Well, I would say that is natural. If the market share continued to grow like it did the first month after 1.0 (33% per month), it would cross the 100% barrier in a year (actually, it would wind up at 124% market share). So I guess the growth has to decline. In absolute numbers, and in terms of market share, Firefox continues to grow. The delta of that growth is smaller, though.
You really don't seem to realise that "the web as a primary news source" is an oxymoron
You perfectly well understood what I was trying to say - "the web is becoming the primary medium (aka. source) for people looking to be enlightened on the latest happenings in the world (aka. news).
My point is that journalism is cheaper than before (because of the digital revolution and other factors), therefore it makes less sense to pay news agencies to do it. I do agree with you that it to a certain degree still makes sense. But they are becoming less important.
GNU's not unix, its an inferior work-alike that serves no purpose.
Serves no purpose? That's funny. Currently, it serves a lot of my needs. I believe that the purpose of the tools is to serve user's needs, but I might be mistaken. Enlighten me.
You are stuck in a very narrow-minded definition of academic. Studies into "fire", for instance, didn't need much funding, and weren't very successful for a long time. Yet, they seemed to cope. Same thing with a lot of different academic areas of interest. They don't need any funding, they are driven by pure interest.
Maybe this isn't a simple issue of publicity or drawing easy cash from Google, but a last attempt to win a juridical last resort against the inevitable death of news agencies?
As the web continues it's march towards becoming the primary news source, and remains free-and-open, news agencies will suffer. Recently, Norway's second largest newspaper Dagbladet opted out of a new contract with the national news agency NTB. Although they did make a deal with ANB, a smaller and cheaper agency, the ratio of articles directly from the agencies seem to fall quite quickly.
And it makes sense. Why pay a lot for content you can receive for free? Journalism in the information world is cheap, because you don't need to travel much to get a good overview. Blogs and online newspapers are much cheaper to make and distribute than paper papers (heh). As journalism and distribution becomes cheaper, the need for agencies diminishes.
So a last resort for the agencies could be making it impossible to aggregate news through portals. They're trying to halt development, to avoid the inevitable, or at least get payed for their inconvenience. I hope they lose, although I'm a little nostalgic on the paper papers behalf too.
This is why so many projects fail. They try too hard to create a mythical overdesigned piece of software that "works in theory" rather than create something that works and then improve it from there.
Ah, the grand old dispute between academics and business people. Linux wouldn't have existed without some quite theoretic early approaches (Babbage, Turing, von Neumann). After all - who cared about the early computers like Babbage's analytical engine? An abacus would be much faster for all relevant computations!
Without theoretic deep-dives like HURD, we would never know if microkernels are a possibility or not. Because it hasn't been proved to work yet. The HURD theorists suggest that microkernels are better than monolithic kernels. Let them explore it, make prototypes, and then someone will make a working kernel to play Duke Nukem Forever on.
Remember: a lot of research just discovers uselessness. It is important to know what's useless, so no-one have to take that path.
but it's current popularity has pretty much killed any chance HURD had
I really doubt it. If linux hadn't been such a success in '91, my guess is that the GNU project as a whole would have been dead. HURD might have been in a more "finished" state, but it would still have fewer users than it will get when it eventually is released.
I think F/OSS would be marginal without linux. Now it's mainstream. That benefits all F/OSS projects.
take a look at the source of gnu-core-utils some day... I did it, and I'm still recovering from the trauma. And gcc and other gnu "tools" are not better.
Uhm... you're saying that the gnu tools and projects should be assessed by their coding style? Who cares what the "unix philosophy" of coding style is? The tools should obviously be assessed by how they work and mimic the original tools - and as far as I know, they are "up there" with the commercial unices. Gcc is far better than any compiler from the old days of unix.
And how do you know, by the way, how the commercial unices are coded?
Remember: GNU's not unix. It's GNU. It works. Pretty up the source if you'd like to, no-one cares.
Any marketroid would tell them that it would be better to go with something like "Enterprise Edition", "Personal Edition" and "Exxtreme! Edition".
Anyone who cares about such things should go use RHEL. Debian is not about marketroid thinking. To those businesses who use more expensive, worse solutions than debian because debian's "modern branch" is called testing: their loss.
