This isn't about that. Nintendo squashed the 'grey' market by threatening their distributors in one country so they could artifically boost their prices without concern of competition in another.
So now, is this going to make them drop the prices in the other countries or raise the prices in the countries that were getting the games at good rates. I wonder.
Unfortunately, artificial barriers like this mean no country gets good rates since they are all inflated. Most console games here in Ireland retail around 55-65 which is outrageous and must be partly attributable to regional controls and other tricks the likes of Nintendo / Microsoft / Sony etc. play to restrict supply.
Just like DVDs, this is a scam designed purely and simply to skim more cash off the consumer.
PDF is fine if you just want to print stuff out, but it contains absolutely none of the information of the original document that allows you to edit it.
Let's all guess which country allows anyone to sell lists containing your name, age, sex, marital status, car, number of kids, address, home phone number, spending habits and much more besides. It seems like the US has a lot of catching up to do with the EU.
By your own link you have demonstrated this is not true. The Netscape Communicator 4.x code base was a piece of shit. Stable? Yes. Modular and able to meet the growing needs of new W3C standards? Absolutely and emphatically not.
Put straight Netscape had to bit the bullet and rewrite. The result was a year or too of pain, but the fruits are beginning to show for it.
IMHO X is even worse. It is arcane, it is backwards, the main reason for still using it are not even relevant on a growing number of Linux desktops. While it is great to be able to run apps remotely there is one hell of a price to pay for it - primitive APIs, poor performance, lack of multimedia support, dreadful font support, terrible drag and drop and clipboard support, lack of hardware support, lack of 'frills' that other UIs have enjoyed for years such as being able to change screen resolution.
There is an extremely strong case for dumping X altogether. So the pain will be short term (though of course people could still be using X so it would be minimal), but in the long term it would pay off in spades. A display engine akin to Aqua would be a real boon, especially for getting into DTP, graphics and other arenas. And what about the people who still need X? Why they can't do what I do when I want to run an X app on Mac OS X & Win32 - run a rootless X session on top of the underlying system.
Since you ask, yes I think it was. The love story was trite but the scale and the spectacle of the whole thing more than made up for it. It was as close to an epic as we get these days, and definitely worthy of the big screen.
It also scores an extra point for having Kate Winslet get her tits out.
If you want native widgets go and run Gecko embedded in something such as K-Meleon.
Of course the concept of 'native widgets' on Windows is little more than a joke since Microsoft routinely inflict their own brand new non-standard monstrosities onto their users with each release of IE or Office. Still, Mozilla uses the Win32 theme engine if its there, so it looks pretty cut on XP.
This is a ludicrous statement (not least for calling it Gnu/Mozilla).
How are they screwing you exactly? Is it because you get millions of lines of source code to an entire application development environment and an extremely generous licence terms for free? Or is it that you're not happy that XUL is not standardized by some body such as w3c?
If the latter is your worry, simply don't upgrade and XUL will remain forever frozen in the state that you released your app in. Alternatively take the risk and download a new version of Mozilla in six months and see what minor tweaks you need to keep it working and benefit from all the bug fixes that six months of open source development bring. Besides, the XUL specification is already documented and versioned, so there should be no worries about it suddenly changing, at least in the forseeable future.
Aside from all the extensions and skins for Mozilla (of which there are hundreds already in places such as in MozDev.org), the various apps that comprise the Netscape/Mozilla suites (browser, mail/news, chatzilla, dom, js debugger, aim etc.), you also have browsers such as Phoenix & Beonix, and entire new applications such as Komodo. and Crocodile Clips. Then there are the numerous 'embedded' applications which use the Gecko engine (little or no chrome) to host content in the likes of Compuserve, Galeon, Chimera, and more.
In short anywhere which requires a web-oriented application (preferably cross-platform) would do very well to evaluate Mozilla as a development platform. I expect database and server-side apps will ship in due course with applications based on Mozilla to do form design and other administrative tasks in a cross-platform manner.
And all Linux distros make good use of Perl, Apache, Python, Mozilla, OpenSSH, XFree and lots of other non-FSF software too. The GNU/ prefix is ludicrous.
While this feature is useful, it will only block a very limited number of banner ads. Most banner adverts images are done using REDIRECTION.
So for example, the page might have an IMG tag or an IFRAME pointing to www.adbastards.com but the actual http response redirects you to some other URL to grab the image.
Blocking the redirected url will do you no good since www.adbastards.com will send you somewhere else the next time. In other words, this feature should offer to block the url specified by the element as well as the one associated with the actual image content.
Actually you were half right. Mozilla is extremely capable of rendering traditional UI widgets such as buttons and toolbars - it does a great job on OS X and since they're rendered by the Aqua engine they look fine. I have no problems using Mozilla on the Mac and I'm doing so right now. Where it does less well is with all the weird OS X specific UI features such as panels that slide out and so forth.
