I doubt DVD would have taken off nearly as well as it did if it weren't possible to circumvent the regional encoding and other hacks in it. I expect most of the early adopters, at least in Europe had region free players. So it was precisely because of the weak protection that it took off as well as it did. For all the moaning by the studios about decss and modchips, I bet their profits would be a fraction of what they are if the encryption and protection had been any good.
Now concerning this format, it has failure written all over it. HD televisions are few and far between (nowhere outside the US), no DVD player supports this format and few people are going to buy another player to support some marginally better picture quality. With few players, the number of discs is going to be nonexistant, the price of discs will be too high and the whole format is doomed. That's not even considering what deals with the devil that player makers would have to make to carry the format - royalities, running WinCE or whatever.
To me it sounds like cross between DiVX and laserdisc. Unpopular, unwanted, artificially hyped and ultimately doomed.
Pummelled? You mean the hospitals, sewage facilities, food storages, etc. were "pummelled.
Yes pummelled. The whole infrastructure has been blasted to bits. There is no food, no money, no produce, no law and order. The coalition makes a big deal about not hitting hospitals and other facilities but they stand by while the looters raid them instead. Another flagrant violation of international law.
Do you honestly believe that there was a peaceful solution to stopping Saddam from torturing, raping, and murdering Iraqis? If so, how?
What the sovereign nation of Iraq did to its own people is none of the United State's business. It's not like the US gives a damn about the torture, rape and murder that happens in Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Georgia, Colombia or anywhere else for that matter, so why Iraq?
The answer is it doesn't. US foreign policy is ammoral. It doesn't care about such things but they make convenient excuses to rouse public opinion when necessary.
Oh, and you should grab a dictionary and look up the word "unilateral," because it's hard to describe 46 allied countries as "unilateral."
LOL. I bet the coalition of the willing was grateful to have Micronesia on board. Most countries on that list gave no support at all or restrict it to a humanitarian / medical / chemical roles.
You mean a regime that welcomed Soviet nuclear missles into his backyard so that the Soviets could strike us within minutes?
You mean the regime that had just fought off a CIA funded and equipped attack at the Bay of Pigs? You mean that regime? I wonder why they didn't think kindly of the US after that. Of course, what about the Turkish regime that first allowed US missiles into their country so they could strike the USSR within minutes? And are those missiles still there?
Show me evidence it was based on freeing the Iraqi people, or WMD. Oh that's right you're an anonymous coward without even the balls to stand up for your opinion.
How about the US training and arming Kurds to attack Iraq? Or destabilizing democratic elections in Chile and supporting right wing dictators such as Pinochet? Or attempting to asassinate Fidel Castro? Or selling weapons to oppresive regimes like Iraq & Iran? etc.
The US has no moral high ground here. Their foreign policy is completely ammoral and attempts to justify it in terms of good and evil is just pure bullshit. Stop thinking in such simplistic terms and consider what they have to gain by removing Saddam, not the lies they use to appeal for public support.
The rest of the world, especially the US wasn't going to stand idly by while Saddam took over all of those oil fields. The invasion, brutality, tortures etc. gave a golden reason for those looking to take Kuwait back.
That is why Saddam had it coming. The reaction to his aggression was so predictable that he may as well have asked to be attacked.
As for the current incursion, I believe it is completely unjustified. At the end of the day it boils down to oil - not just the selling of it but the control of it too.
The US of A hasn't got any responsibility to rebuild this country
Sure it does. It is one of those that pummelled it into dust whilst 'liberating' it. Or did the US free the Iraqi people so they can die in droves from disease, malnutrition and civil war whilst living in the squalor of a devastated country? Some freedom.
Saddam flaunted international law and brought about this action.
And the US flaunted international law by unilaterally attacking Iraq without a UN mandate and while there were peaceful solutions, not least of which continued weapons inspections.
Look at Castro, he's been living under sanctions for god knows how long and the people of Cuba have sufferred for this long because the USA has been unwilling to take action.
I see. So Cuba should have been put out of its misery because evil old Fidel wouldn't kow tow to US foreign policy.
A country known to have possessed deadly WMDs and provide training and support for terrorist groups such as Hamas.
