Category Archives: Browsers

by | July 19, 2017 · 8:44 AM

Microsoft – A Debacle for Humanity: How One Corporation Caused Untold Damage to the World Economy, Cost Society Untold $Billions, Severely Damaged Human Productivity, and Even Significantly Set Back Human Progress

Microsoft was and is still an abusive monopoly which ripped off society for billions of dollars, caused vast losses to the world economy, and even set back technological progress for all of mankind by a significant amount. You had to buy Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Windows was always a piece of crap. Think of how much this worthless to lousy to dysfunctional OS cost consumers, business and society due to its crappy nature.

You are always hearing that “the system is down” right, whenever you go anywhere? The ATM is down half the time you go there. Call random businesses and 10-20% of them will tell you “the system is down.”  I will bet you that that is a Windows system that has crashed at that enterprise. Windows’ endless dysfunction and crashing caused a tremendous amount of damage to the US military who moronically decided to use Windows all through our country’s fighting forces for just about everything. Great. A computer-based military where the system always crashes. I’m sure they’re going to win every war they fight.

Basically, all of humanity was forced to use a glaringly obviously inferior product for all of their computing needs. This inferior product had constant problems which drove a spike through the heart of productivity at the individual, business, nonprofit and government level. All of humanity was using inferior computer systems that barely worked and failed all the time.

All of this time, there were much superior systems out there which could have beaten Windows if they only had a chance. Amiga OS was always one of finest ever developed. BeOS was an outstanding OS, amazingly great. OS/2 was an out of the world OS. All of these OS’s were fantastic at multitasking and even mutithreading. People routinely ran up to 80 applications at a time on OS/2 with little or no slowdown. BeOS was about that good and may have even been faster. But with a monopoly on the desktop where everyone was forced to use Windows, all of these other OS’s died a sad death.

Unix has long ruled at the university and corporate level, and much of the Net runs of Unix. Larger server systems have always run on Unix at the level of the large enterprise, be it government, corporate or nonprofit. But Unix has never really broken in on the desktop where Windows still reigns. Windows is much better now than it was in the Windows 95 era (Remember how horrible that OS was?). I am currently running Windows 7, which is the best Windows I ever run, but it’s still crap. It suffers from unfixable file corruption and sometimes needs a hard reboot or goes down altogether.

Unix on the other hand is virtually uncrashable. It is very hard to take down a Unix system. They are nearly resistant to crashing. File corruption is virtually nonexistent on Unix because of Journaling File Systems and text files instead the idiotic and flawed Registry of Windows. The Registry is so flawed that it can probably never be fixed. As long as the Registry exists, Windows will continue to be slow, hog memory and hard drive, be awful at multitasking, crash your applications, suffer irreparable file corruption, and go down hard and need hard reboots.

Mac OS is an excellent OS now that it runs on a Unix core. Mac OS is almost uncrashable now, and it never or almost never needs to be reinstalled. Plug and Play is as easy as plugging in any electronic device in your house, whereas Windows plug and play has always been horrible, and it still is here at Windows 7.

Windows also harmed the world economy by forcing us to shell out untold billions for OS’s, word processors, browsers, databases, spreadsheets and presentation programs. Microsoft of course leveraged its OS monopoly to create browser, database, spreadsheet and presentation monopolies. All of these products were quite expensive. In the process, many excellent word processors (remember Wordperfect 5.1?), spreadsheets, databases, and presentation products were all destroyed. It didn’t matter how good they were. It didn’t matter if they were better or even vastly better than their Microsoft competitors (Access was always junk) because due to the OS monopoly, none of the competitors in this other software stood a chance.

The truth is that all of this stuff could have been had for free all along. Linux is free and open source, and that is one of the reasons why it is so great. Firefox and Opera are also free now, and Firefox is also open source and has been taken over by Sun. Free online email programs like Gmail have cut significantly into the market share of Outlook Express (always awful – Eudora was so much better) and Outlook.

Open Office, now taken over by Sun, is free and is starting to give Word, Access, Excel and Powerpoint a run for their money. I use Word Writer all the time, and it’s just as good as Word by now. If the world moves to free browsers, OS’s, word processors, chat software (Skype), spreadsheets, databases and presentation software, think of how much money can be saved at the individual, business, nonprofit, education and government level! It will be a great step forward for humanity. There is no way for Microsoft to compete with a free product of course, so we will hopefully begin to slowly destroy this diabolical corporation, one of the worst ones that ever existed.

