Let's see, would that be the IE5.5/x86/win9x BETA? Or the one I can download for free from windowsupdate.microsoft.com today, assuming today has been redefined to be the future? Or the one that comes packaged with NT2k? Or the Mac version? I need clarity on this please. My arguments are quite important to me, and minutae is everything.
Crack is more than that where I live, in astonishing coincidence I do have cancer, and I cannot stop. I am compelled to share my Utter Truth with the world.
<HEAD> <TITLE> I've been karma-whoring on the slashdot, all the livelong day. </TITLE> <STYLE type="text/css"> P {border-style: dotted ; border-color: red} </STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <P>This proves I am a fundamentally better person than you in every way. I hope parasites eat your colon and you die soon. Perhaps they'll look like the little red dots that are around this little sentiment. Unless you use IE, in which case you're going to be eaten alive by red tapeworms which will be shitting red string until you die.</P> </BODY> </HTML>
Mozilla/static/x86/linux is like 7MB compiled/gzipped. I wish they would Bzip2 the bastards. I have not tried any auto-installer for any platform...
The emailer is becoming far more competent. I will enjoy supporting it. Multiple POP3 accounts, al crossplatform. (drool) Goodbye you fucking identities.
The HTML editor is tres-slick... I'm confident it will suck cock for the first netscape release, but oh well..
Keybindings are still a bitch for all platforms. Finicky, tempremental. Fuckit. FUCKIT. I hate that.
Mozilla has the most open development of any project I can think of. No months-of-silence, open CVS tree, open mailing lists, open development discussions, open documentation, public builds for platforms on the HOUR, decent license, open source bugtracker, open buglists, open discussion, GOBS of FTP power, great feedback methods, all is very very nice. Oh yeah, and a script on the homepage that shows EVERY code update made in the last day or so, plus exceptional code navigation tools, all on the web.
Mozilla/NS may never take over every desktop, but does it really need to? It's going to fill shitloads of niches that IE in all it's forms (yeah even pocket explorer which has GOT to be completely new code) is not going to fit into... Look at the netscape4/unix builds going into web appliances... Imagine what mozilla is going to accomplish in the next 10 years...
if nothing else netscape/AOL has opened up reams of competition, both from the Opera people, and people who will turn XPCOM/mozilla into a thousand different mutants...
***LINKS***
For a text-based browser that is similar to lynx and w3m but INCREDIBLY lightweight, complete, easy-to-use, and just all around makes you want to cry with joy, please look into the GPLed 'links'.
It is written in C, compiles anywhere, is way under a meg tarballed, and is the absolute most cruft-free thing I have ever used. Press 'g', go somewhere. It is nearly impossible to describe how fundamentally nice this program is.
It does frames exceedingly well, flies with tables, and is magic over a modem. The interface is (somehow) more pleasant than lynx's and it has pulldown menus hidden with ESC for other options.
It is the most underrated browser I have ever seen. The author is a god. My only complaint is that it fights with gpm for cut and paste.
For real, M16 and all the nightlies are becoming ridiculously good...
Experiences with Win32/x86/133/40/unloaded:
Fast on a 133/40 box... no shit... I spent an hour or two testing my CSS pages and it didn't crash once... The flakiness from generating new browser windows is almost gone...
The sidebar is ACTUALLY cool.. check out cnn.com with NS6PR1 to see how cool questionless/seamless sidebar/install can be.. This ISN'T like those shitty IE4/5 toolbar conquests from noname companies... It just slips in, giving actually cool information and shit...
The UI has calmed down lots... it is clean, rather functional, and what's best, can be COMPLETELY OVERHAULED to be faster/better/simpler/more-complex, ANYTHING...
Mozilla isn't just a lets-clone-netscape thing anymore, it's a big collection of XPCOMponents that you can use to create apps... Mozilla is just one of them..
The default mozilla/netscape skin is still pretty damn slow but managable on my win32/x86/100/40 you will see mozilla FLY when the lighter-weight skins are made... I have used them and they just feel so much lighter...
Experiences with linux 2.2/x86/90mhz/32MB
this machine is used for like three different services and at the time had 6 people using it, plus three people using X apps all over the network...
It was SLOW. FUCKING SLOW.
It took forever to unpack.. It took forever to load.. it took FOREVER for anything to happen...
Then i realized it was running almost entirely in swap, and still hadn't crashed.. that was cool..
The machine was RIDICULOUSLY burded at the time, so i can forgive it...
Experiences on linux 2.2/x86/400/128
Ridiculously fast. Ridiculously good. First time user startup in under 15 seconds... from there on out, starts up in 3 seconds... if mostly cached in memory starts up in under a second...
Crashes are becoming significantly more difficult to find... it is now more pleasant to use than NS4 for me... less UI niggles... FASTER. Good.
Goodbye netscape 4... FUCK IT.... Mozilla is going to be so radically more modifiable and fluid and extensible and NICE... oh wait, it already IS.
Goodbye NS4, we hardly loved ye...
P.S.: crystal-note-perfect CSS is an utter joy... my heart leaps...
from coworker: "where are your graphics stored?" (referring to complex CSS1 box with lots of color-tricks on no-graphic page)
Read the goofy things that have been come up with so far... The FSSTABLEFS or whatever is an exercise in pointlessness.
Section 1: Philosophy [50 pages of authors blar blar patting on back blah blah blah]
Section 2: We think important binaries should go in/usr/sbin. Don't you DARE make a top-level-directory that isn't on this list. [XXX: Are symlinks a good idea?]
Then onto the LSB... What is the POINT of making a reference distro? I like linux because I can update anything without impunity... They're trying to create a reference platform with glibc-2.???? and blah.224.323 and blah 3223.23.so and absolutely noone can come up with an idea as to how far the reach should extend... Determine default window ordering behavior? Startup sounds?
Once a reference distro or whatever goes out that is stamped STANDARDS COMPLIANT LINUX, the value-add of distros becomes much less. Old crap will need to be included... And we will be STUCK with immature libraries and all sorts of backwards compatable cruft and a BORING UNIX PLATFORM FOR THE NEXT 10 YEARS...
