Number one is that there is no WYSIWYG editor for Mozilla.
Are you on crack, son?
If you are runing Mozilla, open up Composer. You now have a window where you can insert text, lists, headings, and tables and they will be rendered almost exactly how to you typed them. You should notice 4 little tabs at the bottom. "Normal" lets you edit your web page WYSIWYG style. "Show All Tags" shows you the same view as Normal, but with viewable HTML tags. "Source" gives you a listing of your HTML source, which you can hack on and have the changes updated in real-time in all of the other tabs. "Preview" shows you exactly how Mozilla renders the finished version of the page. It doesn't get any more WYSIWYG than this.
Second there is no support for drag and drop. There is drag and drop but not using onDrag and onDrop type of events which makes the programming extremely simple.
There is all kinds of support for DnD. Go to the address bar and you'll note that you can drag the link into the tab bar, bookmarks folders, and other places. Ditto for the personal toolbar. Last time I checked, Mozilla's DnD even worked just fine with Windows Explorer.
Third Mozilla for some reason is a little bit slow in Windows.
That doesn't surprise me, since everything seems a little slow in Windows. But when I've used Mozilla in Windows, I can tell you it beats IE hands-down on all of my machines. (Especially WinXP.) Now Moz does take a little while to start up, but enabling Quicklaunch fixes that.
But there is no point of having skins on the browser, it is totally stupid, useless.
Skins? Oh, you must be talking about themes. You aren't required to use customized themes. If you don't like themes, just pick Classic and never change it. Presto, everybody's happy. I will argue that themes are in fact not "totally stupid" and "useless." They are useful to a lot of people I know. I prefer the Classic theme because I'm not a big fan of pixmap themes... I like my interfaces simple. My friend likes the Grey Modern theme because he's a graphics and web page designer and it doesn't have any distracting colors when he's trying to perfect the color scheme of his pages/images. My mom uses the Pinball theme because she likes the way it looks and it gives her browser window more room to show the web page. Themes programs such as web browsers can be very useful. You want to talk about truly useless themes, you needn't look any further than the modern crop of fancy-pants MP3 players.
Mozilla on Mac OS X is somewhat joke. It doesn't feel like a native application.
It isn't meant to. Mozilla's interface is meant to be consistant across platforms, not consistant with the platforms it runs on. If you absolutely must have nothing but native-looking applications on your desktop, there are other web browsers out there that have the sole purpose of integrading with the native environment. Galeon, K-Meleon, Chimera, they're all there. Pick one and use that instead of whining that the Mozilla developers aren't bending over backwards to accomodate you instead of everyone else who uses the internet.
Mozilla's being standard complaint is good, however on the net lots of articles are written for IE, because of the historical reasons as we know it. So Mozilla should allow the users to make a nicer transition by enabling certain non-standard IE-only features as much as possible.
First of all, they're "web pages", not "articles." Second, most web pages are typically written for IE, not for historical reasons, but because web page designers use Windows and IE to design their pages. That won't change until they start to realize that Mozilla, in addition to being standards-compliant, is actually a great platform to develop web pages on since it includes a WYSIWIG/HTML web page editor, a DOM inspector, and a javascript debugger. Third, Mozilla does render web pages that would normally be broken because they don't follow standards properly. They render them in what's called a "Quirks Mode" which means that the renderer breaks a few rules and recommendations so that the page loads and displays. Pages that do follow the proper specifications get rendered in "Standards Mode" which enforces the HTML and other web standards as set forth by the W3C. Mozilla should definitely not support IE-specific extentions and features since that doesn't give web page developers any incentive to switch to Mozilla, but most importantly, it doesn't give them any incentive to write standards-compliant web pages which will work on *any* browser, even text or speech-based ones.
I would wager that when Mozilla was started, Qt was still having licensing issues and GTK was really the only option. Later on, both toolkits matured and the Mozilla folks probably stuck with GTK for the reasons you specified but probably mainly because that's what was already in use. When I went to compile Mozilla 1.0, I noticed that one of the configure options enabled Qt as the toolkit instead of GTK. I tried it out and it build and ran fine, but it was horrendously slow for some reason. There was no visual difference (except for slightly different fonts), so I'm not sure what the point was... Maybe there's a few select people out there who don't have GTK on their systems and can't be bothered to install it but want Mozilla. Who knows...
Remember that Mozilla is two things, a browser and a development platform.
You bring up an interesting point. If I may nitpick, I've always held that "Mozilla" is two things: a development platform first and a internet communications suite second.
