What is so fascinating with ancient monuments that nutcases are driven to invent the wildest explanations (usually involving aliens or ancient global wars) for their existence? The truth is obviously so much more mundane - pyramids were built to deify the king and to praise the gods. I'm don't doubt star alignment etc. came into it, but that's true of a lot of religious buildings, including christian churches.
In fact one might as well suggest that Europeans in the middle-ages built huge cathedrals because the aliens made them do it. Except of course we'd laugh at anyone who suggested that. And so we should for those who suggest the same thing for older monuments including the pyramids. People build buildings because their leaders tell them to and the resources are there to do it.
Does that mean we know everything about the ancient world? Nope. But neither should we start invent a bunch of bullshit alien conspiracy stories from the barest of "facts".
I parse this as "We spent all this time doing the skinning and XML-fu so that you could turn off the chrome"
I suggest you reparse it. It means that "we spent our time implementing the chrome layer so that Mozilla runs the chrome on all platforms, is skinnable, is fully localizable, has a rendering engine that is exercised fully by the variety of chrome apps and skins running on it and which can be changed by users and third parties to add or remove features". Would you rather that Mozilla was like NS 4.x where each platform had it's own front-end code, thus requiring three times the effort to support and maintain a Unix, Mac and Win32 version? And that even before considering localization.
If chrome is so terrible to you, I suggest you use something like Galleon. It will run run a bit quicker without the chrome, but it will be nowhere near as flexible.
When was the last time an end user cared about standards-compliance, especially when standards-compliance means that many of the web pages they use on a daily basis will no longer render correctly?
Naive end-users don't care about standards compliance because they are ignorant of the good reasons for enforcing them. Everyone else should know better. Besides, NS 6.0 (& Mozilla) doesn't get strict unless the HTML claims via a DOCTYPE to be compliant with a particular HTML spec. Where problems do occur they are usually with the HTML, such as broken sniffer code, IE-specific attributes, bad assumptions about padding in frames & tables, missing or mixed up tags and so on.
Yeah, that's what we need is another armchair critic.
If you're so upset about something in Mozilla, how about contributing something to the project rather than whining how Netscape who invested hundreds of millions of dollars into Mozilla are sticking some extra features into the commercial version.
If you'd spent even ten minutes in the newsgroups you'd see that there 20-30 Netscape engineers (not to mention all the QA, testers, managers & administrative staff supporting them) who work full time on Mozilla and this is the thanks they get.
The minimal install of NS 6.0 is around the 8-10Mb mark, depending on the platform you're on. This gets you a fully functional, standards compliant browser. The other 25Mb or so is optional stuff like Realplayer, Java Runtime, Net2Phone, spell checker, mail/news etc. If you don't want that stuff then don't download it!
There are very few people today who couldn't have NS 6.0 downloaded and up and running on their PC within half an hour.
If it's not obvious to people, Microsoft is currently conducting a FUD campaign against Mozilla/Netscape to spoil the launch and turn people away from it. This is why the press has been filled with IE 6.0 rumours and negative articles about NS 6.0. I'm not suggesting that the article authors are in cahoots with MS, but MS is bringing attention to the negative articles.
Do yourselves a favour and try the NS 6.0 or Mozilla out for yourselves. It is very standards compliant, fast, open source and cross platform. If you don't like it then delete it. Unlike IE 5.5, Mozilla can be downloaded and installed in an hour without the need to reboot or replace half of your system DLLs to do it.
And forget about IE 6.0 for a while. It's at least six months or more away from release.
Speaking as a user of a Palm Vx, I think the reason the Palm beats so Windows CE handily in sales is that my top of the line device cost nearly HALF that of the typical "Pocket PC" (Windows CE) device and it does its job perfectly.
Why pay for something that costs more and may do the task less well? Most people buy these devices to organize their lives and the Palm's low cost, excellent software, long battery life and small form factor are compelling reasons to buy. CE devices typically have much shorter battery lifetimes and questionable organizer facilities.
