Does anybody have any clues as to who this mysterious major vendor is?
My guess would be RedHat, although that is pure conjecture on my part. I remember somebody from RedHat stating not too long ago that they are planning of replacing Netscape with Mozilla in their Linux distribution at some point and RedHat Linux 7.2 is just around the corner. Mozilla surpasses Navigator 4.x on Linux in just about all respects at this point, so I wouldn't be surprised if RedHat made the switch now rather than waiting for Mozilla 1.0.
There are some good (and probably better informed) guesses at the Mozillazine article on the subject. So far, the other guesses are OEone and Netscape (yes, there's a good explanation for Netscape being the masked vendor even though they just released Navigator 6.1 - read the comments below the article).
"Let's assume Microsoft could tax everything on the Internet," Torvalds said "You think the U.S. government would give up monopoly status as taxation man? The government would step in and say, 'No, no, that's what we do.'"
I hate to have to disagree with Linus, but I'm not so sure the government would step in. There is already an oligopoly that essentially taxes all transactions on the internet - the credit card companies. Practically all online transactions are made with credit cards and for each transaction made the credit card company collects a small percentage of the sale from the merchant. Why would the government treat Microsoft any differently? Well ok, they might if Microsoft uses its desktop monopoly to gain a network information clearinghouse monopoly (I say if because although Microsoft is certain to try this, it is not certain to succeed). My point is, I don't think the government would have a problem with a single company taxing all internet transactions at the information clearinghouse level as there already companies doing it at lower levels, with the caveat that this only applies to the point that the company seeking to do this works within the law (including anti-trust laws).
You answered your own question: "No way do I want to give MS access to my financial data!" There's a lot of mistrust of Microsoft in the world, even from the people who are wiling to use Microsoft's products.
Sure there is a lot of mistrust of Microsoft, but that comes mostly from those that take an interest in computers (i.e., not most people). I don't think that most people distrust Microsoft enough to question the ramifications of what their software does. Five years down the line when people turn on their computer to go pay their bills, they will happily go along with Clippy when he tells them that the way to pay their phone bill is to just click on "OK". They won't question where the information is coming from which is used for the transaction because 1) they will assume this must be the right way to do it because that's the only option the program gave and 2) they wouldn't know how to find an alternative means of payment even if they were uneasy about the magic being performed.
I don't think that distrust of Microsoft will be the downfall of.NET. It may mean that no nerds will use.NET, but Microsoft will be perfectly happy collecting money from everybody but the nerds. If I had to guess what will make.NET an underwhelming success (or abysmal failure), my few guesses would be:
Lack of critical mass - You touched on this briefly..NET will need to be adopted by a significant number of websites for it to be of any real value to end users and for it to make any real money from Microsoft. Will enough sites be willing to risk their business to be early adopters? My guess is that if things don't pick up quickly enough Microsoft will find ways to "encourage" adoption as they have in the past with their other products (e.g., IE 8 will only talk to sites that use.NET).
Lack of security - Microsoft wants to go from writing desktop software to essentially being a bank. The masses may not distrust Microsoft enough to avoid.NET, but distrust is only one side effect of having poor security - losing a whole boatload of money to theft is a much bigger problem. In my opinion, if.NET is successful it is only a matter of time before a cracker pulls off one of the largest heists in history.
Microsoft's War on Copyright Infringement ("Piracy") - How much do you want to bet that.NET will only work with registered versions of Windows (eventually, if not right away)? This will make.NET unusable by the majority of the world (forget the US - the majority of the world uses illegal copies). Websites wishing to sell products will obviously not want to lock out the majority of the world, so.NET is unlikely to become the only choice (in the same sense that Windows is today).
Actually, those are my best guesses for now, and unfortunately it's not a very long list. I do hope that you're right and I'm wrong and users will just not use.NET as that's probably the best way to kill it before it spreads too far.
An even simpler question that few have asked is: Why? Why do I want to use.NET when I get the same functionality doing things the way I do them now? This is a real problem; in order to sell something, you have to have something to sell that people can't get better and for free elsewhere.