You say "browser," I say "internet communications suite." What's the difference? Well, the former renders web pages but the latter lets you do that and then some. Calling Mozilla (the software) just a browser is like calling Microsoft Office a word processor or calling a PalmPilot an electronic addressbook. When I mean to talk about the portion of Mozilla that renders web pages, I try to refer to it as Mozilla Navigator. Likewise for Mozilla Mail & News, Mozilla Composer, Mozilla Addressbook, and Chatzilla. Referring to these components by names can clear up a lot of confusion that some people have, especially those who aren't familiar with the whole Mozilla project.
Not that I'm going to *insist* that people correct their naming conventions, it's just that my method makes more sense to me.
Er, in all fairness the question had little to do with performance. He simply asked if the Linux kernel even *could* be compiled with anything but GCC. I believe the answer is still a very flat "no."
The DOS demo scene had a lively following in the mid 90's. One thing they liked to do was show off their assembly skills by packing the most visual effects they could into a little tiny binary.
My favorite is called digi.com. It's little more than a 320x200x256 display of a rolling, rotating, reflecting, textured, light-sourced torus with some MIDI synth for background music. After you exit the demo, there's an additional full screen of ASCII art before you get your prompt back. The most impressive part was that the torus did all of it's stuff in realtime with no slowdown at all on my 16MHz 386SX. To this day I'm not sure how they did it since that machine can't even run DOOM acceptably. (This demo is a bit skippy but works under dosemu, minus sound.)
Another one I have is of several (5 or 6) seemingly random (but impressive) 3D scenes stitched together. No sound or anything, but it clocks in at exactly 4096 bytes.
Tried to find web or ftp links to both of these, but no luck. If you want them, track down my email address and just ask. They're really tiny so I have no problem sending them.
1) Serial ports on laptops have doors to cover them up.
2) I cannot imagine getting food *inside* a serial port unless you were doing something extraordinarily messy or morally unclean.
3) By purchasing a dongle, you are paying extra for the privelidge of being able to reclaim about 7/8 square inch of space and shout at the world that you are free of serial ports.
4) A serial port attached to the machine is a lot harder to lose, step on, smash, throw, or steal than a dongle.
I've been happily not using parallel or serial for about two years now. YMMV.
The "YMMV" part is the answer to your own question. Obviously *you* can use up precious desk space with hubs and cables that don't stay in their socket, but many of us still actually *use* parallel and serial ports and like them just fine. A paralel port I could probably part with, if forced to, but I'd still want at least one machine with a parallel port just in case I needed to do something odd.
Serial ports are a different story. My wife and I use serial cradles for our PDAs. I only buy external serial port modems. Just about every OS in the known universe that can run on semi-modern hardware has support for serial ports and their devices (modems, terminals, etc). But if you want all of your external peripherals from mice to cameras to scanners to modems to ethernet headers to printers on USB only, then your only choice is Windows 2000 or Windows XP. (And even there, USB can be rather crufty.) Some support for some of these devices already exists in Linux, *BSD, and OS X but they're still years behind Windows. I want "legacy" ports on the back of my machine because I want my machine to have that kind of flexibility. Many businesses have custom applications and or hardware and *must* have those ports on their machines in order to get their job done.
And don't forget that the entire reason that the x86 is the dominant achitecture today: backwards compatibility. Hardware manufacturers might be happy enough to sell new goods that aren't even remotely compatible with the stuff manufactured yesterday, but businesses in particular aren't keen on the idea of upgrading their whole IT infrastructure just because some goons drafted a new standard.
The crazy thing is that we're still happy to pay $39 a month for cable or satellite TV
Speak for yourself, buddy. I'm a cheap bastard *all* the way around when it comes to content. Even though cable is available in my building, my 27" television gets nothing but PBS over rabbit ears and Playstation on the video-in. I listened to much of my music online via streaming mp3 stations when I had broadband. I've been known to emulate a console game or two that I don't legally own. I browse the web from behind an ad-filtering proxy. One time I even downloaded a divx of Fight Club from a LAN party just to see how good the quality was.
So don't mess with me, mister. A seasoned content veteran like myself *knows* how to stay entertained on the cheap.
Sweet, that's exactly what I've been waiting for. Now to go scouring the net again for information on how well the sound, network, video, and TV-out on these *new* ones work under Linux...
Funny that they're using the same limitations that were claimed for the speed of light.
Well considering that we're stuck back here in the 21st century, stretching, bending, and hammering our current theories is really the only way to approximate 25th century theories, don't you think?:P We've learned an enormous amount about the universe in the past few decades, it's hard to even imagine how much we'll know in a few centuries, let alone what we'll know.
The warp scale must have changed again in the future (in the last episode of TNG) when Dr. Crusher ordered her helm officer to take the ship to Warp 13.
