Hmm. How about if (3) is limited to the case where a person can _continue_ to listen to music without paying for it? If you play a tune for a friend, they decide that they don't like it, and as a result don't buy it--that's fine. You've stopped a sale, but they're not getting the benefit of the music.
But if you copy it for them, then they continue to receive the benefits of the material, without having paid for it. That's sort of the key, I figure. Lessening demand for music isn't inherently evil. (After all, some popular and hyped music just SUCKS!)
As others have pointed out, it was a list of 30 people who worked for the NSA as purchasers. There is no indication that the knowledge of their employment was secret. I'm sure I could find a bit of information on at least 30 NSA employees.
Is it a mistake? Probably, although neither the company or the employer (NSA) seem at all worried. I'm afraid this guy just comes off as a twitball.
OK, it's now another day or two since this reply went up...
Here's a bit more of the story: We had a problem with Samba that was crashing our system, and bringing down our production environment. When we tracked it down (through some fairly extensive work on our part), we posted it to Usenet and also the Samba mailing list. The only response we got was one person who pointed us to a post with exactly the same problem, from two years prior.
Now paying money to a company for software updates is one thing. Offering money as a 'bounty' to a loose and informal organisation in the hopes that someone might get around to it is another thing. A ridiculous thing.
Software as a service industry is an interesting idea, and may actually be quite viable. However, withholding service without payment, ESPECIALLY on supposedly free software, is just stupidity. It's doubly stupid when the work needed isn't a new feature or an enhancement, but a mission-critical show-stopping bug.
More concisely, if the Samba team refuses to read bug reports until they've been paid, then they should post rates on their website instead of asking for donations.
The guy is telling the NSA stuff they already know, and have signed off as acceptable. His company was entirely above board in explaining their operations to the NSA in the first place.
Everyone involved knows what's going on. He is the only person who seems to have a problem with it. It doesn't sound like whistle-blowing to me, as much as whining.
First of all, this article isn't so much about accurately predicting the future, so much as creating it. SF has been giving us the vocabulary and conceptual framework for many of our modern inventions. If what we invent is similar but differently implemented than the idea of an SF writer from 40 years ago, it's not that they got it wrong--it's merely that we took the concept in a different direction than they did, when then invented the concept.
Secondly, this article goes on about movies, where in fact movies are about the most laughable bit of conservativism possible, with regards to futuristic ideas. The few decent ones are almost always based on books that have been around for decades.
Why they'd spend time talking about the five or six truly incisive futuristic movies that have been made when there are thousands upon thousands of SF stories that work so much better, I can't say.
That's quite an interesting statement. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that open source security bugs get fixed faster than closed source ones? Compare Linux with Solaris, if you want a level playing field.
Not a troll--I've heard this statement tossed out so many times as absolute fact, and yet I don't know if it's ever been tested.
As for Samba, you might have had good luck with a security patch, but we had a bug that caused a prouduction system to crater (12 CPUs and about 8GB of RAM) completely. It existed for TWO YEARS after being reported because no one on the Samba team felt like dealing with it. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.
I don't know of a single organisation who has defined Mozmail as the "standard." In fact, amongst organisations who use mozilla constantly, I know of very few who are even aware that Mozilla has a mail client.
Organisations tend to dictate that we use the "standard, (hah!)" exchange/Outbreak. In the rare cases where that isn't true, most people use whatever the hell they want.
To the best of my knowledge (which admittedly hasn't been stretched very far in this regard), there is nothing about Mozilla mail that deviates from standard POP3 or IMAP.
The problem as I see it is this: Computer users have become (a) so prevalent, and (b) so computer illiterate as a whole***, that the _interface_ to a good standard protocol (mail: POP3, IMAP, SMTP) actually has to be standardised, otherwise most people won't understand what you tell them to do. Whereas the instructions might have once said, "enter your mail server's DNS name here..." they now say, "click on the second button from the left in the top row..."
Or...
With the lack of true comprehension, we have to standardise our _user_ interfaces, rather than our _interprocess_ interfaces.
Sad, but true.
***I'm not claiming this as a bad thing in general, or a slight against most computer users. It's just that the median computer user is no longer a techie who likes computers for their own sake.