All I truly want is a nearly universal dependancy/packaging/installation/uninstallation system. rpm comes close, but badly formed packages are an issue. Shit still gets left around... rpms refuse to integrate with tarballs and vice versa.... blah blah blah... Without a common capability database or SOMETHING, it's a bitch to integrate packages of any type and configmakemakeins shit...
And I also want a COMPLETE rethinking of autoconf and automake and m4 and configure and all that shit. Most of my linux shit won't compile on other shit, and that's just damn dumb considering they all are so much alike. And it's so goddamn wordy and verbose and fragile and fucking flimsy.. Stupid fucking make syntax.... try a make -d on ANYTHING sometime and be astonished..
Shouldn't you people be groveling or something? And BRING ME SOME SHOES! Nice ones.
Perhaps the word the Library was looking for is 'EXPENSIVE'. Every action in the universe has a cost (reaction) associated with every modification made on it.
On a related note, humans devised a fabulous method for creating a universal interface between the desire to do something and the ability to do it... It's called MONEY.
Why doesn't Microsoft dismantle their evil company? Financial economics.
Why does Quicktime not exist for Unix yet? Financial economics.
Why is X software not open source? Financial economics.
Why is X product in X configuration? Financial economics.
Why is X entity in the universe in the X configuration it is? Economics. (of a sort)
Why is X? Economics. (of a sort)
Hint: If there's money involved in any way, shape, or form, economics is going to enter into the equation. And scanning oodles of books just so they can rot on some overpriced jukebox in the Data Storage Flavor Of The Month is kind of expensive.
Incidentally, the Library of Congress's money is... erm... MINE.
I say we spend it on coke, whores, and booze instead of poopoo old books. Fuck the children and the future. I want state-sponsored injections of heroin into my anus on the hour.
I believe the code for automatic address-completion went in a couple days ago. It's probably not turned on or something.
Mozzy has password remembering already set up. It works okay. The mailer is radically better than previously. Javascript works. Most webpages work pretty well.
It will be better at web-FTP than IE5 for windows, which was the MOST IRRITATING thing I have ever seen. (it turned it into a file folder, but drag and drop didn't work, so you needed to Right Click, Copy To Folder, then do some GODFORSAKEN SHIT to get it to save... that option went off REAL FAST)
Mozilla knows how to download shit and save and open local files now.
Mozzy starts up without dying now. The initial load is very sluggish, like everything else. If it is in cache, it starts up very very quickly.
The biggest gripe is focus issues... They're still fruity and it is far too easy for focus to go into the void, leaving you with a useless shell.
The extras and the obscene flexibility of the UI definition language will make this a seriously cool thing... If you can't imagine how cool something this flexible will be, then that's sad.
It's like one dynamic living document... I love it.
So the colors suck. Deal. You can change them later. A theme manager will likely be set up in a few more months..
It displays shit correctly, to the spec... There are workarounds for shitty HTML like slashdots...
It remembers your homepage, it remembers all sorts of shit now. Except that goddamn default toolbar. Oh well.
Most of what sucks about mozilla is being fixed or can be changed by you... That's what i like about it. And it is free after all.
And stop bitching about the extra features... The editor and the mail program and all that shit are basically hyper-dynamic webpages. The size is probably going to be like 10MB compressed for EVERYTHING that mozzy does when it gets to netscape release... that includes all SORTS of shit plus new java.
/me shrugs... It's really not that bad folks. And it will continue to get better as long as AOL keeps dumping enormous amounts of money into the project.... And we all start learning how to design better (faster/more effective) user interfaces for mozilla faster...
I am playing with Linux nightly build. It is newer and buggier than M15, which is likely rolled off into another line a week or two before.
The speed is definately picking up... I remember waiting for form pulldowns to draw... It's very close to the same league as NS4.7, and it's doing a SHITLOAD more.
The KILLER APP is the UI overhaul themes... I played with a few last night... If you DONT LIKE MOZILLA NOW, WAIT FOR THE NEW THEMES... A lot of the sluggishness is due to the sidebars and the moving crap and shit... Stuff like the ANDREW theme or whatever the fuck it's called makes things SIGNIFICANTLY faster...
I know because i tried them. =P
It displays most pages right.
It never knows when to stop moving the throbber.
And if you jack up the DPI setting in preferences, you can actually read the fonts.
No java in the nightlies, oh well.
It works much better than before, has replaced NS4.7 for me, remembers preferences well, behaves well, and is ACTUALLY GETTING FASTER... I can see what this will become and I seriously like it.
(faster as in, it is usable on my 400/128 assuming the X server is given a relatively high priority)
Oh yeah, the little turquoise pulldown next to the address bar with the down arrow is really damn sweet... mozilla has POTENTIAL... I like it.
PLEASE tell me that someone will go over the artwork in this game before they port this to non-japan... It's bad enough this character wears makeup, dresses in lace, and has prada boots, but is a HUGE FLESH TONE PENIS SHAPED DILDO SWORD REALLY NECESSARY? Who drew this?
The thing that makes Linux a pleasure to use is, by and large, not the kernel. It's the vast userspace that surrounds it that is of interest, especially the packaging.
[Extreme opinion] At the CORE OF THE OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT is gcc. It is incomparably important, and I would argue significantly more crucial to the future of free software than the ol' piddly linux kernel. Why there is not more attention paid to the dozens of changes and influences on this project is absolutely beyond me. [/Extreme opinion]
Other crucial things:
The twenty odd shells in use
perl/python/expect BLAH BLAH BLAH... Basically the thousands of languages and scripts that make everything go
Netscape/Mozilla
dozens of filesystems
DRIVERS DRIVERS DRIVERS!!!
