Going by previous versions of firefox, shouldn't it be 3.5.0.1 rather than 3.5.1?
Mozilla decided to simplify that with Firefox 3 (note that the upcoming security release for Firefox 3 is 3.0.12, not 3.0.0.12). Exactly why they used four numbers in the first place is something I don't know, it seems it started with Firefox 1.5. I know that one advantage touted of XPCOM was the ability to easily make incremental updates, so maybe there was a plan for a Firefox 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 (with the final number for each being used for security updates). Of course that would've been complicated and silly, so it seems the plan was abandoned and the version number compacted.
Let it be known to Square-Enix that this was the straw the broke the camel's back. I've been less than happy with Square shutting down Chrono Resurrection and giving us that half-assed non-remake for the DS, now they're shutting down another harmless fan project literally days from release? Enough Square! I was planning a few major purchases this year and next, but not now. I can't support a company that does this shit. They're joining Microsoft on my active boycott list. It may not make much of a difference, but I refuse to give my monetary support to a company I'm this pissed at.
Acid2 doesn't use JavaScript, so NoScript will have no effect.
But nice try.
I haven't examined the code, but you must be incorrect as I use Firefox 3.0.10 here, and I just blocked scripts from webstandards.org, ran the Acid 2 test, and found that the eyes didn't render and there was a red box in their place. I then allowed webstandards.org again, the page auto-refreshed, and the eyes appeared. So it seems Acid2 does use JavaScript, it's breaking the test, and you need to place the site on your whitelist.
You have a short memory. I was living in England at the peak (or nadir) of Thatcher's reign, and she had everything well set on its present course.
I think his point was that even during the Thatcher years, you at least had Labour as an alternative. But when Tony Blair took control of the Labour party and sent it down it current Thatherite course, British politics effectively became varying shades of conservatism.
The reason for this is that the Windows compile is compiled with some kind of compiler optimisation. Don't really know what that optimisation was, however it had nothing to do with Windows.
IIRC, that was profile-guided optimization, which gives Firefox a 15-20% speed boost. It was enabled on Windows nightly builds at the time but not Linux nightly builds due to various reasons. It's now enabled on both, and surprise surprise! The performance gap is gone.
We're still seeing this cited and modded up despite being busted on this very site (in the comments for that story) though, which I guess just goes to prove the old adage that a lie can get around the world before the truth manages to tie its shoes.
We should aspire to be like Saudi Arabia - their censorship system presents "an official government page instead, telling you that it is blocked. You can even fill in a form explaining why you think the site should be unblocked".
Actually, we should really aspire to be like a free nation.
I've been looking for a good opportunity to tell this story, so I might as well do it now.
I once read an article about a solo singer-songwriter called Ladyhawke, which I found quite interesting. I did nothing about this for a while, until I saw Amazon UK were offering £3 worth of free MP3 downloads. I tried to buy her first album using this offer, but ran into problems using the Amazon MP3 Downloader*. So I found a much easier and more sensible solution in The Pirate Bay.
But at this point, I found I actually liked the single. Quite a lot. So I ended up going back to Amazon, and ordered the CD instead. I ripped this to FLAC and frequently listen to the various tracks. So in this case, I pirated it, liked it, and bought it legally. This is not an everyday occurrence for me, but it does happen, and there are some things that never would've gained enough attention for me to purchase them if not for piracy.
*Can anyone actually tell me why I have to use this for albums when I don't need to use it for singles and the tracks aren't even DRMed? Amazon's FAQ was a complete non-answer and no one else seems to have any idea.
They really need some kind of working micropayment system. If they could just charge a penny to read an article (with a free abstract) they could make some revenue.
My immediate thought when I read this was that it would breed sensationalism. If things are on a 'pay per article' basis, then boring but important news will be of little value to them, while trivial but popular news (i.e. all of the damn celebrity and reality TV stories I'm getting sick and fucking tired of seeing) will be seen to have huge importance to the company publishing them. That seems to be a bad direction to take things in.
Yea, these alarmists just like scaring people. The biosphere will evolve to deal with any problems we create today.
Not sure whether this comment was meant seriously or not, but it is pretty much a given that the biosphere will evolve to take care of the mess we've made someday (it's been through worse already). The only question is whether we'll be around to see that happen, or if we'll have all died off before that time.
