Let me begin by saying that there is no other browser I will use on Windows other than Firefox. On those rare occasions when I have to install Windows, the first thing I do is use IE to download Firefox. Then I delete all references to IE (as much as possible) install Firefox and use it exclusively from there on out. On Linux I use Firefox -- even though Konqueror doesn't suck.
But on the Mac I use Camino and to a lesser extent Safari. The ideal browser for OSX would be Camino with access to the full range of Firefox plug-ins. I use Camitools now, but I'd love more.
Things I like from other browsers:
Native interface elements! XUL is fine for Windows and X11 but not for OS X!
Camino and Safari's light weight feel and speed.
Camino and Safari's bookmark management.
I like Safari's ability to define a personal CSS stylesheet.
I love Safari's integration with OS X services like Dictionary.app.
Omniweb will delete all cookies after each session.
Omniweb's ability to set preferences on a per-site basis! Killer!
iCab's ability to auto-refresh a local web page when you save changes to the source file -- Excellent for web development!
Firefox needs a better application icon. I know the current one is a big hit, but that's in the context of Windows icons. It isn't in the same league as the best from OS X: Transmit, Watson, App Zapper, Goban and anything by Dave Brasgalla. Hire Brasgalla to design a new one.
Seriously, adopt Camino as the main branch of Firefox for OSX and start there. Keep it lean, but allow people to load up the extensions if they want.
Some of the (to me at least) most desirable Firefox extensions are available in Camino with the add-on CamiTools. These include Flashblock, Adblock, and Bookmark syncing. I've been using them it for a year and it does not seem to adversely affect speed or stability.
"And it is a shame that they're being so taken in, given how said debate-framing is unjustly suppressing the emergent style of misogynistic, sexual-tinged death-threat art. What a pity."
You talk as though Linus was the sole author of the Linux kernel. He is not. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people contributed to producing it. Yet, he has sole decision-making power over whether the project changes licenses?
The only "force" that can be exerted over Linus is the ability of people to choose to participate in his project or not. If a consensus forms in favor of converting to GPLv3 Linus will not be able to stand against it. This is one way that participants in a voluntary association exert their will over "leaders" and it is entirely legitimate.
It is misleading to talk about the Linux kernel as if it were the private property of one person, like a stereo set or football. It is a collective project that was produced by people who voluntarily joined together under certain terms and conditions: The GPL.
Because it was under the GPL, some fraction of the contributors are free to take the source and say, "Thanks, Linus. You did a great job managing this project for 15 years. But we're going to fork it and run the project differently from now on."
Good question. If I contribute code to Samba or the Linux kernel do I license my code to the project, or do I turn over ownership of the copyright to my code to the project?
This will change things drastically. Solaris is a mature OS with some unique tools that could really benefit Free Software: DTrace, ZFS, etc. GPL licensed OS's would really benefit from this stuff. DTrace and ZFS will be included in Mac OS 10.5. But up until now they have been licensed under Sun's CDDL which is incompatible with the GPL.
If Linus ceases to be bull-headed and moves the kernel to GPLv3. The Sun move will be great, Gnu/Linux will be able to integrate these new tools. Sun will be able to use and improve GPL licensed tools more easily. Everyone wins. Except proprietary software developers and MS in particular.
What if Linus continues to be an ass and refuses to license the kernel under GPLv3? Free software developers who do not want their work to be used in DRM or hardware that locks the user out of their software will move towards Gnu/Solaris! The Samba team, Alan Cox, all the GNU projects could all shift focus to Solaris as the default kernel. There is already a Debian-based Gnu/Solaris and this could become the main focus of Debian work. Would Ubuntu Gnu/Solaris be far behind?
If the second case happens Linus could continue with GPLv2 only for the kernel and see the importance of Linux diminish or he could give in and license it under "GPLv2 or later" and contain the hemorrhage.
Well the OS vendor could offer support for MySQL, if they don't already. Debian isn't a company so you couldn't get it there, but Canonical could offer support for MySQL on Ubuntu. They could charge more for the extra service.
