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The Release Notes are here. A link to Mozilla 0.9.3 is at the top of the page so I would assume Netscape 6.1 is based on it.

I anyone able to browse http://localhost? I am not able to do so :-(. It just redirects me to Netscape search.

I'm running Suse 7.1 on Intel.

Hit his URL:
http://developer.netscape.com/support/faqs/champio ns/javascript.html#7 for Netscape's guide to how to use JS to change user prefs...

can't seem to find that feature in IE or Netscape

Well of course not. After all, the article did say modern browsers. I'm sure they're probably refering to mozilla or Konqueror since we all know that IE universally sucks and Netscape is dead.


--BEGIN SIG BLOCK--
I'd rather be trolling for goatse.cx.

You click a button in [your favorite mail application, any platform] ; that in turns sends a simple text message, with the crc or checksum and if they match (either the client software, or the server, you choose) they show as matching, moved to a cleared folder, application dependant.

Applications can compete on how they use the results. One good idea could be to filter out non matching results, or to send them to a junk folder - or simply showing a certain icon.

The real key to the system is this: if spammers are creating a crc which is being used over and over to send to multiple clients via redirecters and other cleaver tricks, hit a button and simply vote it spam. Use a weighted system to eventually filter out the same message. But running the headers throught the checksum would stop most spammers since the TO: field would most likely change.

Simple text messaging that can be used by any programmer, and there are many non GPL, examples of how to compare two checksums.

Guessing the server would carry all the checksums, a good idea would be to add an revokation date which can be set client side either defaulted or user configurable.

Really the whole thing is simple. Just block people from mass e-mailing. Test the system for a while then add the spam blocking to see which crc's where voted spam, cross that with the volume of e-mails by that person. Although the system suddenly became huge, but off site computers could do the computing, not the servers.

E-mail is a huge thing. Linux sends e-mails to my wireless phone without any user interaction. The system better be ready for people who use e-mail like an instant message.

Now it comes to mind - if my pop server software (and maybe all isp's) would just check the crc against the server that would save everyone.

Even MS could get into the game with Hotmail and their own MS CRC server...

This is my manifesto:

Get your free hotmail address - Now with hailstorm and E-mail signing - Free (biometrics required)

----checksumurl--http://checksig.msn.com:7235----
ka;dddjdppwo3as-e34-44444uv2-84urrhpwerrupw34gdgh
4-0394uvm-03485umt5jt-5ut059u-02-95uy05u25uy5fdgh
442i0934it-09utury]==-04904g2-5t8528-b09-2ururt45
----email--checksum:--0x485ksro842---------------

Among other things, in reply to a few comments above, cookies cannot be "standardized" so that multiple sites on different domains can grab it "whenever they want".

From the spec:
If there is a tail match, then the cookie will go through path matching to see if it should be sent. "Tail matching" means that domain attribute is matched against the tail of the fully qualified domain name of the host.

Sorry for the off-topic post...but since we are talking about a possible unified web standard, other web standards such as cookies will inevitably come up.

My guess is that is it. You can find it at:

ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/netscape6/english/6.1_P R1/unix/linux22/xpi

But if Mozilla development continues at this rate, we have nothing to worry about, and there is a fine alternative, Konqueror, if for some reason Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner is prevented from continuing development of Mozilla due to the new anti-GPL/viral clauses in their EULAs.

Am I the only one who noticed that Netscape released the first preview of Netscape 6.1 based on Mozilla 0.9.1???? Well they did, and it rules.

Microsoft = Communism!

That's right, the world's largest software company is little more than a Maoist personality cult bent on world domination! Just look at the facts:

• Microsoft's .NET architecture is moving power away from independent PCs and towards centralized servers. .NET is collectivization for the 21st century!
• Microsoft software controls 95% of the world's personal computers. Windows is the software equivalent of a single-party political system!
• Microsoft ruthlessly squashes all opposition by giving away for free services you would otherwise have to pay for - a classic Communist tactic!
• Chairman Bill wears little round glasses! See any resemblance?
• Chairman Bill donates millions to charity. That's the kind of 'redistribution of wealth' our great country was founded to oppose!

The links about it are still available online -- Slashdot played it's role in events.

