A wee bit o' forum help

[KathleenJ]

Have you encountered this crap where you try to post, and then it just tells you to log in, and nothing gets posted?
I get around that by copying my message and pasting it again after the log in screen. It always goes through the second time. A pain, I know. Gah, I miss the old phpbb board...that one with the big font and the dark bluey color scheme. That one wasn't always up, but it was most of the time, and it worked really well.

[Al_fayyed]

That happened to me a lot early on, but I'm pretty much logged in now. I did a whole bunch of stuff to create some sort of magic workaround, so I can't tell you exactly what it is that works, but it could be:

8) Using Netscape 6.2 instead of Internet Explorer. phpbb may be written by geeks who test only with Mozilla-based browsers.


Clicking on the login screen to log me in all the time. The cookie that's set seems to persist only when I use Netscape (see above), but goodness knows.

Waiting long enough for the KeenAdmins to figure it out.


Frankly, the text box is acting funky on me as I write this (I'm actually cutting and pasting from TextPad), so not everything is working completely yet.

- Akhmed

[Justinpie]

Yeah, I noticed that Netscape works better in this too. But it takes thrice as long to start up for me, and yields a ton more popup ads, so I usually tough it out with IE. I'm also safeguarding against glitches by copying the text to clipboard before submitting, which seems like the Internet equivalent of flinching, but oh well.

Regarding today's comic, I'm a little surprised that Teresa allows smoking in her house.

[KathleenJ]

She technically doesn't, but Dylan and Kristan are a pain in the ass to live with.

And I like the use of these happy yellow characters as bullet points, so I'm being a copycat.
And I should try this with Netscape! ...I'm not sure if I even have it on this computer anymore...
And I very much like the word "thrice".

[Dalhar]

Note, there's quite a difference between the older netscapes (up to.. 4.76?) and the newer ones (latest stable is 6.2). More or less rewritten, thst means.

Ah, and it seems i've stopped lurking here. Seems like there's something fun to do here, or three.
I'll promise to be nice!

[Al_fayyed]

I find Netscape 6.2 a lot more stable (eg, causes me fewer problems) than the previous Netscape sixes, although it's still not as good as Netscape 4.7 when it comes to not breaking. Some open-sourcer should get the old Netscape up to HTML 4 and whatever the current DOM and JavaScript standards are.

I think it's Windows ME, but on my system, Internet Explorer just loves to crash.

I think from now on, all my bullets will be emoti-bullets. They're far more attractive.

And I'm pretty sure Teresa doesn't hold much truck with forming death pacts in her house, either. That's always the problem with houseguests -- they really stretch one's patience.

- Akhmed

[Justinpie]

And I'm pretty sure Teresa doesn't hold much truck with forming death pacts in her house, either.

Oh yeah, that too. JPD is a very bad man though, so it's a tough call. But yeah, as a concept, I tend to frown upon it as well. Usually. I guess.

[KathleenJ]

First up...Welcome to the board, dalhar!
I think I will look into getting Netscape again on here, the newest if possible. I should be testing out webpages I make in both anyway.
As for death pacts, and their general acceptability...
I can't give anything away, but yeah, in theory this would be an extremely tough call for Teresa.
I like that the moral/ethical territory here is quite ambiguous.
[/i]

[Dalhar]

I find Netscape 6.2 a lot more stable (eg, causes me fewer problems) than the previous Netscape sixes, although it's still not as good as Netscape 4.7 when it comes to not breaking. Some open-sourcer should get the old Netscape up to HTML 4 and whatever the current DOM and JavaScript standards are.
- Akhmed

[ramble]
The problem with the old netscape base was, it was hopelessly jumbled. It had been added to and extended, all from the Netscape 1.0, with little cleaning or maintenance. The point of web browsers in this era was "as big as possible, as fast as possible", and the result was some huge piece mass of code noone could keep track of.
So the new project had make a new design from scratch, adding in pieces of code from the old Netscape where possible.
No one wants to work on the old netscape code anymore, because it was a nightmare.
(Microsoft is experiencing the same kind of problems, btw. Except their philosophy has been "As much income as possible for the least expenses possible.")