First of all, any place that deliberately jams cellular signals should be required to advertise that fact. I know there are restaurants in New York which do exactly this.
Now given that the blocking is known about, then a surgeon who is on-call has no right to be going somewhere where their phone/pager won't ring. I'm on an on-call rotation, and it's accepted that you don't go out of cellular range while carrying the phone, period.
Um, I think you got A and B mixed up in your discussion. At least the way I'm reading it.
Regardless, what you say is true--and is one of the reasons I will never be a CEO. One question, however, is how many truly bad decisions that led up to the company not being profitable by the time their money ran out could have been avoided? What did the startup do to get so close to a real goal, and yet not be able to get any more money out of the VC?
I disagree. You may want to block all mail from open relays. That's fine. BUT, they admins (mis)managing the relays aren't the problem. The relays themselves aren't the problem--the spammers and the companies who hire spammers are the ones who are deliberately stealing services from the poor sods who can't manage a mail server are the criminals. We shouldn't have ANY laws on how a person must manage/install their computer. If we're going to do that, then hell--why not make it illegal to run anything but the MS OS of the day?
Hmm. Where to start tearing apart a post that I fundamentally agree with?
Well, consider the aggregation of information--the information being sold(/rented/leased/traded) isn't always aggregate collections of anonymous data. More and more, it's becoming SPECIFIC information, along the lines of "you're name is a, your address is b, your annual income is c, and you like to see naked women doing x." This is DEFINITELY an invasion of my privacy and yours.
Furthermore, it's becoming the standard. There are fewer and fewer companies who refuse to sell individually identifiable databases.
Now moving backwards in your post, I have no problems with companies making a profit. I do object to companies making a profit off of me by exploiting me in ways I didn't agree to. If I buy a book from a bookstore, I expect them to be smart enough to mark it up in order to make a sustaining profit. If they can't make a profit without selling my reading preferences to someone else, then they DESERVE to go bankrupt! Piss on them if their business model doesn't work. (Banks are a different but related situation: They make a profit off of borrowing money and lending it out at higher rates. In the last decade, however, they decided that they can charge us for doing our OWN banking and make an extra profit. Service charges for routing banking should be illegal)
Now another point to bring up is the fact that most of these companies under discussion are selling all of this personal information in direct violation of their contract with their customers! This is reprehensible, and possibly illegal. Again, it's also becoming common because they're not getting slapped down for it.
Unfortunately, your final point holds true: Companies will always put profit ahead of people, and almost all companies are too short-sighted (read: dumb!) to understand that the two work together.
This is the problem with a monopoly. Microsoft says "Today you're going to bend over the table," and the people think they're helpless to resist. Unfortunately, they're too lazy to find out how to walk away.
Microsoft will have a hard time screwing up their own model so badly that they actually drop below 90% market share--I'm not sure they could do it if they tried.
The secret is to move one step at a time. We already accept things that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
1.4 is faster, more stable, smaller, more cleanly coded, better at rendering pages (esp. the badly coded pages), and has controllable pop-up blocking (can't remember if that showed up in 1.2 or 1.3, but you can now have white-lists or black-lists of sites that can override your general policy)
Definitely worth the upgrade, just like 1.3 was definitely worth skipping.
You're probably the moderator who called him flamebait.
1) Discussing problems he's had with past versions is VERY relevant to the current announcement--are they fixed or are they not?
2) If you modded down every post that talked about 1.3 (or earlier), there would be five posts left in the entire discussion.
3) He didn't claim to favour anything, and he didn't try to incite flames (the very definition of flamebait I'd say), but he DID bring up what are at least perceived by the user to be mozilla issues, even though in fact they're Microsoft-sponsored developer problems.
Flamebait? Damn, three out of every ten posts on slashdot are more effective (and usually illiterate) flamebait than that was. The guy raised a serious issue, and brought it forth as a discussion topic. I can't think of anything more relevant.
Oh, I don't mind 'em at all. I'm just saying that they're not really massively necessary from the/. perspective. (the attention they garner by being posted on/. may in fact be massively necessary from the mozilla dev. perspective)
On the other hand, the 1.4 release is News. News as in, "Hey people, wake up! Pay attention! Important Stuff happening over here!"
No slight intended.
