For some companies, support and maintainance is more important than the cost of the original software and they'll gladly pay for the peace of mind.
Crypto is one of those places. If your crypto solution goes wrong it could seriously fuck up your company, especially when you have to explain to investors their entire solution was based on unsupported software "downloaded free from the internet". Yes, PGPFreeware is totally unsupported, less so even than GPL software where at least you can legally pay for someone to support it and hack it if necessary.
Even for individuals, the vast majority would be more than happy to fork out $50 for PGP if it came bundled on a single CD with a whole bunch of other NAI crap such as McAfee, Nuts & Bolts etc.
Like PDAs I doubt that the vast, vast majority of potential users give a damned what OS it runs. What they care about is:
Form factor
Battery life
Usability
Features
Price
Connectivity
The OS it runs comes about 93rd between whether it plays the Star Spangled banner and it's ability to float in orange juice.
Manufacturers who tout Linux as a PDA's main feature or expect the open source community to fix their crappy software may as well give up before they start. Geeks might care about such stuff but no one else does. Get the other stuff right and the fact it runs Linux is just icing on the cake.
Hey, no one in Mozilla is against criticism - otherwise we'd shut down Bugzilla and all the mailing lists - but criticism has to be informed and constructive to be beneficial.
MQ is neither informed nor constructive. Mike Angelo (the only contributor to MQ) seems to make a point of not finding out all the facts, of leaping to the wrong conclusions, of concocting conspiracies to explain the mundane and of ignoring the facts even after he is corrected. All-in-all it make MQ an extremely unreliable, sensationalist and downright mean site.
If you want criticism (independent and internal) you'll find plenty of it in the netscape.public.mozilla.* newgroups, and on mozillazine.org, and on mozillanews.org.
Although this is technically plagarism it does have the beneficial side-effect of denying Mike Angelo advertising revenue for his continuing hatchet job against Mozilla. Frankly I wonder what Netscape or mozilla.org did to him that he feels he must reel out one misinformed article after another.
If this mouse gesture uses chrome overlays to listen for mouse move events then it won't run in Galeon.
Having said that, there is nothing to stop Galeon from installing XPI packages - they just won't work do much if they exploit features it does not support.
I have a 450Mhz machine and it runs great. Certainly the UI needs speeding up somewhat but for page rendering and general responsiveness it is well up to scratch. I have even run it on a P133 running Linux over X and it's still pretty usable.
Funny. I use Mozilla all day and every day and it rarely crashes. Better yet is NS 6.1 which has to be one of the most stable pieces of software I've ever used.
With hindsight it's easy assuming you know to look for such an option and you're not afraid to play with dialog box settings, but I doubt most people including experts would think even MS (after the roasting they've gotten in the last 2 years) would be so dumb as to enable such a feature by default. Probably the first most people would know of it is after it happens. By then it could be too late.
The problem is exacerbated because frankly most Mac users don't want to know how their computers work - that's why they're using a Mac - and put absolute faith in their OS and their programs to protect them from themselves.
No, these are not the only ways to throw the system off. Let's see how far the system would get with someone who's had their face re-set and who has a beard, glasses etc.
All this talk of biometrics being some kind of panacea for terrorism, are woefully optimistic. The only kind of people you'd catch for the billions you'd have to spend on implementing and running such a system are petty criminals. That's a pretty pathetic catch for something that costs so much both in terms of money and civil liberties.
You would be much better off using the same money to beef up the woefully inadequate security that can be seen in most US airports - ban people going through to the gates without a pass, new X-Ray machines, employee screening, trained and motivated staff, more police officers, US customs style security checkpoints, air marshals and so forth.
Anyone who's tried to develop a cross-platform app knows how hard it is to use native widgets, hence the reason they all invariably end up going XP - JFC (after Sun dumped AWT), QT, GTK, Staroffice and so on.
Mozilla is no different and was primarily motivated to go XP because native widgets couldn't do what the CSS specs demanded and that it was next to impossible to produce an decent XP frontend around them. And while this has lead to a few speed bumps on the way, it's turned out to be a good thing. The vast majority of Mozilla is now totally cross-platform and skinnable and most of the time you'd never know you weren't using native widgets.
It is for this reason you'll never see Mozilla use native widgets again. There are some vestiges of native widget support still in CVS but it's so bit rotten it would never work. In fact the only way you'll ever see an Aqua Mozilla is if:
Apple produces an Aqua skin or blesses and official mozilla.org skin (that only works on OS X of course).
Someone embeds Gecko inside an native GUI, just like Galeon on GNOME.
Either option is quite likely to happen at some point. I don't see why Apple would get funny if Mozilla had an "official" aqua like theme just as IE does.
My understanding is that these copy protection schemes only work when you attempt to read tracks as if they were data *however* if you sample them in realtime via your soundcard they can be ripped just as easily for an imperceptible degradation in quality.
I say do that and to hell with these people - rip the tracks and spread them far and wide. Then we'll see how far their expensive and liberty infringing copy protection gets them.
DirectX is prolific because it works and provides easy access to advanced funky effects. If OpenGL 2.0 offered the same level functionality *and* was cross-platform, I seriously doubt anyone would bother with DirectX anymore.