"Support for such a move has been building since 2000, when President Bush became president despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore."
So Bush won despite more actual people voting for Gore? I'm sure there's some great technical reason for the system to work this way, but to a layman it just seems ridiculous.
Wait, what's that you say? Britain works the same way? WHAT!?
We're even worse. In 2005, Tony Blair managed to win the election, and Labour got a considerable majority despite polling only 35.3% of the vote. The Lib Dems got around one sixth of the seats in the House of Commons, but polled 22.1% of the vote! No wonder they want proportional representation.
My PCs are all named after Studio Ghibli heroines. I first used this with San (retroactively naming her predecessors Ichi and Ni), then with Chihiro and now with Shizuku. Both of the last two are still operating, and will be replaced with Haru and Taeko respectively. This doesn't factor much into operations, though the command line does display "rhapsody@shizuku" on this PC.
I don't understand why he couldn't use KDE 3.x until 4.x was more usable?
I thought that too, I get the impression this is how it went for Linus:
"Hmm, KDE 4.0? Let's try installing that."
"..."
"Oh my God, it's a complete disaster, and now my desktop is ruined! I can't use this, I'm starting again from scratch with GNOME."
While for me, it went like this:
"Hmm, KDE 4.0? Sounds like a big step, and I'm pretty settled with KDE 3.5, I should read up on that first and maybe try a live CD."
"..."
"Nah, doesn't feel right for my tastes, I'll wait for a more polished 4.x release."
I believe the phrase here is "Look before you leap". I did, and I'm still on KDE 3.5 here. KDE 4.2 looks pretty good though, so I'll give that a go when it's ready and see if that's what I've been waiting for. If it is (and I really think it will be) then it's time to switch. If not, I'll be looking at others. Maybe Xfce or something.
...except for the most popular combination in the world[Citation Needed]: iPod and iTunes.
Well you can just convert FLACs to Apple Lossless with no quality loss, since they're both lossless. Or you could convert them to MP3, and keep the FLACs around for playback on devices that do support it.
A wide selection of music, and more importantly, a wide selection of formats, from MP3, WAV, to OGG.
You'd have to be mad to insist on WAV, try for FLAC instead. Typically compresses to 30-50% the size of WAV, the best hardware and software support of any lossless codec, can be tagged with Vorbis comments, and supports Replay Gain.
Also, the last codec you're thinking of is Vorbis. Ogg is a container format.
Re:It's not great news for everyone
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 1
Well, I have to admit I had the same concern when I read this story. If they're decreasing their push to get people to buy commercial licenses, and if the whole Qt business is now insignificant relative to the overall business of Nokia anyway, then how strong will their commitment to future development and maintenance of Qt be?
Not like I can see the future or anything, it just concerns me a little.
My impression of this is that Nokia think they can make more money by getting Qt spread far and wide then selling support for it than they could by having a small amount of people paying for commercial licenses. They may be right, and I certainly hope they are.
No, NESticle really does suck. Trust me, I've used more than my fair share of NES emulators and it bugs the hell out of me when people say NESticle is 'good enough'. Seriously, the latest version (which was released ten years ago) doesn't even work on Windows, you have to use DOS! The last version that works on Windows is from 1997, and I've no idea how well that would work on Windows XP. NESticle was ahead of its time, but its time was the late 90s. Move on people!
Nestopia may be a bit heavy duty for low-end PCs like these though. FCE Ultra would be my immediate recommendation. It may not be quite up to Nestopia's level of accuracy, but it's close enough that most people won't notice and it's a hell of a lot faster. You could also give Mednafen a go. I've never tried it personally, but it looks good to me, and the NES emulation is based on FCE Ultra.
Same here. I happened to like the old userpage, now all I've got is this pseudo-idle mess with the actual posts crammed into a little corner. I didn't ask for idle, I didn't ask for the firehose, I asked for a user page!
I think this is a sign that Slashdot has well and truly fallen for Incessant Redesign Disease, where they just have to change the design of everything every now and then to 'keep it fresh'. Nevermind if no one complained about the old design, or if you can't actually think of any way to improve on the old design, you've got to keep it fresh!
