"My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. -- And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth. We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. -- Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion. -- We shall prevail!" -- Apple, 1984. That's the copy from the famous Apple ad with the guy speaking to an audience of people in grey from a big screen.
The Apple fanboys hate that paragraph (and will mod it down to "Troll" in about 30 minutes). But that's a clear statement of Apple's "walled garden" approach. They even use the same terminology: "A garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths". As for the "Information Purification Directive", see the the EFF's analysis of the Apple iPhone Developer Agreement. Apple tries to keep the Developer Agreement secret, but they accepted a NASA app, which made it subject to a FOIA request, and now anyone can read it.
Click here to delete your Facebook account. This is the less-publicized "real deletion" link, not just the "deactivate" link. However, if you log into your Facebook account for 14 days after clicking that link, your Facebook account will be re-activated.
We need a few special-purpose boxes that are highly secure, as examples. The components exist. There are hypervisors certified to EAL-7. They show up in industrial systems, DoD systems, and avionics. They should be showing up in routers, firewalls, DNS servers, and ATMs.
A push by Homeland Security to increase the security level of critical infrastructure would not be out of place.
Who cares? It's just another phone. A leak of the first iPhone, or the first iPad, or the first iPod would have been a big deal. But this is just a minor upgrade for an existing product. Corner rounding slightly different, components a little smaller, different case assembly.
Besides, this one clearly doesn't work. Yawn.
Google once had a real search API. It was SOAP-based. But they discontinued it years ago.
Google's AJAX search API is, by design, very limited. All you can really do is create a little search widget, and perhaps add some fields of your own. The term prohibits doing much beyond that. "You are allowed to use the API only to display, and to make such uses as are necessary for You to display, Google Search Results on your Property. The API does not provide You with the ability to access, and You are not allowed to access, other underlying Google Services or data. Subject to the limitations and conditions described below, "... "You agree that You will not, and You will not permit your users or other third parties to: (a) modify or replace the text, images, or other content of the Google Search Results, including by (i) changing the order in which the Google Search Results appear, (ii) intermixing Search Results from sources other than Google, or (iii) intermixing other content such that it appears to be part of the Google Search Results; or (b) modify, replace, obscure, or otherwise hinder the functioning of links to Google or third party websites provided in the Google Search Results. " Given those restrictions, you can't write Scroogle using that API.
We have a SiteTruth search page which uses the Google AJAX API. We're prohibited from re-ordering the entries or removing any of them. Since the whole point of SiteTruth is to re-order search results by business legitimacy, and we don't do that for the Google results, the Google results are inferior to the ones from other search engines. So our primary search page uses Yahoo/Bing.
That's just a statement that the DoD unclassified Internet won't block social networking sites. Anybody on there can already send email, etc., so it's not really a security issue.
Interestingly, DoD has a policy that all email with attachments on the unclassified net must be digitally signed by the sender.
This doesn't guarantee that the attachments don't contain hostile code, but it makes it easy to track where the hostile code
came from. DoD already has a large-scale public key infrastructure, and they have ID info for everybody who's authorized to send, so this wasn't hard to implement.
ANSI used to have a policy that they would not accept standards which contained patented components. That changed in the 1980s, I think.
(The link to ANSI's patent policy is currently returning the message "Cannot connect to the configuration database. For tips on troubleshooting this error, search for article 823287 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base at http://support.microsoft.com./")
The legal way to address this is to require that standards bodies, from IEEE to ANSI to MPEG-LA, lose their exemption to antitrust law if they promulgate standards which contain patented components. Without that exemption, when companies get together to agree on a standard, it's conspiracy in restraint of trade.
In general, most of the more annoying patent problems are really antitrust problems. Anyone can get a very narrow patent on a very specific way of doing something. Such a patent is not useful unless the very specific way is a de-facto standard enforced by market dominance. That's an antitrust issue.
The reason MPEG-LA gets away with this is that the Justice Department signed off on it in 1997.
That's consistent with the FTC-DOJ 1995 guidelines in this area.
Anyone can buy an MPEG-LA license under stated terms. So they meet the guidelines. The guidelines don't address the issue of the interaction of de-facto standards and market power. They should. That's what needs to be revised.