And I suppose you have the proof to hand for all this, not the wild speculation that some people mistake for facts these days? Certainly they had WMD and perhaps even possess some yet, but until proof arrives you are not in a position to emphatically claim anything. The evidence so far amounts to smoke and mirrors (and downright lies and forgery too). Let's hope something turns up soon eh?
I wouldn't say the US owes them anything for the first war (after all Iraq had it coming) however they most certainly do for the second. It was an outright act of agression against a shattered country.
The US have a responsibilty to rebuild it, though I suspect they'll just screw the Iraqis out of their oil before any substantial aid will be forthcoming.
I'd would love to see a thousand miles of railway track that can be protected against a terrorist with a small explosive charge, or even a plank of wood.
Unfortunately it isn't going to happen. Fact is, it would be easy enough for terrorists to kill people in numerous ways no matter how many freedoms the US government restricts.
Perhaps the serial number will allow mass piracy but unless you're prepared to forever run the server unpatched and unexposed to the internet it won't do you much good. Microsoft will simply release a patch (perhaps an innocuous looking one) which will kill all known pirate keys in existence.
If you think this is far fetched, consider that it has already happened for MS Office for OS X. Users who applyied the first service pack found their installations were nobbled if they had been registered using widely know serial numbers.
It would be no more difficult for MS to do the same with Windows 2003 Server. And given the nature of the product and the huge revenue MS see themselves losing, you can expect them to pursue servers using the hacked serial numbers extremely vigourously with prosecutions and raids galore.
Now I wonder how much revenue is *actually* lost as opposed to counting illegal installs and assuming all those equal lost revenue. People who use hacked serial numbers are not those who would be interested in spending $$$$ on the original in the first place.
My understanding is that Mozilla takes as much memory as your system can offer to improve performance by caching various things. It has memory pressure observers that flush caches when things get tight.
If you want to lower the consumption I would suggest you chop your memory cache for starters and investigate the pref settings since it is probably possibly to tweak this behaviour too at the expense of performance. Tabbed browsing is also more memory efficient than opening windows.
It only launches faster because it is free of the various chrome overlays, extra XUL, extra components that are needed to integrate mail/news etc. etc. with the browser in Mozilla.
If you install just the browser in Mozilla and none of the other stuff I doubt the performance is appreciably any different at all from Phoenix. Where Phoenix may score points is that it has been designed as just a browser from the beginning which may simplify the chrome somewhat since it doesn't need to provide so many hooks for overlays making it somewhat simpler.
But if you don't want those other programmes, why are you downloading them? What I mean is that Linux and Win32 both have net installers, so if you don't want Chatzilla or Mail/News or Composer you don't have to. The installer asks you what you want to install and if you check all the things then naturally you get them all....
As for upgrading things seperately. Yes, you could do this already assuming anyone had the time to maintain the mail/news and browser components seperately. Unfortunately they don't but this is a packaging issue rather than any inherent flaw in Mozilla. You'll find lots of independently maintained modules of Mozilla on mozdev.org such as the spellchecker, so obviously the technology supports it.
Furthermore, Mozilla is moving towards the GRE model, so perhaps what you desire is closer than you think. The GRE is the Gecko runtime shared by all applications. The plan is to distribute one copy of this in a well-defined manner and allow applications to utilise the existing GRE much like the way the JRE works now. I don't know how far along this is, but GRE nightlies have been a common feature for a while now. I expect sooner or later Mozilla will become a GRE client itself and anyone want to use Gecko in their app will point their users at the GRE or detect the one they already have installed.
14Mb isn't particularly fat or bloated when you consider that you're getting a mail/news client, a browser, a JS debugger, a DOM inspector, an IRC chat client and an HTML editor in all that.
And if you don't want all that 'bloat', then use the use the net installer and install only the browser portion.
ChatZilla is an independently developed extension to Mozilla. If you don't like the 'bloat' of it then don't select it during installation! It's pretty simple really.
If you're referring to the.rpm packaging, then submit a patch which breaks up the.rpm into more manageable chunks, or use the Linux net installer.
Either way it's not Mozilla's fault since it is as modular as the user or the install script tells it to be. If you choose to install everything including the kitchen sink you can hardly complain of bloat when you get what you asked for.
