Is there an actual update channel for the ESR versions, or does this depend on manual updating?
In other words, if I need to set machines to use 10.x and receive the security updates, while ignoring all the intermediate "major" versions until the next ESR is released, then how do I do that?
Just for kicks, I decided to see what the local broadcast TV news was saying about this if anything.
The local FOX network noon news actually ran a piece on it surprisingly early on in the program but the spin they gave it - that most viewers would come away believing - was that the people protesting SOPA were "misinformed"!
I just hope they are actually serious about this extended support version. Their other "enterprise" efforts in the past have mostly just been talk.
And then there is still the problem that even if you, the company, are now on the new long term supported version, the beta testers^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h general public will be on newer versions that potentially may do things differently. If your corporate application is also public facing then you still have a problem.
Personally I would encourage regular users to stick with the long term supported version as well.
It's good they have finally picked a release for long term support. I don't give a shit that they say it this is not for individuals, I'll be sticking with 10 if it is LTS in any way, and that is what I will encourage others to use.
I am tired of being what amounts to their beta tester. And it irks me that anyone would use the public at large in that way.
Just hope they are serious about this. In the past most of their "enterprise" efforts have just been talk.
I would like to take yet another obligatory moment to once again point out that people being "stuck" with IE 6 would not have been such a big deal if it had been a proper independent application rather than "integrated" in to the OS.
People would have been better off designing apps that ran only under Netscape 4! You can run that alongside any newer version and on any newer version of Windows. No such luck with IE (at least not in an officially supported manner)
And because Microsoft made IE 6 part of XP, now they have to support it until XP dies. They didn't think about that back then did they?
I duno how much Microsoft really had to do with it, but it seemed like WordPerfect really screwed themselves with poor quality software and service.
The original release of WordPerfect 7 ONLY ran on Windows 95 (Not at all on under NT), was late to to release, and was not very stable. They later produced an update of WP 7 that was more stable and ran on NT 3.51/4.0 but the only way to get that was to order a new CD. No downloadable update patches for you!
WP 7 for Windows 3.1 was just a rebadged version of the 16-bit WP 6.1.
Then they pulled the same trick with WordPerfect 8. Initially buggy and updates required obtaining a new CD.
To this day there is still an option to turn off the "enhanced" open/save dialog because it is buggy and crashes under odd environments - especially under Wine.
It also didn't help that at the time it was switching ownership left and right. WordPerfect corp? Novel? Corel? Good way to destroy confidence in a product.
With the stories I have heard about this kind of thing potentially doing funny things with cable boxes or Tivio and such, I was curious if my little over-the-air DTV converter box would do anything unwanted. Fortunately it did not. Each station simply went to broadcasting their own custom themed video warning message on their channel and sub channels. I flipped through the channels to see all the different ones. The only odd thing was some channels went back to their normal programming sooner than others.
It was kind of interesting seeing how each station had a different looking message and some had different information. I had assumed they would have all been using more or less the same systems.
I know programmers and developers often like to think they know best, but it is important to remember that the file system belongs to the user, not you. You should respect that by not littering THEIR file system up with thousands of small files that they will never touch directly, obscurely named files and folders, or visible system internals.
There is no good reason an end user should be able to browse in to/dev or even see it at all. In *nix there are no attributes for hidden folders so you hacked it by having files start with a period?!! Individual applications are split up in to many thousands of scary looking files and folders that often get picked up when the user searches for something on the drive.
Look at the original MacOS - each application and even the OS was often just one distinct file each. Nothing scary there, and easy to manipulate.
All modern OSes have gotten away from that. On Mac, Windows, and Linux a "fresh" install easily has 10,000 files on it and an insanely huge directory tree. There is so much stuff it even has to have dedicated locations just for user files. Basically the entire disk belongs to the OS - not the user any more.
It doesn't help that Unix style file systems hail from the multiuser mainframe era where the disk NEVER belonged to an individual user.
Complain about the technical issues all you want, you are making things more confusing for end users than it needs to be.
It is conceivable that the real issue here is that Firefox's new rapid release is causing various compatibility problems to crop up at such a fast rate that the third parties can no longer fix issues in their software quickly enough.