After all, why lock your game into one platform when another equally good API allows you to port to other platforms (including consoles) with relative ease? Certainly you'd have to port all the sound and controller stuff but that's chicken feed compared to porting a game engine.
The difference is that apache *requires* the installer to do some manual work to get it working properly. Perhaps the point and click admin would learn something during this process of learning.
He (or his UI design team) have made good decisions and some absolutely fucking stupid decisions.
The biggest and most annoying thing they've done is to persist in promoting the 1-button mouse. This is no longer a usability feature but a millstone around the Mac's neck.
Sorry, but Mozilla is extensible in a number of ways starting from the humble plugin, to chrome & skins, all the way through to writing your own XPCOM components and services which you can hook into Mozilla in all kinds of weird and wonderful of ways. It can even support different scripting languages via the wonders of XPConnect. For example ActiveState already have an XPConnect adaptors for their Perl and Python implementations.
As for security implications, a script context is only as dangerous as the power you expose into it. Javascript is only considered a "safe" language because it typically doesn't have access to any objects that can do damage.
The fundamental difference between IE and Mozilla is that IE automates this process of downloading and installing COM components, whereas Mozilla makes it quite cumbersome. It does have an automatic installation facility in the form of XPInstall but it hasn't been picked up by plugin developers.
The principle problem of automating everything is that the user in general hasn't a clue whether a control is trustworthy or not. Yet a control can be downloaded, installed and run on their machine to do anything it pleases with a few mouse clicks. Manual installation may be more irksome but it gives a novice pause for thought and discourages web sites from using controls in the first place.
As I've been using Linux for nearly a decade and contributed thousands of lines of code, I think I am qualified to express my opinions on the matter.
Perhaps anonymous pricks like you had actually contributed code yourself then you might compehend why people take offence at the FSF claiming credit for their work. That is what calling it GNU/Linux is tantamount to.
I have tried to make a habit of refering to the entire collection of software as GNU/Linux not out of some misguided notion of political correctness or to appease RMS as such, but simply as a small courtesy in saying "thanks" to the guys whose software...
And by doing so you're being discourteous to all the other guys who wrote stuff that you make a living from. I speak of such stuff as the kernel, XFree86, Perl, Mozilla, Python, tcl, KDE, Apache, Samba, MySql, openssh, webmin, and many more besides.
FSF software is what it is - a valuable subset of any distribution, but certainly not *so* important that it deserves everything to be tarred with the same brush.
I hate to state the bleeding obvious but major and significant parts of a typical Linux distribution are not GNU. Try to guess which bits. I consider it an insult that the term is blanketed over code (including some of my own) which is neither owned by the FSF nor even GPL in many cases. Certainly the FSF provides some of the bedrock tools for a Linux distro - and we salute them for it - but to name the whole distro in their honour is just silly.
Linux is a perfectly acceptable term to refer to the whole OS in generic terms or to the kernel. If specific context is needed, prepend Mandrake, Redhat, SuSE etc. as appropriate.
Surely if a user is infected, the ISP could cut them off from the world but still allow them access to an internal ftp site with had patches to fix the problem?
Installing a face recognition system in every airport & federal building would be massively expensive overkill that wouldn't catch a determined terrorist.
To extend your house analogy it would be akin to installing a highly expensive alarm system on your doors and windows to catch a thief who cuts a hole in your wall with a jackhammer.
Certainly you'd catch small fry, but you'll totally fail to catch the people you installed the system for in the first place.
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Truly it shouldn't be that difficult seeing as it already builds for so many other platforms.
For some companies, support and maintainance is more important than the cost of the original software and they'll gladly pay for the peace of mind.
Crypto is one of those places. If your crypto solution goes wrong it could seriously fuck up your company, especially when you have to explain to investors their entire solution was based on unsupported software "downloaded free from the internet". Yes, PGPFreeware is totally unsupported, less so even than GPL software where at least you can legally pay for someone to support it and hack it if necessary.
Even for individuals, the vast majority would be more than happy to fork out $50 for PGP if it came bundled on a single CD with a whole bunch of other NAI crap such as McAfee, Nuts & Bolts etc.
The OS it runs comes about 93rd between whether it plays the Star Spangled banner and it's ability to float in orange juice.
Manufacturers who tout Linux as a PDA's main feature or expect the open source community to fix their crappy software may as well give up before they start. Geeks might care about such stuff but no one else does. Get the other stuff right and the fact it runs Linux is just icing on the cake.
WTF is the point of this story? The current cycling speed record is already 166.9mph so 80mph is peanuts.
MQ is neither informed nor constructive. Mike Angelo (the only contributor to MQ) seems to make a point of not finding out all the facts, of leaping to the wrong conclusions, of concocting conspiracies to explain the mundane and of ignoring the facts even after he is corrected. All-in-all it make MQ an extremely unreliable, sensationalist and downright mean site.
If you want criticism (independent and internal) you'll find plenty of it in the netscape.public.mozilla.* newgroups, and on mozillazine.org, and on mozillanews.org.
