Not in the short haul because the mass that creates the gravity well usually stays within that galaxy. Long haul, as in several trillion years, the two black holes will orbit as before when they both were just stars, but the gravitational waves they emit is a loss of system energy and they will slowly spiral into each other until they merge. But that may take longer for most of them than the universe is old. We are actively looking for the gravity wave that would indicate two such black holes have merged as it will have a distinct waveform.

Cheers, Gene

Actually, and this was only my 2nd position east of the river, I am in north central WV. And I probably work too cheap when I do, because I don't mind "keeping a hand in". And while I can walk to fishing water, the fish seem to have a different little black book than I used in western SD's Black Hills 50 some years ago. But I have enough hobbies to keep me out of the bars, which also counts heavily. Deer hunting, and I like venison, is spotty as I can no longer run up and down on these right in your face hills, and I can't find a boot that is both comfy and keeps my diabetic (I'm a DM-II for the last 30 years) feet warm. But I still hit the range, punching paper to "keep a hand in".

Speaking of fishing, one of my 2 year jobs was in N.W. NM., Farmington TBE. So yes, I have fished the world famous San Juan River below the Navajo Dam. Its barbless hook rules there, and its crazy, you have to wear long johns inside your chest waders 3 miles below that dam as its 600 feet deep and a bottom dumper. In 115F air temps, the water is maybe 35F, and the 12" Brown you just pulled in feels like he's frozen solid when you grab him to unhook and release. But he put up a fight all out of proportion to his size. You can't help but give them a salute as you place them back in the water.

Its been quite a ride so far, and I don't regret too much of it in the long view although my first wife had a stroke at 34 and died. With 3 kids, that was a rough couple years before I found some help willing to say I do.

But I'll not bore with a really long winded session of blowing my own horn.

Hotlanta is someplace I might like to visit, for 2 or 3 days... But an old uncle once said that company was like fish, should be thrown out after 3 days. ;-)

Cheers, Gene

The other side of that coin is:

Is the new opportunity worth the hassle of starting over in some locale where the COL is 3 times higher, your rights are much more restricted, no big game hunting because of the population density precludes the use of even a bow and broad heads, despite the fact that you'll wreck a car a year running into said big game, and its 4 hours to someplace where drowning a worm might get you fish for dinner.

That occurred to me when a head hunter called me, offering 10% more to be the Chief Engineer at a tv station in the top 25 market. But it would have come with all of the above limitations. Even at 200%, which said tv station could well afford, it wasn't worth it to me.

Basically I had found my place back in 1984. I can walk to hunt deer or fish, COL is 1/2rd that of the big city, the house that came with the girl I married in 1989 has been paid off for 15 years, and stayed here till I retired 12 years ago. Technically, my reputation for being able to walk on water when the boat has already sank has been well established, and I still get yells for help occasionally. As a technician who can actually fix things, I am a C.E.T. & have what used to be a 1st phone license before the commission threw us under the bus, we are a dying breed, literally, and I find that I have, at nearly 80 yo, inherited some of the local radio broadcasters, because the engineer they were calling when the cash cow laid down and went dry, had died.

But the surprising detail most find hard to believe is that I am not a "papered" engineer, I have an 8th grade education, but was good enough with electronics that I quit school in the middle of my freshman year in high school, mostly due to health/allergy problems, and went to work fixing what was then these new-fangled things called televisions. Circa 1948-49. And yet the medical help locally available is pretty good. In early June, about a month ago, I woke up, just barely conscious and couldn't breath, on the bedroom floor while trying to tie my shoes to take the better half out for dinner, a pulmonary embolism that damned near punched my ticket. The better half, sitting in the car waiting, finally came back in to see what the holdup was & called 911. They got me to the local shop, started the clot-buster, and shipped me off to a larger facility. I am not 100% yet, but getting there, and TBT I feel better now than I have in years.

The guy from ultrasound looked at my heart with its blown up 2x right half as it was trying to pump into the blockage, for about an hour. I presume looking for places that ought to be bypassed or stented, couldn't find any and said once its shrunk back to normal, you ought to be good for another decade. 2-3 months to shrink again. Sort of feels like getting a warranty renewal but there is no such thing in life.

So I'll be here to pester you folks for a while yet, offering my comments on having observed life for nearly 80 years now. Some comments will come from my experience as a working joat, I am a decent mechanic and am now playing with smaller CNC machinery. I've also made some furniture & remodeled a few guns over the last 50 years.