It's very hard to operate covertly against a hostile or unsupportive population. During WWII, the French resistance was able to operate successfully and was able to support British and American commandos. But no OSS spy dropped into Germany ever even made radio contact with HQ. Islamic terrorists in the US are in that position. If they try to recruit, somebody will probably turn them in, or they will be infiltrated. If they try to operate alone, they don't seem to accomplish much.
Loser terrorist operations recruit loser operatives. The "shoe bomber" (the only US terrorism incident tied to al-Queda in the US in the last year) did very little damage, was caught, and provided intel about the opposition. The bozo who tried to bomb Times Square last week may have been connected to the Taliban, and may have had "training", but he totally botched the job. He got caught, too.
18 U.S.C. 2154 : US Code - Section 2154: Production of defective war material, war premises, or war utilities
Whoever, when the United States is at war, or in times of
national emergency as declared by the President or by the Congress,
with intent to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the United
States or any associate nation in preparing for or carrying on the
war or defense activities, or, with reason to believe that his act
may injure, interfere with, or obstruct the United States or any
associate nation in preparing for or carrying on the war or defense
activities, willfully makes, constructs, or causes to be made or
constructed in a defective manner, or attempts to make, construct,
or cause to be made or constructed in a defective manner any war
material, war premises or war utilities, or any tool, implement,
machine, utensil, or receptacle used or employed in making,
producing, manufacturing, or repairing any such war material, war
premises or war utilities, shall be fined under this title or
imprisoned not more than thirty years, or both.
The claim in the original article was that vibrations from one disk were coupling to other disks and interfering with them. Local vibration isolation will stop that.
This shouldn't be dealt with at the rack level. It should be dealt with at the disk drive mounting bracket level, where it's far easier. There are brackets for that, from several suppliers. There are also rubber grommet kits for fans, to damp vibration from that source.
If you buy servers in bulk, it's something to take up with your supplier. It's the sort of thing that costs only a few dollars per unit at the factory.
I'd encourage young people interested in robotics to stay away from NASA. NASA's record (as opposed to JPL's) is not good. NASA has spent vast amounts of money on space robots like the Flight Telerobotic Servicer without much success. Most of NASA's stuff is really teleoperators. And NASA projects take decades.
Exciting work in robotics is happening. Look at what Willow Garage, Anybots, Festo, and Boston Dynamics are doing. That leaking oil well out in the Gulf is being fixed by teleoperated robots: "Robots position giant box over oil-spewing well" DoD has over 20,000 mobile robots now. NASA only has a few one-offs.
That was amusing, looking at those "leading brands". Chanel now has a line of watches, and even sells bowling bags. (That's appropriate, in a way; Coco Chanel invented "sportswear"). High-fashion brands, and worse, wannabe high-fashion brands, tend to get carried away with web design. So do high-end car sites. Porsche has a Shockwave car configurator, although it doesn't really use the 3D features of Shockwave usefully. Tesla Motors uses flash, but unnecessarily, for animated menus.
Sometimes this reaches the point of utter absurdity.
Girbaud, which sells high-end jeans, has a striking Flash-intensive site. This site does far more with Flash than just play videos. There are two long animations to get through before you reach the impressively frustrating 3D animated menu. Each subsection of the site has its own long animated intro. Many of those can't be skipped. And they all have sound. Some of their pages won't close in Firefox 3.6 if you click on the close box; you have to wait until the animation cycle finishes. However, you can't actually buy their products on line from that site. Nor do they link, in any obvious way, to one of the sites where you can.
The page linked in the Slashdot article wwhich is supposed to illustrate this "browser incompatibility" problem produces the message "Warning: A browser setting is preventing you from logging in. Fix this setting to log in." This is because I have third-party cookies disabled, which is reasonably common. The "Fix this setting to log in" doesn't disclose the domain that wants to send third party cookies, either.
Scribd is more of a pain than a useful tool. It's basically an online PDF viewer, one which makes content non-downloadable. It takes away functionality; you can't select and cut text. So it's really more a form of DRM than anything else.
You can get most of the same effect by rendering your document to PDF with the page size set to "trade paperback".
Programming is a privilege, not a right
on
Flash Is Not a Right
·
· Score: 0, Troll
"My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. -- And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth. We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. -- Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion. -- We shall prevail!"
Yes, Apple fans, you missed the whole point of Apple's "1984" commercial. Apple's real plan was revealed, but you all thought it was a joke. You were wrong. That was the plan. There, you see the ideology behind the iPhone and the iPad. It took 25 years to bring it to fruition. The Information Purification Directive is now a reality.
