Look, the fact is, that due credit is not being given to the FSF for the fact that in most distributions, it created the vast majority of the software used for the OS and other functions.
Perl isn't GNU, Apache isn't GNU, MySQL isn't GNU, Ghostscript isn't GNU, Mozilla isn't GNU, KDE isn't GNU, XFree86 isn't GNU, the kernel isn't GNU, Python isn't GNU, OpenSSH isn't GNU. I could go on, but this should suffice. Some of these things might be GPL'd but that is not the same thing.
Basically you can argue any way you like, but without the hundreds of non-FSF apps your distro wouldn't be useful for a damned thing. Expecting people to say GNU/Linux because the tools are mainly GNU is just plain ludicrous. Linux is a generic term for an operating system using a Linux kernel and it doesn't need some brain exception prefix that ignores the contribution of hundreds of other contributors in the process.
To hell with RMS and the FSF I will *never* say GNU/Linux. Instead of being such an ass perhaps he should work on GNU Hurd. Hurd was started even before Linux and it's still a piece of crap used by no one.
Perhaps you can but then it's the small matter of reimplementing form widgets for every platform / GUI you wish to run Mozilla. In theory this might be possible but you run into all kinds of mess when dealing with clipping, accessibility, printing, tying GUI events to Moz and vice versa. In other words the kind of hell that drove Mozilla to XUL widgets in the first place.
A better solution would be to hook the XUL form widgets up to the existing theme engine support in Mozilla. Then if GTK supplies a rendering engine (does it? I don't know) then it can render in the GTK style but not break the CSS standards support.
I've retrieved sites before now and once I even managed to get the original zipped documents that the original Scientology site pointed to, but it was an enormous struggle. I think the issues boil down to overzealous security, Java and lack of tuning.
The security issue is easy to misconstrue but I'm referring to the fact that everyone is treated equally whether they need it or not. As an author or a user I'd like to be able to voluntarily trade on some of my anonymity for better service. Likewise, if I'm authoring content I'd like to be able to say which files are more important than others so the servers don't waste their time propogating the wrong stuff such as some crappy bullet point and totally miss the important things.
I wonder how much time is wasted in the Java impl. I've heard it said they are trying to get it to run via gjc which would be good. It would also be cool if they retooled the most time critical parts such as rng, crypto, key generate, file io to use native C helper apps.
Bingo. And long after Mozilla 1.0 went out the door, bugs and fixes will still being applied to the branch. If you upgrade to Mozilla 1.0.1, 1.0.2 you'll get the fixes but. The trunk gets fixes and flakey new code and less testing which lowers its stability considerably.
I run Freenet on one linux box (as a transient node since its a dialup) but so far its performance both speed and success wise has been hopelessly crap.
It RARELY ever gets a site in it's entireity. Usually you're lucky to get the main content, but even then it's often missing images and secondary pages NEVER work. You can often retry for hours and not get the thing you're after. The only pages that ever remotely work are the Freedom Engine and Freenet Forever and even there graphics never load. Frankly I think the whole thing needs a rethink.
Ho hum. Netscape *does* have more functionality in some areas. For starters it ships with an AIM/ICQ client, has a spellchecker, a radio button and ties into Netscape/AOL sites and all the content that brings, not to mention that it has been tested to within an inch of its life. You wouldn't get equivalent stability from Mozilla unless you stuck with the 1.0.x branch. It certainly doesn't have the DOM inspector, JS debugger or Chatzilla, but then most new users wouldn't care about those anyway.
Now, is links to Netscape/AOL sites functionality? Well not to someone who knows their away around (from using the web already), who knows about Google, DMoz etc. and has no fear. But we're not talking about people like that - this is someone buying a $199 PC from Walmart here! Newbies need guidance, they need form, they need hand holding and services like AOL and Netscape 7.0 provide that. You might not like it but there it is. New users appreciate being immediately able to read news, shop, chat with friends without struggling for hours in frustration to figure it out before giving up. From Lindow's perspective it cuts down on their support calls, and perhaps Walmart will experience fewer returns too. So everyone wins, profit for Lindows & Walmart and a better experience for the user.
