The price of this openness is that little exploits like this fall through the cracks.
No. The price of this openness are viruses like ILOVEYOU which did nothing at all but utilize the tools that Microsoft provided.
I'll grant you, reusing components and interlinking apps really is a good idea. At the same time, some level of consideration needs to be paid to even the most basic level of security. Should a word processor, or any other Office app, be given the ability to alter the OS without any restrictions? Maybe I'm lacking some imagination here, but I can't think of a single good reason why Excel should be allowed to alter ANY entry in my registry.
Speaking of registry probs, more interesting stuff on this in a later post by me.
Believe it or not, you are probably approaching for the first time in your life the reason why John Adams wrote the 2nd amendment in the first place. Congratulations!
After reading through the previous posts it doesn't seem to me that anyone has addressed the scariest part about I2, "quality of service". What this actually means is that within the header of an IPv6 packet is a priority byte. Based on the value of this byte will determine whether that packet sits waiting at the router, or rushes on through. From the article...
I-2 is researching what it calls "quality of service," some way to guarantee seamless delivery of priority transmissions. A collaborative medical procedure, for instance, should not be interrupted by e-mail traffic. One thought is to create a premium service, where critical data would be tagged so that routers would pass it through first, much the way railroads clear the tracks for express trains.
The way the article makes it sound, there will be a purely technical reasoning behind which packets will be given a priority. Bzzzz, wrong answer folks. What is being sold to corporate IT managers out there (based on some IPv6 seminars I've been to) is that you'll be able to buy higher priority for your packets.
Stop and really think about this. You're an ISP that can assign a different priority to packets going to and from your various customers. Are you really going to ignore the billing potential of selling higher packet priority to different folks? For that matter, as the demand goes up for higher packet priority, so does the cost.
There are some truly frightening scenarios that can come to play here with the standard as it is presently being presented. What we're really looking at here is that live medical procedure waiting at the router for a CEO's E-Mail to get through.
As usual, I can't quite seem to grasp what is so wonderous about Apple. What is so "noble" about a company struggling to take their 5% market niche up to 6% or 7%?
I suppose if Linux would come out in flavors rather than distributions than open source could be innovative too. Maybe, just maybe somebody else out there can take $600 retail worth of hardware, stick it inside a plexiglass fish bowl, sell it for $1299 and they too can be marked as innovating design. Or sued for using plexiglass.
What I really want to know is why Tandy didn't try suing Apple for stealing their TRS-80 Model III design. Heck, even that old box at least came with a floppy drive.
I wasn't going to rant here, I wasn't. No, really!
naden, you hit on a topic that's been scaring the heck out of me considering who is really running the Mozilla show. Yes, I have read many a lecture and been provided numbers of arguments that pointed out for me how Mozilla was not Netscape or AOL, but a truly independant entity. These were all good arguments mind you, but I still have my doubts.
Clue #1: Netscape home page turned into pop up ad hell, designed to look like the Mozilla default skin.
Clue #2: Why was theming so important all this time? As cool as this is the whole process of plugging it in and making it work (even with XUL in the play) could have waited until Moz 2.0. Unless a certain service provider needed a way to expand what platforms their software ran on. A simple browser couldn't do that.
Clue #3: Moz is going to have a mail client. You can love it or hate it, it's in there. For folks, such as myself, it needed to be in order to fully replace NS 4.7. Thing is, somewhere along the line it was decided that they didn't have time to implement LDAP into the address book. This rather upset me, as I utilize this at my office where folks mostly use NS 4.x for mail. Even being upset I can appreciate time constraints. I'm just wondering why 3 months of development has instead been going into working on AOL's addressing schema. All the while, only one indvidual has been doing any work with the open standard LDAP.
There's a good bit more that's still nagging at me about AOL's involvement with all this. I think I'll save some of that for the next milestone release of Mozilla.
Of course there is no single language of the digital world. Duh! English as a language is enjoying wide spread use because the bulk of the cash is sitting in English speaking countries. If folks are learning English as a 2nd language, they are doing so in order to trade with the US and Britain.
And before the left wing around here goes after me with pitch forks and flaming torches, I should add that theres nothing either new or evil about this. It's the natural relationship that language and trade have had for centuries. Now that trade has moved into the cyber realms doesn't change the fact of where the cash is located.
Why the hell does the windows binary of mozilla consume over 30Mb of mem while iexplorer takes 7,8Mb?
I'd like to know why Mozilla is a 7meg download while IE is something like 40-50meg?
To more directly answer your question, the Mozilla development has shifted gears away from functionality at this point towards memory and performance issues. At the moment on NT Mozilla is taking up about 30meg of memory. After a while this number will just continue to grow. The problem at this point is that they are just now addressing memory clean up details, which weren't getting the same level of attention as functions earlier. I would suspect that by the next milestone we'll be seeing memory usage that is far more in line with what you'd expect to see in a browser.