There's one big problem with the Debian system: testing doesn't get security updates.
This is a myth. Testing gets lots of security updates, from both security.debian.org and through the extremely rapid propagation of "normal" upgrades that packages get. Most maintainers seem to propagate security-related bugfixes within hours.
If you use very rare packages with slumbering maintainers, you could probably be in loss of security upgrades, though.
You know, that is an annoyance just because you do not use object orientation much. Java is strongly typed, and it has a lot of advantages. A quite usual way of creating a new variable is:
Car redCar = new Porsche();
Or the more familiar:
List list = new ArrayList();
This does also enable stuff like:
Person p = list.get(1);// even if all objects in list are Man and Woman objects!
If you don't understand the advantages of this kind of casting, you don't understand object orientation, and therefore, you don't need Java.
I wonder why Apple haven't got onto KDE (screenshot)?
Because it isn't an official KDE widget, it's a stand-alone project. It would hurt too much for Apple in the public opinion to smack down on a hobbyist programmer with a cool idea.
What's funny is that Slashdot gives an HTTP 403 to validator.w3.org
I saved the source of this comment page and fed it to the validator. Made 117 errors, among them a fairly serious one:
Line 2007, column 7: end tag for "TABLE" omitted, but its declaration does not permit this
It also has _tons_ of unclosed LI tags. These obviously can mess up the display quite a lot. Except for that, the errors are mainly cosmetic - & instead of & and some spurious attributes which aren't in the 3.2 standard (nobr, iframe height etc.).
The missing </table> is probably the most serious issue.
murder is a legal term, roughly defined as "the unlawful taking a human life"
That's your personal definition. Murder is most of all a moral term, describing unlawful or unethical killing. As long as you believe killing animals is unethical, you are inclined to call it murder, although not in the legal sense (but that's what you want to change).
As always, you can easily see this when changing perspective. While most texans will say execution is not murder, but killing, most europeans will definitely call it murder. While US soldiers won't say that they murder insurgents in Iraq, the (remaining) insurgents would. Moral and law is closely related. Don't dismiss moral statements because of the law. The law might change, you know.
Anyway, I think hunting animals for food is OK. I'm Norwegian, and I eat a lot of whale meat as well. So I don't agree with GP either.
It's ironic that the founding fathers were questioning even *having* a bill of rights. Their reason? You should be allowed to do anything, and putting down in words what you have a right to do would eventually limit people to only those things.
OK, then we just plainly disagree, instead of yelling at each other. Did only take a few days:-) I think the US has net profit from having Microsoft, even if you count in all smaller companies being stopped by the giant and so on. But it's not an easy calculation to make, I'm sure.
At least we probably agree that it's better for the US (financially) that Microsoft is american, compared to having a chinese world monopolist on desktop software?
"having the largest, most important software company in the world in your country is priceless"
means that it is worth more than can be expressed in dollar amounts to have a monopoly operating in your country. That's what you said.
What? Who says that the concept of "the largest, most important company" must be a monopoly? You mix your emotions into my post. I'm as angry as anyone at Microsoft; I'm just pointing out that Microsoft isn't a (financial) liability to the US. (Notice! Again! That this isn't a moral judgement!)
Gates has obviously profited from some dubious business, but he has also given tons back to the US through taxes, employment, and extending the anglo-american cultural heritage in the western world by keeping the control of the single most important piece of software in the world in the US.
Reading this sounds like a rationalization for dubious business practices.
No. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement - it is you who are reading this into my words. I dislike Microsoft, and I hate their business practices. Yet, they're not a financial liability in the big picture. (This is quite far from rationalizing: I do not think that anything that isn't a liability is good for society! Money isn't everything.)
Now, begone. You attack my moral stand, for a post which I explicitly state isn't about morals, but about money. Ask me about morals, and you will get a general bashing of big companies, which you long to read.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox growth is declining
Well, I would say that is natural. If the market share continued to grow like it did the first month after 1.0 (33% per month), it would cross the 100% barrier in a year (actually, it would wind up at 124% market share). So I guess the growth has to decline. In absolute numbers, and in terms of market share, Firefox continues to grow. The delta of that growth is smaller, though.