In the Star Trek Technical Manual (an actual book... that I own), it is stated that if anything ever travels at Warp 10, it will occupy all points in the universe at once. That's the "official" reason that no ship can travel at Warp 10, but I think it's a little flimsy. I personally like yours better... Warp 10 would be infinite speed, but which would be impossible to achieve because it would take an infinite amount of energy. Sounds good enough to me...
A "Fall of the Federation" series could be interesting if done correctly.
I said the EXACT SAME THING when I first heard about Enterprise. I wish I could dig up the slashdot comment link, but it said basically that Enterprise stood a decent chance at revitalizing the Star Trek franchise if they could do two things:
Stay away from anything added to the show simply in an effort to get higher ratings from Joe Sixpack viewers (such as phaser fire, fist fights, space battles, soap-opera scenes, and soft-core porn).
Not introduce technology and species that are known to have been introduced much later in the Star Trek timeline. (Such as phasers, ferengi, etc.)
And we see just how well they did on both counts... OTOH, I think I would trust Jonathan Frakes a lot more with a new Star Trek series than I would Rick Berman and Brannon Braga.
I like TNG but a lot of the lame episodes (holodeck episodes for example) seemed to come at the end of a season when the FX budget was running dry.
I never understood this line of reasoning. Some of the "holodeck episodes" were my favorites and might I remind the general public that while conjuring up a holodeck scene is trivial in the 25th century, it costs actual money, time, and effort here in the 21st to design and erect elaborate sets that are supposed simulate a simulation. Therefore, I don't think lack of money had anything to do with the placement of a "holodeck episode."
This may very well be the last TNG movie, as the trailers say "A Generation's Final Journey". Seems to hint that this is the cap.
First Contact was supposed to be the final TNG movie, but Berman had dollar bills in his eyes and sold the rest of the Paramount crew on it as they were still trying to hang on to the good old TNG days.
In my opinion, that was a good move. First Contact was shitty and predictable from beginning to end.
I always believed that after DS9, Trek as a whole should have taken a long hiatus.
Agreed. I don't even think of some DS9 seasons as being part of the Star Trek franchise, since towards the end of the TNG all of the Paramount Trek-Heads were of course working on TNG which let some of the younger but more creative people have a crack at DS9. And the result was surprisingly good! I only wish more stations ran reruns of DS9 so I could see it more often.
But since TNG ended, it's been nothing but rapid-fire Star Trek, most of which can't hold a candle to TNG. Now they're milking the franchise, and we get crap like Voyager and Enterprise.
I agree once more. When DS9 premiered, I thought it was going to be a sucky spinoff, but it held it's own as an interesting television show during the time that I watched it. Voyager I knew was going to suck. TOS, TNG, and DS9 all had a cool story that shadowed the plots of the day-to-day episodes, but Voyager brought it right out in front in almost every single episode and it got boring quickly. I didn't look forward to the final Voyager episode at all because I knew EXACTLY what was going to happen EVER SINCE THE PILOT AIRED. Another strike was when midway through the series, they starting writing episodes with more action, flimsy effects, and fist fights because they were trying to sell the series to the Joe Sixpack viewers who could give a crap about plot development and actual character depth.
Enterprise is nothing more than a soap opera in space. And no, I won't forgive them for introducing "legacy" technology (transporters, phasers) and species (Ferengi) centuries before they're supposed to be around. Guess they pay their writers by the hour with no overtime.
Insurrection wasn't that great either. I'm hoping Nemesis does something to redeem the TNG movies, as Insurrection kinda put it on a low note. Generations is the best TNG movie so far.
This I don't agree with. I actually liked Insurrection a great deal because it felt much more like the TNG episodes I remember with the added benefit of a movie-sized budget. I liked the fact that it wasn't an epic tale of the Humans vs. the Borg (for the nth time) and it wasn't a lousy excuse to get ancient TOS characters back onscreen again (as well as crash a starship or two). The story wasn't entirely original I'll grant you, but the acting was superb and the characters that we're familiar with remained interesting and fun.
I'd like to see them put the entire franchise to a rest after Nemesis (and kill off Enterprise before the 7 season mark), and let it lie in wait until a team with a GOOD idea a few years down the line can put a fresh and interesting spin on it.
That would definitely be nice. I really do love Star Trek, but IMHO, the Star Trek series' should have ended in dignity with DS9. I can't blame them for wanting to do movies, but hopefully Paramount will realize that it's time to give someone else's TV-show idea a chance. Gene was a brilliant man, but this milking of his creation has already taken its toll on his name.
I could be mistaken, but I think Kirk already did this. (And I don't even like TOS.) Now that I think about it, I think Picard did also, in one of the TNG novels.