Therefore in order to utilise these features, the Chimera people have written a native UI. It is not that Mozilla couldn't render them, given time, just that the effort would be wasted trying to make it do so since they're platform specific. It's just a case of pragmatism at work here, but the price is they have to write and maintain their own UI - no lifting any of the cross-platform chrome from Mozilla for example.
As for XP the concept of 'native widgets' is pretty much a joke. *Every* app of any size hacks their behaviour in some way. Even so, Mozilla is extremely faithful to the look and feel of native widgets and on XP even renders them using the native theme engine. If anything, Mozilla looks more like a native app than even Internet Explorer or MS Office. Microsoft is notorious for foisting some brand new, non-standard widgets onto the desktop with every release.
I wouldn't say the situation is *that* much better on OS X. Both Apple and Microsoft willfully ignore the standard widgets and produce some bullshit contrivance such as a 'brushed metal' finish, or iMac coloured buttons or some other silly effect. Mozilla fits in a lot better than MacIE for example.
This isn't true at all. Like most apps, Mozilla only redraws something when it has been invalidated (e.g. by another window passing over the top). In terms of rendering performance, some skins will obviously be more baroque than others and take longer to draw but the default classic and modern themes are plenty fast.
In fact if you're using Mozilla on XP or OS X, the classic skin maps rendering of scrollbars and other UI widgets straight onto the the platform's native rendering engine. Most of the performance issues with Mozilla in the past (and which are most resolved now) have been more to do with the message pump and inefficiences in the the CSS & DOM implementations.
Nowadays there really is no issue at all with firing up Mozilla. Phoenix is even faster partly because it throws away a lot of the overlays and other gubbins that Mozilla has to resolve when it starts.
This is what happens anyway. The Chatzilla, Mail/News, JS Debugger etc are all bundled in seperate xpi packages. Use the net installer if you don't want to download and install everything, and it will only pull those xpi files that you have chosen.
The EQ economy has been screwed up for years. It is this and the twinking that has made the game so utterly worthless to play. Verant don't give a shit about fixing fundamental weaknesses in the game such as the awful UI, game physics etc., which means unless you're some uber-loser spending 60 hours a week on plane raids etc., this game is an exercise in tedium.
The sad thing is it takes a while to see this. Camping, levelling and watching the exp bar slowly inch upwards are addictive for some inexplicable reason. I'm glad Verant helped me snap out of it by upping their prices and dumping all over their players with the botched Shadows of Luclin release.
I just wish that it didn't give AOL the money and the power to affect the future of the internet.
That money and power allows AOL to fund open source, standards compliant projects like Mozilla. How much has it cost them so far - 100 million? 200 million? More I bet.
AOL doesn't give a shit about proprietary extensions - it sells content. Open standards means it can deliver its content to more people without the likes of MS (who are also the competition) from controlling the pipes through which it is delivered by screwing with it in one way or another.
So if you value standards compliance you should be love AOL because the alternative is too horrible to bear thinking about.
Are they losing customers? Last I heard it had grown to 35 million with markets opening up in places like China.
While I hate the interface designed for idiots, AOL does have certain merits, not least the fact it works from practically anywhere in the world. Most of the time I dial up and minimize the thing and fire up Mozilla or Netscape (which have AOL to thank for their existence BTW). In my trips around the US, I really appreciate the ease that it allows me to dial up some local number and avoid being screwed for long distance calls.
As I say I tend to use AOL more like a conventional, but ubiquitous ISP, but there have been many times when I've turned to their content too. AOL has some truly excellent content which, unlike a lot of sites on the web is tailored for immediate access. As one example, I find the recipe site particularly useful.
So really I believe it does have a place. Lot's of people really don't give a crap about learning what PPP is, or other nonsense. They just want to talk to their buddies, chat online or whatever. While AOL is not unique, it does make all this stuff easy and that's the reason people use it. If power users prefer bookmarks and web browsers, then they're probably not the kind of people AOL is pitched at anyway.
Some large projects such as Mozilla use CVS, however it is not some magic hands-free source control system. It needs significant and daily administration to keep a project of that size running smoothly.
Perhaps Bitkeeper is better in this regard. Perhaps kernel devs hate administrating and using BK means they don't have to.
XP Pro certainly does come with encryption but IMHO it is rotten. While it is true that it encrypts the contents of files, it does not encrypt the name or size of files. Even if you set permissions to limit access on the directory, it is easy enough for an attacker to strip those off. Neither does it use an easily understood or easy to control encryption mechanism.
