Oh, you'd think so, wouldn't you?

Couple of years back I tried to build my dad a cheap wordprocessing machine. I got a pentium II, 64MB RAM-type one, put Ubuntu with fluxbox and Abiword on it. Boot time: 4 minutes. Time to usable Abiword: 2 minutes. Probably spent most of that swapping in and out. Then the UI was _crawling_. My dad quipped that "wow, Linux must be for rich people".

So I had to swap that with a Win98, Word97 setup and suddenly it was flying.

When this sort of box was the state of art, Ubuntu didn't exist, and AbiWord was just starting out. Can't blame them they didn't care to make their product fast enough - after all, devs just use nice new machines, right?

On an old box Linux might be great for VIM but that's not all everyone needs :)

Now you've got me dreamin'...
I would so love a crappy but dirt cheap machine. $5 for a Pentium II, 32MB RAM laptop with ethernet :)
Put Firefox 1 and Windows 98 on it, and I'd get a few, if only to play NFS2 and chat on skype :)

How much faster would my internet access get if all spam were to cease?

You need to read the original from end to end then :)

And Firefox is a bad name? How about Chrome, Excel, Opera and Skype?

Names are not supposed to be descriptive, although sometimes it helps. They're supposed to be catchy, short and easy to pronounce/spell.

OK, fifteen pages of complainers who have no idea about HCI now... let me give you a clue.

Icons are beneficial in all interfaces - menus, file managers, toolbars, you name it. They let you find what you're looking for faster. The human brain is optimized to recognize and analyze colors and shapes. When you're confronted with a menu of 10 programs, research shows you find yours more easily by looking for the circular blue-and-red icon than the words "Mozilla Firefox".

Factors in icon design include:
- A clear shape. Firefox is a circle, VS is an infinity symbol, Notepad is a rectangular notebook, and Word is a W in a square.
- Evocative colors. A red cross means delete, a green tick means confirm, yellow-black strips mean security, gray means utility application
- A unique, simple, recognizable design. Your brain sees it a few times and henceforth only looks for the icon, because it's less strain than reading the text.

If you don't trust me, perhaps you'll believe:
Microsoft
Apple

Monkey fur is closer in color to black human skin than to white human skin. If you don't realize that, well...

Ah. Being from Eastern Europe, I didn't know that, really interesting. I thought all christians interpret Genesis literally, I know my dad does.

Er, what? The Catholic Church doesn't believe in creationism? Care to elaborate?

What?

In a development environment, you run something like ProPolice, so your app crashes loudly when a buffer overflows.

Clearview is for production, where the safety of the user is at stake.

Link for those interested: http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

Hey, _I_ like Vista. Does give me a BSOD now and then, and I had to use DosBox for a few things, but it makes me happy otherwise. Speedy, good looking, well organized, simple UI, good app support for what I use, and mostly just works.

Funnily, "get over" and "get across" always made sense to me (I'm Bulgarian). There's the timeline of your life, and a bulge on it, meaning a problem. You need to climb over the bulge to continue, so, "get over". Conversely, the brains of people are (still) separated by two auditory systems, two speech systems, and an amount of empty space. So, it seems right to say that getting your thoughts across those boundaries is called, well, "get your point across".

You don't actually know what you're talking about do you? For starters, this would make the XUL overlay extensibility model impossible. The big gain of XUL is being able to control all aspects of behavior and look at runtime, which in Mozilla products manifests as extensions, themes, userChrome.css...

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Noone