 

 

4 Comments

Filed under Browsers, Capitalists, Computers, Economics, Education, Government, Scum, Software

by | March 6, 2014 · 10:15 AM

How Bill Gates Forces You to Buy and Use His Crap

Well, it has always been possible to use different OSes on a standard PC- with the Acorns for one thing you couldn’t as the OS was hard-coded in ROM! I meant to add you could always use other software applications too- like with IE and Netscape (now Firefox, Chrome etc.), or perhaps Wordperfect, Lotus, StarOffice etc. (now OpenOffice/LibreOffice) instead of MS Office…

Not really true as many websites were IE-only and many still are! See how Gates tries to force you to use his shit. These stupid fuck web companies and web designers make their site to work in IE only and make it so it fails in everything non-IE. Just lazy coding. It is very simple to use web standards to make sites that work in all browsers.

M$ made this all much worse by coming up with M$ only computer languages, M$-only fake JavaScript, M$ only JavaScript coding that fails in everything else, M$ only HTML (MSHTML) with HTML codes that break in all non-IE browsers. Furthermore, IE deliberately violates all web standards all the time, so if you try to design to standards, IE will often deliberately break it, forcing you to incorporate separate IE only code on your page. Since IE forces you to make IE only code anyway, a lot of designers say screw it and just make the page IE only and forget about standards.

IE has always been by far the worst about implementing web standards. They either don’t care due to huge market share, or they are out to deliberately break and destroy all standards.

Wordperfect was always better than Word and may still be. Bill Gates personally destroyed the best word processor.

Can you name any other industry where the inferior product always beats the superior product? This is what happens in software due to its monopoly nature. Gates leveraged his monopoly to destroy all the competition. The result was that his inferior programs always beat all of the superior competing programs. This can only happen in a monopoly and computer software is a natural monopoly, and this is why so many application areas get overrun by one monopoly vendor.

The whole idea of an inferior product overrunning and forcing superior products out of business by monopoly means is insanity and goes against everything capitalism is supposed to stand for – vigorous competition and a product range varying from superior to inferior with choice up to the consumer. There is almost no other industry where inferior products always run superior products out of business and end up with monopolies. Most industries are sane. Computer software is insane.

We have always tried to make standards for all applications. We tried to have a word processor standard so all word processors could save in that file format and any WP could read anything produced in any other WP. M$ deliberately broke it. M$ deliberately made their crappy Word program so that it would not open or read files in other formats. Also Word files could not be read by competing products because M$ refused to release the Word protocol so competitors could fix their product to read Word files. Reading Word files has always been guesswork as the protocols are proprietary.

M$ did the same for .odf which they are trying to make into a standard word processor file format that can be ready by anyone anywhere. M$ has made their own competing M$ .odf which is not the same and breaks .odf. All the while M$ is singing about how much they love standards.

We also tried to make standards for database files and for spreadsheet files. As it is, you need to read .xls files for work, so you let Bill Gates fuck your ass while he forces you to buy overpriced Excel.

Databases written in M$ file formats cannot be read by other databases. Result: You are forced to buy Bill Gates’ Access program to read work files.

You see how Bill Gates forces you to buy his product? You see how computer software is a natural monopoly?

If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. This is my only job.

8 Comments

Filed under Assholes, Browsers, Capitalism, Computers, Economics, Software

by | March 4, 2014 · 5:17 PM

Microsoft and the Netscape Episode

Steve said

He did whatever he could to make Microsoft as successful as possible and make his products successful and beat the competition. He leant on PC makers to include IE instead of Netscape. Isn’t that the logical thing to do? Strike deals, use your leverage, to beat the competition. Clearly I don’t know enough about the history of Microsoft or the law but the what I’ve read about the Netscape stuff doesn’t seem that bad.

The Netscape episode was all illegal. They were leveraging their monopoly in order to force you to use their other stuff by bundling the browser with the OS. You can’t do that. It’s illegal. You can’t bundle other products with your monopoly product (that everyone has to buy) in order to leverage your illegal monopoly to destroy the competition for other products.

He leaned on PC makers to include IE instead of Netscape. Isn’t that the logical thing to do? Strike deals, use your leverage, to beat the competition.

As Microsoft had a monopoly on the Windows OS, he could force computer makers to exclude Netscape and include the crap IE instead (which to this day is an inferior browser). How? Because they needed to have a low price on Windows in order to sell computers. Gates threatened to not sell them Windows OS’s or to sell them to them at a very high price if they included competing products. You can’t do that. You can’t say, “If you use my competitor’s products, I will fuck you and destroy you. If you use my competitor’s products, then we won’t allow you to carry any of our products, or we will charge you 5X as much for our products.” That is illegal. And this is what monopolists do.

All of Microsoft’s products were always inferior to the competition, but it never mattered since once you have an illegal monopoly, an inferior product can beat a superior product because you force everyone to use it.