Your data is centralized and redundancy is eliminated. The direct benefits to you are that it takes less time to do things online (you no longer have to fill out a whole slew of information when you want to sign up somewhere) and errors are reduced (from typos). It's a nice idea and something that I would like, but Microsoft is one of the last places on Earth I would want to be in control of this.
I've been looking more closely at Microsoft as a business lately. They are in big trouble.
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What's more, the steps they've recently taken to defend that monopoly either alienate consumers (restrictive licensing) or haven't a prayer of becoming profitable (X-box).
What about.NET? A Microsoft tax on all online transactions seems like it could be very profitable and I'm not sure how it would alienate users since the tax will just be built into the price that users see initially and they probably won't realize that Microsoft is involved at all..NET seems like a reaction to the unavoidable obsolescence that you are talking about.
Whether or not.NET will be the silver bullet that Microsoft is relying on is unknown right now, but it definitely sounds like the backup strategy which you say they need. I'm certainly willing to go to great lengths to avoid using.NET myself (no way do I want to give Microsoft access to my financial data with their past history of insecurity), but they have made a good business of getting people to pay for their shoddy stuff so far, so why can't they do it again?
Don't forget, they have a war chest so massive that they can afford to do really stupid things for awhile, just so long as they stumble onto a good solution eventually. I remember when IE3 came out and Microsoft started their enormous push to kill Netscape. I installed IE3 and after using it for a few minutes I thought that there was no way they could overtake Netscape because IE3 was such a hideous, buggy monstrosity. Now look where we are half a decade later. Microsoft uses time to its advantage extremely well.
Is this a troll, or did you really not grasp that the site is a joke?
None of the above. I was passing along the joke because I thought it was appropriate given the topic of conversation in this thread. I think that a holy war between AtheOS and Jesux would be far more entertaining than Gnome vs. KDE or Emacs vs. VI. The Jesux kernel could refuse to talk with AtheOS daemons and AtheOS could refuse to recognize any Jesux binaries as authentic. The possibilities are endless!
Sure, the media's cheaper, it's faster, it's portable, and the media's available, but CDs don't exactly store much!
Well, the Iomega tapes that I used didn't really store much either. I think they held around 1 GB. I guess that was their one advantage over CDs. I don't think it's a very big advantage, though. My backup script automatically splits my giant backup tar file into CD sized chunks, so the only added inconvenience for me is the time that it takes to pop one CD out and pop another one in.
It's not just me then? I got a writer for that reason too!
Oh, that wasn't the first Iomega tape backup drive to go bad on me either. I had one before which broke as well. I assumed it was a fluke and sent it back for replacement. Little did I know that the replacement would start eating tapes on the day that I needed to restore a backup. I really wish I had thought of a CD writer beforehand because it has ended up being superior to the Iomega tape backup solution in every respect that I can think of (i.e., price of the media, backup speed, backup convenience, availability of the media, portability of the media, etc).
Again... yes, they had the right, as the owner, to rip the CDs.
But they did more than that; they distributed the compressed versions to people.
But that's not what the court said. The ruling against them from judge Rakoff found them guilty on the grounds that they made the database of ripped MP3s - I don't think the ruling touched on the distribution at all. Even the RIAA web page on this says that the creation of the database was the problem. Read the very first item - the one that discusses the ruling. The RIAA also says elsewhere on their website that ripping a CD for your personal use is illegal.
I think a lot of people are confusing what MP3.com was actually found guilty of with what one would assume they had been found guilty of if the laws in the US made some sort of sense. Being found guilty for the distribution would certainly be more intuitive (although I would still disagree with the principle of the law), but that's not what the ruling stated - it was the database creation itself that got them in trouble.
Name me one person you know who is at least moderately computer savvy, has a cd burner and uses a computer as a hobbyist device who has not done something illegal with their cd burner within a week of owning it.
Me. I purchased my CD burner to make back-ups of my computer (after having my computer crash and discovering that my Iomega tape back-up drive liked to physically mangle tapes when attempting to restore back-ups). CD-Rs make a fantastic back-up solution because the media is much cheaper than back-up tapes and they are also much more portable. I think it was months after purchasing my CD-R drive before I used it to burn music and even then it was music that I had legally purchased and was using for my personal use (i.e., to make a mix CD for myself).
