For the last decade+, people have been claiming that the BSD licenses are more free than the GPL, because they effectively place no restrictions on what you can do with the code. Now we're being told that there are restrictions on what you can do with the code.
That is cool that you at least have given Opera a shot instead of just striking it down like many FireFox users on Slashdot love to do.
Actually, Opera and I go way back. A friend introduced me to it when we were both working at a computer lab in college, around 1998 or 1999. I used it as my primary browser around 2000-2001, until Mozilla got to the point where it was stable enough to use on a daily basis, and Opera just didn't have the site compatibility I wanted at the time. Plus I was switching to Linux, and the Linux version was new and extremely buggy, and Opera 5 started getting very cluttered. I kept checking in, and kept paying for upgrades (in part to encourage them to keep developing for Linux). Around Opera 8, I thought that the Linux version had finally caught up with the Windows version in terms of stability. And they were working on declutter, and of course standards support and compatibility were far beyond what it had been 5 years before.
At this point, I'm using Firefox at home and for development at work, and Opera for most of my surfing at work. I'm in the process of a major bookmarks cleanup/sync operation with my personal bookmarks, after which I'll probably switch back and forth more at home.
Hmm, that reminds me of the way shareware web browsers used to offer a trial period, then when the trial had elapsed, block all access except to the company's own website, so you could buy a reg code.
Limiting the network connection might work. It would be simplest to just turn it off, but the network is also the best way to handle false positives due to temporary glitches. I actually had WGA give a false positive on XP once, and cleared it up by re-validating online. If there were a way to (reliably) restrict network traffic so that programs could only connect to Microsoft's WGA/web server farm, it might be possible to limit the potential damage.
Websites often get paid by impressions, so if the ads aren't received by the customers then the revenue isn't received by the site. Totally different from the newspaper, who gets an "impression" with every paper sold guaranteed.
Or worse, by click. That's like only paying the newspaper for the people who actually walk into your store -- and only if they happen to mention the ad or bring it along.
My understanding is that security updates and the like are not blocked. This has how it's been in XP...
The article specifically says that nongenuine copies "have limited access to updates, and thus risk attack from viruses, malware and spyware" (emphasis added).
Now, technically, any computer running any OS is at some risk from these things, unless it's disconnected from the network, has no floppy/USB/CD/tape/etc. drive, is in a locked bunker, and is turned off. But in the context of limited access to updates, it certainly sounds like Microsoft is taking things a step further with Vista than they did with XP.
So, what is going to happen when M$ screws up and starts blocking products that are 'genuine'?
It gets worse. Let's take that line of thought a bit further. From TFA:
Titled "Don't let this happen to your customers," the advertisement indicates nongenuine copies of Windows Vista will lose access to key features, have limited access to updates, and thus risk attack from viruses, malware and spyware.
Great. Just what we need: deliberately make some machines more vulnerable to attack. As if those machines are the only ones that will suffer when they get infected.
A malware infection doesn't just impact the infected system's users. Those systems then become nodes in a botnet. They pump out more spam, more viruses, more phishing. They host phishing sites. They could theoretically be used for distributed computing projects... like cracking into paying customers' systems.
What's Microsoft going to say when a large site gets hacked, using someone else's pwned box as a launch platform, and the attacker got into that box because it was pirated, and Microsoft deliberately disabled the update that would have fixed a remote root exploit?
Of course! They need to add a skull and crossbones!
(On a more serious note, doesn't the term "reduced functionality" imply that something is still functional? The description makes it sound like it disables the system entirely.)
Stories like this make me happy I am an Opera user. It has nearly everything the average user needs built in already although if you do want add-on's it still has that ability with widgets
I'm still hoping to see more developer tools by the time 9.5 final rolls around. There's only so much you can do with custom buttons and bookmarklets. Something comparable to Firebug, or even just the ability to do validation in the background on certain sites (rather than having to submit the page to the online W3C validator every time), would be an immense help.
(For the record, I'm posting this with Opera 9.5 alpha.)
Not according to any stats I've seen. Safari's marketshare tends to be around 2/3 to 3/4 of total Mac marketshare.
As an example, my main website, which gets a significant amount of general-audience traffic for a comic book fan site it hosts, is currently showing 4.0% Safari for the first 10 days of September, and 6.5% Macintosh for the same period of time. Go back to May -- before the iPhone and Windows versions -- and it's 3.9% and 6.1%.
I'm too lazy to go looking for more general stats right now, but I seem to recall the proportions being similar.
In roughly 3 years since the release of Firefox 1.0, the same (large) number of people downloaded it in year 1 and year 2. That means interest didn't drop off after the first year. Moreover, twice as many people -- 200 million -- downloaded it in year 3 as in either of the previous two years. That means interest in Firefox has actually increased over the past year.
