I actually started the process to switch about two weeks ago. I weighed the advantages and disadvantages and decided that the trouble of making the swich was worth it in the long run. I'm making good progress and my speed and accuracy are almost caught up with before. There's only one thing I worry about, and that's the trouble that can be involved in switching back and forth on other systems or on things like rescue discs (where it's not really feasible to rebuild the images every time just for that one change.) On other systems I'm most worried, because in some rare cases they are pretty locked down for security reasons, so I can't run files from my flash drive to make the switch or when I'm working on someone else's system (I do a lot of problem fixing for people.)
What I really want -- instead of always relying on some software solution -- is just some dirt cheap Dvorak hardwired keyboard (preferably USB) that I can simply plug in and it work in everything (it would take some interesting work to get Dvorak in syslinux or other boot loaders for example, so such a thing has the added advantage of letting you more easily deal with these sorts of things.) Basically all I want is something like those $12 QWERTY keyboards you can find at a Walmart, only hardwired for Dvorak instead (I know that those ubercheap keyboards will give you a massive case of carpel tunnel type pains if you use them more than a few hours, but we're talking about something that would only be used for less than an hour at a time since I can just use my nice normal keyboard on my personal computer with all the software solutions.)
I realize that it would cost more than the $12 Walmart boards, but right now I have been unable to find a hardwired Dvorak keyboard for less than $60, which is a pricerange that is just out of the question for such a thing. I've checked everywhere ranging from the higher quality electronics sites to places like eBay and even more questionable websites, but the most affordable Dvorak keyboard I ever found was just an ordinary cheap QWERTY keyboard with the keys moved so it still required a software solution (and even that was at a ridiculous price for what it was.) Sometimes I just wish I had the ability to create my own circuit sheets to rewire a keyboard to Dvorak in hardware myself, but while it may be theoretically possible for some to do it with stuff they may even have at home, it's just way too much for me.
I can't believe that companies are selling these things for $100+ when just taking the same crappy parts that make up a $12 keyboard, tossing in different circuits (they don't even have to change the chip it uses!) and putting the keys in different places would allow them to market to a LOT of people making the switch (I know that when I first thought about Dvorak a long time ago I assumed I would need a new keyboard and would have bought one if it were reasonably priced) as well as some who already have (not to mention that they could get away with slapping a $20 pricetag on it and make even more per keyboard within reason to offset the difference in the smaller volume.) Not many people are willing to spend so much for a keyboard...
I was wondering if anyone here might actually know of some solution like the recircuiting idea (but more reasonable) or someone selling cheap Dvorak keyboards that I haven't been able to find?
First, claiming I'm "ignoring things because my mind is made up" is just getting silly, and then later actually outright calling me an idiot is only making your position look worse. You are resorting more and more towards just a simple flame war. Let's keep this intelligent. Refrain from the insults if you wish to continue this conversation, and I'd like to point out that if you didn't want to continue the conversation, the easiest way to have ended it would have been to not have made that post at all.
Things like SMTP authentication aren't feature requests, they are feature requirements. More and more services are finally getting a reality check and realizing that authentication is needed, and thus require it rather than just making it optional or even not available at all. Any mail reader not supporting that needs to be deleted, so if Opera were unable to do it, they might just as well remove all the code for mail reading. No, my point isn't whether or not Opera gets changes at all, but, whether what users (and guess what the market is made up of, that's right, users) actually have any say whatsoever. Again, like I said before, you will even see things get added in that users requested, but, how many of them were added because people wanted them, and how many were added because the Opera team independantly decided that they made sense? It may not even be true, but, from the user (and previously customer) perspective, it looked that way.
Ok, I made a mistake on the API thing, and looked it up. Yes, widgets are using HTML code complete with Java, Javascript, and such. The point remains that everything you can do with them you can do via bookmarks or external programs and it's less intrusive.
And why do you keep saying that extentions have only had weeks? People have not been requesting them for less than a year, people have been requesting them for more than a year. Believe it or not, people used Opera back when it wasn't free with no ads and people wanted things back then too. Opera has had to live in the shadow of browsers like Firefox for quite a long while now, and one of the most notable features Firefox has had for quite some time now is extentions. I don't see why it's so hard to believe that people might have wanted extentions back then too.
And Java does not require more time and resources than a web application. Actually, it tends to get more complicated to create what is like a little program with a web application because the web standards were, ultimately, just designed to be a sort of dynamic form of text. The trouble is, anything you can do with widgets, you can do less intrusively without them. You want a calculator, toss something together something in Java if you need portability, or, heck, even just VB will do. Want a comic strip? Uhm, how about just make a bookmark on the comic page instead of trying to rig up something to link to it -- and even if you must do that, why must it be a little box sitting on the desktop (only while the browser is open, so if you need it any other time, too bad) versus say a box on a page that you designed? Why do I need some annoying box sitting on my desktop in the way when I can get to a bookmark with two clicks (add one keypress if you want it in a new tab/window of course.) For calculators, I can just do start+r (or alt+f2 in X,) calc (maybe kalc in KDE or whatever your preference,) enter. It's actually faster than digging through widgets for a calculator that often enough has a bug or two in it. It's faster, and it doesn't get in the way like the widgets do. And if, despite all this, you honestly think it's easier using web apps (which, I would like to remind you, work in only one browser, and you mentioned ease of deployment, well, the ease falls pretty short since you'll be requiring all your users to install and use a browser that a larger number of them probably have never used,) then I'd like to ask how much you have actually tried developing in Java, VB, or even things like Python and if you have developed as
Then you haven't seen the way frequently requested things are added all the time.
Such as? I'm not saying nothing gets added, I'm saying that it really feels like they aren't so much listening to requests as just adding what they think makes sense when they think of it.
Maybe extensions aren't considered to be of critical importance, or maybe it takes more than a week to implement an extensions system properly.
Maybe. Maybe extentions take more than a year because people have been calling for them for a very long time now, not just a matter of a few weeks.
Then why do Opera widgets have tens of thousands of downloads? Clearly there is something you are not getting, and clearly there is something of strategic importance with widgets, seeing as they are available on mobile phones too (they were before the PC version got widgets).
Tens of thousands? That's actually not very much when it comes to downloads. Let's take an example of something relatively worthless: Birthday Alert on Tens of thousands of downloads, yet, if you think about it, Windows, since 98 or so, has had a built in task scheduler in which you could simply make a task to give yourself a message on the specified date. Linux has had task schedulers built in to any distro in the market for as long as I've used it. But, hey, it has tens of thousands of downloads, so it must be useful huh?
Something I'm not getting you say? I tried numerous widgets, quite a few of which should have been useful (such as a unicode paster thing) and I just found that they got in the way. Perhaps it's not that I'm missing something despite the direct experience, but, instead perhaps it is that all the many people who claim widgets are pretty much a waste of time and resources might actually not be just making thigns up randomly. On a phone, maybe widgets are useful, but, then I'm not discussing the phone browser.
Also, lots of FF extensions can be "emulated" using widgets. Emulated? Extentions do things within the browser itself. Widgets are actually pretty much external. At least I certainly have yet to see a single widget that can do things within the browser itself instead of in it's own external annoying window that gets in the way.
Except doing them with web standards is faster and cheaper, and it's easier to deploy.
What web standards? It's an Opera API... Anyway, if you want a so called "web standard" Java has been known all over the web for a lot longer. Java apps will work in pretty much any browser, while Opera widgets will only work in, you guessed it, Opera. Plus Java isn't even limited to the browser and can be 100% external. It's also quite easy to program for as even I could do simple applications after only a couple of weeks or so of a low level OO class that focused on Java. Some very useful and popular applications use Java, such as the well known BitTorrent client, Azureus. Name one well known popular widget.
Or take a long time. Or aren't a priority for some reason. Sometimes, long awaited features arrive only after some major rewrite since they relied on some kind of functionality which wasn't present yet.
Yes, this is true and I don't disagree. The flaw in this explanation is the fact that extentions have been a request for several major revisions. By now they could have worked in whatever might have been needed had they wanted.
Huh? What about the suggestions about better web dev tolls?
What's a dev toll, and how does it in any way disprove that only a few suggestions from devs are likely to be any more useful than "support x standard in W3C document y" (which my point is that they'll get around to eventually anyway, so the main thing that would do is prioritize.)
That's why I'm saying that it's a misuse of the moderation system to just simply rate down without a word. Not everybody knows that. In fact, I was upset that Halo wasn't released for PC at the same time and that Halo 2 STILL isn't released for PC, but then I didn't know Bungee had anything to do with MS (after all, I had heard MS was paying people to release exclusively for XBox and figured Bungee was just one of those who got paid.)
Ok, so they had no choice in that, that I can accept. I still say they were shooting themselves in the foot, but their hand was guided by someone else then. Does that make the point invalid that most of us will never have the option of playing Eternal Darkness and that its sequals will probably be Nintendo only as well (so those of us who don't want or can't get a Wii won't have the option of an ED sequal either.) Besides, I don't know about you, but, I find that it kind of ruins things for me to just jump in the middle of a series instead of starting from the beginning.
I don't know, I use Opera 99.9% of the time and only fall back to Firefox in extreme emergencies, but, I must say that I'm not entirely certain they really listen all that well to suggestions and such. For example, people have been calling for extentions (let's not get into an argument here, whether you think it's good or bad, the fact is, a huge number of people want extentions so they should at least make it more clear why they haven't made any efforts they've shown to us in this direction) for years and there isn't even an official response as far as I know. Then they do these "widgets" that are just pointless (hey, I tried. I downloaded several things that should be useful and tried to get the hang of using them, but, in the end they just get in the way and have no real use. I searched every widget on their site and didn't find one that I didn't end up finding to be in the way once the neatness factor wore off. Anything a widget can do, you can do better with an actual program in Java or some other easily portable language.) If you look at their forums you can find some long running feature request threads that a lot of people have "+1"ed that just never happen. (Not to mention that more than a few of those are probably requests for extentions. It gets posted a lot.)
We can hope though I guess. All browsers have a lot of room for improvement (though I personally feel Opera mainly just needs extentions and to remove the extra pointless overhead that widget support has added) and if they actually stop and listen maybe we could get a browser that's truly as close to perfect as any peice of software can be? (Ok, that's going too far I guess, but wouldn't it be nice?)