Obviously a migration kit is not going to solve every issue (when do they ever?), but something that installed Linux with all the shared folders, printers, users, permissions, and web page content intact would make Linux considerably more attractive. At the end of the process, anything that couldn't be migrated could by stuck into a TODO list report for the admin to sort out afterwards.
It might be enough to interest people who have stuck with NT despite its flaws rather than incur the expense of upgrading, or porting over to another OS. Obviously someone using ASP or other esoteric things would have to take those issues into consideration, however I don't believe migrating that stuff to Windows 2003 is necessarily going to be any easy thing to do either.
I wonder how much of that 35% is using NT for file and print services or a web server?
Instead of incurring the massive expense of replacing the equipment that currently runs NT 4 plus the licences of running Windows 2003, perhaps they should just move over to Linux. Maybe there is scope for an advertising campaign from Red Hat or others that says as much.
Better yet, perhaps someone should offer an NT 'migration kit' which attempts to replicate the NT services and settings in Linux.
Freenet is a pretty lousy way to store data and I say that as someone who tries it out on occasion. Basically, only stuff in the main page of a freesite is reliable and more often than not any subpages are only partially or completely unretrievable.
And that's for one shot freesites which have had time to propogate the freenet. When people release a succession of sites, none of them propogate properly and it is broken links galore. It is also disasterously single-threaded whereby things arrive sequentially, one at a time so loading a page means sitting there for ages while it times out trying to get icons for later freesite editions.
It would be impossible to stick anything as active and constantly changing as Al Jazeera on it though a snapshot of particular articles would be possible.
To my mind, freenet is a bit of a failure. I reckon that improvements to the heuristics would do a lot for its speed. For example, there should be a way to tell it to preload stuff when its idle to speed up page loading and there should be a way to tag unimportant images and things so priority is given to more important stuff.
Not to mention the chestnut - "The Iraqis claim that...". News reporters rarely say "The coalition claim that..." even when the claims being made are as dubious if not so than many of the things the Iraqis are saying.
Thanks for asking, but yes I have. I run 8.0 on a laptop and 7.3 on my firewall / server. The changes you describe are just bug fixes, bumped versions and window dressing changes to the GUI. Under the surface there is precious little difference between how the two versions operate.
As far as RHCE people are concerned, the differences are minor so there is little justification to require them to sit a horribly expensive exam again because RH decided to call their next version 9.0 instead of 8.1 which is what it is.
Sorry, but this isn't true. Mozilla isn't just a 'technology demonstration', it is a full blown, fully featured advanced browser, most determinedly aimed at end (albeit power) users. If it were just a demonstration, it would be mess of debug menus and QA tests rather than the highly polished browser, mail / news, JS debugger, editor suite that it is.
The XUL cross-platform effort is part of that development and Mozilla makes for excellent proof that it works. But that is not saying the same thing at all.
The sad part is that under the surface Red Hat has harrdly changed in 7.x, 8.0 and neither probably in 9.0. Package versions have been bumped up, bugs have been fixed, and there are small differences here or there but for the most part, there is little to surprise anyone who has used 7.x in upgrading.
While that is not necessarily a bad thing, it does make you wonder what they'll do with RHCEs. Are they expected to pay out $$$$ to learn about the new window dressing and a couple of package changes or perhaps there should some kind of 'booster' certification which costs much less and makes their RHCE good for a few more years.
Well that really depends on your BIOS/firmware and the drive. Modern Macs can boot off firewire drives such as SmartDisk's so I imagine a PC could too if the hardware supported it.
I think other responses explained the general reasons that serial ATA might be better than firewire but I thought I'd make one point. The absence of a driver in Linux is not a reason in itself to not adopt a technology. Linux gets a driver when there is a demand and motivation for such a driver. The emergence of snazzy firewire drives, camcorders etc. is exactly such a reason and will fuel development of such features. The same happened when USB first appeared.
As far as I'm aware IEEE 1394 (firewire) is a readily available standard and assuming specific chipsets are documented there should be no barriers to making Linux talk happily with such devices. I'm no kernel engineer but I would guess that great big chunks of their bus / device abstraction are readily applicable to firewire too.