Personally I'd love an iPaq but I think I would use it more as a toy than something to keep all my appointments in.
Why would AOL tell Nullsoft how to program Winamp? Naturally Nullsoft have to tow the AOL line regarding marketing tie-ins etc., but from day to day they can do their own thang pretty much how they like. From that perspective AOL is pretty benevolant.
As regards why jwz left Netscape (another AOL), you should ask him since it was more likely to do with internal politics than AOL interference because they hardly interfere at all.
Re:What is that fuss all about ?
on
The Rise Of QNX
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· Score: 1
I had the misfortune to have to code stuff on QNX in the days of QNX 2. Small yes, well written no. Judging by some of the sample code that came with it, it was written in a dialect of C conforming to no known standards. The only reason it compiled was because C compiler that came with it was too braindamaged to recognize the bad syntax.
We would have moved onto QNX 4 (the first Unix-like version) but the licencing costs were horrific. I hope QNX have seen sense since then.
Frankly, the Amiga brand name is worth nought nowadays. Yes a few crazies still clutching their A1000s to their chest might impulse buy the SDK when they hear the name, but to others the brand Amiga is synonymous with vapourware, bullshit press releases, living-in-denial fanatics, receivership, and the dodo.
I feel they would be best advised to play down the Amiga name and invent a new one. Something that hasn't left a ten year trail of shit behind it.
The Palm devices might not be as powerful as a Windows CE devices, but they have several key advantages.
They're significantly cheaper because they need less memory and CPU
The battery lasts much longer, because they have less memory, CPU power
They are not tied to Microsoft operating systems. Palm solutions exist for most platforms.
The standard software is extremely well thought out.
I'd love a CE device to play MP3s or to develop more Windows-like apps but most of the time all that extra power (consumption) is a waste. My little Palm Pilot is a great organizer and that's all I bought it for. Personally, I think for more powerful handhelds, EPOC is better choice than Windows CE anyway.
You're right. Many commercial Unices have a lot of legacy baggage some of which undoubtedly incurs a fee. However it is not an inescapable fact of being a Unix implementation that it must do likewise. FreeBSD and it's siblings (which are true Unices whatever that might mean) are free and get by fine without most of the proprietary dead wood that the likes of Solaris still have to support.
"unproven technology" -- Apple doesnt release buggy products, unlike MS. MacOSX is ROCK solid.
It is an unproven technology. Show me systems running Mac OS X for months on end doing CAD/CAM, serving web traffic, managing call centres or any of the other diverse tasks Unix is used for. Show me 5 9's reliabilty.
"processor and memory intensive" -- Dunno about you, but G4's have power to burn. Unlike the gasping-for-breath X86 architecture which has been pushed far past the point of diminishing returns. (a similar case could be made about the dated SPARC and MIPS architectures)
Read the original thread idiot. Someone was claiming that Aqua would become the defacto desktop on Unix. How is it meant to do that if it doesn't run on any other processor?
"doesnt run over a network" -- that's a FEATURE. X is a security nightmare that shoulda been taken out and shot long ago.
X is not a security nightmare unless you're an incompetant administrator. Thousands of sites happily use X terminals. What are you saying? Gee, let's throw all that hardware away and buy even more expensive Macs for everyone so they can do exactly what they do now?
"doesnt run thousands of X apps" -- Hmm. Doesnt run crap. Oh, well. Cant have everything I suppose. boo-hoo. waa waa waa.
You really are clueless aren't you?
"relies of Apple technologies" -- most of the PC industry and architecture relies on Apple technology. They just stole it, arent acknowleding it, and arent paying royalties. If it werent for "Apple technologies" you be running DOS on an MFM disk, wintel boy.
Utterly clueless.
"doesnt support multiple users" -- I dont think this is true, but even if it is, so what? One user, at least one CPU.
It wasn't until Warp 4 that any effort was made to make the desktop more friendly. It was a shame since the underlying power would have shined if IBM had bothered with usability to the lengths that Apple and Microsoft did. IBM probably thought they'd make extra money if the corporates had to send everyone on a training course to figure out how to use it.
