I've woken up in the Soviet Union. No, the police cannot steam open your mail without a warrant. No, they cannot tap your phone without a warrant. (Until recently of course). Why we have given up on these principles and accepted universal wiretapping for newer technologies, I cannot imagine.
Kind of makes you wonder who really won the Cold War, doesn't it?
We've obviously been doing better than Russia and most or all of the other former Soviet republics, and capitalism clearly triumphed over communism, but when it comes to personal freedoms, we're doing to ourselves what we feared the Soviets would do to us. Did we really come out on top?
Many other open source projects -- distributions included -- are developed by a mix of full-time paid contributors and unpaid volunteers. And yet they manage to keep things going.
I know Debian is all about the Free, but it seems odd that paying a couple of people would cause problems with volunteers.
Could happen. As you said, it's finally been released under an open-source license. Not sure about patent status, though.
2. Nvidia drivers
3. play DVD's MP3
4. Flash
Not going to happen. Fedora has a policy of including only open-source, Free with a capital F software that is not encumbered by patents. NVidia drivers and Flash aren't open source. DVD and MP3 playback are covered by patents.
5. Update the ISO's every so often
There's a group called Fedora Unity that does this. Check their site for Re-spins.
If you make certificates too easy to obtain then every phisher and his dog will just buy one and create a false impression of legitimacy. If you try too hard to restrict them to bona fide companies then you risk shutting out the mom and pop outfits. What's the answer?
Don't overload the certificate concept. If you make it clear that all an SSL cert means is that no one is listening in on the conversation between your browser and the website (assuming your machine and the server aren't compromised themselves) then the easy cert doesn't create that false impression.
Anyone what approach Firefox takes compared to IE7 here?
AFAIK, Firefox does not treat EV SSL certs differently from normal SSL certs. This may change, particularly if Microsoft can convince end-users that "greenlighting" EV SSL certs is a good thing, at which point people will start complaining about Firefox being insecure because it doesn't turn the address bar green.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that it does block access to a "red" site with an "are you sure you want to visit this?" warning. The initial design of the phishing filter is described on IEBlog. Some details have probably changed since then, but that's the basic way it works in the final version.
Are the small businesses having to pay microsoft for the certification? No, its the certificate authorities like verisign that get paid, ergo not extortion.
So if I insist that someone give my friend money, or I'll threaten their ability to do business, it's not extortion because I'm not the one getting paid?
Actually there's two issues -- site verification and anti-phishing -- which are getting mashed together because they act on a similar concept (how much can I trust this site?) and display through the color in the address bar.
White is the default state, and says nothing about the site. Red is when the site matches a blacklist of known phishing sites. (If you have the antiphishing turned on, it will check with MS each time you load a new page.) Green is when the site uses one of these new SSL certificates which provides additional data and (supposedly) has a tougher approval process in which the certificate authority does an actual background check on the company instead of just making sure they have a working phone number. One hopes a blacklist hit will trump this.
A secure site that uses a standard SSL cert and is not a known phisher will have a white location bar.
A lot of our resources are wasted in getting features ported from other applications and (Even worse) redoing features on different applications (Because of underlying differences).
OK, which project would we have been better off without? Can you be sure that Project A would have come up with the feature they were copying from Project B? Or that Project B would have been as successful without learning from Project C's mistakes? If the people from Project B had been working on Project A instead, would that nifty feature have made it through the design process to prove its appeal?
Choices aren't just good for their own sake. They're good because each project is going to have its own sensibilities, and is going to go off and try different things. Some ideas will be successful. Some will not. After the Mozilla Suite, Netscape 6, Galeon, and K-Meleon, it finally took Firefox to weaken IE's stranglehold. If everyone had just stuck with contributing to the Mozilla Suite, there's a good chance they would never have hit upon the type of browser that would be positioned to take advantage of crumbling confidence in IE.
I agree that we can't support all the versions in perpetuity, but I thought it would have been more helpful if they had included some reason other than "sorry, we just can't do it anymore". Did it not fit into the big picture of their support? What about future security fixes? etc. etc. As it was, it was very abrupt.
It's been hashed out on the mailing list. The upshot is this: Fedora Legacy depended heavily on volunteers. While there has been demand for them to release updates, there have never been enough volunteers to keep it going. This has been true almost since the beginning, but it finally got to the point where the people running the project looked at it, said "we really can't keep up, can we?" and decided to fold the resources available into the main Fedora Project.
As I understand it, the current plan is to drop Fedora Legacy entirely, but extend official support for the immediate previous release (which right now would be Fedora Core 5) for several months longer than the old EOL policy.