Read the early writings of megalomaniacs to see what they intend. Early bin Laden, early Lenin, early Business Roundtable, early Jobs - they all revealed their master plan well in advance.
They were very cheap, but since the original EeeeeeeeeeeeeePC they've gradually crept up in price and now they're just too expensive for what they are.
I know. There should be vast numbers of $200 netbooks, and there aren't. The PC industry was terrified of that price drop, and with Microsoft's help, managed to fight it off.
I have several of the original EeePC machines. Their Linux has a built-in self-destruct feature. Their "union file system" loses inodes over time.
As a test, I have one plugged in and completely idle; it loses about 1% of its inodes per day. When all the inodes are gone, the machine stops working. There is a workaround for this, which must be applied every 90 days of power-on time, or sooner if you actually use the machine. The vendor-recommended procedure, though, is to reinitialize the machine to the factory-empty state, losing all user files.
And people wonder why Linux hasn't succeeded on the desktop.
The Monotype approach to web fonts shows the pain of the latest DRM scheme. You don't just embed their fonts. You have to register with their site, create a "project", associate your domains with the "project", specify which fonts you want to use (only some are free), specify to their web site which font goes with which CSS element, and put some of their Javascript on your site. Only then will their fonts work, and they're served from their servers.
One implication is that pages using their fonts will not archive properly. Another is that if their font servers are slow, so are your pages. And editing will be a pain; WYSISWYG editors may not display these fonts properly. (One would hope Adobe would get this right in Dreamweaver, but they'll probably try to tie Dreamweaver to some Adobe font system.)
I must have completely missed it, but... what exactly would "Mozilla's font files" entail?
Netscape 4.x through 5.x supported "Dynamic Fonts", downloadable font files. Worked fine, but Microsoft didn't like it and didn't support it in IE. When IE was free and Netscape cost money, IE won out. Netscape then gave up on font support, which was a technology they licensed from Bitstream, not an open standard.
We got into the current mess of text in images because Microsoft wouldn't support Mozilla's font files. Is IE going with the standard this time around, or do we have another browser incompatibility issue?
Once there's a rough understanding of the problem, a heavy engineering contractor with a track record on emergency jobs is brought in to fix it. Their engineers quickly design something to get the problem under control. Materials and parts are rush-ordered and sent to a fabrication yard, where the best welders and machinists, on serious overtime, work to put it together. Then the thing gets put on a truck, barge, or rail car and is sent to the trouble spot, where other mobile heavy equipment has been brought into position to install the fix. Top field workers put the fix into place.
There are a number of contractors in the world that routinely pull off fixes like this. Not many. C. C. Myers.Wild Well Control. Titan Salvage.
Their employees are very well paid, and used to getting a sudden call to get on an airplane and head for the current fuckup.
We have too many TLDs already. Additional TLDs are just a racket for registrars. As Abacus wrote to ICANN when they applied for ".biz", ".fam", ".cool", and a few other TLDs back in 2000, "The more TLDs we are allowed to operate, and the better quality of those TLDs, the greater the total sales will be."
".biz" ended up as the "bad neighborhood" TLD. When you see a ".biz" domain, you visualize a storefront in a half-empty strip mall with trash in the parking lot. We have two vacant TLDs, ".aero" and ".museum". ".aero" is basically a collection of redirects from airport codes to the actual site. See JFK.aero, etc., most of which were created by the promoters of.aero, not the airports.) The ".museum" TLD has so few domains that the entire list fits on one page.
We have the redundant TLD, ".info". What was that for, anyway?
All those TLDs could be closed to new registrations and phased out with no great loss.
Porno belongs in ".com", with other commercial enterprises.
The console and PC gaming market is at the point where it takes $20 million and up to do an "A" title. There's smaller scale stuff being done successfully on Facebook and on phones, though.
Who would have thought Farmville would be a success? Farmville?
Slashdot Mirror
"My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. -- And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth. We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. -- Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion. -- We shall prevail!" -- Apple, 1984. That's the copy from the famous Apple ad with the guy speaking to an audience of people in grey from a big screen.
The Apple fanboys hate that paragraph (and will mod it down to "Troll" in about 30 minutes). But that's a clear statement of Apple's "walled garden" approach. They even use the same terminology: "A garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths". As for the "Information Purification Directive", see the the EFF's analysis of the Apple iPhone Developer Agreement. Apple tries to keep the Developer Agreement secret, but they accepted a NASA app, which made it subject to a FOIA request, and now anyone can read it.
