It's true that there's a sizeable representation from AOL-TW, and it may be the case that this represents a failure on their part to truly open-source the project. But I think of them more as the "shock troops" that have prepared the ground and created the first truly stable code base for the browser. Now that there's a real, working product that is worthwhile to use but not perfect, you'll start to see more bug fixes and features from outside AOL-TW. We've already started to see this as Gecko is used in Galeon, etc. I guess I see this as the beginning of the Mozilla story, and not the end.
Hate to tell you, but the tabbed link thing doesn't work in NS 4.7x right here on Linux. Maybe it's a Windows-only thing? Does sound like a neat feature, though. Have you logged it as a feature request or something?
Unfortunately, it's a lot harder to add developers on the basis of "let's make it stable" than it is for "let's add something flashy!". In order to ramp up developer interest, open source projects really have to maintain that interest level that comes from envisioning and implementing new features that you use. But once the features are there, and the whole community plays with them and becomes familiar with the code, they will get fixed as people are annoyed with them.
It's true that Mozilla has taken a long time to go from essentially 0 to ~6.0. But with this base to build on, and all of the code available to other free projects now, it has nowhere to go but up. I'll admit that I haven't been a big fan of Mozilla thus far, but even I'll be trying it out on Solaris tomorrow because of all the good things I've read here today.
Is that why sometimes when I click on the/. "parent" link the whole story gets loaded, even though the real parent post isn't a top-level post -- this is done for ad revenue? Or is it just a random/. bug?
Here's a good question: if the Klingons were as advanced as they appear, why didn't they conquer Earth right off? They must have been fighting a hella' war with the Romulans at the time, or else the humans got real scary real fast:)
Well, if you go by the Enterprise story line, the Klingons were a lot farther ahead of the humans at the time of their first few meetings. Although both had warp drives, the Klingons had photon torpedoes, beam weapons already equipped on their ships, sizeable space fleets, etc. The Vulcans already had these too (probably) but this was before the formation of the Federation.
I recommend a couple Taco Bell cheap burrito-like items stuffed in one's back pockets, then covered with a coat. Just remember: don't sit down 'til you remove them, and know that it's very messy to eat burritos in the dark:)
So many things that don't make sense, so little time...
QuickTime works on Windows, so it's not like it's too tied to the MacOS's API layer.
Framemaker works on tons of platforms, including HP-UX and Solaris. It is an example of how portable you really can make a tool, not the opposite.
Apple wouldn't have to spend any money at all to get Linux support for QuickTime; they just have to open the specs to the world, or even to just a few dedicated hackers who'd do it for free. These days, portability is practically a gift bestowed for free upon companies that are smart enough to seize upon it. Apple, apparently, is not.
Yeah, whatever, it's a packaging scheme and not an actual codec. How did I know this was going to come up - next to open source/free software, the most guaranteed route to getting corrected on/. is to say something incorrect about Quicktime, apparently.
Unfortunately, your vast intellectual superiority notwithstanding, there remains a sizeable chunk of media labeled "quicktime" for which there is no player available on Linux and other operating systems. Therefore I say that if Quicktime wants people to not think of it as a nonportable format, they need to quit letting it be used by other people who put nonportable stuff in it and basically make it nonportable. Because nobody calls it "a Sorenson Quicktime movie", they just say it's a "Quicktime movie".
If there's a bandwidth glut, you would think that bandwidth would be getting steadily cheaper. This does not seem to be the case. Therefore I find your argument of a glut unconvincing or at least unsupported.
Re:Publish bomb instructions, go to jail
on
Raisethefist.com Raided
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think you'd better be careful on that there slippery slope, because the next step is "how many of us really want 'that hacker kid' down the street having the knowledge of how to reset my router or how to access my bank's poorly-secured web site?" A lot of the things that people on this site know and converse about freely could be just as dangerous to the public as bomb-making instructions.
I'm not defending hacking or blowing up people with bombs, and I'm not entirely defending this kid either. I'm just saying that we need to differentiate between the knowledge of how to do something, the tools for doing something, and the actual doing of the thing. Responsibility should be laid against those who actually commit crimes, not all of those who know how to. Providing bomb-making information (which is available on any number of other sites) does not seem to be such a major crime.
Although hacking a DoD site definitely was a big mistake. On those grounds alone he should go down.
TrustE has been sold out for a while. Their web certification has always been ISO9001-like: it signifies that you do what you say you do, not that you do what consumers would expect that you would do with their data. This is just the next logical step for the visionaries over at TrustE.