Note to the Slashdot staff: You know all those +5 modded rants about Vista? You're doing the SAME FUCKING THING. If the site design needs changing, we'll let you know.
The reason NT started at version 3 is because versions 1 and 2 were already released as the collaborative effort and named OS/2 versions 1 and 2.
I thought it was because Microsoft wanted Windows NT to be at the same version number as their home version of Windows, hence why the first release was 'Windows NT 3.1', since home users were on Windows 3.1 at the time. They've kept that up with Windows NT 4.0 sharing the same internal version number as Windows 95 (originally Windows 4.0) and Windows 2000 (originally Windows NT 5.0) having a higher version number than any of the classic home versions of Windows, resulting in Windows Me (effectively Windows 4.2) considering Windows 2000 a 'newer version' and offering to upgrade if you insert the install CD, despite Windows 2000 actually being older than Windows Me.
One reason for using WebKit over Gecko would be the licensing...I know that for lots of corporations, BSD-licensing is much favored over anything related to GPL...(Gecko is MPL)
Parts of WebKit are under the LGPL and parts are under a BSD-style license (I don't know which parts and I can't be bothered picking through the source code to find out), Gecko is all MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-licensed. You're going to have to adhere to the conditions of the LGPL if you actually want to use all of WebKit, so what's the difference? Gecko could be said to be better as you get to choose between a library-level or file-level copyleft, since you only have to adhere to one of the licenses.
Choosing WebKit over Gecko would probably be more about speed (WebKit is definitely faster), code-cleanliness (I hear Apple chose KHTML over Gecko to base WebKit on because of this), and simple bad feelings. A lot of people at Mozilla still don't like Microsoft, and the feeling may well be mutual among the browser developers on both sides. Apple probably just seem a more palatable choice to be working with for Microsoft.
Presto is pretty quick, but Opera seem to be losing their competitive advantage as of late. WebKit is an absolute screamer, Gecko seems to get faster every day, and Microsoft have even managed to get some speed out of Trident (though IE8b2 is still stone dead last). Presto has gone quiet though. It'll probably burst back into life once Opera 10 is out, but that seems to have dropped off the radar now. Does anyone even have a ballpark estimate of when to expect Opera 10?
Sure, most of us probably have a FF install on a USB key somewhere, but what about the people who just bought their computer from the store? This'll drive them insane just like the "Keyboard error. Press any key to continue" error.
If they got it from a store, don't you think whoever put it together, installed an operating system, and bundled a load of software with it might have put a browser on the PC for them?
Sounds like a PR disaster in the making though. Release source code to a driver then sue people for creating a driver from it? Who the hell would trust Creative after something like that?
Not wanting to get into another flame fest thread over GPLv2 vs GPLv3, but I'm curious as to their reasoning for choosing v2. Did they say?
Not that I've heard, but one reason is patents. If Creative hold any patents over the driver, or even the hardware, they may be at risk when using the GPLv3 (the risk doesn't have to be real, only perceived). There's also the licenses of ALSA and OSS. I checked both, and they're GPLv2-only. GPLv3-only source code would be useless unless they relicensed their entire projects, and I don't think they'd be in any hurry to do that.
Kubuntu 8.04 is working just fine here (though I'm withholding judgement on 8.10 until I've had some hands-on experience), I've heard a lot of bitching about the six month release cycle myself but never had any real problems due to it. Six months to stabilize the revision of Debian Sid they've forked from seems enough from where I'm sitting. Besides, all distros have people who hate them. I was once thinking of switching to Fedora because someone I respect talked about it like it was the best thing since sliced bread, them someone I have equal respect for switches away from Fedora, citing numerous major problems. Who the hell do I listen to? Eventually, I listened to myself, and stuck with Kubuntu. As I said at the start, it's working just fine here, why change things?
BTW, ALSA and Compiz are one thing, but Flash? How the hell are we supposed to fix that when Adobe still insists we can't have the full source code? We're trying our best (re: Gnash, Swfdec) but Flash itself can only be fixed by Adobe. Frankly, if Gnash or Swfdec works for the sites I want, I'm switching in a heartbeat. I'm sick and fucking tired of the Flash plugin crashing and leaving me with nothing but grey rectangles all the damn time.
Slashdot Mirror
Going by previous versions of firefox, shouldn't it be 3.5.0.1 rather than 3.5.1?