A little factoid for those not following the Mozilla project quite THAT closely. The milestone releases stink. They always have, and probably will continue to do so right up until when they release Moz 1.0 some time 3rd quarter of 2005.
If you're looking for a reasonable snapshot of where Mozilla is at, pop on over to Mozillazine and use the links at the top of their page for the latest nightly download that's functional. Unless you're a third party developer, such as Alphanumerica, the milestones are best forgotten. Pull down a nightly and see what ya think. Love it or hate it, it's generally a much better picture of where this project is actually at.
The themes do install, and even on the nightly builds. They just don't install as advertised yet. For some reason the theme install seems to hang while trying to get back in contact with themes.org. What ya need to do is let the theme download, which will extract the files into their proper folders. When the dialog box showing the install goes away, pop into Mozilla's preferences and select the new theme manually.
There's quite obviously more work needing to be done on the follow through on the install, but it is quite possible to get those themes down and switched. You should be aware up front that when switching themes it'll blank out whatever web page you happen to be looking at, so you'll have to re-load. Minor stuff, but a glitch never the less.
With a closed up tight hardware architecture. It really doesn't matter how spiffy Steve's new toy is. So long as Apple and crew continue to dictate what hardware will be used I will continue to wish for their downfall.
I'm left wondering how this is going to play with the plans that AOL has for Mozilla. From the rumour mill, AOL 6.0 client is going to be made up using Mozilla as it's rendering engine. This is supposed to be true whether or not they drop IE as their browser of choice. Couple this with some of the proprietary work being done, such as integrating AIM, and there certainly appears to be a conflict brewing.
Mind you, I have zero concern for the well being of AOL or their software. Thing is, if AOL is going to want to build into Mozilla these proprietary components, aren't we looking at GPL conflicts all over the place? How far can they take this and still please both the company funding them and the community keeping them going? As earlier posts have suggested already, there's a LOT of details that need explained before this has any real weight.
I've used Mozilla now and again (M14 I think is the last one I touched), and it's stability leaves a great deal to be desired.
Yeah, I was trying out Windows 2.0 a little while back. Boy did it ever suck. Nobody would ever use that. Ack, and did you see that Linux 0.8 kernel? That'll never get anywhere either.
It's easy to envision there will be some individuals who are philosophically opposed to the GPL, and will refuse consent on that basis.
A bunch of volunteers working on an open source project with deep philosophical problems with GPL. Are you from Redmond?
This could potentially lead to a very messy code split
Kids, don't try taking logical leaps like this at home. Obviously this person is a professional and has taken the proper safety precautions to avoid falling into a mental abyss.
Your desktop software will most likely not need this for a LONG time. In addition, it's probably also fair to say that most servers won't need anything like this either.
Where we could use this kind of technology today is in the high end routers driving the Internet. As present research is investing heavily into TeraByte routers, even these will be heavily taxed for speed in the coming years. You can bet that folks like Lucent and Cisco are looking very closely at this kind of speed requirement.
Prince and Stephen King are as big as you can get, they could literally get away with any wacky pay-me-if-you-like model off their celebrity alone.
Quite true. We have yet to even see the means for a new artist to break through to the public via Internet marketing alone. What you seem to be missing here though is that where Prince most likely holds zero rights to his earlier work, Stephen King still own all the rights to his work. King can utilize whatever means of marketing he wishes, where as Prince had to wait out his contract with Time-Warner before he could even use his original stage name.
The RIAA owns all the keys to all the gates. They've been very effective at slamming to death any new gates being constructed, such as DAT. I'm not 100% comfortable with the notion of Napster being the primary means of distribution, but I am very sure that something needs to take the keys away from those bastards that have had a 100% lock on the flow of music for better than 5 decades now. It may be that we need to tear down the whole fence and start over.
After going over the patent info, I think I'll just go ahead and stand by my original post. I am still of the opinion this has far more to do with user customization methodology than simply tabs.
Seems like Adobe must be getting prettied scared about Macromedia products if they're willing to unleash the lawyers on this.
Without doing a reasonable amount of research into this, like reading the patent or seeing the Macromedia product, I would guess that what we're talking about here is more than just tabbed windows. Heck, if it were just that they'd be suing a lot more folks than just Macromedia.
Photoshop utilizes a number of floating dialog boxes with tabs that switch between the various tools. Where Adobe's stuff is unique is that you can drag those tabs out to create new dialog boxes. You can also drag between different boxes to form new combinations of tools within a dialog box.
Okay, so customizing floating dialog boxes isn't exactly earth shattering stuff. Lot's of other folks have similar kinds of interfaces, but Adobe apparently owns this concept when utilizing tabs to customize them. You can have floating dialog boxes, and you can have tabs on them, but you can't use those tabs to customize them.