Re:Problems I have with Mozilla 1.3
on
Mozilla 1.4 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Can't believe that you got modded down as flamebait. Must be an idiot with moderator points.
At any rate while I have sympathy for your points, consider it from the point of view of mozilla. There is an internationally agreed-upon set of standards on how to write HTML. A website that doesn't follow those standards is broken, in the same way that a PCI card that requires a nonstandard voltage is broken. If you got a card that didn't fit in any PCI slots other than the ones on motherboards made by the same manufacturer, it's pretty hard to blame the other board makers for following standards, even though you can't use this particular PCI card in their boards.
Ultimately, it's a lost cause. People see websites that are broken because Microsoft promotes broken websites (and renders them the way the creators intended, rather than correctly), and blame Mozilla for behaving properly.
Try dropping a message to netflix. I did that to Toyota Canada a year ago, and within four months they had a site that worked 100% with mozilla, opera, and IE. (Furthermore, they had a note up indicating their intentions to implement this no more than three weeks after I emailed them! Good on Toyota.)
"is it really news worthy every time Moz makes a release?"
No. The announcements for RC1, RC2, and RC3 were really unnecessary.
However, this release--1.4 final--is definitely worthy of a post. This is the official 'stable production' release (the first since 1.0, I think), and is also the final relase in the old development path. If there were only three Mozilla announcements on/. in its entire history, they would be for (1)the initial creation of the project, (2)the 1.0 milestone, and (3)the 1.4 release.
Re:I would like to get this, but...
on
Mozilla 1.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You're mistaking a lack of guarantee with a lack of testing.
Mozilla isn't guaranteed to do ANYTHING. It's not guaranteed to be Y2k "compliant," it's not guaranteed to cause no damage to your hard drive, it's not guaranteed to cause SOME damage to your hard drive! Nor is it guaranteed to render web pages correctly, avoid sleeping with your spouse, or save the world.
The y2k non-guarantee was put up many years ago, because nearly every organisation on the planet was being hounded with the "are you y2k compliant?" question. Mozilla is just as non-compliant today as they were then, which is to say that nobody has found any issues.
Mozilla HAS been tested to work with four digit dates, and also been tested to render almost all web pages properly (certainly all proper web pages). It has NOT been guaranteed to do these things.
Seriously, download 1.4 and give it a go. I think you'll be very happy with its behaviour.
Part of your answer is (or will be) Mozilla 1.5. After the current release of Mozilla (1.4), they're making the big jump to de-monolith the project. There will be an entirely separate browser, email/news, and IRC program which work together.
As far as the million buttons/million options problem, I find mozilla better than average, after two minutes of work. I get rid of the "print," "search," "go," and "home" buttons as well as closing the sidebar, and I end up with an extremely clean looking simple browser. (even better with the new "nautilus" theme).
Quite honestly though, Microsoft had a brilliant and as far as I know original (gasp!) idea with Windows2000: Context-limited menus. These are the menus that hide all of the rare and infrequently used items until you let your cursor hover for a few seconds. Your commonly used items are therefore always available instantly, and the oddball ones gradually make themselves invisible unless needed.
We have an internal application that was written by a sleazy company who are currently charging us on a per-incident basis for finishing the software according to the original contract. It's buggy, badly written, and the ONLY site I've seen in six months that doesn't operate 100% under Mozilla.
Now that 1.4 is a reality, I'm going to make a run of all of the people I convinced to install 1.0, and force the upgrade on them if they haven't already. I was quite shocked to discover recently that my dad has actually been using Mozilla as his main (nearly only) browser since I installed 1.0 or 1.1 on his machine, back during the original release of those versions.
Mozilla 1.4 is solid, stable, full of really nice features (pop-up blocking is nice by itself, adding in white-lists or black-lists is great, but tabbed browsing wins people in a second!), and renders everything I've seen.
Heh, George has talent. Unfortunately, he also has contracted a serious case of "Hollywood Hedging." It's easier for him to make large, boistrous, overblown movies that have little of interest in them, other than big stars, big musicians, and big production.
If he went to smaller movies, the talent that's been (mostly) buried for years might come out again. That would be cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. How about if (3) is limited to the case where a person can _continue_ to listen to music without paying for it? If you play a tune for a friend, they decide that they don't like it, and as a result don't buy it--that's fine. You've stopped a sale, but they're not getting the benefit of the music.
