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Mitch Kapor Warns Against Firefox Gloating
An anonymous reader writes "Mitch Kapor, Lotus co-founder and president and chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation, says open-source advocates should be relatively cautious and avoid making claims and predictions despite the huge success of Firefox. He also briefly touches on Chandler in a ZDNet interview. Chandler is OSAF's personal information manager which will offer e-mail, calendaring, address and task management. The goal for Chandler, Kapor says, is to make it as successful and popular as Firefox."
What, they want to take the joy out of life? What about all past gloating; surely there is enough of that - enough to more than make up for any future gloating deficit.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
This from the guy who helped bring us Lotus Notes? Perhaps YOU should be more cautious about ignoring the requests of your user base.
/me hits F9 to refresh
Oh the irony:
He says not to gloat about firefox's success, then he uses it is a standard he wants to meet.
I like Windows XP Home Edition.
... plus even more!"
It is the most powerful operating-system for Pee Cees. It looks not as gay as Mac OS X by Steve B10 Jobs and has 1,0000,0000 times more softwares that the Linus-operating-system.
Plus, it comes with every Pee Cee for free. People who have grown acusstomt to paying RatHat 699 $$$ or more can hardly beleive this when I consult them with my proffesional Internet- and Network-Service-Center-Bureau.
Wehn I have a new customer, I take him to the back-room to show him the "alternative" to XP Home, which is Suse Linux 9.0.
I have set-up an old Pentium 133Hz and a small monochrome monitor to show teh customer what Linux looks and feels like.
I have it set-up so it runs a fullscreen-Flash-splash-screen on the KDE3.3beta-desktop. It takes 13 min until the mouse cursor responds.
The customer will them make a sound like: "BAH!"
Then I tell them: "See, this is how it is if we let the communists make software."
Then we have a good laugh, wich is psycologicallish valuable for the customer-relatively.
I always tell them:
"Windows XP Home Edition is all you can do to embiggen the producationality of your human resourcers and empower to leverage the outcome-bottomlime of your stickholder
My customers usually are like: "OMG!"
You should really try it one day; it has a very nice light-reddish color theme to hit your tastes.
Thank you!
What's not to like?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's healthy to have goals.
He owned the spreadsheet market and saw it lost to Microsoft through no fault of his own. (He'd left Lotus by then)
However, he was never able to experience the same success. No matter how much hype and support his subsequent projects had, they never panned out in the long run.
FireFox could very much be the same thing. It's a long way from 2% market share to 98%.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Even when I speak to people who do development all day long they still talk about users and developers as if they're two different people. Even when they're talking about themselves they do it. I'm guilty of it myself: I use Mozilla, but I work on Boomerang. Fact is, no matter how much I value my freedom to modify Mozilla, I've probably done it once in the whole time I've been using it. (My Mozilla doesn't have "Close All Other Tabs" right below "Close Tab" cause I accidentially clicked it one too many times.) Why is this? It's because it's just too much hard work to go-and-get-the-source-code that it's easier to just put up with bugs and poor ui decisions, and just hope it gets fixed in the next release. This is especially funny for Mozilla and FireFox cause a large part of them is written in Javascript, meaning you already have the source code. Unfortunately, the effort required to get from noticing an annoyance to finding the right file:line to make a change is still too much. Can anyone think of any way to ease this translation? It'd be really cool if I could hold down alt and middle click on a menu to get a javascript editor focused on the bit of code responsible for the thing I want to fix. Then we can add to that editor a button that says 'email patch'. How many millions of developers-as-users would contribute to projects like Mozilla if this was the case?
How we know is more important than what we know.
...like basic PR. Try picking a name for your software that doesn't suck ass.
Cool: Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla
Gay: Chandler, Bob, Opera
Kapor's put a lot of time, money, and probably other resources into open source. They are many who just talk a good game, and then there are others like Kapor who put millions into open source.
But hey, don't let that get in the way of a perfectly good lynching.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
1. As previous posters pointed out, CTRL-N works. It's even listed in the menu with the rest.
2. The "Bookmarks Toolbar" folder can be removed by manually editing bookmarks.html in your profile directory.
Someone really should gin up a menu item in the bookmark manager to designate an arbitrary folder as the toolbar, and allow removal of the default.
That said, I have recently started using the bookmark bar after years of dispassionately ignoring it - and you know what? it's actually very useful for keeping commonly used links (i.e. webmail, ticketing system and admin pages at work) and RSS feeds. Give it a shot, you might even like it.
3. IE-specific sites are broken, not firefox. complain to the people that spit out the poor markup.
4. two options- either change your keyboard to launch firefox with the URIs as arguments (firefox.exe -remote "openURL http://foo") or complain at logitech to fix their software to pass the URIs to the OS' default handler. The blame here lies solely with them.
Well, I keep seeing people claim Opera is bloated, but how are you measuring bloat?
I generally think of bloated applications based on a few criteria:
1) Big download/space takes up: Is Opera a big download?
No, it's 3.5MB, including a flash plugin. FF is 4.7MB at my last check.
2) Slow to use: Is Opera slow?
No, it's far faster than IE, and at worst the same speed as FireFox on my machine.