Sure, some of those were early adopters of Firefox 2, before the auto-update kicked in. But a surprising number of people stayed on 1.5 until then, going by all the stats I've seen. And then we get into the fuzz factor: some of those downloads are repeats, but there are plenty of installs that won't be counted: downloads from third-party mirrors. Linux distribution CDs. Single downloads that are then copied out to multiple computers via USB thumbdrive or LAN shares.
So while it doesn't tell you how many users they have (and Mozilla didn't claim that it did), it does tell you that people are still looking for Firefox and still trying it out in large numbers.
As for how many people are actively using it, Mozilla currently estimates 120 million.
Just stable builds of Firefox downloaded from the official mirrors.
Updates downloaded through the auto-update system aren't counted. Neither are copies downloaded from third-party mirrors, or installed via a Linux distro CD, or downloaded once, put on a USB keychain or LAN share, and installed on multiple machines.
Mozilla's Asa Dotzler remarked on another site last week that they have an estimated 120 million users right now, and I seem to recall the retention rate being something like 25%.
Still, it's impressive that the number of downloads has actually doubled each year. It took a year from the 1.0 release to reach 100M, another year to reach 200M, then another year to reach 400M. That means that interest in the browser is actually growing.
Semi-off-topic, but Webcam #1 at the north pole reminded me: on Friday the Astronomy Picture of the Day posted a multiple-exposure image of last month's lunar eclipse as seen from the south pole. Not an IT-specific wonder, but still seriously impressive, when you think about it, that we've actually got people near the south pole who are in a position to take photos like this.
And hey, for once I can use the term "polar opposite" and know that it's literally true!
So, this is saying if you join a community/website then you are probably inclined to be interested or involved in whatever the subject matter that site is.
Actually, it's describing a caricature of each site's target audience. It's more of a humor piece than anything else.
They hunt like spiders, awaiting the arrival of an article from their victims -- usually a hapless news reporter. The second moderators accept a story, they pounce -- pedantry, suspicion and anonymity their weapons of choice.
Hmm, it sounds like that should get the article modded -1 Flamebait!:-D
No, you are quite incorrect. Prior art invalidates patents the world over. First-to-file just changes how priority is determined in the absence of published prior art.
Am I correct in assuming that the first-to-file system would remove the value of prior art in invalidating a patent? Would it be possible under such a system for one entity to patent a technology that someone else is already using, but hasn't patented? Or am I misunderstanding the concept?
They have deals with search engines, like Google and Yahoo, to get placement as the default engines in the toolbar, in Speed Dial, and in Opera Mini. (I think these days it's Yahoo in all 3.) Same kind of deal that Firefox has with Google, really.
Plus there are the versions for devices (Nintendo DS, etc.), which they still charge for, either directly or through licensing deals with device manufacturers and mobile carriers. So they pull in revenue from that.
After venting their rage for a day, many of the upset early adopters become even more loyal to the company than before. They get a lot of good PR for listening to their customers.
Good point. I recall reading somewhere that people are more impressed by a company resolving a bad experience to their satisfaction than they are simply by good experience. (This is, of course, self-limiting. If every initial experience is bad, most people will stop slogging through repeated bad experiences to get to the good ones. Well, software.0 versions notwithstanding.)
Early adopters pay out the nose for bragging rights, film at 11.
When the iPhone launched, it sold out at both the nearby Apple Stores. If you weren't in line on Friday, you couldn't get one on Saturday. One of my co-workers waited until the middle of the next week, called a couple of stores to check inventory, and just walked right in and bought one.
Those people standing in line weren't just standing in line to get an iPhone. If that's all they wanted, they could have waited a week or two for the second shipment to arrive. What they stood in line for was the opportunity to have it first. They "paid" extra by waiting around for several hours when they could have been doing something else so they could get an iPhone before anyone else did.
Whatever the motivation -- bragging rights, enthusiasm, impatience, etc. -- there is a cost to getting there first. Conversely, there is an opportunity cost to biding one's time: Anyone who waited for the price to come down has gone the last few months with no iPhone.
Are there people that still use Eudora? And if so, do they have a reason?
I used Eudora for years, until about the time Thunderbird was gearing up for version 1. What finally kicked me over the threshold was that I do a lot of work with spam detection, and so I needed access to the original format of each message. Eudora reformats messages as they arrive, separating out the attachments, adjusting the headers, and in some cases reformatting text.
At the time I had a ~5-year-old collection of mail in Eudora. I must have imported that corpus dozens of times, looking for things that imported incorrectly, figuring out how to identify whether a message was in plaintext, richtext, HTML, etc. so that the importer could reconstruct the appropriate MIME headers, and filing bugs. By the time 1.0 was ready, it could import my 5 years of mail.