In the past it was not uncommon that a major browser release would introduce compatibility problems, or the need for additional small features, with third party programs that interacted with them. There would be a month or so before those issues were resolved and it was back to stability again - which would last a year or two before the next major version.
You might have some luck if you try the disks in one or more different drives. The head alignment and other small factors like that are unique to each drive. Usually they are close enough that a freshly formatted disk will work in most other drives. But when there is a small defect in how it was recorded to the disk (power surge, controller glitch, etc) or a small media defect, then a different drive may have better (or worse) luck. I've seen my fair share of disks that will read fine in one drive but not another.
Be sure to clean any dust out of the drive and use a head cleaning disk before using it if it is old.
Also keep any partial initial copies you retrieve from a damaged disk - it is completely possible that it's condition may worsen as you continue to try and retrieved data from it.
And despite what others may say, keeping the archives in a zip file is a good thing. You know for sure if you files are intact or not. Floppy disks can often "successfully" read a sector only to have it contain gibberish. You can try running a zip recovery utility to like pkzipfix to recover any undamaged files inside a corrupt archive.
I would also recommend copying the files off using DOS (Win 9x DOS 7.1 can copy to FAT32 hard drives). From my experience most protected mode drivers are less forgiving on errors than real mode DOS.
So children, what has this taught us today? That's right, music is DANGEROUS.
What was once part of the human condition, bringing people together, binding their society, and begging at an instinctual level to be shared for the propagation of all human kind, is now owned by a few companies who will sue you to an early grave.
Destroy all of your radios, CD, and MP3 players. This stuff is more dangerous than radioactive waste.
I respect that for certain people that were directly affected by this event that this is something that will be with them for the rest of their lives.
But with all the fear and paranoia that has grown in the public since then, I think it is way past time for the rest of us to move on. But every day I hear the powerful voices in news proclaiming this that and the other that we should be afraid of. Too often invoking the name of 9/11, categorizing any little thing as terroristic, and growing the wave of fear that started that day.
BTW, thanks Slashdot for not running a thousand sensationalist stories about it. Like most media out there you know it would bring in the advertising dollars if you did. (Well, I guess there is still plenty of time for an unintentional dupe to show up)
Just to throw a little more nostalgia on the fire, here is a copy of an archive of Chips & Dips pulled from archive.org before they started blocking retrieval due to a current robots.txt: http://toastytech.com/files/chipsndips.html
Never could find a copy of the original logo graphic.
I guess nobody ever did recover any of the really early Slashdot stores or comments lost in that crash early on. I seem to recall someone saying they had some partial backup tapes.
Thanks for your response. There certainly are plenty of people out there who demand the absolute latest and greatest, and demand it yesterday. You are certainly making these people very happy right now.
But I believe you have seriously underestimated the impact of alienating the needs of your more technical, corporate, enterprise users and developers.
As evidenced by the responses on Slashdot, many are finding it more difficult if not impossible to fully support a rapidly changing target. This means more internal applications will potentially now not support Firefox. Some internal applications may eventually become external applications. And such development views may spill over to existing sites and applications. Which in the long term means more IE-only web sites for Firefox users. On top of that corporate desktops are less likely to adopt Firefox, making it more likely that their employees may want or need to use IE at home.
Although in the past Mozilla has not embraced the enterprise, its development efforts were not contrary to business needs, so it was making some headway.
I strongly suggest that Mozilla developers take a visit to some stuffy corporate or government offices to see what their IT is like there. See how important contracts, long term support, politics, PR, and ass covering really are. Any place that uses Oracle software would be a good bet.:)
There is never any one good answer to any given problem and I only wish I had a magic answer that would make even 99.90% of the people happy. (The only thing that comes to mind is a designated LTS version like what Ubuntu does, but Mozilla already has to worry about nightlys and betas). At any rate, it would be nice to see at least some official public response from Mozilla.org on this matter.
For those that may not remember, there used to be quite a bit of fanfare with Firefox community "parties", special downloading events, and such surrounding the major releases.
I suspect the intent was to try and recapture this publicity at more frequent intervals.