The poster children samba/apache and their ilk
glib / readline / texutils / binutils / GNU GNU GNU
The BSD-licensed variants of all the above
Documentation, support, people, IRC, usenet, et al
Themes and skins and shit galore
All the new XP multimedia APIs
XFree86 and all the other implementations of X
DRIVERS DRIVERS DRIVERS
ALLL the toolkits and bindings and ALL THAT SHIT that flings by on freshmeat
TRILLIONS of things for manipulating mail and network monitors and ALL THAT SHIT
Extremely fundamental: make, makealikes, all the packaging and dependancy systems
The THOUSANDS of standards and APIs and reference implementations for EVERYTHING
And most crucially, wanda the fish
XXX
All i'm whining about is, userspace is vastly more important than piddly dumbfuck kernel, as nice and interesting as it may be.
Unix is not Windows. Unix is not Windows. UNIX IS NOT FUCKING WINDOWS!
There is a vast community of people working to make MS Windows and the other 400 or so assorted MS products better every day, and they're bound together by money, the most powerful social force imaginable. We're talking MCPs, MCSEs, developers, tech support networks, curriculum resale networks, documentation constructs, EVERYTHING. Plus highly centralized news and documentation delivery machines.
Open source unix development doesn't have that same financial weight behind it. In certain areas yes, but not nearly with the same reach as the MS machine.
And wouldn't things be so much easier if we'd stop talking about the difficult-to-define Linux Community and start talking about the computing enthusiast/developer community as a whole? As in, people who use computers to know how they work and synthesize new solutions from them? As in, not end users?
A vast majority of end-users rarely discover the other button on the mouse. They will NEVER NEVER NEVER be interested in all the wondrous things that Unix can do, no matter how gracefully they are introduced into the system of software they have at their disposal.
And let's shut the fuck up about "bad interfaces". If I have to read another "Gnome has a bad rehashed interface" line or "KDE looks too much like windows" bitch, I will murder.
GNOME and KDE are NOT PROGRAMS. They are collections of programs and libraries and APIs and engines and object managers that enable certain UI niceties like toolbars, common themings, mail delivery, window management, and a BILLION different things. If you're going to complain about something, complain about 'panel' or 'kwm' or 'ghex' or 'gmc' or the stock GTK color selector or gnumeric's plugin menu or the refresh rate of some kgame. Not "It totally works the same as windows so it sucks." If it works it works.
Complain about the behavior of a particular widget, or the mechanism for installing new software, or how themes are packaged or SOMETHING. Don't just bitch to be a little zealot.
Oh and get with the times. 32MB of ram on a win32 box is painful. 32MB of ram on an X11 box is just as miserable. If you don't like 'bloated' software, then stick with console. No-ones making you choose. But unless you have a better idea of how the basic architecture of X and GTK and QT should work to be more memory-efficient or what have you, then be quiet.
This is the most unfocused filth I have ever written. It sucks but I am out of time. I hope you find it irritating.
Blargh! If you want to start a conversation about open-source developmental dialogue, at least write an article with some substance to get things going! Maybe start off with ESR's death threats or something.
This post was so lame I feel like becoming a troll now. Here goes.
***THIS ARTICLE WAS WEAK SKINNY AND UNFOCUSED LIKE NATALIE PORTMAN GOING FOR A WEEK ON A HOLE IN MARS WITHOUT HER GRITS!?@$% IS SHE FROZEN? IT IS A MYSTERY! FATTYS ATTACK!!$ IT IS AN EATWAR! ***
Self-replicating machines? Nanotechnology run amok? Machines that become smart and enslave humanity? Please, this is reality, not an episode of star trek.
Finally, he argues argues, this threat [machinery] to humanity is much greater than that of nuclear weapons because those are hard to build.
HAHAHA!
Please. We can't even write a web browser within three years, much less program sentient robot roaches that could destroy our planet.
There's only like, what, forty thousand nukes extant on earth, each capable of wiping out millions of lives in five minutes? Many capable of poisoning an entire planet for millenia if detonated close enough to the ground? ALL of them are owned by warmongering, jingoistic, pathologically disturbed political entities who have NO QUALMS whatsoever about using nuclear warheads whenever it is convenient?
Nuclear weapons, traditionally developed viruses, lethal bacteria, political unrest, riots, the complete disruption of climate, economic decay, and plain old steel bullets fragmenting children's skulls into explosions of bloody brain and bone (just like the children of Kosovo who the entire world is eagerly attempting to exterminate) are ALWAYS going to be more of a concern to me than sentient computers messing with my tax return. This article sucked. Perhaps the real thing will explain stuff better.
The most dangerous aspect of living on earth is that we are sentient. If we weren't, we wouldn't give a shit what happens in the long run. (which we don't, when it gets down to it)
If you enjoy pulp science fiction, try Ben Bova's _MARS_. It's an easy breezy read.
If you want a 3-book-long lovemaking session to the planet Mars, I highly suggest Kim Stanley Robinson's _RED MARS_, _GREEN MARS_, and _BLUE MARS_. They get progressively more boring and uninspired as the series progresses through more and more abstract characters, but they are still extremely decent reads that make a slight effort to represent Mars in all it's beauty. The franchise milker _THE MARTIANS_ is also out as of a few months ago. Haven't checked it out, but I expect it to be just as fatally flawed as the others. Oh well.
Yeah... And there's also Ray Bradbury's _THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES_.. Or was it CS Lewis? I forget and don't care, because I didn't like it.
Oh yeah, and there is now an official Mars Flag or something. It's three vertical stripes going [RED] [GREEN] [BLUE}. Quite cool.
Mars is vastly more interesting than you might expect. Read up on it if you like.
http://www.marssociety.org links you to the Mars Society, a delusional group of Mars Freaks who want to settle the planet or something. But they're still cool.
http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/ has a very supercool solar system simulator that can show you what the planets look like from almost anywhere at almost any time. It's quite accurate and cool. Not open source yet, but i'm sure with some coaxing and good project management, they might be willing to release it. It's written in C and shit, so it'd port pretty easy i'd imagine. The data sets might not be public domain though. Oh well. Go see it anyway.
Typical household tasks: Typing letters in Word, AIM, keeping track of money, e-mail, and retrieving porn. These tasks are accomplished on Windows. The users are familiar with Windows. Their files are all slopped all over and kept on floppies sometimes and various default directories. This is all the family will probably ever use a computer for.