The difference with PGPDisk is the whole volume is encrypted - files, directories, permissions, everything - which means it is much safer. It is also mounted/unmounted from a single passphrase held in your memory and none of this public/private/trusted key crap that XP buries in some advanced Admin settings page. Once the disk is unmounted, you have no idea what, if anything is inside that.pgd file.
Sure it is error-prone. Manipulating strings and constructing command line args, opening pipes and processing results introduces all sorts of buffer overflows and other bizarre exploits that simply don't exist in a library version.
Yes, I know of GPGME and it's a neat idea, but since it's GPL it's very limited. You can't even link it to Apache or other non-GPL open source software without risk of infecting them. Also, as you mention, it's dog slow because it invokes from the command and parses data coming back through a pipe. The reasoning behind wrapping a GPL app in a GPL lib instead of a proper in-process lib seem nonsensical to me.
GPG is a command line tool. If you want to put a UI on it it involves the very sucky process of constructing a command line with the arguments for the action you wish to perform, invoking gpg and parsing the results. In short it is a big pain in the butt and error prone and is seriously hampering its adoption. If the gpg folks had any sense they would release an LGPL library version of it. The reasons for not releasing it as a lib (even a GPL one) in their faq are just plain wrong.
PGP comes with some lovely UI tools and a library for developing more. Speaking from experience of the Win32 impl, the integration with the shell is extremely handy, with encrypt/decrypt/sign options in context menus for example. The PGPDisk utility was also awesome though it doesn't work on XP - hopefully 8.0 will fix that.
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This isn't about that. Nintendo squashed the 'grey' market by threatening their distributors in one country so they could artifically boost their prices without concern of competition in another.
Unfortunately, artificial barriers like this mean no country gets good rates since they are all inflated. Most console games here in Ireland retail around 55-65 which is outrageous and must be partly attributable to regional controls and other tricks the likes of Nintendo / Microsoft / Sony etc. play to restrict supply.
Just like DVDs, this is a scam designed purely and simply to skim more cash off the consumer.
I suggest you install Diggler if you want to navigate to parent directories.
PDF is fine if you just want to print stuff out, but it contains absolutely none of the information of the original document that allows you to edit it.
Let's all guess which country allows anyone to sell lists containing your name, age, sex, marital status, car, number of kids, address, home phone number, spending habits and much more besides. It seems like the US has a lot of catching up to do with the EU.
Put straight Netscape had to bit the bullet and rewrite. The result was a year or too of pain, but the fruits are beginning to show for it.
IMHO X is even worse. It is arcane, it is backwards, the main reason for still using it are not even relevant on a growing number of Linux desktops. While it is great to be able to run apps remotely there is one hell of a price to pay for it - primitive APIs, poor performance, lack of multimedia support, dreadful font support, terrible drag and drop and clipboard support, lack of hardware support, lack of 'frills' that other UIs have enjoyed for years such as being able to change screen resolution.
There is an extremely strong case for dumping X altogether. So the pain will be short term (though of course people could still be using X so it would be minimal), but in the long term it would pay off in spades. A display engine akin to Aqua would be a real boon, especially for getting into DTP, graphics and other arenas. And what about the people who still need X? Why they can't do what I do when I want to run an X app on Mac OS X & Win32 - run a rootless X session on top of the underlying system.
It also scores an extra point for having Kate Winslet get her tits out.
Good movies won't be doomed, something McCallum & Lucas might like to try making some time.
If you want native widgets go and run Gecko embedded in something such as K-Meleon.
Of course the concept of 'native widgets' on Windows is little more than a joke since Microsoft routinely inflict their own brand new non-standard monstrosities onto their users with each release of IE or Office. Still, Mozilla uses the Win32 theme engine if its there, so it looks pretty cut on XP.
How are they screwing you exactly? Is it because you get millions of lines of source code to an entire application development environment and an extremely generous licence terms for free? Or is it that you're not happy that XUL is not standardized by some body such as w3c?
If the latter is your worry, simply don't upgrade and XUL will remain forever frozen in the state that you released your app in. Alternatively take the risk and download a new version of Mozilla in six months and see what minor tweaks you need to keep it working and benefit from all the bug fixes that six months of open source development bring. Besides, the XUL specification is already documented and versioned, so there should be no worries about it suddenly changing, at least in the forseeable future.
In short anywhere which requires a web-oriented application (preferably cross-platform) would do very well to evaluate Mozilla as a development platform. I expect database and server-side apps will ship in due course with applications based on Mozilla to do form design and other administrative tasks in a cross-platform manner.
And all Linux distros make good use of Perl, Apache, Python, Mozilla, OpenSSH, XFree and lots of other non-FSF software too. The GNU/ prefix is ludicrous.
So for example, the page might have an IMG tag or an IFRAME pointing to www.adbastards.com but the actual http response redirects you to some other URL to grab the image.