It seems to me that for-profit corporations are simple creatures. They seek one thing: profit (some are better at it than others). They respond to pleasure (profit), desire (for profit), pain (loss of profit), and fear (of loss of profit). If you want them to change their behavior you must employ these carrots and sticks.
Penalize record companies for their membership in the RIAA. Purchase no music from members of the RIAA. This can be tricky as many record labels that seem to be Independents are actually subsidiaries of RIAA members. Also, you cannot reliably identify whether an album or single is published by an RIAA member just by the artist. Many acts begin their careers on independent labels and then move to majors that are RIAA. There are resources that will help you to identify whether a given album or single is RIAA-member published or not:
Don't buy records, CDs, tapes, or downloads published by these labels. You don't have to avoid *listening* to works published by RIAA members. Just refuse to *purchase* them.
Reward the labels that are not members of the RIAA. Purchase music from labels that are not RIAA affiliated. It shouldn't be hard. Unless you live completely in a mainstream media wasteland, some of the musicians that you like are on independent labels.
If you enjoy purchasing music on-line, consider doing so through eMusic.com. Although they are the #2 on-line music retailer after the iTunes music store, almost all their tracks are from non-RIAA members. As a bonus each song sold by eMusic comes in a DRM-free MP3 format!
If you do these things don't count on industry executives being astute enough to figure out from the sales numbers alone why their fortunes are declining. Consider contacting the Big 4 major labels and tell them exactly why you are avoiding their products and the products of their subsidiaries.
I realized that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction *before* the US invasion. O'Reilly gave complete credence to the lies of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Blair. So now, *who* is the one divorced from reality?
The iPod can play music purchased from other online retailers. eMusic distributes songs as unprotected MP3s, which the iPod can play.
Napster, Rhapsody et al could also distribute their music in a format compatible with iPod. No one is holding a gun to their heads making them use WMA with DRM.
On June 11, a federal jury returned a stunning verdict in favor of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in their landmark civil rights lawsuit against four FBI agents and three Oakland Police officers.
The jury clearly found that six of the seven FBI and OPD defendants framed Judi and Darryl in an effort to crush Earth First! and chill participation in Redwood Summer.That was evident in the fact that 80% of the $4.4 million total damage award was for violation of their First Amendment rights to speak out and organize politically in defense of the forests.
So that's an example that's been proved in Federal Court. But it's just one of many.
A good book on the subject is The Cointelpro Papers by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. It consists of internal FBI documents that were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (which since then has had so many restrictions placed upon it may not be possible to obtain similar documents today) and commentary on them. It details years upon years of the FBI investigating, following, burgling the residences of, attempting to get people fired from their jobs, framing for crimes they did not commit . . . all for *dissenting* and organizing in a lawful manner for political and social change.
No. The study was done by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, not solely of Freshmen at UCLA.
If you click the link provided on the CRN story page to the HERI web site and look at the FAQ for the study you will find a PDF document that lists all of the colleges and universities that participated last year (and every previous year back to 1966).
They aren't numbered. But I count 54 institutions on the first page and there are 26 pages in the document. That's 1400 colleges and universities. Granted, some of the institutions that participated in the past did not participate last year. But in any case it's a large study that encompasses many more than one university.
How about we raise the level of discourse here and try some cursory investigation before we post?
Did any of the moderators who modded up this post check to see if "Flexible Typhoon" was correct in his assertion that the study was only of UCLA freshmen? Is there some kind of mutually-reinforcing aesthetic of half-assed-ness here at slashdot? Do some fact-checking or you may reward a blow-hard.
Thanks to Apple's suit against Think Secret we now have a court ruling that says that on-line journalists aren't subject to the same protections as those who are employed by print journalists.
Because of the barriers to entry to the print market (cost of an print, ink and distribution) the vast majority in the print media are corporate. Thanks to the Net we have just begun to free ourselves from having to rely on cringing lick-spittals like ABCNBCBS, Clearchannel, and Judith Miller and The New York Times for information. (Hey, Judith! Where are those aluminum tubes now?) Trying to put the genie back in the bottle and the blindfold back on our eyes they are.