Although this is technically plagarism it does have the beneficial side-effect of denying Mike Angelo advertising revenue for his continuing hatchet job against Mozilla. Frankly I wonder what Netscape or mozilla.org did to him that he feels he must reel out one misinformed article after another.
Having said that, there is nothing to stop Galeon from installing XPI packages - they just won't work do much if they exploit features it does not support.
I have a 450Mhz machine and it runs great. Certainly the UI needs speeding up somewhat but for page rendering and general responsiveness it is well up to scratch. I have even run it on a P133 running Linux over X and it's still pretty usable.
What's more, if there is something that doesn't have a shortcut you can go into the chrome and add one easily enough.
Funny. I use Mozilla all day and every day and it rarely crashes. Better yet is NS 6.1 which has to be one of the most stable pieces of software I've ever used.
The problem is exacerbated because frankly most Mac users don't want to know how their computers work - that's why they're using a Mac - and put absolute faith in their OS and their programs to protect them from themselves.
All this talk of biometrics being some kind of panacea for terrorism, are woefully optimistic. The only kind of people you'd catch for the billions you'd have to spend on implementing and running such a system are petty criminals. That's a pretty pathetic catch for something that costs so much both in terms of money and civil liberties.
You would be much better off using the same money to beef up the woefully inadequate security that can be seen in most US airports - ban people going through to the gates without a pass, new X-Ray machines, employee screening, trained and motivated staff, more police officers, US customs style security checkpoints, air marshals and so forth.
Any terrorist prepared to commit suicide is going to think nothing of having reconstructive surgery if that's what it takes to foil such a system.
Mozilla is no different and was primarily motivated to go XP because native widgets couldn't do what the CSS specs demanded and that it was next to impossible to produce an decent XP frontend around them. And while this has lead to a few speed bumps on the way, it's turned out to be a good thing. The vast majority of Mozilla is now totally cross-platform and skinnable and most of the time you'd never know you weren't using native widgets.
It is for this reason you'll never see Mozilla use native widgets again. There are some vestiges of native widget support still in CVS but it's so bit rotten it would never work. In fact the only way you'll ever see an Aqua Mozilla is if:
Either option is quite likely to happen at some point. I don't see why Apple would get funny if Mozilla had an "official" aqua like theme just as IE does.
I say do that and to hell with these people - rip the tracks and spread them far and wide. Then we'll see how far their expensive and liberty infringing copy protection gets them.
After all, why lock your game into one platform when another equally good API allows you to port to other platforms (including consoles) with relative ease? Certainly you'd have to port all the sound and controller stuff but that's chicken feed compared to porting a game engine.
The difference is that apache *requires* the installer to do some manual work to get it working properly. Perhaps the point and click admin would learn something during this process of learning.
The biggest and most annoying thing they've done is to persist in promoting the 1-button mouse. This is no longer a usability feature but a millstone around the Mac's neck.
As for security implications, a script context is only as dangerous as the power you expose into it. Javascript is only considered a "safe" language because it typically doesn't have access to any objects that can do damage.
The fundamental difference between IE and Mozilla is that IE automates this process of downloading and installing COM components, whereas Mozilla makes it quite cumbersome. It does have an automatic installation facility in the form of XPInstall but it hasn't been picked up by plugin developers.
The principle problem of automating everything is that the user in general hasn't a clue whether a control is trustworthy or not. Yet a control can be downloaded, installed and run on their machine to do anything it pleases with a few mouse clicks. Manual installation may be more irksome but it gives a novice pause for thought and discourages web sites from using controls in the first place.
Perhaps anonymous pricks like you had actually contributed code yourself then you might compehend why people take offence at the FSF claiming credit for their work. That is what calling it GNU/Linux is tantamount to.
And by doing so you're being discourteous to all the other guys who wrote stuff that you make a living from. I speak of such stuff as the kernel, XFree86, Perl, Mozilla, Python, tcl, KDE, Apache, Samba, MySql, openssh, webmin, and many more besides.
FSF software is what it is - a valuable subset of any distribution, but certainly not *so* important that it deserves everything to be tarred with the same brush.
I hate to state the bleeding obvious but major and significant parts of a typical Linux distribution are not GNU. Try to guess which bits. I consider it an insult that the term is blanketed over code (including some of my own) which is neither owned by the FSF nor even GPL in many cases. Certainly the FSF provides some of the bedrock tools for a Linux distro - and we salute them for it - but to name the whole distro in their honour is just silly.
Linux is a perfectly acceptable term to refer to the whole OS in generic terms or to the kernel. If specific context is needed, prepend Mandrake, Redhat, SuSE etc. as appropriate.
Note to BSD folks: It's Linux, not GNU/Linux.
Surely if a user is infected, the ISP could cut them off from the world but still allow them access to an internal ftp site with had patches to fix the problem?
Installing a face recognition system in every airport & federal building would be massively expensive overkill that wouldn't catch a determined terrorist.
To extend your house analogy it would be akin to installing a highly expensive alarm system on your doors and windows to catch a thief who cuts a hole in your wall with a jackhammer.
Certainly you'd catch small fry, but you'll totally fail to catch the people you installed the system for in the first place.