Unfortunately this has instead made major releases meaningless while destroying long term support and creating problems with many extensions.
I don't think this should have been modded down, it sounds like a Firefox experience that is sadly going to become more common for average users.
Don't know if anybody even noticed, but Mozilla shut down Spreadfirefox.com (now it just redirects to a page on Mozilla's main site) just before they released Firefox 4. Admittedly, the community had already gone down the toilet and the site was mostly just collecting spam.
(also the poster said he started using an iPad with Safari, not that he had been using Firefox on it)
I can understand companies not being in touch with their customers, but does Mozilla not even read tech sites like Slashdot? Every story about Firefox lately is filled with exactly how negatively people feel about this version number fiasco.
Chrome was able to get away with bumping version numbers because it was a very new product and nobody was depending on it yet. Even though they removed the "beta" tag surprisingly early on (for a Google product), I think many people STILL consider Chome as "beta".
On the other hand large corporate type applications were just beginning to support Firefox and depended on long term support of major versions. Well, that has just been stomped in the face. Sadly, from a corporate stand point the only browser that really seems stable, viable, and "corporate friendly" now is IE.
Ditto. I have piles of floppies sitting around here. Most of them have boot loaders and diagnostics. It's the easiest way to deal with dozens of crazy OSes all of which have conflicting boot loaders. Not all machines are happy booting from USB, and it is slightly easier to manage a pile of floppies over a pile of USB drives.
I wouldn't use floppies for storing documents these days but I find floppies very useful. I am rather dismayed that it is becoming harder to find motherboards with floppy drive headers on them - and the ones that do oddly only support one floppy drive instead of the old standard of two. At least for COM/Parallel you can buy PCI/PCIe cards to add those, but nobody seems to make PCI/PCIe floppy disk controllers.
Hmm, me thinks it wasn't an accident, but the microbial ridden primate marketing. How best to get news about your new product but to have a supposed mishap to build buzz about it. It's like a sex-tape for software.
Exactly. Microsoft is very good at this. It is a formula that has worked for them since the early 80s. The next time you see something leak about that new Rick Roll of an OS they plan to call "Windows 8" look closely, it is no accident, it is pure marketing.
Is there any kind of device that can be used to ensure you are only presented with a mass storage drive?
I'm thinking of something like a small adapter where you plug the USB "drive" in one end and the other in to your computer. The device could intercept and reprocess the communication so that anything that is not a standard drive would not get through. That would be nice to have because these days you never know what hardware is really in a seemingly standard looking USB drive. At the rate things are going we might need something like this built in to motherboards.
Also, I actually bought a couple of genuine Sandisk 1gb "U3" flash drives a while back at Microcenter. When inserted on a Windows XP machine it presented itself as both a standard drive AND a CD drive - that autoruns some useless preloaded windows software. (In some work environments just letting it run this hopefully harmless but unauthorized software would be enough to get someone in trouble.) Actually had to download and run a special program just to remove this garbage, and it wipes the flash drive in the process. So yes, even a legitimate commercial flash drive can be hiding stuff.
I'm afraid this version number insanity is just proof that Mozilla has gone totally nuts.
They don't seem to understand that enterprise desperately needed Mozilla - or more specifically a solid "web" platform they can develop applications against besides Microsoft Internet Explorer. I had always hoped that contracting and consulting companies that provide such applications to corporations would get involved in the Mozilla development and help steer the direction.
They needed a browser that could take the lead and add needed features. For a time it looked like the open development nature of Mozilla could provide that. Opera mostly seems to play catch-up, and it doesn't feel like Google develops for anyone other than Google.
This version number mess worked for Google because their product, as far as I am concerned, is still permanently in "beta". Corporate enterprise on the other hand needs something that is stable, production quality, and supported for a significant amount of time.
You know what should happen now... Just to piss of Mozilla, Google should stabilize the Google Chrome version number.
This whole version number thing is insane and pissing off anyone who needs a singe stable version that is supported for a reasonable length of time.
If they wanted to up the version number they should have just skipped 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 to 11 or 12. Or since everyone skips 13 anyway just go directly to 14 and be done with it. Then keep it there for at least a year.