And there is Apple helping them.
Yeah, its to be expected that Apple would care more about their profits (or Steve's beloved surprises) than about the First Amendment and the slim potential that we one day may have democracy in the USA. But I don't give a damn about Apple's profits. I care about freedom of speech and I'm willing to defend it.
It's this sort of reckless behavior from Apple that will lead to me switching from my 10-year Mac-habit. If Apple doesn't back off I'll be putting Yellow Dog Linux on my iBook and staying away from Apple's products in the future. I love OS X, but I love Freedom of Expression more.
1) Wanting to take people to a metaphorical "sea of happiness" is not the same as saying "Let's set up a centralized Leninist dictatorship." You're reading a lot into this alleged statement -- if Chavez indeed said it.
2) Do you have an exact link to the quote? Your assurances that it appeared in Granma aren't good enough.
As for the Venezuelan media, their lying where Chavez is concerned is notoious.
According to this article IBM and Novell also working to promote the use of Open Source in Venezuela.
There is a good overview of Venezuelan government efforts so far -- including in the huge national oil company PDVSA (which owns Citgo in the US) -- to use and promote Open Source software here.
I have never seen Hugo Chavez quoted anywhere as saying that he plans to model Venezuela on Castro's Cuba. Could you please point me to an example of this?
He has modeled Mision Robinson, Venzuela's adult literacy campaign, on the Cuban literacy program of the early '60s that reduced adult illiteracy from 25%-30
% to among the lowest in the world in only a few years.
When the Venezuelan Constitution was rewritten by an elected Constitutional Convention (in accord with the methods called for by the previous Constitution) Chavez proposed a provision for recall referenda mid-way through the terms of all elected leaders -- including President. He faced such a referendum last August and won by 60%.
Glad to hear that IE will be improved before Longhorn is released. Some of us may not live that long.
I agree with the posts that council against throwing every new feature and the kitchen sink into IE. I think the priorities should be:
1) Security - Every Windows user who also uses IE that I know has a hard drive littered with spyware. Fix it.
2) Standards - for CSS2.1, full support for PNG, XHTML.
I just finished building a site this week. I wrote it to the standards for XHTML and CSS, checked it in Safari, Mozilla, Opera, and did *not* check it in IE for Windows. If it looks good in those browsers but not in IE - too bad. I will spend no more of my time cleaning up after you.
On the site's "About" page I included the following text along with badges for XHTML and CSS validity and a link to the Mozilla Firefox page:
"This site was built with XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that fully comply with the specifications of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Without such open and widely recognized standards the Web would degenerate into a Tower of Babel as corporations sought to carve it into mutually unintelligible, captive markets.
"If any part of this site does not display properly it is because you are using a Web browser that does not fully support the XHTML and CSS specifications - probably Internet Explorer. I urge you to try a browser that closely supports W3C standards, like the open source Mozilla Firefox. Less idealistically, Firefox can block pop-up windows."
The above will be included in all web sites that I design in the future until such time as IE's standards support is satisfactory.
The only exclusively PowerPC GNU/Linux distro, Yellow Dog, uses the Anaconda installer in its most recent update (3.3, I think). And it is very nice. For me it bested SuSE's Yast2 as the best installer.
Yellow Dog also uses RPM binaries but includes a version of APT to manage them. They claim that the combination of APT and RPM is not original to them but was converted by a distro in Latin America - I can't remember which.
Actually Congress is not consulted all along the way. For the first two years of negotiations the public was kept in the dark by the Clinton administration about the MAI. Even the Congressional Committees with direct jurisdiction over international commerce
and investment were not briefed about the content of the discussions. It wasn't until April of
1997, when a draft copy of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was leaked to the press, that
the true nature and scope of the talks was revealed.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that without Fast Track there would be no trade agreements. As I say in the above post, "Nearly 300 separate trade agreements were negotiated by the Clinton Administration. Of these, only the Uruguay Round Agreement and NAFTA were submitted to Congress under Fast Track procedures." How does 298 agreements equal "halt[ing] the process in its tracks"?