Click here to delete your Facebook account. This is the less-publicized "real deletion" link, not just the "deactivate" link. However, if you log into your Facebook account for 14 days after clicking that link, your Facebook account will be re-activated.
This is something that ought to be one chapter in a Python book, not another boat-anchor of a standalone book.
We need a few special-purpose boxes that are highly secure, as examples. The components exist. There are hypervisors certified to EAL-7. They show up in industrial systems, DoD systems, and avionics. They should be showing up in routers, firewalls, DNS servers, and ATMs.
A push by Homeland Security to increase the security level of critical infrastructure would not be out of place.
Who cares? It's just another phone. A leak of the first iPhone, or the first iPad, or the first iPod would have been a big deal. But this is just a minor upgrade for an existing product. Corner rounding slightly different, components a little smaller, different case assembly. Besides, this one clearly doesn't work. Yawn.
Google once had a real search API. It was SOAP-based. But they discontinued it years ago.
Google's AJAX search API is, by design, very limited. All you can really do is create a little search widget, and perhaps add some fields of your own. The term prohibits doing much beyond that. "You are allowed to use the API only to display, and to make such uses as are necessary for You to display, Google Search Results on your Property. The API does not provide You with the ability to access, and You are not allowed to access, other underlying Google Services or data. Subject to the limitations and conditions described below, " ... "You agree that You will not, and You will not permit your users or other third parties to: (a) modify or replace the text, images, or other content of the Google Search Results, including by (i) changing the order in which the Google Search Results appear, (ii) intermixing Search Results from sources other than Google, or (iii) intermixing other content such that it appears to be part of the Google Search Results; or (b) modify, replace, obscure, or otherwise hinder the functioning of links to Google or third party websites provided in the Google Search Results. " Given those restrictions, you can't write Scroogle using that API.
We have a SiteTruth search page which uses the Google AJAX API. We're prohibited from re-ordering the entries or removing any of them. Since the whole point of SiteTruth is to re-order search results by business legitimacy, and we don't do that for the Google results, the Google results are inferior to the ones from other search engines. So our primary search page uses Yahoo/Bing.
That's just a statement that the DoD unclassified Internet won't block social networking sites. Anybody on there can already send email, etc., so it's not really a security issue.
Interestingly, DoD has a policy that all email with attachments on the unclassified net must be digitally signed by the sender. This doesn't guarantee that the attachments don't contain hostile code, but it makes it easy to track where the hostile code came from. DoD already has a large-scale public key infrastructure, and they have ID info for everybody who's authorized to send, so this wasn't hard to implement.
Eisenhower said "military-industrial complex", not "military-industrial-Congress" complex. Read the speech.
ANSI used to have a policy that they would not accept standards which contained patented components. That changed in the 1980s, I think. (The link to ANSI's patent policy is currently returning the message "Cannot connect to the configuration database. For tips on troubleshooting this error, search for article 823287 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base at http://support.microsoft.com./")
The legal way to address this is to require that standards bodies, from IEEE to ANSI to MPEG-LA, lose their exemption to antitrust law if they promulgate standards which contain patented components. Without that exemption, when companies get together to agree on a standard, it's conspiracy in restraint of trade.
In general, most of the more annoying patent problems are really antitrust problems. Anyone can get a very narrow patent on a very specific way of doing something. Such a patent is not useful unless the very specific way is a de-facto standard enforced by market dominance. That's an antitrust issue.
The reason MPEG-LA gets away with this is that the Justice Department signed off on it in 1997. That's consistent with the FTC-DOJ 1995 guidelines in this area. Anyone can buy an MPEG-LA license under stated terms. So they meet the guidelines. The guidelines don't address the issue of the interaction of de-facto standards and market power. They should. That's what needs to be revised.
For background, here's a speech by an FTC commissioner of the Clinton era on this issue. He makes the point that antitrust lawyers and patent lawyers don't talk to each other much and don't understand each other's fields. Also see this Justice Department Antitrust Division talk from 2007. If you want to talk intelligently about this issue, you need to read these materials.
It's striking how ineffective al-Queda has been over the last decade. Bin Laden called for attacks on oil facilities back in 2004 - nothing happened. Bin Laden is still out there, issuing audio tapes, but few seem to be listening.