But if you copy it for them, then they continue to receive the benefits of the material, without having paid for it. That's sort of the key, I figure. Lessening demand for music isn't inherently evil. (After all, some popular and hyped music just SUCKS!)
As others have pointed out, it was a list of 30 people who worked for the NSA as purchasers. There is no indication that the knowledge of their employment was secret. I'm sure I could find a bit of information on at least 30 NSA employees.
Is it a mistake? Probably, although neither the company or the employer (NSA) seem at all worried. I'm afraid this guy just comes off as a twitball.
Good work!
Cheers, and thanks for cleaning up some of the digital gene pool.
OK, it's now another day or two since this reply went up...
Here's a bit more of the story: We had a problem with Samba that was crashing our system, and bringing down our production environment. When we tracked it down (through some fairly extensive work on our part), we posted it to Usenet and also the Samba mailing list. The only response we got was one person who pointed us to a post with exactly the same problem, from two years prior.
Now paying money to a company for software updates is one thing. Offering money as a 'bounty' to a loose and informal organisation in the hopes that someone might get around to it is another thing. A ridiculous thing.
Software as a service industry is an interesting idea, and may actually be quite viable. However, withholding service without payment, ESPECIALLY on supposedly free software, is just stupidity. It's doubly stupid when the work needed isn't a new feature or an enhancement, but a mission-critical show-stopping bug.
More concisely, if the Samba team refuses to read bug reports until they've been paid, then they should post rates on their website instead of asking for donations.
OK, I read this article this morning.
The guy is telling the NSA stuff they already know, and have signed off as acceptable. His company was entirely above board in explaining their operations to the NSA in the first place.
Everyone involved knows what's going on. He is the only person who seems to have a problem with it. It doesn't sound like whistle-blowing to me, as much as whining.
Uh, no.
Using NMR as an imaging technology existed before Star Trek. Sorry.
Two points here.
First of all, this article isn't so much about accurately predicting the future, so much as creating it. SF has been giving us the vocabulary and conceptual framework for many of our modern inventions. If what we invent is similar but differently implemented than the idea of an SF writer from 40 years ago, it's not that they got it wrong--it's merely that we took the concept in a different direction than they did, when then invented the concept.
Secondly, this article goes on about movies, where in fact movies are about the most laughable bit of conservativism possible, with regards to futuristic ideas. The few decent ones are almost always based on books that have been around for decades.
Why they'd spend time talking about the five or six truly incisive futuristic movies that have been made when there are thousands upon thousands of SF stories that work so much better, I can't say.
That's quite an interesting statement. Do you have any evidence whatsoever that open source security bugs get fixed faster than closed source ones? Compare Linux with Solaris, if you want a level playing field.
Not a troll--I've heard this statement tossed out so many times as absolute fact, and yet I don't know if it's ever been tested.
As for Samba, you might have had good luck with a security patch, but we had a bug that caused a prouduction system to crater (12 CPUs and about 8GB of RAM) completely. It existed for TWO YEARS after being reported because no one on the Samba team felt like dealing with it. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.
It's, "You can drive out nature with a pitchfork..." not "you can drive nature out..."
No one.
I don't know of a single organisation who has defined Mozmail as the "standard." In fact, amongst organisations who use mozilla constantly, I know of very few who are even aware that Mozilla has a mail client.
Organisations tend to dictate that we use the "standard, (hah!)" exchange/Outbreak. In the rare cases where that isn't true, most people use whatever the hell they want.
I agree, and...I disagree.
To the best of my knowledge (which admittedly hasn't been stretched very far in this regard), there is nothing about Mozilla mail that deviates from standard POP3 or IMAP.
The problem as I see it is this: Computer users have become (a) so prevalent, and (b) so computer illiterate as a whole***, that the _interface_ to a good standard protocol (mail: POP3, IMAP, SMTP) actually has to be standardised, otherwise most people won't understand what you tell them to do. Whereas the instructions might have once said, "enter your mail server's DNS name here..." they now say, "click on the second button from the left in the top row..."
Or...
With the lack of true comprehension, we have to standardise our _user_ interfaces, rather than our _interprocess_ interfaces.