Consider my box, configured with a gnome-panel running on Linux/x86. The only tasks this machine can replace is porn retrieval through Netscape, in its current state.
Why do people insist that general purpose Win32 machines such as the one above can easily be replaced by a morestable/reliable/cheap/easy/logical/wellbuilt/b lah blah blah KDE or Gnome setup?
Microsoft Office is the defacto standard. Virtually every Windows PC has it. A vast majority of people cannot or would not adapt to something like Star Office, no matter how sophisticated and great and similar it gets. MS Office is binary only. MS Office is x86 only (excluding the MacOS PPC work-alike). MS seems reluctant to change either of those facts. Conclusion: Win32 as it stands today is going to be on most general-purpose home-PCs for a LONG time to come, and Linux/*BSD/MacOS don't have a chance of breaking into 100 million FAT partitions.
Repeat this for IE, which has enormous inertia, tax programs, children's games, financial programs, and so on and so forth.
It doesn't MATTER how good gnucash gets, or how great Star Office is packaged in the Ultimate End-User Distro, or how precisely the Windows desktop and file dialogs are replicated, or how "windows-like" KDE or gnome can be forced into behaving.
Microsoft Office and nearly 70k other programs that hundreds of are BINARY ONLY, X86 ONLY, WIN32 ONLY and not under active development anymore.
Billions upon billions of hours and incalculable quantities of time have been spent teaching people MS products and Win32 programs which just don't port that easy. And a huge number of users don't grasp the concept of a file. They want to know where to click to get one of the five things mentioned above done.
My poorly constructed point: Wholesale (think 30%) home migration away from x86 Windows is not going to happen in the next decade at least. If you want to sell unix-wares to the home market in volume they will have to be in the guise of appliances that significantly redefine the concept of a general purpose PC.
There are a million exceptions to the rule, but one thing is quite obvious; MS is going to own a vast portion of the home market for years to come and there is no Magical Sofware / User Interface Paradigm on the horizon that could concievably change that.
Thank you Zico... Your special blend of snotty indignance, bombast, and gripe-laden criticism fills in the hole left by JWZ nicely..:D
Oh wait, didn't he work on Netscape classic? The OTHER free web browser that was developed, debugged, and distributed free of cost for your own private use?
Sheesh... The bigger the pool, the more people think it's okay to pee in.
Someone inform me. Why do most operating systems implement their own C library? Is glibc compile-able across multiple architectures? Is it merely standard C that is implemented in these libraries or is there a lot of other stuff that needs to be implemented? What is a C library written in? Why are they not fully-debugged after years of development? Are some implementations better than others? How much does the quality of an implementation impact system performance?
Keep Netscape/Unix From Crashing Like the Overextended Hack Job Piece Of Crap Code It Is - HOWTO
1) Your distro manufacturer may have packaged netscape incorrectly. See their site for details or upgrades.
2) Turn off Cascading Style Sheets (Style Sheets) support in your preferences. It generally doesn't work well at all and really isn't all that necessary. And IME it makes NS crash. A lot.
3) Turn off Java. Turn off Java. Turn off Java.
4) Turn off Javascript if you don't use somewhat sophisticated sites.
5) Don't invoke mystery components like Messenger and Composer and all that crap unless you actually need to use them. They tend to suck a bit.
6) Feed it lots and lots and lots of disk/memory cache, or none at all.
7) Upgrade. 4.7x is much nicer than previous 4.x releases on all platforms, IME.
-------------------------
This is just my experience. With these changes, NS tends to stay up for a few days for me, as opposed to an hour or less previously.
Real Player will be a nice binary only addition to the world of unix software, but feh.
Microsoft Windows Media Player and it's delightful array of codecs is much nicer to use than the bauble-intensive, ad-encrusted real player.
WMP also does fullscreen much more smoothly than RP and just generally sucks less. I would be delighted to have it available cross platform, even if it was binary only. (which it would be...)
Real tried to play hardball with MS and see where it got them...
The laws of relativity CLEARLY state that the most distant object in the known universe is a pissed off Significant Other, usually of the female variety.
Rambus is a design for a memory system from Rambus Inc. It is extraordinarily fast on paper. Intel chose their design and decided to support it on a lot of their new products.
The implementation took a long time to get around to getting around. It is now here. Intel bet a LOT on Rambus, because it would give them significant control over a lot of markets. (IE: They own rambus designs)
Rambus is significantly different from the DRAM used commonly today. It requires changes to how stuff is laid out on the motherboard. And it is manufactured differently, to very demanding tolerances.
It is now in production and is competing with DDR-DRAM, which uses existing manufacturing processes, generally works with existing chipsets, and is easy to support. And it doesn't require a fan setup for the memory alone. And runs far cooler. And gives almost as good performance when set up correctly as a RAMBUS setup. And is also capable of being manufactured in quantity, whereas RDRAM is extremely difficult to manufacture. DDRDRAM is also about a fifth of the cost of a RDRAM setup.
You do the math, and read up on it a bit.. I think you will agree that for all intents and purposes (read: mainstream pcs, servers, et al), Rambus is DOA.
Slashdot Mirror
Wholly christ... The most ham-fisted tongue-in-cheek sarcasm I could possibly dole out went FLYING over heads...
I cry for the future. So to celebrate, I leave slashdot!
I bequeath to the troll community my +2 account! No more begging for moderation, just TAKE IT!
Username: jikes
Password: trolltech
I want you all to have just as much fun with it as I did. My beloved little pieces of crap.
[sniff] May the noise be with you...
My goals are decidedly simple as relax with my sweetie and her brats in a cottage on long beach...
[song]
// I want to troll with the very best
// like Signal 11 and OOG caveman...
// I'll eat grits till my throat swells up
// Like no-one's ever does
// TROLLEMON! Gotta first-post them alll....
// Natalie, you're my best friend
// In a world that has no MEEEPT?!%@
// BEOWULF!