Mozilla decided to simplify that with Firefox 3 (note that the upcoming security release for Firefox 3 is 3.0.12, not 3.0.0.12). Exactly why they used four numbers in the first place is something I don't know, it seems it started with Firefox 1.5. I know that one advantage touted of XPCOM was the ability to easily make incremental updates, so maybe there was a plan for a Firefox 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 (with the final number for each being used for security updates). Of course that would've been complicated and silly, so it seems the plan was abandoned and the version number compacted.
Isn't it really more Steve's SQL these days?
[Insert overdone chair-throwing joke here]
Let it be known to Square-Enix that this was the straw the broke the camel's back. I've been less than happy with Square shutting down Chrono Resurrection and giving us that half-assed non-remake for the DS, now they're shutting down another harmless fan project literally days from release? Enough Square! I was planning a few major purchases this year and next, but not now. I can't support a company that does this shit. They're joining Microsoft on my active boycott list. It may not make much of a difference, but I refuse to give my monetary support to a company I'm this pissed at.
Acid2 doesn't use JavaScript, so NoScript will have no effect.
But nice try.
I haven't examined the code, but you must be incorrect as I use Firefox 3.0.10 here, and I just blocked scripts from webstandards.org, ran the Acid 2 test, and found that the eyes didn't render and there was a red box in their place. I then allowed webstandards.org again, the page auto-refreshed, and the eyes appeared. So it seems Acid2 does use JavaScript, it's breaking the test, and you need to place the site on your whitelist.
You have a short memory. I was living in England at the peak (or nadir) of Thatcher's reign, and she had everything well set on its present course.
I think his point was that even during the Thatcher years, you at least had Labour as an alternative. But when Tony Blair took control of the Labour party and sent it down it current Thatherite course, British politics effectively became varying shades of conservatism.
The reason for this is that the Windows compile is compiled with some kind of compiler optimisation. Don't really know what that optimisation was, however it had nothing to do with Windows.
IIRC, that was profile-guided optimization, which gives Firefox a 15-20% speed boost. It was enabled on Windows nightly builds at the time but not Linux nightly builds due to various reasons. It's now enabled on both, and surprise surprise! The performance gap is gone.
We're still seeing this cited and modded up despite being busted on this very site (in the comments for that story) though, which I guess just goes to prove the old adage that a lie can get around the world before the truth manages to tie its shoes.
We should aspire to be like Saudi Arabia - their censorship system presents "an official government page instead, telling you that it is blocked. You can even fill in a form explaining why you think the site should be unblocked".
Actually, we should really aspire to be like a free nation.
I've been looking for a good opportunity to tell this story, so I might as well do it now.
I once read an article about a solo singer-songwriter called Ladyhawke, which I found quite interesting. I did nothing about this for a while, until I saw Amazon UK were offering £3 worth of free MP3 downloads. I tried to buy her first album using this offer, but ran into problems using the Amazon MP3 Downloader*. So I found a much easier and more sensible solution in The Pirate Bay.
But at this point, I found I actually liked the single. Quite a lot. So I ended up going back to Amazon, and ordered the CD instead. I ripped this to FLAC and frequently listen to the various tracks. So in this case, I pirated it, liked it, and bought it legally. This is not an everyday occurrence for me, but it does happen, and there are some things that never would've gained enough attention for me to purchase them if not for piracy.
*Can anyone actually tell me why I have to use this for albums when I don't need to use it for singles and the tracks aren't even DRMed? Amazon's FAQ was a complete non-answer and no one else seems to have any idea.
They really need some kind of working micropayment system. If they could just charge a penny to read an article (with a free abstract) they could make some revenue.
My immediate thought when I read this was that it would breed sensationalism. If things are on a 'pay per article' basis, then boring but important news will be of little value to them, while trivial but popular news (i.e. all of the damn celebrity and reality TV stories I'm getting sick and fucking tired of seeing) will be seen to have huge importance to the company publishing them. That seems to be a bad direction to take things in.
Yea, these alarmists just like scaring people. The biosphere will evolve to deal with any problems we create today.
Not sure whether this comment was meant seriously or not, but it is pretty much a given that the biosphere will evolve to take care of the mess we've made someday (it's been through worse already). The only question is whether we'll be around to see that happen, or if we'll have all died off before that time.