No. Racial discrimination--as well as a few other kinds such as gender and whatnot--is strictly prohibited by law. As such, other types of discrimination that the law makes no mention of are actually allowed. I think that in a real court case, however, the store would have to prove that they discriminated against an individual for a legit reason. (Shoplifting, the wielding of a gun, etc.)
3. Supreme court rules they cannot be sued and complaintants must sue the US Government (which one cannot legally sue)
Oh yes they can, just not without the goverment's consent. I do believe this is a clause of the constitution, but I may be wrong.
So how many (if any) times has the government ever consented to being sued? I seem to vaguely recall one person asking for permission to sue, obtaining it, and then winning the case.
You are correct, but I think it's still not a small issue. The core functions of a kernel are the most complex and time-consuming to develop and maintain.
One think you could say about Hurd developers is that they're not it for the vanity.
I neither agree nor disagree with your post, but it has been my experience that bugs in a package are a thousand times more likely to get fixed if you submit a patch along with the report.
Re:Why I won't switch from IE (yet).
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Phoenix 0.4 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
1. Mozilla interface feels "heavy" and slow.
Excercise more. They "feel" fine to me. Mozilla is only slow for me on bringing up some of the dialogs and windows, everything else is just as speedy if not speedier than IE especially in the stable builds.
2. Google toolbar.
This answer probably won't satisfy you, but I personally hate extraneous toolbars. For a normal google search, I type my query into the address bar and an entry pops up in the combo box that lets me run a Google search on that string. For everything else, there's bookmark keywords. For an image query, I set up the appropriate bookmark, type into the address bar something like "img foo" and a Google page of images matching "foo" comes up. Likewise, I have mine set up that "fm" searches freshmeat and "bug" queries the Mozilla bugzilla database.
As far as the Mozdev Googlebar itself goes, you might want to take another look. They're constantly tweaking the thing and it wouldn't surprise me if your features are there already. I'm downloading it now, but I don't want to jeopardize this session by installing it right this second.
3.Edit button.
Mozilla comes with its very own web authoring component called Composer. Click on File --> Edit Page and you're there. Source is one more click away.
If it's web developement you're looking for, you're in luck as Mozilla specifically caters to web developers. Composer is a good WYSIWYG editor with the option of playing with the source whenever you please. Mozilla also comes with a handy DOM inspector and indispensible javascript debugger. Just about the only thing it lacks is a built-in HTML validator and it wouldn't surprise me too much if there were someone working on adding one.
4.View Partial Source.
Mozilla's got it. No add-on needed. Highlight what you want, right click, select View Selection Source.
I also use Images List to see all the images and their sizes in a certain page.
View --> Page Info, click on Media tab. Voila, a list of all images/icons/whatever that the page loads inline. Page Info also reveals all kinds of other stuff including, but not limited to, meta tags, header info, form components, links, and security.
As far as popup blocking goes, I use AdSubtract.
If AdSubtract is a filtering proxy, I suspect you can use it with Mozilla just fine. If not, there are other solutions that work just as well. I personally install Junkbuster (now Privoxy) on my gateway machine and have all web browsers proxy through that. Works extremely well for me.
Here's my page [simpli.biz] that demonstrates exactly what AdSubtract does. It's so much more powerful than what Mozilla does that I'm amazed more people don't talk about it.;)
I'm sure it's a fine program, but it's third party software. It didn't come with IE, so why do you expect Mozilla to come with that kind of functionality? Mozilla might not have the flexibility of AdSubtract but then neither does IE. While Mozilla can give you some control over cookies and ads, I don't use them. I use a third-party program, Junkbuster, which is compatible with every web browser that can connect to a proxy.
The features I use in IE may be some of the more obscure ones, but until I see functional equivalents in Mozilla, I won't be switching.
I've responded to almost all of your feature requests with, "yes, Mozilla can do that." Perhaps now would be a good time to reevaluate your opinions, both on IE and Mozilla. I've been using Mozilla full-time for at least 2 years now (long before it was stable, anyway) and haven't looked back since.
If you ever think of giving Linux another shot, you might give Slackware a try. It's a very no-frills distro, which is (IMHO) a good thing. You dive in and make things the way you want them instead of wading through layers of GUI and buggy config tools. I've been hearing good things about Gentoo also.
One thing that would make me switch to FreeBSD instantly is a framebuffer console. On my desktop, being able to adjust the console resolution is nice, but on my laptop it's essential. 640x480 expanded to 1024x768 w/o anti-aliasing is extremely painful to look at. Painful enough that I won't use an OS that can't display it's console at the native LCD panel resolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Number one is that there is no WYSIWYG editor for Mozilla.
