Byebye IE, welcome Mozilla!

[janestarz]

There were a lot of rumours around that Windows wasn't safe and that there's enourmous holes in the security of Internet Explorer as well. It does get one to think. What if Bill Gates gets large sums of money for producing software that is as leaking as a basket (you know the expression, I s'pose), from the Spammers and the Hackers? Beause let's face it. Windows is about the only OS that has a real position on the gaming market. Games sort of depend on the instability of Windows to make sure the right Pillars of Programming to fall over in order to nudge the sound driver to work properly for that latest game, right? I mean, no offense but an Mac is hardly worth gaming on. The look is horrid, the feel is even worse because what will you do with that control-key if all you do is use apple-c and apple-v to copypaste? Admittedly, Macs are stable, until something goes wrong because it then goes bery bery bery wrong indeed. AND it's hard to fix. I mean, since Mac machines are sort of not-done in this gaming society where status is everything and away is just for wussies, who is going to know how the innards of a Mac work?

So I booted IE out of my Quickstart bar (I'm not going to get rid of Windows 98SE just yet, I'm too addicted to Ann0 1602, the Sims, Transport Tycoon deLuxe, Civilization I and II, and Settlers I and II for that!), and installed Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. I must say I'm very impressed by Thunderbird. Last time I tried to install an e-mail program, it was Eudora, and it brought in the Gator as well. Now I don't hold with those kind of spyware programs, so I let NoKey kill off the Gator thingy, from the reg as well (!!!) and then swore off e-mail programs.
KMail, at Linux, is a great thing though! I was impressed by its raw looks, no-nonsense-bare-text-screw-html-e-mails attitude, and wanted something for my W98SE thing like that as well. And I found it in Mozilla Thunderbird.

Firefox, now whoa, twilightbanana was overreacting when he said it took 10 minutes to set up. It was actually less than that. And I could finally edit my bookmarks just like with Konqueror to have them look the way I want to. No longer the bookmark says "Queen of Wands, Monday april xxth, updated every Monday Wednesday and Friday!" but now it just says "Queen of Wands". Wonderful. Simple, clean, straightforward. Just the way I love it. I only have one point of qritique. The icon in the taskbar is a Windows window.

In other, slightly less exciting but sure as hell pumped up on adrenaline newsfront: NoKey and I saw Kill Bill yesterday. And boy, that movie is wicked. It rocks my socks though. And we were both drooling at the wonderful katana's. It's a dream of us, to go to Japan and have katana's custom-made for us. Gonna cost at least a fortune, but at least it's a nice dream. Raww japanese steeellll *drools*

Comments

[janestarz.livejournal.com]

Is using IE for banking smart? It being as waterproof as a net?

[elektron.livejournal.com]

It's banking on a potentially spyware-ridden computer which isn't smart. Banks have no incentive to send you trojans, since they have your money anyway.

I never figured out why so many banks require IE. And if not, JavaScript (ick).

[tamhavik.livejournal.com]

I use netscape myself, but firefox is good too! (I especially like the name ;) ) I don't use IE at all! Only when I'm on a university computer, they don't have anything else *sticks out tongue* stupid university.
I last made a website that looked good in netscape, but not in IE. Usually it's the other way around... I don't understand why. IE is really stupid.

Enough said about ie. About japanese katana's! I always like those too! Although I'm not sure I would enjoy Kill Bill (from what I've heard). *grins*

[janestarz.livejournal.com]

It's a gorey, wicked, filled-with-pointless-violence movie. I love it.

[elektron.livejournal.com]

Um, you use the control key to type control characters. And as a key other than command (which is good for gaming). If you want the most useless key, it's the windows key (and then there's the macro key or something, and the contextual menu key, and scroll lock and num lock).

And though gaming is decent at best (and not as cost-effective as a throw-together-parts-for-a-couple-hundred-with-pirated-windows PC), Quake 3 is decent. Except renice doesn't work properly (nice -n 20 processes like to run anyway), so I have to remember to killall -STOP.

While I don't like the let's-not-let-anyone-figure-out-how-this-computer-works attitude at Apple, my brother has managed to slimify his old iMac (after the monitor died, three years and a day after it was bought, no less), and change hard drives around several times. I can probably add another HD if I run an IDE cable out through the front, and add a power connector (though it's probably better to just buy a FireWire drive box). The ickiest part is Mac vidro cards.

Hardware problems are mostly limited to the design flaws, and bad RAM. I've never had a software problem which required a reformat/reinstall, nor is the system more stable/faster after reinstalling (since if there's crap slowing everything down, you can remove it).

The best deal is probably a throw-parts-together PC for gaming, and a cheap Mac for everything else (I'd never use Windows as a primary OS, because I'd miss tcsh and everything else).

And the uptime is fun to brag about too =P