you can just type 'goo' in the address bar and it'll go to it. This is useful if you have a site that you visit often, but not often enough to add to your personal bar.
+ Opera supports the Wand feature, which saves your log-in information for the sites you choose, and lets you re-enter this information automatically just by pressing a button (or using a mouse gesture). For example, i can go to Hotmail, click the Wand button in my tool bar, and i get logged in, without typing anything. This