Are you on crack, son?
If you are runing Mozilla, open up Composer. You now have a window where you can insert text, lists, headings, and tables and they will be rendered almost exactly how to you typed them. You should notice 4 little tabs at the bottom. "Normal" lets you edit your web page WYSIWYG style. "Show All Tags" shows you the same view as Normal, but with viewable HTML tags. "Source" gives you a listing of your HTML source, which you can hack on and have the changes updated in real-time in all of the other tabs. "Preview" shows you exactly how Mozilla renders the finished version of the page. It doesn't get any more WYSIWYG than this.
Second there is no support for drag and drop. There is drag and drop but not using onDrag and onDrop type of events which makes the programming extremely simple.
There is all kinds of support for DnD. Go to the address bar and you'll note that you can drag the link into the tab bar, bookmarks folders, and other places. Ditto for the personal toolbar. Last time I checked, Mozilla's DnD even worked just fine with Windows Explorer.
Third Mozilla for some reason is a little bit slow in Windows.
That doesn't surprise me, since everything seems a little slow in Windows. But when I've used Mozilla in Windows, I can tell you it beats IE hands-down on all of my machines. (Especially WinXP.) Now Moz does take a little while to start up, but enabling Quicklaunch fixes that.
But there is no point of having skins on the browser, it is totally stupid, useless.
Skins? Oh, you must be talking about themes. You aren't required to use customized themes. If you don't like themes, just pick Classic and never change it. Presto, everybody's happy. I will argue that themes are in fact not "totally stupid" and "useless." They are useful to a lot of people I know. I prefer the Classic theme because I'm not a big fan of pixmap themes... I like my interfaces simple. My friend likes the Grey Modern theme because he's a graphics and web page designer and it doesn't have any distracting colors when he's trying to perfect the color scheme of his pages/images. My mom uses the Pinball theme because she likes the way it looks and it gives her browser window more room to show the web page. Themes programs such as web browsers can be very useful. You want to talk about truly useless themes, you needn't look any further than the modern crop of fancy-pants MP3 players.
Mozilla on Mac OS X is somewhat joke. It doesn't feel like a native application.
It isn't meant to. Mozilla's interface is meant to be consistant across platforms, not consistant with the platforms it runs on. If you absolutely must have nothing but native-looking applications on your desktop, there are other web browsers out there that have the sole purpose of integrading with the native environment. Galeon, K-Meleon, Chimera, they're all there. Pick one and use that instead of whining that the Mozilla developers aren't bending over backwards to accomodate you instead of everyone else who uses the internet.
Mozilla's being standard complaint is good, however on the net lots of articles are written for IE, because of the historical reasons as we know it. So Mozilla should allow the users to make a nicer transition by enabling certain non-standard IE-only features as much as possible.
First of all, they're "web pages", not "articles." Second, most web pages are typically written for IE, not for historical reasons, but because web page designers use Windows and IE to design their pages. That won't change until they start to realize that Mozilla, in addition to being standards-compliant, is actually a great platform to develop web pages on since it includes a WYSIWIG/HTML web page editor, a DOM inspector, and a javascript debugger. Third, Mozilla does render web pages that would normally be broken because they don't follow standards properly. They render them in what's called a "Quirks Mode" which means that the renderer breaks a few rules and recommendations so that the page loads and displays. Pages that do follow the proper specifications get rendered in "Standards Mode" which enforces the HTML and other web standards as set forth by the W3C. Mozilla should definitely not support IE-specific extentions and features since that doesn't give web page developers any incentive to switch to Mozilla, but most importantly, it doesn't give them any incentive to write standards-compliant web pages which will work on *any* browser, even text or speech-based ones.
I would wager that when Mozilla was started, Qt was still having licensing issues and GTK was really the only option. Later on, both toolkits matured and the Mozilla folks probably stuck with GTK for the reasons you specified but probably mainly because that's what was already in use. When I went to compile Mozilla 1.0, I noticed that one of the configure options enabled Qt as the toolkit instead of GTK. I tried it out and it build and ran fine, but it was horrendously slow for some reason. There was no visual difference (except for slightly different fonts), so I'm not sure what the point was... Maybe there's a few select people out there who don't have GTK on their systems and can't be bothered to install it but want Mozilla. Who knows...
Remember that Mozilla is two things, a browser and a development platform.
You bring up an interesting point. If I may nitpick, I've always held that "Mozilla" is two things: a development platform first and a internet communications suite second.