Windows 1.00 was not quite ready to release to the public but they had some obligation to release, so they branded 1.00 as Windows "Premier Edition" and gave that to certain people. Windows 1.01 was apparently the first version to actually hit the store shelves.
Oh, man. I can think of so many things that have either been lost already or are on the brink of being lost. For starters, web sites that don't require a supercomputer just to display.:P
I also enjoy an old "clicky" keyboard that is slowly falling apart after much use. It is an odd one that has the function keys on the left, which works better for me since I am left handed. Bought it for next to nothing back in the early 90s at Microcenter - Insanely rare to find on eBay and even then anything similar would go for hundreds of dollars. (Is there anywhere else these can be found?) I wish I could go back in time and pick up some more. I also miss the days when it was unthinkable that a standard PC keyboard would have the Microsoft Windows logo on it!
Oh, other things that are harder to find - monitors that can do oddball resolutions (nothing like running MAME games at native resolutions on a CRT), LCD monitors that don't stretch lower resolutions out distorting the image, or that aren't useless "wide" screen in the first place. Motherboards with full legacy support: Dual COM ports, Parallel, PS/2 - and even if you can find one that has an FDD header it seems most these days only support ONE floppy drive (I have uses for this stuff, deal with it). Worse yet, finding newer motherboard with any significant number of PCI/PCIe slots seems to becoming more rare. The way I do things I could easily fill up all 7 standard expansion slots on an ATX system.
I also miss the days when computers didn't absolutely have to constantly be connected to teh innernets, didn't phone home, and "they" didn't keep logs of every action for all eternity.
And of course the days when computers were simple enough one person could understand the entire thing, and there weren't usually pieces that actively tried to keep people from doing whatever they wanted with the system or data.
I'm sure there are enough comments about people's lawns here...
Slashdot Mirror
Is there an actual update channel for the ESR versions, or does this depend on manual updating?
In other words, if I need to set machines to use 10.x and receive the security updates, while ignoring all the intermediate "major" versions until the next ESR is released, then how do I do that?
Just for kicks, I decided to see what the local broadcast TV news was saying about this if anything.
The local FOX network noon news actually ran a piece on it surprisingly early on in the program but the spin they gave it - that most viewers would come away believing - was that the people protesting SOPA were "misinformed"!
Of course, FOX is one of the big media companies.
I just hope they are actually serious about this extended support version. Their other "enterprise" efforts in the past have mostly just been talk.
And then there is still the problem that even if you, the company, are now on the new long term supported version, the beta testers^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h general public will be on newer versions that potentially may do things differently. If your corporate application is also public facing then you still have a problem.
Personally I would encourage regular users to stick with the long term supported version as well.
It's good they have finally picked a release for long term support. I don't give a shit that they say it this is not for individuals, I'll be sticking with 10 if it is LTS in any way, and that is what I will encourage others to use.
I am tired of being what amounts to their beta tester. And it irks me that anyone would use the public at large in that way.
Just hope they are serious about this. In the past most of their "enterprise" efforts have just been talk.
I would like to take yet another obligatory moment to once again point out that people being "stuck" with IE 6 would not have been such a big deal if it had been a proper independent application rather than "integrated" in to the OS.
People would have been better off designing apps that ran only under Netscape 4! You can run that alongside any newer version and on any newer version of Windows. No such luck with IE (at least not in an officially supported manner)
And because Microsoft made IE 6 part of XP, now they have to support it until XP dies. They didn't think about that back then did they?
I duno how much Microsoft really had to do with it, but it seemed like WordPerfect really screwed themselves with poor quality software and service.
The original release of WordPerfect 7 ONLY ran on Windows 95 (Not at all on under NT), was late to to release, and was not very stable. They later produced an update of WP 7 that was more stable and ran on NT 3.51/4.0 but the only way to get that was to order a new CD. No downloadable update patches for you!
WP 7 for Windows 3.1 was just a rebadged version of the 16-bit WP 6.1.
Then they pulled the same trick with WordPerfect 8. Initially buggy and updates required obtaining a new CD.