Personally, I think it's a publicity stunt though. Get the web designers to look at Opera and get it mentioned enough that more users hear about it. To make suggestions on improvements, web designers would have to actually get it and try it (actually, I like the sound of that since a lot of them would have no choice but to admit that it's a good browser and maybe should get the occasional support instead of an "only IE and Firefox supported" page.) The truth is though, it seems to me that most of the suggestions are basically going to be things that should be ignored, such as a designer asking that they support a proprietary extention that works only in IE (I still don't know why they do that sort of thing since it's actually more work in the long run.) The fact is, unlike the big two (IE and Mozilla/Firefox) Opera is among the very few that correctly implements enough of the actual standards to pass the ACID2 test, so it seems to me like there isn't going to be a lot of requests that they support this or that standard.
So what's left from a designer's perspective besides asking them to fully support whatever little bit of the standards they don't already? Most changes need to come from the customer's perspective I think. Extentions, a better download manager, etc. It's easy to think of suggestions a user can make. Actually, what worries me is that generally what it comes down to is a developer wants as much control over your browser as they can. For example, one might want the ability to change the skin and menu layout of your browser specifically for their site. That's great for the developer, but, the end user would go bonkers in a hurry. Besides asking for proprietary extentions and more control over the user's screen, there's really so little that a developer can do that I can only conclude this is really ultimately just meant to get people's attention (hey, they got it on slashdot even, that's a good start, though the problem is that most slashdot users are intelligent enough to know about browser alternatives and most here who don't use Opera are just using it because for whatever reason they don't like it.)
Anyway, I'm not saying boycott Opera or something, just I'm wondering if this is just a publicity stunt or if they really do have a point for
How many of us have even played it? Frankly, they shot themselves in the foot (with a rather large gun) when they chose to make it 100% exclusively Nintendo. Then, while they were at it, they shot themselves in the other foot by choosing quite possibly the least popular Nintendo system ever, the Gamecube (N64 sucked, but, a lot of people bought them just because it was Nintendo and prior to that it felt like they could do no wrong, so they should have stuck with their original plans there.) Anyone want to bet that they'll make Eternal Darkness 2 (or whatever it will be called) for the Nintendo Pee (oh wait, Wii just SOUNDS like it means pee, sorry.) The jury is still out on what will happen there, but, the fact is, every time a company chooses exclusivity, they are pulling out a gun and shooting themselves in a foot. Seriously, how many people really have every system? Sure there are a few, but, most of us just get whichever one has the most games we like and don't buy every single console ever made.)
Oh, and before anyone decides I'm a Nintendo hater, I've personally owned a NES and a SNES (crap, I still play SNES games every now and then,) played a friend's N64 fairly often (though there wasn't much worth playing, so I tended to play my own PSX a heck of a lot more.) I also think that the GBA actually has its merits (like a mini SNES, but, more importantly, it has some decent games a few of which I have enjoyed.) It's not from lack of experience that I judge. I saw firsthand that the N64 and its games basically consisted 100% of "oh lookie at the shiny ultra-low polygon 3D graphics version of a game you used to play in 2D and please be distracted by the 64-bit graphics long enough to not notice that the 2D version of the game was 10x better than the 3D-ized version. From what I've heard Gamecube wasn't much better (but then I never cared enough to get one since it has basically nothing I want. Yeah, I bought a PS2 instead.)
If they decide to remake Eternal Darkness (and its possible sequals) for PC, we'll talk. Until then, I'll never even SEE the game. Now I have seen a lot of old games get remade for PC (Fable TLC anyone?) but it is true that usually it's just the XBox games since they are so easy to convert to PC and rather a few PSX games (many of which I would swear are just using a built-in emulation) which is usually just because they are so popular (or at least the company making them thinks they will be.) I think I recall having heard of some N64 game a while back, but, certainly you don't see many at all, and I don't think I can recall having heard of one GC game ported to PC. I don't care how good Eternal Darkness and its sequals may have been if I never get to play any of them...
Sorry if any of these are already done (hey, look at the number of pages, give me a break.) d-: I'm not really going to illustrate with a long story, just say what I remember.
First, my favorite of all time was probably the one I heard about someone who called a tech support because their CD-ROM drive had become jammed and broken. The tech support guy scheduled a time to go and fix or replace the drive and went to the person's house ready for a simple job. What he discovered when he arrived and actually saw the computer was that the person had decided to emulate the desktop style systems by placing their tower case horizontally. At the time, not all CD-ROMs were designed to be able to operate like this, and theirs just happened to be one of those without the extra little catches to hold a CD in vertically. The user's solution? Press the close button to get the case to begin to close, then throw the CD as quickly as they could at it in the hopes that it would catch just right. It turned out that job was harder than he thought due to having to clean up little bits of broken CDs (and, I suspect, it would involve a hassle since it seems unlikely the service covered such a thing.)
Another I had heard once a long time ago was of a user complaining that they couldn't see their screen. The tech support guy ran through the usual stuff. Check that the power cables are correctly plugged in, that the monitor's plug is in the video card, try pressing the power button again just to be sure, etc. The user sort of gave them the runaround on answers to these and generally just came back to saying that they couldn't really see where the plugs go, where the power button was, etc. Well, after the long runthrough of steps, the tech support guy finally managed to get a straight response from the user. It turned out that the problem all along had been that they had not turned on the light in the room and couldn't see to plug in, much less turn on the computer. (Yes, this is actually what I heard, though I can't tell you if it's true or not since I have no direct experience.)
I have also heard once that between the cleaning disks (which basically consisted of a cloth with just a dab of alcohol added inside a disc instead of the normal metallic or whatever cylinder) and that joke program which said it washed your drive and proceeded to make sound effects through the PC speaker that could be imagined to resemble that of a washer, some rather intelligent person got it into their head to clean one the cheapest easiest possible way rather than spending money on the cleaning disks or what they assumed to be commercial software. Soapy water on a q-tip. Whether this is true or not, the story goes that basically by the end of it there wasn't a single component inside that computer that did not get ruined.
I don't know how funny it is, but, I can even tell one from direct experience where I called up my ISP's tech support to ask why my bandwidth had basically gone down the toilet. The tech guy clearly caught on to the fact that I knew what I was talking about and just had me do a few of those routine from the book steps like running bandwidth tests from multiple locations instead of just one. He didn't bother so much with the stupid little things that only someone completely new to computers wouldn't know (and this is the first time where someone didn't treat me like an idiot where I actually almost wished they had.) We verify that the phone line is ok and such, but, he notices a little something off, so he tells me that it looks like there must be a slight problem in the line somewhere and they'll probably have to send a tech out to fix it. To this end, he asks me to carry a phone and hook it into each line in the house to see if I can determine exactly where it goes wrong. Well, I start to do this and everything seems normal, until I get to one of the bedrooms where I discover that, behind the bed where I couldn't see it, someone had removed the DSL filter and simply plugged the phone directly into the p
Well, my point was that with all the paranoids out there, surely someone would have noticed if it were phoning home.
Of course, there's always the possibility of basically having WGA integrated into an SP3, not to mention that they already require it (or, from what I have read a javascript trick) for updates. I'm not sure if there are truly any updates that are so vital it makes much of a difference though. To those who use a decent quality firewall (instead of the built-in thing,) the updates really don't make much difference. About the only big thing I can think of is IE7, and the obvious answer to that is Firefox and Opera, both of which are better in several ways (including the fact that Opera actually renders things the way they are supposed to when you follow standards, or has IE7's betas passed the ACID2 test yet?) For the rumors to be even CLOSE to true (even via a stretch of the imagination) it will have to make windows xp "unusable" far ahead of the time it would take for it to slowly become outdated enough like previous versions of windows have (heck, today Windows 98 SE is still quite usable with drivers still being updated for most hardware and most software supporting it -- just look at how many people made such a big stink over Firefox going NT only in the CVS or whatever.) They want XP to "die" later this year without WGA, so either they are planning something big that they believe will take over (and MS does tend to get obsessive and decide that whatever new thing they have will take the world by storm when in fact it's basically nothing new most of the time) or they have something set up to do this if the rumor were true. Something set up to phone home would almost surely be caught by now by a paranoid (I might add that you don't need a packet sniffer, just netstat on a firewall or something simpler like that, though on the host perhaps they would hide it) so surely that proves the rumor is just a rumor? The only other thing I can think of besides phoning home is for home to phone you -- which means they can probably only catch people using the SP2 firewall, and, more importantly, they have left a gaping back door for anyone to use. But surely they aren't stupid enough to do that when they already have to deal with so many in the market saying that windows is an insecure os and linux is safer? Even MS would realize that the linux distros would instantly capitalize on the opening and if MS looses their stranglehold on the market for even a second it could be fatal...
This worried me as I've seen enough problems with WGA myself to know that it could be a serious problem if they did a mass shutdown.
However, one thought has been on my mind since I first read this and I have yet to see it properly addressed (perhaps a comment I missed down the many pages of comments to all the articles on the subject?) How would Microsoft possibly proceed to implement this mass-shutdown? They must first determine which systems do not have WGA, and then they must issue some sort of shutdown command. How is this possible? The only conclusion I've been able to reach to support the rumors is that Microsoft would have had to have left a backdoor. To bypass firewalls it must first check out instead of them checking in, but, once the outward connection is made, it would have to be able to execute a list of commands or a given program provided by the outward connection. On the surface, it may sound harmless because such a thing would be hardcoded to connect outward to one location (which would be on Microsoft of course) but, if you look a little deeper you realize that if some virus/trojan designer were to simply override this program, they instantly have absolute access to your system. Not to mention that if such a thing were true MS themselves would have absolute access as well without any virus or trojan (and, quite frankly, I do not trust such a big company where the left had has no idea what the right hand is doing to have perfect procedures in place to ensure that such a thing absolutely could not be abused.)
This, of course, seems highly unlikely though, right? Surely someone would have noted it making it's routine checks for further instructions by now if it were. I would say someone would have designed a trojan or virus by now, but, the truth is that most of the time Windows is so bloated and hard even to program for what is in the SDKs that it typically ends up being after an announcement of a known problem that someone designs a virus to exploit something. They can't have a check in though because it would require a backdoor that is opened and would not be bypassed by simply installing a real firewall. Perhaps I am missing something? Is there any other way it could actually occur? The only thing I can think of that wouldn't require something of a back door is if they had it built in with SP2 or something which would just mean that a virus designer would be limited to only being able to make windows stop booting without actually taking control (I say stop booting because they could rig it so that it not only deactivates but thinks that the 30 days have expired so refuses to work at all.) Considering how much trouble this would cause world-wide and how quickly MS would be denounced for leaving such a gaping security hole with all that big brother mentality, I think surely this must mean those rumors are nothing more than mere rumors?