As a Brit I was shocked to read this from TFA:
"Support for such a move has been building since 2000, when President Bush became president despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore."
So Bush won despite more actual people voting for Gore? I'm sure there's some great technical reason for the system to work this way, but to a layman it just seems ridiculous.
Wait, what's that you say? Britain works the same way? WHAT!?
We're even worse. In 2005, Tony Blair managed to win the election, and Labour got a considerable majority despite polling only 35.3% of the vote. The Lib Dems got around one sixth of the seats in the House of Commons, but polled 22.1% of the vote! No wonder they want proportional representation.
My PCs are all named after Studio Ghibli heroines. I first used this with San (retroactively naming her predecessors Ichi and Ni), then with Chihiro and now with Shizuku. Both of the last two are still operating, and will be replaced with Haru and Taeko respectively. This doesn't factor much into operations, though the command line does display "rhapsody@shizuku" on this PC.
I don't understand why he couldn't use KDE 3.x until 4.x was more usable?
I thought that too, I get the impression this is how it went for Linus:
"Hmm, KDE 4.0? Let's try installing that."
"..."
"Oh my God, it's a complete disaster, and now my desktop is ruined! I can't use this, I'm starting again from scratch with GNOME."
While for me, it went like this:
"Hmm, KDE 4.0? Sounds like a big step, and I'm pretty settled with KDE 3.5, I should read up on that first and maybe try a live CD."
"..."
"Nah, doesn't feel right for my tastes, I'll wait for a more polished 4.x release."
I believe the phrase here is "Look before you leap". I did, and I'm still on KDE 3.5 here. KDE 4.2 looks pretty good though, so I'll give that a go when it's ready and see if that's what I've been waiting for. If it is (and I really think it will be) then it's time to switch. If not, I'll be looking at others. Maybe Xfce or something.
...except for the most popular combination in the world[Citation Needed]: iPod and iTunes.
Well you can just convert FLACs to Apple Lossless with no quality loss, since they're both lossless. Or you could convert them to MP3, and keep the FLACs around for playback on devices that do support it.
A wide selection of music, and more importantly, a wide selection of formats, from MP3, WAV, to OGG.
You'd have to be mad to insist on WAV, try for FLAC instead. Typically compresses to 30-50% the size of WAV, the best hardware and software support of any lossless codec, can be tagged with Vorbis comments, and supports Replay Gain.
Also, the last codec you're thinking of is Vorbis. Ogg is a container format.
Well, I have to admit I had the same concern when I read this story. If they're decreasing their push to get people to buy commercial licenses, and if the whole Qt business is now insignificant relative to the overall business of Nokia anyway, then how strong will their commitment to future development and maintenance of Qt be?
Not like I can see the future or anything, it just concerns me a little.
My impression of this is that Nokia think they can make more money by getting Qt spread far and wide then selling support for it than they could by having a small amount of people paying for commercial licenses. They may be right, and I certainly hope they are.
No, NESticle really does suck. Trust me, I've used more than my fair share of NES emulators and it bugs the hell out of me when people say NESticle is 'good enough'. Seriously, the latest version (which was released ten years ago) doesn't even work on Windows, you have to use DOS! The last version that works on Windows is from 1997, and I've no idea how well that would work on Windows XP. NESticle was ahead of its time, but its time was the late 90s. Move on people!
Nestopia may be a bit heavy duty for low-end PCs like these though. FCE Ultra would be my immediate recommendation. It may not be quite up to Nestopia's level of accuracy, but it's close enough that most people won't notice and it's a hell of a lot faster. You could also give Mednafen a go. I've never tried it personally, but it looks good to me, and the NES emulation is based on FCE Ultra.
Same here. I happened to like the old userpage, now all I've got is this pseudo-idle mess with the actual posts crammed into a little corner. I didn't ask for idle, I didn't ask for the firehose, I asked for a user page!
I think this is a sign that Slashdot has well and truly fallen for Incessant Redesign Disease, where they just have to change the design of everything every now and then to 'keep it fresh'. Nevermind if no one complained about the old design, or if you can't actually think of any way to improve on the old design, you've got to keep it fresh!
