What is actually happening - the way I see it - is that Mozilla (corporation/foundation) is finally abandoning its mail&news client formally. In practice this has been true for years - the number of mail&news developers is currently 2, compared to about... 150 IIRC people working on the browser (although this includes people working on joint core code, such as XPCOM, NSPR, necko, XUL, etc).
In recent years Mozilla is being bankrolled by Google: The choice of Google as the default search engine in Firefox means added revenue of > $5 Billion a year. Google has been paying back with some drops from that bucket - a few tens of Millions a year, see e.g. here (NY Times).
It seems to me (as an outsider and an occasional Thunderbird/Seamonkey extension developer) that effectively means that Google's interests have become, and will be from now paramount in Mozilla's policy. Now, if you're Google, you would be more interested in developing and expanding the use of a browser rather than a fast, modern, full-featured and easily extensible mail and newsgroups client (which I feel Thunderbird is _not_yet_, unfortunately) - this would mean people will tend not to use your webmail system and your web interface for newsgroups. This is bad for you, since you'll be seeing less ad revenue, you'll be able to collect a lot less useful marketing information about users, and your efforts to centralize users' Internet experience around services-servers-content which you control or are involved in will be impeded. So, obviously, you will want the money you donate to Mozilla - which should have 'rightfully' been divided differently (say, at least 25% for e-mail and news work - and that's being modest and not making 'affirmative action' demands).
Now you just need to spin this somehow, e.g. like this.
I don't know about you people, but home come whenever./ has these 10-question interviews, 5 of the questions are pure fluff, and the rest of them are phrased so that the intreviewee can basically just repeat platitudes, and finally, the interviewers/editors don't call BS in such cases? "How do you feel about IE7 strengths?" "I'm flattered that they copied from us" Yeah, great answer, we really care whether you're flattered or not and we weren't actually waiting for your estimate on whether this will effect FF/SM adoption rates. If I were the editor I'd just cut out some parts of the answers and instead put in "[content-free part snipped]".
And now for the shameless plug of my questions about Google, finances, threading and CSS support.
- Why isn't there more transparency about MoFo/Co's finances - why can't you publish where you get money from, how much, and what you do with it? - Is it not in fact the case that the Mozilla project is now mostly controlled by Google, which provides the overwhelming majority of funds? - How much money does Google make due to FF/SM's choice of Google as the default search engine, and how much of that money goes back into Mozilla development? - It seems to an outsider that very little effort is devoted to Mail&News / TB compared to FF. Is this true? - How do you see the future of Mail&News/ TB development, considering the conflicting interest Google has in the matter (GMail)?
And unrelated, technical questions:
- Why does Gecko continue not to support significant aspects of CSS2 properly? Example: bug 5016. - How does FF2 / Geck trunk measure up in the W3C CSS testsuite? - Why is Gecko, and FF/SM/TB, not multi-threaded (these are two questions!) ? - Why does Firefox' memory footprint balloon up to hundreds of megabytes so often? - Why don't Firefox and Thunderbird share most of their memory, the 'engine' part?
I say that Allah has decreed that all commercial software should be stolen and distributed freely, therefore we must claim all of Bill Gates & co.'s binaries and code for the greater glory of Allah.
All of this despite of my being an atheist, of course.
We're not in a 'post-capitalistic' era - quite the contrary, in fact.
The wealth of the world is becoming more and more concentrated: a few thousands of people (most of them Americans) hold ~80% of the entire world's wealth, while about half the world's population (that's like 3,000,000,000 people) works for less than $5 a day. Nearly a Billion people are under-nourished; about 20,000 people die of starvation every day. Even in the U.S.A., whose inhabitants hold near 50% of the global wealth, 45 million people are without health insurance.
Us techies, my friends, are but a small minority who gets to enjoy high standards of living, either because of the type of work we do (high tech, good for making even more money for rich), or the country where we live (you have a good chance at comfortable life if you live in Europe or the US).
If I were to walk up to one of the filthy rich, a person who can really stand to make some serious spending, and tell him: "Hey, man, let's distribute food and medication in Africa and Asia!" he'd answer "Where's the profit in that? I'd rather develop some new tech contraption and sell it to the rich 20% of humanity for loads of money." It doesn't really bother the likes of him that the money he's carrying is but the representation of the product of the work of many people, most of them probably third-worlders...
Which brings us to politics. Without making any personal accusations of this person or another, we can see that the world's governments, which were supposed to act on our behalf ('our' meaning the world's population) have acted so that a minority of people could become ever richer. In fact, some even argue that governments are designed to benefit only a small ruling class. Want an example? James Madisson, one of the drafters of the US constitution, is known to have said during the constitutional debates that the constitution must provide means of preventing the poor masses from pludering the opulent few... and, in retrospect, I suppose that it does.
