Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Australia, Nomenclature, Books
Please, no more name changing. suqur writes "As a follow-up to many stories previously posted, News.com reports that the recently renamed Mozilla Firebird browser (previously known as Phoenix) has finally given up on its new name, and relinquished the name. The new names for the Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird will be Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail, respectively. Looks like they're right back where they started, eh?"
Whatever the name, Mozilla is still only almost perfect: GeekLife.com writes "An old Mozilla exploit continues to crash almost any version/flavor of Mozilla with just 5 lines of plain HTML code (no JavaScript, ActiveX, etc.). If you're very brave, you can test/crash your Mozilla by going here.
It's important to report fairly on issues like this, or people will come to think of the Open Source journals as biased, uninformative, irresponsible propaganda machines, which will greatly harm any legitimate cause that the OS folks are promoting."
Books to download, at varying prices. Scott Pendergrast writes "We're working here at Fictionwise to convince publishers to release Neal Stephenson's works as eBooks. Recently his Cryptonomicon work finally became available in Secure Microsoft and Palm Reader formats (yes, the irony of this title being sold in an encrypted format is not missed ;-)
To encourage sales of this title, which hopefully will result in more of his works becoming ebooks, we're offering a 50% micropay rebate on it (so we're actually losing a bit on each sale)."
If you like your books free and non-fiction, though, mindpixel writes "I am not lying. The National Academies Press which was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States, has more than 2,500 free, searchable, high quality books online. Some random examples:
- The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life
- Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time
- Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy
- Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection, and Response"
This ought to be tax-deductable, too! ThreeToe writes "Recently the RIAA settled a lawsuit with four college students; one of them was Daniel Peng of Princeton University. Daniel is accepting donations to help pay his $15,000 settlement fee along with related legal fees. You can send money via paypal by clicking here. Remember that Daniel simply wrote an MP3 search engine; he didn't distribute MP3s himself. Those who share my belief that this lawsuit was wrong-headed should make a statement by assisting Daniel."
The future isn't what it used to be.
The Browser Formerly Known as Phoenix people seem to be asserting that.
Perhaps it's just a glib reversal to save face?
Better yet, create some free information yourself. Write free software. Write some documentation. Report bugs in free software, or submit patches, or report errors in the documentation. Write free books. Make some music and release it for free. (Or do any of the above, make the information free-as-in-speech, and find a way to profit from it.)
I really couldn't care less about the fate of these students who got sued by the RIAA. All they're doing is perpetuating the public's misconception that free information is a form of parasitism, rather than a form of creativity.
Find free books.
Here's how you can crash IE *and* Mozilla in one file ;) :
</fieldset>
<html>
<form>
<input type crash>
<fieldset style="position:fixed;">
<legend>Crash</legend>
</form>
</html>
The grandparent is not criticizing Daniel's actions. He's simply saying, if Daniel had decided to fight, he would have helped out. He's not fighting, so he won't help with the settlement. It says nothing about disapproving of the settlement.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Please, everyone keep in mind that the naming situation wouldn't have been nearly as bad if Phoenix hadn't made such a big deal in the first place.
The big, bloated, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink Mozilla that you download from mozilla.org is called Seamonkey.
However, nobody ever refers to it as Seamonkey - it's just Mozilla. Phoenix/Firebird was just being referred to directly as Phoenix/Firebird until Seamonkey could be retired and the rest of the developers could move over to the new codebase. At that point it would've been "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail & News" again (as far as we end-users are concerned).
If Phoenix hadn't flipped out and had just waited a few months the "Phoenix Browser" would probably have been forgotten.
It's not like Mozilla ever got sued by Exploratoy.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
This isn't even strictly an HTML exploit (as claimed in the summary): take out the CSS (style="position:fixed") and it loses its teeth. I know of at least one other related crasher (it's reported in bugzilla) involving certain objects and position:..., and this is probably related.
It has always been an internal codename with the intention of publicly calling the browser component "Mozilla Browser" after 1.4 is released. This is not a retraction of "Mozilla Firebird."
Please see this MozillaNews article for reference to the real story.
The books linked there are serious crippleware. Very hard to browse and read. If you have specific questions in Biology you can search some quality books here: PubMedBooks
I knew a formerly married couple where the guy actually quit his job (very high-paying, no less) to avoid paying his wife child support payments when they were about to get a divorce. He got away with it... and as far as anyone knows he left the country at around the same time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The move to "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail" was always in the plan, and was in the branding document published last month. This change is scheduled to happen at some point after we release the currently-in-development 1.4 application suite.
But, before the change happens, there are likely to be one or more releases of the Mozilla Firebird Browser as a standalone application. That was also always in the plan.
Move along, no change, nothing to see here.
Gerv
(gerv at mozilla.org)