Aqua will *never* become the dominant Unix GUI for because it's proprietary Apple (and Adobe) technology. No Unix vendor would be crazy or stupid enough to hand over wads of cash to lock themselves into a proprietary solution particularly since it's unproven technology (security, stability), processor & memory intensive, doesn't run over a network, doesn't run the thousands of X apps, relies on other Apple technologies (e.g. Quicktime) and doesn't support multiple users on the same box.
I'm sure Apple could address some of these issues but frankly they'd be better off saving their money unless they intend to open it up. There's fat chance of that happening.
Who's going to walk around with a finger stuck in their ear while talking to the wrist of their other hand? It looks ridiculous and is impractical.
I can see how such an invention could appeal to a certain kind of asshole (the same kind who thinks wearable computers are neat), but basically it's a stupid idea.
Malaysia is one fucked up country. Watch their satellite TV and you'll see what I mean.
You can't show any sex act (even between animals on the Discovery channel), but it's OK to show brutal and graphic violence. A kid wouldn't be allowed to see an uncensored nature program but they can switch channels to a movie like Scanners with heads exploding all over the place.
To live in Malaysia is to live under the thumb of an authoritarian government pandering to the nutcase views of a religious minority.
More likely, Linus is concerned that dumping a massive change into a mostly finalised kernel will put back schedules by half a year or more.
The 2.4.0 release will have plenty of bugs as it is so introducing spaghetti hacks for one particular fs, incompatibilities with existing software, bizzaro crashes and race conditions is not a good idea at all.
What a stupid site! By their own statistics, 20% of visitors use a different browser so they're throwing away a fifth of their earnings for the sake of what?
I have about 400 bookmarks saved in Netscape 4.75. This file takes up 167k of diskspace. On IE, the same bookmarks, as Internet Shortcuts consumes anywhere between 4k and 32k per shortcut depending on partition sizes. That means the same links eat up anywhere between 1.6 and 12.5 megabytes of disk space!
Not only that, IE has a severely retarded shortcut ordering scheme that frequently goes wrong after renaming or deleting an item, shortcut names can't contain certain characters such as ampersands & slashes, and IE has no equivalent of aliases or separators.
All in all, IE shortcuts are piss-poor substitute for a single bookmarks.html.
PR2 came out at a time when a number of substantial, but potentially traumatic changes were waiting to go in. The problem was that while they were ultimately beneficial they could have they fucked up PR2 real bad pushing back the release schedule accordingly. At some point Netscape has to appraise the state of play, counting the number of P1, P2, dogfood bugs etc. and decide "here is where we branch". It's impossible to release a commercial drop otherwise. With hindsight PR2 probably got released a week too early, since M17 greatly benefited from some of the checkins that never went into PR2.
The same might happen with PR3 where something nice got into the trunk in the last fortnight but not the branch. However, early signs indicate that this is a good release. Yes, it has problems but mostly they seem to fall into the cosmetic and minor with workaround categories.
At the end of the day people can use whichever version they feel happiest with. Both browsers benefit from the presence of their sibling - Netscape 6.0 benefits from the peer review and standards compliance of Mozilla, Mozilla benefits from the mass testing and Full Circle feedback reports of Netscape 6.0.
Personally, I think the recent Communicator 4.x releases are rock solid (on Win32), but it can't hurt to give 6.x a spin. It's beta quality so it's gonna crash but it seems pretty stable in normal operation. If it does crash it won't take out your desktop like IE can.
Besides, it's always a good idea to have a few browsers installed since sites all too frequently don't work properly with one or the other.
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In fact one might as well suggest that Europeans in the middle-ages built huge cathedrals because the aliens made them do it. Except of course we'd laugh at anyone who suggested that. And so we should for those who suggest the same thing for older monuments including the pyramids. People build buildings because their leaders tell them to and the resources are there to do it.
Does that mean we know everything about the ancient world? Nope. But neither should we start invent a bunch of bullshit alien conspiracy stories from the barest of "facts".
