At least as far as I can tell, Moon Hoaxers are considered to be fringe nutters even within conspiracy theory circles. Their theories are so shoddy that even the folks who believe firmly in in little green men at Area 51 want nothing to do with it.
If BSD hadn't forked, it would likely be the most predominate x86 *nix, rather than an almost irrelevant footnote in IT history.
As it is, any great concept that the BSD teams developed was eventually incorporated in the more politically unified development culture of Linux. BSD folks tend toward very shallow marketing slogans like "Security, Portability, and whatever" which doesn't cut it when you look at where the actual work is happening. Any meaningful conclusion is that results beat stoner burnout platitudes.
I disagree. The "forks" from original BSD weren't really forks. They were Berkeley giving up on it and letting others take over.
Most of the various BSD's are "forks" because they have different purposes. OpenBSD is security oriented, NetBSD is intended to run on vritually everything that has a CPU, FreeBSD was intended for more mainstram use.
First of all they weren't forks directly from Berkeley, they all forked from a dead OS called 386BSD that had a lot of development problems.
Second, everything I've read on the topic indicates this was very much personality-driven and related to 386BSD politics. The "reasoning" behind each BSD was something that was developed later.
In an ideal world, I suppose, 386BSD would have been managed better and there would be no forks.
ActiveX is just a DLL, but the only reason it exists is TO CREATE CONTROLS IN REMOTE SCRIPTS. It just uses standard Windows widgets and such to do the actual work. You're the ignorant one... the GP was perfectly right. ActiveX is simply a security hole, period.
ActiveX certainly has some problems, but in these two cases (Excel and Media Player), we are talking about plugins that are specifically designed to be used in web browsers and other "remote scripts". If they were somehow using the Netscape/Firefox plugin API, its likely the same security holes would exist.
But I will give you credit for at least knowing what ActiveX is, which puts you ahead of 99% of the open source cavemen on this site who just grunt OGG SAY ACTIVEX BAD SECURITY and get score 5 for their pathetic peabrained insights.
A vulnerability to opening an Excel sheet in IE? How many people do that on a regular basis? How many EVER do it? I dont think I can remember having ever tried to nor needing to. How is this newsworthy?
I think you missunderstand how this works. Hackers can craft a special page which calls the control, which means anyone with Office installed on their system is vulnerable.
Also as an AC pointed out, it's not really in "Excel", its in "Office Web Components" which are mini-applications specifically designed to be included in (intranet) web pages.
YouTube has various fly-out menus and the like, which generally a PITA to get working in IE6, especially if you have flash all over the page.
Not to mention IT workers are lazy SOBs, and if they can't sit around and watch videos all day, they might get off their butt and upgrade everyone off IE6.:^)
Except browser appliances aren't exactly a mysterious commodity, they've been around in different forms for years. It really isn't complicated.
These conversations are starting sounding like "Could 2010 be the year of the browser appliance?" because the hype never lives up to reality. IMO there might be a niche market for these things, but between smartphones and people who want MS Office even on their netbooks, not very much.
IE doesn't have the problem where something in Window #1 locks up Window #2.
And certainly plugins are still problematic, but when you open a new window, they are restarted. Firefox shares the same code between all windows, so you have to restart the entire browser.
FYI, this user prefers Chrome, because IMO they've worked hard to make the basic user experience better than IE, while Firefox seems to be more worried about extendibility and developer features.
When Navigator 4.0 was first out, and people were comparing it to version 3, the new version was a huge improvement. It wasn't until it'd been out for several years and the most significant update was the Communicator suite (which used more memory and didn't improve the browsing experience at all) that the cheers started to turn into groans,
I think you're misremembering things. Netscape 4 was released as Communicator. The standalone Navigator program wasn't re-released until sometime later, due to user complaints.
Also Netscape 4.00 was buggy, slow, and completely unusable, plus it came with some Java desktop applet crap called Netcaster. It wasn't until something like 4.05 that it was even feasible to replace NN3.