Personally, I think Adobe is going to lose big time on this one. Those tabs emulate file folders moving between drawers, and with a heavy precedent for the folder analogy througout GUI's I think they're going to have a hard time maintaining this one. On the other hand, it is a very cool feature for customizing the look and feel of Adobe products which nobody else has done a good job of emulating without duplicating. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.
But I've never heard anyone describe how, even in the most general terms, a science of such a thing would look. What's the molecular/genetic equivalent of binary math?
A couple of very fair questions. To answer the first I would refer you to my earlier post linking to the article in Wired about this. For a more in depth look at this there are 4 papers USC has published on this subject. Fair warning, quite a bit of this goes beyond "even in the most general terms".
As to your question concerning the the comparison to binary math, it's oddly very similar. DNA uses what amounts to a 4-bit word in it's chemical make up. I could go into more depth here, but that would only serve to show my igorance in this. Follow them links for decent descriptions.
I knew I had read about a very similar set of experiments going on with DNA in Wired. I didn't realize how long ago it was. Anyhow, I did me a search over there on the mag and found the article in their archives called Gene Genie -Aug1995. This is a rather old article, and I honestly have no idea how far this guy got with his research.
To quickly summarize, this Adleman fella actually got DNA to do some simple calculations. What the biggest stumbling block at that time (and most likely still) was getting an interface between the user and the DNA setup. Sounds like that's what these folks in England are up to now.
I feel I should clarify one point that seems to be getting mixed up here on this thread. The promise of DNA based computers isn't specifically to replace CPU's that we know today. In fact, DNA is far slower at running the repititive kinds of tasks that silicon deals with. The exciting stuff is in it's ability to do massive parallel processing on a small scale.
For example, if you had a race between silicon and DNA to count to 1e24 the silicon would most likely be a clear winner. On the other hand, DNA based processors usher in the ability to solve problems that silicon based machines simply can't do, like calculate a perfect game of chess.
Most likely, what we'll eventually see out of all this is a new hybrid computer utilizing both silicon and DNA based on their individual strengths. The prospects for this are both very cool, and very scary. We're talking about a machine that literally removes every advantage the human brain presently enjoys over silicon CPU's in the way of problem solving. Imagine HAL, only one hell of a lot smarter.
There's a whole lot of emphasis on Napster at the moment, but the stakes are much higher than that. Consider the lawsuit that got launched at the folks that wrote PAN not too long ago. These people are after any and all means for transmitting information. Taken to a logical extreme, many of the core features of the Internet are at stake, since any of these tools can be used to distribute copyrighted works.
If a Usenet reader that decodes binaries is a violation of copyright, how much longer before other apps fall prey? FTP? HTTP? If it's found that the means by which binaries are distributed on the Internet is itself a copyright violation, how long before the Internet itself is the target of this kind of lawsuit.
This is a war folks. This war is about who controls the keys to the gates of information. MP3's are nothing more than the initial battleground. The music industry is scared as hell right now over possibly losing the 50 year absolute control they've enjoyed over this art form, with the movie industry also bringing up the rear guard. They have the legal, monetary, and political backing to turn that fear into something destructive against anything that threatens them.
If Napster falls to these gate keepers, you can damn well be assured that they are only to be the first. For those of you in the "I don't collect MP3's, so I don't give a crap" I guess we'll just wait for you to jump on board when something that does concern you eventually does fall under attack. Of course, by then it'll most likely be too damn late.
So what happens to all the users that have been using Netscape 4.x as their primary E-Mail client? Do they just get left off because you don't? Thing is, Mozilla 1.0 really does need to have at very least the functionality of NS 4.x.
The real problem isn't the feature set. A modern browser really does need FTP, LDAP, E-Mail, XML, CSS and all that. What the major sticking point here is has to do with how you get there. NS 4.x has a very nice E-Mail client that is fully functional right to this day. NS 4.x has a very nice bookmark manager that's plenty flexible. There's a ton of great functional things that got tossed out for a COMPLETE AND TOTAL RE-WRITE!! This was done to fix the one major weakness in the 4.x releases, the rendering engine.
What I'd like to know is why all this functional code was thrown out the door. Gecko has been up and running for over a year now, waiting on all this shell stuff to go around it. 4.x may have been yucky code, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that it was so yucky that it would have taken over a year to embed Gecko into it. Had that been done, Mozilla could have a whole additional year to work out all this XPCom stuff that's been holding this up.
Although I should probably be talking about this over on the Mozilla thread, you really gotta wonder why them folks didn't take more of a KDE approach to building a browser. Consider for a moment some of the reasons why Konqueror was able to get out the door so quickly. They took an existing shell, then concentrated their efforts towards the rendering engine.