// open sores! ~~#!!#!~#!##!##!!~#~!#
[/song]
Mozilla: Makes Dots according to W3C CSS specifications.
Every Released Version Of IE5.0: Does not make dots, as required by W3C CSS specifications.
Apology accepted.
Let's see, would that be the IE5.5/x86/win9x BETA? Or the one I can download for free from windowsupdate.microsoft.com today, assuming today has been redefined to be the future? Or the one that comes packaged with NT2k? Or the Mac version? I need clarity on this please. My arguments are quite important to me, and minutae is everything.
Crack is more than that where I live, in astonishing coincidence I do have cancer, and I cannot stop. I am compelled to share my Utter Truth with the world.
This T3 isn't going to clog itself ya know.
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
I've been karma-whoring on the slashdot, all the livelong day.
</TITLE>
<STYLE type="text/css">
P {border-style: dotted ; border-color: red}
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>This proves I am a fundamentally better person than you in every way. I hope parasites eat your colon and you die soon. Perhaps they'll look like the little red dots that are around this little sentiment. Unless you use IE, in which case you're going to be eaten alive by red tapeworms which will be shitting red string until you die.</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>
***MOZILLA***
d ownload
Few more things...
Mozilla/static/x86/linux is like 7MB compiled/gzipped. I wish they would Bzip2 the bastards. I have not tried any auto-installer for any platform...
The emailer is becoming far more competent. I will enjoy supporting it. Multiple POP3 accounts, al crossplatform. (drool) Goodbye you fucking identities.
The HTML editor is tres-slick... I'm confident it will suck cock for the first netscape release, but oh well..
Keybindings are still a bitch for all platforms. Finicky, tempremental. Fuckit. FUCKIT. I hate that.
Mozilla has the most open development of any project I can think of. No months-of-silence, open CVS tree, open mailing lists, open development discussions, open documentation, public builds for platforms on the HOUR, decent license, open source bugtracker, open buglists, open discussion, GOBS of FTP power, great feedback methods, all is very very nice. Oh yeah, and a script on the homepage that shows EVERY code update made in the last day or so, plus exceptional code navigation tools, all on the web.
Mozilla/NS may never take over every desktop, but does it really need to? It's going to fill shitloads of niches that IE in all it's forms (yeah even pocket explorer which has GOT to be completely new code) is not going to fit into... Look at the netscape4/unix builds going into web appliances... Imagine what mozilla is going to accomplish in the next 10 years...
if nothing else netscape/AOL has opened up reams of competition, both from the Opera people, and people who will turn XPCOM/mozilla into a thousand different mutants...
***LINKS***
For a text-based browser that is similar to lynx and w3m but INCREDIBLY lightweight, complete, easy-to-use, and just all around makes you want to cry with joy, please look into the GPLed 'links'.
It is written in C, compiles anywhere, is way under a meg tarballed, and is the absolute most cruft-free thing I have ever used. Press 'g', go somewhere. It is nearly impossible to describe how fundamentally nice this program is.
It does frames exceedingly well, flies with tables, and is magic over a modem. The interface is (somehow) more pleasant than lynx's and it has pulldown menus hidden with ESC for other options.
It is the most underrated browser I have ever seen. The author is a god. My only complaint is that it fights with gpm for cut and paste.
http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/
For real, M16 and all the nightlies are becoming ridiculously good...
Experiences with Win32/x86/133/40/unloaded:
Fast on a 133/40 box... no shit... I spent an hour or two testing my CSS pages and it didn't crash once... The flakiness from generating new browser windows is almost gone...
The sidebar is ACTUALLY cool.. check out cnn.com with NS6PR1 to see how cool questionless/seamless sidebar/install can be.. This ISN'T like those shitty IE4/5 toolbar conquests from noname companies... It just slips in, giving actually cool information and shit...
The UI has calmed down lots... it is clean, rather functional, and what's best, can be COMPLETELY OVERHAULED to be faster/better/simpler/more-complex, ANYTHING...
Mozilla isn't just a lets-clone-netscape thing anymore, it's a big collection of XPCOMponents that you can use to create apps... Mozilla is just one of them..
The default mozilla/netscape skin is still pretty damn slow but managable on my win32/x86/100/40 you will see mozilla FLY when the lighter-weight skins are made... I have used them and they just feel so much lighter...
Experiences with linux 2.2/x86/90mhz/32MB
this machine is used for like three different services and at the time had 6 people using it, plus three people using X apps all over the network...
It was SLOW. FUCKING SLOW.
It took forever to unpack.. It took forever to load.. it took FOREVER for anything to happen...
Then i realized it was running almost entirely in swap, and still hadn't crashed.. that was cool..
The machine was RIDICULOUSLY burded at the time, so i can forgive it...
Experiences on linux 2.2/x86/400/128
Ridiculously fast. Ridiculously good. First time user startup in under 15 seconds... from there on out, starts up in 3 seconds... if mostly cached in memory starts up in under a second...
Crashes are becoming significantly more difficult to find... it is now more pleasant to use than NS4 for me... less UI niggles... FASTER. Good.
Goodbye netscape 4... FUCK IT.... Mozilla is going to be so radically more modifiable and fluid and extensible and NICE... oh wait, it already IS.
Goodbye NS4, we hardly loved ye...
P.S.: crystal-note-perfect CSS is an utter joy... my heart leaps...
from coworker: "where are your graphics stored?" (referring to complex CSS1 box with lots of color-tricks on no-graphic page)
Read the goofy things that have been come up with so far... The FSSTABLEFS or whatever is an exercise in pointlessness.
/usr/sbin. Don't you DARE make a top-level-directory that isn't on this list. [XXX: Are symlinks a good idea?]
Section 1: Philosophy [50 pages of authors blar blar patting on back blah blah blah]
Section 2: We think important binaries should go in
Section 3: [Unfinished, awaiting subcommittee 32.623.GNU/SMla,emGLS:11/2/3. Report 325.423]
The rest of it is equally boring.