It's no different from learning to swim - you can teach someone in the shallow end with water wings and instruction or throw them into the deep end and walk away. Which approach do you think will be more effective, and which will lead to severe trauma and lots of dead bodies?
It's not easy, it's a pain in the ass. Having a modeless find dialog up in order to find again is major inconvenience when you're searching in lots of windows (or panes). The whole point of keyboard shortcuts is they make things faster. Mozilla sensibly provides a shortcut, the IE "solution" is clumsy and unintuitive.
I believe it used to, but nowadays it opens their search sidepanel. The IE online help lists no shortcut for doing a Find Again which is a pretty lame omission if you ask me. And this is typical all the way through IE and OE.
Part of the issue is Microsoft have changed the UI so many damned times that there is no consistency unless every piece of software is contemporary. IE has *never* been consistent with contemporary software.
At least Mozilla tries to fit in. If you run it in Classic mode Mozilla looks and behaves much like any other Win32 application. On XP, it even renders widgets with the theme engine.
As for keyboard shortcuts, Mozilla shares a large set of shortcuts with IE (e.g. cut, copy, paste, find, new window etc.), but if you're a power user the mind boggles why you'd want to use IE anyway. Mozilla has considerably more keyboard shortcuts (and shock horror) some of them are indispensible such as being able to Find Next by hitting Ctrl+G. Why IE doesn't have a Find Next shortcut is a total mystery to me. Outlook Express is particularly hopeless when it comes to shortcuts.
Who wants to see AOTC on a massive screen? The pixelation was bad enough on a normal screen. Perhaps LucasFilms have developed an advanced interpolation algorithm to overcome the problem.
Power-save or standby is not the same as off. Putting a monitor, computer or TV in standby for the night is just a silly waste of power. Why not turn off devices if you're not using them?
I wonder how much of the power drain can be directly attributed to devices that are not being used. At any one time there must be tens if not hundreds of millions of TVs, computers, monitors, washing machines, microwaves all sitting in standby, consuming vast amounts of power, not doing anything. Talk about a waste.
Unless a device needs standby, e.g. a latop perhaps, or a VCR then it should by law not come with one. The energy savings would be enormous for the small extra effort switching a device off properly.
Am I just stating the bleeding obvious when I ask why you don't just turn these things off?
I work in Europe, but travel to the US and one thing I instantly notice in their offices is no one turns their machines or monitors off when they go home. Is it any wonder there is an energy shortage with this kind of attitude?
GSM would be enormously beneficial to the US. I have a GSM telephone which works practically anywhere in the world, except America. Why? Because the US thinks that the market should fight it out until one proprietary protocol wins over the others. Unfortunately this takes years and mass confusion, consumer uncertainty and overpricing reigns.
In the meantime, the rest of the world saw sense and adopted a single standard. The consequence is you can buy a phone in Thailand and use it in Ireland, you can fly from South Africa to India and still be in touch with head office.
The recalcitrance and obstinacy in the US to develop their own standard except through Gladiator-style death matches has left them isolated and way behind the rest of the world. At the end of the day it doesn't matter if the naysayers think CDMA or some variant was technically better than GSM because it still lost. Hopefully the US will learn better the next time around.
Those plane spotters were taking pictures of aircraft at a military airfield in a country where that is illegal. It was their own stupid faults that they were thrown in the slammer, especially after being warned once before.
Because Netscape doesn't maintain a private tree, at least as far as the main browser is concerned. Netscape is essentially Mozilla with a few proprietary bits and pieces overlaid over the top. In other words, you can pull a snapshot from Mozilla which is equivalent to NS7.0 except for stuff like AIM of course.
BTW Jonas you're CC'd to some of my bugs though not under this pseudonym that I use to post to Slashdot:)
NS7.0 is Mozilla 1.0 + 1.0.1 fixes + more fixes. It is very stable, much more so than even 1.0 which was pretty damned good too.
