"There's no such thing as "intuitive" computer interfaces."

I don't know who you are, but I wish I worked with you. I hear 'I don't like it, it isn't intuitive enough. I don't know what would be better though.' pretty much every day. What they MEAN is 'It looks different. I'm really comfortable with the old text based system. Why do we need buttons again?'

A corollary to your statement is that no UI interaction should be irreversible without a warning. Warnings/Alerts should be restricted to important notifications, so as to avoid training the user to blindly accept them.

It's funny to me (in that painful way) that the average 10 year old can load up the latest video game and be fully into the action in ten, twenty minutes tops. But you put a an average 30 year old in front Excel without a training course and it takes two years before they realize that they can sort tables.

Speed of sound is related to temperature ONLY. It is for this reason (ultimately) that turbo-props are most efficient for short flights, and turbofan for long flights.

Most of a ~200 mile commercial flight is spent ascending and descending. Not so much time spent at cruising altitude. Props are significantly more efficient at low altitudes, compared to turbofans. Recall that we are talking about turbine engines in both cases! The 'burn fuel in air' part of the engine is *exactly* the same. The efficiency comes down to the type of blades you're spinning - a few very long unenclosed blades work great -- right up until you have to spin the blades so fast that the Mach-effects of one blade start interfering with the air around the next blade. The fan in the turbofan uses a bunch of smaller blades designed to avoid Mach-effects of this nature. So when those effects start to come into play you see the efficiency of turbofans stay the same (basically) while the efficiency (and eventually capability, if you keep climbing) of the turboprop plummets.

Of course there's all sorts of craziness regarding gear ratios and a bazillion other things that I completely ignored here. But as a high level overview, it's not worthless.

If you can do VTOL, you design for sea level -- a huge portion of your fuel/energy tends to go into getting you up and down. So how high can you CRUISE on a prop designed for optimal performance at sea level? At a guess, closer to 5km/12k feet than to 10km/33K feet, driven by the weight-cost of pressurizing the beast. But there are a bunch of variables:

- What speed do you want to cruise at?
- What is your range? Is it WORTH getting to 30k (40k, 50k, 12k) feet, only to start descending as soon as you do?
- How much can you feather your prop blades? (Change their pitch, letting you spin the blade faster at high altitudes while decreasing blade turbulence)
- What is your L/D? (Lift to drag ratio) At sea-level, your optimal speed may be 200mph. At 30K feet you have to go 300mph for the same amount of lift. Lift to drag ratio tells you that the amount of energy required to overcome that induced drag is the same for 200 mph and sea level as it is for 300mph and 30K feet.
(But that doesn't take prop drag into account. If your prop flies apart because you have to turn it at 20K rpm to stay in the air at 30K feet, all bets are off.)
- more and more, and weather, and a lot about temperature, and how much does it cost to pressurize the cabin, etc).

As for ultimate limits, the difference between stalling and breaking the sound barrier was about 50 knots for the U2 flights. That may have been plus or minus 50', but I think it was actually +/-25. Memory fails. Anyway, 68K feet is a *seriously* nerve-wracking place to fly if your airplane can't do Mach.

The F-15 managed a zoom-climb 'somewhere in the region of' 70K (I've seen 80k cited) feet. That is 'go as fast as you can at the highest altitude that your engines stay lit, and then dive, to go even faster. Then, at a very exact point determined by guys with slide rules, kick on the after-burners and start climbing at a particular angle. Then your engines burn out, then you coast. If you are in the united states and flying an F15, you launch a missile that destroys a satellite. Then plummet back to earth completely out of control, because there is no air going across your control surfaces. And hope you don't enter at the wrong angle, because there are ways you can come back to earth which would preclude you re-lighting your engines in time to save the plane. Nobody WANTS to eject.'

about 8 seconds, at 30K feet in a decompression situation.

Or so I recall hearing. I'm sure there's plenty of better sources than me, on /. ;~)

Troll? Really?

+1 to parent.

It became commonly known as 'Nutscrape' for a reason. And that reason started with 'version 4' and ended with 'communicator'. 'Of disease' was left implicit.

I jest. Netscrape Communicator crashed far to often to allow a virus any time to take over your PC.

Anarchy is the absence of the *need* for rules. Anarchists ala the stereotype are just a bunch of idiots and the occasional hopeful fool wishing for simpler times.

If you miss the part about need, and just take away the rules, you simply end up with survival of the most heavily armed/armored.

Windows Freedom.

(shoot me)

Ah, actually gp post is right. What he/she refers to is called 'capitalism'. As opposed to what 'our forefathers' argued for, which was 'well regulated capitalism'. There's a very, very large difference.

Freedom, as touted by free market folks, has a very well defined meaning*.

*Anything which makes me more money, regardless of how much it actually restricts true freedom of world markets.

Name one other browser that even makes an attempt at supporting Group Policy.

Now you know why MS is the number one browser in enterprise today.

If you are naive enough to believe that MSIE stole the game from Netscrape, then I have to hope that you are simply too young to remember Netscrape 4.0. IE crushed the market because 'Netscape' simply SUCKED. IE keeps the enterprise because nobody else has bothered with GP. Change is *hard*. As a sysadmin, any time you can be certain that 90%+ of all settings for an app are the same across your enterprise, you JUMP at the chance.

