The adventure game Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle also contains a similar easter egg. If you used the computer found in one of the rooms, you could play the original Maniac Mansion game. I never bothereded to play it though, but it was neat:)
The skinnability of Mozilla is not a feature they threw in because "it's cool", the cross-platform skinning engine is in fact Gecko!
You see, when writing a cross-platform application, especially as big as Mozilla, running on som many platforms, you'll want, nay need, to reduce the platform dependent code to an absolute minimum. Given the incredibly cool, fast, standard compliant, cross-platform rederer that Gecko is, they thought: "Why not use it to render the UI as well?" So they came up with XUL (eXtensible User interface Language), which is just an XML DTD, and some suitable CSS to display the whole lot. (Just browse the chrome/ subdirectory of your mozilla installation to see for yourself)
And, while the current Mozilla has the same skin for all platforms, i'd expect Netscape to ship the final versions with a MacOS skin for the Mac version, a Windows skin for the Windows version, etc... It's just a matter of replacing the CSS.
As to websites re-skinning your browser, i've seen it mentioned by some Mozilla developer (and would be shocked see anything else), that it'd be a pref option (never, prompt, always; and in prompt mode, it'd have an "always/never for this site" option) And someone could probably write a plugin that checks for a skin with the same name as your GTK/windowmanager theme and skins mozilla accordingly (this already exists for xmms/enlightenment, IIRC).
So it's not just the ultimate fluff, Mozilla is just partially written "in itself" for portability/cross-platform reasons.
I just think that some basic, fundamental functionality has been overlooked. A single point of configuration for starters...
GNOME has the (more and more) nice control-center, where other apps may put their config stuff as well (just like Sawmill does)
Also worth mentioning is the GConf configuration library. Although not very visible to the user, it makes storing, retrieving and last, but not least monitoring configuration settings easy.
FYI, Mozilla's UI is in its entirety composed in XUL, eXtensible Ui Language, an XML variant. Thus, the entire look of the app can be changed, even by a web page. M13 includes a "Classic 4.x" theme, but I haven't been able to change themes in M13 (and the latest Linux nightly build wouldn't start at all, so i don't know how it's now) --- Ilmari
about the only sensible location is under the fingernails, but unless there is a significant change in fashion, this eliminates at least 50% of the market.
Plus the fact that fingernails grow, and you'd have to refit the sensors ever couple of weeks, depending of your fingernail growth rate... And for them not to come off during other activities, they'd have to be glued on pretty hard, and that would make it a real PITA to refit them... so i guess that makes the fingernails pretty badly suited for this kind of stuff.
A better idea if you're gona have them permanently fitted would be to implant somewhere inside the fingertip. --- Ilmari
good luck, since the "crackers" responsible remain anonymous
Well, according to this article (in norwegian), it was a 15-year old guy named Jon Johansen from Thor Heyerdahl high school, in Vestfold, Norway, who cracked it (He's a member of the group MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering), mentioned in the Wired article).
Not at all that anonymous if you ask me:) --- Ilmari
"Vinoviiva" is the same as "kenoviva" which means slash. I'm not sure about the "takakautta" = "backslash" thing, but literally it means "the back way", or "via the backside".
Disclaimer: Neither Finnish nor English are my primary languages (I'm 50/50 Finnish/Norwegian, living i Norway) --- Ilmari
(...) this person got in through a flaw in the CGI, not the OS itself. (...) we'll never know what affect installing them would of had on this contest since that's not how the site got hacked.
Actually, quoting the site:
Using the bugtraq service, he found a cron exploit for which patches hadn't been applied. He modified the hack to get a suidroot.
That seems like an exploit of the OS itself to me, because, without a suidroot, he wouldn't have been able to modify the index.html (or any other file), it being owned by root.
the education industry (which often runs its IT budgets on a shoestring and definitely can't support expensive filtering, and further has age-old political objections to censorship).
Disclaimer: I live in Oslo, Norway, and only have experience with a few (two, actually) schools, but I do have a general impression of the state of things in the Norwegian school system in general.
Shoestring budget, absolutely! My school is 50/50 486/66 w/8-32MB RAM and P-200 (or equivalent) wiht 32MB RAM, all running Windows 3.11. The main file/print server is a 486/66 running NT 3.51 SP-0
Censorship, on the other hand, is *very* tight (or attempts to) the proxy server does an URL-based filtering of known porn/warez sites, + generic string matches ("porn", "xxx" (which blocks xxx.lanl.gov, the Los Alamos National Laboratory White Paper server), "warez" and stuff like that). Of course this won't block the *really* nasty porn sites, because they don't have obvious URLs. This proxy server (Squid on Linux BTW) has an uptime that stinks worse than my week-old socks, and the firewall only lets through HTTP originating from the proxy, except when the admins notice that the proxy is down after a couple of hours.
It also blocks everything outbound except FTP and IRC, and *all* inbound traffic.