Well, in agreement with parts of the article, I have to second that some are a waste. I used to use Prime95. I even thought once I had a prime, though apprently not (I can only assume some hardware error creeped in there and it failed verification.) It always bugged me that I was decreasing the overall lifetime of my CPU just to find large prime numbers though. I suppose there may be some application for it out there, but, overall, it's just not worth much to the world when they find a new number. Eventually I decided that I'd rather my CPU would last me as long as possible. I decided a while back that with this Athlon 64 running so cool while overclocked, it would make a great server. You'd be surprised what use you can put a computer to even five or so years later. Don't underestimate the potential uses of an old system. I have an old SMP 500 MHz Pentium 3 system which is now my server. Before I dedicated it to use as a server (firewall, web server, lan file sharing, lan diagnostics, etc,) I made it easily portable, hooked up a PSX->USB gamepad converter and played a huge number of old games I missed from back when I had a Genesis, a SNES, and etc via emulation. Thanks to GeeXboX, it can even be a media player for me with about the only thing it can't do being HD H264 (then again, many modern systems can choke up on a full quality H264 video...) Heck, I even found out that an old 266MHz Pentium 2 could play most of my DivX/XviD videos even in 640x480 with the exception of one really high bitrate one where it would occasionally have to play catchup when the video did a white fade out + back in effect.
Now some projects like Folding I can agree with. And it's a good use of one's idle cycles, but, for the reason I mentioned above, I've decided I want my processor to last really long term. As in more than four years. The system I'm now using for so much dates probably to around 1999 and has been in use the whole time. Had it been folding, searching for signals, etc keeping the CPUs at 100% utilization 24/7 (excluding storms) it probably wouldn't be alive today acting in such a useful way.
Then again, for those who don't want their CPU(s) to last for an insanely long time, projects like Folding actually are very nice and might actually potentially benefit mankind some day (and before you think that future computers will do much of what takes ours years in a snap, bear in mind that the idea is to at least get a head start and have possible uses more quickly possibly saving more lives.) I might add that I don't agree with the claim that there is no value to SETI@Home. Finding alien life out there WOULD change things (well, assuming it didn't take several lifetimes to actually get a signal to/from them, which is, unfortunately, quite a possibility.)
The object of DSL wasn't to be so tiny you are amazed. The object was for it to fit on a business card CDR due to their small size and convenience. Well, business card CDRs are rare if at all made anymore. On the other hand, a mini-CDR still exists and is quite common (you can walk in Walmart and come out with some. Heck, I still have a bunch of mini-CDRW discs lying around for their handy nature.) These 8 cm radius discs can hold 210 MiB, possibly a bit more since, unlike with the DVD standard, back when they made the CD-R standard they actually didn't feel a need to try to cheat and trick the customer. If you think about it, since the smallest flash drive you can buy in a modern store is 128 MB (even if that may only be around 110 MiB or so,) you can't even find the old mini-CDRs that only held 185 MiB anymore, and finally business card discs are rare if at all existant anymore (and nearly no more convenient than a mini-CDR really) it just seems a little silly to be limited to 50 MiB for the sake of discs that if you actually had, you would not want to waste on that.
What's important is the philosophy. The idea of distros like these is to pack as many useful tools as possible into as little space as possible while maintaining minimalism. They remove a lot of the unnecessary stuff and get quite a surprising amount packed into it.
Personally, I carry a flash drive around which will boot on any system supporting USB-ZIP (read the readme.USBKEY file in the syslinux archive for how to do this and why you have to -- but, simply put, very few even modern BIOSes support USB-HDD even today.) Ok, it's a 512 MB model, but, I have to squeeze things in there because I have to store a lot of data, a copy of my browser for those systems that force you to use an old version of Firefox (IE is dead to me) and so on. I LOVE having a handy little live linux distro that can boot off of it and be used to repair/diagnose a lot of problems among other things. I can't afford to have some huge 1 GB large image of Ubuntu or something though on my little flash drive, so that's where a linux distro following this philosophy comes in. Honestly though, I am forced to admit I didn't really like DSL that much (remember, with linux distros it's all a matter of opinion and, as they say "to each to his own." I don't like it because it isn't good, I don't like it because it just isn't the type I want.) Personally I used Finnix (site's a little slow these past few days or so) which has much more up to date packages. It's one of the many live distros that follow the same sort of philosophy DSL follows. Squeeze handy stuff in there, remove unneeded clutter. It's my hope that we see even MORE distros like this in the future, not less.
Sorry if someone already posted this, but, it has turned into 5 pages of people war mongering about how much they hate/love homosexuals.
Your "17 minutes" might actually be 16.1 minutes. This is because they get less money if they don't do that. (Plain and simple, that's all it is.) They always round anything they can up. In other words, to ensure overlap, you will have to find an occasion in which even accounting for rounding up (and they always round up, not down) on both ends, the times do still overlap. I know this for a fact from personal experience because I don't use the cell phone much and most of my calls consist of "ok, I'm in front of the store. What was the name of the color paint you wanted? Ok, got it. Bye." Actual call time: in the area of 15 seconds. Call time on bill: 1 minute.
So, your bill MIGHT be more accurately represented as, say (just an example): 2/22 at 3:28.0 pm "NBR unavailable" 16.1 mins usage, round up to 17 on final bill. 2/22 at 3:44.9 pm "123-4567" 2.1 mins usage, round up to 3 on final bill.
In fact, it looks like it could possibly be that NBR unavailable might have even cut out just as you picked up the phone. My first thought would be that maybe it's related to those thoughts of a P2P network on mobiles. If someone could contact your phone and use it while it is idle, then they would possibly be cut off the moment you hit the send button. This is just a thought though. I don't actually have any idea what is actually causing it, and it may be that those two even do overlap, we just can't tell from that is all.
Whatever this is, it is strange though, and I hope you do figure it out.
I think it's interface is unintuitive. How so? It has the same interface that Firefox and IE both have basically... Perhaps you just don't like the default settings?
It's ugly. You mean you don't like the default skin? Well, so get another. Like Firefox/Mozilla, the main site has a ton of user resources (look in the "Community" section.) I highly recommend the "Breeze Simplified Micro" which has a very nice minimalistic look.
It's focused on tabbed browsing, which I do not like. Then turn it off. Here's how turn it off in version 9 with four clicks: Click Tools (Menu) Click Preferences Click checkbox next to "Open windows instead of tabs" Click ok.
Most of us want tabbed browsing because it's a wonderful way to clean up the clutter and speed up multitasking. Many are still upset that you have to use a myriad of plugins to get Firefox to handle tabs the way it should (such as by not popping up new windows for things when you want tabs.)
It is not well integrated with Mac OS X. Ok, I'm a linux/windows user, so I can't comment much on this. What do you mean "integrated" though? Normally by integrated one would think of things like IE where they are built into the OS, but, this surely isn't what you want because it's unreasonable to expect that from a browser. In fact, I have been upset since IE 5 when they first started integrating the browser into the OS. IMO a web browser should never be used for things like the desktop and file manager. I used to use things like 98 Lite to remove it even. Unfortunately, with XP removing IE can cause serious problems (it can be done, it just causes problems with some stupidly built things that require fully functional components from it.)
Experiment around a little more. You may find that when you change certain settings around or give certain things a chance, Opera isn't so bad. In fact, I hated tabbed browsing when I first used Opera some maybe 5 years ago and turned it off, but, a while later I gave it a chance and today I find it to be the most useful thing any program that can involve clutter could possibly do. It cleans things up so nicely. Still, I suppose we have hit on perhaps the real point of the matter. Perhaps the problem isn't that it used to be commercial, nor that it lacks extentions, nor even stuff like tabbed browsing or the interface, but, perhaps what the problem is is that the defaults do not encourage a smooth transition from other browsers. Unfortunately, I have commented on this in the forums and no one cares, so it may continue to hold them back since your average user who just wants to try it out and see will find it so different that they may not give it a proper chance. I would recommend that anyone who can should give it a try for a while, play with the settings, and see if they can't learn to enjoy the advantages it has over Firefox though. There's a reason why even though Firefox is opensource and free and comes with most distros, while IE is integrated (and thus on nearly every windows user's box,) yet Opera is still used by so many people in the desktop world. It may not be the highest market share by far, but, the point is that it is far less negligable than, say something like links, and users aren't choosing it just because they are so happy with the mobile version of Opera (which you likely wouldn't even recognize compared to the desktop version.)
Actually, the biggest limit when it comes to anything wireless is frequencies. There is a very limited range of frequencies that can be used for things, and the FCC highly regulates nearly all of them. In the end, a wireless cellphone network barely has enough to ensure overlap (no dropped signals) and satellite companies can't just broadcast everything they'd like to. I had to do a project a while back about one such problem a cell phone company had to deal with where they were having issues with too much load on one tower but couldn't just drop in another tower to solve the issue due to having only a limited number of frequencies they could use. The end result was they had to put a receiver on a building with limited range so it wouldn't overlap as much and almost just cover the problem area. The solution to the problem isn't always so simple though.
There are a few unregulated things like 800MHz, 2.4GHz, and so on, but, these unregulated things are, so far as I know, without exception very limited in what they can do. (For example, 2.4GHz is absorbed by water -- including the moisture in the air -- and thus about the most you can get with even line of sight high powered directional antennas was something like a mile.) Even should you find one that can go as far as you want it, you'll find so much interferance that it's basically worthless (darn, even those limited ones like 2.4 seem to pick up enough interferance that many such as myself have nothing but problems getting a usable signal on wireless networking.) Actually, frequency regulation is a necessity, but, my point is that the whole thing is limited and they will be limited by frequencies long before they are limited by how many sattelites or towers they can put up.
Get it in tar.gz, or, better yet, tar.bz2 (tar.gz needs to be depreciated for that -- actually, it's about time people started using something better like 7-Zip as the standard already...)
Opera 9 is no longer in beta status btw. That link takes you to the final. You should be able to get the beta on that ftp as well, but, I see no reason why you would want to since the final has solved some of the problems in the beta (in fact, I know of no problems so far in the final, though I guess there must be one or two since no one can release a peice of software without bugs sneaking in.)
They made a mistake on the download page, but, so what? Your typical user doesn't want it in tar.gz/tar.bz2 format. They LIKE having a nice simple little package that installs with minimal effort on their part getting things set up. Even many of the more advanced users who are able to set the thing up the hard way themselves often enjoy the convenience of a nice proper DEB package, or even a RPM (ok, I know people don't like RPMs, but, there's a reason they still use them today.)