You really don't seem to realise that "the web as a primary news source" is an oxymoron
You perfectly well understood what I was trying to say - "the web is becoming the primary medium (aka. source) for people looking to be enlightened on the latest happenings in the world (aka. news).
My point is that journalism is cheaper than before (because of the digital revolution and other factors), therefore it makes less sense to pay news agencies to do it. I do agree with you that it to a certain degree still makes sense. But they are becoming less important.
GNU's not unix, its an inferior work-alike that serves no purpose.
Serves no purpose? That's funny. Currently, it serves a lot of my needs. I believe that the purpose of the tools is to serve user's needs, but I might be mistaken. Enlighten me.
You are stuck in a very narrow-minded definition of academic. Studies into "fire", for instance, didn't need much funding, and weren't very successful for a long time. Yet, they seemed to cope. Same thing with a lot of different academic areas of interest. They don't need any funding, they are driven by pure interest.
In what way did I confuse anything in my post? I totally agree with Schopenauer.
Maybe this isn't a simple issue of publicity or drawing easy cash from Google, but a last attempt to win a juridical last resort against the inevitable death of news agencies?
As the web continues it's march towards becoming the primary news source, and remains free-and-open, news agencies will suffer. Recently, Norway's second largest newspaper Dagbladet opted out of a new contract with the national news agency NTB. Although they did make a deal with ANB, a smaller and cheaper agency, the ratio of articles directly from the agencies seem to fall quite quickly.
And it makes sense. Why pay a lot for content you can receive for free? Journalism in the information world is cheap, because you don't need to travel much to get a good overview. Blogs and online newspapers are much cheaper to make and distribute than paper papers (heh). As journalism and distribution becomes cheaper, the need for agencies diminishes.
So a last resort for the agencies could be making it impossible to aggregate news through portals. They're trying to halt development, to avoid the inevitable, or at least get payed for their inconvenience. I hope they lose, although I'm a little nostalgic on the paper papers behalf too.
This is why so many projects fail. They try too hard to create a mythical overdesigned piece of software that "works in theory" rather than create something that works and then improve it from there.
Ah, the grand old dispute between academics and business people. Linux wouldn't have existed without some quite theoretic early approaches (Babbage, Turing, von Neumann). After all - who cared about the early computers like Babbage's analytical engine? An abacus would be much faster for all relevant computations!
Without theoretic deep-dives like HURD, we would never know if microkernels are a possibility or not. Because it hasn't been proved to work yet. The HURD theorists suggest that microkernels are better than monolithic kernels. Let them explore it, make prototypes, and then someone will make a working kernel to play Duke Nukem Forever on.
Remember: a lot of research just discovers uselessness. It is important to know what's useless, so no-one have to take that path.
but it's current popularity has pretty much killed any chance HURD had
I really doubt it. If linux hadn't been such a success in '91, my guess is that the GNU project as a whole would have been dead. HURD might have been in a more "finished" state, but it would still have fewer users than it will get when it eventually is released.
I think F/OSS would be marginal without linux. Now it's mainstream. That benefits all F/OSS projects.
take a look at the source of gnu-core-utils some day... I did it, and I'm still recovering from the trauma. And gcc and other gnu "tools" are not better.
Uhm... you're saying that the gnu tools and projects should be assessed by their coding style? Who cares what the "unix philosophy" of coding style is? The tools should obviously be assessed by how they work and mimic the original tools - and as far as I know, they are "up there" with the commercial unices. Gcc is far better than any compiler from the old days of unix.
And how do you know, by the way, how the commercial unices are coded?
Remember: GNU's not unix. It's GNU. It works. Pretty up the source if you'd like to, no-one cares.
What exactly is wrong with Australia, I really am curious.
Immigration policies.
The only possible advantage you get with static typing is the compiler catching errors for you.
I think you would like to read up a bit, as well...
Uh, the validator quite easily identifies it as HTML3.2 and validates against that specification. Newer specs require LIs to be closed. Older don't.