I haven't looked back since then, though I do miss the window layout. It's one of the few MDI designs I actually liked. Eh, there's probably an extension for Thunderbird. Other than Penelope, I mean.
Slashdot Mirror
For the last decade+, people have been claiming that the BSD licenses are more free than the GPL, because they effectively place no restrictions on what you can do with the code. Now we're being told that there are restrictions on what you can do with the code.
Huh? What's so headachy about running "yum update" once in a while?
Actually, Opera and I go way back. A friend introduced me to it when we were both working at a computer lab in college, around 1998 or 1999. I used it as my primary browser around 2000-2001, until Mozilla got to the point where it was stable enough to use on a daily basis, and Opera just didn't have the site compatibility I wanted at the time. Plus I was switching to Linux, and the Linux version was new and extremely buggy, and Opera 5 started getting very cluttered. I kept checking in, and kept paying for upgrades (in part to encourage them to keep developing for Linux). Around Opera 8, I thought that the Linux version had finally caught up with the Windows version in terms of stability. And they were working on declutter, and of course standards support and compatibility were far beyond what it had been 5 years before.
At this point, I'm using Firefox at home and for development at work, and Opera for most of my surfing at work. I'm in the process of a major bookmarks cleanup/sync operation with my personal bookmarks, after which I'll probably switch back and forth more at home.
Hmm, that reminds me of the way shareware web browsers used to offer a trial period, then when the trial had elapsed, block all access except to the company's own website, so you could buy a reg code.
Limiting the network connection might work. It would be simplest to just turn it off, but the network is also the best way to handle false positives due to temporary glitches. I actually had WGA give a false positive on XP once, and cleared it up by re-validating online. If there were a way to (reliably) restrict network traffic so that programs could only connect to Microsoft's WGA/web server farm, it might be possible to limit the potential damage.
Or worse, by click. That's like only paying the newspaper for the people who actually walk into your store -- and only if they happen to mention the ad or bring it along.
Or perhaps, as Robert Anton Wilson once said, "It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."
The article specifically says that nongenuine copies "have limited access to updates, and thus risk attack from viruses, malware and spyware" (emphasis added).
Now, technically, any computer running any OS is at some risk from these things, unless it's disconnected from the network, has no floppy/USB/CD/tape/etc. drive, is in a locked bunker, and is turned off. But in the context of limited access to updates, it certainly sounds like Microsoft is taking things a step further with Vista than they did with XP.
It gets worse. Let's take that line of thought a bit further. From TFA:
Great. Just what we need: deliberately make some machines more vulnerable to attack. As if those machines are the only ones that will suffer when they get infected.
A malware infection doesn't just impact the infected system's users. Those systems then become nodes in a botnet. They pump out more spam, more viruses, more phishing. They host phishing sites. They could theoretically be used for distributed computing projects... like cracking into paying customers' systems.
What's Microsoft going to say when a large site gets hacked, using someone else's pwned box as a launch platform, and the attacker got into that box because it was pirated, and Microsoft deliberately disabled the update that would have fixed a remote root exploit?
A plain black rectangle for a screen...
A pirate(d) edition of Windows...
Of course! They need to add a skull and crossbones!
(On a more serious note, doesn't the term "reduced functionality" imply that something is still functional? The description makes it sound like it disables the system entirely.)
I'm still hoping to see more developer tools by the time 9.5 final rolls around. There's only so much you can do with custom buttons and bookmarklets. Something comparable to Firebug, or even just the ability to do validation in the background on certain sites (rather than having to submit the page to the online W3C validator every time), would be an immense help.
(For the record, I'm posting this with Opera 9.5 alpha.)
Not according to any stats I've seen. Safari's marketshare tends to be around 2/3 to 3/4 of total Mac marketshare.
As an example, my main website, which gets a significant amount of general-audience traffic for a comic book fan site it hosts, is currently showing 4.0% Safari for the first 10 days of September, and 6.5% Macintosh for the same period of time. Go back to May -- before the iPhone and Windows versions -- and it's 3.9% and 6.1%.
I'm too lazy to go looking for more general stats right now, but I seem to recall the proportions being similar.
In roughly 3 years since the release of Firefox 1.0, the same (large) number of people downloaded it in year 1 and year 2. That means interest didn't drop off after the first year. Moreover, twice as many people -- 200 million -- downloaded it in year 3 as in either of the previous two years. That means interest in Firefox has actually increased over the past year.