Personally I haven't seen any major crashes in 1.1 but it does suffer from a silly bugs such as broken back/forward behaviour in frame navigation. Things like this would have been caught if the trunk were stabilized for as long as the 1.0 trunk has.
It isn't Mozilla 1.0.1. Development continued on the branch and it received a whole slew of fixes that never appeared in Mozilla. All of these are a result of extra testing and nail stability and compatibility even further.
By comparison, Mozilla 1.1 is based off the trunk where the controls on checkins are much less strict and the QA is less intensive.
This means while Mozilla is also an excellent browser, there will be bugs introduced that weren't caught and the chances of crashes or weird behaviour are higher. This might not be an issue for power users, but end users probably care less about the bleeding edge features than about stability. Netscape 7.0 also ties into AOL/Netscape content which is also handy if you want to immediately start using the browser for reading the news, shopping, finding recipes, talking to friends etc.
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Perl isn't GNU, Apache isn't GNU, MySQL isn't GNU, Ghostscript isn't GNU, Mozilla isn't GNU, KDE isn't GNU, XFree86 isn't GNU, the kernel isn't GNU, Python isn't GNU, OpenSSH isn't GNU. I could go on, but this should suffice. Some of these things might be GPL'd but that is not the same thing.
Basically you can argue any way you like, but without the hundreds of non-FSF apps your distro wouldn't be useful for a damned thing. Expecting people to say GNU/Linux because the tools are mainly GNU is just plain ludicrous. Linux is a generic term for an operating system using a Linux kernel and it doesn't need some brain exception prefix that ignores the contribution of hundreds of other contributors in the process.
To hell with RMS and the FSF I will *never* say GNU/Linux. Instead of being such an ass perhaps he should work on GNU Hurd. Hurd was started even before Linux and it's still a piece of crap used by no one.
I've never taken this guy seriously since he came hunkering across the stage like a deranged orangutan.
A better solution would be to hook the XUL form widgets up to the existing theme engine support in Mozilla. Then if GTK supplies a rendering engine (does it? I don't know) then it can render in the GTK style but not break the CSS standards support.
The security issue is easy to misconstrue but I'm referring to the fact that everyone is treated equally whether they need it or not. As an author or a user I'd like to be able to voluntarily trade on some of my anonymity for better service. Likewise, if I'm authoring content I'd like to be able to say which files are more important than others so the servers don't waste their time propogating the wrong stuff such as some crappy bullet point and totally miss the important things.
I wonder how much time is wasted in the Java impl. I've heard it said they are trying to get it to run via gjc which would be good. It would also be cool if they retooled the most time critical parts such as rng, crypto, key generate, file io to use native C helper apps.
Bingo. And long after Mozilla 1.0 went out the door, bugs and fixes will still being applied to the branch. If you upgrade to Mozilla 1.0.1, 1.0.2 you'll get the fixes but. The trunk gets fixes and flakey new code and less testing which lowers its stability considerably.
Form widgets are XUL because the CSS specs say can be stylized.
It RARELY ever gets a site in it's entireity. Usually you're lucky to get the main content, but even then it's often missing images and secondary pages NEVER work. You can often retry for hours and not get the thing you're after. The only pages that ever remotely work are the Freedom Engine and Freenet Forever and even there graphics never load. Frankly I think the whole thing needs a rethink.
Now, is links to Netscape/AOL sites functionality? Well not to someone who knows their away around (from using the web already), who knows about Google, DMoz etc. and has no fear. But we're not talking about people like that - this is someone buying a $199 PC from Walmart here! Newbies need guidance, they need form, they need hand holding and services like AOL and Netscape 7.0 provide that. You might not like it but there it is. New users appreciate being immediately able to read news, shop, chat with friends without struggling for hours in frustration to figure it out before giving up. From Lindow's perspective it cuts down on their support calls, and perhaps Walmart will experience fewer returns too. So everyone wins, profit for Lindows & Walmart and a better experience for the user.
It's no different from learning to swim - you can teach someone in the shallow end with water wings and instruction or throw them into the deep end and walk away. Which approach do you think will be more effective, and which will lead to severe trauma and lots of dead bodies?