If you are naive enough to believe that ANY browser is "secure" then you are simply an idiot, and age can be no excuse at all - unless you're 12 or younger, I suppose. If you, personally, are targeted by a remotely skilled script-kiddie, your secrets belong to the world. Unless you PAY ATTENTION, and keep your entire environment up to date, patched, and locked down to the highest degree you can manage. And then you stand a *chance*.

Finally: This has absolutely nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior. While we could argue if it is just an idiotic knee-jerk reaction, YOU would come up short, should you search for evidence supporting any argument that relates to monopoly practices. Choice. Exists. Period. Chrome, FF, Opera, Lynx. Three of those are all various degrees of 'better than' the current version of IE. ALL FOUR are various *orders of magnitude* better than IE6 on XP. Which is what this breach is about.

Yeah. IE6. Can't think where I might pick me up something better than THAT.

"The solution is going to be that eventually kids will get used to the idea that they shouldn't bring things in that scare their administrators"
*twitch*

" unless we can somehow reduce the risk that people are going to come and shoot their classmates,"

To negative numbers? The chances of a kid dying in a violent crime involving explosives at a school are so low that you need a scientific calculator to display them. Compare that to the mortality rate in high-school football: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/19980610033631data_trunc_sys.shtml

The problem won't be solved until idiots that fail to understand basic statistics aren't allowed to graduate high school. Though jailing any idiot that ever excuses incidents like this with any permutation of the phrase "they['re] do[ing] the best they can".

There's a quote which I fear I cannot find in order to cite, but to paraphrase:
"If all the well-intentioned were killed at birth, the remaining evil-doers would be small potatoes by comparison."

"Why the hell would they recommend counseling for a non-violent and non-criminal act?"

Being mind-raped by the State causes mental trauma.

Oh. Wait. That couldn't be it.

What's the temperature outside: T[K]
How many inches of water did it rain last night: d[cm]
What's the circumference of the Earth: 2*pi*Re[km]
do you *really* think you were exact when you used 186,000 mi/s or 300,000 km/s : c[m/s]
that the Earth rotates in exactly 24 hours: Who the hell uses days? It's omega(e)[1/s] <-- little omega-sub-e, for earth

I think there was a period of about two years where I didn't turn in a single math paper that had 'a number' as the answer to a problem. In fact, I'd be pretty damned surprised if I turned in a single answer that contained a floating point number anywhere in it. Except perhaps to point out how fast ODE45 can go to hell.

Even for those things where you are inherently using a floating point number (PI), you use the symbol. PI *is* the ratio. Properly taught trig *is* exact. You do not refer to the result of a sine/cosine/tan etc operation as a number unless it *happens* to be expressible as a ratio of integer values. For which there are lookup tables, proofs, or the TI-89 ;~)

I would guess that *most* fields that actually use math find it very, very important that problems remain in algebraic for as long as possible. Certainly any field that uses numeric solvers. Sound odd? Off hand, in orbital mechanics you have the option of just tossing in a solved set of three, 3x3 matrices, which are dotted together. These suckers are chock full of sines and cosines. Or you can solve it out by hand, and end up with the 3x3 resultant with something like 20 fewer sine/cosine operations.

Firefox has vastly exceeded my expectations. But the hype and smugness just turn on my rant mode. Sorry about that. But I'd say you rather confirmed my premise on the extensions ;~)

I'd be hard pressed to consider going 64bit as an innovation. It's an implementation detail. At a guess, FF probably runs slower in 64bit than in 32bit on most operating systems. Unless they significantly optimized some code on their way through.

As for projecting desires, I consider the few things I listed as fundamental violations of 'open' software; decisions that highlight the 'we know better' mentality of the FF core devs. Something I would expect from Microsoft. If I were to have itemized the reasons why I prefer Opera over FF from a pure usability perspective, I would accept the 'projecting' argument.

>> "FF had tabs long before most other browsers (except perhaps Konquerer)"

> "I think that feature (and many others) were primarily copied from Opera."

One of the handful of reasons I despise Mozilla and Firefox was highlighted there: Mozilla has made little to no effort to acknowledge that everything good about Firefox was simply vacuumed from others - mostly Opera. Hey, Moz, it's cool that you took everything and made it open source and free, but don't pretend to be innovative.

There is one and only one instance of innovation that I can find in Firefox: The extensions are powerful enough that some folks have made real, significant, useful applications. Bluntly, Firebug has changed the development world. I wouldn't even have the most *remote* estimate at how many millions of developer hours have been saved by Firebug, world wide. But it was Firebug.

I don't know who is leading the train at Mozilla for Firefox, but I've disagreed with pretty much every significant implementation change that has been made to Firefox. "Fixing" the File input tag by disabling paste? Completely ignoring the fact that SSL Certificates were not created to support Verisign? And *refusing* to allow any level of setting to disable these and other 'important' issues? Force feeding users Java Quick Start (anyone ever see IO counts on that thing. Dear god!)?

If Firefox does anything at all to make developing extensions more difficult without a universally obvious reason (Microsofts .NET viral extension comes to mind), they will be killing the one thing that actually differentiates Firefox from any other browser.

Thanks, that was the one thing that actually gave me any concern at all.

I can tell you now: if Firefox breaks Firebug, 99% of the worlds web developers will never upgrade past the last version it worked with.

Writing extensions to FF is already one of the most absurd instances of UI development I've ever had the misery to witness. Short of going to VB script, it's hard to imagine anything that could make it worse.