I could tell a sixth-grader how to set up a Linux Beowulf cluster in about a page too, including running a provided demo program. As long as the kid can read, type, and plug in network cables I think we'd be all set.
But really using it is where you need the information - programs don't just write themselves in Apple's clustering language, any more than they write themselves to run on a Beowulf cluster. Knowing how to exploit clustered processing is a lot more than a one-page summary, applying this knowledge to your particular problem is where you actually spend your time. Not to mention deciding whether a particular hardware configuration will really work for what you want to do at an acceptable price (which the Mac example completely sidesteps). System installation and setup is a no-op in comparison. (Well, unless you're the guy running Google's 4000-node cluster, but by then I imagine you would have it automated to the point where you could rotate in a new node in less than a page:)
Well, we would have stopped them, but they were busy writing our energy policy and that just would have been, y'know, a little impolite or something? Not to mention embarrassing if it gets out that we got all these ideas for running the country from a bunch of guys who couldn't even run a successful business in a deregulated market. We've got better manners than that here in Texas, don'tya know.
Hmmm, I wonder if this could be another case where the WTO would stick it to the U.S.? It's clearly restraining the trade of this Russian company with what is basically a legal product. It would be quite funny to see the forces of global trade acting to correct the excesses of giant corporations and their laws, rather than the reverse:)
Um, the whole point of "natural rights" is that they do not spring from a government, but innately belong to the people. So in that case, people in any country have natural rights. If you believe in natural rights at all, you must accord them to everyone in the world.
Civil rights are the expression in the government and in society of our innate natural rights. To the extent that these do not mirror "natural rights", one can say that a person lacks "civil rights". Of course this brings up the question of which things are "natural rights", which are really a human philosophical construct, which is another argument.
Repeat after me: the business community doesn't run Linus kernels anyway. They run RedHat kernels, or Mandrake kernels, or maybe Debian kernels. The distributor is completely welcome to adopt these patches if they see the benefit of them and have time to assure themselves of their benefit. The state of the Linus kernel really has very little to do with what an enterprise user of Linux will experience.
Now, it will look kinda bad for Linus if we end up with a system where patches are tested out in shipped distributions before they are tested in the main kernel tree, but that's a PR problem more than anything.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that there's a sizeable representation from AOL-TW, and it may be the case that this represents a failure on their part to truly open-source the project. But I think of them more as the "shock troops" that have prepared the ground and created the first truly stable code base for the browser. Now that there's a real, working product that is worthwhile to use but not perfect, you'll start to see more bug fixes and features from outside AOL-TW. We've already started to see this as Gecko is used in Galeon, etc. I guess I see this as the beginning of the Mozilla story, and not the end.
Hate to tell you, but the tabbed link thing doesn't work in NS 4.7x right here on Linux. Maybe it's a Windows-only thing? Does sound like a neat feature, though. Have you logged it as a feature request or something?
Unfortunately, it's a lot harder to add developers on the basis of "let's make it stable" than it is for "let's add something flashy!". In order to ramp up developer interest, open source projects really have to maintain that interest level that comes from envisioning and implementing new features that you use. But once the features are there, and the whole community plays with them and becomes familiar with the code, they will get fixed as people are annoyed with them.
It's true that Mozilla has taken a long time to go from essentially 0 to ~6.0. But with this base to build on, and all of the code available to other free projects now, it has nowhere to go but up. I'll admit that I haven't been a big fan of Mozilla thus far, but even I'll be trying it out on Solaris tomorrow because of all the good things I've read here today.
Is that why sometimes when I click on the /. "parent" link the whole story gets loaded, even though the real parent post isn't a top-level post -- this is done for ad revenue? Or is it just a random /. bug?
Here's a good question: if the Klingons were as advanced as they appear, why didn't they conquer Earth right off? They must have been fighting a hella' war with the Romulans at the time, or else the humans got real scary real fast :)
Well, if you go by the Enterprise story line, the Klingons were a lot farther ahead of the humans at the time of their first few meetings. Although both had warp drives, the Klingons had photon torpedoes, beam weapons already equipped on their ships, sizeable space fleets, etc. The Vulcans already had these too (probably) but this was before the formation of the Federation.
TARG Ain't Romulan Gakh ? Hard to get a recursive abbreviation out of that one :)
Don't have one of those around here, although we do have a Taco John's which is about the same as Taco Hell.
What're really good are the little local joints run by real Mexican chefs, but those burritos are usually too large to fit in ones' pants pockets :)
I recommend a couple Taco Bell cheap burrito-like items stuffed in one's back pockets, then covered with a coat. Just remember: don't sit down 'til you remove them, and know that it's very messy to eat burritos in the dark :)
So many things that don't make sense, so little time...