• Slashdot reports that Hotmail is out of service, 24 Dec 1999
• Slashdot report on auction, 18 Jan 2000
• C|Net coverage of the auction, 18 Jan 2000

Try Netscape 6.1 PR 1, it's much better than the crappy Netscape 6.0 browser, if you've not tried it, give it a go and let them know what you think (select Help > Feedback Center), even if Mozilla based browsers get a 20% market share it should be enough to encourage webmasters to code to standards and write pages to work anywhere.

BTW Netscape 6.1beta1 is now out and it's based on Mozilla 0.9.1 it's a MASSIVE improvement over Netscape 6.01 and 6.0 which were quite frankly a joke, therefore Netscape's not dead yet and if we can get AOL to support Netscape/Mozilla then there's a good future for the browser.

Under Windows, you probably want Netscape 6.1 (*not* 6.01, which is *way* too unstable).

You will find NS6.1 to be very privacy friendly (though two of your features are missing: JavaScript per domain and images by size).

It's based on the Mozilla 0.9.1 release which is very nice, and usable on it's own, but adds a number of plug-ins that are worth having.

--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)

Go here:

ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/netscape6/english/6.01/ unix/linux22/xpi/spellchecker.xpi

It should start the smart-update installer thingy-bot and then you'll have a spell checker.

Actually this has already sort of happened

I can remember back in '98 I was playing with Beta 1 of "Windows NT Workstation 5" back before it became Windows "Profesional" (Though what "professional" would willingly use windows I don't know.)

In any event I was going about configuring it, and since it only had IE 3, I decided to go and install Netscape Communicator since I prefer it. So I faithfully typed "http://www.netscape.com" into IE and low and behold IE displayed an HTTP error I'd never seen before which was something to the effect of

"You don't want to go there."

" We don't want you to go there."

I managed finally to get Netscape (by installing it from a cd distributed by my school) on the machine, and surprisingly "NT5b1" allowed it to run. I guess the IE division of Microsoft has more of a "sense of humor" than the OS department.

BTW The beta sucked...

DMoz is used here as well as here. If you don't believe they're taken from DMoz, try searching for for "Slashdot" or browsing through the categories a bit.

As for Mozilla/Gecko, haven't you heard of the Komodo project? No doubt it will debut in an embedded form in AOL 7.0 and not to mention Netscape 6.5 and that AOL/Gateway device it's already running in.

Out of mild curiosity I followed the ROT-13 link and was confused by the last comment on Netscape's page. Are they serious that it will decode but not encode? :)

I'm not using Netscape so I can't test this myself... so as a public service to all those unfortunate people unable to properly encode ROT-13 without doing so manually, I offer this link.

The moral equivalent of -turbo for X-based versions of Mozilla is the remote control of a running Mozilla offered by the -remote argument. (This is actually a feature inherited from Netscape, from a long time back.)

Typical usage is mozilla -noraise -remote 'openURL(about:blank,new-window)' (disclaimer: I use a standalone program to feed this to Mozilla, not Mozilla itself, so Mozilla's syntax for this may be slightly different). With some auxiliary programs and some shell scripting you can construct quite useful systems out of this; I can highlight a URL in an xterm (or anywhere), pick a menu entry from my root menu, and be browsing that URL in a new Mozilla window in moments.

Similar tricks can be played in Netscape. Netscape's documentation on this can be found here, along with the small standalone program to do the remote control. There are some differences between the documentation and current Netscapes (and Mozilla), but nothing too hard to figure out.

The RSS 0.91 DTD is back at http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dt d...
--
George W. Bush
President, United States of America

From Dave's Scripting News on Friday, 27 Apr 01:

From the If-It-Weren't-So-Sad-It-Would-Be-Funny Department, yesterday when Netscape (apparently) deprecated RSS and broke all the links to their RSS stuff, they also broke people whose XML parsers require a DTD. The old URL for the RSS 0.91 DTD is totally 404 not found. John Munsch has a report from the field. I put a copy of the DTD into a folder here on scripting.com, and it will stay there, Murphy-willing, for perpetuity.

You can find his copy of the DTD here.

J.J.

What suprises me is that we hold products that include hardware to such high standards, but don't demand (or are prepared to pay for) quality in software-only products.

Last year Toshiba confounded the industry by settling a class action law suit for over a billion. That was $210 to $433 in cash to owners of 5,000,000 Toshiba laptop or notebook computers as well as hundreds of dollars in coupons for more Toshiba products. I myself received $398.70 in cash, plus a coupon for $225 as well as a software patch for a notebook computer that was only bought for a $1,299.99 retail price.