I rather enjoy being close to the biggest frog in the pond, even if the pond is just Pedersons Puddle. It has its advantages.

Cheers, Gene

- Cookies aren't remembered properly.
- The font cache corrupts and requires restart of the browser at regular interval (unless you like Chinese Unicode squiggles taking the place of your normal page text).

Works fine here, and I haven't seen anyone else with these problems.

The original coding team were ditched, the replacements were all new - the forums/blogs describing this were purged but you can still find them if you try really hard.

No, the original coding team is still there. There were several hundred developers. A handful left when they switched to WebKit. Some people were making up stories about entire teams being let go, but that turned out to be a lie.

That means that a tiny percentage of developers are actually new, which happens to be something that happens naturally.

By the way, if you can prove that the original team is gone, please do so. But it's weird that you claim the original team is gone when members of the original team are still at Opera, saying that they weren't.

People who start on new versions? If there are less of those than your ENTIRE existing customer base, you're losing out.

Maybe short-term but not necessarily long-term. The new Opera is apparently getting new users at a much faster rate than the old one and fewer people stop using it than the old version as well.

See replies to this post - a lot of old-time supporters, people who were buyers of the software over a decade ago and still using it, have left it behind.

Not really "a lot." When there are millions of users, a handful of people is not really relevant. Also, as they reported to their owners, the new Opera is growing faster than the old one ever did.

Bug reports used to be answered. Your snarky answer is precisely the problem - nobody cares about replying to them now. And most of them are literally WILLNOTFIX.

Bug reports did not get answers back in the day either. In fact, if you had read the forums you would have known that this is something people have been complaining about for years.

They removed the entire mail and chat clients, the integrated Bittorrent download, the bookmarks, the entire UI customisability (the strongest point of Opera), the kiosk modes, all the stuff that made them unique. Go download a 12.16 and look how many features there are that just aren't there.

They still weren't removed. Removing is taking something away. They made the new Opera from scratch so there was nothing to take away.

Nobody knows that the Desktop version grew. The only numbers you have are from Opera themselves. It was already a niche player.

Actually, Opera is required by law to report accurate information to its owners. The numbers from Opera are also audited. So yes, there is actual documentation on the growth.

The dev team CHANGED. It was announced several times on the forums. The old ones were shown the door, the new ones only broke the old codebase and couldn't advance it.

This is a lie. No such thing was announced on the forums. Why on earth would they announce something like this on the forums anyway?

If the old team was shown the door, how come all those people from the old team are still posting as Opera employees on the blogs and forums?

It was part of the reason they "started again" - they didn't know how to do anything else (and Linux, etc. clients were left in the wake of the change).

This is yet another lie. The old team is still there. In fact, the first Opera patch for WebKit was made by a developer who has been there for more than a decade, IIRC.

Breaking it? See bugs at top of page - not present in 12.13 (before the dev change), present after and getting worse until 12.x branch was abandoned.

What? Those "bugs" that you mentioned at the top (that no one else is seeing) were supposed to be for Opera 15. We're talking about Opera 12 now.

You can't even keep your own lies straight...

And I used Opera since before 3.6. The number of bugs that weren't replied to, fixed in the next minor and never affected much (except the occasional rendering bug) were few and far between... or I wouldn't have paid for it, wouldn't have used it, wouldn't have fought for it, wouldn't still be mourning the loss of it.

Another lie. Had you read the forums you would have seen tons of unhappy people because of bugs.

Opera dev team were shown the door, new dev team can't get close to replicating their functionality even after - what - a year or so with NO HTML engine to worry about (Chrome handles all that now)?

Again, this is a lie. People from the original dev team are still posting as Opera employees on blogs and forums. Also, Opera is one of the main Blink contributors, so claiming that they have no engine to worry about is another lie.

If you don't know this stuff, you probably weren't using old Opera or weren't on the forums at the time all this was announced (before the new versions even existed).

It's clear that it is you who never used either of them.

Although I have gone from EDT to MDT & got right to work when I got there, I can't say as I suffered any more jet lag the next day than if I had put in a long day right here in EDT country.

But its been about a decade since last I flew commercial. I am a broadcast engineer, and when you are going someplace to play fireman and put out the fire in the cash cow, all of ones tools need to go along because you never know what you might need on the other end that home depot never heard of. You would be amazed at the sheer stupidity of TSA folks who can only see a specialty tool in the toolkit as some weapon they never heard of. Ignorance is fixable, stupid is not.