No, they got in trouble for making it available to other people without the copyright holders' consent. No distribution, no foul.
Most of the articles I have read on the subject would seem to indicate otherwise. In fact, even the RIAA web page on this says that the creation of the database was the problem. Read the very first item - the one that discusses the ruling. It says nothing about distribution and states that the database creation was the problem. If you have references that would indicate that the judgement found that the distribution consituted infringement, please post them.
The argument goes like this: MP3.com made compressed copies of about 900,000 songs, which it placed on its computer servers -- without obtaining the rights to do so.
MP3.com purchased all of the CDs containing those 900,000 songs. Why shouldn't they have right to compress them and put then in a database (that is what they were sued for in the inital lawsuit, not distributing the music afterwards)? That seems like fair use to me (but not judge Rakoff, I guess). Once you pay for the music, why shouldn't you be able to shift it to another format so that you can use it more easily? Forget for a second about what they wanted to use it for - they got in trouble for the shifting, not for the intended use. The previous ruling would indicate that the shifting would have gotten them in trouble regardless of the intended use.
That created a vast bootleg library, from which MP3.com subscribers could download songs.
What they fail to mention is that users were only allowed to download songs on CDs that they owned. You had to run MP3.com's "beam-it" software on your PC and insert each CD that you wanted to be able to use with their service before you could download any music from that CD. Nothing here was "bootlegged".
The judge in the previous case ruled that the service was not legal, but I still think it should be. Everybody involved had paid for a copy of the music that they came in contact with and my.mp3.com only served to increase the value of owning a CD (I used it all the time because I could listen to my 150+ CDs from anywhere and it encouraged me to buy more CDs).
There is a known issue to do with Flash and certain sound card setups in Linux bug 58339. [mozilla.org]
Could it be that ?
Hmmm... it might be. I do use my computer to play MP3s a lot and I have found it curious that Mozilla seems to like Flash a lot better right after I have installed a new milestone and I try to make it crash (I usually have my music turned off at this point so that I can hear the Flash pages that I try to crash Mozilla with). I'll have to test Flash with audio playing when Mozilla 0.9.4 comes out. The audio connection never occurred to me - thanks for the suggestion.
I really don't understand this. What are these sites that people have trouble viewing with Linux?
I mean, with Moz.9.3, Java 1.3, and Flash all running fine on my machine, what else is there?
My experience has been the same, except that my Flash plug-in seems to want to crash Mozilla at arbitrary times. I've done a bit of searching to track down the problem and the conclusion that I came to is that the plug-in was written for the old Netscape 4 plug-in API and needs to be updated to work with the Mozilla plug-in API (although I wonder why it works at all, in that case - maybe there is a backward compatability wrapper and maybe that's where the bug is). Anyway, has anybody else done anything special to get Flash to work reliably with Mozilla on Linux? I've tried a lot of different things with each new milestone and always end up removing Flash so that I don't have to restart my browser every few days (Mozilla stays up for weeks without it).
I don't want to stray too far from the topic and I don't want to seem like a troll (I definitely agree that Mozilla on Linux is more than adequate for web browsing), I'm just not sure that the level of Flash support within Mozilla is usable (maybe I'm installing it wrong, though). Whenever I come across a site that requires Flash I just pull up a copy of Netscape 4 because the Linux Flash plug-in still works fine in that without crashing. I'd say it's a minor annoyance rather than a show-stopping problem - it would be nice if somebody reading this knows how to fix it, though.
You're absolutely right. IBM made a mistake, and now they're back to being the fuzzy little happy company they used to be back when they were founded by a kind old man with a heart of gold and his loyal wife out in America's heartland.
To clarify my original post, I was not trying to imply that IBM has altruistic goals. I was merely stating that their original motivation for openness (a severe time constraint) is not applicable to the present situation, so they must have a different motivation now. I actually agree with you and seriously doubt that they are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts - I would say that they serendipitously discovered that openness can actually be very good for business and that it also breeds good will.
Shortly after IBM's open-spec PC, they reverted to the closed PS/2 with a patented bus in an attempt to monopolize the exploding market. Hopefully this particular bit of history won't replay itself.