It's not easy, it's a pain in the ass. Having a modeless find dialog up in order to find again is major inconvenience when you're searching in lots of windows (or panes). The whole point of keyboard shortcuts is they make things faster. Mozilla sensibly provides a shortcut, the IE "solution" is clumsy and unintuitive.
I believe it used to, but nowadays it opens their search sidepanel. The IE online help lists no shortcut for doing a Find Again which is a pretty lame omission if you ask me. And this is typical all the way through IE and OE.
At least Mozilla tries to fit in. If you run it in Classic mode Mozilla looks and behaves much like any other Win32 application. On XP, it even renders widgets with the theme engine.
As for keyboard shortcuts, Mozilla shares a large set of shortcuts with IE (e.g. cut, copy, paste, find, new window etc.), but if you're a power user the mind boggles why you'd want to use IE anyway. Mozilla has considerably more keyboard shortcuts (and shock horror) some of them are indispensible such as being able to Find Next by hitting Ctrl+G. Why IE doesn't have a Find Next shortcut is a total mystery to me. Outlook Express is particularly hopeless when it comes to shortcuts.
Who wants to see AOTC on a massive screen? The pixelation was bad enough on a normal screen. Perhaps LucasFilms have developed an advanced interpolation algorithm to overcome the problem.
I wonder how much of the power drain can be directly attributed to devices that are not being used. At any one time there must be tens if not hundreds of millions of TVs, computers, monitors, washing machines, microwaves all sitting in standby, consuming vast amounts of power, not doing anything. Talk about a waste.
Unless a device needs standby, e.g. a latop perhaps, or a VCR then it should by law not come with one. The energy savings would be enormous for the small extra effort switching a device off properly.
I work in Europe, but travel to the US and one thing I instantly notice in their offices is no one turns their machines or monitors off when they go home. Is it any wonder there is an energy shortage with this kind of attitude?
As I said, GPRS is for data such as WAP. Data being the clue of what it's for and WAP being an example.
GPRS is for data such as WAP. You still need something like GSM for voice.
In the meantime, the rest of the world saw sense and adopted a single standard. The consequence is you can buy a phone in Thailand and use it in Ireland, you can fly from South Africa to India and still be in touch with head office.
The recalcitrance and obstinacy in the US to develop their own standard except through Gladiator-style death matches has left them isolated and way behind the rest of the world. At the end of the day it doesn't matter if the naysayers think CDMA or some variant was technically better than GSM because it still lost. Hopefully the US will learn better the next time around.
Those plane spotters were taking pictures of aircraft at a military airfield in a country where that is illegal. It was their own stupid faults that they were thrown in the slammer, especially after being warned once before.
BTW Jonas you're CC'd to some of my bugs though not under this pseudonym that I use to post to Slashdot
Personally I haven't seen any major crashes in 1.1 but it does suffer from a silly bugs such as broken back/forward behaviour in frame navigation. Things like this would have been caught if the trunk were stabilized for as long as the 1.0 trunk has.
NS7.0 isn't everyones cup of tea (an understatement on Slashdot), but it is much more suitable for end users and workplace use than Mozilla.
By comparison, Mozilla 1.1 is based off the trunk where the controls on checkins are much less strict and the QA is less intensive.
This means while Mozilla is also an excellent browser, there will be bugs introduced that weren't caught and the chances of crashes or weird behaviour are higher. This might not be an issue for power users, but end users probably care less about the bleeding edge features than about stability. Netscape 7.0 also ties into AOL/Netscape content which is also handy if you want to immediately start using the browser for reading the news, shopping, finding recipes, talking to friends etc.
Mozilla 1.1 is more cutting edge and therefore has a few cute new features but will definitely have a lower MTBF.
In other words its horses for courses. Either take the features, or take the stability.
Mozilla is also tested less and therefore suffers from more bugs.
Yes there is, there is just no UI for it. If you want to enable support then read this or search for a popup blocker ui extension.