You know, this isn't exactly 100% related to the article, but, one thing I've been wondering about since I first heard about this is, what's to stop the companies from deciding they don't like, oh, say their competitors or someone who hasn't paid his extortion fees (and don't kid yourself, by every definition I can find -- except the one that relies on the word "illegal" -- this is extortion plain and simple) on schedule and setting latencies to that site so incredibly high that it causes anyone trying to visit to get a timeout? Essentially cutting that site off of the web as far as anyone is concerned. Even if they can't get away with setting it that high, imagine if some big online game company accidentally bounces a check or something. If they add any latency to those lines at all, the game company goes right down the pot. Online games just don't work once heavy latencies start. Who would pay to play, say World of Warcraft, when latency can never go under 1s (and I might add that they are kind of shooting themselves in their own foot with that background downloader saturating people's connections and causing latency to shoot up to 1+s while the average joe doesn't know what's causing it or how to disable the thing.)
I'm really worried that we may be looking at a heck of a lot worse than making the competition's websites act really slow. I'm afraid they may have the ability to cripple online games the moment they have a disagreement with the game company (essentially pay up or I'll break both your legs type of thing) and cut competition completely off the web as far as their customers are concerned -- not just make the sites slower. This really scares me because it puts the Internet largely in control of the ISPs and if they get too greedy, they can essentially make the Internet a useless thing for US citizens -- essentially killing the Internet as far as we would be concerned.
Perhaps I am reading too much into this? Maybe all the law is talking about is allowing them to use those little squid-type caching services simply to speed up sites rather than applying latency to slow sites down? I can understand the idea of charging for maintenance of the servers that would be necessary to implement such a large scale caching system (though it should be the customers who want the benefits of the caching who pay, not companies who are afraid that their sped up competition will get ahead while customers get tired of waiting for their site to load.) Please someone tell me it's just the caching one?
By the way, just a little FYI on a kind of similar matter. The Playstation experiment (PSX) was originally designed to be a 32-bit CD-ROM system (I think an addon like SEGA CD for the SNES) for Nintendo. Same for Colecovision or whatever it was called if I remember correctly. But, my point is, Nintendo messed up with their own bad decision-making and now is dangerously close to a precipice near SEGA's. They've held on a little better and aren't at their fingertips (let's see if Wii does even half of what they claim, else they may be down to the fingers if it fails) but, thanks to their own similar bad decision-making, Sony is now a HUGE dominator in the market they practically owned.
Moral of the story? If you're in a big competitive environment, for your own sake, use your head and think carefully before commiting huge resources on such things!
You know, I think I recall having read an article a while back about the histories of various consoles, and one of the things I recall having read was that the guy in charge of SEGA of America intentionally chose to not bring many RPGs in to America because he thought they wouldn't sell well. I don't remember if this was around the time of the Dreamcast or the Genesis/Megadrive, but, in either case, RPGs were selling like hotcakes on SNES or Playstation. I believe the culprit was Dreamcast though because I seem to recall only two or three RPGs (one of which I never found a legal copy of -- frankly, it strikes me that a huge part of their problem with people downloading the games might have been just due to the fact that they simply wouldn't sell them to begin with...)
Don't misunderstand me. I still agree that one of their biggest downfalls has been the inability to work properly together. I just disagree that we can blame any one side.
Truth is though, SEGA just plain had issues. Like their hardware choices. The Saturn had a weird SMP system that was almost impossible to program for -- only a tiny fraction of the games made for it were able to fully utilize the SMP setup. I still wonder if Genesis couldn't have competed better with SNES's sound-system, though I'm not sure considering that the Gensis's synthesis did at least beat out the PC-Engine's. (IMO they should have both been watching the way sound systems were working. The PC industry should have already shown them how people were interested in things like MOD files, and the SNES's use of a system that kind of vaguely worked like a GUS makes me think that SOMEONE was paying attention. Remember, consoles were supposed to stay ahead of the PC industry in things like that back then.) Not to mention their determination to go with a graphical acceleration method on the Saturn that very few thought would catch on (and which did not catch on -- frankly _I_ could have told them it would continue in the direction it was already on.) Of course, they managed to get all the hardware more or less right on one system, the Dreamcast (relatively easy to program for, good graphics acceleration, good sound system, and so on,) but, then they made the decision to panic and pull out before properly giving it time to start between the people with downloads (come on, a modded PSX was EASIER to copy and download stuff for, yet PSX hasn't quite stopped production even today) and just because the PS2 was overall better at a few things like raw polygon power (yes, the PS2 could look better as things like Xenosaga showed us, but, Soul Calibur showed us that people were underestimating the Dreamcast.)
If they had better marketing, better support for game designers (geez, did they even ONCE approach Square for example? Or, better yet, they should have tried Enix...) and most importantly, better decision making in all fields from hardware to company direction, SEGA might be where Microsoft now is. Instead they are hanging by the tips of their fingers over a their final demise.
I know for a fact that there are over 26 elements preceding the alleged first element "Hydrogen"
You know this do you? Might I ask how you know this? Hydrogen is the first element because it has one proton in it's nucleus (I say one proton, because that's the only thing for certain thanks to ions,) not because of some kind of political "we like hydrogen better than firstium" style of thing. The way the periodic table works is each element in the table has a certain number of protons in their nucleus and they are ordered by this. Therefore, to be less than hydrogen, you must have zero protons in the nucleus. Therefore, to be less than hydrogen, it must be just an electron or a neutron floating around somewhere, not an actual atom at all and therefore not an "element."
I don't really understand why you even said this though. No one ever said anything about needing elements before hydrogen for it to work or something.
Oh, and leave string theory out of this. It's clear you don't even know what it is. It's not a political movement or something, to put it really simply, it has to do with quantum particles and the theory that it may be possible for some to be essentially connected to each other so that one will respond to the other. No murders have occured over this theory and it's quite silly to even think it possible. There's nothing in it to murder for.
I would suggest that everyone else take this person's statements with a grain of salt. It can't hurt to read up on the Joe Cell if you want, but, simply put, if it were so simple as that, don't you think people would be capitalizing on this? Even if you are scared of "the Illuminati" coming after you, the potential profits are enough to hire a host of bodyguards.
So basically this article just tells you how to hold the main piece into something (bandaid) that makes it look simple...
Read my website to find out how to do it using some scotch tape instead! (This was just a joke, I have no such site.)
Seriously though. There must be something I'm missing here, right? I mean, is there supposed to maybe be some kind of interaction between the methanol and the antibacterials placed on some band-aids or something? Surely no one is dumb enough that they'd come up with this whole article touting the use of a bandaid as being somehow simpler than anything else that holds it all together?
I think it will be particularly interesting to see how this affects Opera, whose revenue primarily comes from distribution of its own virtually ubiquitous embedded browser.
Thing is, the average consumer (talking about the more average joe majority type rather than the techno savvy slashdotter) doesn't know one browser from another. ESPECIALLY when it comes to their mobile devices. Should something cause them to begin to actually learn what differentiates one browser from another, they will likely hear it with something like that statement above. Specifically directly mentioning that Opera is more or less the industry leader in the mobile browsers. In other words, they might actually learn that Opera exists. As they say, no publicity is bad publicity.
Right now the biggest hurdle Opera has is a lack of users who even know that it's as good as the other browsers if not better (officially I'm talking about the mobiles there where none of the other browsers are nearly so well developed, but, unofficially I really feel the same way about the desktop version.) The average joe, who makes up the majority, just knows that it can connect to "that interweb thingy," show them their e-mail, send a few text messages the likes of which would make an english professor break down and cry (like the infamous "where u at,") and maybe even play the occasional pointless Java or Flash based game. If they start hearing about how "this new Nokia browser has all these free plugins unlike that Opera browser that almost all the others use" then they've just picked up two facts -- one, it took this long for another browser to compete well enough for them to hear about it, and two, this Opera thingy was so popular up until now that it's on most of the phones.
That's just my opinion anyway. Only time will tell as they say.
I think people are missing the point. Yes, it's a democratic republic. The point is, because it is a republic, some of the best advantages of democracy are lost. On the other hand, some of the worst disadvantages of a democracy are lost.
Anyway, since "the people" don't actually have any kind of direct control over many things -- such as who gets elected (indirect only, sorry) -- it allows certain things, such as the DMCA, to get through which normally would not be allowed. PS. As a little aside note still kind of demonstrating the point, Nixon lost the popular vote but won the elctoral college vote. If it were a true democracy, Watergate might not have happened.
I don't know. I kind of wonder if it might not be better to risk letting minorities be stifled. The main thing was that back in the old days when the government was formed, a republic was basically required for just about anything that even wanted to pretend at representing the people. After all, how the heck do you count, let's say a million votes (talking about the early days) for the president? For that matter, how do you go around the country finding out who to even pick for president when you have to poll millions of people? It would take years in the old days when they had to travel through the wilds on horseback. Maybe decades. And just imagine if someone complained that the dots weren't clear and demanded a recount of a vote? However, I wonder if in this modern day with nice simple computer systems this should maybe all be reconsidered. It's quite easy to use a computer system to do things like counting votes if people will do it right (unfortunately, the complete and absolute lack of any kind of quality control whatsoever in our government right now does mean it is not done right currently of course.) No need for horseback, just use the internet and actual security measures (instead of the easily hackable crap they have currently.) Even those people who don't have a PC or an internet connection just have to get to a local library to get internet access. And no need for a bubble exactly halfway between "Democratic" and "Republican," but, instead, the computer system can actually use radio buttons and even fill in the NAMES of the candidates...
To me, it just rankles with me that there are things like the way we get no real say on laws such as the DMCA (all we can do is try to contact our local representatives who will not personally see our letter and hope that the representative will support our wishes if (s)he decides there are enough people wanting that particular thing to support voting for them again -- assuming they even want to run again) and the way things like the electoral college insure that instead of "the people" it's "California and the other more populated states." With a lot of things like that, you truly see why people talk about the US as a republic and not as a democracy.
What I'm saying is VNC is better at remote stuff. A, you only need a VNC client which has several major binaries (including windows, which is what I need) and a Java version (for emergencies,) and B, you get control over compression level, control of the level of JPEG compression, etc. And the X11 client on windows just wouldn't be fun. Oh, and I've tried the kinds that do the HTTP sessions. Didn't like the way that worked.
Your solution is better for a LAN only configuration. The other way I'm using is just the best you can do with remote, which isn't saying much -- especially when the server is behind an ADSL modem, but, which is all you can really do to get it as close to running smoothly as possible. Besides, it's really just a single user system and I don't really need, nor want, to manage multiple sessions but want just a single session (all the stuff I do where a second session would help, I need only a console to do and a GUI would just slow me down.)