Sad, but true.
***I'm not claiming this as a bad thing in general, or a slight against most computer users. It's just that the median computer user is no longer a techie who likes computers for their own sake.
First of all, any place that deliberately jams cellular signals should be required to advertise that fact. I know there are restaurants in New York which do exactly this.
Now given that the blocking is known about, then a surgeon who is on-call has no right to be going somewhere where their phone/pager won't ring. I'm on an on-call rotation, and it's accepted that you don't go out of cellular range while carrying the phone, period.
Um, I think you got A and B mixed up in your discussion. At least the way I'm reading it.
Regardless, what you say is true--and is one of the reasons I will never be a CEO. One question, however, is how many truly bad decisions that led up to the company not being profitable by the time their money ran out could have been avoided? What did the startup do to get so close to a real goal, and yet not be able to get any more money out of the VC?
I disagree. You may want to block all mail from open relays. That's fine. BUT, they admins (mis)managing the relays aren't the problem. The relays themselves aren't the problem--the spammers and the companies who hire spammers are the ones who are deliberately stealing services from the poor sods who can't manage a mail server are the criminals. We shouldn't have ANY laws on how a person must manage/install their computer. If we're going to do that, then hell--why not make it illegal to run anything but the MS OS of the day?
Hmm. Where to start tearing apart a post that I fundamentally agree with?
Well, consider the aggregation of information--the information being sold(/rented/leased/traded) isn't always aggregate collections of anonymous data. More and more, it's becoming SPECIFIC information, along the lines of "you're name is a, your address is b, your annual income is c, and you like to see naked women doing x." This is DEFINITELY an invasion of my privacy and yours.
Furthermore, it's becoming the standard. There are fewer and fewer companies who refuse to sell individually identifiable databases.
Now moving backwards in your post, I have no problems with companies making a profit. I do object to companies making a profit off of me by exploiting me in ways I didn't agree to. If I buy a book from a bookstore, I expect them to be smart enough to mark it up in order to make a sustaining profit. If they can't make a profit without selling my reading preferences to someone else, then they DESERVE to go bankrupt! Piss on them if their business model doesn't work. (Banks are a different but related situation: They make a profit off of borrowing money and lending it out at higher rates. In the last decade, however, they decided that they can charge us for doing our OWN banking and make an extra profit. Service charges for routing banking should be illegal)
Now another point to bring up is the fact that most of these companies under discussion are selling all of this personal information in direct violation of their contract with their customers! This is reprehensible, and possibly illegal. Again, it's also becoming common because they're not getting slapped down for it.
Unfortunately, your final point holds true: Companies will always put profit ahead of people, and almost all companies are too short-sighted (read: dumb!) to understand that the two work together.
This is the problem with a monopoly. Microsoft says "Today you're going to bend over the table," and the people think they're helpless to resist. Unfortunately, they're too lazy to find out how to walk away.
Microsoft will have a hard time screwing up their own model so badly that they actually drop below 90% market share--I'm not sure they could do it if they tried.
The secret is to move one step at a time. We already accept things that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
versus mozilla 1.2.1...
1.4 is faster, more stable, smaller, more cleanly coded, better at rendering pages (esp. the badly coded pages), and has controllable pop-up blocking (can't remember if that showed up in 1.2 or 1.3, but you can now have white-lists or black-lists of sites that can override your general policy)
Definitely worth the upgrade, just like 1.3 was definitely worth skipping.
You're probably the moderator who called him flamebait.
1) Discussing problems he's had with past versions is VERY relevant to the current announcement--are they fixed or are they not?
2) If you modded down every post that talked about 1.3 (or earlier), there would be five posts left in the entire discussion.
3) He didn't claim to favour anything, and he didn't try to incite flames (the very definition of flamebait I'd say), but he DID bring up what are at least perceived by the user to be mozilla issues, even though in fact they're Microsoft-sponsored developer problems.
Flamebait? Damn, three out of every ten posts on slashdot are more effective (and usually illiterate) flamebait than that was. The guy raised a serious issue, and brought it forth as a discussion topic. I can't think of anything more relevant.