And this was all over a theoretical floppy disk controller microcode bug that was never claimed to have been seen in normal use, and never now since floppys are obsolete. Even if Toshiba acted improperly in the handling of such a bug (it still denies this) I think this payout to be extremely unreasonable and leaves other hardware manufacturers having to insure against such litigation.

On the other hand when a software company puts out a product that will fail in 5 years due to a millenium bug, leaves the default security settings open to a virus or crashes unexpectedly, the best you could expect is a software patch (sometimes an upgrade at your cost), but never compensation.

I know software would be more expensive and slower to come out if it had fewer bugs. And I know those as is license agreements that effectively mean use at your own risk. But couldn't we all benefit os much from more quality in software or conversely less litigation over hardware?

BTW, don't feel bad if you didn't make your claim from Toshiba (it's too late now). Any uncollected money is meant to go to charity.

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

John Romero, and his army of programmers and artists, took four years to create Daikatana!

Three years and a month, thank you very much. And I think you meant John Romero's zombie army of programmers and artists. But bless you for not mentioning Anachronox.

I don't know what the big deal is here. This has happened to many other browsers before, including older versions of IE. With new standards, scripting and virtual machine technologies being implemented in browsers continually, it is expected. It is a simple browser vulnerability, and that is all.

This is not new, if you read Bugtraq, or even Georgi Guninski's page, you will see this and many other exploits are a common occurance in many browsers. Even browsers that handle only plain html like Lynx have been proven vulnerable at times.

Since IE3, many vulnerabilities like this have popped up in MS's browser. IE3 was far worse, as both the Windows and Macintosh platform could both be explotited in terrible ways. Also, we can't forget the famous Netscape Brown Orifice exploit, which Netscape admittedly couldn't even fix in their 4.x series of browsers. I'm sure there are some fine exploits waiting to be found in the lesser used browsers too, but they are just far less reviewed by the security community.

Now I don't think its right that such vulnerabilities exist, but bugs will always be present in software. Internet Explorer just happens to use a lot of mixed technologies and therefore there are more ways for it to be exploited. This is nothing more than someone exploiting a vulnerable version of BIND or RPC. The only difference I find here is that Microsoft is involved, and thus makes a good sensationalist Slashdot target.

IM is not a new market.

Am I the only one who's been doing IM since Powwow came out?

Also, there's a tradeoff between supporting older machines and implementing an application with better features.

Make it like Mozilla, where you can compile out the "features" you don't want (also on windows) and get down to the one feature that matters: fast conforming browsing, leaving the bloat for those former AOLers who don't give a fig. Apps written in a modular fashion (where dead code can be removed in the install-linker) have only those features that you want. Who here still runs the standard Slack/RH/Debian "kernel with everything"?

Ahh, but that was years ago. Funny, that's only about 7 years ago, but it still feels like an eternity (in internet time, at least).

--

In the adventure video game Rama, based off of Arthur C. Clarke's books, you had to learn some alien languages composed of different symbols. The game allowed you to play with an alien octal calculator, then offered some problems to see if you understood the symbols and the math.

Of course, I put this in my submission about this story, along with the link to the machine itself but it got rejected :-(

There was some confusion a ways up in this thread about Netscape for SGI IRIX. Here are three useful links:

SGI's build of 4.75 (4.76 should be there soon):
http://www.sgi.com/products/evaluation/

Netscape's build of 4.76:
ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/communicator/english/4. 76/unix/supported/irix65/

Mozilla, etc, for SGI IRIX:
http://reality.sgi.com/rhess_engr/mozilla/irix/

A couple not so encouraging eBook stories.
E-Books Barely a Blip on Publishing Radar says E-book sales barely show up in the $96 billion U.S. consumer electronics or publishing markets.

""Reading an e-book is just like reading a book ... but it's just less fun, more expensive and heavier," said Robert Hertzberg, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "That's not much of a marketing motto."

While Wired asks What if E-Books Cost Less?, one publisher is lowering prices to sell more books.