Nothing personal, just this is what works best for situations like mine.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually started the process to switch about two weeks ago. I weighed the advantages and disadvantages and decided that the trouble of making the swich was worth it in the long run. I'm making good progress and my speed and accuracy are almost caught up with before. There's only one thing I worry about, and that's the trouble that can be involved in switching back and forth on other systems or on things like rescue discs (where it's not really feasible to rebuild the images every time just for that one change.) On other systems I'm most worried, because in some rare cases they are pretty locked down for security reasons, so I can't run files from my flash drive to make the switch or when I'm working on someone else's system (I do a lot of problem fixing for people.)
What I really want -- instead of always relying on some software solution -- is just some dirt cheap Dvorak hardwired keyboard (preferably USB) that I can simply plug in and it work in everything (it would take some interesting work to get Dvorak in syslinux or other boot loaders for example, so such a thing has the added advantage of letting you more easily deal with these sorts of things.) Basically all I want is something like those $12 QWERTY keyboards you can find at a Walmart, only hardwired for Dvorak instead (I know that those ubercheap keyboards will give you a massive case of carpel tunnel type pains if you use them more than a few hours, but we're talking about something that would only be used for less than an hour at a time since I can just use my nice normal keyboard on my personal computer with all the software solutions.)
I realize that it would cost more than the $12 Walmart boards, but right now I have been unable to find a hardwired Dvorak keyboard for less than $60, which is a pricerange that is just out of the question for such a thing. I've checked everywhere ranging from the higher quality electronics sites to places like eBay and even more questionable websites, but the most affordable Dvorak keyboard I ever found was just an ordinary cheap QWERTY keyboard with the keys moved so it still required a software solution (and even that was at a ridiculous price for what it was.) Sometimes I just wish I had the ability to create my own circuit sheets to rewire a keyboard to Dvorak in hardware myself, but while it may be theoretically possible for some to do it with stuff they may even have at home, it's just way too much for me.
I can't believe that companies are selling these things for $100+ when just taking the same crappy parts that make up a $12 keyboard, tossing in different circuits (they don't even have to change the chip it uses!) and putting the keys in different places would allow them to market to a LOT of people making the switch (I know that when I first thought about Dvorak a long time ago I assumed I would need a new keyboard and would have bought one if it were reasonably priced) as well as some who already have (not to mention that they could get away with slapping a $20 pricetag on it and make even more per keyboard within reason to offset the difference in the smaller volume.) Not many people are willing to spend so much for a keyboard...
I was wondering if anyone here might actually know of some solution like the recircuiting idea (but more reasonable) or someone selling cheap Dvorak keyboards that I haven't been able to find?
First, claiming I'm "ignoring things because my mind is made up" is just getting silly, and then later actually outright calling me an idiot is only making your position look worse. You are resorting more and more towards just a simple flame war. Let's keep this intelligent. Refrain from the insults if you wish to continue this conversation, and I'd like to point out that if you didn't want to continue the conversation, the easiest way to have ended it would have been to not have made that post at all.
Things like SMTP authentication aren't feature requests, they are feature requirements. More and more services are finally getting a reality check and realizing that authentication is needed, and thus require it rather than just making it optional or even not available at all. Any mail reader not supporting that needs to be deleted, so if Opera were unable to do it, they might just as well remove all the code for mail reading. No, my point isn't whether or not Opera gets changes at all, but, whether what users (and guess what the market is made up of, that's right, users) actually have any say whatsoever. Again, like I said before, you will even see things get added in that users requested, but, how many of them were added because people wanted them, and how many were added because the Opera team independantly decided that they made sense? It may not even be true, but, from the user (and previously customer) perspective, it looked that way.
Ok, I made a mistake on the API thing, and looked it up. Yes, widgets are using HTML code complete with Java, Javascript, and such. The point remains that everything you can do with them you can do via bookmarks or external programs and it's less intrusive.
And why do you keep saying that extentions have only had weeks? People have not been requesting them for less than a year, people have been requesting them for more than a year. Believe it or not, people used Opera back when it wasn't free with no ads and people wanted things back then too. Opera has had to live in the shadow of browsers like Firefox for quite a long while now, and one of the most notable features Firefox has had for quite some time now is extentions. I don't see why it's so hard to believe that people might have wanted extentions back then too.
And Java does not require more time and resources than a web application. Actually, it tends to get more complicated to create what is like a little program with a web application because the web standards were, ultimately, just designed to be a sort of dynamic form of text. The trouble is, anything you can do with widgets, you can do less intrusively without them. You want a calculator, toss something together something in Java if you need portability, or, heck, even just VB will do. Want a comic strip? Uhm, how about just make a bookmark on the comic page instead of trying to rig up something to link to it -- and even if you must do that, why must it be a little box sitting on the desktop (only while the browser is open, so if you need it any other time, too bad) versus say a box on a page that you designed? Why do I need some annoying box sitting on my desktop in the way when I can get to a bookmark with two clicks (add one keypress if you want it in a new tab/window of course.) For calculators, I can just do start+r (or alt+f2 in X,) calc (maybe kalc in KDE or whatever your preference,) enter. It's actually faster than digging through widgets for a calculator that often enough has a bug or two in it. It's faster, and it doesn't get in the way like the widgets do. And if, despite all this, you honestly think it's easier using web apps (which, I would like to remind you, work in only one browser, and you mentioned ease of deployment, well, the ease falls pretty short since you'll be requiring all your users to install and use a browser that a larger number of them probably have never used,) then I'd like to ask how much you have actually tried developing in Java, VB, or even things like Python and if you have developed as
Such as? I'm not saying nothing gets added, I'm saying that it really feels like they aren't so much listening to requests as just adding what they think makes sense when they think of it.
Maybe. Maybe extentions take more than a year because people have been calling for them for a very long time now, not just a matter of a few weeks.
Tens of thousands? That's actually not very much when it comes to downloads. Let's take an example of something relatively worthless: Birthday Alert on Tens of thousands of downloads, yet, if you think about it, Windows, since 98 or so, has had a built in task scheduler in which you could simply make a task to give yourself a message on the specified date. Linux has had task schedulers built in to any distro in the market for as long as I've used it. But, hey, it has tens of thousands of downloads, so it must be useful huh?
Something I'm not getting you say? I tried numerous widgets, quite a few of which should have been useful (such as a unicode paster thing) and I just found that they got in the way. Perhaps it's not that I'm missing something despite the direct experience, but, instead perhaps it is that all the many people who claim widgets are pretty much a waste of time and resources might actually not be just making thigns up randomly. On a phone, maybe widgets are useful, but, then I'm not discussing the phone browser.
Also, lots of FF extensions can be "emulated" using widgets.
Emulated? Extentions do things within the browser itself. Widgets are actually pretty much external. At least I certainly have yet to see a single widget that can do things within the browser itself instead of in it's own external annoying window that gets in the way.
What web standards? It's an Opera API... Anyway, if you want a so called "web standard" Java has been known all over the web for a lot longer. Java apps will work in pretty much any browser, while Opera widgets will only work in, you guessed it, Opera. Plus Java isn't even limited to the browser and can be 100% external. It's also quite easy to program for as even I could do simple applications after only a couple of weeks or so of a low level OO class that focused on Java. Some very useful and popular applications use Java, such as the well known BitTorrent client, Azureus. Name one well known popular widget.
Yes, this is true and I don't disagree. The flaw in this explanation is the fact that extentions have been a request for several major revisions. By now they could have worked in whatever might have been needed had they wanted.
What's a dev toll, and how does it in any way disprove that only a few suggestions from devs are likely to be any more useful than "support x standard in W3C document y" (which my point is that they'll get around to eventually anyway, so the main thing that would do is prioritize.)
That's why I'm saying that it's a misuse of the moderation system to just simply rate down without a word. Not everybody knows that. In fact, I was upset that Halo wasn't released for PC at the same time and that Halo 2 STILL isn't released for PC, but then I didn't know Bungee had anything to do with MS (after all, I had heard MS was paying people to release exclusively for XBox and figured Bungee was just one of those who got paid.)
Ok, so they had no choice in that, that I can accept. I still say they were shooting themselves in the foot, but their hand was guided by someone else then. Does that make the point invalid that most of us will never have the option of playing Eternal Darkness and that its sequals will probably be Nintendo only as well (so those of us who don't want or can't get a Wii won't have the option of an ED sequal either.) Besides, I don't know about you, but, I find that it kind of ruins things for me to just jump in the middle of a series instead of starting from the beginning.
I don't know, I use Opera 99.9% of the time and only fall back to Firefox in extreme emergencies, but, I must say that I'm not entirely certain they really listen all that well to suggestions and such. For example, people have been calling for extentions (let's not get into an argument here, whether you think it's good or bad, the fact is, a huge number of people want extentions so they should at least make it more clear why they haven't made any efforts they've shown to us in this direction) for years and there isn't even an official response as far as I know. Then they do these "widgets" that are just pointless (hey, I tried. I downloaded several things that should be useful and tried to get the hang of using them, but, in the end they just get in the way and have no real use. I searched every widget on their site and didn't find one that I didn't end up finding to be in the way once the neatness factor wore off. Anything a widget can do, you can do better with an actual program in Java or some other easily portable language.) If you look at their forums you can find some long running feature request threads that a lot of people have "+1"ed that just never happen. (Not to mention that more than a few of those are probably requests for extentions. It gets posted a lot.)
We can hope though I guess. All browsers have a lot of room for improvement (though I personally feel Opera mainly just needs extentions and to remove the extra pointless overhead that widget support has added) and if they actually stop and listen maybe we could get a browser that's truly as close to perfect as any peice of software can be? (Ok, that's going too far I guess, but wouldn't it be nice?)
Personally, I think it's a publicity stunt though. Get the web designers to look at Opera and get it mentioned enough that more users hear about it. To make suggestions on improvements, web designers would have to actually get it and try it (actually, I like the sound of that since a lot of them would have no choice but to admit that it's a good browser and maybe should get the occasional support instead of an "only IE and Firefox supported" page.) The truth is though, it seems to me that most of the suggestions are basically going to be things that should be ignored, such as a designer asking that they support a proprietary extention that works only in IE (I still don't know why they do that sort of thing since it's actually more work in the long run.) The fact is, unlike the big two (IE and Mozilla/Firefox) Opera is among the very few that correctly implements enough of the actual standards to pass the ACID2 test, so it seems to me like there isn't going to be a lot of requests that they support this or that standard.