As a final note, just remember that our actions as inhabitants of the globe are not always reversible to a better state of affairs - global warming, pollution, depleted natural resources - they're only going to get worse unless we learn to sometimes turn away from the monitor and look out the window.
un-earned wealth is the very basis of Capitalism: the appropriation of Product from the workers by the owners of the means of production, using the wage system, direct slavery, the global financial systems, etc.
Plain Old Telephone Service was developed at Bell Labs, funded entirely by American Telephone and Telegraph, nary a dime of Uncle Sam's money.
You're forgetting that the fact that AT&T had the billions necessary to develop technology itself is the result of their ripping of U.S. citizens for years - the only way they were able to hoard all of those buck$...
And, of course, they've had decades to use proprietary technology to extract even more money from the population.
I'm not saying that government-controlled development is good, mind you: I'm for democratic control of workplaces and research institutes by the people working there, and a free distribution of all knowledge obtained by such research.
Intel did *no* tests of the 1.13GHz.
No, wait, that's not true; they did test it:
There's a very simple test for CPU's; they call it 'install linux and try compiling the kernel'. Doesn't take that much time, really.
Intel performed this test (or a similar one), discovered that the processor _FAILED_MISERABLY_, then decided to go ahead and market it anyway.
(I'm assuming that the guy's not homeless and jobless and can survive without doing this kind of work)
There is never any reason to block porn from children. Sex is natural. It happens. Some (myself included) would even go as far as arguing that it's a good thing.
But won't a child's mind be corrupted by such lewd displays?
no more than it may be corruped by repressive right-wing fundamentalist ideology.
But aren't we encouraging the explotative porn industry by allowing children access to these materials?
It is true that the porn industry is rather explotative of women (and some animals, I suppose), but then - so is the textile industry, and no one seems to suggest that we walk around naked since workers' wages are low and they get no social benefits...
But children arent ready for exploring sexuality until they're 18/21/married/in jail with a muscular cell-mate/whatever.
Yeah, right. It's parents who are not ready... ready to admit their children can't live up to some medieval angelic catholic ideal of purity and chastity.
But won't the violence inherent in some pornographic content cause children to commit violent acts?
1. Oh, you mean like joining the U.S. army and bombing Serbia back to the stone age? (or in my case: joining the Israeli army and gunning down Palestinians in the occupied territories)
2. The cause of most violent crimes is the downtrodden perpetrator's being too poor to care about the well-being of others.
3. There's far more voilence in the evening news than in 2 naked people tying each other up with leather straps while moaning and panting.
Just tell the laundromat people that after careful studies, you have deduced that the blocked keyword list should be empty.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's just a partial list
And that's just what's missing from both Firefox _and_ Mozilla Suite / Seamonkey. Seamonkey has some features which Firefox doesn't, and vice-versa.
What is actually happening - the way I see it - is that Mozilla (corporation/foundation) is finally abandoning its mail&news client formally. In practice this has been true for years - the number of mail&news developers is currently 2, compared to about... 150 IIRC people working on the browser (although this includes people working on joint core code, such as XPCOM, NSPR, necko, XUL, etc).
In recent years Mozilla is being bankrolled by Google: The choice of Google as the default search engine in Firefox means added revenue of > $5 Billion a year. Google has been paying back with some drops from that bucket - a few tens of Millions a year, see e.g. here (NY Times).
It seems to me (as an outsider and an occasional Thunderbird/Seamonkey extension developer) that effectively means that Google's interests have become, and will be from now paramount in Mozilla's policy. Now, if you're Google, you would be more interested in developing and expanding the use of a browser rather than a fast, modern, full-featured and easily extensible mail and newsgroups client (which I feel Thunderbird is _not_yet_, unfortunately) - this would mean people will tend not to use your webmail system and your web interface for newsgroups. This is bad for you, since you'll be seeing less ad revenue, you'll be able to collect a lot less useful marketing information about users, and your efforts to centralize users' Internet experience around services-servers-content which you control or are involved in will be impeded. So, obviously, you will want the money you donate to Mozilla - which should have 'rightfully' been divided differently (say, at least 25% for e-mail and news work - and that's being modest and not making 'affirmative action' demands).
Now you just need to spin this somehow, e.g. like this.
I don't know about you people, but home come whenever ./ has these 10-question interviews, 5 of the questions are pure fluff, and the rest of them are phrased so that the intreviewee can basically just repeat platitudes, and finally, the interviewers/editors don't call BS in such cases? "How do you feel about IE7 strengths?" "I'm flattered that they copied from us" Yeah, great answer, we really care whether you're flattered or not and we weren't actually waiting for your estimate on whether this will effect FF/SM adoption rates. If I were the editor I'd just cut out some parts of the answers and instead put in "[content-free part snipped]".
And now for the shameless plug of my questions about Google, finances, threading and CSS support.
- Why isn't there more transparency about MoFo/Co's finances - why can't you publish where you get money from, how much, and what you do with it?
- Is it not in fact the case that the Mozilla project is now mostly controlled by Google, which provides the overwhelming majority of funds?
- How much money does Google make due to FF/SM's choice of Google as the default search engine, and how much of that money goes back into Mozilla development?