If you want to be on the bleeding edge, also in stability in some ways, try out Mozilla. What Netscape does, essentially, is pick up a version of Mozilla they like, add some Netscape & AOL stuff of their own, and release it as netscape. That's okay, because the Netscape folks do a lot of the work behind Mozilla.
The other part of the Netscape/Mozilla colloboration is the open sorce folks, who take the pieces from Mozilla they want, and make it into a flurry of browsers for different purposes. The open source folks excels at bug reports, debugging and interesting new additions, so it weights out well.

Mozilla almost exclusively works on optimizations and stability by now (they're nearing their official 1.0 release, which I guess is parallel to Netscape 7.0), so I don't think it's any more dangerous than Netscape.
[/ramble]

[KathleenJ]

I've always had this little aversion to Netscape, which I think is based on the fact that it was what we had back when the internet was fairly new, and we had this shitty beepy dialup connection and everything was as speedy as molasses in Alaska.
I have many memories of watching that little logo with the cosmos swirling around the "N", while spending what seemed like several hours waiting for pictures to appear line by line.
I admit I don't know anything about its coding, then or now...I just have this aversion reaction to it and its logo.
And I've wanted to try Mozilla for a long time. Maybe I should actually do it...my IE has been doing a lot of misbehaving lately.
SIDEBAR! Anyone see that movie, the name of which escapes me, in which the heroes are these computer geeks in a garage in favor of open-source code, but one of them sells out and goes to work for this guy that IS Bill Gates with a different name, but pseudo-Gates is running this evil company that's all into murders and conspiracies...
No point here, I just like movies where nerds are the heroes.
Even though it really wasn't THAT good a movie.

[Al_fayyed]

That movie was Antitrust, and I didn't see it because I saw the trailer on an iBook in the office of the head of my university's Computer Science department, and we all couldn't stop laughing. The monitoring satellites thing worked for Enemy of the State, but believing a private corporation could pull something off like that is like believing that the whole "Starlink" thing from Time Crisis 2 was anything more than the feeblest of excuses to shoot many, many commandos.

- Akhmed

[KathleenJ]

You were wise not to see it, my friend.
That's an hour and a half of my life I wouldn't mind having back.

but believing a private corporation could pull something off like that ...

But don't you see, that's what they WANT you to think! And then BLAM, when you least expect it, private corporations have installed monitoring toilet-cameras and god knows what else in your home and places of work for no apparent reason! Didn't you see all those scientific "Caught on Tape" shows on the Fox channel?
Don't you see how far this conspiracy goes?!!
Eh, I'm done. Yeah, the sattelite thing's bull-plop.
And now I'm wondering whether that movie contained the credit line "any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental"...

[Justinpie]

When I heard of this, I immediately thought of two films: the thing with Noah Wiley where it's like "The Steve Jobs/Bill Gates story" that basically goes in and details MS's rise to power (like, that Windows was originally created by Xerox, and Gates ripped it off, while the Mac version was actually being built by Macintosh from the ground up). I forget the title, but it was like "Silicon Pirates" or something.

The other movie I thought of was this thing where Paul Reiser was like trapped in some automated highrise building after hours, and it had like robots and lasers and stuff, even though it was like a bank or something. It was basically Die Hard, but with robots instead of Germans. And Paul Reiser in the Bruce Willis role.

[Dalhar]

Feh. It's what happens when you take something quite complicated and try to make it simple, isn't it?

I mean, do we buy the story of some kind of bat-man jumping high buildings and saving the world from some kind crazy masterminds? Isn't it quite, er, simple, compared to the real thing?


I guess you have to grow up with computers if you'll be able to deal with these things, most people just don't know enough to grasp these kinds of problems.
If the big mass of customers don't know of certain problems, the market mechanisms of "people won't buy things they don't like" won't work properly.

And I'm tired of people calling Bill Gates "evil". He's a salesman, he drives a sales organization who also happens to adapt and sell software. Any company in this situation would have done about the same, and will, unless enough people stop letting themselves be run over.
If you're talking about evil here the question as if it's evil to use too much resources on keeping a healthy and profitable business under the terms given.