On the other hand, Netscape also had a functional shell. They decided to drop all of the 5+ years of development on it to start over from scratch. I personally have trouble believing that 99% of the 4.x code was so dinked that it couldn't have been salvaged to at least encapsulate the Gecko engine that's been collecting dust for over a year now.
The lesson to be learned here is to very loudly kill the idiot who suggests taking a market leading piece of software and re-write it from scratch. Afterwards, place that person's skull atop a stick as folks are walking to their cubicles as a reminder. Joel Spolsky (as linked from that Suck article) has a great run down on this.
Much to the credit of KDE, they didn't get sucked into the notion of rebuilding from nothing. Certainly much of their code has been re-worked, but this didn't mean throwing everything out and starting over. As a result, I fully expect to see a functional KDE 2.0 in September. Mozilla should be out some time after IE 7.0.
When was the last time you could say that about a software project, much less one of this scale? Based on the last update on the KDE site, we should be along the following time line...
3 weeks until KDE 2.0 RC 1 (14 August) 6 weeks until KDE 2.0 Final (4 September)
With so many projects out there with as of yet undetermined schedules, it sure is nice to see folks like over at KDE show how it's done. Set a realistic schedule with achievable goals and stick to it.
Anti business? Sure. But RMS's slant doesn't hurt big business. It hurts the little ones.
This one is especially interesting, and is appearing to be more true than not if the stock market is any indication. For example, you've got this little ol' RedHat company that's been announcing all kinds of really exciting things going on with them. Market share, sales, profits, partnerships, all the things that should indicate positive value to a stock. Do I need to quote where they are trading at now?
On the other hand, IBM the Huge gets to announcing they're gonna put "some" of their R&D into Linux, while getting around to actually putting it on their hardware line. Folks owning IBM stock are most likely grinning too hard to read this.
Do we have any financial success stories that involve GPL thus far? It seems that there's a whole lot of Corel kinda stories that make up the bulk of the news out there concerning this.
So what's the ultimate end? A fringe group of idealistic creators who labor for the masses (who, incidentally, could care less).? More likely, a fringe group of idealistic creators who labor for each other. Hm. Sounds familiar.
I tend to think of RMS in much the same way I do libertarians. (don't try these kinds of logical leaps at home kids, we're talking deep hurting if you miss) I like a lot of the direction that the libertarians push towards. Smaller, more focused government and much of what that means. Thing is, I don't want to live in the land that they would create where things are just on the bitter edge of anarchy.
With RMS, I like the direction he's managed to get folks moving with opening up the source of the applications out there. Essentially moving towards a community of programmers working together to build an infrastructure we can all share into. I don't want to see a world where we have nothing but open source software because there is still (and I believe will remain) tremendous value in closed sourced projects as well.
Down the road I think we're going to see RMS's influence pushing the computer industry towards a direction without ever reaching his wished for destination. The same could also be said of them libertarian folks as well.
In political discussions an analogy to a pendulum often comes up. When the pendulum is pushed hard into one direction, it always ends up coming back the other way eventually. If GPL does manage to push this analogy hard enough one way, you can darn well expect it to swing back.
I was wondering when someone around here was going to comment on the blatant communist dogma in here. The article actually had me going along with it pretty well until I hit this one.
More generally, intellectual property is one more way for rich countries to extract wealth from poor countries. Given the enormous exploitation of poor peoples built into the world trade system, it would only seem fair for ideas produced in rich countries to be provided at no cost to poor countries. Yet in the GATT negotiations, representatives of rich countries, especially the US, have insisted on strengthening intellectual property rights. [3] Surely there is no better indication that intellectual property is primarily of value to those who are already powerful and wealthy.
Did he get that last sentence from a Lenin speech or something?
What's almost spooky here is in how some of his arguments are actually well formed and articulate. His "manifesto" side only comes out in little tid bits. cooldev, I'm sincerely glad to see that you picked up real quick on his redistribution of wealth scheme.
But there would be economic resources released: there would be more money available for other creators
That bold faced lie has sold far too many of those 3rd world countries he's apparently so concerned about into far dire straights than anything IP has ever inflicted.
Since intellectual property can be sold, it is usually the rich and powerful who benefit. The rich and powerful, it should be noted, seldom contribute much intellectual labour to the creation of new ideas.
I love this bit. "Rich and Powerful" used back to back. Ahhh, I get it now. These are the folks that are making my life rotten. Feel free to replace that phrase with "Jews", "Whites", or even "Japanese" and I think we all get a much clearer picture of the ideology here. He's gotten himself an enemy on which to focus, but only in the abstract. No, examples out of context don't count as getting specific either.
This guy is a Marxist zealot. There are a number of very good run downs on the weaknesses of our current IP structure. This is not one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
The price of this openness is that little exploits like this fall through the cracks.
No. The price of this openness are viruses like ILOVEYOU which did nothing at all but utilize the tools that Microsoft provided.