It's very hard to operate covertly against a hostile or unsupportive population. During WWII, the French resistance was able to operate successfully and was able to support British and American commandos. But no OSS spy dropped into Germany ever even made radio contact with HQ. Islamic terrorists in the US are in that position. If they try to recruit, somebody will probably turn them in, or they will be infiltrated. If they try to operate alone, they don't seem to accomplish much.
Loser terrorist operations recruit loser operatives. The "shoe bomber" (the only US terrorism incident tied to al-Queda in the US in the last year) did very little damage, was caught, and provided intel about the opposition. The bozo who tried to bomb Times Square last week may have been connected to the Taliban, and may have had "training", but he totally botched the job. He got caught, too.
18 U.S.C. 2154 : US Code - Section 2154: Production of defective war material, war premises, or war utilities
Whoever, when the United States is at war, or in times of national emergency as declared by the President or by the Congress, with intent to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the United States or any associate nation in preparing for or carrying on the war or defense activities, or, with reason to believe that his act may injure, interfere with, or obstruct the United States or any associate nation in preparing for or carrying on the war or defense activities, willfully makes, constructs, or causes to be made or constructed in a defective manner, or attempts to make, construct, or cause to be made or constructed in a defective manner any war material, war premises or war utilities, or any tool, implement, machine, utensil, or receptacle used or employed in making, producing, manufacturing, or repairing any such war material, war premises or war utilities, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than thirty years, or both.
Those guys are getting light sentences. The FBI is treating this as a counterfeiting problem, not as sabotaging the war effort.
The claim in the original article was that vibrations from one disk were coupling to other disks and interfering with them. Local vibration isolation will stop that.
This shouldn't be dealt with at the rack level. It should be dealt with at the disk drive mounting bracket level, where it's far easier. There are brackets for that, from several suppliers. There are also rubber grommet kits for fans, to damp vibration from that source.
If you buy servers in bulk, it's something to take up with your supplier. It's the sort of thing that costs only a few dollars per unit at the factory.
I'd encourage young people interested in robotics to stay away from NASA. NASA's record (as opposed to JPL's) is not good. NASA has spent vast amounts of money on space robots like the Flight Telerobotic Servicer without much success. Most of NASA's stuff is really teleoperators. And NASA projects take decades.
Exciting work in robotics is happening. Look at what Willow Garage, Anybots, Festo, and Boston Dynamics are doing. That leaking oil well out in the Gulf is being fixed by teleoperated robots: "Robots position giant box over oil-spewing well" DoD has over 20,000 mobile robots now. NASA only has a few one-offs.
That was amusing, looking at those "leading brands". Chanel now has a line of watches, and even sells bowling bags. (That's appropriate, in a way; Coco Chanel invented "sportswear"). High-fashion brands, and worse, wannabe high-fashion brands, tend to get carried away with web design. So do high-end car sites. Porsche has a Shockwave car configurator, although it doesn't really use the 3D features of Shockwave usefully. Tesla Motors uses flash, but unnecessarily, for animated menus.
Sometimes this reaches the point of utter absurdity. Girbaud, which sells high-end jeans, has a striking Flash-intensive site. This site does far more with Flash than just play videos. There are two long animations to get through before you reach the impressively frustrating 3D animated menu. Each subsection of the site has its own long animated intro. Many of those can't be skipped. And they all have sound. Some of their pages won't close in Firefox 3.6 if you click on the close box; you have to wait until the animation cycle finishes. However, you can't actually buy their products on line from that site. Nor do they link, in any obvious way, to one of the sites where you can.
The page linked in the Slashdot article wwhich is supposed to illustrate this "browser incompatibility" problem produces the message "Warning: A browser setting is preventing you from logging in. Fix this setting to log in." This is because I have third-party cookies disabled, which is reasonably common. The "Fix this setting to log in" doesn't disclose the domain that wants to send third party cookies, either.
Scribd is more of a pain than a useful tool. It's basically an online PDF viewer, one which makes content non-downloadable. It takes away functionality; you can't select and cut text. So it's really more a form of DRM than anything else.
You can get most of the same effect by rendering your document to PDF with the page size set to "trade paperback".
"My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. -- And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth. We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. -- Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion. -- We shall prevail!"