This is part of the dynamic of capitalism. Even in 1776 Adam Smith recognized that capitalism tends toward monopoly. In Wealth of Nations he wrote,
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Slashdot Mirror
Let me begin by saying that there is no other browser I will use on Windows other than Firefox. On those rare occasions when I have to install Windows, the first thing I do is use IE to download Firefox. Then I delete all references to IE (as much as possible) install Firefox and use it exclusively from there on out. On Linux I use Firefox -- even though Konqueror doesn't suck.
But on the Mac I use Camino and to a lesser extent Safari. The ideal browser for OSX would be Camino with access to the full range of Firefox plug-ins. I use Camitools now, but I'd love more.
Things I like from other browsers:
Seriously, adopt Camino as the main branch of Firefox for OSX and start there. Keep it lean, but allow people to load up the extensions if they want.
Some of the (to me at least) most desirable Firefox extensions are available in Camino with the add-on CamiTools. These include Flashblock, Adblock, and Bookmark syncing. I've been using them it for a year and it does not seem to adversely affect speed or stability.
To quote Jeff Licquia:
"And it is a shame that they're being so taken in, given how said debate-framing is unjustly suppressing the emergent style of misogynistic, sexual-tinged death-threat art. What a pity."
Phish have never been cool. You can go back to watching your suburban TV, now.
You talk as though Linus was the sole author of the Linux kernel. He is not. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people contributed to producing it. Yet, he has sole decision-making power over whether the project changes licenses? The only "force" that can be exerted over Linus is the ability of people to choose to participate in his project or not. If a consensus forms in favor of converting to GPLv3 Linus will not be able to stand against it. This is one way that participants in a voluntary association exert their will over "leaders" and it is entirely legitimate. It is misleading to talk about the Linux kernel as if it were the private property of one person, like a stereo set or football. It is a collective project that was produced by people who voluntarily joined together under certain terms and conditions: The GPL. Because it was under the GPL, some fraction of the contributors are free to take the source and say, "Thanks, Linus. You did a great job managing this project for 15 years. But we're going to fork it and run the project differently from now on."
Good question. If I contribute code to Samba or the Linux kernel do I license my code to the project, or do I turn over ownership of the copyright to my code to the project?
This will change things drastically. Solaris is a mature OS with some unique tools that could really benefit Free Software: DTrace, ZFS, etc. GPL licensed OS's would really benefit from this stuff. DTrace and ZFS will be included in Mac OS 10.5. But up until now they have been licensed under Sun's CDDL which is incompatible with the GPL.
If Linus ceases to be bull-headed and moves the kernel to GPLv3. The Sun move will be great, Gnu/Linux will be able to integrate these new tools. Sun will be able to use and improve GPL licensed tools more easily. Everyone wins. Except proprietary software developers and MS in particular.
What if Linus continues to be an ass and refuses to license the kernel under GPLv3? Free software developers who do not want their work to be used in DRM or hardware that locks the user out of their software will move towards Gnu/Solaris! The Samba team, Alan Cox, all the GNU projects could all shift focus to Solaris as the default kernel. There is already a Debian-based Gnu/Solaris and this could become the main focus of Debian work. Would Ubuntu Gnu/Solaris be far behind?
If the second case happens Linus could continue with GPLv2 only for the kernel and see the importance of Linux diminish or he could give in and license it under "GPLv2 or later" and contain the hemorrhage.
Interesting, interesting.
So then, I expect Microsoft will be sending Peter Gutman a free laptop for all his good work covering Vista.
Well the OS vendor could offer support for MySQL, if they don't already. Debian isn't a company so you couldn't get it there, but Canonical could offer support for MySQL on Ubuntu. They could charge more for the extra service.
It seems to me that for-profit corporations are simple creatures. They seek one thing: profit (some are better at it than others). They respond to pleasure (profit), desire (for profit), pain (loss of profit), and fear (of loss of profit). If you want them to change their behavior you must employ these carrots and sticks.