The firewall's external hostname is Fat-Mama, and the internal one is Big-Papa, which I find extraordially appropriate:) --- Ilmari
My brother is a web designer, and does some pretty funky DHTML and JavaScripting on his personal home page, and he spends ages cursing and debugging the JavaScript for Netscape and IE.
If you look at the source of *any* of his pages, you'll see it has loads of
if (ns) var = this.thing.here if (ie) var = another.thing.here
One example is the previous version of his homepage, which he couldn't get to work with Netscape because of a DHTML bug in it (and he is *good* at working around bugs), so he had to create a new one from scratch.
(...) You will [??? hear from us?] if you try to do e-commerce and avoid the Bellboy patent (...).
It's supposed to be "You'll have to be skilled to do e-commerce and avoid the Bellboy patent"
So, the company won't come after you if you think of a way to do e-commerce without infriging upon their patent, it's just difficult, it being such a broad patent. --- Ilmari
Of course they can contribute patented ideas, if they own the patent themselves. If an idea is patented, anyone hwo wants to use it has to ask the patent holder for permission, so they'll just license the idea to anybody, free of charge (e.g. under the GPL). So, if they really want to, they can.
Besides, gmc is an app, and it probably shouldn't get the clicks anyway. They should go to either the WM or the gnome panel.
It should definitely be the WM, since the gnome panel is just an ordinary app that happens to look like the Windows9x/NT taskbar, although far superior to it (the system doesn't get unusable if it crashes (which it doesn't do anyway:)) --- Ilmari
Yeah, right... only 3 or 4 Linux users in the whole world have either a Voodoo {1,Rush,2,Banshee,3} or nVida Riva TNT(2) or Amiga Warp3D!! I for sure know more than 4 Linux users who have supported hardware, and besides, if you check Linux 3D, you'll se that support for other cards is under way as well!! --- Ilmari Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address
At least in Enlightenment, and probably most other window managers you can have *huge* numbers of deskstops both vertically and horzontally, as well as several stacked on top of each other... Think of it as Z layers of X*Y desktops. --- Ilmari Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address
It says "...proprietary operating system..." I would hardly call Linux a proprietary OS, it being OpenSource(TM) Software. So I'd guess you'd be pretty safe with 100% Linux. --- Ilmari Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address
Or more correctly, interpolation. Modern programs, such as Photoshop 5.0, user bi-linear og bi-cubic interpolation for better quality. --- Ilmari Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address
Looking at the road is no problem with retinal projection using 3 low power laser beams (RGB). The image will simply be superimposed on the field of view =) --- Ilmari Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address
Slashdot Mirror
© 2000 Ilmari. All ritghts reserved, all wrongs reversed
For some darn neat cross-browser (Well, at least Netscape >= 4.5/ IE >= 4), check my brother's site</plug>
You see, when writing a cross-platform application, especially as big as Mozilla, running on som many platforms, you'll want, nay need, to reduce the platform dependent code to an absolute minimum. Given the incredibly cool, fast, standard compliant, cross-platform rederer that Gecko is, they thought: "Why not use it to render the UI as well?" So they came up with XUL (eXtensible User interface Language), which is just an XML DTD, and some suitable CSS to display the whole lot. (Just browse the chrome/ subdirectory of your mozilla installation to see for yourself)
And, while the current Mozilla has the same skin for all platforms, i'd expect Netscape to ship the final versions with a MacOS skin for the Mac version, a Windows skin for the Windows version, etc... It's just a matter of replacing the CSS.
As to websites re-skinning your browser, i've seen it mentioned by some Mozilla developer (and would be shocked see anything else), that it'd be a pref option (never, prompt, always; and in prompt mode, it'd have an "always/never for this site" option) And someone could probably write a plugin that checks for a skin with the same name as your GTK/windowmanager theme and skins mozilla accordingly (this already exists for xmms/enlightenment, IIRC).
So it's not just the ultimate fluff, Mozilla is just partially written "in itself" for portability/cross-platform reasons.
GNOME has the (more and more) nice control-center, where other apps may put their config stuff as well (just like Sawmill does)
Also worth mentioning is the GConf configuration library. Although not very visible to the user, it makes storing, retrieving and last, but not least monitoring configuration settings easy.
FYI, Mozilla's UI is in its entirety composed in XUL, eXtensible Ui Language, an XML variant. Thus, the entire look of the app can be changed, even by a web page. M13 includes a "Classic 4.x" theme, but I haven't been able to change themes in M13 (and the latest Linux nightly build wouldn't start at all, so i don't know how it's now)
---
Ilmari
There is actually a plugin for K-Jöfol skins, just see under Vizualization plugins at the XMMS Plugin Page
---
Ilmari
Plus the fact that fingernails grow, and you'd have to refit the sensors ever couple of weeks, depending of your fingernail growth rate... And for them not to come off during other activities, they'd have to be glued on pretty hard, and that would make it a real PITA to refit them... so i guess that makes the fingernails pretty badly suited for this kind of stuff.