Oh, I don't mind 'em at all. I'm just saying that they're not really massively necessary from the /. perspective. (the attention they garner by being posted on /. may in fact be massively necessary from the mozilla dev. perspective)
On the other hand, the 1.4 release is News. News as in, "Hey people, wake up! Pay attention! Important Stuff happening over here!"
No slight intended.
Can't believe that you got modded down as flamebait. Must be an idiot with moderator points.
At any rate while I have sympathy for your points, consider it from the point of view of mozilla. There is an internationally agreed-upon set of standards on how to write HTML. A website that doesn't follow those standards is broken, in the same way that a PCI card that requires a nonstandard voltage is broken. If you got a card that didn't fit in any PCI slots other than the ones on motherboards made by the same manufacturer, it's pretty hard to blame the other board makers for following standards, even though you can't use this particular PCI card in their boards.
Ultimately, it's a lost cause. People see websites that are broken because Microsoft promotes broken websites (and renders them the way the creators intended, rather than correctly), and blame Mozilla for behaving properly.
Try dropping a message to netflix. I did that to Toyota Canada a year ago, and within four months they had a site that worked 100% with mozilla, opera, and IE. (Furthermore, they had a note up indicating their intentions to implement this no more than three weeks after I emailed them! Good on Toyota.)
"is it really news worthy every time Moz makes a release?"
/. in its entire history, they would be for (1)the initial creation of the project, (2)the 1.0 milestone, and (3)the 1.4 release.
No. The announcements for RC1, RC2, and RC3 were really unnecessary.
However, this release--1.4 final--is definitely worthy of a post. This is the official 'stable production' release (the first since 1.0, I think), and is also the final relase in the old development path. If there were only three Mozilla announcements on
You're mistaking a lack of guarantee with a lack of testing.
Mozilla isn't guaranteed to do ANYTHING. It's not guaranteed to be Y2k "compliant," it's not guaranteed to cause no damage to your hard drive, it's not guaranteed to cause SOME damage to your hard drive! Nor is it guaranteed to render web pages correctly, avoid sleeping with your spouse, or save the world.
The y2k non-guarantee was put up many years ago, because nearly every organisation on the planet was being hounded with the "are you y2k compliant?" question. Mozilla is just as non-compliant today as they were then, which is to say that nobody has found any issues.
Mozilla HAS been tested to work with four digit dates, and also been tested to render almost all web pages properly (certainly all proper web pages). It has NOT been guaranteed to do these things.
Seriously, download 1.4 and give it a go. I think you'll be very happy with its behaviour.
Part of your answer is (or will be) Mozilla 1.5. After the current release of Mozilla (1.4), they're making the big jump to de-monolith the project. There will be an entirely separate browser, email/news, and IRC program which work together.
As far as the million buttons/million options problem, I find mozilla better than average, after two minutes of work. I get rid of the "print," "search," "go," and "home" buttons as well as closing the sidebar, and I end up with an extremely clean looking simple browser. (even better with the new "nautilus" theme).
Quite honestly though, Microsoft had a brilliant and as far as I know original (gasp!) idea with Windows2000: Context-limited menus. These are the menus that hide all of the rare and infrequently used items until you let your cursor hover for a few seconds. Your commonly used items are therefore always available instantly, and the oddball ones gradually make themselves invisible unless needed.
We have an internal application that was written by a sleazy company who are currently charging us on a per-incident basis for finishing the software according to the original contract. It's buggy, badly written, and the ONLY site I've seen in six months that doesn't operate 100% under Mozilla.
Now that 1.4 is a reality, I'm going to make a run of all of the people I convinced to install 1.0, and force the upgrade on them if they haven't already. I was quite shocked to discover recently that my dad has actually been using Mozilla as his main (nearly only) browser since I installed 1.0 or 1.1 on his machine, back during the original release of those versions.
Mozilla 1.4 is solid, stable, full of really nice features (pop-up blocking is nice by itself, adding in white-lists or black-lists is great, but tabbed browsing wins people in a second!), and renders everything I've seen.
Heh, George has talent. Unfortunately, he also has contracted a serious case of "Hollywood Hedging." It's easier for him to make large, boistrous, overblown movies that have little of interest in them, other than big stars, big musicians, and big production.
If he went to smaller movies, the talent that's been (mostly) buried for years might come out again. That would be cool.