If I remember my history correctly, the original IBM PC was open-spec only because they didn't have enough time to come up with something proprietary. They wanted to monopolize the market from the start, but they were running behind and had to get something out so as not to lose the market entirely. So, I don't think we have to worry too much about this piece of history repeating itself because their push for openness isn't motivated by time pressures this time (at least I don't think it is).
The government in the US is terribly inconsistent. There was a story back in 1999 about a phone sex operator suing for workers compensation because she got carpel tunnel from masturbating on the job . She won. On a fundamental level, the big difference is that the phone sex worker could have conceivably still performed her job because her voice is the only essential capability needed for it. A reporter, on the other hand, would be seriously put out by the loss of her hands. Something is terribly backwards in these outcomes.
Oh well... I'm probably missing something here. Perhaps qualifiying as "disabled" under the ADA is more stringent than the requirements for workers comp. Or perhaps, as another poster mentioned, there is more to this case than the defense attorney is letting on. Or maybe this phone sex worker story is an urban legend (a Salon article was the most reputable reference I could find to back it up). I'm hoping something like this will explain the discrepency here.
I will not see a movie with the Aliyah chick in it. After watching my friends kids watching Disney channel with Aliyah singing to all the 13 year olds i can't imagine i can see her playing a role of inteligence, strength, intuition and power.
I hope you haven't seen the original Matrix then because Lawrence Fishburn (Morpheus) used to play Cowboy Curtis on Pee Wee's Playhouse and that should bother you just as much.
It's Slashdotted right now, so I guess I'll have to check back later... I'm just hoping they didn't get creative in using certain appendages for the second hand.
I have verizon DSL, and it is fast, never goes down. I have never needed to call customer service for any reason (Except to order the service).
I'm glad that you haven't had any problems yet. Just pray that you never do have to call customer service.
What is there to customer service? DSL is 1-2-3 online.
Here's a brief list of some of the problems I had with Verizon/BellAtlantic DSL:
They sent me the wrong type of DSL modem. I explicitly requested an ethernet modem and they sent me a USB modem.
They sent out a replacement relatively quickly when I brought the error to their attention. However, they billed my credit card 6 times for a DSL modem. I could see maybe being billed twice, but 6 times? And these charges were all over $100 a piece.
It took them a full half year and many hours on my part calling customer service to get them to take back the erronious modem and issue me a refund for the 5 erronious charges.
Upon installation, my DSL worked for 15 minutes and then went dead for the next 2 months!
I called customer support immediately after the service died and they told me it would be resolved within 72 hours. I called back 72 hours later and they said that there was no trouble tickets in the system from before, that they would put one in, and it would take another 72 hours. This went on for 2 months!
When I say that my line went dead, what I mean is that it would work for maybe 5-10 minutes per hour, drop so many packets so as to be unusable for about 20 minutes, and drop all packets for the rest of the time. I would call up their tech support and tell them that I knew my DSL wasn't working because when I pinged my gateway the majority of packets were being dropped. One of their tech support guys had absolutely no idea what "packets" were and what I was talking about.
When they finally did fix my line, the way that they did it was way less than ideal. The problem was with the tree at the central office that my line was connected to. They physically moved my line to another central office. That's great for me (the woman who did it was the only person with a clue I ever met at Verizon and she felt sorry for me at that point because it had been so long), but there were hundreds of other people on the same tree who were probably experiencing the same problem - they did not fix the source of the problem, at least not at that point.
This physical line switching messed up my normal phone service and lead to substantial double billing for long distance.
Every other month the service would go down again for periods of days to weeks.
Considering the cummulative number of hours I spent on hold with Verizon, they have wasted days of my life. I was on hold for roughly an hour each day for a long stretch of time.
Once I was on hould for several hours (3 or 4 I think) waiting for a "level 2" tech support (which you can only reliably get if you wait on hold) and then their system just hung up on me after this long wait period.
I frequently recieved promises of being called back within a certain time frame and these promises were almost never kept.
I called to cancel my service last August, but they continued to bill me for the next few months. It turned out that they hadn't actually cancelled my service when I requested. It took me a few more months to the charges taken off my account from that.