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Now concerning this format, it has failure written all over it. HD televisions are few and far between (nowhere outside the US), no DVD player supports this format and few people are going to buy another player to support some marginally better picture quality. With few players, the number of discs is going to be nonexistant, the price of discs will be too high and the whole format is doomed. That's not even considering what deals with the devil that player makers would have to make to carry the format - royalities, running WinCE or whatever.
To me it sounds like cross between DiVX and laserdisc. Unpopular, unwanted, artificially hyped and ultimately doomed.
Yes pummelled. The whole infrastructure has been blasted to bits. There is no food, no money, no produce, no law and order. The coalition makes a big deal about not hitting hospitals and other facilities but they stand by while the looters raid them instead. Another flagrant violation of international law.
Do you honestly believe that there was a peaceful solution to stopping Saddam from torturing, raping, and murdering Iraqis? If so, how?
What the sovereign nation of Iraq did to its own people is none of the United State's business. It's not like the US gives a damn about the torture, rape and murder that happens in Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Georgia, Colombia or anywhere else for that matter, so why Iraq?
The answer is it doesn't. US foreign policy is ammoral. It doesn't care about such things but they make convenient excuses to rouse public opinion when necessary.
Oh, and you should grab a dictionary and look up the word "unilateral," because it's hard to describe 46 allied countries as "unilateral."
LOL. I bet the coalition of the willing was grateful to have Micronesia on board. Most countries on that list gave no support at all or restrict it to a humanitarian / medical / chemical roles.
You mean a regime that welcomed Soviet nuclear missles into his backyard so that the Soviets could strike us within minutes?
You mean the regime that had just fought off a CIA funded and equipped attack at the Bay of Pigs? You mean that regime? I wonder why they didn't think kindly of the US after that. Of course, what about the Turkish regime that first allowed US missiles into their country so they could strike the USSR within minutes? And are those missiles still there?
Show me evidence it was based on freeing the Iraqi people, or WMD. Oh that's right you're an anonymous coward without even the balls to stand up for your opinion.
The US has no moral high ground here. Their foreign policy is completely ammoral and attempts to justify it in terms of good and evil is just pure bullshit. Stop thinking in such simplistic terms and consider what they have to gain by removing Saddam, not the lies they use to appeal for public support.
That is why Saddam had it coming. The reaction to his aggression was so predictable that he may as well have asked to be attacked.
As for the current incursion, I believe it is completely unjustified. At the end of the day it boils down to oil - not just the selling of it but the control of it too.
Sure it does. It is one of those that pummelled it into dust whilst 'liberating' it. Or did the US free the Iraqi people so they can die in droves from disease, malnutrition and civil war whilst living in the squalor of a devastated country? Some freedom.
Saddam flaunted international law and brought about this action.
And the US flaunted international law by unilaterally attacking Iraq without a UN mandate and while there were peaceful solutions, not least of which continued weapons inspections.
Look at Castro, he's been living under sanctions for god knows how long and the people of Cuba have sufferred for this long because the USA has been unwilling to take action.
I see. So Cuba should have been put out of its misery because evil old Fidel wouldn't kow tow to US foreign policy.
A country known to have possessed deadly WMDs and provide training and support for terrorist groups such as Hamas.
And I suppose you have the proof to hand for all this, not the wild speculation that some people mistake for facts these days? Certainly they had WMD and perhaps even possess some yet, but until proof arrives you are not in a position to emphatically claim anything. The evidence so far amounts to smoke and mirrors (and downright lies and forgery too). Let's hope something turns up soon eh?
The US have a responsibilty to rebuild it, though I suspect they'll just screw the Iraqis out of their oil before any substantial aid will be forthcoming.
Unfortunately it isn't going to happen. Fact is, it would be easy enough for terrorists to kill people in numerous ways no matter how many freedoms the US government restricts.
If you think this is far fetched, consider that it has already happened for MS Office for OS X. Users who applyied the first service pack found their installations were nobbled if they had been registered using widely know serial numbers.
It would be no more difficult for MS to do the same with Windows 2003 Server. And given the nature of the product and the huge revenue MS see themselves losing, you can expect them to pursue servers using the hacked serial numbers extremely vigourously with prosecutions and raids galore.
Now I wonder how much revenue is *actually* lost as opposed to counting illegal installs and assuming all those equal lost revenue. People who use hacked serial numbers are not those who would be interested in spending $$$$ on the original in the first place.