A better idea if you're gona have them permanently fitted would be to implant somewhere inside the fingertip.
---
Ilmari
Check these sound files for how the Master himself pronounces it.
---
Ilmari
It's @marquette.edu If you press backspace for the ^H's you'll delete 'vms'.. Methinks you are missing a clue.
---
Ilmari
Well, according to this article (in norwegian), it was a 15-year old guy named Jon Johansen from Thor Heyerdahl high school, in Vestfold, Norway, who cracked it (He's a member of the group MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering), mentioned in the Wired article).
Not at all that anonymous if you ask me :)
---
Ilmari
Disclaimer: Neither Finnish nor English are my primary languages (I'm 50/50 Finnish/Norwegian, living i Norway)
---
Ilmari
Actually, quoting the site:
That seems like an exploit of the OS itself to me, because, without a suidroot, he wouldn't have been able to modify the index.html (or any other file), it being owned by root.---
Ilmari
Disclaimer: I live in Oslo, Norway, and only have experience with a few (two, actually) schools, but I do have a general impression of the state of things in the Norwegian school system in general.
Shoestring budget, absolutely! My school is 50/50 486/66 w/8-32MB RAM and P-200 (or equivalent) wiht 32MB RAM, all running Windows 3.11. The main file/print server is a 486/66 running NT 3.51 SP-0
Censorship, on the other hand, is *very* tight (or attempts to) the proxy server does an URL-based filtering of known porn/warez sites, + generic string matches ("porn", "xxx" (which blocks xxx.lanl.gov, the Los Alamos National Laboratory White Paper server), "warez" and stuff like that). Of course this won't block the *really* nasty porn sites, because they don't have obvious URLs. This proxy server (Squid on Linux BTW) has an uptime that stinks worse than my week-old socks, and the firewall only lets through HTTP originating from the proxy, except when the admins notice that the proxy is down after a couple of hours.
It also blocks everything outbound except FTP and IRC, and *all* inbound traffic.
The firewall's external hostname is Fat-Mama, and the internal one is Big-Papa, which I find extraordially appropriate :)
---
Ilmari
My brother is a web designer, and does some pretty funky DHTML and JavaScripting on his personal home page, and he spends ages cursing and debugging the JavaScript for Netscape and IE.
If you look at the source of *any* of his pages, you'll see it has loads of
if (ns) var = this.thing.here
if (ie) var = another.thing.here
One example is the previous version of his homepage, which he couldn't get to work with Netscape because of a DHTML bug in it (and he is *good* at working around bugs), so he had to create a new one from scratch.
---
Ilmari
> Perhaps this is a step away from the previous situation where algorithms could not get patent in Norway.
.15NOK (that's $.02 :)
I'm not sure about the patentability of algorithms in Norway, although I live here, but:
The Bellboy patent differs from other patents by describing a way of doing business, not a technincal principle
To me, that's not an algorithm. But then again, its ony my
---
Ilmari
(...) You will [??? hear from us?] if you try to do e-commerce and avoid the Bellboy patent (...).
It's supposed to be "You'll have to be skilled to do e-commerce and avoid the Bellboy patent"
So, the company won't come after you if you think of a way to do e-commerce without infriging upon their patent, it's just difficult, it being such a broad patent.
---
Ilmari
---
Ilmari
It should definitely be the WM, since the gnome panel is just an ordinary app that happens to look like the Windows9x/NT taskbar, although far superior to it (the system doesn't get unusable if it crashes (which it doesn't do anyway :))
---
Ilmari
Yeah, right... only 3 or 4 Linux users in the whole world have either a Voodoo {1,Rush,2,Banshee,3} or nVida Riva TNT(2) or Amiga Warp3D!!
I for sure know more than 4 Linux users who have supported hardware, and besides, if you check Linux 3D, you'll se that support for other cards is under way as well!!
---
Ilmari
Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address
At least in Enlightenment, and probably most other window managers you can have *huge* numbers of deskstops both vertically and horzontally, as well as several stacked on top of each other... Think of it as Z layers of X*Y desktops.
---
Ilmari
Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address
It says "...proprietary operating system..."
I would hardly call Linux a proprietary OS, it being OpenSource(TM) Software. So I'd guess you'd be pretty safe with 100% Linux.
---
Ilmari
Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address
FYI: its .au as in the top level domain for Australia...
---
Ilmari
Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address
Or more correctly, interpolation. Modern programs, such as Photoshop 5.0, user bi-linear og bi-cubic interpolation for better quality.
---
Ilmari
Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address
Looking at the road is no problem with retinal projection using 3 low power laser beams (RGB).
The image will simply be superimposed on the field of view =)
---
Ilmari
Remove the capital letters from the e-mail-address