I refused to pay for the charges for the DSL service after I had cancelled it, and because the charges were billed to my phone bill this made my phone bill delinquent. Verizon refused to remove the charges from my phone bill and their excuse was that their DSL deparatment was separate and that they just acted as the billing service (but it's the same frickin company!). They said that I would have to wait for a refund authorization from the DSL department later on.
That's what I remember off the top of my head and what I'm not repressing. I kept a log of my interactions with Verizon, so I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture.
Since I switched to Speakeasy, my service has been down for about 3 ~ 4 hours out of the past year. Their tech support not only knows what "packets" and "gateways" are, but they actually offered to help me troubleshoot my Linux box before! I have had no billing problems with them whatsoever. As you can hopefully see, going back to Verizon is the last thing in the world that I want.
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My guess would be RedHat, although that is pure conjecture on my part. I remember somebody from RedHat stating not too long ago that they are planning of replacing Netscape with Mozilla in their Linux distribution at some point and RedHat Linux 7.2 is just around the corner. Mozilla surpasses Navigator 4.x on Linux in just about all respects at this point, so I wouldn't be surprised if RedHat made the switch now rather than waiting for Mozilla 1.0.
There are some good (and probably better informed) guesses at the Mozillazine article on the subject. So far, the other guesses are OEone and Netscape (yes, there's a good explanation for Netscape being the masked vendor even though they just released Navigator 6.1 - read the comments below the article).
Heh heh... let's just hope they're not tracking their users by the cookies they've eaten.
"Let's assume Microsoft could tax everything on the Internet," Torvalds said "You think the U.S. government would give up monopoly status as taxation man? The government would step in and say, 'No, no, that's what we do.'"
I hate to have to disagree with Linus, but I'm not so sure the government would step in. There is already an oligopoly that essentially taxes all transactions on the internet - the credit card companies. Practically all online transactions are made with credit cards and for each transaction made the credit card company collects a small percentage of the sale from the merchant. Why would the government treat Microsoft any differently? Well ok, they might if Microsoft uses its desktop monopoly to gain a network information clearinghouse monopoly (I say if because although Microsoft is certain to try this, it is not certain to succeed). My point is, I don't think the government would have a problem with a single company taxing all internet transactions at the information clearinghouse level as there already companies doing it at lower levels, with the caveat that this only applies to the point that the company seeking to do this works within the law (including anti-trust laws).
Sure there is a lot of mistrust of Microsoft, but that comes mostly from those that take an interest in computers (i.e., not most people). I don't think that most people distrust Microsoft enough to question the ramifications of what their software does. Five years down the line when people turn on their computer to go pay their bills, they will happily go along with Clippy when he tells them that the way to pay their phone bill is to just click on "OK". They won't question where the information is coming from which is used for the transaction because 1) they will assume this must be the right way to do it because that's the only option the program gave and 2) they wouldn't know how to find an alternative means of payment even if they were uneasy about the magic being performed.
I don't think that distrust of Microsoft will be the downfall of .NET. It may mean that no nerds will use .NET, but Microsoft will be perfectly happy collecting money from everybody but the nerds. If I had to guess what will make .NET an underwhelming success (or abysmal failure), my few guesses would be:
Actually, those are my best guesses for now, and unfortunately it's not a very long list. I do hope that you're right and I'm wrong and users will just not use .NET as that's probably the best way to kill it before it spreads too far.
An even simpler question that few have asked is: Why? Why do I want to use .NET when I get the same functionality doing things the way I do them now? This is a real problem; in order to sell something, you have to have something to sell that people can't get better and for free elsewhere.
Your data is centralized and redundancy is eliminated. The direct benefits to you are that it takes less time to do things online (you no longer have to fill out a whole slew of information when you want to sign up somewhere) and errors are reduced (from typos). It's a nice idea and something that I would like, but Microsoft is one of the last places on Earth I would want to be in control of this.
What's more, the steps they've recently taken to defend that monopoly either alienate consumers (restrictive licensing) or haven't a prayer of becoming profitable (X-box).
What about .NET? A Microsoft tax on all online transactions seems like it could be very profitable and I'm not sure how it would alienate users since the tax will just be built into the price that users see initially and they probably won't realize that Microsoft is involved at all. .NET seems like a reaction to the unavoidable obsolescence that you are talking about.