So what's left from a designer's perspective besides asking them to fully support whatever little bit of the standards they don't already? Most changes need to come from the customer's perspective I think. Extentions, a better download manager, etc. It's easy to think of suggestions a user can make. Actually, what worries me is that generally what it comes down to is a developer wants as much control over your browser as they can. For example, one might want the ability to change the skin and menu layout of your browser specifically for their site. That's great for the developer, but, the end user would go bonkers in a hurry. Besides asking for proprietary extentions and more control over the user's screen, there's really so little that a developer can do that I can only conclude this is really ultimately just meant to get people's attention (hey, they got it on slashdot even, that's a good start, though the problem is that most slashdot users are intelligent enough to know about browser alternatives and most here who don't use Opera are just using it because for whatever reason they don't like it.)
Anyway, I'm not saying boycott Opera or something, just I'm wondering if this is just a publicity stunt or if they really do have a point for
Sorry about that. I accidentally closed the tag wrong. Here's the link again in case it doesn't work right: American McGee's Alice
The cool part: the "insanity" concept. Nothing new but it worked rather well.
You need to try American McGee's Alice (sorry, IBM PC & Mac only.) That game has imagination and insanity up the wazoo. (Actually, kind of literally. The whole game is a trip through a nightmarish version of wonderland is essentially some sort of exploration of Alice's psyche after she had a serious mental breakdown.)
How many of us have even played it? Frankly, they shot themselves in the foot (with a rather large gun) when they chose to make it 100% exclusively Nintendo. Then, while they were at it, they shot themselves in the other foot by choosing quite possibly the least popular Nintendo system ever, the Gamecube (N64 sucked, but, a lot of people bought them just because it was Nintendo and prior to that it felt like they could do no wrong, so they should have stuck with their original plans there.) Anyone want to bet that they'll make Eternal Darkness 2 (or whatever it will be called) for the Nintendo Pee (oh wait, Wii just SOUNDS like it means pee, sorry.) The jury is still out on what will happen there, but, the fact is, every time a company chooses exclusivity, they are pulling out a gun and shooting themselves in a foot. Seriously, how many people really have every system? Sure there are a few, but, most of us just get whichever one has the most games we like and don't buy every single console ever made.)
Oh, and before anyone decides I'm a Nintendo hater, I've personally owned a NES and a SNES (crap, I still play SNES games every now and then,) played a friend's N64 fairly often (though there wasn't much worth playing, so I tended to play my own PSX a heck of a lot more.) I also think that the GBA actually has its merits (like a mini SNES, but, more importantly, it has some decent games a few of which I have enjoyed.) It's not from lack of experience that I judge. I saw firsthand that the N64 and its games basically consisted 100% of "oh lookie at the shiny ultra-low polygon 3D graphics version of a game you used to play in 2D and please be distracted by the 64-bit graphics long enough to not notice that the 2D version of the game was 10x better than the 3D-ized version. From what I've heard Gamecube wasn't much better (but then I never cared enough to get one since it has basically nothing I want. Yeah, I bought a PS2 instead.)
If they decide to remake Eternal Darkness (and its possible sequals) for PC, we'll talk. Until then, I'll never even SEE the game. Now I have seen a lot of old games get remade for PC (Fable TLC anyone?) but it is true that usually it's just the XBox games since they are so easy to convert to PC and rather a few PSX games (many of which I would swear are just using a built-in emulation) which is usually just because they are so popular (or at least the company making them thinks they will be.) I think I recall having heard of some N64 game a while back, but, certainly you don't see many at all, and I don't think I can recall having heard of one GC game ported to PC. I don't care how good Eternal Darkness and its sequals may have been if I never get to play any of them...
Sorry if any of these are already done (hey, look at the number of pages, give me a break.) d-: I'm not really going to illustrate with a long story, just say what I remember.
First, my favorite of all time was probably the one I heard about someone who called a tech support because their CD-ROM drive had become jammed and broken. The tech support guy scheduled a time to go and fix or replace the drive and went to the person's house ready for a simple job. What he discovered when he arrived and actually saw the computer was that the person had decided to emulate the desktop style systems by placing their tower case horizontally. At the time, not all CD-ROMs were designed to be able to operate like this, and theirs just happened to be one of those without the extra little catches to hold a CD in vertically. The user's solution? Press the close button to get the case to begin to close, then throw the CD as quickly as they could at it in the hopes that it would catch just right. It turned out that job was harder than he thought due to having to clean up little bits of broken CDs (and, I suspect, it would involve a hassle since it seems unlikely the service covered such a thing.)
Another I had heard once a long time ago was of a user complaining that they couldn't see their screen. The tech support guy ran through the usual stuff. Check that the power cables are correctly plugged in, that the monitor's plug is in the video card, try pressing the power button again just to be sure, etc. The user sort of gave them the runaround on answers to these and generally just came back to saying that they couldn't really see where the plugs go, where the power button was, etc. Well, after the long runthrough of steps, the tech support guy finally managed to get a straight response from the user. It turned out that the problem all along had been that they had not turned on the light in the room and couldn't see to plug in, much less turn on the computer. (Yes, this is actually what I heard, though I can't tell you if it's true or not since I have no direct experience.)
I have also heard once that between the cleaning disks (which basically consisted of a cloth with just a dab of alcohol added inside a disc instead of the normal metallic or whatever cylinder) and that joke program which said it washed your drive and proceeded to make sound effects through the PC speaker that could be imagined to resemble that of a washer, some rather intelligent person got it into their head to clean one the cheapest easiest possible way rather than spending money on the cleaning disks or what they assumed to be commercial software. Soapy water on a q-tip. Whether this is true or not, the story goes that basically by the end of it there wasn't a single component inside that computer that did not get ruined.
I don't know how funny it is, but, I can even tell one from direct experience where I called up my ISP's tech support to ask why my bandwidth had basically gone down the toilet. The tech guy clearly caught on to the fact that I knew what I was talking about and just had me do a few of those routine from the book steps like running bandwidth tests from multiple locations instead of just one. He didn't bother so much with the stupid little things that only someone completely new to computers wouldn't know (and this is the first time where someone didn't treat me like an idiot where I actually almost wished they had.) We verify that the phone line is ok and such, but, he notices a little something off, so he tells me that it looks like there must be a slight problem in the line somewhere and they'll probably have to send a tech out to fix it. To this end, he asks me to carry a phone and hook it into each line in the house to see if I can determine exactly where it goes wrong. Well, I start to do this and everything seems normal, until I get to one of the bedrooms where I discover that, behind the bed where I couldn't see it, someone had removed the DSL filter and simply plugged the phone directly into the p
Well, my point was that with all the paranoids out there, surely someone would have noticed if it were phoning home.
Of course, there's always the possibility of basically having WGA integrated into an SP3, not to mention that they already require it (or, from what I have read a javascript trick) for updates. I'm not sure if there are truly any updates that are so vital it makes much of a difference though. To those who use a decent quality firewall (instead of the built-in thing,) the updates really don't make much difference. About the only big thing I can think of is IE7, and the obvious answer to that is Firefox and Opera, both of which are better in several ways (including the fact that Opera actually renders things the way they are supposed to when you follow standards, or has IE7's betas passed the ACID2 test yet?) For the rumors to be even CLOSE to true (even via a stretch of the imagination) it will have to make windows xp "unusable" far ahead of the time it would take for it to slowly become outdated enough like previous versions of windows have (heck, today Windows 98 SE is still quite usable with drivers still being updated for most hardware and most software supporting it -- just look at how many people made such a big stink over Firefox going NT only in the CVS or whatever.) They want XP to "die" later this year without WGA, so either they are planning something big that they believe will take over (and MS does tend to get obsessive and decide that whatever new thing they have will take the world by storm when in fact it's basically nothing new most of the time) or they have something set up to do this if the rumor were true. Something set up to phone home would almost surely be caught by now by a paranoid (I might add that you don't need a packet sniffer, just netstat on a firewall or something simpler like that, though on the host perhaps they would hide it) so surely that proves the rumor is just a rumor? The only other thing I can think of besides phoning home is for home to phone you -- which means they can probably only catch people using the SP2 firewall, and, more importantly, they have left a gaping back door for anyone to use. But surely they aren't stupid enough to do that when they already have to deal with so many in the market saying that windows is an insecure os and linux is safer? Even MS would realize that the linux distros would instantly capitalize on the opening and if MS looses their stranglehold on the market for even a second it could be fatal...
This worried me as I've seen enough problems with WGA myself to know that it could be a serious problem if they did a mass shutdown.
However, one thought has been on my mind since I first read this and I have yet to see it properly addressed (perhaps a comment I missed down the many pages of comments to all the articles on the subject?) How would Microsoft possibly proceed to implement this mass-shutdown? They must first determine which systems do not have WGA, and then they must issue some sort of shutdown command. How is this possible? The only conclusion I've been able to reach to support the rumors is that Microsoft would have had to have left a backdoor. To bypass firewalls it must first check out instead of them checking in, but, once the outward connection is made, it would have to be able to execute a list of commands or a given program provided by the outward connection. On the surface, it may sound harmless because such a thing would be hardcoded to connect outward to one location (which would be on Microsoft of course) but, if you look a little deeper you realize that if some virus/trojan designer were to simply override this program, they instantly have absolute access to your system. Not to mention that if such a thing were true MS themselves would have absolute access as well without any virus or trojan (and, quite frankly, I do not trust such a big company where the left had has no idea what the right hand is doing to have perfect procedures in place to ensure that such a thing absolutely could not be abused.)
This, of course, seems highly unlikely though, right? Surely someone would have noted it making it's routine checks for further instructions by now if it were. I would say someone would have designed a trojan or virus by now, but, the truth is that most of the time Windows is so bloated and hard even to program for what is in the SDKs that it typically ends up being after an announcement of a known problem that someone designs a virus to exploit something. They can't have a check in though because it would require a backdoor that is opened and would not be bypassed by simply installing a real firewall. Perhaps I am missing something? Is there any other way it could actually occur? The only thing I can think of that wouldn't require something of a back door is if they had it built in with SP2 or something which would just mean that a virus designer would be limited to only being able to make windows stop booting without actually taking control (I say stop booting because they could rig it so that it not only deactivates but thinks that the 30 days have expired so refuses to work at all.) Considering how much trouble this would cause world-wide and how quickly MS would be denounced for leaving such a gaping security hole with all that big brother mentality, I think surely this must mean those rumors are nothing more than mere rumors?