I was headed to the MI, UP to see about a tv transmitter the first time that happened, and I just rolled it all back out to the pickup and drove that thousand miles. Took my time, was only 2 days late, which in the end made zero difference. I haven't flown a commercial flight since. If I am needed that far away, then they can send Steve and the twin engine Cessna to get me. Very nice small plane, seats 8 in a pinch.

But now as I approach 80 yo, even that is about finished, the wife has COPD, and I don't feel its safe leaving her alone for 72+ hours.

Cheers, Gene

I wonder which Opera Execs received the goodies from google for them to fold their companies uniqueness/any reason to exist.

Sites not working and a mess of confusing features and slow growth is a reason to exist? Remember, after they dumped Presto they've started growing users again.

once it became a chrome re-skin

A skin is just a bunch of visual elements. Opera actually coded a new interface. Calling it a re-skin is just silly.

When exactly was it IE or nothing, pray tell? Was that before or after Netscape devolved into Mozilla? Was this on some magical timeline where Opera 2.0 was never released?

I think he's referring to sites blocking other browsers or not working. Mozilla and Opera weren't even relevant at all early on (no users = no compatibility). For a while after Netscape died there was basically just IE if you wantes to be able to actually browse the web.

they had the smallest, faster, most portable, most customisable browser which was *sold* as part of the Nintendo Wii launch (you call it The Internet Channel

And guess what, Nintendo dumped Opera when choosing a browser for the Wii U. Being small, fast and the most portable doesn't matter anymore. The hardware is fast enough to run just about anything anyway.

I'm suggesting that a company that makes MONEY by having users use it, should strive to keep those users. Rather than become yet-another-Chrome that even less people use.

Yeah, except Opera's reports to its owners indicate that the new Opera is growing faster than the old one ever did, and people who try it out are less likely to stop using it again.

They got bought out, they shipped off the developers that knew how to program, they ended up with a Windows-only Chrome frontend dependent on someone else to do the hard work of making them money.

Opera was never acquired. It's still an independent commpany.

They didn't ship off any developers, as most of the people who used to do development are still working for Opera.

Opera is not Windows-only. It was also released for Mac. and now Linux. And of course iPhone, Android, etc.

Someone else is not doing the hard work. Opera is one of the biggest contributors to the Chromium project.

But let's ignore the facts shall we...

And in the process lost a LOT of users, who are really their only revenue stream now that they DON'T pump out versions for other platforms like the Wii any more...

They didn't lose a lot of users. And besides, the new Opera is growing faster than the Presto-based Opera ever did anyway.

And of course, Opera's revenue has never been higher than it is now.

there hasn't been an update since the 15 series that actually did anything, and most of those updates broke stuff

What stuff was broken with updates after 15?

They are trying to play catch-up from an unnecessary code-base change to what they used to have.

If they hadn't changed, they would have lagged more and more behind. At least now they get the latest web tech.

The coding team has changed. The company has changed.

The coding team hasn't changed more than a team normally changes in a couple of years according to the teams themselves. The company has changed? All companies change.

There is no interest in preserving users any more.

Really? Because switching to Blink seems to be preserving users in a better way than the old version. Opera's report to its owners indicates that people who start using the new versions are less likely to move on to something else than versions before 15.

Bug reports get answered with "We haven't got around to that yet" or "We never intend to put that functionality back in.

You get answers to bug reports? That's new. When did they start doing that? Sounds like a massive improvement. On the other hand, bugs seem to be fixed at a much faster rate now than they used to.

They removed every major feature that did something useful, so it's now a very, very poor Chrome clone.

They didn't actually remove any features. They just started from scratch. It's far from being a Chrome clone. Just becase it's a simple browser doesn't make it a Chrome clone.

We hoped the company would see sense and start re-using that codebase after they realised their catastrophic mistake. It never happened.

A "catastrophic mistake" which made the desktop version grow faster in number of users than any versions before it? Right.

The only patches they ever put out to the "real" Opera codebase broke it along the way, presumably because they just don't understand the code at all.

Why would they suddenly stop understanding the code they wrote? Most of the same people who worked on Opera 12 are still working for Opera.

How did they break it when patching it? Got any examples? Or are you just making up things.

Funny thing is, simple changes in the old Opera often broke things. You know, when all the developers you mistakenly thought had left were still working actively on Presto.

Opera couldn't make any money. They're trying to survive.

Opera has been profitable for a long time. They've had tons of cash in the bank most of the time as well.