Whether or not .NET will be the silver bullet that Microsoft is relying on is unknown right now, but it definitely sounds like the backup strategy which you say they need. I'm certainly willing to go to great lengths to avoid using .NET myself (no way do I want to give Microsoft access to my financial data with their past history of insecurity), but they have made a good business of getting people to pay for their shoddy stuff so far, so why can't they do it again?
Don't forget, they have a war chest so massive that they can afford to do really stupid things for awhile, just so long as they stumble onto a good solution eventually. I remember when IE3 came out and Microsoft started their enormous push to kill Netscape. I installed IE3 and after using it for a few minutes I thought that there was no way they could overtake Netscape because IE3 was such a hideous, buggy monstrosity. Now look where we are half a decade later. Microsoft uses time to its advantage extremely well.
None of the above. I was passing along the joke because I thought it was appropriate given the topic of conversation in this thread. I think that a holy war between AtheOS and Jesux would be far more entertaining than Gnome vs. KDE or Emacs vs. VI. The Jesux kernel could refuse to talk with AtheOS daemons and AtheOS could refuse to recognize any Jesux binaries as authentic. The possibilities are endless!
Does your operating system not believe in Jesux?
At least there's no need to worry about losing market share to christian hackers as they're already running Jesux .
How about "the Code Red worm ate my homework"?
Well, the Iomega tapes that I used didn't really store much either. I think they held around 1 GB. I guess that was their one advantage over CDs. I don't think it's a very big advantage, though. My backup script automatically splits my giant backup tar file into CD sized chunks, so the only added inconvenience for me is the time that it takes to pop one CD out and pop another one in.
Oh, that wasn't the first Iomega tape backup drive to go bad on me either. I had one before which broke as well. I assumed it was a fluke and sent it back for replacement. Little did I know that the replacement would start eating tapes on the day that I needed to restore a backup. I really wish I had thought of a CD writer beforehand because it has ended up being superior to the Iomega tape backup solution in every respect that I can think of (i.e., price of the media, backup speed, backup convenience, availability of the media, portability of the media, etc).
But they did more than that; they distributed the compressed versions to people.
But that's not what the court said. The ruling against them from judge Rakoff found them guilty on the grounds that they made the database of ripped MP3s - I don't think the ruling touched on the distribution at all. Even the RIAA web page on this says that the creation of the database was the problem. Read the very first item - the one that discusses the ruling. The RIAA also says elsewhere on their website that ripping a CD for your personal use is illegal.
I think a lot of people are confusing what MP3.com was actually found guilty of with what one would assume they had been found guilty of if the laws in the US made some sort of sense. Being found guilty for the distribution would certainly be more intuitive (although I would still disagree with the principle of the law), but that's not what the ruling stated - it was the database creation itself that got them in trouble.
Me. I purchased my CD burner to make back-ups of my computer (after having my computer crash and discovering that my Iomega tape back-up drive liked to physically mangle tapes when attempting to restore back-ups). CD-Rs make a fantastic back-up solution because the media is much cheaper than back-up tapes and they are also much more portable. I think it was months after purchasing my CD-R drive before I used it to burn music and even then it was music that I had legally purchased and was using for my personal use (i.e., to make a mix CD for myself).
Most of the articles I have read on the subject would seem to indicate otherwise. In fact, even the RIAA web page on this says that the creation of the database was the problem. Read the very first item - the one that discusses the ruling. It says nothing about distribution and states that the database creation was the problem. If you have references that would indicate that the judgement found that the distribution consituted infringement, please post them.
MP3.com purchased all of the CDs containing those 900,000 songs. Why shouldn't they have right to compress them and put then in a database (that is what they were sued for in the inital lawsuit, not distributing the music afterwards)? That seems like fair use to me (but not judge Rakoff, I guess). Once you pay for the music, why shouldn't you be able to shift it to another format so that you can use it more easily? Forget for a second about what they wanted to use it for - they got in trouble for the shifting, not for the intended use. The previous ruling would indicate that the shifting would have gotten them in trouble regardless of the intended use.
That created a vast bootleg library, from which MP3.com subscribers could download songs.