Well, in agreement with parts of the article, I have to second that some are a waste. I used to use Prime95. I even thought once I had a prime, though apprently not (I can only assume some hardware error creeped in there and it failed verification.) It always bugged me that I was decreasing the overall lifetime of my CPU just to find large prime numbers though. I suppose there may be some application for it out there, but, overall, it's just not worth much to the world when they find a new number. Eventually I decided that I'd rather my CPU would last me as long as possible. I decided a while back that with this Athlon 64 running so cool while overclocked, it would make a great server. You'd be surprised what use you can put a computer to even five or so years later. Don't underestimate the potential uses of an old system. I have an old SMP 500 MHz Pentium 3 system which is now my server. Before I dedicated it to use as a server (firewall, web server, lan file sharing, lan diagnostics, etc,) I made it easily portable, hooked up a PSX->USB gamepad converter and played a huge number of old games I missed from back when I had a Genesis, a SNES, and etc via emulation. Thanks to GeeXboX, it can even be a media player for me with about the only thing it can't do being HD H264 (then again, many modern systems can choke up on a full quality H264 video...) Heck, I even found out that an old 266MHz Pentium 2 could play most of my DivX/XviD videos even in 640x480 with the exception of one really high bitrate one where it would occasionally have to play catchup when the video did a white fade out + back in effect.
Now some projects like Folding I can agree with. And it's a good use of one's idle cycles, but, for the reason I mentioned above, I've decided I want my processor to last really long term. As in more than four years. The system I'm now using for so much dates probably to around 1999 and has been in use the whole time. Had it been folding, searching for signals, etc keeping the CPUs at 100% utilization 24/7 (excluding storms) it probably wouldn't be alive today acting in such a useful way.
Then again, for those who don't want their CPU(s) to last for an insanely long time, projects like Folding actually are very nice and might actually potentially benefit mankind some day (and before you think that future computers will do much of what takes ours years in a snap, bear in mind that the idea is to at least get a head start and have possible uses more quickly possibly saving more lives.) I might add that I don't agree with the claim that there is no value to SETI@Home. Finding alien life out there WOULD change things (well, assuming it didn't take several lifetimes to actually get a signal to/from them, which is, unfortunately, quite a possibility.)
The object of DSL wasn't to be so tiny you are amazed. The object was for it to fit on a business card CDR due to their small size and convenience. Well, business card CDRs are rare if at all made anymore. On the other hand, a mini-CDR still exists and is quite common (you can walk in Walmart and come out with some. Heck, I still have a bunch of mini-CDRW discs lying around for their handy nature.) These 8 cm radius discs can hold 210 MiB, possibly a bit more since, unlike with the DVD standard, back when they made the CD-R standard they actually didn't feel a need to try to cheat and trick the customer. If you think about it, since the smallest flash drive you can buy in a modern store is 128 MB (even if that may only be around 110 MiB or so,) you can't even find the old mini-CDRs that only held 185 MiB anymore, and finally business card discs are rare if at all existant anymore (and nearly no more convenient than a mini-CDR really) it just seems a little silly to be limited to 50 MiB for the sake of discs that if you actually had, you would not want to waste on that.
What's important is the philosophy. The idea of distros like these is to pack as many useful tools as possible into as little space as possible while maintaining minimalism. They remove a lot of the unnecessary stuff and get quite a surprising amount packed into it.
Personally, I carry a flash drive around which will boot on any system supporting USB-ZIP (read the readme.USBKEY file in the syslinux archive for how to do this and why you have to -- but, simply put, very few even modern BIOSes support USB-HDD even today.) Ok, it's a 512 MB model, but, I have to squeeze things in there because I have to store a lot of data, a copy of my browser for those systems that force you to use an old version of Firefox (IE is dead to me) and so on. I LOVE having a handy little live linux distro that can boot off of it and be used to repair/diagnose a lot of problems among other things. I can't afford to have some huge 1 GB large image of Ubuntu or something though on my little flash drive, so that's where a linux distro following this philosophy comes in. Honestly though, I am forced to admit I didn't really like DSL that much (remember, with linux distros it's all a matter of opinion and, as they say "to each to his own." I don't like it because it isn't good, I don't like it because it just isn't the type I want.) Personally I used Finnix (site's a little slow these past few days or so) which has much more up to date packages. It's one of the many live distros that follow the same sort of philosophy DSL follows. Squeeze handy stuff in there, remove unneeded clutter. It's my hope that we see even MORE distros like this in the future, not less.
Sorry if someone already posted this, but, it has turned into 5 pages of people war mongering about how much they hate/love homosexuals.
Your "17 minutes" might actually be 16.1 minutes. This is because they get less money if they don't do that. (Plain and simple, that's all it is.) They always round anything they can up. In other words, to ensure overlap, you will have to find an occasion in which even accounting for rounding up (and they always round up, not down) on both ends, the times do still overlap. I know this for a fact from personal experience because I don't use the cell phone much and most of my calls consist of "ok, I'm in front of the store. What was the name of the color paint you wanted? Ok, got it. Bye." Actual call time: in the area of 15 seconds. Call time on bill: 1 minute.
So, your bill MIGHT be more accurately represented as, say (just an example):
2/22 at 3:28.0 pm "NBR unavailable" 16.1 mins usage, round up to 17 on final bill.
2/22 at 3:44.9 pm "123-4567" 2.1 mins usage, round up to 3 on final bill.
In fact, it looks like it could possibly be that NBR unavailable might have even cut out just as you picked up the phone. My first thought would be that maybe it's related to those thoughts of a P2P network on mobiles. If someone could contact your phone and use it while it is idle, then they would possibly be cut off the moment you hit the send button. This is just a thought though. I don't actually have any idea what is actually causing it, and it may be that those two even do overlap, we just can't tell from that is all.
Whatever this is, it is strange though, and I hope you do figure it out.
I think it's interface is unintuitive.
How so? It has the same interface that Firefox and IE both have basically... Perhaps you just don't like the default settings?
It's ugly.
You mean you don't like the default skin? Well, so get another. Like Firefox/Mozilla, the main site has a ton of user resources (look in the "Community" section.) I highly recommend the "Breeze Simplified Micro" which has a very nice minimalistic look.
It's focused on tabbed browsing, which I do not like.
Then turn it off. Here's how turn it off in version 9 with four clicks:
Click Tools (Menu)
Click Preferences
Click checkbox next to "Open windows instead of tabs"
Click ok.
Most of us want tabbed browsing because it's a wonderful way to clean up the clutter and speed up multitasking. Many are still upset that you have to use a myriad of plugins to get Firefox to handle tabs the way it should (such as by not popping up new windows for things when you want tabs.)
It is not well integrated with Mac OS X.
Ok, I'm a linux/windows user, so I can't comment much on this. What do you mean "integrated" though? Normally by integrated one would think of things like IE where they are built into the OS, but, this surely isn't what you want because it's unreasonable to expect that from a browser. In fact, I have been upset since IE 5 when they first started integrating the browser into the OS. IMO a web browser should never be used for things like the desktop and file manager. I used to use things like 98 Lite to remove it even. Unfortunately, with XP removing IE can cause serious problems (it can be done, it just causes problems with some stupidly built things that require fully functional components from it.)
Experiment around a little more. You may find that when you change certain settings around or give certain things a chance, Opera isn't so bad. In fact, I hated tabbed browsing when I first used Opera some maybe 5 years ago and turned it off, but, a while later I gave it a chance and today I find it to be the most useful thing any program that can involve clutter could possibly do. It cleans things up so nicely. Still, I suppose we have hit on perhaps the real point of the matter. Perhaps the problem isn't that it used to be commercial, nor that it lacks extentions, nor even stuff like tabbed browsing or the interface, but, perhaps what the problem is is that the defaults do not encourage a smooth transition from other browsers. Unfortunately, I have commented on this in the forums and no one cares, so it may continue to hold them back since your average user who just wants to try it out and see will find it so different that they may not give it a proper chance. I would recommend that anyone who can should give it a try for a while, play with the settings, and see if they can't learn to enjoy the advantages it has over Firefox though. There's a reason why even though Firefox is opensource and free and comes with most distros, while IE is integrated (and thus on nearly every windows user's box,) yet Opera is still used by so many people in the desktop world. It may not be the highest market share by far, but, the point is that it is far less negligable than, say something like links, and users aren't choosing it just because they are so happy with the mobile version of Opera (which you likely wouldn't even recognize compared to the desktop version.)
Actually, the biggest limit when it comes to anything wireless is frequencies. There is a very limited range of frequencies that can be used for things, and the FCC highly regulates nearly all of them. In the end, a wireless cellphone network barely has enough to ensure overlap (no dropped signals) and satellite companies can't just broadcast everything they'd like to. I had to do a project a while back about one such problem a cell phone company had to deal with where they were having issues with too much load on one tower but couldn't just drop in another tower to solve the issue due to having only a limited number of frequencies they could use. The end result was they had to put a receiver on a building with limited range so it wouldn't overlap as much and almost just cover the problem area. The solution to the problem isn't always so simple though.
There are a few unregulated things like 800MHz, 2.4GHz, and so on, but, these unregulated things are, so far as I know, without exception very limited in what they can do. (For example, 2.4GHz is absorbed by water -- including the moisture in the air -- and thus about the most you can get with even line of sight high powered directional antennas was something like a mile.) Even should you find one that can go as far as you want it, you'll find so much interferance that it's basically worthless (darn, even those limited ones like 2.4 seem to pick up enough interferance that many such as myself have nothing but problems getting a usable signal on wireless networking.) Actually, frequency regulation is a necessity, but, my point is that the whole thing is limited and they will be limited by frequencies long before they are limited by how many sattelites or towers they can put up.
Here: ftp://get.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/900/final/en/i 386/
Get it in tar.gz, or, better yet, tar.bz2 (tar.gz needs to be depreciated for that -- actually, it's about time people started using something better like 7-Zip as the standard already...)
Opera 9 is no longer in beta status btw. That link takes you to the final. You should be able to get the beta on that ftp as well, but, I see no reason why you would want to since the final has solved some of the problems in the beta (in fact, I know of no problems so far in the final, though I guess there must be one or two since no one can release a peice of software without bugs sneaking in.)
They made a mistake on the download page, but, so what? Your typical user doesn't want it in tar.gz/tar.bz2 format. They LIKE having a nice simple little package that installs with minimal effort on their part getting things set up. Even many of the more advanced users who are able to set the thing up the hard way themselves often enjoy the convenience of a nice proper DEB package, or even a RPM (ok, I know people don't like RPMs, but, there's a reason they still use them today.)