Heck, I like to switch stylesheets based on window size even so why not make that possible also without resorting to Javascript
You mentioned CSS3, so you may be aware of this already, but CSS media queries will eventually do this. AFAIK, Opera is still the only browser with even experimental support for them, though.
Aside from KDE ports to other platforms, khtml can be used standalone on Windows, SkyOS, and AmigaOS (amongst others).
Can be, yes -- there's even a Windows KHTML browser in early alpha stages called Swift -- but practically speaking, most KHTML browsers today are running on *nix platforms, and most Webkit browsers are on Mac OS X. Yes, you can run a non-Webkti KHTML browser on Mac OS X, but Webkit is available right there. And IIRC someone ported Webkit to GTK to run it on cell phones (Nokia?), but for the most part *nix browsers (not counting OSX) tend to use Gecko or KHTML.
Safari has been "Fixed" so that the acid2 test renders correctly, yet still contains lots of rendering bugs.
This nicely demonstrates the fact that Acid2 is not a CSS compliance test (something which I've seen claimed in many discussions). If Opera 9 and Safari 2 can both pass Acid2, but Opera 9 has broader and/or less buggy CSS support, then Acid2 cannot tell you the overall level of compliance.
It's important to remember what Acid2 is: namely, a wish list for web developers. It's a bunch of features that developers would like to use, but which had (until recently) limited, buggy, or just plain no support in major browsers. The prestige of passing Acid2 (and, conversely, the shame of not passing it) was supposed to motivate browser developers to essentially fill in the corners of their CSS support, making it feasible for web developers to start using more of their toolboxes.
It's taken time, but it's succeeded, with one notable "we don't care, we don't have to" exception: Internet Explorer. Of the four major engines, KHTML and Opera have it, and Gecko is getting it soon. And the biggest player on the block seems to be doing its best to prevent us from actually using our tools if we want the majority of web surfers to see our sites as designed.
Heck, chances are Opera will run on his current computer.
Isn't it interesting, though, that most of the Acid2-compliant browsers are either Mac or Unix-based? I suppose that has to do with the fact that most Windows-only browsers just embed the IE rendering engine, and most cross-platform browsers use Gecko (here's to Gecko 1.9 passing Acid2 when it's finished!). That basically leaves KHTML and Webkit, which are firmly entrenched in *nix and MacOS respectively, and a couple of independent engines: Opera (cross-platform) and iCab (Mac).
...and we're still waiting for a complete CSS2 implementation. Though to be fair, CSS2 is only 8.5 years old, and has been undergone a couple of minor revisions. I've seen good comparisons of browser support for CSS2 and CSS3. Anyone know of a good summary of current browsers' CSS1 support?
But charging for functionality that is free elsewhere is like, well, Opera:)
You are aware, I trust, that the desktop version of Opera (the one that runs on Windows, Linux, Mac) has been free for over a year, right? (I'm not trying to be condescending. Just in the last few days I've seen statements by people who honestly thought that Opera still charged for the browser.)
Dillo is philosophically a perfect match for this project. One of its goals is to bridge the "digital divide" by providing a fast, low-footprint browser that can run on cheap or old hardware.
Unfortunately, current versions have no support for JavaScript or CSS, and character sets other than Latin1 currently require a patch. The next version will have Unicode support, due to the switch from GTK1 to FLTK2, and CSS is being worked on. But the project is bogged down due to lack of funding, and the main developers are having to spend time on other projects so they can do stuff like eat and pay rent. Jorge Arellano Cid describes it as a chicken-and-egg problem:
People in the embedded market want a small featured browser,
but don't want to invest in it. This is: if we develop it they'll
use it, but there's not much interest in funding the development.
From a business perspective it makes sense. Investing in Dillo
to make a full featured embedable web browser of it, is a three
years plan (and who knows what the Web will look like in three
years). Now if they only need an embedable web browser that
evolves into a full-featured one. They could start deploying it
in a year.
Unfortunately, those gaps severely limit Dillo's suitability for a large-scale "here's all you need!" project. In an ideal world, OLPC would invest some cash in Dillo so that they developers could at least finish the port to FLTK2 and basic CSS support, which would go a long way toward making it fit with the project's goals, and maybe even get started on JavaScript.
I generally recommend Opera for old hardware, for that very reason. I remember one time my brother dredged up an old 486 laptop with next-to-no memory (by today's standards) and managed to get some version of Windows running on it. Just for kicks, we tried running several browsers, but the only one we could get to start in less than a minute (other than IE 2.0, which is literally unusable since it doesn't send a Host: header on HTTP requests, and therefore is unable to visit any website on a shared server) was Opera.