Then onto the LSB... What is the POINT of making a reference distro? I like linux because I can update anything without impunity... They're trying to create a reference platform with glibc-2.???? and blah.224.323 and blah 3223.23.so and absolutely noone can come up with an idea as to how far the reach should extend... Determine default window ordering behavior? Startup sounds?
Once a reference distro or whatever goes out that is stamped STANDARDS COMPLIANT LINUX, the value-add of distros becomes much less. Old crap will need to be included... And we will be STUCK with immature libraries and all sorts of backwards compatable cruft and a BORING UNIX PLATFORM FOR THE NEXT 10 YEARS...
All I truly want is a nearly universal dependancy/packaging/installation/uninstallation system. rpm comes close, but badly formed packages are an issue. Shit still gets left around... rpms refuse to integrate with tarballs and vice versa.... blah blah blah... Without a common capability database or SOMETHING, it's a bitch to integrate packages of any type and configmakemakeins shit...
And I also want a COMPLETE rethinking of autoconf and automake and m4 and configure and all that shit. Most of my linux shit won't compile on other shit, and that's just damn dumb considering they all are so much alike. And it's so goddamn wordy and verbose and fragile and fucking flimsy.. Stupid fucking make syntax.... try a make -d on ANYTHING sometime and be astonished..
Shouldn't you people be groveling or something? And BRING ME SOME SHOES! Nice ones.
FART!
Perhaps the word the Library was looking for is 'EXPENSIVE'. Every action in the universe has a cost (reaction) associated with every modification made on it.
On a related note, humans devised a fabulous method for creating a universal interface between the desire to do something and the ability to do it... It's called MONEY.
Why doesn't Microsoft dismantle their evil company? Financial economics.
Why does Quicktime not exist for Unix yet? Financial economics.
Why is X software not open source? Financial economics.
Why is X product in X configuration? Financial economics.
Why is X entity in the universe in the X configuration it is? Economics. (of a sort)
Why is X? Economics. (of a sort)
Hint: If there's money involved in any way, shape, or form, economics is going to enter into the equation. And scanning oodles of books just so they can rot on some overpriced jukebox in the Data Storage Flavor Of The Month is kind of expensive.
Incidentally, the Library of Congress's money is... erm... MINE.
I say we spend it on coke, whores, and booze instead of poopoo old books. Fuck the children and the future. I want state-sponsored injections of heroin into my anus on the hour.
I believe the code for automatic address-completion went in a couple days ago. It's probably not turned on or something.
Mozzy has password remembering already set up. It works okay. The mailer is radically better than previously. Javascript works. Most webpages work pretty well.
It will be better at web-FTP than IE5 for windows, which was the MOST IRRITATING thing I have ever seen. (it turned it into a file folder, but drag and drop didn't work, so you needed to Right Click, Copy To Folder, then do some GODFORSAKEN SHIT to get it to save... that option went off REAL FAST)
Mozilla knows how to download shit and save and open local files now.
Mozzy starts up without dying now. The initial load is very sluggish, like everything else. If it is in cache, it starts up very very quickly.
The biggest gripe is focus issues... They're still fruity and it is far too easy for focus to go into the void, leaving you with a useless shell.
The extras and the obscene flexibility of the UI definition language will make this a seriously cool thing... If you can't imagine how cool something this flexible will be, then that's sad.
It's like one dynamic living document... I love it.
So the colors suck. Deal. You can change them later. A theme manager will likely be set up in a few more months..
It displays shit correctly, to the spec... There are workarounds for shitty HTML like slashdots...
It remembers your homepage, it remembers all sorts of shit now. Except that goddamn default toolbar. Oh well.
Most of what sucks about mozilla is being fixed or can be changed by you... That's what i like about it. And it is free after all.
And stop bitching about the extra features... The editor and the mail program and all that shit are basically hyper-dynamic webpages. The size is probably going to be like 10MB compressed for EVERYTHING that mozzy does when it gets to netscape release... that includes all SORTS of shit plus new java.
/me shrugs... It's really not that bad folks. And it will continue to get better as long as AOL keeps dumping enormous amounts of money into the project.... And we all start learning how to design better (faster/more effective) user interfaces for mozilla faster...
It's a platform, not a program.
I am playing with Linux nightly build. It is newer and buggier than M15, which is likely rolled off into another line a week or two before.
The speed is definately picking up... I remember waiting for form pulldowns to draw... It's very close to the same league as NS4.7, and it's doing a SHITLOAD more.
The KILLER APP is the UI overhaul themes... I played with a few last night... If you DONT LIKE MOZILLA NOW, WAIT FOR THE NEW THEMES... A lot of the sluggishness is due to the sidebars and the moving crap and shit... Stuff like the ANDREW theme or whatever the fuck it's called makes things SIGNIFICANTLY faster...
I know because i tried them. =P
It displays most pages right.
It never knows when to stop moving the throbber.
And if you jack up the DPI setting in preferences, you can actually read the fonts.
No java in the nightlies, oh well.
It works much better than before, has replaced NS4.7 for me, remembers preferences well, behaves well, and is ACTUALLY GETTING FASTER... I can see what this will become and I seriously like it.
(faster as in, it is usable on my 400/128 assuming the X server is given a relatively high priority)
Oh yeah, the little turquoise pulldown next to the address bar with the down arrow is really damn sweet... mozilla has POTENTIAL... I like it.
PLEASE tell me that someone will go over the artwork in this game before they port this to non-japan... It's bad enough this character wears makeup, dresses in lace, and has prada boots, but is a HUGE FLESH TONE PENIS SHAPED DILDO SWORD REALLY NECESSARY? Who drew this?
penis-sword character at http://www.ffonline.com/1_ff9tgs/zidan313minaba.jp g
The thing that makes Linux a pleasure to use is, by and large, not the kernel. It's the vast userspace that surrounds it that is of interest, especially the packaging.
[Extreme opinion] At the CORE OF THE OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT is gcc. It is incomparably important, and I would argue significantly more crucial to the future of free software than the ol' piddly linux kernel. Why there is not more attention paid to the dozens of changes and influences on this project is absolutely beyond me.