You know, this isn't exactly 100% related to the article, but, one thing I've been wondering about since I first heard about this is, what's to stop the companies from deciding they don't like, oh, say their competitors or someone who hasn't paid his extortion fees (and don't kid yourself, by every definition I can find -- except the one that relies on the word "illegal" -- this is extortion plain and simple) on schedule and setting latencies to that site so incredibly high that it causes anyone trying to visit to get a timeout? Essentially cutting that site off of the web as far as anyone is concerned. Even if they can't get away with setting it that high, imagine if some big online game company accidentally bounces a check or something. If they add any latency to those lines at all, the game company goes right down the pot. Online games just don't work once heavy latencies start. Who would pay to play, say World of Warcraft, when latency can never go under 1s (and I might add that they are kind of shooting themselves in their own foot with that background downloader saturating people's connections and causing latency to shoot up to 1+s while the average joe doesn't know what's causing it or how to disable the thing.)
I'm really worried that we may be looking at a heck of a lot worse than making the competition's websites act really slow. I'm afraid they may have the ability to cripple online games the moment they have a disagreement with the game company (essentially pay up or I'll break both your legs type of thing) and cut competition completely off the web as far as their customers are concerned -- not just make the sites slower. This really scares me because it puts the Internet largely in control of the ISPs and if they get too greedy, they can essentially make the Internet a useless thing for US citizens -- essentially killing the Internet as far as we would be concerned.
Perhaps I am reading too much into this? Maybe all the law is talking about is allowing them to use those little squid-type caching services simply to speed up sites rather than applying latency to slow sites down? I can understand the idea of charging for maintenance of the servers that would be necessary to implement such a large scale caching system (though it should be the customers who want the benefits of the caching who pay, not companies who are afraid that their sped up competition will get ahead while customers get tired of waiting for their site to load.) Please someone tell me it's just the caching one?
By the way, just a little FYI on a kind of similar matter. The Playstation experiment (PSX) was originally designed to be a 32-bit CD-ROM system (I think an addon like SEGA CD for the SNES) for Nintendo. Same for Colecovision or whatever it was called if I remember correctly. But, my point is, Nintendo messed up with their own bad decision-making and now is dangerously close to a precipice near SEGA's. They've held on a little better and aren't at their fingertips (let's see if Wii does even half of what they claim, else they may be down to the fingers if it fails) but, thanks to their own similar bad decision-making, Sony is now a HUGE dominator in the market they practically owned.
Moral of the story? If you're in a big competitive environment, for your own sake, use your head and think carefully before commiting huge resources on such things!
You know, I think I recall having read an article a while back about the histories of various consoles, and one of the things I recall having read was that the guy in charge of SEGA of America intentionally chose to not bring many RPGs in to America because he thought they wouldn't sell well. I don't remember if this was around the time of the Dreamcast or the Genesis/Megadrive, but, in either case, RPGs were selling like hotcakes on SNES or Playstation. I believe the culprit was Dreamcast though because I seem to recall only two or three RPGs (one of which I never found a legal copy of -- frankly, it strikes me that a huge part of their problem with people downloading the games might have been just due to the fact that they simply wouldn't sell them to begin with...)
Don't misunderstand me. I still agree that one of their biggest downfalls has been the inability to work properly together. I just disagree that we can blame any one side.
Truth is though, SEGA just plain had issues. Like their hardware choices. The Saturn had a weird SMP system that was almost impossible to program for -- only a tiny fraction of the games made for it were able to fully utilize the SMP setup. I still wonder if Genesis couldn't have competed better with SNES's sound-system, though I'm not sure considering that the Gensis's synthesis did at least beat out the PC-Engine's. (IMO they should have both been watching the way sound systems were working. The PC industry should have already shown them how people were interested in things like MOD files, and the SNES's use of a system that kind of vaguely worked like a GUS makes me think that SOMEONE was paying attention. Remember, consoles were supposed to stay ahead of the PC industry in things like that back then.) Not to mention their determination to go with a graphical acceleration method on the Saturn that very few thought would catch on (and which did not catch on -- frankly _I_ could have told them it would continue in the direction it was already on.) Of course, they managed to get all the hardware more or less right on one system, the Dreamcast (relatively easy to program for, good graphics acceleration, good sound system, and so on,) but, then they made the decision to panic and pull out before properly giving it time to start between the people with downloads (come on, a modded PSX was EASIER to copy and download stuff for, yet PSX hasn't quite stopped production even today) and just because the PS2 was overall better at a few things like raw polygon power (yes, the PS2 could look better as things like Xenosaga showed us, but, Soul Calibur showed us that people were underestimating the Dreamcast.)
If they had better marketing, better support for game designers (geez, did they even ONCE approach Square for example? Or, better yet, they should have tried Enix...) and most importantly, better decision making in all fields from hardware to company direction, SEGA might be where Microsoft now is. Instead they are hanging by the tips of their fingers over a their final demise.
I know for a fact that there are over 26 elements preceding the alleged first element "Hydrogen"
You know this do you? Might I ask how you know this? Hydrogen is the first element because it has one proton in it's nucleus (I say one proton, because that's the only thing for certain thanks to ions,) not because of some kind of political "we like hydrogen better than firstium" style of thing. The way the periodic table works is each element in the table has a certain number of protons in their nucleus and they are ordered by this. Therefore, to be less than hydrogen, you must have zero protons in the nucleus. Therefore, to be less than hydrogen, it must be just an electron or a neutron floating around somewhere, not an actual atom at all and therefore not an "element."
I don't really understand why you even said this though. No one ever said anything about needing elements before hydrogen for it to work or something.
Oh, and leave string theory out of this. It's clear you don't even know what it is. It's not a political movement or something, to put it really simply, it has to do with quantum particles and the theory that it may be possible for some to be essentially connected to each other so that one will respond to the other. No murders have occured over this theory and it's quite silly to even think it possible. There's nothing in it to murder for.
I would suggest that everyone else take this person's statements with a grain of salt. It can't hurt to read up on the Joe Cell if you want, but, simply put, if it were so simple as that, don't you think people would be capitalizing on this? Even if you are scared of "the Illuminati" coming after you, the potential profits are enough to hire a host of bodyguards.
So basically this article just tells you how to hold the main piece into something (bandaid) that makes it look simple...
Read my website to find out how to do it using some scotch tape instead! (This was just a joke, I have no such site.)
Seriously though. There must be something I'm missing here, right? I mean, is there supposed to maybe be some kind of interaction between the methanol and the antibacterials placed on some band-aids or something? Surely no one is dumb enough that they'd come up with this whole article touting the use of a bandaid as being somehow simpler than anything else that holds it all together?
I think it will be particularly interesting to see how this affects Opera, whose revenue primarily comes from distribution of its own virtually ubiquitous embedded browser.
Thing is, the average consumer (talking about the more average joe majority type rather than the techno savvy slashdotter) doesn't know one browser from another. ESPECIALLY when it comes to their mobile devices. Should something cause them to begin to actually learn what differentiates one browser from another, they will likely hear it with something like that statement above. Specifically directly mentioning that Opera is more or less the industry leader in the mobile browsers. In other words, they might actually learn that Opera exists. As they say, no publicity is bad publicity.
Right now the biggest hurdle Opera has is a lack of users who even know that it's as good as the other browsers if not better (officially I'm talking about the mobiles there where none of the other browsers are nearly so well developed, but, unofficially I really feel the same way about the desktop version.) The average joe, who makes up the majority, just knows that it can connect to "that interweb thingy," show them their e-mail, send a few text messages the likes of which would make an english professor break down and cry (like the infamous "where u at,") and maybe even play the occasional pointless Java or Flash based game. If they start hearing about how "this new Nokia browser has all these free plugins unlike that Opera browser that almost all the others use" then they've just picked up two facts -- one, it took this long for another browser to compete well enough for them to hear about it, and two, this Opera thingy was so popular up until now that it's on most of the phones.
That's just my opinion anyway. Only time will tell as they say.
I think people are missing the point. Yes, it's a democratic republic. The point is, because it is a republic, some of the best advantages of democracy are lost. On the other hand, some of the worst disadvantages of a democracy are lost.
Anyway, since "the people" don't actually have any kind of direct control over many things -- such as who gets elected (indirect only, sorry) -- it allows certain things, such as the DMCA, to get through which normally would not be allowed. PS. As a little aside note still kind of demonstrating the point, Nixon lost the popular vote but won the elctoral college vote. If it were a true democracy, Watergate might not have happened.
I don't know. I kind of wonder if it might not be better to risk letting minorities be stifled. The main thing was that back in the old days when the government was formed, a republic was basically required for just about anything that even wanted to pretend at representing the people. After all, how the heck do you count, let's say a million votes (talking about the early days) for the president? For that matter, how do you go around the country finding out who to even pick for president when you have to poll millions of people? It would take years in the old days when they had to travel through the wilds on horseback. Maybe decades. And just imagine if someone complained that the dots weren't clear and demanded a recount of a vote? However, I wonder if in this modern day with nice simple computer systems this should maybe all be reconsidered. It's quite easy to use a computer system to do things like counting votes if people will do it right (unfortunately, the complete and absolute lack of any kind of quality control whatsoever in our government right now does mean it is not done right currently of course.) No need for horseback, just use the internet and actual security measures (instead of the easily hackable crap they have currently.) Even those people who don't have a PC or an internet connection just have to get to a local library to get internet access. And no need for a bubble exactly halfway between "Democratic" and "Republican," but, instead, the computer system can actually use radio buttons and even fill in the NAMES of the candidates...
To me, it just rankles with me that there are things like the way we get no real say on laws such as the DMCA (all we can do is try to contact our local representatives who will not personally see our letter and hope that the representative will support our wishes if (s)he decides there are enough people wanting that particular thing to support voting for them again -- assuming they even want to run again) and the way things like the electoral college insure that instead of "the people" it's "California and the other more populated states." With a lot of things like that, you truly see why people talk about the US as a republic and not as a democracy.
What I'm saying is VNC is better at remote stuff. A, you only need a VNC client which has several major binaries (including windows, which is what I need) and a Java version (for emergencies,) and B, you get control over compression level, control of the level of JPEG compression, etc. And the X11 client on windows just wouldn't be fun. Oh, and I've tried the kinds that do the HTTP sessions. Didn't like the way that worked.
Your solution is better for a LAN only configuration. The other way I'm using is just the best you can do with remote, which isn't saying much -- especially when the server is behind an ADSL modem, but, which is all you can really do to get it as close to running smoothly as possible. Besides, it's really just a single user system and I don't really need, nor want, to manage multiple sessions but want just a single session (all the stuff I do where a second session would help, I need only a console to do and a GUI would just slow me down.)
Nothing personal, just this is what works best for situations like mine.