You say "browser," I say "internet communications suite." What's the difference? Well, the former renders web pages but the latter lets you do that and then some. Calling Mozilla (the software) just a browser is like calling Microsoft Office a word processor or calling a PalmPilot an electronic addressbook. When I mean to talk about the portion of Mozilla that renders web pages, I try to refer to it as Mozilla Navigator. Likewise for Mozilla Mail & News, Mozilla Composer, Mozilla Addressbook, and Chatzilla. Referring to these components by names can clear up a lot of confusion that some people have, especially those who aren't familiar with the whole Mozilla project.
Not that I'm going to *insist* that people correct their naming conventions, it's just that my method makes more sense to me.
No idea on the going rate, but for the interested, here's the original announcement of slashvertisements.
Er, in all fairness the question had little to do with performance. He simply asked if the Linux kernel even *could* be compiled with anything but GCC. I believe the answer is still a very flat "no."
The DOS demo scene had a lively following in the mid 90's. One thing they liked to do was show off their assembly skills by packing the most visual effects they could into a little tiny binary.
My favorite is called digi.com. It's little more than a 320x200x256 display of a rolling, rotating, reflecting, textured, light-sourced torus with some MIDI synth for background music. After you exit the demo, there's an additional full screen of ASCII art before you get your prompt back. The most impressive part was that the torus did all of it's stuff in realtime with no slowdown at all on my 16MHz 386SX. To this day I'm not sure how they did it since that machine can't even run DOOM acceptably. (This demo is a bit skippy but works under dosemu, minus sound.)
Another one I have is of several (5 or 6) seemingly random (but impressive) 3D scenes stitched together. No sound or anything, but it clocks in at exactly 4096 bytes.
Tried to find web or ftp links to both of these, but no luck. If you want them, track down my email address and just ask. They're really tiny so I have no problem sending them.
1) Serial ports on laptops have doors to cover them up.
2) I cannot imagine getting food *inside* a serial port unless you were doing something extraordinarily messy or morally unclean.
3) By purchasing a dongle, you are paying extra for the privelidge of being able to reclaim about 7/8 square inch of space and shout at the world that you are free of serial ports.
4) A serial port attached to the machine is a lot harder to lose, step on, smash, throw, or steal than a dongle.
I've been happily not using parallel or serial for about two years now. YMMV.
The "YMMV" part is the answer to your own question. Obviously *you* can use up precious desk space with hubs and cables that don't stay in their socket, but many of us still actually *use* parallel and serial ports and like them just fine. A paralel port I could probably part with, if forced to, but I'd still want at least one machine with a parallel port just in case I needed to do something odd.
Serial ports are a different story. My wife and I use serial cradles for our PDAs. I only buy external serial port modems. Just about every OS in the known universe that can run on semi-modern hardware has support for serial ports and their devices (modems, terminals, etc). But if you want all of your external peripherals from mice to cameras to scanners to modems to ethernet headers to printers on USB only, then your only choice is Windows 2000 or Windows XP. (And even there, USB can be rather crufty.) Some support for some of these devices already exists in Linux, *BSD, and OS X but they're still years behind Windows. I want "legacy" ports on the back of my machine because I want my machine to have that kind of flexibility. Many businesses have custom applications and or hardware and *must* have those ports on their machines in order to get their job done.
And don't forget that the entire reason that the x86 is the dominant achitecture today: backwards compatibility. Hardware manufacturers might be happy enough to sell new goods that aren't even remotely compatible with the stuff manufactured yesterday, but businesses in particular aren't keen on the idea of upgrading their whole IT infrastructure just because some goons drafted a new standard.
The crazy thing is that we're still happy to pay $39 a month for cable or satellite TV
Speak for yourself, buddy. I'm a cheap bastard *all* the way around when it comes to content. Even though cable is available in my building, my 27" television gets nothing but PBS over rabbit ears and Playstation on the video-in. I listened to much of my music online via streaming mp3 stations when I had broadband. I've been known to emulate a console game or two that I don't legally own. I browse the web from behind an ad-filtering proxy. One time I even downloaded a divx of Fight Club from a LAN party just to see how good the quality was.
So don't mess with me, mister. A seasoned content veteran like myself *knows* how to stay entertained on the cheap.
Sweet, that's exactly what I've been waiting for. Now to go scouring the net again for information on how well the sound, network, video, and TV-out on these *new* ones work under Linux...
Funny that they're using the same limitations that were claimed for the speed of light.
Well considering that we're stuck back here in the 21st century, stretching, bending, and hammering our current theories is really the only way to approximate 25th century theories, don't you think?
Oh, I think I see what you're saying. Please don't elaborate further as I suspect it might result in a spoiler.
The episode you refer to ("All Good Things
IIRC, that was never proven to be entirely true.