The whole idea of having external plugins bring functionality to the browser for which it was never designed is a complete mess. This is why there are only workarounds so far.
I think that's a cop-out. Plug-ins have been part of the browsing experience since about 1996, primarily because the browser vendors heavily promoted them. They've had plenty of time to adapt to ensure that crappy plugins aren't hurting the user experience.
Forking a process on unix-like systems if fairly lightweight but for Windows this will not scale well at all. Why not just have rendering worker threads? Have I missed something?
Er. This is an argument which applies to high-volume servers that handle hundreds/thousands of requests per second. Windows' process model is not so heavy-weight that you notice it opening a new browser tab once every few minutes.
OK I'm a user, and I want a browser where the UI doesn't lag when pages are loading. I also want a browser that doesn't completely freeze when a Java applet launches or PDF file opens. I would also like a browser where I don't have to restart the whole thing when Flash gets borked and refuses to play youtube videos.
Point being there's a lot of user-visible issues and longstanding complaints which are addressed by this. Furthermore, the incumbent browser (IE) doesn't have any of these issues.
(And "Use Adblock and stop using Java/Flash/PDF" is a workaround, not a real solution.)
They had to chance a code base from around 5+ years only because they didn't things right 5+ years ago. Remember, back then they were doing a complete code rewrite anyway.
Actually it was more like 10 years ago:/
And you're right -- Internet Explorer 4 had a multiprocess model (one process per window), but Mozilla insisted on having everything running in the same process, even the frickin mail client.
A lot of people questioned this at the time, but the response was "That's the way Netscape Communicator 4 does it and everyone loves Netscape 4".
Remember in the early days of "the web", most of the interesting content was not located on HTTP servers. So the "web" aspect was the ability to tie all of this FTP or Gopher or whatever content together with hypertext. That is, "the web" was the connections, not the resources.
So I would agree with the GP that "the web" has assimilated most of the old stand-alone internet applications/protocols, even if it hasn't technically become those applications.
I tend to agree with you. Just because a device is targeted purely towards internet use doesn't mean people don't want to use Outlook, or AOL Messenger, or Acrobat, or their crappy printer. Even though Google has some decent web apps, I don't think we're at a stage where people are ready to give up their native applications.
However, ad blockers break the data collection for most analytics system. So it is likely that Firefox is being underreported, just because the of the popularity of ABP, NoScript, various cookie blockers, and so on.
The important number is not so much the current percentage, but what the rate of change is. I've seen sites where IE has held steady at 80% and sites where it was never over 30%.
The story shows an 8% IE drop in a single month, which is so huge that it has to be a change in the sample size or methodology. Just as an example, at an old job we used the Omniture analytics service. They signed up Apple Computer to their service, and instantly the "internet" stats for OS X went from 3% to 12%.
Ha, apparently you believe this is only some sort of abstract intellectual debate. Please. None of our internet blathering matters one bit to the capital investors that I'm supposedly "protecting".
In the real world PC games have a poor ROI, and publishers have identified piracy as part of the reason for that. You can get angry and stomp your feet about it, but that's not going to make any more games available to you in reality.
When I was a kid, I pirated hundreds of computer games from friends, so I'm certainly not arguing that sort of thing has always happened. (That sort of thing is exactly what I mean by a "scene".) However, as an adult, I don't have anyone I can call up and say "yo, hook me up with the warez". But I could PirateBay pretty much anything I wanted to.
Just as an example, some years ago I downloaded UT99. It came bundled as 50 1.4MB RAR files on a hacked FTP server downloading at like 1k/sec. Now I could saturate my DSL line bittorrenting a modern game. The user experience of internet piracy has improved enormously over the last few years. Simply dismissing this would be foolish and retarded.
I don't disagree that piracy is often used as an "excuse". But the facts are that PC game sales are stagnant (and this isn't just because the games are bad), high-end PC FPSes are almost becoming a niche within a niche due to hardware issues, and publishers can pull up a web page and see that X Thousand people are downloading their game *right now*. So it's natural they would point their fingers in that direction, because the people with the high end gaming rigs simply are not putting their money down.
