A few heated discussion.

I supposed all of these links to discussions I will post below wouldn’t necessairily be classified as “heated”, but I’m sure you will find them interesting.

First, an article by Keir Thomas, which has aroused much controversey, Firefox May Already Be Dead. In this well written article, which apparently can be offensive to some of the more, “spirited” Firefox users, is a great read, which earned it’s place on this post in most part by it’s comments.

Now another article by Keir Thomas, which was 5 days later, to “explain himself”, because of the controversey that his previous article, Firefox May Already Be Dead, caused for apparently many of it’s readers. This article in my opinion earned better and more interesting comments than his previous article, but that is for you to decide.

Now this next article is from a website you may not have heard about, but I may have blogged about before, a website called WePC.com. WePC.com is a website made by ASUS in partner with Intel. The whole idea behind WePC.com is a community, where users dream up computers, and ASUS together with Intel periodically builds. It’s a great community, that I think any computer user with what they think of as a good idea should come to.

This is an article called It all started with a dream, which is an article where the creators of WePC encourage it’s users to have a discussion about multiple touch screen computers. The resulting discussion is VERY good, albeit not always interesting, and not all of the comments exactly pertain to the discussion, it is still a very good discussion with many good ideas.

So here are your “heated” discussions, enjoy!

Re: Can IE8 Really Tempt You Back to Microsoft?

In response to This article on PC World:

I’m just trying to figure out why people are still using IE? Sure, some pages require you to run IE if you want to view them, but that’s why we Firefox users have an addon called IE Tab, which uses the IE rendering engine, and can fool almost every page requiring IE.

And what’s the whole topic about the “big” “changes” in IE8? For one, it looks a lot like it’s predecessor, which isn’t a big deal, but usually big innovations come with a new look, to mark their innovation (for example, Firefox 2 to Firefox 3. big cosmetic changes there). I have used a couple different IE8 betas, and wasn’t satisfied enough to upgrade the IE on my computer to the new IE8, and besides, it’s not like I use IE enough to merit the upgrade to IE8.

Why I might want to be on a social network…

I’ve said time and time again that I think that social networks are worthless, that they are a waste of time, and that I can’t quite understand why people use them, but every once in awhile I think “Wow, this would be a good random, useless fact that I could post on a Twitter or Facebook account.” The only reason that I think having an account at a social network like Twitter or Facebook, would be to post random little posts, so all those random thoughts I have can be on the internet somewhere where other people can read them. I once heard from someone that the purpose of his blog was to keep a lot of information in one place, so he can know where it is. Now I’m not saying I don’t like this blog, I really like that I get as many visitors a day as I do, and I like that I am getting more and more comments on here, some of which are actually asking for assistance. I really like seeing that my work is finally paying off, that I am getting some user feedback, some input, but sometimes I would like a place to post my random little thought, or maybe some other interesting things I read from a book, for me an account at Facebook or Twitter would be a place to store all of those. Now that doesn’t mean that I think the use of, say, MySpace is a good idea, I still think MySpace is a waste of time, but I do think that Twitter and Facebook, as annoying as some people on there are, and as pointless as some people’s posts are, which can compare to some of the Dullest Blogs’s posts, has a place.

I still think MySpace is a waste of time.

Why a fast internet connection wont necessairily help you out.

Some people still have Dial-up, with a speed of probably around 8 Mbps, which is extremely slow, as you know if you’ve ever used Dial-up before. Now I have a wireless internet connection that usually runs at about 54 Mbps, but is currently runnins at 48 Mbps, for some reason, but as I’ve noticed, no matter what I’m doing, on a Skype call, playing a game on InstantAction.com, playing some world building game or whatever, I’ve never used up more than about 5% or my internet connection, so whether or not I go and plug my computer into my Router, which will present me with around 100 Mbps, I still can’t utilize that connection, because I never, ever, get to more than 5% of my internet connection, no matter what I’m doing.

Bookmarklets

Some of you may have heard of Bookmarklets, possibly from this LifeHacker story, Ditch your extensions for Bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are kinda like extensions, or addons as we Firefox users are used to calling them, except that they aren’t something you install into a browser, Bookmarklets are a bookmark, that does something. And in the case of Bookmarklets, can take the place of some addons. Here are my three favorite Bookmarklets.

1. Capture Screenshot. Capture Screenshot is a bookmarklet that takes a screenshot of the current webpage. To use you go to the webpage you want a screenshot of, and click the Capture Screenshot bookmark on your bookmarks toolbar. Once you click the Capture Screenshot bookmarklet a new tab will open with the picture of that webpage in it. Here’s an example of my taking a screenshot of the login page for Yahoo! mail. 
Now on the right of the screen you will see a small box, with a sliding bar labeled “size:”. If you drag it to the left or the right the image will grow smaller or larger, depending on which way you drag it. To select part of the webpage just click and drag your mouse over the part or parts you want to select. Now once you do this you will notice the “width:” and “height:” boxes that were gray and unusable are now usable, which you can now input different numbers for length and width of your selection. Once you’ve got the selection you want just click the “Cut Out” button, which will take us to a differnt webpage where you can post this image to your website or Flickr, add an annotation to your selection, add a video comment to your selection, email it to a friend, or get the HTML code to embed it on your website. Also on this page you can decide on the Size of your image selection, you can decorate it by adding a border, rounding the image or adding a shadow (you can also customize the shado color). To use this bookmarklet click and drag it into your Bookmarks Toolbar.

Capture Screenshot

2. I found this addon on ChromePlugins.org, while I was looking for Chrome addons. Bookmarklets are commutable, meaning that they can go between different browsers, so I decided to try and see if this addon, Chrome Split Browser, worked in Firefox. It does, so this is a very cool addon, or bookmarklet, depending on what you want to now call them, which can take the place of some addons, and built in features of newer browsers. Chrome Split Browser does just what it’s name describes, it splits the browser into two frames, which can both hold a different webpage, for easier comparing and for other reasons. Here’s a snapshot of the bookmarklet in action:

Chrome Split Browser

3. Download PDF is a bookmarklet that will let you go to a certain website and download a .PDF version of that webpage. All you have to do is go to the website you want a .PDF copy of, click the Download PDF bookmarklet, which will take you to a webpage from pdfdownload.org, which will prompt you to download a .PDF file, which is the .PDF equivalent of the webpage you decided to download.

Download PDF

Note, to use any yof these bookmarklets just click and drag the Capture Screenshot, Chrome Split Browser and/or Download PDF link into your browser bookmarks bar.