I suggest you reparse it. It means that "we spent our time implementing the chrome layer so that Mozilla runs the chrome on all platforms, is skinnable, is fully localizable, has a rendering engine that is exercised fully by the variety of chrome apps and skins running on it and which can be changed by users and third parties to add or remove features". Would you rather that Mozilla was like NS 4.x where each platform had it's own front-end code, thus requiring three times the effort to support and maintain a Unix, Mac and Win32 version? And that even before considering localization.
If chrome is so terrible to you, I suggest you use something like Galleon. It will run run a bit quicker without the chrome, but it will be nowhere near as flexible.
When was the last time an end user cared about standards-compliance, especially when standards-compliance means that many of the web pages they use on a daily basis will no longer render correctly?
Naive end-users don't care about standards compliance because they are ignorant of the good reasons for enforcing them. Everyone else should know better. Besides, NS 6.0 (& Mozilla) doesn't get strict unless the HTML claims via a DOCTYPE to be compliant with a particular HTML spec. Where problems do occur they are usually with the HTML, such as broken sniffer code, IE-specific attributes, bad assumptions about padding in frames & tables, missing or mixed up tags and so on.
For example if you don't want AIM, edit all-packages.rdf and remove all references to aim.jar in it. AIM goes away.
If you don't want certain buttons, open the appropriate JAR file and change the XUL (e.g. communicatorOverlay.xul). The button goes away.
It's hardly rocket science but it demonstrates beautifully the power of chrome over conventional applications.
If you're so upset about something in Mozilla, how about contributing something to the project rather than whining how Netscape who invested hundreds of millions of dollars into Mozilla are sticking some extra features into the commercial version.
If you'd spent even ten minutes in the newsgroups you'd see that there 20-30 Netscape engineers (not to mention all the QA, testers, managers & administrative staff supporting them) who work full time on Mozilla and this is the thanks they get.
Get real. Netscape owes you nothing.
The minimal install of NS 6.0 is around the 8-10Mb mark, depending on the platform you're on. This gets you a fully functional, standards compliant browser. The other 25Mb or so is optional stuff like Realplayer, Java Runtime, Net2Phone, spell checker, mail/news etc. If you don't want that stuff then don't download it!
There are very few people today who couldn't have NS 6.0 downloaded and up and running on their PC within half an hour.
Do yourselves a favour and try the NS 6.0 or Mozilla out for yourselves. It is very standards compliant, fast, open source and cross platform. If you don't like it then delete it. Unlike IE 5.5, Mozilla can be downloaded and installed in an hour without the need to reboot or replace half of your system DLLs to do it.
And forget about IE 6.0 for a while. It's at least six months or more away from release.
Why pay for something that costs more and may do the task less well? Most people buy these devices to organize their lives and the Palm's low cost, excellent software, long battery life and small form factor are compelling reasons to buy. CE devices typically have much shorter battery lifetimes and questionable organizer facilities.
Personally I'd love an iPaq but I think I would use it more as a toy than something to keep all my appointments in.
As regards why jwz left Netscape (another AOL), you should ask him since it was more likely to do with internal politics than AOL interference because they hardly interfere at all.
We would have moved onto QNX 4 (the first Unix-like version) but the licencing costs were horrific. I hope QNX have seen sense since then.
I feel they would be best advised to play down the Amiga name and invent a new one. Something that hasn't left a ten year trail of shit behind it.
I'd love a CE device to play MP3s or to develop more Windows-like apps but most of the time all that extra power (consumption) is a waste. My little Palm Pilot is a great organizer and that's all I bought it for. Personally, I think for more powerful handhelds, EPOC is better choice than Windows CE anyway.
You're right. Many commercial Unices have a lot of legacy baggage some of which undoubtedly incurs a fee. However it is not an inescapable fact of being a Unix implementation that it must do likewise. FreeBSD and it's siblings (which are true Unices whatever that might mean) are free and get by fine without most of the proprietary dead wood that the likes of Solaris still have to support.