Does being the anachrist mean that you don't know if you are Christ or not? Or is that agchristic, I can never remember.
Yeah, whatever, it's a packaging scheme and not an actual codec. How did I know this was going to come up - next to open source/free software, the most guaranteed route to getting corrected on /. is to say something incorrect about Quicktime, apparently.
Unfortunately, your vast intellectual superiority notwithstanding, there remains a sizeable chunk of media labeled "quicktime" for which there is no player available on Linux and other operating systems. Therefore I say that if Quicktime wants people to not think of it as a nonportable format, they need to quit letting it be used by other people who put nonportable stuff in it and basically make it nonportable. Because nobody calls it "a Sorenson Quicktime movie", they just say it's a "Quicktime movie".
So our options are a cross-platform expensive codec, or a free but non-portable codec? Bleh, I say: bleh.
If there's a bandwidth glut, you would think that bandwidth would be getting steadily cheaper. This does not seem to be the case. Therefore I find your argument of a glut unconvincing or at least unsupported.
I think you'd better be careful on that there slippery slope, because the next step is "how many of us really want 'that hacker kid' down the street having the knowledge of how to reset my router or how to access my bank's poorly-secured web site?" A lot of the things that people on this site know and converse about freely could be just as dangerous to the public as bomb-making instructions.
I'm not defending hacking or blowing up people with bombs, and I'm not entirely defending this kid either. I'm just saying that we need to differentiate between the knowledge of how to do something, the tools for doing something, and the actual doing of the thing. Responsibility should be laid against those who actually commit crimes, not all of those who know how to. Providing bomb-making information (which is available on any number of other sites) does not seem to be such a major crime.
Although hacking a DoD site definitely was a big mistake. On those grounds alone he should go down.
For example, if the site shows photos of Osama helping Bert wiring a detonator, it's probably a fake :)
"click"
Wait, he didn't hang up, he just said "click"!
"Dial toooooooone..."
TrustE has been sold out for a while. Their web certification has always been ISO9001-like: it signifies that you do what you say you do, not that you do what consumers would expect that you would do with their data. This is just the next logical step for the visionaries over at TrustE.
I could tell a sixth-grader how to set up a Linux Beowulf cluster in about a page too, including running a provided demo program. As long as the kid can read, type, and plug in network cables I think we'd be all set.
But really using it is where you need the information - programs don't just write themselves in Apple's clustering language, any more than they write themselves to run on a Beowulf cluster. Knowing how to exploit clustered processing is a lot more than a one-page summary, applying this knowledge to your particular problem is where you actually spend your time. Not to mention deciding whether a particular hardware configuration will really work for what you want to do at an acceptable price (which the Mac example completely sidesteps). System installation and setup is a no-op in comparison. (Well, unless you're the guy running Google's 4000-node cluster, but by then I imagine you would have it automated to the point where you could rotate in a new node in less than a page :)
Is your sidekick ThenOrThanBoy? And if that spot isn't taken, can I have it?
Well, we would have stopped them, but they were busy writing our energy policy and that just would have been, y'know, a little impolite or something? Not to mention embarrassing if it gets out that we got all these ideas for running the country from a bunch of guys who couldn't even run a successful business in a deregulated market. We've got better manners than that here in Texas, don'tya know.
- W
I guess that really taught them, didn't it :)
Hmmm, I wonder if this could be another case where the WTO would stick it to the U.S.? It's clearly restraining the trade of this Russian company with what is basically a legal product. It would be quite funny to see the forces of global trade acting to correct the excesses of giant corporations and their laws, rather than the reverse :)
Um, the whole point of "natural rights" is that they do not spring from a government, but innately belong to the people. So in that case, people in any country have natural rights. If you believe in natural rights at all, you must accord them to everyone in the world.
Civil rights are the expression in the government and in society of our innate natural rights. To the extent that these do not mirror "natural rights", one can say that a person lacks "civil rights". Of course this brings up the question of which things are "natural rights", which are really a human philosophical construct, which is another argument.
Repeat after me: the business community doesn't run Linus kernels anyway. They run RedHat kernels, or Mandrake kernels, or maybe Debian kernels. The distributor is completely welcome to adopt these patches if they see the benefit of them and have time to assure themselves of their benefit. The state of the Linus kernel really has very little to do with what an enterprise user of Linux will experience.
Now, it will look kinda bad for Linus if we end up with a system where patches are tested out in shipped distributions before they are tested in the main kernel tree, but that's a PR problem more than anything.