Blocking the redirected url will do you no good since www.adbastards.com will send you somewhere else the next time. In other words, this feature should offer to block the url specified by the element as well as the one associated with the actual image content.
Therefore in order to utilise these features, the Chimera people have written a native UI. It is not that Mozilla couldn't render them, given time, just that the effort would be wasted trying to make it do so since they're platform specific. It's just a case of pragmatism at work here, but the price is they have to write and maintain their own UI - no lifting any of the cross-platform chrome from Mozilla for example.
As for XP the concept of 'native widgets' is pretty much a joke. *Every* app of any size hacks their behaviour in some way. Even so, Mozilla is extremely faithful to the look and feel of native widgets and on XP even renders them using the native theme engine. If anything, Mozilla looks more like a native app than even Internet Explorer or MS Office. Microsoft is notorious for foisting some brand new, non-standard widgets onto the desktop with every release.
I wouldn't say the situation is *that* much better on OS X. Both Apple and Microsoft willfully ignore the standard widgets and produce some bullshit contrivance such as a 'brushed metal' finish, or iMac coloured buttons or some other silly effect. Mozilla fits in a lot better than MacIE for example.
In fact if you're using Mozilla on XP or OS X, the classic skin maps rendering of scrollbars and other UI widgets straight onto the the platform's native rendering engine. Most of the performance issues with Mozilla in the past (and which are most resolved now) have been more to do with the message pump and inefficiences in the the CSS & DOM implementations.
Nowadays there really is no issue at all with firing up Mozilla. Phoenix is even faster partly because it throws away a lot of the overlays and other gubbins that Mozilla has to resolve when it starts.
This is what happens anyway. The Chatzilla, Mail/News, JS Debugger etc are all bundled in seperate xpi packages. Use the net installer if you don't want to download and install everything, and it will only pull those xpi files that you have chosen.
The sad thing is it takes a while to see this. Camping, levelling and watching the exp bar slowly inch upwards are addictive for some inexplicable reason. I'm glad Verant helped me snap out of it by upping their prices and dumping all over their players with the botched Shadows of Luclin release.
That money and power allows AOL to fund open source, standards compliant projects like Mozilla. How much has it cost them so far - 100 million? 200 million? More I bet.
AOL doesn't give a shit about proprietary extensions - it sells content. Open standards means it can deliver its content to more people without the likes of MS (who are also the competition) from controlling the pipes through which it is delivered by screwing with it in one way or another.
So if you value standards compliance you should be love AOL because the alternative is too horrible to bear thinking about.
While I hate the interface designed for idiots, AOL does have certain merits, not least the fact it works from practically anywhere in the world. Most of the time I dial up and minimize the thing and fire up Mozilla or Netscape (which have AOL to thank for their existence BTW). In my trips around the US, I really appreciate the ease that it allows me to dial up some local number and avoid being screwed for long distance calls.
As I say I tend to use AOL more like a conventional, but ubiquitous ISP, but there have been many times when I've turned to their content too. AOL has some truly excellent content which, unlike a lot of sites on the web is tailored for immediate access. As one example, I find the recipe site particularly useful.
So really I believe it does have a place. Lot's of people really don't give a crap about learning what PPP is, or other nonsense. They just want to talk to their buddies, chat online or whatever. While AOL is not unique, it does make all this stuff easy and that's the reason people use it. If power users prefer bookmarks and web browsers, then they're probably not the kind of people AOL is pitched at anyway.
Sentence him to have Harry Knowles sit on his face while watching a sneak preview of Episode 3.
Perhaps Bitkeeper is better in this regard. Perhaps kernel devs hate administrating and using BK means they don't have to.
The difference with PGPDisk is the whole volume is encrypted - files, directories, permissions, everything - which means it is much safer. It is also mounted/unmounted from a single passphrase held in your memory and none of this public/private/trusted key crap that XP buries in some advanced Admin settings page. Once the disk is unmounted, you have no idea what, if anything is inside that
Sure it is error-prone. Manipulating strings and constructing command line args, opening pipes and processing results introduces all sorts of buffer overflows and other bizarre exploits that simply don't exist in a library version.
Yes, I know of GPGME and it's a neat idea, but since it's GPL it's very limited. You can't even link it to Apache or other non-GPL open source software without risk of infecting them. Also, as you mention, it's dog slow because it invokes from the command and parses data coming back through a pipe. The reasoning behind wrapping a GPL app in a GPL lib instead of a proper in-process lib seem nonsensical to me.
PGP comes with some lovely UI tools and a library for developing more. Speaking from experience of the Win32 impl, the integration with the shell is extremely handy, with encrypt/decrypt/sign options in context menus for example. The PGPDisk utility was also awesome though it doesn't work on XP - hopefully 8.0 will fix that.