Your economic analysis is sound, but the upshot is that the future of PC gaming is laptop-style games aimed at the casual market (Sims, Tycoon games, etc.) Broader hardware base, and less warez-saavy users. This puts traditional PC titans like ID in a very bad position.
That was the major difference between BBS culture and Usenet/Internet culture. On pre-september Usenet, everyone posted under their real names, their sigs often contained their job titles and phone numbers, and there was a sense of responsiblity because your account was closely tied to your real life.
For the most part, web discussion boards follow the BBS tradition of using handles and discouraging the posting of personal information. However, that doesn't serve the needs of people who want network their real life as opposed to hanging out with a bunch of internet phoneys called "DarthMegaBlade666". So its natural that things like Facebook or LinkedIn appeared.
This is a scapegoat I'm sorry, many games were released during the age of broadband and the internet and were easily downloadable then (pre 2000, 1998/1997). Warez scene has been around since ye old shareware days and before that. Copies of Dos / Win 3.1 were shared rampantly via sneakernet.
Of course there has always been a ton of piracy, but the major change in recent years is that one can easily download warez without being a member of a "scene". Also, since its occurring in the open, publishers are more aware of it.
I tend to agree with you about the demands of 3D accelleration, but the other major change is the consumer PC market shifting to laptops starting in the early 2000s. In the glory days of PC gaming, a video card upgrade was simple and cheap, now it's basically impossible for most users. So the graphically intensive ID-style titles almost have to be on consoles to find a market.
Slashdot Mirror
At least as far as I can tell, Moon Hoaxers are considered to be fringe nutters even within conspiracy theory circles. Their theories are so shoddy that even the folks who believe firmly in in little green men at Area 51 want nothing to do with it.
Huff another bong hit and consider this, bro...
If BSD hadn't forked, it would likely be the most predominate x86 *nix, rather than an almost irrelevant footnote in IT history.
As it is, any great concept that the BSD teams developed was eventually incorporated in the more politically unified development culture of Linux. BSD folks tend toward very shallow marketing slogans like "Security, Portability, and whatever" which doesn't cut it when you look at where the actual work is happening. Any meaningful conclusion is that results beat stoner burnout platitudes.
I disagree. The "forks" from original BSD weren't really forks. They were Berkeley giving up on it and letting others take over.
Most of the various BSD's are "forks" because they have different purposes. OpenBSD is security oriented, NetBSD is intended to run on vritually everything that has a CPU, FreeBSD was intended for more mainstram use.
First of all they weren't forks directly from Berkeley, they all forked from a dead OS called 386BSD that had a lot of development problems.
Second, everything I've read on the topic indicates this was very much personality-driven and related to 386BSD politics. The "reasoning" behind each BSD was something that was developed later.
In an ideal world, I suppose, 386BSD would have been managed better and there would be no forks.
ActiveX is just a DLL, but the only reason it exists is TO CREATE CONTROLS IN REMOTE SCRIPTS. It just uses standard Windows widgets and such to do the actual work. You're the ignorant one... the GP was perfectly right. ActiveX is simply a security hole, period.
ActiveX certainly has some problems, but in these two cases (Excel and Media Player), we are talking about plugins that are specifically designed to be used in web browsers and other "remote scripts". If they were somehow using the Netscape/Firefox plugin API, its likely the same security holes would exist.
But I will give you credit for at least knowing what ActiveX is, which puts you ahead of 99% of the open source cavemen on this site who just grunt OGG SAY ACTIVEX BAD SECURITY and get score 5 for their pathetic peabrained insights.
A vulnerability to opening an Excel sheet in IE? How many people do that on a regular basis? How many EVER do it? I dont think I can remember having ever tried to nor needing to. How is this newsworthy?