To this day there is still an option to turn off the "enhanced" open/save dialog because it is buggy and crashes under odd environments - especially under Wine.
It also didn't help that at the time it was switching ownership left and right. WordPerfect corp? Novel? Corel? Good way to destroy confidence in a product.
With the stories I have heard about this kind of thing potentially doing funny things with cable boxes or Tivio and such, I was curious if my little over-the-air DTV converter box would do anything unwanted. Fortunately it did not. Each station simply went to broadcasting their own custom themed video warning message on their channel and sub channels. I flipped through the channels to see all the different ones. The only odd thing was some channels went back to their normal programming sooner than others.
It was kind of interesting seeing how each station had a different looking message and some had different information. I had assumed they would have all been using more or less the same systems.
I know programmers and developers often like to think they know best, but it is important to remember that the file system belongs to the user, not you. You should respect that by not littering THEIR file system up with thousands of small files that they will never touch directly, obscurely named files and folders, or visible system internals.
There is no good reason an end user should be able to browse in to /dev or even see it at all. In *nix there are no attributes for hidden folders so you hacked it by having files start with a period?!! Individual applications are split up in to many thousands of scary looking files and folders that often get picked up when the user searches for something on the drive.
Look at the original MacOS - each application and even the OS was often just one distinct file each. Nothing scary there, and easy to manipulate.
All modern OSes have gotten away from that. On Mac, Windows, and Linux a "fresh" install easily has 10,000 files on it and an insanely huge directory tree. There is so much stuff it even has to have dedicated locations just for user files. Basically the entire disk belongs to the OS - not the user any more.
It doesn't help that Unix style file systems hail from the multiuser mainframe era where the disk NEVER belonged to an individual user.
Complain about the technical issues all you want, you are making things more confusing for end users than it needs to be.
It is conceivable that the real issue here is that Firefox's new rapid release is causing various compatibility problems to crop up at such a fast rate that the third parties can no longer fix issues in their software quickly enough.
In the past it was not uncommon that a major browser release would introduce compatibility problems, or the need for additional small features, with third party programs that interacted with them. There would be a month or so before those issues were resolved and it was back to stability again - which would last a year or two before the next major version.
With rapid release, stability goes away.
Great, just what I needed. Yet another article about Windows 8.
You might have some luck if you try the disks in one or more different drives. The head alignment and other small factors like that are unique to each drive. Usually they are close enough that a freshly formatted disk will work in most other drives. But when there is a small defect in how it was recorded to the disk (power surge, controller glitch, etc) or a small media defect, then a different drive may have better (or worse) luck. I've seen my fair share of disks that will read fine in one drive but not another.
Be sure to clean any dust out of the drive and use a head cleaning disk before using it if it is old.
Also keep any partial initial copies you retrieve from a damaged disk - it is completely possible that it's condition may worsen as you continue to try and retrieved data from it.
And despite what others may say, keeping the archives in a zip file is a good thing. You know for sure if you files are intact or not. Floppy disks can often "successfully" read a sector only to have it contain gibberish. You can try running a zip recovery utility to like pkzipfix to recover any undamaged files inside a corrupt archive.
I would also recommend copying the files off using DOS (Win 9x DOS 7.1 can copy to FAT32 hard drives). From my experience most protected mode drivers are less forgiving on errors than real mode DOS.
So children, what has this taught us today? That's right, music is DANGEROUS.
What was once part of the human condition, bringing people together, binding their society, and begging at an instinctual level to be shared for the propagation of all human kind, is now owned by a few companies who will sue you to an early grave.
Destroy all of your radios, CD, and MP3 players. This stuff is more dangerous than radioactive waste.
I respect that for certain people that were directly affected by this event that this is something that will be with them for the rest of their lives.
But with all the fear and paranoia that has grown in the public since then, I think it is way past time for the rest of us to move on. But every day I hear the powerful voices in news proclaiming this that and the other that we should be afraid of. Too often invoking the name of 9/11, categorizing any little thing as terroristic, and growing the wave of fear that started that day.