Penalize record companies for their membership in the RIAA. Purchase no music from members of the RIAA. This can be tricky as many record labels that seem to be Independents are actually subsidiaries of RIAA members. Also, you cannot reliably identify whether an album or single is published by an RIAA member just by the artist. Many acts begin their careers on independent labels and then move to majors that are RIAA. There are resources that will help you to identify whether a given album or single is RIAA-member published or not:
www.riaaradar.com
wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RIAA_member_labels
Don't buy records, CDs, tapes, or downloads published by these labels. You don't have to avoid *listening* to works published by RIAA members. Just refuse to *purchase* them.
Reward the labels that are not members of the RIAA. Purchase music from labels that are not RIAA affiliated. It shouldn't be hard. Unless you live completely in a mainstream media wasteland, some of the musicians that you like are on independent labels.
If you enjoy purchasing music on-line, consider doing so through eMusic.com. Although they are the #2 on-line music retailer after the iTunes music store, almost all their tracks are from non-RIAA members. As a bonus each song sold by eMusic comes in a DRM-free MP3 format!
If you do these things don't count on industry executives being astute enough to figure out from the sales numbers alone why their fortunes are declining. Consider contacting the Big 4 major labels and tell them exactly why you are avoiding their products and the products of their subsidiaries.
Then, sit back and enjoy music and the schadenfreude.
I realized that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction *before* the US invasion. O'Reilly gave complete credence to the lies of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Blair. So now, *who* is the one divorced from reality?
The iPod can play music purchased from other online retailers. eMusic distributes songs as unprotected MP3s, which the iPod can play.
Napster, Rhapsody et al could also distribute their music in a format compatible with iPod. No one is holding a gun to their heads making them use WMA with DRM.
Where are you from? Disneyland?
Well, there is this:
So that's an example that's been proved in Federal Court. But it's just one of many.
A good book on the subject is The Cointelpro Papers by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. It consists of internal FBI documents that were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (which since then has had so many restrictions placed upon it may not be possible to obtain similar documents today) and commentary on them. It details years upon years of the FBI investigating, following, burgling the residences of, attempting to get people fired from their jobs, framing for crimes they did not commit . . . all for *dissenting* and organizing in a lawful manner for political and social change.
Wake up, mama's boy.
No. The study was done by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, not solely of Freshmen at UCLA.
If you click the link provided on the CRN story page to the HERI web site and look at the FAQ for the study you will find a PDF document that lists all of the colleges and universities that participated last year (and every previous year back to 1966).
They aren't numbered. But I count 54 institutions on the first page and there are 26 pages in the document. That's 1400 colleges and universities. Granted, some of the institutions that participated in the past did not participate last year. But in any case it's a large study that encompasses many more than one university.
How about we raise the level of discourse here and try some cursory investigation before we post?
Did any of the moderators who modded up this post check to see if "Flexible Typhoon" was correct in his assertion that the study was only of UCLA freshmen? Is there some kind of mutually-reinforcing aesthetic of half-assed-ness here at slashdot? Do some fact-checking or you may reward a blow-hard.
Coincidentally (?) the beta for PGP 9.0 was released today. The Mac version includes the ability to encrypt IM through iChat and AIM.
Thanks to Apple's suit against Think Secret we now have a court ruling that says that on-line journalists aren't subject to the same protections as those who are employed by print journalists.
Because of the barriers to entry to the print market (cost of an print, ink and distribution) the vast majority in the print media are corporate. Thanks to the Net we have just begun to free ourselves from having to rely on cringing lick-spittals like ABCNBCBS, Clearchannel, and Judith Miller and The New York Times for information. (Hey, Judith! Where are those aluminum tubes now?) Trying to put the genie back in the bottle and the blindfold back on our eyes they are.
And there is Apple helping them.
Yeah, its to be expected that Apple would care more about their profits (or Steve's beloved surprises) than about the First Amendment and the slim potential that we one day may have democracy in the USA. But I don't give a damn about Apple's profits. I care about freedom of speech and I'm willing to defend it.