[/Extreme opinion]
Other crucial things:
The twenty odd shells in use
perl/python/expect BLAH BLAH BLAH... Basically the thousands of languages and scripts that make everything go
Netscape/Mozilla
dozens of filesystems
DRIVERS DRIVERS DRIVERS!!!
The poster children samba/apache and their ilk
glib / readline / texutils / binutils / GNU GNU GNU
The BSD-licensed variants of all the above
Documentation, support, people, IRC, usenet, et al
Themes and skins and shit galore
All the new XP multimedia APIs
XFree86 and all the other implementations of X
DRIVERS DRIVERS DRIVERS
ALLL the toolkits and bindings and ALL THAT SHIT that flings by on freshmeat
TRILLIONS of things for manipulating mail and network monitors and ALL THAT SHIT
Extremely fundamental: make, makealikes, all the packaging and dependancy systems
The THOUSANDS of standards and APIs and reference implementations for EVERYTHING
And most crucially, wanda the fish
XXX
All i'm whining about is, userspace is vastly more important than piddly dumbfuck kernel, as nice and interesting as it may be.
Duh. I made an obvious. Now feed me moderation!
/me picks nose.
Enough braindead thinking.
Unix is not Windows. Unix is not Windows. UNIX IS NOT FUCKING WINDOWS!
There is a vast community of people working to make MS Windows and the other 400 or so assorted MS products better every day, and they're bound together by money, the most powerful social force imaginable. We're talking MCPs, MCSEs, developers, tech support networks, curriculum resale networks, documentation constructs, EVERYTHING. Plus highly centralized news and documentation delivery machines.
Open source unix development doesn't have that same financial weight behind it. In certain areas yes, but not nearly with the same reach as the MS machine.
And wouldn't things be so much easier if we'd stop talking about the difficult-to-define Linux Community and start talking about the computing enthusiast/developer community as a whole? As in, people who use computers to know how they work and synthesize new solutions from them? As in, not end users?
A vast majority of end-users rarely discover the other button on the mouse. They will NEVER NEVER NEVER be interested in all the wondrous things that Unix can do, no matter how gracefully they are introduced into the system of software they have at their disposal.
And let's shut the fuck up about "bad interfaces". If I have to read another "Gnome has a bad rehashed interface" line or "KDE looks too much like windows" bitch, I will murder.
GNOME and KDE are NOT PROGRAMS. They are collections of programs and libraries and APIs and engines and object managers that enable certain UI niceties like toolbars, common themings, mail delivery, window management, and a BILLION different things. If you're going to complain about something, complain about 'panel' or 'kwm' or 'ghex' or 'gmc' or the stock GTK color selector or gnumeric's plugin menu or the refresh rate of some kgame. Not "It totally works the same as windows so it sucks." If it works it works.
Complain about the behavior of a particular widget, or the mechanism for installing new software, or how themes are packaged or SOMETHING. Don't just bitch to be a little zealot.
Oh and get with the times. 32MB of ram on a win32 box is painful. 32MB of ram on an X11 box is just as miserable. If you don't like 'bloated' software, then stick with console. No-ones making you choose. But unless you have a better idea of how the basic architecture of X and GTK and QT should work to be more memory-efficient or what have you, then be quiet.
This is the most unfocused filth I have ever written. It sucks but I am out of time. I hope you find it irritating.
Blargh! If you want to start a conversation about open-source developmental dialogue, at least write an article with some substance to get things going! Maybe start off with ESR's death threats or something.
This post was so lame I feel like becoming a troll now. Here goes.
***THIS ARTICLE WAS WEAK SKINNY AND UNFOCUSED LIKE NATALIE PORTMAN GOING FOR A WEEK ON A HOLE IN MARS WITHOUT HER GRITS!?@$% IS SHE FROZEN? IT IS A MYSTERY! FATTYS ATTACK!!$ IT IS AN EATWAR! ***
Git to moderating.
Self-replicating machines? Nanotechnology run amok? Machines that become smart and enslave humanity? Please, this is reality, not an episode of star trek.
Finally, he argues argues, this threat [machinery] to humanity is much greater than that of nuclear weapons because those are hard to build.
HAHAHA!
Please. We can't even write a web browser within three years, much less program sentient robot roaches that could destroy our planet.
There's only like, what, forty thousand nukes extant on earth, each capable of wiping out millions of lives in five minutes? Many capable of poisoning an entire planet for millenia if detonated close enough to the ground? ALL of them are owned by warmongering, jingoistic, pathologically disturbed political entities who have NO QUALMS whatsoever about using nuclear warheads whenever it is convenient?
Nuclear weapons, traditionally developed viruses, lethal bacteria, political unrest, riots, the complete disruption of climate, economic decay, and plain old steel bullets fragmenting children's skulls into explosions of bloody brain and bone (just like the children of Kosovo who the entire world is eagerly attempting to exterminate) are ALWAYS going to be more of a concern to me than sentient computers messing with my tax return. This article sucked. Perhaps the real thing will explain stuff better.
The most dangerous aspect of living on earth is that we are sentient. If we weren't, we wouldn't give a shit what happens in the long run. (which we don't, when it gets down to it)
If you enjoy pulp science fiction, try Ben Bova's _MARS_. It's an easy breezy read.
If you want a 3-book-long lovemaking session to the planet Mars, I highly suggest Kim Stanley Robinson's _RED MARS_, _GREEN MARS_, and _BLUE MARS_. They get progressively more boring and uninspired as the series progresses through more and more abstract characters, but they are still extremely decent reads that make a slight effort to represent Mars in all it's beauty. The franchise milker _THE MARTIANS_ is also out as of a few months ago. Haven't checked it out, but I expect it to be just as fatally flawed as the others. Oh well.
Yeah... And there's also Ray Bradbury's _THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES_.. Or was it CS Lewis? I forget and don't care, because I didn't like it.Oh yeah, and there is now an official Mars Flag or something. It's three vertical stripes going [RED] [GREEN] [BLUE}. Quite cool.
Mars is vastly more interesting than you might expect. Read up on it if you like.