- It seems to an outsider that very little effort is devoted to Mail&News / TB compared to FF. Is this true?
- How do you see the future of Mail&News/ TB development, considering the conflicting interest Google has in the matter (GMail)?
And unrelated, technical questions:
- Why does Gecko continue not to support significant aspects of CSS2 properly? Example: bug 5016.
- How does FF2 / Geck trunk measure up in the W3C CSS testsuite?
- Why is Gecko, and FF/SM/TB, not multi-threaded (these are two questions!) ?
- Why does Firefox' memory footprint balloon up to hundreds of megabytes so often?
- Why don't Firefox and Thunderbird share most of their memory, the 'engine' part?
"Romani... lazy people who live by stealing, trickery and exploitation."
Yeah, you're not a racist at all.
Pick up used water bottle, wash it with rainwater -> free (reusable) bottle
All of this despite of my being an atheist, of course.
The wealth of the world is becoming more and more concentrated: a few thousands of people (most of them Americans) hold ~80% of the entire world's wealth, while about half the world's population (that's like 3,000,000,000 people) works for less than $5 a day. Nearly a Billion people are under-nourished; about 20,000 people die of starvation every day. Even in the U.S.A., whose inhabitants hold near 50% of the global wealth, 45 million people are without health insurance.
Us techies, my friends, are but a small minority who gets to enjoy high standards of living, either because of the type of work we do (high tech, good for making even more money for rich), or the country where we live (you have a good chance at comfortable life if you live in Europe or the US).
If I were to walk up to one of the filthy rich, a person who can really stand to make some serious spending, and tell him: "Hey, man, let's distribute food and medication in Africa and Asia!" he'd answer "Where's the profit in that? I'd rather develop some new tech contraption and sell it to the rich 20% of humanity for loads of money." It doesn't really bother the likes of him that the money he's carrying is but the representation of the product of the work of many people, most of them probably third-worlders...
Which brings us to politics. Without making any personal accusations of this person or another, we can see that the world's governments, which were supposed to act on our behalf ('our' meaning the world's population) have acted so that a minority of people could become ever richer. In fact, some even argue that governments are designed to benefit only a small ruling class. Want an example? James Madisson, one of the drafters of the US constitution, is known to have said during the constitutional debates that the constitution must provide means of preventing the poor masses from pludering the opulent few... and, in retrospect, I suppose that it does.
As a final note, just remember that our actions as inhabitants of the globe are not always reversible to a better state of affairs - global warming, pollution, depleted natural resources - they're only going to get worse unless we learn to sometimes turn away from the monitor and look out the window.
Check out a more detailed analysis of the global socio-economic system at ZNet magazine
un-earned wealth is the very basis of Capitalism: the appropriation of Product from the workers by the owners of the means of production, using the wage system, direct slavery, the global financial systems, etc.
Plain Old Telephone Service was developed at Bell Labs, funded entirely by American Telephone and Telegraph, nary a dime of Uncle Sam's money.
You're forgetting that the fact that AT&T had the billions necessary to develop technology itself is the result of their ripping of U.S. citizens for years - the only way they were able to hoard all of those buck$...
And, of course, they've had decades to use proprietary technology to extract even more money from the population.
I'm not saying that government-controlled development is good, mind you: I'm for democratic control of workplaces and research institutes by the people working there, and a free distribution of all knowledge obtained by such research.
Intel did *no* tests of the 1.13GHz. No, wait, that's not true; they did test it: There's a very simple test for CPU's; they call it 'install linux and try compiling the kernel'. Doesn't take that much time, really. Intel performed this test (or a similar one), discovered that the processor _FAILED_MISERABLY_, then decided to go ahead and market it anyway.
There is never any reason to block porn from children. Sex is natural. It happens. Some (myself included) would even go as far as arguing that it's a good thing.
But won't a child's mind be corrupted by such lewd displays?
no more than it may be corruped by repressive right-wing fundamentalist ideology.
But aren't we encouraging the explotative porn industry by allowing children access to these materials?
It is true that the porn industry is rather explotative of women (and some animals, I suppose), but then - so is the textile industry, and no one seems to suggest that we walk around naked since workers' wages are low and they get no social benefits...
But children arent ready for exploring sexuality until they're 18/21/married/in jail with a muscular cell-mate/whatever.
Yeah, right. It's parents who are not ready... ready to admit their children can't live up to some medieval angelic catholic ideal of purity and chastity.
But won't the violence inherent in some pornographic content cause children to commit violent acts?
1. Oh, you mean like joining the U.S. army and bombing Serbia back to the stone age? (or in my case: joining the Israeli army and gunning down Palestinians in the occupied territories)
2. The cause of most violent crimes is the downtrodden perpetrator's being too poor to care about the well-being of others.
3. There's far more voilence in the evening news than in 2 naked people tying each other up with leather straps while moaning and panting.
Just tell the laundromat people that after careful studies, you have deduced that the blocked keyword list should be empty.