I don't think that it's OS/2. Apparently this person is browsing using Netscape and AOLTimeWarnerNetscapeCompuserveWorldDominationEven WorseThanMicrosoft doesn't seem to have an OS/2 version, and I can't even find one on their ftp server going back to v3. The list of possible OS's is here. Many of the listed operating systems can be eliminated since they don't run on PC hardware that seems to leave Linux, SCO and BSD that will run on PC class hardware but it couldn't be them since they are clearly unix variants. The other possible systems to run on PC hardware would be QNX (no Netscape and pretty Unixish) and BeOS (no Netscape and probably could be called a Unix variant [it is POSTIX compliant]) so these don't seem to likely. Basically, I'd say that this whole question reeks of troll. We've been had.
_____________

Since most web sites handle planned upgrades w/o a 24 hour downtime, does this mean they shut the system down to fix the JavaScript bug? (And even if so, how long does it take to add code to parse out <SCRIPT> tags anyway?)

Since most web sites handle planned upgrades w/o a 24 hour downtime, does this mean they shut the system down to fix the JavaScript bug? (And even if so, how long does it take to add code to parse out <SCRIPT> tags anyway?)

The creator of javascript, and he's proud of his job!

Check your numbers. Apple (AAPL) has a little over 4 billion in the bank and a market cap of 6.2 billion. This means that the entire value of Apple, Inc. is a little over 2 billion. This for a company that over 6 biliion in sales last year. Yeah, they're in trouble. Now's the time to be buying Apple stock, if you ask me. 'Course I can only afford $25 a month for this but a little at a time adds up.

Does anyone know why we don't have a VeriSign compliant secure e-mail program in Linux?
No. But I think that I know that we do have a VeriSign compliant secure e-mail program in Linux...
And if we do, where the heck is it?
http://www.netscape.com

OK, so it's not free software, but neither is Netscape.

+++

Its not very difficult to get free email addresses... Microsoft, Netscape, and many others, will give you a plethora of email address to use if you're afraid of getting your "real" email full of canned meat.

PERL is practically evolving into an operating system in itself, supporting ::Telnet, ::Ping, and loads of other file-and-network functions available through CPAN. It only seems natural that .SWF is moving into PERL, considering the growing support its obtaining in other platforms. (I just which the sounds-syncing features in the Linux driver I use would sync correctly in the Mondo Mini-shows I catch each week. Instead, they play like chipmunks on speed.)

Perhaps a standard for the platform will come about, similar to PC2001 specs. The current generation of Palms would likely not make the cut, but the next likely would.

Heh, that's pocket change for even Red Hat.

Speculate what you will. :)

Having a case made out of LEGO would be great... need a new piece of hardware? Out of drive bays? No problem! Just build another one!

Also, a LEGO computer case would go great with the LEGO desk I plan to get when I become obscenely wealthy.

(I should probably mention that LEGO and related marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of the LEGO Company , which does not sponsor, authorize, or endorse this post. You have been duly warned.)

--Psi

Max, in America, it's customary to drive on the right.

Having a case made out of LEGO would be great... need a new piece of hardware? Out of drive bays? No problem! Just build another one!

Also, a LEGO computer case would go great with the LEGO desk I plan to get when I become obscenely wealthy.

(I should probably mention that LEGO and related marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of the LEGO Company , which does not sponsor, authorize, or endorse this post. You have been duly warned.)

--Psi

Max, in America, it's customary to drive on the right.

That's only half true. While Netscape themselves are only offering Windows, Mac and Linux, they're still supporting Solaris and HP/UX, but you have to contact Sun and HP to get it. See here.

In related news it seems that the WaSP have changed their minds about Netscape 6.

• windows
• Linux

• windows
• Linux

Are you sure you know how this system works?

If Mozilla were to cease operations today and be disbanded, there would be no shortage of browsers for *NIX.

If you're using a nightly build, you should be warned that it's built directly from the latest CVS every night, and thus some things may work strangely or not at all (and it's definitely not meant to include Java and Flash out of the box). It's meant for developers that are tracking bugs, and for people that want to see how things are going -- it's not necessarily meant to be polished. This also goes for the milestones, though they're supposed to get better with time.

And to answer your questions:

* Debugging in the binaries, bookmarks not quite working, no helpers registered: See above about Mozilla's status. If something doesn't work, wait a few days and try a new build, or better yet, report the bug to the developers so it can get fixed.

* Getting Flash and Java working: For now, you have to install these manually. You can get the Java 2 plugin here, and for Flash, just use the existing Netscape 4 plugin (it'll grab it automatically on Windows, for Linux, copy it to .mozilla/plugins in your home directory).

-lee

Penguin better have my money! The Linux Pimp