BTW, thanks Slashdot for not running a thousand sensationalist stories about it. Like most media out there you know it would bring in the advertising dollars if you did. (Well, I guess there is still plenty of time for an unintentional dupe to show up)
Just to throw a little more nostalgia on the fire, here is a copy of an archive of Chips & Dips pulled from archive.org before they started blocking retrieval due to a current robots.txt: http://toastytech.com/files/chipsndips.html
Never could find a copy of the original logo graphic.
I guess nobody ever did recover any of the really early Slashdot stores or comments lost in that crash early on. I seem to recall someone saying they had some partial backup tapes.
At any rate, good luck CmdrTaco!
Thanks for your response. There certainly are plenty of people out there who demand the absolute latest and greatest, and demand it yesterday. You are certainly making these people very happy right now.
But I believe you have seriously underestimated the impact of alienating the needs of your more technical, corporate, enterprise users and developers.
As evidenced by the responses on Slashdot, many are finding it more difficult if not impossible to fully support a rapidly changing target. This means more internal applications will potentially now not support Firefox. Some internal applications may eventually become external applications. And such development views may spill over to existing sites and applications. Which in the long term means more IE-only web sites for Firefox users. On top of that corporate desktops are less likely to adopt Firefox, making it more likely that their employees may want or need to use IE at home.
Although in the past Mozilla has not embraced the enterprise, its development efforts were not contrary to business needs, so it was making some headway.
I strongly suggest that Mozilla developers take a visit to some stuffy corporate or government offices to see what their IT is like there. See how important contracts, long term support, politics, PR, and ass covering really are. Any place that uses Oracle software would be a good bet. :)
There is never any one good answer to any given problem and I only wish I had a magic answer that would make even 99.90% of the people happy. (The only thing that comes to mind is a designated LTS version like what Ubuntu does, but Mozilla already has to worry about nightlys and betas). At any rate, it would be nice to see at least some official public response from Mozilla.org on this matter.
For those that may not remember, there used to be quite a bit of fanfare with Firefox community "parties", special downloading events, and such surrounding the major releases.
I suspect the intent was to try and recapture this publicity at more frequent intervals.
Unfortunately this has instead made major releases meaningless while destroying long term support and creating problems with many extensions.
I don't think this should have been modded down, it sounds like a Firefox experience that is sadly going to become more common for average users.
Don't know if anybody even noticed, but Mozilla shut down Spreadfirefox.com (now it just redirects to a page on Mozilla's main site) just before they released Firefox 4. Admittedly, the community had already gone down the toilet and the site was mostly just collecting spam.
(also the poster said he started using an iPad with Safari, not that he had been using Firefox on it)
I can understand companies not being in touch with their customers, but does Mozilla not even read tech sites like Slashdot? Every story about Firefox lately is filled with exactly how negatively people feel about this version number fiasco.
Chrome was able to get away with bumping version numbers because it was a very new product and nobody was depending on it yet. Even though they removed the "beta" tag surprisingly early on (for a Google product), I think many people STILL consider Chome as "beta".
On the other hand large corporate type applications were just beginning to support Firefox and depended on long term support of major versions. Well, that has just been stomped in the face. Sadly, from a corporate stand point the only browser that really seems stable, viable, and "corporate friendly" now is IE.
Ditto. I have piles of floppies sitting around here. Most of them have boot loaders and diagnostics. It's the easiest way to deal with dozens of crazy OSes all of which have conflicting boot loaders. Not all machines are happy booting from USB, and it is slightly easier to manage a pile of floppies over a pile of USB drives.
I wouldn't use floppies for storing documents these days but I find floppies very useful. I am rather dismayed that it is becoming harder to find motherboards with floppy drive headers on them - and the ones that do oddly only support one floppy drive instead of the old standard of two. At least for COM/Parallel you can buy PCI/PCIe cards to add those, but nobody seems to make PCI/PCIe floppy disk controllers.
Hmm, me thinks it wasn't an accident, but the microbial ridden primate marketing. How best to get news about your new product but to have a supposed mishap to build buzz about it. It's like a sex-tape for software.