Yes, Apple fans, you missed the whole point of Apple's "1984" commercial. Apple's real plan was revealed, but you all thought it was a joke. You were wrong. That was the plan. There, you see the ideology behind the iPhone and the iPad. It took 25 years to bring it to fruition. The Information Purification Directive is now a reality.
Read the early writings of megalomaniacs to see what they intend. Early bin Laden, early Lenin, early Business Roundtable, early Jobs - they all revealed their master plan well in advance.
They were very cheap, but since the original EeeeeeeeeeeeeePC they've gradually crept up in price and now they're just too expensive for what they are.
I know. There should be vast numbers of $200 netbooks, and there aren't. The PC industry was terrified of that price drop, and with Microsoft's help, managed to fight it off.
I have several of the original EeePC machines. Their Linux has a built-in self-destruct feature. Their "union file system" loses inodes over time. As a test, I have one plugged in and completely idle; it loses about 1% of its inodes per day. When all the inodes are gone, the machine stops working. There is a workaround for this, which must be applied every 90 days of power-on time, or sooner if you actually use the machine. The vendor-recommended procedure, though, is to reinitialize the machine to the factory-empty state, losing all user files.
And people wonder why Linux hasn't succeeded on the desktop.
Bullshit. Maybe Netscape was shareware, but nobody really thinks that's the same as "cost money".
Netscape Navigator was originally a boxed software product. I bought one once, to run on NT 3.51. Cost about $30.
The Monotype approach to web fonts shows the pain of the latest DRM scheme. You don't just embed their fonts. You have to register with their site, create a "project", associate your domains with the "project", specify which fonts you want to use (only some are free), specify to their web site which font goes with which CSS element, and put some of their Javascript on your site. Only then will their fonts work, and they're served from their servers.
One implication is that pages using their fonts will not archive properly. Another is that if their font servers are slow, so are your pages. And editing will be a pain; WYSISWYG editors may not display these fonts properly. (One would hope Adobe would get this right in Dreamweaver, but they'll probably try to tie Dreamweaver to some Adobe font system.)
I must have completely missed it, but... what exactly would "Mozilla's font files" entail?
Netscape 4.x through 5.x supported "Dynamic Fonts", downloadable font files. Worked fine, but Microsoft didn't like it and didn't support it in IE. When IE was free and Netscape cost money, IE won out. Netscape then gave up on font support, which was a technology they licensed from Bitstream, not an open standard.
We got into the current mess of text in images because Microsoft wouldn't support Mozilla's font files. Is IE going with the standard this time around, or do we have another browser incompatibility issue?
This is normal. This is how big stuff gets fixed.
Once there's a rough understanding of the problem, a heavy engineering contractor with a track record on emergency jobs is brought in to fix it. Their engineers quickly design something to get the problem under control. Materials and parts are rush-ordered and sent to a fabrication yard, where the best welders and machinists, on serious overtime, work to put it together. Then the thing gets put on a truck, barge, or rail car and is sent to the trouble spot, where other mobile heavy equipment has been brought into position to install the fix. Top field workers put the fix into place.
There are a number of contractors in the world that routinely pull off fixes like this. Not many. C. C. Myers. Wild Well Control. Titan Salvage. Their employees are very well paid, and used to getting a sudden call to get on an airplane and head for the current fuckup.
We have too many TLDs already. Additional TLDs are just a racket for registrars. As Abacus wrote to ICANN when they applied for ".biz", ".fam", ".cool", and a few other TLDs back in 2000, "The more TLDs we are allowed to operate, and the better quality of those TLDs, the greater the total sales will be."
".biz" ended up as the "bad neighborhood" TLD. When you see a ".biz" domain, you visualize a storefront in a half-empty strip mall with trash in the parking lot. We have two vacant TLDs, ".aero" and ".museum". ".aero" is basically a collection of redirects from airport codes to the actual site. See JFK.aero, etc., most of which were created by the promoters of .aero, not the airports.) The ".museum" TLD has so few domains that the entire list fits on one page.
We have the redundant TLD, ".info". What was that for, anyway?
All those TLDs could be closed to new registrations and phased out with no great loss.
Porno belongs in ".com", with other commercial enterprises.
The console and PC gaming market is at the point where it takes $20 million and up to do an "A" title. There's smaller scale stuff being done successfully on Facebook and on phones, though.
Who would have thought Farmville would be a success? Farmville?