I think you missunderstand how this works. Hackers can craft a special page which calls the control, which means anyone with Office installed on their system is vulnerable.
Also as an AC pointed out, it's not really in "Excel", its in "Office Web Components" which are mini-applications specifically designed to be included in (intranet) web pages.
YouTube has various fly-out menus and the like, which generally a PITA to get working in IE6, especially if you have flash all over the page.
Not to mention IT workers are lazy SOBs, and if they can't sit around and watch videos all day, they might get off their butt and upgrade everyone off IE6. :^)
Except browser appliances aren't exactly a mysterious commodity, they've been around in different forms for years. It really isn't complicated.
These conversations are starting sounding like "Could 2010 be the year of the browser appliance?" because the hype never lives up to reality. IMO there might be a niche market for these things, but between smartphones and people who want MS Office even on their netbooks, not very much.
IE doesn't have the problem where something in Window #1 locks up Window #2.
And certainly plugins are still problematic, but when you open a new window, they are restarted. Firefox shares the same code between all windows, so you have to restart the entire browser.
FYI, this user prefers Chrome, because IMO they've worked hard to make the basic user experience better than IE, while Firefox seems to be more worried about extendibility and developer features.
Thanks Grandpa Simpson, but just because you remember some opinion you held, doesn't make it factually true.
When Navigator 4.0 was first out, and people were comparing it to version 3, the new version was a huge improvement. It wasn't until it'd been out for several years and the most significant update was the Communicator suite (which used more memory and didn't improve the browsing experience at all) that the cheers started to turn into groans,
I think you're misremembering things. Netscape 4 was released as Communicator. The standalone Navigator program wasn't re-released until sometime later, due to user complaints.
Also Netscape 4.00 was buggy, slow, and completely unusable, plus it came with some Java desktop applet crap called Netcaster. It wasn't until something like 4.05 that it was even feasible to replace NN3.
The whole idea of having external plugins bring functionality to the browser for which it was never designed is a complete mess. This is why there are only workarounds so far.
I think that's a cop-out. Plug-ins have been part of the browsing experience since about 1996, primarily because the browser vendors heavily promoted them. They've had plenty of time to adapt to ensure that crappy plugins aren't hurting the user experience.
Forking a process on unix-like systems if fairly lightweight but for Windows this will not scale well at all. Why not just have rendering worker threads? Have I missed something?
Er. This is an argument which applies to high-volume servers that handle hundreds/thousands of requests per second. Windows' process model is not so heavy-weight that you notice it opening a new browser tab once every few minutes.
OK I'm a user, and I want a browser where the UI doesn't lag when pages are loading. I also want a browser that doesn't completely freeze when a Java applet launches or PDF file opens. I would also like a browser where I don't have to restart the whole thing when Flash gets borked and refuses to play youtube videos.
Point being there's a lot of user-visible issues and longstanding complaints which are addressed by this. Furthermore, the incumbent browser (IE) doesn't have any of these issues.
(And "Use Adblock and stop using Java/Flash/PDF" is a workaround, not a real solution.)
They had to chance a code base from around 5+ years only because they didn't things right 5+ years ago. Remember, back then they were doing a complete code rewrite anyway.
Actually it was more like 10 years ago :/
And you're right -- Internet Explorer 4 had a multiprocess model (one process per window), but Mozilla insisted on having everything running in the same process, even the frickin mail client.
A lot of people questioned this at the time, but the response was "That's the way Netscape Communicator 4 does it and everyone loves Netscape 4".
Remember in the early days of "the web", most of the interesting content was not located on HTTP servers. So the "web" aspect was the ability to tie all of this FTP or Gopher or whatever content together with hypertext. That is, "the web" was the connections, not the resources.
So I would agree with the GP that "the web" has assimilated most of the old stand-alone internet applications/protocols, even if it hasn't technically become those applications.