Sure, some of those were early adopters of Firefox 2, before the auto-update kicked in. But a surprising number of people stayed on 1.5 until then, going by all the stats I've seen. And then we get into the fuzz factor: some of those downloads are repeats, but there are plenty of installs that won't be counted: downloads from third-party mirrors. Linux distribution CDs. Single downloads that are then copied out to multiple computers via USB thumbdrive or LAN shares.
So while it doesn't tell you how many users they have (and Mozilla didn't claim that it did), it does tell you that people are still looking for Firefox and still trying it out in large numbers.
As for how many people are actively using it, Mozilla currently estimates 120 million.
IIRC 1.5 will now auto-update to 2.0, though it'll probably be a 2-stage process -- update to the latest 1.5, then update to the latest 2.0.
They're only counting final releases.
According to this comment, Mozilla estimates about 120 million Firefox users at present.
Just stable builds of Firefox downloaded from the official mirrors.
Updates downloaded through the auto-update system aren't counted. Neither are copies downloaded from third-party mirrors, or installed via a Linux distro CD, or downloaded once, put on a USB keychain or LAN share, and installed on multiple machines.
Mozilla's Asa Dotzler remarked on another site last week that they have an estimated 120 million users right now, and I seem to recall the retention rate being something like 25%.
Still, it's impressive that the number of downloads has actually doubled each year. It took a year from the 1.0 release to reach 100M, another year to reach 200M, then another year to reach 400M. That means that interest in the browser is actually growing.
And do what, indict them for impersonating themselves?
Semi-off-topic, but Webcam #1 at the north pole reminded me: on Friday the Astronomy Picture of the Day posted a multiple-exposure image of last month's lunar eclipse as seen from the south pole. Not an IT-specific wonder, but still seriously impressive, when you think about it, that we've actually got people near the south pole who are in a position to take photos like this.
And hey, for once I can use the term "polar opposite" and know that it's literally true!
6.) Now I know you're going to mod me down for this, but...
As far as #2 and #5 are concerned, in Soviet Slashdotistan, lists write you!
Actually, it's describing a caricature of each site's target audience. It's more of a humor piece than anything else.
Hmm, it sounds like that should get the article modded -1 Flamebait! :-D
Got it. Thanks!
Am I correct in assuming that the first-to-file system would remove the value of prior art in invalidating a patent? Would it be possible under such a system for one entity to patent a technology that someone else is already using, but hasn't patented? Or am I misunderstanding the concept?
They have deals with search engines, like Google and Yahoo, to get placement as the default engines in the toolbar, in Speed Dial, and in Opera Mini. (I think these days it's Yahoo in all 3.) Same kind of deal that Firefox has with Google, really.
Plus there are the versions for devices (Nintendo DS, etc.), which they still charge for, either directly or through licensing deals with device manufacturers and mobile carriers. So they pull in revenue from that.
This article is a year out of date, but still informative: Opera making big profits from free software.
Good point. I recall reading somewhere that people are more impressed by a company resolving a bad experience to their satisfaction than they are simply by good experience. (This is, of course, self-limiting. If every initial experience is bad, most people will stop slogging through repeated bad experiences to get to the good ones. Well, software .0 versions notwithstanding.)
When the iPhone launched, it sold out at both the nearby Apple Stores. If you weren't in line on Friday, you couldn't get one on Saturday. One of my co-workers waited until the middle of the next week, called a couple of stores to check inventory, and just walked right in and bought one.
Those people standing in line weren't just standing in line to get an iPhone. If that's all they wanted, they could have waited a week or two for the second shipment to arrive. What they stood in line for was the opportunity to have it first. They "paid" extra by waiting around for several hours when they could have been doing something else so they could get an iPhone before anyone else did.
Whatever the motivation -- bragging rights, enthusiasm, impatience, etc. -- there is a cost to getting there first. Conversely, there is an opportunity cost to biding one's time: Anyone who waited for the price to come down has gone the last few months with no iPhone.
I used Eudora for years, until about the time Thunderbird was gearing up for version 1. What finally kicked me over the threshold was that I do a lot of work with spam detection, and so I needed access to the original format of each message. Eudora reformats messages as they arrive, separating out the attachments, adjusting the headers, and in some cases reformatting text.
At the time I had a ~5-year-old collection of mail in Eudora. I must have imported that corpus dozens of times, looking for things that imported incorrectly, figuring out how to identify whether a message was in plaintext, richtext, HTML, etc. so that the importer could reconstruct the appropriate MIME headers, and filing bugs. By the time 1.0 was ready, it could import my 5 years of mail.
I haven't looked back since then, though I do miss the window layout. It's one of the few MDI designs I actually liked. Eh, there's probably an extension for Thunderbird. Other than Penelope, I mean.