I'll grant you, reusing components and interlinking apps really is a good idea. At the same time, some level of consideration needs to be paid to even the most basic level of security. Should a word processor, or any other Office app, be given the ability to alter the OS without any restrictions? Maybe I'm lacking some imagination here, but I can't think of a single good reason why Excel should be allowed to alter ANY entry in my registry.
Speaking of registry probs, more interesting stuff on this in a later post by me.
Believe it or not, you are probably approaching for the first time in your life the reason why John Adams wrote the 2nd amendment in the first place. Congratulations!
After reading through the previous posts it doesn't seem to me that anyone has addressed the scariest part about I2, "quality of service". What this actually means is that within the header of an IPv6 packet is a priority byte. Based on the value of this byte will determine whether that packet sits waiting at the router, or rushes on through. From the article...
I-2 is researching what it calls "quality of service," some way to guarantee seamless delivery of priority transmissions. A collaborative medical procedure, for instance, should not be interrupted by e-mail traffic. One thought is to create a premium service, where critical data would be tagged so that routers would pass it through first, much the way railroads clear the tracks for express trains.
The way the article makes it sound, there will be a purely technical reasoning behind which packets will be given a priority. Bzzzz, wrong answer folks. What is being sold to corporate IT managers out there (based on some IPv6 seminars I've been to) is that you'll be able to buy higher priority for your packets.
Stop and really think about this. You're an ISP that can assign a different priority to packets going to and from your various customers. Are you really going to ignore the billing potential of selling higher packet priority to different folks? For that matter, as the demand goes up for higher packet priority, so does the cost.
There are some truly frightening scenarios that can come to play here with the standard as it is presently being presented. What we're really looking at here is that live medical procedure waiting at the router for a CEO's E-Mail to get through.
As usual, I can't quite seem to grasp what is so wonderous about Apple. What is so "noble" about a company struggling to take their 5% market niche up to 6% or 7%?
I suppose if Linux would come out in flavors rather than distributions than open source could be innovative too. Maybe, just maybe somebody else out there can take $600 retail worth of hardware, stick it inside a plexiglass fish bowl, sell it for $1299 and they too can be marked as innovating design. Or sued for using plexiglass.
What I really want to know is why Tandy didn't try suing Apple for stealing their TRS-80 Model III design. Heck, even that old box at least came with a floppy drive.
I wasn't going to rant here, I wasn't. No, really!
naden, you hit on a topic that's been scaring the heck out of me considering who is really running the Mozilla show. Yes, I have read many a lecture and been provided numbers of arguments that pointed out for me how Mozilla was not Netscape or AOL, but a truly independant entity. These were all good arguments mind you, but I still have my doubts.
Clue #1: Netscape home page turned into pop up ad hell, designed to look like the Mozilla default skin.
Clue #2: Why was theming so important all this time? As cool as this is the whole process of plugging it in and making it work (even with XUL in the play) could have waited until Moz 2.0. Unless a certain service provider needed a way to expand what platforms their software ran on. A simple browser couldn't do that.
Clue #3: Moz is going to have a mail client. You can love it or hate it, it's in there. For folks, such as myself, it needed to be in order to fully replace NS 4.7. Thing is, somewhere along the line it was decided that they didn't have time to implement LDAP into the address book. This rather upset me, as I utilize this at my office where folks mostly use NS 4.x for mail. Even being upset I can appreciate time constraints. I'm just wondering why 3 months of development has instead been going into working on AOL's addressing schema. All the while, only one indvidual has been doing any work with the open standard LDAP.
There's a good bit more that's still nagging at me about AOL's involvement with all this. I think I'll save some of that for the next milestone release of Mozilla.
Of course there is no single language of the digital world. Duh! English as a language is enjoying wide spread use because the bulk of the cash is sitting in English speaking countries. If folks are learning English as a 2nd language, they are doing so in order to trade with the US and Britain.
And before the left wing around here goes after me with pitch forks and flaming torches, I should add that theres nothing either new or evil about this. It's the natural relationship that language and trade have had for centuries. Now that trade has moved into the cyber realms doesn't change the fact of where the cash is located.
Why the hell does the windows binary of mozilla consume over 30Mb of mem while iexplorer takes 7,8Mb?
I'd like to know why Mozilla is a 7meg download while IE is something like 40-50meg?
To more directly answer your question, the Mozilla development has shifted gears away from functionality at this point towards memory and performance issues. At the moment on NT Mozilla is taking up about 30meg of memory. After a while this number will just continue to grow. The problem at this point is that they are just now addressing memory clean up details, which weren't getting the same level of attention as functions earlier. I would suspect that by the next milestone we'll be seeing memory usage that is far more in line with what you'd expect to see in a browser.