Do you understand law at all? Do you understand US and international law regarding illegal monopolies? Do you understand why they are illegal? Because Microsoft was a monopoly, they were able to charge vastly higher prices for their products than if it were not a monopoly. Also their products hardly improved at all. Monopolies never improve their products because since everyone is forced to use them anyway, The only reason to improve a product is because the competition is threatening you. If you have a monopoly and everyone is forced to use your stuff, why would you waste money improving the product? All that money spent improving the product would be wasted since there is no reason to improve it.

Illegal monopolies are illegal under US law. They’re not fair. No one, but no one, but no one, can compete against an illegal monopoly. Why? Because an illegal monopoly makes it impossible for anyone to compete against them.

If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. This is my only job.

11 Comments

Filed under Assholes, Browsers, Computers, Law, Software

by | December 19, 2012 · 9:04 PM

HTML Code Template For Commenting on Blogs

Repost from the old site.

Many people comment on blogs, either using Blogger‘s built-in commenter or the commenters on Movable Type or Typepad (two blogging platforms that compete with Blogger).

However, when most people make links in either of these commenting systems, they mess it up and end up making a huge hyperlink that scrolls across the page and is not clickable (Movable Type and Typepad‘s commenters may have ways to make a clickable hyperlink – I am not sure).

Another problem when using commenting systems is that many people do not seem to know how to differentiate quoted comments with your own comments. The best way is to put the quoted comments in italics and leave your own non-italicized. You can also bold either your comments or the other person’s comments.

When you don’t differentiate between quoted comments and your own comments, there is confusion about who wrote what.

So, as Lenin asked, “What is to be done?” Well, one thing you could do is what I do, and that is to set up a template for commenting on blogs. I will next show you some HTML code to put in your template.

Even better yet, you really don’t even need to know any HTML to make and use this template. Of course, although Blogger does not require any knowledge of HTML, any HTML knowledge you can acquire will always help you to use Blogger better. There are plenty of basic HTML books out there. I strongly recommend the HTML 4 For Dummies book as a great starter book for any beginner.

How to make your template:

First of all, to make your template, use a plain text file. I do not recommend using Word or any other mainstream word processor, nor should you use your email program or newsreader. On Windows platforms, Notepad automatically uses plain text for all of its files. There are other plain text editors out there, like Notepad++ (one of my favorite applications). The Mac has a correlate of Notepad called Text Edit.

On Windows, find Notepad by going to Search – Files and Folders and typing in Notepad. When you find it, right click and choose Make Shortcut. A message will come up saying, “Windows cannot make a shortcut here. Do you want one on the desktop instead?” Choose Yes. Now go to your desktop and note that you have a shortcut to Notepad there. Leave it there.

Now, double-click Notepad to create a new file. It will open a new blank file with the title “Untitled“. Now go to File – Save As and a Save As screen will come up probably asking you to save the file on your desktop, but it may ask you to save somewhere else, like My Documents. Wherever it asks you to save, make a note of where it is saving the file so you can find it again.

Under File Name it will say *.txt. Save as Type will be Text Documents (*.txt). Encoding will say ANSI. Leave Save as Type and Encoding as they are unless you really know what you are doing. Now, under File Name, go to the beginning of the *.txt string and delete the *, leaving the .txt. Now start typing a name for your file.

Let’s call it HTML for Blog Comments (but you can call it anything you want). Make sure to leave the .txt at the end of the file name. When you finish typing the file name, click Save. You can now go look on your desktop if you want and you should see a saved file sitting there called HTML for Blog Comments.

Now go back to the opened Notepad file that is open in your taskbar and click on it to open it up. Notice that the title has changed from Untitled to HTML for Blog Comments.

Now we are going to start typing. Type the following characters in your Notepad file:

<i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i>

To make it easy for yourself, just type a few of them and then select those with your mouse, hit Control-C to copy them, and then hit Control-V to paste them next to the ones you have already typed. This way you can have as many or as few as you like. I have 22 pairs of <i>'s in my template. The i in brackets is an HTML italic tag. The <i> is the opening tag and the </i> is the closing tag.

Now, next time you are making some comments on someone’s blog and you want to quote the other person, go to this Comments Template and mouse select – Control-C copy the italic tags in your template:

<i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i> <i> </i>

Go ahead and grab them all. Now go to the comments box and Control-V paste the italic tags into the comments box. Now put your mouse cursor before the tags and start typing. Hit enter a few times to give yourself some space to type. This way the italic tags will always be a couple of lines below your typing so you do not get confused.