The warp scale must have changed again in the future (in the last episode of TNG) when Dr. Crusher ordered her helm officer to take the ship to Warp 13.
In the Star Trek Technical Manual (an actual book... that I own), it is stated that if anything ever travels at Warp 10, it will occupy all points in the universe at once. That's the "official" reason that no ship can travel at Warp 10, but I think it's a little flimsy. I personally like yours better... Warp 10 would be infinite speed, but which would be impossible to achieve because it would take an infinite amount of energy. Sounds good enough to me...
A "Fall of the Federation" series could be interesting if done correctly.
I said the EXACT SAME THING when I first heard about Enterprise. I wish I could dig up the slashdot comment link, but it said basically that Enterprise stood a decent chance at revitalizing the Star Trek franchise if they could do two things:
And we see just how well they did on both counts... OTOH, I think I would trust Jonathan Frakes a lot more with a new Star Trek series than I would Rick Berman and Brannon Braga.
I like TNG but a lot of the lame episodes (holodeck episodes for example) seemed to come at the end of a season when the FX budget was running dry.
I never understood this line of reasoning. Some of the "holodeck episodes" were my favorites and might I remind the general public that while conjuring up a holodeck scene is trivial in the 25th century, it costs actual money, time, and effort here in the 21st to design and erect elaborate sets that are supposed simulate a simulation. Therefore, I don't think lack of money had anything to do with the placement of a "holodeck episode."
This may very well be the last TNG movie, as the trailers say "A Generation's Final Journey". Seems to hint that this is the cap.
First Contact was supposed to be the final TNG movie, but Berman had dollar bills in his eyes and sold the rest of the Paramount crew on it as they were still trying to hang on to the good old TNG days.
In my opinion, that was a good move. First Contact was shitty and predictable from beginning to end.
I always believed that after DS9, Trek as a whole should have taken a long hiatus.
Agreed. I don't even think of some DS9 seasons as being part of the Star Trek franchise, since towards the end of the TNG all of the Paramount Trek-Heads were of course working on TNG which let some of the younger but more creative people have a crack at DS9. And the result was surprisingly good! I only wish more stations ran reruns of DS9 so I could see it more often.
But since TNG ended, it's been nothing but rapid-fire Star Trek, most of which can't hold a candle to TNG. Now they're milking the franchise, and we get crap like Voyager and Enterprise.
I agree once more. When DS9 premiered, I thought it was going to be a sucky spinoff, but it held it's own as an interesting television show during the time that I watched it. Voyager I knew was going to suck. TOS, TNG, and DS9 all had a cool story that shadowed the plots of the day-to-day episodes, but Voyager brought it right out in front in almost every single episode and it got boring quickly. I didn't look forward to the final Voyager episode at all because I knew EXACTLY what was going to happen EVER SINCE THE PILOT AIRED. Another strike was when midway through the series, they starting writing episodes with more action, flimsy effects, and fist fights because they were trying to sell the series to the Joe Sixpack viewers who could give a crap about plot development and actual character depth.
Enterprise is nothing more than a soap opera in space. And no, I won't forgive them for introducing "legacy" technology (transporters, phasers) and species (Ferengi) centuries before they're supposed to be around. Guess they pay their writers by the hour with no overtime.
Insurrection wasn't that great either. I'm hoping Nemesis does something to redeem the TNG movies, as Insurrection kinda put it on a low note. Generations is the best TNG movie so far.
This I don't agree with. I actually liked Insurrection a great deal because it felt much more like the TNG episodes I remember with the added benefit of a movie-sized budget. I liked the fact that it wasn't an epic tale of the Humans vs. the Borg (for the nth time) and it wasn't a lousy excuse to get ancient TOS characters back onscreen again (as well as crash a starship or two). The story wasn't entirely original I'll grant you, but the acting was superb and the characters that we're familiar with remained interesting and fun.
I'd like to see them put the entire franchise to a rest after Nemesis (and kill off Enterprise before the 7 season mark), and let it lie in wait until a team with a GOOD idea a few years down the line can put a fresh and interesting spin on it.
That would definitely be nice. I really do love Star Trek, but IMHO, the Star Trek series' should have ended in dignity with DS9. I can't blame them for wanting to do movies, but hopefully Paramount will realize that it's time to give someone else's TV-show idea a chance. Gene was a brilliant man, but this milking of his creation has already taken its toll on his name.
How cool is that - the anti Picard.
I could be mistaken, but I think Kirk already did this. (And I don't even like TOS.) Now that I think about it, I think Picard did also, in one of the TNG novels.