Note to the Slashdot staff: You know all those +5 modded rants about Vista? You're doing the SAME FUCKING THING. If the site design needs changing, we'll let you know.
The reason NT started at version 3 is because versions 1 and 2 were already released as the collaborative effort and named OS/2 versions 1 and 2.
I thought it was because Microsoft wanted Windows NT to be at the same version number as their home version of Windows, hence why the first release was 'Windows NT 3.1', since home users were on Windows 3.1 at the time. They've kept that up with Windows NT 4.0 sharing the same internal version number as Windows 95 (originally Windows 4.0) and Windows 2000 (originally Windows NT 5.0) having a higher version number than any of the classic home versions of Windows, resulting in Windows Me (effectively Windows 4.2) considering Windows 2000 a 'newer version' and offering to upgrade if you insert the install CD, despite Windows 2000 actually being older than Windows Me.
One reason for using WebKit over Gecko would be the licensing...I know that for lots of corporations, BSD-licensing is much favored over anything related to GPL...(Gecko is MPL)
Parts of WebKit are under the LGPL and parts are under a BSD-style license (I don't know which parts and I can't be bothered picking through the source code to find out), Gecko is all MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-licensed. You're going to have to adhere to the conditions of the LGPL if you actually want to use all of WebKit, so what's the difference? Gecko could be said to be better as you get to choose between a library-level or file-level copyleft, since you only have to adhere to one of the licenses.
Choosing WebKit over Gecko would probably be more about speed (WebKit is definitely faster), code-cleanliness (I hear Apple chose KHTML over Gecko to base WebKit on because of this), and simple bad feelings. A lot of people at Mozilla still don't like Microsoft, and the feeling may well be mutual among the browser developers on both sides. Apple probably just seem a more palatable choice to be working with for Microsoft.
Opera's rendering engine probably can.
Presto is pretty quick, but Opera seem to be losing their competitive advantage as of late. WebKit is an absolute screamer, Gecko seems to get faster every day, and Microsoft have even managed to get some speed out of Trident (though IE8b2 is still stone dead last). Presto has gone quiet though. It'll probably burst back into life once Opera 10 is out, but that seems to have dropped off the radar now. Does anyone even have a ballpark estimate of when to expect Opera 10?
Sure, most of us probably have a FF install on a USB key somewhere, but what about the people who just bought their computer from the store? This'll drive them insane just like the "Keyboard error. Press any key to continue" error.
If they got it from a store, don't you think whoever put it together, installed an operating system, and bundled a load of software with it might have put a browser on the PC for them?
Sounds like a PR disaster in the making though. Release source code to a driver then sue people for creating a driver from it? Who the hell would trust Creative after something like that?
Not wanting to get into another flame fest thread over GPLv2 vs GPLv3, but I'm curious as to their reasoning for choosing v2. Did they say?
Not that I've heard, but one reason is patents. If Creative hold any patents over the driver, or even the hardware, they may be at risk when using the GPLv3 (the risk doesn't have to be real, only perceived). There's also the licenses of ALSA and OSS. I checked both, and they're GPLv2-only. GPLv3-only source code would be useless unless they relicensed their entire projects, and I don't think they'd be in any hurry to do that.
Kubuntu 8.04 is working just fine here (though I'm withholding judgement on 8.10 until I've had some hands-on experience), I've heard a lot of bitching about the six month release cycle myself but never had any real problems due to it. Six months to stabilize the revision of Debian Sid they've forked from seems enough from where I'm sitting. Besides, all distros have people who hate them. I was once thinking of switching to Fedora because someone I respect talked about it like it was the best thing since sliced bread, them someone I have equal respect for switches away from Fedora, citing numerous major problems. Who the hell do I listen to? Eventually, I listened to myself, and stuck with Kubuntu. As I said at the start, it's working just fine here, why change things?
BTW, ALSA and Compiz are one thing, but Flash? How the hell are we supposed to fix that when Adobe still insists we can't have the full source code? We're trying our best (re: Gnash, Swfdec) but Flash itself can only be fixed by Adobe. Frankly, if Gnash or Swfdec works for the sites I want, I'm switching in a heartbeat. I'm sick and fucking tired of the Flash plugin crashing and leaving me with nothing but grey rectangles all the damn time.