When you want to quote another person’s text, go find the other person’s text you want to quote, select it with your mouse and Control-C to copy it. Now go to the comments and very carefully put the mouse cursor in between the <i> opening italic tag and the </i> closing italic tag. Hit Control-V to paste the text you want to quote in between the opening and closing tags.

There should now be an <i> in front of the quoted text and a </i> at the end of the quoted text. Now hit enter a couple of times to give yourself some space to respond to the quoted text. Repeat as many times as you want depending on how many snippets of text you want to quote and comment on.

Use the preview button on the commenting system to make sure the quoted text is in italics.

If you don’t like italics and would rather use bold, or want both italics and bold for some reason, then add some bold tags to your template. If you want to put some bold tags in your template, just type a few of these bold tags <b> </b>, then copy-paste them as described above until you have as many as you need. Your bold tags in your template would look something like this:

<b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b> <b> </b>

If you want to mark some text in bold, just copy and paste the text in between the opening <b> and closing </b> bold tags. Once again, preview it in the commenting system to make sure the text actually got bolded.

Now that we have italics and bold tags in our template, it is time to move on to hyperlinks. Yes, links. If you look at comments on blogs, you will notice that comments with links are often not properly written, and tend instead to scroll across the page wildly. Furthermore, they are usually just text representations of the link addresses, something like:

http://www.answers.com/9/11%20conspiracy%20claims%20regarding%20Jews%20or%20Israel

As you can see, that is not clickable at all, although it is a hyperlink. If you copy it and paste it into your address bar of your browser, your browser will take you to the webpage. If you put it into many word processing programs or many email programs, those programs will automatically make a link out of it.

But Blogger will not do it, neither in its compose editor when making posts nor in its commenter. If you want it to show you up, you need to make it into a hyperlink. You will need to write this code in your template:

<a href=""></a>

Now save that line to your comment template. When you want to make a hyperlink in comments on a blog, cut and paste that line above:

<a href=""></a>

into the commenter. Now go and find your hyperlink. Select it with your mouse and copy it. Go back to the commenter and look closely at the code above. Carefully place your mouse button between the two quote marks: “” so your cursor has one quote mark on either side of it. Now paste the url in between the quote marks.

It doesn’t matter at all how long it is either. It won’t scroll. That code can handle huge url’s and it will not lengthen the resulting hyperlink at all. Now you need to call your link something. Look closely at the code now, with the url pasted into it. Look for this space where the two brackets are pointing at each other:

<a href=""></a>

Extracting the brackets from the code, I refer to these two:

><

Position your cursor in between the two brackets that point at each other and start typing something. You can call it my link, or link, or click here, or anything you want. This is what will show up clickable in blue on the web page. When that text is clicked, it will take the person to the web page:

<a href="Paste url here">Type Name for Link Here</a>

Now, if you are feeling really brave, you can try it on your own. Go to a blog somewhere and practice. In fact, you can even practice with this blog post here in the comments section. Use the preview section to look at how your HTML template code came out. That way you can try to correct any errors before you post your blog comments. One more thing: you are starting to learn a bit of the magic art of HTML!

9 Comments

Filed under Browsers, Computers, Reposts From The Old Site, Software

by | November 24, 2010 · 9:46 PM

A Rather Subjective Analysis of European Minority Languages

One way to see how well European minority languages is if you run a popular website that gets a lot of hits from all over Europe. I run one here on my old site, which is in the top 1200 blogs on the Internet (This blog is also in the top 1200).

If you have a good weblog (a weblog allows a webmaster to monitor all of the visitors from your site), and I do, you can see what languages people are using on their browsers. When browsers come to the site, they are marked with language tracking. I am not sure if that is a language preference for webpages or if it is the language that the browser itself is written in.

Minority lanugages are languages that are not the main spoken language of the country or languages that only have a small speaker base. In this piece, we will be dealing with Irish, Welsh, Catalan, Basque, Galician and Luxemburgish. Those I am quite sure are offered as language versions of the major browsers.

Luxemburgish: Luxemburgish is the official language of Luxemburg, however, there are worries about it due to the small speaker base of only around 500,000. Further, there is a problem in that not enough new and technological words are coming into the language. Most browsers from Luxemburg are using the Luxemburgish language, so the language seems to be in pretty good shape.

Catalan: Catalan is the most popular of the remaining five. However, considering how many readers I get from the Catalan region, very few Catalans are using Catalan browsers. Most are using Spanish language browsers. So the situation of Catalan does not look so good.

Irish: I am amazed that there are any Irish browsers at all, but now and then, we do get one from Ireland. Needless to say, nearly all browsers from Ireland are using English. Still, everyone knows that Irish is in bad shape. Considering there are Irish browsers at all, I think Irish is in better shape than we think it is.