The sad part is there are lots people who believe that too.
If you want to lower the consumption I would suggest you chop your memory cache for starters and investigate the pref settings since it is probably possibly to tweak this behaviour too at the expense of performance. Tabbed browsing is also more memory efficient than opening windows.
If you install just the browser in Mozilla and none of the other stuff I doubt the performance is appreciably any different at all from Phoenix. Where Phoenix may score points is that it has been designed as just a browser from the beginning which may simplify the chrome somewhat since it doesn't need to provide so many hooks for overlays making it somewhat simpler.
As for upgrading things seperately. Yes, you could do this already assuming anyone had the time to maintain the mail/news and browser components seperately. Unfortunately they don't but this is a packaging issue rather than any inherent flaw in Mozilla. You'll find lots of independently maintained modules of Mozilla on mozdev.org such as the spellchecker, so obviously the technology supports it.
Furthermore, Mozilla is moving towards the GRE model, so perhaps what you desire is closer than you think. The GRE is the Gecko runtime shared by all applications. The plan is to distribute one copy of this in a well-defined manner and allow applications to utilise the existing GRE much like the way the JRE works now. I don't know how far along this is, but GRE nightlies have been a common feature for a while now. I expect sooner or later Mozilla will become a GRE client itself and anyone want to use Gecko in their app will point their users at the GRE or detect the one they already have installed.
And if you don't want all that 'bloat', then use the use the net installer and install only the browser portion.
If you're referring to the
Either way it's not Mozilla's fault since it is as modular as the user or the install script tells it to be. If you choose to install everything including the kitchen sink you can hardly complain of bloat when you get what you asked for.
Standing in a blasted landscape trying to thumb a lift back to Kuwait.
It might be enough to interest people who have stuck with NT despite its flaws rather than incur the expense of upgrading, or porting over to another OS. Obviously someone using ASP or other esoteric things would have to take those issues into consideration, however I don't believe migrating that stuff to Windows 2003 is necessarily going to be any easy thing to do either.
Instead of incurring the massive expense of replacing the equipment that currently runs NT 4 plus the licences of running Windows 2003, perhaps they should just move over to Linux. Maybe there is scope for an advertising campaign from Red Hat or others that says as much.
Better yet, perhaps someone should offer an NT 'migration kit' which attempts to replicate the NT services and settings in Linux.
And that's for one shot freesites which have had time to propogate the freenet. When people release a succession of sites, none of them propogate properly and it is broken links galore. It is also disasterously single-threaded whereby things arrive sequentially, one at a time so loading a page means sitting there for ages while it times out trying to get icons for later freesite editions.
It would be impossible to stick anything as active and constantly changing as Al Jazeera on it though a snapshot of particular articles would be possible.
To my mind, freenet is a bit of a failure. I reckon that improvements to the heuristics would do a lot for its speed. For example, there should be a way to tell it to preload stuff when its idle to speed up page loading and there should be a way to tag unimportant images and things so priority is given to more important stuff.
Not to mention the chestnut - "The Iraqis claim that...". News reporters rarely say "The coalition claim that..." even when the claims being made are as dubious if not so than many of the things the Iraqis are saying.
As far as RHCE people are concerned, the differences are minor so there is little justification to require them to sit a horribly expensive exam again because RH decided to call their next version 9.0 instead of 8.1 which is what it is.
The XUL cross-platform effort is part of that development and Mozilla makes for excellent proof that it works. But that is not saying the same thing at all.
While that is not necessarily a bad thing, it does make you wonder what they'll do with RHCEs. Are they expected to pay out $$$$ to learn about the new window dressing and a couple of package changes or perhaps there should some kind of 'booster' certification which costs much less and makes their RHCE good for a few more years.
Well that really depends on your BIOS/firmware and the drive. Modern Macs can boot off firewire drives such as SmartDisk's so I imagine a PC could too if the hardware supported it.
As far as I'm aware IEEE 1394 (firewire) is a readily available standard and assuming specific chipsets are documented there should be no barriers to making Linux talk happily with such devices. I'm no kernel engineer but I would guess that great big chunks of their bus / device abstraction are readily applicable to firewire too.