3) Memory use: Does Opera use a lot of memory?
Not in the release versions on my machine...
Opera uses on average 22MB of RAM - not much on modern desktop machines, and I can of course turn off the "Use all available RAM" setting.
4) Has so many features they get in the way: Does Opera have so many features they get in the way?
Maybe. The level of customization lets me pare Opera 7.54 down to the way 5.12 looked, just a browser.
For others however, they might use some of the features I don't, or all.
The issue here is that the features don't get in the way - you can quickly turn them off, or move them around.
Frankly, #4 is all I can figure people mean when they refer to Opera as bloated, and it's really a misleading statement. It's at least as easy to remove things from Opera's interface as it is to find, download and install extensions to FireFox.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
...and I think there will be sufficient interest in Chandler among people who don't to make the project successful.
Many people in the organization I work for use a program called Goldmine to help them maintain contact with sizable networks of people. Goldmine is one of a suprisingly small number of programs that provide person-centric organization of information. In one view, you can see a person's contact information plus all the phone calls, appointments and email communication with that person. Once you've used a system like this, a plain-old PIM (in which email, contact info, and appointments are all stored separately) just won't cut it.
Unfortunately, Goldmine is Windows-only. We've replaced almost all of our other Windows apps with ones that run in Linux, but at the moment there is no viable Goldmine replacement. Consequently, we're watching Chandler with eagerness.
Mitch Kapor warns against gloating?? MITCH KAPOR??? Mitch Kapor telling someone not to gloat is like a crack fiend telling.. Wait, who the hell is Mitch Kapor, and what's this Lotus you speak of?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Actually, I dispute that. Most people that claim it's more secure say that it's because of the amount of vulnerabilities being found in Internet Explorer compared to Firefox. How many people are looking for unknown vulnerabilities in IE? How many are looking at Mozilla/Firefox? This is determined by the media. When there's a MS vulnerability, it's all over the news and the finder gets a ton of glory and hopeful job offers. I see MS patches making it into mainstream news such as the Associated Press. As Firefox gets a spotlight because of a good amount of security professionals (Which happen to be coders with a personal agenda) recommending people switch, I've seen an increase in the amount of vulnerabilities reported. Don't believe me? Look at the stats and compare IE with Firefox. Yes, IEs numbers are higher, but think in proportion to how many skilled people are looking for vulnerabilities in each product. If you look at the different versions of Mozilla over the timeline they give, you can see that not many vulnerabilities were found early last year or before that compared to when Firefox really started to get attention. Imagine how many vulnerabilities would be found if they got the amount of media attention that IE vulns get. Until both products get the same amount of hacker attention, it's premature to say which is more secure.
As a security professional, I believe that as long as you keep your software patched up (computers, routers, switches, etc.), your only fear is a zero day. Hopefully you have other layers of security such as a border firewall, IPSec Transport mode with packet filtering at every host, multiple antivirus vendors software (with at least one of them configured to block password protected archives, known dangerous file types and dangerous content), ongoing training, locked down servers with all the fat trimmed, middle tier servers, etc. These things are not vendor specific. You can run Windows, Linux, OSX, BSD, Solaris and still be able to do these things. Assuming you have all that set up, one zero day most likely wouldn't be enough. If someone really wants in and you've done all these things, do you really think you're going to get "pwned" because you chose a specific vendor or software package? No. You're going to get pwned because someone will be social engineered or some aspect of physical security will be bypassed. It's a hell of a lot easier to get into a company by phishing than it is to hunt down a couple silver bullet zero days as you get through each layer of security. My point is that if someone wants to get in, they can do it. It only takes a few holes at most and enough patience to find them to get to a target. It's up to the admin to ensure that it's as difficult as possible to find them and to ensure that the damage is minimized. Auditing (logging), backups, intrusion detection, policies, procedures, security assessments, a good data structure with granular permissions, etc can help minimize impact.
My professional opinion is that it just doesn't matter what you use as long as it's well administered, but if you want to force me to pick one side and guess which code has less vulnerabilities, I'm going to pick MS. Security through obscurity isn't a magic elixir, but it's definitely another layer of protection. And with all the attention MS gets, they've had an opportunity to patch up a lot of their vulnerabilities. At this point, new vulns are probably easier to find on other vendors that aren't as popular.
-Lucas
Predict massive gains by extrapolating from a very recent improvement in a very small segment of your market.
Keep boasting about the features your product has that your competitor doesn't. Remind everyone that they need those specific features.
Keep telling the "journalists" out there about how your product handles the same tasks better than the competition. Faster. Smaller footprint. Better security. Easier administration.
If someone hasn't heard of your product, they aren't going to try your product.
Get out there and GLOAT.
Salesman: "Nothing makes you feel more like a man than a Thundercougarfalconbird."
Besides, which is more likely to lead to improvements? A sense of quiet pride tempered by some humility, or a superiorist attitude that Firefox is "da shiznat."
Projects that play catch-up (as happened for the first while) tend to go faster up to the point where they are more secure in themselves. Firefox is past the point of catch-up in many ways, but hopefully it will continue to show new features/improvements so that it can continue to become even greater, rather than maintaining a short lead.