It is an unproven technology. Show me systems running Mac OS X for months on end doing CAD/CAM, serving web traffic, managing call centres or any of the other diverse tasks Unix is used for. Show me 5 9's reliabilty.
"processor and memory intensive" -- Dunno about you, but G4's have power to burn. Unlike the gasping-for-breath X86 architecture which has been pushed far past the point of diminishing returns. (a similar case could be made about the dated SPARC and MIPS architectures)
Read the original thread idiot. Someone was claiming that Aqua would become the defacto desktop on Unix. How is it meant to do that if it doesn't run on any other processor?
"doesnt run over a network" -- that's a FEATURE. X is a security nightmare that shoulda been taken out and shot long ago.
X is not a security nightmare unless you're an incompetant administrator. Thousands of sites happily use X terminals. What are you saying? Gee, let's throw all that hardware away and buy even more expensive Macs for everyone so they can do exactly what they do now?
"doesnt run thousands of X apps" -- Hmm. Doesnt run crap. Oh, well. Cant have everything I suppose. boo-hoo. waa waa waa.
You really are clueless aren't you?
"relies of Apple technologies" -- most of the PC industry and architecture relies on Apple technology. They just stole it, arent acknowleding it, and arent paying royalties. If it werent for "Apple technologies" you be running DOS on an MFM disk, wintel boy.
Utterly clueless.
"doesnt support multiple users" -- I dont think this is true, but even if it is, so what? One user, at least one CPU.
Beyond hope.
It wasn't until Warp 4 that any effort was made to make the desktop more friendly. It was a shame since the underlying power would have shined if IBM had bothered with usability to the lengths that Apple and Microsoft did. IBM probably thought they'd make extra money if the corporates had to send everyone on a training course to figure out how to use it.
Nah, I'm just dreaming.
I'm sure Apple could address some of these issues but frankly they'd be better off saving their money unless they intend to open it up. There's fat chance of that happening.
I can see how such an invention could appeal to a certain kind of asshole (the same kind who thinks wearable computers are neat), but basically it's a stupid idea.
You can't show any sex act (even between animals on the Discovery channel), but it's OK to show brutal and graphic violence. A kid wouldn't be allowed to see an uncensored nature program but they can switch channels to a movie like Scanners with heads exploding all over the place.
To live in Malaysia is to live under the thumb of an authoritarian government pandering to the nutcase views of a religious minority.
The longer the phone call, the more you pay. Metering in action.
If you don't like this approach then sign up with someone like Demon for a flat monthly rate.
The 2.4.0 release will have plenty of bugs as it is so introducing spaghetti hacks for one particular fs, incompatibilities with existing software, bizzaro crashes and race conditions is not a good idea at all.
What a stupid site! By their own statistics, 20% of visitors use a different browser so they're throwing away a fifth of their earnings for the sake of what?
I have about 400 bookmarks saved in Netscape 4.75. This file takes up 167k of diskspace. On IE, the same bookmarks, as Internet Shortcuts consumes anywhere between 4k and 32k per shortcut depending on partition sizes. That means the same links eat up anywhere between 1.6 and 12.5 megabytes of disk space!
Not only that, IE has a severely retarded shortcut ordering scheme that frequently goes wrong after renaming or deleting an item, shortcut names can't contain certain characters such as ampersands & slashes, and IE has no equivalent of aliases or separators.
All in all, IE shortcuts are piss-poor substitute for a single bookmarks.html.
The same might happen with PR3 where something nice got into the trunk in the last fortnight but not the branch. However, early signs indicate that this is a good release. Yes, it has problems but mostly they seem to fall into the cosmetic and minor with workaround categories.
At the end of the day people can use whichever version they feel happiest with. Both browsers benefit from the presence of their sibling - Netscape 6.0 benefits from the peer review and standards compliance of Mozilla, Mozilla benefits from the mass testing and Full Circle feedback reports of Netscape 6.0.
I didn't know Konqueror was out for the Mac.
Besides, it's always a good idea to have a few browsers installed since sites all too frequently don't work properly with one or the other.