Galician: I was quite shocked to find a few Galician browsers out there coming out of Galicia in the far northwest of Spain. This language is probably in better shape than people think it is. Most Galician browsers use Spanish.

Welsh: Considering that most reports indicate that Welsh is doing pretty well, I was surprised that one almost never sees a Welsh browser. Almost all browsers coming out of Wales use English. I wonder if Welsh is in as good a shape as people say it is considering the dearth of Welsh browsers.

Basque: I have yet to see a Basque browser! If browsers are indeed offered in Basque (uncertain) this is very bad news. I get quite a bit of traffic out of the Basque country, and 100% of the time, Basque users are using Spanish as their browser language. Things don’t look good for the Basque language.

I can’t speak of other small languages in Europe because in general, browsers are not offered in those languages.

This was an interesting little experiment though.

Leave a comment

Filed under Balto-Slavic-Germanic, Basque, Browsers, Catalan, Celtic, Computers, Gaelic, Galician, German, Germanic, Indo-European, Indo-Hittite, Irish Gaelic, Isolates, Italic, Italo-Celtic, Italo-Celtic-Tocharian, Language Families, Linguistics, Luxembourgish, Portuguese, Romance, Software

by | December 2, 2009 · 8:46 PM

Firefox 3.5 Review

I usually do not review software, but I am a computer buff, so I may as well. Firefox is the free browser made by the Mozilla Foundation based on the old Netscape browser.

It is now starting to seriously rival Microsoft’s Internet Exploder, especially in Northern and Eastern Europe. Finland and the Baltic states have gone over in a big way. Internet Exploiter is still huge in China and Korea, with over 95% penetration in both places. In China, there are many IE clones which are widely used, complicating matters further for Firefox.

I upgraded from 3.0.1x a while back, and the early 3.5 was really terrible, so I’ve been avoiding it ever since. Nevertheless, someone put it on the other computer I use, and I noticed the other day that it was quite nice. So I finally got up the nerve to put it on this one.

What a surprise! It’s not often that a browser upgrade really slaps you across the face with its sudden and dramatic improvement.

One annoyance about earlier Firefox was the extremely bad use of resources such that the browser quickly pigs out and is sucking a good GB or so of RAM and on this box, I’m then into virtual memory territory, which on Windows just sucks. Also many webpages, especially this WordPress, are slow as mud in the Colorado River. I always figured it was the sucky WordPress platform, but whatever’s causing it, the new 3.5 makes WordPress positively snappy.

The browser loads very quickly, even with 2 windows and 17 tabs open as I am wont to do. It’s still pretty piggy, but the browser seems to retain snappiness and stability even as it gorges on your RAM, which is nice. I’m waiting to see how it acts in VM territory, but nothing on Windows is stable in VM, so I’m not optimistic.

The earlier stability problems are completely gone now.

If you have not done so already, upgrade to 3.5 right now!

Leave a comment

Filed under Browsers, Computers, Software

by | July 5, 2009 · 10:16 PM

Firefox 3.5

The long-awaited Firefox 3.5 was released a few days ago, on June 30, 2009. I just “upgraded” yesterday. Big mistake. Many of my extensions didn’t work, and Firefox was seriously hogging the CPU on a regular basis. It was so bad, frankly, FF 3.5 was simply unusable.

My specs: Windows 2000
1 GB memory
1.66 MHZ AMD CPU
Fast graphics card with 128 MB memory

The system works quite well, and frankly, Windows 2000 uses resources much better than that Godawful system pig called Windows XP. Firefox also works much better on Windows 2000 than on XP. On XP, FF rapidly eats up the entire 1 GB of available memory. On Windows 2000, it takes a number of days to do that, possibly over a week.

Also I have found that Windows 2000 is more stable than XP. It is nearly impossible to bring this Win 2K box down. I think I have hard-rebooted it maybe once. Every rare while, you might want to reboot for system performance. You need to reboot XP quite a bit more often. Actually, most of my Win 2K reboots are done just to check for new applications, since a lot of apps only check for new stuff on a reboot.

True, Win 2K does not have System Restore, but I so horribly mangled my XP box with System Restore a while back, that I wonder what good it even is.

On Firefox, I reverted back to Firefox 3.0.10 within a day. You can get old FF versions here and here. I could not find Firefox 3.0.13 available anywhere. But those two sites only go up to 3.0.11.

How to revert to an older version of Firefox? Just go and get the old version manually and install it on top of the new one. You might have a problem with bookmarks though.

Leave a comment

Filed under Browsers, Computers, Software