No. Racial discrimination--as well as a few other kinds such as gender and whatnot--is strictly prohibited by law. As such, other types of discrimination that the law makes no mention of are actually allowed. I think that in a real court case, however, the store would have to prove that they discriminated against an individual for a legit reason. (Shoplifting, the wielding of a gun, etc.)
3. Supreme court rules they cannot be sued and complaintants must sue the US Government (which one cannot legally sue)
Oh yes they can, just not without the goverment's consent. I do believe this is a clause of the constitution, but I may be wrong.
So how many (if any) times has the government ever consented to being sued? I seem to vaguely recall one person asking for permission to sue, obtaining it, and then winning the case.
IIRC, the developers (or at least the lead) are from Hungary and English is their second language.
You are correct, but I think it's still not a small issue. The core functions of a kernel are the most complex and time-consuming to develop and maintain.
One think you could say about Hurd developers is that they're not it for the vanity.
This structure will help the Hurd undergo major redesign and modifications without having to be entirely rewritten.
"...but we might change out the whole kernel from time to time when things aren't looking so good."
I neither agree nor disagree with your post, but it has been my experience that bugs in a package are a thousand times more likely to get fixed if you submit a patch along with the report.
1. Mozilla interface feels "heavy" and slow.
Excercise more. They "feel" fine to me. Mozilla is only slow for me on bringing up some of the dialogs and windows, everything else is just as speedy if not speedier than IE especially in the stable builds.
2. Google toolbar.
This answer probably won't satisfy you, but I personally hate extraneous toolbars. For a normal google search, I type my query into the address bar and an entry pops up in the combo box that lets me run a Google search on that string. For everything else, there's bookmark keywords. For an image query, I set up the appropriate bookmark, type into the address bar something like "img foo" and a Google page of images matching "foo" comes up. Likewise, I have mine set up that "fm" searches freshmeat and "bug" queries the Mozilla bugzilla database.
As far as the Mozdev Googlebar itself goes, you might want to take another look. They're constantly tweaking the thing and it wouldn't surprise me if your features are there already. I'm downloading it now, but I don't want to jeopardize this session by installing it right this second.
3.Edit button.
Mozilla comes with its very own web authoring component called Composer. Click on File --> Edit Page and you're there. Source is one more click away.
If it's web developement you're looking for, you're in luck as Mozilla specifically caters to web developers. Composer is a good WYSIWYG editor with the option of playing with the source whenever you please. Mozilla also comes with a handy DOM inspector and indispensible javascript debugger. Just about the only thing it lacks is a built-in HTML validator and it wouldn't surprise me too much if there were someone working on adding one.
4.View Partial Source.
Mozilla's got it. No add-on needed. Highlight what you want, right click, select View Selection Source.
I also use Images List to see all the images and their sizes in a certain page.
View --> Page Info, click on Media tab. Voila, a list of all images/icons/whatever that the page loads inline. Page Info also reveals all kinds of other stuff including, but not limited to, meta tags, header info, form components, links, and security.
As far as popup blocking goes, I use AdSubtract.
If AdSubtract is a filtering proxy, I suspect you can use it with Mozilla just fine. If not, there are other solutions that work just as well. I personally install Junkbuster (now Privoxy) on my gateway machine and have all web browsers proxy through that. Works extremely well for me.
Here's my page [simpli.biz] that demonstrates exactly what AdSubtract does. It's so much more powerful than what Mozilla does that I'm amazed more people don't talk about it.
I'm sure it's a fine program, but it's third party software. It didn't come with IE, so why do you expect Mozilla to come with that kind of functionality? Mozilla might not have the flexibility of AdSubtract but then neither does IE. While Mozilla can give you some control over cookies and ads, I don't use them. I use a third-party program, Junkbuster, which is compatible with every web browser that can connect to a proxy.
The features I use in IE may be some of the more obscure ones, but until I see functional equivalents in Mozilla, I won't be switching.
I've responded to almost all of your feature requests with, "yes, Mozilla can do that." Perhaps now would be a good time to reevaluate your opinions, both on IE and Mozilla. I've been using Mozilla full-time for at least 2 years now (long before it was stable, anyway) and haven't looked back since.
If you ever think of giving Linux another shot, you might give Slackware a try. It's a very no-frills distro, which is (IMHO) a good thing. You dive in and make things the way you want them instead of wading through layers of GUI and buggy config tools. I've been hearing good things about Gentoo also.
One thing that would make me switch to FreeBSD instantly is a framebuffer console. On my desktop, being able to adjust the console resolution is nice, but on my laptop it's essential. 640x480 expanded to 1024x768 w/o anti-aliasing is extremely painful to look at. Painful enough that I won't use an OS that can't display it's console at the native LCD panel resolution.