A little factoid for those not following the Mozilla project quite THAT closely. The milestone releases stink. They always have, and probably will continue to do so right up until when they release Moz 1.0 some time 3rd quarter of 2005.
If you're looking for a reasonable snapshot of where Mozilla is at, pop on over to Mozillazine and use the links at the top of their page for the latest nightly download that's functional. Unless you're a third party developer, such as Alphanumerica, the milestones are best forgotten. Pull down a nightly and see what ya think. Love it or hate it, it's generally a much better picture of where this project is actually at.
The themes do install, and even on the nightly builds. They just don't install as advertised yet. For some reason the theme install seems to hang while trying to get back in contact with themes.org. What ya need to do is let the theme download, which will extract the files into their proper folders. When the dialog box showing the install goes away, pop into Mozilla's preferences and select the new theme manually.
There's quite obviously more work needing to be done on the follow through on the install, but it is quite possible to get those themes down and switched. You should be aware up front that when switching themes it'll blank out whatever web page you happen to be looking at, so you'll have to re-load. Minor stuff, but a glitch never the less.
an honest-to-god modern consumer alternative
With a closed up tight hardware architecture. It really doesn't matter how spiffy Steve's new toy is. So long as Apple and crew continue to dictate what hardware will be used I will continue to wish for their downfall.
I'm left wondering how this is going to play with the plans that AOL has for Mozilla. From the rumour mill, AOL 6.0 client is going to be made up using Mozilla as it's rendering engine. This is supposed to be true whether or not they drop IE as their browser of choice. Couple this with some of the proprietary work being done, such as integrating AIM, and there certainly appears to be a conflict brewing.
Mind you, I have zero concern for the well being of AOL or their software. Thing is, if AOL is going to want to build into Mozilla these proprietary components, aren't we looking at GPL conflicts all over the place? How far can they take this and still please both the company funding them and the community keeping them going? As earlier posts have suggested already, there's a LOT of details that need explained before this has any real weight.
I've used Mozilla now and again (M14 I think is the last one I touched), and it's stability leaves a great deal to be desired.
Yeah, I was trying out Windows 2.0 a little while back. Boy did it ever suck. Nobody would ever use that. Ack, and did you see that Linux 0.8 kernel? That'll never get anywhere either.
It's easy to envision there will be some individuals who are philosophically opposed to the GPL, and will refuse consent on that basis.
A bunch of volunteers working on an open source project with deep philosophical problems with GPL. Are you from Redmond?
This could potentially lead to a very messy code split
Kids, don't try taking logical leaps like this at home. Obviously this person is a professional and has taken the proper safety precautions to avoid falling into a mental abyss.
Other than that, good post.
Your desktop software will most likely not need this for a LONG time. In addition, it's probably also fair to say that most servers won't need anything like this either.
Where we could use this kind of technology today is in the high end routers driving the Internet. As present research is investing heavily into TeraByte routers, even these will be heavily taxed for speed in the coming years. You can bet that folks like Lucent and Cisco are looking very closely at this kind of speed requirement.
I would like to see benchmarks of the DRI drivers that are more crossplatform (work being done on FreeBSD for example)
Especially considering the fact that their site is running on FreeBSD.
Prince and Stephen King are as big as you can get, they could literally get away with any wacky pay-me-if-you-like model off their celebrity alone.
Quite true. We have yet to even see the means for a new artist to break through to the public via Internet marketing alone. What you seem to be missing here though is that where Prince most likely holds zero rights to his earlier work, Stephen King still own all the rights to his work. King can utilize whatever means of marketing he wishes, where as Prince had to wait out his contract with Time-Warner before he could even use his original stage name.
The RIAA owns all the keys to all the gates. They've been very effective at slamming to death any new gates being constructed, such as DAT. I'm not 100% comfortable with the notion of Napster being the primary means of distribution, but I am very sure that something needs to take the keys away from those bastards that have had a 100% lock on the flow of music for better than 5 decades now. It may be that we need to tear down the whole fence and start over.
After going over the patent info, I think I'll just go ahead and stand by my original post. I am still of the opinion this has far more to do with user customization methodology than simply tabs.
Seems like Adobe must be getting prettied scared about Macromedia products if they're willing to unleash the lawyers on this.
Without doing a reasonable amount of research into this, like reading the patent or seeing the Macromedia product, I would guess that what we're talking about here is more than just tabbed windows. Heck, if it were just that they'd be suing a lot more folks than just Macromedia.
Photoshop utilizes a number of floating dialog boxes with tabs that switch between the various tools. Where Adobe's stuff is unique is that you can drag those tabs out to create new dialog boxes. You can also drag between different boxes to form new combinations of tools within a dialog box.
Okay, so customizing floating dialog boxes isn't exactly earth shattering stuff. Lot's of other folks have similar kinds of interfaces, but Adobe apparently owns this concept when utilizing tabs to customize them. You can have floating dialog boxes, and you can have tabs on them, but you can't use those tabs to customize them.