It's this sort of reckless behavior from Apple that will lead to me switching from my 10-year Mac-habit. If Apple doesn't back off I'll be putting Yellow Dog Linux on my iBook and staying away from Apple's products in the future. I love OS X, but I love Freedom of Expression more.
"Castro inherited a very high literacy rate from the previous Cuban governments."
Everything I've ever read on the subject agrees with this Associated Press article:
"In Cuba, thousands of volunteers mobilised following Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution in a campaign that reduced illiteracy from 23 per cent of the population to 3 per cent."
Where are you getting your information?
1) Wanting to take people to a metaphorical "sea of happiness" is not the same as saying "Let's set up a centralized Leninist dictatorship." You're reading a lot into this alleged statement -- if Chavez indeed said it.
2) Do you have an exact link to the quote? Your assurances that it appeared in Granma aren't good enough.
As for the Venezuelan media, their lying where Chavez is concerned is notoious.
According to this article IBM and Novell also working to promote the use of Open Source in Venezuela.
There is a good overview of Venezuelan government efforts so far -- including in the huge national oil company PDVSA (which owns Citgo in the US) -- to use and promote Open Source software here.
I have never seen Hugo Chavez quoted anywhere as saying that he plans to model Venezuela on Castro's Cuba. Could you please point me to an example of this?
He has modeled Mision Robinson, Venzuela's adult literacy campaign, on the Cuban literacy program of the early '60s that reduced adult illiteracy from 25%-30 % to among the lowest in the world in only a few years.
When the Venezuelan Constitution was rewritten by an elected Constitutional Convention (in accord with the methods called for by the previous Constitution) Chavez proposed a provision for recall referenda mid-way through the terms of all elected leaders -- including President. He faced such a referendum last August and won by 60%.
If that's a "dictatorship" sign me up.
is a free download with no ads or reporting home that I've heard of.
Glad to hear that IE will be improved before Longhorn is released. Some of us may not live that long.
I agree with the posts that council against throwing every new feature and the kitchen sink into IE. I think the priorities should be:
1) Security - Every Windows user who also uses IE that I know has a hard drive littered with spyware. Fix it.
2) Standards - for CSS2.1, full support for PNG, XHTML.
I just finished building a site this week. I wrote it to the standards for XHTML and CSS, checked it in Safari, Mozilla, Opera, and did *not* check it in IE for Windows. If it looks good in those browsers but not in IE - too bad. I will spend no more of my time cleaning up after you.
On the site's "About" page I included the following text along with badges for XHTML and CSS validity and a link to the Mozilla Firefox page:
The above will be included in all web sites that I design in the future until such time as IE's standards support is satisfactory.
The only exclusively PowerPC GNU/Linux distro, Yellow Dog, uses the Anaconda installer in its most recent update (3.3, I think). And it is very nice. For me it bested SuSE's Yast2 as the best installer.
Yellow Dog also uses RPM binaries but includes a version of APT to manage them. They claim that the combination of APT and RPM is not original to them but was converted by a distro in Latin America - I can't remember which.
Actually Congress is not consulted all along the way. For the first two years of negotiations the public was kept in the dark by the Clinton administration about the MAI. Even the Congressional Committees with direct jurisdiction over international commerce and investment were not briefed about the content of the discussions. It wasn't until April of 1997, when a draft copy of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was leaked to the press, that the true nature and scope of the talks was revealed.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that without Fast Track there would be no trade agreements. As I say in the above post, "Nearly 300 separate trade agreements were negotiated by the Clinton Administration. Of these, only the Uruguay Round Agreement and NAFTA were submitted to Congress under Fast Track procedures." How does 298 agreements equal "halt[ing] the process in its tracks"?
This is part of the dynamic of capitalism. Even in 1776 Adam Smith recognized that capitalism tends toward monopoly. In Wealth of Nations he wrote,
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
He could have been describing the World Economic Forum!