Exactly. Microsoft is very good at this. It is a formula that has worked for them since the early 80s. The next time you see something leak about that new Rick Roll of an OS they plan to call "Windows 8" look closely, it is no accident, it is pure marketing.
Is there any kind of device that can be used to ensure you are only presented with a mass storage drive?
I'm thinking of something like a small adapter where you plug the USB "drive" in one end and the other in to your computer. The device could intercept and reprocess the communication so that anything that is not a standard drive would not get through. That would be nice to have because these days you never know what hardware is really in a seemingly standard looking USB drive. At the rate things are going we might need something like this built in to motherboards.
Also, I actually bought a couple of genuine Sandisk 1gb "U3" flash drives a while back at Microcenter. When inserted on a Windows XP machine it presented itself as both a standard drive AND a CD drive - that autoruns some useless preloaded windows software. (In some work environments just letting it run this hopefully harmless but unauthorized software would be enough to get someone in trouble.) Actually had to download and run a special program just to remove this garbage, and it wipes the flash drive in the process. So yes, even a legitimate commercial flash drive can be hiding stuff.
I'm afraid this version number insanity is just proof that Mozilla has gone totally nuts.
They don't seem to understand that enterprise desperately needed Mozilla - or more specifically a solid "web" platform they can develop applications against besides Microsoft Internet Explorer. I had always hoped that contracting and consulting companies that provide such applications to corporations would get involved in the Mozilla development and help steer the direction.
They needed a browser that could take the lead and add needed features. For a time it looked like the open development nature of Mozilla could provide that. Opera mostly seems to play catch-up, and it doesn't feel like Google develops for anyone other than Google.
This version number mess worked for Google because their product, as far as I am concerned, is still permanently in "beta". Corporate enterprise on the other hand needs something that is stable, production quality, and supported for a significant amount of time.
You know what should happen now... Just to piss of Mozilla, Google should stabilize the Google Chrome version number.
This whole version number thing is insane and pissing off anyone who needs a singe stable version that is supported for a reasonable length of time.
If they wanted to up the version number they should have just skipped 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 to 11 or 12. Or since everyone skips 13 anyway just go directly to 14 and be done with it. Then keep it there for at least a year.
>Apparently there was some sort of major bug with 1.0, or memory leak, or something.
There was an article linked to on Slashdot a while back that explained this. Here is the link:
http://technologizer.com/2010/03/08/the-secret-origin-of-windows/
Windows 1.00 was not quite ready to release to the public but they had some obligation to release, so they branded 1.00 as Windows "Premier Edition" and gave that to certain people. Windows 1.01 was apparently the first version to actually hit the store shelves.
Oh, man. I can think of so many things that have either been lost already or are on the brink of being lost. For starters, web sites that don't require a supercomputer just to display. :P
I also enjoy an old "clicky" keyboard that is slowly falling apart after much use. It is an odd one that has the function keys on the left, which works better for me since I am left handed. Bought it for next to nothing back in the early 90s at Microcenter - Insanely rare to find on eBay and even then anything similar would go for hundreds of dollars. (Is there anywhere else these can be found?) I wish I could go back in time and pick up some more. I also miss the days when it was unthinkable that a standard PC keyboard would have the Microsoft Windows logo on it!
Oh, other things that are harder to find - monitors that can do oddball resolutions (nothing like running MAME games at native resolutions on a CRT), LCD monitors that don't stretch lower resolutions out distorting the image, or that aren't useless "wide" screen in the first place. Motherboards with full legacy support: Dual COM ports, Parallel, PS/2 - and even if you can find one that has an FDD header it seems most these days only support ONE floppy drive (I have uses for this stuff, deal with it). Worse yet, finding newer motherboard with any significant number of PCI/PCIe slots seems to becoming more rare. The way I do things I could easily fill up all 7 standard expansion slots on an ATX system.
I also miss the days when computers didn't absolutely have to constantly be connected to teh innernets, didn't phone home, and "they" didn't keep logs of every action for all eternity.
And of course the days when computers were simple enough one person could understand the entire thing, and there weren't usually pieces that actively tried to keep people from doing whatever they wanted with the system or data.
I'm sure there are enough comments about people's lawns here...