Personally, I think Adobe is going to lose big time on this one. Those tabs emulate file folders moving between drawers, and with a heavy precedent for the folder analogy througout GUI's I think they're going to have a hard time maintaining this one. On the other hand, it is a very cool feature for customizing the look and feel of Adobe products which nobody else has done a good job of emulating without duplicating. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out.
But I've never heard anyone describe how, even in the most general terms, a science of such a thing would look. What's the molecular/genetic equivalent of binary math?
A couple of very fair questions. To answer the first I would refer you to my earlier post linking to the article in Wired about this. For a more in depth look at this there are 4 papers USC has published on this subject. Fair warning, quite a bit of this goes beyond "even in the most general terms".
As to your question concerning the the comparison to binary math, it's oddly very similar. DNA uses what amounts to a 4-bit word in it's chemical make up. I could go into more depth here, but that would only serve to show my igorance in this. Follow them links for decent descriptions.
I knew I had read about a very similar set of experiments going on with DNA in Wired. I didn't realize how long ago it was. Anyhow, I did me a search over there on the mag and found the article in their archives called Gene Genie -Aug1995. This is a rather old article, and I honestly have no idea how far this guy got with his research.
To quickly summarize, this Adleman fella actually got DNA to do some simple calculations. What the biggest stumbling block at that time (and most likely still) was getting an interface between the user and the DNA setup. Sounds like that's what these folks in England are up to now.
I feel I should clarify one point that seems to be getting mixed up here on this thread. The promise of DNA based computers isn't specifically to replace CPU's that we know today. In fact, DNA is far slower at running the repititive kinds of tasks that silicon deals with. The exciting stuff is in it's ability to do massive parallel processing on a small scale.
For example, if you had a race between silicon and DNA to count to 1e24 the silicon would most likely be a clear winner. On the other hand, DNA based processors usher in the ability to solve problems that silicon based machines simply can't do, like calculate a perfect game of chess.
Most likely, what we'll eventually see out of all this is a new hybrid computer utilizing both silicon and DNA based on their individual strengths. The prospects for this are both very cool, and very scary. We're talking about a machine that literally removes every advantage the human brain presently enjoys over silicon CPU's in the way of problem solving. Imagine HAL, only one hell of a lot smarter.
There's a whole lot of emphasis on Napster at the moment, but the stakes are much higher than that. Consider the lawsuit that got launched at the folks that wrote PAN not too long ago. These people are after any and all means for transmitting information. Taken to a logical extreme, many of the core features of the Internet are at stake, since any of these tools can be used to distribute copyrighted works.
If a Usenet reader that decodes binaries is a violation of copyright, how much longer before other apps fall prey? FTP? HTTP? If it's found that the means by which binaries are distributed on the Internet is itself a copyright violation, how long before the Internet itself is the target of this kind of lawsuit.
This is a war folks. This war is about who controls the keys to the gates of information. MP3's are nothing more than the initial battleground. The music industry is scared as hell right now over possibly losing the 50 year absolute control they've enjoyed over this art form, with the movie industry also bringing up the rear guard. They have the legal, monetary, and political backing to turn that fear into something destructive against anything that threatens them.
If Napster falls to these gate keepers, you can damn well be assured that they are only to be the first. For those of you in the "I don't collect MP3's, so I don't give a crap" I guess we'll just wait for you to jump on board when something that does concern you eventually does fall under attack. Of course, by then it'll most likely be too damn late.
So what happens to all the users that have been using Netscape 4.x as their primary E-Mail client? Do they just get left off because you don't? Thing is, Mozilla 1.0 really does need to have at very least the functionality of NS 4.x.
The real problem isn't the feature set. A modern browser really does need FTP, LDAP, E-Mail, XML, CSS and all that. What the major sticking point here is has to do with how you get there. NS 4.x has a very nice E-Mail client that is fully functional right to this day. NS 4.x has a very nice bookmark manager that's plenty flexible. There's a ton of great functional things that got tossed out for a COMPLETE AND TOTAL RE-WRITE!! This was done to fix the one major weakness in the 4.x releases, the rendering engine.
What I'd like to know is why all this functional code was thrown out the door. Gecko has been up and running for over a year now, waiting on all this shell stuff to go around it. 4.x may have been yucky code, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that it was so yucky that it would have taken over a year to embed Gecko into it. Had that been done, Mozilla could have a whole additional year to work out all this XPCom stuff that's been holding this up.
Although I should probably be talking about this over on the Mozilla thread, you really gotta wonder why them folks didn't take more of a KDE approach to building a browser. Consider for a moment some of the reasons why Konqueror was able to get out the door so quickly. They took an existing shell, then concentrated their efforts towards the rendering engine.