Anyone else ever had their site visited by the Turnitin bot?
And the article mentioned Copyscape, which is more aimed at finding dupes of web pages (you enter a website, and it looks for similar pages in their index).
That's an interesting point. Would a Windows/Mac game (packaged in one box) be eligible for the "Games for Windows" label? Or would the studio have to choose between separate packaging and forgoing the premium brand?
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of makes you wonder who really won the Cold War, doesn't it?
We've obviously been doing better than Russia and most or all of the other former Soviet republics, and capitalism clearly triumphed over communism, but when it comes to personal freedoms, we're doing to ourselves what we feared the Soviets would do to us. Did we really come out on top?
Many other open source projects -- distributions included -- are developed by a mix of full-time paid contributors and unpaid volunteers. And yet they manage to keep things going.
I know Debian is all about the Free, but it seems odd that paying a couple of people would cause problems with volunteers.
Could happen. As you said, it's finally been released under an open-source license. Not sure about patent status, though.
Not going to happen. Fedora has a policy of including only open-source, Free with a capital F software that is not encumbered by patents. NVidia drivers and Flash aren't open source. DVD and MP3 playback are covered by patents.
There's a group called Fedora Unity that does this. Check their site for Re-spins.
Don't overload the certificate concept. If you make it clear that all an SSL cert means is that no one is listening in on the conversation between your browser and the website (assuming your machine and the server aren't compromised themselves) then the easy cert doesn't create that false impression.
AFAIK, Firefox does not treat EV SSL certs differently from normal SSL certs. This may change, particularly if Microsoft can convince end-users that "greenlighting" EV SSL certs is a good thing, at which point people will start complaining about Firefox being insecure because it doesn't turn the address bar green.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that it does block access to a "red" site with an "are you sure you want to visit this?" warning. The initial design of the phishing filter is described on IEBlog. Some details have probably changed since then, but that's the basic way it works in the final version.
So if I insist that someone give my friend money, or I'll threaten their ability to do business, it's not extortion because I'm not the one getting paid?
I'll have to remember that one!
Actually there's two issues -- site verification and anti-phishing -- which are getting mashed together because they act on a similar concept (how much can I trust this site?) and display through the color in the address bar.
White is the default state, and says nothing about the site.
Red is when the site matches a blacklist of known phishing sites. (If you have the antiphishing turned on, it will check with MS each time you load a new page.)
Green is when the site uses one of these new SSL certificates which provides additional data and (supposedly) has a tougher approval process in which the certificate authority does an actual background check on the company instead of just making sure they have a working phone number. One hopes a blacklist hit will trump this.
A secure site that uses a standard SSL cert and is not a known phisher will have a white location bar.
OK, which project would we have been better off without? Can you be sure that Project A would have come up with the feature they were copying from Project B? Or that Project B would have been as successful without learning from Project C's mistakes? If the people from Project B had been working on Project A instead, would that nifty feature have made it through the design process to prove its appeal?
Choices aren't just good for their own sake. They're good because each project is going to have its own sensibilities, and is going to go off and try different things. Some ideas will be successful. Some will not. After the Mozilla Suite, Netscape 6, Galeon, and K-Meleon, it finally took Firefox to weaken IE's stranglehold. If everyone had just stuck with contributing to the Mozilla Suite, there's a good chance they would never have hit upon the type of browser that would be positioned to take advantage of crumbling confidence in IE.
Just to clarify, "the people running the project" in this case means "the people running the Fedora Legacy project."
Random Rule of Slashdot #843: The one time you don't use Preview will be the one time you should have.
It's been hashed out on the mailing list. The upshot is this: Fedora Legacy depended heavily on volunteers. While there has been demand for them to release updates, there have never been enough volunteers to keep it going. This has been true almost since the beginning, but it finally got to the point where the people running the project looked at it, said "we really can't keep up, can we?" and decided to fold the resources available into the main Fedora Project.
As I understand it, the current plan is to drop Fedora Legacy entirely, but extend official support for the immediate previous release (which right now would be Fedora Core 5) for several months longer than the old EOL policy.
You mentioned CSS3, so you may be aware of this already, but CSS media queries will eventually do this. AFAIK, Opera is still the only browser with even experimental support for them, though.