What they fail to mention is that users were only allowed to download songs on CDs that they owned. You had to run MP3.com's "beam-it" software on your PC and insert each CD that you wanted to be able to use with their service before you could download any music from that CD. Nothing here was "bootlegged".
The judge in the previous case ruled that the service was not legal, but I still think it should be. Everybody involved had paid for a copy of the music that they came in contact with and my.mp3.com only served to increase the value of owning a CD (I used it all the time because I could listen to my 150+ CDs from anywhere and it encouraged me to buy more CDs).
Could it be that ?
Hmmm... it might be. I do use my computer to play MP3s a lot and I have found it curious that Mozilla seems to like Flash a lot better right after I have installed a new milestone and I try to make it crash (I usually have my music turned off at this point so that I can hear the Flash pages that I try to crash Mozilla with). I'll have to test Flash with audio playing when Mozilla 0.9.4 comes out. The audio connection never occurred to me - thanks for the suggestion.
My experience has been the same, except that my Flash plug-in seems to want to crash Mozilla at arbitrary times. I've done a bit of searching to track down the problem and the conclusion that I came to is that the plug-in was written for the old Netscape 4 plug-in API and needs to be updated to work with the Mozilla plug-in API (although I wonder why it works at all, in that case - maybe there is a backward compatability wrapper and maybe that's where the bug is). Anyway, has anybody else done anything special to get Flash to work reliably with Mozilla on Linux? I've tried a lot of different things with each new milestone and always end up removing Flash so that I don't have to restart my browser every few days (Mozilla stays up for weeks without it).
I don't want to stray too far from the topic and I don't want to seem like a troll (I definitely agree that Mozilla on Linux is more than adequate for web browsing), I'm just not sure that the level of Flash support within Mozilla is usable (maybe I'm installing it wrong, though). Whenever I come across a site that requires Flash I just pull up a copy of Netscape 4 because the Linux Flash plug-in still works fine in that without crashing. I'd say it's a minor annoyance rather than a show-stopping problem - it would be nice if somebody reading this knows how to fix it, though.
To clarify my original post, I was not trying to imply that IBM has altruistic goals. I was merely stating that their original motivation for openness (a severe time constraint) is not applicable to the present situation, so they must have a different motivation now. I actually agree with you and seriously doubt that they are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts - I would say that they serendipitously discovered that openness can actually be very good for business and that it also breeds good will.
If I remember my history correctly, the original IBM PC was open-spec only because they didn't have enough time to come up with something proprietary. They wanted to monopolize the market from the start, but they were running behind and had to get something out so as not to lose the market entirely. So, I don't think we have to worry too much about this piece of history repeating itself because their push for openness isn't motivated by time pressures this time (at least I don't think it is).
Oh well... I'm probably missing something here. Perhaps qualifiying as "disabled" under the ADA is more stringent than the requirements for workers comp. Or perhaps, as another poster mentioned, there is more to this case than the defense attorney is letting on. Or maybe this phone sex worker story is an urban legend (a Salon article was the most reputable reference I could find to back it up). I'm hoping something like this will explain the discrepency here.
I didn't mean to imply that Pee Wee's Playhouse wasn't a great show, just that it was a kids' show. Pee Wee's Playhouse was indeed great.
I hope you haven't seen the original Matrix then because Lawrence Fishburn (Morpheus) used to play Cowboy Curtis on Pee Wee's Playhouse and that should bother you just as much.
It's Slashdotted right now, so I guess I'll have to check back later... I'm just hoping they didn't get creative in using certain appendages for the second hand.
I'm glad that you haven't had any problems yet. Just pray that you never do have to call customer service.
What is there to customer service? DSL is 1-2-3 online.
Here's a brief list of some of the problems I had with Verizon/BellAtlantic DSL:
That's what I remember off the top of my head and what I'm not repressing. I kept a log of my interactions with Verizon, so I could go on, but hopefully you get the picture.
Since I switched to Speakeasy, my service has been down for about 3 ~ 4 hours out of the past year. Their tech support not only knows what "packets" and "gateways" are, but they actually offered to help me troubleshoot my Linux box before! I have had no billing problems with them whatsoever. As you can hopefully see, going back to Verizon is the last thing in the world that I want.