On the other hand, Netscape also had a functional shell. They decided to drop all of the 5+ years of development on it to start over from scratch. I personally have trouble believing that 99% of the 4.x code was so dinked that it couldn't have been salvaged to at least encapsulate the Gecko engine that's been collecting dust for over a year now.
The lesson to be learned here is to very loudly kill the idiot who suggests taking a market leading piece of software and re-write it from scratch. Afterwards, place that person's skull atop a stick as folks are walking to their cubicles as a reminder. Joel Spolsky (as linked from that Suck article) has a great run down on this.
Much to the credit of KDE, they didn't get sucked into the notion of rebuilding from nothing. Certainly much of their code has been re-worked, but this didn't mean throwing everything out and starting over. As a result, I fully expect to see a functional KDE 2.0 in September. Mozilla should be out some time after IE 7.0.
When was the last time you could say that about a software project, much less one of this scale? Based on the last update on the KDE site, we should be along the following time line...
3 weeks until KDE 2.0 RC 1 (14 August)
6 weeks until KDE 2.0 Final (4 September)
With so many projects out there with as of yet undetermined schedules, it sure is nice to see folks like over at KDE show how it's done. Set a realistic schedule with achievable goals and stick to it.
Mozilla, are you listening?
Responding to some of this out of order here.
Anti business? Sure. But RMS's slant doesn't hurt big business. It hurts the little ones.
This one is especially interesting, and is appearing to be more true than not if the stock market is any indication. For example, you've got this little ol' RedHat company that's been announcing all kinds of really exciting things going on with them. Market share, sales, profits, partnerships, all the things that should indicate positive value to a stock. Do I need to quote where they are trading at now?
On the other hand, IBM the Huge gets to announcing they're gonna put "some" of their R&D into Linux, while getting around to actually putting it on their hardware line. Folks owning IBM stock are most likely grinning too hard to read this.
Do we have any financial success stories that involve GPL thus far? It seems that there's a whole lot of Corel kinda stories that make up the bulk of the news out there concerning this.
So what's the ultimate end? A fringe group of idealistic creators who labor for the masses (who, incidentally, could care less).? More likely, a fringe group of idealistic creators who labor for each other. Hm. Sounds familiar.
I tend to think of RMS in much the same way I do libertarians. (don't try these kinds of logical leaps at home kids, we're talking deep hurting if you miss) I like a lot of the direction that the libertarians push towards. Smaller, more focused government and much of what that means. Thing is, I don't want to live in the land that they would create where things are just on the bitter edge of anarchy.
With RMS, I like the direction he's managed to get folks moving with opening up the source of the applications out there. Essentially moving towards a community of programmers working together to build an infrastructure we can all share into. I don't want to see a world where we have nothing but open source software because there is still (and I believe will remain) tremendous value in closed sourced projects as well.
Down the road I think we're going to see RMS's influence pushing the computer industry towards a direction without ever reaching his wished for destination. The same could also be said of them libertarian folks as well.
In political discussions an analogy to a pendulum often comes up. When the pendulum is pushed hard into one direction, it always ends up coming back the other way eventually. If GPL does manage to push this analogy hard enough one way, you can darn well expect it to swing back.
I was wondering when someone around here was going to comment on the blatant communist dogma in here. The article actually had me going along with it pretty well until I hit this one.
More generally, intellectual property is one more way for rich countries to extract wealth from
poor countries. Given the enormous exploitation of poor peoples built into the world trade
system, it would only seem fair for ideas produced in rich countries to be provided at no cost to
poor countries. Yet in the GATT negotiations, representatives of rich countries, especially the
US, have insisted on strengthening intellectual property rights. [3] Surely there is no better
indication that intellectual property is primarily of value to those who are already powerful and
wealthy.
Did he get that last sentence from a Lenin speech or something?
What's almost spooky here is in how some of his arguments are actually well formed and articulate. His "manifesto" side only comes out in little tid bits. cooldev, I'm sincerely glad to see that you picked up real quick on his redistribution of wealth scheme.
But there would be economic resources released: there would be more money available for other creators
That bold faced lie has sold far too many of those 3rd world countries he's apparently so concerned about into far dire straights than anything IP has ever inflicted.
Since intellectual property can be sold, it is usually the rich and powerful who benefit. The rich and powerful, it should be noted, seldom contribute much intellectual labour to the creation of new ideas.
I love this bit. "Rich and Powerful" used back to back. Ahhh, I get it now. These are the folks that are making my life rotten. Feel free to replace that phrase with "Jews", "Whites", or even "Japanese" and I think we all get a much clearer picture of the ideology here. He's gotten himself an enemy on which to focus, but only in the abstract. No, examples out of context don't count as getting specific either.
This guy is a Marxist zealot. There are a number of very good run downs on the weaknesses of our current IP structure. This is not one of them.