Can be, yes -- there's even a Windows KHTML browser in early alpha stages called Swift -- but practically speaking, most KHTML browsers today are running on *nix platforms, and most Webkit browsers are on Mac OS X. Yes, you can run a non-Webkti KHTML browser on Mac OS X, but Webkit is available right there. And IIRC someone ported Webkit to GTK to run it on cell phones (Nokia?), but for the most part *nix browsers (not counting OSX) tend to use Gecko or KHTML.
This nicely demonstrates the fact that Acid2 is not a CSS compliance test (something which I've seen claimed in many discussions). If Opera 9 and Safari 2 can both pass Acid2, but Opera 9 has broader and/or less buggy CSS support, then Acid2 cannot tell you the overall level of compliance.
It's important to remember what Acid2 is: namely, a wish list for web developers. It's a bunch of features that developers would like to use, but which had (until recently) limited, buggy, or just plain no support in major browsers. The prestige of passing Acid2 (and, conversely, the shame of not passing it) was supposed to motivate browser developers to essentially fill in the corners of their CSS support, making it feasible for web developers to start using more of their toolboxes.
It's taken time, but it's succeeded, with one notable "we don't care, we don't have to" exception: Internet Explorer. Of the four major engines, KHTML and Opera have it, and Gecko is getting it soon. And the biggest player on the block seems to be doing its best to prevent us from actually using our tools if we want the majority of web surfers to see our sites as designed.
I take it you haven't been following news about IE7? Or did I miss something and it's got some major bug in its alpha channel support?
Sorry, I left out the scare quotes around "only."
Heck, chances are Opera will run on his current computer.
Isn't it interesting, though, that most of the Acid2-compliant browsers are either Mac or Unix-based? I suppose that has to do with the fact that most Windows-only browsers just embed the IE rendering engine, and most cross-platform browsers use Gecko (here's to Gecko 1.9 passing Acid2 when it's finished!). That basically leaves KHTML and Webkit, which are firmly entrenched in *nix and MacOS respectively, and a couple of independent engines: Opera (cross-platform) and iCab (Mac).
...and we're still waiting for a complete CSS2 implementation. Though to be fair, CSS2 is only 8.5 years old, and has been undergone a couple of minor revisions. I've seen good comparisons of browser support for CSS2 and CSS3. Anyone know of a good summary of current browsers' CSS1 support?
You just look out the windows.
...
Reminds me of the "Weather Log" (or sometimes the "Weather Rock")
If it's wet, it's raining.
If it's white on top, it's snowing.
If it has a shadow, it's sunny.
If it doesn't have a shadow, it's cloudy.
etc.
I don't know, maybe SAFARI, the browser that was first across the finish line for Acid2?
Not to mention iCab and (as another poster mentioned) Konqueror.
You are aware, I trust, that the desktop version of Opera (the one that runs on Windows, Linux, Mac) has been free for over a year, right? (I'm not trying to be condescending. Just in the last few days I've seen statements by people who honestly thought that Opera still charged for the browser.)
Dillo is philosophically a perfect match for this project. One of its goals is to bridge the "digital divide" by providing a fast, low-footprint browser that can run on cheap or old hardware.
Unfortunately, current versions have no support for JavaScript or CSS, and character sets other than Latin1 currently require a patch. The next version will have Unicode support, due to the switch from GTK1 to FLTK2, and CSS is being worked on. But the project is bogged down due to lack of funding, and the main developers are having to spend time on other projects so they can do stuff like eat and pay rent. Jorge Arellano Cid describes it as a chicken-and-egg problem:
Unfortunately, those gaps severely limit Dillo's suitability for a large-scale "here's all you need!" project. In an ideal world, OLPC would invest some cash in Dillo so that they developers could at least finish the port to FLTK2 and basic CSS support, which would go a long way toward making it fit with the project's goals, and maybe even get started on JavaScript.
I generally recommend Opera for old hardware, for that very reason. I remember one time my brother dredged up an old 486 laptop with next-to-no memory (by today's standards) and managed to get some version of Windows running on it. Just for kicks, we tried running several browsers, but the only one we could get to start in less than a minute (other than IE 2.0, which is literally unusable since it doesn't send a Host: header on HTTP requests, and therefore is unable to visit any website on a shared server) was Opera.
Anyone else ever had their site visited by the Turnitin bot?
And the article mentioned Copyscape, which is more aimed at finding dupes of web pages (you enter a website, and it looks for similar pages in their index).
I think "Gambit" is a mutant. Or at least a mutation of the English language.
That's an interesting point. Would a Windows/Mac game (packaged in one box) be eligible for the "Games for Windows" label? Or would the studio have to choose between separate packaging and forgoing the premium brand?