Funny thing. My university set up a linux login box for us students to enjoy last week (before that it was all Solaris). These are my ulimits:
It's Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 4 (Nahant).
This looks like it's ready to be wasted...
Any marketroid would tell them that it would be better to go with something like "Enterprise Edition", "Personal Edition" and "Exxtreme! Edition".
Anyone who cares about such things should go use RHEL. Debian is not about marketroid thinking. To those businesses who use more expensive, worse solutions than debian because debian's "modern branch" is called testing: their loss.
There's one big problem with the Debian system: testing doesn't get security updates.
This is a myth. Testing gets lots of security updates, from both security.debian.org and through the extremely rapid propagation of "normal" upgrades that packages get. Most maintainers seem to propagate security-related bugfixes within hours.
If you use very rare packages with slumbering maintainers, you could probably be in loss of security upgrades, though.
You know, that is an annoyance just because you do not use object orientation much. Java is strongly typed, and it has a lot of advantages. A quite usual way of creating a new variable is:
Or the more familiar:
This does also enable stuff like:
If you don't understand the advantages of this kind of casting, you don't understand object orientation, and therefore, you don't need Java.
I wonder why Apple haven't got onto KDE (screenshot)?
Because it isn't an official KDE widget, it's a stand-alone project. It would hurt too much for Apple in the public opinion to smack down on a hobbyist programmer with a cool idea.
What's funny is that Slashdot gives an HTTP 403 to validator.w3.org
I saved the source of this comment page and fed it to the validator. Made 117 errors, among them a fairly serious one:
Line 2007, column 7: end tag for "TABLE" omitted, but its declaration does not permit this
It also has _tons_ of unclosed LI tags. These obviously can mess up the display quite a lot. Except for that, the errors are mainly cosmetic - & instead of & and some spurious attributes which aren't in the 3.2 standard (nobr, iframe height etc.).
The missing </table> is probably the most serious issue.
murder is a legal term, roughly defined as "the unlawful taking a human life"
That's your personal definition. Murder is most of all a moral term, describing unlawful or unethical killing. As long as you believe killing animals is unethical, you are inclined to call it murder, although not in the legal sense (but that's what you want to change).
As always, you can easily see this when changing perspective. While most texans will say execution is not murder, but killing, most europeans will definitely call it murder. While US soldiers won't say that they murder insurgents in Iraq, the (remaining) insurgents would. Moral and law is closely related. Don't dismiss moral statements because of the law. The law might change, you know.
Anyway, I think hunting animals for food is OK. I'm Norwegian, and I eat a lot of whale meat as well. So I don't agree with GP either.
It's ironic that the founding fathers were questioning even *having* a bill of rights. Their reason? You should be allowed to do anything, and putting down in words what you have a right to do would eventually limit people to only those things.
Cool! The founding fathers were anarchists!
Then you could use evolutions vfolders, which work pretty much like labels.
OK, then we just plainly disagree, instead of yelling at each other. Did only take a few days :-) I think the US has net profit from having Microsoft, even if you count in all smaller companies being stopped by the giant and so on. But it's not an easy calculation to make, I'm sure.
At least we probably agree that it's better for the US (financially) that Microsoft is american, compared to having a chinese world monopolist on desktop software?
means that it is worth more than can be expressed in dollar amounts to have a monopoly operating in your country. That's what you said.
What? Who says that the concept of "the largest, most important company" must be a monopoly? You mix your emotions into my post. I'm as angry as anyone at Microsoft; I'm just pointing out that Microsoft isn't a (financial) liability to the US. (Notice! Again! That this isn't a moral judgement!)
Reading this sounds like a rationalization for dubious business practices.
No. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement - it is you who are reading this into my words. I dislike Microsoft, and I hate their business practices. Yet, they're not a financial liability in the big picture. (This is quite far from rationalizing: I do not think that anything that isn't a liability is good for society! Money isn't everything.)
Now, begone. You attack my moral stand, for a post which I explicitly state isn't about morals, but about money. Ask me about morals, and you will get a general bashing of big companies, which you long to read.
/dev/zero? Uh. You must debug your humor.
Uh, so they are going force themselves into releasing their own products under the GPL? Fat chance.