I tend to agree with you. Just because a device is targeted purely towards internet use doesn't mean people don't want to use Outlook, or AOL Messenger, or Acrobat, or their crappy printer. Even though Google has some decent web apps, I don't think we're at a stage where people are ready to give up their native applications.
Google doesn't have any way of inserting advertisements into your network X11 applications. :)
Disabled NoScript so the web would "work".
That sounds completely reasonable, disabling scripting does in fact make sites "not work".
Why are you foisting an extension for hardcore goatporn browsers onto regular corporate users?
No, for large sites, it's much easier to do web-bug stats rather than log crunching.
And, yes, most of published browser stats come from companies selling services which "measure something else".
As others said, forget spoofing.
However, ad blockers break the data collection for most analytics system. So it is likely that Firefox is being underreported, just because the of the popularity of ABP, NoScript, various cookie blockers, and so on.
The important number is not so much the current percentage, but what the rate of change is. I've seen sites where IE has held steady at 80% and sites where it was never over 30%.
The story shows an 8% IE drop in a single month, which is so huge that it has to be a change in the sample size or methodology. Just as an example, at an old job we used the Omniture analytics service. They signed up Apple Computer to their service, and instantly the "internet" stats for OS X went from 3% to 12%.
Ha, apparently you believe this is only some sort of abstract intellectual debate. Please. None of our internet blathering matters one bit to the capital investors that I'm supposedly "protecting".
In the real world PC games have a poor ROI, and publishers have identified piracy as part of the reason for that. You can get angry and stomp your feet about it, but that's not going to make any more games available to you in reality.
When I was a kid, I pirated hundreds of computer games from friends, so I'm certainly not arguing that sort of thing has always happened. (That sort of thing is exactly what I mean by a "scene".) However, as an adult, I don't have anyone I can call up and say "yo, hook me up with the warez". But I could PirateBay pretty much anything I wanted to.
Just as an example, some years ago I downloaded UT99. It came bundled as 50 1.4MB RAR files on a hacked FTP server downloading at like 1k/sec. Now I could saturate my DSL line bittorrenting a modern game. The user experience of internet piracy has improved enormously over the last few years. Simply dismissing this would be foolish and retarded.
I don't disagree that piracy is often used as an "excuse". But the facts are that PC game sales are stagnant (and this isn't just because the games are bad), high-end PC FPSes are almost becoming a niche within a niche due to hardware issues, and publishers can pull up a web page and see that X Thousand people are downloading their game *right now*. So it's natural they would point their fingers in that direction, because the people with the high end gaming rigs simply are not putting their money down.
Your economic analysis is sound, but the upshot is that the future of PC gaming is laptop-style games aimed at the casual market (Sims, Tycoon games, etc.) Broader hardware base, and less warez-saavy users. This puts traditional PC titans like ID in a very bad position.
That was the major difference between BBS culture and Usenet/Internet culture. On pre-september Usenet, everyone posted under their real names, their sigs often contained their job titles and phone numbers, and there was a sense of responsiblity because your account was closely tied to your real life.
For the most part, web discussion boards follow the BBS tradition of using handles and discouraging the posting of personal information. However, that doesn't serve the needs of people who want network their real life as opposed to hanging out with a bunch of internet phoneys called "DarthMegaBlade666". So its natural that things like Facebook or LinkedIn appeared.
This is a scapegoat I'm sorry, many games were released during the age of broadband and the internet and were easily downloadable then (pre 2000, 1998/1997). Warez scene has been around since ye old shareware days and before that. Copies of Dos / Win 3.1 were shared rampantly via sneakernet.
Of course there has always been a ton of piracy, but the major change in recent years is that one can easily download warez without being a member of a "scene". Also, since its occurring in the open, publishers are more aware of it.
I tend to agree with you about the demands of 3D accelleration, but the other major change is the consumer PC market shifting to laptops starting in the early 2000s. In the glory days of PC gaming, a video card upgrade was simple and cheap, now it's basically impossible for most users. So the graphically intensive ID-style titles almost have to be on consoles to find a market.