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/billa/t np/mars.html is an EXCELLENT start if you want to learn more about the planet at a glance.
http://www.marssociety.org links you to the Mars Society, a delusional group of Mars Freaks who want to settle the planet or something. But they're still cool.
http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/ has a very supercool solar system simulator that can show you what the planets look like from almost anywhere at almost any time. It's quite accurate and cool. Not open source yet, but i'm sure with some coaxing and good project management, they might be willing to release it. It's written in C and shit, so it'd port pretty easy i'd imagine. The data sets might not be public domain though. Oh well. Go see it anyway.
Enjoy.
Typical household tasks: Typing letters in Word, AIM, keeping track of money, e-mail, and retrieving porn. These tasks are accomplished on Windows. The users are familiar with Windows. Their files are all slopped all over and kept on floppies sometimes and various default directories. This is all the family will probably ever use a computer for.
b lah blah blah KDE or Gnome setup?
Consider my box, configured with a gnome-panel running on Linux/x86. The only tasks this machine can replace is porn retrieval through Netscape, in its current state.
Why do people insist that general purpose Win32 machines such as the one above can easily be replaced by a morestable/reliable/cheap/easy/logical/wellbuilt/
Microsoft Office is the defacto standard. Virtually every Windows PC has it. A vast majority of people cannot or would not adapt to something like Star Office, no matter how sophisticated and great and similar it gets. MS Office is binary only. MS Office is x86 only (excluding the MacOS PPC work-alike). MS seems reluctant to change either of those facts. Conclusion: Win32 as it stands today is going to be on most general-purpose home-PCs for a LONG time to come, and Linux/*BSD/MacOS don't have a chance of breaking into 100 million FAT partitions.
Repeat this for IE, which has enormous inertia, tax programs, children's games, financial programs, and so on and so forth.
It doesn't MATTER how good gnucash gets, or how great Star Office is packaged in the Ultimate End-User Distro, or how precisely the Windows desktop and file dialogs are replicated, or how "windows-like" KDE or gnome can be forced into behaving.
Microsoft Office and nearly 70k other programs that hundreds of are BINARY ONLY, X86 ONLY, WIN32 ONLY and not under active development anymore.
Billions upon billions of hours and incalculable quantities of time have been spent teaching people MS products and Win32 programs which just don't port that easy. And a huge number of users don't grasp the concept of a file. They want to know where to click to get one of the five things mentioned above done.
My poorly constructed point: Wholesale (think 30%) home migration away from x86 Windows is not going to happen in the next decade at least. If you want to sell unix-wares to the home market in volume they will have to be in the guise of appliances that significantly redefine the concept of a general purpose PC.
There are a million exceptions to the rule, but one thing is quite obvious; MS is going to own a vast portion of the home market for years to come and there is no Magical Sofware / User Interface Paradigm on the horizon that could concievably change that.
Thank you Zico... Your special blend of snotty indignance, bombast, and gripe-laden criticism fills in the hole left by JWZ nicely.. :D
Oh wait, didn't he work on Netscape classic? The OTHER free web browser that was developed, debugged, and distributed free of cost for your own private use?
Sheesh... The bigger the pool, the more people think it's okay to pee in.
Someone inform me. Why do most operating systems implement their own C library? Is glibc compile-able across multiple architectures? Is it merely standard C that is implemented in these libraries or is there a lot of other stuff that needs to be implemented? What is a C library written in? Why are they not fully-debugged after years of development? Are some implementations better than others? How much does the quality of an implementation impact system performance?
Honest questions.
Keep Netscape/Unix From Crashing Like the Overextended Hack Job Piece Of Crap Code It Is - HOWTO
1) Your distro manufacturer may have packaged netscape incorrectly. See their site for details or upgrades.
2) Turn off Cascading Style Sheets (Style Sheets) support in your preferences. It generally doesn't work well at all and really isn't all that necessary. And IME it makes NS crash. A lot.
3) Turn off Java. Turn off Java. Turn off Java.
4) Turn off Javascript if you don't use somewhat sophisticated sites.
5) Don't invoke mystery components like Messenger and Composer and all that crap unless you actually need to use them. They tend to suck a bit.
6) Feed it lots and lots and lots of disk/memory cache, or none at all.
7) Upgrade. 4.7x is much nicer than previous 4.x releases on all platforms, IME.
-------------------------
This is just my experience. With these changes, NS tends to stay up for a few days for me, as opposed to an hour or less previously.
Take this at well less than face value.
Real Player will be a nice binary only addition to the world of unix software, but feh.
Microsoft Windows Media Player and it's delightful array of codecs is much nicer to use than the bauble-intensive, ad-encrusted real player.
WMP also does fullscreen much more smoothly than RP and just generally sucks less. I would be delighted to have it available cross platform, even if it was binary only. (which it would be...)
Real tried to play hardball with MS and see where it got them...
The laws of relativity CLEARLY state that the most distant object in the known universe is a pissed off Significant Other, usually of the female variety.
Duh.
Rambus is a design for a memory system from Rambus Inc. It is extraordinarily fast on paper. Intel chose their design and decided to support it on a lot of their new products.
The implementation took a long time to get around to getting around. It is now here. Intel bet a LOT on Rambus, because it would give them significant control over a lot of markets. (IE: They own rambus designs)
Rambus is significantly different from the DRAM used commonly today. It requires changes to how stuff is laid out on the motherboard. And it is manufactured differently, to very demanding tolerances.
It is now in production and is competing with DDR-DRAM, which uses existing manufacturing processes, generally works with existing chipsets, and is easy to support. And it doesn't require a fan setup for the memory alone. And runs far cooler. And gives almost as good performance when set up correctly as a RAMBUS setup. And is also capable of being manufactured in quantity, whereas RDRAM is extremely difficult to manufacture. DDRDRAM is also about a fifth of the cost of a RDRAM setup.
You do the math, and read up on it a bit.. I think you will agree that for all intents and purposes (read: mainstream pcs, servers, et al), Rambus is DOA.
Toodles.